Ray Evans Harrel:
>I've said this before but Russia's failure depends upon where you look.
Did Russia
>fail with those Ice Skaters or Olympic Athletes? How about with scholars in
>esoteric fields? Or taking peasants and making them into Doctors, Scientists,
>Writers, Composers and hundreds of performing companies filled with what Peter
>Senge desires for American private industry. It all depends on where you look.
>Or consider the former Yugoslavia, even though he ultimately failed,
Marshall Tito
>created a national consensus that allowed Serbs to live with Moslems and Croats
>with the finest standard of living in the third world and one of the most
educated
>work forces in the world. Remember Michael Chussodovsky? (Sp?) But Tito
died and
>the IMF screwed it up.
Goodness! A voice from the past, and a very welcome one. Don't ever go
away for so long again Ray. We've missed you.
When guys like me visit Russia, we see the chaos and not the beauty.
Perhaps this is because we in the west come from a long tradition of seeing
truth, beauty, rationality and order as being part of an inseparable
package. Russians, being part European but part Mongol, Turk and many other
things, have moved through a history of varied traditions in which varying
dosages of truth and beauty were mixed with varying dosages of irrationality
and chaos. By the most brutal of means, Peter the Great sought to make them
European rationalists, and to see truth and beauty as Europeans ought. He
succeeded in part, and it is probably to him that we owe much of what is
European in Russian music, literature and art.
There was a time of openness and experimentation in the arts before the
Revolution, but it faded out rather quickly after that. Stalin, who was
more oriental than European in culture and personality, pulled Russia back
into its history of fearfulness and suspicion of the west (and the south and
the east, and just about everything else). The arts remained superficially
European, but the rules under which they were pursued or performed and the
purposes they served were those of oriental despotism. Many painters,
musicians and poets left Russia. If they stayed, they were suppressed,
killed, exiled to the gulag or emasculated and made to toe the official
line. You should read Vitaly Shentalinsky's "Arrested Voices" to get a
flavour of the times.
You are right, Ray, that Russia produced great dancers and athletes during
the Communist period. But was this because of a genuine interest in dance
or sport, or was it because great dancers and athletes enhanced the image of
the state? Perhaps it doesn't matter. Great is great, whatever the
purpose. But it does matter in that you were allowed to be great in only
one way. To be great in ways that were not officially sanctioned was of
little value, and was in fact very dangerous.
The Communist system produced a very large number of "one way" greats -
artists, scientists, writers and philosophers. Russia continues to produce
such people. It still hasn't learned to do otherwise. The problem is that
these people are talented and often enormously skilled, but the system in
which they could function no longer exists. "One way" thinkers were valued
in that system; they are not valued in the system which has emerged. As an
American consultant I met in Moscow put it: "They lack flexibility and
creativity". Walk around Moscow in summer and see the wonderfully rendered
watercolours the sidewalk painters have produced. All are beautifully done,
but all look as though they are of the same thing, and even a little as
though they were done by the same person.
Anyhow, that is my two cents worth for the evening. And again, welcome back
to the list.
Ed Weick
