Keith hesse. Keith Gessen. The Guardian, UK. Murderer, kleptocrat, genius, spy: numerous myths about Vladimir Putin. President Putin. Russian emigrant at the Brighton windows

I don't remember when I started talking to Raffi in Russian. I did not speak Russian to him when he was in the womb, although I have since learned that this is when children begin to recognize sound patterns. And I did not 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 spoke to when I spoke to him was his sleep-deprived mother, Emily, who was on edge and needed company. She does not know Russian.

But then, at some point, when the situation stabilized a little, I started. In the moments when I carried it around the neighborhood or rolled it in a stroller, I liked the feeling that we have our own language with it. And I liked the large number of affectionate expressions 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 expressions of affection.

When we started reading Raffi's books, I included several editions in Russian among them. A friend gave us a beautiful book of poems for children by Daniil Kharms. They were not meaningless rhymes, on the contrary, they were very much connected with 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 the next year he died of starvation in a psychiatric hospital. The great Soviet bard Alexander Galich eventually called the song about the man in the forest "prophetic" and wrote his own song, including forest lyrics in the cycle about the Gulag. Raffi liked Kharms's song very much; when he got a little older, he ordered it and then danced.

Before finding out, I constantly spoke to Raffi in Russian, even with his mother. And although at first it seemed silly, because he did not understand anything because we spoke in any language, the moment came 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. “Mu!” Raffi replied. "What does the cat say?" - "Meow!" "What does the owl say?" - Raffi made big eyes, raised his hands and said: "Hoo, hoo!". He did not understand anything else, although at some point, at about the age of one and a half years, he seemed to know what it meant Russian word"No" - I often repeated it.

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

But I doubted and still doubt.

Previously, bilingualism had an unfairly bad reputation, then it got an unfairly exalted one. In the first case, American psychologists of the early twentieth century, in contrast to nativists, suggested that, in addition to heredity, there was something else that made Eastern and Southern European immigrants show lower results in the recently invented IQ tests compared to immigrants from Northern Europe. Scientists have suggested that an attempt 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 useless on their own.

In the early 1960s, this pseudoscientific theory was debunked by Canadian researchers in the midst of the debate over Quebec nationalism. The work of two McGill University scientists who studied French-English bilingual students in Montreal showed that they actually performed better than monolingual children on tests that require mental manipulation and reorganization of visual models. This is how the concept of "bilingual advantage" was born. And, as I recently learned from people who tell me this over and over again, this remains common wisdom.

In fact, in recent years, the bilingual advantage has been called into question. Early research has been criticized for selection bias and lack of clear, testable hypotheses. There is probably no bilingual advantage other than the undeniable advantage of knowing another language. And although it is wrong to assume, as some parents still think, that learning another language along with English will make it much more difficult to master the latter, it is quite possible that it makes it a little difficult. As the psycholinguist François Grosjeon emphasizes, language is a product of necessity. If a child discusses, say, hockey only with his Russian-speaking father, he may not know for a long time what "puck" is in English. But he will know when the need arises.

Either way, in the absence of a “bilingual advantage” that your child will be screened for at the preschool of his choice, you, as a parent, will have to decide if 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 it because they did not like the Soviet Union - it was, as my grandmother used to say, a "terrible country", cruel, tragic, poor and prone to outbursts of anti-Semitism. They did it 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 adventurous - my father paid a serious bribe at some 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 didn't cut me off from American society, and they couldn't. I completely assimilated, embarrassed my parents in many ways, allowing my Russian not to suffer from neglect. Six years is an intermediate age in terms of assimilation. If you are much younger - at two or three years old - the chances of retaining your Russian are slim, and you basically just become American. If you are a few years older - for Russians it seems like nine or ten - you will probably never lose your accent, and for the rest of your life you will be Russian to those around you. At six, 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 came 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 came back all the time and even started families with Russians. I'm in the last group; I started in college and have been writing and thinking about Russia ever since.

Knowledge of the Russian language means a lot to me. This allowed me to travel with relative ease throughout the former Soviet Union. Culturally, I enjoyed what my parents liked: Soviet bards, some charming Soviet novels from the 1970s, poetry by Joseph Brodsky, and plays by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. As I got older, I added something of my own. But I realize that my ties with Russia are weakened. I don't know either 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 the opportunity to use them as a writer and translator, while my parents once saw another opportunity - to get out. But I have 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 kids 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 point of view of the parents, this is not entirely desirable. I still remember the look on my father's face when he left me at Logan Airport to travel to Russia for the first time on my own. It was the spring of 1995, the end of my sophomore year in 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 have ever seen. I wonder if he regretted at that moment 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 increase his ability to communicate with New Yorkers, as well as with most of the rest of the world. I wish I could teach him Italian, Greek or French so that he can visit these beautiful countries and speak their languages. In terms of future career prospects, it would be nice to teach Raffi Mandarin or Cantonese (dialects of Chinese, the first of which, being the largest by the number of speakers, formed the basis of the literary language - approx.transl.), As ambitious hedge sponsors arrange for their children in New York. Hell, even Israel has beaches. If I taught him Hebrew, he could read the Torah. But I do not speak any of these languages. All I have is Russian. And I don't even speak it well enough.

