INTRODUCTION
Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, and the metaphor of classifying certain peoples (land settled) as Apollonian and others (wanderers) as Mercurian was a moment of personal insight to me. Yuri Slezkine, who was trained as an ethnographer in the Soviet Union, while highlighting the condition of the Jews as a prime example of Mercurians, does not limit this designation to them alone. My Russian ancestry – particularly its landed gentry status – which would have placed me into the Apollonian category, has been altered by my being a child of the White Russian diaspora.
After surviving World War II in Yugoslavia and forced labor and then refugee camps in Germany, I next absorbed the colonial contradictions of growing up in Morocco between the French and the Arabs, then the impracticality of being fluent in four languages but not English in Australia. Finally, as an American citizen of long standing I felt responsible for the bombing of Belgrade in 1999, where I had been bombed at the age of three in 1941. All these exposures to “the way of the world” made my chances of an Apollonian identity in God’s country unpromising.
This discovery of my “Mercurian” qualities caused me to protest a review of Slezkine’ The Jewish Century in the New York Review of Books back in June of 2005 and to keep up with his work in general.
THE EDITORS
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Orlando Figes picks up on the most obviously provocative thesis of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, namely that the century traditionally defined by the tragedy of the Holocaust should be reinterpreted as the century of Jewish vindication. That such a view should not be associated with the creation of the State of Israel, but with the success of Jews in the Diaspora, particularly the former Soviet Union, is a further point of likely controversy.
To defend his thesis, Slezkine takes a very broad view of what it means to be Jewish. To follow him one must buy into his defining metaphor of dividing social groups into Apollonians and Mercurians. This is no doubt a heuristic tool, but one which affords a fresh look at a highly charged issue. That Figes fails, in his review, to outline Slezkine’s central theses or to discuss the ethnographic research underlying it is a disservice to the originality of the author’s book. Slezkine contends that the Jews are not unique in their role of Mercurians and that several groups (the Gypsies, the Margi of Western Sudan, the Jains and the Parsis in India, the Lebanese expatriates, and the overseas Chinese, among others) offer Jewish-like or what he calls Mercurian characteristics: specialization in border-crossing, trade, finance, and other occupations variously looked down upon by sedentary or mainstream (Apollonian) societies. The latter, as Slezkine suggests, tend toward opposite characteristics: territorial claims and aggressive hostility to perceived outsiders.
As a specific case of Mercurian behavior, Jews are likely to be associated with “modernity” at any given time in history: when a society is expansive and open and its economy flourishes, the specific skills of Jews as expert Mercurians are welcomed. As a perennial minority, Jews have also been the natural champions of progressive causes. When rapid social change causes turmoil, however, Jews have often found themselves vulnerable to backlash. Some examples of this process, when periods of prosperity and efflorescence for Jews were followed by periods of persecution have been recorded, among others, in ancient Egypt and Babylon, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Moorish Spain, Nineteenth Century Germany, and Twentieth Century Russia.
Amos Elon’s The Pity of it All is helpful in this respect in reminding us how successful and assimilated Jews were in pre-Nazi Germany. Similarly, Slezkine documents in detail how seductive to the shtetl Jews were the ideals of Russian culture and Communist revolution, and how they stepped into the vacuum created by the liquidation of the educated classes (while the rest of society was still illiterate) and became an integral part of Soviet leadership. That this should entail the running of the Gulag was part of the premises of that society. Solzhenitsyn’s singling out of Jews for special apology on that score is typical example of nationalist backlash.
As Slezkine argues and Figes notes, it was World War II that brought about change with respect to Jews in the Soviet Union. It can be similarly asserted that World War I initiated the turning of events in Germany. In both cases, the trauma of war caused a resurgence of nationalism and its attendant faith in blood and soil. This, in turn, produced hostility toward outsiders, and among them Jews, however assimilated.
The principal difference between Slezkine and Figes is that the former, despite spectacular dangers, embraces those aspects of “Jewishness” which tend to make them “progressive,” while Figes prefers to ground “Jewishness” in more traditionally ethnic, religious, or national terms. The creation of the state of Israel reflects this Apollonian assertion of Jewish identity in the 20th century.
Figes’ current research on the private life under Stalin and his earlier book, Natasha’s Dance exemplify this position. The defining passage for the title of the latter book was taken from Tolstoy’s War and Peace. That Natasha, the offspring of the presumably Westernized Russian nobility who speak French better than Russian, should perform “instinctively” a Russian folk dance is an expression of Tolstoy’s belief in earthborn, (and surely Apollonian) nativism.
