Chapter 9. Narodnost’: quite simply the people

The question of who represents the people isn’t an abstract one at all, especially when we set people in relation to nation or state – this leads us to a discussion of the “national question”.  In Russia, where the term “people” (narod), both in its singular and plural forms, may stand in the place of the term “nation” (natsiia), such a “national question” has a long and complicate history.

What is more, neither people / peoples (narod / narody) nor nation / national (natsiia / natsional'niy) have been clearly defined in their specific relation to the state (gosudarstvo). I will look at some aspects that are relevant in the context of this article, that is, in the context of “roots”, by connecting narod to narodnost’; the latter may be paraphrased as simply being the people. It might help to explain why the works by the New Artists are sometimes seen as representing narodnost’ and hence considered as simple, as suggested by the already mentioned press campaign slogan for the “Brushstroke” exhibition  –  “cheerfulness, idiocy, and ardour.

The proposed amendments to the Russian constitution of 1993, approved by a general vote that took place between 25 June and 1 July 2020, fuelled the discussion of the meaning of narod and narodnost’, since one of those 206 amendments regarded Article 68, Point 1. The previous version from 1993 was The Russian language shall be a state language on the whole territory of the Russian Federation. In its new form, Article 68, Point 1 is now more specific: The Russian language shall be a state language on the whole territory of the Russian Federation as the language of the state-forming people, a member of the multi-national union of equal peoples of the Russian Federation.” [1]

Curiously, we are told only the language of the state-forming people (gosudarstvoobrazuiushchiy narod) – Russian – but not the name of this state-forming people. So who are those strange people X that speak Russian and are the state-forming people? Let’s assume that X = the Russian people (“the state-forming Russian people”), and not any of the other peoples living in Russia also speaking Russian, but perhaps as a second language – the Tartars, the Kazakhs, the Sami etc. If they had been included, we would read of the state-forming peoples speaking Russian, that is, of “peoples” in the plural, of narody.

To implicitly call the Russian people the state-forming people makes them primus inter pares, first among other peoples in Russia. Seen in this light, a “Kandinsky Prize” is more respectable than a “Malevich-Prize”, as Kandinsky was born in Moscow, while Malevich was born in Kiev to a Polish family.

Perhaps that implicitness, that “going without saying”, is why from the amendment, an explicit mention of a Russian people has been modestly omitted, so that from a legal point of view, no such claim of superiority exists. [2]

To further soften the non-existing claim about a state-forming people X, there is an apposition defining X as “a member of a multi-national union – многонациональный союз”, mnogonatsional'nyi soiuz.

So what is multinational (mnognonational’nyi) in relation to people (narod)?

Article 3, Point 1 Russian constitution stipulates that The bearer of sovereignty and the only source of power in the Russian Federation shall be its multinational people.[3] Here we learn that different nations form a single people. In the amendment to article Article 68, Point 1, instead, equal peoples of the Russian Federation form a multinational union.

It isn’t clear what multinational actually refers to in the Russian constitution: to a people consisting of many nations? Or to a union consisting of different peoples? The terms nation and people are used almost interchangeably.

As a matter of fact, Latin-rooted natsional'nyi, national, has a strong component of ethnicity, conflicting with its reference to nation as a political subject. In this respect, a publication on the English website of Kremlin.ru, the official website of the Russian president, is quite interesting. In a discussion from February 2020 with president Putin about the amendments to the constitution, the term mnogonatsional'nyi soiuz is translated as multi-ethnic union and not as multi-national union.[4]

We see that the amendment to Article 68 immediately raises the question of a “normal” ethnicity versus a higher-ranking ethnicity assigned to the people X capable of state-forming. I deliberately avoid the term nation here, because nation can be understood as determining the whole of Russia’s population as a single people, as shown by an – unsuccessful – suggestion made by the working group that drafted amendments to the Russian Constitution. The idea to substitute “multinational people” of Article 3 with “a nation of many peoples” (многонародная нация, mnogonarodnaia natsiia) caused protest and was abandoned.[5] In other words, the concept of a state-forming people X is acceptable, unlike the concept of peoples building the nation of Russia.

