Category Archives: Slavic Studies

About Putin’s Inauguration and More on Bakhtin and Dostoevsky

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Before I get to my main topic, I wanted to provide a link to the Russian Channel 1 footage of Putin’s inauguration.

http://www.1tv.ru/news/social/206393

Do not be intimidated by the fact that it is the Russian television channel – language matters little in this exercise in semiotic analysis. Just let the footage run. You will be able to tell fairly clearly when Medvedev arrives at the Kremlin, when Putin arrives at the Kremlin, and when Putin takes his oath of office.  Later in this entry I will also provide links to articles in English that will provide more details about the setting, in case my kind reader would like to learn more about the setting of Putin’s inauguration.

For reference, think about the spectacle put together for Obama’s inauguration back in January 2009. Washington’s metro system had record ridership, and the city was overrun with people who wanted to share in the experience. It was so cold that Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma “lip-synched” their performances.[i] Everyone remembers it was cold because everyone stood outside to witness the event.

Meantime, if you look at the footage of Putin’s inauguration, one is struck by the feeling of claustrophobia of the ceremony within the Kremlin’s main palace. The presence of soldiers dressed in uniforms that seem out of the Napoleonic period adds to the sense that this was not a ceremony designed for the Russian public, but for the select few oligarchs who got invited to this private event.  The ornate nature of the interiors –Putin was inaugurated in the Kremlin’s St. Andrew’s Hall, the former throne room of the tsars, which stands in stark contrast to the Stalinist monumentalist marble foyer from which Putin departed in Moscow’s White House – really gives the whole even an imperial air which is very missing from the United States’ more populist inaugural celebration.[ii]

Even more disturbing are the aerial shots taken when Putin and Medvedev were driving to the Kremlin palace for the actual inauguration. It seems like Moscow is a ghost city, with no one but the Napoleonic period honor guard standing outside the palace to greet the President/Prime Minister and the Prime Minister/President. Pay attention at the points between 16:30 and 23:50. That is six minutes of Putin driving in a caravan through hundreds of abandoned blocks in one of the largest cities in the world. In the United States, you would have the sidewalks overrun with people trying to get a glimpse of the caravan.  Moscow, in contrast, looks like a ghost town.

The eerie absence of people stands in stark contrast to the apparent activity that occurred the day before the inauguration. The Huffington Post, among the more mainstream online news sources, noted how over 120 people were detained as opposition protests drew more than 20,000 people into Moscow the day before the inauguration. [iii]

This leaves one wondering about the nature of political change in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union.  Specialists tend to agree that Russia has evolved into a strange form of parliamentary oligarchy. The emerging protest movement, which has mobilized the younger emerging middle class in ways never seen in Russia, presents a particular challenge. Will Putin find a way to allow for an increasingly diverse range of political actors to gain equal access to the political processes in Russia? Or will Putin turn to a more “stereotypical” authoritarian mode of governance?

The wonder of living in Washington, D. C., is that we have so many people actually interested in this topic that you can expect that I will have more to say on this topic later this month. ….

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Which brings us back to the previous topic of Bakhtin. I know, this constitutes some of the horrible writing that I try to battle in my classroom. There really is no graceful way to transition between Russian politics and Dostoevsky – what am I saying? Dostoevsky was the man (cheesy cliché, check!) when it came to trying to work out political and philosophical questions in artistic form. This is what made him Bakhtin’s favorite novelistic writer. There – transitional link with Putin’s ornate, traditional coronation –er, inauguration – established.

Going  back to Bakhtin’s essays on Dostoevsky, in his chapter  «Основная особенность творчества Достоевкого и её освещение в критической литературе», “Fundamental Features of Dostoevsky’s Work and Its Manifestation in Critical Literature, ” Bakhtin points out that what most characterizes Dostoevsky’s literature is that it has no genetic or causal categories. Rather, he saw details in the world around him, gradations in significance and meaning.  In chapter two, “Dostoevsky’s Characters,” Bakhtin observes how:

«Не только действительность самого героя, но и окружающий его мир и быт вовлекаются в процесс самого знания, переводятся из авторского кругозора в кругозор героя.»

