RUSSIAN CHARACTER
In Sanct-Peterbourg the Ethnic Russians were represented mostly in workers' class which formed more than 80 % of all inhabitants of the Town. Russian workers were alien to the Town - they had no original homeland in Finno-Ugrian surroundings but were temporary residents coming to season works up to the last quarter of the 19th c. (Russian colonists, settled in the surroundings in the 18th c., were only an ethnic minority there). The cultural alienation of the Ethnic Russians in Sanct-Peterbourg is especially obvious from the fact that they concentrated in 'Russian Settlements' (Russkaya Sloboda) in the 18th c. Since the middle of the 19th c. territories mostly settled with (temporary or constant) ethnic Russian inhabitants were these: Viipuri Side (Vyborgskaya Storona) in the North-East, Ohta in the East, and the whole southern part (except Catarinehof), essentially industrial, the northern boundary of which stretched along Sadovaya Str., but turned to the South-East a quarter before Neva av., till merging in the remaining plot between the Liteinaya Str. and the river Neva. All these territories together make so-called Petersburg of F. Dostojewski (F. Dostojewski carefully described this peripheral Peterbourg in his novels but he criticized the West-European architecture of central Sanct-Peterbourg as alien to Ethnic Russians - this reasonable criticism allows to doubt propagandic concepts of the "Russian baroque" or the "Russian classicism").
One must emphasize that the difference between the Ethnic Russians and the Peterbourgians was obvious in culture, traditions, mentality, behaviour, values and even in the physical appearance. This is a sign of different nations. The Orthodox religion and the Russian language played only symbolic role as if uniting these 2 nations.
The character of the Ethnic Russians may be described as a complex of features, each of which being able to be found in other nations too, but their sum producing typically ethnic Russian effect.
1. Vandal intolerance coming of ignorance.
Ethnic
Russians are usually intolerant to everything what is alien to them but what
they suspect may be estimated by the others as a kind of superior characteristic
they do not understand and accept. First of all this is practically the whole
West-European tradition and world culture of which they are ignorant (even from
formally educated persons one may hear astonishing questions like "Are
the Moslems not Catholics?" Or "Are the Catholics Christians?"
etc.). Since Peterbourg produced samples of such tradition and culture, they
willingly negated this. Peterbourgian Peter Czajkowski (whose mother was a
Frenchwoman but whose father was a Polish descendant from Russia) is considered
to be a great Russian composer. Of course, there are thousands of musically
developed Russians who like his music. Nevertheless, when common Italians love
their composers and like to sing popular fragments of their operas, or when one
can listen to the music of Chaupin played with the accordion in
Warsaw streets by poor musicians, for the millions of common Russians the word
"opera" is something disdainful, what is liked by fool intellectuals.
An Ethnic Russian turns off any classic European music, whether by Czajkowski,
or by Beethoven. When the supreme power of Sct.-Peterbourg collapsed, all
cultural monuments became objects of vandalism, the stained glass in windows of
staircases was knocked out by young people. Not because these youths were
"bad", but because the stained glass appeared unnecessary and
therefore strange and alien to them. Very typical was a chalk inscription
(for the wall inscriptions see further, Feature 2) "Moulded by the Russian
people!" on the sculpture group by
Peter Clodt "Taming a steed" as a reply to the engraved memory words
"Moulded by Baron Peter Clodt". This was not only a sample of the communist indoctrination (in
such case one should expect "By the people" only), but demonstrated an
astonishment of a common Ethnic Russian that some "foreigner" is
named as one of the authors of this strange city. Otherwise this common Ethnic
Russian should acknowledge that he himself, not P.Clodt, is a foreigner there.
