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by Martin Kraemer Liehn
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diary of a fortnight
Diving down in quest for Siberian Atlantis
a personal and very inconsistent contribution to our
Communist future
written in Novosibirsk August 2006
edited as raw material in February 2012, Kiev
Martin Kraemer Liehn
ul. Shaumjana 8-2
UKR-04111 Kiev
Ukraine
Tel.. landline +38 044 449 07 01
Email: [email protected]
the diaries are precious...
"Will I again travel eastwards just to find myself end up
with
even more questions than before, not even enabled to
think about answers
to be honest? How long can this go on?"
but I didn't notice too much "seksualnoi otkrovennosti",
just have
slightly better understanding of your biography...
Shirley from Minsk/Istanbul, giving me the first readers
response I ever got about it yet (April 2011)
(thanks Shirley for two good clues about understanding
Russian language better and improving this text, their
effect is marked in the text respectively)
These notes are in some sense the raw sketch for
http://lccn.loc.gov/2008503857
Type of Material: Book
Kraemer Liehn, Martin.
Main Title: Siberian diary / Martin Kraemer Liehn.
Published/Created: Warszawa : Instytut Wydawniczy kip,
2008.
Description: 47 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
ISBN: 8388353942
Copyriot at: http://www.archive.org/details/SiberianDiary
1. resting under beats of lightening and thunder
2. turning a day-train into a proletarian hotel
3. steps into Asia
4. raspberries and more plavchiki
5. Omsk sisters on holiday
6. taking an expectable nip of aloofness at Akademgorodok
7. Novosibirsk refurbishment
8. affluent gardens at the sources of river Ob
9. a night of compulsory adoration
10. Asian mountains Asian rivers
11. Ezen Privet
12. harvesting stones and taking them home
13. immensely agitated water slowing down
14. two words of German
15. reversing into running ice
16. birch-trees of Siberian Bahamas
17. Honey, Honey, and another night awake
18. cold, wide rivers
19. rebels ready for the countryside?
20. a theory of progress reconstructed
21. advancing within a collective of brilliant practice
22. swimming off in more than tears
23. rebeginning in Barnaul: fresco, Francesco, Ionesco
24. hitch-hiking into most unexpected gardening
25. dictatorship of the proletariat vs. a collage of
abilities
26. sketches for a commune
1. resting under beats of lightening and thunder
Novosibirsk is humming into a cold morning, end of
August. I gaze at its concrete immensities from the
windows of a painter s workshop, half a dozen stories
above ground. My spacious shelter lays left hand of the
river Ob, dragging north with immense loads of water from
the rainy days behind us. Some Africans, I have been
told, would actually say before us because the immediate
past is sensually so much more present and convincing
than our pale projective expectations we call future and
pretend to be before us . In some African languages, the
future is actually spatially behind you. I reckon this to
be indeed very adequate. In our consciousness, we really
do face the immediate past while having future hopefully
backing us up, behind us, yet potentially so uncanny, so
deceptive, so unknowable.
There is a sensually pulsing past in my body, though, and
stripped free of all remainders of bourgeois idealism,
with the conviction of a materialist convict to my body
only, I know that any key to any future is just in here.
Really? You pretend that there is a revolutionary future,
something different from selfish Capitalist consumerism?
And you pretend that it is actually included (with the
help of a sly dialectical transformation) right
intrinsically of the sensual fulfillment your body has
known from the past weeks? Kidding? Just behind this
unshaven, sun-burnt face with all its rat-like senses so
terribly awake and fond of life that I would feel
slightly uneasy if I myself were the future and obliged
to host him? Fortunately, I can say, it is the other way
round(
Strokes of lightening and thunder go down on the
indifferent townscape of concrete and its distant noise
of cars. Socialist urbanism knew how to keep cars out of
living and working areas. Though half a mile away, I can
feel the metropolitan underground pass in the breaks of
thunder. I can tell by a slightly different, more
delicate vibration in the concrete continuum connecting
every human being to each other in this one and only
Siberian metropolis.
Cold rain, cold wind comes upon the town from vast plains
in the North. The water going down the Ob now will
probably not make it any more to the icy ocean far up in
the polar night this year. It will be caught by frosty
chills with temperatures hostile to any kind of flow and
life, nights which look like the end of the world when
seen once from their Siberian insides.
The Russian situation is ready for anti-Capitalist
guerrilla warfare , said my friend V. yesterday morning.
But our countryside is different from the Columbian
battle-ground. A Russian winter kills you when you have
no house. And Russians who do have a house are capable of
denouncing you right away to the state killers.
1943, Germans lost against partisan warfare because of
its civil support in Russia, I recalled from my history
text-books.
That is the cinema version of history my friend
explained. When we were trained for guerrilla warfare in
the late Soviet union one of our primary lessons was
avoid to get into contact with this population
I could not help to admit that this would be exactly the
opposite of what is really necessary for a revolutionary
situation. After some time, it seemed to me that I had
understood comrade V. better. The question of armed
struggle against Capitalism, the choice of arms in
general, is a side issue. The essential step for the left
is to form partisan units, quit the vague contingency of
bourgeois careers and left militancy. To my mind, the
arms to be taken, the methods to be chosen should allow
maximum contact and interference. With the confidence of
the 19th century Narodniki, I know that this global
population, avoided by Soviet defence strategies,
deprived of the control of any means of production and
progress, merits a life choice. That is why at the end of
this diary, I try to sketch the concept of a commune for
militant investigation and scientifically reflected
intervention, not the other way round.
Blows of thunder and lightening go down on the concrete
loneliness of a Monday morning, which left me terribly
privileged in an artist s studio with 8, 80 or 800 free
weeks ahead, 20 metres above ground. Another stroke goes
down, another blow of cold wind and rain bursts through
the windows onto my open senses, so furiously alive with
joy and creative expectation. If this is the end of
summer, this year, this life, I will not complain. I am
ready to harvest. Let us see what.
2. turning a day-train into a proletarian hotel
15 precious years have gone down the drain and the Soviet
experience is still more than a set of scattered
fragments to be recovered by archaeology. Sitting in a
collective sleeping wagon of a train gaining the first
heights of the Ural, I remembered the August days 1991 in
the working-class backwaters of Paris. I had run free
from school, ceased to be a teen, learnt to keep a garden
and eventually to defend a road block of burning cars in
the student demonstrations of the French capital. And as
if this was not enough to burden a summer, I had chosen
to be fatally in love with a comrade from East Germany.
On that August morning 1991, when news broke that Moscow
is ready for anything, I rode far on a borrowed French
bike to get hold of humanit , not waking up my special
guests. A whole group of East German students had made
its way to my rural retreat in the Paris plain by bicycle
themselves and was living at my workplace, tolerated by
my French and African workmates with the help of little
payments in our common black cash-box. Throughout the
following days, I kept on translating to my Socialist
guests the French articles on the Soviet Union from the
one and only Communist newspaper available. Just imagine
there was no internet at that time, only a funny French
precursor called minitel , logistically not able to
support much more than French dating businesses, not to
speak about independent media. My guests with their
Socialist socialisation who found praising words even for
the Thaelmannknoepfe on my work suit listened
attentively. Instead of French, they had learned, what I
could only dream of: Russian. There was a vague feeling
among us that maybe everything returns to what we
expected. Maybe, we hoped, Capitalism will not make the
race in the end. And I even remember voices predicting
that it was time to return to East Germany and join the
deserted building site of Socialism. Some of my comrades
had travelled to Mongolia and Kazakhstan before, served
on the Western GDR border and exchanged shots with
demoralised ex-Vietnam units of the US-Army. For them,
returning to the GDR meant returning to the East in
general, a giant collective full of contradictions but
worth fighting for. All of them had been thinking like
that at some point of time, no timely opportunism could
conceal that. Socialist loyalties, we thought to feel,
might be in force again soon. In fact, we were fatally
mistaken and our illusionary forces paid heavily for
this.
The thrill of the initial change soon gave way to broad
disillusionment when El cin (Yeltsin) putsches his way to
supreme command. Only some days later, I met the chief
editor of the Pravda in Paris, literally reduced to the
modesty of a 19th century Russian migr . He had fled the
white take-over of Moscow and used his invitation to the
te de l humanit in Paris to escape the crack-down. His
newspaper was closed and delegalised, the Communist party
forcefully dismantled and a dictatorship installed in
Moscow with nothing but Western sponsors, Tsarist
sentimentalities and a offensive primitivism of crude pro-
capitalist Adam Smithian neo-liberal theory that made few
of us laugh. Speaking with the refuge from Moscow, a man
made sensitive and sensible by the disaster of the
preceding two weeks, I suddenly and quite inexplicably
took to a fancy in this Soviet Union, now that it had
made its claim on exclusive working-class representation
history. How fatal, such fancy to set in exactly when its
material base gets physically dismantled, taken over by
the enemy, ridiculed and distorted by their propaganda!
In how far does such caprice of affection betray a
certain deliberate distance to reality, a dash of
voluntarism opposed to materialist wisdom and politically
effective strategy against Capitalism? I cannot tell. I
know that I had a certain conscience about this
ontological problematic already in 1991. In how far can
we pin-point our visions to the past? Is that not the
mode of reflection characterising positivism, our
bourgeois class enemy? What has the Jacobinist fervour of
the 19th century, what has the love for the Paris Commune
in the 20th century really contributed to revolutionary
progress? 15 years ago, I took two steps out and into
this dilemma which were almost ridiculously juxtaposed. I
became member of the French Communist party. And, I
remember this from the first meetings and exchanges with
my new party cell, I resolved to travel eastward.
Precisely 15 years after this fatal August when
Capitalism triumphed globally and succeeded in adding a
new and formerly unknown sense of bitterness to our
lives, I find myself still travelling eastward with love
s labour lost. Has a youth frustration turned into a life
obsession? Do I actually get closer to the social
explosives of collective potentials which countless of my
dreams and quests have localised East, behind the East-
German border, in East German student homes, in East
Polish villages, in the Rumanian Carpathians, in the
Polish capital, in Prague, in Byelorussia, in the
Ukraine, in European Russia and now finally behind the
Ural mountain range? Those dreams boasted of sly
technical rationality, humane industrial benefit, evenly
distributed by efficient railways. Such dreams were
colonising vast landscapes of my mind. They were actively
taking refuge in things I got to know about the history
of Soviet cultural vanguards, Soviet Communes, worker
biographies, founders of Soviet power.
Sincerely speaking, this is counter-realist to the
extreme. Present Russia and all of its periphery in its
wake has been strategically decomposed, forcefully
irrationalised and as it seems irretrievably
deindustrialised at a speed and scale hardly ever
recorded in human history. Will I again travel eastwards
just to find myself end up with even more questions than
before, not even enabled to think about answers to be
honest? How long can this go on?
After passing giant river beds behind Perm our train was
gaining height among the endless green wooden slopes of
the southern Ural ranges. Passengers were getting more
familiar, more provincial and conversation easier. It was
enough to say that I had travelled from Moscow to arouse
frank astonishment. So you have come such a long way (32
hours, Vladivostok is more than 120) just to be here in
our forlorn little mountains, people asked. Later there
might have been a shy question like But you are a
foreigner anyway, aren t you. I have learnt to silence
such doubt with a vague geographical reference. I am from
the Baltic sea , I would respond slyly. Nobody in Russia
would at first glance understand this to mean actually
anything outside the former Soviet Union. Citizens former
the former Baltic Republic are not actually Russian in
the cultural sense of the word Rusky , but they are still
ours in a very comprehensive understanding.
I put my finger on the all-Russian railway map comprising
two continents and decided to get off where it had
landed. I had a special pleasure to slow down getting my
luggage ready on the platform in the train door, a group
of commuting clerks returning home had taken the fancy to
flirt with me so that I would get on the train again and
make it at least to the next little town with them, for
here, there is nothing . I understood that their flirting
was inspired by the boredom of a long trip much more than
by their acquaintance with me. Consequently, my counter-
proposal to spend the forthcoming week-end together
walking through rural rain did not encounter quite
anything worthwhile to be called enthusiasm. With a
smiling and a mournful eye, I finally took to this
delightful prospect on my own, searching the next
footpath from the platform to the vast adjacent riverbed,
when a firm female voice woke me up with a series of
funny questions and proposals. She was standing among a
vast heap of bags and sacks, carefully watched over by a
big man in military suit. I would not know what this
military clothes meant, I could not tell where this woman
took her splendid vitality from under the constant late
summer rain. But I grasped, that I was just meeting a
folk, previously unknown to me plavchiki, rafters. They
wait entire days for trains. They transgress wide
stretches of Siberia, carry their Soviet boats, their
soviet team spirit and their liquid spirit to the outmost
out-back, just to have a ride down untamed rivers. In the
following weeks I meet plavchiki-families, plavchiki-
summer-communes, plavchiki-invitations, plavchiki-
hospitality, plavchiki-snobism and finally and most sadly
a plavchiki-widow. Actually after travelling the European
parts of this country during the last 7 years, I was not
quite prepared any more to see Russians publicly doing
anything different from grabbing small occasions for
making money or accumulating streamlined commercial
prestige or merchants or otdachnut (breath out) in most
petty-bourgeois senses of the polyvalent word. I was
being arrogant, because I had no clue about rafting.
Rafting takes you out of the ritualised misery of Russian
commercial life. Rivers flow for free for the time being.
Rafting throws you on your own physical forces, your own
physical senses and the power of collectives helping each
other, spending the river nights with their guitars and
laughing about mosquitoes, lack of food and summer colds.
But rafting also probes the limits of escapism. It
provokes the Russian macho-stereotype and its military
socialisation to flourish, unfortunately not only in
women whom it happens to do incredibly good for a change.
Men drink, men get drunk, men get into wild water, men
drown. Very simple plot, though, it happens hundred of
times every season. To be fair, some die because there
are crazy waters in the Siberian out-back. Accidents
happen even without alcohol. Exceptions can prove a rule.
Despite everything, there is something hilariously
beautiful in the rationality of formerly Socialist
tourism. I remember to be caught by the thrill of non-
commodity based excursionism in 1994 when my Rumanian
uncle announced that with his wife having disappeared, we
could now take the kitchen into self-management and eat
tourist-style . He meant functional modesty, the end of
laborious urban conventions, butterless sandwiches to put
it in a nutshell. A Westerner would quite probably
understand just the opposite. Tourism after life-long
Capitalism is rather a merchant to show off. Eat tourist-
style would rather point at some pumped up cheap
exoticisms like pizza, Indian or Chinese food.
Plavchiki are folks of quite another planet. Some even
manage to avoid road transport up the rivers at all, they
do it all with cheap trains, spacious enough for their
solid Soviet hardware. There is actually hardly any
sleeping infrastructure in place for plavchiki, they
sleep on river-beaches and railway stations just as the
water and the trains happen to carry them.
Once I had heard the voice of that first plavchik woman
to step into my senses, I was quite convinced to follow
her wherever she was up to. There was such an
uncompromising playful ease in her jokes and
observations. It took me some time to understand where
she took it from she was actually returning with her
folks to Perm after weeks of wild and austere life on the
waters. And then she would whisper the formula for
happiness into my ear and it went Kyn-Zavod . Behind some
bushes, she made me understand, another train was waiting
which I had not noticed before. Now it was high time for
it to depart. Its final destination being nothing else
but Kyn , I looked into her eyes. She nodded. So, I took
my legs into my hands and my luggage between my teeth to
run for my life and the promise of happiness and catch
the departing train. Behind me sounded a laugh which had
become all too familiar within those last 9 minutes on
the forlorn rural platform. Still days later, I would
hear her laughing, it went through my head and breast
like the most beautiful invitation to Asia I have ever
been offered, even when it had already dawned to my mind
after some incredibly restless days and nights that at
least this year Kyn-Zavod would never be reached by me.
But that is another story, the one of chapter 3.
I was in a strange fit of humour in this train to the
middle of nowhere promising Kyn-Zavod . An excursion of
youngsters was sitting around me with one boy bursting
out into hysterical laughter every now and then. Gils not
older than 12 would flirt around him and make him
physically explode with shyness and pretended strength.
This was actually pathetic to look at. Here sat I, three
times older than him and the only faculty helping me more
than him was to direct those spasms of unfulfilled love
into myself so that they would not burst out so
disagreeably. There was another boy sitting diagonally,
astonishing sad-looking, maybe two times older than the
young helpless annoyance. Through my commiseration, I
would actually consider to shut the young one up. But the
elder one took up the task and asked offensively what
these laughers were about. So I could take to moderating
and suggested that our young colleague was probably in
love and did not know what this meant. So what , the
elder boy retorted still offensively, come on, you are
even some 12 years or so of age." The young one nodded
ashamed. With 12 he practically knows everything about
love already, doesn t he? So why is he laughing so
stupidly all the time? The younger one agreed that indeed
practically he knew everything already. And I just wanted
to turn the scene into something more pedagogically
instructive and ask for example about the use of condoms
in different generations of Russian youth. But the agenda
was in the sad one s hands now. What do you think? he
asked me. Why me? I decided to do something very
unRussian and tell him everything I actually managed to
grasp of my thoughts in that moment: For the last half
hour I have been thinking that you look quite unhappy. Is
that what you were thinking about? he asked back as if
seeking reassurance. I said yes. Without pathetic
gestures or words, he then virtually stepped out of his
cool and tight demeanour as if out of a cold shower. I
looked at him with new eyes. Suddenly, he had begun to
burn with interest. How can you talk like that? It is not
what you would normally talk in our trains. We spent the
rest of the trip looking at paintings, commenting only
them. On the one hand it was as if enough sincere
sentences had been said and everybody was musing on their
impact. On the other hand, we knew that if there was need
to say more, nobody would have any reserve to say what
came to his mind.
Leaving the train, the two parted as if they were my
friends.
Arriving at the station of Kyn, I was all awake with
delight. There was such a clear evening breeze of
mountain air going through the heights of fir trees and
between the wooden huts, an air of calmness and chilly
summer idleness set in on our minds and conversations. I
had strong memories of early childhood. When I was 4
years old, my father lost his work and we made a step
familiar to most Russians, but quite a horror to me
nowadays in my situation for example. We moved out of
town to a village in the northern mountains to live with
my grand-parents. The clear mountainous air, the high fir-
trees, the change from rumour to quietness and the long,
long trip were physically so alike on my senses that I
was hit with wonder. The world around me was entering
through such paths into my consciousness which were
already familiar to me. Still, what made me almost cry
with surprise: these paths had not been in use for 3
decades! Suddenly, I remembered what we had been eating
on an early summer day in 1976, my sister and me. I
remembered how I drew with my sister on a big white board
with sharp pencils. Today I would tell from my sensual
memory that the pencils were HB, but I could be mistaken
by some degrees. Including my whole childish body in the
game, I lost a brow from my eye and subsequently drew a
burial site for it on the board. The pencil line was
quite alike the line of the bending dead eye-brow. The
sun was shining brightly on the board, it hurt in my
eyes. Contrasts were as sharp as the clear air. This was
not the familiar place. This was something new. For my
grand-parents this was home. One evening they were
sitting all silent. They both watched a flower, a blue
flower. This flower had a meaning in their lives I could
not know. It was connected with a political prison
sentence, three years in jail in the leaden times of the
1950s. I did not know that it was possible to sit silent
for, well, for hours as it seemed. I started crying, my
sister was living far away then.
The important observation I could make from these
memories of more than 30 years ago besieging all my
senses now was how important it was for me to do things
in accordance with my elder sister, even travelling. A
year earlier than painting the white board, we had taught
ourselves to paint grass with different colours of green
and different movements of our hands. Writing first
single letters, listening to blackbirds in spring,
speaking about the war which will be, all this was a
collective exploration. When we were still living in the
town of Stuttgart, my sister and I saw war-planes over
Lebanon on black-and-white television and we were very
afraid. I clearly remember two war-planes on the screen.
We felt close to the end. It took our parents some effort
to calm us. They said that Lebanon is far away and that
the war will not yet come to us tomorrow. A third of a
century later, we see similar pictures from the same
places. My understanding of the war has not progressed or
changed so much from the one I had developed then with my
sister. Just some more specific arguments joined the line
of associations. (We did not really believe our parents
and their calm, their talk about far away still meant
that there was war). My feelings even do not seem to have
changed at all. How strange! Maybe my memory is prey to
determinist manipulation.
I write about my sister attempting to characterise the
self-assurance with which I lobbied myself to sleep with
the conductresses of our little train. Having no place to
pass the night under a roof in the little settlement, the
female collective had long ago taken to heating up one
wagon and sleeping there together. The atmosphere of
erotic tension came later, came and went without changing
our relation of trust. Our evening began with quite a
work-load. We cleaned the wagons. After all my idle
travelling, I had incredible sensual pleasure to wipe the
floors of the Platskartny common sleeping wagons. I sang
and danced doing the work. The floor of these wagons is
actually very detailed and complicated, with 10 niches
for 6 to maximum 9 sleepers each. There seems to be a
Russian system of a small steel bar constructions holding
your wiping cloth. For larger surfaces, the width of the
tool would be ineffectively small but in a railway wagon
it is perfectly adapted to all the holes and tiny niches
which need cleaning. It was interesting for me to learn
that every desk, even the luggage places are being wiped
after a day s journey. There is a complicated system of
using clean, dirty, dirtier and disposing of dirties
water. An incredible mass of objects and garbage can be
dragged out of each wagon. The heating oven, not the
toilet as I thought, is the central operational unit for
all domestic tasks, disposing of garbage, waste-water,
collecting bottles which can earn some money for
returning them, drying and storing the cleaning
instruments. After a long evening, we had great pleasure
to sit by the open samovar. The fire was lighting our
table and the faces, I began to draw. Outside, a big
industrial saw was working throughout the night. They
work in three shifts , the conductresses assured me. They
spoke with a very familiar tone about fellow workers of
different trades. In European Russia, wood does often not
even get basic processing. Most of the harvest is
transported to Finland as raw material and returns to
Russian consumers as processed boards with Western
prices. We started to talk about the railway trade union
and their wages, about AIDS and condoms, about technical
possibilities to sabotage trains on the Transsib
connection in case of need, say for a revolutionary
situation. We discussed about gender roles and personal
relations with male machinists on the train who slept in
a separate place though one conductress had been heavily
flirting with one machinist assistant that evening.
The female director of the wooden railway station of Kyn
had an interesting conversation with my landladies. She
said, she would put me up in the train station which was
officially closed over night, but it was too cold there
to have a nice sleep. The conductresses retorted But when
we molest him sexually in the night he will then speak
badly about us Russian folk. I asked if their
hospitability could be a problem in a control and they
assured me that they do have a very tight control on any
controller sent to them. So I was confident to stay.
Everybody had a good laugh at my poor efforts to portrait
them. With singing and playing tunes on the recorder
flute the night progressed swiftly. There was some
interest in my had-sawn trousers and the pretext was good
enough to finger-test some of its sewing details not
omitting all the flesh and bones within them. In
consequence, the collective resumed that having to get up
for work so early in the morning there was no use to
engage in any love-making any more. So we slept quietly
and warmly until early morning duty woke up the more
mobile part of the collective. Others lay on their desks
and made up poetry like Oh, how I love to sleep in the
morning. Martin, why did you not visit us a bit at night?
and so on.
Secretly, I marvelled at the sovereign mode of
socialising and dealing with sexuality the proletarian
collective had put me up with. It was quite different
from the middle class neuroses, I have got used to
encounter and I still do encounter in myself. Somehow, I
was quite confident that there were less unwanted
pregnancies with such a proletarian and factual sexual
socialisation, than in the painful bourgeois relations, I
have witnessed and created myself. As to pregnancies, in
our train it was just good for a general laugh to find
out that with 35 years of age, I have not even been able
to coax anybody into a wanted pregnancy, forget about
boasting of unwanted ones.
Anyway, there was no reason for me to talk badly about
the Russian working folk, even if their interests had
been slightly less poetic and somehow more factual.
There are precious examples of self-determined sexuality
in female working-class collectives. Florian and
Znaniecki collected life-stories of Polish peasants
migrating to pre-World War I Prussia for seasonal work.
The Prussian latifundistas organised special trains to
direct the stream of migrant labour to their benefits.
Other than the trains for bourgeois clientele, these poor
people trains run and stood waiting for days and nights
on end. The two early sociologists happened to come
across records of female collectives quite deliberately
making use of male companions for their own sexual
notions of pleasure and desire during the trip. They were
not only sovereignly distributing sexual partners among
them, but organising the use of the wagon space according
to their collective female interests and their specific
notion of smaller group intimacy. Comparing this account
with e.g. the portrait of female migrant worker sexuality
given by George Orwell, e.g. in his pot-boiler (that s
his own words) A clergyman s daughter , he appears to
have quite missed the point. (He is a bloody macho
anyway, the opposition in 1984 is betrayed by a woman,
his own wife doing more serious political work in
revolutionary Spain than himself is a persona non-grata
in the action of A homage to Catalonia Coming up for air
searches for revolutionary class coalitions to the
detriment of the female race Keep the aspidistra flying
glorifies sex which is unpleasant for a woman as family-
founding, The road to Wigham Peer chants the tune of good
old working-class patriarchy. Similarly in 1920, Florian
and Znaniecki published their source on female sexual
agency in their American edition under a strict
commentary evoking something like the absolute moral
degradation of some fractions of the migrating workforce
. More individualised sexual relations, e.g. between a
male Polish migrant and a married bourgeois German
landlady were not commented this way. Maybe the main
reason for moral indignation by the male researchers was
actually not free sexuality in general but more specific
female working-class sovereignty in sexual affairs. In
the Polish edition of 1974 the passage seems to be
suppressed altogether.
In a broader sense, the first female working-class
collectives earning their own money in the rice-paddies
of Northern Italy have left some instructive tales on new
discoveries about making love in the canzone delle
Mondine . Bourgeois Petrograd women s rights activists
published alarming notices on the sexual agency of
Ukrainian migrant woman working on Crimean tobacco
plantations. They were economically forced to produce the
dope for men dying on the battlefields of World War I.
Why is their unconventional freedom of sexual choices
generalisingly discredited as prostitution by their
Petrograd class rivals? (This observation is the fruit of
a week of study by my comrade Vlasta in Moscow archives
while the sun was rather inviting to have a swim, thank
you for sharing the information).
Analytically, I reckon it to be not too difficult to draw
a dividing line between promiscuity and genuine sexual
liberation. In practice, one of the most prominent
indicators of genuine sexual liberation seems to be that
though nothing is prohibited, there is actually no stress
on making love to the detriment of other forms of social
intercourse. And for this reason it might actually never
take place, so what? This is a real problem only for
Catholic population ideologists. They together with the
pornographic industry are the one and only obsessed with
sex, for they have instrumentalised it without reserves.
This is the secret message of our last book Kalinka. I
guess that some 90% of the people receiving it this
summer and not reading carefully enough understood our
cause just the other way round. Now, they might think of
us editors as a bunch of strange missionaries. Just as
that pathetic Polish director of a railway restaurant car
on our way to the Athens social forum. When he saw the
Kalinka cover page on sexuality and anti-capitalism he
positively thought this enough a motive to call an
ambulant police unit into the train and get the foreign
parasites out. Luckily, our comrades working on the
Russian railways have a slightly more progressive
socialisation in this respect. 28 more years of
historical socialism (sorry folks, this is a complicated
one: from 1917 until 1944 and 1989 until 1991 minus the
year 1920) do seem to make a difference, even if it is 15
to 79 years back in time.
3. steps into Asia
Any reader who has some sense of what goes on in Russia
will positively marvel how on earth I do get only the
chocolate side of the disaster. To be honest, I have not
told about the other side yet. Strindberg, Munch, Brecht
and Seghers have taken great pains to recreate
artistically how much people can hate you for having made
love to them and not really meant it. But who has
documented the consequences you face for not making love
and meaning it?
One ticket collector on the train gave way to all her
doubts on my character and thus painted a vivid portrait
of Russian conservatism in action. You told us, you will
not only dance on our tables but also start to cry when
we fill you up with coffee. That means that you are a
weak one, you cry. I have heard that artists natures tend
to be weak, degenerated somehow. And you put on your t-
shirt the other way round. Your shoes do not look proper
either. Why have you wiped the floors yesterday? You are
a Cinderella type. Not a strong one. Maybe you are gay
altogether. You should be going by car. You are a looser
if you take the train. Anyway what do you look for in
this country bumpkin hole? If you were serious, you would
be in Moscow now. Why did you ask us about sabotage on
trains? You might be a terrorist. Anyway, you are a
travelling type. That s the sort which contracts AIDS
first. How disgusting to sleep with such a person, even
if you use a condom. That s not what I love. Your
painting stuff is a failure altogether. You have been
drawing us for hours and there is not a single
resemblance. Why did you not give me my portrait as a
memory? There were addresses written on the back side of
the pages? I understand now: the address of your girl-
friend. Maybe you are even married. Take your luggage
now. Don t stand in my way. There are some people who
work, however. Our train is to leave in half a minute.
What do you say? I get a copy of your sketches, also the
one when I posed for you on the bench? You do not believe
yourself. You will forget about me as soon as our train
goes off. But if you come, I will quit smoking and we buy
a little stretch of land in the mountains and we will
raise our own potatoes and my two children and we will be
The train went off. I would not bet my head. But the last
word might have been happy . I took my luggage as I had
been told. It was quite heavy. I noticed that at least. I
walked off into the direction I was vaguely instructed to
bring me to Kyn-Zavod after some 15 kilometres. Quite
close for the Ural mountains. For a moment I paused and
considered to buy some food, but it would have been
several hours for any village shop to open. In my mind
Moscow and local time collided unadvantagously. I took
the first opportunity to leave the track I had been told
to take. First, heading to the left, I then turned to the
right, two more times to the left and then I followed
some paths deeper and deeper into the hilly woodlands
until standing before a bush of raspberries and
realising: Dear colleague, you are physically, morally
and politically destitute. You have nowhere to go. You do
not even know what you look for in these damned forests
plundered of their saleable hardware. Your luggage is
heavy like hell. Your talk is empty. Your feelings are
useless. Your Russian is evidently unconvincing. Your
questions on trade-unionist perspectives have been
insufficient. You haven t even had the guts to talk about
whom they would surely have called your girl-friend. You
should have painted portraits in oil on canvas and not
with pencil on address books. You should have asked them
more about sexuality and fulfilment, concepts of
happiness, education of children. Once in 5 years you
have such a free discussion and all you seem to be
worried about in that moment is that there is only two
condoms in your pocket, they have been there for weeks
now in critical vicinity to the sewing needle and it s
not even you who bought them, that your underwear could
hardly be in a presentable state any more and your
toothbrush had got lost two night-trains earlier. All the
while, I was eating raspberries, sweet red dots of
delight on the black seas of my miseries. After having
eaten more than a kilo or so and swallowed additional
loads of self-hatred alongside, I decided the following.
You have not really slept well this night. You should try
to find something different to eat than raspberries the
next days. You should better not get lost in these
forests. You should rather not sleep in the open air.
