Sith Lords of the World, Unite!

Among the many proxy battlefields that took the place of armed superpower conflict during the Cold War, we should also count the war for the popular imagination. When it came to “good guys” and “bad guys,” the Soviet Union after World War II specialized in only one type of story: the fight between the Soviets and the Nazis. This story structure proved both powerful and productive, and it remains one of the primary filters imposed on Russia’s post-Soviet struggles. We see this in the post-Maidan conflicts in and with Ukraine, as I discuss at some length in chapter 6 of Plots against Russia: the enemies of Russia inevitably become the “fascists.” It was, however, of limited utility for framing the Cold War when the Soviet Union still existed, and of virtually none after the USSR’s collapse. And, like American stories of the fight against Soviet espionage or expansionism, it did not travel well to the other side.

American and Western European dualist dramas, in contrast, were context-independent; rather, in depicting fantasy worlds, they carried all the context they needed with them like a snail carries its shell. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter have captured audiences’ imaginations the world over, and all of them are Anglo-Saxon story worlds based on the struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil (with only the post-Cold War Harry Potter series treating the subject matter with any attempt at nuance). As such, they address themes that could reasonably be considered universal. After all, what culture manages to do without stories about heroes and villains? Ideally, fantasy gives us virtual worlds which we can inhabit regardless of our background and baggage. Everyone can be Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins, because no one actually is Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins.

The problem is that the very last people who can determine what is universal and what is specific about such stories is the Anglo-Saxon audience. In the case of Russian audiences, we have, as is so often the case with late- and post-Soviet interactions with global popular cultures, a delicate question of timing. Tolkien, as we shall see, makes some headway in the USSR in the 1970s, much more in the 1980s, and is already a mass-culture juggernaut by the time Peter Jackson’s first installment of The Lord of the Rings appears in 2001. Star Wars was not available in the USSR in the 1970s, although it was frequently discussed (and reviled) in the Soviet press; the first two films were popular bootlegs when videocassettes became available and were screened at two Soviet theaters in 1988, with spotty distribution of the films throughout the 1990s (by which point they had already saturated the VHS market). The post-Cold War Harry Potter comes to Russia with virtually no time lag whatsoever. Western fantasy’s capture of the Russian popular imagination coincides with the decline of the Soviet Union and the chaotic 1990s.

It is fitting that the entanglement of Western mass fantasy and Cold War politics should be highlighted by America’s Hollywood president, the former cowboy actor Ronald Reagan. On March 8, 1983, Reagan gave his notorious “evil empire” speech, named after the phrase he used to describe the Soviet Union, in which he called on his countrymen to commit to the fight against communism as a “struggle between good and evil.” Fifteen days later, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, immediately ridiculed as “Star Wars.” Two months after that, George Lucas concluded his trilogy with Return of the Jedi.

Conservatives lauded Reagan for bringing moral clarity to the superpower conflict and reminding his countrymen that there was nothing ordinary about the ideological clash with the USSR. Liberals ridiculed him for endorsing a simplistic worldview that was likely to turn a Cold War hot. In fact, Reagan’s rhetoric was a departure for US mass media and culture. Despite the enduring caricatures of Soviet villains in spy stories, the more liberal-leaning Hollywood (which nevertheless managed to produce the right-wing Reagan) preferred stories that humanized the Soviets rather than demonizing them. For example, Norman Jewison’s 1966 film, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!, portrayed both the Soviet and American characters as flawed, lovable doofuses who, by eventually working together, manage to avoid bringing their two countries to all-out war.

Even popular science fiction and fantasy with explicit Cold War parallels often nudged its audience toward a more complex understanding of the enemy. The Klingons of the original Star Trek series were an obvious Russian stand-in, but at least one episode (1968’s “The Day of the Dove”) pushed the two sides toward a peaceful resolution of their conflicts. When the series was revived as Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Klingons were the Federation’s allies (granted, they were also now culturally closer to stereotypes of the Japanese).

Reagan’s use of the term “evil empire” was part of a call for his country to recommit to binary, black-and-white thinking but couched in language that pointed beyond politics and even metaphysics: the phrase “evil empire” invites its listeners to understand their world in terms of fantasy. We now reach a strange convergence of genre and high theory: Lacan’s and Zizek’s identification of ideology as a form of shared fantasy and Reagan’s notorious slippage between fiction and fact. The Soviet Union as an enemy was not just real but complicated, in a way that no amount of world building would complicate Mordor or the Galactic Empire. This is not to say that all fantasy is as simplistic as Reagan’s “evil empire” speech; Reagan needed the straightforward morals of Lord of the Rings, not the messy ethical compromises that, decades later, would be the hallmark of Game of Thrones.

Evil Empire: Love It or Leave It

When a film has millions of viewers, those millions of viewers are not all watching the same film. We all bring our own baggage to any text that confronts us, and we all pay attention differently to different things.

Scholars of media long ago abandoned the mid-twentieth-century assumption that audiences passively received the messages transmitted to them, instead focusing on the ways in which diverse audiences encounter a media object in order to create or wrest meanings for themselves. This is most starkly the case when the implied audience and the actual audience diverge: LGBT audiences and people of color, for instance, might use the lack of characters for obvious identification constructively, reading allegorically in a way to reclaim a space for themselves in stories ostensibly not about them (as in the case of American gay men’s postwar appropriation of The Wizard of Oz).

The grand dualistic fantasy entertainments I’ve mentioned so far (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter) are inherently reassuring to Anglo-Saxon audiences, as the heroes act according to familiar cultural scripts, and, in the first two cases, are coded to be essentially stand-ins for Americans or Brits, while in the third, they simply are British. This does not mean that international audiences cannot identify with the heroes; quite obviously, they can. But when we step away from the individual characters to the general framework in which they operate, geopolitical allegories can become obstacles.

To some Russian audiences, the villains can start looking uncomfortably … Russian. Or, in a pinch, Soviet (a distinction Western entertainment was never particularly good at maintaining in any case). In his 1986 study Konveir grez i psikhologicheskaia voina (The conveyer belt of dreams and psychological warfare), Kirill Razlogov warns his readers (most of whom had probably not had the chance to see the films yet) that the Star Wars trilogy must be seen in the context of Western propaganda:

It cannot be ruled out that, under the conditions of anticommunist hysteria, in the West the “black star” [Death Star?] … may appear to the mass audience as the center of “world communism”—“the evil empire,” according the US president’s famous phrase. Such an interpretation is supported by the television productions and films where in similar space adventures the villains are quite simply KGB agents, and the protectors of ‘innocence” are 100-percent Americans from the CIA. (Quoted in Dubogrei.)

In Gollivud: Kontrasty 70-kh (Hollywood: Contrasts of the 70s), Elena Kartseva notes that the emperor’s favorite, Grand Moff Tarkin, has a Russian-sounding surname and looks like the “sly Bolsheviks … in anti-Soviet films.” The enemy’s frozen territory shown in The Empire Strikes Back would apparently remind American audiences of Siberia, while the imperial uniforms in Return of the Jedi look like they come from the Warsaw Pact.

How likely is it that the resemblance noted by Soviet critics was intentional? This is a question to which we will return but one that, for the moment, is not particularly relevant. Instead, if we assume that at least some Russian-speaking viewers would see parallels with the USSR (or start to see them after someone else points them out), how are such viewers supposed to situate themselves in relation to the films? Luke Skywalker and his friends invite identification on an individual level, but through visual cues spotted by some Russian viewers, the forces of evil suggest kinship on a group level.

Consuming entertainment that seems to identify the forces of evil with one’s own culture presents serious challenges. One can assume a stance of distanced, amused irony, such as in Victor Pelevin’s Generation P (also published in English as Homo Zapiens), in which the narrator muses about whether it was worth trading in the “evil empire” for an “evil banana republic that imported its bananas from Finland.” Also possible is outrage, based on the supposition that a Russophobic West is intentionally encoding anti-Russian messages into its popular entertainment as part of an overall plot to weaken the Russian Federation in the eyes of the world.

But what has proven especially productive for some is a strategy of acceptance and identification, whether based on pride in the motherland’s continued status as dangerous threat (and therefore a force to be reckoned with), as styob (ironic overidentification), or as a combination of the two (styob that over time becomes serious, like the gradual process in which online trolls can move from ironic appropriation of fascist tropes to espousing fascist views in all sincerity).

All of this brings us back to the Eye of Sauron, which, however inadvertently, captures the dynamic perfectly. The Eye is both viewer and viewed, an audience that watches and an audience that watches itself being watched and transforming what it sees through the very act of observation. The Eye is a case study in reification, turning the other into a fixed object of unmitigated evil that reifies at the same time, an image of what could be an intersubjective relation but collapses into mutual objectification and deliberate misprision.

