The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “I had dinner already, thank you. So what about those ideas that grip the masses?”

  “What I’m telling you is there aren’t any left in big politics. That’s the thing, Daryna. Have some cheese. They’re all illusions of the pre-information age—all those socialisms, liberalisms, communisms, and other what-have-you…. The nineteenth century still believed all that—in the last twitches of Enlightenment. But, you can write four-letter words on a wall all you want—it’s still a wall, and everything’s still behind it. Take the Second World War—it was a clash of two socialisms, the Russian against the German, and who now remembers that? What ideas? Who gives a damn? The masses are not ruled by ideas—they are ruled by certain complex emotions, but even those are not so complex that you couldn’t predict and model them. Self-satisfaction, envy, resentment, fear—you’ve studied psychology, you know this yourself. And ideas in politics—whenever politicians really needed the support of the masses—always had the same function as slogans in advertising: they’re triggers.”

  “Meaning—they affect the subconscious?”

  “You got it. They mobilized certain complex emotions and locked them into a short circuit. Like with Pavlov’s dogs. You said it right, just then: Communism was a mobilization of envy. Thus, your core constituency is the socially disenfranchised; that’s the base you can count on. Everyone knows the best pogrom squads are made of those who’d grown up being pogrommed themselves. Bolsheviks made good use of the Russian Jewry before they secured their power. You mobilize the base with envy, with the desire for revenge—and intimidate the rest, the passive majority, terrorize them to nip resistance in the bud. And that’s it; you don’t need no ideologies after that.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that was the Bolsheviks’ original plan?”

  “That, or something else—what does it matter? The main thing was that Lenin made the brilliant discovery: it’s not an ideology that constitutes a material force—it’s political technology!” Vadym enunciates the last word with such gusto you’d think it were edible. “You can feed the masses whatever hogwash you want—today one thing, tomorrow another, and the day after something different yet, without any connection to what came before. Today we’re dismantling the army, tomorrow we’re shooting the deserters; today we’re recognizing Ukraine’s independence, tomorrow we’re installing a puppet government with our bayonets; today we’re giving land to the peasants, tomorrow we’re taking it away. Any maneuver can be justified by the political goal of the moment, and the masses will keep eating it up. But—only as long as you keep pushing the same button. That is to say, engaging the same complex emotions. And you can keep pushing it till kingdom come if you not only have the means of enforcement in your pocket, but also the media—and Lenin didn’t even have television! What you can’t do, under any circumstances, is change the button or the whole machine will explode. Gorbachev tried it—and you see what happened?”

  “Vadym, you lost me. Are you talking about political history, or the mechanisms by which criminal groups co-opt political power?”

  Vadym cringes, but in a friendly way: he heard my fart this time and is letting me know that in the company of serious people it will not be tolerated.

  “I am talking about effective politics, Daryna. Have some cheese; it’s Brie, good stuff, fresh…. Politics is by definition the struggle for power.”

  “To what end?”

  “What—to what end?” Vadym asks, confused.

  “Struggling for power—to what end? To come to it, get it, and sit there? Chase away new contenders? Or is power still a means of implementing certain, forgive me for belaboring the point—ideas? Certain convictions about the way your nation ought to develop and, more generally speaking, about how we can all collectively dig ourselves out from the pile of shit your effective politicians have piled on the human society? I’m sorry, I know I’m spouting banalities here, but I do feel like I’m missing something.”

  We have never had conversations like this before, Vadym and I. When he called me out of the blue at ten at night—“Hello, Daryna, Vadym here, gotta talk”—and stunned me by declaring he was coming to get me, I could imagine anything (my first thought was, something’s happened to Katrusya) other than this lecture on the fundamentals of political cynicism in an empty restaurant. If what he really wanted to do was to warn me, he could have done that on the phone. And yet somehow I am not surprised; I am playing right along, dutifully posing my questions. As if I were interviewing him for the cameras. (Do they have security cameras, I wonder?) As if one day I were going to bring this interview before Vlada who stands, an invisible shadow, between us: she is the one who left Vadym to me—like a question to which she failed to find an answer.

