BO I’ h . LI A P l». H A ii I H 1 BI, lULHHCTBL -- CIDIA' - six B/iafOMOBMIf) H3A3HiC r33BTbl «flAMflTb» - fAaUJ3T3fl AtjXGBHUfO H HauiOHa/IbHarG 803(!0)«AEHi5t PtJCH’ - [»m BwoueckoecmR «boii<CA3BC«ia t Ceps^Mi, - be e x - e ;|L-jL-|h|L-|XX CUE X XX ft X X XXiOd 5T5TFT HE7HT 5T5T£THi5THi5iJJiJ7i£i£ISiFi SiFiXIuXEEXHETSiFiSiFTFTF3 3 B HOMEPE: Pa3pyiuHTejni Pocchh. io jrj IO. lIep/iHmttn. OKJieBeraHHbiH mojiboh Tatiiibiii croBop HKB/l h TecTano 1219 £T] ,7. IJacu.ibev. Mto6i.i hmctb Otcmcctbo, Bccth H3 3apy6e>Kbfl: nano othhtb ero y apyrux!... "Chohh3m — 3to epecb" h| //. Koj)t>inu>Ko. rocyflapcTBeinio-npaiiOBaH Ria&Han Tatiiia Katuviepa KOHuenuHs A. KopxoKoe: "51 caoea — naixHOHajincTH- 15 5iX Axaa-IaaM. Taiinbiii bojk/xb uyneiicKiiH. MeCKHH — He CTCCHHXOCb HHCKOJlBKo!" 15 Si rio/X.’lHHHOCTb «Ct1OHCKHX HpOTOKOJOB* Pocchh, npocnncb! 16 15l£Ii5l5lJlSl£i5l£rl£r!£riJi5l£il5!£ri£rl£rl5’idi£ri£ri£)iji5’l5']£i'i£jl£Jl£j!£ri£rl£ri£ri£rl£j K^.EEr: ■ PUSHKIN AT 200 ■ PULP FICTION IN RUSSIA ■ NO(W)STALGIA ■ INTERVIEWS WITH CHUBAIS & AKHMADOV ■ DEMOCRATIC REFORM THE HARRIMAN REVIEW Volume 12, Numbers 2-3 Winter 1999/2000 Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy PUSHKIN AT 200 1 Helena Goscilo BIG-BUCK BOOKS: PULP FICTION IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 6 Natalya Ivanova NO(W)STALGIA: RETRO ON THE (POST-)SOVIET TELEVISION SCREEN 25 Padma Desai INTERVIEW WITH ANATOLY CHUBAIS 33 Dodge Billingsley INTERVIEW WITH ILIAS AKHMADOV 38 Clifford Kupchan U.S. ASSISTANCE FOR DEMOCRATIC REFORM IN RUSSIA 46 Cover: Front page of the monthly newspaper Pamiat' (Memory), no. 1 (1999), published in Moscow by the National-Patriotic Front Pamiat'. The Harriman Institute Bradley F. Abrams, Edward A, Allworth, Karen Barkey, Edward Beliaev, Robert L. Belknap, Thomas P. Bernstein, Richard Bulliet, Kathleen R. Burrill, Vitaly Chernetskv, Istvan Deak, Padma Desai, Richard E. Ericson, Richard Foltz, Anna Frajlich-Zajac, Boris Gasparov, David Goldfarb, Ramila Gorup, Richard F. Gustafson, Leopold H. Haimson, Robert Jervis, Peter Juviler, Manouchehr Kasheff, Christina H. Kiaer, Mara Kashper, Peter Kussi, Valentina Lebedev, Marina Ledkovsky, Robert Legvold, Rado L. Lencek, Robert A. Maguire, Stephen Paul Marks, Rajan Menon, John S. Micgiel, Frank J. Miller, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Marc Nichanian, Vratislav Pechota, Cathy Popkin, Irina Reyfman, Joseph Rothschild, Carol Rounds, Ivan Sanders, Peter J. Sinnott, Jack Snyder, Steven L. Solnick, Michael Stanislawski, David Stark, Lars Tragardh, Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Mark von Hagen (Director), Stanislaw Wellisz, Richard Wortman, Warren Zimmermann, Kimberly M. Zisk. THE HARRIMAN REVIEW, successor to The Harriman Institute Forum, is published quarterly by the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Copyright ©2000 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any kind without written permission is strictly forbidden. Annual subscription rates: U.S. and Canada: $35.00 (1 year), $60.00 (2 years); elsewhere: $45.00 (1 year), $85.00 (2 years). Back issues: $10.00. Check or money order should be made payable to Columbia University. U.S. funds only. Send all orders, changes of address, and subscription inquiries to: The Harriman Review, 1218 International Affairs Building, Columbia University, 420 West 118"' Street, New York, New York 10027. FAX: (212) 666-3481. The Harriman Review is indexed by PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service). PUSHKIN AT 200 Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy Pushkin is the Russian person as he will develop, as he will perhaps appear two hundred years from now. Nikolai Gogol Like a first love, you Russia’s heart will never forget... Fedor Tyutchev Pushkin is our all. Apollon Grigoriev une 6, 1999, the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Alexander Pushkin, marked the high point of the year-long commemoration of the most Jimportant Pushkin jubilee in the past half century. The birthday festivities in Moscow were capped by a gala at the Bolshoi Theater. With Moscow mayor and potential presidential candidate Yury Luzhkov looking on from the third row, the smorgasbord spectacle opened with a filmed statement by Russia's grand old 4^ ptfikgemvi man of culture, the noted medievalist Dmitry Likhachev, who was to pass away only a few months A.C.Jljmkuna later. Setting the tone for the evening's festivities, prmafifJi'i Likhachev began his brief remarks by acknowledging that it was with a "tremor of the soul" that he took up the "incredibly difficult" task of saying "something very substantive, something fundamental about Pushkin." Likhachev then proceeded to validate his concern by reading a statement mired in cliche: Pushkin is Russia's Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante, Homer; among his most characteristic traits is "the perception of the world as good and beautiful. Pushkin created and affirmed the language of Russian culture. Language is not only the words we