REVIEW PUTIN AND EMPTINESS •• THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF ANDREI BITOV •• HARRIMAN NGOS IN TAJIKISTAN •• REMEMBERING YALTA •• THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN BELARUS •• CHECHEN AND RUSSIAN MEDIA OPERATIONS •• THE THE OCCULT REVIVAL IN RUSSIA April 2009 THE HARRIMAN REVIEW DOUBLE ISSUE: Volume 16, Number 4 — Volume 17, Number 1 April 2009 Emily D. Johnson Putin and Emptiness: The Place of Satire in the Contemporary Cult of Personality 1 Ellen Chances An Event Like No Other... The Four Dimensions of Andrei Bitov 6 Livia Alexandra Paggi Pretending Civil Society: Western NGO Scripts and Local Actors in Post-Soviet Tajikistan 22 Serhii Plokhy Remembering Yalta: The Politics of International History 34 David R. Marples and Uladzimir Padhol The 2006 Presidential Election in Belarus:The Candidates, Results and Perspectives 48 Dodge Billingsley Weaponizing the Story: Chechen and Russian Media Operations 58 Birgit Menzel The Occupt Revival in Russia Today and Its Impact on Literature 64 Front Cover: One of the works of art, painted for Andrei Bitov's Forum, on the wall of the Vladimir Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg. Train with letters of Bitov's last name on earch carriage. Back Cover: Putin Balloons (see Emily Johnson, “Putin and Emptiness”). THE HARRIMAN REVIEW, successor to The Harriman Institute Forum, is published quarterly by the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Copyright ©2009 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 (includes postage). Check or money order should be made payable to Columbia University. U.S. funds only. Send all or­ ders, changes of address, and subscription inquiries to: The Harriman Review, 1216 International Affairs Building, Columbia University, 420 West 118th Street, New York, New York 10027. FAX: (212) 666-3481. The Harriman Review is indexed by PAIS and ABSEES. Harriman Institute http://www.harriman.columbia.edu/ 420 West 118th Street, MC 3345, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027 Putin and Emptiness: The Place of Satire in the Contemporary Cult of Personality Emily D. Johnson utin posters, postcards, New Year's greetings, t-shirts, wall clocks, calendars, oil portraits, Pbiographies, encyclopedias, English-language primers, and films: in recent years, the figure JU4 of Russia's second president has loomed ever jp> ■ - • £ larger over the cultural landscape of the Russian ta, - ‘3? Federation and the quantity and variety of Putin ’'V paraphernalia available for sale has correspondingly ?/ y increased. Although I am not a serious collector of consumer items associated with the contemporary 9HH7\ JIV cult of personality, one object that I found in a kiosk ^r©l■Sv ptf just outside the metro station Akademicheskaya in Moscow in the fall of 2006 did capture my imagination: bright blue rubber balloons imprinted with the face of the Russian president. I bought a ■;! gnft^ small supply for myself and also for Boris Isayevich Belenkin, the librarian at the central office of Memorial, who, I knew, had an interest in the RK "**' u jaMBfe* * • 'HtcrbK ” *•, ^r'-y. iconography of power. In his work space, Belenkin -s' w&! ,mi had assembled an impressive display of artistic \ Bk ZU reproductions and photographs clipped from magazines, all of which contained human figures or animals with features that, to one extent or another, My gift was very well-received. Belenkin blew resembled Putin's: images of narrow-nosed dogs it up and then called in his friends as he set about with long faces and sad, expressive eyes; a famous affixing it to the wall. “Where,” Memorial staff portrait by the fifteenth-century painter Jan van members asked, “did you find that fabulous piece Eyck; Dobby, the house elf from the Harry Potter of filth? On the Arbat?” “What happens if we pop movies; a drowsy, slightly petulant-looking lemur. it? Would that count as a terrorist act?” Jokes about In this door-sized collage of images, it seemed, the moral elasticity, puffed-up political leaders, and the leader's face emerged spontaneously and often possibility or desirability of their deflation followed incongruously from the pages of old magazines in quick succession. “Who would make a thing like and from posters for long-forgotten exhibitions, that?” someone asked. “Don't they think things as if nature and generations of artists from around through?” the globe had, in dozens of separate acts of creation No one at Memorial in Moscow, it seemed, had spread over a period of centuries, prophesied the ever seen Putin balloons before or knew of their emergence of Russia's current leader. existence. At least initially, some staff members Belenkin, I