The Other Russia

Lecture 5

In December 1989 after 15 years of life in the West for the first time I was able to go in the Soviet Union. Among other amazing discoveries that I did in my country, I was struck, I recall, by the fact that on the streets of Russian cities were still roaming the same old men and women, in the typical Russian patriarchal style, as I left them here in 1974. A gray down shawl, a worn fur collar of a tired out cotton-wool coat, women boots crackled like hoofs, a molted hat, a cotton-wool coat and the same cloven-hoofed footwear for the old men, and maybe a stick and a bag as well. According to my calculations they should have died a long time ago. It was as if they were all living abnormally long and they should have been at least ninety years old. I did not immediately get the simple truth that these were not the same old women, but Russia’s citizens who got old during the years of my absence, that were 50 at the moment of my departure, only after I came to Kharkov and saw my parents. From vigorous, slightly over fifty parents they too looked like old people of the 1974 pattern, cleaner, though. It is then that I realized that the torch of Russian old age is transmitted from generation to generation.

One gets the impression that generations of old people, like in the theater, take off their clothes from each other and change themselves. Their clothes are identical, up to the buttons. And the faces are the same as of those of my generation. Today’s American or French pensioner does not resemble at all the pensioner of the 50s and even less the American prewar old man. The clothes are brighter, more various, more fresh. The bodies are fuller, more muscular, the faces’ expressions are different. Completely! The faces are different! This is noticeable if compared to old pictures. The same is observed through all Western Europe and even in the likes of Latin America, in Malaysia, in Singapore. There old people of different times are: different! Here in Russia young people are different: young people of the 30s, 50s, 70s, 90s are recognizable by their clothes and hair style on pictures, but as for the old people, then it is hardly some XIX century and not higher.

This means something, doesn’t it? Right! This yells, screams of one and only thing, that we have here a monstrous stagnation of society. That in its essence it is old, its structure never deeply changed, regardless of the shocks, supposedly profound of the 1917 revolution. That it’s been two hundred years now that we have a social stagnation! Our little old people, like an emigrant who has fallen into a coma in foreign land begins to scream in the forgotten native language, thus the old people closest to death put on their own clothes of serfdom times, revealing their true archaic essence – slip, splash on the streets.

The fact that Russia is an old, peasant, serf-like country can be seen in Moscow’s center and its suburbs and even more clearly seen in all sorts of Mitishi, Electrostali, etc. Well, naturally, it watches top fashion on TV, but it is a big question what does it see there, on the place of the top fashion? Probably not what the other countries do. Don’t we have millions of citizens who listen to musical texts in English, without totally understanding their sense? Getting high on the foreign “mova” [language in Ukrainian].

All this talk, this chatter about grannies was started by me with the goal of showing by a multitude of examples that Russia, the RF, if it does not want to drop dead in its snow, let everything rot with the constantly thinning film of the Russian people, needs a huge social crash, an explosion.

Morning. Snow. The gray bricks of five story buildings. Birches. Asia. Krasnoyarsk region. City of Nazarovo. The citizens are going to work, the young people in leather coats, the middle age is muffled a little warmer, in felt boots and shawls. Pensioners, like suspicious old woodchucks by their holes, stand near their porches, looking around at the hostile world. Everybody is frowning. Discontented. I am looking at them, I arrived to Nazarovo, in the Krasnoyark region, to collect the material for a book about their fellow countryman Anatoly Bikov, I watch and reflect. They are all from the past. From my childhood. From the 50s. It is a copy of the Saltovski village, Stalin has just died, all the types are in places: frowning workers, women fat from potatoes and sweet dough. Have they spent all this time in refrigerators or what? Fifty years! But it’s true though they had lived in the social refrigerator – in the USSR, in a frozen social climate.

Once, in 1996 I attended the session of the Consultative Chamber with the president of the RF, the consultations of its Committee (I think it was called a committee) on defense. The Committee’s chairman was the bureaucratic Yuri Petrov, former secretary of the Sverdlov defense committee of the KPCC and former head of Yeltsin’s first administration. The meeting was taking place in the President’s Administration building on Ilyinka! Notwithstanding all the loudly sounding titles of the Chamber, it was a useless structure, created by the efforts of Ribkin, the glib Ivan Ribkin, who was already losing the favors of Yeltsin. Out of staff, friable activity that has for its goal to assemble together officials looking for a post, a lavatory for them. I got there, disoriented by its name and the fact that it was loudly announced: all political parties of Russia, without exception are invented to participate. NBP was then persistently working on its legalization and rehabilitation in society, the image of “red fascists” stuck to us by the mass media harmed us. We met the representatives of the “Chamber” and proposed them our participation. From a dozen of candidacies the sly-assed administration of “the chamber” managed to bargain to leave only myself, citing the fact that without us there was already a lot of people assembled and that we – NBP are still young, a “starting” party, so to speak. “But You, Edward Veniaminovich, You are very famous, we can’t refuse You.” They tried to put me in the committee on culture, but I insisted on defense.

