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The Multivalence of Political Identity: Veronika Gorlova interviews
Moez Surani

The first thing I noticed about this piece is the deliberate choice to refer to Vladimir Putin as “Volodya.” This nickname for Vladimir is usually one that is used by close friends or family and is meant to be endearing, and it creates an interesting contrast to the picture that is painted of Putin (as well as the one many of us have in our heads). Why did you make this decision?

I thought it helped draw him as a character—that name helped to see him anew, and without the very effortful branding. There’s an air of vulnerability with that form of the name, or, as you say, an intimacy, but an intimacy with the aspects of himself he wishes to hide.

There’s a part of this work that talks about the muscular armoring that narcissists create for themselves. That armoring plays out in the monumental exercise in branding “Vladimir Putin” with menace, mastery, masculinity—but, of course, it’s important to see him in a multivalent way, one that is in concert with this branding, but isn’t overwhelmed by it. This is a story about a Volodya who was bullied in school, who hid behind his teacher’s leg, who withdraws during crises, and who lashes out with cruelty whenever his fallibility is exposed. “Vladimir” is the reassuring projection that Volodya has nervously made for himself and the world.

You chose to open with a scene of Volodya celebrating the end of the millennium at a strip club, and I had to refer to your notes in order to understand the context for this scene. This is happening at the same time that Russia is bombarding Chechnya, ostensibly to fight terrorism, but the only indication of this context in your piece is the year (1999) and the reference to high security. What made you decide to introduce us to Volodya in this very subtle way?

This scene shows an essential trait of his: how he conducts himself in a performance of trite masculinity. Here he is in the Luna strip club, picking up the bill for all of his friends, then he signs a terse note on the wall. In his own autobiography, Putin asserts with some defensiveness that he is an average, normal man, and there he is in Luna—47 years old, married with two daughters, watching an erotic bullfight, and writing to wish the dancers a good millennium. This is what he means by “normal.”

As he ages, these performances of manliness exaggerate into a campiness: he deep sea dives and earnestly finds treasure, he fishes topless with his minister of defense, he scores an unfathomable number of goals against former pro hockey players during a pickup game. If not for the consequences of his actions, his life would be absurd! But this sad, friendless Volodya needs it all to be part of his gallant romance.

Near the end of the piece there is a description of Tony Blair’s private visit to Volodya’s home town in 2000, and the pressure he was under to address Russia’s war crimes in Chechnya and push Volodya into peace talks. There is also a description afterwards about Volodya’s rejection of liberal governance and not wanting to be like the US or Britain, which ends in “he used war and genocide to achieve nonmilitary goals such as social unity and civil accord.” Three years after this meeting, Tony Blair supported America’s illegal invasion of Iraq, based on very similar justifications as Russia’s invasion of Chechnya, and both countries committed numerous war crimes including civilian massacres and mass torture. This reality creates a very interesting contradiction to the way Volodya and Russia are being described in contrast to western “liberal governance.” Are you able to talk about this contradiction and how your piece engages with this?

Putin skillfully deploys the cruelty and hypocrisy of the West to justify his own violence. The West has hidden behind empty words—such as the Rule-Based Order, freedom, nation-building—for decades. Putin uses the West’s double standard as moral fuel. “Everything is bad,” he implies, “and perhaps I am bad too, but at least I am candid about it.”

One of the surprises I encountered as I worked on this was that the text gravitates to the genre of a noir, which, when I thought about it, does make sense. The noir is a world without justice; it’s a world in which everyone is compromised. This isn’t a world I can accept, and this isn’t a world I live in, but it’s the world view that Putin needs to exonerate him of everything he’s done. So he acts the part, trying desperately to will this genre to life. And look at how many people Putin has had to kill to persuade people that his violence is only bad in a relative way, not in some absolute, extreme way—the writers, activists, politicians—all these people who hold him accountable, who report on his crimes, who laugh at him, and who deploy that choicest of weapons: candour.

This piece is the first section of a larger project called The Ghost. Can you tell us more about your larger work and how this first section sets the stage for what comes next?

So, The Ghost is a novel whose protagonist, Russian President Vladimir Putin, is a maker of violent fictions. These fictions overlay the entirety of his life: the circumstances of his birth, an insidious domestic apartment bombing, the subsequent military campaign in Chechnya that propelled his rise, and his ascent to the presidency.

I’ve used a polyglot, multimedia collage of witnesses to build a footnoted biography of this life. The Ghost functions as a reverse panopticon: instead of the figure of power deploying his centrality to surveil and discipline those on the periphery, the journalists, artists, activists, and citizens I cite focus unrelentingly on the destructive principal at the center. Putin is so reliant on ad hominem attacks that one by one undermine people who speak against him; I thought what if everyone spoke, even himself and his own propagandists?

The Ghost also serves as a poetic memorial to those who resist: the contraband flowers of opposition at politician Alexei Navalny’s funeral, the risk-soaked suite of performance art by Pyotr Pavlensky who's now exiled in France, and the dignity of the journalists—Anna Politkovskaya, Paul Klebnikov, Natalia Estemirova—who were murdered while exposing the truths that refute Putin’s implausible mythology.

You’re an interdisciplinary artist and your work spans across many mediums including poetry, photography, performance art, etc. How does working in such a variety of mediums shape your approach to writing?

I feel intensely grateful to do the work I do. I am just as excited by conceptual ideas, such as the custom-scent work Heresies, which I worked on with Nina Leo, as I am by the novel The Legend of Baraffo, which I recently published with Book*hug.

With Heresies, we were able to present the interiority of a place, Hiroshima for example, or Baghdad, and allow people to grapple with scent as an expressive medium, and, through that, to experience a stigmatized place without preconceptions.

With The Legend of Baraffo, I believed literature could be a place for reckoning. It narrates the story of how a young society yearns for equality and succeeds in taking a fiery, miraculous step towards this end—and, decades later, how this revolution is reshaped and enshrined in the town’s memory as a laudable spectacle that is picturesque, patriotic, and even kitschy. More simply, and of much consequence to today’s world, The Legend of Baraffo depicts how a liberalizing revolution can succeed, yet still become an illiberal myth that codifies a people’s culture and sensibility.

Working in different mediums has helped me to see that the conventions of a genre are merely that; they certainly aren’t sacrosanct; they are a kind of set of best practices. Sometimes they’re useful and other times the material requires a new approach.

 

 

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