Keith Gessen
Infobox Writer
name = Keith Gessen
imagesize=150px
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birthdate = 1975
birthplace = Moscow , U.S.S.R. flagicon|USSR
deathdate=
deathplace=
occupation = Editor , Writer
nationality = American flagicon|US
spouse =
children =
website =
Keith Gessen(born Kostya Gessen, Moscow , U.S.S.R. , 1975) [ http://www.bu.edu/agni/fiction/print/2004/59-gessen.html] is the editor-in-chief of " n+1 ", a twice-yearly magazine of literature, politics, and culture based in New York City .
Born Kostya Gessen ] [Joanna Smith Rakoff, "Talking with Masha Gessen", Newsday , 2 January 2005] he, his parents, and sisters moved to the United States in 1981 "to escape state-enforced anti-Semitism" [ ] [http://www.arlindo-correia.com/140505.html] and settled in the Boston area, living in Brighton, Brookline , and Newton, Massachusetts .
He graduated from Harvard College , where his major was Russia in America Fact|date=August 2008 . Gessen completed the course work for his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University in 2004 but did not receive a degree, having failed to submit "a final original work of fiction". [ ]
Gessen has written about Russia for The Atlantic and the New York Review of Books . [ cite web
last = Wickett
first = Dan
title = Interview with Keith Gessen
publisher = Emerging Writers" Forum
date=2005-03-06
url=http://www.breaktech.net/EmergingWritersForum/View_Interview.aspx?id=143
accessdate=2007-06-27] In 2005, Dalkey Archive Press published Gessen"s translation of Svetlana Alexievich's "Tchernobylskaia Molitva" (Voices from Chernobyl), an oral history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Gessen has also written about books for magazines including "Dissent" , "Slate" , and "New York" , where he was the regular book critic.
His first novel, "All the Sad Young Literary Men", was published in April .
In an August 2008 interview, Gessen revealed that he is moving back to Russia for a year, returning in June 2009, while his sister attends graduate school in the United States. [ http://youngmanhattanite.com/2008/08/ym-keith-gessen-q.html]
Family and personal life
His mother was a literary critic [ http://www.bigthink.com/media-the-press/10477] , and his father was a computer scientist. [ Gabriel Sanders, "Faces Forward: Author Tells Tale of Her Grandmothers" Survival", Forward , 10 December 2004] . His sister, Masha Gessen (born 1967), is the author of "Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler"s War and Stalin"s Peace" (a.k.a. "Two Babushkas"). [ http://www.bloomsbury.com/Authors/details.aspx?tpid=1589] His maternal grandmother, Ruzya Solodovnik, was a Soviet government censor of dispatches filed by foreign reporters such as Harrison Salisbury ; his paternal grandmother, Ester Goldberg Gessen, was a translator for a foreign literary magazine. [ http://www.arlindo-correia.com/140505.html]
Gessen is divorced. [ http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_269/loveandother.html] [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/fashion/27gessen.html] He lives in Prospect Heights , Brooklyn , with two roommates. [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/fashion/27gessen.html]
References
external links
* [ http://www.nyinquirer.com/nyinquirer/2006/11/an_interview_wi.html "New York Inquirer"] - 2006 interview with Keith Gessen about "n+1"
* [ http://youngmanhattanite.com/2008/08/ym-keith-gessen-q.html "Young Manhattanite"] - 2008 interview with Keith Gessen
* [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/fashion/27gessen.html "New York Times"] - Profile of Gessen, 27 April 2008
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Keith Gessen, a Russian-speaking American and editor of the popular literary and political magazine "n + 1", can be safely called the favorite of the current literary season.
Recently, Keith (Konstantin) Gessen met with representatives of the American media in Russian in the conference hall of the PR agency VIA3PR. The guests were met by Irina Shmeleva, the president of the agency. The meeting was coordinated by Mikhail Gutkin, a well-known columnist for the Voice of America radio station. He asked Keith the first question, “Who is the main reader of n+1 magazine?
A rare literary magazine comes out with such a circulation as "n + 1". It's rare that it sells. Seven and a half thousand copies is too much not only for America, but also for Russia. The design of the magazine from the first to the last page is impeccable, magnificent illustrations, inserts, compositions. The magazine is published in English, and Keith himself writes mostly in English, and not only for his magazine and for the press in general. Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men came out last year and was a huge success.
I actually think that books, more than anything else, can really change the way you think, says Kate. - And our main reader is the American intellectual elite...
The phenomenon of Hesse's Bones is a highly remarkable and conspicuous phenomenon. He is a writer on Russia for The New Yorker, The Atlantic and the New York Review. He interviewed the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov. He translated Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. Pictures about Russia, created by his hand, are understandable and look true to Americans. In addition, during a recession, when many newspapers have abandoned their own correspondents, the words of an eyewitness become even more significant.
What made an ordinary American teenager turn his face to Russia? - Mikhail Gutkin continues to ask Keith.
I did not want to sit at home with my parents, read Russian books, drink tea. But much later, when I visited Russia, I realized how rich and interesting life there is. The book I wrote is not a novel about the life of Russian émigrés, it is about how hard life treats a man full of ideas when faced with a sobering American reality.
Kostya came to America with his parents at the age of 6. He was educated at Harvard. Specializations - Russia and America. He does not just talk about Russia, he is interested in its politics. According to Gessen, American society does not need quick answers, it is tired of entertainment and children's games, it craves calm, serious reading.
In 1995, Russia was trying to become America, says Kate. - When I arrived there ten years later, it turned out that Russia had gone its own way. Nevertheless, it is possible and necessary to talk about the mutual influence of the two countries. Relations between Russia and America are now balanced. But if Russia becomes more aggressive, then America will become more aggressive...
Journalists asked Keith a variety of questions. What kind of Russian writers does the average American read (and does) - Nabokov, Bulgakov, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov? What does America look like in the Russian media? - Whose education - Americans or Russians - is better?
Keith willingly (and witty) answered questions, and in conclusion he told reporters the amazing news: “Everyone good people now the Marxists. In Moscow, this is the Forward movement, and in St. Petersburg, the Chto Delat group. Very interesting guys...
If the mutual influence of Russia and America is really great, and if in Russia now, as a century ago, Marxists set the tone among the intelligentsia, then can we say that Marxism is popular among American intellectuals as well? That is, can it be argued that the American intellectual elite (including the readership of the n + 1 magazine) is stuck in a Russian ideological impasse?
Konstantin admits that there is some link between young American and Russian intellectuals.
Perhaps it is not so important what this or that movement is called, but what young people in America and in Russia will become seriously interested in and actively involved in politics? And this will sooner or later lead them from Marxism to another ideology - less revolutionary and less discredited? Because all of us - both Russians and "Russians" in America - have already gone through Marxism.
Elena Gorsheneva
Keith Gessen. The Guardian, UK. Assassin, kleptocrat, genius, spy: numerous myths about Vladimir Putin.
President Putin.
Russia's involvement in Trump's election sparked a boom in Putinology. But all these theories tell more about ourselves than about Putin.
As you can see, Vladimir Putin is everywhere. He sends soldiers to Ukraine and Syria, his troublemakers operate in the Baltics and Finland, he had a hand in elections literally everywhere, from the Czech Republic and France to the United States. And he's in the media. Not a day goes by without some big new article like "Putin's Revenge", "The Secret Source of Putin's Anger" or "10 Reasons Why Vladimir Putin Is a Terrible Person".
