Zhores essay part 2/?: Historical issues, biases, and matters of culture.
In part one I did the basic jist of the facts we know, and so now I can actually start to move into headcanon territory, but first a little note on just how effing difficult it is to get a clear picture of the cold war.
At first it seems like an easy thing, the war’s been over for decades, the KGB has declassified a large portion of its’ archives, and generally most people involved during that time are open about what happened. However the problem is that most of the later reports act as though you know this stuff, because it was such a big deal. In more then one biography of a spy I’ve seen them comment something to the extent of “but you already know this, so let’s move on”. Rather unhelpful for someone who’s trying to get a better picture of things years later. The additional problem is that the materials they’re referencing have a clear and downright insulting bias. No it’s not even the over the top “COMMUNISTS!!!1” reaction that a lot of people joke about. It’s a more snide and debasing form of writing that nearly made me throw a few books against the wall.
During the cold war a good deal of the books on the matter were either written by former agents (who assumed you knew what they were talking about), or by people affiliated with the west… which led to a rather skewed perspective. The bias tended to be separated into two groups. The, “Russians are barbarians who fail at acting European, and are miserable downtrodden people” camp and the “Russians are all brainwashed and fiercely loyal to their country, and this makes them dangerous and effective” camp. The former tends to have more actual truth in the books, but are harder to read from the sheer undiluted douchebaggery on the part of the author. The latter often read like a cold war tall tale, where women spies go into training for twelve years, come out knowing a language like a native, and are trained to never defect even if their lives are at stake. In a way it’s like a Noble Communist Savage trope. If you’ve read Flemings’ work, then you know this kind of writing well.
So getting the facts means a person has to read the biased source material, and then cross-reference it against a spy’s biography, or other more reliable material. For instance the aforementioned twelve years of training is most likely incorrect. Aleksei Myagkov doesn’t directly say how many years it takes him, but he gives his age before and after the training and it comes to about three years. Far from being a skilled multi-linguist who endures multiple loyalty tests and horrific training, when he arrives in East Germany he barely knows any German, and thinks about how incompetent his co-workers can be and how they get promotions more by who they know then anything else. The KGB was something any sane person would be afraid of, but the agents were far from the “Russia makes you strong” trope that was prevalent in books from the west.
Also incorrect is the “Blind, dumb sheep” idea that makes me want to flip a godamn table. Sadly, this one isn’t quite as clear-cut. Some people honestly didn’t know what the hell was going on outside of the USSR, and others bought into the ideology to the extent that later on in their lives they looked back on it and regretted what they had said and done. However others knew what the hell was going on and didn’t like it… but saying anything about it to anybody who wasn’t close was generally regarded as a stupid fucking move. Again though there are notable exceptions. After world war 2 there’s was even a case of someone writing a letter to Stalin saying the equivalent of “What the hell? We go through all that hardship during the war and this is how we get treated now?”
But in a good deal of what I read the average Russian citizen learned how to filter out the truth in propaganda, a lot like how most people I know can filter out the truth from what a politician says or a commercial. We know that most of it is going to be lies, so we’ve learned how to read between the lines. And much how a sales clerk doesn’t tell a district manager that the policies they implemented are hurting the company, the Russian citizen wasn’t going to pipe up and say that communism had flaws that needed to be worked out. In fact doing so wouldn’t just impact your life, but it could keep your family from getting a good job, going to university, or worse. There were certainly dissidents, and a decent black-market trade (chiefly for household goods that were hard to acquire), but people kept their mouth shut for a reason. Again I know like it sounds like I’m flogging a dead horse here, but this is by no means a complete summary of how Russians acted during the cold war. It’s honestly something that a person needs to research for themselves and come to their own conclusions.
So where does Zhores fit in?
Zhores is very much a product of his era. Both growing up in a postwar environment, and living a significant portion of his childhood in Stalin-era Russia. While I’m not sure if he was a Komsomol or not, I’m pretty sure that he got a good dose of propaganda. I’d say this was tempered by the attitudes of the people around him who were trying to rebuild, and in my headcanon, his sister nudging him more towards Marx then the other communist writers. Considering that he seems to have socialist ideals during his mission (making comments about Louise mingling with the common people, not really having ridden in a high-class car before, and so on), I’d say it points more to a disillusionment with the newer party line then just being jaded with his work.
Another thing to take in is that Zhores isn’t just Russian. He does self-identify as Russian and he certainly knows a lot about his country’s history, but he’s also spent a little under half his life in Germany. This is also reflected in that he doesn’t want to go back to Russia, or even be buried there until the soviet union falls. Zhores also for his part speaks German well enough that he’s able to correct a native speaker and knows the culture well enough to blend in. In short he’s an expat. However he’s a bit more then that, the act of disconnecting from his culture and not claiming West Germany as his home creates some of the issues that Third Culture Adults suffer from. If he couldn’t flat out lie and had to ask if the Soviet Union was his real homeland… well it’d be a difficult question for him.
