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The Eurasian Politician - Issue 1 (May 21st, 2000)
by Anne Kuorsalo
(translation from Finnish by Anssi Kullberg)
”People are only thinking about their own profit”, is Academician Dmitri Likhachov’s summary on the value vacuum that prevails in Russia. The Academician, respected as the conscience of his country, has seen almost all the 20th century. The balance sheet of the century is quite gloomy for Russia.
In a morning of early summer, everything seems delusively normal in St. Petersburg. Chestnut trees and lilacs are blooming and the main street of Neva is crowded by joyful life. When one takes a glance from the Nevsky to the side streets, one faces decay of the buildings, but even that seems somewhat cosy. Still, somewhere hidden from the eyes of a vagrant visitor, there is an entirely other kind of St. Petersburg, a frighteningly dark one.
In the same morning when we go to interview Academician Dmitri Likhachov, a chief of an advertising agency has been murdered in front of his home along the Griboyedova Canal, another hired killer has hit a criminal investigator who has studied grand mafia affairs, wounding him and his wife in a mortally dangerous way. Later in the evening yet one car-bomb explodes, destroying the car of the Russian marketing manager of the St. Petersburg filial of the Finnish company Outokumpu.
”This century has not given to Russia as much as it has taken from Russia, because so many negative phenomena have appeared. The Russian people was wiser and more civilised up to the war that began in 1914. But the bad development began already before the revolution”, thinks Academician Dmitri Likhachov. He was born in November 1906, but he still regularly visits his working place, the institution of literature research known as the Pushkin House.
”War always cancels the value of a human life, and every war and killing of people leads to decrease of a culture’s quality. The revolution was even an extreme form of disastrous war”, reminds the Academician, whose own fate was upset, too, in the upheaval of the October Revolution. That was also the end of his childhood. Part of the happy memories of his childhood are connected with Finland, with the time that was described on the Karelian Isthmus as ”the time when the border was still open”.
The Likhachovs had a villa in Kuokkala, on the Finnish side of the former border, and the Academician can still say ‘hello’ and ‘how are you’ in Finnish, because the Finnish peasants used to help the Petersburgian summer guests. An even warmer memory of his home city are the first days of spring, when snow had just started to melt. Then the Finns came to St. Petersburg and offered sleighride for children.
”The Finnish horses were worse than ours, but their sleighs glided better”, remembers the Academician when living again the past. However, the reality became something totally different when the Bolsheviks captured power.
”In St. Petersburg, like also elsewhere in the country, they started organised liquidation of the intelligentsia, and destruction of books. Sometimes it was it was explained as fighting cosmopolitanism. Sometimes whole branches of science were attacked”, Likhachov repeats the burden of history, and mentions genetic research as one example of a science, where Russia had high quality in the twenties, before it was destroyed.
”I remember well how professors started to disappear from the university, and what kind of an effect it made on students.” Besides the disappearances of teachers, Likhachov had other experiences, too. He was imprisoned, and he lived the years 1928-1932 in the notorious monastery island of Solovetsk in the White Sea. Later the sentence has been found illegal.
A summary of the heritage of the Soviet era – or the decay of heritage by that era – is given by Likhachov in his notice that the result was a total destruction of morals and of respect at man. He pays special attention on the effect on the way of thinking of the fact that the Soviet ideology prohibited any interpretations, according to which a writer, researcher or a politician could act with morals or righteousness as his sole motive.
Ten years ago the Soviet Union first time started to publicly search for an escape from deadlock. A hopeful atmosphere prevailed in the country, when the first Parliamentarian Congress chosen in an almost free elections met in the shift of May and June in 1989. Likhachov was one of the about two thousand members of the Congress. He had been elected as the chairman of the Culture Foundation of the Soviet Union.
It has stayed bothering Likhachov’s mind, how in one of the congress sessions a wheelchair-bound veteran of the Afghanistan War rudely attacked against the well-known human rights fighter, Academician Andrei Sakharov. It still bothers Likhachov that he was not present to defend his brother in spirit.
Namely, Likhachov had just been released from the travel ban ordered to him by the Soviet Union, keeping the internationally recognised thinker and expert of ancient Russian culture as a prisoner of his native country. Likhachov even suspects that they wanted him out of Moscow, because they knew in beforehand about the veteran’s attack against Sakharov.
