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Putin, America, and the Politics of Being (Concluded)

          Putin, coming out of relative obscurity, was elected Russian president in 2000 with 53% of the vote. He consolidated his power quickly and extensively in ways large and small and was reelected in 2004 with a reported 71% of the vote. The Russian constitution then only allowed the president two consecutive four-year terms preventing his run for a third term. Putin endorsed Dmitry Medvedev for the March 2008 election and Medvedev got more than 70% of the votes. He then appointed Putin his prime minister.

          A constitutional change during Medvedev’s term increased the presidential term to six years, and Putin again ran for president in 2012. The election was viewed by many within and without Russia as corrupt. In her book The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012), Masha Gessen reports: “Putin declared victory in the first round of the presidential election, with 63 percent of the vote. Holding a virtual monopoly on the ballot, the media, and the polls themselves, he could have claimed any figure, but he opted for a landslide, and a slap in the face to the Movement for Fair Elections.” The Movement had been part of widespread demonstrations that started months before the election. The protestors wore white ribbons, which Putin crudely sexualized by saying the cloth looked like condoms.

          Putin won, but it was clear that a significant portion of Russians were unhappy with him and the direction of their society. Putin had invaded Georgia in 2008, which perhaps was initially popular, but became less so as the war wore on. Privatization of industry had put money into private hands, but little of it went to anyone other than what are now known as the oligarchs. Russians could increasingly see the results of wealth, but few experienced it. Russia became the most economically unequal society in the world. More and more people felt dangerously unsettled. Gessen again: “Many Russians, however, got poorer—or at least felt a lot poorer: there were so many more goods in the stores now but they could afford so little. Nearly everyone lost the one thing that had been in abundant supply during the Era of Stagnation: the unshakeable belief that tomorrow will not be different from today. Uncertainty made people feel ever poorer.” And people took to the streets in numbers that Putin could not ignore.

          He responded not by trying to distribute wealth more equally, increasing civil liberties, or having fairer elections. Instead, in something that should feel familiar to Americans today, he sought to unite Russians by launching an anti-homosexual crusade. Gessen states, “In the spring of 2012, Putin decided to pick on the gays. In the lead-up to the March 2012 election, faced with mass protests, Putin briefly panicked. . . . And faced with the protest movement, the new Kremlin crew reached for the bluntest instrument it could: it called the protesters queer.” Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America sees Putin as making this an external threat: “Some intractable foreign foe had to be linked to protestors, so that they, rather than Putin himself, could be portrayed as the danger to Russian statehood. Protestors’ actions had to be uncoupled from the very real domestic problem that Putin had created and associated with a fake foreign threat to Russian sovereignty. [The protestors] were mindless agents of global sexual decadence whose actions threatened the innocent national organism.” Putin claimed that these protestors were the tools of a foreign power, a power embodied in the person many American conservatives loathed. “Three days after the protests began, Putin blamed Hillary Clinton for initiating them: ‘she gave the signal.’” A few days later, without providing evidence, he claimed that the protestors had been paid.

          The propaganda maintained that the forces promoting sodomy were not just trying to affect Russia. They were also infiltrating Ukraine. “European integration (of Ukraine) was interpreted by Russian politicians to mean the legalization of same-sex partnership (which was not an element of Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU) and thus the spread of homosexuality.” Gessen tells us that a Russian politician “warned that if Ukraine went west, that would lead to ‘a broadening of the sphere of gay culture, which has become the European Union’s official policy.’ Over the next couple of months, the image of the Western threat menacing Ukraine broadened to include not only the gays but also the Americans, for whom the gays were always a stand-in anyway.”

          Whether or not American manifest destiny compares to Russian exceptionalism, Putin’s turn to sexual matters does have American parallels. How American does this sound? Putin announced, Gessen reports, that he was “defending traditional values.” Russia passed legislation “not only banning ‘homosexual propaganda’ but also ‘protecting children from harmful information,’ which meant, first and foremost, any mention of homosexuality, but also mention of death, violence, suicide, domestic abuse, unhappiness, and, really, life itself.” (The law was entitled, “For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values.” Perhaps it produces a snappy acronym in Russian.) Russian kiddies should not learn of things that might make them uncomfortable. It is clear that a similar agenda is being implemented in an increasing number of American schools.

