On the occasion of receiving the Russian translation of my book.

Last week, my UK publisher, Thames & Hudson, sent me two copies of the Russian translation of my book ‘Seven Keys to Modern Art’, which is published by Ad Marginem. In Russian, the title is:  

Семь ключей к современному искусству.

My name is:

Саймон Морли.

What a beautiful looking language! I felt proud when I looked at the book. But also very sad. Since the Ukraine-Russia war began in late February many commentators have lamented the fact that the land of Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Kandinsky and Tarkovsky is now behaving like what these same commentators call ‘barbarians.’ How did it happen?

I have asked my Korean friends and students if they think Russia is part of Europe, and most of them say it is not. It certainly doesn’t seem to belong in the “West’. As Putin himself declares, it is  the ‘West’ that is making war on Russia. By “West’ he means mostly the United States. But the animosity may go much deeper. After all, Russia has a significantly different history to western Europe because it straddles so much of the Eurasian continent. Not many people realize that Russia shares a border with North Korea! In fact, it’s thanks to Russia – or the Soviet Union, as it then was - that North Korea continued to exist, at least up to the early 1990s, at which point China stepped into the role of primary supporter of the sick and deranged child of Marxist-Leninism. But that’s another story.

In 1917, Russia chose a dramatically different kind of modernity to the rest of Europe. Marxism as a political philosophy was born in Germany and elaborated in England as a theory to explain the development of the new capitalist industrialized societies, but a predominantly agrarian nation became the first nation to call itself ‘communist.’ Strange. Very quickly the Bolsheviks adopted an authoritarian system of governance which claimed to be ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ but  obviously was not, which caused great confusion for left-leaning intellectuals and Communist Party members globally. But perhaps the actual story of what happened is now becoming more clear.

The ideology of communism was important not because of its intrinsic ‘scientific’ validity in predicting the inevitable evolution of capitalism toward the ‘classless society’, but because it served as a way of making a rapid and violent redistribution of power, glossed as a ‘revolution’, seem inevitable and benign. But actually, what happened in Russia (as later in North Korea, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, etc.) was a massively accelerated transformation that was sufficiently anarchic that power could be quickly transferred to those most ruthlessly wanting it. Marxist ideology, defined succinctly as “the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction” by the art historian Paul Wood,  served as useful window-dressing. But the reality was always the kind of redistribution of power that a democratic system cannot permit, and indeed, is explicitly designed to render as difficult as possible. The Russia of today is the result not so much of the practice of communism as of the rejection of the democracy that step by step (and very  imperfectly) the “West’ adopted over the period of two centuries. 

The ’West’ opted for the ‘open’ society rather than the ‘closed’ society.  These terms were first used by Karl Popper in his two volume ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’ (1945). Popper argued that what was so important about the democratic principle central to the modern ‘open’ society was not, as was the case in the Classical world, because it focused on the question “Who should rule?” (although this continues to be a fallacy dear to modern democracies) but rather because it confronted the problem of how a state can be “constituted so that bad rulers can be got rid of without bloodshed, without violence.”

What is so striking about much of the Russian propaganda about the war is the projection onto the Ukrainian and ‘Western’ Other of precisely the characteristics of Russia itself. After all, a good synonym for a ‘closed society’ is ‘Nazism.’ So, if you switch the pronouns from ‘they’ to “we’ you get quite an accurate accounting of Russian actions. Putin and the Russian elite’s current war is essentially a war not against ‘Nazism’ but against the principle that bad rulers can be got rid of without violence. This is what Putin hates about the Ukraine. They got rid of their bad rulers more or less without violence, and are leaning decisively toward democracy.  The idea that he and his kleptocratic system could be voted out is unthinkable because it depends on a profound transformation in society that would make his kind of rule impossible. This transformation is one in which leaders are made accountable to large numbers of people and do not simply base their rule on consolidating power and privilege and protecting themselves from potential and aggressive rivals.

Seeing my name in Russian, a script that is now more illegible to me than Korean, and thinking of the Russians who made it possible for my book to be published there, is therefore a melancholy experience. Can they continue to publish books like mine? In fact, another of my books, ‘The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art’ is due to be published by Ad Marginem. But maybe now it won’t be. How much censorship is being exerted? Is modern art sufficiently harmless these days that the Russian leadership doesn’t mind?  It seems highly unlikely there will be a compelled return to Socialist Realism (see my blog post of North Korean ‘Juche Realism’).  Then again, maybe these days there is no need. As the Russian art historian Boris Groys pointed out in ‘The Total Art of Stalinism’ (1992), Socialist Realism grew out of the same heady cultural climate as the modernist avant-garde, in that both believed art could change the world. Maybe no one believes that anymore. It’s all part of the ‘culture industry’. But insofar as that ‘industry’ is radically oriented toward the values of neoliberalism and America, it does seem feasible that there will be a clamp down in Russia. 

So I hope Russians can find my book. I hope that what I write about the artists I discuss, and the seven ways of thinking about art I offer, helps them celebrate and have confidence in the values of an open society in which bad rulers are regularly peacefully voted out of power.