National character is a myth in every sense of this word. It is a “non-truth”: not every Jew is a smart penny pincher, not every Frenchman a womanizer, not every Russian a drunkard and so on.
But it is also a myth in a “truth above the fact” sense. Jews had to be smart and thrifty and education-obsessed to survive in times of persecutions and to give their children a better life. The French language contains over 600 words for love-making, and don’t tell me it is for no reason. The average amount of alcohol consumption in Russia is 15.76 litres of pure ethanol per person over 15. It is lower than in Moldova, the Czech Republic and Hungary, but in those countries it is mostly wine and beer, and in Russia it is mostly vodka.
As a rule, national stereotypes are wrong when applied to a certain particular person, but a stereotype by default is “something that shapes”. There is a national stereotype of the greedy, industrious and independence-crazy Ukrainians. It shapes me whether I want it or not. I am not greedy and far from industrious, but when it comes to independence-crazy… well, guilty as charged. And when I cannot throw away a thing still in a good condition, which I do not need anymore, I say to myself and others that it is my “inner khokhol” who prevents me.
And now the most important part: being half-Russian myself, a native Russian speaker since my first word and writing in Russian for now, I have never, EVER referred to my “inner Russian”.
Strange? Not at all. The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that being Russian means to be… actually, nobody.
First things first. The national stereotype, as a part of the national myth, is something that shapes the culture and is shaped by the culture at the same time. Thus, we have to refer to the Russian culture in a search for the Russian character.
(By the way, Russian nationalists have searched for the “Russian national idea” for over 150 years. Don’t you think it is a bit too long?)
Let us start from the bottom tier: mass culture. Folklore, jokes and so on. They take national stereotypes up to eleven both in positive and negative sense. The Ukrainians are greedy (negative value), independence-crazy (ambivalent, depends on who’s telling the joke) and industrious (positive value). The Georgians are corrupt (negative value), sex-crazy (ambivalent, depends on who’s telling the joke), hospitable (positive value). The Moldovans are stupid (negative value), workaholics (ambivalent, depends on who’s telling the joke) and laborious (positive value). The Estonians (and the rest of the Baltic nations) are slowpokes (negative value), taciturn (ambivalent, depends on who’s telling the joke) and poised (positive value). The Chukchas are totally uncivilized (negative value), childishly naïve (ambivalent, depends on who’s telling the joke) and sharpshooters (positive value). The Armenians are cunning (negative value), cunning (ambivalent, depends on who’s telling the joke) and cunning (positive value).
The Russians are stupid (negative value), axe-crazy (negative value), totally uncivilized (negative value), never learn (negative value), slobs (negative value), drunkards (negative value), lazy (negative value), foul-mouthed (negative value), spiritless (I don’t mean ethanol)…
What, no positive or, at least, ambivalent values? You could think that the Russian self-criticism degrades into self-flagellation. Don’t be hasty. Any of these negative values in Russian jokes leads to the utter success of the Russians!
Well, joke is a form of self-criticism, too. Russians make jokes about their vices and their ability to represent a vice as a virtue. Well, what about true virtues?
Yes, there are many virtues that the Russians brandish as their national traits. The Russians claim to be loyal, patriotic, crazy brave, patient, steadfast, laborious, vigorous, they love freedom, they are kind, generous and sympathetic.
This is an image drawn not by the mass culture, but the classic literature and cinema. Classic writers, generally nobles by origin, praised Russia and the Russian people in the most turgid heroic manner.
