Yuri Tarnopolsky                                                                                                                          ESSAYS Essay 44. Remembering Russia: 1940-1987 Use Firefox browser or see  essays-complete.pdf

Essay 44. Remembering Russia: 1940-1987       Through a crack in time-space   History would be a mere entertainment if not for its smooth merge with the future. Suddenly you feel history catching up with you. The future is right behind the corner, you see its shadow, but not what casts it, unless the future itself can see your face. Yet the shadow looks familiar. Where exactly does the past-to-future transformation happen? It can be last year or yesterday, next year or tomorrow. Thus, the September 11, 2001 attack on USA was already in the future during the first attack on the World Trade Center, February 23, 1993.  That day, with its own roots in the past, the 2001 event started its seven year long ascent from the murky depths of probability to the sunlit surface of  actuality.  Some, like William Dobson, plant the seed of the 9-11 in 1991, when the Soviet empire had collapsed and the world was knocked off balance. It is hard to dispute. The 1991 death, however, connects with the 1917 birthday and goes back to Karl Marx and Industrial Revolution, and far back to the taming of fire. As a fait accompli, the 9-11 immediately unrolled a whole spectrum of options for the American future, ranging from the current morass in Iraq, the loss of world prestige, and the even more troubling signs of the "slow acting coup d'etat" on part of the President, as somebody put it with a feeble question mark on Public Radio.  Jonathan Schell  (1943 – 2014), who had clearly formulated the major American dilemma, did not put a question mark after "one party government." And "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina" by Frank Rich  tells it all in the title.  The sober and brilliant  critics have suddenly popped up from the cooling down soil of the fall elections like the spring daffodils. A conspiracy of truth. Looking much farther back into history, we see the seeds of major events, such as, for example, American Civil War and World War 2, germinating years before their fruits fell to the ground and left the seeds of future events. Moreover, the patterns of history are not tied to geography. The story of the fall of the Roman Empire is generic on many continents. Revolution, terror, dictatorship, aggression, war, restoration, recovery, reconciliation, revival, expansion, rise, renaissance, decline, and decay are patterns: the standard circular blocks of history. That there is nothing new under the sun was certainly true in the time of Solomon.  The origin and the consequences of big events is the favorite trade of ambitious historians. The lay people who lived long enough to witness at least one major cataclysm become unwilling historians, too. They discover something important about themselves after having met the future face to face. I remember myself since 1940. When the World War 2 had ended, I was nine, too young for the sense of history, but old enough to have pictorial memory of the period. The major historical event of my life was the grave illness of Russian Communism in the late1970's, followed by my personal conflict with the agonizing and twitching body and my escape to America. I thought that would be enough. Today, however, I have a feeling that the fall of the Soviet Empire was just a link in the long domino chain set upright somewhere around the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the fall of 2006  I see America entangled in two sluggish Kafkaesque wars hardly visible for most normal, stable, practical, and busy people, but haunting those few who themselves are prone to be torn by internal wars in their hearts.  1. The Cold Civil War, (see Essay 43, The Cold Civil War in America) about the fundamental democratic principles of the US Constitution, waged against the demoralized opposition by a politburo-like group propping the increasingly comical President.    2. The hot, endless, and hopelessly inept war waged by the mainstay of democracy against Iraq with the purpose of making the invaded country democratic and therefore incapable of waging any hot war in the future. It looked in the beginning like an immunization shot against the disease of war by a dose of a war vaccine, but now it is a flaring infection. The vaccine was pure and unadulterated germ.    Of course, my grim vision comes from my background, personality, and idiosyncrasies. More and more often, however, I hear the native voices that go as far or much farther as my own dark perception of things in  Essay 43.     In this Essay I want to look at the long gone history of the Soviet Empire as a future. Already forgotten by a new generation, the Soviet past is pushed aside by history as an extravagant aberration, bad dream, full of embarrassing details we are ashamed to remember. Soviet Russia is, by measures of marketability,  passé, old hat.  But what can it tell us about ourselves, regardless of time and space?  What kind of seeds—or dragon's teeth—did the Soviet idea plant into the future for us all?   