The Russian Tragedy
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”
Perhaps the most famous opening line in all of literature, Tolstoy’s words speak with a raw and simple insight that shocks the reader to attention. First released in installments between 1875 and 1877, Anna Karenina belongs to the golden age of European high culture. The great Russian novelists - alongside the symphonists, painters, and public men - are exemplars of the 19th and 20th Centuries’ greatest cultural triumphs.
In the 21st Century, a stupified world might perhaps twist Tolstoy’s immortal phrase into a more accurate reflection of contemporary public opinion: “All good countries are alike; each bad country is bad in its own way.” So stands the paltry state of public discourse surrounding the world’s largest country by landmass, and Europe’s largest population mass (at 144 million people, Russia has more citizens than Britain and France put together). There is a poetic absolutism to contemporary Russia hating. The rational knowledge of a suffering Russian populace appears impotent in the face of a cartoonishly simple need to be sure the enemy is as maximully evil as possible.
The contemporary denigration of Russia no doubt finds its locus in the need for war to be executed in terms saleable to the public. Ukraine is the good guy here, and war - especially war waged in a post-gentlemanly age, demands the total buy-in of public opinion to the good guys’ mission. Even World War 1 (a confused and gruesome conflict with relatively less-definable antagonists than its successor conflict) was framed to posterity in binary terms, yet any historian worth their salt could quickly point to a morass of cross-purposes emerging from the fog of that war.
There is something deeply disturbing about the sheer mindlessness of the present anti-Russian sentiment permeating the globe. Aghast opposition to Putin is one thing, but the rabid pile-on, the dim-witted homogenisation of Russia in the public imagination into one singular, ghoulish entity, does a severe discredit to the community of nations in the western world. The Russian people have suffered bitterly for this war, and indeed, have been suffering bitterly - and innocently - through over a century of failed leadership.
The motifs of everyday Russian life since the end of the 19th Century have been poverty, terror and suffering. The 20th Century began with terrible losses in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese war. This precipitated the Revolution of 1905. Added to shocking personnel losses in World War One, this stoked the febrile atmosphere which bred the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War. The Bolsheviks and the opposing White movements perpetrated the Red and White Terrors. Famine killed 5 million in 1921-1922, and another 8 million in 1932-1933. Then there was the horror of World War Two: over 3 million Russians captured and starved to death by Nazis, countless more slaughtered in the most vicious fighting the planet had ever seen, at the siege of Leningrad. For a near quarter-century Joseph Stalin ruled over the chaos, disappearing enemies - and friends - in the middle of the night. With the loss of the cold war, the Russian people bore the weight of their leaders’ intergenerational failure. After Reagan prevailed on Gorbachev and the Berlin Wall came down, the oligarchs enriched themselves, while the peasants remained entrapped in economic ruin, their chances of self-improvement sunk by the inky-dark sludge of pervasive corruption.
Anti-Russian absolutism, the kind that willfully ignores the suffering of the Russian people themselves, got its start in the United States. In 1919, spurred by the Russian revolution 2 years earlier, American radicals gathered in Chicago in an attempt to found an American communist party. Quite rightly, in the decades that followed, their liberal and conservative opponents organized an anti-communist ethic of opposition, and sought devastating takedowns using propaganda and legislative action. The enemy had to be imagined not just as an abstract ideology, but increasingly as Russia totalis, in order to rouse the people to a requisite level of vigilance against the menace of communism. By the middle of the 20th Century, McCarthyism came to prominence as the natural outgrowth of this anti-communist movement. In the post-cold war era, a monolithic view of Russian national character, forever tied to the deeply negative specter of soviet communism, failed to adjust itself. The West itself bears at least some of the burden of this failure.
Russian-American journalist Keith Gessen wrote in the New Yorker in June that at the conclusion of the Cold War, both President George H.W. Bush, and Secretary of State James A. Baker appeared disinterested in addressing the profound problems associated with re-integrating Russia into the western hemisphere. Neither man was up to the task of negotiating a best-case-scenario exit from the impasse of Soviet politics. As Gessen describes:
“Gorbachev thought he was discussing the creation of a new world, in which the Soviet Union and the United States worked together, two old foes reconciled. Bush thought he was merely negotiating the terms for the Soviets’ surrender”
In the power centers of the old world, before America rose to international pre-eminence, the European royal families and their appendaged aristocracies were too closely interrelated to have conceived of a Russia so spiritually and ideologically divorced from the rest of the world. The complex ethnic history of Central and Eastern Europe also prevented such black and white readings of the Russian national character. This complexity also explains, in part, why the moral reasoning behind wars of aggression on the European continent are far more opaque than the Anglosphere’s journalists have the capacity or inclination to comprehend.
