周按：今天的文章是一篇译稿。作者为Michael Idov，是《GQ》俄罗斯版的编辑。原文载于纽约杂志网站。文中，作者清楚的写出了当代俄罗斯人的迷茫：由于对政府的信任崩溃，他们不遗余力地构建着自己与体制之间的缓冲带。在俄罗斯这样的混合政体国家中，愤世嫉俗、阴谋论弥漫着整个社会，甚至已成为俄罗斯人对其生活方式的一种保护——毕竟，一个总是想着最坏情况的人是不太会感到失望的。译者：sanxu1998，在此致谢。
在我第一次去普京时代的俄罗斯采访时，我和我的朋友亚力克斯遭遇了堵车。在我们几车之隔的身后，一辆救护车也被堵在路上。救护车拉响了警笛，打开了警灯，但是无人避让：救护车不得不和我们一起在拥堵的交通中慢慢爬行。当我问亚力克斯他为何不避让时，他却冷笑了几声。“在俄罗斯，每个人都知道救护车司机通过接送机来赚外快。” 他说，“谁又知道救护车里坐着谁呢？去他妈的。“ 当时最震动我的是，这说法的真假对俄罗斯人来说并不重要，不管它是都市传说，还是只发生过一两次的事情。让人相信这是真的，你只要把这件事编的似乎有可能发生。当人们相信救护车其实是出租车的时候，救护车丧失了道路优先权。
人们往往认为压迫和恐惧统治着集权社会：大街上的武装人员，对民众的全面监控，不断重复的政治口号，以及民众之前的窃窃私语。但对于像俄罗斯这样的混合政体 —— 打着民主幌子的集权政体——的民众来说，奥威尔式的集权社会只是一种浪漫的想象。我很快发现，俄罗斯人的生活与其是说被恐惧统治，不如是说被愤世嫉俗统治。愤世嫉俗弥漫着俄罗斯社会：没有建制（institution）能够被信任，因为没有建制能够超越其领导者的贪婪。这种愤世嫉俗,
同无休无止的阴谋论一道，是俄罗斯人对其生活方式的一种保护。毕竟，一个总是想着最坏情况的人是不太会感到失望的。但这种愤世嫉俗已经发展到了对于改变的失败主义态度。
出生在苏联但在纽约长大，我在2011年搬到了莫斯科。尽管表面上我是去做绅士季刊（GQ）的俄罗斯版的编辑，我其实是去近距离观察莫斯科抗议议会选举造假的游行。在多年的政治压抑后，人们走上了大街。参与游行的人数以几何级的速度上升（12月5日，七千人；12月10日，五万人；12月24日，十万人）。另外，这次游行的领导人并不来自传统的政治阶层。他们是像我一样的人 —— 小说家、博主，诸如此类。我从没有想到，甚至不太情愿我的朋友们会前往枪声阵阵的克里姆林宫。 我认为克里姆林宫会在半路拦住游行队伍，但那却没有发生。2012年，当普京第三次当选俄罗斯总统时，他很快着手镇压抗议活动。因为缺乏纲领和领导者，抗议活动很快被镇压下去。2013年，生活回归了”正常”。
表面上，参与抗议的俄罗斯人代表了全球正在兴起的自由派阶级：思想开明，英语流利，向往纽约（就像纽约人当年向往巴黎一样）。局外人可能想象着这些“自由的灵魂”生活在与集权体制长期的斗争之中，尤其是当后者开始欢迎俄罗斯社会最落后的势力：教权主义，恐同主义，以及仇美主义时。这种斗争并不存在。相反的是，俄罗斯特殊的体制让俄罗斯的精英们在莫斯科艰险的基础上构建了一个理想化的西方社会，正如我的一个朋友所说：“卡拉奇里的哥本哈根”。在西方媒体报道着高尔基公园的新都市主义奇迹时，在西方媒体采访俄罗斯时尚界的女孩们时，当西方媒体称赞莫斯科的饭店复兴时，你就能看见这“西方社会”的影子。
只要我选择正确的道路，我就能够在莫斯科过上和在纽约几乎一模一样的生活。很多莫斯科人就过着这样的生活：光顾朋友开的饭店（在莫斯科，对饭店的最高评价是“这简直不像是在莫斯科”），与朋友共享钟点工与保姆，使用朋友开发的应用软件（APP），与朋友一起骑行在莫斯科几个“模范社区”新建的自行车道上，故意使用脸书（Facebook）而不用俄罗斯当地更流行的社交软件VKontakte，去电影院看带俄语字幕的美国电影，并把剩余的时间花在看Netflix（美国著名电视剧在线播放网站，译者注）上。
