Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski
From my Notion template
This Book – in 3 Sentences
I somehow stumbled across this book in my kindle recommendations, or perhaps it was a blog (Kevin Kelly perhaps?) somewhere but I’m glad I read it. The author is a Polish journalist from the Iron curtain era who traveled quite widely in the Soviet Union at it’s peak and decline, in particular the outer republics, not so much in Russia proper. It’s a pure travelogue, mostly of the “I went here and saw this” variety (i.e. the good kind). The highlights do a much better job of summarizing it than I would. A few notable thoughts after reading this book (mostly vibe based, my observations, not the author’s).
- It occurred to me that both Russia and it’s former imperial territories and the United States are outliers in how people view nationality. Russia assumes that everything is a natural empire and anything that isn’t currently an empire will become part of one at some point . America thinks that America is at the forefront of the natural progression of things and everything will be America at some point. The world becomes one eventual empire vs becoming one eventual country. I now think that a comparison of views of nationality involving either country is of limited value due to the viewpoints being such outliers. That is my observation, not the author’s.
- Scott Alexander’s definition of communism as mostly “taking every bad idea in the world and doing them all at once” seems much more accurate to the real Soviet world result than anything involving Marxism seems very apt.
Highlights
How many victims, how much blood and suffering, are connected with this business of borders! There is no end to the cemeteries of those who have been killed the world over in the defense of borders. Equally boundless are the cemeteries of the audacious who attempted to expand their borders. It is safe to assume that half of those who have ever walked upon our planet and lost their lives in the field of glory gave up the ghost in battles begun over a question of borders.
In short, the total surveillance clearly plays the same persuasive role as those one-story-high, thick billows of barbed wire: it is simply a silent but emphatic warning, lest some preposterous idea accidentally enter your head!
Worst of all are the books. What a curse to be traveling with a book! You could be carrying a suitcase of cocaine and keep a book on top of it. The cocaine wouldn’t arouse the least bit of interest; all the customs inspectors would throw themselves upon the book. And what—God forbid!—if you’re carrying a book in English? Then the real running, checking, paging through, reading would begin.
The second group will observe the Soviet people and imitate their way of thinking and acting. The essence of this posture is resigning oneself to the existing reality, and even being able to derive from it a certain satisfaction. There is a saying that is very helpful in this, and which it behooves one to repeat to oneself and to others every evening, regardless of how terrible the day that has just ended: “Rejoice in this day, for things will never again be as good as they were today!”
It wasn’t really possible to imagine Siberia. One of my friends finally showed me a drawing in a book: in a heavy snowstorm walked a column of tattered and hunched-over men. Heavy chains with iron balls at the end were attached to their hands and legs, and they dragged these balls behind them over the ground. Siberia, in its sinister, cruel form, is a freezing, icy space…plus dictatorship.
And yet it doesn’t occur to anyone to frighten children with: “Wash your hands or they’ll send you to Canada!” Or “Play nicely with that little girl or they’ll deport you to America!” In those countries, quite simply, there is no dictatorship, nobody puts anyone in chains, nobody imprisons anyone in camps, dispatches him to work in hellish frost, to a certain death. In those frozen lands, man has one antagonist—the cold. Here, as many as three—the cold, hunger, and armed force.
Despite being transported in a wagon-coffin, the general is aware of being in a certain way privileged—they are driving him; others they force to march for years on foot.
This wandering of the deportee is not only a displacement in space and in time. It is accompanied by a process of dehumanization: the one who reaches the end (if he doesn’t die along the way) has already been stripped of everything that is human. He has no surname; he does not know where he is; he does not know what they will do with him. His language has been taken away: no one will speak with him. He is a consignment; he is a thing; he is a trifle.
Whiteness is often associated with finality, with the end, with death. In those cultures in which people live with the fear of death, mourners dress in black, to scare death away from themselves, isolate it, confine it to the deceased. But here, where death is regarded as another form, another shape of existence, mourners dress in white and dress the deceased in white: whiteness is here the color of acceptance, consent, of a surrender to fate.
