The Other Russia

Lecture 20

Obviously, there are no two similar revolutions, but it is useful to remember the experiment of the most classical – the French one. The first French furious republic (without a president, thanks God!) existed from 1789 to 1799 – ten years. Afterwards Napoleon Bonaparte was an imperator from 1799 to 1815. Then the First Restoration occurred, from 1815 to 1828 reigned a certain king Louis XVIII, Bourbon. That is, the Bourbons’ dynasty was restored. Then ruled the king-bourgeois Louis-Philippe, at the end of his reign the 1848 revolution broke out, then it is Bonaparte’s Restoration that happened: from 1852 till 1870 reigned Napoleon’s relative – Napoleon III. And only afterwards was the republic firmly established, as we see, merely 81 years after the revolution.

What we are interested in is the First Restoration, the reign of Louis XVIII. He arrived in Paris on the guns of the occupiers: Russian Kazaks were among them and all of Europe as well: Austrians, British, Prussians. After restoring himself Louis XVIII didn’t exile and didn’t hang all the political class that had appeared in France during 26 years from 1789 to 1815. He left a part of the officials and the functionaries, blending them with his emigrants, who hided from the revolution in England and Russia. (One should not dispute the fact that the Restoration in the whole and broad sense was precisely the return of the traditional Bourbon dynasty on the French throne, and not the coronation of the general Bonaparte, since the latter brought new people with him, elevated by the revolution and the wars.)

Life in these Restoration years, from 1815 to 1828 was, by the reminiscences of the contemporaries, strange, strained and tense. After all, two generations before that France partied, amusing itself with the revolution and the executions, and afterwards with victorious wars. Of course they amused themselves, thousands of people died on the guillotine, and tens of thousands watched the guillotine’s work with delight. The famous knitters, “tricotteuses”, without which not a single execution could do, women with knitting-needles encouraged or insulted the victims depending on the whim of the crowd’s mood. And under Bonaparte they amused themselves with France’s victorious wars… And here silence came, the Bourbon with his ribbon over the stomach, his power, his selective repressions. France, defeated, enslaved by the occupiers, felt itself, I suppose, like Germany subsequently in 1918 and 1945 would feel itself and like we, the Russians, feel today. At the same time there was also a feeling as after a bloody hangover. The party was great, millions were laid down on the fields of fame from the Borodino field to Waterloo and the Egypt pyramids! Here we are now, walking and stumbling…

The Restoration is recoil, it is a break between two cataclysms. Between two volcano eruptions. It is clear that people carried heads on lances, enrapturingly ransacked palaces, somebody’s father still saw the queen with a menstruation stain on her prison shirt, uncombed, raising on the scaffold under the insults of the knitters. And it was clear that the grandson too would see heads peddled on lances. The Restoration was a break, an entr’acte between historical dramas. A rather dark, nauseating, stingy time. Before the Restoration there was a desperate attempt of the nation to set life anew. A powerful, serious attempt, people yelled in the Convent, heads flew into the guillotine basket. Robespierre came out to speak – everybody grew pale. The baldish Napoleon fought, grenadiers went into heavy attacks. But the forces are not all spent. There is many. There will be a new irruption. Everybody awaits it.

Another moment of History. 1905, Russia’s blue snows. Gapon with the workers, crossing themselves, carries a petition to the tsar. And suddenly – the Kazaks, salvos, corpses get cold on the snow. In the summer the uprising on the “Potemkin”, under steam the armed carrier goes away to Rumania. And by fall, by winter: Moscow districts in barricades. The Red Presnya, crackling of firing shots. Farther, Stolipin’s ties, executions… It is worth to read Felix Dzherzhinsky’s diary, he was seating in a casemate in these very years of the Russian, metaphorically speaking, “Restoration”, the restoration of the most savage autocracy possible (actually, it happened within the limits of the reign of a single monarch) – each night the guilty and the just were taken for execution: peasants, soldiers, officers who refused to calm down the peasants. Twelve years before the next revolution. Only twelve years. But the majority of those who participated in the 1905 revolution will not participate in the February 1917 revolution. The more so in the October one. (Later Trotsky would arrive from abroad, he was a 1905 activist.) The majority would get away from the revolution. Someone became a famous doctor, someone a lawyer. The most worthy: hanged, shot. Gradually the executions run out. Life becomes a bit easier. By 1913 Russia reaches the peak of its economic power. But in August 1914 in Saint Guy day the whole world resounds with one pistol shot. A Serbian boy of eighteen years Gavrilo Princip assassinates the Archduke Ferdinand. The volcanic lava is rising from the fire depths. The first clouds of the dreary smoke over the word. In February 1917 Nikolai II abdicates. Russia has exploded. The end of the Restoration, the end of the break of 12 years.