Already the days are terribly chilly up here and the
nights will be hell. By the way, better you will never
write or tell about this last night, really about these
trains altogether. Funny, trains have been for the
Russian revolution what ships have been for the
commercial revolution. And individual motor traffic for
capitalist restoration. What is the flagship of
feudalism? A horse, well. Would not mind a horse now. My
German friend Carsten, whom I have invited to go to China
with me said he would be more selective and just take the
horseback experience on the tracking part Kazakhstan-
China. And the slave society? What is their trains?
Individual hand carriers. See how Capitalism longs to
restore slave relations. Under every car a bunch of
welders is tight to weld above their heads, 8 hours a
night shift, 6 nights a week. And you collapse after a
single night in proletarian workmates company. By the
way, why is Marxist history writing always so schematic?
At times it even gets worse than the Agitprop train-slave
car story you made up some raspberries ago. Dialectically
materialist history should be the best writing in the
world and all you manage to read of it appears just dry
stuff. To be honest, the worst things you have probably
ever read is your own stuff. What a good luck for them
that people are generally reluctant to read anything of
it. In 1986, I overheard a very nice conversation in an
Australian school library. I have done a homework on
German history. One started. Should have been 10 pages, t
techer said. Fuck it, I did it on half a page. Actully,
German history is an easy one. Germany was not a bad
country when there was still Charles the great, you know.
The trouble started when his sons divided it in two. See
now, today, you have East Germany and you have West
Germany. That s bloody hell. More than thousand years,
just because of these two brothers I always wonder the
other responded without responding, how do these dicks
actually write those books? As for me, I have even
trouble reading books. Well, I read the spelling
dictionary once. Honestly, in half a night I came to the
word Absalom . Don t laugh that was a hell of a lot of
reading. The problem about writing books. Well, I could
probably write some hundred pages. You can just copy from
other books, I have heart. The real horror is that they
always cross out two thirds of what you write because it
is bull-shit.
These two Australian boys seem to have become the two
guiding stars of your pathetic attempts at saying somehow
something important after 28 years of study. The first
one stands for your historical research, the second one
for your writing altogether. Painting, writing, fighting,
you are only making a fool of yourself, while your former
friends raise children, pay into pension funds and edit
clever articles in revolutionary journals. Strangely
enough, sometimes, I chance to have quite a lot of ideas.
At other times however, one and a half ideas torment me
for a whole day and nothing else turns up. Well, to be
honest, two mushrooms turned up. I know now, that I
should better not have eaten them. They seemed to fulfil
at least one of my resolutions: to eat something
different from raspberries in the end, while a proper
place to spend the night seemed further away than
anything I could reach by foot. And there was nothing
than my feet to give me a lift. I strolled along rivers,
then started to cross them. First I kept to mountains,
than I tried to follow valleys. I am not really ignorant
for things like south, north, the position of the sun at
different times of the day, polar star, proper shoe work,
changing socks and keeping track record. But this day and
the following ones, everything failed. There was not a
living soul turning up and my last strategy to walk in
the direction of faint dog barking which I imagined to
hear behind the horizon also seemed to somehow miss the
point. To cut a long story short, I had got lost. Later I
learned that I had got to Asia that way. But even that
would have been of little consolation in the nights I
then had still before me.
4. raspberries and more plavchiki
There did turn up a trail of a car through the wilderness
when I was restlessly wandering through one of those
nights trying to control the shivering of my body from
frost, malnourishment and dissatisfaction with stern
walking movements. I was not in a position to be snobbish
about cars any more, to be honest. I clung to this path
as to an anonymous love letter. Pulling together all my
remaining wits, I managed to analyse the following. A car
trail has two directions. If you follow one direction to
the end, you arrive at a production plant. There will be
workers and there will be something to eat around. On the
other side of the trail there will be a car cemetery.
There will be some kind of human beings around even there
or vultures and they as well will have things to eat they
have left over, just as the corps of a car never really
gets ripped off to the end. Then the doubts set it. Maybe
this is a hermeneutic circle. We only notice cars which
have not completely been taken apart. Those which have
been taken apart to the last screw are not perceptible
any more. It s likely to this bourgeois mourning of Why
is there no lively proletarian literature? If you would
grant proletarian writers a room of their own and
faculties to publish and interest audiences to read them,
you might notice in the meantime that the chap does not
really write to the benefit of your class interests. Your
tastes will be insulted and your generosity will feel
exploited. That is how you make proletarian voices
disappear from your mind-set. I stood still and felt my
nerves shake my body with horror. Maybe I have taken the
dead direction of the car trail and it will end right
away in one of those pittoresc deserted valleys which
once have been kept and looked after by Kolkhozes. See,
they as well have disappeared to the last screw. Only on
their vast meadows, meadows of thousands of hectares an
agronomist eye can see that the bushes and small trees
are not much older than a decade and some plants
flowering there still betray superb soil fertility, which
is the result of women s and men s toil, socialist toil
on such sour locations as these ones. I saw the car trail
in the moonlight suddenly disappear. The car had stood
there some weeks probably before the vultures had found
its corpse. Then everything happened very quickly. The
last fragment of metal was kicked into the nearby river,
that was it. No, the trail continued. Maybe we had taken
the other direction towards its birthplace. But hark. Do
you really think there will be any factory any more?
Maybe there is just ruins like in those places where
Socialist industry had been producing for socialised
needs and not for the sake of individualised grabbing.
Take the Crimean peninsula for example. In a couple of
years more, they will have taken down even the concrete
ruins. You know, if you bang a steel hammer on concrete
long enough, some metal pieces will eventually stick out.
Getting some kilo of these to a metal shop, will at least
assure you to be able to get drunk for the following
hours, because they sell the metal to China where they
build houses in kilometre dimensions. There has been no
El cin in China, that has made a difference. What do you
grunt? Tien Amen? Do you know the official number of
demonstrators shot in Moscow in 1993 when El cin shelled
the parliament, dismantled the informalist self-
management of living areas, and ordered to shoot on any
civil person approaching the butchery? Officially they
killed close to a thousand victims during this
chirurgical strike (NATO type) . Unofficially, you can
assume that Bejjing Tien Amen 1988 and Moscow White House
1993 are on quite a similar scale of brutality. That is
for the military intervention. Capitalism however has a
supreme capacity to deprive and kill with most civil
instruments. Just note, that the average life expectancy
of a Russian male citizen has dropped by 8 years in the
last 15 years, precisely speaking from the point in time
when Gorbachov s campaign against alcoholism was called
off. In the 1820s the free forces of the Capitalist world
market could crack Chinese self-sufficiency only with the
help of opium and the opium wars. It is true that you do
not learn much useful details about German history in
Australia. But at least you get a sensible introduction
into Asian history. Want to hear it or not, in any
Australian high school you learn that the British
military operation to force China opening up to British
Indian opium import cost 20 million lives. This was the
epoch of the European Romantics. Europeans got very
emotional on hearing about the cruel destiny Greek-
Bavarian monarchists endured when getting some beating in
Ottoman jails for their practices of criminal piracy.
While opium has slipped out a bit of control in the
Capitalist world market. Alcohol seems to be the perfect
civil weapon in the Russian case. Just notice that female
heavy drinking in the former Soviet Union is a specific
phenomena to the happy few who have made their day,
accumulated grants, gone through American sponsored
leadership seminars, communicate with their children
through the meagre payroll of their nanny. Alcohol eats
up the male part of Russian society from below with the
assistance of ubiquitous gamble machines, risky sex and
military manliness. Alcohol eats up the female part of
Russian society from above with the assistance of
systematic gender discrimination cemented to a genuinely
racist system of assault, sexual aggression in literary
all public spaces (not to speak about the private ones)
and exclusive burdening with childcare as soon as a
pregnancy is confirmed. To be successful in such a
society you have to forget effectively. To industrialise
your selective ignorance, there is no better fluid than
alcohol at disposal. I hate all the racist talk about
mentality and tradition . Bullshit! Its bloody structural
violence and alcoholism is the reaction, the last resort,
the false friend still a friend, where even friendship is
out for grab. I once spent a night in a Pskov police
station. I had been seriously beaten up for money. My
left eye was bleeding. I would have genuinely appreciated
my burglars to give me let s say 10 seconds to get off my
glasses before beating into my head. But they would not
take the trouble. After shaking hands with me amicably
and moistening their fists with artisan calm and care in
a greasy street pond of old Pskov, they would beat
straight away into my face, into my glasses. One glas
broke and tore a scratch right along my left eyelid.
There were not many millimetres left to save my left
eyesight, I was told later. That night, I felt safer in
the police station than in the Russian public. Today, I
know that my feeling was a dire illusion. There is no
reason whatsoever to trust Russian police. They will
assess your situation professionally and then, based on
their knowledge of your resources, they will try to
squeeze as much out of you as they can. However, during
the whole night, there were women coming to the police
station. I have rarely seen such brutal traces of
beating, rarely heard such panicking voices and desolate
sobs as from my female fellow victims in the hands of the
police that night. It was in that night, I had a first
real insight into the scope and scale of Russian domestic
violence. These women knew what they were risking in
handing themselves over to the police. They went there
nevertheless. There is a choice between Black Death and
cholera which definitely lets you choose cholera.
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was damned right in tearing
Strauss musical falsification of an Alp morning into
pieces. The main insult to our senses, he argued, is that
the Strauss morning comes out triumphantly, as a proud
piece of bourgeois commodity. Mornings never do come out
triumphantly. The only form we know mornings to grey in
our times ( grauen the German word is synonym to horrify
) is with the ridiculously modest hope that only once it
will not get darker any more. And that is the mode in
which a Ural night turns to an end. There are seemingly
endless hours of greying. No colours, faint black and
white. If you have Moscow time in your senses you loose
hope altogether. This is not the morning. This might be
polar light or something the like, you think after three
hours with the temperatures still dropping and dropping.
Yet there is an end even to that. And there has been a
happy end to the car trail as well. It lead to something
like a trail eventually used in two directions, this lead
to something like a way, this lead to something like
street. Well, not a street. Raw concrete elements laid
out in two long rows of kilometres and kilometres and
kilometres to fit under a lorry. Cars have to improvise
with the mud in-between. It took me half a day to be able
to study the kind of travelling taking place on such
Russian main connection roads, for the first vehicles
choose to appear quite late that day.
And still, they would not bother to give me a lift. They
would just stop to hear my story. It is terribly boring
to travel by car on such lengthy, lonely roads, so you
stop at every occasion, with occasions only popping up
with hours and hours of distance between each other.
Hence people halt, get down their drivers window, lighten
a cigarette and start to chat. Do not use all your hope
to inspire your talking and lobby yourself into their
vehicles. In Russia, you have to be a sovereign economist
with the rare and vulnerable material called human hope.
Only throw a little bit of your precious resource at such
a chatterer. He will probably not let you in once he has
finished his cigarette. And you need some genuine hope
inside of you once you decide to walk for hours and hours
behind the dust cloud that driver has left you walking
in. Thinking back now, I realise that I did not get any
lift to Kyn. I did not even make it to sit in a motor
vehicle this whole week. I made everything by foot. The
reason, why I hardly noticed this default and why my
memories of these endless walks along a straight double-
concrete trail to the horizon just to discover that there
is another infinity stretching to a consecutive horizon
is quite simple. I chanced to meet two farmers. Yes, I
met two farmers. In the beginning I would not believe it
myself. There were actually to men working on a meadow to
fish something like hay out of the pouring rain. I
started talking to them as if to myself. But they would
not socialise like that. Lad, sit down with us first!
Indeed, how can you start a conversation standing when
there is half a hundred kilometres of emptiness around
you. So we sat and we looked at the fir trees on the
other side of the meadow. I had been walking a lot. I had
forgotten what it meant to look at fir trees. I literally
rediscovered them with the help of my new company. Where
do you want to go , the elder peasant asked slowly after
a while. Kin-Zavod I answered economically. The less
unnecessary words you make, the later they understand
that you are an alien. And thus, you might chance to get
a glimpse of real talk. Kin-Zavod is over there, but it
is quite far . Something was going through my body, but I
did not yet know what. I turned around to look into the
direction my neighbour on the hay had indicated. It was
exactly where I came from. And now I heard it clearly, it
was a laughter, not mine. It was the laughter of a woman
shaking me, shaking my bones, my wits. So, after all this
I could still laugh at myself. That meant I was alive,
healthy. Give me three days of rest, a bed, some light
food, not too fat and I will be socialisable again. I was
overwhelmed with joy. I collected my new spirits and made
an explorative request myself.
And where is Kyn railway station? I asked. That s a
little closer both replied amused, over there as well,
same direction . This was it. I had a direction to go. I
had some kind of train taking me to Sverdlovsk in not too
far future. Everything superficially necessary for me was
resolved, so I could turn to the essentials.
- What are you doing here We make hay the elder peasant
replied. He had a massive scull and a broad throat. His
clothes were practical, a lot of linen, tough.
- Isn t it a bit wet for haying
- Won t get much dryer before autumn, probably.
- So what do you do with this filthy hay then?
- Feed my cow.
- How come this is a meadow and not a forest as all the
kolkhoz lands?
- That s my work, lad. The older one replied and looked
at the younger one. Thirty years, I worked on this patch
of land. It was a forest then. Now it is a nice piece. A
week ago, I mowed it by hand, now we collect the
remainders of the rains to one heap if we find a dryer
moment these days.
How did you come here, I asked with a slight uneasiness.
By foot, just as you they answered.
But how do you take the hay to your cow then?
Leave that problem to the winter. Now we make a heap of,
let s say 4 metres. We put a flag-pole on it. Then we
will know where to dig the snow in winter and get down to
the heap.
I laughed at my new friend, he laughed at me. We were
comrades in arms, fighting the battle for realism against
an empty post-modern petrol bubble. The realist method,
as Brecht taught rightly, is made up of a series of well-
polished exaggerations. Only these artefacts of monstrous
unreality can coincide realistically with the monstrosity
of capitalist accumulation.
Miles away I hit the petrol bubble again. There is a most
poignant cinema film by Gauddart, who had reason to hate
television like the end of the world. A working youngster
steals off time, records and devotion from his gramophone
company to date with a young Parisian living behind a
window on the other side of his street. Once he gets into
her flat, he is introduced nicely to her parents. Still
exchanging niceties with these parents, their daughter
has already let in her student lover, a boy abundant in
free time and spare money for fashion clothes. Well , the
girl announces, we two are off. Have a nice evening! Her
working-class guest is left standing uneasily among her
parents. Her parents look uneasily at this one, not
ordered, not taken. Well says her mother defaitistically,
You can watch television with us. And she shows him to a
place in front of the screen. He could not even turn down
the offer.
So I sat down and looked at the screen. I could not
really make out how long I had been off-line but for
Central European standards it was by far too long. Once
in Germany, I saw a business card of a former freak which
had a postal address, telephone, even fax and said in the
end no mail . Everyone has a good laugh at his joke.
Clearly, he will reach retirement age very soon.
However, no mail was the message I got from the screen as
soon as I managed to remember my damned pass-word. What
is this, I marvelled. There are dozens of comrades
getting paid for the hour, sitting in front of computer
screens and being obliged to simulate some kind of work.
Is it possible that none of them has been able to direct
his or her professional boredom at me for some minutes
all these days? To be sure, there were several hundred
spam messages. A lot of exceptions prove a rule. And at
that point, my anger was content to find a single
culprit, the woman whom our comrades on the Ural railways
would have surely called my girl-friend. Clearly, she had
all her mind taken by the task to date with a German
student in the Carpathian Mountains. To do that, they
would have certainly exchanged a hell of a lot of Emails
these last weeks. And there had been not a single half
minute of mercy to throw some rests of dry bread at me
which had eventually fallen from the orgiastic meal they
were preparing each other. Actually, I did not resent her
not writing to me. But I did resent myself to have
believed in so many cheap declarations she had issued for
my relief. Yes, next time I sleep with another one, I
will tell you, even beforehand. Imagine, I will write to
you what I feel and how I develop. We had been so merry
then. I declared in return to write old-style paper
letters and send them to an address which she should let
me know. She did not let me know any address. So this was
it? As far as mail is concerned, this was it. But there
is still another way to reach friends born after 1975. It
s costly, but it sometimes works: mobile telephones.
Throwing half a thousand roubles in, I got a cabin in
Sverdlovsk.
- Hello, I am in Asia.
- Where?
- In Asia!
- Where?
- In A-S-I-A!!! Sverdlovsk, tomorrow Omsk.
- Where? I don t understand a word.
When you have not spoken to a real friend for weeks such
conversation is not exactly funny. I remained silent this
time. Then there came a question from the other continent:
- Have you seen lake Bajkal? Lake Bajkal was farther away
from me than she at that moment. Lake Bajkal meant more
than half a week of non-stop train ride, anyway I would
never get a cheap ticket so quickly now in the high
season, in the middle of August. I looked at the cold
rain beating against the windows. How can you explain
anything about Siberia when the telephone connection
transmits but syllables? I know, future generations will
adopt. Their communication will be more general, less
self-commiserating probably:
-
-
-
- o.k.
However, I managed to ask and make myself understood.
- Will you go on holiday with your new lover?
- Yes, 16th.
Again she had broken her promise. Another time, it was my
questions to hit on it. She would never tell me out of
her own initiative. And in the meantime she would enjoy
the sociable peace until the evil investigative fervour
of my questions would destroy our harmony again. I
thought about English classes back in 1988. We had a very
nice teacher. She was never envious of our time and
attention when we told her outright that we had found no
time or motivation to prepare her texts, i.e. in
classical terms to do our home-work. But, she once
explained desolately I don t want to hit on it, you know.
I want to hear it from you, right away, just when we
start talking about our texts. You can probably imagine
that I have little professional satisfaction in
discussing a text with you which nobody except for me has
taken the trouble to read. This is not a theatre course,
I want to teach you English. Yes, we did understand her,
we did commiserate her. But surely, next time we would
have a go again and try to get through without admitting
that we had not cared a minute about her, that is,
between classes. During classes I even fell in love with
her which was the source of much confusion and irritably
hot day-dreams. Nonetheless, it was just too elegant a
feeling to cheat away without having done any home-work.
In principle, I understood my friend on the other end of
the telephone connection. I might have possibly done
something similar. Would I? I cannot really tell. I never
had the occasion to find out in the last 2 years. And in
the 16 years before that, I cannot remember a single
incident when I acted like that. Maybe my memory has
omitted such incidents. Well, it has, now I recall. But
that is very, very far away already. There was a change
in the altitude of cracks and noise in the telephone
line. She had given me her daughter, our daughter, as we
had agreed to call her, meaning not a new bourgeois
entity of two parents, pretending for heterosexual
wholeness, but a whole commune (though, still to be
founded). Our daughter knew perfectly how to use the poor
technical base linking us. For half a minute she simply
said my name and I said hers. I said Eva, Eva, Eva ,
there was no place for lengthy talk such as Maria
Andreevna or something of the like, simultaneously I
heard Ma-in-M-nnn-in-M-Mat---n. My heart exploded with
happiness. There is a longstanding observation in me how
much I love her mother for her craziness to have a child
in these times. I do not love her for having chosen a
fascist father. I do not really like her compromises with
Ukrainian nationalist at all.
And then, again I chanced to hear half a sentence without
major interruption. It was her again. She went I wish
that the sun should shine for you. This was too much.
This was taken one to one from a pop song. I was furious
with rage and anger, I was sobbing with malcontentment
and bare physical disappointment. Well, the conversation
was over anyway.
I got onto a commuter train. Sometimes in my life, I
really wonder how I do that, getting on a train. It seems
to work really independently of me, in spite of the state
I am in. Getting on a train is so terribly difficult.
Where do I take all this energy from, this coordination
work? My friend V. told me about a case of Western
workaholics. How can you call off this advertisement
campaign, when I have given my last guts, the kernel of
my days to make it happen, how can you! The complaining
party was a copy-writer who had invested more or less
three words into the campaign. They went like buy our or
the like. I sat down in the Elektrichka train and I
perfectly understood the exasperation of the colleague.
He had given so much. I had given so much. For half a
year, I have boiled down literally everything in my life
to be able to attend to Eva. Attend to her in perfect
symmetry of what her mother did for her the 2 years
before. You can call it compensatory symmetry or
affirmative action. I have endured her cruel scenes of
envie for months, taught her to draw calmly, taught her
not to be afraid that I will kill her as her biological
father kept on inscribing into her psyche. In a joint
effort, we erased her fixation on Ma-ma. Whenever she
cried the syllable Ma, I would run and be at her
disposal. So she took to calling me ma and her mother by
her first name. Sometimes, we organised an equality of
attention over the week. But in the end, it was always me
who took more responsibility, save for dealing with
Ukrainian institutions which are a nightmare of disdain
to every stranger not being able to put on the obligatory
middle class Ukrainian artificial talk. Finally, I hitch-
hiked with her across the Crimean peninsula while her
mother was busy in Moscow. We formed a team of unbeatable
liberty. Hitch-hiking together, she took the liberty to
sleep on my violin case while I was fiddling in the early
summer sun waiting especially for lorries with high seats
and wide views to take us up, one of our shared
favourites. I painted, she painted. She sang, I sang.
When we went short of food, she readily learnt how to
find herbs in the woods which make a nice salad. She
cooperated with me whenever one of the Russian machos
tried to interest the police in us. Some of these
anabolica-stuffed new-Russian men apparently see no other
reason for male beings to care about children than
outright paedophile interests. Her biological father even
tried to exploit a deliberately invented accusation of
this type before a Ukrainian court against me. Though
always bragging of his clientele liaisons among the Kiev
ruling class he fatally lost that law case and Eva was
handed over to her mother by court decision.
To tell the whole story, there was a one-sided interest
by Eva for me. I was a missing species in her daily
expanding collection of anthropological knowledge. She
has no brother and her biological father is a hampered, a
sensually broken authoritarian Casanova. I can understand
that Eva does not take the same interest in his body as
her mother did. We managed to invent a more adequate
language about hunger, about danger, about sleep.
Sleeping is a terribly dangerous hunger for a 2 and a
half year old child. We visited communes of the past and
of the present. We watched sunsets and sheep, horses and
kitten, pine-trees and insects, boats and locomotives. On
our last day, we hit the sea at Alupta, the only place of
heaven on earth I chance to know. Yet, summer and its
tourists easily turn this paradise into hell. There is no
peace, no single hour of night and day. It is all noise,
brutal noise about making money, making photos, making
souvenirs and fast transport. Well, we nicked in and out
without having to spend the night there. I explained to
Eva, that this is the last day, that she will be able to
see her best friend Karina and that is it, that we have
two night trains ahead to return her to her dad. She
understood everything. She even understood the choice I
gave her to bath her either in sweet or in sea water. She
chose sweet water. She cried but that was out of custom.
As soon as she had grasped the big, big towel, she was
whole again. Silently, we walked up the hill. And there
at the bend allowing to look down for the last time. To
look down the cliffs to the immensely transparent blue
waters, she called me to stand still and look back. Some
time she said clearly and gazed at the waters. And she
took her time. And I took my time. And we stood and
looked back onto the waters. I saw bodies swimming, they
were all transparent, the sun was playing around them on
a deep, deep blue fond. I thought about that New Zealand
writer, her hopeless love on the Spanish Isles, the words
she found for her body, she had found in such waters.
They might take Eva one day, I thought with a muffled
horror. One of these Ukrainian profiteers of social decay
could make it with the help of some cheap adoration, some
fast-food of Hollywood sentimentality and it will all go
down the drain as it went with her mum: courting,
binding, motherhood, emotional desertion combined with
legal and material bondage. Already today Eva boasts how
proud she is to be a Ukrainian; she wants to be a
princess. Oh goodness, it will all be ready to ruin her
life once she is old enough to buy their lies. You try to
counter-educate and it is just a queer drop in a flood of
false plastic dolls making her one of them. My tears were
becoming a nuisance. My shirt was getting wet. Enough Eva
said and we turned away swiftly, never looking back any
more. I cannot help crying when I think about this
afternoon. It is not exactly a sad memory. It was a
beautiful day for us. That is all, actually. Eva can find
a lot of people who can give her something similar to
what I was able to give her. No construction, no
Bourgeois family morale necessary. Nice, that we both are
still alive. It could be worse.
Yet, even now in the listless commuter train rolling
roughly into the depths of Asia, there were tears rolling
down my cheek. In front of me sat a girl of 13 with her
grandmother. They came from their plot of land with bags
full fruits and vegetables to be conserved for a long,
long winter to come. The girl did not cease to look at
me. Her observation was all-intense. Suddenly, after
silent conversation with her grandmother, she opened her
bag and took out a big glass bowl of raspberries. This is
for you she said simply. You know, what she could not
know. The last days, I had missed a lot, but to be honest
not exactly raspberries. Yet, I never ate so sweet, so
aromatic raspberries as in that train. All the plavchiki
sitting around this scene were cheering and the girl got
a bit shy in the noise. She felt cornered, really. Nobody
should have any reason to claim that she had taken a
fancy in me. So she did, what only very poor people are
able to do. She dealt out all her harvest of raspberries.
I bet there was nothing left for her in the end. She
would give it to everyone around her, the fruit of hours
and hours of work. On getting off the train, I secretly
promised her that my love will try to learn from hers, so
much more mature than mine, so very, very useful for
everyone around.
5. Omsk sisters on holiday
The afternoon s sky is run over with clouds. To their
company, the main gardens of Omsk inner city are overrun
with people in festive spirits. Gulane, walking, is a
strange cardinal aim in Russian life. It has the air of a
dinosaur habit, a hang-over from baroque times. It
involves showing off as much as finding a collective
melody of strolling and, well, and meeting. Maybe that is
the main attraction, you constantly meet and greet on
these walks. So gulanie is basically a provincial past-
time. Once you know less than a crucial one per cent of
the people you chance to look into their eyes, the thrill
has gone. A modern metropolis allows no gulanie. Maybe
that is why folks in Moskow are so terribly fixed to
narrow consumerist ghettos or, if they cannot afford it,
terribly privatist.
Omsk is a provincial setting, to be sure. Looking at the
seemingly chaotic mass movement through the main alleys
of the park and adjacent places, they recognise at least
some friends every fifty steps. I would attribute the
atmosphere of gayness to the short and precious summer
days, had I not made my first acquaintance with Russian
public walking in knee-deep snow of mid winter. I was
working in the town of Khar kov then and lived at the
place of two young women at one of the two central
promenades. Their mother was at a psychiatric hospital
then and I was very careful, not to abuse the trust they
had put in me, opening their door to a stranger. While
the elder one was being sucked up by a business career,
selling English style tea to customers not necessarily
dissatisfied with Russian style tea, the younger sister
was a public walker, a passionate one to say the least.
My proposal to have a look at Chechov in a theatre next
door were really misconceived from the beginning. One was
busily working. The other busily walking, gulala. Several
times in the evening she would sort of dive up from the
street to the upper story flat. I could then observe the
movements of her strong, large and young body. She was as
if radiating from the glamour of the street, the
encounters, the little consumerist distractions on her
ways. In her self-assured demeanour was something common
with this sly selfish Russian obsession of some women
about themselves only, their own bodies only, their own
smiles only. Essentially, Zinaida Evgenina Serebrjakova
hardly painted anybody else than herself from 1884 to
1967. Sure she was French-born, but ten years of life in
Petrograd (1912-1918 and 1920-1924) and on her husband s
estate, Neskuchnoe (1918-1919), made a perfect Russian
flaneuse of her. My flatmate s eyes were glowing quite
akin each evening in the light of the promenade lamps;
her breath had the strength and determination with which
you have to take eastern frosts in order to receive them
as a welcome medium to invigorate your senses. One
prolonged hesitation, one defeatist minute of aimless
standing around and you have lost the game, you would be
bloody freezing for the rest of the evening. She had no
air of freezing. I probably never understood a person by
mere sight in such a spatial wholeness. And here it was.
She did not need any artificial scene. Har kov main
street was her inborn theatre and she came in from the
Estrada just to nip some warmer air as if not paying any
attention on the applause following her steps behind the
curtain. And back again she would dive onto the street
like a Bahamian diver out for red shells in the depth of
tropical water.
Four years later, I became suddenly curious, what had
become of them. My imagination was indeed insufficient to
portrait the younger sister now. Even larger, stronger,
with a still more spatial presence of her body than half
a decade before? Something must have changed, changed
direction probably. I decided to take a look by surprise.
I actually managed to sneak into the main entrance, got
up the stairs and knocked at their door. An elderly,
utterly frightened woman responded. I knew that their
mother had returned, who would probably never open the
door for me. And if she opened, it would probably all be
representation, niceties, conversation actually
dispersing the attention needed to grasp the traces of a
very specific atmosphere, I once succeeded to understand
with such a rare sensual intensity. Probably it was only
possible then due to the privileged senses sharpened to
the utmost by a first sight. I talked reassuringly
through the closed door. She would indeed not open. I
left, silently laughing about myself. Actually many Har
kov friendships ended similarly. I tended to be somehow
too close to the home bases to associate freely. Indeed,
I should have better taken part in the public walking.
But for such past-time I definitely lack this minimum one
per cent of acquaintances in these cities.
So, Har kov and Omsk are sisters with little in between
them than the Ural and some 3000 railway kilometres:
Russian provincial towns, run away from them if you want
and if only can.
The beauty in an acquaintance of non-erotic closeness
counts nothing under the grinding set of stereotypes
processing the intestines of provincial sociability for a
materially beneficial outcome in the most traditional
sense. For my little travelling ignorance this does not
make much sense.
Leaving the town for Novosibirsk, I stood in front of the
railway office with two sisters. For some time, they
followed every movement of me with strangely attentive
eyes and then said with occasional intimacy: German . I
was scattered. It is quite irritating to be somehow
publicly identifiable as a legitimate grand-son to mass
murderers. Intrusive observation is so much more
reassuring when you know it to be one-sided. Will
Novosibirsk be as provincial as Omsk? I asked them,
plunged in shame and guilt. Omsk is provincial one sister
answered slyly. Novosibirsk is the capital, the other one
concluded. They remarked that I was still red in my face
from their investigative assault.
6. taking an expectable nip of aloofness at
Akademgorodok
I got stuck in the left luggage cellar of Novosibirsk
station. Not with my luggage, but with two young
Englishmen. They would talk about the tail of the devil
and his children. They had been travelling like me with
not more than 10 words of Russian at their disposal to
dilute their observations with any local opinion around.
Actually, it was quite interesting to listen to their
accumulated accounts. They had as many questions as they
had collected mute-film observations. All they said was
really nicely balanced. I hope I will not make worse in
China.
- Did we get it right, economically everything is going
to pieces here, isn t it?
Well, what should I say? After a little while, I could
figure out two contradicting political approaches in the
two travellers.
One of them was pushing a nice anti-neoliberal line of
observation, the other one was more sceptical.
- What do Russians really think about all this Coca-Cola
invasion?
Well, what should I say?
- We have been to the countryside, there is absolutely
nothing left?
Well, what should I say?
- We look at this Novosibirsk railway front, these
incredibly big buildings in such a ruined state and we
tend to think, this is the work of socialism altogether.
But that is not right, is it, socialism did the work,
capitalism ruined them?
Well, what should I say?
Here were two guiding stars, heirs to their Australian
counterparts. I liked to listen to them more than
answering them. For what should I say? They were from
Southampton.
