Popular Culture Predicts the Things to Come
In the mid-2010, I chanced across the English-language edition of Ukrainian artist and writer Ihor Baran’ko’s spell-binding graphic novel Jihad. Internationally known as Igor Baranko, since the turn of the 21st century, he has been active in the United States, France, Thailand, and also in Ukraine. Baranko authored the first full-fledged Ukrainian graphic novel, featuring the Cossack superhero Maxym Osa (2008).
It was the US publisher who decided on the title Jihad, which was then intended to boost sales on the wave of the West’s continuing ‘war on terror.’ The French original was titled rather more appropriately L’Empereur Océan (‘The Emperor of the Ocean,’ 2003), while the first English-language edition used The Horde (2004) for the title. Both early titles more clearly allude to the graphic novel’s main symbolic personage, or Genghis Khan, whose ‘Horde’ (steppe empire) initially (around 1206) extended from the Pacific Ocean in the east to the Caspian Sea in the west, before his successors conquered Eastern Europe half a century later.
The graphic novel’s plot is enticing but far-fetched, I thought, when I read the book for the first time. The story opens in the depressing Tuvan capital of Kyzyl (‘Red’ in Tuvan), where it always rains. It is 2040. In a room in the residence area composed from a mass of bleakly communist blocs of apartments, a stark-naked Mongolian or Tibetan woman meditates. She is an incarnation of Kali, awaiting her Shiva, who in one of his own incarnations used to be Genghis Khan. Wayward shamans, lamas and demons stack surprise upon surprise. The sitting Russian Dictator gets a whiff of the matter. He would do anything for immortality and to conquer the entire globe. Capturing the warlike spirit of Genghis Khan for this purpose seems to be a straightforward answer to his yearnings. The dictator’s brutal but high-tech rule rests on the twin pillars of the military and the Orthodox Church. Hence, the tyrant orders the top brass general and the Patriarch of Moscow to secure this martial-cum-eschatological prize for him.
Both officials have misgivings. The rational general does not believe in deities or magic, while the patriarch cannot see how heathen Genghis Khan could become a saint in the Orthodox Church’s pantheon. Yet, it is the dictator who calls the shots. They do as he ordered. Any wavering on their part would be interpreted as a lack of patriotism, leading to summary execution.
The graphic novel’s plot unfolds in Moscow and democratic Ukraine under constant Russian attack. It features the always-living mummy of Lenin and other fantastic beings. Finally, Kali and Shiva are reunited in this life, but earthly existence is fleeting. Meanwhile, in a death foretold, the patriarch slays the dictator in an awful and ridiculous accident by sticking a pencil into his eye.
In one word a tall story that Baranko dreamed up around 2000. But today, a quarter of a century later, with the privilege of hindsight, this graphic novel looks prophetic. The magnificent Resurrection of Christ Cathedral in Moscow (designated as the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces) opened to the faithful in 2020, on the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over nazi Germany. What the first visitors saw on the temple’s mosaics were Red Army troops and bloody Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, amounting to the deification of this victory and Soviet militarism on an imperial scale. Furthermore, the inclusion of the depiction of President Vladimir Putin, alongside Stalin makes this past of eight decades ago Russia’s present.
The first glimpse of this past, which has already become the country’s glorious future, the Russians got in 2014. Upon the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, they went into a hypnotic trance of turbo-patriotism, crying out and again the single-word-like slogan Krym-nash! (‘Crimea-is-ours!’). This supposed victory over ‘nazi Ukraine’ and dermokratik (‘shito-cratic’) Europe also made onto the cathedral’s wall.
Sergei Shoigu is Putin’s closest collaborator in the bloody business of rebuilding the Russian Empire. Officially he is the country’s minister of defence, but in reality the 19th-century title of ‘War Minister’ becomes him more. In the cathedral Shoigu is paired with Putin on the respective mosaic. Shoigu is an ethnic Tuvan. But in the name of this empire-under-reconstruction, he gave up on the interest and future of his native land of Tuva and its Turkic-speaking people, traditionally led by shamans and Buddhist lamas. This empire, then designated as ‘Soviet,’ annexed and enslaved Tuva on the sly in 1944, when the world was busy with World War II. Shoigu assumed the post of the top manager of Russia’s war machine. In conjunction with Patriarch Kirill, he pledged for Putin’s victory in the war on Ukraine, which the Kremlin re-started with the full-scale invasion in 2022.