这是舒适的幻觉。但当遭遇体制（尤其是警察）时，这种幻觉就烟消云散。被交警拦下，丢失护照，甚至与看门人发生争执这些事都像是一针清醒剂。突然，你来到了只用贿赂才能保驾护航的残酷世界。当你想解决和体制有关的一切问题时，你得采用“人工控制”：找朋友的朋友。一次，我认识的一个导演被殴打致昏迷时，但这次袭击却被警方当做轻微犯罪：显然打人者买通了警察。最后，他在电影界的朋友打通了警方高层官员的关节，于是这次袭击又重新开始被调查。另一次，我一个朋友受到诈骗，他的房子被一银行职员非法转卖。如果不是他的一个朋友打电话给银行CEO的女儿的话，警方会让这个案子不了了之。但是对于没有关系的俄罗斯人来说，他们又怎么办呢？
那些“越线”的人又怎么样呢？即使你不算记者Anna Politkovskaya和反对派领导人Boris
Nemtsov悬而未决的谋杀，你也能清楚地看到体制支持哪一方。我不用费多大力气就能找到例子：Oleg
Kashin，一位给我在绅士季刊所创办的政治博客供稿的记者，在2010年差点被殴打致死。警方侦探问他的第一个问题是：“你再写政治文章时动过脑子吗？” 尽管时任总统梅德韦杰夫公开承诺亲自过问这件事，打人者最后也没有被定罪。据信，打人者是一个Kashin批评过的当地官员的手下。我的朋友Andrew
Ryvkin，另一位为我的政治博客写作的记者，也在光天化日之下被两位亲体制的作家殴打。他试图举报这两位打人者，警察却说：“算了吧。他们是名人。你懂的。” 最后一句话颇有深意。有个俄语词专门指这种情况。Ponyatiya，字面意思为“被人理解的规则”，换句话说，“潜规则”。生活在“潜规则”之下，不但意味着不能违抗“潜规则”，更意味着承认“潜规则”的存在。生活在这种对“潜规则”的默认下，比生活在真正的规则之下，压力更大。
所以，我身边的莫斯科人都不遗余力地构建着自己与体制之间的缓冲带。这种缓冲带甚至提供了一些政府的功能。对“官方”教育感到失望的大学生们私下里组织了学生论坛，在线课程，甚至开办教育企业。整洁、现代、盈利性的“档案中心”在莫斯科遍地开花：它们提供了车管所的功能，却没有车管所办事的粗鲁与腐败。讽刺的是，为了开办“档案中心”，人们必须把腐败上移几个级别。我渐渐开始理解，为什么俄罗斯人不相信政府能提供最简单的社会功能。即使是抗议运动领导人Alexei
Navalny堂吉诃德式地参与2013年莫斯科市长选举时，他主要的竞选承诺是私有化警察。
但有一种事情你无论如何都不能躲避：信任的崩溃。在俄罗斯生活的每一天都侵蚀着我做好事的意愿。首先，我不再进行垃圾分类。虽然莫斯科街头常常有分类垃圾桶，不过没人相信它们。人们相信他们精心挑出的可回收垃圾最终还是会和其他垃圾被扔到同一个垃圾堆里。所以，为什么要尝试呢？此外，在我多次试图与俄罗斯客户签订合同（这会给客户带来巨大税务负担）未果后，我开始接受现金。同时，我也开始给出现金，主要是给交警。
这就是体制的天才之处。它不需要巨大的安全机器。它只需要让你对体制有一些害怕，而又不让你对体制憎恶到愿意失去一些去改变它。2011年，俄罗斯的改革派就遇到了这种困境。他们发现事实上，没有人愿意挑战克里姆林宫，甚至没人愿意保护反对派领导人被非法逮捕。最终，他们被当局镇压到了不得不屈服的地步。随着俄罗斯不断消逝的公共生活，这种镇压还在继续。现在人们甚至会因为参与只有几个人的抗议活动而被逮捕。五年前，十万人的抗议似乎还是被允许的。当局不断推出新的禁令，比如针对“同性恋宣传”的禁令，以及臭名昭著的刑法第282条：它把任何可能冒犯他人的言论解释成“仇恨言论”。这些禁令释放的信号是清晰的：任何人在任何时候都能被定罪。这些举措把司法正义成功地纳入体制“潜规则”的掌控之下，并且起到了大规模镇压的功能。最后，一两个被操纵的案件，如对暴动小猫（Pussy
Riot）乐队的审判和对2012年抗议者子虚乌有的指控，确保所有人都得到了这一信号。
这个信号它并不运行在极权主义恐惧的逻辑之下。它更像是：安静地待着，享受新造的自行车道，不然就面对来自体制随机的惩罚。生活在莫斯科意味着脑中不断的计算：做越出“潜规则”的事情会带来什么后果？这值得吗？坐牢？被开除？登上“黑名单”？尽管从来没人见过所谓“黑名单”，相信它不存在又会令你付出什么代价呢？
