Russia under Putin: A return to Soviet absurdity
and moral hypocrisy?
Under Putin, Soviet 'Morality' Crawls from its Grave (Rzeczpospolita,
Poland)
"Putin has begun to be increasingly admired in various
circles abroad. He appeals as a defender of morality, carnal purity, and faith,
even though he has perhaps gone too far recently. He just declared himself protector
of the Russian language and signed a law forbidding the use of salty words, as
well as the broadcast of movies or music containing vulgarity. ... In the Soviet
Union there was also great concern for morality. Pink Floyd was forbidden for 'meddling in the Soviet Union's
foreign policy (Afghanistan)', the Talking
Heads for 'spreading the myth of the Soviet military threat' (I never heard
of the band, but doubtless it would be very popular today in eastern Ukraine). Tina Turner was banned simply for 'sex,'
and poor Julio Iglesias for 'neo-fascism.'"
"This
is not Russia getting up from its knees, it is the Soviet Union crawling from
its grave," my good friend Sergey Duvanov, a Kazakh
journalist, wrote on his Facebook page a few days ago.
The
fact is that Sergey has little chance of having his work published in
newspapers. He writes in Russian, is of Russian descent, but really doesn't
approve of the policies of Putin's Russia. He's a real reporter: in order to form
his own opinions, Sergey traveled to Ukraine a few months ago, including
Crimea. He met with and spoke to ordinary people from different barricades and
in between barricades. Every day on Facebook, he published extremely
interesting reports.
In
Kazakhstan, there is no place for him to publish, because they don't like him
there. His journey to Ukraine triggered an adverse reaction from Kazakh authorities,
who fear the "separatist bug." It isn't clear whether they mean
syphilis or AIDS. Of the 12 journalists who chose to go to Ukraine, ten were "persuaded"
to stay, and the 11th has already been punished. Sergey can allow himself to be
more daring, because he has already been jailed for several years for exposing "Kazakh-gate"
- a corruption scandal, the stain of which reached the inner circle of President
NursultanNazarbayev - a friend and one of many patrons to
our [former President] AleksanderKwaśniewski.
Presidents,
not only Polish, after completing their patriotic duty, are often tempted into
fast and easy money, but Kwaśniewski's case is
truly acrobatic: he both advised dictators and represented democratic Europe in
talks with other dictators, while sitting on the boards of energy companies tied
to various dictatorships - those he wanted to preserve and those he was
striving to undermine. A true Metternich
of today's Europe!
Kwaśniewski's career reminds
me of deep-sea diving. He jumped into the water quickly and swam determinedly
to the bottom, so that as a mere 30-years-old he was already part of Jaruzelski's
cabinet (Kwaśniewski was known, like Messner or Rakowski, for acting
like a camouflage) [the three men were prime ministers under General Jaruzelski, the last communist dictator who died
a few days ago].
Of
course, Kwaśniewski's friends pooh-pooh this
period, saying he wasn't much of a communist, just a minister of sports and
youth, nothing to see here really. Obviously, however, he was in charge of a
portfolio, and as always under communism, the job wasn't given to someone knowledgeable
on the subject, but to someone loyal and obedient (it was called the system of "nomenklatura"). So it was in this case. From youth
secretary in the late Jaruzelski period, he passed to
the Round Table commission on trade
union pluralism, and there he began a gradual move toward the surface; not
too fast, so as not to get the bends. And it worked.
Getting
back to crawling out of the Soviet grave: Putin has begun to be increasingly
admired in various circles abroad. He appeals as a defender of morality, carnal
purity, and faith, even though he has perhaps gone too far recently. He just declared
himself protector of the Russian language and signed a law forbidding the use
of salty words, as well as the broadcast of movies or music containing
vulgarity. This may cause a genuine tsunami of indignation and protest in
Russia. After so many years of reducing language to trite Newspeak interspersed
with cussing, people will have difficulty communicating. How to translate back
into Russian the title of the first chapter of The
Master and Margarita: Never fu..ing f... with
a d... ." Substituting one verb for 200 was possible, but reversing the
process is more difficult. It's like putting an omelet back in the eggshells.
[The Master and
Margarita, written between 1928 and 1940, but unpublished in book form
until 1967, is woven around a visit by the Devil to fervently atheistic Soviet
Union. Many critics consider it to be one of the best novels of the 20th
century, and the foremost of Soviet satires. In part, it is angled against a
suffocating bureaucratic social order.]
Speaking
of omelets, in Arthur
Koestler's memoirs, there's the story of a leftist intellectual in the
1930s who returns from a visit to the Soviet Union none too impressed, and who
shares his disillusionment with the public, I think in Paris. He speaks of
arrests, executions, forced labor, and famine, and was told that one cannot
make an omelet without breaking some eggs. "I agree," he said, "but
everywhere I went, I saw only broken shells and no omelet!"
Posted By Worldmeets.US
In
the Soviet Union there was also great concern for morality. In the KGB Museum in
Tallinn, Estonia (I highly recommend it to everyone) there are, among
others, various lists of forbidden bands and singers - with explanations. Pink Floyd was forbidden
for "meddling in the Soviet Union's foreign policy (Afghanistan)", Talking Heads for "spreading
the myth of the Soviet military threat" (I never heard of the band, but
doubtless it would be very popular today in eastern Ukraine). Tina Turnerwas banned simply
for "sex," and poor Julio Iglesias for "neo-fascism."
The
Polish Peoples' Republic's black book of censorship, written by former censor
Tomasz Strzyżewski who based it on materials he
smuggled out of Poland in the 1970s, shows that in comparison to the Soviet
Union, Poland was indeed a free land and could serve as a window to the West
for Soviet citizens. Nevertheless, many cooperated with censorship authorities,
not just workers but also scientists from different disciplines who, doing odd
jobs on contract for the censor, provided reviews and learned of the secrets of
socialist intellectual risk. Lustration
[the process of purging "impure" figures from the
state] notwithstanding, one would like to know who squealed on Thucydides, whose
History of
Peloponnesian War was removed from bookshops at the time, after just a
few days.
