The Aleph of Sochi

The first example is from the Olympic Games hosted by Russia in 2014. This was meant to be an important year for the Russian Federation. It definitely was, but not in the way that the leadership had clearly hoped. Russia’s military incursion into Crimea on February 27, 2014, immediately eclipsed everything that had happened in the first seven weeks of the year, including the Winter Olympics in Sochi. This was supposed to be a moment of triumph for Russia on the world stage, one that could have withstood all the bad public relations that preceded it (the stories of corruption and wasteful spending, the Internet memes of the bizarre toilets found throughout the newly built complexes).² The opening ceremonies on February 4 were a meticulously choreographed celebration of Russia, its history, and its culture, a condensation of Putin-era ideology and a perfect example of history being treated as an ideological playground.

Denigrating the opening ceremonies as nationalistic kitsch is as unfair as complaining that the Eurovision contest trades in national stereotypes packaged with all the aesthetic restraint of an eight-year-old experimenting with makeup. These things must be understood according to their own generic conventions. It is the job of a host country’s opening ceremony to turn its culture into kitsch while providing a stunning spectacle. In this regard, the Sochi Olympics worked like a charm.

Besides the usual speeches and processions of athletes, the opening ceremonies consisted of two staged components that bracketed most of the event, one arranged according to the sequence of the Russian alphabet, the other a dazzlingly quick march through most of Russian history. In other words, the first part was synchronic, the second diachronic (that is, moving through time). Thanks to this division into two parts, as well as the obvious symbolism in each, it is as though the entire event were designed for semiotic analysis at some strange intersection of Tartu and Vegas, where Siegfried, Roy, and Yuri Lotman shared a residency. Since the show was masterminded by Konstantin Ernst, the chief executive officer of Channel One, whose brilliance as an impresario is matched by his facility for propaganda, this comparison is not so far from reality: Ernst is Putin’s most sophisticated supporter in the Russian media world (Yaffa 25–76). He is also a past master of the historical subjunctive, as producer of Old Songs about the Main Thing, a series of nostalgic New Year’s specials (1995–2001) that featured songs from the middle-aged viewers’ Soviet youth, with plots and settings that evoked a bygone Soviet era somehow untroubled by the crimes of the regime.

Each half of the Olympics show exemplifies the willfulness and syncretism that underlies so many of the phenomena discussed throughout the present book. Though obviously designed for the live and television audiences, the show is based on the conceit that everything unfolds from the perspective of a little girl named Lyuba (she recites the names in the first half and watches the parade of history in the second). Lyuba’s role as mediator helps soften the imperial bombast of the show (even her name means love), but a less receptive audience could easily see the presence of eleven-year-old Liza Temnikova in this role as unsettling or even uncanny; the seemingly innocent little girl is such a common horror trope that an earnest version can be difficult to accept. Her proximity to grand historical events and cultural accomplishments can be a reminder that the country’s patrimony is the inheritance of the next generations, but it is also nakedly manipulative. Watching Lyuba in the Sochi opening ceremonies is particularly disturbing in 2022, when images of happy, innocent, blond girls and their mothers have been plastered all over Russian-occupied towns in Ukraine as a symbol of the invaders’ beneficence, accompanied by the slogan “Russia is here forever!” (“They Don’t Belong Here”). Childlike, innocent, apolitical, and passive, Lyuba occupies the same subject position as the ideal Russian television viewer: what happens is for her edification and approbation but is not a matter of her own responsibility.

In the second half of the show, all (or almost all) of Russian history unfolds before her eyes, a series of uninterrupted triumphs preceded by a light-bedecked troika pulling the sun behind it. The dancers construct St. Basil’s Cathedral (a monument built to commemorate Russia’s military conquest of Kazan), then Peter the Great raises an army. The show dwells on the army longer than one might expect from a peaceful historical highlights reel, morphing from its seventeenth-century origins all the way to the Soviet era.³ The soldiers are followed by an imperial ball, which makes way for the Russian Revolution, Stalinist industrialization, the Worker and the Peasant Woman statue, and Gagarin and the Soviet space program. Apparently, the army itself is as much of an achievement as the country’s national monuments and scientific innovations.

