On Sunday several thousand demonstrators marched in Moscow, demanding that the twelve men still imprisoned for their participation in the May 2012 Bolotnaya Square protests be freed. The treatment of one of those twelve has raised particular alarm bells: last week a Russian court ordered that Mikhail Kosenko be confined in a psychiatric hospital. For students of the Soviet dissident movement this raised the specter of the return of one of the worst chapters in late Soviet repression. Beginning in the 1960s the USSR used psychiatric confinement to punish dissidents.

Psychiatric confinement had a particular appeal to the Soviet government because it permitted the pretense that dissidents were not political prisoners – they were insane. Of course the main evidence of their insanity was that they protested against the state, but Soviet psychiatrists manufactured a diagnosis of “sluggishly progressing schizophrenia,” the only symptom of which was social maladaptation evidenced by … dissident activity. There were special psychiatric hospitals (sometimes called psych-camps) for dissidents, and they were the stuff of horror movies: the patients, heavily medicated with psychotropic drugs, shuffled about in a daze, watched by attendants whose principal qualification was that they were beefy enough to hold down recalcitrant “patients” while the next dose was administered.

The first cases of such psychiatric abuse came as early as the 1940s, but the widespread practice, and the establishment of special psych-camps for dissidents, began in the late 1960s, just as the USSR and the United States began actively pursuing détente. This was probably not a coincidence. The USSR needed to improve its human rights reputation to advance its international agenda, and the psych-camps provided a way to claim that dissidents were not political prisoners. The practice was also convenient for the Nixon administration, which could not easily ignore show trials like the infamous trial of Yulii Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky in 1966, but could more easily ignore the confinement of “schizophrenics.”

Is Putin heading down the same road? Russian human rights violations are becoming a regular feature in the Western press, just as Russia prepares to welcome the world to the Sochi Olympics. As Mark Galeotti describes in his excellent blog on Russian crime and security, there are other signs that Putin is trying to polish Russia’s international reputation by backing away from embarrassing political show trials. If Russia reopens the psych-camps on the eve of the Olympics, let us hope that Western governments do not again accept psychiatric confinement as a convenient fiction and turn their backs on the newest generation of dissidents.

When Nadezhda Tolokonnikova spoke of the aesthetics of Russian power last summer she evoked the unique relationship between the arts and politics in Russia and the Soviet Union. That relationship was on full display this week when Russian TV channels broadcast the arrest of Orkhan Zeynalov, a migrant worker and accused murderer. Members of a special police unit, clad in their black uniforms, their faces hidden behind black ski masks, handcuffed Zeynalov, threw him to the ground, and kicked him with their black boots. This was public theatre, staged for the xenophobic mob in Moscow.

Tolokonnikova condemned the return of a “secret-police aesthetic,” linking it to its Soviet and Tsarist past; the Zeynalov arrest confirms this. Yet there is also something new in the aesthetic of Russian power today: it is profoundly masculine.

To be clear, the reality of power in Russia has always been masculine, and there are no more women in high office today than there were fifty or a hundred years ago. But aesthetically the Soviet Union consciously incorporated women into the pastiche of art and politics called “socialist realism.” Soviet propaganda posters portrayed the new Soviet Woman, freed from house work (“Down with Kitchen Slavery!” a famous poster slogan proclaimed) so that they could operate machines in factories or drive tractors on collective farms. Soviet movies portrayed women as factory managers and members of city governments.

Today the dominant images are unfailingly masculine, with photographs of Putin himself, bare-chested, heroic, and alone, leading the way. Putin is famously fond of his own physique, and he loves to appear shirtless in publicity photos: shirtless, on horseback; shirtless, fishing; shirtless, hunting; shirtless, swimming with dolphins. As an insightful (if slightly tongue-in-cheek) Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty article asks this week, is there something homoerotic in all of this?

The RFE article also raises a more serious question. It focuses on Elton John’s December concert dates in Russia and the homophobic reactions they are provoking. Elton John first toured Russia in 1979 and he is a big star there. His two December concerts are already sold out. In the city of Kazan, where he is scheduled to perform, an over-the-top Imam told the press that "attending the concert will lead to adultery, drugs, and alcohol. Orphans, single mothers, and sick children – all of them are the result of lechery."

The new, masculine aesthetic of Russian power seems to go hand-in-hand with the rise of homophobia.  The LGBT community is under attack in Russia, violently on the streets and legislatively in the Duma. For now the police stand aside and watch, but how long will it be before we see the black-clad men in ski masks putting the boots to gay men?  

