Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Read online

  1.4 Dig your own Berlin Wall, animatronic set in the Mini Europe theme park in Brussels

  What is not remembered enough, and to a greater disgrace, is the Holocaust, which happened nearly entirely on the lands of the current Poland. The recent Polish film Consequences, about the aftermath of a pogrom in Jedwabne, caused the outrage not only of the right wing – magazine covers were calling for lynching of the main actor. Many ex-communist countries are plagued with anti-Semitism, which, given the near-non-existence of a Jewish population is all the more outrageous. Many of them were directly implicated in the Holocaust, especially Hungary, Lithuania, Romania and Western Ukraine, those who are now the most willing to commemorate the ‘crimes of communism’, and want to be seen as its ‘great crashers’. One of the biggest “successes” of e.g. Lithuania in the EU was in trying to force a European Day of Memory to the victims of Nazism and Stalinism, trying to enshrine in law the levelling of the two totalitarianisms in the EU parliament a few years ago. This leads to the trivialisation or obliteration of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust and justifying anti-Semitism with anticommunism. In all the post-communist countries there are now great anti-communist museums to be built: in Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Hungary, soon in Poland, where we still have a commonly-used word, Żydokomuna, that conflates Jews and Communists. It was justly criticized not only by the left, but also by liberal British commentators, with Jonathan Freedland being appalled by the ideas behind the ‘double genocide’. In his recent Bloodlands, historian Timothy Snyder tells the story of the war crimes in the East caught ‘between Hitler and Stalin’, yet doesn’t highlight enough the participation of the locals in the Holocaust, which was pointed out by the Vilnius-based Jewish historian Dovid Katz. In Poland, this discussion is mostly due to Jan Tomasz Gross’s ground-breaking books Neighbours and Fear on the collaboration of some Poles with the Germans in assisting the Holocaust for the sake of personal financial gain. Focusing on communist crimes not only whitewashes the scale of collaboration with Nazi crimes against the Jews and denigrates the significance of the Holocaust, the real idea behind this elision is to show that the evil comes from the outside, and we are good, therefore we haven’t done anything wrong, ever.

  The backdrop of this manipulation of historical memory is a shadowy justification to all the policies introduced after ’89. How else, than by the ritual beating of ‘komuna’, would the subsequent governments justify themselves? In many countries, Hungary being the most blatant, it leads to some atrocious right wing and racist politics on the part of the government. But as we’ve seen, the European Union didn’t react when Hungarian authorities were introducing censorship. It didn’t react to the president Orban marginalizing the opposition’s legal rights. It didn’t react to government ministers’ recent racist comments on Jews and Roma, comparing them to animals and bringing back the rhetoric of Nazism. It did intervene, though, when Hungary started to limit free trade. The message is: we don’t care what your politics are, unless you’ll mess with our economic requirements. The recent rise of the right in Eastern Europe is a result of the messy communist transition into capitalism. The people who were the architects of it, today very often speak disdainfully of the exotic Eastern right-wingers, yet little is done in terms of boycott.

  Toxic Ruins

  While so many of us are outraged at our own ineptitude, this means different things for different social and political parties, factions and classes. Neoliberal politicians claim our capitalism is not capitalist enough, the Right claims to be besieged by the ‘leftist tanks’ in the country, where the majority is intolerant of homosexuality, the government rejects any liberalisation of women’s and gay rights and over 90% declare themselves Catholic, and where there was arguably no organized independent left since the interwar period. The rhetoric of a besieged fortress is conflated with a post-colonial rhetoric, in which the westernization of the country is a danger – and that including the seemingly tiny impact of the left. But the question is whether the EU was always so neoliberal or only at the time when we entered it? If communism came to us too soon, the West invited us to the party way too late.

