Keith Gessen

Infobox Writer
name = Keith Gessen

imagesize = 150px
caption =
birthdate = 1975
birthplace = Moscow, U.S.S.R. flagicon|USSR
deathdate =
deathplace =
occupation = Editor, Writer
nationality = American flagicon|US
spouse = spouse
children =
website =

Keith Gessen(born Kostya Gessen, Moscow, U.S.S.R. , 1975) [ http://www.bu.edu/agni/fiction/print/2004/59-gessen.html] is the editor-in-chief of "n+1", a twice-yearly magazine of literature, politics, and culture based in New York City.

Born Kostya Gessen, [ ] [Joanna Smith Rakoff, "Talking with Masha Gessen", Newsday, 2 January 2005] he, his parents, and sisters moved to the United States in 1981 "to escape state-enforced anti-Semitism" [ ] [http://www.arlindo-correia.com/140505.html] and lived in the Boston area, living in Brighton, Brookline, and Newton, Massachusetts.

He graduated from Harvard College, where his major was Russia in America Fact|date=August 2008. Gessen completed the course work for his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University in 2004 but did not receive a degree, having failed to submit "a final original work of fiction". [ ]

Gessen has written about Russia for The Atlantic and the New York Review of Books. [ cite web
last = Wickett
first = Dan
title = Interview with Keith Gessen
publisher = Emerging Writers" Forum
date = 2005-03-06
url=http://www.breaktech.net/EmergingWritersForum/View_Interview.aspx?id=143
accessdate = 2007-06-27] In 2005, Dalkey Archive Press published Gessen's translation of Svetlana Alexievich’s “Tchernobylskaia Molitva” (Voices from Chernobyl), an oral history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Gessen has also written about books for magazines including "Dissent" , "Slate" , and "New York" , where he was the regular book critic.

His first novel, "All the Sad Young Literary Men", was published in April.

In an August 2008 interview, Gessen revealed that he is moving back to Russia for a year, returning in June 2009, while his sister attends graduate school in the United States. [ http://youngmanhattanite.com/2008/08/ym-keith-gessen-q.html]

Family and personal life

His mother was a literary critic [ http://www.bigthink.com/media-the-press/10477], and his father was a computer scientist. [ Gabriel Sanders, "Faces Forward: Author Tells Tale of Her Grandmothers" Survival", Forward, 10 December 2004] . His sister, Masha Gessen (born 1967), is the author of "Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace" (a.k.a. "Two Babushkas"). [ http://www.bloomsbury.com/Authors/details.aspx?tpid=1589] His maternal grandmother, Ruzya Solodovnik, was a Soviet government censor of dispatches filed by foreign reporters such as Harrison Salisbury ; his paternal grandmother, Ester Goldberg Gessen, was a translator for a foreign literary magazine. [ http://www.arlindo-correia.com/140505.html]

Gessen is divorced. [ http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_269/loveandother.html] [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/fashion/27gessen.html] He lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, with two roommates. [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/fashion/27gessen.html]

References

External links

* [ http://www.nyinquirer.com/nyinquirer/2006/11/an_interview_wi.html "New York Inquirer"] - 2006 interview with Keith Gessen about "n+1"
* [ http://youngmanhattanite.com/2008/08/ym-keith-gessen-q.html "Young Manhattanite"] - 2008 interview with Keith Gessen
* [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/fashion/27gessen.html "New York Times"] - Profile of Gessen, 27 April 2008

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Born in Moscow and moving to the United States at the age of six, writer Keith Gessen published an article on Russia in the New York Times. In particular, he described how confusing it is to see the discrepancies between the image of Russia broadcast in Western media and what the country really is.

“For people like me, who have been writing and thinking about Russia for most of my life, the last few years have been a strange experience. I, like everyone else, read the news and am horrified. Then I visit Russia and discover discrepancies that confuse me,” writes Gessen, the text of whose article is reported by InoSMI.

Gessen admitted that his parents loved Russian culture, literature, films, but did not love Russia as it was in Soviet times. But when they moved to the USA, they fell in love with America with its freedom and abundance.

Keith Gessen recalls that he began writing articles about Russia in the late 90s, but for a long time it was impossible to sell them. Interest in Russia surged in 2014 and increased further after the 2016 US presidential election. He admitted that in connection with such interest he felt a depressing feeling, since he expected that the country would close itself in a “fortress called “Russia” and would be afraid of the world around it.

The scandal surrounding Russia's alleged "interference" in the American elections turned out to be good for business, Gessen writes. He notes that the university where he teaches gave him the green light to form new group in Russian studies, and students began to sign up for these classes. “This wouldn’t have happened a few years ago,” he noted.

“But why do I have such bad feelings about everything that’s happening? Perhaps the reason is simple: since I lived in Russia, I know how complex this country is. Living in Russia does not mean that you are constantly being arrested, tortured and killed. People live their own lives,” the article says.

The author of the publication admitted that, having visited Moscow last spring, he experienced “cognitive dissonance.” In just a few years, during which he did not visit Russia, more than 20 new metro stations opened in Moscow. “During the same period, three new stations were opened in New York with great fanfare,” he notes.

According to him, many new cafes and restaurants have appeared in the Russian capital with affordable prices, where there is no end to visitors.

“No one can confuse Moscow with Paris, but nevertheless Russian capital it will be difficult for a person transported there from, say, 1998 to recognize,” the author writes.

At the same time, Gessen believes that the “political atmosphere” in Russia is poisoned. He compared Russia to a "little known but beloved band" that becomes famous because of a "stupid act" such as destroying a hotel room. “In this case, the hotel room represents the post-war global order,” he writes.

“I really liked her early albums - Late Socialism, Perestroika, Deindustrialization - but today everyone listens to them,” he concludes.

Keith Gessen's novel The Terrible Country was recently published.

Let us recall that in March, the Select Committee on Intelligence of the US House of Representatives investigated Russia’s “interference” in the 2016 US presidential election. US President Donald Trump then emphasized several times that there was evidence of collusion between his team and Moscow.

President Vladimir Putin emphasized that Moscow is in the American elections, but the United States has repeatedly tried to influence elections in other countries.

I don’t remember when I started talking to Raffi in Russian. I didn't speak Russian to him when he was in the womb, although I have since learned that this is when babies begin to recognize sound patterns. And I didn't speak Russian to him in the first few weeks of his life; that would be funny. All he could do was sleep, scream and suckle. In fact, the person I was communicating with when I spoke to him was his sleep-deprived mother Emily, who was on edge and in need of company. She doesn't know Russian.

But then, at some point, when the situation had stabilized a little, I started. In the moments when I carried him around the neighborhood or pushed him in the stroller, I loved the feeling that he and I had our own language. And I liked it a large number of terms of endearment that Russian gave me access to. Mushkin, mazkin, glazkin, my good, my beloved, my little boy. This language, given its history, is surprisingly rich in terms of endearment.

When we started reading Raffi's books, I included several publications in Russian. One friend gave us a beautiful book of poems for children by Daniil Kharms. They weren't nonsense rhymes; on the contrary, they were very much related to each other, and Raffi enjoyed them. One of them was a song about a man who went into the forest with a club and a sack and never returned. Kharms himself was arrested in Leningrad in 1941 for expressing “inflammatory” sentiments and died of starvation in a psychiatric hospital the following year. The great Soviet bard Alexander Galich eventually called the song about the man in the forest “prophetic” and wrote his own song, incorporating forest lyrics into a cycle about the Gulag. Raffi really liked Kharms' song; when he got a little older he would order it and then dance.

