Vol. 5: Can we talk about Russia?
What do Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky, Chagall, and Nabokov have in common?
Writing about the war in Ukraine this month, the New York Times columnist Christopher Caldwell urged us to empathize with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin because, Caldwell said, even with 11 time zones stretching from Europe to the Pacific, Russia feels trapped without access to the Black Sea.
“The largest country by area on the planet has no reliable exit into the world,” Caldwell argued. “The most reliable route runs through the Black Sea, where it crosses the trade routes that link the civilizations of Asia to the civilizations of Europe.” (To read the full text, click here. )
Caldwell’s thesis begs two key questions:
1. Is military aggression the only solution to this quandary? Is there no other way for Russia to gain access to the world’s riches? Has nobody in Russia considered, say, friendly persuasion or reciprocal trade as an alternate strategy?
(The Swiss, to cite one similarly landlocked example, have managed to achieve prosperity without invading their neighbors once in more than a thousand years.)
2. Why aren’t Russia’s neighbors clamoring for access to Russia the way Russia is clamoring for access to its neighbors?
The answer, of course, is that Russia has nothing much to offer, thanks to its consistent failure to encourage the creative instincts of its citizens.
John McCain’s idea
Too many of us perceive Russia as a giant superpower threatening to gobble up its teensy-teensy European neighbors. A few comparisons may be helpful:
—France and Germany combined have a greater population than Russia.
—France alone has a larger gross domestic product than Russia. So does Germany.
—For that matter, so does Italy. So does the United Kingdom. So does Canada. So do New York State, California, and Texas.
—As The Economist recently reported, in any given year Microsoft Corporation alone files more patent applications than Russia’s entire population.
—Since the Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901, Harvard, Penn, and a dozen other American universities have each produced more Nobel laureates than Russia’s entire population.
The late Senator John McCain’s characterization of Russia as “a gas station with an army” wasn’t too far off the mark— except that, as the war in Ukraine has demonstrated, Russia’s army isn’t much to boast about either.
When Russia invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Czechs responded with a joke that went viral:
A Czech civilian runs up to a Russian soldier, shouting, “A Swiss soldier just stole my Russian watch!”
“Don’t you mean: A Russian soldier stole your Swiss watch?” the soldier asks.
“You said it, not I,” the Czech replies.
Some countries make useful products like watches; others make soldiers.
Claiming credit for Tchaikovsky
At the opening of the 2014 Soshi Winter Olympics, Putin presented “Dreams of Russia,” an extravaganza celebrating 11 Russian cultural giants of the past. Yet without exception, all of his acclaimed Russian writers, composers, artists, and filmmakers flourished despite Russia’s government, not because of it. Indeed, many of them fulfilled their creative potential only by fleeing Russia altogether. The litany is truly astonishing:
— Pushkin wrote his most famous play, Boris Godunov, at a time when he was under the strict surveillance of the Tsar’s political police and unable to publish.
— Dostoyevsky was arrested in 1849 for his involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle, a secret society of liberal utopians. He and other members were condemned to death. But at the last moment, a note from Tsar Nicholas I to the firing squad commuted their sentences to four years' hard labor in Siberia.
—Tolstoy’s experiences in 19th-Century Russia molded him into an outspoken pacifist and anarchist. "The truth,” he once wrote, “is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.”
—Tchaikovsky, a musical prodigy, was trained for a career as a civil servant because Russia in his youth offered no system of public music education and little opportunity for a musical career. Not until his 20s did Tchaikovsky enter the newly created St. Petersburg Conservatory— which offered Western-oriented teaching that blessedly distinguished him from the Russian nationalist composers of his day.
Oh— did I mention that Tchaikovsky was gay? Can you imagine how Tchaikovsky would manage in Putin’s Russia?
— Chekhov attended a school for Greek boys (not Russians) and sang in a Greek monastery. As an adult, he became an atheist and an outspoken critic of the Russian government’s mistreatment of convicts.
— The pioneering abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky settled in Munich in 1896, when he was 30, returned to Moscow in 1914, but left Russia for good in 1921 and became a citizen of France, where he produced his best work until his death in 1944.
— Nabokov fled Bolshevik Russia with his family in 1919. He studied at Cambridge and spent the rest of his life in Germany, the U.S. and Switzerland. Although his early novels were written in Russian, he achieved international prominence as a writer of English prose.
—Marc Chagall left Russia in 1922, when he was 35, and thereafter lived in the U.S. and France.
—Sergei Eisenstein, the great Soviet film director, went to Hollywood and Mexico in 1928 to polish his craft. When he returned to Russia in 1930, he discovered that his foray to the West had earned the disfavor of Russia’s staunchly Stalinist film industry. The official suspicion of his loyalty never quite evaporated, and in 1933 Eisenstein wound up in a mental hospital.
—Kazimir Malevich, a pioneer of geometric abstract art, was denounced as a counterrevolutionary after Stalin succeeded Lenin in 1924; he was banned from creating or exhibiting further art works.
— Alexander Rodchenko, a pioneer of abstract and socially engaged photography, switched to sports photography and images of parades in the 1930s after the Soviet Communist Party reprimanded him.
— The artist/designer/typographer El Lissitzky, another pioneer of avant-garde art, similarly fell afoul of Stalin’s guidelines in 1932 and subsequently survived by creating a new career as a pioneer of propaganda art during World War II.
(I know— “Dreams of Russia” overlooked Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Nijinsky, Solzhenitsyn, and Gogol. But none of them could be described as a champion of the motherland, either.)
Authoritarian mindset
Were any of these creative innovators alive in Russia today, most would likely be languishing in Putin’s prisons. For Russia to take credit for these geniuses would be like Bostonians taking credit for Ben Franklin. He was born there, yes, but Franklin thrived only after he fled Boston’s stifling Puritan confines for Philadelphia’s more tolerant Quaker environment.
Artistic creativity, like commercial creativity, flourishes in those rare societies—Periclean Athens, Elizabethan England, modern-day America and Europe — whose leaders perceive that their own positions will be more secure if their citizens are happy and free. Putin, by contrast, believes that what makes Russians happy is the glory of their government and their military. And there may be something to that notion: As his nemesis Mikhail Khodorkovsky observed (after Putin arbitrarily released him from prison in 2014), the real problem with Russia is not Putin but an inbred authoritarian mindset that predates Putin and Communism as well.
Putin sometimes contends that his government is obligated to protect not only Russian citizens but also Russian speakers everywhere. This is like suggesting that King Charles of Britain should look out for America’s Anglo-Saxon Protestants. As Putin’s own Sochi catalogue of great Russian artists attests, the world beyond Russia’s borders abounds in native Russians, most of whom want nothing to do with Putin’s Russia. Nearly a million live today in the U.S.; more than 1 million live in Israel; more than 1 million have fled Russia since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine; and, yes, many more millions live in Ukraine iteelf, the land Putin now claims to protect.