Acerca del autor

Adele Barker is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona. She is the editor of Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev, also published by Duke University Press; co-editor of The History of Women’s Writing in Russia; and author of Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka.

Bruce Grant is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University. He is the author of The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus and In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas.

De la contraportada

""The Russia Reader" provides a wonderful overview of Russian life and culture across the centuries, from the emergence of Muscovy and Russian Orthodoxy to the present day. The editors have done a remarkable job in selecting a range of texts that offer a sweeping overview of the complexity and passion of Russian life, and their brief introductions helpfully situate the texts. Whether readers follow the fate of Russia chronologically or use the book as a kaleidoscope to explore different facets of Russian life and culture, they will find a treasure trove of beautiful, dramatic, and tragic readings for exploring Russian history and culture across the ages."--Peter Holquist, University of Pennsylvania

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THE RUSSIA READER

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................................xiGeneral Introduction........................................................................................................................1The Scythians, Aleksandr Blok...............................................................................................................13On Russian Distinctiveness and Universality, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.............................................................................16To Russia (March 1854), Aleksei Khomiakov...................................................................................................20Moscow and Petersburg: 1842, Aleksandr Herzen...............................................................................................22"Great Russians" and "Little Russians," Andreas Kappeler....................................................................................31Bathing the Russian Way, From Folklore to the Songs of Vladimir Vysotskii...................................................................40A Cosmopolitan Project, Susan Buck-Morss....................................................................................................47The Igor Tale, Anonymous....................................................................................................................61The Russian Primary Chronicle, Anonymous....................................................................................................66Slavic Byzantium, George P. Fedotov.........................................................................................................70Russia through Arabian Eyes, Ibn Fadlan.....................................................................................................75Rules for Russian Households, Att. Monk Sylvestr............................................................................................80My Early Life, Ivan IV......................................................................................................................85The Bronze Horseman, Aleksandr Pushkin......................................................................................................97Peter's Social Reforms, John Perry..........................................................................................................101Love and Conquest, The Correspondence of Catherine II and Grigory Potemkin..................................................................110The War of 1812, Leo N. Tolstoi.............................................................................................................115Description of the Clergy in Rural Russia, I. S. Belliustin.................................................................................120Emancipating the Serfs, Petr Kropotkin......................................................................................................125Classic Russian Cooking, Joyce Toomre and Elena Molokhovets.................................................................................128The Challenged Gentry, Elizaveta Vodovozova.................................................................................................134Dear Nicky, Dear Sunny, The Correspondence of Nicholas II and Empress Aleksandra............................................................140Russia's Conquest of Siberia, Basil Dmytryshyn, E. A. P. Crownhart-Vaughan, and Thomas Vaughan, editors and translators.....................151Sibiriaks, Marie Czaplicka..................................................................................................................158Exile by Administrative Process, George Kennan..............................................................................................162Science Everywhere, Ol'ga Marchuk...........................................................................................................168The Big Problems of Little Peoples, Aleksandr Pika and Boris Prokhorov......................................................................174At the Source, Vladimir Sangi...............................................................................................................186The Dacha, Faddei Bulgarin..................................................................................................................201Work Done "Out of Respect," Aleksandr Engelgardt............................................................................................207The Mushroom Hunt, Sofya Kovalevskaya.......................................................................................................213Progress and Prosperity, Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace.......................................................................................218Svetloyar: In a Wild and Holy Place, Vladimir Korolenko.....................................................................................222Searching for Icons, Vladimir Soloukhin.....................................................................................................237The Village of Posady, Lev Timofeev.........................................................................................................243The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, John F. Baddeley......................................................................................257Mtsyri, Mikhail Lermontov...................................................................................................................263Sandro of Chegem, Fazil Iskander............................................................................................................270Chechnya-A Brief Explanation, Georgi Derluguian.............................................................................................281Evening Prayers, Idris Bazorkin.............................................................................................................293The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.....................................................................................305The Background of Revolution, Edward Hallett Carr...........................................................................................310Revolution and the Front, Viktor Shklovsky..................................................................................................319Letters from the Front, Ol'ga Chaadaeva, comp...............................................................................................326The Withering Away of the State, Vladimir Lenin [V. I. Ulianov].............................................................................331Voices of Revolution, 1917, Mark Steinberg, editor..........................................................................................336Gedali, Isaac Babel.........................................................................................................................339Two Years among the Peasants in Tambov Province, A. Okninsky................................................................................343Make Way for Winged Eros, Aleksandra Kollontai..............................................................................................351The Bathhouse, Mikhail Zoshchenko...........................................................................................................362We: