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2Timothy Frye
FEATURED REVIEW
The Price of Loyalty
TIMOTHY FRYE, Columbia University
Yaffa, Joshua. Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin’s
Russia. New York: Tim Duggan Press, 2020. 368 pp. $28.00. ISBN
978-1-5247-6059-5.
For many people autocracy brings to mind a binary picture of a non-democratic elite using
the power of the state to repress a pro-democratic society united in their oppression. But
autocracies are subtler beasts. In what Beatriz Magaloni calls autocracy’s “tragic brilliance,”
rulers often use individual self-interest. These citizens then rationalize their behavior even
sas they recognize that they are propping up a regime that they oppose.1 Autocratic rulers
create elections that pit opposition groups against each other, coopt elites with government
funding and sinecures, use wedge issues to divide rival groups, and provide just enough
economic growth and government services to keep people from fighting for their liberties.
No better treatment of the tension inherent between ambition and compromise in Putin’s
Russia exists than Joshua Yaffa’s Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition and Compromise in
Putin’s Russia. Indeed, it is hard to find a better treatment of daily life under modern
autocracy. Of the many, many Russia books currently on offer, Yaffa’s work stands apart in
its richness and nuance. It captures with clarity and empathy the arc of Russia’s authoritarian
politics and the tenuous nature of support for and opposition to the Putin government.
Between Two Fires depicts individuals facing moral quandaries of varying degrees of
complexity and importance. There is Konstantin Ernst, the Kremlin’s “Master of
Ceremonies,” who indulges his highbrow sensibilities for Russian state television when he
can, while also trucking in unabashed propaganda for the state as needed; Heda Saratova,
a human rights activist who becomes an apologist for the Kadyrov regime in Chechnya;
Pavel Adelgeim, a rebellious Orthodox priest who battles a conservative Church hierarchy
in Pskov; Oleg Zubkov, a successful zookeeper in Yalta trapped in bureaucratic hell due to
conflict with the new authorities in Crimea; Viktor Shymyrov and Tatyana Kursina, the
driving forces behind the creation of a museum dedicated to the notorious prison camp at
Perm-36; Elizaveta Glinka, a doctor who rescues children trapped by war in Syria and also
becomes a face for Russian foreign policy; and Kirill Serebrennikov, the celebrated theater
director whose rise and fall (and rise?) are all intimately tied to state funding.
Many of Yaffa’s subjects benefit from their relationship with the state. They get funding,
access, and stature that allows them to do their jobs better and advance their careers, but
the state also gains from their cooperation. Recruiting respected cultural and social figures
gives the state a veneer of legitimacy that is hard to come by otherwise. Ernst, Serebrennikov,
and the others have some room to maneuver because some within the state gain from their
association with these figures. This is a two-sided bargain, but the leverage is clearly with
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The Price of Loyalty 3
the state, and when the state changes the terms of the deal, Yaffa’s subjects have little
recourse.
Many of the characters are tragic. Grozny-based human rights activist Saratova appears
particularly pathetic as her room for influence shrinks in Kadyrov’s Chechnya, and her
former defenders in the Moscow-based human rights movement shun her. Loyalty to the
state comes with benefits, but also a price.
At the same time, this is not a parade of tragic characters plagued with doubts about
their deal with the state. They are usually aware of the costs and benefits of their choices.
Yaffa draws out the humanity in his subjects and depicts well-rounded characters with all
their flaws and strengths. His depiction of the colorful zookeeper Zubkov arriving in a
helicopter in a white tuxedo at his extravagant fiftieth birthday party while promising to
fight on against the bureaucrats who seek his demise is noteworthy. With cuts to foreign
news bureaus, and the mass exodus of foreign businesses and non-governmental
organizations, we have far less deep reporting on Russia than prior to the annexation of
Crimea. Yaffa’s book reminds us that the cardboard depictions often found in popular
commentary on Russia are just that—cardboard. In contrast, Yaffa’s characters are rich
and complex.