  At the same time, our own fucked-upness turns out to be quite interesting within the modern economy. In the traditionally more affluent West, the domination of simulacra is never-ceasing, only deepening and widening its reach, producing people who are willing to pay and to pay well for the possibility of feeling ‘in your own skin’, how it is to live in an area of heightened insecurity, be it political, ecological or historical. Numerous tourist companies with a sophisticated programme are willing to take you to the former East. For instance, one of them called Political Tours, in the case of Kosovo, promises “aided by local experts, politicians, and analysts, the tour [explores] the origins of the conflict in Kosovo and looks at the enormous changes that have taken place since 1999”, notwithstanding “what the country has to offer in terms of its rich culture, cuisine, and even nightlife”. Political Tours will take you to the places of crisis, political upheaval, and specializes in (post)communist regimes: this way, places like Serbia, Bosnia, North Korea (as well as Canary Wharf) get the treatment. It seems that even if everything is ruined there’s still a way of making money by picking over the corpse.

  The past history has literally become a theme park for us – hence the various ‘Parks of Memory’ throughout the ex-Bloc, or the communist statue parks popular among European tourists, like Grutas Park in Lithuania and the Memorial Park in Budapest – but also the present in the contemporary world, a present, which is especially tormented, making people’s lives difficult or unbearable – can be just as easily turned into a funpark for the rich and bored.

  On our first visit to Ukraine, when bumping to friends and art curators, the first thing we were asked was “are you going to Chernobyl?” They obviously were: you could tell that with the same enthusiasm they’ll put on the famous silvery protective uniforms, as when they penetrated the galleries in New York or any “hot” place on the art map. It didn’t occur to me, that by then, in 2010, the sightseeing of the ruined ex Soviet Union had become somewhat an industry, a kind of still-a-little-bit “frightening” (all those ex-communists, radioactivity and whatnot) type of tourism, largely popular among a community of so called “urban explorers”, internet-bred geeky fans of danger, willing to pay a decent sum of money and risk their health a little to experience the thrill of entering the Zone. They are currently scavenging some of the USSR’s darkest places, and Pripyat, the city in northern Ukraine, then USSR, the nearest town to Chernobyl, where the reactor in a nuclear power plant erupted in 1986, is their “holy Grail”, as one of them put it recently on the pages of Icon monthly, in a special ruin-themed issue. The Zone of Exclusion, as it is called, meant everybody was evacuated in the 30km surrounding it.

  This new fashion was made possible not only because the state of Ukraine saw a potential in opening the former dead zone as a tourist attraction. The higher popularity of the so-called ruin porn, made ever popular by internet forums and blogs, is a direct effect of the fall of traditional industry and the rise of the so called “creative industries”. The now omnipresent photographs of abandoned, depopulated cities like Detroit, or New Orleans destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, transforming quickly into beautifully produced coffee table books, turn the tragedy for some into a source of visual delight for others, who may ponder their tragedy from a philosophical point of view. You may say it’s the media saturation which turns the images of disaster into everyday experience. But the fascination of “urbex”, as it is gently called, not accidentally focuses also on places of great historical importance and scenes of dramatic events.

  An “urbex” is a usually a well-off, well educated Western male from a big city who might or might have not have read a lot of SF fiction in his youth, who wants to give his usually safe, sedentary job an exciting kick. It is this factor, that casts some shadow on the perhaps vacuous, but seemingly not very endangering activities. For i
nstance, the former USSR has become a scene of such fetishization exponentially with its own economical fall after the collapse of the socialist system and capitalist shock therapy, as pictures of heavy drinking, impoverished folk from Siberia populate the internet as “Hipsters from Omsk”. The tons of pictures from Pripyat notwithstanding, Ukraine and Russia haven’t had a worse press from Western commentators since the dissolution, for jailing their liberal West-friendly politicians, like Yulia Tymoshenko, or anarchist activists Pussy Riot.