“Not only the reality of the hero himself, but also his surrounding world and reality become part of the very process of knowledge, change from the author’s point of view to the character’s own…” [iv]

These characteristics come through in one of Dostoevsky’s shorter works, Notes from the Underground. If you want to follow along, you can access an online version courtesy of the University of Virginia library system: (Side note: if you like the collection of texts in this site and you live in Virginia, do not forget to write to your legislator and let them know the University of Virginia, and its library system, rock!)

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengD.browse.html

Now that we have a unified source to reference, we can start by taking a second and being impressed by Constance Garnett. Constance Garnett lived at the turn of the twentieth century and single-handedly brought classic nineteenth-century Russian literature to the English speaking world. While new translations of a lot of these works have emerged in the last thirty years, when I was starting my studies in Russian literature the Garnett translations were the only translations we used. And she was a woman. And she translated over seventy one volumes of literature. I have not even written one whole volume of literature in my life, I cannot even imagine how she managed to work her way through so much material.[v]

Now that credit has been given where credit is due, let us go back to the actual text. The story is a strange little narrative of a man who finds himself quickly losing any and all hold on reality.  He starts by revealing his former experience as a low level government bureaucrat – in clear homage to Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” The narrator is not a pleasant person – he starts by admitting he is a “spiteful man” at least four times within the first two pages.

This man contemplates the world around him. The narrator goes through a list of traditional motivators to action or interaction in life. He tried falling in love, but ended up suffering. People in general, he believes, go through life fooling themselves as far as to their motivations and actions. In contemplating the nature of action, he comes to a moment that displays Bakhtin’s claim of Dostoevsky’s ability to display gradation of thought and consciousness where others may not see any gradation at all.

“…You know the direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious sitting-with-the-hands-folded. I repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all “direct” persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are at ease and you know that is the chief thing. To begin to act, you know, you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of doubt left in it. Why, how am I, for example to set my mind at rest?…”[vi]

The answer, in this case, is that trying to set one’s mind at rest is nothing but a foolish endeavor. Free will is a hard concept to accept when seemingly physical and rational laws, such as the mathematical law the two times two makes four, rule the world – “without my will.”

Those who decide to assert their free will end up suffering in Dostoevsky’s world.  Dostoevsky’s narrators peel away layer after layer of motivation for each and every character in his books – from his frustrated male heroes to his virtuous female heroines. He makes passing references (or as my students would say, he pays homage) to major figures in nineteenth century Russian literature. Notes from the Underground intentionally echoes Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, as well as reference Turgenev’s hero, Bazarov, from Fathers and Sons. He also creates a hero that directly opposes Nikolai Chernychevsky’s Rakhmetov, from What Is to be Done? All of these heroes try to manifest their intellectual, personal and political agency, and all of them fail in one way or the other. The richness of the narrator’s discourse, as well as the discourse it carries on with the different type of literary heroes that have populated nineteenth century Russian literature, is one of the ways that Dostoevsky manages to change the author’s point of view to the character’s point of view.

Why do we find it so hard to understand Dostoevsky’s Underground Man? In part it derives from a certain sense of philosophy that strikes us as fatalistic. You English language reader came into the tradition of Russian literature fairly late in the nineteenth century, thanks to Constance Garnett’s herculean translation work. At the same time, English language readers read more popular magazine serials such as Charles Dicken’s novels, which somehow always managed to provide his main hero with a relatively positive ending, or with Jane Austen, whose heroines managed to find their mate in spite of whatever prejudice they bore at the beginning of their work. A novel that so explicitly focused on the ideas of free will and the consequences of intellectual and political agency differed in the way it approached the topics of political and philosophical discourse. Russian literature does not provide any easy options for social change, while one could surmise from a work by Dickens that if society came together as an organic whole it could at least seriously ameliorate the effects of the tenements and slums that had emerged as a result of the early industrial revolution. The thought that one would end underground because of the inability to exert free will in a politically or economically significant way went against the grain of the more positive, rational legal trend inherited from nineteenth century English language literature. If one accepts the existence of Horatio Alger, then the Underground Man is the result of lack of will, rather than lack of existential possibility for action.

 

[i] Michele Salcedo. “Inauguration Music – Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma – Wasn’t Live But Recorded.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/22/inauguration-musicians_n_160216.html

[ii] Mikhail Aristov, “Benefit, Honor, Glory”, Voice of America, May 6, 2012 http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_05_06/73978542/. See also  Svetlana Kalmykova, “Putin: I’ll do my best to measure up to people’s expectations,” Voice of America, May 7, 2012, http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_05_07/74070146/.