So what defines the higher-ranking ethnicity assigned to the people X? What is the role of Russians’ Russianness? In her article “The End of Post-Soviet Religion“, Kristina Stoeckl quotes Bishop Savva of Zelenograd (Tutunov):

“For the multinational and multi-religious people of Russia, the Russian people, Russian culture and the Russian language are formative. Without suppressing the characteristics of other nationalities, other peoples, but formative. For the whole variety of cultures and traditions of Russia, Russianness can be likened to the skeleton on which the veins and muscles are built and hold. And without a skeleton, the body turns into an amorphous unorganized, conflicting mass.”[6]

In this sense, Tatars would be “only” an ethnic group, while Russians are an ethnic group also forming the Russian state on behalf of all other ethnic groups; consequently, Russians form the nucleus of the multinational people. But this brings up the next question: what exactly qualifies the Russians as primus inter pares? How exactly should “Russianness” be defined? Since the nineteenth century, intellectuals, artists and politicians have been trying to find an answer ex-negativo: “What is left of us if we remove everything that is alien to us?” There is, of course, hope that the answer will bring to light something substantial and unique – something that explains the role of Russians in history.

(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov Everybody sit down up, please! We will now hear the anthem of the universe. Part 2/3 Crayon and ink on paper, 29.7 x 21 cm, 2018.

There are actually two ways to define a national identity. The first is to exclude everything alien, and the second is to assimilate everything alien, making it “Russian”. We may call the first an exclusive approach and the second an inclusive approach. Russian history shows that both approaches co-exist in a conflicting way as “a pattern of assimilation and disavowal”, as Jane A. Sharp stated for the Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century.[7]

From an ideological point of view, the least equivocal way would seem to follow an exclusive approach, to take away all “foreign” influences  and to assign authenticity to what is left. Admittedly, the answer isn’t as simple as it might appear at first sight, as we would have to remove from history some truly Russian brands, among them the House of Romanov-Holstein-Gottdorp, including Catherine the Great (German), Alexander Pushkin (considering that one of his great-grandfathers was African), Carl and Agathon Fabergé and the “Imperial Easter eggs” (French and later Baltic German), and, last but not least, Nobel Laureate in Literature Iosif Brodsy (Jewish).

But this is exactly what right-wing ideologue Alexander Dugin suggested musician Sergey Kuryokhin when they both met in the 1990s, as Kuryokhin was looking for a new, national mission in his life. In the 1980s, Kuryokhin, one of the brightest and most admired figures of the Leningrad Underground, challenged the authorities with his extravagant Pop-Mekhanika concerts, where he was joined by the New Artists to stage his concept of “action on a totally global style”.[8] Now, he was convinced, “The real show is politics”.[9]

In my article “Empire and Magic. Sergey Kuryokhin's ‘Pop-Mekhanika No. 418’” (1995) I discussed that Dugin praised Kuryokhin as “a personality capable of recreating ‘pre-cultural’ forms of priesthood via the medium of Pop-Mekhanika performances.”[10]Dugin laid out his concept in an article from 1996 dedicated to Sergey Kuryokhin:

Sergey Kuryokhin has always not just pursued his creative quest, but persistently and consistently recreated the organic unity which came before the classical, modern and hyper-modern (rock music, avant-gardism) periods. His perseverance in re-establishing the main characteristics of the traditional, “pre-cultural” and archaic priesthood is striking.[11]

For those defending “pre-cultural” forms, Peter the Great marks the fall from grace, but we can go further back, as Dugin does  – prior to the church reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow in the seventeenth century. Despite Kuryokhin’s admiration for Dugin, I consider it rather unlikely that Kuryokhin, who died in 1996, would have followed Dugin’s uncompromising stance for very long, because Dugin’s concept

would have wiped out most of Kuryokhin’s cultural heritage and repertoire, from the baroque period right through to jazz, rock and pop music”. A statement made by Dugin in 2008 leaves no room for doubt in this connection: “We need to kill the Westerner inside ourselves every day.” [12] [13]

In fact, Kuryokhin never gave up playing with Western musicians, and his anarchic spirit would have made it difficult for him to maintain a principle of cultural segregation.

Instead of excluding foreign influences, as did Dugin, we can choose an inclusive approach and allow Russian ethnicity to absorb foreign influences – which are thus becoming “Russian”. This option removes the permanent stress of justifying why “foreign” is bad.

 A typical and not very sophisticated argument is in an article discussing the amendments to the Russian constitution, published on the website of modern diplomacy by Slavisha Batko Milacic, a historian from Montenegro affiliated to Alexander Dugin’s think-tank Geopolitica.ru:

[…] Russians, for the most part, are not nationalists, just the opposite. Suffice it to mention the names of Barclay de Tolly, Bagration, Benckendorf, Totleben, Rokossovsky – all these heroes and commanders in the Russian service are held by the Russians as their own. Most Russians will be surprised if told that de Tolly, the founding father of Russian military intelligence, or the engineer Totleben, were both Scots.
“Wait a minute,” they would say, “these guys spoke Russian, attended the Orthodox Church and served our country, which means they are Russian!”[14]
This means that there is no such thing in Russia as nationalism. What there is, however, is the Russian people’s healthy patriotism and innate pride in their ancestors.[15]

