Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 1 – Russians will
at some point in the future come to view the period of Vladimir Putin’s rule in
their country with the same horror and distaste that Germans now view Hitler’s
Third Reich in Germany, according to Svetlana Aleksiyevich, winner of this year’s
Nobel Prize for Literature.
Aleksiyevich made that observation
and many others in the course of an interview with Poland’s Onet.pl portal (wiadomosci.onet.pl/tylko-w-onecie/swietlana-aleksijewicz-przyjdzie-taki-czas-ze-rosjanom-bedzie-wstyd/p1xlw8;
a Russian translation of her words is available at charter97.org/ru/news/2015/10/30/176080/).
She
began by saying that Belarusians were extremely pleased by her receipt of the
Nobel Prize, something that she says was for her “a shock.” The reaction of many Russians was horrifying
but hardly unexpected given her criticism of Putin for his war against Ukraine
and the way in which Moscow has greeted most of its writers who have won the
Nobel.
But
other Russians were pleased and welcomed the decision of the Nobel committee, a
reflection, Aleksiyevich says, of the fact that today “Russia is a divided
country. There is not one Russia but two, and they are struggling with each
other.”
She
notes that the Nobel committee gave her the prize “as a Belarusian writer,” but
she points out that “I write in Russian and I am the sixth writer with a Nobel
who writes in this language.” Like four of the five others, she has been
vilified by officials. Only Mikhail Sholokhov who was loyal to Stalin escaped
that fate.
But
Aleksiyevich continues, “”a time will come when the Russian people will be
ashamed of what [Putin] is doing, and it will think about ‘the Putin period’ as
an eclipse of the mind just as today Germans remains the 1930s” when Hitler and
the Nazis ruled in their country and unleashed wars on others.
At the moment, that may seem improbable, just as it once
seemed likely that “Stalin would live forever,” she says. But eventually “time
passed and we have been able to assess him.” No one should forget that “dictators
– large or small – are temporary figures. Where are Hitler, Mussolini, and
Stalin now?”
But
the people who lived under them remained, and they are the subject of
Aleksiyevich’s work. “They even say this
about themselves: ‘the Soviet Union doesn’t exist, but we (its citizens)
remain.’” And it has been very difficult for them to part company with the
myths of the Soviet past.
“I
think this is connected with the fact that we democrats didn’t use our chance,”
Aleksiyevich adds.
“If
you leave the big city for the village or the town, you see horrifying
pictures,” she continues. “In Russia, a young generation is growing up whose
parents are simple people who do not have anything and cannot educate their
children.” They thus “begin to remember times when it wasn’t necessary to have money
to study in universities or to be treated by a doctor.”
These
people live in a world of myths, and Aleksiyevich says that she sees her task
as exposing and dissolving such myths. Her book about the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, “Zinky Boys,” undermined the claims that Russians are “great and
just and everywhere seek to establish peace.”
In
fact, “in Afghanistan, Russians were called ‘Soviet Hitlerites.” But many
Russians prefer the comfortable myths to the bitter truths and are angry at her
and others who try to speak the truth. These people are “hostages” of the regime’s
ideology. Russians are “not idiots” but they are constantly bombarded with
government propaganda and come to accept it.
A
change in the regime in Moscow could dispel these myths or make the situation
even worse, Aleksiyevich says. It could happen that “fascists who would be even
worse than Putin could come to power,” and they would be “significantly more
extremist than Putin. Much more horrible.”
The
Nobel laureate says she finds none of this surprising or signaling any final
stage in history. That is because she and her friends have read about how Germany
appeared when Hitler came to power and how Russia looked when the Bolsheviks
did. “We see that all this is the same. Then too no one believed” that either
of these marginal groups would come to power.
The
same thing was true of Putin’s rise to power. Only a few years ago, he and
those who think like him were viewed as marginal as well. People laughed at
them, “and no one listened to them. But now they decide everything.” But
equally, with time, the other dictators have passed away, and so will he.
Aleksiyevich
concludes her interview by saying that she once had a chance to look Putin in
the eye, in Paris at a cultural meeting organized by the French government. He “used
sweet phrases,” but it was obvious that “this is not a personality of the size
of Vaclav Havel, which would be what we would need. In this phase, there was no
sign of intellectual heft.”
