Condee10/25/2018: 1

The State Face: The Empire's Televisual Imagination[1]

Death of the Empire [Gibel' imperii, 2005], a ten-part series directed by Vladimir Khotinenko andproduced by state television Channel One, was launched around the time of celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the Great Fatherland War. The series, however, celebrated a different war. Its treatment of World War One begins just before the Sarajevoassassination in 1914 and ends with the Brest-Litovsk treaty in 1918. Filmed at shooting locations that stretched from Prague to Moscow, from Kiev to Vilnius, from Karlovy Vary to St. Petersburg (as well as studio sequences in "Japan") and supported by a cast of 479 characters, the series' sweep was truly imperial. Its ambitious cast of major actors (Aleksandr Baluev, Sergei Makovetskii, Sergei Garmash, and so forth) sustained this gesture of imperial panache. The series was awarded the Gold Eagle in January 2006 for best television series, alongside nine other Eagles awarded to Channel One productions for the year.[2]

Against this backdrop of World War One was played out the major theme of the series: the establishment and early fate of Russian counter-intelligence. We may note from the outset that, for this series, counter-intelligence is crafted in a specific mode. Unlike plain old intelligence, counter-intelligence is a kind of necessary and peace-loving defense of imperial borders. It is not so much that Russia spies on anyone; rather, it gathers information on those who themselves spy against Russia. By an extension of this cultural logic—and as a riveting example of the imperial unconscious—Death of the Empire produces a Russia that woulddo two apparently unrelated things well: a.) occupy enormous territory and b.) also be a peace-loving land, a naturalized space, located outside any interrogation about how the empire got so big.

As for the series' major protagonist, Sergei Kostin (Aleksandr Baluev), it is reasonable to argue that this character is presented to us as entirely a figment of the empire's imagination. Just as he periodically dreams of it, it continually dreams of him, sending him on assignments to Vilnius (Episode Four), to St. Moritz (Episode Five) and to Kiev (Episode Nine). Abroad in the world, Kostin demonstrates extraordinary cultural competence in his foreign contacts from Japan to Switzerland—that is to say, from one enemy encounter to another, from one set of military provocations to another across the entire Eurasian expanse. Produced by that expanse, Kostin is at the same time its historical trajectory: behind him (biographically and as a figure of statehood) is the Japanese threat to the homeland; with him right now is the German-speaking threat to the homeland; and in his future implicitly awaits the unmentioned and unmentionable juggernaut of globalization. Through it all, his facial expression is as implacable and unchanging as the empire aspires to be.

Like a number of other male protagonists throughout Russian and Soviet cultural history—Aleksei Merese'ev (Story of a Real Man, 1947), Aleksei Voropaev (Happiness, 1947)—Kostin is an amputee.[3] His truncated arm does not hamper his masculine appeal; indeed, the shortness of his arm is the inverse measure of his virility. At the same time, Kostin's stump arm functions as a mark of ambiguity: either, as one memory sequence suggests, it was lopped off in the Russo-Japanese War mentioned above; or perhaps it is simply a lyrical variation on Stalin's withered arm.

But Kostin—functioning as a strategic composite—also conjures up another political figure. Like Putin, he comes to leadership through the security service, where discipline, loyalty and a "need-to-know-basis" incuriosity are the foundational virtues. He is distinct amongst his colleagues for his mastery of Oriental ritual fighting—kendo, Japanese Samurai swordsmanship, rather than Putin's karate—and for his mastery of the enemy's languages. Finding himself beyond the Eastern imperial border, Kostin speaks Japanese; finding himself beyond the Western imperial border, Kostin speaks German. Were the borders of the empire unexpectedly to expand—as empires by definition oftendo—Kostin would be already be linguistically chez soi at the new, outer periphery. And as with Putin, Kostin's only shortcomings—as his subordinate points out early in the series—are his imperskie zamashki ("imperial ways").

