I didn’t appreciate the value of sociology until I started reading
about modern Russian history. Now I wish I’d studied it more in
college.
I started college in
June of 1990. I started a little bit early—Northeastern University
was on the quarter system, and there was no one to say that I
couldn’t. (It was in college that I learned to start asking for
forgiveness instead of permission.) I knew I wanted to study history,
but for whatever reason, it was easiest for me to take two sociology
classes (101 and Environment and Society) that summer. I very much
enjoyed those classes, but they weren’t part of the The Plan, and
even then I was dogged in my adherence to such things.
The Berlin Wall had
fallen just a few months before, and like clockwork, the world was
about to pivot attention to the Middle East (or, as I now prefer to
think of it, the Middle World). I wasn’t quite eighteen, but I was
already ignoring statements about the end of history, or however they
phrased it back then. I knew there would be things to keep me
busy...I just hadn’t figured on us returning to such a similar
point as where I, in some ways, began.
I did take a Russian
history class a few quarters later, but it was a lot of Peter the
Great, plus Catherine, and thus relatively insulated from
contemporary developments. I wonder what a sociology of Russia/The
USSR would have looked like in 1991.
Russia, Russia,
Russia...or so said the progressive activists on Twitter in 2017,
annoyed that people were talking about Russia’s interference in the
2016 election. That’s okay, though, because I loathed those people
already, since they had shown how subjective their commitment to
human rights was during the Syrian Civil War. (That, or their
organizations had been bought co-opted by Russian interests—you
decide.)
The Syrian Civil War will get its own volume
when we talk about Assad
or We Burn The Country. Suffice
to say that when I saw Russia starting to play a big, public role, my
breath hitched. That wasn’t going to be good. Obama’s obsession
with the Iranian Nuclear Deal coupled with everyone’s insistence
that we couldn’t repeat Iraq (even though the civil war in Syria
was night and day from Iraq), meant that Russia was able to give full
cover to Assad while he terrorized his own country with, among other
things, chemical weapons and barrel bombs. And, from
the perspective of people who didn’t care,
wouldn’t that have been just too bad except that the United States
and Europe saw a completely predictable influx of refugees...perhaps
you remember what the consequences were?
I
considered that Russia’s
first shove at the United States to see what it could get away with,
but that was wrong. They may arguably have been publicly testing
their limits since the 2004 poisoning of then presidential candidate
Viktor Yuschenko of Ukraine,
and the shocking invasion of Georgia in 2008.
(But why leave out what they did to Chechnya in the late 1990s/early
2000s?) I do submit that there was something of a different flavor to
all of that, if only because it was done when the US was embroiled in
our own presidential cycles, and the rest of the world is lucky we
remember they exist at that point. But they were all unbelievable,
and more still because who would have thought in 1988 that we would
let a newly diminished Russia get away with any of that?
Right—and
then remember that time in
the 2000s they were
righteously indignant because Poland was going to be a site of US
missiles? How dare we!
But
all of that was just a test. The real action started in 2014, when
they not only shoved the world community, but did it with a smirk as
they invaded Crimea. But, while the Obama administration was shocked,
shocked, we were also assured that this was a bloodless coup, because
essentially it mostly affected predominantly Russian speaking
regions, and really, who were we to start pointing fingers at anyone
over anything? (Yes, that hurt to write as much as you think it
would.)
(I’m
sorry, did you say “diplomatic agreements”? You
mean Ukraine agreeing to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for
security guarantees? But that was in 1994, and things
changed—don’t you know anything about realpolitik?)
Even
if it was difficult for people to sort through what Russia was up to
by 2016, it should have been clear that, of all countries, this was
the very last one we would want interfering in our election. But
bringing up the possibility of espionage was just not as captivating,
ultimately, as...Her Emails. (Note to my fellow Americans: next time,
go for the candidate Russia *doesn’t* support.)
I
had picked up Revolution
1989 by Victor Sebestyen back in the halcyon days of Obama’s
second election campaign, and while I had lived through the years
that saw the end of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of their
bloc, I hadn’t been following the developments preceding it that
closely. It wasn’t until this book that I began to understand how
corrupt a totalitarian regime is, and in every way.