I observed just such a dance last year, characterized by the same apparent spontaneity and those same folksy gestures – performed by my Russian-Jewish hostess in Moscow. Only having been TAUGHT those very dance movements as a little girl in Displaced Persons Camps in Germany, (even though I happen to be an Orthodox Russian), I do not conclude, with Tolstoy, that either Russianness or Jewishness are inborn. Surely my Jewish friend’s ‘Russian’ dance moves were “learned” just as mine were, in her case to conform to and in my case to salvage, some fancied Russian ideal or identity.
If definitions of nationality turn out to be constructed, then Yuri Slezkine’s characterization of Jewishness as primarily ‘occupational’ has much to recommend it. As a “rootless cosmopolitan” myself, thanks to the ejection of my family from Revolutionary Russia, not because of religion or ethnicity, but because of class, I’ve had an interesting nomadic life. And, having survived thus far (this is a prerequisite one cannot, unfortunately, take for granted) would not exchange the stimulus of Mercurial strangeness and adaptability for Apollonian certainties.
THE JEWISH CENTURY
Yuri Slezkine’s book, The Jewish Century, is an impressive and original work. Based on extensive ethnographic research Slezkine proposes a theory of social development which classifies certain groups of people into Apollonians and Mercurians. In this view Apollo, the Greek sun god, is the patron of settled agriculturalists, which entails a sense of entitlement to geographical territory and tends to traditional and defensive belief systems. Hermes (for the Greeks) or Mercury (for the Romans), on the other hand, is the messenger god wearing his winged helmet who fosters commerce and ingenuity.
Though Slezkine cites several other groups (the Gypsies, the Margi of Western Sudan, the Jains and Parsis of India, the Lebanese expatriates, and the overseas Chinese among others) he concentrates on the historical role of the Jews as typical Mercurians. Because their hold on a viable state of their own has been relatively brief, they have largely been a people of the diaspora. Whether in Egypt or Babylon or Rome or Spain or Germany or Poland or Ukraine, they have nevertheless conserved a specific identity – at times because they did not wish to become integrated, at times because they were not allowed to do so.
This position of perennial strangers in the land of others involves both advantages and dangers. As outsiders they are not likely to get caught up in the prevailing groupthink of the host country, whether this relates to religious or other cultural allegiances. For example, the belief in the evils of usury among both Christians and Moslems has given the Jews a niche to specialize and excel in financial transactions. As travelers from place to place, they have also been transmitters of learning and innovation. As perennial minorities, they have tended to militate for progressive causes.
These Mercurial qualities of adaptability, ingenuity, and advocacy for change are sometimes appreciated by the Apollonians among whom they live, especially, according to Slezkine, in times of economic growth. At other times, when those Apollonians are going through troubled times and magical thinking is apt to prevail, the Jews have been scapegoated – hence all the instances of persecution, including the latest and most grievous one known as the Holocaust.
Slezkine’s title, so provocative to many Jews (the century of the Holocaust as the “Jewish Century”) insists on pointing out the achievements of Jews in the 20th century. This of course is problematical because it is associated with the Soviet Union. Just the same, in time the author was the recipient of the National Jewish award in 2005.
One unanswered question, however, remains: how does Slezkine’s thesis relate to the state of Israel? If to be modern is to be ‘Jewish’ in the sense of cultivating Mercurian qualities, the Jews have now traded their Mercurian adaptability for Apollonian rootedness. As subsequent history demonstrates, this has not resulted in reliable security for the people of Israel.
THE USSR AS A COMMUNAL APARTMENT, OR HOW A SOCIALIST STATE PROMOTED ETHNIC PARTICULARISM (Slavic Summer Review of 1994).
Slezkine begins by placing the concept of nationalities and ethnicities within the framework of Lenin’s and Stalin’s writings on the subject. Although in Marxist terms discrete national cultures were understood as “bourgeois superstructures” or transient “forms,” the new leaders had to cope with the reality of inheriting a vast and diverse RUSSIAN empire. Their intention was not to emulate the British “white man’s burden,” or the French “mission civilisatrice,” but to create, on the ruins of the Russian empire, something of an anti-imperial world rooted in the needs of the common people.