I only attended the first session. In the house of the President’s Administration on Ilyinka a multitude of weighty, potbellied people went up the stairs, a part of them – bold, functionaries. Our committee assembled in the round hall. When I entered it, there, already in two columns of chairs (with a passage between them) rested functionary’s bodies. I took a place somewhere in the back. There was a scene, on the scene there were chairman’s tables. Some functionaries recognized me and started to look at each other with fright.

Entered Yuri Petrov – a tall, gray-haired bureaucrat of the soviet type. They selected the presidium. And it began… They had to select a secretary – the only paid employee except the chairman Petrov. They competed, furiously reddening. One general with stripes even got sick and he was escorted out of the hall supported by the arms. A certain functionary N defended the candidacy of the functionary M, who had good contacts at the State Duma and insistently proposed to choose just him as a secretary. Uri Petrov did propaganda for his candidate Y. A certain Z came out to the microphone and started to persuade the audience that he executed at a time the contact between the Supreme Council and the Government and he, just he has all the cards on hands, he has an uncounted number of contacts and only he should be elected. They accused each other, sneered, even screamed, without forgetting to look at me from time to time, the stranger, but the desire to possess the secretarial post overcame in them the prudence. I observed them, listened and gradually started to understand that they are peculiarly familiar to me, with hairs glued to the skull, with ears overgrown by gray hair, with boundless waists, with bellies, sticking out of the pants. Aren’t they Gogol’s characters, the great Nikolai Vasilievich, people from “The Inspector-General” and “The Dead Souls”, and “the Nose” and also “The Coat”. And also from Griboedov, from “Distress from Cleverness”. Here is the general Skalozub, here is Nozdrev, here is Molchanin, Famousov, – all the types, all had survived, all were preserved, after a hundred and a half years – like brand new! Among these mastodons in pants (because here is like in pre-Revolutionary China – the higher is the official in rank, the fatter he is, the heavier, weights more), among these mastodons, in a small leather coat bought on a flea market in Paris, I felt myself as Chatsky.

I never went there again. Though precisely for half a year they still sent me faxes with invitations to sessions, and even called: “Edward Veniaminovich! A session is coming on. Extremely important questions will be discussed…” When they created a few new ministries, among them a customs one, I saw some of the previous co-searchers from the round hall already in theatrical uniforms of this department with many stars.

Wasn’t the Great October Revolution less than a hundred years earlier and all these ancient types had survived, the functionary types? Why?

Notwithstanding the 1917 and 1991 revolutions, so different, oriented at different things, other true Russian types had survived. Streets of Russia’s big cities are filled with cops. The cops are now in trains, on frontiers, customs, at the city’s entrances and exits, along the roads, in the subway, on squares and streets, near historical monuments and stalls. A countless army, wearing gray armyaks. A multitude of really young, but untidy, high-handed, thuggish and sinister faces like on paintings of Vasnezov, Surikov, Repin. If one is to discard the machine guns, put lances and clubs in their hands we will get archers, some kind of oprichniks. Fall into their hands and you’ll see, they always beat up, clarify (if clarify) later. In police departments reigns self-governance, butchery, drunkenness, insults, needless hatred to their own people. In reality the largest extremist organization in Russia is the MVD. More transgressions are committed in one police department over night than those the supposedly extremist organization RNE has committed in all the years of its existence, in ten years! More!

Walking together with the angry people the 3rd October to the White House, sweeping the cops on our way, I myself saw boxes with vodka in police cars, that the people who suddenly turned out to be conscious broke right there on the sidewalk’s border: a dense alcohol smell permeated the air. Not seventy years of the Bolshevik leadership, nor the ten years of the Russian but nonetheless “democracy” did affect police mentality in any way. In the police, by a direct line, executioner traditions go from the masters of torture, from the secret order, from tongs and hammers for bone crushing. The cops see their power as absolute, up to the right to inflict injuries in anger and beat up to death. Somebody fell to them – they do with him whatever they want. The law does not stop them at all, even if there is a limit to their personal laissez-faire, then it is the fear of personal responsibility. Even if suddenly an honest modern young guy gets in the MVD, he is forced to become such as their intern departmental tradition demands it, or he is forced to leave, to abandon the world of the cops.

