Fishing, Putin style.

The press and social networks are awash with images of topless Vladimir Putin fishing in Siberia with his Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu, a native of Tywa, the republic where they went on a holiday trip.

But why do Putin's image-makers persist with this particular bit, the fishing? This time, including the underwater chase after a pike? One explanation could be that they have in mind the macho man James Bond fighting the baddies underwater in the 1965 'Thunderball' with Sean Connery. (wiki on the film)

To the giggling Russians, the idea of going on a fishing trip inevitably evokes the cult 1960s comedy 'The Diamond Hand' with a staged fishing episode, when one crook is scuba-diving with a net full of live fish that he puts on the hook and the second is on shore supposedly ready to knock out the 'target.' It all backfires. (wiki on the film)

The phrase, that every Russian knows, 'клёв будет такой, что он забудет обо всём на светe' — 'the fish will be biting so often that he will forget about everything' is also from  that film.

Here is the episode —



And here is the 'Thunderball' sequence —

Baba Yaga the Beautiful.

As the West is so furiously debating whether it is morally acceptable to have Putin as an ally in the fight against terrorism, one lovely blogger declares her love for the wicked witch of Russian fairy tales.

The wicked (but sometimes good, as in this tale, in Russian) witch Baba Yaga is one of the main recurring characters in traditional Russian lore. Another is Vassilissa the Beautiful, who sometimes also appears as Vassilissa the Wise.


This Australian vlogger is talking about her fascination with Baba Yaga, but if you wished to imagine what Vassilissa the Beautiful could look like, that's her, The Raven of Poe.

Read an earlier post about Baba Yaga (The Guardian about a new book of fairy tales) here.

'Monkey with grenade.'

Rogozin

'The West is behaving in Islamic world like a 'monkey with a grenade,' tweeted Dmitry
Rogozin today. His tweet is widely reported by international press as representative of Russian attitudes to the Syrian crisis as the West is preparing for military action in the wake of apparent use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.

Rogozin is a vice-premier in the Russian government responsible for the military industries, a Special Representative of the President (Putin) and an outspoken nationalist. He also has the diplomatic rank of ambassador because he served as Russia's representative at NATO, where he appalled Ukraine and Georgia with his comments about these two former Soviet republics. And he has an academic degree of a doctor of philosophy. His Twitter account (in Russian) has 150,000 followers. He is a controversial figure because of his comments.

The 'monkey with a grenade' in his comment, while taken as insulting in international media, is an established, though recent, idiom in Russian. It simply means foolish or dangerous behaviour.

The idiom comes from an anecdote (joke) that apparently started making circles in the early noughties. Currently the expression is often used in reference to blondes (blonde jokes) and bad driving.

One popular version goes like this:

A man sees a monkey playing with a grenade.
—Monkey, stop playing with this. It's dangerous, it may blow you up.
—It's okay,—says the Monkey,—I have plenty more in store.

Take it as you will, black humour or not. Getting involved in Syria may turn out to be 'playing with grenades.'

Photo of Rogozin by A.Savin

Every time Putin opens his mouth...

...America gets five students of Russian

Alexander Genis, a Russian-American writer, has been to the Summer meet of the language students and professors at Middlebury College, Vermont. Novaya Gazeta published his thoughful report on what is going on with Russian studies in America. 

He has a word or two to say about Solzhenitsyn, the most famous Russian who had lived in Vermont, and many more on Robert Frost, much loved and translated in Russia.

I found two passages from Genis’ article especially interesting, and amusing too.

At one of the workshops Genis asked postgarduate students to name their favourite Russian ‘book.’

...I cautiously walked into an auditorium to see postgradute students, who didn’t look at all like philologists. The girls were pretty and none had glasses, the boys were big and muscular.

“What is your favorite Russian book,” I asked, to open the discussion.

“The Lady with the Dog,” said one girl.

“The Lady with the Dog,” echoed another.

“The Lady with the Dog,” agreed a boy.

“Geopolitics of Russia,” coldly said another, with a crew cut.

“OK,” I said. And, realising I have used an English borrowing, quickly added an awkward Russian “Ladnen’ko.”  (Note: ладненько, from ладно)

I wholeheartedly support the majority choice. Chekhov’s short story is my favorite too, even if it’s not quite a ‘book.’ The force of what Genis is saying is revealed in another striking passage on President Putin’s contribution to the promotion of Russian abroad.

I haven’t been here for ten years and immediately noticed the change for the better. In the number of students, Russian summer school outshone both Chinese and Arabic. 

