In the 1980s, though, I was still inexperienced in this regard. All this is inevitable, and when I speak, write, or communicate with people, I always take this reaction into account. Now it has switched back to an extremely negative one. Later, due to the Soviet Union’s collapse, the attitude changed to a more positive one. When I came to the West, the attitude towards Russians was negative. It is generally believed that emigrants were welcomed back then, but this is not the case. I have a lot of experience in this sense: I emigrated to the West in 1981. Inevitably, the attitude towards Russia’s actions as a country is superimposed on this perception of me.

Nevertheless, I know that others see me primarily as Russian, and I must constantly take this into account. Unfortunately, I don’t even feel old, although I definitely am old. To what extent do you, a man with thirty years of experience as an emigrant, feel like a Russian implicated in post-Soviet civilization?īoris Groys: As for me personally, I don’t feel bound up with any identity whatsoever. It was the “return to the great past,” the philosopher recalls, that in the 1990s underpinned the idea of a post-reform Russia, which was essentially a sequel to the Stalinist restoration.Īndrei Arkhangelsky: Since February 24, 2022, none of us has been able to adopt an individualist approach and claim to be responsible only for ourselves: we are all now responsible-in the eyes of others-for the Putin regime’s actions. While unreservedly condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine, the philosopher suggests that we regard it as part of a broader “civilizational rollback,” as an attempt to return to the imaginary year of 1913, which was a universal touchstone for both czarist and Soviet propaganda. He gave lectures to peaceful protesters in Moscow in 2012 and has repeatedly voiced support for Russian political prisoners. The most renowned Soviet-born Western intellectual in the world and author of the groundbreaking book The Total Art of Stalinism (1992), Groys has been in steady dialogue with post-Soviet Russia. The philosopher and cultural critic Boris Groys emigrated from the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Boris Groys at HKW, Berlin, during the opening of the exhibition “Art Without Death,” 2017.

Rise of Kings : Endless War free