This omnipresence of Putin has recently elevated putinology to the peak of popularity. This intellectual branch, engaged in the production of comments and analytical materials about Putin, about the motives of his actions and deeds on the basis of invariably biased, incomplete, and sometimes outright false information, has existed for more than 10 years. She shifted into overdrive in 2014 after the Russian invasion of Crimea. But in recent months, as allegations of Russian interference in the election of President Donald Trump have taken center stage, Putinology has outdone itself. Never before have such a huge number of people with very little knowledge expressed such great indignation at the topic of Russia and its president. It can be said that reports of Trump's sexual pleasures in a Moscow hotel room gave rise to the golden age of Putinology.
And what does this very Putinology tell us? It turns out that she put forward seven clear hypotheses about Putin. None of them is completely wrong, but at the same time none is completely correct (except for theory #7). Taken together, they say much more about us than about Putin. They paint a portrait of intellectuals (our own portrait) on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But let's look at them in order.
Theory #1: Putin is a genius
Everything is simple here. While the world is playing checkers, Putin is playing chess. He took Crimea from the Ukrainians practically without firing a shot. He returned Yalta, where Russian tsars and Chekhov loved to relax. And they punished him for this with just some minor sanctions. He launched an intervention in Syria on the side of the Assad regime after the United States, Turkey and the Saudis supported the rebels for several years, and turned the tide of the war in no time. He played a significant role in weakening the unity of the EU; it funds right-wing Eurosceptics (and, if appropriate, left-wing Eurosceptics); he clearly set his sights on the collapse of the post-war international order, deciding to replace it with a bilateral relationship based on mutual interests, in which Russia should mainly act as a senior partner.
And finally, he interfered in the American elections, elections for the most powerful office in the world, and managed to get his man into the White House. And what are the consequences? Several diplomats were expelled from the United States. This is a negligible price for the possible lifting of US sanctions, for the resumption of economic ties, for the joint development oil fields in Russian Arctic and for the de facto recognition of Crimea as part of Russia.
Domestically, Putin has managed to suppress or co-opt almost all opposition. Liberals squabble among themselves on social networks and emigrate. The far right, who hate Putin for refusing to form a completely fascist regime and, for example, take over Kyiv, he keeps on a short leash. And the left-wing Social Democrats, hobbled in appearance by the left, but in reality by the authoritarian and mass Communist Party Russian Federation, so few that Putin does not even notice them (although he has oh so many eyes).
In the first two presidential terms, Putin was unspeakably lucky, as the world began a rapid rise in prices for raw materials. He could miss his luck, but he managed to grasp it tenaciously, treated it with care and diligence, and as a result, Russia became rich. Today, a pale semblance of Putin's rival in his inner circle can only be the prime minister, the small and plump Dmitry Medvedev, who distinguished himself mainly by his love of playing on his iPad. The only politician in Russia who has managed to create a noticeable threat to Putin is Alexei Navalny, a talented Moscow populist with volatile political beliefs and a love of networking. But the Kremlin does not allow him to breathe freely, filing numerous criminal charges and subjecting him to house arrests.
Putin as an evil genius is undoubtedly the West's main speculative judgment about the Russian president. This is evidenced by his numerous critics and small admirers. Those who are more prejudiced against Putin's political, intellectual, and military abilities (President Obama, for example) are seen as naive and gentle, lovers of drafts, but not chess. Meanwhile, most Russian observers of Putin are surprised by the West's awe of his overwhelming strategic talent. World chess champion and not-so-great opposition politician Garry Kasparov, for example, sees all of these statements as offensive to chess.
In any case, these claims about Putin's genius raise a lot of questions. Was the capture of a once-favorite but defunct resort destination that Russians no longer go to be worth falling into international isolation, subject to increasingly burdensome sanctions, and earning eternal hatred? Ukrainian people? Yes, there were fears that the post-Maidan Ukrainian government might cancel the lease on the massive Russian naval base in Sevastopol. But a real genius would be able to eliminate this threat in some other way, without resorting to the capture of the entire peninsula, right?
As far as Syria is concerned, Putin is definitely basking in the glory today by bailing out the Assad regime. But who wants to celebrate this victory with him? Definitely not the Sunnis, whom Assad ruthlessly and massively destroys. Some of those who survived will soon return to their homes in the Caucasus and Central Asia with a deep hatred for the Russian bear. And as for the collapse of the EU, which Putin wants most of all, is it really beneficial for Russia? "Hungarian Putin" Viktor Orban is still friendly to Moscow, but the Polish Putins from the Law and Justice party are staunch Russophobes. As one astute commentator pointed out, if Putin succeeds in bringing a right-wing nationalist leader to power in neighboring Germany, that German Putin may well decide that it would be a good idea to go to war with the Russian Putin. German Putins have done this quite often in the past.
And even our own American Putin, Donald Trump, may not be as much manna from heaven for Russia as it might seem at first glance. First, Trump's apparent romance with the Russian president has sparked a storm of Russophobia in the United States that hasn't been seen since the early 1980s. Secondly, Trump is an idiot. And it is not good for a genius to associate with a fool.
Putin's genius inside the country also raises serious suspicions. In 2011, he made the fateful decision to return to the presidency after Medvedev's four-year rule. Medvedev himself announced this decision in a self-humiliating manner, and very soon powerful protests began in Moscow, the likes of which it had not seen since the early 1990s. Putin skillfully waited out these protests. He did not make the mistake that Viktor Yanukovych made in Ukraine two years later, first overreacting to events and then underestimating the situation. Putin waited until the protests fizzled out, and then began to remove the leaders of the protest movement one by one. Someone was discredited by making a video recording on the sly, someone was presented with false accusations of committing crimes. At the same time, Moscow itself experienced something of an urban renaissance. New parks, bike paths and much more have appeared there to calm the indignant creacliat, as the creative class was called. But in essence, Putin has not reacted in any way to criticism from the opposition that his political power is corrupt, unresponsive and short-sighted. Instead, he invaded Ukraine and began fanning nationalist sentiment, exacerbating the worst aspects of his power.
If Putin had resigned after 2008 and become the great old man of Russian politics, monuments to him would have been erected all over the country. Under him, Russia emerged from the chaos of the 1990s, and relative stability and prosperity reigned in the country. But today, when oil prices have fallen, the ruble has collapsed, ridiculous counter-sanctions have appeared instead of European cheese, and the opposition is demoralized, it is hard to imagine the Putin era ending without violence. And violence breeds more violence. If this is genius, then some strange property.
For the first time, most Russians saw Putin in 1999 before new year holidays. A clearly ill Boris Yeltsin, with six months left on his term, announced in his traditional New Year's address that he was stepping down from the presidency and handing over power to a newly appointed, younger and more energetic prime minister.
Then Putin appeared. The effect was stunning. Yeltsin seemed confused and unwell. His speech became so slurred that it was difficult to understand him. He sat unnaturally upright, as if on props. But this? This pygmy? Putin was tiny compared to Yeltsin. He was younger and healthier, and yet he seemed no prettier than death. Putin spoke for several minutes. On the one hand, he promised to strengthen Russian democracy, but on the other hand, he issued warnings to those who intend to threaten Russia. The speech seemed a bit silly. Many then thought that Putin was unlikely to stay in this high post for a long time. For all his faults, at least Yeltsin was someone. Tall, with a booming voice, a former member of the Soviet Politburo. And Putin? People unexpectedly found out that he was just a colonel in the KGB. He worked abroad, although what kind of foreign country is this - a provincial East German Dresden? Putin was small, with a raspy voice and thinning hair. He was a nonentity even among those nonentities that remained after the constant purges of the Yeltsin government.
