The Russian Soul Is Characterized by a Profound Feeling of Nostalgia for the Past
RussiaProfile.Org, an online publication providing in-depth analysis of business, politics, current affairs and culture in Russia, has published an unusual Special Report on the mysterious "Russian soul". Fifteen articles by both Russian and foreign contributors examine this concept, which has been used by Russia watchers for some 150 years, from a contemporary perspective. The following article is part of this collection.
In his 1973 classic comedy “Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession,” Leonid Gaidai transported viewers back in time to the 16th century’s land of plenty and conquests, ruled by Tsar Ivan the Terrible. As comedy goes, it was a carefree world of drinking, dancing, caviar and vodka that left the audience enthralled with the grandeur and splendor of Ivan Grozny’s court for a solid 93 minutes. Enthralled, that is, until the time machine inventor, Alexander Timofeyev, is startled from his deep slumber and stands dumbfounded before the wreckage of his dream machine, which had knocked him unconscious after exploding.
In today’s Russia, a rosy and romantic idea of the past, which led Timofeyev to want to invent a time machine, still permeates all social strata, and has shaped the nation’s current political and social development in a way that sometimes defies explanation. In times of doubt, despair or political impotence, Russian leaders have sought to exploit the nostalgia ingrained in the Russian soul by throwing a bridge to the distant past, in efforts to promote a sense of national pride when everything else is lost.
Elena Volkova, Ph.D., a professor of comparative literature and culture at the Moscow State University, puts this down to a combination of poverty of ideas and deep-seated authoritarian tendencies, which are hallmarks of Russia’s post-Soviet rulers. “In the last 20 years we have been trying to revive different historical patterns, but have been able to restore only communist ones. Whatever we try to restore takes the shape and the sense of communist Russia,” Volkova said. “They [political leaders] can only copy old patterns which are dear to them, but cannot create anything new.”
Ian Appleby, Ph.D., an expert in identity politics in post-communist Russia at the University of Manchester, pointed out that the loss of superpower status combined with lack of “all the trappings of a ready-made nation” when the Soviet Union collapsed may have aroused an overwhelming sense of grief, annoyance and pain in the Russians. “From being the first among equals in the mighty Soviet Union, Russians were reduced to a territory that many felt is not fit to carry the name of Russia, not least because so many of them (around 25 million) lived outside its borders. This blow to national pride still rankles among certain sections of society,” Appleby said.
The economic upheavals that followed the political crisis have also shattered the thin veneer of stability so well projected under communism, leaving many insecure and exposed. “Under Leonid Brezhnev, while life might not have been a bundle of laughs, it was at least predictable,” Appleby said.
“There was no longer a fear of the midnight knock at the door—at least not for the majority who were not active dissidents. Employment was secure, and, while not exactly well-rewarded, allowed plenty of opportunity for moonlighting: ‘you pretend to pay us, we’ll pretend to work.’ They were all in it together, and the system of informal favors, or ‘blat,’ and a parallel economy worked to foster a sense of identity,” Appleby said. While “blat” is still important, those other ties have collapsed, he said.
In a piece titled “Flirting with Stalin,” Arkady Ostrovsky wrote that while the sudden windfall from oil and gas was partly responsible for the Russian leaders’ infatuation with an idealized past, the post-Soviet nostalgia is mainly rooted in the fact that “the destruction of the Soviet Union did not yield a new, liberal post-Soviet ideology.”
“When Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, he said that Russia’s national idea was ‘to be competitive.’ But then, as the price of oil climbed and Russia started to feel important again, the need for ideology became more urgent. Unable to offer any vision or strategy for the future, the Kremlin looked, inevitably, to the past,” Ostrovsky wrote in Prospect Magazine. “It is easy enough to condemn Russia’s manipulation of history for ideological ends, or Putin’s restoration of the Soviet anthem in 2000. But the truth is that a large majority of Russians—77 percent, according to one poll—welcomed the restoration of the anthem, and at least half the country views Stalin’s role in history as positive.”
