Waiting for Fortinbras

Photo: (CC) Commons.wikimedia.org

Back then, I wrote about the example of the crown prince Fortinbras from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who at the end of the play offers hope that the Danish state will improve. For my generation of intellectuals, Fortinbras is an example of someone who takes the “corpses” away. In the same way, we should have finished the work that was left to us by the 20th century. This century exposed us to two totalitarianisms, communism and Nazism, together with their horrific crimes and massive number of victims. That is why I even created a slogan: “Generation Fortinbras to work!” Yet, the corpses have not been taken out. They are still alive and now these zombies from the Kremlin are bombing Ukraine. Russia has been governed by Felix Dzerzhinsky’s offspring, who now work for the FSB. Make no mistake about it, this group is a criminal organisation, one that was earlier called the KGB, NKVD and Cheka. The devil has many names, but it is this particular devil who is responsible for genocide and mass murder.

Back in the 1990s there was a chance for a better Russia. However, when the former KGB agent became president, I knew that this chance was over. Since 2000, Russia has been ruled by the KGB, which resembles Orwell’s Inner Party from 1984. It is a criminal organisation that has never been punished for its crimes.

When did you first understand that Putin had “crossed the Rubicon”?

For me, such a moment came with the Kursk submarine disaster and our reaction to it. At that time, Putin arrived in the US and took part in Larry King’s show. This was his first extensive interview for western media. At one point, King asked Putin what had happened to Kursk. Putin’s answer was cynical. With a KGB-style smile he simply said that “It sank”. Years later, in an interview for Russia Today, King admitted that he really liked this answer and thought it made good TV. In his view it was short, to the point and catchy. Putin and King shook hands, sealing an alliance between two different types of sociopaths: a KGB agent and a showman-journalist. A combination of “infotainment” with politics aimed at manipulation on a mass scale. This is the problem with today’s media all over the world.

But wouldn’t you say that today’s Putin, with all his botox, works well only in the Russian market, while outside his charm has faded away? He is a former KGB agent who resembles a Frankenstein. He reads statistical data from a piece of paper and talks, for over an hour, about something that could be said in a few minutes. Can such a leader, in the time of memes, TikTok and Instagram, manipulate people who live outside Russia?

It is not about Putin’s charm or his human side. He is an executor of a role in a system, where media, regardless of which kind, has a huge impact on people. Umberto Eco noticed this danger in Italy much earlier. This mechanism creates a world in which there are specific people who write scripts for reality, including the scripts of war, such as hybrid and information war. This was the case in Donbas in 2014, when people were being frightened with information about the non-existent threat of Ukrainian aggression and genocide. In this new media reality, KGB methods can work.

Do you think that Putin is still effective?

If he had not been, severe sanctions would have been imposed back in 2014 and 2015. However, back then, we were being told that there was no Russian aggression, but a conflict in Ukraine. I would often get furious when I heard about this conflict in Ukraine, or even worse, a “Ukrainian crisis”. I would often say that there is no Ukrainian crisis but a Russian aggression. At the same time, western media outlets were calling the officers of the Russian army operating in Donbas “Ukrainian rebels”. Right now we have some form of a realisation but it is not enough. The question of “Will he enter Ukraine or not?” showed that lessons have not been learnt from the 20th century. Had we learnt them, we would have known that this is what Hitler did in the 1930s. Of course, those actions ultimately led to the Second World War. Instead, some western journalists, experts and politicians are now saying that Ukraine should perhaps give up its aspirations to join NATO. This means that we are focusing on what Ukraine should do to please Putin. It is unbelievable that people can talk like this and be treated seriously. Ukraine is being wrongfully treated like a woman who has been the victim of domestic violence. She is encouraged to forgive her husband who had been beating her.

We have learnt nothing. On May 8th 2014, on the anniversary of the Second World War’s end, I was in Berlin. Then, today’s German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier stated that we need to understand Putin. He was saying this at a time when Russian forces had already been murdering people for speaking Ukrainian. I was talking right after Steinmeier. However, when I compared Putin to Hitler my microphone was cut off. The only person who spoke in my defence was the Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis. Now, this analogy between Putin and Hitler is becoming more and more apparent for everybody.

You watched Putin’s speech before the invasion in which he talked about history. What do you think about his statements?