Yaffa’s subjects are not the usual suspects of liberal-leaning political activists or artists
with extensive ties to Western organizations. Only theater director Serebrennikov has a
following outside of Russia, although his work is designed primarily for a Russian audience.
And most toil far from Moscow. Yaffa brings us to Grozny, Perm, Pksov, Eastern Ukraine,
and Crimea—places more often hinted at than explored in popular discussions of Russia.
What gives Between Two Fires its great richness is Yaffa’s treatment of the dilemmas
before his subjects. Each chapter focuses on a particular individual making a delicate
compromise with the state. Take, for example, the plight of Serebrennikov, who received
generous funding and autonomy for his Moscow theater during the Medvedev thaw, but
ended up in jail on a financial technicality because he was too slow to correct course after
Russia’s conservative turn in 2014.
But Yaffa also includes mini-portraits of those who have made different choices.
He retells the story of Yuri Bykov, a talented film director who, out of spite against an
artistic intelligentsia that never fully accepts him, directs a heavy-handed television series
called Sleepers, which depicts heroic Russian security services who save the Motherland
from a Maidan-style revolution backed by the CIA and a fifth column of anti-corruption
activists and liberals. Shortly after the series airs, he recants his role in the project in a
public statement. In the end, he is wanted neither by officialdom nor the artistic community
whose respect he covets. “Let me try and put it like this,” Bykov sums up his experience to
Yaffa: “I don’t have the ability to constantly live a lie. This starts to eat at me. But neither
do I have the courage or the guts to be a hero all the time. So that’s how I ended in this
hole” (p. 304).
Similarly, Yaffa tells the story of the state taking over the museum at Perm-36 and
switching its focus from depicting the horrors of the Soviet political system to, at one point,
highlighting the contributions made by prison labor to Soviet economic development. This
is a familiar tale. The outspoken founders of the museum refuse to compromise with the
state after the political winds shift and are replaced by a more pliable figure, in this case
Natalia Semakova, a thirty-eight-year-old mid-level bureaucrat without a background in
history who saw her job as keeping the lights on until a decision was made.
Rather than end the story here, however, Yaffa follows Semakova’s evolution from a
naïve functionary with little interest in the camp to a somewhat more vigorous defender of
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4Timothy Frye
the educational mission of her predecessors. Semakova recognizes that Perm-36 is a pale
shadow of its former self, but is also perhaps the best that she can hope for in the current
political climate. She could resign in protest of restrictions on her work, but Semakova
understands the costs of doing so: “Those who came before me aren’t coming back—and
who knows what sort of aims those after me will bring?” (p. 239). Instead, she tries as she
can to recruit talented historians to work for the museum while not giving authorities a
pretext for closing it. That Yaffa is able to follow these controversies for years and interview
those who pick up the pieces after his subjects fall from grace gives the work an arc that is
missing from much popular commentary on Russia.
Yaffa frames his character’s choices around the concept of “The Wily Man,” with
frequent references to the work of Russian sociologists Yuri Levada and Lev Gedkov at the
Levada Center in Moscow. Levada (who died in 2006) and Gudkov are heroes to many
social scientists for their commitment to independent and objective research on public
opinion in Russia over the last thirty years. Russia is the rare case among autocratic countries
where high quality public opinion research is possible, and the Levada Center is a remarkable
institution.
In their own research, Levada and Gudkov focus on the values of ordinary Russians
with a special interest in the evolution of “Homo-Sovieticus,” or Soviet man. In this
argument, the Soviet experience created a distinctive and novel type of person with values
and habits that were deeply held and difficult to change. To survive under the Soviet
system, Homo-Sovieticus was politically passive, conformist, and reliant on self-deception.
The successor to Homo-Sovieticus, the Russian “Wily Man,” retained many of his
predecessor’s traits. Yaffa quotes Levada that the Wily Man “required self-deception for
the sake of his own self-preservation” and was politically passive and accepting of authority
in public, while also undercutting the system for personal gain whenever possible (p. 10).
