Alternative Russian Alphabet: P is for Putin

Last night I gave a dorm talk at Ohio State to try to explain the Sochi Olympics. My task was made much easier by NBC.com and the opening ceremony alphabet sequence, which took the Cyrillic alphabet and that sweet little Russian girl and laid out a narrative of Russian history and the achievements of Russian science and culture.

But as I went through the presentation, I realized that there were a number of odd choices in how to represent Russian culture through its letters. So I've picked a few alternatives that in my mind fill in some of the gaps that the Russian Olympic organizers left out. 

А The first letter of the Russian alphabet is A, which stands for Азбука, or alphabet. Makes sense -- when people think of the Russian language, one thing they fear is those 33 letters that seem so impenetrable -- like the Russian soul or the vast taiga. The video clip takes us back to Cyril and Methodius who invented the Cyrillic alphabet, and thus to the roots of the Russian Orthodox religion in the 10th century and its link with literacy and the development of Russian culture and society.

This great map of the Soviet empire shows all the
"islands" that represent Soviet work camps.

But what if A stood for Архипелаг Гулаг? Alexander Solzhenitsyn's rendering of the "second" Soviet state, an island nation of work camps across the Soviet landscape, as the "Gulag Archipelago," encapsulated the attitude of the Soviet government to individual citizens, who were incarcerated for years if not decades, building their own camp facilities, most often in harsh environmental conditions, working as free labor in the industries of forestry, mining, and many others. The human costs of mass arrests of Soviet citizens were enormous, but so were the economic benefits to the state, and that remains to be calculated with any accuracy. Nonetheless, in the lead-up to these Olympic Games, Moscow blogger Alexei Navalny characterized the $50 billion cost of the Olympic Games as a "lost chance," and he pointed directly to those economic benefits, opining: “Russia could have had a new industrialization along the same lines as the industrialization under Stalin.” 

Hmm. As with all Olympics, it is not clear that the money spent on roads, railways, hotels, and ice rinks between 2007 and 2014 will be worth that investment in the future -- but "industrialization along the same lines" as under Stalin? Such a prospect evokes an even greater human cost than we've seen in the human rights abuses during construction of the Sochi venues.

В  One of the things students noticed is that the video sequence highlighted Russian cultural achievements (ballet, music, literature) along with scientific and technological achievements. This is all to the good -- it is right to include Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Tolstoy along with Gagarin and Mendeleev among the names Russians can be proud of. But the Russian letter V stood for вертолет Сикорского, Igor Sikorsky's helicopter. Why, exactly? Sikorsky himself -- like many of the figures who are now the "pride" of Russia -- left Russia in 1919 and emigrated to the United States, where he was able to further innovation in aviation without the hassles of Civil War economic and political disarray or, god forbid, the Bolsheviks and their centralized economy. 

What if instead V stood for Vladimir Vysotsky (1938-1980)?

"Bard" is Russian for "singer-songwriter."

This immensely talented and sometimes long-haired Russian actor and "bard" was the voice of more than one generation. Songs of anger and protest alternated with love songs and patriotic songs about war, and many listeners believed he too was a veteran of the trenches (both WWI and WWII!) and the camps, though he was too young to really experience either. Vysotsky played Hamlet at the Moscow Taganka Theater and spent time in a psychiatric ward. He married a French actress, among others. He even had an unlikely appearance on 60 Minutes in 1977 -- though he never appeared in an interview on Soviet state television during his lifetime. Russianists this month on my professional listserv have been debating how to explain Vysotsky to American students: is he the Russian Bob Dylan? the Russian John Lennon? His charisma (and a lot of bootleg tapes) made him one of the most beloved figures of 20th century Russian culture, and his tragic death due to alcoholism adds to his iconic status. If Russia is an enigma, hard to understand and even harder to explain, then Vysotsky is a perfect representative of the nation. 

