research
Before the 24th of February 2022 my practice was focused on the time, memory, human perception of existence. I was going to go deeper into the research on existentialism and entropy following Matt Franks’s image-object seminars. I wanted to expand on my essay on entropy from 2021. I had a concept of a video performance about societal entropy. The theme of Unit 2 was Testing Beyond Subject and little did I know how far beyond my subject I will be forced to go.
Entropy is a measure of disorder, randomness, uncertainty, and destruction. The entropy of the universe always increases. Early morning on the 24th of February 2022 my universe, the universe of my family, my friends, community, people, my country, of the beloved neighbouring country, and all post-Soviet space exploded with entropy. Irreversibly. When Vladimir Putin, the president of my country, declared war on Ukraine.
War is the ultimate entropy. Chaos is constantly increasing in all spheres. Cities are bombed, people are being killed, whose missiles, contradictory reports, whose bullets, people are fleeing, intermittent connection, people are lost. Historically Russian and Ukrainian people are closely interrelated and at least a third of Russian people have family ties and even more have friends in Ukraine. No one in Russia, even none of the political scientists I’m following, believed a war was possible in the XXI century. After the initial shock I and all the people I know started looking for their friends and family in Ukraine. Many of the people I knew in Russia fled from there within a few days. Chaos, shock, disorientation. Grey hair from my previous art project multiplied in geometrical progression on the Ukrainian and Russian heads.
The only thing I could do then is to help Ukrainians, they were the ones being bombed. From day three I helped fleeing people by providing them with the information they needed on transportation, border controls, accommodation, medication, other help. Multiple, multiple chats in all the messengers, people losing connection, people trapped under the rubble. They were fleeing with invalids, children, elderly, cats and dogs. I spent around 12-14 hours daily searching for information, organising and structuring it, sending it to the ones who needed it. I couldn’t go to the Ukrainian border because I didn’t have a Schengen visa but many of my Russian friends from the UK and Europe went there. None of them who are from the art world could do any art.
To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric
(Theodor Adorno, 1949)
Although Adorno didn't mean to silence all the poets and artists, I witnessed an instant manifestation of it among Russian and Russian-speaking artists and other creatives. For me too, in all honesty, the practice of humanism turned out to be much more important than art practice. My reflections on the meaning of art brought me to the radical conclusion that in the times of war art is a luxury, an add-on, even though an influential one. Making art literally felt like a waste of my time. I would rather spend my time on providing necessary information that can potentially save lives of real people, of flesh and blood. In this regard I followed my favourite Russian film critic Anton Dolin in his opinion that art doesn’t stop wars and it doesn’t change the course of history. It cannot have an influence on nations or countries or governments. Art can only influence a person individually, then he or she in turn can influence politics, and history, and wars. But
Inter arma silent Musae
(Latin phrase)
In the times of war Muses fall silent
So did I. I just focused on the first and second levels of Maslow’s pyramid. Food, medicine, safety. Bringing people to safety.
*external collaborations and professional skills
The experience I got during these first months of the war was both traumatising as well as enriching. I learned so much and passed on to the Ukrainians how to sellotape windows under a missile attack to prevent their breaking, how you need to open your mouth to protect your eardrums from exploding, which is the most secure space in your house in case of explosion. I progressed in reading fluently in Ukrainian and learned how to talk to people in complete distress and panic attack. I met people I wouldn’t have met in any other circumstances. More importantly, I experienced the unprecedented civic engagement and solidarity. I united with complete strangers based on our anti-war ideals and we organised from the scratch horizontal structures that provided help to thousands of people in need and in immediate danger.
