Internal Terror

Off Topic.

Sean,

You’re specialty is politicized youth movements, correct?

What’s your take on Organizing for America?

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/pledgeproject

It’s not a youth movement by definition, but I’m betting the “youth” represent a big slice of Organizing for America’s membership. I know there are dozens of grassroots political organizations doing just about the same thing as Organizing for America, and I’m involved in a handful of them. But reading an e-mail from Organizing for America, it kind of struck me as not quite the same, simply because it is run by the President, promoting the agenda of the party in power. And it kind of creeped me out, esp. the pledge bit. And I thought, “Oooh, if this were the Putin Administration, people would be making references to Brownshirts.” Obviously, there are many differences between this and the Komsomol or Nashi. I guess it is the connotations, or the possibilities of how Organizing for America could evolve that make me do a double take.

BTW, I have been reading Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, and love love love it. Can you recommend any similar books, maybe that expand on Yurchak’s subject matter?

Thanks – will check it out. I was actually looking for more “late” Soviet rather than post-Soviet material, but I will read Serguei’s articles since I have a weakness for cute guys from Siberia who throw that crazy “u” in their Sergei names.

I actually agree about the youth movements being good for promoting civic engagement. Absolutely. Part of me can’t wrap my brain around teens not rebelling against or at least questioning the established authority, but that’s my main complaint. I was simply struck by this trend in both Russia and America of rallying and organizing the kids to go promote the Administration’s agenda & popularity. I don’t remember that from my youth. There were Boy and Girl Scouts, but nothing explicitly enlisting us to promote the political agenda of the sitting President to one’s fellow citizens who might not be on board. I’m not of the opinion that it is either good or bad. I just think there are some parallels between Organizing for America and the Russian youth movements. Both also seem to have the trappings of cults of personality…

One parallel I would not draw is equating Putin/UR with the Obama/DNC. Obama doesn’t head the DNC or Democratic Party. The DNC is not a party, but a fundraising apparatus. The Chair of the DNC cannot dictate to members of the party. The Democratic Party itself is a seriously fractured group. (Frankly it’s a big mess.) Organizing for America is an explicitly Obama White House-oriented organization with no affiliation with the Democratic Party beyond the fact that that’s the ticket Obama ran on. The DNC has little to nothing to do with it. It’s about the nation’s leader and his agenda and getting the kids to hit the streets for him. Sound familiar?

I offer it here for readers’ intellectual enjoyment.

I found it very boring actually…
Both – how it was presented and what was presented. But I guess this is because the topic is very special and narrow.

Kind of off topic.
Sean, have you read Stephen P. Dunn “The Peasants of Central Russia” (with Ethel Dunn 1967, reissued 1988)?
I have only hard copy. It’s excellent account of transition of rural Russia from the beginning of XX century to 60s.

They used data about Viriatino as well.
But I found their work really scientific and exact. No ideology at all. And this is rather rare case

“I don’t think that youth have any natural rebellious tendencies.”

The above is proof positive that Sean was never young.

As far as the inner workings of NKVD, “Евангелие от палача” by brothers Вайнер would be much more engrossing for those who can’t get enough of that kind of thing.

As far as recommending decent modern Russian fiction, “Petropolis” by Anya Ulinich is quite good read, I think.

I looked up Yurchak on Google books but I was not not very excited about what he wrote. First, there is lots of pretentious terminology/jargon in the chapters past the introduction. And I got seriously annoyed by Yurchak’s repeated chewing around how the most ordinary people in USSR internalized the value system and the main tenets of the propaganda and how – looking back – many have sentimental feelings about the past,and that there were positive things about the Soviet lifestyle and world outlook that made people feel good about themselves. How Russians were sleepwalking but the moment the communism collapsed they knew how to act etc etc. All these points that Yurchak is making to me seem self-evident, for anyone who knows about the recent history of Eastern Europe.

