There Ain´t No Cure for the Russian Blues

There Ain´t No Cure for the Russian Blues

“Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Winston Churchill

By: Erreh Svaia

I suppose my Russophilia started when I was very young, I learned in school about capitalism, socialism and communism, in elementary school we didn't get too much details about it, capitalism, as we were thought meant private property, individuality and abundance, freedom of choice; Communism, exemplified then by the now defunct USSR, meant authoritarianism, no private property, austerity, "everybody is equal", "the government owns everything"; Socialism was in a poor simplistic way described as the combination of the former two (Third Way?)

When I went to college, I developed an habit of reading novels, and I also loved geography and history, which lead me to know and love the works of the great Russian literature masters Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol and Chekov, I was intrigued by the lives of mighty characters like the dictator Joseph Stalin, the revolutionary Trotsky, and the mystic Rasputin, in a way the stories of all these guys remind me of the stories about the Mexican Revolution times by Jorge Ibarguengoitia or the rural tales of Juan Rulfo and Bruno Traven, to me, the Russian Revolution and the Mexican Revolution both went hand in hand at some points, after all, both armed movements started in the poorest sectors of both societies only to be manipulated by political fractions, ended up in two long lasting dictatorships, and both countries societies ended up oppressed precisely by the revolutions they supposedly put in motion, with revolutionary pioneers Ricardo Flores Magón, and Lev Trotsky ousted from the movements they helped to create and betrayed by their new leaders.

While growing up, I was always interested about Russian culture, I loved Eisenstein and Tarkovsky cinema, the troubled and despairing poetry of the great Anna Akhmatova, eastern Europe architecture amazed me or made me nostalgic, and I was blown away by the Chernobyl disaster (terrifyingly described in Voices of Chernobyl by the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexeievich, recently (well deserved) awarded with the Nobel Prize in literature) and the subsequent fall of the communist regime, nearly a decade after that, a one political party dictatorship also ended in México (PRI).

Another reason to madly love Russia was the works of other two more contemporary writers I appreciate so much, the monumental talents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn an incredible writer close to traditional Russian literature, but denouncing the horrors of the Gulag (there is a great book on this by Anne Applebaum) and the wild and legendary Eduard Limonov, a Russian maverick, two totally opposed writers with a unique vision of the events leading to the end if the soviet experiment and who in a way, felt booth betrayed by the country they at one time loved so much.

These days I can name Vladimir Sorokin as my current favorite Russian writer with his impressive Day of the Oprichnik, a powerful blow to Russia's current oppressive system, I'm also deeply in love with the great musical legacy of the amazing Egor Letov and visionary music created under the specter of punk rock, but developed truly underground, lo fi and running away from the KGB; More recently, I was totally blown away by today's great realistic cinema with directors like Yuri Bykov and Andrei Zviaguintsev whose Durak and Leviathan movies respectively showed a powerful and severely critical vision in the middle of the chaotic Russian landscape, their obscure and sometimes desperate style of storytelling reminds me of the great work of Mexican filmmakers Arturo Ripstein and Felipe Cazals whose greatest works displayed similar type of stories in the 70s and 80s, impossible again to negate the emotional connections and links between both countries, and impossible not to identify and love that unique story and cultural past that make Russian culture so fascinating to me, how accurate was Mr. Churchill.