Yesterday, I was reading a copy of the New York Times when a “Special Advertising Supplement” fell out from behind the dining section. A disclaimer says that the supplement was written and sponsored by the Rossiyskaya Gazette and did not contain any reporting or editing from the staff of the Times. The supplement took the form of a short newspaper issue, but looking at the collection of articles included in this supplement, I think it is clear that its form was deceptive of its function. Though it looked and read like a newspaper, the eight pages combined to create a well-crafted and well-disguised advertisement. Just like any advertisement it has a target audience; in this case, that target audience is quite narrow. This supplement was intended to reach high-powered financial investors, and it carried a strong message for them: we’re stable, we’re on our way up, and you can be part of the ride if you take the plunge of investment.

To be fair, none of what I’m calling ‘advertising’ was untrue or exaggerated. The tone of the issue was simultaneously realistically self-aware and shamelessly self-promoting. The articles didn’t gloss over weaknesses in the nation’s economy or try to exaggerate its true extent of foreign investors, but for every story of struggle there was a story of expansion and improvement. A front-page article detailed the Russian Government’s hiring of Goldman Sachs to attract capital from abroad, and an interview feature with the chairman of the Russian Union of Gold Production had a prominent pull-quote: “we need to create the right conditions to attract investors.” Stories on the back page were concerned with the Russian tourism industry: one was about a Russian booth at a New York City tourism fair, and another assesses reviews of Russian travel destinations on the website TripAdvisor. Another front page blurb declared Russia as the world’s second-largest arms dealer, an article next to it reviews a new line of mobile devices from a Russian firm, and an entire page of the issue was devoted to the increased gold mining in Siberia and the far east. One headline is particularly amusing given our past few class discussions: “Quality rather than quantity of capital a concern in 2013”.

Since my mind has been stuck in the Stalin era and the disasters of the Five Year Plans, I’ve almost forgotten that Russia has moved beyond those years and is in the process of rebranding its once unstable economy. Though I lack a strong economics education that would help me comprehend some of the jargon and come to my own independent conclusions about the current Russian economy, it will be interesting to see what direction it will take in the coming years.

In Timothy Johnson’s introduction to Being Soviet, he talks about successful rumors. The author states, “Successful rumors… survive on the basis of ‘natural selection’. Those rumors which are credible to those who transmit them are passed on and become successful; rumors which are not credible do not survive” (Johnson, 27). When I hear the word “rumor,” I’m instantly skeptical- of the validity of the statement, and of the trustworthiness of the person relaying said rumor. In truth, I often associate the word “rumor” with “gossip.”

However, what intrigued me and incited me to write a blog was how powerful rumors were within the Soviet Union, noted specifically in the introduction of Timothy Johnson’s Being Soviet. In this reading, Johnson talked about how Soviets were able to acquire news on a daily basis. Discussions soon revealed that while newspapers were generally looked to for news, the rumors spread through familial ties and friends held just as much legitimacy in the minds of the Soviets. Johnson wrote specifically that “Rumors supplemented, rather than replaced, the contents of the official press…However, they did not regard the two [the press versus rumors] as intrinsically in competition with one another. Indeed, they often spoke of cross referencing material from one source against information from another: ‘Even the members of the party among themselves don’t believe everything that they read in the Soviet newspapers . . . Conversations with members of my family or with friends were very important.’” (Johnson, 21).

Upon reading this, I was mildly surprised. I found this to be very similar to American news culture. It’s arguably true that within American society, the population as a whole focuses on the news and newspapers for our daily intake of information. Ironically there is reliability placed in rumors spread throughout the country as well, very similar to the Soviets. Indeed, while at times rumors possess a negative connotation, that doesn’t stop the general population from researching the validity of a rumor, or acknowledging it as partly true, thereby lending integrity to the rumor. Despite how rumors are viewed by society in general, that doesn’t stop the general population from using them to their advantage. For instance, in the political realm, “rumor bombs” are used in various contexts. They’re especially used by political campaigns via smear campaigns to slander one’s opponent, or to revamp or reframe a situation in a way that is politically beneficial to one side of a campaign and utterly destructive to the opposing side. In thinking about rumors in those contexts, it was clear that rumors can’t just be brushed aside as mere gossip, irrelevant to society.