[iii] Lynn Berry “Vladimir Putin Sworn In For Third Term As Russia’s President.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/vladimir-putin-sworn-in-russia-president_n_1494084.html

[iv] М. М. Бахтин «Бахтин под маской: Маска четвёртая: Проблемы творчества Достоевского.» Алконост: 1994, 40-41 Translation my own.

[v] Once again, Wikipedia is not my favorite source in general, but for this general type of information it more than first the bill. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constance_Garnett

[vi]http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengD.browse.html For more commentary regarding the critical reception of the book you can go to: http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/courses/previous/ru351/novels/UGMan/ugman.html

Bakhtin and Dostoevsky…

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Just listen to the name: Bakhtin. The –kh-, by the way, sounds like the “h” sound that Ernie the Muppet from Sesame Street makes when he laughs. If you are going to write what amounts to a nerdy fan letter to an author who has been dead since 1975, it helps that said author has the kind of name that belies the gravitas of his oeuvre.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н) wrote the kind of serious literary criticism that makes you know that you are engaging in no holds barred, honest to goodness, heavy duty intellectual pursuit. I remember when I first heard about Bakhtin in graduate school. We were introduced to two of his main concepts – chronotope, the intersectin of time and art, and the picaresque hero. The term “picaresque” comes from the sixteenth century Spanish narrative El lazarillo de Tormes. Bakhtin took the image of the underclass rascal who uses his wits to gain upward social mobility and applies it to novels at large. I always found his preference for French Renaissance, rather than Spanish narratives, when discussing this term rather disconcerting. His development of the concept, however, proved very useful.  There is, simply told, an intellectual world before Bakhtin and an intellectual world after Bakhtin. He wrote about ideas in a way that illuminated the relations between the real world and the world of creative prose. Never mind that he packed it in the form of linguistically scintillating neologisms, such as dialogic, heteroglossia, and chronotope, among others.

Bakhtin also gained the academic equivalent of “street credibility” through the extremes he endured to write his theory. Bakhtin’s works “came of age” during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev era. He lived a challenging professional life, and taught in a wide range of institutions. [i] His works were hard to come by, since he found himself teaching far away from the intellectual centers of (then) Leningrad and Moscow, and since his works were considered controversial during his time. This only added to the cache of clandestine Soviet writing that made Russian literature such a heady affair during the Soviet period.

Bakhtin took the time to explain the origins of literary forms – both as descendants from earlier forms and as originators of new forms. Which brings me – finally! – to the reading for the week. I have been skimming – for skimming is all one can do when closing the books on a four course load teaching semester – Bakhtin’s writings on Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky, by himself, is another one of those Russian writers whose every piece of writing tries to challenge a reader’s conception of the world. His Grand Inquisitor, for instance, is still one of the most exhilarating treatments of free will.

Bakhtin saw Dostoevsky as what best be described as a “founding innovator.” The way that he took previously existing structures and metaphors and integrated them with specific philosophical content turned the novel into what Bakhtin considerd the most advanced literary form.

“Dostoevsky is the creator of the polyphonic novel. He created an essentially new novelistic genre. Therefore , his work cannot be fit into any kind of frame, does not obey any of the hiistorico-literary schemes, which we have become accustomed to attribute to the European form of the novel. In his works, a hero appears whose voice is constructed like the voice of the very author in a novel of the normal type, and not like the voice of his hero. The hero’s voice regarding himself or his world carries as much weight as the normal authorial word…” [ii]

One of the Dostoevskian heroes that Bakhtin analyzes is the one derived from Gogol’s works. One only need to compare Gogol’s Diary of a Madman to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground to see both Gogol’s influence on Dostoevsky, and how Dostoevsky could take what had by his lifetime become a classic literary figure and innovate the figure into a new generation, if that is not too egregious a rhetorical sin to express. Dostoevsky adapted Gogol’s grotesque characters and gave them a greater level of philosophical and moral depth, leading to his take on the Nietzschean superman in Crime and Punishment in the form of Raskolnikov.

