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Mostrando postagens com marcador The New Yorker. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador The New Yorker. Mostrar todas as postagens

domingo, 13 de agosto de 2023

Rereading Russian Classics in the Shadow of the Ukraine War - Elif Batuman (The New Yorker)

 

 Letter from Tbilisi

Rereading Russian Classics in the Shadow of the Ukraine War

How to reckon with the ideology of “Anna Karenina,” “Eugene Onegin,” and other beloved books.

By Elif Batuman


The New Yorker., January 23, 2023


The first and only time I visited Ukraine was in 2019. My book “The Possessed”—a memoir I had published in 2010, about studying Russian literature—had recently been translated into Russian, along with “The Idiot,” an autobiographical novel, and I was headed to Russia as a cultural emissary, through an initiative of pen America and the U.S. Department of State. On the way, I stopped in Kyiv and Lviv: cities I had only ever read about, first in Russian novels, and later in the international news. In 2014, security forces had killed a hundred protesters at Kyiv’s Independence Square, and Russian-backed separatists had declared two mini-republics in the Donbas. Nearly everyone I met on my trip—journalists, students, cultural liaisons—seemed to know of someone who had been injured or killed in the protests, or who had joined the volunteer army fighting the separatists in the east.

As the visiting author of two books called “The Possessed” and “The Idiot,” I got to hear a certain amount about people’s opinions of Dostoyevsky. It was explained to me that nobody in Ukraine wanted to think about Dostoyevsky at the moment, because his novels contained the same expansionist rhetoric as was used in propaganda justifying Russian military aggression. My immediate reaction to this idea was to bracket it off as an understandable by-product of war—as not “objective.”

I had years of practice in this kind of distancing. As a student, I had often been asked whether I had Russian relatives and, if not, why I was so interested in “the Russians.” Was I perhaps studying the similarities between Peter the Great, who had Westernized Russia, and Atatürk, who had Westernized Turkey, where my relatives were from? Such questions struck me as narrow-minded. Why should I be studying whatever literature happened to have been produced by my ancestors? I was reading Russian literature from a human perspective, not a national one. I had chosen these books precisely for the universal quality expressed in titles like “Fathers and Sons,” “Crime and Punishment,” and “Dead Souls.”

Of course—I saw, in Kyiv—you couldn’t expect people in a war not to read from a national perspective. I thought back to what I knew of Dostoyevsky’s life. As a young man, he had been subjected to a mock execution for holding utopian-socialist views before being exiled to Siberia. In the eighteen-sixties, after his return, he wrote “Crime and Punishment” and “The Idiot,” contributing to the development of the psychological novel. I remembered that a later work, “A Writer’s Diary,” included some dire tirades about how Orthodox Russia was destined to unite the Slavic peoples and re-create Christ’s kingdom on earth. Looking back, I could definitely see a connection to some parts of Russian state propaganda.

But wasn’t that why we didn’t admire Dostoyevsky for his political commentary? The thing he was good at was novels. Anyone in a Dostoyevsky novel who went on an unreadable rant was bound to be contradicted, in a matter of pages, by another ranting character holding the opposite view: a technique known as dialogism, which features prominently both in Russian novels and in my own thinking. In the months following my trip, I often heard the Ukrainian critique of Dostoyevsky replaying in my mind, getting in arguments with past me, and resonating with other reservations I’d had, in recent years, about the role of Russian novels in my life.

These questions took on a sickening salience late last February, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Once I was on the lookout, it wasn’t hard to spot Russian literature in the discourse surrounding the war—particularly in Vladimir Putin’s repeated invocations of the “Russian World” (“Russkiy Mir”), a concept popularized by Kremlin-linked “philosophers” since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russian World imagines a transnational Russian civilization, one extending even beyond the “triune Russian nation” of “Great Russia” (Russia), “Little Russia” (Ukraine), and “White Russia” (Belarus); it is united by Eastern Orthodoxy, by the Russian language, by the “culture” of Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky—and, when necessary, by air strikes.

In early March, I wasn’t altogether surprised to learn that a number of Ukrainian literary groups, including pen Ukraine, had signed a petition calling for “a total boycott of books from Russia in the world!”—one that entailed not just cutting financial ties with publishers but ceasing to distribute or promote any books by Russian writers. Their rationale was similar to the one I’d encountered in 2019: “Russian propaganda is woven into many books which indeed turns them into weapons and pretexts for the war.” The boycott wasn’t totally consonant with the pen charter (“In time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion”). pen Germany quickly put out a press release to the effect that deranged twenty-first-century politicians shouldn’t be conflated with great writers who happened to be from the same country. The header read “The enemy is Putin, not Pushkin.”

Pushkin was at the center of the storm. Widely revered as the founder of Russian literature, he serially published “Eugene Onegin,” often considered the first great Russian novel, starting in the eighteen-twenties, at a time when much of Russian aristocratic life was conducted in French. Pushkin’s own relationship to the Russian state was not untroubled. In 1820, at the age of twenty, he was banished from St. Petersburg for writing anti-authoritarian verses (notably “Ode to Liberty,” which was later found among the possessions of the Decembrist rebels). In 1826, he was allowed to return to Moscow—with Tsar Nicholas I as his personal censor. He eventually went back to St. Petersburg, where he died, at the age of thirty-seven, after an eminently avoidable duel. The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union went on to erect bronze Pushkins all over the world, from Vilnius to Havana to Tashkent. Many monuments were built during the height of Stalin’s purges, in 1937: the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death.

In April, a movement known as Pushkinopad—“Pushkin fall”—began sweeping Ukraine, resulting in the dismantling of dozens of Pushkin statues. A pair of Ukrainian I.T. workers created a chatbot on Telegram (@cancel_pushkin_bot) to identify Russian writers who didn’t deserve to have things named after them in Ukraine. It describes Pushkin and Dostoyevsky as Russian chauvinists. (Tolstoy—a vocal pacifist for the last three decades of his life—gets a pass.)

Around that time, I received an invitation to give a talk on Russian literature in Tbilisi, Georgia. It came from a Russian-language study-abroad program that normally took place in St. Petersburg but had relocated, along with its founder, a British educator named Ben Meredith. The invitation gave me pause. There was surely much to be learned at this rich juncture of geospatial and historical currents. But was I really going to inflict myself, in my capacity as an eternal student of Russian literature, on another former territory of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union?

Georgia’s tangled history with Russia seemed to open out before me like another pathway in an ever-forking maze. In 1783, King Erekle II signed a treaty with Catherine the Great that secured Russian protection of Georgian lands against the Persian Empire (and the Ottoman Empire, and various neighboring tribes and khanates). Russia never fulfilled the treaty and, in 1801, began its annexation of Georgia. Tiflis, as Tbilisi was then known, became a colonial capital, with printing presses, schools, and an opera. It also became the base for Russia’s expansion into Chechnya and Dagestan. In response to Russian incursions, many of the North Caucasus highlanders came together to form a Muslim resistance army, led by a series of Dagestani imams, the last of whom, Imam Shamil, surrendered in 1859. During the war, generations of Russian literary youths—among them, Pushkin and Tolstoy—went to the region. They wrote about their experiences, forming what came to be known as the Russian literature of the Caucasus: works I had been hugely excited to learn about in college, because they often included Turkic words. As the nineteenth century progressed, Georgian literary youths began to study in St. Petersburg, read Pushkin, and adopt Russian Romantic rhetoric to describe Georgian national identity.

Georgia was conquered by the Red Army in 1921, and seceded from the U.S.S.R. in 1991. The country annually mourns April 9, 1989, when the Soviet Army quashed a pro-independence demonstration in Tbilisi. Stalin’s birthday is still commemorated every December in his hometown of Gori. In 2008, Russia sent troops into Georgia to support the separatist republics South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Memory of the ensuing war has done much to bolster popular Georgian support of Ukraine. Nonetheless, the ruling Georgian Dream Party, founded by the Russian-made billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, hasn’t joined the international sanctions against Russia.

After the invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens crossed the Georgian border, for a wide range of reasons, both ideological and pragmatic. Tens of thousands reportedly took up residence in the capital, reviving historic memories and driving up apartment prices. Meanwhile, because so many study-abroad offerings in Russia had been cancelled, enrollment in Meredith’s normally tiny program shot up by an order of magnitude, to more than eighty. Contemplating the invitation, I wondered how people in Tbilisi would feel about their city becoming a destination for Russian philological study.

It was “Anna Karenina” that first got me hooked on Russian novels, back in the nineties. As an only child, going back and forth between my divorced parents (both scientists) during the school year, and spending summers with family in Turkey, I grew up surrounded by different, often mutually exclusive opinions and world views. I came to pride myself on a belief in my own objectivity, a special ability to hold in my mind each side’s good points, while giving due weight to the criticisms. I fell in love with “Anna Karenina” because of how clearly it showed that no character was wrong—that even the unreasonable-seeming people were doing what appeared right to them, based on their own knowledge and experiences. As a result of everyone’s having different knowledge and experiences, they disagreed, and caused each other unhappiness. And yet, all the conflicting voices and perspectives, instead of creating a chaos of non-meaning, somehow worked together to generate more meaning.

