The Other Russia

Lecture 16

According to Darwin and Marx-Engels, retold by soviet textbooks – the settled way of life, cultivation of edible plants in the fields, their harvest and use for food is the most advanced step of the “development” of human society, compared to the nomad, stock-breeding step of the development. To spite the soviet textbooks there is a more cynical and valid version of “development”. Settled tribes are a lot easier to control. In the very end of the 50s of the XX century it is precisely because of this reason that Khrushev definitively settled the gypsies, disregarding their national customs, vans and all the rest of it. As a boy, in 1955 or 1956, I recall, I had the chance to see in an oak grove in September a gypsy band. These were not today’s gypsies on little UAZ’s [car brand] wheels. But this was a traditional, witheringly beautiful, bigger than life band. Well fed, strongly smelling horses, tanned men in colorful silk shirts, in caps and with earrings, women in silk. After half a hundred years I distinctively see this, such a bright impression it was. After the war, life in Kharkov was not pretty, dark, patched clothes. And here – what a beauty! The gypsies, I remember, cooked corn and treated us, children with pioneer ties.

So: it was a lot easier to control settled tribes, therefore the feudal lords, surrounded by activists-commandos preferred to settle the tribes. You can’t run away with a field, it is with horses and bulls that it is easier to run away. (Though you can’t run far with sheep, as I learned in Serbia. If you stole a flock you will have to leave it because the sheep stop to nibble grass anyway, you might as well kill them.

If you, naturally, stole a dozen of sheep and ride an automobile, then it’s another story.) I believe in the cynical hypothesis of the power. Tribes were settled forcibly, to put them under contribution, to control. And accordingly to this limitation the villains-settlers adjusted themselves. The nomad stock-breeding had to be packed away (the horses, maybe, were left them very short, for plough), practiced pasture-stock breeding, cows, pigs instead of horses and also reorganized themselves, began more to cultivate fields and sow field cultures. If one is to think according to Marx-Engels, then it turns out that barley, wheat, rye are more progressive than meat and milk? Nonsense, rubbish!

Settling – played the same role that it played under soviet power (and continues to fulfill this role) the enslavement with an apartment. After putting the citizen on the chain of an apartment he can be easily controlled. And he was successfully controlled and is controlled with an apartment. In a country where there is snow and bad weather during nine months, each apartment is a warm ark in which the family sails across the storming ocean of life. A registration is already a kind of a writing document of enslavement.

One should foremost seek an explanation to these or others social or economic conditions of the past, explanations to the modifications of these conditions, in the power. Power, strength, aggression – created the world system in the past and create it now. And not the considerations of “progressiveness”, not the arithmetic of profits or the abstract criterias of “development’ or “backwardness’.

By settling the tribe on a certain land, the khan, kniaz, prince knew where to look for it when it came the time to collect the tribute: pelts, food reserves or young women. As for the nomad tribe – look for it, whistle it, where it went. In a certain sense the khan, prince, leader of the detachment was needed to the tribe as well: he realized the role of a “roof”, protected his tributaries from other princes or soldiers of fortune. The first cities appeared from the same considerations. The prince built himself a fortified nest – a castle, and the prince’s tributaries – foremost merchants and artisans settled next to its walls and even within them. And the peasants settled near by. That’s how the cities were formed. In the winter 1974/75 I saw the decrepit, medieval towns in South Italy, without developing into modern cities, they however served as a great teaching aid on urbanism. Usually a large castle, where, apparently, in extreme cases all the nearby population fled, a relatively small town, where the houses acquired with time some kind of a rockiness, the quality of cave residencies, so much they were melted together from time, then fields and vineyards. In concentric circles, receding from the core of the castle the population’s density diminished.

In this way, in its essence the city was directly the consequence of the power of the kniaz, the prince, the kurfurst, an object of possession and its population – the subjects on whom the power extended. Therefore initially the bearer of the power and his subjects, whom he protected, simultaneously exploiting them, were joined by criminal relations.

A hundred years later nothing had changed. The essence of the relations stayed the same. Protectorate in exchange for exploitation – this is what urban civilization bears with it. Only the details changed. The leader-thug, a strong aristocrat, with a brigade of commandos yielded his place to an elected thug with a brigade of administrators. (They are all today representatives of the third estate – the bourgeoisie) Distinct cities are already essentially states of really decent size (let’s recall that in ancient times the first cities-States appeared and existed in Mesopotamia and Greece. Ur, Athens, Sparta are known to us from childhood). Such cities as Mexico City or Moscow are simply gigantic States. A net of cities joined by communications form a modern State. (Communications are extremely important. In order to destroy Russia for sure, one has to destroy the single railroad net of Russia, the MPS [Ministry of Railway Transport], this is a lot more effective than to excite separatist feelings in the citizens of the regions.) Cities are inseparable from the traditional commoner civilization, the Bolsheviks did not understand this and in this was another failure of the 1917 revolution. In cities it is possible to live only by the rules of the past, in cities the past is collected and showed to all to see: churches, architectural constructions of the XIX century – all suggests inequality and unfreedom. And the suburbs – monstrous in their ant-bee essence, these kinds of concrete-honeycombs, in the mornings vomiting their human stuffing and in the evening taking it back inside – this is a completely unceremonious modern manner of slavery, the new serfdom. Apparently, the Red Khmers understood this, possibly, they did an awkward and bloody attempt, but at a time they liquidated the city of Phnom Penh. The city is the concentration of political power, economical power and police power, it’s not for nothing that the State insists so much on its registrations.

