A Mind of Their Own

By JOHN KOHAN MOSCOW

Russia cannot be understood with the mind,

Or measured by an ordinary yardstick:

She has a special status --

All you can do is believe in Russia.

-- FYODOR TYUTCHEV

No nation can ever become something altogether new: it is what it is by virtue of what is in the minds of its people. Those habits of thought, ingrained over the centuries by geography and the vagaries of invading tribes and traders, do not shift as easily as the political winds. To make their voyage of reinvention even harder, Russians, ever since their empire began expanding from the principality of Muscovy in the 15th century, have never fully grasped who they are or what their national destiny ought to be.

To tell the truth, they seem to revel in the uncertainty. In the 19th century, Nikolai Gogol depicted Russia in his novel Dead Souls as a wildly careering troika rushing into the unknown. Now, after seven decades of forced efforts to mold the Russian mind to fit rigid communist orthodoxy, people have taken to the road again with such an exhilarating clatter of hooves that it sometimes seems as if the destination means nothing, movement is everything.

Boris Yeltsin contends that he does have a final goal in view: to turn Russians into modern democrats with a free-market economy that can claim its rightful place in the world community. Some passengers are worried that there will be a colossal breakdown en route. Others are experiencing motion sickness as they try to grapple with new ideas like demokratizatsiya and privatizatsiya or attempt to figure out what makes brokery different from raketeery. (It is instructive that the Russian language has no words of its own for these borrowed concepts.) Still others shout for Yeltsin to crack the whip and get the old nags moving faster. But however bumpy the ride, if reform is really to take hold, every Russian must somehow arrive at an internal alteration of his or her mental outlook, a fresh landscape of the mind, to suit the new system. In the meantime, the troika is weighed down by some peculiarly Russian < baggage:

THE BURDEN OF THE PAST. Russians already have a great deal of trouble reading the road map of their past. The notion of historical determinism may have been drummed into their heads in courses on Marxist-Leninist dogma, but they have never stopped believing that history moves in a circle, not a straight line. Ask a wrinkled babushka selling vodka on the street about Yeltsin's chances of success, and she will leapfrog back in memory over Mikhail Gorbachev's ill- fated perestroika to recall the doomed attempt by Nikita Khrushchev to break the stranglehold of the Stalinist past. An intellectual will delve even further into Russia's history, comparing Yeltsin's policies to the failed campaigns of reform-minded Czars like Peter the Great and Alexander II.

Any understanding of the Russian character must inevitably begin with the land, which covers roughly one-sixth of the globe. Historian Vasili Klyuchevsky speculated that the vast sweep of Russia's steppes and forests induced "a ghastly feeling of imperturbable calm and deep sleep, of loneliness conducive to abstract, sad musing without any clearly defined thought." Russians seem so overwhelmed by the sheer enormousness of their country that they would rather settle down by a warm stove, break out a bottle of vodka and muse about life than go out and plow a furrow toward the endlessly receding horizon. A leading Moscow architect maintains that this sense of the horizontal is so strong in Russian minds that it is hard to find a straight vertical line anywhere.

Russia's rulers have been so obsessed with the geography factor that they developed the most centralized system of control in human history. In reality, the notion that whatever Moscow dictated would automatically be done throughout the farthest reaches of the empire was a carefully fostered illusion. The Potemkin village was the inspired invention of a royal favorite seeking to delude Catherine the Great about the conditions of life in the hinterlands. During the Soviet era, local apparatchiks flooded Moscow with so many meaningless statistics that no one to this day knows the real state of the Russian economy. The Yeltsin team has shown healthy pragmatism in admitting that one solution to Russia's problems might be to devolve decision- making power to the provinces.

THE PSYCHIC MOLD. Historians have long contended that a totalitarian system developed in Russia because its people were too servile to enjoy the blessings of democracy. Anyone who has watched as waves of debate roar through the chamber of the Congress of People's Deputies knows that this is simply not true. The Russian is more than a democrat; in his heart of hearts, he is an anarchist. Russia's rulers have lived in constant dread of the kind of spontaneous, popular uprisings that troubled the czarist era and set off the Bolshevik Revolution. After the communists came to power, others strove to topple them as the sailors of Kronstadt and the Tambov peasants rebelled against the new regime. It has been this way throughout Russian history: early chronicles describe how ancestors of the Russians appealed to neighboring Vikings to come in and rule over them because "our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it."