The disadvantage for Raffi is that his father's Russian is as imperfect as he is. I often cannot remember or don’t know the names for well-known things - the other day I tried to remember how the scooter would be 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". Also, my grammar is full of mistakes.

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

Long Island is home to zealous representatives of the communities of the White emigration, in which even in the fourth generation they force children to learn Russian. From such a community came the journalist Paul Khlebnikov. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he went to Moscow, where he published a book on 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 with an acquittal for the two defendants. No one has ever been punished for his murder.

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

source: cdn.img.inosmi.ru

Russian emigrant at the Brighton windows

During the first two and a half years of Raffi's life, the development of his Russian language was somewhat rather indecisive. His first word was "kika", which meant chicken (there are chickens in the garden next to us). For a while, because he used the word "k" and not "ch" at the beginning, I thought it might be a combination of the word chicken and the Russian word for chicken. But none of his subsequent approximate sounding words - "ba" for bottle, "kaku" for cracker, "magum" for mango, "mulk" for milk - contained any Russian components. The glossary we put together for his grandparents when he was almost 18 months old included 53 words or attempts to pronounce them. Only one of them was in Russian: "sword", that is, "ball". Looking back, I had to admit that he said "kika" not because he was trying to say "chicken", but because he could not pronounce the sound indicated by the combination "ch" in chicken.

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

The psycholinguist Grosjon, in his review of modern research in the popular 2010 textbook Bilingual: Life and Reality, says that the main factor in determining whether a child becomes bilingual is necessity: does the child have any real reason to comprehend the language, be it a need talk 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 compared to others, is the attitude of parents towards the second language. Grojon gives the example of Belgian parents whose children must learn French and Flemish. Many parents are not enthusiastic about Flemish, which cannot be safely called a world language, and their children end up not learning it very well.

In our case, Raffi had absolutely no need 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 did my best to create a reasonable amount of Russian in his life, but it is overshadowed by the amount of English. Finally, as I said, there was a bad attitude towards me.

And yet I continued to do it. When Raffi was very young, the only Russian books for him were the silly poems of Kharms and the cute 1980s Swedish books by Barbra Lindgren about Max, the translations of which into Russian were brought by my sister from Moscow. But at about two years old he began to like the poetry 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 violent himself, and could also listen to long stories, we read about Barmaley, a cannibal who eats small children and. in the end, he himself was eaten by the crocodile. Then we switched to kind-hearted Dr. Aibolit (Dr. Ouch), who takes care of animals and makes a heroic journey to Africa at the invitation of Behemoth - Chukovsky was a great 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 melancholic Crocodile Gene, who sings to himself a sad song about his birthday.

After several months, I realized that he understood more and more what I was saying. Not that he did what I told him. But sometimes I mentioned, for example, about my slippers, calling them the Russian word, and he knew what I was talking about. Once he hid one of them. “Where is my second slipper?” I asked him in Russian. He climbed under the sofa and pulled it out very proudly. And I was proud too. Was our child a genius? Just because I repeated the same words enough time and pointed to objects, he recognized the Russian designations for these objects. It's incredible what the human mind is capable of. I can't stop now.

I recently read one of basic research on the topic of bilingualism - the four-volume work of Werner F. Leopold 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 landed a job as a German teacher in the Northwest. He married an American woman from Wisconsin; she was of German descent but did not know the language, and when in 1930 they had a daughter, Hildegard, Leopold decided to teach her German on his own. He kept a painstaking record of results. The first three volumes are quite technical, but the fourth volume is smaller. This is Leopold's diary about how Hildegard grew up from two to six years old.

The book is full of Hildegard's cute grammar mistakes, as well as a fair amount of technical transcriptions of her German speech. After an impressive increase 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 retreat," he writes when Hildegard is just over two years old. "Progress in the German language is small." "The suppression of German words by English is progressing slowly but steadily." He does not receive support from the German émigré community: “It is very difficult to have a German-speaking influence, strengthened by our many German-speaking friends. They all fall involuntarily into English when Hildegard answers English language».

At the same time, Leopold has a wonderful calm about Hildegard's progress, because she is very sweet. “It's amazing that she says 'shave' in English,” he writes, “although I'm the only one she sees shaving. She asks me every time what I am doing and gets the answer in German: raiseren. One evening she touched my beard and said in English, 'Should you shave?' ”Several months later, he notes that Hildegard has become interested in the two languages ​​she is studying. She asks her mother if all fathers speak German. “Apparently,” writes Leopold, “she still 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 reversed impressively when she was five years old and the family was given the opportunity to travel to Germany for six months. In her kindergarten, she occasionally 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, of course 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, the development of his Russian language suddenly accelerated. He began to notice that I was speaking a language different from the language of all the others - so he “faced two languages,” as Leopold said about Hildegard. Raffi's first reaction was annoyance. "Dad," he said one evening, "We need to introduce English into you." He clearly understood language - exactly according to Grojon - as a substance that fills a vessel. I asked him why he doesn't speak Russian to me. "I can't," he said simply, "Mom put English in me."

Then, one night, while Emily and I were talking, putting him to bed, he noticed something strange: "Dad, you speak English with Mom!". He hadn't discovered 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 ponder this. "Dad," he exclaimed one evening, as he sat on my shoulders, heading home from kindergarten, "This is how it sounds 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 in which he could theoretically speak.

