Maps as psychology, the history of the Kremlin, and the plague of fundamentalism (Books - Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski)

(This post along with three others here, here, and here constitute my review).
Global maps in the Imperium and in the U.S. are an expression of national psychology. Ryszard Kapuscinski's wide traveling, observant eye and wry tongue make the tone of his analysis unique:

One type is disseminated by the National Geographic Society in America, and on it, in the middle, in the central spot, lies the American continent, surrounded by two oceans - the Atlantic and the Pacific. The former Soviet Union is cut in half and placed discreetly at both ends of the map so that it won't frighten American children with its immense bulk. The Institute of Geography in Moscow prints an entirely different map. On it, in the middle, in the central port, lies the former Soviet Union, which is so big that it overwhelms us with its expanse; America, on the other hand, is cut in half and placed discreetly at both ends so that the Russian child will not think: My God! How large this America is!

These two maps have been shaping two different visions of the world for generations.

In the course of my wanderings over the territories of the Imperium my attention was caught by, among other things, the fact that even in forsaken and tumbledown little towns, even in practically empty bookshops, there was for sale, as a rule, a large map of this country on which the rest of the world appeared to be almost in the background, in the margins, in shadow.

This map is for Russians a kind of visual recompense, a peculiar emotional sublimation, and also an object of unconcealed pride.

It also serves to explain and justify all shortages, mistakes, poverty, and marasmus. It is too big a country to be reformed! explain the opponents of reforms. It is too big a country to be cleaned up! janitors from Brest to Vladivostock throw up their hands. It is too big a country for goods to be delivered everywhere, grumble saleswomen in empty shops.

A great size, which explain and absolves everything. Sure, if we were a small country like Switzerland, everything here would run like clockwork, too!

Kapuscinski's bleak chapter on Kolyma - one of Russia's arctic death camps - sees the camps as a metaphor for the entire country:

The half-naked deportees stood motionless in a blizzard, lashed by the gales. Finally, the escorts delivered their routine admotion: A step to the left or a step to the right is considered an escape attempt - we shoot without warning! This identical formula was uniformly applied throughout the entire territory of the USSR. The whole nation, two hundred million strong, had to march in tight formation in a dictated direction. Any deviation to the left of to the right meant death.

Quite a different story from the romantic one of a utopia whose only price is allegiance to the state above the individual so that no one will live in want.

One of my favorite sections of the book is the one on the Kremlin. Kapuscinski sneaks his way into the Kremlin, normally closed to visitors, under false pretenses. His only motive is the search for a story, to see something few others have seen. For this he might be shot or imprisoned if he is caught. But that is what Kapuscinski seems to live for. His story of being smuggled into Armenia in 1990 reads like a spy novel - he takes terrifying risks.

To walk into the Kremlin just like that, simply to walk in, without a reason or a goal, is impossible. One can gain access for only three reasons: a) to visit the museum as part of a group excursion from one's place of work (it is a form of distinction and reward), b) to attend one of a variety of important congresses that from time to time take place here (delegates and accredited journalists can enter then), c) at the summons of one of the dignitaries who officiate here. In each of these cases, one is required, after having passed the gate, to move by the shortest route possible to the preordained destination - there and back.

Kapuscinski offers as series of other writers' views of the Kremlin - H. G. Wells from 1920, Roy Mevedev's memoir of Stalin's reign, with stories of the build up of of security in the Kremlin as Stalin's paranoia grows, and the horrifying story of Stalin's wife's suicide, Kilovan Kjilas' book Conversations with Stalin, and Nikita Krushchev's Memoirs are also quoted.

The story of his trip to Nagorno-Karabakh in 1990 had me on pins and needles. I'm not going to ruin the suspense of his journey there, it is worth reading of-a-piece. In fact, this whole book views the world from a vantage point which, even with awareness of Russian history, is difficult to imagine in this kind of experiential detail if you have grown up with the western abundance we have grown so used to. That fresh viewpoint, delivered as experience not merely as explanation, is the value of reading Imperium. In fact, to my mind, a new experience of worlds we think we know is one of my chief reasons for reading at all.