When I learned that some critics considered “Anna Karenina” to be a continuation of Pushkin’s verse novel, “Eugene Onegin,” I decided to read that next. It opens with the title character, a world-weary cosmopolitan, inheriting a large country estate. There, he meets Tatiana, a provincial, novel-obsessed teen, who writes him a declaration of love. He rejects her—only to encounter her three years later, in St. Petersburg, where she is now the supremely poised wife of a great general. It was a turn of events that I, a provincial, novel-obsessed teen, found strangely compelling.

At the time of my trip to Ukraine, I was already in the middle of a reckoning with these books—for reasons unrelated, I thought, to geopolitics. It had started in 2017, the year I turned forty, began identifying as queer, published “The Idiot,” and went on a book tour amid the swirling disclosures of #MeToo. Like many women, I spent a lot of 2017 rethinking the story of my own romantic and sexual formation. As I tried to map out various assumptions about the universality of heterosexual love and emotional suffering, I came across Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” In it, Rich identifies a tendency in Western literature to suggest “that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal . . . it is still an organic imperative.”

I thought back to “Anna Karenina” and “Eugene Onegin.” How clearly Tolstoy and Pushkin had shown that, by falling in love with men, Anna and Tatiana foreclosed their already direly limited life choices! And yet, that ruinous, self-negating love was made to seem inescapable and glamorous. Anna dies, but looking fantastic, and thinking insightful thoughts up to the moment of her death. Tatiana’s love letter to Eugene Onegin causes nothing but heartache—but what a great letter! Had such novels encouraged me to view women’s suffering over men as an irreducible, even desirable part of the human experience—as something to be impartially appreciated, rather than challenged?

In Ukraine, in 2019, confronting an unfamiliar critique of Dostoyevsky, I had instinctively reverted to the idea that novels should be read objectively. But what constituted an objective attitude to Dostoyevsky? “The enemy is Putin, not Pushkin”: was that objective? Such thinking had long formed a part of my own mental furniture. Putin had come into power the year I started my Ph.D. in comparative (mostly Russian) literature, which thus coincided roughly with the beginning of the Second Chechen War. That war was still going on eight years later, when I finally filed my dissertation. I don’t remember making any clear connection between my studies and the war. Certainly, it would have seemed facile to me to use Russian literature to explain Putin’s actions. What was next, mining James Fenimore Cooper for insights into Donald Rumsfeld? (But what would “The Last of the Mohicans” look like, read from Baghdad in 2003?)

The idea that great novels disclose universal human truths, or contain a purely literary meaning that transcends national politics, wasn’t evenly distributed across the world. I had seen no signs of it in Kyiv. After the 2022 invasion, it was voiced both by Western groups, like PEN Germany, and in Russian outlets. “Writers don’t want war, they don’t want to get involved in politics,” reads a pro-invasion open letter signed, last February, by hundreds of self-identified “writers,” that was published in Literaturnaya Gazeta, a newspaper with Pushkin’s portrait on the masthead.

It made me think: if the books I loved so objectively were actually vehicles of patriarchal ideology, why wouldn’t the ideology of expansionism be in there, too? Was that something I could see better from Tbilisi?

It was in Tiflis, I reflected, that the twenty-three-year-old Tolstoy, having expended much of his youth on gambling and what is sometimes called “women,” started writing his first novel. He had gone there to enlist in the military, and had eventually served in present-day Chechnya and in Crimea. In one of his last works, “Hadji Murat,” Tolstoy returns to the Tiflis of 1851. There, he had crossed paths with the real Hadji Murat, a rebel commander who fell out with Imam Shamil and offered his services to Russia, but ended up getting decapitated. His head was sent to the Kunstkamera museum, in St. Petersburg. (Hadji Murat’s descendants and Dagestani politicians have long been petitioning for its return.) In the novel, Tolstoy likens Hadji Murat’s severed head to a beautiful Tartar thistle he uprooted one day from a ditch.

My college fascination with the Russian literature of the Caucasus hadn’t lasted—the books I liked best seemed to be the ones set in the center, not the peripheries—but I had once written a term paper comparing Hadji Murat’s head at the end of “Hadji Murat” with Anna Karenina’s head near the end of “Anna Karenina.” When Anna jumps in front of a train, having grasped, in the course of a revelatory stream-of-consciousness carriage ride, the futility of human relations and of her love for Vronsky, her body is mutilated—but “the intact head with its heavy plaits and hair curling at the temples” continues to exercise its magnetism, “the lovely face with its half-open red lips” wearing a terrible expression. In both cases, the human head, detached from its customary function and milieu, is represented as a static image for contemplation—rather than as a symbol of a potentially avoidable human-rights incident.

Now I dug up my old copy of “Hadji Murat” and reread the pages set at a newly opened theatre in Tiflis, where Hadji Murat stoically endures the first act of an Italian opera. The description of him limping into the theatre in his turban recalls the scene in which Anna Karenina, wearing a rich lace headdress, defies social norms by appearing at the opera in St. Petersburg. Will the Russian viceroy protect Hadji Murat’s family? Will Karenin grant Anna a divorce? Considered side by side, the operas of Tiflis and St. Petersburg seemed to become more than the sum of their parts—as when two photographs, taken from different angles and viewed stereoscopically, cause a three-dimensional image to spring from the page. The hidden mechanisms of patriarchy and expansionism suddenly came into focus as two facets of the same huge apparatus. What other aspects of the “universal” Russian novel might be visible from a trip to the former imperial peripheries?

My flight from Istanbul was overbooked and delayed. I headed straight from the airport to the program orientation in a courtyard in Old Tbilisi, arriving just in time to hear an audience of thirty-odd, mostly British university students receiving instruction in how to practice their Russian without triggering the local population. A list of Russian-friendly bars was distributed. (There had been stories of Russian speakers being ejected from bars.) I was introduced to the students as a guest lecturer. The lectures, I learned, would be followed by something called “_(ref)_lectures.”

“It’s terrible! It’s so bad!” Meredith said gleefully of the name, which he had made up himself. He had also, despite objections by the lecture coördinator, Katya Korableva, called the program “We Must Believe in Spring.” When I asked Korableva about the name, she shook her head and looked down, eventually saying that she thought it was too optimistic. (I would later encounter a similarly visceral-seeming lack of optimism in other antiwar Russians I met. Once, in a rustic courtyard in Telavi, I heard an expatriate podcaster from Moscow mutter, “I can’t even,” as he turned his back on a picturesque wooden window shutter: the boards happened to form a letter “Z,” a symbol of Putin’s war.)

At breakfast the next morning, I felt nervous about speaking Russian, which limited my ability to exchange niceties with some people making pancakes in the kitchen. I stress-ate several pancakes, while trying to figure out what to prioritize: rereading Russian novels, reading Georgian and Ukrainian novels, meeting Georgian people, meeting Russian people, visiting historic sites? What was the right way to untangle the relationship between Russian imperialism—arguably a forerunner of both Soviet and post-Soviet expansionism—and the novels I’d loved growing up?

I was staying at the Writers’ House of Georgia, an Art Nouveau mansion said to be haunted by the ghost of the poet Paolo Iashvili, a member of the Georgian Blue Horns symbolist group, who had shot himself there in 1937. Lavrentiy Beria—who orchestrated Stalin’s purges in Georgia—had been making writers testify against one another. Tbilisi’s Pushkin monument was a short walk away, and I decided to pay it a visit. I’m the kind of person who can get lost anywhere, so I spent a long time wandering around the Writers’ House, trying to find the exit. In one hall, I came upon a wooden door with a plate that read “Museum of Repressed Writers.” I tried the door handle. It was locked.

Once I had escaped from the building, I turned right, onto a street named after Mikhail Lermontov. Lermontov had been exiled to the environs of Tiflis as a military officer in 1837, for writing a poem that implicated court slanderers in Pushkin’s duel-related death. He went on to serve in the Caucasus, which furnished the materials for his ironically titled novel “A Hero of Our Time.” (The opening line is “I was travelling post from Tiflis.”) Pushkin, too, had first come to the region as a political exile, in 1820. Inspired by his surroundings, he wrote “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” a narrative poem in which a Circassian girl falls in love with a Russian prisoner of war, who is too brooding and Byronic to return her feelings—until she risks her life to set him free, at which point he implores her to go with him to Russia. No longer capable of happiness, she drowns herself instead. It’s considered the first major work of the Russian literature of the Caucasus, and I had reread it in preparation for my trip.

In the epilogue, Pushkin implies a connection between the Circassian girl’s fate and that of the North Caucasian peoples. The most ominous line—“Submit, Caucasus, Ermolov is coming!”—had recently been quoted to me by the Ukrainian Telegram bot. General Alexei Ermolov, a Russian commander whose brutal tactics contributed to the elimination of some nine-tenths of the Upper Circassian population, once declared, “I desire that the terror of my name shall guard our frontiers more potently than chains or fortresses”—an ambition in which he was arguably assisted by Pushkin.

