Troika2013

An Undergraduate Journal in East European, Eurasian, And Slavic Studies University of California, Berkeley

Volume Volume41||Issue Issue12

Fall 2011 2013 Fall

Novgorod, Claire Haffner

This publication is made possible by support from the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with funding from the the U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Centers program.

University of California, Berkeley Graduate Program in Slavic Languages and Literatures The graduate program is designed to train future scholars and teachers of Slavic languages and literatures. Students concentrate either in literature and culture or in linguistics and philology; they combine a core curriculum with independent research early in their graduate career. Our graduate students participate in the life of the Department (studying, teaching, running the library, organizing film series, performances, colloquia, conferences), in the life of the University, and in the profession (reading papers at national and international conferences).

More information: http://slavic.berkeley.edu/graduate.html

http://iseees.berkeley.edu

1

Seeded, Egle Makaraite

2

City on a Hill, Egle Makaraite

Table of Contents 5

Editors’ Note

6

Troika Staff

7

Contributors

8

Acknowledgements and Disclaimer

9

Grumbles | Their Daughter, Their Comrade: Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya’s Image in Soviet Media 19421987

14

Konstantinovic | When Bakers Stop Baking Bread

18

Nakayama | Valery Viktorovich Lyaschkevich: Ǭ ǓǕǏǠ ǚǍ ǚǒǏǞǗǛǙ

20

Snyder | Aral Sea

22

DiCandeloro | The Fundamental Principle: Pipeline Politics and the Dilemma of Kazakhstani Growth

27

La Flèche | Feminine Motility and Gendered Space in War and Peace

31

Little | Liudmila Ulitskaia: The Daughter of Bukhara

38

Karabashlieva | Editor’s Column: Rebels with a Cause

40

Magganas | Editor’s Column: A Review of Peter Pomerantsev’s Russia: A Postmodern Dictatorship?

42 44 46

Cover Photo: Spas Na Krovi, Claire Haffner

3

A Bridge Over Water at Tsarskoe Selo, Claire Haffner

How to Contribute to Troika Interested in having your work published in Troika’s next issue?

E-mail your submissions to: thetroikajournal@gmail.com We accept a variety of student work, from research papers and memoirs to photography and art.

To find more information on our submission policy and requirements, or to view an online version of our journal, visit: http://troika.berkeley.edu

4

Editors’ Note Dear Reader, As we are completing this issue I am preparing to leave for Russia to study abroad at St. Petersburg State University for the spring semester. I have been waiting for the departure date anxiously, watching the calendar and frantically buying wool socks wherever I can find them. Now that my departure is right around the corner however, I find myself being extremely thankful for all that I am privileged to right here in the Slavic Department at UC Berkeley -- not least of which is all the energy, support, and talent that was dedicated to this semester’s journal.

This semester we accepted a diverse range of pieces that I believe speak to the range of cultures that fall under the category of “Slavic Studies”, as well as the array of disciplines that inform this field. Kayla Grumbles writes on the mythologized 18-year-old komsomol member Zoya Komsodemyanskaya, showing us how the memory of this courageous and defiant young girl continues to live on throughout the Soviet and Post-Soviet era. Alexandra Konstantinovic’s “When Bakers Stop Baking Bread” is a short story that depicts the economic collapse of Yugoslavia through the eyes of a young woman. John DiCandeloro’s “The Fundamental Principle” examines the political economy of in oil Kazakhstan, and helps us understand many important issues facing this country in its transition away from communism. Natasha Richer La Fleche’s “Feminine Motility and Gendered Space” provides a fresh perspective on Tolstoy’s iconic character Natasha Rostova through modern theories of gendered movement, and Carol Troika Editorial Staff, Fall 2013 Rose Little’s “Daughter of Bukhara” is an English translation of the contemporary short story by the internationally acclaimed Russian author Lyudmila Ulitskaya.

I might be biased, but I believe that this semester I have had the most dedicated, hardworking, and talented editorial staff that I could have asked for. Hailing from departments across campus, from Slavic to Anthropology to Applied Mathematics, each editor brought their unique viewpoints and skill sets to this issue. I am proud to present you with Troika’s first series of editor columns, which I believe speak to the talents of our editors, as well as the diverse and mind-expanding environment that we are privileged to be a part of here at Berkeley--both in our Slavic classes and outside of them.

I hope that you enjoy this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together for you. I also hope that whether you are a stranger to the field or a seasoned Slavophile, we have been able to spark your interest in a new topic within the myriad of subjects that make up this vibrant, multifaceted, and ever-expanding field.

Happy reading, Charlotte Pizella Editor-in-Chief

5

Troika Editorial Staff Sara Karabashlieva Copy-Edit Manager Sara is in her third year as a linguistics major. She appreciates proper grammar and correct spelling. She also enjoys reading, writing, and scrabble.

Charlotte Pizzella Editor-in-Chief Charlotte is a fourth year Russian language and literature major with a minor in political economy. She initially entered the field of Slavic studies to follow a curiosity sparked by her passion for classical ballet. She is currently doing research for a senior thesis on literary interpretations of blockaded Leningrad.

Serena Smiley Managing Editor Serena Smiley is a third year double majoring in Applied Mathematics and Cognitive Neuroscience with a minor in Slavic Literature. In her free time, she enjoys individual dance parties and everything to do with superheroes.

Nika Monokandilos Managing Editor Nika is an Anthropology and Philosophy double major meta-reflecting her way through her fourth year. She was born in Latvia and is working on a minor in Slavic languages and literatures as a nod to her birthplace. She reads too much, wears an exorbitant amount of black, has a healthy appreciation for the absurd, and believes in the oxford comma.

Aristotle Magganas Associate Editor Aristotle is beginning his first year at UC Berkeley as a Mathematics and Economics double major. He enjoys reading, talking about politics, listening to music, playing chess, and watching old British TV-shows.

Patrick Babajanian Associate Editor Patrick is a first year student, undeclared but intending to major in History, Peace and Conflict Studies, and/or Slavic Languages and Literatures. He enjoys socializing, traveling, learning new languages, and playing his accordion. He strives to make the world a better place however he can, in part by sharing his love for his Armenian and Russian cultural heritage with the world.

Maya Garcia Layout Editor Maya is a fifth year Slavic Studies and Comparative Literature double major. When she’s not swooning over her senior thesis subject (Vladimir Mayakovsky’s early lyric poetry), she does art and layout for The Heuristic Squelch and the Troika Journal.

6

Contributors Kayla Grumbles graduated from Baylor University in May 2013 with a double major in Russian and Language and Linguistics. After studying abroad in Voronezh, she developed a passion for incorporating Russian culture into her daily life. She plans on attending graduate school next Fall. She hopes to study Slavic Languages and Literatures, with a concentration in historical Slavic linguistics.

Aleksandra Konstantinovic is a junior majoring in English Literature with a minor in Political Science at UCSD, where she also works for the campus newspaper as an Associate News Editor. She was born in Serbia before moving to California when she was 5. She enjoys hiking, reading, and yoga.

Claire Haffner is a fourth year at the University of Chicago, majoring in Russian Language and Literature with a minor in Creative Writing. She is particularly interested in the works of Vladimir Nabokov. She speaks Russian and Spanish and hopes to teach English abroad after graduation.

Morgane Richer La Flèche is a third year undergraduate student at the University of Chicago, where she is pursuing a double major in History and Russian Studies. In her academic work, Morgane explores the intersection of gender, discourses of power, and the law.

Gwendolyn Snider is a sophomore majoring in Russian Language and Public Policy Management at the University of Oregon. She first became interested in Russian culture when she studied in Russia, in the summers of 2011 and 2012, through a State Department program.

Carol Rose Little graduated in 2012 from McGill University in the joint honors program in Linguistics and Russian studies. When she was thirteen, her father presented her with a Teach Yourself Russian book. She has had a keen interest in the Russian language and culture ever since. She currently works in New York City at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

John DiCandeloro is a junior at Wesleyan University, where he is pursuing a major in the College of Social Studies. John is interested in the politics and development of Central Asia and the Middle East, as well as social and political theory.

Moè Nakayama started studying Russian on a whim, but has since become an enthusiastic Russian Language & Literature major. Originally from Kobe, Japan, she has had the pleasure of calling many cities in the world home, including St. Petersburg, Russia in summer 2012. A 4th year set to graduate in June 2014, she is currently writing her senior thesis on Andrei Platonov.

Egle Makaraite is a senior at New York University, due to graduate in May of 2014. She studies Creative Health because she believes that health and creativity are intimately linked. She wholeheartedly loves traveling, making new friends, reading, and making all kinds of art.

7

Sunrise over Parliament, Claire Haffner

Acknowledgments

Disclaimer

This issue would not have been possible without support from the Peter N. Kujachich Endowment. We would also like to acknowledge Jeff Pennington of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Professors Irina Paperno, Darya Kavitskaya, Ronelle Alexander, and Anna Muza, and Alla Efimova of the Magnes Collection for their indispensable advice, time, and support.

The Troika Journal is an ASUC sponsored publication of UC Berkeley. The content contained herein does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the ASUC, nor does it necessarily reflect our own.

We would like to acknowledge our former Editors-in-Chief, Olga Slobodyanyuk, Zuzanna Gruca, and Isabella Mazzei, and our founder, Alekzandir Morton. Most importantly, we would like to thank all of this semester’s editors for their hard work and effort in creating this publication.

8

Their Daughter, Their Comrade:

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya’s Image in Soviet Media 1942-1987

Kayla Grumbles In the village of Petrishchevo, in the last weeks of 1941, a young woman was brutally tortured and eventually hanged by German troops stationed there.

This young woman had been caught setting fire to stables and houses in the village in order to destroy German supplies. Although German soldiers held her overnight and tortured her for information, she refused to reveal anything. On the morning of November 29, the German soldiers hung her with a sign around her neck labeling her a “houseburner.” Her last words were remarkable and lend credit to the legendary associations that would grow to engulf her image in the Russian national consciousness. According to the official narrative, just before she was hung, this young woman yelled to the villagers: “I am not afraid to die, comrades.

It is happiness to die for one’s people!” Turning to the commanding German officer, she continued: “You will hang me now, but I am not alone. There are 200 million of us; you cannot hang us all …”¹ After the young woman’s death, her body was left hanging on the gallows for several weeks and was mutilated on one occasion by drunken German soldiers.

Her story remained unknown until a Russian journalist, Pyotr Lidov, learned of her fate and published an article simply entitled “Tanya” in Pravda (Truth) in late January of 1942. This article was accompanied

by Sergey Strunnikov’s photograph of the hanged girl laying in the snow, rope still around her neck, shirt open to the waist and exposing her mutilated body. This graphic picture likely affected the readers of Pravda just as strongly as Lidov’s words and left a lasting impression on the Russian populace. Once Stalin proclaimed her “the people’s heroine,” Komsomol authorities rushed to identify the girl’s body. In February of 1942, Moscow Komsomol representatives determined that “Tanya” was Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, an eighteen-year-old Muscovite schoolgirl. From that point on, legends developed around this young woman, eventually overwhelming the memory of her simple life. These state-sponsored legends enabled the Communist Party to construct an image of Zoya in order to further their many objectives from the war period into Perestroika.

Zoya remains quietly present in the Russian media today.

During Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union, journalists used Zoya’s image mainly as propaganda in order to exemplify the ideal Soviet citizen for the entire country. After Stalin’s death, however, Zoya’s image evolved; while her central role in the remembrance of the war and in the overarching Russian culture remained static, Zoya remained ever-present in the media. This pattern became apparent to me after thorough analysis and careful consideration of seventy-one newspaper articles held in RGASPI–the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History–gathered from throughout the

USSR.

Through the narrative of Zoya’s noble death, the Party found a means through which to communicate highly prized Soviet ideals: self-sacrifice, total obedience, and an almost radical dedication to ensuring the ultimate survival of the Soviet State. This was the crucial message conveyed most frequently during the war period. On March 28, 1942, Pionerskaya Pravda (Pioneer’s Truth) published a collection of letters written

by Zoya’s comrades in an article titled “A Vow to a Friend.” In one letter, the writer referred to Zoya as “an empathetic comrade” and “a good organizer in school.”

He wrote that her morals “were always perseverance, honesty, heroism” and that her favorite characters were “the fighters for freedom, for honor, for the homeland.”

The writer emphasized the fact that he and his friends went to work in a factory in order to “be worthy friends and comrades of Zoya;” he promised to “work the way [she] fought against the Fascist executioners” in order to “destroy damned Hitlerism”.² This letter, published in the newspaper for the young and impressionable Pioneers, would have had a great influence on the young children in the Soviet Union. Being encouraged to work by someone of their own age would have had a stronger effect on these children than being told to work by someone much older. In publishing letters written by other young people in the country, the Party ensured that the younger generations would be inspired to follow Zoya’s example and encourage others to do the same.

Several times, letters from Zoya’s mother, Lyubov Timofeevna Kosmodemyanskaya, were published in the Pioneer and Komsomol newspapers. In one such letter, published on May 6, 1942 in Pionerskaya Pravda, Lyubov Timofeevna encouraged the young readers to “love [their] excellent country and Comrade Stalin more than [themselves]” in order to be “capable of heroic deeds for [their] country.” Lyubov ended her letter by urging the Pioneer readers to “be honest, hardworking, truthful, as [her] Zoya was,” who gave her life “for the love of Stalin, with whose name she died.”³ These letters from Zoya’s mother accomplished the same as the letters from her comrades, but in a more intense fashion. One could imagine that, reading letters from the mother of the Soviet Union’s most recent hero, the Russian people were greatly affected on an emotional level.

As the person who arguably knew Zoya best, Lyubov was also most able to recall Zoya’s virtues. According to Ann Livschiz, “The youthful heroes of the Great Patriotic War, who had died in the fulfillment of their patriotic duty, could be safely frozen in their moment of triumph, with either real or manufactured life-stories of near perfection leading to the heroic deed, which was presented for other children’s emulation.”4 Lyubov’s words about her daughter, and Zoya’s comrades’ words

9

Grumbles about their friend, presented Zoya in such a light that one could find no fault in her.

Although the reverence of heroes was generally discouraged during the postwar period, Stalin allowed Zoya’s memory to live on; this could largely be due to the use of Zoya’s image to display ultimate devotion not only to the Motherland, but to Stalin himself as well. According to Nina Tumarkin in The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, Stalin felt that “an ideal Soviet hero was much better dead than alive.” Death served as the “perfect conclusion” to heroism, allowing the hero to “sacrifice to the motherland the most valuable thing” she could: her life. In death, these widely sung heroes “could not interfere with the myths concocted about them,” providing a perfect blank slate for the State to further their own goals through the hero’s accomplishment.5 Because of this, Zoya was allowed to become a shining example “for a people reared for centuries on the lives of Russian saints” and pulled strongly “toward the reverence of exemplary individuals.”6 One might argue that Stalin allowed Zoya to be revered so highly only because the State shifted the focus from the actual fact of her bravery to its source: the Motherland, her Soviet upbringing, and above all else, Comrade Stalin.

In the years following Stalin’s death until the beginning of the 1960s, journalists still described Zoya as a “legendary heroine” and a “fiery patriot.” Journalists continued to use the feminine forms of these words, just as they had since Lidov’s article first told of Zoya’s feat.

This gender distinction was unusual: being a “patriot” or “hero” was generally expressed through masculine forms of these words. By using the feminine forms, writers ensured that they drew attention to the fact that she was female–ensuring that female readers would be equally inspired to acts of devotion and sacrifice as were male readers–without diminishing the attention they placed on her sacrifice for the Motherland.

During the years in which Russia was abandoning Stalinism, the media primarily clung to the same general presentation of Zoya that they had used during Stalin’s rule. They continued to focus on her soldierlike qualities and on the aspects of her personality that allowed her to be successful in her absolute devotion to the Motherland, and rarely mentioned her life outside of the partisan squad. The journalists writing about Zoya made no attempt to develop a picture of her family life, her time as a Pioneer, her membership in the Komsomol, or her student life. This lack of personalization could have largely been due to the fact that Zoya’s mother had published a hagiographic narrative titled “Povest’ o Zoe i Shure,” or, “The Story of Zoya and Shura,” in 1953.

This book was widely read during this time period and was frequently republished, so the majority of Soviet citizens had read or heard of Zoya’s personal qualities through this avenue.

