On April 10, 2022, Moscow police arrested resident Konstantin Goldman for brandishing a book in public. Goldman had posted an image on social media in which he posed holding a copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace next to a section of a World War II monument that commemorates Kyiv’s status as a Soviet “hero-city”—a distinction given to cities that endured some of the harshest moments of the Nazi invasion. He was charged with violating Russia’s prohibition against discrediting the military, a new law that can carry a punishment of up to 15 years in jail.

But Goldman’s photo went viral, tapping into latent sentiments against the lack of freedom of expression and repressive fear-based tactics. A meme began to circulate that modified the image so that the word “war” in the novel’s title was replaced with “special operation,” the term that the Russian government has been using for its invasion.

Literature has long occupied a key role in Russian culture. A popular adage describes poet Alexander Pushkin as “our everything.” The novels of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky are lauded the world over as some of the greatest exemplars of realist literature. The famous Soviet-Russian poet Evgeny Evtushenko famously noted that “in Russia, a poet is more than a poet,” commenting on the central social role that writers have played.

Now, instead of bringing Russians together in pride for the country’s cultural achievements, literature is dividing them, being used both to advocate for the country’s war with Ukraine and to protest against it. Public intellectuals who support the war have marshaled Russia’s literary tradition as a symbol of the greatness of the Russkiy mir, or the unified “Russian world,” that the Putin regime claims to be defending in Ukraine; meanwhile, those who are protesting the war have used literature as a source of inspiration and material—even in the face of draconian new laws designed to silence opposition. Supporters of Russia’s military actions use references to Russian literature and culture to further a monolithic state narrative that discounts the uniqueness of Ukrainian identity while at the same time stoking fear that Ukrainian language and culture represent a threat to Russia.

Pro-war literary rhetorics began even before Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine. Last summer, Aleksandr Shchipkov, a political philosopher and deputy head of an international NGO concerned with the future of Russian society and questions concerning what constitutes “Russianness,” wrote on Russian social media platform Telegram that “Gogol and Shevchenko wrote in Russian and were actually Russian writers.” By folding Gogol, who was born and raised in Ukraine, and Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, into the Russian canon, Shchipkov attempted to subsume the cultural achievements of which Ukrainians are proudest—even, in the case of Shevchenko, one of the foundational figures in the development of the modern Ukrainian language—into Russian culture. Echoing Putin’s insinuations that Russia and Ukraine are one nation, Shchipkov made literature into a tool for justifying the continuation of Russia’s colonial history in Ukraine.

Another trope seen across social media has used literature to reiterate the idea that the Ukrainian people are rejecting all of Russian culture. This is another of Putin’s frequent claims, based on little more than the Ukrainian government’s promotion of the Ukrainian language. In such framings, any perceived attempts by Ukrainians to demonstrate the unique elements of Ukrainian language and culture become an existential attack on the Russian nation. On April 8, the prominent author Zakhar Prilepin, who has fought on the side of pro-Russian Donbass separatists in eastern Ukraine, wrote on his Telegram channel that one “goal of a Ukrainian textbook of the Russian language” would be to remove all the Russian words from the Ukrainian language. (Because of Russia’s long domination over Ukraine, including the decades of the Soviet Union, many Russian words have come into the Ukrainian language; there is a movement by some Ukrainian activists to return to using more native Ukrainian words rather than use these loan words.)

According to Prilepin, the end result of re-substituting loan words for their original Ukrainian equivalents would be that “for the future ‘Ukrainian’”—putting the word in quotation marks to add even more aspersion on Ukrainian legitimacy—”Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Sholokhov [the Nobel Prize-winning Soviet author of And Quiet Flows the Don] will become incomprehensible without translation into Ukrainian.” Invoking some of the most prominent names in all of Russian literature to stoke fear in his readers, Prilepin claims that those in power in Ukraine want to eliminate all traces of Russian culture.

Yet Russians have also used literature to make arguments against war—even when doing so carries a high degree of risk. Goldman isn’t the only one who has been arrested for invoking Tolstoy in a moment of protest. In late March, Russian police arrested Aleksei Nikitin, an activist from the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, for holding a sign with a quotation from Leo Tolstoy that, in English translates to, “patriotism is the renunciation of human dignity, reason, conscience, and the slavish subordination of oneself to those who are in power. Patriotism is slavery.”