He started to enjoy it more. "Phi-fi-fo-fum," he sang one evening before getting into the bathtub, "I smell the blood of an Englishman!" "Me? - I said in Russian, - Am I an Englishman?" Raffi understood my idea well and immediately corrected himself: "I smell the blood of a Russian person!" He laughed: he likes to replace one word or sound with another, often meaningless. But in this case it made sense. A few days later, at supper, he said something even more startling. I talked to him, but then changed the subject and turned to Emily. Raffi didn't like it. “No, Mom! - he said. - Don't take daddy's Russian from him! " Russian in this case was a symbol of my attention.

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

At the time, Raffi was experiencing one of his recurring bouts of misbehavior. They tend to come in cycles. A month of good behavior gives way to two months of willful disobedience and hysterics. The last such period began a couple of months ago. Raffi runs away from me or Emily as we go out for a walk - sometimes a block away. This implies certain penalties. And it definitely has to do with bad behavior with your playmates: picking up their toys, pushing them, pulling their hair.

I have found that I am more hot-tempered in Russian than in English. I have fewer words and therefore they end faster. I have a certain case in Russian that doesn't seem to be in my English. In it, I make my voice deep and threatening, telling Raffi that if he doesn't immediately choose which shirt he's going to wear this morning, I'll choose it for him. When he runs down the street, I shout without any embarrassment in a very scary manner that if he does not return, he will receive a timeout (we have no Russian equivalent for the English word timeout, so the phrase goes like this: “Rafik, if you you will not come back immediately, you will have a very long time-out ”). 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 it. Instead of an eloquent, ironic, cold American father, Raffi gets an emotional, sometimes screaming Russian parent with a limited vocabulary... This is a compromise. Again, I had a gentle mother and a stern father. And I was very happy.

One of my weaknesses as Raffi's Russian teacher is that I am poor at scheduling. In Brooklyn, there are constant meetings of Russian parents, to which I cannot go or I simply do not want to be dragged there. Nonetheless, one morning a few weekends ago, I took Raffi to play children's songs at a bar in Williamsburg. One Russian parent booked this seat and asked singer Zhenya Lopatnik to perform several children's songs. We were there - 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 it? What exactly did we want to pass on to our children? Of course, nothing about Russia as it stands. Perhaps it was appropriate that we listened to children's songs. There was something magical in 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 very sound of the language. Probably none of this. It was probably just magical to be a child. But since we could not rule out that Russian was related to 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 his birthday. Raffi got interested and danced a little.

At the end of the children's program, Lopatnik announced that she wanted to perform several songs for her parents. “What do you think of Tsoi?” She asked. Tsoi was the songwriter and lead singer of Kino, one of the greatest Russian rock bands. The adults welcomed this offer. She sang the song "Kino". Then she performed the well-known, 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 beloved died in the fire, and he longs for her, although in subsequent years the author insisted on his belief that the song had religious connotations, and that its addressee was God.

“I broke glass like chocolate in my hand
I cut these fingers because they
Can't touch you I looked into these faces
And I could not forgive them
The fact that they do not have you and they can live. "

We never listened to this song together, and yet Raffi was shocked. We were all shocked. The original version was accompanied by nonsense inherent in late Soviet rock like synthesizers and saxophone solo. Rubbish. Deprived 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 what, in spite of everything, one way or another connected with Russia and the Russian language. And in many ways about the impossibility of maintaining these ties.

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

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

And a few days later he pronounced his first sentence in Russian: "I am a hippo."

I was deeply, stupidly, indescribably moved. 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 that in the end he will do it.

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

President Putin.

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

As you can see, Vladimir Putin is everywhere. He sends soldiers to Ukraine and Syria, his troublemakers operate in the Baltics and Finland, he had his hand in elections literally everywhere, from the Czech Republic and France to the United States. And he is also in the means mass media... Not a day goes by without some new big article like "Putin's Revenge", "The Secret Source of Putin's Spite" or "10 Reasons Why Vladimir Putin is a Terrible Man."

Such omnipresence of Putin in recent times elevated Putinology to its peak of popularity. This intellectual industry, engaged in the production of comments and analytical materials about Putin, about the motives of his actions and deeds based on necessarily biased, incomplete, and sometimes frankly false information, has existed for more than 10 years. She turned on an overdrive in 2014 after the Russian invasion of Crimea. But in recent months, with allegations of Russian interference in the election of President Donald Trump dominating the news, Putinology has surpassed itself. Never before have such a huge number of people with very poor knowledge expressed themselves with such huge indignation on the topic of Russia and its president. We can say that reports of Trump's sexual pleasures in a Moscow hotel room sparked the golden age of Putinology.

And what does this Putinology tell us? It turns out that she put forward seven clear hypotheses about Putin. None of them is completely wrong, but at the same time none is completely correct (except for theory # 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 away from the Ukrainians practically without firing a single shot. He returned Yalta, where the Russian tsars and Chekhov loved to rest. And he was punished for this with just some minor sanctions. He launched an intervention in Syria on the side of the Assad regime after the United States, Turkey and the Saudis supported the rebels for several years, and quickly turned the tide of the war. He played a significant role in weakening the unity of the EU; it finances right-wing Eurosceptics (and, if appropriate, left-wing Eurosceptics); he clearly set his sights on the collapse of the post-war international order, deciding to replace it with bilateral relations based on mutual interests, in which Russia should mainly act as a senior partner.