Lofty
historians point out how draining it is to spend so much money on the
military, and that is true; however, while many of us may question
the amount of money the United States spends on our military, we are
*still* the strongest economy in the world. It’s not just a lot of
money spent in dictatorships, it’s money badly spent, as generals
and officials frequently take a portion of their own budget through a
variety of convoluted means. (Would that that were a totalitarian
government’s only sin: they famously spend a lot on their internal
surveillance—more on that later.) How inefficient were the
Communist Bloc governments? So much so that the only way many of them
remained solvent was through loans from Western banks. Without them,
those governments would have been insolvent by the 1970s. (Ah, why
does it always come back to the banks?)
In
fairness, the Soviet Union itself wasn’t as financially stressed,
but whatever advantage that gave them was effectively frittered away
by the early 1980s, thanks to the ill-advised entry into Afghanistan
and the agitations in Poland. It should be noted that the war in
Afghanistan was *not* the Soviet Union’s idea; to read Sebestyen’s
account, the Communist Party in Afghanistan made the decision, and
the Soviet officials were pretty desperate to pull them back as it
was apparent how it would turn out. Of course, not desperate enough,
because once they went in, they stayed in for years, never mind the
extremely high cost to their troops. The Polish, in many ways, can be
said to have benefited from the USSR’s preoccupation in
Afghanistan, because that is arguably why they didn’t commit more
troops to put down the Solidarity movement, or terrorize them into
not submitting
Karol Wojtyla, later known as Pope John Paul II, to the
Catholic Church.
Revolution 1989
gave me the first insights as to
the nature of the damage totalitarian regimes can do to people. At
the time I thought of it as the guilt of the collaborator, but a
decade after reading this, it might be better to say it’s the
sublimated shame of the victim. A collaborator wants to succeed,
while a victim wants to survive. The caprice of the dictator allows
for the facade that the victim has any control over their fate, but
in all too many instances, what survivors had was luck. (Is this what
the Modern Person is really trying to court?)
It
was Masha Gessen’s The
Future Is History that
showed the long-term consequences of that damage, and it was the
first time I appreciated that a country can be sociologically damaged
in the same way that a person can be psychologically damaged. Are
there other countries that might be suffering from the same
phenomenon? Possibly—probably—but few were as thoroughly
terrorized as the inhabitants
of the Soviet Union for so long.
In
the United States, we take it for granted that we have the right to
say what we want, however offensive our words might be. And if we
don’t always get to exercise that right—the Constitution is going
to do only so much for us when we’re outnumbered in a dangerous
environment—we *know* when we’re being deprived of it, and we
bitterly resent it. Maybe that explains why some of us can be so
hyperbolic about our own opinions (or maybe some people could do a
better job tempering themselves).
I’m
writing this as our freedom to speak and write is under explicit
threat. Just this month, a young PhD candidate at a nearby university
was kidnapped by ICE off of her street while she was on her way to
break her Ramadan fast. Her crime was co-authoring an op-ed
criticizing her university for not divesting from Israel—in other
words, she didn’t commit a crime of any kind. This is a dangerous
time, and people may find themselves curtailing their statements.
They shouldn’t, but even if that is the case, that still won’t be
as much constant terror as living in the Soviet Union, because there
you weren’t even allowed to have *thoughts* people found
objectionable.
But
how do I
know what someone else is thinking? I
don’t, of course, but I don’t have to *know*; you have to prove
my suspicions are incorrect, and how are you going to do that? There
is no right answer—such is the way of a totalitarian state—but
there are myriad ways to ensure that you deliver a wrong answer,
right down to the look on your face. Are your pupils widening? Are
you trying to look away? Is your face twitching just so? Any
of that can condemn you to punishment, up to and including torture
and death.
I
can get you for anything in a totalitarian state, but you just might
be able to buy yourself a little bit of luck with a credible
demonstration of belief in the prevailing doxa. And on the plus side,
most of us are going to have a pretty good idea of what that
demonstration—that performance—is supposed to look like. You just
need to pretend that you believe whatever it is you’re supposed to
for the amount of time that you are being interrogated and observed.
But
when aren’t you being watched? The panopticon
that Jeremy Bentham so cleverly designed is best tested out in the
totalitarian state, and it
works. Of course no one can
watch anyone else all of the time, but the trick is that you don’t
have to. Make it known that you could
be watched at any time, and make the consequences of being “caught”
dire enough, and you have
effectively created a condition that encourages people to police
themselves. And the
most effective way to do that is to police your own thoughts. If your
thoughts don’t betray you, then it’s almost impossible for your
actions to step out of line. Congratulations—you (probably) get to
live.
Just
one thing: who do you become once you make sure you’re thinking
what the state wants you to? Answer: the perfect organelle of the
state, and one that has the capacity to reproduce the state.