I have been to Southampton only once at the end of a
crazy hitch-hike by road and boat from Cuba to the
Bahamas, from Florida to Newburyport into the most
appalling New English conservatism, taking a boat to
Southampton, where it all came from, the pilgrims, the
sects, Puritanism, the workaholics, the British colonial
drill. America would be a continental, cool and slightly
ruined out-back like Siberia had there not been the iron
grip from Southampton. Well, the Southampton you see now
is a corpse of what it was. A corpse stuffed with money,
though. I have rarely seen a posher place. There were
closed residential regatta quarters, recent development
sites which stank of money and private security and
boredom. Every step you made was a commercial event and a
security issue simultaneously. Setting over to the Isle
of Man is an occasion to rip you of incredible sums
money. You can cross half of Siberia for the price you
pay for a ridiculous little boat trip at home. I walked
through the black night in your place for hours, still
sea sick and already sick of Europe. Around the homes of
the very rich stands an immeasurable army of semi-
detached middle class lodgings. Everything so British, so
cared for, so pale, so sick of tea and sugar and Sunday
papers and their night shopping of cheap booze served by
another army of Pakistani neo-colonial commercial
servants. And all the mainstream gives them in return for
their 24-hour servitude is disrespect and some pennies.
And if the racially white mainstream does not succeed in
keeping up appearances, most middle-class in England does
though, a pathetically shaven pit-bull racism emerges.
Your predecessors were able to tyrannise half of the
globe with it. The hell of neo-liberal globalisation
essentially is of British colonial making (thank Soviet
Russia that it is not of German making). And Southampton
ripped its fruits for 300 years. Southampton was the door
spitting out pale, hampered, raping, rubbing, murdering
soldiers onto the colonised world and sucking in
merchants for incredibly unfair prices. Now it is a nice
little back-yard of London-Heathrow continuing the
business on a much larger and still more brutal scale.
What should I say? You are travelling a country which
ripped itself off the chain of colonial profiteers before
the Irish could even set up a nationalist army. Soviet
Russia has resisted the global game of capitalist trade
hierarchy and it has paid the highest price in world
history for it. Soviet Russia has financed the
decolonisation of British crimes, your predecessors left
around the world: Shanghai, Burma, Tanzania, Namibia,
Granada, and still helped to reconstruct your one s
rubbles better than yours had ever allowed them to
become. And with a careful I for today s German neo-
fascists who operate breathtakingly close to our
argument, we could add to the list Magdeburg, Dresden,
Halberstadt. Your army only set fire on them and the
Nazis remained. Soviet Russia liberated them street by
street and then built them up more spaciously, more
rational and more social than they had ever been before.
Siberia had to bleed bitterly for the combined ignorance
of our grand-fathers.
During almost a century Soviet Russia and its Siberian
backwaters have challenged the deadly world order, they
have succeeded in turning the Capitalist war propaganda
upside down. And now, after 70 years of incredible
efforts and exhaustion, they have given in, politically
dwarfed, culturally annihilated and economically reduced
to a colony themselves. Can you blame them, while
Hodorkovskij daily transfers fortunes to the London
municipality?(note 2012: in the following, Mihail
Borisovich had to cease some of these privileges to
capital closer aligned with the federal political police)
Often Siberians themselves assess that their country
looks as if after a war. Well, Siberia has lost the most
important war in modern history just recently: the Cold
War. And now it pays for a cold peace under foreign and
domestically foreign class rule. What should I say?
I only had a night for Southampton. But it shocked me
probably more than Siberia was able to shock you all that
way. Your officially public spaces were a moneyed
emptiness with privatised access for privileged consumers
only. Your licked buildings of pretentiously modest
height are actually a source of financial ruin,
administered by dubious mortgage trusts and predator
banks sucking the blood out of middle-class careerists,
such as you might become one day if everything goes as
they want it to go. What should I say?
Let s spit in their soup even if invited to their dining
table, let s smuggle sand into most varied parts of their
machine, let s strike where we can to bring those down
who ruined Siberia, and Southampton. I did not say that
in front of the Novosibirsk railway station, though. I
thought it would look just too ridiculous, to spit out so
much anger and uncouth class hatred on such a nice
metropolitan morning.
After eating a set of most juicy c ur-de-beuf tomatoes
from private gardens off the street floor, I was all
ready for painting a juicy portrait of a 19th century
Siberian house left over in the middle of the city. Then,
I made my way to the academic township south at the Ob
seaside . Learning a lesson from my break-down in the
social isolation of the Ural Mountains, I had taken great
pains to hold on to three contacts in the centre of
Siberia: Kostja, Olga and Larissa. The first is one of
Katja s friends, the second her one and only mother and
the third among her best comrades. So, for the following
two weeks, my movements and investigations were contained
within the far reaching provisions made by my Leningrad
companion of mid-July before departing to Rwanda, wise
provisions, to be sure.
Trying to sketch the tune of Akademgorodok, I would be
caught in the trap of singing a song for Katja. That
would be unfair to Akademgorodok and I prefer to serve
for the cult of personalities who will be physically less
than 10 000 km away from me during the forthcoming year(
:. All I can say is that I am glad for her, that she got
out of this. Everybody who wants to do something in the
sense of Marx s 11th thesis on Feuerbach has to get out
of a Khrushchovian dream nowadays ( Die PhilosophInnen
haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert. Es kommt
darauf an, sie zu veraendern ).
After two weeks in their orbit, I can even understand her
leaving the circles of Novosiberian vanguard art and its
cute little Bohemia. One night, I got up in Kostja s
studio and discovered the poster of an anti-commercialist
monstration . It has enchanted my soul, as the cruel
French song goes, and stolen my sleep ( et la premi re qu
il vu, lui a ravis son ). To be honest, I knew about the
anti-commercialist happenings in Novosibirsk long before
from Russian indymedia. And to my mind it lacks some
originality to post-modernise Mayday with the financial
help of the Ford foundation. Yes, I know, the Ford
foundation was used by the scene to finance the
production of their more commercialist interfaces.
Nevertheless, the whole of this little fragmented
collective has an eye on the institutions of Austro-
German and US-American agencies for cultural imperialism.
A considerable part of its productivity is directly
linked to a speculation bubble on the agencies objective
need to let off balloons with hot air from the centre of
Siberia. Such artefacts rising from the soil of
Novosibirsk are worth a smile among monitors located in
the world centres of capital and cultural accumulation.
And their smile can be worth more purchase power on the
world market than the life-toil of thousands in these
damned forgotten freezing plains.
If the same town bore let s say the name Starosibirsk or
Novokuzneck, its cultural marketing assets would be much
more limited. I am not against using culturally motivated
dole money from the enemy. D accord. Nimm was Du kriegst.
Aber pfeiff auf den Quark. Denk an Deine Klasse. Und die
mach stark.
But can you really provide long standing anti-
commercialist agitation with the theoretical background
of Mickey Mouse? Guy Debord was a provocateur and the
Situationist International of 1968 did produce comics,
yes. But the comrades knew Marx s analysis of value by
heart and developed it further. That does make a
difference.
However, the poster I saw is miles ahead of Mickey Mouse
already, highly economic in its communication: condensed,
tactile hatred. There is an irrefutable urge in it. I
will go around the corner to have its integral text
before me:
WHEN they tell us, that our love goes along with youth
discount,
WHEN they sell our liberty in new-year s price-breaker
action,
WHEN the prison guard wants to snicker (us) into his
format
WHAT can we do to retort against such a Demonstration of
force and power (the question mark gets lost in the
flying hair of a flabbergasted McDonald s clown with his
eyes crossed out by black spray paint)
MONSTRATION, come and monstrate, all that is not yet sold
out on the total market of everything
fucking police!!!
www.monstration.narod.ru
The first sentence is the strongest one. Though there is
an essentialism in the fixation of our love it is still a
convincingly open signifier for a tissue of
unsalable/uncontrollable dynamics in social relations.
The point is made by the collectivisation of a
collectivising tendency. I am grateful to the collective
copy writer (: for not putting in my love or your love .
The whole loving business is terribly individualising and
reactionary as we know. But in the slogan our love ,
there is at least still a, let s say theoretical,
possibility to form a critical mass. Yet, behind the
polemical construction might hide an all too clear notion
of the lovingly unalienated life without commercialism. I
would place its approach closer to the Marxian
philosophical-economical manuscripts, than to the
brilliant introduction (written in 1843 for the critique
of the Hegelian philosophy of Law). According to a recent
Polish discussion I was lucky to attend, this last piece
is by far the most brilliant Marxian writing among the
younger texts. The Polish comrades judged from the
viewpoint of their political practice (check on
www.lewica.pl, I cite the contribution to our discussion
by the editor of the book reviews) which makes their
lively perception of the text practically valuable. Look
how that sounds in Russian (by the way: is the time ripe
for a new translation or does the old one set of sparks
and lightening similarly bright as from reading and
rereading the German original?): - , 1834, . 2., 1955,
414-429, 428 429.)
What makes this dialectical firework to my mind
materially powerful today is its openness (pay attention
to the 6 more or less delicate manipulations, I
fabricated in copying the original text, to make
rereading more interesting). In contract to the later
philosophical-economical manuscripts there is no
essentialist version of the unalienated man created and
superimposed to revolutionary creativity. Marx did a step
backwards in this respect, as Europe did in a whole. Most
of bourgeois humanism follows down the idealist line,
including major parts of the Social Forum process.
The second sentence in the poster breaks free from
essentialist sentimentality, but at what a price? Our
freedom stinks of US freedom-fries. Freedom has been a
word meaning positively nothing throughout bourgeois
enlightment, today with enlightment under authoritarian
reversion it means regime change in failed states . But
the rebel phrase against its sell-out still makes sense.
And maybe it is better to promise positively nothing than
to promise false love, isn t it?
As to the third catch-phrase I am not sure whether I have
understood it right. Snickers sounds like a chocolate bar
brand. Format sounds like a torture instrument from the
hellish cabinet of Mister Gill Gates. Prison ward sounds
no better. Interestingly, the third movement has no
positive vision any more. It is a distopia without a hole
in it. My friend Merle from Munich would say: the mouse
cannot get out .
The call for action has a very consistent grammatical
form. The noun monstration is dissolved into a verb,
monstrate, very clever. To my mind, the activating
quality of a text can be measured to a certain extent by
the proportion of verbs in active use.
Total market makes my bones chill, because a terrible cry
of 1943 from the Sportpalast in Berlin resounds in my
spine reading this ( Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg? Ja! ).
I would never use it. But as the grand-children of those
who put an end to that totality at least, you are free to
use the legacy as you think it right.
For the same reason, I avoid the catch-phrase
totalitarianism . As far as I could follow the
discussion, it is not an analytical category, but a short
cut to the above mentioned spinal reaction. Hannah Arendt
abused it to sell her misconception of Soviet Russia and
the French Revolution alike (to the difference of Soviet
Union propaganda she earned her reputation lying both
about American capitalism and about Socialism, whereas
Brezhnev only lied about Socialism). General Marcos and a
lot of Communist Cuban and Latin American writers use a
similar shortcut to make up for an insufficient analysis
of global capitalism and its intrinsic contradictions
today.
The problem about shortcuts to spinal reactions is that
our spine is damned sly. Overuse its rapid reaction just
a little too much and there will be no reaction at all.
But, listen comrades. We need a last resort. If Bush,
like El cin starts to shell his own parliament (the
October 2001 anthrax attacks by parts of the FBI were
already very close to that what might come). If this
happens tomorrow, we will still need a word to describe
what is happening. We cannot give out all analytical
registers before the very end. Well, this warning
actually stems from an experience about the use of
Prussian blue in painting. Maybe however, this metaphor
is not adequate and philosophical analytics entitle to
use totalising connotations here and now. But still, I
would like to be able to understand a philosophical
foundation of the terms in use then.
That way or the other, Total market of everything is a
pleonasm and not helpful. Sounds as if you do not really
believe the totality you state in the first place. Quite
obviously, there is an intrinsic contradiction in this
final call. If the market is total, those who will come
to the demonstration can only be market zombies. Guy
Debord would agree with this vision. Althusser would
excuse your insult on the demonstrators, because you
cannot fight the ruling ideology without being
ideological yourself, a dilemma which should not lead to
self-contentment, though. If the market is not total we
can still call our enemy a hegemonic force, even a
dominating ( ) force.
But how do you call our enemy? Fucking police This is
unacceptable. If they would be actually fucking, let s
say one another, everything would be easier with them.
They would not seek so actively for sublimation with
their beating sticks, they would be less keen on grabbing
for substitutive objects on the streets and demobilise
them in arrest cells for symbolic penetration. The main
problem about police is that they are rather not fucking
but doing their service for getting satisfaction.
Still, there is a special problematic with gay policemen,
according to my colleagues in the Scottish police arrest
following our G8 protests 2005. They had definitely a
longer criminal record than me as far as the British
Isles were concerned and they could illustrate their
claims with vivid detail. According to them, Thatcherism
and Blairism combined have tended to transform British
police units from (alienated) working-class background
recruitment towards co-opting lower middle-class
careerists. I cannot tell what was the case before the
miner strike repressions 1984, when the bobby was still a
workmate and repression on the mainland rather an
economic task for private capital. Now, there are
definitely major gay clientele networks making up very
aggressive police units, which operate in working-class
districts of Glasgow. Their sadist potential is evident.
I have seen some evidence for sexualised aggression
during my arrest in Glasgow. Now these policemen might
actually be fucking during service, but still this rather
reinforces hierarchy within the unit and hierarchy
creates aggressive practices towards civil victims. This
is a delicate topic, something for a diary, really, not
for a poster. In our press campaign which got a good echo
in Scottish mainstream media (just google for free fresco
academy and ) we choose to avoid the issue altogether. I
think this issue cannot be adequately communicated in a
society which is still repressively heterosexualised. It
is just too attractive for agents of law and order who
adhere to a heterosexual credo. They would never go along
with us and criticise police violence as an expression of
capitalist domination. They would only take up our
evidence to campaign for heterosexually clean police
beating. I could not imagine anything more horrible than
that.
Maybe the slogan fucking police is just an error and
should sound fuck the police . I could go along with
that, if the verb would be free of aggressive
connotation. The dynamics of revolutionary aggression are
only then trustworthy when they build up independently
from individual sexual economies. I would not go along
with an untrustworthy build-up of revolutionary violence.
Let this be the business of the SWP UK leaflet sellers,
who hailed the bulldozers in Belgrade as the early agents
of proletarian rule when in fact their drivers were just
paid hooligans as in Georgia completing the work of NATO
bombing towards regime change. Proletkult was an artist
collective searching for a way to communist society, not
a positivist religion hailing repressive relations, e.g.
of sexualised violence, sociologically present in the
Soviet working-class of its time.
So, sexualising revolutionary violence is unacceptable an
operation. The most progressive empirical approach which
comes to my mind where the teachings of some political
commissars in the Interbrigadas fighting for the Spanish
Republic. According the estetics of resistance by Peter
Weiss (1970s, written in German, available in Spanish
translation since last year) a Swedish commissar gave
lessons on how to masturbate with pleasure and without
harming your body for male and female volunteers at work
in the Spanish Civil War. The official aim of these
courses was to eliminate the phenomena of prostitution
behind the Republican lines, which was clearly identified
as contradictory to communist principles.
Consequently, there is no political point in promoting
sexualised violence or violent sex. Fuck the police would
then quite astonishingly be rather Christian a slogan,
like Love your enemy or Make love to those who beat you .
This sounds more a conservative wife s recipe for keeping
her family together. Actually, this is definitely
abhorrent and not really a slogan fit for a monstrating
with it through Novosibirsk.
There is a problem about the use of English in the
circles of Siberian artist vanguard in general. I have
read about half a hundred posters, postcards and flyers
of their making. They all try their luck at English. The
economic motivations behind this are perfectly legitimate
and understandable. However, to be honest, I did not come
across a single English expression which was both
grammatically and logically acceptable. Well there are
nice misunderstandings and hilarious russicisms, such as
calling a festival for contemporary cinema festival for
actual kino . But when it comes to English prosaic texts
by the Novosibirsk vanguard, my sense of humour feels
somehow acutely over-exploited. Well, judging by some
years of socialisation I am a German, as the two sisters
at Omsk railway station legitimately insulted me (sorry
folks, this is a complicated one again: less than half: 8
(if you do not count bourgeois holidays 17) of 35 full
years, i.e. 1971-1995 with the exceptions 1977/1978
Italy, 1986/1987 Australia, 1990/1991 France, 1994
Rumania). Consequently, my sense of humour should rather
not become the guideline to set a local guillotine into
operation. The trouble is rather that Russian copy-
writers do not really seem to have a clue about the
degree of dilettantism in their publications. How much is
it to send an Email to an English native speaker and
counter-check before printing a junk message several 1000
times and sending it out to an applauding global
audience? I can tell you, it is almost free. I go through
this unpleasant step towards publishing whenever there is
any English, Italian, Spanish, French, Polish or Russian
word to come out of the printing machine I feel
responsible for. The problem is not training or
resources. The problem is that artist vanguard reproduces
as a farce what happens in society as a tragedy. Half-
educated middle-class machos have the controlling
positions over cultural production and they have no sense
of co-operating for reaching better quality. Major parts
of their publicly exhibited creationism is unsocial,
phallic in a Lacanian sense, that means in practice:
boring.
8. affluent gardens at the sources of river Ob
So I stood in front of the railway station of Bijsk, the
home town of Larissa on the last bit of railway tracks
towards the Altaj (Altai) Montains. Their Massive hosts
the Russian border to China west of Mongolia. I waited
for her to pick me up. In the meantime, I resolved to
play the clarinet for money. It was for the first in my
life. Both the trumpet and my new (in fact a 100 year
old) violin had suffered demission at a final luggage
check in Lena s Moscow flat. I was very excited playing
for Roubles and thought my breath would faint any moment.
It quivered, to be sure. But necessarily, you have to go
through fits of uneasiness to learn to hold the tension
of the air in any situation. There is no way around
failure if there is to be failure for the beginning. You
have to begin.
I got loads of money. The poorer people live, the more
they are liable to give in to sugared tea and music. I
rather played unsugared cacao, i.e. Brecht-Eisler songs
which nobody would know. They all know only Brecht-Weil
songs, because on the opposite side of the globe,
Hollywood made such a marketing decision in the 1940s and
not another, basta.
People would throw in either very small amounts down to
single kopejki or generous donations of paper money. One
ambulant newspaper seller threw in paper and wanted a
chat. What should I do, I was grateful four his donation,
he must have sold a lot of newspapers to earn such a sum.
I was also grateful for the pause he decided against the
urge of my pseudo-professional ambition.
- Where do you come from?
- Baltic Sea. We had this one already
- Ah, Riga. He was a bright one. Before falling in the
hands of a Latvian chauvinist minority, Riga was indeed a
magnet for all-Soviet bohemia. I even met a Russian wall-
painting monumentilist artist in Odessa in 1999, who had
made a relief in memory of Jurij Gagarin in the Altaj
region. He could cry his eyes out for the lost
companionship of his Riga youth.
There was no beating about the bush with this one. I had
to be a bit more responsible. Not wanting to speak about
the personal qualities of Adolf Hitler, I nevertheless
choose to silence those damned 17 years in Germany.
- More south. I answered with a poker spirit.
- South, that is what? Lithuanian?
- Don t you hear my Polish accent? Damn, again, I was
heading right into a lie. I do not like to lie to
strangers. You never really know what comes out of it. It
is much more comfortable to lie to close friends. You can
tell right away how and what you risk. Well, I also feel
bad with lies myself, sometimes. But that s another
story.
- So you are a Pole?
- Well, I have been living in Warsaw for the last decade.
- I see, he concluded, you are Polish. People do not seem
to have a clue what a bunch of German assholes has been
living in poor Warsaw in the last century. For them it is
all so easy going, this 20th century, if you live there,
you are Polish.
There was a silence. My friend Nicolas from Geneva had a
double passport, Swiss and French. On travelling to
Vietnam by rail and road in the 1990s, he learnt to keep
his mouth shut about Switzerland. It is an unbecoming
word for people s imaginative resources. In the best case
they get you into chocolate, generally, you will be
interviewed about banks and big money. But exposing a
little hint at being French, it was suddenly all cinema,
fashion, Paris, chansons, savoir vivre. I seriously
considered to risk the Hitler conversation, now. Why play
cat and mouse? But then I had a rare glimpse of sobriety.
Hold on, I said to myself, officially this guy paid for
your music only, not for your talking. Why should I say
anything at all. It was getting hot.
- You were living with your family, there? This guy
seemed to be really interested as it appeared not only
about labels and my position in the passport-based racist
order in and around Europe. So, I decided to leave the
defensive trenches and try to find answers which could
surprise even me.
- No, I was living there with a woman I loved very much
- Why did you come here then?
- One day she told me that she would rather like me to go
away. I had been west already, so I decided to move east
this time.
- Why would she not like you any more?
- It was not that. But she liked another one as well. In
the first 4 months nothing needed to be changed, but
then, she got a bit impatient. And her new lover was
probably not a Communist either, that winter at least. I
heard he even went on a bike tour allowing a third person
later.
- So you are a Communist?
- I try my best. Communism seems actually a bit far w
away for a single party if you ask me. Presently, I would
even throw in everything for Socialism, I am not against
Anarchist methods. This was getting a monologue. The
newspaper sellers wanted facts and not a revision of the
split of the first International. So he returned to
hardware.
- Where do you go? That was an easy one for a change.
- Altaj, Kitaj. He passed an absorbing smile to me and
continued with a very familiar voice, like a homeless to
a homeless.
- Where do you sleep? He had evidently not believed my
destination. Altaj is expensive for travellers and Kitaj,
ie. China without paying for another visa, needs a 4000
kilometre trip around Mongolia, for there is no legal
border crossing on the Altaj plateau, up to more than
4000 metres above sea level.
- I know Larissa I answered thoughtlessly, she might put
me up. Now, I had definitely become more sincere than I
wanted to. Thinking why, I detected a slightly
inconsistent intention to make up for the lie about my
Polishness. I was not really sorry for him, actually, but
somehow I was sorry for my Polish friend. I know that she
extremely dislikes that story. As for the name I had
betrayed, in a town of a quarter of a million telling a
first name would probably not amount to a breach of
conspiracy rules, would it?
- You will sleep with her? Oh no, this gets boring, I
thought as if watching a bridge collapse into water.
- I never thought about that. I answered and put in all
my available concentration after 9 consecutive night
trains from Praha Holosovice right to these doorsteps. I
had no choice than to fix his sight with my glance, for
evading his eyes with such an answer would have been
worth no more than a giggle. It all worked perfectly
well. This was the first lie to him I did enjoy. And to
counter-balance, I continued with a sincere answer which
did not fail to astonish myself, I am more interested in
what she wants. That was a good formula to cut his sexist
talk short. And indeed, the conversation was over. My
proletarian sponsor returned to his work, which I
sincerely respected, not only for filling my purse.
Taking up the clarinet play, I thought about reacting to
all obsessive talking by nice people in this manner, with
a mix of Tolstoj compassion and Babel short-hand. If a
sympathetic anti-communist would again try to pump me up
with Hitler same as Stalin small-talk, as my elderly
acquaintances at Akademgorodok the day before, I would
try to speak about the American administration today and
our prospects for the future. I marvelled at
prefabricated sentences like I am not so much interested
in what you call Communism, but I am very curious which
work you do like most on a building site.
Anybody who has seriously worked for agitation knows that
this is just as good a preparation as playing chess with
three, continually changing sides. In a lively
conversation, you would never literally retreat a horse
or use a prefabricated sentence, but the element of
movement and surprise, abstracting from the middle-class
obsession to win a discussion personally can be trained
indeed. Brecht would even make a fool of himself on stage
just to let the audience have it all, including social
truth in its most agreeable, materialist and dialectical
elasticity.
A train station official turned up and explained that any
begging was severely forbidden around her train station.
She did so in a loud voice. And then she continued in a
low voice, that I should just bother to put away the
money already earned. This is Russia how I like it. The
sun was shining and there she came, Larissa.
In the twilight of the evening, we were on the allotment
of her parents. A whole valley of allotments was boasting
and fertile, overloaded with berries, vegetables. I had
come south, finally. Everything was whole again. I felt
like Eva in her big towel after a cold bath. Soviet
allotments are the most rational luxury on earth. It is
just barbarian how Westerners drag their summer
vegetables out of supermarkets. I am not speaking about
the allotment banja now, for it was not on the agenda.
Generally, I found out that Larissa had just as much
puritanical drill as necessary to become very good
friends. None of that malicious over-production your
senses get insulted with in genuinely puritanical
countries like the Check Republic, England, or, beware,
the Berlin alternative ghetto. We went home in dusk
already, loaded with our harvest. There were little
apples with humoresque red and yellow paintings, tomatoes
which could be called lion hearts, but oxen hearts was
all right as well and, of course, there were raspberries,
raspberries as if to console the whole block with them.
For the first time this year in Russia I felt something
like warm summer ease, and my sentiment registered with a
new kind of calm that cold dense rain set in that evening
for the rest of the week. True, there had been some hours
in the outskirts of Valdaj, some seconds in the Ural
mountains on getting out of the train, where the
sensuality of a wholeness of summer tended to culminate,
but that was still comparatively a frosty ease.
Of course, I am not talking about the climate, but about
a years happiness, or questions of musical taste if you
like. Maybe I thought, Katja and Larissa should be taken
serious with their late-Wagnerian weakness, i.e. their
lack of immunity against the movement in Rachmaninov. Did
the charlatan not coax about a point in his concept of
music, even when interpreting Chopin? Once you reach this
point, he pretended all the consecutive steps flow like
rivers down with ease. We know, that the music teacher of
Hanno Buddenbrock, or was it Adrian Leverkuehne, would
not admit such pilgrim s talk in an age of industry.
Indeed, I get suspicious when the two are being combined.
Who s working day gets distributed to whom in this
transaction? If you want the non-understandable, do not
accept it in the product form, mixed with heavy
perfumery. Take Prokofiev, take Berg, head to the light,
let the incomprehensible go through your senses at the
peak of attention to the comprehensible. Face the
absurdity of late capitalism all the while trying to
understand, to relate, to get clear of the mist. Death
will break our hands, our senses anyway. Death will
through us into a lack of clarity which will be enough
for all and everything. As long as my senses allow to
look straight, I will give my best to look straight, to
have all our known instruments sharpened and the material
ready for creating just those curves and detours which we
socially need. Mist and perfume is a poor workmate on the
building site. You can not even produce mist with mist
and perfume with perfume. Look at the historic death of
Rainer Maria Rilke. All his anesthetisations with
artistic sublimation of death and decay were useless even
in his own hands once it was getting materially serious
for him to close his shop. He was unripe in spite of all
his rituals simulating self-ripening. He even ran away
from a well-meaning doctor. He had a pathetic and costly
attempt at what my friend Nicolas does with the twist of
a tongue: he left Geneva for Paris. Nobody wanted to hear
his message in the post-war salons down there. According
to rather embarrassed, friendly witnesses, he declaimed
some dogmatic formulas about automatic writing and that
was it. Nobody around him would believe or want to listen
to such talk any more. The neo-Catholicist left the scene
as mannerist as he has entered it 30 years before, a self-
made-man of literary kitsch. No development, no movement,
just consumption?
Well, movement in Rahmaninov (Rachmaninoff ) give me more
time to find out what my friends really mean. In two
years I can say more. But forgive me that in the
meantime, when hitting on a Rahmaninov tune with my
fiddle, I immediately start to laugh, because I find it
funny now, funny and dangerous, not deep.
We made up a company of three to stroll through the rain
and explore the town. Bijsk was the ending point for
lazaretto trains from the battlefields of Europe, the Far
East and Afghanistan. There are large complexes for
military surgery. A considerable female proletariat
worked in light industries, tobacco and garment. As for
further details on the revolutionary history of our
agreeable southern settlement at the feet of the Altaj
mountains, my communist friend promised me to undo a long-
standing deed, research and report on the results.
For that night, the soviet apartment of Larissa s parents
was shared half. One half remained for them and a
detachable second half was for us. I thought that to be a
fair arrangement. And I laughed at the idea what my
parents would do with their affluence of hundreds and
hundreds of square metres living space. They would
probably file a complaint that our luggage was occupying
too much space to allow them to move. My brother and my
sister would do it in written.
- What are your plans?
- Well, I came to see you. I see you now. I am quite
satisfied.
- What did you want to see?
- Where your faculties come from, where they leant to
walk and speak so fluently. Actually, I was interested in
that in the first place, even before trying to understand
your life and your work in Moscow.
- And your plans? I had no plans in this moment. How can
you have no plans? Maybe I was just hiding them for the
time being? Was I sincere not to have any eyes for them?
Plans? Maybe I was right and there were no plans left as
soon as the railway tracks ended which had brought me all
the way from Prague, i.e. Praha-Warszawa, Warszawa-
Vilnius, Vilnius-Daugavpils, Daugavpils-Rezekne, Rezekne-
Pskov, Pskov-Leningrad, Leningrad-Valdaj, Valdaj-Moscow,
Moscow-Kazan, Kazan-Perm, Perm-Kyn, Kyn station-Kuzino,
Kuzino-Sverdlovsk, Sverdlovsk-Omsk, Omsk-Novosibirsk,
Novosibirsk-Bijsk. That was it. I had maybe some further
directions prepared, but they were not so much a
continuation as a set of emergency exits: to allow to run
away from an eventual collision which would not do good
for any party involved. Many Russians have a nice
sensitivity for collisions. In their understanding, it is
actually not a metaphor taken bluntly from street traffic
but rather from the stage. To the contrary, an accident,
that can happen to you on the street is the same as what
happened to Chernobyl at three o clock in the night of
the 26th of April 1986. In Russian, that this not a
collision but avaria , something quite different, more
technical, less tragic. A major fond of knowledge about
collisions is actually theatre. Now, there is a little
black spot in our understanding of theatre. When Visocki
sang about being a prisoner of the Taganka scene in
Moscow, having so utterly lost his reason tvoj bessumny
arrestant he did not really take care to make it quite
clear which theatre at the Taganka he had in mind, for
there are actually two. One is the best in town, one is a
nuisance altogether. Actually, Larissa does agree with me
on this assessment. The problem is, that we would not be
able to figure out, whether we meant the same theatre
with the same verdict or whether or aims on Moscow
evenings were just literally juxtaposed during all those
days we lived next to each other in this megalopolis,
crossed ways half a dozen times each day and would not
care a penny about the other. Therefore, when I talked to
Larissa in rapture about the new productions of Berthold
Brecht and Peter Weiss, she would watch me with a certain
reservation. All the while, I would not spare the other
house from throwing mud at. A petty-bourgeois nightmare,
I called it for it had afflicted me with a seriously
irritation about Chehov (Chekhov) himself, when, by fatal
error, I happened to stumble into a production stifling
unbearably under illustrationistic tsarist requisites and
unreflected conventions.
- Something is going wrong she would say with a very
general air.
- Why?
- Your favourite theatre does not play what my favourite
theatre plays and the one you do not like does not play
anything my favourite theatre plays either. I guessed
that we would probably not be able to figure that out
from the distance of 4000 railway kilometre. Visible, I
wanted to dilute down any possible collision between us
in time and space, though, the possibility of it
happening one day was lingering, 1:1 you could say. We
fixed each other with our eyes.
