Back in the USSR

Chekov linked to an article about Russia and the World Order as such (some time ago now). He finishes with a note of, "it should make instructive reading for those who consider Russia recalcitrant, aggressive and incorrigible ". I confess that I think that Russia is all three of those things and then some. This is not a purely academic argument nor one based upon any support of American policy. It is one, for lack of a better word based upon truthiness. I use this word knowing its full implications, but somehow feel compelled to use anyways. I suppose it goes back to a memorable line (one of many) from Tom Dunne's book Rebellion's: Memoir, Memory, and 1798, in which his father aged 14 at the time was,

"forking corn on the threshing mill at home when two RIC men arrived looking for Jim, who was on the run. My father 'shouted up the IRA' (just 'acting the idiot') and was instantly hauled down and frogmarched toward New Ross, fifteen miles away. Coming near town, they stopped at a little pub at Ballyanne, where his captors had a few pints and bought him a lemonade. Then as they left the pub, they turned him towards home, booted him in the backside and told him to behave himself. A different outcome might have made him, and me, a nationalist"

At the risk of getting off point even before I begin, I would make a side point about the fact that Francis Hughes joined PIRA after receiving a beating from the UDR after they realized who his brother was. A "different outcome" indeed.

But back to my original point. History is personal, not always but oft times the strongest convictions have far more emotion behind them than objective reasoning. It would be dishonest to say that my initial response to Russia stems from a long and strict study of the country, its people, and history (though I'm not entirely ignorant of it either). It would be honest to say that my responses to them do stem from my family's and my wife's family's (I have no idea whether or not you're even allowed to do a double possessive) dealings with the Soviets. It's all quite well and good to say I've read this article and that article and I know about this or that. It is quite another to say that my brother in law was arrested and threatened with imprisonment for selling little yellow polka dot stickers at the tender age of eleven because that was "capitalistic" (I shit you not).

Or to listen to the men and women of the Hungarian club (my wife is a member) talk about their flights from Hungary or Romania (Now you want some tough Hungarians, talk to the ones stuck outside Hungary after Trianon). Listen to old women recounting tales of crawling across no man's land with no shoes to Austria past corpses in winter while the Russians lit up the night sky with flares and peppered the ground around them with machine gun fire. Listen to the heartbreak in my wife's voice when she talks about how her father who stayed behind was arrested and broke right away, telling the police everything they wanted to know about his eleven year old daughter who had fled. And these were ordinary people, not political dissidents or threats to the state in any normal sense, or even the abnormal sense.

Probably the most politically active member of my wife's family was her great aunt who helped found the steel workers union in Hungary (which my grand father and great grandfather were members of). When the Nazi's came she was killed and the Germans forbid anyone from going to her funeral. Her brother (my wife's grandfather) said nuts to that and that no one would stop him from burying his sister. For that he was shot by the Germans at the funeral, but carried on to finish seeing his sister put to rest. When the Russians came in, did they greet this act of defiance to Nazi tyranny with even so much as the international anti-fascist salute? Not hardly, they tried to send him to Siberia for the crime of being an ethnic German (the horror).

I've already recounted some of my family's experiences with them. And those stories do fire me up, but it takes it to an entirely new level when you can see the pain on some one's face as they recount their experiences. What continues to beggar disbelief is the discordance between cause and consequence. The woman of whom I wrote crawled across no man's land had painted banners that were used in the protests leading up to '56. That's all. But after at least five people from her village had already been arrested and deported she took the cue and made her exit.

Does that mean that I shut myself off from anything having to do with Russia and live in insulated Russophobe cocoon? If only, but unfortunately I have a love of Russian literature and an (at times) overly analytic mind. So I can appreciate the proposed NATO missile shield is a bad idea and that Kosovo has an unhealthy level of gangsterism in its society. But then so does Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Italy (off the top of my head). So if you're already a sovereign country its okay, but if you just happen to be trying to recover from an abusive relationship with a genocidal country with a penchant for ethnic cleansing then until you can meet the requirements which apparently most other countries in the region can't then you're somehow stuck with Serbia who would rather do away with around 90% of the population?

But I make the connection between my family's experience and that of the Georgians deported over a spat over oil prices, at least on an instinctual (truthiness) level, as my grandmother is Volga-Deutsch. And oddly enough I'm not alone in this. Even Fyodor Lukyanov the author of the article in the start of this post admits that Russia more or less makes things up as they go along,

"what is Russia's strategy? There is no answer to this. Russian actions, or at least those actions that provoke the strongest reaction, are as a rule a more or less spontaneous reaction to external irritants"

Are you fucking kidding me? I can understand Bush making up a speech or two as he goes along, that's why we have Bushisms. But if the best you can do for policy is to say "we're making it up as we go along" then fuck all.

And to those who cite Bush and the neo-cons misadventures throughout the world and say, "who are you to criticize Russia?" I would say this, "I'm (insert name here) and Bush and his buddies can go fuck themselves and their adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and anywhere else they choose to go". I would also point out that while I'm not thrilled with Obama in any sense what so ever, I do think his election marks a clear displeasure with the current administration and symbolic if farcical departure from current American policy.

I'm not opposed to a multi-polar world or the primacy of international law, indeed I whole heartedly welcome both of those developments within the European context which Medvedev is offering. Though I would point out that within the spheres of influence that he is talking about that a multi polar world is one in which the sovereignty of former Soviet states is something which must be respected and in which Russia is failing miserably at right now. Tack on the continuing string of unsolved murders of opponents of the Kremlin which include former KGB agents, journalists who dared critique Kremlin policy, rebel leaders, and human rights lawyers (interesting link from this article noting that 42 journalists have been killed in Russia since '92), not to mention failed attempts. And this is without going into the allegations of the apartment bombings which led to the second war in Chechnya (which while I have some time for this theory are still a little fringe for me to present as more than conspiracy theory. Again though we would do well to remember that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you). But you have to understand people like me only say this because we don't "understand" Russia or we're stuck in some sort of Cold War mentality.

And as a side note to the kind of this kind of thinking I'll throw up a piece which states that,

"The idea of a new cold war is simply a symptom of attitudes which have not yet adjusted to the idea of a strong and independent Russia not comprising a threat."

Note that this post is written less than a month after Russia resumed the Cold War era practice of a military parades. Actually the idea of a new Cold War is very disconcerting to me. Our war on terror is almost a direct of policies enacted during the Cold War such as provoking the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, our misadventures in Lebanon, and our propping up of Saddam against Iran. So I have no problem in criticizing the idea that anything that sticks to the Ruskies is a good thing, while anything they want is bad. But Russia's actions of late leave me wondering if they can appreciate that this kind of ideology is a flawed one.