Image
THE NEW LAPUTIANSBy Boris Tumanov
September 2006
SourceThe present-day Russian authorities have not forgotten anything from the experience of their predecessors in the epoch of developed socialism. But they haven’t learnt anything either
In the mid-1970s when the Soviet Union reached the peak of stagnation (or, as it is now said, “stability”), the TASS bureau in Nouakchotte, the capital of Mauritania, received more or less similar instructions from Moscow, from time to time. “Urgently send comments of the Mauritanian political and public circles on…” (then followed information about another epoch-making event in the country of developed socialism). And it was expected that these comments could vary in a broad range from raptures to warm appreciation. Naturally, I scribbled these comments sitting at my desk in the bureau, copying them from similar items on the subject in the newspaper Pravda in which representatives of the US communist party, Argentine gauchos, Indian coolies, Norwegian fishermen and even Australian aborigines noted the wisdom of this or that resolution or decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (CC CPSU), or wrathfully condemned another attack of the American imperialists against the Soviet state.
Here it would be appropriate to say a few words of African realities and the effectiveness of Soviet propaganda. Mauritania is a big desert with an area equal to two territories of France and inhabited by up to a million-and-a-half nomadic tribes. The country’s capital Nouakchotte occupies an area of about one square kilometer, and it was well-nigh impossible to distinguish a minister from a water-carrier, inasmuch as they all were dressed in similar blue “bubu” (loose shirt reaching the heels) and blue kerchiefs which covered their faces during sand storms.
Our uncle in AlmatyLiving in this ascetic reality I tried at first to understand what the officials of an appropriate department of the CC CPSU were thinking of when they compiled the above-mentioned instructions. The conclusions I arrived at were as sad as they were dangerous to be expressed aloud. But once my patience came to an end. It happened on the day when I was ordered by Moscow to urgently send comments of the Mauritanian political and public circles on the speech of Leonid Brezhnev in Almaty. So I decided to accept the rules of the game invented by communist party functionaries, who, without a shadow of a doubt, believed that the Mauritanian people, following the example of the Soviet people, passed their time eagerly awaiting another speech of our wise general secretary on the subject of “the economy having to be economical,” or the local party organizations having to pay more attention to spring field work.
And so I went to the local Foreign Ministry, roamed about empty and dusty corridors and in one of the rooms saw an acquaintance of mine (he was either a department head or the minister’s secretary). Fighting drowsiness, he straightened his back in the armchair and heartily greeted me. “How’s life, how’re things?” I didn’t give him the chance to find out about the life and things of each member of my family and tell me about the same of his family, and immediately took the bull by the horns.
“What do you think about the speech of Mr. Brezhnev in Almaty?” I asked him.
“Mr. Birezh…Birezh… Who…who?”
“Mr. Brezhnev, the Russian President, the Soviet Union…” I was more precise.
“A-a-a! Birezhniv, good, good…So what about him?”
“He made a speech in Alma Ata,” I said.
“Where, where? And where is it?”
Then I read a short lecture on the geography of the Soviet Union and gave the gist of Leonid Brezhnev’s speech, emphasizing his words on the need to raise crop productivity.
“This is correct,” the Mauritanian said, “absolutely correct,” giving me to understand that our meaningless conversation on the subject should stop. After that we began a lively discussion on the subject of the forthcoming solar eclipse which would best of all be seen from the territory of Mauritania.
This interview showed me that the role of the Mauritanian public could well be played by the local employee of our TASS bureau Diallo. Once I tried to explain to him that I had come from the Soviet Union, but he couldn’t understand it and it was easier for him to think that I came from France. This was why I said to him: “There is the most important man in my country, just like your President, Moktar uld Dadda. He said recently that crop productivity should be raised. What do you think of it?”
“He’s a clever man,” Diallo said after thinking. “Here in our country crops are very poor, you see for yourself. Only the sand, and almost no water. It would be good if our President should take care of that.”
I painstakingly described these two scenes and sent my dispatch to the African section of TASS. The head of the section immediately responded by saying that Mauritanian heat had evidently had a very negative effect on my brains and that if I continued to send writings in the same vein, he would be unable to keep me on the job and I would have to return to my homeland.
And so I resigned myself to the existing situation.
Several years later, back in Moscow I worked on a freelance basis for the French section of the external services of Radio Moscow. Then I learnt that there was a section broadcasting programs in Swahili, a language widely used by the Bantu people and many other African nations, and that these programs often included leading articles from Pravda. And it seemed to me then that the inhabitants of towns, villages and jungles of my beloved Africa each day eagerly await to hear the voice of Moscow from their transistor radio sets.