Before I knew this, I constantly spoke to Raffi in Russian, even in front of his mother. And although it seemed stupid at first because he didn't understand anything we were saying in any language, there came a point when I saw that he understood something. We started with animal sounds. “What does a cow say?” I asked, pronouncing the name of the animal in Russian. “Moo!” answered Raffi. “What does the cat say?” - “Meow!” “What does the owl say?” - Raffi made big eyes, raised his hands and said: “Huu, huu!” He didn't understand anything else, although at a certain point, around the age of one and a half years, he seemed to learn what the Russian word for "no" meant - I repeated it often.

He didn't understand me as well as he understood his mother, and he didn't really understand either of us, but it still felt like a small miracle. I gave my son some Russian! After this I felt that I should continue the experiment. It helped that everyone around me was impressed and supportive. “It’s wonderful that you teach him Russian,” those around him said.

But I doubted and still doubt.

Previously, bilingualism had an undeservedly bad reputation, but then it received an undeservedly exalted one. In the first case, early 20th-century American psychologists, countering the nativists, suggested that there was something other than heredity that caused eastern and southern European immigrants to perform lower than northern Europeans on newly invented IQ tests. Scientists have suggested that trying to learn two languages ​​may be to blame. As Kenji Hakuta notes in his 1986 book The Mirror of Language, neither psychologists nor nativists believed that IQ tests were worthless on their own.

In the early 1960s, this pseudoscientific theory was debunked by Canadian researchers during the height of the debate over Quebec nationalism. Work by two McGill University researchers who studied French-English bilingual schoolchildren in Montreal found that they actually performed better than monolingual children on tests that required mental manipulation and reorganization of visual patterns. This is how the concept of the “bilingual advantage” was born. And as I've recently learned from people telling me this over and over again, this remains accepted wisdom.

Actually in last years the bilingual advantage has been questioned. Early studies were criticized for selection bias and lack of clear, testable hypotheses. There may be no bilingual advantage other than the undeniable advantage of knowing another language. And although it is wrong to assume, as some parents still do, that learning another language along with English will make it much more difficult to learn the latter, it is quite possible that it makes it a little more difficult. As psycholinguist François Grosjon emphasizes, language is a product of necessity. If a child discusses, say, hockey only with his Russian-speaking father, he may not know how to say “puck” in English for a long time. But he will know when the need arises.

In any case, in the absence of a “bilingual advantage” that your child will be tested for at the preschool of his choice, you as a parent will have to decide whether you really want him to learn a language. And here, it seems to me, the problems begin.

My parents took me out of the Soviet Union in 1981, when I was six years old. They did this because they didn't like the Soviet Union - it was, as my grandmother said, "a terrible country", cruel, tragic, poor and prone to outbreaks of anti-Semitism. They did this because there was such an opportunity: Congress, under pressure from American Jewish groups, passed legislation linking Soviet-American trade with Jewish emigration. It wasn't easy to leave, but if you were aggressive and enterprising - my father paid a hefty bribe at one point - you could leave the country. We moved to Boston. Probably no other decision has had a greater impact on my life.

My parents were connected with Russian culture by a thousand inextricable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, and they could not. I completely assimilated, embarrassed my parents in many ways, and allowed my Russian not to suffer from neglect. Six years is an intermediate age in terms of assimilation. If you're much younger - two or three years old - the chances of maintaining your Russian are slim and you basically just become American. If you are a few years older - for Russians it seems to be nine or ten - you will probably never lose your accent, and will look Russian to those around you for the rest of your life. At six years old, you can still remember the language, but you will not have an accent. What to do is up to you. I know many people who arrived at this age and still speak Russian with their parents, but do not use Russian professionally at all and never return to Russia. I also know people who moved at this age, but kept coming back and even started families with Russians. I'm in the latter group; I started studying in college and have been writing and thinking about Russia ever since.

Knowing Russian means a lot to me. This allowed me to travel throughout the former Soviet Union with relative ease. Culturally, I enjoyed what my parents liked: Soviet bards, some charming Soviet novels from the 1970s, the poetry of Joseph Brodsky, and the plays of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. As I got older, I added some of my own. But I realize that my ties with Russia are weakened. I don’t know Russian or Russia as well as my parents. I am an American who inherited certain linguistic and cultural skills and saw in the wake of the collapse of the USSR an opportunity to use them as a writer and translator, while my parents once saw another opportunity - to get out. But I lived most of my life in English. Does a talented programmer teach his children C++? Maybe. If they show interest in it. But a talented programmer doesn't teach his children languages ​​they don't need or languages ​​they find difficult. Right?

Russia and Russian are definitely not useless, but for the foreseeable future this country is a place of darkness. How old will Raffi be when Putin finally leaves the scene? In the most optimistic scenario, when Putin steps down in 2024, Raffi will be nine. But if Putin lasts longer, maybe Raffi will be 15. Maybe 21. Can't Raffi go to Russia yet? Nothing is impossible. But from the parents' point of view this is not entirely desirable. I still remember the look on my father's face when he left me at Logan Airport to go to Russia on my own for the first time. It was the spring of 1995, the end of my sophomore year of college. My father recently lost my mother to cancer; my older sister, a journalist, returned to Russia to continue her career there. And now he's lost me too? When my father cried, it was the most intimate thing I've ever seen. I wonder if at that moment he regretted that he had kept my Russian. In my case, I returned. Nothing bad happened to me. But that doesn't mean I want Raffi to go there. He's so small!

I would like to teach him Spanish, which would greatly enhance his ability to communicate with the people of New York, as well as much of the rest of the world. I wish I could teach him Italian, Greek or French so he could visit these beautiful countries and speak their languages. It would be a good idea from the point of view of future career prospects for Raffi to teach Mandarin or Cantonese, as ambitious hedge funders arrange for their children in New York. Hell, even Israel has beaches. If I taught him Hebrew, he could read the Torah. But I don't speak any of these languages. All I have is Russian. And I don't even speak it well enough.

For Raffi, the disadvantage is that his father's Russian is as imperfect as his own. I often can't remember or don't know names for well-known things - the other day I was trying to remember how to say scooter in Russian and used the word "moonshine" instead of "scooter" for this. I often have trouble remembering how to say "sheep" and "goat". It doesn't help that Russian words are much longer than English ones - milk is "milk", apple is "apple", hello is "hello", ant is "ant". Besides, my grammar is full of errors.

I see friends who moved at the same time as me, but did not maintain their Russian language, raising their children entirely in English. Sometimes I feel sorry for them and everything they lack; other times I'm jealous. They were finally freed from the yoke of Russia, as their parents wanted. Around their children, they are free to be themselves, expressing themselves without difficulty. They always know what words to use for scooter, goat and sheep.

On Long Island live zealous representatives of White emigration communities, in which even the fourth generation forces their children to learn Russian. Journalist Paul Khlebnikov came from such a community. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he went to Moscow, where he published a book about corruption involving big business in the Russian state. In 2004, he died on a Moscow street when he was shot nine times. A poorly conducted trial ended in acquittal for the two defendants. No one was ever punished for his murder.

