Op-ed: The Eulogy Putin Gave

This op-ed was published in the IAJ International Update.

The Eulogy Putin Gave
May 3, 2007

The famed philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote that a eulogy is a fundamentally selfish act. The eulogizer elevates himself, constructing his image through the death of the other.

Russian President Vladimir Putin knows that lesson well. The eulogy Putin delivered at the funeral for former President Boris Yeltsin last Monday was the eulogy Putin himself wants to receive years hence. The speech was all democracy and greatness, bereft of Russia’s fall in Chechnya, the rise of the oligarchs, and today’s undemocratic democracy. As the Russian state archives have slowly closed, an official state history has begun to rise. Steven Lee Myers of The New York Times compared the eulogy to Stalin’s treatment of Lenin: “appropriating his legacy by transforming him ‘into the realm of state propaganda’ to be used for other ends.” By presenting a beautiful Boris, Putin created a wonderful, problem-free Putin—construction through exclusion, as Derrida would say.

Yeltsin created a constitution, said Putin, that declared the rights of the person as its highest virtue. But this is not Putin’s virtue. Earlier this month, he banned all foreigners from all retail markets across the vast country. Putin credited his predecessor with creating a government that “allowed people to freely express their thoughts.” But this is not Putin’s government. The previous week, his administration told all Kremlin-controlled radio stations—which are all of them, except Echo Moscow—that at least 50 percent of the news they report have to be positive, regardless of reality. Where Yeltsin grumbled but ultimately gave way for NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, Putin is making a Cuban missile crisis out of ten missile interceptors that even his generals concede pose no harm.

What do we students care of Russia’s government and its leaders’ eulogies?

Russia is not the great power Soviet Union once was. Our generation will not face an existential nuclear threat of Soviet proportions. We will face, instead, a people who search for identity in a largely imperial past—from the Romanov empire to the Soviet empire; from the czar to the general secretary. Building democracy with a guilty memory is hard, perhaps impossible. Germany did it once, but the communist grip has proven stronger. Even in Berlin you can tell when you cross into former East Germany.

We care, in short, because, while mitigated and transformed, the threat remains. Our generation will witness the unraveling of conflict in a dauntingly complicated and increasingly important region. If we are to understand that conflict, if we wish to offer constructive solutions, then we must learn the history of the region and its peoples—lest we repeat the mistakes of cowboy-style democratization.

Another Moscow eulogy was delivered later last week. Mstislav Rostropovich, the greatest cellist of his generation, passed away on Friday. Rostropovich was exiled from the Soviet Union for “anti-Soviet” activities that included providing shelter for the regime’s most potent critic, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. In 2005, an interviewer asked Rostropovich about the proper attitude towards Russia: “Don't you think that the silence of the West might be justified by the necessity of peaceful world coexistence?” Rostropovich nodded as his wife, Galina, answered: “That was already done under Hitler, and that was enough! That method had been tried. Now maybe we should try another approach: force or disobedience!”