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"young, attractive girls" without experience or English. In the "work required" there
are almost 200 ads from Russians seeking jobs as cleaners, nannies, carpenters,
labourers, waiters, cooks and private tutors.
Yuri Stepanov, a 52-year-old former musical child prodigy, is one of the small
group of Soviet-era Russian emigrés in London who has watched the Russian presence
here broaden and deepen over the years. He first arrived in 1980, following a short-
lived marriage to a British student whom he met in what was then Leningrad.
"It was like going to the moon. I had no idea what awaited me," he says. "Our idea
of Britain, even among advanced people - and I counted myself as one of them - was
formed from the novels of Charles Dickens and Jack London and the few films that the
Soviet censors allowed us to see." Stepanov struggled to find work, then flourished, he
has now found a niche playing terse, ruthless, unshaven Eurasian gangsters and
terrorists on TV and in films such as the Jackal and Snatch; now he promotes Russian
rock and pop.
"When I came in the 1980s, there were White Russians here, old families who
came after the revolution, refugees who came after the last war, and a small number of
dissidents from the Soviet era," he says. "After the fall of the Soviet Union there
appeared a fourth wave. Now it was economic migration, and in 1993 and 1994, the
'new Russians' started to appear. These were people who already had it all right back
home and were quite - not totally, but quite - cosmopolitan. They felt comfortable
anywhere in the world."
It was these new Russians, often naive, stigmatised by intellectually snobbish old
Russians as uneducated, vulgar and marvellously rich, who first caught the attention of
Britons as they bought property and flashed their wads of cash around
western Europe in the mid-1990s. But then, Stepanov says, in about 1996 the Russian
diaspora underwent another change: a rassloyeniye, or separating out. Yuri and some
friends used to have a club in Knightsbridge in the mid-90s where they played Russian
music; anyone who spoke Russian in London would come along. "Now, you wouldn't
get the very rich and the very poor going to the same place. At the beginning there's a
cultural hunger, a desire to gather together with people who speak the same language
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as you do. Then the hunger is satisfied and people just want to be with people they
like."
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Приложение 2
Russia’s turbulent century of revolutions, from Lenin to Putin
Russia 1917. That country’s two revolutions – in February to topple tsarism, and
in October bringing the Bolsheviks to power – mesmerised the 20th century and still
fascinate us today, in this centenary year. That’s the benefit of anniversaries: they
prompt debate in the media about history. Yet often that debate is sharply focused on
a brief flashback moment, rather than illuminating the longue durée – history made up
of vivid dots instead of continuous lines.
So let’s attempt to join up some of the dots of Russian history, to trace a line from
1917 to 2017. It is very much a story of revolutions (plural) because Russia is a country
that has been changed significantly during the course of that century: sometimes
violently and very publicly, at other times through quiet revolutions that did not hit the
headlines but nevertheless made history. I want to pick out five such moments of
Russian upheaval that take us from Lenin to Putin.
British reactions to these “revolutions” are also revealing. In the case of Russia,
as with other countries, by looking at “the other” we can learn something about
ourselves – just as Edmund Burke, in his 356-page pamphlet Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790), used the turmoil in France to ponder the British political
experience. In Brexit Britain, where self-knowledge and historical awareness are
woefully lacking, such reflection may be no bad thing.
The first revolution in 1917 in Russia came as almost a relief for the British
government. It suddenly eliminated the embarrassment of fighting for the freedom of
France and Belgium hand in hand with the world’s leading autocracy. Britain
recognised the new provisional government little more than a week after Tsar Nicholas
II’s abdication and welcomed the liberalising project of its leader, Prince Lvov, to
reduce the coercive power of the state and promote local self-rule. This all sounded
agreeably Gladstonian. But Russia’s new rulers saw themselves in the guise of the
French revolutionaries of 1789; the crowds in the streets eagerly adopted the
Marseillaise as their anthem, with new words.
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Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, however, was not playing that kind of history game.