To accomplish this, they decided that the message of the “content” of socialism needed to be promoted through the “form” or cultural lens of each national entity or ethnic group. This called for armies of ethnographers who were tasked to implement the leaders’ vision on the ground. One of the metaphors Slezkine proposes to summarize the complex project is that “the dictatorship of the proletariat was a Tower of Babel in which all tongues on all floors would have a proportionate share of all jobs.” But as Slezkine argues, such a project, like the Biblical one, bore the stigma of hubris. Whether through initial good intentions or subsequent dictatorial ones, the center did not hold. Like the passing of earlier empires, the Soviet Union disintegrated. The diligently constructed national “non-states … were the only possible heirs.”
Yuri Slezkine, now professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, has been the recipient of the 2020 Russian Valdai Conference prize for his House of Government. It seems that President Putin’s view of the Bolshevik project to unify the former Russian empire under the auspices of particular “nations” reflects Yuri Slezkine’s negative assessment. After all, instead of inheriting a “Russian Empire,” however dysfunctional, President Putin has inherited the shards of a “union” made up of “republics” whose “national” identities have rather different historical foundations. The Baltic states, like Georgia and Armenia, had enough historical precedent for self-determination. But the newly independent republics (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirgizstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan) while sharing the historical tradition of Islam, owe their republican status, as President Putin points out, to Soviet political and economic initiative.
The Chechen “national identity” offered yet another instance of a problematical situation: after all Chechnya, and many other “republics,” find themselves within the actual territory of the Russian Federation. This problem is a familiar one to the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of North America, who were more realistic. They did not try to convert the natives. They just destroyed their source of sustenance by exterminating the buffalo, and eventually pushed off what was left of them onto infertile territories. Well, given the ingenuity of free enterprise, they are now encouraged to thrive on the running of casinos.
Still, the miraculous working of the “invisible hand” of the free market has its own religious imperatives. Like medieval Christianity, the West has been called upon to join the various crusades in the Middle East: how many people have perished in the cleaning up of the “Axis of Evil” in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and Yemen and Syria? And what about the unfinished job of Iran?
Similarly, the “humanitarian intervention” in Former Yugoslavia was initiated to bring peace to “republics” warring on the grounds of their “ethnic” differences. Yet these republics had managed to live together as Southern Slavs despite the religious legacy of various empires: the Byzantine Orthodox Empire, the Turkish Muslim Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Catholic Empire. However, empires spring back to life under new guises, and Yugoslavia has been reappropriated again.
Thus, conversion to neo-liberalism by way of “regime change” is the order of the day and has worked remarkably well in some instances. Following Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, the Soviet Union has completed the process under Yeltsin, and the various republics and national entities which composed it, not without considerable incentive from the “international community,” have regained or forged their autonomy.
As to the “foundational” Slavic identity which Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus share, here too problems have arisen. Regime change was attempted in Ukraine in 2004 and was finally successful in 2014. But President Putin calls this presumably democratic revolution a Nazi putsch. He also claims that the attachment of Crimea to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956 was but an administrative move and is no longer viable. And when Ukraine considered joining the European Union and NATO, he simply “took Crimea back.”
And then there is the issue of the Donbass region, which resists, among others, the banning of the Russian language, and has been mercilessly shelled by the Kiev regime for the last 8 years. President Putin claims that the training of special battalions and the sending of arms to Ukraine amounts to turning the country into a de facto NATO state. And since this sense of an “existential threat” to the Russian people is not acknowledged by the West, Putin has made the decision to take action, and the Russian military has invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2021. Thus, the definition of what constitutes a sovereign country or nation state is still very much at issue today, whether in Europe, Africa, or Asia.
THE HOUSE OF GOVERNMENT
The central thesis of this book is that the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent building of socialism was a typical millenarian episode encountered elsewhere in history. Circumstances conducive to popular unrest and search for solutions, sometimes irrational solutions, were certainly present in the Russia of the early twentieth century. The notorious example of Rasputin, his inordinate influence and lurid death, is a familiar symptom of the times. Such times, as the title of Slezkine’s first chapter suggests, were a “Swamp.”
The use of metaphor and the reliance on documentary evidence are the chosen tools of Yuri Slezkine’s method. Again, the very titles of subsequent chapters leave the reader in no doubt of the argument in progress. The second chapter introduces “The Preachers.” They are a collection of young men (and some women) who suffer tsarist persecution in prison and exile. What impels them to sacrifice? As the third chapter spells it out, it is “The Faith” i.e., the Marxist faith.
