Translation: Confessions of a Russian “Liberal” Part 1

NOTE: This article TRANSLATION: Tatyana Korchevnaya LJ post of Feb 24, 2009 is now available in pdf format.

It is a pity that foreigners are not privy to the wild and wacky world of LiveJournal, Russia’s premier blogging site – many prominent people have accounts there and traditions of opposition and kompromat makes for a lively stream of scandal. One recent case involved Tatyana Korchevnaya, who used to be a prominent member of the Russian “liberal” opposition (I’ve explained why I use apostrophes around the word in that context before and my translation of her work below will clarify it further) and ran one of the top 10 Russian political blogs, but now condemns Soros funded evangelical groups / NGOs in Russia and the mafia linked Vladivostok demonstrators. She made a huge splash and political Runet is abuzz with the story. Whatever made her change her mind?

She came to the movement young, naive and with a Manichean worldview in which the Putinists were bad and the oppositionists good. Little by little that black and white picture dissolved into the gray cynicism of virtual politics (though of course I doubt she read the excellent work of Andrew Wilson). In a nutshell, she became disillusioned with how the “liberals” organized web brigades, the cynicism of their leaders and the zombiesm of their followers and above all their unbearable hypocrisy. They put “democratic” ideals above common human decency and empathy, tossing aside their cripples once they were no longer useful in the fight (on which note, LR recently provided a good example of this) and treated ordinary Russians as a herd to be guided and manipulated. As in the movie Night Watch, we realize that the borders between good and evil are porous, if they exist at all, and that should their cancer spread and the likes of Kasparov and Limonov ever come to power in Russia we are doomed to replay the history of Bolshevik Terror.

Read all about it here in the original Russian or my English translation below. She writes in a very colloquial style and I did my best to maintain a balance between keeping it both true and readable. I also tried to fill in several points of possible confusion (it was not a well organized text) and tried to find suitable English replacements for Russian idioms. This is a two part series. Enjoy!

TRANSLATION: Tatyana Korchevnaya LJ post of Feb 24, 2009

(http://tanya-ogf.livejournal.com/202793.html; accessed March 7, 2009)

Translated by Anatoly Karlin.

Warning: I will not reveal any of your true names¹ or LiveJournal² (LJ) identities, but only in so far that you do not force my hand.

I decided to write all this only now because by this time the “for” arguments begin to outnumber those “against”. Call me a traitor all you like, I couldn’t care less – I’m just sick and tired of your lies and the lies of your (and not that long ago, my) leaders.

When you only have access to limited information, your knowledge, your beliefs and your opinions all revolve around that information. Sometimes, the more information you acquire – the more you understand that sometimes you go off on a wrong track.

It is natural for good people to be mistaken from time to time. What is inexcusable is to continue deceiving other people, and yourselves, even after receiving new information and realizing, knowing, that you strayed into error.

As I said before, I’m usually a nice girl – but I also mentioned that I don’t like it when people lie.

I will now tell you a snippet of history from my life. I have more than enough evidence that it all happened. The problem is that if I were to reveal it, it will not only confirm my story but will also strongly compromise everyone else who is mixed up in this mess. And so they have a choice – accuse me of lying (with all the consequences for them therein) or keep their peace forever.

Yes, I understand that there might be consequences for myself – I’ve been warned more than a few times already. But I’ve insured myself…

So let’s start from the beginning. It was an ordinary day in the spring of 2007. I, Tatyana Korchevnaya, was surfing the Internet and reading my Friends list. On the pages of the online community namarsh_ru³, I stumbled across a post in which an unbeknown to me woman was soliciting communication from people who’d like to participate in a project to link together Dissenters⁴ on the Web.

Now I’m always for linking people together, so I sent her a reply.

I got my answer. I was told to swallow the red pill⁵, acquire an anonymous mail folder⁶ in an Internet-cafe and continue corresponding from there. I did this.

