I think few of my friends who follow Russia or *are* Russian, or few of my Second Life friends who follow SL politics or are *in* SL would find this encounter (transcript below) comprehensible, taking place as it did in the intersection between these two, well, virtual worlds. I've been meaning to write about Russians in Second Life for awhile, and what a disappointment it has been. Knowing a foreign language is supposed to enrich your life; using Second Life with its affordances to have "hands across the sea" and all that is also supposed to enrich your life, yet often, the resulting effect is underwhelming. There are reasons for this -- chat in SL isn't in fact a place where misunderstandings disappear; I find if anything, it burns in stereotypes. Perhaps the beauty of it is that it is not possible to war -- with anything than a pixel gun or a sim crash, anyway.
I don't mean the problem of Russians who hustle. That's to be understood -- they hustle and scam and even grief in ways that poor people do from other countries -- Brazilians, Spanish, Portugese have all acquired (unfairly) reputations as hustlers and copyright thefts because of an obvious few -- and as is often the case with the poor, their fellow poor exploit them first and most before they exploit anyone outside their community. All that's understood. Of course, there's a special kind of Russian khamstvo (rudeness, insolence) in the Russian SL hustle -- a Brazilian who runs a fake rentals scam on to of your rental boxes, putting invisicubes over your rental box and defrauding above all his fellow Brazilians, usually skedaddles when you uncover the scam. He might try a few times but he doesn't insult you. An American scum from one of those poor methed-out lifeless mid-western towns of the U.S. might squat on your land, and then act shocked and insulted if you eject him and his prims, acting as if you have insulted him by uncovering his rip-off -- but usually he doesn't swear at *you*, and moves along.
But Russians are different. First, they keep lying, pretending that it was a "mistake" when they put up a 4,000 prim villa above the public commons near their $150/150 week prim newbie cottage. (In other words, when they filled up the server with objects beyond the US $2.50 a month price they were paying for only a small part of the server). When you tell them to remove their 50 chickens on a crowded sim after you've already told them chickens aren't allowed, they act as if you've done something wrong. They keep swearing at you in colourful mat', the Russian cursing language, and go on and on and on. They send back-ups of friends, they grief your sim further -- it's endless, like the war in Chechnya.
A Russian emigre who came to one of my SL evenings surprised me by vehemently sounding off about how much she loathed the Russians in SL. I couldn't comprehend the depth of her denunciation, and figured it was a personal experience. But after a few years, you put the pieces together yourself...
It's not just that the Russians in SL could think of nothing better to put up than Red Square...and a literal versimilitude of Red Square, complete with the mummified Lenin. One well-known Russian intellectual in Moscow to whom I described SL, which she wasn't familiar with, was shocked and horrified and responded in just those words: they couldn't think of anything better to put up than Red Square?!
And not just GUM or St. Basil's...but here, in this world of all possibilities, a Red Square *with* the Lenin, that horrid creature who should be "given a decent Christian burial," as the wags have it. When it would be possible to do without, to imagine a new world...How many cultures in the modern world mummify their leaders and place them on the public square? Only a state based on the cult of the dead -- and of course which created a lot of those dead...
Of course, the magnitude of the Lenin and then Stalin terror is something Western intellectuals have trouble grasping, and Russians are still in denial about it -- and Putin is busy revising some of this history now. The Lenin part is particularly hard to get at -- there is a deep-seated wish to find something to redeem the horror, and to posit that there was "an ideal that went wrong" is one way for the mind to handle it. Of course, now, there are plenty of archives and books explaining that Lenin's terror and personal ordering of mass murders laid the groundwork for the Stalin terror; he created the first labour camps -- as is often pointed out, even before the Nazis thought up this modern machinery of overwork and death.
So I don't expect all of this to be fixed overnight, and when I see a cafe named "Lenin," I figure it's either lefty or ignorant Americans making a Soviet-themed night club without any depth, or else Russians who are both embracing that "ideal communist past" as well as heavily ironizing on a forced state icon -- that maybe they just shouldn't name a cafe with such a name doesn't occur to these indulgent youth -- in real life, a journalist who tried to take on such cynical ironizing of a cafe in Moscow with a witless name like this ended up having to go into hiding from death threats -- so serious do those indulgent Putin-loving youth take their particular right to ironize on history when and as they please.