The Eye of Sauron is a basilisk.

The Fellowship of the Wrong

Given the obvious associations between Reagan’s “evil empire” and Star Wars, not to mention the far greater cultural weight of the Star Wars phenomenon in North America before Peter Jackson’s movies came out, Western observers might be surprised to find Tolkien looming so large in internal Russian discourse about the culture’s relationship with the West.

After all, other upstart Dark Lords have made a name for themselves since Tolkien first wrote The Lord of the Rings. Presumably, Darth Vader’s genocidal home base would have been as powerful a symbol as anything associated with Mordor, but Death Stars, like old Soviet color televisions, have an unfortunate tendency to explode. And as for Voldemort, even He Who Must Not Be Named trembles before the might of J. K. Rowling’s legal team.

Nor can the plan to project the Eye of Sauron onto a Moscow skyscraper be patronizingly chalked up to a local culture’s misunderstanding of an imported work of art. If anything, The Lord of the Rings is one of those foreign classics that has so permeated the culture as to have become all but Russian. As someone who long ago found himself reading John Galsworthy’s The Forsyth Saga and Astrid Lindgren’s Karlsson-on-the Roof to remedy embarrassing gaps in his knowledge of Russian culture, I truly believe this is not an overstatement.

Indeed, I find it difficult not to view the entire Eye of Sauron affair as a postmodernist prank. A tale of the forces of Light fighting the armies of Darkness, The Lord of the Rings easily lends itself to allegorical readings. Tolkien created the better part of his secondary fantasy world during World War II, allowing simple connections to be drawn between Mordor and fascism. But, as Michael Moorcock shows in Wizardry and Wild Romance, the implications of the triumph over evil, dark-skinned hordes by pasty-faced hobbits and porcelain-skinned elves are disturbing.

So projecting the All-Seeing Eye of Sauron over the capital of a country that is developing a reputation for xenophobia and excessive media surveillance could seem like a rather pointed political statement. But if we throw Gogol into the mix of our wandering body parts, perhaps the Eye of Sauron is a bit too “on the nose”?

Writing in the hardline newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia on December 30, 2014, Svetlana Zamlelova included the Eye of Sauron controversy in her end-of-the-year column, whose headline, “The Americans Have Announced Sanctions Against Us,” would become the title of her essay collection the following year. After a brief reference to Reagan-era attempts to bring the “evil empire” to heel and listing all the anti-Russian events of 2014, she turns to the Tolkien fans’ idea for commemorating the release of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit:

The Eye of Sauron—Tolkien’s main symbol of evil—was supposed to light up over the capital. Why Moscow and why the Eye of Sauron? We can only guess. And if we recall that “Putin is capable of any atrocity,” and Russia is a “Mafia Country,” that is, the epicenter of evil, then there’s no reason to be surprised. After all, Mordor—Sauron’s country—is the same thing as the “evil empire,” only updated. The “Evil Empire” is old-fashioned, pathetic, and boring. But Mordor is dynamic, “trendy,” and young people, including Russians, understand it. There’s even a kind of “message” to Russian youth: if you don’t want to live in Mordor, change the system, get rid of Putin/Sauron and his butchers.

Zamlelova is not one to see light-hearted humor, let alone styob, when there is an opportunity to uncover a Russophobic conspiracy. On the contrary, she wants to make sure her readers understand that the real Eye of Mordor belongs in America. Knowingly or not, she is situating herself in a decades-long Russian tradition of Tolkienist allegory, even if, by 2014, nationalist rereadings of Tolkien had far surpassed her own in terms of sheer ingenuity. For years, the most active venue for deconstructing The Lord of the Rings’ political implications has been Russia itself.

Although an official, complete Russian translation of The Lord of the Rings would appear only in 1992, numerous Russian-language manuscripts of the trilogy had been circulating in samizdat since the 1960s (Hooker, 17–25). While the danger of being caught with an unauthorized edition of The Two Towers could not reasonably be compared with the possession of, say, The Gulag Archipelago, Tolkien’s unofficial circulation certainly added to his work’s subcultural mystique. And if The Lord of the Rings had become the model for epic fantasy in the West, its centrality would only be greater in a literary environment that was largely inhospitable to elves.

The Abuses of Enchantment

Politics, like fantasy and science fiction, is the art of creating and selling an imaginary world. It can be the world yet to come: Stalin called on his people to create a “radiant future,” Bill Clinton built a “bridge to the twenty-first century” (as if we would not have gotten there without one), and Reagan’s “morning in America” promised the optimism of a brand-new day. It can just as easily be a restoration of past glory: Trump bellows his plan to “make America great again”; Miloševic´ proclaimed a return to Serbian purity; and Putin, after “saving” Russia from an imagined imminent dismantling, is restoring his country to “great power” status after years of humiliation.

Particularly telling is the increasingly frequent application of the American term “paleoconservatism” to Putin’s program; paleoconservatism, like the Paleo Diet, connotes a return to a Stone Age informed less by archeology than it is by Clan of the Cave Bear. Linking one’s politics to a purely fantastic world is but a small step. This might suggest Frederic Jameson’s famous connection of politics with science fiction and utopia, but the example I have in mind is a more comfortable fit with “heterotopia”: we are dealing with political fantasies rooted in a different, not necessarily better world. I bring you word of a small but vocal community of Russian patriots who voluntarily, if ironically, proclaim that Russia is not, as the old Soviet joke goes, “the motherland of elephants,” but rather, the motherland of Orcs.

Through a philologically suspect reading of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, this community has appropriated the trilogy’s largest contingent of villains in defiant response not just to the Manichaeism of Tolkien, but to the equally primitive binaries of the Cold War and its aftermath. Although it is the result of a clever and subversive appropriation of the tools of postmodernism, the identification of Russians with Orcs is not deconstructive. Even when the same Tolkien references are used by the liberal opposition, the inherent dualism remains undisturbed. Productive irony cannot save either group from the fact that they are simply reversing Cold War binaries rather than undermining their foundation.²

This tacit acceptance of dualism is consistent with the source material. J. R. R. Tolkien has been accused of many things, but subtlety is not among them. Nor is there even the faintest whiff of moral relativism in his most famous works. After all, one of the hallmarks of old-fashioned high fantasy is a straightforward, dualistic cosmology, a worldview that encompasses works as apparently disparate as Lord of the Rings and Star Wars (a film series that is essentially epic fantasy with droids instead of dragons).

Such heroic stories bring an extra appeal to the familiar F&SF phenomenon known as world building: we are not only invited to share in the imagining of Tolkien’s (or Lucas’s) imaginary world but also to find clear and compelling ethical positions for our own imagined selves to adopt. This is the unjustly maligned escapism that features the simplicity and moral clarity that the real world should best avoid. (After all, Aragorn is basically trying to “make Middle Earth great again,” something even Tolkien’s fantasy world rejects when Frodo joins the elves in the exodus of magic from the land.)

We have in Lord of the Rings a famously complex fantastic geography, history, and ethnography, in which all the forces of good just happen to have languages and cultures with clear Anglo-Saxon roots, while the “dark” and “savage” enemy offers little resistance to familiar racist, orientalist tropes. The very fact that Middle Earth contains “evil” races is, at the very least, problematic. F&SF practitioners as varied as Michael Moorcock, David Brin, and China Miéville take Tolkien to task for his nostalgic feudalism and displaced racism, while the scholarship and commentary on Tolkien’s racial politics continues to grow.³

It is the racism that is key here. Where Russian critiques and reappropriations of Tolkien will be preoccupied with a geopolitical framework, English-language discussions are rarely concerned with international relations. This makes sense, in that each community is reading Tolkien in line with its own most pressing concerns.

In 2001, Andy Duncan, after noticing that the early-twentieth-century segregationist senator, Theodore G. Bilbo, shared a last name with one of Tolkien’s most famous characters, wrote a short story imagining the senator, now recast as Bilbo’s descendant, leading a racist campaign to keep nonhobbits from immigrating into the Shire. The story gained little attention until it was republished in Duncan’s 2018 short story collection An Agent of Utopia. After the author was interviewed in episode 336 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (Adams and Kirtley), the question of Tolkien’s racism led to a brief culture war skirmish, ridiculed in The New Statesman (Jefferson) and National Review (Timpf), as well as on rt.com (“Tolkien Was ‘Racist’ to Orcs?”).

