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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 66

THE NEW RUSSIA: CULTURE

A Mind of Their Own


On their voyage of reinvention, Russians grapple with the centuries-old
question of what their national destiny should be

By JOHN KOHAN/MOSCOW



    No nation can ever become something altogether new: it is
what it is by virtue of what is in the minds of its people.
Those habits of thought, ingrained over the centuries by
geography and the vagaries of invading tribes and traders, do
not shift as easily as the political winds. To make their voyage
of reinvention even harder, Russians, ever since their empire
began expanding from the principality of Muscovy in the 15th
century, have never fully grasped who they are or what their
national destiny ought to be.

    To tell the truth, they seem to revel in the uncertainty.
In the 19th century, Nikolai Gogol depicted Russia in his novel
Dead Souls as a wildly careering troika rushing into the
unknown. Now, after seven decades of forced efforts to mold the
Russian mind to fit rigid communist orthodoxy, people have taken
to the road again with such an exhilarating clatter of hooves
that it sometimes seems as if the destination means nothing,
movement is everything.

    Boris Yeltsin contends that he does have a final goal in
view: to turn Russians into modern democrats with a free-market
economy that can claim its rightful place in the world
community. Some passengers are worried that there will be a
colossal breakdown en route. Others are experiencing motion
sickness as they try to grapple with new ideas like
demokratizatsiya and privatizatsiya or attempt to figure out
what makes brokery different from raketeery. (It is instructive
that the Russian language has no words of its own for these
borrowed concepts.) Still others shout for Yeltsin to crack the
whip and get the old nags moving faster. But however bumpy the
ride, if reform is really to take hold, every Russian must
somehow arrive at an internal alteration of his or her mental
outlook, a fresh landscape of the mind, to suit the new system.
In the meantime, the troika is weighed down by some peculiarly
Russian baggage:


    THE BURDEN OF THE PAST. Russians already have a great deal
of trouble reading the road map of their past. The notion of
historical determinism may have been drummed into their heads
in courses on Marxist-Leninist dogma, but they have never
stopped believing that history moves in a circle, not a straight
line. Ask a wrinkled babushka selling vodka on the street about
Yeltsin's chances of success, and she will leapfrog back in
memory over Mikhail Gorbachev's ill-fated perestroika to recall
the doomed attempt by Nikita Khrushchev to break the
stranglehold of the Stalinist past. An intellectual will delve
even further into Russia's history, comparing Yeltsin's policies
to the failed campaigns of reform-minded Czars like Peter the
Great and Alexander II.

    Any understanding of the Russian character must inevitably
begin with the land, which covers roughly one-sixth of the
globe. Historian Vasili Klyuchevsky speculated that the vast
sweep of Russia's steppes and forests induced "a ghastly feeling
of imperturbable calm and deep sleep, of loneliness conducive
to abstract, sad musing without any clearly defined thought."
Russians seem so overwhelmed by the sheer enormousness of their
country that they would rather settle down by a warm stove,
break out a bottle of vodka and muse about life than go out and
plow a furrow toward the endlessly receding horizon. A leading
Moscow architect maintains that this sense of the horizontal is
so strong in Russian minds that it is hard to find a straight
vertical line anywhere.

    Russia's rulers have been so obsessed with the geography
factor that they developed the most centralized system of
control in human history. In reality, the notion that whatever
Moscow dictated would automatically be done throughout the
farthest reaches of the empire was a carefully fostered
illusion. The Potemkin village was the inspired invention of a
royal favorite seeking to delude Catherine the Great about the
conditions of life in the hinterlands. During the Soviet era,
local apparatchiks flooded Moscow with so many meaningless
statistics that no one to this day knows the real state of the
Russian economy. The Yeltsin team has shown healthy pragmatism
in admitting that one solution to Russia's problems might be to
devolve decision-making power to the provinces.


    THE PSYCHIC MOLD. Historians have long contended that a
totalitarian system developed in Russia because its people were
too servile to enjoy the blessings of democracy. Anyone who has
watched as waves of debate roar through the chamber of the
Congress of People's Deputies knows that this is simply not
true. The Russian is more than a democrat; in his heart of
hearts, he is an anarchist. Russia's rulers have lived in
constant dread of the kind of spontaneous, popular uprisings
that troubled the czarist era and set off the Bolshevik
Revolution. After the communists came to power, others strove
to topple them as the sailors of Kronstadt and the Tambov
peasants rebelled against the new regime. It has been this way
throughout Russian history: early chronicles describe how
ancestors of the Russians appealed to neighboring Vikings to
come in and rule over them because "our whole land is great and
rich, but there is no order in it."

