From Russia With Hate
Anton Krasovsky and the 'Goggle-Eyed Imbecile'
In Joseph Conrad’s most Russophobic novel Under Western Eyes, the tormented student Razumov has his life turned upside down when his fellow-student Haldin confesses to the murder of a state official and various bystanders in a bomb attack. Haldin asks Razumov to help him escape, and Razumov reluctantly agrees.
Terrified and angry at having been implicated in a terrorist attentat, he heads out into the Russian night in search of the ‘town-peasant’ Ziemianitch, who Haldin hopes will help him get away. On finding Haldin’s would-be driver in a drunken stupor, Razumov thrashes him in a frenzied rage and then tries to decide whether to help Haldin escape or hand him over to the authorities.
As Conrad describes it, Razumov, Haldin and Zeimianitch are all prisoners of the same Russian world, in which:
Under the sumptuous immensity of the sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history. It covered the passive land with its lives of countless people like Ziemianitch and its handful of agitators like this Haldin—murdering foolishly.
In Russia, the land of spectral ideas and disembodied aspirations, many brave minds have turned away at last from the vain and endless conflict to the one great historical fact of the land. They turned to autocracy for the peace of their patriotic conscience as a weary unbeliever, touched by grace, turns to the faith of his fathers for the blessing of spiritual rest.
Razumov also succumbs to the same irresistible compulsion. Rejecting the ‘attractive error’ of liberalism, he decides to offer up Haldin’s name up to a well-known prince as proof of his patriotism. The prince introduces him to ‘General T’ - a secret service official and the embodiment of autocratic power:
Sitting down before his desk the General listened with compressed lips.
It was impossible to detect any sign of emotion on his face. Razumov watched the immobility of the fleshy profile. But it lasted only a moment, till the Prince had finished; and when the General turned to the providential young man, his florid complexion, the blue, unbelieving
eyes and the bright white flash of an automatic smile had an air of
jovial, careless cruelty.
I thought of the general Razumov calls ‘the goggle-eyed imbecile’ and his ‘air of jovial, careless cruelty’, while watching the horrific interview between the Russia Today director of broadcasting Anton Krasovsky and the bestselling fantasy/science fiction writer Sergei Lukyanenko on the subject of Ukraine.
Lukyanenko is one of a number of Russian sci fi writers who have taken strong anti-Ukrainian positions before and during the war. Long before the 2014 Maidan Uprising, Russian sci fi writers were writing violent military futurist and ‘alternative history’ novels which depicted an apocalyptic war between Russia and the West with its epicentre in Ukraine.
These novels invariably depicted Russia as the heroic imperial avenger, defending and expanding the ‘Russian space’ and restoring Russian imperial greatness in the face of Western/NATO aggression backed up by Ukrainian ‘Nazis’.
Some of these writers were natives of Ukraine, and became protagonists of the fictional wars they predicted. Fedor Berezin became the ‘Minister of Defense’ in the Donetsk People’s Republic in 2014. The Afghan veteran and author of ‘The Era of the Still-Born’ Gleb Bobrov, is currently head of the ‘Writers Union of Luhansk People’s Republic’.
Lukyanenko belongs to the same Russian nationalist/Ukrainophobic tradition. In 2014 he banned the translation of his books into Ukrainian in response to the Maidan Uprising, which he described as the equivalent of a ‘sex-change operation.’ He was one of the eighty organisers of the ‘Stars Over Donbass’ literary festival in March this year who signed an open letter supporting what they called the ‘special operation to denazify and demilitarize the state of Ukraine.’
No one could be surprised therefore, to find Lukyanenko sitting in a shirt covered with bird designs, accusing the Ukrainian public of a ‘self-sustaining cycle of hysteria’ based on ‘an insane level of lies’ and ‘sick fantasies’ about the Russian military.
As an example of these ‘lies’, Lukyanenko claims that Russian soldiers were y given Viagra and told to rape Ukrainian women. Krasovsky then jokes about Russians raping ‘Ukrainian grannies, before Lukyanenko recalls how Ukrainian children in the 1980s once criticised the ‘Moskals’ (Russians) who occupied Ukraine and prevented it from becoming ‘like France’.
Even Lukyanenko seem embarrased when Krasnovsky turns to the camera and says that such children should have been drowned, suggesting instead that the traditional ‘rod’ should have been used ‘rather than the river.’