Russia (namely the people and culture that had existed before the 1950's) is his homeland, but at the same time he can’t forgive the Soviet Union for what they’ve done. The reverse is true for Germany. He despises the Nazis (and to an extent, any member of the German military who’d try to deflect the blame for their actions during the war), but the people he’s encountered in West Germany for the most part have been warm, kind, and regretful of what happened during the war. It’s not that he’s even stuck between two cultures, it’s that his real culture is partially overshadowed in his time, probably changed enough to disorient him by the current time, and he really doesn’t identify with any other culture, even if he’s picked up some of their habits.
An issue of cultures.
The next question then is, “how does he feel about X country”? While I said before in another essay how he felt about individual countries, how he feels about individual cultures is kind of a separate thing. For Zhores you could define his worldview as “See what the people are like and hate the government by default.” There’s a good number of reasons for this. Firstly there’s his government, which doesn’t really need much elaboration. Then there’s Germany, in which again, hating the government that was around for the first five years of his life and impacted Russia’s culture even to this day… is pretty darn understandable. The West German and current German Government is something that he’s wary of, by now just out of habit for distrusting governments. America seems to have decent people and a decent countryperson, even if they way the American Government reacts makes him facepalm today and nearly scared him shitless when he was younger. And Turkey… Well Turkey is a special case, as always.
The Turkish government has a few issues, in his opinion, and so again, he’s critical of it in addition to his normal bias. While there were a great number of Turkish people coming to Germany starting from the 1950’s, his main point of reference is Turkey the countryperson. Turkey isn’t reliable as a reference because he’s the people and the government and possibly the landmass all wrapped up in a big confusing ball that Zhores stopped trying to pick apart about a few months ago. In addition Turkey is very proud of his people and so mentioning his problems with the government or X event is in general a Very Bad Idea. He knows that it not only pisses Turkey off, but if his memories of the card event were correct, it hurts Turkey a lot more then anything he’s done before, and he just doesn’t want to do that to him. As a good friend and as someone he has romantic feelings towards, it just makes him feel terrible. So he analyzes Turkish media and plans on getting to know the Turkish people better when he goes back to his world (or at least that’s what he thinks is going to happen to him).
And so how he handles any new culture is put through roughly two sets of filters. First he views things through the perspective of how he was raised, looking for familiar cultural traits and reading between the lines on every given bit of news or media. Then he looks at it from what he’s picked up of German culture, viewing it as the closest thing to a “Central European” mindset that he knows. Then if neither of those fit, he tries to look at it from any American/British cues he picked up… the last one hurts his head a bit.
In a related note, languages!
In a way because of not being so tied to one culture he takes to languages and collects snippets of them like an old lady would collect stamps. He knows German inside and out, and in my headcanon he can speak enough English to be understood. It’s grammatically correct, but he has an accent like nothing else, and he’s more then a little ashamed to actually communicate in anything other then written English. He knows enough French to read a menu, and he recently started asking Rika about Japanese. His Turkish is… well he’s able to get the basic concepts across, but he still has issues with his accent, and there are plenty of times where a turn of phrase will completely lose him. He likes to grumble to himself that he needs an immersive environment to really get the language, but honestly that would freak him out at his current level. When he learned German there were other people around speaking Russian. If he was in a completely immersive situation then his main support would be Turkey. And Turkey is a horrible troll.
As a side note he also has this bad habit of learning the worst bits of any given language. This stems from the fact that while he speaks politely, often his thoughts involve cursing, insults, and generally terrible things. Even in his native tongue he’s not crude… until you piss him off and then he’s sometimes prone to using a bit of Mat, but only if the other person doesn’t understand it. Zhores has a nasty tongue and it’s a good thing that he’s good with languages, otherwise it’d take him twice as long to learn anything. He likes to learn the crude form alongside the normal and polite parts of the language.
In conclusion, part deux!
So in the end of the day we can try and define what is and isn’t the Russian mindset, heart, soul, exc and not really be any closer to pinpointing what Zhores is. He’s Russian, that’s for sure, but he’s also bits of German, British, and everything that made up Frankfurt during the 1970’s. At the same time he wouldn’t say he’s any of those other things and he’d still be correct. He’s prone to picking up bits of cultures and languages without becoming a part of them, and he still tries to understand said cultures through his own reasoning. He’s someone who would be glad to give up his job and globetrot for a few decades, and it’s quite possible that he could pull it off if he had the freedom. He hates the government, likes the people, and in general is a big mess of contradictions that manages to work out somehow.
