Russian Presswatch / Patriot Games
Young, Cathy
Patriot Games by Cathy Young Aletter from Ada T., the elderly music teacher at whose Moscow apartment I stayed for a week last November—and who certainly feels no nostalgia for the old...
...It is not that Radzikhovsky is an ardent fan of the director's...
...T he siege of Ostankino was not the only show of force by Russia's "new right...
...I have been an optimist because I believed in common sense, in the public's instinct for self-preservation...
...The presidium included the usual mix of suspects: Slavophile, anti-urban, conservative Christian writers Valentin Rasputin and Vasily Belov...
...He turns—whether sincerely or cynically, doesn't matter—the way he "thinks" the masses are turning...
...But what if I don't understand anything while Govorukhin has gauged the situation accurately and rushed to join those whom the wave is sweeping to the top...
...A survey on Russian TV showed 9 percent sympathetic to the demonstrators, while 42 percent were fully behind the state broadcasting company and the rest had no opinion...
...Eddie expresses his contempt for both by having sex with a black male vagrant in an empty Manhattan parking lot...
...n a June 17 column in the Moscow daily Kuranty, political commentator Leonid Radzikhovsky was disconcerted at the sight of the well-known filmmaker Stanislav Govorukhin, author of the acclaimed anti-Communist documentaries This Is No Way to Live (1990) and The Russia We Lost (1992), among those in attendance at the Russian National Congress...
...And that is particularly outrageous, given that "we were the ones who gave the world a model of human relations in which other things besides money, the passion for consumption, the instincts of reproduction and profit . . . exist and matter: love of humanity, soul, self-sacrifice for a just cause...
...On June 15, representatives of Russian TV and the Russian government met with a delegation of protesters, headed by one Viktor Anpilov, a Moscow City Council member and a leader in the Russian Communist Workers' party who, according to Kommersant (June 15-22), used to be a state TV correspondent in Nicaragua...
...The Russian National Congress met in Moscow on June 14-15...
...She wanted a return to "socialism and state planning," and also "something Soviet or Russian on TV, the way it used to be...
...Albert Makashov, who campaigned against Yeltsin in 1991 on a platform of preserving the Communist Soviet empire...
...Limonov's latest literary effort appeared in June in Sovetskaya Rossiya—a nearly full-page article titled "A Russian Nationalist Manifesto," which holds that Russian nationalism embraces the legacy of both Peter the Great and Lenin and rejects the "unconstitutional destruction of the USSR...
...and the notorious TV personality Aleksandr Nevzorov...
...His biggest claim to fame, before he put his pen in the service of a greater cause, was the 1979 autobiographical novel It's Me, Eddie...
...Vlasov's is a truly sad case: a champion weight lifter in the 1960s, hewas elected to the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies under Gorbachev and made a stunning televised speech at the first Congress in May 1989 openly and passionately denouncing the KGB...
...and, most ominously, that Russia must unite with the Islamic world against the West, which is destroying Russia with the superweapon of "democracy" and "human rights...
...Formal demands included a daily hour of live, prime-time air time for the "opposition...
...In Ogonyok, former editor-in-chief Vitaly Korotich wrote an emotional column comparing the Ostankino siege to the seizure of the Vilnius television tower by Soviet troops in January 1991, and using such words as "takeover" and "occupation" to describe the actions of the "patriots...
...that what is good for the state is good for the individual...
...These events were quite a jolt for the Russian democratic press...
...The American Spectator September 1992 51...
...The bizarre battles of the "democrats" and the "patriots" continue, with monarchists and Russian Orthodox joining hardline Communists and even some ex-democrats...
...rally permitted by the city government...
...In Izvestia, Luzhkov defended the dispersal of the demonstrators, invoking the fact that their spoken and written slogans "insulted the honor and dignity of the President of the Russian Federation...
...alleged Jewish domination of TV has long been a sore point with the "patriots...
...there were cries of lawlessness and anarchy...
...Vlasov urges all Russians to stand together and save the country, leaving aside the differences between "right and left, Communists and constitutional democrats," and ominously reminds the country's new rulers that they are toying with a people which "has the unique experience (via schooling and tradition) of Bolshevik revolution...
...If Russian idiom had a cliché comparable to "a long, hot summer," it would be cropping up all over the press...
...After that, Vlasov, who has the mournful and bearded look of a Russian prophet, remained a faithful member of the democratic movement—until recently...
...She named two popular singers of the 1970s, one of whom is Jewish and the other Azerbaijani...
...The rally, about 3,000 strong, turned into an encampment of a few hundred people with tents, loudspeakers, a truck, red banners, and such posters as "Put Yeltsin in a Drunk Tank" and "Down With the Zionist Occupation...