The ten-part narrative, each a discrete unit, combines detective story with historical epic. The series is held together by four sleuths: in addition to Kostin, there are his two assistants in counter-intelligence, Ivan Karlovich Shtol'ts (Marat Basharov), and Nikolai Alekseevich Strel'nikov (Andrei Krasko). The fourth major character—Kostin's foil and intellectual equal—is Aleksandr Mikhailovich Nesterovskii (Sergei Makovetskii), a university professor. As a foursome, their collective job—at which they eventually fail over an agonizing stretch of ten hours—is to stave off the death of the empire. Our collective job, watching that demise with them and through them, is to participate in the empire's continuity. Our viewing practices are invited to construct that continuity in the realms of ritual andbelief, outside of which continuity has little independent existence.

To that end, before us is displayed the transitional period from Empire One to Empire Two, from the dynastic to the socialist empires, with salutary exemplars of honor and integrity, loyalty and grace, work discipline and uninhibited clannishness. We, survivors of the transition from Empire Two to Empire Three, are ideally situated in history to imagine that continuity, funded, not surprisingly, by state television Channel One.[4]

The series' setting, therefore, is solicitously similar to the viewer's own setting a century later: just after the turn of the century, in a time of incipient war and escalating conflict, when the lines begin once again to blur between the military and the intelligence services, between that intelligence and the intelligentsia. Indeed, the line from "intelligence" to "intelligentsia" turns out to be circular: Professor Aleksandr Nesterovskii, a legal scholar at the University of St. Petersburg, had earlier been a detective, then became an academic, only to move on—through the exigencies of war—to counter-intelligence when the borders of the homeland were once again threatened. This is the kind of intellectual—just as Khotinenko is the kind of filmmaker—that state television needs: dedication to the state, democracy without liberalism, and—in the case of the film object itself—mass culture over popular culture.[5] As one industry critic reassures us, "the authors of the project do not intend to strain the viewer with a confused narrative of those years that were complex for our country" (Sterkhova). Death of the Empire belongs—less historicallythan ideologically[6]—to the same loosely associated constellation as the Fandorin series: Aleksandr Adabashian's Azazel [2002], set in Moscow of 1876, Djanik Faiziev's Turkish Gambit [Turetskii gambit, 2005], set in 1877, and Filipp Iankovskii's Councilor of State [Statskii sovetnik, 2005], set in Moscow of 1891.

I will not rehearse in great detail the Russia shared by these films, other than to say that they celebrates a splendiferous étatism, extolling the benefits of participating—at as high a level as personal contacts may allow—in the mechanisms of state. Indeed, in interviews and publicity releases Khotinenko makes no secret of his preference for strong state control: 'There is simply no governmental mechanism for the regulation of such situations [as the present political climate]. Almost everything is held together through the will of the president, thank God [emphasis mine]" (Piatunina). It is in this context that independent culture—that is to say, culture not produced by state television—might be worthy of special scrutiny, both within the diegesis of the series and in the contemporary worldview of Channel One.

I. A Film and a Corpse

The series begins reflexively: a film and a corpse. Both are bad. Indeed, in this post-Soviet television series, filmmaking regains some of its Soviet-era political urgency as it is recycled through this narrative of early counter-intelligence. Episode One draws us in by its suggestion that cinema was a medium that transferred secret information about military installations across political borders. Treacherous cinema professionals, including the film editor Zenevich at the Renaissance Production Company, have smuggled air-balloon photographs of the Russian imperial border near Kars in northeast Turkey. Filming becomes coded as a form of potential espionage. As citizen-viewer, we are disheartened to learn that the situation in literature is no better. Here in Death of the Empire, unofficial literature that manages to elude censorship is no longer the vauntedsamizdat of the dissident era, but rather something suspect anddisruptive: the gloomy and pseudo-prophetic New Iliad by the "Ivan Kassandrov" (a reference to Cassandra's prescient abilities) is not mere sham mysticism, but scurrilous defeatism, abetting the enemy in time of war, and well within the purview of Kostin's vigilant counter-intelligence. And beyond cinema and literature, even a theatre performance of Blok's Puppet Show [Balaganshchik, 1906] provides a furtive venue for espionage. All in all, art is a volatile enterprise: left inadequately supervised, it is ever susceptible to appropriation by the state's enemies. The only solution is careful scrutiny of artistic codes, coupled with state support for the loyal few.

