The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  Andrei was from Novosibirsk and a northern Siberian family but had been born in Kazakhstan and raised there until the age of ten. He had spent some time in Boston on a work/travel visa working for the hardcore label Bridge 9, after quitting a construction job with some Poles in Dorchester. We pulled over at a rest stop where a dozen shirtless army guys milled around in the sun. I was about to make a snarky comment about the array of terrifying knives for sale until it occurred to me that any given truck stop in Oklahoma would have all that and more. (Though maybe it wouldn’t have had the fifty vultures, circling something I couldn’t quite see behind the building.) A sign read “2800 km to Chita.”

  “Chita,” said Andrei. “I’ve got some stories from there.”

  “And?”

  He didn’t elaborate. “It’s like a giant bad neighborhood. Everyone’s trying to leave.”

  He turned over the Patti Smith tape as we passed an Armenian shashlik (kebab) house and stopped to use the bathroom. In the back, they were building a stage and dance floor that would hold hundreds. In the front stood a statue of an eagle crushing a snake. Next to that, two live bears—Misha and Masha—in an iron cage.

  “Rock and Roll Nigger” came on the tape, and I started singing along under my breath. “You like this song?” Andrei asked.

  “Yeah, it’s a classic,” I said.

  “Is it . . . controversial in America?”

  I explained that people understand the premise that it’s about feeling like an outsider and a defiant outcast. He nodded and kept driving.

  Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and some of the other Siberian cities have a distinctive local architecture of nineteenth-century rough wood houses, like aristocratic log cabins with ornate carved trim painted in fading ceruleans, purples, and reds. The buildings are deteriorating and sinking into the unsteady ground and facing an uncertain future. “The ones that aren’t protected [by the government], they get burned down by developers,” said Kostya. “If someone is living there, first they will burn the porch, as a”—he and Andrei briefly debated the translation—“as a hint.”

  A new big business in Tomsk was selling insurance against Lyme disease. The old big business was importing used cars from Japan. “A whole region lived on it,” said Kostya. Many of the eastern Siberian cities teem with cars with steering wheels on the right, “Japanese style.” Importers would ship the cars to Vladivostok, then move them westward across the country via train, selling them in the cities along the tracks, until Putin raised the tariff on auto imports to “encourage” the purchase of domestic vehicles.

  “That must have been an unpopular reform,” I observed.

  “Yes,” said Kostya. “There were riots. People burned Lada dealerships. I saw a picture with ten or twelve guys with machine guns protecting one of these stores.”

  Would you ever, I asked him, consider moving away from here?

  “To Moscow or Saint Petersburg, no,” he said. “I don’t like cities, they are moving too fast. And people from Siberia, when they go to Saint Petersburg and take a shower, they’re breaking out in pimples, because of the different water!” He paused. “It’s hard here, though, if you want to make some change, that is—against the grain.”

  From the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, Tomsk was a way station for the tea trade from China to the Nizhny Novgorod market via Perm’. Custine detailed an annual delivery of “75 or 80,000 chests of tea, half of which remains in Siberia, to be transported to Moscow during the winter on sledges, and the other half arrives at the fair.”1 It was probably my favorite Siberian town: off the main train line, it was compact, charming, shaded, and full of those picturesque old wooden houses.

  A few decades later, Kennan complained of getting caught behind the caravans of “slow, plodding” sledges of tea from China—shades of today’s Polish trucks.

  Chekhov disagreed, variously describing Tomsk in letters to friends as “not worth a brass farthing” and “a dull and drunken sort of place; no beautiful women at all, and Asiatic lawlessness. The most notable thing about Tomsk is that governors come here to die.” He expanded on that opinion to his family: “Tomsk is a most boring town. To judge from the drunks I have met and the supposedly intelligent people who have come to my room to pay their respects, the local inhabitants are deadly boring. At all events I find their company so disagreeable that I have given instructions that I am not receiving anyone.”