And who are the judges? Even before I got arrested the 7th April 2001, I attended courts several years for various reasons. Sometimes as a social advocate, sometimes as the chairman of the National-Bolshevik Party, if our people were on trial. And our people were getting on trial more frequently. I was struck by the fact that forty years after I attended two-three trials over my friends or classmates of that period, in the beginning of the 60s – the type of the judge stayed the same. In most cases it is always a woman, young or old, or middle aged, that’s not the point, but they are all of the same type. Nothing advanced in the social sense. The judges have the same nun skirts and the same nun jackets (when they are without the cloak) and the same nun shoes without heels. They have the same hairdos as soviet ladies, back-combings made forever. They smell naphthalene, museum. With the supposed democracy in 2001 they judge in the same way as people were judging during the totalitarian soviet regime in its peak, in the 60s. They still in the same way receive a salary and apartments from the State and will never take the side of a private individual against the State. The nuns judge in the favor of the government that keeps their old-regime monastery.

What was said about the judges can also be said about the investigators. It is an historical, archivist type of people. Until you are confronted to them, you think that these types don’t exist in the world anymore. They are all from movies about the distant historical epoch that supposedly don’t exist since long ago. It does! And they give you time, and they keep you in a cage, they are dead, you are alive.

And the peasants aren’t they the recent kolhosniks, laborers of agriculture? If one is to exclude the TV-antennas, the peasants live like in the XVIII century. And they behave like in the XVIII century. In some villages you will not find a book. There are no bookstores in any village, and they don’t sell newspapers. Not even in regional centers. Still the Soviet authority introduced by force general education. And if they had acquired even the tenth part of even the soviet manuals, they would have been the luminaries of knowledge. Nothing of the sort is observed. Hardened fellows drive on frozen plains on their miserable affairs and have even stopped from bearing children – the only justification to their existence. They don’t produce children, or wheat, they walk around drunk. Peasantry!? Drunken depressed shadows in the fields.

The conclusion of these observations: Russia is an old, in the social sense decrepit country. And this is not the age of healthy traditions, but the decrepitude of death. Why is Russia so old? After all in 1917 we had a revolution, supposedly radical, supposedly that had broken the old ways. In 1991 there was another supposedly “civilizating”, supposedly democratic.

Recently, before my arrest, I had an illumination. Russia lives by an “adat”, by concepts that had formed from the customs of the ancestors. “Adat” in the Muslim world precisely means the traditional customs of the ancestors, s opposed to the “shariat” – the coranic law of the Muslims, brought by the prophet Muhammad. Russia just attempted, pretended that it attempted, but never in real fact lived by socialism, and now does not live by capitalism, and even less so by democracy. Our “adat”, concepts, turned out to be stronger than socialism and capitalism. These are ancient, reactionary and angry customs, and this is why the archetypes formed by them of judges, cops, investigators, pensioners with the unchanged psychology of serfs, vile functionaries (in a genius way seen by Griboedov, Gogol, Saltikov-Shedrin), an insolent unfashionable intelligentsia – are ancient harming types.

In order for the New Russia to take place, it is vitally necessary to destroy the angry customs of the Russian “adat” and in this way stop the eternal reproduction of miserable and negative archetypes. So that Gogol’s functionaries do not multiply, museum judges and their nun shoes do not multiply, degraders-peasants, archers-cops. So that the grannies do not multiply anymore, so that the tribe of the obedient, coward, trembling before the authority do not appear from generation to generation again and again in Russia, we have to destroy the “adat”. The old world should be destroyed to the base, destroyed in such a way as to deracinate all the roots, all the segments of roots. All Russia’s institutions should be created anew. Not one of them is worth to be preserved. But they must be created only after a hard work of a profound destruction. The task of the destruction will be even harder and more complicated than the task of the creation. Nothing should be left. The national worldview should be changed. And in this work should be included even the revolution in faces’ expressions. People should be taught anew with what face grimaces to walk on the streets. They should be taught positivism and even positive mood.

