Guilt and the new barbarism in Putin's Russia
Viktor Erofeev, a critical anti-war voice since Crimea, presented his latest work. In Russia, repressing guilt has become automatic. The collapse of the Soviet Union is one example and the Orthodox Church, which never apologised for collaborating with the atheist regime, is another. Khrushchev words about Russia's wars in Georgia and Ukraine appear prophetic; meanwhile, the opposition abroad is failing.
Russian author Viktor Erofeev (Yerofeyev), one of the most significant figures in post-Soviet Russian literature, presented his latest book, The New Barbarism (Novoye Varvarstvo): A Fictional Novel About Russia's Guilt, in Prague. The writer, who has lived in Berlin since 2022, has disapproved of the Kremlin's aggressive policies since the annexation of Crimea.
The book is a reflection on the contemporary consciousness of Russians and its historical and psychological roots, but also on that eternal essence of the national character that becomes relevant today, marking the rhythm of our days, "of the eternal wild in the Russian soul, the eternal wildness."
Erofeev begins with a parabolic story about his grandmother's cup, a symbol of Russia's temperament: “My grandmother, Anastasia Nikandrovna, was a rosy-cheeked beauty, but even beauties sometimes break cups."
The blue cup slipped from her hands, fell to the kitchen floor, and broke, shattering into a thousand pieces, leaving only the broken handle, in a corner, in its useless integrity. Grandma never said, “I broke a cup.” Instead, she would say, “The cup broke.”
Imagine, “As if a cup could break on its own. Of course, it could have broken accidentally, and that's exactly what happened. I imagine my grandmother, desperate, in a fit of rage (she had a fiery temper), deliberately breaking the cup, but I don't imagine her deciding to apologise: ‘I broke the cup’.”
This broken cup embodies the Russian concept of guilt, and the categorical refusal to acknowledge it, perhaps because the punishment for a crime committed in Russia is never proportionate to the crime itself, but is always greater “like dough that overflows a pan, and overflows into existence.”
A cup in a poor family is a treasure, and “poverty is Russia's vice. If I destroy a family treasure, I have committed a family crime and will be punished for it, but I can't buy a new cup. I don't have the means. I shift the blame, if not onto someone else, then onto the cup itself. It slipped from my hands and shattered.”
The parable indicates that suppressing guilt from one's conscience has become automatic for Russians: because of a broken cup, they can lose everything. The accusation of breaking a cup can spill over into every other area of life.
It is no surprise that the terms "always" and "never" are often used in everyday Russian conversation. You never wash your hands properly before eating, you never greet my half of the family.
No one took the blame for the collapse of the Soviet Union, neither the party leaders nor the military, and Vladimir Putin often repeats that it was the "greatest tragedy of our time," even though no one knows who bankrupted the socialist economy, who wanted to jump into the arms race to surpass the West in the "Star Wars”, who invaded Afghanistan, generating an endless chain of resentment and revenge, from which radical Islamic movements, the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, the Islamic State wars, and much more followed.
The Orthodox Church has refused to apologise for its collaboration with the atheist regime, which used it to lull the conscience of the few remaining believers and to support its ideological propaganda internationally. Following the spontaneous, post-Soviet religious revival, the Church took control of the conscience of new believers, subordinating them again to state control.
Just recently, Patriarch Kirill boasted that "no other city in the world sees as many churches under construction as Moscow," where fewer people go to worship, and those who go usually do so to support the war.
According to Erofeev, “blaming others for one's own faults is Russia's national sport, because strong men are not inclined to apologise: taking responsibility for a broken cup is a fool’s thing."
The writer belongs to the "post-modernist" generation that emerged at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, someone who describes reality with utopian images that look to the past rather than to a science-fiction future.
As early as 1982, he had formed a literary group called Eps, from the initials of his surname, along with conceptualist Dmitry Prigov and the "prophet of Putinism" Vladimir Sorokin, author of The Day of the Oprichnik in 2006, in which he satirically exposed the course of Russian politics, transforming Putin into the cruel leader of the Guardians (Опричники, Oprichniks), Ivan the Terrible's guards, the cruel Malyuta Skuratov, in a Russia isolating itself from the rest of the world, raising new walls towards the West and rediscovering its Asian nature.
