Putin’s House of Mirrors

In Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II, Ash (Bruce Campbell), while hiding in a cabin to escape the onslaught of undead demons, consoles himself in front of a mirror, repeating the words, “I’m fine… I’m fine.” Shockingly, Ash’s reflection literally jumps out of the mirror and grabs the “real” Ash, shouting, “I don’t think so! We just cut up our girlfriend with a chainsaw. Does that sound ‘fine’?”

I recently read another article in The New York Times about Vladimir Putin’s (alleged—but practically assured) nefarious scheming with regard to the Litivenko case, an absolutely ridiculous web of intrigue that could only have been pulled from the best things Ian Flemming ever wrote (seemingly evoking the old Hollywood catchphrase, “so real it must be fiction.”). Numerous other newspapers such as The Economist and The Guardian have also done an acceptable job of covering the ominous and foreboding direction Russian democracy has been headed recently, but there is something almost banal about their analyses, a key piece of the puzzle missing, relying instead on tired Cold War clichés (like the worst of what Ian Flemming wrote) (such as The Economist’s Pining for the cold war or The New York Times’ From Moscow, a New Chill) and pseudo-Leftist humanitarian pleas to emphasize the significance of the authoritarian turn, i.e., the arrest of Garry Kasparov, censorship of major media networks, and now the poisoning of an ex-KGB dissident.

What these articles have done is treated Putin’s political scheming as if they’re somehow wholly separate from the international political sphere, part of some other bizarre dimension that only Russians can understand. To borrow terminology from modal logic, a subject lacking any predicate. Thus, causation seems to be swept under the rug of Cold War dreams, a sort of secret longing, a nostalgia, for simpler times. Times when our enemies not only had names and faces, but were easily identifiable and had ambassadors to call, politicians to speak to, a designated country to bomb—the good old days. Now our enemies live in caves on the outskirts of Afghanistan-Pakistan and use our very own instruments of modernity as weapons against us, perhaps the ultimate absurdly ascerbic twist of irony.

The abandonment of the predicate seems to tacitly place the blame of Russia’s democratic failure on its people, perhaps for a loss of vigilance or just pure laziness (we’re never explicitly told), which is an analysis rife with smug Western decadence that is ostensibly at the root of Putin’s angst (or Angst?). We should venture a far simpler and less ridiculous hypothesis, which is that Russia’s turn from democracy to authoritarianism, marked by Putin’s consolidation of power, can and must be read through the lense of the failure of U.S. hegemony.

Rather than being some independent phenomenon, Russia’s turn is not a step backwards in time, a revival of the Cold War corpse from beyond the grave akin to a Stephen King novel or George Romero film, but part of a new phenomenon following in the wake of the woefully misguided Second Gulf War. Putin’s stance is thus: “If the U.S. has the power to act without recourse (his exact words were, ‘almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations’) and chooses to do so, I must therefore consolidate power as a counterbalance to U.S. hegemony.” Putin’s New Russia is therefore an alternative to the modernity offered by the U.S.’s current Straussian-based neo-conservatism, which has failed to an astounding degree.

Thus, in Russia, we as Americans see something highly disturbing, something that we know we see, but are afraid to speak of. It’s the thing that The Economist and The New York Times are not able to explicate from themselves, which is why all articles on Russia and Putin have this bizarre dissonance—the missing piece, so to speak. The missing piece is that Russia itself is a mirror through which we see ourselves. It is the mirror in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II. We sit in front of a mirror, spouting things we don’t know we know are lies (or, as Vonnegut might have said, foma), when a seemingly distorted version of ourself actualizes from the ethereal interspace. This is our Real self—our democracy and society in all its twisted, unspeakable horror. It is the NSA wiretappings, Guantanamo torture camps, John Edwards’ haircut and Alberto Gonzalez’ left hand of darkness revealed from behind the wall of perception that we as Americans can, but choose not, to penetrate. In that regard, isn’t it interesting that Democracy carries the same potential as Communism to be gutted like a fish and then danced around like a soulless marionette? Is what is happening in Russia just a slightly more distorted alternative to what is already happening here in front of us? If so, and if we still feel comfortable blaming the Russian people for their support of Putin (he has, since the Iraq War, maintained a practically steady 80% approval rating¹), is this not an indirect condemnation of ourselves? (And though Bush is not faring well in the polls lately, it is, tragically, not for the reasons it should be.)

Therefore, Putin’s house of mirrors is unlike that of those found in Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai or Bruce Lee’s Enter The Dragon, an obfuscated battle in a hellish netherworld pined for by Cold Warriors (though Putin is, to be fair, a sixth dan black belt in Judo), but instead a very obvious reflection of what America’s identity Really is (or translates into). It is reminescent of something Slavoj Zizek wrote about right after 9/11, but I think it can be applied to Putin just as easily: “Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to remember the Hegelian lesson: In this evil Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence.”²

1. The Age, Tide of anti-US sentiment rises in Russia, 8 Apr 2003 ↩
2. Slavoj Zizek, The Desert of the Real, 29 Oct 2001 ↩