SOVIET HISTORY LESSONS

A.O.: I know some — children of friends. And it's complete escapism. Some of them want to be rock stars, and they listen to Led Zeppelin, all this retro kind of British rock… It's weird. It’s pure escapism, in my view.

 

E.B.: But what else do they have? What else are they supposed to do besides escapism? Unless they are going to rise up, which no one is doing.

 

A.O.: It's strange how back in 1956 in Hungary they were all 15 - 16 year old. That was incredible. But the times were different.
E.B.: It helps to feel like there is a foreign occupier. And then you are the good people, fighting the foreign occupier. In Russia's

case, who is the foreign occupier? If you are right-wing enough, then maybe it's the Jews and the Americans, but for the most part it's just this pretense that there are fascists on the border trying to attack you. And I think the extent to which people believe that, it doesn't go that deep. So there's not much room for heroism.

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A.O.: No. I've spoken to Ian Garner recently, the author of a book on youth fascism in Russia. He is adamant that propaganda works. And I'm saying, "No, it doesn’t." Just like under Stalin it did not work. Everyone knew that the neighbor who got shot the other day did not commit any terrible crimes. It's just convenient to pretend that you believe. But he is certain that propaganda really works. What do you think?

 

E.B.: You know, in all of these years of finding myself shocked at how many people in Russia seem to believe what they're hearing on television, after decades of Soviet television viewers being so much more sophisticated than Western ones (because they're used to being lied to), and thinking about what's happening, I think Russian propaganda is so much more sophisticated than Soviet propaganda. 

 

Because Soviet propaganda was trying to make you believe that what you're seeing right in front of you is not happening. You know, the shelves are full, right? No, it's not true. 

 

But Russian propaganda isn't trying to make you believe that what you're seeing in front of you is not true. It's trying to do a couple of things: make you believe that what you can't see directly is happening the way they're saying it, but also pushing you further. It's kind of like what Fox News does. It has a sense of what kind of things you're already willing to believe in and reinforces them and pushes you further. 

 

So it's not starting at… It would be one thing if you had people who were kind of ordinary consumers, Western-oriented, and telling them, "The Ukrainian fascists are going to come get you," and they tell you this in 2007. It would be insane. But if you slowly work your way to that, maybe not intentionally, then it becomes thinkable. I mean, it's like this whole idea of the Overton window, right? [The Overton window is an approach to finding out which ideas are within the spectrum of acceptability of governmental policies - Ed.] 

 

The Overton window of what is permitted to be discussed, what is considered a topic for polite, sophisticated, or normal conversation, shifts and shifts and shifts. And that's what Russian propaganda has done so much over the years that I think a lot of people who might spout some of this rhetoric — if their selves from 2010 could hear them — they would be shocked. But it's a slow process.

A.O.: John Lenczowski, Reagan’s advisor on the USSR at the National Security Council, told me once in an interview how much money the administration spent on Radio Liberty and Voice of America to counter Soviet propaganda, which they thought was very important. Why do you think the same kind of push is not happening right now within the American foreign policy establishment?

E.B.: I think because they probably correctly assess that it won't do that much good. Because I think, you know, what you can see for the past several years — even now, if you get can a VPN — people who want to find different sources of information about conflicting areas can find them, but they have to want it. Just like people in a Fox News bubble, if they don't want to go outside that bubble, they'll stay within it. 

 

And so, even today, if you just get a VPN — which I believe is still pretty easy to do in the Russian Federation — you can have access to all sorts of sources that are going to counter Russian propaganda. But I think most people aren't interested. 

 

And so, that is the big challenge. That’s the big media challenge which is so different in the 21st century from the 1980s, where it's not just a matter of getting information out there. You're fighting for people's attention. And people don't want to give their attention. So how you get attention? Unfortunately, one of the things that far-right propagandists do really well is come up with sensationalist things to get attention. Nuance never gets anyone's attention. That's an old story. But now, we could come up with 10 Voices of America, and if no one wants to listen, they're just talking to no one.

 

A.O.: That’s true. But what is happening in the field of Russia studies or Russian studies these days? Is there a great upheaval? What is happening? 

