Jón Ólafsson

[A talk given at SLOWAR: The Dictionary of War, Moscow 2-3 September 2010]

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Cataclysmic events change everything. Or, one could say, they happen and after that nothing can ever be the same. This is in some sense obvious. Natural disasters are cataclysmic events in precisely this sense – they physically destroy homes and habitats. Think of hurricane Katerina that destroyed New Orleans five years ago or of any other disaster in human history. Revolutions can be similarly cataclysmic if overnight all rules and regulations cease to hold. The fall of the Berlin Wall was cataclysmic. Berlin on November 10th 1989 was a fundamentally and irreversibly different place from the Berlin that existed on November 9th 1989.

But sometimes cataclysmic events happen without there being a clear signal or sign of what has happened. It becomes clear after it has happened. The affected group simply realizes that something has happened, something enormous and irreversible. A series of events, a development leaves a community, society a group in a situation where everything is clear, and at the same time nothing is clear. It is a state where the question “and now what” is pressing and without any clear or given answer. There is a choice and a range of possibilities, but no guidance about what to choose.

The final year of the Soviet Union and perhaps also the first year of the Non-Soviet Union was a time permeated by AFTER. It was fully clear that something was entirely changed. Something had happened that made the Soviet Union cease to exist long before it actually ceased formally to be a country on the map. Yet it was not so easy to tell what exactly had changed: Certainly some habits of authorities had changed and so on, but what had changed the atmosphere for good was not so certain. It fits to this view of things that when eventually the Soviet Union was formally taken out of existence it was a non-event. A world began in which the Soviet Union did not exist and in the Soviet Union itself people were mainly talking about something else. It was hardly worth mentioning in the news, and had not a couple of cameramen working for foreign media in Moscow been on the alert, the Soviet flag might actually have been taken down over the Kremlin for the last time without anyone filming or taking pictures at all.

The beginning of the AFTER is very simply a state of confusion and the state of confusion is as we all know a state where certain individuals think they know exactly what is going on.

In January 1991 I went as a journalist to Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia to cover events surrounding Lithuania’s declaration of independence, which opened the way for the other Baltic countries to do the same. A further reason for us was to follow the Icelandic minister of foreign affairs who had led Icelandic efforts to support the Baltic struggle for independence by formally recognizing their statehood. That gave me the opportunity to follow closely the events of that month and I made a short documentary for the Icelandic TV with my cameraman, Þorfinnur Guðnason, who produced it, and I will show you three very short fragments of the film as we go along. I will also use photographs from my journalistic travels in Georgia, Abkhazia as well as Moscow to illustrate my points here.

One could think of these events as preparatory maneuvers, as actual uprising of a people who thereby took their fate in their own hands so to say, and that was surely the way in which people wanted them to be perceived. In Riga and Vilnius people took to the streets with the express purpose of defending the Parliament buildings from an impending attack by the Soviet army. But the question in the background was very simple: What had made these events possible? What kind of a cataclysm created the conditions in which so many people would not fear showing open defiance against Soviet power.

Somehow the group DDT captured a part of the answer to this question. DDT’s music in these years was openly defiant, but at the same time remaining mainstream. The lyrics showed the way: They were not only critical but emphasized the gap between the personal – the human – on the one hand, irrational demands of authority on the other: “Revolution you taught us to believe that good is unjust: How many worlds have we destroyed in the name of your holy fire?”

DDT shows the way out, but nothing more than that. What next is the next question.

In the Vilnius parliament building the theatricality was even more striking than in Riga: Everyone who had managed to find an old uniform of some sort was wearing it, a collection of ancient weapons had been assembled, some of which looked as if made for the 17th Century wars. Theatrical does not mean non-serious. Quite the opposite. The theatrics were a result of the absolute need to show defiance, and to show no fear.

The fearlessness in DDT’s music make it not only sound post-cataclysmic. It serves as a proof of evaporating authority. The seriousness of the serious. Soviet authority had been absolute and unmovable but now it wasn’t. One could simply resist it, reject it.

When I watch now the film I made and hear my own commentary, I try to listen whether there is a hint of irony in it. The guarding of the parliaments in Vilnius and Riga was serious business, but it also had the obvious characteristics of the cliché. It had the aura of people’s heroism – and of course it was heroic, it was after all resistance. It was thus one could say an improvisation upon a well-known theme. The striking thing is the improvisation. The cataclysm had removed the old formulas for acting and speaking. It had created a situation in which it seemed obligatory to start engage in the idea of being a resistance fighter. There were good examples from literature and film that could be used to sketch the general picture. The rest was improvisation.

