Russia is complicated. We here in the West, and especially in the United States, have been trying to deny this fact. It’s much easier to dismiss a bunch of buffonish commies bent on world domination than to try and understand the nation that has given us Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin and Tchaikovsky.
My own first feelings towards Russia were purely negative. As kids in Prague, we all wanted to learn English, so that we could understand Beatle lyrics. Instead were force-fed Russian as the language of our “liberators”. From the elite we never heared anything but “The Soviet Union - Our Shining Leader” But among us, the hoi-polloi, everything Russian was considered second rate, boorish, uncouth. Soviet politicians would visit Prague wearing suits that looked like they were made of cardboard, drinking oceans of vodka, looking to score wrist watches. We the people saw the Soviets as our oppressors. Our leaders imitated their murderous communist systems, complete with show trials and extra-judicial killings.
And yet, my father’s words still ring in my ears today: “Yes, the Soviet system is awful. I will never support Russian communism. But I will also never forget that it was the Red Army that liberated me and saved me from the certain death Hitler had planned for me” At the time, his words didn’t mean much. I hated the Russkies. And then, come August 21, 1968, I hated them even more. Their Red Army occupied my homeland and forced me into exile. And exile is something that lives in you forever.
But as time went on, I read Crime and Punishment, listened to the 1812 Overture and saw a string of absolutely magnificent, soul-stirring Soviet war movies such as The Cranes Are Flying, Fate of a Man and Ivan’s Childhood. No one makes war movies like the Soviets used to. Incidentally, World War II is not called that in Russia. For the Russians it is “The Great Patriotic War”. I began to appreciate the breadth and depth of both Russian culture and Russian suffering. In America, we talk about neither of those things very much. Nor do we talk about about how much more difficult (most likely impossible) it would have been to win the war without those Russkies fighting like lions and dying in their millions on the Eastern Front.
I’ll be the first to admit I know very little about the history of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. But I DO know this: our leaders and our media have been lying to us non stop for two and a half years about Covid. I have absolutely no doubt they lie about everything else too. Therefore I know that Zelensky isn’t a saint, Putin isn’t the worst monster ever to walk the face of the earth, the Ukrainian Army actually *does* contain a good number of modern day Nazis. Aside from all that, I know that you do not solve an armed conflict by pumping billions into arming the side you believe has God on its side - as Bob Dylan would have put it. In view of their blood-soaked history, the Russians have legitimate fears which we are ignoring at our peril. It is a near certainty that if NATO achieves its stated goal and topples Putin (it won’t), the next dictator will be far more bloody and far more dangerous and far closer to the way we caricature Putin.
Putin is corrupt. His country is a corrupt empire run by a Mafia of oligarchs. Zelensky is corrupt. His country is an even more corrupt empire run by a Mafia of oligarchs, with a sprinkling of Nazis for good measure. But we have made up our mind about who the hero is and who the villain is and the media follows the script, so that all of us will only keep caricatures in mind: not the Russia of Pushkin and Tolstoy - they would be far more difficult to hate.
We are bankrupting ourselves pursuing the impossible. Every serious military analyst I’ve heard says that a Russian defeat is an impossibility. It makes Biden feel good to be a NATO uniter but perhaps it will make German people feel less good when half of the Black Forest is chopped down for firewood and they are still freezing in their homes and their supermarket shelves are bare. It’s truly fascinating how NATO borders are more important to an American president than his own borders.
The bottom line: all politicians lie. Putin lies, Zelensky lies, Biden lies. But the dispute between two Slavic countries 5 thousand miles away, a dispute that once again involves the infamous “blood lands” that have seen war, famine and strife since Napoleon’s times - this is not our dispute. It’s not even a NATO dispute (last I checked Putin didn’t invade Poland) The obscene flow of American taxpayer money to support an unwinnable war and prolong the suffering of Ukrainian civilians and Russian soldiers must stop.
As an aside: for anyone looking for a brilliant look inside the Russian psyche, you could do worse than read Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita”
"It’s much easier to dismiss a bunch of buffonish commies bent on world domination than to try and understand the nation that has given us Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin and Tchaikovsky."
We don't even bother to try. We paste stupid little flags on social media profiles and accept anything the msm tells us. It's almost as if they decided to throw a world war and nobody bothered to come.
I've been working on something along these lines for 3 months.... same complicated feelings about Russia, disgust with our elites, etc. It's hard to express.
Great minds...