The Other Russia

Lecture 6

So, in December 1989 after 15 years of absence I arrived in the USSR. The result of my observations, of what I saw in three weeks, became the book “A stranger in Troubled Times”, written in 1990, it was published by the Omsk regional publishing company in no less than 300 thousand copies, but passed over the metropolitan reader and the critics. And that’s too bad, it contained a lot of original observations. I saw a lot with the fresh eye of someone who had just popped out, as in 15 years I completely lost the habit of the country and the population. Now I got used again to my compatriots and I don’t see a lot anymore. Then I noticed the untied high-handedness of my compatriots, the wolf-like faces in Sheremetievo, when you suddenly come out of the interior premises of the airport into the crowd. The late Ulian Semenov, it’s to him that I am indebted for this first instructive visit, lodged me in the gigantic hotel “Ukraine”. I saw “Ukraine” as an ancient crumbling German temple, and myself as the archeologist Indiana (from the movie about Indiana Jones, he was nicely played by the actor Harrison Ford)

Among other things I then managed to see how many Turk there was in Russians, how much in Russia is from Turkey. Everywhere in Russian apartments, including the apartment of my parents in Kharkov, there was an immoderate abundance of carpets. Well, ok, the carpets covered the floor, but they also hung on the walls, giving to the apartments an unmistakable Muslim touch. As for the apartments they turned out to be very dark because the population curtained its windows with thick blinds, even two ranks of blinds – light and thick ones. A good half of the apartments had former lodgings and balconies rebuilt as little rooms – pencil boxes. And on the windows of these pencil boxes there were blinds, so the sun and the sky were totally absent from the apartments. A Muslim half-light reigned in Russian apartments, like in harems. The absence of light undoubtedly negatively affects the growth of the children, the mood of the children and the parents, the quantity of life energy in the apartment.

The other indisputable Turkey’s attributes were the countless bleak lampshades with tassels. Mostly coffee, orange or even red. And also – in most part silent women who served the food and who did not participate in men’s talk. Women-shadows. A similar patriarchal society I saw later in Abkasia in 1992. One should not think that Russia went far from Abkasia, only because here are singing Alla Pugacheva, Vetlizkaia or Zemphira. The Turkishness of my compatriots manifested itself in the fact of how willingly they were all wearing sharovars [wide trousers] – sportive pants made in Turkey. Next to the “Ukraina” hotel young boys were squatting down near their cars. Later on train stations, on platforms, on bus stops I saw thousands of these very Muslim birdmen sitting around. (Actually, it is partly also a prison habit.) The compatriots turned out to be Turks.

There happened to be no less of Germany in Russia. Short, low built casern buildings, usually yellow or ochre, green roofs – recognizably German. Vladislav Hodasevich has the following lines:

“Wait: The biting wind will blow in Okarino

On the slits of the bulky Berlin

And the rough day will rise from the houses

Above the step mother of Russian cities”

I don’t guarantee the precision of the citation but I guarantee the “step mother of Russian cities”. Hodasevich had noticed right. When you go from France to southern Germany by train, then suddenly before the border the train plunges in a long tunnel and comes out in the light in a wholly different landscape. The romantic France, its round trees, its two-sided roofs of reddish tiles are left behind the mountain and here appears a flat and squared country of yellow walls, casern type buildings. Poets noticed all this with a sharp eye. Mandelshtam: “Above the yellowness of governmental buildings / the turbid storm went round and round / the lazy lawman gets in the sleigh / with a large movement having wrapped himself in his coat”. This is about St Petersburg, built by Peter and Catherine from German models.

And here is what the same Mandelshtam wrote about France:

“France, like pity and grace

I want your land and honeysuckle

The truth of your turtledoves and the lies of your dwarfish

Your vine-growers in gauze bands…”

Noting that this strophe looks like a swift look on a page of the “National Geographic” magazine I would say that in the landscape of France the abundance of details instantly catches the eye, from there the precisely employed complicated letters “J”, “round” word: turtle-doves, “dwarfish” and the realistic detail of the gauze bands. As for Germany’s landscape it is totally different, it is more general, emptier, it is lighter, the buildings – yellow, the roofs – green-salad. (When in France country-houses are redbrick. And French trees are cut roundly.) It is interesting that Bismarck, I just read a book about him in the prison library, being an ambassador in Russia, was delighted with the greenness of Russian roofs. They reminded him of his native country – Prussia, Berlin.

Kutuzovski Prospekt, in the very beginning of it, near Moscow river stands the fortress of “Ukraine”, all in snow it appeared before me ceremonial, German, back then in 1989. “A Stranger in Troubled Times” begins with the scene when thirteen snow removing bulldozers go in pig-headed German ranks on the nocturnal Kutuzovsky.

