As Europeans try to make sense of the war on their doorstep, boycotts targeting Russia have reached past the country’s oil exports to its poets, painters and tennis players. The invasion of Ukraine earlier this year set off the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II; it also, according to past contributor Vladimir Vertlib (tr. Julie Winter), inspired a wave of “outright hostility” against Russian literature. This thoughtful essay by the Vienna-based Jewish Russian writer is an argument about the baby and the bathwater—Pushkin and Putin—and a strident call for nuance in wartime.
When I was a child, other people always knew who I was better than I did. One day my parents told me that I was Jewish. But I wanted to be a Leningradian because I was born in Leningrad, known today as St. Petersburg. My parents laughed. They said that you could be a Jew and someone from Leningrad, that was no problem, even if you lived in Vienna. I didn’t feel Austrian or Viennese at that time, although I was undoubtedly at home in our neighborhood Brigittenau. To this day, parts of this Viennese district, as well as the adjoining Leopoldstadt, have remained the only place in the world where I feel I belong.
This ambivalent identity confusion was soon as much a part of my being as was my accent-free German and everyone’s mispronunciation of my first name, which I accepted and eventually even adopted myself. For my Austrian classmates and teachers, however, the matter was perfectly clear: I was a typical Russian. Why I was “typical” was a mystery to me because whenever my classmates or teachers described something as “typically Russian,” they immediately said that they “of course” didn’t mean me.
Brigittenau, where I went to elementary school and later to high school, had belonged to the Soviet occupied zone in Vienna after the war; the memory of that time was still fresh almost fifty years ago when I started school. The “Russians” were said to be brutal and uncultured. They drank water from toilet bowls, screwed light bulbs into sockets that were disconnected from any source of power and then wondered why they didn’t light up, raped women en masse, stole, robbed, murdered and destroyed senselessly, simply out of anger and revenge. Russians are emotional, it was said. Sometimes they’re like children—warm, naive and helpful—but they could suddenly become brutal and unpredictable like wild animals. They were, after all, a soulful people, in both negative and positive respects. The latter was attributed to me. If my essays or speeches were emotional, it was said to be due to my “Russian soul,” and people thought they were paying me a compliment. I, on the other hand, was always unpleasantly affected by these attributions, because I knew, even in elementary school, that Jews and Russians were not the same thing. No Russian, my parents explained to me, would ever accept me as his equal. In the former Soviet Union, ethnic groups, which included Jews, were clearly distinct. So my supposed “Russian soul” was not only embarrassing, it was also presumptuous. I was assigned something that I was not at all entitled to, based on my ethnicity.
Almost half a century later, the Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko, who lives in Kiev, has written about the crimes committed by the Red Army in Germany in 1945. In her article she draws parallels to the current crimes of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, and complains about a German friend who “like all Germans” [sic!] feels guilty towards Russia for crimes Germans committed there and in all of Europe in 1945. It’s a way for Germans to not exactly justify Russia’s actions, but at least explain them, in a loose kind of “tit for tat” logic. Ms. Zabuzhko is mistaken: the large majority of Germans (and Austrians) do not have feelings of guilt towards Russia, and for those who do, Russia’s campaign of aggression and destruction against Ukraine comes in very handy for many of them to finally exchange their feelings of guilt with impunity for the resentment they had hitherto concealed with shame. “The Russians”—rapists, murderers and bandits. Doesn’t that somewhat relativize the crimes of one’s own grandfathers, who once rampaged in Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere? It has long since ceased to be about marauding soldiers gone wild, sent by a terrorist regime into a dirty war. Now it has to do with the “character of the people,” that which is Russian, that which is typical. Putin’s military conquest campaign and Ukraine’s defensive war against this aggression have from the very beginning also been waged as brutal culture wars, and large parts of Western societies have willingly joined in.
For someone like me, this is a bitter and painful déjà vu experience, but of course, once again, they do not mean me. With my Jewish origins, roots in Belarus and some relatives originating from Ukraine, it has become more difficult for others to categorize me.