Variant of a Manifesto, Dziga Vertov....................................................................................................365The Travels of My Brother Aleksei to the Land of Peasant Utopia, Aleksandr Chaianov.........................................................370Learning to Labor, Anastasiia Bushueva......................................................................................................378Stalin's Forgotten Zion, Robert Weinberg....................................................................................................388Lenin's "Last Testament," Vladimir Lenin....................................................................................................401The Body and the Shrine, Nina Tumarkin......................................................................................................405Soviet Literature: The Richest in Ideas, Andrei Zhdanov.....................................................................................413Swell the Harvest, Shock Brigade of Composers and Poets.....................................................................................417Dizzy with Success, Joseph Stalin...........................................................................................................419The War against the Peasantry, 1929-30, Lynne Viola et al., editors.........................................................................422Collectivization 1931, Ivan T. Tvardovskii..................................................................................................426Anna's Story, James Riordan, editor and translator..........................................................................................431The Proletariat's Underground Paradise, Irina Kokkinaki.....................................................................................436Bukharin 1936, J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, editors....................................................................................447Mass Attack on the Watershed, Maxim Gorky et al.............................................................................................453Requiem, Anna Akhmatova.....................................................................................................................456Memories and Biographies of the Leningrad Terror, Leningrad Martyrology.....................................................................465Revelations from the Russian Archives, Diane P. Koenker and Ronald D. Bachman, editors......................................................471Labor Camp Socialism, Galina Ivanova........................................................................................................475Spies and Murderers in the Guise of Physicians and Scientists, V. Minayev...................................................................483June 1941: The Enemy Will Be Destroyed, Leningrad Pravda editorial..........................................................................493Magnificent Stubbornness, Vasilii Grossman..................................................................................................497Wait for Me, Konstantin Simonov.............................................................................................................508Smolensk Roads, Konstantin Simonov..........................................................................................................510The Blockade Diary of A. I. Vinokurov.......................................................................................................513The Diary of a Red Army Soldier, S. F. Putiakov.............................................................................................518Tragic Numbers: The Lives Taken by the War, Ol'ga Verbitskaia...............................................................................520The Paradox of Nostalgia for the Front, Viacheslav Kondrat'ev...............................................................................523March 5th, 1953, Yevgeny Yevtushenko........................................................................................................537The Secret Speech, Nikita Khrushchev........................................................................................................540The Defense of a Prison-Camp Official, Anna Zakharova.......................................................................................545Who Lives Better? Giuseppe Bova.............................................................................................................551When Did You Open Your Eyes? Boris I. Shragin...............................................................................................559The Last Trolley, Bulat Okudzhava...........................................................................................................567Russian Harbin, E. P. Taskina...............................................................................................................573China, Aleksandr Vertinskii.................................................................................................................586From Harbin, Home, Natal'ia Il'ina..........................................................................................................588On the Banks of the Seine, Irina Odoevtseva.................................................................................................593108th Street, Sergei Dovlatov...............................................................................................................599Communal Living in Russia: Stories and Thoughts, Ilya Utekhin, Alice Nakhimovsky, Slava Paperno, and Nancy Ries.............................615Trial of a Young Poet: The Case of Joseph Brodsky...........................................................................................621The Most Well-Read Country in the World, S. S. Vishnevskii, editor..........................................................................627International Relations at the Lenin Library, Galina Koltypina..............................................................................633Moscow Circles, Benedict Erofeev............................................................................................................639The Soviet Middle Class, Maya Turovskaya....................................................................................................650Anecdotes of the Times......................................................................................................................658Partisans of the Full Moon, Akvarium........................................................................................................661The Most Responsible Phase of Perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev................................................................................667Causes of the Collapse of the USSR, Alexander Dallin........................................................................................673Our Fairy-Tale Life, Nancy Ries.............................................................................................................684Getting By, Valerii Pisigin.................................................................................................................692Burying the Bones, Orlando Figes............................................................................................................701Pyramids and Prophets, Eliot Borenstein.....................................................................................................706My Precious Capital, Mikhail Ryklin.........................................................................................................714Fade to Red? Masha Lipman...................................................................................................................721Casual, Oksana Robski.......................................................................................................................729Anecdotes about New Russians................................................................................................................734Return to the Motherland, Irina Sandomirskaia...............................................................................................735Suggestions for Further Reading.............................................................................................................743Acknowledgment of Copyrights and Sources....................................................................................................753Index.......................................................................................................................................765