However, as early as December of 1961, the perception of Zoya began to shift. While journalists occasionally continued to refer to her in a militarized

fashion, a new trend emerged in the media: writers began describing her as “the people’s heroine,” the “oldest friend” of the Komsomol and Pioneers, and “a fellow traveler and friend”of the same.7 Journalists began to write of how she loved school and reading; her excellent study habits and her diligence; and how she “passionately responded to all of the events happening in the country.”8 The focus on her personal traits and the use of intimate terms in describing her character were tools used by the media to remove Zoya from the pedestal they had so clearly set her on during the 1950s. This movement was linked with the rise of what Nina Tumarkin has called a “war cult” in Soviet Russia, which placed a large part of its focus on the discipline and education of the next generation. In The Living and the Dead, Tumarkin defines this movement as “a kind of counter-campaign against the international youth culture and some of the major forces impelling change in much of the western hemisphere,” with the goal of “rein[ing] in the populace and keep[ing] it moving … on the right path”9 in pursuance of cornerstone Soviet ideals.

As Zoya’s compatriots approached old age, and as older citizens began searching for a way to relate to their youth, Zoya’s youth and beauty began to make more frequent appearances in newspaper articles. On November 30, 1966–one day after the twenty-fifth anniversary of Zoya’s execution–Pravda published an article titled, “The Name of Zoya Became a Legend.”

The author consistently called her a “girl,” whether she was an “unknown,” “brave,” or “ordinary Muscovite”¹0 girl. Following this trend, journalists wrote of her bravery and heroism and highlighted the fact that she was “not anything unordinary” but “just as simple … as the rest” of the Soviet youth. Even though some writers mentioned her “strict, serious attitude toward her duties,”¹¹ spoke of her consistent lack of childishness, and named her a “militant figure”¹² and a “fearless heroine-partizanka,”¹³ authors also described Zoya as “extraordinarily kind,” an “affectionate, gentle, and helpful” person, and a “legendary Russian girl.”¹4 This new focus on Zoya’s younger and more personal qualities was a result of the war cult’s efforts to bring the youth into their circle. In The Living and the Dead, Tumarkin stated that this “upbringing of the young” began to have an “unprecedented significance to those who strove to keep the old order intact.” ¹5 By describing her as a “simple Soviet girl,”¹6 the media ensured that although Zoya’s compatriots continued aging, she stopped altogether. This focus on her adolescence served to make her more relatable to the youth: the youth that the advocates of the war cult believed were in dire need of discipline and good examples. At this time, journalists painted Zoya as someone very similar to the Soviet youth at that time in an attempt to bridge the generational gap that existed between her and the newer generation. One journalist wrote that she “pos[ed] as a symbol of purity and heroism for all of the youth of the world for decades,”¹7 endeavoring not only

10

Their Daughter, Their Comrade

Kotlyarov, L. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. 1972. Postcard. Izdatel’stvo “Izobrazitel’noe isskustvo,” Moscow.

11

Grumbles to make Zoya tangible for that particular generation, but for future generations as well.

One should not conclude that Zoya’s cult overlapped completely with the war cult, however. Lisa Kirschenbaum has asserted that with the institution of Victory Day as an official non-labor national holiday in 1965, and while the war cult’s influence grew, many war veterans and survivors determined to remember “what really happened”¹8 in the Great Patriotic War. This new determination gave rise to the construction of varied monuments, ranging from “understated markers” to “monumental statues situated in enormous memorial ‘complexes.’”¹9 Although this meant that monuments were built to honor many other Heroes of the Soviet Union, the same cannot be said for Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. Although the construction of these monuments was just beginning in the 1960s, many monuments to Zoya had been built while the country was still under Stalin’s control. The first monument to Zoya was built in the year of her death, and further monuments to her were constructed throughout the 1940s and 1950s, in great opposition to Stalin’s general suppression of wartime memories. One can suppose this is because the Party separated Zoya’s image from the war; while they frequently wrote of her heroic deed, the focus was on Zoya as an individual and, more importantly, the source of her bravery–the Motherland.

As the 1970s began, the media increasingly focused on Zoya’s physical qualities, affecting a general feminization of her appearance. Journalists wrote that Zoya would “eternally remain young and beautiful” and emphasized her “lively and bright eyes”²0 and “slim girlish figure.”²¹ One article, published on September 13, 1973, gave readers a spellbinding description of Zoya when the author wrote of her “soft oval face,” “clearly bending eyebrows,” “intent gaze,” “finely chiseled nose,” and the “stubborn crease of [her] lips.”²² The decade of the 1970s brought overall an impressive feminization of the representation of Zoya. Journalists not only encouraged readers to remember how she was an excellent soldier, student, and family member, but also urged them to recognize her “physical and spiritual beauty [and] charm.”²³ This concentration on her physical features and her beauty is in direct contrast to the description journalists gave in the 1950s, when they focused on her bravery and utilized her gender to demonstrate that every citizen was equally able to help the Motherland. During the 1970s, the focus on her physical appearance was another way of immortalizing her: through emphasizing her youth and her beauty, Zoya’s aging comrades were able to believe that they would live on after death, just as Zoya had.

In the 1970s, this notion of immortality became the main feature of Zoya’s portrayal in the media. There were many references, sometimes within the same article, to her “immortal name” and her “immortal feat.”²4 Journalists declared that Zoya’s image had become “firmly ingrained in [the] minds and memories”²5 of the Russian people; that her memory “[would] not

die.”²6 One author went so far as to say, “She lives with us, as our conscience, as our understanding of the humanity in Man.” In this article, the author also mentioned the beauty of this “Moscow schoolgirl” who would “eternally remain young and beautiful.”²7 At the same time that the Soviet state was attempting to make Zoya more relatable to the younger generations in the country, Zoya’s fellow partisans were approaching old age. Perhaps in immortalizing Zoya, the government also ensured that the veterans did not feel forgotten: instead, they may have felt as though they and their accomplishments in the war would live on through Zoya after their lives were over.

The 1980s saw a return to the focus on Zoya’s militarized characteristics. According to Tumarkin in The Living and the Dead, vandalism of war memorials occurred during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These incidents indicate a general abandonment of the ideals propagated by the war cult. This return to Zoya’s heroism, therefore, could be interpreted as an attempt to remind the apathetic youth of the importance of the Great Patriotic War to their national identity. This was demonstrated when one journalist, Captain A. Kovalev, wrote that Zoya’s name “quickens the pulse of our conscience [and] sounds a bell in our memories” in 1983. He wrote of the pride that was “in her effort to raise her head” and how she died “as a conqueror … for her land.”²8 It seems that the use of this language attempted to convey a renewed sense of pride in the heroism of Zoya and the many other Heroes of the Soviet Union. In conclusion, one can observe that while the presentation of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya in the media throughout the Soviet period has, at first glance, been unpredictable, closer examination reveals something close to a layering effect. Over a period of four decades, her image became more complex.

Beginning as a simple Russian partizanka, Zoya slowly evolved into a beautiful, fiery, passionate soldier with humble beginnings, who thoroughly enjoyed hard work and encouraged all those around her to do the same.

Eventually, her image became that of a passionate girl who would remain forever young and beautiful and stand as an excellent example of patriotism throughout the ages. Although this process was not complete until long after Stalin’s death, Zoya always represented the Soviet ideal of the times. Her image remained an ideal of a heroic time for the Russian people to return to time and again for inspiration.

Works Cited ¹ Pyotr Lidov. “Tanya,” Pravda. January 27, 1942, p. 3. ² “A Vow to a Friend,” Pionerskaya Pravda. March 28,1942, RGASPI (ZK F 7 OP 2 649.16.62). ³

12

Lyubov Kosmodemyanskaya. “Letters to the Pioneers and Pupils,” Pionerskaya Pravda. May 6,

Their Daughter, Their Comrade 1942,RGASPI (ZK F 7 OP 2 649.16.63).

4 Ann Livschiz. “Children’s Lives after Zoia’s Death: Order Emotions and Heroism in Children’s Lives and Literature in the Post-war Soviet Union,” Late Stalinist Russia: Society Between Reconstruction and Reinvention. ed. Juliana Furst (London; New York: Routledge, 2006), 194.

5 Nina Tumarkin. The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), 80.

6 Ibid, 77.

7 Ivan Irlin. “In the School Where Zoya Studied,” Uchitelskaya Gazeta No. 143. December 2. 1961, RGASPI (ZK F 7 OP 2 649.16.48).

8 Ibid.

²¹ “Forever in Our Hearts,” Krasnaya Znamya. November 28, 1972, RGASPI (ZK F 7 OP 2 649.16.34). ²² “Our Zoya,” Krasnaya Zvezda. September 13, 1973, RGASPI (ZK F 7 OP 2 649.16.36). ²³ Ibid. ²4 “Forever in Our Hearts,” Krasnaya Znamya. ²5 “Our Zoya,” Krasnaya Zvezda. ²6 “Forever in Our Hearts,” Krasnaya Znamya. ²7 “You Will Always be a Living Example,” Leninskaya Smena. ²8 A. Kovalev. “Our Zoya,” Krasnaya Zvezda. 9 November 1983, RGASPI (ZK F 7 OP 2 649.16.46).

9 Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 133. ¹0 “The Name of Zoya Became a Legend,” Pravda.

November 30, 1966. ¹¹ “The Body of the Party Committee,” Bolshaya Kama.

May 9, 1965 RGASPI (ZK F 7 OP 2 649.16.43). ¹² E. Debova. “Hero of the Soviet Union, Z. Kosmodemyanskaya,” Za Kommunisticheskiy Trud.

May 13, 1965, RGASPI (ZK F 7 OP 2649.16.11). ¹³

Debova, “Hero of Z.Kosmodemyanskaya”.

the

Soviet

Union,

¹4 “The Body of the Party Committee,” Bolshaya Kama. ¹5 Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 133. ¹6 “Zoya is in our Hearts: Moscow Komsomolets Honor the Memory of the Heroine,” Moscow Komsomolets.

November 30, 1966, RGASPI (ZK F 7 OP 2 649.16.02). ¹7

“We Will Remember the Harsh Autumn,” Komsomolskaya Pravda. September 10, 1966, RGASPI (ZK F 7 OP 2 649.16.31).

¹8 Lisa Kirschenbaum. The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 188. ¹9 Ibid,187. ²0 “You Will Always be a Living Example,” Leninskaya Smena. 13 September 1973, RGASPI (ZK F 7 OP 2 649.16.43).

13

When Bakers Stop Baking Bread Aleksandra Konstantinovic

Davies, Ryan. Communist Block, Belgrade. 2010. Photograph. Flickr. Web. 18 Nov.2013. < http://www.flickr.com/ photos/remdavies/5155168392/>.

In 1993, inflation in Yugoslavia hit 99%, with the national currency valued at pennies on the American dollar.

The government, which had played a major role in the country’s financial crisis, began to print more money to satiate creditors.

But the superfluous currency drove the price of basic necessities up, leaving millions without the means to shop at even the staterun, price-controlled shops. In Belgrade, homes went without power and businesses were robbed, and in October of that year, the bakers in the city stopped baking bread in protest.

On Friday, she walked to work because the bus was always too crowded and she had stopped expecting to see the gas station open again. She carried her tote like a shield against the cold winds threatening the end of summer. Her coat might’ve been unseasonal were it not for the painstaking care she took to shelter the bump in her belly. Leaving early had allowed her a solitary discourse with the dying city, and she walked on through the empty streets.

She stopped her quiet march to consider a pharmacy whose windows looked, for once, well stocked. The bell above the door rang faintly as she entered, summoning the suspicious cashier from his storeroom. The woman traced her fingers along the little bottles of scented stuff that had traveled so far to end up on those dark shelves. She picked

14

up a tube of red lipstick just a few shades too obscene for autumn in the gray country.

“It’s new.”

The voice startled her out of the early morning dream.

“We have lots of new things this week,” the cashier said.

The woman nodded and smiled without looking up.

Appeased by this customer’s quiet manner, the man relaxed his pose with a lean onto the counter.

“Are you looking for something? We have lots of new things now that people have been looking for,” he announced with pride.

The woman shrugged against the cashier’s scrutiny.

“I’m not, no. Not in particular,” she said. “Thank you.”

She turned to leave, wrapping her arms around her middle—but before she could take a step, she caught sight of a plastic package housing a brand new, pink pacifier. The Gerber label stretched above the face of a laughing, chubbycheeked baby spokesmodel.

“How much?” She spoke, holding up the pacifier.

“Ehm,” muttered the man, pulling out the battered, state-issued ledger. “Five, flat.”

When Bakers Stop Baking Bread

price.”

The woman’s eyes widened.

She said, “Be serious brother, surely that’s not the

He held up his hands helplessly.

“It is. What can I say?” He put the ledger away, certain that he had lost her business. “If I were to sell it on the streets, it might even get me more.”

The woman didn’t need to open her wallet to know that the sum would be far less than 5 million dinars. She started to put the pacifier back up on its shelf, surprised to find tears pooling in her eyes, hot with pointless frustration over the idea that her child couldn’t have this stupid trinket.

Impulse stayed her hand, and she spun towards the counter.

“Hold this for me, would you?” she asked the man.

He looked at her through narrowed eyes, as if determining whether the fine material of her coat could vouch for her character. Just as he was about to deny her, to implore her to consider the state of his business, she held up her hand.

“I’m paid today. I’ll stop by as soon as I leave work,” she assured.

His eyes caught sight of the hand missing a gilt ring moving reflexively to cover the top of her belly.

“Only for today—mind me now,” he grumbled.

She smiled her first genuine smile that day, that month, that year, and left with renewed faith. And with strength, she threw open the doors to the awakening world, her comrades already gathering outside the storefront.

As she approached the clinic, she locked eyes with another daybreak traveler clutching an oversized briefcase.

The woman smiled at him politely, but he only shifted his eyes away from hers in reply. She noted the bottle of pills in his gloved hand and, despite all her training, pitied him.

The hallways were devoid of their usual bustle as the woman opened the door to her tiny office. She marveled at the inescapable cold breeze that seemed to have found its way under the crack of the door. She glanced at the ancient radiator in the corner, hesitant at the memory of a fuel shortage that had nearly crippled the hospital. But freezing without her coat, she reached towards the dial. An intrusive rush of wind grazed the back of her neck and, whirling around, she realized.

The corner window was shattered, glass strewn across the floor. With her breath in her hand, she flung open the doors to her supply cabinet to find it emptied. Not even a syringe forgotten, let alone the store of antibiotics.

Shuffling footsteps in the hallway made her heart leap in fear and she grabbed for her coat. A harried face behind crooked glasses peered through the doorway.

“Oh, thank heaven,” the man said. “I thought you were one of them.”

She shook her head in bewilderment.

“What happened?”

“They took everything, just everything. From every floor,” he sighed, slumping into a moth-eaten chair.

“Who?” But her voice trailed off.

She turned towards the broken window and peered down to the sidewalk, sure that the man would already be

gone.

But, he wasn’t.

Still he stood on the sidewalk with that too-large briefcase. A woman approached him hesitantly and waved a quick request. The man opened the briefcase and recovered a bottle of pills, taking an uncounted wad of bills into his fist.

For an imagined second, the thief looked back at the hospital.

The woman at the window closed her eyes against dizzying hopelessness, as a second pair of footsteps came streaming down the hallway. A nurse on the verge of tears slammed down her badge in front of the two doctors.

“I can’t do this anymore. I won’t.” Her eyes found her best friend’s stricken gaze. “And you shouldn’t be dealing with this the way you are. Let’s get out of here.”

With a final shake of her head to wake from the bad dream, the nurse ran out the door.

The man in the chair looked up at his colleague.

“You should go,” he said. “She’s right.”

The woman glanced down at her baby cocooned under heavy, handmade wool, and smiled.

“Not a chance,” she said, ribbing gently. “You owe me a check today.”

He rubbed his tired eyes and laughed at the desperation of it all. He allowed her to grab hold of his elbow and pull him out of the chair. The sun had won its battle with another dreary, fall morning, and meek rays filtered through the broken glass, casting ragged shadows across the office.

“Let’s find whoever’s left,” she preached as the two exited together. “We’ll count up everything that was stolen...” ___ The day had taken its toll on the woman staggering back to the break room, a half-empty cup of coffee in hand.