我对潜规则做的让步往往是很小的。我第一次收到今日俄罗斯，克里姆林宫恶名远播的英语宣传频道的采访邀请时，我在内心斗争要不要去。我最终还是接受了采访，但在那时抗议运动的风潮中，我在胸口戴上了代表抗议运动的白丝带。今日俄罗斯的摄影师简单地解决了这一“问题”：只拍我肩膀以上的部分。在俄罗斯议会例行公事般地通过了禁止“同性恋宣传”的法案之后，我所在杂志的律师建议我删去我对于《烛台背后》（一部2013年讲述美国钢琴家李伯拉斯与其同性恋人的电影，译者注）影评中有关家庭和爱的字词，理由是：“把同性恋称作爱不当地把传统生活方式与非传统生活方式相提并论。” 我虚晃一枪，称要辞职，杂志还是发表了我的影评。不知什么原因，体制也没有干涉，但体制这些象征性的宽容是建立在社会广泛沉默的基础上的。这些象征性的小动作也只能让我自我感觉良好一些。
政治行动能够提供的也越来越少。在抗议活动失败后，俄罗斯自由派们开始自怨自艾。相互猜疑取代了团结一心。自由派们相互责怪对方与当局合作，而丝毫没有意识到在俄罗斯的体制下，完全独立于体制是不可能的。举个例子，克里姆林宫动动手指，独立电视台TV
Rain就失去了几乎所有的广告生意。另一些自由派们开始自我放逐，就像沙皇时代以来很多俄罗斯知识分子（intelligentsia）一样。一些人真正离开了俄罗斯，另一些人则创造了自己的“潜规则”。当莫斯科的一家自由派学校的老师与学生传出绯闻时，家长们并不责怪该老师，反而责怪曝光这件事的人。“你不知道你在为’他们’提供妖魔化我们的弹药吗？”
当然，每一次反对派自我攻击时，体制赢了。每一次艺术家或科学家向外国寻求庇护时，体制赢了。每一次年轻人宣传所有政府都是腐败，所有政治都是肮脏的时，体制赢了。不费吹灰之力，体制一直在赢，在一个为其创造胜利的循环之中不断地胜利。每个人在很久以前就失败了，也许是在他递给交警一千卢布时。
Once you lose faith in one institution, you start to lose
faith in them all. Lessons from Putin’s Moscow.
By Michael Idov，January 22, 2017
On one of my first reporting trips to Vladmir Putin’s Russia
— of which there’d be so many that they’d blend into residence — my friend Alex
and I got stuck in Moscow traffic a few cars ahead of an EMT van. The siren
wailed, the lights whirled, but no one would budge: The ambulance crawled along
at the same pace as the rest of us. When I noted this, Alex scoffed. Everyone
knows that ambulance drivers make money on the side selling VIP airport rides,
he said. Who knows who’s in that van right now? Fuck ’em.
What struck me most, at that moment, was how little
difference it made whether his allegation was true, an urban legend, or
something that had occurred only once or twice. All you needed for it to matter
was for it to be plausible. The moment you lived in a society where someone
could conceive of an EMT van used as an Über-Uber, you lived in a society where
ambulances no longer received the right of way.