  The ongoing fascination/repulsion that the capitalist West had with the ex-Soviet Bloc started during the Cold War years and prepared the ground very well for the flourishing of all sorts of urban and political myths, that were only confirmed by photos circulating in magazines like LIFE. They were consolidated by a few works by the most popular Russian director in history, a man with an extraordinarily distinct vision, Andrey Tarkovsky, most notably Stalker, which, despite being shot in 1979, is popularly perceived as a “Chernobyl” film for its uncanny prophecy. It is endlessly reproduced in the company of the reactor-trips pictures and transformed into a video game, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, where instead of indulging in philosophical debates, one becomes an amnesiac urban explorer, one of whose tasks is to kill a villain called “Strelok”.

  Let’s get one thing straight - ruin porn is at least 200 years old. When the romantics encountered the freshly rediscovered Roman and Greek ruins of towns like Pompeii and trips to Rome became a favorite activity of romantic poets, there was nothing more trendy than a pensive ruin contemplation; English gardens had randomly scattered “ruins” and fake ancient architectural fragments purposely built in around for trysts and contemplation. Painters since classicism have relished in plotting architectural riddles, as different as Canaletto and Piranesi. There was in this a longing for the lost past, for the “golden age”, that was never to come. Interestingly, Tarkovsky probably also believed in the idea of an irretrievably lost golden age.

  Tarkovsky has a reputation of a pensive, sinister, gloomy prophet-saint, famous for three hour films full of endless contemplative scenes fixated on nature, the rural and antiquity as opposed to industry, cities and modernity in general. Yet despite saturation with symbols and obsession over nature, if you examine the films closely, something quite modern emerges. Of the four most quoted films in the West - that is: Andrey Rublev, Stalker, Solaris and Mirror - two of them are starkly modern, futuristic, and adaptations of SF literature; the two others, most notably Mirror, are usually quoted to prove Tarkovsky’s love for obscurantism and dismissal of everything later than JS Bach and the old masters, like Breughel or Leonardo. Andrey Rublev sits uncomfortably as a portrait of an artist, who is critiqued for his innovation: a clear alter ego self-portrait of Tarkovsky himself and his ambivalent relations with the communist authorities, which did not begrudge him money for usually extremely opulent and expensive productions. It is enough to quote one scene from Solaris, when the characters have a videophone conversation, one sitting in a bucolic little hut in paradisiacal forest surroundings, while another is in a car, which turns out to be on an extremely high-speed highway around a grim, menacing metropolis. The sequence that ensues is one of the most mysterious in the whole of Tarkovsky’s career. Right from the heavenly greenery we’re taken on a crazy ride through the never-ending flyovers and tunnels, Brutalist skyscrapers, slabs and blocks, accompanied only by an uncanny noise, which turns out to be an extremely futuristic, now cult soundtrack by electronic composer Eduard Artemiev. What is this city and does Tarkovsky look at it with fascination or repulsion? Probably both, and this is what makes it such a thrilling scene still today.

  1.5 Eye to eye with history, Budapest’s cemetery of communist sculpture, Szoborpark

  The universality of Stalker and the source of its ongoing inspiration regardless of nationality has several reasons. One is its status as a universal image of decaying, post-industrial civilisation, a sinister glimpse of the real cost of industrialization in terms of people and climate, where the happiness and comfort of some is paid for by the poverty and crumbling lives of others. Is it though a critique or a complete rejection of it? Tarkovsky was neither a liberal intellectual, nor purely a “yurodivy” - a holy fool or a shaman, living only on spiritual values. He was an uncanny mixture of both, applying his westernized doubts to the (according to some), incurably “crazy”, irrational part of the Russian soul, necessarily in love with despotism, tsarism and nationalism, and his fanatically spiritual part was undermining the possibility of seeing anything positive in late Western civilization. This wasn’t, importantly, a stance of any of the authors of the novels he adapted: Stanislaw Lem of Solaris famously rejected his novel’s adaptation, while the Strugatsky brothers’ novella Roadside Picnic adapted for Stalker is significantly more rigorous and less inclined to existentialism than Tarkovsky’s view.