- And your plans now? She was right to recall me. I had
to present something, to take the strain of hosting me
from her for the case she did not enjoy it. She had come
home after a year of work, she had gone through a concise
railway week to do so. I had granted her exactly 30 hours
to have a rest from Moscow finally. Before catching up
and colonising her free time again. To make the trouble
round, she still had to finish some work left over
through the internet.
To be frank, personally, for having a rest from Moscow, I
sometimes took months and it was not enough. She would be
returning to Europe, to a measureless workstrain within
just 20 precious days. It was not that she actually
intended to lie down on the canap . Her home flat was
just to be the base for extensive excursions. There were
all the colleagues from university, 5 years back. I guess
everybody of them had at some point or another damned the
Siberian province and wished to be in Moscow. Maybe their
moaning for something less cold, less backwaterish were
not as desolate as those of the three sisters which
Chechov managed to portrait from his ways to Sahalin
(Sakhalin). 70 years of socialist development have
changed a lot. Take the factual capital Novosibirsk, e.g.
Novosibirsk did actually not exist on a map some 110
years ago. Chehov mentions a lot of water when crossing
the Ob, he does not mention the hamlet Novonikolaevsk, a
predecessor in a certain sense. But the 19th century
Novonikolaevsk compares to Novosibirsk today like one of
those a little ambitious scientific article of Lenin to
the work of the Russian Revolution.
Still, Russian provincial life rotates around a certain
set of axes. I already mentioned one of them, gulanie.
Another one of these axes is definitely getting out. To
be sure, some of Larissa s colleagues from Bijsk have
made it, to Barnaul, even to Novosibirsk. But virtually
nobody except for her has made it to Europe and Moscow.
There are a set of questions to be answered each summer
on returning and a set of friendships to be renewed,
which is not so easy. You come back home after a year and
you do not meet the same people any more. Same for all
the relatives up in the mountains. Though, grandma has
been tormenting her for the last decade to get married
with as little changes as she had success. No way of
bringing a Germ up there. She would just explode with
good wishes for a future neither of us wanted to be that
simple.
I smiled to myself when hearing about some of Larissa s
relatives originating from the Altaj mountains, the very
heart and centre of Asia. There is a whole poem by Anna
Ahmatova (Akhmatova) just about the eyes of Asia .
Ahmatova wrote it when she was evacuated from the German
blockade of Leningrad to spend the war years here,
precisely among the people who had come down from the
Altaj Mountains. Maybe I cheat my memory, but I imagine
to have thought about these lines from the first times
onwards, when I first saw her, long before I dared to
intrude as much as to ask whether there was maybe still
something else to be important in her life than just
Moscow. Well, just Moscow, funny expression. Moscow can
be understandably everything! Just by size it s more than
three times the whole of the Czech republic comprising
its conservative nest of cute little cosmopolitanism,
Prague.
- Your plans? she insisted. I felt cornered and took the
escape path.
- I want to hitch-hike though the Altaj mountains. Later
I go to China. Well, there had been such plans indeed,
but that was so far away. I was quite impressed at my
casual tone, simulating that I was someone travelling
with ease.
Ease and travel is a genuinely simulated connotation. I
once was a guest on an ecological farm for avocadoes in
Southern Spain and found a comrade in arms for this
painstaking issue. Nine said, that she would sometimes
like to just stuff the mouths of German burgers when they
start their domestic chants of simulated envy. Well, your
life doesn t know such gravity, you are a travelling
type. For you, the sun is always shining. If not, you
just travel to the place where it is. And you seem to
have loads of friends. None can hurt you. You loose a
friend, you continue your life-long trip and get friends
with another one. You are a travelling type, I repeated
to myself and could not figure out why now this made
stroll my imagination through unfathomable voids of human
contact in the Ural mountains. Now I recognised that
inner voice. It was the ticket collector from Kyn
station. you are a travelling type. That s the sort which
contracts AIDS first. How disgusting to sleep with such a
person, even if you use a condom. That s not what I love.
Blasted, for such people Friedrich Nietzsche s travelling
to Italy and contracting syphilis is one and the same
incidence. How do they imagine our travelling to be like,
I ask myself. Personally, I have never, never had sex
with anybody I met while travelling. If you are not out
for buying, cheating or violating, sex simply does not
happen when travelling seriously. It is not an issue.
There is all kinds of closeness. Maybe a kind of
closeness the burger never sees and feels and to be
honest does not want to see and feel, really. But not
that kind of closeness you would actually risk a
pregnancy for or, well, sexually infectious diseases.
Somehow, the Pfahlburger gets seriously mixed up what is
to happen on his and her domestic little holiday with the
back seat of their car, a hotel distracting their kids
and regular meals. This is one world and they seem to
quietly assume the other one completely opposed to be
just of the same making. That is the reason for all their
stupid talk about the one world throughout the damned
1990s. Among other fatal misunderstandings, they are
positively convinced that the life you have to lead when
throwing in one continent for another is just like
theirs, just a little bit more free, more ideal, more
holiday-like. Can they understand what it means, when you
are materially forced to be spitting on your upbringing,
your school, your privileges, your prejudices just to be
able to survive as a social being, come out of the ordeal
of travelling as someone who is still able to relate
somehow, perceive and react to other s needs and not only
buy food, buy peace, buy company, an egomania machine for
cross-cultural consumption.
Take my best friend from school for example,
unconventionally Danish, though with astonishing
bourgeois sophistication. She has actually taught me how
to make love out of a fond of experience I could only
marvel at then and now. However, I cannot remember her
characterising any of her children with her long-standing
lover of the past decade as being planned. Try such a
strategy when relating in another continent and you will
be quite ruined for your life within a fortnight. Luckily
for my horizons always tending to get terribly narrow in
the course of the years by uncouth and dogmatic
principles and the fervent desire to betrayal my class
origin at least if I really cannot strip it off like the
skin of a snake, she keeps me up to date with how the
established world of German middle classes chooses to
dispose of its nauseating purchasing power. Holidaymaking
she would declare with a sly irony, is just a shameful
word for having all-day-all-night sex. Sometimes I ask
myself, whether I could actually return and live in that
country any more. Every a few years or so, I try it out
for some time, even for two weeks or less. It works. You
can actually boil all your senses down, start again,
repair that bicycle you left there on the last day of
school. Well, school continued for another month but I
would not care, I was off to France already, studying
handbooks about gardening in the tropics with a fervour
maybe as if to get the satisfaction out of Tolstoyian
work, which my class of origin casually associates with,
yes with holidaymaking maybe. I sought for Tolstoj
(Tolstoy) and found Orwell, down and out. I did not find
a lot of satisfaction to be sure. I found monstrous
contradictions, frustration, depression, shortage of
money, comrades, new work, nothing stable, nothing
reliable a world to devour you and be devoured. To put a
thousand turning points straight, I found the reality of
contemporary Capitalist class war. I approached it from
two sides, to be sure. For in many respects its reality
is by far too brutal to be continually snobbish about the
wrong side of your upbringing.
- Fine she resumed into my thoughts. I planned to move
around in the next days, so I could not put you up any
more anyway. Where are you going in the Altaj Mountains?
I was glad she had interrupted me. This was heading
towards an unsupportable hermeneutic of self-
commiseration again. Now was the time to confess, that my
travelling was based on a map of the scale 1:4 million.
My Ural experience was e.g. perfectly localisable within
a tiny square centimetre of that table-flooding giant
piece of paper. Mind, that it showed only western
Siberia, not even lake Bajkal, as someone had quite
recently presumed from a Carpathian perspective. I could
divine from that outer space perspective on Siberia, that
the Higher Altaj Republic alone was greater than the
whole of what I know from Germany. Its capital, Gorno-
Altajsk was marked just on the northern border at the
exit of one of the few valleys accessible to road traffic
from the Siberian plains. The population of that capital
did not considerably outnumber a thousandth piece of
Moscow and would be housed comfortably in one single
modest street of the Federal Capital. We exchanged some
opinions on what the map revealed and what it did not
reveal.
- It is all very far apart up there, Larissa warned me. I
did get some occasion to remember these words of her
during the following days.
- Normally, you only go up there in good company, don t
you? I inquired exploringly. I still believe that my
question was quite innocent. I would rather not want to
suggest that Larissa s duties for her guest extended over
a terrain comparable to the extensions of Western Europe.
Quite probably, I rather wanted to calm my bad
conscience. Maybe again, I thought that my planning to go
there alone stemmed from my class origin, the selectively
blind individualism of Western German provincial middle
class. I knew that it was materially based on the
deception that we think we can master what we can
purchase with our currency. On the other side, I had been
hearing soviet stories about Altaj expeditions for years
and years which were always, always done in company. The
uncle of Elena from Irkutsk had presumably drunk from a
little standing water in the forests and not recognized
in time that a dead animal was polluting the source. He
had died three days afterwards. On a dark early autumn
night in 2002, just south of Riga, I was addressed by a
Siberian who recognised that my linen rucksack was a
standard soviet model. That is the one, I took for
walking in the Altaj Mountain range in those soviet
years. He exclaimed in a very unlatvian, cosmopolitan
soviet friendliness. So you do not go there any more now
, I asked with rising interest. No way, he answered,
there are people specialised in picking up excursionists
and you can be happy if they spare your life. Indeed a
week later, I heard about an Omsk journalist who got
killed just for some cash a few valleys away from where I
slept in the green. Yet, I had asked Larissa about
companies preparing themselves for excursions into the
area mainly to get her benediction for my individualist
plans, I guess. I wanted to hear from her simply a
warning assurance. Go, but be careful , something of that
sort. But she would not say that. Instead, she would
think so intensely, consider, reconsider, that I could
almost feel the physiological side of the process near
me. Oh no, I thought. Don t do that! Don t declare you
will go with me just because you feel sorry for my naivet
. You have not allowed me to do the washing up, because
guest do not wash at our place . That s bloody
patriarchy. You have not told me that you are tired of
Moscow and European acquaintances and the lot, though I
see it in the movements of your eyes. You have given
enough. Don t do that.
- Listen, she said after a long process, taking a final
decision.
- Listen, in four days I will take you to a place in the
woods near a river. My friends will be there, very good
friends, my best friends actually. We organise a training
camp for the Communist party youth. I take you with me.
Be back in four days and we will go together.
I had no words. I would not even start to dissuade her
German-style: but maybe you should think about it, do you
really want me there? You say your best friends. It does
not take a very subtle faculty of observation to know
that I am not one of them. Not yet. Why do I call that
German-style? Am I really entitled to dump so much shit
on a country I haven t really cared for in a decade?
When the friend of my heart, Oliver, came back to
Heidelberg after a year in the United States around 1987,
he met an old acquaintance in the city centre. I can
vividly imagine him retranslating the warm American words
How are you? into the German he was relearning and
stretching out to shake hands. Any civil American, even
after having received a cancer diagnosis would shake
hands warmly and answer with a smile over the whole face
I am fine, thanks, and you? They do not only say so
because they respect you. There is a bit more to it. Who
has spent a winter in New York climate knows that these
people could not possibly make it there just with that
one powerful faculty to kill Indians and advance the
white race west. That might take you through the autumn,
but not through an East coast winter. So they have got
this peculiar sentimentality about Thanksgiving. I know
it is all messed up in a mass of plastic, now. The most
prominent mass murderer of present days releases a turkey
from the zoo in Washington taking his willing combat
sponsors to tears, while tens of millions of its equals
are slaughtered by fully automatic machines, processing
and deep-freezing their corpses within seconds for just
the same occasion, filling the tables of national
Thanksgiving, adding another heap of affluence to a
mindless affluence which is capable of killing our equals
all over the globe, not only in Iraq. But there is that
sentimental kernel about Thanksgiving and none of my
hatred for the so-called American way of Life and its
deadly consequences can wipe that it in my consciousness.
The first settlers from Europe in New England were poor
underdogs really, spat out from one of the cruellest
class societies of modern times with nothing to cling to
than crazy religious principles. They were actually dying
a slow death of starvation in their praised New World .
With their religious idiocy alone, they would never have
made it until next spring. They were in terrible need of
a helping hand and their white God s one would somehow
not take the trouble to do anything. So they had to take
and shake the hands of beings, they utterly comprehended:
Indians, redskins, devil like creatures with eyes acutely
similar to those overlooking today s Altaj, to those in
front of me at the kitchen table, actually. Oliver put
his hand forward out of New-Wordly custom and amiability.
His friend stepped back and said a very upper-class
German sentence, which is basically untranslatable: Man
gibt sich die Hand? I cannot even tell whether she was
really upper class. Some of the dead language of the
Goethe/Schiller classics can actually be picked up in
German high school if you are a willing climber. I cannot
translate that, however. It could have meant something
close to What the hell is the reason for your being so
bloody friendly after that year, you interested bastard?
Here I sat as far away from Heidelberg as our beloved New
York. So I did not even bother to translate the
fingerprints of my German socialisation into Russian that
night. However I still wondered slightly, what had made
Larissa consider this invitation so lengthily and what
had really made her invite me in the end. Eventually the
transmutations of this initial curiosity was the source
of endless misunderstandings and, to be honest, an
infectious sadness in an emotional and prospective sense.
Politically, it was the conclusion of a long-standing
promise, the one given to me by a jobless Pravda
journalist to the day 15 years before. I was eager to
follow the line.
All the while, the political police units of lower Altaj
charged with repressing anti-capitalist potentials
wherever they show up were already spinning a net of
investigation and informants to localise the rebel camp
and destroy its contagious potential. The forests of
Russia may be spacious, but they are not free terrain to
stroll in liberally. The last seasons have seen the crack-
down on a genuinely anti-political forest reverie called
the ferry temple . In the Anglo-Saxon world ferries have
become a code name and a dress code for insinuatingly
malignant anti-capitalist protesters. I remember the
nights in the Scottish police cell, when my cell
neighbour was driving his jail masters mad with the chant
But you arrested me for hugging a fairy! He had bloody
blocked a road around the G8 and subsequently resisted
arrest.
Russian ferries are not quite that clever in their way to
attack the hardly fairy-friendly world of Capital reign.
They only retreat into the Russian woodlands. There they
meet, hundreds of them, put on their true wings and
fluffy dressings, wave their silk and emanate their
obnoxious perfumes. It is as if they were living a life
of disguise for the rest of the year just to breathe the
air of pure and sweetish ventilation in remote settings
for some precious, fulfilling weeks of summer idle. They
build wooden castles, relate to princes of the tales
named after them and swarm about in fluffy flocks of
hundreds. Well, this might be actually quite funny.
However with the exception of two groups which are not
negligible in the story. In the first place, it is not
funny for the fairies themselves and it is definitively
not funny for the Russian police forces.
Instead of being let to realise a summer long collective
orgasm of escapism the last big fairy gathering in Russia
has become a sea of tears. Special anti-riot forces
cracked down on the event, localised operationally by
helicopters and ground control in a paramilitary
operation. The wooden castle was destroyed and the
elements arrested to be put to a treatment as if they
were a resurrection of the Decembrists, executed by the
Russian autocracy one and a half centuries earlier. All
this, I did not know by that time.
I did know that Gasprom had passed firmly into partly
control of German capital and that it was indeed high
time to associate on the other side of the barricade as
well.
I mentioned, that us two generations shared the tiny flat
sovereignly that night. Larissa s sister was out in the
mountains, so we had our half for ourselves. I got the
bed of her sister, where Larissa had slept in after her 4
day train ride from Moscow and Larissa herself moved on
to the next room on a canap . It reminded me of my
brother and me once before we dissolved our friendship
stemming from our childhood just a year ago. He and me
would always move out of our bed for our guest. Siberians
love to sleep softly Chehov wrote a century ago. He was
damned true wherever I got. So I lay in her bed like in
mountains of raspberries. Through the open door I could
hear Larissa breathing. Somehow, I must have forgotten
that my place of birth is 6000 km west. I strangely felt
to be right there, i.e. just in the place I had been born
to that many years ago. So on the next day, I readily got
onto a bus towards China, gaining the Altaj heights.
9. a night of compulsory adoration
I cannot help the feeling to want to narrate the days in
the Altaj heights as briefly and quickly as possible to
come back to the plains, Bijsk, my comrade. I was as if
put on a waiting loop, yet in one of the most fascinating
places of the earth. Time was short and efficient
transport asphalt-bound. So the first 32 hours were
actually a nightmare of running to gain access. There
would be hardly any break to the cold rain the first day.
I would never see anything else than the feet of
mountains, all the rest was covered in clowds.
Nauseatingly disappointed, I stumbled across the rural
trifles of the capital settlement at the entrance gate to
the Plateau. It was not yet 3 o clock in the afternoon
local time and the days motion had already collapsed. No
bus any more. No answer to any practical question. Time-
table? Reservation? Alternative transport? Guesthouse?
Something different to eat than fast-food? I simply could
not get any answer whatsoever. The Altaj majority was
socialising visibly among itself and the few Russians I
could get hold of seemed to be day-dreaming and counting
sheep in some realms of federal elision. I don t know
what you feel when a Russian answers to a basic question,
lets say about the meaning of a notice board saying hotel
above his door bez ponjatija (without a clue, thanks
Shirley for correcting this one, too) . I just feel
helpless. What can you say to abuse him? Nothing than to
repeat his words. My dear friend, you seem to be without
a clue. That is not satisfactory. A potential victim for
swear-words who tells you everything you could tell him
in a bad temper with his own calm words is just too much
for a raging stranger. So I took to medieval practice. I
circled around the central bus stop seven times
widdershins and seven times shins, asking randomly
everybody about everything which was on my mind. And
finally, I understood a bit more. There was a little car
going up on 1500 m heigt, passing mountain ranges rising
far above 3000 metres. Its trail to one of the rajon
centres in the south-east was to last some 10 hours and
transgress some 800 km, the last part remaining entirely
without asphalt. Ust-Ulagan was to be a boring outpost of
Russian colonialism with native Altaj people endemically
drinking and beating up foreigners to come to money. The
only way out of this hell of criminality and untameable
wilderness by public transport was to return exactly the
way I would go first, no other connection to the world
around, no public through-traffic, no guarantee of a
place to sleep. I threw in a breathtaking proportion of
my pocket/money and bought a single ride ticket up there.
You do not want to reserve a place to come down again?
the ticket seller asked with disbelieve. No, I pretended,
I will be quite comfortable hitch-hiking further towards
Mongolia. My counterpart visibly gave up my case and sold
me the ticket for the next morning mechanically. My
luggage alone was checked in for the price of some 12
adult passenger tram rides in the town of Bijsk. I had
delivered my throat to the outmost edge of the Russian
nightmare and I was determined to be happy with it. As
for the rain, I had little worries. Rumours had it that
everything above 2500 meters was already covered in
thick, new autumns snow now, on 10th of August, and this
snow was not to melt again until end of July next year,
according to authoritative locals. It would just descend
further down now, they assured with the deep voices of an
Altaj shamanist oracle.
I could not find any
hotel, though there were quite some signs announcing
them. In the end, I got the footpath description of a
state guesthouse for kids whom nobody would let further
into these mountains to learn something about their
fragile ecology there. The path lead over a wild river by
the help of a hanging bridge. To reach the bridge, I had
to go half a kilometre downstream and then go upwards
again. If this was the capital, I was not in the mood to
figure out what its province would look like. But before
closing my eyes to dive into it, I wanted to have a last,
civilised sleep, something like white linen and evening
reading of Kropotkin s expeditions into unknown
Manchuria. This, as I would learn later, was a vain hope.
There was no sleep for me that night. It all started very
occasionally, like a stupid little affair. Checking in
after a prolonged walk through the rain, I noticed that
the registering Altaj, was actually quite young. She
would be very formal though. It was only 4 o clock but
the rain was dense as a continual shower and there was no
use bumping about under those clouds. I got myself
drippingly into the room, given to me, put the table in
front of the window and started to learn Chinese
vocabulary. I love to learn Chinese vocabulary as much as
fiddling dilettantely on my violin. I discovered my
extraordinary liking for these two past-times right when
my Polish friend started to date with her new lover for
weeks without coming back to our joint flat. She would
not always tell me with whom, but she always told me
where she was going, to a romantic wood, to the island of
Wolin. To Hamburg, to Kiel. I was tied to the flat then,
forced to finish a work which I could not even support to
look at. And for two months I did hardly anything else I
can remember except for trying to learn Chinese
vocabulary and fiddling from 6 in the morning to 10 at
night. When I had to be afraid to get a reasonable
complaint about this dilettante fiddling, I would escape
to the Vistula river and take to torture the ears of by-
passers. Quite funnily, it hardly occurred to me that my
dilettantism on the violin could be actually insulting. I
liked it immensely. The sheer traumatic vagueness in
which the cords scratched by my bow responded to my
clumsy finger play corresponded perfectly with my vision
of the world in ruins. Let me just get free of this
damned workload, I told myself and I will take to China.
Taking to China was about as false as my play. I had no
friends there, no contacts, no clue how to get around
there. I did not even know a dozen of signs or words with
which to communicate basically. I told you that I learned
for six or eight hours without breaks. Indeed, I employed
various techniques, exploited my pleasure in brushwork to
cheat my way to writing through calligraphic exercises, I
read aloud, Heard hundreds of hours of Chinese
recordings, many of them corresponding to my lessons. I
consulted a private teacher twice a week. But the effect
was close to nothing. My head would immensely enjoy to be
filled up with signs and sounds, movements and
pronunciations of this distant language, yet somehow
overnight, it would empty itself mysteriously as if
continually pissing it all out again onto my bedclothes.
I did not feel the slightest unease with this balanced
nothingness. It was the perfect reflection of my
emotional failures, accumulated over a decade. Fiddling
without reaching tones and learning Chinese without
remembering words were the comforting guiding stars of my
tacit exasperation. All the time in the silent rooms of a
full Warsaw summer, I would not be able to do a stroke of
the work which I had to do. Deadline was drawing closer
like a gentle warm summer flood streaming around my
throat. Well, I had one other activity which could absorb
me for some hours a day, which was letter-writing to the
most fundamentalist Protestant Berlin Lesbian I have ever
known. Once she told me on the telephone that she would
not bother to answer these letters as agreed before,
because she had the suspicion that I was only writing
them to publish them later as a book. I was a bit
disappointed that her literary taste was so modest, that
she might believe that actually anybody wanted to print
or read such texts if they were not written precisely for
him or her. Well, these letters were precisely written
for him or her and they missed the point completely. I
had realised that by the time I came to number 43. I
desperately wanted to communicate with someone and in the
end only my fiddle seemed to respond to my efforts. I
cannot describe these months as being unhappy. I rarely
succeeded in reaching such an ambitionless t te- te with
nothingness in my life before.
There was a knock at the door. The Altaj receptionist
entered politely with delicate and a bit demonstrative
movements. She saw the new arrangement of the table,
walked past smiling and quietly put down some bed cloth.
As in a train, you know she would declare, cryptically.
Only after I had heard this formula three more times
through the corridor, each time another guest for the
night got his room, I understood that she was explaining
a little lazy caprice of her own. She imagined a hotel
like the one she was working for to provide bedclothes
being prepared for the guests already. Her formula As in
a train, you know never changing and uttered with an air
as if to excuse herself meant that she was not prepared
to do what she herself thought to be her duty. Excused
her as well. There is no problem in having some 5 minutes
of work for your own well-being. I am actually opposed to
any notion of service. My senses are vibrating with
satisfaction when I encounter the last species of
careless waiters and guest house personal in the Eastern
hemisphere. Once, being unfriendly to your guests in
public places was a class privilege of a whole army of
waiters and hotel personal who worked independently of
the fits and feelings of their clients. They did not need
to care. Capitalist reinvention of their working role as
a serving role has changed this fundamentally. Smiles out
of financial loyalty are a nightmare actually, for those
who receive them and for those who issue them. I often
dream of the time when revolution will introduce a new
functional rudeness in all former servicing trades. This
was a bit too much theory for one young Altaj
housekeeper. I actually failed to register in how far her
behaviour was far from servile or not servile. Looking
back later, I registered in how far it was schematic and
not reactive to the situation. This should have given me
a warning, but I would not heed to it then.
Back alone with my bedclothes prepared for the night and
still half way to go in time through the Chinese lesson,
I felt actually quite grateful for this failed summer
when I started courses. Maybe real break-downs can only
happen in the midst of fulfilment. The long-standing
austere absence of fulfilment lacks the critical
emotional mass to generate any movement, including
anything of the sort of a break-down. So just a 1000
mountainous kilometres in front of the year-long aim,
China, I halted to re-hibernate into the mindless void of
my knowledge of Chinese. After 10 o clock at night, I
dived up again from this state with difficulty and the
feeling of pity, as if my mother had dragged me out of
the sand-pitch by force (what she rarely did). My mother
did not even pressure me to go to kindergarten in time.
She allowed me to brawl around for hours in the morning,
forgetting myself in endless slopes of play, imagination
and boredom, take false ways and detours of a truly
escapist dimension. She would kindly wait for me to live
my fits to their very end and return, satisfied, to the
gardens of peer sociability, which I actually quite
enjoyed once I was there. Oh, follies of bourgeois
upbringing! My mother taught me how to stroll into a
sunny day with nothing on my mind than an illuminating
stupor of vague apprehension. What I understood then, I
could not tell. I was wordless, my mother used to say.
She observed me how I had something seemingly important
on my mind but could not tell which made me go red and
blue with rage and exasperation. Not having the words for
it is a basic horror, I know to be inscribed into my
nerves. It might actually be conneted with my father
never being around but that is post-factum speculation.
The only thin I lean from the suspicion is not to be
absent as my father was absent. He was a notorious
traveller to China, by the way, one of those
theoretically negligent Maoists populating assistant jobs
of Western German Universities in the 1970s. So I had a
problem with finding words but I had almost no exterior
problem with finding time. I was granted time as only
kings and princes might have been granted time in the
past. I think many children got what I got, the
astonishing material well-being of the 1970, never to
return after the destructions of Thatcherism, Reagenomics
a peculiar imitation, the geistig-moralische Wende of
doctor Helmut Kohl.
I got time and freedom in hilarious dimensions. But my
mother did not teach me a single time how to wipe a
floor, how to tighten canvas, how to chalk the fond of an
oil-painting, though she is a painter by trade and
training.
I got to sleep, I meant it. I was tired of being with
myself. To tell the truth, after Bijsk I felt terribly
lonesome.
But sleep was not meant for me that night. I started to
understand that when the door suddenly opened without so
much as a knocking and the light was turned on to a full
and hurting brightness.
What is that? a voice shouted at me. I startled. I fine
you! She repeated her cry as if dealing out strokes with
a whip on my half awoken body. Straf, straf, straf she
assured herself. I asked why and foumd out that she had
already met her aim, my voice was too late. She had
already reassured herself with the sheer mechanical
violence her delicate body was able to produce. You have
moved the table, that s forbidden. I will make you pay, I
can tell you. The following three hours were a failure on
my part. I reached with calm hatred to her assault. That
was exactly what she did not want. She wanted either
breathless hatred, such as hers or calm adoration.
Nothing in between. She would not act in any way
acceptably again until I accepted this tacit rule of
hers. I reminded her, that she had seen the arrangement
at 7 o clock in the evening and could have said a word,
couldn t she? She would not give in a millimetre. I
required a written document saying that moving a table
from a to b inside the rooms is liable to a fine. She
went away and I thought that there was probably some
peace to be found before negotiations would reassume in
the early morning. She knew that my bus was leaving very
early and that it was the only one in the whole day. So
she would probably use this card. Strangely enough, I did
not register, that she had already handed back my
passport. I calculated how much she would take until
letting me go. After half an hour she stumbled into my
room again, this time without putting on the light. She
carefully arranged a sheet of paper on which she had just
made up new rules and new fines on her reception
computer. I was quite amused at this playful mistake of
hers. She issued documents without a director s
signature. That could take the air out of her attack. I
told her so when going to the toilet. The toilets had a
strange notice as well. Forbidden to be used between 6:00
o clock in the morning and 23:00 o clock at night. Maybe
she had done all these new rules in one go. There was
something clearly uncanny in her stile of administration.
Furthermore, she would not sleep, she would walk around,
in and out. I decided to cut a long story short and to
silently lift the table back again where it stood. It was
all so easy. I lay down and looked at the ceiling. How
much aggression was there in this woman under the thin
egg-peal of false, schematic nicety. I felt a bit like
after a light traffic accident, not a collision but
surely a moderate avaria. It took her an hour before she
returned to my case. Same procedure. Enter without
knocking, turning on the light. Now she cried at the
pitch of her voice. You have put the table back. How can
you. You had no right to do so. And she continued with a
lament, for now surely, the whole guest/house was awake.
I want to sleep at night she wailed. And you make it
impossible. How can you dare and shift a table in the
middle of the night! I will not register you. I will not
register you until you pay the fine you deserve. I will
see to that. I felt that she was loosing ground. She had
no prove any more. The table was at its normal place. She
did not even have my passport any more as I noticed now.
She would not have raised the side issue of registration
if she had had such a powerful weapon in her hand as
withholding my passport. Without a passport in Russia,
you are reduced to nothing. You cannot buy a ticket, you
cannot pass a police control, you cannot leave luggage,
you cannot change money, you are immobilised and you have
to prepare for extreme humiliation. She could not do that
to me. I saw it clearly now, that the factual side of the
conflict was won. I wondered whether she would get any
fine money pout of me at all. The affair had tuned into a
sportive contest and I had a hearty laugh for every new
offensive. When she came in for a remake, turned on the
light and approached my bedside where my tormented body
was learning to lie indifferent under the beats of her
voice, I had a sudden idea. Maybe I guessed You have
fallen in love with me. I could help you then. I wondered
what I had in mind with help you . But she was retorting
simultaneously. No you, you, she cried You have fallen in
love with me. This was kindergarten, then. It acutely
reminded me of a strive between two friends in 1976 where
one started singing, that her parents had a camper van
and the other one s parents hadn t. I remembered my
resolution on obsessive talk and answered. I do not know
yet whether I love you, but I can find out.
- How will you find out?
- I will paint a portrait of you. Then I will be able to
tell you.
- You mean you will find out whether I am beautiful? Oh
goodness, she was so full of complexes and so unripe. It
hurt me physically. No, I explained calmly. It is rather
the other way round. You know, if I would love, I would
love your body just as your character. Funnily enough,
this brought her back on the barricades. So object to my
character, yes. Well, I cannot help you. That is the way
I am, I am tough, I am a beast of toughness. Take that! I
like whoever I love to be tough and smart. What comes out
when I paint you is more complicated. When I paint badly,
I have a fancy. When I paint well, I look from a distance
and not much can harm me. That is the way to find out.
O.k. she said simply and I followed her into her
reception room.
