SACW - 10 March 2015 | Nepal: Ruling n War Crimes / Sri Lanka: Justice for War Victimes / Bangladesh: Killing of Avijit Roy / Pakistan: sectarian divide / Unreason in South Asia / ‘illegal Bangladeshi’ Racist Shorthand for All Bengal / India: Banning of the Film 'India's Daughter' / Russian TV / Northwestern Russia after World War II / Jewish Life in Nazi Germany

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 10 March 2015 - No. 2849 
[since 1996]
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Contents:
1. No Amnesty for War Crimes - Landmark Judgement by Supreme Court of Nepal
2. Sri Lanka: Justice for War Victims, UN OHCHR Report and Politics of Tamil Nationalism
3. Bangladesh: editorials and commentary following the killing of the blogger Avijit Roy
4. Petition to Bangladeshi Government: Prosecute Islamists who Killed Avijit Roy and Protect Freethinkers
5. Pakistan: Healing our sectarian divide | Pervez Hoodbhoy
6. How does Pakistan today feel about its actions in 1971? | Salil Tripathi
7. Salil Tripathi: Where Assassins are Emboldened and Thoughts are Imprisoned
8. Pakistan - India: Joint Statement of the 4th Islamabad Dialogue | Jinnah Institute & Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation
9. Bina Shah: Should White Women Make Documentaries about Rape in India? | Bina Shah
10. The Banning of the Film 'India's Daughter': No leg to stand on - N. Ram / Easiest Option is to ban things - Rajeev Dhavan
11. Is the film 'India's daughter' a victim of corporate media war ?
12. India: AIDWA strongly opposes the blanket ban on the documentary titled "India's Daughter"
13. India: What's This Din Over Leslee Udwin's Film on Rape in India ? - selected commentary & a statement
14. The Challenge of Unreason in South Asia | Subhash Gatade
15. India: Budget for the rich to get richer and throw crumbs to the poor - Statement by NTUI
16. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - India: Assam government and the Centre to Bodo violence are mired in apathy (Suhas Chakma)
 - India: 'My father was dragged out of bus and beaten': Other face of NE racism (Rezaul Hasan Laskar)
 - India: Dimapur Lynching - Internet and SMS Banned, Curfew Lifted
 - India: Is Anand Patwardhan's Webiste Being Blocked ?
 - India: Patna maulana's say all talk of uniform civil code is an attack on freedom of religion
 - India: Mob justice? in Dimapur, Nagaland
 - India: Caste Panchayats Dispensing Justice Through Kangaroo Courts in Maharashtra
 - India: Teesta Setalvad and Gujarat riots - media has to be objective (Anil Dharker)
 - India: Vigilantism in Dimapur
 - India: Modi government mulls new education policy, including making Vedic Maths compulsory
 - India: Progressives and Muslim Right SDPI co-orgnising the founding conference of All India People's Forum (14-15 March 2015)
 - India: Photo of 8 March 2015 Delhi Demo and Rally at Jantar Mantar by Supporters of rape accused guru Asaram Bapu
 - India: Isn’t ‘illegal Bangladeshi’ Racist Shorthand for All Bengali Speaking Muslims in Assam? (Bonojit Hussain)
 - India's new Hindutva laden custodians take charge at ICHR
 - Feminists Rally on Women's Day 2015 in Delhi Provides a Platform to a representative of SDPI - The political arm of the Popular Front of India
 - India: Newsreport re Sadhvi Balika Saraswati's vile communal talk at the VHP convention in Karnataka
 - India: Latest move underway to harrass Teesta Setalvad - Modi govt's human resources development ministry set's up a new probe
 - Press Release by Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti (6 March 2015)
 - The problem in RSS’ Hinduism (Kancha Ilaiah)
 - Indians praising Pakistan should be ‘hit with shoes': VHP’s Sadhvi
 - VHP, Bajrang Dal harass people by capturing cattle: Government
 - RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat, Heal Thyself (Brinda Karat on NDTV)

::: FULL TEXT :::
17. Gary Shteyngart: What I learned from watching a week of Russian TV
18. Historical Preservation in Northwestern Russia after World War II | Susan Smith
19. Schmidt Hollander on Nicosia and Scrase, 'Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses'


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1. NO AMNESTY FOR WAR CRIMES - LANDMARK JUDGEMENT BY SUPREME COURT OF NEPAL
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Nepalese Supreme Court gave landmark judgement that serious crimes should not be the subject of Amnesty and declared ultra vires a several provisions of - Commission on Disappearance and Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act.
http://www.sacw.net/article10748.html

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2. SRI LANKA: JUSTICE FOR WAR VICTIMS, UN OHCHR REPORT AND POLITICS OF TAMIL NATIONALISM
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The UN Human Rights Commission's decision to investigate violations and the huge loss of life during the last months of the war concluded in 2009 was a significant victory for the victims. The dignity of the victims required that the truth must be told without fear or favour, and processes of justice and restoration set in motion. And the wrong was not all on one side. Dignity also demands that we await the verdict of the judges with restraint and reverence for the name of justice.
http://www.sacw.net/article10772.html

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3. BANGLADESH: EDITORIALS AND COMMENTARY FOLLOWING THE KILLING OF THE BLOGGER AVIJIT ROY
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Selected editorials and commentary in the Bangladesh media on the hacking to death of author and blogger Avijit Roy
http://www.sacw.net/article10736.html

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4. PETITION TO BANGLADESHI GOVERNMENT: PROSECUTE ISLAMISTS WHO KILLED AVIJIT ROY AND PROTECT FREETHINKERS
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We are outraged by the senseless and brutal hacking to death of well known scientist, atheist and writer Avijit Roy and the serious attack on his wife and blogger, Rafida Ahmed Bonya, by Islamists in Bangladesh.
http://www.sacw.net/article10739.html

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5. PAKISTAN: HEALING OUR SECTARIAN DIVIDE  | Pervez Hoodbhoy
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More razor wire, guards, and gun licences cannot assure the safety of Pakistani citizens. Whether Sunni, Shia, Christian, Hindu, or Ahmadi, they all live in fear. Real protection can come only by educating Pakistan’s upcoming generations that all faiths are entitled to equal respect, moving firmly and equally against all militant groups, and giving every Pakistani citizen exactly the same legal rights and privileges as any other.
http://www.sacw.net/article10761.html

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6. HOW DOES PAKISTAN TODAY FEEL ABOUT ITS ACTIONS IN 1971? | Salil Tripathi
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February 21 resonates with special meaning for Bangladeshis. That morning in 1952, hundreds of students of what was then known as Dacca University, came to their campus to protest against restrictions placed on public assembly. The students were part of the movement that sought equal recognition for the language spoken most widely in East Bengal, and the mother-tongue of most — Bangla. Bangladesh was part of Pakistan then, and the national language was Urdu.
http://www.sacw.net/article10783.html

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7. SALIL TRIPATHI: WHERE ASSASSINS ARE EMBOLDENED AND THOUGHTS ARE IMPRISONED
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The ghastly murder of Avijit Roy on a road in Dhaka reveals just how dangerous it has become for writers to express themselves freely in Bangladesh. These attacks are outrageous, and the Bangladesh Government, particularly the present one which claims to be secular, should stand by the writers and protect their right to speak freely. Instead, it has adopted a policy of appeasement of ‘religious sentiment.’ This comes alongside intimidation of the mainstream media that are critical of the government, including the leading national newspapers.
http://www.sacw.net/article10752.html

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8. PAKISTAN - INDIA: JOINT STATEMENT OF THE 4TH ISLAMABAD DIALOGUE | JINNAH INSTITUTE & CENTRE FOR DIALOGUE AND RECONCILIATION
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Senior diplomats, parliamentarians, policy-makers and journalists from Pakistan and India met for the fourth round of the Track-II Islamabad Dialogue to discuss the state of bilateral relations, ahead of the much anticipated meeting between the Foreign Secretaries of the two countries on March 3. The dialogue was organised by Jinnah Institute and the Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation
http://www.sacw.net/article10747.html

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9. BINA SHAH: SHOULD WHITE WOMEN MAKE DOCUMENTARIES ABOUT RAPE IN INDIA? | Bina Shah
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On the one hand this could be an attempt by these women to reassert control over the Indian conversation about rape and women's rights, feeling that British filmmaker Leslee Udwin has taken it away from them with this film. That's understandable, from an intersectional viewpoint, and also an anti-imperialist one. I can see the argument that a white woman has swooped in and made statements about India – “a sick culture” – that Indian feminists would find insulting. Yet it's not hard to see that the sick culture Udwin refers to is the rape culture that is actually sick and diseased. Should an Indian woman have made this documentary? Perhaps. Was it wrong for a British woman to do so? I don't think so.
http://www.sacw.net/article10781.html

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10. THE BANNING OF THE FILM 'INDIA'S DAUGHTER': NO LEG TO STAND ON - N. Ram / Easiest Option is to ban things - Rajeev Dhavan
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India's Daughter is a powerful and sensitive documentary that is part of a global campaign against rape, violence against women, and gender inequality. It explores the life and dreams of an extraordinary young woman, brutally ended. The tension between her story and the outrageously reactionary social attitudes expressed on camera gives the documentary its power. The government's ban has no leg, social, moral, or legal, to stand on.
http://www.sacw.net/article10784.html