People who inhabited the past told us about their life in letters, diaries, memoirs, poetry, and novels. The documents of time could be researched and commented by historians but fully understood only by the contemporaries. My perception of Russia is that of  somebody  who did not belong there, was happy to finally flee the land, and never intended to come back.  In my new existence, so much different from the past, I see, however, that there is no escape from the continuity of the world and the unity of human nature. Russian past is a prophesy that cannot be fully understood by contemporaries and compatriots—as nobody is a prophet in his land—and is addressed to a larger world. By definition, ironically, nobody is a prophet in his time, either.    I cannot see Russia with Russian eyes. There is a tectonic break between my past and my future: my past was tied to one place, while my future is tied to a different and larger place. Believing in the non-spatial nature of patterns of history, I am trying to see the Russian past as an American future. This mental contortion is troubling and even painful to myself. It is unnatural. But I have no links with Russian present and future and I hold on to the only future I can think about: the future of my American grandchildren, while the only distant past I have is the Russian one, already being washed away by my long enough American past.   Having had a furtive e-glimpse into modern Russian arguments about Russian czarist past, recent Communist past, and prospects for the future, I got an awful feeling that Russia, at least on the Web, has been brought back to its intellectual infantilism and is playing with the antique pieces of her historical Lego with complete disregard of historical experience. The thousand years of sequential historical sediments have been stirred up in the flow of time as if there were no time elapsed at all.  I had recoiled from the Russian search engine and returned to the only firm ground in Russian history I have ever known.    My primary source for in-depth pre-Soviet Russian history has been Vassily Kluchevsky, Василий Осипович Ключевский, (1841-1911) He was a compassionate analyst of Russian reality who had not subscribed to the sniveling nationalistic and fist-brandishing supremacist visions of his native land.  As for the Soviet period, I have the first-hand knowledge of its major part.   What is so special about the only other superpower of the past?   Here is my largely obstructed and narrow snapshot of Russia by February 1, 1987, my last day in Russia.    1. Russia has been the largest reservoir of Judeo-Christian ideology in Eurasia   I use the word ideology instead of religion for two reasons: for a while, religion disappeared from Russian landscape. But religion is an ideology and even the Communist ideology preserved important features of Judeo-Christian religion: virtue of hard work, the promise of a paradise, and obligations to your neighbor, community, faith, and the authority, whether in heavens or as the powers to be. An examination of Communist ideology and Christianity side by side is an intriguing topic, which is beyond me. The Russian orthodox Communism definitely combined the stern non-Orthodox Protestant ethics with the dogma of even more un-Orthodox papal infallibility and it had the glaring gap between ideals and reality typical for any religion.  The elimination of God from ideology in the Soviet times left the frame of monotheism intact. As result, pluralism has been a mostly alien idea to an average Russian. There could be only one right thing for all (правда, pravda;  it is not just truth, for which there is also a different word, istina, but, in its second meaning, the guiding or ruling truth). Whoever does not think like you is wrong, or, worse, your enemy.  There is no God, but, still, there is the truth and justice, pravda above this world.   For a long time Russia was separated from the West by its Orthodox version of Christianity, prevalent for the first 1000 years of the religion, in which the czar is the actual head of both the state and the church and his power comes from God. Unlike the Chinese Mandate of Heaven, however, the Czar is always good and just by definition and does not require either approval and acceptance by the people or account before Heavens.    For five centuries the Russian church regarded Russia as the Third Rome: the only world custodian of Christianity and the successor of the fallen Roman Empire of Constantine the Great and Eastern Roman Empire.    I call Russia a reservoir, but what it means except the preserved system of ideas? Imagine two hypothetical countries, Novia and Oldia, with similar sets of ideas in our modern world. One has very porous ideological borders and high level of unrestricted flux of all kinds. The other is much more homogeneous and conservative. Let us not prejudge that, but if the old set of ideas has been replaced by a new one in Novia, at least Oldia can supply missionaries or mercenaries to restore the old ideology, for better or worse. Otherwise, the genetic pool of Novia changes forever.  Whatever we think about the messianism of George W. Bush, his  idea of American democracy is a kind of Oldia watching over the erring Novia. The Russian idea of Communism was the Novia winning over the erring Oldia. The political Islam is, at least in pretense, Oldia over Novia, which only confirms that flipping the old and the new leaves the pattern intact. Democracy or theocracy—it depends on the supply of energy. But I should quench my flippant ruminations right here.   2. Russia never knew stable democracy and political freedom for a single year.                                  