Finally, he intervened in the American election, the election for the most powerful office in the world, and managed to hold The White house your person. And what are the consequences? Several diplomats were expelled from the United States. This is a negligible price 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. The extreme right, who hate Putin for refusing to form a completely fascist regime and, for example, take over Kiev, he keeps on a short leash. And the left social democrats, hobbled in seemingly left, but in reality authoritarian and mass The Communist Party The Russian Federation is so small that Putin does not even notice them (although he has so many eyes).

In the first two presidential terms, Putin was incredibly lucky, as the world began to rapidly rise in prices for raw materials. He could blink his luck, but he managed to grasp it tenaciously, treated it carefully and prudently, and as a result, Russia became rich. Today, only the prime minister, small and plump Dmitry Medvedev, who distinguished himself mainly by the fact that he loves to play on his iPad, can only be a pale likeness of Putin's rival in his inner circle. The only politician in Russia who has managed to create a visible threat to Putin is Alexei Navalny, a talented Moscow populist with fluid political convictions and a love of networking. But the Kremlin is keeping him from breathing with multiple criminal charges and house arrests.

Putin as an evil genius is undoubtedly the West's main speculative judgment about the Russian president. His numerous critics and small admirers speak about this. Those who are more prejudiced about 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 watching Putin marvel at this reverent Western fear of his irresistible strategic talent. World chess champion and not-so-great opposition politician Garry Kasparov, for example, finds all these statements offensive to chess.

In any case, these claims about Putin's genius raise a lot of questions. Was the seizure of a resort place, a favorite in the past, but having lost its former popularity, where Russians no longer travel, was worth it to fall into international isolation, be subject to increasingly burdensome sanctions and deserve 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 seizing the entire peninsula, right?

As for Syria, Putin is now definitely basking in the glory of bailing out the Assad regime. But who wants to celebrate this victory with him? Certainly not the Sunnis, whom Assad is ruthlessly and massively destroying. 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, what Putin wants most, is it really beneficial for Russia? The "Hungarian Putin" Viktor Orban is so far benevolent to Moscow, but the Polish Putin from the Law and Justice party are convinced Russophobes. As one shrewd commentator pointed out, if Putin succeeds in bringing a right-wing nationalist leader to power in neighboring Germany, that German Putin may well decide it would be nice to fight the Russian Putin. German Putin's have done this quite often in the past.

And even our own American Putin, Donald Trump, may not be as heavenly for Russia as it might seem at first glance. First, Trump's apparent romance with the Russian president has sparked a storm of Russophobia in the United States that hasn't been seen since the early 1980s. Second, Trump is a fool. And a genius shouldn't mess with a fool.

Putin's genius inside the country also raises serious suspicions. In 2011, he made the fateful decision to return to the presidency after Medvedev's four-year rule. Medvedev himself announced this decision in a humiliating manner for himself, and very soon powerful protests began in Moscow, which she 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, by first overreacting to events and then underestimating the situation. Putin waited until the protests fizzled out, and then began to remove the leaders of the protest movement one by one. Someone was discredited by secretly filming, someone was presented with fake charges of committing crimes. At the same time, Moscow itself experienced a kind of urban renaissance. New parks, bike paths and much more have appeared there to calm the outraged kraakliate, as the creative class was called. But in fact, Putin did not respond in any way to criticism from the opposition, which argued that his political power was corrupt, unresponsive and short-sighted. Instead, he invaded Ukraine and began fanning nationalist sentiments, exacerbating the worst aspects of his power.

If Putin resigned after 2008 and became the great old man of Russian politics, monuments would be erected all over the country. Under him, Russia emerged from the chaos of the 1990s, and relative stability and prosperity reigned in the country. But today, when oil prices have fallen, the ruble has collapsed, ridiculous counter-sanctions have appeared instead of European cheese, and the opposition is demoralized, it is difficult to imagine that the Putin era would end without violence. And violence gives rise to new violence. If this is genius, then of some strange quality.

For the first time, most Russians saw Putin in 1999, before the New Year holidays. Obviously unwell, Boris Yeltsin, who still had six months before the end of his term, announced in his traditional New Year's address that he would step down from the presidency and transfer powers to the newly appointed, younger and more energetic prime minister.

Then Putin appeared. The effect was overwhelming. Yeltsin seemed embarrassed and unhealthy. His speech became so slurred that it was difficult to understand. He sat unnaturally upright, as if on props. 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 against 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 flaws, Yeltsin was at least someone. Tall, with a loud 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 - the 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 believe in the genius of the Russian president, this theory of Putin as a nonentity deserves attention. There is indeed some kind of mediocrity in Putin. One of my favorite observations about him was made by a person who knew him in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. The man became a whistleblower when, shortly after Putin came to the presidency, the medical company he headed (a very successful one) was offered to transfer part of the profits to the fund for the construction of a huge "Putin's palace" on the Black Sea coast. He told some very curious 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 ordinary temperament ... an ordinary intellect ... not a particularly high intellect. You could go out the door and find thousands and thousands of people like Putin in Russia.

