RUSSIA :

РИССЯ : ЯССИР

(RUSSIA : AISSUR)

"In the years before the Revolution, Russians had a favourite story about their ambassador to Washington, 'a grand seigneur of the old school' called Yuriy Bakhmetev. Called to the Secretary of State's office, he was surprised when the American, having greeted him politely, lounged back in his chair and crossed his feet on his desk. Sitting on the other side of the desk, Bakhmetev followed suit. The Secretary of State removed one foot; Bakhmetev did the same. And after a slight pause, the American removed the other."

(Anna Reid, 2024, A Nasty Little War, John Murray, London, p. 13)

"In the first years after he arrived on the international scene, the tsar had stayed on the fringes a bit, with the classic attitudes of the Russian, whose papers are never fully in order and who has to submit to the detailed scrutiny of judges from more civilized parts. It's the age-old complex of the savage from the border-lands who has to atone for five centuries of rape and pillage, culminating in the apocalypse of real-world socialism."

(Guliano Da Empoli, 2023, The Wizard of the Kremlin, Pushkin Press, London, p. 205)

"The poet Sergei Yesenin, visiting Paris in 1922, wrote:

    'Even if we Russians are poor, even if we do have famine and cold and cannibalism, yet we also have a soul, which people here hire out to others as something unwanted. Even if we are Asiatics, even if we are foul-smelling and scratch our backsides in public, yet we do not stink as much as it stinks here. The only thing that can save the West is an invasion of barbarians such as ourselves. Russia should prepare itself for an invasion of Europe'."

(Martin Sixsmith, 2019, An Unquiet Heart, Simon & Schuster, London, p. 410)

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'They Weren't Expecting Him'

(L to R ― Navalny, Putin, Medvedev, Lavrov)

                                              

"While I was pondering which university to apply to, the phenomenon was personified in our town by a man in white socks. These were highly visible, because he stuck his feet out of the window of his Audi. I doubt whether sitting in a car with your feet hanging out the window is at all comfortable, but it was evidently important to him as a means of proclaiming his superiority. This individual's name was Emil, and he was our town's top bandit ...

It was an extraordinary phenomenon, especially for the army town where I lived. This was home to a whole division of armed men, whose job was to fight and kill, and yet the town's main authority was this Georgian in white socks ...

This hierarchy was something everyone ― school kids, students, adults ― knew and understood. How they knew was not clear, but it was obvious to everyone ..."

(Alexei Navalny, 2025, PATRIOT, Vintage Press, London, pp. 99-101)

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TWENTIETH-CENTURY 'SINISTER'

"'I don't see', he said, 'how it can serve the Party that her members have to grovel in the dust before all the world. I have signed everything you wanted me to sign. I have pleaded guilty to having pursued a false and objectively harmful policy. Isn't that enough for you?'

...

'Your task is simple. You have set it yourself: to gild the Right, to blacken the Wrong. The policy of the opposition is wrong. Your task is therefore to make the opposition contemptible; to make the masses understand that opposition is a crime and that the leaders of the opposition are criminals. That is the simple language which the masses understand. If you begin to talk of your complicated motives, you will only create confusion. Your task, Citizen Rubashov, is to avoid awakening sympathy and pity. Sympathy and pity are a danger to the country'."

(Arthur Koestler, 1940, Darkness at Noon, Jonathon Cape, London)

"Why, you may wonder, will a zek put up with ten years of backbreaking work in a camp?

Why not say no and dawdle through the day? The night's his own.

It can't be done though. The work gang was invented to take care of that. It isn't like a work gang outside, where Ivan Ivanovich and Pyotr Petrovich each gets a wage on his own. In the camps things are arranged so the zek is kept up to the mark not by his bosses but by the others in his gang. Either everybody gets a bonus or they all die together. Am I supposed to starve because a louse like you won't work? Come on, you rotten bastard, put your back into it!

...

More depends on the percentages than the work itself. A foreman with any brains concentrates more on the percentages than on the work itself. It's the percentage that feeds us. Make it look like the work's done, whether it is or not. If the rate for the job is low, wangle things so that it turns out higher. That's what a foreman needs a big brain for. And an understanding with the norm setters. The norm setters have their hands out too. 

