People often ask me, "Why did you stay?" Indeed, I did have opportunities to go to the West in 1991. And I had my share of doubts, too, I confess. But it turned out I had many reasons not to just get up and go. I had a family. I had a certain professional status, and I didn't want to sit down at a student's bench all over again or go in to interview junior assistants. My professional plans to create my own group of young researchers were starting to bear fruit. Finally, and most important, after many trips abroad I realized that although I could live anywhere I pleased, I wanted to live in Russia. This was no manifestation of unadorned patriotism but the result of a fundamental choice.

Many of those who remained in Russia did not stay in one place either. Some went into business and did quite well for themselves. Others started trying to make it in economic consulting. Still others went into politics. Nowadays, while continuing to exploit their "scholarly" status whenever they can, and not disdaining to cite their academic degrees, they are engaged in completely different matters. The most energetic have formed commercial firms that have taken up quarters in their old institutes and solicit orders for research work. Strictly academic research has moved off into the shadows. Only those who did not want (or were unable) to do anything else engaged in academic research--those who were either the most talented or the most helpless.

Why didn't I leave academia back in the early 1990s? After all, I had offers to jump into consulting or politics. In part it was stubbornness, an ambition to beat the odds, to be "different from everyone else." In part it was a reluctance to abandon my beloved work. In order to resist that siren song, I had to observe a strict personal principle: Research must be kept completely separate from politics and commerce. That left only professional work that had no relation to business.

At the time, the rhetoric of survival reigned supreme. It was constantly asserted that you could not conduct non-business-related research under those circumstances. The constant refrain of the era was: "You have to live on something, survive somehow." All too often this kind of rhetoric served as justification for leaving the country, leaving the profession, or simply doing nothing.

Soon thereafter, I became the director of a small research subdivision consisting of young colleagues. In the next five years its staff turned over completely. Some left, and I found and invited others to join us. At first people's departures irritated me, threw me for a loop. But I soon worked out two defensive rules. The first: Don't judge anyone (if they left, then so be it). And the second: Don't hold out any hope for those who leave, because almost no one ever comes back.

## Organizational Crisis

In parallel with the exodus of capable researchers, the institute's financial problems became more acute. I soon stopped asking the office for money for foreign travel so as to avoid a predictable refusal. Asking for money for research in a deteriorating situation also turned out to be completely hopeless. More important, though, was the fact that with the beginning of liberalization in 1992, it became utterly impossible to live at all decently on the frozen salary of a research associate. Realizing this, the institute directors sharply reduced the requirements for labor discipline among employees. They started switching over to virtually complete flex time. They stopped checking up on moonlighters, a practice about which they had been rather strict

3

back in the 1980s. And flex time, as we know, is good for individual employees and small
groups but disastrous for a major hierarchical organization. The result was an organizational
crisis that led to the institute's de facto fragmentation. Groups and individual researchers stayed
on who continued to work, regardless of the difficulties. You could count them on your fingers.
Others did practically nothing. But both groups began to engage more and more in their own
scientific and nonscientific affairs on the side. The institute was turning into a "roof" to shelter
the most diverse types of activity.

Periodic attempts were made to reorganize the institute. Once, I remember, I was drawn
into developing fairly radical plans to cut staff. The goal was seen as throwing the "ballast"
overboard and qualitatively improving working conditions for those who were left, the most
capable associates. But all this remained on the level of bold plans. In most instances the
administration did not have the heart to dismiss anyone. Actually, the staff was cut anyway--as a
result of attrition. The problem was that it was the most energetic who were leaving and the
"ballast" stayed right where it was. And although new personnel have been turning up at the
institute since the mid-1990s, unfortunately, they are not very impressive professionally. The
staff has continued to deteriorate. A sure sign for me was very simple: I had no desire to bring
anyone in to join us (as I had earlier). With time it became clear that as a matter of principle these
large hierarchical structures cannot be reorganized. They possess tremendous inertia and are
capable of undergoing extended periods of decay.

One of the important reasons for the current decline of the Academy of Sciences is rooted
in the institutional separation of research and teaching that was characteristic of the Soviet
period. Systematically, and over many years, only individual associates of our institute gave
lecture. Even the creation of departments of academic institutes in universities--an important and
necessary change--did not turn the situation around. For most "academics," lecturing is alien and
little understood. Many are locked into a relatively narrow specialization and cut off from vital
interaction with future young colleagues. Apart from this, the influx of young people into the
institute has dropped off. And then these "academics" complain that none of the capable people
are coming to them.

All these years I have always taught in various universities as an adjunct, and I have seen
that the isolation of academic research has reflected poorly on the universities as well. Even in
the leading institutions of higher education, only a very few teachers, who are chronically
swamped with classroom hours, retain the motivation to do systematic research. And since
competition from practicing researchers is negligible, education is largely turning into training by
alien standards: they are teaching something they have never done themselves in a serious way.

## Survival Strategies

The early 1990s were a difficult time for research from the psychological as well as the material
point of view. More than once I got the impression that no one needed all this work. Hardly any
major conferences were held, and many regular seminars stopped altogether. Conference activity
mostly shifted abroad. The domestic dialogue among Russian researchers was destroyed became
conceptual conventions had eroded and a common language was lost. Everyone was cultivating
his own garden and speaking in the language of the few foreign books he had managed to read by
then.

4

At first we ran largely on sheer enthusiasm. Then we learned to write applications for Western grants and started modifying our style of work accordingly. A sad comment went around: "Today no one talks about ideas; everyone talks about grants." This was half a joke and half the truth. Trips to the West (always at the expense of the receiving side) were a good source of material support (apart from the opportunities for additional teaching). To this day these trips are viewed largely as a way of making a little money on the side. A line of demarcation runs through the scientific community--between those who travel and do have grants and those who sit at home and don't.

Many scholars have begun purposefully seeking out contacts with their Western colleagues. They might latch onto some research topic and supplement their work for a miserable sum (by today's standards). And who would dare reproach colleagues for this when their salary amounts to $15-20 a month, and when one dollar will only take you halfway across Moscow in a taxi?

Participating in a research project with Western colleagues also raised one's professional prestige. Simultaneously, though, a serious trap lay hidden there. The cooperation, as a rule, was unequal. Whoever paid the money called the shots. In addition, it was felt that Russian specialists had a lot of learning to do in order to reach international standards. As a result, the overall concept of the project was proposed (and often strictly dictated) by its Western directors. They also took on the work of interpreting the results. And the local specialists collected information or gave life to other people's questionnaires. There have been examples of genuine partnership, but at first they were relatively rare. There's no doubt that, apart from money, any cooperation brings certain professional benefits as well. But I had to turn down such proposals many times. I do not dispute that at the time both my colleagues and I lost out in the material sense. Now, though, I have no regrets about time misspent.

Today, when we evaluate the results of the 1990s, we have a right to say that a certain, albeit small, number of professionals were able to demonstrate a principle: Even with the most drastic shortage of funds, one can conduct research without bending to serve someone else's interest. Later it became clear that in addition one can earn a living by pursuing that kind of professional work.

## *The Role of Western Foundations*

Western sponsorship played an enormous role in the survival and development of the Russian research community in the 1990s. Today there is practically no even slightly prominent Russian researcher who is not indebted to some Western foundation--and often to several. This has meant money for field research, equipment, publications, and travel. Without exaggeration one can say that nearly all the leading academic research programs and many of the more advanced educational programs in Russia in the 1990s were made possible by Western funds. I would not like to think what would have happened to basic research in that period if half a dozen major Western philanthropic foundations had abandoned Russia. As for my own research, most of the projects simply would never have happened.

True, two noteworthy Russian funds did appear which used funds from the Russian budget to finance and support basic research: the Russian Basic Research Fund (RFFI) and the Russian Humanities Research Fund (RGNF). This is an obvious improvement, but the work of these funds, unfortunately, has not solved the basic problem. It has become clear that there are

5

extreme difficulties with organizing serious projects under these grants. The reasons are several. First, the sums allocated are insufficient for conducting any kind of large-scale fieldwork; there is only enough to supplement salaries for associates and to acquire basic equipment. Second, even these relatively modest sums are subject to all taxes (the government has resumed its old practice of shifting funds from one pocket to another), and the institutes deduct overhead from their own associates at the maximum allowable rate. Third, sums are transferred very irregularly, making it very hard to plan any kind of fieldwork. Finally, grants are transferred not in full amounts. As director of the projects, I was supposed to receive 75 and 53 percent from each of the two funds of the amounts approved under the competition, but then I was asked to deliver my final report and shut down the project. After August 1998, one of these funds declared total default on the major international two-year grant we had won. Thanks only to Western donors, who more than graciously assumed not only their own obligations but the obligations of the Russian side, could the project proceed successfully, with only six months' delay.

It would be nice, of course, to work on Russian money, but for the time being we have to admit that for practical purposes all relatively major and significant empirical projects have been carried out with the support of Western (primarily American) foundations. Their grant policies are fairly liberal; I would not say that they dictate the conditions in any unreasonable manner. However, they do shape the strategy of academic research in Russia to a significant degree. And unfortunately, hardly anyone here is concerned about that.

## Unexpected Relief

At a certain point in the mid-1990s, when everyone was still talking about the general crisis and decline, I suddenly felt that things had become easier. Many attractive professional offers had materialized. Moreover, the same work that previously had run on nearly pure enthusiasm, began to generate all kinds of requests and hints at offers of monetary reward. We began to secure research grants regularly. Although the number of sponsoring foundations was extremely limited, it turned out to be not a very difficult matter to get grants; despite the high stakes, the actual competition was not great. Of course, our past persistence was bearing fruit. We had gained authority and made a name for ourselves within a relatively closed circle of experts.

The financial status of our own academic institute began to stabilize. More and more space in its building was being leased. The federal budget settled some of the debt it owed the Academy. Along with this, the institute concluded some fairly major economic agreements that brought in extrabudgetary funds. However, after covering expenses for supporting the cumbersome infrastructure, the resources allocated specifically for the needs of research were hardly thrilling.

By the mid-1990s, participation in the creation and development of the new educational institutions attempting to introduce Western higher educational practices had become very important for me. I had the good fortune to work in three such institutions: the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, the Higher School of Economics, and the European University in St. Petersburg. Today, except for the Higher School of Economics, these are small "chamber" institutions of higher education, as it were, that have been called upon to demonstrate that we can work differently in Russia, and can produce a Russian "product" that meets Western standards. Thus far not enough students are graduating from such institutions to alter the situation in the

6

country drastically, but very soon these graduates will be playing an important role in the new research community.

At first these new institutions began each new academic year as if it were to be their last. Gradually, though, they achieved relative stability. In addition to my own increasingly steady teaching income, I began to gain confidence that I could always find professional work in virtually any amount I desired. And although, whenever they would meet, my colleagues complained of their hard life as they had before, there was the sense that by the latter half of the 1990s many of them had already found and furnished for themselves professional niches. I began to receive questions like "How are you poor people doing?"--usually asked out of inertia with a thinly disguised smile.

Professional credentials--both my own and those of my colleagues--began to improve noticeably. We began to know our way around the Western literature, we each had completed several decent projects, we had written new books. Without ceasing to learn from our Western colleagues, we stopped gaping at them. And a feeling of professional dignity is a matter of no small importance in any business.

The old problems with publishing research articles vanished. There were more journals and their backlog of unpublished submissions dropped. You didn't have to hustle any more; the editors themselves were asking for materials on virtually any professional topic. At times journal articles were published with a speed that any Western colleague would think fantastic--in a couple of months. True, there is now a lot less to read. Formerly, every article in any leading publication was an event noticed by one's colleagues. Today, you have to publish three articles in different publications for a Moscow colleague to read even one. In the provinces, as before, they are reading mainly a limited group of accessible post-Soviet journals.

Actually, there are still problems with the publication of monographs. Nowadays this is not a question of political connections and ideological purity, but money. Publishers are interested in publishing different kinds of textbooks and primers, for which there is a huge demand. You have to camouflage your monographs as supplementary textbooks; then everything becomes much simpler.

On the whole, the level of competition in the academic sphere throughout the 1990s has been extremely low. The same people keep running into each other in various settings--and that, of course, is both good and bad.

## What Lies Ahead

What if the Western foundations were suddenly to close up shop? What can the Russian researcher fall back on? Theoretically, there are three possible sources: the government, business, and Russian noncommercial organizations.

Unfortunately, Russian business has shown no particular interest in research, especially if it falls outside the framework of the current state of the economy. The exceptions usually have to do with the researcher's personal acquaintances, who might throw in some resources out of friendship. Institutionalized support of "bright ideas," however, is extremely undeveloped. Actually, even before 1917 Russian entrepreneurs contributed to hospitals and children's institutions and willingly patronized the arts but much more rarely helped the universities. A tradition of sorts appears to have been continued today.

7

Nor do I hold out much hope for financial nourishment from the newly created noncommercial organizations. Russian philanthropic institutions are weak and themselves are looking for foreign grants. True, a special type of noncommercial organizations has arisen-- political parties, which are accumulating tremendous assets. As election campaigns approach, they will give intellectuals a chance to make some money. However, the "research" they request is very specific. And I have no desire to change my principle of keeping "research outside of politics."

Our overall conclusion about the future is that if there is going to be additional support for research and educational programs from Russian resources, it is going to come from government agencies. Whether we like it or not, the most realistic alternative to Western financing is the resources of the government and the agencies directly dependent on it.

Although strengthening the role of government structures will not (as many fear) lead to the nationalization of research, state control over research would increase, dooming some independent research and educational organizations to extinction or merger. Those which are the largest and strongest and are most firmly undergirded by state orders will remain, as will the smallest, which can combine maximum flexibility with minimum expenses and few high expectations.

From the point of view of staffing, the greater participation of women in the social sciences will continue (as is rather clearly visible in the field of sociology). Another important factor is the gradually increasing flow of young researchers returning to Russia after getting their education in Western universities. We need to attempt to capture at least some of these young people. In the final analysis, such changes encourage professional standards more oriented toward international experience.

## What Is to Be Done

Everyone says, "Give us more money." In and of itself, though, money will solve nothing. We need to restructure institutions. Above all, we need to overcome the serious split between research and educational activity. Should the government issue yet another edict? That's laughable. Or, as some feel, shut down the Academy and transfer all the financing to the universities? In and of itself, this will yield nothing, either. You can't make a teacher who has to prepare and deliver over twenty lecture hours a week write strong articles as well, even if you shower him with golden rain.

How is this problem to be solved? We must find institutional forms that closely link universities and effective research teams. In recent years quite a lot has been accomplished: Departments of academic institutes have been introduced in universities, while academic institutions have launched their own state and non-state universities. All these steps are still not enough, though. Institute departments have proven to be detached from university life. Educational programs in universities under the Academy of Sciences mainly provide supplementary higher education. The usual baccalaureate degree, with its abundance of general, nonspecialized disciplines, is not within the reach of academic institutes. Nor is that their task.

I envision the following ideal model for a combined institutional form. For example, a department is created in an existing university. It is made up of half staff teachers and half staff researchers, all working in a single efficient research center. The researchers teach as adjuncts in the given department, and the teachers engage in research by holding joint appointments in the

center. This arrangement would assure close ties between the institutions and make possible the gradual reduction in the costs of specialization.

Because such institutional arrangements are not always possible, we must improve the status of research work in universities and learn how to evaluate it correctly. At the moment, university teachers consider research to be optional, because whether or not you conduct research, your salary or your total teaching and administrative load will not change. No one is likely to give you time off to write your dissertation. And honoraria for scientific publications (if they are paid at all) do not compensate for the effort expended. We need a system which weighs the staff teachers' research load equally with their teaching and administrative load. At our disposal is a universal criterion and measure--the publication of books and articles in leading scientific journals.

The next problem concerns the relationship between government-supported and independent universities and research centers. Which should get the emphasis? It used to be said that state institutions were useless under the new conditions, but now criticism of the new, primarily non-governmental entities has intensified. We do need stricter controls, including licensing, over academic programs and we must develop standardized measurements for academic programs more actively. Standards, however, should not be like directives. In setting standards and improving academic programs we need to study more closely the experience of the new, so-called model universities: the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, the European University in St. Petersburg, and the New School of Economics (Moscow). One useful step would be to initiate partnership programs between universities in the capital and the provinces, such as that initiated on a large scale by the Open Society Institute. Meanwhile, new small educational institutions, for their part, have already created a diversity of curricula that has made the educational monsters sit up and take notice.

The future trend is for education to become more and more open. The number of people receiving higher and continuing education will grow, in part through the development of open universities and new forms of distance learning. The future also lies with the development of "through" education that begins with high school or college preparatory department at a specific university, moves into the usual five-year program, and concludes with a master's degree and graduate study for students who have distinguished themselves.

Academic institutions will have to go on earning money--through tuition fees, additional educational services, contracts, and research grants. They will have to work more actively with government structures, which will be functioning not only as monitors but also as clients. Especially important is the federal interaction with the regional and municipal authorities. Most important, we must not to lose a sense of proportion. A clear-cut distinction has to be made between the commercial and the noncommercial and between programs initiated by clients and those by researchers. Commercial contracts that bring in the most money cannot be allowed to dictate their own terms. It is important for the nation to maintain its own strategic course.

* * *

The same month I wrote these lines, in July 1999, I quit the Russian Academy of Sciences, where I had worked for more than a decade, and moved to a new university which in a mere five years has grown from nothing into one of the country's leading educational centers. This move promised a complicated but professionally more interesting life. One heard the words of

9

Experimenting with Liberal Education in Russia:
The Break with Soviet-Era Conventions

Nikolai Koposov and Dina Khapaeva*

Canterbury, England. August 18, 1991. "You don't read the newspapers and you don't watch television. How are you going to keep up with the news while I'm away?" Our British professor friend put this question as he was leaving for his vacation in Italy. "Not reading the newspapers is part of our Russian cultural tradition," we replied. "And you'll tell us the news when you return." Meanwhile, in Foros, on the Black Sea, Mikhail Gorbachev's communications with the outside world had already been cut.

We learned about the coup late that same evening. The next few days we spent in front of television. The BBC stuck struck us as the eighth wonder of the world. We felt as if we were present in Moscow finding out about events the instant they occurred. We couldn't believe what was happening. A military coup had broken out in Russia! Hundreds of thousands of people in a nation of slaves had decided to risk their lives and fight for freedom. Russia seemed to be a different country, and the Russians a different people, not at all like those we knew when we departed for Paris that day in 1982.

...The airport customs agent, a red-haired woman, had already spent an hour rummaging around in our suitcases. The mountain of confiscated books and papers kept growing. Behind the glass partition, we saw the frightened faces of our friends who were seeing us off. No politics at all from that agent. Just the ordinary Soviet-style mockery of human beings...

"Look your homeland in the face for the last time," we had said to each other. We felt certain we would never return. Admittedly, it took several years of the reforms for us to believe that the past would not return. But after the failure of the August 1991 coup, we could no longer relate to our country with fear and contempt, as we had in the past.

We were not alone, though, in misjudging the durability of the Soviet regime. The collapse of Communism came as a complete surprise to many Sovietologists (to say nothing of the Soviet people). For this there were many reasons. One of them had to do with the very concept of totalitarianism.

The West had long regarded the Soviet Union as the totalitarian regime *par excellence*, although in the 1980s some historians and political scientists began to doubt whether even Stalin (not to mention his heirs) had actually controlled people's behavior and consciousness in their totality. As often happens (remember the debates about Byzantine autocracy or French absolutism?), it turned out that the "ideal model" for totalitarianism vastly simplified reality. Not that totalitarianism did not exist: rather, Soviet society was far more complex and contradictory that the concept of totalitarianism allowed. But this hitherto forbidden concept had extraordinary

* Nikolai Evgen'evich Koposov - Born in 1955, Koposov studied European history at Leningrad State University, where he also earned his advanced degree. He worked and taught in France, Britain, Germany and Hungary under various exchange and visitor programs. His research interests include the epistemology of history and intellectual history of the social sciences. In addition to his current teaching responsibilities at the St. Petersburg State University, he is one of the founders of the Smolny College for Liberal Arts and Sciences, a joint undertaking with Bard College.

Dina Rafailovna Khapaeva - Born in 1963, Khapaeva studied ancient history in Leningrad State University, where she earned her doctoral degree. She pursued a career in sociological research and worked in numerous European institutions, publishing articles in several languages. Khapaeva is currently director of external relations in the Smolny College for Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg.

success in Russia in the 1980s. Calling Communism "totalitarian" meant identifying it with
Fascism, thereby depriving it of legitimacy. The simplicity and persuasiveness of the totalitarian
concept made it an effective ideological weapon. More subtle analytical constructs seemed
unnecessary: it was enough to say "totalitarianism," and the entire course of Soviet history could
be explained.

Except, of course, for the final act in the drama. If the Soviet system of repression were
as absolute as it sometimes seemed to us, struggling against it would only have been tilting at
windmills. Besides, there would not have been anyone to fight. In the end, though, the same
concept that had influenced the Russian public's mindset and helped Communism to collapse
made it more difficult for us to foresee the impending event. In a sense, the rigid concept of
totalitarianism proved to be an obstacle to understanding Soviet--and post-Soviet--reality.

The most important lesson of the abortive 1991 coup was: don't underestimate the
complexity of the world. If the Party-state machine eventually failed as an instrument of
repression, that was because the dichotomies of good and evil, freedom and slavery were not its
only operational logic. Every element of the Soviet system contained various whimsically
intertwined--and at times mutually exclusive--principles. The Communist grand design proved
to be inseparable from the history of European humanism--in terms of continuing as well as
replicating that humanist tradition.

Today, thinking about Communism "dialectically" seems a comparatively safe pastime.
And it may therefore not be very interesting. But let's try to apply the lesson of the world's
complexity not to the Other, but to ourselves. Not to the abandoned "evil empire" of the past,
but to the very intelligentsia in Russia which considered itself as the diametrical opposite of the
Soviet system, while constituting at the same time an integral part of that system. The
intelligentsia in Russia today is going through a profound crisis: after Communism's collapse, it
found itself deprived of a key element of its identity.

Indeed, the idea of the intelligentsia in Russia cannot be separated from the idea of the
Russian government. From the time of its emergence in the second half of the nineteenth
century, the intelligentsia staunchly opposed the tsarist regime; later, it simply extended this
opposition to the Soviet regime. As in the past, you can still hear talk of how the intelligentsia
epitomized at its very core rejection of the Soviet system, and as such served as the very force in
society which destroyed that system. (You can also hear a paradoxical, but typical, elaboration
on this theme: today the intelligentsia is suffering from the market reforms--from the
irresponsible policies of the same Russian government). Any description of the travails of the
intelligentsia, the repository of the highest humanist values, and yet the victim (in the heroic
version, also the unmasker) of those in power, resembles a subject followed immediately by a
predicate. If you say "totalitarianism," you would tell a tale about the control of minds. If you
say "intelligentsia," your tale will be about faith and suffering. Nor does it matter much that
neither tale is consistent with the other. After all, if total control had been in effect, there would
have been no place left for spiritual opposition; and if opposition existed, then control was not
total. Words have meaning not because they describe reality, but because they are used in a
certain way by people who aspire to something, loathe something, dream about something--and
who express their hopes and fears in words. Let's remember this--it may help us tell a different
tale.