So when I flew into the sim where the Lenin bar was located -- it was empty -- and I saw the description proclaimed that it was a book and discussion club, even while realizing I was behind the ironic curtain again, I still put it into my notecard for "Russia" on my International Bazaar compass to guide people to language and country sims.
Then came an IM. The bar was empty in what was the very wee hours of Saturday night for Muscovites, but this fellow told me he was curious to find out how I heard about the bar and why I came there. I don't know if he was somewhere I couldn't cam (I was lagging) or he had one of those sim surveillance scripts that alerts you to visitors, but he asked me why I came. I said I collect sims, so to speak, and gave him the International Bazaar card.
Looking at his profile, and seeing the "28, Moscow University instructor, journalist," I sighed inwardly, because I knew I'd be dealing soon with somebody who would likely defend to the death (or be blithely dismissive of -- which is worse?!) the architect of the bloody system where my children's great grandfather was killed, their great aunt worked to death, and their father and uncle imprisoned for 9 years... and perhaps I had a little less patience for this than usual because I had just spent the week with some old and new colleagues in the Russian human rights movement -- people with whom you don't have to sigh, because they get it. In fact, the subject of many of our late-night talks was precisely how the next generation was going to get it, and I became once again deeply troubled about how hard it is to pass on the legacy of human rights...
As you can see from the transcript, the Lenin conversation got nowhere -- this was a fellow capable of cynical ironizing on the Lenin legacy and aura, but not as capable of examining history. For some reason, we immediately got into the issue of Lenin's ethnicity. Someone who is an instructor in Moscow University is at least capable to understand that not everything about Lenin is positive, but his means of letting you know that is to reveal that Lenin might be...part Jewish. And of course part Kalmyk. Anything but Russian! Of course, as the saying goes, scratch a Russian, find a Tatar, but few Russians these days like to admit their Tatar Yoke heritage, which not only gave them Lenin and the authoritarian system but some of their choicest swear words. Or to contemplate what the meaning of first-generation secular socialist means...
The name of Volkogonov was invoked (to get the choice quote about Lenin's ethnic heritage, of course) -- and then he was denounced as a fool. Well, sorry, MGU or not, that seems rather narrow-minded. Volkogonov of course has his limitations. But like Lenin, you have to appreciate his role in history -- and his efforts in uncovering the Stalin past. To be sure, he heavily relied on that Russian intellectual crutch of preserving Lenin as sacrosanct and Stalin as "an aberration of Russian history) (Russian history, being, of course, a Hegelian animate force of nature, like a river, that gets pushed off course by...Jews and Kalmyks, I guess *cough*). But I think towards the end he might have had glimmers of the problems with that notion -- and whatever his flaws, he had an important role to play in the Yeltsin era. He's an important alternative source of history in a country where so much of the truth of history is still hidden.
But, not for this Moscow university brainiac, who denounced Volkogonov as a fool....and then of course in the same conversation told me that he "spit on the intelligentsia".
This is a funny thing, this intelligentsia. People mean different things by it. In some cases, it has been a positive thing, rescuing the Russian mind from tyranny, and transfering the values of the humanities. In others, it has been sycophantic and supine when faced with state suppression and has never done enough for its fellow members. For both these reasons -- the desire of some educated to embrace totalitarianism and the strong state, and the desire to reject a body with a flawed past -- the intelligentsia is taking a beating these days. Dead again?
Even so, I continue to think of "the intelligentsia" as a good thing, and, for better or worse, what there is of it, a hope for the future. Not so the instructors of Moscow university...they wish to spit.
I encountered this with some of my earlier contacts with Russians making sims. I recall once referring to someone in what I felt was a positive light as a "typical Moscow intelligent," i.e. an intellectual in the sciences who was part of innovation in society and presumably part of the tradition of the intellectual freedom about which Sakharov spoke and stood for -- only to find that this fellow felt he was insulted, either because the name has a bad reputation for him now, or because he felt it even if true it was a kind of insult -- there's a kind of ambiguousness to the term that seems to be the hallmark of the intelligentsia thoughout history anyway...
