#21 - JRL 8074
From: "Gideon Lichfield" <gideonlichfield@economist.com>
Mailing-List: list
gideonlichfield@yahoogroups.com;
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004
Subject: Gideon-Moscow 45 - The Master and Ivan
I've been late in sending out last week's article partly because, to be honest, I felt a bit ashamed of it. I had written before on this mailing list about how modern-day Russia resembled Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita", and the idea of comparing Ivan Rybkin's mysterious vanishing act to that of Styopa Likhodeyev was a brilliant one (thanks to Arkady Ostrovsky for giving me the idea and letting me use it). And I was not the only journalist to have a bit of gentle fun with the absurdities of a presidential candidate disappearing into thin air and turning up in a different country claiming he'd just gone to to have a quiet couple of days to himself.
But as Matt Bivens later pointed out in the Moscow Times, Rybkin's disappearance is no laughing matter. It would be if he really had pulled it as a pre-election publicity stunt, as his detractors claimed. But the ones who claimed that were all well-known Kremlin stooges. After he got to London, Rybkin started talking about being kidnapped, drugged and made to do unspeakable things on video rather as if he'd been abducted by aliens, which, according to Oleg Kalugin, everybody's favourite defector, is precisely how the KGB's SP-117 truth drug makes you feel. Meanwhile, rather than coming back to Russia to participate in debates and stir things up as he should be doing if it was all for publicity, Rybkin is staying in London, keeping out of the spotlight, and apparently trying to decide whether it is worth his life, let alone the election, to return to Russia.
Then again, all of this only makes the parallel with "Master" sharper. On being magicked to Yalta, Styopa Likhodeyev, a theatre director, starts on a series of frantic attempts to convince his friends, who have great difficulty accepting that he is in Yalta at all, never mind that he was transported there instantly after a meeting with a foreign magician and a large black cat. He is ridiculed by all and sundry, spends eight days at a clinic where he is confined to a secure cell at his own request, and ultimately ends up as a shop manager in Rostov, where, it is said, "he has become taciturn and keeps away from women." Nobody believed Rybkin's story and he was ribbed mercilessly; now he is awaiting the results of clinical tests (which, concidentally, are also taking about eight days) to find out what happened to him during his absence; and by the looks of it, the most sensible thing he could do right now would be to stay in London, become taciturn, and keep away from politics.
Suddenly, therefore, I have understood the allegories in "The Master and Margarita" in a way that I never did before. Everything that Bulgakov writes about mysterious disappearances, unexplained phenomena, records vanishing from files, sinister people with apparently supernatural powers is a satire on the Stalin terror, but written in such an absurdist way that it is hard to relate to if you didn't live through those years yourself. Rybkin's case is an uncannily close real-life example that gives the book an immediate context. And the scary thing, of course, is that it happened not in Stalin's time, but last week.