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Title: Petersburg
Author: Michel Donnegan
Date: 1995
Language: en
Topics: AJODA, AJODA #42, Petersburg, Russia
Notes: Originally published in “Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed” #42, Fall ’95 — Vol. 14, No. 4.

Michel Donnegan

Petersburg

dyr boul chtchyl oubechtour

skoum vy so bou

rrléz

— Russian futurist manifestoes, 1913

“There is more national character in these five verses than in all the

poetry of Pushkin.”

— Krutcheny

They close the door. They are “among friends”; it is a broad definition

that covers both old relationships and the hosts of the moment. They

will drink. They help each other and search for ’ solutions to

everyone’s problems; money is never an issue here. They joke, we

exchange views, and again they drink and eat. They can end things with

vows of friendship. They remain lucid for a long time. They can laugh at

themselves and at the world. They tell each other what they have been

doing. It is usually generous and warm. The feeling of loneliness

doesn’t exist, and everyone is ready to exclude whoever does not respect

this “community,” “among friends.”

“If they could kill each other, they would do it willingly.” More and

more numerous cars accelerate in pursuit of a passer-by crossing a wide

street. Swinging doors swing back violently against the next person. As

soon as the subway train reaches the platform, passengers who were

waiting rush inside: people have to elbow their way out. They take their

children in their arms as they approach the bottleneck at the escalator,

where everyone brutally forces their way through with their shoulders

and fists. They are crammed together in the buses, when they circulate.

Bags hit people’s knees. Elsewhere, a man insinuates himself into a

waiting line and tries to trick everyone, with an expression that is a

mixture of uneasiness and false indifference. On the Nevsky Prospect,

one passes a disturbing number of faces bruised by blows. In many places

one finds a number of holsters for sale. A former-officer, who is “a

little drunk,” asks our advice: “I’m looking for someone to slaughter.”

One hears very few insults, yells or even comments. It is an insidious

violence, where everyone hates everyone else, where other people are

responsible for misfortunes and difficulties, where their very existence

makes everything worse. It is a hatred that tries to take advantage of

every opportunity to simply and maliciously do harm. Without any

compensation: “That’s life.” And though Russians have always abused each

other in the street, today some discover a fear they were unaware of

until now: a growing one caused by the permanent war of all against all.

There, people don’t burden themselves with any politeness or

conviviality, which, as they do in the West, remove uneasi-ness and

frustration and conceal aggressiveness and contempt. Fear is not afraid

of its effects: hatred is omnipresent and expresses itself

indiscriminately against everyone, mute and straightforward,

opportunistic and unsubtle — a constant veiled vengeance.

Without endless debate, straight out, Russians do not like work.

Production is low and of poor quality; planning is only formally

respected and authority is ridiculed. What counts, apart from wages, is

what you can pick up there. Threats, terror, recruitment and competition

haven’t changed anything. They are still recalcitrant. These “Asian

Barbarians” have neither a head nor the taste for it. Discipline is an

obligation, order a constraint. They don’t expect any enrichment, unless

it is one that results from a collective exchange.[1] The more they are

able to exert themselves in their daily lives for themselves and their

friends, the more they will be indifferent and indolent at work.

Money was not their main preoccupation: the stores filled up and they

could buy. It was just a sinister means that was usually separate from

relationships that ensured survival. They used the money to feed and

clothe themselves; other expenses were residual ones, as opposed to the

West, where an extreme complexity of credit, taxes, social insurance,

rent, insurance, bills, etc., subjugates everyone to the pace of life

that is imposed by it. The social organization did not bind Russians

through the diktat of money: they were largely unfamiliar with it.

Indifference to work and money: here are two terrible evils that modern

states have always recognized as their most formidable enemies. For

them, the West’s contamination by the “spirit” of the East would be the

worst possible case. The most plausible one is fear of a migratory

contagion of the poor populations, reaching the West and its wealth “on

foot” without an initiation into the effort and type of submission that

is required by the hope of attaining that wealth. Since (according to

the propagandists) the world has been divided, until now, between

totalitarianism that the populations of the East were subjected to under

the heel of the police, and western happiness, where people flourish in

a standardized slavery — and this division is finished — from now on,

Russians must be forced to love freedom.