“Radical Measures”

In Moscow the words “radical measures” seem to be on every politician’s lips this week as they seek solutions to the ethnic tensions that exploded into violence again last Sunday. Thousands of Russians took to the streets in Moscow’s Biriulevo district to ransack a market and stores where undocumented migrants work. For most of the day the police stood by and watched before finally making a handful of arrests. Then on Monday the police were out in force, arresting, not the rioters, but an estimated 1200 of their victims.

The solution to ethnic tensions? “Radical measures,” said Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobianin. “Radical measures” said the leader of the United Russia Party Vladimir Vasiliev. “Radical measures” said Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party. No one has yet fleshed out the details of what constitutes “radical,” though Zhironovsky, decrying what he called “internal colonization” from Russia’s southern borderlands, demanded that the government “push them all out, every migrant.”

Sunday’s riot grew out of a conflict between a Russian (Egor Shcherbakov) and an Azeri migrant worker named Orkhan Zeynalov. Zeynalov allegedly stabbed and killed Shcehrbakov. On Wednesday Zeynalov was arrested in the city of Kolomna by an elite riot police unit.

Video of Zeynalov being arrested, roughed up, paraded through the streets, and flown by helicopter back to Moscow appeared on Russian TV Wednesday night, providing a clue to what “radical measures” might look like in practice.

What all this means about Putin’s government is difficult to say. He no doubt sympathizes with the anti-migrant sentiments of the mob, and as his middle class support has eroded over the last three years he has increasingly relied on working class Muscovites like those who took part in the riot. On the other hand, the riots hardly reflect good governance. The last thing Putin wants just a few months before the Sochi Olympics is yet another reminder of how ineffective the Russian police are. While TV news stations are playing video of Zeynalov’s arrest, Moscow newspapers are reporting more quiet investigations of how things got out of control Sunday, and how police can get a grip on the ultra-nationalists. On Tuesday the Ministry of Internal Affairs fired the Chief of Police for Biriulevo District. On Thursday Moscow Police Chief Anatolii Yakunin tried to redirect the blame to migrant workers, saying that his force would check “every apartment in Moscow” for illegal migrants.

This is a dangerous game for Putin, and it hints at the shaky foundations of his control in Russia. He needs the mob, so he can’t just suppress it. He needs the police, so he can’t publicly criticize them. He needs to avoid international criticism on the eve of the Olympics, and this week both the mob and the police brought international criticism. But where else can he turn for support?

 

Sochi Olympics Update

In September I wrote about the round-up of migrant workers in Moscow and mentioned that undocumented workers have been the primary construction force in Sochi. Now that the Olympic facilities are ready I guess they are no longer needed. According to Human Rights Watch over the last month the Sochi police have begun raids on construction sites, arresting large numbers of migrant workers. Some are being held for days in the outdoor courtyards of police stations, without proper sanitary facilities, adequate protection from the elements, or sufficient food. Others are being “tried” (without legal representation) and deported.  

Meanwhile in the areas around Sochi plain-clothed police wearing ski masks and driving unmarked cars have been busily kidnapping Islamic men off the streets. They claim that their targets are suspected terrorists, but they are providing no evidence. The detainees disappear, often for weeks, without any contact with their families or any semblance of a legal process. So far this year, nineteen such “detainees” have disappeared altogether. Nobody knows their fate.

As for Moscow’s migrant workers, things are only getting worse. Yesterday anti-migrant rioters chanting racist slogans tore through the streets overturning cars and smashing windows. The riot police responded but to little effect.

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.

 

We Canadians are not innocent in his regard. The conservative Canadian government has been pushing an agenda to rewrite Canada’s history in a more “patriotic” vein. Its heinous War of 1812 drum-beating last year made me squirm, and in May 2013 the Canadian House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage announced a "thorough and comprehensive review of significant aspects of Canadian history." They had to back off in response to a public outcry (everybody assumes the real agenda was to construct a more militaristic, conservative version of the Canadian story). There is a second disturbing trend: the government is cutting funding to public archives and limiting public access, even for historians.

And your comments make me think of the way that the Texas School Board controls the textbooks in the United States. Since Texas has such a large population, textbook publishers basically cater to them, and all other states get stuck with the version of history (or science, or ...) that they approve. According to the "Need to Know" blog hosted by PBS station WNED, the TSB's version of history "emphasiz[es] the Christian influences of the nation’s founding fathers, highlight[s] conservative groups and personalities while downplaying liberal ones, and rewrit[es] common terms such as 'democratic' to fall more in line with standards the board deemed more conservative" (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/culture/texas-school-board-approves-controversial-textbook-changes/954/). If memory serves, the TSB (or maybe just the committee in charge of social studies texts) is currently headed by a dentist...

