THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE ABSURD IN PUTIN'S RUSSIA JOSIE GRUNDY

As Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, it also released its public justification for the war: to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. Much of the world viewed this claim of “denazification” as bizarre and contradictory, not least because the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. The incongruity between reality as described in the media and lived experience has frequently appeared in Western media headlines since the start of the war, but this strategy exists beyond the rationale underlying Russia’s “special military intervention.” It is symptomatic of a greater political strategy: the weaponization of the absurd. This state-sanctioned “absurdity” recalls the absurdist literary movement which briefly flourished in the early 20th century, before Socialist Realism was adopted as the official genre of the Soviet Union. Unlike the countercultural and satiric genres of the early 20th century, Russia’s contemporary absurdism shapes domestic and foreign policy.

The early roots of Russian absurdism are often attributed to Gogol and his renowned works such as “The Nose” and “Diary of a Mad Man.” But Daniil Kharms in the 1920s and 1930s best exemplified the complex qualities of the maturing genre. His black humour, inspired by the chaos of the Soviet Union, was antithetical to the civically-minded content the state demanded of its writers, leaving him unable to publish anything other than children’s stories during his lifetime. While absurdism is often oversimplified as a mere dismissal of the rules of logic, the genre is also characterized by a divorce between man and the world, the victimized or pitiful protagonist, and the decomposition of language. These traits are present throughout Kharms’ work. In the opening lines of “The Old Woman,” the speaker asks an elderly woman what the time is:

“Have a look”– the old woman says to me. I look and see that there are no hands on the clock. “There are no hands here”– I say. The old woman looks at the clock face and tells me: – “It’s now a quarter to three.” – “Oh, so that’s what it is. Thank you very much”– I say and go on” (Kharms, 17).

The nonsensical rules of the world are clearly laid out. The speaker accepts that a divorce between himself and the world affects the information he has access to. Kharms’ “Blue Notebook No. 10” offers a different example. In this story, a red-haired man is said to exist, but each description of him is contradicted by the physical features that he lacks, until “there’s no knowing whom we are even talking about” and that, “In fact it’s better that we don’t say any more about him” (49). Language breaks down as every presupposition associated with the existence of a “red-haired man” is found to be false.

Though absurdism and related contemporary styles, such as futurism and the avant-garde, were quashed by growing state control, absurdism found a new home in politics and (dis)information campaigns in Russia. What was once a style of expression has become a tool of suppression. Russian propaganda, which as a concept, does not carry the same negative connotation in Russian as it does in English, can broadly be sorted into two categories: agitational and obfuscatory. Agitational stories paint Russia as a victim, standing in defiance of Western persecution of Russian values. Such narratives claim that Russians need liberation from a nationalistic, Russophobic Ukraine, particularly those living within Ukraine’s borders. Obfuscatory media muddles truth from fiction, friend from foe, and the critical from the banal.

A recent example can be seen in journalist Peter Pomerantsev’s description of news stories from the stateowned broadcaster RTR regarding the 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. These stories claimed that Russian nationalists in the region were Western actors who wanted Russia to be dragged into war, rather than Russians who genuinely wanted a Russian intervention (Pomerantsev 177). This two-pronged approach to propaganda characterizes the weaponization of the absurd. From politically motivated trials, such as the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s, to the cognitive dissonance that is “schizo-fascism,” the same tools of the literary absurd are used to achieve political ends.

“Schizo-fascism” is a term coined by Yale historian Timothy Snyder in the wake of the War in Ukraine. It refers to the practice of fascists calling their enemies fascists, displacing their ideology and violence onto someone else (Gessen 2022). The hypocrisy in Russian talking points is no secret, with the pro-Kremlin political scientist Dmitry Drobnitsky declaring on Vladimir Solovyov’s pro-government talk show in 2022, “Russians are Russophobic, and Jews are the worst anti-Semites,” with the Russian Foreign Minister echoing similar sentiments soon after (Gessen 2022). Words like these lose meaning and not only appear grossly inappropriate as justifications for war, but the point at which they became warped is lost. In an interview with Masha Gessen regarding the policy of referring to Ukrainian forces as “Nazis,” a Russian news editor said that they believed they lacked the schooling necessary to make that decision for themselves, and so deferred to the language of the authorities but were confident that “truth exists… it’s just that it’s unknowable” (Gessen 2022). This answer demonstrates just how much propaganda focuses on spreading doubt and confusion rather than planting a single, clear message. It is worth noting that this task of “denazifying” Ukraine came only a year after the adoption of a bill that banned any attempt to deny the Soviet Union’s success in triumphing over fascism in World War II and days after the introduction of a bill that would impose fines for doing so (TASS 2021; Lawfare 2022). By controlling the language of the media and public, people are left reliant on approved distributors of the truth. The purposeful break between the reality promoted by the state and that experienced by citizens has ideologically isolated the Russian public from the outside world.

Putin’s frequent quotation of Tsar Alexander III’s belief that Russia “has only two allies– the army and the navy” demonstrates a worrying degree of fear-mongering that Russia is surrounded by enemies out to get ordinary Russian people. Similarly, the transformation of language– words lose their clarity and may even come to have their opposite meaning– functions to confuse the audience. The shifting associations of what it means to be fascist or antisemitic erode the real threats they present, and they are instead used as fodder for nationalistic and victimizing narratives. The resulting sentiment is that “if nothing is true, then anything is possible” (Pomerantsev 2014). The government itself is not absurd, but the methods employed to produce confusion, apathy, and distrust mirror the techniques that defined the most iconic Russian absurdist works of the 20th century. The declaration of Socialist Realism as the official genre of the Soviet Union in 1934 signalled the demise of absurdism, but it remains unclear what will bring an end to the Russian absurdism of today.

“Duma adopts in First Reading Ban on Putting Soviet Union, Nazi Germany on Same footing.” TASS 25 May, 2021.

Gessen, Masha. “Inside Putin’s Propaganda Machine.” The New Yorker, 18 May, 2022. Hirsch, Francine. “Putin’s Memory Laws Set the Stage for His War in Ukraine.” Lawfare 28 February, 2022.

Jaccard, Jean-Philippe. “Daniil Kharms in the context of Russian and European Literature of the Absurd.” Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd, edited by Neil Cornwell, St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Kharms, Daniil. “The Old Woman.” Incidences edited and translated by Neil Cornwell, Serpent’s Tail, 1993.

Pomerantsev, Peter. “The Kremlin’s Information War.” Authoritarianism Goes Global, edited by Christopher Walker, et al., John Hopkins UP, 2016.

Pomerantsev, Peter. “Russia and the Menace of Unreality: How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing Information Warfare.” The Atlantic 9 September, 2014.

Sorokin, Vladimir. “Russia Is Slipping Back into an Authoritarian Empire.” Interview conducted by Martin Doerry and Matthias Schepp. Spiegel International, translated by Christopher Sultan, 2 February, 2007.