Kyiv is a place where many people speak Russian. This should also include parts of Estonia and Latvia. Entire blocks of Tel Aviv. Brighton Beach! I would like Raffi to visit all these places before he goes to Moscow, where his father was born.

source: cdn.img.inosmi.ru

Russian emigrant near Brighton shop windows

During the first two and a half years of Raffi's life, the development of his Russian language was somewhat hesitant. His first word was “kika”, which meant chicken (there are chickens in the garden next door to us). For a while, because he used the word "k" rather than "ch" at the beginning, I thought it might be a combination of the word chicken and the Russian "kuritsa". But none of his subsequent rough-sounding words - "ba" for bottle, "kaku" for cracker, "magum" for mango, "mulk" for milk - contained any Russian components. The glossary we made for his grandparents when he was almost 18 months old included 53 words or attempts to say them. Only one of them was in Russian: “sword”, i.e. “ball”. In retrospect, I should have recognized that he said “kika” not because he was trying to say “chicken,” but because he couldn’t pronounce the sound indicated by the “ch” in chicken.

Despite all my doubts about the Russian language, I talked to him a lot, and his inability to learn it was hard not to take personally. Did Raffi prefer the language of his mother (and everyone around him) to that of his father? Did I - this is probably closer to the truth - not spend enough time with him? Did he sense my ambivalence about the whole project? Did he hate me?

Psycholinguist Grozhon in his review modern research the popular 2010 textbook Bilingual: Life and Reality says that the main factor determining whether a child becomes bilingual is necessity: whether the child has any real reason to acquire language, be it the need to speak to a relative or playmates , or understand what they are talking about on TV? Another factor is the degree of “immersion”: does he hear enough to begin to understand? The third factor, more subjective than the others, is the parents' attitude towards the second language. Grosjeon gives the example of Belgian parents whose children are required to learn French and Flemish. Many parents are not enthusiastic about Flemish, which is not exactly a world language, and their children end up not learning it very well.

In our case, there was absolutely no need for Raffi to learn Russian - I didn't want to pretend that I couldn't understand his inexperienced attempts to speak English, and there was no one else in his life, including Russian speakers in my family, who didn't knew English. I have done my best to create a reasonable amount of Russian in his life, but it is dwarfed by the amount of English. Finally, as I said, I was treated poorly.

And yet I continued to do it. When Raffi was very little, the only Russian books for him were silly poems by Kharms and cute Swedish books from the 1980s by Barbra Lindgren about Max, translations of which into Russian my sister brought from Moscow. But at about two years old he began to like the poems of Korney Chukovsky. I found them too violent and scary (and long) to read to him when he was very young. But since he became a little cruel himself, and could also listen to long stories, we read about Barmaley, an ogre who eats small children and. in the end, he himself was eaten by a crocodile. Then we switched to the kind-hearted Doctor Aibolit (Dr. Ouch), who takes care of animals and makes a heroic journey to Africa at the invitation of Behemoth - Chukovsky was a big lover of hippos - to treat sick tigers and sharks. I also added a few Russian cartoons to his screen rotation - most of them were too old and too slow for him. But he liked one of them. It tells the story of the melancholy Crocodile Gen, who sings to himself a sad song about his birthday.

As the months passed, I realized that he understood more and more what I was saying. It's not like he did what I told him to do. But sometimes I mentioned, for example, about my slippers, calling them a Russian word, and he knew what I was talking about. One day he hid one of them. “Where is my second slipper?” I asked him in Russian. He reached under the sofa and pulled it out very proudly. And I was proud too. Did our child turn out to be a genius? Simply because I repeated the same words for enough time and pointed at objects, he learned the Russian designations for these objects. It's incredible what the human mind is capable of. Now I can't stop.

I recently read one of basic research on the topic of bilingualism - Werner F. Leopold's four-volume work Speech Development of a Bilingual Child. This is an amazing book. Leopold, a German linguist, came to the United States in the 1920s and eventually got a teaching job German language in North-west. He married an American from Wisconsin; She was of German descent but did not know the language, and when they had a daughter, Hildegard, in 1930, Leopold decided to teach her German himself. He kept meticulous records of the results. The first three volumes are quite technical, but the fourth volume is less so. This is Leopold's diary about how Hildegard grew up from two to six years old.

The book is full of Hildegard's endearing grammatical errors, as well as a fair amount of technical transcriptions of her German speech. After impressive growth in her German vocabulary in the first two years, Hildegard begins to submit to a predominantly English-speaking environment. Leopold repeatedly laments the decline of her German. “Her German continues to recede,” he writes when Hildegard is just over two years old. “Progress in the German language is small.” “The displacement of German words by English is progressing slowly but steadily.” He receives no support from the German expatriate community: “It is very difficult to exert a German-speaking influence, strengthened by our many friends who speak German. They all spontaneously fall into English when Hildegard answers English language».

At the same time, there is a wonderful sense of calm in Leopold about Hildegard's progress because she is so sweet. “It’s amazing that she says ‘shave’ in English,” he writes, “even though I’m the only one she sees shaving. Every time she asks me what I am doing, and receives an answer in German: raiseren. One evening she touched my beard and said in English, ‘Should you shave?’” A few months later, he notes that Hildegard began to take an interest in the two languages ​​she was studying. She asks her mother if all fathers speak German. “Apparently,” writes Leopold, “she had hitherto tacitly assumed that German was the language of the fathers, because it was the language of her father. The question reveals the first doubts about the correctness of the generalization.”

Hildegard's decline in German stopped and was dramatically reversed when she was five years old and the family was able to go to Germany for six months. At her preschool she sometimes hears "Heil Hitler" but mostly has a great time. Reading this, I thought that if Leopold could take Hildegard to Hitler's Germany to improve her German, surely I could go to Putin's Russia. But I haven't done that yet.

About six weeks ago, a month before Raffi's third birthday, his Russian language development suddenly accelerated. He began to notice that I spoke a different language from everyone else - so he “faced two languages,” as Leopold said about Hildegard. Raffi's first reaction was irritation. “Dad,” he said one evening, “We need to introduce English to you.” He clearly understood language - exactly according to Grosjeon - as a substance that fills a vessel. I asked him why he didn't speak Russian to me. “I can’t,” he said simply, “Mom put English in me.”

Then one night, as Emily and I were talking after putting him to bed, he noticed something strange: “Dad, you speak English with Mommy!” He didn't discover this before.

Then his mother left for a long weekend. For the first time in a long time, he heard more Russian than English. He began to think about it. “Daddy,” he exclaimed one evening, as he sat on my shoulders and headed out of kindergarten home, “That’s what it sounds like when I speak Russian.” He began to make a series of guttural sounds that sounded completely different from the Russians. But he began to understand that it was a different language, and one that he could theoretically speak.

He started to enjoy it more. “Fi-fi-fo-fum,” he sang one evening before climbing into the bath, “I smell the blood of an Englishman!” “Me?” I said in Russian, “Am I English?” Raffi understood my thought well and immediately corrected himself: “I smell the blood of a Russian man!” He laughed: he likes to replace one word or sound with another, often meaninglessly. But in this case it made sense. A few days later, at dinner, he said something even more amazing. I was talking to him, but then I changed the subject and turned to Emily. Raffy didn't like it. “No, mom! - he said. “Don’t take your dad’s Russian language from him!” Russian in this case was a symbol of my attention.

We were really into it at the moment. He not only understood the Russian language, he understood it as a special form of communication between us. If I had taken it away at this point, we would have lost it. There was no turning back.