Of course, it's impossible to deny that the Soviet regime suppressed free thinking and
viewed the intelligentsia with suspicion. Or that a significant part of the intelligentsia supported the
October Revolution, and only later became disenchanted with it. Or that Communism turned into a

Gulag, but never entirely renounced its humanistic ideals, or the hope of turning those ideals into
reality --a reality that the intelligentsia, in Russia as well as beyond its borders, had long associated
with that doctrine. Or that the Communist leaders were pragmatic men who understood the
benefits they could reap from exploiting these ideals in such a way that they could integrate the
intelligentsia (which they could not do without in any case) into the Soviet system--a goal that
would hardly have been possible without all kinds of compromises. Or that the intelligentsia, for
its part, was doomed to search for acceptable forms of coexistence with the regime--not at the cost
of hypocrisy so much as of self-deception.

Enormous psychological energy was invested in this self-deception. It gave rise to
extremely perverse reactions, including bitterness and intellectual barrenness. There was still
enough energy to lie to oneself, but not enough to create. The general public believed that only an
insignificant minority of the intelligentsia found the courage to struggle against the system; the
majority of intellectuals, in this view, timidly sympathized with the minority and merely persisted
in deceiving themselves. But it was the intelligentsia which gradually turned into the bearer of
humanistic values; it was from this milieu that most leaders of the democratic movement came.
Meanwhile, the hypocritical repetition of the words "Liberty, equality and fraternity" cost the
Soviet regime too much; and on that rainy day in August 1991, the generals didn't dare issue the
command: "Fire!"

From these observations, a far more contradictory picture emerges than that depicting a
confrontation between totalitarianism and the intelligentsia. Most of the Soviet intelligentsia,
which had co-existed with Soviet rule for decades, did not consist of Sakharovs and Solzhenitsyns.
The many adaptation strategies essential for this co-existence could not disappear in a single hour
on August 21, 1991; they continue, although in ways that are not always positive, to influence the
intelligentsia's sense of identity. Recall the bewilderment that ensued at the end of the 1980s,
when the shackles of censorship fell away and when, instead of a gallery of masterpieces or a burst
of creative energy, the eyes of society saw a void. Consider also how many of our colleagues
continue voting for the Communists. Any hope for a renaissance of the Russian intelligentsia will
be vain until we acknowledge the link between today's intelligentsia and that of the Soviet system-
-our common bond.

Of course, not all members of the intelligentsia sought to compromise with the Soviet
regime, but neither did they all wind up in camps and psychiatric hospitals. After all, "someone"
continued to attend Party meetings, bestow and receive advanced degrees, take examinations on
the history of the CPSU. These numerous "someones"--we ourselves--needed the operational
means to secure our psychological comfort. Now it's more important for us to understand how this
arsenal of means is at work in our present day lives than to award ourselves the titles of
uncompromising fighters against Soviet rule in the past.

One of the most important methods of our psychological self-defense was the ideology of
professionalism. This was a spontaneous reaction against attempts to make life, and especially
scholarship, an ideological instrument called upon to serve the building of Communism. Clearly
not many persons decided to question Marxist ideology openly. On the contrary, we would say
that "Marxism is good for everyone, but philosophers, rather than scientists and scholars, should
study it; scientists will be of greater service if they do their own work, and not just reiterate
Marxist truths." Saying this was relatively safe. Of course, even this stance required a certain
amount of courage and amounted to a form of protest. Nonetheless, what we had here was a
certain self-deception among those dissatisfied with the limited extent of their own opposition.
While requiring total ideologization in theory, the Communist leaders rather soberly understood

that this was neither possible nor necessary; it would suffice if academics simply kept their
distance from politics. Keeping one's distance from politics meant not allowing oneself to reflect
on any profound issues--assuming, of course, that you didn't want to think about them in orthodox
Marxist terms. The Soviet regime permitted, not to say encouraged, various forms of pseudo-
opposition in order to avoid the growth of real opposition, creating a vast kingdom of crooked
mirrors, in which only a few persons could distinguish between the false and the true. Because the
autonomy of science was acceptable to the regime, it served as a comparatively safe form of
protest. Of course, this form of compromise, just like any other, had its price: The intelligentsia
could retain a certain degree of autonomous professional activity, but on condition that its
members undertook the enormous labor of "self-education." One could think only within certain
limits, beyond which it was dangerous to stray. Going beyond those limits, one had to persuade
oneself, was not so much dangerous as absurd, and even unworthy. How could this be done?
Naturally, by sanctifying one's chains, by creating a belief system in which the rejection of
freedom actually became a manifestation of virtue.

The ideology of professionalism was just such a belief system. Aspiring to narrow
specialization is the professional affliction of most scientists. It represented the utmost in
respectability --after all, its adepts were no "scientific bureaucrats," but "real scientists,"
acknowledged leaders in their fields. The autonomy of science was an ever-elusive ideal
compromise that one had to continually re-conquer, and with a certain degree of risk. Becoming a
professional seemed an achievement, almost a heroic feat. But we remembered the price we paid.
In order to justify the tactic, we had to convince ourselves that there was no alternative; to do so,
we had to condemn, and in the most severe fashion, those who refused to pay this price, those who
feared the regime a little less than we did, those who allowed themselves, if not acts of dissidence,
then at least periods of simple reflection, "daytime excursions" into the forbidden realm of theory.
It's no surprise that for such narrow professionals, the word "intellectual"--with which they readily
labeled such people--became almost a swear word.

Proclaiming that professional rather than moral, civil, or cultural values were the epitome
of perfection; rejecting philosophical reflection in favor of pursuing narrow professional interests;
and retreating into purely academic discourse with utter disregard for political or social issues, did
make it possible to achieve impressive results. These results, of course, served as a definite line of
defense against Marxist discourse, limiting its penetration into the domain of scientific debate.
The quest for scientific truth (the more private the truth, the safer it was) helped overcome many
moral problems that arose in Soviet daily life. At the same time, this ideology of professionalism
turned its adherents into very convenient citizens of the Soviet regime.

The extreme hostility these adepts had toward "speculation" of any kind led them to equate
any philosophical or epistemological thought that was not directly related to a narrowly
professional topic with Marxist normative discourse. As such, it was to be discarded as irrelevant.
Even the most intellectually open-minded scholars made establishing impenetrable disciplinary
barriers against Marxist ideology a point of honor.

One would think that the need for complex mechanisms of adaptation to Communism
would disappear after the system collapsed, and that the perverse reactions--such as the ideology of
professionalism--underlying these mechanisms would no longer be necessary. Nonetheless,
perestroika was the very time when such devices flourished. This phenomenon was related to the
intelligentsia's general transformation, which in turn led to the emergence of new groups in
Russian society on the cusp of the 1980s and 1990s.

(c1)

...When we returned to Russia soon after the August 1991 coup, we were astounded by the evidence of a revolution in the most minute details of everyday life. During those August days our friends had been in the Palace Square in St. Petersburg and in front of the White House in Moscow. Thanks to their stories, we relived again, this time from the inside, the events which we had watched from afar. By then, most of our friends had embraced politics, business, or journalism as their life's work. Of course, all of them vowed to return to the field of history, but in the meantime, they "simply didn't have time for anything." And we were about to leave the country again...

But it wasn't those colleagues who had once been the hope of their teachers -- those who now so easily abandoned their academic institutes and departments (which they were just about to inherit), and whose departure, in the eyes of the academic world, was a betrayal of their calling, a moral failure, almost like our own departure abroad--who astounded us. It was our colleagues who continued to annotate Herodotus and date fibulas from the routine excavations in Pontius Heraklea, as if nothing at all had happened. And apart from their "absorption in their work," demonstratively triumphing over the destroyed world order, you could guess that on the other side of this posture was the painful desire to create the impression that everything was just as it had been before.

At that time it seemed that only those who were incapable of doing anything else-- including being able to secure a minimally acceptable standard of living--remained in the Russian academic world. The university survived in those years largely thanks to those who had nowhere to go, or who hadn't managed to leave. Their situation seemed nearly hopeless. For a number of years there was a feeling of total stagnation. The only thing that was not destroyed or subjected to doubt was academia's system of professional values, since it occupied a very marginal place in the public consciousness during the years of turbulent changes. This system remained untouched and survived intact. Is it any wonder that the ideology of professionalism became the only method of bringing back a lost era?

Of course, it is not professionalism itself that's bad, it is the ideology of professionalism. Not so much because it is an ideology, but because it assumes an extremely simplified concept of the individual: his value is seen not in his uniqueness and the richness of his inner world, but in the degree that he can master a number of standardized skills. Under this notion, talent has no place. Professionalism expresses the values and aims of the petit bourgeois: accessible to all industrious, hard-working people, it transforms mediocre abilities into something perfect, levels out diversity, and does not push for another, higher measure of the individual. Professionalism, like the social sciences, is a middle-class ideology that attained an almost perfect form in the USSR.

Today the ideology of professionalism obstructs the path to innovation in three closely related areas: the modernization of the education system, the resolution of the crisis in the humanities, and the development of Russia's intellectual life. More generally, it hinders the formation of a new Russian intelligentsia.

"Does French intellectual life interest you?" a French colleague asked us when we first arrived in Paris in 1982.

"Yes," we replied. "We have already attended two concerts."

This true story, which we often laughed about later with our French friends, was never popular in Russia. The reason is simple: most of our compatriots were simply not familiar with the phrase "intellectual life," just as we had not been when we arrived in France. At that time we decided that it meant cultural life, since it followed from the context that what was meant was

something different from scientific life. If it wasn't scientific and if it wasn't cultural, what was it? In our picture of the world there simply was no place for a third something.

Today we understand the term "intellectual life" to mean a particular realm of culture--and a particular type of discourse -- where an initial philosophical understanding of the results of basic research in the disparate sciences can emerge and be juxtaposed to other findings. New problems and new approaches can thus arise and help determine the further development of thought in these disciplines. In other words, this is the point where scholarship intersects with the life of society. It is because of intellectual life that the renewal of scientific thought takes place (at least as far as the social sciences are concerned), for it is in the real world that scientific intuition usually finds its roots. And thanks to intellectual life, scholars are able to make their contribution to the formation of public opinion and to the development of society.

Does it follow that nothing analogous to intellectual life ever existed or now exists in Russia? Not necessarily, but, in any case, from our comments about the ideology of professionalism, it is clear why this aspect of culture remained undeveloped. Responding to the problems of contemporary life was the very thing that professionals were forbidden to do. They could have responded in unforeseen ways; to be more precise, the distillation of new data on societal trends into scientific theories could threaten Marxist dogma. Of course, such general distillation of ideas did occur, but in private, secretly, during the nightly talks around the kitchen table that were an inseparable part of the Soviet intelligentsia's daily life. These secret colloquia were little known to the general public and remained unnamed and unacknowledged. And consequently -- distorted. The transition from the private space of the kitchen to the public space of the scientific institution led to an automatic switching from "reflection in general" to stereotyped professional discourse.

Even in today's democratic Russia, intellectual life has not undergone any particular development, nor has a dialogue developed among intellectuals and society about contemporary problems, such as the role of intellectuals in public life, or the state of affairs in science and education. In today's Russia, culture and economics, politics and science remain extremely isolated from each other, despite the fact that many new politicians and businessmen came from the ranks of the intelligentsia. But in leaving their academic disciplines, our friends aspired to become professionals in fields that were new to them -- politics, business, journalism -- precisely because of their conviction, generally shared, that the main evil of the Soviet regime was the lack of professionalism among those in power. When our friends returned to their desks as historians, anthropologists, sociologists (if the opportunity arose), they once again withdrew into a world of professional discourse and professional interests. If the word "intellectual" in Russian has begun to have a more favorable connotation, this is because it now means professionals "like those in the West" who accomplish something--unlike members of the Russian intelligentsia who talk on and on about nothing. Small wonder that intellectuals in the true sense, who advocate certain philosophical principles, discern connections between many disciplines, and make their observations known to society at large, virtually do not exist in contemporary Russia.

A free and robust intellectual life is essential for Russia today. As an ingredient of that "social glue" whose secrets sociologists probe, its integrating force is exactly what Russian society needs. A vigorous intellectual life, beyond being the essential condition for Russia's becoming a democracy, is important for other reasons as well. Without it, the intelligentsia will hardly be able to create a new self-awareness more appropriate for out times. Without it, the crisis in the social sciences will not be overcome, nor will intellectuals be brought down from the ivory tower in

which practitioners of the ideology of professionalism tried to immune them, so that they might
turn and face society's problems head on.

Several years ago, during a discussion among scholars on teaching history at a recently
founded university, the dean of St. Petersburg historians declared: "We are traditionalists. We are
certain that the scholarly methods we use will still be good for about another 200 years. And then
we'll see if we need other methods."

The methods he was talking about were, of course, not Marxist at all. Although his
generation of historians graduated from the "iron school of Marxism," and absorbed its analytical
categories, the best of that generation do not in the least regard Marxism as their own.

What our colleague alluded to are techniques of historical research. It is customary to think
that Soviet historiography, like the other social sciences, suffered heavily from ideological
domination, as well as from the low professional level of our researchers and instructors in higher
educational institutions. For a long time we held this view ourselves. In the late 1980s we helped
found the Soviet Association of Young Historians, which advocated the deideologization and
technological modernization of historical studies. Only later did we realize that the very
domination of Marxist phraseology triggered a drive for technical competence. We found quite a
few high-class Soviet historians who were completely fluent in modern historical research
methods.

The most attractive of these methods were those as far removed from the theory of history
as possible. We favored the study of origins, paleography, and archival research, but we regarded
with guarded alarm the methodological revolution in twentieth century historiography led by the
French "Annales" school. Underlying our reservations was the conviction that every theory is by
definition evil; the determination of facts is the essence of historical research. This analytical
system was the canonical authority to which our esteemed colleague in St. Petersburg appealed.
Today this is not a matter of generations. In 1999 a young historian created a storm in Moscow by
publishing an article entitled "Forward to Herodotus," in which he pronounced all general
historical constructions obsolete, and argued that future historiography will center on the telling of
tales, albeit on the basis of serious historical criticism. Although most historians did not approve
of the article's extreme tone, many judged it as the "confession of a generation."

If this was so, what does this mean? Of course, it would be easy to say that after the
dissolution of the Marxist paradigm, the ensuing methodological chaos can be overcome only with
the help of internationally accepted theories. These chaotic tendencies, however, exist well
beyond the borders of Russia. It is a widely held view that the social sciences, and history above
all, are in a crisis, that postmodernism has cast doubt upon their capacity to ascertain true
knowledge and be useful to society. In contemporary French, English, and German literature, one
encounters the idea that all the troubles of the social sciences come from excessive absorption in
theories: philosophers must be banished from the ranks; scholars must work as the positivists of
the nineteenth century did. Both the West and Russia have their postmodernists as well as their
intellectual conservatives (actually they are two sides of the same coin). Pure reason lacks
confidence in its own powers. Other theories, which claimed to possess a more or less unified
explanation of social life, including functionalism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis, also arouse
skepticism. This is no localized phenomenon, nor can it be explained using localized reasons.

The crisis in the social sciences elsewhere can also be related to the collapse of
Communism. If the social sciences are seen as a response to the Communist utopian experiment
and as the justification of a middle way between capitalism and Communism, it is not surprising

that many of their programs were considered to confront Marxism. When Marxism began rapidly losing its attractiveness, the urgency of legitimizing "the third way" also diminished.

In our view, the most important thing the social sciences have to say about the human being is that they articulate and substantiate a particular cultural, anthropological ideal. For example, a historian who discovers one or another dimension of human individuality in the past expresses his view about what a person is or should be. Thus, for Marx, man's principal purpose and the main measure of his worth is the class struggle. During Russia's "brilliant three decades" (from 1950-1980 the conception of the individual as the subject (not the object) of culture triumphed. With the establishment of social stability and the extensive growth of universities, that time of "the paradise of intellectuals," this concept, introduced by professional transmitters of culture, was broadly attractive. It accorded with the strategy of the "third way" and with the values and aims of an intelligentsia which had moved away from orthodox Marxism, with its theory of class struggle; at the same time, the concept maintained a general humanistic-socialist orientation. In the USSR, this evolution was no less obvious than it was in France, for example, although, of course, its public manifestation was more difficult. Thus, Russian scholars invested much intellectual energy in the history and theory of culture because one could to some degree express in symbolic language what one could not say openly. Accordingly, the finest achievements of Soviet social sciences in this period relate specifically to the history and theory of culture.

But does it not follow from this that in Russia today the main problem is that the intelligentsia has no equally obvious cultural-anthropological ideal it finds essential to affirm? An ideal that could inspire a new generation of scholars to create for Russia "its Athens, its Rome, its Renaissance"? Man as a subject of culture has triumphed over man as a subject of class struggle, but now the professionals have nobody to hide from in that ivory tower. The psychological springs of creative energy which inspired generations of scholars have run dry. Paradoxically, this has happened precisely during a period of colossal changes, when the Russian intelligentsia's creative energy is needed as never before. After all, if the social sciences serve as the ideology of contemporary democracy, their crisis means a crisis of democratic values. In Russia, the future of which is much less predictable that that of America, for example, the danger of such a state of affairs is especially obvious. What can be done in these circumstances?

These reflections brought us to the idea that we need a critique of the social sciences, both as a particular symbolic system and as a particular ideology. Reducing the individual to a subject of culture was a notion derived from the evolution of the social sciences after their inception at the end of the nineteenth century. This historical context might explain why it was simply impossible to formulate a new ideal of the individual within the framework of the social sciences. It follows that without a review of the basic certainties of the social sciences, a substantive intellectual renewal is impossible, much less a new flowering of intellectual life. Initially we gave little thought to what a new ideal of the individual might be. Most of our attention was focused on the symbolic forms which have hindered its formulation.

* * *

In Paris, in the early 1990s, we worked on a project of critiquing the social sciences. The social sciences, we thought, were insufficiently reflective; its practitioners had adopted a limited number of analytical calculations, whose origins they though little about; it was this uncritical attitude toward themselves, together with a certain intellectual laziness, that explained the contemporary crisis. The focus of our work therefore became the analysis of the thinking of researchers in the

social sciences, particularly historians. We were interested in exploring logical errors and contradictions in thinking that would shed light on the logical conflicts which imperceptibly direct our thought patterns.

In critiquing the social sciences, our favorite instrument became the study of the history of ideas. History, especially comparative intellectual history, allows us to see the chain of random circumstances which give rise to the contradictory, logically inconsistent ideas used by the social sciences to construct a vision of the world. We could imagine no better method of "making strange" our habitual forms of thinking or of adopting a critical distance in relation to oneself. This approach to the history of ideas received a positive response in France, where we had worked for a long time, as well as in Russia, to which we finally returned. At the same St. Petersburg University which we had been forced to leave in the late 1980s, we organized a seminar, "Critique of the Social Sciences," which soon developed into the project on "A Comparative Dictionary of Major Historical Ideas in Russian, English, German and French." The project has inspired a series of analogous initiatives in other countries, directed by the major German reference work, "Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe." More than 70 researchers from Russia, the United States, France, Germany, Italy and other countries have agreed to take part in the initiative, projected to last for several years. It is too early to sum up even the preliminary conclusions. We hope that the three-volume edition under preparation will become an important instrument for critiquing the intellectual foundations of the social sciences, as well as for advancing mutual understanding among international scholars. This initiative, of course, will also help the Russian social sciences become a more integral part of the world scientific community.

Enthusiastic as we were about being engaged in a critique of the social sciences, we always thought that the project had a predominantly negative cast, as if it were mainly groundwork, clearing the terrain, preparing instruments for something else. A more positive program was needed, but we didn't know where to find one. In the meantime, we had lived in Russia for an entire year, conducting our seminar, and we didn't just know, we almost physically felt, how much had changed in the country. After the failure of the 1991 coup, we gradually began to evaluate the future of Russia very optimistically. Russia yes--but not the Russian academic world. That seemed an utterly immovable monolith. As far back as 1994 and 1995, we had been telling everyone, and putting it in writing as well, that fresh shoots would not grow for an unpredictably long time in soil where professionalism had been so carefully cultivated by ideologues. Indeed, very little of intellectual interest was taking place in the Russian academic world. But our judgement also reflected the ineradicable habit of thinking in terms of the totalitarian model, a habit that prevented us from accurately evaluating the changes that were appearing as far back as the early 1990s.

In the constantly changing world of today's Russia, even a bastion of conservatism like the academic world could not remain unchanged. The internal controls exercised by the learned patriarchs over their flocks, which were so effective as little as seven or eight years before, had weakened considerably. Having just returned from France, where rigid hierarchy and unquestioning subordination to the master are the rules of the functioning academic world, we discovered in Russia, to our surprise, an unprecedented degree of intellectual freedom. Life had become decentralized, and a scientific career was no longer the only choice for a scion of "a decent family." Salaries of university instructors sharply lagged behind (and continue to lag behind) the subsistence minimum, and most of our colleagues worked on the side wherever they could, often in non-governmental institutions. Their welfare now depended much more on their personal initiatives that on the decisions of academic bigwigs. Students, graduate students, and young

instructors who differed with university officials could leave for careers in journalism, business, or politics, thus weakening academic authority. The intellectual disorientation following the liquidation of Communist dogma also played an important role: a flood of everything, the familiar and the partially familiar that had been hidden behind the remnants of the Iron Curtain, surged into the void. Most of our colleagues were unfamiliar with contemporary Western theories, and they could not attune themselves to them well enough to endorse some ideas and criticize others. Enclaves of intellectual freedom, fragments of "no man's land," appeared within the territory of the social sciences. These factors encouraged brilliant and creative people, especially among the young. At the same time, the struggle for survival under completely new circumstances helped many elderly colleagues discover unsuspected talents in themselves.

During our absence, a new generation of students had grown up, very unlike those we had taught in the 1980s. They were better educated and more self-reliant, independent, and critical. This is only one of the reasons for the proliferation of new educational programs in Russia, some of which attempt to take into account the interests of young people and depart from the usual standards of Soviet higher education. These unsystematic but persistent educational experiments strike us as a hopeful factor in the evolution of the Russian academy. We also took part in one of these experiments, using our seminar. First, through, a few words about the traditional Russian educational system.

Soviet institutes of higher learning operated on a comprehensive eight-year program: five years of basic university education and three years of graduate school, ending with defense of the doctoral dissertation. Narrow specialization was the hallmark. A student entering the university at age 17 would choose his profession (for example: history), but also a narrower specialty (for example: the history of medieval France). Although Party ideologues required institutes of higher learning to prepare not so much "real specialists", as "real Communists," the institutes of higher learning themselves did not aspire to that goal. The natural self-defenses of professional communities against the incursions of Communist ideology required support for high teaching standards and, by the way, the education in quite a number of institutes of higher learning was not bad. But the ideology of professionalism also implied an extremely elitist attitude toward students: the very few who wound up in a position to reproduce precisely the guild system of values of their professors received the faculty's attention. It was simply not accepted practice to be concerned about the rest. The university aspired only to recreate itself. The ideology of professionalism approved the hierarchical abyss which separated the students from professors and endorsed the didactic teaching methods which, for all intents and purposes, excluded classroom discussions. Students were to supposed to master, and reproduce, ready-made knowledge.

