Russia and fear

“The first night they come and pick a flower from our garden, and we don't say anything,” begins a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), written in Soviet times, to describe how totalitarianism can make its way.

“The second night, they no longer hide, they step on the flowers, they kill our dog and we don't say anything,” the verses continue, increasingly metaphorical.

In the end, the terror of fear is evoked, the human feeling that paralyzes and that allows all dictators to be sustained, including Vladimir Putin: “Until one day, the weakest of them enters our house alone, steals the moon from us and , knowing our fear, tears our voice from our throats.

And because we didn't say anything, we can't say anything anymore.”

Throughout Russian history, there have been individuals who challenged these established rules with their courage;

Alexei Navalny is the last of them.

They knew they would pay a high price for it, often the price of a life.

And the fear for one's own life is nothing compared to the awareness that they can take revenge through the people close and dear to them.

“In the grave lies the husband, and in prison is the son: pray for me,” Anna Akhmatova describes her life situation in the poem

Requiem

(1935-1940).

Years later she would write an ode to Stalin with the simple goal that the only close relative she had left alive, her son Lev, would survive.

Should we judge her?

The perversity of governors who rely on the psychology of fear to perpetuate themselves in power has countless examples in Russian history.

Pasternak rejected

the Nobel Prize in Literature to essentially protect those closest to him.

Despite this, the woman who inspired the protagonist of

Doctor Zhivago

suffered serious reprisals, like the writer himself until the end of his days.

When on one of my last trips to Russia I was sitting with a friend on the bench in front of Pasternak's tomb, criticizing Putin's power, she whispered to me: "Be careful what we say, under this wooden bench they placed listen in the communist era, to spy.

“Those who come to honor a writer like Pasternak have always been considered enemies of the country.”

Putin also wants to sow fear outside Russian borders—apart from the war in Ukraine and other sporadic war conflicts in areas that were part of the Soviet Union—and in the Western world he flirts with the possibility of using nuclear weapons. that Russia has as a last resort.

“If they consider me cruel, I will be terrible!”, they say Ivan IV, nicknamed

the Terrible

, exclaimed in the second part of his regime.

“Putin is revealing himself to be a new Stalin,” stated more than ten years ago another Russian friend, former journalist and former historian who—precisely because he thought freely—was forced again and again to change jobs.

“Don't exaggerate,” I replied, imagining that a person who had already experienced fear in Soviet times ends up seeing demons everywhere.

He wasn't exaggerating.

He alone knew better the mechanisms that the political despotism that he rules in his country has always used, at least from the time of Ivan the Terrible to the present day - with a short respite during the time of perestroika

-

.

I have not asked any of my Russian friends or colleagues if they have gone to vote or what they think of these last elections;

They know it's a farce, but they can't do anything.

Talking to me about how censorship has returned in art and culture, which is theoretically prohibited by the current Russian Constitution, one of them made the following diagnosis: “When we celebrated the end of communism, no one could imagine that an even worse time would come.” than that one.

This spring they will elect the current president for the sixth time;

I am afraid that I will no longer live to see someone other than him in power.”

As Putin's policies increasingly close the siege around the population of his country, some memories of the times when a certain democracy began to be breathed in the streets of Russian cities at the end of the last decade of the century XX come not only with sadness, but also with uncertainty: did they ever really exist?

Next to a portrait of Navalny in a large graffiti in the Russian capital, “hero of our time” was written immediately after his indecipherable death in a Siberian prison.

This is the title of the only novel by Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), another of the brave men who, when Pushkin had already died, accused the tsarist power of that time: “And you will never wash, with your black blood, the innocent and pure blood of the poet, the just blood.”

These verses can now be read on the Ramblas of Barcelona, ​​in an improvised monument to honor Navalny, the last of the martyrs who fought for (more) freedom in Russia.

But all these brave figures left their mark more on Russian cultural or spiritual life than on its material history.

Tamara Djermanovic

is a writer and professor at the Pompeu Fabra University.

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