Under the patriarch’s careful pastoral care, the Russian Orthodox Church wholeheartedly supports Moscow’s unholy war. In the spring of 2022, after lifting Russian occupation in north-central Ukraine, a genocidal massacre was discovered in the town of Bucha near the country’s capital of Kyiv. It was the Russian occupiers who had perpetrated this horrific crime against humanity. As the ultimate authority on morality in Russia, Patriarch Kirill had to take a stance on this issue. Fittingly, he brushed off multiplying reports on this genocide as a piece of ‘Western propaganda.’ The patriarch opined that ‘peaceful, peace-loving and modest [Russians] just protect[ed] our homeland.’
Other parallels between present-day totalitarian Russia and the graphic novel are rather uncanny. Branko also predicted the mixed Soviet-Nazi esthetics that visually underpins the Russian propaganda in the time of war. For instance, following Moscow’s onslaught on Ukraine, the Z-swastika became ubiquitous in the symbolism of Russian neoimperialism on street posters, during official rallies and in television.
Shaman
In 2019, a Sakha (Yakut) shaman Oyuun Haaska embarked on an 7,500-kilometer-long trek from his home Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in Siberia to Moscow. To the world he is known under the Russian-language name of Alexander Prokopievich Gabyshev, which civil servants of Soviet imperialism had imposed on him. Now Gabyshev is increasingly better known under his self-adopted Sakha name Ойуун Һааска (Oyuun Haaska), literally meaning ‘Shaman Sasha.’
The shaman’s self-professed goal of this trek was to ‘drive the evil spirit of Putin from the Kremlin.’ In Haaska’s own words, unless he would exorcise ‘demon Putin’ soon, the Russian dictator would start a great war. The shaman voiced this prediction three years before Russia’s 2022 onslaught on Ukraine. Haaska recorded his progress on the way to the Russian capital in an online video blog. Most saw the shaman as a harmless eccentric, a Russian Forrest Gump. Yet, his decision to take singlehandedly on the powers that be began attracting followers, both online and along the route of Haaska’s transcontinental walk. The shaman had been trekking for half a year before policemen arrested him. At this stage, he had already walked for 2,600 kilometers. The remaining 5,000 kilometres to Moscow, Haaska would have covered in a year or so at the established pace. But the authorities would not suffer the unruly folly of a Sakha Forrest Gump. Unlike in the US, in Russia the rule of law is supreme.
At times, a different explanation of the curious situation is whispered. Perhaps, the Kremlin took genuine fright and, thus, reacted in a heavy-handed manner typical of the Soviet times. Haaska was arrested and returned to Sakha for psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. The straightforward press description of these events should not blind readers to the fact that the police basically bundled the shaman up to an unmarked van serving the role of a black maria in the Siberian outback. The thankless and difficult ride through the taiga on dirt tracks took them a week. Out of their own boredom or on the superiors’ orders, the policemen roughed Haaska up, so that he would give up on ‘these stupidities’ and the ‘Yakut superstitions.’ But according to the Russian law, traveling across this vast country on foot and spinning tall tales do not amount to any crime. Tourists are wont to do stranger things than that. Soon afterward, the shaman was discharged from psychiatric care. But the authorities took him under close surveillance.
Enjoying the first days of regained freedom, Haaska solemnly promised to his followers that he would resume the delayed trek to Moscow in spring 2020. After all the original task remained unfulfilled. The shaman feared that he would not make it in time to stop the Kremlin’s demon from starting a horrific war. To save the world, Haaska still had to do his best to exorcise the evil spirit from Putin. Before the shaman could hit the track again, he was confined to a psychiatric hospital. The ‘treatment’ – or rather threat – did not work. Adversities and hurdles put in his way only steeled the shaman’s resolution. He focused all his efforts on resuming the walk to Moscow. The Russian word employed to describe the trek, pokhod, displays eschatological undertones, as it also refers to the crusades.