Of course such views on the goals and methods of education, like the ideology of professionalism itself, have by no means lost their popularity within the Russian academic world. A sociological survey we conducted at St. Petersburg University in the summer of 1999 showed that more than two-thirds of the instructors continue to consider the narrow professional preparation of a "pure scholar" to be the main goal of a university education. Echoing throughout those responses is nostalgia for a world that passed into oblivion ten years ago. Students, though, think otherwise: more than half of them do not share the view of their professors on this matter. They see an academic career as only one of many possibilities, and by far not the most attractive one: business, the arts and letters, and politics also occupy their thoughts.

Note, however, that more than a quarter of the instructors is more or less free of the ideology of professionalism; they do not share the university's ideal of self-recreation. These are

usually instructors who participate actively in the new educational programs based on fee-based teaching; they cannot avoid weighing the extent to which consumer demand affects education.

The first of these new educational programs appeared in the late 1980s and expanded rapidly during the first half of the 1990s. Even now, institutes of higher learning are being created every year. The number of institutes of higher learning in St. Petersburg has more than doubled in a decade. Although the new non-governmental institutes are usually much smaller than the old state ones, we are nonetheless observing a large-scale phenomenon.

Will the Russian intelligentsia survive under these circumstances? We have no doubt that it will. The intelligentsia may go on to renew itself and at least partially overcome its lack of social responsibility, recovering from the effects of the once dominant ideology of professionalism. Subordinating science and education completely to the laws of the market, naturally would be just as deplorable as making these disciplines depend completely on the state. In bemoaning the destructive influence of the market economy on the Russian intelligentsia, critics often forget about the market's healing properties. The shock therapy of fee-based private teaching has forced the intelligentsia to evaluate its place in the world more realistically. Indeed, a greater sense of reality, along with the extraordinarily substantial help of Western foundations, is what has allowed the academic world to survive and to live fairly well, at least by Russian standards. Of course, quite a number of colleagues are inclined to complain about life, and not without reason. Nonetheless, the hopeless anticipation of the imminent end of the world, widespread in the early 1990s, already co-exists with a more optimistic world view.

We are now taking part in one effort to broaden general university education: Smolny College, founded in 1997 as the first college of free arts and sciences in Russia, a joint project of the St. Petersburg University and Bard College in the State of New York.

The Smolny College project complements our earlier project of critiquing the social sciences, described above, and we believe it can help provide practical solutions for the crisis in the social sciences. Had we been told ten years ago that we would be organizing an alternative traditional education program at St. Petersburg University, with the support of the chancellor and many instructors, we would have thought we were being mocked. However, Smolny College is emerging, although not without a battle (some colleagues publicly assert that we are backed by the CIA and World Zionism). Even its early critics now concede that Smolny College can make the university more competitive on the education market, create a healthy intellectual tension within the university, and force a review of outdated practices.

No one expects liberal education to triumph immediately in Russia. The point is not to eliminate professional education as a whole, but to attain a reasonably balanced and well-thought-out relationship between the two. Our experiment can provide new ideas and approaches that will be useful for the design of other educational models and can help uproot academia's entrenched and rigid attitudes toward broad education in general. Of course, in order for this to happen, talented students must attend. This is precisely what we are counting on.

Actually, Smolny College has been in existence for two years, initially as a program of open courses attended primarily by students from other university departments. Each semester, many more students applied for these courses than we could accept. Among them were those who, like ourselves, were deeply dissatisfied with the narrow specialization and didactic methods of the existing education system. They embraced the chance of not just listening to a professor pontificate from the rostrum, but actively designing their own education and having the right to speak and be heard in class. They were drawn to the non-standard choice of lecture subjects and the diversity of approaches. Each course centered not on an academic discipline but on an issue

that could be understood from different disciplinary perspectives and traditions of thought. Something intellectually fresh and new was taking place at Smolny College: a critical attitude toward the university from within, and a critical distance in the style of discourse.

In 1999 Smolny accepted its first full time students. Those who entered needed to come to a college of liberal arts and had interests too broad to fit into the usual academic canon. Where else in Russia can you study sociology and learn to write poetry, master playing the piano, acquaint yourself with the theory of complex physical systems and get an idea of modern management? Incidentally, the study of music, management and modern theoretical physics could turn out to be mutually enriching. In a word, we have good students. We believe the instructors are just as good.

Returning to our project on a critique of the social sciences, Smolny College provides a liberal education that cultivates independent critical thinking, is not bound by the conventions of one or another discipline, and mobilizes the most diverse approaches to solve the problems that life presents. Is this not a model for rejuvenating the social sciences? To be sure, a liberal education does not aim primarily at the preparation of researchers and scholars. A good researcher, though, is not someone who knows more, but someone who thinks better. What we lack now is not so much knowledge as creative thinking.

But for us at Smolny, the cultural project is perhaps the most important thing. A liberal education presupposes a goal other than a professional one. Mastery is achieved not by one who can reproduce the conventions of a professional environment, but by one who can create his own profession and change it if necessary. Not by one who resembles his colleagues, but by one who has become a unique, creative individual. A democracy of sociologists, undoubtedly, is possible. Is a democracy of poets possible? Is this not a challenge?

A liberal education also helps students become citizens of a society committed to dialogue. We want to turn Smolny into a cultural forum where many logics intersect and diverse cultures meet, a place where individual self-expression is joined with a polycentric, infinitely diverse world. As an international educational project, Smolny will invite Russian and foreign students and professors to study and teach together.

For us, belonging to an international intellectual environment is the most important element of our identity. In this, we are typical of many people born in Russia during or after perestroika. Hundreds of liberal arts scholars of our generation have lived, studied and worked abroad, continue to travel there often, have broad professional contacts, and in Russia work in close contact with foreign institutions. They have developed their own world view, belonging to the Russian as well as to the international environment. We call this phenomenon "Russian cosmopolitanism." Smolny College has become one of the first facilities in Russia dedicated to translating this cosmopolitan outlook into an institutional framework attractive to the emerging leaders of our country.

*Translated by Anna Kucharev.*

# The Architecture of Humanism in Russian Higher Education

Evgenii Kniazev*

Today there can be no cut and dried assessments of the path Russia has taken in the realm of academic activity. We have shed our ideological blinders, but we have lost our competitive edge and our intellectual potential in many fields, and we have led the research and educational base of our institutions of higher education into decline.

The new openness of higher education is largely due to expanded and deeper international cooperation. My work in this area of university activity began in 1988. At the time, I was the dean of foreign students. In 1991, my responsibilities were broadened to include the international department, which registered passports and visas for university associates. I faced my first problem: How was I to manage two absolutely unconnected subdivisions, organize my own work, and achieve success? Much later I learned that at the time, all alone, for many weeks at a stretch, I was engaged in what amounted to SWOT analysis. (An abbreviation popular among strategic management specialists referring to a system for analyzing the "Strong" and "Weak" internal aspects of an organization, as well as its external "Opportunities" and "Threats.") This brainstorming resulted in two projects.

To begin with, I was able to talk the university rector into launching Kazan's first small enterprise, the Univex academic research center. We began to design nontraditional international projects: seminars and Russian language courses. In learning how to make money from educational activities, we mastered the basics of entrepreneurship step by step, learned to keep track of our cash flow, and rejoiced in every ruble or dollar earned. This was good training, and we made good students and a good team. There were six of us in all--young doctoral candidates, just eight years ago. Today one of us is a banker who has survived multiple (and now chronic) crises. Another is a trade representative for Tatarstan in the United States. The third owns a small finance company. The fourth is one of the leading experts in the Ministry for State Property Administration. The fifth is a leading marketing specialist. And I am still at the university and consider it my calling.

The second project was to reorganize a system for administering international cooperation programs at the university. What a wave of opposition and misunderstanding among university officialdom this project provoked! I had to respond to so many accusations--indulging my personal ambitions, encroaching on traditions, criticizing the university as inflexible! I looked at myself in the mirror--and had to agree with the indictment. But as I came to work each day, performed routine, monotonous work at my pathetic office, and supervised the boring ladies who worked for me and were constantly bickering among themselves, I suddenly realized that Gorbachev's already skidding perestroika would begin, and end, with us. Simply carrying out orders from above was not for me.

My project aimed to create a completely new structure to administer international ties, expand the university's international activity, and raise its significance and status. The focus was

* Evgenii Anatolievich Kniazev - Born in 1955, Kniazev earned an advanced degree in applied mathematics at Kazan State University, Tatarstan where he stayed to teach cybernetics and computer science. In 1988 he was appointed dean of international students and in 1991 was named head of the university's department for international programs. Kniazev has worked closely with various American and European universities and exchange programs. Since 1996 he has been one of Russia's leading advocates of university governance reform.

on providing information and organizational services for undergraduates, graduate students, and teachers. Today ours has become the university's most advanced department. We have the most modern technology, a team of educated, experienced and young specialists, a modern, business style of work, and a congenial atmosphere.

Responsible, independent, and professionally qualified workers are the key to success in any undertaking. The director can supply everything else. I have seen my principal task as seeking out work for our team and creating incentives for its high-quality implementation. What don't my colleagues end up doing! We publish an information bulletin on international cooperation in higher education, *Globus*, sent out to all regional institutions of higher education, and we cannot keep up with demand. We prepare and execute the most unexpected international projects for entrepreneurs, farmers, teachers, and journalists. We assist those who want to get an education abroad and offer services in the transfer and registration of passports and visas. We have an e-mail station where novices first learn to use the medium and then maintain a mailbox and get access to a computer. We have the European Documentation Center, the Spanish Cultural Center, language and culture courses for participants in international programs, and printing services. The income this brings in allows us to support the infrastructure at a high level: modern computers, the Internet, copying and publishing equipment, and our own specialized library of reference works, periodicals, and electronic data bases. All this gives our colleagues interesting work, a broad perspective, authority, and pride at their involvement in this necessary and important business.

Our experience organizing international activities at Kazan University is known far
beyond the Kazan city limits. The journals *Evropa* and *The Chronicle of Higher Education*, as
well as central and local newspapers, have described our work. Television reporters like to spend
time with us; they know they will always find interesting and instructive information here, a
commodity that our society has in all too short supply. Even the Voice of America and the BBC
have honored us with their attention.

Over the last five or six years we have secured about $4 million from foreign sources for
technical equipment, joint scientific research, educational projects, and international travel.
Against the backdrop of a protracted economic crisis and an acute shortage of budgetary funds,
this figure is quite encouraging.

However, it is not the material and financial component alone that has been important.
University colleagues have been able to acquaint themselves with the achievements and
experience of European, American, and Southeast Asian universities. Eight or nine years ago, we
could not have dreamed that the university's international contacts would encompass every
continent; that our partners would number over fifty well-respected universities and
organizations in the leading countries of the world; that our scholars and teachers would be
successfully participating in major international projects; that eminent foreign professors would
be teaching in our lecture halls; or that American, German, Swiss, Belgian, Japanese, and many
other foreign undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral students would be regularly
attending the lectures of our professors. The university and its academic staff have passed the test
of openness, with honors.

Beyond the strictly academic vantage point, international travel has enriched us with
invaluable experience of university life in the most diverse corners of the planet. This experience
has forced us to take a critical look at how we manage our own work. The social and economic
cataclysms in our country, and the impoverished status of science and education, demand that the

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university respond effectively. International programs of academic cooperation are one way to
do so.

The first major grant we received from the European Union was for implementing a joint
European project called "The University in a Changing World." Representatives from Belgium
and Spain were our partners. This project allowed nearly sixty colleagues and students of the
university to spend time in Europe. As coordinator of this project, I worked hard to direct work
into constructive channels. Each participant (many of whom found themselves abroad, in a
completely new environment, for the first time) studied a very specific area of the work of our
university partners and made suggestions for improving the analogous activities at our alma
mater.

Thanks to the active participation of the university leaders, including the rector, pro-
rectors, and directors of the principal offices (the people who make the decisions), and after
stormy debates at the start, we were able to submit a work plan to our colleagues from
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the University of Granada covering five topics:

* the study of the socioeconomic and political characteristics of educational administration in a federative state;

* strengthening the interdisciplinary approach in research and education;

* organizing continuing education programs and expanding the range of educational services offered;

* emphasizing the broad international dimensions of university life; and

* examining issues common to university administration elsewhere.

Thereupon, university activities moved into completely new areas.

We established the **Information Center on Issues of International Cooperation** and a
**Library of Reference Literature**. A year later, in 1995, the rectors of ten major institutions of
higher education in Kazan signed an agreement giving the center the status of a **regional center for international cooperation**. Today the center serves all the institutions of higher education in
our city, including about three hundred regular clients--scholars, teachers, graduate students,
undergraduates, and administrators.

We created the **Department of Continuing Education** and an inter-institutional
noncommercial organization, the **Forra Fund for Business and Community Development**.
The department markets new educational programs and examines fee levels, multimedia
applications, and certification. The university's income from providing these additional
educational services has already equaled regional and federal funds allocated. We are closely
studying foreign experience in continuing education, and we know what our colleagues from the
Urals, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Tomsk state universities, as well as the Moscow University of
Statistics and Information, have achieved, which is even more than we have.

The Forra Fund owes its existence to the exceptionally active moral and material support
of the American Council on International Exchanges (IREX), the Chamber of Trade and Industry
of the Republic of Tatarstan, and Organic Synthesis, a Kazan-based corporation. The Forra Fund
assists the market and political transformations in our republic by involving the intellectual elite
in the resolution of the problems facing our society. During the three years of the fund's
activities, including seminars, conferences, publishing projects, study courses, and exchange

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programs, two elements stand out: joint work among scholars and practitioners, and the
integration of national and foreign experience.

Three examples of the Fund's work will suffice. Together with the Monitor Company, affiliated with Harvard University, it organized a competition among young entrepreneurs, economists, and students to evaluate the international competitiveness of Tatarstan's industries. The five winners, who demonstrated an exceptional understanding of the ideas of Michael Porter and an ability to apply them in practical work, received an opportunity to spend two weeks at Harvard Business School. The Fund published a multi-criteria business rating handbook, *Business Leaders of Tatarstan*, which uses the same methodology as *Forbes* and *Fortune* and was the first publication of its type to appear in Russia. Finally, the Fund held a major conference on attracting foreign investment to Tatarstan's economy, attended by representatives from the Troika-Dialog Bank, the KPMG consulting firm, and the World Bank's Institute of Economic Development, as well as by leaders of the republic's government, enterprises, and banks--about eighty people altogether.

The fifth topic of our work plan (to me the most important one), examining issues common to university administration elsewhere, this we took up when half the time allotted for the whole project had already elapsed. By then we had accumulated enough information and ideas about management in foreign universities, and I had recruited the chief administrator of Belgium's Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Professor Karel Tavernier, a man with enormous practical and theoretical experience. After four years of close collaboration, and now that we are friends (I'm certain he thinks so, too!), he often jokes about our first meeting. What first flashed across the mind of this estimable bureaucrat, who is experienced in university subtleties, when I showed up at his office was, "Does this young Russian really think that I'm going to go to work for him?"

But now Professor Tavernier does so, and with great pleasure. He has many friends in Kazan. He knows my university well, generously shares his experience, and actively influences the new approaches to administrative problems. I see him as a mentor and reliable partner. I would add only that today he and I are involved in three international projects.

In the course of this work, which has consumed all our attention, we have been able to bring together a working group, including directors and associates from various subdivisions of the university, as well as teachers and outside experts, whose members have been working for three years on a completely voluntary basis. This group is made up of pro-rectors, faculty deans, directors of administrative services, and people of various ages, experience, and social status. They have become initiators and participants analyzing the effectiveness of the system of administration at Kazan University and seeking ways to improve it.

We have studied modern university organization and administration in the United States and Western Europe. We have absorbed the ideas of the strategic approach to university administration and have achieved good results by utilizing these methods at Kazan State University. A university **mission statement**, approved by a conference of professors and university teachers, has become an important component of our charter.

We have drawn up a development strategy and convinced the university community to endorse it. Drawing on the university's mission statement, we have formulated seven **policy statements** relating to education policy, scholarly research, culture and education, regional policy, relations with international partners, social policy, and university development.

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These policy statements constitute the program for the university's rector during his second term and serve as the basis for the joint activities of the university's Academic Council and its various commissions and administrative units. Funding to implement reforms in our system of administration has come from foreign sources, including TEMPUS/TACIS, the Flemish Scientific Society, and the World Bank.

We have aroused community interest in finding our own solutions to the prolonged economic crisis and perhaps have even ignited a spark of confidence in the public by the very fact of our existence. We have worked out a **concept for reforming the system of administration**, which will allow us, while remaining a **classic research university**, to become **more entrepreneurial and more integrated into international cooperation**.

The first conference of directors of academic and administrative subdivisions of the university, which was held in mid-June 1999, supported our proposals, notably the **idea of separating administrative and academic management**. An **Administrative Council** will remove nonacademic issues from the agenda of the university's Academic Council, which for many years has spent over 80 percent of its time to adjudicate these very questions! The Administrative Council will coordinate interaction among departments and smooth out conflicts over the allocation of resources. The Academic Council will concentrate on academic quality and on implementing and fine-tuning the mission statement. An office of the **general manager** will assure executive discipline and adherence to standards, regulations, and the budget. A **system of efficient resource administration** and an **integrated system of assessment and self-evaluation** are other important elements. In all this, we have benefited enormously from the experience of such marvelous experts as Professors John L. Davies of England; Anthony W. Morgan, James L. Ratcliff, Paul T. Brinkman, and Bruce Johnstone from the United States; Peter A.M. Maassen from the Netherlands; Robin H. Farquhar from Canada; Herbert R. Kells from Denmark; and Paul Verdin and Karel Tavernier from Belgium.

Along the way, we encountered skepticism and lack of trust, envy and suspicion, huge cultural differences, and the language barrier. However, this has been interesting work, and it remains so for me. Moreover, by studying other universities, we have come to a better understanding of our place and mission in Russian society. We have become more sensitive to the requirements of the region, our students, and our partners. Finally, we have come to envisage more clearly what we expect of the future and what kind of university we want to be. I think that we have learned to stay our chosen course under Russian conditions of swift and turbulent change.

Russian institutions of higher education are doing much interesting work in administration reform. At Rostov University, procedures of technology transfer, patenting, and innovative activity are being perfected. In Tver they are introducing new information technologies into university administration. Many institutions of higher education are launching new services and departments to encourage international cooperation, attempting to build their relations with local business circles along new lines, creating administrative systems for continuing education, and developing distance learning.

From my talks with colleagues from other universities, I have noticed that there is much duplication of effort; we are deplorably lacking in information about one another's experience, ideas, accomplishments, and failures. For this reason, one cannot overestimate the importance of the "Universities" project. For over two years, under the aegis of the Salzburg Seminar, project director Raymond Benson and his colleagues from Middlebury College (Vermont) and Salzburg

5

(Austria) have created a constructive and open atmosphere for the serious and creative exchange of experience in administration, organization, and technological changes. Directors and specialists from the leading Russian universities work with renowned specialists from Europe and North America. Today the Salzburg Seminar serves as perhaps our sole opportunity to have serious, instructive discussions. It was there that I learned of the innovative approaches adopted at Nizhnii Novgorod State University, where they are successfully applying matrix structures and effective material stimuli in the organization of their work, and where they pay great attention to normative and regulatory activity. At the seminar I became acquainted with the impressive results of the integration of institutions of higher education in Greater Novgorod and Novosibirsk, heard about the successes of Tomsk University in developing continuing education programs, and rejoiced at a successful initiative of Ekaterinburg University, which has begun publishing a journal *Universitetskoe upravlenie* (University Administration).

The last ten years have changed me personally. Until the early 1990s, my research career as a mathematician was working out quite successfully: my dissertation defense, interesting work as a dean, lecturing, and interacting with young people. Then came the offer from the rector, and (naturally!) the Party committee, to take up administrative work in developing the university's international ties. And so, beginning in 1988, the academic and bureaucrat within me have been making their peace. At first it was hard to reconcile the two different types of activity, but later I became more and more convinced that university administration in the new conditions is intriguing work. At a certain moment I made a paradoxical discovery: even though we may engage in both research and teaching in a university, we know so little about the essence of the institution. We approach university administration so uncreatively, and at times so unprofessionally, that we feel at sea in the new conditions.

The primordial question for Russia has always been "What is to be done?" What I must do is something I decided for myself. Strategic university administration, its theory and practice--that is what interests me today as a scholar and as an administrator. I have not abandoned my mathematics: I still give lectures and direct student research. Moreover, I have found many applications for my mathematical knowledge in the modeling and research processes in education and the university. The last ten years have brought me experience, knowledge, information, and contacts with leading specialists in university management all over the world. Apparently, thanks to my creative streak (though this does not sound altogether modest), I have realized that this sphere interests me as an area of scholarly research as well. As the young people say, I have "switched my orientation."

I should like to record the enormous impression that many books and publications on university management published in Europe and America have made on me. I am altogether envious when I see that university education abroad is under the meticulous gaze of researchers; that scholarly analysis and opinion invariably accompanies decisions made on issues of higher education administration; and that university administration abroad, and especially in the United States, is a professional sphere of activity.

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Our principal success along these lines is probably the **team of like-minded thinkers we have assembled**. Our university is dear to us. We care about it and want to make it better. It is with these people that we are pursuing yet another line of reform, one that is most important for me personally.

We are creating a **Center for Strategic Analysis and Planning** at Kazan University. This center will be an analytical laboratory for improving administration and research in university administration and will function as a continuing education institute for administrators in institutions of higher education. The prototype for our center is the Center for Higher Education Policy Study (CHEPS) created at the University of Twente (Netherlands) and widely known in Western Europe, and also the Center for Educational Policy and Leadership (CEPAL) operating at the Anglia Polytechnic University (Chelmsford, England). Preparations are already under way for opening an **analysis laboratory** with the financial assistance of the World Bank's Innovation Project. The first **modules for a training program for university administrators**, which is intended for administrators in higher education in the wider Volga-Urals region, are ready. With funds from the European Union, an **information guide book on university strategic management for Russian institutions of higher education** is being readied for publication and a **web site** is being created for posting useful information on university administration.

Why am I so enthusiastic about this? Because the strategic line of our universities' development must first pass through a process of strengthening their autonomy. Because I am convinced that the social base for reforms in universities should be broadened. Because university administration should become a professional activity. All this requires training university administrators, and professional training is impossible without a scientific understanding of Russian and foreign practical and theoretical experience, without systematized knowledge, without publications. Nor am I free of my own personal ambitions and selfish plans. The idea that my colleagues and I are part of something that is completely new for us, and for the entire system of higher education, gives me strength and inspiration. Without false modesty, I can say that I want to be at the head of this work, the principal "culprit" in its success.

In an institution as conservative as a university, resistance to innovation persists and probably will continue. The roots of this resistance, I believe, lie in the resilience of the administrative-command tradition in our society, the all-encompassing and all-pervasive authority and tyranny of the bureaucracy, and our people's ignorance of their own powers and lack of confidence. The problems of our society are reflected in the universities as in a single drop of water. This is why the recipes for overcoming our troubles are also of a general nature--decentralization, open international cooperation, transparent decision-making, and an emphasis on nurturing the best creative forces and professionalism.