There was a little bit of a calculating spirit behind
this abracadabra. I felt that the night s sleep had gone
down the drain anyway and I knew that I had 10 canvasses,
which is a lot for 4 days when you travel something close
to 2000 km. From Cuban nights I had learned, that my old
Cuban formats, done in November 2003 had a very lucky
chalk-linseed oil consistence. Such canvas does half of
the painting. You can let go, every caprice is good
enough to keep the brushstrokes light. I felt confident
and professionally inspired by all that circus over the
better half of the night. There were 4 hours left. I
worked with my eyes now and paid little attention on de-
conspirating her previous attack. Her cabinet reminded me
of a mineral collection. But instead of dead stones, she
had spent the evening and the night to collect adorators
from the male sex. I made my why through their bodies
spread about in her room. Some of them were very subtle
but incredibly conservative. They would spend hours to
engineer compliments of the most unspecific kind. It was
as if they paid their night with her with flattery. Most
of them were form Novosibirsk. They had obviously trained
this kind of conversation with women for half of their
lifes. I found it all excessively boring. Basically, it
was about her not wanting to be photographed. I
registered, that I had a little favour of her, because
painting a portrait was perfectly o.k. in her obsessively
capricious little world. I groaned to myself at the idea
that I would be a woman in this macho hell of Russia. I
would, yes I would get away, get out of it any way, at
any price. Well, that is speculation. The task I had set
myself was more down to earth. I had to coax her into
reducing her cornered movements, try to convince her to
stay on one side of the light. Well, the light was a pity
anyway. It is always a pity not to paint in sunlight.
There is so much less substance getting palpitable under
electric lights. I tried my best and got her with
bravery. No trace of love, as for me at least. Yet, I
think that the bravura of male compliment filling the
night time holes of conversation nicely, coldly and with
an obnoxious, constant insinuation was equally an
indicator for the perfectly ignored absence of any real
feeling. Into this void, she said sentences which I
believe she has been repeating for years in her place of
work. It was all made to spurn adoration and it all
missed the point. She was talking about her stories in
Altaj language, which she published in the newspaper. She
told about her university career, did not forget to
mention that her dancing talents had made her join a
tourney around Europe. At one point, I was feeling really
sorry for her. It was when she tried to speak about the
poems she writes and was so unwise to try to recite one.
She got stuck. She did not remember. And then she
commented herself sharply. Not a convincing thing to get
stuck with your own poems, is it? She was so terribly
unsure, irritated. Speaking about her face, her body, the
repressive sexist character of the Russian talk about
female beauty turned up like a dying dolphin on the
surface of the sea. Age and ripening is unacceptable for
the male Russian cult of youth, male disrespect and male
ignorance are the malicious revenge against experienced
women for the flattering credit dealt out to any
available inexperience.
She was working against a hill now. I am praising myself
she remarked, and as if citing her grandmother s counsels
that is bad, it looks as if I was dependent on your
opinion. I rather cheered her now, silently. I had the
vision, that she could be independent; she understood the
mill she was caught in. But she was grinding on.
Complements hailed down listlessly on her. In the end,
when nothing seemed to work any more, she started to
boast of her husband, of her luck and happiness to be
married. I felt slightly sick from lack of sleep.
After having got the dark accents on the Cuban tested
surface in their places, I retreated to have my things
ready for the early morning bus. Everybody was hastily
getting out of her room now. It was as if the end of my
work had made it finally inappropriate for the majority
to hang around her bedside any more. An hour later, I saw
with a clear morning eye, how a youngster with a rather
pale and somehow brutal looking visage came out of her
cabinet, getting his trousers right with an occasional
and firm movement claiming importance. He fixed me with a
rude air and turned his face slightly up so to let me
glance at his head from a lowered perspective, a very
effective tool you can observe with certain eastern
European male types who pay very much attention to make
you believe that they are on the winning side. When I had
my luggage ready and it was time to go, the housekeeper
was sitting behind her window with an air of subdued
professional humility. Without doubt she was very tired.
I understood that she had an awful job and no training to
economise her forces. That made her a victim, not only to
male compliments but to her own ambition. She was full of
talents and a very sound ambition to make them heard. But
the way she took was just right to ruin her resources at
a breathtaking speed. Or maybe, I had not understood her
true reserves. Possible.
Weeks later, I asked myself why her nightly attacks had
been rather acceptable to me and I came across the memory
of the African cook at my French workplace. She was a
terrible cook. Once over a week, some colleagues and I
registered that she had dumped so much oil in our food
that bay half of the week everyone had swallowed an
average of two glasses. Only after she was fired I
learned that she had slept with almost everybody in the
establishment and many conflicts in our centre, e.g.
between Christian and Moslem Africans were really
fraction fights of jealousy. I marvelled how all this
extreme activity could possibly have omitted my attention
and I found no answer. I remember clearly however, that
she had a tendency to attack me for unbelievable trifles
with a fervour and persistence I could not explain at
that time. Having travelled the United States, I learned
to pay more attention to the superposition of triple
oppression: discrimination of working-classes, women and
racial discrimination. I am quite convinced that French
African cook just as the Russian Altaj housekeeper were
suffering excessively from all three modes of repression.
Their compensational strategy was astonishingly similar.
They would assume a stiff authoritarian and despotic
attitude which would only compromise in the case of being
offered sexualised complements and reverence. To the
difference of middle class women of equally authoritarian
socialisation, such emotional economy would not keep to
common conventions of accumulating symbols of
respectability. Instead, maximalising success within the
compensational strategy resulted in intense
instrumentalisation and maybe exploitation of the body
and the mind. In The grass is singing , a school lecture
I owe to my Australian education, Doris Lessing has
portrait the neurotic consequences of slave labour in an
erotic relation between mistress and servant. The inhuman
tension of physical closeness and forceful social
distance leads to male aggression in the case documented
by Lessing. The female outlet in a form of arbitrary
tyranny seems more stable, nevertheless. It puts, as in
Lessing s study, the price at the expense of the female
body. The question of structural racism against Altaj
aboriginals for the benefit of heirs to the Russian
colonial system is a black spot in the analyses of the
regional, traditional left.
With a little shock, I noticed that there was now only
minimal time left to go down the river, take the hanging
bridge and go up on the other side. I asked for my
reservation and put special attention on the tricky task
to keep any demanding notion out of my voice. She would
not give it to me. Why? I asked casually, and then I
heard myself continue with that lightness only a morning
can give you and which you cannot invent beforehand are
you still cross with me for that table? No, she answered
plainly. I believed her. But, slightly letting her tongue
get between her teeth, she then explained I do not know
how to do that. I am afraid, I will make a mistake. Now,
I clearly felt the nerves around my eyeballs shiver from
lack of sleep and a grinding feeling of helplessness set
in on me.
So, I wished her a nice and sunny day, a pleasant walk
home and many new and fine poems to be published in the
newspaper of the Altaj Republic. I thanked her for the
amiable atmosphere with which she provides the guesthouse
and especially for her patience at sitting for the
portrait. But , she broke my flow of carefully
desexualised compliments, will you really send me a copy
of your picture? Won t you forget me as soon as you get
out of this town? I decided to be finally a bit more
economical with my words. I thought about an appropriate
answer, which would be at once true and brief. It took
some time and then I said .
10. Asian mountains
Asian rivers
The small carrier was already packed with people and
luggage. I was the only European. The village of Ust-
Ulagan has a largely Altaj population of 2000, of which
only one tenth claim an exclusively Russian background.
However, higher functions such as in the police force,
the fire fighters, the administration, school and a
proportion of small business is practically inaccessible
for Altaj people. However, no matter how hard I tried in
Altaj-only discussion circles, I could not detect any
practice or interest in linking issues of ethnicity and
issues of power. In a very plain way, my Altaj informants
would refuse to take up my provocations and stress
instead, that e.g. many of their friends and workmate
were Russian, that many Russians have to work hard as
well, etc. All in all, no Western money seems to have
been invested effectively in transforming social issues
into ethnicised assets in the Autonomous Republic of
Altaj. I was quite astonished by the firmness of the
replies I got. Principally, this could be the state of
discussion e.g. in Ukraine now. Judging by statistical
and material indicators the case for camouflaging ethnic
division as a viable form of voicing social aspirations
has more basis in the Altaj republic than in Ukraine.
Evidently, investing in such battles is not a question of
the available material pretexts but rather of material
chances to enforce division until a beneficial end, when
investment in polarisation along ethnic lines pays out,
with or without Western support.
We came through valleys of giant, reddish slopes. We
spent hours cooling down the boiling motor with icy
bottles, filled under the outcome of thundering
waterfalls going down towards us in hundreds of metres of
almost free fall. We poked through layers of clouds and
mist to dissolve our subdued senses finally in an
obnoxious transparency of crystalline, chilly air giving
way to our glances: upon eternal ice, glaciers of
majestic remoteness, hosting shadows of green in their
fantastic closeness to the light of the sun. I looked
back in our vehicle. I saw into sun-burnt faces of
incomprehensible Asian calm and observation. No words.
This was their land, their hights and falls. The
incredible vertical movements of our streets were a
subtle shake of their heads, not more. Their lively eyes
protected by slyly slimmest lids would not need to cramp
for protection when facing the bold reflections from
those hilarious meadows of snow that never melt. But the
greatest impact made their reflected immensities in the
majestic Asian riverbeds, gurgling and turning over,
beating foam and carrying with them stones and rocks in
their irresistible stream downhill, some of them weighing
tons and groaning repetitively once in a while with roars
of impact unmuffled by the overturning water masses and
resounding through the gigantic valleys we had to pass.
Horseback riders overtook us, when we were fighting with
the inaptitude of a Japanese motor to cope with Altaj s
vertical dimensions. They were sitting in such a clever
rhythm that their horses backs seemed to pop up only once
in a wile to keep them in their most elegant trajectory
position. Everything about them was moving bumpily and
shaking in the thrill of speed. Only they were gliding
stably through the late afternoon air. I saw tents tended
by nomads; I saw Asian cattle and cooking over fire. I
saw colours dripping with the tickle of the evening
approaching into a see of dark intensity as if submerging
under that eternal water, conjured by the English
Romantics when their bodies gave way to the last
prolonged and calm spasms of decay inspired by Asian
opium. Here the venoms of their deaths came from, here
their imagination finally returned home. This is the
mother of the earth, the roof of the world.
I arrived at Ust-Ulagan with a quiet in my senses as if I
would only now hear and understand the first words in my
life. Everything seemed simple, true and unpretentious.
Ulagan is a veritable ice-pole in the immensely chilly
body of colonial Russia. The air of far Northern Siberia
might actually collapse down to a monstrosity of 40
degrees minus zero during the peak of a polar night. But
Ust-Ulagan had minus 50 just last winter. The huts and
banjas, carefully imitating the form of traditional tents
in Russian block-house technique look as if they pealed
out of immense snow and ice last week and would re-
submerge again the other week for almost another year.
Their wood is greyish, their forms betray the immense
pressure of masses of snow and ice piling above them in a
winter s night.
I was taken to the fire-fighters of the rajon to have a
look at their map. If you definitely will not want to
return with us tomorrow morning, our driver said
warningly, you will have to pass through this, towards
Russian Tibet and down with the water from Mongolia
towards this lake, Teleckoe ozoro. It is the second
biggest sweet water reservoir in the world after Lake
Bajkal, as I learnt later. There might be a boat taking
you some 100 km over the lake to reach Bijsk again. I
nodded deferently, though I clearly noticed that the way
he had showed me on the map went over peaks of nearly
3000 m above sea level and this could hardly be the trail
the locals would prefer. Well, he was a public bus driver
from the capital and his machine was already at the edge
of its possibilities in climbing up here. I would have to
ask a lot more people. I went around the wooden building
and saw a writing above the door. Delegation for inner
affairs , it said, vnutrych del, VD, formely NKVD. I
imagined how the officers had picked out of the
settlement their compulsory quota of Trotskyists and
Japanese spies in 1937, I imagined their damp warm blood
run down the cold wooden walls of the building after the
first interrogation to baptize the Russian National
Revolution and I could not bear the thought. This
climate, this frosty air in mid August was somehow
already at the edge of comprehensible brutality. I could
not really support the idea that man would add to this
still.
I ignored my ideological reservations to administrations
of inner affairs and tried to ask for a way through the
mountains. The officer on duty arrested me immediately. I
asked for the reason. There was no reason. I asked for
the head of the rajon. A Russian turned up. According to
the laws of the Russian Federation you are obliged to
motivate my arrest. Why do you take me in custody? I
asked with a leaned sentence from the days of protest
against the G8 in Russia. The commander however was
obviously not trained to respond to such rebellious talk.
He even looked helpless for a moment. Then, he took to
sophism. We arrested you because we arrested you. You are
a foreigner, you know. We do not get many foreigners up
here, you know. Terrorism, you know. The world is full of
enemies of Russia. This is not a reason for arrest under
the laws of the Russian Federation. I insisted. Our
intercourse had obviously reached a dead point. We will
check your papers and then we will decide what to do with
you over night. There was a little sting in my
consciousness. My little friend down in the cute capital
keeping me awake so laboriously over the night had not
bothered to register me in the Autonomous Republic of
Altaj. I was silent and waited. I waited for hours. The
arrest was a come and go. The unusual stir by the
sensation that they had got hold of a foreigner was
cleverly used by an elder Altaj woman to walk out of the
cell laughingly. She was caught and brought back only
after actually leaving the building. All in all, I was
reminded of a scene in the Wild West during the Indian
wars. The prison commander a European, his victims
representing all arrestable fractions of population with
Asian origin, his torture assistants corrupted Red Sins.
In the end my documents would be handed over to a woman
for assessment. Obviously the men on service, including
the commander would not trust their literacy as much as
their fists for enforcing law and order up here. She was
a scrupulous type. She would not let go. She would call
the capital by satellite telephone. She would consider a
monstrous fine and in the end, she would say simply Let
him go! Really the men would interrogate. Let him go, I
said. There was no conversation about the reason why I
was hold up and why I was now entitled to go.
Nevertheless, the combined masculine police force of Ust-
Ulagan let me go. I was a bit cross with them that they
had not bothered to answer my initial question about the
way through the mountains but I excused them to myself.
They were obviously very busy in the capital settlement
of the municipality and could not have an eye so
intensely on the rest of their terrain of operation,
actually larger than a good deal of the size of England.
I stumbled out of the administration building right into
another queer treatment, a sweetish one this time though.
There was actually some internet connection. I fingered a
single personal mail out of a heap of spam. It was from
the woman my comrades on the Ural railway lines would
have surely called my girl-friend.
Hello, she wrote gaily. I am hitch-hiking with Hauke
through the Carpathian Mountains. Yesterday we had sex in
the tent. Everything is fine.
But what is the matter with you? I would like you to
write a bit more personal, to be honest. How can I know
your real feelings if you only write so superficially?
By,
V.
She had again ignored my pledge for a real mail address.
I stepped out of the wooden hut called Internet-caf and
thought in the twilight why these famous Ust-Ulagan
robbers hadn t turned up yet to give me a well-measured
hit on my forehead. The owner of the internet caf just
came along to see how business was going with his boys on
service. I stopped him and asked. Please, tell me where
these robbers are all of Moscow talks about. Or is it
just a hype. It is not a hype , the little Altaj man said
calmly looking into my face, I am the biggest one You are
a gangster? Yes, the little man retorted seriously, I am
a big gangster. Please come with me. I want to find you a
place where you will pass the night. We walked through
the evening chill, not to a place to sleep at first, but
to a place to work. My little gangster was doing some
less illegal business alongside and had his mates build a
new kiosk in the centre. Have a drink with us he ordered.
This is my best friend, a Russian, a worker from
Tadzhikistan. He has made my mates go far up into the
mountains to get yellow and grey stones for a mosaic all
around the kiosk. He is a good worker, a mate. Let us
drink. I did not drink. Anyway most of the workforce was
indeed already excessively drunk and hilariously good-
natured. They could not believe that I gave them
postcards which had my own paintings printed on them.
Even hours later, they would tell newcomers that I had
painted those for them right on the spot. With the help
of my little gangster, I then found a place to rest. A
hotel tended by a very bright Jewish widow who rejoiced
of her liberty and her business activity after having
successfully buried a bullying Moslem husband at the end
of a 14 years ordeal. Her hotel was endemically empty and
consisted of a room for herself and her daughter and two
adjacent spaces with some bed constructions stuffed into
them. My landlady was a delicate and experienced lady
with a winning sense of humour. She said, that she kept
on collecting tops of these little Vietnamese magic oil
tins and when she had five (red) stars in her collection,
she would nail them onto her door. Personally, I would
give her not five but six stars. She had even thought to
place a set of sewing needles next to my bed, not to
forget about a rice cooker, washing water, plates, spoons
and a glass of drinking water. I am sorry for you, that
you come today , she said apologising. I am not in my
best humour today, because I had to burry my sister this
afternoon. See how red my eye-lids are. But I have
stopped crying now. I thought about me burying my own
sister and hiring out a part of my flat some hours later
and started to cry out immediately. Actually, it sounded
a bit as Eva would have done it. Of course our learning
in the last half year was perfectly mutual. With
experienced care, my landlady investigated my little
attack and gave me not Vietnamese oil this time, but the
address of a healer, a friend of hers living right next
door in Western Germany, just in case, my sister needed
any support for her health. Well, she marvelled, turning
over further pages in her impressive address-book. I have
got protection, I can tell you. Business is no fun in
this republic if you have not a serious network of
protection, a roof, we call it. All right, down there in
Russia, they have mafia, extortion, and paid murder. But
our Autonomous Republic is just so much worse. You cannot
imagine how much vampires I feed along with my little
hotel and to be honest, this business activity is not
precisely as rewarding or let s say as profitable as I d
have thought it to be. Fortunately, I have built up a
little empire of shops and income in the next village
down the valley to get over the winter. My father was a
military there. He came over for career reasons from the
Jewish Autonomous Republic in the Far East. Well we Jews
are at home here in the East now as anywhere in the
world. I have 7 siblings. One is in Germany, some in
America, one in Uzbekistan. It is as if we had secretly
agreed to get interested in a different culture
altogether every single one of us, marry there and be as
happy or unhappy as we only could. I have been quite
unhappy in marriage, but that is over now. My husband has
died and I am a free person. Oh, Martin, can you imagine
how happy I am not to be married any more! People
continue to make up good parties for me, new protection,
all that. To be honest, my young friend, I am perfectly
happy to live without a man. And I have my business to
attend, I am not a house-wife type, oh no! I am not the
one to sit in a corner and suffer, I can tell you!
11. Ezen Privet
The next day had a crystalline clear wind of sun-beams go
through the freezing mountainous depths. I took the trail
opposite from where we had arrived. My first lift was two
hobby photographers who admitted rather ashamedly that
they were in fact jobbing in a soulless fitness studio in
Novosibirsk. They had a map, though. I chanced to take a
quick look on it and I knew within moments what I was to
do in the following 72 hours. Above the trail I had
decided for a warning was written onto the map. Do not go
on this road without special off-road vehicles! it read.
My company had rather something of a normal off-road
vehicle and would give in after a couple of kilometres
already. There were clearly efforts to build a bridge
over the riverbed, but for the time being, building work
had just begun and there was no way around abandoning
your vehicle however special you might think it to be to
the abundant floods hoping for good luck and a lucky dive
right through the trap. My colleagues resigned from that
kind of sportsmanship. And my stripping and diving
through the icy floods on bare feet would not in the
least convince them to follow me. So I walked on alone,
wondering how many tougher off-road vehicles with tougher
drivers there might be in this part of the world. For the
time being, I could not see a trace of them.
Only if I know all my weaknesses within my little finger,
I can shake hands and join fate with a revolutionary
collective, I oracled to myself. Now is the moment to
make the overall confession and sum it up to a trifle in
view of the social task ahead, I declared with a loud
voice. I was somehow convinced that nobody would hear me
on this theatre practice.
Looking back, I quite missed my aim, thus exposing my
cardinal weakness in practice where I wanted to get the
theory of it. Protestant socialisation has it that you
are to confess to yourself before you become ready to
join in communion with the movement. I had a serious
invitation downhill. It was not enough to engage in
endless marvelling about the dark eyes of comrade
Larissa. This was, speaking strictly from a dialectically
materialist point of view (DMPV) missing the point to say
it plainly. Confession was on the agenda. But halas,
instead of analysing my defaults, I went about grabbing
my selective memories for excuses and pretexts. Instead
of condemning myself, I started analysing and condemning
the material forces which had made me so deficient a
soldier for the great cause. From the point of view of
Protestant socialisation, this was rebellious non-sense
and not apt to interest the almighty corporation for
granting redemption. Well, Protestants are not bad in
marketing, so they are silent about hell, whereas my
Polish working/class colleagues have suffered tyrannical
visions of hell and punishment in childhood from their
parochial Catholic torturers, while the leftist branch of
the free world was praying for the Victory of Solidarno .
Compared with Catholic confession to a fatty priest, the
Protestant ritual looks almost as a mental exercise.
During the 1991 Iran bombardment, I went to a priest
genuinely enveloped in a bag of obesity, routinely
hosting confessors in N tre Dame chapel. Pretending to be
a Catholic who has run away from military service, I
urged him to put me up for the night and save me from my
prosecutors of the military police. Go and give yourself
in to the police searching for you , the clergyman
replied unmoved. It is your Christian duty to obey the
laws. But they will order me to kill , I cried in false
despair. It is your Christian duty to obey the law, he
repeated and dismissed me. At that time, I had the
intuition that a German clergyman would have been
slightly more clever and would have included the historic
case of German Fascism in his argument. And indeed, in
spring 1999 Antje Vollmer, a Protestant priest handed
over to the service of German expansionism in the ranks
of the olive-green party would follow her leader Joseph
Fischer and declare it our utmost duty to bomb Belgrade
with German missiles for a third time in the 20th
century. This time it was to end the occasional
repetition of Holocaust in Kosovo discovered by some
Western media. Their poor pretexts from the ground were
falsified and contradicted even Western military
intelligence of these days as it turned out later in
investigation conducted by the European council. Hence,
there is some reason to mistrust priests on the whole
line. How attractive therefore to be able to confess to
yourself (though it will not win you a free bed in Paris,
even if you are successful).
I walked up-hill half-consciously humming Schubert s
Winterreise: I have to go that road which nobody ever
came back! It is a long time ago that I got infested with
Winterreise. I was in Spain then on the farm of Nine, my
colleague in rage against bourgeois adoration of us
travelling types. When calling someone back in Central
Europe, I would speak just enough to make them listen
attentively to the songs of Schubert. This could go on
for hours. Telephone is cheap in the West. When I left a
town in those times, I was sure to sing the crow song and
when I found a place to sleep, it was almost obligatory
to sing, imitating a slightly romantic and intrinsically
ridiculous bass in einer Koehlers simplen Huett hab
Obdach ich gefunden. Doch meine Glieder ruh n nicht aus
so brennen ihre Wunden This can get quite obsessive if it
does continue for months as in my case. Actually it was
fiddling and presumably learning Chinese which cured me
from the truly comic tragedism of Winterreise. But I was
not diving into the same river once again now up on the
Altaj Plateau. It was not about music at all now. I was
recalling the death of my grandmother suddenly and I had
long hours in the mountain solitude to contemplate my
recollections.
I was returning from work in Rome to Warsaw then, in
March 2005. Everything was snow beyond Florence. The
olive trees on the slopes around Bologna had their
branches heading heavily to the earth under loads of
white. I stopped for ages in Vienna. I remember these
Fascist bunkers standing with obnoxious brutality in the
middle of parks and public spaces. Nobody can get them
away my friend Eva from Vienna explained. I slept in a
flat of some 200 square metres and ceilings some 4 metres
above the floor. My host, Eva s best friend, played the
clarinet. We played in three together, Eva on her
accordion and me on the trumpet with the assistance of a
muffler. We could have continued to live like that, I
suppose. I knew nothing. My grandmother was already in
the morgue then.
But I went on to Warsaw. She opened the door for me and
dealt out the news just as a welcome blow into my face, I
had not yet put down the luggage. She watched me
intensely. I am sorry for Catholically socialised people.
They have such a neurotic, such an unconsidering relation
to death. They want it all to be in keeping with their
plastic flowers and their compulsory feelings in such
cases. I did not cry then. And she would attack me
bitterly. I thought you had some rest of feeling left.
Not for me, of course. But for the death of the most
important woman in your life! I know that she was more
important for you than your mother. And still, you do not
even cry. You are an emotional corpse; there is nothing I
can do with you any more. She did make love to me still.
But later she claimed that she had not really meant that,
not meant if for the past 8 years actually. You are too
fast. You see only yourself. You do not register my
reaction. You have no real feeling. Your caressing is
empty. After a while, it rather hurts. Secretly I
believed her everything then.
A year afterwards, I interviewed the woman my comrades on
the Ural railway lines would have certainly called my
girl-friend on the topic. She said the exact opposite
were true. Let us wait and see what she will tell when
she knows a little better what exactly she is getting
herself into in these nights on another part of that
globe. What starts off easily in a tent can boil down to
most conventionalist fixation and that would necessitate
a guilty verdict for someone around here to be sure. In
small details with her, there has already been much
practice of such inversion.
Maybe my Polish companion for a decade was really a
virtuosi in twisting things to their very opposite to
match an underground feeling of senselessness. For
example, she would have a damned good intuition of what I
sincerely intended to and then she could slap into my
face her poignantlyy bitter proof that, in effect, I
attained nothing but the exact opposite. I would e.g. try
to pass over money I happened to have with the utmost
occasionality I was capable of. She was jobless for 8
years. It was not her fault. It was the fault of Polish
capitalism not letting her put her laborious conscience
into such results which earn you market remuneration. She
wrote a brilliant PhD instead. I read it with enthusiasm
through a day and half a night. She herself would not
read a page of my PhD. She would just warn me, do not use
me to write it . To be honest, she has done exactly that
herself, used me to write hers and that was perfectly
o.k. Once she had written it, she went out to search for
one she loved and in the long run finally disposed of the
comrade who had stepped into her flat on 10th of December
1996 quite unwilling to go in the following decade. Take
the example of money. Little has been as painful as that.
Once she had guessed my intention to transfer purchase
power between us without making any fuss of it, she would
brake down in tears, how I, a German intruder, could be
so indelicate to expose her material dependence publicly.
German intrusion that is really a key motive of the
decade. I guess my very German successor did not get
quite the beating. I imagine it to be like the career of
younger siblings. My brother hardly ever got a smack,
whereas I went through a hell of a lot of beating by my
mother. She would never admit it nowadays. I cannot help
seeing parents who beat as a failing sort. For me this an
early childhood experience and it continued to the age of
18. It got worst in the end, in 1988, when my mother had
an affair with a clergyman. I would get physical
punishment even for returning late with the bicycle from
my lover s home, 15 km north. Alas, it took some 3 hours
to push the bike if the air had gone out of it again. I
came late, yes. But I did not even have the guts to make
love to her being quite conscious about a certain lack of
talent then for making rubber products hold any pressure,
as my truly dysfunctional bike clearly showed me. Well,
that were the 1980s. We were all caught in a terrible
ecomania. On the agricultural I went on later to learn
everything for an organic commune, half of the students
would get pregnant before passing the exam on
Agrartechnik . I passed that exam without a family
background and on riding home to a little gypsy wagon in
a cherry orchard I laughed from delight on the whole way
from the beginning to the end. I was 22 years old and
this had been the last exam of my life, I rejoiced. In
the aftermath of this little success, I decided to engage
in some compromises with technology for the sake of
widening my horizons beyond academical knowledge.
On the first night I stayed at that place in Warsaw 1996,
she would ask me to tell a joke in German language. That
s enough, she would cut me short after a while. It really
sounds just as in our films on German Fascists. I was
shocked but took it as a legitimate observation. I did
not want delicacy. Honesty was quite sufficient. 7 years
later, I went to a working-class Cuban hairdresser
collective before meeting a woman who had taken the
liberty to kiss me in her place of work. The public
hairdresser who got me took off everything I had on my
head, surest way of keeping me out of the shop for some
time. Afterwards, she stroke over my head with laughing
admiration and said Just as a little Nazi. I do not even
think she meant that to be funny. It was just a reverence
to my origin, a shockingly neutral connotation a for
Cuban youth. You can possibly imagine that the Baltic
story does not really work there and telling people you
are a Pole makes them shrink away from you with muted
fear for Cubans rightly know Poles to be traitors to the
cause of socialism. Even all the left friends I have in
Poland have acted as traitors, if they were old enough to
buy a kilo of bananas. In the Cuban case however where
bananas grow in your back-yard, I rebelled with all my
spirits and made a big scandal out of it. A woman living
on the rubbles of the Warsaw ghetto has the right for
more offensive remarks than a woman in the least anti-
semitic country of the world, including Israel.
Ten years ago, my Polish companion did not know a word of
German and she knew reasons not to change this. When we
travelled through Germany on the quickest way possible to
get to Paris she would feel feverish the entire length of
the delicate transit because of the war. Nine years
later, she could date with her new German lover without
any translation help from my part. It was the peculiar
idea of the later acquaintance, whom the comrades on the
Ural railways would have surely called my girl-friend, to
ask me to translate and edit her love letters to her new
German bed mate. Hold on, these two guys even came from
the same town, Hamburg, and worked in the same political
spectrum, leftish Anarchism, they might call it. The
repetitiveness of these developments, one after 10 years,
one after 10 months of intense friendship does remind me
of something I think to have learnt from experiencing the
impact of a death. It sets forth learning processes which
are really aloof from the usual self-commiseration and
the common unmaterialistic appeals to make everything
good again by the force of will and sympathy. The force
of will and sympathy has definite limits a materialist
has to become familiar with. There is a lack of
inventiveness, a blind heeding to material currents, in
the case of love s labours lost e.g. socio-economic
factors among others, there is the standard commodity
blueprint of fostering and protecting your new
acquisition on the emotional market. All of them combined
can result in developments similar to the mode in which
death sets definite limits. And there is nothing to be
done against it and there is no reason, no sense to
pressure against that. It does make sense to pressure
against lots of other developments though. It this case,
however, even your resistance may be just a preliminary
version of the end. The end. I remember my mother talking
to me on the phone, advising me how to do those 1200 km
to come to her mother s funeral in time. She wanted me to
be very quick and get the ritual conversation with the
Protestant clergyman before the actual burial. I thought
about a song which has had a certain fascination for me
in autumn 1991. It s text by Tucholsky went very funny
and realist: When someone goes away, your interior starts
to vibrate like a dimmer: now she s gone, what am I to do
here, still? But no higher forces come for help, because
by established custom the most stupid ideology has to do
all the talking at a grave. I did not want to hear any of
that talking and I knew why. Protestants always talk.
They are the parrots of bourgeois consciousness and they
accumulate spiritual capital by exploiting your readiness
to listen. Maybe I became a materialist in the full sense
of the word only when burying my grandmother. If my
childish religiosity hanged already with a blue face,
this event threw itself at its dangling feet and pulled
it down with all its might. So it succeeded in definitely
finishing up the earthly existence of the culprit. I do
not conceal that in the first place all that hanging
procedure was the exclusive doing of Marxism put at work
within me. My mother would actually be quite sorry
hearing that. It would certainly remind her of a personal
battle she fought alone in her class against reason and
careerism alike in an East German school during the
1950s. She is definitely against the death penalty. I
will not issue any statement on such a moralised question
as long as world Capitalism still succeeds in starving
some 50 000 of my comrades daily. In the conditions of
the third world, comparing Cuba and its neighbouring
countries, including Georgia and Florida, I learnt to
actually appreciate the effects of red terror when
nothing else seems to help keeping capitalists off our
throats.