  Kostya asked about the politics of other punks on the tour. The touring circuit we had been on since we arrived in Poland would be familiar to anyone from the German squat and youth center archipelago and the scene associated with American labels like No Idea and Plan-It-X Records: young, idealistic kids who love Fugazi and Hot Water Music, planning antifascist action days and running leftist infoshops and zine exchanges. Their politics were progressive; they were fighting what they considered the good fight. Notwithstanding the fact that they were entirely tangential to the effective politics of the country, they had a valuable sense of camaraderie and moral grounding.

  Kostya and Andrei, on the other hand, agreed with the old cliché that Russia needs the “knout or the pierogi”—or, as we might say, the carrot or the stick. It’s the historical idea that, as Custine quotes a Russian aristocrat, Mongol despotism “established itself [in Russia] at the very period that servitude ceased in the rest of Europe. . . . Bondage was thenceforward established . . . as a constituent principle of society.” This is the view that gives grudging respect to figures like Ivan, Peter, Stalin, and Putin—that only the iron hand of a stern but fair tyrant-cum-father figure, cruel in what used to be called the “Asiatic” model, can corral and control the sprawling and fractious Russian nation (including, of course, its colonized territory).

  Kostya ran a small punk label and had been putting on shows in Tomsk for years. His great-grandfather was a Kazakh kulak (“wealthy peasant”), exiled four times. Another great-grandfather was an NKVD officer who worked with the Chinese army. “I’ve seen pictures of him. I think he was—not really a nice guy. He looked—typical.” Kostya’s father had been the head of the medical department of a local university but lost his job after he objected to a Putin policy that replaced a free prescription drug benefit for seniors with a cash stipend. Kostya left college and got a job working for an offset printing company to support the family. “It is hard to put on punk shows officially here—I mean [to publicize them] with posters and Facebook and so on. Some people will show up and wait for you after the show, you know what I mean? . . . I saw down by the beach a few years ago—the students like to have flash mobs there, and [at] this one they were wearing terrorist masks, and doing—” He mimed a Nazi salute.

  Ultra-nationalist thugs, of course, are a danger anytime you have a stagnant backwater whose best days seem irretrievably past. As Christopher Hitchens put it, “nationalism and chauvinism are often strongest at their peripheries—Alexander the Macedonian, Bonaparte the Corsican, Stalin the Georgian”—and, he might have added, at the psychological peripheries, where dwell the economically tangential and the politically crippled. “Developing an overweening national pride is always a sign,” Michel Houllebecq once wrote, “that you have nothing much else to be proud of.” International punk has footholds in both the positive and creative and the negative and destructive axes of what Greil Marcus calls “the geopolitics of popular culture.”

  For all their devotion to and passionate advocacy for progressive Western punk tropes like veganism and antiglobalism, the punks I had talked to thus far had a disheartening aversion to, or apathy about, their corrupt and depressing local and national politics. Like Yegor from Saint Petersburg, there was a general disdain for the protests that sprang up in Moscow and Saint Petersburg in the wake of Putin’s 2011 reelection. The common view was that they were of interest only to the urban, Westernized bourgeoisie, and doomed.

  The feminist punk band–art collective Pussy Riot had already been arrested, but the international attention generated by the
ir conviction and imprisonment wouldn’t come to full force until the fall. When I asked the punks I met in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and further afield about the controversy, their opinions were muted, verging on dismissive: the women were naïve; they weren’t really a band, or at least not a band anyone knew;2 what did they expect, and what are we supposed to do about it? In this apathetic light, their focus on Western-style punk ethics came to seem an escapist distraction with the veneer of protest, and a funneling-off of critical energy.3

  This was basically true. Pussy Riot the band was more a pseudonymous vehicle for performance art and protest by a larger collective than a band in the traditional sense.

  The counterargument, as articulated by political scientist Kevin Dunn, is that the global idea of punk rock in the Internet age, with its egalitarian ethos and ability to repurpose international telecommunications to disseminate “counterhegemonic expression,” offers a kind of alternative civil society in repressive states: “Punk rock is not just a medium of global communication; the medium itself becomes a subversive message in its own right. . . . While some observers occasionally bemoan the ‘apolitical’ nature of some punk rock scenes, often those critiques operate from a simplistic framework of understanding what can be regarded as political . . . the mere expression of punk rock can be regarded as a political act in itself.”