Becoming an American in the Age of Trump
One tends to imagine life in an autocratic regime as
dominated by fear and oppression: armed men in the street, total surveillance,
chanted slogans, and whispered secrets. It is probably a version of that
picture that has been flitting lately through the nightmares of American
liberals fretting about the damage a potential autocrat might do to an open
society. But residents of a hybrid regime such as Russia’s — that is, an
autocratic one that retains the façade of a democracy — know the Orwellian
notion is needlessly romantic. Russian life, I soon found out, was marked less
by fear than by cynicism: the all-pervasive idea that no institution is to be
trusted, because no institution is bigger than the avarice of the person in
charge. This cynicism, coupled with endless conspiracy theories about
everything, was at its core defensive (it’s hard to be disappointed if you
expect the worst). But it amounted to defeatism. And, interestingly, the higher
up the food chain you moved, the more you encountered it. Now that Russia has
begun to export this Weltanschauung around the world, in the form of
nationalist populism embodied here by Donald Trump, I am increasingly tempted
to look at my years there for pointers on what to expect in America.
Having been born in the then-USSR but having spent most of
my life in New York, I moved to Moscow in 2011, ostensibly to edit the local
edition of GQ but also to be closer to the fascinating protests that had
engulfed the capital in the wake of a crooked parliamentary election. After
years of political catatonia, the people hit the streets, in numbers that
swelled in a head-spinning progression (7,000 on December 5; 50,000 on December
10; 100,000 on December 24). What’s more, this time the leaders of the protest
did not come from the permanent political class; they were people much like me
— novelists, bloggers — some of whom I personally knew. It was the year of
Tahrir and Occupy; I didn’t quite expect, or even want, my friends to gallop
into the Kremlin with guns blazing, but I half-expected the Kremlin to meet
them halfway. That didn’t happen. When Vladimir Putin was elected for the third
time, in 2012, he quickly moved to suppress the protests; since the opposition
had never settled on a platform or a leader, it wasn’t hard to do. By 2013,
life returned to “normal.”
On the surface, the Moscow crowd with which I ran was part
of the emergent global liberal class: cosmopolitan, English-speaking, and
worshipful of New York the same way their New York counterparts used to idolize
Paris and now do Berlin. An outsider might imagine these free spirits living in
some kind of perpetual combat with the regime, especially as the latter began
to embrace Russian society’s most backward strains: clericalism, homophobia,
anti-Americanism. But no such thing transpired. Instead, ingeniously, the
particular structure of the regime (and its particular corruptions and
enticements) allowed Moscow’s elites to build for themselves a kind of scale
model of an idealized Western society atop Moscow’s rough basis — what one
friend of mine had termed “Copenhagen in the middle of Karachi.” This scale
model is what you see every time a Western publication goes gaga over the
urbanist wonders of the renovated Gorky Park, profiles the latest batch of
Russian fashion’s “It” girls, or applauds Moscow’s restaurant renaissance.
As long as I picked the right routes and stuck to them, it
was possible to keep up a near-complete facsimile of my New York life. In fact,
many Muscovites lived like this: ate and drank in places owned by friends (the
highest praise for a Moscow restaurant being “This doesn’t feel at all like
Moscow”), shared cleaners and babysitters among friends (or used cool apps
developed by friends), rode the new bike lanes across the city’s few model
neighborhoods, pointedly used Facebook instead of its more populist local clone
VKontakte, watched American movies in the few theaters progressive enough for
subtitles, and filled the rest of their time with Netflix.
It was a comfortable illusion. But it fell apart as soon as
anyone needed anything from the state or encountered it in any way — especially
in the form of the police, who became the practical face of the problem. A
traffic stop, a lost passport, even an altercation with a konsierzhka (Russia’s
doormen, traditionally elderly women endowed with the superpowers of snooping
and snitching): Any of this could feel like swallowing the red pill and waking
up outside the Matrix. Suddenly, you were in the world of institutionalized
sadism alleviated only by bribery. When you needed to solve a problem involving
the state, you used the same ruchnoe upravlenie (“manual control”) as Putin
exercised over the country itself: You asked friends of friends. When the
director of photography on a TV show I had written suffered a brutal street
attack that put him in a coma, the assault was suddenly refiled as a minor
misdemeanor 24 hours later: The attacker had evidently paid off the police.