I could argue the stuff here but it would be too long. So instead, I would compare Yurchak to Kundera – I think they are both artfully posing as if they possessed a tremendous insight into the condition of human soul under communism but in reality their stuff is rather trite.

milkshake:

I can understand a person being turned off by the jargon. And I can understand anyone who actually grew up in the Soviet Union finding the book seriously tedious. What appeals to me about Yurchak is 1) his use of primary source material (I want more!) and 2) his insistence that the good/bad, black/white, us/them etc. binary approaches traditionally used in my part of the world to analyze Soviet society are perhaps unhelpful and deceptive.

I have never had access to a lot of the information in this book beyond some vague knowledge of the existence of some cultural trends. But even that information was always presented to illustrate some simplistic political agenda. I don’t know anything about your background. I am American born and raised, born in the 70’s, grew up in the 80’s. Yurchak’s book, whatever its faults and however obvious and intuitive its conclusions, is the only one I am aware of to actually publish a solid illustration of those obvious and intuitive its conclusions, in English, in America. It validates a lot of my suspicions, made me question some of my assumptions, but totally throws the established discourse about the Soviet Union out the window. Which is why it is very refreshing to me.

Also, I think the book does sometimes risk making everyone out to be impossibly oblivious, but in the end, the effect is actually, imo, a humanizing one. Yes it is obvious to me that you can’t reduce the entire Soviet population to ignorant sycophants, evil authority figures and brave brave dissidents. It’s obvious. It’s just incredibly rarely pointed out.

The book is much more nuanced than I’ve made it out to be here. But inevitably, what it accomplishes, for me, is to provide a peek into a reality that 1) has been hidden beneath various forms of propaganda for decades and 2) is history so I can’t just go see for myself. So I really appreciate it.

BTW, Sean, I am not necessarily disagreeing with you about youth and rebellion. But as a person who was distrustful of the government when I was very young, because I was raised by those 60’s weirdos, it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around kids who don’t question the prevailing authority.

Also, after read some of Limonov’s books, I was really really confused because the whole backdrop was so incongruous with what I’d been told live in the FSU was like. Yurchak’s book actually made Limonov’s books make more sense. Which is really saying something!

When I was throwing rocks through Gorkom building windows at night, there was nothing
discursive (or constructive) about it.

I have not read any Yurchak. Maybe he’s worth a read. If he’s a “postmodern”, though, I probably would not be able to read too far. I have to confess that in general I have little tolerance for “postmodern” language (within quotes because I don’t even know if I’m using the term correctly.) Yes, culture is full of social constructs, but the “postmoderns” seem to take that idea to an extreme. It’s the old science training in me: unless a theory or school of thought is based on empirical data and can be tested, I simply do not trust it.

In any event, I knew people in Russia who already in the 1980s (and some even in the 70s) assumed that the Soviet system was destined to a fall. Not that they knew how it will happen, but they saw the Soviet Union as an unsustainable failure that will come to an end. I guess they were in the minority.

poemless: I was born in commie Czechoslovakia in 1969 and I grew up in the capital Prague in a lower-middle class family; I was in the second year college when the regime fell in 1989. As someone who went through a gradual transition from a vaguely pro-socialist into an closeted anti-communist quite late, in the high school, as someone who was living a comparably comfortable and “normal” existence (in what was effectively a conquered vassal country with a sclerotic but totalitarian government, failing economy and Darth-Vader-like secret police) I can completely understand how one could be a part of that sleep-walking population Yurchak is writing about and not fell abnormal (except for slight envy to better living standards enjoyed west of the border). In a way it was quite easy to accept that life, one had a pretty clear path charted for him, all that was required was a degree of conformity on your part. And I should mention that people did not get to travel to West too much, and the propaganda was taking great effort to publicize and exaggerate any pathology found in western democracies.

Russians had many additional reasons to identify themselves with the propaganda (which always contained hidden nationalistic elements): Like many other big nations – Germans, French, Chinese, British, Americans – Russians are fond of their “destined-for greatness” role in the history. They threw off the czars yoke and defeated white invaders, they modernized, they won the WWII, they created better life for the oppressed ll over the World, they have the best rockets and nukes and the life is getting better and more joyful. They had several more generations living under communism, surviving it all – in reference to WWII, the great terror and the post-war poverty, the life under Brezhnev was quite good.

