Robinson and Manilov

I have always hated this famous saying by Rudyard Kipling. It exudes an inbred, colonialist idiosyncrasy. These words resound with a crack of a whip against leather jackboots. The East’s fatal lack of prospects peers through the sharp terseness of this poetic sentence, which leaves no hope for a way out of this geocultural trap. “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” These lines have haunted me lately with its grotesque mocking grimace. I am tempted to ask myself, and you: What if the West is indeed the West and the East is the East? An affirmative answer to this question would save much time. Political debates would cease. There would no longer be any cause for enthusiasm or disappointment. Let us then elect a king from some exhumed corpse of the Brezhnev era (preferably a Cheka secret police officer) and then lie down at the bottom of the Great Puddle of Myrhorod at the depth of one-sixth (with certain reductions) of the earth’s diameter.

The crack of Kipling’s whip resonates in me every time I see the Ukrainian mass media stubbornly disseminating two dominant and stereotypical responses to events in our country. The first is a “passive” stereotype: lamentations are most often expressed in such formulas as “disappointment,” “a crisis of Maidan ideals,” “depression,” etc. In an expression of extremely “constructive” synthesis, they are summed up with the sacramental question: what kind of people are we?

The other one is an “active” stereotype: total criticism of everything that has been done during the past year. We learn that everything has been “ruined” and “destroyed” and that “an opportunity has been lost.” The conclusion: defeat is inevitable. The subtext contains the same “constructive” synthesis: we are a good-for-nothing nation.

Well, since we are good for nothing, we must learn from our neighbors. Consider our fraternal Belarus, for example: a prosperous and stable country headed by a wise lifetime president. Those who may question such a state of affairs or, God forbid, speak out against it, must remember that Belarus has introduced criminal responsibility for criticism of the state and its leader’s actions.

Take a look at Russia, which is even more fraternal. The government and “opposition,” leftists and rightists, communists and oligarchs, national Bolsheviks and the “children of Genghis Khan” — Eurasians, “ours” and “theirs,” all blend in shared patriotic ardor under such slogans as “Russia is everything, everything else is nothing.” Where Joseph Stalin does not suffice to raise the national spirit, they can always appeal to Hitler. You arrange the hammer and sickle to form a swastika as the emblem for national Bolshevism, and, lest people get bored, the movement “Slaviansky Soyuz” [Slavic Union] produces a promising acronym — SS.

So when you take an outsider’s view of the somewhat hysterical waves that are rocking the Ukrainian boat today, you have the sneaking suspicion that maybe our society is indeed less mature than its own ideas and dreams. What if the gap between these ideas and the energy required to bring them to life is so huge that they cannot be realized? What if the notion of “East” is indeed fatal to the point that it will not allow the nations stuck in it ever to create normal living conditions in their respective countries without special “missions” on the regional or even planetary scale?

In his famous 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, the American historian Samuel Huntington claims that the democratic world ends where Eastern Christianity begins. Beyond this threshold is a hopeless continuum of the East, where the possibility of instituting democracy is progressively shrinking from Orthodox to Muslim countries. According to the author, Ukraine lies on a fault line between these two civilizations. However, Ukraine cannot always remain straddled like this and sooner or later will have to determine its civilizational affiliation.

As Churchill once famously remarked, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.” The West is not a perfect model. Elementary knowledge of history shows how difficult, contradictory, and often dramatic the process of building a democracy in the Western world has been. Most importantly, it is a constant process whose ultimate goal is not the final eschatological prospect of a “bright future for mankind” and global “energy” empires, and other kinds of super empires, but a pragmatic goal, namely to create even more optimal living conditions for people, in which specific civil rights would be correlated with quite specific civic duties.

From the Greek polis onwards, the past 2,500 years have seen the creation of institutions, forms of social life, culture, and mindset that today have resulted in the complex structure of the democratic world. This process was interrupted by wars, colonial conquests, occupations, religious clashes, and international conflicts. Western civilization gained a democratic conscience and the form of its institutional organization while experiencing the collapse of empires, totalitarian regimes, and two world wars in the 20th century alone.

In essence, a cultural and political system was built on the ruins of the old empire, in which people received liberties and guarantees that are fundamental to a normal existence. In bureaucratic language this is called the European community. Beneath it is a new dimension of being for the collective brain of mankind. Not even Marxist history succeeded in refuting the undeniable fact that the Mediterranean is the cradle of civilization, and that the philosophy, science, and later technology of Western Europe formed the foundations of a world on whose margins the rest of the planet is living today, and that even America, the world’s only superpower, is the result of Europe’s cultural “expansion” that reached the Atlantic shores of North America.