In fact, Russia’s military was supposed to have an even greater role in this part of the ceremony, but the International Olympic Committee insisted that the organizers remove the segment dedicated to the Soviet victory in World War II. It is a glaring absence, not only because it would have made the early emphasis on the army more legible, but because of the Great Patriotic War’s centrality to Russian historical myth. The lack of World War II is also the opening ceremonies’ most significant deviation from the literal and metaphorical time travel that has been the subject of Unstuck in Time. Otherwise, the ceremonies offer the viewers a brief taste of historical reenactment, a glimpse of the Soviet Union in 2012, and imperial and Soviet nostalgia from the viewpoint of someone too young to have a direct connection with any of the touchstones of Soviet history. Also typical is the show’s utter lack of a vision of the future, in keeping with Putinism’s insistent recycling of useful elements of the past. Once again, Rabfak called it, just two years before the Olympic Games: “Why is today yesterday and not tomorrow?”

Lyuba’s first vision, which opens the show, is not weighed down by the march of history, since its structure is alphabetical. This makes the sequence confusing for Western audiences, since Lyuba’s list goes according to the order of the Cyrillic alphabet.⁴ But this is as it should be: Russia is the host country, after all, and in any case, the sequence would never work perfectly because of translation issues. Hedgehog in the Fog, for example, was never going to appear between “G” and “I,” since the Russian title starts with the Cyrillic letter ë. Even if it did, however, there is also the question of cultural translation. The title refers to Yuri Norstein’s beloved 1975 cartoon; outside of the former Warsaw Pact, the only people likely to know this brilliant short film are area specialists and animation buffs. Equally obscure were the references to the architect Alexey Shchusev, the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, and the parachute (Gleb Kotelnikov invented the knapsack parachute in 1911, a fact I must admit I learned from Wikipedia). But the audience for the show was domestic as well as international; nearly everything about this particular alphabet would have been legible to an educated Russian speaker.

Or perhaps “legible” is not an apt metaphor here; the show is based on the building blocks of literacy, but the alphabetical order means that the letters form neither words nor sentences. The letter sequence is introduced by a scene of Lyuba holding a bukvar’, an alphabet book for children. Such books use examples of familiar items (“A is for Apple”) to teach what might not yet be a familiar letter. For the literate Russian audience, the letters are a given; it is the examples that must be learned or reinforced. The alphabet sequence presents the building blocks of Russian culture and civilization, which can subsequently be used to create more meaning. If the juxtapositions are odd, well, that is just how the alphabet works.

Except when it is not. Russia is the last word on the list because it ends with the last letter of the alphabet (ia); Tchaikovsky is drafted to represent the i kratkoe, the last letter in his name in Russian and a letter that can never appear at the beginning of a word. Most of the letters are paired with a single example, but T and G each have two: Tolstoy and Television, and Gagarin and Gzhel’. In the case of G, one can imagine an argument among the event’s planners, “Yes, we have to have Gagarin, of course, but what about gzhel’? Everybody loves gzhel’.” The juxtaposition of Leo Tolstoy and Television is even stranger. There would seem to be nothing intrinsically Russian about television, except that Russians use the Russian-American inventor Vladimir Zworykin’s invention of the cathode-ray tube to call him the father of television. The invocation of Tolstoy and television together, then, suggests that Russia’s cultural triumph is one of both form and content: Tolstoy wrote some of the world’s greatest novels, while television became the planet’s dominant medium in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Tolstoy/Television dyad is just the clearest example of the definition of Russia that is at work. In this timeless, context-free collection of Russian-related signifiers, everything is equally related (or unrelated). There is no room for judgment, whether aesthetic or moral. Like the Periodic Table (seventeenth in Sochi’s alphabetic list of accomplishments, or eighteenth if we account for the doubled examples for G), it is a system unto itself: on the Periodic Table, it is not bismuth’s fault that it is next to the poisonous polonium. Yet there is one crucial difference: if we recognize the atomic number as the crucial distinction among the elements, the order of the Periodic Table is a foregone conclusion. But the organizers of the opening ceremonies had a broad spectrum of options for most letters. Surely “Russia’ was more obvious for “R” than “Ballets Russes,” but they played fast and loose by using the last letter of the name to match it up with the last letter of the alphabet. In fact, the organizing principle of the Sochi alphabet is indifference rather than difference: émigrés such as Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Chagall are welcomed into the fold as if their exile never happened. Sergei Eisenstein and Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s inclusion is predicated on the implicit denial of their (forbidden) homosexuality, at a time when the Russian Federation was enduring harsh criticism for adopting the “gay propaganda” law the year before. And the tenth letter—empire—embraces Russia’s past as a conquering and occupying power while sending an ominous (and, ultimately, correct) signal about the country’s attitude toward its neighbors. An empire incorporates a wide variety of difference (ethnicity, language, faith, history) while subjugating these variations to the transcendent signifier of empire itself. Empire delineates the boundaries of acceptable difference in the name of a grand sameness.