The broken windows had been boarded up, but she had spent the whole day turning away any patient not under lifethreatening duress. The report she filed pled for nearly a full new supply of medicine and equipment, and she knew that there was little hope of receiving even half of what they lost before the new year. She rested her head against the cheap kitchenette cabinets and topped off her cup.

“You shouldn’t be drinking that,” said a familiar voice.

She rolled her eyes and took a defiant draught as she turned to face him.

“She just might like it,” she said. “And I think I deserve it today.”

He took a step towards her, and shook his head defeatedly.

“Thanks for staying today,” he said, meeting her gaze.

“I sure didn’t do it for free,” she prodded with a laugh.

His eyebrows leapt up and he reached for an envelope on the table. But he held on to it.

“Listen, I can’t give you everything I owe you this week. Between the damage, and the new supplies...” he lost the sentence.

15

Konstantinovic She disguised her disappointment with a small nod of her head, and tore into the envelope. The number was abysmal, but would do for the time being.

“I swear I’ll pay you the rest by next week,” he said.

She glanced up at him and smiled. “It’s alright. I’ll be fine for the week.”

He watched her manic energy return as she gathered her things and started for the door.

“Wait—” “Everything will be fine on Monday, you’ll see,” she said. “And I bet some of the staff will come back too.”

He waved at her retreating figure through the double doors.

“Goodnight,” he managed. ___ The teller stood at his counter, absentmindedly thumbing at the crisp sheets of paper in the drawer. Fresh out of the printer likely only days ago, the bills were better off as kindling than currency. He raised an eyebrow in the direction of a former customer now dressed in a ragged coat, wailing in the lobby. A team of his coworkers hoisted her under her arms and dragged her out into the rain.

They narrowly avoided bumping into a young, pregnant woman, struggling to harness her umbrella as she skidded through the door. She sped toward the teller and pushed away hair from her flushed face, apparently thundering in from a lengthy walk. She grinned at him and pushed a check in his direction.

“In cash, please, all of it,” she breathed.

He removed the money from its catacomb, and began to count it out in front of her. She radiated a nervous energy, and though her determined eyes shone, they darted over and again to the clock on the wall.

“There you go, missus,” he concluded.

Still breathless, she scooped up the bills and ran back towards the door.

Outside, the woman paused and breathed in the gentle drops of water, buoyed by the incomparable, tactile pleasure of paper money in hand. As she started back to the pharmacy, she noticed the woman who had been unceremoniously wrestled out of the building, now huddled on the flooding pavement.

Sobered by the sight, she knelt down next to the woman, and slipped a bill into her hands. She struggled to top the money with some trite optimism, but the words dissipated in the rain.

Several blocks north, people had begun to gather in the street, some marching in rage, others whispering at the outskirts. The woman resumed her protective stance, and her purposeful gait slowed. As she turned the corner, a dull roar surged towards her, a cacophonous milieu of voices erupting from the street. Men and women hollered indignities over each other, as their children wept inconsolably. Two bakers stood on a raised platform, shouting down the protesters.

The woman navigated carefully through the outer edge of the crowd, catching snippets of the fury. “...selfish, cheating crooks!”

“What do they expect us to do now?” “...our right! We can’t make a living like this!”

She reached a veritable dam of protesters and had to stop. She tapped an older man on the shoulder.

“Pardon me, uncle, what’s going on?” She asked quietly.

The man didn’t take his infuriated gaze off the platform.

“The bakers got together and decided to screw the rest of us over,” he said. “They said the price controls are forcing them into the poor house.”

The man’s wife leaned over his shoulder.

“A pack of crooks,” she spat. “They won’t bake anything more until the government lifts prices.”

The woman bit her lip as she looked over the crowd. She was close enough to the pharmacy, but still— she had kept the man waiting all day. From up the street, the unmistakable shriek of sirens announced the arrival of the state police. A captain exited his car and addressed the crowd.

They were all to go home immediately, he said. More cars arrived to form a blockade directly in the woman’s path.

He said the situation would be dealt with, and two other armed policemen approached the bakers. Tomorrow, he said, there would be bread for everyone. When the restless crowd grumbled and shuffled their feet in repressed frustration, the policeman’s tone changed. Anyone who did not go home immediately would be found in violation of the curfew and sentenced for disobedience. The protesters began to disperse, and the woman was left stationary, considering the barricade now in her way.

A guard noticed her stare in the direction of the police cars.

“Identification, missus,” he demanded.

Wordlessly, she handed over her papers for him to inspect.

“We’ve secured this whole street,” he said, pointing out her route. “You’ll need to go around to get home.”

She nodded and started moving her feet to get away from the cops, looking for something to do. Her heartbeat like a hammer in her chest—she knew she’d never make it to the pharmacy before it closed.

She glanced back at the police swarming the street like cockroaches. Surely, she reasoned, the shop would be affected by the closure too.

Guilty, but assured, and exhausted anyway, the woman found herself on her own stoop. And soon, sinking into a deep, deserved sleep. __ On Saturday, she awoke with the lazy dawn out of habit. She blinked away sleep in a contented haze, mulling over the tantalizing possibility of walking to the bakery for breakfast.

Her stomach knotted. She shut her eyes tightly as she remembered.

Suddenly the air in the room was too stale to breathe in comfortably, and her chest spasmed. Her feet hit the wood

16

When Bakers Stop Baking Bread floor in a sprint, only just allowing her to fall in front of the porcelain in time. She stumbled back towards her bed and threw open the creaking window, where she hung her head into the dewy air.

“Good morning to you,” she said softly. And her resolve settled in like the humidity. ___ The line stretched outside the store already and people slowly filtered in and out with their clutches of soaps and razors and supplies. The woman took her place along the broken pavement, avoiding eye contact with the few faces she recognized. Her stomach twisted into knots as she waited, and she prayed, no, no, but it was only the nerves.

The line shuffled forward. Even though she rehearsed her little speech, her hands shook in their wool mittens.

Finally she was admitted into the store with four others. She rushed to the pacifier and triumphantly laid it down on the counter for the cashier.

“Good morning, brother...” she sang.

“You’re late,” he said, but she detected no malice.

“The police were out...” she glanced at the guards by the door.

“I saw. I couldn’t even buy bread in time,” the man said. “That’s five and three.”

“Sorry?” The woman’s smile faded as she scanned his face for any sign that he was joking.

“Five million and three, miss,” he said, looking at her expectantly. The eyes of the other shoppers were suddenly, quietly focused on her.

“That’s not right,” she said, smiling nervously.

“Yesterday it was five. I brought five.”

The cashier cast a quick glance towards the door, his face burning red for her.

“I don’t know what to tell you, missus,” he said.

“The prices...”

“Hey!” One of the officers barked and rushed over to them in two enormous steps. He turned his bulging face to the woman.

“Do you have the money or not?” he demanded.

She struggled to reply. Waved her hands in lieu of explanation.

“Then get out!” The guard said, reaching for her arm. She pulled away and stared at the cashier in disbelief.

He dropped his horrified gaze.

With the line of neighbors outside of the store doors now huddled in the entryway, all eyes were fixed on the woman and the pacifier she was holding. Straightening her back, she put the pacifier on the shelf graciously, and turned to walk away.

“I’m sorry,” the cashier said as she left. ___ She kept her head high during the humiliating, empty-handed walk home, but as soon as the door shut behind her, she seethed. Corruption permeated the air in the country. She detested the guards at the door, the silly men in their suits at the bank. They snarled and fought for

the scraps, helping no one but themselves and destroying everyone else.

She slammed open cabinets in search of flour, determined to channel her rage. She began mixing in yeast and water, using every last measure of strength to pound the lumps out of the unyielding, sticky dough.

As she rolled the smoothed dough in her hands and finished it with its floury crown, an idea came to mind. ___ On Monday afternoon, she returned to the shop a final time with a basket tucked under her arm. The shelves had almost returned to their typical, barren state.

The man behind the counter snapped to attention at the bell but he furrowed his brow at this familiar face.

“For you,” she said, placing the basket in front of him. “I hope I didn’t cause you any grief.”

With a moment’s pause, he took hold of the cover and pulled it aside. Inside, little loaves of bread rested against delicate cloth napkins.

He put the cover back and looked at her sternly.

“I can’t trade,” he stated.

She smiled, tight-lipped, and said, “Five years ago, no one would have questioned a basket of bread from a neighbor. Isn’t it a shame? Anyhow—it’s simply a gift.”

Her blunt reminder was a realization that had run through his mind many times before, and as he peered into her face, he saw no hint of dishonesty.

“I appreciate it,” he sighed.

She turned to leave, but he cried out, “Wait!”

He hesitated, as if the police would swoop in on him from above, and asked, “Can you write a check?”

She shot him a questioning look.

“I can, but what does it matter? I won’t have any more money till Friday,” she said.

“Write a check for today’s price, and I’ll deposit it on Friday,” the cashier blurted out.

The woman slowly laid a hand on her purse, but didn’t move further for fear that it was a trap.

She asked, “What if you’re caught?”

“Then we’ll call it an accounting error,” he smiled.

“You’d be surprised at how many accounting errors there are nowadays.”

They shared a moment as co-conspirators over a wicker basket. She took out her checkbook and deliriously scribbled out the price for the pacifier, and finally, finally, took it off the shelf for herself.

She looked back at the cashier, struggling to find words adequate enough to express her immense gratitude.

She started, “I-” But he held up his hand.

“We do what we can,” he said with a nod towards the basket of bread.

The woman left the shop under the joyful chime, into a day cleared of its hazy pallor. She stepped along the ruined street, where weeds pushed through the cobblestone cracks, where bystanders behind patched cloth wondered at her obstinate smile, and she walked on and on.

17

Valery Viktorovich Lyaschkevich: ȇ ǮǰǪǻ ǵǨ ǵǭǪǹDzǶǴ Moè Nakayama

Valery Viktorovich Lyaschkevich is a homeless artist in St. Petersburg. I had noticed him, sitting on his tiny chair on Nevsky Prospekt— the city’s main artery— toward the beginning of my 8-week stay. Even in passing, his vividly colored pictures captivated me, so much so that I silently promised to one day eject myself from Nevsky’s constant flood of people and stop to talk to him.

That promised day did not come until a week before my departure from St. Petersburg. I had passed him countless times— but his silence and apparent invisibility made me uneasy. By then, I had developed an extroverted hobby of talking to strangers in Russian. But with him, I hesitated a good three minutes and even faked a phone call while nervously watching his crouched figure. I was sure he was going to shoo me and my nosy camera away with a gruff nyet.

But Valery surprised me. The gentleman explained (in a soft, feline voice) his artwork, asked about me, and even posed for a portrait shot on my camera. Our friendship was sealed the day before my departure, when I delivered the printed portrait to him and he gave me three signed posters in exchange. Before he disappeared into the Nevsky crowd, I saw him set the portrait by his chair, breathe deeply, and rub his hands together, as if motivated and inspired anew.

My story about Valery is my most treasured souvenir from St. Petersburg. He is one person I will definitely look for when I next visit that incredible city.

18

19

Aral Sea Gwendolyn Snyder

The Aral Sea, formerly the fourth largest lake in the world as well as a naval and fishing base, has shrunk since Soviet irrigation projects diverted its feeder rivers in the 1960s, and is now only a tiny fraction of its original area. Now the water that is left is polluted with pesticides, and is increasingly salty, causing the destruction of many villages and harbors that once relied on the sea. This white charcoal drawing depicts a â&#x20AC;&#x153;ghost shipâ&#x20AC;? similar to many abandoned ships in the region, that are decaying in what is now a desert. The names in the smoke are for the neighboring provinces and cities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that border the sea in the north and south, and the boat in the drawing is named Nikolai, which was the name of the first warship to sail on the Aral Sea in 1848.

20

21

The Fundamental Principle: Pipeline Politics and the Dilemma of Kazakhstani Growth

John DiCandeloro Central Asia, unfamiliar and perplexing to many in the West, has undergone a radical transformation in the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A group of young, impoverished states burdened with corrupt post-communist political institutions, underdeveloped illiberal economies, and severe ethnic cleavages, the Central Asian states have been forced to confront the inherent tensions within their political, social, and economic structures over the past two decades. Forced by circumstances and carried by will, this handful of states has made steady progress toward sovereignty and respect since independence. Today, most remain uncompetitive autocracies of various levels of wealth and clout. However, slowly, transition from the fallen communist order is occurring—the individual states are finding their ways in the dim dawn with every means that have been granted to them.

Kazakhstan seems exemplary in the Central Asian context. Since its independence in 1991, Kazakhstan has experienced the same signature troubles as its regional counterparts— ethnic tension, political and economic dependence, and authoritarianism, among others. But an oil boom has allowed this second largest of the former Soviet Republics to experience growth rates far above those of its neighbors to the south.

Kazakhstan is currently the world’s fourteenth largest oil exporting country, and holds the world’s twelfth largest proven petroleum reserves.¹ Oil has proved itself to be the lifeblood of the Kazakhstani economy and current trends suggest that it will remain so for at least the next 50 years. Kazakhstan’s petroleum industry thus stands out as the most promising instrument for this emerging power’s further development. Appropriate further utilization of Kazakhstan’s petroleum resources is contingent upon improving export capabilities, although the social utility of these gains will be limited so long as current kleptocratic structures remain.

This study will proceed with an overview of the history of Kazakhstan’s oil industry, followed by a description of the country’s present economic and political situation. The study will then proceed into analysis of the primary limits on Kazakhstani growth, finally concluding with a review of the state of Kazakhstan’s oil industry that emphasizes its centrality to the country’s future prospects.

The 1983 explosion of Well 37 of Tengiz Field in the Northeast Caspian washed away this ignorance, revealing Kazakhstan’s potential as a major energy producer to the world.³ Despite this transformative discovery, Kazakhstan’s oil resources went largely unexplored until the Soviet Union opened to private investment in 1990. Until market reform, Kazakhstan’s potential had been methodically ignored by the Soviet energy monopolies Trasneft and Gazprom.4 Chevron was given exclusive rights to Tengiz, altho ugh field ownership and revenue sharing were renegotiated along lines less favorable to the American company in 1991 after Kazakhstani independence.5 Field proprietorship was to be split evenly between “TengizChevroil” (a joint venture between Chevron and Exxon Mobil) and Astana, with the government claiming 80% of revenues. At this time, Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev proclaimed that developing the Tengiz Field was to be the country’s “fundamental principle” for addressing modernization.6 Indeed, oil and gas revenues have been essential to the survival of Kazakhstan’s social services and general state sector over the past two decades.7 This proved particularly important in the context of post-communist transition; in the wake of independence, the state was forced to reform social policies such as pensions in ways that fundamentally altered the traditional relationship between society and the State.8 In July 1991, the Kazakhstan Oil and Gas Corporation, soon renamed Kazakhstanmunaigaz, was established as the national oil company (NOC).

In consort with government ministries of energy and geology, Kazakhstanmunaigaz established a centrally coordinated corporatist structure through which Nazarbayev would attempt to run the energy sector for the first half of the 1990s.9 Despite divided bureaucratic organization, numerous departmental officials and representatives from the federal and regional governments immediately began signing copious contracts for subsoil development without coordinating with the appropriate ministries—or each other. Mass, uncoordinated actions geared towards top-down privatization “spun out of control to such an extent that by 1995, no one knew how many signed contracts existed in the country, much less what their terms might be.”¹0 The early 1990s emerged as an anarchy of competing claims and laws until authority was transferred to regional governments in a series of reforms.

The next wave of privatizations would centralize authority in the president, while a new constitution was drafted, likewise granting Nazarbayev manifestly authoritarian powers, centralizing authority in forms reminiscent of Soviet-style socialism.¹¹ Although the newly empowered president signaled his openness to

History In relation to the rest of the Soviet Union, the Kazah SSR was “a supplier of raw materials, foodstuffs, and military production,” as well as a chemical and nuclear weapons testing site and favored location for ethnic exiles.² Although the Caspian region has been known to possess oil since early nineteenth century explorations centered on Baku in Azerbaijan, the sheer mass of available energy resources was long unsuspected.

