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[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] The New Russia
Mar. 17th, 2003 12:01 amRecently, a friend pointed me to an article in The New Yorker, by Gary Shteyngart called "Teen Spirit." It begins by considering the rise of Tatu (the now moderately-famous Russian duo of teen lesbians singing songs to their mutual love, the world's incomprehension, and so on, in tight-fitting outfits), but becomes a broad-ranging survey of the situation of modern Russia and youth culture. Three representative paragraph-long quotes:
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The Russia that Shteyngart--himself Russian-born, a Soviet Jewish expatriate from Leningrad whose parents had emigrated to the West when he was six--describes is far from the Russia that was once naively hoped for in the early 1990s after Communism and the Soviet Union dissolved. It is pervaded by violence at all levels of society, it is riven by innumerable divides (economic, ethnic, sexual, geographic), it is governed by a man (Putin) whose regime uses the same patriotic language and mechanisms of state oppression as Soviet regimes save to much less effect, and it has absolutely no governing ideals apart from short-term pleasure seeking in a vaguely nihilistic context. It's certainly an interesting society, in the way that any society so radically mutating is interesting, though I have to agree with Shteyngart that it seems that "the best part of the New Russia is the fact that you can leave it." (49)
It struck me that Russia is a good place for cyberpunk, whether as a source environment for aspiring writers or as a real-life prototype of the Sprawl. You have the massively dysfunctional economy and society; you have the corrupt, mildly oppressive but generally ineffectual government; you have the great national and multinational corporations which dominate life, one way or another; you have the looming military presence and brush-fire wars on the periphery; you have the massive environmental catastrophes, produced by pollution chemical or radiological, created by carelessness, aggravated by non-attention; you have the nihilistic search for pleasure, the promiscuity and the multiple partners and the looming undercurrent of illicit desire coupled with real-life STD's; and, last but not least, you have the advanced technology available to whoever can afford it and/or whoever wants it, seeping from the high ranks of the economic and political powers and across national frontiers, for God knows what ends.
Perhaps more to the academic point, this evening while I was at the Town & Country I remembered Wallerstein's observation that, in revolutionary eras, it's the semiperipheries that see the most radical changes. After the First World War, for instance, Austria-Hungary split into a half-dozen successor states, Russia was taken over by the Communists, Poland tried to emerge as a European Great Power, China went through its revolution and warlord periods, Japan embarked on imperial expansion, and Mexico underwent first its post-Diaz civil war then the early radical years of PRI rule. Russia isn't Canada's future; too much differs. But the world's?
When I arrived in Moscow on the first day of August, the city was under the heaviest haze it had seen in thirty years, the result of fires in the surrounding peat bogs. The capital, with its goofy Soviet cars and apocalyptic Stalinist architecture, looked like 'Blade Runner' on a budget, and seemed to be sliding out of time, on the way to someplace not too pleasant, yet thoroughly its own. The growth of Russia's economy, such as it is, is concentrated almost entirely in the four hundred square miles occupied by the city of Moscow, where more than four-fifths of Russia's financial resources, as well as much foreign investment, is based. Yet, a sleek Ikea, hudidled beneath a low-rise skyline of Soviet apartment blocks, is surrounded by signs directed less fortunate shoppers to the House of Romanian Furniture. The average Russian pension was recently raised, with much fanfare, to about fifty dollars a month. (43-44)
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Yet no-one can accused two giddy teen-age would-be lesbians of following the herd. One of the most debilitating aspects of the New Russia is its popular music, a great deal of which sounds like the soundtrack for a mandatory calisthenics workout. By contrast, Tatu's songs, and their videos--which are played frequently on MTV Russia and are now getting airplay on music channels across Western Europe and the United States--are extreme, if in a clumsy, heartfelt way. In the video that established them, "Ya Soshla S Uma" ("I Have Lost My Mind," released in English as "All the Things She Said"), the singers, dressed in school uniforms, smooch and caress behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire (and beneath a torrent of sexy rain) while shocked older Russians look on. In another, Julia packs sticks of dynamite to blow up the half-naked Lena for kissing a boy on a carrousel while curious kindergarteners watch. In a third, the lovelorn girls hijack a truck at the airport and knock down an innocent road worker. The girls are most proud of their new video, "Prostye Dvizheniya" ("Simple Motions"), in which Julia is supposed to be masturbating with Lena in mind, although all you see is her contorted face. She looks like a wounded otter. (44) (
and
On the way out of [liberal Weekly Magazine]'s offices, [editor Masha] Lipman told me to be wary of Paratroopers Day. The city was full of drunken belligerents in blue-and-white striped uniforms, stumbling through the metro and crawling down the street. The paratroopers had started a major fracas with an Azeri fruit seller, and by the time the holiday was over they had accidentally killed one of their own with a grenade launcher in St. Petersburg, nearly drowned several of their members in a fountain in Moscow's Park of Culture, and given a rousing sing-along to Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" at a local airfield. I walked past Moscow's new office buildings, ugly takes on neo-classical motifs, as madly inebriated paratroopers passed by, on their way home, I hoped, to a comfortable couch from the House of Romanian Furniture. (48)
The Russia that Shteyngart--himself Russian-born, a Soviet Jewish expatriate from Leningrad whose parents had emigrated to the West when he was six--describes is far from the Russia that was once naively hoped for in the early 1990s after Communism and the Soviet Union dissolved. It is pervaded by violence at all levels of society, it is riven by innumerable divides (economic, ethnic, sexual, geographic), it is governed by a man (Putin) whose regime uses the same patriotic language and mechanisms of state oppression as Soviet regimes save to much less effect, and it has absolutely no governing ideals apart from short-term pleasure seeking in a vaguely nihilistic context. It's certainly an interesting society, in the way that any society so radically mutating is interesting, though I have to agree with Shteyngart that it seems that "the best part of the New Russia is the fact that you can leave it." (49)
It struck me that Russia is a good place for cyberpunk, whether as a source environment for aspiring writers or as a real-life prototype of the Sprawl. You have the massively dysfunctional economy and society; you have the corrupt, mildly oppressive but generally ineffectual government; you have the great national and multinational corporations which dominate life, one way or another; you have the looming military presence and brush-fire wars on the periphery; you have the massive environmental catastrophes, produced by pollution chemical or radiological, created by carelessness, aggravated by non-attention; you have the nihilistic search for pleasure, the promiscuity and the multiple partners and the looming undercurrent of illicit desire coupled with real-life STD's; and, last but not least, you have the advanced technology available to whoever can afford it and/or whoever wants it, seeping from the high ranks of the economic and political powers and across national frontiers, for God knows what ends.
Perhaps more to the academic point, this evening while I was at the Town & Country I remembered Wallerstein's observation that, in revolutionary eras, it's the semiperipheries that see the most radical changes. After the First World War, for instance, Austria-Hungary split into a half-dozen successor states, Russia was taken over by the Communists, Poland tried to emerge as a European Great Power, China went through its revolution and warlord periods, Japan embarked on imperial expansion, and Mexico underwent first its post-Diaz civil war then the early radical years of PRI rule. Russia isn't Canada's future; too much differs. But the world's?
