Бедная
Россия!
Poor
Russia!
I have a
PhD in Russian history. I got it a long time ago, in 1977. I never had a chance
to use it much; but I still have it, and it is still a big part of my
self-identity. I have no family connection to Russia. My ancestral roots are
all west European not Russian. My interest in Russia began when I was a sophomore
at the University of Oregon during the 1966-67 academic year. I already knew a
lot of German. I thought of studying Russian. It sounded interesting. Those
were the Cold War years. Russia was the enemy. Most Americans hated Russia and
the Russians, considering the country to be evil and the people to be nothing
but bad guys. Reagan wouldn’t call the Soviet Union part of the “axis of evil”
for quite a few years yet, but that is how most Americans thought of the USSR
and its largest, dominant component, namely, Russia. Yet I also knew that
Russia had given the world some of its greatest cultural and scientific achievements.
I knew of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Tchaikovsky. I knew of Sputnik. I knew of Yuri
Gagarin, the first man in space. Yes, I had been enculturated to think
negatively of Russia, but, still, studying Russian sounded intriguing. So I
enrolled in first year Russian.
I got
hooked. I took second year Russian the next year, the 1967-68 academic year. In
the summer of 1968 I participated in the summer Russian language study program
of Indiana University, one of the country’s major centers of Russian studies. I
spent five weeks on the IU campus in Bloomington, IN. During our time there we
had to promise to speak nothing but Russian even when we were trying to
communicate with people who knew not one word of that language. I
learned a lot of Russian in those five weeks. I also learned about summer in
Indiana. I always say I spent an eternity in Indiana one summer, but I digress.
One of the
things I learned is that in Russia I would be said to have a speech defect. In
one of our classes the instructor was teaching us the difference between a hard
R and a soft R in Russian. Don’t worry about what that means. It doesn’t matter
for our purposes. I could not properly pronounce either sort of R because I
can’t roll an R. The instructor told me that was because my tongue is too
short. Who knew? I don’t have a speech defect in English. In Russian I
definitely do.
After five
weeks in Bloomington, the program got even a lot more interesting. We went to
the Soviet Union. We were divided into three groups with different itineraries,
though all groups would spend one week in what was then Leningrad and one week
in Moscow at different times. All of us spent around ten days in Pyatigorsk, a
small city in southern Russia near the Caucuses Mountains that was the home of
what was then called the Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages. It’s now
called Pyatigorsk Foreign Language University. There we did more intensive
Russian language study. My group flew from Copenhagen, where we spent I think
all of one night, to Leningrad, then to Pyatigorsk, then to Tbilisi, George,
then to Kiev, Ukraine, then to Moscow. After one week in Moscow we flew to
Helsinki, Finland, and then home.
Those five
weeks in the Soviet Union were my first direct exposure to Russia and to
Russians. It was one hell of an experience. The Soviet Union, in all of its
different parts, was a very foreign place to us young Americans. It’s hard to
explain how different it was from anything we were used to. Of course, no one
was speaking English as a native language. All the signs on buildings were in
Russian, or Georgian, or Ukrainian, or some other language of the USSR. The
standard of living everywhere was very noticeably lower than it was in the
parts of the US we’d all come from. In public, though not in private, everyone
was sour, gruff, and uncooperative. The place was physically drab, though that
was less true of Georgia than it was of the other parts of the USSR I saw. There
was Communist propaganda everywhere. Buildings didn’t have company names on
them, they had slogans praising the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or
proclaiming “We will complete the Five Year Plan in four years,” never mind
that doing so would violate the plan. Or “Glory to the Great October!” Or
“Glory to the Red Army!” “Glory” (“slava” in Russian) was a big word in the
USSR in those days. The weather was warm enough. We were there in August. But in
public the people could be awfully cold.
We
expressed our feelings about the USSR as we were riding on a bus from downtown
Moscow to the airport from which we would start our journeys home. A few days
earlier, the Soviet Union and some of its Warsaw Pact puppet states had invaded
Czechoslovakia to suppress the reform movement called the Prague Spring. We
were mad as hell at the Russian leadership. Not at the people. They had nothing
to do with it. We couldn’t wait to get out of Russia. As we rode in a bus to
the airport we sang the popular song of the time that had the refrain, “We’ve
got to get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do. We’ve got to
get out of this place. Girl, there’s a better life for me and you.” Russia was
indeed a very good place to get out of. It was not a place I would ever want to
live for any length of time.
Still, I
was hooked. Russia was not an easy place to visit in 1968, but it is an
immensely fascinating one. Part of its fascination for me came from how
different it was from my home environment in America. There’s nothing quite
like spending time in the USSR to make you appreciate the United States. But
there was more to my fascination with Russia than that. I didn’t understand
Russia or its history then nearly as well as I would in a few years, but I
already found the development of the tsarist state and the conflict between
being eastern and wanting to be western that began in the eighteenth century
most interesting. Russian high culture is well known outside the country.
