Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present

30 Boris Akunin

Boris Akunin (Grigorii Chkhartishvili) Playing with Imperial History. From Boris Akunin, Smert' na brudershaft 2 (Moscow: 2008). •• • 30 Boris Akunin (Grigorii Shalvovich Chkhartishvili, 1956–) STEPHEN M. NORRIS The most famous living author in a country that has long worshipped its literary stars, Boris Akunin is really two people—both products of empire. The first Akunin is his creator, for Akunin is a pseudonym used by a Georgian literary scholar of Japan named Grigorii Chkhartishvili. The second Akunin is the creator of an alternate empire , a place described by the author as “a country resembling Russia,” where the forces that sustained and ultimately dissolved the empire of the Romanovs are turned into playful points of debate and the basis for a good detective story. The first Akunin is a product of the Soviet empire and the specific milieu of late socialism, and the second is a product of the post-Soviet cultural desire to understand the Russia that may have been lost in 1917. Turning Japanese Born in a significant year in a significant place, Grigorii Chkhartishvili’s Soviet life was in many ways a typically atypical one. The son of a Georgian father and a Jewish mother whose families had long since become assimilated Muscovites, Grigorii arrived on the scene in May 1956. The fact that he was born in Tbilisi was part coincidence, for Chkhartishvili’s father was at the time a member of Stalin’s Red Army Georgian unit, created as an imagined Praetorian Guard and as a symbol of the Georgian acceptance of Soviet socialism (or perhaps the Soviet acceptance of Georgian socialism). Chkhartishvili’s unit was stationed in Central Asia and then in Georgia; thus, Grigorii was born in his ethnic homeland. Just three months before Grigorii’s birth, however, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev delivered his Secret Speech at the Communist Party’s Twentieth Party Congress, where he denounced Stalin’s cult of personality in a packed special session. Fearing a revolt among the supposedly Stalinist loyalists who made up the Georgian guard, Khrushchev eventually had the unit disbanded. The Chkhartishvilis moved back home, to Moscow, within a year of Grigorii’s birth. Chkhartishvili senior did not protest. 328 Stephen M. Norris Grigorii maintained no connections with his homeland, nor did his parents encourage him to do so. He does not speak Georgian and has returned to Tbilisi only once. However, in many ways, because of the way Soviet nationality policies worked, Grigorii Chkhartishvili was deemed “Georgian,” not “Russian,” and therefore had to claim Georgian nationality on his Soviet passport. Soviet nationality experts, beginning with Stalin himself (a fellow ethnic Georgian), viewed Georgians as one of the great power nations within the larger Soviet empire of nations. Georgians, the Soviet state decided, oppressed and exploited their Ossetian and Abkhazian minorities but also had acquired a sense of national consciousness by the twentieth century. Georgia became a Soviet republic because of this perceived enlightenment, but ethnic minorities within Georgia gained special rights. Within each national republic and among other nationalities, the Soviet state encouraged the national minorities to develop their own “national cultures.” Georgians were encouraged to learn their own history , folklore, and culture while also learning about the other national groups within the Soviet empire of nations. In sum, as Yuri Slezkine has defined it, the Soviet state functioned like a communal apartment. Each nationality got a room next to other nationalities. Although the Russians got the biggest room (metaphorically speaking ), the Ukrainians and Georgians got the next best rooms. As Slezkine has argued, however, Soviet encouragement to develop a sense of nationhood also encouraged ethnic particularism: Georgians quarreled with Armenians and Russians within the apartment.1 Because of the stress on “nationality,” the Soviet state ultimately viewed Grigorii Chkhartishvili, despite his Muscovite roots, as “Georgian.”2 Being Georgian may have meant occupying a nice place at the table of Soviet nationalities , but it also meant coming from the Caucasus. Many Soviet citizens viewed Caucasians as swarthy bandits predisposed to corruption and violence. Soviet society certainly revered Georgian artists such as the film director Georgii Daneliia and the singer Bulat Okudzhava. At the same time, as Georgii Chkhartishvili was well aware, films such as the 1967 comedy Kidnapping Caucasian Style and Daneliia’s 1977 comedy Mimino depicted Georgians and other Caucasian peoples as scheming, boorish, and criminal. Being Georgian—even if one thought of oneself as Russian—carried certain connotations. Chkhartishvili grew up Georgian...