Reactionary defense of Tolkien could be dismissed as a familiar fandom phenomenon: (mostly male) “curatorial” or “affirmational” fans, who reject any attempt to reinterpret or play with beloved source material, and “transformative” fans, for whom the original stories are a springboard for creating something more interactive, resonant, and inclusive. But even this divide in fandom has obvious political content, and it is exacerbated when dealing with faux-medievalist high fantasy such as Tolkien’s. As controversies online and at the International Congress of Medieval Studies have shown, the alt-right is preoccupied with the Middle Ages as an imagined utopia of Whiteness, a preoccupation that spills over from scholarship and pseudoscholarship into fan communities.⁴

In 2013, N. K. Jemisin, an African American woman who is among the most critically acclaimed writers of F&SF in the United States, wrote a post on her blog, “From the Mailbag: The Unbearable Baggage of Orcing”:

Awhile back I got an email from a reader which asked, “When are you going to write some real fantasy, y’know, with Orcs? […]

I have a problem with orcs. I’m orc-averse, you might say; even orcophobic. I know, I know, orcs are everywhere in fantasy; from Tolkien to Warhammer; by saying I hate orcs I invite the wrath of … well, the fannish horde. (Groan. Sorry.) But here’s something I want you to think about: what are orcs?

Seriously. In most of the fantasy works I’ve consumed, orcs are violent, mindless or less intelligent than human beings, brutal and thuggish and Always Chaotic Evil. But these are adjectives, not nouns. All mythological creatures have a real-world root. Dryads are trees + humans + magic. Mermaids are fish + humans + magic, or maybe porpoises + magic. Unicorns are deer or horses + magic, maybe with a bit of narwhal glued on. Dragons are reptiles + magic, or maybe dinosaur bones + magic—paleontology. So again: what are orcs supposed to be? […]

They are human bodies + bad magic—the essence of humanity, for whatever value that essence might hold: a soul, a mind, aestheticism, whatever. And therefore, in most fantasy settings in which I’ve seen orcs appear, they are fit only for one thing: to be mowed down, usually on sight and sans negotiation, by Our Heroes. Orcs are human beings who can be slaughtered without conscience or apology.

Think about that. Creatures that look like people, but aren’t really. Kinda-sorta-people, who aren’t worthy of even the most basic moral considerations, like the right to exist. Only way to deal with them is to control them utterly a la slavery, or wipe them all out.

Huh. Sounds familiar.

So maybe now you can understand why I’m not very interested in writing about orcs.

Jemisin commends the serious and sincere attempts to redeem the orc as a fantasy figure and notes with amusement that “for a while, ‘orcing’ became slang for SFF fans of color getting pissed off at authors’ racefails … but there’s a reason that slang caught on, and there’s a reason it was as painful as it was funny when we used it.” Orcs, she concludes, “are fruit of the poison vine that is human fear of ‘the Other’.”

David Brin’s 2010 essay takes a similar approach. Brin points out that the “urge to crush some demonized enemy” is old and deep, and satisfied too easily by Tolkien. Of particular concern are the orcs. Brin laments: “the vicarious thrill we feel over the slaughter of orc foot soldiers at Helm’s Deep. Then again as Ents flatten even more goblin grunts at Saruman’s citadel, taking no prisoners, never sparing a thought for all the orphaned orclings and grieving widorcs. And again at Minas Tirith, and again at the Gondor Docks and again … Well, they’re only orcs, after all” (35).

Brin, tongue firmly in cheek, calls for “empathy” for the Orcs, a task that could be complicated by two facts: (1) they’re supposed to be entirely alien from us; and (2) they don’t exist. The cultivation of empathy is one of the many uses of fiction, particularly when readers and viewers find themselves empathizing with characters who are, in some way or another, alien to them.⁵

Such empathy can also be problematic, in that audiences might be manipulated into empathizing with characters whose actions and values remain repellent even when the story is over, by the simple virtue of the characters being either the protagonists, the narrator, or both (see American Psycho or Dexter). But what happens when the most alien, most “othered” characters—by virtue of plot, description, and world building—provide an unexpectedly easy platform for identification by those who are not part of the initial target audience?

The story of Russia’s Orcs has roots both deep and shallow: deep, in that they stretch back almost to the beginning of Russian Tolkien fandom; and shallow, because Tolkien’s work arrived in the former USSR with a significant delay. Although there were nine translations of Tolkien in circulation by 2004, this was the result of a decades-long process.⁶

The famed F&SF translator Zinaida Bobyr’ tried to get her abridged Russian version published throughout the Khrushchev years, with the result that three typed and bound copies of it circulated as samizdat in the mid-1960s (Markova, 163–64). It would only be in the last days of perestroika that an abridged version was published, with a full edition brought out a year after the Soviet collapse.

As a result, Tolkien’s reception in Russia is distinguished by two important features. First, in a country with a history of distrust of “subcultures,” Tolkien fans (Tolkinisty) were greeted with suspicion by the media and the Russian Orthodox Church, with Tolkienists treated as yet another “foreign sect” that threatened Russian traditions. Second, and more important for our purposes, the timing of Tolkien’s Russian fame facilitated political readings of The Lord of the Rings. In a 1997 article in Nezavaisimaia gazeta, Ivan Sleptsov wrote, “The Lord of the Rings is—among other things—a political pamphlet in which Tolkien included an encoded description of the conflict of the political darkness of the East and the freedom of the West, and a prediction of the inevitable fall of Mordor and its analog on the real earth, the Soviet Union” (Sleptsov, quoted in Markova, 165). More recently, on the “Law in Russia” web portal associated with the online journal Politicheskoe obrazovanie (Political education), a user identifying himself as “Egorov” (http://lawinrussia.ru/content/russkie-orki) developed this idea in greater detail:

Hidden and unhidden chains of association have their effect on the subconscious. Let’s take, for example, good old fantasy, in particular the fundamental world of Middle Earth by the great author John Tolkien. And let’s look at it through the prison of the geopolitical circumstances at the time this work was written. And so there are four main races: elves, humans, gnomes, and force. Let us break them down according to their associations with nations in the atmosphere of the middle of the last century. “Of course,” the elves are Anglo-Saxons, a higher race, immortals who can always run back to their island if need be. The human alliance is most of Europe at the time. The gnomes are the residents of Belgium, Switzerland, and other mountainous areas of Europe. What’s left are the orcs. Here there is disagreement as to whether they are Chinese or Russian. At times they are presented as yellow-skinned people, a direct reference to the Chinese. At other times their skin is green. But let’s not be racist. After all, we also live in Asia. But the land of the orcs was most likely the Soviet Union. And if we take a look at our character, then we obviously fit the role of orcs. The Russian character: simplicity, a tendency toward risk-taking and heroic deeds, an expansive soul, tenacity, group thinking. We are directly associated with orcs not only through our character; our historic path over a great deal of time is connected with the horde, from the Tatar-Mongol Horde to the communist system. And it’s no surprise that for the elves and the European alliance we were and remain a horde; if you like, it’s a matter of genetic memory reinforced by “authorial opinions.” Recall that this world was created on the verge of World War II. Then Europe feared a union of Sauron and Nazgul—which one was Hitler and which one was Stalin hardly matters. The orc army is a direct association with the Soviet army and the peoples of the Union, that was the message for lovers of John Tolkien’s work.

While such a reading is not unknown in the West, it does run into several obvious problems. First, Tolkien himself was adamantly against political or allegorical interpretations of his work. This, however, is not a serious objection for most literary scholars, who, for a variety of critical and theoretical reasons, dismiss the idea that a meaning’s work is equal to the author’s intent.

The more serious problem is that it is anachronistic. The Lord of the Rings was written between 1937 and 1949; if we assume that contemporary concerns could have crept into the manuscript against the author’s will, a British citizen writing during this period has a much more obvious model for the embodiment of evil than Stalin’s Soviet Union. Thus the equation of Sauron with Hitler and his dark hordes with the Nazis seems far more likely, if still reductive, and it is a comparison that is easy to find in English-language writings about Tolkien’s trilogy.

There are specific linguistic reasons for Russian readers to find a Soviet subtext in Lord of the Rings, depending on the book’s translation. Mark T. Hooker devotes an entire chapter to the subject in Tolkien through Russian Eyes: “One Day in the Life of Frodo Drogovich: Stalin and Yezhov in the Shire.” In particular, the translation of Tolkien’s trilogy by Mariia Kamenkovich and Valerii Karrik, numerous editions of which were brought out by the noted F&SF publishers Azbuka and Amfora, weaves a Stalinist thread throughout the entire text. Their annotations inform the reader that “The Scouring of the Shire” is a parody of socialism: “Tolkien never had any doubts as to the true face of the socialist utopia, which Lotho Sackville-Baggins tries to introduce into the Shire” (Kamenkovich and Karrik, as cited by Hooker, 185).⁷

This is an interpretation that is much easier to dismiss thousands of miles from Moscow, with the self-satisfied assurance that comes from reading Tolkien in its more or less native, quasi-Anglo-Saxon linguistic and cultural milieu. But we should not be so quick to discount the “Russia as Mordor” idea, if only because Russian culture during the perestroika years and the decades that followed cannot be understood without the creative anachronism that came with the return of both Western and prerevolutionary culture after the removal of censorship.

