Politics

There is a date that ought to be carved into the memory of anyone who cares about how nations come to terms with their own crimes: the twenty-fifth of February, 1956. On that day, at the close of the Twentieth Party Congress, a leader of the Soviet Union stood up and told the assembled delegates the truth — or at least a usable fraction of it — about the man whose portrait they had all worshipped. The hall listened in a silence that has been described, again and again, as deafening. When he finished, the session chair proposed that no discussion be opened and no questions be permitted. The reason was obvious: a discussion would have detonated. The report was approved, then quietly buried — distributed only inside party organizations, kept out of the open press. Even the act of telling the truth was conducted as a half-secret. ...

There is a sentence that a certain kind of decent Russian likes to say, and that I have come to regard as a small masterpiece of self-deception. “I am against Putin,” the sentence goes, “but I am for Russia.” It sounds balanced. It sounds like the position of a grown-up who refuses to be swept into hatred of an entire nation. And in peacetime it would have been a perfectly serviceable thing to believe. The trouble is that we are not in peacetime, and the sentence, transposed into the year a country is bombing its neighbor’s maternity wards, becomes something else entirely. It becomes the exact structural equivalent of saying, in 1943, “I am against Hitler, but I am for the Third Reich.” Once you hear it that way you cannot un-hear it, and you begin to understand why I no longer accept the formula, however gently it is offered. ...

There is a particular kind of theater that unfolds whenever the people who call themselves the leaders of the Russian opposition are handed a microphone in a European institution. They are well dressed, they speak fluently about human rights and political prisoners, they have suffered real imprisonment, and yet, the moment a sharp question is put to them, something gives way. They cannot answer it. Not because they lack the words, but because answering honestly would force them to stand on one side of a line they have spent years refusing to acknowledge exists. I want to describe that line, and why the inability to step across it tells us almost everything we need to know about the state of the Russian emigration today. ...

When I was little, it was in Ukraine that I first learned what nationalism is. It was there that people started calling me “moskal” and “katsap,” words whose meaning I didn’t fully understand until I asked my parents. Nationalism was foreign to me, but I saw it in the dull, hardened eyes of the little girls who taunted me. For some reason it was always the girls… There it was, right in front of me — this strange, incomprehensible, baseless, embittered nationalism. ...