The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (11 page)

Kostya lived on the edge of town in one of the gray concrete housing projects, built around an overgrown courtyard with a rusting playground. Driving to his place for dinner (borscht, potatoes with mushrooms, tomato and onion salad; a cold tea of mint, whole cranberries, lemon balm, lemon, and sugar), he asked if we'd met an American named Dave in Ufa. I said we had. Kostya said they had been friends until a “cultural misunderstanding.” He and Andrei exchanged a meaningful look, and Kostya said he'd explain later.

As we brought our bags in, he pointed out graffiti: “Kill the Jews.” “I saw the guy who wrote it. It was weird. Usually you expect that to be a young kid, but he was forty, fifty years old!”

After the show we stood outside a supermarket, waiting for their crew of friends to buy beer before they went and smoked weed on the beach of the reservoir under an orange half-moon. It was then they explained the “cultural misunderstanding” that severed their friendship with Dave. Andrei's band, who are on Kostya's label, is called Niggers. (This explained some stickers on Kostya's mom's refrigerator.) Don't you agree, they asked, that punk rock is about provocation, and nothing provocative should be off the table?

You're going to have trouble convincing most Americans of that, I said—hypocrisy or no. Maria told them about her friends from New York who decided to call their band Ching Chong Song. After stubbornly sticking to the name through protests and boycotts, they eventually changed it after an incident in which the people with whom they were staying that night had been, unbeknownst to both parties, boycotting their show. They had clung to their contrarian anti-PC stance for too long, and it became a pointless expense of energy that led to conflict solely for conflict's sake.

Andrei said that didn't matter, that his band wasn't for the mass public anyway. He said it expressed how they felt, as Russians, as Russian punks, as outcasts, embattled at home and stereotyped overseas. Their record was called “Ugly Russians.” Like the Patti Smith song—she used the word, why couldn't he? He pointed out that punk bands casually reference Hitler and the Nazis all the time. Richard Hell, I remembered, was quoted in the
NME
in 1977 saying, “Punks are niggers.” Are both Hell and Smith examples of what scholar Julie Roberts called “the long European tradition of using art as a vehicle for the exploration of complex, uncomfortable and troubling issues . . . utilized by the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, the marginalized and the
reviled to speak out and assert their own position”—or just kids (so to speak) pushing a button that now sounds a sour note?

I said that using a discredited ideology as an object of or vector for satire was different from adapting it to an identity as oppressed outsiders—not least if you were coming from a historically imperialistic country. Kostya and Andrei seemed disappointed that I didn't agree that Dave was being unreasonable. Andrei remained in a sulk for the remainder of the evening.

I remembered “Kill the Niggers,” the smash hit from “the most popular band in Rostov-on-Don.” “Russian artists,” wrote the American expat journalist Mark Ames, “going back to the Romantics like Lermontov and Pushkin, up through Dostoyevsky and experimentalists like Kharms, have always had a way of borrowing their aesthetics from the West, Russifying them, and taking them one step too far.” And the vocabularies of provocation often resist translation. The fascination that some Western punks had with fascist symbols, in particular, became a problem for Soviet and post-Soviet punk.

Beginning in 1983, as Sergei Zhuk relates in his book
Rock and Roll in the Rocket City
, General Secretary Yuri Andropov, “concerned ‘with the social control of young people' . . . declared war on Western pop music, [citing] ‘repertoires of a dubious nature' . . . [and] the ‘distortions, confusion, and antisocial patterns of behavior' associated with Western degenerate music.” Rock clubs were closed, and bands were forced to perform at anti-American rallies to demonstrate “their loyalty and ideological reliability.” The Soviet government policy against homegrown punk was similar to its war on rock in general but distinct in several important particulars. By purposefully or accidentally confusing and conflating punks in general with neofascist
skinheads, the authorities amplified a dynamic of shifting boundaries between the two groups that continues to resonate.
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Punk imagery, which came through official channels mostly in its late 1970s British incarnation, arrived stripped of the (admittedly vague) signifying markers that distinguished genuine neofascists from leftists and from simple provocateurs like Johnny Rotten, Mark E. Smith, and Lou Reed, who used Nazi imagery for its shock value. The swastika, wrote Dick Hebdige in his book
Subculture
, “was made available to the punks (via Bowie and Lou Reed's ‘Berlin' phase) [and] reflected the punks' interest in a decadent and evil Germany . . . which had ‘no future.' It evoked a period redolent with a powerful mythology.” He continued:

            
Conventionally, as far as the British were concerned, the swastika signified “enemy.” In punk usage, the symbol lost its “natural” meaning—fascism. The punks were not generally sympathetic to the parties of the extreme right. . . . On the contrary . . . the widespread support for the anti-fascist movement (e.g. the Rock Against Racism campaign) seem to indicate that the punk subculture grew up partly as an antithetical response to the reemergence of racism in the mid-70s. . . . The swastika was worn because it was guaranteed to shock. (A punk asked by
Time Out
why she wore a swastika replied: “Punks just like to be hated.”). . . . It was exploited as an empty effect. . . . Ultimately, the symbol was as “dumb” as the rage it provoked.

But the “symbolic” provocations were taken at face value by the Soviet press. The Russian music journalist Artemy Troitsky remembers that “the only thing anyone knew about punks was that they were ‘fascists' because that's how our British-based correspondents had described them. . . . To illustrate this, a few photos of ‘monster' [
sic
] with swastikas were printed. . . . The image of punks as Nazis was established very effectively.”