22

The Fundamental Principle selling most energy assets to foreign investors, far fewer offers were made than had been expected. A suboptimal investment climate, or “legal nihilism,” is regarded as the cause for this underperformance of expectations.¹² Nazarbayev responded to this disapointing turn of events and to the concurrent rise of opposition groups by centralizing the energy industry further in a new NOC, KazakhOil, in March 1997, under which a new wave of privatizations occurred.¹³ The Kazakhstani NOC continued its evolution—KazMunaiGas (KMG), the current NOC, was established in 2002 as a merger of the National Oil and Gas Company KazakhOil and the National Company Transportation of Oil and Gas.¹4 Within the above-described trend of centralization, Nazarbayev steered the Kazakhstani oil industry from a corporatist to a patron-client organization with himself in the center of a political and legal web, codified into the ultimate patron.

In the next stage of development, Nazarbayev undertook the task of ethnically cleansing the ranks of the oil industry by establishing ethnic Kazakhs at the head of KMG and other Kazakhstani affiliates.¹5 This policy of “Kazakhization” was motivated by domestic concerns: Nazarbayev wanted to placate a growing nationalist movement that opposed Kazakhstan’s nearly even demographic split between ethnic Kazakhs and Slavs.¹6 Central Asia has a long, tense history of ethnic strife, institutionalized with the purposefully artificial political division of Russian colonial acquisitions into the five Central Asian SSRs in the 1920s. “The administrative boundaries of the Soviet republics were modified many times and were designed to leave large irredentist populations scattered throughout the region.

When independence was granted in 1991, literally millions of Central Asians lived within the region but outside of their national republic.”¹7 Hence, the national question became one of paramount importance to all of the newly independent Central Asian states in the early transitional periods. Nazarbayev saw the opportunity for further consolidation of his authority; practically, Kazakhization served to cement his relationship with the state’s clients.

Since 2002, the main trend in the development of Kazakhstan’s energy industry has been the Eastward expansion of its markets, establishing a consistent and ever-growing market in China, realized through the construction of the Kazakhstan-China oil pipeline and numerous joint ventures with the China National Petroleum Company (CNPC).¹8 This, alongside further development of the Tengiz as well as the Karahaganak, Uzen, and Mangistau fields, has resulted in dramatic economic growth, as is illustrated in Figure 1 from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.¹9 Nevertheless, Kazakhstan’s refining capacity remains severely limited due to lingering inefficiencies from the vertically-integrated Soviet energy apparatus.²0

focused, composed primarily of joint ventures and relying upon foreign investment. KMG operates as the Kazakh-run NOC with ownership of KazTransOil, the national oil transportation company—although it should be noted that the vital China pipeline is owned by CNPC. In 2002, Nazarbayev and Russian President Vladimir Putin formalized a 1998 agreement that established a “median-line approach” to the partition of Caspian wells, with the division of three additional fields.21 Caspian Sea production has traditionally encountered complications stemming from the geopolitics of Russia and Iran, which pressures Kazakhstan into further dependence on Russia’s political and economic will.22 In 2011, 25% of Kazakhstan’s oil exports went to Italy, conveyed through Russian pipelines, although China now looms as the market of the future.²³ As the history of Kazakhstan’s oil industry shows, the energy sector has become highly centralized in the hands of President Nazarbayev.

Kazakhstan’s location in the global market—as a landlocked country in Central Asia— will continue to limit its economic potential if current means of exporting its energy resources go unimproved. One of the greatest challenges to sustained Kazakhstani growth is an export pipeline deficiency. The Soviet Union, in its attempt at autarky, directed all pipelines internally; consequentially, upon independence, all of Kazakhstan’s pipelines ran through Russia.²4 The young nation was confronted with absolute economic dependence of the sort deliberately contrived in the Soviet system; furthermore, pre-established pipelines led only to Western markets, ignoring the growing Eastern demand. In 1995, CNPC in conjunction with Exxon and Mitsubishi conceived of a Central Asian oil and gas pipeline network running from Kazakhstan to Japan, notably passing through energy superconsumer China.²5 This idea would bloom into the KazakhstanChina pipeline, which has been vital for Kazakhstan’s recent growth, providing a growing market for energy exports and using China to counter Russian pressure.²6 Additionally, Kazakhstan is connected to foreign markets through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, the Uzen-Atyrau-Samara Pipeline, and the Baku-TiblisiCeyhan pipeline.

Unfortunately, Kashagan, which promises to replace Tengiz as Kazakhstan’s most important oil field, needs further connection to the global market if growth is to be sustained.²7 The importance of Kashagan cannot be overestimated: the US Energy Information Administration describes the field as “the largest known oil field outside the Middle East and the fifth largest in the world in terms of reserves,” holding an estimated 13 billion barrels of crude oil— enough to produce consistently for 50-60 years, energy industry analysts project.²8 Kashagan production was promisingly initiated on September 11, 2013, run by an international consortium, the North Caspian Operating Company; however, output was halted in late October following the discovery of numerous gas

The Present Situation Kazakhstan’s oil and gas industry is market-

23

DiCandeloro son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, financial director and vice president of KazakhOil. Kulibayev has since moved on to directorship of the trade association KazEnergy and now sits on the Gazprom Board of Directors.³6 Such symptoms of crony capitalism pose obvious issues pertaining to individual qualifications as well as Nazarbayev’s personal reach. Dr. Wojciech Ostrowski of the Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law Policy argues that “in the centre of the country, the actions of oil men and other important clients working in the oil industry are monitored closely by members of Nazarbayev’s family . . . in the peripheries, they are monitored by the often-rotated and centrally appointed local governors.”³7 KMG in particular is known for its corruption, systematized during Kazakhization.³8 Kazakhstan’s endemic corruption is clearly demonstrated in the “Kazakhgate” scandal, centering on American banker and consultant to the Kazakhstani government James H. Giffen. A personal friend of Nazarbayev, Giffen served as the intermediary between US investors and KMG for years. Recent evidence suggests that Giffen routinely paid off Nazarbayev and former Prime Minister Balgimbayev for oil contracts— exposing the kleptocracy at the heart of the Kazakhstani system.39 Within the current severely corrupt national scheme, increased oil and gas wealth will serve to do little but reinforce the status quo. Although GDP can be improved through investment in pipeline construction, this will do little to improve the life of the average Kazakhstani without complementary comprehensive political reforms that decentralize power and check corruption at all levels. But prospects for positive reform remain bleak so long as Nazarbayev remains in power. In the face of this grim reality, the most that sympathetic observers can hope for is that Kazakhstan’s economic growth will result in increased internal and external pressures on the state that push it toward sustainable reforms that can impart a new air of legitimacy upon the Central Asian republic.

Modernization can provide Kazakhstan with the resources to reform in meaningful ways that may pose more opportunities for properly rechanneling the spoils of growth.

Conclusion Though marred by corruption, dependency, and the vestigial inefficiencies of Soviet production, Kazakhstan has immense promise.

Since its independence, Kazakhstan has made great strides towards more liberal, efficient energy policies, and has created much of the necessary infrastructure to develop the energy industry further. Less fortunately, these steps forward have been accompanied by increased centralization of the economy, and the energy sector in particular, bequeathing unto President Nazarbayev uncontested power within Kazakhstan.

Predictable accounts of systematic corruption demonstrate how leaky Kazakhstani growth truly is. Kazakhstan could use its resource endowments to become a truly formidable global player, but fundamentally disadvantageous

leaks.²9 Proper, sustained development of Kashagan resources is the Kazakhstani economy’s most immediate challenge—and of paramount importance.

Kazakhstan still requires Russia to refine much of its crude, limiting the state’s economic and political sovereignty.³0 Kazakhstan’s future prospects rely on effectively connecting a functional Kashagan operation and any other possible new fields to China and other markets, without forgetting the necessity of breaking Russian dependence, lest growth putter out and expectations be disappointed. Kazakhstan’s growth has been export-driven—it needs to refine its export capabilities if its growth is to return to the high rates that it experienced in the mid-2000s.³¹ With Kazakhstan’s immense oil resources, established national identity, and great human capital, it could possibly pursue a growth model akin to that of Norway, using its energy wealth to sponsor significant social services, raise labor participation, and enable civil society to flourish.³² Unification of Kashagan’s colossal supply with enormous Eastern demand promises the sort of GDP growth that could carry Kazakhstan onward toward true independence in the twenty-first century.

Qualifications Corruption is overwhelming in the post-Soviet world, especially in the developing region of Central Asia. Even if improved export capabilities raise GDP substantially, within the current political matrix, much of the money will be diverted towards corrupt practices instead of invested in social projects or other worthy public enterprises. Jonathan Winer, a former US undersecretary of state, once remarked, “I can’t think of a leader in the free world as notoriously corrupt as Nazarbayev.”³³ Although Winer’s classification of Kazakhstan as part of “the free world” should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism, Nazarbayev’s stated reputation for corruption among allies demonstrates the pervasiveness of the corruption issue. Despite Nazarbayev’s public proclamation of a “holy war” against corruption, political opponents—including his former son-in-law, Rakhat Aliyev —claim that Nazarbayev himself is guilty of diverting considerable amounts of state wealth into his own accounts.³4 Political nepotism is consistently shown to the powerful and others close to Nazarbayev and legal and monetary favors are distributed with few if any checks. Kazakhstan’s elite, which primarily consists of Nazarbayev’s family and former Soviet apparatchiks, has persistently demonstrated rent-seeking behaviors, redirecting revenues from resource development into the hands of the few at the expense of the many. Despite formal democracy, elections are consistently regarded as rigged by outside observers.³5 Corruption requires attention if truly constructive growth is to proceed.

Nazarbayev, in addition to his immense personal power, has openly appointed family members to important positions. In 1998 he named his other

24

The Fundamental Principle conditions—resulting from both situation and policy— inhibit it from realizing its full potential.

Appendix A Figure 1

Works Cited

Independence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006), 50.

¹ Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, “Kazakhstan,” https://www.cia.gov/library/ publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kz.html.

5 Yergin, The Quest, 68.

6 Ibid., 67.

² Nazarbayev in Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 66. ³ Yergin, The Quest, 65.

7 Pauline Jones Luong, Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Power, Perceptions, and Pacts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 152.

4 Richard Pomfret, The Central Asian Economies Since

8 Pomfret, The Central Asian Economies, 58.

25

DiCandeloro 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/11/ kazakhstan-kashagan-idUSL5N0IW19020131111.

29 “UPDATE 1-Kazakhstan’s Kashagan field needs some weeks to resume output,” Reuters, published October 24, 2013, http://uk.reuters. com/article/2013/10/24/oil-kashaganidUKL5N0IE0QT20131024.

9 Wojciech Ostrowski, Politics and Oil in Kazakhstan (New York: Routledge, 2010), 33. ¹0 Ibid., 39. ¹¹ Ibid., 46. ¹²

Aleksandra Jarosiewicz, “Kazakhstan Again Toughens Its Policy Towards Investors in the Oil and Gas Sector,” Centre for Eastern Studies, last modified August 4, 2010, http://www.osw.waw.pl/ en/publikacje/eastweek/2010-08-04/kazakhstanagain-toughens-its-policy-towards-investors-oiland-gas-se.

³0 Johnson, Oil, Islam, and Conflict, 207. ³¹ Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook, “Kazakhstan.” ³² Roger Schjerva, “The Norwegian Welfare Model: Prosperous and Sustainable?,” Norwegian Ministry of Finance, published November 28, 2012, http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dokumentarkiv/ stoltenberg-ii/fin/taler-og-artikler/2012/ t h e - n o r we g i a n - we l f a re - m o d e l - - - p ro s p e ro u s . html?id=709446#.

¹³ Ostrowski, 48. ¹4 Ibid., 57. ¹5 Ibid., 61.

³³ Winer in Ron Stodghill, “Oil, Cash and Corruption,” The New York Times, published November 5, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/business/ yourmoney/05giffen.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

¹6 Dilip Hiro, Inside Central Asia: A Political and Cultural History of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Iran (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2011), 251. ¹7 Martha Brill Olcott, Central Asia’s Second Chance (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 24.

³4 Praveen Swami, “Nursultan Nazarbayev: the shepherd’s son who became Kazakhstan’s Emperor,” The Telegraph, published December 1, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/ wikileaks/8171617/Nursultan-Nazarbayev-theshepherds-son-who-became-Kazakhstans-Emperor. html.

¹8 Pomfret, The Central Asian Economies, 51. ¹9

U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Kazakhstan,” last modified October 28, 2013, http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=KZ.

³5 Bhavna Dave, Freedom House, “Kazakhstan,” http:// www.freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/inline_ images/NIT-2011-Kazakhstan.pdf.

²0 Ibid. ²¹ Rob Johnson, Oil, Islam and Conflict: Central Asia Since 1945 (London: Reakton Books, 2007), 203.

³6 Ostrowski, 49.

Gazprom, “Timur Kulibaev,” http://www.gazprom. com/about/management/directors/kulibaev/.

²² Ibid., 208. ²³

U.S. Energy “Kazakhstan.”

Information

³7 Ibid., 59.

Administration,

³8 Ibid., 81.

²4 Johnson, Oil, Islam, and Conflict, 206.

³9 Stodghill, “Oil, Cash and Corruption.”

²5 Hiro, Inside Central Asia, 265. ²6 Olcott, Central Asia’s Second Chance, 198. ²7

U.S. Energy “Kazakhstan.”

Information

Administration,

²8 Ibid. ²9“Kashagan oil flows seem delayed until spring – industry sources,” Reuters, published November 11,

26

Feminine Motility and Gendered Space in War and Peace Morgane Richer La Flèche engagement […] with timidity, uncertainty, and hesitancy.”7 In turn, women’s inhibited physicality results in “a failure to make full use of the body’s spatial and lateral potentialities.”8 Furthermore, this limited interaction with space suggests boundaries and Young views enclosed and confining space as characteristically feminine because “the space available to [women’s] movement is a constricted space.”9 Similarly, Young characterizes feminine existence as sedentary: women’s motions are not only limited, but also bound in place.¹0 This paper uses Young’s analysis of feminine motility in a context for which it was not explicitly intended. The author does not propose that Young’s theories are a final guide to feminine behavior or gendered space in War and Peace; rather, Young’s observations are a starting point for interpreting Natasha’s development through a framework of physicality. Young warns that her theories concern primarily women in “contemporary advanced industrial, urban, and commercial society,” although she notes that elements of her observations may apply to women in other societies at other times.¹¹ According to Young, the limitations of feminine motility “produce in many women a greater or lesser feeling of incapacity, frustration, and self-consciousness.”¹² An awareness of feminine physicality, however, is neither expressed by the text, nor readily apparent in Natasha.

Instead, Young’s analysis is most useful in tracking Natasha’s progression towards a constructed feminine ideal, and as Natasha’s motility becomes typically feminine–as defined by Young–so does Natasha.

The construction of gendered space is prevalent throughout War and Peace, consistent with traditional distinctions between the male (the battlefield, the study, nature) and female (the salon, the nursery, the home) spheres.

The indoor and outdoor realms also take on a gendered quality: while Pierre and Andrei commune with the wideopen sky, the female characters are typically kept indoors– with notable exceptions such as Natasha’s participation in hunting. This separation is consistent with the notion that “feminine existence lives space as enclosed or confining” but also suggests different relationships between sex and action.8 The males in the novel must undergo a baptême de feu in order to achieve manhood, often proving their worth through military action, while Natasha tarnishes her purity through exposure in society.

The strict boundaries that define gendered space in War and Peace are illustrated in the scene where Natasha and her cousin Sonya peer into the bedroom in which Nikolai, the elder of the Rostov sons, and his friend Denisov are resting, having just returned from war. The room is presented as a masculine enclave, filled with military objects and the “smell of tobacco and men.”¹4 Conversely, beyond the separation of a half-opened door, giggles and “the rustle of starched skirts” betray Sonya and Natasha, whose presence is identified exclusively by their feminine attributes.¹5 The eager arrival of Natasha’s youngest brother, Petya–whose intrusion into the male realm is described as a boyish impulse–highlights the

Set against Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, War and Peace chronicles the lives of four families of the St. Petersburg elite: the cheerful Rostovs, the proud Bolkonskis, the wily Kuragins, and the awkward-yet-goodhearted Pierre Bezukhov. This essay centers on the evolution of Natasha, the youngest daughter of the Rostov family.