          Putin has learned a basic political trick: when the topic is about the shortcomings of Russia or of Putin himself, shift the topic. “Putin was enunciating a basic principle of his Eurasian civilization: when the subject is inequality, change it to sexuality.” American conservatives have followed a similar path to avoid confronting American shortcomings. Instead of addressing homelessness, switch the topic to any number of other topics — critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, DEI, or the ever-handy rainbow flag of gaydom and transgenderism. American conservatives and Putin share the goal of wanting to make “politics about being rather than doing.”

          Russia has recently been meddling in the affairs of other countries. For example, when Germany’s Angela Merkel admitted Syrian refugees causing a backlash among some of her constituents, Russia increased its bombing of Syrian targets, thereby creating more refugees. Through Twitter accounts and the media outlets it controls, Russia published false reports about the crime wave in Germany supposedly caused by the refugees. This had me thinking about conservatives who talk about crimes and diseases brought by immigrants to this country. They have little data to back up their claims and seldom mention that almost all who come here expect to work hard to attain a better life. Moreover, they fail to mention that birth rates are dropping in the U.S., and we need those workers.    

          Before the vote on Scottish independence, Russian media, hoping to encourage the disruption of the United Kingdom, rattled on about the terrible consequences for Scotland if it remained in Great Britain. After the referendum failed, Russia cast doubt about the vote’s validity. Internet video suggested vote rigging, and the videos were promoted on Twitter by accounts based in Russia. Timothy Snyder states, “Although no actual irregularities were reported, roughly a third of Scottish voters gained the impression that something fraudulent had taken place.” Sound familiar?

          Russia favored Brexit–anything to disrupt European unity–and over 400 Twitter accounts heavily promoting the “exit” position were traced to Russia. Russian media did not attack the outcome of the referendum. Snyder says, “This time, no Russian voice questioned the result, presumably since the voting had gone the way Moscow had wished. Brexit was a major triumph for Russian foreign policy to weaken the United Kingdom. The margin of the vote was 52% for leaving and 48% for staying.”

          Why should Russia seek to destabilize other countries? There are at least two reasons. Masha Gessen reports that Putin understands strength to mean that “the country is as great as the fear it inspires.” Thus, Russia’s ability to influence the internal affairs of other countries demonstrates its powers. In addition, because Russia has not been able to raise itself up in the world, it has begun to define success “not in terms of prosperity and freedom but in terms of sexuality and culture, and [suggests] that the European Union (and the United States) be defined as threats not because of anything they did but because of the values they supposedly represented.” Russia’s method of moving up in the standings is to tear others down. Snyder points out, “The essence of Russia’s foreign policy is strategic relativism: Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others weaker. The simplest way is to make them like Russia.”

          The reasoning would suggest that Russia thinks itself better or, at least, not so bad when people in other countries doubt their institutions and their society’s values. Russia suggested that a Conservative win in the UK was the result of a rigged election. If it can get Britishers to believe that, Russia’s elections appear similar to British ones. Moscow does not try “to project some ideal of their own, only to bring out the worst in the United States.” Under communism, the Soviet Union tried to convince the world that it had a better system than the west — one that would eventually prevail and bring a better life for the Soviets and people around the world. Russia no longer has that ideology. It cannot produce or promise an improving society; it can only tear down others.

          It is more than a little frightening to picture Putin giggling in triumph, but he must be more than a little pleased with recent American trends as conservatives seek to undermine the basic validity of our elections. If, in this bastion of democracy, our votes are rigged, then Russian elections look better. The Russian portrayal of America as a land of sexual decadence is only promoted when conservatives “find” homosexual and transexual groomers hiding in American classrooms. Russia’s own repression of Russians who contest their country’s direction looks sounder when U.S. schools are portrayed as places for racial and woke indoctrination. The conservatives may not be consciously seeking to make Putin stronger, but they are unwittingly playing into his hands. Perhaps when the cameras are off, he runs victory laps around those huge conference tables he often sits behind wearing a MAGA cap. And giggling.

