by Stefano Caprio

Author Viktor Erofeev, from exile in Berlin since 2022, publishes a novel entitled Velikij Gopnik, illustrating how Putinism emerged from Russian subconscious and the backyards of Leningrad to reach levels of extremism towards its very soul, incapable of ‘accepting a normal life’.

One of Russia's most important writers and intellectuals, Viktor Erofeev, who has been living in Berlin since 2022, has published a novel entitled Velikij Gopnik, the ‘Big Thug’, in which he tries to show how Putinism grew out of the unconscious of Russians from the backyards of Leningrad, where the future ‘eternal president’ Vladimir Putin showed himself in all the brazenness of the street urchin, the gopnik, a term that became popular in the last Soviet period.

The delinquent characteristic of power now seems to have been transferred from Russia to the whole world, especially after the election of Donald Trump and the announcement of appointments of, to say the least, disturbing characters in the key posts of the American administration, from the secretary of state to defence and justice, coordinated by the new minister of state simplification, the impetuous billionaire Elon Musk.

Tulsi Gabbard, the darling of Russian television and considered to be the main Putin propagandist in the West, should even go as head of US intelligence, and health minister Robert Kennedy, the most extreme of the no-vaxers, could become minister of health.

One might have expected a reaction to the cancell culture that in the past years has tried to impose a sociality subject to obsessive inner censorship, with the fear that any expression could become offensive according to various interpretations. Now we see the opposite regurgitation of the rejection of any convention, not only linguistic or communicative, but also legal and international relations.

This was the attitude of the gopniki, the street bandits who stole not out of necessity but in protest against the prevailing rules, which were particularly rigid in the Brezhnev Soviet world. The term comes from the acronym Gop, Gorodksoe Obščestvo Prizora, ‘City Surveillance Community’, when at the end of the 19th century a centre was set up in a building in the centre of St Petersburg for the detention and control of bezprizorniki, ‘unsupervised’ boys, orphans or runaways who engaged in theft and hooligan acts on the streets of the capital.

After the 1917 revolution, in the same building - which today houses the Oktjabrskaya Hotel - the work of rehabilitating minors continued, called Gosudarstvennoe Obščežitie Proletariata, still Gop, but understood as ‘State Hostel of the Proletariat’.

The number of Leningrad hooligans grew exponentially, and the gopniki of Ligovka, the district of the city where the hostel was located, became a definition extended to the entire Soviet Union, almost a universal category of mankind. From this ‘subculture’ of the Russian-Soviet past, Erofeev now proposes to draw insights into how today's Russia was constructed, talking about a real president and a ‘mythological’ one, the return of Stalinism in the souls, the reasons that generated a new totalitarianism, up to the war in Ukraine.

The book is partly autobiographical and intertwines various subjects and sub-motifs, making it a conceptual novel, in keeping with Erofeev's style that renews the ‘polyphonic’ characteristics of great Russian literature.

Trawling through the most contradictory meanderings of human nature, the many dimensions of the gopnik that resides in each person are revealed, becoming an almost ‘metaphysical’ opening to the horizons that then end up raging in Russian and world society. It is reality that is overwhelmed by chaos, showing unforeseeable fragilities, both metaphorical and documentary, from anguish and resentment to repression and war, in a confused and fragmented chronology.

The author jumps from pre-war Putinan Russia to different phases of the Soviet period, starting with the February of the 1917 revolution and projecting onto all subsequent events. Even the geography shows overlaps between Russia, France, America and Africa, like a planetary catastrophe due to the collapse of the ‘Russian world’.

In 200 pages of the novel, even hinted at frescos of the many faces of the Great Hooliganism thicken, making it a challenging read despite the splendid effectiveness of the language, but it is worth swimming in the stormy sea of Velikij Gopnik to understand the crisis of the 1920s in which we are all now immersed.

From the writer's childhood memories, about his difficult relationship with his mother who did not recognise his talent and his way of seeing life, we move on to the hero-author's contrasts with the state, retracing the years when Erofeev was an anti-Soviet dissident. The crucial moment is the attempt to save his younger sister O. from prison, which in part recalls the authentic story of the persecution of his younger brother Andrej in recent years, between 2007 and 2010, by attempting to come to an agreement with the ideologue of the administration, President Stavrogin, a name taken from Dostoevsky's Demons. Included in the episodes is the ‘little Stalin’, who accompanies the various stages of the novel in a dreamlike dimension, until he becomes a companion of the ‘successor’.

