A recent interview with Sorokin

[Alexandra Smith]

Der Spiegel Online
February 2, 2007
SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR VLADIMIR SOROKIN
"Russia Is Slipping Back into an Authoritarian Empire"

Russian author Vladimir Sorokin disscusses waning
freedom of opinion in his country, the lack of
opposition against President Vladimir Putin and
dangerous Western ambivalence that is enabling
the Kremlin's growing authoritarian tendencies to take root.

Vladimir Sorokin is one of the best- known
contemporary authors in Russia. He established
his literary reputation in the West with his
novels "The Queue," and "Ice." In his latest
book, "Day of the Oprichnik," he describes Russia
in the year 2028 as a nationalist country ruled
with an iron fist that has shut itself off from the West by building a wall.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Sorokin, in your new novel "Day of
the Oprichnik," you portray an authoritarian
Russia ruled by a group of members of the secret
police. The story is set in the future, but this
future is similar to the past under Ivan the
Terrible. Aren't you really drawing parallels to today's Russia?

Sorokin: Of course it's a book about the present.
Unfortunately, the only way one can describe it
is by using the tools of satire. We still live in
a country that was established by Ivan the Terrible.

SPIEGEL: His reign was in the 16th century. The
czardom was followed by the Soviet Union, then
democracy under (former President Boris) Yeltsin
and (current President Vladimir) Putin. Has
Russia not yet completed its break with the past?

Sorokin: Nothing has changed when it comes to the
divide between the people and the state. The
state demands a sacred willingness to make sacrifices from the people.

SPIEGEL: The absolute ruler in your book bears
some resemblance to President Vladimir Putin ...

Sorokin: ... which was not my intention. Coming
up with a Putin satire wouldn't be very
thrilling. I'm an artist, not a journalist. And a
novel is not a documentary. In my book, I am
searching for an answer to the question of what
distinguishes Russia from true democracies.

SPIEGEL: What explanation have you found?

Sorokin: Germans, Frenchmen and Englishmen can
say of themselves: "I am the state." I cannot say
that. In Russia only the people in the Kremlin
can say that. All other citizens are nothing more
than human material with which they can do all kinds of things.

SPIEGEL: In old Russian, the word "oprichnik"
means "a special one." Do you feel that the
divide between the top and the bottom in Russia
today can no longer be bridged?

Sorokin: In our country there are special people
who are permitted to do anything. They are the
sacrificial priests of power. Anyone who is not a
member of this group has no clout with the state.
One can be as pure as can be -- just as magnate
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was -- and still lose
everything in a flash and end up in prison. The
Khodorkovsky case is typical of the "oprichnina"
-- the system of oppression I describe.

SPIEGEL: Does a character like Khodorkovsky appear in your book?

Sorokin: Such a parallel didn't occur to me.
However, my book does begin with an attack on a
rich man. This is almost a daily occurrence
nowadays. It has always been that way in Russia.
Only those who are loyal to the people in power can become wealthy.

SPIEGEL: How is the elite reacting to the literary images you paint?

Sorokin: The reaction to my book has been
tumultuous. But I had no other choice than to put
all this on paper. I have been carrying around
this wish for a long time, and so it took me only three months to write it.

SPIEGEL: Why did you suddenly feel the need to write this book?

Sorokin: The citizen lives in each of us. In the
days of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev and
Yeltsin, I was constantly trying to suppress the
responsible citizen in me. I told myself that I
was, after all, an artist. As a storyteller I was
influenced by the Moscow underground, where it
was common to be apolitical. This was one of our
favorite anecdotes: As German troops marched into
Paris, Picasso sat there and drew an apple. That
was our attitude -- you must sit there and draw
your apple, no matter what happens around you. I
held fast to that principle until I was 50. Now
the citizen in me has come to life.

SPIEGEL: Some of your novels are filled with
violence. In "Ice," for example, human beings are
mistreated with hammers made of ice. Why is
Russian society still so preoccupied with violence?

Sorokin: As a child I perceived violence as a
sort of natural law. In the totalitarian Soviet
Union, oppression held everything together. It
was the sinister energy of our country. I had
that sense by as early as kindergarten and grade
school. Later on I wanted to understand why human
beings are unable to do without violence. It's a
mystery I haven't solved to this day. Yes, violence is my main theme.

SPIEGEL: How is this sinister energy reflected in Russia today?

Sorokin: It is alive in every bureaucrat.
Whenever you encounter a minor official, he lets
you know that he is above you and that you depend
on him. It is reflected in the superpower
mentality that nourishes the Kremlin. An empire
always demands sacrifices from its people.

SPIEGEL: Criminal proceedings were launched
against you five years ago for supposedly
pornographic passages in your novel "Blue Bacon
Fat." Is censorship about to be reintroduced in Russia?

Sorokin: What happened at the time was an attempt
to test writers' steadfastness and the public's
willingness to accept open censorship. It didn't work.

SPIEGEL: Did the pressure that was applied to you intimidate other writers?

Sorokin: Certainly. I have Mikhail Gorbachev and
Boris Yeltsin to thank that a Russian writer can
not only write anything he wants today, but also
publish it. I don't know what will happen in the
future. The media -- television, newspapers and
magazines -- are already controlled by the state today.

SPIEGEL: One of the characters in your book brags
"that not just one diplomat was expelled from
Moscow, not just one journalist was thrown from
the television tower and not just one
whistleblower was drowned in the river." When you
wrote this you knew nothing about the murder of
investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Sorokin: I just imagined what would happen to
Russia if it isolated itself completely from the
Western world -- that is, if it erected a new
Iron Curtain. There is much talk about Russia
being a fortress. Orthodox churches, autocracy
and national traditions are supposed to form a
new national ideology. This would mean that
Russia would be overtaken by its past, and our past would be our future.