Khotinenko's series is replete with characters who carry encrypted information—drawings, ciphers, maps, instructions, letters—across borders in an unending variety of evil ways: inside the heels of their shoes, tied to the legs of homing doves, inside false fur that is strapped to a dog's body, tattooed in invisible ink on a spy's torso, screened as a backdrop in amusement-park rides, etched on the inside of hard-boiled eggs. This subversive literacy takes on increasingly fantastic forms, espionage stunts each more inventive than the next, whereas state literacy, like Kostin himself, is laconic, paramilitary, and without affect, its reverse-theatricality deriving from its flatness, "naturalness," and apparently inert features.

Eventually, Episode Severn provides a more lyrical mode: ancient, 130-year-old carp who link the early twentieth-century characters backwardto the late eighteenthcentury of Catherine II, just as the viewer-witness—watching early twenty-first-century Russian television—completes this trajectory. The ring found in the carp's mouth provides a fairy-tale element, interpellating us into an organic and naturalized world of circular loyalty and cultural continuity from Catherine's imperial spectacle to our own televisual spectacle.

II. À trios: Empire between War and Revolution

On the website of Channel One, one finds an instructive tagline for the series: "At the basis of the film is the history of the emergence and establishment of the Russian counter-intelligence […] when first World War One, then the Great Socialist Revolution shook the empire."[7] Note that the empire, the passive member of the sentence—the direct object in the accusative case—is "shaken" (a verb with sexual overtones in the original) by war and revolution. Khotinenko settles scores with both, but in very different ways.

World War One was, in many respects, among Russia's forgotten wars.[8] Often displaced in both popular memory and state discourse by the October Revolution, World War One was largely constructed in the Soviet memory system as a conflict that served the economic interests of capitalism and the imperialist elite, a war settled only by the acumen of a new Bolshevik leadership in the name of international class solidarity. Death of the Empire, by contrast, displaces that Soviet version with two contending scripts. At the imperial center, the War is "normalized"; its commemorative practices are drawn more closely similar to Western patriotic models. The imperial capital, even in wartime, is an architectural showcase, as true European capitals are supposed to be; capitalism is flourishing, as it normally does in Western cinema; the trajectory of a Western modernity is on track; the war is scripted as a defense of family and fatherland.[9] At the periphery, by contrast, the War is infused with tropes of a later Soviet era and a very different, socialist modernity: vigilance at the borders, unquestioning dedication to the state mission, suspicion of foreigners, and so on, more appropriate to the discourse of World War Two, stressing the virtues of Soviet patriotism, militarism, and national honor, rather than international class solidarity. In this somewhat schizophrenic fashion, the series attempts to re-integrate World War One simultaneously back into Western European commemorative practices and at the same time forward into the military ethos of a later Soviet war.

As for the series' treatment October Revolution, suffice it to quote one viewer's remarks:

It turns out [in the series] that they changed the signs from minus to plus, and the other way round. If only it were that simple in reality—if someone's a Bolshevik, then he's the last bastard on earth. If he's not a Bolshevik—he's an ideal hero with the intelligent face of a Sergei Makovetskii. The Russian people split in 1917 in no sense along this line—bad versus good. It was all much more frightening. Why simplify it?[10]

Not all plusses, however, are changed to minuses. The series steps aside from a direct assault on Lenin. Indeed, Nadezhda Krupskaia's cameo appearance demonstrates greater cultural sensitivity than Kostin himself, when the latter is roundly scolded for smoking inside Krupskaia's apartment as a search is going on. But Lenin is absent, and—in his absence—no measure is spared to portray the Bolsheviks as a randomly violent, corrupt, and volatile mob, dangerously detached from the Party's leadership.

