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, 80). Historically comparative scholarship since the late 1980s has demonstrated that similar accusations structured European descriptions of subjects and enemies, imputing mimicry and masking to colonial subjects in order to maintain distance, claim intellectual superiority, and justify imperial rule (Bhabha 1984). It is no surprise that a visiting French diplomat reached for a similar metric, especially when accusations of theatrical masking and manipulation were swirling through de Custine’s homeland before his visit to Russia. Historian Paul Friedland, discussing political conflicts in eighteenth- century France, explains: “There were reports that deputies to the National Assembly were taking acting lessons and that claqueurs were being planted in the audience to applaud their employers on demand…. [P]amphlets were written in which the entire National Assembly was unmasked as a troupe of actors in disguise and election results were printed in the form of a cast list…. Conversely, while politicians were being unmasked as actors, dramatic actors were themselves being denounced by both the political left and right as being secret agents of the other” (2002, 2).
Habits of imagining political others’ communications—and increasingly, their thoughts—as repressed or masked had already left deep tracks by the time Miłosz wrote during the Cold War:
Such acting is a highly developed craft that places a premium in mental alertness. Before it leaves the lips, every word must be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be can occasion dangerous suspicions and associations. Even one’s gestures, tone of voice, or preference for certain kinds of neckties are interpreted as signs of one’s political tendencies…. Of course, all human behavior contains a significant amount of acting…. Nevertheless, what we find in the people’s democracies is a conscious mass play rather than automatic imitation … [until a person] can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in party slogans. (1953, 55)
This book has long been cited by American politicians as a core text on the socialist world. Its strength lies in explaining the attraction of ideology to people who had witnessed the atrocities of World War II. However, it is more frequently cited by Americans to claim that others are puppets who mouth propaganda—or who at best live by concealing all opposition, a contradiction they resolve “by becoming actors.”
To be sure, people in Russia can also animate this logic: at GITIS during my time there, one teacher commented upon student failure at a drill in ways that put the blame on Soviet-era conditions. This was another drill to develop intuitive technique, again by limiting the usual face-to-face forms and media for communication, to channel and limit contact and its purpose. A student stood in the center of a circle of other students who had been assigned to play either “friend” or “foe” and had been directed to repress any sign to indicate which they were. As the instructor remarked, “In real life, such sentiments may be the very ones not expressed.” The student in the center was allowed to shake each hand and exchange one word, “Hello.” Based on that minimal interaction, she was to decide “friend or foe?” “Friends” were sent to one side of the room, “enemies” to the other. The poor student could not make up her mind. Flustered, she sent nearly