When I complimented one of the professors, he replied: “What do you want? Every time Putin opens his mouth we get five more students. The tide changed at the time of the Georgian war and grows stronger with each, so to speak, exotic law or, shall we say, judicial trial.

“Slavonics," we sighed, "is the daughter of the cold war. We should be glad that it’s only cold.”

The Russian version of this article is here,

The Novaya Gazeta article is here, 

Read The Lady with the Dog by Chekhov here (Constance Garnett translation), 

Wikipedia article about Alexander Genis here, 

Middlebury College summer language programmes here.

The Noughties. A Russian wrap-up.

Mikhail Yefremov in Citizen Poet.

The Noughties ("Нулевые") is a 70-minute documentary about Russia in the 2000s that is quickly becoming a hit on the internet. It was made by Vadim Vostrov for Krasnoyarsk, East Siberia, regional television company TVK-6 (producer Xenia Cherepanova).

It paints a bleak picture of modern Russia controlled by corrupt bureaucracy who act with complete impunity knowing that Putin will never let them down.

Vostrov follows the rise of the opposition protests since September last year. The collection of politicians, historians, activists, journalists (including The New Yorker's Moscow writer Julia Ioffe), writers and actors who are interviewed in the film seems haphazard at first but towards the end grows into a multi-dimensional picture of vibrant  Russian debate.

Bykov

The film includes extensive interview with one of the top modern writers Zakhar Prilepin and footage of Boris Akunin speaking at protest rallies in Moscow.

One subplot in the film describes the extraordinary success of a Moscow theatre production called Citizen Poet ("Гражданин поэт"). It is, essentially, a reading of poetry, or rather paraphrases of well-known poems by Russian classics written by Dmitry Bykov, a popular journalist and TV presenter. They are all blistering satirical takes on Putin and Medvedev and their publicity stunts. Packed hall bursts out laughing at each new joke, and the performer, Mikhail Yefremov, can't help cracking up himself at times. The production has been seen in theatre by more than 300 thousand people. Citizen Poet was released as series on Echo Moskvy  radio and Dozhd TV channel. YouTube clips of Citizen Poet have been viewed more than 15 million times.

The phrase 'When poets rocked the stadiums' has long become commonplace to describe the phenomenal renaissance of Russian poetry during Khrushchyov's thaw in the late 50s - early 60s. Could it be that now, 50 years later, we may see a new wave?

(The film is in Russian, the subplot about Citizen Poet starts at 1:07:45 into the film, Prilepin's interview is split into short takes throughout the film. Read more about Citizen Poet in this Russian Wikipedia article. Photo of Bykov by Rodrigo Fernandez).

What is a Samovar? (Arthur Ransome)

Read a blog post on the role of the samovar in international relations here (in Russian).

Few items of material culture are as close to  Russian heart as the samovar. The word literally means self-boiler, but the device is symbolic of home, warmth, shelter and closeness of friends and family. Samovars come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from portable travel devices to huge tavern-service monsters.

Here is how Arthur Ransome of the Swallows and Amazons fame describes the samovar in Old Peter's Russian Tales, which he compiled and adapted in English while in Russia (from The Hut in the Forest):

Then old Peter took his big coat off and lifted down the samovar from the shelf. The samovar is like a big tea-urn, with a red-hot fire in the middle of it keeping the water boiling. It hums like a bee on the tea-table, and the steam rises in a little jet from a tiny hole in the top. The boiling water comes out of a tap at the bottom. Old Peter threw in the lighted sticks and charcoal, and made a draught to draw the heat, and then set the samovar on the table with the little fire crackling in its inside. Then he cut some big lumps of black bread. Then he took a great saucepan full of soup, that was simmering on the stove, and emptied it into a big wooden bowl. Then he went to the wall where, on three nails, hung three wooden spoons, deep like ladles. There were one big spoon, for old Peter; and two little spoons, one for Vanya and one for Maroosia.

Old Peter's Russian Tales can be downloaded in various formats, including ePub and Kindle, from Gutenberg here. Ransome had incredible adventures while in Russia, serving as a secret agent for both the British and the bolsheviks. Read about him in The Last Englishman.

I recommend Old Peter's Tales to translators and students of Russian to see how he tackles the numerous affectionate-diminutive suffixes. Most of the tales included in Ransome's collection are available online in Russian. For example, The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship is here as "Летучий корабль".

Wiki article on samovars here.


Photo: from here.