  Kostya lived on the edge of town in one of the gray concrete housing projects, built around an overgrown courtyard with a rusting playground. Driving to his place for dinner (borscht, potatoes with mushrooms, tomato and onion salad; a cold tea of mint, whole cranberries, lemon balm, lemon, and sugar), he asked if we’d met an American named Dave in Ufa. I said we had. Kostya said they had been friends until a “cultural misunderstanding.” He and Andrei exchanged a meaningful look, and Kostya said he’d explain later.

  As we brought our bags in, he pointed out graffiti: “Kill the Jews.” “I saw the guy who wrote it. It was weird. Usually you expect that to be a young kid, but he was forty, fifty years old!”

  After the show we stood outside a supermarket, waiting for their crew of friends to buy beer before they went and smoked weed on the beach of the reservoir under an orange half-moon. It was then they explained the “cultural misunderstanding” that severed their friendship with Dave. Andrei’s band, who are on Kostya’s label, is called Niggers. (This explained some stickers on Kostya’s mom’s refrigerator.) Don’t you agree, they asked, that punk rock is about provocation, and nothing provocative should be off the table?

  You’re going to have trouble convincing most Americans of that, I said—hypocrisy or no. Maria told them about her friends from New York who decided to call their band Ching Chong Song. After stubbornly sticking to the name through protests and boycotts, they eventually changed it after an incident in which the people with whom they were staying that night had been, unbeknownst to both parties, boycotting their show. They had clung to their contrarian anti-PC stance for too long, and it became a pointless expense of energy that led to conflict solely for conflict’s sake.

  Andrei said that didn’t matter, that his band wasn’t for the mass public anyway. He said it expressed how they felt, as Russians, as Russian punks, as outcasts, embattled at home and stereotyped overseas. Their record was called “Ugly Russians.” Like the Patti Smith song—she used the word, why couldn’t he? He pointed out that punk bands casually reference Hitler and the Nazis all the time. Richard Hell, I remembered, was quoted in the NME in 1977 saying, “Punks are niggers.” Are both Hell and Smith examples of what scholar Julie Roberts called “the long European tradition of using art as a vehicle for the exploration of complex, uncomfortable and troubling issues . . . utilized by the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, the marginalized and the reviled to speak out and assert their own position”—or just kids (so to speak) pushing a button that now sounds a sour note?

  I said that using a discredited ideology as an object of or vector for satire was different from adapting it to an identity as oppressed outsiders—not least if you were coming from a historically imperialistic country. Kostya and Andrei seemed disappointed that I didn’t agree that Dave was being unreasonable. Andrei remained in a sulk for the remainder of the evening.

  I remembered “Kill the Niggers,” the smash hit from “the most popular band in Rostov-on-Don.” “Russian artists,” wrote the American expat journalist Mark Ames, “going back to the Romantics like Lermontov and Pushkin, up through Dostoyevsky and experimentalists like Kharms, have always had a way of borrowing their aesthetics from the West, Russifying them, and taking them one step too far.” And the vocabularies of provocation often resist translation. The fascination that some Western punks had with fascist symbols, in particular, became a problem for Soviet and post-Soviet punk.

  Beginning in 1983, as Sergei Zhuk relates in his book Rock and Roll in the Rocket City, General Secretary Yuri Andropov, “concerned ‘with the social control of young people’ . . . declared war on Western pop music, [citing] ‘repertoires of a dubious nature’ . . . [and] the ‘distortions, confusion, and antisocial patterns of behavior’ associated with Western degenerate music.” Rock clubs were closed, and bands were forced to perform at anti-American rallies to demonstrate “their loyalty and ideological reliability.” The Soviet government policy against homegrown punk was similar to its war on rock in general but distinct in several important particulars. By purposefully or accidentally confusing and conflating punks in general with neofascist skinheads, the authorities amplified a dynamic of shifting boundaries between the two groups that continues to resonate.4

  The following section draws upon the writings of Yngvar Steinholt and Sergei Zhuk.