“Russians” should get what they deserve, we read on social networks—and in seemingly serious newspaper articles. Russia’s backbone should be broken once and for all, we hear at the pubs where the regulars gather—and at panel discussions. What was “Islam” not so long ago (and will certainly be again soon) is now “the Russian.” He is no better today than he was in 1945, but the Ukrainians will show him, they say. The fact that Ukrainians were the second largest ethnic group in the Red Army in 1945 and committed war crimes in Germany and Austria just like their Russian comrades apparently plays no role in all these absurd historical analogies. I’m waiting for someone to claim that the Ukrainians from that time are not the Ukrainians of today, but that today’s Russians differ little from their grandparents and great-grandparents. These sorts of arguments would almost sound sophisticated, but hardly anyone takes the trouble now to offer up such sophistication. In times of fear and crisis, you rarely worry about the details—you simply brush them aside.
In the Austria of my childhood and youth, no one even thought of distinguishing between Ukrainians and Russians. The former Soviet occupied zone was called the “Russian Zone” by everyone. East of Hungary lay Russia, which reached as far as Tbilisi, Baku and Tashkent. Who among today’s Russia-haters and freshly-minted Ukrainian patriots in this country would have been able to name even a single Ukrainian poet, musician or artist half a year ago? And how many of them associated the word “Ukraine” exclusively with prostitution, crime and abject poverty, just ten years ago? Today, people are creating their own image of the citizens of this country—painting them as brave heroes, self-sacrificing mothers and proud democrats. But woe to Ukrainians should they ever fall out of their assigned roles. How quickly admiration turns into disappointment, support into indifference and gratitude into annoyance.
It’s easy to understand why many people in Ukraine want nothing more to do with anything Russian, including Russian culture. In regions of Ukraine where Russian is spoken by the majority, it may seem absurd and disturbing that monuments to the classical Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), more than a hundred years old, are being torn down; squares named after Leo Tolstoy are being given new names; and Ukrainian libraries no longer want books in Russian. Alexander Pushkin, who had an Ethiopian grandfather, was certainly not a racist. He never had anything against Ukraine and was undoubtedly not an ideological forerunner of the Putin regime. Such accusations probably could be made against the Russian chauvinist and antisemite Dostoevsky, or the Ukraine-hater Joseph Brodsky, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature. Oksana Zabuzhko, however, establishes a direct connection between Tolstoy’s novels and the massacres of Bucha—a claim as monstrous and outrageous as the war itself, which makes such ways of thinking possible in the first place. The fact is that Russian culture is being emotionally overhyped by the Putin regime and misused for propaganda purposes, while Ukrainians are being denied their own national and cultural identity. It’s understandable that many Ukrainians no longer want to see monuments to Pushkin on the main squares of their cities—and these are disappearing, just as the ones dedicated to Lenin or Marx did a few years ago. Still, many Ukrainians, even in wartime, in air-raid shelters or at the front, continue to listen to Russian music, follow Russian bloggers and read Russian literature. In a photo of the ruins of a house destroyed by Russian missiles in eastern Ukraine, I could see a half-torn, blood-stained book with “Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment” clearly written on its cover.
Russophobia has long since arrived here in Central and Western Europe—a frightening and unsettling development. Behavior that is understandable among people in Ukraine who have no choice but to experience war and terror must neither be trivialized nor excused far from the events of that war, with their immediate impact and associated trauma. But what is happening now is that Russian culture is often unwelcome in many European countries. Russian artists are being disinvited from festivals and events or are not allowed to participate in competitions because of their nationality. While this was and is not the norm, it has happened on a regular basis, especially at the beginning of the war. Now and then there is even outright hostility against people who are considered or identified as Russians. I myself have taken to putting Russian books that I’m reading on trains, on park benches or in coffee houses into the covers of German or English books, or wrapping them in paper.
Once resentment is activated, it persists for a long time and is very difficult to overcome. Ukrainian refugees who have come to us usually want nothing to do with Russians who live here—not even with those who openly oppose Putin’s tyranny and would like to help them.
Given all this, the question arises as to what we are actually fighting for. “We” means the free Western world, which Ukraine is defending, as they themselves claim, so that it will not be overrun by Putin’s troops. It is the free world that is rightly, directly or indirectly, on Ukraine’s side in this war and supports it politically, economically, or militarily, if not with its own soldiers. This includes the United States, as well as Great Britain, Sweden, Poland and Austria, which is still formally neutral.
