Soviet kitsch to Russian politics

...There is, however, a fine new political history museum in St...

...Unfortunately, other Soviet-era traditions persist as well...

...Allusions to his memory, however, are very much in evidence...

...Mass produced for foreign visitors, today's designer dictatorship is just for fun...

...As Svetlana Boym writes in her remarkable study of nostalgia and post-Soviet memory, The Future of Nostalgia, "the problem is that this kind of 'deideologized' attitude has become a new style, almost a new official discourse...

...Rude, inconsiderate, and internDISSENT / Summer 2004 n 27 POLITICS ABROAD perate behavior toward visitors has long been a hallmark of Russian tourism...

...he invoked "country" and "Russia" more than thirty times...

...IN NEITHER Moscow nor St...

...Putin's comments were pointedly directed at organizations protesting the arrest of oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is currently on trial for tax evasion and tax fraud...

...But it is also a cultural compromise between the lack of any serious effort to confront the dear departed Soviet regime and the current glorification and idealization of the Soviet imperium that contrasts sharply with what Putin contemptuously called Russia's post-communist "backwater...

...Putin also warned that westernbased nongovernmental organizations criti28 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 cal of his repressive policies—human rights organizations cite his closing of critical television stations, forcing opposition parties out of the State Duma, and a recent bill to ban most public demonstrations—were serving the interests of "dubious group and commercial interests...

...Today, Stalin's image is hardly to be seen, but that is a product of the Khrushchev era, not of Yeltsin's or Putin's...

...Putin promised continued economic growth, a reduction of poverty (20 percent of the population still lives below the poverty line), and respect for the rule of law in "a stable democracy and a developed civil society...

...Generals and lesser ranks of bemedaled veterans were cheered as they proudly marched down the Nevsky Prospekt...

...As one critic observed, Putin "selects his tools of governance from the same shed as his Soviet predecessors once did...

...Not only does the museum present the war in uncomplicated and heroic vignettes, but it contains dioramas depicting great battles, and a massive "Hall of Glory" in the center of the monument features a heroic (pre-political) Schwarzenegger-like Soviet soldier...

...Petersburg is there a museum devoted solely to the Gulag or Soviet crimes...

...More important, whereas in the West many monuments have dramatically changed their tenor, no longer celebrating war heroes and generals on horseback, Russia's monuments hearken back to Falconet's famous "Bronze Horseman," placed on the banks of the Neva in 1782...

...Flea market hawkers sell soviet military paraphernalia, watches, and caps adorned with Lenin pins...

...For the May 9 celebrations of "Victory Day," the streets of St...

...Petersburg as a Fulbright Senior Specialist...

...Lenin himself, still wellpreserved in polyurethane, is beatifically unperturbed by such obvious transgressions against socialist morality...

...Petersburg was always the center of the artistic underground...

...Close scrutiny of Putin's speech reveals a distinctly nationalist tone...

...Two other wealthy media moguls, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, whose television stations criticized Putin's slide towards authoritarianism, have since fled the country to avoid arrest...

...The government has recently issued a directive to passport control agents to try to smile and appear friendlier to visitors...

...Trendy eateries with catchy names such as "Propaganda," "CCCP," "Soviet Kitsch," and (no kidding) "Lenin's Mating Call" are doing a lively business...

...These wares should not be misread as evidence of nostalgia for the bad old days...

...Although the average Russian still earns about $230 each month, Russian executives are the highest paid in Europe...

...Petersburg in 1991), a larger-thanlife Lenin still exhorts passersby in front of the Finland Station, and the monumental likeness stands before the former Party building on Moscow Avenue and points emphatically ("tc the liquor store across the street," goes the lo26 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 POLITICS ABROAD cal joke...

...Putin's publicists, such as Stanislav Belkovsky, president of the National Strategy Institute, call him a "revolutionary" whose commitment to economic self-sufficiency, an end to statist policies, and a mandate to "cast off the weight of Russian history" makes him Russia's first "radical-liberal...

...pRESIDENT PUTIN'S March election campaign, which limited access to state-run media by opposition candidates, and his annual address to the Parliament on May 26' underscored the paradoxes of his rule...

...In Moscow, the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky (creator of the preKGB Cheka) has been removed from its pedestal on the square in front of the feared Ljubjanka prison...

...More threateningly, civil liberties do not appear to be firmly anchored, and police are everywhere in evidence, especially when dignitaries are in town...

...He frequently repeated his commitment to a liberal market economy and dismissed those who regard his consolidation of power as evidence of growing authoritarianism...

...Stalinist kitsch banishes irony by taking seriously its pantomime of aesthetic representation...

...The trial sparked fears in the world financial community that Putin is selectively targeting oligarchs who profited from the post-Soviet "wild" capitalism of the 1990s...

...Grandmothers with communist banners unfurled and photos of Stalin held aloft followed the traditional military parade...

...Soviet kitsch is benign, but it is much more than just a tourist draw...

...For the average Russian, police are an irritant, harassing drivers for bribes, arresting drunks on the Arbat (Kalashnikovs at the ready), and beating up suspected con men in front of the Moscow train station in full view of arriving tourists...

...T-shirt vendors offer up Lenin in a field of marijuana, Stalin as the "great helmsman," and "McLenin" under golden arches...