The Ethnic Russians tried to make that alien Town more Russian, i.e. more
similar to their province towns and villages by annihilating everything
non-Russian. All statues in parks were crushed or at least remained without
noses. This happened even to statues in famous Summer Garden in Sct.-Peterbourg,
because the authorities were not able to attach a policeman to every statue. A
curious history is that of the statue of Flora in the amphitheatre of the
Paulovsk (orig. Germ. name Paullust) Park. For many times it, as well as the balustrade, was restored, but
each time everything finally appeared crashed and ruined. Of course, one may
find cases of vandalism also in the West, but nobody ever heard that e.g.
cultural monuments in the park Charlottenburg in Berlin had been consistently
crashed, the marble carved with knives, by several generations up to now, as it
takes place in Paulovsk (Paullust) or in Saari (Saarimoisto, Saarskoe, Tzarskoe). The last greatest vandalism of ethnic
Russian hooligans in Paulovsk was burning up of J.Velten's wooden Lutheran
Church of 1794, 1876. The marble balls of the balustrade of the
Marble Bridge in the Catherine park in Tzarskoe Selo (so-called Pushkin )
are constantly broken off for many decades. Some hooligan succeded to make knife
engravings even on the marble of the hand-rail of the Jordan stairs in the
Winter Palace (1991):
Expression of ethnic Russian
artistic soul: knife-carving on marble Andrey, etc.
State Museum
Hermitage. 1991.
No sense to mention the vandalism on old Peterbourg cemeteries. Finally the authorities had to gather all remaining marble monuments from parks and cemeteries into museums. This is the real reason, why Leningrad museum of the town's sculpture appeared. Ethnic Russians have comprehension of beauty of their own. When oriental matryoshkas were introduced into Russia from Japan, these wooden doll-boxes gained such love that became feature of ethnic Russian folk art. The main thing is that they must be as variegated and bright as possible. When the Ethnic Russians came to Koenigsberg, even the authorities supported annihilation of "the German character" of the architecture, i.e. breaking off all ornament elements from the buildings. This Western architecture was alien officially and therefore annihilated officially. No normal Russian will ever urinate at the doors of the cinema house in his village. Staircases in small towns are not clean but are not covered with urine. Practically all staircases in Sct.-Peterbourg became urinised and one can breathe in the smell of the urine even in entrances of dwelling-houses in the main, Neva (Nevsky) avenue, especially - on Minor Nevsky, in the centre. When the central Catholic cathedral on Nevsky was restored already in Gorbachov's time but burned out afterwards (the "mysterial" conflagration recurred on 6 December 2002 when the Church of St. Ann had to be given back to the Lutherans), the entrance became place for artists' market. The artists and other people went to urinate behind the huge columns of the Cathedral and the stink was unbearable there. Is something similar possible in national capitals of Paris or London? For the ethnic Russians Sct.-Peterbourg never was their capital.
2. Passion to write on the walls.
Usually
the knife engravings of own names demonstrate another typical feature: a passion
to write on the walls. Of course, the so-called "graffiti" is wide
spread in the West in our days. This kind of children inscriptions has its
international style. The Russian wall inscriprions are a kind of folk culture
and remain the same in centures. One may read names "One was here"
written with a knife even on seats in public transport, not to say about public
WC's, which are unimaginable without inscriptions. Of course, one may find wall
inscriptions in Western WC's too. Nevertheless, the Russian inscriptions are
often senseless: only separate curse words meaning male and female sex organs
and nothing more. This great national passion of the Ethnic Russians gained
official support of the authorities when they protested against the removal of
the wall inscriptions of 1945 from the building of former Reichstag in Berlin.
What other nation has distinguished itself by leaving wall inscriptions on the
walls of the Parliament of the captured capital with subsequent protest of the
state authorities when the wall inscriptions had to be removed?
3. Vodka as national drink.
The
national drink of the Ethnic Russians is vodka. One is perceived as a real man
if he can drink a glass of vodka at once as water. To drink a litre of vodka or
spirits is a sign of virility. President Yeltsin demonstrated this virility even
during his official meetings with Western leaders.
4. The "Mat".
This
must be accompanied by so-called "mat" - specific brave by-words
inserted in speech after each fourth- tenth word. These are curses of sexual
sphere ("I fucked your mother" - the "mat" is named in
accordance with this Russian word "mother", as well as "whore",
names of male and female sex organs). Each youth starts to be a man using these
by-words and drinking vodka. Of course, there cannot but exist thousands of
exceptions, but the tradition of the millions is this. Finally, not this
separate feature is significant, but its being a component of all other features
together. Therefore, it is the aggressive hooligan striving for the Chaos'
freedom from incomprehensible alien moral norms, which makes Russia a criminals'
country with the Russian language as a criminal slang and with slang songs as
those of the criminal world. Under such circumstances no respect for the law and
no constitutional state are possible in this society.