In a world where most people believe in the genius of the Russian president, this theory of Putin as a nonentity deserves attention. There is indeed some mediocrity in Putin. One of my favorite observations about him was made by someone who knew him in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. This man became a whistleblower when, shortly after Putin came to the presidency, the (very successful) medical company he headed was offered to transfer part of the profits to the fund for the construction of a huge "Putin's palace" on Black Sea coast. He told very curious things about the president, as he knew him before. He shared his observations with British journalist Ben Judah:
He was a completely ordinary person… He had an ordinary voice… not low, not high. He had an ordinary temperament… an ordinary intelligence… not a particularly high intelligence. You could go out the door and find thousands and thousands of people like Putin in Russia.
Well, he's not entirely right. Putin was not an ordinary person, at least in several respects (for example, he was the judo champion of Leningrad). But there is a deep insight in these words. Putin's charm lies precisely in the fact that he does not stand out in any particular way. During his first interviews as president, he carefully emphasized what an ordinary person he was, how difficult it was financially in the 1990s, how often he was unlucky. He knew the same jokes, listened to the same music, watched the same films as everyone else in his generation. It was a testament to the strength of Soviet culture, its egalitarianism and its shortcomings. It was so convincing that when Putin recalled lines from a dissident song or an episode from a movie from the 60s or 70s, almost everyone understood what he was talking about. He was like everyone else. An unremarkable only child from an unremarkable Leningrad working-class family. One got the impression that the Soviet Union had extracted a typical specimen from its huge human mass, with its typical aggressiveness, typical ignorance and typical nostalgia for the past.
Tales from the early years of Putin's presidency confirm that he was far from being a colossus. He was impressed by the power of the American empire and was in awe of George W. Bush. He also understood how limited his power within the country was. Russian politics of the Yeltsin era was dominated by a small group of oligarchs, oil and banking titans with their own private armies. They were led not by short and skinny retired colonels like Putin, but by burly former generals from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB. Moreover, some oligarchs were the smartest strategists who survived the dashing 90s and emerged victorious from them. Putin, meanwhile, somehow clambered up the career ladder, while being a corrupt deputy to a short-lived mayor. On the initial stage he became popular due to his toughness towards the Chechens and the oligarchs. He managed to raze Chechnya to the ground. But will he be able to win the decisive battles with the oligarchs? Putin had no idea about this.
In 2003, one of the main turning points in his reign. It took Putin several months to gather his courage and arrest the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. But he did it and got the result. People did not take to the streets and did not stand up for the fallen oligarch. Secret armies did not emerge from the forests. Putin got away with it, as will later get away with many other things. He will mature and grow to his position. Today we see how short Putin during official ceremonies passes through the spacious Kremlin halls, and we understand that he has not risen to this magnificence. But time has taken its toll. Trump will be the fourth American president Putin has met. Numerous British prime ministers, two French presidents, and one German chancellor (whom Putin later hired, which was by no means a cause for pride for the German people), left their posts. But Putin remains. He acquires a special dignity simply because he knows how to survive. True, this is a dubious merit.
Theory #3: Putin had a stroke
This classic theory from early Putinology gained popularity in 2005, when an article appeared in the Atlantic under the heading "Autocrat by Chance." The author cites the work of a "behavior researcher" at the US Naval Academy in Newport, Rhode Island named Brenda L. Connors. After studying records of Putin's gait, she concluded that he had a serious, possibly congenital, neurological malformation. It is possible that Putin suffered a stroke in the womb, due to which he cannot fully use the right side of his body, and therefore swings his left arm more than his right when walking. Connors told The Atlantic that Putin may not have been able to crawl as a baby. He still moves, as it were, with his whole body, "from head to tail, like fish or reptiles."
This hypothesis is unlikely to help predict whether, for example, Putin will attack Belarus. And yet, she is very intrusive. So it seems that the fish-like Putin moves through the world of people who are able to use both sides of their body, and is very upset that they do not have such an opportunity as they have.
Theory #4: Putin is a KGB agent
After his famous first meeting with Putin, President-elect George W. Bush told a press conference that he looked the Russian in the eye and saw his soul. Bush's advisers were stunned. “I was just dumbfounded,” National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice wrote in her memoir. Secretary of State Colin Powell took the president aside. “Maybe you read all this in his eyes,” he said ominously, “but I look into his eyes and still see three letters there - K, G and B. Remember, he is not just fluent in German.” Vice President Dick Cheney had a similar impression. "Whenever I see Putin," he said, "I think of one thing: KGB, KGB, KGB."
Since then, nothing has changed. Whenever Putin tries to be nice to someone, it's only because he was a KGB agent and wants to manipulate other people. And if Putin behaves ugly, say when he introduced the dog-fearing Angela Merkel to his black Labrador Connie, it is also because he was a KGB agent and wants to achieve psychological superiority.
There is no doubt that Putin accumulated most of his professional experience in the KGB, since he worked there from the moment he graduated from university in 1974 until at least August 1991. Moreover, the KGB is not just a department, it is also educational institution. At the Higher School of the KGB in Moscow, where Putin studied, young agents received university-level education. The authorities believed that this was important, since employees must understand the world where they have to carry out subversive and recruiting work. It is likely that Putin maintained ties with former KGB colleagues after 1991, while working in the St. Petersburg mayor's office. It is also true that Putin took many former colleagues with him and installed them in the highest positions in government.
However, this hypothesis about the KGB seems unconvincing. When people like Rice, Powell and Cheney talk about Putin's KGB past, they mean that he treats politics as a manipulation contest. People are either his agents, whom he controls, or his enemies, whom he is trying to weaken. This is a cruel worldview, but isn't that what many politicians do? Are there not enough tyrants in the world who divide people into those whom they can control and whom they cannot? Isn't that how, say, Dick Cheney acted? Of course, doing so is unacceptable. But there is nothing unique in this, since not only the KGB operates in this way.
But the KGB label finds another use in the West. This is such a synecdoche, denoting the entire Soviet Union. And Putin, as a Soviet revanchist with a sickle in one hand and a hammer in the other, has become one of the main images in the Western press. What does all of this mean? Of course, hardly anyone thinks that Putin stands for a historical alliance of the working class (hammer) and peasantry (sickle), or that he is in fact a communist who wants to expropriate the bourgeoisie. Rather, here we are talking about the USSR as an aggressive imperialist power that occupied half of the eastern part of Europe. It is also true that the countries on Russia's periphery do not seem to Putin to be sovereign and entitled to their own rights. In this regard, it would be fair to call him an imperialist. But it is unfair (in relation to the Soviet Union) to believe that Putin's imperialism is Soviet in nature. Imperialism is not a Soviet invention. Russian empire, whose territory the Soviets managed to keep intact, became an empire by subjugating the indigenous northern peoples, waging a series of cruel and long wars in the Caucasus, and cutting off part of Poland. Putin is a Russian imperialist, period.
But of course, there is some moral reason for calling someone a KGB man, because the Soviet KGB committed murders, persecuted and imprisoned dissidents, and was one of the inventors of what today is called information stuffing. But the idea that any KGB person is the embodiment of evil is as absurd as the KGB's view of itself as an incorruptible and "professional" agency of the late Soviet period.