The ahistorical grab bag of Russia’s achievements that constitutes the Sochi alphabet turns time into space: all the important elements of the country’s history are laid out on a set of virtual pages. In 1945, Jorge Luis Borges published a story called “The Aleph,” which posited a singular point in space (the Aleph) that somehow incorporates all other points. All time and space are visible to one who gazes upon the Aleph. Borges’s Aleph is personal (in that it is understood in relation to the story’s characters and the mundane plot in which they are embroiled) and metaphysical (questioning our very understanding of the universe). The Sochi opening ceremonies are another kind of Aleph; since the subject is Russia, the scale is smaller, but as a vehicle of empire, the Sochi Aleph, as seen by Lyuba, models the peculiar balance of pride and indifference that characterizes the post-Soviet subject position in twenty-first-century Russia. The Aleph of Sochi embodies the polemical syncretism that animates the alternate USSRs and quirky time travel that form the subject of this book.

The End of the Fucking World

The post-Soviet era’s obsession with revisiting or reconstructing the Soviet past is a trap that writers, filmmakers, and readers have willingly set for themselves, encouraged by a state media and government that want to keep the people looking backward. History has become a nightmare from which there is little public desire to awake. One might expect a boom in stories involving time loops, but despite both the occasional time loop in Soviet film and fiction (such as the 1987 movie A Mirror for the Hero (Zerkalo dlia geroia) and the popularity of the American hit film Groundhog Day, time loops only make an occasional appearance in post-Soviet entertainment. There is Vladimir Pokrovskii’s 2004 story “Groundhog’s Day, or Greetings from the Man with Horns,” about a man who repeatedly relives his own murder, and Aleksei Slapovskii’s 2013 novel Back (Vspiat’), in which time starts to flow in reverse on a daily basis (if today is December 12, then tomorrow we will all relive December 11). And, of course, we have already seen the attempt to stop the forward flow of time in The Man Who Could Not Die.

I would like to close this book with one of the few works of popular entertainment that has appropriated the tools of regressive, backward-looking storytelling not just for resistance but also to offer glimmers of hope within despair: Oleg Kuvaev’s long-running series of short cartoons about a young woman named Masyanya. Begun as a quick-and-dirty online Flash animation project in 2001, over the next two decades it morphed into a pop cultural phenomenon and was even, for a brief period, broadcast on Russian television before returning to its Internet roots. Masyanya (as the series is called) was an unlikely vehicle for such a serious purpose: the show is an irreverent, deliberately vulgar set of stories about the title character, her (eventual) husband Hryundel (from the word for “grunting”), their children, and their best friend, Lokhmaty (Shaggy). A typical episode lasts for just a few minutes, detailing the absurd misadventures of its heroes and satirizing life in contemporary Russia. That satire was not particularly political at first, in keeping with the tenor of the early 2000s. After a series of conflicts about the ownership of Masyanya and the site that hosted it (mult.ru), Kuvaev left Russia in 2006 and moved to Israel, where he resides to this day. Masyanya continued to take place primarily in Kuvaev’s hometown of St. Petersburg, but the fact that he no longer lives in Russia has made possible the much more trenchant political commentary that he began to produce in Putin’s fourth term.

