Russia’s Great Shame

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Among the torrent of stories coming out of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — military atrocities, blunders, sanctions, seized super-yachts, top-level spies and generals under house arrest and on and on, are regular reports of Russians, captured soldiers but self-exiled Russians in particular, expressing shame. Shame for what their country is doing and for what they didn’t do to prevent it.

You don’t have to be raised Catholic to agree that shame is a powerful human emotion. Few emotions motivate civilized people more. (My Jewish friends and I argue over who was raised in a denser cult of shame. But that’s a topic for another day.)

Simultaneous with these stories, I dropped in my DVD of “Andrei Rublev” , the classic 1966 film that is really more of a biography of 15th century Russia than the legendary painter of Eastern Orthodox icons. I don’t expect many of you to have have seen it, although I encourage you to give it a try. All three and half hours of it. (Shot in 2:35:1 “CinemaScope” black and white by the equally legendary Andrei Tarkovsky. ) Along with its mesmerizing imagery and epic scale, the film is often mentioned as the most vivid depiction of medieval Russian rural life ever put on film.

And, following the life of the ever-conscience stricken monk, Rublev, it simmers in shame.

The question I’ve been asking myself as I follow Putin’s invasion is, “What responsibility do common Russians have for what their leaders are doing in their name … again?” And, is it ever fair (or meaningful) to hold an entire culture responsible, with shaming, for repeated cycles of kleptocracy, despotism and psychopathology in its ruling class?

I ask this because Russia, of the world’s so-called “great powers”, is demonstrating again that it is unique in its inability to prevent regular devolutions into violent autocracy.

“Andrei Rublev” opens in 1400 with the peasant class living in farm animal squallor, periodically raided by rival villages if not Tartars from the Far East and wholly subservient to a regal class defending its status with vicious militaristic policing. Midway the film depicts the 1408 sacking of the city of Vladimir, organized by a Russian prince conspiring with marauding Tartars, in an attempt to kill his twin brother. (Although financed by the Soviet bureaucracy, Leonid Brezhnev’s Kremlin refused to release the film for years and cut it by almost 50%. The Criterion edition runs the original, full 209 minutes.)

And 1400 was already at least five centuries into Russia’s organized despotism, not even halfway through, with the calamitous eras of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, various weaker but no less vicious Czars, Josef Stalin, the grim, grey Soviets and now … Vladimir Putin still to come. In all, a truly remarkable thousand-year cavalcade of sociopaths … accepted, tolerated and often revered.

The informed will argue, “But every culture experiences this!” And the most woke liberals will point out the United States’ genocide of the Indians, racism toward Blacks and innumerable military misadventures. All of which is fair. As is the fact that Russia’s history is pock-marked with invasions from almost every direction.

But I still believe Russia is different. Not only is the violence of Russia’s despots borderline irrational and invariably unapologetic, but the common Russian, even today, in an era of Twitter, TikTok, McDonalds and Boeing jets, remains largely subdued, cowed and mute. For all our failures, the West, meaning the US, Europe, Japan, the Commonwealth and the like, has largely brought what you might call “the despotic impulse” under control. Certainly to the point where one man, a flagrant gangster, is not likely to be able to commandeer a vast army to attack a neighbor. Even repressive China sees that a better, stronger (near-term) future lies in providing cheap manufacturing for Western corporations.

So what is about Russian psychology that keeps its culture in this endlessly repeating, violent, self-destructive trap?

I’m asking. I don’t know.

But the eminent Russian historian Stephen Kotkin, recently interviewed by New Yorker editor and Russian authority in his own right, David Remnick, suggested that in addition to Russians’ historically heavy indoctrination in threats from “others”, they have also been fed a wildly disproportionate belief in their “exceptionalism.” (The FoxNews, American right-wing echo chamber comparison is right there to behold in all its naked ignominy.)

It’s as though having produced Rublev, Rachmaninoff, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Sakharov and Tarkovsky (indisputably one of film world’s all time greats) they believe themselves every bit the cultural, technological and inventive equal of democracies like the United States, Britain, etc.

(Kotkin is a fellow at the Hoover Institute and has been regularly interviewed on all things Russian. Here’s one recent video.)

The problem, says Kotkin, is that they are not. Not even close. Their repeated cycles of repression, kleptocratic corruption and violence pushes them back every time — as with Gorbachev — they showed the possibility of shaking off neo-Czar-ism or whatever you might want to call it. Consequently, because it regularly slides back into medieval tyranny and isolation, Russia simply hasn’t achieved like the “super power” it insists it is.

And today — with the world watching horrified and in real time as Russia bombards maternity hospitals in an obscenely irrational assault on a peaceful-enough neighbor — the shunning and shaming of Russia, all Russians, not just Putin, is going to be worse and more immediately punishing than it has ever been.

So the mostly younger, urban, elite, “modernist” class — the very people a retrograde culture needs to shake off the “despotic impulse” — is fleeing Russia in droves unlikely to ever return. (If you were young and bright how long would you wait abroad before you were convinced Father Russia had fully and permanently exorcised Putinism?)

From Turkey, or Europe or wherever will take them, they’re looking back, rightfully ashamed at their native land for what is doing, again, and for what they didn’t do to stop it from doing … again.

