Mikhail Shishkin uses the exotic term ‘oelus’ no fewer than 75 times in his collection of essays My Russia. The ulus was the form of government that Russia, or rather Muscovy, knew when it was a vassal state within the Mongol Empire.
In Shishkin’s work, the ulus is a metaphor for a constant in Russia’s tyrannical state model, from the thirteenth century to the present day. Revolutions left the power pyramid untouched. Beautiful constitutions were written, but they had no control over the unwritten iron laws governing the dealings of tsars, Soviet leaders and presidents with their subordinates. Those subordinates also continued to view their leaders with the same view.
A characteristic of the ulus, writes Shishkin, is that people have no part in what those leaders decide. That explains why they, by definition, do not feel responsible for the actions and decisions of their leaders. With rare exceptions, such as dissidents who protested against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Shishkin writes. They themselves were not guilty of this, but they did feel responsible. Just as a minority of Russians now feel responsible for the war in Ukraine.
Two types of consciousness
“Great, courageous people,” agrees Shishkin, visiting the Netherlands to present his book. “Where are they now? They are in prison, or they had to emigrate.”
Against this minority, says Shishkin, stands the majority, on the other side of the rift in society. “Hundreds of thousands of Russians went to war to kill and be killed by Ukrainians. To understand that you have to realize that in Russia we have two different types of consciousness.”
“It started with Peter the Great, who came to the Netherlands and saw how beautiful everything is here, and said: let’s build Amsterdam in Russia (Saint Petersburg, ed.). It is a misunderstanding that he also wanted to introduce European culture and European ideas to Russia. He didn’t want that. He wanted Western technologies, to fight the West. But with the technologies and the guns came ideas about equality, freedom and fraternity.”
My Russia or Putin’s Russia
“So we got two different nations, of – say – Russian Russians and Russian Europeans. For the Russian Russians, Russia remained a holy island, surrounded by an ocean of enemies who want to eliminate us. Only the Tsar and our generals can save us. For the Russian Europeans that is a dead end. They want freedom and the rule of law.”
These two Russian nations have been at war with each other since time immemorial, Shishkin argues. One side, Shishkin’s Russia – My Russia as the book title reads – is opposed to the other, Putin’s Russia and the leaders who came before him and their followers.
“Twice in our history we – my Russia – have been the winner in this war. We won in February 1917 (the democratic revolution before the communist Bolsheviks seized power later that year, ed.). That brought democracy to us, the European Russians. But for 150 million Russian peasants it meant anarchy. The Bolsheviks succeeded in establishing another dictatorship, another ‘ulus’.
“We experienced our second victory in the 1990s. But that victory for us was accompanied by enormous chaos for the population.”
Democracy as lawlessness
The word democracy became contaminated under then-president Boris Yeltsin and became synonymous with gang violence, greedy oligarchs, poverty and lawlessness. Russia was ripe for a czar again, namely Putin, who promised to turn the tide by being a real czar. He brought the oeloes back.
“For our Russia it is dictatorship, but for the other Russia it is order. For them, if the Tsar is a fake, we will have chaos and anarchy. Only the victorious Tsar is the real one. Stalin could kill millions and millions of people, but even now people love him because he was the victorious Tsar. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, so beloved here in the West, lost the war in Afghanistan and lost the Cold War. He is despised, he was a fake czar.”
Yeltsin also understood that he had to be a victorious tsar to give himself legitimacy, Shishkin argues. “He started the first Chechen war. His generals had told him: within three hours we will take the Chechen capital Grozny. But Yeltsin lost the war. And he was hated by everyone in Russia.”
War criminal against his own population
Successor Putin started the second Chechen war for the same reason – the legitimacy of the Tsar. That war was started by a series of bomb attacks on apartment buildings, probably committed by Putin’s secret service, and attributed to Chechen terrorists.
“Putin was a war criminal against his own people from the start. And in Chechnya he committed outright genocide. But the tsar must provide himself with legitimacy, again and again. So in 2014 he annexed Crimea. Most Russians were so happy: ‘Crimea is ours! Crimea is ours! Now we have a real czar’.”
“And his generals told him: ‘We will take Kiev in three days.’ If Putin had known what we know now, he would never have started this war. For many Russians he is no longer a real tsar. Because: where is the victory?
