Big Think

Question: Is the Russian intelligentsia more pure than the American counterpart?

Keith Gessen: That’s an interesting question. I think the- you know, the Russian- in the Russian world, and I don’t think it’s a richer world, I think it’s a poorer world- it’s definitely poorer- it has less diversity. It’s- especially, the world of our parents, my parents in the ‘60s, they were cut off from a lot of what was going on, and this allowed them a kind of, a sort of glorious narrowness, you know, where they were very convinced of certain things. And they didn’t have the experience with the world to disabuse them of that. So, you know there’s this line that I love from Brodsky talking about these people, “They thought the rest of the world was like themselves.” Hopelessly cut off from the rest of the world, they thought at least it was like themselves, meaning, you know, they were sitting in their kitchens and they knew that Russia- Soviet Union- was crude and vulgar and violent, but at least out in the West, there were these people who would be sympathetic to them, and then Brodsky writes, “Now they know that the world is just like the others,” meaning like the other Soviets, only better-dressed. So- but this was, you know, this was something that I think, you know, the immigrants learned this a bit earlier than the rest of the Russian intelligentsia. They learned this when they came over in the late ‘70s, that America, in a way, was just as crude and vulgar as the Soviet Union. But so yes, so- the effect of being in that cocoon was for them- allowed them to develop a kind of- a fine morality that is very attractive. And yet, that- what has actually happened in the post-Soviet space is that it turned out to be totally helpless when faced with actual complicated political/social realities. The Russian intelligentsias collapsed, so I- you know, I find myself- I find myself very attracted to these people and yet, historically, they have- they have failed. And that’s very- that’s very sad. At the same time, you know, when you’re in America and where things are so complicated, it’s often very easy to say, well, things are so complicated. You know- these people have a little bit of right on their side, and these other people have a little bit of right on their side, and well, who knows? And, to go back and read the Russians who are so convinced of things, who are so convinced that they knew the difference between right and wrong, is extremely tonic and extremely useful, and I always find it very heartening to go back to those people. And I also- you know, there are now Russian intellectuals who are beginning to do this again, who are beginning to say that things have gone very badly in Russia. And these are people my age, who are beginning to reconstruct this old kind of opposition to the regime, so that’s very- that’s very important to me.

Question: Who are the new Russian intellectuals?

Keith Gessen: Well, the previous generation, the ‘60s generation, were people who thought that what the Soviet Union needed was liberalization, and they needed to allow the import of Beatles and blue jeans and the free market, and they needed to allow people to just live their own private lives and become consumers, just like in the West. The result of this has been- you know- and that’s what they’ve gotten. And that’s what- excuse me- that’s what Russia now is. It’s a place where everybody has a car, everybody has a television and they have a kind of fake democracy, and basically, with the oil money, they’ve managed to buy off a fairly large proportion of the population, including especially these very people who had once been the silent and sometimes not so silent opposition to the regime. Those people have basically been bought off, and where they’ve not been bought off, like if they’re college professors and they’re not making a whole lot of money, they don’t really have a leg to stand on intellectually because this is what they wanted. They said, “Let’s have a free market. Let’s have voting.” And these things have been perverted in various ways, but ultimately, yeah, they got the right to vote and they got freedom of speech, and they got a free market. And it’s horrible. <chuckles> So, what- there’s one poet in particular named Kirill Medvedev who I’ve translated and I’ve translated some of his essays, and he says, you know, what’s missing- what was missing from the generation of the ‘60s, what they didn’t have, was the experience of Western Marxism. They totally- they missed it. It was not available to them in the Soviet Union, and until- and you know, this means the Frankfurt School, it means Bourdieu, it means Gramsci, this is what Western intellectuals were working with, and you know, using some of it, rejecting some of it, Lucach. The Russians did not have this, and where they came across it, it reminded them too much of, you know, Lenin, and they rejected it. But, in fact, this stuff is extremely valuable and so this is- this Medvedev and some of his friends are working on, are working through this material and trying to understand life with the benefit of Western Marxist criticism.

Recorded: 3/18/08