Not getting anywhere on the Lenin question, I switched gears -- and probably too fast, given that I didn't explain the issues. I wondered what this fellow, Mr. 28 years old, journalist, MGU instructor, would think of Roland Grant's expedition. Perhaps he'd agree that Roland, like so many Europeans before him, was being the posledniy naivets in Moscow, having the state's news agency RIA Novosti host him for a workship on social media. Sigh. Or perhaps he would think it was all "cool".
Does this take explaining? If you go and have a workshop on new media with the Kremlin, well, your partners are so to speak, pre-cooked. They are the golden youth and the approved scribes who are allowed to experiment with the New precisely because they can be relied upon not to stray into any taboo topics like government corruption, Chechnya, suppression of the press, the murder of journalists. They can be counted on, with their enthusiastic dewey-eyed Western trainers, to rhapsodize enthusiastically about these new tools, that let you build communities and reach new horizons. That you are building communities not only in a kind of cul-de-sac, but on the literal bones of people who really use new media to do real things of course escapes the Westerner, who is often channelled into these state-controlled facsimiles of real encounters precisely by his haste, his desire to hook up with something that can get the job of interaction done, that can rent conference halls, supply visas, provide interpretation -- the sort of things that poor, struggling online newspapers who were shut off last week might not be able to do (getting the visa invitation, with its requirement of approval from the Foreign Ministry and consulate, can be the toughest part; renting the room isn't a trivial challenge, either).
Of course, if you point out any of these realities -- that you're in a contrived relationship with something that is creating a false impression of the actual media capacities of Russia -- you run the risk of being castigated for not being for "friendship between nations" and teaching of innovative new things to youth. It's the old Soviet hustle...and of course I fear not in being accused of curmudgeon status because I didn't think RIA Novosti really needed training in Twitter ROFL. The twittering Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's rambunctious and rude ambassador to NATO in Brussels, is one of many colourful Russian presences on Twitter, which doesn't really take a special workshop to learn. If anything, Russian Live Journal enthusiasts have something to teach us -- the Russian blogosphere is actually far more serious and has more interesting discussions than its mass equivalent in the U.S. It's not uncommon for comments sections to run thousands of words per entry and turn into hundreds of replies, reminding one of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy if not Goncharov.
All of this of course has been burgeoning without the tender mercies of Roland's media training, but so fervent is the desire of these lefty idealistic Euros with their evergreen hope in socialism and the Internationale, that there's no stopping the GONGO train (government-organized non-governmental organizations...)
Having been around the bend on these arguments for, gosh, 25 years or more, and heard the oft-repeated mantra of USAID-paid trainers that we must "work with" these state journalists even despite their constraints because they can "wait in the wings" until an opportune moment when they will burst forth in freedom, with their newly-received skills, I have to say: chepukha. Better smaller, but better, as Lenin might say -- but let me return to my lovely interactive virtual dialogue with Moscow's finest mind...
I give the guy the link to Roland's blog -- he seems to be able to read and write English well enough as his profile is in English (although somewhat badly spelled). He is uninterested, in the way that the arrogant intelligent can be about discussing his own culture and its interaction with the West. I point out that there are only a few small papers and a radio station in Moscow that can be considered free -- rather than argue that this isn't true, or argue, as Roland might, that "it's all in transition" (even while some have long ago realized the transition isn't going anywhere) -- he takes another route:
"Truism" he snarks -- using an English word that of course exists transliterated in Russian with legitimate usage but with a connotation of cynical dismissal. "Yes, I know our country's press is not free. So what? Who cares? This isn't interesting to keep describing. I'm beyond all that. What else you got?"
Of course, with that sort of attitude -- and I suppose it's a pragmatic sort of attitude to take in a country where journalists aren't even jailed so much as they are assassinated -- 52 in the last 10 years! -- you won't ever get a free press. And it's as if it doesn't matter -- and my interlocutor wants me to know that he is too cool for all that.