* * *

A few words about the assistance that Western countries provide our country in the field of higher education. Without any question, this help will preserve our institutional relevance for the near term. Nonetheless, this aid must become more effective, better targeted, and more pragmatic.

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Funding for centers of academic excellence should not be dispersed and spread thin among too many recipients, but should be allocated to achieve vigorous levels of support for the most deserving. It is unwise to allow ourselves to be guided by mere political or transitory interests and divorce the potential of Russian higher education from the solution of these problems. One can, and probably should, admit that Russian society acutely needs humanization on a broad scale. Foreign investors are perfectly justified in not wanting to risk supporting enterprises or institutions capable of "dual use" military and civilian production or research. Specifically for this reason, our army of many thousands of university specialists in the exact sciences, by all accounts, has not seized sufficient attention and support from international organizations and foundations. Many celebrated scholars and young talents are departing, or have already left the country. Seductive offers from abroad (including those from overseas) are easier to find than support for their work here, in Russia.

This is leading to the devastation of our scientific schools, the loss of top-notch specialists, and--it's not hard to predict--Russia's increasing technical and technological lag behind the industrially developed countries. The country's economic revival and the resolution of its most acute social problems will require more than just political will or financial instruments. These goals require a scientific-technical potential, an educated public, a public consensus, and society's unified efforts. Today, foreign support is largely humanitarian, as I see in the example of my university, but we must not forget that a university, like a nation, is a unitary organism, a unitary family, a community.

In my opinion, specific adjustments should be made in the planning and execution of Western assistance programs for Russian education. First, we should not drive a wedge between the humanitarians and the natural scientists by helping one to the detriment of the other. And second, we must help stop the brain drain from Russia by creating conditions so scholars can pursue their creative work "at home." It is my deep conviction that Western assistance would be more effective if it were focused on the more advanced Russian universities. Bringing these universities up to modern levels of organization and supporting the academic process is far from simple; it cannot be solved through making hard-to-get grants in a few specialized fields. Everything in a university is interconnected and interdependent: scientific research and teaching; administration and infrastructure; the humanities, the natural sciences, and the exact sciences. It is impossible to combine coherently modern curricula, methods, and style of work in some spheres with archaic ones in others.

At the turn of the new millennium, harmony should be the indispensable characteristic of a university. **Cultivating and supporting** these kinds of **harmonious universities that meet the demands of the era** in Russia should become not only the key to effective Western humanitarian assistance for our country, but also the guiding principle in Russian educational reform. Centers of academic excellence could serve as models to stimulate all other institutions of higher education. The mentality of my fellow citizens is such that it is easier for them to trust examples of successful work and to follow the example of "our own" than that of "foreigners." It has been pounded into our heads so insistently that we are different, that we are following our own path. Do you remember what Tyutchev said: "Russia cannot be understood with the mind or measured by a common yardstick; it has a special imperative, one can only believe in Russia"? I do not believe this saying! I am convinced that we are talented and enterprising, and that we can and will work and live like other civilized countries! If only we could be a little more

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demanding of our leaders of all ranks and a little more patient and trusting, work a little more and talk a little less.

Western assistance programs should direct special efforts to supporting **university libraries and telecommunications**. Information is food and fresh air for science, it is a window on the world. It is instructive that our Kazan State University library, the oldest in Russia, which counts more than five million volumes, including over 10,000 ancient manuscripts, has been forced to cancel its subscriptions to many scholarly journals, something that did not happen even during World War II. Adequate library service and communications systems ensure the minimum conditions for scientific research activity, the basis of a university education; they also prevent Russian higher education from becoming isolated from the world academic community because of our economic problems. We cannot allow this huge country, which has survived such hard times, to be thrown back into the chaos of ignorance and embitterment. If that were to happen, then all of humanity would be the loser.

The West should not trust bureaucrats in the federal center and the regions, but instead should work more intensely and directly with institutions of higher education and scientific collectives. There are quite a few intelligent and decent people in the federal and regional organs of educational administration. However, they are functionaries, "cogs" in the system; they articulate and defend the system's interests and are detached from the real academic process, from the academic product, which is created "below," in the universities. But the system will be strong if it is made up of many effective institutions of higher education and if it meets the demands of the times. The system will be strong if it provides institutions of higher education the important services and resources they need. Today institutions of higher education in Russia do not get either. Federal and regional authorities have to give us more autonomy and administer us from a distance, using the tactics of mediation.

However, universities and institutions of higher education as a whole are too important as public institutions to be condemned to live in isolation from one another. This is why the **weakness of the old "vertical" system of management must be offset by expanding "horizontal" connections: professional associations and contacts, integration among institutions, and networks of cooperation extending to other disciplines.** As the greater Volga-Urals region's oldest and leading institution of higher education, Kazan State University is continually proposing joint projects to develop academic infrastructure and telecommunications and to work out coordinated programs for advancing the interests of science, education, and culture in our region. Our international connections are open to the entire higher educational community and student body of the republic.

When we Russians think carefully about what awaits us, we conjure up our own visions of the country we would like to live in. Some probably dream of Florida and other demi-paradises. But those who want to live and work here, those who can work and know what to do, those who have faith, picture the future Russia as a civilized country of enlightened, law-abiding citizens that is swiftly developing and helping others.

We must replace false patriotism, based on a belief in military force and the myth of inexhaustible natural resources, with pride in assuring for our citizens a high quality of life reinforced by the reliable protection of their rights. In our own profession, we must reject hallow incantations about the high level of Russian education, which conceal the reluctance or inability of the authorities to make development of our intellectual potential a paramount concern. Here I include all official levels, from the ordinary director of a department, laboratory, or college, and

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university rector to minister, head of government, and president. Miserly salaries for history teachers in high school or mathematics professors in the university need to be raised, of course; but just as important is the opportunity to work, the opportunity to be in demand. A good system of education, to my mind, is inextricably linked with the flourishing of our graduates, with mutually enriching connections to the business world, and with the active participation of the academic community in solving regional, national, and even global problems.

I see my role in performing a great deal of creative and effective work and in becoming a recognized leader surrounded by talented, proud, well-meaning, and cheerful people. I want my university to be known and respected not only in the Ministry of Education, but also abroad and in the corridors of local power; I want the research and development work of our scholars to bring glory and prosperity to the university; I want the diploma and education received at Kazan State University to be valued far beyond the borders of Tatarstan and Russia. If we, the thirty or so forty-year-old scholars, teachers, and administrators who have been working at Kazan State University, can achieve this by the end of our careers, we will be able to say that the glorious traditions of our university live on.

*Translated by Marian Schwartz.*

10

# A Theater for Oneself

Vladimir Mirzoev*

In the word "Rossiia," the Russian ear can hear a chain of random meanings: rosa (dew), siianie (radiance), rost (growth), rasseian'e (dispersion), messia (messiah). Actually, the last word in the series requires philological cleverness and a rich imagination, which nature has given us hyperboreans in great abundance. A rich imagination is, perhaps, our main national trait, our gift from above, and at the same time, our curse. In any case, we are convinced that we have a mission in History as a nation, a special role in the Divine Comedy. But Westernizers and Slavophiles, right and left, intellectuals and staff of the FSB, all have their own understanding of that role. Some are frightened by that fact, and there are occasional hysterical cries in the mass media that we urgently need a "national idea" (read: to replace communism sleeping in the deep), otherwise we will perish. I don't think there is any cause for fear: Russia for the first time in many years has the chance to bring its citizens out of an infantile sleep. Let everyone defend his own opinion, let everyone learn to carry on a dialogue and recognize the possibility of an alternative turn of thought. Therein lies our salvation. The works of Albert Einstein should be published in the Rabelaisian printings that were used for the classics of Marxism.

That is why I thought that the best format for my remarks is a dialogue. The form is also good because within me I have, as does every thinking person in Russia, various voices arguing among themselves. Sometimes there are two, sometimes three or four. And believe me, it's not schizophrenia. It's just that it is impossible to give a simple answer to a single vitally important issue today. Everything is confused and mixed up in our house. We are going to have to mark reality anew.

## 1

1st Voice: The most inspiring acquisition in Russia in the last eight years is, of course, the ability to choose. And not only the political choice that has resulted from the introduction of a multiparty parliamentary system. Along with the refusal to build a Tower of Babylon (that is, a utopian society), the existentialist paradigm of Russian society has changed. Emigration or putting one's energy into the country's renaissance, wearing ashes while mourning the imperial "fraternity" of peoples or mastering the spiritual wasteland left behind by the Soviet regime--all these are typical and fatal questions facing our intelligentsia today. Russians have had to master the theory of relativity rapidly: previously we had been forced to live in a world without any alternatives to the one "true faith," a world where a few million of the most cynical, narrow-minded, and easily bought citizens usurped the role of high priests. They called themselves "Communists" but essentially they were feudal, self-proclaimed pseudo-aristocrats.

* Vladimir Vladimirovich Mirzoev - Born in 1957, Mirzoev studied theater directing in the Russian State Academy for Theatrical Arts (GITIS) and produced several plays before emigrating to Canada in 1989. During his years in Toronto, Mirzoev directed plays in many theaters, in Canada as well as the United States. After returning to Russia in 1995, he has been a resident director at the Stanislavskii Drama Theatre, a guest director in various Moscow and provincial theaters, and a director of several TV documentaries.

1

2nd Voice: Let's assume that for the theater the cannibalistic regime was an inexhaustible source of inspiration. After all, the art of the theater in any society is to play the role of the trickster, the violator of tribal taboos. The Soviet regime had a taboo on almost everything: unorthodox ideology, erotica, freedom of movement, esthetics--the list can go on and on. Before 1991 the theater provided the breathing space where the nation, enslaved and exhausted by prison camps and wars, could rest, could breathe the air of "Aesop's fables," could enjoy their hidden meanings, hints, and metaphors.

1st Voice: But why the theater, rather than film or music?

2nd Voice: There are several reasons. The language of the theater in the twentieth century became more and more the language of poetry rather than the everyday telling of an interesting story. This allowed us to speak obliquely about things that were considered dangerous and shameful for society. But for all that, unlike symphonic music, the theater remained a democratic institution. Here the laborer, the intellectual, and the Party boss could meet, laugh together, and have ice cream during the intermission. The movies were too literal and lifelike. There wasn't enough of the theater's elusive and ephemeral qualities, its subtexts. And also: since filmmaking in Soviet times was a sinecure, only the "right" people, ideologically correct comrades, were allowed to work there. White crows like Eisenstein were chased from that fat field ruthlessly.

1st Voice: But weren't theater people also fired, didn't they too perish in the camps? Think of Tairov, Meyerhold. When Tairov lost his child--the Kamernyi Theater--he lost his mind. Meyerhold was executed in the Gulag.

2nd Voice: That is true, of course, but it does not refute my thought that the theater was the unique provocateur in the Soviet Union, the many-faced trickster who cast doubt on the reinforced concrete of Socialist idols and who always managed to evade punishment. Individual unacceptable artists could be destroyed, but the very atmosphere of a dangerous and half-hinting conversation was indestructible. An actor's free, albeit totally illusory, expression of will on the stage reflected everyone's secret dream--to be free of fear, to be Someone. Actors had the status of national heroes.

And so: in my opinion, the "spiritual wasteland" you mentioned above is what today's theater has actually encountered. The good old taboos are gone, but new ones have not yet appeared. One might think, what could be better for an artist? It's a paradox: the absence of censorship has deprived us of energy, we seem to have fallen into emptiness. In the eyes of society, actors have ceased to be idols and have turned into ordinary performers; the profession has lost its status. Any rag of a newspaper can publish invectives against the government. But soon enough the "elite" that is shamelessly enriching itself at the expense of the silent majority will be forced to shut the mouths that are too open.

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1st Voice: But you must agree that someone has to take on "original sin" and become a property owner, to take over what used to be held in common, that which the Soviet mentality considered "no one's" property--factories, oil fields, theaters? Isn't it natural that the lucky owners turned out to be former bureaucrats?

2nd Voice: In other words, you're trying to say former Communists? Yes, it is natural, especially since they were the ones who created a bloodless revolution from above. The people never did dare do anything, even thought the Soviet Union had a fifth column the size of four-fifths of the population. The Communists realized that they quickly had to change the overhead sign, otherwise they might lose everything. The party nomenklatura established first commercial banks back in 1987. However, there is something unnatural in that story of speculation.

1st Voice: And what is that, if it's not a secret?

2nd Voice: For instance, theater directors were given the freedom to handle real estate as they wished. They rented up to 30 percent of their theater space to various small companies: restaurants, travel agencies, stores - and now they are hauling in money. The same thing is happening in factories and educational institutions. A question: why shouldn't a theater director not work at making the theater flourish instead of, say, the strip tease?

1st Voice: But actors and other workers in the theater get a bonus added to their pathetic salaries from that money. (The major Moscow theaters pay their actors $15-$20 a month.)

2nd Voice: If only that were so! Only part of those profits show up on paper. Tens of thousands of dollars (called "black cash") ends up in the administrator's pocket. And that scheme works throughout the land and of course, not only in theaters. The vicious circle of payoffs among the nomenklatura turns the law into a pathetic parody.

1st Voice: But what can you do.... The inability to differentiate between what is "mine" and what is "the state's" is a common trait in *Homo Sovieticus*. According to Marx the destruction of private property was supposed to lead practically to a rebirth of the spirit of the early Christians. Instead it led to alienation from elementary morality. Are you seriously maintaining that some other category of former Soviet citizens would not have done the same thing?

2nd Voice: Steal?

1st Voice: Yes, get rich at the expense of the less clever and swift. Party and Komsomol leaders are not the most dangerous types. Their egoism was at least regulated a little by their past experience. I can just imagine what would have happened to the "underground man" (that is, the dissident intellectual) if power had come into his impatiently trembling hands. He would have turned the remains of the hated

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Evil Empire to ashes. Unconsciously, perhaps, but he definitely would have done that. It's just like asking a hippie family to run an atomic submarine.

**2nd Voice:** Well, let's say you're right. ... However, what great future are the "Red Directors" and former Komsomol lads preparing for us, now that they have turned into capitalists overnight? What can be expected, say, from a theater director who has saved a decent fortune and doesn't know how to use it? Being an independent producer is too much trouble. Opening a sausage factory will lead to questions, "Where did you get that much money, comrade?" And if questions don't come up now, they might later, after the next change of scenery on the political stage. And so the theater director keeps his money in America somewhere, perhaps in the bank account of his great-niece, drives around in a cheap Zhiguli, and trembles in fear, anticipating the thunderbolts that will drive him across the border. In any case, the money as well as the people will be lost to Russia forever.

**1st Voice:** Why forever? The government is seriously discussing an amnesty for those who exported capital illegally. Tomorrow that director will buy himself a theater as his private property or he will become its largest stockholder.

**2nd Voice:** That's just what I mean, and we'll have what we see now in entrepreneurial theaters: trite French comedies and home-grown melodramas played by three actors on three chairs so that they can travel more easily from town to town, playing to provincial audiences. Total dependence on the box office will kill the evocative language that distinguishes the art of the theater from TV soaps--and which makes the Russian theater a unique phenomenon in European culture.

**1st Voice:** OK, OK, don't get upset. Let's talk about mutations in stage language. After all, we're not such Marxists that we need to reduce everything to economics.

Since 1991, or more accurately since the start of perestroika, when Russian civilization became a fully open system, the theater started greedily adopting "foreign" languages: modernist dramaturgy and music, modern dance, unusual materials for the stage, unusual people--"eccentrics," as Chekhov used to say.

In 1987-89 I staged Samuel Beckett, Howard Barker, Paul Claudel, and August Strinberg. This list of authors would have been impossible under "Sof'ia Vasil'evna" (the code words the intelligentsia used for *sovetskaia vlast*, the Soviet regime). The audiences enthusiastically filled in the blanks in their experiences with **difficult** plays. Experimental studios and laboratories grew like mushrooms after rain back then. Unused cellars and dusty conference halls filled with ghosts of Partycrats were quickly converted to newborn theaters and art galleries. The state subsidized all this marginal activity without a murmur, apparently hoping to distract intellectual young people from politics, and later, from privatization. I may be wrong and there may have been nothing more to it than the true romanticism of renewal.

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**2nd Voice:** The post-modern theater of the mid-1980s used the poetics of deconstruction, and that refreshing gesture was an expression of destructive energy vented into the air. Although there weren't many people who picked up on it then: the critics were stunned into silence, as if they had water in their mouths. They're all left-brain folk, analysis always precedes experience for them.

**1st Voice:** The audience didn't always understand that language, but they loved the emotional charge.

**2nd Voice:** Be that as it may, the idyll soon ended, it just wasted away. The *nouveaux riches* took over the cellars for warehouses. And the repertory theaters were taken over by dreary *petit bourgeois* elements. There was a new audience: poorly educated and weary of the drama of daily life. This audience wanted to be entertained, not made to think. "Fill myself up with information or, God forbid, philosophy? Go find yourself another fool! My brain is composted enough at work, I want to relax." That was the typical argument of the new audience, and theater administrators quickly echoed it.

**1st Voice:** But even in Shakespeare's day people like that attended the theater. That didn't keep playwrights from writing at the peak of their own ideals and creating great works.

**2nd Voice:** And so now we've moved to Shakespeare and other classics. No one has dared to bring up Beckett or Pinter in our repertory theater - they would be misunderstood and fired.

**1st Voice:** It's possible that Russians need the classics, the canon, now more than ever--as a symbol of stability and dependability. Sitting on a powder keg for ten years is hard on the nervous system. Canonic art, oriented on tradition, gives people what the state cannot give - psychological foundation, support. If there is no law, then you need at least consistency. Just as a child who can't read likes to have the same story read over and over. That gives him the illusion that he can get around in a frightening and hostile world.

**2nd Voice:** Exactly--illusion is the operative word.

**1st Voice:** So what? Isn't the art of the theater by definition illusory? The question is what that illusion serves. Did you know that in Greek and Roman days madhouses were built next to theaters? The ancients thought that theater had a healing effect on the human psyche. In my observation, theater always plays the role of a complementary system in relation to the primary reality--life. It is a kind of compensatory mechanism, that helps regulate the collective unconscious of a nation.

**2nd Voice:** I must note parenthetically that Russians have a particularly unconscious unconscious.

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1st Voice: No argument from me. But the time for reconstruction has come. The theater must not be the catalyst for destruction, when the soul of the audience is in ruins as it is. It should offer a model of new spiritual programs, scan versions of the future--and positive versions at that. In our present situation the best medicines are sacred laughter and high tragedy. But note the resistance that tragedy encounters.

2nd Voice: Which illnesses are you planning to treat, if I may ask?

1st Voice: The classic ones: cynicism, greed, spiritual apathy, and various social neuroses.

2nd Voice: I see. Then we must simply determine how your "sacred laughter" differs from ordinary guffawing. If one tries, one can find profound meaning in anything, even the swift degradation of artistic taste. The primitiveness that is TV will soon come to the theater. The alliance of bureaucrat and shopkeeper will do its work.

1st Voice: Don't exaggerate--our culture has a pretty good immune system if it survived "developed socialism." The art of post-Soviet Russia, for all it might try, cannot manage without the primitive. After all it is a different country now with new rules of the game. Of course, this isn't the country's infancy, but a new reincarnation of its culture. And the problem is that an enormous part of the Russian intelligentsia (and not only the intelligentsia) does not wish to take the new rules of the game into account. Writers unconsciously extend the lost reality in their imagination. They use obsolete codes and are angry at the "unenlightened crowd" because it has suddenly become unreceptive to their art. They are substituting the art of self-hypnosis, spiritual masturbation, for living creativity and intuitive knowledge of reality. This lack of correlation leads to decadence that likes to dress up as "tradition." A kind of travesty in reverse.

2nd Voice: In that sense the situation in repertory theaters is very sad, since they are given for life to old people whose fate is inextricably entwined with the fate of the USSR. The average age of chief directors of Moscow theaters is sixty-five. Among them there are people like Tat'iana Doronina, who has turned the Gorky Moscow Art Theater into a totalitarian preserve. For some mysterious reason she stages trite and totally unnecessary productions season after season. The actors are terrified when that Party lady arrives. Doronina perceives herself, at the very least, as a queen. A gigantic space in the center of Moscow is being wasted, free tickets are handed out among schoolchildren and pensioners. The theater collective is paralyzed by the evil will of a single mediocre person. And everyone is silent.

1st Voice: You must agree, that these "old people" (among whom there are forty-year-olds who have prematurely aged morally) simply have no other way out. The state isn't prepared to give them a dignified old age free of anxiety.

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**2nd Voice:** Of course not. Not every high-placed bureaucrat has built himself a million-dollar house. By the way, do you know that between 1991 and 1999 the number of civil servants has grown five-fold?

**1st Voice:** What are you proposing? Do away with repertory theater? Break up the permanent troupes? That's equivalent to destroying Russian dramatic art. The school and its traditions can survive only in conditions of stationary theater and direct inheritance of mastery: from one generation to the next. After all, our craft is not just technique, it has its own irrational component, its subjective magic. This will vanish in an instant if the actor's "family" is replaced by random connections.

**2nd Voice:** Perhaps.... However, the dysfunction of the old model is obvious. It was obvious back in the Soviet period, when "family members" were chained to one another and to their building like galley slaves. We did not have (and still do not have) a rational mechanism of self-liquidation for a dead collective. For changing the leadership. The monarchist principle in the theater, the monarchist principle in the regime--believe me, it's not accidental. It was the cause of many tragic break ups: just think of Anatolii Efros or the forced emigration of Yurii Liubimov.

**1st Voice:** Then we must create new models.

**2nd Voice:** Without destroying the old ones? Do you think that's feasible?

**1st Voice:** Of course, the most painful thing is that the new generation of professionals, who are much more suitable and are not deformed by censorship and double morality (they are now 26-36 years old), does not have its own spaces. They have no place in which to carry on a dialogue with society.

**2nd Voice:** But you seem to have found yourself a good place. Academic theaters invite you to do productions. Entrepreneurial theaters, as far as I know, are at your service, too. Then what's your problem? Altruism is suspect nowadays, it stinks of demagogy at a hundred paces.

**1st Voice:** First of all, we're not talking about me but about a tendency. And secondly, two or three exceptions merely prove a sad rule. Just a year ago I had a plan. I thought: we need to create a theater within a theater. To bring together young actors on some project, ignore sabotage and grumbling from the "living dead" (that is, the so-called main repertory troupe). When the administration discovered that we could attract another audience, that the media would write about us differently, that we were always sold out - it would start to help us. But nothing of the sort. The theater administration is quite happy with a "swamp" and the lack of initiative from the workers. And third-rate performances suit them, too. Because it's easier to fish in muddy waters. They don't want to attract unnecessary attention. And the administrators keep their money in a different bank--a bureaucrat doesn't make money on plays. He'd happily get rid of the

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theater, but then he wouldn't have that cozy spot. That's the entire mathematics involved. So then I gave up on my idea of a theater within the theater, just another utopia, and decided to stay a free agent. I work on various stages, without expecting special support or encountering fierce opposition, either. They're not too crazy about me, nor I about them. But I have an audience, a fact they admit reluctantly. However, to try to change something seriously, to try to build a fundamentally new Theater - sorry, no go. Young directors don't have their own spaces, and therefore all their work is a constant and disillusioning compromise with the half-dead establishment.