  Vadym finishes chewing unhurriedly, dabs his lips with the napkin again, folds it neatly, and puts it down beside his plate. Then he raises his eyes to me—a statesman’s weary gaze, a mix of boredom, lenity, irony, and pity.

  “Do you think that Bush lost sleep over saving the world? Or Schroeder, after he stuck his country on the Russians’ gas needle? Or Chirac? Or Berlusconi?”

  “What’s gas got to do with anything? Even if they’re all rotten bastards it doesn’t automatically mean that…”

  “Whoa, now!” Vadym cuts in, beginning to enjoy himself. “What do you mean, what’s gas got to do with it? Power is access to energy sources, my dear! Fuel is the key to world domination—always has been, always will be.”

  “I seem to remember hearing this before, somewhere—the thing about world domination…”

  Again Vadym squints at me with the directed gaze of an attentive, always internally focused person. (Where, where did I see this look? Night, darkness, reddish reflections of fire on people’s faces…)

  “If Hitler’s who you have in mind, his case is actually the best proof that having an idea can only undermine a serious politician. Really, ideas are counter-indicated. Of ideas, poor Adolf, unfortunately, had plenty—and believed in them, to make things worse.”

  For an instant, I despair: it’s like Vadym and I are speaking two different languages, using the same words that have different meanings for each of us, and I don’t know how to disentangle myself from this confusion. And he is on a roll, words are spilling out of him, and he is clearly enjoying the process—how smoothly and evenly it all comes out.

  “It was from the Bolsheviks that Hitler learned the most important thing—the technology of manipulating the masses. And the button he found was good, too: national resentment, the Weimar defeat complex. Plus the same envy of the socially disenfranchised that the Bolsheviks exploited. And there he had it—the German nation of workers and peasants, and on an order of magnitude more successful, by the way, than the one the Russians had built. If Hitler hadn’t had a brain-fuck, excuse me, on the idea of winning world domination for his beloved German people—and that’s a totally demented idea; no people can dominate the world, only corporations can, and that’s how it has always been and always will be—if he hadn’t had, to put it simply, a bunch of idiotic fantasies in his head, history would’ve have taken a different course. And the US today would mean no more than Honduras. Or, say, New Zealand.”

  “So what then, Adolf fucked up?”

  Vadym does not share my irony.

  “Exactly. Fucked up. There was a reason Stalin couldn’t, until the very last moment, believe that Hitler would attack him. He couldn’t fathom that a politician of that stature could turn out to be such an ideological dickhead, like a green student radical or something. They could have—couldn’t they?—just divided the world into spheres of influence as they’d agreed in ’39, and everything would’ve been fine. A lot less blood would’ve been spilled, too. Back in my university days, I wrote my thesis on the Battle of Kursk—I tell you, that was a horrific business: if you didn’t know better, you’d think the only thing either side cared about was how to kill more of its own soldiers. There you have your ideas.”

  “Is there any chance it migh
t matter what those ideas are?”

  “Whatever you want them to be, Daryna! In politics, all they do is stand in the way—they’re noise. Trust me; I’ve been handling this shit for years. And without gloves,” he clarifies as if this were some especially sophisticated exclusive he were giving me. “We’re on the verge of a new world order—the status quo that emerged after World War II has long been pushed to its limits, the Yalta epoch has exhausted itself. Think about it, you’re a smart woman. Do you honestly believe that toppling the Twin Towers was the homespun work of a handful of demented Arabs from nowhere? And that Bush, who, by the way, has old family business ties to the Saudi oil sheiks, went into Iraq to save the world? And the apartment buildings blown up in Ryazan when Putin needed to send the Taman Guards to Chechnya, a division recruited from that same Ryazan—is that not the same scenario? Only they did a sloppier job in Russia, and everyone knows that those explosions were FSB’s handiwork. But it’s too late now; the deed’s done. The way to the Caspian oil pipeline’s been cleared—Georgia’s still fussing underfoot, but it’ll be its turn soon. Now one of your journalist people over in the States is making a movie about September 11—trying to prove the whole thing was a political provocation, and that Bush knew about it ahead of time…”

  “You mean Michael Moore?” I remember I saw the headline on a news crawl somewhere—about the film’s presentation at the Cannes Film Festival, where I am no longer going. “I wouldn’t think you followed that kind of news. So, is there a hypothesis about who engineered that provocation?”