At the time, Raffi was going through one of his periodic bouts of bad behavior. They tend to come in cycles. A month of good behavior gives way to two months of willful disobedience and tantrums. The last such period began a couple of months ago. Raffy runs away from me or Emily when we go for a walk, sometimes as far as a block away. This implies certain punishments. And it definitely involves behaving badly with your playmates: taking their toys, pushing them, pulling their hair.

I have found that I am more short-tempered in Russian than in English. I have fewer words, so they end faster. I have a certain register in Russian that seems to be missing in my English. In it, I make my voice deep and menacing, telling Raffi that if he doesn't immediately choose what shirt he's going to wear this morning, I'll choose it for him. As he runs down the street, I shout without any embarrassment in a very scary manner that if he doesn't come back he will get a time out (we don't have a Russian equivalent for English word timeout, so the phrase goes like this: “Rafik, if you don’t come back immediately, you will have a very long timeout”). I shout more in Russian than in English. Raffi is afraid of me. And I don't want him to be afraid of me. At the same time, I don't want him to run out into the street and get hit by a car.

Sometimes I worry about this. Instead of an eloquent, ironic, cold American father, Raffi gets an emotional, sometimes shouting Russian parent with a limited vocabulary. It's a compromise. Again, I had a soft mother and a strict father. And I was very happy.

One of my shortcomings as Raffi's Russian teacher is that I'm bad at scheduling. There are regular meetings of Russian parents in Brooklyn, which I don’t have the opportunity to go to or simply don’t want to drag myself to. However, one morning a few weekends ago, I took Raffi to perform children's songs at a bar in Williamsburg. One Russian parent booked this place and asked singer Zhenya Lopatnik to perform some children's songs. There we were - a bunch of Russian-speaking parents with our two- and three-year-old children. Most of us are more comfortable communicating in English than in Russian, and none of us would like to repatriate. Then why did we do this? What exactly did we want to pass on to our children? Of course, nothing about Russia in its current form. Perhaps it was fitting that we listened to children's songs. There was something magical about our childhood, we were sure of that. What we couldn't know was whether it was because of the music we listened to, or because of the books we read in Russian, or because of the sound of the language itself. Probably none of this. It was probably just magical being a child. But since we could not exclude that Russian had something to do with this, we had to pass it on to our children. Maybe.

Raffi didn't know most of the songs. But then Lopatnik sang Crocodile Gena’s song about her birthday. Raffi became interested and danced a little.

At the end of the children's program, Lopatnik announced that she wanted to perform several songs for parents. “What do you think about Tsoi?” she asked. Tsoi was the songwriter and lead singer of Kino, one of the greatest Russian rock bands. The adults welcomed this proposal. She sang the song "Cinema". She then performed the famous, albeit less cool, composition of the Nautilus Pompilius group “I Want to Be with You.” The title is banal, but the song is truly convincing: it says that the singer's lover died in a fire, and he longs for her, although in subsequent years the author insisted that he believed that the song had religious connotations, and that its addressee there was God.

“I broke glass like chocolate in my hand
I cut these fingers for what they are
They can't touch you, I looked into these faces
And I couldn't forgive them
That they don’t have you and they can live.”

We had never listened to this song together, and yet Raffi was shocked. We were all shocked. The original version was accompanied by typical late Soviet rock nonsense like synthesizers and a saxophone solo. Rubbish. Devoid of all this, the version performed by Lopatnik turned out to be intrusive. “But I want to be with you,” she sang, “I want to be with you. I want to be with you so much".

In that room at that moment it was not about religion, but, as Nabokov said in Lolita, about culture, about language - about how, in spite of everything, we are somehow connected with Russia and the Russian language. And in many respects about the impossibility of maintaining these connections.

Raffi hummed the Nautilus Pompilius song on the way home. A few days later I heard him singing it to himself while playing with Lego.

"I wanna be with you
I wanna be with you
I wanna be with you".

And a few days later he uttered his first sentence in Russian: “I am a hippopotamus.”

I was deeply, stupidly, indescribably touched. What have I done? How could I not do this? What a brilliant, stubborn, adorable child. My son. I love him so much. I hope he never goes to Russia. I know he will eventually.

Keith Gessen. The Guardian, UK. Murderer, kleptocrat, genius, spy: numerous myths about Vladimir Putin.

President Putin.

Russia's involvement in Trump's election has sparked a boom in Putinology. But all these theories tell more about ourselves than about Putin.

As you may have noticed, Vladimir Putin is everywhere. He sends soldiers to Ukraine and Syria, his troublemakers operate in the Baltics and Finland, and he has his hand in elections literally everywhere, from the Czech Republic and France to the United States. And he's also in funds mass media. Not a day goes by without some new big article like “Putin’s Revenge,” “The Secret Source of Putin’s Bitterness,” or “10 Reasons Why Vladimir Putin is a Terrible Person.”

Such omnipresence of Putin in Lately brought Putinology to the peak of popularity. This intellectual industry, engaged in the production of comments and analytical materials about Putin, about the motives of his actions and actions based on necessarily biased, incomplete, and sometimes outright false information, has existed for more than 10 years. She upshifted in 2014 after the Russian invasion of Crimea. But in recent months When allegations of Russian interference in the election of President Donald Trump dominated the news, Putinology outdid itself. Never before great amount people with very little knowledge have not expressed such great indignation on the topic of Russia and its president. One could say that reports of Trump's sexual dalliances in a Moscow hotel room gave rise to the golden age of Putinology.

And what does this same Putinology tell us? It turns out that she put forward seven clear hypotheses about Putin. None of them are completely wrong, but at the same time none of them are completely true (except for theory No. 7). Taken together, they say much more about ourselves than about Putin. They paint a portrait of intellectuals (our own portrait) on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But let's look at them in order.

Theory #1: Putin is a genius

Everything is simple here. While the world is playing checkers, Putin is playing chess. He took Crimea from the Ukrainians almost without firing a single shot. He returned Yalta, where Russian tsars and Chekhov loved to vacation. And they punished him for this with just some minor sanctions. He intervened in Syria on behalf of the Assad regime after the United States, Turkey and the Saudis had supported the rebels for years, and quickly turned the tide of the war. It played a significant role in weakening EU unity; it finances right-wing Eurosceptics (and, if appropriate, left-wing Eurosceptics); he has clearly set his sights on the collapse of the post-war international order, choosing to replace it with a bilateral relationship based on mutual interests, in which Russia should primarily act as the senior partner.

And finally, he intervened in the American elections, the elections for the most influential post in the world, and managed to get his man into the White House. And what are the consequences? Several diplomats were expelled from the United States. This is a negligible price to pay for the possible lifting of American sanctions, for the resumption of economic ties, for the joint development of oil fields in the Russian Arctic and for the de facto recognition of Crimea as part of Russia.

Domestically, Putin has managed to suppress or co-opt almost all opposition. Liberals squabble among themselves on social networks and emigrate. He keeps the far right, who hate Putin for refusing to form a completely fascist regime and, for example, take over Kyiv, on a short leash. And the left-wing Social Democrats, hobbled by the seemingly left-wing, but in reality authoritarian and mass Communist Party Russian Federation, so few that Putin doesn’t even notice them (although he has so many eyes).