...And I trust his intuition more than I do opinion polls...
...several policemen were beaten...
...One of the demonstrators, N. Galkovskaya, a 60-year-old economist whose poster read, "CIA Strategy: Collapse of the USSR, Plunder of the Gold Reserves, Sex, AIDS," told Argumenty i Fakty that she was "allergic" to American programming...
...And so it goes...
...I think Govorukhin is a very good barometer," writes Radzikhovsky: He's no fanatic...
...On the next day, Moscow's new mayor Yuri Luzhkov—an old-time apparatchik and nemesis of free-market reformers in his capacity as deputy mayor under Gavriil Popov, who resigned in May—denounced the talks as a cave-in and gave orders to get rid of the encampment...
...His June 11 article in Pravda, of all places, "Whose Children Are We...
...riers and storm the studio...
...More shocking was the appearance in this crowd of Yuri Vlasov, a highly respected, veteran member of the democratic movement...
...This may be the result of an alarmist predisposition, but a front-page editorial in the Literary Gazette voices the same fears...
...On June 11, a group of demonstrators from the Workers' Russia movement gathered in front of the Ostankino TV tower, from which both national and Moscow programming is broadcast, for a daytime picket and a 6 p.m...
...Russia remains "perhaps the only country that has not completely succumbed to consumerism, lechery, and contempt for poverty...
...The chief of studio security complained to Argumenty i Fakty that staffers entering and leaving the building were being made to walk a "gauntlet of shame" and called various names, including—if they were young women—"Bush's whores...
...The implication that people of politically incorrect views must be mentally unhinged has an unpleasant echo of the ancien regime, but some of Vlasov's recent pronouncements do suggest a less than sound mind...
...is a long rant filled with such exclamations as "A darkness has set over the Russian land" and "We are the most disgraceful generation of Russians...
...KGB general Aleksandr Sterligov...
...mathematician, former Solzhenitsyn coauthor and dissident, more recently author of the anti-Semitic tract Russophobia Igor Shafarevich...
...Bolshevism was undoubtedly a tragedy, he says, but capitalism in Russia has proved to be a great evil too...
...rather that the presence of people like Govorukhin (whose publicly• expressed concerns—crime, pornography, etc.—seem far closer to a Western-style social conservatism than to any sort of radical nationalism) indicates the growing legitimacy of neo-fascism...
...Patriot Games by Cathy Young Aletter from Ada T., the elderly music teacher at whose Moscow apartment I stayed for a week last November—and who certainly feels no nostalgia for the old regime—offers a none-too-happy view of present affairs: galloping prices, utter chaos ("In one district of Moscow, people pay for electricity at the old rates, in another at the new ones . . ."), and, "most frightening of all, the looming threat of fascism and civil war...
...Izvestia commentator Aleksei Kiva remarked (June 16) that "some mentally unstable democrats can't bear the tensions of the transition period, and so they either get out of the game . . . or go over to the other side...
...It is only fair to say that critics of the Yeltsin government, including those who worry about the preservation of nomenklatura privilege and the inadequacy of political reform, do not have enough access to the Russian media, TV in particular...
...Yegor Yakovlev, the head of 50 The American Spectator September 1992 Russian TV, told the delegates that he would set up a joint committee to ensure representation for all political viewpoints if the tent city and the loudspeakers were removed, but the uncompromising patriots would have none of that...
...Of course, this threat existed before, but now it's more real than ever...
...It chronicles the author's simultaneous disillusionment with women and with bourgeois society after coming to America and being abandoned by his wife...
...In the early morning hours of June 17, the riot police—the very same "black berets" who used truncheons to disperse anti-Communist demonstrators—chased the "patriots" away from the TV tower without much violence, confiscating seventeen tents, one truck, and a number of posters...
...another passionate defender of the defunct empire, former Soviet parliament member Sazhi Umalatova...
...The siege continued for days, with attempts by some especially zealous patriots to rush the police barCathy Young, our regular Russian Press-watch columnist, is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...
...The central, endlessly restated point of this idiosyncratic essay is that without a strong Russian state, the Russians will cease to be a "people" and turn into a mere "population," to be exploited, abused, plundered, raped, and spit upon by foreigners and domestic "predators...
...If anyone doubts that these are strange times in Russia, consider that one of the most prominent exponents of the new wave of "red-and-brown" Russian nation- alism, the novelist and poet Eduard Limonov, is not only an émigré currently residing in Paris but a man whose morals should be rather shocking to his austere ideological brethren...
Vol. 25 • September 1992 • No. 9