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Putin, America, and the Politics of Being

          The Trump administration is trying to coerce Ukraine into accepting a peace settlement with Russia even though Russia may not want peace. The deal would basically have Ukraine capitulate to Putin. This reminds me of the books The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) by Timothy Snyder and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012) by Masha Gessen. Both books were written before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and our 2020 and 2024 elections, but the two books complement each other in their portraits of Putin and Russia. They present pictures that aid in understanding the present Ukraine situation and illuminate for me aspects of our own politics. Reading them did not lead to a full-blown depression, but it did not improve my mood.

          Putin’s obsession with Ukraine is longstanding. The Soviet Union, founded in 1922, was a federation of national republics that included Ukraine. However, during the 1970s and 1980s every Soviet Republic increasingly felt as though they were being exploited by some other republic. In March 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the USSR, organized a referendum on whether to maintain the Soviet Union as a single entity. Voters in nine of the fifteen constituent republics voted in favor of unity, but six republics boycotted the vote. A few weeks later, Georgia held its own referendum and voted to secede from the USSR. Two months later, Ukraine declared its independence from the USSR, as did Chechnya, which had been part of Russia. The latter led to a destructive war with Russia. (In August 1991, President George H.W. Bush went to Kyiv and urged Ukrainians not to leave the Soviet Union, saying “Freedom is not the same as independence.”) More than 90% of the Ukrainians voted for independence.       A coup to remove Gorbachev failed, but in the aftermath, Gorbachev resigned and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, became increasingly popular. He was soon head of the Soviet Union and removed Russia from the USSR ending the federation. Putin followed him as president of Russia in 1999. After a brief hiatus (2008-2012), Putin has been elected president ever since.

          Putin proclaims religious, ethnic, and near mythical connections between Russia and Ukraine. Snyder says Putin sees Ukraine as “an inseparable organ of the virginal Russian body” and that Putin has said that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people.” The independent Ukraine that came into being in 1991 may have been tolerable to Putin as long as it remained receptive to Russia’s desires and provided it with oil, food and precious metals. Viktor Yanukovych was elected head of Ukraine in 2010 and, according to Snyder, began his term “by offering Russia essentially everything that Ukraine could give, including basing rights for the Russian navy on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.” At the time it was understood that this installation would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.

          The Ukrainian population, however, increasingly looked not to Russia for guidance and inspiration but to the West. When Yanukovych canceled an association agreement with the European Union in 2013, pro-European demonstrations broke out in Ukraine. After several elections, the present government took power, and as we all know, this is not a Ukraine that takes orders from Moscow.

          The westward turn by Ukraine has been especially troubling for those who have “Mother Russia” feelings about Ukraine. While former Soviet satellite countries and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007, the EU had not extended into any territory that had been part of the original Soviet federation of 1922.

          This history and Putin’s viewpoints about Ukraine struck me as quintessentially Russian. The first time I read in Crime and Punishment about Raskolnikov’s kissing the soil at the crossroads, I tried to understand his semi-mystical feeling for Mother Russia. Snyder writes that Russian slavophiles believe “that Russia was endowed with a particular genius. Orthodox Christianity and popular mysticism, they maintained, expressed a depth of spirit unknown in the West. The slavophiles imagined that Russian history had begun with a Christian conversion in Kyiv a thousand years before.”

          But as I thought about these aspects of Russian culture, I wondered whether there were counterparts in American history. Putin apparently believes that Ukraine is an integral part of Russia, and it is Russia’s destiny to include Ukraine. How much different is that from the nineteenth century American faith in “manifest destiny”? At the time, many felt that it was the express mission of Americans to push onward to the Pacific even though other peoples already lived there. Didn’t the use of the word “destiny” imply that this path was preordained by the Almighty? Putin and others believe that Russia is exceptional, distinct and more holy than other lands. And Americans? Of course, America is exceptional, and just below the surface of that notion is a kind of religious belief. Surely when Jesus returns, he will not go to Galilee, but instead will come to the holiest of holies, America. (That is, if he can navigate our immigration laws, for nothing in them would allow him to enter. He might be able to walk over the river, but what if a border wall keeps him out, and he is consigned to a squalid camp on the Mexican side?)

          Perhaps finding links between Mother Russia, manifest destiny, and American exceptionalism is a stretch, but comparing some aspects of recent Russian and American political history is not.

