The Obscurity of the Russian Soul

with Nikita Petrov

War has a way of testing abstract principles in all-too-concrete ways. It’s common to use the word “we” to indicate our belonging to a national or ethnic group. But the conditions under which we feel comfortable saying “we” may change, and the bonds of affiliation we feel may weaken or threaten to break. My Creative Director, Nikita Petrov, is Russian. In the wake of the war in Ukraine, he’s been asking some deep, difficult questions about those conditions and about those bonds.

How do we gauge our individual relationship to large-scale geopolitical concerns? We can’t lay the actions of government on the shoulders of the ordinary citizen. And yet, in a democracy, government action requires the implicit consent of the voters, and what are “the voters” except an aggregate of individual citizens? When things go wrong, as when, for example, the state engages in unprovoked military aggression, we may be angry not only at the military action itself but also at the fact “we” are the ones who did it, that it was done “in our name,” no matter how monstrous we find it. We feel, in some way, responsible.

One might think that undemocratic conditions would change things. Why should any citizen feel responsible for the actions of a government they never had a hand in legitimating? And yet, it turns out the matter isn’t so simple. In this excerpt from our recent conversation, Nikita and I work through the problem of responsibility under conditions of political repression. As he points out, it is difficult to know the “true” Russian attitude toward the invasion of Ukraine because the “Russian soul”—the character of the Russian people—has been obscured, existing almost entirely under more-or-less repressive conditions for a very long time. Without democratic expression, he suggests, we can’t truly know what it is Russians want. But he would very much like to find out, and so would I.

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NIKITA PETROV: I'm trying to think. So you've mentioned the word “shame” again, and I'm trying to think about that feeling in my life right now. So the feeling of shame, it seems like it would have to be connected with the notion of responsibility. It's more obvious that shame is warranted if it's something that I did or didn't do than if I'm thinking about somebody else who did or didn't do something.

I'm thinking about the Russian people, and I think I have two different sort of shades of that feeling, depending on whether I'm talking about, let's say, the supporters of the war or the supporters of the regime. Those were people who I've never agreed with and, in my very modest way, tried to—I don't know what the word is—fight or something? And then there's a shame that I feel for me, my actions or inactions, and then the failure of the people who were with me at, let's say, protests in Russia, trying to gain political agency, trying to get the right to vote for who we want to vote.

And we failed. And so I feel stronger about that. Like maybe I could have done more or maybe we collectively could have done more. Maybe if we argued with each other a little less and and were able to unify and present a more unified front, the situation would've been different. And I don't know how to phrase the question.

GLENN LOURY: I was just going to confess ignorance about Russian history of the last 30 or 40 years to be able to know exactly. And I was going to ask you whether you had an overarching narrative of the sort that I sketched, where I start with slavery and I say the plight of a people enslaved who are adversely affected by that enslavement and who are then freed and have the challenge before them. And I'm seeing myself here all the way into the twenty-first century as being at the tail end of this drama of the progression and transformation of the social status and self-understanding of the descendants of slaves, of whom I count myself one. And whether there was anything like that for you about Russia. Because if so, it would seem to be relevant.

Yeah. There is that narrative, though I'm not sure if I'm gonna be able to formulate it. The—what what should I call it, what should I say—the uncharitable way of presenting that narrative that happens sometimes, people say things like, that is the reason we haven't been able—and by “we” I mean both sort of the strain of Russian society of which I feel more a part of than Russian society broadly, people who wanted to have democracy or their rights affirmed—we failed to gain political agency.

And then I could argue Russians as a nation don't have political agency, because even if you support the regime, you're not really asked about that. It's not that people go to the polling station to really make the decision, that the polling station has been prepared for them so that they can only choose one. I'm simplifying, but that's the case. And then so the uncharitable interpretation would be, we've never learned to take responsibility for our society, because we were slaves or serfs in the nineteenth century, then the Soviet Union had its own kind of serfdom, with people being jailed and sent to work in the camps. Or even if you live in a city and you're a citizen that has the same rights as your neighbor, you don't have a whole lot of rights and freedoms, and so you're not making these decisions for the society collectively.

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And then that system falls apart in 1991, and we had a very short window of trying to assert ourselves, the people to assert ourselves as the decision makers here. And part of the reason we failed, that narrative would go, is we haven't had this experience and we didn't take that opportunity to retain the freedoms that sort of fell into our lap. The Soviet Union fell apart not because the Russians or the Soviet people rose up and said to be done with this. It happened sort of without our input. And so then what? Then the question is, how do you go from this position of submission to one where you actually take charge?

Okay, I'm gonna ask an irreverent question. And I apologize in advance. I intend no offense. Here's the question I have in the back of my mind, and my ignorance will be revealed even in my asking of it. And, again, I apologize.

So one story is that these forces were imposed upon the Russian people. There is the pre-Revolution, pre-1917 order, feudalistic and whatever. There is the domination of the post-revolutionary government, the Soviet Union, and it's anti-democratic, authoritarian, autocratic. There's the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it's a moment and the moment passes and we have what we have now that has emerged.

I read some of those novels that you sent over here to me. There's all the corruption, all the deadening of the soul, all of the decadence and the meaninglessness. And it's like, underneath there's the heartbeat of the Russian people. There's the soul, there's the beauty, and it can't get out. It's being repressed. So that's one story.

But a reaction to that story could be that's way, way, way too simple. That's romantic. I don't know if the demos governed in Russia, that it would be all flowers on the streets and all the tanks would be retired and there'd be no repression. There'd be no hatreds. There'd be no nationalist fervor. I don't know that. I don't know that the soul of the Russian people is pure and that that purity has only been repressed by one or another external force. I don't know that at all. I know little about the soul of the Russian people, but why should I believe that it's pure? And again, I mean no disrespect.

Yeah. I guess the way I feel about it is I would like to discover what the Russian soul would look like expressed in a state that there's this connection, this sort of decision-making power on the part of the Russian people. There's another angle to approach from, which is the phrase that comes to mind. This is Dovlatov, a Soviet writer who then immigrated to the United States and I think died there. And he, in one of his columns, I think for a newspaper, like an immigrant newspaper in the US, said we—and this would be in the '80s, probably—he said, “[We continuously curse Comrade Stalin, and, naturally, with good reason. And yet I want to ask: who wrote the four million denunciations?]”

So, yeah, I don't have an answer to that, except that I would like to see what happens if Russian people have agency, political agency. Because as of now, I think we don't. Even with this war, there are a lot of supporters of this war in Russia, but they were still not making a decision.

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