Well, he's not entirely right. Putin was not quite an ordinary person, at least in several ways (for example, he was the champion of Leningrad in judo). But there is deep insight in these words. Putin's charm is precisely that he does not stand out in any way. During his first interviews as president, he diligently 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 in 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 movie 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. The impression was that the Soviet Union had extracted a typical specimen from its huge mass of people with its typical aggressiveness, typical ignorance and typical nostalgia for the past.

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

2003 marked one of the major turning points in his reign. It took Putin several months to gather his courage to arrest the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. But he did it and got the result. People did not take to the streets to defend the fallen oligarch. Secret armies did not appear from the forests. Putin got away with it, and much more will get away with it later. He will mature and grow to his position. Today we see a short Putin walking through the spacious Kremlin halls during official ceremonies, and we understand that he has not risen to this magnificence. But time has done its job. Trump will become the fourth American president Putin will meet. Numerous British prime ministers, two French presidents and one German chancellor (whom Putin later hired, which was by no means a reason for the pride of the German people), left their posts. And Putin remains. He acquires special dignity simply because he knows how to survive. True, this is a dubious merit.

Theory # 3: Putin had a stroke

This classic theory from early Putinology rose to prominence in 2005 when an article appeared in the Atlantic entitled "Autocrat by Chance." The author refers to the work of a "behavior researcher" at the US Navy Academy in Newport, Rhode Island named Brenda L. Connors. After examining the records of Putin's gait, she concluded that he had a serious, possibly congenital, neurological malformation. It is possible that Putin suffered a stroke in the womb, which is why he is unable to fully use the right side of his body, and therefore swinging his left hand more when walking than his right. Connors told The Atlantic that Putin may not have been able to crawl as an infant. 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 around the world of people who can use both sides of his body, and is very upset, not having such an opportunity as they have.

Theory # 4: Putin is a KGB agent

Following his famous first meeting with Putin, President-elect George W. Bush said at a press conference that he looked the Russian in the eye and saw his soul. Bush's advisers were stunned. “I was just dumbfounded,” National Security Advisor 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 still see three letters there - K, G and B. Remember, he’s not just fluent in German.” 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 is only because he was a KGB agent and wants to manipulate other people. And if Putin is behaving ugly, say, when he introduced dog-afraid Angela Merkel to his black Labrador Connie, it is also because he was a KGB agent and wants to achieve psychological superiority.

There is no doubt that Putin has accumulated most of the professional experience in the KGB, since he worked there from the moment he graduated from university in 1974 until at least August 1991. Moreover, the KGB is not just a department, it is also an educational institution. At the KGB Graduate School in Moscow, where Putin studied, young agents received university-level education. The bosses believed that this was important, as employees must understand the world in which they will conduct subversive and recruiting work. It is likely that Putin kept in touch with his former colleagues in the KGB after 1991, working in the mayor's office of St. Petersburg. It is also true that Putin took many former colleagues with him and put them in the highest positions in the government.

However, this KGB hypothesis seems unconvincing. When people like Rice, Powell and Cheney talk about Putin's KGB past, they mean that he treats politics as a contest of manipulation. People are either his agents, whom he controls, or his enemies, whom he is trying to weaken. This is a cruel worldview, but isn't that what many politicians do? Are there few tyrants in the world who divide people into those whom they can control and whom they cannot? Wasn't that how, say, Dick Cheney acted? Of course, 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 has other uses in the West as well. This is such a synecdoche that denotes 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 has become one of the main images in the Western press. What does all this mean? Of course, hardly anyone thinks that Putin is in favor of a historical alliance of the working class (hammer) and peasantry (sickle), or that he is actually a communist who wants to expropriate the bourgeoisie. Rather, here 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 the countries on the Russian periphery do not appear to Putin as sovereign and in possession of their 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. The Russian Empire, whose territory the Soviets managed to keep intact, became an empire, conquering the indigenous peoples of the north, 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 a certain moral implication in the fact that we call someone a KGB person, because the Soviet KGB committed murders, persecuted and imprisoned dissidents, and became one of the inventors of what is today called information stuffing. But the idea that any person from the KGB is the embodiment of evil is as absurd as the KGB's opinion of itself as an incorruptible and "professional" agency of the late Soviet period.

The KGB was a gigantic organization - hundreds of thousands of people worked there in the 1980s. When he began disclosing information in the 1990s, we learned that the KGB agents were very different. There was, for example, Philip Bobkov, who at one time persecuted Soviet dissidents, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he began working for the media oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky and began to write meaningful comments on the activities of the KGB. Some of the KGB officers left for the private sector, becoming surveillance specialists and contract killers. Someone 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 joined 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 to cooperate with Western intelligence services, 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 the killer

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

I had heard this point of view earlier from some Russian oppositionists, but this was the first time I encountered it 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 and an expressionless look. 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 purchases. The perception of Putin as a murderer has become widespread.