This is my last entry on the splendid, wild ride - a mixture of history, psychology, world politics, geography - that was Imperium. It has convinced me, as Sheila said it would, to want to read other works by Kapuscinski. I'll leave with two more of his wonderful this-is-the-way-the- world-works observations from his 1990 trip.

For Armenians, an ally is one who believes that Nagorno-Karabakh is a problem. The rest are enemies.

For Azerbaijanis, an ally is one who believes that Nagorno-Karabakh is not a problem. The rest are enemies.

The extremism and finality of these positions is remarkable. It isn't merely that among Armenians one cannot say, "I believe that the Azerbaijanis are right," or the among Azerbaijanis one cannot maintain, "I believe that the Armenians are right." No such stance even enters the realm of possibility - either group would instantly hate you then kill you!

...

Three plagues, three contagions, threaten the world.
The first is the plague of nationalism.
The second is the plague of racism.
The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.

All three share one train, a common denominator - an agressive, all powerful, total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that awaits only it sacrificial victims. Every attempt at calm conversation will fail. He doesn't want a conversation, but a declaration that you agree with him, admit that he is right, join the cause. Otherwise you have no significance in his eyes, you do not exist...a mind touched by such a contagion is a closed mind, one-dimensional, monothematic, spinning round one subject only - its enemy.

That's why politics and religion must remain separate. I am horrified whenever religious belief enters the political fray. It is no less heinous when it happens in my country than it is in the middle east. 'A government of laws and not of men' is supposed to sidestep some of the influences of irrationality in the application of the law. Not to say that people do not have the right to the comfort of their beliefs - of course they do- but for personal beliefs, whether shared by many others or few, to be legislated for everyone, for 'god' to enter every political address is a crass commercialization of something meant to be sacred. I can't understand why it doesn't revolt the devout. I'd love to hear Kapuscinski on this - too bad we won't get that chance.

The impact of ethnicity on politics and the deprivation of the frozen North (Book - Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski) cont'd

Kapuscinski arrives in Baku:

Buses arriving from the countryside crawl amid the deafening cacophony of horns into a dense, bustling crowd, into a swarm welcoming and bidding farewell, amid sellers of tomatoes, cucumbers, and shish kebabs, groups of children asking for baksheesh, sluggish and listless policemen with clubs in their hands. The East, the real East, smelling of anise and cardamom, mutton fat and fried paprika, some sort of Esfahan or Kirkuk, Izmir or Herat, an exotic world, noisy, eccentric, preoccupied with itself and closed, inaccessible to anyone from the outside. Wherever its people come together, there immediately forms a colorful, agitated concourse, bazaar, souk, market; there is immediately lots of shouting, jumping at one another's throat, quarrels, , but then (patience!) everything is transformed into calm, into an inexpensive little restaurant, into a chat, into a friendly nod of the head, into a small glass of mint tea, into a lump of sugar.

This tumult of images is like the opening shot of a film, assisting me in not merely placing myself, but experiencing the character of place upon my arrival.

I enjoy the following generalization not because it is necessarily more true than others, but because of the way Kapuscinski introduces his observations of the soviet people's relationship to nationality becomes the basis on which he builds his story of the dissolution of the Imperium.

Like peasants the world over who begin each conversation with reflections on the subject of crops, and Englishmen who start every exchange with a discussion of the weather, so in the Imperium the first step in establishing contact between people is a mutual determination of one's nationality. For much will depend on this.

Kapuscinski follows this thesis with a two-page history of soviet ethnicity from the nineteenth century to the moment of his travels as the empire dissolves. It's an excellent primer on the role of national identity in world politics and economics, and he does it all in two pages! That lays the groundwork for this simple passage about the leader of the Azerbaijani National Front, Yusif Samedoglu, who, like Kapuscinski, is a writer.