Russian folk culture is less well known, but it is beautiful and sufficiently
different from other folk cultures to be quite attractive. Whatever the dynamic
of it was, I was hooked. I knew then that I would go to graduate school in
Russian history.
I don’t
know that I thought of it in quite these terms at the time, but the Russia I
saw in 1968 was already poor Russia. Stalin, one of history’s truly horrific
monsters, had died only thirteen years earlier. World War II, in which the
Soviet Union lost over twenty million people and suffered inconceivably bad
physical destruction, had ended only twenty-three years earlier. The Russian
people had gone through an unimaginable hell under Stalin and then at the hands
of the Nazis. In 1968 they were still living under a totalitarian communist
regime that severely restricted their individual liberties and ran an economy
in which the needs of the consumer were considered only after the military and
heavy industry had gotten what they wanted. It’s no joke that people used
Pravda for toilet paper, the real thing being virtually never available. Virtually
no Russians had the opportunity to do in the United States what we did in Russia.
I learned more about Russia during the 1975-76 academic year, which I spent in
Russia doing PhD dissertation research, but that more extensive exposure only
reenforced the notion I had of poor Russia.
The Soviet
Union had begun to fall apart by at least 1989, only thirteen years after I
left the place in 1976. It ceased to exist on December 25, 1991. Boris
Yeltsin, the former mayor of Moscow, became the president of the new Russian Federation,
which actually as the old Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic without
communist leaders. Most of us who had studied Russia in depth were shocked, but
after December 25, 1991, there was no USSR. Russia was no longer communist,
something we thought we’d never live to see. Along with a great many Russians,
we hoped then that a new day was dawning for that great Russian people. I didn’t
understand back then how difficult the challenges the new government faced were
in transitioning from a planned, centralized economy to one more along free
market lines, introducing civil liberties Russians had never had, and
establishing a democratic government.
As the
twentieth century neared its end, it was clear that corruption was rampant in the
new Russian government and that the primary beneficiaries of the new economy
were a very few immensely wealthy people called oligarchs, not the Russian
people as a whole. It was clear that President Boris Yeltsin was both corrupt
and an alcoholic. Still, perhaps Russia still had a chance to overcome its
history of oppressive governments and become a much freer, richer country.
Then, on January
1, 2000, Vladimir Putin became the country’s president. It would be years
before the ultimate significance of Putin becoming president became obvious. At
first, no one knew anything about him other than that he had been a KGB agent
who Yeltsin had put in positions of power though no one really understood why. At
first Putin talked a good line about maintaining and strengthening Russian
democracy, but then he started to show his true colors. He turned out to be a
Russian fascist. He rigged elections to keep himself in power. He even changed
the Russian constitution so he didn’t have to quit at the end of one of his
terms as president. He used oligarchs to take control of virtually all Russian
media. Yes, there was, and is, a Russian parliament; but Putin has essentially
brought it under his personal control. Under Putin, Russian elections have been
as meaningless as Soviet elections were. Putin has, in effect, made opposition
to his regime criminal and punishable by long prison terms. He has had a great
many opponents, including prominent people in the print media, murdered. Under
Putin, poor Russia has gone from communist to fascist. In many ways it is
difficult to tell the difference between those two conditions.
Then there’s
Ukraine. Years ago, Putin said that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the
greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century. I guess he forgot
about all of the death and destruction Russia suffered in World War II and
several other horrific things that happened in and to Russia in the horrific first
half of the twentieth century. It has been clear for years that Putin’s goal is
to recreate the Russian Empire/Soviet Union, not with an emperor but with him
as fascist dictator. He
has revived the old imperial canard that Ukrainians and Byelorussians are not
separate peoples with their own languages but just Russians who speak a dialect
of Russian. He has made it perfectly clear that he thinks Ukrainians are really
Russians and that their land is really Russian as well. In 2014 he occupied the
Crimea, which Nikita Khrushchev had transferred from the Russian Soviet
republic to the Ukrainian one in 1954. Through his ally Alexander Lukashenko,
the president of Byelorussia, he has made Byelorussia a vassal state of Russia.
It is clear that Putin will not be satisfied until Ukraine is also at least a
vassal state of Russia or, better, incorporated into Russia.
