Partisan Songspiel: A Belgrade Story

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March of the Assenters

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Stanislav Markelov: Moscow, 30 November 2008

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No. 19: Free Babi Badalov!

Babi Badalov is an old friend of ours. From the late eighties until the late nineties, Babi was one of the brightest figures on the Petersburg independent art scene, especially that part of it that centered on the artists squat at Pushkinskaya 10. When the squat was closed, in the late nineties (to be replaced by an “official” alternative arts center with much less room for artist studios and independent creativity), Babi fell on hard times, eventually returning to his home country of Azerbaijan. He continued to pursue his art there, although under quite different circumstances. Not only is Babi a radical artist in the personal sense of the word, he is also openly gay. Faced with a society that was growing both less tolerant of political dissent and becoming more socially conservative, Babi found a new home in Cardiff, Wales. There he has become fully integrated into the local arts community. He has also become the focus of a spirited campaign, led by No Borders South Wales, to support his asylum application and, in the last few months, after his application was rejected, to resist his repatriation to Azerbaijan.

On September 16, Babi was detained during his weekly sign-in at the UK Border Agency and taken to the Rumney Police Station. On Thursday morning, Babi was transferred to the Campsfield Immigration Removal Centre. It has now been learned that British authorities are planning to deport him to Azerbaijan on Saturday, on an Azerbaijan Airlines flight from London to Baku.

No. 18: Ekaterina Degot on Saying No to War in Russia

The war hasn’t ended: it’s only getting started. The war is on and that means all of us—people who write, talk, and think—are walking on a minefield. On a minefield of words. We have to be very careful about what we say, to make sure we don’t let the war slip into our words and thus become its accomplices.

Anti-War Protest in Petersburg

Today things are said that provoke in me an instantaneous reaction of protest, rage, and the desire to struggle. Because I know what is behind such words. Or, at least, what such words might mean. Even if the danger is hypothetical, it is wrong to talk that way all the same. There are moments in history when seemingly neutral words—for example, “Russian” or “Jew”—cease to be neutral. The political context strips them of their neutrality, and these are moments when naively ignoring this context is a crime.

No. 12: Alexei Penzin on Symbolic Capital

The expression “symbolic capital” is all the rage in Russia. It is perhaps the only term in Pierre Bourdieu’s entire social theory that has found its way into everyday usage. A Google search returns something like a million and a half links to the term in various languages.

Not long ago I had occasion to ponder the usage of the concept. The Chto Delat group and the Forward Socialist Movement carried out a collective action against the plans of Gleb Pavlovsky’s Foundation for Effective Politics to invite French leftist philosopher to Russia. Badiou heeded the arguments of his Moscow comrades and refused to come to the Russian capital at the bidding of this pro-Kremlin organization. Afterwards, the Internet was filled with accusations that Chto Delat and Forward had simply wanted to cause a fuss and raise some “symbolic capital” in the process.

This take totally nullified the intentions, political motives, and internal debates of the people who took part in this action. Everything was reduced to an instrument for raising that elusive substance known as symbolic capital (fame, reputation). The activists were told that they hadn’t done anything special. You’re just like us, their critics said; you’re out to get what everyone else is after, only you use different means and work in a different area.

No. 9: Kirill Medvedev on the Crisis of the Russian Intelligentsia

In distant Soviet times, I found Bertolt Brecht’s statement that “for art, not being a party member means belonging to the ruling party” the height of absurdity. Nowadays, this line has a different ring to it. It sounds okay. In any case, it makes you think.
—Lev Rubinstein (in Grani.ru)

In order to talk about democracy (people power) we have to give the word “conviction” a new sense. It should mean: to convince people. Democracy is the power of arguments.
—Bertolt Brecht, Me-Ti: The Book of Changes

The principal symptom of the cultural situation in today’s Russia is the crisis of the liberal-intelligentsia consciousness and its schism. For over fifty years the consciousness of this stratum consisted of two main components. The first component was the intelligentsia’s well-known anti-statism, its sense of empire (inherited from the revolutionary intelligentsia) as a repressive force. The second element, on the contrary, was inherited from the statist intelligentsia that had produced the famous Vekhi (“Landmarks”) almanac in 1909: the cult of private values and a hatred of everything “leftist,” everything that called the “bourgeois” into question; that is, a mindset that sanctified inequality and exploitation as the order of things. For the Vekhi crowd itself, this hatred was aggravated because they had dallied with Marxism in their youth. For the Soviet and post-Soviet intelligentsia, this hatred was stirred by their own genetic origins among those very same “socialists,” “destroyers,” and “lefties” who had planned and carried out the Revolution. While it was natural that it rejected Soviet (“imperial,” “collectivist”) reality, this type of consciousness became unbelievably hypertrophied. It was this stratum—a hodgepodge of dissidents, moderate frondeurs, crypto- or latent anti-Soviets—that captured the position of cultural hegemon in the nineties on the crest of a general anti-totalitarian wave and the collapse of the Soviet bureaucratic model. It was this stratum that rediscovered the culture that had been wholly or partly forbidden by the Soviet authorities. It was this stratum that set the tone in the press of those years. Using innocent slogans that seemed logical at the time, it was this stratum that threw its ideological weight behind the notorious reforms of the nineties.