PLEASE DO NOT CITE Freedom of Speech in Russia University Of
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1 DRAFT: PLEASE DO NOT CITE Freedom of Speech in Russia University of Maryland St. Mary’s Hall (Multipurpose Room) 24 April 2014 (9.00-5.00) Eminent Domain, Fire Codes, and the Plundered Self Nancy Condee (University of Pittsburgh) Abstract. “Sovereignty” and its related terms (e.g. Surkov’s 2006 coinage “sovereign democracy”) have accrued intensified meaning since the March 2014 Crimean annexation. The talk looks at contemporary cultural politics (with an emphasis on today’s cinema) to ask how issues around sovereignty (including seizure, occupation, and expropriation) function as a broad, modern response—by both the state and its citizens—to global financialization. The marshalling of tax law, fire codes, sanitation inspection, and real-estate cadasters has come to shape contemporary culture, in terms of both its functional survival and its internal preoccupations. The tropes of the ‘imperiled dwelling” and “imperiled self” are rich sources of allegorical comment on the autonomous title to words, meaning, and value. “If civilization is what counts […] violence between Ukrainians and Russians is unlikely.” —Samuel P. Huntington (167) 2 “... The property of subjects is under the eminent domain of the state, so that the state or he who acts for it may use and even alienate and destroy such property, not only in the case of extreme necessity, in which even private persons have a right over the property of others, but for ends of public utility, to which ends those who founded civil society must be supposed to have intended that private ends should give way.” —Hugo Grotius, De jure belli et pacis, 1625, the origin of the term “dominium eminens” (“supreme lordship”). I will begin with three unrelated events in Russian culture over the last three years: a performance, a real-estate scandal, and a film. Event # 1. As the world now knows, on Tuesday, February 21st 2012, five members of a girl punk group, wearing bright hoods and dresses, entered Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior to perform an idiosyncratic ritual, invoking the Virgin Mary to remove Putin from power. At the level of official discourse, they had “no business” being in the Cathedral. And although the Cathedral as the ritual’s chosen venue later became a key prosecutorial element in the events that followed, the women’s choice of this venue emerged somewhat incidental to the spectacle’s planning: the performers had earlier debated a punk spectacle on a plane (Gessen 110) or in the Duma (111), but eventually settled on the Cathedral performance. 3 Event # 2. Almost three years later, in an unrelated incident on Wednesday, October 1st 2014, twelve masked men, who also presented no identification or documents of authorization, entered the main administration building of Yalta Film Studio, owned by Moscow businessman Sergei Arshinov. According to Arshinov, these anonymous masked paramilitary men sealed the entrances to the office building and declared the film studio to be confiscated from its legal owner for transfer to the Russian state. We have no image of the men in balaklavas—nothing as engaging as punk girls in their own masks—but we do have an image of the Yalta Film Studio props warehouse that will give you a glimpse of the casual use into which it had fallen before the Russian state’s confiscation. Before we move on to the third event, I invite you to compare the girl-punk incursion into the Cathedral and the paramilitary incursion into the Yalta Film Studio. We will, of course, encounter objections to such a comparison from many readers, and they will be right, both in an ethical sense and in whatever details they choose to inventory. Nevertheless, let us take a moment to think this through. Three things present themselves: • The girl punks and the paramilitary forces are both costumed, anonymous, balaclava-masked intruders, who occupied the territory for their own purposes. • The girl punks and the paramilitary forces each penetrated a space where the routine production of belief—Russian Orthodox religion, on the one hand, and the regional Russo-Ukrainian “dream factory,” on the other—is an important function of the sites’ respective missions. • The girl punks and the paramilitary forces each represented the authority of an alternative belief system, inimical to the owners of the property. On the one hand, the girls agitated for the removal of the legal president Putin from government; on the other hand, the paramilitary men agitated for the removal of the legal owner from the studio. 