It is Europe. European civilization is the only one that has ever had global ambitions and (almost) realized them. Other civilizations either couldn’t satisfy such ambitions for technical reasons (for instance, the Maya), or simply didn’t have such interests (for instance, China), convinced that they themselves were the entire world. Only European civilization proved capable of overcoming its ethnocentrism. Within it arose the desire to know other civilizations, as well as the theory (formulated by Bronislaw Malinowski) that global culture is created by a constellation of parallel cultures.
If there exists such a thing as the genius of a nation, then the genius of the Russian nation is expressed in, among other things, just this saying: “Well, that’s life!”
One of the pillars upon which the system rests is isolation from the world, and a foreigner, by the mere fact that he exists, undermines this pillar.
I read Bierdayev’s old book in which he reflected upon how the great expanses of the Imperium had influenced the Russian soul. What does a Russian think about, somewhere on the shore of the Yenisey, or deep in the Amur taiga? Every road that he takes seems to have no end. He can walk along it for days and months, and always Russia will surround him. The plains have no end, nor the forests, nor the rivers. To rule over such boundless expanses, says Bierdayev, one had to create a boundless state. And behold, the Russian fell into a contradiction—to maintain the great expanses, the Russian must maintain a great state; on the maintenance of this great state he expends his energy, of which not enough remains for anything else—for organization, for husbandry, and so on. He expends his energy on a state that then enthralls and oppresses him. Bierdayev believes that this immensity, this limitlessness of Russia, has a negative influence on its inhabitants’ way of thinking. For it does not demand of them concentration, tension, an intensification of energy, or the creation of a dynamic, vigorous culture. Everything falls apart, is diluted, drowned in this ungraspable formlessness. Russia—an expanse, on the one hand, endless, broad, and yet, on the other hand, so crushing that it takes one’s breath away, and there is nothing left to breathe.
And then I traveled to the non-Russian republics of what was then the Imperium. What caught my eye? That despite the stiff, rigorous corset of Soviet power, the local, small, yet very ancient, nations had succeeded in preserving something of their tradition, of their history, of their, albeit, concealed pride and dignity.
Painting did not bring him happiness. He had a girl called Margerita. No one knows what sort of girl she was. Niko loved her and painted her portrait. Margerita’s face is done according to the conventions of the great naives, by which everything is too big and out of proportion. Oversized lips, bulging eyeballs, enormous ears. Niko gave this portrait to Margerita. The girl shrieked in indignation. Enraged, full of hatred, she left him. His talent condemned him to solitude. From then on he lived in lonely abandonment.
A nation that does not have a state seeks salvation in symbols. The protection of the symbol is as important to it as the protection of borders is to other states. The cult of the symbol becomes a form of the cult of country. Protection of the symbol is an act of patriotism.
But there is also the matter of religion. In the year 301, during the reign of the emperor of the Armenians Tiridates III Arashakuni, Armenia adopts Christianity. It is the first country in the world in which Christianity attains the rank of a state religion.
way. Many works of ancient literature survived owing entirely to the fact that they were preserved in Armenian translations.
Baku always made a career of oil. As far back as the tenth century Arab writers refer to Baku as the place from which oil is brought.
We are standing over a relief map of Central Asia, and she wants to show me how great Azerbaijan once was (this is what she regards as a bit of nationalism). I tell her that her desire to present to me the Great Yesterday is a universal impulse in today’s world.
Today expansion is difficult and risky, as a rule broadening ends in narrowing, and that is why nations must satisfy the instinct for breadth with a feeling of depth, which means reaching into the depths of history to demonstrate their strength and significance.
After the Revolution, Valery tells me, they started giving girls’ names that celebrate the modern inventions now making their way to the countryside. So there are girls with the names Tractor, Chauffeur. One father, apparently counting on tax reductions, called his daughter Finotdiel, which is an abbreviation of the name of the Office of Finance (Finansovyj Otdiel).
The disciples of this martyr, the Hurufites—mystics of the numeral, cabalists, and diviners—believed that the origins of the universe could be comprehended in terms of the figures 28 and 32. Using these numerals one can explain the mystery of each thing. It was the Hurufites’ belief that God expressed himself through beauty: the more beautiful something was, the more God manifested himself in it. Beauty was their criterion for valuating the phenomenal world.