Why do Restorations inevitably lead to Revolutions? Why there wasn’t any successful Restoration? And there are no examples in History, there is no and no successful Restoration, even if you go through all history pages, all of it, reaping the pages from the start and from the end as well. No! The answer: because a Revolution is not a fancy of a group of people, it is an historical law. When the necessity to change the national elite becomes imminent, when the Bourbons alone, there has already been sixteen of them, when it is clear that the best, the most talented in the country is stopped by this dynasty wall: it is clear that one has to beat, to break, to rebel. Then the Revolution volcano irrupts. But it can’t win by a single try, the lava will not reach enemy’s remote outposts, the lava will peter out. That’s when Restoration comes. Silence. Repressions. Reaction on the Revolution that just happened. Simultaneously a new unbridled irruption already breathes heavily under the earth, releasing only clouds outside for the moment, already puffs, preparing itself.

Switching from the metaphorical language to the commonly accepted, let’s return a bit into the past. Sakharov has understood that USSR has big problems, still back in the 60s. The dissidents didn’t expose themselves and bustled in vain. They mistakenly trusted in the West’s altruism and infallibility, but they didn’t hold in vain and it is not in vain that they went to prisons, although they inaccurately defined the country’s problems. The principal problem was and remained – the problem of the human material, the human factor. The KPSS [Communist Party of the Soviet Unions] was already a party of dead souls and adjusters, the country didn’t have an elite anymore. They were still able to build, able to produce (not, what was required), but the plebeian offspring of the revolution were overtaken, half a hundred years after the Revolution, by the aristocratic disease of degeneration. I already shouted on one of the lectures here: they had to take and to put, even then in the end of the 60s – beginning of the 70s at the head of Russia the most raving ones: to take Vladimir Bukovsky, Amalrik (the author of the unfairly forgotten now, prophetic book “Will the USSR survive until 1984?”), Edward Kuznetzovin, Natan Sharansky, Volodya Gershuni into the Politburo. They would have stumbled for a while, erred for a month or two, and then would have found the path for the country, and would have been cured from their love to the West after studying GRU [Intelligence Administration] reports, in a couple of weeks. By 1985 it became irrefutably clear even to the KPSS itself: it has an enormous problem of personnel and as a result of this problem a lot of problems to the country. That resource, from which the KPSS drew its leaders’ elite had drew itself out, either the speechless “party members” – the bourgeois, the overwhelming majority or the thrusting, visible, but permeated throughout with the corporative spirit, cynical and untalented bureaucracy were available. The latter pitilessly exploited the country for its needs, there was nobody to stand at the head of the State. The scandals with the deaths of in succession Brejnev, Andropov and Chernenko revealed the weakness problem. To the KPSS itself, at first it seemed that it was sufficient to call up the younger generation of party workers and the country will resurrect. The younger generation, alas, under the test turned out to be also defective and simply not corresponding even to the standards presented to the regular party member in the West. That is, these were undeveloped half-rural people. The newly elected Gorbachev turned out to be a little dwarf with a brain the size of a walnut, before the problems that felt down on him. Besides, he didn’t possess the prudence and the defensive limitedness of the old men from the Politburo, whom he replaced. Extra-historical, uncultured and stupid person – he surrounded himself by similar half-people. What does “Edik” Shevarnadze alone worth (oh, unhappy Georgia!) dark, rural, but megalomaniac, all of these rednecks-reformers cut, chopped and screwed up so much that the entire heritage, amassed by the tsars and the Bolsheviks and the Cesar Stalin, was squandered and it turned out that we were left without the victories of the Great Patriotic War, for which we paid with 25 million of lives. If in 1878 the Russian general Skobelev arrived in the last day of January with his troops to the suburbs of Istanbul, the ancient Constantinople – the world’s capital – also Christ’s Jerusalem, then by 1991 a war was at its peak in Nagorni Karabakh, Chechnya was practically put off, in Osetya a war of the Ingushis with the Osetins broke out and the Baltic region considered itself put off.

From 1985 to 1991 there was no revolution. There was an auto-destruction of the country, made up by the stupid mechanizer, who received the Great Empire in uncontrolled sovereignty. I wrote in spring 1991 to the editor of the newspaper “Soviet Russia” Valentin Chikin, begging him to organize Gorbachev’s deposing. “Where are you looking, communists, take him away!” In august 1991 the KPSS, alas, demonstrated that it is as dead as a corpse. The GKChP [State Committee for a State of Emergency] members demonstrated it.