Like many liberal-leaning artists and intellectuals, Kuvaev was astonished and horrified by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, sharing the uneasy mix of helplessness and shame experienced by so many of his compatriots in the Russian Federation and abroad (Gavrilova). Not addressing the war was impossible, and, in any case, his cartoons had become increasingly political since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic. In his March 13, 2021, episode “Doppelganger,” every Russian citizen is assigned an armed soldier who constantly points a gun at them to make sure they do not say or post anything disloyal. As of August 2022, when this conclusion was written, Kuvaev had posted three videos devoted to Russia’s war in Ukraine, and each one is a variation on the conditional subjunctive, a pocket Russian universe that obliges viewers to challenge their understanding of the war through a kind of thought experiment.

The first, “Wakizashi” (March 22, 2022), centers around Masyanya’s and Hryundel’s attempt to shield Lokhmaty from the horrible truth of the Ukrainian invasion. Just as they survived the pandemic through isolating themselves in their apartment (“Self-Isolation,” April 1, 2020), now they contrive to keep Lokhmaty confined to their home and cut off from all sources of information (Lokhmaty’s nickname comes from his Ukrainian last name, Lokhmatenko). Like so many Time Crasher stories, and like Russian propaganda about Ukrainian “Nazis,” this episode works through its multiple appeals to the experience of World War II. The basic premise is a burlesque on Robert Benigni’s 1997 film Life Is Beautiful, about parents who convince their young son that their confinement in a concentration camp is just a game, and after Hryundel is forced to reveal the truth to Lokhmaty, he reassures his friend that they can convert an overhead closet shelf into a hiding place, so he can survive “like Anne Frank.”

All of their attempts to live in their own bubble and ignore the outside world fail. Lokhmaty finds out the truth after days of frustration at his friends’ flimsy excuses for the lack of Wi-Fi, television, or any source of news. Hryundel cannot keep Lokhmaty safe, because the police break in to arrest them both, despite Hryundel’s pathetic attempt to demonstrate loyalty to the regime (“We’re all for nuclear war! Death to everyone! Death to everyone!”). But the real problem is not their recent attempts to live in their own private worlds. As Hryundel tells Masyanya, “You always said, ‘No politics, please! No politics!’ So this is what you get.” It is a reproach to Masyanya, to Kuvaev himself for avoiding politics for so long, and to the generation of Russians who spent years repeating that same tired phrase and tacitly exempted themselves of any responsibility for their government’s actions. They have been living in their own conditional-subjunctive bubble for decades.

Now it turns out that Masyanya’s approach to life has been a kind of cynical optimism. “Wakizashi” contains a telling callback to an earlier episode, “The Mirror,” from October 10, 2018. This was Kuvaev’s first cartoon since the Ministry of Justice expanded its definition of “extremism” and added nearly five thousand books, websites, and other media to its list of banned materials. The episode proper is a hilarious juxtaposition of Masyanya’s readings from The True Mirror of Youth (Iunosti chestnoe zertsalo), a 1717 guide to manners and family life, and the uncouth antics of her children and husband in twenty-first-century St. Petersburg. The episode concludes with a brief, seemingly unrelated clip of Masyanya and Hryundel dressed in tuxes, performing on a stage (Masyanya is on vocals, while Hryundel is at the piano). She sings a song that has become almost as famous as her many catchphrases over the previous eighteen years. The refrain is “Eto ne pipets,” which uses a euphemism for the obscene word pizdets; pizdets, from the Russian word for “cunt,” in this context means something absolutely horrible, including possibly the end of everything. My translation (below) is not literal and does not rhyme, but is meant to convey the overall sense:

Her song took on a second life during the COVID-19 pandemic, since this was just the message many people wanted (and needed) to hear. But now, in “Wakizashi,” Hryundel tells Masyanya that thousands have died in Ukraine, cities have been destroyed, the whole world is against Russia, and the state is imprisoning people over the slightest expression of dissent, and concludes: “This time we really are totally fucked” (Na etot raz deistvitel’no pipets). In response, Masyanya sings:

