Thoughts on a suburban train

continued from the previous issue

Stilyan Stoyanov
About himself — “I am 43 and graduated from the Philology Faculty of Sofia University. My specialization is Bulgarian Philology. I work as an Associate Professor of the Theory and History of Literature at the South-Western University in Blagoevgrad (Bulgaria). I am particularly interested in the problems of mass literature and culture, especially the relations between “the writer and power (the pen and the sword)”. I have recently been thinking about the potential manipulative power of literary texts and that of culture in general. I taught for 4 years at the Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University, and now I am teaching at the Melitopol Pedagogical University. My Ukrainian and Bulgarian friends and acquaintances jokingly say that I have two homelands and I move periodically between them. They say that to try to sit on two chairs is bad and painful, but I think that to have two motherlands is unusual but interesting.”

One size fits all?
Essentially, the problem of equality prompts a different chain of reasoning. Carl Segan said it is statistically impossible for two identical people to exist. Tainted Marxism, also known as Leninism, tried to inject the notion of equality between people. It succeeded, albeit only in an ideological sense. Ideology thus entered into conflict with human nature. One person cannot be totally the same as another person. 
In today's Ukraine, you sometimes see people who feel nostalgic for the times of "equality." Those people have apparently forgotten that they were also "equal" while standing in long lines for almost everything. They seem to remember only the equality on posters, on radio and television; not the real equality, but the well-articulated slogans of equality. Language as a medium was used to impose an equality of words. But all doors to the human brain, speech and thought were left open. Not everything could be controlled. People applied all the resources and means in their rich language to escape this equality. 

"All Human Beings Are Equal, 
But Some Are More Equal Than Others!"
It strikes me how often the word 'special' (spets) is used in the Russian language. "Spets" could be a prefix to every word — spets-food, spets-order, spets-naz (special forces), spets-clothes, spets-vehicle, spets-connection… Nobody today speaks of equality existing today, either declared equality or true existing equality, although some still grieve over the imaginary social quality of the past. Today the word 'spets' is being replaced with the word 'exclusive'. I met a hardworking man in Kyiv named Oleksiy, and He told me he gives "exclusive" massages, but admitted he had no idea what that meant. His massages are exclusive because that's what his customers call them — vendors, police chiefs, people working at currency exchange point and people from the half-underground world. "Exclusive" people that want to have their "exclusive" massage, who get "exclusive" tickets to theater and concerts, who buy themselves clothes in "exclusive" shops, who drive "exclusive" jeeps and talk on their "exclusive" mobile phones. What a new way of escaping equality!

As if in the shop full of toys
I try to collect a world of my own. 
I hurry in a new garb 
To my New being, in Old ways.
                                   Great Cat 

Long Live Privileges and Benefits!
In an article by a Ukrainian economist, I read that if pensions are increased but privileges canceled, it is likely to cause more discontent than happiness. The author explained that privileges convey the feeling that a person is 'special' and that the country values what that person has done or is doing. Naturally, this provides an explanation for why the number of privileged individuals has not decreased, thought there are fewer war veterans every year. 
Paradoxically, both the phenomenon of people trying to escape from equality into the world of "spets", and nostalgia for the equality of Soviet times coexist. Is this something similar to the syndrome of "escape from freedom", well-known from the days of existentialism? I don't know. But I do notice how people, fully understanding that certain concepts and artifacts are gone forever, still try with all their might to preserve some fragment of them. Perhaps they think of these things as part of their tradition. Those seeking votes also attempt to prey on this desire. I am bombarded with election campaign pamphlets and handouts (I get them absolutely everywhere), and they always solemnly state that if you vote for this deputy (doubtlessly the best deputy), education and healthcare will again be free, Ukrainian goods will again be exported to Russia in exchange for cheap Russian oil and gas and WE will have our good old lives back. What a gross exploitation of obsolete reactionary concepts! Nothing will ever be the same again. The Ukrainian market will never again be filled again with Bulgarian wine and canned vegetables (Ukrainian pickles and wines are no worse) and Bulgarians will never again need to wait 15 years for their long-desired Ladas. Some things have gone forever.

Isolation Zone?