The dialectics of relations between East and West have now entered a new phase of antagonism, and the results are anyone’s guess. Of course, two new colossuses — China and India — are rising menacingly on history’s horizon. However, so far they owe their competitive potential to the maximum acceleration and proliferation of the production of cloned (read: worse) Western products.

Clearly, Europe depends on energy resources, which is why it does not always engage in transparent Realpolitik with Russia and the Islamic East. However, the living standards in Europe with its meager natural resources are not to be compared to those of Russia (where the world’s tallest skyscraper is being built in Moscow, while the Middle Ages begin just outside the city limits) or the Arab world (where oil geysers shoot from the ground and hotels with helipads are built, while children are dying because hospitals don’t even have aspirin).

Of course, Russia is a separate civilization — the powerful Eurasia that is challenging the Atlantic hegemony. However, Russian mafiosi, much like their Ukrainian counterparts, as well as politicians in both countries, have their sofas shipped from Italy and home appliances from Germany, while their wives’ wardrobes are supplied by French or Italian couturiers, not to mention cars or the nerve of the contemporary world — computers. This is taboo in the country of Moskva typewriters, a slapdash assemblage of iron parts joined together for an unknown purpose. In the “world’s most democratic country” nothing was ever done for the people, and everything was done for the blind, brutal, and brainless machine of war that was waged against the entire world. This machine drew a great deal of blood from this world, but eventually became rotten and crumbled into useless pieces.

We are learning, though slowly, and are still producing ersatz things. From time to time the things that are “our own” stick out from such ersatz products like a superfluous addition, a bent nail, or unpolished groove.

The cultural border separating the two Europes is very complex. Sometimes it crosses the territory of a single country, such as Germany. After the catastrophe of World War II, the destruction of the country, and the global denouncement of Nazism, stone by stone “American” West Germany became the continent’s economic engine. In the second volume of his memoirs former chancellor Helmut Kohl remembers with gratitude the progressive Mikhail Gorbachev, who on the eve of the collapse of the Berlin Wall familiarized his German colleagues with a secret Kremlin dossier that discussed socialist Germany’s inevitable economic collapse.

Helmut Kohl invested stupendous amounts of hundreds of billions of euros in East Germany. But where are the highest unemployment rates today? Which part is experiencing non-stop emigration? Where are wages lower than in Greece? Where do you find social apathy? Finally, where else can you encounter so many neo-Nazi movements other than in the communist DDR, “Russian” Germany, which was once studded with banners depicting Brezhnev and Honecker, who locked lips in that disgusting kiss? Thus, wherever the “east” passed, in this particular case the Russian “east,” human energy waned even in Germany.

To put it simply, Europe is close but out of reach. At a time when it seems that Europe is just an arm’s length away, political upheavals are again driving us to the opposite, “eastern,” shore. Meanwhile, fraternal Russia is standing on the other shore, rubbing its hands in a similarly fraternal manner: “Aha, they are not wanted in Europe. Serves those Orangists right” — this should give you an idea of the general tone of publications in the Russian mass media today, which is sometimes even worse.

That is why, caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of plebeian hatred for the West among Russo-Ukrainian communists, Eurasianists, and other anti-Western forces, and occasionally utopian ideas about Europe that are widespread among the liberal representatives of the two societies, Kipling’s words have become unexpectedly relevant, much like the heroes of two different worlds: Robinson and Manilov.

They say that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is the second most read book in the world after the Bible. What is this book about? It is about the evolution of European civilization in miniature, one stage at a time. The book’s protagonist is washed ashore on an uninhabited island without any means of survival. All he has is his mind and two arms. He can either die or survive. But how should he spend a third of his life on an uninhabited island — as a feeble hostage of the elements, disease, animals, and the wilderness? Or as a person of iron will that can build his world out of nothing?

Here he is, this 17th-century Puritan, a person with an entire array of weak and strong traits: he is simultaneously confused and brave, disillusioned and adamant, patient and defiant, emotional and concrete. He is experienced in some things and naive in others. Occasionally he finds the right solutions and sometimes makes mistakes, but he continues to search, think, and resist, thereby accumulating consistent knowledge. Most importantly, Robinson is a man who turns every defeat into experience.