An underwater mountain range connects the eastern and western shores of the Caspian Sea. The mountains stretch from Baku to Krasnovodsk in Turkmenistan.
The transition to a sedentary life was for the nomad always a last resort, a sign of failure in life, a degradation. One can settle a nomad only by force, by economic or political coercion. For him, the freedom that the desert gives has no price.
The people of the Uzboj worshiped sacred stones. This is typical of inhabitants of deserts, who revere everything they have at hand—stones, gorges, wells, and trees.
Particles of dust, these bits of near nothingness (they are stones ground to powder by wind and water), suspended in the air, grow warm in the sun, and thus comes into being a dry mist, the terror of all desert people, a dry and hot mist, clouds of powder as hot as burning coals; that is what the desert commands one to breathe in the hour of its fury.
During the feast they serve the guest the sheep’s boiled head on a plate. The guest must eat the brain. Then he must pluck out and eat one of the eyes. The host eats the other eye. In this way the knots of brotherhood are tied. It is an experience one does not quickly forget.
Erkin said that an Uzbek prefers to overpay and buy in the bazaar than to spend less in a store. The bazaar is tradition, the place of meetings and conversation, a second home.
He ordered his adversaries and opponents poisoned. He prepared the potions himself. He carried the standard of death, and this mission absorbed him for half the day. During the second half of the day, art absorbed him. Timur devoted himself to the dissemination of art with the same zeal he sustained for the spread of death.
Timur was sounding the limits of man’s possibilities. Timur demonstrated that which Dostoyevsky later described—that man is capable of everything.
Erkin showed me Timur’s grave in Samarkand, made of green nephrite. Before the entrance to the mausoleum there is an inscription, whose author is Timur: Happy Is He Who Renounced the World Before the World Renounced Him.
Just as Columbus lived in the epoch of great geographic discoveries, when every sailing expedition altered the picture of the world, so we live today in the epoch of great political discoveries in which ever newer and newer revelations continuously change the picture of our contemporaneity.
But doubts at once assailed me—was I really right to search for perestroika outside Moscow? I had just read a new book, published in early 1989, by the eminent historian Natan Eydelman, Revolution from the Top in Russia. The author regards perestroika as just one more in a series of turning points in Russian history and reminds us that all such turning points, revolutions, convulsions, and breakthroughs in this country came about because they were the will of the czar, the will of the secretary-general, or the will of the Kremlin (or of Petersburg). The energy of the Russian nation, says Eydelman, has always been spent not on independent grass-roots initiatives, but on carrying out the will of the ruling elite.
Nicholas I: “The Czar is surprised—the inhabitants of Petersburg tremble with fear, / The Czar is angry—his courtiers die of fear; armies are marching, whose God and faith / is the Czar. The Czar is angry: let us die, we will cheer up the Czar!”) The czar has been considered a god, literally, for centuries, for Russia’s entire history. Not until the nineteenth century was there a czarist decree to remove the portraits of the czar from the Orthodox churches. A czarist decree! Without it no one would have been so bold as to touch such a portrait, or rather, icon. Even Bakunin, that anarchist and subversive, Jacobin and dynamiter, calls the czar “the Russian Christ.” And just as the czars are the vicars of God, so Lenin and Stalin are the vicars of world communism. Only after Stalin’s death does the slow process of secularizing the rule of the Almighty begin. Secularization—and with it the gradual erosion of omnipotence.
This last notion was put forth in the sixteenth century by the Pskov sage and visionary, the monk Philotheus. “Two Romes have already fallen (Peter’s and Byzantium),” he writes in a letter to the contemporary Muscovite prince Vasily III. “The Third Rome (Moscow) stands. There will not be a fourth,” he categorically assures the prince. Moscow: it is the end of history, the end of mankind’s earthly wanderings, the open gateway to the heavens.