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

No, there is a different sense here, in which Putin is considered an assassin, and this was widely discussed in the US during Donald Trump's strange rise. When the Republicans were holding the primary, conservative broadcaster Joe Scarborough, known for his affinity with Trump, began to pressure him about his sympathy for Putin, who, according to Scarborough, "is killing journalists and political opponents." A few days later, former White House adviser George Stephanopoulos once again challenged Trump on Sunday's more famous politics program. Trump said, "To my knowledge, no one has proven that he killed anyone." Stephanopoulos in response to this confidently stated: "There are many allegations that it was he who was behind the murder of Anna Politkovskaya." Trump fought back as best he could. But it is clear that the problem remains. In a pre-Super Bowl interview in early February, Trump clashed with Fox ballerina Bill O "Reilly. "Putin is a killer," said O "Reilly, to which Trump gave a sensational (albeit correct) answer:" There are many killers in the world. We have many killers. What do you think? Our country is so innocent? "

“I don’t know a single government leader who is a murderer,” said O. Reilly. He didn’t mean that he didn’t know the government leaders who ordered the invasion of Iraq, gave the go-ahead for dozens of drone strikes, or ordered a special operation like the one that killed Osama bin Laden, no, he meant that he did not know the leaders who kill 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 mean Politkovskaya, who was killed in 2006, and 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 who are versed in these matters do not believe in them. They believe that Politkovskaya and Nemtsov were killed by the close associates of the brutal dictator of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov. In the Nemtsov case, there is a mass of convincing evidence of involvement in the murder of people close to Kadyrov. In the Politkovskaya case, the evidence is largely circumstantial (as for Politkovskaya, that is, there is a lot of evidence and other attempts on her life, say, an attempt at poisoning, very similar to the order of the authorities), but this is still the most likely scenario.

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

In the “Putin is the killer” theory, we find ourselves in a kind of conceptual “dead zone” of Putinology. It seems that Russia is not a bankrupt state (where the government has no power), and at the same time, not a totalitarian state (where the government has all the power), but something in between. Putin does not order the killings, and yet killings do occur. Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea, but, as far as you can guess, he did not order to invade eastern Ukraine. The invasion appears to have been undertaken at their own risk by a handful of mercenaries financed by a well-connected Russian businessman. Real Russian troops arrived later. But if Putin does not lead everything, if there are some powerful forces acting to bypass Putin's orders, then what is the point in Putinology? Putinology is silent on this score.

The worst crime Putin is accused of is the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow. 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 FSB head to the chair of the head of the Yeltsin government, two large apartment buildings were blown up in Moscow, as a result of which almost 300 people died. A few days later, there was another explosion of 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 bringing something that looked like explosives into the basement of a residential building. It turned out that these people were from the FSB. They quickly removed what they brought, and then announced that it was an exercise, checking the population and the police for vigilance.

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

The question of the involvement of the Russian state in the apartment bombings remains unanswered. The most authoritative account of the available evidence and evidence was written a few days ago by John Dunlop of the Hoover Institute. He does not claim that he completely solved this case, but claims that there is convincing evidence that the blowing up of residential buildings was ordered by Yeltsin's entourage, and the operation itself was carried out by the FSB.

However, Putin shies away from answers and shuns us. If the explosions of houses were a palace conspiracy, then this conspiracy was concocted not by Putin's court, but by Yeltsin's. And the political assassinations that have become a characteristic feature of Putin's rule were a characteristic feature of the Yeltsin regime as well. Again, this does not absolve Putin of responsibility in any way. However, this indicates that the period of violence was longer and more complex, that various groups within and outside the government used murder and terror as a political weapon, and that these were not the machinations of one evil person. If Putin, as president, is incapable of stopping this violence, then perhaps someone else must be president. And if Putin, as president, is involved in this violence, then another person must necessarily be the president.

But we need to keep our sanity. Putinologists are infuriating with their imprecision and uncertainty, and such imprecision and uncertainty is very harmful. When George Stephanopoulos appears on national television and announces that Putin ordered the assassination of Politkovskaya, it becomes much more difficult to blame Putin for what he did. This is obvious and certain.

Theory # 6: Putin is a kleptocrat

Until about 2009, complaints from liberal critics of Putin in Russia, supported and replicated by Western journalists and statesmen, focused primarily on the fact that he was violating human rights. Putin was the censor of the Russian media, the executioner of Chechnya, the heavy-handed retrograde during our glorious invasion of Iraq, the killer of Litvinenko and the invader of Georgia. It took the efforts of anti-corruption fighter Alexei Navalny to radically change the topic of the discussion about Putin, shifting it from human rights violations to something else: stealing money from Russians. Navalny, a lawyer and activist of the anti-corruption movement, came to the conclusion that in modern Russia, human rights are a losing topic, and money is a winning one. (I remember how he called Putin's United Russia party "a party of crooks and thieves."

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's one thing when the Berezovskys, Khodorkovskys and Abramovichs emerged from the brutal battle of the 1990s with billions in their pockets. They would by no means become the owners of these billions if it were not for their proximity to the Yeltsin regime; but at the same time, they had to survive in the turbulent years of early Russian capitalism. They really were geniuses of sorts. And the genius of Putin's billionaire cronies lies only in the fact that they made friends with the future president of Russia on time.

If Putin loves his friends (it looks like he does), and if his friends like to stuff their pockets (and this is undoubtedly so), then it follows that if it hurts to hit Putin's cronies 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 "pinpoint" sanctions imposed in 2014 by the US and the EU against Putin's inner circle.