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11. IS THE FILM 'INDIA'S DAUGHTER' A VICTIM OF CORPORATE MEDIA WAR ? | Vidya Bhushan Rawat
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A few days ago our finance minister and the legal brain of the current government Mr Arun Jaitley spoke in a conference and said that ‘you can not ban anything in the current age of information'. ‘How can any government ban any thing when the flow of information is so far and vast he said'. It is not more than a month when the government was seen hiding itself in the war cries of nationalism and arrogance of ‘we will see' and ‘India's reputation is being targeted'.
http://www.sacw.net/article10775.html

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12. INDIA: AIDWA STRONGLY OPPOSES THE BLANKET BAN ON THE DOCUMENTARY TITLED "INDIA'S DAUGHTER"
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All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) strongly opposes the blanket ban on the documentary titled “India's Daughter” made by BBC 4. This is a knee jerk reaction that constitutes an attack on the freedom of expression. Furthermore the film reveals the reality of the brutality of rape without sensationalizing it.
http://www.sacw.net/article10770.html

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13. INDIA: WHAT'S THIS DIN OVER LESLEE UDWIN'S FILM ON RAPE IN INDIA ? - SELECTED COMMENTARY & A STATEMENT
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Article by Anna MM Vetticad, Sanjay Hegde and a review by Sonia Faleiro of Leslee Udwin's Film on Rape in India there is also the statement by the Editors Guild of India opposing any ban on the film.
http://www.sacw.net/article10768.html

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14. THE CHALLENGE OF UNREASON IN SOUTH ASIA | Subhash Gatade
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Words, ideas scare fundoos rather fundamentalists of every kind, every colour and every stripe.
http://www.sacw.net/article10762.html

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15. INDIA: BUDGET FOR THE RICH TO GET RICHER AND THROW CRUMBS TO THE POOR - STATEMENT BY NTUI
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The government’s promise of ‘poverty elimination’ comes with an across-the-board reduction in government expenditure on social protection and social security. The funds allocated for the MGNREGA are frozen at Rs. 34,000 crores and have for the first time come to below 2 percent of government expenditure. Expenditure on health, education, women and child development, both rural and urban housing, drinking water and sanitation, and welfare of SCs, STs and minorities all taken together have faced cuts amounting to 1 percent of the total budgeted expenditure or nearly Rs. 10,000 crores.
http://www.sacw.net/article10746.html

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16. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
=========================================
available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/
 - India: Assam government and the Centre to Bodo violence are mired in apathy (Suhas Chakma)
 - India: 'My father was dragged out of bus and beaten': Other face of NE racism (Rezaul Hasan Laskar)
 - India: Dimapur Lynching - Internet and SMS Banned, Curfew Lifted
 - India: Is Anand Patwardhan's Webiste Being Blocked ?
 - India: Patna maulana's say all talk of uniform civil code is an attack on freedom of religion
 - India: Mob justice? in Dimapur, Nagaland
 - India: Caste Panchayats Dispensing Justice Through Kangaroo Courts in Maharashtra
 - India - Delhi: churches, gurdwaras and temples stand in the path of signal-free corridor
 - India: Teesta Setalvad and Gujarat riots - media has to be objective (Anil Dharker)
 - India: Vigilantism in Dimapur
 - India: Modi government mulls new education policy, including making Vedic Maths compulsory
 - India: Progressives and Muslim Right SDPI co-orgnising the founding conference of All India People's Forum (14-15 March 2015)
 - India: Photo of 8 March 2015 Delhi Demo and Rally at Jantar Mantar by Supporters of rape accused guru Asaram Bapu
 - India: Isn’t ‘illegal Bangladeshi’ Racist Shorthand for All Bengali Speaking Muslims in Assam? (Bonojit Hussain)
 - India's new Hindutva laden custodians take charge at ICHR
 - Feminists Rally on Women's Day 2015 in Delhi Provides a Platform to a representative of SDPI - The political arm of the Popular Front of India
 -  Seminar Announcment: Trilokpuri to Trilokpuri: 30 years of Targeted Communal Violence, 9-10 March, IIC, New Delhi
 - India: Newsreport re Sadhvi Balika Saraswati's vile communal talk at the VHP convention in Karnataka
 - India - Maharashtra govt scraps Muslim quota
 - India: Latest move underway to harrass Teesta Setalvad - Modi govt's human resources development ministry set's up a new probe
 - Press Release by Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti (6 March 2015)
 - The problem in RSS’ Hinduism (Kancha Ilaiah)
 - Indians praising Pakistan should be ‘hit with shoes': VHP’s Sadhvi
 - VHP, Bajrang Dal harass people by capturing cattle: Government
 - RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat, Heal Thyself (Brinda Karat on NDTV) 

and More ...
available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/

::: FULL TEXT :::
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17. ‘OUT OF MY MOUTH COMES UNIMPEACHABLE MANLY TRUTH’
GARY SHTEYNGART: WHAT I LEARNED FROM WATCHING A WEEK OF RUSSIAN TV
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(Magazine, The New York Times, February 18, 2015)

On a cold, sunny New Year’s Eve in 2014, I am sitting at the edge of my king-size bed at the Four Seasons hotel in New York, munching through a stack of Wagyu beef slices and demolishing a bottle of pinot noir while watching a woman play a man playing a bearded woman on Russian state television. Standing on a stage lit by gleaming chandeliers before an audience of Russia’s elite celebrities, the parodist Elena Vorobei sings to the tune of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” in a crude impersonation of Conchita Wurst, the Austrian drag queen who won the 2014 Eurovision song contest. Vorobei is dressed in a sparkling gown, winking cheekily, scratching at her bearded face and swishing her lustrous wig around. “I have a beard!” she belts. At one point she throws out a Hitler salute, a gesture that’s meant to evoke Austria, Conchita’s homeland. The camera pans the laughing audience, cutting for a moment to a well-known actor-singer-writer-bodybuilder and then to one of the show’s M.C.s, Russia’s pop king, the also-bearded Philipp Kirkorov (widely assumed to be gay). The men, who are almost all tanned, in sharply cut suits, grin with unconstrained glee. The bejeweled women wear tight, knowing smiles. Everyone sways and claps.

Viewers in Yekaterinburg
wolfing down their morning
kasha are given a rundown
of the crimes committed
by the British royal family.

With the exception of fishing, soccer and the Orthodox Church, few things are taken more seriously in Russia than Eurovision. Indeed, much of the sequined musical fare on Russian television looks like an endless Eurovision rehearsal. When Conchita won, back in May, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an ultranationalist in Russia’s Parliament who is roughly equivalent to Michele Bachmann, said her victory meant “the end of Europe.” The deputy prime minister and the Orthodox Church issued statements essentially denouncing the collapse of Christian civilization as we know it. On tonight’s show, broadcast to millions of Russians, the message is clear: Europe may have rejected homophobia, a value it once shared with Russia, by giving a musical prize to a drag queen, but Russia, like Gloria Gaynor herself, will survive, never to succumb to the rest of the world’s wimpy notions of tolerance. A country where gangs of vigilantes who call their cause “Occupy Pedophilia” attack gay men and women on the streets of its major cities will now carry the mantle of the European Christian project.

“I love you, Russia,” the bearded singer intones in English at the end of her number. “Russia, I’m yours,” she adds in Russian.

Seven more days of this, I think, as I crawl over to the minibar.

You might be wondering why I left my home and family and started watching Russian drag-queen parodies. I am the subject of an experiment. For the next week, I will subsist almost entirely on a diet of state-controlled Russian television, piped in from three Apple laptops onto three 55-inch Samsung monitors in a room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan. (If I have to imbibe the TV diet of the common Russian man, I will at least live in the style of one of his overlords.) Two of the monitors are perched directly in front of my bed, with just enough space for a room-service cart to squeeze in, and the third hangs from a wall to my right. The setup looks like the trading floor of a very small hedge fund or the mission control of a poor nation’s space program. But I will not be monitoring an astronaut’s progress through the void. In a sense, I am the one leaving the planet behind.

Continue reading the main story
I will stay put in my 600-square-foot luxury cage, except for a few reprieves, and will watch TV during all my waking hours. I can entertain visitors, as long as the machines stay on. Each morning I will be allowed a walk to the New York Health & Racquet Club on West 56th Street for a long swim. Vladimir Putin reportedly takes a two-hour swim every morning to clear his head and plot the affairs of state. Without annexing Connecticut or trying to defend a collapsing currency, I will be just like him, minus the famous nude torso on horseback.

Ninety percent of Russians, according to the Levada Center, an independent research firm, get their news primarily from television. Middle-aged and older people who were formed by the Soviet system and those who live outside Moscow and St. Petersburg are particularly devoted TV watchers. Two of the main channels — Channel 1 and Rossiya 1 — are state-owned. The third, NTV, is nominally independent but is controlled by Gazprom-Media, a subsidiary of the giant energy company that is all but a government ministry. Executives from all three companies regularly meet with Kremlin officials.