Yes, mood. It happens to everybody to compose a wrong number. Well, the finger kinda slipped or the old telephone line did not join right. It happens to me as well.

What kind of voices sound in the membrane! Particularly unpleasant are women voices: for the most part old, tired, sleepy, suspicious, exhausted, timid. You imagine their owners altogether as old women with legs swelled with varicose veins. They sit on their beds, in dirty colored dresses, wrinkled and miserable. A sound from the exterior world is already a threat for them: “Hello!”

“Good afternoon, Igor, please?”

“There is no such person here. Don’t call here anymore.”

Men go to the telephone more rarely. Men voices are gloomy, drunk, menacing, but always depressed, and, of course, sound with suspicion. In Russia everybody suspects everyone. One gets the impression, usually, that the person on the other end of the line was going to kill herself and you are disturbing her from the external world. When it happens to me, in such a way, to hear another’s world, to enter another’s, extremely depressing, fearful existence, then I spend a long time cursing after this. Sometimes I used to live as poorly as the poorest Russia’s pensioner will never dream in the scariest dream, but I never sounded so depressed. Cheer up, for Christ’s sake, I want to tell them. If you are alive – it is already a good thing, a reason to be happy. And if you are healthy as well – throw yourself a party.

The mothers of my guys – members of the party, are not an exception, neither, although there are some perfect mothers and fathers, and in their majority sound sourly and sadly. Each time, having spoke with the parents, I understand why the guys are going into the party. In the party, regardless of the arrests and the threats, reigns a heroic spirit, in the party it is vigorous, brotherly secure and fun. The guys are also escaping the parents, the often-miserable reality that does not answer their exigencies, from the depression of their parents.

I call to the city K. To a boy who had written a letter to the newspaper. In the city K. we do not have a party organization and we would like it to be. We are trying to inspire the boy for the creation of an NBP cell.

“Hello…”

“Good afternoon, please Oleg?”

Silence. Very suspiciously: “And who’s asking him? It’s not from the party?”

“Yes, from the party.”

“Don’t call here anymore. I receive four hundred rubles, we live very poorly. Oleg has just got a job…”

There is fuss in the receiver, rustle, noise, murmurs, maybe.

“That’s why we are fighting against this situation of things, with which You receive four hundred rubles, while the functionaries steal millions of dollars… Please, Oleg,” – I say as softly as I can.

“But what can you do, they will just put you all in jail, you and Oleg…” there is whining in the voice…

“Edouard Veniaminovich, it’s me… I’m sorry, my mother is panicking…” – Oleg finally got hold of the receiver.

Finally, he did not organize us a party cell in the city K. The mother has won over the boy. You can imagine what miserable and depressing life is ahead of him.

Time from time the National-Bolshevik Party participated in some elections. From the confrontation with the living reality, having been (collecting the signatures for the candidacy) in thousands of apartments, the boys came back hurt. Those guys, who collected signatures for the first time were deeply shocked, dismayed by the black reality that they saw in their co-citizens apartments. Here is what wrote Dmitri Bahur in his “Notes of a signatures’ collector”, published in “Limonka” No 79 with the subtitle “There is a general opinion that residents are human. That’s bullshit.”

Here is another hole of a statistical unit of the Moscow population. A door. The last time it was painted even before its creation. But this fact did not prevent the owner, in alcoholic drowsiness, several times breaking off the lock, to crush the doorpost into splinters. Having taken a look at the scratched off walls, I come to the conclusion that the door serves more for camouflage than for the protection of the entrance to the dump. Having joined the two little wires sticking from the wall, I listen the bell’s cracking that had resounded in the emptiness of the apartment. Opening the door, the owner of the house appeared in front of me, although he is not a genie it obviously involved a bottle.

His wife went to a night shift. And this was a pretext. But he does not remember it anymore. On my command, he swiftly brings the passport and puts his signature. The coming of a new person provoked in him an unseen splash of emotions. He suddenly wanted to talk but the unfamiliar tension of vocal cords led to a sudden fall on the floor. It is in this position that I left him.