Part II is titled “Fulfillment” with chapters titled “The Real Day,” “The Last Battle,” “The New City” – on the hill or still in the swamp? Probably the latter, because of NEP or New Economic Policy, which was a temporary free-market concession – hence “The Great Disappointment.” And when Lenin, the “charismatic leader,” dies in 1924, the vacuum is filled by human, all-too-human, politics: who will be the worthy successor to define “The Party Line?”
By choosing to focus on the inhabitants of The House of Government, the principal political figures who define “the party line” – figures like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin – are not the subject of Slezkine’s work, since they don’t live in the “House” and are present there only as reflections in the lives of those who do. Once again, it is the task of the followers to actualize these leaders’ decisions. This indirect method, however, leaves the reader short of important aspects of the historical context.
The adoption of Marx’s ideas in a country that did not have the advanced capitalist development he posited as a foundation for socialism was, by definition, problematical. Moreover, the countries that did have such a foundation, (the one Lenin most counted on was Germany), rather than initiating the world revolution, opted for World War I instead. It is precisely World War I and Russia’s unpreparedness for it – especially the peasant soldiers’ reluctance to die for some distant cause irrelevant to their lives – that prompted Lenin to take his chances on initiating revolutionary change in Russia.
By the time the winners of the Civil War move to the “House” in 1931, Stalin is said to define “the party line.” Under his leadership the members of the new government, for whom “The Eternal House” has been built, concentrate on the monumental task at hand: industrialize a country of peasants and compensate for the transfer of populations from the land to new urban centers by creating presumably more efficient collective farms. As Yuri Slezkine documents, they do this governing work 20 hours out of 24.
Luckily, the facilities of “The House” and the staff that runs it, liberate the government workers from more mundane chores. One of the issues to be resolved under such circumstances of radical change is the role of the family. At first there is a sort of liberation from the traditional bounds of the nuclear (and patriarchal) family. Later, however, the unavoidable complications of family life gradually undermine the initial insouciance of free love. Children are born. Grandparents, uncles, aunts, mothers-in-law crowd the apartments. This is great for the children, who have distant and heroic fathers to admire, and immediate caretakers to rely upon. Just the same, the outcome of such complicated family arrangements may be conducive to regression: some of the grandfathers are priests or rabbis.
The assassination of Kirov in 1934 is a tipping point. From then on bourgeois indulgence becomes indistinguishable from counterrevolutionary betrayal. The “House” proves no shelter as the top officials of the State, one by one, experience “the knock on the door” in the middle of the night, are called to account and disposed of. In due course their wives are shipped off to labor camps and the children, if not rescued by the extended family, end up in orphanages.
The catastrophic impact of these purges is reflected in the desperate diaries of the condemned. Slezkine’s record of these documents is supplemented by visual evidence: the early group pictures of happy friends and family are replaced by a gallery of haunted, isolated faces, recorded in “arrest photographs.” Bukharin, one of the early star Bolsheviks, is now a star witness to his own demise. His protestations of innocence in his letters to Stalin, whom he calls by his nickname Koba, evoke the classical “pity and terror” of tragedy.
But by his exhaustive witnessing of personal diaries and correspondence – is Slezkine writing history? Stephen Cohen has written a thoroughly researched book on Bukharin, while in Slezkine’s account Bukharin’s position remains elusive: his case is presented as a particularly telling display of millenarian “scapegoating.” Another case of allusive history is the role of Trotsky. “Trotskyism” becomes the hallmark of “betrayal” in later accusations and confessions. We are left ignorant of his leadership in the Civil War or, more to the point, the radical divide between Trotsky’s insistence on “permanent international revolution” against Stalin’s “socialism in one country.”
And what if these political contests did result in “betrayal,” and “wrecking,” and “sabotage”? There were witnesses, foreign as well as domestic, who corroborated these claims, and the debates are far from settled. The international support for the Whites during the Civil War, the non-recognition of the Soviet government and subsequent trade blockades are established facts. Was the trial and condemnation of General Tuchachevsky willful persecution? My own family (father and grandfather) joined the Vlasov movement from Yugoslavia, and Stepan Bandera, happily celebrated these days, joined the Nazi “liberation” of Ukraine during World War II. Was Stalin paranoid when he accelerated the five-year plans to the breaking point to prepare for the showdown to come?
And the showdown did come in 1941. To borrow Yuri Slezkine’s language, the word “apocalypse” would be fitting to characterize the terror and desolation World War II visited on the people of the Soviet Union. However, World War II remains absent in Slezkine’s account, except in two marginal references: he does mention that a couple of the “patriots” of the younger inhabitants of the “House” perished in partisan activities and at the front. But since the “House” itself was closed until further notice, the author’s narrative ends there as well – except for the final chapter honoring the work of the novelist Yuri Trifonov.