Racing against time, his film-industry friends found a personal connection to a
higher-ranking officer — and, just like that, the case was re-refiled. Another
friend had an apartment stolen from her through a phony sale facilitated by a
crooked bank employee; the police would be useless had she not found someone to
call the daughter of the bank’s CEO. Moscow, in that sense, was a very small
town. But what about the Russians more than a handshake removed from generals
and bank CEOs — that is, most of them?
And what about someone who dared step over the line? Even if
you set aside the conspicuously unsolved assassinations of reporter Anna
Politkovskaya and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, it was clear which way the
system leaned. I didn’t have to go far for examples. Oleg Kashin, a leading
journalist who contributed to the political blog I established at GQ, was
beaten within an inch of his life in 2010; the detectives on the case began by
asking his friends, “Well, did he use his head when writing [about politics]?”
(Even a public promise of manual control by Dmitry Medvedev, the president at the
time, didn’t help convict the ultimate culprits, believed to be working for
Andrei Turchak, a regional governor whom Kashin had offended in a blog post).
My friend Andrew Ryvkin, who wrote for the same blog, was also attacked — in
broad daylight, by two well-known pro-Kremlin writers, for a Twitter slight;
his attempt to report the case ended when the detective told him, “Come on.
They’re famous guys. You must understand.” That last sentence was telling.
There is a Russian word, ponyatiya, which literally means “things that are
understood” — i.e., unwritten rules. Like many phenomena of modern Russian
life, it comes from prison culture. And to live by the ponyatiya means not only
to stay within the lines but also not to acknowledge the lines’ existence out loud:
a version of the wrestling world’s kayfabe. And, just like with wrestling, this
pretense takes as much effort, if not more, as the real thing.
This, perhaps, was why the Muscovites around me were
furiously building as many intermediaries between themselves and the state as
they could, effectively privatizing government functions but only for their own
benefit. Media managers established private medical clinics; frustrated
university students, disgusted with ever-worsening “official” education, organized
private student circles, online lecture courses, and educational start-ups.
Tidy, modern, for-profit “document centers” proliferated, offering the
functions of, say, the DMV without the rudeness and corruption (though,
ironically, the only way they could function was by moving this corruption up a
few levels). I was beginning to understand why so many Russians who called
themselves “liberal” were, in fact, anarcho-libertarians in the Western sense,
distrusting the government to perform even the simplest jobs. Even the protest
leader Alexei Navalny, whose quixotic campaign for the mayor of Moscow in 2013
briefly regalvanized the movement, ran on a promise to, among other things,
privatize the police force. In that sense, the Russian anti-Putinists and Donald
Trump have more in common than either side would care to admit (though there
are many, many things Trump would privatize before the police forces that
helped elect him).
There was, however, one thing from which no creature comfort
could shield you: the general breakdown of trust. Wealth may or may not trickle
down, but normalized corruption certainly does. Each day of the three years I
spent in Russia nibbled away at my archetypal Brooklyn do-gooder instincts.
First, of course, I stopped recycling. Waste-sorting bins occasionally appear
here and there in Moscow — but, naturally, no one trusts them (“It’s a PR stunt
to create a green image for the Moscow government,” declared Greenpeace Russia
in response to the latest campaign), and carefully sorted recyclables are
generally assumed to end up in the same landfill as toxic waste. So why try?
After years of unsuccessful attempts to sign freelance contracts as an American
citizen (which would mean a huge tax liability for my Russian clients), I began
accepting cash. I also began handing it out — to traffic cops.
That was the genius of the system. It didn’t need a giant
security apparatus. It needed only you, the citizen, to be implicated just
enough to have something to lose but not desperate enough that you’d be tempted
to lose it. In 2011, reform-minded Russians faced this dilemma head-on,
realized no one was ready to actually storm the Kremlin or even protect the
opposition leader from unlawful arrest, and backed down — and were
legislatively and legally beaten into submission. That process continues to
this day, aided by Russia’s ever-shrinking civic life. Now people may get
arrested for single-man pickets where, five years ago, 100,000-person marches
were fine. The new restrictive laws — such as the “gay propaganda” one, or the
notorious Article 282 that reinterprets hate speech as anything anyone can take
offense at — are shoddily written and full of holes on purpose; their true
message is that anyone can be found guilty at any time. This moves justice
fully into the realm of ponyatiya and obliterates all need for mass repression:
One or two show trials, such as the Pussy Riot ordeal and the fabricated cases
against the protesters of May 6, 2012, ensured that everyone else got the
message.