Just think though ― who benefits from all this overfulfillment of norms? The camp does. The camp rakes in thousands extra from a building job and awards prizes to its lieutenants. To Volkovoy, say, for that whip of his. All you'll get is an extra two hundred grams of bread in the evening. But your life can depend on those two hundred grams. Two hundred gram portions built the Bolomor Canal."

(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Knopf, New York)

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'they wept over Holy Russia'

"'There was nothing to see,' a dreamily disoriented Scot wrote of a refuelling halt, 'except grass and flowers, and an occasional partridge, and nothing to hear except the slow escape of steam over the singing of the larks ... It was the biggest place I had ever seen."

( Farewell to the Don: The Russian Revolution in the Journals of Brigadier HNH Williamson )

'An Encounter with Russian Prisoners, Easter Front, July 1941'

Benno Zieser, German Wermacht.

"We suddenly saw a broad earth-brown crocodile slowly shuffling down the road towards us. From it came a subdued hum, like that from a beehive. Prisoners of war. Russians, six deep. We couldn't see the end of the column. As they drew near the terrible stench which met us made us quite sick; it was like the biting stench of the lion house and the filth odour of the monkey house at the same time.

But these were not animals, they were men. We made haste out of the way of the foul cloud which surrounded them, then what we saw transfixed us where we stood and we forgot our nausea. Were  these really human beings, these grey-brown figures, these shadows lurching toward us, stumbling and staggering, moving shapes at their last gasp, creatures which only some last flicker of the will to live enabled to obey the order to march?  All the misery in the world seemed to be concentrated here."

(John Lewis ed., 1995, The Twentieth Century, Book Company International, Sydney, pp. 308)

"For a millennium, Russia has been an autocracy with power concentrated in the hands of an all-powerful leader or leadership group. Strong centralised rule has held together a disparate, centripetal empire and preserved it from the predations of powerful foreign enemies ...

Unlike America, Russian lands were vulnerable, not shielded by protecting oceans, open on all sides to hostile forces: from the twelfth century fierce nomadic tribes in the southern steppes had been raiding Kievan Rus' to pillage, murder and kidnap. The wild dangerous steppe and the dark forces contained within it ['From their depths would come forth the Mongol hordes that ruled over much of European Russia for two hundred years'] became an enduring terror myth in the national psyche...

This conviction that Russia is vulnerable helps explain behaviour that can seem strange to the West ― the readiness to sacrifice the individual, the subjugation of personal interest to the good of the whole, the collectivist ethos that enshrines the state as the the supreme national priority. It's seen in the unflinching expenditure of Russian lives in battle, the aggressiveness of a military stance that flows from the certainty of national weakness, and the widespread acceptance that the state has the absolute right to murder its enemy's abroad."

(Martin Sixsmith, 2022, The War of Nerves, Wellcome Collection, London, pp. 2-4)

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Kremlin Corpus No. 1

1. French, Marquis de Custine, c. 1827

    "To him, the Kremlin was 'a prop of tyrants', a 'satanic monument', 'a habitation that would suit some of the personages of the Apocalypse'. 

     'Like the bones of certain gigantic animals', he concluded, 'the Kremlin proves to us the history of a world of which we might doubt until after seeing the remains'."

2. American, John Steinbeck, 1947

    "'We approached the long, heavily guarded causeway', Steinbeck wrote. 'There were soldiers at the entrance. Our names were taken, and our permission scrutinized, and then a bell rang and a military escort went with us through the gate'.

    It was like crossing from daylight into shadow; even their guide, a Russian hand-picked for the job, had never been inside the Kremlin in his life. The place felt barren, almost empty.

    'Just two hours in this royal palace so depressed us that we couldn't shake it all day', Steinbeck remarked. As they drowned the whole experience in whisky, the pair concluded that the Kremlin was 'the most gloomy place in the world'."

