Russia, Land of Free Speech

Pep Montserrat for The Chronicle Review

I’m back in Russia, where I can finally speak freely. Perhaps I should explain.

With the reinvigoration of Cold War rhetoric, many in America picture Russia as a bunch of homophobic politicians and church leaders stomping out all but officially sanctioned discussion. And, um, yeah — that’s accurate. But as someone who has lived, worked, studied, and taught in both countries since 1984, I can tell you that it’s just part of a far more complicated picture.

Recently I met another professor from the Russian university where I teach. She, too, is well versed in American and Russian academe, and we found ourselves bonding over a shared sense that it’s somewhat easier to teach in Russia these days than in the United States. Both of us felt that there was less censorship in our Russian classrooms, less fear of angering students or administrators.

This will no doubt come as a surprise to my American colleagues, one of whom asked me, “Why would you spend your sabbatical in Russia?” No matter how often I explained the reasons, she would forget and ask me again, a kind of nationalistic dementia. Here, on the other hand, most of my Russian colleagues can’t imagine that there might be any censorship in the United States, where higher education is perceived as the gold standard for the free exchange of ideas.

To be clear, censorship in Russia is real, pervasive, and deeply troubling. It comes from above — for instance, the government ban on “homosexual propaganda” and an even more opaque law against offending religious sensibilities.

I was recently invited to give a talk about my current research at a large academic conference in Moscow. I told the organizer that my recent work is about Russia’s state views on homosexuality within the context of a nationalist agenda. Since such a talk would violate the ban on homosexual propaganda to minors — students under 18 would be in the audience — she asked if I would speak on older work (which I did).

Moscow’s city council in August shut down a film festival known for its queer content and other ostensibly radical and controversial themes. The council based its decision, it said, on “difficult economic conditions,” but it replaced the festival with a new “positive, youth-oriented one.”

Moreover, state censorship spurs unofficial acts of hate, destruction, and narrow-mindedness. In Moscow, Russian Orthodox hooligans destroyed an art exhibit that they accused of “offending religious sensibilities.” And in August, not far from where I live in St. Petersburg, two men tore down a prized century-old bas-relief of Mephistopheles on a building across the street from a church under construction. A letter sent by a self-proclaimed Cossack taking responsibility for the act said the sculpture was offensive to Orthodox believers.

An old joke here is that “the laws in Russia are so strict because everyone ignores them.” It’s not funny, but it does get at the resistance that has long thrived here. At my Russian university, snuggled safely within the intelligentsia, people are committed to the free exchange of ideas. The reverence for saying what you mean dates back to the Soviet era.

As an undergrad and then a graduate student in Russia, I knew people who risked their freedom, even their lives to publish journals of political satire, feminist theory, or gay literature. Despite the oppressive state censorship, educated people did then what they do now: They created spaces in which they could say what they thought. In certain universities, departments, and classrooms; around someone’s kitchen table; and at political gatherings in parks and cafes, no one ever forbade anyone else’s speech. When speech offended or undermined the ethics of those gathered, vigorous debate ensued. And Gorbachev’s Russia was not Stalin’s. People were not hauled off in the middle of the night for what they said outside of the public sphere.

Meanwhile, in America, censorship emanates from within universities. The desire for safe spaces has created a minefield of forbidden speech that students, professors, and administrators alike must navigate. It is not that these forms of censorship are meaningless or ill-intentioned. They come out of a deep and abiding sense that we owe one another respect, that structural inequalities can play out in personal interactions, and that symbolic violence is, in fact, violence. As Sara Ahmed argues in a recent essay, this impulse to control speech is an attempt to include previously excluded people in the conversation:

“Trigger warnings are assumed as being about being safe or warm or cuddled. I would describe trigger warnings as a partial and necessarily inadequate measure to enable some people to stay in the room so that ‘difficult issues’ can be discussed.”

I respectfully disagree. In my experience, more-honest conversations happen in Russian classrooms than in American ones precisely because of the current Western intellectual climate encouraging us to avoid speech rather than engage with it. Moreover, this chilling effect falls hardest on academics low on the ladder: the ever-growing number of untenured and contract faculty members.

That has racial and gender implications, too. Tenured professors, far less vulnerable to student evaluations, are more likely to be white and male than adjuncts are. Professors from marginalized groups are more likely to receive negative student reviews. The result is that in many American classrooms, the powerless must watch what they say far more than the powerful do.

In my American classrooms, I have been asked to put trigger warnings on most of what I discuss in my courses, which are about gender, race, and sexuality and therefore full of potentially volatile images and texts. I want everyone to be part of the conversation, but I am not sure this is the answer. If I were not tenured, I just wouldn’t teach about social power, because it is ugly, messy, and likely to upset people.

In my Russian classrooms, I show and talk about whatever I think will help us dig deeper into the texts. I don’t worry about what it will trigger in students. And they aren’t interested in stopping me; they prize the freedom to speak their minds truthfully. That is because outside of the classroom, theirs is a highly censored world.

The other day I was teaching Talcott Parsons’s theory of sex roles. I started discussing his daughter, Anne, an anthropologist and “career woman” who was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit, where she eventually killed herself. I might not have mentioned the suicide in the U.S., at least not without wincing, knowing that someone would point out that it could trigger someone in the room. But Anne Parsons’s suicide, in the framework of her father’s normative sociology and patriarchy, is not just part of the story; it is the point. I wanted my Russian students to know this, but I might have shielded my American students.

Perhaps that is the real difference between classrooms in America and Russia. In Russia, the common enemies of all free thinkers are the state and the church. Intellectuals of all stripes understand this and so huddle together and agree to disagree, to shout, yell, and say what they really mean.

In America, the enemy is internal and therefore more difficult to locate. Am I the enemy for not giving trigger warnings and for refusing to stop all microaggressions in my classroom? Are the enemies my students, many from marginalized groups, for demanding safer spaces? Maybe it is the administrators who make academic labor more and more precarious and thus more and more nervous? Perhaps we are all our own worst enemies.

The truth is that as long as racism, misogyny, and homophobia are entrenched in our culture, students will be exposed to racist, sexist, and homophobic speech. That’s inevitable. But the protest, too, should be inevitable. Protest does not shut down free speech; it is free speech. Calling speech out for being oppressive is part of the dialogue and a way of “staying in the room” even when you feel that you’re not wanted there.

If what we disagree with is only ever said privately, and we are never given the chance to contest speech we find offensive, then our places of higher education will become far more like Russia’s public sphere: an intellectual dead end.

Wouldn’t that be ironic? Russian academe becomes a free-speech bubble within an oppressive state, and American academe becomes a repressive bubble within a dynamic, chaotic democracy.

It is not that speech is freer in Russia. But there is a deeper and fuller understanding that knowledge demands contestation. We can never know the world by shutting it out. You can force disagreement to move out of the open, into the little nooks and crevices left after power has cleansed all offensive speech. But you can never make the disagreement disappear.

Russian intellectuals have long understood that the ability to say what they really think is one of the few battles worth fighting. If only America’s educated classes understood that. Hearing speech that is meant to exclude, speech that is racist, sexist, homophobic, is sometimes painful. But it is also necessary to the joy of discovering one’s own voice.

Laurie Essig is a professor of sociology and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Middlebury College. She is a Fulbright Scholar at the European University at St. Petersburg.