The KGB was a gigantic organization - hundreds of thousands of people worked there in the 1980s. When he began to disclose information in the 1990s, we learned that the KGB agents were very different. There was, for example, Filipp Bobkov, who at one time persecuted Soviet dissidents, but after the collapse Soviet Union started working for the media oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky and began to write meaningful comments about the activities of the KGB. Some of the KGB officers went into the private sector, becoming specialists in surveillance and hired killers. Someone remained in the FSB, and using his official position, began to promote organized crime, killing innocent citizens and accumulating personal fortunes. Some former KGB agents fought bravely in Chechnya, and some committed war crimes there. There was a KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who moved to the FSB and there he received an order from his corrupt leaders to kill the oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He did not kill him, and instead made these plans public. After some time, he fled the country, fearing for his life, settled in London and began to cooperate with Western intelligence agencies, publishing numerous articles sharply criticizing Putin. A few years later, Litvinenko was poisoned in London with a large dose of polonium-210 by another former KGB agent, Andrei Lugovoy.
Theory #5: Putin is a killer
Now I live in New York, but I was born in Russia and sometimes I write about this country. Therefore, people often share with me their opinions about Putin. I remember one day in March 2006 I was introduced to a well-known woman photographer from France. When she found out that I was from Russia, she said: “Pu-utin?” In French, it sounded somewhat offensive and not masculine. "Poo-ting is a cold-blooded killer," she said.
I have heard this point of view before from some Russian oppositionists, but in New York I came across this for the first time. Since she was a woman, a photographer and a Frenchwoman, her opinion struck me primarily from an aesthetic point of view. Putin is a killer because he does not smile, he has a cold, impassive expression and an expressionless look. A few months later, Litvinenko was poisoned in London, and journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in central Moscow as she was returning home from shopping. The notion of Putin as a murderer has become widespread.
I have no desire to dispute this point of view. Putin has unleashed brutal and bloody wars against Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine, and I agree with the recently published conclusions of the British investigation that he “probably” approved the murder of Litvinenko. But for unleashing aggressive wars and for killing a former operative and a defector, they are not expelled from the international community.
No, there is another sense here in which Putin is considered a murderer, and this was widely discussed in the US during the strange rise of Donald Trump. As the Republicans were holding the primary, conservative broadcaster Joe Scarborough, known for his closeness to Trump, pressed him about his sympathy for Putin, who, Scarborough said, "kills journalists and political opponents." A few days later, former White House adviser George Stephanopoulos challenged Trump again on a better-known Sunday political program. Trump said, "To my knowledge, no one has proven he killed anyone." Stephanopoulos responded confidently: "There are many allegations that it was he who was behind the murder of Anna Politkovskaya." Trump countered as best he could. But it is clear that the problem remains. While giving an interview before the Super Bowl in early February, Trump ran into Fox buffoon Bill O'Reilly. “Putin is a killer,” said O Reilly, to which Trump gave a sensational (albeit true) answer: “There are a lot of killers in the world. We have a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country is so innocent?”
“I don’t know a single government leader who is a killer,” O’Reilly said. He didn’t mean that he didn’t know the government leaders who ordered the invasion of Iraq, gave the go-ahead for dozens of drone strikes or ordered a sting operation like the one that killed Osama bin Laden.No, he meant that he did not know the leaders who kill ordinary people.
The trouble with this accusation is not that it is false, but that it is careless, like everything else in Putinology. When people accuse Putin of killing “journalists and political opponents,” they mean Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006, and opposition leader and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, who was killed in 2015. Allegations that Putin was behind the murders of Anna Politkovskaya and Nemtsov do exist, but people who know about these cases do not believe them. They believe that Politkovskaya and Nemtsov were killed by close associates of the cruel Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov. In the Nemtsov case, there is a mass of convincing evidence of involvement in the murder of people close to Kadyrov. In the Politkovskaya case, the evidence is mostly circumstantial (as for Politkovskaya, there is a lot of evidence of other attempts on her life, say, an attempted poisoning, very similar to the order of the authorities), but this is still the most likely scenario.
And yet, Kadyrov's involvement does not absolve Putin of responsibility, since Kadyrov works for Putin. The press widely reported that Putin was puzzled and enraged by the murder of Nemtsov, and did not return calls from Kadyrov for several weeks. On the other hand, almost two years have passed, and Kadyrov is still in charge of Chechnya. Putin appointed him to this post. Therefore, even if Putin did not directly order these killings (again, most journalists and analysts believe that Putin did not), he still continues to work with and supports those who did.
In the theory of "Putin the killer" we find ourselves in a kind of conceptual "dead zone" of Putinology. It seems that Russia is not a failed state (where the government has no power), and at the same time, not a totalitarian state (where the government has all the power), but something in between. Putin doesn't order killings, and yet killings happen. Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea, but, as far as one can guess, he did not order an invasion of eastern Ukraine. This invasion appears to have been undertaken at their own risk by a handful of mercenaries funded by Russian businessman with good connections. Real Russian troops arrived later. But if Putin is not in charge of everything, if there are some powerful forces that act around Putin's orders, then what is the point of Putinology? Putinology is silent on this score.
The worst crime that Putin is accused of is the 1999 Moscow apartment building bombings. In September of that year, when President Boris Yeltsin was ill, the presidential election was just around the corner, and the little-known Putin moved from the head of the FSB to the head of the Yeltsin government, two large apartment buildings were blown up in Moscow, killing almost 300 people. A few days later there was another explosion of a residential building, this time in the southern city of Volgodonsk. A few more days passed, and a very strange incident occurred when the police in the city of Ryazan detained several people who were carrying what looked like explosives into the basement of an apartment building. It turned out that these people were from the FSB. They quickly removed what they brought, and then announced that these were exercises, a test of the population and the police for vigilance.
The state immediately blamed the bombings on Chechen terrorists, using this as an excuse to invade Chechnya. However, a stubborn minority invariably insisted that the state itself was responsible for the bombings. (Litvinenko was one of the first to vociferously support this theory.) Soviet biologist and dissident Sergei Kovalyov set up a public commission to test these claims. In 2003, two members of this commission were killed: Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin. Yushenkov was shot near his own house, and Shchekochikhin was poisoned.
The question of the involvement of the Russian state in the explosions of residential buildings remains unanswered. The most authoritative report analyzing the available evidence and evidence was compiled a few days ago by John Dunlop of the Hoover Institute. He does not claim to have completely solved this case, but he claims that there is convincing evidence that Yeltsin's entourage ordered to blow up the residential buildings, and the operation itself was carried out by the FSB.
However, Putin dodges and avoids us. If the explosions of houses were a palace conspiracy, then this conspiracy was concocted not by Putin's court, but by Yeltsin's. And the political assassinations that have become feature Putin's rule were a characteristic feature of the Yeltsin regime too. Again, this does not absolve Putin of responsibility in any way. However, this indicates that the period of violence was longer and more complex, that various factions in power and beyond used assassination and terror as political weapons, and that these were not the machinations of one evil man. If Putin, as president, is unable to stop this violence, then perhaps someone else should be president. And if Putin, being president, is involved in this violence, then another person must be the president.
