In the summer of 2022, a friend invited me to write an afterword for a theme section of the Baltic Worlds journal about what it was like to be young and bohemian in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. Much of the theme section revolves around the philosophy department of St. Petersburg University. That is why my friend thought I might have something to say about the whole thing.
Baltic Worlds is an open-access magazine, so you can download the entire theme section for free. I really enjoyed reading the other contributions. The pictures are also great.
Below is my piece, with the editor’s title.
The Weimar Republic Analogy Seems Unavoidable
I went to university in 1996—2001, a few years later than the contributors to this issue. My alma mater, if one can call it that, was a lowly teacher-training college on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Temporally, spatially, and socially, my university experience was a kind of missing link between today’s Russia and the lost paradise described in this collection of memoirs.
On the one hand, I do remember a grim crumbling city where I felt like nothing could ever again be forbidden. Freedom, it seemed, had somehow triumphed once and for all. I also remember not caring much whether our student dorm had a functioning shower (it didn’t) or reliable heating (the temperature in our room could get as low as 8º). What mattered was that I got to read all those books you could never find in my hometown. I got to learn English and German and feel like I was reclaiming my place in a world where I was always meant to live.
At the same time, I was keenly aware that living in that world required a decent salary. Like some of the contributors, I had a vague interest in philosophy when I left school, but majoring in it never occurred to me back then.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, my university was Putin’s Russia in a nutshell well before Putin. The university management was ignorant and authoritarian in equal measure; students were already being forced to collect signatures for a pro-Kremlin party; a special department was already in place for studies of the “Russian soul” and other pseudo-scholarship with an imperialist slant. Four years into my degree, my roommates and I were personally grilled for an hour by the university president because I had drawn a picture showing Lenin as a bird in a cap and put it up on the wall next to our dorm room. We were told that we were unpatriotic scum; that any “strong” Russian leader had to be respected. I was told to take the picture down and stuff it up my ass.
In other words, as I read the memoirs collected here I find myself occupying the awkward vantage point of someone who is certainly not an outsider but isn’t quite an insider.
With that established, let me say a few words about one aspect of this fascinating collection that I keep thinking about, namely the philosophy.
We often use analogy to make sense of the world. Some analogies turn out to be more useful than others. Some turn out to be more useful than we ever wanted them to be.
One such analogy is that between post-Soviet Russia and the Weimar Republic. Once upon a time, I used to feel that comparing Russia after 1991 to Germany after 1918 was lazy thinking. Sure (I would say), both places were defeated empires. Both had crippling economic crises, widespread poverty, gaping inequality, and fragile democratic institutions. However (I would say), those similarities were superficial. Russia’s “defeat” in the Cold War was very different from Germany’s defeat in World War I. Russia’s “glorious past” was different. Its elite and its people were different. The world around it was nothing like it was in the 1920s or 1930s.
***
AS I WRITE THESE WORDS in the ninth year of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the seventh month of the full-scale invasion, I must admit I was wrong. It is the differences that were superficial, not the similarities.
The memoirs collected here are a case in point. Try as I might to read them without thinking of Germany between the wars, the Weimar Republic analogy keeps popping up in my mind.
To be sure, St Petersburg in the 1990s was not quite Babylon Berlin. The philosophy department of St Petersburg State University (freshly renamed back from Leningrad State University, along with the city itself ) was no Freiburg. And yet, the overlap is too striking to ignore. There is the same exhilarating, shortlived freedom of thought and lifestyle. There are the drugs and the new music. There is the cheerful bohemian poverty. In philosophy, there is the same desire to go “back to the roots”: to an imaginary time when pure spontaneous thought had not yet been corrupted by ideology.
When seen through the Weimar Republic analogy, the prominence of Heidegger in these memoirs seems almost spooky. We learn that in the early 1990s, in the shabby philosophy classrooms on St Petersburg’s Vasilyevsky Island, young post-Soviet men and women dressed in heaven knows what spent a lot of their time reading Sein und Zeit, first published in German in 1927. Their introduction to Western philosophy was a rehash of Heidegger’s lectures, taught by an enthusiastic professor who had first read Heidegger just a couple of years earlier than his students.
***
WITH MY SWEDEN-ISSUED philosopher hat on, I want to be careful here. The reasons why, of all the non-Marxist thinkers of the 20th century, the first post-Soviet philosophy students ended up overdosing on Heidegger are surely complex. At least one of those reasons has little to do with post-Soviet Russia and everything to do with Heidegger’s fame as a particularly forbidden fruit in Soviet academia. Perhaps because of his Nazi connections, Soviet censors saw Heidegger as a “decadent bourgeois philosopher” par excellence. Vladimir Bibikhin recalls in his essay “For internal use (Dlya sluzhebnogo pol’zovaniya)” how happy and proud he was in 1974 to have a hand in a 250-copy print of “the first Russian Heidegger”. The copies were meticulously numbered and distributed among a select few.
