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Svetlana Alexievich: The Truth in Many Voices
Timothy Snyder
The central attainment of Svetlana Alexievich, this year’s laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is the recovery of Soviet experience from myth; it has made her an acute critic of the nostalgic dictatorships in Belarus and Russia.
October 12, 2015
She is connected to Russia and Ukraine as well as Belarus and is a writer of all three nations; the passage from Soviet state to national state was experienced by them all, and her life has been divided among them. Her method is the close interrogation of the past through the collection of individual voices; patient in overcoming cliché, attentive to the unexpected, and restrained in the exposition, her writing reaches those far beyond her own experiences and preoccupations, far beyond her generation, and far beyond the lands of the former Soviet Union. Polish has a nice term for this approach, literatura faktu, “the literature of fact.” Her central attainment, the recovery of experience from myth, has made her an acute critic of the nostalgic dictatorships in Belarus and Russia.
To say that Alexievich was born in Soviet Ukraine in 1948 is already to indulge in the kind of simplification she has sought to expose from the beginning. Her home city, Stanislaviv, was in a region known as Galicia, which had been part of Poland from the fourteenth century, part of the Habsburg monarchy in the nineteenth, and part of the Second Polish Republic in the 1920s and 1930s. It fell under Soviet rule in 1939 when the Soviet Union invaded Poland following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and then under German power in 1941 when Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. Jews were the largest population in Stanislaviv before the war; almost every single one was murdered in the Holocaust. Many of the city’s Poles and Ukrainians were killed or deported by either the Germans or the Soviets during the war, and others were drafted into service in the Red Army and died in combat. The Stanislaviv where Alexievich spent the first few years of her life was thus a new Soviet city, both in its administration and its population...
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The sort of books the current president of Russia are rather different - with a piece written earlier this month:
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"Third empire". Putin’s special operation
Why does Putin behave in such an arrogant way? Why doesn’t he want peace and doesn’t want to let Ukraine go? Why do his propagandists provocatively threaten to attack European countries, and to start nuclear war with the US, during which they hope to turn America into "radioactive ash"?…
The answer can be found in one book, propaganda-utopia "Third empire". Diplomats, politicians, journalists who have had the opportunity to communicate with the master of the Kremlin, call it Putin’s handbook. If Putin wanted to hide his plans, it would not be noticed. If he took it just in order to read and escape from the monotony of everyday life, it would not lay on his desk for years. If it was not the official ideology of the Kremlin, it would not necessarily studied by the entire leadership of the RF
So, it is a conscious signal, at least, to intelligence services and analysts of Western countries. This instruction of international politics for the Russian autocrat is being implemented now. This is a challenge to the entire democratic world... For a start , let’s talk shortly about its content...
"Third empire". Putin’s special operation
Why does Putin behave in such an arrogant way? Why doesn’t he want peace and doesn’t want to let Ukraine go? Why do his propagandists provocatively threaten to attack European countries, and to start nuclear war with the US, during which they hope to turn America into "radioactive ash"?…
The answer can be found in one book, propaganda-utopia "Third empire". Diplomats, politicians, journalists who have had the opportunity to communicate with the master of the Kremlin, call it Putin’s handbook. If Putin wanted to hide his plans, it would not be noticed. If he took it just in order to read and escape from the monotony of everyday life, it would not lay on his desk for years. If it was not the official ideology of the Kremlin, it would not necessarily studied by the entire leadership of the RF
So, it is a conscious signal, at least, to intelligence services and analysts of Western countries. This instruction of international politics for the Russian autocrat is being implemented now. This is a challenge to the entire democratic world... For a start , let’s talk shortly about its content...
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But this was spotted many years before - as with this piece from 2014:
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#Ukraine Crisis* Putin does live in another reality: Leonid BershidskyThe Editor/TheEdge
March 04, 2014 08:19 am +08
(Mar 3): The New York Times reports, third-hand, that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, after talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone, worried that he was out of touch with reality, "in another world." To Russians and Ukrainians fearing a Kremlin-ordered military campaign, this sounded like evidence of something they have suspected since Putin asked the parliament for permission to send troops into Ukraine: That Putin is mad.