This section of reading truly made me think about rumors and made me realize just how important they are for the population in general. They were essential not only in the Soviet Union where they were a source of news, but also in the modern era. Rumors in a way offer a kind of freedom that press does not. What a newspaper chooses to publish, or a news station chooses to broadcast is beyond the power of the common individual. Rumors offer people a choice- to listen or to dismiss, to share or to not. It’s no wonder that rumors were so powerful and a common way of gaining information within the Soviet Union and in America today. In short, despite possibly negative associations, rumors are commonplace and play an integral and at times even valuable part in society.

In my class on Russian politics, we recently watched a documentary called “My Perestroika”, which documented the experiences of Russians who came of age during the era of Gorbachev, focusing on both their past and their present. Two of the people profiled are high school history teachers in Moscow. In one of the scenes, one of them teaches high school students the exact topic we were discussing; the forced collectivization of peasants. You can see the incredulous looks on the students’ faces, as he compares it to the government coming into their apartments today, taking everything, and telling them that it will become a communal dormitory. The contrast is striking, as when the teacher was his students’ age, he was not taught the same things that he is now teaching.

Both history teachers talk about how hard it is for Russian students to understand how the Soviet Union could have happened. One of the teachers, Lyuba, says that even explaining it as a fairytale, of good verses evil, does not work, as the situation was so confusing and complicated. She believes that even understanding the history of the formation of the Soviet Union is not enough, and that much of it remains incomprehensible

Every country has challenges confronting their own history. For Russians, this challenge is especially difficult. Russia has a history of re-writing its own past and using past events to justify the current reality, even if that means falsifying its history. I hope that later on in the semester, we might touch upon how the Soviet Union re-wrote the history of Russia to give meaning to its own existence, exploring how Soviet textbooks portrayed various tsars.

I tried to post this soon after seeing the film back in January, but because the wifi on the first floor Adams is useless I didn’t realize until recently that the post hadn’t gone through.

This weekend, I went with my roommate to see the most recent adaptation of Anna Karenina at the Carlisle Theater. I’ll make the disclaimer now that I’ve never read the book – I knew the plot line and general ending already, but I’ve never made good on my perennial pledge to read the novel over my summer break (the same can be said for The Illiad and Infinite Jest.). I think it goes without saying that literary adaptations are almost always disappointing, but I figured I could still enjoy the film as a stand-alone piece of cinema.

                Twenty minutes in, I knew I was wrong. Even just as a film, Anna Karenina was awful. The storyline was unclear, and character development was completely secondary to the film’s art direction. Granted, the film was visually rich, with impressive costuming and scenery. A review from the New York Times described it as a “visual kaleidoscope,” which is an apt metaphor. Even so, conceptual aspects of the art direction were unnecessary and confusing, such as the motif of performing on a stage. There were multiple instances when the camera would zoom out from a shot and the Russian countryside would appear on a stage in a theater, replete with Peter Karenin and his frolicking children. To me, this motif was an unsubtle way of commenting on the superficiality of Russian high society and the way that Anna was forced to act the part of a wife to a man she did not love. However, this, along with the repeated foreshadowing of the following scene, seemed to insult the intelligence of the audience and deny them the opportunity to determine themes or anticipate the climactic ending. I use the word “climactic” because I assume that was how it was supposed to be in the novel, not because the ending was this way in the film. In fact, the character development was so poor that it was hard for me to sympathize with Anna or even care about what happened to her in the final scene.  

                I left the theater with the feeling that the past two hours would have been better spend reading the first few chapters of Tolstoy’s novel. With no thanks to this adaptation, maybe this summer I’ll finally cross it off my to-do list.

Learning about the revolutionary history of Russia and its ascension to a modern state, I continue to be struck by the parallels to the rise of modern China and its revolutionary period in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Last semester I took a class on the Rise of Modern China with very limited knowledge of Chinese or Russian revolutionary history. Though we did discuss the effects of Marxism-Leninism on the Chinese revolutions, I lacked the knowledge necessary to place this in any sort of historical context. However, the past few class sessions have helped me crystalize the ways in which China and Russia followed similar trajectories as they modernized.