5. Using diminutives.
In
their language the Ethnic Russians use a lot of diminutives, e.g. vodochka
"dear little vodka", stakanchik "dear little glass", dokumentiki
"dear little documents", biletik "dear little
ticket", chayok "dear little tea" etc. Ethnic Russian
women often speak with the diminutives only. This was a typical feature of serfs
who wanted to please their lords.
6. Collectivism.
The
strong feeling of the so called collectivism of persons possessing all these
features is very important. If in a village a person appears (e.g. typically - a
Vote or an Inkeri who succeeded to come back to his Russian-occupied native
Ingrian village from the place of his deportation), who does not use the
by-words, does not drink vodka and therefore begins to live better than his
neighbours, he is collectively hated and his house is finally burnt. In
summer 1917 Russian peasants began to totally rob farmers who had moved to
individual farmsteads during Stolypin's reform earlier and who therefore lived
better than the others ("at the expense of all peasants"). This
tribualistic instinct of solidarity of the primitive communal herd has been
brilliantly revealed by S.Kara-Murza, apologist of the Russian totalitarianism, in
his book "The Soviet Civilisation" (Moscow: Algorithm 2001, cf. p. 129).
7. Confirming social acceptance by
collective drinking-bout as a sign of the alcoholism in totality.
This
collectivism strikes the eye in Russian attitude to the National Drink. It is
disgraceful to drink Vodka alone. At least 3 persons should be found before
drinking. Collective drinking is a sacralized (and the single) national rite
with which a "Mat"-speaking person can demonstrate his loyalty and be
accepted as a compatriot friend: Sevodnya s nami tee ne veepyesh, a zavtra Rodenu
predash 'Not having drunk with us today, tomorrow you will betray the
motherland!' One who avoids to drink at the common table is suspect and
dangerous. He maybe fears to give his evil intents away, or probably wants to
spy out and memorize something. Open-hearted sobuteelnik 'man of the
same bottle' is a pure Russian concept lacking in other languages. In families
wives are sent by husbands to buy vodka. Snapping with fingers at own neck is a
sign meaning necessity to drink. This sign is known and comprehensible to
everybody in Russia. Alexandre Mayurov, Chairman of the International Academy of
Soberness, says the Russian nation will disappear at the end of the 21th
c. due to total alcoholism. 18.5 litres of alcohol pro person is produced in
Russia annually, 8 litres being the bound at which final degradation of a nation
begins, as according to World Health Organization.
8. Negation of personal dignity.
The
strong collectivism is opposite to any individualism. The Ethnic Russians do not like
those who are different. This is very favourable for the humiliation of separate
person and individual dignity, what is an old Russian tradition. Ordinary people
are usually treated with the utmost rudeness ("Hamism") by various
officials and even by representatives of the budget medicine (an aged person may
be ironically asked by the doctor "How long do you think to live?"). If
one dwelled in a communal flat but the house is to be demolished and the
tenants sent to dwell in other buildings, the officials may require to pay
thousands dollars space difference for a bigger flat given under compulsion.
Since an "ordinary citizen" is not regarded to be a person and is
mocked at by the State machinery at every step, all kinds of experiments may be
possible and the "ordinary people" may be even sacrificed for any aim of the authorities (e.g. as in the
case when 2 Moscow buildings were blown up by the secrete service in order to
accuse the Chechens and to renew the terrorist annihilation war against them).
Therefore such thing as human rights is not acceptable in the ethnic Russian
society. In this respect this nation is constantly as dangerous for their
neighbours, as the Germans of the period of the Nazi regime were.