To be sure, there were two people at my grandmother s
grave who wept terribly, my father and me. I know me to
be liable to collapse facing any consequences of red
terror in a very similar intensity. My mother, whom I
remember as a tremendously powerful weeper in my early
childhood would appear all relaxed and calm then. When
the guests were leaving us at the end of the day, she
would remark with this strange talent of hers to say the
most inappropriate phrase in a given situation I wonder
who will be the next. My mother says that she has learnt
how to cope with death and dying when being forced to
raise us three children. I remember her lying in the
kitchen in a genuine spasm of desperation. Our father was
away as nearly always. He was actually terribly busy from
the earliest times I can remember onwards, slowly and
steadily building up his life project of merging work-
and alcoholism. All the while my mother was forced to
live in a situation comparable to wives under Spanish
Fascism. Until today she has no bank account of her own.
She would have literary no pay-for-work experience except
for unremunerated and often humiliating auxiliary jobs
created by my father s devouring ambition at a breathless
speed. Still today, she is able to come close to a
nervous break-down on discovering that I have used some
card-board from her hand-printing shop or some red
pigment. Even if she had granted a general permission
earlier she would then find out that this was from a
stock she had saved from her precious years of liberty
when studying fine arts in the 1960s and that she
disposed of literally no personal money to buy any
replacement nowadays. All the while my father earns
roughly 4 times the pay of a qualified industrial worker
in the same village. It must have been around 1977. It
was not about artistic materials then, but rather about
time. She resolved in weeping with long and incredibly
intense cries which made the whole house reverberate. Her
body came to lay down in wild contractions on the kitchen
floor, just before the entrance of a lousy and cold
storage room the architecture of my father s hand had
allowed at this place to facilitate domestic duties. This
was actually her studio at that time, leaving roughly a
square metre for her laborious paintings she worked on
intensely for months. I say roughly a square meter but
actually right into this free space the kitchen door was
opening. Whenever one of us three kids would run to her,
we would inevitably bump the metal door handle right into
her spine. In order to have just a little distance to
look at her work which was later to be exposed in first-
hand galleries of the affluent republic my mother
actually had to abandon her cell-like retreat of the size
of a toilet and risk to go into the kitchen. This kitchen
is notoriously tidy to the present day, no matter what
bull-shit any of us lousy bastards has been fabricating
there. Actually, there could not be a better
architectural composition for enslaving a professionally
trained woman to idiotic house-work than this one. My
father was writing a pompous dissertation at that time on
the so-called hodological architectural space , the space
defined by the ways you have to walk. For this
explorative book, he found the muse of combining Chinese
philosophy and modern empirical studies, including even
some conducted in the Soviet Union. Theoretically
speaking, he might have been a leading expert at that
time in defining social relations by making people live
within his design of space and ways to walk. I have only
once heard such crying again, it was in Ingmar Bergman s
film Fanny and Alexander. Her crying was officially about
us three. It was not only that we made it impossible to
her to go on painting as she wanted. She claimed more.
You bury me alive! She cried at the edge of a female
voice in the age of 35. Today having her age of that time
myself, I understand that we were probably not that much
guilty as maybe our father was. Maybe a good proportion
of guilt in a materialist sense was even sucked up in the
tremendous success of the left publishing house
Kiepenheuer & Witsch of that time. Having studies in the
Berlin of student revolt and doing occasional support
work for comrades who had gone underground, my mother had
all her enthusiasm and graphical skill set at work for
illustrating at the service and mercy of that publishing
trust flirting with a new and radical left. Alas, they
would never pay a Pfennig for all my mother did. They
were just a bunch of macho bastards pressing free
resources out of a devolving movement.
But children are in a certain sense defenceless. I think
this afternoon alone might have actually had the effect
of a life-long anti-baby pill for the three of us. We
seem to have the necessary physical drill and the nerve-
racking discipline reaching right down into the most
blissful moments of our lives. With a curious blockade
which seems to be built into our very nervous
constitution set down in early childhood we can avoid in
the course of decades what others risk on occasional
hitch-hiking through the Carpathian Mountains.
Though counting 103 years now, altogether, neither my
sister, nor my brother, nor me have ever succeeded in
becoming really intimate with anyone who seriously wanted
to provoke a child with us. Maybe we have not actively
sought for such acquaintances. Who could tell? I prefer
to judge some developments from their results.
Take my companionship of a Polish decade for example. Isn
t it humiliating how you can create misery for each
other? I positively assume that all these unfair
treatments by her were just a faint reflection of what
she has suffered from me. My later Ukrainian
acquaintance, gifted with that little weakness to fall
for anti-authoritarian behaving students, be them
Ukrainians, Russians or Germans, would bluntly analyse
that I had myself fallen into a hierarchy trap and
submitted under the despotism of a woman against whom I
could raise no prolonged criticism because of my
complexes of historic guilt towards Polish people. Indeed
as soon as my mother would hear of me kicking people in
my childhood or anything of the like, she would conjure
up that picture, monstrously realist as I found out
later, of a German in uniform kicking Jews of the Warsaw
ghetto into the trains to Treblinka. My Ukrainian
acquaintance has indeed got a point there. But it is only
a point, not the clue, not the key for doing any better.
Tyrannical behaviour is not alien to her. She has learned
to span in her daughter for well-conceived emotional
attacks of which she would easily admit a certain un-
fairness a couple of days later when the battle s won.
She lets her daughter work for herself. She has
incredibly fatal fits of jealousness, even damaging some
of my essentially political friendships by chance, sort
of collateral impact. And while doing such demolition
work she can actually be just heading off with another
bed mate.
There is such a lack of constructivism in the late reign
of Capital! I was out for confession and catharsis and I
have missed the trail and got right into the practical
question: how can we possibly burn out class rule from
the face of this earth? All the while, no matter where I
get to by the chaotic convulsions of my memories, it is
all about accumulation, materially, emotionally,
destructively. Take the dearest memories available to me,
e.g. Both, my later Polish and my later Ukrainian
companion can be just as aggressive, especially when they
know themselves that they are really playing false.
Interestingly enough, no one of them ever expressed the
wish, not even the dream, which could have been put under
the reservation that it should not be fulfilled, of
risking a child with me. Though I still believe and I
told them on every appropriate and inappropriate occasion
that with an utmost and combined effort you can bring up
a new generation in a constructivist spirit, getting
beyond the neurotic ambition to accumulate on your own
genetic principles. The answer has been uniform, like a
consistent echo from a cry of 1977: Not now! Not to this
world! Not with this one! In 1977 I got early training to
accept this. I can really understand them. I did never
insist on our disagreement to mean anything for us. And
all the while through my seemingly perfect understanding
it hurts, terribly, like those prolonged cries of 1977
did hurt terribly and do not disappear from my daily
doings. And this peculiar pain is quite likely to
accompany us three siblings to our graves with first two,
then one, then none to throw some earth and flowers.
Though, empirically speaking, childmaking is not fun to
watch either, in most cases. I have heard of terribly few
cases where the driving force was not fatal male
machismo, paranoiac conservatism, outright resignation
due to more or less joyless lovemaking or helpless
deference to outside expectations. Children seem to come
out primarily from neurotic, ritualisingly dead and anti-
modern sexual relations as far as I can see. Bad luck for
the children, I would say in the first place. Socialist
revolution mobilises a vast process of public adoption.
Walking uphill, I was suddenly being shaken by warm and
ringing laughter. What was this? An insect or a tiny
bird? Something very big. It would start up from the
mountain grass as a giant black locust and then spread a
set of additional wings of scarlet red colour to go down
in a terribly theatrical rattle. It was an Asian devil of
the upland steps, a caprice of nature to be sure. Where
did it get the energy from, to perform such scenic
mastery in this meagre climate where basically nobody
would watch? Nobody? Can we ever understand anything so
simple? I had literary to sit down to laugh. This was the
only adequate answer to my reflections. I will not undo
my childhood; I will not retrieve love s labours lost.
But I can laugh about a beast summing it all up in one
hilarious jump, and furthermore I can through a Molotov
cocktail in the right moment, demolish a police car and
run out of a wedding ceremony when I feel the water close
around my throat. It must have been an insect really. I
saw two or three more. Sometimes I lie sleepless at night
and I ask myself in a very general sense: what does my
party, a party as defined in the Communist Manifesto,
what does it really want me to do during the remaining
time of my life? Well, supposedly I then got the mission
to promote shamanism; I would make very broad use of the
Altaj scarlet locust.
We had already thrown flowers and earth onto the grave
and I was shaken by unbearable fits of weeping, just as
my father, when I happened to become subject to a
coinciding outside attack. This one as well was inspired
by Roman-Catholic socialisation. It did not feel exactly
a fortunate week then, I can tell you. History does
indeed seem to happen as a tragedy and repeat itself even
somehow more painfully in the form of a farce as the moth-
bitten uncle Marx in exile rightly observed. Now it was
my childhood neighbour and Catholic elementary
schoolmistress Frau Hillmann who descended on me with
veritably biblical fervour. Funnily though, she could not
really accuse me for not weeping, as the counterpart
linked to her by the holy communion and another couple of
cardinal performances. The Polish victim, though
philosophically as much an atheist as I can claim to be
one already, had descended on my not weeping with some
legitimacy three days before. To the contrary, maybe the
overweighty and retired schoolmistress attacked me right
for weeping, who knows. She fished me out of the
protection of the crowd, dragged me apart to face the
melting snow and started to agitate me with the voice of
a Trotskyite or a Japanese spy Your grandmother has given
you so much! Do not forget that. Do not forget that!
Martin! Listen to me! Do not forget her! I should have
been economical with words that afternoon to simply shut
her up with the unpretentious word . Instead, basically I
did hardly notice her and would actually not react to her
at all. I was very busy these minutes, not as it might
have appeared to some bystanders busy with weeping, that
can be left perfectly to the eyes and the adjacent
respiratory system, but to the contrary: busy with
thinking. As I can tell in retrospective, I was making up
bold and graciously open plans for the whole rest of my
life in precisely that moment. I had not the slightest
fraction of rational capacity left over to behave towards
Frau Hillmann, that is for sure. My rationality was all
at work under these immensely effective protective covers
of sobs and convulsive physical grief. I actively
expanded my materialist concept of life and death with
every breath I took and gave away. I soberly assessed the
forces which were still in my body, and made up somehow
joyously how I wanted to use them for a sensually opulent
and politically revolutionary life before everything
would inevitably and without any comfort recede into
meaninglessness.
Following the winding traces east, I had now gained
considerable height and passed a mountain range. This
allowed me to oversee a high plateau of fulminate
extension. Different tones of green were intermingling
and playing changingly into the yellowish heights beyond
the reach of trees. Snow-covered tops were showing up in
the farest southwest and I could not help imagining them
as the veritable, physically impassable frontier to
China, the promised land. Maybe I had really come in
sight by now to where the outposts of four republics meet
on eternal ice: Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan and the
destination of my long, long journey on this splendid top
of the earth, Kitaj.
12. harvesting stones and taking them home
At this moment a huge soviet lorry came to an abrupt and
honking halt just behind me. An Altaj woman addressed me
impatiently. Are you going far? Until today, I cannot
possibly guess what she asked it for. Would she not take
me if I actually wanted to go too far or would she only
take me for heading very far? I instantly grasped the
need to utter an answer so vague that either way round,
it could not possibly cause her to go without me. I
hastily jumped on the big open rear. After a jump 10
metres downhill I had understood that I would simply
break my bones from the impacts of the vehicle if I had
continued to remain in a sitting position. I had expected
a stern drive, but this was nothing of the like, it was
plainly a hellish enterprise. They were going down on an
open meadow with more than 60 km an hour. Two young Altaj
farmhands sharing the rear with me showed me how to cling
to a wooden board and compensate being thrown up with
perfectly elastic legs when crashing down. I told to
myself that the earth was moving very fast anyway every
second and that this was just another vector and that
anyway only burgers believe that the world stands still
for their comfort. But it was terribly cold in the
velocity. I would have loved to put on a scarf but there
was no free second to do that. You had to cling to the
board, the only life insurance available under present
market conditions. Underneath us, 4 tons of steel were
working with gigantic flexions and torsions making the
metal roar and squeak to the extreme. I started to
understand the landscape, the hills mountains, sudden
falls and sharp risings as actually flying towards us,
not the other way round, that helped a little. The
following hour I saw possibly the most dramatic mountain
scenery in all my life but it felt like a gramophone disc
being played some 5 times too fast. Mountains of 3000
meter and more flew past, giant breaks lead half a
thousand metres down and I could imagine us overturning
and going strait down without considerably taking on
speed in the almost free fall. There was a lake down in
those valleys and I had a quarter of a second to plunge
my intensified imagination right into it, put up a tent
on its shore, invite Eva, draw the gentle midday waves
against the mountain summer light. And on we honked with
relentless acceleration.
Suddenly, however, there was an old Altaj woman walking
on the middle of the trail in the middle of nowhere. The
truck came to a sudden halt a metre before her and now we
had all the time of the world for a lengthy chat. The
walking woman was dressed in traditional Asian clothing
and I felt a reverence for her calm expression and
gestures which I had probably internalised on working
with Malayan rice farmers in Madagascar 14 years ago and
started to comprehend on speaking to Asian peasants in
Burma for the first time back in 1987 on returning from
Australia. Our lorry was to load hay from a site 30 km
away, I leaned. The old woman was coming from a hayfield
as well. Everything turned around agriculture. The short
summer is a succession of long, long workdays.
The principle of our hellish speed was a rational,
agricultural work routine as well. Once you start to slow
down on such a bumpy track as a four wheel drive
equipped, well-fed, well-reposed tourist tends to do, you
really enter the holes with the full physical might of
tons of steel falling down and being hit up again,
painfully for your body and actually devastating for the
metal hardware around it. In the end, going slowly would
be quite worse for both, truck and driver, actually. So
the hellish acceleration of Altaj trucks, their
trajectory flight over endless, nauseating successions of
holes, interrupted only by occasional breathtaking
touchdowns on the amortisation is nothing but a direct
translation of the horseback experience, a technique
dating back thousands of years. Continual journeying
through this part of the world, which seems closer to the
moon actually, can only be had at the price of
stabilising a mobile and most chaotic falling dynamic
consisting of nothing else but constant collisions to be
rescued and supported. In a very broad sense, socially,
economically, politically, emotionally, this is the mode
of truly revolutionary travelling you evolve towards when
seriously taking up the task. The Altaj riders and their
modern truck-based followers have found a perfectly
rational and self-contained clue for dynamic stability
and it was not only a thousand years ago that their
superb mastery could afford to go for a reconquest of
bloody old Europe.
Some kilometres down though, the journey came to an
abrupt halt again. No chatting through the open drivers
window, now. It was my turn. You go down here, we drive
up there, be careful! and they were off uphill in a
rolling cloud of dust. Go down to the riverside, was
actually the adequate expression. There was a gigantic
river a kilometre away, but the way towards it had a more
important vertical component than a horizontal one.
Actually there was nothing in the least horizontal before
my senses, it was all a scenery of giant masses of stones
and rocks and gravel in the very process of falling down
similar to a waterfall. Back in the cute German hills I
have an old friend from school, Dirk. During the 1980s,
we developed an art of excursionism and exploring
outdoors which could stretch over summer weeks on end.
After half a decade of studying geology, he would tell me
with glowing spirits about his growing ability to have a
feeling for time. When looking at a landscape, he
reported, he could by then literary feel the mountains
move, condensing their evolution over hundreds of
millions of years in his professionally trained
perception. Water is the one and everything , he would
resume his stupor of apprehension to my amateur ignorance
when we were standing in front of any landscape
representing a thrill to him. Leaving aside volcanic
activity, the majority of mountains we know could only
built by water under water, calm water. Their layers
might rise up later from tectonic pressure. But once the
substance gets above sea level it is subject to a
continual destruction. This destruction is again the work
of water, dynamic water. I could not help to use his
instructions for the most dilettante analogies. In the
beginning, I was even a bit ashamed of what I made of his
wisdom. However, later I learned that he had given up
geology and working outdoors altogether for a lousy job-
agency retraining scheme making him a Microsoft system
administrator, i.e. learning practically nothing in a
year s course and being granted the right to promote
Microsoft products in return. So now, I am more confident
to use his ingenious insight, exporting Marx and Darwin
into the realm of stones, to try a linkish reimport. Take
the Soviet Union experience for example. The pressure of
a World War butchery had made it rise above the marazm of
Capitalist suffocation, a large and rough formation
comprising one sixths of everything man can inhabit.
Tectonically speaking, this result of a tragic collision
was a direly instable but nonetheless giant island. The
only one at its time. It has had two predecessors in
time, the Owenite communes in the first half of the 19th
century and the Paris commune, a tiny and fascinating
atoll of tropical splendour provoked by the long-term
aftermath of the social volcanism the French revolution
had set free. But we agreed to leave volcanism aside. We
have to leave something out of our metaphor to be retain
the potential for surprise in our minds. Let us keep to
the continent of the Soviet Union then, a structure in
permanent collaps from the first day onward, yet still
above sea level for the time being. Yes, I know that
there were giant rivers and giant lakes included in this
formation, even inner seas right in its centre. But to
the difference of bourgeois mainstream historiography I
do not take that as a proof that land above sea has in
fact never existed on the face of the earth.
To the contrary, the one and only giant island soon got
two little-known Sputniks in its first years of
tormenting rains. One was the Socialist Republic of
Mongolia. The Third one is my personal favourite to smash
even the bourgeois encyclopaedism of the BBC show Brain
of Britain : it was the Socialist Republic of Tuva,
Soviet Tibet as it is called among initiated Siberians.
There are not many of them still alive, to be sure. This
land on the face of the terribly ultramarine earth was
accessible only once in a year. A late pseudo-Tsarist
dictator of the revolutionary civil war had flown into
this mousetrap and put up his orthodox reign there. But
the tectonic pressure of class conflict in this part of
the world was just too high. His repressive terror was
useless, Tuva had to come out of the water! Altaj people,
their immediate neighbours tell of a last effort by the
white officers to hide their heritage in gold, weapons
and paper documents. There must indeed have been a
considerable rest of the immeasurable stuff they had
inherited or ripped of the dying body of tsarist rule. In
the freezing cold, they are said to have got the load up
to a mountain peak of exceptional height. They would then
take to their common practice of expropriating live-
saving sheep kept by locals for surviving the winter
cataclysms of the region. Ripping apart the precious
animals, they would hold the carcasses to the chilling
cliff piling up inaccessibly human feet above their
position. Within minutes, the corpses froze to the stone
and allowed the desperate rest of a dying army to advance
one step further towards a legendary secret cave. This
cave finally served as a burial site for both, the
tsarist fortune and its carriers. Spring came, the frozen
corpses of the sheep fell down. Were they collected by
locals who had survived the white terror or were just
their bones taken away years later? We do not know. This
makes it considerably difficult for a contemporary army
of fanatics to localise the site. But they are out there,
winter and summer, trying to get to the last trace of a
dying empire. With a truly submarine interest, they want
to restitute the submarine heritage of the roof of Asia.
But the Republic of Tuva moved out of the waters with
glory and by herself. And it became a fully independent
ally of the great Soviet Union. Though quite aloof from
ocean tempests at first site, it shared some of the most
tragic giant storms, giant rainfall and floodwater
originating from the faraway seascapes which had remained
on the earth. Tuva was in fact the only Socialist country
in the world between 1920 and 1944 not having to share a
border with a capitalist predator state. Nevertheless,
the little country put incredible efforts into supporting
its two Socialist sister countries in the Great War of
the East. The state of Socialist Tuva delivered cattle
and horses, sheep and butter to the Japanese front of
World War II. It was a loyal member in the Socialist
triangle alliance actively guarding the centre of Asia
from the fascist nightmare. Only at the end of World War
II it finally merged with the Soviet Union in one of
those short moments in the year when the country was
temporarily accessible to people from the outside world.
In that very moment, I was standing in front of exactly
that giant Mountain Range forming the border to the
Autonomous Republic of Tuva, as it is called today. There
was snow on the upper parts of the enormous massifs
sticking into the dark, dark blue sky. Deep, deep down at
the expansive feet of that enormous mountain range, a
violent, broad Asian river was groaning with a load of
noisily clicking rocks it slowly carried downwards,
towards the eternal ice of the polar ocean.
Such movement had ground down the Soviet Union, I
marvelled disbelieving at my own imagery. Inner
contradictions you could say, yet unimaginable without
the distant works of oceans laboriously active for the
benefit of the destruction of everything solid that dares
to stick out of their floods. Surely, they allow little
leftish beasts to swim around in their depth, dreaming
about mountains in the sun, rice paddies and horse-
riding. They are harmless and quite entertaining idiots
as long as they are content with themselves and do not
mess around with the tectonic forces of real social
unrest. However in a world totally submerged since 1991,
we still know the very destructive forces of water to
also be of use for our cause. Under the level of the sea,
the forces of evil cannot avoid to pile up layer upon
layer, develop formations of bizarre architecture and
monstrous gravity which will eventually, when time is
finally ripe, poke out of the terror of the sea and make
up new formations, sets of entirely novel continents,
speculative fish can only marvel at. Still today, there
are underwater islands hilariously close to a coming out,
Southern Mexico for example and some parts of Venezuela.
Cuba is so closely under sea level that we are easily
lead to believe it were a similar case. But after two
rather suffocating winters there, I feel that it is
rather caught in a move geologically downwards if no
tectonic pressure from around helps it up again. Maybe
Cuba didn t drop at all, geologically speaking. But the
sea level is rising dramatically these years and this
might account for major arts of the loss. t Though, some
forms of live from the times Cuba once enjoyed lavishing
above sea level can still be detected within its shallow
reefs. And there is the one fifth of India under
Mescalite control and there are breathtaking upward
tendencies in Nepal, Argentina, Bolivia. Well, to give a
real tectonical assessment of our underwater world today,
a lot more travelling would be necessary, a task for a
global collective, not for a lonely wanderer around the
Republic of Tuva. Though, every now and then he was
caught in fits of jolly laughter: on meeting scarletly
exploding Altaj mountain locusts.
- Just imagine how close I had come by now. Falling down
these slopes, I would have almost touched it with my
knees!
- What are you talking about?
- Siberian Atlantis, of course. Just a shift in the
tectonics of social conflict and it will be up again to
stand the fight!
13. immensely agitated water slowing down
Things are happening here, Martin, and we do not know
what to think about them, four Altaj workers hiding in
the shadow of a giant black cliff reported mysteriously.
I had discovered them in a side valley because of their
big truck. I had been following the river for 30 hours
without the slightest sign of any vehicle transport. I
had observed an Eagle from above, hunting for mice. I had
thought a lot about my friend Udo. But now I was all
anxious to relate with my potential saviours from this
Tuva expedition into immeasurable solitude.
- What are you talking about? I asked, having a look
behind my back just in case it was approaching. People
having enjoyed a live-long training in shamanist and semi-
Buddhist practices could well keep on lying and drinking
tea, while a bigger version of the scarlet locust was
already setting foot on my rucksack. But no, if I was to
believe them there was presumably something even more
uncanny and still less real approaching, my comrades
assured me. We have seen signs in the sky and we have
felt a monstrous trembling in the earth. I decided to be
silent and wait for the initiation ceremony to continue.
My questioning could only mislead the direction they were
clearly heading to. However, they would not say a word
either now. So we sat and drank tea silently in the
boiling heat of the mountain step. We were sweating like
little devils ourselves by this time. My comrades because
they had collected a ton of stones and brought them down
in linen sacks from a breathtakingly steep mountain
slope, me because I had simply lent a hand to lift some
of them up on their truck.
You know Bajkonur? One of the highland farmers inquired.
Yes, the cosmodrome, its in Kazakhstan though.
- Listen, they shoot their rockets right over our heads
into outer space. We see them disappear there. I was in a
chatting mood and resolved to gesticulate if need be to
make myself understood. Altaj people are said to have no
historical religious contamination except for basic
shamanism and the colonial imposition of some external
orthodox rituals. I wanted to probe the limits of their
tolerance for metaphysical speculation.
- Maybe they follow Roerig, that Soviet artist s
spiritual advice from the 1930s. He claimed that there
are only two places on the earth allowing to get into the
world above us: the Himalaya and the Altaj. The Chinese
actually do the same.
What?
They also follow the Soviet advices to launch their
rockets into cosmic space. They even had a Tajkonaut out
there lately. There might be Chinese producing game-boys
on the moon soon.
My colleagues were visibly not amused and feeling rather
uneasy on hearing that. Altaj people are not comfortable
about China. Presently, their doubts are focussing on a
Russian road. Being projected without their say and
already partly realised by Russian investment, it is to
cut their republic in two to transcend the century-old
deadlock between English and Russian Imperialism on the
Altaj high plateau and build a new set of pipelines and
communication facilities linking both sides.
We have hold on to these mountains for thousands of
years, one gave way to their fears. We are few and the
Chinese are so many. They will just wipe us away. I
thought for a moment about the loveable Polish hysteric
and painter Witkiewicz who, having fled successfully from
the German invasion in 1939, committed suicide precisely
because he feared to be overrun by Chinese in the end.
Obviously the most powerful modern mysticism is to
disguise social conflict as ethnical competition.
Evidently, it was at work all over the submarine world.
Curious what would sediment on top of this layer once all
these Independent Republics of Kosovo and Montenegro at
NATO s mercy were let to go bankrupt.
- So you really think the earthquakes are connected with
Russian cosmonaut missions?
- Of course not directly, my friends said rationally, but
with atom bomb testing for sure. The last earthquake on
the Altaj plateau was uncanny indeed. According to many
observers, it reached an extraordinarily high level on
the Richter scale for the region and caused almost no
damage. The few losses were however serious because any
aid arriving in the aftermath was almost completely
sucked up by the Republic s fraudulent political
economics. In some valleys people still live in their
banjas to the present day with their houses in rubbles
according to local sources. Russians in the adjacent
region say, that Altaj revendications for Russian
rockets, throwing off cosmic waste on their heads, are
just another hype produced by Republican lobby groups to
smear the corrupted policies of the territory with
possible fresh money for compensation.
Why did you charge only one ton of stones when the truck
takes five easily I tried to return our conversation to
practical rationality.
My wife wants an oven. It is crazy anyway. We should all
be down making hay. The weather is just right, it can
only become worse. So we just take a ton and that s it.
Furthermore, my new friend hesitated, we do not think it
good to take more from the mountains than what is
necessary for us. I secretly bowed in respect. If Kiev
had taken to this principle in the dirty hot spot of its
urban luxuries, Chernobyl, there would probably be less
cancer around the former Union nowadays. This stone is
very precious. My friends continued without me daring to
interrupt them. It is the property of the whole village.
It would be inappropriate to take more than we need, say
for selling it to a neighbour. This material retains an
incredible amount of heat. Our village has been
harvesting stones from here for generations. That is why
there are so few suitable ones left to take home and we
had to search the whole morning to get a ton together.
We got on the open truck and I hold on to the well-known
board in front as fast as I could. Our speed was breath-
taking to be sure but the road followed the riverbed now.
14. two words of German
In a poetic little wood with clear and bright water
streaming over birch tree roots in sounds of laughter the
motor stopped to work and the truck came to a long, long
drawn out standstill. Everybody was prepared for this
case. Petrol is not traded officially in these villages.
It is a very scarce resource, similar to what awaits us
in the West in a couple of decades. My colleagues had
started with 15 litres, made 15 km up the mountains and
14 and a half downhill and that was it. There was no fuel
available that afternoon, no tractor to pull the truck
either, everyone was busily making hay. The young husband
without a proper oven who had been organising the
excursion with his friends was starting to get a bit
cloudy in his face. I walked with him into the village.
In spite of a little wooden hut with a Russian fairy-tale
roof identifiable as an orthodox church everything
actually reminded me of a Burmese settlement at the banks
of a broad Asian low-land river. We went from wood house
to wood house but there was no response. In the
beginning, my driver still offered me to give me some
bread. Oh, no, I will better buy some in the village
shop. I declared. He smiled occasionally. Our shop sells
as little bread as it sells fuel. Later, he forgot his
offer. He was really getting very much concerned about
not being out for haymaking. In this moment, I saw
something very unexpected taking place in 100 metres
distance. First a four wheel drive was passing the
village downstream and then, I hardly believe my eyes, a
Volga. To speak with the language of a rather primitive
Orwell pamphlet, Volga is the car for the Soviet Pig
class. How on earth did this car make it all these
hundreds of kilometres through the wilderness surrounding
the Republic of Tuva? I wondered. They are gone, you won
t get them any more my companion commented
professionally. Nevertheless, I had a go and run after
them stumbling into the most comic patches of knee-deep
bogs within the village huts. This was my chance to hit
the lake! This was what I had speculated for during 30
hours following the riverbed on my feet and now it was
gone. I tried to wring some water and mud out of my
trousers and met my former driver again, still on search
for petrol. We were both not too lucky, today. I could
perfectly understand his mood now and went away following
the big river to my right downstream in a contemplative
mood. That was it actually. I would not possibly be on
time in Bijsk any more and Larissa would depart to their
conspiratory camp site in the middle of the woods of the
wide plains down the river without me. I had put
camaraderie and friendship at risk for a badly-prepared
little expedition towards the moon and now I had lost it.
I went to the river-bank utterly subdues. The water was
still flowing quite fast, though it was not strong enough
any more to roll rocks with it. I through my rucksack to
the left, stripped off my clothes and flung my body and
my misery into the flood. My skin contracted immediately.
That was about 7 degrees, I guessed. It did not need a
lot of time to realise that this was not a travelling
alternative to Bijsk. I got hold of a bit of grass on the
shore luckily and walked back the running distance I had
made with the water. And now, I started to declare with a
loud voice, we will have a look at Heraclitus and his
teachings from a practical side. We will try to jump in
the same river once again. I suddenly had enormous fun
with this exercise. Maybe I should have taken the U-turn
which appeared unexpectedly in my life 2 years ago to
become university teacher. My collisions with reality are
of such a playful nature, that in the long run it needs
something as crazy and far from reality as German
Academic Life to finance them, does it not? Well, won t
probably like to jump in that greasy river once again,
will I? And here I jumped a second time. The water was
clear and cold as ice, I cried from joy and physical
contraction. Now, I declared after having gained ground
under my feet again despite of the running flow of water.
I will walk throughout the night. I will not give in
until I am not finally defeated. I had my clothes on in a
few seconds and took back to the path almost running. Yet
the hours were getting long on the trail and the sun was
going down fast. There was no sight of any repletion of
the Volga miracle. I greeted farmers on their meadows.
Everything was getting fat and thick here, down in the
valley. I felt like coming down towards Munich after days
up on the Alps. The well-being of your body is embodied
so perfectly in the big brown bodies of the affluent cows
on affluent meadows. More than three third of the urgent
mowing was actually done by hand. They were clearly
fighting with time, now. Hand mowing should be done in
the early morning, if I was to believe the accounts of
Anna Karenina and my mother back in Europe. And indeed
the weather did not support much confidence either.