In his first two presidential terms, Putin was incredibly lucky, as the world began to experience a rapid rise in prices for raw materials. He could have missed his luck, but he managed to grasp it tenaciously, treated it with care and diligence, and as a result, Russia became rich. Today, the only pale imitation of Putin's rival in his inner circle is the prime minister, the small and chubby Dmitry Medvedev, who has distinguished himself mainly because he likes to play on his iPad. The only politician in Russia who has managed to create a noticeable threat to Putin is Alexei Navalny, a talented Moscow populist with changeable political beliefs and a love of online communication. But the Kremlin is not allowing him to breathe freely, filing numerous criminal charges and subjecting him to house arrest.

Putin as an evil genius is undoubtedly the West's main speculative judgment about the Russian president. Both his numerous critics and his few admirers speak about this. Those who are more prejudiced towards Putin’s political, intellectual and military abilities (President Obama, for example) are considered naive and soft people, lovers of checkers, but not chess. Meanwhile, most Russian observers of Putin are surprised by the West's awe at his overwhelming strategic talent. World chess champion and not particularly great opposition politician Garry Kasparov, for example, considers all these statements insulting to chess.

In any case, these claims about Putin's genius raise a lot of questions. Was the seizure of a once-favored resort destination, which had lost its former popularity and where Russians no longer go, worth the risk of falling into international isolation, being subjected to increasingly burdensome sanctions and earning the eternal hatred of the Ukrainian people? Yes, there were fears that the Ukrainian government formed after the Maidan might cancel the lease of a large Russian naval base in Sevastopol. But a real genius would be able to eliminate this threat in some other way, without resorting to capturing the entire peninsula, right?

As for Syria, Putin is certainly basking in the glory of bailing out the Assad regime today. But who will want to celebrate this victory with him? Definitely not the Sunnis, whom Assad mercilessly and en masse destroys. Some of those who survived will soon return to their homes in the Caucasus and Central Asia, harboring a deep hatred for the Russian bear. As for the collapse of the EU, which Putin wants most of all, is this really beneficial for Russia? “Hungarian Putin” Viktor Orban is still friendly towards Moscow, but the Polish Putins from the Law and Justice party are convinced Russophobes. As one astute commentator has noted, if Putin succeeds in bringing a right-wing nationalist leader to power in neighboring Germany, that German Putin may well decide it would be a good idea to go to war with the Russian Putin. German Putins have done this quite often in the past.

And even our own American Putin, Donald Trump, may not be as much manna from heaven for Russia as it might seem at first glance. First, Trump's apparent affair with the Russian president has caused a storm of Russophobia in the United States not seen since the early 1980s. Secondly, Trump is a fool. And a genius should not associate with a fool.

Putin's genius within the country also raises serious suspicions. In 2011, he made the fateful decision to return to the presidency after four years of Medvedev's rule. Medvedev himself announced this decision in a humiliating manner, and very soon powerful protests began in Moscow, the likes of which it had not seen since the early 1990s. Putin skillfully waited out these protests. He did not make the mistake that Viktor Yanukovych made in Ukraine two years later, first reacting too sharply to events and then underestimating the situation. Putin waited until the protests fizzled out and then began removing the leaders of the protest movement one by one. Some were discredited by secretly making a video recording; others were falsely accused of committing crimes. At the same time, Moscow itself experienced something of an urban renaissance. New parks, bike paths and much more appeared there to calm the indignant creakliat, as the creative class was nicknamed. But in fact, Putin did not respond to criticism from the opposition that his political power was corrupt, unresponsive and short-sighted. Instead, he invaded Ukraine and began to fan nationalist sentiment, strengthening the worst aspects of his power.

If Putin had resigned after 2008 and become the great old man of Russian politics, monuments to him would have been erected throughout the country. Under him, Russia emerged from the chaos of the 1990s, and relative stability and prosperity reigned in the country. But today, with oil prices falling, the ruble collapsing, European cheese replaced by ridiculous counter-sanctions, and the opposition demoralized, it is difficult to imagine the Putin era ending without violence. And violence begets new violence. If this is genius, then it will be of some strange quality.

The first time most Russians saw Putin was in 1999 before New Year holidays. A clearly unwell Boris Yeltsin, who still had six months left in his term, announced in his traditional New Year's address that he was resigning as president and handing over powers to a newly appointed, younger and more energetic prime minister.

Then Putin appeared. The effect was stunning. Yeltsin seemed embarrassed and unhealthy. His speech became so slurred that he was difficult to understand. He sat unnaturally straight, as if supported by supports. But this? This pygmy? Putin was tiny compared to Yeltsin. He was younger and healthier, and yet he seemed no more beautiful than death. Putin spoke for several minutes. On the one hand, he promised to strengthen Russian democracy, but on the other, he issued warnings to those who intend to threaten Russia. The performance seemed somehow ridiculous. Many then thought that Putin was unlikely to stay in this high post for long. For all his faults, Yeltsin was at least somebody. Tall, with a booming voice, a former member of the Soviet Politburo. And Putin? People unexpectedly learned that he was just a colonel in the KGB. He worked abroad, although what kind of foreign country is this - provincial East German Dresden? Putin was small, with a raspy voice and thinning hair. He was a nonentity even among those nonentities that remained after the constant purges of the Yeltsin government.

In a world where most people are convinced of the genius of the Russian president, this theory of Putin as a nonentity deserves attention. There really is some kind of ordinariness about Putin. One of my favorite observations about him was made by a person who knew him in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. This man became a whistleblower when, shortly after Putin assumed the presidency, the medical company he headed (a very successful one) was offered to transfer part of its profits to the fund for the construction of a huge “Putin palace” on the Black Sea coast. He told very interesting things about the president, since he knew him before. He shared his observations with British journalist Ben Judah:

He was a completely ordinary person... He had an ordinary voice... not low, not high. He had an average personality... average intelligence... not particularly high intelligence. You could walk out the door and find thousands and thousands of people like Putin in Russia.

Well, he's not entirely right. Putin was not an ordinary person, at least in several respects (for example, he was the judo champion of Leningrad). But there is deep insight in these words. Putin’s charm lies precisely in the fact that he doesn’t stand out in any way. During his first interviews as president, he carefully emphasized what an ordinary person he was, how difficult it was for him to financially in the 1990s, how often he was unlucky. He knew the same jokes, listened to the same music, watched the same films as everyone else of his generation. It was a testament to the strength of Soviet culture, its egalitarianism and its shortcomings. It was so convincing that when Putin recalled lines from a dissident song or an episode from a film from the 60s or 70s, almost everyone understood what he was talking about. He was like everyone else. An unremarkable only child from an unremarkable Leningrad working-class family. It seemed as if the Soviet Union had extracted from its vast human mass a typical specimen with its typical aggressiveness, typical ignorance and typical nostalgia for the past.

Accounts of the early years of Putin's presidency confirm that he was far from a colossus. He was impressed by the power of the American empire and was in awe of George Bush. He also understood how limited his power was within the country. Russian politics of the Yeltsin era was dominated by a small group of oligarchs, titans from the oil and gas industry. banking sector with their own private armies. They were led not by short and skinny retired colonels like Putin, but by portly former generals from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB. Moreover, some oligarchs were the smartest strategists who survived the turbulent 90s and emerged victorious. Putin, meanwhile, was somehow climbing the career ladder as a corrupt deputy to a short-lived mayor. At the initial stage, he became popular due to his toughness towards the Chechens and oligarchs. He managed to raze Chechnya to the ground. But will he be able to win the decisive battles with the oligarchs? Putin had no idea about this.

