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of course, was that Russians, unlike Europeans, had carried their new
freedoms too far.
Foucault's vision of America as a "circular prison" is even more pop–
ular in Russia.
In
a broader context, post-Soviet Russians believe that
America is repeating the follies of the Communist regime. In the Soviet
era, America had been the embodiment of liberty of all sorts, including
uninhibited sexuality. Then, America's uninhibited individualism and
brazen eroticisation of life, as Soviet propaganda fancied it, was the rea–
son for the negative image of the West and of America. Now, the image
of America has been recast, and not only on sexual matters.
Many Russian intellectuals believe that Americans' propensity for spy–
ing and informing on their neighbors is greater than it ever was in Soviet
Russia. According to this view, during the last years of the U.S.S.R., "Big
Brother" had become nearsighted, and spying and informing on friends
had become a tasteless crime committed only by fools-even though offi–
cial propaganda still praised Pavlik Morozov, the youngster who had
delivered his parents to the Secret Police in the
1930S.
Towards the end of the Communist regime, Soviet citizens spied on
friends and relatives only when under direct pressure from the KGB,
and then felt the torment of conscience. According
to
Russian critics,
nothing of this sort could be seen in the United States. This willingness
to inform on others was alleged to come not from external pressure but
from some internal call to duty.
In this view, America totalitarianism has achieved absolute perfec–
tion, because it is not imposed from above but is intrinsic to America as
a nation. Americans cannot reach the "end of history," as Francis
Fukuyama elaborated in his famous essay, because there is no history in
America's experience. As a matter of fact, they argue that American civ–
ilization has not much changed since the Pilgrim era. The lack of a his–
tory sets it apart from the rest of the world.
My Russian friend, who has always been a staunch liberal, is today a
strong proponent of the new, post-Soviet Russia. He and his late father
were among the crowd on that day in
1991
when hardliners prepared
to attack Yeltsin's government in the White House. His hatred of the so–
called "Red-to-Brown" movement-that is, the nationalistically minded
Communists-is so strong that he even ran from the room when his
mother told him that his grandfather had been on the side of the Red
during the Civil War after the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet his views on
America are similar to those of his political opponents.
Still, when I attended a meeting called the "Russian Project," some
prominent nationalists and members of other fascist groups that con-
