Anniversary of one failure

material: Gleb Pavlovsky
illustrations: LW

Political scientist, publicist and publisher Gleb Pavlovsky with a note about how he created the Russian Journal, a new Russia on the ruins of history, and, most importantly, why it all failed.

Memoir

The experience of RJ, like almost all political experiences of the last 25–30 years, is, of course, the experience of defeat. But since failure forms the most important intellectual subject today - a magnificent array of ambushes, dead ends and perversions, especially false conclusions - then why be ashamed? It exploded! Although you cannot say after the old diplomat “Blessed is he who visited...”, but the scale of the catastrophe of action and the catastrophe of intellectual is so great that sometimes it seems that one can be proud of it. We are again - and in this “we” there is nowhere to hide, it is as diverse for everyone, as unique as the common “we”, that sometimes you want to believe, as if by Turgenev’s behest, that such terrible defeats are granted to truly great peoples. However, the gift of defeat is an opportunity, not a gift, and the people may be frightened and not accept it.

“Russian Journal” was conceived as a result of the previous defeat, which also seemed colossal to us. But the difference is that several years of despair and pitiful attempts to swim had passed, and it seemed as if now we were tempted - both by the mind and by pain. For me, the change consisted primarily in the fact that by the mid-nineties I swore off being a publicist. Such a paradox: having decided to act “in the real world” and closing my favorite thin “20th Century and the World”, I unexpectedly came up with “Russian Journal” (at the beginning of 1995). This decision was not a continuation, but a challenge to resistance, an expansion, if you will.
If it weren’t for Marik Pechersky, I wouldn’t have decided to do this. My invaluable friend in a past life, whom I met at Gefter’s “on the flat”: under the sofa where I usually spent the night when visiting, I discovered a text written as if by me. Definitely by me, but definitely not by me who wrote this text. At the same time, I knew that no one in Moscow would or could write like that.
It turned out that not far from Gefter, with the same bird rights as a “young friend,” lived, like me, a certain Kharkov resident. By the mid-nineties, he had already left for San Francisco a long time ago. We briefly restored our old friendship, and then Gefter died. Mark said that Bill Gates intended to create an intellectual magazine on the Internet ( Slate magazine actually took place soon after). I was turned on by the idea of working ahead of the curve, and I immediately took up my own. The name of the project was also given by Mark: Russian Journal. Since the Russian Institute had emerged by this time through the efforts of Sergei Chernyshev, I found a funny rhyme in this.

These memories mean nothing today. After all, Mark, Gefter and I lived in a completely different Universe. In the universe of continuity of Russian history - fragmentary, of course, we knew this - devoid of academic integrity. But it was a continuum about the fate of which we were not very worried, we were in it. We knew that this continuum often breaks in a terrible way, but it breaks with the invasion of other turns, other melodies: a tunnel of tunnels, although we did not know the word “multiverse” then. I was born in this continuum, I went to school festivals and demonstrations in it, I quarreled with the state and sat down in it... and yet I did not know the split. The plot was the same, it continued. The incompatible names of Stolypin, Lenin, Pushkin, Zhelyabov, Pasternak - they were all synonymous. Synonyms for an ongoing plot, which even in your despondency you knew that no one and nothing could stop it. And now he's gone.
We lived in an expanding Russian Universe, leading to a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. Well, in fact, modern cosmophysics told us the same thing: in the beginning there was the Big Bang. When I first read the samizdat Doctor Zhivago in 1971, I often silently thanked fate for sparing me the need to be a literal contemporary of the Big Bang. But that was what was - both the Revolution and the War were in the past, and we only had to deal with the state that arose from both. But it was a worthy task, I was proud of it. Even with spasms of despondency and hopelessness, I knew that the plot can sometimes be lost from sight, but it is there, it cannot disappear. While enjoying the political style of Andrei Amalrik in “Will the USSR Exist Until 1984,” I experienced an experience similar to horror: of course, anything can happen, but it will happen within the great plot of Russian history. With me, but not with her. The thought that both of them, the Motherland and history, could disappear on the same day did not occur to me.
When what happened in 1991 happened, it took time to get used to the loss. I lived this time very closely with Gefter and I don’t know how I would have lived without him (I talked about this in “Experimental Homeland” and especially in “The Weak”). By the mid-nineties, the horror of dead history began to fade. I forbade myself from regretting the loss or even thinking about it. At the same time, the task of gathering survivors and building a Russian raft for everything that remained from the great era began to seem like a worthy goal - “not for me, not for me, but for Your Name.”

Even at the beginning of Perestroika, I began to guess that I was about to witness something inexplicable within the framework of the Russian history that I imagined. In itself, the betrayal of the liberals and the educated class was not a surprise; I was ready for it, I was warned by Mikhail Gefter. But the forms of this betrayal could not be captured by moralism alone. Already since the late 1970s, something strange has been emerging precisely in our way of dealing with historical experience, and this strangeness has come to the surface with the weakening and abolition of censorship. My first article in the still censored Soviet press was called “Freedom to Remember,” and it was already polemical. The dotted line led to my future “Belovezhsky Man”, a creature who instantly forgets his yesterday’s choice, and then wholeheartedly tramples on it. This person can literally become anyone, a liberal or an SS man. I understood that this was scary, but I was not afraid of it enough - it seemed that the ethical, intellectual, cultural impulse of Russian history was powerful enough to overcome any betrayal of itself. This was a mistake, of course.
In Russia, any novelty, being instantly forgotten, does not become the past - and therefore does not pass away. It returns again, but the form of its return does not bear traces of previous experience; the form is silent about the experience of emergence, and about the experience of success, and about failure. The former, without ever becoming the past, rises one day “innocent”, like the exhumed corpse of a murdered man. Hence the hysterical matrix of action - always uncertain, always prone to escalation.

