5 2
July-August 2018
T
HE FRIENDLY chap waiting patiently on the city bench pictured
is called Zhdun and Zhdun has an unusual penchant, or compul-
sion perhaps, for waiting. It’s in his name, Zhdun is a play on
‘zhdat’, the Russian verb to wait, and so it’s his inescapable
reason to be, at least until that something special comes along
to satiate that which we know not what.
It’s not even certain that he’s a he, he could be a she, or a hermaph-
rodite or or some form of inspired zooidal spacecraft transporting the
millions and billions but whatever the truth, we are quite sure of one
thing, Zhdun is a dab hand at playing the waiting game. He (for conveni-
ence) has become a ubiquitous figure in the annals of Russian and
Ukrainian sub-culture (where he goes by the name of Pochekun), social
media, even the political sphere, where he sits, waiting, watching, with
hands folded and seemingly mute, alien cum seal cum future face of
humanity.
Our alien friend may have won the limelight in Mother Russia but he
does not hail from her vast shores. He is Dutch by birth, created by sculp-
tor Margriet Van Breevoort and was originally given the intimidating
moniker of ‘Homunculus Loxodontas’, embodying patience and making
appearances in hospitals and children’s wards where he has been teach-
ing the young the virtues of sitting still and waiting
His misappropriation and depiction led to legal proceedings and the
subsequent granting of temporary usufructuary rights (right to use) to
Russian internet company CD Lands.
Regardless of the controversy, it is fair to say that the winsome alien
has been richly, if not legally, re-imagined by the Russian internet com-
munity, in whose space he subsists, sedentary and often silent: ‘the one
who waits’.
Zhdun is cute, his large imploring eyes bespeak the adoring child, or
the doting pet, or the large neotenous features so seemingly de rigueur
with Japanese women. If one is to mine the inexhaustible ground of the
Russian online world one will find our cuddly meme endlessly mired in
romantic entanglement or selfie liaison, with captions such as “wait for
me”, “I’ll wait for you”, “please, don’t make me wait”, “you’re the one I’m
waiting for”.
Not being able to answer back he may make the ultimate companion,
the lifemate-in-waiting,
saecula saeculorum
. Any snap can be given a war m
dollop of frivolity with the inclusion of the cuddly and dazzlingly passive
From the modalities of a Russian meme to the universal malaise.
By Shane Fitzgerald
What are you waiting for, Zhdun?
What are you waiting for, Zhdun?
From the modalities of a Russian meme to the universal
malaise.
Shane Fitzgerald
The friendly chap waiting patiently on the above city
bench is called Zhdun and Zhdun has an unusual
penchant, or compulsion perhaps, for waiting. It’s in his
name, Zhdun is a play on ‘zhdat’, the Russian verb to
wait, and so it’s his inescapable reason to be, at least
until that something special comes along to satiate that
which we know not what. It’s not even certain that he’s
a he, he could be a she, or a hermaphrodite or or some
form of inspired zooidal spacecraft transporting the
CULTURE
Zhdun, and to ask why him in par ticular would be akin to raking
over the hermeneutical minutiae of Ronald McDonald before
buying a Big Mac; you can if you wish but it really isn’t
necessary.
And if that was the full extent of the zhdunian repertoire then
no doubt he would fail to be a figure worthy of enquiry. How-
ever, the alien has a darker side and will reward those who wish
to peel back the layers and look inside, redolent of the mysteri-
ous allure of an r-rated matryoshka.
The meme spills over from the kitsch fairground of the selfie
to the unseemly twilight of the Russian political game, where
the real and unreal meet in the performance of power, even spin-
ning back asymptotically to the Soviet memoriam, the past life of the
Russian Federation and a metaphysical space open to boundless inter-
pretation. Here we find Zhdun recast as implacable judge passing down
sentence to Alexey Navalniy, the totemic leader of the non-systemic oppo-
sition, or as one of the court officers looking on with dispassionate
disinterest, now lithe and angular.
Alternatively, we see the alien wrapped in a Soviet-red headscarf
warning computer users of the dangers of idle chatter or barging into the
particularly esteemed company of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin one
evening in Yalta. In his political garb Zhdun sits in the Ukrainian parlia-
ment with a smattering of deputies waiting for the country’s business to
take centre stage, or is pictured in Saint Petersburg looking on at the
seemingly never-to-be-completed building of a football stadium; he even
sympathises with Vladimir Putin as he is kept momentarily waiting by
Recep Erdogan at a meeting in Turkey, “Well, waiting for the next
election?”.