  Again, a quick triumphant flame flares up in Vadym’s eyes—as if he himself were one of the provocation’s authors. “Who it was, Daryna, no one will find out for the next ten to twenty years. Until the new redistribution of the energy-source markets is over. And that Moore guy won’t prove anything to anyone, mark my word.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because—again—it’s too late! The button has been pushed, the masses mobilized: they were shown very real horror on television, and they got scared. Bunched together into a herd. And no journalistic investigation can now convince them that that was precisely the goal—to have them bunch together into a herd and put their fate in the shepherd’s hands. On the contrary. Now, the more American blood is spilled in Iraq, the more trust there will be for the administration because it is the hardest thing for people to admit that their loved ones died for nothing. Nothing glues a nation together like spilled blood: the USSR was sealed in the same way—by the Great War. And Bush, you can be sure, will get reelected for a second term this fall. That’s the reality, Daryna. And all the talk about liberal democracy, or the Party’s dictatorship, or whatever—it’s all crap, forget it. The politics of today is an amalgamation of the experience of twentieth-century superpowers and the experience of the marketplace, of advertising. An immensely powerful combination, if you know how to use it.”

  “Precisely. Orwell wrote about it, back in the day.”

  Vadym ignores Orwell like another fart.

  “This is a very serious shift, Daryna. A historical one. The masses no longer choose an idea, or a slogan—they are choosing a brand. And they’re not doing their choosing rationally either—they vote purely with their emotions. Bread and circuses? Here you go—public politicking itself becomes a circus! What are presidential debates if not the same old gladiator fights? September 11 is the most successful reality show in history: every soul on Earth who could find a TV set watched it. Putin is a TV superhero now, and seventy percent of Russian women have erotic dreams about him. In Stalin’s days, they threw people in jail for dreams like that. A public politician today is a showman first and foremost, the registered trademark of the company behind him.”

  “And the company—who is that?”

  “A corporation of those who do the actual governing,” Vadym answers calmly. “The world has always been ruled by such corporations. Only the post-information society is much easier to rule than societies were sixty years ago. He who ensures the best show for the masses wins. He who, to put it bluntly, puts the picture into the TV. Meaning, ultimately, whoever has the most money. And that’s that.”

  “You really believe that?”

  Vadym smiles. He does have a really nice smile.

  “Believing belongs in church. And Daryna, I am used to dealing with things that are real. You just remember that history is made by money. That’s how it’s always been and will be.”

  An unpleasant chill begins to fill me, like in a dentist’s waiting room when I was little.

  “The Soviet Union had enough money to wipe its ass with it,” I tell him, mustering as much crudity as possible. “And fat lot of good it did them.”

  “Whoa there one minute!” Vadym exclaims, astonished. “Half the world under control—that’s not good enough for you? You couldn’t swing a dead cat in the twentieth century without hitting Soviet cash! Take even what happened in ’33—Stalin got the West right where he wanted them when he flooded the world market with all that genocidal Ukrainian wheat! And remember, it was the Great Depression—d’you think Roosevelt just happened to roll over and recognize the USSR exactly then? There’s your fat lot of good, right there. In ’47, Moscow sent grain to France in silk sacks, and French Communists waved those like flags at the elections: look how the working class in the USSR lives! All those Western Communist parties, leftist movement, terrorism, Red Brigades, all the rumbles in the third-world jungles—do you think it all fed and clothed itself? No, dear, the hand of Moscow could be very, very generous when it needed to be. And not a single peep from anyone—so, alright, they let a couple dissidents out, and maybe the Jews stood up for their own, but that’s it; that’s your entire Cold War right there… Americans can tell themselves they won it all they want since it makes them so happy—but they’re living in a fool’s paradise. In reality, if oil prices hadn’t collapsed in the eighties, and if the Politburo hadn’t started squabbling, you and I would still be living in the USSR. You can be sure about that.”