Two years after encouraging her audience with the thought that things could always be worse, Masyanya has no more illusions about the direction of her country. Her words, and her demeanor as she sings them, could easily be interpreted as despair, but they actually are a turning point from critique to action. Her husband’s words have sunk in, and not only those describing the slaughter in Ukraine; she has also taken to heart his earlier reproach about her desire to keep her distance from politics. Now Masyanya, who for two decades had been a symbol of Putin-era absurdism and directionless irony, has understood that her life “without politics” was a carefully curated illusion that is no longer tenable. In the best Russian moralistic tradition, she, like the eighteenth-century social critic Alexander Radishchev, embarks on a journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Physically, her trip is far less arduous than that of her predecessor; it’s the twenty-first century, and she takes a high-speed train. But Kuvaev replaces her actual trip with a symbolic montage that completely disrupts the serialized world of Masyanya. Animation is replaced by a series of actual photos of the devastation in Ukraine: bombed-out buildings, desperate refugees, and an aid worker comforting a survivor. In the corner of each still is Masyanya’s face, drawn in black-and-white, her mouth agape in horror and her eyes bulging out of her forehead. It is both the Masyanya we have come to know over the past twenty years and someone new. The scene lasts only thirty seconds, though it seems to go on much longer. The temporary shift in medium from animation to still photography has done its job: Masyanya’s absurd little micro-world has burst like the bubble it has always been.

Now Masyanya walks along the streets of Moscow, a scene that is animated in black and white (only Masyanya is rendered in her usual color scheme). Like her train trip, this walk is more thematic than realistic. Everywhere she goes, Masyanya passes signs with pro-war slogans: “The final solution of the Ukrainian problem”; “Yes to war!”; “Bombs and rockets for Ukrainian children”; “The people are with the Führer” (the word “with” in Russian, usually a Cyrillic s, has been replaced with the Latin Z, a symbol of support for the war effort); “The whole world is Nazis! Except us!”; “Z. Catch the national traitors!”; and “Z. Stalin is a hunk!” (the “Zs” in the last two slogans are made to look like swastikas). Though the slogans steal the show, Masyanya’s own role here is noteworthy: every time a slogan comes her way, her eyes turn to stare at it. She has finally stopped looking away.

Masyanya’s newfound activism does not negate the value of twenty years of cartoons; to the contrary, her reputation for insouciance helps her achieve her goal. When she is confronted by two armed guards at the gates of the Kremlin, there is no realistic way for her to gain entry. Instead, Kuvaev breaks the cartoon’s long-standing fictional frame: the guards are Masyanya fans. They laugh, in imitation of her well-known Beavis and Butthead-style chuckle, and immediately quote two of her most famous catch phrases: “Go fuck yourself, director!” and “Let’s go have a smoke!” They let her in (“since you’re Masyanya!”), chuckling and repeating the same catch phrases.

When Masyana makes her way into Putin’s bunker, the Russian president, unlike his guards, has no idea who she is. Instead of using her apparently famous name, Masyanya describes herself with words that could belong to millions of women in the Russian Federation: “I’m the wife of my husband and the mother of my children.” She tells Putin he is a war criminal who has dragged two countries into hell out of vanity and an inferiority complex but offers him a gift: a Japanese short sword (the wakizashi of the episode’s title), which is “convenient for, you know … ” When she gets back home, Hryundel whispers the news to her; the audience can’t hear, but we know what he is saying: Putin has killed himself. (“Well, I was, I was very persuasive!)

“Wakizashi” is a powerful and shocking revenge fantasy, the sort of cartoon that could never have appeared on the Internet had Kuvaev remained in Russia. It is a persuasive work of political art, but even as it strives to show the complicity of ordinary Russians who have turned a blind eye to their government’s actions for years, it still replicates the structure of the conditional-subjunctive fantasy world: this episode takes place in an alternative present in which Russians can breathe a sigh of relief. The tyrant is dead.

In the next episode (“How to Explain to Your Kids,” May 12, 2022), Masyanya, Hryundel, and Lokhmaty stage a six-minute theatrical review of Russian and Soviet history in order to help their children understand what is happening in Ukraine. It’s a sharp and uncompromising view of the rise of Putin and his territorial ambitions, yet still somehow lighthearted and funny thanks to Masyanya’s vulgar, sarcastic narration and the men’s over-the-top performances. The choice of home theater as an educational vehicle makes sense because it treats their apartment once again as an isolated pocket of humanism in contrast to a cruel and dangerous external world. Throughout the performance, and especially afterward, Masyanya is at great pains to make the children understand that they cannot talk about what they have seen at school. When the kids are about to leave for the day, she explains that, in her time, her parents also told her to keep her mouth shut about certain issues when she was not home, and now her own children will have to do the same. In fighting against state propaganda within the confines of her apartment and telling her children that what they hear at school is lies, she is teaching her son and daughter how to operate in two opposing worlds of meaning, each with its own sense of politics and history. The children are not time travelers per se, but they may as well be; they are learning to navigate multiple realities over the course of a single day.