Only in fall 1991, from August 21 and in September – October revolution’s bubbling is finally audible in the country.

A democratic one, not mine, not the one I want, but the birth pangs of a revolution, nonetheless. The democrats’ miscalculation consisted in the fact that they didn’t dare to come up BY THEMSELVES, under the leadership of THEIR LEADER. Well, naturally, they didn’t have Sakharov anymore, but in those days, leaders were made momentarily, they had to take any democratic big mouth. (Later more talented ones would have forced him aside.) but they borrowed a leader. But they preferred to cover themselves with Yeltsin like with a tank and thus they went. And they ruined their revolution. Because what kind of revolution hides itself behind some Boris Godunov?! The noisy, vulgar, brainless Yeltsin turned out to be a despot and was raised by the stinky milk of bureaucracy. She was his mother, his nanny – nurse. And his bureaucracy mates – are just mates. And not Orlov or Bonner or Kovalev. The crowd took down Dzherzhinsky’s monument (Dugin affirms that it wasn’t even the democrats who did it, that people form the “Memory” took it down and brought the crane. And when the crowd started to assault the buildings on the Old Square – Yeltsin stopped them. He put up security everywhere. The democratic revolution was over. The principal democrats nonetheless remained satisfied. Gaydar was given big power. Gavryil Popov a bit less. Sobchak put himself at the head of Russia’s second city. All of this in exchange for the democratic revolution. They shouldn’t have gone on a compromise with them. They had to continue overthrowing monuments, destroy the buildings on Lubyanka and the Old Square, let their crowd to break into a couple of ministries and put a democrat at the head of the State. Or a Committee of Social Rescue from democrats. It was possible back then.

And then came the turn of the patriotic opposition. And it ruined its revolution too. In 1997 I rode in Anpilov’s car, beside him and asked him: Victor Ivanovich, don’t you have the impression, that on March 17 1992 we had to lead the people from the Manejnaya, where we were all orated till dark, to lead them to Kremlin and to fucking take it, ah? That we missed the chance? After all, from 350 to 500 thousand people gathered on the Manejnaya then?” “You see, Edward…” began Anpilov, clutching the wheel. “And then, Victor Ivanovich, there was also another chance. The 9th of May 1993, that day, I recall, I went at the head of a column of national radicals. Then Krasnov (the head of the Moscow Union) begged me not to turn the guys on the Red Square, he asked us to disperse. To my shame I didn’t even understand then, why his face was so pale-green. And still there was only one spurt from the Eternal Fire, where we had just stood on our knees, bowing before the memory of the soldiers-victors of 1945, to the Kremlin…” “You see, Edward, who could have known then,” – exhaustingly answered Anpilov.

Nobody could have known. Revolutions are not repeated. And if I had a justification: I was an emigrant and although crowds greeted me in a friendly manner (they knew me, read in the “Soviet Russia), they wouldn’t have followed me. Or a few would have followed. But to Anpilov these days must appear in his nightmarish dreams as a reproach: the 23 February and the 17 Mars 1992 and the 9 May 1993. He was at the peak of fame and power, people would have followed him. Everybody, our people and strangers, called us then to beware of “provocations” and not to “yield to provocations”. In real fact, it’s not that we should have yielded, prayed! Remember this, young natzbols, those who are just coming forth to the fight with the System. Huge crowds gather rarely. But if such a crowd gathers, it should be leaded! One cannot allow it to disperse without committing a feat.

And during the resistance of September-October 1993 the opposition didn’t win because there was no united opposition organization. Because nobody had prepared the resistance. Because Russia’s VS [Supreme Council] deputies (the same ones, who dissolved the USSR!) made speeches and didn’t display any initiative. I wrote about this in detail in “Anatomy of a Hero”. I won’t repeat myself. It was a defeat.

The president Yeltsin lingered at the power from 1993 to 1999, not doing anything specially and not changing the rules that he laid down still back in 1991. However under his stable “roof” security and repressive organizations came around, recovered and rebuilt themselves anew. He gave them to breath and to grow muscles. By habit, in gratitude to the support in the resistance with Gorbachev in 1989-91 he did not oppress the mass media, and sure in the worthlessness of the political parties, did not persecute them so much. Benignly he removed the ban from the participation of the Communist Party in the elections already a month after the blood bath near the White House. But Yeltsin is not yet the Restoration. He’s a caricatural Bonaparte of our unsuccessful Russian Revolution.