3. English, Catherine Merrifield, 2013

"In 1931, Stalin and the Secret Department of the Central Committee took over a suite of offices in the corner of the Senate building (now rechristened 'Kremlin Corpus No. 1'), close to the Nikolsky gates. Stalin's new sanctum, a pair of rooms, was austere, smoke-filled, and equipped with books, maps, a globe and portraits of Lenin and Kutuzov. To reach it (if you had the right papers) you climbed a short flight of carpetless steps from the courtyard and crossed a guard-filled anteroom. Beyond, along an impressive stretch of corridor ('like a museum', one witness recalled), there were several offices, the largest of which was a reception-room in which Stalin's private staff would be at work ... No-one entered Stalin's room without speaking to Alexander Proskrebyshev ('the head of the Central Committee's Secret Department and co-ordinator of everything from Stalin's diary of appointments to classified intelligence reports'), and no-one spoke to Proskrebyshev without a nod from Nikolai Vlasik, Stalin's chief bodyguard."

(Catherine Merrifield, 2013, Red Fortress, Picador, London, pp. 1, 334, 316)

     Osip Mandelstam was arrested for this poetic attack on Stalin, in 1934 and in 1938 (died):

'We live, not feeling the land beneath us

We speak, and ten steps away no one hears us 

But where there's even a whispered conversation

The Kremlin's mountaineer, murderer and peasant-slayer will be mentioned. 

His fat fingers, like grubs, are greasy

His words, like lead weights, are final

His boot rims shine

And all round him, a gaggle of spineless leaders,

Half-humans, serve as his toys

One whinnies, one purrs, one whines

Only he shouts and points

Throwing decrees like horseshoes

Hitting a groin, a head, an eye ― 

Every death sentence tastes sweet

For the broad-chested Ossete.'

   "The mania for arrests and executions spread down the Party hierarchy, and throughout society. It was pushed from the top by Stalin, who used it to eliminate his enemies, create a new class of loyal leaders, terrorise the Soviet population ― and fill his concentration camps. Starting in 1937, he signed orders which were sent to the regional NKVD bosses, listing quotas of people to be arrested (no cause was given) in particular regions. Some were to be sentenced to the 'first category' of punishment ― death ― and others to be given the 'second category' ― confinement in concentration camps for a term ranging from eight to ten years."

(Anne Applebaum, 2004, GULAG, Penguin Books, London, pp. 130-131, 105)

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SIBERIA (unfinished)

"The icefields are crossed forever by a man in chains ... Siberia: ... A bleak beauty, and an indelible fear ... It impends through the darkness as the ultimate, unearthly Abroad. The place from which you'll never return ... For this is Russia's Elsewhere. Long before Communism located the future in an urban paradise, Siberia was a rural wasteland into which were cast the bacilli infecting the state body: the criminal, the sectarian, the politically dissident ..."

(Colin Thubron, 1999, In Siberia, Chatto & Windus, London)

"From the beginning, Siberia was represented as both the frightening heart of darkness and a fabulous land of plenty ... This was a world that included everything that one could not or would not find a home, a world where one banished the despicable and cultivated the  forbidden, confined the contagious and protected the perfect ... As a place of total privation and darkness, Siberia became the dumping ground for prisoners and incompetent officials; as a source of furs ('soft gold') it became the land of opportunity for the state, for merchants, and for fugitive serfs."

(Diment & Slezkine ed., 1993, Between Heaven and Hell, Palgrave Macmillan, London)

 "... told from the European Russian perspective ... the Siberian character is shaped by the extreme climate and broad territory of Siberia itself ... the view of Siberia as a badly exploited colony ...

Since the 16th century Siberia has been tied to European Russia and defined geographically through a long series of towns and cities along Siberia's southern edge, between Tiumen' and Chita, linked first by the Siberian highway or trakt, and in the early 20th century connected more firmly through the Trans-Siberian Railway ...

An interesting point is made by the editor of the Tomsk newspaper, Tomski vestnik, Aleksandr Krasnoperov, that many Siberian cities are much more tied through transportation networks to Moscow than they are to one another ― as Krasnoperov puts it, it takes 4 hours to fly from Tiumen to Moscow by plane but 48 hours to travel by train between Tiumen and Irkutsk. One can fly from Tiumen to Irkutsk only through Moscow."

(Edith Clowes, 2013, 'Being a Sibiriak in Contemporary Siberia', Region, 12.1,47-67)