Note the difference made between nationalism (bad) and patriotism (good). Thus, making someone “Russian” is not an expression of nationalism – it is healthy patriotism. It is remarkable that Batko Milacic awards the privilege of “russification” only to military commanders, and not to entrepreneurs and artists like the Fabergé brothers nor to bankers and patrons of the art like Alexander Stieglitz. Obviously, with regard to patriotism, culture is secondary to the art of warfare. As opinion polls from the last years show, the majority of Russians share this view: giving preference to “native” art and literature is no condition for being a patriot, while avoiding military service clearly shows a lack of patriotism.[16] Possibly, the reason for being more tolerant to “foreign” culture is that “national” narrations in art and literature are essentially perceived as universal.

However, neither of these two approaches we have been discussing can solve the problem of defining the Russians' original “stratum” – the Russian proto-people, or proto-“narod” – the “real” Russians. But It appears that they still exist. They real Russians are somehow just Russians –  “simple, uncorrupted people”, as Goncharova and Larionov called them.[17]

The concept of the unspoiled folk is very close to the romanticised image of the narod and its life in a rural community cherished by the intellectually refined upper class youth of the nineteenth century. The “narodniks”, students and revolutionaries ”going to the people” after the emancipation of the serf under Tsar Alexander II in 1861, constitute an important example regarding expectations put upon a supposed – innate – anti-capitalist stance of Russian peasants. The narodniks’ expectations on the revolutionary potential of the Russian peasantry were, however, frustrated. The Russian peasantry was conservative, not revolutionary-minded.[18]

In this way, the question of native roots turned into a social question of the privileged upper (urban, cosmopolitan, educated) class versus rural people or folk – “narod” as people possessing narodnost’, that is, “peopleness”, if translated literally.

It is a concept of narod that idealised national identity as an anti-intellectual – anti avant-garde, anti-elitist – property, a property that can be found somewhere out there, where the people are. Strikingly, the same concept is still en vogue today – as glubinnyi narod  or “deep people”, a term coined by Kremlin ideologue Vladislav Surkov in 2019 by analogy with the American “deep state” theory stipulating a secret control of the US political system by a state within a state. Characteristic of this “deep people” is its “peopleness”; we might call it the essence of the proto–people.

Surkov wrote:

There’s no deep state in Russia, everything’s out in the open, but there is a deep people (glubinnyi narod). … With its gigantic supermass the deep people creates an insuperable force of cultural gravitation, which unites the nation and pulls (presses) the elite down to earth (native earth) as it tries, from time to time, to soar in a cosmopolitan manner. Narodnost’, however defined, precedes statehood, predetermines its form, limits the fantasies of theoreticians, and forces practitioners to take certain steps. … An ability to hear and understand the people, to see through it to its depths, and to act accordingly, is the unique and primary quality of the Putin state.[19]

I wouldn’t exclude that Surkov has an ironic sense of himself, since he doubtlessly belongs to this very cosmopolitan elite of the Putin state being pressed down to earth by the deep people. But the image of the deep people as a gigantic supermass is one of hope, as I understand it: perhaps from there, from the black hole created by the deep people’s gigantic supermass, from the narodnost’, some day another Yury Gagarin will emerge. Yury Gagarin, the first man in cosmos, is “the simple Soviet guy”[20] with a bright smile who had lunch with the English Queen.

It is the hope that with narodnost’, things should become great and simple, as expressed in Gagarin’s famous meme „Поехали!“ poekhali / “Let’s go”, when he took off in his spaceship Vostok – “East”. From the poor village of Klushino, a lost village two hundred kilometres off Moscow, to the stars – this is the Russian equivalent of the American dream “from rags to riches”, but with a transcendent dimension.[21] 

And with regard to organising social life, life in a community, simpleness is the fairy-tale of simple people’s simple narodnost’ achieving what the refined elite has been unwilling to achieve – great things. In her article The Kitchen Maid That Will Rule The State. The Last Hundred Years of Women’s Emancipation in Russia, Alissa Klots sums up the essence of Mayakovsky’s famous poem-necrology on Vladimir Lenin:

Describing the inglorious flight of former nobility from the Soviet country, the narrator sarcastically exclaims: “Good riddance! We’ll train every cook so she might manage the country to the workers’ gain.”[22]

