Russia and Culture

Walking composition

“To your mad world—one answer: I refuse.”
—from “Poems to Czechoslovakia,” Marina Tsvetaeva

I had promised to write more about Konstantin V. Kustanovich’s book Russian and American Cultures: Two Worlds a World Apart* when I finished reading it, but I’ve been having trouble articulating the thoughts it left me with.

The main issue is that it reaffirmed and detailed what I already instinctively felt to be true of Russia. It agreed with my priors, in other words, and in fact strengthened them. That’s not to say I prefer writing that doesn’t—obviously, in searching for books about the commons and private property, I’ve been accumulating ones that will teach me more about and deepen my belief in something I already feel is true. Perhaps the issue is more that the explanation of Russian culture and character, which I felt to be accurate, doesn’t provide a way forward. I really hope that’s wrong.

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Winston Churchill famously said of Russia: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” He was referring at the time to Germany’s actions near the Black Sea in 1939 and how Russia would respond but the quote has been used to illustrate the enduring attraction and seemingly opaque quality of Russia to people in Europe and North America ever since. The unarticulated question these days is slightly more precise: why?

Or, as Kustanovich wrote in the first line of his introduction, “What is wrong with Russia?” How can a country so rich in resources as well as human potential and artistic achievement also be so full of corruption, so rife with income inequality, so suspicious of Europe and America, so seemingly eager to elect authoritarians?

I’ve read quite a number of pieces discussing the expansion of NATO throughout the 1990s and early 2000s to explain the current crisis, but, as with most countries and cultures, the roots of these responses and fears go back much further. It’s the development of Russian culture over the last thousand years or so, writes Kustanovich, that has shaped the national character and the way people respond to both modern propaganda and perceived threats. A lot of it has to do with how Russian Orthodoxy shaped itself in negation of the wider European Catholic Church, and its development as a repository of ritual and mystery without an attendant emphasis on teaching and pastoral care. Add to that a collective economic and agricultural system dependent on values of the communal rather than individual, and a long history of autocratic rulers (the Bolshevik revolution didn’t give the Russian people much respite from those) and you have modern Russia:

“Collectivism, authoritarianism, poor geographic conditions, and lack of religious exhortation prevented developing habits of continuous and disciplined hard work among Russians. Their life provided few chances for accumulating significant wealth and also choked individual initiative and individual responsibility for one’s well-being. It also formed a consciousness prone to striving for immediate gratification. . . . Also, mutual trust and interdependence among the members of the village commune and lack of such trust in relation to the authorities and the law combined with seeing outsiders as fair game for any unlawful actions have fostered a very strong notion of the division between us and them—insiders and outsiders—that in turn engendered such prominent features of the Russian culture as nationalism, nepotism, favoritism, and legal nihilism.” (Emphasis mine.)

An attraction to mystery, ritual, and appearance over content (maybe more than an attraction; a belief that these things are in fact closer to God than other Christian sects with Bible study groups and after-service coffee hour), combined with an us vs. them conviction born of centuries of oppression and survival mechanisms drawn from life on marginal agricultural land, leads to . . . what exactly? Deep suspicion of American-style individualism and skepticism of the values of democracy and human rights for all. Pride in the strength, and even ruthlessness, of a leader.

Not to mention the success of more than a decade of increasingly sophisticated propaganda and increasing restriction on outside media. “What is wrong with Russia?” asks Kustanovich:

“The greatest problem is that Russia is Russia. As long as it exists it will never become a Western-type liberal democracy no matter who rules it and what laws it has on paper. . . . Russia will remain an authoritarian, corrupt, mendacious, nationalist, even xenophobic country. At the same time, Russians will continue to be a warm, cordial, loving, and hospitable people capable of considerable sacrifice in relations with their family and friends.”

The only truly effective response, he writes, is for Western democracies to work much harder at actually understanding the culture they’re negotiating with, rather than assuming it will organically change on its own.

There’s a lot more in the book explaining all of this thinking, and I urge interested people to go ahead and read it because the tangle that reading it has caused among my own memories, experiences, and knowledge makes me wonder if I’m choosing the wrong passages to quote, or the wrong aspects to highlight. I am desperate to understand because I see little hope, while also worrying about my family who remain there, and about what’s at risk for the people I care about and all of Ukraine and whoever else will suffer. For me, it showed how deep the taproot of culture and character can run, how little influence a few decades of geopolitical maneuvering can have on the deeper forces at work. For you, it might strike differently.

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The one question that lingered as I walked around town thinking of this book and taking pictures of train graffiti was how much of the specific Russian-culture qualities discussed exist among the rest of us. I thought about the specific schisms I’ve personally experienced over the last few years, the iterations of us vs. them and dehumanization—not even the larger cultural movements at work, but instances right in front of me. Or the different ways that people approach religion and religious faith, and the suffering some are willing to inflict in the name of their religion (contrasted with the suffering many are eager to alleviate in honor of their religion).