2nd Voice: And what do you propose?

1st Voice: I propose creating (with the help of American cultural foundations, for instance) several independent spaces: in Moscow, St. Petersburg, perhaps in other major cities. These companies would sign a contract for one or two seasons with producers, directors, actors. Everything would be done on a competitive basis.

2nd Voice: And why not bring in the city authorities? Especially since the Primakov government passed a resolution supporting the creation of alternative models for theater.

1st Voice: And where is Primakov now? You're looking for last year's snow, dear fellow. City authorities, just like the federal ones, are busy with politics and have no time for the theater. They have their own great play, "The Mother of All Plays." And they won't have time for the theater for a long, long time. So if we don't want to lose a generation of talented people, we have to look for real alternatives now. Especially since the theater, at least in part, is capable of keeping itself afloat: expenses are recouped much more quickly than in film. But even more important: if spaces are created where unique plays appear, over time the Russian government will want to subsidize them. It prefers to bring up children that are already born.

2nd Voice: You bet: unborn children have to be fed with your own blood. And what, pray tell, will be so unique about these plays?

1st Voice: Well, perhaps nothing more than the fact that it will be contemporary Russian playwriting. You're not going to deny that the plays of the best young playwrights - Mikhail Ugarov, Maksim Kurochkin, and Ol'ga Mukhina--are almost never produced. This is a sad but not accidental fact. The artistic language of their plays is alien and incomprehensible to the establishment.

2nd Voice: Perhaps it's incomprehensible to the audience, too?

1st Voice: That can be tested only in work. A playwright whose works are produced develops differently - much more intensely and harmoniously. By the way, one could organize at these independent spaces workshops of contemporary drama,

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modern dance, and so on. Young people have nowhere to continue their studies, nowhere to exchange experiences. The gerontocracy, exiled from politics, has found itself a safe haven in culture, where the "era of the last General Secretaries" still reigns. It's turning into a real disaster.

2nd Voice: Why can't such workshops be organized at repertory theaters?

1st Voice: Attempts have been made more than once -- at the Lenkom, at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, but they didn't work. Every time the effort died at the root, before it even began. Apparently the atmosphere of cynicism and despair is not very conducive to experimental strivings.

So: it is in establishing independent spaces for all that is fresh and esthetically radical in our theater that the West could help Russia.

2nd Voice: Where Western money goes now is a deep dark secret. Either straight into the pockets of bureaucrats or to mend holes in the budget that formed because of the thievery of those very same bureaucrats. It's a vicious circle. Don't you see?

1st Voice: That means the West should change its system of financing cultural projects in Russia. Bureaucrats must be excluded from the chain, they must lose their absolute grip on financial flows. Russian society cannot exercise any financial control whatever over such income streams. On its side, the state has not only power and force but seventy-five years of operating a totalitarian regime in Russia. Fear and apathy are still in our genes and our mentality. The immorality and brazenness of bureaucrats and bandits alike is the flip side of the coin. The cause of this phenomenon must be sought in the very servile fear of life among our people which allegedly can be put to rest with money. It can't, bureaucrats and bandits, you're making a tragic mistake!

2nd Voice: Let's set emotions aside. If I understand you, you are talking about the system of grants. Such a system of subsidizing culture exists in Canada, for example.

1st Voice: Absolutely right.

2nd Voice: I must disillusion you: the system doesn't work. It turns out that the bureaucratic machine (in the person of various councils and collegia) devours almost half of the money given by the state. Secondly: the principle of grant distribution is quite subjective and politically motivated. There isn't enough pie to go around, which means a caste of "the chosen" is created. And who chooses them? Friends and colleagues.

1st Voice: I'm not surprised by what you tell me about Canada. That country budgets for its own culture, about which it allegedly cares, less money than the German city of Munich. In that sense, the only thing Canadians and Germans have in common is a love of beer. Of course, Canada is a young country, and a country of

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immigrants. The newly arrived have to master the elementary bases of life and learn the new rules of the game.

**2nd Voice:** In that sense, Russians today are like immigrants who changed their citizenship virtually, without ever getting up from their chairs.

**1st Voice:** Yes, but you can't reproach Russians for being indifferent to culture. No sooner does a new Russian attains a little social status, than he, like Eugene Onegin, rushes off to the theater. Let's get back to grants: in my opinion, the system could work without a clumsy bureaucratic allocation system. The important thing is not to create a scuffle beside the feeding trough.

**2nd Voice:** Cultural figures, according to your model, turn out to be like spongers: useless but so nice it's hard not to feed them. And yet, we're talking about the survival of the nation. Dysfunction and degradation of the arts inevitably leads to the death of all other institutions.

**1st Voice:** Don't forget, there's still religion.

**2nd Voice:** All we need is theocracy after the communist delirium!

**1st Voice:** Let's not confuse God's gift with an omelet.

**2nd Voice:** And don't you confuse the inquisition with theatre directing. You of all people won't have a good time if a theocracy should come to Russia. Even though you admire Paul Claudel, your plays are far from being Catholic.

**1st Voice:** It's time for all of us to clear up one simple truth: culture is perhaps the only sphere in which man is fully free. Free from all constraints: religious, national, even ethical. Only in culture does man truly imitate the Creator. Only here can unlimited experimentation take place.

**2nd Voice:** Yes, yes, and then young people who take the experiment too much to heart will start testing its effectiveness on their compatriots. Saint-Simon's utopian socialism was merely an amusing fairy tale, wasn't it? And the cult of violence in Hollywood films is merely a pleasant tickle for the viewer's nerves. Yet the former "Easter egg" hatched Russian communism and the latter has hatched unmotivated murders in American high schools.

**1st Voice:** What a comparison.... Let's take a break, otherwise we might dump too many various things into the same pile.

**2nd Voice:** They say that Americans like garage sales as an informal method of socializing.

*Once upon a time plays had many acts and a play could last five or six hours. Today the optimal time for a play is two hours and fifteen minutes, two hours and forty-five minutes at*

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most. Exceed that and the audience gets bored. It looks as if film has imposed its format of time, its rhythm on the theater. Which confirms yet again that we are musical creatures and any algorithm can be imposed from outside. Especially when it is tied to the principle of pleasure. It's not bad or good--it just requires attention. ... Musicologists maintain that music is usually about a century ahead of its time. Beethoven, for example, anticipated the cataclysms of the first half of the twentieth century. The best contemporary composers have moved away from the principles of atonal music and are rediscovering polyphony. I don't know about you, but I find that encouraging.

Especially since graphically speaking the sequences resemble DNA chains.

By the way, about DNA. The average Russian, like the average American, is a mixture of bloodlines like a good exotic cocktail. For example, I have seven: Armenian, Georgian, German, French, Arab, Jewish, and Russian. It is very hard to define ourselves ethnically but very easy to do so culturally. The United States as ethnos is properly considered the archetype of future humanity. But Russians wouldn't mind auditioning for the part.

2

1st Voice: Every nation, even the most eccentric and prone to dangerous fantasies, if it intends to survive in history, sooner or later finds its mysterious mechanism of self-regulation turned on. In that sense - hail, old man Bacon!--a nation is like the human body with its instinct for survival, despite the obvious advantages of suicide. Probably this is the cosmic principle of self-preservation of all living things right up to final entropy, decline and subsequent metamorphosis.

2nd Voice: But people do commit suicide frequently enough. And weren't the Revolution, the Civil War, the genocide of the best part of the population in Stalin's camps, and the loss of millions through emigration a form of suicide for Russia? I'm afraid that Igor Shafarevich is right: having to choose between Eros and Thanatos, the Russians chose the skeletal embrace once and for all.

1st Voice: However, it was the Communists themselves who dismantled the system.

2nd Voice: In order to privatize the country, which they considered their private property anyway.

1st Voice: We've talked about that already. Nevertheless, my prognosis for the next ten years is optimistic.

2nd Voice: That's because you have a dual citizenship and if things should take a turn for the worse you can pack up in three days and move your family to Canada. It's easy for you to talk about variations of life and freedom of choice. And what would you have the average person do?

1st Voice: Well, I think a trip abroad, for just a few years, wouldn't hurt anyone. You get the right distance in relation to your own culture. The experience of communicating and--most importantly--thinking in a tongue that is not your native language has

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an enlightening effect, leading you out of the labyrinth of orthodox ideology, which, as you know, is just one step away from paranoia. ... Perhaps I have a greater degree of freedom of choice than my actors. I emphasize: perhaps. But I made that choice back in 1993--to be with them during the crossing of the desert, to work in Moscow, to try to change at least some things.

2nd Voice: My goodness, what a marvelous fellow you are! Things won't change in Russia until everyone who had the least connection to the Soviet regime dies out. Now, you, for instance, were you in the Komsomol?

1st Voice: Of course I was. You were inducted automatically at age thirteen.

2nd Voice: So was I. So: until you and I die, everything will remain as it is.

1st Voice: I don't agree with you. Thievery and cynicism come from above. The bureaucrats of all levels are tied together. It's their example that is corrupting.

2nd Voice: Ah, yes, "our wise, good Russian people," how easily you are corrupted!

1st Voice: If the government and Duma are represented by people with a different mentality--neither angels nor saints--but simply professionals who are not indifferent to the fate of their country, and if those people can give the country normal laws and most importantly will want to obey them--

2nd Voice: Cleaning up the Augean stables will take more than one generation. Once you start, it will stink to high heaven.

1st Voice: Nevertheless, someone's going to have to start. I hope that it will be our generation. I wouldn't want to go down in history as apolitical weaklings and neurotics.

2nd Voice: You know, Thomas Mann has a marvelous essay on that topic. He writes that politics in Germany was always considered a dirty and undignified job. The German character is too romantic to take the crude reality of political games and find the drop of common sense in it. Therefore, Mann concludes, when a German does go into politics, he behaves like a filthy pig and sheds rivers of blood - in complete accordance with his perceptions. So: I have a troubled surmise that deep in their hearts Russians consider not only politics but economics--in fact anything that returns a profit--a dirty and sinful business. Just look at how quickly the young intellectuals who appeared on TV in the early 1990s degenerated. They were people of our age and our circle. And it turned out that they had nothing to counterpose to the cult of stupidity, bad taste, and crazy money that came from advertising. Isn't it clear that if they had come to power, this generation would have used it just as ineptly? Look at a Chubais or a Kirienko. I don't think that they're in any sense better than Luzhkov or

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Berezovskii. They're just as pushy and have the same distorted sense of historical reality.

1st Voice: Come, come. Chubais, Gaidar, and Kirienko were all forced to make compromises with members of the old nomenklatura who knew little about economics--that's why their reforms were so half-baked and unproductive. Yet you work with directors who, in your opinion, don't have clean hands. You stage your production despite or, shall we say, in parallel with your knowledge of their "off the books accounting." So the question is: why?

2nd Voice: Because I love my craft and I have no other way. For now.

1st Voice: And perhaps the young reformers were hostages of a similar situation. ... But you are right, it's not about politicians. The average person is merely an object, the new material of history, and the Russian especially. The concepts of "personal initiative" and "personal responsibility" were eroded for centuries in Russia. We need a system aimed at the renaissance of the very concept of Personality and Individual Uniqueness. The value of human life in Russia is still barbarously low.

2nd Voice: What kind of a system would this be?

1st Voice: For a start the state must at long last carry out real, and not fictitious, liberal economic reforms. Leave decent people alone, not skin them three times over with absurd taxes that don't fill the treasury so much as push the entrepreneur into crime. Under present circumstances no honest business can make a profit. And the government should strip the crooks of their semi-legal "covers." Today you can buy yourself off any criminal charges at the Procurator General's Office, even the most clear-cut ones. In this situation, the criminal bosses have become practically the pillars of society, a special privileged caste.

2nd Voice: I hope you realize that this is no accident. Why should the former Communist nomenklatura breed strong and honest competitors? Today they are working in small business, where they are relatively controllable and loyal, but tomorrow they'll move up and start dictating their terms. Our bureaucrats are not used to competition. They like to be the boss, but without the stress and rivalry. And they can keep wealthy crooks out of power on "legal" grounds.

Besides, if the entire society, because of the idiotic tax system, is forced to cheat a bit, then bribe-taking among bureaucrats has smooth sailing. This frees them psychologically from responsibility. That's why everything in our economy is made to make the "chosen" richer and to keep the rest of the people ("cattle" in their terminology) in their shameful poverty. Our middle class is embryonic and society consists of the poor and the millionaires.

1st Voice: Our middle class prefers emigration to a political struggle for its rights.

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2nd Voice: That's preferable for everyone now. Bureaucrats are happy to get rid of the critically thinking part of the population, their potential rivals. The West is no less pleased to consume Russian brains. Leaving for the West, the scientific and cultural elite makes room for mediocrities.

1st Voice: And what is the way out?

2nd Voice: Either a true democracy or a new form of fascism. It doesn't matter what it's called: a presidential republic or a theocracy.

1st Voice: But you must admit that the most passionate part of today's Russian elite is the repatriates. Those who have lived in the West and got an injection of the Protestant ethic and then returned to Russia after 1991. They are rarely deceived by the virtues of living abroad, they had the experience of surviving in an inhospitable environment (relative to their previous experience), and they have developed a strong immunity to social stress. These are not false patriots, their feeling for their homeland is much more objective and no less emotional than ours.

2nd Voice: Yes, if you don't praise yourself, no one else will. However, what is it you're suggesting? That the entire Russian intelligentsia emigrate and then all come back one fine day?

1st Voice: I've already told you that this wouldn't be a bad idea, however utopian. But here's the through I have: America and other Western democracies could create special programs for those Russian intellectuals who want to acquire the experience of living in another culture. For instance, Russia absolutely requires such experience in contemporary ballet and filmmaking. We're at least thirty years behind. We need contemporary projects. Not one or two, but many. Let's say that in three or four years we have a boom in the film industry, it's inevitable. And then those professionals could change something in both the esthetics and the economics of filmmaking. And by the same token, in the way people think.

2nd Voice: You, dear friend, are a complete romantic. You can't be allowed near politics. The American film industry is much more interested in promoting its own products in our huge market. Why the devil should they help their Russian competitors, who know local conditions much better than they do as it is?

1st Voice: You're talking about narrowly focused industry people, merchants, who don't see beyond their own noses.

2nd Voice: I'm talking about normal, patriotic businessmen. Hollywood is not only a Dream Factory, but a source of wealth for the nation and especially for the national elite.

1st Voice: I'll never believe that America is so short-sighted. Russia has too strong a sense of identity to become a cultural colony. Anyone's. We easily adapt to foreign

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influences and turn them into part of our own psychological makeup. In that
sense, we very much resemble Americans and Jews.

2nd Voice: But the US and Russia are still if not enemies, then rivals.

1st Voice: Only a crude consciousness, which evidently characterizes of politicians the world over, puts military potential at the cornerstone of the arch. War always follows. We arm ourselves because we do not understand one another. Lacking understanding, we have no trust in each other and we are afraid. Fear leads to aggression. It's classic psychopathology. In fact, though Russian cultural genes are no less universal than American ones. We compete with one another because we have similar roles in world history, we are actors in the same style. In its radical nature the American experience of individualism is comparable to the Russian experience of collectivism. And now both concepts are being shaken back and forth. The Russians have shifted toward the pole of individualism and as usual, we know no limits in our movements. (Russians in general tend to act without a sense of limits.) In the meantime Americans are mastering collectivism. What else can explain "political correctness" if not an Orwellian influx into democracy? The new millennium is setting our two countries the goal of intensive "language" exchange (naturally I am speaking of "language" in structuralist terms). Therefore America is vitally interested precisely in the renaissance of Russian film rather than in cultural expansionism. Do you know how some scholars at Oxford decipher the letters GOD? "Generator Of Diversity."

2nd Voice: But for some reason intellectuals never come to power, either in America, or in Russia.

1st Voice: Perhaps we should thank God that they don't? They have too much imagination and fill a different function in society. Politicians and military men, however, should not think that they are God's representatives on earth. Dialogue is the only acceptable form for the relationship between people and government. This concept--a socially acceptable moral imperative--is having a difficult time taking root in our soil, where arbitrary and unchecked power has always been the norm. But now the authoritarian model is reaching its ignominious end - first of all, in the minds of the people. The nation no longer is willing to live under servile, humiliating conditions. Any government that does not take that into account is doomed.

2nd Voice: That brings tears to my eyes. Emotional and pathos-filled rhetoric always affects me like tear gas. But I'd like to know then why the people's wrath in theaters hasn't swept away directors? As everybody knows or surmises, they are behaving in arbitrary fashion.

1st Voice: Because they will be replaced by people exactly like them, or worse. (A theater director is not selected by the troupe but is appointed by the Ministry of Culture.)

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Because they have "protectors" at all levels of the pyramid. After all, they feed their bosses, who then feed theirs. It's like the wrapper on the "Try To Take It" candy bar: there's a little girl making a dog beg, holding up the candy, and on that candy wrapper is another picture of a girl making a dog beg, and so on. An infinity of evil that makes your head spin. But in the year 2000 Russia will have another government.

2nd Voice: Honest and incorruptible.

1st Voice: No need for sarcasm. Russia is an irrational country. Inexplicable things and sudden metamorphoses often occur.

2nd Voice: Here's a random thought. Near Copenhagen there is a statue of the Little Mermaid. Some miscreants have already cut off her head with an acetylene torch twice, and then, once a hefty sum was paid to them, left the head on a deserted street. After which the head was neatly welded back on. That is vandalism Danish-style. The other monuments that were erected in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries are still there untouched. Now think about the fate of monuments in Russia, particularly in the twentieth century. They are constantly being taken down and replaced with new ones, as if in an effort to destroy the past along with its inevitable mistakes.

1st Voice: Is that some kind of a metaphor?

2nd Voice: I imagine that we just won't be able to start from a clean sheet.

While I was writing these dialogues there came a new scent of human sacrifice: the Second Chechen War started. In several cities in Russia, terrorists blew up apartment buildings. This took place at night and the people asleep in the buildings were not troopers but women and children, peaceful civilians. ... The most incredible rumors are circulating: that these monstrous acts of terrorism were committed by Russian special services in order to ruin the elections, to declare an emergency situation in the country, and to provoke an invasion of federal forces into rebel Chechnya. As if their invasion into neighboring Dagestan, the vicious murders of hostages, and the entire bandit regime of self-proclaimed Ichkeria were not sufficient grounds to start military action. ...

For all the bizarre quality of these rumors, you can see a rational grain in them, a hard-to-find bit of sense: people do not trust their government one hundred percent, they think that this government is prepared to sell its soul to the Devil just to stay in power.

Of course, this demonization of the higher elite did not happen overnight and for no reason. But another thing is also clear: the Russian tendency to mythological thought is genetic. I can accuse myself of that to the fullest extent. Even though it is more natural for a person working in the theater to think this way than, say, for the mayor of Moscow. (Recently Mr. Luzhkov said on television, "Mr. Berezovskii is the devil, Satan." Perhaps he meant that Mr. Berezovskii had

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tempted the mayor? I can't say for sure, but honestly, that phrase didn't sound at all like a metaphor.)

I can offer other examples of mythological thinking:

**Example No. 1.** I am given my salary at the accounting office of the theater. And the cashier behaves inappropriately: very hostile, even aggressive. She behaves as if she were paying me personally, out of her own pocket, for work that I had either not done or had done badly. The reason? Laughably simple: the bills physically pass through her hands, she mentally makes them hers, and she considers the work of a director to be a priori not worth one penny.

**Example No. 2.** I am convinced that there will be no civil war, no bloody rebellions in Russia and that even the separatism of Chechnya will not set ablaze the entire Northern Caucasus. And what is the basis of my optimism? If you like, the law of composition. After all, history has its composition, its predetermined harmony. In the twentieth century Russians have made a colossal sacrifice. Tens of millions of citizens - the best and brightest--died in Stalin's camps. I'm not even mentioning the wars and revolutions. I don't know to whom that sacrifice was made. I doubt that it was to the Creator of all that exists. But I do know that thereby we have earned at least a hundred and fifty years of relative peace, a respite from bloodshed and violence; we have earned cultural renaissance. Is that naïve? Perhaps, but I've already said that Russians have a rich imagination. And this text was merely Theater for Oneself.

Translated by Antonina W. Bouis.

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Russia's Literary Revival:
From Authoritarianism to Intellectual Freedom

Aleksandr Ageev*

In order to understand the altogether unique aspect of the present literary situation in Russia, one must fully comprehend the role literature has played in Russian life throughout the nation's history, and especially during the many decades before the Gorbachev/Yeltsin reforms, when Communist ideology predominated.

Russia has never been truly free--the evolution of its social thought (philosophy, the social and political sciences) and publishing (the printing of books and the press) was always held back by the constraint of rather fierce censorship. In consequence, virtually the only realm in which **ideas** of any sort could develop and, most significantly, could be brought to the attention of the public, even in a mediated form, inevitably became fiction and *belles lettres*.

This circumstance appreciably distorted the scale of esthetic values to which both writers and the public gradually came to orient themselves. Artistic craft, aesthetic originality and novelty of form were valued far less than the writer's ability to respond to the current burning issues of the day. The writer was perceived not as an **artist**, **virtuoso**, and **master craftsman of the word**, but primarily as a **teacher of life**, a **prophet**, and **a thinker**. Two great Russian writers (better known in the West than any of the others), Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky, each in his own way expressively represent the **archetype of the Russian writer** proper--that is, the writer who considers the art of the word merely a means of **transforming man and the world**. In the end, both men resorted to direct **advocacy** of their religious and sociopolitical ideas, with Tolstoy casting doubt on the moral value of art itself in his tracts on aesthetics. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was, and remains, the last of these writer-prophets; his literary talent simply loses importance when seen against the vast scale of his social and historical role in a particular historical era.

In a Russia seized by the thirst for changes, every spiritual movement (represented by both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and--in his own way--Solzhenitsyn in recent times) was perceived as a version of a liberating, revolutionary movement. Most nineteenth and early twentieth century Russian writers were far from supporters of revolution, but public opinion nonetheless subsumed their work into a revolutionary context.

The Communists, who came to power in 1917, understood very well literature's principal importance as a social institution, and they used the traditionally eminent authority of literature in Russian society to accomplish their own ends. During Soviet rule, this authority ceased being a matter of free social choice; it was inculcated, using the full force of the entire State propaganda machine, so that in the end, literature became its most significant aspect. The writer saw his status raised to an unprecedented height, the Party and the State lavished their attention on him, and he received privileges and perquisites which served to separate him socially and materially from the majority of the population, which was impoverished and had no rights.