The very title—Death of the Empire—evokes a text peripherally familiar to the twenty-first century elite. Spengler's Decline of the West[Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918-22], translated as Twilight of Europe [Zakat Evropy, 1923] to considerable metropolitan acclaim, rhymes conceptually with Death of the Empire. The latter title might be seen as a nostalgic, yet ironic conversation with its early twentieth-century kin: neither Europe nor Russia's empire in fact perished. In Russia's case, its political structures collapsed, but its cultural legacies were re-appropriated and recycled in a fashion that produced the televisual series itself, revealing death, decline, and twilight all as a cyclical rather than linear process.[11]

Indeed, Spengler's Decline lived its own Russian literary career: in Konstantin Vaginov's first novel, the semi-autobiographical roman à clef entitledSatyr Song [Kozlinaia pesn', 1925-27],[12]the protagonist Teptelkin labors under the influence of Spengler, through whose philosophy of history Teptelkin comes to understand the events of October as analogous to the destruction of pagan Rome. In Satyr Song, we might see the Russian refraction most clearly: as the declining Rome is superseded by the barbaric new Christians, so the declining Russian empire superseded by the barbaric Bolsheviks, and so the declining Soviet empire is superseded by the new post-Soviet Russia.[13]

III. The State Face

This series is an interesting artifact for those of us who work in the field of empire, theories of state, and so-called national identity, providing an occasion to explore a paradigmatic shift in the dyad of "individual versus state"and a very different emergent notion of collective subjectivity. For those who remember the Cold War, totalitarian theorists as well as many Soviet friends and colleagues operated within a conceptual system that posited the USSR as an atomized society, tyrannized by a monopolistic state, within which a small number of valorized, but continually endangeredcitizens managed to sustain private selvesthat could speak its true name to immediate family and close friends in kitchen conversations. Solzhenitsyn was an emblematic figure in this regard.

By the 1970s, however, this model came under interrogation first by scholars such as Sheila Fitzpatrick and others who argued in favor of a very different paradigm, one less reliant on the positively inflected individual than on social forces, such phenomena as social mobility, status distinctions and benefits, material concerns. How has this shift affected our thinking about the dyad of "individual vs. state"? On the one hand, the subjectivity of the "individual" has, under the influence of Foucault and Althusser, ceased to be thought of as a stable and coherent self. Displacing the assumption of the human as a unique and individual personality, such younger scholars as Jochan Hellbeck and Stephen Kotkin have argued the notion of the "fashioned self," the self that learns to "speak Bolshevik," and in so doing is constituted as a subject within and by the Soviet regime of truth. Homo soveticus, therefore, as Zinov'ev had negatively inflected that term, loses all normative value whatsoever and functions as a descriptive category, that is to say, without the capacity to counterpose an alternative private sphere and therefore unable to lay claim to a personal, subjective truth as (in Hellbeck's words) as a "pure and power-free domain" (111).[14]

More relevant than the individual personality here, however, is what happens at the other end of the dyad, the imperial state. Long ill-suited to the model of state deriving from Weber's seminal "Politics as a Vocation" (1918)—wherein the statemanages human affairs in an objective, rule-driven, and orderly fashion—Soviet state rendered little evidence of a presumptive evolution toward an impersonal, essentially faceless, bureaucratic institution, but was marked instead by what might be described as patrimonialism, neo-traditionalist exchange, and personalist, informal practices. Research by such scholars as Jerry Hough, T. H. Rigby, and John Willerton—and more recently Geoffrey Hosking, Terry Martin, and Joel Moses—have variously challenged the inevitable impersonality of the modern state, suggesting by contrast that the Soviet state in particular, whatever its own discourse about impersonality, had functioned instead as a set of cooperative networks, mutual services, reciprocal alliances, thus raising interesting questions about the representational strategies of state-commissionedtexts as Khotinenko's Death of the Empire. The series, in this sense, an over-determined text, participating in Channel One's own genealogical history: whether or not Kostin ever existed, state television nevertheless requires the physical embodiment of a collective personality that most adequately expresses the congeries of which it is a small part: the fierce loyalty, vigilance, clannishness, and so forth, covered over by the impersonal, expressionless mask of the modern sphinx-state, recognizable to us in the imaginative sphere as, among other things, Kostin.