But we have to keep our sanity. Putinologists are infuriating with their inaccuracy and vagueness, and such inaccuracy and vagueness does great harm. When George Stephanopoulos appears on national television and announces that Putin ordered Politkovskaya's death, it becomes much harder to blame Putin for what he actually did. This is obvious and undeniable.
Theory #6: Putin is a kleptocrat
Until about 2009, the complaints of Putin's liberal critics in Russia, supported and replicated by Western journalists and statesmen, were predominantly that he violated human rights. Putin was the censor of the Russian media, the executioner of Chechnya, the heavy-handed retrograde during our glorious invasion of Iraq, the murderer of Litvinenko and the invader of Georgia. It took the efforts of anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny to radically change the topic of the discussion about Putin, moving it from human rights violations to something else: stealing money from Russians. Lawyer and anti-corruption activist Navalny concluded that in modern Russia human rights is a losing topic, but money is a winning one. (I remember how he called Putin's United Russia party "a party of crooks and thieves.") According to this theory, which was soon picked up by Western Putinologists, Putin is no longer a terrible monster, but something simpler - an ordinary thief who can be dealt with.
The merit of these accusations is that they are undoubtedly true. Or very many old friends of Putin are real business geniuses, since after he came to power they became billionaires. It's one thing when the Berezovskys, Khodorkovskys and Abramovichs came out of the brutal battle of the 1990s with billions in their pockets. They would by no means have become the owners of these billions, if not for their closeness to the Yeltsin regime; but at the same time, they had to survive in the dashing years of early Russian capitalism. They really were kind of geniuses. And the genius of Putin's cronies-billionaires is only in the fact that they made friends with the future president of Russia in time.
If Putin loves his friends (which seems to be the case), and if his friends love to line their pockets (and they certainly do), it follows that if it hurts to hit Putin's cronies in their wallets, Russian President will be forced to abandon the most outrageous foreign policy adventures, primarily in Ukraine. Such was the logic of the “targeted” sanctions imposed in 2014 by the US and the EU against Putin’s inner circle.
Today, we rarely hear about Putin's kleptocracy. This is probably due to the fact that the sanctions did not change his behavior on the world stage. Naturally, neither Putin's friends, nor Putin himself could like these sanctions. Friends - because today they cannot go to their favorite resorts in Spain; Putin - because because of the sanctions he was isolated and outside the international order. And this is shameful and annoying.
But that hasn't stopped Putin from stalling and undermining the Minsk agreements designed to stop the fighting in eastern Ukraine. This did not stop him from carrying out his brutal intervention in the civil war in Syria. If Putin's friends begged him to come to his senses, he clearly did not listen to them. Most likely, Putin's friends understood that they got a lot from his generosity, thanks to his incredible rise to the top of power, and that if necessary they should support him. Kleptocrats are not the kind of people who successfully organize palace coups. To do this, you must be a true believer. And if among them there is someone true believer, then he has not yet shown his face. It seems that only Putin himself is a true believer among them.
Putin leads a very modest day-to-day existence. Yes, he has a palace on the Black Sea, built with stolen money, but he does not live there. And it is unlikely that he will ever live. The palace is, in a certain sense, the most hopeful thing that Putin has created. This is the hope for his future resignation. And under the current circumstances, Putin is unlikely to be torn apart by the indignant mob that broke into the Kremlin and dispersed his personal guards.
Theory #7: Putin's name is Vladimir
A recent article published on the website of a respected American magazine warned readers that the end of the communist regime "does not mean that Russia has abandoned its primary task of destabilizing Europe." Putin was called there "a former KGB agent, who, not by chance, bears the name Vladimir Ilyich, like Lenin." Then an amendment was made to the article, writing that it was no coincidence that Putin was named Vladimir - like Lenin. If there is no coincidence in this, then probably due to the fact that Vladimir is one of the most common Russian names. But it's impossible to deny it. Both Putin and Lenin are called Vladimir.
This hypothesis is either a historical apogee or the greatest decline of Putinology, depending on your point of view. But the fact that a person who does not know Putin's middle name confidently proclaims himself an expert clearly means something. This is a sign that Putinology is not really about Putin and has never been about Putin. The flurry of “Putin analysis” before and after the inauguration is generated by the hope that Trump will evaporate by itself, as well as the desire to shift the blame for his victory to someone else. How could we choose this limited and narcissistic idiot? It must have been imposed on us from somewhere else.
At this point, there is no reason to dispute the generally accepted view of intelligence analysts that Russian agents hacked into the mail of the Democratic National Committee and then passed the stolen information to Julian Assange. It is also well known that Putin hates Hillary Clinton.
Further, it is also true that Trump won by a narrow margin, and that it did not take much effort to turn the result one way or the other. But it must be remembered that there was almost nothing incriminating in the leaked information from the mailboxes of the Democratic National Committee.
Compare these leaks to the 40-year cycle of American deindustrialization where only the rich got rich, to the 25-year right-wing war against the Clintons, to the Tea Party's eight-year assault on facts, immigration and taxes, to the timid centrist campaign, and to the recent revelations of the FBI director. about the suspicious investigation into Clinton's use of a private mail server, compared to all this, leaks from the Democratic National Committee can hardly be called the main reason for Trump's victory. But according to a recent report, Hillary Clinton and her campaign still blame the Russians for their defeat, as well as Barack Obama, who did not raise a fuss about the hacker attacks until November. In this case, talking about Putin helps not to think about where the mistakes were made and how to correct these mistakes.
In such evasions is the whole essence of Putinology, which seeks solace in Putin's undeniable, but some very distant corruption, instead of struggling with much closer and more unpleasant vices and mistakes. Putinology appeared 10 years before the 2016 election, and yet what we have seen in recent months with Trump is its platonic ideal.
Here we have a man named Donald J. Trump who has made numerous violent and biased statements, proposed violent and biased policies, who is a pathological liar who has failed in almost nothing he has tried, who has surrounded himself with crooks and billionaires. And yet, day by day, people are greeted with glee by every new piece of information in an attempt to expose Trump's secret/secret ties to Russia. Every scrap of information is being blown up in the hope that he will finally delegitimize Trump, drive him out of the White House, and end the liberal nightmare of losing the election to this hated jerk.
If Trump is impeached and imprisoned for conspiring with a foreign power to undermine American democracy, I will be as happy as any other American. And yet, in the long run, playing the Russian card is not just a bad political decision, but also an intellectual and moral failure. This is an attempt to shift the blame for our country's deep and enduring problems onto a foreign power. As some commentators have noted, this is a line from Putin's own script.
Original publication: Killer, kleptocrat, genius, spy: the many myths of Vladimir Putin
I don't remember when I started talking to Raffi in Russian. I didn't speak Russian to him when he was in the womb, though I've since learned that that's when babies start recognizing sound patterns. And I didn't speak Russian to him in the first few weeks of his life; that would be funny. All he could do was sleep, scream and suckle. In fact, the person I interacted with when I spoke to him was his sleep-deprived mother, Emily, who was on edge and needed company. She does not know Russian.
But then, at some point, when the situation stabilized a bit, I started. In the moments when I carried it around the neighborhood or rolled it in a stroller, I liked the feeling that we have our own language with him. And I liked the large number of endearing expressions that the Russian gave me access to. Mushkin, Mazkin, Glazkin, my good, my beloved, my little boy. This language, given its history, is surprisingly rich in terms of endearment.
