Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (6 page)

A quite opposite phenomenon is Russia’s nostalgia towards communism. There are several modes of it. The contemporary Russian left is rejecting the legacy of communism after the first ten years of the revolutionary period, until Stalinism. But the nostalgia of the ordinary man in Russia, as many post-Soviet liberal intellectuals believe, the one that makes people vote for Putin, is a nostalgia for Stalin, and the ‘glorious’ empire he represents. But this isn’t just confined to the impoverished workers and peasants of Russia. When you listen to most popular music in contemporary Russia, (like the mega-popular counter-tenor singer Vitas) or read aspirational magazines, like
Snob
(the title of the popular magazine of the liberal intelligentsia!), or look at contemporary art, the prevailing feeling is that of imperialism. The residual love for splendor and bling was necessary after the demise of Soviet blankness. At the same time, Russia is a country with some of the biggest inequalities in the world. Older people may feel in a need of a tsar-like, strong leader, but their existence is shrinking.

After ’89 we observed the waning of and even the hostility towards any politicized thinking that would, especially in the former East,
be called ‘ideological’, labelled as belonging to the previous system and so on. It is funny how when the leading liberal-leftist association, Krytyka Polityczna, published a book on post-1989 documentary film, where authors wrote on the ‘ideologies of Polish capitalism’, there was a sacred outrage all over the liberal press, a shock at calling capitalism too an ‘ideology’, as if this word was necessarily reserved for the fearful ‘Komuna’ (a derogatory term for communism used universally in Poland). Just as everywhere else, the 1990s meant for the ex-Bloc the end of politics as we knew it: end of politics practised with the help of political programs, political differences, with everything landing in a undifferentiated mass. Political parties lost their original meaning – in the recent election in Poland it was hard to say what any candidate associated himself with. This is the world of postpolitics, as we know it from the last decades of elections in Italy, Russia and, increasingly, the rest of the Bloc.

These manipulations of history and memory are a direct revenge on the communist system, in which it isn’t a mystery why uncomfortable, inconvenient facts from history were erased from the books and not put in the public domain. As the PRL was silencing the memory of the Independence Day (as it was connected with the inter-war, bourgeois Poland), the wartime Home Army or the Warsaw Uprising, in contemporary Poland history is nothing but the remembrance of those three facts. In this vein, the religious right wing part of the Polish political scene founded the National Remembrance Institute, established as an organ to ‘pursue the crimes against the Polish state’, which given our history, were many, but transformed with time into basically a way to persecute anyone who had anything to do with the old system, in a witch-hunt not dissimilar from McCarthyism, touching many leading figures. This led to the absurd situation where it aimed to discredit people like Ryszard Kapuścinski, the Polish star reporter, who was a believer in socialism and later a supporter of Solidarity, but somehow started to be a liability in the new system. Many of our artistic and moral authorities had to pretend they didn’t live under communism, or had to quickly erase their engagement with the system to remain in the government’s good books.

1.4 Dig your own Berlin Wall, animatronic set in the Mini Europe theme park in Brussels

What is not remembered enough, and to a greater disgrace, is the Holocaust, which happened nearly entirely on the lands of the current Poland. The recent Polish film
Consequences
, about the aftermath of a pogrom in Jedwabne, caused the outrage not only of the right wing – magazine covers were calling for lynching of the main actor. Many ex-communist countries are plagued with anti-Semitism, which, given the near-non-existence of a Jewish population is all the more outrageous. Many of them were directly implicated in the Holocaust, especially Hungary, Lithuania, Romania and Western Ukraine, those who are now the most willing to commemorate the ‘crimes of communism’, and want to be seen as its ‘great crashers’. One of the biggest “successes” of e.g. Lithuania in the EU was in trying to force a European Day of Memory to the victims of Nazism and Stalinism, trying to enshrine in law the levelling of the two totalitarianisms in the EU parliament a few years ago. This leads to the trivialisation or obliteration of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust and justifying anti-Semitism with anticommunism. In all the post-communist countries there
are now great anti-communist museums to be built: in Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Hungary, soon in Poland, where we still have a commonly-used word,
Żydokomuna
, that conflates Jews and Communists. It was justly criticized not only by the left, but also by liberal British commentators, with Jonathan Freedland being appalled by the ideas behind the ‘double genocide’. In his recent
Bloodlands
, historian Timothy Snyder tells the story of the war crimes in the East caught ‘between Hitler and Stalin’, yet doesn’t highlight enough the participation of the locals in the Holocaust, which was pointed out by the Vilnius-based Jewish historian Dovid Katz. In Poland, this discussion is mostly due to Jan Tomasz Gross’s ground-breaking books
Neighbours
and
Fear
on the collaboration of some Poles with the Germans in assisting the Holocaust for the sake of personal financial gain. Focusing on communist crimes not only whitewashes the scale of collaboration with Nazi crimes against the Jews and denigrates the significance of the Holocaust, the real idea behind this elision is to show that the evil comes from the outside, and we are good, therefore we haven’t done anything wrong, ever.

The backdrop of this manipulation of historical memory is a shadowy justification to all the policies introduced after ’89. How else, than by the ritual beating of ‘komuna’, would the subsequent governments justify themselves? In many countries, Hungary being the most blatant, it leads to some atrocious right wing and racist politics on the part of the government. But as we’ve seen, the European Union didn’t react when Hungarian authorities were introducing censorship. It didn’t react to the president Orban marginalizing the opposition’s legal rights. It didn’t react to government ministers’ recent racist comments on Jews and Roma, comparing them to animals and bringing back the rhetoric of Nazism. It did intervene, though, when Hungary started to limit free trade. The message is: we don’t care what your politics are, unless you’ll mess with our economic requirements. The recent rise of the right in Eastern Europe is a result of the messy communist
transition into capitalism. The people who were the architects of it, today very often speak disdainfully of the exotic Eastern right-wingers, yet little is done in terms of boycott.