Marshall Zhukov in 1941

Ж Zh is one of those funny Russian letters -- we represent it as z+h, and we only know how to pronounce it because it's found in the middle of the name Brezhnev. The Olympic clip has Zh for Zhukovsky, emblematic of the Russian competition with the West. Nikolai Zhukovsky (1847-1921) was the "founding father of modern aero- and hydrodynamic sciences." Indeed, if Zhukovsky hadn't been so cautious with his research, a Russian would have flown the first aircraft, not the Wright brothers. 

But what if Zh instead stood for Marshall Georgy Zhukov (1896-1974), the most decorated Russian military officer ever? Zhukov was instrumental in all the great battles of WWII, and he and Stalin together made the decision that it was vital not to give up Leningrad when it was besieged by the Germans. The so-called "Leningrad Blockade" lasted 872 days. The losses are almost incalculable: over 1 million Leningrad civilians, including those who died in the city and those who were so physically weakened that they were unable to survive when they were evacuated from the city. Army losses were over a million killed, captured or missing, up to 2 1/2 million wounded. Zhukov was one of the few in the Soviet hierarchy who survived Stalin's purges to live a full life, and for that, too, he is remarkable. But putting him into the alphabet would have raised the specter -- among others--  of journalistic repressions, since the alternative news channel Dozhd' ("Rain") has just been taken off the air for a violation of the "no badmouthing the history of WWII" law. They dared to question Zhukov and Stalin's decision not to surrender the city of Leningrad, thus in the eyes of the state dishonoring the suffering of those millions of Leningraders.

Ё  Ёжик в тумане, A Hedgehog in the Fog, is a 1975 Soviet cartoon film. Like the use of Pushkin's fairytale-like prologue to his first narrative poem Ruslan and Liudmila [to represent the hard sign, a letter used in pre-reform orthography and thus in Pushkin's lifetime], this choice of the hedgehog makes sense, since the heroine of the video is a little girl dreaming a dream of Russia. There have been wonderful contributions to children's lives by Russian authors -- from Pushkin and his fairytales to Chaikovsky's magical music for The Nutcracker to Soviet cartoons like this one. But before Ё [pronounced Yo] in the Russian alphabet comes E [pronounced Ye], which stands for Yezhov.

Nikolai Yezhov (1895-1940) was disappeared from the narrative of 20th century Russian history for the purposes of Olympic pride. And not the first time: the famous set of photographs of Stalin with his commissar inspecting the White Sea Canal project (brought to you by the Gulag, Inc.) reminds us of the many Soviet citizens "disappeared" by Yezhov himself during the worst of Stalin's purges in 1937-1938, called "The Great Terror" in Western sources but in Russia known as the Yezhovshchina. 

Indeed, if A didn't stand for the Archipelago, it might have stood for Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet who in her poem cycle Requiem chronicled the horror of women waiting in line for days in Leningrad outside the gates of the Kresty prison to find out the fates of their loved ones who had been arrested during the Yezhovshchina. In any version of state propaganda, inconvenient figures and events can be "disappeared." And the Olympics in Sochi are nothing if not state propaganda.

Though in English I'm at the 25th letter of the alphabet, Y, in Russian I'm only on the eighth letter. But the point is becoming clear. While of course no one expected S to stand for Stalin, this entire Olympic Games has been about P for Putin. As I said to my students, it's rare that I find myself rooting for the rule of dictatorship and the lockdown of totalitarian police regimes, but as I think about those athletes, perched at immense environmental, economic, and social cost at the edge of the Caucasus mountains, I am hoping that this ego-show designed to highlight the power of Russia and of Putin will come off without too many more human costs. 

I will admit, too, that in the best of all possible worlds, P would stand not for the 50,000 police and armed forces who are on site to guarantee a peaceful Olympic Games in Sochi, but for the Russian Police Choir. There's a Canadian video out there arguing that the winter games have always been gay; I think the Police Choir's rendition of Daft Punk's Get Lucky makes that abundantly clear.

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