Gudkov takes the argument further and attributes Russia’s authoritarian turn under Putin to
the persistence of anti-democratic attitudes of Homo-Sovieticus and the Wily Man.
In this respect, Yaffa’s work resembles Masha Gessen’s best-seller, The Future is
History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Like Yaffa, Gessen uses a handful of
beautifully crafted portraits to discuss larger issues about Russian politics, and one of her
subjects is Lev Gudkov. Like Gudkov, Gessen links Russia’s authoritarianism in part to the
reappearance of Homo-Sovieticus. Gessen invokes a hard version of the argument. She
writes that
the ability of to make sense of one’s life is a function freedom. The Soviet
regime robbed people not only of their ability to live freely, but also of the
ability to understand fully what had been taken from them, and how. … The
only stories Russia told about itself were created by Soviet ideologues. If a
modern country has no sociologists, psychologists, or philosophers, what can
it know about itself?
She roots the failure of democracy in Russia to the persistence of attitudes induced by the
trauma of Soviet rule that stole from Russians the tools to understand their own reality.2
This approach is common, if often implicit, in popular discussions about Russia, but
Homo-Sovieticus/The Wily Man is a problematic concept.3 As Gulnaz Sharafutdinova
points out, invoking it takes away Russians’ agency to act, blames them for their plight, and
overstates their apathy.4 In her view, Soviet rule was disastrous in many respects, but
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The Price of Loyalty 5
Russians are far more capable of understanding and changing their condition than Gessen
allows.
There is also little evidence that Russians are more passive, distrusting, or willing to
deceive than those who did not grow up under Soviet rule. Indeed, cross-national studies
show that Russians today are no less honest, trusting, or willing to participate in politics
than citizens in other peer countries.5
The kinds of broad cultural stereotypes implied by Homo-Sovieticus/The Wily Man
are misleading at best. Countries have multiple political cultures that persist over time, and
it is problematic to privilege one. In addition, the variance in personality types within a
country are typically much greater than the variance in personality types between countries.6
“Wily men” are hardly unique to Russia and would be familiar to readers of James Scott’s
Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance.7 Moreover, because
personality types are thought to be fixed over time, they have trouble accounting for the
kinds of change in political systems that Russia has experienced over the past forty years.
To his credit, Yaffa’s treatment of Homo-Sovieticus is subtler than Gessen’s. It is
sometimes said that “economics is about how people make choices; sociology is about how
people have no choices to make.” In this formulation, Gessen is the sociologist to Yaffa’s
economist. Yaffa explores how individuals make the choice to compromise with the state,
why they made the choice that they made, and what effect those choices have on Russia.
And these choices do not boil down to simple tales of unscrupulous Russians selling out to
the state or principled Russians refusing to compromise their ideals when confronted by
the state. His subjects recognize the costs and benefits of their decisions and struggle with
the balance.
Fortunately for Yaffa, the notion of a novel post-Soviet man is not needed. Yaffa’s
incisive portraits of less powerful parties making compromises with more powerful parties
they cannot avoid are the stuff of resistance politics across time and place. Like others in
their position, the Russians that Yaffa depicts are trying to extract as many benefits as they
can in an increasingly constrained space and they are acutely aware of their actions.
In the end, Yaffa tallies the costs and benefits of compromise and, faithful to the
experiences of his subjects, is equivocal. He recognizes the systemic consequences of
these individual choices. Each compromise helps to keep in place a repressive system of
government that works for the few rather than for the many. At the same time, he sympathizes
with his subjects, who just want to live a little better, to be a little better at their occupation,
while not doing anything egregiously wrong.
One strength is Yaffa’s reluctance to make sweeping claims that oversimplify. Yaffa’s
subjects are not reflexively supportive of the state, trapped by their Soviet past, or yearning
to overthrow the chains of their oppressor, but struggle with difficult choices between
ambition and principles. In this way, they are not that different from any one of us. And
therein lies the radical message of Between Two Fires.
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