The intellectual criminalization of modernity (Gefter called it the “Russian craving for self-accusation”) is based on the criminalization of Russians of the 20th century, starting with the Revolution of 1917. However, in most reflections you will notice a desire to avoid the very mention of the revolution - too clear evidence of an anomalous Russia. And, of course, it is customary to portray Soviet people as socially unhealthy . Homo soveticus is equated either to a “camp man” or to a “thieves’ man.” The Soviet man did not grow up in a normal family and did not go to a normal school. He knew nothing about the normal world and “normal values.” Soviet people work abnormally, eat abnormally, and practically do not live at all. It is not surprising that such a criminal individual transforms into a post-Soviet Alien, tormenting the noble minds of post-Soviet reformers and liberals.
Meanwhile, the style of public speech during the transition from the nineties to the zeros became laughing, taking everything not seriously. The names of things have turned into literary devices for abusing pathos: “the absurdity of the regime is obvious even to a child” or “the encroachments of globalism on the lands of the Motherland have been exposed.”
Russian publicity, Stalinistically, replaced the question of authorship with the question of the culprit . The question of authorship was replaced by the search for villains, which destroyed interest in historical experience. They even lost the benefit of criminal guilt , attributing it to someone else’s account. It was the contemporaries themselves who recognized themselves as failures, and not their critical descendants. Many of those in the Union and in the Russian Federation tried to process the Russian experience, abandoned their work and turned away from the experience, from its subject with disgust, all the more difficult it was for others to perceive what was discarded as their own, to continue heroic work with what was soiled. Self-condemnation alone is not enough for this - the thread of experience was interrupted by the lack of examination. The language has gone wild, accustomed to denying, scolding, and remaining silent.

This utopia of the mid-nineties probably deserves to be thought about and told. Of course, it was thought that Russia would still be great, but we don’t know when and how. And now the capacity is important for the Russian, the capacity is sufficient to compactly place the main components of the experience in it. Naturally, it must first be processed, revised, and then posted. We discussed this a lot with Sergei Chernyshev, and Simon Kordonsky laughed venomously at us. I have been motivated since childhood by the captivating story of two friends Boethius and Cassiodorus during the kingdom of the Lombards. The leader was the example of Cassiodorus, who managed to create a compact version of Roman culture - the trivium and quadrivivium and teach it. Cassiodorus's project copied the ancient classics with the help of dozens of semi-literate monastic scribes from the Scriptorium monastery.
The task of transforming the wretched Russian Federation, a miscarriage country found by chance among the flying wreckage of the USSR, completely captured my attention. But, in essence, it was more about creating a container, a state and political container for the resource debris of the Soviet ? What will be the content of this colossal parody of the Scriptorium of Cassiodorus? And who are these Latin monks, to whom do they pray? All this seemed simpler then. The monastery of Cassiodorus stood in the kingdom of Theodoric, while his friend Boethius, who tried to return imperial politics to Rome, paid with his life at the Lombard garrote. Strangely, it did not occur to me that my fascination with the invention of political forms inevitably turns them into the true content of the project. A virtual monastery-repository of the universal values of history does not arise spontaneously - and gradually the form of power replaced the question of its content.
RJ was initially conceived as a tool for creating content, debating about it, and freely playing with it. But the Foundation for Effective Politics absorbed me more and more, absorbed me completely. Building a rescue module for the Russian government was more exciting and seemed more urgent. By the end of the nineties, I stopped being interested in who exactly inhabited our module. Who do we save and what do we take them on board with? I made the last attempt to expand the capacity of the Russian Journal project in the form of a so-called paper version of the network Russian Journal - the magazine “Pushkin” (at first almost called “Idiot”) - and by incorporating the team of Sergei Kostyrko’s “Magazine Hall” into the “Russian Journal”. But 1999 completely captivated me, drawing me into Putin’s funnel for decades.
I shielded myself from responsibility in RJ for the tandem of Mark Pechersky and Elena Penskaya. This tandem turned out to be conflicting, but it gave birth to another project - the IF quarterly, an intellectual forum. His numbers are valuable to me for Mark's elegant and enlightened essays, but they too will remain to post-singularity archivists as a sign of the era between the first and second Big Bangs.

We were, we were, and we lost. Risk in Russia is ontological, gnostic: you don’t just fail, you fall into primordial evil. Gefter spoke about the Russian Atlantis model: The future Atlantis does not stand on the basis of the past. On the contrary, it is established by a self-appointed tribunal over history. Judges do not judge the past (whether understood correctly or incorrectly). They are judging an imaginary historical crime - the murder and sinking of the past Atlantis. Expert camps by progressive publicists, like Stalin’s, are filled with heroes of the Russian past. Russian history, as it is represented in the Russian landscape, is a death camp, a penitentiary surrounded by criminal favelas with fugitives from the endless courts of history.
Today the only thing worth writing in Russian is something that will land you in prison. But even more valuable, perhaps, is the sudden deafening silence.