In mountains and woods you could not wave your registration so much. Cities as centers of pollution and ecological murder of the planet are a hated goal for ecologists as well.

Their remote goal is the dispersing of the population from cities. But for us, for the revolutionary movement the fight against the city has to be a prioritary goal. Cities as the main kind of human settlement (It is cities that dictate us civilization habits) have to be liquidated.

(Well, perhaps it is possible to use the large accommodations, such as theaters, museums, churches for the locating of the communes. Temporarily, of course.)

Cities in any case parasite the countryside. The thirty-million conglomerate Mexico City, the twelve-million Moscow don’t sow a single little seed and don’t raise a single hen. And they produce little, mostly they realize the governing and the control (well they also pour vodka there or bake bread from the raw product imported from the country-side). The city however is not useless – it is bad. It produces, as already mentioned: power and control. In the city-capital are concentrated all the systems of overpowering of the citizens: all kinds of polices, special services, systems of administrative control, political power of the country, its economical power – the banks. The Red Khmers took the revolution seriously: they liquidated the city. If it is not liquidated, all the revolution will be reduced to the poor moving in rich districts and the rich forced into the poor.

The mystical trinity: Russia – Moscow – Kremlin looks strikingly and explains a lot about city power. Russia is the only country in the world whose power (its core) is located in a medieval castle-fortress. All the three components are not interchangeable. (The West loved and loves to vary its communiques and information with the sentences: Kremlin said or Moscow said, having in mind once the USSR and now Russia.) After the revolution, having evacuated Petersburg, the communist power settled in Kremlin! They could not have invented anything worse. Dungeons, chambers, arches and vaults daily and accurately like consumption undermined the forces of the revolution. They had to found a new capital; if they needed it so badly, to build up Tatlin’s and Melnikov’s buildings. Instead the red commanders went to service in narrow, musty dungeons, in a museum, strictly speaking. But in a museum not only there is no revolution, there is no living life there. Recently, researchers established that even the color of the walls of the children room where the newly born spends the first months of life, later affects their temperament forever. I firmly believe in the fact that Kremlin’s little porches, dungeons and little lumps with all this woman’s carving affected the souls and actions of the red generals. They should not have put in Kremlin the new revolutionary power.

Or here is another thing on cities. In 1945, in April-May, after seizing Berlin they should have immediately made there the Empire’s capital city. And today everything would have been different. And there would have been enough work from 1945 until today to everybody. And the enthusiasm generated would have been gigantic. And Moscow should have been made a museum already in 1917. This is a horrible, ugly, depressing city without attractions, where old buildings are drawers and new buildings are mailboxes and parcels. (This is not Paris, I lived there on a simple little street, mentioned in a 1233 chronicle, on rue des Ecouffes!) Russian cities are as a rule an assemblage of frozen barracks and there will be nothing to feel sorry for them.

Kremlin was rebuilt by Pavel Pavlovich Borodin. Cushions, sofas, couchettes with chiseled legs on which the president sits. Like in the Elysee Palace, like at the Queen in London! A worker, vigorous, muscular president will not sit on a couchette with chiseled legs! This would be disgusting for him! Little couchettes are not traditions of statesmanship, they are traditions of the middle class, the only thing missing is a lace umbrella. In 1943, my mother going to the military plant plotted me, a baby, in a shell-box and moved under the bed, father enforced the table with planks. Just in case, the Germans flew so far as this area. That’s a tradition!

As for cities they are quickly overgrown with grass. I saw the demolished Vukovar, the smoking Sarajevo, Benders where on public places mines splashed like vomit, I saw the burned down Gagri where on a speedway, after ripping it open from inside, grass had grown to the waist of a man, I saw beaches of once elegant resorts, overgrown with grass to the very edge of the tide. Nature quickly conquers abandoned cities. I realize that I love destroyed cities more than living ones. And your generation will have to realize that destroyed cities are more beautiful than living ones.

Look into history, flip its pages. The very first act of the revolutions of the newest history is the construction of barricades. They destroy the pavement, tear off stones and block the streets with them. They stop the automobiles, autobuses, block the city with bricks. And also attack, rob, destroy and set fire to the city hall, administrative buildings, presidential palace, parliament, shops and warehouses. The crowd has a sure instinct. It wants to destroy the city – the citadel of the power, political and economical – the main cause of its misfortunes. The crowd is stopped by those who have plans for the city hall, the presidential palace. We will not stop the crowd.