After coming back to London in 2020 I became part of the activist art group “Art of Rebel” which was formed by the Russians living in the UK as a reaction to the unlawful imprisonment of Alexey Navalny. We are a part of a bigger international movement that unites the Russians living in and outside Russia and protesting against Putin’s politics. The Russian-speaking community outside Russia embraces people speaking Russian regardless of their nationality. On a bigger scale our democratic protests unite anyone who comes from the post-Soviet countries - Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan. This is how the second main practice in Unit 2 for me became the art of protesting. Almost every night after volunteering as a coordinator for the Ukrainian refugees I went to the Trafalgar square to take part in the Ukrainian anti-war protest. My friends and I were standing under the Ukrainian flag and supporting our Ukrainian friends every night. Later we formed the Russian anti-war movement under the new flag – the white-blue-white – the red, the colour of blood, was erased from the national flag of Russia. This initiative was supported by the Russians across many countries on all continents. Together with my friends from "Art of Rebel" we made a few performances during protests.
Unlike other nations the Russians living abroad are known to hardly ever form any communities and diasporas. The level of disconnection between people is extremely high within and outside of Russia. This time the saddest and most terrible event as this war gave a long-awaited urge to very different people across the world to unite around our shared ideals and values we hold dear. Many initiatives have been implemented within days and started helping the Ukrainians and also the Russians who were fleeing from Russia due to persecution. London is the base of one of the biggest organisations like this - “The Arc”. The others are the protest activists’ group “RusDem Society”, the politics discussion club “Kolokol”, etc.
Many people who are participating in protests are risking in one form or the other. In the first days of the war president Putin signed the laws establishing the war censorship and prohibiting anti-war statements and calls for sanctions. The punishment for crimes on this group of federal laws is from 3 to 15 years of prison. There were thousands of people protesting in Russia, beaten up by the police and put to jail. There were artists who made amazing anti-war actions who are now being imprisoned and facing these serious charges. The justice system in Russia is completely corrupted and is under the rule of the secret service FSB. The prisons are almost completely closed-up systems where prisoners are subjected to torture and humiliation. The Russians living in Russia are afraid to say anything because it will not change a thing and their lives will be completely ruined. The Russians living abroad are afraid to go visit their families in Russia. They are afraid that the fact that they actively protest abroad could be used against them and their family members. Those who are on a visa are afraid of the time when their visa expires and they have nowhere to go but back to Russia and to face persecution.
* external collaborations and professional skills
During the protests and actions I met many artists, curators and theatre performers from Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Belarus, and Russia living in London and the UK. None of them could create art they were creating before. In our conversations we shared that it all lost any meaning. All were volunteering in one form or the other and all were very vocal in their anti-war position and actively protesting against Putin and his war. It became very important to give voices to the Ukrainian artists who are under threat or displaced and scattered around Europe. My friend from Crimea who has dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship travelled to the Polish-Ukrainian border to get the paintings of artists from Ukraine and organised an exhibition in London. The other friends from the only Russian-speaking theatre in London organised a concert to raise funds for Ukraine. I tried to help in such events whenever I could.
I left Russia in 2008 long before the annexation of Crimea in 2014 which was as I see now only the forerunner of the war. Back then I considered myself a true cosmopolitan, a global nomad. Only with time I became more and more aware of how much of me consists of my language, literature, all the pieces of art and culture I experienced and absorbed as a child in Russia. I have been visiting my home town a couple of times per year and I saw changes, my friends saw changes too. These were slow gradual progressions that never let us see over the event horizon. I saw propaganda, I saw militaristic frenzy, I saw the learned helplessness of the whole nation that was purposefully grown by the government to be apathetic and apolitical. No one in my circle was taking it seriously, or the rumours about the war. We all laughed at it and now our light-heartedness painfully echoes with the bullet shells in Mariupol.
My country is undergoing a horrible ugly transformation and I am scared to see the final stage of it which is still impossible to imagine. The authoritarian regime of Putin’s is on the verge of transgression into totalitarianism. The metamorphosis is still not completed according to the Russian sociologist and philosopher Grigory Yudin who was beaten unconscious by the police on the anti-war protest in Moscow on the 24th of February. However, if we peruse the fourteen properties of fascism by Umberto Eco in his essay “Ur-fascism” we find that all of them are nearly met in today’s Russia.