    Perhaps the sky so dominates the Russian earth that it
compels thoughts of eternity. After decades of officially
sponsored atheism, the Russians remain a profoundly spiritual
people. To mark the 600th anniversary of the death of St.
Sergius of Ra donezh, an enormous banner recently appeared on
the facade of the Historical Museum in Red Square. It bore the
slogan REVEREND FATHER SERGIUS, PRAY TO GOD FOR US. An outsider
would see the irony in a saint occupying the spot once reserved
for larger-than-life portraits of Marx and Lenin. Not a Russian.
During a recent missionary crusade by U.S. evangelist Billy
Graham, large crowds stood by the speaker's platform to commit
their lives to Christ and fill a spiritual void left after the
collapse of communism.

    Strip away the veneer of traditional religion, however,
and a superstitious pagan often lurks underneath. Many Russians
light candles in church nowadays the way they formerly paid
their Communist Party dues -- as a kind of insurance, just in
case. Belief in miracles remains strong in a nation once
fervently dedicated to the scientific method. How else to
explain the extraordinary following of psychic healers like
Anatoli Kashpirovsky and Alan Chumak, who held audiences
spellbound with their televised seances a few years ago? Even
sophisticated Muscovites rushed to buy supposedly energized
issues of newspapers and placed jars of water by their TV
screens to absorb the healing rays of these video shamans.

    Russians are constantly looking for a leader who will be
a secular version of the beloved St. Nicholas the Wonderworker.
Centuries of setbacks have not shaken their confidence that
someday a Good Czar will finally appear with a quick fix for all
their problems. Since no one ever measures up to these great
expectations, Russians soon tire of the incumbent. They sink
into apathy or pin their hopes on samozvantsy -- the numerous
pretender czars of Russian history who rose out of nowhere to
challenge the powers that be. Yeltsin donned this historic
mantle when he led his populist crusade against Gorbachev. Now
Yeltsin must be careful that no golden-tongued rabble rouser
gathers throngs of the disenchanted for a new march on the
Kremlin.

    Westerners often consider Russians shiftless and lazy.
While their style of work may be puzzling to outsiders, it has
a logic all its own, rooted in the peasant's seasonal cycle of
activities, when months of idleness gave way to short but
intensive periods of planting and harvest. As novelist Leo
Tolstoy once explained, "The Russians harness their horses very
slowly, but they ride with great speed." Russian people have
little patience for daily chores and fixed schedules. They
prefer to get things done in sudden bursts of activity. This
style of work came to be known in the Soviet period as
sturmovshchina, or storming a task.

    The bigger the job, the better. At one time, Soviet
scientists seriously considered changing the course of Siberia's
rivers. Economists have repeatedly tried to package the
country's development into neat five-year -- if not 500-day --
plans. The strategy does achieve results: Russians built the
marvelous city of St. Petersburg out of a desolate, frozen swamp
and launched the first satellite into space. They just have not
fared as well in producing regular supplies of soap and toilet
paper.


    THE BLAME GAME. When things go wrong in Russia, no one
ever thinks that he personally might be to blame. In contrast
to Western Christianity, the Russian Orthodox Church places
little stress on the concept of personal guilt. The first two
saints of the Eastern Slavs, Boris and Gleb, were passive
martyrs to political intrigue. Their story provided a powerful
image of suffering innocence in an unjust world that has lodged
in the national psyche to this day. Russians routinely use the
excuse that they are innocent victims of forces beyond their
control to explain away personal failures. A vague, amorphous
"they" is always responsible: selfish relatives, meddlesome
neighbors, greedy capitalists, corrupt bureaucrats, the
government.

    When such personal convictions are projected onto the
entire nation, they give rise to a militant patriotism based on
a no-fault Russia. This is expressed today in its most virulent
form by the neofascist Pamyat movement, which wants to absolve
Russians of responsibility for the horrors of the communist era.
Pamyat contends that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was actually
conceived and carried out by Freemasons and Jews. The search for
scapegoats was a national passion long before Stalin filled the
docks at show trials, and the fall of the Soviet Union has
sparked another round of finger pointing. This time, democrats
and conservatives have reached rare unanimity about whom to
blame: Mikhail Gorbachev.