History is powerful. The ability to control it and especially to teach it should concern everyone (in my opinion as a historian!).

Jennifer, the sort of fatuous rewriting of history you describe is in full gear in Russia, where the Moscow Times  reports that Putin is pressing for new high school and university textbooks “built around a single concept, with the logical continuity of Russian history, the relationship between the different stages in history, and respect for all the pages of our past." Naturally the new history will explain Stalinism as a necessary stage in Russian development, no doubt justifying authoritarianism in Russia today. As one of my students pointed out to me this week (thanks Dylan!), this effort to rewrite the Soviet past even extends to video games. Angered by the portrayal of the Soviet military in “Company of Heroes 2,” the Russian Ministry of Culture has announced plans to subsidize the development of Russian video games that will offer a “realistic and historically truthful representation of events." No doubt the new games will depict a brave new Russia world….

OK, so here is why knowing our history is so important to the pursuit of true civil rights for all: 

1)      Recently the CEO of AIG compared the criticism heaped on his company and others like it to the lynching that occurred in the South (AIG received an $85 billion bail-out during the 2008 financial crisis and then 6 months later paid out $165 million in bonuses to the executives whose bad decisions helped cause that crisis).

2)      Critics of the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) have been suggesting that it is as harmful as the Fugitive Slave Act (which guaranteed the return of a runaway slave, even one who made it to the “free states” of the North, to his/her master) and that the Republican battle to fight the ACA is akin to the battle waged by a very different incarnation of the Republican Party during the Civil War era.

In attempting to rehabilitate the image of his company, Robert Benmosche likened the criticism of AIG bonuses to the lynching of African Americans, trying, I suppose, to imply that both acts punished an equally innocent group of people.  The outcry, he said, “was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitch forks and their hangman nooses, … sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago]. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.”  (http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/09/23/aigs-benmosche-and-miller-on-villains-turnarounds-and-those-bonuses/)

Putting aside the question of whether the employees deserved their bonuses, likening verbal criticism to lynching – in which victims were hanged, burned alive, tortured by having various body parts cut off before their death – is the sort of downplaying of the wrongs done to African Americans that makes it difficult to have an open and honest dialogue on race in the United States.  More on that in a minute.

In other recent news, Representative Bill O’Brien (of the New Hampshire state legislature) said that the ACA “is a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that allowed slave owners to come to New Hampshire and seize African Americans and use the federal courts to take them back to federal … to slave states.” (http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/09/26/opponents-fugitive-slave-act-claim-highlighted-by-obama/)  When a caller to a radio call-in show suggested that the Republican battle against the ACA sought the same sort of “moral victory” that the Republican Party pursued against “slavery and segregation,” U.S. Congressman John Fleming of Louisiana agreed. (http://www.thenation.com/blog/176478/congressman-agrees-caller-fighting-obamacare-fighting-slavery#)  In fact, though there were “Radical Republicans” who fought a good fight against slavery, President Lincoln insisted for many years that his goal was to preserve the Union, and that he would end or preserve slavery only insofar as that act helped him to achieve that aforementioned goal.  In fact, the legal end to segregation was achieved largely by Democratic leaders, who did get some important support from (mostly Northern) moderate Republicans.

This complete misrepresentation of history allows some of the people in power to downplay the wrongs done to African Americans because of race.  When lynching is dismissed as the equivalent of some bad publicity, and when fighting against the provision of health care to those who need it is likened to the fight against slavery, African American people, their history, and their struggles, are similarly undervalued. 

When I teach the end of slavery, I argue that in many ways, the slaves freed themselves: when they heard Union cannonading, they ran away.  So many runaways flooded Union lines that they forced military leaders in the field to come up with policies to deal with them.  Their numbers continued to swell until Abraham Lincoln himself could not ignore their presence.  Lynching was not only a violent miscarriage of justice, it robbed the African American community of some of its best and brightest.  Victims of lynching were often those who were taking on leadership roles as their communities fought against white supremacy.  Such violence also sent the message to those who were considering challenging the status quo that they would quite literally be putting their lives on the line.  Now, when legally passed acts like the ACA are about to begin, in one small way, to rectify some of these disparities, it is suggested that rather than grant a fuller citizenship to individuals, it will send them back to the days of slavery and segregation?!?  (For more on how the ACA would benefit specifically African American communities, see http://thegrio.com/2013/09/30/what-you-need-to-know-african-americans-and-the-affordable-care-act/.) 

If we diminish the injustices that African Americans have suffered in the United States in the way that these political and economic leaders have, then African Americans who ask for the government to address inequalities that have been centuries in the making are dismissed as lazy beggars with their hands out, needing, once again, to be saved by white men who know what is best for them.