All dictators, irrespective of epoch or country, have one common trait: they know everything, are experts on everything. The thoughts of Qadaffi and Ceauşescu, Idi Amin and Alfredo Stroessner—there is no end to the profundities and wisdom. Stalin was expert on history, economics, poetry, and linguistics. As it turned out, he was also expert on architecture. In 1934—which means between one ghastly purge and the next, even more horrifying, one—he commissioned a plan for the rebuilding of Moscow. He devoted to it, as was piously written, much time and attention. The new Moscow was to manifest in its appearance the following traits of the epoch: triumph, power, monumentality, might, seriousness, massiveness, invincibility
In any case, the greatest ambition and fondest dream of Stalin was precisely the same as the greatest ambition and fondest dream of all Soviet leaders—namely, to catch up with and surpass the United States!
After all, there are countless churches in Moscow; there are even churches in the Kremlin, and yet the Leader’s finger came to rest on just this one place, where there towered the spectacular silhouette of the temple built by the czars of Greater Russia to thank God for forcing Napoleon to retreat and saving their Imperium.
Only he who maintains (and has somehow proven) that his authority has a human and divine nature can rule here, can lead the people and count on their obedience and devotion. Hence the preponderance in Russian history of pretender czars, false prophets, haunted and fanatical holy men—they claim the power to rule souls and that they are touched by the hand of God. The hand of God is in this case the sole legitimation of power.
In short, the background scenery changes, but the main principle of history, which continues to operate in the foreground, remains unchanged—the principle of the cult.
unaware that as he does so he becomes for a second time communism’s victim: the first time he was a victim by force, imprisoned by the system, and now he has become a victim voluntarily, for he has allowed himself to be imprisoned in the web of communism’s problems. For such is the demonic nature of great evil—that without our knowledge and consent, it manages to blind us and force us into its strait-jacket.
Armenians! They must be together. They search for one another the world over, and—the tragic paradox of their fate—the more their diaspora expands and dissipates away, the greater their mutual longing for one another, their desire and need to be together. Only
can one appreciate how painful a thorn for them is the matter of Nagorno-Karabakh—to live a dozen or so kilometers from one another and yet not to be able to be together! An eternal splinter, an eternal wound, an eternal stigma.
that we do not resolve difficulties, we only displace them. “The art of clarification,” says Cournot, “like the art of negotiation, is often simply the art of displacing difficulties. There is, one might say, a kind of untouchable reserve of incomprehensibility in certain things that the calculations of human intelligence are capable neither of removing nor of diminishing, but only of arranging this way or that, sometimes leaving everything in a half-light, at another time illuminating certain points at the expense of others, which are then submerged by a darkness even deeper than before.“
(They say “comrade” more and more infrequently here, but they also aren’t able to say “mister,” for that still sounds too bourgeois, and the form “you,” toward a person whom one doesn’t know well, is impolite. So they address each other as “woman,” “man.”)
Like peasants the world over who begin each conversation with reflections on the subject of crops, and Englishmen who start every exchange with a discussion of the weather, so in the Imperium the first step in establishing contact between people is a mutual determination of one’s nationality. For much will depend on this.
At the same time, behind these front lines, Beria directs the deportation of Poles and Greeks, Germans and Kalmuks, into the depths of the Caucasus and to Siberia. As a result, entire nations find themselves in lands foreign to them, in unfamiliar surroundings, in poverty and hunger. One of the goals of these operations is to create the uprooted man, wrenched from his culture, from his environment and landscape, and therefore more defenseless and obedient vis-à-vis the dictates of the regime.
A single czarist official drives an entire column of Tuvinians (a Siberian tribe) to a hard-labor camp, and not one of these unfortunate vassals will revolt. After all, they could easily kill this official and vanish into the forest. But no, they walk on obediently, meekly execute his commands, endure his verbal abuse in silence. The reason, Mickiewicz explains, is that, in the eyes of the enslaved Tuvinians, this official personifies the might of the all-powerful state, which arouses their fright, terror, dread. To raise a hand against the official is to raise a hand against the superpower, and none of them can bring himself to do that.
One need only see cities over which a wave of ethnic conflict has recently rolled—even Fergane or Osh. Among the burned and devastated houses of Uzbeks, Karakalpaks, or Tajiks are visible the untouched houses of Russians. For who stands behind a poor Karachi, attacked by an infuriated Turk? At most—another Karachi. And behind a Russian? A kalashnikov, a tank, a nuclear bomb.
