Professor Motyl, who teaches at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and is perhaps the best American expert on Ukraine, has aimed his hyperbolic and outrageous tale not at the U.S. political scene, but at Russia’s.
That is both the virtue and fault of the book. To be sure, you can appreciate it on the level of a hilarious story, the purported memoir of Vladimir Putin’s alter ego, Vovochka. But unless you are a history or political science buff, you won’t get the full deliciousness of Motyl’s sophisticated tale. You will likely enjoy it anyway, but you may not realize that many of the characters are not fictional, but real– woven into a fictional tale and doing hilarious things based on outrageous, Kremlin practices.
First let’s introduce Vovochka. He is almost the exact double of Vlad , except that he exists on a human level with human failings, while the Putin simulacrum is elevated to sainthood and spiritual savior, linked to the bosom of Mother Russia (God) herself. If Vlad is the Holy Spirit, Vovochka ishis acolyte seeking to save the world through the gospel of socialism. But rather than doing so with religious or political solemnity, their methods involve such things as donning disguises to launch nefarious schemes
A few examples will suffice. At one point, the two young KGB men follow Vlad’s plan to capture 10 of the worst dissidents in East Germany. The latter are to be tracked, trailed and captured with the help of trained dogs by virtue of their body odor. The trick is to get samples, of each dissident’s ripe underwear. The task is finally accomplished with all 10.
I won’t give away how.
All this may sound bizarre, but I do recall what happened when my husband, Jiri Valenta and I, stayed in a Kislovodsk sanatorium once visited by Boris Yeltsin while doing research. Jiri is a specialist on Russia – quite likely to be a source of suspicion. When we vacated our hotel room, Jiri made sure to remove the garbage so that the KGB would have no access to our personal information. We hung around to watch what happened, and sure enough, the guy who came for the trash was duly pissed and even bawled us out!
More zany exploits of the Vlad and Vovochka occur between bouts of Vovochka’s philosophizing. Motyl correctly characterizes Vlad as a loyal communist for most of the book, who eventually brings back the Orthodox church. Though he does not mention novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn or religious philosopher Ivan Ilyin among Putin’s present heroes, Vovochka does rhapsodize about a spiritual revival of Russia along a special and distinct path, devoid of both communism and democracy but constituting: a “fourth Rome.”
Nowhere is this more evident than when the two men are temporarily parted. Vlad goes to work for Mayor of St. Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak. Meanwhile, Vovochka, in Moscow, becomes a massage therapist to pay the bills. Thereafter, his stream of consciousness attendant on his massages not only includes attempts to psychoanalyze Vlad, but balloons into mystical ruminations that make the book almost worth reading for these passages alone. With verbal pyrotechniques evocative of Mark Twain or Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Vovochka writes:
“I place one hand on the client’s neck and keep one hand in the thigh cavity. Then, after fluttering my fingers as if I were Rostropovich playing a grand piano, I move both hands toward each other like two colliding trains. They meet midway on the spine with a crash. There I repeat the piano like motion of the fingers and slide both hands outward, to their original positions. I repeat this motion about 30 times. My clients always respond with extended moans that resemble the cries of Russian mystics and holy fools. When I am done, they invariably pray-as do I. Like Mother Russia, they rise-strong, invigorated, and self-confident.”
More exploits follow after the fall of the USSR. The two friends are harsh on CIA agents, not averse to acts of physical violence as well as peeing in their beers at an Oktoberfest. They also plan and accomplish the assassination of “CIA agent,” Yeltsin, indoctrinated with deadly “CIA serum.” Subsequently, Vovochka vindicates Vlad from apartment bombings in Moscow, putting the blame on – you guessed it – heroine (Tetiana) Chornovol, of Ukraine’s 2014 “fascist” coup.
We learn about Vovochka’s cultural and culinary tastes, his soft side, not to be confused with loathed “soft power,” and his occasional feelings of inferiority. We go into his dreams, including one where Vlad sees a burning bush. We discover Vovochka’s hatred of Estonian “fascists,” decadent America and Jews (Zionists). Vlad also denies the details of a homosexual affair in his past, although it is clear that his relationship with Vovochka is quite physical and devoid of ultimate consummation. A hilarious sauna scene with Vlad and his top officials also hints at homosexuality.
The book thus captures even as it mocks, the complexity of Putin himself, a man with old fashioned family values, yet one of his best friends is former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
There is also an exchange of letters between the two friends which are so identical in tone and style that you can’t tell one from the other, even though Vlad occasionally signs his “V.” In fact, this confusion seems intentional.
My suggestion for Motyl, besides having his book translated into Russian, is to provide a reader’s guide for the Western world. In a master’s program at Yale University years ago I spent a semester reading James Joyce’s voluminous Ulysses with two reader’s guides. Vovochka is only 150 pages long and a guide will surely increase its readership. In fact, Motyl and other professors should use this work as uniquely enjoyable textbook, with assignments to students to separate fact from fiction. It will certainly enliven, not just the readers of defunct Krokodil in the Kremlin, but any Western classroom.
Leni Friedman Valenta and Jiri Valenta own the Institute of Post-Communist Studies and Terrorism website at http://instituteofpostcommuniststudies.com