In 2003, one of the main turning points in his reign came. It took Putin several months to gather the courage to arrest Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. But he did it and achieved results. People did not take to the streets and defend the fallen oligarch. No secret armies emerged from the forests. Putin got away with it, as will many other things later. He will mature and grow into his position. Today we see how the short Putin walks through the spacious Kremlin halls during official ceremonies, and we understand that he has not risen to this splendor. But time has done its work. Trump will become the fourth American president to meet with Putin. Numerous British prime ministers, two French presidents and one German chancellor (whom Putin later hired, which was by no means a source of pride for the German people), left their posts. But Putin remains. He gains special dignity simply because he knows how to survive. True, this is a dubious virtue.

Theory #3: Putin had a stroke

This classic theory from early Putinology gained popularity in 2005, when an article appeared in the Atlantic entitled “The Autocrat by Chance.” The author refers to the work of a "behavioral researcher" from the US Naval Academy in Newport, Rhode Island named Brenda L. Connors. After studying recordings of Putin's gait, she concluded that he had a serious, possibly congenital, neurological defect. It is possible that Putin suffered a stroke in the womb, due to which he cannot fully use the right side of his body, and therefore swings his left arm more than his right when walking. Connors told the Atlantic that Putin may have been unable to crawl as a baby. He still moves as if with his whole body, “from head to tail, like fish or reptiles.”

This hypothesis is unlikely to help predict whether, for example, Putin will attack Belarus. And yet, she is very intrusive. So it seems that the fish-like Putin moves through the world of people who are able to use both sides of their body, and is very upset not having the same opportunity as them.

Theory #4: Putin is a KGB agent

After his famous first meeting with Putin, President-elect George W. Bush told a press conference that he had looked into the Russian's eyes and seen his soul. Bush's advisers were stunned. “I was simply dumbfounded,” National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice wrote in her memoirs. Secretary of State Colin Powell pulled the president aside. “You may have read it all in his eyes,” he said ominously, “but I look into his eyes and I still see three letters there - K, G and B. Remember, he is fluent in German for a reason.” Vice President Dick Cheney had a similar impression. “Whenever I see Putin,” he said, “I think of one thing: KGB, KGB, KGB.”

Since then, nothing has changed. Whenever Putin tries to be nice to someone, it's only because he was a KGB agent and wants to manipulate other people. And if Putin behaves badly, say when he introduced the dog-fearing Angela Merkel to his black Labrador Connie, it is also because he was a KGB agent and wants to achieve psychological superiority.

That Putin gained most of his professional experience in the KGB is beyond doubt, as he worked there from his graduation in 1974 until at least August 1991. Moreover, the KGB is not just an agency, it is also educational institution. At the KGB Higher School in Moscow, where Putin studied, young agents received a university-level education. The bosses believed that this was important because employees needed to understand the world in which they would engage in subversive and recruiting work. It is likely that Putin maintained contacts with his former KGB colleagues after 1991, while working in the St. Petersburg mayor's office. It is also true that Putin took many of his former colleagues with him and installed them in the highest positions of government.

However, this KGB hypothesis seems unconvincing. When people like Rice, Powell and Cheney talk about Putin's KGB background, what they mean is that he views politics as a contest of manipulation. People are either his agents, whom he controls, or his enemies, whom he tries to weaken. It's a cruel worldview, but isn't that what many politicians do? Are there not enough tyrants in the world who divide people into those they can control and those they cannot? Isn't that what, say, Dick Cheney did? Of course, doing this is unacceptable. But there is nothing unique about this, since it is not only the KGB that acts in this way.

But the KGB label also finds other uses in the West. This is such a synecdoche, meaning the entire Soviet Union. And Putin, in the role of a Soviet revanchist with a sickle in one hand and a hammer in the other, became one of the main images in the Western press. What does all of this mean? Of course, hardly anyone thinks that Putin stands for a historical union of the working class (hammer) and peasantry (sickle), or that he is actually a communist who wants to expropriate the bourgeoisie. Rather, we are talking about the USSR as an aggressive imperialist power that occupied half of the eastern part of Europe. It is also true that countries on Russia's periphery do not appear to Putin to be sovereign and have their own rights. In this regard, it would be fair to call him an imperialist. But it is unfair (in relation to the Soviet Union) to believe that Putin’s imperialism is precisely Soviet in nature. Imperialism is not a Soviet invention. Russian empire, whose territory the Soviets managed to keep intact, became an empire, conquering the indigenous northern peoples, waging a series of brutal and long wars in the Caucasus, and cutting off part of Poland. Putin is a Russian imperialist, period.

But of course, there is some moral connotation in calling someone a KGB man, because the Soviet KGB committed murder, persecuted and imprisoned dissidents, and became one of the inventors of what is today called information hoaxes. But the idea that anyone in the KGB is the embodiment of evil is as absurd as the KGB's view of itself as an incorruptible and "professional" agency in the late Soviet period.

The KGB was a gigantic organization - hundreds of thousands of people worked there in the 1980s. When he began to reveal information in the 1990s, we learned that KGB agents came from a variety of backgrounds. There was, for example, Filipp Bobkov, who at one time persecuted Soviet dissidents, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union began working for media oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky and began writing insightful commentaries on the activities of the KGB. One of the KGB officers went to private sector, becoming surveillance specialists and assassins. Some remained in the FSB, and using their official position, began to promote organized crime, killing innocent citizens and accumulating personal fortunes. Some former KGB agents fought bravely in Chechnya, and some committed war crimes there. There was a KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who moved to the FSB and there received an order from his corrupt leaders to kill the oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He did not kill him, and instead made these plans public. After some time, he fled the country, fearing for his life, settled in London and began collaborating with Western intelligence agencies, publishing numerous articles sharply criticizing Putin. A few years later, Litvinenko was poisoned in London with a large dose of polonium-210 by another former KGB agent, Andrei Lugovoi.

Theory #5: Putin is a killer

I now live in New York, but was born in Russia and sometimes write about this country. That's why people often share their opinions about Putin with me. I remember one day in March 2006, I was introduced to a well-known female photographer from France. When she found out that I was from Russia, she said: “Pu-utin?” In French it sounded somewhat offensive and unmanly. “Poo-ting is a cold-blooded killer,” she said.

I had heard this point of view before from some Russian oppositionists, but this was the first time I encountered this in New York. Since she was a woman, a photographer and a Frenchwoman, her opinion struck me primarily from an aesthetic point of view. Putin is a killer because he does not smile, he has a cold, impassive expression on his face and an expressionless gaze. A few months later, Litvinenko was poisoned in London, and journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the center of Moscow as she returned home with shopping. The view of Putin as a murderer has become widespread.

I have no desire to dispute this point of view. Putin has launched brutal and bloody wars against Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine, and I agree with the recently published findings of a British investigation that he “probably” approved the murder of Litvinenko. But for starting aggressive wars and for killing a former operative and defector, they are not expelled from the international community.