When we started reading Raffi's books, I included several editions in Russian among them. A friend gave us a beautiful book of poems for children by Daniil Kharms. These were not meaningless rhymes, on the contrary, they were very much connected with each other, and Raffi enjoyed them. One of them was a song about a man who went into the woods with a club and a sack and never returned. Kharms himself was arrested in Leningrad in 1941 for expressing "incendiary" sentiments, and the following year he starved to death in a psychiatric hospital. The great Soviet bard Alexander Galich eventually called the song about the man in the forest "prophetic" and wrote his own song, including the forest lyrics in the Gulag cycle. Raffi really liked Harms' song; when he got a little older, he ordered it, and then danced.
Before I knew it, I was constantly talking to Raffi in Russian, even in front of his mother. And although at first it seemed stupid, because he did not understand anything from what we said in any language, there came a moment when I saw that he understood something. We started with animal sounds. “How does a cow say?” I asked, pronouncing the name of the animal in Russian. "Moo!" Raffi replied. "What does the cat say?" - "Meow!" "What does the owl say?" - Raffi made big eyes, raised his hands and said: "Khuu, huu!". He did not understand anything else, although at a certain point, at about the age of one and a half years, he seemed to learn what the Russian word “no” meant - I often repeated it.
He didn't understand me as well as he understood his mother, and he didn't really understand either of us, but it was still like a small miracle. I gave my son some Russian! After that, I felt that I should continue the experiment. It helped that everyone around was impressed and favorably disposed. "It's great that you are teaching him Russian," the people around him said.
But I doubted and still doubt.
Bilingualism used to have an undeservedly bad reputation, then it gained an undeservedly elevated one. In the first case, American psychologists of the early 20th century, in opposition to the nativists, suggested that there was something besides heredity that caused Eastern and Southern European immigrants to score lower on newly invented IQ tests than those from Northern Europe. Scientists have suggested that trying to learn two languages may be to blame. As Kenji Hakuta points out in his 1986 book The Mirror of Language, neither psychologists nor nativists believed that IQ tests could be useless on their own.
In the early 1960s, this pseudoscientific theory was debunked by Canadian researchers at the height of the debate over Quebec nationalism. The work of two McGill University scientists who studied French-English bilingual schoolchildren in Montreal showed that they actually perform better than monolingual children on tests that require mental manipulation and reorganization of visual models. This is how the concept of “bilingual advantage” was born. And as I've recently learned from people telling me this over and over again, this remains conventional wisdom.
In fact, in recent years, the bilingual advantage has been called into question. Early studies have been criticized for selection bias and lack of clear, testable hypotheses. Perhaps there is no bilingual advantage other than the undeniable advantage of knowing another language. And while it is wrong to assume, as some parents still think, that learning another language along with English will make learning the latter much more difficult, it is quite possible that it makes it a little more difficult. As the psycholinguist François Grosjohn emphasizes, language is a product of necessity. If a child discusses, say, hockey only with his Russian-speaking father, he may for a long time not knowing how "puck" would be in English. But he will know when the need arises.
In any case, in the absence of a "bilingual advantage" for which your child will be tested in preschool if he chooses, you as a parent will have to decide if you really want him to learn the language. And here, it seems to me, the problems begin.
My parents took me out of the Soviet Union in 1981 when I was six years old. They did it because they didn't like the Soviet Union - it was, as my grandmother used to say, a "terrible country", cruel, tragic, poor and prone to outbreaks of anti-Semitism. They did it because there was such an opportunity: Congress, under pressure from American Jewish groups, passed legislation linking Soviet-American trade with Jewish emigration. Leaving wasn't easy, but if you were aggressive and adventurous - my father paid a hefty bribe at one point - you could leave the country. We moved to Boston. Probably no other decision had a greater impact on my life.
My parents were connected with Russian culture by a thousand inseparable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, nor could they. I completely assimilated, embarrassed my parents in many ways, allowing my Russian not to suffer from neglect. Six years is an intermediate age in terms of assimilation. If you're much younger - at two or three years old - the chances of keeping your Russian are slim, and you basically just become an American. If you're a few years older - for Russians it seems like nine or ten - you'll probably never lose your accent, and be a Russian to those around you for the rest of your life. At six, you can still remember the language, but you won't have an accent. What to do is up to you. I know many people who came at this age and still speak Russian with their parents, but do not use Russian professionally at all and never return to Russia. I also know people who moved at that age but kept coming back and even starting families with Russians. I'm in last group; I started in college and have been writing and thinking about Russia ever since.
Knowledge of the Russian language means a lot to me. This allowed me to travel with relative ease throughout the former Soviet Union. Culturally, I enjoyed what my parents liked: Soviet bards, some charming 1970s Soviet novels, the poetry of Joseph Brodsky, and the plays of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. As I got older, I added some of my own. But I am aware that my ties with Russia are weakened. I don't know Russian or Russia as well as my parents. I am an American who inherited certain linguistic and cultural skills and saw in the wake of the collapse of the USSR an opportunity to use them as a writer and translator, while my parents once saw another opportunity - to get out. But most of my life I have lived in English. Does a talented programmer teach his children C++? Maybe. If they show interest in it. But a talented programmer doesn't teach his children languages they don't need or languages they have trouble with. Right?
Russia and Russian are certainly not useless, but for the foreseeable future this country is a place of darkness. How old will Raffi be when Putin finally leaves the stage? In the most optimistic scenario, when Putin retires in 2024, Raffi will be nine. But if Putin lasts longer, maybe Raffi will be 15. Maybe 21. Can't Raffi go to Russia just yet? Nothing is impossible. But from the point of view of parents, this is not entirely desirable. I still remember the look on my father's face when he left me at Logan Airport for my first trip to Russia on my own. It was the spring of 1995, the end of my sophomore year of college. My father recently lost my mother to cancer; my older sister, a journalist, returned to Russia to continue her career there. And now he's lost me too? When my father cried, it was the most intimate thing I have ever seen. I wonder if he regretted at that moment that he kept my Russian. In my case, I returned. Nothing bad happened to me. But that doesn't mean I want Raffi to go there. He's so small!
I would like to teach him Spanish, which would greatly enhance his ability to communicate with New Yorkers, as well as with much of the rest of the world. I would like to teach him Italian, Greek or French so that he can visit these beautiful countries and speak their languages. It would be nice for future career prospects to teach Raffi Mandarin or Cantonese (dialects of Chinese, the first of which, being the largest number of speakers, formed the basis of the literary language - approx. Trans.), as ambitious hedge sponsors arrange for their children in New York. Hell, even Israel has beaches. If I taught him Hebrew, he could read the Torah. But I don't speak any of those languages. All I have is Russian. And I don't even speak it well enough.
For Raffi, the downside is that his father's Russian is as imperfect as his own. I often can’t remember or don’t know the names for well-known things - the other day I was trying to remember how scooter would be in Russian and used the word “moonshine” instead of “scooter” for this. I often have trouble remembering how to say "sheep" and "goat." It doesn't help that Russian words are much longer than English ones - milk is "milk", apple is "apple", hello is "hello", ant is "ant". Besides, my grammar is full of mistakes.
I see friends who moved at the same time as me but didn't support their Russian language by raising their children entirely in English. Sometimes I feel sorry for them and everything they lack; other times I'm jealous. They finally freed themselves from the yoke of Russia, as their parents wanted. In the circle of their children, they are free to be themselves, expressing themselves without difficulty. They always know what words to choose for scooter, goat and sheep.