He is of course creating his own myth. In psychiatry, it is called a delirium or created reality. These hallucinations have a very specific logic behind them. This idea that Ukraine was created by Vladimir Lenin… This war is a projection of Putin’s fears of Ukraine and the collapse of his empire. Of course, this would also mean the collapse of today’s Russia. He is scared of the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union and he desperately wants to maintain Russia as an empire.

But this projection is not only Putin’s problem, but also a problem for many Russians.

Yes. Peter Pomerantsev was correct when he said that, as a former KGB agent, Putin essentially recruited a whole nation. The vast majority of the population either stay silent or actively support him. This was achieved with the help of TV and the internet. Overall, this is a form of reality show, in which a war and people’s deaths are manipulated for a specific purpose. I would describe this as “neo-Orwellian metaphors in the 21st century”. Unfortunately, in Russia there is no real society. Over the last 200 years there have been a few moments when it could have become a reality. However, none of these moments ended with success. That is why Russia has been either a totalitarian or authoritarian state on a cyclical basis. In Ukraine there is a society. The state may be a disaster, it may have many flaws just like during the winter of 2014, but there is a society that knows how and when to say “no”. In contrast, we have a state that is eating up its own society in Russia. The West, unfortunately, is a victim of an illusion that there is such a thing as a Russian society and that it can be relied on.

So why are there these moments when Russia is close to achieving a proper society?

I actually believe that Russia’s ethnic and religious diversity plays a key role in these matters. There has to be a simultaneous change amongst Tatars, Bashkirs, Siberian Russians, etc. in order to create a proper society. But Russia’s unity has been, for centuries, executed by force. This is an imperial history. A society could have been realised during moments when minorities or regions showed that they did not want to disappear from the map or be subordinated to Moscow. That is why Ukrainians say that “without the Volhynia Legion Russians could not do anything”. After all, it was Ukrainians, with their blue and yellow flags, who started the 1917 February Revolution. It is thus a huge mistake of the West to associate Russia with the USSR or ethnic Russians.

In that case, what should the West do now?

It should create a large frontline that would call things by their real names. Russia is a terrorist state and for the good of its people it has to change on a fundamental basis. There has to be a discussion on the transformation of Russia into a real federation and even about the freedom of Russia’s different nations. I know that this is not politically correct to say, but I am not a politician and I can say whatever I want.

What do you think about the opinion that whilst Putin is terrible, he is a lesser evil compared to what can come after him?

The problem with Russia is not only Putin. The disease has been progressing. Russia is a state governed by the FSB, which is an organised crime group. This is what needs to be eliminated, as otherwise things will only get worse.

The current Russian aggression against Ukraine has brought relations between Berlin and Moscow to the forefront. Ukrainians and Poles were disappointed with Germany’s passivity but it looks like that has now changed. What is your opinion on this matter?

 Somebody created a meme that said “Let the Germans know that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is no longer in place.” This is of course an ironic message, but there is something true to it. Again, we have to refer to psychology, as Germans still suffer from a great amount of post-war trauma. This is a mixture of fear and guilt. In Germany I once talked about my book Field research on Ukrainian sex, which discussed the issue of mass rapes committed by Red Army soldiers on German women at the end of the Second World War. I will never forget the facial expressions of two older women who were sitting in the first row. Even now, when I am talking about them I shiver. They froze. They looked so frightened, as if they saw these soldiers again. Maybe it was the first time when someone talked publicly about this in their presence.

The German sense of guilt regarding the horrible crimes committed on the Eastern Front led to the situation in which the country did not talk about the suffering of German women for three generations. There was only one book made about this theme. It was written by Marta Hiller and was titled A woman in Berlin. There was also a movie based on this but it also portrayed this issue through the prism of some terrible love story. Unfortunately, Germans solely associate Russians with the victims of their crimes in the East. Putin reminds them of this all the time. The truth is that among the German victims, there were also millions of Ukrainians and Belarusians. In this way, we have returned to the first part of our conversation. The Germans also appear to be waiting for their Fortinbras.

Translated by Iwona Reichardt. This interview was first published in Polish on the web portal www.new.org.pl.

Oksana Zabuzhko is a Ukrainian poet, writer and public intellectual.

Adam Balcer is a programme director at the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe in Wrocław.

Russia, Russian aggression, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian war, Ukraine, Ukraine at war