To justify the arrest, the police engaged in their own effort at literary analysis. They issued a statement that read:

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy is a historical figure who has been called, ‘the mirror of the revolution.’ It is a well-known fact that in his works and journalistic articles he heavily criticized the ruling regime, especially for its justifications for the use of violence during moments of social upheaval. Thus, the actions of Mr. A.N. Nikitin should be interpreted as following the ideology of L.N. Tolstoy and as a call to overthrow the current government as well.

In order to discredit a protester, the Russian authorities held Tolstoy—who despite his religious disagreements that led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church, remains one of the country’s most revered writers and one whose greatness has also been used to justify the war—as a direct threat to the state. Tolstoy, in other words, is too radical for Russia’s current regime. While the government might point to him as a great exemplar of Russian culture, anything beyond a surface-level engagement with his work is met with fear. The simple act of referencing his words and ideas have become proof of subversion and grounds for arrest.

The authorities’ fear is revealing. The Putin regime and its supporters are using Russia’s literary heritage to demonstrate the greatness and strength of the Russian nation, and to deny the very existence of a Ukrainian nation. When Russians who oppose the war look to that same literary tradition and draw upon it for their own positions, it shatters the illusion that there is a single, unified Russian literary tradition that supports Russia’s military actions. The Russian government cannot abide any dissent, even if it comes from literature. Yet part of what makes Russian literature so great is its complexity. The richness of the literature, combined with its profound cultural importance, assures that readers will continue to find counterexamples and new interpretations that challenge the state’s monolithic narrative.

The post How Literature Became a Weapon in Russia’s Culture Wars appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Take my guilty plea, Mr. Mueller. Because this Californian has been colluding with the Russians.

To be sure, I didn’t subvert any elections. But one recent week this spring, when my colleagues were out of the office, I snuck away to visit that most alluring of Russians, the Russian River, which seductively winds its way through Mendocino and Sonoma counties on its way to the Pacific. Perhaps the special counsel, who knows the territory from a stint as U.S. Attorney for Northern California, will cut me some slack in sentencing.

To travel the length of the Russian—as I did at this moment of maximum paranoia about all things Russian—is to be reminded that California and Russia are too intertwined for scandal to keep us apart.

For one thing, Russian interference in California is older than the state itself. For another, our state’s defining industries, entertainment and technology, have themselves been defined by Russian emigres from songwriter Irving Berlin to Google’s Sergey Brin.

But at heart our connection is mystical. California and Russia are two of this planet’s greatest puzzles. Each territory is considered too vast, and its people too strange, to ever be truly understood. Winston Churchill famously called Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”; anyone who has ever watched Californians try to govern themselves knows that those words apply to the Golden State too.

On my excursion, I approached the river from the south, via Sebastopol, a town named for a late 1850s fistfight so brutal it was compared to the British siege of the Russian seaport of Sevastopol during that decade’s Crimean War.

I made my way through Bodega Bay, which Russia’s earliest colonizers to California used as a port. Then I crossed over the river on my way up the sumptuous Sonoma coast to Fort Ross, a Russian settlement established in 1812.

That was an eventful year for invasions, with Britain fighting the United States, and the Russians repelling Napoleon—a victory so great that the Russian composer Tchaikovsky’s overture about it is still performed each summer at the Hollywood Bowl, accompanied by fireworks and the USC Trojan Marching Band. Fort Ross was established by the Russian-American Company, a trading firm backed by the Russian crown, to provide food for its Alaskan operations. The Russians’ presence gave the river its name.

But like so many who would move to California, the Russians found the beautiful place harder than they’d anticipated. The cost of living was high, Southern Californians (then Spanish) were hostile, and the fur trade proved unprofitable. Still, the Russians made a historic mark, constructing the first windmill and first ship ever built in California, and becoming the first Europeans to record California’s distinctive flora.

The Russians in California sought to salvage their colony by enlisting the support of the new Mexican government in the 1830s, on the condition that Russia would recognize Mexico. But the tsar wouldn’t agree to that condition, and so in 1841 the Russians sold off Fort Ross like a failed startup. The buyer, John Sutter, had everything of value hauled back to his home in Sacramento, a move that prefigured modern California’s centralized tax policy.