The people of Petersburg have been seized with a feverishness that is

quite new: in addition to waiting in lineups, they will have to run and

compare commodities, take an interest in them and spend time on them

following the “liberation of prices.” The invasion of many new products,

signs of long-awaited abundance, is leading Russians into a pace of life

that they have never experienced until now. The promise of commodities

calls for their participation. The arrangements and schemes that show

their lack of civic-mindedness must disappear. It’s only by grabbing

these Russians by the throat that they will change and submit willingly,

because this is the only way they will be able to survive “the end of

communism and the coming of democracy.” They must get down to work,

acknowledge its advantages, give in to its demands and further reduce

their lives to a sum of activities that they are forced to do and that

have become vital.

In one month the price of everyday products increased by a factor of two

and a half, urban transport by a factor of two and trains by a factor of

two or three. Wages hardly budged. Pensions are a thousand rubles a

month — 3 kilos of sausage, a vague agglomeration of dubious-looking

meat. Rents are going up. At the slightest rumor of a price increase,

shopkeepers empty the shelves, anticipating the profits that speculation

will bring them. Cash shops are proliferating and most people suffer

nightmarishly in front of the windows.

Leave? From now on, the borders of the ex-USSR will be open. But western

states, which have always protested against the shutting in of

populations in the “totalitarian” countries, are increasing difficulties

at their ports of entry in the form of interdictions.

Recently, the Austrian State bought border installations from Hungary

that it had at the time of the Iron Curtain: although it is said that

Hungarians can now leave, their entry into Austria is controlled from

the same watchtowers. Germany is still tolerating a little final easy

access, for a little while. A Russian who bears an invitation must pay

into an insurance policy that is meant to prevent any expense to the

German State. Other western countries are closing their borders de facto

by requiring, with sinister hypocrisy, a mass of documents and

attestations that are hard to assemble. As a last resort, the consul can

block it, without explanation and irrevocably. Money will select people:

every Wednesday there are significant increases in train and air fares

with destinations in the West. As a final toll, the Baltic countries are

slowly setting up a system of visas, which, in cooperation with the

western states, will contribute more, acting as a final filtering

effect.

Neither seventy years of communism nor the brutal offensive by the idea

of money invented the crushing of Russia’s peoples. It was a Czar who

created the city of Petersburg ex nihilo: thousands of forced mujik

volunteers exhausted .themselves in the construction of this caprice.

Men had to be little and despised there: broad streets, a geometrical

convergence toward the center, an architectural monumentalism that was

the result of a mix of western styles, without a trace of the

hesitations, plans and disorder liness of its inhabitants.[2]

Accounts of previous epochs describe street scenes in which lineups

outside supply depots trudge through the mud. Scenes of arrests,

evictions of mujiks, forced labor camps, shortages, emaciated faces and

vodka. The knout has been replaced by the club, which the cops still

hold constantly and threateningly.

Bolshevik propaganda used to rely on the support of communal traditions

to conquer state power. As Czarism’s heir, the communist regime applied

the same principles: subservience, contempt, barbarity and greed. Having

the mentality of a docile functionary was and has always been the norm

of social behavior. More grotesquely than elsewhere, lying, informing,

blackmail, careerism and servility ensured the ruling classes’

preservation and expansion. Membership in the Party, which was

indispensable to social climbing; informing, which was not always

inspired by fear, revealed a civic-minded attitude from which one could

expect many advantages. Submission to ideology and the hierarchy had to

prove its zeal. “One had to force one’s way through the bureaucracy,

enmities, paperwork and stupidity.”[3] There an individual’s worth has

always been measured by his baseness.

As opposed to the western ruling classes, who understood the need to

weaken and domesticate abilities and talents without suppressing them,

the ruling classes of Russia and the ex-USSR always saw in them a deadly

threat that had to be eradicated.[4]

The western powers have achieved this incomparable feat: in all moments

of their lives, citizens use the same language as the State. This

governing apparatus has diluted itself in people’s heads and its

coercive nature has been expurgated: it is defended as a personal

choice, with the same servility and baseness as the ones that exist in

the functioning of communist society. There, lies are consumed, produced

and spat out again as definitive truths, whereas even in Russia official

truths are ridiculed. There, just as the language of the authorities is

seen straight out as propaganda, spinelessness and duplicity, which are

required in social life, are seen as monstrous excrescences. People are

not unaware of self-renunciation; it can be described as an obligatory

degradation, but one that has not lost its ability to judge itself. In

the West, one has to reach the point of great intimacy or anger to spare

oneself the dissembling, hypocrisy and peculiarities that justify arid

reproduce misery in relations among men.

Soviet power was the productive and regulating center that forced every

citizen to submit to a bureaucratic normality made up of careerism and

contempt. It not only dictated the need for it but defined its limits,

which were supposed to force everyone to stay in their assigned place:

it was out of the question for some people’s zeal to be allowed to

offend the hierarchy.