(Concluded April 30)

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Snippets

I recently saw the play Patriots, which was written by Peter Morgan and directed by Rupert Gold. The production came from London where it won awards. I knew that the play had something to do with Vladimir Putin but didn’t know much beyond that. Within a few minutes, I realized, however, that I was familiar with the story from having read Masha Gessen’s book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. In both the play and book, we learn how Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky elevated the obscure bureaucrat Putin from insignificance to the dictator of Russia. The play — the set, the acting, the direction, the writing — was outstanding. I enjoyed it, but it also made me think about the creative process. How does one learn about Berezovsky and Putin and decide to make a play about their dynamics? How does one read Ron Chernow’s Hamilton and decide to make a hip-hop musical of it? How does one read American Prometheus and decide to make a movie of it?

The menu said that a dish contained “tofu and other stuff.” I eschewed it.

Are desert flowers more vibrant than others or does it just seem that way?

I apparently need to learn more about the Bible. Or football. Or perhaps both. Deion Sanders, now a football coach, in promoting his book Motivate and Dominate: 21 Ways to Win On and Off the Field, was asked: “What book (fiction or nonfiction) best captures the game of football as you know it?” Sanders replied, “The Bible.”

A friend said, “All my life I said I wanted to be someone. . . . I can see now that I should have been more specific.”

From her dress, I pegged her as a street person. She was pushing a cart filled with bulging kitchen trash bags. She reached into one. She pulled out latex gloves. She put them on. She reached back into the bag and pulled out sanitizing wipes. She then scrubbed the subway seat before sitting down.

At a New England town’s used book sale, a friend held up Smallbone Deceased and said I would like it. I did. The mystery by Michael Gilbert published in 1950 is set in a London solicitor’s office where the corpse of Marcus Smallbone is discovered in a large deed box. I had not heard of Michael Gilbert before, but I learned that he was a practicing solicitor as well as the author of many books in different styles. Perhaps what I found most intriguing is that Gilbert only wrote on his weekday commute from the suburbs to London, averaging five hundred words a day. This schedule produced over thirty novels and more than 180 short stories. I assume he commuted by train, and since I also assume that he was writing in longhand, his train rides were smoother than my subway trips.

The first mysteries I remember reading were Freddy the Pig books by Walter R. Brooks. The Library of Congress cataloging data printed on the copyright page above the ISBN for Freddy the Detective states: “Brooks, Walter R. (1886-1958) with illustrations by Kurt Wiese. Summary: Freddy the pig does some detective work in order to solve the mystery of a missing toy train.” Below the ISBN it continues: [1. Pigs—Fiction 2. Domestic animals—fiction. 3. Mystery and detective stories.] How could you not want to read this?

My idea for a book group: Everyone reads three-quarters of the same mystery and then gets together for a discussion.

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It Was So Age-Inappropriate What I Read

My grade and high schools must have had libraries, but I have little memory of them. I certainly don’t remember any controversies surrounding what books they should or should not shelve. On the other hand, I have many memories of the Mead Public Library, the facility that served the entire town of 45,000. I went there obsessively. It was a two-story building with the adult section on the entrance floor and the children’s books upstairs.

I gave little thought to who or how it was decided what books were in the children’s library. The decision, no doubt, was made by the librarians as to what was age appropriate. Appropriateness, I would guess, had to do with reading ability. Third graders were not ready for War and Peace or Descartes. Such books would be in the adult section.

Now, however, books are kept from children not just because of vocabulary, complexity, or length. Instead, the books in many places are segregated because the subject is not considered age-appropriate or, as an Arkansas statute says, because the book will be “harmful” to the young reader or even because it may make a reader “uncomfortable.”

Take Heather Has Two Mommies by Lesléa Newman. It has been frequently removed from shelves for being age-inappropriate, but it is written with a simple vocabulary and structure with innocent, colorful illustrations. It is not age-inappropriate for first and second graders because it is too difficult to read. Instead, some adults insist it is age-inappropriate because of its subject matter. The book readily accepts as normal a same-sex relationship, although nothing in the book states that Heather’s mothers have sex. Is this age inappropriate? The answer should be no.