He then takes the typical SL forums-dweller tactic of literalism, demanding proof that Roland has praised RIA Novosti -- which of course isn't something done in so many words, as much as it is about Roland's utterly uncritical approach to his task (except, when pushed by me, to concede that it is "complicated").
Something grotesque about all this -- outside the conference walls near the Kremlin, happily chirping about Twitter and learning all sorts of new media deliciousness, there is the weight of the bloody past with its millions massacred by Lenin and then Stalin, its millions jailed in the GULAG, it's hidden past and suppressed media, and then these 52 killed -- and we're supposed to soldier on, pretend that we can get by and never address it, never take it head on, because that's not practical, that leads nowhere.
"Better service, than struggle," one NGO activist pragmatically told me some years ago to explain why NGOs should just try to help the poor and the disabled and not take on any sort of confrontational issue like the war in Chechnya or the abuse of soldiers or migrant workers from Central Asia.
The fascination with "new media" and its bottomless capacity for fluffy, shallow workshops -- my friends call them "vegetarian" -- and "international peace and understanding" stuff from the West reminds me of the nyeformaly period of 20 years ago. Then, as now, Russia seemed to be coming out of a period of oppression and the state was allowing a bit more, and people were forming "informal" groups (even as those who had formed them a bit too early, or a bit too deeply as to subject matter, were still languishing in the Gulag unless they informed on their fellow members). Western foundations were ecstatic at the appearance of these "informal" constructs that seemed to mean they could at last find something useful to fund -- even though these structures still had strong ties to the state (you had only to ask the doorman who owned the buildings where these lovely nyeformaly were housed to find out that the Komsomol, the Party, the official Journalists' Union, RIA Novosti, etc. were the ones really calling the shots ultimately). To make a somewhat compressed and peremptory statement, not much directly came of the nyeformaly movement, because its leaders either went to work for the state, went into the coopted government, or went into oligarch-dominated business -- more authentic organizations were led either by former political prisoners or people who returned from exile or new people without coopted pasts.
Evgeny Morozov is a leader of new-media philosophizing and has a lot of important things to say. I like some of what he says but take sharp exception to what I see as his moral equivalency, a kind of fashionable posturing for his largely Western audiences to appear like a Western liberal (most zeky or political prisoners do not adapt this pose of the Western liberal). I guess I chalk it up to youth or the need to conform to funders or institutional etiquette - but he may in fact really believe his equivalencies unexamined. That would because it is quite fashionable among people of his generation and 5-10 years younger to find the West deeply at fault for the bombing of Kosovo and the invasion of Iraq, yet to become vague and forgiving about the far worse crimes of the East, seeing it as a victim of "structural adjustment programs" and such.
Of course, I think you can walk and chew gum at the same time, and not have to grow blank about the massive killings of Afghans (one million) after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or grow blank about the 100,000 Chechens killed, or even (one death is a tragedy; multiple deaths are a statistic, taught our dear Stalin!) the 52 journalists. It's ok to say, in fact, that these things are *worse* than the "equivalent" U.S. or EU backed crimes. There are something like 15,000 cases from Russia in the European Court of Human Rights precisely because the torture cases of Russia itself dwarf those of Guantanamo...without anything like the remedies. Yet we live in a world where Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov can write with a straight face that "Freedom came from the East" about the Russian defeat of the Nazis...as if the defeat of one totalitarianism by another was some kind of "freedom"...
But nobody likes to compare...it's not polite when you're having a workshop about international understanding and building communities with new tools.
In any event, I think a key problem for the Russian intelligentsia is its isolation. Nobody ever debates it. That's why Roland's workshop, as goofy as it is, is ultimately a good thing and helps make that reality process possible -- a reality-grasping that probably has to happen more for Westerners than Russians...That is, sure, there are islands of sanity like Open Democracy's Russia page, and a few Live Journal blogs, but you have only to peer at the horrible Youtube like comments on Russia Today to see the impossibility of talking to these thin-skinned ahistorical aggressive Russian youth clinging to their "God Save the Tsar" with murderous fury...The worse thing is, they aren't all KGB sock-puppets.
