United States and Russia in search of paradise lost
Making Russia and America “great again”, MAGA and Russkij Mir, is nothing more than the dream of returning to a world in which two great empires ruled and all the other countries submitted. It is not about conquests, but about the losses suffered, and returning to the top of the world helps overcome fears of further losses.
After months of bogus negotiations to seek peace in Ukraine that neither of the two contenders really wants, what brings America closer to Russia more than any else is the quest for paradise lost, for a greatness that has been humiliated, for a dominion that was shelved away in the past century.
Making Russia and America “great again”, whether MAGA or Russian World (Russkiy Mir, Русский Мир), is nothing more than the dream of returning to a world in which two great empires rules and all the other countries submitted, each forced to choose one of the others, leaving an inchoate Third World on which both rested their heels.
The restoration of lost power has been the leitmotif of Vladimir Putin's policy in the first quarter of this century, and key to his war propaganda in the last decade, up to the tragicomic statement that “if the whole world is destroyed, we will go to heaven and all the others will disappear.”
For the Russians, this is in fact the real goal of the negotiations, at least wiping away the Ukrainian people, and possibly a large portion of Europeans.
It is not the conquests that are of interest, but the losses suffered, and returning to the top of the world serves to overcome the fears of further losses, to reveal the illusory nature of one's superiority, the inconsistency of one's mission in asserting completely artificial moral values, the dazzle of a popular support built on both terror and indifference.
In mid-January, when Donald Trump was getting ready for his inauguration, Rossiya 24 TV broadcast a documentary titled "The America they have lost", by journalist and chronicler of American life Mikhail Taratuta, which paraphrased the 1992 film by Sergey Govorukhin, "The Russia we have lost", shot immediately after the collapse of the USSR, to look for a basis on which to build a new independent Russia.
The dominant theme remains the myth of "paradise lost", nostalgia for the past but unable to pick the parts to salvage, whether a make-believe well-being or a colonial dominion, which the Russians threw away, by scuttling the Soviet system, while for the Americans it is the meddling in the destinies of peoples incomprehensible to them, setting off the chain reaction that led to Islamic extremism.
Govorukhin was one of the most important war correspondents in Russia’s post-Soviet conflicts, in Chechnya, Central Asia and Yugoslavia. He died of a heart attack at the age of 50 in 2011, after holding public office, and founding associations to help disabled war veterans.
His dream was to see the rebirth of an ideal Russia, that of princes and tsars who had risen out of the medieval Tatar yoke, in place of the gloomy empire of Soviet officialdom and regimented social classes under Westernising emperors, from Peter the Great to Nicholas II.
The "Russia of the great tsars" before the revolutions, those in France and Russia, represented the "divine beauty of power” for him, with a sense of belonging to a celestial kingdom that the messengers of Prince Vladimir of Kiev felt during the imperial liturgy at Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which prompted Rus’ to immerse itself in the waters of Orthodox baptism, because “we did not know whether we were in heaven or on earth,” as Nestor’s ancient Chronicle says.
By covering the wars that followed the collapse of the Soviet colonial empire, the director dreamt of finding a new “father and monarch” according to the most solemn principles of tsarism, the triad of “autocracy, orthodoxy and populism,” the nationality (narodnost, народность) that indicates the recognition by the people of a deep union, the universal “spiritual community” (sobornost, соборность) that the Russians want to establish everywhere.
Another famous Russian movie director, Nikita Mikhalkov, chose to play the main role, that of Emperor Alexander III on a white horse, in the 1998 film “The Barber of Siberia” (Sibirskiy tsiryul'nik, Сибирский цирюльник), stating that “power must show the whole world its authentic wonderful face”.
Soon after the picture hit the theatres, producing a remarkable effect on Russians, one of the gloomiest and most anonymous of Soviet bureaucrats, secret agent Vladimir Putin, was chosen as the “father of the people”, perhaps precisely to allow every Russian to imagine himself on the tsar’s throne.
The State Duma replaced the Central Committee, with actors and directors replacing workers and peasants, in a new stage of power that exalted "beauty" rather than the “class struggle”, as in the heaven of new saints and angels.
In "The Barber of Siberia" a young American woman gives birth to a beautiful child fathered by a young Russian cadet, who is sent into exile in Siberia for this. Mikhalkov explained this scene as "the lost Russia that becomes an opportunity for America’s rebirth, which has always envied the strength of the Russian spirit, but they lost us,” in a nod to Govorukhin’s film.
This is the real "spiritual" motivation behind Russia’s war on Ukraine, to attract again the lost love of young America to the superior beauty of Russia, which is taking place precisely in a year in which the world order of East and West is being reshaped.
Mikhalkov made his directorial debut in 1974, in full Brezhnev era, with “A Friend to Foes, a Foe to Friends” (Svoy sredi chuzhikh, chuzhoy sredi svoikh,Свой среди чужих, чужой среди своих), a film dubbed as an Ostern movie, an eastern version of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood.
Filmed in Chechnya and Azerbaijan, it tells the story of the seizure of gold by the Soviets at the end of the civil war after the 1917 revolution, and the struggle between Chekists, White Army officers and bandits, with lots of shooting and melees in which it is not clear which side the main characters are on.
The underlying theme is full of Soviet inspiration, that of the "union of the party with the people", always proposing an ideal “militant brotherhood” capable of creating paradise on earth, then lost during the years of perestroika and the unravelling of the new world of Soviet justice and peace.
In the 1990s, Taratuta hosted a TV programme devoted to America, reporting on the wonders of that other world long loathed as the “reign of evil".
The latest documentary shows instead how the Americans themselves “lost it on their own” in the "woke culture revolution" that reached its peak in the years of Joe Biden's presidency, in the “liberal regime” that protects any minority and oppresses the majority holding onto true values, like in “liberal San Francisco, a city with 15 per cent homosexuals” or in “super-liberal New York, that does nothing but protest against policemen who kill black, drug addicted criminals.”
America has become "decadent, ignorant and transgender”, implying that only Russians can save it, like in the operation to de-Nazify Ukraine; as if they wanted to say, “now we come to you too,” skipping over gray Europe, because Russians love to mirror themselves directly in the Americans.
As psychologist and publicist Kira Merkun states on Radio Svoboda, the search for paradise lost is "a derivative of the infantile illusion of omnipotence", when one feels strong and secure next to one's parents, especially in the shadow of one's father. Paradise is “a projection of one's ideal self” towards external reality, be it Chechnya, Crimea, Donbass, Ukraine, Europe or America.
“Everything is fine if we arrive,” the Russians think, who invade their neighbour's garden by climbing over the fences to steal apples from the tree. This is how “totalitarian sects are created,” says Merkun, in the fantasy of their own world dominated by their almighty father, who then reveals himself as an absolute criminal. “Nazism is the simulation of paradise” that justifies every war and every extermination.
One gets the impression that the Russians are frustrated not so much or not only for the loss of Soviet greatness, but for the dissolution of the American world that had deluded them so much after communism, with chewing gum and chicken nuggets, porn films always available, and now "we have to put that degraded world back in place".
It is the denial that reveals the greatest level of affirmation, where “I hate you” means “I love you madly” by the orphan abandoned by his parents, and Russia is the eternal orphan of the whole history of the West, left at the mercy of the Siberian steppes and Caucasian passes.
The lack of a true father generates in Russians an invincible sense of guilt, a need for redemption and a return to paradise lost, a universal archetype experienced as exclusive and apocalyptic: Russia wants to take God’s place, even at the cost of destroying man.
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12/04/2022 13:31