Chapter One

Who are Russians and where did they come from? As long ago as two millennia, Slavic peoples were said to occupy the northeastern realms of the Eurasian continent, competing with Finnic and Lithuanian northerners for preeminence in vast lands. More popularly, ancestors of modern Russians, often called "the eastern Slavic tribes," are thought to have come from what is now present-day Poland between the seventh century and the ninth. Rus' is the name most often given to the people who gained political ascendancy in Kyiv at this time, with the year 988 marking the founding of the Russian Orthodox branch of Christianity.

Whether Polish or Ukrainian in its origins, a collective of roaming tribes, or a seemingly absolutist state, Russian space has long been multicultural, multi-confessional, and regularly contested. At its height the Russian Empire covered one-sixth of the world's land mass. While Russians' well-known nineteenth-century efforts to stabilize control through intensive Russification of their non-Russian subjects gained them a reputation for harshness, the pluralism of the mammoth political enterprise was never far from view. In the census of 1897, the tsar officially recognized 104 "nationalities," 146 officially active languages, and dozens more of each waiting in the wings for their moment of recognition. Yet in an age of modernity, with the rise of empires and the forging of the nation-states that would succeed them, the notion of countries as persons unto themselves, with their own natural environments, landscapes, personalities, possessions and, not least, souls, came to Russia as it did to all corners of the globe. This is the Russia of imperial majesty and onion domes, Siberian snowscapes and fearsome forests, fearless leaders and iron rule.

The essays in this section furnish illustrations of these famous Russian icons and archetypes, as much as they aim to partially undo them. What exactly does it mean to be Russian, asks Aleksandr Blok in his poem "The Scythians," which opens our volume. Does Russia more properly belong to Europe or to Asia, and what does it mean, Blok asks, to be part of an Asiatic mentalit? If Blok located Russia's sense of self among the tribes that once spread across the southern steppe, the nineteenth-century philosopher Aleksei Khomiakov champions the cause of the inward-looking Slavophiles who saw a distinctive Russian character free of foreign influence in response to the more expansive Westernizers who, since at least the time of Peter the Great, have argued for particular brands of liberal reform. Regardless of what side one took in the debate, the question remains whether any political body, not least one as extensive as that of the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Russian Empire, could meaningfully forge such a coherent collective at all.

In the twentieth-century world of nation-states, the notion of nation-as-person was everywhere read back into Russian history and society. The very idea of the nation (in Russian, natsiia) comes from the Latin root natio, "to be born," as does the Russian term for "people" (narod). One hears in the mysterious Russian soul, in the zagadochnaia russkaia dusha, one of many metaphysical shelters wherein Soviet citizens sought safety as a response to a state that had ambitiously promised a world of rationality for all.

Popular writers, both Russian and foreign, have spared little ink in suggesting Russia's strangenesses. The Marquis de Custine, journeying to Russia from France in the nineteenth century, is perhaps among the most famous in this line of gentlemen travelers. During the cold war even the more apolitical scholars managed to frame culture as an explanation for history. In the 1950s the psychologist Geoffrey Gorer and the anthropologist Margaret Mead advanced "the swaddling hypothesis," suggesting that places like Russia, where infants were tightly bound in blankets to prevent them from injuring themselves, created a host of primal frustrations, making their citizens prone to irrational outbursts later in life.

More favorably, essays such as Susan Buck-Morss's take us a long way from a cold war of primal outbursts and mysterious unknowns. What if, she asks, the Soviet Union was never as closed to the flows of shared European political ideals or global capital as most area specialists suggest? To what extent have the binary categories of East and West obscured more than they have revealed? The disarming proposition is that, far from engineering a world of two solitudes, the United States and the USSR spent much of the twentieth century actively imitating each other.

Aside from questions of character that encased Russia in a cloak of mystery or of cold war rhetoric, or a little of both, resides the more fundamental question of geography. Andreas Kappeler takes as his point of departure the fact that the first Russian state was located in what is today Ukraine. His is part of the much larger debate over whether Russia properly belongs to Europe or to "the slave soul" of a more absolutist Asia.