The Star-Spangled Trotsky, or St George, Revolutionary Style

St George's Day is the national day of England. It is on 23 April, the accepted day of his death in 303 A.D.  When it falls on Easter week the Church moves the feast of St George to the nearest Monday after Easter. This year for example it is on 2 May. But St George is also popular in many other countries including Russia. St George is the patron saint of Moscow.

The image of St George slaying the dragon has been popular throughout history. Here is a curious example of how an early Soviet propaganda poster showed Leon Trotsky, commander of the Red Army at the time, in 1918,  as St George slaying the dragon of capitalist counter-revolution (the inscription on the dragon's tail).


Note how Christian, nationalist, communist and internationalist symbols blend in this work. The whole composition is unmistakeably Christian. The golden star behind Trotsky's head looks like a saintly halo, but the red star on his shield bears the communist hammer and sickle. He is dressed in a stylised suit of armour of a Russian medieval warrior – a nationalist symbol, but has red stars on boots and shoulders. The dragon wears a silky top hat, a traditional image in Soviet art for depicting bourgeois enemies.

Having looked at several dozen images of St George I couldn't help noticing that Trotsky is charging at the West – to the left, but in most other images St George is advancing on the East – to the right.

St George on British half-sovereign

The best part is the starry sky around the central image. The white-on-blue stars of the background have an unmistakeable resemblance to the US flag. Why? And why so many stars? I counted 91? In the American flag white stars represent the member states of the Union. I think the symbolism may be the same in this poster. It is probably a reference to the coming 'world revolution'. Early on after the October revolution of 1917 many believed that similar events would soon follow throughout the world, at least throughout Europe, other nations will get rid of their bourgeoisie and join Russia in a union of socialist republics.

One of the lesser known maxims of marxism was that revolution can only happen in a country where proletariat (working class) represents a substantial part of the population and is politicallly conscious. Taking into account the number of working class people in Russia at the beginning of the 20th Century many revolutionaries believed that socialist transformation could only happen if revolutions succeeded in other countries as well. In fact, Trotsky was one of the strongest proponents of 'permanent revolution' and the 'export of revolution'. In a few years time Lenin would postulate that it was possible for socialism to succeed in one separate country. That would be one of the major reasons for the split with Trotsky and his eventual downfall when Stalin took control of the country.

Coat of arms of Moscow

But in 1918 the multitude of stars in the poster represented the expectation that other nations would soon join Russia in a revolutionary union and showed Trotsky as the leader of that victorious struggle.

A new book exploring the influence of religious thinking on Russian revolutionaries is out in the US: Laurie Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia.  (A review and an interview with Manchester is on New Books in Russian Studies). Many studies have concentrated on persecution and extermination of the Russian priesthood by the bolsheviks. But many of Russian revolutionaries themselves came from priests' families, including the iconic figure in Russian revolutionary movement Nikolai Chernyshevsky. This book looks at how Orthodox Christian ideas contributed to the intelligentsia's, and in particular the revolutionaries' sense of mission, to their impatient desire to change the world and the people for the better.


Poster from here, author unknown.

The History of Russia. Takes and Breaks.

The BBC starts today a major new series on Russian history, The Wild East (begins at 15:45 Greenwich time). The series are to cover a thousand years from the founding of Kievan Rus to modern day, and explain why the country swings from opening to reforms and democracy and then reverting back to autocracy and stagnation. The series with an accompanying book were apparently commissioned in connection with the 20th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The author-presenter is Martin Sixsmith, a Russian expert and a former BBC Moscow correspondent. He took part in last week's Radio 4 programme Start the Week to explain his idea. From what he says, it appears that he shares the view that Russia is somehow ‘not suited for democracy’ and that periodic returns to autocratic rule happen because ‘autocracy has worked’ there at times. You can almost hear bewildered gasps of other participants in the programme, some of whom also have first-hand knowledge of Russia. Arguments about Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin and other famous rulers have long been a staple of Russian table-talk. They are now brought to Western audiences.

Schedrin in 1872

The series is a huge undertaking and not to be missed. (Links to the programme are below the video.)

To illustrate how views of Russia and her history have been changing over time I add the first part of the US-made 1943 documentary The Battle of Russia. Then, of course, America, Britain and Russia were allies fighting Hitler. Careful: documentary footage there is mixed with sequences from feature films including Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky with the score by Prokofiev.

And for a lighter take on Russian history, do read the hilarious satire by Saltykov-Schedrin (1869-70, wiki,), The History of a Town (Amazon link, Russian text here). Not often cited in the West, the book is very popular in Russia. Quotes, references and characters from it have entered the language as metaphors, idioms and proverbs. (An excerpt from the introduction to the book below the video.)

