ONLINE STATMENT HONORING NAVALNY'S COURAGE:
Strakh, in Cyrillic Страх, is the one-word title of the next-to-last chapter of a Russian-Ukrainian memoir I happen to be finishing up now. It describes the atmosphere of the early 1930s in the USSR and is taken from a play of the same name by Aleksandr Afinogenov. It means quite simply FEAR.
The concept of fear as an ever-present Russian reality is relevant once again in our time of High Putinism, for it is fear that rules, from Moscow to the Donbass to Vladivostok. And with the ever-present chance of more missile attacks on civilian infrastructure and housing, Vladimir Vladimirovich has extended terror’s reign, to some degree, to Ukraine as well.
So it’s uncanny that just as I’m reading and thinking about Strakh I learn of the death earlier today of Aleksei Navalny, the last leader of any significant opposition in Russia. He faced his own fear – and an almost-certain premature death, which finally came at the age of 47 – when he returned from Germany in 2021 after being flown there for treatment for poisoning.
Navalny himself had demonstrated the complicity of Russia's secret services in that act against him by calling one of the apparent FSB agents involved, pretending to be a fellow officer, and coaxing the toxic substances specialist to say over the phone that all traces of the poison had been cleared up. Yet despite the evidence, and even if Russians know deep down that it's true, no one dares say it.
Take the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya - who'd already been poisoned in 2004 after her reporting on the Second Chechen War. Gunned down in Moscow on October 7, 2006. Which just happened to be Putin's birthday. Coincidence? "There is no direct evidence," the fear-filled Russian dutifully retorts, "linking Putin to this or other deaths of journalists."
Navalny’s fate is representative of the intimidation faced by opposition activists, or artists and academics. Those people are inakomyslyashchie, to use another Russian word, one that translates concisely as “dissidents” but whose full meaning is “different-thinking people.” One might say “those who dare to think differently,” adding the word dare, because in Russia, it requires a level of audacity little known in the West. And that is why, the more I learn about Russia, the more I feel its darkness, the more I pity its average citizens, and the more I admire those who refuse to conform.
The worst display of conformism in Russia – and similar societies – is parroting official lies. And this is where the memoirs I’ve been reading come in, as their author was an academic historian suffocating under the onus of censorship for decades before finally emigrating to Israel in the early 1970s.
Nikolai Poletika had been one of the Soviet Union's foremost authorities on the outbreak of WWI. His memoirs, published shortly after his arrival in his new country, are called simply Videnoe i Perezhitoe – “Seen and Experienced.” To my knowledge, they have never been translated into English. I’ve found them an eye-opening read, from his witnessing 1905’s Kiev Pogrom as a child, to the succession of governments who forcefully took over Kiev during the Civil War – and how he kept a low profile under each one for the sake of survival – and into the Stalinist Era. He could read all the leading Western news periodicals during his time as a journalist in 1920s Leningrad – though he had to be very careful about what he filtered through as a "foreign correspondent." Like other academic historians, he struggled to get his research published in an atmosphere in which it was easy to run afoul of the powers-that-be. Finally, he recounts the fate of those who overstepped the bounds, ending up in internal exile, or sometimes dying in labor camps.
None of this was entirely new to me, nor was the extent of the horrors of Stalinism. I’d already read, for instance, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Yet I felt as though I was overcoming some old naivete as I came upon Poletika’s Strakh chapter, which followed all his personal ordeals. Suddenly I could name the gloom that for me had so long hung like a thick, dank fog over all my impressions of Russia – from three and a half months spent in language courses there, from copious study and teaching of Russian culture in the States, and from conversations with friends and acquaintances from the former Soviet space.
The gnawing pain I associated with Russia hadn't come from seeing dirty streets or drunks passed out on sidewalks, though these things were symptoms of the greater ill. Nor did it come from knowing about short lifespans or that you couldn't trust the police. Nor was it the overblown monuments to Soviet greatness – which were, it is true, effective at dwarfing the individual. It was the feeling that you had to pay fealty to this grandiose view of the Russian state, even as it belittled your worth as an individual and mocked any desire for truth-telling. You might recognize its hollowness and decay, but to point them out was unthinkable, because it still had the power to control your tongue and your pen. Even your mind. And that power was fear.
Yet there's more to the specifically Russian/Soviet type of strakh - which is probably why it took me all those years to make the connection. (Though when I comes short life expectancies or corrupt, violent cops, I might have put more thought into the fear Blacks in the Jim Crow South must have felt.)
Afinogenov’s protagonist, Professor Borodin of the Institute of Physiological Impulses, describes the nature of that peculiarly totalitarian strakh:
“The dairy-maid fears the confiscation of her cow, the peasant, forceful collectivization … the technical worker, accusations of sabotage… The individual becomes mistrustful, shut off, unscrupulous, slovenly, and unprincipled… Fear begets absence from work, trains running late, disrupted production, and general poverty and hunger… The rabbit, upon seeing a constrictor, becomes frozen to the spot, its muscles rigid. It waits in ignominy until the coils of the constrictor squeeze and asphyxiate it. We are all rabbits. After all this, can one work creatively? Of course not!”
And in Poletika’s view, the Communist Party waged war on one group of people first and foremost: the intelligentsia. Not only on the professoriate, but also on writers or others inclined to think independently.
