Only in Russia

I simply must note here an event reported in the New York Times this morning. Two men stood in line somewhere in southern Russia waiting to buy a beer at an outdoor festival. They were discussing the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. (Of course, one might add.) The argument grew heated. One man pulled a gun loaded with rubber bullets and shot the other in the head. The man attacked survived—fortunately. The very brief NYT story ends with this deadpan sentence: “Among educated Russians, classical literature and philosophy are sometimes debated in casual social settings, the way sports often are in Western countries.” Based on my own experiences, Russians need not be all that “educated” to fall into such discussions. Mother’s milk and so on.

In the Furnace

A story in the New York Times reports on rifts appearing in the coalition opposing my favorite candidate, Vladimir Putin. Liberals look around at rallies and discover all kinds of people they don’t like, thus ardent nationalists and those who want a Russia for Russians, a designation that apparently excludes some ethnic minorities, among the non-Slavic migrant workers. Earlier stories report on violence—including a beheading—attributed to splinter nationalists.  The thought that came was: “We don’t live long enough to get wise, and by the time we do, we stumble about, and putting on socks is a labor.” A second thought was that until people emerge from the animal state, where tribalism is normal, they’re quite able to see “the other” as something to push away and even to kill—and feel righteous about it! The third thought? Hell and damnation. It keeps happening, over and over again. Nothing’s ever learned. The fourth was, Du calme! This realm, this earth, this life is a reverberatory furnace and not an end in itself. And by the time you realize that, you’re close to metal and about to be poured.

When Will This Spring End?

I note that opportunist Mikhail Dmitrievitch Prokhorov is suddenly running for the presidency of Russia. Who is this Prokhorov? Why, he is the owner of the New Jersey Nets. He is also a billionaire from Russia, born in 1965, who got to be a billionaire in the chaos of Russia’s transition to “democracy” at age 28 when, having managed to become head of the Management Board of the International Finance Company, he “acquired” a state-owned bank that just happened to own vast mining properties that he later sold. Well, enough already.

It looked for a while as if Russia were sensibly abandoning its “democracy” in favor of order, but what with the virulent Arab Spring spreading its spores all over the world, things appear to be unraveling there. Headlines speak of Russia’s “awakening,” the protests against Putin are led by a punk rock band called The Last Tanks in Paris, and the Last Tanks are helped by a rap group called Rabfak whose symbol is a skeleton’s hand giving us the finger. Billionaires, punk bands, and university students. Rock on, comrades, rock on.

A KIT of a PR Venture

I refer to an eight-page insert in the New York Times today. It’s actually a newspaper called Russia, with the secondary name of Beyond the Headlines. It features color photos, a few ads all promoting Russian interests. It is labeled ADVERTISEMENT at the top of the pages, but it is actually a paper produced by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, an official organ of the Russian government created in November 1990 by the Supreme Soviet. The whole production is very sophisticated, interesting, indeed good reading. The paper is on the Internet (link) and also appears as a supplement to the Washington Post. Its main sections include:

Front page
Politics & Society
Special Report
Business
Money & Markets
Opinion
Culture
Feature

Within each of these sections we find further subdivisions. On the Politics & Society page, for instance, we learn that only 29 percent of Russians want Putin, 11 percent want Medvedev. But no other candidates are shown. Some 18 percent, Russia tells us, want both candidates, 27 percent want neither, and 15 percent don’t know. On the Opinion page another poll tells us how Russians see the next twelve month economically. Only 5 percent say Good. Probably Good gets 33, Probably Bad 30 percent. Etc.

My headline comes from the Money & Markets page from a story headlined “KIT Finance Returns from the Dead.” KIT Finance is a St. Petersburg investment bank. Helpfully Russia tells me in a box that KIT is the Russian word for whale. Too big to fail? It delights me that in Russia an investment bank would have the chutzpah to call itself a “whale.” My cultural education is getting a lift.

Now, needless to say, this paper is intended to influence us downtrodden Americans. The Russians—and this, by our count, is the second issue of Russia that we have seen—intend to make a good impression. How better to do that than to present a crisp, informative, and comprehensive picture of a place we imagine quite differently. It’s a whale of an effort. What amazes me is that they would bother. We must appear to them a much bigger—and perhaps much more dangerous—fish than we look like to ourselves.

The Turkish Context

I got to musing about the Ottomans yesterday—but in a modern context. We were discussing recent events in Iraq—and the ethnic patchwork that Iraq happens to be—and the power that once effectively governed it—the Ottomans for a long time, the “little sultan” Saddam Hussein more recently. The question arose: What does it take to stabilize such patchwork-quilts of hostile ethnicities? And the Ottoman techniques came to mind—namely an armed force and administrative apparatus which was, for centuries, an artificial culture-within-a-culture, above the ethnicities, disdainful of them but holding the sword.

The past in some ways is the present. We can see that if we suspend our faith in Progress. Change is certain, but what goes around comes around. The troubles in the Balkans had something to do with the USSR’s collapse. World War I began with a declaration of war by Austria against Serbia, one of the breakaway parts of the Ottoman realm. In the background were a series of earlier wars (Greek War of Independence, the Russo-Turkish War, the Bosnian Crisis, the First Balkan War) all of which were the consequence of a weakening Ottoman Empire. After World War I the Arab portions of the Ottoman domain became unstable—but had been in partial revolt earlier too. In the Middle East the Ottoman breakup has been followed by a century of frequently violent disorders—and no let-up in sight. Most recently the U.S. invasion has managed to destabilize Iraq. It remains to be seen if the American Way, not least its faith in democracy and money, will manage to subdue what hitherto could only be governed by force.