I turned onto Pushkin Street, which led to Pushkin Park, and there was Pushkin, or at least his bust, perched on a pink marble plinth. I felt somehow relieved to see him. Then I felt ashamed of feeling relieved. I wondered what Pushkin had felt—whether shame had entered into it—after getting banished by a tsar, at twenty, for a poem he had written as a teen-ager. “Returning to St. Petersburg from his exile, Pushkin stopped criticizing the Russian throne, and started to write great-power odes, glorifying imperial aggressive acts of tsarism against neighboring peoples”: that’s the chronologically reductive, but not totally inaccurate, interpretation offered by the Ukrainian chatbot. For the rest of his life, the Pushkin who championed individual freedom was always alternating with the Pushkin who celebrated the Empire.

Take the preface of Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman” (1837), which shows Peter the Great contemplating the swamp, dotted by the blackened hovels of “miserable Finns,” where he plans to found St. Petersburg. (It was by establishing a westward-facing capital with access to the Baltic Sea in 1703, as well as by radically Westernizing military and civic institutions, that Peter transformed Russia into a major European power.) “From here we shall threaten the Swede,” Peter reflects. It wasn’t like there was nothing there that could remind you of Putin. At the same time, “The Bronze Horseman”—a nightmarish fantasia in which the most famous statue in St. Petersburg, an equestrian Peter, leaps off its pedestal and terrorizes a clerk to death—is surely, among other things, a testament to Pushkin’s ambivalence toward monuments. In its way, it’s a poem about a monument that dismantles itself. What would Pushkin have made of the Pushkinopad movement in Ukraine? It might depend on which Pushkin you asked.

I headed back toward the Writers’ House on a street named after another Blue Horns poet, Galaktion Tabidze. Having lost both his wife and a cousin in the purges, Tabidze had eventually jumped to his death from the window of a psychiatric hospital. It occurred to me to wonder whether I was already inside the Museum of Repressed Writers. Maybe that locked door hadn’t been keeping us out but locking us all in.

One place I had really wanted to see in Tbilisi was the Tiflis Imperial Theatre, opened in 1851 to promote Russian culture and to distract people’s attention from the North Caucasus war. The young Tolstoy had attended the Italian opera there, and I felt certain it was the same theatre that he imagined Hadji Murat visiting. Unfortunately, the building turned out to have burned down in 1874. Instead, I stopped by its original site, in Freedom Square, where Pushkin Street meets Tbilisi’s main thoroughfare, Rustaveli Avenue. Standing in the busy square, gazing from the City Assembly building, constructed in the nineteenth-century Moorish Revival style, to a Courtyard by Marriott Hotel, renovated in the early-two-thousands Courtyard by Marriott style, I felt the words “center” and “periphery” slowly losing their meaning. In Tolstoy’s career, was Tbilisi peripheral, or was it central? Tolstoy’s first novel, “Childhood,” was written in Tiflis but set in Russia. Fifty years later, “Hadji Murat” was written in Russia, but set partly in Tiflis.

Historical phenomena—revolution, modernity—are often said to start at a center, and then to spread to the peripheries. But that hierarchy or chronology—center first, periphery second—can be misleading. Technically, capitalism wasn’t born in a self-sufficient Western Europe and then transmitted to the rest of the world. It was, from the beginning, enabled by the wealth streaming into Western Europe from non-European colonies. The peripheries were always already playing a central role.

I thought of Edward Said’s “Culture and Imperialism” (1993)—a classic text that I read for the first time only after my Ukraine trip—which makes a similar case about novels. As Said points out, novels became a dominant literary form in eighteenth-century Britain and France, precisely when Britain was becoming the biggest empire in world history and France was a rival. Novels and empires grew symbiotically, defining and sustaining each other. “Robinson Crusoe,” one of the first British novels, is about an English castaway who learns to exploit the natural and human resources of a non-European island. In an influential reading of “Mansfield Park,” Said zooms in on a few references to a second, Antiguan property—implicitly, a sugar plantation—belonging to Mansfield’s proprietor. The point isn’t just that life in the English countryside is underwritten by slave labor, but that the novel’s plot itself mirrors the colonial enterprise. Fanny Price, an outsider at Mansfield, undergoes a series of harrowing social trials, and marries the baronet’s son. A rational subject comes to a scary new place—one already inhabited by other, unreasonable people—and becomes its rightful occupant. What does a story like that tell you about how the world works?

In college, I had studied Said’s earlier and more famous book, “Orientalism,” which is often assigned alongside the Russian literature of the Caucasus. (It’s about how Western descriptions of the East, whether scientific or artistic, end up reinforcing modes of Western domination.) But I had never read “Culture and Imperialism,” or considered the role of imperialism in novels like “Anna Karenina.” Post-colonial criticism, which Said helped pioneer, originally focussed on the legacy of British and French colonialism, meaning that places like Russia, Turkey, and the former Soviet Union tended to get left out. Said himself omitted Russia from his book, claiming that the subject was too big, and that, because the Russian Empire grew contiguously, and not by overseas conquest, imaginative projections didn’t play the same role as they did in Britain or in France. (Russian literature curricula are already changing, in the wake of the Ukraine war. The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, a leading professional organization, has dedicated its 2023 conference to the theme of decolonization.)

In Tbilisi, it seemed clear that the Russian Empire had required vast resources of imagination to build and to sustain—and that my favorite novels might have played a role. In “Eugene Onegin,” I kept coming back to Tatiana’s husband, a war hero “maimed in battle.” Though mentioned only briefly, he’s the catalyst for Tatiana’s transformation—the reversal that makes Onegin fall in love with her. We never do learn whom the general himself may have maimed. The maiming that we do see: Tatiana gazing emotionlessly at Onegin; Onegin corpselike and grovelling, as the general’s spurs clink in the hallway. Tatiana reminded me now of the Circassian girl in “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” who also loves in vain, until she aligns herself in a self-annihilating way with the interests of the Russian Empire. And wasn’t that Pushkin’s arc, too? Tatiana wrote a rash declaration to Onegin; Pushkin wrote a rash ode to freedom. Tatiana became the social queen of St. Petersburg, Pushkin its foremost poet.

As for “Anna Karenina,” it really does start where Onegin ends: with a flawlessly dressed heroine married to an influential imperialist. The tension between center and periphery is woven into the plot. The character of Karenin, a statesman involved in the resettlement of the “subject races,” turns out to be partly based on Pyotr Valuev, the Minister of the Interior from 1861 to 1868. Valuev oversaw the Russian appropriation of Bashkir lands around the Ural Mountains—and also issued a notorious decree restricting the publication of Ukrainian-language educational and religious texts throughout the Empire. (It reads, in part, “A separate Little Russian language never existed, does not exist, and shall not exist.”)

Unlike Tatiana, Anna doesn’t remain faithful to her empire-building husband. She leaves Karenin for Vronsky, who turns down a prestigious military post in Tashkent in order to travel with her to Italy. But the Imperial Army gets Vronsky back in the end. That final image of Anna’s lifeless head is actually a flashback Vronsky has, on his way to join a Pan-Slavic volunteer detachment fighting the Ottomans in Serbia. With Anna dead, and the love plot over, his only desire is to end his own life, and to kill as many Turks as possible in the process. To quote a recent think piece titled “Decolonizing the Mysterious Soul of the Great Russian Novel,” by Liubov Terekhova—a Ukrainian critic who was reassessing “Anna Karenina” from the United Arab Emirates, as Russia bombed her home city, Kyiv—“Russia is always waging a war where a man can flee in search of death.”

Literature, in short, looks different depending on where you read it: a subject I found myself discussing one afternoon over lunch, in a garden overlooking Tbilisi, with Anna Kats, a Georgian-born, Russian-speaking scholar of socialist architecture, who immigrated to Los Angeles as a child. We talked about the essay “Can the Post-Soviet Think?,” by Madina Tlostanova, an Uzbek-Circassian proponent of “decoloniality,” a theory that originated in Latin America around the turn of the millennium. A key tenet is that “thinking” is never placeless or disembodied. The first principle of thought isn’t, as Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” but “I am where I think.”

I remembered the first time I read Pushkin’s travelogue “Journey to Arzrum,” the summer I turned twenty—during my own initial foray into travel writing, for a student guidebook. I had requested an assignment in Russia, but my Russian wasn’t good enough, so I was sent to Turkey. To improve my Russian, I was reading Pushkin on night buses, feeling excited every time I saw Erzurum (Pushkin’s Arzrum) on the schedule board at intercity stations.

Turkey hadn’t been Pushkin’s first-choice destination, either—he had wanted to go to Paris. Denied official permission, he resolved to leave the country the only way he could think of—by accompanying the military in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-29. The tone of the resulting travelogue fluctuates unsettlingly between chatty verbiage and dispassionate horror. “The Circassians hate us,” Pushkin writes at one point. “We have forced them out of their open grazing lands; their auls”—villages—“have been devastated, whole tribes have been wiped out.” Nine years after his first visit to the Caucasus, Pushkin seems to have gained some clarity on the Circassians’ plight. (In 2011, the Georgian parliament voted to characterize Russia’s actions there as a genocide.) Still, in the next sentence, he goes on to observe, implausibly, that Circassian babies wield sabres before they can talk. Later in his account, Pushkin describes a lunch with troops during which they see, on a facing mountainside, the Ottoman Army retreating from Russian Cossack reinforcements—leaving behind a “decapitated and truncated” Cossack corpse. Pushkin quickly segues to the congeniality of camp life: “At dinner we washed down Asiatic shashlik with English beer and champagne chilled in the snows of Taurida.”

