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PARTISAN REVIEW
By the 1980s, Rasputin had emerged as a leading spokesman for eco–
logical causes, such as keeping lake Baikal pollution-free. He also cam–
paigned for the preservation of historical buildings, including churches
and pre-Soviet wooden architecture. While his fiction remained free of
Jewish characters, anti-Jewish sentiments had crept into his discursive
works by the early 1980s. Jewish names were dropped when Rasputin
talked of the officials who condoned the pollution of the environment
and oversaw urban renovation. Historians of Soviet anti-Semitism
know that the ultra-nationalist
Pamiat'
movement
(pamiat'
means
"memory" in Russian) emerged in the 1980s as a grassroots movement
of citizens for preservation of historical buildings and churches. In July
of 1987, Rasputin addressed the Fifth Congress of the All-Russia Soci–
ety for the Preservation of Monuments of History and Culture in
Gor'kii (now Nizhnii Novgorod). The title of his speech was "To Sacri–
fice Oneself for the Sake of Truth: Against Unremembrance." Rasputin
defended the
Pamiat'
movement from the attacks of the press and the
"people, who have betrayed Russia, smeared her name, and later, not
finding the Promised Land abroad, ...returned" to Russia. Rasputin
never mentioned the word Jew, but his allusions to Jews were quite
transparent to the audience he addressed and the readers of the ultra–
nationalist monthly
Nash sovremennik [Our Contemporary],
where the
speech was printed. He referred to the logic of "the interests of their
caste
[kastovye interesy]."
Speaking of "some people [est' liudi] who do
not like Russia regaining her memory," Rasputin disseminated anti–
Semitic ideas also present in the speeches and writings of the
Pamiat'
leaders. "This is why," he continued, "they are ready to make 'memory'
[pamiat']
and 'patriot' swear words, as they did in the 1920S, and to
declare the great creations of our ancestors primitive works and nation–
alistic poison." (Rasputin voiced similar ideas in a speech at the Seventh
Congress of Russian Writers in 1990.)
In 1990, Rasputin was interviewed by Bill Keller for an article on
Russian nationalists that appeared in the
New York Times Magazine;
a
year later the full text was printed in Peter Matthiessen's long essay on
Siberia in the
New York Review of Books.
Rasputin's remarks on Russian–
Jewish relations have raised many questions, both in Russia and in the
West, about the moral integrity and intellectual honesty of a writer who
had maintained so incessantly that a writer is first and foremost a mouth–
piece of "truth." "I think," Rasputin told Keller, "that today the Jews
should feel responsible for the sin of having carried out the revolution,
and for the shape that it took. [They should feel responsible] for the ter–
ror. For the terror that existed during the revolution and especially after