At the same time, Surkov’s formula “An ability to hear and understand the people, to see through it to its depths, and to act accordingly” also expresses fear of this supermass’es potential recklessness. Narodnost’ might get out of control and stage another revolution if the Putin state doesn’t see through its depths and act accordingly – because, as we may assume, its intellectual weakness makes the deep people behave like immature children who may be lured by mischievous leaders. This is why in Surkov’s opinion the deep people needs to be contained by a personal bond to the leader. Summing up the position of the Russian elite, Ekaterina Shulman, a political scientist and associate professor at the RANEPA, Moscow, interprets the attitude of the Russian elite towards the people as an attitude towards citizens in general:

For those who take decisions here, citizens are not agents [social subjects] – only those who represent the elite possess such a quality […]  People cannot simply take their own decisions or even suggest a candidate from their own non-elitist social circle.  Everything must be arranged and decided by those serious guys.[23]

In this way, narodnost’ has become an ambiguous category: it stands for simplicity and integrity as positive factors, but also for ignorance and incivility as negative ones. These aspects of narodnost’  were adapted by two Leningrad art groups: the positive ones in a playful manner by the Mitki, and the negative ones in an ironical manner by the Necrorealists. Those contradictory aspects of narodnost’ have been transferred and applied to the reception history of the New Artists, and if Ivan Sotnikov constituted the link between the New Artists and the Mitki, then Evgeny Yufit constituted the link between New Artists and the Necrorealists.[24]

The Mitki at a Leningrad exhibition in 1988. Source: Self-Identification. Positions in St. Petersburg Art from 1970 until Today. Exhibtion catalgoue, ed. Kathrin Becker, and Barabara Straka, Berlin: Haus am Waldsee, 1994, pp. 86/87

Evgeny Yufit, the founder of "Necrorealism" (centre) in his Leningrad flat with New Composers Valery Alakhov (left) and Igor Verichev (right) Photo: (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, mid 1980s.

I suppose that this aspect of narodnost’  inspired the press campaign slogan for the “Brushstroke” exhibition – “Bodrost’, tupost’ I zador” ( “Бодрость, тупость и задор” / “cheerfulness, idiocy, and ardour), the 2010 retrospective of both the New Artists and the Necrorealists (see chapter 7). The slogan is, in fact, more suitable for the Necrorealists than for the New Artists, although simplicity – simple simplicity, we might say, simplicity without a folkloric “colouring” – was also promoted by Timur Novikov. In his New Artists text from 1986 we read:  

The artists try to make their content intelligible and develop utterly simple expressive forms accessible to everyone, and they also practise this accessibility especially at exhibitions. [25]

Returning to Novikov’s statement from 1989 quoted earlier, I will now complete it with another sentence added in italics: “My works are simple. They are not overloaded with information. I want my viewer to relax, to feel rested”.[26]

Novikov’s insistence on simplicity and relaxation for his own art and on accessibility for the works of the New Artists fostered a general view on the New Artists as anti-intellectuals. Simplicity and accessibility mean that their art is, allegedly, just what it is, without any subtext – in contrast to that of their Moscow counterparts, such as the group Inspection Medical Hermeneutics, who wanted their viewer to be confused, not relaxed. Sergei Anufriev, Yuri Leiderman, and Pavel Pepperstein played a game of overinterpretation, of hyperinflating meaning to a point where it gets devoid of meaning.

(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov Everybody lay down, please! We will now hear the anthem of infinity. Part 3/3 Crayon and ink on paper, 29.7 x 21 cm, 2018.

previous page: Chapter 8. Cosmopolitism and ethnicity: how Russian is the Russian avant-garde?
next page: Chapter 10. Fishing at Peter the Great’s pond

Introduction: The ostensibly synchronistic evolution of the New Artists

Part One: The New Artists and the Russian avant-garde

Chapter 1. Timur Novikov: native roots and western influences

Chapter 2. Perestroika, the Mayakovsky Friends Club, and pop art

Chapter 3. E-E Kozlov: Two Cosmic Systems

Chapter 4. ROSTA Windows stencil techniques – updated

Chapter 5. The inclusion or exclusion of stylistic influences

Chapter 6. From Mayakovsky to Larionov and folk art: something of everything

Chapter 7. Beyond the trend: Kozlov’s portrait of Timur Novikov (1988)

Chapter 8. Cosmopolitism and ethnicity: how Russian is the Russian avant-garde?

Chapter 9. Narodnost’: quite simply the people

Part Two: E-E Kozlov and Peterhof

Chapter 10. Fishing at Peter the Great’s pond

Chapter 11. The Petrodvorets Canteen Combine

Chapter 12. Galaxy Gallery

Chapter 13. A perception of pureness

– Works cited –

Uploaded 24 September 2020
Last updated 21 April 2023