What can we afford to see, as writers and as readers? Could Pushkin afford to see that he benefitted from the “resettlement” of the Circassians? How clearly could he see it? For how long at a time?

After lunch, Kats and I took a funicular to the top of Mt. Mtatsminda, where she maintained that Tbilisi’s best custard-filled doughnuts were to be found. Rising above the treetops, thinking back on my own national and global privileges, the extent of which have grown clearer to me with the passing years, I did not, I decided, find it difficult to understand Pushkin’s simultaneous ability and inability to perceive the truth.

The relationship between literary merit and military power is not a delightful subject for contemplation. I prefer to think that I would have loved Pushkin even if Peter and Catherine the Great hadn’t waged extensive foreign and internal wars, dragging Russia into the European balance of power. But would Pushkin’s work still have been translated into English and stocked in the Barnes & Noble on Route 22 in northern New Jersey—in the world superpower to which my parents came in the seventies, in pursuit of the best scientific equipment? Even if it had been translated, and I had read it, I might not have recognized it as good. Would it have been good?

In Tbilisi, I remembered a line from Oksana Zabuzhko’s classic 1996 novel, “Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex,” which I read on my 2019 trip to Kyiv. “Even if you did, by some miracle, produce something in this language ‘knocking out Goethe’s Faust,’ ” Zabuzhko writes, of Ukrainian, “it would only lie around the libraries unread.” Her narrator, an unnamed Ukrainian-language poet visiting Harvard, suffers countless indignities. She’s broke, and her work is rarely translated. But she refuses to write in English or in Russian. A self-identified “nationalist-masochist,” she remains faithful to her forebears: poets who “hurled themselves like firelogs into the dying embers of the Ukrainian with nothing to fucking show for it but mangled destinies and unread books.”

Were those books unread because they weren’t as good as Pushkin’s—or was it perhaps the other way round? If a book isn’t read, and doesn’t influence other books, will it hold less meaning and resonance for future readers? Conversely, can a “good” book be written without robust literary institutions? “Eugene Onegin” is clearly a product of Pushkin’s constant dialogue with the editors, friends, rivals, critics, and readers whose words surrounded him, even in exile. Nikolai Gogol, born in 1809 in Ukraine with Pushkin-scale talents, became a famous writer only after moving to St. Petersburg.

Gogol, now a central figure in the post-2022 discourse about Russian literature, first found critical success in the capital by writing, in Russian, on Ukrainian themes. But the same critics who praised him also urged him to write about more universal—i.e., more Russian—subjects. Gogol duly produced the Petersburg Tales and Part 1 of “Dead Souls.” A celebrated literary hostess once asked Gogol whether, in his soul, he was truly Russian or Ukrainian. In response, he demanded, “Tell me, am I a saint; can I really see all my loathsome faults?” and launched into a tirade about his faults, and also other people’s faults. He eventually suffered a spiritual breakdown, came to believe that his literary works were sinful, burned part of his manuscripts (possibly including Part 2 of “Dead Souls”), stopped eating, and died in great pain at forty-two.

The Kremlin now uses Gogol’s work as evidence that Ukraine and Russia share a single culture. (An essay about Gogol’s Russianness appears on the Web site of the Russkiy Mir Foundation, which Putin started in 2007.) According to a 2021 article by Putin, Gogol’s books “are written in Russian, bristling with Malorussian”—Little Russian—“folk sayings and motifs. How can this heritage be divided between Russia and Ukraine?”

In Tbilisi, the Gogol story I kept coming back to was “The Nose”: the one where Major Kovalyov, a mid-level civil servant, wakes up one morning with no nose. Fearing for his job and his marriage prospects, he hits the streets of St. Petersburg, searching for his missing proboscis. A carriage pulls up nearby. A personage emerges, wearing a uniform and plumed hat that denote a higher rank than Kovalyov’s. It is Kovalyov’s nose. “Don’t you know where you belong?” Kovalyov demands. “Don’t you realize you are my own nose! ”

The nose coldly replies, “My dear fellow, you are mistaken. I am a person in my own right.”

Read enough Putin speeches and Kovalyov’s attitude toward his nose starts to sound familiar. How dare a mere appendage masquerade as an independent entity? What cruelty, to separate the Little Russian nose from the Great Russian face! In “The Nose,” as in so much of the Russian literature that I had been revisiting, the interests of empire prevail. The police apprehend Kovalyov’s runaway organ “just as it was boarding the stagecoach bound for Riga.” Tellingly, the nose had been headed west.

The morning of my lecture, I went for a walk on Rustaveli Avenue. The broad tree-lined sidewalks were flanked with used booksellers purveying, alongside Georgian books I couldn’t read, lone volumes of Tolstoy and Turgenev. At one stall, a series of Soviet-era classroom maps—one of them showing the changing eighteenth-century borders of the Russian and Ottoman Empires—were held in place by a Latvian cookbook and a Dostoyevsky omnibus.

Dostoyevsky: we meet at last. I opened it to “Crime and Punishment,” the story of Raskolnikov, a poor student, who decides to murder an old pawnbroker to fund his education. Turning the yellowed pages, I noticed multiple mentions of Napoleon. I thought back on Raskolnikov’s theory about how “extraordinary” individuals have the right to kill others for “the fulfillment of an idea.” If Napoleon, who murdered thousands of Egyptian people and stole their archeological treasures, is lauded as the founder of Egyptology, why shouldn’t a student be able to kill one person to advance his studies? The logic of Raskolnikov’s crime, I realized, was the logic of imperialism.

“Putin’s offensive on February 24 owed much to Dostoevskyism,” Oksana Zabuzhko wrote in an essay last April, after the massacre in Bucha. She called the invasion “an explosion of pure, distilled evil and long-suppressed hatred and envy,” adding, “ ‘Why should you live better than us?’ Russian soldiers have been saying to Ukrainians.” It was easy to see that message in “Crime and Punishment.” Why should “some ridiculous old hag” have money, when Raskolnikov is poor?

Dostoyevsky didn’t, of course, endorse Raskolnikov’s views. (The clue is in the title: the story ends in a Siberian prison.) Still, he found his ideas interesting enough to be the subject of a book. Should we still read that book? In “Culture and Imperialism,” Edward Said raises a similar question about Jane Austen. He concludes that to “jettison” “Mansfield Park” is to miss an opportunity to see literature as a dynamic network, rather than as the isolated experiences of victims and perpetrators—but that the solution isn’t to keep consuming Austen’s novels in a geopolitical vacuum. Instead, we need to find new, “contrapuntal” ways of reading. That means seeing “Mansfield Park” as a book with two geographies: one, England, richly elaborated; the other, Antigua, strenuously resisted—yet revealed, all the same.

Contrapuntal, or stereoscopic, reading felt like an exciting approach to the Russian canon, in which categories like victim and perpetrator—or center and periphery—are particularly fluid. Madina Tlostanova, the decolonial critic, has described Imperial Russia, along with the Ottoman sultanate, as a special kind of “secondary” empire, one that formed on the margins of Europe, and that compensated for its resulting inferiority complex by “modernizing” its own subject peoples. Peter the Great’s Westernization of Russia can be seen as an unacknowledged trauma. In the words of the scholar Boris Groys, this “cruel inoculation” protected Russia against “real colonization by a West that surpassed it both technically and militarily.”

A contrapuntal approach would mean thinking about Russian classics alongside works by Zabuzhko and Tlostanova—and Dato Turashvili, Nana Ekvtimishvili, Nino Haratischwili, Taras Shevchenko, Andrey Kurkov, Yevgenia Belorusets, and Serhiy Zhadan, to name a handful of the important Georgian and Ukrainian writers whose works exist in English. It would mean not bracketing off novelists’ political views, as I initially tried to do with Dostoyevsky. One editorial in The Spectator, responding to the proposed suspension of a Dostoyevsky lecture series in Milan, called it ironic to “censure” a writer who had himself been “sent to a Siberian labour camp for reading banned books that attacked the Tsarist regime.” As it turns out, being a victim of imperial repression doesn’t make you incapable of perpetuating repressive ideas. One of Dostoyevsky’s fellow-prisoners in Siberia, a Polish nationalist, wrote in his memoirs about Dostoyevsky’s insistence that Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland “had forever been the property of Russia,” and would, without Russia, be mired in “dark illiteracy, barbarism, and abject poverty.”