  It’s a strange candidate for a patron saint of hipster land explorers. And paradoxically, this mixture gave a very coherent, at least on film, worldview, in which neither is true: we see clearly that neither the cynical, self-pitying, hollow Poet’s reasoning, nor a fanatical conviction of the Professor, is correct. The Stalker himself, an incurably melancholic, unhappy creature was by many compared to a Gulag prisoner, not only because he famously says the enclosed Zona is nothing in comparison to the “prison that is the world”. Geoff Dyer, an English essayist and author of the latest book-length interpretation of the film, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, confirms this by giving us a rather sentimental quote from Anne Applebaum’s GULAG on the never-ending “zone behind the barbed wire”. Dyer’s shot-by-shot analysis, despite its over 200 pages, seems strangely abortive in how little of the essence of the film it delivers. Everything becomes obvious: Zona is USSR, Stalker is a victim of the regime, the regime is eternal, there’s no escape.

  And yet, the Zona fascinates: fascinates the characters in the film and now the scavengers, who want nothing more than be in it. Why? Slavoj Žižek suggests that its popularity is prompted exactly by its prohibition: its properties are augmented by the fact they are somehow wrong, bad for us. Lacanian interpretations of the Real as an area of exclusion prompting its power aside, the ex-communist area, as possessive of dark forces is for that reason precisely popular among the Westerners. The bad thing is that what they do, the money they leave in the former East is based on this place staying toxic: remaining forbidden, radioactive, sick. And the guarantee this world can remain sick is that where we come from remains safe and healthy. This has an additional touch of the macabre, in that this film had a number of “victims”, a true chain of corpses behind it. It was not shot in Russia, but in Estonia, near Tallinn, at two deserted power plants on the Jagala River and several other toxic locations, like a chemical factory, which was pouring toxic liquids. At least three people involved in the production, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Larissa Tarkovska and Tarkovsky himself, died of cancer in the aftermath.

  This perception of the former East as a constantly sick place, needing our help/advice/political intervention is enduring. It also prompts the specific kind of nostalgia after communism, Ostalgia. The neoliberal governments of the ex-communist countries, like Estonia or Ukraine, are only too happy to exploit this for their perhaps irrational yet profitable interest. Estonia based even its cultural offer for the film-makers and other creative industries as a “land of Stalker”. Toxic ruins keep influencing the imagery of the natural catastrophe in new generations of films, like Hollywoodian blockbusters Chernobyl Diaries or The Darkest Hour. Another example of this mutual misunderstanding is Baikonur, formerly Leninsk, in Kazakhstan, the city of the Soviet space programme still launching Russian satellites, which people usually think is a dead, abandoned area. The deserted post-nuclear landscapes of Stalker were recalled even during the recent tragedy of Fukushima by a Guardian journalist. Yet there is little Western interest in contemporary cultural and political issues in these places, not only because in the situation of civilisational an
d economical weakening, the ex-Bloc was left with the choice between the manipulation of oligarch-driven economy or death, abandoned by the state support. The recent Euro 2012 tournament in Poland and Ukraine saw the England team and its fans visiting the reactor, alongside Auschwitz in Poland.

  The wisdom of Tarkovsky’s films was that they offered a kind of post-religious, post-spiritual consolation in the empty world “after God”, in a way that was neither simplistically existential nor devoid of a kind of higher moral stance. It’s the mystery of Tarkovsky how he understood so well the awkward spiritual side of the seemingly mechanical process of industrialization, a legacy of the Bolshevik regime he no doubt hated. Like Kafka, who worked in a gigantic insurance company and got an insight to bureaucracy as a universal model of the modern world, Tarkovsky saw through the USSR and the strange ambiguity between the system and the modernization, the tension between Western capitalism and supposed socialism; as a director and visionary, he understood their strange interdependence in the world pushed by mechanisms of history, man’s striving for perfection and cynicism of politics, creating a world balancing between utopia and hell on earth. Yet as Putin’s Russia recently strives towards a nationalistic orthodoxy, tourism based on seeing the former USSR as a toxic Disneyland ceases to be as innocent as it may initially seem.