Paranoia: A Novel by Victor Martinovich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Corporate Living

Oh, the challenge of being a Yuppie in Stalinesque Belarus: cell phones, and Marks & Spencer's, and macchiato and Lexus four-wheel drives; dominated by the KGB (MGB in Paranoia), dodgy electric circuits and Soviet-era quality architecture. It's like American Psycho but with the protagonist living in a two-room walk-up in the South Bronx. A certain tension is to be expected.

This is a land in which quasi-bohemian writers (of whom Anatoly Nevinsky, protagonist) and internet nerds confront the state security services. These are residents of the ultimate corporate, only lately Communist, state, which provides cradle to grave stability (repression), recognition (surveillance) and attentive care (harassment) for those who behave themselves (or don’t). Providing short-term, on-demand contract employment (no minimal hours) with the promise of the possibility of unlimited consumption of white goods, and cafe culture a la Casablanca 1942. A sort of pre-post-modernist idyll. Romania in 1988.

Much has been modernised since the clumsiness of the old Soviet republic. Even the KGB functions by creating a controlled advertising image rather than allowing the public to invent their possibly calumnious versions of the protectors of national morals. No more goons in leather coats. Just the laconic corporate slogan: "We see, we hear, we know" expressing the delicate combination of sensitivity and power in the central institution of Belarusian society. Google run by Trump.

"What's distinctive about the present epoch is that nowadays anti-utopias can be based entirely on factual material", says one of Martinovitch's characters. 1984 and Animal Farm had to be written by Orwell as impressionistic fantasies because documented facts about the Stalinist system were unavailable. But Martinovich paints from reality, in tones of concrete grey, a brutalist literature, therefore, with colourful splashes of BMW's and Audi A8's. Nothing needs to be hidden here. The game is played in the open. This is the definition of a free society, no?

It would be a mistake to consider Paranoia as merely an existential take on young adult life in present-day Belarus. It is that certainly. But the extremes Martinovich burlesques are facts of contemporary international, not just Belarusian, culture. Anatoly's daily life isn't much different from that of his peers in Europe or North America. Yes, clandestine sex is easier in New York City than in Minsk, but probably just as difficult for a struggling writer with limited resources in, say, Tokyo, and certainly in Jeddah. Like almost every young man of moderate education and minimal awareness, Anatoly tries to get on in a world he didn't make, falls in love with the wrong person, and doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut around authority figures. Anatoly could easily fit into Rupert Dreyfus's 2014 novel Spark, whose protagonist is a similar 'snowflake' who wanders into a collision with the British security services.

Do the maths: Take an Anthony not an Anatoly, let's say from Brooklyn rather than Minsk. Anthony-from-Brooklyn has no more job-choice than Anatoly-from-Minsk; he can work for City Bank or the government, the two biggest employers in New York City. And working for either one will throw Anthony-from-Brooklyn into the great panopticon of investigative vetting which will follow him the rest of his days. He will be continuously evaluated as to his team spirit, his ideological suitability, as he moves, perhaps, back and forth between the two employers (During my time in the military, something called 'adaptability polls' were used to assess just this; one's peers and superiors periodically forced ranked everyone in the cadre according to attitudinal traits considered relevant to loyal service; the results were used to determine promotion and references).

So Anthony-from-Brooklyn's career is then established. The paper-trail on which his reputation is recorded in corporate offices, and upon which his livelihood, his pension, and a large part of his identity hangs is who he is, his corporate identity. The fact that Anatoly’s equivalent records in Minsk are all in one place in the KGB archives hardly matters in the age of internet data-sharing. And if Anthony-from-Brooklyn happens to be Black, or Islamic, or just a mouthy white boy, he's just as likely to spend some time on Riker's Island as Anatoly is in KGB HQ detention cells. Anatoly and Anthony share much more than we might be willing to admit. For a start neither one is Republican.

What Martinovich describes are the essential features of life in the modern corporate world no matter what language is spoken or national political history. The corporation not the state rules. Constant vigilance over personnel and archival maintenance are essential to the smooth running of corporate interactions. The traditional concerns of bureaucracy are combined in this world with the tensions of security, both commercial and political. The result is a sort of permanent condition of high terror-alert, which of course is in itself terror. Neither torture nor physical threats are necessary to keep the peace. Instruments of control have been internalised: the fear of failure, of redundancy, of technological obsolescence, of inadequacy of either skills or, even more crucially, of will to succeed. Aspire or die. Dropping-out is a theoretical possibility but practically destructive to health and satisfying family life.

Belarus sounds like a horrid place to live. But not because of fear of imminent arrest, imprisonment, and exile. Belarus after all doesn't have a Siberian Gulag and has fewer incarcerations per head of population than the United States (554 vs. 715 per 100,000). The techniques of assuring political conformance are a bit subtler than in the old days. It's enough now to be able to wreck a career and make life an administrative nightmare among a relatively well-educated urbanised population. If you don't think the FBI and CIA write and store surveillance reports at a level of equivalent banality and triviality as those by the KGB in Paranoia, wake up and smell the ether (See that well known radical publication, The Wall Street Journal, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014...
578641993388259674).

No need any longer to prevent access to foreign luxuries in Belarus or anywhere else. Just make sure the right people, those who 'contribute', get them. And do keep the process through which contribution is defined a bit vague inside the corporate leadership of the KGB...and Citibank of course. Young people of the snowflake generation are so much easier to indoctrinate than the bourgeoisie ever were. Their feeling of entitlement is easier to exploit. Let the dissatisfied ones emigrate if they dare. Life out West isn't easy. And when they find out they need references, they'll be back. If not, there are others here who know how we work. Belarus is evidence that totalitarianism can absorb consumerist culture more smoothly than the reverse. It's the corporate way.

Having come of age during the Vietnam War and intense American nationalistic paranoia, I don't detect much difference between Anatoly's crime of "defamation of the Motherland" and the tag of "unpatriotic slacker, coward" I heard hurled at a friend who very sensibly headed North of 44 degrees 40 minutes in 1967. He, like a character in Anatoly's book, was dismissed from university for brash impoliteness to a professor with the sure and certain knowledge that he would be drafted and on his way to Cam Ranh Bay within months. La meme chose as far as I can see.

Conformity achieved through corporate incentive is far more effective than physical threat. Paranoia begins with an inversion of the biblical story of creation, "There was light, and then came darkness." The darkness he is referring to seems to be precisely the incentives that are the reality of everyone in Martinovich's Belarus. But not only there. We all suffer at least a bit from the same nagging suspicion that someone's out to get us. If not Vladimir, then Donald. So we play along. That, too, is the corporate way.

View all my reviews