Then I started receiving letters. In one of them there were several IQ tests, personality tests and a form “About Myself” which I had to fill in. I was asked about my nationality in one of them, to which I truthfully replied that I was Russian. After several more letters they requested me to provide links to my discussions on the Internet so that they could gauge how good an opponent I was of the so-called “Kremlin web brigade”⁷.

For by that time I was already registering and debating with “defenders of the regime” wherever I could under my own name. I always included my phone number, cell phone number, etc, in my sig. Why did I do this?

After the Moscow Dissenters arrived to our gatherings in Nakhodka and at around the time when we joined the United Civil Front⁸ (UCF), I went from opposing the local authorities⁹ to dissenting against our government in general – I became a full-fledged Dissenter. Many people were writing about our movement on forums and sympathizing with us, and I wanted to reply to them. I also suffered from a sense of loneliness, for I had an idea, information – and I wanted to share it with people. Yes, I still believed in many things back then, and when I believe in something, I tell everyone about it.

I made an evolutionary jump, becoming an active, convinced adept of the revolution, any revolution, because I had had enough of the state’s criminal wantonness¹⁰. I believed all bad people were for Putin, and all good people – for the UCF and Other Russia; I respected the likes of Limonov and Kasparov for their words (which at the time did not seem to me to be at odds with their actions) and respected everyone who supported them, whether I knew them or not.

Although I wasn’t quite as woolheadedly naive as you might think from above – after all by summer 2006 I had already done time as a “terrorist”¹¹ and was well acquainted with many famous figures in the opposition.

And here I am, sitting at home and answering all your letters, and on the other end of the line people are already forming positive opinions about me as well, as an impression of me as a ninny. But I’m a ninny only in a nice sense. To all those for whom it is necessary, I am not a ninny at all. Hell no! Although the attentive reader would have already noticed this.

Anyway, back to the story. They perused the links to my online discussions and wrote to tell me that I debate very well, that I have a good “command of the word”, etc. And I love it when I’m congratulated.

But they also mentioned that to participate in the project not only did I need to know how to elegantly own opponents¹², but also how to operate with facts, pass on information and several other things of this nature. I said that although I could do all that, it is not the brigadniki¹³ who need facts but ordinary people who go on the Internet to get info and to talk about the chaos in the country. After all, replying to comments along the lines of “You have no boobs!” or “Have you ever tried getting married?” is pointless.

Why? Because their only goal in a debate is to a) bait their opponent and portray her as a schizo and b) to bury an important thread under a heap of unrelated comments so as to distract readers’s attention and reduce everything to floods and flames¹⁴. I mean in real life when we don’t care for someone’s opinions, do we go to his house for hours, days, months and years on end, just to bait and goad him? Of course not. Because we’ve got all got our own lives, our own interests. No-one will ever go to a Pugacheva¹⁵ fan club just to try convincing its members that she is a bad singer. Why then do some people on the Internet behave differently? It would seem the answer is obvious.

They told me that I understood the situation well and asked me to draft a manual of instructions for those who weren’t as advanced or experienced as myself. I just borrowed the manual used by the brigadniki, because their “Kremlinist” methods were already well developed¹⁶. It’s not as if it was something sacred and untouchable¹⁷.

So I wrote the manual and sent it off. And they sent me an air ticket to Moscow.

Now that was quite curious – is it really that there’s no-one in Moscow who’s as clever as me, or else why spend so much money to get me there? (Yes, back then I had no idea of how big they were and that this was all pennies to them). The last time I was in Moscow was when I was 7 years old and now I kind of needed to go there again. True, I was afraid to fly there, for the “scars” from last summers’ attempt to reach Moscow hadn’t yet healed¹⁸. But then again they did send the money, plus I was lonely, I wanted to meet up with all the opposition in real life, and anyway, what the hell – why not go to Moscow?