But there was something puzzling about these virtues. I shall explain by examples. Take bravery. Many classics, or, rather, every classic praised the bravery of the Russian soldier. Not only soldiers, but peasants and even women were lauded for their bravery. There is the famous poem by Nekrasov, “Grandfather Frost-the-Red-Nose”; it has got a female character who is praised for her beauty, wisdom, poise and bravery. It is said that she can stop a galloping horse and enter the burning log cabin. But in “Who is happy in Russia?” we see the similar character suffering a cruel treatment from her husband, her mother- and sisters-in-law. And she suffers meekly, making no attempt to resist, despite being a strong woman. Or take Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” – the war part are about the heroic strife with Napoleon. The true Russian soldier Platon Karataev is an embodiment of faith, spirituality, courage, sympathy, yada-yada-yada. But in another story, “After the Ball”, he depicts the same Russian soldiers whipping their comrade into bloody pulp, meekly, with no attempt to resist or to make a punishment less cruel. And the most terrible part in it: "Do you think I had come to the conclusion that the deed I had witnessed was wicked? Oh, no. Since it was done with such assurance, and was recognised by everyone as indispensable, they doubtlessly knew something which I did not know.”
Well, so much for Russian love for freedom, too. The Russian campaign of The Napoleonic Wars is dubbed as the Patriotic War. The Russian people was fighting for freedom… despite the fact that the majority of the Russian peasants were enslaved and remained slaves after the victory. Well, the Americans exhibited similar hypocrisy, but at least they have stirred up a fight for the liberation of black people. No one fought for the liberation of the Russian peasants, including themselves.
Patriotism. Lermontov’s “Borodino” where he praises Russian forces:
The foe that day had many ways
To feel what daring combat weighs,
Our Russian hand-to-hand!..
As did our chests – earth's hollows trembled;
The steeds, the men all disassembled,
And cannon volleys' sound resembled
A moaning o'er the land...
And, in a row, his “Farewell, unwashed Russia, / land of slaves, land of lords, / and you, blue uniforms, / and you, people, obedient to them…”
You can go on by yourselves: take any virtue of Russia praised by any Russian classic – and you will find the disproof of this virtue in the texts of the same classic!
Such schizophrenia, of course, couldn’t remain unnoticed. The classics were not fools, they were conscious that the Russian commoner, however praised he might be, languished in misery, and they could not do anything about this. They’ve witnessed incredible humiliation, torment, abuse – and were helpless. Even when they have got the power, like Saltykov-Shchedrin, they were helpless, because they had to deal with an enormous system of lies, exploitation and oppression.
They had to deal with the fact that, despite all the lies, exploitation and oppression in Western countries, people resist, people fight, while the Russian people suffer silently. They couldn’t cope with the fact that the Russian people are tramped in total meekness and they are accomplices. Remember, they were nobles, and many of them had serfs of their own.
So what did they do?
They invented the concept of the enigmatic Russian soul, of the Russian people as a collective Christ, a martyr nation that redeems the sins of “godless Europe”.
Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone,
No ordinary yardstick can span her greatness:
She stands alone, unique –
In Russia, one can only believe.
(prosaic translation of Tiutchev’s poem)
- this is the most pervasive opinion the Russians have of themselves. Russia is godlike, period.
The question is – who was the collective Pilate then? Yes, the answer seems obvious, the Tsar and nobility, but you see, the Russian nationalists of those times (they called themselves Slavophiles) couldn’t blame the Tsar, who was their sacred cow. So they blamed… Bingo! They blamed Westerners!
Let us sum this all up: the so-called enigmatic Russian soul is nothing like an enigma. There is nothing unique about it. There is nothing special. It is but pure narcissism extended to the national principle, that’s all.
This narcissistic dissociation between the praised ideal self of the nation and the real state of this nation is typical for the early modern period in Europe and Asia. The foremost countries closed this gap with raising their social standards. The underdeveloped countries – Russia, Poland, Japan, Turkey, China and so on – tried to cover this gap by inflating up the narcissistic egos of their nations. Why? Because the leaders of those countries were the first to fall under the narcissistic glamour. No wonder: since they were the first to abuse and exploit their nations, they needed the biggest excuse!
It works with a nation just like with a personality. There is an actual miserable state of the nation. There is the only way to change this state, but it is painful and difficult (especially for the dominant political elite, which risks to lose its privileges). There are neighbour nations that live better. There is a shame for that miserable way of living. And there is a huge temptation to say: they may live better – but we are better! We live worse because, unlike them, we do not care much for wealth, we are spiritual, self-sacrificing people, honest and modest and true to the ways of our fathers. We are happy in our poverty, because it makes us strong and steadfast. We could have easily gained wealth – we just don’t want to, the wealth can spoil us.