The psychology of Gopnik is then analysed, from his childhood and romantic failures to the absolute power in which he transforms into a modern Erostratus, the ancient Greek shepherd and criminal who, in order to immortalise his name in some way, set fire to and destroyed the celebrated temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Particularly effective is the description of the ‘pandemic of stupidity’, which is analysed in a correspondence of the protagonist with Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Quoting a passage from the novel, the Great Gopnik, like a tick, started to bite everyone from the back, but when he turned towards them, he discovered that he was looking at himself in the mirror. This image is the fundamental content of the book, and the description of present-day Russia: power in the country is in the hands of the Gopniks, who spring from the depths of the Russian soul.

Erofeev warns readers: you may disagree with Putin and even hate him, but the language in which he thinks and expresses himself is no different from yours. Putin can be understood only by the way he moves his lips, even without uttering a whole word, and his worldview is rooted in the national historical soil, which has been generating poisoned herbs for centuries, the story reminds us.

The ‘popular mentality’ is described in the scenes of little Stalin, with whom the protagonist of the novel meets in a special circumstance, in the bathroom next to his denuded mother, as he sits on the toilet and gives birth to a small male doll, capable of generating a new human species. This is the origin of the stalinovirus, which penetrates all human cells and multiplies endlessly.

Stalin states that he never left the toilet, because he experienced the underground, like the protagonist of another Dostoevsky novel, who dreamed of revenge against the whole world without ever leaving his basement. Stalin explains that every commander, even if he does not realise it, is my man, every head of the family holds all his own, you will never get rid of me, and even the protagonist's mother speaks to him with ‘the voice of the Fatherland’.

The Stalinist structure penetrates the deepest layers of social life, manifests itself even in the most trivial and everyday situations, giving rise to the ‘Putin myth’ in the spread of gopničestvo, the ‘hooliganism’ and vandalism that drags the whole of society down to the most miserable levels, what Erofeev calls the ‘cemetery of childish offences’.

Let us quote again a passage from the text, no longer metaphorical, but directly publicistic: ‘ Gopničestvo has become the religion of Russia, it has sucked Orthodoxy, the Empire and all collective activities into itself... the gopniki are our champions, We are the champions, my friends, our only passion is Victory’.

One of the scenes in the novel shows a young street thug Putin inviting his German friend Henrick to a hyper-realistic experience with him, immersing himself in a beating of his personal enemy and the humiliation of a neighbour girl, with whom he has fallen in love without receiving satisfaction. The boy ‘Vova’, diminutive of Vladimir, turns into the president who is in turn continually frustrated by his endless defeats in the war.

At this point the Kolobok appears on the scene, a figure from Russian fairy tales, an ‘animated bun’ who escapes from the kitchen in which he was prepared and has to dodge the woodland beasts until he is devoured by the fox, what is referred to in the West as The Gingerbread Man. His figure represents the misery and hunger of society, the need to ‘scrape the bottom of the barrel’, the only desire left after all the adventures of street banditry.

In the fable, the hare represents the people, the wolf is the bandit and the bear is the state, while the fox is the ‘external enemy’, more developed and ‘technologically advanced’.

The conclusion of the novel is that ‘Russia is the land where there is no defence’, not only from street hooliganism that becomes the policy of the state, but above all from extremism towards its own soul, ‘the inability to accept a normal life’. A danger that concerns the Russian world of unquenchable vendettas against ‘street and border’ enemies, and that spreads throughout the world like a new virus of hostility of all against all, against which there is no vaccine, which would in any case be rejected by the no-vax gopniki.

RUSSIAN WORLD IS THE ASIANEWS NEWSLETTER DEDICATED TO RUSSIA. WOULD YOU LIKE TO RECEIVE IT EVERY SATURDAY? TO SUBSCRIBE, CLICK HERE.

• RUSSIAN
• WORLD