Former superpower complex
Yet of all manifestations of nostalgia, none has been more puzzling than the veneration of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. As late as December 2008, Stalin was voted Russia’s third most popular historical figure in a nationwide poll that drew more than 50 million votes in a nation of 143 million, Reuters reported. Stalin’s nostalgic supporters like to repeat that he defeated Nazi Germany, industrialized the Soviet Union and achieved total literacy across a backward peasant nation. According to Communist Party Leader Gennady Zyuganov, today “the greatness of Stalin’s era is self-evident even to his most furious haters. We liberated the whole world … we built a nuclear shield, we were the first to fly into space, and we created this [nuclear] parity that ensured stable peace for nearly 50 years.”
Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov promised in March to place billboards of Stalin on the city’s streets to recognize Stalin’s achievements as the commander of the Red Army in World War II. His plans included setting up ten information stands describing Stalin’s role in the war, and was dropped shortly before the celebrations after caustic criticism by human rights groups. President Dmitry Medvedev went on television to debunk Stalin’s wartime role. But portraits of Stalin appeared on buses in St. Petersburg, and an ongoing poster campaign celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Moscow metro features an archive photo with a portrait of Stalin clearly visible, The Moscow Times reported. “Of course, there were also dark pages…and coming along with his genius there were also destructive moments, but in general he is remembered mostly as a great leader,” Viktor Ilyukhin, a leading member of the Communist Party, told Reuters. “We have been living under capitalism for 20 years now and so what? We are now a rank-and-file country, no longer a superpower. Our voice is weak both in economics and politics, and key decisions are sometimes taken without us.”
One of Vladimir Putin’s first acts as Russian president was the adoption of the old Soviet anthem with text modified by Sergey Mikhalkov. He also revived a number of sacred Soviet symbols like the old Red Army banner for Russia’s new army, and Tsarist-era symbols including the double-headed eagle and the tricolor flag. Along with the return of the Soviet anthem in 2000, Channel One reinstated a Soviet-era jingle for the main nine o’clock news program, Vremya. “Melodies, like smells, can be highly evocative,” Ostrovsky wrote. “The tune signaled a return to Soviet-era news coverage. In fact, it was as if the state was sending signals to the country as a whole—signals of restoration and revanche.”
Mourning the lost
Perhaps the urge to relive the Soviet past is so strong and so all-inclusive because every social group appeared to have lost something as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The ordinary people who had embraced the Soviet community values, egalitarian and collectivist, have found themselves stigmatized as accomplices of the former regime by the liberals’ incessant condemnation of the authoritarian past. The young and brave men and women, who in their heyday accomplished heroic deeds like the construction of the Academic City in Novosibirsk, or the second trans-Siberian railway, can no longer refer to the romantic and adventurous past which they held so dear to heart. As Ostrovsky pointed out, even intellectuals and artists who had pressed for perestroika and were supposed to have benefited most from the collapse of the Soviet Union behaved like losers because they lost the special status that they enjoyed under the communist regime, but did not have enough talent, integrity or independence to make use of their new freedom.
Yet whatever the Russian leaders lacked in material guarantees for the people, they have been more than willing to make up for by invoking the past in which years of pampering and paternalism have had a sedative effect on the people. In Soviet society, people never had to think about material things or make difficult choices and decisions for themselves, Volkova said. “They could live as children do, protected by their parents. In the 1990s those people felt unsafe, disoriented in the world of freedom and chaos, when they had to grow up and build their own life.” Russia’s nostalgia, Volkova said, is therefore as much a sense of helplessness in the face of the current realities as “a longing for a time of sweet slavery, when one’s life was ruled by a strong hand and powerful authorities who made people feel safe within some kind of a parental womb.” “For almost a century, people were taught that they were the best and the most powerful in the world. It is a matter of pride. Russians haven’t repented the crimes of the communist regime, yet many people still share the illusion of being the best,” Volkova added.