SPIEGEL: How realistic is such a relapse in a globalized world?

Sorokin: Putin likes to quote a sentence from
Czar Alexander III, who said that Russian has
only two allies -- the army and the navy. As a
citizen, this makes me sit up and take notice.
This is a concept of self-imposed isolation, a
defense strategy that sees Russia surrounded by
enemies. When I turn on the TV I see a general
calmly claiming that our missiles are ahead of
the latest American models by three five-year
plans. It's a nightmare. We are creating a
concept of the enemy, just as they did in the
Soviet era. This is a giant step backward.

SPIEGEL: You have no confidence in the current Kremlin administration?

Sorokin: This is their fault, not mine. My
television teaches me that everything was
wonderful in the Soviet Union. According to the
programs I watch, the KGB and apparatchiks were
angels, and the Stalin era was so festive that
the heroes of the day must still be celebrated today.

SPIEGEL: Why is there no opposition from Russia's legendary intelligentsia?

Sorokin: It's astonishing. I can't help but gain
the impression that our champions of the freedom
of opinion -- writers, emigrants and civil rights
activists -- had only one goal in mind: the
collapse of the Soviet Union, started by
Alexander Solzhenitzyn. And now they are all silent.

SPIEGEL: How do you feel about the former chess
world champion, Garry Kasparov, who is trying to build an opposition movement?

Sorokin: I have respect for him and other members
of the opposition movement, like former Prime
Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and (politician) Irina
Khakamada. But these politicians do not exist for
most people. About the only place you will find
them is on the Internet. If a state-owned station
were to report tomorrow that Kasyanov was
visiting Russian cities and talking to the
people, the manager of that station would be
looking for a new job the next day.

SPIEGEL: What can be done?

Sorokin: It's pointless to expect change to be
ordered from above. The bureaucracy has grown
such powerful roots, and corruption is so
widespread, that these people have no interest in changing anything.

SPIEGEL: In other words, everything is hopeless?

Sorokin: Everyone must awaken the citizen within
himself. The Russian philosopher Nikolay
Berdyayev once said that Russia has many ideas
and few goods. It was that way throughout the
entire 20th century. Only in the last 15 years
have the Russians managed to dress up and eat
their fill. However, people with full bellies
tend become drowsy. This explains, for example,
the disinterest among students. In no other
country are they as apathetic as they are here.

SPIEGEL: With so much pessimism, do you even like your fellow Russian people?

Sorokin: The word "people" is unpleasant to me.
The phrase "Soviet people" was drummed into us
from childhood on. I love concrete people,
enlightened people who live conscious lives and
do not simply sit there and vegetate. To love the
people you have to be the general secretary of
the Communist Party or an absolute dictator. The
poet Josef Brodsky once said: The trees are more
important to me than the forest.

SPIEGEL: In your book you describe a wall with
which Russia isolates itself from the West. Why is this wall built?

Sorokin: After the Soviet Union collapsed in
1991, former party officials burned their party
books and traded in their black Volga limousines
for black German-made sedans. That was it. We had
no purifying revolution. Neither Communist Party
officials nor KGB generals were forced to give up
the reins of power. In August 1991, I was in the
crowd standing in front of the Lubyanka KGB
building when the monument to KGB founder Felix
Dzerzhinsky was toppled. It seemed as if a new
era was about to begin. But we underestimated the
power of the Soviet Union. It became ingrained in
people's consciousness over the course of seven
decades. After German reunification, West Germany
became a mirror for former East German citizens. We didn't have that.

SPIEGEL: You hold a degree in petroleum
engineering. Was the latest confrontation with
Belarus over natural gas and oil an expression of Moscow's power politics?

Sorokin: Our government hasn't become accustomed
to the fact yet that Georgia, Azerbaijan, the
Baltic states -- in fact, the entire former
Soviet Union -- are now independent countries.
Incidentally, I wrote my thesis on the
development of dampers for oil pipelines.

SPIEGEL: Did this expertise come in handy in your book?

Sorokin: Yes, there is a sentence in it that
reads: "We shut the damper, as the czar ordered."

SPIEGEL: How should German politicians, including
Chancellor Angela Merkel, behave in dealing with the Russian government?

Sorokin: The West should be even more vocal in
insisting that the Russians respect human rights.
All compromise aside, I ask myself whether Russia
is moving in the direction of democracy. I don't
believe it is! Bit by bit, Russia is slipping
back into an authoritarian empire. The worst
thing that can happen to us is indifference in
the West -- that is, if it were interested in
nothing but oil and gas. I am always surprised
when I watch the weather report on German
television. First they show the map of Europe and
then the camera moves to the right. Then comes
Kiev, then Moscow and then everything stops. This
seems to be the West's view of us -- of a wild
Russia that begins past Moscow, a place one
prefers not to see. This is a big mistake. The West must pay closer attention.

SPIEGEL: Does the West understand Russia?

Sorokin: Yes and no. In Russia no one is
surprised when an official accepts a bribe while
at the same time portraying the state as some
sacred entity to which the bourgeois should pay
homage. This all sounds absurd to you. But for
Russians it is completely normal.

SPIEGEL: There used to be a similar attitude
toward the state in Germany. But that changed
after the Nazi dictatorship. Nowadays the state
plays a more modest role in society, just as it does in America.

Sorokin: That just happens to be democracy. The
Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov once said: In a
Democracy, portraits of a nation's leader should
never exceed the size of a postage stamp. That
won't happen so quickly in our country.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Sorokin, we thank you for this interview.

Interview conducted by Martin Doerry and Matthias Schepp.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

********

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