There are very few very large nations on Earth with old uninterrupted traditions of statehood: Russia and China, to be exact (there are smaller, too, for example, Iran, Japan, Thailand), both with dense population in the plains and both with the heritage of authoritarian rule sanctified by the heavens.   At a closer look, Russia and China, with all their similarities, are very different—religion and soil are probably responsible for most of the contrasts—but let us take a look from afar. The strong central power made possible a consolidation of the introvert national character and  the centralization was able to spill easily over the flat surface. Large plains were navigable horseback in all directions, more like water than the land, while the big cities stuck to water.  In an anti-symmetric fashion, probably, American democracy was spilling, horse driven, over the Great Planes until the nineteenth century when landscape did not matter anymore.   Russia did not know democracy, but what did it know? Between at least 1700 and 1861 it was full blown slavery (крепостное право), called serfdom in the West.  Its legal form and practice was a real, not metaphoric, but literal and brutal slavery, when people were bought and sold with separation of families and severely punished for disobedience and for fleeing the master. The slaves in the core Russia (not on the periphery) made up the  majority of all peasants and were not in the least racially or religiously different from their masters, although the precipice between  the two ways of life was of an almost biological magnitude.   For a much longer timeб the Russian peasants, whether free or enslaved, had a communal form of life in a rural settlement (obshchina, община). Land was distributed according to the needs of the members of community. It was not considered  private property and if a free peasant wanted to quit and move out, he had to leave his land behind.  The communal land could be a collective property of free peasants,  private property of the landlord who owned the serfs, or  state property  in case of the so-called  "state peasants" owned by the state.   There are conflicting views about the origin of this system destroyed by the czar only in the beginning of the twentieth century, not long before the Russian revolution. The Communists, however, who had come to power with the promise of private land for all peasants, took all land away and restored the old Russian commune in a new and much harsher form out of which no one could move away. They abolished private land altogether, as well as anything smelling of capitalism and private initiative.           3. Russia has been the largest country in the world, always very much conscious of its size,             power, and mission   As for the size, it is obvious. As for the mission, while under the czars it was the burden of guarding the true Christianity, under the Communists it was to spread the principles of true social justice over the entire world.  I am convinced, however cynically, that any active ideological mission, like spreading Christianity, Communism, Democracy, Islam, or any other system of ideas by force is always a cover-up for a deeply seated drive for power and wealth. More specifically, it is a drive to secure political power of an emperor, dictator, clique, politburo, president, sheik, etc. The subconscious purpose of a messianic drive is to increase the geographic distance between the seat of power and the borders, i.e., between the domain of the power and the external world full of uncertainty, hostility, threat, and alien ideas. It has always been done either by direct conquest or, more appropriate for new times, creation of voluntary alliance or a circle of dependent satellites.  NOTE (2016). It is clearly seen in the Putin’s war against Ukraine. Why does it always fail?   The simple natural reason is that by applying a concentrated power to a larger area dilutes power. This is the paradox of expansion: power over a growing area evaporates like a thin layer of water. This is not so with the power of immaterial ideas.  The delocalization (dilution) of power, as chemist would say about energy, is what Paul Kennedy called overextension, attributing to it the decline of great powers.  Naturally, concentration of power depends on the ratio of the sources of energy to size and complexity of the system. Unlike chemistry, however, it depends also on the intellectual resources and their use by the government, which can be miserably low, as the current era illustrates. .   