So if by the end of this you still feel like you’re at square one about Zhores’ culture, that’s okay. Zhores is probably right along there too, and he just rolls with it.
At first it seems like an easy thing, the war’s been over for decades, the KGB has declassified a large portion of its’ archives, and generally most people involved during that time are open about what happened. However the problem is that most of the later reports act as though you know this stuff, because it was such a big deal. In more then one biography of a spy I’ve seen them comment something to the extent of “but you already know this, so let’s move on”. Rather unhelpful for someone who’s trying to get a better picture of things years later. The additional problem is that the materials they’re referencing have a clear and downright insulting bias. No it’s not even the over the top “COMMUNISTS!!!1” reaction that a lot of people joke about. It’s a more snide and debasing form of writing that nearly made me throw a few books against the wall.
During the cold war a good deal of the books on the matter were either written by former agents (who assumed you knew what they were talking about), or by people affiliated with the west… which led to a rather skewed perspective. The bias tended to be separated into two groups. The, “Russians are barbarians who fail at acting European, and are miserable downtrodden people” camp and the “Russians are all brainwashed and fiercely loyal to their country, and this makes them dangerous and effective” camp. The former tends to have more actual truth in the books, but are harder to read from the sheer undiluted douchebaggery on the part of the author. The latter often read like a cold war tall tale, where women spies go into training for twelve years, come out knowing a language like a native, and are trained to never defect even if their lives are at stake. In a way it’s like a Noble Communist Savage trope. If you’ve read Flemings’ work, then you know this kind of writing well.
So getting the facts means a person has to read the biased source material, and then cross-reference it against a spy’s biography, or other more reliable material. For instance the aforementioned twelve years of training is most likely incorrect. Aleksei Myagkov doesn’t directly say how many years it takes him, but he gives his age before and after the training and it comes to about three years. Far from being a skilled multi-linguist who endures multiple loyalty tests and horrific training, when he arrives in East Germany he barely knows any German, and thinks about how incompetent his co-workers can be and how they get promotions more by who they know then anything else. The KGB was something any sane person would be afraid of, but the agents were far from the “Russia makes you strong” trope that was prevalent in books from the west.
Also incorrect is the “Blind, dumb sheep” idea that makes me want to flip a godamn table. Sadly, this one isn’t quite as clear-cut. Some people honestly didn’t know what the hell was going on outside of the USSR, and others bought into the ideology to the extent that later on in their lives they looked back on it and regretted what they had said and done. However others knew what the hell was going on and didn’t like it… but saying anything about it to anybody who wasn’t close was generally regarded as a stupid fucking move. Again though there are notable exceptions. After world war 2 there’s was even a case of someone writing a letter to Stalin saying the equivalent of “What the hell? We go through all that hardship during the war and this is how we get treated now?”
But in a good deal of what I read the average Russian citizen learned how to filter out the truth in propaganda, a lot like how most people I know can filter out the truth from what a politician says or a commercial. We know that most of it is going to be lies, so we’ve learned how to read between the lines. And much how a sales clerk doesn’t tell a district manager that the policies they implemented are hurting the company, the Russian citizen wasn’t going to pipe up and say that communism had flaws that needed to be worked out. In fact doing so wouldn’t just impact your life, but it could keep your family from getting a good job, going to university, or worse. There were certainly dissidents, and a decent black-market trade (chiefly for household goods that were hard to acquire), but people kept their mouth shut for a reason. Again I know like it sounds like I’m flogging a dead horse here, but this is by no means a complete summary of how Russians acted during the cold war. It’s honestly something that a person needs to research for themselves and come to their own conclusions.
So where does Zhores fit in?
Zhores is very much a product of his era. Both growing up in a postwar environment, and living a significant portion of his childhood in Stalin-era Russia. While I’m not sure if he was a Komsomol or not, I’m pretty sure that he got a good dose of propaganda. I’d say this was tempered by the attitudes of the people around him who were trying to rebuild, and in my headcanon, his sister nudging him more towards Marx then the other communist writers. Considering that he seems to have socialist ideals during his mission (making comments about Louise mingling with the common people, not really having ridden in a high-class car before, and so on), I’d say it points more to a disillusionment with the newer party line then just being jaded with his work.
Another thing to take in is that Zhores isn’t just Russian. He does self-identify as Russian and he certainly knows a lot about his country’s history, but he’s also spent a little under half his life in Germany. This is also reflected in that he doesn’t want to go back to Russia, or even be buried there until the soviet union falls. Zhores also for his part speaks German well enough that he’s able to correct a native speaker and knows the culture well enough to blend in. In short he’s an expat. However he’s a bit more then that, the act of disconnecting from his culture and not claiming West Germany as his home creates some of the issues that Third Culture Adults suffer from. If he couldn’t flat out lie and had to ask if the Soviet Union was his real homeland… well it’d be a difficult question for him.