"Hypertoxic schizophrenia," political consultant Stanislav Belkovsky wrote in a post on Snob.ru, read by almost half a million people and re-posted almost 40,000 times on Facebook: "Putin actually decided he is a great man and can change the course of history."
"Hypertoxic schizophrenia," political consultant Stanislav Belkovsky wrote in a post on Snob.ru, read by almost half a million people and re-posted almost 40,000 times on Facebook: "Putin actually decided he is a great man and can change the course of history."
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Maria Snegovaya, a graduate student at Columbia University, provides a useful analysis of the sources of Putin's ideology, rooted in the writings of early 20th century messianic, nationalist philosophers Nikolai Berdyayev, Vladimir Solovyov and Ivan Ilyin. To them, Russia had a mission to spread and maintain the Orthodox Christian faith on territories it controlled, and the West was the eternal enemy of that mission, perpetually trying to break up the Russian world. Snegovaya also recalls the 2006 book "Third Empire: The Russia That Should Be," by Mikhail Yuriev, an entrepreneur and ideologue popular with Kremlin bureaucrats. In Yuriev's utopia, Russia gathers up the lands of the old Russian empire, grabbing, among other areas, eastern Ukraine after a standoff with NATO. Two years before Russia's small victorious war against Georgia, "Third Empire" described a Russian conquest of the disputed Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
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This piece was written earlier today:
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Putin Is Just Following the Manual
A utopian Russian novel predicted Putin’s war plan.
By Dina Khapaeva
MARCH 26, 2022, 7 AM ET
No one can read Vladimir Putin’s mind. But we can read the book that foretells the Russian leader’s imperialist foreign policy. Mikhail Yuriev’s 2006 utopian novel, The Third Empire: Russia as It Ought to Be, anticipates—with astonishing precision—Russia’s strategy of hybrid war and its recent military campaigns: the 2008 war with Georgia, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the incursion into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions the same year, and Russia’s current assault on Ukraine.
Yuriev’s book, like Putin’s war with Ukraine, is an expression of post-Soviet neo-medievalism, a far-right, anti-Western, and antidemocratic ideology that assigns “Russian Orthodox civilization” a dominant role over Europe and America. Yuriev, a businessman and former deputy speaker of the state Duma who died in 2019, was a member of the political council of the Eurasia Party, which envisions an essentially feudal social order overseen by a political class that rules through fear. Putin and Yuriev knew each other. The Third Empire is rumored to be popular and highly influential in the Russian leader’s circle; one Russian publication described it as “the Kremlin’s favorite book.”
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Yuriev’s novel is fiction, of course, but should still help the West calculate the risks of appeasing Putin’s aggression. Understanding Russia’s expansionist vision should play an important role in Western decisions regarding the war in Ukraine: Ukraine is not Putin’s only target.
A utopian Russian novel predicted Putin’s war plan.
By Dina Khapaeva
MARCH 26, 2022, 7 AM ET
No one can read Vladimir Putin’s mind. But we can read the book that foretells the Russian leader’s imperialist foreign policy. Mikhail Yuriev’s 2006 utopian novel, The Third Empire: Russia as It Ought to Be, anticipates—with astonishing precision—Russia’s strategy of hybrid war and its recent military campaigns: the 2008 war with Georgia, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the incursion into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions the same year, and Russia’s current assault on Ukraine.
Yuriev’s book, like Putin’s war with Ukraine, is an expression of post-Soviet neo-medievalism, a far-right, anti-Western, and antidemocratic ideology that assigns “Russian Orthodox civilization” a dominant role over Europe and America. Yuriev, a businessman and former deputy speaker of the state Duma who died in 2019, was a member of the political council of the Eurasia Party, which envisions an essentially feudal social order overseen by a political class that rules through fear. Putin and Yuriev knew each other. The Third Empire is rumored to be popular and highly influential in the Russian leader’s circle; one Russian publication described it as “the Kremlin’s favorite book.”
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Yuriev’s novel is fiction, of course, but should still help the West calculate the risks of appeasing Putin’s aggression. Understanding Russia’s expansionist vision should play an important role in Western decisions regarding the war in Ukraine: Ukraine is not Putin’s only target.
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