He is a son of England, an ancient documentalist, explorer of unfamiliar worlds, a prototype of the inventor, traveler, and industrialist who turned the Albion of those days into the stars of the New Time, a planetary superpower — and, of course, into Kipling’s colonial Great Britain, which unceremoniously rejected the possibility of the West ever meeting the East.

The East — the Orthodox East — takes pleasure in thinking that ex Oriente lux (light from the east), and that the sun sets in the West, where hostile shadows lurk. Meanwhile, Robinson rises with a concrete sunrise and goes to bed with a concrete sunset. He does not think in categories of abstract time and eternity. He reasons in the categories of daily life. Every day he has to get up and do something that will help him live this day and prepare for the next.

Robinson’s pragmatic ego does not indulge in any special ascents; he is not inclined toward mysticism. He does not seek to secure “a bright future” for mankind. All he wants is to find enough food to last him until the night and not become a dinner for wild animals. He is not a hero, martyr, or revolutionary, but a simple man, who is filled with contradictions and capable of mistakes. But even his mistakes are a concrete experience of building a human space.

A single man is stranded on an uninhibited island, but thanks to this man, life arises around him, a world is being built, and events start to unfold. Each tool that he makes and each meal that he cooks is a step toward overcoming a hopeless situation. His inventive mind and willpower bring this uninhabited place to life and humanized it, filling it with imagination and energy. Noting occasional banal or incredible events in his diary, this lonely adventurer, a stalwart sailor from York, born of a mixed German-English marriage, has no idea that he is one of the engines of the New World, a hero of the modern time, a European Odysseus whose lonely challenge to fate contains the encoded meaning of his civilization.

Consider a different hero, who is, unfortunately, closer to our geographical and cultural latitudes. He lives in the village of Manilovka, which is located 15 versts from here, or perhaps even 30, but what difference does that make anyway? He has an overgrown pond, “which is not unusual in the English gardens of Russian landlords.” Above the green murky pond is a “temple of solitary reflection” [a reference to an outhouse — Ed.], a symbol of utter uselessness, worthlessness, and hopelessness in this world of “dead souls” described by Gogol.

Even the daylight is of a “light-grey color, the kind you see only on old uniforms of garrison soldiers of this generally peaceful army that is partly drunk on Sundays.” These words have a deathly stench! As for Manilov himself, unless you step away from him, “you will feel deathly boredom.” “Everybody has something of his own, but Manilov had nothing.”

This is how the relentless author, Gogol, painted the epitome of Russian life: “At home he spoke little and spent most of the time reasoning and thinking. But God only knows what he was thinking about. You can’t really say that he managed the household. He never even went to inspect the fields, and the estate somehow carried on by itself. Whenever his steward said ‘it would be good to do this and that, master,’ Manilov would reply with a smoking pipe in his mouth: ‘Yes, that would not be bad’.”

Remember how Manilov the philanthropist always dreamed of “how good it would be if an underground passage were dug from the house or a stone bridge were built over the pond with stalls on either side, so that merchants could sit there and sell the sundry small merchandise that peasants need.” In his house there is a mixture of expensive furniture with chairs upholstered in cheap burlap, while a “deluxe candelabrum” is placed on the table alongside a sooty bed lamp. Neither the master, nor his wife, nor their servants seem to mind this. All questions about the disorderly household where nothing functions remain unanswered.

The governor, instead of attending to his government duties, “embroiders various homey patterns” that “few women can embroider as skillfully.” Meanwhile, Manilov is dreaming “of pursuing some kind of science that would stir up the soul and make it soar, so to speak.” All this “soaring” happens over the same boundless expanse of utter, impenetrable swinishness.

Mind you, Manilov’s garden is “English,” and his children are called Alcides and Themistocles. Again, they are ersatz. Committing illegal acts and buying dead souls, Chichikov says that he “becomes mute before the law.” The suffocating cycle of illusions, stereotypes, and falsehoods symbolizes the utter lack of future prospects. So Manilov is still sitting and dreaming of “how good it would be to live on the other bank of some river; then a bridge would be built across this river; then a huge house would be built with such a tall gazebo that even Moscow could be seen from it.” Of course, the bridge and the house would have to be built by themselves. And the “sovereign himself, after learning of his friendship would make him a general.” The horizon of desires and ambitions ends there. The story also ends, without having begun.

This story is like the book that Manilov is reading: for two years it has had a bookmark on the same page 14. Meanwhile, with his own life Robinson wrote a book that ushered in the history of the New Times.