9. Idolatry of symbols.
The
Ethnic Russians are inclined to the pagan idolatry and make idols of ideologies,
church icons, rulers etc. Therefore they confuse reality with its symbols and
change it with the symbols. After the February revolution they began to break
off crowns on all images of the iron or stone Eagle of the State Coat of Arms. After
the Bolshevik revolt of 1917 they broke off remaining parts of the Eagle and cut
off crosses from closed churches. Most astonishing is that this ideologic
madness cannot distinguish between policy and art. In a photo-album
propagating iron elements of Peterbourg architecture " With iron
tracings richly wrought... ", produced by AuroraPublishers in 1970,
i.e. 53 years after the Bolshevik revolt, an example of this madness is demonstrated
without any hint to comprehension of its vandalic character:
It was really comic to observe the evolution of the Soviet hymn. After the
death of Stalin it became "music without words", when finally in
Brezhnev's epoch the Ethnic Russians inserted a slightly changed text without
the name of Stalin. Finally an attempt to introduce the Old Russian Empire hymn,
after the communism had crashed, was a fiasco because the majority of the Ethnic
Russians demonstrated that the Bolshevism was really their ideology, when they
demanded to restitute the Soviet hymn. After that a phantastic arguing in the
press began concerning real authorship of the "correct" text, although
all corrections of all times were only in deviations of who (Stalin, Flag,
Party, Russia) "leads us" from "the victory to victory",
"communism" etc.
[There is more evidence that this is
the Soviet period which the Ethnic Russians consider to be national, but the
present one - to be its continuation. At souvenirs markets the foreigner
is offered to buy matryoshkas which depict "the Rulers of
Russia". The series, finishing with the post-Soviet presidents Putin and
Yeltsin, begins with Lenin and Stalin, not with Nicolas II or any earlier
ruler. Therefore the ethnic Russian parades of demonstrators marching under red flags, Stalin's portraits
and Church icons is not any insignificant
misunderstanding. Neither this is only a protest against hardening prices or
corruption of the authorities. One must see here an expression of the inner
national ideal: 1) the collective tribualistic Truth (symbolised by the Red
Drag), 2) the Compulsion of the Supreme Power ensuring this Truth (symbolized by
Stalin, True Terrible Czar), 3) the Divine Guarantee of the eternity of this
national order (symbolised by the Icon). Therefore, S. Kara-Murza, The Soviet Civilization
(Moscow: Algorithm 2001) is undoubtedly right when he says the same]
10. Belief in some miraculous Almighty
Teaching.
Because of their idolatry
the Ethnic Russians are a good material for any tyranny. They easily let
themselves being indoctrinated with a new ideology because they are sure, as the
Russian Orthodox tradition was, that "a correct teaching" may solve
all the problems automatically and make the life as fine as in paradise.
When they see that the teaching does not help, this is only a sign that it is
not correct. Then the Ethnic Russians begin to laugh at their idols in everyday
conversations and anecdotes but finally become victims of a group of new
indoctrinators who manipulate them. As a result a new dictatorship comes on the
place of the former one and nothing changes. The Russian Bolshevism was nothing
else but a reincarnation of the Russian Messianic Orthodoxy: Russia has a
mission to save all the world as "the Third Rome" (see Berdyaev N.A. Sources
and sense of the Russian Communism ).
___________________
No sense to speak whether these features are "good" or "bad". They were deadly for the Peterbourgians, but for the Ethnic Russians they are good because they possess own cultural values, different from those of the Europeans. After the crash of the communism only the freedom of the utterance has been introduced, although the authorities still control the main mass media. The remaining reality, except changing socialism with criminal group monopolism, keeps to be the same. Vladimir Socor, the Wall Street Journal Europe, 1-3 November 2002, writes the following in his article about murder of 120 hostages by Russian special forces during the Chechen militant attack in Moscow:
"Russia's tragedies are not divinely ordained: they are entirely man-made, and probably avoidable if their causes were properly addressed. Such causes include shoddy technology, bureaucratic mismanagement, military brutality, pervasive corruption, and the callousness of leaders toward their subjects. Recurrently, these factors add up to a deadly mix.