    No law-governed state can ever be founded in Russia that
is not based on a uniquely Russian understanding of injustice.
As a popular maxim puts it, if a Russian peasant discovers that
his neighbor has two pigs and he has only one, he would rather
see his neighbor's extra pig slaughtered than raise a second one
of his own. Such crude but firmly ingrained egalitarian ideas
predate communism. They help explain why the average Russian is
so suspicious of the new breed of street entrepreneur who hawks
everything from bathtub fixtures to brassieres on city
sidewalks. He welcomes the sudden abundance, but he thinks it is
extremely unfair that someone should make a living by buying
scarce goods and reselling them at prices most people cannot
afford.


    THE SLAVIC LEGACY. Straddling Europe and Asia, Russians
have never been sure whether to view themselves as a Western or
Eastern society. Judging from Cyrillic-lettered Coca-Cola signs
and Barbie doll billboards in Moscow these days, the
Westernizers seem to have the upper hand in their century-long
debate with the Slavophiles. Government ministers and
parliamentarians constantly refer to the way the Dutch milk
cows, the Americans collect taxes and the Germans dispose of
garbage, as if Western practice is the standard by which
everything must now be judged. As cultural historian James
Billington notes in his book The Icon and the Axe, "Repeatedly,
Russians have sought to acquire the end products of other
civilizations without the intervening process of slow growth and
inner understanding."

    Every time a slapdash imitation of something Western goes
wrong, the Slav ophiles latch on to it as evidence of the danger
posed by alien ideas. In their view, the Bolshevik Revolution
exactly fits this category. The current fashion for wearing
czarist-era uniforms and holding balls for descendants of the
old nobility reflects an intense nostalgia for a Russia long
gone, a monarchist age that appears as full of sunlight and
promise for the Slavophiles as it was dark and despairing for
the communists. The traditionalists take inspiration from
prerevolutionary conservatives like Pyotr Stolypin, the
assassinated Prime Minister of Czar Nicholas II, who dismissed
his radical opponents with the curt dictum, "They need a great
upheaval; we need a great Russia."

    Russians may beg, borrow or steal foreign artifacts and
ideas, but the vast majority of them would never want to live
abroad. Those who do emigrate often suffer from chronic
homesickness. Though keenly embarrassed by their economic and
social backwardness, they believe passionately in the inherent
superiority of their own soulfulness when compared with the arid
materialism of the West. Ivan Goncharov's classic 19th century
novel, Oblomov, presents the ethnic German Stolz as a model of
energy and industry, but it is the dreamy Russian Oblomov who
handily wins the competition of cultures. It may take Oblomov
most of the day just to get out of bed, but he wins our hearts
by his valiant and endearing struggle to be a man of action.

    Yet the great East-West debate does not really trouble the
average Russian much. He thinks such questions are the proper
concern of the intelligentsia, a cultural elite that is a unique
feature of Russian society. Few other countries have accorded
their writers, scientists, artists and poets so much honor and
prestige. Such confidence has not always been justified: Russian
intellectuals may like to view themselves as social oracles, but
they have never been particularly good at predicting the future.
Many of the intelligentsia who welcomed the 1917 Revolution
became its first victims in the cellars of Lubyanka prison.
Today they face a different kind of crisis in the aftermath of
the democratic revolution: they are in danger of becoming
irrelevant in a society where commerce is winning out over
culture.

    If the present reform trends continue, it is possible that
Russia might eventually open its doors to the world so wide that
it will lose a great deal of its mystery. An inevitable
leveling process is bound to take place as Russians adjust to
new political institutions and market mechanisms. The
perestroika kids who have come of age during the reform era
already act as if they live in a different world from their
parents' -- and they probably do have more in common with their
video-culture peers around the globe than with Russians of the
older generation. Still, it is hard to imagine that Russia could
ever turn completely into a nation of time-card punchers too
busy to philosophize over tea. Would they still be Russians?

    There is an unpredictable, impish streak in the Russian
character often expressed in the desire to confound expectations
and astonish with feats of prowess. The Russians have always
longed to drive their national troika at breakneck speed,
forcing other nations, in Gogol's words, to "look askance, as
they step aside to give her the right of way." Now history has
accorded them a unique chance.