The Other Russia

Lecture 4

In the second half of the XX century too, young people kept rebelling and trying to take the power away from their fathers. The last time it had all began with China. It is Mao Zedong who called the “Hunveybins”, his young Red Guards to the foreground of History. The old, sly wise man Mao, possibly, was sincere in his terror before the new bureaucracy that the Chinese communism has created only in 17 years, from 1949 up until 1966, resurrecting the thousand years old cast of fat functionaries-mandarins. Possibly he used students and young people in the fight against his political opponents, which is not the point. He had precisely put the finger to the wound, having sensed it: on the sharpest problem of all modern societies. And precisely: the young people are the most oppressed class of society. Having proclaimed: “Bombard the Headquarters!” – Mao gave schoolchildren and students the right of inspection and punishment of the functionaries. And the Chinese boys with little red books thrown in the air, the fanatic boys enjoyed it fully. They leaded the highest officials of the State through the entire country in fools caps (like from paintings of Goya and Bosch!), they beat, spit, kicked and sent on reeducation in the country teachers and even the premier Liu Shaozi and the ministers Zhou Enlai or Deng Xiaoping. All of this began in 1966 and calmed down only in 1976.

The example was contagious. In 1968, on May 2nd, right in the midst of the cultural revolution of the Hunveybins when French newspapers daily brought the news of million people strong raids of Chinese red guards on the offices of Chinese officials, in Paris the student revolution of May 1968 began. At the sociology faculty in Nanterre, a Paris suburb students headed by the 23 years old German Daniel Cohn-Bendit organized a meeting, which transformed itself in a confrontation with the police. The police closed down the faculty but the unrest moved to the Latin Quarter, in the heart of Paris, in the building of the Sorbonne. The rector addressed the police for help. The police broke into the auditorium. Fights between two thousand of students and the policemen lasted several hours. People started to put cars on fire, they built a few barricades. 596 students were arrested. The Sorbonne was closed and the police stood in front of the entrances. Some students appeared in court and received two months of prison. But the next day student demonstrations resumed. As did the confrontations with the police – 460 students were arrested. Student organizations demanded on May 7th to withdraw the police from the Latin Quarter, to free the convicted students and to open the faculties in Paris and Nanterre.

It is interesting that the instigators everywhere were students of human sciences faculties, that is, those who were the most stuffed with the ideas of western civilization. It is also curious that General de Gaulle perfectly understood that the wind blew from the East. On May 7th he stated in anger to his ministers: “This means that we are talking about a trial of strength. We will not tolerate such a situation. Order has to be restored, before everything… These bad students do not want to return to their studies. They are making fun of the return to calm and work. They strive for the Chinese Cultural revolution. Not for anything in the word! Concessions are out of question.”

The situation became particularly heated on May 10th. Students have built about 60 barricades in the district of Edmond Rostand Square. Above the barricades – black and red flags. Around – several thousands of policemen wait for the order for the siege. Students are armed with Molotov cocktails and rocks. The policemen are armed with clubs, big plastic shields and gas grenades. At 2 o’clock AM comes the order of the siege. The fighting lasted five hours. The total: 367 wounded, among them 32 heavily, 188 burned cars. The students disperse on orders of Cohn-Bendit. The workers unions decide to have a general 24 hours strike of protest. The 13th May begins the general strike and demonstration. More than a million of protesters have participated in the march from the Republic Square to the Denfert-Rochereau Square.

The slogans of the demonstration: “De Gaulle – to the archives!” “De Gaulle – to the pauper’s house!” “Farewell De Gaulle!” “Ten years is enough!” Arrived to Denfert-Rochereau the demonstrators, as previously decided, disperse. But groups of students call on to walk further and to take over the Elysee Palace. The moderate unions do not follow them.

The 14th of May the police leaves Sorbonne. Leftist students take residence in the auditoriums. Now it is a “critical” or “free” university. Meetings go on days and nights. They are singing the “International”, hands are flashing red books of Mao’s sayings, they are being distributed by the Chinese embassy. They demand the abolition of exams, mandatory programs and courses. They often cite Trotsky. Sorbonne’s walls are covered with inscriptions: “Be realists – demand the impossible!” “Forbidden to forbid!” “Imagination to power!” An “uninterrupted artistic revolution” was declared. The Sorbonne was not enough for the students and they seized the theater “Odeon” where activities took place similar to the one in Sorbonne with the participation of the Paris intelligentsia. On May 14th De Gaulle went on a visit to Rumania.

