Russians Living Near Europe Radically Different from Russians in the Interior, Mironova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 4 – It is an ancient observation that people who live in port cities or in portions of a country bordering others are often very different than those who live in the interior of the country, often simultaneously more aware of their own identity but also profoundly affected by the culture and style of those they come into contact with.

            But this pattern is seldom discussed by Russians not only because until recently few of them lived in places where they could actually cross the borders and thus be affected by others and because many are clearly reluctant to point to yet another way in which Russian identity, supposedly so strong in the Kremlin’s telling, is actually weak and fissiparous.

            In an article in Novaya  gazeta, Leningrad oblast resident Anatasiya Mironova says that nowhere do Russians take more pride in putting their appearance in order than when crossing the border into European countries. They don’t want to be put to shame by the quality of life of the Europeans or worse not allowed in (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2017/02/27/71629-esli-by-ne-finny).

                But this behavior doesn’t stop when they cross or recross the borders, she continues. Russians who return from visiting the Baltic countries take better care of their yards, clean up the trash, and make sure that their houses are painted well. Moreover, the closer they are to the border, the more they are inclined to behave that way.

            “Perhaps, therefore, the most well-appointed Russian regions are those at the border. There where people often go to Europe.”  Even between the northern part of Leningrad oblast and its southern section there is a huge difference in how Russians behave.  Even in impoverished Pskov oblast, those near the border dress better.

            And in Kaliningrad, even the homeless appear well-dressed, she adds.

            Until recently, almost two million Petersburg residents visited Finland at least once a year – that is “about half of the working-age population.”  Now, they don’t have the money to do so because of the economic crisis; but they still are affected by their image of what is appropriate in Finland – and that guides their actions even when they don’t travel.

            Mironova says she would not be surprised to find out that “in fact in Finland there exists a secret program for bringing Russians up to snuff. Who wants to live alongside a neighbor who isn’t concerned with his own home? Nobody.” And the Finns have played a huge role in transforming Russians in the northwestern part of the country.

            “Finland has trained us to eat better foods! In Petersburg as in Kaliningrad and Pskov, there is a lot less bad food being sold than in central Russia.” People know what fresh milk is and expect it, and these expectations affect what is sold even in parts of the city where people travel compared to those where they don’t.

            “What would Peterssburg be like if it weren’t 200 kilometers from Finland? And what would be our entire country which now is ruled by people from Petersburg be like as well? There are few who have done as much for Russia as today’s Finns. For thanks to Finland, we have federal officials who from their youth know European cleanliness, manners, and quality.”

            If those in power in Moscow had come not from Petersburg but from Yaroslavl or Kirov, she concludes, “I fear we would all have to begin to weep.”

Soviet-Style Friendship of the Peoples Returns in New Russian Superhero Film

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 4 – A new Russian blockbuster movie, “The Defenders,” explicitly revives the Soviet-style friendship of the peoples by having its four main heroes represent the titular nationalities of four former republics, putting the Russian “bear” in charge, and committing all of them to the defense of Moscow against alien enemies.

            The four heroes are Arsus – “bear man” (Russia), Khan – “wind man” (Kazakhstan), Ler – “earth man” (Armenia), and Kseniya – “water woman” (Ukraine).  The film’s producer, Gevond Andreasyan, said: “our heroes are based on nationalities: we operate on the principle that our strength is greatest when we are together and when we defend one another.”

            He said that he and others working on the film had “consulted with representatives of the nationalities involved so that no one would be offended –and especially not the Russians because this is a Russian movie” (nazaccent.ru/content/23272-supergeroi-blokbastera-zashitniki-imeyut-etnicheskie-harakteristiki.html).

                Set during the times of the Cold War, the film tells the story of “’Patriot,’ a secret organization” consisting of superheroes from various republics of the USSR. “In order to defend Moscow from enemies, a major of the Russian army revives the commando of super-people who for a long time were forced to hide their super-abilities,” Nazaccent reports.

            While the film has proven extremely popular and profitable in Russia – it more than made back its production costs in the first four days it appeared in theaters – not everyone was thrilled. The Lithuanian government banned the film because of what it described as its aggressive messages.

            In a commentary for the Regnum news agency, cultural observer Aleksey Yusev traces the history of Soviet and Russian superheroes, a history very different from that genre in the West. Soviet ideology, he says, opposed the idea of super heroes: no one needed superpowers because those led by the CPSU could achieve miracles (regnum.ru/news/cultura/2242376.html).

                Moreover, unlike in the US where superheroes arose in comic strips, in the USSR, there was an unwritten rule against such things and no tradition of such stories, something that only began to change at the end of Soviet times. But even after 1991, domestic analogues to Western superheroes didn’t immediately appear.

            There were many reasons for that, Yuryev says, including the absence of infrastructure and tradition of drawing comic figures and “the absence of an ideological platform for forming the psychology of new Russian superheroes,” something he says continued until the annexation of Crimea.

            (The Russian commentator doesn’t say, but a similar problem arose in the West with the disappearance of the Soviet threat.  Many stories that relied on USSR as the embodiment of evil to be fought now had to find someone else whose numbers were small enough not to cause commercial problems. Thus, the “Mighty Ducks” franchise made Iceland the evil enemy.)

            In trying to develop a Russian tradition of superhero comics, Russian writers often borrowed shamelessly.  Thus, in a 2003 serial, Superman is said to have arisen in Stalin’s Russia and fought on his side in the war against the West, a crude borrowing that fell flat with almost all readers.

            The first Russian superhero film was the 2009 production, “Black Lightning,” but its hero not only didn’t have any superpowers but relied on Soviet equipment and motifs, again an indication that Russian writers couldn’t find a new way forward.  And efforts by Western companies like Universal to come up with Russian themes worked no better.