”I was invited to meet Primakov (Yevgeny Primakov who belonged to the Soviet elite then), who said that I must travel to Italy in order to receive a prize granted there, because the state needs more money”, Likhachov tells, partly amused. The joke is in the fact that the Italian prize included only honour, but there was such a shortage of money in Moscow that they wanted to seize the opportunity. In the Soviet times all foreign prizes for researchers and artists went to the state.
In Russia the Congress ten years ago is being remembered partly with bitter sentiments. According to Likhachov, however, it is wrong to say that the expectations of that time would not have been met. The problem, to his mind, is that the expectations became true in a different form than they were wished to become true.
”Nobody could even imagine that a decrease of morality as seen now would happen, and that this massive stealing would begin especially in economic life, but still we have now freedom in science, in the press, and maybe even too much freedom in television. There is neither any more a ban against religion, although the new religious laws have been criticised in the West”, Likhachov lists the positive achievements.
”I would not say that everything has been lost and that everything is bad”, Likhachov his thoughts, and simultaneously wishes an end to the Communist Party. He estimates that the Party has lost a lot, when its long-time attempt to sack President Boris Yeltsin failed in May.
About Yeltsin, the Academician remarks that the president has done his part, and Likhachov also hopes that Yeltsin would give up honourably. At the moment there are lots of rumours on various strategies to lengthen Yeltsin’s regency. The most popular variant is the union of Russia and Belarus into a federal state, in which case Yeltsin could continue as a leader of a new country.
Likhachov has got too receipts to recover morals in Russia, and to fill the present vacuum of values. He thinks one should invest both libraries and upper secondary education. ”Russia has been a country of libraries – there were lots of them already in the 19th century. Ever since, libraries have been destroyed and now they are being thrown out to the streets when the buildings are given to (better-paying) companies.”
As an example of positive development, Likhachov mentions the foundation of the great investor George Soros, who has supported Russian science and culture. Of Likhachov’s initiative, the foundation now has also a library programme. Among other projects, it has been used to send books to read for the Russian border patrol troops serving in Central Asia.
”They have been allowed to choose the books themselves, and the most wanted books have been various kinds of technical literature, especially guide-books for cars. It shows that the people are interested in getting knowledge and to develop in their professions”, rejoices Likhachov.
Likhachov rejects the idea of a Russian ideology as impossible. ”There cannot be any Russian ideology. The richer culture is, the more diverse it is. One united idea is impossible in such a big and heterogeneous country as this. Russian culture is not united, but differs a lot depending on if we are in the North, in St. Petersburg, or in Vladivostok.”
The Academician is neither enthusiastic about the rhetorics of a special mission of Russia. ”Russia’s special mission today is not in very grand issues. Of course the history has certain tendencies, but Russia does not have any special role, however much we would like it to have one.”
As a man who has personally experienced almost all the 20th century, Likhachov hopes that in the beginning of a new century, the Russians would finally be sensible and concentrate in taking care of their own business, yet so that the benefits of all nationalities of Russia would be respected.
Likhachov sees the growth of nationalism as a great danger. He remarks that Islamic fundamentalism is already now a danger in the Caucasus. According to the Academician, the old administrative regional division of the czarist era was better than the present, where borders have been drawn along with nationalities. He reminds that in Karachay-Cherkessia, nearly driven into a civil war in the spring, the situation was in control as long as the republic was part of the neighbouring Stavropol district.
”All nationalism leads to the decrease of culture and of humanist values, and to closeness. Also Russia’s neighbours must give up their nationalism, because the campaign against Russian language in Estonia only increases Russian nationalism”, Likhachov complains.
His advice for his own country is clear: ”We have to pay attention on humanitarian values, culture and education. We have to take care of our own business instead of trying to be something great in the world’s eyes. We do not need primary positions in the world. What we need is stability, and a correct place between Europe and Asia, because we are not fully part of any of them.”
The future is, however, shadowed by an entirely new factor. ”It can be seen with own eyes how population decreases in St. Petersburg. Mortality exceeds the birth rate, which has almost stopped, while before there were so many people that we did not know where to put all the people. Now we see that Russia can cease to exist by simply disappearing”, formulates the Academician the image of threat that makes ever more members of Russian intelligentsia worried.
Anne Kuorsalo
The author is a well-known Finnish journalist, former Anne Sailas, who has a long experience as a foreign correspondent in Russia, and who is one of the authors of a recent book on Russia, which has raised discussion in Finland.