From play to politics the central feature remains the same, the experi-
ence of waiting, whether for the impossible fulfilment of teenage fantasy
or re-modulated as the ceaseless, never-ending revolving door of Kafka,
where participant is stripped of agency and doomed to walk the wheels
of a big machine. Zhdun may play the role of system representative,
meting down justice and edict from the impasse of a celestial bureau-
cracy, the alien’s amorphous features akin to the f aceless void, unfeeling,
uncaring, as Crowley’s ‘dweller in the abyss’, Choronzon, standing between
the world of man and self-realisation.
Conversely, Zhdun may be cast as citizen, his vague visage signifying
the everyman, the unknown soldier, condemned to an anonymity he is
powerless to affect as he looks in at the party he will not be invited to,
in some sort of absurd political aquarium where the exhibits make the
rules.
‘It is Zhdun’s very malleability, his amorphousness, that lends itself to
such re-interpretation. The alien’s features impute a passiveness, a pas-
sivity, an inability to act or move or speak or resist; symbolically, he has
no mouth, and therefore, in effect, he cannot speak or be spoken to, he
has no legs, he cannot move or be moved. All we have is a large ill-defined
circle with two large eyes watching on unblinkingly, while the two arms,
pathetic and disproportionate, straddle the stomach with a resigned
acceptance. This may inculcate the futility of resisting that which is irre-
sistible, or indicate the limbo experienced by the human animal as it floats
about, trapped in the interstices, when in thrall to large dehumanising
institutions.
It is this sense of waiting, this feeling of being impossibly silenced yet
inescapably implicated, as the patient anaesthetised yet horribly awake,
that strikes a chord with the Russian cyber generation. This affinity may
be couched in a mocking absurdist humour or charged with a genuine
subversive will.
Navalniy's campaign against Dmitry Medvedev
This internet generation and its offshoots have been called the post-
Bolotnaya youth of Russia, after the square where protests broke out in
Moscow in 2012 following Putin’s inauguration. It has been said that
Zhdun stands for this segment of Russian society;
highly aware yet wholly marginalised, plugged-in
yet seemingly powerless.
This burgeoning civil society emerged from the ranks of the youthful,
urban internet-users of Yekaterinburg, Vladivostok and Moscow, who
sought not revolution but a reformation of state institutions and appara-
tuses, an end to corruption and something more representative for their
democracy to represent. Those that would seek change have been increas
-
ingly pushed to the side and silenced; by the 2014 interdiction on the
freedom of assembly, by media collusion, foreign agent laws and a gen-
eral circumscription of civil society.
Although, as seen in May this year in protests across Russia, again fol-
lowing the inauguration, the space for genuine action and protest still
remains for those willing to step forward, take the risk and cleave open
the necessary cavity. It seems that there has never been a machinery built
large enough that the right group, at the right time, cannot manage it.
It should also be said that these Zhduns, these indefatigable lookers-
on, many of whom are wholly disenchanted with the never-ending Putin
story may also use their impressive critical faculties for observing the
moving world elsewhere. Nowhere is this truer than in Ukraine, where we
have two crises inextricably intertwined, the Ukrainian and the Ukraine.
The former crisis attesting to the internal inconsistencies and disharmony
that plague the country, the latter the power games taking place bet ween
an expansive US using twenty-first century universalist language to
achieve nineteenth-century imperialist aims, a naïve and mind-bogglingly
inept EU and a largely reactionar y Russia drawing a line in the sand across
a country that is equal parts brother and equal parts self, all for the soul
of Ukraine.
These post-Bolotnaya Zhdun youths may seek to extricate themselves
and Russia from a thinly-veiled authoritarianism, but that does not mean
they will so willingly give up their Russian pride and run into the arms of
a West that forever says one thing and does another, raising hypocrisy to
the status of exalted fetish, and forever refusing to see things from Rus-
sia’s point of view.
The alien’s folds unfurl to reveal not only the vagaries of trifling love
and the joyous meaninglessness of memolog y but also the deeper malaise
of a generation not being heard. They watch on with an almost self-debas-
ing voyeurism as power inexorably perpetuates itself, and perhaps Zhdun
stands not only for the dull enervation of a real and imagined incapacity,
but also for a people who would ask questions, who do want answers,
who do want change.