It was the last drop for the demon in the Kremlin. The specter of crowds of angry protesters walking across Russia to exorcise the Russian president in Moscow became all too real. The local authorities in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, guided from the capital, already knew what to do to prevent the looming confrontation between the shaman and the demon. In 2021, the police again arrested Haaska on the administrative border of Irkutsk Region. The shaman was committed to another asylum, this time in Siberia’s largest city of Novosibirsk. The expectation was that the ethnically Russian psychiatrists would take a better care of this ‘deluded native’ than their colleagues in Sakha the previous year. The assumption is that the shaman’s educated co-ethnics were not ‘objective’ in their choice and application of ‘cures’ in this difficult case.
In the meantime, Putin amassed an invasion army of 200,000 Russian troops along the Ukrainian frontier both in Russia and Belarus. In January 2022, the Kremlin rejected out of hand any accusations that Russia was preparing a full-scale on Ukraine. According to the Russian government, it was just regular military games.
The shaman failed to exorcise the demon of his lies and warmongering. His quest resonated in art, pop music and even theatre. But it was too late. Evil triumphed. The Russian army pounced on Ukraine at dawn on 24 February 2022. In light of the Russian propaganda’s needs entailed by the ‘special military operation,’ the authorities decided to cut the shaman’s saga short. Haaska was transferred to a psychiatric hospital in Ussuriisk for compulsory treatment. De facto this is a life sentence with no hope of release offered to the patient-cum-inmate. The Soviet-style punitive (polititical) psychiatry returned to Russia with vengeance. In December 2023 Haaska’s request to be transferred to an open hospital was declined. Hardly does anyone remember now about the political prisoner that the shaman undoubtedly is.
On top of that, no Russian city is located farther from Moscow. In terms of distances involved, Ussuriisk is just a stone’s throw of 800 kilometers across the sea from Japan. The Primorski Region authorities play it safe. Even if Haaska evades the hospital guards and escapes, it would take him at least two to three years to walk all the way to Moscow. The good chance is that he would perish en route, due to exhaustion, inclement weather or sheer effort needed to hide from the police.
False Shaman
The attraction of the genuine shaman was not lost on the ruling ‘demonic powers’ in the Kremlin. Russian history is littered with false (self-declared, pretender) tsars. Why not a false shaman that would work in support of the Russian president rather than against him?
The ruling elite’s choice fell on aspiring pop singer Iaroslav Iur’evich Dronov, who had been active on the stage since the early 2010s. It was of a symbolic importance for the propaganda project that Dronov was born in 1991. His birth coincided with the breakup of the Soviet Union. According to Putin, this event was the 20th century’s greatest geopolitical tragedy. The Russian president vowed to rebuild the Soviet Union as a renewed Russian Empire in its 1914 borders.
The plot thickens. In 2020, Dronov adopted the stage name of Shaman, alongside a patriotic image in synch with the Kremlin’s neoimperial project. Conveniently for the Russian authorities, Dronov’s stage career developed quickly. The singer’s artistic pseudonym overshadowed and gradually erased Haaska from cyberspace and the Russian public opinion’s attention. The name ‘Shaman’ ceased sending chills down the Kremlin’s spine. Instead, it became a balm to each Russian imperialist’s heart, including the president and his courtiers.
Russia’s Defender of the Fatherland Day commemorates the founding of the Red Army in 1917. It falls on 23 February. In 2022, on this very day, Shaman released his new song in memory of the fallen in the Great Patriotic War. This is the preferred Russian designation for World War II, less the period 1939-1941. During the initial three years of the bloodbath, Moscow and Berlin formed a brown-red alliance for partitioning together Poland and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe.
This song, titled Vstanem (‘we will rise up [from the knees]’), helped ramping up patriotic fervor across Russia on the eve of the Russian onslaught on Ukraine. The attack followed at dawn the very next day. But Putin’s blitzkrieg stalled. The Kremlin’s promise that Kyiv would fall in three days did not materialize. No Russian victory parade took place in the Ukrainian capital. Instead, hundreds of thousands of educated well-to-do Russians eligible for conscription began fleeing abroad. The invading army was sustaining heavy losses in Ukraine and badly needed more recruits.