In reality, that poverty doesn’t make people strong. It makes them cruel and abusive. The Russian classical literature is full of atrocities, but the narcissist is blind to them even if they describe them with their own hand. Dostoyevsky depicted incredible poverty, alcoholism, child prostitution and abuse amongst Russian people – and still he praised Russian generosity. Because “the hideousness is a temporary disaster, it almost always depends on the previous transient circumstances, on slavery, on the centuries of oppression, of roughness, but the gift of generosity is the eternal, spontaneous gift, born with the nation and the more revered if even after ages of slavery, ties and poverty it will survive intact, in the heart of this nation”.
Nota bene: Dostoyevsky didn't even consider generosity as a trait that requires cultivation and development. It has to be “spontaneous”, not to be born and raised in the heart of the nation. Can anyone guess why it hasn't happened yet?
The spontaneous, miraculous transformation from Saul to Paul is a typical narcissist fantasy. The narcissists cannot fantasize about them creating virtues of their own – they are already perfect! This perfection can only be revealed. Thus, the Russians need no improvement – they are God-bearing people already!
The harsh moral flagellation of the Russian national character, performed from time to time by some thinkers, is nothing more than the other phase of the narcissistic cycle, the phase of mortification. Then comes the phase of self-pity and harvesting the narcissistic supply, and then – again the phase of grandiosity. In this phase Russia, as a rule, engages in a “little victorious war” which ends in an epic fail. One of those wars had ended with the October Revolution.
Had it changed anything? Hell, no. The narcissists never learn, because they cannot consider themselves imperfect. The Russian people remained a messianic people in its collective mind, but now their Gospel was not a God-bearing, but the bearing of the World Revolution.
Of course they failed. They just couldn’t help it.
There is an opinion that the Russians were spoilt and degraded by the Bolsheviks. Wrong. They were like that long before Lenin. Long before Peter the Great (who was a flamboyant narcissist himself). They adopted the myth of “the Third Rome” ("Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will be no fourth. No one shall replace your Christian Tsardom!") in the early 16th century, but they believed themselves to be the only “true Christian” nation long before that. This narcissistic claim has its roots deep in the times of the Tartar invasion, and I will not trace them. Let’s concentrate not on the reasons, but on the consequences.
So, in the modern folklore, the Russians can hardly denote their significant positive traits and virtues. I can compare this to the subconscious of a narcissist, who feels miserable deep inside.
In the Russian classical literature, the Russians are praised for their enormous virtues and criticised for their enormous vices (but not for their real vices!) – this is very much like the splendour-mortification cycle.
What about the modern literature? I mean starting since 1900, not just contemporary?
Well, when you read something like Babel’s “Red Cavalry”, or Sholokhov’s short stories, or “How the Steel was Tempered”, or “The Rout”, or any other book on the October revolution and the Civil war, you cannot help thinking “These people are monsters… and they are completely OK with that”.
Well, they had it coming. When a nation considers itself godlike, it is about to repeat the destiny of the most well-known character who considered himself godlike. It is about to fall, and the fall of the Russian Empire was massive. The Bolsheviks had inherited the Empire and restored it – along with its narcissism. During their 73-year rule, the Russian narcissism reached the final stage: total separation from reality and hence, self-destruction of the nation.
During the Bolsheviks rule it finally became clear what it means to be Russian. It means to be nobody, no person and no nation – just the material for a Great Social Experiment. The very concept of national martyrdom was firing on all cylinders: how many people were killed in the gulags is still unknown, in the Holodomor the estimate was ranging from 4 to 7 million, WWII – from 20 to 27 million, more than half of them civilians (and from 8 to 10 of them Ukrainians, but we shall talk about this matter later).
The value of the human life was tending to zero, but the greatness of the First Working Class State was close to absolute. If it wasn’t for the death of Stalin, all hell could have broken loose.