Each channel has a slightly different personality. Channel 1 was the Soviet Union’s original channel, which beamed happy farm reports and hockey victories at my parents and grandparents. It features lots of film classics and a raucous health show whose title can be roughly translated as “Being Alive Is Swell!” Rossiya 1 is perhaps best known for a show called “News of the Week,” featuring a Kremlin propagandist, Dmitry Kiselev, who once implicitly threatened to bomb the United States into a pile of “radioactive ash.” (Sadly, for me, Kiselev is taking this week off from ranting.) NTV is more happy-go-lucky, blasting noirish crime thrillers and comedy shows, like a “Saturday Night Live” rip-off shamelessly titled “Saturday. Night. Show.” But during regular breaks for the news, the three networks are indistinguishable in their love of homeland and Putin and their disdain for what they see as the floundering, morally corrupt and increasingly lady-bearded West.

Here is the question I’m trying to answer: What will happen to me — an Americanized Russian-speaking novelist who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a child — if I let myself float into the television-filtered head space of my former countrymen? Will I learn to love Putin as 85 percent of Russians profess to do? Will I dash to the Russian consulate on East 91st Street and ask for my citizenship back? Will I leave New York behind and move to Crimea, which, as of this year, Putin’s troops have reoccupied, claiming it has belonged to Russia practically since the days of the Old Testament? Or will I simply go insane?

A friend of mine in St. Petersburg, a man in his 30s who, like many his age, avoids state-controlled TV and goes straight to alternative news sources on the Internet, warns me in an email: “Your task may prove harmful to your psyche and your health in general. Russian TV, especially the news, is a biohazard.” I’ll be fine, I think. Russians have survived far worse than this. But, just in case, I have packed a full complement of anti-anxiety, sleep and pain medication.

Continue reading the main story
DAY 1

I glance from monitor to monitor, muting the volume on Channel 1, pumping it up on Rossiya 1, lowering it two bars on NTV. On one channel, Asiatic dwarves are shooting confetti at one another. Another screen shows a musical number performed by cadres of athletic dancers celebrating the 33 medals Russia won at the Sochi Olympics. Each line is met with the English refrain “Oh, yeah!” Another channel has two men dressed as giant bears, break dancing.

Russian TV has lovingly preserved all eras of American and European pop culture, and it recombines them endlessly, the more nonsensically, the better. Two frosted-haired individuals — a small bearded man and a middle-aged giantess — belt out a cover of the 1989 Roxette hit “The Look.” On another monitor, the famed Tatar crooner Renat Ibragimov, a dapper elderly man, performs a rousing version of Tom Jones’s 1960s dark pop ballad “Delilah.” If Spinal Tap actually existed, it would be touring its heart out in Vladivostok right now. But no matter what the style of the music, the studio audience goes bananas with the clapping and cheering. I send a few clips to my friend Mark Butler, who teaches music theory and cognition at Northwestern University, to help me understand the Russian style of enthusiasm. “The audience is not clapping solely on two and four, as listeners versed in rock do,” he writes back. “Nor are they ‘one-three clappers’ (the stereotype of people who don't get rock rhythm). Instead, they are clapping on every beat.”

I remember all this clapping from my early teenage years, at bar and bat mitzvahs in the Russian nightclubs of Queens and Brooklyn, and my constant need to slink away from the applause so I could be shy and alone in the parking lot. The happiest applause, in my memory anyway, belonged to my grandmother and her generation, who seemed amazed to still be walking the earth and to be doing so in the relative wonderland of Rego Park, Queens.

Slightly drunk off a frisky Clos Du Val pinot noir, which I’ve been sipping along with another helping of Wagyu, I can’t help myself. I begin clapping too, mouthing the lyrics “Forgif me, Deelaila, I jas’ kudn take anymorr.” In my high spirits, I take an affectionate look at my surroundings. The Four Seasons is a fine choice of hotel for my task. The lobby is filled with Russians, trendy grandmas sparkling from head to toe in Louis Vuitton and Chanel, guiding their equally gilded granddaughters past an enormous Christmas tree. The view from my room faces the nearly completed 432 Park Avenue, a 96-story luxury condominium building, which will be one of the tallest habitable towers in Manhattan (apartments start at nearly $17 million). If I had checked in for New Year’s Eve 2015, by which time 432 Park Avenue is expected to be complete, some of the tenants staring back at me would very likely belong to the class of Russian oligarchs who have helped transform the real estate in London, and now in New York, into the priciest on earth.

On NTV’s New Year’s extravaganza, the talk among the presenters turns to politics. The end of the year, after all, is a time to take stock, and stock-taking, whether at the kitchen table or the bathhouse or upon waking up after a night of drinking on some icy railroad platform far from home, is a national tradition. Russia is a country blessed but mostly cursed to endure years of civil war, global upheaval and dissolution of empire so transformative that other countries would have just given up and called it a day: 1917, 1941 and 1991 come to mind as moments when the very nature of Russia changed. In 2014, Russia changed again, or rather, Putin has taken a more definitive turn in his increasingly aggressive, anti-Western style of politics. He has become a conqueror, like the Russian czars he sometimes invokes with pseudomystical reverence in his speeches. In 2014, he concentrated his neo-imperial ambitions on Crimea, a sunny peninsula jutting into the Black Sea.

The year wasn’t supposed to end the way it did. The Sochi Olympics, perhaps the most corrupt in Winter Olympic history, were designed to present Russia as a nation that could compete with the West on its own terms, a nation that could mount an expensive pyrotechnical display while celebrating literary heroes like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Nabokov. The fact that in 2013 a museum dedicated to Nabokov’s work in St. Petersburg was spray-painted with the word “pedophile” by the same sort of people who revile Conchita was not mentioned.

In February, a pro-European revolution swept the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, a strong ally of Putin’s, from power in Kiev, replacing him with Petro Poroshenko. With Ukraine slipping from the Kremlin’s orbit, Putin sent Russian troops to occupy and later annex Ukrainian Crimea. Putin has said that Crimea is as important for the Russian people as the Temple Mount is for the Jews and Muslims, an opinion that should offend Russians, Jews and Muslims alike. For most people born in the U.S.S.R., myself included, the word Crimea evokes memories of summer vacations gorging on pelmeni (a species of dumpling) and getting reacquainted with the sun in decaying hotels and private huts. Think of it as a shabbier Fort Lauderdale with the occasional Chekhov statue. In any case, the loss of Crimea, with its majority-speaking Russian population, has been one of the most acutely felt wounds of the dissolution of the Soviet Union — having Crimea fall outside of Russia’s borders was like cutting off a piece of the Floridian peninsula below Jacksonville — and its reconquest has elevated Putin’s standing far above that of any Russian leader in perhaps a century. But that proved not to be enough for him.

The imposition of Western sanctions against Russian officials after Crimea’s annexation dealt but a glancing blow to the Russian economy. Putin’s next move, his support of pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine’s industrialized Donbass region, led to a war that the United Nations estimates has displaced a million people and resulted in more than 5,000 deaths, and further sanctions from the West. (As of this writing, a cease-fire has been brokered, but it is fragile and may not last.) But it is the collapse of the price of oil, Russia’s main export commodity, that has weakened the regime. As the price of a barrel of Brent crude and the value of the ruble go down, the tenor of propaganda on Russian television goes up.

The presenters of a Pan-Slavic Russian-Ukrainian-Belorussian concert are rattling off a list of Russian pop stars no longer allowed into Ukraine after Putin’s invasion of Crimea. “We don’t have such blacklists,” the M.C. says. “We wish all people love and friendship without any boycotts.”

Photo
Shteyngart dining on Wagyu beef during his captivity at the Four Seasons. Credit Sasha Rudensky for The New York Times
“They” — meaning Ukraine and the West; according to the Russian media, NATO and the C.I.A. have all but taken over Ukraine’s government, so it’s hard to resist conflating the two — “have oppressed our artists!” another singer says.

“They’re not allowing us to have our own point of view.”

“How can one not love one’s own president? That’s our point of view.”

“On our stage, there are no borders.”

The presenters sound genuinely hurt, and they are speaking for much of their television audience when they complain about the West’s cold shoulder. This is geopolitics as middle-school homeroom. Like an ambitious tween who longs for social success, Russia wants to be both noticed and respected. The invasion of Crimea and the bloody conflict in Eastern Ukraine got the world’s attention, but now the cool nations are no longer inviting Russia for unsupervised sleepovers, and the only kids still leaving notes on Russia’s locker are Kim Jong-un and Raúl Castro.

DAY 2

I miss Putin. He is on a TV sabbatical for most of this week, enjoying the 11-day extended New Year’s holiday, swimming up a tsunami in his presidential pool, I’m sure. Putin’s face did show up on all three of my monitors around midnight, Moscow time, as he delivered his New Year’s address to the country. “Love of homeland is one of the most powerful, elevating feelings,” Putin declared, with his patented affectless-yet-deadly seriousness. The return of Crimea will become “one of the most important events in the history of the fatherland.”