The main Russian idea has been repeated through centuries in different word triads which always meant the same: God, Czar,  and  Fatherland (Bog, Tsar, and Otechestvo), Russian Orthodox Christianity, Imperial Absolutism, and the primate of Russian Nation (Pravoslaviye, Samoderzhaviye, Narodnost—none has an exact English counterpart, whatever the dictionaries say), and Communism, Party, and Motherland. In short, common ideology, autocracy, and Russian (Soviet) supremacy. Soviet Russia had a mission to improve the erring Capitalist West and it was the only just and the most powerful (i.e., military) force to do that by spreading the Soviet style democracy. It is my impression—there were no polls in Soviet times—that very few Russians cared about improving the outside world or believed that it was possible. As Kluchevsky noted long before the Russian Revolution, The rich have bad influence not because they are rich, but because they make the poor to feel poor. If the rich were destroyed, the poor would not be richer, but they would feel less poor.   "Богатые вредны не тем, что они богаты, а тем, что заставляют бедных чувствовать свою бедность. От уничтожения богатых бедные не сделаются богаче, но станут чувствовать себя менее бедными".   Without the rich, the Russian poor, i.e., everybody, felt certainly less poor for as long as they were prevented from traveling beyond the Iron Curtain and the display of wealth could lead only to various problem.        4. An unprecedented social transformation happened in Russia between 1917 and WW2    During this time, millions of people of the pre-1917 upper and middle classes either flew the country or were uprooted, expropriated,  and exterminated  as classes, physically or politically, following  a Marxist doctrine of eradicating private property other than personal possessions. I cannot recollect any episode in world history comparable with this class extinction, although the French Revolution was a predecessor and an inspiring example. As result, proletarians, i.e., people who had no independent sources of income and completely depended on their employer, were declared the ruling class, while peasants became a class one step lower. The white collar workers, including educated professionals, scientists, artists, writers, and actors, were tagged not as a class but as a layer or thin strata (прослойка) of society, required to serve under the dictatorship of proletariat, the buzzword of the revolution and the major Soviet inanity, gradually abandoned. Immediately, a new ruling class began to take shape, with a new czar at the top. He became the single actual employer and de facto owner, of all citizens of Russia and the land under their feet. People in the West use the term totalitarian state, following Hannah Arendt, in mostly political  sense. Totalitarianism, as anything complex enough, has degrees. The Soviet totalitarian state was absolute because everybody without exception, received the daily bread from the single employer, from the politburo to the peasants that grew bread from the earth. The employer could not fire you but was able to shift  you to a new unpaid job behind barbed wire. I have an impression that the Western public missed or underestimated the economic basis of Soviet totalitarian idea. It was not so much the political oppression as the impossibility to make a living without being employed by the state. Looking from a different angle, the Soviet system was on the borderline between the animal pack and a tribal society: the members did not elect the leaders of the pack: the strongest took the power. Any resistance to the new order, whether real or either suspected or falsely reported, was cruelly eradicated.  The power of the new class, or nomenklatura, the privileged, was not in money, land, and means of production but in subservience to the top  party leadership who rewarded loyalty above all. Although the way to nomenklatura was open to the rank and file party members, and the way to the party was open to the blue collar workers first and the rest next, by the 1970's it was already a minority class in itself, with an exclusive way of life, however far from the lifestyles of rich and famous abroad.  Increasingly, money was becoming the preferred medium of exchange in addition to bartering goods, favors, and power. The next step up could be only private property. Within the Soviet framework, the power to make an administrative, managerial, judicial, or service decision was a surrogate of private property. If it looks like the common American corruption, it is not quite the same. One completely legal and normal decision could be exchanged in a deal for another completely legal and normal decision. This looks more as the common business. In this curious way, underground economy merged with underground politics. The Soviet way of life was a direct consequence of limited and underdeveloped production, total scarcity, stressed  supply, and enormous demand. It is an example of what happens to an industrial society when productivity for whatever reason has no chance to go up. Remembering Russia, when I think about what is going to happen with America if the energy becomes scarce, I come  to the conclusion that, the obvious option of a war for the resources aside, the political system has to shift on the scale toward  the authoritarian end. Unfortunately, nothing pushes the society in this direction as strongly as war.  The simple reason is that some force is needed to keep the pressure in check during the transition period. Then a new generation gets used and adapts to it, as the Russians did.  Somebody has to remind the new generation about the past, but with time, such reminder can come only from the outside, as it was coming to Russia with BBC and  the Voice of America.  