(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[book] Like an enormous sea without water, Russia lies there and connects Norway with China and the Pacific.
Once mighty czars ruled the country. Then King Karl Johan gave the Norwegian geographer Chrisopher Hansteen the following advice before embarking on his journey through Siberia: "Remember, my Lord, that Russia's soil is not the same as Norway's: here you can say anything you want; but things are different in Russia. You must not interfere with politics. "
Nor should one interfere too much in it when the tsar was replaced by the general secretary of the Communist Party and the country was called the Soviet Union. But its era also came to an end. Elections are now even being held where several candidates and several parties are running – even though both the election winner and the distribution of seats have largely been decided in advance.
Everything is similar, but apparently not the same in Russia. How should one then convey knowledge and case information on the country's culture, politics and history? It is a task Professor Pål Kolstø solves with his new book: Russia. The people. History. Policy. Kulturen. It has just been published in Aschehoug's new series "Behind the News". And let it be said right away: He succeeds in every way.
It is not simply given out from the huge canvas he straps on. He embraces a thousand years of history, the struggle to transform the kingdom into a nation-state after the fall of communism, Russian orthodoxy, literature, the discussion of the "Russian people's soul" and gives a bird's-eye view of the relationship between Norway and Russia from the Vikings to the present day.
Nor can it be done less if the most important of Russia's many facets are to be highlighted. More than anything else, Russia's culture is a crossroads culture. There, the Byzantine hierarchical traditions meet with European equality and human rights ideals, Mongolian despotism with local democratic traditions and the archaic literary genre novel with an art vision and an art experience that breaks all imaginable bourgeois frameworks. It has its roots in the icons of Orthodoxy, which is not ecclesiastical decoration, but a form of representation of the divine.
The icons are not outside reality, but reality itself. The great novelists of the 1800th century allowed them to re-emerge in the form of words and thus transformed Western novel art. With quick strokes, Kolstø outlines the most important features of the development of Russian literature to this day. He notes that contemporary Russian literature is no longer so "Russian": it is not preaching and moralistic, but aestheticizing and brutal. In this sense, it has become more "west-facing" – but Kolstø doubts that it will continue to be so.
Literature is the place where Peter the Great's reforms were completely successful. Peter (1672-1725) tried to make Russia a European nation. In other areas the result has become an apolar mix where we can distinguish the many traditions that meet at the "intersection". In literature, on the other hand, the West blended completely with the place-bound into something qualitatively new.
Putin's ruled democracy
The tension between the West and Russia carries the Russian political and cultural history. Vladimir Putin's "controlled democracy" with the "dictatorship of the law" must also be understood in this context. Likewise, what Kolstø calls "the difficult democracy". This form of governance is not only problematic because of the lack of "western" traditions and institutions, but because of the contempt for the individual in Russian history. It has been almost 150 years since people bought and sold cattle in the country.
Personally, I find it problematic without talking about "democracy" when it comes to Russia. That institution rests on the rule of law and the rule of law, both of which are at best developing in Russia. "The Russian state has become increasingly able to enforce its laws, but is not always careful to comply with them," Kolstø dryly notes.
He also highlights another problem for the development of a rule of law in Russia: the indifferent attitude of citizens to laws and regulations. The Soviet state was all-powerful and all-inclusive. It crept into people's daily lives and mastered it from cradle to grave. When that state collapsed, respect for the state's laws also disappeared.
As in Norway
That does not mean that Kolstø is a pessimist in terms of developments in Russia. Certainly the country has a heavy and complicated legacy to drag on, which is why it has often been found that the sneezes have moved on to the cargo as the Russians have moved into a new era, "he points out," but they have moved anyway done."
In 1990 I published the book Russia is Another Place. With reference to it, Kolstø brings a worldwide survey as a corrective to the perception that Russia should be so very different from the West. The Norwegian and Russian answers differ in some areas, but in others they are strikingly similar. For example, 27 percent of Russians answered that obedience was the most important thing you can teach a child – and as many as 31 percent of Norwegians the same.
The differences are most pronounced in the fact that the Russians place so-called "survival values" over "self-realization values", while in Norway it is the other way around. No wonder, since survival is much more secure in Norway than in Russia. "Had the Russians had greater financial security than they have today, the attitudes in many areas would have shrunk further," comments Kolstø.
If the "soil" was different from Norway's in Karl Johan's time, it seems as if it is now becoming more and more similar. Well. What one can at least say is that dreams and hopes revolve around the same thing. If the Russians are asked what kind of country they want, they answer "a normal country". They are not alone. But the country is no longer "normal" for that reason – just as little as Norwegian children are remarkably obedient because 31 percent of Norwegians think they should be.
Russia will probably be "another place" for a long time yet, as Norway, seen from Russia, is also quite another place. We can rejoice or be annoyed by this, but we must really rejoice that, after all, the people who inhabit our great neighboring country in the East have improved since the days of the Soviet Union.
And we should very much enjoy the good neighborhood that has always existed between Norway and Russia, and which was not completely soured by the Cold War. In order for it to continue and develop, we need knowledge of each other. Kolstø's guide into Russian time and space is exemplary in this regard. His book represents the best in popular science dissemination.