Frantz
Fanon in Wretched
of the Earth explored the
consequences of being a fascist in a revolutionary milieu. Yes, it
makes people brutal monsters, but one who still has a mirror and can
see what they are doing. More importantly, the face looking back at
you resembles the person you used to be. In a totalitarian state,
that face is the first thing that needs to go.
What
happens to someone who has to live that way, and among other people
in the same circumstance? What happens to the place they live in? We
are called Homo sapiens because we use our minds constantly,
and we don’t like to be told to use them in limited ways. I believe
in the capacity of human beings to heal, but when they’ve been
terrorized for two or three generations, it’s unrealistic to expect
that such healing will happen overnight. It requires space and time.
Unfortunately, those resources were in low quantities when the Soviet
Empire finally collapsed.
Carl
Sagan caught it in his 1996 book The
Demon-Haunted World. The totalitarianism
and terror had been the lid on a cauldron, and when it was lifted
seventy-five years later, that cauldron was seen to have been
bubbling a toxic combination of superstition and prejudice. The
Soviets needed science and technology desperately, but they would not
tolerate science that contradicted their state-sanctioned beliefs,
facts be damned. (I submit that it is a characteristic of a
totalitarian regime: facts are always subject to approval.) They did
not foster an ethos of inquiry but dogma. Suffice to say, that wasn’t
an environment conducive to working out maladaptive habits of mind.
It
shouldn’t be a surprise that Russia went so retrogressive, so
quickly. Gessen’s book outlined the rise of threats to Russian
feminists, the LGBTQ community, Jews, and activists in general. It
was—is—the classic totalitarian, fascist playbook of values: the
state is under constant attack, and the only way it can survive is by
the return to the strong, god-fearing nuclear family. Feminists and
anyone who isn’t straight push on this because they undermine the
concept of the traditional family, Jews undermine the mythology of a
unitary Christian state, and activists *are* the attacks on the
state.
This
is obviously nonsense if you are concerned with facts. The Russian
people *are* under attack, but those attacks come from a political
leadership aligned with a class of oligarchs that they created with
access to fossil-fuel resources. This is to say nothing of the state
violence they were frequently subjected to, whether that was car
bombs or the murder of journalists. The reason that Russians have a
shocking low life expectancy is because the state doesn’t meet
their needs, not because people are agitating for human rights.
But
when you’ve been living in a civilization as damaged as Russia,
it’s difficult to establish that facts should matter in the first
place. And that is deadly. Eight years after reading this, I’m
still chilled by the description of the murder of a young, gay man by
an alleged friend in the 2000s. Evidently, they had had no
disagreement, and the victim had no reason to feel unsafe with his
attacker. For his part, the murderer did not express any animus
toward the victim, other than that he was gay and everyone knew how
dangerous gay people were.
That
was not an isolated incident, and as state television continued to
broadcast messages of hatred toward the LGBTQ community, Jews, and
feminists in increasingly hysterical tones—one is reminded of
Fahrenheit 451, but that itself reminds us of much of cable
news—the danger to those groups increased. When we examine what
Russia looks like on the inside, the surprise isn’t that there is
so little meaningful Russian opposition, but that there is any at
all.
Even
if I no longer identify as a liberal or progressive (I seem to value
human rights too much), I had for a long time a lingering instinct to
pull back from criticisms of Russia or the Soviet Union, because, in
my lifetime at least, the majority of the people making those
criticisms were people I would never identify with. (And yet, I am
nostalgic for them now.) One of the reasons I loved Scott Anderson’s
The
Quiet Americans was because he described this tension so
well. Once you know what the communist totalitarian regimes of
Russia, China, North Korea, et al looked like, *of course* you should
be anti-communist. (Please, let us save the discussions of whether
Leninism/Stalinism was ever truly Marxist/Socialist/Communist for
another day.) But, as Anderson put it, claiming to be so was not far
removed from being opposed to fluoride. American adherents of
communism could be alternatively ruthless and naive, but many
anti-communists sounded like crackpots within two minutes of
conversation. Contemplating this cognitive divide was one of the
reasons Anderson set out to explore the history of the Central
Intelligence Agency in the first place.
This
book is relevant to a discussion of Russia because the CIA was
defined by the Soviet Union. Yes,
there was an Office of Strategic Services during World War II, but
the CIA was particularly devoted to prosecuting the Cold War.