We rarely hear about Putin's kleptocracy today. This is probably due to the fact that the sanctions did not change his behavior on the world stage. Naturally, neither Putin's friends nor Putin himself could like these sanctions. Friends - because today they cannot go to their favorite resorts in Spain; To Putin - because, because of the sanctions, he was isolated and outside the framework of the international order. And this is shameful and annoying.

But that did not stop Putin from driving him into a dead end and undermining the Minsk agreements, designed to stop fighting in eastern Ukraine. This did not stop him from carrying out his brutal intervention in the civil war in Syria. If Putin's friends begged him to come to his senses, then he obviously did not listen to them. Most likely, Putin's friends understood that they received a lot thanks to his generosity, thanks to his incredible ascent to the pinnacle of power, and that, if necessary, they should support him. Kleptocrats are not the kind of people who successfully organize palace coups. For this you need to be a true believer. And if among them there is someone who is a true believer, then he has not yet shown his face. It seems that the only true believer among them is Putin himself.

Putin leads a very humble day-to-day existence. Yes, he has a palace on the Black Sea, built with stolen money, but he does not live there. And he will hardly ever live. The palace is, in a sense, the most hopeful thing Putin has ever created. This is the hope for his future resignation. And under the current circumstances, Putin is unlikely to be torn apart by the outraged crowd that broke into the Kremlin and dispersed his bodyguards.

Theory # 7: Putin's name is Vladimir

In an article recently published on the website of a reputable American magazine, readers were warned that the end of the communist regime "does not mean that Russia has abandoned its primary task of destabilizing Europe." Putin was called there "a former KGB agent who is not accidentally named Vladimir Ilyich, like Lenin." Then an amendment was made to the article, writing that it is not by chance that Putin bears the name Vladimir - like Lenin. If this is not an accident, it is probably due to the fact that Vladimir is one of the most common Russian names. But this is impossible to deny. Both Putin and Lenin are called Vladimir.

This hypothesis is either a historical climax or the greatest decline of Putinology, depending on your point of view. But the fact that a person who does not know Putin's patronymic 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 "Putinanalysis" before and after the inauguration is fueled by the hope that Trump will evaporate on its own, as well as the desire to shift the blame for his victory onto someone else. How could we have chosen this narrow-minded and narcissistic idiot? Surely they imposed it on us from somewhere else.

There is no reason at this time to challenge the conventional intelligence analysts' view that Russian agents hacked into the Democratic National Committee's mail and then passed on 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 narrow margin, and that it did not take a huge amount of effort to change the result in one direction or another. But it must be remembered that there was almost nothing incriminating in the leaks of information from the mailboxes of the Democratic National Committee.

Comparing these leaks to the 40-year cycle of American de-industrialization, when only the rich got rich, with the 25-year war of the right against the Clintons, with the tea-drinking movement's eight-year attacks on facts, immigration and taxes, with the timid campaign of the centrists and with the recent revelations of the director of the FBI. about a suspicious investigation into Clinton's use of a private mail server, 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 headquarters still blame the Russians for their defeat, and along with Barack Obama, who until November did not raise a fuss about hacker attacks... In this case, talking about Putin helps not to think about where mistakes were made and how to fix these mistakes.

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

Here we have a man named Donald J. Trump, who came up with numerous cruel and biased statements, proposed a cruel and biased policy, who is a pathological liar, who has failed almost nothing of what he tried to do, who surrounded himself with crooks and billionaires. And yet, day after day, people are greeted with glee at each new piece of information in an attempt to uncover Trump's secret / covert ties to Russia. Every scrap of this information is hyped in hopes that he will finally strip Trump of legitimacy, expel him from the White House and end the nightmare of liberals suffering from the thought that they have lost the election to this hated jerk.

If Trump is impeached and jailed for conspiring with a foreign power to undermine American democracy, I will be as happy about it as any other American. Yet in the long run, playing the Russian card is not just bad. political decision but also intellectual and moral failure. It is an attempt to shift the blame for the deep and enduring problems of our country onto a foreign power. As some commentators point out, this is a line from Putin's own script.

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

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

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

A rare literary magazine has such a circulation as "n + 1". Rare is so sold. Seven and a half thousand copies is too much not only for America, but also for Russia. The design of the magazine from the first to the last page is impeccable, 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. Hesse's book All the Sad Young Literary Men came out last year and was a great success.

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

The Bone of Hesse phenomenon is a highly remarkable and perceptible phenomenon. He is the author of articles on Russia for The New Yorker, The Atlantic and the New York Review. He interviewed the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov. He translated Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. Pictures of Russia, created by his hand, are understandable and look true to the Americans. In addition, during the recession, when many newspapers have abandoned their own correspondents, the words of an eyewitness become even more significant.

What made the average American teenager turn their faces to Russia? - Mikhail Gutkin continues to question Keith.

I didn't want to stay at home with my parents, read Russian books, drink tea. But much later, when I visited Russia, I realized that life there is so rich and interesting. The book I wrote is not a novel from the life of Russian émigrés, it is about how harshly life treats a person full of ideas when faced with a 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 does not 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 longs for calm, serious reading.

In 1995, Russia tried to become America, says Keith. - When I arrived there ten years later, it turned out that Russia went its own way. Nevertheless, one 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 ...