Granted, Dostoevsky’s literature does not easily merit the adjective of “pretty.” If you want seductively pretty prose, look to Nabokov, who is constantly trying to show how rhetorical beauty and rot a moral soul from within. Dostoevsky’s universe leaves you unnerved as you wonder if there is any real beauty left in the world. His endings always prove reassuring in that they point to the face that morality can reappear even in the most unlikely souls. It does leave you wondering how out of place society can be if it can morally disorient people with such ease. All of this and more is reflected in Bakhtin’s discussion of Dostoevsky’s contribution to world literature, and why he sees him as the novelistic author above all other novelistic author.

 

[i] I usually try to avoid Wikipedia as a reference, but in this case the information is so general, and truth is stranger than fiction in Bakhtin’s case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakhtin

[ii] М. М. Бахтин «Бахтин под маской: Маска четвёртая: Проблемы творчества Достоевского.» Алконост: 1994 p. 7 Translation my own.

 

ON LITERATURE ABOUT LITERATURE.

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One of the things literary critics get to do is to write commentary on literature about literature, where we ponder the nature of the writing craft. Writing differs according to its form and function. Some forms of writing have gained a place in our culture as intrinsically challenging, like poetry, drama, and “serious” belletristic literature – think Ulysses and James Joyce.

All good writing, however, contains some basic traits. Lidiia Korneevna Chukovskaia, in her book «В лаборатории редактора,»[i]  In the Editor’s Workshop, spends a lot of time discussing what makes good writing, and what makes a good reader of literature. In this case, she contemplates the kind of reading skills that make a skilled editor.

«Интерес к языку, постоянные попытки осознать, осмыслить перемeны, происходящие в нём, тонкий слух к индивидуальным особенностям, присущим языку и стилю того или другого писателя, -вот что характеризует мастера редакционной работы…»

“Interest in language, the constant attempts to understand, to comprehend the changes that occur in it, the delicate sound of individual features inherent to the language and style of one or the other writer, that is what distinguishes a master of the editorial labor…”[ii]

Chukovskaia points out that truly gifted writing can come from a great range of sources, but what it needs is a respect for the words themselves. The style of a work, its form, reflects the totality of the writer, down to the writer’s sincerity or insincerity. What matters most is for a writer to be truly committed to the depth of the words s/he writes, their meaning, and the way they function stylistically to reflect the segment of life from which they derive. The words should serve as the eyes of the world that the writer sees. Total honesty and total mastery of the grammar of the world s/he is trying to depict.

«Искусство – орудие изучения жизни, орудие воздействие на жизнь не в меньшей степени, чем наука. А без ясности – какое же изучение и какое воздействие?»[iii]

“Art is a tool for the study of life, a tool that impacts life no less than science. And without clarity  — what kind of learning or impact can there be?”

The key to this learning, to this impact, lies in the word «естественность» — which the dictionary defines as “natural,” but which means so much more.  In Chukovskaia’s parlance,  “natural” involves not only a sensitivity to language style that reflects the elements of nature it portrays, but also moral and artistic sincerity and integrity in its utterance.

The emphasis on sincerity and sensitivity should come as no surprise to those who Chuckovskaia as The Memory of Soviet literature. Not only did she serve as guardian of her father’s work – his insistence on sincerity and sensitivity in his literary criticism earned a “demotion” to the children’s literature division, where he and other talented writers created some of the most memorable children’s literature in the world – but also of Anna Akhmatova’s works. Her efforts to keep Akhmatova’s literary memory alive ensured that some of the most riveting poetry of the Stalinist period made it to the era of perestroika and to this day.

At the same time, in true Soviet style, Chukovskaia never utters the words sincerity or sensitivity explicitly. What she does is to create the rhetorical equivalent of a picture of the negative space around these words, forcing the reader to fill in the positive space to obtain its meaning. Rather than speak directly of the need for sincerity and clarity in Soviet literature, she speaks about the problems of Soviet literature and its intrinsic “didactic” tone, the imprint of the Soviet bureaucratic way of thinking, чиновничье мышление. The only antidote to that was a scientific approach to language that maintained its reflection of life. “Clarity, clarity, and clarity again is the demand of the editor in the name of the reader on the style and language of scientific language…” Left unsaid, of course, is that this bureaucratic language lacked a lot in the area of clarity. At the same time, Chukovskaia warned of the dangers of assuming too reductionist a stance when it came to grammar. “Editing an artistic text from the narrow position of elementary school grammar means to destroy it.”[iv]

What Chukovskaia tries to encourage is a critical stance that avoids selfish ideological reductionism and encourages sensitivity to the nature of language. The goal is to create a text that will transcend the limitations Socialist Realism placed on Soviet literary production, and which would make it possible to record the reality of life following the Stalinist regime. Thus, true art could emerge from any form of art – novels, poems, children’s literature – as long as the editor and the writer worked together as a dynamic duo and presented a language that clean and true and pure.