In 1880, near the end of his life, Dostoyevsky gave a famous speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in what is now Moscow’s Pushkin Square, extolling Pushkin as the most Russian and the most universal of writers. He linked Pushkin’s achievements to Peter’s reforms, through which Russia didn’t just adopt “European clothes, customs, inventions and science” but actually incorporated into its soul “the genius of foreign nations.” Russia, like Pushkin, knew how to transcend national limitations, and was on a course to “reconcile the contradictions of Europe,” thereby fulfilling the word of Christ. The speech was received with hysteria, weeping, screaming, and shouts of “You have solved it!,” referring to the eternal mystery of Pushkin. Dostoyevsky’s “Pushkin speech” is quoted on the Russkiy Mir Foundation’s Web site.

The point of drawing a connection between Dostoyevsky and Putin isn’t to “censure” Dostoyevsky but to understand the mechanics of trauma and repression. Among the writer’s formative memories was an incident he observed at age fifteen, at a post station on the road to St. Petersburg. Before his eyes, a uniformed courier rushed out of the station, jumped into a fresh troika, and immediately started punching the neck of the driver—who, in turn, frantically whipped the horses. The troika took off at breakneck speed. Dostoyevsky imagined the driver going back to his village that night and beating his wife.

Dostoyevsky eventually adapted this memory into Raskolnikov’s nightmare in “Crime and Punishment.” In it, Raskolnikov dreams that he is a child and has to watch a peasant beat a horse to death. On waking, he clearly connects the dream to his own impending plan to kill someone with an axe. He then gets out of bed and kills someone with an axe. In other words, being a middle link in a long chain of violence—even knowing you’re a middle link in a long chain of violence—doesn’t magically rapture you out of the chain. In his own life, Dostoyevsky didn’t always apply this insight—but, like all good novelists, he enabled his future readers to see further than he could at the time.

My talk about how we don’t need to stop reading Russian literature was received warmly by the audience of assembled Russian majors and educators. One student, bringing up Pushkinopad, asked whether my ideal vision of the world was one in which the Pushkin monuments were toppled. I wondered aloud whether, in an ideal world, we might recognize literary achievement in some way other than by building giant bronze men who tower above us.

Later that evening, I heard that one live-stream viewer of the lecture had written in, protesting the decision to broadcast a talk about Russian literature. As I walked back to the Writers’ House, past a bar with a chalkboard that said “free wine on the occasion of putin’s death,” I contemplated the vast difference between an ideal vision of the world and the world we live in. Feeling a wave of pessimism, I thought back to the essay in which Zabuzhko, quoting Tolstoy’s line “There are no guilty people in the world,” characterizes Russian literature as a two-hundred-year festival of misplaced sympathy for criminals, rather than for their victims, enabling crimes—including war crimes—to continue.

Something in her argument resonated with me. Wasn’t there a way of celebrating the ability to feel sorry, the ability to “see all sides,” to “objectively” take in the whole situation, that ended with seeing painful outcomes as complicated, interesting, and unchangeable? It was as if “good” novels had to make human affairs seem insoluble and ambiguous. If a problem in a novel looked too clear-cut—if the culprit was too obvious—we called it bad art. It was a subject I’d been thinking over for a while, questioning my own decision to write novels. There are signs that Tolstoy had similar worries. After publishing “Anna Karenina,” he underwent a “spiritual crisis” or “conversion,” decided his own novels were immoral, and turned to religious writing. But, eventually, he went back to novels—including “Hadji Murat.”

“Hadji Murat,” which was published posthumously, is considered unique in Tolstoy’s work, and in the nineteenth-century Russian canon, for how thoroughly it enters the perspective of the imperial subject. In consecutive chapters, Tolstoy portrays the destruction of a Chechen village, first from the point of view of a young Russian officer—he can’t believe his luck at being, not in a smoke-filled room in St. Petersburg, but “in this glorious region among these brave Caucasians”—and then from the perspective of the villagers, whose lives have been “so lightly and senselessly destroyed.” The juxtaposition recalls Pushkin’s “Journey to Arzrum”: the gutted village, the iced champagne. But Tolstoy, whose life was many decades longer than Pushkin’s, exposes the terrible calculus facing the villagers, who must abandon their own values and join either the Russian Empire or Imam Shamil’s resistance. The imam’s brutality mirrors Tsar Nicholas’s. As in the image of Dostoyevsky’s troika, it’s easy to see the chain of violence—and maybe to envision its disruption.

Multiplicity is built into the text: ten versions exist, none conclusive. Tolstoy kept the draft at hand until his death, in 1910. In an 1898 diary entry, Tolstoy mentions a certain “English toy”—it sounds stereoscopic—that “shows under a glass now one thing, now another.” Hadji Murat, he writes, must be represented in this fashion: as “a husband, a fanatic, etc.” It occurred to me to think of that “English toy” as the novel itself—a technology inherited by Tolstoy from Austen and Defoe, one that could reveal different truths from different points in space and time, perhaps even destabilizing the structures it once bolstered.

Most of “Hadji Murat” takes place outside of Russia, in the North Caucasus and Georgia, places where Russia isn’t unilaterally right. It’s where Tolstoy, having escaped the smoke-filled rooms of St. Petersburg, first became a writer. Looking at “Hadji Murat” from Tbilisi, I found its stereoscopic quality extending to “Anna Karenina,” which also became less fixed, more provisional, in my mind—almost as if Anna’s fate, like the meaning of the novel itself, could, and would, keep changing.

One evening in Tbilisi, at a restaurant around the corner from where Tolstoy had lived, I met the filmmaker Salomé Jashi. I had been captivated by her 2021 film, “Taming the Garden,” about a project orchestrated by Georgia’s former Prime Minister, the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, to uproot hundreds of trees from across the country, for relocation at a privately funded “dendrological park” on the Black Sea.

Jashi doesn’t appear in the film, which has no narration. Instead, the camera silently follows the workers who carry out the extraction with giant machines. Locals, having exchanged their rights to the trees for unheard-of sums, contemplate the ravaged earth, the stumps and severed limbs of other trees that had to be cut down to make way for the trucks. They weep, cross themselves, laugh, shoot cell-phone videos. Some seem to be auditioning different emotions, to see which one fits.

Jashi told me that, as a child, during the 1992-93 war in Abkhazia—a partially recognized Russian-backed state, which Georgia views as a historic part of its territory—she used to write patriotic poems, and dreamed of devoting her life to her country. She speaks Russian, but as a teen-ager she stopped reading Russian books. To this day, she has never read a novel by Dostoyevsky; not, she told me, on principle, but because she didn’t want to read books in Russian, and why read Dostoyevsky in translation?

As I topped off our wine—we were splitting a bottle—I found myself recalling the unforgettable shots in Jashi’s film of massive trees in transit. One bounces sedately down a country road on the back of a flatbed truck; another glides along the Black Sea on a barge. The image of the sailing tree, its leaves ruffled by the breeze, was almost too outlandish to process, more like a metaphor than like anything actually existing in the world. In it, I seemed to see the spectral presence of Ivanishvili, whom many suspect of steering the country behind the scenes. I saw Robinson Crusoe’s island, unmoored and floating toward the horizon. I saw the thistle Tolstoy yanked out of the earth, now bigger than he was. And I saw the great Russian novels themselves, their roots newly visible, their branches stretching to the sky.


Published in the print edition of the January 30, 2023, issue, with the headline “Novels of Empire.”

 

 

domingo, 23 de abril de 2023

Tunisia, a primeira nação árabe a iniciar a primavera democrática é a última a recair na ditadura, depois de todas as outras - David D. Kirkpatrick (The New Yorker)

 Triste evolução da democrácia islâmica, estrangulada pelas suas contradições internas.

Tunisia Arrests Its Most Prominent Opposition Leader

Rached Ghannouchi has been a voice for democracy in his nation and across the Muslim world.

Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, was the last place where it failed. After a decade of freedom and democracy, in 2021 a new strongman, President Kais Saied, shut down the parliament and, soon after, began imposing an authoritarian constitution and arresting his critics. This week, the police finally came for Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s largest political party and the Arab world’s most influential thinker about the potential synthesis of liberal democracy and Islamic governance.

Born in 1941 to impoverished peasant farmers in remote southern Tunisia, Ghannouchi studied in Cairo, Damascus, and Paris; worked menial jobs in Europe; and returned to Tunis, in 1971. Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamist politics was on the rise across the region, as an alternative to the autocracies in power, and, in 1981, Ghannouchi co-founded a Tunisian Islamist movement. He was jailed and tortured for three years, and in 1987 he was arrested again, sentenced to death, and exiled to London. (Other Arab states would not take him.)

Ghannouchi’s examination of Britain’s liberal democracy through an Islamic lens set him apart from a generation of Arab intellectuals. Islamic scholars had long ago concluded that in the true “Abode of Islam” a Muslim must feel secure in his liberty, property, religion, and dignity, Ghannouchi wrote in his landmark treatise, “Public Freedoms in the Islamic State,” which he began writing in prison and published, in Arabic, in 1993. So why had he found that security only in the West? A true Islamic state, he concluded, must be founded on “freedom of conscience” for Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Quoting a revered twelfth-century scholar, Ghannouchi urged Islamists to learn from Western democracy—to benefit “from the best of human experiments regardless of their religious origins, since wisdom is Shari’a’s twin.”