The same day workers occupy the “Sud Aviation” factory and two days later the “Reno” factories. Transportation stopped, communications did not work, radio and television. A furious De Gaulle returns on May 18th. On May 24th he appears on television with a bleak six minutes long speech from which it is clear that the general is tired and frightened. The same day in Paris took place a new grandiose demonstration. Hundreds of thousands walk with the slogans “De Gaulle on resignation!” In the Latin Quarter fights again, it smells gas, hundreds of arrested. The 28th May in the hotel “Continental” the leader of the leftists Francois Mitterand made public a proposition about the creation of a temporary government headed by Mendes-France, Mitterand – president, ten ministers, not excluding the communists. Mendes-France supported the students-revolutionaries from Nanterre and Sorbonne. On May 29th De Gaulle disappears after not coming to the meeting of the Council of ministers. He somehow ends up in Baden-Baden, on the base of the French occupying troops. On May 30th he returns to Paris. Appears on the radio: “I took a decision. I stay.” France, frightened by the barricades and the black flags goes to the electoral urns on June 23-30, the Gaullists have acquired an extra 97 seats and have now 358 mandates out of 485 in the National Council. One of the ministers-Gaullists said after the elections: “The party was won but it is over with the general.” Students could also have said that “the party is won” because they were over with the general. Though De Gaulle left his post only the 27 April 1969, it were the students who threw him down, even though themselves turned out to be unable to take the power. It is against the old de Gaulle and the old France that was directed the rising of the students. The efficiency of their rebellion was acknowledged. Jean-Raymond Tourneau ascertains in his book “General’s May”: “The feeling of bitterness has reached an extreme limit with him… And here with one movement a few madmen from Nanterre were able to do a thing in which failed the specialists of the psychological war in 1958, the creators of the barricades in 1960, the rebels of 1961 and the leaders of the OAS in 1962.” It is another thing that the students removed De Gaulle but not the Gaullists. The next president became the ex-premier minister of De Gaulle – Georges Pompidou.

“A few madmen” turned out to be in many countries of Europe in those years, not only the German red haired student Kohn-Bendit was mad. In Germany leads the student leader Rudi Duchke. His fate is tragic (at a time when Khon-Bendit has degenerated in an old fat grumbler, became vice-mayor of Hamburg, and later deputy of the European parliament and a centrist of course) – he was shot during the same fateful year by a rightist worker-alcoholic. Duchke was paralyzed, in 1980 died in a bathroom, already a deputy from the “Greens”. In America the hippies were rebelling, the democratic convention in Chicago ended with many thousands of fightings and the trial of Jerry Rubin and his friends. In 1968 in California revolutionary murders took place, carried out by Charles Manson and his commune. Even the socialist Prague tried to rebel in 1968. The rising in Prague bore a student character at the beginning, but we, the Russians, took it as an attempt of the Czechs to leave the socialist camp and the Russian tanks interfered.

For the sake of justice it should be said that the “smogists”, “The Youngest Society of Geniuses” started to rebel in Moscow already in 1965-1966. Many thousands of large auditoriums collected their poetic appearances. They also tried to carry out political actions. There was their barefoot demonstration to the western Germany embassy, there was the list of “ the literary dead”, nailed to the door of the Central House of Men of Letters. Their leader was Leonid Gubanov, deceased at 37 from the consequences of alcoholism. But few people know that very noticeable dissidents as well came from the ranks of SMOG: Vladimir Bukovsky (at a time he was worth a high price. The ChK exchanged him for the president of Chili’s communist party Luis Corvalan), Vadim Delone (he participated with Gorbanevskaia in the demonstration against the leading of soviet troops in Czechoslovakia in August 1968, later died in Paris), less noticeable dissidents V. Batchev and Kuchev. Repressions hit SMOG already in 1966. When I arrived in Moscow, the 30th September 1966 I immediately found the smogists and took up with them (this episode is described in my book “A stranger in Troubled Times”). However then in Russia Brejnev’s (after Kruchnev’s thaw) reaction was already raging to the outmost: I remember that V. Batchev and the painter of SMOG N. Nedbailo were in exile in the Krasnoyarski region.

In 1969 the campus of the university town Berkley that is in California rebelled. The late professor Simon Karlinski told me that revolutionary students came in his class, he taught Mayakovsky to students from the Slavic faculty, furious with the fact that he did not fulfill the order to stop the classes. Karlinsky took up on the students, stating that he was reading a lecture about a revolutionary poet. The committee members had to agree with him: “Go on, comrade!”

The 60s were actually years of youth. It was fashionable to be young. And for the first time the young people put themselves as an age group against the harsh, (“square people” as they were called in those times) fathers. Movies with the young she-devil Brigit Bardo were coming out, Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie “Blow Up” with the young principal character – a successful cool young guy-photographer (a fashionable profession at that time) with girls-models was highly popular. The 60s were also the years of an unprecedented rising of young rock bands: Beatles and Rolling Stones drove their fans to madness. People around were talking about the culture of youth.

