INSULTED. The story of one existential journey

By Andrei Kureichik

Do you have premonitions? When the sour, depressing taste of anxiety suddenly begins to flutter within  you, and, contrary to logic, hope, your faith in God, humanity, and the laws of history, you feel the icy,  fetid breath of impending catastrophe coming down on you? 

Putin’s “little green men,” the badly hidden mercenaries he sent to Crimea in 2014, marked the  end of an era. 

For centuries, Russia has enjoyed only brief humanitarian respites of normalcy in an unending  historical eruption of various forms of social madness and frenzy. In his book Sick Russia at the beginning  of the 20th century Dmitry Merezhkovsky wrote: “It occasionally seems that there are no revolutions in  Russia at all, only uprisings — the January uprising, the Decembrist revolt, the Chuguev mutiny,  outbreaks of cholera, the Pugachyov rebellion, the Razin insurgency — the eternal rebellion of eternal  slaves.” The senseless, merciless subjection of nations all around and the enslavement of people for  centuries led to the creation of a savage, imperial kind of Frankenstein. The humanistic literature of  Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov in the 19th century, to say nothing of high hopes for a  parliamentary state system, an effective intelligentsia, good education, and great theater — instead of  creating a hoped-for breakthrough to an enlightened civilization — led to world and civil wars. The  Russian Republic of 1917 was devoured by a communistic Caliban. From one “prison of nations” in the  era of the tsars, nations ended up in the red gulag of the Soviet Union. Poets, philosophers, playwrights,  and directors found themselves either on “philosophical ships” sent forcibly into emigration, or in the  thick ledgers of the NKVD as “enemies of the people,” potential saboteurs, or suicides who slit their  veins, hung themselves, shot themselves, or drank themselves to death at the height of their personal  glory, and in the prime of their personal lives. 

The polar night is long. In a historical sense, it may last for centuries or millennia. There was a  glimmer of light in the 1960s. Something sincere and real, like white- flowered snowdrops, broke  through the crust of ideological ice. Gorbachev’s perestroika was perhaps the finest hour in the entire  history of Russia and its neighboring peoples. Germans once again could mingle freely after half a  century of living on opposite sides of a wall. Afghans saw the backs of their occupiers heading home.  Eastern Europe embraced Western Europe. The USSR collapsed peacefully, without civil war, rivers of  blood, or hatred run rampant. 

This is something I remember. The heart of a teenager from Belarusian Minsk was filled with  conflicting emotions. “We are no longer half the world. We are no longer one big nation. We are  different countries now. We are different peoples. We are just different.” No longer was there a single  ideology. And the red flag, the color of red, was no longer a reference to communism advancing  throughout the world, but referred to our own national treasure, the belts of Slutsk, exquisitely woven  from silk, golden and silver threads. “Different” meant that people had their own languages, and we had  our own — the stunningly beautiful Belarusian. And it wasn’t “Belorussia” anymore, it was “Belarus.”  And we were all different. 

Why doesn’t the life of a happy village interest us? I often ask myself this question. I ask it of  myself, and of others. Why do we begin to feel awkward when everything seems to be fine? Why did  Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man merely evolve into the prologue for a new  round of civilizational hell? What happened to those bright, cheerful years of the heyday of theater and  cinema when everyone ignored borders among countries? When in one and the same year both the  young Ukrainian comedian Zelenskiy and the Russian technocrat President Medvedev performed in my  films, while I blithely traveled back and forth to and from Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, paying no mind to  borders, and enjoying cultural diversity and freedom. How was that replaced by imperious hatred, anger,  misunderstanding, resentment, and violence? 

Vladimir Vysotsky, the great Russian poet of the 1960s, wrote prophetically: 

“If a friend suddenly turns out to be 

Neither friend, nor enemy, but — in between . . .  

If you can’t understand right away 

Is he good or is he bad . . .” 

Who are we really? Insulted. Offended. Humiliated. Stung. Infected. Zombified? Deceived? Who  are we to one another after living side by side for so many centuries? Enemies? Friends? Relatives? Who  are Ukrainians to Russians? Who are Russians to Belarusians? What is America for Russia? Who are  Russians for Europeans? Who are we all for the planet we inhabit? Invaders? Madmen warming the  planet’s climate with carbon dioxide, wars, and man-made disasters? 