His death delayed, but did not stop the fall of USSR. He was a narcissist, a megalomaniac – but he hadn’t created that narcissistic system of common martyrdom, he was picked and raised by it. After his death the system reproduced itself, as the narcissism does, from generation to generation. Parents affected children, children affected grandchildren and so on. I had a bit of it in my school times, the late 80th, when teachers told us in classes how bad the capitalism was and how unhappy our peers were in the USA, or Italy, and after that, during the break, they discussed a possibility of scooping out Italian boots or American jeans, because domestically produced shoes and clothes were good for nothing. That was a narcissistic gap in its extreme: we had to believe we lived in the best country ever, and everything around was crying to us that it was wrong.
You know how it ended.
Although it has not ended at all…
One more word. Modern Russian nationalists blame the Communist Party for “denationalization” of the Russians, for turning them into a device for holding the multinational Soviet Empire together. But looking at the history closely, the Russians have always been like that. The Russian nation was nothing but a tool for its leaders: a “ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them”. But they could be proud of it. Many political leaders admitted that the Russians make good soldiers. That is true. All the aforementioned praised Russian virtues are soldiers’ virtues mostly. But the first of the soldiers’ virtues is obedience. Soldier must be brave, strong, cunning, self-sacrificing… but only when he is ordered to. “Die yourself, but save a friend”, Russian saying goes. But not when your superior orders you to flog your comrade to death. In that case, another saying is a motto: “You die today and let me die tomorrow”.
The Tsars allowed the Russians to take pride in their superiority. Being Russian meant being a tool for the conquests of the Empire, and being proud of it.
Post-Communist Russia declared peaceful politics, and robbed all the Russians of the source of their narcissistic pride.
Consequences… well, do you still remember the metaphor of a truckload of shit and a high-pressure turbine?
It turned out to be not-so-metaphoric.
But it is also a myth in a “truth above the fact” sense. Jews had to be smart and thrifty and education-obsessed to survive in times of persecutions and to give their children a better life. The French language contains over 600 words for love-making, and don’t tell me it is for no reason. The average amount of alcohol consumption in Russia is 15.76 litres of pure ethanol per person over 15. It is lower than in Moldova, the Czech Republic and Hungary, but in those countries it is mostly wine and beer, and in Russia it is mostly vodka.
As a rule, national stereotypes are wrong when applied to a certain particular person, but a stereotype by default is “something that shapes”. There is a national stereotype of the greedy, industrious and independence-crazy Ukrainians. It shapes me whether I want it or not. I am not greedy and far from industrious, but when it comes to independence-crazy… well, guilty as charged. And when I cannot throw away a thing still in a good condition, which I do not need anymore, I say to myself and others that it is my “inner khokhol” who prevents me.
And now the most important part: being half-Russian myself, a native Russian speaker since my first word and writing in Russian for now, I have never, EVER referred to my “inner Russian”.
Strange? Not at all. The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that being Russian means to be… actually, nobody.
First things first. The national stereotype, as a part of the national myth, is something that shapes the culture and is shaped by the culture at the same time. Thus, we have to refer to the Russian culture in a search for the Russian character.
(By the way, Russian nationalists have searched for the “Russian national idea” for over 150 years. Don’t you think it is a bit too long?)
Let us start from the bottom tier: mass culture. Folklore, jokes and so on. They take national stereotypes up to eleven both in positive and negative sense. The Ukrainians are greedy (negative value), independence-crazy (ambivalent, depends on who’s telling the joke) and industrious (positive value). The Georgians are corrupt (negative value), sex-crazy (ambivalent, depends on who’s telling the joke), hospitable (positive value). The Moldovans are stupid (negative value), workaholics (ambivalent, depends on who’s telling the joke) and laborious (positive value). The Estonians (and the rest of the Baltic nations) are slowpokes (negative value), taciturn (ambivalent, depends on who’s telling the joke) and poised (positive value). The Chukchas are totally uncivilized (negative value), childishly naïve (ambivalent, depends on who’s telling the joke) and sharpshooters (positive value). The Armenians are cunning (negative value), cunning (ambivalent, depends on who’s telling the joke) and cunning (positive value).