Not everyone knows that the Turkish language is the second most dominant language of the Imperium. About sixty million people speak it. An Azerbaijani can communicate not only in Ankara, but also in Tashkent and Yakutsk. His Turkish-speaking brethren live everywhere. In a certain sense, the former USSR is a Slavic-Turkish superpower. Solzhenitsyn’s idea was to get rid of the Turkish element so that only a Slavic superpower would remain.
After seventy-three years of bolshevism, people do not know what freedom of thought is, and so in its place they practice freedom of action. And here freedom of action means freedom to kill.
They stole what they could. Stalin locked them up in boarding schools. There they learned hatred, and when they grew up, they were dressed in the uniforms of the NKVD. The NKVD held the nation in the grip of a bestial fear. And there’s communism for you.
I have flown maybe one hundred thousand kilometers in this country on airplanes. Two observations from those trips: The airplanes are always full—at each airport, for every destination, mobs of people are waiting, sometimes for weeks, so that finding an empty seat somewhere is quite out of the question. Second, during the entire flight there is complete silence in the cabin. The passengers sit motionless; no one speaks. If one hears a buzz somewhere, bursts of laughter, and the clink of glasses, it means that a group of Poles is on board: who knows why, but travel puts them into a state of boundless euphoria, into a near frenzy.
It is true that a bit of time has elapsed since the epoch of Stalinism, but its memory is alive, and the lessons, traditions, and habits of that period remain, are fixed in consciousness, and will long influence people’s behavior. How many of them (or their families, acquaintances, and so on) went to the camps because during a meeting, or even in a private conversation, they asked about this or that? How many in so doing ruined their careers? How many lost their jobs? How many lost their lives?
A wise sentence from Ecclesiastes: “Who gathers knowledge, gathers pain.” Developing this bitter thought, Karl Popper once wrote (I am quoting from memory) that ignorance is not a simple and passive lack of knowledge, but is an active stance; it is the refusal to accept knowledge, a reluctance to possess it; it is its rejection. (Or, in a word, antiknowledge.)
A civilization that does not ask questions, one that banishes from within its compass the entire world of anxiety, criticism, and exploration—the world that expresses itself precisely through questions—is a civilization standing in place, paralyzed, immobile. And that is what the people in the Kremlin were after, because it is easiest to reign over a motionless and mute world.
No Louvre, no castles on the Loire, can offer so many pleasant and unforgettable sensations as the gloomy and humble interior of the Hotel Vorkuta. At work here is the immemorial law of relativity. Entering the Louvre from the sidewalks of Paris is not a passage from earth to heaven, whereas entering the lobby of the Hotel Vorkuta from the street is. The lobby saves our life, for it is warm, and warmth in this town is the most priceless thing.
Genady Nikolayevich, a miner, just turned fifty and retired. Such an early retirement is one of the perks one receives for work in such dreadful, polar conditions. Although it is a rather dubious perk—only twenty percent of miners live to be fifty.
Genady Nikolayevich is rather inclined toward the opinion of Ivan Solonievich, one of the few inmates who in 1934 succeeded in escaping to the West: all of Russia is a camp.
In small and medium-sized countries there is no equivalent of this class of which we speak here. In such countries, the elite are busy with their own internal affairs, their local intrigues, their own closed backyard. But in the Imperium, the ruling class (and often the common people as well) are preoccupied with the imperial scale of thinking, and, even more, the global scale, the scale of large numbers, large spaces, of continents and oceans, of geographic meridians and parallels, of the atmosphere and the stratosphere, why, of the cosmos. In Western Europe they were surprised to see on television that poor old women in Moscow abandoned the breadlines they had been standing in, gave up buying bread, to march down the street shouting the slogan “We will not give back the Kuril Islands!” But why be surprised? The Kuril Islands are a part of the Imperium, and the Imperium was built at the cost of the feeding and clothing of these women, at the cost of their leaking shoes and cold apartments, and, what is most sad, at the cost of the blood and lives of their husbands and sons. And so they should give this back now? Never. Never ever.