This song “Don’t shoot” of course relates to Afghanistan rather than to Lithuania and it is amazing that it was recorded and published already in 1982. I found that it captured the naïveté that so characterized those standing to defend the Lithuanian parliament in 1991. But here it romanticizes the whole atmosphere of resistance fighters, and that was also the point of it in the film.

The significance of the public action in the Baltic countries in 1991 has to do with myth-making. I am not saying this with any irony. The creation of a myth that could for a long time serve to support the legitimacy of demands for independence, the need for a resistance put up by whoever cared to show up was most of proactive myth-making, creative myth-making. The myth involved is simple, and classical rather than a cliché. It goes like this: The simple people rise to oppose power that has been forced upon them. The simple people turns out actually to be stronger than the ruler seeking to suppress them because they are possessed by an inner, spiritual power which by definition is stronger than the power imposed through violence by the authorities. It is a powerful myth, not a cliché. It is a post-cataclysmic formula that turned out to be ready for use by the Baltic independence movements.

The lack of fear is also part of the myth-making enterprise. It is not that the situation is not dangerous. It is highly dangerous and in this case it is good to remember that just a few days before these photos were made 13 people had been killed on the streets in Vilnius and 4 in Riga. I remember asking myself why these people were suddenly so willing to sacrifice their lives? After all it was pretty clear to the outside observer that they would get independence, the Soviet Union had already lost them.

The rational unromantic eye could see the heroism on display as superfluous and therefore unnecessary. But that meant it could also be a very last chance for heroism. The danger in the air was the danger encouraging heroism, rather than the dull and depressing Soviet certainty of repressive measures for voicing or showing dissent. The idea of an inner, spiritual force came up in almost every conversation. That was the final, the simplest and most important part of the myth-making enterprise: The people on the streets in Riga and Vilnius saw themselves not only as people who had the right to be independent. They saw themselves as good fighting evil.

There is another side of the coin. There always is. If myth-making is the creation of a myth, there is also a resistance to a myth or to any received view or wisdom. It’s usually retroactive in the sense that it goes back to challenge what is taken for granted.

This is Georgia in the spring of 1992. We can see a map on the wall and the guy in the picture is Dzhaba Ioseliani who was briefly the most powerful person in that country. He was commonly referred to in the Western press as a warlord. He had spent years in prison in Soviet times, before embarking on a career as a writer and academic. Here he had just managed to oust Georgia’s elected president Zviad Gamsakhurdia.

The cataclysmic events in Georgia was a civil war that had left the city center in Tbilisi not perhaps in ruins, that would be to exaggerate, but with every other building burnt out like this one on the picture. It was a depressing reminder that every end is a new beginning and the fighting showed that things were not destined to develop towards peace and happiness.

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The primary theme of retroactive truth making is revenge. It is therefore highly dangerous. It will seek to tear down whatever the proactive myth-maker has created, but it does not necessarily provide a vision beyond that. Ioseliani was intent on crushing the separatist movements in Georgia, which had, just as had happened in the Baltics, engaged in proactive myth-making. Later that year he staged an invasion in Abkhazia, the Western-most region of the country in an attempt to gain control over that territory once and for all.

One could see truth-making and myth-making as opposites, and in a way they are. But more importantly they are two ways of world making. Myths are indispensable justificatory frameworks for policies especially in situations were any rational basis for legitimacy of power or leadership has been removed. But myths are always challenged by truths. And the truths involved need not contain anything more than the debunking of the myths. Truths are not any truer than the myths. They simply invoke another vocabulary, another way of reasoning and justifying actions.

The myth-maker creates narratives out of the set of facts available at any given time. The truth-maker gathers evidence, goes on a search for new facts and confirmations of claims and allegations. The truth-maker presents alternative versions, confronts. The myth-maker rests in a web of beliefs or narratives that serve to make sense of the position he is aiming at or finds himself in.

Truth-making is as I said dangerous when it is driven by a force ready to fight in order to establish its truths. It is on the other hand a biographical necessity. To lead a meaningful life is closely connected to truth-making, to challenging the myths that have been created as a virtual world in which one can move around partly as a product of those myths. To be an independent character is to be able to debunk them to go for truths rather than the myths.

Memoirs can be a good example of this. Take Gulag memoirs. There were not many of those around 20 years ago. There was Solzhenitsyn, there was Ginzburg and a few writers who had published their recollections. The Gulag Archipelago was the towering piece, a recognized masterpiece of independent scholarship and literary craft. Now there are thousands of memoirs around. Hundreds have been published, other are accessible on the various websites kept by the Memorial society and other organizations committed to helping people find and make known truths about themselves and their relatives.