No, Krasovsky insists, these children should be drowned ‘right there, where the duckling swims’. Turning back to Lukyanenko he says, ‘that’s not your method, because you are intelligent sci-fi writers, but it is our method’. He goes on to recommend that the ‘shitty little houses’ of Ukrainians should be burned with their inhabitants inside them
It’s not clear who Krasovsky is referring to when he smirkingly suggests that drowning and burning Ukrainians alive is ‘our method’, but this is not the first time he has publicly revelled in Russian military violence and cruelty.
In January this year, he warned Ukrainian ‘animals’ on his chat show that Russia would invade if Ukraine joined NATO, and take back ‘our Russian land’ by force.
Earlier this month, Krasovsky published a video of himself wearing Russian military pyjamas and a cap with a ‘Z’ mark, celebrating the missile attacks on Ukrainian cities that followed the bombing of the Crimean Bridge.
Despite these precedents, it’s something of a shock to hear a television presenter openly advocating the mass murder of civilians on a tv chat show. At first sight, Krasovsky might seem to be a 21st century variant on Conrad’s theme of Russian cruelty, in expressing a desire for punitive extermination and Ukraine’s non-existence that the goggle-eyed General T might have agreed with.
But Krasovsky is a surprising apologist for genocide. In 2013 he was fired from the pro-Kremlin tv channel Kontr TV after openly coming out as gay on television in response to proposed homophobic legislation. It took some courage to declare on-air ‘ I’m gay and I’m as much a human-being as President Putin and Premier Medvedev.’
Krasovsky has campaigned for gay rights and established a foundation to support people living with HIV. In 2015 he ran for mayor of Moscow. Yet this month he supported a law banning ‘LGBT propaganda in Russia’ - the same law that he opposed in 2013.
And his rabid support for Putin’s war makes it clear that he does not believe that Ukrainians deserve the human rights that he once campaigned for regarding homosexuals in his own country.
On the one hand, this strange trajectory seems to bear out Conrad’s thesis of a Russia in which even ‘brave minds’ have ‘turned to autocracy for the peace of their patriotic conscience.’
But many brave minds in Russia have not done this. Tens of thousands have risked their lives protesting against a vicious war of national annihilation which Russia is clearly losing, or fled the country to avoid fighting in it.
Krasovsky has since been suspended in response to what the chief editor of Russia Today called his ‘wild and disgusting statement’, and he has apologised for allowing himself to be ‘carried away.’
This smirking cruelty - regardless of Krasovsky’s personal motivations - is clearly intended to please a regime and a section of the Russian public that he believed would be amenable to his genocidal proposals. And his coarse brutality is also a symptom of a wider culture of cruelty that already preceded the Ukraine war, in the treatment of prisoners by the police, in the vicious hazing of military conscripts.
The war has brought these tendencies to the surface and intensified them, as the belligerent and incompetent army that set out to obliterate Ukraine as an independent state has found itself unable to realise its political and military aims.
Faced with a well-armed and well-trained Ukrainian military that acts with the broad support of its population, the Russian military has resorted to rape, torture, the killing of prisoners, and the bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure.
This is not the result of combat stress or the dehumanising impact of war. The Russian regime had already dehumanised Ukrainians even before Russian troops crossed the frontier, with the help of writers like Lukyanenko and tv presenters like Krasovsky. Russian atrocities in Ukraine are strategic atrocities, intended to terrorise Ukrainians into submission.
‘ I detest rebels. These subversive minds,’ says General T, before asking Razumov ‘what honour there can be against rebels - against people that deny God Himself - perfect unbelievers! Brutes! It is horrible to think of.’
In the eyes of Putin, the KGB Tsar, there is no honour or humanity for the Ukrainians ‘rebels’ asserting their right to self-determination, and the inability to achieve Russia’s objectives makes it ever more tempting for a failing imperial power to regard Ukrainians as ‘brutes’, worthy only of extermination.
Krasovsky expressed precisely that view, and he is not the only one. And despite the slap on the wrist he has received, the regime will attempt to ensure that many other Russians share it.
And the only good news that can be taken from this vertiginous moral collapse is that countries that succumb to it, ultimately tend to find themselves on the losing side.