Attentive observers have long recognized that Putin’s campaign of attack and destruction is first and foremost an ideological war. A democratic Ukraine is a threat to the authoritarian Russian regime, not because the people there are different, but because they are so similar to the people in Russia. Russian-speaking people in Ukraine are the primary targets of attacks and conquests, and of reprisals and terror against the civilian population. Under no circumstances should Russian-speaking Ukrainians be allowed to serve as role models for people in the Russian Federation. At the very least, everyone should be made to understand the consequences of shaking off old Soviet patterns of thinking and behavior, and what happens when people desire freedom. That’s why the war is being waged so relentlessly, that’s why the Ukrainian resistance is so consistent and uncompromising, and that’s why “we” should also never forget that this war is about defending freedom, democracy and truth against dictatorship, chauvinism and lies.
However, this means that we must not sink to the level of the opponent and adopt his own methods against him. The Putin regime claims that Ukraine is a Nazi country, but we, in turn, must not claim that Russia is a country of fascists and criminals. There are many Russians who are against the regime or simply don’t know what is really happening in Ukraine. Putin’s propaganda machine proclaims that Ukrainians are not a separate people, and that their culture is inferior or nothing more than a facet of Russian national culture. But we must not, in return, stigmatize or erase Russian culture. And we must exert pressure on Ukraine to ensure that those values that are being defended militarily are actually being lived in Ukraine. These include—even in times of war—more legal guarantees, a more consistent fight against corruption, a freer press, more critical discernment and less pathos. Otherwise, what signal would we be sending to our own people in Europe, whom we are already preparing for a worsening energy crisis and the associated hardships? And most importantly, what would we be conveying to the many Russian opposition figures, intellectuals, artists, journalists and bloggers who are fighting against Putin’s regime, who are locked up in camps or forced to flee into exile? These are the people with whom “we” will work in the future, who will one day be our partners when the authoritarian regime has been overthrown or dissolved. Is it useful and beneficial to tell them that they are a nation of primitive criminals, that the culture of their country is reprehensible and should be ousted from the public sphere? Doesn’t this approach actually serve the Putin regime and its propaganda, which for a long time has claimed repeatedly that sinister powers of the West have conspired against Russia and want to destroy it?
I, for one, will continue to read and quote Russian classics; I’ll continue to invoke Russian humanists and point out the quality of Russian poetry or music. I have no desire to abandon the Russian language and culture, which are also mine, to the Putin regime, even if many Russia-haters here have long since taken that step.
Translated from the German by Julie Winter
Photograph of Vladimir Vertlib by Yves Noir
Vladimir Vertlib was born on July 2, 1966 in Leningrad, USSR (today St. Petersburg, Russia). He emigrated with his parents in 1971, staying temporarily in Israel, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and the USA before settling permanently in Austria. He studied economics in Vienna, and since 1993 he has been a freelance writer. He now lives in Salzburg and Vienna. Vertlib writes novels, essays, book reviews and articles for newspapers and magazines. He is co-editor of the Vienna-based journal Zwischenwelt. Journal of the Culture of Exile and Resistance. During the refugee crisis in 2015/16, he was active in Salzburg as a volunteer refugee aid worker. His play ÜBERALL NIRGENDS lauert die Zukunft on the subject of the refugee crisis, was performed in Salzburg and Munich, among other cities. His books include the novels Zwischenstationen (1999), Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur (for which he received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, 2001), Letzter Wunsch (2003), Schimons Schweigen (2012), Viktor hilft (2018) and Zebra im Krieg (2022). His novel Lucia Binar und die russische Seele was longlisted for the German Book Prize in 2015.
Julie Winter received her MA and PhD in German literature from Northwestern University and an MA focusing on English linguistics from Eastern Washington University. She teaches all levels of German at Western Washington University. She is the translator of Freya von Moltke’s Memories of Kreisau (University of Nebraska Press) and three other memoirs from the German resistance and World War II. She has translated and published numerous shorter works of fiction and literary non-fiction and is assistant editor of No Man’s Land: New German Literature in English Translation.
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