In the early passages of War and Peace, Natasha Rostov is the disobedient Cossack who knows no bounds. Unfettered by conventions of propriety, she runs freely through space, bursting loudly into rooms with little regard for limits. She invades traditionally masculine spheres, peering into her brother’s bedroom and joining the men on a hunt. Over the course of the novel, however, she moves away from this uninhibited youth to espouse the confines of domesticity in her marriage to Pierre Bezukhov. Using Iris Marion Young’s theories on feminine motility as a framework, this paper maps Natasha’s development by examining how Natasha’s physical movement and relationship to space mirror her increasing conformity to conventional femininity. She shifts from a lack of bodily restraint to a more traditional gender role, from a nomadic to a domestic existence, and from the realm of high society to home. Natasha’s transformation is dramatic, yet the text treats her withdrawal into the home as a righteous and inevitable conclusion. By characterizing Natasha’s retreat into the home as the virtuous choice, the novel vilifies society’s expectations of femininity–the society belle–in favor of another image, the submissive wife and mother. The changes in Natasha’s motility reveal a steady evolution dictated by an overarching purpose: to offer a feminine ideal apart from the desirable debutante admired by society and suggest that certain boundaries are better left uncrossed.

In “Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality,” Iris Marion Young examines “the modalities of feminine bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality” to reveal how the social construction of feminine identity is physically manifested in women’s motility.¹ According to Young, women’s motility– encompassing both motion and interaction with space–is not an intrinsic characteristic dictated by physiology or a mystical feminine essence.² Instead, Young argues: “the particular existence of the female person is […] defined by the historical, cultural, social, and economic limits of her situation.”³ Crucially, Young acknowledges women’s own agency in conforming to society’s expectations of feminine behavior.4 In a patriarchal society, a gender normative social conception of femininity informs women’s understanding of their experience and self, and ultimately prescribes the way that women move.5 Young identifies a positive relationship between femininity and physical limitation: “The more a girl assumes her status as feminine, the more she takes herself to be fragile and immobile.”6 Due to their lack of confidence in their physical abilities, women “often approach a physical

27

La Flèche boundary created by the stark dichotomy between male and female space.¹6 Unaware of the bounds of sexual propriety, Petya symbolizes the prepubescent insouciance that Natasha and Sonya have already lost, defined instead by their overt femininity and their hesitant, self-conscious attempts to explore the male space.

After Natasha’s postponed engagement to Andrei Bolkonski, Count Rostov takes his daughter and Sonya to Moscow where they are invited to penetrate the heart of Moscow society: the opera. An analysis of gendered space organizes the scene at the opera according to Natasha’s migration from her father to Helene Kuragin, the femme fatale of the day. The threshold of Helene’s box is a sexual boundary, and Natasha’s behavior changes to reflect her escape from the familial enclave. While in her father’s box, Natasha remains under patriarchal rule: she delights in the feeling “of hundreds of eyes looking at her bare arms and neck” but remains passive in her enjoyment of the scene.¹7 When she enters Helene’s box, however, she ventures beyond her father’s grasp and falls into a dangerous flirtation with Anatole, Helene’s brother and a notorious womanizer. Her father’s urging that Natasha go see Helene complicates this spatial transition, consistent with Count Rostov’s inability to be a protector for his children, and his failure as a patriarch.

By now, the Rostov fortune has been frittered away on Nikolai’s gambling debts, and the Rostovs’ untenably grand lifestyle. Count Rostov’s willingness to throw Natasha to the wolves reveals the extent to which Natasha operates within a social context that rewards the performance of femininity.

Until the scene at the opera, Natasha demonstrates complete freedom in her motions, whether by bursting into adult conversations, riding horses with her male family members, or scurrying around the house with Petya. Only her absurd reveries at the opera, in which she reveals her wish to jump on stage or tickle Helene, show the real Natasha struggling to remain on the surface.¹8 Given her brazen behavior at her parents’ parties, the ridiculous impulse to jump on stage almost seems natural for Natasha. At the opera, however, Natasha is no longer within the safe limits of the family home. Outside in the public eye, she is subject to the boundaries and expectations dictated by society, no longer free to express her flighty, childish nature. The opera scene depicts a Natasha who is playing at being a woman but only ends up losing her identity to society’s game, foreshadowing the novel’s ultimate resolution regarding Natasha’s rightful place outside of society.

Natasha’s entrance into Helene’s box precipitates a premature sexual encounter for Natasha. She is characterized as unusually vulnerable and exposed with regard to Anatole: “that barrier of modesty which she had always felt between herself and other men was not there at all.”¹9 The relationship between Natasha and Anatole is ill fated, however, and ultimately results in Natasha’s confinement at home. By juxtaposing Natasha’s failed erotic experience with her subsequent indisposition, the text constructs her infirmity as a punishment for crossing a forbidden sexual and spatial boundary.

After her botched elopement with Anatole, Natasha is restricted to the family home for the duration

of her convalescence. Immediately following her venture into society at the opera, this confinement marks her first absence from the public sphere. Beyond cementing the dichotomy between the private and public spheres, Natasha’s removal from society signals a beneficial return to a presexualized state. She is described as childish, only spends time with her younger brother Petya, and experiences a new focus on purity.²0 Yet when she re-emerges from her home, she is unable to retain the purity regained during her confinement because she is subjected anew to the gaze of others.²¹ Natasha’s femininity is a self-conscious practice insofar as Young writes: “bodily existence is self-referred to the extent that the feminine subject posits her motions as the motion that is looked at.”²² Natasha is a woman again, and the text assigns an overt femininity to her movements: “Natasha walked in her violet dress with black lace as women know how to walk.”²³ According to Young, “the young girl acquires many subtle habits of feminine body comportment and movement,” and Young names “walking like a girl” as a manifestation of this learned behavior.²4 The text attributes intentionality to Natasha’s walk to suggest that Natasha is active in shaping her appearance to society.

Having returned from the front and recovered from his prolonged illness, Pierre realizes his love for Natasha. The scene of their initial reunion evinces the extensive change that Natasha undergoes in the course of the novel. Toward the end of War and Peace, Natasha starts to conform to a conventional model of femininity, having lost the freedom she exhibited in the earlier passages of the novel. Natasha’s very presence seems diminished: the girl who burst into a room with uncontrolled liveliness is gone, as is the young woman who could command the attention of an entire theater. Instead, Natasha can only gaze out at Pierre, her formerly radiant face reduced to “only eyes–attentive, kind, and sadly questioning.”²5 Her participation in the reunion scene is almost entirely passive, and she remains seated even as others rise quickly to greet Pierre.²6 She hesitates, consciously refrains from speaking, and the smallest movements–such as raising her head–require deliberate effort.²7 By the end of the novel, Natasha has moved away from a position of centrality, and into a quiet corner of the stage. The gap between the public and private spheres is widened, and the two are presented as incompatible for Natasha: she cannot exist in both, and she no longer has any interest in public life.²8 Natasha reciprocates Pierre’s affection, and they eventually wed.

Yet this narrow domestic existence, in such striking contrast to the earlier portrayals of Natasha, now appears predetermined and inevitable. The unexpected nature of Natasha’s transformation is undermined by the claim that Countess Rostov “with her mother’s intuition, understood that all Natasha’s impulses came only from the need to have a family, to have a husband.”²9 Consumed by household affairs, Natasha represents an extreme of domesticity and maternity, and the text frames her devotion to motherhood as a vocation rather than a duty. Even her social relations revolve around motherhood, because she only values “the society of the people to whom, disheveled, in a dressing gown, she could come striding out of the nursery.”³0 Natasha’s new situation

28

Feminine Motility

L Pasternak. “Natasha Rostova at the first ball.’’ Watercolor. In Al’bom Akvarelei k romanu grafa L. N. Tolstogo Voina i Mir. Ed. E Evdokimova. 1893. Moscow.

29

La Flèche is therefore presented as a kind of natural development, as she conforms to her rightful purpose in marriage: “she could not even imagine and saw no interest in imagining how it would be if it were different.”³¹ In her confinement within the home, Natasha achieves fulfillment.

While a permanent confinement to the domestic sphere evidences Natasha’s transformation, her evolution is also visible in the immobility and hesitancy that define her movements in the nursery. Reduced to a nursing figure in a chair, Natasha is depicted as unmoving, evoking Young’s qualification of “feminine bodily existence as rooted in place.”³² When Pierre returns from a trip to Petersburg, Natasha is nursing and “afraid to move lest she awaken the baby.”³³ Speaking only in whispers, she relies on the nanny for news of her husband’s arrival rather than greet him herself.³4 Her stillness is also portrayed as an imposed incapacitation: “her feet made an involuntary movement, but she could not jump up and run.”³5 Young argues that such immobilization is a defining characteristic of feminine motility because women’s bodies “project an aim to be enacted, but at the same time stiffen against the performance of the task.”³6 Natasha’s unconscious impulse serves as a reminder of her former spontaneity, now sacrificed to her maternal duties and her conformity to a consummate and idealized femininity.

Within the framework of Young’s investigation of the feminine lived space as an “existential enclosure,” the baby becomes a paralyzing force, confining Natasha to the nursery.³7 When she briefly hands the child to the nanny, she is restrained by “a pang of remorse that, in her gladness, she had left the baby too quickly” and turns back towards the child.³8 Young ascribes such “wasted motion” to feminine hesitancy.³9 The text associates Natasha’s hesitancy with guilt, as well as a sense of maternal obligation. Natasha’s restrictive attachment to the nursery is symptomatic of her total devotion to an all-consuming domesticity, and her identity, as wife and mother, defines her interaction with the space she inhabits.

Natasha ultimately finds her place in the ordered vision of history articulated by Tolstoy. She achieves happiness by conforming to a predetermined sense of purpose, which is revealed to be a vocation for family life. Natasha’s evolution from irreverent freedom to fettered domesticity betrays a pointed moral didacticism in the text, but the novel leaves room to interpret Natasha’s transformation through a different lens. Natasha’s retreat into the domestic sphere– while certainly expressing a positive view of the institutions of marriage and the family–also reaffirms her individual agency.

According to Young, a woman’s retreat into domesticity can be seen as an active move: “the woman lives her space as confined and enclosed around her at least in part as projecting some small area in which she can exist as a free subject.”40 Natasha is not the passive victim of an imposed domesticity; rather, she intentionally withdraws into the home, creating a refuge against invasion by society. Natasha’s incompatibility with society is not merely a clash of the domestic and public spheres. Instead, Natasha’s particular vulnerability to the dangers of society leads her to reject its openness in favor of full dominion within the confines of the home.

Works Cited ¹ Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality.”

Human Studies Vol. 3 No. 2 (1980): 141. ² Ibid, 152. ³ Ibid, 138.

4 Ibid, 148.

5 Ibid, 140.

6 Ibid, 153.

7 Ibid, 143.

8 Ibid, 142.

9 Ibid, 143. ¹0 Ibid, 152. ¹¹ Ibid, 140. ¹² Ibid, 144. ¹³ Ibid, 149. ¹4 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 299. ¹5 Ibid, 300. ¹6 Ibid. ¹7 Ibid, 558. ¹8 Ibid, 561. ¹9 Ibid, 565. ²0 Ibid, 658-659. ²¹ Ibid, 661. ²² Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 148. ²³ Tolstoy, War and Peace, 660. ²4 Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 153. ²5 Tolstoy, War and Peace, 1112. ²6 Ibid, 1111. ²7 Ibid, 1113-1114. ²8 Ibid, 1156. ²9 Ibid, 1154. ³0 Ibid, 1156. ³¹ Ibid, 1156. ³² Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 151. ³³ Tolstoy, War and Peace, 1158. ³4 Ibid. ³5 Ibid. ³6 Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 147. ³7 Ibid, 149. ³8 Tolstoy, War and Peace, 1158. ³9 Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 147.

40 Ibid, 154.

30

Liudmila Ulitskaia: The Daughter of Bukhara A Translation Carol Rose Little IN THE DAYS of old Moscow boroughs, honeycombed with back streets and gathering points centered around ice coated water pumps and wooden sheds, there existed no family secrets. There was not even ordinary private life, for any patch on one’s long johns, fluttering about in all directions on the laundry lines, was known to one and all.

The hearing, seeing, and physical intrusion of neighboring lives were nonstop and unavoidable and the only reason it was still possible to survive was because waves of gossip from the right were balanced on the left by drunken and merry harmony.

There, in the depths of a massive and jumbled courtyard divided with enclosures of wooden barns and barracks pitched against the firewall of the apartment building next door, stood a respectable wing of prerevolutionary construction with an inkling of architectural design fenced off by a sparse dividing hedge. A modest-sized garden adjoined this wing. And there in the wing lived an old doctor.

Once in broad daylight at the end of May ’46, when everyone who had been fated to return had already returned, an Opel Kadett pulled up to the courtyard and stopped by the gate of the doctor’s building. The kids still hadn’t had time to properly plaster their eyes on this fancy war trophy when the door swung open and out from the car stepped a major in the medical corps, prim and proper, with white teeth, a real Russian, as if a tanned war hero had just jumped down from a poster.

He went around the humpbacked car and flung open the side door – and slowly, lazily like jam oozing across a table, out of the car there stepped a very young woman of a type of Oriental beauty never seen before with shining hair of such immeasurable force her little head bent back under its weight.

Over the flower pots in the variously sized windows appeared the faces of old women; the neighbors were already pouring out into the courtyard, and over the chaotic buildings there hung a high-pitched jubilant cry of women’s voices. “Dima! Dima the doctor’s grandson has come back!”

They stood at the gate, the major and his companion.

He had put his hand to the side and tried to draw back a bolt without looking at it, when out towards them along an overgrown path rushed the old lame doctor Andrei Innokent’evich. The wind lifted up the old man’s long white hair and he frowned, smiled, only half-recognizing his grandson…

The light out from the penumbra of his room was somehow too much, unearthly and it stood like a shaft – as often happens in a strong downpour – over the major and the woman with him. The major turned back to wave at the neighbors with his hand, and then took a step towards his grandfather and hugged him. The beautiful woman with dark black eyes gazed meekly out from behind him.

Where before the wing had lived all on its lonesome,

with the return of the doctor’s grandson, it burst forth with a special rich and beautiful life. With the deaf-and-dumb blindness typical to all those lucky devils, the young folk didn’t seem to notice the soul-wrenching contrast between the life of the liumpen1 evacuees who were not quite from the city nor from the countryside, and their own life behind the new completely closed fence, which had replaced the old dilapidated one.

Bukhara2 – as the people of the courtyard nicknamed this nameless beauty – couldn’t stand the looks of strangers before the fence was built. Not one of the neighbor women ever missed the chance when passing by to peep into those alluring windows.

Still, in spite of the well-known laws of justice whereby going without is fair if it applies to everyone, if poverty is universal, equal and compulsory for all, the neighbors in the courtyard, poor and destitute, forgave them their aristocratic right to have a personal room for each of the three, to dine in the dining room instead of the kitchen and work in the study3... How was it unto them not to forgive because there wasn’t a single old woman in the courtyard who was not treated by the old doctor, a baby who was not treated by the old doctor, not a single person who could say that the doctor took even so much as a ruble for treatment…

This wasn’t even a family tradition, rather a family obsession. Andrei Innokent’evich’s father had been a battlefield medic, his grandfather a regimental doctor. His only son, a young doctor, had died of camp fever caught in a typhus-infected barrack, leaving behind a year-old child for the grandfather to raise.

The last five generations of the family had all displayed one hereditary trait: the strong and strapping men of the clan each had only one son a piece, as if there had been some kind of ordinance from above which limited the natural production of these strong professional men, strolling about in tight rubber gloves all over the field of surgery.

Knowing of his family’s low fertility, old Andrei Innokent’evich looked hopefully at his frail daughter-in-law in her pink and lilac dresses, he noticed with sadness the adolescent narrowness of her hips, the overall delicacy of her constitution and remembered his own Taniushka, now long gone, the way she had been at eighteen: as tall as a man, broad-shouldered, face flushed like a hot samovar, and with a long bushy braid which she cut pitilessly and happily the day she finished high school…

While Dmitrii was hesitating between taking over a unit in a city hospital or teaching at the Academy of Military Medicine and moving to Leningrad, his wife took charge of the household with zeal and thoroughness, replacing Pasha, the nurse’s aide at the hospital who had run the household for almost twenty years by that time.

1Those who are poor and devoid of moral principles and material goods.