Anderson does not equivocate when he talks about the Soviet Union—as
seen through the eyes of early administrators Frank Wisner and
Peter Sichel, the Soviets did evil things in Romania and Germany,
respectively, in the run up to their victory, and eviler still once
they had won. My first
two
volumes touch on how toxic and genocidal European and American
culture is, so if we’re going to credibly censure another polity,
they’ve got to hit a high bar. The Soviets did that, and
maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a bad idea to have an organization
essentially dedicated to eradicating them.
How
horrible was the Soviet
Union? Anderson gets at some
of Stalin’s depravity. One episode that comes to mind is laughing
about the execution of a Jewish henchman Genrikh
Yagoda with his replacement,
Nikolai Yezhov—whom,
you could have guessed, was going to be executed in short order
himself. And of course there was the Great Purge between 1936 and
1938 which saw the murders of hundreds of thousands who had
increasingly tenuous connections to Trotsky. And
that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the estimates of 20-30
million killed during Stalin’s rule, including the Holodomor, and
including not only the Soviet
Union but also the bloc countries. There are, as noted above, other
ways to suffer; when you include those, the numbers are much higher.
Sean
McMeekin’s Stalin’s
War goes into greater detail
about what Stalin was willing to do. I don’t give content warnings
generally, but this is
an exception. I have rarely been nauseated while reading, but the
descriptions of the prisons in Ukraine were horrifying. Please pick
up the book because it is a very good read, but if you’re bothered
by true gore, you might want to sit this one out.
McMeekin’s
title is a reflection of the thesis: Stalin was the only one who
endured World War II from beginning to end. Hitler, Tojo, Roosevelt,
and Churchill were all either dead or compromised when everything was
over. He also marched out
with control over more territory than Hitler had dreamed of.
In
The
Origins of the Second World War,
A. J. P. Taylor describes Hitler as an excellent poker player but a
lousy chess player. By the end of the war, Stalin played both at a
master level: he read Roosevelt and Churchill well enough to know how
far he could push them, but with an eye toward the medium-term, if
not long-term, he also seeded both the US and British governments
with assets who could help him establish the logistical framework
needed to achieve his goals.
Please
do not think that McMeekin or I are praising Stalin’s brilliance.
On the contrary, Stalin needed to be clever about getting at the
resources of the American and British empires because he squandered
the resources of the Soviet empire, including soldiers, before the
dissolution of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Had Stalin utilized his
resources better, many more countries could have fallen behind the
Iron Curtain.
While
some of the gory details aren’t common knowledge, much of what
McMeekin discusses is known to history, but more importantly were
known at the time. Certainly, they would have been known by Roosevelt
and Churchill, and yet Churchill championed Stalin as an ally, and
Roosevelt gave the Soviet Union an aid package that was
stunning in its generosity. While the arrangement could be
categorized, roughly, as American money for Russian soldiers (or
casualties), that doesn’t hold completely. The Soviet Union
defended against Germany, but did nothing to help American defenses
against Japan until the very end. It also can’t be emphasized
enough that Germany would not have been in as strong a position were
it not for their
initial pact with the Soviets.
Pretend
that the Soviet Union were perfect allies who kept Americans and
Western Europeans safe from harm (suspend your disbelief for a
moment). That justifies a generous aid package, but even by those
standards, the Soviets still made out extremely well. They not only
received billions of dollars from the Lend Lease Act, including state
of the art vehicles and war materiel that our own troops could have
used, but also almost
prefabricated factories which transferred an astonishing amount of
technical knowledge. And this is to say nothing of
butter and crab meat, which the Soviets themselves fished in American
waters. At a certain point, you have to question the judgment of the
people Stalin was negotiating with. Better
said is that Churchill and Roosevelt shouldn’t have been such easy
marks.
McMeekin
holds Churchill in greater disdain than Roosevelt, who by comparison
comes off as something of a rube. Churchill had been at this longer
and should have known better, but then again why would anyone have
heightened expectations of an admirer of Mussolini? Access to news
and intelligence didn’t deter Churchill’s admiration for Stalin,
either, who was willing to bet on Stalin’s “personality” as a
counter force to Hitler’s, even before their alliance was broken.
While much has been made of Churchill’s foresight and nobility,
McMeekin suggests that if Churchill had really wanted to protect
Poland, he should have declared was against Germany *and* the Soviet
Union after the invasion—but he did not. It seems Churchill
understood how badly he’d judged everything by Tehran in 1943, but
by then there wasn’t much the British empire was able to do.