                One of the clearest similarities between the two countries was their agrarian-based economies and large peasant populations that, along with the intellectual classes, became revolutionaries due to their exasperation with ineffectual monarchies and unequal social structures. Both nations had tentative revolutionary successes before finally defeating the powers of their respective empires: Russia had a 1905 revolution as well as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and China had revolutions in 1911 and 1949. Both countries were weakened by civil wars between opposing ideological and national groups. Communism took hold in Russia first, but Lenin proved highly influential to Mao Zedong, who would become Chairman of the People’s Republic of China and declare it a communist state in 1949. Indeed, the revolutionary activity in Russia proved to be an impetus for the Chinese revolutionaries to stage a second uprising.

                One of the most intriguing – and perplexing – similarities I have yet to notice is the parallel family backgrounds of Mao and Stalin. These two men are considered to be among the world’s most ruthless and fearful dictators, and both came from families with strict, abusive fathers and compassionate mothers. Both also dabbled in religion before reverting to atheism. I don’t know much about psychoanalytic theories of war or dictatorship, and I hardly know what to make of this connection, but I would like to continue to explore studies of comparative revolutions in upcoming weeks.

The New York Times online ran an article on Thursday about the opening of the Moscow Stock Exchange, calling it “another milestone in the country’s capitalist evolution.”  I found it interesting, considering we have just begun discussing the plan for the Soviet economy, that twenty years after it ended, Russia deferred back to capitalism almost by default.  This transition does not seem to be easy-going, however, as the article described the Russian markets as the most “volatile,” either being in the top five or bottom five performing markets in the world.

While the article contained mostly economic jargon that I am not able to understand yet, what I did gleam from it was that this new stock exchange is considered a maturation, which at least to me implied that the Soviet program was in a sense immature and ill-conceived.  The return to capitalism can be likened to Lenin’s New Economic Policy’s reluctance to give up capitalism.  Despite being seen as violating socialist ideology, the Russian economy of the late 1920s was increasing because capitalism was partly responsible for encouraging production.  It left me wondering, coming from my capitalist background in America, which economic structure really makes the most sense.  While socialism’s ideas of equality sound wonderful from the outside, it is difficult to adjust to having one place in the economy and society without hope for advancement.  The competition of capitalism spurs the desire for betterment.  At times in our class it seemed the Soviet’s liked to punish sons for the sins of their fathers, as in Stalin’s singular promotion of those with working class backgrounds and hatred to the Tsarists.  The men of Russia in the the Soviet beginnings were far removed from the days of serfdom and probably the new middle class did not need to be punished for rising above these backgrounds.  This too contradicts the socialist ideology in that it promotes a hierarchy, even if peasants make up the top sphere.  If the leaders of the revolution themselves saw the benefits in capitalist ideals, is it the better system?  Is socialism designed to be a short term fix to get rid of wide-spread oppression but not meant to sustain in the long run?  While I am sure Marx, Lenin, and Stalin are rolling over in their graves at this post, the fact that Russia is finding its way back to capitalism seems to indicate that in order for Russia to once again become an imposing world power, it needs to end its years of teenage rebellion and finally settle into a stability, innovating in order to be able to compete with the other world markets.

For class this week, we were assigned to read the novella We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I personally admit that I was not looking forward to reading this book, knowing nothing about it except that it was two hundred pages long. However, upon first picking up this book, I found that I could not put it down. Not only was it interesting to me, it also gave me an opportunity to see the ideas and theories that were circulating Russian society at the time. One of these ideas (and a central theme in this novella) was that of a perfect society. The concept of a perfect society, or utopia, has incited the questioning of the possibilities of this since the beginning of mankind. Man has always strived for perfection; therefore humanity in general has explored numerous methods of possibly achieving the ultimate society.

In searching for a perfect society, a theory is to end all unpredictably and to cling to logic and science. The argument is that by adhering to what cannot be questioned or suddenly change, a society will stay consistently perfect. The arithmetically perfect society of the One State in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We shows a society that is completely and utterly obsessed with logic and science. With this obsession in mind, the society has little choice but to stamp out any unpredictable factors within society; specifically, individuality. This individuality, whether it’s described through clothing, emotions, relationships, or even scheduling is completely eradicated and systemized into one single unit of people. As a result, the society becomes completely equal, with everyone wearing the same uniform and all adhering to the same schedule dictated by the One State. However, the novella We exemplifies that while these ideas of perfection seem on the surface to be solely beneficial to humankind, all of them have the potential to be morphed and distorted into a dystopia. The novella We clearly emphasizes this, particularly through the development of the character D-503.