There Are People Who Know What The Russians Have Been Up To With Trump

NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3I’m not so sure “no one knows” what’s going on with Trump and the Russians.

You hear something like that four or five times an hour as pundit-reporters compete to be the most flabbergasted by the latest tweet and revelation from TrumpWorld. But, if there is any credibility to Steve Bannon’s “deep state” paranoia, it strikes me as very-to-highly likely that within the gargantuan US intelligence apparatus there are people, and my guess is they would be senior career professionals, who have a real good idea of the games Trump has been playing with Russians, or to be more precise, games Russians have been playing with Trump.

Over just the past two weeks three separate pieces of reporting have etched a portrait of the Trump reality in clearer detail. None of them can be described as “sound bites.” You’ll need an hour to digest them all. Two have appeared in consecutive issues of the New Yorker and one is a series of posts by Josh Marshall for his site, Talking Points Memo.

“Trump, Putin and the New Cold War” by New Yorker editor David Remnick and two colleagues is a fascinating overview of the populist forces that first Putin and now Trump have very cynically exploited (and in Putin’s case sustained) to grab power. “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal” by the same magazine’s Adam Davidson uses a bizarre development deal in Baku, Azberbaijan to lay out a money-laundering operation involving comically corrupt Azerbaijani officials, Trump and … Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Over at Talking Points Memo, Marshall’s series, zeroing in on Trump’s long-standing, very close association with a strange fringe mob/wannabe spy character named Felix Sater and Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen. Begin, if you’re interested, with, “The Innocent Explanation, Part 1.”

To compress a very broad narrative to its essence, you have this: In the late ’90s and early ’00s Trump was effectively bankrupt and no American bank would do business with him. What he found were Russian oligarchs, newly and fabulously wealthy from mob-style “privatization” in the post-Soviet economy. That crowd needed ways to launder money, and a lot of it. They bought into Trump projects, often at absurdly inflated prices, enriching Trump as their cash got legitimized. As the pattern repeated itself, Trump and family become ever more beholden to their “business partners.”

Now, it is interesting from a media critic perspective to note how little anyone else in the press is playing with this Felix Sater keyhole to Trump’s empire. Sater, as Marshall reveals, not only served prison time for stabbing a guy, Joe Pesci-style, with the broken stem of a wine glass, but has established connections to New York mob families.

It is a long-standing fascination of mind at how the once enormously influential crime families of “Godfather” legend have all but entirely disappeared from media attention, as though they were never anything but a fiction. (Remember, until 1957 J. Edgar Hoover insisted organized crime did not exist in the United States.) The general explanation being that they all went “legitimate” at some point 25-30 years ago and there’s nothing more to see here.

I don’t think so. More likely is that the families figured ways to better launder their criminal earnings and are probably as wealthy today as they’ve ever been.

Whatever, this Felix Sater story is the extraordinarily rare instance when American organized crime reemerges in mainstream reporting. (The New York Times has reported on Sater, but to date has not pressed the connections Marshall has.) On the other hand Russian mobsters are a common subject of conversation. (It’s another form American exceptionalism, you see. We are the only culture in world history exempt from the scourge of organized criminality, and the corruption and violence that comes from it.)

Marshall acknowledges the normal viability of Occam’s Razor — (Definition: “Suppose there exist two explanations for an occurrence. In this case the simpler one is usually better. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation is.“)

Says Marshall, “The simplest explanation isn’t necessarily the right one. But in the spirit of Occam’s Razor, we should prefer it because it usually will be. To state the key point for clarity and emphasis, it is not the simplest explanation. It it is the simplest explanation which accounts for all the known facts. That distinction makes all the difference in the world.”

I could go on, but the reading list above lays all this out in compelling fashion.

My point, regarding the likelihood of senior people in the permanent government, (the part of the government Steve Bannon wants to “deconstruct”), knowing what all this Russia business is about also has a bit of Occam’s Razor to it.

Specifically, fabulously wealthy Russian oligarchs, essentially organized international criminals, many (but not all) aligned with Vladimir Putin (who is reputed to be one of the wealthiest people in the world thanks to his looting of the Russian economy), would be precisely the people enriching and enabling all sorts of nefarious activity all over the world, including here in the United States. They would therefore be primary targets for US (and allied) intelligence operations, intercepting their communications and monitoring their contacts and money flows.

If they weren’t/aren’t being regularly surveilled it would be an astonishing dereliction of duty on the part of our $80-$100 billion annual intelligence apparatus.

So … here’s the assumption. Senior intelligence people, knowing with very high confidence what Trump has been involved with for years, begin a series of strategic leaks to the media to prod judicial action. After all, enabling by ignoring quasi-to-overtly criminal association with foreign adversaries is diametrically opposed to what they signed up for.

And this is very serious stuff for whoever is leaking. They themselves are risking criminal prosecution. Which is why I find it hard to believe it’s just a few Bartleby the scrivener types buried in the bureaucracy. People like that have essentially no political cover. But further up the chain, where senior officials have personal relations with influential political leaders — from the likes of Diane Feinstein and John McCain and Lindsay Graham, etc. — such a risk becomes more tenable.

In summary, while the pundit press saying “we don’t know” is credible.

But that is not at all the same thing as saying, “No one knows.”