Georgious

Not many notes have been emanating from the basement recently. A lot has been happening upstairs, but the excitement generated there is unlikely to be of particular interest to you. And of course something big is afoot in the world outside, yet whenever I’m on the verge of writing about an especially funny or shocking or disgusting or seminal episode in the presidential campaign that is finally, finally coming to a close, I find that someone has already said it, and the urge passes. By and large I have been content to let everyone else do the talking online, and stick to kvetching and comparing notes with a few folks in person or in our venerable family forum—which, again, concerns you not.

And so, to kill some time between now and Tuesday, and to get a post in for the month of October, I’ll cobble together a personal, far from comprehensive, somewhat belated roundup of Russian news.

In late July one of my brothers gave me a T-shirt, for no reason other than the fact it had Russian writing on it and he figured I might like it. I do like it, but as luck would have it, I couldn’t wear it for a while.

It says, “Kiss me, I’m Russian!” (In the States, anyway, you come across such stuff all the time—“Kiss me, I’m Italian,” “Kiss me, I’m Lithuanian,” etc., etc.) Just the thing to wear during my bicycle commute, since my other T-shirts are getting ratty. Unfortunately, in August the Russians invaded Georgia, and my commute takes me past the Russian embassy, where the Georgians picketed for several weeks: “Russian tanks … out of Georgia” was the chant I heard the most as I pedaled by. I resisted the urge to congratulate them on having a president who is just about as reckless as ours. Speaking of whom, how could a person not laugh when George W. Bush, with no trace of irony (of course), criticized Russia’s “bullying and intimidation.” He said “Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected.”

The Russia bashing started in earnest, as prescribed by our fetid foreign policy conventional wisdom—even Barack Obama felt the need to join in, unfortunately. One could find scattered attempts in the US press to put the conflict in context, but the tenor of the coverage was Cold War redux. Here are a few pieces I found evenhanded or sympathetic (gasp!) to the Russian point of view:

• Mikhail Gorbachev: Russia Never Wanted a War
• Fred Kaplan on the “feckless response” of the US to the Russian invasion of Georgia
• Glenn Greenwald on being smeared for not toeing the line on the Russia–Georgia conflict
• The Nation: The Cold War That Wasn’t

Earlier in the month, a giant of Russian letters passed away. I would be remiss if I didn’t note, however briefly, the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

As I was coming of age in the 1970s and became infatuated with Russian literature and, soon after, the Russian language, the figure of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sure to appeal to an American teenager, especially during a time of protest against the Vietnam War, racial inequality, and a tight-ass culture. Here was a guy who was butting heads with the Soviet state. Brezhnev was sort of like their Nixon. The reasoning was pretty clear, if juvenile. A trace of my Solzhenitsyn craze can be found in the St. Joseph High School yearbook for 1972: at the back, a donation in the name of Oleg Kostoglotov, the main character in Cancer Ward. (I leave it to the devoted reader to say whether the 54-year-old is any less pretentious than the 18-year-old.)

After the Soviet Union dissolved, Aleksandr Isayevich turned his withering gaze on the West, with its liberal mores and diverse ways of living. It became clear that Solzhenitsyn was in fact a Russian nationalist and theocrat of the Dostoevsky mold—and a monarchist to boot. Whatever relevance he had to Russian public life seemed to fade with each passing year, even after he moved back home, eventually taking up residence in a dacha outside Moscow (between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko).

Whether or not he ever regains the stature he enjoyed for several decades, he had a big impact on me. And I often think of his breakthrough work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—not the descriptions of the grim conditions of the labor camp, or the political discussions among the zeks. It’s the fact that Ivan Denisovich wakes up feverish and achy but decides to work rather than spend the day in bed in the infirmary. And that night he concludes he made the right decision—he feels better, he ate better (he wouldn’t have gotten his full ration in the infirmary), and he accomplished something. It felt good to work, even on behalf of the Gulag and the Soviet state. The opening page and the closing page—for whatever reason, they stuck.

Time to lighten up a bit. Only recently I discovered you can select a “country content preference” in YouTube, and naturally I selected Russia. Almost immediately I found a video that played off the famous “Where the Hell is Matt?” video, only in this case Matvei does his “dance” in all the stations of the Moscow Metro.

I was glad to have the opportunity to “revisit” the three or four I saw in person, and to get acquainted with the rest. The Russian guy starts off doing the exact same goofy dance that Matt does, but in what I would say is typical Russian fashion, he varies it occasionally—out of boredom, or to stave off anticipated boredom in the viewer, or both. In some ways it’s a more artistic product, but it is long; and, as different as the Metro stations are, they aren’t as varied as the locales in Matt’s video. But I like it, and tip my hat to him.

Translation of the introduction:

It took 27 hours to film this video. It took 7 hours to edit it. We visited all the stations marked on the map of the Moscow Metro. At each one, the same dance was performed.* About 300 people witnessed the dance in person.

At the end:

Thank you, Homepage.ru, for the jersey and the fares.

In the YouTube “more info” area for this video, it says further:

Для полных идиотов, без обоих полушарий головного мозга – это видео – стеб над оригинальным роликом танцующего Мэтта. Если вы этого не поняли и пишите, про какой-то плагиат – ВЫ ИДИОТ. [For complete idiots, lacking both hemispheres of the brain: this video is a send-up of the original film of the dancing Matt. If you don't get it and write that this is some sort of plagiarism—YOU'RE AN IDIOT.]

Among many nice touches: at the Lubyanka station, he dances in front of the police booth.

And now that I’ve discovered Homepage.ru, I’ve learned that they have discovered Halloween.

Addendum 2008.11.08: The New York Times has published an excellent piece, “Georgia Claims on Russia War Called Into Question,” based on accounts by international monitors—members of an international team working under the mandate of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. (OSCE is a multilateral organization with 56 member states that has monitored the conflict since a previous cease-fire agreement in the 1990s, according to the Times.) See also this piece about the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev (“perhaps the world’s most famous Ossetian”) and the heat he took for defending Russia at the time.
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*Not quite true, as noted above.