Crisis 22

From Moscow to Jakarta

Pushkin’s Brethren - The Global South - The Colonial Map - “I Hate War”

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The heart of this project lies in my look at novels. While I use poetry and drama on numerous occasions, I tend to focus on novels because they create miniature worlds that we can experience in psychological and sociological detail — albeit vicariously. Novels can give us a detailed, realistic, personal take on history and politics, and they can also contain moments of intense poetry and drama.

This map locates the main novels I use, from St.Petersburg to Jakarta:

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Pushkin’s Brethren

In the first half of Crisis 22 I focus on Russian novels. My angle isn’t that of a specialist in Russian Studies or Literature, but rather that of an enthusiast of literature in general. In reading Russian novels I try to see what an educated reader can get from them, even though that reader may not speak the language or be expert in the culture. As I delve into these novels, I ask the following questions: How can these novels help us see into the cultural, political, social, and psychological contexts of the country? Within these context, what is the Russian experience of colonialism and imperialism? What has led them to accuse the West of colonialism and imperialism while at the same time invading their neighbour Ukraine? Can literature help us understand the emotional and mental patterns of Russians? And can we find in these patterns a way of talking these Russians back to a less aggressive state?

These questions complement the question I ask in the second half of Crisis 22: How do postcolonial novels show us that colonialism and imperialism, whether Western or Russian, is not in our best interest? How do they show that imperialism and colonialism may be in the interest of a few empire-building authoritarians, yet the interest of authoritarians is not the interest of people in general?

The four Russian novels I’ll use the most are Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1940). I’ll use these novels to argue that there are deep flaws in the Kremlin’s claims. The Kremlin sees itself as a champion of Russian tradition, identity, and morality. And in the worst of senses this is true: it’s created a new version of the czarist state we read about in the 19th century writers, with the same old nationalistic imperialism and the same old secretive and elite control over the masses. The Kremlin has also created a new version of the Soviet regime we read about in Bulgakov, with its elitism, secrecy, and lack of personal freedom. In addition, the Kremlin has what the czarist and Soviet regimes had in spades: an urge to control peoples and cultures from Eastern Europe to the Caucasus and the Pacific. This control is more colonial than neocolonial, since it involves direct control over land, not just overwhelming economic influence. The Kremlin’s control also comes with a bizarre claim to be liberating the world from the imperialism of the West.

The Kremlin displays an authoritarianism that’s similar to the czarist one that forbade Pushkin from travelling abroad and that sent Dostoyevsky to a prison camp for a mock execution. It’s also similar to the illiberal Soviet repression that censored Bulgakov at every turn, forbidding him to leave Soviet Russia and write freely in the West. This lack of freedom forced Bulgakov to keep secret his Master & Margarita. While the novel was completed by the time of his death in 1940, it wasn’t published until 1967, and a completely uncensored version didn’t appear till 1969. Edythe Haber says this about it:

"It’s a very complicated novel, and people get what they want out of it. […] One thing that Putin and the people of present-day Russia support is the Christianity that was attacked during the communist period. Those people who are very pro-church pick that out, whereas most readers look at the anti-authoritarianism of it." Haber says that after all the years of repression, Bulgakov's work is now out in the world, and no amount of censorship can ever put it back. (From NPR, January 21, 2015)

In using Russian writers, I don’t mean to imply that they would necessarily disagree with the Kremlin (although Bulgakov would), especially in its aim to enlarge the boundaries of Russia. Indeed, Russian literature is in general nationalistic. It doesn’t have the same type of open, powerful, anti-colonial bent we find in England with writers like Swift, Blake, Byron, Orwell, Forster, and Rushdie. It’s difficult to say what the Russians would have written about their own political system if they weren’t constantly being censored by that same system.