For the rest of New Year’s Day, Russia falls into catatonic American-movie mode. The state-controlled networks hand themselves over to “Avatar,” “The Seven Year Itch” and “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Despite the bad blood with Obama, there is simply no way to fill out a day of programming without “Die Hard” or a David Blaine magic show. I enjoy a light snooze interrupted by further beef injections from room service.

The evening news on Rossiya 1 starts off with Ukraine. The anchors of the three networks are a clan of attractive, dead-eyed men and women. They speak in the same unshakable “out of my mouth comes unimpeachable manly truth” tone that Putin uses in his public addresses, sometimes mixing in a dollop of chilly sarcasm. Their patter has a hypnotic staccato quality, like a machine gun going off at regular intervals, often making it hard to remember that they are moving their mouths or inhaling and exhaling oxygen.

Putin’s popularity has mostly survived intact despite the ruble’s collapse and the gradual pauperization of his subjects. The media helps with a twofold strategy. First, the West and its sanctions are blamed for the economic situation. Second, the nascent Ukrainian democracy is portrayed as a movement of torch-wielding Nazi fascists under direct control of their Western masters. Few Russian families escaped unscathed from Hitler’s onslaught, and Nazi imagery, which remains stingingly potent, is invoked frequently and opportunistically, as a way of keeping historical wounds fresh.

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On today’s news, the so-called Ukrainian Nazi fascists are celebrating the fascistic life of the neo-Nazi Stepan Bandera with a torch-lit Hitlerite parade. Bandera is a complicated figure, a Ukrainian nationalist who flirted with the invading Germans during the Second World War but was ultimately imprisoned by them. Any march through Kiev by Ukraine’s Right Sector, a xenophobic, socially conservative right-wing movement that has more in common with Moscow’s current regime than either side would like to admit, is catnip to the newscasters. “Instead of celebrating New Year’s, they’re celebrating the fascist Stepan Bandera,” the reporter declares. “It looks like fascist ideology will be the basis of the Ukrainian state.”

The leader of Right Sector did run for president of Ukraine in the May 2014 elections. He and his “fascist ideology” received 0.7 percent of the vote. Since the election of Poroshenko, who won by a majority, Ukraine is now easily the most democratic and pro-European republic in the former Soviet Union, excepting the Baltic States. It is, in fact, the anti-Russia. This, of course, drives Russia nuts.

DAY 3

I wake up feeling swollen. Movement is difficult, especially in my lower extremities. Probably just gout. The monitors are turned off at night, but the laptops are still whirling, the satellites still transmitting. I waddle over to my marble bathroom and look at my sleep-creased face.

There’s one small consolation in my day: crossing 57th street, moving through crowds of Russian, Asian and South American shoppers who are spending their way across New York, and finally dropping into the saltwater pool at the health club. I try to clear my mind of Russian TV, but the high-decibel pop soundtrack and the booming voices of the news anchors travel with me underwater, haunting my eardrums.

Back in my cage, the morning’s Catskill-smoked-salmon-and-egg-white sandwich arrives as I flick on the monitors, one showing the Red Army Choir singing its brains out, another with an advertisement for a 24-karat golden necklace for men that “doesn’t just show your material status but your good taste.” The thick, gleaming chain — chains, I should say; buy one, get one free — goes for 1,490 rubles, about $45 at the start of 2014, but about $25 at the start of 2015 as the ruble continued to plunge.

The news is pretty exciting today. Two reporters for LifeNews, a Russian channel that heavily supports the rebels in Ukraine and is rumored to have ties to Putin’s F.S.B. security service, had their camera smashed during a torch-lit parade through Kiev. “Anti-Russian feelings are approaching hysteria,” the reporter says.

I look at my watch. A full minute into the piece, and he hasn’t mentioned fascism, Nazism, neo-Nazism or the perfidy of the West.

“Torch-bearing parades are associated with Nazi Germany,” the reporter says.

Photo

Russian TV, Shteyngart writes, “dulls the senses and raises your ire.” Credit Sasha Rudensky for The New York Times
On the monitor tuned to NTV, I catch a comedy called “An Ideal Pair.” The programming notes describe the plot: “Zoya is a sportswoman with a male character. That’s why she has trouble with the stronger sex and everyone runs away from her.”

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I’m noticing a trend of movies about Russians in their mid-30s who are not yet married, a phenomenon confounding to most Russians who prefer to marry, have 1.61 children and then divorce early in life (according to the United Nations, Russia consistently has one of the highest divorce rates). Like most Russian rom-coms, the movie seems overly long, wordy and ridiculously chaste. Even a mild kiss fades out before anything can happen under the sheets. It’s rare to find a society with a more contradictory approach to sex. A new conservatism, led by the Orthodox Church, is constantly at odds with whatever progressive notions the Soviet Union instilled. Abortion was pretty much the most common form of birth control: The efficacy of Soviet prophylactics left much to be desired. Today, you can barely find explicit sex in a commercial film like “An Ideal Pair,” but watching one of the dance numbers on television makes you want to reach for a body condom just to be safe.

I crack open another bottle of wine and settle back into the world I cannot leave, with the January wind whipping past my lonely skyscraper. On Channel 1, the scandal of the smashed camera in Kiev rages on. There are many close-ups of the injured camera lying in what looks like snow or confetti. Then it’s time for Macaulay Culkin in the original “Home Alone.”

DAY 4

I am crawling through the snow in Kiev searching for my cellphone, which has been stolen by the neo-Nazi fascists. I find it by a wall defaced by a giant swastika, its screen shattered by the torch-bearing Ukrainians. “Allo,” I say in Russian. “Someone please help me. It’s cold out here.” A dead-eyed anchor from Rossiya 1 appears on my FaceTime. “Torch-bearing parades are associated with Nazi Germany,” he declares. I wake up and trundle off to the bathroom, pop some benzos and crawl back into bed. I sleep maybe three hours total. When I’ve occasionally returned to Russia for visits, I’ve sometimes woken up in the middle of the night thinking, What if they closed the borders? What if I’m supposed to live out the rest of my life here? Even though I’m ensconced in a luxury pad in the very epicenter of Manhattan, a similar feeling disturbs my sleep.

Today, I’m a mess. My breast stroke at the club looks more tadpole than frog. Back in my sunlit chamber of horrors, Rossiya 1’s news is on a rampage. A 35-car pile up in New Hampshire. No serious injuries, it seems, but clearly the West is falling apart. Things are even worse across the ocean. “An unpleasant New Year’s present for Prince Andrew,” a reporter says with a honed mixture of seriousness, sarcasm and glee. “Britain is shocked by a sex scandal between the prince and a minor who claims to have been held in ‘sexual slavery.’ ” Viewers in Yekaterinburg wolfing down their morning kasha are given a rundown of the crimes committed by the British royal family, from Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform to Princess Diana’s death “in mysterious circumstances.”

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Russians, on the other hand, are leading exemplary nonfascist lives. At the site of the Air Asia disaster, in the Java Sea, “Indonesian authorities are relying heavily on Russian divers and their equipment” to find and recover the doomed plane. In the northernmost reaches of Russia, we meet Aleksey Tryapitsyn, a “salt of the Earth” postman in a tiny village who somehow doesn’t smoke or drink and has been featured in a recent documentary, “The White Nights of the Postman Aleksey Tryapitsyn.” His wife is pretty salt-of-the-earth too. “I’m such an ordinary woman,” she says, “I know how to do everything: shoot a gun, catch ducks.”

The lessons for all Russians, especially spoiled Camembert-addicted Muscovites, are clear: In the difficult days to come, learn to shoot a gun, learn to catch ducks.

Today I have visitors: the Moscow-born writer Anya Ulinich and her friend Olga Gershenson, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I order a meat plate from room service, and we settle in for lunch.

Last night, Anya found out that her cousin was killed in a small town not far from Donetsk, the Ukrainian city that has been a stronghold for pro-Russian fighters. “He was found dead in the lobby of his apartment building,” Anya tells me. “Nobody knows who killed him. There’s no police. It’s just anarchy.”

“I blame Putin roundly for this,” she says. “It used to be a normal town.”

She sighs. We glance from screen to screen. On NTV a man in a leather harness is dancing — well, practically having leather intercourse — with an equally leathered woman in front of two giant gilded statues of gladiators.

“That ballet is kind of cool,” Anya says.

“Yeah, it’s amazing,” Olga adds.

We watch for a while without saying another word.

DAY 5

My psychiatrist agrees to make a rare house call. We try to recreate the customary couch-and-psychiatrist’s-chair arrangement, except I’m in my king-size bed and he’s seated just to the right of me. The monitors are still on. On one, a Ukrainian drug dealer is caught in Moscow, and there are close-ups of his dastardly red Ukrainian passport. On another, two men are passed out on the grass, a spent vodka bottle between them. “There it is,” I say to my doctor. “Russia.”

I shut my eyes and think of what I mean by that.

“In my books, I’ve tried to understand my parents and what they went through in the Soviet Union,” I say. “Maybe this project is another way to get to know them. Times change, regimes change, but the television stays pretty much the same.

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Shteyngart’s psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Lacy, holds a therapy session at the hotel. Credit Sasha Rudensky for The New York Times
“I don’t agree with my parents about politics in the States that much, but we do tend to agree on Putin. That’s true of a lot of Russian-born friends of mine. It’s weird, but Putin brings us together with our parents. It’s nice to know that there’s a source of cruelty in the world that we can identify together.