While so many of us are outraged at our own ineptitude, this means different things for different social and political parties, factions and classes. Neoliberal politicians claim our capitalism is not capitalist enough, the Right claims to be besieged by the ‘leftist tanks’ in the country, where the majority is intolerant of homosexuality, the government rejects any liberalisation of women’s and gay rights and over 90% declare themselves Catholic, and where there was arguably no organized independent left since the interwar period. The rhetoric of a besieged fortress is conflated with a post-colonial rhetoric, in which the westernization of the country is a danger – and that including the seemingly tiny impact of the left. But the question is whether the EU was always so neoliberal or only at the time when we entered it? If communism came to us too soon, the West invited us to the party way too late.

At the same time, our own fucked-upness turns out to be quite interesting within the modern economy. In the traditionally more affluent West, the domination of simulacra is never-ceasing, only deepening and widening its reach, producing people who are willing to pay and to pay well for the possibility of feeling ‘in your own skin’, how it is to live in an area of heightened insecurity, be it political, ecological or historical. Numerous tourist companies with a sophisticated programme are willing to take you to the former East. For instance, one of them called Political Tours, in the case of Kosovo, promises “aided by local experts, politicians, and analysts, the tour [explores] the origins of the conflict in Kosovo and looks at the enormous changes that have taken place since 1999”, notwithstanding “what the country has to offer in terms of its rich culture, cuisine, and even nightlife”. Political Tours will take you to the places of crisis, political upheaval, and specializes in
(post)communist regimes: this way, places like Serbia, Bosnia, North Korea (as well as Canary Wharf) get the treatment. It seems that even if everything is ruined there’s still a way of making money by picking over the corpse.

The past history has literally become a theme park for us – hence the various ‘Parks of Memory’ throughout the ex-Bloc, or the communist statue parks popular among European tourists, like Grutas Park in Lithuania and the Memorial Park in Budapest – but also the present in the contemporary world, a present, which is especially tormented, making people’s lives difficult or unbearable – can be just as easily turned into a funpark for the rich and bored.

On our first visit to Ukraine, when bumping to friends and art curators, the first thing we were asked was “are you going to Chernobyl?” They obviously were: you could tell that with the same enthusiasm they’ll put on the famous silvery protective uniforms, as when they penetrated the galleries in New York or any “hot” place on the art map. It didn’t occur to me, that by then, in 2010, the sightseeing of the ruined ex Soviet Union had become somewhat an industry, a kind of still-a-little-bit “frightening” (all those ex-communists, radioactivity and whatnot) type of tourism, largely popular among a community of so called “urban explorers”, internet-bred geeky fans of danger, willing to pay a decent sum of money and risk their health a little to experience the thrill of entering the Zone. They are currently scavenging some of the USSR’s darkest places, and Pripyat, the city in northern Ukraine, then USSR, the nearest town to Chernobyl, where the reactor in a nuclear power plant erupted in 1986, is their “holy Grail”, as one of them put it recently on the pages of
Icon
monthly, in a special ruin-themed issue. The Zone of Exclusion, as it is called, meant everybody was evacuated in the 30km surrounding it.

This new fashion was made possible not only because the state of Ukraine saw a potential in opening the former dead zone as a tourist attraction. The higher popularity of the so-called ruin porn, made ever popular by internet forums and blogs, is a direct effect
of the fall of traditional industry and the rise of the so called “creative industries”. The now omnipresent photographs of abandoned, depopulated cities like Detroit, or New Orleans destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, transforming quickly into beautifully produced coffee table books, turn the tragedy for some into a source of visual delight for others, who may ponder their tragedy from a philosophical point of view. You may say it’s the media saturation which turns the images of disaster into everyday experience. But the fascination of “urbex”, as it is gently called, not accidentally focuses also on places of great historical importance and scenes of dramatic events.

An “urbex” is a usually a well-off, well educated Western male from a big city who might or might have not have read a lot of SF fiction in his youth, who wants to give his usually safe, sedentary job an exciting kick. It is this factor, that casts some shadow on the perhaps vacuous, but seemingly not very endangering activities. For instance, the former USSR has become a scene of such fetishization exponentially with its own economical fall after the collapse of the socialist system and capitalist shock therapy, as pictures of heavy drinking, impoverished folk from Siberia populate the internet as “Hipsters from Omsk”. The tons of pictures from Pripyat notwithstanding, Ukraine and Russia haven’t had a worse press from Western commentators since the dissolution, for jailing their liberal West-friendly politicians, like Yulia Tymoshenko, or anarchist activists Pussy Riot.

The ongoing fascination/repulsion that the capitalist West had with the ex-Soviet Bloc started during the Cold War years and prepared the ground very well for the flourishing of all sorts of urban and political myths, that were only confirmed by photos circulating in magazines like
LIFE.
They were consolidated by a few works by the most popular Russian director in history, a man with an extraordinarily distinct vision, Andrey Tarkovsky, most notably
Stalker
, which, despite being shot in 1979, is popularly perceived as a “Chernobyl” film for its uncanny prophecy. It is
endlessly reproduced in the company of the reactor-trips pictures and transformed into a video game,
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl
, where instead of indulging in philosophical debates, one becomes an amnesiac urban explorer, one of whose tasks is to kill a villain called “Strelok”.