Fortunately, not all are paralyzed by strakh. Here's to all those, like Navalny and Politkovskaya, who are not afraid to speak the truth.
The concept of fear as an ever-present Russian reality is relevant once again in our time of High Putinism, for it is fear that rules, from Moscow to the Donbass to Vladivostok. And with the ever-present chance of more missile attacks on civilian infrastructure and housing, Vladimir Vladimirovich has extended terror’s reign, to some degree, to Ukraine as well.
So it’s uncanny that just as I’m reading and thinking about Strakh I learn of the death earlier today of Aleksei Navalny, the last leader of any significant opposition in Russia. He faced his own fear – and an almost-certain premature death, which finally came at the age of 47 – when he returned from Germany in 2021 after being flown there for treatment for poisoning.
Navalny himself had demonstrated the complicity of Russia's secret services in that act against him by calling one of the apparent FSB agents involved, pretending to be a fellow officer, and coaxing the toxic substances specialist to say over the phone that all traces of the poison had been cleared up. Yet despite the evidence, and even if Russians know deep down that it's true, no one dares say it.
Take the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya - who'd already been poisoned in 2004 after her reporting on the Second Chechen War. Gunned down in Moscow on October 7, 2006. Which just happened to be Putin's birthday. Coincidence? "There is no direct evidence," the fear-filled Russian dutifully retorts, "linking Putin to this or other deaths of journalists."
Navalny’s fate is representative of the intimidation faced by opposition activists, or artists and academics. Those people are inakomyslyashchie, to use another Russian word, one that translates concisely as “dissidents” but whose full meaning is “different-thinking people.” One might say “those who dare to think differently,” adding the word dare, because in Russia, it requires a level of audacity little known in the West. And that is why, the more I learn about Russia, the more I feel its darkness, the more I pity its average citizens, and the more I admire those who refuse to conform.
The worst display of conformism in Russia – and similar societies – is parroting official lies. And this is where the memoirs I’ve been reading come in, as their author was an academic historian suffocating under the onus of censorship for decades before finally emigrating to Israel in the early 1970s.
Nikolai Poletika had been one of the Soviet Union's foremost authorities on the outbreak of WWI. His memoirs, published shortly after his arrival in his new country, are called simply Videnoe i Perezhitoe – “Seen and Experienced.” To my knowledge, they have never been translated into English. I’ve found them an eye-opening read, from his witnessing 1905’s Kiev Pogrom as a child, to the succession of governments who forcefully took over Kiev during the Civil War – and how he kept a low profile under each one for the sake of survival – and into the Stalinist Era. He could read all the leading Western news periodicals during his time as a journalist in 1920s Leningrad – though he had to be very careful about what he filtered through as a "foreign correspondent." Like other academic historians, he struggled to get his research published in an atmosphere in which it was easy to run afoul of the powers-that-be. Finally, he recounts the fate of those who overstepped the bounds, ending up in internal exile, or sometimes dying in labor camps.
None of this was entirely new to me, nor was the extent of the horrors of Stalinism. I’d already read, for instance, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Yet I felt as though I was overcoming some old naivete as I came upon Poletika’s Strakh chapter, which followed all his personal ordeals. Suddenly I could name the gloom that for me had so long hung like a thick, dank fog over all my impressions of Russia – from three and a half months spent in language courses there, from copious study and teaching of Russian culture in the States, and from conversations with friends and acquaintances from the former Soviet space.
The gnawing pain I associated with Russia hadn't come from seeing dirty streets or drunks passed out on sidewalks, though these things were symptoms of the greater ill. Nor did it come from knowing about short lifespans or that you couldn't trust the police. Nor was it the overblown monuments to Soviet greatness – which were, it is true, effective at dwarfing the individual. It was the feeling that you had to pay fealty to this grandiose view of the Russian state, even as it belittled your worth as an individual and mocked any desire for truth-telling. You might recognize its hollowness and decay, but to point them out was unthinkable, because it still had the power to control your tongue and your pen. Even your mind. And that power was fear.
Yet there's more to the specifically Russian/Soviet type of strakh - which is probably why it took me all those years to make the connection. (Though when I comes short life expectancies or corrupt, violent cops, I might have put more thought into the fear Blacks in the Jim Crow South must have felt.)
Afinogenov’s protagonist, Professor Borodin of the Institute of Physiological Impulses, describes the nature of that peculiarly totalitarian strakh:
“The dairy-maid fears the confiscation of her cow, the peasant, forceful collectivization … the technical worker, accusations of sabotage… The individual becomes mistrustful, shut off, unscrupulous, slovenly, and unprincipled… Fear begets absence from work, trains running late, disrupted production, and general poverty and hunger… The rabbit, upon seeing a constrictor, becomes frozen to the spot, its muscles rigid. It waits in ignominy until the coils of the constrictor squeeze and asphyxiate it. We are all rabbits. After all this, can one work creatively? Of course not!”
And in Poletika’s view, the Communist Party waged war on one group of people first and foremost: the intelligentsia. Not only on the professoriate, but also on writers or others inclined to think independently.
Fortunately, not all are paralyzed by strakh. Here's to all those, like Navalny and Politkovskaya, who are not afraid to speak the truth.
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