Nationalism cannot exist in a conflict-free condition; it cannot exist as a thing devoid of grudges and claims. Wherever the nationalism of one group rears its head, immediately, as if from beneath the ground, this group’s enemies will spring up.
In Irkutsk I spot a poster advertising a theatrical production entitled A Word about Russia. I buy a ticket and go. The show takes place in a church that was formerly called the Museum of Atheism.
“Russia,” he calls, “must remain a great world power! They want us to become like the Indians on an American reservation. They are trying to make us drunk, they are trying to poison us. But we will not become Indians. We will not be a banana republic!”
Fiodorov speaks about terrible things. When criminals escaped, they would persuade one of the political prisoners—naive and unsavvy—to go with them. This they did as insurance against death from hunger, which was always a threat. At a certain point they would kill the victim and divide up his flesh.
So let us stop getting excited and thrashing about, let us stop tormenting the stewardesses with questions for which they have no answers, and, following the example of our brothers and sisters from the sleepy village of San Juan near Valdivia, from the settlements on the Gobi desert crushed by the heat, and from the littered outskirts of Shiraz, let us sit motionless, staring off into space, and every hour sinking deeper and deeper into a state of mental numbness.
“Caucasian mafia” was how the taxi driver characterized those detained. The word “mafia” is enjoying a tremendous popularity these days. It is increasingly replacing the word “nation.” Here where one hundred nations once lived “in harmony and brotherhood,” one hundred mafias have now appeared. The nations have vanished, have ceased to exist. Three large mafias have taken their place—the Russian mafia, the Caucasian mafia, and the Asiatic mafia. These large mafias are divided into an infinite number of smaller ones. There are Chechen and Georgian mafias, Tatar and Uzbek, Chelyabinsk and Odessian. The smaller mafias are divided into even smaller ones, and these in turn into utterly small ones.
In today’s post-Soviet society there exist not only individual criminals, not only criminal elements, but an entire criminal class possessing a genealogy and tradition different from the rest of society.
Magadan is the capital of the northeastern territory of Siberia called Kolyma, after the river that flows here.
In colloquial Russian, Kolyma was transformed, bizarrely, into a word denoting the consolation of relativism. That is, when things are truly bad, awful, frightful, one Russian consoles another: “Don’t despair, it was worse in Kolyma!”
There were 160 camps—or, as they are also called, Arctic death camps—in Magadan and Kolyma. The convicts changed over the years, but at any given moment there were around half a million residents. Of these, one-third died in the camps, and the rest, after serving years of hard labor, left as physical cripples or with permanent psychic injuries. Whoever survived Magadan and Kolyma was never again the person he or she once was.
Garanin shot several, a dozen, or sometimes several dozen people a day. Murdering, he laughed or sang cheerful ditties. Beria ordered him shot suddenly and for obscure reasons, ostensibly for being a Japanese spy.
Convinced that he is in an insane asylum, that he is in a ghastly land of madness and surreal paranoia, Weissberg does not break down; under the most horrifying conditions, in crowded, dirty prisons dripping with blood, his mind, the mind of a Western rationalist, works intensively—it searches for a rational, reasonable explanation for that which is happening around him. In each cell they throw him into, Weissberg strives to discuss, to question, to exchange opinions.
It is Shalamov’s mind that is rational and logical and Weissberg’s mind that is astray, lost in abstractions. “Each intervention in that which fate was bringing, in the will of the gods, was something unbecoming and contradictory to the code of camp conduct,” Shalamov recalls. And between the lines: whoever thinks that he can behave differently has never touched the true bottom of life; he has never had to breathe his last in “a world without heroes.”
That desire—for one’s voice to be heard somewhere—is characteristic of enslaved peoples, who cling to their belief in the possibility of justice in the world the way a drowning man clings to a plank, who are convinced that being heard is being understood and that by that means alone they can prove their argument and win the case.
He doesn’t want a conversation, but a declaration that you agree with him, admit that he is right, join the cause. Otherwise you have no significance in his eyes, you do not exist, for you count only if you are a tool, an instrument, a weapon. There are no people—there is only the cause.
