Russia’s Yen to Rebuild a House of Cards

The ability to “read the play” is a quality often ascribed to successful politicians, businessmen and sportsmen. The term refers to the ability to predict events and then to take an advantageous position in expectation of the prediction coming to fruition. In the sporting arena it is best seen in champion tennis players like Lew Hoad whose anticipation allowed him simply to “materialise behind an opponent’s ball” (as my brother Peter once neatly put it), and modern Aboriginal footballers with their uncanny foreknowledge of the way an oblong ball is about to bounce.

I was thinking about reading the play (or if you like, prescience) recently when reading the wonderful  memoir Last Boat to Astrakhan by Robert Haupt (left), an Australian writer and traveller who he died at the age of 49 just before this book was published and who spent five years in Russia between 1990 and 1996. Towards the end of this time, he took a boat trip down the Volga River from Moscow to the ancient trading city of Astrakhan, where the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. The boat trip provides the backdrop to the book’s observations on Russia and Russians.

I found it especially interesting because I have always been fascinated by Russian history, especially the history of the 20^th century. The years covered by Haupt’s book coincided with the demise of the Soviet empire and the start of Russia’s troubled journey towards democracy. ‘The barriers to progress,’ Haupt observed, ‘were as they were when Gogol named them: roads and idiots’. Nikolai Gogol, the 19^th century Russian novelist and playwright had asked “Why does a people so blessed with intelligence remain in thrall to fools? Why has a country that spans one-sixth of the world’s land surface remained so short of roads?  Do the idiots rule because the roads aren’t there, or is it the want of roads that put idiots in charge?”

Russian history (not unlike history elsewhere) is replete with examples of fools in charge, but in Russia the fools very often seemed to be exceptionally dangerous and ruthless. Haupt touches on the failures of the Romanovs (who for almost 300 years presided over a country in which the bulk of the population were either serfs or counts), but provides his best insights into the Bolshevik and Communist eras, as well as the tragic consequences for ordinary Russians of the collapse of the USSR. (These include, as we all know now, the advent of Vladimir Putin).

One of the things I like about Haupt’s writing is his wry humour. For example, he notes that the ugliness of Stalinist architecture is fortuitously counterbalanced by the inferiority of Stalinist concrete.

There is also a superb example of “reading the play”. Haupt recounts a conversation between the writer Andrei Sinyavski (right) and a colleague at the Institute for World Literature in Moscow, some time in the early 1960s. Sinyavski believed his colleague was something of a liberal, and this encouraged him to speak freely. In Sinyavski’s words:

…one day I told him how hard I found it to live without freedom, and what a bad effect the lack of freedom had on Russia and Soviet culture. I argued that the Soviet State would not necessarily collapse if it lifted certain restrictions in the cultural sphere. If it allowed abstract art, if it published Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, and so on. If anything, a slight thaw would benefit Russian culture and the Soviet State!           

‘Of course the State won’t founder because of such trifles’ said my colleague. ‘But you are forgetting the effect all this would have on Poland’.

‘What does Poland have to do with it,’ I asked, perplexed, ‘when the point is they should publish Pasternak in Moscow’. 

‘If we ourselves, at the centre, allow a relaxation in the cultural sphere, then in Poland, where it’s freer than here, there will be an even greater drift towards freedom. If a thaw starts in Moscow, Poland will secede from the Eastern Bloc, from the Soviet Union.’ 

“So let Poland secede!” I said flippantly, “Let it live the way it wants!” 

‘But after Poland, Czechoslovakia would secede, and after Czechoslovakia, the entire east bloc would break up.’ 

“So let it break up,” I said “Russia would be only better off”. 

But my interlocutor saw further. “After the East Bloc, the Baltics would go – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia!” 

‘So let them, what do we need these forcible annexations for anyway?’ 

“But after the Baltics, the Caucasus and the Ukraine would go! What do you want? An end to Russian power? For your Pasternak you would let all of Russia crumble, Russia which is now the greatest empire on earth?”

Thirty years before it occurred, Sinyavski’s colleague had read the fall of the dominos (the play) with uncanny accuracy, and he foretold the way in which the ultimate play (the collapse of the USSR) would unfold. It is also possible to read into this story the inevitability of the Putin attempt to rebuild the empire, with Ukraine being the first “reverse domino” as it were.

Haupt refers to the Soviet philosophy of cultural and intellectual repression as “the iron logic of empire”, and recounts how Sinyavski himself suffered from it, being sentenced in 1966 to seven years hard labour for publishing anti-Soviet writings abroad. Times had changed. In the 1930s, the Communists would have got away with this, and no-one would have heard of Sinyavski ever again. In the 1970s Sinyavski became an international emblem of Breshnevian repression following the Krushchevian relaxation. To acute observers this reinforced the famous line of de Tocqueville that ‘there is no more dangerous moment for a repressive regime than the one at which it begins to reform itself’. 

In Haupt’s view, and looking at it from the Soviet perspective, the most significant “error” made by the USSR was that they did not send armoured divisions storming into Poland and crushing Solidarity as once they had stormed into Hungary and Czechoslovakia and crushed the embryo nationalist and socialist movements in those countries. Once Poland had been “allowed to get away with it” the house of cards started its inevitable collapse.  Today, the situation is reversed. Having been allowed to get away with his annexation of the Crimea, Putin was confident he would also be allowed to get away with annexing all of Ukraine. Whether he will remains to be seen.

Turning from politics, one of the saddest stories in the book is about the Volga River itself. Once one of the world’s greatest and busiest commercial and domestic waterways, its management was progressively abandoned during the last years of the USSR. It became so silted up that ferries like the one on which Haupt travelled can no longer navigate its shallows, and the system of lights and markers was allowed to decay beyond the point at which they are fixable.

Returning from Astrakhan on the voyage described in this book, the ferry finds itself on a stretch of river at night and with the navigation lights turned off. It takes the wrong channel and runs aground. The next day a tug is called to tow it off, but fails and the passengers are offloaded. Haupt sees this as a parable for the new Russian State: freed from communism, Russia has taken a dark stream, and has run aground. Tugs struggle to redress the calamity, while the Volga flows on……

Haupt is more of a historian and an observer than a “reader of the play” and he does not go on to predict the advent of the new Russia, with the ex-KGB Colonel Putin firmly in control of the government, the Mafia in control of commerce and the Chechins in revolt. But he does foreshadow the problems with environmental degradation and the failure of the environmental managers, which may well turn out to be one of the greatest legacies of the Soviet era.

Roger Underwood lives in Perth and is a frequent contributor