I cannot get rid of the impression that I roam through a district of asylums and today is the open houses day. Here an alcoholic, having lost touch with the world, sits on the floor and examines his navel. He reacts promptly to simple commands, without asking himself questions about their authorization. And here is another granny, having pissed herself behind the door, announces me that nobody’s home. The door is armored, with a bunch of locks, bolts and little chains. The door was mounted by the grand nephews in the hope that grandma will move to the cemetery. But the grandma doesn’t open the door to anybody and the grandchildren already regret such a hard “little gift’. I enter the apartment of the serial population. Trying to suppress the anguish collectively, they get accounted with the help of two television sets to the lives of other people that have became almost their own. They almost don’t talk with each other, because they watch different serials. She – the “fiction”, he – the “news”. She watches the fate of Huan-Karlos, he – of Chubais. He regards my appearance as the continuation of his favorite, which goes on ORT, under the name of either “I lie” or “We Lie”. Trying to understand where is my camera he gives his signature and impels his wife to leave the action on screen and to sign too. I leave them, certain that they got finally lucky and got on some serial…

Corpses. Moscow is overfilled with living cadavers. They fill its streets. They reside in its multi-apartment vaults.

The resident of this vault made European-style repairs there, installed a double metal door and got himself a dog. Useless to this world he became the servant of a dog. This wretched owner of a passport and a Moscow registration comes out on the street when the dog wants to take a walk, he cooks when the dog wants to eat. I press the doorbell. I don’t hear the bell but by a familiar barking I understand that I was noticed. A few minutes later through the indignant barking the voice of the resident is heard, saddened by the fact that he was distracted from his favorite ad. His words, that he will not sign anything and stop roaming around, have sunk in uninterrupted dog chatter.

It darkens. People open the doors less and less. They fear always more visitors from the exterior world.

Another door. Another button. How insupportably long they decide behind the door what to do: to open or to call “02”. A woman, who approached on the noise of the ring, having doubts about my involvement in the criminal world, asked her husband to open the door. The husband, having heard what I needed left to finish his tasteless supper. The wife stayed to talk. A woman whose body became not interesting to anybody and her knowledge not needed. She and her husband form a typical society cell, that had wasted everything in the world: as the great achievements of their fathers and grandfathers as their own useless savings. So they decided that with signatures they would not be ripped off… I told them to fuck off…

It seems to me that there is not so much people in Moscow. Simply, as I cross from porch to porch, these pieces of meat roll around in secret hallways into new apartments. They take new passports there. They take another deformed spineless form and meet me with their sticky smile in the peephole. I am tired of telling them all sorts of bullshit. They are tired of being. I suddenly lost fate in humanity. How much will you pay me for it?

Today is a happy day. Roaming the city, like Diogenes, in search of a man, I found one. The door was opened by a healthy and a vigorous man who looked 50. Invited to the table where his wife served, just as lively. I told him about our Party. He put his signature and said at the end: “You should not play elections but come out on the streets with machine guns”. Leaving I promised him that time will come and we will give him a machine gun.”

The population’s degradation is seen everywhere and cannot be doubted. Particularly it is seen in the exhausted central Russia, less distributed in Siberia. Monstrous stories in the accidents section of the newspaper, such programs as “Section on Duty” or “Road Patrol”, “Man and Law” allow the viewer like a collector of signatures to for a moment enter the dwellings of people. They can watch the savage misery, alcoholism, debility, dirt and as a result – vile, everyday crimes. The personal experience of each citizen also shows that a part of our co-citizens are degenerates.

And those who consider themselves called to improve the human species or as a minimum – the Russian nation don’t look better. I recall the disgusting, lop-sided, leprous, drunken rabble on the congress of nationalists in St Petersburg in 1996. The custom of bestial drunkenness belongs to the set of undying traditions of the adat. Alcoholism has its apologues and theoretics. Apparently the wide Russian soul cannot live without the irrational dash of alcoholism. One should shot alcoholics and not encourage the squalor in them. All of our conceptions about us, the Russians, should be revised.

People tried to change Russian society and not only with paper decrees. Terrorists – narodnovoltsi and socialist-revolutionaries, for half a century attempted the lives of tsars, nobles and ministers. Lenin and comrades reasoned that the new man will appear and will become free, having received in ownership material goods: land and factories. However the new man still didn’t come.

Having destroyed the institutions of the old society the Bolsheviks could not handle the “adat”, the set of archetypes of the Russian people, stipulated by the traditions. “Adat” turned out to be stronger than the tsars and more powerful than the revolutionaries, and outlived Lenin, Stalin, Beria and the GULAG.

The Bolsheviks, in my opinion, have even reinforced the Russian “adat”. Rephrasing the Roman patrician Cato, I scream: “Adat” has to be destroyed!