He is trying to navigate between the dictatorship of the local political bosses and the Islamic fundamentalists. But these are difficult times for liberals, for people of the center, for those who would like to reach out and hug everyone. I know what he will tell me about the situation in Baku, so I do not ask him about that; I ask him instead whether he is writing anything. He shakes his head, a resigned no. And anyway - how should he write? He always wrote in the Cyrillic alphabet, and now they are going to abolish Cyrillic. They will use only the Latin alphabet, as in Turkey, or will go back to the Arabic, nobody knows which. And what about the books that he wrote in Cyrillic? Translate them into other alphabets? Who is going to do this? Is it worth it? A writer in the prime of his life is left empty-handed, with work that will be illegible.

The observer and the observed for a moment meet at a common point. It becomes poignant because Kapuscinski can sum up the personal impact of a political upheaval in a way that he himself can feel and thus express (rather than describe) to us.

Vorkuta is north of the 'stans, north of the Urals, north of the Arctic Circle. It is pretty much beyond everything you would ever want to experience in your life. This chapter made me realize why the Russians chose Siberia as their prison. The sheer size of the country and the immobility and cruelty of the regimes that have governed it are magnified tenfold there: not just because it is isolated and has a punishing climate, but the cold is so intense, just to live is difficult - breathing is painful, you can't break the ground to make sewers or bury electricity cables most of the year, it takes ages to communicate with the central government to accomplish anything, just the way you must dress to survive isolates you from others, those who survive look straight ahead, they do not waste energy with becoming irritated, they do not ask questions - what is the point?

On his flight to Vorkuta they land instead in Syktyvkar. Kapuscinski stays with the fellow passengers from his first flight, sweating inside his sheepskin coat in the airport, there are no announcements, there is no food. He looks at those around him:

They stood staring fixedly straight ahead. Just like that: staring fixedly straight ahead. One could see no impatience in their expressions. No anxiety, agitation, anger. Most important, they asked about nothing; they asked no one about anything. But perhaps they weren't asking because they already knew?

I asked one of them if he knew when we would be taking off. If you suddenly ask someone a question here, you must wait patiently. For you can see in the face of the one queried that it is only under the influence of this stimulus (the question) that he seems to awaken, comes to life, and starts the laborious journey from some other planet to earth. And this requires time. Then an expression of slight and even amused surprise crosses his face - what's the moron asking for?

[...]

In literature (in Vasily Grossman, for example), scene describing a return home from the camps. A man has come back after ten years of suffering in Siberia. He sits down the first evening at the family table together with his wife, his children, his parents. They eat supper, perhaps there's even a conversation, but no one asks the newcomer where he was during those years, what he did, what he experienced.

What would one ask for?

A wise sentence from Ecclesiastes: "Who gathers knowledge, gathers pain."

Developing this bitter thought, Karl Popper once wrote (I am quoting from memory) that ignorance is not a simple and passive lack of knowledge, but is an active stance; it is the refusal to accept knowledge, a reluctance to possess it; it is its rejection. (Or, in a word,, antiknowledge).

Kapuscinski writes of the cruel deprivation of the lives of the coal miners of a place called Komsomolski Posiolek. He begins though with a desicription of the bus ride to his destination that is hilarious in its description of discomfort and also, somehow, elegant and richly detailed:

A small, old bus, crowded, packed, jammed. People tightly wrapped, enveloped, entangled in sheepskins, furs, scarves, pieces of felt - large, stiff, clumsy cocoons. When the bus stops, the cocoons abruptly tip forward; when it suddenly starts, they tip back. At each stop several cocoons vanish into the darkness, and others appear in their place (that is, I assume that they are others, for all the cocoons look more or less alike). Sometimes something kneads our feet so hard that we feel our bones are cracking - it is some little cocoon that is making its way towards the exit. A question about the hotel must be directed at the upper part of the cocoon - that is, at the spherical object directly in front of us, just as if we were talking into a microphone. One must strain one's ears to hear the reply, for it will not be aimed at us, but will float up from where a voice emerges from the cocoon. The downside of this mode of travel is that one can be riding next to a very beautiful girl and be completely unaware of it - no faces are visible. It is also impossible to see where we are - a thick hoarfrost and extremely rich, rococo bouquets of white flowers cover all the windows.