2 Province in the southwest of Uzbekistan.

3 Refers to the housing shortage in Russia of this period when most families lived in single rooms, sharing kitchen and bathroom facilities.

31

Ulitskaia/Little Pasha took offense to this and stopped coming.

For the first time in his life the doctor set off for Pasha’s in Izmailovo4, finally found her, sat on a chair bound-up in packing twine, set his rumpled hat down in front of himself on the table, and while taking a good hard, somewhat myopic look at the icon draped in embroidered linens said: “I didn’t know you were a believer.” He nodded and then ended in his stern doctor’s voice, “I haven’t let you go, Pasha. You will give up the kitchen but you will tend to my room and the laundry, that’s what’s still yours. And you will get as much as you got before.”

Pasha burst into tears, her lips turned down like a rumpled horseshoe.

“What are you bawling for?” asked the doctor sternly.

“But what’s there in your house to tidy up, in your study? One wave of the hand and the work’s done…and the way she cooks – she can’t even whip up borsch or kasha…”

She got a little white cloth out of her faded black dressing gown and dried her eyes.

“Get your things, Pasha, we’re going and no more nonsense,” ordered Andrei Innokent’evich, and together they set off on the long tramway ride through all of Moscow to the doctor’s.

“No reason to get mad, the time has come to cash in our chips. Let her do her things her way, she’ll have her baby soon,” said the doctor trying to console Pasha on the way home, but she shook her head mournfully and kept quiet and only as they were coming up to the house did she muster up the courage to respond: “It’s upsetting all the same. He married that scrawny little Uzbek… in a word: Bukhara!”

Obviously, Pasha hadn’t got all the way into the spirit of complete and total internationalism.

That “scrawny little Uzbek” whom her husband tenderly called Alechka, said nothing, her eyes beaming in his direction, easily and neatly picking through one thing after another in the household with delicate hands.

The doctor, who had spent some time in Central Asia in his youth, understood a lot in the distinctive ways of the East. He knew, that even the most educated Asian woman, one who wrote poems in Farsi and Arabic, at the flicker of her mother-in-law’s eyebrow, would submissively join the maids who were gathering dung cakes to pat them into adobe bricks...

From the window of his study the doctor watched his pregnant daughter-in-law squatting in the little front garden scrubbing an old pot, her delicate-crescent shaped shoulder blades shifting under the flimsy cloth of her dress.

“Poor girl,” suddenly thought the old man. “It will be hard for her to get used to things.”

But she figured it out quickly.

Not really a mother-in-law nor a maid – she decided for old Pasha, she thought for a bit and it dawned upon her: she’s the nanny.

And from that minute Pasha had nothing to complain about in the young mother because even though she had mistaken on the role of the old woman, her mistake

turned out to be closer to the truth. Alechka was tender and respectfully plainspoken with Pasha.

As for the old doctor, his white hair alone would have been enough for her to not raise her humble eyes to him. But furthermore the doctor reminded her of her father, an Uzbek scholar of the old school who had died just before the war. They never did find a proper place for him in the new pantheon of Soviet Uzbek dignitaries, having to choose between a multilingual Orientalist with publications and expertise in folklore and a broadly educated doctor well versed in Eastern medicine.

He at the end of his life preferred theology to all other pursuits and until his last days had been writing a treatise on isra5, the journey in a night of Mohammed to Celestial Jerusalem, which had been a serious obstacle to the official posthumous recognition. Nevertheless a street on the outskirts of the capital had been named in his honor, even though a few years later it was renamed... He was such a liberal-minded person that he saw to it that not only his many sons but also his daughters got an education. The youngest was not able to complete her studies during her father’s lifetime so all she managed was a diploma in nursing.

Andrei Innokent’evich never found out right up to the day of his death which came suddenly and shortly after the birth of his great-granddaughter, just how refined was the blood rendered from many centuries in the medresa of Asia that flowed in the veins of the tiny yellow-faced and yellow-haired girl who was triumphantly brought home in the grey Opel Kadett from the Krupskaia6 maternity hospital.

From the very first glance, the child put the old doctor on his guard. The little girl was apathetic, edematous, with a pronounced epicanthic fold, the crease on the eyelid characteristic of the Mongolian race. Andrei Innokent’evich noticed a hypotonia and total absence of the grasp reflex, but said nothing.

Dmitrii who had finished his medical degree in double-quick time, specialized in field surgery, knew nothing about pediatrics but was disturbed and pushed aside those bad premonitions.

They named the girl Liudmila, Milochka for short, and Alia who spoke absolutely perfect Russian, softened the ending, calling her “Milei”. She never let her out of her arms and even at night always tried to get her to sleep beside her.

The old doctor died taking his suspicions with him, but by the time the child was half a year old it was perfectly clear to Dmitrii that she was mentally disabled.

He took the girl to the pediatric institute where Academician7 Klosovskii, who shared with the late doctor the old corporate ties of yesteryear, examined the child with great artistry under the enraptured looks of interns and graduate students. He turned the tiny hand up and pointed to a barely visible crease lengthwise across the palm, pressed skillfully on the side of her cheek bones, pulled out the child’s little whitish tongue and declared his diagnosis, for that time a rare one, a classic case of Down Syndrome.

Having completed his brilliant diagnosis, the The first part of the night journey when Muhammad travelled from Mekkah to Jerusalem, followed by miraj, his ascension to heaven.

6 Hospital named after Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Kostantinova Krupskaia.

7 Member of the Academy of Sciences 5

Suburb of Moscow.

4

32

The Daughter of Bukhara difference, in her own little way, between “good” and “bad”, the most severe punishment her mother allowed was “Mila is a bad girl.” She would cover her face with her little hands and cry a storm of tears. She was rarely subjected to such a punishment and in general it was just concerning faults of “dirtiness”: a stain on a dress, blanket, or chair.

Milochka’s favorite element was the mud where she would mess about with delight. She would sit there for hours on end next to the sandbox paying no attention to the clean crumbly sand specially trucked in for her by her father, pouring water from the rain barrel over the rich garden earth she would knead into dough and pat pat pat it into shape...

Dmitrii Ivanovich, having been raised by his grandfather under the dry and solid moral system of Marcus Aurelius, together with the boring materialistic religion of the common wealth he had adopted, would stay late at the office delving deeply into the medical destinies of his patients.

On his way back home, he would feel his usual evening despair and his wife who was so fiercely attached to her daughter that the symptoms of Milochka’s mentally disabled state seemed to penetrate her, making her become more and more of a stranger to him.

All the magic of intimacy with this lovely and docile Eastern beauty drifted off somewhere and even when on the rare occasion he’d call her to his grandfather’s study which he had long ago taken over, he couldn’t free himself from the deep dark fear of the invisible movement of mysterious and incomprehensible particles guiding the destiny of the child he already had and that of another who might come into the world... This fear was so strong that it occasionally provoked a physical nausea and in the end it took away all Dmitrii Ivanovich’s desire to embrace this perfection of a woman.

Scrub nurse Tamara Stepanovna, corpulent and crude, with smart and reliable hands, after an office party marking the occasion of someone’s birthday on a fake leather couch in the locked waiting room freed Dmitrii Ivanovich from the prejudices of his upbringing, also his beauty of a wife from her husband.

With her large pores, tightly curled hair and fat legs, Tamara Stepanovna hadn’t counted on such a success.

But she was a big bruiser of a front line vet and had long ago learned and memorized the hidden secret of men: send your strongest reinforcements to your weakest battalion.

With the intuition of an experienced female beast, she had sniffed out his weakness and on their second encounter which happened a few days later when their duty shifts happened to coincide, she complained about being sterile and so with this unattractive woman, no longer young, Dimitrii Ivanovich liberated himself from the nightmarish image of chromosomes moving about in vile and miniscule ways which at this time were denied outright by advanced science but this could not change any more his estranged relations with his wife.

Dmitrii Ivanovich informed his wife that he was leaving her for another woman. Without raising her eyes or expressing the least feeling, asked him what was the point in leaving... Dmitrii didn’t understand the question and clarified for her.

Academician left the little girl on the cold white table in the care of the Department’s head nurse and, taking the distraught father by the arm, brought him to his study, ornate with bronze ornaments and brain specimens.

After five minutes of conversation it became clear to Dmitrii that the child was a hopeless case, that no medicine could ever lighten the burden of her fate and the only blessing that nature had sent to ease this misfortune was that an anatomical construction of the nasopharynx, which makes colds unavoidable and continuous, together with inflammation of the lungs, would result in a premature death. In general, the Academician tried to console him, these children rarely reach adulthood.

On the way home the mentally disabled child slept undisturbed, her beautiful mother pressed her treasure against her with such a deepened importance that Dmitrii intensely wondered whether his wife had fully understood the whole unimaginable horror of what had just happened and couldn’t bring himself to ask her about it.

As time carried on Dmitrii thoroughly studied American medical reviews grasping the origin of this disease, cursing the theories of the all mighty Weismann and Morgan8, he painfully recalled the happiest moments of his life, of the first days having felt that sudden onrush of love for the beautiful virgin sent straight from janna, the Muslim paradise, to his infirmary, instead of some demobilized field nurses.

Embracing the first and only man in her life with her saffron-and musk-scented arms, she whispered into his ear: “The name Dmitrii was written on my breast,” and uttered words in an exotic Eastern language which were not words of tenderness but of prayer... At that precise moment thick clots of genetic matter came together, separated, and accidentally interlocked and one extra chromosome or a part of it moved off into the wrong cell and this microscopic error had determined the existence of a living being damaged from conception.

It was as if Dmitrii’s wife didn’t even notice that the girl was mentally disabled. She dressed her up in colorful silk dresses, she tied fancy ribbons in her thin yellow hair and admired her flat, senselessly cheerful little face with her little squashed-in nose and her always half-open wet mouth.

Milochka was a calm and smiling child, -- she didn’t cry, didn’t get angry or upset, never hankered after anything forbidden. She didn’t rip up her little books, was careful around fire, went only as far as the fence around the garden, looked through a chink but never went onto the street.

Whenever Dmitrii Ivanovich watched his daughter, he would think bitterly about the wonderful girl she could have been, what a charming personality laid buried beneath this defective flesh.

Milochka’s only unpleasant trait was her uncleanliness. She started asking to go to the potty very late, which is usual for such children; she really couldn’t grasp the notion of “dirty” even though she had figured out many other more difficult concepts. Though, she could tell the

8 August Weisman was a German evolutionary biologist and Thomas H. Morgan was an evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and embryologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for his discoveries associating the function of chromosomes in heredity.

33

Ulitskaia/Little “I know you’ve had enough of me. Bring your new wife here. I accept. I myself am the daughter of a younger wife...” Bukhara said without raising her eyes.

Dmitrii Ivanovich grabbed his head and groaned and the evening of that very day, having packed his shirts and socks in a suitcase, went to live with Tamara Stepanovna.

Dmitrii Ivanovich sent money by post. He never came to visit Milochka. Within three days the little girl had forgotten him. With his departure, Pasha settled once and for all in the doctor’s wing, and Bukhara went back to work in her specialty she had almost lost.

Life changed abruptly. The neighbor’s old avid curiosity regarding Bukhara and her daughter heated up further by the height of the fence and their completely separate lifestyle, was now replaced by an aggressive wish to squeeze the foreigner out, to consolidate area9, as they still said back then. Illiterate and persuasive documents were sent to the Residency Board, to the police force and certain other organizations not unconcerned with the assignment of living space10. However these were more progressive times and neither eviction nor even cutting back on their square meters was successful, though the neighborhood policeman, Golovkin, would still come over to have a look at the grass widow’s rooms.

Dead cats from all over the district were constantly being thrown over Bukhara’s fence, but she wasn’t squeamish, she would take the cats to the garbage heap and whenever Milochka found a carcass when Mommy wasn’t home, she would dig a hole in the corner of the garden under the big oak tree, bury the cat there and make a secret underground monument at the grave: she’d put colored papers under a piece of glass, some golden globe flowers, tin foil, and pebbles. She would toil away for hours arranging this work of art and when her mother came home from work she would move aside the thin layer of earth and show her the enchanting picture under the glass on top of the late lamented cat, poke a dirty finger at the glass and explain to her mother.

“The kitty’s there.”

Fat Little Milochka was growing up in happy isolation. There was mother, Pasha, the high fence around the little garden and an abundance of wonderful and enormously important things: an old iron barrel filled with rain water surrounded by various smells and the little movements of bugs around it and inside it, the old oak in the corner of the garden scattering about acorns onto smooth caps, hard serrated leaves and brittle twigs also was teeming with animal life, and the gazebo where Milochka went to suck on her short chubby fingers.

She was going on eight, and she knew an abundance of things by sight, by smell, and by touch. It was just that she could pronounce a few words and her pronunciation was strange, as if her voice were meant for another language from another place.

Old Pasha loved Milochka. My poor little dear, she

called her, and when Bukhara left for work Pasha would tell the little child long stories of her childhood. It wasn’t that Pasha’s mind had started to go but all of it was oriented to the distant past and she would tell Milochka again and again the story of her family back in the village, of the mean shepherd Filipp who had beat her as a little girl once with a whip and the time their bathhouse had set the village on fire and her big brother had burned to death.

Milochka’s childhood was endlessly long: for ten whole years she loved patty cake and peek-a-boo, she would hide her little baby face behind a handkerchief or in a pillow and ask people to look for her… Her babyhood came to an end in her eleventh year when she started to improve in development, her three-year-old intellect became more mature, she started to speak better and really began look after her hygiene, mainly her hands: she would wash them with hot water for a long time as if she were laundering them.

And she also learned to cut things out of paper with scissors. Her mother would then bring her an abundance of postcards, old torn-up newspapers, and for days on end Milochka would eagerly cut out all sorts of little flowers from the stiff cardboard postcards. With her large tongue between her teeth, she would sniff each flower and cry if she accidently cut a little green leaf or stem.

Her effort was serious and worthy of respect, the meaningless activity looked like rational and conscious work for her. She would glue her cutouts onto pages of a scrapbook, put horse heads, car wheels, and women’s hairstyles into unimaginable combinations that were in their own way attractive, artistic. Zealous spit would flood her chin. But there was no one around to cry watching the poor creative soul suffer, the little soul that was driven by an inconceivable Divine Will in the hard-working freak.

She would joyfully bring her meticulously crafted pieces of handiwork to her mother, who would pat her on the head and praise her by saying “Very nice, Milochka!

Good, Milochka!” and the little girl’s legs would twitch joyfully and she would crouch down and laugh “Good!

Good!” It was obvious that aspiration for perfection had been instilled within her...

By that time Bukhara had abruptly and definitively stopped being a beauty. She had become very thin, her face had become more sallow, she had packed away her flower-print dresses in an old German suitcase and taken to dressing in dark colors. Her face was covered with an unpleasant black fuzz on the chin and cheeks, and her once brightly sparkling teeth lost their jubilant color.

Her colleagues at the clinic hinted to her that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to consult a good specialist, but she just smiled, and lowered her eyes. She knew she was sick and even knew what she had.

At the end of winter she suddenly took time off and flew back home with Milochka for the first time in many years. They were gone for barely a week, when Bukhara returned barely alive, even more sallow, with a huge lightweight sack made out of loose-knit woolen fabric.

The sack was full of herbs, which she spent a long time picking through, then sorted, then ground. Then she

9 A policy from years 1917-1920 in response to the housing shortage.

Where the government seized “surplus housing” to distribute it out to the proletariats, or in other words, to consolidate it.

10 Reference to the Soviet State Security organizations, which became the KGB in 1954.

34

The Daughter of Bukhara handkerchief and kissed Bukhara on the face and hands like a little puppy that licks its owner all over.

Milochka didn’t learn to walk on heels right away, for about two weeks she kept on stumbling around the house.

When she did learn, her mother took her to the workshop at the neuropsychological clinic where with the help of the trade school, i.e. gluing envelopes together and cutting out price tags, they tried to turn the intellectually disabled into useful working members of society.

Bukhara quit her job at the school and started work at the clinic at the registration desk, in order to be close to her daughter and help her with her working career.

Bukhara delivered the patient charts from office to office and studied the patients with a certain goal in mind.

She had little time left and she hastened like a condemned artist would to finish a masterpiece before his death.

Work at the clinic was, as in any other administrative service, set up in an impossibly routine and absurd way.