Thus, if we superimpose these paradigms onto our contemporary life, we would be hard put to reach any comforting conclusions. Yet it is not difficult to see that Ukraine is in fact located, as Huntington said, on a fault line between two worlds.

On the one hand, during the Orange Revolution society proved capable of an expression of civic will that was fantastic in terms of its force, endurance, and victorious vital energy. On the other hand, society started to demand “everything and at once,” though not of itself, but primarily of those in power, very much in line with the Soviet (and imperial Russian) principle.

This same society humbly endured 70 years of the Soviet torture chamber and the humiliating and offensively sugared tragicomedy of the post-Soviet quasi-regime. Society has not understood that the political force now in power has received only an opportunity as a result of this expression of popular will. The concrete results of this opportunity are up to society itself, the people’s professional skills, intellectual potential, and, most importantly, civic integrity.

However, right now society is showing a certain degree of political naivete. It pictures the building of a state as a kind of toy palace: once we find this other missing piece of the picture, we will put it into the empty space and will get a democratic state complete with EU membership.

No, this won’t work. There will be no state or EU membership unless all the social factors of building the country in keeping with this pattern of development kick in. Essentially, these are social factors that can begin to form only now. But there is a risk that this process will not begin. After all, it doesn’t take a political scientist to realize how difficult it is to overcome the “shadow” forms of social existence and its illegal niches even within the context of consolidated democracies.

The political killings are unresolved? The public is categorical in its demands for politicians to solve them in a matter of months or even weeks and expose those who ordered the killings. Maybe some of you remember a series of Italian movies released in the 1970s, starring Gian Maria Volonte. The Italy of the 1970s, which had been a democratic republic already for a quarter of a century following the demise of a regime that lasted for only two years, not seven decades, was a country plagued by “fascist terrorism” and “communist terrorism.”

This country was helpless against the mafia. Yet to this day the perpetrators of the bloody acts of terror in those days have not been found or punished. And do we really know exactly what, and more importantly who, was behind the assassination of Kennedy or Aldo Moro? In 2006, 20 years will have passed since the assassination of Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme, but the name of his killer remains unknown, even though the investigation continues. Or maybe you think that the secret of the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II has been unraveled? Perhaps somebody thinks that the Vatican does not know the truth? It probably does, but the “Bulgarian (or Russian) trace,” which recently surfaced again, is still diplomatically camouflaged.

In democratic conditions it is sometimes not easy to punish wrongdoers. Of course, we would like the current president’s election slogan “Imprisonment for bandits!” to become a magical spell that would open the heavy iron gates of prisons and propel criminals into prison cells. Once the gates close, a new life would begin.

However, “presumption of guilt” exists only under totalitarian regimes as opposed to presumption of innocence in democracies. It gave me the creeps to watch Milosevic’s arrogant behavior at the Hague Tribunal. He was defended by a lawyer, who was billing by the hour. But Milosevic’s Serbian “scorpions” killed Bosnian men without any lawyers. They executed them while their mothers, wives, and children were tied up and forced to watch.

Meanwhile, Milosevic was excused from questioning whenever he had high blood pressure, because the law in democratic countries does not allow this for health concerns. This is to say nothing of the fact that the butcher of Srebrenica, Ratko Mladic, who ordered the killing of 8,000 Muslims, and the ideologue of the Balkan massacre, Radovan Karadzic, are still in hiding in Serbia, which nonetheless dreams of EU membership.

What about corruption? Corruption scandals are a banal reality of life in many Western countries. Corruption at the “lower” levels of society is the province of Third World countries. Meanwhile, corruption in the top echelons of power is commonplace in powerful countries: big money is involved where there is big power. Yet these scandals normally end at the very least in dismissals of indicted politicians whose guilt has been proven in court.

Of course, we may say that our society is better than the political class that rules us (ruled and will continue to rule). But is corruption a phenomenon that occurs exclusively among politicians? While exposing politicians is a just cause, it might not be a bad idea to take a look at corruption in society. It’s an open secret that in terms of its corruptness Ukraine is second only to Russia, especially in education and health care — the two spheres that are vital to society’s healthy functioning, culturally and physically.

If university examinations and children are for sale in our country, do we really have to appeal to those in power? Maybe we first have to understand that corruption is not a wad of bills handed over illegally, but a gaping abyss in society’s moral existence. This abyss has deepened throughout the decades and centuries. A law on paper will not help us climb out of this abyss. Society must mature ethically, someday to understand that aside from the present day there is a future, which will not be “bright.” It will be the way we build it ourselves.