'Tradition Is So Stubborn in Russia'

“For the workers to arise and break the chains of capitalist oppression was unexpectedly easy work in 1917 but those chains were gossamer compared to the cast-iron shackles of a Russian tradition that has so far outworn every idea of the new.” 

Murray Kempton is writing in 1988, on the cusp of a promising change in Russian tradition. Three years earlier, Mikhail Gorbachev had become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Soon after, I was covering a speech by the late Richard Luger, then a U.S. Senator from Indiana. I don’t recall his precise words but Luger confidently dismissed Gorbachev as just another Commie despot. Within a few years some of us found ourselves in the unlikely position of rather reluctantly rooting for the Commie.

 

Kempton filed his column after a visit to Moscow. His final conversation there was with a Soviet journalist and former son-in-law of Nikita Khrushchev, Alexi Adzhubei, who asked Kempton if he was a Sovietologist. The American replied: “To me, the only Sovietologist who is always up to date is Anton Chekhov.” Adzhubei reacted with “a knowing smile.” Kempton goes on:

 

“None of us could be so bold as to advance a particular Chekhov story as the greatest of all but ‘My Life’ would be a splendid candidate. At one juncture, its hero marries a young woman of wealth, who is transiently possessed by an itch to go back to the land. They go off to convert her estate into a working farm and spend a horrid few months until, disgusted by the crafts and coarseness of the peasants, she abandons all lofty notions and flees to London to study singing.

 

“From there, she writes to ask for a divorce and to report that she has bought herself a ring engraved in Hebrew, ‘All things pass away,’ and that it would be her talisman against future infatuations. And he reflects: ‘If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be, “‘Nothing passes away.’”

 

“And nothing seems ever to pass away in Moscow. Russian history asserts itself there as all but immutable and immovable, and so it asserted itself for Chekhov in 1900. The on-again, off-again harryings of Andrei Sakharov and Boris Pasternak would have been for him the oldest of tales.”

 

I think of Kempton and Chekhov after reading a recent article portentously titled “What classic Russian literature can tell us about Putin’s war on Ukraine.” The author cites Putin’s much publicized admiration for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Of course, when politicians issue lists of favorite or most-influential books, we’re skeptical. Richard Nixon recalled a youthful dalliance with Tolstoy, especially Resurrection. In the article, the author makes passing references to Putin’s other alleged favorites, Turgenev, Lermontov, Sergei Yesenin, Pushkin and Nikolay Karamazin. Conspicuously absent, though it’s no surprise, is Chekhov (and Babel, and the Mandelstams, and Nabokov, and so on). Kempton writes in his column:

 

“The czars will never be back but, after seventy years, their style of command has yet to pass away, perhaps because tradition is so stubborn in Russia that the techniques of journalism, wondrous as they are, come to appear so inadequate for dealing with her development year by year, let alone day by day.”

 

[Kempton’s column, published in New York Newsday on June 19, 1988, is collected in his Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events (1994). I clipped the column and saved it.]