One problem is language, of course -- the Russian-language Internet takes place on another planet, seldom teleported to, except by a few experiments like The New York Times exhange of letters and comments now and then. But another is is both ignorance of Westerners of Soviet and Russian history, so they are simply ill-equipped to debate intelligently, and the unwillingness of Russians to realize they've been fed stereotypes and disinformation in their "managed" press for years and can't see reality. It's a very hard job. It's not fixable just with "new media". If anything, it undoubtedly will be made worse with new media.
Well, I don't despair. I try to chronicle all these things, and see if anybody else will talk. Break the barrier.
Let me suggest that we already get our first indication of how "new media" turns out in the Kremlin news agency's hands by this statement on Roland's lovely live streaming page I'm "interacting" with now:
"Your reactions will not appear immediately, we authorize them manually."
"Ваша реакция не появится сразу, мы разрешаем их вручную."
And so, my chat in Second Life:
Transcript
[2010/02/13 20:35] Avel Karu: так долго не живут )
[2010/02/13 20:36] Prokofy Neva: живут
[2010/02/13 20:36] Avel Karu: я отказываюсь в это верить )
[2010/02/13 20:36] Avel Karu: что занесло сюда? отслеживаете свежие поступления
[2010/02/13 20:36] Prokofy Neva: nu otkazyvaete, no fakt.
[2010/02/13 20:37] Prokofy Neva: Sobirayu simy o stranakh
[2010/02/13 20:37] Avel Karu: я бы не сказал, что у нас о странах )
[2010/02/13 20:37] Avel Karu: хотя пожалуй что-то есть
[2010/02/13 20:37] Prokofy Neva: Lenin, eto s ironiyei ili vsereioze?
[2010/02/13 20:37] Avel Karu: это секрет
[2010/02/13 20:38] Prokofy Neva: Russian, Russia, Luterature, Dance, Jazz, Music, Politics, Discussion, Club, Library, Books, Education, Culture
[2010/02/13 20:38] Avel Karu: но учтите, тут уорхоловский ленин
[2010/02/13 20:38] Avel Karu: это скорее от того, что это для русскоязычных делается
[2010/02/13 20:38] Prokofy Neva: no vy zhe zdes' obsuzhdaete Luterature
[2010/02/13 20:38] Avel Karu: кто сказал, что русскую?
[2010/02/13 20:38] Prokofy Neva: nu puskai для русскоязычных
[2010/02/13 20:38] Prokofy Neva: ya vse sobirayu
[2010/02/13 20:39] Prokofy Neva: Lenin -- kitaets konechno.
[2010/02/13 20:39] Prokofy Neva: Mongol
[2010/02/13 20:39] Avel Karu: есть еще версия, что он еврей )
[2010/02/13 20:39] Avel Karu: и швед
[2010/02/13 20:39] Avel Karu: но я вас понял
[2010/02/13 20:39] Prokofy Neva: kto mog podnumat'
[2010/02/13 20:40] Avel Karu: если серьезно, то у него есть шведские корни, это типа научный факт
[2010/02/13 20:40] Avel Karu: ну и мордовские
[2010/02/13 20:40] Avel Karu: почти монгольские, только это финно-угры )
[2010/02/13 20:40] Avel Karu: впрочем, это не имеет значения
[2010/02/13 20:40] Prokofy Neva: imeet
[2010/02/13 20:41] Prokofy Neva: shto vy dumaete ob etom http://www.mixedrealities.com/?p=2852
[2010/02/13 20:42] Prokofy Neva: http://newmongols.blogspot.com/2005/06/lenin-mongolian.html
[2010/02/13 20:43] Avel Karu: по первой ссылке трюизмы
[2010/02/13 20:43] Avel Karu: по второй - волкогонов дурацкий автор
[2010/02/13 20:43] Avel Karu: ульяновы - мордовская фамилия
[2010/02/13 20:43] Avel Karu: поволжье
[2010/02/13 20:44] Prokofy Neva: ne ob'yatel'no
[2010/02/13 20:44] Prokofy Neva: u vsez russkikh tatarskaya krov', zachem sporit'?