This entire chapter is one to read on your own, rather than in excerpts. Life in Vorkuta seems the ultimate in a desolate and pointless existence. You are lucky, if you live here, to make it to fifty years of age and yet, to give this description context, many of the people in the coal mining communities came there from elsewhere for a chance at a better life than the one they had somewhere else. Reading this incredibly vivid writing coupled with our watching the film Blood Diamonds last night really let me know how good a life I have.

Beauty and cruelty meet (Books - Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski - cont'd)

In his discussion of the influence the climate of Turkmenistan has upon its politics is the first time I noticed that Kapuscinski sometimes lets the poetry of his ideas run away with the facts. A good deal of Turkmenistan is desert and he makes the point that

...it was one nation torn apart by the struggle for water. Rashyd says that in oases an ideal proportion reigns between the amount of water and the number of inhabitants, and that is why an oasis cannot absorb new people. An oasis can absorb a guest , it can absorb a merchant, but it will not absorb an entire tribe, for that would immediately disturb the balance upon which its very existence depends. That is why there must be war between the desert and the oasis. Man finds himself in a much more dramatic situation in these climes than does his brother living in a temperate zone, and for this reason the causes of wars are deeper here and, one would like to say, more humane than in Europe, where history records wars started over such petty affairs as lese-majeste, a dynastic feud, or a ruler's persecution mania. In the desert the cause of war is the desire to live, man is born already entangled in that contradiction, and therein lies the drama.

Now that sounds good, but it seems to me that Kapuscinski is romanticizing his subject. I'm not sure that the need for water is any less dramatic than the need not to be murdered by Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot. When one's existence depends upon the whim of a despot, one cannot predict whether one will live or die and the desire for life would not be any less intense than when one is dependent instead upon the existence of water.

Kapuscinski's description of a desert sandstorm is wonderfully written:

A sharp wind and clouds of dust, which fill all the space between the earth and the sky. Dust that blinds and chokes; there is nothing to breathe. All life stops; machines grind to a halt. Now Palina, Shchaviey, and everyone else hide in corners, sink into crannies, draw sheets over their heads, blankets, whatever happens to be at hand, so as not to suffocate; the sand storm buries everything; the deluge drown men and herds (for in the desert there are deluges!), chokes, suffocates, gags to death. Particles of dust, these bits of near nothingness (they are stone ground to powder by wind and water), suspended in the air, grow warm in the sun, and thus comes into being a dry mist, the terror of all desert people, a dry and hot mist, clouds of powder as hot as burning coals; that is what the desert commands one to breathe in the hour of its fury. I am in a hotel, in my room; there is no light, and more important there is no water; the wind must have torn down the wires, the sand stopped up the pipes; I still have a sip of warm liquid in the pitcher, but what will happen later? The city has no water; the telephones are down; there is only radio communication. I am lying on the bed, but everything is damp, dusty; the pillow gives off heat like a furnace; in the desert, during a storm, people are seized by a water madness, all of a sudden they drink their entire water supply, greedily, thoughtlessly, it is really a kind of madness, they drink not because at that moment they are suffering from thirst, they drink from fear, obsessed by the thought that there will be no more water, they drink to beat the inevitable to the punch. Deserted streets, quiet in the hotel, empty corridor, I go downstairs. Empty restaurant. The barmaid is sitting, staring out the window. A Russian comes in from the street, dusty, the wind has pulled his shirt out of his pants, on his head he wears a warm cap with earmuffs, buckled beneath his chin. "Give us two hundred grams," he says to the barmaid. She gets up, pours him a glass of vodka. He drinks it and utters an ahhhhh! "Now that's better," he says, and walks out into the street with this fire in his belly - into the fire of the desert. For a moment the barmaid follows him with her eyes. "He's one of us," she says, "that sort will endure everything." Then she looks at me, kindly, but also with a touch of irony, and without a word hands me a bottle of lemonade.

