Bookstore politics

When in Russia, I like to take a look at the shelves of the politics section in major bookstores, in order to get some flavour of what politically-interested Russians are reading. The assumption is that what’s on sale reflects what people buy, and that what people buy tells us something about political preferences. It’s perhaps not the most sophisticated method of assessing educated opinion, but I find it interesting nonetheless.

On Sunday, therefore, I popped into the big bookstore in the Singer building on Nevsky Prospekt in St Petersburg, and took a look at what what was on the shelves of the politics section there. This photo shows the main finding:

What you see here is an entire shelf of books authored or co-authored by Nikolai Starikov. We’ve discussed Starikov before on this blog, in the context of his attempts (in the face of the documentary evidence) to deny that the Soviets murdered several thousand Polish officers at Katyn during World War Two. Starikov peddles a sort of anti-Western Russian nationalism allied with apologies for the Soviet Union. He takes the line that the history of the Soviet regime, particularly under Josef Stalin, is used by the West to discredit the USSR and through that undermine modern Russia. From this it follows that the Soviet Union must be defended, and the costs of Stalin’s policies downplayed, in order to defend Russia against the West today. Historical truth thus has to be interpreted in the light of the role it can play in contemporary geopolitics.

It’s a little disturbing, therefore, to see how popular Starikov’s books seem to be. In fact the situation is even worse than it seems, as above the shelf of Starikov books I found another shelf full of works listed as ‘Nikolai Starikov Recommends’, like these:

Here we have a book about the Kurile Islands, another entitled ‘Russophobia’ whose content is pretty self explanatory (the West, along its Russian liberal allies, hate Russia), and a third about State Language as a Weapon of Power.

Elsewhere on the bookstore, I found another book on Russophobia, authored by (surprise,  surprise) Nikolai Starikov. Next to it was a copy of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s famous tome The Grand Chessboard, which is often viewed in Russia as the blueprint of the Western master plan to crush and dismember Russia. The juxtaposition of the two books makes a very clear political point.

None of this is to say that works by more liberal authors were entirely absent. As you can see in the next picture, a book by Vladislav Inozemtsev entitled An Unmodern Country: Russia in the 21st Century World was also for sale. The liberal effect was rather undermined, however, by the book in blue to left by Anna Shafran, which seems intent on proving Inozemtsev right through its the uncomprising title, A State of Honour: Monarchy, Russia’s Future.

Overall, conservative and anti-Western themes dominate the bookstore politics section. Underneath the collection of Starikov’s spewing we find, for instance, several of the works of the ‘left conservative’ economist Sergei Glazyev, who peddles the line that the United States is deliberately spreading chaos around the world in order to harm potential rivals, most notably Russia.

More than the West as a whole, it’s the USA and its British ally who seem to be enemy no. 1. This can be clearly seen in another book on display in St Petersburg: Evgeny Fyodorov’s Anglo-Saxons and Russia.

 

As the blurb at the back says, ‘Russia’s sovereignty … is in question (due to) 40 years of opposition from the United States’.

The enemy lies not only without, however, but also within, as you can see in Evgeny Tolstykh’s Fifth Column: Made in USA.

By now, I’m sure, you’ve got the point. If the shelves of this particular bookstore are anything to go by, there’s not much of a market in Russia for anything willing to give the Western world even the slightest benefit of the doubt. That doesn’t totally surprise me, but I had thought that St Petersburg, which has a reputation as being relatively liberal and pro-Western by Russian standards, might be a little different. Apparently not. For anyone hoping for a bit more mutual understanding between Russia and the West, it does not bode well.