The decline of soviet organization is that of this regulating center.

The desertion of the apparatchiks and the considerable worsening of

living conditions are leaving the behavior gained in the functioning of

communist society leaderless and unmanaged. These upheavals are not

suppressing them, they are aggravating them. Contempt and indifference,

barbarism and greed, pettiness and spinelessness are taken up and

developed by a whole new category of speculators and grabbers. The

hoarding of foodstuffs and products, price increases, and speculation on

everything — they are obeying a new master: money.

Speculators, the “farsos” or “bandits” whose work is underwritten and

maintained by the former powers-that-be, are a type of independent

vanguard that is reproducing the same techniques of despotism: threats

and hope, competition and war. They are imposing money on people as the

bask precondition of survival. This population that is dramatically

suffering the diktats of this new master must now learn to understand

the meaning and idea of money.

Money is not the external exercise of despotic power: it wants to devour

the innermost recesses of the mind and does not tolerate anything that

is foreign to it. It must penetrate minds and colonize tastes, feelings

and aspirations much more deeply than any bureaucratic and ideological

power can. It promises not a fragment of power but universal power, and

in fact must wipe out the old ideologies, which left enclaves where

people could “still breathe.” Police terror is being substituted by the

war of all against all. “The Russians are learning what loneliness is”:

it is a new situation and a new feeling. The exchange of services,

mutual aid and the agreed-upon repurchasing of state production ensured

a stable imbalance in the ex-USSR and the preservation of collective

ties. The idea of money must destroy these vestiges, which are

obstructing its development. “You have to count on your friends less and

count your money more.”

The state has “disengaged itself’[5]: private businesses are

proliferating and stalls are taking up the sidewalks, long unmoving

lines that offer a pair of shoes here, a pack of cigarettes and a bottle

of cognac there, etc., and leave a line for passersby. This market is

becoming the principal market.[6]

And everyone must pay: to the state (which adds a tax to fictitious

bookkeeping), the municipality and the local mafias.

To apply the tax or regulate competition, which have not been made

official by any law that legalizes rackets the way they are in the West,

they have to use force and direct threats. As a result, private militias

are recruited in body-building and karate clubs, when they are not cops

who have left the force but kept their uniforms. These “sportsmen,”

these new dmjenniki, must terrorize people and regulate the overall

orderliness of the market.[7]

At the service of a project that goes far beyond them and will suppress

them, whose on-the-spot managers are, as they have always been,

apparatchiks who have been redeployed — the blatnoi dogs, big

traffickers and all the little men of business, speculation and terror

are just a passing and necessary tool. Like the “golden boys” who worked

so hard in the West during the ’80s to establish and strengthen

financial power over the whole planet, they are ephemeral; here a

monetary gust, there a legislative squall will sweep them aside and send

them back to the garbage cans they were taken from by interests far

superior to their little businesses. All the same, the main thing is

that they are creating the atmosphere and the social climate, defining

the new social relations being imposed by the idea of money.

A vast conspiracy is being set up in Russia. Its foreman is the IMF and

its branches. Russia, which has been a member since June ’92, received a

first loan of a billion dollars[8]. The managerial apparatuses are mere

order-takers. After the long spectacle of East-West conflict, Russia’s

integration, and by extension that of the ex-USSR, is experiencing its

globally programmed impoverishment and collapse first.

Because the ruble will have parity from now on, the National Bank of

Russia, obeying the orders of the World Bank, is setting its value: in

December ’92, in the streets and the banks, the price of a. dollar was

500 rubles. The western countries — which set up the BERDS and are

moaning with lust over Russia, that declared in the context of the

reorganization of the Russian economy that they want to shift 70% of all

produced wealth monopolized by the army to civilian needs — are causing

a quickening decline of the country with the aid of these monetary

manipulations. Their contribution to the “reconstruction of Russia” is

in fact extravagant. Because payment in rabies has obviously become

impossible, only barter, which had already installed itself from the

’70s on, allowed western states to contemplate setting up markets. At

lower prices than those of the international markets, copper, manganese

and other natural resources are its money. Thus, the IMF and its western

organizations are appropriating the country’s wealth at the same time

that they wax indignant about the decline in sanitary conditions, which

for example, forces Russians to buy their syringes in the stalls before

going to the hospital; that they are surprised by the cutoffs of hot

water, electricity and heating for periods of several months; that they

describe the accumulated and multiple ordeals that the Russian people

are being subjected to as the heritage of a past which they have made

such good use of, and which, with their hands over their hearts, they

now declare they want to save.

