The Return of the Russian Leviathan

"Until recently Sergei taught at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, which is a top and very liberal institution. He had a blog at the same time. I understand that that job was taken away from him, but the blog part is still there. At the time of the decision of the jury, we didn’t have that information, that happened later. It’s really unfortunate that he’s lost his position—unfortunate is maybe the wrong word, unfortunate to me means something that happens that you can’t control. But it looks like there are people at the top who don’t like what Sergei says, who don’t like his analysis, and who contributed to him losing his job. The book is amazing. It’s just the wonderful writing, but most important are the thought and argument that went into this book. It’s a collection of essays or standalone chapters. I will be talking about the other books on the shortlist; Sergei’s book stands at the top of the pyramid of the other books. The shortlisted authors discuss different aspects of Russian or Soviet culture and history—or even go into the future, with environmental studies like Kate Brown’s—but Sergei’s book brings this all together, it brings in history, it brings in politics, it brings in culture. In that sense, it really brings together the best of what we’ve got on the shortlist. “Russia is only now trying to make sense out of what happened in the last 30 to 50 years, with the loss of empire, the loss of messianic ideology” Sergei is a deep thinker. With his knowledge of sociology, of political psychology, of history, he deals with the question, which is very important today—and I would say very important to the world of the last maybe 100 years—of Russia as a post-imperial state. Russia is going through post-imperial struggles, something that maybe other countries and nations that had empires went through before. Other countries went through transformations in the 1960s with social upheavals. Russia is only now trying to make sense out of what happened in the last 30 to 50 years, with the loss of empire, the loss of messianic ideology. Sergei remains optimistic, but his diagnosis is not great in the sense that Russia, at this point, doesn’t have a clear sense of itself or a clear vision for the future. It’s stuck in the past and visions of a grandiose Soviet or imperial past, which is one of the factors that pushes it toward all this adventurism and expansion and a lot of blood in the Russian neighbourhood, but also outside of the post-Soviet space. Again, it’s done in a very, very erudite way. It really brings up knowledge from different disciplines to tackle the question that all of us have today, ‘What is happening in Russia? How do you explain that?’ And he does that on a very deep level, going beyond your normal explanation of, ‘Okay, there is Putin, or the Kremlin, or there is this advisor or that advisor.’ He is talking about the society and saying that people at the top are really using certain insecurities, certain features that are in the society already, to come to power, to secure their power, and then also advancing those insecurities and probably making them worse. So, from that point of view, it’s a very important book. Exactly. What is being reflected, projected and articulated by the current regime are the current uncertainties but also the longer tradition of Russian political history—and political history is one of the subjects that Sergei specializes in. The argument that there is this authoritarian trend in Russian history, and that Russia really has difficulty going outside of that trend, is something that Richard Pipes, a historian who worked at Harvard, was promoting in the 1960s and 70s. He was considered an archenemy by the Soviet establishment. But then, when Putin came to power, people like Vladislav Surkov invited him and there was a translation of his books. They said, ‘Okay, you’re absolutely right. Historically that’s how we function and we can’t function otherwise.’ And Pipes unwillingly became a justification for the new authoritarian regime and its authoritarian tendencies. What I’m trying to say is that Sergei is really trying to deal with issues that have been noticed by others before, but he does that through the prism of current developments, and the country’s unhealthy fascination with its great power past. The biggest or founding myth of today’s Russia, I might add, is the myth of the Great Patriotic War. That’s one example of society being deeply rooted in the past and having difficulties breaking away. Absolutely, and that’s a quality you don’t see so much. I hope Andrew Jack will maybe see this interview and correct me if I’m wrong—he possesses the institutional memory and knowledge of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize like nobody else—but it seems to me this is the first book translated from Russian that won the prize. In my previous incarnation as a judge a few years ago, I remember that we looked at a translated book and weren’t sure what to do with it. We created a separate category for that book. This time it was different, there was no positive or negative inclination for translated books. Return of the Russian Leviathan is very well translated . Translated books should have the same prominence for the prize because, exactly as you said, they provide that absolutely unique perspective."