“Imagine if my parents had never taken me out of Russia. Where would I be now? All this” — I gesture to the three screens — “would be my permanent reality.”

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“You’re in a virtual childhood here,” my psychiatrist says. “These are regressive feelings.”

“Also, the televisions in the Soviet Union used to explode,” I say. “Sixty percent of the house fires in Moscow used to be caused by exploding televisions at one point.”

We’re silent for a bit, as happens often in the course of psychoanalysis.

Still, it’s good to talk.

DAY 6

Oh, the hell with it. I’m just going to start drinking after breakfast. And no more shaving or wearing clothes. The Four Seasons robe will do just fine. A woman with a Russian name on her tag rolls in my coffee and an H & H bagel with whitefish.

“Whitefish and not salmon?” She chastises me as if she were a Channel 1 television anchor and I were Ukraine.

“I’ll get the salmon tomorrow,” I promise her.

I watch a Jerry Springer-style show called “Male/Female.” Today’s topic: Tatyana, a woman from the village of Bolsheorlovskoe, 300 miles from Moscow, wants to find out the paternity of her latest child. A DNA test is administered to scores of the village men, and there are shots of poor Tatyana’s bedraggled neighbors voicing their opinions of her.

“A whore is a whore.”

“You get drunk, come to her house and bang!”

The village itself looks as if it has been banged repeatedly by some coarse muzhik in an ill-fitting Chinese-made sweater. The dwellings are tiny holes with room for a refrigerator, television and a sprinkling of roaches.

There’s a panel of experts, including a lawyer, a psychologist, a painter and a poet with a velvet jacket and a luxuriant, poetic mustache, commenting on Tatyana’s problems. “All Russian couples should have children while sober,” the poet duly notes.

Tatyana herself speaks with a hoarse country warble and is missing many critical teeth. Still, she’s oddly beautiful, and unlike a similar apparition on Jerry Springer, she never fights back even as the hosts and audience humiliate her. She sits there stoically, like a fallen character out of Dostoyevsky. In her own way, she is a model citizen for Putin’s new Russia. She knows to keep her trap shut while being continuously shouted at by persons in authority.

The DNA results are presented, and none of the assembled sad sacks proves to be the father. Tomorrow, Channel 1 will air the second part of Tatyana’s story. More villagers will be brought in for their DNA tests. Tatyana will once again be told she’s a whore.

There’s no way I can watch the news anymore without at least two minibottles of the Absolut, which I wash down with a couple of beers. The monitors are blurring one into the next, and I’m having trouble following the proceedings. On one screen, a man with a gun is being inhumane to others, while on another a woman of cubic-zirconia-grade glitz is singing nonsense. I let myself dissolve into the nonsense and the menace, as if I were a man just returned from a day of hardship at the hands of thieving bosses and thieving traffic cops somewhere in Tomsk or Omsk. What a powerful weapon Putin’s television is. How skillfully it combines nostalgia, malice, paranoia and lazy humor; how swiftly it both dulls the senses and raises your ire.

I bury my face in a hypoallergenic pillow. I need another drink.

But instead of the Absolut, I decide to do something forbidden. I whip out my laptop and log on to the progressive news site www.slon.ru. (Slon means “elephant” in Russian.) My friends in St. Petersburg subsist on these analytical blogs and news sites, the Slates and Salons of Russia. Slon is one of the remaining few that has not been bent to the will of the regime. Two other favorites, Gazeta.ru (gazeta means “newspaper”) and Lenta.ru, have lost their impartiality.

The two main headlines on Slon are not about the decline of the euro versus the dollar. They are about the price of Brent crude oil falling below $57 a barrel. Another article concerns the opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s refusal to continue to live under house arrest (the activist and his brother were convicted of unsubstantiated charges for challenging the administration). Another article is titled “How the Regime Will Fall: A Possible Scenario.”

Tens of millions of Russians, mainly younger and urbane, use social media. I imagine at least a few of them are posting the article on “How the Regime Will Fall” on their timelines or tweeting it out with abandon.

DAY 7

Today is my lastday in virtual Russia. The Christmas tree in the Four Seasons lobby is being disassembled, the ornaments put into boxes labeled “American Christmas ‘We Make the Magic Happen.’ ” Upstairs in my room, Russian Christmas Eve — Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on Jan. 7 — is just beginning.

I watch the second part of the “Male/Female” exposé of Tatyana, the village temptress. Today on the panel of important people judging Tatyana, instead of a poet, there’s a “showman” or “performer,” with a Barbie doll stuck in the lapel of his studded jacket, his hair styled into a thick pompadour. A redheaded dude in a jacket bearing the single word “Russia” proves to be the father. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Tatyana screams.

“I would castrate all of these men,” one of the program’s hosts says of the male villagers present in the studio.

Keith Gessen, the Moscow-born novelist and journalist, comes by. I have ordered a mortadella and Spanish jamón platter. “You’re like a Russian person who lives in luxury, but you have to imbibe this trash,” Keith says after examining the three monitors.

Keith follows Russian TV closely, and he has noted a shift in the last few years. “You’re watching the news, but the news is the news. Not from the information they’re giving you but from how they’re presenting the information. You feel like it’s a message being sent to you by the Kremlin.”

As the television drones on about the glory of Russia-backed rebels in Ukraine, he asks me if I’ve heard of the murder of Batman, an especially lawless rebel commander in the Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine.

“Apparently,” Keith tells me, “he was attacked and killed by Russian forces or other rebels because he was out of control.”

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I snap open my laptop and take a look at the uncensored Russian websites. Batman’s murder is top news. The New York Times has already posted an article about Batman’s demise. The only places where he’s not mentioned are Rossiya 1, NTV and Channel 1.

After Keith leaves, I focus on the Christmas service, currently reverberating live across two networks. There are blue-eyed women in kerchiefs, bearded priests in gold, gusts of incense. From the proceedings at the ornate Cathedral of Christ the Savior, we suddenly cut to a small, humble church in an equally small and humble town to the south of Moscow.

Dressed in a simple sweater, his gaze steady and direct, Vladimir Putin celebrates the holiday surrounded by several girls in white kerchiefs. In the solemn act of religious contemplation, Putin’s expression is as unknowable as ever. Here he is, the self-styled restorer of the nation. But who is he? We are briefly shown people in the back pews reaching upward, straining to snap a photo of him with their smartphones. We are told that children who are refugees from rebel-held Luhansk are staying on the grounds of the church. The Kremlin has given them “candy and historical books” for the holiday. Are the girls in white kerchiefs standing next to Putin the very same ones who had to flee the violence his regime has backed, if not itself unleashed, in Ukraine?

Putin stands there, the centerpiece of his tableau, a contented man. Therein lies the brilliance of Russian television and why watching a week of it has been so painful. Unless you’re a true believer, its endless din just reminds you of how alone you are in another man’s designs. That man is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. These are his channels, his shows, his dreams and his faith.

On my last visit to Moscow several years ago, a drunken cabdriver from a distant province drove me through the city, nearly weeping because, he said, he was unable to feed his family. “I want to emigrate to the States,” he said. “I can’t live like this.”

“You should try Canada,” I suggested to him. “Their immigration policies are very generous.”

He mock-spit on the floor, as he nearly careened into the sidewalk. “Canada? Never! I could only live in a superpower!”

It doesn’t matter that the true path of Russia leads from its oil fields directly to 432 Park Avenue. When you watch the Putin Show, you live in a superpower. You are a rebel in Ukraine bravely leveling the once-state-of-the-art Donetsk airport with Russian-supplied weaponry. You are a Russian-speaking grandmother standing by her destroyed home in Luhansk shouting at the fascist Nazis, much as her mother probably did when the Germans invaded more than 70 years ago. You are a priest sprinkling blessings on a photogenic convoy of Russian humanitarian aid headed for the front line. To suffer and to survive: This must be the meaning of being Russian. It was in the past and will be forever. This is the fantasy being served up each night on Channel 1, on Rossiya 1, on NTV.

A generation from now, Channel 1 news circa 2015 will seem as ridiculous as a Soviet documentary on grain procurement. Young people will wonder at just how much nonsense their parents lived through and how, despite it all, they still emerged as decent human beings. As for me, I am escaping from Russia once more. Three satisfying clicks of three Samsung remotes and my whole week fades to black.

Gary Shteyngart is the author of “Little Failure,” a memoir, and the novels “Super Sad True Love Story,” “Absurdistan” and “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 22, 2015, on page MM118 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘Out of My Mouth Comes Unimpeachable Manly Truth’.

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18. HISTORICAL PRESERVATION IN NORTHWESTERN RUSSIA AFTER WORLD WAR II
by Susan Smith
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(Dissertation Reviews, March 2, 2015)	

A review of The Material Culture of Stalinism, The City of Novgorod, Urban Reconstruction, and Historic Preservation in the Soviet Union After World War II (1943-1955), by Marina Dobronovskaya.