No, there is another sense in which Putin is considered a killer, and this has been widely discussed in the US during the strange rise of Donald Trump. As Republicans held their primary, conservative TV host Joe Scarborough, known for his closeness to Trump, began pressuring him about his sympathy for Putin, who Scarborough said was “killing journalists and political opponents.” A few days later, former White House adviser George Stephanopoulos again challenged Trump on a more prominent Sunday politics program. Trump said: “As far as I know, no one has proven that he killed anyone.” Stephanopoulos responded with confidence: “There are many allegations that he was behind the murder of Anna Politkovskaya.” Trump retorted as best he could. But it is clear that the problem remains. During a pre-Super Bowl interview in early February, Trump clashed with Fox moron Bill O'Reilly. “Putin is a killer,” said O’Reilly, to which Trump gave a sensational (albeit correct) answer: “There are many murderers in the world. We have many murderers. What do you think? Is our country so innocent?”

“I don’t know a single government leader who is a murderer,” O’Reilly said. He did not mean that he doesn’t know of government leaders who ordered the invasion of Iraq, authorized dozens of drone strikes or ordered special operation like the one that killed Osama bin Laden. No, he meant that he did not know of leaders who killed ordinary people.

The trouble with this accusation is not that it is false, but that it is careless, like everything in Putinology. When people accuse Putin of killing “journalists and political opponents,” they are referring to Politkovskaya, who was killed in 2006, as well as opposition leader and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, who was killed in 2015. Allegations that Putin was behind the murders of Anna Politkovskaya and Nemtsov do exist, but people knowledgeable about these matters do not believe them. They believe that Politkovskaya and Nemtsov were killed by associates of the brutal Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov. In the Nemtsov case, there is a lot of convincing evidence of the involvement of people close to Kadyrov in the murder. In the Politkovskaya case, the evidence is largely circumstantial (as for Politkovskaya, there is a lot of evidence of other attempts on her life, say, an attempted poisoning, very similar to an order from the authorities), but this is still the most likely scenario.

And yet, Kadyrov's involvement does not relieve Putin of responsibility, since Kadyrov works for Putin. The press widely reported that Putin was puzzled and enraged by Nemtsov's murder, and did not answer Kadyrov's calls for several weeks. On the other hand, almost two years have passed, and Kadyrov is still in charge of Chechnya. Putin appointed him to this post. Therefore, even if Putin did not directly order these killings (again, most journalists and analysts believe that Putin did not do this), he still continues to work with and support those who did.

In the “Putin is a killer” theory, we find ourselves in a kind of conceptual “ dead zone"Putinology. It seems that Russia is not a failed state (where the government has no power), nor is it a totalitarian state (where the government has all the power), but something in between. Putin does not order killings, and yet killings happen. Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea, but as far as one can guess, he did not order the invasion of eastern Ukraine. This invasion appears to have been undertaken at their own peril by a bunch of mercenaries financed by a Russian businessman with well connected. Real Russian troops arrived later. But if Putin does not rule everything, if there are some powerful forces acting in circumvention of Putin’s orders, then what is the point of Putinology? Putinology is silent on this matter.

The worst crime Putin is accused of is the bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow in 1999. In September of that year, when President Boris Yeltsin was ill, the presidential elections were just around the corner, and the little-known Putin moved from the chair of the head of the FSB to the chair of the head of the Yeltsin government, two large residential buildings were blown up in Moscow, killing almost 300 people. A few days later, another explosion occurred in a residential building, this time in the southern city of Volgodonsk. A few more days passed, and a very strange incident occurred when the police in the city of Ryazan detained several people who were carrying something similar to explosives into the basement of a residential building. It turned out that these people were from the FSB. They quickly removed what they had brought, and then announced that this was an exercise, a test of the population and the police for vigilance.

The state immediately blamed these explosions on Chechen terrorists, using this as a justification for the invasion of Chechnya. However, a stubborn minority has consistently insisted that the state itself was responsible for the bombings. (Litvinenko was one of the first to vocally support this theory.) Soviet biologist and dissident Sergei Kovalev created a public commission to test these claims. In 2003, two members of this commission were killed: Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin. Yushenkov was shot near his own house, and Shchekochikhin was poisoned.

The question of the involvement of the Russian state in the bombings of residential buildings remains unanswered. The most authoritative report analyzing the available evidence was compiled a few days ago by John Dunlop of the Hoover Institute. He does not claim to have fully solved the case, but he does claim that there is convincing evidence that Yeltsin’s entourage ordered the bombing of residential buildings, and that the FSB carried out the operation.

However, Putin is evasive and avoids us. If the house explosions were a palace conspiracy, then this conspiracy was concocted not by Putin’s court, but by Yeltsin’s. And the political murders that became a characteristic feature of Putin’s rule were also a characteristic feature of the Yeltsin regime. Again, this in no way relieves Putin of responsibility. However, it does indicate that the period of violence was longer and more complex, that various factions in and outside power used murder and terror as political weapons, and that these were not the machinations of one evil man. If Putin, as president, is unable to stop this violence, then perhaps someone else should be president. And if Putin, as president, is involved in this violence, then another person must be president.

But we should keep our sanity. Putinologists are infuriating with their imprecision and uncertainty, and such imprecision and uncertainty causes great harm. When George Stephanopoulos goes on national television and announces that Putin ordered Politkovskaya's murder, it becomes much more difficult to blame Putin for what he actually did. This is obvious and undeniable.

Theory #6: Putin is a kleptocrat

Until about 2009, the complaints of liberal critics of Putin in Russia, supported and circulated by Western journalists and government officials, were mainly about his violation of human rights. Putin was a censor Russian funds mass media, the executioner of Chechnya, the slow-moving retrograde during our glorious invasion of Iraq, the murderer of Litvinenko and the invader of Georgia. It took the efforts of anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny to radically change the topic of discussion about Putin, moving it from human rights violations to something else: the theft of money from Russians. Lawyer and anti-corruption activist Navalny came to the conclusion that modern Russia Human rights are a losing issue, but money is a winning one. (I remember how he called Putin’s United Russia party “a party of swindlers and thieves.”) According to this theory, which was soon picked up by Western Putinologists, Putin is no longer a terrible monster, but something simpler - an ordinary thief who can be dealt with.

The merit of these accusations is that they are undoubtedly true. Or many of Putin’s old friends are real business geniuses, since after he came to power they became billionaires. It was one thing when the Berezovskys, Khodorkovskys and Abramovichs emerged from the brutal battle of the 1990s with billions in their pockets. They would never have become the owners of these billions if not for their closeness to the Yeltsin regime; but at the same time, they had to survive in the hard years of early Russian capitalism. They really were some kind of geniuses. And the genius of Putin’s billionaire friends lies only in the fact that they made friends with the future president of Russia at the right time.

If Putin loves his friends (as he seems to do), and if his friends love lining their pockets (which they undoubtedly do), it follows that if you hit Putin's cronies hard in their wallets, Russian President will be forced to abandon the most outrageous foreign policy adventures, primarily in Ukraine. This was the logic of the “targeted” sanctions imposed in 2014 by the United States and the EU against Putin’s inner circle.

Today we don't often hear about Putin's kleptocracy. This is probably due to the fact that sanctions have not changed his behavior on the world stage. Naturally, neither Putin’s friends nor Putin himself liked these sanctions. Friends - because today they cannot travel to their favorite resorts in Spain; Putin - because sanctions have left him isolated and outside the international order. And this is shameful and annoying.