thought, might like to add a Putin were inclined to view the balloon as a souvenir balloon to his collection of pseudo-Putiniana. made primarily for tourists, something akin to What better object to crown the strange genealogy the political matryoshki dolls and wooden eggs of images that he had constructed, than this that have been ubiquitous to outdoor art markets joyous, supremely modern affirmation of political since the late 1980s. They expressed surprise when ascendancy! I said that I had found it in a down-market kiosk that sold a mixture of cheap gifts and children's THE HARRIMAN REVIEW toys, computer supplies, batteries, and other odds as a rule, do not put their own candidate's face and ends, presumably, to a predominately Russian on anything that might easily explode. Are the customer base. One staff member promptly asked Putin balloons I found really nothing more than for exact directions, I assume so that she could go an example of clumsily executed Russian election and buy a little “piece of filth” for herself and/or her material? loved ones. The very different responses that I received In the context of the Memorial library, affixed from Russians to whom I showed the Putin to the top of Belenkin's Putin wall or attached to balloons helped remind me of an important and, I the lamp over his desk (it was displayed in several think, very basic fact: a cult, like beauty, is to some locations over the course of the next few weeks), the extent always in the eye of the beholder. Whether Putin balloon I bought read as an ironic comment or not we view a particular object as having cultic on the current Russian president's growing cult significance depends, to a large measure, on the of personality. It inspired sarcastic quips and context in which we see it. A Putin balloon pinned gave Memorial staffers another excuse to vent to Boris Belenkin's ironic display of pseudo- the hostility that they felt towards the Russian Putiniana means something very different than one president and their anxiety about anti-democratic carried in a political demonstration. Where we see trends in Russian society, particularly following an object for sale is important, because it seems to the Politkovskaya assassination and the scandalous suggest something about its producer, sellers, and Litvinenko poisoning. intended audience: Is it just a piece of kitsch slapped The balloons received a very different reaction together for sale to foreign tourists who know little when, after my return to the University of Oklahoma about contemporary Russia but may have seen, at in December 2006, I showed them to a recent Russian one point or another, a photo of its judo-loving immigrant who occasionally teaches introductory president? Did its maker mean the balloon to be courses for us. Eyeing my “find” with complete carried in support of Putin and his policies? Who indifference, she noted: “They carried those in (other than me, obviously) buys Putin balloons at demonstrations in Samara, where my mother lives, Metro Akademicheskaya and with what intention? before the last election.” Quite clearly, unlike much Many Putin objects, like these balloons, I think, of Memorial's staff, she did not perceive the balloons have no fixed meaning in and of themselves. They as a bizarrely ill-conceived manifestation of Putin's are essentially empty or, if one prefers, so full growing cult of personality; rather, she saw them of potentially conflicting significance that their as the normal detritus of the election process, the meaning remains indeterminate. When individuals equivalent of a Barack Obama bumper sticker or a buy a postcard of Putin struggling to master a Hillary for President front-yard sign. lump of clay at a pottery wheel, do they regard it And, indeed, from a certain point of view, with reverence or amusement? Does it show us an absolutely: she is right. What exactly is so elected official being a good sport at some awful outlandish about a balloon bearing the face of the public event, or does it mockingly cast Putin as a Russian president? Balloons are a fairly standard leader of Soviet-style pretension, intent on “re­ accouterment of the political marketing process, shaping the nation and/or human nature”? How which the Russians learned from extremely well- about the popular photographs of Putin out for paid Western consultants in the early 1990s. They a stroll with a jacket carelessly draped over one figure in essentially all U.S. elections. You could shoulder or the “romantic” fuzzy-edged Putin buy campaign balloons on the websites of a number posters that show the leader with a Byronic scarf of our 2008 presidential contenders, including both about his neck a