A side character hijacks the plot

A telling example of how liteature can be hijacked and manipulated by those in power, and an intellectual's conscience devoured, albeit unknowingly, by ever-hungry politics. The scam is nonetheless veiled by the glamour of fame. A typical means of blinding eyes and hearts, it is something all of us need to beware. Was it not this that Mr. Kuo Pao Kun was criticising in his early works of the 1990s - what was termed the "massage effect"? Goes to show that we should never place 100% trust in those who hold the keys to our pragmatic concerns. The reason is simple: Conscience cannot be traded for anything, other than death.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Dmitry Shlapentokh, For The Straits Times


AT THE Russia Day awards ceremony on June 12, President Vladimir Putin gave the most prestigious national honour, the State Prize, to Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Calling the world-renowned Solzhenitsyn a man of great erudition, Mr Putin mentioned only one of his works in his award speech: a compendium of rare words and expressions in the Russian language. The omission of the major work of the 88-year-old writer and historian is a telling indicator of the political and intellectual culture of the regime.

The work that brought Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize and worldwide acclaim was, of course, The Gulag Archipelago - his account of the Soviet terror machine, most notably Stalin's concentration camp system. The attack on Stalin and Stalinism was one of the major thrusts of Solzhenitsyn's long literary and public career.

He invariably presented Stalin as a bloody tyrant whose reign of terror brought about the murder of countless millions. Stalin's USSR subjugated not only Russians but also numerous ethnic minorities inside the then-Soviet Republic and beyond. Indeed, in Solzhenitsyn's early works, the Red Army's march to the East was seen not as liberation of Eastern Europeans but as conquest, in which they plainly exchanged one dictator, Hitler, for another, Stalin.

This vision of Stalin and the Soviet regime is not in the minds of most average Russians today. For people who see the brazen luxury of the nouveau riche and the pervasive corruption that flourishes despite Mr Putin's promise to establish a 'dictatorship of the law', Stalin has emerged as a tough but just ruler who promptly punished the immoral and corrupt who fattened themselves at the expense of the state and society. Some innocent people had to suffer, but Stalin in this respect was hardly unique, as Mr Putin himself made clear. Recently, speaking with teachers, Mr Putin suggested that the United States' use of atomic weapons in World War II was worse than the abuses ordered by Stalin.

Stalin has also emerged as a builder of a great empire, an image that caters to the nostalgia for Soviet imperial greatness. In this view, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was an empire of mostly ethnic Russians and Russified minorities with a strong but basically protective hold over the numerous minorities. This protective, loving aspect of the empire was underscored by the fact that under the veneer of Marxism was centuries-old Orthodox Christianity, which permeated Russian society regardless of political and socioeconomic constructions.

The Soviet state was driven by the same Orthodox current, and, if one is to believe a recent television mini-series on Stalin, the dictator himself was deeply religious, a good Orthodox Christian. This benign Christian-type nationalism has nothing in common with Western imperial design, where subjugation of conquered people and exploitation of their resources are the major reasons for expansion.

In this new or re-emerging construction of Soviet foreign policy, the Red Army was an exclusively liberating force welcomed by all East Europeans. The repression and terror that befell them after the war, as Stalin duplicated his repressive rule at home, are ignored, as is the fact that the Soviet presence in East Europe was clearly an imperial one, indicated by the fact that the weakening of the USSR led to the immediate disintegration of the Warsaw Treaty.

Mr Gleb Pavlovsky, a leading Kremlin ideologist, has remarked angrily that for some people, '1945 was not a year when fascism was destroyed, but rather a year when East Europe was occupied'.

These notions of Stalin and the Soviet regime explain why Solzhenitsyn's major work was not part of Mr Putin's speech. One might then wonder why Solzhenitsyn has become important to the Russian President. It is true that Solzhenitsyn is more favourably disposed to Mr Putin than to former president Boris Yeltsin, whom he saw as launching a path disastrous for Russia. But Solzhenitsyn received the award only after seven years of Mr Putin's rule. The reason is simple. The West increasingly sees Mr Putin's Russia as restoring an authoritarian, neo-Soviet nature and thus as not acceptable as an equal. Incorporation into the West, especially 'Old Europe', is the strongest desire of the Russian elite. Mr Putin's re-discovery of the Nobel laureate, leader of the Russian dissident movement, is a bid to show the current regime's distance from the Soviet past.

Solzhenitsyn's emphasis on religion is also needed by the Russian elite to create an internal image of a benign moral society based on collaboration and harmony among the members of one, mostly Orthodox, family.

By this award to Solzhenitsyn, President Putin wished to show how different present-day Russia is from the USSR. Yet in his 'selective' reading of the writer's huge literary output, Mr Putin has followed the Soviet authorities, who also 'selectively' appealed to the aspects of great Russian writers that suited their needs.

Following this tradition, Mr Putin has transformed the greatest living Russian writer and virulent critic of the totalitarian regime into an obscure philologist.


The writer is associate professor of history at Indiana University South Bend in the United States.