And yikes, its not as if they hired me as some kind of hitwoman, but rather to share my experiences with other “young revolutionaries” like myself, for the sake of destroying the regime, if you will. I can write a whole book on those 45 days I spent there, if I wasn’t so lazy. I arrived in Moscow and they greeted me.

For some reason the woman said she was Jewish. This was the first Jewess whom I had ever met in my life. She asked me about my views on Jews. I replied that I can’t have much in the way of views since I don’t know anything about them, but she kept insisting that I confirm that I don’t have any hidden Antisemitism. I replied truthfully that I don’t have any such thing.

Not to mention that at the time I had already spent two years in the United Civil Front, whose leaders and nearly all Bureau members are Jews, so obviously this couldn’t have annoyed me that much.

This topic was raised again several times. One day she became very upset after returning from a Dissenters March, where two guys in the crowd said something along the lines of “Ah, these foul Yids, they have taken over the whole country they have”. She said that she had had enough of the hatred which we Russians project to her people.

I said that I was a Russian, a very Russian Russian, and I don’t have any Jews in my family tree, or indeed any other people. I mean I don’t have anything against her, so why is she so mad against all Russians? But either I was unconvincing or my words fell on deaf years. She continued that Jewish children know Brodsky¹⁹ by heart by the age of six while their Russian counterparts just play football or throw snowballs at each other and don’t develop at all. I replied that I too knew all the sonnets of Shakespeare by heart by six. But I’m not a Jewish child. Don’t belittle others to make yourself look better, I said.

In this world you can’t ever make everybody love you – Jew or Russian, no matter who, if someone wants to hurt you, they will, no matter your ethnicity – they’ll just find another reason. I am Russian, but other Russians can offend me just as easily as Jews or anyone else. And in general whenever a person is vulnerable there will be those who will take advantage of his vulnerability to kick him down. Anyway, sorry for the brief diversion.

On the other hand I understood a specific feature of the Jewish disposition – they are a people with many complexes²⁰, complexes that take over and drive them. Such people no longer belong to themselves. I was possibly not the first one to understand this, nor the only one, but I did by myself. Along with their mother’s milk they’ve internalized that everybody everywhere always oppresses them, and hence live with hatred towards everyone around them, always ready to oppress them right back.

She admitted that the tipping factor leading to my invitation to Moscow was that I wrote about reading the “Rose of the World” by Daniil Andreyev. Apparently he too was a Jew. I sure never realized that there were so many Jews everywhere before this trip, but she told me all about it.

I can’t say that I’d actually read this book, as it was my mum and aunt who were fans of occult literature, but I more or less know what it was about. Or to be more specific I internalized one idea from the book, which is that religion divides people and that it’s better to get together and to unite everyone. She was rather unpleasantly surprised by my exegesis, but she never told me how she interpreted the book²¹. I didn’t have a return ticket, but the UCF bought me one and sent me back home.

As my favorite poet put it (also a Jew, by the way) – “You can convince the whole country of anything, most likely, if you mutilate spirit and reason with the help of a printing press”²². But since we, the opposition, didn’t have money for newspapers or large volumes, and were not allowed on TV, only one media source was still left open to us – not the most popular, but still the freest – the Internet. The choice of whether to surrender it entirely to official propaganda or to fight back and seize at least a small part of it was entirely up to us.

Furthermore, the Internet was the only media space where it is possible to establish feedback and dialog. Where it must be established. After all, who knows how people react to program after program on the main TV channel of the country – I mean, it’s not as if anyone measures the volume of spittle on TV screens around the country, right? But on forums, on LJ, etc, you can observe people’s feelings, discover their opinions, etc.

But, as is usually the case in social relations… Do you remember how in the film “The House that Swift Built” – “I hired actors to show the people this, but the powers that be proved cannier. They hired the audience…”. So. They explained that the aim of the project is to unite many Dissenters across the country, differing from each other in status, social position and other such things. That said that it is being created under adverse conditions – “harsh oppression of the opposition” – and that very soon there will come a revolutionary situation in the country, when the state will exert its energies towards suppressing anti-regime information on the Internet and that we must become the detachment responsible for breaking up this information blockade. And they said that the project already has a conception and many other such things, up to patrons in the “enemy camp”, as well as skilled hackers and other such folks.