            “These crude borrowings,” Yuryev says, “testify to the fact that their authors weren’t trying to create something original … [although] one can note that in the content of the Bubble comics,” there was one step forward: they stopped returning to the Soviet past and put their stories in the present.

            The new film, “The Defenders,” represents a kind of synthesis, the commentator continues, drawing on Soviet ideas but set in the present, “which has become necessary for contemporary Russia in its struggle with a powerful enemy” of today and not of the distant past.  And he praises it for its clearly expressed “ethnic component.”

            For the superhero project to come into its own in Russia, Yuryev  concludes, one of two things will be necessary: “a stable state ideology or, at a minimum, a common enemy.” Until those things obtain, Russian society isn’t going to unite and agree to any common heroes, let alone super ones.

‘The Dulles Plan Doesn’t Exist but It is Being Implemented’ – Conspiracy Thinking in Putin’s Russia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 4 – Conspiracy thinking, about which Aleksandr Panchenko of the Moscow Institute of Russian Literature is the leading Russian specialist, is now widespread in Putin’s Russia because it represents “a science for the poor,” explaining why things happen in simple and comprehensible ways that allow Russians to avoid having to take responsibility.

            Panchenko, a scholar at the Moscow Institute for Russian Literature, has been investigating conspiracy thinking for the last three years, a topic that he suggests has become more important because such ideas are “an expression of psychological discomfort” as well as a means of “’simplifying’” surround reality (ng.ru/stsenarii/2017-02-28/9_6937_zagovor.html).

            One of the key features of conspiracy thinking, he says, is that it is generally unaffected by rational arguments because “it operates so to speak with its own rationality,” a principle he suggests is clearly shown by Russians’ continued belief in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Dulles Plan, despite the fact that both have been unmasked as fabrications.

            “The history of ‘The Dulles Plan,’” he says, is particularly instructive about the main features of “contemporary Russian conspiracy thinking.”  The term refers to a plan supposedly developed by Allen Dulles, an American intelligence officer, in the late 1940s, to destroy the Soviet Union via social and moral degradation.

            In fact, Panchenko says, there was and is no such American plan. Instead, what Russians call “the Dulles Plan” consists of fragments taken from a Soviet novel, The Eternal Call, “which belonged to the pen of one of the literary generals of Brezhnev’s time, Anatoly Ivanov, the chief editor of the ‘ruralist’ journal Molodaya gvardiya.

            In that novel, Ivanov followed the standard CPSU line that “all the misfortunes of the pre-war USSR, including mass repressions” were the work of “’Trotskyites’” who sought “not only the restoration of capitalism in Russia but the subordination of the Soviet people to some dark forces.”

            By the time that Ivanov wrote his novel, such references had for the initiated a clear anti-Semitic message, and thus “the Dulles Plan” represented little more than a modernized version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forgery that had circulated in tsarist Russia at the end of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

            But for anyone interested in post-Soviet conspiracy thinking, Panchenko continues, what is most interesting is not the first reference to this plan but rather “the history of its ‘reincarnation’ in the form of ‘the Dulles Plan’ and the causes behind its unusual popularity present-day Russia.”

            Most students of the subject have assumed that the first person to extract “the Dulles Plan” from Ivanov’s novel was either Ukrainian publicist Boris Oleynik in his book, Prince of Darkness: Two Years in the Kremlin (various editions 1992-1994) or St. Petersburg Metropolitan Ioann in an article “The Struggle for Russia” published in February 1993.

            In fact, Panchenko says, neither of them deserves “the credit” for this innovation. The Dulles Plan made its first post-Soviet appearance in pro-communist and national-patriotic newspapers in the spring of 1992 among a collection of “imagined ‘declarations of the enemies of Russia.’”

            This text included both sometimes falsified and often distorted texts not only from Dulles but also from Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Goebbels, John Kennedy and James Baker. That text has now taken on a life of its own and circulates widely on the Russian Internet. What is striking is that the Dulles Plan has attracted far more attention than any of the other “texts.”

            The reason for that is two-fold, the Moscow scholar suggests.  On the one hand, rising anti-Americanism in Russia has made a focus on supposedly nefarious plans by the US especially powerful in the minds of many Russians. And on the other, even those who doubt the plan exists believe that it does, saying “’The Dulles Plan’ doesn’t exist, but it is working.”

            By invoking the Dulles Plan to explain anything Russians don’t like about the current situation, they can comfort themselves with the idea that they bear no responsibility for it – and that “makes the world more understandable, reduces the level of concern, and guarantees a unique form of psychological comfort.”

            Thus, the popularity of the idea of the Dulles Plan in Russia today reflects with psychoanalytic anthropologists call “projected inversion” in which whatever one group is doing or trying to do is in fact blamed on an external enemy, thus reducing still further any sense that the society itself has any responsibility for its own condition.

            At the end of his article, Panchenko cites three Russians who very much believe that “’the Dulles Plan’ lives and is winning.”  First, KPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov who already in 2011 said that the program of de-Stalinization as part and parcel of that Plan and was directed at undermining the ideological foundations of the Soviet state.

            Second, Moscow State University historian Mikhail Chisty cited the conclusions of Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenty Beria that “interesting materials have come from America. They can’t take us by force, and so they want to destroy us from the inside,” confirmation of the Dulles Plan at least in his eyes.

            And third, Samara Governor Nikolay Merkushkin last year accused opposition figure Aleksey Navalny of acting as an agent in Russia of the Dulles Plan, one that the governor suggested intended to “split us into 32 states” and arrange things so that “the word ‘Russia’ would never be heard again.”