Nikita Mikhalkov, Besogon, and Russia’s patriotic creative intellectuals
In my occasional explanations of the logic of my essay-writing, I point out that my contribution to discussion of the big issues in the ongoing confrontation between Russia and the West is to provide readers with current information about what the Russian elites are thinking and saying. This is something they almost never see or hear today in Western media given a) the near total black-out of Russian media in the West through denial of access to satellites or other actions that amount to jamming, and b) the servile behavior of Western media as mere disseminators of Pentagon and State Department press briefings. At the same time, I avoid joining the pile-up of fellow commentators at the scrimmage line of the single most talked about developments of the day, whether that means latest news from the war front or latest news about the destruction of Nord Stream II.
You will note that most of the information from Russian media that I provide week by week comes from my watching the leading news, analysis and panel discussion programs of Russian state television, in particular Sixty Minutes and Evening with Vladimir Solovyov. These are high quality programs watched by millions in Russia where authoritative parliamentarians as well as non-government voices are presented.
I have so far not mentioned another type of Russian broadcast that I regularly keep an eye on, what they call ‘author’s programs,’ meaning broadcasts that are scripted and presented by an independent personality who has wide recognition and is allowed to speak only for himself, how he or she views current events. Sometimes these individuals run afoul of official views on sensitive subjects and their shows are taken off air for a while if not permanently. That in fact happened about two years ago to Nikita Mikhalkov, though his blacklisting was rescinded and his show Besogon can be viewed every week on Pervy Kanal, where it is repeated several times at different hours and days of the week.
What I am about to say pertains to the latest edition of Besogon, which I watched this morning courtesy of www.smotrim.ru. For those of you who are not Russian speakers, I hasten to say that today’s program is only in spoken Russian, so you will have to rely on my summary of its contents and its importance. However, older editions of Besogon with English subtitles are available for viewing on youtube.com. To give you a clear idea of this program, I suggest you go to Besogon TV Special English subtitles 18+
Who is Nikita Mikhalkov? Many of you may know of him as a leading Russian film director (incidentally also the head of the Russian Union of Cinematographers). His film Burnt by the Sun had a big global audience. He has been on both sides of the camera and had an important career as an actor before he took up directing.
Mikhalkov was born in 1945 into a family of creative professionals that enjoyed prominence in the Soviet period over two generations. Through his mother, he is related to the still more prominent family of the artist Konchalovsky, who made his mark on Russian avant-garde art still before the Revolution.
Mikhalkov is both an accomplished creative professional and an important defender of patriotic values in his country. The name of his author’s television program, Besogon, is not easily translatable. The word is pejorative and can mean trickster or liar. And Mikhalkov’s program is an expose of the tricksters and liars in the Liberal camp who have heavily influenced Russian culture, the structure of the economy and much else from the time Boris Yeltsin came to power and Russia was flooded with American ‘advisers.’
The program I watched this morning was dedicated to education, in keeping with the fact that during this past week Russia extended bouquets and kind words to teachers and mentors. Almost every profession has such a day in the official Russian calendar and this was the turn of teachers.
Mikhalkov used the opportunity to address a very topical issue: why did so many fellow citizens in their twenties and thirties clear out, go abroad at the start of the Special Military Operation. He takes it back to the Soros-led changes in the Russian educational system implemented in the 1990s: upbringing and inculcation of societal values were replaced by unfettered individualism or, to be less kind but more accurate, by unchecked egoism.
Here I, as a 43-long resident, now citizen of Belgium have seen how the destruction of the forces binding this society together, namely Church and monarchy, have in the course of the last few decades given rise to an ethos of indifference if not hostility to social conventions and to civility written large. It is unimaginable that the heroism of Belgium’s partisans in their clandestine hiding and succoring U.S. and other Allied airmen shot down by the German occupiers during WWII would be repeated by the Belgians of today.
But to return to Mikhalkov and his narrative today, I want to call out a short film from the late 1960s that he presented in the show. This depicted a test of the character of Soviet schoolchildren when facing a stark choice between self and the collective, between acting on conscience and conformism. Specifically, girls and boys aged perhaps 10 were, one by one, introduced into a room, given rifles and asked to choose their target and fire. In front of them were two bulls-eyes. If they hit the one on the left, they would be rewarded with a coin which they could keep. If they hit the bulls-eye on the right, money would be deposited in a fund for the benefit of the community. But to this was added an important overlay: the bulls-eye on the left showed it had been hit by sixteen of their peers, while the bulls-eye on the right had been hit by only two. The camera captured the hesitation of each of the girls and boys before they chose their target and fired. What is poignant is that the vast majority of these kids then chose to shoot at the bulls-eye on the right, meaning they opted for the general good rather than for personal reward.
For those of us who are used to thinking about Soviet society in its heyday, it is stunning that these kids did not follow their peers, were not conformists in what would benefit them individually. They went against the current, as they saw it. I do not have to ask what the results of such a test would reveal if it were tried on American or Belgian kids today in our hedonistic societies.
The show today was all about restoring to Russia’s schoolrooms the function of upbringing and not just education.
Mr. Mikhalkov, you have my bouquet. And my regret that this important distinction has been utterly lost in Western societies.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023