Habitus

by Habitus · 03/02/10

If you are wondering what you are going to do in November, 2011, Harvard will be hosting a very interesting conference on the Russian-Jewish Diaspora. Not exactly timely information yet, but this statistic from the program description is quite remarkable:

Almost two million Russian-speaking people, most of them Jews, live outside the former Soviet Union (FSU). In January 1989, when the last Soviet census was taken, 1,449,000 people identified themselves as Jews.

Such a an amazing statistic doesn’t necessarily reflect the inherent challenges of defining a Jew. For example, the contention that all 1.1 million Russian speakers in Israel are in fact Jewish is, to say the least, subject to debate. Would also be interesting to know what defines a Russian speaker (i.e. second generation?). All the same, it helps to illustrate the remarkable imprint of Jews on the Russian-speaking world.

The organizers are accepting paper proposals through May, 2010.

Leave a Comment

by Habitus · 02/18/10

Michael Idov has published an interesting review in The New Republic on Stalin in Russian Satire, 1917-1991 by Karen L. Ryan. He starts off:

The idea that Russia’s many current woes stem from its incomplete de-Stalinization is so widespread as to be banal. It is also correct. Just two months ago, I stared agape at the newly restored name of Stalin coiling around a neoclassical portico at the Kurskaya metro station in Moscow. The name had its own security guard: look up at those six letters for more than a few seconds, as I did, and he would saunter closer. A few weeks earlier, Stalin had been leading a national poll for Russia’s “greatest name.” After some careful counting and recounting, he ended up in third place, still handily beating out Pushkin and Dostoevsky.

His case was made even stronger today by an article entitled “Moscow to Display Informational Posters Gloryfing Stalin.” The article is published by the Coalition for Democracy in Russia, aka The Other Russia, the political faction most identified with Gary Kasparov. The story highlights the ambivalence of Russians today towards the memory of Stalin. They report:

Moscow’s department for publicity and design came up with the plan after pensioners and veterans’ organizations repeatedly requested that officials display pictures of Stalin as part of the wider set of decorations set up for anniversary celebrations.

For more on the legacy of Stalin, there is no better guide than our friend Jonathan Brent, whom we spoke to in our Moscow issue, and whose memoir of his years spent researching the Stalin archives is now coming out in paperback.

Leave a Comment

by Habitus · 02/16/10

We were very gratified to receive a glowing review from Newpages.com, one of the only publications out there that gives serious attention to journals. The reviewer, Anne Wolfe, sums up the issue nicely:

As one reads the poetry and stories, it seems easy to see that Muscovites could be anyone, or everyone. These works reveal their subjects’ psyches and set up intimacy. They do so with virtuosic imagination and deft clarity.

Leave a Comment

by Habitus · 02/16/10

Since we featured Jason Eskenazi in our Moscow issue and in our first Habitus-produced video, the Brooklyn-based photographer has continued to win fans and earn critical attention.

Most importantly, his award-winning book Wonderland is now back on sale. He also appeared recently on NPR’s Studio 360, where he talked about working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum. He also gave a nice, long interview with the blog A Photo Student.

When we least heard from Jason, he was already exploring a new part of the globe for his next project: he’s just back for a shooting trip to Cairo. He was also recently in Turkey, exploring his family’s Sephardic ancestry.

Leave a Comment

by Joshua Ellison · 01/21/10

In February, the city is filthy with almost-black snow. It drifts from the streets and overwhelms the sidewalks. Drainpipes pour water on the pavement that instantly turns to ice. No one lays down salt. In a few days, a half-dozen guys with shovels will show up, scraping away for hours without making any real progress. The passersby each have to find their own elusive footing; they try to keep themselves upright without making direct contact with the concrete. From the flat roofs, other men with shovels send the excess snow and ice hurtling downward without warning. The traffic moves incautiously through the intersections, spinning off more filth. Cars race forward, just to idle again in mid-block traffic.

But then, a black—always black—sedan or jeep will ride through, gleaming. There isn’t a speck of dirt or soot; even the tires are clean. This seems impossible when you look at the sputtering, gray Russian cars, or even the plentiful German and Japanese imports, none of which could make it a few feet without succumbing to grime. Somehow, though, these cars manage to stay pristine, unspoiled, unimpeded. They travel along their own privileged plane: above the pollution, the crowds, even the weather. Moscow is a place that won’t surrender or accommodate easily to fate, history, or nature. With a little luck and the right connections, anything can be made or unmade.