 

[i] Лидия Корнеевна Чуковская, «В лаборатории редактора.» Арханьгелск: АОА «ИПП» «Правда севера», 2005

[ii] Чуковская, 89

[iii] Чуковская, 89

[iv] Чуковская, 92.

WRITING ABOUT THE LIVING…

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So, close to the top of my things to do during my spring non-break is to write an article for the Mid-Atlantic Conference of Latin American Studies, MACLAS. I proposed a paper that will include Esmeralda Santiago’s work When I Was Puerto Rican, Cuando yo era puertorriqueña, and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent.

What was I thinking? I actually chose to write about someone who is living, who writes about events experienced by contemporary living people. Furthermore, I write about authors who have written other opinion pieces and books on topics related to those on which I want to focus. This is almost as stressful as writing about Vladimir Nabokov, who had an opinion about pretty much everything under the Sun, and left behind writings about his opinions about pretty much everything under the Sun. He is also the one who inspired me to write this paper. In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he talks about childhood memories and the effect of severe change on those memories.

“I would moreover submit that, in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known. Genius disappeared when everything had been stored, just as it does with those other, more specialized child prodigies – pretty, curly-headed youngsters waving batons or taming enormous pianos, who eventually turn into second-rate musicians with sad eyes and obscure ailments and something vaguely misshapen about their eunuchoid hindquarters. But even so, the individual mystery remains to tantalize the memoirist… [i]”

What Nabokov would attribute to the power of the Russian Revolution to displace a whole generation of young people – the ability to hoard up impressions – is actually reflected time and time again in the autobiographical narratives of émigrés.  I have been looking at autobiographies mostly from Slavic and Latino immigrants into the United States. They provide an interesting pint of contrast due to what I call the “permeability factor.” By permeability, I mean the ability of the person to hope for an opportunity to return, or at the minimum visit, their homeland. Most Slavic immigrants were denied this opportunity, due to the laws government immigration during the Soviet period – the result of the “cataclysmic” take over by the Soviets in 1917, which led to Nabokov’s exile, and their expansion throughout Eastern Europe, which led to the exile of many others. Once exiled, these immigrants into the United States had no hope to return to their homelands.

One particularly interesting memoir from the Soviet period is Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation.[ii] Eva Hoffman is a Polish born writer who immigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1959, at the age of fourteen. She later came to the United States to study in college in Houston, and she then continued graduate studies at Harvard University. She basically matches Nabokov in the area of demonstrable erudition, down to her studies in music in Cracow before she was forced to flee Poland. In her memoir, she contemplates the effects of the adjustment to her new language, English, on her view of the world around her.

“I am becoming a living avatar of structuralist wisdom; I cannot help knowing that words are just themselves. But it’s a terrible knowledge, without any of the consolations that wisdom usually brings. It does not mean that I’m free to play with words at my wont; anyways, words in their naked state are surely among the least satisfactory play objects. No, this radical disjoining between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colors, striations, nuances – its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection. [iii]”

It is the experience of “living avatar of structuralist wisdom” that all of these writers seem to share, whether Slavic or Latino. Particularly, when looking at Santiago’s memoir and Alvarez’s novel, what strikes one the most is their shared hyperawareness of the role of language in their performance as women in a new environment. Esmeralda Santiago ends up attending a high school for the performing arts, as if to publically display the challenges of communicating in her new world. And a common fear among all of these women is the concern with staying jamona, the pejorative term for an old maid. Fictionalized, autobiographical, or based on interviews, they all share the fear and challenge of mastering he rituals of adolescent womanhood, which implies mastering the female rituals of courtship.

Thus, I get to write about living writers, who write about living people and living topics. And at the same time try to say something original, clever and hopefully insightful about the challenges of facing the period of the quinceañera in a new land.

 


[i] Vladimir Nabokov. Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) 25.

[ii] Eva Hoffman. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. (New York: Penguin Books, 1989).

[iii] Hoffman, 107.

