They wield their pens to defend their Homeland against the West. A review of political bestsellers.
Our correspondent has studied the sales ratings of political literature at three major Moscow bookshops (the Moscow Book House, Biblio-Globus and Moskva) to find out that the vast majority of Russian political bestsellers explain to the public who our country's foes are and why.
Some decent books sell well in Moscow. Among the bestsellers I found, for example, Valery Panyushkin's books about Gazprom and about the "prisoner of silence," Mikhail Khodorkovsky; Natalya's Grib's books about gas wars, the books about RAO UES of Russia and its CEO Anatoly Chubais by Mikhail Berger and Olga Proskurnina.
Georgy Arbatov's reminiscences about the Cold War "hawks" and "doves" are comparatively popular, as are a collection of jokes about politicians by Andrei Kolesnikov, the memoirs of Fidel Castro and Barack Obama. Reports by Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov about Vladimir Putin, the crisis and Gazprom sell well. However, serious books do not sell as well as exposures of world conspiracies.
On the Western front
I have discovered that the shelves are full of books that portray the world as a wretched place. Russia's foes can be divided into two groups: the first is the US-led West. The most popular book in that group is Nikolai Starikov's "Cherchez la Oil. Why our Stabilization Fund is OVER THERE?" Its main message is that the money is kept in banks in the US, referred to as the "20th century Golden Horde", because this is Russia's "indemnity", while the West needs Russia only as a supplier of "oil, cannon fodder and pretty women". Mr Starikov shares some tricks of the trade with the readers. Thus, the media reports to the effect that inflation in the euro-area in March 2008 was the highest in 16 years helped the author to understand that in the early 1990s the USSR was within a hair's breadth of winning the Cold War and that the West was saved from imminent demise by a miracle.
Another hot-selling item is a collection of articles and interviews by "a thinking conservative patriot", Natalya Narochnitskaya, entitled "Russia and the Russians in the Modern World". In the preface to the book Oleg Belyakov, a political observer of the newspaper Radonezh makes this complaint: "We often look at the world with the naivite of newborns believing that if we have changed, the attitude towards us should have changed too. For our long-time opponents the history of great Russia has never been interrupted: its very existence is seen as a challenge and a threat." Another passage of Belyakov's confirmed my hunch that the state of Russian minds is rather like that of smoking ruins after a nuclear blast: "Liberalism in its neo-Trotskyite, libertarian form is becoming a totalitarian ideology."
Vying in popularity with Natalya Narochnitskaya's books are the books in the mysterious "Project Russia" series which "do not simply stimulate the mind, but structure it". The Exmo publishers who have already put out three volumes assure us that they do not know the names of the authors (the Kremlin says "We don't know". The West says "We don't know".) The books, by the way, offer nothing new: the authors chastise and brand the mores of the egregious liberals.
I also found some reprints of bestsellers by Andrei Parshin, "Why Russia is not America" and Oleg Platonov, "Why America will Perish". Mr Platonov, by the way, believes that the US is "anti-God, anti-human and extremely totalitarian" and should be destroyed by the common efforts of humanity.
Maxim Kalashnikov paints a picture of the triumph of the "Empire of Good" over the "Empire of Evil". To recap, in his book "Baptism of Fire. The Altar of Victory" he branded the "new barbarians": "The engines of snub-nosed trucks with trailers were roaring, obviously crammed full of Snickers, Tampaxes and rags. The gaudy motorized chariots of the new barbarians bringing colonial goods to my long-suffering land, invading the bustling markets". In the sequel, "A Snowstorm in the Desert", Mr Kalashnikov describes the defeat of "invaders" of Iraq in 1991 which would have happened if the Soviet Union had helped Saddam Hussein. I was particularly impressed by the duel between the Russian rocketman Ovtsin and an American helicopter armada.
"Breakaways"
Somewhat lesser enemies are the breakaway Ukraine and Georgia as well as some former socialist camp partners.
Dmitry Zhukov titled his study "Poland: the Chained Dog of the West" ("...at all times and under any political system Poland has been and remains a ferocious, relentless and sworn enemy of Russia, a ‘chained dog' of the West ready to tear up the ‘cursed Muscovites' at the first order of their owner").