If children are asking about a topic, a book in age-appropriate language is not inappropriate. It is only natural for curious kids to wonder why they have a mother and father while another child has two mommies or only one parent or only a grandmother. Books written at a suitable language level about divorce, single motherhood, and untimely death are appropriate for kids who wonder about such things. The same is true for a family with two mothers or fathers. Heather has been banned not because young’uns are not inherently interested in the topic but because adults are uncomfortable with it.

Some book removers go further when books for kids deal more directly with sexuality. They maintain that the goal of the authors and librarians is to groom or indoctrinate children. If the fear is that schoolkids will be transformed into  gay or trans or nonbinary people, it’s just plain silly…worse, ignorant. On the other hand, these books introduce the concept that gay, lesbian, trans, nonbinary, and other queer folk should be accepted into the community, should be free from legal and societal discrimination, should be treated with the same respect as we treat others. (I recall there being something in the Bible about loving thy neighbor as thyself.) However, if that’s the kind of dangerous indoctrination the censors fear, they may be right.  

Attacking books because of their sexuality might mask broader concerns than just gay sex.  What comes to mind is what Masha Gessen wrote about Vladimir Putin in The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. When Putin feels politically vulnerable, he launches anti-gay attacks. He has produced his own version of don’t-say-gay laws by enacting legislation that bans “homosexual propaganda.” Putin has also anticipated those loyal Americans who don’t want topics taught that might make school kids uncomfortable. Russia under Putin “protects” kids not merely by eliminating reference to homosexuality. He has also banned “any mention of death, violence, suicide, domestic abuse, unhappiness, and, really, life itself.” In putting in place these restrictions, Putin has said that he is defending “traditional values.” As far as I am aware, however, he has not said that he was promoting “family values.” When he is criticized, Putin has been a master at diverting that criticism by attacking gays.

When I hear concerns that books are in the library for purposes of  “indoctrinating” children, I think back to what I recall of my elementary school reading. I remember few of the books I consumed except for a series which I labeled in my mind the “orange biographies” because they all had orange bindings. Of appropriate length and vocabulary for a third grader, they were hero books with an emphasis on the childhoods of the likes of Thomas Edison or Andrew Jackson, but they also contained enough about the subject’s adulthoods for me to learn a bit of history. These books have stayed with me on some level, forming some of my background knowledge about various personages and historical eras. Looked at another way, however, they were books that indoctrinated.

Although the spouse remembers an orange biography about the first woman doctor, almost all were about men. Although there might have been biographies about Booker T. Washington or Washington Carver, almost all were about whites. They were about “great” white men with little, if any, suggestion that “ordinary” people did important things. They were all about Americans as if “foreigners” could not or did not contribute to a better world. The books were a subliminal indoctrination into the American myth that any American child (at least any white male) could become a great person—just work hard and live right and, perhaps, be a little adventurous. The subliminal corollary to this belief, however, is that if you or your parents have not become rich, are not powerful, or are not important, it is your or their fault. (David Maraniss reports in A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Family that the playwright Arthur Miller thought Americans had the tendency to blame themselves for economic shortcomings and not the economic system. He theorizes that this proclivity to blame oneself prevented America from ever facing a real challenge to the economic system.)

So yes. Reading indoctrinates. By using a much less charged synonym, however, we also know that reading teaches. That is, of course, why education should present all sorts of information and all sorts of views to children. Presentation of only one viewpoint might be indoctrination; presenting more than that gives a child a true opportunity to learn.

(The fear by conservatives of indoctrination in our schools is not new, but the concern over subject matter has not remained constant. I found it amusing when I read that William “Big Bill” Thompson ran for Chicago mayor in the 1920s on an America First platform charging that the English monarchy was planting pro-British propaganda in the Chicago schools. Sarah Churchwell, “America First” in Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Myth America: Historians Take the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.)

Concluded June 19

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Putin, America, and the Politics of Being (continued)

          Putin, coming out of relative obscurity, was elected Russian president in 2000 with 53% of the vote. He consolidated his power quickly and extensively in ways large and small, such as by nationalizing television, and was reelected in 2004 with a reported 71% of the vote. The Russian constitution then only allowed two consecutive four-year presidential terms. Putin endorsed Dmitry Medvedev for the March 2008 election and Medvedev got more than 70% of the votes. He then appointed Putin his prime minister.