Russia (namely the people and culture that had existed before the 1950's) is his homeland, but at the same time he can’t forgive the Soviet Union for what they’ve done. The reverse is true for Germany. He despises the Nazis (and to an extent, any member of the German military who’d try to deflect the blame for their actions during the war), but the people he’s encountered in West Germany for the most part have been warm, kind, and regretful of what happened during the war. It’s not that he’s even stuck between two cultures, it’s that his real culture is partially overshadowed in his time, probably changed enough to disorient him by the current time, and he really doesn’t identify with any other culture, even if he’s picked up some of their habits.
An issue of cultures.
The next question then is, “how does he feel about X country”? While I said before in another essay how he felt about individual countries, how he feels about individual cultures is kind of a separate thing. For Zhores you could define his worldview as “See what the people are like and hate the government by default.” There’s a good number of reasons for this. Firstly there’s his government, which doesn’t really need much elaboration. Then there’s Germany, in which again, hating the government that was around for the first five years of his life and impacted Russia’s culture even to this day… is pretty darn understandable. The West German and current German Government is something that he’s wary of, by now just out of habit for distrusting governments. America seems to have decent people and a decent countryperson, even if they way the American Government reacts makes him facepalm today and nearly scared him shitless when he was younger. And Turkey… Well Turkey is a special case, as always.
The Turkish government has a few issues, in his opinion, and so again, he’s critical of it in addition to his normal bias. While there were a great number of Turkish people coming to Germany starting from the 1950’s, his main point of reference is Turkey the countryperson. Turkey isn’t reliable as a reference because he’s the people and the government and possibly the landmass all wrapped up in a big confusing ball that Zhores stopped trying to pick apart about a few months ago. In addition Turkey is very proud of his people and so mentioning his problems with the government or X event is in general a Very Bad Idea. He knows that it not only pisses Turkey off, but if his memories of the card event were correct, it hurts Turkey a lot more then anything he’s done before, and he just doesn’t want to do that to him. As a good friend and as someone he has romantic feelings towards, it just makes him feel terrible. So he analyzes Turkish media and plans on getting to know the Turkish people better when he goes back to his world (or at least that’s what he thinks is going to happen to him).
And so how he handles any new culture is put through roughly two sets of filters. First he views things through the perspective of how he was raised, looking for familiar cultural traits and reading between the lines on every given bit of news or media. Then he looks at it from what he’s picked up of German culture, viewing it as the closest thing to a “Central European” mindset that he knows. Then if neither of those fit, he tries to look at it from any American/British cues he picked up… the last one hurts his head a bit.
In a related note, languages!
In a way because of not being so tied to one culture he takes to languages and collects snippets of them like an old lady would collect stamps. He knows German inside and out, and in my headcanon he can speak enough English to be understood. It’s grammatically correct, but he has an accent like nothing else, and he’s more then a little ashamed to actually communicate in anything other then written English. He knows enough French to read a menu, and he recently started asking Rika about Japanese. His Turkish is… well he’s able to get the basic concepts across, but he still has issues with his accent, and there are plenty of times where a turn of phrase will completely lose him. He likes to grumble to himself that he needs an immersive environment to really get the language, but honestly that would freak him out at his current level. When he learned German there were other people around speaking Russian. If he was in a completely immersive situation then his main support would be Turkey. And Turkey is a horrible troll.
As a side note he also has this bad habit of learning the worst bits of any given language. This stems from the fact that while he speaks politely, often his thoughts involve cursing, insults, and generally terrible things. Even in his native tongue he’s not crude… until you piss him off and then he’s sometimes prone to using a bit of Mat, but only if the other person doesn’t understand it. Zhores has a nasty tongue and it’s a good thing that he’s good with languages, otherwise it’d take him twice as long to learn anything. He likes to learn the crude form alongside the normal and polite parts of the language.
In conclusion, part deux!
So in the end of the day we can try and define what is and isn’t the Russian mindset, heart, soul, exc and not really be any closer to pinpointing what Zhores is. He’s Russian, that’s for sure, but he’s also bits of German, British, and everything that made up Frankfurt during the 1970’s. At the same time he wouldn’t say he’s any of those other things and he’d still be correct. He’s prone to picking up bits of cultures and languages without becoming a part of them, and he still tries to understand said cultures through his own reasoning. He’s someone who would be glad to give up his job and globetrot for a few decades, and it’s quite possible that he could pull it off if he had the freedom. He hates the government, likes the people, and in general is a big mess of contradictions that manages to work out somehow.
So if by the end of this you still feel like you’re at square one about Zhores’ culture, that’s okay. Zhores is probably right along there too, and he just rolls with it.