See about Novia and Oldia above. NOTE (2016). Today, when the world is awash in oil, the energy does not seem to be a problem. But there should be also the spiritual energy of society which does not seem to grow. Besides, the use of energy needs a thermodynamic sink for heat known for the public under the name global warming.         It is hard to find anything as radical  in world history as the Russian transformations. It is also difficult to find a more traumatized national character, about which Kluchevsky noted that the Russians were more inclined to look back than to plan ahead. With this kind of history, its next turn is always expected as an act of God, against which no insurance exists. No wonder, Russians have always considered themselves the people unlike any other. The attraction of the West, from which  most of science, technology, and powerful cultural and ideological influences came, was countered by xenophobia, chauvinism, and rather low key and inefficient, by modern standards, propaganda. Today this kind of schizophrenia is best exemplified by some Middle Eastern societies.  Nevertheless I believe that no old and big nation on earth is spiritually closer to the West than the Russians. I also wish to testify that  the Soviet life I saw around had a rather high degree of normalcy and stability. Russian mind adapted to its regenerated after mutilations body.       By Western standards, Russia was an oppressed society.  It was certainly not what the Russians had to mull over every day.  Between 1956 and 1983 it was a relatively stable society where life was governed by simple rules and normal human aspirations. People were unaware that they were poor, enslaved, and oppressed. This is a fundamental distinction that tests the definitions of slavery, poverty, and oppression. It is certainly not the same as an oppressed group, class, or ethnicity. The absolute majority of Russians regarded their life as natural. There was a good deal of civil order, communal services, criminal justice, and common purpose, in spite of gradual erosion by corruption and hackwork.   The very narrow range of choices, attractions, distractions, and focal points of attention created strong emotional attachments and repulsions. Russian life, with its poverty, high urban overcrowding, and great cultural contrasts between two big and vigorous capital cities (Moscow and Leningrad, protected from incomers) and the bleak provinces (from which the inhabitants could not move out) had an emotional intensity of a Shakespearean drama on private scale.   According to my observations, the openness, sincerity, genuine interest of Russian people in each other, mutual support, strong friendship, selfless love, and emotional involvement made a pleasant, although sometimes burdensome, contrast with American life for the Americans who happened to spend significant time  in Russia or among Russians at remote places, such as Antarctica.    Russia was a pro-intellectual society. With work and business being often routine and stagnant, art was usually important. A rare talented novel or a poem that somehow could break through the asphalt of censorship was an event. Private property, personal wealth, advertisement, unemployment, competition between institutions and enterprises, checking accounts, and many other outlandish things were unknown, salaries fixed, size of an apartment limited, choice of place of residence restricted, and competition for a higher position tightly controlled. And yet the general culture of the society was essentially European and unquestionably Western, less so in the backward countryside and alcohol-saturated blue collar (actually, black collar) apartments. It was my personal impression that the overwhelming majority of the people did not like the party members and  were ideologically indifferent.   To live as in the West—minus capitalism, democracy, and pluralism, but even better—was an official social goal.  When people are consumed by  small gnawing  problems, like to find a decent pair of shoes, they need either to create an internal justification of the meager existence or ignore anything but the immediate goal. In a way, it was a society of hunters and gatherers—for food, clothes, appliances, and connections—in the life that at all levels, except strictly private decisions, was planned by the state. The hunter-gathering habits prevailed in industry and agriculture, where scarcity of supply was planned. Bartering  was a typical way of doing business.   If you could not buy a decent pair of shoes, the scarcity was planned, too.  And yet if you carefully avoided unorthodox political remarks and conflicts with authorities, this life could be lived in a harmony typical for any established human society in equilibrium with its conditions.  When the equilibrium was shifted by the prospect of space wars, military-industrial decay, and the heroism of dissidents,  the system was half doomed. The other half of the doom came from the accumulation of illegal wealth and the fusion between the ruling elite and professional criminals.   Communism in Russia was abolished from above, same way as the old Russian slavery had been abolished by the czar. The process of abolition took 130 years: from 1861 to 1991, but the authoritarian streak of Russian history has not yet been broken.    