David Satter. It was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway. Russia and the Communist Past. New Haven: Yale University Press 2012. 383pp.
Alexander Etkind
Vladimir Ryzhkov grew up in Barnaul, a place you would find on the map if you tapped your finger right in the middle of the Eurasian landmass. In 1989, while studying history, he took part in the excavation of a burial site near his home city. In a pine forest, students found “shooting pits”, dips in the earth that were created when human bodies decomposed in groups. Underneath were bones and skulls, and each skull was marked with a hole from a bullet. One of hundreds of such places in Russia, it was the site of mass murder. “A person who sees this, forever becomes different”, says Ryzhkov, who isnow a leader of the protest movement that has shaken the Russian capital.Between the rallies, he teaches political science and writes prolifically, both in Russian and English. Youthful and worldly, Ryzhkov wears Harry Potter glasses on an unmistakably Russian face.
A former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and business correspondent in Moscow, David Satterbegins his book, It was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway, with Ryzhkov’s meditation over the skull.The trajectories of these two people’s lives could hardly have been more different, but the same sense of tragedy has changed them both. It does not seem to matter that Ryzhkov could have been a grandson of a Barnaul victimwhile Satter could not. Recently, Jewish scholars such as Natan Sznaider have acknowledged the cosmopolitan nature of the memory of the Holocaust: catastrophic events of this scale are – or should be –meaningful for all. This is – or should be –true for the memory of the Soviet terror as well, and Satter’s book documents thisglobal awareness. Relying on the interest and competence of his English-speaking readers, Satter writes about the massacres in Dubovo and Katyń, the failures to build memorials to the victims in Vorkuta and Oryol, the survivingmonuments to the perpetrators in Volgograd and Petrozavodsk, and the battles about memory of the Soviet past in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Estonia.He writes about the shameful but comfortable ways in which some of theSoviet perpetrators ended their lives well after their crimes were revealed. And he writes about the furious debates between Russian historians about how to write the history of Stalinism.
A journalist rather than a scholar, Satter feels free from commitment to the academic literature on his subject. His inflated figures for the victims of Stalinism would surprise many experts. He arrives at a generalization that he believes to be his own discovery. Russia has elaborated a political culture that vindicates the state and sacrifices the individual. Stalinism epitomized this anti-individualist culture, which preceded and survived it. Stalinism and Putinism are thus manifestations of one and the same Russian tradition, whose Orientalroots layin medieval Moscow. “Russia differs from the West in its attitude towards the individual. In the West, the individual is treated as an end in itself… In Russia, the individual is seen by the state as a means to an end.”
There is much to say against these antinomies. Does anybody but the luckiest of us in the West believe that our states have always treated us as their ends? In Russia, what is this anti-individualist substance that has survived so many troubles and revolutions? Different periods differed in so many respects, not least the relations between the individual and the state. The best minds in Russia fought, successfully orotherwise, against the abusive authorities; does this make them less Russian?VladimirRyzhkov and his friends stand on the shoulders of giants, fromBelinsky to Tolstoy and from Trotsky to Sakharov.
Rich in detail and enthused by civil passion, many of Satter’s observations are precise, moving, and original. However, his central premise – that Putinism embodiesRussian historical tradition – is problematic. ExplainingPutinismin terms of eternal Russia absolves its very specific origins and crimes. There are persons and institutions, not the tradition, to blame for the murder of journalists, the suppression of rallies, or the extraordinaryincarceration of female performers from the Pussy Riot punk-rock groupforpublicly praying against Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral.It is essential for Putinism to perpetuate the Orientalist idea that Russia is a country in whichan individual does not count, the people are primitive, and society cannot rule itself. Therefore Russia needs a ruler like Putin. And it has always had one, exceptfor the “times of trouble”.
In one sense, the memory of Stalinism is indeed very much alive in Putin’s Russia. Statistical analyses of Russian blogs and articles tell us that very few names are used in some proximity to Putin’s more frequently than Stalin’s, whether for the purposes of comparison or contrast. But relations between memoryand history are often tricky. Putinism and Stalinism are vastly different. The old regime used unprecedented violence to consolidate the power of dogmatic, ascetic bureaucrats. Enthusiastic self-sacrifice and scientific rationality were both promoted as ideals. Corruption was a crime and was punished as such (while continuing to grow). Industrial development and military victories were real, but their price was an enormous death toll. The state was dependent on the labour of the people, which it organized in draconian ways of the gulag. For the current regime,corruption is a recognized norm of life. In July, a top law enforcement officer in St. Petersburg announced that the level of theft from the state budget had reached eighty percent. One creative ideologue of Putinism, Simon Kordonsky, has written books about corruption as an indispensable lubrication for the mechanisms of Russia’s “resource state”.Putinism has led to the de-industrialization of the country, but it shuns mass violence. It uses torture and show trials, and will do so more often as public protests grow; yet this is a far cry from Stalinism.