Marina Dobronovskaya’s dissertation is an examination, rich in archival sources, of Soviet urban planning and historic restoration ideas, policies, and bureaucracies in the pre- and immediate postwar periods, particularly as relating to the historically important city of Novgorod. Among the strengths of this dissertation, two are worth noting immediately. The first is that this work is multi-disciplinary as is appropriate for a dissertation in Preservation Studies: it combines the study of urban planning with architectural, political, economic, and cultural history. The second is the comparison of these themes as they developed in Soviet Russia to developments in a broader European context.

The dissertation includes an introduction and conclusion, six body chapters organized thematically and chronologically, and nearly sixty images. The introduction makes clear the scale of destruction during World War II and the resulting importance of reconstruction throughout Europe, but particularly in the Soviet Union where “close to seventy-five percent of urban and rural settlements lay in ruins and 25,000,000 people were left homeless” (p. 1). Novgorod had not been an economically important city but it was historically important and had become a symbol of Russian resistance during the war when Russian nationalism’s propaganda value became essential and even Orthodox practice was allowed. As such, Novgorod, an early Russian city with ties to important historic figures such as the warrior-prince Alexander Nevskii, serves Dobronovskaya as a case study of “historic preservation planning within the broader context of urban planning; [of] how the needs of preservation and reconstruction of architectural monuments affected, and were affected by, policies of urban reconstruction and development after World War II” (p. 7). The study ends in roughly 1955, by which time, according to Dobronovskaya and the historiography of European postwar rebuilding, planners and architects had become less concerned with reconstruction and more concerned with moving away from planning and building that responded directly to the destruction of the war.

In addition to laying out the dissertation, the introduction provides an overview of this historiography for both Western and Eastern Europe, and argues, correctly, that the work is a step towards addressing the dearth of studies on preservation in the Soviet Union and the scarcity of English-language works on the history of Soviet urban planning. (Karl Qualls, one of the few authors to address such issues, served on Dobronovskaya’s committee.) Dobronovskaya also notes the recent work of Andreas Schönle on Russian imperial perceptions of ruins and Steven Maddox’s study of the shift from revolutionary iconoclasm to the rehabilitation of the pre-revolutionary past, as well as the work of postwar geographers on urbanization and housing. She argues that, regarding the broad picture of historic preservation in Russia, “there exists only one fundamental and reliable study,” which was edited by Aleksei Shchenkov and published in 2004. Her work is also meant to complement scholarship on other aspects of postwar urban life, such as the work of Donald Filtzer, Elena Zubkova, and Elena Trubina. Finally, it is worth mentioning that several of the most important studies upon which she modeled her work are themselves comparative across cities. These include the essay collections Remembering, Forgetting and City Builders (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) and Three Postwar Eras in Comparison: Western Europe, 1918-1945-1989 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), and the work of Nick Tiratsoo on English reconstruction and of Jeffry Diefendorf on German reconstruction, as well as Anders Åman’s monograph, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era: An Aspect of Cold War History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

Chapter One, “Soviet Urban Planning and Historic Preservation in the European Context,” argues that the related modernist movements such as the International style and Constructivism, so important in the 1920s, started to give way in Soviet Russia in May 1930 when the Central Committee of the Communist Party first intervened in architectural and urban planning discussions. The Soviet Union was not the only country to turn in the 1930s towards a “totalitarian” style, which made selective use of the trends of the war and early interwar periods, however. So,

   [d]espite the revolutionary isolation of the Soviet Union prior to 1946, architecture and urban planning there developed within the mainstream of European trends. After the war, while Soviet practice followed and extended these same trends, practice and ideology in other countries, especially the defeated “totalitarian” states shifted dramatically. From this perspective, Soviet post-war urban planning can be seen as conservative rather than revolutionary. Soviet victory in the war served to legitimate the monumentalism of the totalitarian style of urban planning and architecture from before the war, even while practice and theory in the defeated areas of Europe took different directions in accordance with the establishment of new, more democratic, systems of government (p. 50).

For those of us less familiar with the developments in these fields, architectural drawings and urban plans provide important visual clarifications of the ideas and styles under discussion during the interwar period and the continuities and discontinuities between the avant-garde and Socialist Realist work.

The first chapter concludes by providing the reader with a sense of the scale of the destruction throughout Europe that led governments to take the lead in reconstruction after war. Priorities and approaches were different in different countries, however, with Western European states supporting local governments and planning and encouraging residents’ participation in related discussions, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, focusing on housing needs. In the developing socialist bloc, the central governments played much larger roles. In the Soviet Union in particular, the unparalleled destruction led to not only bureaucratic changes, but also to a focus on industrial needs rather than on housing, the development of city plans for 250 cities by 1950, and the increased importance of pre-revolutionary Russian architectural heritage.

The second chapter, “Agency and Practice,” looks at the histories of urban planning and historic preservation in the Soviet Union in the interwar, war, and postwar periods and finds bureaucratic confusion and unattainable goals. Different commissariats were responsible for their own planning needs, resulting in an enormous number of stakeholders with their own goals, funding, and champions. Central, republic-level, regional, and local stakeholders also had different priorities and shortcomings. As Dobronovskaya argues, this bureaucratic mess with the push for rapid industrialization and extensive immigration into old and new cities, combined with an insufficient number of trained planners and architects, meant that few Soviet cities were truly planned or modernized. In addition to this set of problems, Soviet historic preservation was also hampered by two other elements: first, most structures recognized as historical monuments had been built by the defeated class enemies, such as earlier regimes, the Orthodox Church, and members of the upper classes; and second, the space and construction materials these structures could provide could be “utilized” for Soviet purposes. As a very old and historically politically important city, Novgorod had a large number of such structures, several of which are discussed at various points throughout the work. This chapter, like those that follow, makes very clear that although Soviet historians use the word “totalitarian” and write extensively about how the Soviet Union was centrally controlled, the country was far from being either. Moreover, “the complexity, confusion, lack of clear jurisdictions, and policy contradictions that described the bureaucracies of urban planning and preservation were typical” (p. 164).

Aleksei Shchusev’s career as a planner and preservationist and his important scheme for postwar Novgorod are the subjects of the third chapter, “A. V. Shchusev and Novgorod.” Dobronovskaya sees the career of the architect, best known as the architect of Lenin’s tomb on Red Square, as a strong representation of not just the “ideological and stylistic trends in architecture, urban planning, and reconstruction of historic towns” (p. 50) of the first half of the twentieth century, but also of the possibilities for leading figures in their respective fields to simultaneously benefit from, represent, and challenge the programs and ideas put forth by the state. His plan for Novgorod, designed towards the end of his career and during a short period of liberalization from 1944-1946 in which Western ideas in planning and preservation were acceptable, was not typical for a Socialist Realist city plan. Rather it combined stylistic elements that he desired with the restoration of particular architectural monuments. Creating a plan for Novgorod was an especially important commission. As Dobronovskaya demonstrates, “[s]everal unique factors—the high concentration of architectural monuments, the ideological shift of the regime, the revival of a mythically heroic Russian past, and the history of Novgorod—provided the context that made the reconstruction of the city important for the Soviet government” (pp. 190-191). Although the Russian Republic’s Council of People’s Commissars approved his general plan at the end of 1945, Shchusev’s decision to focus on Novgorod’s historical importance rather than its industrial potential became very problematic. In many ways, these seemingly incompatible identities shaped the bureaucratic entanglements and struggles as it did many of the failures of the planning and preservation processes, all of which are recounted in the second half of the dissertation and all of which, Dobronovskaya argues, were typical of the Soviet experience.

“Reconstruction and Restoration in Novgorod: The Beginning (1944-1949)” demonstrates that reconstruction planning was underway even before the war was over and that it was the chaos resulting from the proliferation of planners and plans that made success impossible. This fourth chapter begins with Novgorod’s liberation in January 1944 after two years of German occupation and the ensuing rapid return of residents, of whom military officers apparently only found fifty-four as the Germans retreated, despite a small number of intact buildings. The number and variety of decrees issued after this liberation and related to reconstruction make the head spin even today and allowed local politicians and builders then to manipulate the scanty resources available for their own ends, personal and/or political. Efforts to promote the development of housing; municipal services, such as water and sewage systems; and industrial development suffered from overlapping bureaucracies, unenforced legislation, scarce resources, poor workmanship, and corruption. Little had been achieved by 1949.

In 1949, urban planning experienced a dramatic shift away from focusing on urban development for the typical resident towards a monumentalism glorifying the state. “Changing Directions (1949-1955),” the fifth chapter, explains how this shift, together with two events of 1949—the purge of officials during the Leningrad affair and the death of Shchusev, a critical proponent of maintaining Novgorod’s historic urban core—encouraged urban planning designed to promote the city’s industrialization and administrative importance. Shchusev’s plan had come under strong attack before his death and regional authorities had requested a new general plan for the city from the Soviet Council of Ministers in late 1948. The Council approved a revision of Shchusev’s plan at the beginning of 1953 but a detailed plan of the city’s center to flesh out this revision did not become law until 1957. This plan called for a mix of old and new: preservation of elements of the historic center and new boulevards connecting the railway station and a new, central Victory Square alongside the old Kremlin. New housing units would be taller than Shchusev had desired and public buildings would be erected on Victory Square. In the years it took for this plan to work its way through the system, work had been carried out but much more remained to be done, with housing for the rapidly growing population being a particular problem. The 1950s were important, nonetheless, and Dobronovskaya notes that today Novgorod clearly reflects that era.