Their world is small—several valleys and mountains. Their world is simple—on one side we, the good people, on the other they, our enemies. Their world is governed by an unambiguous law of exclusivity—us or them. And if another world exists nevertheless, what might they want of it? Only that it leave them in peace. They need to be left in peace so as to thrash each other all the more thoroughly.
We have a saying here: if you do not plant cotton, they will plant you [in prison], if
It Is a Known fact that a dozen or so meters below the surface of every desert lie large deposits of concentrated salt. If water is conducted to it, the salt, together with the moisture, will begin to rise to the surface. And that is exactly what happened now in Uzbekistan. The concealed, crushed, deeply secreted salt started to move upward, to regain its liberty. The golden land of Uzbekistan, which was first cloaked in the white of cotton, was now glazed over with a lustrous crust of white salt.
Siberia is called the largest prison on earth. The czar deported hundreds of thousands of his subjects here; here the Bolsheviks imprisoned millions of innocent people. But our Siberian, Claudia Mironova, considers Siberia a place of sanctuary, an island of liberty. The immeasurable distances, the enormous taiga, and the lack of roads facilitated isolation, provided refuge, enabled one to vanish from view. Entire communities of dissenters, says Claudia Mironova, were able to survive here. They survived the czar and the Bolsheviks—no one knew where they were.
And she herself, Claudia Mironova? When they were herding everyone into the kolkhoz, one night she and her husband, taking with them a cow and two pigs, fled deep into the taiga. They settled there, built a shed, and later even a little house with an enclosure. During the entire Stalinist era, she says with pride, they did not see a single stranger. She posits as the key to their survival her knack for canning lard. Lard—therein lies the secret of life. The secret of life and the prerequisite for liberty. If you do not have lard—meaning, if you do not possess this basic, elementary wealth—you will not be free. That is what Claudia Mironova says, sharing with us the most important lesson of her life.
The so-called Soviet man is first and foremost an utterly exhausted man, and one shouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t have the strength to rejoice in his newly won freedom. He is a long-distance runner who reached the finish line and collapsed, dead tired, incapable even of raising his arm in a gesture of victory.
Simplifying greatly, one can say that there are two Ukraines: the western and the eastern. The western (the former Galicia, territories that belonged to Poland before the war) is more “Ukrainian” than the eastern. Its inhabitants speak Ukrainian, feel themselves to be one hundred percent Ukrainian, and are proud of this. It is here that the soul of the nation survived, its personality, its culture. Things look different in the eastern Ukraine, which covers a territory larger than the western. Thirteen million native Russians live here and at least as many half Russians; here Russification was more intense and brutal; here Stalin murdered almost the entire intelligentsia. In 1932 and 1933, he had several million Ukrainian peasants starved to death and ordered tens of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals shot. Only those who fled abroad were saved. Ukrainian culture was better preserved in Toronto and Vancouver than in Donetsk or Kharkov.
And they were all talking about one thing—the fact that on January 21, on the anniversary of the proclamation of the short-lived Ukrainian independence of 1918, hundreds of thousands had joined hands and formed a chain stretching more than five hundred kilometers between Kiev, Lvov, and Ivano-Frankovsk.
the Parliament passes a declaration of the sovereignty of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The declaration proclaims the primacy of the laws of the Republic over those of the USSR and also the right of the Republic to possess its own army and to mint its own currency. The declaration states that the Ukraine will be a neutral and nonatomic state. (This has great importance, since enormous stocks of the weapons of mass destruction are located in the territories of the Republic.) Yet
Rudzkoy, Yeltsin’s deputy, and Sobchak, the mayor of Petersburg, depart at the head of the delegation. Both had played leading roles in the defeat of the neo-Stalinist putsch, but both are Russians and thus they understand what Russia is without the Ukraine. “Without the Ukraine,” the Polish historian J. Waswicz wrote back in the thirties, “Moscow is relegated to a northern wilderness.”
Ukrainian patriotism has a peasant quality: it is firmly rooted in the native soil.
Even the Pioneers were sent in to help, but were later pulled out, for these were children, and children died in the greatest numbers—not only from hunger, but also because cannibals carried them off.