Unlike in Russia, in England literary arguments against censorship are time-honoured and deep. They go back at least to Chaucer’s 14th century Prologue to the Miller’s Tale, to Milton’s 17th century Areopagitica, and to John Stuart Mill’s 19th century On Liberty. Chaucer argues that if you don’t like what you’re reading, turn the page — don’t burn it. Milton argues that true Christians should read all manner of writing, good and bad, if they are to freely choose the good. Mill argues that even subtle censorship and coercion have no place in a free and equal society. These arguments are deeply rooted in English trends of evolving liberalism and democracy, trends which find few successful parallels in Russia. Notwithstanding this fact, we can still learn a great deal about Russia and about the way Russians think and feel by reading their finest writers. We can better see 1. how they see themselves, and 2. how we might approach them more effectively.

Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov help us see some of the problems in both czarist and Soviet Russia: the acceptance of authoritarian government, the lack of individual freedom, and the slippery nature of social morality. From this angle, the Kremlin and its Ukraine War exacerbate the deep-rooted political and ethical problems that have plagued Russia for the last 200 years.

In cases where we imagine that great Russian writers might agree with the present thinking of the Kremlin, referring to them helps us get at certain ways of thinking, and at certain cultural and historical patterns. For instance, in his 1836 “Journey to Arzrum,” the father of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin, makes extremely negative remarks about Circassians, who are an ancient people who were largely decimated by Russia (see Circassian Genocide). Their descendants now live mostly in the hills of North Caucasus, north and east of Abkhazia (which Russia recently wrested from Georgia):

Pushkin’s patronizing, colonial remarks about the Circassians are reminiscent of the accounts many European colonizers made about foreign peoples, from Congo to Peru. And the result is the same: the local population ends up hating Europeans:

The Circassians hate us. We have forced them out of their open grazing lands; their auls have been devastated, whole tribes have been wiped out. They withdraw further and further into the mountains and from there carry out their raids. The friendship of the peaceful Circassians is unreliable; they are always ready to help their violent fellow tribesmen. The spirit of their wild chivalry has noticeably declined. They rarely attack an equal number of Cossacks, never the foot soldiers, and they run away at the sight of a cannon. But they never miss a chance to attack a weaker troop or a defenseless man. The country roundabout is full of rumors of their villainies. There is almost no way to subdue them, so long as they are not disarmed, as the Crimean Tatars were, which is very hard to accomplish on account of the hereditary feuds and blood vengeance that reign among them. Dagger and saber are parts of their body, and a baby begins to wield them sooner than he can prattle. Among them killing is a simple body movement. They keep prisoners in hope of ransom, but they treat them with terrible inhumanity, force them to work beyond their strength, feed them raw dough, beat them whenever they like, and have them guarded by their young boys, who at one word have the right to cut them up with their children's sabers. A peaceful Circassian who had shot at a soldier was recently captured. He justified it by the fact that his rifle had stayed loaded for too long. What to do with such people? It is to be hoped, however, that if we acquire the region east of the Black Sea, cutting the Circassians off from their trade with Turkey, that will force them to become friendlier to us. The influence of luxury could contribute to their taming: the samovar would be an important innovation. There is a means that is stronger, more moral, more consistent with the enlightenment of our age: the preaching of the Gospel.

In general, since World War II the West has distanced itself from such attitudes. Russia calls the West colonialist, yet the colonial things Russians did in the Caucasus and the colonial things the West did in places like the Congo, the Caribbean, Burma, and Peru, the Russians continue to do today, whether in Chechnya or Ukraine. In the absence of a Bartolomé de las Casas (whose 1542 Relación details the atrocities of the conquistadors) and in the absence of powerful anti-colonial writers — like Twain in “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (1905) and Orwell in Burmese Days (1934) — we might look instead at Russian writers who witnessed Russian colonialism yet didn’t condemn it. Pushkin’s paragraph above is a case in point. Seeing how a colonial mentality lingers today in the minds of the Kremlin leaders, we might substitute Ukrainians for Circassians, and put Pushkin’s words into the mouths of a Kremlin spokesperson:

The Ukrainians hate us. We have forced them out of their open grazing lands; their auls have been devastated, whole tribes have been wiped out. […] There is almost no way to subdue them, so long as they are not disarmed [. …] It is to be hoped, however, that if we acquire the region east of the Black Sea, cutting the Ukrainians off from their trade with Turkey, that will force them to become friendlier to us.