          A constitutional change increased the presidential term to six years after Medvedev’s term, and Putin again ran for president in 2012. The election was viewed by many within and without Russia as corrupt. Masha Gessen in The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin reports: “Putin declared victory in the first round of the presidential election, with 63 percent of the vote. Holding a virtual monopoly on the ballot, the media, and the polls themselves, he could have claimed any figure, but he opted for a landslide, and a slap in the face to the Movement for Fair Elections.” The Movement had been part of widespread demonstrations that started months before the election. They wore white ribbons, which Putin tellingly sexualized by saying the cloth looked like condoms.

          Putin won, but it was clear that a significant portion of Russians were unhappy with him and the direction of their society. Putin had invaded Georgia in 2008, which perhaps was initially popular, but became less so as the war wore on. Privatization had put money into private hands, but little of it went to anyone other than what are now known as the oligarchs. Russians could increasingly see the results of wealth, but few had it as Russia became the most economically unequal society in the world. More and more people felt dangerously unsettled. Gessen again: “Many Russians, however, got poorer—or at least felt a lot poorer: there were so many more goods in the stores now but they could afford so little. Nearly everyone lost the one thing that had been in abundant supply during the Era of Stagnation: the unshakeable belief that tomorrow will not be different from today. Uncertainty made people feel ever poorer.” And people took to the streets in numbers that Putin could not ignore.

          He responded not by trying to distribute wealth more equally, increasing civil liberties, or having fairer elections. Instead, in something that should feel familiar to Americans today, he sought to unite Russians by launching an anti-homosexual crusade. Gessen states, “In the spring of 2012, Putin decided to pick on the gays. In the lead-up to the March 2012 election, faced with mass protests, Putin briefly panicked. . . . And faced with the protest movement, the new Kremlin crew reached for the bluntest instrument it could: it called the protesters queer.” Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America sees Putin as making this an external threat: “Some intractable foreign foe had to be linked to protestors, so that they, rather than Putin himself, could be portrayed as the danger to Russian statehood. Protestors’ actions had to be uncoupled from the very real domestic problem that Putin had created and associated with a fake foreign threat to Russian sovereignty. [The protestors] were mindless agents of global sexual decadence whose actions threatened the innocent national organism.” These protestors were the tools of a foreign power, a power embodied in the person many American conservatives loathed. “Three days after the protests began, Putin blamed Hillary Clinton for initiating them: ‘she gave the signal.’” A few days later, without providing evidence, he claimed that the protestors were paid.

          The propaganda maintained that the forces promoting sodomy were not just trying to affect Russia. They were also after Ukraine. “European integration (of Ukraine) was interpreted by Russian politicians to mean the legalization of same-sex partnership (which was not an element of Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU) and thus the spread of homosexuality.” Gessen tells us that a Russian politician “warned that if Ukraine went west, that would lead to ‘a broadening of the sphere of gay culture, which has become the European Union’s official policy.’ Over the next couple of months, the image of the Western threat menacing Ukraine broadened to include not only the gays but also the Americans, for whom the gays were always a stand-in anyway.”

          Whether or not American manifest destiny (see previous post) compares to Russian exceptionalism, Putin’s turn to sexual matters does have American parallels. How American does this sound? Putin announced, Gessen reports, that he was “defending traditional values.” Russia passed legislation “not only banning ‘homosexual propaganda’ but also ‘protecting children from harmful information,’ which meant, first and foremost, any mention of homosexuality, but also mention of death, violence, suicide, domestic abuse, unhappiness, and, really, life itself.” (The law was entitled, “For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values.” Perhaps it produces a snappy acronym in Russian.) Russian kiddies should not learn of things that might make them uncomfortable. A similar agenda is being implemented in an increasing number of American schools.

          Putin has adopted the basic political stance that when the topic is about the shortcomings of Russia or Putin himself, shift the topic: “Putin was enunciating a basic principle of his Eurasian civilization: when the subject is inequality, change it to sexuality.” American conservatives have followed a broader path to avoid confronting American shortcomings: the topic may be switched to a number of topics, including critical race theory or Black Lives Matter, but, of course, the staple of avoidance still remains of waving the rainbow flag of gaydom and transdom. American conservatives and Putin share the goal of wanting to make “politics about being rather than doing.”