  He is talking like a sports commentator reflecting on the rise and fall of some team like Manchester United, and in that regard I also hear something else in his voice: the time-tested ardor of a soccer fan, a boy’s admiration for the forward—the same intonations with which old retired military remember the USSR. There are so many of them—people who are always ready to see all kinds of good in any crime as long as it goes unpunished.

  “That’s exactly what I am not so sure about.” For some reason, my voice goes low; shit, could I possibly be nervous? “I know nothing about any squabbling in the Politburo, but as far as I can tell, if one were to try to find a single reason for why the USSR collapsed, it was under the burden of its own lies. All of it, accumulated over seventy years. Because virtual reality—it is this thing, I’m here to tell you, that can hit back very hard if you play with it for too long. You can’t keep lying and maintain your own sense of how things really are at the same time. If you keep ordering a certain picture on TV, you eventually start believing it yourself. Inevitably. And that’s the end of any, as you call it, actual governing—exactly what happened in the USSR. And this Politburo of yours, a corporation of senile old men…”

  “It’s not mine,” Vadym grins, warming a glass of cognac in his paws. “But it does fit the definition of a corporation, I’ll give you that.”

  That’s praise—as if he were assessing my performance in his mind, like a judge at an art show or a violin recital. Putting pluses in some imagined columns next to my name. And this, for some reason, really pisses me off.

  “So then, this corporation of yours was made up of zombies who’d zombied themselves so thoroughly they knew nothing about the country they ruled! They thought Armenians were Muslims—remember that big shot from Moscow who let that drop in Nakhchevan? The FSB still can’t bring itself to believe that Ukraine is independent—they keep waiting for their made-up picture to come back on. Governors, my ass! Like blind butchers in a slaughterhouse
.

  “Some folks I know interviewed Fedorchuk not too long ago—the head of the Ukrainian KGB under Brezhnev, he’s living out his days in Moscow now—with not a soul to talk to, his son shot himself, wife also committed suicide, and to him it’s all like water off a duck: like they’d catapulted the dude to Mars decades ago, and he just stayed there—spent all his life in virtual reality. By the way, it was on his watch they packed my father off to the loony bin…. And do you know what this mummy remembers before he dies, the most important thing in his life? That he put up a new departmental apartment building for the KGB in Kyiv: made sure all his cronies had a place to live! My jaw dropped when I heard it: what kind of a Gestapo chief is that? I thought he’d at least lash out at the nationalists he used to fight, you know, regret that he didn’t quite finish them bastards off, since now they’ve brought the great country down. But he couldn’t care less—the only reality he had and still has is this one: a departmental apartment building. A family corporation, like the mob. Beyond that, the world doesn’t exist for these people; that’s how they see it—like a picture they chose for themselves, and on which they can push the delete button if they want to. Not much by way of ideas there, you’re right! What kind of government can there be with ideas like that? You’re a historian, Vadym,” I resort to my last argument (like all serious people who didn’t start out as goons, Vadym likes pointing out his former “civilian” vocation).

  “You don’t need to be reminded how that corporate country burst, like a soap bubble, every time it came face to face with a reality on which it couldn’t press its delete button. That’s exactly what happened at the beginning of the war, only Hitler helped them out that time, by turning out to be a worse zombie yet—folks took a good look at what rolled into their backyards and went to fight for real. And in our own memory—when Chernobyl blew up: an idiot could see that the system was on its last legs, an idiot would’ve known people should have been evacuated from the contaminated area. But these zombies herded children to the Labor Day parade in Kyiv, and the KGB was running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, desperately recruiting new finks because it ran out of the ones it already had… pressing the same old buttons, as you say. Lies can get you to the end of the world, but they can’t bring you back, thank God. You can’t keep raping reality with impunity; sooner or later it will take its revenge, and the later it comes, the more terrifying it will be. You don’t kid around with these things, Vadym!”