Today, Russians are asking him not to write more novels of this kind, lest reality critically outstrip fantasy.
The writer is distinguishable from the journalist who wants to "go out towards the public," while preferring instead to "lock himself in a room where he can criticise everything and everyone, because indoors he is free," a condition that harks back to the attitude of Soviet dissidents during the samizdat era, which is increasingly becoming relevant again.
Erofeev’s father had worked as Stalin's interpreter, and for this reason was later sent as a diplomat to Paris, where little Viktor grew up with the conviction that “Europe is my home, it's my free room,” without renouncing his Russian identity.
From this conviction, he drew the reasons for his nature as a writer, which is not that of "someone who wants to write, but someone who wants to experience every emotion... writers are born, not made."
In 1975, he graduated with a thesis that caused quite a stir in the Soviet Union, on the topic "Dostoevsky and French Existentialism." His first essay, at the age of 22, was on “The Marquis de Sade, Sadism, and the Twentieth Century,” published in the journal Questions of Literature (Вопросы литературы, Voprosy literatury) after lengthy discussions and reviews. It was accepted after the inclusion of a quote from Engels on sadism.
Speaking about his past experiences in Europe and the Soviet Union, Erofeev states that during Brezhnev's time, there was much more freedom than in Putin's Russia, because “under Brezhnev, there was no longer any attempt to build communism, but communism built luxury homes for high-ranking officials.”
Today, “we have fallen into the darkness of the night; there are no longer even analogies with the past, perhaps only with the last years of Stalin.” Before his book on Russia's Barbarism (Варварство, Varvarstvo), he had written The Great Gopnik (Великий Гопник, Velikij Gopnik), applying the Soviet definition of gopnik, “street thug”, to President Vladimir Putin, as a symbol of “the increasingly widespread stupidity of our time, from which the barbarism we live in arises.”
The gopniks use vulgar and brazen language, like Putin, who recently accused Europeans of being "pigs in Biden's court," and that Russia could never become part of Western civilisation. “There is no civilisation, only fetid degradation,” he repeated in various ways on 19 December “hotline” with citizens, answering children's questions as well.
On the other hand, barbarism is a recurring occurrence throughout history, from the times of ancient Greece and the dissolution of the Roman Empire, and today it is repeated in “absolute and universal” ways at the end of the ultra-liberal civilisation that emerged after the world wars.
The writer identifies the “Russian Guilt” in this, having ushered in the era of barbarism to which all other peoples are now adapting.
In the novel, Russian Guilt is personified by a young 32-year-old woman (the post-Soviet period), the narrator's wife, who “expresses love and hate without logical reason”, a figure embodying the nightmare Russians live today.
It hints to the time when Georgian dictator Joseph Stalin died in 1953, and his successor, Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev, appealed to the people to “at least try not to kill each other,” a prophetic aspiration given Russia’s recent wars in Georgia and Ukraine.
Since then, the succession of party leaders attempted to express some sense of humanity, from Brezhnev and Andropov to Chernenko to Gorbachev, while today “time is working against us, the hope is that what we are experiencing will end as soon as possible.”
It is said that "hope is the last to die," but according to Erofeev, in Russia "hope dies first."
Even the opposition abroad, which is currently bickering and hurling insults at each other, no longer represents a true intelligentsia; at most, it is “a well-educated middle class”, but then again, “it's not as if in France or elsewhere you see a genuine class of intellectuals who can save the world.”
Erofeev is nevertheless convinced that “Russia is not dead yet, because Russia is a lot of stuff, it can't die completely.”
No one can say what kind of Russia there will be after the war, assuming that the war somehow ends or at least stops, which Putin absolutely does not want, but like what happened at the end of the Soviet Union, “no one will take the blame for the disasters that occurred, we will all be a blank page on which to write a new novel.”
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