The authors of "Independent Ukraine. A Failed Project", Maxim Kalashnikov and Sergei Buntovsky, explain that "in modern Ukrainian mythology Ukrainians are not Russians but a distinct nation with its own ancient history, culture and its own language".
Unfortunately, I had no time to read Pavel Sheremet's book "Saakashvili/Georgia. Failed Dreams". However, I was somewhat taken aback by the annotation: "Why doesn't Vladimir Putin like Mikheil Saakashvili? Why are Georgians Russia's bogeymen and why are Georgians taught to hate their northern neighbours? <...> You will find answers to all these questions in the first detailed and honest book by a foremost TV journalist in modern Russia"). It made me think of a maxim: "A true gentleman never calls himself a gentleman".
An invisible battle
By the way, more often than not, the West causes mischief not through its own stupidity but because it is nudged by some dark forces, for example, Masons. I stumbled upon a book by Francisco Franco, a recognized specialist on conspiracies. The publisher claims that "against the background of dozens of modern anti-Masonic publications this book will become a key source, will give us insight into historical problems and elevate our scientific knowledge in this sphere to a higher level".
Zionists are another enemy. Browsing through such "eye-openers" in a major magazine I drifted from the Politics section to a neighbouring section where books on Jewish culture were on display. I was jolted out of my fit of abstraction when I bumped into the works of a prominent fighter against the "Jewish yoke" Yuri Mukhin and writings on the topic of the "invisible Khazaria".
I also encountered some broader generalizations. For example, a fresh reprint of the "conspirological Bible" by John Coleman, "Committee of 300: the Secrets of the World Government". That American has devoted 40 years to finding the traces of the "conspiracy against God and man" and exposing the forces openly hostile to humanity" (the Club of Rome, Masons, the Left, the Rothschilds, the Beatles and so on). The Russian publishers thus explain the popularity of Coleman's revelations: "The book elevates the consciousness of the patriotically-minded reader to a new level that enables him to take a systematic and comprehensive bird's eye view of many events and phenomena of the present and the recent past".
Another "ambitious" work, called "Who Rules the World or the Whole Truth about the Bilderberg Club," was written by Spanish journalist Daniel Estulin (who claims to have left the Soviet Union in 1980). I would like to note Mr Estulin's flowery baroque style of writing which is a welcome contrast with Mr Coleman's dreary preaching and diligent listing of the names of the members of the World Government. In general, conspiracy books differ more in style than in substance. The Spaniard, for example, writes: "The Club's standard technique is to subjugate the population and foster an abiding feeling of discontent, a sense of danger and terror... Its members have applied similar technique to street gangs, financial crises, narcotics and the present-day education system".
The book by the British connoisseur of conspiracies, Nicholas Hagger "Syndicate: the Story of a Coming World Government and How It Influences World Politics and Economics" had little to add to my ideas of the Secret World Government. The "Syndicate" is about the same old company: the Rothschilds, the World Bank, the Masons... It's a bore.
An eight-year-old captain
So, we know who Russian foes are. What is to be done? To follow the unique Russian path and, of course, to trust its leaders. By the way, Dmitry Medvedev gets rather less attention as a target of research than Vladimir Putin. For example, in Moscow Alexander Bushkov's "Vladimir Putin. A Colonel Who Became Captain" is selling like hot cakes ("All the previous Russian leaders in the 20th century were haughty and imposing, they could speak eloquently at great length and on any subject, they knew exactly how to run Russia, the Solar System and the Galaxy: let them be at the steering-wheel and remove all the little pebbles along the way. <...> Of course, not many of us used to be KGB colonels, but that is a minor detail. On all other counts Mr Putin is very much like each one of us. The only difference is that not everyone has been working as hard as he has to be offered to stand at the helm of a great country.")
I for one feel that such intellectual readiness to flatter behooves the subjects of a tiny nervous tyranny rather than the citizens of a republic that occupies one-eighth of the earth's land surface.
Ilya Kriger