The Russians are stupid (negative value), axe-crazy (negative value), totally uncivilized (negative value), never learn (negative value), slobs (negative value), drunkards (negative value), lazy (negative value), foul-mouthed (negative value), spiritless (I don’t mean ethanol)…
What, no positive or, at least, ambivalent values? You could think that the Russian self-criticism degrades into self-flagellation. Don’t be hasty. Any of these negative values in Russian jokes leads to the utter success of the Russians!
Well, joke is a form of self-criticism, too. Russians make jokes about their vices and their ability to represent a vice as a virtue. Well, what about true virtues?
Yes, there are many virtues that the Russians brandish as their national traits. The Russians claim to be loyal, patriotic, crazy brave, patient, steadfast, laborious, vigorous, they love freedom, they are kind, generous and sympathetic.
This is an image drawn not by the mass culture, but the classic literature and cinema. Classic writers, generally nobles by origin, praised Russia and the Russian people in the most turgid heroic manner.
But there was something puzzling about these virtues. I shall explain by examples. Take bravery. Many classics, or, rather, every classic praised the bravery of the Russian soldier. Not only soldiers, but peasants and even women were lauded for their bravery. There is the famous poem by Nekrasov, “Grandfather Frost-the-Red-Nose”; it has got a female character who is praised for her beauty, wisdom, poise and bravery. It is said that she can stop a galloping horse and enter the burning log cabin. But in “Who is happy in Russia?” we see the similar character suffering a cruel treatment from her husband, her mother- and sisters-in-law. And she suffers meekly, making no attempt to resist, despite being a strong woman. Or take Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” – the war part are about the heroic strife with Napoleon. The true Russian soldier Platon Karataev is an embodiment of faith, spirituality, courage, sympathy, yada-yada-yada. But in another story, “After the Ball”, he depicts the same Russian soldiers whipping their comrade into bloody pulp, meekly, with no attempt to resist or to make a punishment less cruel. And the most terrible part in it: "Do you think I had come to the conclusion that the deed I had witnessed was wicked? Oh, no. Since it was done with such assurance, and was recognised by everyone as indispensable, they doubtlessly knew something which I did not know.”
Well, so much for Russian love for freedom, too. The Russian campaign of The Napoleonic Wars is dubbed as the Patriotic War. The Russian people was fighting for freedom… despite the fact that the majority of the Russian peasants were enslaved and remained slaves after the victory. Well, the Americans exhibited similar hypocrisy, but at least they have stirred up a fight for the liberation of black people. No one fought for the liberation of the Russian peasants, including themselves.
Patriotism. Lermontov’s “Borodino” where he praises Russian forces:
The foe that day had many ways
To feel what daring combat weighs,
Our Russian hand-to-hand!..
As did our chests – earth's hollows trembled;
The steeds, the men all disassembled,
And cannon volleys' sound resembled
A moaning o'er the land...
And, in a row, his “Farewell, unwashed Russia, / land of slaves, land of lords, / and you, blue uniforms, / and you, people, obedient to them…”
You can go on by yourselves: take any virtue of Russia praised by any Russian classic – and you will find the disproof of this virtue in the texts of the same classic!
Such schizophrenia, of course, couldn’t remain unnoticed. The classics were not fools, they were conscious that the Russian commoner, however praised he might be, languished in misery, and they could not do anything about this. They’ve witnessed incredible humiliation, torment, abuse – and were helpless. Even when they have got the power, like Saltykov-Shchedrin, they were helpless, because they had to deal with an enormous system of lies, exploitation and oppression.
They had to deal with the fact that, despite all the lies, exploitation and oppression in Western countries, people resist, people fight, while the Russian people suffer silently. They couldn’t cope with the fact that the Russian people are tramped in total meekness and they are accomplices. Remember, they were nobles, and many of them had serfs of their own.