The images of my past Russian life tell me of an immense ability of human society to adapt to any system. Human condition spreads over the full spectrum of social forms from tribal life in the jungle and desert to the wasteful culture of disposable things and ideas. People can be happy in any such system if their lives and loves are not threatened and if they do not remember better times.   The most difficult thing for me was the mind-boggling inconsistencies of Russian life, ignored by the majority of  people. The Soviet life was a cluster of obvious contradictions: "free" elections with a single appointed candidate, capitalist ideals of prosperity without capitalism,  "socialist democracy" without freedom of movement inside the country, not to mention across the borders, the "first free society" in history with total vacuum-tight censorship, "dictatorship" of the proletariat, i.e., people who have no property to stand the pressure of the state, etc.   Once I had to buy a locally made pair of shoes: the left and right shoes were made of different leather, but after a week both looked like they were ten thousand years old and stolen from an archeological exhibition.   It is not such a big deal to wear ugly shoes. You cannot have broken logic, however. The violations of elementary logic coming from a Yale graduate, such as the President's stubbornly repeated senseless arguments for the Iraq war, have been for me among  the most troubling déjà vue’s of Soviet life. It is the acceptance of a flagrant in-your-face irrational contradiction by a significant part of population that appears to be the first symptom of a serious disease of a democratic system.  Lie can be given  the benefit of doubt, but irrationality cannot because it is instantly demonstrable. People do not start believing in a lie repeated thousand times, as the Nazis and Soviets hoped: they simply cease to notice it.   There is at least one positive lesson from the history of fallen empires, dictatorships, and oppressive societies:  after a period of calamities, they enter periods of reconstruction, revival, and stability—the Phoenix  effect—waiting for the next fire.  This is the true natural mechanism of history, which is tolerable on the condition that the periods of peace are substantially longer than periods of turmoil.   But who or what sets the fire?  This is something that I keep thinking about. Chemistry gives no clue because natural sciences do not deal with human or other autonomous agents. Galileo is absent from the physical equation of the free fall.  There is no personal imprint on a new chemical substance that a chemist designed and materialized.  An intermediate result is at the very end of this essay.     What has Russian experience to do with America?    Turning to America, it is impossible to find a more optimistic and energetic nation, in spite of all failures and whatever the global polls say. According to my personal and, most probably, immature impressions, disregarding all other sources, what makes America unique is:   1. The overwhelming belief that your position in life depends only on you.   To look at it from a different angle, political ideas do not feed you, but your hands, mind, personal freedom, and equal opportunities do. Whether the belief is justified or not, it does not matter, but the belief itself does.  The all-American secular faith includes an assumption that there are no legal and systemic obstacles to your success. You are your own boss (i.e., Lord). If there is a secular devil that rigs college admissions, for example, you chances to have your way through a different avenue are very good. Unlike religious faith, the American idea has lots of evidence to support it.    But what is success?   2. The predominant measure of success is money.   This drastically simplifies the social design, so that practically anybody can enter the competition and see personal standing. But it makes competition the way of life. The success in competition is not always measured by a  monetary kill. It consists in the score of successive wins and losses, as in a sports tournament. The money comes as the reward at the end of the season. I would say that American life is a game for money. This makes life stimulating and exciting, like a perpetual childhood. It is a youthful and optimistic society. It makes you a compulsive gambler and, as many Europeans note, perpetual teenager, but what to make of it, I have no idea. I definitely have nothing against it.   But what about power?   3. The measure of power is the sum of money (private or public) one can control and spend for a single purpose.    Thus, American president earns a moderate for his status salary but can waste the biggest sums of money on earth. If George Soros wants to fight the Republicans, he does it by  the money he can throw in the campaign ring and not by clock-and-dagger methods.  Bill Gates sprinkles the nasty germs in Africa with money, the best biotic/antibiotic, itself not sterile, though.  A stock of bombs costs money, but if you can drop a lot of it in a go, you have real power.    