Absurdity as a policyAnother body of our foreign propaganda was the Press Agency Novosti (now RIA Novosti). Its offices either in Paris or in Brazzaville were distinguished by the atmosphere of a barber-shop or a dentist’s waiting-room, where visitors, in order to while away their time, were offered last-year’s magazines or pamphlets on treating and preventing hepatitis. The Novosti products telling their readers from among the local population about breeding the sturgeon in the Caspian Sea, building the Sayan-Shushenskoye hydropower plant, or about the immortal literary creations of Leonid Brezhnev, were, at best, thumbed through nonchalantly, with an occasional exclamation: “Look here, it’s Red Square, isn’t it!” On condition, of course, that these magazines sent to, say, Dakar were in French, but not in English or German.
The pompous meaninglessness of the Soviet regime and its propaganda efforts has long been considered absurdity. However, this word inadequately explains the irrational behavior, impeccable consistency and perseverance of the then nomenklatura and its all-embracing idiocy. In actual fact, the Soviet Union was nothing but the real embodiment of Swift’s Island of Laputa and the rather original but, in a way, quite logical outlook of its inhabitants. If you remember, the Laputians believed in the possibility to obtain sunlight or create immortal literary works by a strangely unnatural, to say nothing of absolutely fantastic, way, just as Soviet people and their leaders believed in the advent of communism. Just like the Island of Laputa, the Soviet Union was detached from earthly realities, but not to the extent of excluding all contacts with the outer world; after all, Gulliver managed to visit the island, became acquainted with its inhabitants, and even got away from there. Moreover, the Laputian rulers had their possessions and subjects on the earth’s surface whom they governed by almost the same means as the Soviet Union used in dealing with the countries of the socialist camp: with the help of packthreads which they let down with small weights and instructions to the bottom.
Foreign propaganda as such telling the world about a country’s economic, technological and cultural achievements, its history, national traditions, the way of life, etc. is a natural and legitimate phenomenon. The United States, for example, spends about one billion dollars for the purpose. But the Americans have much to boast and tell about. Whereas the Soviet nomenklatura, realizing the defective nature of their regime, advertised not so much the socialist reality, as a textbook on Marxism-Leninism. Did the Soviet bigwigs believe in the effectiveness of their propaganda or not was a matter of their personal ignorance or fanatical faith in the possibility to attain the unattainable. However, one thing could be said for certain: neither the high communist party functionaries nor their subordinates working in numerous editorial offices and correspondent bureaus abroad had no idea at all (and hardly wished to) about the audiences to which they addressed such a revolutionary document of the recent era as the pamphlet The Soviet Union: 100 Questions and Answers.
Paradoxical as it might seem, Soviet foreign propaganda, on which enormous sums were spent, looked like the propaganda by outcasts fawning upon the world public in the hope to hear at least one good word about Soviet power. It couldn’t rely for anything more by objective reasons, because in order to know to whom to turn and with what it was necessary to take into account the specific features of the national character or social strata and thoroughly study their medium. For instance, the Russian writer Alexander Kuprin knew perfectly the subtleties of life in Paris and Nice after living there for almost two decades. But how could Soviet citizens who were allowed to go abroad from the huge ghetto named the USSR and get to the ghetto of Soviet offices in foreign countries, know much about people and their life there? Their stay abroad absolutely excluded any human contacts with locals.
Nomenklatura existentialismHere is an example which I recently came across in Kommersant-Vlast magazine. When the Soviet authorities began to attract foreign tourists mainly of proletarian origin to the country, one of the first groups to arrive was one of French communists who sailed to Leningrad [now St. Petersburg] by boat. Their letters sent home from here were, of course, opened and inspected with a view to finding positive comments on Soviet life. Naturally, the French guests were pleasantly surprised that they were not guarded by armed men while walking about the streets of Leningrad. Their positive comments were mostly on this subject and they were sent to the corresponding department of the CC CPSU as a proof of the success of the Soviet tourist initiative.
But the point is not only who and how foreign propaganda is addressed to. The main aspect is its aim. From this angle Soviet propaganda didn’t and couldn’t have any practical meaning. No matter how ignorant the party bosses could have been, many of whom really believed in the existence of the African proletariat armed with class self-consciousness, they were hardly stupid enough to hope that tales about the labor achievements of the Soviet people would speed up the advent of world revolution, or at least would facilitate the coming of American communists to power in their country. And it was equally meaningless to hope that the creation of a positive image of the Soviet Union would increase the influx of tourists to our country, inasmuch as this contradicted the very nature of the regime.