But this has not stopped Putin from stymiing and undermining the Minsk agreements designed to stop the fighting in eastern Ukraine. This did not stop him from carrying out his brutal intervention in civil war in Syria. If Putin's friends begged him to come to his senses, he clearly did not listen to them. Most likely, Putin's friends understood that they had gained a lot from his generosity, from his incredible rise to power, and that if necessary, they should support him. Kleptocrats are not the people who successfully organize palace coups. To do this you must be a true believer. And if there is someone among them who is a true believer, he has not yet shown his face. It seems that only Putin himself is a true believer among them.

Putin leads a very modest daily existence. Yes, he has a palace on the Black Sea, built with stolen money, but he does not live there. And it is unlikely that he will ever live. The palace is, in a certain sense, the most encouraging thing Putin has created. This is the hope for his future retirement. And under the current circumstances, Putin is unlikely to be torn apart by an indignant crowd that broke into the Kremlin and dispersed his personal security.

Theory #7: Putin's name is Vladimir

An article recently published on the website of a reputable American magazine warned readers that the end of the communist regime "does not mean that Russia has abandoned its primary goal of destabilizing Europe." They called Putin “a former KGB agent who, not by chance, bears the name Vladimir Ilyich, like Lenin.” Then an amendment was made to the article, writing that it is no coincidence that Putin bears the name Vladimir - just like Lenin. If this is not an accident, then it is probably due to the fact that Vladimir is one of the most common Russian names. But it is impossible to deny it. Both Putin and Lenin are named Vladimir.

This hypothesis is either a historical apogee or the greatest decline of Putinology, depending on your point of view. But the fact that a person who does not know Putin’s middle name confidently proclaims himself an expert clearly means something. This is a sign that Putinology is not really about Putin and has never been about Putin. The flurry of “Putin analysis” before and after the inauguration was generated by the hope that Trump would evaporate on his own, as well as the desire to shift the blame for his victory to someone else. How could we choose this narrow-minded and narcissistic idiot? Surely it was imposed on us from somewhere outside.

At this point, there is no reason to dispute the generally accepted view among intelligence analysts that Russian agents hacked the Democratic National Committee emails and then passed the stolen information to Julian Assange. It is also well known that Putin hates Hillary Clinton.

Further, it is also true that Trump won by a razor-thin margin, and that it did not take a huge effort to swing the result one way or the other. But it's important to remember that there was almost nothing incriminating about the DNC email leaks.

Compare these leaks to the 40-year cycle of American deindustrialization in which only the rich got rich, to the right's 25-year war against the Clintons, to the tea party's eight-year attack on facts, immigration and taxes, to the timid centrist campaign, and to the recent revelations of the FBI director. about a suspicious investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server, then compared to all this, leaks from the Democratic National Committee can hardly be called the main reason for Trump's victory. But according to a recent report, Hillary Clinton and her campaign still blame the Russians for their defeat, and at the same time Barack Obama, who did not make a fuss about the hacking attacks until November. In this case, talking about Putin helps not to think about where mistakes were made and how to correct these mistakes.

Such evasions are the whole essence of Putinology, which seeks consolation in the undeniable, but some very distant depravity of Putin, instead of fighting much closer and more unpleasant vices and mistakes. Putinology emerged 10 years before the 2016 election, and yet what we have seen in recent months with Trump is its platonic ideal.

Here we have a man named Donald J. Trump, who has made numerous cruel and biased remarks, proposed cruel and biased policies, who is a pathological liar, who has succeeded in almost nothing he has tried, who has surrounded himself with crooks and billionaires. And yet, day by day, people are jubilantly greeting every new piece of information in an attempt to uncover Trump's secret/covert connections with Russia. Every scrap of information is being hyped in the hope that he will finally delegitimize Trump, kick him out of the White House, and end the nightmare of liberals suffering from the thought that they lost the election to this hateful asshole.

If Trump is impeached and imprisoned for conspiring with a foreign power to undermine American democracy, I will rejoice as much as the next American. And yet in long term Playing the Russian card is not just a bad political decision, but also an intellectual and moral failure. This is an attempt to blame a foreign power for our country's deep and enduring problems. As some commentators have noted, this is a line from Putin’s own script.

Original publication: Killer, kleptocrat, genius, spy: the many myths of Vladimir Putin

The favorite of the current literary season can easily be called Keith Gessen, a Russian-speaking American and editor of the popular literary and political magazine “n+1”.

The other day, in the conference room of the PR agency VIA3PR, Keith (Konstantin) Gessen met with representatives of the American media in Russian. The guests were met by Irina Shmeleva, president of the agency. The meeting was coordinated by Mikhail Gutkin, a famous columnist for the Voice of America radio station. He asked Keith the first question: “Who is the main reader of the n+1 magazine?”

Rare literary magazine is published in such a circulation as “n+1”. Rarely sells like this. Seven and a half thousand copies are too much not only for America, but also for Russia. The design of the magazine is impeccable from the first to the last page, magnificent illustrations, inserts, compositions. The magazine is published in English, and Keith himself writes mainly in English, and not only for his magazine and for the press in general. Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men came out last year to great success.

I actually think books, more than anything else, can really change thinking,” says Kate. - And our main reader is the American intellectual elite...

The phenomenon of the Bone of Hesse is a highly remarkable and noticeable phenomenon. He has written articles on Russia in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and the New York Review. He interviewed oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov. He translated for Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. The pictures about Russia created by his hand are clear and look true to Americans. Moreover, during a recession when many newspapers have abandoned their own correspondents, the words of an eyewitness become even more powerful.

What made an ordinary American teenager turn to Russia? - Mikhail Gutkin continues to ask Keith.

I didn’t want to sit at home with my parents, read Russian books, drink tea. But much later, when I visited Russia, I realized how rich and interesting life there is. The book I wrote is not a novel about the life of Russian emigrants, it is about how harshly life treats a person full of ideas when faced with the sobering American reality.

Kostya came to America with his parents at the age of 6. He was educated at Harvard. Specializations - Russia and America. He doesn't just talk about Russia, he is interested in its politics. According to Gessen, American society does not need quick answers, it is tired of entertainment and children's games, it craves calm, serious reading.

In 1995, Russia was trying to become America, says Kate. - When I arrived there ten years later, it turned out that Russia had gone its own way. Nevertheless, we can and should talk about the mutual influence of the two countries. Relations between Russia and America are now balanced. But if Russia becomes more aggressive, then America will become more aggressive...

Journalists asked Keith the most various questions. Which Russian writers does (and does) the average American read - Nabokov, Bulgakov, Dostoevsky, Chekhov? What does America look like in Russian media? - Whose education - Americans or Russians - is better?

Keith answered questions willingly (and wittily) and concluded with some amazing news: “Everyone good people now with the Marxists. In Moscow it is the “Forward” movement, and in St. Petersburg it is the “What to do” group. Very interesting guys..."

If the mutual influence of Russia and America is really great, and if in Russia now, like a century ago, Marxists set the tone among the intelligentsia, then can we say that Marxism is also popular among American intellectuals? That is, is it possible to say that the American intellectual elite (including the readership of the magazine “n+1”) is stuck in a Russian ideological dead end?

Konstantin admits that there is a certain link between young American and Russian intellectuals.

Perhaps it is not so important what this or that movement is called as the fact that young people in both America and Russia will begin to take a serious interest and actively engage in politics? And sooner or later will this lead them from Marxism to another ideology - less revolutionary and less discredited? Because we all - both Russians and “Russians” in America - have already gone through Marxism.

Elena Gorsheneva