So what did they do?
They invented the concept of the enigmatic Russian soul, of the Russian people as a collective Christ, a martyr nation that redeems the sins of “godless Europe”.
Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone,
No ordinary yardstick can span her greatness:
She stands alone, unique –
In Russia, one can only believe.
(prosaic translation of Tiutchev’s poem)
- this is the most pervasive opinion the Russians have of themselves. Russia is godlike, period.
The question is – who was the collective Pilate then? Yes, the answer seems obvious, the Tsar and nobility, but you see, the Russian nationalists of those times (they called themselves Slavophiles) couldn’t blame the Tsar, who was their sacred cow. So they blamed… Bingo! They blamed Westerners!
Let us sum this all up: the so-called enigmatic Russian soul is nothing like an enigma. There is nothing unique about it. There is nothing special. It is but pure narcissism extended to the national principle, that’s all.
This narcissistic dissociation between the praised ideal self of the nation and the real state of this nation is typical for the early modern period in Europe and Asia. The foremost countries closed this gap with raising their social standards. The underdeveloped countries – Russia, Poland, Japan, Turkey, China and so on – tried to cover this gap by inflating up the narcissistic egos of their nations. Why? Because the leaders of those countries were the first to fall under the narcissistic glamour. No wonder: since they were the first to abuse and exploit their nations, they needed the biggest excuse!
It works with a nation just like with a personality. There is an actual miserable state of the nation. There is the only way to change this state, but it is painful and difficult (especially for the dominant political elite, which risks to lose its privileges). There are neighbour nations that live better. There is a shame for that miserable way of living. And there is a huge temptation to say: they may live better – but we are better! We live worse because, unlike them, we do not care much for wealth, we are spiritual, self-sacrificing people, honest and modest and true to the ways of our fathers. We are happy in our poverty, because it makes us strong and steadfast. We could have easily gained wealth – we just don’t want to, the wealth can spoil us.
In reality, that poverty doesn’t make people strong. It makes them cruel and abusive. The Russian classical literature is full of atrocities, but the narcissist is blind to them even if they describe them with their own hand. Dostoyevsky depicted incredible poverty, alcoholism, child prostitution and abuse amongst Russian people – and still he praised Russian generosity. Because “the hideousness is a temporary disaster, it almost always depends on the previous transient circumstances, on slavery, on the centuries of oppression, of roughness, but the gift of generosity is the eternal, spontaneous gift, born with the nation and the more revered if even after ages of slavery, ties and poverty it will survive intact, in the heart of this nation”.
Nota bene: Dostoyevsky didn't even consider generosity as a trait that requires cultivation and development. It has to be “spontaneous”, not to be born and raised in the heart of the nation. Can anyone guess why it hasn't happened yet?
The spontaneous, miraculous transformation from Saul to Paul is a typical narcissist fantasy. The narcissists cannot fantasize about them creating virtues of their own – they are already perfect! This perfection can only be revealed. Thus, the Russians need no improvement – they are God-bearing people already!
The harsh moral flagellation of the Russian national character, performed from time to time by some thinkers, is nothing more than the other phase of the narcissistic cycle, the phase of mortification. Then comes the phase of self-pity and harvesting the narcissistic supply, and then – again the phase of grandiosity. In this phase Russia, as a rule, engages in a “little victorious war” which ends in an epic fail. One of those wars had ended with the October Revolution.
Had it changed anything? Hell, no. The narcissists never learn, because they cannot consider themselves imperfect. The Russian people remained a messianic people in its collective mind, but now their Gospel was not a God-bearing, but the bearing of the World Revolution.
Of course they failed. They just couldn’t help it.
There is an opinion that the Russians were spoilt and degraded by the Bolsheviks. Wrong. They were like that long before Lenin. Long before Peter the Great (who was a flamboyant narcissist himself). They adopted the myth of “the Third Rome” ("Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will be no fourth. No one shall replace your Christian Tsardom!") in the early 16th century, but they believed themselves to be the only “true Christian” nation long before that. This narcissistic claim has its roots deep in the times of the Tartar invasion, and I will not trace them. Let’s concentrate not on the reasons, but on the consequences.
