In the last couple of posts we’ve been talking about the relationship between culture and civil rights in Russia and the United States. These things converged in New York City last week at the Met’s opening gala for its performance of the magnificent Russian opera Eugene Onegin. Outside the Met protestors handed out leaflets denouncing Russia’s anti-LGBT laws, while inside a protestor shouted “Putin, end your war on Russian gays!” They chose this venue because the opera is Russian, but also because the composer, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, was gay.

Russia’s law banning “propaganda on nontraditional sexual relationships” – any public expression of support for LGBT rights – briefly stirred controversy last summer about the safety of LGBT athletes at the Sochi Olympics. That’s a reasonable concern, though not because there is any likelihood that the laws will be enforced against foreigners. For the most part Russia isn’t very good at enforcing any laws, and this is a much bigger danger. The gangs of Russian thugs who prey on the Russian LGBT community, and whose vicious attacks have been finding their way onto YouTube, are breaking Russian laws without the least fear of retribution. Of course, turning a blind eye to lawlessness is partially a reflection of the Kremlin’s support for the actions of the thugs. But it also represents a deeper problem: Putin, who considers himself above the law, is not very good at convincing the Russian people to behave lawfully. A country that engages in political show trials – for Navalny, for the members of Pussy Riot, for Magnitsy, for Khodarkovsky, etc. – is ultimately saying that there are no laws. Everybody knows it, including the police who blithely ignore “illegal” attacks on members of the LGBT community. So here is the billion dollar question: can Russia guarantee that it can protect LGBT athletes at Sochi from the thugs? Can it really just turn the switch and make the thugs stay home? Can it turn the switch and make the police protect LGBT athletes? Can it turn the switch and make local and regional administrators in Sochi and everywhere else that athletes may touch Russian soil protect LGBT athletes? If the answer is “no” (and what in the world would make anybody think it is “yes”?), then the only responsible course for the rest of the world is to keep their athletes home. It’s not even a political decision – it’s a simple matter of safety.

By the way, if you see the opera (which will be simulcast in theatres on October 5^th) pay close attention to Tchaikovsky’s romantic depiction of the uplifting, joyous harvest celebration at the Larin Estate. I’ve always wondered how audiences would react if this scene were reset in the American south. After all, those happy singing peasants were serfs (very near to slaves). The scene is entirely Tchaikovsky’s invention; Pushkin, author of the novel that inspired the opera and the great grandson of an African slave, seems to have been indifferent to peasants. He certainly didn’t bother to romanticize their lives; while they do sing as they harvest berries, it’s only because their master forces them to in order to prevent them from eating his fruit (chapter 3 verse 39).

See you at the Fredonia Opera House on Oct. 5^th for the sumulcast!

Jennifer, as I read your post I couldn’t help but compare Cyrus’s banality to the principled dissent of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot who this week began a hunger strike to protest conditions in the penal colony where she is incarcerated. In March 2012 she and two other members of the band were jailed, ostensibly for “hooliganism aimed at inciting religious hatred,” after they leapt onto the soleas of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow and performed an anti-Putin song (see video of the performance here). Like Cyrus’s VMA performance, Pussy Riot also garnered a lot of criticism, some for their blasphemous disrespect for the Orthodox Church and some for their questionable musical talents. But nobody could claim that their performance was inauthentic, nor that it was made in the name of crass commercialism.

In July Tolokonnikova was denied parole. The official reason was that she refused to take part in a prison camp beauty contest, thus showing her lack of a “positive attitude” toward her rehabilitation. Her response to that charge demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the role of aesthetics in constructing identity, and of the way that women in Russia are sexualized and marginalized in that process. Although the context is very different, this seems to directly respond to what you say about Cyrus’ cultural “borrowing.”

Here is a brief excerpt from Tolokonnikova’s statement: “The style of the Putin regime is a conservative, secret-police aesthetic…. This aesthetic persistently samples and recreates the principles of two previous regimes…: the czarist-imperial aesthetic and the … aesthetic of Socialist Realism…. This worthless aesthetic is lovingly recreated by each and every state institution in Russia, including, of course, the prison colonies, which form such an important part of the repressive machine of the state. And so, if you are a woman and, what is more, if you are a young woman and even the slightest bit attractive, then you are basically required to take part in beauty contests. If you refuse to participate, you will be denied parole based on your disdain for the ‘Miss Charm’ event…. In boycotting the beauty contest I express my own principled and painstakingly formulated ‘positive attitude.’ My own position, in distinction from the conservative, secret-police aesthetic of the camp administration, consists in reading my books and journals during moments that I extract by force from the deadening daily schedule of the prison colony.”