He envisaged nothing less than a new world. Although the Bolsheviks seized political
power in Petrograd on 7-8 November 1917, the country was plunged into a five-year
civil war, which cost far more lives through combat, famine and disease than were lost
during Russia’s involvement in the First World
War from 1914 to 1917 – perhaps ten million, as against two million. And the
Bolsheviks never forgot or forgave Western intervention on the side of their foes.
Initially the Allies intervened for military rather than ideological reasons. They
sent troops and supplies to support the so-called Whites (a mishmash of competing
local warlords) because Lenin and the Reds pulled Russia out of the war and it was
vital to maintain an eastern front against Germany as the struggle reached its climax in
1918. Yet keeping Allied troops in Russia in 1919-20, once the war against Germany
had ended, was a counter-revolutionary act – and no one was more explicit about this
than Winston Churchill.
Although not prone to cite Edmund Burke, Churchill offered a take on the Russian
Revolution that was distinctly Burkean – in both its intellectual argument and its florid
language. “The essence of their policy is to produce worldwide revolution,” he told the
cabinet in May 1920. “They have committed and are committing unspeakable atrocities
and are maintaining themselves in power by terrorism on an unprecedented scale.”
Churchill asserted that Bolshevism was not a “policy” or even a “creed” but a “disease”
and a “pestilence”. His language had a positively orientalist flavour, expostulating
about the “foul baboonery” of Bolshevism. After one such tirade in 1919, AJ Balfour,
the foreign secretary, told Churchill: “I admire the exaggerated way you tell the truth.”
But David Lloyd George, the prime minister, became infuriated with Churchill’s
persistent and hyperbolic lobbying for an expensive anti-Bolshevik crusade. On one
occasion, he urged Churchill to “throw off this obsession which, if you will forgive me
for saying so, is upsetting your balance”. Lloyd George had no compunction about, in
Churchill’s phrase, grasping “the hairy paw of the baboon” – in other words,
negotiating with the Reds – accepting, unlike Churchill, that communist Russia was a
fact of life with which Britain and the West had to live.
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In 1921, Lloyd George pushed through a trade agreement with the Soviet Union
that was, in effect, a de facto recognition of the regime. His pragmatic policy was
continued by Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour governments, which – despite the need to
disprove Tory accusations that they were Bolshie wolves in Methodist dress – opened
formal diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1924 and again in 1929, after a temporary
severance by the Tories. By contrast, the US did not extend diplomatic recognition
until 1933, under Franklin Roosevelt.
Ideological hostility v pragmatic acceptance: here were two positions around
which British attitudes to the USSR tended to polarise. This contradiction was not
surprising, because Moscow was operating a dual foreign policy, institutionalised on
the one hand in the foreign ministry (Narkomindel) and on the other in the Comintern
(the Third International). By creating a foreign ministry, the new regime recognised
that, needing to survive in a largely non-communist world, it would have to play the
game of bourgeois diplomacy, at least for the moment. But the Comintern’s role was
to exploit any opportunity for global revolution, especially in China, India and other
volatile areas under Western rule or influence.
Was one dealing with a “normal” state that accepted the basic international order,
or with a “revolutionary” state that sought to undermine that order? This was a
recurrent challenge for Britain and the West throughout the Soviet period – and, indeed,
after it. Yet there was another way to see the USSR: as a harbinger of modernity.
It was the historian Robert C Tucker who popularised the idea that Stalin mounted
nothing less than a second revolution, this time directed “from above”, which exceeded
even the ambition of Lenin’s revolution because it aimed to transform both society and
the economy.
But the idea originated from Stalin himself. In a situation of what he called
“capitalist encirclement”, the threat of war was one pressure. “We are 50 or 100 years
behind the advanced countries,” he warned in 1931. “We must make good this distance
in ten years. Either we do it or we shall go under.” A more personal motive was Stalin’s
desire to eclipse the heroes of Russia’s past – not just Lenin but also Peter the Great.