So, in the modern folklore, the Russians can hardly denote their significant positive traits and virtues. I can compare this to the subconscious of a narcissist, who feels miserable deep inside.
In the Russian classical literature, the Russians are praised for their enormous virtues and criticised for their enormous vices (but not for their real vices!) – this is very much like the splendour-mortification cycle.
What about the modern literature? I mean starting since 1900, not just contemporary?
Well, when you read something like Babel’s “Red Cavalry”, or Sholokhov’s short stories, or “How the Steel was Tempered”, or “The Rout”, or any other book on the October revolution and the Civil war, you cannot help thinking “These people are monsters… and they are completely OK with that”.
Well, they had it coming. When a nation considers itself godlike, it is about to repeat the destiny of the most well-known character who considered himself godlike. It is about to fall, and the fall of the Russian Empire was massive. The Bolsheviks had inherited the Empire and restored it – along with its narcissism. During their 73-year rule, the Russian narcissism reached the final stage: total separation from reality and hence, self-destruction of the nation.
During the Bolsheviks rule it finally became clear what it means to be Russian. It means to be nobody, no person and no nation – just the material for a Great Social Experiment. The very concept of national martyrdom was firing on all cylinders: how many people were killed in the gulags is still unknown, in the Holodomor the estimate was ranging from 4 to 7 million, WWII – from 20 to 27 million, more than half of them civilians (and from 8 to 10 of them Ukrainians, but we shall talk about this matter later).
The value of the human life was tending to zero, but the greatness of the First Working Class State was close to absolute. If it wasn’t for the death of Stalin, all hell could have broken loose.
His death delayed, but did not stop the fall of USSR. He was a narcissist, a megalomaniac – but he hadn’t created that narcissistic system of common martyrdom, he was picked and raised by it. After his death the system reproduced itself, as the narcissism does, from generation to generation. Parents affected children, children affected grandchildren and so on. I had a bit of it in my school times, the late 80th, when teachers told us in classes how bad the capitalism was and how unhappy our peers were in the USA, or Italy, and after that, during the break, they discussed a possibility of scooping out Italian boots or American jeans, because domestically produced shoes and clothes were good for nothing. That was a narcissistic gap in its extreme: we had to believe we lived in the best country ever, and everything around was crying to us that it was wrong.
You know how it ended.
Although it has not ended at all…
One more word. Modern Russian nationalists blame the Communist Party for “denationalization” of the Russians, for turning them into a device for holding the multinational Soviet Empire together. But looking at the history closely, the Russians have always been like that. The Russian nation was nothing but a tool for its leaders: a “ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them”. But they could be proud of it. Many political leaders admitted that the Russians make good soldiers. That is true. All the aforementioned praised Russian virtues are soldiers’ virtues mostly. But the first of the soldiers’ virtues is obedience. Soldier must be brave, strong, cunning, self-sacrificing… but only when he is ordered to. “Die yourself, but save a friend”, Russian saying goes. But not when your superior orders you to flog your comrade to death. In that case, another saying is a motto: “You die today and let me die tomorrow”.
The Tsars allowed the Russians to take pride in their superiority. Being Russian meant being a tool for the conquests of the Empire, and being proud of it.
Post-Communist Russia declared peaceful politics, and robbed all the Russians of the source of their narcissistic pride.
Consequences… well, do you still remember the metaphor of a truckload of shit and a high-pressure turbine?
It turned out to be not-so-metaphoric.
Hello Olga,
ВідповістиВидалитиI have linked your posts to my blog, The Well Run Dry. You have provoked me to do a bit of fascinating research, particularly regarding Russian claims to be "the Third Rome." Could you please elaborate on the effect of the Tartar invasion on the production of the Russian grandiose self? I am unfortunately ignorant of that bit of history.
I'll give it a try.
Видалити