He returned to Tunisia, in 2011, when a spontaneous wave of protests against police brutality drove its longtime ruler into exile and set the Arab Spring revolts in motion. Ghannouchi helped make the country’s political transition the most liberal in the region, and he did his best to salvage the prospects for democracy elsewhere. In the late spring of 2013—a decade ago—he flew to Egypt to offer advice to its first democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood. The hopefulness of those months is now difficult to remember. Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya had all held credible elections and had started drafting new charters. Western experts cited Yemen as a model for the peaceful handover of power. Even in Syria most rebels still marched under the banner of democracy, rather than of extremist Islam; the uprising had not yet devolved into a sectarian civil war. But a sandstorm was blowing toward Tahrir Square, where two and a half years earlier an eighteen-day sit-in, inspired by Tunisia, had toppled President Hosni Mubarak and opened the way for Morsi. Now Morsi’s opponents were calling for protests to demand his resignation, and the head of the armed forces was sending mixed signals about his allegiance.

Ghannouchi had spent more than two decades thinking and writing about the same promises that Egypt’s Muslim Brothers had campaigned on—combining Islamic governance with democratic elections and individual freedoms. During his trip to Cairo, he told me a few months later, at his party’s headquarters in Tunis, he had tried to convince Morsi that, in order to achieve those goals, he should voluntarily forfeit some power. (Morsi advisers later confirmed the broad outlines of Ghannouchi’s account, which he told me on the condition that I keep it private at the time.) After revolutions like those in Egypt and Tunisia, a majority party should understand the anxious vulnerability of political or religious minorities, such as Egypt’s secular-minded liberals and Coptic Christians. They had been afforded at least some protections under the old authoritarian order, and those were now gone, with little reason yet to trust promises about the rule of law, checks and balances, and individual rights. Precisely because of the Brotherhood’s electoral success—Morsi had already won ratification of the new constitution—in the interest of democracy and to reassure the Party’s weaker rivals, it should bring in a unity government ahead of another election. Why remain the lightning rod for his opponents’ fears or resentments? “The democracy of consensus succeeds—not the democracy of the majority,” Ghannouchi told me.

Morsi rejected that advice, convinced that yielding power under threat of protests would be a capitulation to political extortion and set a dangerous precedent.. Had Morsi followed Ghannouchi’s advice, perhaps he could have defused the protests that filled the streets on June 30th, demanding his ouster, or at least won over more Egyptian liberals. We’ll never know: on July 3, 2013, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—now President Sisi, possibly for life—ousted Morsi from power, ending Egypt’s thirty-month experiment with democracy and freedom.

More than a thousand Egyptian Islamists were killed in the streets for opposing the coup. Tens of thousands more were jailed. Those who were underground or in exile demanded retribution against the ostensibly liberal factions who initially supported Sisi’s takeover. But Ghannouchi still urged reconciliation. “The Egyptian ship needs to include all Egyptians and not throw some of them into the water,” he told me. “There should be no collective punishment. The cure for a failed democracy is more democracy.”

In the months after the Egyptian coup, one Arab Spring revolt after another foundered in despair and extremism—a reversal of 2011, when the Tahrir Square sit-in stirred democracy movements in capitals across the region. Tunisia was the exception to the dark turn after the coup, in part because Ghannouchi followed his own advice there the following year. The Islamist party that he co-founded and led, Ennahdha, meaning “the renaissance,” had won the dominant role in a transitional parliament. By late 2013, the assassinations of a pair of left-leaning, secular politicians had brought the political process and constitution-drafting to a halt; opponents suspected Islamist extremists of carrying out the killings, and blamed Ennahdha for failing to prevent them. Ghannouchi, who held no elected office at the time, defied many in his party to reach a power-sharing agreement with the main leader of the secular opposition. Ennahdha voluntarily handed power to a caretaker government to oversee new elections. Ghannouchi’s concession broke the logjam. Tunisia’s revolution celebrated a fourth anniversary—it was the only Arab Spring uprising that appeared to succeed—and the civil-society organizations that helped sponsor the talks between Ghannouchi and the opposition received a Nobel Peace Prize. “We are not angels. We would like to have power,” Ghannouchi said on a visit to Washington. “But we fervently believe that a democratic constitution is more important.”

His leadership made Ennahdha a unique example of what some called liberal Islamism. In fact, Ghannouchi helped persuade Ennahdha leaders to jettison the label “Islamist” and to begin describing themselves as Muslim democrats. (He published an essay in Foreign Affairs explaining the change.) His party, which led the drafting of the constitution, pushed through a charter with explicit protections for the rights of women and of religious minorities. When we spoke in 2014, he also noted that Tunisia’s was one of the few Arab constitutions that made no reference to Islamic law. He assured me that Tunisia guaranteed freedoms for mosques, churches, synagogues—and even “pubs.” He stopped short of endorsing same-sex marriage but described sexuality as a strictly personal matter—a more liberal stance than that taken by almost any Arab government.

Tunisia’s tourism-heavy economy, however, never fully recovered from the images of turmoil in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprising, and the pandemic shut down its resorts. Years of relative inaction by Tunisia’s caretaker government and its successors fuelled a backlash against the whole political class, and especially against Ennahdha. During the next elections, in 2019, Ghannouchi also made the questionable decision to seek a seat in parliament and was then chosen as its speaker. He had become a politician. Emad Shahin, a scholar of political Islam in exile from Egypt, who is now a visiting professor at Harvard, said, “That parliament was a circus—not a place for a leader of his intellectual calibre to preside over, and he was consumed by petty politics.”

In the 2019 elections, voters rejected every Presidential candidate who had held public office. Two populists—a prominent media mogul and an obscure law professor, who together received only a third of the vote—went to a runoff. The professor, Saied, won in a landslide. In many ways, Saied is an inverse of Ghannouchi. He has eschewed any known political philosophy or faction. He routinely rails against the West, directing particular vitriol toward the International Monetary Fund, whose support Tunisia now desperately needs. His constitution promises the state “will work to achieve the objectives of pure Islam” and gives the government control over Islamic interpretation and teaching. He has called gay people “deviants” and supported the criminalization of homosexuality. This year, in his own adaptation of “replacement theory,” he set off a wave of anti-Black violence by scapegoating dark-skinned African migrants for Tunisia’s economic travails.

Saied initially cited the crisis of the pandemic as a pretext to dissolve the parliament and to rule by decree. It was not long before he began detaining a long list of critics and opponents, culminating this week with Ghannouchi. His alleged crime involves a statement that he made last weekend: “Tunisia without Ennahdha, without political Islam, without the left or any of its components is a project for civil war.” Shortly before dusk and the breaking of the fast on Monday, the holiest night of Ramadan, more than a hundred plainclothes police officers raided his home, his party said in a statement. After two days in custody, Ghannouchi, now eighty-one, was interrogated for eight hours. On Thursday, a judge sentenced him to an extended pretrial detention. Initially accused of incitement, he now faces charges of conspiring against the security of the state—a crime that can carry the death penalty.

The blow to Tunisian democracy is clear. But the imprisonment of a leader as singular as Ghannouchi is also a setback to the wider world. For Islamists who espouse violence, his imprisonment is a vindication—new evidence of the futility of the ballot box. And the silencing of his voice is a loss to the West, too.

“Marrying Islam and liberalism and democratic governance,” Robert Kagan, a historian of U.S. foreign policy, told me, “is the solution to our problems in the Arab world, and it is the solution to their problem with us.” That was also the hope that Ghannouchi tried to salvage in Egypt ten years ago.

Ghannouchi, in a prerecorded video released on Thursday, urged patience. He told Tunisians, “Trust in the principles of your revolution, and that democracy is not a passing thing in Tunis.”

terça-feira, 1 de novembro de 2022

Why Vladimir Putin Would Use Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine - Masha Gessen (The New Yorker)

 Why Vladimir Putin Would Use Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine

The more the Kremlin has signalled its readiness to drop a nuclear bomb, the more the rest of the world has sought a reason to believe that it will not.

By Masha Gessen

The New Yorker, November 1, 2022 

On October 23rd, the Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, made phone calls to the defense ministers of four NATOmember countries to tell each of them that Ukraine was planning to detonate a “dirty bomb”—that is, a conventional weapon spiked with radioactive material—on its own territory. Three of the four recipients of this information—France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—responded that day with an unusual joint statement denouncing the claim. (Shoigu’s fourth interlocutor was Turkey.) Russian leaders and propagandists, who covered the phone calls in some detail, don’t necessarily think that anyone, anywhere, will believe that Ukraine would use a radioactive weapon against its own people just so it can blame Russia for the attack. Shoigu’s phone calls were preëmptive, another example of Russia creating information noise, sowing doubt, asserting the fundamental unknowability of the facts of war. On Thursday, Vladimir Putin said that he had personally directed Shoigu to make the calls, and this claim underscored their true meaning: Russia is preparing for a nuclear, or nuclearish, strike in Ukraine.