These were the titans against whom the nondescript little Georgian measured himself
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in the struggle to etch his name into history. And, as the American scholar Stephen
Kotkin has argued in his book Stalin: Paradoxes of Power (2014), the Soviet leader’s
brutal campaign of agricultural collectivisation and mass industrialisation was a
gratuitous programme of zealotry, imposed by a man who was no mere pragmatist or
power-seeker but a passionate believer in revolution.
Certainly the Soviet Union in the 1930s seemed one of the prodigies of the world.
This was the decade when, across the Atlantic, boom turned to bust, as the American
dream morphed into a depression that was not merely economic but also psychological.
The country so recently viewed as the embodiment of modernity now seemed to
epitomise the economic and moral failures of capitalism.
Meanwhile, the Russian epic commanded global attention – all the more exciting
because the details were often obscure. The centrepieces of Stalin’s revolution were
gigantic prestige projects such as the iron and steel complex of Magnitogorsk, the
“magnetic mountain” in the Urals, modelled on US Steel’s giant works at Gary,
Indiana; and the huge car plant at Gorky on the Volga, which was based on Henry
Ford’s factory in Dearborn, Michigan. Such mimesis was ideologically deliberate.
Stalin told party workers in 1924, “The combination of Russian revolutionary zeal and
American efficiency is the essence of Leninism.”
Foreign fascination with the new revolution was particularly intense among
members of the political left, some of whom were unbelievably credulous. Take, for
instance, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the grand old couple of British Fabian socialism,
who abandoned their philosophy of gradualism in the economic crisis of 1931 when
Britain was forced off the gold standard. Likening the struggle between American
capitalism and Russian communism to that between Christianity and Islam in the
Middle Ages for “the soul of Europe”, Beatrice declared: “Without doubt we are on
the side of Russia.”
In 1935, the Webbs published Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? – two
huge volumes running to 1,100 pages. When the book was reprinted in 1937, they
deleted the question mark, confident that Stalin had indeed created a new civilisation
characterised by “planned production for community consumption” and a scientific
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ideology that “rejects every element of the superstition and magic” still pervading the
West. Privately, however, the Webbs did have some doubts. In 1937-38, Beatrice pored
over reports of the purges and show trials, fearing that Stalin and his clique “may have
lost their heads”. In public, she and other fellow travelers kept the faith.
At least, they did so until August 1939, when the Nazi-Soviet Pact exploded many
of the international left’s illusions about Stalin and Stalinism. Yet the pact reflects a
far more serious illusion on Stalin’s part. Not about Nazism: the Soviet leader knew
that conflict with Adolf Hitler was only a matter of time. Stalin’s illusion was about
the amount of time he had bought. Instead of triggering a war in the west that tied down
Germany, France and Britain for years, Stalin’s devilish pact allowed Hitler to mop up
the Western Front in a few weeks in 1940 and then turn east with near impunity in
1941.
The stage was set for perhaps the most tragic upheaval in the history of 20th-
century Russia – Hitler’s revolution.
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Приложение 3
The 1917 Russian Revolution: Then and Now
The many people writing about the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution
this year usually have to pause early in their work to explain why the February
Revolution was in March and the October Revolution in November. The reason is
simple — Russia was on a different calendar at the time — but that nagging
inconsistency offers a foretaste of the extraordinary degree to which perspective shapes
the facts, myths and political narratives of an upheaval that continues to shape history
today.
In the White Russian emigrant world into which I was born, the Russian
Revolution was a horrible cataclysm that destroyed our Holy Russia and installed a
demonic, murderous regime. Many families had a portrait of Czar Nicholas II on the
wall, often the one by Valentin Serov, alongside the icons and a faded photo of the old
manor house. The old men, many of them veterans of the blood bath that was World
War I, often lapsed into “what ifs” — what if the czar had not abdicated, what if the
Guards had arrived on time, what if. … Other émigrés, like the old exiled socialists in
New York, argued endlessly over what the Duma, the provisional government or the
Mensheviks should have done differently.