With the collapse of the ruble and its repercussions on the country’s

“adjustment” (according to the IMPs expression), a constant rise in the

prices of current products adds to this decline daily. It has been a

long time since the slightest threat of an increase made the state fear

social unrest: since prices rise daily, the citizens are imperiously

encouraged to spend their savings quickly, to hold on as long as

possible.

The old “opium war” with alcohol and vodka, which was orchestrated in

Russia by all the ruling classes to exhaust the population and drown

people’s anger,[9] has been revived, reorganized and resupplied by the

western states. Thus, a kind of alcohol that is impossible to find in

the West has appeared in the stalls, the streets and the stores: its

label, following Russian tradition, shows all the medals that testify to

the quality of the product. This imported alcohol, known as “spirte” is

96 proof. But on the label of “Royal,” the most common brand, the

eagerness of the poisoners signs the confession to the conspiracy by

innocently indicating the many and surprising sources of the product —

Californi a, France, Holland and Italy — and whosemanufacturer is

apparently a multinational corporation unknown in the West.[10] Less

expensive than vodka, and tasteless, it is cut with a quarter-liter of

water. Its effects are anesthetizing and can lead to serious nervous

disorders: paralysis and blindness at high doses, that is, more often

than not.[11]

For twenty years now the western ruling class has deepened a type of

domination that had never been experienced before on such a scale: the

days of triumphalism and odes to prosperity are over. For a long time,

western states thought they could maintain a semblance of social peace

with the promise of wealth. A ruse of History; the western poor wanted

even more of this wealth, to the point of sensing the possibility of

realizing it completely at the end of the 70s. The managers therefore

resumed doing what their predecessors did: impoverishing people to

separate them and threatening people to ensure their support. From

economic crises to stock market crashes, from closer and closer wars to

reductions in the standard of living, the reigning lie has instituted

itself as an enormous campaign of intimidation, creating many conflicts

and just as many new threats, which do not call the basic principle of

poverty into question: preserving gains means reducing them; isolation

worsens the breakdown in relationships among men; impoverishment rules

out any universal project. Therefore this maneuver must impose absolute

support for itself, which itself revives the lie. The wealth of the

state lies in this support.[12]

Russia’s current impoverishment, which is no more than an inevitable

tactical moment, originates in the same maneuver. But there, the

population does not give its support to the extent that we are familiar

with in the West. The IMF must act quickly: internal political struggles

can destabilize, slow or check the completion of the operation.

Dependency on the West must be irreversible. Meanwhile, the blow must be

struck now, so it can be generously tended to later. The widespread

collapse in living standards must spectacularly prompt people to feel

compassion and pity.

For the time being, nothing in Russia will allow a real development of

the market economy to take place. The distribution networks are

rudimentary and archaic, the circulation of commodities is hampered

materially and bureaucratically, and the Russian population has not been

completely colonized by work and money. Thus, the country’s collapse

must reach a level high enough to stimulate the guilty conscience of the

West and raise the whole moral, industrial and military armada of

humanitarian aid, which synthesizes the high degree of mixed stupor and

alienation of the western mentality. A promotional show that displays

the aid brought by peoples who are full of happiness to ignorant peoples

that are drowning in misery, it will create the primary distribution and

communication networks — as in Romania in ’89, when the infrastructures

of the humanitarian organizations facilitated the implantation of

western corporations. This harmful benevolence must evangelize on behalf

of the democratic and commercial spirit. It organizes the ideological

and material penetration of the commodity.

The contacts that humanitarian aid already has there are the remnants of

the state apparatus. The “organs,” the apparatchiks and the mafia are

the only ones that hold the key to distribution. With a few slips due to

the recent nature of the operation, they take over shipments sent from

the West and redistribute them at higher prices. Sometimes a few

charitable associations still suffer the setbacks of their naive

extremism: thus, at the beginning of ’92, a German Protestant

organization set out to collect some money and used articles, which were

meant for a hospice in Moscow’s Kiev district. The people in charge

demanded that the shipment be handed over to the administrators

themselves. The cops sequestered the hospice’s managers, replaced them

and seized the collected goods.