Hellish work the Agronom and son of peasants, my friend
Aleksej would summarise the experience of 15 years of
Russian private farming three days later. Not a terrain,
where you can make social experiments, actually, Martin.
Maybe you should not put too much hope into an
agricultural commune in these times in Russia. His words
hit my head like a good old wine, Isaak Babel would say.
How can you be so left an Agronomist and so realist a
revolutionary at the same time? We have got a terrible
lot to learn from you. We? Pampered children of the
bloody colonial centres in modern history.
You got to the camp site of the left youth then? Yes, but
not because of a Volga. There was a third truck, just at
the end of the evening. It came back from throwing off a
bunch of tourists somewhere in the periphery of Tuva and
took me without asking any question. There was one
possible direction: Teleckoe Lake and still a hell of a
lot of kilometres to go. The driver and his female
partner would go on very elaborate detours to find
farmers out mowing and making arrangements with them for
transports on the following day. One conversation took
place over the full width of the river which was by now a
stream of more than a hundred metres width. After this,
we had to turn to reverse to the main path. But there was
virtually no place to turn on the river shore. I really
wondered whether we would be going back in reverse speed
altogether. The driver accelerated impressively just to
swing the driving wheel around and run our rear deep into
the flowing icy waters. He then shifted gears, which took
a little moment, in which I positively thought that we
were now drifting and had lost ground completely. I
remembered countless idiotic films on this issue and the
immediate need to get out of the door in time. But we
still touched ground and gained speed even within the
water, enough to mount the slope of the beach and bounce
back and along the trail downstream once again, heavily
dripping though. We even picked up new hitch-hikers. A
peasant made me retreat my Baltic story when he explained
through the roaring noise of the motor that he had served
4 years of military service in Halle/Saale. That was
exactly where I attempted to become a sound Socialist
Agronomist following the winter of 1991. He could not
tell anything about civil life though. He just remembered
how they had freed Czechoslovakia from an enemy rebellion
and returned home after the work being done. I could not
imagine how to bridge the gap between him and my friends
in Prague. Somehow they were all sympathetic to me, and
working class people all the like. Why would they look at
one story from so different a side? Maybe I am
theoretically just as weak as my pseudo-Maoist father and
all this business of harmonising historic polarisations
is not needed. I cannot tell. I will have to counter-
check in Prague. Still, I did not know anything about the
civil aspects of life in East Germany for an Altaj
soldier. What did he actually do during all those 4 years
except for pacifying Prague? Asking him directly yielded
no result whatsoever. So I asked him what German words he
could remember. That if anything would probably best
characterise his intercourse with Eastern German civil
life. Well, he actually knew two expressions in German.
They had obviously brought him through life abroad just
as necessary, he would reassure me. One was let s eat and
the other one was let s love .
He got off at the next meadow, carefully carrying a huge
set of knives for his tractor, which he had repaired for
further mowing in a little hamlet upstream.
15. reversing into
running ice
In the last beams of a splendid sun, I was set off on the
beach of Lake Teleckoe. I was ready to kiss the earth for
my fortunate ride or do other more helpful things. But my
drivers would refuse to take any money. I went over a
gleaming meadow and saw some youth writing a graffiti
onto a block house stable. Got you, bloody hools! I
barked at them from behind and really, they went red in
their faces. We laughed and became friends on the spot.
Later they told me a fascinating story about the break-
through , the place, where my first truck had set me out.
In the Brezhnev years, a single bulldozer driver was set
to make the road down in a summer. He pushed gravel and
drove a U-turn, pushed gravel and drove a U-turn and
after some hundred U-turns he arrived down at the
riverbed with right with the end of summer. So that is
the story why I had managed to come down to Lake Teleckoe
at all.
16. birch-trees of
Sibirian Bahamas
Zoologically speaking, parasites like me, drifting in
these regions seem to follow gravity. Down at the shore,
a lot of my sort seemed to have been swum in, suddenly.
Actually the only road connection is more than a thousand
kilometres away from the capital, taking you all around
for a big big detour. You can come over the lake but that
is almost a 100 km of boat ride as well. People take all
this pain and they get a hut on the shore and then they
do not know what to do with themselves and their heavily
gained tranquillity. This situation is called muse and it
is damned rare in Capitalism. So the whole of the
situative shore population drifts into realms of
intriguing Chekhovian boredom. That was balsam on the
waves of my body and mind to be sure. I couldn t imagine
a better way to wait for a ship back to Bijsk. Now, my
fate was clearly not in my hands any more. I had arrived
at the point where I could just let everything go as it
wanted. It is a strange feeling to follow with a lazy
glance all the excuses and imaginations which your mind
and soul make up out of pure habit to run around like a
stressed rabbit. In Cuba, I once had the illuminative
intuition that we European visitors are physically
addicted to political frustration. We just know
everything to have gone wrong, wrong, wrong. It is
obligatory to carry around political frustration in
Europe. Then you arrive on the Island pointing to a
better world and you can, if you are a careful and a
honest observer, soon catch your assembled faculties in
the operation of finding new pretexts to continue the old
song. \\It is actually funnier the longer you stay
because you see the short-term visitors not changing sail
to the different wind at all, they just fall from one
line of criticism adopted in western Europe into the same
line of criticism for Eastern Cuba. They have of course
ready-made theories on class-war, world and micro-
economics, corruption and money, prostitution and their
new comrades on the island. It is all hilariously
improvised to supply them with the set of arguments they
need to continue the old political understanding of work
and failure. So what have I learnt within two years close
to tropical Socialism? What have I learnt in 18 hours
waiting at the Southern shore of Lake Teleckoe? I have
not yet learnt to explain much more than any newcomers,
but I do have learnt to ask some more questions than
before. That is a nice little piece of progress.
There was a striking contrast between the un-
pretentiousness of the place tended by an Altaj-Russian
working collective. Some wooden huts for a limited number
of guests stood close to the shore. Wide open spaces save
from the rain had been created using nothing else but
wood. One of them was an Altaj pagoda, really closer to
the Southern Chinese, than to the Russian meaning of the
word. It was so musically placed on a hill among a sea of
wild coastal birch-trees that none of the land-rover New-
Russian guest killing their time before restarting their
cars to return to Novosibirsk would ever set foot into
them. They set foot into everything else, though. For me
there was still a task before abandoning body and mind to
perfectly helpless idleness waiting for a ship. I had to
wash my brushes, they had been in use without cleaning
from the Ural excursion onwards. Roughly speaking I had
been painting an oil painting every day since then.
However some of the less popular brushes had fallen out
of use without me noticing it. Their bank of oil colour
within not being refreshed, they were already
painstakingly stiff. For me, brushes mean what the
animals mean in the farm behind the woods of the tales
collected by Brother Grim. They are to be served first
when settling down for a rest. No way to think about a
treat for you if they have not got their due treat yet. I
was quite desolate. I would wash for an hour with mild
soap and cold water I had to pump up. I tried to warm the
detergent under the work of my fingers. Well, I had
failed for some of them, It looked. I had been proven a
bad guest in the farmstead behind the woods. It was
already getting dark when Irina stepped into the scene.
Once in 2002, a communal panting festival of ours in
Estonia was blasted up with incredibly sophisticated
Russian intrigues and rivalry from a Byelorussian painter
called Irina. I was warned to the utmost, though her
sister was roughly double her age. There are some basic
faculties in people, they are not apt to give up. There
is Eva for example, will she ever give up the convenience
of that hellish sexist idolatry her Ukrainian environment
builds up around her little body of two and a half
wherever she sets foot? How can she? The effects of
spoiling with adoration are meant to stay and they do
stay. Listen carefully when they start to praise you, you
might get out of it more stupid than you are likely to
notice still yourself. This utterly Protestant prophecy
by my mother is a guiding star just as if it came right
over from Melbourne or Southampton. Another one to
complete it is missing, we will get it unexpectedly in
chapter 25.
Brushes with old oil paint are to be washed with pure
sunflower oilseed Novosibirsk Irina said amiably,
stepping before me out of the dark. And then she
continued with a chattering frankness. I put mine in a
tin with sunflower oil. And admitted, well it does not do
them any good if they remain in there used for a very
long time. I am Irina, by the way. This stout lady of
about 50 held out her hand to shake mine. I had to take a
little step back. She was talking Russian and thus
relating so freely as only very experienced women in the
United States manage to, drawing from centuries of women
s liberation movement, and well, and the pioneer
experience I have tried to sketch in Heidelberg. For 20
years now, people have been watching me wash my brushes
with a method, I taught to myself from an old German book
and nobody would care to pass over anything more than a
distant laugh about my efforts to keep the brushes save
from the aggressive chemical impact of terpentine. And
here, in the insinuatingly mild night wind under the
birch-trees somebody came out of the dark to care as much
for my labour as to tell me about hers. This was
extraordinary. Irina offered some sunflower oil from her
car. And this was definitely the point, a set of stupid
responses by me began. They would continue throughout the
night and into the next day. I have collected such a
fluffy stock of addresses that I have to paint little
portraits next to the name to be able to associate even
so central new acquaintances as Larissa in the last
months of travel. But somehow, I did not take the address
of Irina. I am really cross with me for that failure. She
definitely wanted to dance with me under the wide wooden
roof on the sandy hill. I was taken aback again. But I
was in dirty work suit clothes. Russian classism would
normally rule out any intimacy with you. Once you walk
around in a greasy work suite, you find out that their
habitual xenophobia is nothing in comparism to their
classism. They are really arrogant towards any working-
class markers as only the superior class of shop-keepers
in Naples or Polish middle-class on a church Sunday can
be. Something like a European record, to be sure. But, to
the contrary Irina answered with sovereign amusement. Don
t you know that today is the day of the building worker?
It is my day as well, by the way, I am an Architect.
Promise me to come to the dance floor to join our little
reception banquet as soon as you have put your brushes in
order. While she was disappearing, I wondered why I had
been messing around with women under 40 at all in my
life. Life seems so terribly short and it is close to
criminal negligence to throw yourself into the arms of
inexperience altogether. Or maybe this practical grip of
the elder Irina is just a precious gift she received from
Soviet socialisation. For men acquaintances in Russia, I
have found out that the year of birth 1958 seems to be
the last limit. Everybody born later has become a
professional cynic before even maturing to an age of
adulthood. Some of them never reach it. Socially, Russian
men seem a failure in 90% of all cases I could ever come
close to. It is utter success which provokes them to grow
anti-social. I imagine it to be a monstrous set of
dubious favours done to them, of the type my mother
allowed to happen when not instructing me to wipe the
floors I was using.
I got some oil from the kitchen. It was used frying oil
mixed with new frying oil, probably rapeseed. It was a
total failure. I had another hour to get it off again and
would only finally succeed the other day with a clear and
operative mind. I would then stumble into the banquette
for our trade on the sandy hill among the birch trees,
inertly wincing into myself because I had messed up my
brushes, the tools of my working trip.
Of this banquette, I remember only one nice detail, that
I risked a scandal and ate the fish from Irina s plate
which was much better than what they were giving us. The
banquette was a show for Irina brother , really. A failed
man, I am sure to say. In this case, I would clearly opt
for regime change. He is a leading commander in the
Novosibirsk police force and a self-made man of
incredibly gross manners. He is moneyed, though a state
servant. He would openly praise himself for privatising
all the efficient parts of the police s economical
empire. He would direct all eyes of the reception s
company to Irina and me crying at the top of his drunken
voice We want to see you dance, you two! And some time
later, he would remark with the characteristic unheeding
brutality of his work-place Will get less stiff, this
German, once my sister caresses his dick, I suppose. I
took that without so much as a smile. But I would imply
him in a conversation at the top of our cultured voices,
going diagonally through the company of the night. I have
picked some nice, juicy pieces of Marihuana up there in
the mountains. How much will you give me for that, once
you catch me in Novosibirsk? He became astonishing
factual despite of his drinking. I will give you five
years of prison if you only use it yourself. He retorted.
Whereas, in the case you sell it to others, you will get
something up to 15. This was clearly sufficient. There
was no joking about his being terribly jealous of Irina.
I knew that he would be able to search my hut with his
inferiors that same night. And being indeed too much of a
German in this case as he had so insinuatingly remarked
for quite another, I had told the truth and nothing but
the truth about my exceptionally attractive harvest from
the high Altaj. So now was the time to kiss Irina s
experienced hands for a fare-well, get into running to my
hut as soon as the dark of the birch-trees had firmly
enveloped me and fish all the green branches out of my
rucksack. They were so full of summer s heavy perfume as
to incense the whole rucksack with a comforting and
promising smell. It was a real pity to have betrayed
them. I just hoped their analytics were too primitive to
distil anything out of the cloth of the rucksack. Asking
myself where to put it, I occasionally tried if my
neighbouring hut, where Irina and her brother were to
sleep, was locked. It was not. I lifted up the red divan
on their floor, in a faintly smiling moonlight breaking
through their window. Everything was silent. This was a
jolly good burial place for the precious green, I cheered
myself up. Just imagine the headline tomorrow in
Novosibirsk. Head of municipal police forced discovered
with unknown woman and 250 gram of pure Marihuana in an
Altaj hut I went to sleep. And as in 13000 and one
previous nights of my life, nobody would delicately knock
on my door, of course.
17. Honey, Honey, and another night awake
On the next morning familiarity and boredom among the
company on the site reached veritably Chekhovian
dimensions. I came to sit next to Irina on the long
breakfast table. I told her that I had left her the night
before to prevent her brother from cracking down on my
hut with his employees. I have a brother myself, Irina I
assured her. I know that they can sometimes be terribly
jealous and that would not have been in keeping with our
holiday of the building trades , would it. Irina answered
calmly that I had been perfectly right and that brothers
are sometimes just a jealous lot indeed.
The policeman now insisted on taking me on a boat tour,
he would sponsor generously for his sister . Hiring boats
is incredibly expensive on that corner of Russia. I
guessed what his sudden good-nature towards me was
stemming from and thanked politely.
Maybe now, it was me who was a bit jealous after all. You
might probably call it just a professional health risk if
you have finished university some 12 years ago and you
are actually still tramping around as an underperforming
artist without a fixed place of abode.
I took my rucksack, still smelling with promising
affluence lost. Someone had told me that I had to go
straight north to find the place where a boat might come
today or tomorrow. Well tomorrow was too late. Today was
bingo, though. I went straight and came to the shore of
the lake after 20 metres. I returned to ask a very young
Altaj woman who had taken curious interest in my drawing
the night before. She was actually the manager of the
place and though not much more than a third of age in
comparison to the stout, blonde architect getting on the
boat now, she was a very reliable and settled
personality. You have to go through the water. She said.
I believed her everything, yet having arrived at my
rucksack, I took care to strip of all my clothes, just in
case the water would be a bit deep after the rain of the
last weeks. I still did not know what I should head for.
A little sand bank was some 40 metres out in the lake so
I made my way straight. The first five steps got the icy
water up to my stomach, the following fife up to my ears
and there was no halt in sight. Lake Teleckoe is up to
almost 400 metres deep, I learnt later. There was no
sense in taking my rucksack on such a walk over water. So
I carefully put on some clothes so as not to offend the
young Altaj manager and returned back to the reception. I
went straight and, believe me or not, the water was
further up than my knees. I would not quite like to admit
to her to what extent I had actually trusted her words
and that there was excessive water in my ears from her
advice. She laughed as only Altaj people can laugh in
Russia, with a soft and melodious, utterly Asian
delicacy, reminding your senses of the touch of a light
feather. No, not straight in the literal sense. Of course
you follow the underwater bank taking the detour to the
right. I went back, saying good-by to her for a third
time but without any routine as I noticed with a subtle
ring of uncomfortability. It was then, that I saw the
motor boat paid for with manoeuvres of privatising the
public police force of Novosibirsk swimming out of the
bay in an elegant curve. It was then, that I understood
that I had not taken Irina s address. I had felt just too
familiar with her to bother about anything of the sort.
Well, here they went off. I regretted not to have been a
bit more selfish and used the offer for a lift on the
boat to get to this damned sand bank before me. It s
complete extensions were concealed by a set of bushes
growing out of the lake. The water was higher than
normal, that was for sure. I searched for traces and I
found deep imprints of four-wheel car tires under the
surface of the water. Indeed, these traces were taking a
bold right curve towards the sand bank. I guess, I really
came under water this time only because the car traces I
followed were very deep. Apart from that, the trail got
me over brilliantly. I obviously knew whom I could trust.
The sand bank turned out to be a lengthy peninsula of
half a kilometre. Wood bleached by months in the water
was piling up on the beach. I was looking forward to a
good fire to warm me through my waiting hours. I did not
quite know which point of the peninsular was the one
where boats would eventually hit it. But taking into
account the steep slopes of several hundred, up to a
thousand metres making up the shore of the lake and not
allowing even an official foot pass to go along the major
part of its hundreds of kilometres of shorelines, I
judged that the place where the sandy peninsula stemmed
off from this bold shoreline was probably the one with
the deepest water here where sediments from the broad
river were piling up in the most incomprehensible forms.
I could not tell why I felt so much alike to the days I
hitch-hiked from Cuba to the US over the Bahamian
islands. I had stolen a piece of extraordinary luxury
with bare foot travelling that was for sure. I was
appalled by the New/Russians bossing around the young and
incredible Altaj manager of the place to serve them at
the banquet as much as I was appalled by the moneyed tax-
invaders gathering in this elect space from all over the
world who would not even care about the homeless natives
under their bridges. The natives were fed with Anglo-
Saxon Christianity and an appalling lack of education as
compared to the Cuban proletariat and that was obviously
enough to keep them down in that tax-haven of painful
affluence.
I had rebelled then, agitating people under the bridge,
on night-shifts in the harbour. I had told them about
Cuba and they were listening with interest. One post
woman, a stout black Bahamian native asked me if I had
heard about this dinosaur issue. Nobody had told her at
school that it was actually a well-established fact of
biological science. They would probably be very British
and behave politically correct towards creationist
fanatics of the various sects operating on the lack of
proper education of the Isles. Yet, their understanding
was vivid and fresh, they would be able to have
hilariously educated discussions with any Afro-Cuban if
they just let them have basic access to the weapons of
bourgeois knowledge of the world. They would not.
However, nearly everyone on the Bahamas would be able to
tell what Cuba was. It was only in the United States on
trying to agitate El Salvadorian illegal workers, that I
came across adult minds who were not able to associate
the word Cuba with anything. Well, that is US society,
the most classist educational management of the world.
The post woman on the Bahamas had grasped the sting of
the dinosaur story in the flesh of creationist sects all
around her with such a vivid mind as the Altaj stone
farmers had swallowed their rulers idle lobbying on
Baikonur compensation money. Dinosaurs, big, big
creatures. Did God make them and not like them? she would
ask me in the dialectical clarity only Pidgin English can
produce in this world, with her wide black eyes fully
attentive, opened towards me. And then she would come to
the very essence of Marxist methodology asking firmly How
can that be? I tried my best to spur her asking. I did
not quite succeed. Instead, she started to send love
letters over to Europe which for the first time in my
life, well not counting a flute player in Florence, make
me go through that painful and hopeless feeling of
deprivation I must have caused others without really
knowing in sending them helpless love letters. I have
been very careful with love letters since. They seem in a
sense to block a process of coming to a better
understanding of the world. And how can we possibly
relate in a better way if we do not understand so much
more than we do today?
18. cold, wide rivers
I did get the boat. I did get it in time. I did manage to
cut the price half. I did get fabulous lifts down to
Bijsk. I even got a bottle of fine honey to bring along.
But I did not get to the comrade I had hoped to find.
Bijsk was all aloof, perfectly relaxed and lazy in a bath
of disconcentrated summer evening air, something I did
not quite associate with Siberia by now. During my days
and nights on the roof of Asia, my senses had opened up
to her. I would be ready to listen to her not talking. I
would have been ready for being silent altogether. I had
nothing to say to her any more. There was a bit of
reporting to be done, but I would get through that with a
supreme sense of economics for words. My consciousness
was ripe enough to just melt in her presence and heed to
her. My faculty of observation had fortunately not yet
melted alongside, so after watching whom I had met again
for two minutes, I hastily put on a veritably childish
drill to make myself appear a normal visitor who has come
from a normal week-end trip to go to a normal little
occasion to meet friends down near Barnaul. In the end, I
did not need anything else, did I. After half an hour, I
marvelled at my success. I had successfully taken the air
out of everything. Even the honey I brought was nothing.
They had just the same bottle of honey standing already
on their kitchen table. They had been in the high Altaj
as well. I was not surprised to learn that their honey
was by far tastier than the one I had become so excited
about. Larissa would not go to the allotment with me any
more, so I went with her mother. This mother was a
hilariously agile and jolly company. Within five minutes
she had scanned my entire civil position in life.
Married? No. Divorced? No. Children? None. None? None.
Fixed plans? None. There was a little pause and into the
void of the on-setting evening she sighed: So, why do you
make such a fuss? I vaguely thought, she could mean us
two and agreed tacitly.
In the night, she took me out with her for seeing off a
best girl-friend of hers. A silent thunderstorm had set
upon the summer town and my senses were all open to its
radiating lightening and changes of air. We tacitly
returned to the shelter of our half of the flat and I lay
down in well-known landscapes of raspberry-mountains. I
was afraid to make any movement in the cushions, fearing
to keep her awake, which would have been inappropriate.
Her movements on the contrary would not let me sleep at
all. This time, her mere breathing rhythm coming faintly
through the open door from the adjacent room would not
let me close an eye for a minute that night. I did not
regret anything. I did not really want anything. Any
faculty of commiseration was perfectly put at naught with
all the others. I was bleeding silently with my senses
all laid open and I was content with the standstill. I
calmly waited for the tension of the night, this
unbearable lightening and not thundering, to pass into
oblivion. Oblivion, though, was never to be found. I
stood up in the morning with a feeling of comic
gratefulness. I had come through another night of my
life. Sometimes this seems so terribly difficult, every
step in time seems so unbearably to do at all that in the
course, I positively doubt to make it to the end.
However, I sincerely believe that actually dying would
still feel quite different. It must be something in-
between, then. But here I was and the morning light as
well, we had made it against all odds. I had spent 6
hours without doing anything, when everything I could
have done including all the possible consequences would
have been much, much easier to support, I believed.
There was a little superficial satisfaction of the type
Pushkin celebrates. In fact, in the course of a week, her
father had not addressed me a single time, had not looked
into my eyes and not even said a greeting. In a certain
bourgeois sense this was a bit rude, actually. I knew my
own father perfectly well enough to know that he could
treat any visitor of my sister like that, disregarding
her emotions altogether. This was most probably plain and
hilariously unreflected jealousy and she did agree with
my guess. I had to address it anyway. I had to take the
initiative and make a point of it, because I feared she
might be tacitly sorry for it if we would not address it
and secretly laugh about him together.
So we went off from home. Quite probably, I would never
return in my life, but who knows? My muscles were feeling
rather unfit to stick to their bones. Nerves were going
painfully through this disco-ordinated lump of flesh
shivering irritably from time to time. In German, we have
a very funny expression for such a state, we call it ein
Haeufchen Elend a cute little lump of misery. In Barnaul,
we took the river boat on the Ob. We went for ages on
these wide, wide waters. It was freezing cold. I leant
alternatingly on her laps and on her shoulders with my
will falling very low under the throbbing progression of
exhaustion. I think it was not only a bliss for me to get
a little warmth from the closeness of another body. There
was a climatic need for a certain degree of intimacy and
as every materialistically founded argument, she would
heed to it without exchanging unnecessary words on the
topic. How amazing that there are 72 hours of rest ahead,
I said to my self secretly with the feeling of guilt,
that this was politically quite incorrect. But the
prospect of not having to change place and drag your
luggage for four days and three nights on end was just
too attractive after my Marathon over 3000 km of Siberia.
For two weeks now, from Lena s place in Moscow onwards,
actually, there had not be a single night s rest at the
same place where I had been resting the night before. I
was getting positively out of my senses with an over-dose
of Roma essence. Judging from the rain and the weather
forecast, I knew that the whole camp would probably swim
in mud and water. I expected it to have poor meals and
loud nights and in spite of everything, I approached it
like an undeserved four star accommodation. Personally, I
did not need a glimpse of politics to make it attractive
to me. I was just content with the chance, not to move
physically, and, well, and be somehow close, in a
measurable numbers of metres, close to her. Half-sleeping
on her sisterly shoulder it was now standing clear before
my eyes that we were heading for genuine collision if I
did not succeed to knock my bodily affection for her out
by myself in the very first round. As it turned out, she
would assist me perfectly in this task. It felt a bit
dump inside afterwards but the culprit was indeed lying
knocked off on the floor and my interest in political
discussion and analysis could take his place with an air
of not knowing what had been done in the first row to let
her have it all, centre-stage and the cheers of the
audience.
Only during one night, after being allowed a very, very
nice dance and refused the following, the one knocked off
so cleverly by the combined effort of the two of us stood
up to a kind of zombie existence and wandered through the
grey spaces of the empty darkness, an eye-sore to look at
and to listen to, I guess. With a certain formal good-
heartedness, she would then offer me to go for a walk
together and speak, if it is really that bad. This was
all done publicly in the attentive space of a tent with
her and three other comrades who could put their own and
not in the least negligible affection for Larissa in a
much more becoming and chevalresque wording than I could.
On Zauberberg, they had at least some pulomaria to excuse
the visible effects of a Russian aristocrat, I joked to
myself. And I remembered a rather brutal invention out of
a recent Dostoevsky performance put on a bombastic scene
in a truly Wagnerian spirit of Russomania by Hans Castorp
in the Volksbuehne am Rosa Luxemburg-Platz where a none
the less black-eyed Russian actress utters the raging war-
cry 7 German pigs against the Russian beauty! I was not
amused by my acute feeling of sea-sickness and thought it
would indeed not be explainable if I started vomiting
right inside of the tent. I felt the collective waiting
for my answer. Would I take the hand stretched out in
comradeship with a feeling not matching her nobility?
Yes, I would. So I said I do not want to get on peoples
nerves here. That would have been the perfect occasion
for her to retort merrily, that I did not get on their
nerves at all, that I was a stranger yes, but they could
excuse my inappropriate emotionality as the unfortunate
but excusable result of not having gone through the
strict school of Russian comradery. She could have said
something of that sort, or something more socialisable or
something less socialisable or a joke reflecting the
absurdity of the position I had manoeuvred myself in on
the wide and cold waters of the Ob.
But actually, she deliberately chose to say nothing at
all. I was quite at the end of my whit. My socialisation
has not equipped me with the practical knowledge how to
get through a Siberian winter. It simply makes me go
cold. I listened into the half-hour of silence spanning
through the dead of the night with growing concern. So
every word I had said in baroquely polemical intention
was just right, my principally joyous affection for my
comrade, ready to step back just on command, was actually
a nuisance for the collective. Not even my male
neighbours would come to rescue me, let s say for keeping
up appearances. Appearances in general are not really an
issue in Russian commons of a proletarian making.
Instead, my male fellow-sleepers would be so delicate as
not to mingle in the tacit test of forces between me and
her. They would not even more than just giggle jollily to
themselves. I dragged myself out of the tent in the end,
carried myself to the next bush where I sincerely hoped
to be far enough away from any waking ear. I felt
perfectly like vomiting still, but I discovered, that I
had only tears to loose. The convulsions of my body
however were quite comparable. Finally, a sensation of
the cold of the night and a certain realist stupor would
take over in my body again. When I came back to the tent,
she would be awake. Why don t you sleep? She asked with a
definitely reproachful air now. Love , I said
defencelessly. What? she inquired with some disbelief and
a little ring of revulsion in her voice, subdued to allow
those who slept not to witness this. Love. What do you
think? I repeated and hated myself for having taken
resort to a worthless piece of conventional kitsch. But I
was truly tired of it by then. Again there was no answer
and I would not even wait any more.
A rather sarcastic answer reached me next morning. We
were truly bathing in floods of cold water by that time,
which poured down in never ending cascades from a darkish
grey sky. The amount of rain would finally promote a
certain sense of humour within my spirits, as I was not
sorry to observe.
Again, women would take to the dishes and the male
comrades to the birch-tree firewood, the only one burning
under rain, the one and only consolation in Russia s
seemingly never-ending misery. So I would again rebel
against gender division of work and challenge. Larissa,
who was facilitating a lot of these works, was visibly
and generally tired of me by then and conceded after a
discussion: All right, you will dry the dishes with the
girls. Drying is poloskat (thanks Shirley for the
language proofreading) . In Polish this means becoming
physically intimate. I did not know what I was doing in
Russian language, but that is just the way you move
around in a foreign system of connotations. I have no
objection at all, to engage in drying with the girls, I
retorted with a complicating, probably a little old-
fashioned grammatical construction, which I almost surely
got wrong. On her going away, I heard a sarcastic sigh of
hers. It was a bit in the mode of her mother but not
quite as sympathetic. I do have noticed that, I can tell
you! it went. We were over with it all, then. We were
ready for engaging in politics.
19. rebels ready for the countryside?
I remember watching the faces and limbs, the eclectic
pieces of uniforms from the Columbian FARC-EP to ordinary
US-army store outlets. I remember hearing the voices go
round in this collective of 30. I remember the first
smiles and laughter I managed to register. I remember
watching some girls taking apart an automatic riffle and
potting it back in form within seconds. It was all very
new for me, who had gone through a hell of a lot of
Christian singing and bourgeois pacifism at that age, but
knew Marxism-Leninism exclusively from history-books and
much-admired Kurdish radicals hibernating in the bloody
provincial town I had to go to school to in Western
Germany.
I heard them talk about other youth movements, some of
them were present in the camp and it sounded quite
sensible. They made no compromise with fascists,
chauvinists or related patriots of any kind, though they
were sometimes using the word patriotic in a sense you
could never clarify to the left of Western Europe. They
had sober but amiable criticism for Trotzskyite
techniques and felt most closed to Anarchists actually. I
reckon the biggest problem on the Russian left is not
Anarchophobia, but that most Russian Anarchists are
everything but left. They are in general kids of the
middle-classes with hilariously consumerist expectations
towards life. All the while, they would think it too
direct a way to follow their parents and become liberal
right away, so they become libertarian for the interval
until starting to build middle-class families themselves.
These interesting rebels against conventions are the
closest allies of Russian Communists. For Russian
Communists have a potent and powerful enemy. One of their
most suffocating enemies is a monstrous system of command
and control, a marazm of petty-bourgeois mediocrity and
greasy, opportunistic loyalty to the army, to Russian
capital, to the Putin dictatorship. I am talking of
course about the Communist Party itself.