Sigmund Freud, Oswald Spengler, Otto Weininger, Cesaro Lombroso, Nikolai Fyodorov, and Andrei Platonov were all contemporaries of the last Soviet generation and its children, taking on a relevance that they might arguably lack without Russia’s twentieth-century experience of rupture and return. Why, then, shouldn’t Tolkien be equally timeless?

How to Read Like an Orc

We cannot dismiss popular reading strategies simply because of their faulty grasp of history. Misreading is a crucial part of the fantasy experience. Even when the worldview is simplistic, the allegorical potential of fantasy, the fantasists’ tendency to extrapolate their secondary worlds based on recognizable cultures and historical events, and the intensity of the emotional and imaginative investment by fan communities mean that these fictional worlds are serious business.

Moreover, their heroes and plots often recapitulate commonly accepted values in the cultures that produce them: the freedom-fighting of Star Wars, the emphasis on diversity and tolerance in the Harry Potter books, and the crusading yet restrained liberalism of the original Star Trek may not be particularly appealing to other cultures, even when the stories themselves are popular.

The real-world parallels to events and situations in secondary worlds can, once again thanks to fan identification, take on political and ideological baggage that may not have been intentionally packed by the stories’ creators. If, for example, the greed and cowardice of Star Trek’s diminutive, big-nosed Ferengi are reminiscent of antisemitic stereotypes but are in no way actually identified with Jews, is there reason for Jews to take offense? Is the planet Bajor, once occupied by the morally suspect Cardassians, a stand-in for Palestine, or maybe even Israel? If these questions strike you as trivial or absurd, then you clearly have not been spending enough time in the appropriate subreddits or comment sections.

What many Russian fans are recognizing is something akin to the experience of minority readers and viewers in the West: a limit to the possibilities for identification provided by a work of mainstream (or majority) entertainment. The heroes do not “look” like them, whether it is a matter of physical appearance (and really, how many of us want to admit a resemblance to hobbits?) or of culture and values.

Tolkien insisted that his location of the villains in the “East” of Middle Earth was nothing more than a matter of geographical convenience, but intent aside, today such a claim seems naive. Think of the visceral shock many liberal and minority viewers felt at the end of the third season of Game of Thrones, when Daenerys Targaryen (perhaps the whitest White Savior we have ever seen) is so beloved by the throngs of recently liberated brown slaves that they pass her from hand to hand in a bizarre scene of faux-medieval crowd surfing.

The minority or liberal subject position here is not a neutral interpretive strategy; for the reader who feels un- or misrepresented, the result can be a sense of empowerment or reclamation. For the majority reader, who is used to seeing himself (properly) represented wherever he looks, this can seem like a politicized misreading; see, for example, the crusade in right-wing science fiction circles against so-called Social Justice Warriors, a crusade that nearly ruined the 2015 Hugo Awards, as detailed by Kehe (2017). In the cases of both Tolkien’s evil East and Daenerys’s White Goddesshood, we are more than likely dealing with the unintended consequences of underexamined cultural bias. But what is noteworthy about the case of Russian reactions to Tolkien is the persistent claim of Tolkien’s Russophobic intent. The equation of Orcs with Russians is an example of paranoid reading.

The Hobbit Menace

The paranoid reading of Tolkien begins as playful, revisionist fan fiction. Throughout the 1990s, Natalia Vasilieva and Natalia Nekrasova produced a multivolume reinterpretation of Lord of the Rings online: Chernaia kniga Ardy (The black book of Arda). Here the point was not so much that the Orcs were good, but that Tolkien’s dualism was too simplistic. A similar claim can be made for Nik Perumov’s revisionist Tolkien sequel series, Kol’tso t’my (The ring of darkness).

But the true moment in the sun for Russian Orcdom was the 1999 release of Kirill Yeskov’s Poslednii kol’tsenosets (The last ringbearer). Yeskov, a professional biologist and avowedly amateur novelist, exposes Tolkien’s account as a work of elvish propaganda. Mordor, it turns out, is a beacon of rationality and enlightenment besieged by the dying and decadent forces of magic.⁸ Here the Orcs (who are now simply another human ethnic group) are the good guys, Gandalf is a spell-casting Hitler looking for the “final solution to the Mordor problem,” and Saruman is the only wizard smart enough to realize he’s been on the wrong side.⁹

Inverting the classics is nothing new; while The Last Ringbearer is a well-conceived semisequel to Tolkien, Gregory Maguire (Wicked), Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea), and John Gardner (Grendel) have done this sort of thing much better. Not only do these three novels work brilliantly as freestanding literary works, none of them has, to my knowledge, produced ressentiment-infused subcultures (though Maguire, in providing the inspiration for the shlock anthem “Defying Gravity,” is guilty of much worse).

Yet if the political overtones of The Last Ringbearer are relatively restrained (“final solution” references excluded), the novel reinforces a political reading that some in the West might find baffling. Baffling, but brilliant: Internet users in the orbit of the “liberpunk” subgenre of Russian science fiction (dystopias in which the world has gone to hell thanks to the triumph of liberalism and tolerance), have reappropriated not just Tolkien but the simplistic, pop-culture-inspired metaphysics of American exceptionalism as articulated by Ronald Reagan and extended by George W. Bush. Fine, they say, we’ll be your evil empire. But we’ll do it with an irony and pride that you’ll never entirely comprehend.

The ironic reappropriation of alien evil reaches its apotheosis in the third book of Maksim Kalashnikov’s and Yuri Krupnov’s four-volume paranoid rant, Amerika protiv Rossii (America versus Russia), to which they give the title Gnev orka (The rage of the orc). Kalashnikov and Krupnov dismiss the “common perception” that the Orcs are supposed to represent Muslims: “Remember that the orcs are ‘Easterners’ in Tolkien’s Western consciousness”: “The time has come to understand that, for the West, we have always been and will always be—unless the best people in the West change their consciousness—those revolting, savage orcs, those barbarians for whom the earth has no place” (26). After excerpting several pages of descriptions of Orcs from The Lord of the Rings, they simply assert that the connection is obvious: “Can you feel it? Tolkien’s somnolent mysticism is about us. The hundreds of years of slavery, the pathological, animal cruelty, the disdain for death, and the clinical incapacity for the market and democracy. It’s all there… . The time has come to understand that, for the West, we have always been and will always be—unless the best people in the West change their consciousness—those revolting, savage orcs, those barbarians for whom the earth has no place” (26).

Kalashnikov’s and Krupnov’s miniature Orc manifesto is breathtaking in the scope of its projections. If Tolkien’s depiction of the Orcs resembles the authors’ imagined slanderous depiction of Russians, then Tolkien is speaking about Russians. When they boldly take on the Orc mantle as an act of subversive appropriation, the objects of their rebellion start to lose focus: they assume the identity of a famous group of villains in order to spite the authors of this Russophobic calumny, but those authors are the same as the authors of the entire book: Kalashnikov and Krupnov. The equation between Russians and Orcs is all but unknown in the West, but it spreads in Russia largely due to the efforts of those who claim to be offended by it. This isn’t just self-colonization; it’s self-orientalizing.

Kalashnikov and Krupnov complete this process when they proclaim that they, like Aleksandr Blok, are willing to say:

And if not—we have nothing to lose,

And we are capable of betrayal! …

We, too, can burn buildings, and drive herds into the church,

And fry up the meat of white people!

Yes, Orc-ism turns into a variation of idiosyncratic Eurasianism through the quotation of Blok’s famous poem “The Scythians” almost in its entirety (a move that is frequently repeated by later “Orcs” online). Later in the book, the authors justly condemn George W. Bush for his Manichaean world view, yet their critique suits The Rage of the Orc even better: any plot structure with two sides, one of which is said to be civilized and the other barbaric, becomes available as a mode of Russian self-representation. (The authors also compare contemporary Russia to Isaac Asimov’s fallen, now barbaric Galactic Empire from the Foundation series).

If the appeal to literary fantasy might seem to cheapen ideological discourse, then, from my point of view, this is a job well done. While the comparison of a classic poem by Blok to Lord of the Ring fan fiction is troubling on aesthetic grounds, it exposes the fantasy inherent in ideological claims of primordialism. After all, how much did Aleksandr Blok know about the actual Scythians when he wrote this poem? How much does anyone? What starts out as popular ethnography ends up as ideological cosplay.

