Montesquieu’s text activated both early colonial hierarchies and imperial competitions, kicking off the long conversation about Russian capacity for feeling. Published in the years after Peter the Great’s Russian imperial expansion, the text made an impression in Russia.
Russian imperial rulers were well-read; French, German, Latin, and English posed few obstacles. Empress Catherine, hailing from Austria, barely spoke Russian when she first arrived but carried on extensive correspondence in several languages with continental philosophes. Russian elites were always aware of European perceptions of Russia (see Layton 1994),27 and as Soviets and now Russians continue to study other languages, they continue also to consider how Russia is viewed from elsewhere. It does not escape notice when foreign sources anchor policy to claims about Russian capacity to feel. It is noticed when depictions zigzag between extremes, northern stoics giving way to Dostoevskian maniacs or Hollywood depictions of cold-faced bureaucrats being eclipsed by Khrushchev removing his shoes at the United Nations to bang one on the table (some argue that those 1960s photos were faked).28 The world switches between Orwellian visions of a state stifling passions and romantic images of a culture of feisty philosophers and emotional ballerinas. Russians get caught in these compelling oscillations; they echo the shapes of historical accounts of survival between other imperial powers, East and West.
Anglophone Cold War writing on Soviet telepathy and extrasensory perception rarely mentions crisis and instead privileges capacities to feel. When Americans Ostrander and Schroeder published their paranormal travelogue of encounters with Soviet telepathy scientists and telepaths, they took care in the introductory pages to note that people, such as actor Karl Nikolaev, greeted them effusively, belying images of emotionless, brainwashed Soviets:
[A] major thrust of Soviet ESP work is to develop machines capable of monitoring, testing, and studying ESP. But the Soviets are also eager to study the human, people-to-people aspects of ESP. “We believe ESP is enmeshed with all of everyday life,” they told us, “We believe ESP affects any group situation.” And perhaps with people as warmhearted and volatile as the Slavs, ESP does flow more easily. Many Westerners seem to have the idea Soviet citizens are robot-like people, gray automatons in a well-run machine shop. An American we met in Leningrad confessed, “I thought the sun never shone in Russia and people never smiled—boy was I wrong!” (1970, 8)
They followed these words with examples of extravagant and spontaneous hospitality, descriptions of flowers and gifts of poetry, and accounts of sudden embraces from elevator operators.
Nevertheless, soon after their book came out, Ostrander and Schroeder appeared as guests on The Amazing World of Kreskin, a television program broadcast in North America from Ottawa, and zigzagged in the other direction, discussing how little Russians smile in public. These kinds of shifts happen all the time. One person might claim that the Russian people are more closed than smiling Americans, but in another context will say that winter frosts protect emotions deeper than any westerner can fathom. And yet these claims are often couched with one eye looking out for evaluations from elsewhere: on an October morning at GITIS, one of the acting teachers exhorted his students, “go look at faces on the Metro, you will not see a smile—foreigners notice this all the time.”
I have indeed heard the refrain on absent Russian smile many times from Americans, since first visiting Russia in 1988 as a student on a study tour and then later as a professor leading such tours. “Why don’t they smile?” This question, ten times out of ten, prompts someone else in the group to speculate: “Well, they never had the freedom to smile,” or “It’s trauma from Stalin’s cruelties.” The histories of the corporate campaigns in the United States to train the service smile seem yet unknown to most of my fellow citizens (see Hochschild 1983). American guidebooks to Paris, by the way, mention an absence of public smiles, attributing that not to political regimes, but to refined French sensibility. In any case, foreigners claim that Soviet-era rationality and rule shut down feeling—and many local people also say that Soviet modes of communicating chilled the space between souls, left a gap between false, official, public words and real, underground, or private expression. Words, some say, were born in a Soviet “culture of dissimulation” (Shlapentokh 1984; Sinyavsky 1991; Seriot 2002; Thom 1989) that barred citizens from “living in Truth” (Havel 1987). By the 1990s, such views no longer smelled of dissidence, and by 2000 they were mainstream.
“THE ONLY SPACE OF MAGIC IS THE THEATER”
Some arguments combine the approaches just described while sharpening the stakes, attributing intuitive capacities to particular political systems. They extend beyond any particular period of crisis, the better to press people to discern friends and declare enemies. There are many who blame socialism for such conditions, arguing that Soviet habits stunted abilities to connect and blocked compassion and communication, leaving people closed and numbed, suspicious.29 Czesław Miłosz (1953) ascribed the duplicity of Polish intellectuals to socialist conditions, which he contrasted with the streets of capitalist Paris where he lived, juxtaposing its variety to the drone of socialist cities, where people adjust to lifeless architecture and to “short, square” bodies, the “racial type well-regarded by the rulers.” Like many observer and émigré memoirs, his colored socialist societies grey and gloomy, a twilight of windowless rooms, overmechanized, overrationalized, and monotonous. If a paucity of sensation drains socialist spaces of “magic,” theater restores it: “The number of aesthetic experiences accessible to a city-dweller in the countries of the New Faith is uncommonly limited. The only space of magic is the theater…. [T]he tremendous popular success of authors like Shakespeare is due to the fact that their fantasy triumphs even within the bounds of naturalistic stage setting” (1953, 64–67). Exiled poet Miłosz never actually lived in socialist Poland, though he did visit when he was a diplomat. From 1946 to 1950 he lived in Washington, D.C., working as Polish cultural attaché, and was transferred to Paris in 1950, where he defected. Published in France in 1951, Miłosz’s The Captive Mind starts with a description of intellectual life in Poland under the Nazi regime during World War II and extends to describe the nascent socialist regime.
Many representations of life in the socialist bloc well known to Americans were written by people who spent little time in socialist countries. When George Orwell crafted 1984, he drew from experience with the English government and from scenes in H.G. Wells’s stories. Earlier, Yevgeny Zamiatin based his dystopian novel We on close observation of how labor was managed in the British shipyards in Tyne during World War I, when he worked there for the Russian Imperial (not the Soviet) Navy. He wrote just as critically about Russian imperial responses to the 1905 Revolution as he later did about the Bolshevik’s strategies and practices.
Perhaps this preponderance of limited and refracted accounts, often written by diplomats constrained by their missions to limited contacts, helps to explain why, as cultural historian Julie Cassiday has noted, theatricality is “all too dominant a trope” to describe Russian people, as if they all live stifled under masks of deceit and suspicion or enchanted by illusory mystery, building Potemkin villages under duress. What are the anchors to the repeated claims that Russia is exceptionally given to theatricality, that acting pervades social life there?30 Many of the anchors turn out to be texts by diplomats; Marquis de Custine, in his 1839 travel diary Empire of the Csar, described the Russian imperial court as theatrical. Russia’s aristocrats, he famously claimed, lived under a veneer of European customs masking an Asiatic essence, possessing “just enough of the gloss of European civilization to be ‘spoiled as savages,’ but not enough to become cultivated men. They were like trained bears who made you long for the wild ones” (quoted in Kennan 1971,