Along with the painful feelings of shame, guilt, loss, and horror that were forced upon, I felt another, the weirdest and most unbearable, psychological process I never expected to go through personally - the re-evaluation of my own identity. The eerie feeling of a shattered self-identity started creeping in with some lag a month or so later. I started to feel that I couldn’t understand or be sure of who I was any more. It felt as if you know there’s a wound on your body and as if in a dream you are searching for it frantically but you can’t see or find it. Is this how internal bleeding feels? Who am I now? Who are we? What awaits us?
The flashbacks from the XX century European history sprang at me and my Russian friends who live outside of Russia. The white Russian émigrés that fled or were expelled from Russia in the wake of the 1917 Soviet Revolution and the following Russian civil war of 1918-1923. The brightest intellectuals of that time emigrated to Europe and the US on the “Philosophers’ ships” cherishing the hope to come back to their motherland soon. Only never to come back. All of those who did come back were executed by the USSR government. The other historic parallel was the Germans or German-speaking people including the Jews who fled Germany before and during the WWII. In many countries they were met with suspicion and distrust. Here in the UK during both world wars they were interned on the Isle of Man together with escaped Nazis. Being a Russian when Russia unlawfully invades Ukraine, kills civilians and bombs cities calls for a thorough re-evaluation of what being Russian means.
The German-speaking suspects, Agatha Christie's Poirot, The Clocks, episode 4, series 12, 2011
Before the 24th of February 2022 I felt as a representative of all post-soviet people because we shared similar historical and cultural background. I often used “we” explaining how Russians, Ukrainians, Tartars, Yakuts, Belorussians would feel or think in certain contexts. But after this date it ceased to be. My pan-post-soviet identity was gone and I was left with something it was hard to look at. The new page in history has turned for all post-soviet space, especially for Ukraine and Russia. Whatever I say I cannot say the word “we” anymore because Putin eradicated all the milliards of connections between our two nations, between me and Ukraine, the country whose music I was raised with, whose writers I read since childhood, whose language I tried to learn and I still remember the front of the Ukrainian textbook and on which bookshelf it is still kept in my mum’s apartment in Russia.
Стали батьками доньки й сини
Все кольорові бачили сни
І цілували руки брехні
За тихі ночі — віддали дні
Гілля калин похилилося
Мама, кому ж ми молилися?
Скільки іще забере вона
Твоїх дітей, не твоя війна?
Daughters and sons became parents
They saw the dreams of all the colours
And kissed the hands of a liar
For quiet nights - gave days
Viburnum branches bent
Mum, who did we pray to?
How many more of your children
Will it take, this not-your-war?
(Okean Elzy, Не твоя вiйна, 2016)
In the quest to try to grasp this new identity crisis in its personal and national aspects I turned to the other countries’ histories – the colonial past of the British and French Empires, the aftermaths of the slavery in the US, but the closest example was Germany after the Holocaust and the WWII. The Germans managed to acknowledge their past, their guilt and responsibility and to re-evaluate their culture and they re-invented the new German identity that is rid of imperialistic thinking. It took them over thirty years to process these terrible events and still each new generation of the Germans is re-inventing their own new language they approach and speak with about them. It is important to start this process in Russia as soon as possible. For Germany back then it started during the WWII with the famous BBC speeches by Thomas Mann addressed to the Germans in the German language. Then Carl Jung propagated the notion of collective guilt in 1945 and later the collective and personal responsibilities and the important difference between the three.
The Soviet Union was an empire that has never repented of its bloodthirsty imperialistic sins – the Gulag, the suppression, forced resettlement and destruction of non-Russian nations living in the USSR, etc. Russia as its descendant never has done it either. Big empires like massive brontosauruses if killed die slowly and their last breaths often take forms of war conflicts in the disputed territories. Like the Falklands War in 1982 was a last breath of the British Empire, the Russian invasion in Ukraine is a last breath of the practically dead but still agonising Soviet Empire.