Another song of Shaman’s was the answer. The Kremlin’s propaganda equates the unprovoked Russian invasion of peaceful Ukraine with the Great Patriotic War. In this deluded frame of mind year 2024 is 1941. On 22 June 1941, Moscow’s nazi ally of German attacked the Soviet Union, like Russia attacked Ukraine. In Russian propagandists’ twisted logic, the past became the present and the present morphed into the past. In this timeless patriotic present, a month later, on 22 July 1941 New Style (that is, 2024 Old Style), the hit Ia Russkii (‘I am a Russian’) gathered tens of millions of page views online.
In Russian the word Russkii means ‘ethnically Russian’ as opposed to Rossiianin, that is, ‘an inhabitant or citizen of Russia, irrespective of language, ethnicity or religion.’ With this song, the ethnically Russian vocalist Shaman was subliminally appealing to ethnically Russian males. The patriotic message was that the latter should rise to the challenge of defending Mother Russia by joining the thinning ranks of the country’s conquistadors in Ukraine. The singer emphasized this call to arms with the oft-repeated slogan Ia russkii vsemu miru nazlo! ‘I am Russian to spite all the world!’ Although, at the subliminal level, the slogan’s ending may be also interpreted as ‘to sow evil across the entire world.’ Imagery employed in the accompanying video clip appropriates for Russia the rural landscape of a wheat field with the sky above it, which underpins the Ukrainian flag’s color scheme. The song’s rallying effect was good but insufficient. In September 2022, Putin was compelled to announce mobilization.
The transformation of Shaman into the Kremlin’s pop force of choice was remarkable. The vocalist is still on the make, presumably, under the close guidance of the Kremlin’s image specialists, or so-called polittekhnologs (‘specialists in the field of applied technologies for conducting politics’). On 20 April 2023 – coincidentally, or on purpose on the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birthday – a new song was released, concisely titled My (‘We’). The production’s video clip saw the chilling overhaul of Shaman’s image form a generic Russian pop star with dreadlocks into that of a ‘blond nazi officer of pure Aryan blood.’ A long cry from Haaska and his likes of ethnically non-Russian origin, Siberia’s indigenous peoples conquered and suppressed by ethnic Russians during the past half a millennium. In the Kremlin’s view, these ‘barbarian natives’ should be thankful for the Rossiianin status of a second-class citizen generously extended to them in the resurgent neoimperial Russia. Let the ‘natives’ then pay for this privilege by taking disproportionately more casualties during the war in Ukraine than ethnic Russians themselves.
In July 2023, Shaman’s new song Moi boi (‘My Struggle’) appeared. In its title, this song directly refers to Hitler’s infamous work Mein Kampf. The video clip’s imagery intersperses the singer with the pictures of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine. The warzone’s towns and cities reduced to rubble serve as the background. The story’s plot poses the ruins as though located somewhere in Russia. Such a false contextualization imposed on the audience; the soldiers appear to be defending their country against some unnamed aggressor. In today’s Russia Shaman flogs up audiences into patriotic frenzy. It is as much thanks to the lyrics as to the singer’s image reeking of nazi Germany.
Who now remembers about the true Sakha Shaman-turned-political prisoner? Did the Kremlin already win most Russians’ hearts by remaking the country’s official ideology and culture in emulation of the Third Reich? Must Russia become a Rashist empire? Who can now exorcise the demons of war in the Kremlin?
These are timely questions that require serious pondering. Culture, religion, language, cyberspace and what else have not been yet weaponized for the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine and the ‘collective’ West? Over two decades ago, when Baranko conceived his graphic novel Jihad, a scenario of this kind was just a far-fetched fantasy. Asking such questions then would have appeared to be a fit of madness. But this geopolitical storm was already brewing in Putin’s head, a vengeful KGB officer humiliated in his career plans by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now the Russian president-for-life’s anti-Western and resurgent Russia lives out both this graphic novel’s unbelievable plot and the timeline of the Great Patriotic War. I shudder at what may come next.
Can at least Sakha (Yakutia) be spared the coming conflagration? As long as he lives, Haaska has a chance to meet and confront the Kremlin’s ethnically Russian ‘demons of war’ if they dare to arrive on the border of his homeland of Sakha. But will the true Shaman’s exorcisms manage to stop these evil spirts in their imperialist tracks?