Since the Gulag Archipelago works dealing with Gulag experiences have been dealt with on their literary merits mainly. The less known and unpublished memoirs are often considered less interesting because the stories they tell fail to meet the literary standards set by Solzhenitsyn. Thus through the work of Solzhenitsyn and a few other writers, the Gulag has its set of myths, of received ways of understanding and interpreting the experience associated with the Gulag that shapes expectations and demands when it comes to telling or retelling experiences that are one’s own. Anyone writing on the Gulag in the shadow of the giant of the Gulag can either submit to the particular myth created by him, or engage in challenging it, or of course choose to remain silent.

Rehabilitation was the conventional way of recognizing the right of a truth-maker to his or her own personal story. The drab wording of the classic Soviet rehabilitation document reflects the extreme reluctance, the suspicion harbored toward any personal experience in a state so dependent on myth and therefore so hostile to anyone who tries, for the sake of his or her own right to truth to challenge myths nourishing state power and its glory.

The classic rehabilitation letter says something like: This person, X is rehabilitated due to an absence of crime in any evidence available to the authorities. It does not say anything about the injustice or harm done to the rehabilitated person (who in many cases would also have been dead when the rehabilitation letter was written), nor does it voice regret for the inflicted punishment. The access to truth is given reluctantly. The possibility of there existing evidence unknown to the authorities is still left open. The “absence of crime” in documents therefore does not even mean no crime was ever committed by rehabilitated person. Nor of course, does it say what should be the most important thing: That a crime actually was committed. Not by the person named in the document, but to this person, by the authorities. He or she was the victim of a crime.

So we are, it seems, locked in an endless conversation even about the most serious things. The person seeking rehabilitation, and seeking to have his or her memory of the past in Soviet space restored – recognized, is a proactive truth-maker. The proactive truth-maker challenges the retroactive myth-maker. The glory of the past, achievements of former generations, victories and conquests, are the myths that the retroactive myth-maker cannot let go of. He will think of these myths as absolutely necessary part of understanding the past. He will see truth-makers as a hostile force and claim that to give up more than the very least will have catastrophic consequences for his country, the fatherland or motherland.

Extolling the virtues and achievements of Stalin are an indispensable part of retroactive myth-making here, in this country, but so are full and vigorous denials of any wrongdoing by Soviet soldiers in World War II. The interesting thing about Russia is the dependence on myth that makes political conversation and political dissent such a difficult enterprise. Truth-makers are seen as a constant threat to official positions; the authorities try to limit their freedom of movement as much as they can. There is no enthusiasm for giving truth-making more than just a tiny bit of personal space.

One of the most impressive achievements of Soviet power was the power of silencing. The repressions of the thirties not only resulted in hundreds of thousands of executions, millions of arrests and in huge prison camps all over the country. It also led to a situation were the only way to survive was to keep silent, even to people very close to you about who you were. Any biographical detail that connected one to an arrested person or to someone who had actually been executed could compromise one severely, so could any information about bourgeois or kulak origins.

The silence makes the silenced person just as dependent on the reigning myth as the silencer. That is I think the reason why the proactive truth-making has again become so difficult even now 20 years after the Soviet collapse. The space for some myth-making from the other side, such as the general perception of the Gulag created by Solzhenitsyn is still ok, it does not challenge, does not remove the former myth entirely. Stalin can be both good and bad. But with the enormous quantities of detail pouring in through a myriad of personal records demanding to be taken seriously, demanding to be studied, that’s a real threat.

The retro positions that I have talked about are frequently justificatory frameworks for war. One could even argue that retroactive truth-making inevitably leads to war.There isn’t much more to be said about war. It is prototype of cataclysm. No natural disaster can ever come close to the definiteness of war. But war also simply creates the need for new kinds of truth-making and myth-making.

Abkhazia in the late nineties. Ioseliani has been powerless for a long time and spends time in prison for organizing an attempted assassination of Shevardnadze. But the consequences of his invasion of Abkhazia are overwhelming. The region is locked in a limbo that makes both survival and defeat impossible, Russian and UN troops move around pointlessly sending reports on everything that moves to New York and Moscow.

Myths and truths are an integral part of any political culture. We cannot simply throw out the myths and opt for truths. It isn’t as easy as that. Myths and truths are used. The question is always to what purpose and in what way. Myths must be debunked all the time by truths. The irrational and irresponsible defense of myths creates the need for violence. But to insist on common truths is just as dangerous and irresponsible. The individual must challenge the state with truths. If that is not possible then something will go wrong sooner or later. If individuals are enslaved in a position where the truth about them is so dangerous that they will grab thankfully the myths of glory and power that the state hands out to them in order not to have to reveal the truth about themselves, we are in a state of unlimited oppression.