Zealous representatives of White emigration communities live on Long Island, in which even in the fourth generation children are forced to learn Russian. Journalist Paul Khlebnikov emerged from such a community. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he traveled to Moscow, where he published a book on corruption involving big business in the Russian state. In 2004, he died on a street in Moscow when he was shot nine times. A badly conducted trial ended in acquittals for the two defendants. No one has ever been punished for his murder.
Kyiv is a place where many people speak Russian. Parts of Estonia and Latvia should also be included here. Whole blocks of Tel Aviv. Brighton Beach! I would like Raffi to visit all these places before he goes to Moscow, where his father was born.
source: cdn.img.inosmi.ru
Russian emigrant at the windows of Brighton
During the first two and a half years of Raffi's life, the development of his Russian language was somewhat indecisive. His first word was "kika" which meant chicken (there are chickens in the garden next door to us). For a while, because he used "k" instead of "ch" at the beginning, I thought it might be a combination of chicken and the Russian "chicken". But none of his subsequent roughly-sounding words—"ba" for bottle, "kaku" for cracker, "magum" for mango, "mulk" for milk—contained any Russian ingredients. The glossary we compiled for his grandparents when he was almost 18 months old included 53 words or attempts to say them. Only one of them was in Russian: "sword", i.e. "ball". In retrospect, I had to admit that he didn't say "kika" because he was trying to say "chicken" but because he couldn't pronounce the sound represented by the "ch" in chicken.
Despite all my doubts about the Russian language, I spoke with him a lot, and his inability to learn it was hard not to take it personally. Did Raffi prefer the language of his mother (and those around him) to that of his father? Didn't I - this is probably closer to the truth - spend enough time with him? Did he sense my ambivalence about the whole project? Did he hate me?
The psycholinguist Grojon, in his review of current research in the popular 2010 textbook Bilingual: Life and Reality, says that the main factor in determining whether a child becomes bilingual is necessity: is there any real reason for the child to learn a language, be it necessity? talk to a relative or playmates, or understand what is being said on TV? Another factor is the degree of "immersion": does he hear enough to begin to understand? The third factor, more subjective than others, is the attitude of parents to the second language. Grojon gives the example of Belgian parents whose children must learn French and Flemish. Many parents are not enthusiastic about Flemish, which is not exactly a world language, and their children end up not learning it very well.
In our case, there was absolutely no need for Raffi to learn Russian - I didn't want to pretend that I couldn't understand his inexperienced attempts to speak English, and there was no one else in his life, including Russian speakers in my family, who didn't knew English. I have done my best to create a reasonable amount of Russian in his life, but he is overshadowed by the amount of English. Finally, as I said, there was a bad attitude towards me.
And yet I kept doing it. When Raffi was very young, the only Russian books for him were Kharms' silly poems and Barbra Lindgren's cute Swedish books about Max in the 1980s by Barbra Lindgren, the Russian translations of which my sister brought from Moscow. But at about two years old, he began to like the poems of Korney Chukovsky. I found them too violent and scary (and long) to read to him when he was very young. But since he himself became a bit violent and could also listen to long stories, we read about Barmaley, a cannibal who eats small children and. in the end, he himself was eaten by a crocodile. Then we switched to the kind-hearted Dr. Aibolit (Dr. Ouch), who takes care of animals and makes a heroic trip to Africa at the invitation of Behemoth - Chukovsky was a big lover of hippos - to treat sick tigers and sharks. I also added a few Russian cartoons to his "screen" rotation - most of them were too old and too slow for him. But he liked one of them. It tells about the melancholy Crocodile Gene, who sings to himself a sad song about his birthday.
As the months passed, I realized that he understood more and more what I was saying. Not that he did what I told him. But sometimes I mentioned, for example, about my slippers, calling them a Russian word, and he knew what I was talking about. One day he hid one of them. “Where is my second slipper?” I asked him in Russian. He crawled under the sofa and very proudly pulled it out. And I was proud too. Did our child turn out to be brilliant? Just because I repeated the same words for enough time and pointed to objects, he recognized the Russian designations for these objects. It's incredible what the human mind is capable of. Now I can't stop.
I recently read one of fundamental research on the topic of bilingualism - Werner F. Leopold's four-volume work Speech Development of a Bilingual Child. This is an amazing book. Leopold, a German linguist, came to the US in the 1920s and ended up getting a job teaching German language in North-west. He married an American from Wisconsin; she was of German descent but did not know the language, and when they had a daughter, Hildegard, in 1930, Leopold decided to teach her German on his own. He kept a meticulous record of results. The first three volumes are quite technical, but the fourth volume is smaller. This is Leopold's diary of how Hildegard grew up from two to six years old.
The book is full of Hildegard's cute grammatical errors, as well as a fair amount of technical transcriptions of her German speech. After an impressive growth in her German vocabulary in her first two years, Hildegard begins to conform to a predominantly English-speaking environment. Leopold repeatedly laments the decline of her German. "Her German continues to recede," he writes when Hildegard is just over two years old. "Progress in the German language is small." "The displacement of German words by English is progressing slowly but steadily." He does not receive support from the German émigré community: “It is very difficult to have a German-speaking influence, reinforced by our many friends who speak German. They all involuntarily fall into English when Hildegard answers in English."
At the same time, there is a wonderful calm about Hildegard's progress in Leopold, because she is very sweet. “It's amazing that she says 'shave' in English,” he writes, “even though I'm the only one she sees shaving. She asks me every time what I'm doing and gets the answer in German: raiseren. One evening she touched my beard and said in English, ‘Do you have to shave?’” Months later, he notes that Hildegard has begun to take an interest in the two languages she is learning. She asks her mother if all fathers speak German. “Apparently,” writes Leopold, “she has hitherto tacitly assumed that German is the language of her fathers, because it is the language of her father. The question reveals the first doubts about the correctness of the generalization.
Hildegard's German decline stopped and reversed spectacularly when she was five years old and the family was able to travel to Germany for six months. In her kindergarten, she occasionally hears "Heil Hitler" but mostly has a great time. Reading this, I thought that if Leopold could take Hildegard to Hitler's Germany to improve her German, of course I could go to Putin's Russia. But so far I haven't done it.
About six weeks ago, a month before Raffi's third birthday, his Russian language development suddenly accelerated. He began to notice that I spoke a language different from everyone else's, so he "bumped into two languages," as Leopold said of Hildegard. Raffi's first reaction was irritation. "Daddy," he said one evening, "We need to get you into English." He clearly understood language - exactly according to Grosjon - as a substance that fills a vessel. I asked him why he didn't speak Russian to me. "I can't," he said simply, "Mom put English in me."
Then, one night, when Emily and I were talking while putting him to bed, he noticed something strange: “Dad, you speak English with your mother!”. He didn't discover it before.
Then his mother went away for a long weekend. For the first time in a long time, he heard more Russian than English. He began to think about it. "Daddy," he exclaimed one evening as he sat on my shoulders as he walked out of kindergarten home, "That's how it sounds when I speak Russian." He began to make a series of guttural sounds that sounded nothing like the Russians. But he began to understand that it was a different language, and one that he theoretically could speak.