 

Start the Week discussion with Martin Sixsmith is here, available as podcast too.

The Wild East BBC page with the series schedule and press release here.

from Laughter in the Dark: The History of a Town reviewed years ago by V. S. Pritchett.

Shchedrin is known to English-speaking readers only by his great novel The Golovlyov Family, the most somber and pitiless instance of black comedy in Russian literature of the nineteenth century. Now, in the first English translation of The History of a Town, we see the master of political satire, for which he was best known in his own time. One sees at once that this book gave Zinoviev his model for The Yawning Heights, his uproarious fantasy written at the expense of communism under Stalin and Khrushchev a few years ago; the dissidents take pride in recovering the old Russian tradition. Zinoviev's fabulous lbansk (a double pun which means Ivan's town but also Fucktown)--derives plainly from Shchedrin's farcical history of Glupov or Stupid Town, in which for hundreds of years the bewildered and passive Russian peasants do what they can in a sluggish way to live with the violence and lunacy of their tyrants.

Portrait of M.E. Saltykov-Schedrin by Nikolai Ghe.

Villain of the piece

Ivan Turgenev, Asya (1858)

Viewpoint

In Western eyes, Russia is a third-rate, sloppy, inept nation. And we resent the distortion, says Alexander Anichkin

Villain of the piece

As soon as we heard the devastating news that a plane carrying 54 holidaying teenagers had crashed over Germany I had a familiar sinking feeling: there was a Russian plane involved, so whatever had happened it would be the Russians’ fault.

Sure enough, before the first tears had splashed the dust, blame for the midair collision in which 71 people died was being flung in our direction: “Russian pilot ‘ignored’ warnings” screamed the tabloid headlines; “Russian pilot failed to act”. Even after five years of living in Britain I still can’t get used to the ease with which Russia is blamed for any disaster to which we are remotely connected. In Russia there was, rightly, fury at the assumptions that either the Russian pilot or Russian plane must have been at fault.

When it appeared that the Russian pilot, far from failing to act, may have tried to warn Swiss air traffic control that he was on a collision course 90 seconds before the crash, and that vital security systems had been switched off by Swiss air traffic controllers, we felt vindicated but still angry.

The readiness with which the West assumed that it was a Russian fault shows that for all the talk by world leaders about Russia as a strategic partner of Europe or the US, a serious player on the world stage, deep down we are still seen as an international joke, a nation of drunks and incompetents.

It is, as a compatriot observed, a Hollywood view of Russia – but one which persists. Ever since the days of the Reds Under the Bed scares, Russia has been – certainly in tabloid and entertainment industry shorthand – the root of world evil, the eternal baddie.

Of course some of it is our own fault. Who could forget the notorious incident when a pilot let his young son take the controls of his plane which then plunged into the Siberian taiga? Or Chernobyl nuclear station going into meltdown when people there staged an unauthorised experiment?

And former President Boris Yeltsin didn’t help our image as a nation of drunks: despite his awesome achievements in overseeing the transition to democracy he is remembered as much for being too “tired” to get off the plane at Shannon airport to meet the Irish Prime Minister as for his famous tank-top resistance to the hardline coup attempt. We Russians laugh and cry with embarrassment over these incidents. But the scars left by them on our national psyche are deeper than most Westerners realise. Ever since Peter the Great started modernising Byzantine Russia in the 1700s we have been battling with the discrepancy between our image as a superpower, the birthplace of Pushkin and Tolstoy – and a country of Third World sloppiness.

The 19th century writer Ivan Turgenev summed it up when he observed: “I can tell a Russian from afar, mostly by the sudden changes on his face, one minute arrogant and full of grandeur, another all cautious and meek, checking to see if anyone is laughing at him.”

Stereotypes, as we know, are born of fear and ignorance, and to the majority of Westerners, despite the opening of our borders, Russia is still an unknown territory. But blaming everything bad on Russia is not just hurtful to individuals like me. The fury in Moscow at the way Russia was, again, guilty until proven innocent shows that Russians have had enough of old Cold War attitudes.

Many in Russia are beginning to blame the West for her post-Soviet difficulties. When it becomes clear that the West still sees Russia as a third-class citizen, it is difficult to convince them that they are being paranoid. But we clearly have a long way to go before we emerge from what I had believed were the bad old days of mutual suspicion and insult-throwing.

From The Times, 8 July 2002