"In the Moscow theater, the state applied brute force indiscriminately on terrorists and on hostages alike. The procedure is shocking, but it is not unprecedented. In 1995 in the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk, security forces shelled and stormed a hospital that had been taken over by Shamil Basaev's Chechen gunmen. More than 100 hospital patients were killed in that indiscriminate attack, before the security forces gave up. In 1995-96, Russian aviation and artillery bombarded the city of Grozny indiscriminately, burying thousands of Russian residents as well as innocent civilians under the rubble. Unrelated to Chechnya, but reflecting an ingrained disregard for the lives of Russian citizens, the state leadership tried to cover up the Kursk submarine's disaster while there was still time to save crew members. Western countries migth have done the job, but the 118 lives counted less than the "state's prestige" as the Kremlin saw it.
"The three or four dozen terrorists who took over the Moscow theater made their way from Chechnya to the heart of the Russian capital through troup cordons and police checkpoints. They reached the scene of action wearing uniforms, in vehicles loaded with arms and explosives. Russia's top authorities don't seem to have any explanation for this remarkable infiltration. The only known facts are these. First, weapons are often sold by Russian military personnel (whether greedy senior officers or hungry, drug-addicted recruits) in Chechnya. Second, entrenched mafia networks in Moscow and other Russian cities also deals in weapons. And, third, military cordons, police checkpoints and patrols are sieves through which ordinary citizens, traders, common criminals, and indeed Chechen gunmen routinely bribe their way. Bribing is exactly how Basayev's detachment managed to drive in trucks from Chechnya to Budyonnovsk. Subsequently, in 1999, three apartment buildings were mysteriously blown up in Moscow and Volgodonsk, causing hundreds of casualties. The government blamed Chechens, and launched the second war, which helped catapult Vladimir Putin to presidency. The authorities never caught any perpetrator of those explosions, however; nor did the government ever explain such gross security breaches as may have allowed those deadly actions. In a society where rumor often fills the information vacuum, suspicions are rife that elements within the authorities were involved in the apartment building bombings." (Cf. also analogous conlusions of Vadim Chorny).
All described features of the Ethnic Russian society are not any "racial" characteristic - they appear and exist in their tradition only. Only in this way one should understand the words of Admiral Alexandre Kolchak (1873-1920), known leader of the White Guards: "Mad and wild people, incapable to overstep the psychology of the slave". Many Ethnic Russians did this individually. They overstepped the ethnic Russian tradition and became Peterbourgians, i.e. Europeans, in the filia Town of the West, in the Finno-Ugrian land of Ingria.
As for the "lords", it is clear that the West-Europeans in Ingria (Peterbourgians) could not become any Ethnic Russians only due to the change of the language and religion. Neither could they make millions of Ethnic Russians West-Europeans by means of the state power. Representatives of the 3rd generation of Klosse, even Constantin, F2, who named himself von Klosse, really used Russian in everyday life, although the wife of F2 was a Lutheran too. His sister Marie, F7, even became Orthodox. Nevertheless this could not change their western culture, nor tempt them or their children to drink vodka, crash statues, urinate in staircases, use the "mat" by-words or write the latter on walls. Nobody of them could be named NASH ("ours") by the Ethnic Russians - they remained alien in spite of the language or the religion. If one names Peterbourgians lords, they lived and died as lords even when shot to death by the Ethnic Russians or having got into the extreme poverty after 1917. Analogously could not this small ruling group force millions of Ethnic Russians to acquire the western culture and to lose essential ethnic features of the thousand-years old tradition. Therefore, the difference between these 2 peoples was incomparably greater than the difference between the English-speaking Englishmen and the Americans. One even does not need to mention essential difference between the westernised Russian dialect of the elite and the criminals' slang of the Ethnic Russians. These were clearly 2 nations different in origins, culture, traditions, values, behaviour, language (whether Russian or not) and (in most cases) even in physical appearance.
This means that one day the annihilation of Sanct-Peterbourg was predestined. Of recent works showing that the revolt of 1917 was ethnic, not only social, cf. that of the newest Ethnic-Russian ideologist communist S. Kara-Murza: The Soviet Civilisation (In Russian, Algorithm: Moscow 2001). From the Ethnic-Russians' point of view the ethnic hatred is demonstrated many times in this book.