One of the key components of a utopian society is that of equality. The idea of individuality is not only frowned upon, it is also unheard of in this type of society. No one person is better or worse than another. D-503, who was the ideal citizen of One State, shows through his actions that even the “perfect” citizen is susceptible to the instinctive human desire to be superior. At one point early in the novella, D-503 praises the perfection of the One State society, and relates this by stating, “…it was as if I – not whole generations past – had personally, myself, conquered the old God and the old life. As if I personally had created all this” (Zamyatin, 7). This line clearly epitomizes the expression of pride D-503 felt as an individual, and how in turn his pride placed him subconsciously on a level above the equality-focused doctrine of the One State. In turn, he fools himself into the unconscious belief that as a builder of the Integral, he has the ability to alter the State or leave it as is. This fantasy contradicts the utopian ideal of equality and the idea that there is no individual. D-503’s own innate human emotions cannot be stamped out by the One State, and their beliefs.

This is but one example of many in Zamyatin’s novella. The idea that the author strives to convey (and I believe ultimately succeeds in doing) is that as long as there are human beings, and in turn innate human emotions and tendencies, there can never be a utopian society. These emotions are not explainable, and cannot be controlled by math or science. Emotions are inherently unpredictable, and what make us unique as individuals. It is what drives humans to question, to fight, to argue, to love, and so much more. Try as a government might, a way has not been found yet to stamp out human emotion, and unfortunately, that would be the only plausible way to guarantee complete and utter control in a utopian society.

During our discussion in class today I was quite intrigued by many of the actions that some of the Bolshevik leaders took during the initial years of Bolshevik rule. Growing up in the United States, even after the end of the cold war, I have been conditioned to think of the Soviets as mindless robots devoid of thought or intuition. However, during the lecture I realized that that idea was an enormous misconception as Lenin and the other party leaders were incredibly intelligent and new how to accomplish their goals.

One such example of this is in Lenin’s NEP (New Economic Policy). Although it was not as popular idea among many members of the party, Lenin realized that he needed to ease into socialism, rather than force it immediately. Because of this, he allowed non-essential businesses to function on their own and only took over industries essential to government function. This was a brilliant move by Lenin, as rushing straight into pure socialism would have led to the complete collapse of the Soviet system, due to the lack of money in the government.

Joseph Stalin was also another power player in this intellectual community, despite being looked down upon. Stalin used his lack of education to his benefit, and filled many important governmental positions with his supporters. Due to his almost lack of respect among Bolshevik leaders, he was able to do this without arousing suspicion and when the time came, he had the power to depose Trotsky and take power.

I think that it is always important to remember your educational base, especially when learning about other cultures. Throughout this class, I have routinely noticed things that I originally thought to be true about the Soviets are actually entirely false. I accredit this to being brought up in the US, where the fear of communism is still present. I know that it is impossible to be completely unbiased, but I feel that it is important to do everything we can to come at all topics with as open-minded as possible.

A theme that is becoming more apparent to me in this class is the role of the human body. As we discussed in the group class, revolutionaries would often dig up the graves of saints in order to prove that the dead bodies do in fact decay, contrary to religious belief. While this is a very literal example, there are also examples in literature that we can observe. For example, Rakhmetov devotes an enormous amount of time to improving his body.Like the previously mentioned revolutionaries, he stresses the importance of present carnal strength and potential rather than the role of the body after death.

Yet another example lies in “We.” The protagonist becomes concerned when he begins to “grow a soul.” I cannot personally identify a religion that presents the soul as post-birth trait. Generally speaking, it is something that already exists at the time of birth (and usually before). In “We,” it would appear that yet again the body is completely tied to the present. It’s role in the after life becomes very unclear.

Perhaps what we can identify from these examples is that the struggles and goals during  revolutionary Russia were so entirely carnal that the philosophical perspective among the country became more agnostic, if not atheistic  We know that there was a rise in anti-religious groups (and instances of violence against groups that maintained religion) throughout Russia. But how subconscious was this rise in perspective? That is the question I would be curious to explore further.