Patients were called in for check-ups, this was the clinic’s main concern. But then in the neighboring clinic over, in the ordinary neighborhood clinic, they would drag in the crippled for the same kind of re-certification. Without it, they wouldn’t get their pension, which came to a considerable amount, in some cases, almost forty rubles.

And so it was the people who came in for recertification who caught Bukhara’s interest. She even had her own little set of records and her own files. She wanted to know who had what and who they lived with and where...

Nevertheless it was the prey, who found the hunter.

One day on the worn-down marble steps of the villa where the clinic was located, she was approached by a small bald old man in short striped pants with a Chaplinesque liveliness about him. Not letting go of the hand of a chubby bigheaded moron with a pink smile, the old man asked Bukhara what had become of Dr. Ratkin who used to work in their department but who wasn’t seeing patients any more.

Bukhara replied that Raktin had left and now the young Dr. Vedeneeva had taken his place, though today it seemed she was not seeing any outpatients.

“Ai ai ai!” the man cackled helplessly as if no one knew what misfortune had just struck.

Meanwhile Bukhara inconspicuously examined the man standing next to him, - also bald, kind-hearted and fat, wearing a checkered shirt, clean but unironed, and sateen post-war-style trousers. He was thirty years old give or take, but Bukhara already knew that sick people live and grow old in a somewhat different way than normal people do, and it is easy to get their age wrong: as children they look younger than their years and then suddenly start to show their age...

“What is your last name?” asked Bukhara respectfully.

“Berman,” the old man replied, and his fat son started nodding his head. “Berman Grigorii Naumovich,” repeated the old man, pointing to his son who just kept nodding and smiling.

It turned out that they had come for a certification.

Their house was slated for demolition11 and the old man Berman wanted to take advantage of his son’s sickness in order to get a few more square meters living space.

put them all in little cheese gauze sachets, wrapped them in white paper and started to boil them by the handful.

Pasha kept sniffing them and grumbling “Ah, Bukhara, the witch from Uzbekistan!”

Bukhara became quieter and quieter then she squatted up against the wall the way she liked to sit, and told Pasha: “Pasha, I have a fatal illness. I can’t die right now for how can I leave Milochka behind... With these herbs I can hold out another six years, then I’ll die. An old man gave me them, a man of God. Not a witch.”

Pasha had never heard so many words from Bukhara.

She thought, bit her crinkled lips and asked: “So give some to me too.”

“You’re healthy, you’ll outlive me,” Bukhara quietly answered and Pasha believed her.

Bukhara drank the smelly herbs all the time and ate hardly anything, and only one kind of food – boiled rice and very coarse, almost white dried apricots, which she had brought from back home.

And she set one more plan in motion: she began to take Milochka to a special school for defective children.

She also changed jobs, taking up a position in the medical center of the same school and together with all the special education personnel she tried to teach Milochka the sciences of life: how to lace up her shoes, to hold a needle in her hand, to peel potatoes.

Milochka did her best, sighing patiently, and in two years came out top of the class in manual labor. It is true though that she never truly had any success at all with numbers or letters. Out of all the numbers she could recognize five, which made her happy, and she could distinguish the letter M. She took such joy when going outside at night with her mother and seeing the red letter M by the entrance of the metro.

“M, metro, Mila!” she’d say and laugh happily.

Among all the various idiots of this terrible school the children with Down syndrome stood out for their placid and good-natured dispositions.

The Down syndrome kids are great, said old Goldin who headed the medical team and was always full of jokes and sayings he made up himself. “Only pity is they’re really bad learners.”

Bukhara carefully observed Karen, Katia, and Verochka, comparing them to her Milochka, and the comparison was in her daughter’s favor. Even though the physical resemblance among the children was astonishing – short, stubby fingers, with upturned eyes, myopic, pudgy – Milochka seemed to her mother to be better than the others.

Maybe this was the case…

In her seventeenth year Milochka started to fill out, her pudgy body grew breasts. Milochka felt awkward and a bit proud and said: “Mila is big, Mila is a grown up...”

She asked her mother for high-heeled shoes. Her little feet were child-sized and for quite some time her mother couldn’t buy her any shoes. At last she got hold of some Georgian patent leather shoes with a little stubby cork heel. Milochka was happy, she polished her shoes with a

Referring to the post-war reconstruction effort under Khrushchev.

11

35

Ulitskaia/Little Bukhara quickly found out when he should come back and promised to let him know whether or not they would be able to give Grigorii such a certificate.

The father and son left and Bukhara stood for a long time watching them go, this pair who might seem funny to some...But not to her...

She studied the bloated file of Grigorii Berman. It featured congenital hydrocephalus and meningitis, a trauma due to a lightning strike at age seven, as if Providence wanted to guarantee that this person would definitely be handicapped.

Judging by the barely decipherable scribbles of the attending physicians, the young man possessed inferior intellect, a calm and well-behaved demeanor, and wasn’t subject to fits.

The next day Bukhara went to Saropimenovskii Lane, but where in a little wooden lodge, exactly like the hut that stands on chicken legs12 nevertheless shared between three families, old Berman and his son lived.

On a rope stretched across the little room hung still drying laundry, the old man was reading one of the leatherbound books piled up on the table, and Bukhara’s heart skipped a beat at the sweet familiar scent of old leather from her childhood.

Grigorii was sitting on a chair and stroking a dirty white cat that was sleeping on his lap. It smelled of burnt soup and the chamber pot.

Old Berman scuttled up when he recognized the nurse from the day before, he hadn’t at all expected such thoughtfulness.

“Grisha, go put the kettle on at once,” Berman ordered and, picking up the kettle very carefully with a wash cloth in his hand, Grigorii left the room.

“I’ve come to see you on business, Naum Abramovich,” the nurse began. “While your son isn’t here, I just wanted to tell you that I have a daughter, and she’s a really good girl, calm and kind. And she has the same illness as your son.”

A shudder went up Berman’s body and he wanted to say something but meek Bukhara stopped him and continued: “I’m sick. I’m going to die soon. I want to give my daughter’s hand in marriage to a good person.”

“My dear!” said Berman throwing up his hands in such a way that the big book thumped heavily to the ground and he dove down after it in order to pick it up from wherever it was under the table and continued frantically to answer her: “what are you talking about? What are you thinking?

Who would marry him? And what kind of a husband would he make? What is wrong with you, you think a girl would be very happy with him, do you understand what I’m getting at here?”

Bukhara silently took in all the old man’s long and superfluous speech, then Grigorii came in, sat on a chair, took the cat on his lap and started scratching it behind its ear. Bukhara cast him a sharp and careful look: “Grisha, I want you and your dad to come visit me.

I want to introduce you to my daughter, Mila.” Then she turned back to Naum Abramovich and said to him straight out in Yiddish: “What is the harm in them meeting?” ...On Sundays Bukhara usually didn’t get up, she’d lie in bed, recuperating her strength. Her skin grew dryer and more sallow, her face became altogether that of an old woman and even her thin figure lost its air of grace, as her shoulders and back hunched over. She wasn’t even forty but the only thing that remained of her youth was her bright black strong hair, which she had cut off a while ago exhausted under its living excess weight.

Milochka brought her mother a cup of hot herbal tea, some soaked uriuchiny13 and sat next to her bed on a low bench, then crossed her chubby arms. Bukhara stroked her thin yellow hair with a weak hand and said: “Thank you, sweetheart. I want to tell you something.

Something very important.” The girl raised her head. “I want you to have a husband.”

“What about you?” wondered Milochka. “Better if you get the husband. I don’t need one.”

Bukhara smiled.

“I’ve already had a husband. A long time ago. Now it’s better for you to have a husband. You’re a big girl now.”

“No, don’t want one. I want you. No husband, you you!” Milochka frowned.

Bukhara hadn’t expected her to resist.

“I’ll be going away soon. I told you,” she said to her daughter.

“Don’t go, don’t go! I don’t want you to!” Milochka started to cry. Her mother had already told her many times that she’d be going away, but she still didn’t believe it, and would quickly forget about it. “Let Mila go away too!”

Whenever Milochka was upset she’d forget to talk about herself in the first person and would talk in the third person again as she had in her childhood.

“I’ve lived a long, long time with you. Since forever.

Now I must go away. You’ll have a husband and won’t be alone. Pasha will be here,” Bukhara explained patiently. “A husband is a good thing. A good husband.”

“Mila’s bad?” the little girl asked her mother.

“Mila is good.” Bukhara stroked her fat round head.

“Don’t go away tomorrow,” asked Mila.

“I won’t go away tomorrow,” Bukhara promised and closed her eyes.

She had already decided that she would go away to die at her older brother’s place in Fergana14 so that Milochka wouldn’t see her death and so that she would gradually forget her. Milochka’s memory wasn’t very big, and it couldn’t hold people or events for very long.

Everything went as Bukhara had planned. Berman came over with his son and his sister, who was a small old woman who looked like a dandelion. Pasha had cleaned up the apartment the day before even though she grumbled about it. Bukhara brought a store-bought cake. She couldn’t cook at all; she wouldn’t go near the stove that was how sick the closeness of the flame and the smell of food made her feel.

12 Reference to Baba Yaga, a witch in many Russian folktales who lives in a hut with chicken legs as stilts.

13

A type of apricot from Central Asia.

Capital of the province of Fergana in Uzbekistan.

14

36

The Daughter of Bukhara tram stop, energetically swinging his fat mitten...

Theirs was a wonderful marriage. But it held a secret that they themselves knew nothing of: from the point of view of healthy, normal people, their marriage wasn’t real.

Old Pasha, perched on a bench, would tell the rest of the old biddies with an important look: “You think you know so much? Hah! Bukhara turned out to be smarter than all of us! She figured everything out, everything beforehand! And found Milochka a good man, and then when she got home back to where she came from... she died five days later. And you say you know!”

But no one said anything anyway. And that’s the way it was.

They drank tea. They talked. The old woman turned out to be unusually talkative and asked many strange and meaningless questions that were possible to ignore. Old Berman thoughtfully drank his tea. Grigorii kept smiling and asking his father if he could take yet another slice of cake and then eating it enthusiastically, wiping his hands with a handkerchief or with his napkin or with the edge of the table cloth.

Bukhara recognized in him as her heart leapt all the painstaking, delicate gestures of Milochka, who was very scared of staining or dropping something when sitting at the table.

Milochka got down from her chair. She was the size of a child but with the bust of a grown woman. She went up to Grigorii.

“Let’s go, I show you something,” she invited and he obediently put down his half-eaten slice and followed her to the smaller room.”

Without even a change of topic, as if she were talking to herself, the little old lady suddenly said: “Maybe she’s right… And their apartment is very nice, like a real general’s place, you might say…” and she started to chew on her lips.

Milochka was in her room setting out her countless collection of scrapbooks in front of Grigorii. He had kept a nut from the cake in his mouth and was flipping it over with his tongue and admiring the pictures and then he asked Milochka.

“Guess what I have in my mouth!”

Milochka thought a bit then said: “Teeth.”

“A nut,” and Grigorii started to laugh, taking the nut out of his mouth and placing it in her hand. … Waiting until Milochka was just barely of legal age, the two were married. Grigorii settled into the doctor’s wing. A month after the wedding Bukhara went back home.

At first when Milochka came across her mother’s things, she would say sadly: Mommy’s apron, Mommy’s cup... But then old Pasha slowly cleared all these things away little by little and Milochka no longer recalled her mother.

In the mornings Milochka went to work at the workshop. She liked cutting tags, she did this almost better than everyone. Every day Grisha would see her off at the tram stop and then would meet her back there. When they walked down the street, hand in hand, little Milochka wearing heels and a girlishly pink dress of Bukhara’s and her husband, Grigorii with his large bald head overgrown with fluff, both wearing hideous round glasses which had been given to them for free, - there wasn’t a person who didn’t turn around to stare. Behind their backs little boys yelled streetside obscenities.

But they were so preoccupied with themselves that they didn’t even notice the mean-spirited interest of others.

They were on their way to the tram stop. Milochka clambered awkwardly up the high step. Grigorii nudged her from behind and waved his hand until the tram disappeared around the bend. Milochka also waved, plastering her smudgy smile up against the window and standing on her tiptoes so she could better see her husband standing at the

Original work: Ulitskaia, Liudmila. Doch’ Bukhary. N.p.: n.p., n.d.

Http://www.rulit.net/books/doch-buhary-read-113224-6. html. RuLit, 2011. Web. 4 Dec. 2012. <http://www.rulit. net/books/doch-buhary-read-113224-6.html>.

Works Referenced Harding, Luke, and Kate Connolly. “Adolf Hilter’s Mercedes, the Ultimate War Trophy for a Russian Collector.” The Guardian. 27 Nov. 2007. Web. 22 Dec. 2011. <http:// www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/27/adolf-hitlermercedes-war-trophy>.

Schneider, Carl J, and Dorothy Schneider. World War II. New York: Facts On File, 2003: p. 140. Print.

Thompson, Ewa M. “The Archetype of the Fool in Russian Literature.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 15.3 (1973): 24573. Print.

Ulitskaya, Liudmila. “Interview De Michel Parfenov: Le Nouveau Roman Russe.” Interview by Michel Parfenov.

Evene.fr. Evene, May 2010. Web. 11 Sept. 2011. <http:// www.evene.fr/livres/actualite/michel-parfenov-actessud-etonnants-voyageurs-litterature-russe-2727.php>.

Ulitskaia, Liudmila, and A L. Tait. Sonechka: A Novella and Stories. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. Print Slovar’ Mul’titran. Mul’titran. Web. 20 Dec. 2011. <http:// multitran.ru/>.

37

Editor’s Column Rebels with a Cause

Sara Karabashlieva On October 23, 2013, the student population of the University of Sofia began occupying their university in demand for the resignation of government posts and the elections of new officeholders. While demonstrations had been transpiring in Bulgaria for 140 days prior, the students’ occupations quickly spread to other campuses across the nation and encouraged citizens to continue the struggle.

These non-partisan demonstrations reflect the moral issues surrounding the political situation in Bulgaria—namely, the government’s ties to corporate groups. However, the students expose an issue that has shrouded Bulgaria for years; too much of its population is emigrating in favor of other countries.

For many citizens, the aim of the protests is not merely to provide transparency in a government rated second most corrupt in the European Union, but to create a country they can be proud of and not have to leave in order to thrive. Although the problem of declining population is not limited to Bulgaria, the country has the 7th lowest population growth in the world.1 The students involved in the protests voiced their concerns over this issue, stating that “so many people are leaving Bulgaria to go to richer EU countries but our main slogan is that we that we want to stay here and build Bulgaria into a country that we can be proud of one day.”2 The appeal of other countries is clear; Bulgarians desire a country that can fulfill both their

Petrovna, Valentina. Students raising their hands to show that they are participating in a non-violent protest. November 2013. Sofia, Bulgaria.

Salon.com. <http://www.salon.com/2013/11/17/bulgarian_students_demand_end_to_govt_corruption/>

38

Rebels with a Cause 1. Edward Hugh, “A Shortage of Bulgarians inside Bulgaria”, EconoMonitor, 24 February 2013, http://www.economonitor.com/edwardhugh/2013/02/24/the-shortgage-ofbulgarians-inside-bulgaria/.

social and economic needs. While financial hardship is a considerable factor in the decision to emigrate, the government’s role is also tremendous. According to the public, it is up to the government to take responsibility for the corruption and amend its relations with the people.

These protests are not a result of any new happenings in Bulgaria, but are rather the consequence of a populace fatigued by dishonesty and government nepotism. According to Justice Minister Zineida Zlatanova, the European Commission has monitored Bulgaria since its admission into the union and provides yearly reports on its progress.3 The main criticism the EC delivers and desires to see amended is the independence of the judiciary system.

While there is a substantial problem with organized crime in the country, the judicial system inadequately—if at all—manages this concern due to its corruption. The EC monitored 77 high profile cases of organized crime in 2012, only 16 of which concluded in a final ruling; in 10 of these cases, the defendants were exonerated.4 While the matter of corruption in Bulgaria is indisputable, the question remains of why the government has not made progress in addressing it.

The current Prime Minister Plamen Oresharski, however, is determined to wait out the protests and refuses to resign.5 Nevertheless, it is clear that students throughout the country are resolute in their demands for government transformation; what is not clear, though, is what party would satisfy the electorate.6 A misunderstanding remains between the populace and the politicians; while the policymakers would recognize a protest founded around money, they cannot fathom a movement centered on morality.