In exchange, the writer was required to give up his creative freedom and write "at the bidding of his heart, and our hearts belong to the Party," as the official Soviet classic writer Mikhail Sholokhov put it. At the same time admission to "the rank of writer" was put under rigid ideological control and was sharply restricted (only a member of the official Union of Writers could be considered a "writer," only he had access to privileges and perquisites, only his books did not encounter obstacles on the way to the reader; the rest, if they were engaged in literary work but were not listed as employed anywhere, could be sentenced to administrative exile for "parasitism," as was Joseph Brodsky in 1964). A few overcame this kind of official temptation and perished during the years of repression or were persecuted their entire lives. The rest

* Aleksandr Leonidovich Ageev - Born in 1956, Ageev earned an advanced degree in philology and taught literature in Ivanovo State University. A prominent literary critic, he has been widely published in many "thick" journals, including *Znamya*, *Novyi mir*, and *Oktyabr*, as well as in newspapers. In 1991 he moved to Moscow to become an editor of *Znamya*, where he directs the literature department.

compromised with their own personal artistic natures (I'm referring here to genuine writers, not the third-rate hacks who constituted the majority of orthodox "Soviet writers"), and their literary lives became dramas of talent betrayed by their own hands.

The Communists, having carried out a "cultural revolution," conquered illiteracy (albeit at the cost of "mediocritizing" culture) and developed high school and higher education in their own way and for their own purposes (and in so doing dramatically increasing the formerly very thin strata of "educated people" in Russia), were able to cultivate for Soviet literature and, with its help, the genuinely **average reader**. By the end of Communist rule, this reader readily devoured enormous editions of practically any sort of literature. The tastes of this average reader were formed by Soviet schools and propaganda, but in general they were standard tastes, similar to those of the general reader in any country--appreciating realistic literature reminiscent of classical models. From the mid-1960's and to the very end of the Soviet rule, the strange phenomenon of "book hunger" was evident at nearly every level of the population. A book (a good book) became a **prestigious consumer item** for all strata of the population. During Khrushchev's "thaw" of 1956-64, the status of the writer was elevated even higher. Apart from the customary official aspect, a measure of spontaneous societal trust in writers and in their authority appeared, since they were often leading dissidents and human rights activists. The example of Alexander Solzhenitsyn was particularly compelling.

In short, just as in pre-Revolutionary Russia, writers were expected to oppose the regime intellectually. By that time, Soviet rule had become completely stagnant, decaying internally and rapidly losing society's support. The Andrei Siniavskii and Yulii Daniel trial in 1965, Solzhenitsyn's expulsion to Germany in 1974, the exile of many other writers in his wake, the development of "samizdat" and "tamizdat" [underground publishing within the USSR and abroad] and the weakening of the "Iron Curtain," through which a carefully measured but substantial influx of new artistic and philosophical ideas came from the West--all this promoted the authority of literature and writers.

The years of perestroika (1986-1991) were marked by a final and unprecedented stir of public attention to literature. Besides their earlier polemical articles, novels and stories, Anatoly Rybakov's *Deti Arbata* [Children of the Arbat], Daniil Granin's *Zubr* [Bison], Vladimir Dudintsev's *Belye odezhdy* [White Garments], and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's works (published in Russia for the first time) became the banners of perestroika. The circulation of the "thick" journals in which all these books were published surpassed the million-copy mark (the number of subscribers to *Novyi mir* [New World], where Solzhenitsyn was published, was nearly 2,700,000 in 1990, and the publisher simply could not cope with the demand, so that the last four issues of the journal did not get published that year).

"Serious press," a far cry from cheap tabloids or entertainment pulp fiction, had never had such circulation figures anywhere.

It seemed as if the entire nation was reading these literary journals, that writers had unlimited power over minds. Already this seemed abnormal, almost hysterical to some. The euphoria of the early years of perestroika, when the population learned the monstrous truth about Soviet history in shocking detail, seemed to be growing into a kind of narcotic dependence. I recall that in my article, "On the Harm of Literature," I asked myself and my compatriots: "If everyone in the country is reading, who's working here?" The intensity of interest in literature was also heightened by the general instability of the situation in the USSR and the real, harsh ideological war which, because of the backwardness of the press in those years unfolded right on the pages of the literary publications. Moreover, writers were often more candid than politicians, who maintained an attitude of restraint virtually until the last days of the regime with regard to the "socialist choice" on which Gorbachev insisted.

This wave of interest in literature, unparalleled in magnitude, began playing itself out back in 1991, when it seemed to many that perestroika had reached an impasse, and that the complete breakdown of the socialist planned economy confronted the nation with a real threat of hunger and collapse. A five-year ideological discussion, which thereupon divided society into two hostile camps without bringing victory to either side, psychologically exhausted the people in the extreme, particularly the middle intelligentsia, the main body of readers. A landslide

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began, a serious decline of circulation which continues to this day. My first critical articles were published in the monthly magazine *Znamia* [Banner] (where I work and am published), which had a circulation of one million copies in 1990; my most recent pieces in 1999 appeared in an edition numbering only 9,500 copies.

The last "heroic" period in the history of Russian literature ended in January 1992, when the former "Soviet people" woke up one day in different country. Western observers, it sometimes seems, are inclined to underestimate the harshness of the shock which most Russians experienced (they had just been cut adrift, without the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) during the first few months of actual economic reforms, which Gorbachev had delayed for such an inexcusably long time. The point wasn't even so much the steep drop in the standard of living or the loss of savings eaten up by inflation--people in Russia have always known how to **suffer and live in poverty** and they still do. The shock was primarily psychological: no one knew how to **act** in the proposed situation and hence it seemed as if the will of the majority was paralyzed.

Perestroika's "liberal-progressive" rhetoric (and writers were partially responsible for this) was in large part starry-eyed, optimistic and detached from reality. It contended that Russia, with its great human and creative potential, once freed from the fetters of the administrative-command economy, would immediately blossom under free market conditions. Almost no one wanted to consider that the species *Homo sovieticus*, a type of dependent individual lacking in creative initiative, had actually evolved during the long years of the Communist rule in the nation. No one had prepared people for the difficult, lengthy, agonizing adaptation to the new rules of the game. No one—including writers—could bring themselves to say that most people were absolutely unprepared to accept the new system of priorities and values which the reforms entailed; that in order to survive they would have to change radically the petrified socialist communal stereotypes which had formed in their minds during the era of distributive economics and rigid regulation of every individual's social behavior.

People had lived for many years in a badly organized, cruel and unjust--but understandable--**Cosmos**; they had been united with people similar to themselves by a not-too-joyful but common fate. Now they suddenly found themselves cast down into creative Chaos by an invisible new life, with no agency providing leadership or risk insurance. The former Soviet individual had nothing against the rights which he was granted, but he couldn't even imagine their real price--the personal responsibility for his own life and work which he would henceforth have to bear. From a distance and in theory, it didn't seem that difficult.

But freedom became a trial that was nearly unendurable for the general population's mentality. The nation experienced stress, which easily slid into a depression from which it is only now very slowly beginning to recover.

Literature was also among the victims of this mass depression, or more accurately, the role literature was accustomed to playing in Russian life. This was a unique moment of truth. Freedom had suddenly arrived (along with it requirements, too); the opportunities that accompanied freedom revealed the degree of society's actual demand for literature (which proved to be lower than that expected in Russia, but wholly within worldwide standards). Freedom also revealed the price of propaganda cliches about "the nation that reads the most" and about the social stability derived from the intelligentsia's proficiency in the humanities.

Reading fiction systematically proved not to be among the most stable of the intelligentsia's skills. Moreover, the change in the national psychological and economic climate led to the marginalization of the mid-level service intelligentsia, of which there was a surplus. It was these people who were the first to wind up on the street as a result of the closing down of many useless offices where it had been possible to exist, peacefully albeit meagerly, shuffling papers nobody needed. For some reason, it was in this environment (according to not just my own personal observations) that the "reevaluation of values" was the most radical: a person who only yesterday had been incapable of surviving a month without devouring four or five of the latest "thick" journals and without discussing the prospects of Russia's Christian (national,

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economic) renaissance with his comrades was now reading only cheap novels and the sports pages, watching only Hollywood blockbusters on television and video and passionately engaging in some petty speculative business.

In short, the average reader turned his back on literature, and the prestige and status of the writer's profession declined accordingly. The entire powerful government infrastructure comprising the economic foundations of literature collapsed then and there--the system of book publishing (limited but cheap paper and printing services, book sales, the relatively high royalties which depended little on print runs) and the system of privileges and perquisites. At first (and later as well) the State was not at all concerned with the fate of literature: it wound up at once as the private business of private people. And then and there--deprived of the government protection and high social status--literature was forced to enter into competition with cheap novels (formerly artificially suppressed and now luxuriantly flourishing), mass literature, pulp fiction which at first was translated, and then was domestically produced. (The new reality furnished many plots for all this crime reading matter.). "Serious literature," needless to say, could not endure this competition, having in the meantime acquired an inferiority complex and having wasted a huge amount of energy to no purpose in the "battle" with this inescapable "evil." The very idea of the separate coexistence of "two cultures," which simply had different natures and functions, could by no means penetrate the heads of writers and critics who were accustomed to the strict hierarchical structure of "socialist culture."

Paradoxically, writers who had themselves just themselves become liberated from the all-suffocating censorship publicly and loudly demanded that the government prescribe or at least set strict limits on its competitors' activities. In turn, the competitors defended, entirely reasonably, the free choice of the reader (already seen as a "consumer"), who preferred to entertain and distract himself instead of following the acknowledged "masters of the word" to peer into the darkest, remote corners of the Russian soul and Russian life.

The "serious" literature of the perestroika and post-perestroika years was predominantly gloomy and hopeless; above all, it demonstrated the bewilderment of its creators, who had wandered into a kind of existential impasse in their attempt to reflect the Russian historical experience of the bloody twentieth century. The works of Liudmila Petrushevskaya, Vladimir Makanin, Andrei Bitov, Nina Sadur and many other talented writers whom the new era freed from the underground astonished us not only by their power and deep penetration into human psychology, but also by the glaring absence of even a hint of a future "light at the end of the tunnel." Essentially they refused to collaborate with the reader, who was accustomed to getting not only questions from literature, but answers as well. But the pendulum had somehow swung too far in the other direction. Answers were not forthcoming. Liudmila Petrushevskaya expressively entitled one of her best (and most gloomy) works It's Nighttime.

The crisis in Soviet and post-Soviet consciousness, even though it was analyzed by the nation's best pens, did not bring back to literature the readers who had abandoned it. In the meantime, the generation of writers mentioned above and the marked pathos of their post-Soviet works dominated the best literary magazines of the past decade. These writers, who had encountered many a difficulty in Soviet times, were already mature masters who had captured the imagination of readers; they became something akin to the present literary "establishment," by turns serving as laureates of all the literary prizes, the main characters in all the critical discussions, and the "plenipotentiary representatives" of Russian literature for Western readers. Despite all my respect and love for the works of the writers of this circle, I cannot refrain from venturing the speculation that they are nonetheless *fin de siecle* writers: their spiritual roots lie too deeply in Soviet soil--not the healthiest environment, it should be said, even for powerful talent. Their experience is priceless, but it is also rapidly depreciating--its unkind gravity is vanishing before one's eyes--in proportion to the turbulent changes taking place in real life.

It should be noted that literature in Russia has always been slightly ahead of society, has led it, in a certain sense, indicating the desired path of development and furnishing it with moral reference points. Now it looks as if the situation is directly the reverse--literary consciousness, formed back in Soviet times, lags behind the evolution of life. Perhaps the main problem in our

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literature is its extremely unclear, dare I say, skeptical attitude to such a fundamental value as freedom.

Variations on the standard plot roam from one literary work to another (and we're talking about works of high literary quality): an individual attains freedom but finds no happiness in it, simply doesn't know what to do with it. No argument here--the structure of Russian life throughout the nation's history has inevitably produced a type of contemplative person, a dreamer, a visionary, since this life did not require the activist and life-affirming elements in a person all that much. The doer in Russian classical prose was, as a rule, either a foreigner or a crook, while the true Russian hero sought from life not so much **freedom as truth**. Here the specific nature of Russian life--always strictly regulated, not challenging the individual to take creative initiative in practical action-- gave rise to the particular nature of the national consciousness and, correspondingly, to the specific character of its literature. The instinct for freedom did exist, as it does in any creature possessing reason, but it was, to put it bluntly, weakened by the circumstances of life itself.

Vladimir Makanin, one of Russia's major contemporary prose writers, has been preoccupied with this issue in his work for rather a long time. Nearly all the main characters in his works, as far back as the Soviet period, undergo the agonizing process of individual self-definition, displacement from a close circle, the "collective," the community which spawned and shaped them. To keep from dissolving as individuals in the depersonalizing collective (which the family can also be), nearly all of them escape. In the story "Pustynnoe mesto" [Deserted Place], an entire philosophy of escape is worked out. It's a pessimistic philosophy: "There is no purification in escape--there is only a craving for, a kind of prolonged attraction to a deserted place, and nothing more. A craving which exhausts itself in the escape itself, runs its course on its own, like chickenpox or measles."

And completely in keeping with this philosophy, Makanin's characters run in place. The "craving" deceives them, the "deserted place" horrifies them, "the childhood disease" of freedom--"chickenpox or measles" as we are slyly told--passes. And those who have been given more than others, who had a powerful start, gained momentum and wound up beyond the "ring of the Ural Mountains," like Bashilov in the story "Gde skhodilis nebo s kholmami" [Where the Sky Met the Hills], or like Ninel Nikolaevna and Goloshchekov from the story "Odin i odna" [One and One]. They are doomed to lonely nostalgia for their "village," their "collective," their "brood," from which they broke out by yielding to their "craving."

Yes, there is no purification for them in the instant of freedom. On the other hand, in Makanin's words, "this instant is small and seemingly even meaningless; however, a man has valued it and will always value this instant and, if you ask him why, he'll shrug his shoulders--saying, 'you, brother, are a fool.'" In the Soviet era, this collision had no resolution, because that "freedom" about which Makanin and his characters agonizingly reflect was still a theoretical and philosophical category, and the questions "What for?" "Why?" arose almost from the realization that attaining real freedom was impossible. But since then, life in Russia has changed in a radical way. Literature that had been bold and advanced in Soviet conditions (since it even had the impudence to think about freedom) has begun to lag noticeably behind rapidly changing life.

"Literature lags behind life" was a favorite thesis of official, standard Soviet criticism. But, strange as it seems, it is now true. Everything has been turned upside down.

The time, of course, is "Nighttime." Russia is experiencing a time which is not the most psychologically comfortable for writers or readers. But economic chaos and the spiritual crisis of the former Soviet individual does not change the simple fact that it has fallen to our lot to live in the great era of reconstruction of the entire world order. Russia was the site of the jolt to this landslide-like process, which has given Russia, for the first time in its most difficult history, actual (not "internal," not "spiritual," not theoretical, not hypothetical) **freedom**. And, finally, a new type of individual has appeared, a person who knows why he needs this freedom. This individual, however, lives among a multitude who remain internally unfree and who are horrified, like Makanin's characters, by the "deserted place." This in itself constitutes our most important moral and aesthetic problem. How Russian literature helps solve this problems will be its most profound challenge in the years to come.

* * *

Knowing the history and specific characteristics of Russian literature, I have been deeply interested to observe over the past ten years how it has evolved without anyone's control, how its secularization and emancipation--not only from ideological Communist blueprints and from the State, but also from certain venerable yet time-worn aesthetic traditions--has taken place. This evolution has proceeded in the most diverse ways, at times ludicrous and intriguing, at times dramatic, accompanied by tumultuous discussions (sometimes the topics of the discussions themselves were ridiculous as well; for example, for a rather long time serious critics argued about the role and function of so-called "obscene" vocabulary in a literary text, or they rushed to draw the line between erotica and pornography, since all these phenomena, which were strictly forbidden in the past, appeared in literature and assumed their normal places).

Literature was becoming colorful and diverse right before my eyes, losing the "unity" which had been constructed by theoreticians of socialist realism, splitting apart into a multitude of autonomous and fully self-sufficient "literatures." In order to describe this scene, critics were forced to invent a myriad of "temporary" terms such as "the other literature," a term which Sergei Chuprinin introduced, or "artistic prose," which Mark Lipovetskii launched. "Literary trends" increased and multiplied and were also given florid names--such as "metametaphorism" or "turbo-realism." The "underground" came out of the basement noisily, in carnival fashion, but its creative potential, as later became apparent, was not very high; its most vital aspect, "sots-art" [sardonic reference to socialist realism], is represented by the work of Dmitrii Prigov, Yevgenii Popov, Vladimir Sorokin and several others. Western Slavists are very familiar with these writers, but almost no one in Russia reads them: their aesthetic novelty drew on an all-too-perishable substratum. The language and ephemera of everyday life in the Soviet era and their re-interpretation in parody form, which form the essence of sots-art, disappear and are forgotten very rapidly. The aura of scandal surrounding these writers also faded rather quickly, while the overuse of literary devices that had been successful discoveries at one time led only to the trivialization of talent. Prigov finally became something akin to a literary showman, more interesting to "society page" journalists (when he appeared at any public function or any gala event) than to readers and serious critics. And Vladimir Sorokin, after the publication of his novel Goluboe salo [Blue Bacon], seems to have tried to publish something in the bestseller genre.

Most of the poets and prose writers once ranked as "avant-garde" were by no means all avantgardists. Those writing within one or another influential tradition (neo-classical, neo-acmeist), such as Sergei Gandlevskii or Sergei Soprovskii, simply were not published in the censored Soviet press. Now they have emerged from semi-legal poetic circles into a wider audience and have immediately, since they had matured as artists, taken their rightful places in the new literary "establishment."

The literary arena was rapidly expanding. Former dissidents and external and internal emigres entered the general literary stream once more. Noisy, scandalous marginal groups and trends which irritated traditional tastes but advertised themselves rather skillfully appeared. The critics nurtured on such concepts as the "literary process" (actually what they meant was not so much process as "progress," in which literature was supposed to get "better and better"), were at first greatly annoyed by all this diversity, understanding neither where it was all headed (the fact that literature must constantly **move in the right direction** was understood implicitly) nor which "conception" they could possibly use to describe it all. This is why critics of the older and middle generations (such as Anatolii Bocharov, Viktor Kam'ianov, Stanislav Rassadin, Valentin Kurbatov and many others), occasionally have felt open or secret nostalgia for Soviet times--unfree and difficult for literature but comprehensible--and began speaking about the "crisis in literature." They rose up in openly conservative opposition to the literary innovations which annoyed them.

In a certain very limited sense they were right. Much of what floated up to the literary surface during these years and enjoyed a brief notoriety was simply froth and failed to live up to

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general expectations. But these critics did not appreciate the revolutionary nature of a situation, when **everything** became possible in literature, nor did they approve or support the powerful creative potential inherent in it.

In 1991, irritated by the many-voiced choir of critics complaining about the "crisis in literature," I myself wrote an article entitled "Synopsis of the Crisis," in which I did everything I could to welcome what was then called a "crisis." I characterized the situation as follows: "The picture which we are witnessing is a really motley one that can shock the outside observer. Our literature is now experiencing that extremely rare transitional point when it contains everything: all the stages of the evolution that awaits it are not spread out over time, but are revealed all at once, the way the 'cultural layers' of several centuries are laid open in the cross-section of an archeological dig."

From a creative standpoint, the situation even then seemed to me extraordinarily fruitful, as it still does. We were observing and we continue to observe neither disintegration nor entropy (even if it is destruction, it is the destruction of a prison) but creative Chaos, as the ancient Greek thinkers understood it. The Cosmos can arise only from Chaos--this is what I always kept in mind as I observed literary life in post-Soviet Russia's life, which sometimes annoyed me, too.

In the meantime, pessimism about the literary situation in Russia is to this day rather widespread and influential. In a society which has turned its back on literature, has stopped subscribing to and reading "thick" journals, and does not buy serious books the desire to somehow justify its cooling off to culture in general is apparently very strong. Hypotheses such as "Good literature has disappeared in our nation," "There's nothing to read," "Thick journals have died," "Gallows humor and pornography reign supreme in contemporary literature," and "The craft of writing has declined" are very popular in the semi-educated circles which are cut off from active participation in literary life and which once were the collective "social clients" of Soviet literature.

The facts attest to the complete opposite. Unabashedly mediocre, "dull," uninspired but ideologically impeccable prose and poetry produced by an army of over ten thousand official "Soviet writers" in an almost planned system predominated in the enormous stream of Soviet literature issued by Soviet publishers. The reader had to search for "pearls" in this enormous heap of, metaphorically speaking, dung. Given the frank vulgarity, mediocrity and falsehood, even simply honest writers about everyday life (such as Boris Mozhayev, Vasilli Belov, Yurii Nagibin, Valentin Rasputin, Anatolii Pristavkin and several other prose writers of a very average aesthetic level) seemed like very good prose writers. The best journals of the Soviet period (such as *Novy mir* [New World] or *Yunost*' [Youth]) were nonetheless forced to devote the greater part of their space and their pages to the mediocre literature of the writers' bosses, printing endless, multi-volume "epics" about the grand revolutionary past, about "socialist collectivization" and "industrialization," about the war and "post-war peace building." For some reason, there was an especially large number of books (under the paternal leadership of the Communist party, to be sure) about the natural resources of Siberia, the Far East and other exotic places.

All this useless ballast was forcefully cast overboard in the very first years of perestroika, freeing up space, at first for the enormous expanse of literature forbidden under Soviet rule and then for completely new, young literature.

I can state with complete assurance, both as one who is sufficiently close to the scene by virtue of working at a "thick" literary journal and as a critic who by professional necessity knows the state of affairs in contemporary Russian literature: never in its history has there been a decade in which so many writers with mature, fully developed talent, whether in prose, poetry, dramaturgy or criticism, have appeared. There are so many of them and they have appeared so suddenly that no one has had the time to be surprised and astonished by this phenomenon; after all, in the previous era it took years for something even relatively new and fresh to appear.

And here the change in quantity has immediately generated a **qualitative** leap. In just a few years the level of **literary standards** has risen to an unprecedented height. Every list will be incomplete, but it is impossible not to mention here at least several names of writers who made their debut very recently. They are principally: Viktor Pelevin, Dimitrii Bakin, Oleg Ermakov, Andrei Dmitriev, Aleksei Slapovskii, Yuri Buida, Mikhail Butov, Vladimir Berezin, Aleksandr

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Borodynia, Vladimir Sharov, Anatolii Korolev, Aleksandr Melikhov, Aleksandr Terekhov, Anton Utkin, Mikhail Shishkin, Irina Polyanskaya, Olga Slavnikova as well as many, many others.

This is by no means a "Moscow" urban snob literature--many of the prose writers I have named live in the provinces: Oleg Yermakov in Smolensk, Aleksei Slapovskii in Saratov, Olga Slavnikova in Yekaterinburg. Many have only recently moved to Moscow: Yurii Buida from Kaliningrad, Andrei Dmitriev from Pskov, Anatolii Korolev from Perm. This is genuinely new and young prose, achieving a level of craftsmanship, inner freedom, and readiness to reflect and speak about issues that the older literature could not reach.