 

E.B.: It's a real moment of crisis. On top of the whole decline of the humanities in the university that's been happening for many years, and on top of what had been not a huge interest in Russia before all this (before the second invasion) now what you have is a lot of soul-searching among academics themselves: "How much is my work complicit in this?" 

 

And for one thing, you have a real split. So you have all of these Russianists — whether they're Russian or not — who are in a very uncomfortable position with Ukrainians, because you assume that most of us — everybody I know — supports Ukraine in the war, but we're not going to stop studying Russia. That puts us in a position which tacitly assumes an engagement with Russian culture. And that is not a position that a lot of Ukrainians I know are particularly tolerant of right now, for reasons that I completely understand. 

 

There is a war of destruction going on against their country and they don't want to hear any discussions about how, well, this part of Russian culture might be good and so on and so forth, and that there are good Russians and bad Russians. This isn't the time to make that argument to people whose country is being constantly attacked. 

 

But that means a few things. That means events where sometimes Ukrainians will not want to be present where Russians are present, no matter what the point of view, and that's a whole can of worms. But then there is also — where is Ukrainian Studies? Why are we not studying Ukraine? And that's an excellent point. 

 

But sometimes what happens, I'd get this question, "Why are you Russianists keeping Ukrainian Studies down?" And my response would be, "You know, we're barely keeping Russian Studies up." 

 

My department is called Russian and Slavic Studies, which is a misnomer because we used to have Czech, but now we basically only have Russian and occasional courses in other literatures. And the reason we don't have other languages is that we've never been able to get enough students to take them. The students simply will not sign up for them today — they are not sustainable. 

 

Now we are going to be offering Ukrainian next year — that’s a one-year thing — and hoping to get more. There is interest in Ukraine, and that is wonderful. But we're still dealing with the baseline of American academia when our students are much more pre-professional, a lot of students don't want to take a language, and then they're not likely to take a language that they just don't know much about, which would include Russian, but then, of course, all of the other Slavic languages. 

 

So there is a sense in which yes, Russian has taken up way too much space — realistically, and also in the culture and how we approach it.

 

But then there's the flip side: How do we get people to want to engage with Ukrainian culture, with Belarusian culture, with Czech culture, with Tajik culture, when they don't even know what it is? So getting it in the news means that there's an opportunity. But I understand why administrators are turning around from saying, yes, hire a bunch of Ukrainians, hire a bunch of people to do Tajikistan because they're not convinced the number is going to be there. But when I say this, I feel like I'm an apologist for a terrible situation. 

 

The decolonization of Russian Studies has been a big one in the humanities for decades. But in Slavic Studies things do tend to come late, and a lot of Russians weren’t… it was happening in Russian Studies, but not to the extent that people wanted. And now all of a sudden, with the war in Ukraine, there's this big push: We have to decolonize, which is great, but it's not always clear what that's going to mean and how we're supposed to do it. 

 

And I think the franticness with which you respond to it doesn't help. I guess part of the problem is, the funny thing is, that the people I know who feel most implicated in this are not people like me who study contemporary Russia, because I feel like this is the stuff I've been talking about for years. It's people who study Tolstoy, and people who study Dostoevsky, people who study, "the great Russian culture," you know, the stuff that Russian imperialism uses to justify its importance. 

 

These people I know who feel very implicated and are rethinking their work. I don't think their work has been doing that. I don't think their work has been specifically propping up Russian imperialism, but it's a moment when they're starting to think, "What does my work mean in the context of a war where this aggressive, horrible regime uses, instrumentalizes Russian culture as a weapon?" 

 

So that's what I think is the real irony. The people whose work is so much less obviously political than mine, are the ones who are feeling most vulnerable. Whereas I feel like everything that's going on is horrible, but I can keep doing what I'm doing because it's all sort of adjacent to it anyway.

A.O.: There are voices in Ukraine who indeed blame the golden age of Russian literature for what is happening now. But it always makes me think of the foreword that Alain Besançon wrote to [Andrei] Amalrik's Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? where he says an average Soviet citizen has no clue what Crime and Punishment is about and has no clue what The Idiot is about. The whole corpus has been perverted by the Soviet education system. It makes me think that perhaps people who do blame Tolstoy really don't know what Tolstoy really wrote about and what his message was. Equally, they don't know what Dostoevsky’s message was when he wrote Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky’s says, "You have free will and therefore you will bear responsibility for your actions." In The Idiot the message is that you cannot rely on any other person but yourself to save you. Besançon, "This is the key message Aglaya has to comprehend." I think that, and a lot of similar messages were completely obliterated from the Soviet curricula.