But what is it that they want, what is it that they
are waiting for?
It is not too hard to imagine what twenty-something, urban, plugged-in,
socially-aware Russian internet users want when they look out at the world
through the prism of their computer. More than likely, much like the rest
of us, it begins with those little things that have the largest proportions
– free and unfettered access to information, unrestricted internet, the right
to mess around on social media, exchange ideas, discuss bits and pieces
and engage in the time-honoured art of bullshitting. At a higher level, an
July-August 2018
5 3
Wait for me
Zhdun is cute, his large imploring eyes bespeak the
adoring child, or the doting pet, or the large neotenous
features so seemingly de rigueur with Japanese women.
If one is to mine the inexhaustible ground of the
Russian online world one will find our cuddly meme
endlessly mired in romantic entanglement or selfie
liaison, with captions such as “wait for me”, “I’ll wait
for you”, “please, don’t make me wait”, “you’re the one
I’m waiting for”.
Not being able to answer back he may make the
ultimate companion, the lifemate-in-waiting, saecula
saeculorum. Any snap can be given a warm dollop of
frivolity with the inclusion of the cuddly and dazzlingly
passive Zhdun, and to ask why him in particular would
be akin to raking over the hermeneutical minutiae of
Ronald McDonald before buying a Big Mac; you can if
you wish but it really isn’t necessary.
Waitforme
5 4
July-August 2018
honest and trustworthy police force, strong social supports, decent pay.
At the highest, open and pluralist media, consistent rule of law and a
rules-based constitutional order, transparency of government and free and
fair means of deciding those who will occupy the seat of power; a people
being listened to, a people with a voice.
This does not and should not mean that Russia and Russians aspire to
every single value or belief that may be bounced about abroad. Respect for
conventional family and religion, traditional gender roles, pride in one’s own
culture and history, the desire for strong and stable leadership: these are not
necessarily values that every person will espouse or hold, but many Rus-
sians, both young and old, believe in them deeply and presumably have every
right to.
But there are also universals that transcend isms and time, and that is why
it is quite possible to make some presumptions as to the aspirations of many
younger Russians. The need to be protected, the need to be secure, the need
to trust and be trusted accordingly, the need to speak and be listened to,
the need to feel free and be respected. These are universals. It just so hap-
pens that some societies allow for their existence and flourishing somewhat
better than others. And it also just so happens that some societies allow the
lesser qualities of humankind to abound more than some others.
Zhdun too has a universal aspect. It has been perspicuously ventured that
the alien’s disquieting purgatory relates also to the universal inertia of
modern man, or more to the point, postmodern man, 'Waiting for Godot'.
So terminally aware of every permutation, every eventuality, ever y success,
ever y f ailure, he slips into a debilitating lassitude, as Vladimir and Estragon,
Didi and Gogo, in Beckett’s seminal meditation on the stasis of modern
man; trapped between the antipodal limitations of life, birth and death,
salvation and oblivion, creation and destruction, the finitudes that mediate
his existence in a world where all can be imagined but nothing is possible.
These essential finalities, these grand universals, of fer naught but the slow
inevitability of science and the phantasmagoria of a religion that no longer
holds for the critically thinking. And so, all he can do is wait, tragically
aware of the limitations of his own mind and the meaninglessness of an
intelligence that would be so hyper-aware and yet so terrif yingly inept, and
yet still he waits, hoping for something to break the boredom and impend-
ing doom, until perchance he learns how to fashion a world of fun and
value in which he can learn to forget.
There is a beautiful word in Russia that per fectly encapsulates this vague
sickness of the soul, ‘toska’ (ттттт). The word itself defies convenient trans-
lation and perhaps it will be prudent to defer to Vladimir Nabokov, “No
single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and
most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any
specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing
with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness,
mental throes, yearning. In particular cases, it may be the
desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-
sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui,
boredom”.
What are you waiting for?