If
Churchill should have known better, Roosevelt’s concessions to
Stalin come off as shocking naivete that betray, perhaps,
callousness. It might be
one thing to give away American resources to an ally one could only
call untrustworthy, but it’s another thing to sign off on
war crimes and human rights violations. For as much as some want to
blame the terms of the Treaty of Versailles for the advent of World
War II, Roosevelt did not agree, and demanded Germany’s
unconditional surrender. He also insisted that there was no such
thing as a German Resistance and agreed to allow Stalin to shoot
49,000 German soldiers without a trial. But probably the worst of all
was essentially donating Poland to the Soviets.
It’s
fair to say that the Soviet Union as we knew it from 1945 to 1991
wouldn’t have existed without the US’s initial acquiescence, but
that doesn’t mean we didn’t suffer from a case of buyer’s
remorse ourselves. What we were willing to tolerate and even abet to
stop a “greater evil” we saw as a threat in peacetime. And they
were a genuine threat. Again, maybe the CIA as an organization
dedicated to stopping the Soviet Communists wasn’t such a bad idea
initially. There was just one problem: they didn’t know how.
It
is worth repeating that the problems
were the Soviets and the Iron Curtain countries. It just so happened
that those countries were the scenes of horrific fighting before and
during (and in some cases after) World War II. There were areas that
saw German Nazis come in a wave to the east, followed by the Soviets
pushing west, then once again by the Nazi coming east. (And
in many cases, the Soviets
were by far the most brutal.) By 1946,
the uncompromised good guys in these places were almost
all dead. If anyone was left
to work with the CIA, they had to hold their noses and work with
people who had Nazi bonafides.
In
the early years, the CIA did try to work with resistance movements
when they could find them. Unfortunately, intelligence around these
movements was difficult to find at best. When missions were proposed
based on this intelligence, they immediately aroused the concerns of
field supervisors
because,
in many cases, they seemed
too good to be true. It took a few years—and a handful of
deaths—for the CIA to realize that they were being baited by the
target governments, particularly in Poland.
MI6
agent Kim Philby pops into The Quiet Americans
to demonstrate the shocking lack of operational security that plagued
the CIA initially (surprisingly relevant in April of 2025). However,
while that weakened the CIA, they were already in a compromised
position: we had not done what the Soviets did and seeded our people
in their governments, period. Given Stalin’s capricious purges, it
may not have mattered.
Let’s
say Churchill and Roosevelt suffered from a little bit of hero
worship. However, Eisenhower doesn’t have that excuse, because
eventually Stalin did what all dictators eventually do.
By
March of 1953, Stalin was dead, and his successor Nikita Kruschev was
the most obvious of the celebrants. Anderson opens a chapter with an
anecdote about the first general meeting Kruschev chaired. When
someone questioned out loud why no one stopped Stalin, particularly
in his later years, Kruschev demanded to know who asked the question.
After everyone in the room remained silent, Kruschev grinned. “That
is why.” He—and many in his generation—understood exactly what
Stalin had cost them, and he wanted to remedy that.
If
I’m spending a lot of time on this particular book, it’s because
Anderson did a fantastic job of underlining how Stalinism’s effects
on the world endured beyond his death. The CIA couldn’t do anything
to the Soviet Union, so it concentrated on where it could get
something done. Whether it was worth doing is the question.
In
fairness, the 1950 civil war in Korea *did* feature not only
Communist actors but also Soviet influence and support. To their
credit, the CIA did in fact warn about the Truman administration
about an upcoming operation. However, that intelligence was ignored,
and thus the United States was caught off guard when the fighting did
break out. I’ll leave it to others to dissect the missteps on all
sides of the Korean War; suffice to say that our failures there were
further inspiration to get something done in other theaters. Thus,
Guatemala, Iran, and of course Vietnam, among others. Shame that most
of them had precious little Communist movements before the United
States interfered with them. But at least people could see that we
were busy!
Kruschev
may have been sincere about wanting to improve relations with the
United States, but decades of dealing with the machinations of
Stalin’s Soviet Union left us suspicious at best, paranoid at
worst. While it isn’t fair to blame Stalin entirely for the control
J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI were able to exert on American life, it
is difficult to imagine that said control would have been as total or
remotely justifiable without Stalin. Anderson cheekily invokes the
old saying, “Just because I’m paranoid, that doesn’t mean
they’re not out to get me” when referring to Stalin; similarly,
the same can be said of the United States, but perhaps the emphasis
should be reversed. The United States government did have multiple
people in positions of power who were more sympathetic to the Soviet
Union than they should have been, but those people tended to operate
in the open (see Lend Lease Act arrangements above). And if there
were “assets” that needed to be rooted out, that didn’t justify
the persecutions of homosexuals, civil rights leaders, and anyone
else Hoover felt was “subversive”. But when Anti-Communism was a
tenet of American religion, all you had to do was invoke the word
“communist”, and, like a magic spell, anything was allowed. And
just like magic, the rules of logic seldom applied.
