TRAC
Interview Transcript

Kirill Razlogov   (cont)

So there is nothing astonishing, nothing especially new about what's happening now. It's something that we have known but somewhat have forgotten. And to understand what is going on now, we have to understand how these kind of situations were solved by Russian cultural traditions. From this point of view, I think that weÑthe Russians and the Americans and the Western scholarsÑlargely overestimate the importance of the 1917 Revolution. My feeling is that, as far as everyday life of the people is concerned, as far as cultural traditions are concerned, as far as habits, customs, feelings are concerned, nothing much changed.

What changed the superstructure, and the Orthodox Christianity was replaced by Marxism/Leninism. And it explains why 70 years after, Marxism/Leninism was so easily replaced by Orthodox Christianity. Because the place was there, and by reading about the role of the Orthodox church in Russian history, we come upon exactly the same things that happened during the Communist regime. For example, the Orthodox church had a rule that four of the most important ministers, which were the minister of education and internal affairs, and some others, important ministers, had to be Orthodox. What the Communists did about it, they established a rule that all the ministers should be Communists. But the rule is the same, and the approach is the same. And the relation between the Communist Party and the State was, in fact, the same as the relation between the State and the Orthodox Church in the Czarist period. It was not exactly the same, because there was this great fight of who's more important, the Czar or the church, and the religious schisms of the 17th Century, and the fight inside the church in the 18th and the 19th Century. I'll give many examples of how this fight was going on. But in fact, the place was occupied by the Communist Party, who took all the decisions without answering for them. And the role of the Central Committee of the Communist Party was exactly corresponding to the role of the church in the kind of state Russia has become.

To that we can add a geographical remark which is very funny as we go see the recent Russian history, because the Central Committee of the Communist Party, you know MoscowÑyou have been to MoscowÑis located in the old square special building which traditionally is linked to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. So the fight about the buildings that followed the fall down of the Soviet Union was the fight to occupy separate places. And it's not by accident that the president's administration replaced the Central Committee of the Communist Party in this building exactly, because the function of the president's administration had to be the same as the function of the Central Committee. Now things are changing because the president's administration is becoming weaker. But they still occupy the building, they still occupy the function, and the fight around the Russian white house, who will be there, be it the government or the parliament, was a fight about power relations, but a very symbolic fight, because fight about symbols is the fight we're thinking about when we're speaking about the situation from a cultural studies point of view, which will be my point of view here. Most of it was shared in part by Victor, but Victor was much more flying in what he said and much more free as an artist, and I have to be much more careful about what I say.

So coming back to this symbolical meaning of places, the symbolical let's say the symbolical links between the past, the present, and the future, we can also remember the hammer and the sickle symbol was the symbol of the new Bolshevik civilization. It was, in fact, like we discussed here, a transformation of the Islamic symbol of the Moon crescent, and the Christian symbol of the Cross. So, putting together an Islamic symbol with a Christian symbol and transforming it into a symbol of union between workers and peasants, was a way to transform the historical tradition without really breaking it.

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