With my writer hat on, however, I feel like throwing caution to the wind. So let me suggest that the Heidegger-heavy curriculum of the early 1990s and the whole going-back-to-the-roots project are telling. They say something about Russia’s Weimar Republic experience.
To begin with, they are indicative of what one American observer1 of Russian intellectual life in the 1990s called “a sort of supersaturated space” “crammed” with Western ideas and texts from the previous 70 years. In that space, intellectual imports from the West appeared “stripped of their original contexts and genesis”. Equally importantly, they came stripped of years, often decades, of copious interpretation, ruthless critique, and further refinement.
This often meant that the illusion of rejoining the West, whether philosophically or politically, was just that — an illusion. Modern Western thought, just like modern Western politics, was not a set of authoritative texts or unassailable ideas that you could simply copy or memorize. Instead, it was and is a messy, never-ending argument, carried out by communities and institutions. Even if we take at face value Whitehead’s quip that all of Western philosophy is a bunch of footnotes to Plato, the fact stands that there is no Western philosophy without those footnotes or the debates raging therein.
***
THE SOVIET UNION has been described2 as “the most astounding … case of a philosophy-centric society”, “an amazing sanctuary where philosophy’s nominal public role was greater than anywhere else at any other time”. It is no secret, however, that Soviet philosophy, just like Soviet “democracy”, did not allow for any genuine critique or disagreement. Rather than being an argument, it was a never-ending ritual of invoking the true prophets and doing word magic. In the last decades of Soviet history, it seemed largely accidental that the prophets were Marxist or that the verbiage revolved around dialectical materialism. To paraphrase McLuhan, the ritual was the message; Marxist debates were just as suspect as anything non-Marxist.
Heidegger fit this framework perfectly. In life, he was never one for messiness or pluralism, and he resisted both across the board: from academia to art to politics. In philosophy, he wanted to wipe the slate clean by going back not just to Plato but beyond Plato: all the way to the pre-Socratics, whose thought helpfully survives only in tiny fragments open to creative incantation.
Heidegger was a fan of going back to the roots in his conceptual analysis, too: time and again he strives to elucidate a term by trotting out its old use or the literal sense of the morphemes that make it up. In fact, Heidegger’s fondness for word magic famously goes much further than that. While back at the roots, he felt that he needed a pristine new vocabulary to talk about things. Finally, he had a habit of using his trademark vocabulary in sentences so convoluted that one cannot but suspect deliberate obfuscation.
None of that is a fatal flaw for Heidegger as a philosopher. Like so many other important thinkers, he was saved from himself by the messy, never-ending argument — in other words, by the international philosophical community he was part of. A fundamental feature of this community is that it can be inspired and fruitfully provoked by whatever you say without ever fully subscribing to your assumptions or methods — or indeed while outright dismissing them.
Another community that saved Heidegger from himself were the Allied forces that defeated the Nazis. While cooped up in the Third Reich, Heidegger used his word magic to praise the Führer, expound German exceptionalism and openly rail against “the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism” [die angelsächsische Welt des Amerikanismus], hell-bent on destroying Europe and the cradle of Western civilization. With the Nazis gone, such rhetoric came to an end. For the 30 remaining years of his life, Heidegger would be spared the temptation to voice his chauvinistic and authoritarian tendencies.
Lone geniuses do not make philosophy. Good leaders do not keep democracy alive. Communities matter. Institutions matter. As Olga Serebryanaya, one of the contributors, puts it, while we were trying to “renew” our thinking, “it was the institutional structure that primarily required renewal”.
***
THE STRUCTURE was never renewed. The fragile new institutions created in the 1990s have since been destroyed or rendered utterly decorative. Russia’s Weimar Republic has gradually mutated into a Reich that is likely to be around much longer than Hitler’s for the simple reason that it has the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet. No Allied forces will be coming to save Russia from itself.
Our memories are all that’s left. That’s not much, but it is more than nothing. The lost paradise described in this issue did exist, however brief or however confined to the philosophy classrooms of Vasilyevsky Island and the cold dorm rooms where we read our precious books and drank our cheap booze.
September 2022
КОНСТАНТИН ЗАРУБИН 
Оставьте комментарий