Election-Palooza

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So, I missed one week’s worth of blog entries due to election season in Washington DC – but not the type of election you may think about. Granted, the town is all abuzz with the Republican race for presidential candidate. Probably anybody outside of the politics addicted D. C. area thinks that twenty debates is more than excessive to choose a candidate.

However, that is not the elections cycle that has kept me busy. On the other side of the world, on March 4, 2012, there is an election for president that is probably much more significant from the historical point of view: the election for President of the Russian Federation. In a way, elections in Russia have come a long way since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990. Following the collapse of a sixteen country regime, an orderly transfer of power was arranged, and a more or less stable transfer of office has taken place since then.

What has proved much more interesting is the return of Vladimir Putin to the Presidency of the Russian Federation. This will be Putin’s third time occupying the office of President, following a short break as Prime Minister. He has run what has amounted to a non-campaign. Dmitrii Medvedev, the current President of the Russian Federation, could have run for another term as President, but decided – or was persuaded – to step aside for Putin to return to the office. Once Medvedev announced that he was not running, and Putin announced that he was running again, Putin’s return to office became a seemingly unavoidable fate.

First, let us recognize a few facts about Putin’s return to the Presidency. He is actually still popular enough that most experts in the field have had a hard time envisioning any other individual who could have run a campaign that would have seriously challenged Putin’s campaign. Putin did manage to orchestrate the stabilization of the Russian Federation following what had been some fairly stressful and economically unstable years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union.

However, the seeming unavoidability of Putin’s return to power befuddles people who do not follow Russian politics on a daily basis – people like me, and I am technically a professional in the field! Thus, the last two weeks have been spent catching up, since D. C. think tanks that deal with the Russian Federation have been having what amounts to a Russian Election-Palooza (think Lolapalooza, only for policy wonks!) The Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (http://www.wilsoncenter.org/program/kennan-institute) had Matthew Rojansky, Deputy Director, Russia and Eurasia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, spoke on the topic of “The Fate of the “Reset” During Political Open Seasons in Russia and the U.S.: Prospects for Change and Continuity,” an appropriately long wonky title for what turned out to be a very interesting talk. Mr. Rojansky talked about how under Putin, the Russian political system has evolved into a “vertical of power,” which sits above a carefully “managed democracy.” In the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace publication: “The Russian Protests and Putin’s Choices,”[1] Mr. Rojansky points how that in spite of the apparently increasingly visible opposition in Russia, a third of the population is behind Putin for the simple fact that he has brought stability to Russia and, in relative terms, assured prosperity. Furthermore, he gets the credit for shutting down the chaos of rampant criminality, separatism, and terrorist attacks in the 1990s.

At the same time, an increasingly vociferous part of the growing middle class are becoming frustrated by the growing corruption within the system, and their desire to have their civil rights respected. This is horribly oversimplifying the situation, but it is probably an accurate overgeneralization of the most visible part of those who are voicing objections to Putin’s reelection.

On the other side of the debate there are those who are frustrated with United States policy towards Russia. Speakers at the World Russian Forum 2012, at the Hart Senate Office building, on Monday, February 27, 2012, pointed out that the United States has not done much to encourage Russia’s warm regards. Among the most serious points of conflict are the expansion of NATO to what amounts to Russia’s doorstep, the United States policies towards Afghanistan and Pakistan, and last but not least, the continuing existence of the Jackson Vanik amendment, a small but significant legal artifact that came into existence during the Soviet period to provide the United States with a legal justification to try and exert pressure on the Soviet Union and its civil rights record. The amendment was originally drawn to deal with the issue of free emigration, and now it exists for reasons of trade. One of the latest hearings on the issue can be found in the United States House of Representatives record, http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/111/56198.pdf.

What has really proved perplexing from the American point of view is that, in spite of the fact that there have been some visible protests in some of Russia’s major cities, Putin’s reelection has come about as some sort of fait accompli. Most likely, he will be reelected by a wide margin.  He will do so without conducting a single debate. Instead of encountering the other opposition candidates in an open debate, Putin has chosen to explain his views in a series of six long essays. He published these essays in the principal news outlets in Russia, as well as in his web site, http://putin2012.ru/. It will be interesting to see what happens in the streets of Russia over the weekend.


[1] Matthew Rojansky, “The Russian Protests and Putin’s Choices.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Policy Outlook, December 22, 2011