Given the centrality of the apocalyptic anti-Nazi campaigns of World War II to the Soviet self-image, this was a powerfully negative association. Perversely, it only added to the subversive appeal of fascist imagery for some Russian punks: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and to identify with the greatest historical foe of the Soviet state was to express the power of one's own opposition to Soviet Communism. “Fascism” as a synonym for pure evil became, by convenient or lazy association, “an epithet hurled at whomever the Soviet authorities happened to designate as the worst ideological foe of the USSR or its international interests,” independent of actual political characteristics, wrote historian Mischa Gabowitsch. This decoupling of insult from meaning turned fascism into a useful shorthand for dissidence. Both Yegor Letov and a later 1990s group formed bands called Adolf Gitler,
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the latter band adopting the stage names Goebbels, Gimmler, and Goring. Letov's second band, Posev (Seed), was named after a World War II–era anticommunist—and at the time anticommunist necessarily meant Nazi collaborator—publishing house.

This led to some confusion about which bands were officially condoned: the Clash, though iconic punks, were regarded approvingly by the Soviet state for the band's friendly relations with the British left on issues such as labor and race relations. Other scenesters, wrote Zhuk, protested the government bans on grounds of aesthetic taxonomy: “When one of our discotheque enthusiasts interfered and told the KGB people that AC/DC and Kiss were not punk rock bands, he was arrested by the police and removed from the dance floor.” But the net was cast widely and none too perfectly. The band 10cc was banned as fascist because the Cyrillic letter С is pronounced like the Latin
s
, and thus the band was assumed to be referencing the SS in their name (Kiss was blacklisted for similar reasons). A British article contrasting punks and skinheads was vaguely translated to conflate the two (identifying “shaven temples of the head” as the distinctive marker of a punk). Ironic intent of any kind was lost in translation.

Young people with a contrarian bent got the idea: punks were fascists, fascists were anti-Soviet, thus if you were an anti-Soviet punk the most effective vehicle for your disaffection was fascist and right-wing imagery. “In 1983,” Zhuk wrote, “the Dnipropetrovs'k [Ukraine] police arrested ten students from the local vocational school . . . [who] had made special white robes, put the words ‘Ku Klux Klan' on them, and tried to ‘imitate acts of this American fascist organization.'”

This conflation of punk and fascism in the official imagination led to confusion and mistrust that exists to this day. Battles between so-called Fa (right-wing) and Anti-fa (progressive) groups
similar to those recalled with a kind of nostalgia in England today are present, visceral, and dangerous in the former Eastern Bloc, especially in its periphery.

Like the Soviet press, willfully or not, misinterpreting the British punks' swastikas, mistranslations become more aggressive in a world in which provocative concepts are available cross-culturally to people with vastly different frames of reference with which to interpret them. It's so easy to airlift an ideology, complete with a fraught vocabulary, wholesale off the Internet that it's equally easy to miss the context. The analogy is going to be inexact at best if one doesn't share the precise historical prejudices at play—and, I suppose, even if you do: I couldn't say precisely why something that feels OK for Patti Smith in 1978 would be off the table for a Russian in 2012, and the short answer may be that it should have been off the table for her as well. The result is a scattershot shooting gallery of offense: look at the tense, ongoing battle over the use of the word “gypsy,” which many Roma consider an ethnic slur, others embrace, but which most Americans and British use freely. I heard an Asian American in Beijing brag about “jew[ing] down” a cell phone salesman. It's enough to make a guy say, “Fuck it” and buy everyone a Redskins jersey.

One man's life, in particular, makes a useful fable demonstrating the confusing way in which “punk” has been understood in the context of Russian political and cultural life. The writer, provocateur, founder of the quasi-fascist National Bolshevik Party, and self-identified “punk” Eduard Limonov has long blurred the line between radical politics and large-scale performance art. Because of the centrality of his experience with and interpretation of Western punk to the aesthetics of his politics, he provides
a contrast with the later generation of young people, similarly inspired by Western punk but to radically different effect, who constitute the contemporary Russian punk scene. Limonov, exhilarated by characters like Johnny Rotten and of a Soviet generation mistrustful of any ideology, understood punk as an amoral license for confrontation and offense for its own sake. Today's punks (excepting, maybe, our friend Andrei), inspired by the anarchist, progressive politics of bands like Crass and Fugazi, imbibed not only aesthetics but a set of ideals and a progressive moral sensibility.

Limonov was born Eduard Savenko in 1943 in Kharkov and grew up in its gritty and violent Saltovka neighborhood, which he described in his third book,
Memoir of a Russian Punk
. In the 1960s “punk” meant petty theft and hooliganism, and Limonov describes an aimless world of gang scuffles, drinking, and run-ins with the “trash,” or cops. His own father was a secret police officer who ran train convoys “transport[ing] punks to labor camps and prisons” in Siberia. So it was with a kind of oedipal commitment that he managed to get himself exiled from the Soviet Union by 1974. “Rat out your degenerate friends or go into exile,” the KGB reportedly told him. He went to New York and managed to embed himself in the Lower East Side punk scene, befriending and idolizing scene luminaries including Richard Hell, Marky Ramone, and, yes, Patti Smith. It was a debauched period he used as material for his first books,
It's Me, Eddie
and
His Butler's Story
, which became sensations in France and Germany
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and sold more than a million copies in Russia. The
exposure to the provocative downtown art world of 1970s New York shaped his self-conception permanently. To this day, he wears the “torn black sleeveless T-shirt or a button-down black T-shirt, black fake jeans unraveling at the seams, and Keds-like shoes” of an aging SoHo artist and “is clearly proud of being the sort of Iggy Pop of the right-wing literary world,” according to journalist Mark Ames, a longtime Limonov apologist. He already had a
nom de punk
, thanks to a friend who had dubbed him “Limonov” or “lemon” because “he was very pale, almost yellow.” He explained with no little pride that to a Russian ear the word sounds like “something punk, like Johnny Rotten.”