In 2022,
Putin invaded the independent nation of Ukraine. His invasion of his country’s
neighbor was an act of war the likes of which hadn’t been seen in Europe since
World War II. He intended to crush the Ukrainian government and force all Ukrainians
to admit that they are really Russians. I, along with most more informed
observers, thought the Russian army would conquer Ukraine in a matter of weeks
if not days. But the Ukrainians fought back, and are fighting back, in a way no
one suspected they could. They have received, and are receiving, enormous
amounts of military and other aid from various NATO countries including the
United States. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has become an
international hero. Yet Ukraine has suffered, and is suffering, terribly because
of the Russian invasion. The Russians target civilian facilities at will,
causing large numbers of civilian casualties. Russia’s soldiers commit egregious
war crimes against innocent Ukrainian people. The outcome of the Russia-Ukraine
war is uncertain. What is certain is that Putin is an international war
criminal who has inflicted great suffering on both the Ukrainian and the
Russian people because of his disordered understanding of who the Ukrainians
are and because of his mania to recreate the Russian Empire.
In Russia,
Putin has cracked down even harder than before on anyone who opposes him. He
calls his invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation,” and it is illegal
for anyone to call it a war. All of the news the Russians get from domestic
sources about the war is heavily censored. It amounts basically to
propagandistic lies. Much of the world, though not China or India, has imposed
strict economic sanctions on Russia because of Putin’s war. Putin has had some
success in mitigating the effect of these sanctions on the Russian economy, but
they still hurt ordinary Russian people by crippling the Russian economy at
least in significant part. The effects of the sanctions will only deepen in the
years ahead. Putin has turned Russia into a police state at home and a pariah
nation abroad.
Poor
Russia. The great Russian people deserve so much better than they have gotten
through most of their history. They deserve civil liberties as much as we
Americans do. They deserve an economy that provides at least a modest standard
of living for them. They have neither. They have never really had either. I
once called Russia a third world country with nukes. I remain convinced that
that is essentially what it is.
The tsars
weren’t anywhere near as oppressive as the Soviet communists or Vladimir Putin
and his thugs, but they were hardly champions of democracy and individual
liberty. Russia was becoming a more modern economy at the end of the nineteenth
century, but it still lagged far behind the countries of western Europe and the
United States. Russian history is to a considerable extent a history of
suffering. It is so much a history of suffering that most Russians consider the
ability to bear suffering the way they do a national virtue.
Russians
fear foreign invasion in a way it is hard for Americans to understand. Their
history is one of foreign invasion after foreign invasion, from the Mongols in
the twelfth century CE to the Nazis in 1941. Russia is a huge country geographically,
and it has no easily defensible national borders. Every Russian government,
except perhaps for Yeltsin’s, has used fear of foreign invasion as a cover for
oppressive domestic policies, supposedly in the name of a national unity claimed
to be necessary for defense against foreigners. Putin stokes fear of the United
States and NATO as he tries to justify his illegal and immoral invasion of
Ukraine and his broader desire to put the Soviet Union back together under his
authoritarian or even totalitarian leadership. Putin’s desire to do so creates
a great risk for us Americans and our European allies. Three former Soviet
republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, are now members of NATO. If Putin
attacks any one of them, NATO’s founding documents will compel its member nations
to come militarily to the defense of that country Russia has attacked. Even if
a war between Russia and NATO didn’t become nuclear, which it very well might,
it would impose even more hardship on the people of poor Russia.
There is
no doubt that Russia is suffering under Putin. Was Putin or someone like him
inevitable after the collapse of the Soviet Union? I think the answer to that
question is probably yes. Russia has next to no tradition of democracy or
respect for human rights. Since the time of the grand princes of Moscow in the
thirteenth century CE, Russian government has, with the exception perhaps of a
few years under Boris Yeltsin, been authoritarian at best and totalitarian at
worst. Russia is rich in natural resources, but the Russian people have never
enjoyed a standard of living anything like that of the countries of the west. Because
of their history, the Russians tend to favor security and order over personal freedom
and democracy. They are conditioned simply to accept what their government does.
They think governmental affairs are for the government not for them to be
concerned with. Of course there are exceptions, but these statements are still
true for the Russian people as a whole. I suppose it was remotely possible that
Russia could develop in a democratic direction after the collapse of Soviet
communism, but the odds were certainly stacked against it. There is no ground
in Russian history from which freedom and democracy could grow. Perhaps a leader
as fascistic as Putin wasn’t necessarily unavoidable, but that Russia has
developed the way it has since December 25, 1991, is not a surprise.
Poor
Russia. She has what her history has created. Will Russia ever become free and
democratic? Nothing is impossible, but Russian history and Russian reality do
not point in that direction. I believe that authoritarian rule from Moscow is
the future for all of Russia. I just pray that it is not the future for
Ukraine.
The Bolshevik coup that the Soviets called the
October Revolution took place in October under the old calendar Russia used at
the time but in November under our current calendar, which Russia has used
since the communists came to power. The Soviets celebrated the “revolution” of
October 25, 1917, on November 7. Perhaps a bit confusing, but true.