However, nowhere did a revolution succeed. In China the letting lose of the was stopped by Mao himself. The Confucius in him won over the revolutionary. Not instantly, but already in the beginning of the 70s the Hunveybins were gradually driven out of cities to the province where they quietly faded, growing rice and raising pigs. The Chinese bureaucracy suffered losses (western sources name crazy numbers ranging from 1 to 9 million victims of the cultural revolution, however they cannot be trusted. “Bombard the Headquarters!” had for its goal not the elimination of bureaucrats, but the removal of power from them), but survived. Five times submitted to public humiliations Deng Xiaoping returned, he was returned to power from the country where he took care of horses. Mao died in 1976.

In Paris Pompidou became president and after him Giscard d'Estaing also a Gaullist. They restored just for one month the vacillating power of the middle age. Sometimes one can hear that, supposedly, Guy Debord and his collective of “situationists” were the ideologists of May 1968. This does not correspond to reality. Arguable is even simply the influence of the “situationists” on these events. Maybe a ridiculously small part of the lightest slogans: such as “Under the pavement the beach!” is apparently “situationalistic”. Not Guy Debord nor Kurt Vangheim were the leaders or ideologists of May 1968 in Paris. Just as Herbert Marcuse was not a leader though his book “One Dimensional Man” was read but nothing from the influence of a rather heavy and rather “high brow” Marcuse’s philosophy in the events of may 1968 in Paris and later revolts in Prague, in Germany and in the USA is not traceable. Rather they were spontaneous, hardly realized unrests of the most able-bodied and ready for military service people about their role in the life of society. A role submitted to the older age. And the impetus and the example was given by Mao, the wise Mao, De Gaulle already testified (I discovered a book about De Gaulle in the prison library and a citation from De Gaulle “The striving for the Chinese Cultural revolution”. – confirmed my own earlier enounced opinion), that Hunveybins are the fathers of the student revolt in Paris in May 1968.

As among the Parisian comrades of the May revolution, no serious revolutionaries were discovered among the “hippies”. Timothy Leary, “the prophet of LSD” with his ideology of drugs, obviously looked more serious. Ken Kesey with the novel “One flew over the cuckoo's nest”, published in 1961 later experimented with drugs and life in communes – did not came out as a leader. Manson sullied the “hippie” movement in criminality.

The 70s, especially their fist half, belonged to the young rather by momentum. In 1975 in London on Kings the punks movement was born (a young hooligan, on the slang of the 40s). However though red haired like Kohn-Bendit, Malcom Mcloren was able to create a style and created the style of a “young hooligan”, the punks limited themselves to the style as an ideology just adding spontaneous anarchy to it. The revolutionaries of the 60s who wanted to continue their struggle in the 70s principally went into radial politics and this road led them, the German boys into the RAF, the Italian to “the Red Brigades”. As for the French, the radically toughest turned out to be Paul Goldman (the brother of the singer Jean-Jacques Goldman) – a bald sturdy fellow. He was shot during the expropriation of a bank in 1973. The same year was banned the organization of the “autonomists”, these guys in masks participated in all demonstrations of any kind and transformed them into combats with the police.

In November 1974 I saw young Italy with its red flags. I was 31 years old but externally – long hair, in rumpled jeans, I looked 20 something and perfectly matched with these 70s and that country. Italy was boiling, demonstrations were taking place every day, the smell of tear gas floated over Rome. I remember I entered Rome University where I had an appointment with the late professor Angello Maria Ripellino. While in the university there was a fight of students with the police. I liked it so much!

We left Rome on a PANAM flight to New York precisely the 18 February 1975, the day when Mara Cagol freed her husband, the leader of the “Red Brigades” Renato Curcio from jail. She got there with four other comrades: they all took out machine guns and the security got down on the floor. Our flight was delayed: they were looking for a bomb. All the passengers had to recognize their briefcases: they were put on the flight field. My briefcase with books turned out to be broken, naturally it was the heaviest one, where else than in the heaviest briefcase should one look for a bomb of the “Red Brigades”?