That message? Again, it wasn’t to operate in totalitarian
fear. More like: Sit quietly, enjoy your new bike lanes, or face a carefully
randomized punishment. Living in Moscow meant a constant background calculation
as to how much this or that transgression against the ponyatiya would cost you,
whether it would be worth it or not. Probably not jail. Just your career. Your
name on a “stop list.” Maybe. No one has seen these lists. But how much would
you be willing to bet that they don’t exist?
The accommodations I made were often quite small. The first
time I was asked for an interview by Russia Today, the Kremlin’s notorious
English-language propaganda channel, I debated whether to go. Swept up in the
excitement of the rallies, I justified going by pinning the white protest
ribbon to my chest. The cameraman simply framed me from the shoulders up. After
the Russian legislators rubber-stamped the vile law against “gay propaganda,”
the magazine’s in-house lawyer suggested we delete the words love and family
from a review of the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra (the logic: Gay
people can have sex all they want, but calling it love “creates false
equivalence between traditional and nontraditional lifestyles”). I threw a fit,
threatened to quit, and we published the review. Somehow, the system weathered
the blow. These meaningless little gestures belied an overall acquiescence. All
they did was make me feel temporarily better about myself.
Activism offered less and less of that kind of comfort.
After the protests failed, the Russian liberals turned their resentment on
themselves, with all solidarity vanishing down the rabbit hole of intramural
recriminations. Charges flew, of collaborationism and selling out; almost no
one was willing to face the idea that these terms simply didn’t apply to a
system where even the opposition newspapers, TV channels, and radio stations
were on an indirect hook (the independent TV Rain lost nearly all its advertisers
at a snap of Kremlin fingers). Some cocooned themselves in the state of
so-called internal emigration, a natural M.O. for the Russian intelligentsia
since czarist times. Some packed up and left for real. Yet others developed
their own version of ponyatiya, circling the wagons in a mirror image of how
the Kremlin operated. When a teacher at one of Moscow’s few progressive
schools, where the liberal elite sent their children, was revealed to have
conducted affairs with students, many parents heaped outrage not on him but on
the whistle-blower: Don’t you understand that you’re giving “them” ammunition
to demonize us even more? And, of course, every time the opposition attacked
itself, corruption won. Every time an exhausted artist or scientist asked for
asylum abroad, corruption won. Every time a young person declared all politics
equally dirty and all governments corrupt, corruption won. The regime could
just sit back and keep winning, in a self-propelling loop of triumph — because
everyone else had lost this battle long ago, perhaps when they forked over
their first 1,000 rubles at a traffic stop.
These days, I am writing for Russian movies but doing it
from Berlin, where glass is recycled according to color. With Germany being the
last global bastion of liberal democracy (now, there’s a sentence I never
imagined I’d write), the ethical compromises I’m involved with are much more
familiar ones — the ones I’d internalized long before I moved to Russia. The
truth is, there is absolutely nothing unique about my Russian experience. To
live a privileged life in the West also means to engage in daily hypocrisy and
selective blindness, no matter who’s in charge. It means not thinking too hard
about the kind of regimes our elected representatives prop up, the kinds of deals
they strike, and the kind of strikes they deal. We know, though we often
pretend not to, that things like democracy, liberty, and corruption exist on a
continuum: Russia’s direct presidential elections are by definition more
democratic than our Electoral College, for instance, but bribery in America is
still, in most cases, a risky proposition. Yet corruption gradually shades into
a culture of lobbyists and expediters and so on.
Trust, on the other hand, is trust. It’s either there or it
isn’t. Regardless of how strict or liberal a society’s rule book is, the people
either agree to Tinkerbell it into existence or they do not. A wailing
ambulance contains either someone who needs help or someone taking you for a
sucker. Post-Soviet Russia is a spectacular modern case of what happens when
that basic trust between the individual and the institution, any institution,
breaks down. And it may now — we shall see — provide some useful lessons for
the brave new world the U.S. has just entered.
*This article appears in the January 23, 2017, issue of New
York Magazine.