This was not the first, second, or third time that Moscow had sent this message. Putin has been rattling the nuclear sabre since the start of the full-scale invasion in February, and, indeed, for many years before. In 2014, months after annexing Crimea and at the height of engineering a pro-Russian insurgency war in eastern Ukraine, Russia changed its military doctrine to open up the possibility of a nuclear first strike in response to a threat from NATO. In 2018, Putin first profferedhis promise—since reprised, and replayed many times by Russian television—that, in a world-scale nuclear event, Russians will go to heaven while Americans “just croak.” The threat of a nuclear strike has become more apparent—more frequently repeated on Russian propaganda channels—since the Ukrainian counter-offensive began, at the end of the summer.

The more the Kremlin has signalled its readiness to drop a nuclear bomb, the more the rest of the world has sought a reason to believe that it will not. Earlier this month, the U.K.’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, reassured the audience at a Conservative Party conference that, although Putin’s actions could be “totally irrational,” he wouldn’t use nuclear weapons because he couldn’t risk losing the support of China and India—both of which, Wallace asserted, had put Putin on notice. President Biden has offered a different perspective: Putin, he said, is a “rational actor who has miscalculated significantly” in launching his offensive in Ukraine, and this was the reason he wouldn’t use nuclear arms. (On another occasion, Biden said that a Russian nuclear strike would unleash Armageddon.) Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national-security adviser, has consistently said that the White House takes Putin’s threats seriously and would respond decisively in the case of a nuclear attack. Still, in recent weeks, as Moscow has ramped up its warnings, it has become conventional wisdom, or perhaps just good form, to say that Putin isn’t really going to use nukes. “Russian President Vladimir Putin will probably not drop an atomic bomb on Ukraine,” a September Washington Post editorial began, axiomatically. Bloomberg’s European affairs columnist Andreas Kluth started a recent column by instructing the reader to “put aside, if you can, the growing anxiety about Russian President Vladimir Putin going nuclear in his barbaric war in Ukraine” because, Kluth asserted, the risk “remains small.”

These reassurances tend to rely on arguments that fall into three categories: Putin fears the consequences of a nuclear strike, Putin is unwilling to put Russian citizens at risk, and a nuclear strike will not help accomplish Putin’s strategic goals. Back in July, James Stavridis, a former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, laid out most of these arguments in a Bloomberg column. He wrote that Putin understands he needs to work to maintain the political support China has reluctantly given him, and the economic coöperation of Latin American, African, and South Asian countries—especially India—that continue to buy Russian oil and gas. Putin also, according to Stavridis, “likes his life and loves his country”—and the use of a nuclear weapon would jeopardize both. Stavridis argued that the conceivable strategic objectives of using a nuclear weapon—to cut off military supply lines by destroying the western Ukrainian city of Lviv; to decapitate the state by annihilating the capital, Kyiv; to devastate Ukraine’s economy by pulverizing the Black Sea trade-port city of Odesa—could be achieved with less risk by using conventional weapons. Finally, Stavridis noted, if Russia used a nuclear weapon, it could not deny that it had, the way it was able to at least attempt to deny that it had used chemical weapons in Syria.

In an October 5th Substack newsletter, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, one of the most knowledgeable observers of the war in Ukraine, cautioned his audience against caving to Putin’s “nuclear blackmail” and advanced several new arguments for why Putin is not about to use nuclear weapons. With a military draft in effect since late September, Russia is putting hundreds of thousands of men on the ground in Ukraine, and Putin wouldn’t want to risk killing them by detonating a nuclear bomb, Snyder argued. Russia has unilaterally (and illegally) declared a chunk of Ukraine to be part of Russia—which makes it impossible for Putin to detonate a nuclear bomb in eastern Ukraine, where it would presumably devastate lands and people Russia claims as its own. The country has had so much trouble holding on to its military equipment, and, conversely, Ukraine has proven so adept at shooting down and capturing Russian weapons, that Moscow would not risk bringing a nuclear weapon even close to Ukraine. Finally, Snyder argued, given that Russia has been losing to Ukraine for months, if Putin were going to detonate a nuclear bomb as a desperate response to military defeat, he would have done so already. What Putin really needs, Snyder argued, is to shore up his power at home, something he is more likely to accomplish by finding a way to end the war—a nuclear bomb, Snyder suggested, would almost certainly prolong it.

Snyder is making the case that a nuclear attack against Ukraine would risk too much collateral damage to Putin, his people, and his troops—and that Putin’s awareness of these risks has so far held him back. And, like Stavridis, he suggests that Putin doesn’t need to use nuclear weapons to end the war. But, as the nuclear-arms expert Ankit Panda told my colleague Isaac Chotiner, Putin has been consistently—and unproductively, from the point of view of Western war science—running down his conventional arsenal; soon, cannon fodder, Iranian drones, and nuclear arms may be all he has left. “He’s making tactical military decisions that really don’t make sense from the perspective of rational military planning,” Panda said.

When we say that someone isn’t acting rationally, what we mean is that we do not understand the world in which the person’s actions are rational. The problem is not so much that Putin is irrational; the problem is that there is a world in which it is rational for him to move ever closer to a nuclear strike, and most Western analysts cannot comprehend the logic of that world. Robert Jay Lifton, the pioneering psychiatrist and historian who has written about nuclear arms for half a century, is fond of quoting the philosopher Martin Buber’s phrase “imagine the real.” That is what we fail to do when we talk about Putin and his nuclear threat: we can’t imagine the very real possibility that he will follow through.

We have three sources for understanding what the world looks like to Putin: Putin’s own statements, Russian propaganda, and the voices of Russian defectors. During the Soviet period, memoirs by men who fled to the West—such as the former Party functionary Abdurahman Avturkhanov and the former spy Anatoli Granovsky—served as manuals to the thinking of the Soviet leadership for generations of researchers. These days, it’s much easier to leave Russia than during the Soviet Union, when citizens were rarely allowed to travel abroad and, if they were, had to endure constant surveillance. And yet few highly placed Russians have left recently, and so far only Boris Bondarev, a diplomat who defected following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has written in detail about his experience. Bondarev’s article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs is a fascinating account of a conspiracy of distortion. “Even some of my smart colleagues had Russian propaganda playing on their televisions all day,” Bondarev, who had been stationed in Geneva, wrote. “It was as if they were trying to indoctrinate themselves.”

After Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, the U.S., members of the European Union, and some other Western nations imposed economic sanctions on the country. Putin responded with counter-sanctions, effectively isolating the Russian economy even further. The Kremlin spun the entire affair as a victory, a boon for domestic manufacturing—and in some sectors this was true. But, Bondarev writes, some essential components used in defense production—sensors for aircraft, for example—came from Western manufacturers, and sanctions cut off the supply. “Although it was clear to my team how these losses undermined Russia’s strength, the foreign ministry’s propaganda helped keep the Kremlin from finding out,” Bondarev writes. “The consequences of this ignorance are now on full display in Ukraine: the sanctions are one reason Russia has had so much trouble with its invasion.”

Similarly, diplomats covered up losses on the international-relations front. In 2018, when Russia stood accused of poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter, in Salisbury, the Kremlin attempted to derail the investigation by introducing a resolution before the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It was easily defeated, but Bondarev writes that cables to Moscow reduced the loss to a single sentence, surrounded by paragraphs “about how they had defeated the numerous ‘anti-Russian,’ ‘nonsensical,’ and ‘groundless’ moves made by Western states.”

Such is the feedback loop of propaganda, ambition, and fear that shapes Putin’s perceptions of the world. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Bondarev writes, many of his colleagues “took pride in our increasingly bellicose behavior.” When questioned, “they gestured at our nuclear force.” This was during the very early days of the full-scale war, when Russians and much of the world believed that Ukraine would quickly lose. As the Russian offensive faltered, the deployment of the nuclear threat went from triumphant to menacing. “One official, a respected expert on ballistic missiles, told me that Russia needed to ‘send a nuclear warhead to a suburb of Washington’”, Bondarev writes. “He added, ‘Americans will shit their pants and rush to beg us for peace.’ He appeared to be partially joking. But Russians tend to think that Americans are too pampered to risk their lives for anything, so when I pointed out that a nuclear attack would invite catastrophic retaliation, he scoffed: ‘No, it wouldn’t.’”

Although it may be evident to a non-Russian military strategist that the use of a nuclear weapon would be strategically disastrous for Russia, Putin sees his mission in grander and less pragmatic terms. He believes that, on the one hand, he is facing down an existential threat to Russia and, on the other, that Western nations don’t have the strength of their convictions to retaliate if it comes to nukes. Any small sign of a crack in the Western consensus—be it French President Emmanuel Macron pressuring Ukraine to enter peace negotiations, or the House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy criticizing what he sees as unconditional aid to Ukraine—bolsters Putin’s certainty. An army of yes-men and the propaganda machine amplify both the threat Russia ostensibly faces and the support it supposedly enjoys.