Our Restoration is Voldemar Putin. (Vladimir doesn’t go with his image. He is more complicated than the name Vladimir.) It sufficed to look at his inauguration ceremony. Actually Putin is even two Restorations together. One slipped as an allusion in the grotesque coronation ritual, that is, inauguration – a bleak restoration of the pre-revolution tsarist epoch. And at the same time Putin is an indubitable restoration of our Sovok. With him repressions against the differently minded resumed (selective for now), the General Prosecution plays the unprecedented role of the Inquisition (operates selectively for now) – in a whole the soviet repressive machine is restored. The blending of people of the past and the new regimes is always characteristic for a restoration, therefore the FSB officers and the Prosecutor’s office quietly blended together during Putin’s rule, next to his throne, with the oligarchs Deripaska and Abramovich and the SPS member the tadpole Kirienko, a scientologist. A crossbreed of sovietizm and democracy? That’s right. And precisely in the proportion of 15 sovietizm and 9 democracy. The numbers here are the years spent by Valdimir Vladimirovich: 15 years in the KGB and 9 years in the apparatuses of Sobchak, Borodin and Yeltsin.

And how with the inner urges of society, with the emotions’ lava propping up at the throat of the volcano, emotions of the intelligentsia and the people, with this fast-boiling steam, which prompted still in the 60s the first protest movements? And the people, and the intelligentsia and the misfits are still left out of the State government. Over thirty years of discontent and what did the mountain generate? Two autumnal months of freedom – from August to October 1991? Two, three, well say a dozen of monuments thrown down? What guided the democrats when they called a leader – a Varyag from the Politburo? They maybe thought: “Well, this way it’s safer. Our people are such, that the moment you let them loose, you won’t be able to drive them in factories afterwards! And later we’ll grab the most supreme power from the Varyag. We’ll end up by getting it. He’s here temporarily, he’ll serve a bit and then we’ll push him down…”

They didn’t grab, didn’t push down. The Varyag preferred to transfer the power to a heir he had elected himself, composed in 15 parts of a KGB officer and in 9 parts of an administrative Russian bottling, a liberal democrat. And 15 to 9 that is the formula of Restoration.

Magma, blind forces, our society’s emotions, the collective unconscious and conscious, unspent, still long for freedom. They didn’t get anyway. The principal problem remained the same as in 1985: the worn out state of the human material of Russia’s ruling class. In 1985-1993 the fresh people didn’t have the time to break into the political scene in Moscovia. There, where it had – in Karabakh, in Abkasia, in Pridnestrovie, in Chechnya – there each time a new, local world was being born, a new regime. Not always, actually, pleasant to the countries-opponents – Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldavia, Russia, but what can you do?

The Restoration is a poorly built temporary respite. Nothing is solved, present was poorly built from the past and the recent present – already past. But the problem remained: society doesn’t need a limited change of only some thousands of leaders and their replacement with only their deputies or functionaries, previously standing lower in the hierarchy, which in a 150-million country isn’t a reform even, but a simultaneous forced banishing. Of some million bureaucratic bosses (many of them hereditary!) and their replacement with new, young, strong people. This kind of total replacement of the personnel of a ruling class is called: Revolution. Rough, young, idealistically oriented, prompt to experiences, fresh, some millions of yesterday’s adolescents will bring to the country each his energy. It is this very energy that has to create the New Russia. Without these new barbarians there will be nothing. There will be Gogol’s and Saltikov-Shedrin’s characters at the scale of the entire country. A continuous “The Dead Souls” play, that’s what is and will be. “Adat” in a word.

An important clarification: The resignation of some millions of bureaucratic bosses should not be voluntary. They should be ousted, banished with kicks, only then will the desired effect be attained. I am certain, Russia will not escape the revolution. The survival instinct has to push her on the Revolution. The Revolution has to be offensive for some, an act of revenge for others. It has to be unfair, when people grab, kick, insult, banish. Then the necessary emotional temperature will be attained in society. This atmosphere of implanting a forcible justice will awake talents, genial ideas of society’s reconstruction will come. This is precisely what it takes. It takes a state of conflict. As for peace, it is preached to us as stability, security on the streets, quiet happiness within four walls is needed only to the sick, the old and the handicapped, in real fact. For the healthy and the young the conflict of Revolution is a blessing. For the 2.8 homeless kids it is a blessing.

During a Revolution a miracle is always possible. Therefore it is so attractive. During the Restoration, the pause – there is no miracles. Therefore the Restoration is always unattractive, to nobody, except to the restoration’s leaders. And a peaceful Revolution does not work, as I tell it. It is designed by nature as the destruction of the old, as an all-cleansing violence. Only then on the cleared space the new could live.