The students, backed by the majority of the community, demand that the government take responsibility for their actions and proceed with transparency in order to appease the country.7 These protests reflect the inner turmoil of the country and the determination of the youth to procure a resolution.

While youth unemployment is at 29% and wages and job opportunities are at an all time low, it is inevitable that the youth will look elsewhere for employment.8 That, precisely, is the reason why the students have been occupying their universities and forgoing their education for this movement. They are refusing to reside in a corrupt country, but they are also refusing to leave. While their movement is backed by integrity and accountability, they will continue to demand a just government.

2. Emma Kirby, “Bulgarian Protests: Students determined to overthrow system”, British Broadcasting Corporation, 21 November 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worldeurope-25014732.

3. Emma Kirby, “Bulgarian Protests.”

4. Ralitsa Kovacheva, “Bulgaria Remains Under EC’s Monitoring as Long as it Takes”, EU Inside, 20 July 2012, http:// www.euinside.eu/en/analyses/bulgaria-remains-under-theec-monitoring-as-long-as-it-takes.

5. Charlotte McDonald-Gibson, “Students invoke spirit of ’68 in fight to rid Bulgaria of corruption”, The Independent, 8 November 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/ news/world/europe/students-invoke-spirit-of-68-in-fightto-rid-bulgaria-of-corruption-8929682.html.

6. Ibid.

7. Max Rivlin-Nadler and David M. Herszenhorn, “Students Try to Occupy Bulgarian Parliament Building”, New York Times, 15 November 2013, http://www.nytimes. com/2013/11/16/world/europe/students-try-to-occupybulgarian-parliament-building.html?_r=0.

8. Kit Gillet, “Bulgarian Students Lead Wave of Protest”, The Guardian, 26 November 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/26/bulgaria-student-protestcorruption.

Works Cited

39

Editor’s Column

A Review of Peter Pomerantsev’s Russia: A Postmodern Dictatorship?

Aristotle Magganas Russia is in the news. One finds Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, mentioned in nearly every news bulletin. The ongoing Syrian conflict, the upcoming Sochi winter Olympics, and the Ukrainian government’s aboutface on the EU have all sharpened the West’s focus on Russia. It seems impossible to understand any of these events without first understanding how today’s Russia works. So, one is driven to ask, what is the inner logic of Putin’s regime?

The question is on many Westerners’ minds and its answer is critical for shaping the West’s future policy toward Moscow.

In a recent lecture for the Legatum Institute, a London-based think tank, Peter Pomerantsev, a British author and documentary producer, offered an interesting answer.

In order to understand today’s Russia, he claims, one must realize that Putin’s regime constitutes a truly new form of dictatorship. The regime in today’s Russia is not totalitarian; unlike North Korea, it does not attempt to coercively impose its will on everyone and everything. Nor is it authoritarian in the traditional sense. The Russian regime does not justify itself by any single unifying ideological narrative.1 Rather, it adopts many narratives, utilizing them whenever it finds them useful. It does not so much crush opposition as co-opt it and subvert it from the inside.

Instead of using these old-fashioned labels, Pomerantsev argues, the best way to schematize Russia is as a “Postmodern Dictatorship.” In such a regime, half-truth—or something less— reigns as the official narratives shape-shift, the counter-narratives are controlled from the center, and the center’s actions make no attempt to look logical.

In today’s Russia, elections are held, but they are rigged and controlled. Though private enterprise exists, the State is patrimonial and plays favorites, doling contracts and other goodies to cronies and taking away assets from enemies.

This setup, indeed, is neither totalitarian nor liberal, and the absurdity with which it works makes Pomerantsev’s label apt.

He offers many examples to demonstrate each of his points and together they paint a convincing picture.

The message Putin wishes to project through the state-owned media and elsewhere changes according to circumstance; there is no attempt at consistency. When defending Assad and demanding that the US treat Russia as an equal, Putin emphasizes that sovereignty is inviolable and that all States must be treated equally.2 When invading Georgia, sovereignty becomes secondary and Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin’s international media outfit, claims that Russia is acting in order to prevent “genocide.”3 RT, whose fans, Pomerantsev points out, celebrate it as “anti-hegemonic,” warns against American Exceptionalism, pointing out how dangerous it is to allow any country too much power.4 Nonetheless, the channel has no problem projecting a vision of Russian Exceptionalism in which Russia is charged with bestowing civilization on the benighted countries around it.

As Pomerantsev notes, these and the other examples he offers cannot be explained simply as a case of “double standards,” a

charge frequently leveled at the West. Rather, in Russia there are no “standards” whatever: any ideology will do so long as it serves the Kremlin’s current interests.5 Pomerantsev goes on to illustrate the stories of Mikhail Prokhorov and Yana Yakovleva, holding them to be emblematic of the Putin regime as a whole. Prokhorov, one of Russia’s wealthiest men, owns a magazine called Snob and founded a liberal, “opposition” political party in 2008. Around Prokhorov, there gather a cadre of proWestern thinkers critical of the way Russia works. The catch, Pomerantsev points out, is that the Kremlin in fact funds Prokhorov’s magazine and political party. The Kremlin sees Prokhorov as a pliant “sponge” for opposition votes and so it chooses him as the liberal opposition to the exclusion of others because Putin’s “political technologists” control the image he projects of opposition politicians. Snob, as its name suggests, appeals to only the wealthiest, most Westernized Russians, and so, by promoting Prokhorov, the Kremlin undermines the opposition’s popularity whilst pretending to allow true democracy.6 Yakovleva, an entrepreneur, founded an industrial cleaning fluid company. When officials approached her and asked for a share of her company’s profits, she refused.

In response, the government declared illegal a chemical her company extensively uses and arrested her for “drugdealing.” In order to get past this debacle, she had to play one government agency against another—the head of one despised the head of the other, and so he offered her protection, allowing her to successfully protest for the repeal of the law that made her business illegal.7 This anecdote shows rather powerfully what a charade rule of law and capitalism are in Russia. Entrepreneurs must cultivate connections with the State, acquiesce to corruption and red tape, or play officials against one another in order to survive.

All this vindicates Pomerantsev’s assessment. In today’s Russia, a heavy dose of surrealism infects every facet of governance: the State makes no attempt to stay consistent with any narrative, the opposition is not the opposition, and private property can be made worthless unless one goes along with the State officials’ corrupt agenda. The regime does in fact earn Pomerantsev’s “Postmodern” label.

Nevertheless, the schematization falls short if a true “understanding,” in every sense of the word, is what is desired.

It describes what is, neglecting to explain the why and how.

To do that, one has to use more ordinary modes of analysis.

What social scientists call the “natural-resources curse” can go a long way to explaining why Russia, a State whose revenue comes predominantly from oil and gas, is authoritarian, inefficient, and corrupt.8 9 Russia cannot be understood unless one grasps that transition from totalitarianism is incredibly difficult to navigate, full of pitfalls, and prone to hijacking by authoritarianism and cronyism.10 11 Understanding Putin’s appeal requires admitting that many Russians feel humiliated at their country’s loss of super-power status.12

40

A Review of Pomerantsev’s Russia Despite these problems, Pomerantsev is convincing for the task he sets himself and is most powerful when he comes to his recommendations for Western policy. He notes that many Russian anti-Putin and pro-democracy activists despair at Western complacency and see the West as hypocritical. They point out that Western countries’ financial systems stumble over themselves to make Putin’s cronies’ money legal.13 Ironically, Western capitalism may be undermining the creation of liberal capitalism in Russia.

Pomerantsev’s suggestion, then, is simple: the West should combat Putin’s cronies and put principle above money.14 It should not pretend that Putin’s Russia is a democracy and invent euphemisms for its actions.

It is interesting to note that this species of suggestion is increasingly popular among foreign policy circles. Edward Lucas, author of The New Cold War, suggests that the best policy for dealing with Russia is for the West to get its house in order and rebuild its moral authority.15 Richard Haass, the experienced diplomat, argues in his book Foreign Policy Begins at Home that the US should fix its own problems and more closely uphold its own principles domestically in order to bolster its credibility abroad.16 This increasingly popular argument shows true promise. Though Western governments have done little to implement its recommendations, they have on occasion. The most illustrative example is that of the so-called Magnitsky Law. Sergei Magnitisky, a Russian tax lawyer, discovered a massive fraud undertaken by State officials and exposed it in 2008. This prompted his arrest; while in prison, he was denied medical care and was tortured. As a result, he died. In response, after lobbying by Magnitsky’s friends and despite the White House’s opposition, the US Congress passed a bill freezing the assets and restricting the travel ability of all those involved in Magnitsky’s arrest and subsequent death. The bill clearly spooked Kremlin and it responded by pushing through the Duma a bill that disallowed American couples from adopting Russian orphans. This more than anything illustrates how sensitive Putin is to his cronies’ ability to travel freely and use Western financial systems; when the West decides to put principle above money and refuses to allow its institutions to be used as Putin’s instruments as the congress did in this case, the results are impressive.17 In other words, Pomerantsev and others argue, the way to combat the “Postmodern” regime in Moscow, the regime in which nothing is genuine and everything is up for grabs, is for London, Brussels, and Washington to show by their acts—and not just by their words—that some things are in fact genuine and incorruptible. In order for the Russia of today to move forward in a more liberal direction, the West must start work in making itself true to the values of its own liberalism. Western policymakers, keeping the inner logic of Putin’s regime in mind, should take note of this and get to work.

Transitions Lecture Series, London, United Kingdom, October 2013.

Works Cited 1

Pomerantsev, Peter. “Russia: A Postmodern Dictatorship?”

Paper presented at the Legatum Institute Global

41

2

Ibid.

3

Ibid.

4

Ibid.

5

Ibid.

6

Ibid.

7

Ibid.

8

Ross, Michael. The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

9

William Hogan and Federico Sturzenegger, eds. The Natural Resources Trap: Private Investment without Public Commitment. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.

10

Manzetti, Luigi. Neoliberalism, Accountability, and Reform Failures in Emerging Markets: Eastern Europe, Russia, Argentina, and Chile in Comparative Perspective.

University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010.

11

Yegor Gaidar. Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, trans. Antonia W. Bouis. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2007.

12

Judah, Ben. Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell in and out of Love with Vladimir Putin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

13

Pomerantsev, Peter. “Russia: A Postmodern Dictatorship?”

Paper presented at the Legatum Institute Global Transitions Lecture Series, London, United Kingdom, October 2013.

14

Ibid.

15

Lucas, Edward. The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

16

Haass, Richard N. Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America’s House in Order. New York: Basic Books, 2013.

17

“The Enemy Within,” The Economist, March 9, 2013.

Editor’s Column

The Armenian Defense of Van

Patrick Babajanian The historian George Santayana stated that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I believe that history is one of the most powerful forces to shape the progress of human moral development, and we cannot progress in this regard until the truths of the past are acknowledged for what they were. To this end, I would like to focus my column on an event that destroyed the lives of many people and, in my opinion, drastically altered the course of history; not only for its survivors and their descendants but for the millions of others who endured unimaginable human rights abuses afterward. The genocide against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, beginning in 1915, was one of the first major genocides of the 20th century. Today, the Armenian genocide is actively denied in many countries – most notably by the government of modern-day Turkey – and has yet to be globally recognized for the atrocity that it was. I hope that by learning more about this particular act of genocide, we as a global community can begin to embrace the study of history as a means with which to resolve similar potential tragedies before they take place.

Henry Morgenthau, ambassador of the United States to the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, witnessed firsthand many of the events that comprised the Armenian Genocide and recorded his experiences in his autobiography, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. I will focus on his account of the situation in the region of Van, which was only one of many other atrocities of similar intensity that transpired throughout the course of the genocide.

Today, Ambassador Morgenthau is widely recognized as one of the most reliable witnesses to the Armenian Genocide: as a third-party, he collected testimonies from various government officials of violence against Armenians.1 In modern-day Turkey, it has become widely accepted that the atrocities committed against the Armenians from 1915 to 1923 were justified as retaliation for Armenian rebellions against Ottoman government authority, and against Turks in general.2 It is true that Armenians resisted Ottoman authority. This resistance was however, above all else, self-defense on the part of the Armenian people against armies that were supposed to protect them during a time of war but instead attacked and massacred them.

In the region of Van, Ottoman authorities pursued the established policy of “[provoking] the Christian population into committing overt acts, and then seizing upon such misbehaviour as an excuse for massacres”.3 The Armenians in this area, however, responded by restraining themselves. They did not give in to this provocation and thereby prevented any cause for retaliation by the Turks.

When Ottoman officials realized that their plan was not functioning effectively, the Ottoman authorities replaced Tahsin Pasha, the more conciliatory governor of Van, with Djevdet Bey, who was more enthusiastic about “massacre as a state policy”.4 On the front, the Ottomans had been fighting against the armies of the Russian Empire, which had

been advancing steadily through the Caucasus into Ottoman territory. The Ottomans forced the Russians to retreat from Van and the surrounding area, and then “instead of fighting the trained Russian army of men… turned their rifles, machine guns, and other weapons upon the Armenian men, women, children, and old men in the villages of Van”.5 The Ottoman authorities, perhaps fueled by a sense of power from victory over one of their major military foes, irrationally turned their forces on their own citizens instead of pursuing their official wartime adversaries.

Djevdet Bey, following the gradual massacre of 24,000 Armenians in Van,6 and “acting in obedience to orders from Constantinople,”7 began preparations for the destruction of the entire Armenian population of the region8.

He called for 4,000 able-bodied Armenian men from the city of Van to serve as volunteers in the Ottoman army, with the hidden purpose of killing them so that the rest of the Armenians in the region would have no defenders.9 Offering 500 soldiers and exemption money for the rest, the Armenians struggled to forestall the siege that would surely plague their city if Ottoman’s plan followed the intended trajectory. Speaking of “rebellion” and the need to “crush” it “at any cost,”10 Djevdet declared that if the Armenians fired even a single shot, he would kill every Christian, including every child up to his knee in height, living in the city11. The Turks had been preparing for a siege of Van, surrounding the city with trenches and armed soldiers. The siege began when a group of Armenian women entering the city were seized

by Turkish soldiers; two Armenians ran to assist the women and were shot dead by the soldiers; using this as their excuse to attack, the Turks opened fire on the city.12 Numbering only 1,500 individuals with 300 rifles and a low supply of ammunition, the Armenian defenders of Van faced a force of 5,000 Turkish soldiers equipped with rifles, artillery, and more than enough ammuni-tion.13 This one chapter of an incredibly tragic story has a relatively fortunate ending, however: the Armenians, as outnumbered as they were, were able to hold off against the Turkish siege just long enough for the previously defeated Russian army to return and drive the Turks off. The loss of life that the city and region had suffered was staggering, resulting in the deaths of about 55,000 Armenians, whose bodies were collected and cremated following the flight of the Turkish army from the area.14 Ultimately, the Armenians were able to hold their own against an army much larger than their own informal fighting force, proving in action the potential strength of a people united in the defense of their liberty and way of life against a ruthless oppressor.

Why do I write about this one siege among so many others that occurred during the course of the First World War? I believe that history and historiography are some of the most important subjects about which to be knowledgeable.

Whoever controls the past controls our opinions in the present and our actions in the future. Adolf Hitler, in an

42

The Armenian Defense of Van effort to justify his plans for the imminent invasion and conquest of Poland to his generals, asked them “who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” That was a little over a week before the beginning of World War II, a war that would see another systematic eradication of groups of people “guilty” of the crime of just being who they were.

Works Cited ¹Steiner, Pamela. Henry Morgenthau’s Voice in History.

Harvard University. Web, 13. ²Stanford University Turkish Student Association. The Armenian Genocide: The Turkish Side of the Story. Web. ³Morgenthau, Henry. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story.

Reading: Taderon, 2000. Print, 196.

4Ibid., 197.

5Ibid.

6Ibid., 198.

7Ibid.

8Ibid.

9Ibid. ¹0Ibid. ¹¹Ibid. ¹²Ibid. ¹³Ibid. ¹4Ibid., 199.

43

44

45

46

47

Catherine Palace, Claire Haffner

Dacha Windows, Gwendolyn Snyder

Tsarskoe Selo, Claire Haffner

48