The search for the “real” within the paradoxical Russia persists five centuries later. But what is this “real” in the Russian context? For many European travelers, past and present, the “real” stands for the “Russian people” as opposed to the repressive Russian state and its corrupt officialdom. Or the “real” Russia is somewhere out there in the countryside and not in the twin capitals of Petersburg and Moscow. The “real” Russia is also something concealed by the modern facades of the capitals, obscured by the state’s propaganda machine, or silenced by the whims and interests of the foreign observer. More recently the “real” Russia is garbled by a postmodern veneer, absent of grand narratives, and where life is “surreal.”
Two recent books, Anne Garrels’ Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia and Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, both, in their own way, seek to capture the “real” Russia. Garrels wants to understand Russians’ relations to Putin and Putinism from the ground up. She paints portraits of real Russians dealing with real problems. Pomerantsev shuns digging too deep since to him, Putin’s Russia is akin to a surrealist painting where pulling back the curtain only reveals more curtains. His subjects are actors in a big reality show. [...]
This begs the question of what to do with Putin. Garrels’ book is about Putin country, after all. It’s worth noting that for her interlocutors, Putin represents “stability.” Here, stability can be read as more than just economic, but in the figure of Putin a new metanarrative. It’s telling that over the last five years Putin has increasingly concentrated on Russia’s great power status, nationhood, Russian identity, history, and other remedies for fragmented national souls. In this sense, perhaps Garrels and Pomerantsev are not so much pointing to a Russia that is, but one that was as we witness the twilight of the shattered post-Soviet man and the dawn of a consolidated Russian one.
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