In the last of the war-themed episodes to date (“Sankt-Mariuburg,” July 11, 2022), Kuvaev creates yet another conditional-subjunctive world in an attempt to do for his viewers on YouTube what Masyana does for her children: use art to make them understand Russia’s crimes in Ukraine. By the end of the episode, the viewers also learn how its story came to be, both diegetically (it’s all a nightmare Masyana is having) and nondiegetically (St. Petersburg and Mariupol are sister cities, a fact Kuvaev exploits by having the atrocities of Mariupol occur in his native city and using a portmanteau of both cities’ names to give the episode its title).

None of this is explained at the beginning, however; instead, viewers are suddenly thrown into a world of unrelenting horror along with Masyanya herself, whom Hryundel awakens early in the morning with the news that Russian cities are being bombed by China. Step by step, the family’s sense of safety is whittled away: they can’t escape by car because the roads are blocked; their building is destroyed by a bomb; Hryundel is killed by another bomb while his family waits for him in a shelter; Masyana dies after yet another explosion. Soon only Badya, her son, is left to detail his experiences in his diary as he hides alone, underground. Two Chinese soldiers throw a grenade into the cellar, and Badya dies as well. Throughout the episode, Masyana and Hryundel cannot help but be continually appalled that this is now their reality: “How can this be happening in the twenty-first century?” St. Petersburg’s most famous monuments are ravaged by shelling, and in one of the most painfully ironic moments in the entire episode, Hryundel hears about people who have found safety in the Ukrainian city of Bucha (the site of mass slaughter by Russian troops in our world). On television, the president of China (speaking Russian in an unfortunately racist caricature), declares that there is no such thing as Russia, that Russians are really just Ukrainians who stole all their land from China.

When Masyanya awakens from her nightmare, she muses aloud about the importance of empathy, driving home a message that one hopes is already obvious. Just imagine the terrible things committed by your country were happening to you: how would you feel? In the panoply of alternate Russias, in which the fate of the nation depends on the intervention of ordinary “heroes” righting historical wrongs, Kuvaev’s Masyanya stands out as a rare call to conscience and responsibility rather than nursing post-imperial grievances. If I were a Time Crasher who could intervene in the course of post-Soviet Russian literature and entertainment, I would find a way to make fewer triumphant war stories and more Masyanyas.

1. There is also the variation “History knows no subjunctive mood.”

2. As Kobierecki writes, “Putin’s aim in organizing the Olympics was not only to show Russia strong, but also civilized” (173).

3. On the role of the military in the Sochi show, Jonathan Grix and Nina Kramereva note: “The use of military vocabulary in the context of the Olympics demonstrates an interesting paradox. Outwardly, that is to the Western onlooker, Russia wants to appear a benign and responsible, though strong and ambitious, agent in international relations, committed to soft power ideals. Inwardly, that is, to the domestic audience, Russia sends a message which is meant to ignite a certain hostility against an outside world and to juxtapose ‘us against them’ and thus to use the West as a dissociative group in this identity building enterprise” (470).

4. The words associated with the alphabet in Lyuba’s vision are: Alphabet, Baikal, Sikorsky’s Helicopters, Gagarin and Gzhel’, Dostoyevsky, Catherine the Great, Hedgehog in the Fog, Zhukhovsky, Grain Sorting Machine, Empire, Tchaikovsky, Kandinsky, Moon Rover, Malevich, Nabokov, Space Station, Periodical Table, Ballets Russes, Sputnik, Tolstoy and Television, Ushanka, Fisht, Khokhloma, Tsiolkovsky, Chekhov, Chagall, Shchusev, Pushkin, We, Love, Eisenstein, Parachute, Russia.