  Punk imagery, which came through official channels mostly in its late 1970s British incarnation, arrived stripped of the (admittedly vague) signifying markers that distinguished genuine neofascists from leftists and from simple provocateurs like Johnny Rotten, Mark E. Smith, and Lou Reed, who used Nazi imagery for its shock value. The swastika, wrote Dick Hebdige in his book Subculture, “was made available to the punks (via Bowie and Lou Reed’s ‘Berlin’ phase) [and] reflected the punks’ interest in a decadent and evil Germany . . . which had ‘no future.’ It evoked a period redolent with a powerful mythology.” He continued:

  Conventionally, as far as the British were concerned, the swastika signified “enemy.” In punk usage, the symbol lost its “natural” meaning—fascism. The punks were not generally sympathetic to the parties of the extreme right. . . . On the contrary . . . the widespread support for the anti-fascist movement (e.g. the Rock Against Racism campaign) seem to indicate that the punk subculture grew up partly as an antithetical response to the reemergence of racism in the mid-70s. . . . The swastika was worn because it was guaranteed to shock. (A punk asked by Time Out why she wore a swastika replied: “Punks just like to be hated.”). . . . It was exploited as an empty effect. . . . Ultimately, the symbol was as “dumb” as the rage it provoked.

  But the “symbolic” provocations were taken at face value by the Soviet press. The Russian music journalist Artemy Troitsky remembers that “the only thing anyone knew about punks was that they were ‘fascists’ because that’s how our British-based correspondents had described them. . . . To illustrate this, a few photos of ‘monster’ [sic] with swastikas were printed. . . . The image of punks as Nazis was established very effectively.”

  Given the centrality of the apocalyptic anti-Nazi campaigns of World War II to the Soviet self-image, this was a powerfully negative association. Perversely, it only added to the subversive appeal of fascist imagery for some Russian punks: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and to identify with the greatest historical foe of the Soviet state was to express the power of one’s own opposition to Soviet Communism. “Fascism” as a synonym for pure evil became, by convenient or lazy association, “an epithet hurled at whomever the Soviet authorities happened to designate as the worst ideological foe of the USSR or its international interests,” independent of actual p
olitical characteristics, wrote historian Mischa Gabowitsch. This decoupling of insult from meaning turned fascism into a useful shorthand for dissidence. Both Yegor Letov and a later 1990s group formed bands called Adolf Gitler,5 the latter band adopting the stage names Goebbels, Gimmler, and Goring. Letov’s second band, Posev (Seed), was named after a World War II–era anticommunist—and at the time anticommunist necessarily meant Nazi collaborator—publishing house.

  The Russian language, which has no h sound, substitutes a hard g.

  This led to some confusion about which bands were officially condoned: the Clash, though iconic punks, were regarded approvingly by the Soviet state for the band’s friendly relations with the British left on issues such as labor and race relations. Other scenesters, wrote Zhuk, protested the government bans on grounds of aesthetic taxonomy: “When one of our discotheque enthusiasts interfered and told the KGB people that AC/DC and Kiss were not punk rock bands, he was arrested by the police and removed from the dance floor.” But the net was cast widely and none too perfectly. The band 10cc was banned as fascist because the Cyrillic letter С is pronounced like the Latin s, and thus the band was assumed to be referencing the SS in their name (Kiss was blacklisted for similar reasons). A British article contrasting punks and skinheads was vaguely translated to conflate the two (identifying “shaven temples of the head” as the distinctive marker of a punk). Ironic intent of any kind was lost in translation.

  Young people with a contrarian bent got the idea: punks were fascists, fascists were anti-Soviet, thus if you were an anti-Soviet punk the most effective vehicle for your disaffection was fascist and right-wing imagery. “In 1983,” Zhuk wrote, “the Dnipropetrovs’k [Ukraine] police arrested ten students from the local vocational school . . . [who] had made special white robes, put the words ‘Ku Klux Klan’ on them, and tried to ‘imitate acts of this American fascist organization.’”