The realistic sentence at the beginning of the paragraph predicts the failure of the idealistic sentence at the end.

How can Russians bomb infrastructure and hospitals, and then expect Ukrainians to be friendly to them? Russian leaders may have their reasons for doing what they’re doing — solidarity with Russian-leaning people in the Donbas, fear of NATO, the example of Kosovo, all of which I will look at in later pages — yet none of these justify the use of extreme and prolonged violence. And none of this violence will make Ukrainians feel friendly toward them.

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The Global South

While the Russian novels of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov help us see into illiberal Russian systems and colonial mentalities, the postcolonial novels I look at help us see through Russia’s claim to be a champion of the Global South. I should note that by postcolonial I mean after the colonial period or critiquing a colonial power, system, or mentality. For instance, I consider Graham Greene’s The Quiet American as postcolonial. While it was written at the time the French were leaving Vietnam, it critiques both the French and the American interference in that country.

I’ll use Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously, Greene’s The Quiet American, and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to compare the Ukraine Crisis to Cold War scenarios in Europe, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and I’ll use Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shame, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories to explore southern histories and paradigms. All of these novels will be used to understand the Global South and to see why the Kremlin’s rhetoric isn’t nearly as glorious as it pretends to be.

Part 4. Puppet Masters and Part 5. Fearless Leaders may seem like deviations in time and space from the Ukraine War, yet they give new context to the bizarre spectacle in which the Kremlin presents itself as a champion of the Global South against the evil West.

Note

Global South is an odd yet helpful term. As the blue line on the following map shows, much of the Global South lies north of the equator, and some of the Global North lies south:

Demographically this is even more the case. North of the equator we find the following Global South countries: Mexico (128 million), Nigeria (223 million), Egypt (112), Ethiopia (125), Pakistan (243), India (1,425), Bangladesh (169), Vietnam (100), and the Philippines (113). The only Global South countries south of the equator with a population over 100 million are Brazil (210), DR Congo (102) and Indonesia (278).

(I might also note that The West is an odd term, given that its component countries circumnavigate the globe, including the Americas, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the eastern fringe of Asia. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines are aligned militarily with the West, and some human geographers consider these Far Eastern countries to have important things in common with the West).

Yet Global South does get at the basic idea of a swath of countries that are generally 1. to the south, 2. less wealthy, and 3. resist falling into the orbit of very powerful countries or regions to the north — principally the U.S, Europe, Russia, and China. For this reason I suggest not including China as a Global South nation. The use of Global South also avoids the potentially negative terms Third World and developing.

One alternative term for this group of countries is non-aligned. Like Cold War, this term invites immediate comparison with the post-WW II period. This may be helpful, especially if one sees China as a Global North country. Yet it may also create some confusion: just as there are key differences between Cold War I and today’s Cold War II, so there are key differences in degrees of state-to-state alignment, especially for Vietnam, Eastern Europe, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia.

Alternatively, if one wants a more geographical and poetic name — as suggested by my light blue line on the map above — the Central Wave or the Middle Fin might be appropriate.

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The Colonial Map

The Kremlin argues that it’s liberating Ukraine — and fighting for the Global South — yet it’s not hard to see through this rhetoric. Like General Westmoreland and George W. Bush, who ripped apart Vietnam and Iraq, the Kremlin is ripping apart Ukraine. It’s obvious that this type of violence is similar to the brutal colonialism aimed at the Global South in the past, yet the U.S. and Russia tell everyone that they’re in fact liberating the world.

