User Submitted Blog Post: Reunited and It Feels So. . .

In the weeks leading up to yesterday’s Russian elections, the American media was full of stories reflecting on Vladimir Putin’s years as President. Whether focusing on the inner sanctum of the Kremlin or its influence on Russian’s hinterlands, these reports repeatedly underscored both the nation’s increasingly authoritarian government and its increasingly robust economy. More often than not, the portrait of this new Russia was shaded with a mixture of regret and fear. What happened to the previous decade’s dream of a Russia comfortably integrated into the West?

The compartmentalization of the mainstream news in the United States and its longstanding reluctance to waste words on historical interpretation makes it difficult for even a highly educated reader to confront this question directly. For better or worse – more the latter, of late, if the crisis in the nation’s housing market is any indication – Americans live in the now at the expense of both the past and future. As a consequence, some of the most prescient analyses of the United States come in displaced forms, particularly its popular culture.

Although academics who devote lengthy treatises to the analysis of television programs like 24 are frequently ridiculed for devoting their energy to entertainment instead of more serious topics, they have the right idea even when they use the wrong tools – self-important rhetoric, needlessly specialized terminology – to convey it. For it is patently clear to anyone who confronts contemporary American politics without prejudice that the country’s popular culture facilitates thought and action that the news itself does not. It’s no accident, to give one obvious example, that Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign was able to make a surprisingly rapid assent to legitimacy at a time when one of the most talked-about shows featured a tough-minded African-American leader.

Where American attitudes towards post-Soviet Russia are concerned, Hollywood’s insistence that the country’s chief export is organized crime – rather than oil and gas – is an apt index for the anxieties set loose upon the end of the Cold War. Just as the attack on the World Trade Center of September 11, 2001 was prefigured, as the philosopher Slavoj Zizek noted two days afterwards, by a series of cinematic representations of the American bubble of security being burst by hostile alien forces, the realization that Russia is once again a formidable geopolitical antagonist was foreshadowed by the menacing Slavic mobsters who played a role in a broad range of popular culture.

A more sophisticated elaboration on that theme can be found in genre fiction of the past two decades, where the disintegration of the Soviet Union is depicted as the source of both danger and opportunity. Perhaps the best example of this approach can be found in William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, where the expatriate author – he has lived in Canada since the 1970s – famous for coining the term “cyberspace” turned his attention from the near future to what might be called a “distant present,” in which features of the world as we know it are exaggerated by the power of wealth.

The novel’s protagonist Cayce Pollard, a “cool hunter” who works as a consultant with leading advertising firms, directs the unresolved feelings generated by the attack on the World Trade Center, in which her father has gone missing, towards participation in an internet subculture devoted to tracking what appears to be a guerrilla filmmaking project. As the story unfolds, however, readers learn that the “footage,” as this project is called, is a labor of love made, not by a savvy Western trendsetter, by a Russian woman severely disabled in a politically motivated attack on her family. Furthermore, what makes it possible for this functionally autistic artist to produce and distribute her work is a combination of her mobster uncle’s money and a state all too willing to adapt the logic of the Gulag to the demands of the post-Soviet political and economic landscape.

In other words, Cayce and her fellow “footage heads,” as they like to call themselves, are captivated by a product made possible by a new Russia where the ruthlessness of capitalism does not replace the ruthlessness of the communist state it supposedly vanquished, but redeploys it for its own ends. They are, in short, an awful lot like the Americans who avidly read the Time magazine that declared Vladimir Putin its “Man of the Year” for 2007. The difference is that, whereas the “footage heads” know they are consuming culture, their real-world counterparts are still likely to believe that they are engaged in the more sober-minded activity of following the news.

Even in an era where the boundary between fact and fiction, news and entertainment is as blurry as it has ever been, few Americans are able to register the degree to which their investment in a particular kind of knowledge doubles as a deposit in the bank of desire. Much has been made recently of President George W. Bush’s comment, upon first meeting Vladimir Putin in the summer of 2001, that, after looking him in the eye, he was able to "get a sense of his soul" and, as a consequence, found him "trustworthy." As this photograph from March, 2004 forcefully indicates, the media was already calling Bush’s assessment into question long before Putin’s Presidency was coming to an end.

The critique of what was retroactively chalked up to Bush's stubborn naïveté reached a peak with the best bon mot of Republican Presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign. Upon learning that Putin had been named Time's "Man of the Year," McCain played off of Bush's words: "I looked into his eyes and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B." But the realization that Putin may be as menacing a strongman as some of his Soviet predecessors hardly comes as a shock. On the contrary, it is the predictability of this outcome that makes Americans open-minded enough to realize it. As the fact that McCain's comment was replayed over and over for laughs suggests, the fear that Putin’s Russia inspires in the United States is of a peculiar stamp. It’s as if the American public had been waiting desperately for a time when it could once again place Russian in the pantheon of its antagonists.

This might not make much political sense. After all, the United States is already stretched dangerously thin with its commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, its need to reign in the ambitions of nations like Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, and its rivalry with a China intent on following the American lead in pursuing an imperialist agenda far from home. To be blunt, a nation already saddled with a disturbing amount of debt does not need another reason to spend money it is unlikely to recoup in the immediate future. Most educated Americans understand this, too, even if they do not wish to admit it.

But Russia’s resurgence as a global power worms its way into the American psyche on pathways barred to reason. The number of recent stories on the Putin Era testifies to a nostalgia for the verities of the Cold War, when mutually assured destruction was, paradoxically, a source of confidence precisely because it was a sure thing. If Americans muse on the foreign policy best suited to meeting the challenges posed by the New Russia, it is largely because they prefer the poses they grew up with, for which they have, in a sense, been trained, to new positions that cause them discomfort.

That the same holds true for a Russia still smarting from its failures in Central Asia and years of domestic terrorist attacks as demoralizing as 9/11 goes without saying. Whether the two countries will derive long-term benefits from revisiting their Cold War “marriage” is another matter. Old wounds may provide more comfort than new ones, shoring up an identity in danger of washing away. But that doesn’t mean that they are any less painful. Indeed, to the extent that they distract us from more recent injuries, they leave us vulnerable to more pressing problems. Perhaps the United States and Russia should enter voluntary counseling together, not so that they can restore their relationship to what it once was, but so that they can help each other to confront a future for which such long-term commitments might be more hindrance than help.