Mad Places

What a wonderful word is freedom! But where do we go to be free? In Germany there are the woods and mountain tops; in France it is sought in a Revolution; while in Russia; ah Russia… In two extraordinary books Svetlana Alexievich takes us to the strangest of places.

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The idea of the zone occupies an important place in Russian culture. The zone is difficult to describe, but Geoff Dyer, doing wonderfully, does his best: it is where we go to satisfy our greatest desire.

It is hardly benign. To quote the serial killer in Klute, who regrets his murderous transformation, we should be wary of releasing our lust, whose fancies, those demons, are wilful and aggressive and impossible to control. The zone is a perilous place, where we risk everything for a compulsive wish that will not be denied.

To be free - the necessary condition to release this desire; the two are synonymous - you will take this risk; the dangerous place a safe space for those whose primeval value is liberty, and the autonomy that it requires. In Chernobyl Prayer the zone is the irradiated area around the ruined nuclear site; it is where the outsider, the outcast and the recalcitrant live, free from the solicitous bureaucrats making society too safe for liberty. Only where the authorities are afraid to tread can a Russian be really independent.

In Secondhand Time the zone expands, just like, to use an unfortunate metaphor, a nuclear cloud; Perestroika exploding into the toxic gangsterism of the 1990s, whose fallout wiped out a culture and wrecked the middle classes. Although some loved this time; such as those free-spirits of capitalism who prospered when the zone - The Free Market - conquered the country.

Putin has returned the zone to the wilderness, where billboards and television commercials, today’s new fences and watchtowers, protect it now. The free once again forced to find their liberty in the vast spaces of Russia’s hinterland. But this is not Stalin’s time. Then the zone was too dangerous even for those willing to sacrifice everything for freedom; the promise of the Communist paradise, the Bolshevik utopia of the Rational Man, having no place for the crazies and the anarchists.

In the 1960s and 70s a dream died. Reason gave up trying to change the Russian soul. The regime growing old, its wits declining, freedom could creep back into the cities; it settled in Moscow, grew confident in Leningrad; where, ensconced in those tiny kitchens, the intellectuals talked dissidence late into the morning. How they loved samizdat! It excited the bourgeoisie, who also began to speak of freedom; hoping for a new kind of socialism, they became lyrical over the Marxist cliché, the complete, the fully realised, human being - that English gentlemen - then talked of a humane polity, the renaissance to come. If only… 

If only what? If only the Soviet Union could open up a little, widen that zone a teensy-weensy bit, extend that kitchen into the living room, even out into the public hallway…

They were forgetting something important: we all say we love the zone; however, only the mad few can ever inhabit a place too wild for the ordinary citizen and those with true civility (the Russian intelligentsia discussing Mill and Kundera by the family stove). It is a truth. Few bourgeois, and never a bureaucrat, can live for long without her rules and laws, her safe spaces. No sane person risks their lives for this idea. Yet we all talk about it. We fantasise about the emancipated life. We forget that in the zone everyone else will also be free; the zone no comfortable sitting-room, with a few invited guests, but a no-man’s land, where anyone - yes: anyone - can be at liberty.