Last week, Putin hosted his annual Valdai policy conference, an invitation-only junket that has traditionally served as a way for him to broadcast his message to the world. In the past, the audience has consisted largely of Western journalists and Russia scholars. But the crowd at this year’s event was different. The topic was “A Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security for All.” Putin delivered a nearly hour-long talk on the need to liberate the non-Western world from the choke hold of “cancel culture” and “the ten different genders” that the West inflicts on countries in place of “traditional values.” For a couple of hours afterward, he fielded questions from representatives of Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Brazil, former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and others; most speakers began by expressing respect bordering on adulation. “Many countries are tired of living under the rule of external powers,” Putin remarked at one point. “The more they see us pushing back against that pressure, the more they support us. That support will only grow.”

Putin’s world view—in which he, a once-lowly K.G.B. bureaucrat, wields a mighty sword that will save the world from decadence and decay—is the product of his specific background and historical moment, but it also belongs to a recognizable type of thought. Charles Strozier, who founded the Center on Terrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, has written extensively on what he calls the “fundamentalist mindset,” the kind of thinking that can fuel genocidal violence. And he has recently written about the evidence that suggests Putin, like Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden, has it. Strozier told me, “The thing that psychologically infuses the leadership style of someone like Putin, or Hitler, is the certainty that comes with paranoia.”

That Putin is paranoid is an observable fact: he is obsessed with the idea that Russia is surrounded by enemies; he is terrified of all protest and dissent, even though he has long since disabled any levers by which either could influence his regime; his fear of the coronavirus and, possibly, assassination, has driven him into near-total isolation and compels him to hold in-person conversations across giant tables. “The certainty that comes with paranoia is a strength of their leadership style, but, because they are inflexible, they make huge mistakes,” Strozier said.

The fundamentalist mind-set is apocalyptic and millenarian. Hitler had the idea of the “thousand-year Reich,” which positioned him as a successor to Roman and German emperors. Putin’s excursions into history have been similarly grandiose: he views himself as the last of a lineage of Russian emperors, and he explicitly dismisses historical facts—such as the existence of the Ukrainian state—that interfere with this narrative. Snyder, the Yale historian, has written extensively about the apparent influence on Putin of Ivan Ilyin, a twentieth-century Russian émigré philosopher who believed that the world, corrupted by Western-style liberalism and individualism, was ripe for radical renewal at the turn of the new millennium. I think that Snyder may overestimate the primacy of Ilyin’s teachings in Putin’s thinking: Putin uses ideas instrumentally, picking up and wielding them when he needs to say something that affirms his intuition. He has, similarly, used the ideas of the contemporary philosopher Alexander Dugin, another mystical thinker who believes that Russia’s mission is to restore traditional order to a world endangered by chaos coming from the West. The specific words and concepts are less important than Putin’s sense of his own vast historic mission.

In a 1990 book called “The Genocidal Mentality,” Lifton, the psychohistorian, discussed the term “nuclearism,” which he viewed as an ideology akin to Nazism. The politics of deterrence, he argued—the entire school of thought that saw the survival of the world as contingent on a balance between powers capable of annihilating it—activated “a mind-set that includes individual and collective willingness to produce, deploy, and, according to certain standards of necessity, use weapons known to destroy entire human populations.” Both nuclearism and Nazism offered themselves as cures for historical disasters: Nazism for the humiliation Germany supposedly suffered in the aftermath of the First World War and nuclearism for the catastrophe wrought by the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both Nazism and nuclearism positioned themselves as preventive, as hedges against a greater threat—to the Aryan race by Jews and others, or to all of human life by nuclear holocaust. Both ideologies are peculiarly modern in that they “include near worship of science and technology.” And both feature “vast societal involvement in a genocidal project, creating dangerous forms of bureaucratic momentum that can carry one across the threshold into genocide.”

In May, I wrote about the way Russian television was broadcasting Putin’s nuclear threat on repeat. Since then, the threat has morphed into a sense of inevitability. “We are not calling for nuclear war,” Margarita Simonyan, the chief of the RT propaganda consortium, said, shortly after Putin ordered the draft in September. “We are telling you that we have no other choice.”

The threat against which Russia must wield its nuclear shield is the encroachment of the West, framed variously as the expansion of NATO, an assault on traditional values, the advancement of “gender ideology,” and a spreading decadence. All of it adds up to an existential threat to Russia, which in Putin’s view is a besieged island of heterosexuality, whiteness, and truth. Strozier has written that the fundamentalist mind-set involves an overarching mission that justifies all means. “The salvational notion is always present in genocide,” he told me, citing Hitler’s belief that inferior forms of life had to be exterminated to enable the thousand-year Reich. “Large-scale violence, genocide is embarked upon for a moral purpose.”

Putin and his propaganda machine have also framed the war in Ukraine as a struggle that flows directly out of the battles of the Second World War. Over the years, Putin has reminded Russians that they sacrificed the most in the fight against the Nazis—at least twenty six and a half million killed, according to post-Soviet historians. (A disproportionate number of those lost lives were Ukrainian, but Russia lays claim to their legacy, too.) He has also asserted that Russia was “alone” in fighting the Nazi menace and therefore Russia has the right to determine who is a Nazi now. But Russia is not just cosplaying the Second World War—the country is still prosecuting it, fighting to regain the superpower status once achieved by beating back Nazi Germany. This narrative bolsters Putin’s belief that he has the moral right to use nuclear arms. The Americans did it, so the Russians can, too.

Lifton won the National Book Award in 1969 for a book about survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima, in which he described the predicament of the city’s residents as a “lifelong immersion in death.” The phrase can just as well be used to describe the experience of Russians who grew up in the shadow of the Second World War. Putin was born in the first postwar decade, and raised in Leningrad, a city that lost a still uncounted number of civilians—the official toll was six hundred and thirty-two thousand, but estimates range upward of a million—during a nearly nine-hundred-day siege. The siege of Leningrad was, by contemporary standards, a war crime, one that Russian troops have repeated this year in Mariupol and elsewhere in Ukraine. The devastation of the city and the degradation of its residents were total: people died of hunger, but not before they had eaten, pawned, or used as fuel whatever remained of their lives.

After the war, Soviet propaganda glossed over the ugly brutality of the siege while it valorized its victims and survivors. Polina Barskova, a Russian poet, literary scholar, and historian at the University of California, Berkeley, told me, “What distinguished books about the siege that could be published from those that couldn’t was that the former claimed the sacrifice had a purpose. It was Victory with a capital “V” over Enemy with a capital “E” and Evil with a capital “E.” It’s the kind of goal for which you can sacrifice any number of human lives.” For Leningrad natives, this myth is a birthright. For Putin, it is further proof that he has the moral right to kill, or condemn, entire human populations.

Putin’s older brother died, as a toddler, during the siege. His parents survived—barely, miraculously. “No one could survive by living solely off the ration cards issued by the government,” Barskova, whose book of short stories and essays about the siege, “Living Pictures,” was recently published in an English translation, said. “That is just a fact. Every survivor was a miracle, and most acts of surviving were transgressive, criminal.” Survivors had access to state power—nomenklatura rations—or committed crimes to pull through, or both. Putin is now the head of the criminal state that is Russia. He believes that he is exceptional and will survive the nuclear disaster he unleashes. It also helps that he has built a series of bunkers, underground palaces where, he imagines, he can survive the nuclear holocaust in luxury.

In the end, every “rational” case for why Putin won’t use nuclear weapons in Ukraine falls short. He is not afraid of losing support from his current allies, because he misapprehends Russia’s position in the world; he sees Russia as politically, economically, and militarily stronger than it is. Chinese and Indian leaders may express alarm at the use of extreme measures such as nuclear weapons, but to Putin this points to their lack of resolve—their weakness, not the Kremlin’s. And, if need be, he is prepared to make outlandish denials, no matter how implausible. Russian propagandists have argued that the Malaysian airliner shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2015 was packed with corpses by bad actors trying to frame Russia and that the scenes of war crimes in Bucha were “staged.” Indeed, Shoigu’s Sunday phone calls opened the possibility of Russia deflecting blame for a nuclear strike by claiming that it was a Ukrainian false-flag operation.

The arguments that Putin won’t use nuclear weapons because doing so would endanger Russians, including himself, are blind to the fact that Putin believes he has the right, possibly the moral obligation, to sacrifice hundreds of thousands or millions of people. The argument that a nuclear strike wouldn’t help Putin achieve his strategic goals mistakes Russia’s strategic goals as anything but inflicting terror on Ukrainians. The losses the Russian military is suffering now can only motivate Putin to create more terror, against more people.

The one credible argument remaining is that Putin may fear repercussions. He is not afraid of nuclear retaliation—because Ukraine doesn’t have its own nuclear weapons and NATO is unlikely to mount a nuclear response against the use of a nuclear weapon inside Ukraine. (And, if NATO did, Putin believes that he would have a totally mobilized, albeit diminished, nation.) What he may fear, however, is an extreme response from NATO using conventional weapons—a series of strikes, for example, that would devastate Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and destroy all its remaining military capability in Ukraine. This would be a blow so humiliating that nothing but a second, more powerful nuclear strike could avenge it. Is that a prospect that Putin is unwilling to contemplate? Possibly not, but it is as close as the West can get to deterrence these days. 

More on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

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Masha Gessen became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2017. Their latest book is “Surviving Autocracy.”

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