"Bulgarians do not like peoples from the former Soviet Union any more", two Volodymyrs have told me at different times. One of them is a university professor and the other a chief designer. In response, I invited them to come to Bulgaria and see for themselves that our attitude is absolutely reasonable. Both say that they would not go even if they could afford it. They then informed me that Bulgarians no longer like Soviet people and therefore the Alyosha monument in Plovdiv may soon be removed. They had read discussions about it in newspapers and seen items on TV. All I could do was assure them that the monument still stands where it was in Plovdiv, as in Sophia there is still a monument to Tsar the Liberator and another to the Russian Army. I know that there are political extremists in Bulgaria and I am glad that their numbers are dwindling. I truly tried to convince both Volodymyrs that extremists, in all cases, are always a minority.
But how can I explain to my children a photo I have of myself when I was even younger than they? Behind me is the Mausoleum, which no longer exists? What happened to it? Did political extremism destroy part of my own history or was this just more modernization? ("In place of the Mausoleum, we will build a modern European square!")
My mother misses Soviet movies on TV and Soviet songs on the radio. "Why don't they show Russian movies anymore?" she asks. She recollects "Merry boys", "Volga-Volga", "Circus", and "Ovod" with Oleh Stryzhenov. She does not watch "Spetsnaz" or "Killing power" or "Cops" or "Men's work." 
"Why would someone show movies in which a brave special agents beats the mean Chechens; movies where people kill other people? Haven't we had enough Rambos?" she cries. They do show Andriy Tarkovskiy films in Bulgaria, but deep at night, along with the films of Nikita Mikhalkov and Andriy Konchalovskiy. I cannot explain to my mother or to the two Volodymyrs that there are people in Bulgaria who do not like what is now called the 'post-Soviet space' and that there are those who do. To be more precise, love is always very defined, concrete and targeted.

"You destiny is in your hands," — read the words on the wall of a public toilet in Odesa. Well, my friend Angel from my student days has said there is nothing more profound than a deep-thinking man on the toilet. Here in Odesa was a thoughtful, if a bit literalist, man on a toilet seat echoing the ides of Voltaire in "Candide": "Let each of us care for our own garden" — we must each care for our human individuality, because our lives depends on us. For people who lived in a socialist society, this is a surprising discovery. We are "systematized" people: we lived in a system, accepted it or fought it, but were never without it. When there is no more system we find it hard to understand our existence outside and mechanically continue to adapt ourselves or fight departed ideologies.
Even when we succeed in our struggle, we continue to look for another system, for new Party Committee Secretaries to interfere with our lives. Maybe this explains people's negative attitude to political elites in Bulgaria and in Ukraine. 

Have you heard these ideas before? The People's Assembly in Bulgaria and the Verkhovna Rada in Ukraine are places for bad people; they are places for those that think only about their own interests and forget about ours. The political elites deeply corrupt, absolutely immoral, and they destroy any progressive initiative. These two sentences sum up the general attitudes of people who have lived the better part of their lives in a Socialist system. They seek a continuation of the System in the current political elites and identify the latter with the system. A certain effort is required to understand that society cannot do without its political elites, just as it cannot do without its teachers, doctors, municipal service workers, or retail salespeople. The emotional energy spent rehashing how corrupt the deputies are, causes nothing but headache and internal discomfort.
It is still difficult for us to come to terms with the idea that there is no absolute system any more. We are indignant that the political and economic elite is corrupted and thieving, but it is not the politicians who stole the traffic signs from the roads, benches from the parks and engines from the Bulgarian irrigation systems. It was members of another cliche group — the masses — that did that. The words, written in an Odesa toilet, are hard to believe. It is easier for us to look for excuses for our failures in those around us; blaming them on a bad system (because we as individuals are good), a bad government, or an even worse president. We worship Hope as our god with almost a feeling of sanctity, we elect the next parliament, the next president, the next mayor, just to see the things clear again a couple weeks later and dismiss them as also bad.
"Take as much independence as you can!" offered Yeltsin. What if you don't know how much you need and what to do with it?

What's a Single Party?
Philosophically, it turns out to be not so easy to take one's life into one's own hands. Why does this surprise us so much? It is a process that takes time. From the time when Candide called for everybody to take care for his own garden to the time when an average Swiss person feels so unaffected by politics that he does not know who belongs to his political elite, two full centuries have gone by. But from the time when the Soviet System was officially dismantled to the time I read the inscription on the Odesa toilet, only 13 years. I've noticed some other changes, too. I've noticed with surprise that the phrase "a leading role in the Party" means absolutely nothing to my students or my children. They do not understand what on earth a single party or a single ideology means and therefore have no idea what having a leading role in this single party would mean. This generation is already beyond the stereotypes of the System and the people of that System as well.

I am continually surprised at how many little things can be sold on a local train: beer, carbonated drinks, waffle cakes, cookies, doughnuts, vegetables fruits, socks, knitwear and school supplies. For the entire two hours of my journey, somebody is constantly is in the row selling something. "For four years, one boy sold knitwear on this local train," says my friend Serhiy. "Maybe he has a store in Zaporizhzhia now," I joked. "Yes, right near the central public market," answers Serhiy without a hint of irony. It appears someone has taken his destiny is in his own hands.
With a squeak and a jolt (just like in a Benedict Yerofeyev novel), the train reaches its final stop. Crowds of people spill out on to the platform and seem to dissipate away into the darkness of the night, which has already covered the Earth.