Ever since, the cover story has been that the Russians abandoned California to the Mexicans and then the Americans. But California actually preserved the old Russian colony as a state park in 1906. The state has since added three times to the property, and even re-routed Highway 1 around it.

Fort Ross State Historic Park. Photo by Joe Mathews.

In recent decades, with tens of thousands of tourists visiting from the motherland, Fort Ross sees far more Russians than it ever did under Russian rule. Among the guests have been Russian generals, the speaker of the Russian senate, and the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church. And then there are the Americans who use the fort to play Russian. On the day I visited, fourth graders from a Santa Rosa school, dressed in 19th-century Russian garb, occupied the fort, claiming to have seen ghosts in one building while cooking carrots over an open fire.

The Russian presence here doesn’t merely honor the past. It also seeks to shape the future. From Fort Ross, I drove back to the mouth of the river in tiny Jenner. On a beautiful bluff, I saw the unmistakable hammer-and-sickle flag of the Soviet Union flying over a restaurant called Russian House #1.

Inside I met the restaurant’s founders, Tatiana Ginzburg and Polina Krasikova, Russians who split their time between Sonoma County and St. Petersburg, which is where the Russian-American Company was headquartered.

When I started asking questions, Ginzburg, a psychologist, answered with questions of her own. She lamented that we didn’t have a few days to talk, so we could connect over a “long Russian story.” So here’s the short version: The restaurant, which in 2015 replaced an Indian joint called Sizzling Tandoor, is less a restaurant and more a project for those interested in civilization, quantum physics, transpersonal psychology, self-actualization, and “a space for dialogue between two great cultures and peoples.”

The place also challenges capitalist and imperialist structures. There is no menu. You are not greeted by a server; the Russian food, home-cooked, is laid out buffet-like. And there are no prices and no bill—you pay what you think is right, in a bowl by the door.

All these practices are designed to get people to stop, think, and ultimately experience a change in consciousness, she said.

Ginzburg says her work draws from the 20th-century Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, who taught that many humans live their lives “asleep” and thus behave as unconscious automatons who are easily manipulated into thoughtless horrors, like world war. But through dedicated work, humans can ascend to a higher state of consciousness and become more fully human.

Gurdjieff was a composer of music as well as a spiritual master, and the restaurant has a piano and a harp, and hosts events and performances. It also contains two chessboards, and various puzzles. The word for puzzle in Russian is “Golovolomka,” she noted, “which means something that will break your head.”

“We try to see the fundamental things here, and our intention is to create a new type of being,” she said, adding as she left for a rebirthing: “There is a connection here on the river, between Russia and this place.”

After perusing the restaurant library, with titles from Le Carré to Dostoyevsky, I thought about connections as I continued my river trip. There is a magic in the scale of the Russian landscape or the giant trees of the Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve. Both Russia and California love the arts. The dachas there might be the large Wine Country estates here, and both exist uneasily amid the poverty of people who do the farm work. Then there’s the joy of carousing. Russia loves its vodka, and the Russian River runs on wine.

Through Guerneville, Forestville, and Rio Nido, my mobile phone didn’t have service. But on the radio, NPR reported on the investigation into Russian interference in American democracy. The news was framed as an ongoing invasion of our country.

Such news is maddening, and put me in mind of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the massive novel of that French invasion back in 1812, when Russia met California. “Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad,” Tolstoy wrote.

He also wrote about love and enemies: “Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.” Tolstoy believed that when we muster love for our enemies, when we see God in even those we might kill, we reach a level of love that “nothing, not even death” can shatter.

I don’t love authoritarians who attack democracy and innocent people. But Putin is not Russia, and America is not Trump. And at least I was questioning myself and my consciousness, just as the women at the Russian House #1 advise. “All we can know is that we know nothing,” Tolstoy wrote. “And that’s the height of human wisdom.”

I still don’t know what I was thinking when I reached Healdsburg and walked to a beach along the river. A man had let his dog run into the water, which somehow inspired me to remove my shirt and shoes and wade into the Russian in my blue jeans.

The water was warmer and deeper than I had expected.

The post What’s So Wrong About Californians Colluding With This Russian? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.