This was a compulsively interesting portrait of how a people live under a heavy handed dictatorship. Yaffa travels through time by highlighting the lives of several Russians, mainly artists, humanitarians, and religious leaders and the compromises they felt they had to make (or the consequences of not making them) to allow them to continue to create art, help people, or otherwise function in a society where the government is the ultimate authority, and the consequences are powerlessness, imprisonment, or even death. Yaffa names the people who find a way to exist in a society that calls for the compromise their principles in order to function and even exist as "wily" and seems to indicate that it is unique to the Russian people. Perhaps that way of living has become second nature in a nation where such oppression has been the norm for so long and it is disheartening to read the interviews with young people who feel this way of living is fine and normal, but I think most people would rationalize their principles in the face of such dire consequences, especially when they could justify that such actions were for the greater good. Living in a country founded on freedoms of speech, religion, the press, etc. I hope we continue to fight for our rights.
It began as a survival mechanism, in which citizen and state subconsciously worked together to ensure that the individual took agency in stifling his own freedom and chances for self-realization.
This was not especially fervent loyalty, but rather passive acquiescence, made palatable by all the ways a person could outsmart the system and eke out small, private victories against it.
The citizen was again making do, adjusting to the rules of the game rather than looking to effect change.
Levada worried that its fall was an outcome that came about too easily for the average citizen, an effective revolution that didn’t require anything revolutionary at all from most people. It was an event that happened to individuals, not one made by them—and thus could be internalized as yet another imposition from above.
The Russian wily man, Levada wrote, “not only tolerates deception, but is willing to be deceived, and even… requires self-deception for the sake of his own self-preservation.”
Given weak levels of social bonds and underdeveloped institutions, the wily man is ultimately alone, which leads to a paradox of Russian life that goes back generations: “If a person is forced to carry himself like everyone else, and to demonstrate this publicly, he frees himself from responsibility for those shared positions—but that doesn’t mean he has gotten rid of this basic loneliness in relation to everyone else.” Freedom from responsibility provides the illusion of freedom itself.
THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE HAS an especially rich word for a person skilled in the act of compromise and adaptation, who intuitively understands what is expected of him and adjusts his beliefs and conduct accordingly: prisposoblenets.
Dovlatov’s 1981 book The Compromise
For Orwell, the telling of “deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them” is a way of staying sane, an effort at retaining a sense of individual will—
One could not live in ignorance or indifference to the urges and caprices of the state; in fact, it was to your advantage to guess what it wanted from you, and to deliver that while also being clever enough to extract some benefit for yourself.
“Many of them never made a conscious decision,” he told me. “It was more of a psychological process—they simply got tired of being afraid.”
on one path lies danger and hardship for you and your family; the other beguiles with a measure of comfort and access—and maybe, you tell yourself, even a measure of influence, a small lever to make life in Chechnya a bit better here and there.
Orthodoxy allowed for a nationalist ideology that venerated the Russian state without the mothballed, inoperable rhetoric of Communism.
He thought of them as reminiscent of holy fools, peculiar figures in Orthodoxy who are known to commit grotesque and provocative acts and are first judged as hooligans or madmen, but after their deaths are revealed to have been saints all along.
“This is the terrible sin of Patriarch Kirill,” Kuraev explained. “He legalized the right to hate.
The message was clear: to act out against Putin is to act against the church, and vice versa. Each institution will defend the interests of the other.
demanding ever-less spiritual effort from parishioners, that they had lost the voice of clarity and truth, and instead spoke in terms of rituals and obedience.
He saw the church as fueled by the same cocktail of fear and self-interest as Yuri Levada’s wily man.
Sergei Chapnin, editor of the official journal of the patriarchate, lamented that the Russian Orthodox Church has become a “Church of Empire,” a “post-Soviet civil religion providing ideological support for the Russian state.”
church emphasizes “Russian saints and Russian greatness; we care about being a patriot.” At the same time, Chapnin said, “we somehow forget the Gospel, and Christ himself isn’t quite so necessary.”
Russia is among the only countries in Europe where the outward manifestation of Christian faith is growing, rather than retreating.
the West is not only a geopolitical foe, but a spiritual one,
Ukraine developed its modern national identity in part by rejecting the Soviet past,
That changed with the Maidan. The protests caused not only a political rupture in Ukraine, but a cultural and civic one.
“We must live to see those times in a way that does not make us blush, so that we have nothing to be ashamed of in how we passed these years,” Dzhepparov said.
“If the Nazi Holocaust exterminated the Other, the Soviet terror was suicidal,” notes Alexander Etkind, a professor at Cambridge University, in Warped Mourning,
the Soviet Union, people were killed or imprisoned for reasons that did not comport with observable reality. As Etkind notes, a Jew caught in the Holocaust understood himself as a Jew; he recognized the category and his belonging to it, even if he obviously did not find this a reason to exterminate him. But who was a kulak, an enemy of the people, a counterrevolutionary element?
After the Soviet collapse, freedom had descended on the country too effortlessly, and wasn’t appreciated or understood.
somehow, the Stalinist machine produced millions of victims but no criminals.
with no settled, mutually accepted version of the country’s history, any attempt to come up with one was, by definition, a political gesture.
Not entirely unlike Heda Saratova, Glinka was in the ironic position of relying on the state to help those who, in some sense, were victimized by that very same state.
moral value of helping a person in need trumped how that help might be obtained. I
Putin’s response—turning to a new ruling ideology that blended conservative values, anti-Western resentment, disdain for urban elites, and an elevation of the Orthodox Church—
be a functioning adult in the world, we all must balance competing sets of expectations and pressures with our own understanding of self.
is the singular role of the state that gives this dynamic, otherwise perfectly relatable and universal, its particular Russian tinge.
Putin is more likely to be replaced in a coup from above than a revolution from below.
“A growing part of society is developing civic consciousness as a result of nonpolitical conflicts in which entities supported by the authorities intrude into ordinary people’s private space.”
Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