We’re half-awake in the fake empire
(The National, Fake Empire, 2007)
The UK has been doing the “home work” on accepting its imperialistic past and "decolonisation" is becoming a term widely known and used among different societal strata. However, in Russia any excavation and exhumation of its past is forbidden unless it’s the glorification of the WWII victory. Terms like “decolonisation”, “appropriation”, “diversity”, “privilege”, “inclusion” have never been a part of the official discourse in Russia. A very timely book “The Uncomfortable Past. The Memory of the State Crimes in Russia and Other Countries” by Nikolay Epple was published in 2020 in Russia.
Two years ago, the uncomfortable past in Russia was the Stalinist repressions and the millions of Gulag’s victims that were never fully acknowledged and atone for. Little did we know that the enslavement and extermination of our own citizens in Gulag in the last century will be topped by the invasion of our closest neighbour in the 21st century. In the book the author gives a pathway how Russia can finally start working with its traumatic imperialistic past. Getting rid of the imperialistic poison is the fundamental process, without which the Russian society will stand no chance to its cultural and idealistic renewal and re-invention.
As a reaction to the war many voices were raised among Russian citizens living in and outside of Russia with the call to the denazification and decolonisation of Russia itself which is a home to more than 120 ethnic groups who speak more than 100 languages. There is an amazing project of Aleksandra Garmozhapova, a native Buryat, which raises questions of racism and xenophobia in Russia towards Russian citizens of “non-slavic” looks.
I come from Perm, from the Urals Mountains, the area that was for centuries populated by Komi and Komi-permyaks, a Finnic nation that speaks Finno-Permic languages. The neighbouring nations – the Udmurts, also Finno-Permyaks, the Mansi of the Ugric ethnic group, the Bashkirs of the Turkic ethnic group, the Samoyedic ethnic groups – all live now on the territory of Perm province. The colonisation of Permia, the historical area, was gradual and finished by late 17th century when the Slavic people, mostly Russians and Ukrainians, came to build factories and mines.
I never knew my family history earlier than my parents’ because from one side my ancestors were the Gulag’s survivors who never told their true story to their children and died before I was born. From the other side of my family there was also the generational silence because they were victims of the Dekulakisation during which prosperous peasants were displaced and eradicated as a class. Nevertheless, it always bothered me being born in a multi-cultural region how little we knew and appreciated the true cultures of the nations who lived in Permia for centuries.
Although I was acquanted with the decolonisation discourse, I never heard of it in relations to the post-soviet space. Until I visited a lecture on post-soviet colonialism by professor Madina Tlostanova, a specialist in this area from Linkoping University. She came from the Caucasus region and was analysing the art world of the Caucasus from the post-colonial perspective. It opened my eyes. This conversation should be extended into the other areas of art and culture and cover the whole territory of the post-soviet space. I started to talk about it with my Russian friends. My previous background is in filmmaking, I have extensive knowledge about film and film history. So, I organised a film club "Anti-Imperia" where I show films that in my opinion touch upon this subject. I include films not only specific to post-soviet space but from other parts of the world to see how this discourse was maintained there. The list of films comprises the works of Sergey Paradjanov, Alexey Balabanov, Gille Pontecorvo, Steve McQuinn, Werner Herzog.
There is a strong public debate at the moment about the cancellation of the Russian culture. Indeed, in the time of war there is no place for voices related to the transgressor. However, the transgressor is Putin, his clique and his supporters. There are Russian artists who oppose them with their anti-war messages even though the price they pay for it is much more higher than anything artists in the West can imagine. Moreover, the great Russian culture doesn't belong to the Russians. Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Chaikovsky, Malevich, Kandinsky belong to the world since a long time. The greatest Russian pieces being it literature or music always carried the anti-war appeal. However, there are bits and moments in some films or books that have this imperialistic colour that went unnoticed and unrecognised because no work has been done to trace them. They stayed in the unconscious thinking patterns of the Russians. We need to start the hunt for these information bits and items that carry the harmful code of imperialism.
Along with the film club the further development of my research I see in documenting how the Russian artists express their anti-war position and how they are being prosecuted for it. I would like to collect and curate their works in order to give them voice because they consciously risk their freedom and potentially lives. I believe those Russians who live abroad and are not in immediate danger should express solidaruty with them and re-present them in our protest here.
Bibliography
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