4 Beyond these suppositions, the commonalities fall apart. What is gained from comparing them? Amusement, in the short term; perhaps more than this, in the longer term. In my view, one of the major values of the punk performance was its inadvertent conformity with the dominant tactics of state seizure and expropriation—both material and ideological—that is the governing trope of contemporary cultural politics. Unlike the dissidents of the late 1960s, but akin in some ways to the parallel culture of the early 1980s (most specifically sots-art, but also conceptualism more broadly), Pussy Riot included in its portfolio of talents the capacity to mimic the state: surprise entry without apparent authorization, occupation of the physical territory, and the repurposing of the space for an antagonistic ideological project. It is particularly appropriate that the punk drama—this rogue act of eminent domain, if we may think of it this way—would occur in this very spot and not, as had been originally considered, on an airplane or in the Duma. After all, the 1931 destruction of the expropriated Cathedral of Christ the Savior, followed by the destruction of the half-built Palace of Soviets, the 1958 construction and 1994 demolition of the municipal Moscow Pool to build the new Cathedral all provided the most adequate site where Pussy Riot would enact their own unauthorized entry, seizure, and repurposing in an idiosyncratic exorcism of the contemporary church-state demon that had imprisoned bodies (as would subsequently be the fate of Alekhina and Tolokonnikova), exploded the buildings, and expropriated foreign homeland and alien property. In all, it was a highly tautological act. As for the Yalta seizure, it was in no way unusual among events of those months. The state expropriations of the Massandra Winery in Yalta, the Zaliv shipbuilding factory in Kerch, and of many other enterprises occurred on either side the 11 March 2014 Crimean Declaration of Independence by the Supreme Council of Crimea. But the Yalta film studio is interesting to us 5 because, like the Black Sea Television Studio in Simferopol (also confiscated during these months), it was a seizure not only of objects but of instruments for representation. The seizure of media space is an act that effectively doubles in value, automating future seizures: of history, ritual, family memory, cultural heritage, school instruction, and consciousness itself in ways that the seizure of the shipbuilding factory or the winery does not effect. It is here that the conference topic—freedom of speech as a representational practice—finds itself literally embodied and physical embedded in the everyday habits, leisure activities, documentary records, artistic texts, and architecture of quotidian citizen life. The focus here is the cultural site where the speech act takes place: where the site is seized, the speech act as a representational practice also is confiscated. Two months after the March 2014 Crimean Declaration of Independence, on 5 May 2014 Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the so-called “memory law” (Law of the Russian Federation, N 128- FZ),1 rendering criminal the dissemination of “knowingly false information on the activities of the USSR during the Second World War.” This signature extended the capacity to control ways in which contemporary artists could be restricted to remembering only those things that the state—at shifting moments in its declared states of exception—deemed accurately memorable. In cinema, we have already seen the consequences in the past year for such films as Hussein Erkenov’s 2014 historical drama Order to Forget [Приказано забыть] on the 1944 NKVD mass killing of 700 Chechen and Ingush civilians at Khaibakh. The film currently exists in a kind of limbo, neither expressly banned nor given its screening certificate (прокатное удостоверение).2 1 See Rossiiskaia gazeta (7 May 2014), www.rg.ru/2014/05/07/reabilitacia-dok.html. 2 See the interview with the director at http://www.gazeta.ru/culture/2014/06/25/a_6085921.shtml. 6 Event # 3. Now let us add the final event. Andrei Zviagintsev’s 2014 drama Leviathan [Leviafan] recounts the battles of an ordinary man, the auto mechanic Nikolai, who lives in the coastal town of Pribrezhnyi on the Barents Sea, and who faces the municipal seizure of his family home by collusion of the corrupt mayor, local state bureaucrats, and church officials. Losing a series of legal battles, Nikolai is offered a miserable sum of money for his family home and loses the right to contest the seizure. His attempts to resist the proceedings prove his undoing, as well as the destruction of his family on a scale that invites comparison with the Book of Job, the biblical prophet who loses family, health, and property in a series of trials. Again, the connections between the film and the other two examples are—on the surface—fleeting. A brief televisual appearance of Pussy Riot graffiti at the end of Zviagintsev’s film suggests a compatibility between the performance and the film, but the two cultural texts are neither homologous nor ideological aligned: the punk group had often been enthusiastically anti-religious, while the filmmaker might reasonably be described as, among other things, a spiritual but anti- clerical figure.