I’m not enough of a scholar to feel confident knowing the difference between culture and character traits. But I look at the time period Kustanovich began with, the end of the tenth century when the land was called Rus’ and Grand Prince Vladimir of Kyiv decided on Greek Orthodoxy as the religion of the land—with an ensuing total lack of accompanying education with the exception of some upper-class literacy mostly confined to learning Church Slavonic—and wonder where in there, or before or after that period (which was followed by two centuries of domination by Mongol warrior bands), worldviews and self-perceptions on that continent began to diverge from neighboring Europe.

And how much? How different are we really? I understand the core of difference that Kustanovich and I, at least, are talking about, but what about the potential? What about the attraction to authoritarianism and xenophobia? On the more positive side, what about the growing articulations against community-fracturing individualism?

The taproot of difference is deep, but I wonder how much geographical isolation has contributed to its strength: Russia’s location allows it to more easily shut itself off from neighboring countries and cultures, and the legacy of Mongol invasion gave it strong incentive to do so (many have argued that those occupations are at the root of the country’s xenophobia). And I remember that time is long and wonder if the balance of these forces plays itself out over millennia rather than decades, or even centuries.

In The Dawn of Everything, David Wengrow and David Graeber extensively lay out the case that human cultures and civilizations are capable of incredible variation, and always have been. Nothing is fixed and everything is possible. And we have choices to make.

My father and I have had many conversations about Russia and the future since he returned from Russia much earlier than planned last week. Though my culture is not Russian, I see the traits of Russian culture, both the good and the bad, all around me.

*Just a reminder, Kustanovich is an old friend of my father’s and professor emeritus of Russian at Vanderbilt University. Their connection goes back to their parents during the Siege of Leningrad. Remind me to tell you about it sometime.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• I was on the War on Cars podcast very briefly, along with Garnette Cadogan, Jerry DeSilva, and David Ulin, as part of their episode on Ray Bradbury’s classic short story “The Pedestrian” and what it means when we lose the right to walk. It’s a fun listen!

• D.J. Hobbs writing about phenomenology on Psyche—how it can shift our perception of the world and our own place in it: “Thinking about ourselves through the reduction is a radical type of introspection, one that simultaneously reveals how we are always reaching beyond ourselves to engage with a world that, in turn, gives itself to our consciousness.”

• Julia Zarankin, author of the memoir Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder, has a lovely short essay about taking up ballet in her forties—a reminder that our bodies are ever-evolving companions throughout our lives.

• Giovana Martino in Arch Daily with a brief history of the kitchen.

• Jonathan White writing in Aeon on the injustice of lives and jobs structured to almost guarantee poor sleep: “Bad sleep can make bad circumstances less bearable, and is often the thing that makes them unbearable. It comes with a distinct set of risks. And it can affect people’s ability to change their circumstances, making other disadvantages more sticky.”

• I try not to post things from standard news sources, but this article about the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (a Catholic religious order) opening their Rome archives of residential school records (they operated 48 residential schools in Canada) to researchers seems really important and I haven’t seen it covered elsewhere. Much easier to ignore the realities of history when its records are locked away from the public eye.

• The Shared State podcast with an episode on the future of the Badger Two-Medicine, an incomparable place that the Blackfeet Nation has been trying to protect for decades. (Can’t link directly; scroll down for Season 2, Episode 3.) A good overview of the struggle and history, but also a reminder that many conservation groups carry a legacy of Indigenous removal and erasure, and not all have come to terms with the realities of stolen land.

• Thank you to Charles for sending me physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s Aeon piece about her (paid!) conversations with people who wanted someone in the field to listen to their ideas about physics (also known as crackpots). I found the compassion in it—and the reminder that we’re all learning all the time—heartening.

• Humpback whales have made an incredible comeback to almost pre-whaling numbers, but face further challenges due to climate change. Veronika Meduna presents the findings of several humpback researchers in Nautilus.

• Charles Truehart writing in The American Scholar on a new book about the history of the index. As a copy editor, I’ve only had the opportunity to write an index once (it’s a specialized skill and a lot of work) and loved it: “An index is a work of art, a rich echo of the text in question, a nest of clues to the essence of the work, and a source of literary fun for centuries.” Indeed!

• I really enjoyed the Ghost Train podcast miniseries, about Colorado, trains, public transit, and the very fraught processes of civic engagement. And, as always, how difficult it is to reverse-engineer our car-centric infrastructure.

• Mark Liebenow with a beautiful short essay on toasting a missing friend, and the fraught nature of life full of possibility and sorrow: “In the tired faces of people hunched over at the bar, I see the need to believe that there is more than a cold beer at the end of a long week. We want to know that despite our differences, there is enough compassion in each of us to find common ground.”