The sixth and final chapter, “Historic Preservation,” begins by noting a problem common to Soviet studies, namely, the inability of scholars to rely on official numbers. Dobronovskaya does a good job of tracking the changes made to the official register of architectural monuments in Novgorod beginning with the earliest post-revolutionary compilation. Of particular concern for her study are two complexes at the heart of the historic center: the Kremlin and Yaroslav’s Court, and several churches dating from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries. “Adaptive use,” both official and unofficial, damaged buildings further. So, in addition to the damage caused by the war, none of the structures fared well in the postwar period. Historical structures were used as housing, storage facilities, small plants, office space, and toilets; none received the attention needed. Even the reconstruction of the Kremlin, deemed ideologically important, was controversial although it received significantly more attention than the other monuments and nearly all of the funds devoted to restoration. Restoration officials were purged in the summer of 1950, exacerbating problems. Dobronovskaya ends the chapter on a happier note, addressing the conservation and stabilization projects that had taken place by 1955 and the creation in 1958 of the Novgorod State Historical-Architectural Preserve, a collection of ensembles and structures to be protected and supported by the Russian Republic’s Ministry of Culture. This designation marked an official recognition of an idea that Shchusev had promoted, namely that Novgorod’s historic core could serve not only as a source of pride but as an economic driver through tourism.

English-language case studies of urban planning for the Soviet Union are unusual. Even more uncommon are studies of historic preservation. Happily, both fields are growing, albeit slowly. More broadly for students of governance and or Soviet history, this dissertation is a rare in-depth case study of state administration in the Soviet Union that spans the era of World War II and looks specifically at the provinces. Dobronovskaya’s admirable work at disentangling the people and organizations involved helps explain a typical and very bumpy trajectory for the modernization of Soviet towns and uncovers some of the hidden costs of the Stalinist system. After all, as Dobronovskaya reminds us, the Stalinist system was one of “dysfunctional totalitarianism—not a rationally working, command administrative system of governance, but an overlapping tangle of bureaucratic levels and authorities” in which local authorities were able to resist central directives (p. 357). Importantly, this work places Soviet developments in urban planning and historic preservation into a comparative European framework and draws heavily on the archives. All of this makes it rich in examples to be considered for students in any of these aforementioned fields.

Dr. Susan Smith
Independent Scholar
dr.susan.n.smith at gmail.com
Primary Sources

State Archive of Novgorod Region (GANO)
State Archive of Contemporary History of Novgorod Oblast, former archive of the Oblast Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR (GANINO)
State Archive of Russian Federation (GARF)
Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE)
Published documents from the inaccessible archival collection of Aleksei V. Shchusev located in the State Museum of Architecture
Dissertation Information

University of Delaware. 2013. 380 pp. Primary Advisor: Robert Warren.

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19. SCHMIDT HOLLANDER ON NICOSIA AND SCRASE, 'JEWISH LIFE IN NAZI GERMANY: DILEMMAS AND RESPONSES'
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Francis R. Nicosia, David Scrase, eds. Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. xv + 245 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84545-676-4.

Reviewed by Hanna Schmidt Holländer (University of Hamburg/Clark University)
Published on H-Genocide (March, 2015)
Commissioned by Elisa G. von Joeden-Forgey

In their edited volume, Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses, Francis R. Nicosia and David Scrase assemble a collection of essays by distinguished German, Australian, Israeli, and US scholars. The book consists of seven chapters about different aspects of Jewish private and public life in Germany during the Nazi period. It covers the changing structures of Jewish families; different strategies of Jews to evade Nazi persecution by legal means or emigration; the problem of cooperation with the Nazis faced by Jewish political and welfare organizations; and the ever-increasing spatial, social, economic, and cultural exclusion of German Jews.

Two main themes pervade the individual chapters: ghettoization of German Jews and the dilemmas they faced when reacting to Nazi persecution. The ghettoization policy in Germany did not, as suggested in some chapters, resemble the practice as it was implemented in the occupied countries in the East. Several chapters in this book describe the gradual “social death” of Jews in Nazi Germany, causing German Jews to live in a “ghetto without walls.” Other chapters deal with the dilemma of identifying as Jewish and German in a society that rejected the idea that these two identities could coexist; the dilemma of making the decision “to stay or go” (to remain in a country that is not safe anymore or to go to a foreign place with all its unknown difficulties); and the dilemma of making the impossible decision of whether to cooperate with the Nazis or to resist Nazi orders.

According to Nicosia’s introduction these dilemmas stemmed from the “historic failure” of Jewish emancipation. Nazism destroyed the hope and promise of nineteenth-century ideas of Jewish legal, social, and cultural integration into German society. This “failure” is evinced firstly from Nazi persecution and secondly from the Jews’ understanding of their place in Germany. In his words, the essays in this volume try to help clarify the tragedy of this failure by focusing on Jewish attitudes and reactions as an integral part of the unfolding history of Nazi persecution.

The collection begins with “Changing Roles in Jewish Families,” a chapter by Marion Kaplan, which leads the reader into the individual experience of Nazi persecution. The essay describes the changing roles of men, women, and children in the unfolding persecution by the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s. She poses the question whether, in times like this, families could still (or, in some cases, for the first time) function as a “safe haven.” She illustrates the stress inflicted on Jewish families by ever-increasing persecution and the conflicts that resulted. Jewish mothers were now more than ever expected to take care of the emotional well-being of the family and carried out the “emotional housework” when children were harassed in school and men lost their jobs (p. 16). Women moved more and more into the role of provider and into the public sphere, as men were pushed out of their professions, lost their societal status, and often faced arrest. While the role of women as providers was still seen critically by most Jewish organizations and the press, it became a necessity for most families and was slowly accepted as a response to the crisis. According to Kaplan, the main dilemma families faced in the increasingly hostile environment was to decide whether to emigrate. Women had to take on the role of decision makers and organize emigration or survival in Germany, including negotiating with Nazi authorities and foreign governments.

In his chapter with a somewhat misleading title, “Evading Persecution: German-Jewish Behavior Patterns after 1933,” Jürgen Matthäus focuses on Germans who were defined as Jewish or partly Jewish and who pursued legal measures to “enhance” their racial status in order to avoid persecution. “Volljuden” (full Jews) and “Mischlinge” (people of "mixed race") with “questionable” ancestry (most often previously hidden illegitimate “Aryan” fathers) increasingly approached courts with their “shameful” family history as persecution increased and ancestry became a matter of life and death. Pointing out the often rather bizarre “science,” legislation, and competence struggles between different German agencies concerned with racial questions, Matthäus discusses several cases in which these conflicts and the fate of those investigated were decided. Using what he calls “evasion by compliance” (p. 64), people affected by anti-Jewish persecution actively rejected the “out-group” definition, thus undermining the definition of who was a Jew with legal means. They did not question (at least not publicly) the notion itself, only that they themselves were part of this group. “Compliance” might be a strong word here, considering that Jews were not in the position to question German law and were desperate for any means of rescue, especially after 1941, the time this essay covers. Matthäus acknowledges that most of the cases reported to the prosecutor were not even brought to court and many ended with the appeal not granted. The cases in which “full” or “half Jews” were reclassified remained exceptions. Furthermore, Matthäus illustrates the borders of seemingly strict racial laws and the complicated enforcement on the individual level.

In his chapter “Jewish Self-Help in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939: The Dilemmas of Cooperation,” Avraham Barkai poses the question of cooperation or collaboration of German Jewish leadership with Nazi authorities. He takes a firm standpoint against the critical assessment of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany) by Raul Hilberg, Hannah Arendt, and Isaiah Trunk. Disagreeing with them, Barkai, using his research, concludes that the Reichsvereinigung was not the “prototype of the Jewish Council in Poland that was to be employed in activities resulting in disaster.” Indeed, he argues that through their leadership and diligence they did not “participate in the process of destruction” and that the number of victims would not have been smaller if the Jews had been unorganized (p. 72). Using two examples, the hachschara (vocational training program) and the haavara (money transfer program), Barkai analyzes the question whether German Jewish leaders were, “at the time or merely in retrospect, right” to cooperate with the Germans (p. 79). Stating that the hachschara saved Jewish lives and the haavara saved Jewish assets, he claims that the question whether or not to cooperate was not in fact a dilemma. In his interpretation, Jews in Germany took the only action that was logical and possible at that time, even though from the later perspective it might have looked like cooperation with the Germans.