The powerful mayor of Moscow not only venerates Stalin’s achievements, but also appears to yearn for everything grandiose and glamorous from the Stalin era. Since becoming mayor, Luzhkov’s grand projects have included the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior; the building of the largest underground shopping mall in Europe near Red Square; the construction of the memorial complex on Poklonnaya Hill for the 50th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War (also known as the Second World War); the erection of huge statues to Peter the Great and wartime hero Marshall Georgy Zhukov, and smaller ones to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Alexander Pushkin. In 1999, Luzhkov unveiled the New Moscow Ring, an ambitious plan to surround the city with hundreds of skyscrapers, which would have become one of City Hall’s grandest construction projects ever. Conceived as the 21st century’s answer to the Stalin era’s famous “Seven Sisters,” the New Moscow Ring envisioned 200 skyscrapers to be built in 60 different sites on the peripheries of the city.
In her book “The Future of Nostalgia,” Svetlana Boym, a professor of Slavic Languages and Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, says that Luzhkov’s projects appeal to the common denominator of collective nostalgia. “Working within the mythology of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’ and the ‘big village,’ it is at once authoritarian and intimate, cosmological and cozy. The architecture of the new Moscow is a kind of vernacular postmodernism of toy towers, gilded cupolas, fountains, and fairytale bears,” Boym wrote.
Luzhkov hoped that leisurely strolls in the gardens and grottoes of conspicuous consumption would supersede politics and protest. The new official nostalgia was thus bound up with the collective forgetfulness that was considered healthy and necessary to forge a new identity. As contemporary wisdom put it, “In Russia the past has become more unpredictable than the future.” “Moscow’s new nostalgia, its focus on architectural restoration, is characterized by a megalomaniacal impulse that recreates the past as a time of mythical giants. It encourages neither historical reflection nor individual longing, but rather a totalizing nostalgia for eternal grandeur. Megalomania tends to cover over sites of destruction and loss and to demand ‘rebirth,’ not reconstruction,” Boym wrote.
As the nostalgic virus infests every fabric of society, it triggers a conservative ferment in the Orthodox Church, where about two thirds of Russian Orthodox Christians now claim to support nationalist ideas and feel nostalgia for the royal or Soviet imperial past, Volkova said. “The greatest paradox of Russia today is that some Christians venerate their own persecutors,” she added. “The new Christian nationalist theology, developed in the last 20 years, regards the state, the Russian army and Russian people as sacred phenomena and calls for ‘holy hatred’ of the enemies of Russia and Russian Orthodoxy. They support the restoration of the integrity of the traditional Russian empire and of an authoritarian political system, with the Russian Orthodox Church to be married to the State and playing a leading role in social policy and education.”
Contemporary nationalist Christianity has revived the pre-revolutionary slogan “Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality,” and mixed it with communist ideology, which makes the new teaching very popular among those thousands of former communists who converted to Christianity en masse since 1988, Volkova said.
But there has been no lack of effort to eradicate enthusiasm for the communist past. A myriad of Russian and Soviet writers have taken the mantle to challenge those Russians yearning for the elusive past. Vladimir Voynovich’s novel “Moscow-2042,” written in 1986, was a satirical image of the Communist Christian Empire named after George Orwell’s dystopia “1984.” Other dystopias written in the last five years include Vladimir Sorokin’s “Day of the Oprichnik,” Dmitry Bykov’s novel “JD,” and almost all of Victor Pelevin’s latest novels. Sorokin’s “Day of the Oprichnik” describes the Russia of 2027 as a reborn “Great Muscovy,” separated from the West by a Great Russian Wall and governed by modern-day Oprichniki, the personal guards of Ivan the Terrible. In 2002, Sorokin’s books were labeled as “pornographic” and publicly burned by “Going Together,” a pro-Kremlin youth organization.
By Tai Adelaja
Russia Profile