Orcs Online

Published in 2003, Kalashnikov and Krupnov’s The Rage of the Orc could be the inspiration for the Russian Orc Runet (Russian Internet) meme, but the search for a point of origin might be as much an exercise in fantasy as the primordialism I have just condemned.

Like all Internet memes, it spreads digitally, with no need of an original. It lurks in the comment sections of right-wing and SF-related LiveJournal pages; in spirit if not in frequency, this borrowing from Tolkien is comparable to the invocation of the “red pill” throughout the antifeminist manosphere (an appropriation of a term from The Matrix that has become gloriously, unintentionally ironic, since we now know the film series was created by a pair of transgender sisters initially known as cisgender brothers). While there are numerous essays and blogposts about the hidden Russophobia in Tolkien’s Orcs, it took one notorious LiveJournal personality to make Orc-ism a key part of one of his many manifestos: Vladimir Georgievich Frolkov, the Aryan nationalist most famous first as “Yarovrat,” then as “heideg.”

After a long and tortured explanation about the difference between the “Rus” (the powerful, hypermasculine wolf man responsible for all of Russia’s victories and for the very nature of the Soviet Union) and the “russkii” (a slave, that which belongs to the Rus), an explanation that rejects Europe in favor of “Northwest Asia” and Eurasia in favor of “Sakharaziia,” Yarovrat/heideg declares that the “true Russian ideology” is Orc-ism. This is the best of three possible paths for Russians:

U russkikh tri puti: libo pizdoboliia, libo selfkheit, libo orkizm.

Pizdoboliia: “my ne orki, my el’fy!”

Selfkheit: “my orki, nado stat’ el’fami!”

Orkizm: “my orki, i slava B-gu Mokoshi!”

Russians have three paths: bullshit, self-hatred, or orc-ism.

Bullshit: “We’re not orcs, we’re elves!”

Self-hatred: “We’re orcs, and we must become elves!”

Orc-ism, “We’re orcs, thank God Mokosh!”

Yarovrat’s protestations to the contrary, I would submit that the line between Orc-ism and self-hatred is somewhere between thin and nonexistent. If we keep in mind the frequent use of “Orc” as sarcastic self-reference in comment sections, usually referring to the West’s disdain for the “savage” and “unrefined” Russians, then the Orc’s true identity becomes clear: the Orc is the latest incarnation of the sovok, the Soviet yokel whose lack of civilized habits of thought and behavior was a source of simultaneous embarrassment, humor, and even pride. But the Orc is not merely a fantasy-inflected, post-Soviet update of the sovok; the Orc is the sovok weaponized.

The Orc Song of Mikhail Y. Elizarov

The Orc, like the right-wing ideology behind him, has needed time to move from the margins to the mainstream. The best of his earliest champions, such as Yeskov (The Last Ringbearer), rehabilitated him with the light touch of authors more concerned with plot and aesthetics than with explicit ideology. Yarovrat and the online community that interacts with him are relatively self-contained; if Yarovrat’s ideas migrated beyond his circle of interlocutors, they most likely did so without any attribution to Yarovrat himself or to his wider project. Given time, however, the Orc would be taken up by writers and performers with a much broader appeal, all of whom would facilitate the appropriation of the “Orc” epithet after Russia’s seizure of Crimea. This brings us to Mikhail Elizarov.

Of all the nationalist, right-wing authors discussed in this book so far, it is Elizarov who has been most successful at tempering ideology with talent. Although his 2003 novel, Pasternak, caused a minor scandal for its reinterpretation of the (ethnically Jewish) Russian poet as a demon, much of his later work imposes fewer ideological requirements on his readers. For example, his 2007 novel, The Librarian (translated into English by Andrew Bromfield in 2015), in which the nearly forgotten books of a tedious but prolific socialist realist writer are revealed to grant magical powers to anyone who reads them in one sitting, manages to turn the theme of Soviet nostalgia into something of a magical treasure hunt, like Harry Potter searching for horcruxes.

Structurally, the novel transforms the familiar post-Soviet gang war plot into a battle among libraries desperate to accumulate as many original copies of the book as possible. While Elizarov’s nationalist views are well known, the novel’s contents contain enough ambiguity about the role of Soviet relics to facilitate readings that might run counter to the author’s ideology.

But Elizarov is also a musician, working in a style he calls “bard/punk/chanson.” His songs, though clever and playful, are ideologically something of a blunt instrument. His 2014 “Orkskaia” (Orc song) is no exception. The full Russian text is easily available online, as is a video of Elizarov performing the song on YouTube. I’m quoting it here in English in my own translation, with the caveat that Elizarov’s original rhymes, scans, and is generally clever, while my version is blunt and prosaic. Elizarov reminds his listeners of the time they “crushed the Elven scum,” sending them fleeing to the West. Their swords struck down “the Gandalf Youth,” and soon they had triumphed. A “Mordor Tribunal” sent most of the fallen enemies to Kolyma but sentenced Gandalf and Aragorn to death, “mostly for taking part in faggot porn.” Only after “General Secretary Sauronich” got “fucked up” and fell into a volcano did things get really bad:

That was when a Zionist Silmarillion named Tolkien

Threw together his unprincipled talmud.

Historical truth vanished that day.

Since then we have lost the ridges, plateaus, and shelves

And now unbeatable Mordor

Is conquered by Rohanites, Jews, and Elves… .

We’ve read The Lord of the Rings from cover to cover,

With baited breath while we learned all the lies.

Of course, our Mordor is totally fucked

Because we are no longer Orcs!

Recall our earlier discussion of the competing geopolitical readings of The Lord of the Rings: the anachronistic equation of the Orcs with the Soviets/Russians and the more historically grounded connection between Lord of the Rings and World War II (not to mention Tolkien’s own disdain for all political interpretations of his work). Ingeniously, Elizarov is having it both ways: the Orcs are the Russians/Soviets, but the initial conflict appears to be World War II (the Elves speak German, for instance).

By the end of the poem, the humiliated post-Soviet Russia is the victim of a fascist restoration, in which the NATO powers are the heirs apparent to the Nazis. But that is not all. The real villains of the piece appear to be the Jews and Zionists (including Tolkien himself), while the European Elves are, of course, decadent and effeminate (“faggot porn”).

The song is an implicit call for the renewal of Orc pride; that is, Russia has lost its way by trying to please the “Rohanites, Jews, and Elves” who have conquered it. In The Librarian, Soviet nostalgia was a force of nature, granting power to anyone regardless of ideology. In this song, Elizarov appropriates the Orc meme to root that nostalgia in strength, violence, and savagery.

Off the Reservation

Macho posturing aside, the Russian Orc still faces one more challenge: he may not even be Russian. The reasons, however, make sense only in Russian. Back in 2002, the always inventive Goblin Studios released their own version of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), replacing bratstvo, the Russian term used here for “Fellowship” with bratva, a slang term for a band of criminals. Offering up an irreverent “translation” from the English that functioned as a cross between What’s Up, Tiger Lily? and Mystery Science Theater 3000, Goblin had the fellowship fighting not Orcs (orki), but “urks” (urki), slang for professional criminals that happens to be only one vowel away from Tolkien’s prominent villains.

Almost a decade later, Victor Pelevin picked up on this phonetic resemblance in his novel S.N.U.F.F. Pelevin, who generally overestimates the cleverness of his precious bilingual wordplay, made the orki/urki parallel the foundation of the novel’s media-besotted dystopian future. After a series of wars and disasters, the “civilized” population of humanity has moved to floating cityglobes called ofshary.¹⁰ The novel’s protagonist, Damian-Landolo Damilola Karpov, lives in Big Byz (“big business” crossed with “Byzantium”) and pilots a camera/weapon drone that films “snuffs” (ultraviolent propagandistic newsreels) while cavorting with his sentient, synthetic sex doll, Kaya.

The snuffs are primarily about the Orcs (spelled “Orks” in Andrew Bromfield’s 2014 translation), the population that lives on the ground. Damilola somehow anticipates his readers’ surprise and quickly offers an explanation about their name:

Why are they called that? It’s not at all that we despise them and regard them as racially inferior—we don’t have any prejudices like that in our society. They’re people, the same as we are. At least physically. The fact that the word is formally identical to the ancient word “ork” (or “orc”) is purely coincidental (although, let me remark in an undertone, there’s really no such thing as a coincidence).