In Russians, it seems, equally exist these two elements: Germanishness and Turkishness. Totally right are our revisionists, bright academics Fomenko and Nosovski. Russia did not suffer any invasion of the feebly developed Mongols in the XIII century, since always it was a mixed Turk-Slav State. We were born in sharovars – this is why we’ve got carpets hanging, lampshades, the laziness of our men is famous (always loll about in beds). The voracity of our plump women, this is why are close in meaning the words “terem” [maid-room] and “harem’. Fomenko/Nosovski also affirm that the Orda was a permanent army of eastern Russia, that the “Ottomania” – the ottoman Turkey is only the southern Russia “Atamania” that has broke away from us late, that Batiy is only “Batko” [father] and “Mamai” – mamkin [mother’s]; but the essence is clear, we were born in sharovars. It is stupid to deny it. And then after that came Peter the Great and forcibly implanted in us the German coat. So, rephrasing Victor Shklovsky, the literature expert (We all came out from Gogol’s “Coat”) with a new right one can affirm that we all came out from sharovars and a coat.

Back then in December 1989 I daily saw dozens of proofs of the fact that we are a mix of Turkey and Germany. Today it strikes me less. However the prison fortress Lefortovo is of German model and XVIII century production. I’m sitting with a notebook on the wood plank and I’m writing, a political prisoner, these lines within the building, its part that forms the letter “K” in the name of the German princess. Hello to Germany! Deutschland uber alles! And Ottomania, Atamania is my other hand!

When did germanishness come into Russia? Undoubtedly with Peter I. In any event, the governmental germanishness, at least, the government organization, its administration, the coats of militaries and functionaries. However, had it not already come with the Poles, mediatized, during the Troubled Period? Had it not already come earlier, with the Swedes? After all we fought with them as early as in the XIII century, after all the Ice fight (NBP celebrates it at the Day of the Nation since 1996) happened in gray-haired ancient times the 5th April 1242. It did come, of course. Moreover, the early IX and X century’s white temples in the city of Vladimir, I studied them personally, resemble like two peas the similar ascetic constructions in Great Britain that were left by the Saxons, I studied them personally in 1980. This identity of the temples is not explained by the Norman theory, but by the extraordinary resemblance of Slavic and German tribes. The Great Englishman Chamberlain, no, not the premier-minister who gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler but the Chamberlain who already in 1923 prophesized to Hitler a Great fate. Chamberlain – a Germanophile, explorer of peoples’ fates, historian, affirmed the similarity of Slavs and Germans and called them the great races. The external similarity is also indubitable. But what I want to say is that possibly germanishness is the natural propriety of Russians (or at least of a part of Russians) that we got genetically. Because in actual fact Russians are not at all choleric and hysterical, as western producers see them, directors of plays based on Dostoevsky’s novels. We are a rather morose, northern people, you can’t pull a word from us and we were always attracted to Gypsies because they are our complete opposite – hot southern like pepper. The natural Russian is unsociable and morose. We are not that far from the Scandinavians and their “phlegmatism” made famous in jokes about “hot guys”. And if one is to recall that many Slavic tribes in the East of Elba were Germanized and became Prussians then one can altogether put an equal sign between us. Russians = Germans.

How to handle the roots that I just found, with this discovered Russia’s new identification? Well, thus, that one should not refuse his Turkishness and one should not refuse his Germanishness. We already have this in us and we have to live with this. And it is unlikely that we will get rid of it quickly. It is a part of the ancestors’ heritage – the Russian “adat”, its most profound part. (I already talked about the “adat” in the chapter “Where do old women come from?”) Unfortunately besides these two parts: Turkishness and Germanishness, there is a third one as well, it is the psychology of serf peasants: fatalism, submission to one’s fate, whining (“Holy Russia, the sufferer!” and other lamentations, “Why are we so unfortunate! Why all the countries look like countries, but we…”). This part of the “adat” should be rejacted and trampled in oneself and in the country.

The psychology of serfs was acquired with negative experience, with the experience of serfdom that was breaking the psychostructure of the peasant and the commoner-villain for over four centuries. And it happened that after the terrible losses inflicted upon the ruling classes of 1917 practically all of us – modern Russians are descendents of peasants and commoners. Some smart asses pretend that, like, it is the Soviet power that taught slavery to Russians. Oh non, the Soviet power actually in the beginning headed the rising of the slaves against the masters. And only later succumbed to the temptation of using the centuries long experience of submissiveness of the population for its own ends. The school of slavery Russia did not learn it with the Mongols, who, paradoxically, supposedly our conquerors did not exist in nature as it is brilliantly proved by the fundamental research of the professors Fomenko and Nosovsky. The school of slavery Russia learned it in the hands of its own princes, lords and leaders of military bands (today – fighters). What was happening in Chechnya in 1991-1999, was happening on Russia’s territory in the XV-XVIII centuries. And only the last hundred years it was a relatively civilized slavery.

Take a good look at the faces of the majority of our pensioners or workers: these are resigned, obedient, tired faces. Listen to what popular masses say in response to surveys and ratings: skepticism, mistrust, gloomy pessimism, negative opinions, fatalism, “I don’t know”, “I’m not interested”, “I don’t have an opinion…”

This result is obtained if 15-20 generations are to be beaten daily, forced on hard labors, sold and offered, raped and murdered. So here is the diagnosis: a too lengthy serfdom, from there – too bended necks. And no sharovars or coats will straighten them.