I don’t mean to equate what the Americans did in Vietnam and Iraq with what the Russians are doing in Ukraine. What the Americans did was extreme and in my opinion unjustified, yet it wasn’t colonial. By this I mean that the Americans didn’t try to take over the two countries and run them like their colonial possessions. Only in a vague sense, and only in a sense that ignores American isolationism, can we say that they wanted Vietnam or Iraq to be a part of an enduring Empire.

It’s hard to get at an equivalent situation, but as a Canadian I see what Russia is doing to Ukraine as a colonial, fratricidal betrayal, much as it would be if the U.S. were to invade Canada, its closest neighbour in terms of shared history, economy, language, and culture. As the old story of Cain and Abel attests, killing a brother is a horrible, primal sin. Killing a brother nation is the same sin writ large.

The U.S. has no intention of invading Canada (although Trump recently suggested it would make a nice 51st state…). Yet the U.S. did invade Vietnam and Iraq, two nations that the Kremlin is very quick to mention in its diatribes against the West and the U.S. In these diatribes the Kremlin portrays the U.S. as the puppet-master behind the actions of the Western nations. It’s therefore important 1. not to play into the Kremlin’s game by downplaying what went on in Vietnam and Iraq, and 2. not to let the Kremlin use the facts to justify their unjustifiable war on Ukraine.

It’s true that American violence in Vietnam was more lethal than Russian violence in Ukraine: the Vietnamese contend that three million Vietnamese died over the course of the war. Also, the American invasion of Iraq led to a comparable amount of internal division: it unleashed the Sunni/Shia tensions and it allowed for the rise of ISIS. Yet the U.S. didn’t aim to take over the lands and run them, not in the same colonial way that the Spanish did in Mexico starting in the early 16th century, or like the British did in the Indian subcontinent from 1600 to 1947. Or — and this is my point — like the Russians have done all the way from Ukraine to Kamchatka, and all the way from the 16th century to 2024.

The Russians may have allowed the Soviet Union to split up in the 1990s, yet the Kremlin soon reverted to their old colonial aims and strong-arm tactics, first in Chechnya, then in Georgia and Ukraine.

Because of their colonial expansionism, combined with the fact that they’re expanding into a country that 1. borders Europe and 2. wants to be a part of Europe, what the Russians are doing is far more dangerous to global peace and survival than what the Americans did in either Vietnam or Iraq. The Russian invasion directly infringes on the international, Western, United Nations value of self-determination, although according to the Russian leaders it’s the West who have infringed on their inherent right to control Ukraine. Yet seen in the light of colonial history, this supposed right is a misguided colonial privilege and abuse.

I spell this out because I want to clarify my political position from the start: I’m deeply critical of any colonial stance. I also want to distinguish my political view from my overall aim, which isn’t to apportion blame but to use literature as a lens to see into the geopolitical, personal, and cultural aspects of the present crisis.

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“I Hate War”

While the death of young men in battle may be accepted by the Kremlin as an inevitable price of what I call their special colonial operation, there’s a long literary tradition that argues that this price is too high. Even in the Greek epic story about the Battle of Troy, where the glory of battle is a prevalent theme, a deep critique of war is there too. This starts when Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter so that the Greek ships will sail swiftly to Troy. It ends when Achilles drags Prince Hector’s dead body all over the battle field, after which King Priam comes to Achilles secretly. The two enemies then lament the division, destruction, and futility of war.

One of the most moving instances of the combination of poetry & war is the case of Wilfred Owen. A World War I English poet, Owen wrote about the horror of combat, after which he died in battle a week before Armistice. Owen argues, skillfully, within the rhythm and rhyme of poetry, that we shouldn’t teach our children “the old lie” — that is, the idea that battle is a glorious affair. In his 1918 poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen refuses to finish Horace’s Latin phrase, dulce et decorum est (“sweet and proper it is”) until the end his poem, after he has shown how bitter and unfitting war is for the soldier in battle. At the end of the poem the phrase Dulce et decorum est / pro patria mori (“sweet and proper it is / to die for your country”) is preceded by three words: “the old lie.”

