TRAC
Interview Transcript

Victor Erofeyev (cont)

If a Russian person happens to be a success story, the rest of the Russian society, even the higher stratum will certainly make him an outcast. Why? Because there is something indecent about being successful. Now, if you use this set of measurements and view the U.S. through them, you have become an indecent country. Because from this standpoint, every American is wild and indecent because the only thing on his or her mind is how to become more successful.

And so we find ourselves in the quagmire, in this predicament. We can never see eye to eye simply because we use the same notion or concepts but the semantics with them are so different. It is not a rational approach. We are sort of gliding over whatever irrational surface.

So, on the one hand we have this Western outlook where the Russians are those poor, those hurt people who absolutely have to be rescued and saved. On the other hand, we have the Russian outlook; the Russians view themselves as full-bodied. They do not feel the lack of anything and they are very happy. They are very deep. They are very profound and they could do without this Western civilization. This is a paradox.

To make this situation more presentable, take a look at some Russian intellectuals. They are so well integrated with the Western culture; they are so well met by the Western civilization that they are the chosen ones for the West to communicate with. Hence, the West begins to believe that there are some Russians, you can have rational dialogue with them, which is not exactly the case.

The West has never been able to figure out Russia. But to figure it all out is to figure out this whole essence of mystery in Russia. Apparently, what the West cannot do is lift its self-imposed restrictions. The West still insists that Russian society should be viewed through this paradigm of Western experience, i.e. the Russians have to be helped. I don’t know how to put it but I feel if you go down to the essence of Russian culture you would realize that the Russians feel it is the West that needs to be helped. The Russians, being true Christians do not have any history. This is way for any Christian. If you are a Russian and your family just collapsed around you, this is a message from Christ. You are supposed to drop your family and follow your Christ. These are all sorts of other examples of the same thing.

But then you would turn around and say okay, if the Russians are so happy, how come the Russian society is so horrible? Why is it? First, you have this czarist regime, czarist imperialism, then the Soviet imperialism. Basically why have you had whatever you have had in history?

Let’s say that there is a turtle crossing your path. Are you going to negotiate with the turtle? If so, are you going to negotiate with its bone or with its head? It would make more sense to negotiate with its head. Now this turtle is Russia and this turtle is the Russians. Crossing Russia and the Russians, then this turtle will die. So you have to deal with this dual reality.

The Russians are hiding underneath this turtle bone. And, for the time being, they feel perfectly safe because of the bone. Although all it takes is an anti-tank gun and you put a hole through all these layers of steel. This is why it makes more sense to negotiate with the Russians than to negotiate with Russia. This is why at a conference like this, any one of you can find some common language with a Russian counterpart; hence, come to a realization well these Russian guys are really like ourselves.

God forbid you get sick in Russia. Then you would realize what this Russian bone is all about. How come that Russians are so inept or inadequate that they manage to survive underneath this heavy layer of bone? The answer is very simplistic — because Russia consists of so many Auntie Neoras i.e. the people who still cannot figure out what this bone is all about and where it came from. So, when you deal with any Russian one-on-one, you can do that, as a regular human being, but put them all together and you realize that what makes them all Russian is a quality that they all share, i.e. the inability to create a normal, functioning, decent society.

Now I would like to concentrate some more on what constitutes a Russian person. In the Western civilization, when you talk in terms of standards, you imply that a standard is something real. In Russian the word "standard" is neither here nor there. It’s the polarity that counts. The Russian mind can be characterized by the fact that in his everyday life, a Russian strives to experience both poles, understanding that one is good and the other one is evil.

Culturally speaking, for the Russian mind, this metaphysical trait is so important and life is one huge experimental field where you have to experience all the downs and all the ups of life. So it should become equally obvious that because of this metamorphosis and because of this life experiences, Russia becomes the country where it’s absolutely impossible to put together a railroad or to manage a drugstore or to find yourself a decent silk tie. It is because of this cultural imbued polarity that the Russian culture has achieved incredible heights.

Russian civilization is such that before the Revolution of 1917 you would have had hard to find a single drug store in Russia that would be managed by an ethnic Russian. It was the Germans who managed the drugstores. So if you are to alienate culture and civilization, the Russian would — put it this way — thank God we have this culture and we couldn’t care less about civilization. We cannot run a drugstore — we’ll have the Germans, they’ll do it for us. We don’t know how to make shoes — we’ll have somebody else, they’ll make the shoes for us. We don’t know how to make silk ties so we’ll buy them. But thank God, we have this culture. We think in terms of eternity. And thank God we do not have to put on plastic smiles when somebody happens to mention the word "metaphysics". Another angle of approach would be that the Russians know how it feels to have this turtle bone about but then again they also know how to fight it.

Russia is a bag of jokes. In Russia, we do not have historic records. We do have an amazing number of historic jokes. Every Russian, I would even submit that every Russian who happens to be in this room is a character in a potential anecdote or a carrier of the joke culture. One reason we probably are not part and parcel of any actual joke is only because we have those classical characters that are like nomads, traveling from one joke to another. If we do not treat life seriously, but whatever the reason is because we find ourselves the part and parcel of this joke culture. We belong to the joke culture which is the best psychological therapy you can find at any time on the psychoanalytical couch. All it takes is to tell or hear a joke. Life and jokes are structured in such a way that it triggers your relief mechanism. You no longer have to be victimized by all these innumerable layers of horror that otherwise would suppress you. This whole culture of jokes created a Russian character which is very self-critical, which I believe is amazing. If Americans were to share these kind of jokes that we have, I believe the whole American civilization would come to a sudden halt. The Ford Company would no longer need people to manufacture any new cars. But in Russia, we do tell jokes; hence, we do not have any cars in any factories. So basically what happens is that if Russia generates yet another dictator or generates a class that all the rest of us have to fight, at least in mental terms, immediately we come up with this whole factory, this whole class of jokes. And what the jokes do, they save you, from the evil. At one point, what we did — we generated this endless stream of jokes about the Civil War heroes. About the red commissar. And basically, what it boils down to — in so many stories about this commissar-idiot who would fail in everything he would attempt to achieve and yet, on the other side, he becomes your ideal true blue Russian. Relatively speaking, quite recently in the quote-unquote New Russia we came up with this whole new class of the new Russian and immediately the national response was a new stream of jokes. But the structure was the same as that of the red commissar. The inner logic, the structure of those jokes, in this sense they are almost identical. It’s almost like a tarantula; there is so much poison in its saliva that it helps to digest anything it wants to internalize. This is the case with Russia.

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