E.B.: Sure. Of all the individual writers Tolstoy is the one that I feel worst about being associated with Russian imperialism because, of course, of what he wrote about. 

 

But I think the argument is not about what individual Russians think of the classics or even what the classics themselves say. I think the most compelling argument about great Russian culture and its role in imperialism is how it has been used by the state in its various iterations to prop up a sense of Russian cultural superiority. 

 

So on the one hand, you ask yourself, "Why should you take down a monument to Pushkin in Kyiv?" But the next question is, "What is a monument to Pushkin doing in Kyiv in the first place?" 

 

And so that's where, in a sense, the great writers of the Russian culture, however wonderful or terrible they were, I mean Dostoevsky is really implicated, I think, — he hated Poles and Jews. 

 

A.O.: He did, yes.

E.B.: He was horrible with that.

 

A.O.: He was.

 

E.B.: But I still love Dostoevsky. But I think in a way, the great Russian writers were used. Their function for the empire is kind of like the function of Christian missionaries. They're the soft cultural good part, right? My colleague Bruce Grant in the Department of Anthropology has interesting things to say about how the great Russian culture is framed: "The great Russian culture is this gift we're giving you whether you want it or not. And whatever you guys have is just not as good as our stuff. And we know that without even asking, because we can't read the stuff in your language, but you know, it's all worse. And aren't you lucky that we give you Dostoevsky and Tolstoy?"

A.O.: Oh, yes.

E.B.: "And you should be grateful." So, I mean, I chose Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I sought them out. No one pushed them on me. So that's a completely different thing. But if you're from a country that has been colonized by some iteration of Russian statehood, and you're being told, "Here's this great Russian literature that's somehow yours," then yes, I can understand why they want none of it. Even if this individual author or this individual text is in some way innocent.

 

A.O.: I remember vividly a Facebook discussion some years ago where a Russian was arguing with a Kazakh, and his main argument was, "I am still waiting for your culture [i.e. the Kazakh culture] to produce something at the level of Bulgakov. When you finally do produce something on that level, please get back to me." And the other guy was just lost for words. 

 

E.B.: Right. And has he read anything from the Kazakh literature?

 

There was similar theme here in the 1980s, during the culture wars here, where I believe it was Saul Bellow who said, "Show me the Zulu Shakespeare." And that's just the wrong question to ask in absolutely every way. 

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But the set-up, the presumption is that, "The cultural values that I'm speaking from are the most important ones, and if you don't have a representative that works in that way, well, that's your problem." 

 

Ironically, Russia in the 1990s was speaking the same way about itself. Again and again I heard Russian intellectuals say in the 1990s, "Where is our contemporary Tolstoy? Where is our contemporary Dostoevsky? All the writers are shit." And I'm thinking, why would you expect Tolstoy or Dostoevsky in any given decade? You're asking an awful lot. 

 

But in post-collapse Russia, sometimes there was a sense of not even living up to Russia's own legacy. But posing that legacy and using it as a yardstick — which is one of the problems with that Facebook commentator's post — is that he gets to determine what is the measure of all things. And that's already a problem.

A.O.: We are getting back to the subject of post-Soviet shame. I used to write for music magazines in the UK, in the US, and in Russia — mostly guitar magazines — and the level of shame among Russian rock musicians and jazz musicians was unbelievable. "Where is our Jimi Hendrix, where are our Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd?" 

 

E.B.: Of course. That is one of the things I was getting at in the late Soviet era. It’s kind of unavoidable if you are trying to catch up to a mass culture that you really love: you are always going to feel like you're playing catch-up. And also, if you get to be the Russian Jimi Hendrix, that's good, but you're still the Russian Jimi Hendrix, right? We are not asking who the American [Vladimir] Vystosky is. 

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And I'm not saying we should, but there is no way of winning that. That's where the shame comes in. You are never going to — at least in the initial years — be able to feel like you can compete and win. And then, of course, also the real embarrassment is that as long as you're singing all this stuff in Russian, no matter how good it is, no one outside the Russian-speaking world is going to know you're alive.