[2010/02/13 20:44] Prokofy Neva: tryuizmy, no mne kazhetsya journalist ochen' naivny
[2010/02/13 20:45] Prokofy Neva: esli Vy deistvitel'no journalist v Moskve, togda Vy ponimaete shto znachit RIA Novosti
[2010/02/13 20:45] Avel Karu: ну тогда можно сказать, что все русские монголы
[2010/02/13 20:45] Avel Karu: но это бессмыслица
[2010/02/13 20:45] Avel Karu: я понимаю, что значит риа новости
[2010/02/13 20:46] Avel Karu: (Saved Sat Feb 13 23:45:46 2010) но какая мысль содержится в посте?
[2010/02/13 20:46] Prokofy Neva: on kvalit RIA Novosti za kakoi-to training o novom smi, o Twitter it t.d. i ne ponimaet gde on nakhoditsya
[2010/02/13 20:47] Avel Karu: я что-то не заметил, что он хвалит
[2010/02/13 20:47] Prokofy Neva: on v ostorge
[2010/02/13 20:47] Prokofy Neva: chitaete predidushiye posty
[2010/02/13 20:47] Prokofy Neva: V Rossii net nastoyazhey svobody smi, za isklucheniye neskol'ko malenkikh izdanii
[2010/02/13 20:48] Avel Karu: это трюизм
[2010/02/13 20:48] Prokofy Neva: Novaya gazeta, Ekho Mosky, polit.ru -- shto eshche?
[2010/02/13 20:48] Avel Karu: и что дальше?
[2010/02/13 20:48] Prokofy Neva: a dal'she ne nado delat' fiksiyu sho izichat' new media u RIA Novosti izmenit situatsiu
[2010/02/13 20:48] Avel Karu: я делаю фикцию?
[2010/02/13 20:48] Avel Karu: вы о чем вообще?
[2010/02/13 20:48] Prokofy Neva: on delaet
[2010/02/13 20:49] Prokofy Neva: a vy o chem?
[2010/02/13 20:49] Avel Karu: а кто такой он?
[2010/02/13 20:49] Avel Karu: и при чем тут я?
[2010/02/13 20:49] Prokofy Neva: kogda ya slyshu etot Moskovskoe zaumstvo, ya vspominayu shto Moskovskaya intelligentsia voobshche umiraet
[2010/02/13 20:50] Prokofy Neva: no esli Vy journalist na samom dele -- ili u vas "those who can't do, teach"?
[2010/02/13 20:50] Avel Karu: мне наплевать на интеллигенцию )
[2010/02/13 20:50] Prokofy Neva: um, da, ya vizhu
[2010/02/13 20:50] Avel Karu: вам не кажется, что вас заносит?
[2010/02/13 20:50] Avel Karu: вы ничерта не знаете про меня, но уже много претензий
[2010/02/13 20:50] Prokofy Neva: naoborot
[2010/02/13 20:51] Prokofy Neva: вы ничерта не знаете про меня, но уже много претензий
[2010/02/13 20:52] Avel Karu: у меня к вам нет никаких )
[2010/02/13 20:52] Avel Karu: это вы проповедуете )
[2010/02/13 20:52] Avel Karu: про свободу слова
[2010/02/13 20:52] Prokofy Neva: Provintsial'naya obidchevost'
[2010/02/13 20:52] Avel Karu: идите к черту, милейший )
[2010/02/13 20:52] Prokofy Neva: ne ya propobeduyu, a sami journalisty v Rossii -- vidimo ne vashi kollegi
[2010/02/13 20:53] Prokofy Neva: go fuck yourself, too, cupcake
[2010/02/13 20:53] Prokofy Neva: 28 years old, Ph.D. -- and full of shit
[2010/02/13 20:54] Prokofy Neva: Learn to spell "intellegent women" -- and maybe you will find some? It's "intelligent"
[2010/02/13 20:54] Prokofy Neva: but then, you spit on the intelligentsia!
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