Aside from that being an utterly brilliant passage about a place, its character and its climate - one that is not merely descriptive but involving - one can see at work the same qualities that were liabilities in the passage about war above are advantages here. It is the effusiveness, the momentum of the words that create a spell that envelopes us like, well, a storm. Gorgeous writing.

His evocation of the two cities of Uzbekistan occupy just one efficient paragraph:

Bukhara is commercial, noisy, concrete, and material; it is a city of merchandise and marketplaces; it is an enormous warehouse, a desert port. Asia's belly. Samarkand is inspired, abstract, lofty, and beautiful; it is a city of concentration and reflection; it is a musical note and a painting; it is turned toward the stars. Erkin told me that one must look at Samarkand on a moonlit night, during a full moon. The ground remains dark; the walls and the towers catch all the light; the city starts to shimmer, then it floats upward, like a lantern.

Kapuscinski weaves a spell like a magician.

He makes some startling and convincing observations about the Russian people in relation to their governments. He writes of all of the turning points in Russia - the revolutions and other big turning points - occurred because they were the will of a czar or secretary general of the party, or the Kremlin - it is the ruling elite rather than the people who have effected all the major changes in Russia. Ironic that Lenin chose it for his revolution!

It is autumn 1989. My first encounter with the Imperium in years. I was last here more than twenty years ago, at the start of the Brezhnev era. The era of Stalin, the era of Khrushchev, the era of Brezhnev. And before that: the era of Peter I, Catherine II, Alexander III. IN what other country does the persona of the ruler, his character traits, his manias and phobias, leave such a profound stamp on the national history, its course, its ascents and downfalls?

He then talks about Moscow being a "Third Rome," and how, nevertheless, the Russians themselves burned it down to force Napoleon's army to retreat. Most of the city's structures were built of wood and thousands of Russians met their deaths - only the aristocracy in their stone palaces had a chance of surviving. It made me think that, if Russia could burn thousands of its own people to achieve this end, no wonder the communist experiment - in which the needs of all must supercede the needs of the individual, was tried there.

A fascinating combination of beauties and horrors meet in the history and culture of this great land and Kapuscinski is proving an evocative and insightful tour guide. I've never experienced
Russia in quite the same way.

Extraordinary writing on distant and unknown places (Books - Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski)

It's wonderful being on vacation, but it amazing, even on a supposed break, how much there is to do - taking care of finances, doctor appointments, giving away clothes, selling books, cleaning closets, PhD application, getting through those old Book Reviews - so I'm not getting in quite as many books as I had hoped. That said, I have read about 1/3 of Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium. This is the first book of the Russian Challenge I have chosen to read. Kapuscinski was a Polish journalist with wide-ranging interests and a most unique voice. This is the first of his books I have read - part memoir, part travelogue, part political critique - the subject matter ranges from the production of cognac to Armenian sculpture. The book begins with his own childhood memories of the Soviet occupation of Poland in 1939. Actually, no, this book begins with a page and a half of quotes by Chekhov, Vasily Grossman, Simone Weil, H. G. Wells, Dostoyesvky and others each characterizing Russia (differently). He recalls, for instance, the changes in his school curriculum and the requirement to learn the Russian alphabet which, in Stalin's day, began with 's' rather than 'a.'

Petrus, who is a Belorussian, can read the whole title: "Stalin, Voprosy Leninizma" (Studies in Leninism). It is the only book from which we learn Russian, and our only copy of this book. On the stiff cover wrapped in gray linen, large, gold letters.

