Redifining Freedom!
(A link to an article that may just help with the understanding of this possibly convoluted blog entry–I barely know what I wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/23/books/bread-lines.html?ref=bookreviews)
Oddly enough—ironically enough—it seems as though it was the concept and practice of ‘freedom,’ not the manufacture of thousands upon thousands of nukes and atom bombs that threatened, on a daily bass, our international existence, that finally shocked post-Soviet Russia into a post-apocalyptic era, a notion explored in Eleanor Randolph’s Waking the Tempests: Ordinary Life in the New Russia. Apparently, it was like watching what would have happened if Y2K had hit once the millennium ball dropped. Russian citizens, their realities, were transformed into something like a bad sci-fi novel where everyone is forced to fend for themselves in the seediest and most sordid of ways just to get by, just to escape the poverty, the sense of abandon, to escape the ideological destruction that had been undeniably wrought upon a land that knew nothing but ideologies, strict ones, classical, romantic, vast and grand and epic, real and harsh, all of which—most importantly—were definable. Russians are all about definitions, all about meaning, all about details and exhausting explanations and exposition, everything—as Soviet ideals have ingrained—must be a choice between black and white, evil and good, right and wrong, one way or the other, Communism or death (or some other and lesser, but still great form of punishment). Words, thoughts, opinions were said as if cut in stone, with a literal standing. What was said was said and forever held accountable.
So…knowing what there is to know about Russians and their words and phrases that anchor, their former government that was hell bent on creating the culture, the ideologies, and the very opinions that ran through its citizens’ heads, what do you think their thoughts of ‘freedom’ were? Most certainly not the same as an American’s, which for the most part, if you look at our liberal democracy’s definition simply means: do whatever you will as long as no one around you is cheated, swindled, pained, killed, or emotionally and psychologically bruised in direct reaction to your practice of ‘freedom.’ In other words, don’t go marching down the street brandishing a burning crucifix while robed and costumed in white hoods and sacks, screaming prejudiced words of hate in the middle of a New York street, claiming that all your doing is practicing that damned ‘freedom of speech’ of yours, knowing full well that people’s fear’s elevated by the mere sight of you. You see, Americans are realistic about the limitations of freedom, Russians on the other hand, are not. They have lived and been burdened, for almost a full century, with an ideological extreme—the opposite of freedom, and not the American kind mind you. They are attracted and their mouth waters for the unbridled Merriam-Webster definition, the literal definition, of the word: “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.” And once the Soviet empire fell, came crashing down like the tower built to God, what chanced to stumble through the smoke and rubble? Pure and unadulterated freedom. Which, of course, in my opinion, goes hand-in-hand with the vague and general, the undefined.
As you can see in the New York Times review of Waking the Tempests, boundaries seemed to have vanished and allowed Russia’s counter-economy (a sort of gray—a mixture of black and white—market that existed during the Soviet-era for the sake of foreign good consumption) to come out and play unfettered. Even sexual liberation, which was only hitting Russian then in the ‘90s as opposed to the time it waved through every other important nation three decades prior, was considered “as [Ms. Randolph] rightly reports, less a liberating experience than a mixture of exploitative commercialism and degradation. Incidents of sexual violence and discrimination against women have soared, according to the Government’s own inadequate statistics.”*
* (Quick Side Note—since blogs don’t allow for foot notes—the article then goes onto mention how these statistics “would be familiar to us,” as in the US. I would like to quickly debunk that and say that, sure, we do of course deal with the same issues as the ones described in Ms. Randolph’s book, but it’s all relative. I truly doubt that current-day America, or even ‘90s America, has ever had to face the specific, abject-level of poverty and grime faced post-Soviet Russia in the early ‘90s. That is very slipshod reviewing on Katrina vanden Heuvel’s part. End Quick Side Note.)
The country’s post-Soviet sense of freedom is one of post-apocayptic free-for-all that allows entrance for anyone and everything, it even allows the nation to become a virtual playground for every and all religious groups and categories and sects and denominations and et cetera and et cetera, as is explored in the following paragraph: “Although the elderly have borne the brunt of the economic turmoil, political and psychological changes have led Russians of all ages to new religions and faith healers. In sometimes darkly funny prose, Ms. Randolph describes the arrival of the Hare Krishnas on Moscow’s streets. The Mormons, the evangelicals and the Bahais soon followed. Psychics fill stadiums with followers and broadcast weekly programs to millions of believers. When Ms. Randolph left Moscow in 1993, America’s Christian right groups were beginning to find Russian converts.” What this suggests to me, this sprint and dash for spiritual explanation and meaning and interpretation, is that Russians really do hunger for that world of former definability, that this expanse, this half-continent’s sense of ‘freedom,’ is too open-ended and without comfort. I mean, no one’s truly comfortable without walls and boundaries to protect them from the capricious, right? We’re just more sure of ourselves, of our identities, when we can see clear, defineable lines cutting us out of the rest of this world’s indefinite jumble.
Hence—*
* (And this is where I get incredibly lazy with my blog as it pertains to Homo Zapiens. End Even Quicker Side Note.)
—Homo Zapiens’s protagonist’s proclivity for the ad-game, and redefining how Russians examine and perceive their new surroundings, how they take what already exists in America’s consumer, capitalistic culture and rework it to fit their own—metaphorically-speaking—cratered and blown-out landscape, their fallen set of ideologies. And maybe, just maybe, in the process of all this reshaping, this game of craft the new synonym!, the Russians will find a new, more appropriate word for ‘freedom’ that will help them in their transition from ending to beginning.
-Mikhail Karadimov
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