...As the proverbial "woman on the street" remarked, Lenin is still the grandfather of the country and Stalin the "father...

...Despite the polite and almost cheery service at the sparkling Starbucks-style cafés in the city center, service is erratic, and a slammed door or vulgar epithet is not uncommon...

...These prominent cases underscore Putin's assault on the policies of the Yeltsin era, which he claims were responsible for the abuse of power by the elite (meaning the oligarchs) and Russian dependence on what he called a club of overseas creditors (the West...

...No longer subversive it has turned into an aesthetic norm, a dominant fashion...

...It creates a symbolic bridge to the old regime without drawing unnecessary attention to more disturbing elements of continuity...

...Kitsch, as Milan Kundera wrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is intimately linked to totalitarianism: it functions by offering a sanitized view of the world in which "all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions...

...For that reason, the avant-garde response to totalitarian art was to create its own subversive simulacra of political kitsch...

...ANSON RABINBACH just completed a visit to St...

...To be sure, in the city that once bore his name (it was renamed St...

...Their presence is hardly reassuring, despite the fact that serious terrorist attacks are a reality (on May 9 the Putin-supported Chechen prime minister, Akhmad Kadyrov, was blown up at the local festivities in Grozny...

...Putin also rebuked Western critics: "far from everyone in the world wants to see an independent, strong, and confident Russia," he said, noting that: "the strengthening of our statehood has intentionally been interpreted as authoritarianism...

...Forbes magazine added eleven billionaires to the list of wealthiest Russians since Putin's reelection and not surprisingly, 85 percent of workers surveyed said they are not paid enough...

...Even at Lenin's tomb, which is still treated with great reverence and extreme security, a four-hundred-ruble bribe will allow a camera (absolutely forbidden) to go through the first cordon of cops and metal detectors (though not through the next checkpoint a few feet away...

...And his favorite tools are coercion and campaigns against internal enemies who are blamed for the transgressions of the regime...

...The case targets one of Russia's richest individuals (who happens to be Jewish) and the founder of the once powerful Yukos oil conglomerate, whose stocks plummeted on news of the company's inability to pay a huge $3.4 billion tax bill levied by the courts...

...In the 1970s, during the later Brezhnev years, artists critical of the regime, such as the brilliant Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar, founders of SotzArt (Soviet pop-art), deployed the arsenal of Stalinist signifiers, slogans, and iconography in the approved socialist realist style with a devilish, ironic sense of humor (for example, the famous pose at Yalta, substituting the cinematic alien ET for Stalin flanked by Churchill and Roosevelt...

...The problem with such images, not unlike the monument to the victorious General Zhukov in front of the Kremlin (also erected in 1995) is that post-communist representations of history do not significantly depart from their predecessors...

...Whatever the sources of Putin's support, "de-oligarchization" as many POLITICS ABROAD call it, is a popular move in a country whose oil-driven economy grew by an impressive 7.3 percent last year, compared to 4.7 percent in 2002...

...Petersburg is that in Moscow the real thing is much more visible, and St...

...Petersburg that devotes significant attention to the cult of Stalin and the repressive character of his and Lenin's rule (installed in 2001...

...Perhaps one reason that there appears to be somewhat less interest in the new consumer kitsch in the capital than in St...

...Irate letters to the Moscow News complain that police are not very friendly to visitors, and in several cases, openly demanded bribes from Westerners just to leave them alone...

...Wartime" Soviet and Nazi Leicas do not mimic rare originals, but are entirely new creations, drawn from the fantasy of highly skilled Russian instrument makers...

...Stalinist culture was, of course, already kitsch, and the architecture and iconography of the 1950s is still very much in evidence in Moscow...

...and how can one go against the fashion and risk being considered humorless—quite an offense in the Russian context...

...During a rally in the great square of the Winter Palace, for example, an enormous image of a hammer and sickle party badge hung on the very spot where Stalin's visage once graced the first celebration of the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945...

...bookstores feature constructivist propaganda and Stalinera slogans warning against excessive alcohol consumption...

...Petersburg were decked out with banners commemorating not only the defeat of the Third Reich but the public political symbols of the Stalin era...

...By contrast, Moscow's skyline is dominated by seven shining examples of Stalinist architectural gigantism, and practically every metro station is consecrated to the symbolic figures of the old ideology, whether construction, electrical, health workers, or, in Red Square's Revolutionary Station, a remarkable statuary of revolutionary types—workers, soldiers, students, athletes, and red guards...

...Many, including those who in the past supported the Communist Party, regard Putin as a tough-minded tsar who routed the evil capitalist oligarchs of the Yeltsin years, just as Ivan the Terrible made short work of the evil boyars...

...But the building is still in use by the new incarnation of the KGB (called FSB...

...Putin's overwhelming victory at the polls in December's Duma election and his 72 percent margin on March 15—supported by media saturation by state-owned television—make him Russia's most popular and strongest leader since, well, Joseph Stalin...

...But Stalin-era museums dedicated to Leningrad's beloved mayor Sergei Kirov (murdered in 1934) and to the heroic nine-hundred-day siege of the city receive state support and are largely unchanged from the 1950s and 1960s...

...Perhaps most striking, one of the largest and most costly monuments to the Great Patriotic War, a massive museum and memorial complex in Victory Park, on Moscow's Kutuzovsky Avenue, was completed in 1995, two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union...