Issue #29/54, December 17 - 29, 1998  

by Dar Zhutayev

He's wearing a business suit,
Gold-rimmed glasses, His attache-case is bursting with bucks... But here WE come.
Out with his guts, head impaled on a stake, we're gonna spend his bucks on beer and rock 'n roll.
Kill the Yankee!
The star spangled banner
Flushed down the toilet sink...

This is the kind of sentiment you are likely to encounter in contemporary Russian rock lyrics. This particular one is by alternative bard Alexander Nepomnyashchy, whose songs can always be distinguished by their impeccable logic ("If a cop is beating you up, you have the right to kill the cop!!!"). But the real question is, why don't we Russians act it all out? Just think of it: charred corpses of USAID employees hanging from trees, Moscow offices of foreign companies looted and burned, innocuous asexual Western ladies subjected to various barbaric forms of molestation... Gee, that would be fun! And if Russia's present, er, bizarre socioeconomic situation is really our own doing (we shouldn't have let our country be colonized by the West in the first place--and capitalism is SHIT in any national garb)--what of that? At least reducing any Americans or Europeans in sight to hamburger would make us feel a lot better. So why don't we?

Mark Ames, ever concerned about the fate of Moscow's dwindling eXpat community, asked me to answer this question. For me personally, there is no problem with the answer. The only problem is how to put it in words. This, no doubt, has something to do with the mysterious Slavic soul and its intuitive wisdom. And the reason why so many Westerners are able to walk our streets unmolested is connected with this same mysterious soul. ANY other nation in the world but us... But I'll try to dissect my intuitive feelings into coherent postulates, as I am in great need of those shining symbols of all good Western values: Democracy, the Free Market, Political Correctness--bucks. At the time of writing this I'm downright hungry. So here goes.

First of all, the West and all it stands for is the great shining nucleus of our sordid life, something we aspire to and are always ready to lick the boots of, something that gives our existence a raison d'etre. Think of it--what would make the life of a Russian engineer or, say, a provincial teacher receiving his salary in coffins (an actual occurrence somewhere in Siberia this summer) worth living? Only one thing, only one exalted aspiration--to get a job with Coca-Cola or Proctor & Gamble and become a human being at last, instead of the non-person that anyone throwing in his lot with Russia now is. Hell is other people, said Jean-Paul Sartre (an observation not surprising from someone living with Simone de Beauvoir). For us now, it is more like heaven is other people--Westerners.

This attitude has gotten down to the level of elementary school education. A schoolmistress in my hometown admonishes her pupils whenever they get naughty: "Children, you've got to behave yourself and study well, or else you won't be able to emigrate to the West!" And my friend, a philosophy student with Leftist inclinations, confesses that whenever he sees a European or American girl in the age group from 16 to 60, brutal sexual molestation is the last thing that occurs to him. The thing foremost in his mind at such moments is a vivid picture of the villa in the Canaries he is going to buy when he marries her. For guys like me, a foreign connection is our only chance of spending a night at a decent nightclub. I remember being out with a friend one night, listening to Alexander Laertsky at Tabula Rasa, with just enough cash between us to buy a single 50-gram shot of vodka. There we met two middle-aged ladies from the French embassy who were really impressed with our good looks and ability to discuss Foucault in French. So they offered to get us drunk and the prospective follow-up of the evening was not difficult to guess... I didn't protest at all, while my friend managed to summon enough patriotic pride to say curtly that we'd come there for the music. I continue to reproach him for his nationalistic imbecility to this day.

We look to the West as the source of all inspiration, the Promised Land. I am not going to reiterate all those crusty historical stereotypes about Russia perennially lagging behind Europe, about its ambiguous inferiority/superiority complex towards the latter. I do not propose to explain the phenomenon at all, but... A stage director of my acquaintance spent a couple of weeks in Germany with his theater and when he came back he could not bring himself to see people at all, pick up the phone, open the door when the bell rang, anything. He just lay on the couch for two weeks, suffering from culture shock. My own erstwhile girlfriend once went to Germany (Germany again!) and the sight of those ubiquitous flowers in pots and clean-swept sidewalks did something to her way down deep. Before you could say "Down with World Imperialism!" she had jilted me and found herself a German husband. Good thing that when my wife went to that accursed land, Germany, to attend a conference, she was so drunk all the time she had to be heaved into the car like an inanimate object on her way back.

So how can we begin to think of those lofty symbols, those sacred cows-Westerners--in connection with such crude notions as lynching, necklacing, or hanging? Destroy our own sweet Russian Dream? Kill all the Yankees--and be left in the company of true-blue Russian fruitcakes: Gusinsky, Berezovsky, Zurab Tsereteli, with the only consolation of drinking that most indigenous product, Bryntsalov vodka, each bottle bearing the proud motto "We can produce not only good vodka, but also good life for Russians"!