It’s all a matter of their official language, which is called Upper Mid-Siberian. (25)

Upper Mid-Siberian turns out to be an invented language, based on “Ukrainian, larded with yiddishisms.” When its creators turned their attention to phonetics, “they threw in an aberrant vowel reduction from ‘o’ to ‘u’—apparently they couldn’t think of anything better.” To make matters more complicated:

Upper Mid-Siberian has made virtually no inroads into colloquial speech. The only exception is the name of their country. They call it the Urkainian Urkaganate, or Urkaine, and they call themselves Urks (apparently this was a hasty revamping of the word “ukry”—a High Russian name for an ancient Slavic tribe—although there are other philological hypotheses). In everyday speech the word “Urk” is unpopular—it belongs to high-flown, pompous style and is regarded as fusty, bureaucratic and old-fashioned. But it was the origin of the Church English “Orkland” and “Orks.” (25)

Pelevin’s narrator marshals a great deal of fake linguistics to justify this conceit, which seems to be in the service of multiple authorial agendas, the most apparent of which is the linkage of “orc” to “Ukraine.” But Ukraine itself does not seem to be the primary target of Pelevin’s satire; if anything, the only real anti-Ukrainian element of his use of this toponym as a convenient link to Tolkienist vocabulary is the conflation of Ukraine with Russia. For the split between Big Byz and the Orcs dramatizes a different set of international and intranational conflicts.

On the international level, S.N.U.F.F. is a straightforward satire of the relationship between imperialist, Westernized powers and the Second- and Third-World objects of their manipulation, condescension, and aggression. The snuffs serve to entertain a rich and jaded populace while simultaneously demonizing the Orcs as the primitive enemy of Big Byz “democracy.” In December 2011, Mikhail Boiko asserted that the filming and bombing by drones are “obviously” animated by the civil war in Libya. The sad truth is, of course, that Pelevin’s drone satire always seems current—only the names of the battle zones change.

In addition, the Big Byz/Orcs split facilitates a bit of liberpunk-lite on Pelevin’s part: thanks to the triumph of political correctness, feminists in Big Byz have raised the age of consent to forty-five, the rights of “faggots” must never be denied, and adult heterosexual males have developed their own “perverted” sexual subculture, based on their love of synthetic, surrogate women.

The Orc question becomes much more provocative when seen in terms of internal cultural dynamics. For one thing, there is no actual ethnic distinction between the population of Big Byz and the people who live below. And the condescension toward Orcs turns out to replicate the age-old Russian split between the elites and the common people, with the Orcs at times appearing to be just another variation on the snobbish Russian epithet bydlo. The rank-and-file Orcs are scorned by their own elites, who call themselves “Global Orcs.”

To the contemporary Russian reader, the object of satire is obvious: the short-lived, online movement of cosmopolitan Russian-speakers throughout the world who called themselves “Global Russians” (a project associated, appropriately enough, with a journal named Snob). Global Orcs flock to anything foreign and do their best to distance themselves from the yokels who share their ethnicity.

In S.N.U.F.F., as in Elizarov’s “Orc Song” and Kalashnikov and Krupnov’s Rage of the Orc, Russia is the Orcish motherland. But Pelevin complicates their jingoistic vision of Orc Pride, placing it squarely back within its native context: the inferiority complex that insists on turning the substance of Russian critique into a point of pride.

The Tank Drivers of Mordor

The canon of noncanonical Russian Orc fiction continues to grow, although without much fanfare. Even hard-core fans of Russian fantasy and science fiction could be excused for missing the phenomenon, because, unlike the ever-popular tales of popadantsy (accidental travelers to other times and dimensions), it has yet to cohere into a recognizable subgenre.

These books constitute a small handful of texts with a few key elements in common: post-Tolkien revisionism, to be sure, but almost always in the service of the aggressive, nationalist, and militaristic ideology we have already seen in Elizarov’s “Orc Song,” albeit without its playfulness and wit. In 2014, Sergei Shkenev published a novel called Krasnyi vlastelin (Red lord), whose blurb is delightful:

There’s never been a book like it! The most unexpected twist in the eternal popadanets plot. After his death in our reality, J. V. Stalin is reborn in a parallel Swords and Sorcery world.

The people’s Power (Derzhava) versus the aristocratic Empire! The Red Army versus cannibal dragon warriors! Can the Red Lord in his white jacket with a single Gold Star transform a magical war into a Patriotic War and once again lead his people to a Great Victory?

Has there really never been a book like it? Yes, in that the combination of Stalin and Tolkien (the word for “Lord” here is the same as in the Russian translation of Lord of the Rings) is certainly novel, but no, in that it is otherwise a mash-up of two very familiar narratives.

The readers’ comments on the Fantasy Worlds website (https://fantasy-worlds.org/lib/id21689/) are certainly edifying. A reader with the Internet handle Araviel complains that Stalin is absent for most of the novel (a critique I want to adopt now for every novel I read, from The Color Purple to David Copperfield), which is admittedly a useful data point. Otherwise, the comments quickly devolve into arguments about Russian patriotism and insults lobbed at Ukraine and its supporters.

Pavel Mochalov’s 2017 Tankist Mordora (The tank driver of Mordor) is exactly what it sounds like. A student at a Soviet tank drivers’ school finds himself in Mordor. The novel’s big selling point is that the hero is not a hypercompetent warrior, as is usually the case in the popadantsy genre, but an ordinary guy. In Mordor. Mochalov’s book looks like a typical “chosen one” story, except the chosen one here seems to be the tank itself. The hero, Sergei Popov, starts the novel in a twenty-first-century mental hospital, where no one believes that he has spent thirty-three years in Middle Earth thanks to a spell cast by the wizard Myron. Poor Popov has been transported to unknown lands twice in the course of the novel: first to Mordor, then to post-Soviet Russia. Myron brought him to his world in order to defend Mordor, “a model of statehood for all of Middle Earth”: “We represent ideal organization and order. Wherever we come to power, we put an end to the arbitrary rule of the little people who imagine themselves kings. Yes, sometimes our methods are harsh, but you can’t plant wheat without pulling up a few weeds, can you? … Unified power and unified order are the ideals of Mordor. We have brought the light of truth to the far east and south. But the west …” Among the peoples he encounters are Orcs, who are clearly inferior, but the leaders of Mordor hope that he will join in their eugenics plan and mate with Orc women to produce a stronger breed.

Leonid Meshalkin’s 2014 short novel, Orki i russkie—brat’ia navek! (Orcs and Russians are brothers forever!), is a particularly odd specimen. A work of fan fiction (fic) set in the universe of the multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) EVE Online, it is also both an example and parody of a smaller subsection of neural-network-themed EVE Online fan fiction called khortiatina, named after Igor Khort, who wrote a fic called Shakhter (The miner) that inspired numerous imitators.

Orcs and Russians tries to be all things to all fic readers. It somehow combines the space opera of EVE Online with the tropes of epic fantasy (largely thanks to the main character’s habit of whimsically naming the types of creatures he encounters after species found in Lord of the Rings and World of Warcraft), peppering this stew with frequent self-conscious, apparently humorous asides about the clichés of the popadantsy and khortiatina genres, all in the service of none-too-subtle nationalist geopolitical satire.

The hero, a popadanets named Vladimir Vol’fovich Shirokovskii, is an obvious stand-in for the neofascist parliamentarian Vladimir Vol’fovich Zhirinovsky. He insists on naming his goblin aide-de-camp Chubais (after the architect of post-Soviet privatization); dreams of verbal jousting with the enemy of humanity, a thinly veiled analog of the human-rights activist Valeriia Novodvorskaia, here named Starokhatskaia; and pranks the idiots from Pindosiia (a version of a Russian slur for America) by teaching them Russian names for their weapons that actually mean “combat homo” and “combat lesbo,” as revenge against the Americans who dared refer to the Russian Empire by the derogatory term “Rashka.”¹¹

Finally, though it is not an Orc book, there is one more novel worth mentioning here: Viktor Dubchek’s Krasnyi padavan (Red padawan). As we have seen, the “evil empire” meme in Russia depends not just on Lord of the Rings fandom but on the universe of Star Wars, suggesting that there may be Star Wars-inflected fiction that serves the same function as pro-Orc nationalist F&SF. Red Padawan is yet another popadantsy story, but with a twist. Here Darth Vader and his armies are the accidental travelers who find themselves orbiting Earth in 1941. Naturally, Vader forms an alliance with Stalin in order to fight World War II.

Surprisingly, this book gets a positive blurb from the best-known Russian F&SF writer alive today: Sergei Lukyanenko, author of the Night Watch series. Lukyanenko admits that everything about this plot suggests that the book should be terrible, “yet the most surprising thing is that at some point this joyful, ironic burlesque balanced on the edge of trash and farce becomes something greater than just a parody—and the author, without changing his facial expression, starts to speak of serious things.”

This is precisely what turns off one fan reviewer (https://fantasy-worlds.org/lib/id17882/Viktor_Dubchek_Krasnyiy_padavan), who expected ironic parody (styob) but was disappointed to find that the book was “socialist realist, hurrah-patriotic war fiction with all its ideological cliches.” In other words, perfect grist for our mill.