In the Soviet Union, where I arrived in 1980 as a reporter, these debates were
officially closed and to raise them risked a visit to the K.G.B. The February Revolution,
in which the monarchy gave way to the provisional government, was considered a
“democratic bourgeois” sideshow to the Great October Socialist Revolution that
opened the way for a “new era in the history of humanity.” The October Revolution,
Nov. 7 (Oct. 25 in the Julian calendar), the day on which the provisional government
was overthrown, was the national holiday, marked with military displays on Red
Square under massive portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin.
Now that the new era in the history of humanity is over, the masters in the
Kremlin have a problem. As The Times’s Neil MacFarquhar reported from Moscow,
neither the February nor the October Revolution fits comfortably into President
Vladimir Putin’s view of himself or Russian history. Popular uprisings in Ukraine and
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Georgia have made him wary of any revolution, and neither the ouster of the Orthodox
czar in February nor the victory of Lenin in October fit into Mr. Putin’s preferred
narrative of continuous Russian greatness and importance. It’s not easy rewriting
history to create a new Russian identity out of the contradictory narratives of czarism,
Bolshevism and the post-Communist travails.
But then no nation that has experienced revolution can ever cease poring over its
causes, myths and lessons. Not even America. I was drafted into the Army in the late
1960s, at the peak of the antiwar and social movements. Basic training included
propaganda films, and one was about the American Revolution. Alongside the standard
stories of minutemen, freedom and democracy, the film made a point of arguing that
the Loyalists were also good people and that revolution — as in what was going on in
America at the time — is not always good. Most of my fellow trainees slept through
the film, but it did demonstrate the way national histories require massaging even in
mature democracies.
The great events of history, however, have a way of defying ideological
manipulation. The Soviets’ version of revolutionary history ended up in the same
dustbin of history to which they had relegated their opponents. And much as Mr. Putin
would like to play down the revolution, he cannot stop Russians from continuing to
explore an event whose consequences still reverberate around the world. Mikhail
Zygar, a former editor in chief of the independent TV Rain news channels in Russia,
for one, is recreating the events of 1917 day by day in Facebook-style updates, through
snippets from diaries and archival materials he and his staff have scoured. To the many
Russians following his project, the book is not closed.
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Приложение 4
Bears, vodka and Harry Potter: The hunt for Stalin's forgotten gulags in Siberia
Gulag hunter is an unusual CV entry, admits Stepan Cernousek.
"We are not like professional archaeologists from the university — it is a kind of
passion which is a little strange, because the topic is very dark."
"Today's Russia and its relationship with its history is awkward," says Stepan.
"Putin's regime wants to show that Soviet history is full of great victories and
moments like the gulags are inconvenient. It's not right."
For decades from the 1920s onwards, the Soviet Union sent political dissidents,
criminals — anyone inconvenient — to the gulags.
Here they were made to work, some say to death, on railroads, mines, and
construction as part of Stalin's ambitious nation-building plans.
"Tens of millions were sent to the harsh labour camps and millions died, many of
them political prisoners," says Stepan.
Some of the camps the group has come across are like time capsules from the
worst days of the gulags.
"In some of the camps buildings stood perfectly preserved and we found a lot of
old fashioned tins, bottles, old bunks and machinery — personal things including letters
of the prisoners, because these camps were abandoned very suddenly with the death of
Stalin in 1953," says Stepan.
Northern Siberia — where the majority of the group's work takes place — is a
logistical nightmare for fieldwork.
Winters can get down to -50 degrees Celsius, there are no roads, and the landscape
is cut through with rivers, swamps, and shrouded in dense taiga forest, meaning a lot
of travel is spent on foot hauling heavy gear.
"We each carry about 30 kilograms of weight — the backpacks are so heavy that
we can't get them over obstacles like rivers without the help of another," says
archaeologist Lukas Holata, who has been a part of the last two expeditions.