I had come to the main fraction numbers of communist
youth active in Russia today. In the terms of correct
fractionology they must be called Zyuganov-partition. I
was now comfortable to learn that they were actually
among the most active anti- Zyuganovists active in the
country. Those of them having formal function and income
inside the revolting party body are organised informally,
well linked and communicating throughout the year to give
life to an inner-party opposition. This opposition inside
of the Communist party is lively, theoretically
sophisticated, willing to discus with more consistent
anti-party positions and taking part in the
alterglobalist movement of Europe actively ignoring party
orders and even counter-acting them. I listened to a wide
variety of inside horror stories about the bourgeoisation
of their Communist party. During our last night together,
when I voiced the malignant prophecy that the day could
be close, when class war made it necessary, as Mao had
put it, to bomb our own party headquarter , they agreed
with a noticeably long-standing wrath. They are
professionals is as much as to professionally subdue
their intense anger for the time being to be able to
counter-function within the apparatus, but it really
seems ready to be mobilised for a final division when
time is ripe. There is one even more serious political
enemy in the country: the Putin administration and its
incomplete alliance with national capital. My comrades
vary in their analysis of the dynamics this capital can
develop. You can say that those working closer to the
centre in Moscow tend to see the possibility of an orange
revolution show being sponsored jointly with the West for
the 2008 elections as we have witnessed in Ukraine 2004
and Byelorussia 2006, the consequences of which can be
summed up as a tragedy in the first case and a farce in
the second. Russian capital could go for full neo-
liberalism and sell-out of the remaining national
resources in this scenario. The present dictator would
then be backed up by a dubious so-called Eurasian
movement which promotes the primitivistic Putinist plot
that everything is bad in Russia, but the tsar is good.
People based in the Lower Altaj region would say that
Russian capital is not independent enough to mount an
orange opposition. According to the sources closer to
Moscow however, there could actually be a show down. Come
to Russia in 2008, they would say, There will be pompous
mobilisation for blue and orange leadership. There might
be some unexpected change in that. In the next sentence,
they would point out, however, that the Communist party
will be most loyally and most boringly sticking to the
traditionally falsified election procedures anyway. They
will send our rank and file stick election propaganda and
explain where to make a cross while others crash over the
real future division of power over Russia. In 1996, this
division of roles between capital and its auxiliary
stabilising forces within the established Communist party
were amounting to a farce, indeed. It was clear for all
insiders that Zyuganov and the Communist Party of the
Russian federation had factually won the election for
presidency. Nonetheless, Zyuganov would negotiate a deal,
conceding victory to El cin and negotiating a strong Duma
fraction instead. It was in this year, that Larissa s
father had finally torn apart his party membership card.
But he retained the little container for it. When Larissa
was already on a masters course for Politology in Moscow
and taking the final steps to become a member of the
Communist party with the help of two Barnaul comrades, he
would pass over his empty container, so that she might
use it on her further way through politics. This way lead
her to work in the State Duma. She is active, 18 hours a
day as it seems, and even a considerable part of her
modest Bijsk holidays for a partieless member of the
Chamber, the delegate for Omsk. As a blind man, he is
entitled to get help from 4 assistants altogether. His
main concern is educational policies. And we have done a
deal just before going on holidays ourselves, Larissa
would admit guiltily. Why? The student holidays were on
and the government was putting on a most perfidious
reform to be able to privatise higher education assets
against the constitution, declaring them to be
independent instead of stately . According to an old
compromise negotiated with the privatisation mafia of El
cin times, you cannot privatise state higher education.
But you could, formally, do just the same by declaring
state higher education to be independent. So what was
your deal? We analysed our potential to mobilise against
this attack. It was well-timed indeed. We would have to
mobilise student resistance right in the great break of
the summer. It would have been an up-hill battle indeed,
but we would have done that, if need be. And probably
with very poor results. So, we made Zyuganov call Putin.
The leader of the Communist party talks to the head of a
capitalist dictatorship on the phone? What do you think,
they are part of the establishment. They have to be in
close contact to do business. So we used that to threaten
and Putin resigned to force it through this summer
already. What is the compromise about it. That is the way
we worked at Greenpeace to stop the most disgusting
multinationals doing worse than average. It is normal
campaigning within the ruling set of power. That would be
the way for a possible take-off, I hoped as long as I
still hoped for Greenpeace. But mind, we did a deal. We
promised to stop our public attacks. It did however
combine well to allow you a little holiday once in the
year, didn t it?
The work with the regional Komsomolsk association, a
structure independent of party membership, heads in a
different direction though. Formally you should leave the
association at the age of 28, normally to become a party
member then. Functionaries can stay until the age of 40.
There is that general problem of youth organisations that
youth does not stay young in a numerical sense of the
word and ageist limits are inadequate to define a
political working space anyway. I got the impression,
that youth is a code word for radical. Young communists
in Russia are radical communists. Not, though, in the
understanding of the party. The youth secretary of the
party would not bother to come out into the rain until
the very last day. He hardly arrived in time to precede
the police which was already heavily insisting on the
party apparatus to betray the location of the venue.
Contemporary Communist Youth in Russia clearly flirts
with the concept of anti-capitalist guerrilla. This flirt
may be false, it may be a hype, it may be necessary and
it is certainly acutely dangerous for all of us involved.
Concepts of Maoist inspired advancements from outside of
the highly privatised metropolitan and industrial
strongholds, as in the cases of Cuba 1958 or Columbia
today, have a definite importance, even in more reflected
analytical discussions. This can be due to the fact that
the industrial base of the country has been actually
reduced to a third-world-country. All the time, there is
still a relatively high level of professional education
on the one hand and natural resources to be exploited for
hardly processed and little value-generating exports.
20. advancing within a collective of brilliant practice
From the stop of the river boat to the camp site, we had
to go some three hours through the woods stretching
without interruption over more than a hundred kilometres
between Barnaul and Bijsk. Our colleague V. was already
waiting at the pier. He has made the way to us and back
with us to a total of 6 hours walking for letting us have
some company during the last part of our trip. Though he
is approaching 50 years of age and has some problems with
his spine, he would positively want to take my my
rucksack containing a clarinet, a computer and many other
heavy things I had hardly the occasion or the peace of
mind to use during the ensuing 4 days.
Beside our domestic tasks, there were be presentations
and discussions and , most important, simulation games.
We simulated how to organise a semi-legal street-action
with a hell of a lot of police around and activist rank-
and-files infested with spies and provocateurs. In one
word, training for political basics in today s Russia. We
got police beatings and unfair trials. We were even shown
by the hilarious invention of the police actors how easy
it is to smuggle Marihuana into someone s possession to
lock him away for really long. Well, that detail failed
to strike me as anything new, to be honest. For the next
day, some even thought about simulating feudal society
for one day. This would not be put into practice. I am
still more sorry for the aborted simulation of communist
society during at least one day. It did not take place
either. To be honest, we had the possibility in our hands
to make it really happen. All the factors of late
capitalism in Russia were there: a marginalised
proletariat, hidden away in the woods, the place around
the fireside being out for sale. Alcohol as a revenue for
policemen, arresting people unwilling to work for a soup
a day. Somehow, I fell into the role of a producer of
cultural trash for sale. These artefacts were partly
hailing capitalism so bluntly that they would be smuggled
into the prison by the wife of an oligarch, Natasha, to
stir up rebellion. When I was finally arrested for
subverting the existing order, I became friends with a
group of rather intellectually aloof oppositional women.
Making use of an amnesty before the staging of an
election-farce by our rulers, we associated to form a
politically operating opposition. All the while, we were
ignorant about the working population. We did not really
have them before our eyes, they were hidden away in their
endless tasks of preparing meals they would hardly be
allowed to eat and getting firewood for a fire they could
not afford to sit at.
In retrospect, I see this day as the consistent
development of a most realist failure and in fact a
perfect humiliation of our concept of the left without
organically linking with working-class interest. Yet the
course of action was still much more curved and indirect.
Exactly in this crucial moment of building up the network
to strike at the centre of power the exploitative working
relations we were called off to attend the audience of
Lower Altaj s member of Parliament. I do not recall his
name. His appearance altogether was a farce. Politically
and even as a mere counterpart for chat. I remember
Larissa sitting deaf silent in defiance. He talked to us
like a father after numerous strokes of Brezhnevian
Alzheimer would to a bunch of kindergarten rascals who
would not listen to him anyway. After the depute had
taken the only sensible consequence and retreated to roar
off with his four-wheel drive without really saying good-
bye to anybody, I stormed to Larissa to open her mouth
for the first time in half an hour. After all this was
the kind of people, she was sacrificing her years for,
with the exception of those lonely two fraction members
outside of the Communist party discipline, the only one s
you can call left within GosDuma in any sensible
understanding of the word. And still, Larissa was a party
member. How did this compare to the anti-climax we had
just witnessed? This type of men, she would slowly say
and I could hear a bitter undercurrent in her speech, are
actually good-natured, still. I opened up my ears. How
would she set the nail. She set it brilliantly. Nothing
would remain to be said about this any more for the rest
of the camp. With their stories and opinions, she
continued, slowly, taking up verve and speed, they should
be sent to a men-only fishing afternoon. But not to
parliament, for Christ s sake!
We resumed our play as if having returned from the
toilet. Nobody lost a word on the procedure. Yet, to give
true account for colleagues in the West, who will
inevitably condemn me for socialising with Zyuganov youth
at all, I should take the pain to note the following.
This representative of hundreds of thousands of Communist
votes rallied by 4000 party members in Lower Altaj had
displayed utmost satisfaction with the military policy of
the regime. He had expressed his personal feeling of
gratitude to the Putin administration, for using
professional soldiers to kill and get killed in one of
the most profitable money-machines of the Russian mafia,
the fake-war in Chechnya. Nonetheless, he praised himself
for pressuring the government to increase the percentage
of compulsory conscripts in the Russian army.
Nonetheless, he had a concept for the careers of young
women to vote for him as well. He had claimed all female
bodies in the camp-site as legitimate baby-producing
machines for satisfying his genuinely social-Darwinist
passion about the need to multiply the Russian race. I
guess that any slightly feminist audience in Western
Europe would have positively lynched him at that point.
Yet, upon request from the audience, he had contradicted
any political preference for working-class interests, and
instead handed out the word of order to make class-
alliance against class interests for the sake of Russia s
future . And finally, he issued an unlimited declaration
in favour of internationalism, as long as it keeps to the
borders of the Russian Federation . With Russians being
more than 80%, he argued, such Internationalism was to be
had at a reasonably cheap price. With his mind-set,
socialisation and materially motivated busyness-interests
in big politics, I would not be sure to tell, if in
Germany he would have still found a place on the right
wing of the potentially crypto-Fascist Christian
Alliance, CDU. He was definitely not the kind of person,
I would personally want to spare from red terror once the
time was ripe.
As if suffering under a mental strain after this
encounter, our oppositional gathering focussed its
potential purely on participating in elections, now. We
would set up a woman candidate and a monitor to be able
to lobby for a more or less fair election process. When
asked about a programme, our candidate issued the slogan
of free access to the fire-side for our peer-group
(tusovka) . I was a bit disappointed but supported her,
nevertheless. Then however, she and three of her friends
would suddenly drop out of the game. They actually
claimed to feel offended by an intervention from Larissa
moderating the course of the action from within. To
provide some stabilising impact, Larissa urged us all to
behave loyally until lunch . Lunch actually, would never
come within the game, it was not on the agenda, just as a
Communist party election victory. She was a brilliant
player. To fix our minds on a trifle instead, she accused
us of stealing the blowing horn to call for meals. She
called our behaviour quite unfair and issued a call for
more social responsibility at the campsite towars us.
These 3 minutes were enough to deactivate what was left
of a Left opposition in the game. The girls dispersed and
took to sneer right until night, not eating anything that
day actually.
The night was unique, I can tell you. The fire was
lighted in an unprecedented intensity, obviously the
working-class had found an outlet in their anger, being
abandoned by the left butterflies in retreat. They had
been working like hell. Asked why, they said, they had no
free time to rally for rebellion but they would have
positively reacted to anyone looking for them in the
woods. And now we were burning the fruit of their labour
to reflect the outcome of the day. In the end of the
game, we had actually been witnessing the making of a
perfect coup-d tat by an orange mafia. They had
accumulated incredible piles of money and were showing it
with a breathtaking new-Russian sophistication, right in
their press-conferences transmitted by local TV. You
could see them operate with arbitrary imprisonment, not
paying promised wages and organising support with
hilarious corruption. And what was most irritating, we
could not do anything to stop them. I really did feel
transported from present Russia to bloody Ukraine towards
the end. It was all hyper-real. Only one fifth of it was
planned and intrigued by the moderation, the rest was
just the combined social ability of all participants at
work, including the leftish butterfly fraction out for a
sneering stroll while a veritable neo-liberal putsch was
taking over command and control of all resources around.
There were three summaries of the day, which took my
breath away: Sasha, Larissa and Aleksej. I could not make
it out for sure. All of them were standing in the most
inconvenient side of the fire, where the wind was blowing
the smoke. Were they holding their improvises speeches in
tears because of the smoke beating their eyes or was
there more to it? Suddenly, I realised, that I was not
the only one to shed tears in this camp. But my three
colleagues were not getting passionate for an aborted
dance. They were right at their heart of their year-long
work in the movement. Why had we failed? Sasha said in
almost perfect accordance with my own assessment, that
there was no reason to sneer at our sneering left, it was
the perfect representation of us all, failing to initiate
a process of proletarian self-empowerment. Larissa all
the while kept on asking questions. Cutting questions.
Personal questions. Relentless questions. My whits would
have faltered as well under such an inquiry. Why are you
in the Communist youth? What did you want here? Why did
you come here? A girl gave in to the group pressure and
admitted blushingly, that she had come just to have a
rest. I later walked up to her and told her, that my
motivation was pretty much the same plus some personal
affection. But that should not prevent us to learn some
useful political lessons on the way, should it? I doubt
whether my sincerity helped her in any way.
The last one was Aleksej to have his say, the Agronome
colleague from behind the Ural. Hardly noticeable though,
he, too, was sobbing. This was not a game any more. This
was about the mere sense of our lives. I had painted a
portrait of him just before, in the evening light. Now, I
could investigate his expression with some experience
already. He is a great agitator without knowing it. He is
too humble to know it and that is perfectly o.k. He
combines vivid emotion with the fruits of extensive
reading in Marxism and theoretical reflection within
daily political work. I decided to take advantage of the
fact, that he belonged to my company in Larissa s tent. I
was looking forward to a bright night of discussion.
.
21. a theory of progress reconstructed
There were endless memories and personal findings to be
localised in a broader context lying side to side while
Sasha and Larissa were already sleeping, were they
really? Basically, I knew the theoretical position of
Aleksey s Marxism-Leninism only from literature.
Empirically, it can hardly be found in the movement s
open debate in Western Europe. I had been studying it for
the last 18 years, though, starting after a school
excursion to Jaroslav in the Soviet Union in 1988 brought
extensive literature into our provincial circles.
I will not give a complete account of the night-long
discussion we had, for it is by far not over yet. I know
it to make a redefinition of my live s political
struggles, failures and achievements necessary and this
is one reason why I sat down for 8 consecutive days to
write down this diary and could not do it in 4 hours as I
had honestly planned it, even with a consecutive train to
Tomsk in mind for the same day. 4 hours turned into 80
hours and I have but recorded some turbulences at the
surface of my reflection and self-critique. Surely, the
impact of Aleksej would have been less fruitful for my
quest if I had not had three more days close to my friend
V. in the following. Aleksej is of my age and has talked
my line of study in the beginning of the 1990s, just 3000
km east. V. was born in 1958 and has a sound and thorough
political and personal socialisation within a Soviet
Union that presented a real chance and a real threat. His
assessment of proletarian dictatorship, theoretical tasks
ahead, and central hermeneutical issues are more sound
and more poignant with empiric disillusion than our
grossly improvising reinvention after the devastation of
Capitalist victories over the last 15 years. And there is
Larissa, whom I trust to the twinkle of her eyes. I still
cannot quite understand how she can possibly be that
childish and serious in the meantime, so sophisticated
and serene in treating one and the same task. Will they
be able to break her? My hope, as the hope of many lies
in Moscow. Not buried under glass in a red marble shrine
but in our own doing next winter and in the years to
come.
22. swimming off in
more than tears
It was painful for me to leave the camp with Larissa
dissolving into tears under incessant, continuing rain.
The ways through the woods were turning into the fifth,
the Russian element on earth, which had driven Napoleon
to the edge of his senses: mud, mud, mud. Yet, I was so
glad to be close to her on a scale measurable in metres
for those last hours. I would indeed not have a clue,
what will happen to me once this connection was cut.
23. rebeginning in Barnaul: fresco, Francesco, Ionesco
I started to work on a fresco painting in V s Lower Altaj
youth centre. It was to sum up the last fortnight and I
worked to do it well with a fervour and intensity I had
really started to miss in all this deconcentrating
travelling activity, since the last fresco with Vlasta in
the German Commune KoWa in June this year.
24. hitch-hiking into most unexpected gardening
Together with V., we had a hilarious period of research
to collect material from memory, archives, museums and
expositions, films and photographs, artist s shops and
building-trade discounters in Barnaul. Within 36 hours,
we got almost everything, wet lime, sand of different
colours, excellent and simple fresco brushes right to the
history of communes in the region from the 1920s onward,
faces from the revolutionary wars in Barnaul, a critique
of the political economics of Soviet political police
from local life experience and a view of Soviet industry
in the scale of thousands of hectares damped to rubbles.
How should I put it all together? I was increasingly
getting worried collecting all these sketches and complex
insights.
There was actually only one trifle, we could not get at
all: red pigment. In the end, we drove out on Saturday
evening the slightly doubtful address of an artist,
someone had given us out of commiseration. This proved to
be the clue. V. and I happened to sneak into a party
which had an unconcealed explosive erotism written on the
foreheads of everybody welcoming us. For Russia, the
social set was very unusual, formal couples, parting with
new friendships in all directions. But somehow and very
little inkeeping with the mode in which Russians
including my Ukrainian acquaintance break private
relations and parentship, this was somehow all holding
together. All this was happening clearly on the edges of
possible personal tolerance and yet the drive for
transgression of any bourgeois norms had V. and me
electrified within minutes. A woman, the widow of a
plavchik who had drowned in the Altaj waters was dancing
alone in the wild garden among a company preparing the
banja. I joined her and we turned around and around until
seeing nothing of the world any more but in our mutual
glances. She delicately took to rubbing off the rests of
building lime and sand on my cheeks while turning and
turning with me, inquiring. You think it so easy to get
some lies from me and sleep with me this night and think
it all to be perfect? she asked as if singing the text to
the tune we were dancing. A friend of mine is having a
night out today in the Carpathians, that s for sure, with
a new and quite superficial lover, I retorted. How
superficial? We turned. She would not be able to tell me.
That means she does not really love you? Possible. She
searched with her eyes in my eyes. Suddenly, she had got
me with a little sly, ringing laugh. So you see it all
fall. I am falling myself, it is little fun. Be calm, she
said with the burden of a dead man having been her
husband, you will only grow from it. How can I possibly
grow, how can I possibly realise the Commune, when every
friendship goes through my helpless fingers as if really
restless to go down the drain? Be calm, your soul will
only grow from it. We had ceased to dance now. We were in
the far end of the wild garden, holding our hands fast. I
have no experience with such kind of encounters, really,
apart of stupid dreams. But this was neither a dream, nor
was it stupid as far as I understood it. Maybe this was
even a realisation to stop talking? Do I have a soul? I
said naively as if she could tell. She twisted me back
with analytical sharpness: So, you are an atheist. How
good to hear that. You have some experience then with
coming to terms with what you cannot flee from. Nothing
remained to be said. I felt perfectly understood. And in
the same second, I unwillingly repeated a phrase to
myself which I had unexpectedly written down in a
schoolmistress fit to end a letter to Olga in Moscow:
Remember that you do not built new society with romance.
What we need is collective action to deconstruct
patriarchy. Have a nice summer, yours
My companion in the garden was incredibly drunk and in
the meantime behaving breathtakingly sly alongside,
incredibly sure of herself, her words, her body, her
movements. She chose to talk about the death of her
lover, then. I heard it with horror. Having lived with a
woman for a decade that had seen the early deaths of two
of her brothers, one of them a plavchik, I immediately
sensed that her talking was not what she would talk in
the years and some hundreds of occasions before. Forget
about fresco painting tonight, if you really heed to this
vicinity, I muttered to myself. And it was in this moment
that I broke in, just for half a second. With a little
sting of guilt, I thought about my comrade. I could not
help it. Later he would try to help me in return, but it
was all lost and gone. Why did I understand that so much
earlier than him with roughly 13 years less experience?
For the fraction of a second, I lost hold of her eyes and
my eyes flared off to look into the other side of the
garden to see whether my comrade was having quite such a
thrilling time as me out here. I could not tell but I had
some doubts. This was enough to kill off any further
interest in me within her mind. She had opened up to tell
me about her experience of closest death and I had not
been able to hold her glance in the meantime. So
inevitably, I had lost her confidence altogether. Our
bodies were still intimate but her mind was gaining
distance at a breathtaking speed. She took her girl-
friend and my comrade in her arms and brought us three
into V s car. A little boy was with us, the son of her
girl-friend. I was sorry for him. Drunken parents
relating strangely to strange people are not necessarily
a comforting support when need be. We drove to her girl-
friends home. My comrade readily bought them another
bottle of vodka on request. I wouldn t have done that. In
the widow s talk, there was now a solid hatred for her
own drinking sticking out sharply against her ambition to
have us buy more and there was suddenly an explicit
adjacent hatred for me as I registered from a distance.
V. to the contrary, would be shocked. Quite pathetically,
he resolved to throw in everything he had in store for
me. Most interesting for my ears to hear though was that
he advised her to stop talking Russian with me. Already
in the Ural, I had felt the intuitive sensation that my
Russian was really a lousy failure, because I wanted more
demanding a closeness and mutuality than sex. Honestly,
my comrade pleaded while I silently winced under his
implicit verdict in the agony of acute language
isolation, try to speak to him in English for the rest of
the night, you will see what he is really up to. This is
unnecessary, I thought pleadingly. She hates me already,
just as any Russian has the right to hate a German, and
you make it worse with your advertisement. Actually, she
did not speak a word of English either, just some juicy
German swear-words, but that would not be sufficient to
restore her confidence. Don t tell me you have, let s
say, a million. She now declaimed all cold. Do you think
I would do it for less? You two do not really look like
busyness ones. Why should I socialise with you anyway? V.
underlined with a truly ridiculous honesty in his voice
that he had not that bad a nice car if she would just
bother to take a look and that we weren t actually
underdressed for a garden party. I remembered that he had
reminded me three times to make some effort and change my
work-clothes with anything slightly worth to be shown
around in Saturday night Barnaul. I smiled a tacit and
previously unknown smile at this competition taking place
between the two now. Was this still about me, really? It
seemed as if they were summing up the main concerns of
Russian middle classes over the last 15 years. Now, the
ugly term middle class sounds a bit like the church bell
back in the village of my parents. I did a little
arithmetic and arrived just at a million, Roubles that
is. Well, this week. Next week, if would already be a
painful bit closer to the end. I had no income for a year
now. I would have liked to bring the conversation to a
collapse with something of the like. But in the end, I
was not familiar enough with this sphere of Russian
society to be able to tell whether she had meant Roubles
or US Dollars. And anyway, we had reached a dead point
some time ago already and maybe even V. would have
misunderstood my irony.
Back in the garden, she inquired occasionally can t you
just piss off? I had seen this coming from the moment, I
had lost sight of her, worrying about my comrade to feel
uneasy and unheeded to in the garden. Honestly, we felt a
bit uneasy both now. Later he told me, still with some
agitation in his voice. Oh, this type of women!
Impossible. You have to take them like that. The gesture
he made then reminded me of how you catch a wild horse. I
could not be less interested in such an acquisition. I
preferred to say nothing.
We got the red pigment and went, not without exchanging
hot kisses with the donor, a brilliant artist, heading
off for Tibet. I reckon, I will not forget her either.
No.
This garden was a miracle. It made you go through a
decade in 20 minutes. It made you trust and not regret.
It made you regret and trust yourself, my comrade, my
colleague. If I lived in Barnaul, I would care very much
for at least a little pie in this sky. There was just a
tiny stint in the fabulous glasses, she fused and
composed to precious interior designs. She obviously
wanted to excuse the rudeness of her friend in kicking us
out. I have not actually invited them. She would confess
to us unnecessarily They always turn up by themselves.
There was a pause. Like metastasis, she added and smiled
to us across this rather awkward metaphor sombrely and
just a little uneasy, a little from underneath. With a
pang of sudden speculative sadness, I realised that maybe
she would not see Tibet in this life any more, but I can
be entirely mistaken. I noted that my comrade was taking
down the contact details of my colleague, our benefactor,
with remarkable care. But that, of course, was only to
duly return a little plastic bag with some red pigment.
She, however, would insist that we should just use it up
or keep it.
25. dictatorship of the proletariat vs.
a collage of abilities
Dictatorship of the proletariat is bull shit, really. Of
course, the bourgeois grip on economic life has to be
inversed. Of course, parliamentarism does provide no
effective tool for dispossessing the dictatorship of
Capital. But my dear V., could we really sneer at the
expertise and unique abilities of her and him and the
Young Communist pretending to have come three hours
through the rain and mud for having a rest only?
Dictatorship is rotten convention just as hierarchy is
rotten convention. Let the grass yield on their ruins!
Empowerment of the proletariat is essential, but that is
a process you can neither buy with purchase power nor win
over putting in place a command structure. All
enhancements beyond participation would not get us any
degree farther than another simulation. We know
simulations of a Social Democrat and a Bolshevik making.
We would now rather prefer the original in both cases, to
be sure. New forms of proletarian public life,
expression, control and self-management will be the
water, in which empowerment, the jolly fish, will learn
to swim, not the other way round.
We will not enter the same river which lead up to the
failure of working-class emancipation in East and West
once again. Maybe, we will investigate proletarian
initiative and not oracle about it from a set of excerpts
from bourgeois news-papers and theories about
imperialism. We will try to form living and fighting
collectives and not fighting and dying martyrs. We will
not import industrial social models from the West any
more, because the West has lost out to their suffocating
productivity just the same by now.
Hence, we will integrate production and reproduction,
guerrilla and conciliation tactics, cultural invention
and industrious creativity on a new level of escalation.
We will scatter the carcasses of gender and carry sexual
liberation to the point where fulfilment is not to be had
in bed any more. We will desexualise colloquial language
and sexualise socialism instead. We will try to paralyse
the reflexes of classism inside of us and toil to become
free of toil altogether. We will not be modest. We will
not be restrained. We will not be consumers of our own
dreams. We will become what nobody has ever been. We will
taste what everybody has been capable to dream of. We
will be the graveyard orchestra of capital relations
dancing to their very last rhythms.
26. sketches for a commune
Looking at historical communes can be instructive. Some
initial collective, e.g. four or five communards, always
had to make a start: condense their aspirations,
expectations, experiences, differences, dreams, fears and
needs. Such a crystallising process is essential to any
further growth of the network. A workable result is only
worth to be evolved in collective practice. It could be a
crystallising collective, living it and putting it down
(i.e. in written, in documentation and decision hardware
as Kommune Niederkaufungen e.g. has developed and passed
on to other communes). As with tomorrow s weather, there
can be individual forecasts. You will not hang down your
head because the forecast was somewhat misleading, will
you? Instead, you are perfectly right to do so if the
weather actually turns out to be nasty. So I try and risk
a forecast. It is nothing more than individual finger
training for a future walk on our hands. To enhance
specific reactions, I associate the ideas with letters
making them more easy to cite.
A) Our commune serves the people, aspiring to get beyond
capital relations.
B) A shared economy is essential for developing
revolutionary ferment.
C) Only if all available individual capital is
collectivised, there can be some hope for a sufficient
fund to work with responding to the abilities present in
the collective.
D) Economically, communes were mostly a failure as long
as capitalism (or NEP) subsisted. The future quality of
communal life and work has to compensate for this
tendency in time.
E) Shared work and life are the result and basis of a
common political struggle.
F) Latin America is as important a weak element in the
chain of imperialism as the former Soviet Union. A
wandering commune e.g., doing mainly analytical work to
support class struggles in Latin America for some years
could be more interesting than developing a farm on the
Crimean Peninsula.
G) Hierarchy is a waste of talents.
H) Consensus decision making is the supreme tool for
equal empowerment. But specific procedures have to be set
up for treating vetoes adequately.
I) Levelling economic possibilities is a primordial
task. This means resigning from material benefits for
most of us.
J) The quality of life and work facilitated by the
commune is to remunerate according to real material need.
Therefore, collectively set up priorities distribute
irrespective of the amount of individual sacrifices,
voluntary workload and income generating initiative.
K) The material realisation of women s liberation has to
be always three steps ahead of any attempts at sexual
liberation.
L) Everybody should be able to do any task in the
commune.
M) Racism, Sexism, Classism, Ageism, Homophobia and any
kind of violence inside of the commune, including
structural and symbolic violence (anche gridare, also to
raise your voice above the necessary to make yourself
acoustically understood) are not acceptable. Reproductive
work and the assignment of unpopular tasks have to be
counter-imposed to gender roles and genderised behaviour
patterns.
N) Affirmative action is a primordial principle when
rebalancing gender biases, class background biases and
accumulated potentials to realise hierarchies.
O) Equal or affirmative distribution of reproductive
tasks could be monitored minutely, i.e. to the very
minute.
P) Empirically, communes live on a politically
acceptable deception: People enter them as a life
engagement and in most cases their very stability in time
depends on individuals drifting in and out.
Q) Fluctuation is experienced as individual failure,
nevertheless. The communal structure has to put aside
resources to provide for relief.
R) The most convincing way to deal with fluctuation in a
shared economy is to make up individual exit contracts
between single members and the commune as a whole
(Kommune Niederkaufungen).
S) These contracts should at all costs be agreed on
before splitting becomes an issue to resolve conflicts at
all.
T) Exit payment expectation by the commune should not be
based on the concept of profit-sharing
(ZuverdienerInnengemeinschaft, artel). Parallel to all
decisions on consumption and investment inside the
commune, exit payments will be based on a collectively
shared assessment and prioritisation of material needs.
U) With the Capitalist market providing easier work and
better pay for men than for women, no exit contract for a
man should envision a higher exit support sum than the
lowest agreed on for a woman and there should be no lower
for a woman than the highest fixed for a man.
V) Ageism and Internism (snobbish attitudes based on the
length of internship) are not helpful.
W) Admission procedures for people joining the commune
after crystallisation should be transparent, stick to
clear rules and be subject to unbiased control. There is
no reason for those who joined earlier to build up any
sense of superiority.
X) Even a guest for three days can make more serious and
important a contribution than regulars. The common
classist division between full members and guests is to
be levelled without giving in to consumption patterns of
the fast-food society.
Y) Children get adopted by the commune as a whole.
Biological parenthood is only an issue when dealing with
the outside. Hierarchy in care and responsibility is to
be analysed and understood as a deficiency in the working
of the commune. Children can be expected to want to leave
the commune at first occasion. They should therefore be
empowered to realise exit contracts on special terms and
retain a special guest status.
Z) The material integrity of the commune can be highly
elastic if the social dynamic is empowered to support
physical distance. The Gudut example shows that
proletarian work and partisan activism can be combined
with the concept of rural settlement as well as
cosmopolitan participation in one single integrating
shared economy (Palestine (1919) 1924 until 1927 when a
part left for the Soviet Union).
and) There is always something very important you forget
to write down in the end.
Date Published: 2012-02-20 16:19:54
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# Topics
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