Orknash: Supporting the Home Team

Like many a reclaimed epithet, the identification of Russians with Orcs shifts its valence depending on the speaker. That is, when a patriotically inclined Russian such as Kalashnikov or Elizarov claims the Orc mantle for his people, the term is, overall, positive—even if it also contains multiple layers of irony. Out of the mouths of non-Russians, or of Russian liberal critics of Putinist politics, “Orc” remains a fighting word. And, as Pelevin’s wordplay suggests, the “Orc/hobbit” paradigm is not merely a metaphor for bilateral East/West tensions; Orc-ism has taken on a new life since the annexation of Crimea and the fighting in Ukraine.

Earlier I compared the Orc with the sovok, the yokel who embodied stereotypes of Soviet backwardness. Both terms are negative projections that can nonetheless overcome their origins in abjection: the savagery of the Orc is transformed into a primal strength, while the ridiculousness of the sovok can still be tinged with an ironic affection. Unlike the sovok, however, the Orc is not a symbol of a multinational Soviet state. Thus its true identity is up for grabs.

Since the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, “Orc” has evolved further: now the Ukrainians are ukropy, while the presumably savage, warlike Russian invaders are, of course, Orcs. In the aftermath of the Eye of Sauron fiasco, Leonid Bershidsky recalled that, as far back as 2012, his colleagues in Kyiv joked that Ukraine was “much like [the] Shire, the hobbits’ home country, while Putin’s Russia was Mordor, working its evil magic on the bucolic land.” He inevitably compares Putin to Sauron and notes that the Russian president’s “repressive machine is run by orcs.”¹²

Not to be outdone, Ukrainian hackers hijacked Google Translate in the early days of 2016, adding a distinctively Orcish twist to the Ukrainian-to-Russian translation function. The Ukrainian words for “Russian Federation” became “Mordor” in Russian, while Foreign Minster Sergei Lavrov’s last name became “sad little horsie” (“Google ob”iasniaet”). Google promptly fixed these “errors,” but if there was damage to be done, it had been done already. On the scale of Russian/Ukrainian conflict, this is small potatoes, but it is appropriately Tolkienist: The Lord of the Rings was just as much an exercise in philological imagination as it was in faux medieval mortal combat.¹³

The connection between the Russian Orc identity and the war in Ukraine inevitably colored both the outrage and the schadenfreude associated with the Eye of Sauron fiasco in Moscow. Aleksandr Nevzorov, the former nationalist Soviet television broadcaster turned anticlerical gadfly, invoked the Eye of Sauron in his 2014 review of the new Hobbit as an opportunity for pointed political commentary:

Of course, Jackson’s Tolkienist epic is yet another blow to the whole ideology of the “Russian world’s” “unique” essence. Phenomena of such a scale as The Lord of the Rings: The Hobbit, having accumulated and partly cultivated the examples of European aesthetics is, as a rule, merciless toward the accomplishments of the natives. They simply squeeze them out and successfully replace them.

Russia and its “great culture” once again had nothing with which to resist Tolkien’s gnomes… .

The appearance of The Hobbit in Russia contains only one riddle: why did the priests, Black Hundreds, and other commissars of official spirituality make such a scandal out of the Eye of Sauron over Moscow? …

The patriots should have overcome their culturological timidity, taken the reins of the situation, and used the image of the Orcs for the successful propaganda of their ideology.

After all, it is the Orcs who, like no others, have demonstrated their capacity to give their all in the service of the military industrial complex. They are ready to die on the field of battle by the thousands, unthinkingly and joyfully. No doubt their portraits would be the best visual aids for military-patriotic preparation classes.

Moreover, it is the Orcs who embody politeness in the sense that the Russian Federation now understands the word.

The tale of the Russian Orc is more than simply a chronicle of the Russification of a Tolkien meme. It is the tale of a national, ideological emplotment based on a set of resistant, paranoid reading strategies: The Lord of the Rings becomes available at a key historical moment, and it is such a powerful narrative that Russian audiences find their own story encoded within it. The outlines of this story are, by the 1990s, sadly familiar: an evil empire has been thwarted by the forces of good. A Russocentric reading of Lord of the Rings would have to be self-hating, at least in the initial stages, but a resistant interpretation of the book gained popularity at the same time as resentment of the so-called forces of good (the United States and Europe) increased.

Just as the once-earnest perestroika refrain, Zapad nam pomozhet (The West will help us), could be uttered only with bitter irony, The Lord of the Rings showed some Russian readers just how devastating Western help could be. But the greatest irony is the one that always surrounds Russian ideological rejections of the West: the Orc identity imagines rejection by the West, only to turn the Orc into an imaginary weapon against the West. But the vocabulary employed was nonetheless developed by an eccentric European, dreaming his Elvish dreams in a study in Oxford.

Salting the Earth

As the Orc meme has developed over the course of the 2014 war in Ukraine, back in Russia it has come to occupy a space that is not just contested but bifurcated. With the Orc identity simultaneously reclaimed as a demonic yet positive image in some Russian circles and used as an anti-Russian epithet among supporters of Maidan, it cannot be fully and comfortably assimilated by either side. Here Pelevin’s “Urkaina” becomes more apt than he could possibly have intended when S.N.U.F.F. was published back in 2011: the definition of “Orc” is now dependent on the speaker’s attitudes toward separatist movements in Eastern Ukraine. Discursively, Donbas has become the homeland of the Orcs; the question is whether the Orcs are the heroes or the villains.

Just three years after Elizarov’s song about fascist Gandalf Youth undermining Mordor, the Orc question would get the musical treatment once again. In late 2017, the ultrapatriotic Russian Orthodox rap group Sol’ zemli (Salt of the earth), a group formed in the suburbs of Moscow in 2005, released a track called “Varkraft” (Warcraft). Its main target is liberals, but the group’s polemic centers on Russia’s historic mission and the noble crusade to liberate Donbas from its Ukrainian oppressors. As with Elizarov, all of the song’s poetry has been brutally stripped away by my literal translation. “Warcraft” laments the rise of the “half-elves” who “hold court” in cafes in the capitals, support gay rights, buy Apple products, and go crazy over anything “indie.” These half-elves have disdain for the Donbas, worship the West, and consider everyone else simply Orcs. The singer of the song is different, however:

I’m an ugly little guy with yellow teeth,

Like half of Russia, I’m covered with scars, my lips are chapped …

I’m your nightmare, like a prole, like a Cossack,

The whole bestiary stuffed into a paddy wagon …

The singer is a proud Orc, whose values are, of course, traditionally Russian. His people are:

Those who walk around the church at Easter with a candle,

Who believe in the holiness of the word “mama” and don’t live in Rashka.

Who in Rus had all their children baptized,

Without even posting the pics to Instagram.

In the song’s chorus, which is repeated six times, the Orc is identified with the Russian Donbas fighters who mourn the 2016 assassination of the Donetsk military leader nicknamed “Motorola.” They proudly wear uniforms with a Novorossiia patch. As the singer repeatedly proclaims, “Yes, we’re Orcs. Not from Tolkien, but from Warcraft.”

Andrei Korobov-Latyntsev, a philosopher and scholar of Russian rap at the University of Voronezh, provided a close, polemical reading of the song not long after its release (in 2017). Drawing a comparison with Blok’s “The Scythians,” Korobov-Latyntsev identifies the song’s Orcs as “traditionalists and patriots,’ the sort of people who “defend their brothers in the Donbas and fight for their brother Christians in Syria.” The elves, of course, are the liberals who betray Russia with their every breath. All of this is clear from the song’s text, and it also differentiates the Salt of the Earth track from Elizarov’s “Orc Song,” which is the expression of a general stance, while “Warcraft” is much more closely aligned not just with current events but with the current policies of the Russian government.

Despite these minor variations in politics, the actual text of “Warcraft” continues the redemptive interpretation of the Orc identity championed by Elizarov. Where Elizarov warns that Mordor (Russia) is doomed if Orcs (real Russians) abandon their Orcish ways, “Warcraft” does not even entertain the possibility that real Russians (Orcs) could ever betray their true nature. Their steadfastness is, in fact, one of their defining features (consistent with the common Russian nationalist slogan that “Russian’s don’t surrender” (russkie ne sdaiutsia).

Korobov-Latyntsev expands on the central claim of the chorus of “Warcraft” in order to extend the song’s antiliberal sentiment even further. What, after all, is the difference between the Orcs in Lord of the Rings and their counterparts in the Warcraft game?

