When any conversation about the here and now is made impossible, the conversation about the past becomes but a euphemism, a means of clarifying our relationship to the ousted present, a way to take a stand, to feel out and mark yourself and what’s yours: the surrender and death of the Russian intelligentsia,7 the victory stolen by some unnamed entity, the global conspiracy, musica mundana,8 whatever. All of this is lying at the ready, closer than the day before yesterday.
Now—completely and unquestionably—a “solid order” has been installed in Russia, which consists of the hands and feet of its inhabitants being bound together tightly—separately for each person and collectively for everyone. Any active movement (in any given sphere) can only bring suffering to your neighbor, who is as tied up as you are. Such are the conditions of public, state, and private life. You should, while not forgetting your own illness, always remember that you are in a position no better and no worse than that of any other conscious person who lives in Russia. Because of that you can only feel okay in those moments when you forget your surroundings. […] All is as foul, filthy, and airless as ever in Russia: history, art, events, or any of the things that create a fundament for life, have barely ever existed here. It’s not surprising that there isn’t any life either.
(Blok, in a letter to his mother, November 1909)
August 2014
Translated by Maria Vassileva
After the Dead Water
1.
Some months ago, I was asked to write an article about the centennial of the First World War,1 and while working on it, I realized that the text was turning toward the present, toward its complex, warped distinctness, and there was no way to prevent that turn. As hard as you try to avoid historical analogies, they have become impossible to escape, and each new comparison seems to nudge the country ever closer to an actual catastrophe, sewn from that same twentieth-century pattern. The rhetoric of the last few months, all the speech bubbles that swell around our dismal situation, is marked by a strange pragmatics: their task is not to explain what is happening using a recent example, but to fortify it, to scale it up. Comparing Putin to Stalin or Hitler, calling Kyiv’s Maidan fascist or Banderite,2 is not an attempt to get the formula right; it is just meant to inspire fear: as if, having summoned the ghost of past catastrophe, we can halt or repel its pale resemblance.
Everyday existence, no matter how mundane, is always guilty before something or someone—by the mere fact of its coexistence with someone else’s misfortune. You can never know the full measure of the things that cast a shadow on your own prosperity, how your luck breathes the same air as so much suffering. Sometimes—when what’s happening is so conspicuous that it can no longer be ignored—the mundane existence becomes not just blind but criminal. And so it does not know how to respond: abolish itself, change, squint harder?
Nowadays, it’s hard not to think about how our daily life (over the past few years, Moscow has adopted the generic look of a peaceful European capital with bike lanes, small cafés, and a complete lack of preparedness for any kind of danger) has a flip side, and how the curious apathy, which now accompanies any statement that can fit into our shrunken public sphere, is backed by the fact that for half a year, not very far from the bike lanes and cafés, there’s been a war going on, and it looks like everything we had to read about as children. And that there are people, some of them sitting at the next table, to whom this double edifice seems natural and understandable.
I recently read an article by a psychotherapist whose clientele is made up of people my age, Muscovites in their thirties and forties, all burdened by a Soviet childhood and softened by years of relative prosperity. Somewhere in the text a dream is retold; here is what I remember from it. A new law has been passed, the dreamer says, and now those who lose their documents are sentenced to death by firing squad, and I’ve lost my passport, so they’ve come for me. Everyone is really upset at home, but there’s nothing to be done, I collect my things, mom tells me, “Well, no, of course they won’t shoot you, they’ll just exile you.” And indeed they don’t shoot me, and I’m sitting in the cold train car, and the train is going somewhere. And I’m thinking, I always knew this would happen. That my home, my childhood, my daily life with its small troubles—that none of it would last, that it would all end this way, that there’s nothing else besides this train car. That I was born to be here.
At this point the psychotherapist explains that this is a typical dream, that nearly everyone living in Russia today has had a version of this dream. And all of these dreams are about a profound disbelief in the soft surface of this world—that shaking it will bring you back to its icy foundation, the cold-hearted “us-them,” and to the simple realization that anything could happen.
2.
The events of the last two years, which still seem unbelievable, comic, macabre, illustrate this point. It seems that there is no law too absurd to pass—and our bewilderment and public outrage merely spur on our lawmakers. There is also no situation you could consider unthinkable. The war with Ukraine, Khodorkovsky’s release,3 banning Parmesan4—none of this seems surprising anymore: in the dark, all swans are black. The borders of what is possible have stretched to the horizon, logical arguments do not work, everyday pragmatism does not save us: it’s like falling into a zone of turbulence that shifts all proportions, moves all the accents—and removes the very possibility of a corridor, a clear perspective, a view of the future. Which might be the hidden meaning of what is happening, its actual purpose.
In a recent interview, Boris Groys talks about the fear of the future as one of the hallmarks of the present, and of the idea of saving oneself from the future as an urgent problem. “There is the sense that the future, whatever shape it takes, will bring about some kind of unpleasantness and a worsening of what is. There is a tendency to hold one’s ground and preserve what is. In other words, what’s current today is how to save oneself from the future and maintain the status quo.”
Nowhere is this fear stronger than in Russia. We habitually express horror at the fact that (according to sociologists) 84 or 86 percent of the population supports Putin. But, in reality, the consolidation is almost 100 percent, and it all boils down to the fear of tomorrow, which brings us all together: Putin, cabbies in Moscow, teachers in the provinces, social media users, and those active in the protest movement. The mere thought of the fact that the unsightly and uncomfortable today is not the final point, that tomorrow will be worse, is the source of a heavy, secret, communal anxiety. Tomorrow promises myriad unknown dangers—war, crisis, revolution, mass repression—and our neurotic logic fails to accept that those things are not likely to happen all at once.
Putin’s rule over the last years (with his conservation projects à la “linger a while—thou art so fair!”) was the first symptom of this turn in our worldview. The commonplace thing to say about Putin is that his main political goal is to preserve this very same status quo, to strengthen his position at the gambling table. This is, broadly speaking, what the conflict between Putin and the protesters on Bolotnaya5 was about: he reminded us of the social contract of the aughts (offering the private joys of travels, consumption, and the unsubtle ploy of oil bonuses in exchange for our non-participation in political life), the opposition demanded a future, a return to the historical process, a life that was dynamic instead of static. But when things were set into motion, the ensuing dynamic turned out to be worse than any stasis—and as early as the winter of 2013 we were talking and thinking about how nice it would be to go back at least a couple of steps. Back to the previous summer, to the protest spring of 2012, to the peaceful autumn of 2011—before the Bolotnaya Square case,6 before the cannibalistic laws were passed, before people were banned from their jobs, etc. Back to the warm stasis when life was, it turns out, much more bearable.