Trifonov’s The House on the Embankment was, like Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, an eminent sign of political “thaw.” Eventually these liberating spring waters became a flood. They broke through the dam of Soviet consensus to generate dissident literature. Young people who had learned patriotic songs in pioneer summer camps and marched in huge parades to celebrate the Soviet conquest of space were now confronted with tales of seemingly arbitrary trials and the evidence of the gulag archipelago dotting the country’s map. This questioned the very foundation of their lives.
As Slezkine points out, the children in the House of Government had been taken to the theater and ballets and concerts and the playgrounds of Gorki Park. And what the new generation reads is not Marx, but Pushkin and Tolstoy. This reconnects them to the humanist traditions of the pre-revolutionary intellectual elites, full of “repentant noblemen” who criticized the status quo of Russian society but did not know “the dismal science” of economics.
And just as those elites were swept away by the Revolution, the new intelligentsia, the advance guard of socialist progress, now must face the imperatives of catching up with the West, OR ELSE. The WEST, once again, in the guise of WAR. And many of them are found wanting and suffer repression. And now it is the turn of the generation following the trauma and painful recovery from World War II to take on the work of questioning the status quo and the burden of “repentance” – the title of Tengiz Abuladze’s remarkable film. In short, the dissidents of the 70s are the new intelligentsia.
Yuri Slezkine is the heir of this generation of intellectuals. And the gifts of scholarship he brings to the lives of the people who worked in the The House of Government is a kind of memorial. His conclusion is that Marx and his followers did not measure up to Moses or Jesus or Mohammed – or even Cromwell, Luther, and Robespierre. Consequently, those who followed their injunctions were mere “organized salvation professionals” like the Dukhobors, Anabaptists, Zoroastrians, Bogomils, Cathars, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the followers of Charles Manson or David Koresh.
This “religious” interpretation of the Soviet Socialist experiment reflects an earlier reference in Bertrand Russel’s History of Philosophy. Russel equates Yahwew with dialectical materialism, Marx with the Messiah, the Proletariat with The Elect, the Party with The Church, the Revolution with The Second Coming, Hell with the punishment of the capitalists, and The Millennium with the Communist Commonwealth. Russel’s assessment is not as dismissive as Slezkine’s. However, he calls it “a psychological understanding of Marx,” which presumably coming from a philosopher, implies a lack of discernment.
But it is one thing to “philosophize” from a distance, and another to live the reality of social upheaval. And while Yuri Slezkine documents the psychological reverberations of the generation who bore the brunt of both “the faith” and the “fallout” of their convictions, the next generation reflects yet another “psychology,” born of the “loss of faith.”
Did the youngsters of the 80s even know or care that the prerevolutionary life span of Russian peasants was about 40 years? Now the works of Marx are a boring chore imposed by the official curriculum. Sure, their parents had stood up to the Nazi onslaught, but now all those medals sort of look like kitsch. So now there was food, if you could call it that, but why should they stand in line for food and clothes so that people in Cuba or Africa can get ahead? So, Stalin and then Khrushchev had built public housing, but was it not terminally shoddy? And they had fancy subways, but what about cars as in the rest of the civilized world? Ok, they had received a free education, and send Sputnik into space, but what about “regular” stuff like jeans and rock n’ roll? In other words, what of the entitlements of a generation that was now middle-class?
However, once essential needs are satisfied, human consciousness also feels liberated to explore “higher” options. Michael Gorbachev picked up on the popular discontent and responded with glasnost and perestroika. The ensuing power struggle between the “old guard” and the promoters of change culminated in Gorbachev’s resignation and the coming to power of Boris Yeltsin in 1991. And since “human rights” and the “free hand of the market” are clearly one and the same, he invited western advisers and inaugurated the privatization of the Soviet economy. Svetlana Alexievich witnesses this phase of social development in Russia: has it all become about “sausage”? On the Capitalist side of the contest, however, this was hailed as “the end of history.” Would Slezkine recognize in this claim millenarian strivings of their own? As the author of brilliant work on the generation that worked so hard in The House of Government and whose failure he mourns, would he not be well prepared to explore the “religious” and “psychological” undertones of the “free hand” of Capitalism or the faith in “American Exceptionalism”?
Rise and Shine: Galina DeRoeck's Website 