Owen’s less-famous poem, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (1917), might be seen as the next stage in this grim process: the funeral. Owen’s dark and poetic vision of the soldier’s funeral isn’t pervaded by a glorious notion of afterlife. Such a notion is for him as illusory and self-serving as Spenser’s claim to write the name of his mistress in the heavens (in his sonnet cycle Amoretti Spenser tells his mistress, “My verse your virtues rare shall eternize, / And in the heavens write your glorious name”). Instead of seeing soothing candles and hearing heavenly music, the attendees at the soldier’s funeral hear “the monstrous anger of the guns.” That is, they hear the very things that their brothers and sons heard before being blasted to death.

Graham Greene gets at the horror of war in a much more intimate way in his 1955 novel The Quiet American. Coming upon a dead Vietnamese mother and child, he writes:

They were very clearly dead: a small neat clot of blood on the woman’s forehead, and the child might have been sleeping. He was about six years old and he lay like an embryo in the womb with his little bony knees drawn up. ‘Mal chance,’ the lieutenant said. He bent down and turned the child over. He was wearing a holy medal round his neck, and I said to myself, ‘The juju doesn’t work.’ There was a gnawed piece of loaf under his body. I thought, ‘I hate war.’

Like Greene’s The Quiet American, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five helps us see the present Ukraine crisis within the framework of ❧ the insanity of war, ❧ the brutality of aerial bombardment, and ❧ the geopolitics of the Cold War. Vonnegut understood the logic of fighting Hitler and (later) the Soviets, yet his 1968 novel shows that he didn’t understand the demonization of the average German or Russian. In one moving scene, he has the POWs come up from the rubble of devastated Dresden, only to find that the only place they can eat or sleep is the inn of a normal, decent German family. The parallel to Mary and Joseph being given a place to sleep is subtle yet palpable. In an earlier scene, the protagonist Billy is wounded and doped up on morphine in a prison hospital. The prison has a barbed-wire fence dividing Western and Russian POWs.

[Billy] suddenly found a door, which opened, let him reel out into the prison night. Billy was loony with time-travel and morphine. He delivered himself to a barbed-wire fence which snagged him in a dozen places. Billy tried to back away from it, but the barbs wouldn’t let go. So Billy did a silly little dance with the fence, taking a step this way, then that way, then returning to the beginning again.

A Russian, himself out in the night to take a leak, saw Billy dancing — from the other side of the fence. He came over to the curious scarecrow, tried to talk with it gently, asked it what country it was from. The scarecrow paid no attention, went on dancing. So the Russian undid the snags one by one, and the scarecrow danced off into the night again without a word of thanks.

The Russian waved to him, and called after him in Russian, “Good-bye.”

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Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shame, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories also deal with the rhetoric and insanity of war. In addition, they supply us with two paradigms, the Sufi conference of birds and the Hindu ocean of stories, both of which ❧ apply to geo-politics and ❧ give us insight into culture and religion in the Global South.

Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously does both of the above: it helps us see into the cultural and political situation of Cold War Indonesia in 1965 (which goes from simmering authoritarianism to apocalyptic violence), and it also supplies us with a southern paradigm, the Wayang shadow puppet theatre, which Indonesians use to explore and evaluate politics. Koch’s use of the Wayang can help us understand ❧ the larger context of the Cold War, ❧ the way Indonesians use religion and art to interpret politics, and ❧ the way puppetry and shadow worlds can help us to come to terms with the fact that much of what we try to understand — Who are the puppet-masters? How do they operate? What are their plans? — remains behind closed doors, beyond our sight-line, behind the screen.

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I see each of the nine novels as a unified, contextualized world that we can use to understand our own world. Each one gives us an imaginative yet realistic vision of alternatives, as well as a critical distance from today’s world of difficulty and pain. The novels of Gogol, Bulgakov, Vonnegut, and Rushdie also contain deep comic elements, which can help us deal with the present war in Ukraine, which might otherwise make us boil up in anger or break down in tears.

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Next: 🍏 Rivers & Apples

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