"Departing from us, Comrade Lenin commanded us to...," the humble and quite Wladzio reads from the first row in a faltering voice. Best not to ask who Lenin was. All our mothers have already instructed us not to ask about anything. But these warnings weren't necessary anyway. I cannot explain it, I cannot say where it came from, but there was something so frightening in the air, something so tense and heavy, that the town in which we use to cavort with wild and joyful abandon had suddenly become a minefield. We were afraid even to take a deep breath, lest we set off an explosion.

I am so fascinated by Russian culture, the Russian language, the country's great history - it's the reason I was so excited to participate in this challenge - however, we shouldn't forget how most ordinary Russian souls lived, the oppressiveness of the czars as well as the horrors of the great failed experiment that was the Russian revolution and the nightmares of the Stalinist regime that followed. Along with their vast land, their impressive works of art, and their soulful culture there was much suffering, poverty, and oppression and that makes me glad to be starting with Kapuscinski's book.

Next he remembers a 1958 journey on the Trans-Siberian railroad - an astonishing, claustrophobic train trip through a landscape made barren by Siberian snow and intense paranoia.

While still at university I read Bierdayev's old book in which he reflected upon how the great expanses of the Imperium had influenced the Russian soul. What does a Russian think about, somewhere on the shore of the Yenisey, or deep in the Amur taiga? Every road that he takes seems to have no end. He can walk along it for days and months, and always Russia will surround him. The plains have no end, nor the forests, nor the rivers. To rule over such boundless expanses, says Bierdayev, one had to create a boundless state. And behold, the Russian fell into a contradiction - to maintain the great expanses, the Russian must maintain a great state; on the maintenance of this great state he expends his energy, of which not enough remains for anything else - for organization, for husbandry, and so on. He expends his energy on a state that then enthralls and oppresses him.

Bierdayev believes that this immensity, this limitlessness of Russia, has a negative influence on its inhabitants' way of thinking. For it does not demand of them concentration, tension, an intensification of energy, or the creation of a dynamic, vigorous culture. Everything falls apart, is diluted, drowned in this ungraspable formlessness. Russian - an expanse, on the one hand, endless, broad, and yet, on the other hand, so crushing that it takes one's breath away, and there is nothing left to breathe.

This third section remembers a 1967 journey through the southern republics of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkemenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, and Uzbekistan. This fascinating region of the world contains treasures of civilizations that we hardly learn anything about in the West, and yet it in many ways it gave birth to our modern civilization. Christianity became the state religion before it was accepted elsewhere, tribal relationships influence politics to this day, Azerbaijan is rich in oil. Kapuscinski writes of gorgeous frescoes in a Georgian church from the year 1010 that were ordered painted over by the czar. He offers a treatise on the production of cognac in Georgia, an amazing history of Armenia and its desire to save the world by translating great books of all cultures into its own language. And there is a description of his climb up a high tower made of wood in pitch darkness to see the Caspian Sea, the city of Baku, and its oil wells:

The tower stands in the middle of the sea, the sea is black, although it is called Caspian, and I am climbing up to heaven on stairs that creak because they are made of wood, the whole tower is made of wood nailed together, it reaches to the stars, and although the wind rocks it like a stalk, it stands, gniotsa nie lamiotsa (it will bend but it won't break), so on this tower I am climbing up to heaven, it is dark here, actually it is black like the sea, we are walking into tar, I prefer not to look anymore, I would like to stop, enough is enough, but I can hear Nik-Nik going farther, so I go too, into the darkness, into the abyss, into the chasm. Everything is becoming unreal, because I can no longer see anything, meaning that I can see only this thing of wood around me, rough, unplanned, as if hairy, a piece of raw wood wedged into the sky, in an utterly gratuitous place, jutting out in the darkness, improbably, abstract.

I found the writing in this passage so palpable that at the end of reading it my feet and palms were sweating.

More soon.