Our discussion about the misuse of history in public discourse has got me thinking about public intellectuals and their role in liberal democracies. By public intellectuals I mean people with well-established intellectual credentials who take up public causes. Michael Eric Dyson, who recently visited SUNY Fredonia, is a great example.

It isn’t hard to come up with names of public intellectuals in the U.S., but just try to produce a similar list of Russian names. I know that I can’t. In the Soviet era the state’s control of media ensured that there could be no independent voices, meaning the very notion of a public intellectual was impossible. Perhaps Andrei Sakharov came closest; the leading figure in Soviet nuclear physics, he became the most important Soviet dissident. But just how “public” he was is open to question: he had no access to the media, and relied on samizdat channels to communicate with other dissidents.

It is a sad commentary on post-Soviet Russia that public intellectuals remain largely absent. A rare exception is Grigory Chkhartishvili, who under the pen name Boris Akunin is Russia’s most popular mystery writer. Chkhartishvili is a scholar of Japanese literature and an important cultural figure in Russia. As the protest movement against Vladimir Putin gained strength in late 2011, Chkhartishvili emerged as one of its most prominent voices. Most famously he organized and led a peaceful protest of 10,000 people through downtown Moscow in May 2012.

Chkhartishvili has always been an unwilling political activist; in a September 2013 interview with the liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy he spoke of the “habit of reflection inherent in my class” and his reluctance to push his views on others. Yet, he went on, “there are some events … such as the [Presidential elections] of November 2011, that make me realize that it is not just me.… We are many.”

While Chkhartishvili has been an organizer and speaker at anti-Putin rallies, he refuses to attach himself to any political group or to run for office. His weapon, he insists, is his pen. As he told Ekho Moskvy, “I’d rather be writing books and say what I think at this moment, not worrying about whether I'm consistent.”

In March 2013 Chkhartishvili announced that he was done with writing mystery novels. Instead, he is focusing his efforts on writing a multi-volume history of Russia, a pointed response to Putin’s plan to promote a new, regime-friendly Russian history. He authors a superb blog that relates tidbits from his research and anecdotes from his family history. Often the blog engages in thinly-veiled political commentary, e.g. in a comparison of the “liberal reformer” Tsar Alexander II with the reactionary conservative Tsar Nicholas I. Occasionally he drops the veil, as he did on July 18 2013 when Navalny’s guilty verdict was handed down. That day he was unusually terse, writing: “No elections - for life. This is what the sentence means … not only to Navalny, but to all those who think a change in the system is possible to achieve through elections. While the Putin regime is still alive, there will be no elections. We have got our answer to the question ‘to b. or not to b.’ (to boycott or not to boycott). And to other questions as well.”

Chkhartishvili is a public intellectual, but the Russian regime does all in its power to silence his public voice. Since mid-2012 he has mainly lived in France, voicing his criticism from abroad. Few Russian media outlets are brave enough to publish his political views. As for his blog, he acknowledges that it is a voice crying in the wilderness. With his typical self-effacing humor he recently posted a picture of a nineteenth-century painting by Vasilii Petrov depicting Russian peasants travelling by sled to a cemetery:

 

He subtitle it: “Boris Akunin’s blog, and his readers.”

AN UPDATE: A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s hunger strike to protest conditions in the prison colony where she is imprisoned. On September 29^th Tolokonnikova was moved to the prison hospital.  For the following two weeks no word was heard from her. I’m relieved to report that, according to RIA Novosti, on Friday her lawyer was allowed to meet with her, ending growing concerns that she had died. On Saturday she published an open letter denouncing her isolation and insisting there were no medical grounds for denying her access to her family and her lawyer. I’ll continue to post updates as news becomes available.