 

A.O.: The same went for Russian writers, I think. There's Stephen King and there's Pelevin. Who wants Pelevin outside of Russia, you know? Everyone wants Stephen King.

 

E.B.: But at least they can get translated, right? I mean, you can translate the lyrics of a Russian rock song but it just doesn't work the same way. But yeah, trying to challenge the American superculture and the broader global cultures after decades of being isolated, you're never going to feel good about yourself as long as you're looking over your shoulder at the people who are your models.

 

A.O.: What are you working on right now?

 

E.B.: Right now I am revising a few things. I have three books that might be coming out. I have a book coming out at the end of the year, and I think three more coming out next year. 

 

A.O.: Incredible! 

 

E.B.: I am revising a book about an HBO's drama series, The Leftovers, which I'm obsessed with. And then, possibly next year, I'll have a short book out called Russian Culture under Putin, a slightly longer book about Harry Potter and Russian culture, and the follow-up to Soviet Self-Hatred, Unstuck in Time, which is largely about time travel narratives, popadanstsy [accidental travelers — characters in fictional literary works who find themselves outside of their space and time - Ed.] and theme park stories about reviving the Soviet Union and this weird sense of time and timelessness in the post-Soviet culture.

A.O.: This is incredible.

E.B.: That stuff was on my blog actually. So that's what's coming out. And I'm doing some more work on comics that I'm writing about. So that's been fun too.

A.O.: So what is Russian culture under Putin? Was there Russian culture under Putin? Is it culture? What is it?

E.B.: Well, I think everything is culture. So I should step back. There's a series of books you may have seen by Bloomsbury called Russian Shorts. They're 40,000 words on a subject. 

 

A.O.: Oh, yes. 

 

E.B.: I did one on Pussy Riot and one on the internet memes. And when I proposed the Harry Potter book as one of those, they said, "That's a little too niche. Do that for something else. (Which I did, also for Bloomsbury). But why don't you do a 40,000 word book about Russian culture under Putin?" And I said okay. And it's the hardest thing I've ever written because it's very synthetic. It's like the sense I have to cover stuff. I just feel like no matter what I'm doing, I'm doing a bad job because there's 20 some years of stuff here and it's very hard to pull together. 

 

But the idea is a book you would give to an undergraduate and say, "Here, this is what's going on in Russian culture. These are the debates that are happening." "Culture" here includes things like the gay propaganda law, the increasing repression of freedom of expression, the protest movements, but also internet culture, and so on and so forth. So a little bit of everything.

A.O.: This is awesome.

E.B.: I’m not enjoying it. 

 

A.O.: This is such a huge topic. 

 

E.B.: I know, it's crazy. There's no way for it to be satisfying. That is my advertising for this book: "There's no way this book could possibly satisfy." [Laughs].

 

A.O.: So what is going to happen to Russian culture, to artists, writers, and musicians? Will they be able to function in exile?

E.B.: I think what might actually happen — ironically — there was this whole thing about "Global Russians," this middle class, about 15 years ago. (I’ve been writing about that, and it really seemed to kind fizzle). But I think that in a sense this Rusophone diaspora that we now have, it's so much bigger than it was, and it might actually be a kind of global Russian culture, where — unlike the immigration, unlike the early Soviet immigration, where you were just completely cut off — because of the contemporary conditions, and the internet, and so on and so forth, I think a lot of this stuff is going to live in a diaspora that is so much better-connected than the diaspora before it. 

 

I mean, look at Kuvaev doing Masyanya, how long has he been living in Israel? And for most people, it didn't matter where he was doing this from, because they would just go on YouTube and watch Masyanya. And that’s the sort of thing that gives me hope. And I'm still amazed they haven't blocked YouTube in Russia. So that means people can watch this stuff, right?

 

A.O.: But Russian culture has been so robust. Look at Nabokov and how had he managed to not only survive, but to flourish, and grow, and be incredible.

E.O.: Right, but imagine that when Nabokov was writing, his works would immediately be circulated throughout the Soviet Union fairly freely? And if you want it, you can find it now. So that's a difference.

 

[end]

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