What if eternal Russia exists? Navalni, in the Arctic prison where he was serving his sentence, was woken up every day at five in the morning by playing the song I am Russian by the singer Shaman, Putin’s pop kalashnikov, on the public address system.
The Kremlin is possessed by an intimate obsession with death. From fertilizer to eternity, it is a bunker that calculates each of his funeral steps, how he kills dissidents, how he buries them and how he sanctifies his own power by perfuming it with incense.
The Kremlin is not worried about death. He worries that death questions his primary dominion, not being able to control the strength of a coffin, the forcefulness of a tomb, everything that escapes the visible.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin did not invent this obsession with mystery. Until their extinction, the tsars believed themselves touched by the finger of God, although the monarchy was still a mere biological control of power.
The Soviets gladly inherited this ecstasy and dyed it red, because of the people. “The truth is absolute, and only the absolute can be the foundation of human life. Things that are not absolute are unstable”: Comrade Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin, could have said it, but they are the words of Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonóstsev, mentor of Nicholas II, the last tsar. He was shot with his entire family so that no trace of his crowned biology would remain.
Comrade Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Stalin, perfected the Russian equation of power-eternity-humus of the earth. Vasily Semyonovich Grossman describes it with biological bitterness in Life and Destiny, with the Holodomor, the grass, the Gulag and the ice melted into total power: “It was the hour of his triumph,” he writes of Stalin in 1945. Not only had he defeated the present enemy, he had also prevailed over the past. The grass grew thicker on the peasant graves of the 1930s. The ice, the hills beyond the Polar Circle would retain their serene silence. He knew more than anyone in the world that victors are not judged.”
Grass, ice and smoke. “In 1937,” Grossman writes of the Stalinist trials, “hundreds of convicts were executed every night without the right to correspondence, every night the chimneys of the Moscow crematorium smoked, and the Komsomols, mobilized to help with the executions and the transportation of corpses, ended up becoming crazy.”
Ash, humus and cemeteries with uprooted tombstones. “This marble comes from the cemetery of the monastery of the Don of the Mother of God,” a Russian architect friend told me, pointing out the reliefs sculpted on the platform of a Moscow metro station, I think the one in Revolution Square.
Today – pure spiritual ash – the majority of Russians view this mass gravedigger, Stalin, with sympathy and display his image alongside icons of Our Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, the Soviet empire – so anti-God – was founded on the incorrupt mummy of a saint, with the Commission for the Immortalization of Lenin’s body serving as the College of Cardinals.
Indeed, when he died, in 1924, the obsession of the red power was to prevent the decomposition of his body. Futurism infected Soviet medicine, convinced that progress would make possible the resurrection of the father of the Revolution. In the end it was just embalmed, but Lenin’s Institute for the Study of the Brain still existed when the Soviet Union collapsed.
For Lenin’s funeral music, the Kremlin thought of parts of Verdi’s Requiem, Beethoven’s Third Symphony, Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods and some Chopin. Beethoven fell from the program for “too boring for the masses” and Wagner for “too pompous.” What music will embellish Putin’s funeral? The catchy song I am Russian by the very young singer Yaroslav Yuryevich Dronov, Shaman, the pop kalashnikov of the Kremlin?
Shortly before he died, Aleksei Anatolyevich Navalny said that every morning at five o’clock, they woke up the prisoners in the Arctic prison by playing the Russian anthem (the same as the Soviet Union’s) on the public address system and – it was probably the last song he heard in his life – the pop hit I am Russian… the way I am they cannot break me, I am Russian, and I am going to the end, I am Russian, despite everyone, I am Russian…
It is the Russian soul. As if Russians, individually, never finished biologically dying because Russia is a heavenly cloud and each Russian will continue to live in it eternally… The sun in the sky looks at me, says a phrase from Shaman’s song, as if the sun I would look at him for being Russian. The sun looks at him, without a doubt, but it has a surprise in store for him: like all the stars, he will die killing. Within 1,000 or 2,500 million years – it is not easy to specify – the accumulation of helium in its core will turn it into a radiation festival. The sun will evaporate our oceans and end up scorching the earth.
That day the Russian soul and its eternal horizon will disintegrate: “Russia has no borders,” say the posters that the Kremlin has placed in the streets.
That day there will be no trace of the Commission for the Immortalization of Lenin’s corpse. And no one will survive to tell it. Not even La Vanguardia, imagine.