Perhaps the sky so dominates the Russian earth that it compels thoughts of eternity. After decades of officially sponsored atheism, the Russians remain a profoundly spiritual people. To mark the 600th anniversary of the death of St. Sergius of Radonezh, an enormous banner recently appeared on the facade of the Historical Museum in Red Square. It bore the slogan REVEREND FATHER SERGIUS, PRAY TO GOD FOR US. An outsider would see the irony in a saint occupying the spot once reserved for larger-than-life portraits of Marx and Lenin. Not a Russian. During a recent missionary crusade by U.S. evangelist Billy Graham, large crowds stood by the speaker's platform to commit their lives to Christ and fill a spiritual void left after the collapse of communism.

Strip away the veneer of traditional religion, however, and a superstitious pagan often lurks underneath. Many Russians light candles in church nowadays the way they formerly paid their Communist Party dues -- as a kind of insurance, just in case. Belief in miracles remains strong in a nation once fervently dedicated to the scientific method. How else to explain the extraordinary following of psychic healers like Anatoli Kashpirovsky and Alan Chumak, who held audiences spellbound with their televised seances a few years ago? Even sophisticated Muscovites rushed to buy supposedly energized issues of newspapers and placed jars of water by their TV screens to absorb the healing rays of these video shamans.

Russians are constantly looking for a leader who will be a secular version of the beloved St. Nicholas the Wonderworker. Centuries of setbacks have not shaken their confidence that someday a Good Czar will finally appear with a quick fix for all their problems. Since no one ever measures up to these great expectations, Russians soon tire of the incumbent. They sink into apathy or pin their hopes on samozvantsy -- the numerous pretender czars of Russian history who rose out of nowhere to challenge the powers that be. Yeltsin donned this historic mantle when he led his populist crusade against Gorbachev. Now Yeltsin must be careful that no golden-tongued rabble rouser gathers throngs of the disenchanted for a new march on the Kremlin.

Westerners often consider Russians shiftless and lazy. While their style of work may be puzzling to outsiders, it has a logic all its own, rooted in the peasant's seasonal cycle of activities, when months of idleness gave way to short but intensive periods of planting and harvest. As novelist Leo Tolstoy once explained, "The Russians harness their horses very slowly, but they ride with great speed." Russian people have little patience for daily chores and fixed schedules. They prefer to get things done in sudden bursts of activity. This style of work came to be known in the Soviet period as sturmovshchina, or storming a task.

The bigger the job, the better. At one time, Soviet scientists seriously considered changing the course of Siberia's rivers. Economists have repeatedly tried to package the country's development into neat five-year -- if not 500- day -- plans. The strategy does achieve results: Russians built the marvelous city of St. Petersburg out of a desolate, frozen swamp and launched the first satellite into space. They just have not fared as well in producing regular supplies of soap and toilet paper.

THE BLAME GAME. When things go wrong in Russia, no one ever thinks that he personally might be to blame. In contrast to Western Christianity, the Russian Orthodox Church places little stress on the concept of personal guilt. The first two saints of the Eastern Slavs, Boris and Gleb, were passive martyrs to political intrigue. Their story provided a powerful image of suffering innocence in an unjust world that has lodged in the national psyche to this day. Russians routinely use the excuse that they are innocent victims of forces beyond their control to explain away personal failures. A vague, amorphous "they" is always responsible: selfish relatives, meddlesome neighbors, greedy capitalists, corrupt bureaucrats, the government.

When such personal convictions are projected onto the entire nation, they give rise to a militant patriotism based on a no-fault Russia. This is expressed today in its most virulent form by the neofascist Pamyat movement, which wants to absolve Russians of responsibility for the horrors of the communist era. Pamyat contends that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was actually conceived and carried out by Freemasons and Jews. The search for scapegoats was a national passion long before Stalin filled the docks at show trials, and the fall of the Soviet Union has sparked another round of finger pointing. This time, democrats and conservatives have reached rare unanimity about whom to blame: Mikhail Gorbachev.