all use. It is the images, concepts, symbols in which we express our thoughts, our ideas, our worldview." Tellingly, Likhachev concluded his remarks with a quotation, what he termed the "best" of the "very many statements about Pushkin," the famous passage from Gogol's "A Few Words About Pushkin": Pushkin is an extraordinary phenomenon and perhaps the sole phenomenon of the Russian spirit. He is the Russian person as he will “Seven days left until Pushkin's birthday. " Literary Cafe, St. Petersburg. THE HARRIMAN REVIEW develop, as he will appear in two hundred who came later, often fellow writers, who most elo­ years. In him Russian nature, the Russian quently, aptly, hyperbolically encapsulated Pushkin's soul, the Russian language, the Russian char­ significance have become an emotionally charged acter were reflected with the same purity, with idiolect of Russian, a language within a language, a net the same beauty with which a landscape is of quotations in which all Russians—at least those "of reflected on the convex surface of an optical a certain age"—are entangled as pervasively, but far glass. more complicitly, than English speakers are by Shake­ speare or the King James Bible. The rest of the evening was devoted to performances of musical numbers based on Pushkin's works—ranging n the days leading up to the jubilee celebration on from excerpts from the ballet The Fountain of June 6, while the most prestigious "Pushkin places" Bakhchisarai and the opera Boris Godunov to ro­ in the land (from the family estate at mances—alternating with solemn recitations from IMikhailovskoe in the Pskov Region to the Moika Pushkin's poetry and readings from the more canonical Museum in the apartment where Pushkin died in memoirs by the poet's contemporaries. Petersburg to the Pushkin apartment museum on the The backdrop against which these performances Old Arbat in Moscow) were being hurriedly prepared took place, moreover, provided the most compelling for public openings and visits by political figures, visual metaphor not only for the Bolshoi concert, but, quotations from the poet moved out into the streets, more to the point, for the Pushkin jubilee as a whole. displayed on banners spanning main thoroughfares, Throughout the scene changes accompanying the posters, and billboards. The most pervasive manifesta­ musical numbers, the backdrop remained blue, varying tion of public Pushkiniana in Petersburg was the from the light blue of the daytime sky to the deep blue appearance in prominent spots from Senate Square to of the night or, perhaps more to the point, the cosmos, Nevsky Prospect of an attractive, oversized, free­ with quotations from Pushkin fanning out in rays from standing poster. One of Pushkin's own self-caricatures the center. That center remained empty, only subtly lit adorned the top with a sketch of the statue of the by clouds or haze, until the finale. Then, as a boy Bronze Horseman at the bottom, both images superim­ dressed as the adolescent Pushkin walked out to center posed on a ground of Pushkin's words in his own stage reciting "To Chaadaev"— Pushkin's stirring 1818 handwriting, with the famous quotation from Pushkin's lyric calling on Russia's youth to place their finest emotions at the service of Russia, which will surely awaken from its sleep—in the center of the backdrop appeared a spectrally white profile of the young Pushkin, and the stage filled with waltzing couples. Perhaps no image could better have captured what the observance of the Pushkin bicentennial had to tell us about Russia—that it is a culture trapped in the texts of its own past and yet, in a strangely nostalgic fashion, yearning for rebirth, for a new center to anchor signifi­ cation. Of course, it is hardly a revelation to note that, as early as Pushkin’s own lifetime and with increasing magnitude and intensity since his death, the poet has served, especially at key moments of anniversary commemorations, as a screen onto which Russia's most eloquent apologists and most powerful political forces as well as simply average Russians have projected their most fervid, sometimes utopian aspirations, in the process revealing their deepest anxieties about what it means to be Russian. Indeed, not only Pushkin's own words, but those of his contemporaries and of those The Bronze Horseman. 2 THE HARRIMAN REVIEW Bronze Horseman, "I love you, creation of Peter," displayed in prominent red letters in the center of the poster. By the same token, a banner at the head of Nevsky Prospect sported the same sketch of Pushkin and another well-known line from his "Petersburg Tale," "Be beautiful, city of Peter." These same quotations, complete with representations of the Bronze Horseman and Pushkin, were also "broadcast" in periodic sequence with commercial announcements and advertisements on the computerized display towering over Petersburg's Ploshchad’ vosstaniya farther down Nevsky. Petersburg, the city where Pushkin lived much of his life and where he died, was agressively claiming its native son.