The morning after the VMAs, I had the morning shows on in the background as I got ready for work.  That was how I happened to have the distinct displeasure of starting off my morning with the image of Miley Cyrus strutting and twerking across the stage.  At the time, my reaction to her performance was filtered through two lenses: the fact that the morning shows reproduced only a limited view of her performance, and my own personal perspective as a white woman.  The segments reproduced on the morning shows did not include Ms. Cyrus’s interactions with her backup dancers, so even though, as a scholar of African American history and culture, I am familiar with the long history of whites’ “love and theft” of black culture (or their mistaken perception of black culture; Eric Lott’s phrase) I did not see her performance through a racial lens.  Thank goodness several other social/media critics did. (http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/jody-rosen-miley-cyrus-vmas-minstrel.html; http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/miley-and-minstrelsy-rosen-responds-to-critics.html; http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/if-miley-cyruss-twerking-is-racist-isnt-janis-joplins-singing-also-racist/279162/)

Why is it legitimate to liken Cyrus’s performance to blackface minstrelsy?  Because of her own comments indicating her attraction to what she called “hood music” and her claim that she feels a deep personal connection to Lil’ Kim.  To fully understand the connection, however, one has to understand the long and purposeful misrepresentation of black women in American history.  During slavery, one (of several) stereotypes assigned to black women was that they were oversexed.  The abuse a black woman suffered at the hands of her master, overseer, or any other man could thus be blamed on her rather than him.  The stereotype of the sexually aggressive woman was given a name: Jezebel, after the Bible’s Queen Jezebel, who, because she supposedly followed false gods and particularly because she dressed in finery and wore makeup, was branded a prostitute.  Long after slavery ended, the stereotype continued, and remains with us today (watch just about any mainstream hip hop video, many/most of which are produced by white corporate interests).  (For more on the Jezebel character, visit The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia here: http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/jezebel.htm.)  Ms. Cyrus’s hypersexualized performance and her treatment of her black backup dancers, joined with her professed connection to black culture (a version of black culture that, I would suggest, is highly selective and misunderstood), encourages a continuation of the association of black women with aggressive sexuality and promiscuousness. 

I found myself talking about Ms. Cyrus’s performance with my Harlem Renaissance class the other day.  Why?  And why is this relevant to a blog about Civil Rights?  Frederick Douglass and other black writers in the slavery era understood, when they produced their narratives, that the image of blacks in the popular (white) mind was interpreted through various racist assumptions.  Harlem Renaissance artists in the 1920s similarly understood this.   The public images that blacks tried to create for themselves often sought to correct the negative stereotypes because these writers and artists understood that so long as they were seen only through prejudiced white eyes, they would never be seen as intelligent contributors to American culture, nor would they be seen as deserving of the vote or skilled jobs that paid a living wage.  They understood that civil rights and a group’s representation in popular culture are intricately connected.  So long as we continue to represent African Americans through stereotypes that emphasize hypersexuality or athletic prowess (which presumably comes at the expense of intellectual pursuits), we maintain an atmosphere in which it continues to be difficult for African Americans to be seen as equal citizens, deserving of all of the rights and responsibilities granted to any other American citizen.

In a June 28^th raid, Moscow police arrested 1400 undocumented migrant workers in the first act of a campaign that continued through the summer. By August, as the numbers of arrested exceeded 4000, the city ran short of detention cells and established an ad hoc tent prison at Golyanova in the east end of the city. According to Moscow’s interim mayor Serge Sobyanin, the arrests were justified because the 300,000 or so illegal immigrants working in the city commit most of Moscow’s crimes. Presumably the thuggish “youth groups” like Moscow Shield that stalk migrants aren’t really criminals. In Russia there is no such thing as meaningful public advocacy, despite the valiant efforts of the Russian Human Rights Watch and a handful of other organizations. While there are Russians who are appalled, they are a tiny minority. The type of people whom western liberals might expect to care are silent, or, worse yet, they support the crackdown. Alexei Navalny is the darling of the western media because he is Russia’s most articulate and effective opponent of Putin. But westerners would do well to remember that opposing Putin is not the same thing as being liberal. Navalny is an ultra-nationalist, utterly unsympathetic to the migrant workers, who are mostly from the Caucasus and Central Asia. These are the people who fill many of the least attractive manual labor jobs in Moscow. And of course, the camp was created as an election ploy, to attract support for Sobyanin – Putin’s hand-picked candidate in the Moscow mayoral election. Navalny was Sobyanin’s only meaningful opponent in the election, meaning there was no advocate for the poor souls locked up at Golyanovo. All indications are that they are living in miserable conditions. They are confined in a concentration camp (let’s call it what it is) in a country without the means or desire to provide them with a legitimate legal process, let alone proper food, clothing, sanitation, etc. There best hope, probably, is to be shipped home before they start dying of cold or disease. Or perhaps they’ll be sent to Sochi, where no one seems to mind that undocumented migrant laborers are the main labor force building facilities for the coming Olympics.