In this long process of decline, which is already liquidating thousands

of people and will liquidate more, the new Russian leaders had to show

the westerners proof of their good will. In August ’91, the putsch was

supposed to prove that the ex-USSR was entering a new phase as a fiefdom

of the West. A few tanks and the stern faces of old Stalinists were

supposed to frighten people once and for all, and impress them with the

irreversible nature of the changes that are in progress. Democracy’s

spectacular officialization had to provoke a reaction in the street with

a popular feel to it, one that would defend the present order and show

both people’s hopes and their refusal to return to the past. But

Russians are stubborn, accustomed as they are to mistrusting state lies:

this Yeltsinian show was too much like Tejero’s playacting. Those who

met at the barricades — which in Petersburg wouldn’t even have held up

against the passing of a truck — took advantage of the occasion to meet

and drink and dance together in the streets. Even those who wished the

putsch was real — and there were many of them — don’t seem to have taken

it seriously. What did they have to fear or hope for? In Petersburg, the

commanding officer was the same high-ranking officer who officially

protested the Tbilisi massacre in ’89, and had been transferred after

it. Many Russians say the putsch succeeded, and that it was Yeltsin who

organized it.

Big maneuvers, manipulations, exactions, poisonings, expropriations and

isolation in the name of democratic and commercial freedom are so many

techniques of enslavement that are far too coercive and mundane, and

which run the risk of provoking uncontrolled acts of resistance and

refusal after all. Although Russians only envy the West for the wealth

that is on display there, they want it right away and easily. What they

are lacking is the spiritual dimension that justifies hardships and

describes fatalism and submissiveness as virtues. Apartment blocks,

public transportation and streets are neglected, but churches are right

in the middle of renovations. All kinds of western sects are turning up.

American religious lobbies are. financing propaganda and a share of the

reconstruction of religious buildings. Russians are invited to big

rallies, where preachers promise them happiness in the midst of

suffering (or the opposite). On the Nevsky, groups of priests in

plainclothes distribute luxuriously printed digests of the Bible. The

only advertisement displayed on Moscow walls shows Billy Graham in a

stadium, offering to answer the metaphysical question: “Why?”....

These missionaries sponsored by big American corporations have come to

preach social peace, and present money as the salvation of the soul.

In August ’92, public transport in Petersburg was blocked for ten days:

it was a bosses’ strike organized by the Communist Party. The

Baltyskaya, one of the biggest firms in the city, is the stronghold of

an ultranationalist competitor of Yeltsin’s. The last big strikes of ’91

in Vorkhuta, the Donbass and the Donetz were settled after management

agreed to a tenth of the wage increase that was demanded, accompanied

with insistent threats; in the west there have been massive layoffs.

Apparently the strike was led by the NTS, the old corporatist and

ultra-nationalist organization which stems from Russian emigre circles.

Several movements in the factories and neighborhoods are the product of

a hidden struggle between various political groups that will continue to

exist, with nostalgia and a return to the past as their common viewpoint

— the royalist-czarists, the nationalists, Pamyat, the Communist Party —

whose program consists of profiting exclusively from the decline in

living conditions by outdoing each other in disorganization.[13]

In 1986 there were about 7 million prisoners in the USSR. Individual

struggles and the threat they were able to bring to bear on the

administration resulted in a slight “softening” of the prison regime —

more mail and visits. In early ’92, a congress of the “Memorial”

organization[14] estimated that 50,000 prisoners had carried out acts of

rebellion. The camps for “prisoners of opinion,” to use the official

expression, were closed and psychiatric hospitals are used solely for

their intended purpose. In prisons for young people between the ages of

twelve and eighteen, the color red is violently forbidden, and this ban

has become a pretext for the hierarchies and for a reign of terror among

the prisoners: such and such a prisoner who has agreed to a visit with a

visitor dressed in red, or who has received a package containing a red

object or red food is subjected to all kinds of punishment, ranging from

humiliation to death.

On one hand nostalgia, which wants to revive the past, and on the other

a caricatural and fetishistic rejection of it, seem to monopolize

people’s expression of their refusal.

“There is no future; the future is today” is a remark that is often

heard. Others, who experienced the KGB cellars, the blows, the camps and

the psychiatric hospitals, anticipate forty years of hardships: “The

time it will take for a new generation to forget their parents were

slaves.” Like it does at the end of a long period of imprisonment, when

the enemy was clearly defined, fatalism maintains confusion in the face

of the situation’s complexity and the increase in people’s misfortunes.

“There is no light in Russia today,” an ex-member of SMOT said to us.

“Let’s hope there will never be another communist regime. And though we

are eating even worse now, at least we can read the books we want to.”

Many Russians say they don’t understand at all what is going on anymore.