Milkshake, interesting comment.

Let me go back to what you wrote about Kundera, though. It has been many years ago, but I remember really liking his “Unbearable Lightness of Being” (I was very disappointed in the movie, though) as well as “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (these two are the only Kundera novels I’ve read.) Did you find these novels trite? And if so, isn’t it because much of day to day life is trite? Is Chekhov then trite? Bear in mind that I’m asking about Kundera the novelist, not Kundera the person.

(FWIW, I found Kundera’s anti-Russia polemics unconvincing and thought that Joseph Brodsky, in his defense of Russia, dealt with Kundera quite well.)

I am going to come out of the woodwork for the first time in the last couple months and agree with Sean. Most kids have not developed the cognitive faculties to understand what it means to be a rebel. They go through a lot of soul searching to pick an identity that makes them feel comfortable and not a phony, and then do whatever the collective wisdom of that group demands, so that they are not ostracize and have to go through the whole identity crises thing again. The whole idea of not trusting authority can’t really be understood as they can’t get their mind around the concept that someone they trust would lie to them. That takes age and experience to develop.

Being involved in the whole punk/hardcore thing during the early 90’s, I was friends with plenty of “rebels”. They mostly all conformed to a loose list of accepted values though. There were plenty of factions, but all were made up of a group of people who all dressed and thought alike. The vegan/straight edge ones though were the most insufferable. Anyway, nobody really was rebelling; they were just doing whatever was fun and allowed them to be accepted within the group.

Also, violence does not equal rebellion. All kids in their late teens are violent and need to blow off steam in some way. Whether its vandalism, sports, gangs, video games, etc., they all serve the same purpose.

The charges I level against Kundera are 1) he is a very boring writer of “serious stuff” 2) he fakes insight and he is very pretentious – a catnip for western snobbery

I was delighted when I found out there are people who also get turned off by his writings and are not afraid to say that Kundera is an overrated poseur:

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/11/dating_without_kundera.htm

Just to clarify on the above. Poemless said:

“But as a person who was distrustful of the government when I was very young, because I was raised by those 60’s weirdos, it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around kids who don’t question the prevailing authority.”

But in your case Poemless, your parents were the prevailing authority, and you did not question them on their views of the gov’t. What I am trying to get at is that kids do not comprehend that people or institutions they trust could be wrong. I remember people telling me not to trust everything I was told in school, and thinking that surely a history book, encyclopedia, etc. that was put out by a reputable company could not be wrong. I mean, why would they want to lie? And my teachers, they seemed like good people, surely they wouldn’t lie to me, I thought.

So, I guess what I am trying to get at, is that to rebel, you have to believe that the accepted authority, whether that is your parents, teachers, gov’t, etc. is wrong, and that them being wrong is creating injustice, and most importantly, you have to come to that conclusion on your own. Otherwise, there is no conviction, its just conformity.

I’ll check out the link you sent, Milkshake. I wonder what my impression of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” will be now. When I read it in the 1980s I loved it and thought it had plenty of insights. For me it was one of those hard-to-put-down novels. A few years later I started “Immortality.” Don’t quite remember why, but I could not get into and did not finish it.

In any event, Kundera may be a poseur and perhaps even worse (if it’s true what some recently wrote about him), but even poseurs can write good novels.

I think Sean and Jason must be sent back to college to read “L’Homme révolté” very carefully. Obviously they weren’t paying attention the first time around.

And this is only proof of how old you are since it’s mainly adults that tend to define youth rebelliousness. I’ve seen very few historical examples when youth, as some kind of biological or psychological result of their youthfullness, declare themselves to be rebels.

Yeah, punk rock must have completely passed you by.