Stalin’s goal was to save the Imperium: the Imperium cannot exist without the Ukraine. Yet the twenties witness a renascence of Ukrainian nationalistic ambition, which develops under the slogan “Far from Moscow!” The main repository of the Ukrainian spirit is the peasantry. To break that spirit, Stalin must destroy the peasantry. At the time, there were around thirty million Ukrainian peasants. Technically, one could have annihilated a significant portion of them by building a network of gas chambers. But that is an error Stalin did not commit. He who builds gas chambers bears all the blame, brings the disgrace of being a murderer down upon himself.
Novgorod was a famous city in the Middle Ages, something along the lines of a Florence or an Amsterdam of the north—a dynamic concentration of commerce and craftsmanship, a long-flowering center of various arts, especially of sacred architecture and icon painting. A unique political system existed here. For hundreds of years (from the eleventh to the fifteenth century) Novgorod was a kind of independent, self-governing feudal republic in which the highest authority rested with a council composed of different elements of the city’s population and the neighboring free peasantry. The people elected a prince who ruled in their name and could be recalled at any moment. For those times and in that part of the world, these were unheard-of practices. The symbol of the freedom and independence of this city-state was a great bell with which the residents were summoned to the council.
the local kremlin. (A kremlin is a type of ecclesiastical citadel, a gathering of churches, cloisters, and service buildings surrounded by walls and, once, the seat of princely power.)
Moscow was anxious that Belorussia be inhabited by a Russian-speaking population—not even necessarily ethnic Russians, just Russian speakers.
I am all ears as one of the delegates ponders: Which domination is more dangerous for Belorussia—the Russian or the Polish? And he concludes that it is the Polish, because Poland is more attractive.
History In this country is an active volcano, continually churning, and there is no sign of its wanting to calm down, to be dormant.
The Russian Writer Yurii Boriev compared the history of the USSR to a train in motion: The train is speeding into a luminous future. Lenin is at the controls. Suddenly—stop, the tracks come to an end. Lenin calls on the people for additional, Saturday work, tracks are laid down, and the train moves on. Now Stalin is driving it. Again the tracks end. Stalin orders half the conductors and passengers shot, and the rest he forces to lay down new tracks. The train starts again. Khrushchev replaces Stalin, and when the tracks come to an end, he orders that the ones over which the train has already passed be dismantled and laid down before the locomotive. Brezhnev takes Khrushchev’s place. When the tracks end again, Brezhnev decides to pull down the window blinds and rock the cars in such a way that the passengers will think the train is still moving forward.
The Third World was born and a great demographic explosion began—the population of poorly developed countries began to increase at a rate three times greater than that of wealthy countries. A dozen problems result from this, which will be the worry of the twenty-first century.
Gorbachev’s enemies claim that he assumed the leadership of a flourishing USSR and brought about its breakup. It was just the opposite—the USSR was disintegrating for a long time, and Gorbachev extended its life for as long as it was possible to do so.
It is interesting that today blood flows only where blind nationalism enters the fray, or zoological racism, or religious fundamentalism—in other words, the three black clouds that can darken the sky of the twenty-first century.
Despite these difficulties, one can assume that three processes will come to predominate in Russian life. The first is the battle between the forces of integration and disintegration. Nationalism. Russians will want to maintain a large and strong state, an imperial superpower, whereas various non-Russian minorities will pursue more and more explicitly their own, autonomous goals.
The Russian land, its characteristics and resources, favor the power of the state. The soil of native Russia is poor, the climate cold, the day, for the greater part of the year, short. Under such natural conditions, the earth yields meager harvests, there is recurrent famine, the peasant is poor, too poor to become independent. The master or the state has always had enormous power over him. The peasant, drowning in debts, has nothing to eat, is a slave. Simultaneously, it is a land rich in natural resources—in oil, in gas, in iron ore. But these are natural resources whose exploitation and profits are easy to monopolize, particularly by a strong bureaucratic-authoritarian state. In this way both the soil’s poverty and its riches undermine the people and bolster the regime. It is one of the great paradoxes of Russia.