Brothers in apocalypse: the messianic tradition in Russian and American politics
For most of the 20th century, the United States and the Soviet Union served as Yin and Yang, each nation opposing its righteousness to the other’s evil.
Even today, with the collapse of the Soviet Union almost twenty years behind us, multifarious hacks in the Anglo-American media remain wedded to a vision of America and her sinister doppelganger. They pine for a New Cold War.
This Russian-American “doubling” runs deeper than politics. Culturally too, Russia is frequently viewed as reflecting American forms in a shadowy, distorted way: Tarkovsky’s Solaris is the Russian answer to Kubrick’s 2001, and Boris Grebenschikov is Russia’s Bob Dylan. Perhaps this is just a crude marketing tool, but the ease with which it is done suggests something more substantial lurking beneath the surface. Would anybody care about the Belgian Bob Dylan? Nope.
How deep are the roots of this doppelganger effect? Both nations expanded at roughly the same time, gobbling up the territories of indigenous peoples as they did so. Both nations were also riddled with non-conformist sects. But for me, the most interesting parallels are the rival beliefs, widely held throughout history, that America and Russia each has a God-given destiny to save the world.
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I think your analysis is largely correct. Both sides committed a lot of atrocities in the name of their own ideology – I guess you’d call that idolatry of ideology. I would say that NATO in general had a high-ground that was about 1ft above Warsaw’s, and as far as that goes the Soviets were *maybe* slightly better than their allies (Bulgaria, Romania, etc) for a lot of the times.
One other nit-picky thing, the Solaris novel was released in 1961 whereas the 2001 film (film before movie) was released in 1968.
Re: the Solaris novel- I know it predated 2001, but the marketing blather for Solaris the film as the USSR’s answer to 2001 postdated Kubrick’s movie, as Tarkovsky’s movie was released in ’72. Indeed, Lem, being Polish, doesn’t really serve a doubling function for the states.