Waiting for the new Tsar
A bad sign for Putin was last year’s uprising by mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Army. “His tanks advanced, 400 kilometers from Moscow, 300 kilometers, 200 kilometers. In Rostov, Prigozhin’s soldiers were greeted with flowers and ice cream. Everyone was waiting for the new Tsar. Nobody wanted to fight for Putin. So Russia is ready for a new Tsar. A winner, a real czar.”
In any case, the next Tsar will not be called Prigozhin. The man who killed thousands of barely trained ex-detainees at Bachmut, had deserters killed with a sledgehammer, and called for general mobilization in the fight against Ukraine, died last year in a ‘plane crash’, two months after his uprising.
Shishkin has few illusions about the next tsar and the possibility that he can bring about a democratic turn. “To build a democratic society, you need society, a civil society, people who understand what democracy is about, how it works. We need citizens. But millions and millions of them have left Russia over the past thirty years. At the moment I do not see any conditions necessary for a democratic society.”
Control over nuclear weapons
There will certainly not be a revolution as long as the war continues. “First of all, Russia’s defeat in this war is necessary,” Shishkin said. But support for Ukraine is waning, and the country does not receive enough arms support to win the war.
The West is also waiting for a new tsar, Shishkin thinks. “The leaders of democratic states fear the chaos that could arise in Russia and the loss of control over Russia’s nuclear weapons. They will shake the hand of any subsequent czar who promises control over nuclear weapons.”
Another condition for a more peaceful and democratic Russia is also missing, he believes. “Russians must recognize their national debt. The next Russian tsar must be on his knees, as German Chancellor Willy Brandt did in Warsaw in 1970. He must kneel in Kiev and wherever there were Russian tanks: in Budapest, in Prague, in Vilnius.”
Murderer or hero?
But the necessary sense of guilt is lacking. “Many in the West think that Russians are victims of propaganda, that they do not know the truth due to a lack of free media. But they forget that Russia already had independent media for the past 20 years before they were banned.”
“Imagine: you are the father of a Russian soldier who died in the trenches in Ukraine. Then you can choose between two truths. The first truth is that Ukrainians wanted to build a democratic society, turn to Europe, free themselves from their Soviet past. You are the father of the fascist who came to kill Ukrainian children. Shame on you.
“The second truth is: your son is a hero. Ukrainian Nazis killed our children because we spoke Russian. He defended our homeland, our Russian culture. You are the father of the hero, be proud of this. Which truth would you choose?”
A bridge over hate
The role of writers in promoting awareness is limited, says Shishkin. “Great literature could not stop Auschwitz. Russian literature could not stop the Gulag. So we need to understand what literature can do and what it cannot.”
Shishkin’s books are no longer published in Russia. “The people who think like me – Russian Europeans, the people on my side of the front line – they all know it. And people on the other side will never read my books, because I’m a traitor.
“But I think we need the culture and the literature, because one day the war will be over. Not tomorrow, but maybe in two years, maybe in twelve years. But when the war is over, an abyss filled with death, blood and hatred will yawn between Russians and Ukrainians. And we will have to build a bridge over that ravine. Maybe not our generation, maybe the second or the generation after that. Who will build this bridge over hatred? These will be people of culture: writers, musicians, artists.”
‘First become president’
When asked why the Russian opposition in exile is unable to unite, Shishkin remains unable to answer. “It hurts to see how people, great people, don’t want to come together. They invite each other to joint conferences, but someone always doesn’t want to come, including Alexei Navalny’s team. The disease of the Russian opposition is not a new disease. It was always the same.”
In his book, Shishkin recalls an anecdote that is both sad and telling about Navalny when he stood as a candidate for the presidential elections in 2017. After an election rally in a provincial Russian town, he was approached by a man who said: “Aleksey, I like the way you speak and what you say. I like you as a person, but I’d better become president first. Then I will vote for you.”
“That’s how it works in Russia,” sighs Shishkin. “To introduce democracy you must first become czar. But after you become Tsar, you are just playing the role of Tsar. You cannot change that role. The role will change you. That is the problem.”
Mikhail Shishkin (1961) is one of the best-known contemporary Russian writers. His work has been published in thirty languages. In 1995 he emigrated to Switzerland. “Putin is a symptom, not the disease,” Shishkin writes in his recently translated essay collection My Russia. War or peace.
Mikhail Shishkin
My Russia. War or peace
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