There are so many countless examples of youths that define themselves as rebels against the establishment … from the 60s hippies movement to swing kids in Nazi Germany … that it is really preposterous that you would suggest otherwise.

That adults may have documented it only indicates that the adults own the means to publish.

Every change in society over human history has come from the young. There are no old people who suddenly decide to rebel against the establishment and create meaningful change. The ideas and seeds of rebellion are formed in youth.

I will add that it is telling that practically all conformist youth groups are started by, led by, and carefully managed by adults … and that rebellious or anti-establishment youth groups are either not managed or led at all, or led by youths themselves.

Teenage kids like to belong to something that is “cool” – powerful, radical, self-confident and overt in action. They can be quite intolerant in rejecting anything from the existing order that looks like a moral compromise or half-measuare. They want to put their mark on the World fast – often in heroic terms. The funny part is that since there is only limited number of ready-to-join causes, the more “individualistic” they try to act the more groupthink-ridden they become.

Putin is (rightly) feared in the West as a capable and utterly unscrupulous strongman but he is widely admired for the same reasons at home. People in the West tend to forget how miserable, chaotic, humiliated Russia was until recently – with leadership that was both corrupt and impotent. Putin resembles a no-nonsense boss who knows how to wield raw power to cut through the problems. He personifies everything than makes Russian people feel good about themselves again. (We will see how his macho image survives the economy downturn).

Putin is a genius populist that can charm both young and old. He plays on the grievances, sentiments and insecurities of post-USSR Russia. He understands that what most people in Russia care for is order and a government that takes care of the problems. Prosperity is also important but even more important is power and prestige which Russia projects abroad. Human rights and rule of law are not anywhere on that list, the democracy has been discredited and yearning for strong Russia is the unifying sentiment.

What makes Nashi and other pro-authoritarian organization less dangerous is a relative lack of ideology so far. Putin himself is more of a “pragmatist”. He uses nationalism and Soviet sentiments in the same way he supports Orthodox church – he is not religious man. Putin is exceptionally good at hiding his true beliefs, my guess is that if someone could read his mind one would find a carefully calculating, cynic opportunist of Nixon type.

Wally, you wrote:

“There are no old people who suddenly decide to rebel against the establishment and create meaningful change.”

A small quibble, but you overstated your case. Proportionally most so-called rebels are young, but you can also find old people among them. By that I mean that you can find people who decided to rebel in their forties or later. Perhaps not a common occurance, but certainly not unknown. For example, regardless of what we think of the second phase of his life (it did not improve his writing), Tolstoy became a non-conformist rebel in his forties and became more and more so as he grew older.

Milkshake, more than likely this is my last comment on Kundera. I read the post you linked to. Well, the poster didn’t like “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” I did. That’s perfectly fine. Among books I didn’t like or was not able to finish there are several that were admired and loved by people I respect (and the same with movies.) One thing is not to like a book and another is to characterize it as a “really bad book.” That’s a presumptuous pronouncement on the part of that poster. Anyway, among the admirers of that novel you will find well-known writers that cannot be dismissed as poseurs. I don’t know what I would think of Unbearable Lightness if I read it again, over twenty years later. Perhaps I would not be as impressed, but I doubt that I would dismiss it as a “really bad book.” And, once again, I’m limiting myself to the Kundera works of fiction I’ve read, I’m not referring to the man himself.

In the 1920s, the Komsomol was led and managed by youths themselves at the national and local level. Every GenSek was in their early 20s. The same could be said of Nashi at the moment.

Not sure if this could be said about the Komsomol in its early years, but I’m pretty sure Nashi wouldn’t exist at all without the grown-ups providing funding.

I will add that it is telling that practically all conformist youth groups are started by, led by, and carefully managed by adults … and that rebellious or anti-establishment youth groups are either not managed or led at all, or led by youths themselves.

I disagree – “adults” often try to co-opt, redirect, harness or otherwise manage rebellious and anti-establishment youth groups. And there are plenty of youth groups (or groups of youth) led by young people who are careerists or conformists without needing adult encouragement.