Vote For Vysotsky, Or Pushkin, Or....
From The Boston Globe (July 23, 2008):
"THE LATEST controversy over voting in Russia has nothing to do with rigged presidential or parliamentary elections. In fact, the only political figures involved in this dispute are long dead - and yet they continue to haunt Russia's present. The vote in question is an Internet vote for the greatest Russian in history, sponsored by a program on the state-owned Rossiya television channel. Two historical figures are vying for the top spot: communist dictator and mass murderer Joseph Stalin and Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II, shot by the communists with his wife and children in 1918.
Twelve winners, picked from 50 names selected in the previous round, will be profiled in a TV series and will face a vote by the audience. In this round of the vote, much to the organizers' dismay, two fallen idols of the defunct Soviet regime emerged in the lead. Initially, Stalin was followed by Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the communist revolution, while Nicholas II ranked fourth, after the singer/poet Vladimir Vysotsky. In mid-July, Nicholas briefly surged to first place, then fell to second; on Sunday, Stalin had 441,492 votes to Nicholas's 429,403.
It should be noted that the vote is in no way representative. For one thing, most Russians still have no Internet access. The website also allows unlimited votes from the same computer.
And yet Stalin's dominance cannot be dismissed as a mere spam attack. It is telling that, even after the negative publicity in Russia about the voting results, there has been no massive effort to boost the vote for any liberal candidate (such as scientist/human rights activist Andrei Sakharov). The only pro-democracy figure with a chance to make the top 12 is Boris Yeltsin, currently with about 100,000 votes. Meanwhile, in real polls, 50 to 60 percent of Russians rate Stalin's role in history as mainly positive.
Stalin, in tandem with Hitler, may have been the closest the world ever had to a true devil on earth: a man who sent millions to their deaths before firing squads, in the Gulag camps, or in wastelands where whole families of peasants were deported and who relished sadistic games with victims he knew personally. A poster on the forum of the daily Izvestia noted that, given how many Russians Stalin slaughtered, for Russians to vote for him as the greatest man would be akin to Hitler being awarded that title - not by the Germans, but by the Israelis.
Why, then, is this monster somewhat popular? Partly because he is credited with defeating Nazi Germany in World War II, one of Russia's few genuinely proud achievements in the 20th century. (In fact, Russia's horrific losses in the war can be blamed largely on Stalin's failure to prepare for the German invasion and his prewar purges which decimated the Russian military's officer corps.) Many Russians also see him as the man who turned the Russian state into a leviathan feared around the world - even if it was equally feared by Russians themselves.
Almost as sad is the emergence of Nicholas II - the incompetent ruler whose attempts to hold on to autocracy plunged Russia into revolution - as the main alternative to Stalin. As columnist Leonid Radzikhovsky noted caustically on the liberal EJ.ru website, "What a magnificent Russian choice: a great butcher or a total loser." He also notes that the top three vote-getters - Stalin, Nicholas, and Lenin - are, each in his own way, symbols of an autocratic, paternalistic state.
The high rating of Vysotsky, the poet/singer, has a less obvious symbolic aspect. Vysotsky, who died in 1980 at 42, is the only person in the top 12 associated with protest against official authority - an underground singer shut out by the Soviet cultural establishment in the 1960s and '70s, but worshiped by the public. But his voice of protest belongs to an era in which political resistance was futile; it is the voice of a rebel who can at most express his revulsion and despair at the injustices and humiliations of life around him, but has no hope of changing anything."
The author, Cathy Young (whose innocence of Islam has been mocked by this very site, but recently she seems to be staying safely away from that topic, and is back at her old export-import trade, dealing in articles of Rossica) -- misses a bit about Vysotsky that readers need to know. He was not an "underground singer" -- in fact, he appeared as an actor on a widely-watched Soviet television series. He also acted at the Taganka which, though directed by the dissidentisant Yuri Liubimov, was still a major theatre, not a place to find an unknown "underground singer." He was in dozens of Soviet movies. He was not unknown, an "underground singer," but widely known, all over Russia, to millions, and tomorrow, when I put up what I had long ago planned, one will get a better sense of his fame, and of the magnitude of the felt loss at his death.
He was a bard who lived bardically. He was uncompromising in his principles. He disliked cruelty, and also its handmaiden, stupidity. He was brave. He had a famous love affair, and then a famous marriage, to the beautiful French actress, of Russian émigré origin, Marina Vlady, with all the attendant incense that wafted to Moscow all the way from the Parisian cathedral on the rue Daru. He died young, at the age of 42. All of that comes into play, along with his songs, and his unforgettable rasping delivery of his songs, in the minds of those voting. No doubt, if you want to be psephologically cunning, you should vote only for one of those already among the highest-polling candidates, and that means, by appalled elimination, Vysotsky.
But here's another idea.
One Jewish refugee, Yakov Smushkin, who had endured the Soviet Union, and who was finally let out in late 1972, was waiting for entry into the United States at a H.I.A.S. (Hebrew Immigration Aid Society) camp at Ladispoli, or possibly at Ostia, outside Rome, where so many other refugees, each with his own tragic family history, also passed through. To Westerners he, Smushkin, would introduce himself (so a friend of mine later told me), self-deprecatingly and comically (for what else could he do, how else could he have endured everything?), with the following couplet: "Lenin, Stalin/Pushkin, Smushkin." And that name, to me, the very name "Smushkin" became, like the "Finkelmayer" in Felix Roziner's "A Certain Finkelmayer," symbolic, a Russian or Russian-Jewish Everyman, with a painful past, a history of being persecuted, and when the Germans came murdered, and then threatened, put-upon, trampled-upon, scorned by the powerful, yet still resilient, still trying not to yield or to give up -- a name also perfect because of its almost-fulfillment of the Yiddish deprecative “shm” reduplicative, made widely known in England (it has long been known in America) from the title Dennis Potter used for one of his television dramas: “Oedipus, Shmoedipus" -- which in the original joke is followed by "so long as he loves his mother."
Incidentally, the same American friend of mine who told me about Smushkin also told me that this same man, who had trained Soviet Olympic skaters, managed to return to the profession in which he had been trained, at the highest level (and the Soviets took very seriously the training of their athletes), and does so to this very day. If I wanted to be trained in skating, I'd certainly try to do so with Yakov Smushkin.
So what about a vote for Pushkin?
And what about voting for a symbolic Russian or Russian-Jewish put-upon, trampled-upon, scorned and yet resilient, Everyman, with the name so touchingly comical to a non-Russian ear, Smushkin?
Don't vote for "Lenin/Stalin."
Don't vote for Nicholas, or for that matter Rasputin-enthralled Alexandra.
No.
If you must vote because even though you recognize that the whole thing is a meaningless farce (after all, there is no limit on how many times some unrepentant Communist, or for that matter monarchist, many of them of the well-known “bej zhidov, spasi Rossiyu” school of political thought, can vote), you still can’t help recognizing that others do not see it as such, and therefore if a farce it is not a meaningless one, and you’ve just got to take part, so as to somehow make it less farcical and less dangerous and less horrible, and so you decide that yes, you too will vote. So go ahead.
Vote for Pushkin
Or,
Vote for Smushkin.
Early, and often.