Nothing but questions. “To be or not to be?” In 2017, I went looking for an answer.  The Insulted project was a deep dive into conscience. There, where a detector of evil and good is  cradled in the very depths of our consciousness and hearts. In the Limbo of Conscience, a journey begins  through the traumas and grievances of communities and groups, where in the churning ocean of  emotions, stereotypes, lies, and truth, one can find the answers to what is happening. I wrote my first  Insulted play about Russia. Putin’s hybrid virus of imperialism, fascism, and revanchism shattered the  reflexes of the long-suffering Russian people, who have been utterly brutalized by generations of  dictators, from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin. The task of “remaining human” in a world of zombies and  zombie boxes, as Russians call their television sets, turned out to be an almost unsolvable proposition in  Russia. In Russia, the nature of the social conflict of different groups, their traumas and grievances,  devolved into an immanent existential ulcer. When the ulcer burst, the pus of schizo-fascist (in the apt  expression of my friend and colleague Professor Timothy Snyder) insanity flooded half the world. In 2020, we Belarusians attempted to break out of this vicious circle. After 30 years of rule, the  experienced, brutal, recidivist dictator Alexander Lukashenko lost an election. He was defeated by a  modest woman who had never been involved in politics and only spoke publicly for the first time shortly  before the elections took place. She spoke timidly, with a stammer, ineptly and unprofessionally, lacking  charisma or “cool.” She was weak as a performer, and Belarusians voted for her without the slightest hesitation. This housewife by the name of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya emerged from the  presidential election as president-elect. Belarusian society chose unadorned humanity and empathy over  pompous scum and flashy cynicism. This comprised the second part of the Insulted project. Insulted.  Belarus was the loudest and most famous of the project’s pieces. Society again was sucked into a vortex  of conflict. This tornado devastated the beautiful, exuberant country. Hundreds of thousands of  Belarusians found themselves jettisoned beyond its borders. Thousands were in prisons or in graves. I  myself became a grain of sand in that storm, jettisoned from the country by a hurricane of political repression. But through this play the world learned that there is such a people as Belarusians. It learned  that we existed. 

There should have been a play called Insulted. Ukraine. It probably would have been the most  complex, contradictory, and mysterious part of the project. Neither the West nor the East truly  understood Ukraine. They still don’t understand it now. It is a country where the legendary, nationalist leaning Stepan Bandera is a hero, and the president is a Jew. Where the people elect and reject  presidents with a kick in the butt at their own discretion. (Of six presidents in Ukraine, only one has been  reelected for a second term.) A country where people did not believe in their government, its laws, their  army, or the real possibilities of a big war, suddenly inflicted a crushing defeat on Putin’s countless armored armadas near Kyiv in 2022, forcing their remnants to flee through the radiation- laden forests of  Chernobyl. A country where, on the day when advance Russian tanks were already driving down Victory  Avenue in Kyiv, the comedian president took a selfie in front of his residence and boldly responded to  American president Joe Biden’s offer to spirit him out of the country: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” 

Resentment in Ukraine turned into rage, irrational resilience, and fearlessness. And neither  Russians, nor Europeans, nor Americans can understand the thermonuclear nature of this rage.  Physicists like to talk about “energy levels.” For me, the strength of Ukraine and Ukrainians is an  unattainable energy level. These are fluctuations on a universal scale. All versions of the play Insulted.  Ukraine were outdated before I could finish it. I put this work aside for later, but the “Insulted” people of  Ukraine flourished without me, once again confirming that Ukraine is a metaphysical mystery. Thanks to  translator John Freedman, a project called the Insulted. Belarus Worldwide Readings suddenly  blossomed into an entire universe of drama, readings, performances, books, and publications of  Ukrainian plays. If I had to bear witness before God, this fact alone would be enough for me to declare  that my life and work have not been in vain. 

At this moment when writing this text, I paused to take a long, deep breath. 

The former free and carefree Russia of the late 1990s and early 2000s no longer exists. Putin  murdered it as he did the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The united, effervescent Belarus of 2020 has  vanished — it was ravaged and savaged by Lukashenko’s guardsmen. The rollicking, cheerful pre-war  Ukraine is no more. It now bleeds as it battles back against its rabid attacker, while the United States and  the rest of the world seem to limit themselves to timid, sometimes even cowardly “levels of support.” I  am no longer in that world either. As such, the Insulted project has achieved a level of planetary  distances and philosophical generalizations, traversing the long span from a premonition of catastrophe  to the fait accompli of human Armageddon. From the intimately concrete to the existential. “There is not  enough evil,” my mother once said, in the sense that sometimes something has already gone so far that  you no longer have the strength to be angry. How could we allow such chaos to embrace our planet?  What will we leave for our children? What should we do if we are forced to live together anyway? On  one tiny stone sphere in the middle of nowhere. With no walls to stop missiles, or the refugees who flee  from them. No amount of demagoguery will stop climate change, which will turn half the Earth into a  desert. The play Offended. Planet turned out to be about more than conscience, resentment, trauma,  and pain. It is also about responsibility. Humanity’s responsibility to itself. To children. To the planet. To  the universe, after all. 

—Translated by John Freedman