There is no resemblance between Putinism and Stalinism, and there is no continuity either. Almost fifty years separated the death of one dictator and the emergence of another, and many reformist and revolutionary effortshave filled these decades. Satter expects that at some point in the future, Russia will completely renounce its tradition by “acknowledging the reality of the state’s crimes and the human worth of its victims”. But this process has beenunder way for some time -- since 1956, in fact, if we specifically meanacknowledgement of the crimes of Stalinism.Much more should be done for commemorating the Soviet victims, but it does not seem likely that this work of mourning could change the well-lubricated mechanisms of Putin’s regime.
Russia’s arrested development has nothing to do with tradition or inertia. During two long post-Soviet decades, Russia had an excellent chance to reshape itself into a European country, a success that would have been hugely beneficial for Russia’s people, Europe and the world. If Russia is still“post-Soviet” (a euphemism that both insiders and observers of Putinism are using to conceal its novelty), itis due to a concerted effort of a narrow groupwhich has been actively preventing Russia from becoming a productive, law-abiding, European country.This group has captured Russia’s oil and gas, on whose rising prices the development of Putinism has entirely depended.The massive security apparatus andthe corrupt, irrational bureaucracy recycle the wealth that isproduced, as if by God’s will, by holes in the earth rather than by the work of the people.
Once again, the mechanics of this new system are seriously different from those of its Soviet predecessor. For reasons of ideology, the Soviet Union was keen to affirm its technological independence from the West. Borders were closed, and machines, knowledge, and engineers had to be produced domestically. Alongside military competition with the West, this ideal of technological autonomy explains the massive investment that the USSR made in science and education. Autonomy, of course, was never fully achieved. At the turn of the 1980s, the USSR was buying Western pipes and pumps for new pipelines stretching from Siberia to Germany. Then, Europe and the US responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with the boycott of the Moscow Olympics, and cancelled crucial deliveries of gas equipment. Perestroika began a little later.
In contrast to Brezhnev’s regime, Putin’s Kremlin has no objection to foreigners supplying the equipment, knowledge and labour, all of which can easily be exchanged for a fraction of the oil and gas profits. This is the true reason for the degradation of Russia’s science, technology and education. Borders are open, and the regime is effectively pushing astute and ambitious individuals out of the country. Awash with cash, it is saving on hospitals, schools, roads, cities, and much more – in fact, on everything but its own security.
Timothy Mitchell’s recent book, Carbon Democracy (2011),helps explain the consequences of the oil curse for contemporary Russia. In a subtle analysis, Mitchell describes the contrasting political significance of the two kinds of fossil fuels, coal and oil. Coal has traditionally beenmined near its consumer, and was rarely transported for long distances by land or sea. In the era of coal, Mitchell shows, miners held serious power; their strikes could paralyze regional economies, and their organized labour provided the model for the Marxist idea of the proletariat. Coal miningpaved the way for “carbon democracy”, essentially a balance between labour and capital. Oil, in contrast, has been found mostly in distant and exotic locations. It is liquid and therefore easy to transport, but long pipe-lines present an immense security risk. Very few people are needed to serve the drills and pumps. Working in distant enclaves and having special skills, these people, often foreigners, are not connected to the centres of population. If in the coal economy the key figure was the miner and the major threat was the strike, in the oil economy the central figure is the security guard and the main threat is terrorism.
This is why security personnel occupy the top positions of Russia’shyper-extractivestate. For its purposes, the population is superfluous. This does not mean that the people have to suffer or die; the state will take care of them as it wishes. From being the state’s source of wealth,the population turns into its object of charity. The oil curse does no determine Russia’s arrested development; it only provides conditions that are eagerly used by the group in power. Since the people do not create the state’s wealth, they cannot control its government. This mechanism of the emancipation of the state from its people is the essential truth of Putinism.