Not everyone would be required to participate in the debates, as some will simply spread information to every corner of Runet²³, and will need to know how to defend it in case our opinion – the correct opinion, fails to win against their opinion – the incorrect one. So as to prevent everyone in our team from being uncovered in one fell swoop, they developed a clandestine cell system²⁴ wherein one person knows only four others from her detachment, as well as her manager; and the manager knows only the four people in her command as well as her own manager. The other four don’t know each other at all.

They explained to me that these precautions were taken so that if it were uncovered by the bloodthirsty regime²⁵, for example if they got hold of me and tortured me, then I would be unable to betray anyone else and the project will continue its work “without pausing for its fallen soldier”²⁶. They told me about the array of torture options available to the regime, that there exist truth chemicals that can be injected into someone’s bloodstream which will force her to rapidly spill out and betray anyone and everything; quite a change from the days of Joan d’Arc, where none of this was possible and they had to burn her. Again, sorry for using so many words, its easier for me to write this way.

And if they figure me out and I crack, I would only know my “manager” and the four members of my cell. That is, if I choose to be the leader of the cell. But if I don’t agree to participate in it straight away, then I will know only her which is not so bad because I will not tell anyone anyway, or they’ll sooner believe her, than me. There.

Our main agents would preferably live not in Moscow, but in some shitty-ass backwater²⁷, like myself in Nakhodka. The wider the net the better it would be for everyone. Why that is so, I did not understand then.

We would be required not to go under own names in the Internet so as to not get unmasked before our time. This was very much in contradiction to my values – the gist of it was that nobody would listen to anonymous Dissenter crybabies, nor would the authorities respect them, and this is why I always wrote everything I thought about our government under my own name everywhere. For I myself would have given no heed to some random shit-stirrer²⁸, some coward who cannot stand up and expose the regime in full view but instead prefers to hide behind nicknames, proxy servers, etc. And I’d never agree with him because I don’t like cowards.

I believe that if someone is afraid to say what they think out loud from their own names then they are not a free person – it’s as if they’re playing for both teams. That is, at work he is a Putinist²⁹, but then he comes home, logs in as Lusechka and off he goes “exposing” the regime. And the regime quails in terror – yeah, right! And anyway if you shrink from writing something you believe in from under your true name, but instead shriek, “It’s time to grab the pitchforks, for its time!” then the revolution should not be entrusted to you, coward! For as it stands you’re just a fleck in the crowd, zombified, capable of doing something. And generally, what is the only thing crowds are capable of? Chaos. A senseless and merciless bunt. And then you wake up, sober up and again gather round your porno sites, whining: “Oh what a bad, bad regime!”

But they explained me that I was in the wrong. I was supposed to be Vasya O. on one forum, on another – Lolita, on a third – Sergei Petrovich Kozlov. I could remain in LJ under my own name, but only if I left no traces tying me to my three previous alter egos.

And we would have an internal network, where our team members knew each other only by our virtual nicknames (mine was “Daughter”), and if, for example, we have difficulty “convincing” an opponent or making him out as a donkey before the other readers, we would call on our cell buddies for help or our own clones from other forums. I was OK with my secret nickname – “Daughter”, though a year, or perhaps a bit later, I finally understood the why of it. Or more accurately, the whose.

Please continue to Part 2.

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Related posts:

1. Translation: Confessions of a Russian “Liberal” Part 2
2. Translation: Russia’s Phantom Tandem, Real Triumvirate and the Kremlin Clan Wars
3. Translation: The Case of the “Stalinist” Textbook
4. Translation: “Radio Liberty – The Liberty of Mendacity”
5. Why Russians like Putin’s Russia