The journalists asked Keith a variety of questions. What Russian writers does the average American read (and does) - Nabokov, Bulgakov, Dostoevsky, Chekhov? What does America look like in the Russian media? - Whose education - American or Russian - is better?

Keith willingly (and witty) answered questions, and in the end he told reporters the amazing news: “All the good people are now with the Marxists. In Moscow, this is the movement "Forward", and in St. Petersburg, the group "What to do". Very interesting guys ... "

If the mutual influence of Russia and America is really great, and if in Russia now, as well as a century ago, Marxists set the tone among the intelligentsia, then can we say that Marxism is popular among American intellectuals as well? That is, can it be argued that the American intellectual elite (including the readership of the magazine "n + 1") is stuck in the Russian ideological deadlock?

Konstantin admits that there is some kind of connecting link between young American and Russian intellectuals.

Perhaps it is not so important what the name of this or that movement is, but the fact that young people in both America and Russia will begin to be seriously interested in and are actively involved in politics? And this, sooner or later, will lead them from Marxism to a different ideology - less revolutionary and less discredited? Because all of us - both Russians and "Russians" in America - have already passed through Marxism.

Elena Gorsheneva

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 =
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 settled 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

Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Look at other dictionaries:

At the 6 Moscow Internacional Book Festival, 2011 Masha Gessen (born 13 January 1967) is an American journalist and author. Born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Russia, in 1981 she moved with her family to the United States, returning in 1991 ... ... Wikipedia

Infobox Magazine title = n + 1 image size = 175px image caption = publisher = circulation = frequency = biannually language = English category = culture, literature, politics editor = Keith Gessen editor title = Editor in Chief firstdate = 2004…… Wikipedia

Hesse, Maria Alexandrovna- There are articles on Wikipedia about other people with this surname, see Hesse (disambiguation). Masha Gessen ... Wikipedia

This article is about the n + 1 literary journal. For information about high availability models, see N + 1 redundancy. n + 1 Managing Editor Carla Blumenkranz Categories culture, literature, politics Frequency Triannually First issue 2004… Wikipedia

Khodorkovsky in 2001 Born 26 June 1963 (1963 06 26) (age 48) Moscow, Soviet Union Nationality… Wikipedia

- (born October 13, 1981) is the former co editor of Gawker.com. She grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and attended college for two years at Kenyon College before transferring to Eugene Lang College in New York City.Gould resides in Brooklyn, New…… Wikipedia

Hesse, Maria- Director of the Russian service of Radio Liberty since October 1, 2012 Russian and American journalist and writer. From October 1, 2012 she should take the post of director of the Russian service of Radio Liberty, from January to August 2012 she was the main ... ... Encyclopedia of Newsmakers

David Samuels Born David Samuels Brooklyn, New York Occupation Non fiction writer, Journalist Nationality American Period 1991 present Notable work (s) Only Love Can Break Your Heart (2008) The… Wikipedia

Infobox Website name = Gawker favicon = caption = url = http://www.gawker.com/ commercial = Yes type = Blog registration = owner = Gawker Media author = Nick Denton (Managing Editor) Alex Pareene / Richard Lawson / Sheila McClear / Hamilton Nolan /…… Wikipedia

Infobox Venue name = Bowery Poetry Club image caption = The front facade of the Bowery Poetry Club nickname = BPC location = Manhattan, New York type = Performance Arts venue genre = Poety, Spoken Word, Slam Poetry, Hip Hop, Experimental Theater… Wikipedia

Born in Moscow and at the age of six, writer Keith Gessen published an article on Russia in the New York Times. In particular, he spoke about the confusion caused by the discrepancy between the image of Russia broadcast in the Western media and what the country is in reality.

“For people like me, who write and reflect on Russia for most of their lives, the past few years have been a strange experience. I, like everyone else, read the news and am terrified. Then I visit Russia and find inconsistencies that confuse me, ”writes Gessen, the text of the article of which is reported by Inosmi.

Gessen admitted that his parents loved Russian culture, literature, films, but did not like Russia as it was in Soviet times. But, having moved to the United States, 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 skyrocketed in 2014 and increased further after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He admitted that in connection with such an interest he experienced a depressing feeling, as he expected that the country would lock 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 was beneficial for business, Gessen writes. He notes that at the university where he teaches, he was given the green light to form a new group for the study of Russia, and students began to sign up for these classes. “It wouldn't have happened a few years ago,” he remarked.

“But why do I have such bad feelings about everything that happens? Perhaps the reason is simple: since I lived in Russia, I know how difficult this country is. Living in Russia does not mean that you are constantly 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 had not been to Russia, more than 20 new metro stations opened in Moscow. “During the same period, three new stations were opened with great fanfare in New York,” he notes.

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

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

At the same time, Gessen believes that the "political atmosphere" in Russia is poisoned. He likened Russia to a "little-known but beloved group" that becomes famous for a "stupid act," such as the destruction of a hotel room. “In this case, the hotel room is 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.

The novel "Terrible Country" by Keith Gessen was recently published.

Recall that in March, the special intelligence committee of the US House of Representatives investigated Russia's "interference" in the 2016 presidential elections in the States. US President Donald Trump then stressed several times that there was evidence of collusion between his team and Moscow.

President Vladimir Putin stressed that Moscow is in the American elections, while the United States has repeatedly tried to influence elections in other states.