Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Vasily Rozanov, The Apocalypse of Our Time (Praeger Publishers, New York, 1977; trans. Robert Payne and Nikita Romanoff, pp. 228–9).

Sovok is a derogatory name for all things Soviet, and is also the Russian word for a dustpan.

Famous Soviet singers of the 1930s–60s.

Named after Andrei Zhdanov, who was responsible for that round of purges.

Reforms introduced by Petr Stolypin (prime minister, 1906–11) led to a massive deportation of peasants and prisoners to Siberia. A special type of carriage was introduced for these settlers, consisting of two parts: a standard passenger compartment for a peasant and his family and a large zone for their livestock and agricultural tools. After the Revolution, the Cheka /NKVD found these carriages convenient for transporting convicts and exiles: the passenger part was used for prison guards, the cattle part for prisoners.

The system of prison camps established across the Soviet Union under Stalin. GULAG is an acronym for Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei , the Main Directorate of Camps.

https://www.krugozormagazine.com/show/Brodskiy.2107.html. Krugozor magazine (in Russian), February 2014.

In 1932–3, Stalin ordered the deliberate creation of a manmade famine in Ukraine, which wiped out millions of Ukrainians. The word Holodomor is the Ukrainian (and Russian) word for famine.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/16/historybooks.features.

Varlam Shalamov, The Kolyma Tales , (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1994; Trans John Glad).

Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford University Press, 2013, p. 245).

As cited in The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies , edited by Siobhan Kattago (Routledge, 2016, p. 255).

Etkind, Warped Mourning , p. 245.

The Axis Powers before and during the Second World War were Germany, Italy and Japan. Despite formally signing the Tripartite Pact in 1940, they were united by little more than their common enemies. Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania later joined, as did Yugoslavia – for two days.

Like Spitting Image , Kukly parodied the politicians of the day. The programme was extremely popular in Russia in the 1990s, and President Yeltsin apparently found his own puppet very funny. Putin, however, was unable to laugh at seeing himself portrayed satirically by a puppet, and the show was closed in 2002. In time, the channel that had shown it, NTV, was also shut down.

Vladimir Nabokov, Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1975, p. 36).

Brodsky was expelled from the USSR in 1972 for ‘anti-Soviet activity’. He never published the poem, On the Independence of Ukraine , but he did deliver it on a few occasions at poetry readings.

https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2015/07/03/599078-rossiiskoe-obschestvo-ne-vidit-sebya. Russian Society Can’t See Itself (in Russian), 2 July 2015.

http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/GeneologyofMorals.pdf. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality , (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, trans. Carol Diethe, First Essay, Section 10, p. 20).

https://mercaba.org/SANLUIS/Filosofia/autores/Contempor%C3%A1nea/Scheller/Ressentiment.pdf. Max Scheler, Ressentiment: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau Der Moralen , p. 101, n. 26; translation into English by Louis A. Coser from the text of 1915.

In August 1998 Russia defaulted on its debts and almost overnight the rouble crashed to about a quarter of its value. This made imported goods very expensive, and it acted as a stimulus for Russian industry.

https://www.colta.ru/articles/specials/4887-v-strane-pobedivshego-resentimenta. In the Country Where Resentment Has Triumphed (in Russian), 6 October 2014.

https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2014/07/28/izbezhat-afganistana-2. Sergei Karaganov: Avoid Afghanistan-2 (in Russian), 28 July 2014.

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/46860.

For more on Zhirinovsky and his Party, see Part I, notes 16 and 17.

Dozhd is the only TV station in Russia not controlled by the government. It broadcasts online.

The Dolchstoss im Rücken (‘stab in the back’ theory) was that in the First World War the German Army was ‘undefeated in the field’ and had been ‘stabbed in the back’ – i.e., had been denied support at the crucial moment by a weary and defeatist civilian population and their leaders. This idea gained popularity in Germany in the difficult postwar years of the 1920s and ’30s.

Iampolski, In the Country Where Resentment Has Triumphed.

The extremist ‘South East Radical Bloc’ (SERB), which started up in Eastern Ukraine when the war began in March 2014, and has since been active in parts of Russia.

‘White Guard’ refers to the Russian Civil War of 1917–22, when ‘the Reds’ – the Bolsheviks, who had carried out the Revolution in November 1917 – defeated the supporters of the former Tsarist system and anyone else who opposed them. Collectively, they were known as ‘the Whites’ or ‘the White Guards’. Bunin hated Bolshevism and left Russia in 1920, never to return. He lived most of the remainder of his life in France, until his death in 1953.

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2827530. Why Do We Cry and Pray So Bitterly? (In Russian), 12 October 2015.

The camps in Kolyma, situated in the far northeastern corner of Russia, were considered the most notorious in the whole GULAG system.

Re Holodomor , see above. The siege of Leningrad by the German Army in the Second World War lasted from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944, and cost the lives of one and a half million of the city’s inhabitants. Re Dozhd TV, see note 32.

Alexievich, Why Do We Cry and Pray So Bitterly? .

http://pelevin.nov.ru/texts/pe-t.html(in Russian).

Come and See is a Soviet war tragedy film made in 1985 by Elem Klimov, based on the book Out of Fire (referred to in the text) about the Belarusian villages burnt to the ground with their inhabitants by the Nazis.

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/requiem/.

https://www.mk.ru/politics/2016/11/22/nenakazuemoe-proshloe-nuzhno-li-iskat-palachey-nkvd.html. The Unpunished Past: The NKVD Executioners Should be Sought Out (in Russian), 22 November 2016.

https://iz.ru/news/646830. I Fear Justice (in Russian), 23 November 2016.