No law-governed state can ever be founded in Russia that is not based on a uniquely Russian understanding of injustice. As a popular maxim puts it, if a Russian peasant discovers that his neighbor has two pigs and he has only one, he would rather see his neighbor's extra pig slaughtered than raise a second one of his own. Such crude but firmly ingrained egalitarian ideas predate communism. They help explain why the average Russian is so suspicious of the new breed of street entrepreneur who hawks everything from bathtub fixtures to brassieres on city sidewalks. He welcomes the sudden abundance, but he thinks it is extremely unfair that someone should make a living by buying scarce goods and reselling them at prices most people cannot afford.

THE SLAVIC LEGACY. Straddling Europe and Asia, Russians have never been sure whether to view themselves as a Western or Eastern society. Judging from Cyrillic-lettered Coca-Cola signs and Barbie doll billboards in Moscow these days, the Westernizers seem to have the upper hand in their century-long debate with the Slavophiles. Government ministers and parliamentarians constantly refer to the way the Dutch milk cows, the Americans collect taxes and the Germans dispose of garbage, as if Western practice is the standard by which everything must now be judged. As cultural historian James Billington notes in his book The Icon and the Axe, "Repeatedly, Russians have sought to acquire the end products of other civilizations without the intervening process of slow growth and inner understanding."

Every time a slapdash imitation of something Western goes wrong, the Slavophiles latch on to it as evidence of the danger posed by alien ideas. In their view, the Bolshevik Revolution exactly fits this category. The current fashion for wearing czarist-era uniforms and holding balls for descendants of the old nobility reflects an intense nostalgia for a Russia long gone, a monarchist age that appears as full of sunlight and promise for the Slavophiles as it was dark and despairing for the communists. The traditionalists take inspiration from prerevolutionary conservatives like Pyotr Stolypin, the assassinated Prime Minister of Czar Nicholas II, who dismissed his radical opponents with the curt dictum, "They need a great upheaval; we need a great Russia."

Russians may beg, borrow or steal foreign artifacts and ideas, but the vast majority of them would never want to live abroad. Those who do emigrate often suffer from chronic homesickness. Though keenly embarrassed by their economic and social backwardness, they believe passionately in the inherent superiority of their own soulfulness when compared with the arid materialism of the West. Ivan Goncharov's classic 19th century novel, Oblomov, presents the ethnic German Stolz as a model of energy and industry, but it is the dreamy Russian Oblomov who handily wins the competition of cultures. It may take Oblomov most of the day just to get out of bed, but he wins our hearts by his valiant and endearing struggle to be a man of action.

Yet the great East-West debate does not really trouble the average Russian much. He thinks such questions are the proper concern of the intelligentsia, a cultural elite that is a unique feature of Russian society. Few other countries have accorded their writers, scientists, artists and poets so much honor and prestige. Such confidence has not always been justified: Russian intellectuals may like to view themselves as social oracles, but they have never been particularly good at predicting the future. Many of the intelligentsia who welcomed the 1917 Revolution became its first victims in the cellars of Lubyanka prison. Today they face a different kind of crisis in the aftermath of the democratic revolution: they are in danger of becoming irrelevant in a society where commerce is winning out over culture.

If the present reform trends continue, it is possible that Russia might eventually open its doors to the world so wide that it will lose a great deal of its mystery. An inevitable leveling process is bound to take place as Russians adjust to new political institutions and market mechanisms. The perestroika kids who have come of age during the reform era already act as if they live in a different world from their parents' -- and they probably do have more in common with their video-culture peers around the globe than with Russians of the older generation. Still, it is hard to imagine that Russia could ever turn completely into a nation of time-card punchers too busy to philosophize over tea. Would they still be Russians?

There is an unpredictable, impish streak in the Russian character often expressed in the desire to confound expectations and astonish with feats of prowess. The Russians have always longed to drive their national troika at breakneck speed, forcing other nations, in Gogol's words, to "look askance, as they step aside to give her the right of way." Now history has accorded them a unique chance.