Whatever history may over us by way of clarifications and corrections, Russian society has no doubt long invested in a series of icons and archetypes that have provided meaningful coherence to millions. Debates over what these archetypes mean arise in organized politics and in clouds of steam, with vodka, birch branches, and the company of fellow travelers.

The Scythians (1918) Aleksandr Blok

On 29 January 1918, frustrated with the slow pace of the Brest peace negotiations intended to keep the new Soviet Russia out of World War I, Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921), one of Russia's most gifted lyrical poets, wrote "The Scythians" ("Skify"). The poem is a mix of history, destiny, promise, and threat, a challenge made to Europe to settle scores or face the consequences from a Russia rising from the ashes of revolution.

For all his creative gifts, Blok was never fully embraced by the worlds he lived in. He was born into an aristocratic family who felt betrayed by his revolutionary sympathies (the poem opens with an epigraph from his uncle, the famous Slavophile Vladimir Solov'ev), and the nascent Bolshevik literary establishment was suspicious of his religious and mystical leanings. The poem is a deft commentary on Russia's famously divided soul. If there is an Asiatic bent to the Russian character, Blok implies, this might be a character best not tangled with. Two centuries of Mongol domination (1237-1480), he suggests, taught Russians a thing or two. But the true song in Russia's "barbarian lyre" comes from what Blok held to be its pre-Slavic, "proto-Indo-European" Scythian legacy, referring to the nomadic pastoralist peoples whose reach embraced vast swaths of contemporary southern Russia and Ukraine during Classical Antiquity (600 BCE-300 CE), an influence attested to in elaborate archaeological finds. The Scythians, Blok reminds us, were a dynamic, multiethnic force, a world of the future, rather than peoples of a fallen past. Europe would do well to heed their call.

Panmongolism! The name, though savage, yet rings caressful in my ear. -Vladimir Solov'ev

Mere millions-you. We-teem, and teem, and teem. You want to fight? Come on, then-try it! We're-Scythians-yes! With Asiatic mien We watch you, gloating, through our slit-squint eyelids. For you-long years. For us-alone one hour. We, like brute serfs, in blind obedience, Have held our shield between two warring powers- The Mongols and the Europeans!

For years, long years, your ancient furnace forged And dulled the avalanches' rumble, And what a wanton tale of woe was yours When Lisbon and Messina crumbled!

A thousand years you've watched this East of ours, Amassed and melted down our jewels, Contemptuously, have counted but the hour When you could train your guns on to us!

That hour has struck. Misfortune beats her wings, You multiply your insults daily. The day will come when nothing more remains, Not one trace, of your Paestums, maybe!

Old world! Before you fall in ruins-think, While yet you writhe in sweetest torture, How Oedipus, before the ageless Sphinx's Enigma, once, was moved to caution!

So, Russia-Sphinx-triumphant, sorrowed, too- With black blood flows, in fearful wildness, Her eyes glare deep, glare deep, glare deep at you, With hatred and-with loving-kindness!

Yes, so to love, as lies within our blood, Not one of you has loved in ages! You have forgotten that there is such love That burns and, burning, lays in ashes!

We love them all-cold numbers' heartless heat, The gift of heavenly visions in us, We understand them all-keen Gallic wit And gloomy-weighed Germanic genius.

Remember all-the streets of Paris' hell, The gentle coolnesses of Venice, The lemon groves-their distant, perfumed smell- And, smoke-enswathed, Cologne's immenseness ...

We love the flesh-its taste, its pinkish tone, The scent of flesh, too-choking, deathsome ... Are we to blame, then, if we crunch your bones When our unwieldy paws caress them?

It's nothing new for us to seize the rein, To curb our prancing, fiery chargers, To bend their stubborn will, to break them in, And let them know that we're the masters ...

Come on, then, come!-into the arms of peace. Have done with war and all its horrors. Before it's all too late-now, comrades, sheathe Your age-old sword, and we'll be-brothers!

And if not-well, we've nothing left to lose, We, too, can be perfidious traitors. For years, long years, you'll stand-accursed, accused Of crippled coming generations.

We'll blaze a trail-we'll beat a broad-flung track Through the dense woods that fringe, behind you, The gentle brow of Europe. We'll be back- Our Asiatic mugs will find you.

Come on, then-on, unto the Urals. We'll Prepare meanwhile the field of battle Where cold machines of calculated steel Shall meet the savage Mongol rabble.