Although in complete agreement with Salt of the Earth’s characterization of today’s Orcs in “Warcraft,” Korobov-Latyntsev takes issue with the category of “elves” (he dispenses with the “half-” used consistently in the song). He reminds the reader that Tolkien’s Orcs are Elves whose long-ago turn to the dark side rendered them ugly both inside and out. These liberals resemble neither the Elves of Tolkien nor those of Warcraft. In fact, it is the liberals who are the true Orcs—but from Tolkien, not from Warcraft. There is no longer any common language with liberals, who are unable to understand such important words as “Motherland,” “Soil,” “Duty,” “People,” or “God”:

They have their own motivations: a new iPhone, or the latest pre-election clip by the latest clown styling himself as a fighter against corruption, or a stylish selfie on Instagram and the number of likes it gets… . Look on in horror at how everything with them is identical, how it has all become so uniform! That can’t happen to such a large mass of people of their own free will. This is a matter of some kind of black magic. These people’s will has been enslaved, they are under the command of dark forces. That’s why they have so much aggression and hubris. They are incapable of explaining this hubris and this aggression. The Dark Lord has enslaved them and maimed them, like the Orcs in Tolkien’s novel. And we face the question that the popular fantasy writer George R. R. Martin posed to Professor Tolkien: after the triumph of the forces of Light, what is to be done with the servant of the Dark Lord, that is, the Orcs? Will there be special concentration camps for them? Or will they somehow be reeducated and socialized? Or tried and executed? … This is a very topical question, you must admit. If truth will, indeed, triumph. If it does not triumph, and the Orcs win, then … Well, it’s clear what Tolkien’s Orcs will do if they win.

The distinction between the two kinds of Orcs is a perennial topic in fan communities throughout the world, with the general consensus that Tolkien’s more bestial Orcs win battles thanks to their overwhelming numbers, while smarter, better trained, and slightly less monstrous Warcraft Orcs are more individuated and capable of strategic thinking. By recasting the conflict in Salt of the Earth’s song as a struggle between two kinds of Orcs, Korobov-Latyntsev manages to maintain the most flattering aspects of the equation between Russians and Orcs while projecting the more troubling Orcish traits onto anti-Russian liberals (Tolkien’s Orcs). The origin story of the Lord of the Rings’ Orcs is a key point, because it allows Korobov-Latyntsev to contrast true Russian steadfastness with liberal (anti-)Russian treachery and inconstancy.

Even the worst mass violence is attributed to the liberals as the heirs to Tolkien’s Orcs: somehow, the next step in the conflict between the two Orcish tribes is going to end with liberals putting Russian patriots in concentration camps. Korobov-Latyntsev’s reading is the apotheosis of aggressive Russian nationalist victimhood, reveling in the threat of antiliberal and anti-Ukrainian violence while maintaining that it is the true Russians who are threatened with Western-inspired genocide.

This is still fantasy, but it is that of neither Tolkien nor Warcraft. It is the fantasy of Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek: imaginary projections onto a demonized other in the service of an aggressive, wounded ego. Treatment would require the services of both the psychoanalyst and the literary critic, perhaps in the form of a Game of Thrones book club facilitated by a therapist. The humanities provided so much of the source material for this particular nationalist narrative. It would be nice to think the humanities could help provide a remedy.

A Song of Orcs and Trolls

Should we really be surprised that the Russian Orc, though born in late-Soviet misreadings of Tolkien, has found its natural habitat on the Internet? The Internet has been a bestiary of creatures real and mythological since its foundation: haunted by daemons and (mail)chimps, providing an alternative to snail mail and a pool for both phishing and cat fishing, while serving as a haunted house for ghosting, the Internet is home to species predatory and mild. Its most infamous resident shares some crucial cultural DNA with the Orc: I speak, of course, of the troll.

Internet trolls, like Orcs, are creatures defined by aggression. They don’t just seek out conflict; they create it. As individual independent actors, trolls spend their time online baiting their victims. If they make you angry or start an argument, they have already won. But the past decade has shown the power trolls can have when they band together (as a “troll army”), harassing their targets with death threats, doxing, swatting, and photoshopped porn images. It took the wider world some time to recognize the effect trolls can have, in part because the stories covered in the media involved communities that, though large, are almost invisible to outsiders: gamers, science fiction fans, comics fans. Not to mention the inevitable downplaying of the threat when its most visible targets were women.

Or at least that was the case in the West. As far back as 2003, Anna Polyanskaya, Andrei Krivov, and Ivan Lomko alleged that a radical shift in the political content on the Russian Internet after 2000 may have been the result of state security interventions. In 2013, a report for the St. Petersburg Times wrote that the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency was employing people to write pro-regime comments on blogs and other websites (Chernov). By the time the Internet Research Agency was profiled by Adrian Chen in the New York Times just two years later, the agency and organizations were known widely as “troll farms.”

At this point, I wish I could say that the rest is history, but, sadly, it’s current events. The run-up to the 2016 US election saw a series of reports on the activities of paid Russian trolls fanning the flames of White nationalist fear in social media under false names, spreading conspiracy theories, demonizing Democrats and migrants, and making sure that the words “Benghazi” and “Hillary’s email” would never disappear from the news feed.

The success of Russian trolling within the US informational ecosystem is unparalleled, but not necessarily because of the effects of any particular troll campaign. Russian trolling in the United States is a boss-level victory, upping the ante from trolling to metatrolling by spawning intense paranoia about Russian trolling. When people on the American Left, so traumatized by this MAGA nightmare, start looking for Russian trolls under every bridge they cross, they have fallen into a Foucauldian trap. Like the denizens of the panopticon who get into the habit of surveilling themselves because they never know if they are actually under surveillance, Americans who are paranoid about Russian trolls are trolling themselves.

Whether by design or by accident, Russian trolls have fulfilled a fantasy whose roots lie not in Tolkien but in pre-Newtonian physics. They have turned trolling into a perpetual motion machine, one that no longer actually needs them in order to function. Like the deistic conception of a God as First Cause, creating the universe and then stepping back, Russian trolls, should they choose, have the luxury of simply sitting back and enjoying their handiwork as spectators. It works because the nature of this machine is virtual and informational, a triumph of memes over matter. While the jury is still out as to whether the fictional troll should be considered a mammal or a reptile, the Russian troll is oviparous, a cuckoo bird laying its eggs in the minds of anxious Westerners who will raise its offspring as their own.

What does this have to do with Russian Orcs? If the American victims of Russian trolls are self-trolling, the Russian Orcs are, to use an Internet term of art, self-owning. In each case, we have a complicated problem of self and other.

On the Internet, the Orc can be seen as a particular variety of troll. Both Orcs and trolls have broad, abstract targets in their sites: liberals, snowflakes, Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), feminists, and so on. The troll wages war against the abstract enemy by focusing on specific targets and engaging in coordinated campaigns. The Orc is comfortable remaining at a high level of abstraction. Though the metaphor doesn’t fit their respective mythologies, trolls are ground troops, engaging their enemy in hand-to-hand combat; Orcs are masters of ideological drone warfare.

But the Orc will never be as successful as the troll. This is not just because the definition of the Orc is so easily hijacked by the enemy, but because the very notion of the Russian Orc is based on a faulty premise about self and other. The Russian Orc is a reappropriation of an anti-Russian meme for pro-Russian purposes, yet, before the war in Ukraine, the equation of Russian and Orc existed almost entirely within Russian-language cultures, based on a reading of Tolkien that few in the West were inclined to make. The Russian Orc is a double projection: projecting onto Westerners the projection of Orcs onto Russians. Proponents of the Russian Orc are defiant, but defiant in the face of nothing, since no one was calling Russians Orcs except for Russians themselves.

This does not render the Russian Orc idea ineffective, just intramural. It makes sense that the Russian Orc stands at the intersection of nationalism and F&SF fandom, because both nationalists and fans display an enthusiasm and defensiveness about cultural phenomena that, to outsiders, can look trivial. Here we should recall the opposition between the two types of fandom: affirmational (rigidly orthodox and closed) and transformational (improvisational and open), because the Russian Orc occupies both ends of the affirmational/transformational spectrum at once. On the level of historical metanarrative, the Orc is as affirmational as they come. In terms of traditional fandom, however, the Russian Orc is a clear example of the transformational approach, reclaiming Tolkien for the fans’ own purposes. The Russian Orc stands at the intersection of two different fandoms, Lord of the Rings and the Russian nationalist metanarrative, transforming the former for the greater glory of the latter.

Russia, then, can be Mordor and Motherland at the same time. If affirmational Tolkienists find such a reading mistaken, and if opponents of Russian nationalism or state policy consider it a slur, this hardly bothers the Russian Orc. The Russian Orc laughs at his enemies’ outrage, and Mordor does not believe in tears.