The world wants to make them ashamed of having put up with so much and

for so long: they defend themselves against it and submit to it. Caught

in the frantic pace of an offensive against their way of relating to

each other in society, and in the lies of an international propaganda

which pretends to feel sorry for them while it starves them, they are

being ordered to lose even the lucidity that allowed them to point out

the rottenness of a world where they had to struggle to get by.

Humor — the “anekdotes” which are often about the unforeseen drawbacks

of alcohol, and which made it through police terrorism, informing and

careerist ambitions — seems to have gotten lost. The most recent jokes

that are still circulating ridicule Gorbachev. There is nothing about

Yeltsin and the imposition of the new laws, and no insolence, apart from

an unhappy cynicism that jeers at the disturbing levels of radioactivity

and the poor quality of food, and which repeats the most sinister

anecdotes that young children tell each other in the West. A musical

style inspired by hardcore and techno-pop, and which mixes in parts of

military marches, has attracted a significant following among the youth,

who call it “depressnaya musika.”

The domesticated slaves of the West indifferently put up with the

biggest lies and the most perceptive truths in a state of hypnotic

contemplation. But it is a whole different matter for the Russian

“barbarians,” unused as they are to consent to being subjected to a

general impoverishment of their lives in the name of the western model.

For the Russians, the attainment of wealth claims that it is no longer

hampered by the bureaucratic and communist system. But they, who had to

bear horrors and terrors to attain “western happiness,” have not

experienced the slow process of dispossession and exhaustion experienced

by the western populations. In a very brief period of time they must

join a system that has taken several decades to put the finishing

touches to itself, to channel people’s ideas and anger, to impose itself

as eternity and as the only measure of freedom. It is a finished product

which they have to swallow brutally and in large doses, without the

promise of drunkenness and with a permanent hangover. It is not the slow

digestion of an insipid product: it is a violent ingestion which

concentrates the poison and its vile taste.

Like the immensity of Russia, the inertia of its population is

formidable. In the past, many invaders have already come to catastrophic

defeats there after a few brilliant victories.

[1] A few years ago, using the recent western technique, a factory

manager asked his workers to elect the one among them with the best

performance, so he could be awarded a bonus. They all elected each

other....

[2] It is the courtyards and alleyways which cross the building blocks

that bring back the city’s confused and disorderly character.

[3] Mayakovsky.

[4] The recurrent anti-Semitism in Russia has its origins in the same

viewpoint. Independently of religious antagonism or the association

Jews/Bolsheviks or Jews/revolutionary movements that supposedly favored

the Bolshevik seizure of power, the constant rejection, whatever

ideology of state power is in force, defines an aspect of this despotic

will: in Jews, they have always seen the threat of a phantasmagorical

myth of “Jewish talent.”

[5] In early January ’93, a decree issued by the new government proposes

to reestablish the old system for the price of bread, milk, and of

course, vodka....

[6] So, for example, shoe stores have nothing but summer sandals left in

winter. There would not be anything unusual about this situation, except

that today, these shoes are being resold in front of the stores.

[7] Civil volunteers recruited in ’57-’58 to struggle against

hooliganism, in cooperation with the police.

[8] Through May ’92, it had received aid in the form of goods and

supplies worth an estimated $26 billion.

[9] During the Andropov period, when the current mood was one of

“struggle against parasitism and absenteeism,” and the cops went on

raids right into people’s showers, he put a low-priced vodka on sale,

known as “Andropovodka” (cf. note 5).

[10] The “spirte” whose origin is exclusively French is called

“Krystal”; “Camoe,” the locally produced one, bears the inscription in

English, “Cleaner for surfaces.”

[11] Small 25 centiliter bottles of eau de cologne can be bought at the

stalls: some people drink one in a gulp while they wait for the bus....

[12] During this period a new change in the situation appeared; people

began to fight the lie everywhere, but in an illusory way: nationalism

against unification-standardization, the critique of science against the

degradation of biological life, the emotional plague and instinctive

refusal against the despotism of well-reasoned submissiveness,

dissatisfaction against praise for a world that gets by despite the

difficulties.

[13] An article in the November ’92 issue of Monde diplomatique claims

that anti-IMF committees are being set up in various regions of Russia

and that kolkhoz workers who have been evicted from their homes by new

private landlords are reviving the “scorched earth” tradition. We

haven’t heard of it....

[14] An association that has set itself the task of collecting all

information about the prison system — drawing up lists of the number of

people deported and imprisoned during the communist epoch and

publicizing current movements in the prisons.