Russia's Fine Art of Failure

In Russia, nothing succeeds like failure. Take the Decembrists, for example. In 1825 they organized a confused demonstration in St. Petersburg and a doomed little uprising around Kiev -- neither of which achieved anything at all. They called themselves "Russian knights" and "free gardeners," for heaven's sake. And a lot of their followers thought that the constitutsiya they were after was the name of the wife of Grand Duke Constantine. (It must have seemed a reasonable notion at the time.)


Yet today, they are entirely successful Russian heroes. And so is Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose "What Is To Be Done?" was probably the most influential book written in Russia in the 19th century: one that's passed, irrevocably, into the language -- even though it's virtually unreadable and must have been the same when it first hit the streets.


So there they are: a bunch of losers -- aristocratic reformists virtually to a man, and a writer who ought to have been encouraged into some other line of business -- enshrined in the Russian canon. And if you think this process of elevation is over, then think again. For nowhere else on earth is failure still met with so much honor. It can get you to the highest levels of government; it can keep you installed at the top of major art institutions. Why, it can even buy you sainthood.


The best path to Russian failure of the kind I'm talking about is actually the path of least resistance: If in doubt, do absolutely nothing. This was the guiding principle of life under the tsars, and remained a pretty good idea, by and large, in the totalitarianism that followed. Anything you actually did was probably wrong -- or would be later when the line changed. So the best thing to do was to stay your hand, keep mum, not even get out of bed in the morning -- and rise. It's no wonder that Goncharov's Oblomov -- who had, to say the least, problems with getting out of bed -- remains a national icon, his example followed by everyone from civil servants high and low to the Bolshoi's chief choreographer, who couldn't quite manage a new ballet in 13 years, yet somehow in the process got more powerful and famous -- and a whole lot richer.


If you have to do something, though, the next best thing to doing nothing is to do it in spades -- i.e. to do something so disastrous that no one will ever forget -- a huge lie, a monumental fraud, something so unutterably appalling that it makes every mouth gape in wonder. For this seems to reap exactly the same sort of rewards. Take Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, for instance. Not only did he do nothing at all -- and this is being charitable -- to deodorize the stink of corruption that surrounded the withdrawal of the Russian Army from Germany. Not only did he cause the resignation of the most popular officer in the Russian Army. He also launched -- and totally botched -- the war in Chechnya. Yet there he is, still at the top of the tree and seemingly irreplaceable.


The list of those who have shared Grachev's happy fate, though, could go on and on. There's the head of Yeltsin's bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, who has busily lurched from PR disaster to disaster. There are people from the last miserable political go-round like Yegor Gaidar, the heavyweight champion of "liberalization" and fraudulent privatization, who still basks in international acclaim. There's Sergei Mavrodi, who has gone from prison to parliament to the launch of his People's Capital Party -- which is due to make MMM, he says, "a giant pump incessantly bringing the world's financial resources to Russia." (One would like to say "Yeah, yeah," but this being Russia, anything is possible. It could just be the first country to become a pyramid scheme).


My own favorite, though, in all this is Nicholas II, who, now that his bones have been identified in some God-forsaken pit outside Yekaterinburg, is on the point of being made a saint. Now I know that Nicholas loved his wife and his family. But not even his most devoted follower could claim that he was an energetic, wise and beneficent ruler. Most of the time he didn't do much of anything; and when he did do something, it mostly turned out to be a disaster. Which -- hey, wait a minute! -- now I come to think of it, makes him a perfect cross between Oblomov and the Decembrists, with just a touch of Pavel Grachev thrown in: a quintessentially Russian figure, and an ideal image of success through failure. On second thought, I not only believe that Nicholas should be sanctified; he should immediately do duty as Russia's patron saint.