In actual fact, the reasons for the development of Soviet propaganda were rather of an existentialist character. Simply, the nomenklatura felt hurt, not for the country which they ruled absolutely correctly, as they believed, but for themselves, for power. “Indeed, we work in the sweat of our brow, building giant canals and ploughing up virgin lands, but they continue to reproach us with the GULAG. More than ninety-nine percent of Soviet citizens vote for the unbreakable union of the communists and non-party people, but the West not only mocks at it, but raises the question of human rights. We invite a confirmed friend of the Soviet Union and communist sympathizer Yves Montand, but he buys samples of ladies’ underwear at which the entire Paris laughs its insides out. But of what kind ladies’ underwear should be if the one made and sold in the USSR is in strict conformity with the moral code of the builder of communism?”
In the context of our recent past, the need for “improving the image of Russia,” which has suddenly dawned upon the builders of the vertical power, is nothing but a symptom pointing to the fact that the new Laputians, who are preparing to immortalize themselves in power, feel the same psychological discomfort as their Soviet predecessors. They know better than we do that corruption and embezzlement in the country have reached unbelievable proportions with their direct participation, that their heroic struggle with Shamil Basayev has turned the entire North Caucasus into a powder-keg, that the triumph of “basmanny justice” [a byword for biased justice] has forced foreign investors to turn away from Russia, and that their foreign policy again boils down to freezing their own ears to spite the American, and also the Ukrainian, Estonian and Georgian grannies. As for us, they have explained to us quite convincingly and in great detail that all these negative phenomena are the results of the schemes of foreign non-governmental organizations and the pernicious influence of the West which forces on us frozen American chicken legs, or “Bush legs,” as they are called by Russians, Mercedes, Lexus, Maseratti and other cars, as well as Vatican proselytes and spiritlessness.
There’s wealth of spirit in our heartsIn would be more convenient and honest to recreate the Soviet model of life completely and at once, instead of cutting the cat’s tail by stages: first returning the Soviet anthem, then the military training at colleges, the TV program Vremya, and the young androids with the text of the anthem printed on the back of their T-shirts. On the other hand, the Kremlin’s pet dog Kony has established close friendly relations with many western leaders and it would be cruel to deprive her of this pleasure by way of returning to isolationism.
It is in these difficult conditions that the idea of laundering the image of Russia has emerged. Most probably, Russian power will be laundered in the same virtual space in which Soviet power was laundered, somewhere between the Island of Laputa and Earth. And with the same touchy belief that the world is so tired of constantly seeing and hearing slander about Russia that it is ready to believe in what it will be told and shown about Russia from the screen of the future TV company Russia Today. May the western press criticize [Chechen] President Alkhanov and President Putin for being unable to tell about the fate of eleven Russian citizens who were abducted from the Chechen village of Borozdinovskaya during another “cleansing” operation. However, everybody will learn that the Russian Foreign Ministry closely follows the fate of a Russian citizen who was wounded during the terrorist act in Sharm al Sheikh. Sooner or later, we shall return to the old song in a new version. They tell us about corruption, human rights and democracy, and we reply something like
There’s wealth of spirit in our hearts,
And in our earth there’s gas and oil.
We mine them fruitfully for all,
And give the world a good example.
In general, this new undertaking has two quite amusing aspects. First, judging by everything, its initiators do not even suspect that today most Europeans display benevolent indifference to Russia and are not anxious to find out how the appointment of governors enriches the world democratic practice, or what the term “guided (or “sovereign”) democracy means. They are more interested in the cost of hotel accommodation in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the degree of corruption of the traffic police in Russia and the sanitary state of Russian toilets. As for Russians themselves, they can meet their growing number in Europe and get in touch with them freely and without any prejudice, in accordance with their upbringing, education, erudition and politeness. Second, the initiators of the laundering of the image of Russia, as a rule, belong to those Russians who have long since firmly entrenched themselves in fashionable and expensive European resorts and restaurants and wine bars for the elite customers. They don’t suspect that more often than not it is they who serve as the live denial of the allegedly overall drawing of Russians closer to European civilization. As, for instance, one of the heads of the presidential administration who, having arrived in Italy on board a personal plane with five friends, demanded from the shocked proprietor of an exquisite wine restaurant “the most expensive” wine, one bottle per person for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Incidentally, each bottle cost six hundred dollars.
It’s all very simple. To extricate oneself from the recent vegetation, to grab fabulous amounts of bucks, to instill fear in fellow citizens, including business tycoons, to revel in one’s grandeur and omnipotence, and constantly hear that Russian power has not become civilized. It’s really vexing, isn’t it?
So, judging by everything, Europeans and Argentinians, representatives of the Bantu people and inhabitants of the State of Kentucky are doomed to hear and see “This is Moscow,” if they happen to pick up this channel.