Cold War Ghosts
Peter Pomerantsev
‘Russia is a mental subcontinent, the subconscious of the West. This is why we place our fears, our phobias and foibles in Russia,’ a character says in Zinovy Zinik’s novel Sounds Familiar or The Beast of Artek. The book, published last summer, explores the way the Kremlin Menace can loom to a monstrous size in the Western imagination. A timely subject, given the way the debate around Donald Trump's admiration of Vladimir Putin has morphed into a grotesque tale of Putin playing puppet-master in the US election – complete, according to a recently leaked 'unverified' report, with candid camera footage of Trump enjoying golden showers in the Moscow Ritz and secret meetings between the Kremlin and Trump's team in Prague (home of the Golem).
The first character we meet in Sounds Familiar is Sim, a Russian émigré, now living in Hampstead, who carries around all the baggage of a Soviet upbringing: he grew up in a communal flat where he could hear his relatives fucking and cheating on each other. His first sexual partner is an in-law, who dies when a bathroom wall collapses on them. His parents are taken away to labour camps and he's raped in a Young Pioneer camp. He has hallucinations of a bald, bare-breasted monster who appears at moments of mental stress.
Contemporary Russian literature is full of ghosts. The historian and philologist Alexander Etkind connects this to the country’s failure to come to terms with its traumatic past. But the West is haunted too. In Zinik’s novel, many of Sim’s North London neighbours were raised by pro-Soviet parents. They spent time at Artek, the Young Pioneer camp in Crimea which welcomed socialist kids from around the world. Many of them believe the director of Artek, Makarenko, raped them. (He shares a name with the Soviet educational theorist Anton Makarenko, who died in 1939.) Zinik’s Makarenko has since recreated himself as an online bodybuilding guru who manipulates people across the world through the web.
But the true villain of the piece turns out to be Archibald Wren, a Home Office official who met Makarenko in the 1990s while organising the disposal of British industrial waste in Crimea. Together they turned Artek into a paedophile brothel for the global plutocracy. It was Wren who raped Sim, pretending to be Makarenko, and he has convinced the other characters that Makarenko is an über-villain. He wants them to kill his former associate so he can steal the money he has helped launder. They are easy to manipulate because, having once believed Soviet Russia was heaven, they can now be convinced it is hell.
I often think of Sim when I travel to Eastern and Northern Europe. In Ukraine, Georgia or the Baltic states, there are good reasons to feel haunted by the Kremlin. Moscow uses a combination of corruption, cyber attacks and propaganda that draws on historical trauma (as well as the odd invasion) to make mischief in its former empire. But rather than talk about these very real problems, a lot of people seem happier with a rhetorical battle against an abstract beast known as the ‘Soviet Mentality’.
The US is also still in thrall to Cold War ghosts. The descendants of anti-Soviet liberals accuse today’s pro-Putin leftists of being useful idiots, who in turn accuse the anti-Russian liberals of being neo-McCarthyists. Cold Warriors are reliving their youth by fighting Putin’s supposedly neo-Soviet ambitions, while ageing Cold War doves get to be young again by claiming they will stop the New Cold War. Meanwhile, Republican voters who used to see Soviet Russia as the ultimate enemy are apparently just as easily convinced that it’s their new best friend.
At the end of Zinik’s novel, Sim and his friends exorcise their Cold War ghosts in a bizarre therapeutic ritual. The ‘Beast’ of Artek turns out to have a rational, if brutal, historical explanation. The characters begin a new life in which they can see things for what they are. This can’t come too soon in the real world too. Cold War categories are particularly unhelpful in making sense of our current shitstorm. The danger today is less a Cold War style confrontation between Moscow and Washington than an alliance between Putin’s Russia, Trump’s America and whoever else wants to join in a carnival of nationalism, hate-speech, bullshit and corruption. I can only hope that that monster exists, like the Beast of Artek, only in my imagination.
Comments
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13 January 2017
at
11:43am
Joshua K
says:
Liberals' mission for 2017: delegitimize and impeach Trump; mute any media sources critical of the west.
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13 January 2017
at
2:57pm
IPFreely
says:
@
Joshua K
Trump does that himself every time he opens his mouth or tweets.
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17 January 2017
at
7:10pm
John Cowan
says:
@
Joshua K
Impeach Trump? That's the plan of an idiot, and not a useful one. First, you have to convince a Republican Congress to do it. If that succeeds (how? with blackmail? or black magic?), you then have President Pence, who is far more right-wing than Trump. I think not.
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13 January 2017
at
3:05pm
IPFreely
says:
There are quite a large number of Trump fans in the Ukraine. A friend wrote to me in November to say that there were great hopes that Putin and Trump would come to an agreement and end the conflict in the east. My reply in which I pointed out some of the more unpleasant aspects of his character were met with "but that's just your western liberal attitude." That "press conference" revealed again just how unsuited he is for the job.
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16 January 2017
at
7:55am
Higgs Boatswain
says:
Although the paranoid fear of the Russian East is undoubtedly a deep-seated nightmare in the psyche of the liberal West, it is not quite so cliched as the illiberal nightmare of a global paedophile-ring of child-raping politicians and plutocrats. This too is a fantasy that could bear some rational analysis - both in Russia and in Britain - rather than repetition and exploitation, whether in the tabloid newspapers or in works of literary fiction.
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17 January 2017
at
8:41pm
Doetze
says:
It is not the present-day leftists who admire Putin, but the xenophobic ultra-right wing nationalists. Le Pen and Wilders got financing from the Kremlin.
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18 January 2017
at
12:26am
Phil
says:
The conclusion may or may not be a ghost. A USA-Russia propaganda alliance sounds like a weak force, compared to actual trends, which are internal and indigenous to Europe and North America.
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18 January 2017
at
5:14pm
Graucho
says:
NATO is obsolete, it would be OK for the EU to break up, I'll start off trusting Putin and Merkel equally ... Did the Kremlin do everything in its power to get Trump elected ? They would have been mad not to.
Read morehttp://m.truthdig.com/report/item/the_real_purpose_of_the_us_governments_report_on_alleged_hacking_by_russi
To the contrary, Obama has already announced a $1 trillion "modernization" of the USA nuclear arsenal. While one could attribute this to fear of China, which is indeed making great effort to become STEM-wise creative, on the ground the only plausible counterweight to US hegemony remains as it was, Russia.
The USA views itself as exceptional and properly hegemonic. I therefore see little reason to doubt the potential for a Neo-Cold War.
In favor of this hypothesis is the behavior of the US national security establishment. Are we to propose they are motivated by abiding concern of the evils of nationalism, sexism, plutocracy, or even corruption. Not me.