Love To Be Naked

[twohorses]

At the beach.

Mr. Pleshakov, again, walking around naked!

Another opinion: THE VIEW FROM MOSCOW

Revisiting an evil stereotype

By CONSTANTINE PLESHAKOV

MOSCOW -- Each country has a reputation. For France, it is wine and food; for Italy, wine, food and the pope; for Holland, canals; for Austria, skiing; for Russia vodka, snow and bears.

Stereotypes are in most cases correct, and that's why they are so widespread. Some nations have spent decades trying to persuade the rest of the world that they are different from their stereotypical images, but the world refuses to believe. The suggested revised editions of national identity almost invariably appear artificial and sometimes simply untrue.

Contrary to what academic snobs say, stereotypes rarely lie. The difference between them and reality is the difference between cartoons and feature films. True, in real life, or feature films for that matter, cats do not hit mice with hammers. Yet, as every cat owner can testify, the felines chase the rodents obsessively, almost like serial killers, and in this sense the hammer image from the cartoons is absolutely appropriate.

A nation complaining about its international reputation must have done a lot to deserve it. I am not aware of any exceptions to the rule.

Vodka, snow and bears aside, in the past 100 years Russia as a collective of individuals has been working really hard to damage its worldwide standing. The corrupt regime of the last czar was swept away by a homicidal orgy sometimes called the Russian Revolution. The latter grew into the worst sort of totalitarian regime, which slaughtered about 50 million of its own people and threatened to kill at least as many overseas during the Cold War. After the totalitarian monstrosity collapsed, its ruins quickly organized themselves into a state of thugs and robber barons, as clever but mean clusters of atoms would.

True, Russia is remembered not only for the cruelties and aggressions of its regimes, but also for a blooming culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with people like Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky and Nabokov serving as its permanent cultural envoys abroad.

Western scholarship has been aware of this Russian duality for years, and that is why the best books on Russia have traditionally concentrated on the two opposite poles: one of enlightenment and wisdom, such as the captivating "Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)" by Stacy Schiff; the other of darkness and folly, visited by the monumental "The Great Terror" by Robert Conquest.

Probably, purely accidentally, the two best books on Russia on the market right now deal with the darkness only, and both carry ominous key words in their titles: "Gulag" and "Khrushchev."

Gulag is one of the few words the Russian language has shared with the rest of the world, together with vodka, sputnik and babushka. Originally it stood for an abbreviation signifying the main directorate of labor camps, but now it epitomizes jail, forced labor and most painful death.

Very few people can spell Khrushchev correctly, but even younger folks still remember that he was the dude that banged his shoe in the United Nations and nearly cremated the whole world during the Cuban missile crisis. Both books came into the limelight recently as both were awarded the Pulitzer Prize on April 5 -- and quite deservedly.

It took William Taubman about 20 years to write "Khrushchev: The Man and His Era." As I understand it, the first draft perished under the avalanche of new archival evidence and oral history that became available with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We as readers should feel very grateful for the delay, as now we have a book belonging to the rarest genre of all: definitive biography.

There is hardly any significant episode in Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's life not covered in the book, and most are cross-examined through numerous, often conflicting, sources. Of course, people are free to interpret them, but interpretations are hardly as interesting and important as the story itself. By and large, now it is safe to proclaim the Khrushchev case closed -- perhaps, the most rewarding compliment one may pay to a historian.

Anne Applebaum, the author of "Gulag: A History," had a notable predecessor, namely Alexander Solzhenitsyn with his "Gulag Archipelago." In the 1970s, Solzhenitsyn's book was instrumental in shredding the lies and misperceptions about the Soviet system knitted by armchair Marxists on Western university campuses (each of whom had a mortgage and a savings account). But precisely because of its propagandist nature, it is more like a documentary novel than a balanced study.

Now we have the much needed comprehensive picture of the meanest slaughter machine in history, but this is not to say that Applebaum's account is beyond anger and judgment. In my view, one of the most powerful episodes in the book is when U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace visits the Gulag area in 1944 without realizing that he was visiting a prison. He was misguided not just by his cunning hosts but also by his own ivory tower illusions.

Books like that are also Russia's envoys, together with biographies of Tchaikovsky and explorations of Nijinsky's technique. Art is immortal, but it looks like evil is, too. Lost or forgotten beauty makes people poorer; forgotten or forgiven evil makes them cheaper.

A couple of years ago, one of my favorite gay bars in New York City underwent extensive and expensive renovation. When I revisited it, I confronted a wall full of TV screens, not unlike those you encounter in a sports bar. On that particular night, the clip played on all the screens simultaneously was a smart postmodern mixture: Each scene of grotesquely extreme gay sex was followed by authentic Khrushchev footage -- naked sweaty bodies alternating with Khrushchev promising the fall of the bourgeois world.

I kind of liked the brazen mockery; after all, Charlie Chaplin had done almost the same to Hitler in "The Great Dictator." Yet, a smirk is a fleeting weapon, and an expedition to the pole of darkness is better off when lead by a historian.

Constantine Pleshakov, a former member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is a freelance writer living in Moscow.

The Japan Times: April 18, 2004
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