Zhdun, it turns out, then fulfils the frissons of fanciful love,
where an oddly compelling alien meme will wait to the end
of time for your company alone. The one who waits may also
stand for a Russian people who await a meaningful role in
the political sphere. And if the Russian people, in part or in
large numbers, seek to be part of the big picture, to be
included in the wheels of power and to have their questions
answered, can we, on the opposite side in what is sometimes
called the West, say that we are firmly included when it
comes to making the big decisions that shape all our lives,
that someone up there takes account of us, that we are lis-
tened to, that we are satisfied, that our democracies are
fully-functioning and healthy, bestowing their goods and
rights equally, that we have got all we expected and wait for
nothing more? Zhdun may be an entity born of the Russian
constellator y mind but the message transcends borders and
imposes its imperative on all those tired of waiting, in Russia
and beyond.
Every morning, I’ll be waiting
And if that was the full extent of the zhdunian repertoire
then no doubt he would fail to be a figure worthy of
enquiry. However, the alien has a darker side and will
reward those who wish to peel back the layers and look
inside, redolent of the mysterious allure of an r-rated
matryoshka.
The meme spills over from the kitsch fairground of the
selfie to the unseemly twilight of the Russian political
game, where the real and unreal meet in the
performance of power, even spinning back
asymptotically to the Soviet memoriam, the past life of
the Russian Federation and a metaphysical space open
to boundless interpretation. Here we find Zhdun recast
as implacable judge passing down sentence to Alexey
Navalniy, the totemic leader of the non-systemic
opposition, or as one of the court officers looking on
with dispassionate disinterest, now lithe and angular.
Alternatively, we see the alien wrapped in a Soviet-
red headscarf warning computer users of the dangers of
idle chatter or barging into the particularly esteemed
company of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin one
evening in Yalta. In his political garb Zhdun sits in the
Ukrainian parliament with a smattering of deputies
waiting for the country’s business to take centre stage,
or is pictured in Saint Petersburg looking on at the
seemingly never-to-be-completed building of a football
stadium; he even sympathises with Vladimir Putin as he
is kept momentarily waiting by Recep Erdogan at a
meeting in Turkey, “Well, waiting for the next
election?”.
WaitingforthenextelectionI’m
waitingforametrotobebuiltinChelyabinsk
From play to politics the central feature remains the
same, the experience of waiting, whether for the
impossible fulfilment of teenage fantasy or re-
modulated as the ceaseless, never-ending revolving
door of Kafka, where participant is stripped of agency
and doomed to walk the wheels of a big machine.
moved. All we have is a large ill-defined circle with
two large eyes watching on unblinkingly, while the two
arms, pathetic and disproportionate, straddle the
stomach with a resigned acceptance. This may inculcate
the futility of resisting that which is irresistible, or
indicate the limbo experienced by the human animal as
it floats about, trapped in the interstices, when in thrall
to large dehumanising institutions.
It is this sense of waiting, this feeling of being
impossibly silenced yet inescapably implicated, as the
patient anaesthetised yet horribly awake, that strikes a
chord with the Russian cyber generation. This affinity
may be couched in a mocking absurdist humour or
charged with a genuine subversive will.
Wearewaitingforchangewithsubversivemusician
ViktorTsoi.I’mwaitingforanexplanation#He’snot
Dimontoyou.
Navalniy'scampaignagainstDmitryMedvedev
This internet generation and its offshoots have been
called the post-Bolotnaya youth of Russia, after the
Zhdun may play the role of system representative,
meting down justice and edict from the impasse of a
celestial bureaucracy, the alien’s amorphous features
akin to the faceless void, unfeeling, uncaring, as
Crowley’s ‘dweller in the abyss’, Choronzon, standing
between the world of man and self-realisation.
Conversely, Zhdun may be cast as citizen, his vague
visage signifying the everyman, the unknown soldier,
condemned to an anonymity he is powerless to affect as
he looks in at the party he will not be invited to, in some
sort of absurd political aquarium where the exhibits
make the rules.
ZhdunasChurchill,RooseveltandStalinlookon
laughing.Navalniy–PrisoneroftheCastle
‘It is Zhdun’s very malleability, his amorphousness,
that lends itself to such re-interpretation. The alien’s
features impute a passiveness, a passivity, an inability
to act or move or speak or resist; symbolically, he has
no mouth, and therefore, in effect, he cannot speak or
be spoken to, he has no legs, he cannot move or be
Every morning I'll be waiting
We are waiting for a change with subversive musician Viktor Tsoi; I'm waiting for and
explanation #He's not Dimon to you
Zhudun as Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin look on laughing;
Navalniy – Prisoner of the Castle
Waiting for the next election; waiting for a metro to be built in
Chelyabinsk
CULTURE

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