Another possible reason for our all-forgiving attitude to foreigners might be our doubts about the actual existence of the West. I have personally been to some republics of the former Soviet Union and can testify to the fact that they really are there. Not belonging, however, to the inner circle of those selling laundry detergents or tampons, I have no means of going abroad and verifying the existence of Europe or the United States. What if the world really ends at the old Soviet borders and west of Lviv or Brest you can see ocean waves splashing and the trunks of those elephants on which the Earth is supposed to rest? In that case Paris, New York, and LA are actually located somewhere in western Ukraine, and Tokyo is somewhere on Kamchatka peninsula.

I discussed this with my Texan friend, Richard A. Smith from Dallas. He was elusive, to say the least, in his answers and would not tell me unambiguously whether his home state is co-located with western Ukraine or not. Once he even explicitly wrote in an e-mail message, "Greetings from the Lone Star State, a subdivision of western Ukraine." If I am right in my suspicions, Europeans, Americans, and Japanese are ordinary Soviet people, like ourselves, only weirder. Now, what possible harm can a western Ukrainian do?

We are tolerant of Westerners because we are accustomed to think of them as otherworldly beings: coming either from a superior world or from a non-existent one, or both. We have far too many problems to tackle stemming from our own, worldly, domestic, affairs. Until we have strung up the last New Russian pig, there is little danger for foreigners.

P. S. But only until then. After I had already finished this article I came across some information sure to provide food for thought for those who became too complacent after reading my meditations above. I managed to communicate with an underground group engaged in clandestine operations aimed at, as they put it themselves, "purifying Russia of American influence and Americans themselves." The organization's name is the Russian Rebel Army (RRA). At the appointed hour at Kotlyakovskoye Cemetery in Moscow, I was approached by three men in crew cuts and leather jackets. One of them introduced himself as Colonel Krutov, Commander-in-Chief of RRA Detachments in Moscow and the Moscow Region, the two others, as Chief of Staff Colonel Ublyumkin and RRA Chief Expert Dr. Zaitsev. I asked them several questions and received exhaustive answers.

Q. What is your organization's purpose?

A. The only conceivable way for Russia's tortuous revival is the liberation of its territory from American imperialism and great-nation chauvinism via the physical elimination of all US citizens, their agents of influence and sympathizers residing in that territory. The main goal of our organization is the restoration of Russia's 1913 borders and declaring war against any relevant states refusing to voluntarily incorporate themselves into Russia.

Q. How large is the RRA's membership?

A. The RRA formed only recently, but there are already more than a thousand members in its ranks. Among our militants there are many anti-American and pro-Russian former officers of the KGB, spetsnaz, and Internal Affairs Ministry. Many of them have seen action fighting American imperialism in Yugoslavia or taking part in guerrilla warfare all over the world. Even now we are in possession of sufficient military resources to physically eliminate every American citizen residing in Russia.

Q. What are your plans for the near future?

A. A large-scale purification campaign is scheduled for the middle of 1999. Its main objective is to dramatically reduce the size of the American community in Moscow. Analysis shows that the most efficient tactics to achieve that objective is surprise armed assaults on places with the highest concentration of American citizens, i.e., nightclubs and restaurants with a predominantly American clientele, as well as the offices of American companies and English-language newspapers. We have set up a special research group to determine primary targets and we find the eXile's Bardak nightlife section a particularly helpful source of information.

Q. How do you determine who is an American? Just by his/her passport? (This question was answered by RRA expert Dr. Zaitsev.)

A. My colleagues and I have made a thorough study of the problem. Our conclusion is that Americans and West Europeans constitute a pronounced racial type with marked psycho-physiological peculiarities. To put it more simply, we have designed a device, similar to the race-o-meter widely used by Comrade Zyuganov's CPRF. While the race-o-meter measures the degree of a person's ozhidovleniye (Yidization), our apparatus uses the shape of an individual's skull and his bodily proportions body to determine, with 96 percent accuracy, the degree of that individual's Americanization (or Westernization).

Dr. Zaitsev offered to test the apparatus on me. To my relief, my degree of Americanization/Westernization turned out to be even less than the average level for Russia.

In conclusion, Colonel Krutov made the following statement: "We are humanists. That is why we have decided to give this interview to the eXile--to warn any Americans remaining in Russia to leave the country while there is still time before purification operation begins. Now, with the purpose of better informing the public, we are constructing the RRA Internet site. There one will be able to find our official documents."