Nicosia, in his contribution “German Zionism and Jewish Life in Nazi Berlin,” illustrates the role of Zionism for emigration and Jewish life in Germany from 1933 to 1945. He takes up the question of legitimacy of Jewish cooperation with Nazi authorities. The Nazis initially supported Zionist activities, because they were in line with Nazi emigration policy for Jews. In the Jewish community, support for the Zionists grew over time, mainly because it remained the only political option for Jews in Germany. More and more Jews supported Zionism as they recognized that assimilation in Germany had become impossible and Zionist organizations offered assistance with emigration, for example, through professional retraining and the visa process. However, authorities eventually dissolved the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden (VnJ, Association of National German Jews) in November 1935; forced the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (CV, Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith) to change its name to Centralverein der Juden in Deutschland (Central Association of Jews in Germany); and did not allow any assimiliationist tendencies anymore. Despite their traditional differences, Centralverein and Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (ZVfD, Zionist Federation for Germany) had to cooperate in the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Representation of Jews in Germany), an organization formed under Nazi pressure by a broad range of Jewish organizations in 1933 which was the only Jewish organization allowed in Germany after 1938. The ZVfD faced problems as it was growing and simultaneously losing leadership to emigration. While Zionism was in theory supported by the Nazis, Zionists were not exempt from brutal treatment as Jews. Zionist work, like any Jewish activity, became increasingly difficult and dangerous. Nicosia therefore concludes that cooperation with the Nazi state was necessary to facilitate Jewish emigration.

In his essay “Without Neighbors: Daily Living in Judenhäuser,” Konrad Kwiet explores the “termination of the cohabitation of Germans and Jews” and illustrates Jewish daily life in Judenhäuser (Jews’ houses) and Judensiedlungen (Jewish settlements) (p. 117). To accelerate complete segregation of Jewish and non-Jewish living space, Jews were expelled from their homes, were forced to move into designated places, and had to wear the star. Nazi authorities enforced these practices to depersonalize, concentrate, and control the Jews. Kwiet argues that as the Nazis planned to expel the German Jews as quickly as possible, there was no need to relocate them behind ghetto walls. Complete segregation did not require ghettos. German Jews were already without neighbors: “the Jews trapped in Germany had become on the eve of deportation a pariah caste that society saw only as a burden and that the Nazi state could dispose of as it saw fit” (p. 121). 

Kwiet describes the legal procedure and administrative process taken by the Nazis to strip Jews of their rights as tenants and owners, remove them from their homes, and acquire Jewish property and leases for the Volksgemeinschaft (national community). He argues that the segregation of “Jewish” and “Aryan” living space was implemented from “above” and carried out “inconspicuously,” “systematically,” “gradually,” and “free of trouble” (p. 125). Further analyzing the involvement of Jewish leadership in these processes, he also discusses how Jewish organizations had to provide help in the re-housing programs. Kwiet shows that the relocation program and the expulsion of Jews were in fact neither a means to solve the housing crisis nor did they ease the shortage of workers in Germany during the war.

On the contrary, he argues that in the way these “excluded communities” were first segregated and surrendered to their social death and then sent to their deaths, they shared the fate of their coreligionists in Nazi-conquered countries. Judenhäuser and Judensiedlungen thus served as a means to “exclude Jews from society and to include them—temporarily—into ... a segregated Jewish living quarter.” This function, as Kwiet points out, “was assigned to all ghettos set up by the Nazis in the occupied territories, be it in the form of a hermetically sealed ghetto, a ‘semi-open,’ or an ‘open’ ghetto.” Understanding Judenhäuser in Germany synonymously with ghettos in Eastern Europe, he considers both as “based on racial hatred and mass murder,” as “steps along the path to genocide” (p. 143).

Deepening further our understanding of the problem of cooperation versus collaboration, Beate Meyer’s chapter “Between Self-Assertion and Forced Collaboration: The Reich Association of Jews in Germany, 1939–1945” divides the history of the Reich Association (the Reichsvereinigung) into three phases. The first phase from 1939 to October 1941 marks the period when the Reich Association was involved in “enforced emigration.” During this time, the interests of the Nazis and the Reichsvereinigung coincided in the task of emigration. Mostly powerless, only in very few cases was the Reichsvereinigung able to intervene when deportations were scheduled. They were able, however, to assist Jews with emigration. During the second phase, from October 1941 to June 1943, the association became, says Meyer, an instrument of Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office ) and the Gestapo in organizing deportations of German Jews to the East. Functionaries of the Reich Association were told that they would be exempt from deportations and threatened that the SA and SS would take over if they did not cooperate. Afraid of the brutality, the Jewish leadership cooperated and prepared deportation lists. When many of them were deported to Theresienstadt, they assumed leading positions there as well and continued their work. The third phase began in the summer of 1943, when, upon completion of deportations from Germany, the Reichsvereinigung was officially dissolved. De facto, it continued to exist as it cared for the needs of Jews who were married to non-Jewish partners.

Meyer then returns to the question of why Jewish functionaries continued to cooperate with Nazi authorities until the end. Her explanation lies in their mentality. Since most Jewish functionaries had been in leading positions during the Weimar years, they followed, she argues, the principles of an “old-style administration.” They believed that bureaucratic rules would act as a “counterweight to arbitrariness, violence, and murder.” She points out, however, that “such bureaucratic rules and mass murder by no means precluded one another,” and that, on the contrary, they might have formed a “tight bond, contradict[ing] the personal experience of these Jewish functionaries.” The National Socialists, she explains, “propagated the ideal of a ‘fighting administration’ that was not bound by norms and the law” (p. 165). This was where the Jewish leadership in Germany, much like in many ghettos in the East, was tragically mistaken.

Michael Brenner concludes the collection with a short piece, “Jewish Culture in a Modern Ghetto: Theater and Scholarship among the Jews of Nazi Germany.” In the first section, he focuses on the role of the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural League; before 1935, Kulturbund deutscher Juden). He interprets it as “perhaps the most blatant symbol of Nazi Germany’s cultural ghettoization of Germany’s Jewish community,” and he discusses its role in the Third Reich (p. 171). In the second section, he reflects on Jewish historians who studied Jewish history during the Nazi years, either at one of the few Jewish research institutions or as independent scholars, after the Nazis had stripped them of their positions. Brenner concludes his essay and the book with one of the questions that Jewish historians during the Nazi period posed, historians today still ask, and this collection aims to answer: “Why and how did emancipation and assimilation fail in the context of modern German-Jewish history”? (p. 182).

Throughout the book, “Jews” appear as a group separate from “Germans.” This is partly owed to the fact that it focuses on the Nazi years. Relations with non-Jewish Germans, before and during the war, however, are mainly mentioned on the level of official entities, government, police, etc., as negotiations between Jewish and non-Jewish institutions. Thus, the collection creates the image of two spheres of Jewish and German life that were only remotely connected, even in prewar Nazi Germany. Also underrepresented is the analysis of Jewish everyday life (with the exception of Kaplan) and social and cultural life (with the exception of Brenner). Although the title of the book, Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, promises a wide range of topics, issues of Jewish organized political life are clearly emphasized with three chapters out of seven focusing on this topic. German-Jewish experiences in workplaces, forced labor camps, and extermination camps, as well as the economy, culture, etc., remain faint.

The introduction features a quote by Primo Levi, which is instructive for the analysis of Jewish life in Nazi Germany: “We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence” (p. 2). According to Nicosia, beginning in 1941, Jews in Germany faced the same difficult dilemmas in the choices they were forced to make. The assumption that social habits were “reduced to silence,” something Levi said about Auschwitz, leads to an underrepresentation of social aspects. To use this specific quote also points to a misconception about life in Nazi Germany versus life in the ghettos and camps in occupied Poland, a misconception that is suggested in several of the chapters. While in both countries Jews experienced exclusion and were eventually sent to their death, the paths that led up to this point were very different. In Poland, for example, the perpetrators came as occupiers from outside and this created a unique dynamic between Jews, the local population, and German occupying forces, and it also shaped Jewish experiences. Because Poland was suddenly attacked, the dilemma of whether to stay or to go presented itself in a different way than in Germany. Other problems had to be considered in the emigration process and the timing was different. To compare Jewish life in Germany with Jewish life in occupied Poland by using the term “ghetto/ghettoization” for both cases oversimplifies the matter and does not help with the analysis of the path to the Holocaust in either place.

While these are only a few shortcomings, the strengths are manifold. What was mentioned before as a weakness of the book—the emphasis on Jewish political life—is also its strength. The combination of several chapters dealing with Jewish representative organizations and their activity in Jewish welfare, assistance with emigration, and negotiations with Nazi authorities provides a strong picture of Jewish agency. This also allows for critical analysis of Jewish leadership in Germany and their balancing act between cooperation and collaboration with the Nazis. Carefully weighing responsibilities and actionability of Jewish functionaries, and thereby broadening the view of the scope of Jewish responses to Nazi persecution, the authors are never unreasonable with their ex-post facto judgment of what could be expected from a Jewish leader who himself was persecuted.

The clear forte of this collection of individually written chapters is its coverage of the time beyond 1939. Many introductory surveys do not allow for such detailed analysis of Jewish life in Germany until 1945. As suggested by the editors, this book is especially well-suited for teaching purposes. The book serves as an excellent introduction into the special issues that Jews were facing in Germany in an increasingly hostile environment without having a textbook character. This collection brings together the work of excellent scholars and can be used in the classroom to teach not only the interesting content but also its fine historiography. I highly recommend it to all interested readers, students, teachers, and scholars of Holocaust history.


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