Approximately the same scene can also be observed in poetry, where an entire generation of brilliant poets has appeared in the last ten years. Once begun, the list is impossible to complete. It includes, for example, Timur Kibirov, Yelena Fanailova, Vitalii Kalpidi, Aleksandr Levin, Maksim Amelin, Aleksei Purin, Leonid Shevchenko, Shampal Abdullaev, Denis Novikov, Danila Davydov--and so on to infinity.

What unites all these very diverse, utterly dissimilar prose writers and poets is a high level of literary and--I will not be afraid to use the word--philosophical culture. They have come to literature enriched by diverse life experience and carrying serious intellectual baggage. There has never been so cultured (in the best sense of the word) a generation in our literary history. After all, Soviet literary tradition viewed any intellectualism with almost open hostility and relied on "natural talent," the man from "the bottom" possessed of little culture who was easy to shape ideologically and aesthetically and to render dependent on the prevailing literary norms and customs.

In the past few years a school of literary criticism has developed simultaneously with the new prose and poetry which is capable of understanding and evaluating its quality and significance. The names of Andrei Nemzer, Aleksandr Arkhangelskii, Vyacheslav Kupritsyn, Mark Lipovestkii, Mikhail Zolotonosov, Evgenii Shklovskii, Andrei Zorin, Aleksandr Etkind, and many others, are familiar to anyone involved with literature. As head of the bibliographic section at a "thick" journal, I can say with certainty: the intellectual and esthetic level of even the "average," "ordinary," "rank-and-file" criticism, sometimes even written by a greenhorn critic, is now very high. Unknown young men and women fresh from their student desks come to us bringing their first manuscripts. Very often these are the writings of fully mature critics, who do not have to be taught anything (in Soviet times editors used to love to "instruct" a talented person for a very long time, since a young person, as it was then considered, by definition couldn't write anything worthwhile--he "didn't know life").

In short, there are now, as never before in Russian literature, many young and talented writers who have something to say to society and who know-how to say it. What is alarming, though, is the drastic reduction in the number of readers who are capable of hearing them. I have already described the natural and understandable reasons for this reduction. It isn't just that Russian society, after the stress it has undergone, is experiencing a devastating spiritual and cultural apathy as between the writer and his potential reader. The point is also that the normal channels of communication in culture--the entire system of cultural communication--were destroyed in the breakthrough era and have not been reconstructed to this day. The old system was poor, no argument here; it was constructed for purposes of propaganda, but it operated after a fashion. The new system is being created with toil and in agony, but in the meantime it is fragmented and ineffective.

I am referring primarily to book publishing. The first post-perestroika years were marked by the most difficult crisis in this field, which is so very critical for cultural evolution. The monsters of State publishing collapsed, their privatization was long and hard, rife with endless scandals, while the newly emerging private publishers were initially preoccupied with making money and set no cultural goals for themselves. They published (often through copyright pirating) an enormous amount of purely entertaining, low-brow reading matter, which brought quick and easy profits because the Soviet regime had treated consumers of this product so badly that they eagerly bought these previously unavailable books.

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It was now possible to publish any book--but only if you had the money, of course, to pay for the cost of printing. Alas, money was precisely what talented young people of letters have always lacked. Meanwhile, books were published anyway. Money was found by various means, sponsors were discovered, friends and admirers of the gifted helped; however all of this was chaotic and haphazard. Most significantly, the public simply could not find out about a book published in this manner since the State system of book distribution had collapsed along with the State system of book publishing. Many talented prose writers or poets published books at their own expense and then were left penniless with unopened packages of unwanted copies of a print run that nobody wanted.

In those years libraries were dramatically reduced to beggary (they are still all government-run in Russia) and hence stopped replenishing their collections with new books. Books published in Moscow did not reach the provinces, nor did provincial editions get to Moscow. There was practically no specialized reporting on books (even of a strictly commercial nature), no print media that reported on new books or advertised them. Book circulation continued only because of the efforts of few enthusiasts, who carried heavy packages of books from city to city (it is worth mentioning that the postal service also became inordinately expensive, thus closing down still another channel of communication, while the cost of surface and air transportation sharply increased as well.)

At that time the "thick" journals, which continued to appear in spite of their desperate financial straits, saved the day. But for an enormous country there were (and remain) few of these journals, nor could they accommodate every author worthy of publication. Besides, their readership was sharply reduced, not to mention the fact that they could only pay their authors symbolic royalties. It became impossible to survive on a literary paycheck in Russia; moreover, this was equally true for all writers, venerable ones as well as beginners.

Nonetheless, nothing could prevent the growth of new literature. The enthusiasm of its creators proved to be stronger than the nearly insurmountable economic competition. Writers such as Zufar Gareev, Aleksandr Terekhov, Viacheslav Kupritsyn earned a living any way they could, most often by journalistic work at "glossy" entertainment magazines and tabloid newspapers, which had multiplied, or by writing all sorts of "pulp fiction" under pseudonyms, as did Irina Polyanskaya and Iulia Latynina.

Generally speaking, most of the new writers share a broad intellectual profile and are much more dynamic and resourceful than their older comrades in literature. Poets do not disdain to write book reviews and other semi-business prose, and moreover are doing so professionally. Prose writers write scripts for TV series. All this varied work allows them, in their search for their daily bread, to avoid straying far afield from literature, a profession that is not bringing them money or glory at the moment but does give them the feeling of full creative self-realization.

An enormous number of journals, little magazines, collections of literary miscellany and anthologies are being published for the most insignificant sums (in small editions, of course) both in the major cities and in the provinces. After existing for a short time and finding no serious financial support, they disappear quickly, but new ones appear all the time. Talented organizers of literary affairs emerge suddenly amid gifted young people, who create out of thin air literary associations, publishing houses and a great many collections of literary miscellany and anthologies. One of them in Moscow is the writer and critic Dmitrii Kuzmin, who gathered around him creative young people and founded the literary union "Vavilon" [Babylon] ("membership" in it was prohibited initially to writers over 25) and the publisher "Argo-Risk." The publisher came out with several dozen issues of a literary review in which many talented poets and prose writers made their debut, while Vavilon organized several national poetry festivals--and all this without solid and regular financial support, using money donated by occasional sponsors.

Another publisher is Nikolai Iakimchuk, who lives in Tsarskoe Selo and is the founder of the Tsarskoselskoye Literary Prize. Vladimir Abashev and Vitalii Kalpidi from Perm founded the Iuriatin Foundation (affiliated with Perm University), which publishes and distributes at no charge the books of young prose writers and poets. For a time they even published a solid literary

9

journal called *Nesvoevremennye zapiski* [Untimely Notes]. Aleksandr Kasymov in Ufa publishes the "small literary magazine" *Sutoloka* [Hubbub], in which very accomplished young writers are published. The list of literary enthusiasts who are among talented young people disinterested in profit can be continued on and on.

Virtually every major city, especially university centers such as Saratov, Yekaterinburg, Cheliabinsk, Samara, Tver', has its own literary environment from which fully developed writers emerge. All these writers lead difficult and impoverished lives and must spend an enormous amount of energy not on creative work, but on earning money. Charitable giving and sponsorship grants are still very poorly organized in Russia. Local authorities in the provinces prefer to help members of the old Writers' Unions, while officials at branches of the national Union of Writers of the Russian Federation do not wish to involve themselves with talented young people who are oriented to a new literary consciousness.

I cannot fail to mention here that the West extended its helping hand to well-known writers in this time of difficulty for literature. Benefiting from the wave of interest in Russia at that time, these writers began to be published in the West, were invited to lecture at American and European universities and were given stipends, grants, and literary prizes (the Alfred Toepfer Foundation's Pushkin Prize deserves special mention). Several writers and critics settled in the West for a long time, including Tatiana Tolstaia, Yevgenii Yevtushenko, Mikhail Shishkin, Aleksei Parshchikov, Marina Palei, Mark Lipovetskii, Evgenii Dobrenko (unfortunately, nearly all of them stopped writing). This foreign aid was spotty and, to be sure, did not reach those who needed it most, the youngest writers whose authority had not yet been established or whose work was simply not noticed by Western Slavic scholars. Their Russian colleagues, often individuals who were not young by any means, always gave "correct" suggestions and typically sought to confine them to traditional literary tastes.

The Soros Foundation has provided and continues to provide generous and, most importantly, regular assistance to Russian literature. It supports libraries and helps "thick" journals to survive. Without its grants, the lives of scholars in the humanities would be much more difficult and bleak. But the area which is of greatest priority for the Soros Foundation has been the support of science and education, not literature. To be sure, this support also indirectly helps literature, since it shapes both the contemporary free cultural environment and the potential readers of new literature.

Another area in which the Soros Foundation works, assistance in bringing the Internet to Russia, has a more direct bearing on the growth of new literature. The Internet is an ideal instrument for literary communication, and the Russian part of the Web is already filled with a great number of literary sites (true enough, most of them are of rather poor aesthetic quality--money and opportunities often do not go hand in hand with talent). It's possible to read practically all the influential literary journals, newspapers and literary miscellany on the Web; a "web" literature has also emerged with its own infrastructure--electronic libraries, journals, prizes and competitions. The potential audience of the Internet has no limits, but in reality, the poverty of most Russian writers and readers sets the limit. Using the Internet, by Russian standards, is still expensive. Nevertheless, good literature will certainly continue to master and inhabit the Internet in the future, where it can have, in addition to unlimited editions, the possibility of rapid feedback from its readers.

On the whole, unfortunately, too many of the problems of the new literature in Russia have poverty as their source. The contemporary young writer has rights and freedom--but not the material resources to take advantage of these rights. For instance, a Russian now has the right to see the entire world--it's difficult to overestimate the importance of such knowledge for a writer, especially a young one--but he doesn't have the money to exercise this right. And in the past few years the West has not been inviting young writers on exchange visits very often, certainly not as often as it used to in the past.

In concluding this article, I want to say that the picture of literary growth, which it describes, is, naturally, subjective and incomplete. Others may see the meaning of literary life in entirely different terms, such as the merging of literary consciousness with religious consciousness, or the renaissance of "national consciousness." But I nonetheless insist on the

10

# Will Russia's Terrible Years Be Repeated?

## Vyacheslav Vs. Ivanov*

"We are the children of Russia's terrible years."

Alexander Blok

The swift pace of events in Russia has required me to make changes in my epilogue to this book. It has become necessary for me to do more than comment on the assessments made in these essays of what has happened in Russia in recent years. Along with those authors who dare to peer into the future, I too must try to take a look at the new century. Let us try to assess the embryonic changes and gain some understanding of the possible direction of the nation's development. Boris Yeltsin's departure from the presidency denotes the end of an entire historical period, which most of the essays in this volume address. It is clear even now that a new era has begun; its contours are only beginning to take shape. I feel an affinity to many of the thoughts in Vladimir Mirzoev's article, written last fall, which juxtaposes various points of view about Russia's prospects in an imaginary dialogue. I can venture early prognoses regarding a few probable paths of future changes in Russia. That in turn requires me to review the main features of the preceding period and think about the lessons that come to mind even now.

* * *

In the last ten years we have heard much talk about the need for economic reforms. But it cannot be said that reform goals were defined in a way that would be clear to the broad public. It is not an end in itself to proclaim, as did the first governments assuming power after the collapse of the USSR, that construction of a market economy was the goal, any more than the former communist phraseology was justified in proclaiming the construction of socialism--a false goal. The goal of all such recent reforms, whose success we desire, can only be the speediest improvement of the wellbeing of the greatest number of Russia's inhabitants, including the guarantee of what everyone needs: jobs matching qualifications and providing regular pay; inexpensive housing; reasonable prices for medicines and medical services; pensions for the elderly; and education for the young (adequate numbers of teachers for a modern education, school and university buildings, textbooks, and educational aids). In comparison with these priority goals, which can in principle be achieved in Russia (notwithstanding their apparently utopian nature today), all the others, on which incommensurate sums are being spent, must be

* Vyacheslav Vselovodovich Ivanov - Born in 1929, Ivanov graduated from Moscow State University, where he lectured until 1958, when he was dismissed because of his friendship with Boris Pasternak, a Nobel Prize winner and then the target of political persecution. For thirty years after that Ivanov was banned from travelling to the West, while he headed the Institute for Slavic and Balkan Studies. In 1989 he was again invited to Moscow State University to chair the new Department of the History and Theory of World Culture. He then became director of the M. Rudomina Russian Library of Foreign Literature until 1993. A former member of the USSR parliament representing the Academy of Sciences, Ivanov is currently a professor at the Slavic Department, University of California, Los Angeles. He is a fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, as well as the recipient of numerous awards for his scholarly research.

deemed undeserving of such encouragement. In particular, a country where the majority of the population lacks the above-mentioned primary necessities, it does not seem appropriate to maintain a huge and inefficient government apparatus that is constantly expanding in size and privileges. This includes the special services, which were inherited from the Stalinist period and are once again assuming greater significance at present. Nor does it seem justified to give priority to the production of the newest and most expensive weapons systems and the maintenance of a gigantic army.

But the mere reduction of such nonproductive expenditures (at present a very unlikely prospect, despite its urgency) would not solve the country's economic problems. In order for real reforms to succeed, many other urgent actions are required, in particular, immediate passage of legislation on land reform, which is needed for private farming to develop quickly. Without land reform, Russia will not be able to return to the time (before the catastrophe of dekulakization and collectivization), when not only did the nation not depend on food imports and foreign aid, but it actually exported food products. The newly elected Duma is planning to resume consideration of draft land reform legislation, but the political composition of that body makes it unlikely that the law as enacted will respond to the interests of farm owners. Tired of waiting for decisions from the center, some oblasts are already beginning to introduce radical land reform. We can examine the different points of view on this issue by reading Kirill Gorelov's article in our anthology.

A bold start in reform came about through the private initiative displayed by many enterprising Russians in the period 1989-1992. For an appreciation of how capital arose in the early stages of development and how market relations formed, see Arkadii Zlochevskii's account in our collection. The instant creation of wealth for the New Russians, and the tendency to spend it as profligately as the merchants of the past, have astonished the world. But a consumer society is not built solely on the ability to consume, getting everything on credit and not repaying debts. It is important to start manufacturing not only weapons or planes (the current government, reminiscent in this too of the early years of Stalin's dictatorship, is once again enthralled by flying). Before anything else, Russia must begin trading with the world for its own benefit, as it had in the past. And for that there must be an assortment of items that are more edible and useful (and not for Saddam Hussein alone) than rockets, bomber planes, and submarines.

The frequent comparisons made in recent years between the economic situation in Yeltsin's Russia with that of the post-Versailles Weimar Republic can be extended in yet another way. Hitler increased military production in destitute Germany. This form of development is echoed in the program of the new Russian leadership, envisaging a substantial expansion of the military-industrial complex. The dominance of this sector in the Russian economy under Brezhnev made serious reforms impossible. We must make the same assumption in view of the new government's analogous plans.

The main failures of the economic transformations that were proposed and have been partially implemented in the last eight years derive from the fact that development was artificially limited primarily to the field of financial capital. Capital has a tendency to flee to other countries, although with rational organization these assets could have been used for beneficial capital investments, for example, in the neighboring republics, once part of the USSR, which are economically important for Russia. Capital flight without

investment deprives the country of capital without substantially increasing the volume of
savings of its owners, and thus in the final analysis is not good for anyone.

Among the more general reasons for the failure of the reforms begun in 1992 I
would include the exclusive orientation on the ideas of the liberal school of economics,
whose application has not proved to be fruitful in many other countries, either. The
absence of any serious and original economic theories in Russia since the death of Leonid
Kantorovich, Nobel Prize laureate in economics, had an effect, too. In conversations
with me he acknowledged that the illegal black market was the real basis of the Soviet
economy in Brezhnev's day. The legalization of that black market, with all its distortions,
could have been the guiding developmental principle during the post-Soviet years.
Similar ideas are expressed by the authors of our collection. Sergei Vasil'ev describes
how the former political elite converted its privileges into property and income. Vladimir
Chetvernin's article describes the process of privatization of state property by the "post-
totalitarian" (perhaps too optimistic a term?) bureaucracy. The author relates the
appearance of private property among the nomenklatura to the period when Mikhail
Gorbachev was in power. But the desire for personal gain was present much earlier
among all the Soviet leaders of the Brezhnev period. Mikhail Suslov, considered the
primary guardian of Marxist ideology, left a multimillion dollars inheritance.

Yurii Plyusnin's article demonstrates that, contrary to expectations, the reforms of
the 1990s led to a sharp decline in the standard of living for the average inhabitant of
large urban areas in Russia, like Novosibirsk, where he did his research. I agree with the
author's conclusion that the decline in life expectancy and the acute emotional stress
people feel reflect the depth of the psychological crisis brought on by the negative results
of the reforms. Nadezhda Azhgikhina's article points out that the position of women has
deteriorated rapidly in the reform period.

* * *

Capitalism has become global. It has identical or similar characteristics in every country – both developed and developing. And it is these common traits that have had a highly negative effect on the events in Russia of recent years by sharply increasing material inequality. Throughout the world there are attempts to find an optimal balance between a free market (which can be either good or bad, especially if the market is not left to itself) and the mechanisms regulating it. The details may vary from country to country, but the failure of extreme attempts that dogmatically select only one path to development is obvious. In that sense, the shift in recent months toward an increasing government role in economic policy does not appear to be a sensible decision.

However, the weak side of the arguments offered by the proponents of economic
reform in Russia was the essentially unsubstantiated assertion that the market had a
beneficial effect on the development of many countries (Mikhail Prusak, among others,
writes about this in our anthology). On the contrary, today we can speak of general
complications in this theory. The difficulties involve every country (the US is still
relatively untouched, even though there are concerns about a possible crisis and the
government is considering measures to avoid it). It seems unrealistic to suppose that
Russia could somehow manage to be the only exception in the world or that she could be
isolated from it, as the extreme nationalists would hope. Russians, no longer operating on

the proposition that the economy can be built "in one separate country," cannot escape the consequences of the development of modern technology, which inexorably affect all those who cannot avoid using it. In a view that is gaining ground, the goal should not be to wheedle yet again large sums from such institutions as the International Monetary Fund, only to have the money vanish without trace in the bowels of an omnivorous state machine without anything reaching the ordinary citizen. Also gaining ground is the desire to define once again the place of Russia, whose countless riches should keep her from remaining a beggar and eternal debtor, in the world economic community. But Russia will have to fight for a dignified place.

There must be a change in the entire strategy of development for the Russian economy. It is time to stop thinking, as the country did during the early Five-Year-Plans, about heavy industry: it is time to start producing consumer goods, to develop farming intensively, and to modernize light industry. It is time to stop focusing on the extraction of oil and gas and on the production of weaponry. Modern society has become information-based. Therefore, it is most important to produce and to sell information. And it is in this very field that Russia has an excellent chance to secure a place among the world's top-ranking countries. It is here that the country's intellectual potential can find a practical outlet. Many of the most gifted young people have mastered computer programming magnificently. The absence or the shortage of good computers for many years did not stop them, and in fact promoted the development of efficient ways to use imperfect technology. The level of computer expertise among the public in Russia is higher than that of Germany and is comparable to America's. But there is talk in the United States of overproduction of computers; supposedly the country has more computers than are needed to handle commercially viable tasks. But in fact, it is not a question of having too many computers, but rather that there are not enough new ideas for their possible applications. What has been invented in Russia (but as a rule, not implemented) would suffice for others countries, too. Let me give two examples from areas which I have watched develop over decades of my work. Now in America even rather primitive translation programs are beginning to make money. Before Igor Melchuk was forced to emigrate to Canada (in Brezhnev's closed era), he and his co-authors developed translation systems that were far superior to these commercially profitable programs.

Moving to examples of artificial intelligence programs with wider industrial applications, let me mention robot technology, the foundations of which were developed in Russia before World War II by N. A. Bernshtein and his followers.

The basic error and miscalculation of Russian governments in recent years has been the inability to understand that Russia's wealth lies not so much in oil, gas, and aluminum but in the amazing number of her super-gifted people and in the energy devoted to intellectual inquiry among broad strata of the population, primarily the young. According to the generally accepted findings of the economist Nikolai Kondrat'ev, who was executed during the Stalin terror, the decline that comes once an existing technology has exhausted its possibilities is accompanied by discoveries whose integration into the economy makes possible a new industrial upsurge. According to this paradigm, when economic difficulties first appear, experimental work and fundamental research in the sciences must be supported. Some of the difficulties and hardships experienced by scientists in Russia today are recounted in Vadim Radaev's essay in this volume. Ten

years ago our best biological laboratories were on world levels. Today, without investing
in new and especially expensive measures, Russia could not have participated in a series
of important biotechnological and bioinformational discoveries of recent years and
months. Here, as in the comparable lag in other leading fields of science and technology,
the fault lies primarily in the obtuseness and lack of general culture (to put it mildly)
among many high ranking officials in the recent past. The current government in recent
days has begun talking about the intensive development of high technology, but for the
time being it is spending enormous sums not on science but on a bloody internal war.
However, the newly elected governor of Moscow Oblast, Boris Gromov, outlined in his
first speeches and interviews in early February 2000 his goal to assist the "science cities,"
one of the oblast's main resources. Science can be used in various ways. It would not be
to its benefit to return to military applications. As Nobel Prize winning physicist Pyotr
Kapitza once said, in such a case science would have to go back into purdah wearing the
veil. The secrecy required by military research slows down the development of science.
If the new government sends Russian science down that path, the loss will be both
Russia's and the world's.

* * *

As the result of the reforms of the 1990s, monopolistic state capitalism, which under the
demagogic pseudonym of "socialism" prevailed throughout the Soviet period (sometimes
in conjunction with the market, whether illegal as under Brezhnev, or semilegal as during
NEP), was replaced in the dominant part of the economic system by a form of
monopolistic capitalism in which the state sector was merged with the supermonopolies.
Thus, the supermonopolies were given the right to export the country's basic energy
resources, which gave rise to new opportunities for speculation. Socialism as a system to
provide every citizen all the basic necessities did not exist in the USSR. Therefore the
transition to a new predatory and thieving system took place without any great difficulty.

One of the effective means of overcoming abuses in this field could become the
total freedom of access to information regarding relationships between monopolies and
companies and among the entire government, individual (especially high-ranking)
political leaders and their relatives, and state institutions (such as the Central Bank). A
review of the history of antimonopoly legislation in Russia in recent years appears in
Natal'ia Fonareva's article. But it is not enough to introduce antimonopoly legislation of
the Roosevelt type and the most severe laws against corruption. These laws must be
executed and applied with utmost severity to those high-ranking officials who are
especially mired in graft. The ancient Russian skills of embezzlement and bribery
survived the entire Soviet era. To these must now be added the wide-ranging influence of
transnational corporations, for instance, in mining and selling diamonds and in the
corresponding political spheres. From this it follows that unlike developed societies with
the rule of law, where the state can help regulate the market, in Russia during the years of
Yeltsin's presidential administration (and as was the case during the Soviet era), the state
was the main predator, working with other very large capitalists to plunder the country's
resources, and it continued to hinder the free development of entrepreneurial initiative in
every citizen without exception.