The
penalties for stepping out of bounds in the United States weren’t
as severe as they were in the Soviet Union, but you’d be forgiven
for thinking that they could be just as arbitrary and damning. The
fear of dissent chilled the sciences in the Soviet Union; here, they
stifled or ended the careers of multiple people in the arts. Much as
we like to joke about East German films that featured someone sitting
in a darkened room with a candle, possibly uttering gibberish, as the
safest meta-statement they could get away with under a repressive
regime, it’s hard to look at the arts of the United States in the
1950s and not see at least a partial retreat to infantilization and
absurdity, and a haven in speculative fiction. Once again, Everything
Was Awesome, and you’d better make sure people knew you believed
that. Perfect your performance of Happiness, but now throw in a
special flavor of Goodness that smelled like motherhood and apple
pie. The Medieval met the Modern in the strangest place.
Strategies
from a non-existent fourth dimensional chess game is the paradigm we
invoke when we see or hear something that doesn’t make sense from
an actor that we trust. Merrick Garland didn’t immediately go after
Trump for the January 6 insurrection because he had secret
information and had to make considerations that the rest of us
haven’t thought through. Trump didn’t prosecute Hillary Clinton
for her alleged crimes during the 2016 election because he wanted to
use her to snare the Pizza Gate operation and ultimately the entire
conspiracy reported on by QAnon. Perversely, those explanations made
more sense to many than Garland running out the clock on an
investigation because he did not, for whatever reason, want to have
to prosecute Trump, or than Trump wanting to use misinformation to
egg on and build up his supporter base.
Seeing
a 4D chess game requires you to believe what people say, not what
they do. It’s convoluted and comes up all too often in twenty-first
century discourse, but it was invented in the twentieth. It made it
possible for people to live in the world they believed they should,
in spite of events transpiring around them that contradicted the
values they were supposed to live by. Cynical as I am about
Eisenhower, I think he was genuinely caught up in the game
himself.
Hungary in 1956 was legitimately ready and able
to take the United States up on its implied offer of assistance if it
overthrew its government. The protests were enough that Kruschev
believed the game was up...but Eisenhower didn’t. So bereft of
meaningful intelligence for so long, we couldn’t believe our luck,
and then created facts on the ground to justify not acting on it.
(While the United States may be excused for wanting to avoid heavy
combat after World War II at all costs, that excuse wears thin when
the alternative was nuclear weapons.) Kruschev evidently couldn’t
believe his own good fortune at first, but when he finally realized
the United States was, indeed, not going to move, the repression in
Hungary was swift, brutal, and long-lasting. The same may be said for
the consequences in the rest of the world.
It’s
not the fault of the Soviet Union/Russia that the United States has
taken a totalitarian turn (and it wasn’t their fault in the 1930s
and 1940s, either). For all of the influence both empires had in the
twentieth century, it was never just us. It might be fairer to say
that we were all influenced by similar philosophies. But that is not
innocuous: certain
strains of thought, if given credibility, can
be deadly.
When
I finished The Future Is History, I made the impolitic
statement to my family that Russians were homophobic, antisemitic,
and misogynists. You will be happy to know that my children have
*never* let me live that down, and I regret my statement because, of
course, no group of people can be defined by the actions of some of
its members (regardless of opinion polls). I regret it even more
because I was *not* trying to say that too many Russians have been
murderously homophobic, antisemitic (and Islamophobic), and
misogynistic because of some essential characteristic. A Russian
identity is not any more toxic than, say, a Navajo one, and there are
as many elements in Russian history to move them away from prejudice
as there are to move them toward it.
Sociology
does an excellent job of explaining complex social interactions and
even cultures, but it is not prophecy. Russia is not mindless, and it
was never, even in the early 1990s, a plaything of the Western world.
Its leadership and people made choices, even if admittedly they
didn’t always have good options. They didn’t have to become
fascists and, more importantly, they don’t have to stay that way.
And,
I should add, neither do we.