This lack of comprehension, allied to the ever-living remnants of cold-war era American anti-sovietism, have produced a crude, unsophisticated reportage on the Russia that fights against Ukraine today. This circumstance, in turn, has fed a crude and unsophisticated anti-Russian public imagination. The consequence has been the denigration of the Russian people, and the broad refusal to see Vladmir Putin for what he is: not a representative of a world-historical people, but the latest in a long line of usurpers running back to his namesake, Vladimir Lenin.
This has not been healthy for the western world. To begin with, anti-Russian mania has prevented an honest appraisal of the more worrisome aspects of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s leadership. It has concealed Zelensky’s unprecedented crackdowns on Orthodox Christians, and allowed his growing connections to billionaire oligarch backers to go largely unreported. It has shielded Ukraine from serious examination of its corruption crisis, and given cover to a western military-industrial complex hell-bent on getting its money’s worth from arms sales which feed the conflict. The binary framing of not just the conflict itself, but the moral character of each participant nation, has also prevented the progression of meaningful dialogue towards a peace which would stop the slaughter of innocents on both sides. Instead, an absolutist rhetoric remains in the ascendancy. Lindsay Graham, the senior United States senator for South Carolina, typifies this disposition. For Graham, Russia is unconditionally evil, and Ukraine unconditionally good. Anything less than total humiliation for the Russian nation state is unacceptable.
Walter Russell Mead, in God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, illustrates how since the dawn of modernity, the Anglosphere has required a ‘Great Satan’ in order to give focus to its foreign policy. It is certain that Vladimir Putin has emerged as such a character, after the subsiding of the Iraq war, and the messy conclusion of the conflict in Afghanistan.
But the problem with Putin is that his person has bled profusely into his country in the western imagination. Not enough people are able to see the distinction between Putin - the usurper - and Russia - the country he usurps. We are left with the tragedy of a nation that has contributed spectacularly to the cultural inheritance of Western Civilisation being humiliated before the eyes of the world. Its institutions are denigrated on television, while its citizens are slaughtered in trenches. Sometimes, the citizens are slaughtered on television, too.
Last month, a young Russian man living in Egypt was attacked by a shark while swimming in the Red Sea. In a video posted to social media, the swimmer in distress can be heard calling out in Russian for his father, understood to be closeby at the time. More horrifying than the video itself, are the replies posted online. Hundreds of commenters express delight at the tragedy. For the world subjected to the binary messaging of mass media, even a man so clearly unconnected to his country’s leader, must be condemned to the deepest suffering, for the sin of his shared nationality. Videos from the frontline of the war with Ukraine are similarly appalling. Young men - often conscripted against their will - seen cowering in fear as jerry-rigged grenades are dropped by drones. Again, the comments posted are simply appalling and appallingly simple: Russia is bad, Ukraine is good, Russians deserve to die, Ukrainians deserve to triumph, at any cost.
The Russian people gave us Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Shostakovich and Stravinsky, Repin and Kandinsky. They fostered the Bolshoi and the Ballet Russes. They protected the mystic beauty and sacredness of the Orthodox church, and pushed the United States every step of the way in technological innovation throughout the 20th Century. And yet, the Russian people have never seen just rewards for their civilisational genius. Few batted an eyelid earlier this year when Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, described Russia as “A gas station with nukes”. DeSantis was repeating a throwaway line used on the US Senate floor by the late Senator John McCain. Both men - both running for President - ought to have thought more carefully about the import of their messaging.
Through the horrors of communism, Russians lost three generations of their own humanity. War took perhaps three more, and stands poised to take yet another, as the crisis of 21st Century Eastern Europe rolls on. The world needs to do better at disentangling justified prejudices against Putin’s imperialism, from the hard-earned dignity of the long-suffering Russian people themselves.
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Ben Crocker is Academic Programs Manager at UATX, in Austin, Texas and a research fellow at Common Sense Society, in Washington DC