Aleksandr Auzan stresses in his essay the significance of legal and ethical factors for the future of the Russian economy. No less important is the guarantee of enacting economic legislation that would totally preclude the theft through speculation that reigned throughout the 1992-1999 period with the connivance, if not the outright participation, of government officials. Over the years of non-ownership under the communists, everyone involved in business – from highest officials to rank and file dealers and traders – got out of the habit of obeying the rules protecting property, both public (including the collection of taxes) and private.

It should be noted, though, that a harsh monetary and budget policy by itself is not always and uniformly a benefit: in this connection the observations made by Sergei Vasil'ev regarding the recent Primakov government, which had the support of the communist majority in the former Duma, are interesting.

As for the social democratic ideas that helped strengthen the state's regulatory role in many Western countries, especially in the social sector, they were profoundly alien to the former ideology, which demanded the total subjugation of the personality and its individual needs to the interests of the Communist Party and the Soviet regime. But in some areas (health and education), despite all the bureaucratic obstacles created by the regime, the Russian intelligentsia managed to do amazing things by using a system where the state, at least theoretically, supported the social sector. State institutions in Russia, as in the rest of the world, functioned very badly because of the low levels of personal interest among employees in the results of their work (that is why nationalizing an enterprise or branch of industry does not, as a rule, solve any problems). But there have always been self-sacrificing individuals who worked fabulously hard – not out of fear but because of conscience, although they were paid miserable salaries, and although in recent years they have not been paid at all (the new government has promised to pay salaries regularly, but it is not yet clear how these promises can be kept). The government must not permit a decrease in the level of services to the population in fields where the USSR had achieved great success – for instance, ambulance and first aid services and many aspects of the educational system. Tellingly, in listing the beneficial results of the first stage of the reforms, Mikhail Prusak mentions among the changes for the better the preservation of free primary education and medical care of the populace.

The main threat to the development of these dimensions of life in Russia is the new market society, with its cult of money as the only goal and measure of success. The negative consequences toward life values and their hierarchy is described in Yurii Plyusnin's article. The traditional Russian ethical concepts were the direct opposite of this materialism. This earlier idealistic tradition prepared the way in part for the development of noncommercial organizations, described in the amusing report by Elena Topoleva and Andrei Topolev in this anthology. The role of noncommercial legal organizations is outlined in Vladislav Grib's article.

The activity begun during the two Chechen wars by such completely independent public organizations as Mothers of Soldiers shows that this form of expressing public opinion is slowly developing and will not repeat the mistakes of years past.

Throughout the civilized world the importance of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is growing. In order to understand how they work in modern Russia, you must read Valerii Sokolov's interview. The exceptionally interesting text describes how in a

short time help for the homeless was organized and periodicals devoted to them began to be published.

The more I study the history of Russian culture, the more I am astonished by the thousand years of striving toward a higher beauty and by the concentration on fundamental world issues. And at the same time, reflecting upon the tragic fate of the best people of that culture, there are things to make me despair.

Despite the mockery to which our intelligentsia has been subjected (political in the Soviet period, economic in the post-Soviet), Russia has preserved the spiritual strength that distinguishes it from most contemporary large countries. The acutely critical remarks in the article by Dina Khapaeva and Nikolai Koposov pertain not so much to the intelligentsia in the old serious sense as to modern scholars ("The proletariat of mental labor," a phrase the physicist Umov introduced in the early twentieth century). They are the subject of Evgenii Kniazev's article, which is basically a factual footnote. I will not engage in a dispute with the authors of these two articles: the very existence of numerous contradictory opinions on even such a seemingly obvious issue as the exceptional historical role of the Russian intelligentsia can be taken as an interesting sign of the new times.

The patterns of Russian culture still aspire to unite modern scientific reason with the wisdom of religious philosophy, a trend which marked the spiritual flowering at the start of the last century, only to be interrupted by Communist terror. It is no accident that the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin is of such great significance in Russia and the entire world. The concept of dialogue formulated by Martin Buber and Bakhtin can serve as the basis of a contemporary understanding of democracy both within Russia (which must be freed of demagogy) and in relations among nations. The articles of this anthology (for example, the imaginary exchange of remarks in *Theater for Oneself* by Vladimir Mirzoev) show how much the dialogue principle has become part of the daily life of Russian culture.

That article also allowed the reader to judge how much the theater meant and continues to mean in Russia—despite all the financial and political difficulties. A similar conclusion regarding literature can be drawn from the review of the latest tendencies offered by Aleksandr Ageev. Irina Prokhorova tells us how she managed to create and publish a new literary and critical journal that reflects the latest creative trends and therefore is popular with readers.

Among the most important achievements of the heroic members of our intelligentsia who continued to labor over the cognizance of the highest esthetic values, despite everything in the years of the impoverishment of official culture, are the works of the late Yurii Lotman. His books, which reveal for us a new understanding of literature, are constantly in print in Russia and remain bestsellers.

I hope that a scholarly revision of the philosophy of art will return Lotman to his place as perhaps the most important and accessible author from whom we can comprehend the harmony and tragedy of the world. And if we remove from art its functional role as mirror and entertainer and restore its dignity, it will ennoble us with a new flowering. I expect that this will come from the Russian arts and letters, which in

(ll)

the prose of Varlam Shalamov and the poems of Osip Mandelstam, for example, have
already dealt with what is most important about the last century.

The upsurge in Russian spirituality cannot be stopped, but the suffering is great in the Via Dolorosa of our intelligentsia. New and necessary insights could come from Russia if the restoration of a police state does not hinder it.

Interludes of foreign influences in Russia, like those in the Petrine era, are later
recognized as having been necessary for the preparation of subsequent original
achievements. I am certain that once again the window that has been flung open onto
Europe and America will have an invigorating effect on the discovery and embodiment of
new Russian talents. A convincing example can be seen in the biography of Evgenia
Alekseeva, recounted in our anthology by Elena Topoleva and Andrei Topolev.

It is hard to overestimate the significance of the fact that in recent years millions
of Russians have been able to touch the "sacred stones of Europe." Dostoevsky, who
coined the phrase, in a speech about Pushkin called the ability to penetrate and transform
oneself into the essence of various cultures the most important trait of the Russian genius.
The openness of the country in recent times has been aided in large measure by the
publication of numerous books written by formerly banned authors and dealing with
formerly forbidden topics. This is due to the enormous achievements of a dozen private
publishing houses, which have shown how much small and medium-size businesses can
do in a brief time.

***

The basic traits of the regime in Russia that I believe have been preserved to some degree
during all the changes throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet Yeltsin period and right up
to the last few months of 1999 have a tendency to recur. I consider them to be: (a)
retaining power at any cost in the hands of a single person and those of the well-
organized group around him, protected by the might of the police system; (b) unlimited
freedom for consistent robbery of all strata of the population for the benefit of that group;
(c) the absence of any information on how the narrow group that rules the country makes
decisions. Despite the appearance of effective change in some forms, titles, and symbols,
these entrenched traits of the regime, or at least their vestiges, make real reforms
impossible.

Aleksandr Sergeev's interview shows the similarity of behavior among officials in
Soviet times and during the Yeltsin administration. Not only did these officials behave in
the same way but in many cases, they were the same people. Governor M. M. Prusak of
Novgorod remarks in his article that during the reforms they brought in people from the
former Oblast Committee of the CPSU and other Soviet organs.

Many Russians (including the authors in the anthology) had hoped that the time
had come to Russia when choice was possible. The presidential elections in March 2000,
which were in effect a plebiscite without alternatives and with a predetermined outcome,
have cast doubt on such hopes. The difficulty of bringing the idea of democratic
elections to a Russian population that was completely unprepared and uninstructed about
it, is described by Nadia Seriakova. Vladimir Chetvernin in his article analyzes the fatal
flaws in the Russian Constitution, which offers an adherent of an authoritarian and
bureaucratic system possibilities of becoming a dictator if he wins the elections. Of the

three scenarios outlined in Sergei Vasil'ev's article, the most likely in that case will be the third – the scenario of the "strong hand."

In order to establish the most elementary conditions for the development of democracy in Russia, the inherited forms of political investigation, surveillance, and informing on others must first be eradicated. And that requires a law on freedom from fear, which must formulate a categorical ban on the reinstitution of the activity of any organization like the KGB, whatever combination of letters it may use. People who worked in political investigation have no place in the government apparatus and certainly not in its leadership. The tragedy of the last period of Yeltsin's administration was that three times the head of the government was a man from the secret service. This paved the way for the present attempt to significantly increase the influence of these vestiges of the totalitarian system on the life of society. The conviction expressed in some of the articles in the anthology (and until quite recently one that was widely held) that a return to totalitarianism was impossible has been put in doubt by recent events. Even in the Brezhnev era, the former Communist ideology was replaced by total cynicism. The only stable part of the system was the police apparatus. Therefore its strengthening is an actual restoration unlike the alleged ideological restoration, the danger of which many (especially in American and Western Europe) mistakenly attribute to Communism.

One of the most vicious signs of a return to the police methods of Yurii Andropov's day is the growth of a new secret services division dealing with the mass media. In that sense there is a substantial difference with the almost limitless freedom of the press described in Andrei Rikhter's article. For authors like Iosif Dzialoshinskii, freedom of the press, or "glasnost" in the broad (and traditional) meaning that Gorbachev restored to the word, was perhaps the most important (and may be the only) achievement of the entire period of reform. After that period pressure from the authorities on the press has clearly increased. But even during the Yeltsin period, freedom of the press had criminal limitations: those who broke the unwritten rules were killed; for instance, Dmitrii Kholodov, a reporter of the newspaper *Moskovskii komsomolets*, who presumably received information on corruption in the army (a suspect in the murder is a former intelligence officer of the paratroopers named Popovskikh).

An urgent issue, which cannot be avoided in discussing the observance of human rights in Russia, is the banning of torture during criminal interrogation. The question of torture and its variants in contemporary Russia is raised in the article by Vladimir Chetvernin. In the Stalin period political prisoners were tortured; the torturers, all members of the Communist party, are living out their days in peace. Today it is almost the norm for criminal suspects to be beaten and tortured. The inhumane conditions in prisons is another grave concern. As Chetvernin rightly notes, being detained in them is a form of torture in and of itself.

While serving on the presidential commission on pardons in the first half of the 1990s, I was depressed by the scope of crime in Russian society. That is perhaps the best evidence of the corruption created by the Soviet regime. The serial murderer Chikotilo, whose villainy made the whole country shudder in outrage, in his last letter to the president asked for mercy because he was a faithful party member and KGB agent (was this not the reason that he went so long unpunished for his cannibalism?). One can only fully overcome the terrible legacy of the inhumane despotic regime created by the Communist Party by going away from it as far as possible and in the direction of a

civilized democracy. The majority of the new, smug Duma, however, is not concerned
by the interests of the population and does not express its demands.

The past decade was characterized by attempts (as yet episodic) to restore the
consciousness of law in society. One of the interesting directions, setting up conciliation
meetings, is described in the article by Rustem Maksudov.

The disintegration of the USSR had not been prepared for either politically or
economically. The subsequent policy of the Russian government has been immoral
(most glaringly seen in Chechnya) and also devoid of common sense and consistency: it
is not clear why Russian soldiers must die to defend the government of Tajikistan, which
is independent of Russia. In any case, it is clear that Russia must not feed and defend
regions that can separate from it at will. Russia has no interest in holding onto them: the
marvels of ancient Russian art took place at a time when the country was much smaller.
For all of its morbid outbreaks of nationalism, the modern world is inexorably moving in
the direction of weakening the role of national governments and borders and creating
large associations like the European Union (into which Russia is being drawn gradually).
In turn these associations belong to the world community, which is growing to be more of
a reality with every year.

Against this background, extreme decentralization and the transfer of a significant number of functions of the federal government (primarily in social services) to local authorities at various levels is a real problem for Russia. The disasters occurring in the Russian Far North show that the center can no longer handle its obligations. Ol'ga Lobyzova's article, based on her experiences, shows the hardships and achievements of the northerners who seek a way out, no longer relying solely on the federal authorities for help. The latter seem to plunder more than to support. This in turn gives rise to the tendency toward self-government observed in the regions. As Aleksandr Auzan demonstrates in his article, there is no real self-government yet. The weakness of the appropriate legal framework is explained in Aleksandr Voronin's article. On the one hand, there is the almost unlimited power of governors and mayors (which shows the conditional nature of all the elections held to date). On the other hand, groups of citizens organize to resist lawlessness. In describing one example of an association of local residents that successfully combated crime, Yurii Plyusnin correctly compares this episode with the happy end in Western films. But the Russian situation of the Yeltsin period is a Western film without a sheriff, and therefore without a happy end. If a strong hand does come to power in the near future, it will be a response in part to the desire of the majority of citizens to end the lawless rampage of the mafia (which does resemble the Sicilian or Colombian variety) and gangsters. The newly elected president will also be the Chief Sheriff. In that case it is not surprising that he will depend on the power of the police. How this will affect local self-government is hard to tell.

But if we assume the growth of independent planning for the future for a single
city or oblast, as described in the article on a detailed strategic development plan for St.
Petersburg, then we can start thinking now about new prospects. A total re-orientation of
the main direction of development is possible in relation to regional capabilities, which
were subordinated in the Soviet era for the benefit of the centralized military-industrial
complex. Thus, following the experience of Greece and a few other countries where the
main source of revenue (and a very large one) became tourism, this could be the plan in
the near future not only for St. Petersburg and the cities near the Golden Ring, but those

in the Southern Urals (where the Arkaimskii Museum and preserve is being created on the site, recently discovered by local archaeologists, of a "country of cities" dating back four millennia). Moscow does not need to remain an industrial city at all; and it would be more appropriate for the Moscow Kremlin to become, in the words of the great philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, the main museum of the peaks of the Russian past instead of bearing the burden of a burgeoning bureaucracy. Besides the indisputable ecological advantages of this development strategy, it is important that all the measures necessary for commercially successful tourism (pleasant cities, safe and speedy travel, improved catering and housing, reconstruction of buildings, financing of museums and other cultural centers) will make life better and more pleasant for the local population, too. And the influx of foreign tourists will help us overcome the vestiges of tension remaining from the Cold War.

The main danger for the entire country and for the intelligentsia as the center of its spiritual potential is the recent coming to power of a totalitarian government, supported by a police apparat, and the intended union between the pro-government and communist parties in the new Duma. The situation is reminiscent of the Weimar Republic during Hitler's legitimate rise to power: the weak government's policy led to systematic state bankruptcy and (hyper)inflation. At the same time, extremists who wanted to use the police and militias were involved in nationalistic propaganda. With the history of the Hitler and Stalin camps, the intelligentsia must not allow itself the luxury of noninterference.

The task of the intelligentsia is to be the guide through the noosphere – the sphere of thought in the sense of Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. and Vladimir Vernadsky. Russia and humanity in general need positive confirmation of the basic spiritual values. Even the part of those values found in the moral precepts of the great world religions should be known to us now, but it remains unused, primarily because the values have to be presented in the language of our times. And it has to be done before the absence of a universally recognized moral law leads to a new catastrophe. In that sense, probably the most modern moral philosopher was Leo Tolstoy (who clearly showed the immorality of the state, the army, the courts). Like many later philosophers, he sought a synthesis of the religious philosophies of East and West (and through Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Tolstoy had great influence on the course of events in the United States and the Third World).

The Russian Orthodox priest Father Aleksandr Men' was taking the same path. Not long before he was killed, he proposed holding a debate at the Moscow State Library of Foreign Literature (where I was then serving as the elected director) on the relationship between Christianity and Islam. Men' and the Muslim clergyman who came to Moscow for the debate discussed what the two religions had in common in their concept of God. I think that the regular continuation of such discussions is very important. The conclusions of modern philosophy should be among the topics debated.

There is no doubt that one of the main problems of the twenty-first century for Russia and Western Europe and America will be the relationship between the Christian and Islamic nations. Kosovo and Chechnya have shown us how not to solve the problem.

Sophisticated diplomacy is not enough. Mutual enlightenment and conviction are required.

I was a friend of Father Aleksandr Men' and I found the breadth of his views similar to my own. The theological ideas of other members of the modern Orthodox Church can be seen in the article by Heiromonk Hilarion (Alfeev). The part of his autobiographical sketch when he witnessed the events in Vilnius is of particular interest.

The article by Mikhail Prusak notes that the appearance of forced migrants led to the creation in Novgorod oblast of various cultural associations based on ethnicity, which coexist: German groups, Jewish culture societies, the "Vainakh" Chechen-Ingush center, the Armenian community, and the Russian assembly. They all live peaceably with one another. Thus quietly are born the traits of the future, so different from the nationalist-socialist madness.

The new millennium will see the dreams come true of Sergei Korolev, who to bring them about worked at night in his bunk after a day of forced labor in the *sharashka* (prison for scientists) on his blueprints for space ships. After Korolev's release, he directed their construction. Russia's exploration of space began with his plans (in accordance with those of his predecessor Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) and under his direction, for he religiously believed that humanity must move into the cosmos and that this exploration could lead in the twenty-first century to the mastery of the Moon and then Mars. Russia will have an important role in such preliminary phases as building an international space station, even though the recent worsening of the world situation is creating discord in the joint project.

Russia must not lose its place in these international projects, even though the short-sighted cuts in financing, and especially the ridiculous reduction in training of young specialists, may interfere. If these hopes of conquering the Solar System come to pass, there will be a need for clear international legal principles to prevent the danger of clashes and piracy. Coordinated action in space will be promoted by a united global community. For the next few centuries it will have to turn into a single whole: otherwise humanity will perish.

The global nature of the market determines everything mentioned above regarding the economy. Modern communications have in fact already united humanity.

Within this unity it is probably good to preserve cultural and linguistic diversity, but not political and certainly not military differences. Let us hope that some nonbureaucratic form of world government will be able to prevent a third world war, the likelihood of which grows with the proliferation of nuclear capability in more and more countries (the latest statements of Russian politicians on this topic are not distinguished by excessive caution). In the worst-case scenario (unfortunately, not to be discounted completely), a world government will have to save the surviving part of humanity. In any case, in the near future people will have to solve several problems, which as the Club of Rome's projections thirty years ago showed, threaten the very continuation of history in this century. Each of these difficulties can be overcome, but only if they are constantly in our field of vision and constantly combated.

These are not theoretical quandaries, but the essence of the coming age, with the fate of every country, including Russia, at stake. One of these problems is the danger of radiation, related not only to the continuing manufacture of atomic and nuclear weapons and the probability of nuclear war, but also the possibility of another Chernobyl. No

matter what complications shutting down atomic reactors of that type may have, it will
have to be done. Another ecological danger demanding urgent action is the threat of
global warming: we must act decisively to prevent the poisoning of the atmosphere.
Aleksandr Knorre addresses the shocking ecological situation in his article.

Similar decisive measures are required by the exhaustion of energy resources that
many people (albeit with differences over the statistical data) expect in the next century.
In this context the extravagant use of energy resources by the Russian government and
the monopolies appears all the more feckless. By the middle of the twenty-first century,
when this issue will come to a head, controlled thermonuclear synthesis might be a new,
industrially viable energy source (along with other alternatives like solar and wind
power). Russia, in cooperation with other countries, has been working on these matters,
and it is important that these projects not be part of the cutback in fundamental research.
The problem of world food shortages and hunger (which has begun in Africa), related to
the continuing demographic explosion (in some parts of the world), underlines the
urgency of Russian agricultural reform: it is dangerous for Russia not to have its own
stable food base. The global nature of medical problems is defined by the fact that
pandemics (like AIDS, which is a threat to a great part of the population in Africa) knows
no borders (and in fact, AIDS came into Russia from Africa). The fight against AIDS
and other viral diseases, most importantly cancer, calls for serious progress in molecular
biology and related sciences. And once again I must express my concern over the
situation of science in Russia: after yet another arrest more than fifty years ago, Lev
Zilber discovered the viral theory of cancer in Butyrka Prison. His imprisonment
interfered with the publication and development of his theory, and then it became
classified. Zilber's successors in Russia are hindered by lack of funds. Although out of
political prison, Russian science has fallen into a financial trap.

Despite all this, the latest achievements in biology lead me to predict that there
will be a time when theoretically human life will be extended almost limitlessly (through
replacement of faltering organs) and through a partial physical resurrection of cloned
pseudo-doubles, almost like in Andrei Tarkovsky's film *Solaris*. These achievements in
science raise numerous social, religious, and psychological issues. It will be through
science about man based on biology that the difficulties relating to the inexorable growth
of knowledge and its practical applications will be solved, just as the successes of biology
were based on breakthroughs in chemistry and physics.

Among the first in Russia to follow this path was Yurii Lotman, whom I
mentioned above. In his last works, he pondered the role of explosion in historical
development and ways of predicting it.

Russia belongs to countries that dream about these future successes of knowledge
as if it were a physical need. The complexity of development in the twentieth century has
been a severe obstacle in the search for a way out of the continuing crisis. First of all, we
must try to understand what has happened. The next step can be prognosis. It will take
more than one volume, similar to this one, before we can approach a joint solution to
these issues on a rational basis without the nationalist madness that has eclipsed reason in
many Russian politicians and is leading the world once again to the brink of nuclear
catastrophe.

Vaclav Havel has spoken more than once of the determining factor of the
anthropic principle for the worldview of modern man. Andrei Sakharov examined the

role of this principle thoroughly in three articles, written during his exile in Gorky and published then by Pyotr Kapitza in the journal he edited, *Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk [Achievements in Physical Sciences]*. According to one formulation of the principle, the starting conditions of the evolution of the universe determine the possibility of the appearance of man. In other words, the establishment of the Universe presupposes that it will become the object of observation and conscious reflection (and according to some philosophers, thereby turning it into reality, at least for us). The place given to man in these theories of physics forces us to take our responsibilities seriously. The world would be extremely absurd if after the billions of years of evolution required to create rational humans, they could be destroyed as a species by a few crazy politicians. To keep this from happening, we must grasp the scope of the growing threat. Today those who do not want a third world war must pay attention to Russia and the worrying tendencies that are apparent in its new government.

Of course, in the past Russia had along with profound disasters the most amazing turns of fate, like the ones tied to the names of Alexander II and Mikhail Gorbachev. Even if our rational considerations make us expect the worst, we can still hope that the irrational side of Russian history will work for the better.

Even though the scenario of a totalitarian, militarized police dictatorship that develops the military industrial complex, increases state control in the economy and in ideology, and limits freedom of the press seems the most likely at the moment of writing this article (6 February 2000), nevertheless we cannot consider that all opportunities to resist this tendency have been exhausted. There are political forces supporting such presidential candidates as Konstantin Titov and Grigorii Yavlinsky, whose programs are not chauvinist-police ones. Despite the obvious passivity of a significant mass of the voters, who are disillusioned by all politicians, there are groups and associations, like the ones I mentioned earlier, independent of both politics and the state, which continue their work. Despite the weakening of activism among miners and other groups protesting economic injustice, the potential remains for their collective actions against property inequality. Parallels with post-revolutionary France in the nineteenth century bring to mind the Paris Commune and its suppression. The threat of such social explosion can influence future Russian governments and limit their totalitarian tendencies. As the middle class and farmers grow, they will also act as a deterrent on the behavior of the nomenklatura. But these more optimistic prognoses are for a longer term than the future that is discussed in this book and in its epilogue.

*Translated by Antonina W. Bouis.*