He began to enjoy it more. “Phi-fi-fo-foom,” he sang one evening before climbing into the bath, “I smell the blood of an Englishman!” “Me?” I said in Russian, “Am I an Englishman?” Raffi understood my thought well and immediately corrected himself: “I smell the blood of a Russian person!” He laughed: he likes to replace one word or sound with another, often meaninglessly. But in this case it made sense. A few days later, at dinner, he said something even more startling. I talked to him, but then changed the subject and turned to Emily. Raffi didn't like it. “No, mom! - he said. “Don’t take your father’s Russian from him!” Russian in this case was a symbol of my attention.
At the moment we were really immersed in it. He not only understood the Russian language, he understood it as a special form of communication between us. If I had removed it at that moment, we would have lost it. There was no way back.
At the time, Raffi was going through one of his periodic bouts of bad behavior. They tend to come in cycles. A month of good behavior gives way to two months of willful disobedience and tantrums. The last such period began a couple of months ago. Raffi runs away from me or Emily when we go for a walk - sometimes a whole block away. This implies certain punishments. And it definitely has to do with bad behavior with your playmates: taking their toys, pushing them, pulling their hair.
I have found that I am more short-tempered in Russian than in English. I have fewer words, and therefore they end faster. I have a certain register in Russian that doesn't seem to be in my English. In it, I make my voice deep and menacing, telling Raffi that if he doesn't choose which shirt he's going to wear this morning, I'll choose it for him. When he runs down the street, I scream without any embarrassment in a very scary manner that if he does not return, he will receive a timeout (we do not have a Russian equivalent for the English word timeout, so the phrase sounds like this: “Rafik, if you if you don't come back immediately, you'll have a very long time-out"). I scream more in Russian than in English. Raffi is afraid of me. And I don't want him to be afraid of me. At the same time, I don't want him to run out into the street and get hit by a car.
Sometimes I worry about it. Instead of an eloquent, ironic, cold American father, Raffi gets an emotional, sometimes screaming Russian parent with a limited vocabulary. This is a compromise. Again, I had a gentle mother and a strict father. And I was very happy.
One of my shortcomings as Raffi's Russian teacher is that I'm bad at scheduling. In Brooklyn, there are constant meetings of Russian parents, to which I do not have the opportunity to go or simply do not want to drag myself there. However, one morning a few weekends ago, I took Raffi to play children's songs at a bar in Williamsburg. A Russian parent booked the place and asked singer Zhenya Lopatnik to sing some children's songs. We were there - a bunch of Russian-speaking parents with our two- and three-year-old children. Most of us are more comfortable communicating in English than in Russian, and none of us would like to be repatriated. Then why did we do it? What exactly do we want to pass on to our children? Of course, nothing about Russia in its current form. Perhaps it was appropriate that we listened to children's songs. There was something magical in our childhood, we were sure of it. What we couldn't know was whether it was because of the music we listened to, or because of the books we read in Russian, or because of the very sound of the language. Probably none of this. It was probably just magical to be a child. But since we could not rule out that Russian had something to do with it, we had to pass it on to our children as well. Maybe.
Raffi didn't know most of the songs. But then Lopatnik sang Crocodile Gena's song about his birthday. Raffi became interested and danced a little.
At the end of the children's program, Lopatnik announced that she wanted to sing a few songs for her parents. "What do you think of Tsoi?" she asked. Tsoi was the songwriter and lead singer of Kino, one of the greatest Russian rock bands. The adults welcomed this suggestion. She sang the song "Kino". Then she performed the famous, although less cool composition of the group "Nautilus Pompilius" "I want to be with you." The title is trite, but the song is truly convincing: it says that the singer's lover died in a fire and he craves her, although in later years the author insisted on his belief that the song had religious connotations, and that its addressee was God.
"I broke glass like chocolate in my hand
I cut these fingers for what they are
They can't touch you, I looked into these faces
And I couldn't forgive them
The fact that they do not have you and they can live.
We had never listened to this song together, and yet Raffi was shocked. We were all shocked. The original version was accompanied by nonsense inherent in late Soviet rock like synthesizers and a saxophone solo. Rubbish. Deprived of all this, the version performed by Lopatnik turned out to be intrusive. “But I want to be with you,” she sang, “I want to be with you. I want to be with you so much".
In that room, at that moment, it was not about religion, but, as Nabokov said in Lolita, about culture, about language - about how, in spite of everything, we are somehow connected with Russia and the Russian language. And in many ways about the impossibility of maintaining these ties.
Raffi hummed the song "Nautilus Pompilius" on the way home. A few days later I heard him sing it to himself while playing Lego.
"I wanna be with you
I wanna be with you
I wanna be with you".
And a few days later he uttered his first sentence in Russian: "I am a hippopotamus."
I was deeply, stupidly, indescribably moved. What have I done? How could I not? What a brilliant, stubborn, adorable kid. My son. I love him so much. I hope he never goes to Russia. I know that he will eventually do it.
Born in Moscow and moved to the United States at the age of six, writer Keith Gessen published an article in the New York Times, dedicated to Russia. In particular, he spoke about the confusion caused by the discrepancies between the image of Russia broadcast in the Western media and what the country is in reality.
“For people like me, who have been writing and reflecting on Russia for most of their lives, the last few years have been a strange experience. I, like everyone else, read the news and am horrified. Then I visit Russia and discover inconsistencies that confuse me, ”writes Gessen, whose text is reported by InoSMI.
Gessen admitted that his parents loved Russian culture, literature, films, but did not like Russia as it was in Soviet time. But, having moved to the USA, they fell in love with America with its freedom and abundance.
Keith Gessen recalls that he began writing articles about Russia in the late 90s, but for a long time they could not be sold. Interest in Russia skyrocketed in 2014 and increased even more after the 2016 US presidential election. He admitted that in connection with such interest, he felt an oppressive feeling, as he expected that the country would close itself in a “fortress called Russia” and be afraid of the world around it.
The scandal surrounding Russia's alleged "interference" in the US elections has been good for business, Gessen writes. He notes that at the university where he teaches, he was given the green light to form a new group for Russian studies, and students began to sign up for these classes. “This would not have happened a few years ago,” he remarked.
“But why do I have such bad feelings about everything that is happening? Perhaps the reason is simple: since I lived in Russia, I know how complicated this country is. Living in Russia does not mean that you are constantly being arrested, tortured and killed. People live their own lives,” the article says.
The author of the publication admitted that, having visited Moscow last spring, he experienced “cognitive dissonance”. In just a few years, during which he did not visit Russia, more than 20 new metro stations opened in Moscow. “In the same period, three new stations were opened in New York with great fanfare,” he notes.
According to him, many new cafes and restaurants with affordable prices have appeared in the Russian capital, in which there is no end to visitors.
“No one can confuse Moscow with Paris, but nevertheless, the Russian capital will be difficult to recognize for a person transferred there, say, from 1998,” the author writes.
At the same time, Gessen believes that the "political atmosphere" in Russia is poisoned. He compared Russia to a "little-known but beloved band" who become famous because of a "stupid act", such as destroying a hotel room. “In this case, the hotel room is the post-war global order,” he writes.
“I really liked her early albums – Late Socialism, Perestroika, Deindustrialization – but today everyone listens to them,” he concludes.
The Terrible Country by Keith Gessen has recently been published.
Recall that in March, a special committee on intelligence of the House of Representatives of the US Congress investigated the "interference" of Russia in the presidential elections in the United States in 2016. US President Donald Trump then stressed several times that there was evidence of collusion between his team and Moscow.
President Vladimir Putin emphasized that Moscow is in the American elections, but the United States has repeatedly tried to influence the elections in other states.