But as for us-we'll no more be your shield; Ourselves no longer sword unsheathing, Through narrow eyes we'll scan the battlefield And watch the mortal combat seething.

We shall not turn aside when raging Huns Go delving into dead men's pockets, Turn churches into stables, burn the towns, And roast their white-flesh comrades' bodies ... For the last time-Old world, come to! The feast Of peace-fraternal toil awaits you. For the last time-the fair, fraternal feast. And our barbarian lyre invites you.

On Russian Distinctiveness and Universality (1880) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Throughout the nineteenth century one of the most famous debates in Russian society was held between self-proclaimed Slavophiles and Westernizers. Though a wide variety of thinkers marched under the Slavophile banner, they shared a concern that Peter the Great's founding of St. Petersburg and the relocation of the imperial capital from Moscow to create "a window on Europe" had created a moral vacuum in Russian life typified by imitations of Western European custom. Philosophers from Petr Chaadaev onward thus called for a return to pre-Petrine values, stressing Russian communalism and religious orthodoxy. By the late nineteenth century more radical thinkers such as Nikolai Danilevskii used the premises of Slavophilia to call for the creation of pan-Slavist nationalist movements. In his famous "Pushkin Speech," extracted at the outset of the text here and first given at the unveiling of a Pushkin monument in Moscow on 8 June 1880, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81) offers an encomium to the Russian poet that is artful in its political navigation. Setting aside decades of debate, Dostoyevsky insists that the longstanding disagreements between Slavophiles and Westernizers over Russia's future was simply "a big misunderstanding." In Dostoyevsky's rendering, his countrymen had "admitted the genius of other nations" into their souls. At the same time, this melting pot of East and West created something entirely new, whereby Russia, by "becoming a brother to all human beings," was embodying a universal human standard. Russian distinctiveness, Dostoyevsky insisted, could be found in this very ecumenism.

That he used Pushkin as the platform for his speech points to the reverence in which Pushkin has been held from the nineteenth century up to the present. Heralded as Russia's first national poet, he was the first to incorporate the living, spoken Russian language into his art, thus creating an artistic legacy thoroughly Russian, independent of foreign influences. In the characters Pushkin created, Dostoyevsky sees both the kernel and the apotheosis of true Russian types. In Tatiana from Eugene Onegin he finds the image of spiritual and moral nobility reflective of the Russian people as a whole. While Pushkin has often been used throughout Russian and Soviet history for political ends, the character of Tatiana has remained for Russians the image of what is good and morally sound about the Russian character, the personification of its highest ideals.

(From a speech on Pushkin published in the August 1880 issue of Writer's Diary, a journal that Dostoyevsky single-handedly wrote and edited.)

I shall state it emphatically: there has never been a poet with such a universal responsiveness as Pushkin. The point is not just in his responsiveness, but in its amazing depth, and in the reincarnation of his spirit in the spirit of foreign nations, in an almost perfect, and therefore also miraculous, reincarnation, because no such phenomenon has taken place anywhere else in any other poet. This can be found only in Pushkin, and in this sense, I repeat, he is an unheard-of phenomenon and, in our opinion, even a prophetic one, for it was precisely here that his national Russian force expressed itself the most: precisely in the national quality of his poetry, the national quality in furthest development, that of our future, which exists at present in concealment, and it expressed itself prophetically. For what is the strength of the spirit of Russian nationality if not Russia's striving toward its ultimate goals of worldwide and international universality? When Pushkin became a national poet, as he came in close contact with the people's strength, he acquired a presentiment of the great future mission of that force. Here he is prescient, here he is a prophet. (1880)

In fact what has Peter's reform meant to us, not only for the future, but also for what has already taken place, what has happened, what has appeared before our eyes? What did that reform signify to us? For us it was not merely the adoption of European costumes, customs, inventions, and European science. Let us penetrate into the essence of what took place, let us look closely. Yes, it is very possible that Peter originally began to carry it out only in the narrowest utilitarian sense, but subsequently, when he developed his idea to its furthest limit, he doubtlessly yielded to some secret intuition, which pulled him, in this matter, toward future goals that were indubitably far greater than narrow utilitarianism.

In exactly the same way the Russian people also did not accept the reform merely out of utilitarianism, but rather they already sensed with their foresight, almost immediately, some kind of very remote, incomparably higher goal than mere narrow utilitarianism.

(Continues...)

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