New York was naturally a city for serious middle age and old businessmen but there was the Lower East Side where the American Punk roamed and was born among the children of the eastern-European immigrants. Not many people got this, by after all I wrote “It's Me, Eddie” in 1976 and “Diary of a loser” in 1977 in New York, in essence inside the punk-movement, in the esthetic of a punk. Also there were personal contacts – I slept with Mereline Mazure, a girl-photographer, she studied in a visual arts school and was an avant-garde chick – she took pictures of pregnant women, led me to (at that time they were still illegal) S M clubs. In April 1977 I met Julie Carpenter and she was friends with Maryanne, the girlfriend of Markie from the band “Ramones” and he was also a musician for the punk-star Richard Hell (his most famous album – “Blank Generation”), so I lived in all of this. And the atmosphere influenced even more: the newspaper “Village Voice” – announcements about representations of punk bands in the CBGB, printed in white font on black background, they are still today standing before my eyes. Unemployed, I went to lectures of anarchists, to the CBGB, roamed the Lower East Side with girls with lilac hair, on St. Marks Place, attended meetings of the Socialist Workers Party. I was rebelling and looked for a gang of people like me. If America was more revolutionary I would have been revolutionary already then.

In 1977 Sid Vicious came to New York and lived in the Chelsea Hotel. He was shown on TV, hissing, wrinkling his nose, cursing. Himself extravagant, he was with Nancy, a really ordinary chick with acne. Their entire story could be observed time to time on television. I came to Chelsea Hotel, wanted to live there. They said to me that the waiting list is signed up years beforehand and laughed a bit at the emigrant who was badly speaking English. However they did not laugh a lot, what if this insolent weirdo will become the second Andy Warhol, Lower East Side was full of all kinds of visiting morons. In 1977 Nancy died from an OD, Vicious was arrested. Among the aristocratic bohemia and punk beau-monde the opinions diverged: some considered Sid a murderer, others – the All Mighty God of the punk-movement who could do anything he wanted. I felt that with Nancy’s death, Vicious entered the clan of heaven residents like Rimbaud or Lautreamont. That’s exactly what happened, in 1978 Vicious himself died from an OD. Some years earlier in Paris Morrison died, just as tragically messed up.

In actual fact this was the end. The Empire of Youth lasted from 1966, from the call of Mao “Bombard the Headquarters!” up until 1978 – until Vicious’s death. Only during that lapse of time young people were aware of themselves and the others as a class, with particular demands and needs. They were about to force their privileges on the world. But it did not happen.

It is symptomatic that another even earlier idol of youth, Elvis Presley promptly died in 1977, had the time to fit in the time limit. Only more and more sharp explosions and terrorist acts of the “Red Brigades” and the RAF members up until the middle of the 80s still reminded time to time about the hopes of the European youth to seize the power.

And what about modern Russia? First of all, I assert: all attempts as of the right reformists (SPS, “Yabloko”) and the left restorers of the USSR (Zuganov, Anpilov) to press down on the young people did not succeed. The virtual, “advanced”, “hype”, materially provided young people in bright pants, sweet to the hearts of Kirienko and Nemtsov do not yet exist: in our poor and very peasant-like country. And the rough, crooked, corny, blindly devoted to the Marxist dogmatism young people in pea jackets, overcoats, sheepskin coats do not exist anymore. Putin’s block “Unity” and Putin’s PRists try to build the young people: Surkov and Co, but the project is doomed to fail. Because they take young men and women not as equal partners but as servants: for the role of speechless helpers, guardians, lackeys and executioners of the will of functionaries. Even the pleasures of making photocopies or placing bottles with mineral water on “Unity’s” congresses are given to a few only. For a small price the students naturally will put on t-shirts with the logos of anyone you’ll want and will wave flags but it is piecework and not a political party.

The young people do not want it this way. They are not interested in serving the adults.

They want to do it themselves. They want to find a change to their life in a political party, to find their fate. A young person who is just starting life mostly likes the slogan: “Who was nothing will became everything!” Because coming to the awareness age of 14 and more, boys are dreaming only about it:

Magically, right away, with one leap to become “everything”. This is why they idolize epochs in which it was possible. Epochs of revolution, when sixteen years olds commanded over troops and twenty years olds over armies.

The epoch of the end of 80s, beginning of 90s at first appeared to be such an epoch to a part of our young people.

But it did not confirm their hopes. Gradually the democratic revolution was extinguished by the party apparatchiks who got scared by it. External enthusiasts, who noisily dethroned statues became useless and even dangerous. The bureaucratic power was being restored.

Putin’s government insolently denied its own youth the just share of the common pie of power and prosperity. Still it did its work: the State should at first balance the classes, ages and shares of pies. But because the government’s administration is also realized by the middle age, so what can be expected from them?! The youth is the victim in this State. All the burdens are piled up on it. The middle age directs and commands, children and seniors eat on account of the parents and previous merits and they all are being pulled by those who are being called in announcements for work: “healthy young people up to 35 years old are needed”. From them is also expected to give up their lives and limbs without complaint, in wars started by the middle age. In the direct and figurative sense youth is the most oppressed class of the modern world. As for Marx it was the proletariat, as in the modern world the place of the proletariat was taken by the youth.