Read more »

Leave a Comment

by Olga Zondberg · 01/21/10

[This is the shortest day of the year in our neck of the woods.]

The divergence of animals, said Khlebnikov
is the result of their ability
to see God in many different ways.

If the Universe, said Hawking
was different, we still
would not notice.

From Chanel to Escape (remembered
one pretty fashion magazine)
in every year death has a different scent.

There are these people, writers
who have everything written down
the tics and the tacs
in place of numerical facsimiles

Read more »

Leave a Comment

by Yuri Slezkine · 01/21/10

I became Soviet in 1963 when the USSR beat Czechoslovakia in the World Hockey Championship on an empty-net goal by Leonid Volkov. I became Russian around the same time and for the same reason. I became exuberantly Soviet in 1964 when I joined the Octobrist (Lenin’s Grandchildren’s) League, and then again briefly in 1966 when I was admitted to the All-Union Pioneer Organization.

I became half-Jewish in 1967 when I told my father that Mishka Ryzhevskii from apartment thirteen was a Jew, and my father said, “Let me tell you something.”

I became mostly Jewish around 1968, when I became anti-Soviet. My father, who was already anti-Soviet, did not have the option of becoming Jewish.

I was officially classified as Russian in 1972 when I received my internal passport (on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday). I was temporarily reclassified as Soviet in 1978 when I received my external passport (on the day I was hired by the Ministry of the Merchant Marine).

I became Swedish for a day and a half in 1978 when I borrowed the identification papers of one Gunnar Gunnarsson (place of birth Göteborg, permanent residence Boda) for the purpose of surviving a visit to the rebel-held part of Sofala Province in the People’s Republic of Mozambique.

I became a published author in 1981 when Progress Publishers printed my Portuguese translation of L.M. Maksudov’s Ideological Struggle at the Present Stage. My attempt to translate a manual on mechanical engineering for Peace Publishers was aborted due to my unfamiliarity with the subject matter.

I became Iouri Slezkine in 1981 when the Department of Visas and Permission of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR received special permission to transliterate my name into French. I was dismissed from the All-Union Union of Communist-Leninist Youth and from the Soviet Army reserve.

Read more »

1 Comment

by Habitus · 11/18/09

We hope you enjoy our first Habitus-produced video, a profile of our friend Jason Eskenazi. Jason’s project Title Nation is featured in our Moscow issue.

Jason Eskenazi talks about Wonderland and Title Nation from Habitus A Diaspora Journal on Vimeo.

2 Comments

by Joshua Ellison · 11/15/09

Our Moscow issue will go on sale this week, and it features an excellent conversation with Jonathan Brent, author of Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia(Atlas, 2008). Jonathan has added his voice to the reflections of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in the most recent issue of the New Criterion.

When the Berlin Wall was torn down and a new beginning was about to unfold across Europe, Russia was completely unprepared for the changes that appeared to many in the West to be the natural result of the love of freedom and a widespread desire to throw off the repressive, criminal, monstrous legacy of Soviet communism. The impetus behind the desire to tear down the Soviet system in Russia, however, had many sources. A desire to establish a free market, liberal democracy was only one of them—that is to say, a free market in the context of the legal structures without which liberal democracy is impossible. This stream of Russian/Soviet thinking was best characterized during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin regimes by figures like Alexander N. Yakovlev, Yegor Gaidar, and most recently Grigory Yavlinsky, the founder of the Yabloko Party. But another stream was characterized by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and many other writers and thinkers who viciously attacked the Stalinist system, yet did so from a very conservative position defined by Russian nationalism and Orthodox Christianity. Others more extreme than Solzhenitsyn challenged Soviet rule based on a nationalism considerably more xenophobic and anti-Semitic, and less humane.

Leave a Comment

by Joshua Ellison · 10/08/09

Our Moscow issue is just a couple of weeks away.

In the meanwhile, we’d like to acknowledge the anniversary of the killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce and fearsome critic of Vladimir Putin, who was murdered three years ago.

Amnesty International is among the organizations organizing to press for justice in the unsolved case.

Our friend Keith Gessen, a gracious host in Moscow, also wrote an excellent article on the case for The New Yorker.

Leave a Comment