Poor Russia!

 

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.[1]

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.[2] 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!”[3] 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.[4] 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.[5] 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.

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[1] The class was taught by a Ukrainian exile. At the time I knew nothing of Russian-Ukrainian relations. I know a lot about them now. The Russian and Ukrainian languages are closely related, and most Ukrainians in those days, and still pretty much today, can speak both Ukrainian and Russian fluently. Ukrainian is, however, a distinct language in its own right.

[2] I was allowed to make one exception to that rule once. The students of the Russian language program put on a talent show. I had no particular talent, but I had done stage work in local community theater back in Eugene. So my contribution to the show was to work with the people at the student center where we would put on the show. We were helped in preparing the show by the old Russian emigrees who were our primary teachers that summer. They had lived in the United States for decades by 1968, but most of them spoke next to no English. The staff at the student center of course spoke no Russian. So I acted as translator between those two groups of people. I was thus allowed to speak and listen to English as long as I did so as part of my work as translator.

[3] 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.

 

[4] That date is not Christmas in Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church still uses the Julian calendar not the Gregorian one, so its December 25 is in January.

[5] The Soviet Union was almost though not quite completely contiguous with the old Russian Empire.