(concluded May 9)

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Putin, America, and the Politic of Being

          The reading for the history book group was The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) by Timothy Snyder. In preparation, I reread The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012) by Masha Gessen. I read it shortly after it came out, with a postscript, in paperback in 2014. The two books were written of course before Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and our 2020 election with its fallout, but the two books complement each other in their portraits of Putin and Russia and present pictures that aid in understanding the present Ukraine situation and our politics. This reading did not lead to a full-blown depression, but it did not improve my mood.

          Putin’s obsession with Ukraine is longstanding. The Soviet Union, founded in 1922, was a federation of national republics that included Ukraine, but during the 1970s and 1980s in every Soviet Republic increasingly felt as though they were being exploited by other regions. In March 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev, the head of the USSR, organized a referendum on whether to maintain the Soviet Union as a single entity. Voters in nine of the fifteen constituent republics voted in favor, but six republics boycotted the vote. A few weeks later, Georgia held its own referendum and voted to secede from the USSR. Two months later, Ukraine declared its independence from the USSR, as did Chechnya, which was part of Russia. (In August 1991, President George H.W. Bush went to Kyiv and urged Ukrainians not to leave the Soviet Union, saying “Freedom is not the same as independence.”) More than 90% of the Ukrainians voted for independence.       A coup to remove Gorbachev failed, but in the aftermath, Boris Yeltsin became increasingly popular. He was soon head of the Soviet Union and removed Russia from the USSR and ended it.

          Putin, who came to prominence in Russia after 1991, proclaims religious, ethnic, and near mythical connections between Russia and Ukraine. Snyder says Putin sees Ukraine as “an inseparable organ of the virginal Russian body” and that Putin has said that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people.” The independent Ukraine that came into being in 1991 may have been tolerable to Putin as long as it remained receptive to Russia’s desires. Viktor Yanukovych was elected head of Ukraine in 2010 and, according to Snyder, began his term “by offering Russia essentially everything that Ukraine could give, including basing rights for the Russian navy on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula,” which as it was then understood, would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.

          The Ukrainian population, however, increasingly looked not to Russia for guidance and inspiration but to the West, and when Yanukovych canceled an association agreement with the European Union in 2013, demonstrations broke out in Ukraine. After several elections, the present government took power, and as we all know, this is not a Ukraine that takes orders from Moscow.

          The westward turn by Ukraine has been especially troubling for those who have “Mother Russia” feelings about Ukraine. While former Soviet satellite countries and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007, the EU had not extended into any territory that had been part of the original Soviet state of 1922.

          This history and Putin’s viewpoints about Ukraine struck me as Russian. I remembered the first time I read about Raskolnikov kissing the soil at the crossroads and trying to understand a semi-mystical feeling for Mother Russia that seemed alien to American experience. Snyder writes that Russian slavophiles believed “that Russia was endowed with a particular genius. Orthodox Christianity and popular mysticism, they maintained, expressed a depth of spirit unknown in the West. The slavophiles imagined that Russian history had begun with a Christian conversion in Kyiv a thousand years before.”

          But as I thought about these aspects of Russia, I wondered whether there were counterparts in American history. Putin apparently believes that Ukraine is an integral part of Russia, and it is Russia’s destiny to include Ukraine. How much different is that from the nineteenth century American faith in “manifest destiny,” that it was the mission of Americans to push onward to the Pacific even though other peoples already populated the land? Didn’t the use of “destiny” imply that this path was preordained by an Almighty? Putin and others believe that Russia is somehow exceptional, distinct and more holy than other lands. And Americans? Of course, America is exceptional, and just below the surface of that notion is a kind of religious belief. When Jesus comes back, perhaps he is going to Galilee, but more likely he is coming to America. (That is if he can navigate our immigration laws, for nothing in them would allow him to enter. He might be able to walk over the river, but what if a border wall keeps him out, and he is consigned to a squalid camp on the Mexican side?)

          Perhaps finding links among Mother Russia, manifest destiny, and American exceptionalism is a stretch, but comparing some aspects of recent Russian and American political history is not.

(continued May 6)