What  can counter the strength of money? Brutal force and threat to life, freedom, and pursuit of happiness. This takes money, too, of course, as the story of state and stateless terrorism shows. But the cost effectiveness of money for personal, social, or national causes could be very different depending on whether civil, military, or terrorist methods are used, i.e. whether you are grabbed by your wallet or by your throat.   The cheap price of disposable human life compensates for sophisticated costly military technology.  This is crystal clear in Iraq.  Do we have the guts to repeat Hiroshima and Dresden in time of war?    What strikes me in the Code of Hammurabi, where punishment by death was as common as fine, is how cheap human life was in the name of justice. It looks like both money and life were considered species of the same genus. In the former land of Hammurabi life is cheap again, equating murder with power.    The terrorists do not have money to blow up a plane a day. Their power is very limited. If we cannot win, it is because we are stupid, not because we are powerless.   But what about work?   4. Hard work is the way to success.   There is nothing to add to this point. In America, this truism is also a belief, an article of faith, but as any other article of  the American faith, it is well supported by evidence.  To be more accurate, hard work is the necessary but not sufficient condition of success. So is money regarding power,  so is your willpower regarding success, etc.  The very absence of a single or composite sufficient condition  is what I would call social fairness. In this sense, Communist Russia had a great degree of social fairness. The problem with Soviet Russia was that there was a single sufficient condition of a devastating personal failure: the political disloyalty.    While many aspects of American pop culture make me cringe, while I see definite signs of regression and erosion in my twenty years in America, while I am terrified by the non-Americanism of the Bush politburo, while I am sickened by the aggressive radical Christianity on the offensive, the social fairness of  this land is my strongest overwhelming positive impression and this is why I keep a small American flag on my desk and keep worrying about American future.  If the difference between old Russia and modern America is so enormous, how can we speak about similarities at all? As an answer, I have to remind that I am speaking about systems separated by a gap in both time and space.  One is dead, the other is in a transition to a different and still unknown state.  Under such conceptual strain we have to search for similarities hidden in the cracks between big blocks of differences. Answers to important questions never lie on the surface: otherwise they would not be important. But the most important questions do not have answers at all. I am not yet ready to discuss the question of the direction of the American Evolution. I am overwhelmed by the flood of pessimistic assessments and predictions coming from intense thinkers (Paul Kennedy, Niall Ferguson) as well as from the fuming sewers of the Web. I should better wait until the electoral test at the Midterm Elections, 2006. Pessimist by nature, I would still bet on America.  I need  the showdown.   Here are some off the cuff ( and some off the wall) similarities between past USSR and modern USA as I see them.  Some of them have been well discussed in literature. 1. Reliance on  military power   The reliance is contradicted by the experience in Vietnam and Iraq for the USA and in Afghanistan for the Russians . 2. Global ideological messianism   "We are the best and the rest should be like us. Convert, infidels!"    3. Schizophrenia   See above.  The symptoms of  a major American schizophrenia can be found on the right, around the pro-life ideology, and on the left, in the clash of national interests and humanitarian ideals. Yes, go to war but do not kill.  4. Education and access to elites   Decline of education is a certain way to imperial demise. This question deserves a separate consideration. In Russia the education  was hampered by politically and ethnically discriminatory college admissions. It looks like America learns to inhale the same  suicidal  stuff.  See Daniel Goldin,  The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates. Crown Books, 2006.  This is a true meritocracy-eating bacteria that may spread over the society.  The silver spoon factor contributed to the entire Bush era.  There are, probably, much more weighty eroding factors at work in education, not yet fully researched by anybody.  See the biennial "Measuring Up 2006: The National Report Card on Higher Education"   5. Territorial segregation   Soviet Russia (USSR) was multi-ethnic and multi-cultural federation with historical territorial segregation: the most westernized Baltic republics in the North, the Muslim republics in the south, the American style melting pot of  Siberia in the East. While the cultural and ideological balkanization of America has been already registered by many observers, it is getting more and more visible on the map. Territorial segregation was the main factor in the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union: most borders were clearly drawn. The map of the USA is already scored at many levels—from party color to longevity—and the country has already had a precedent of an earthquake. 6. Loss of privacy   This is a remarkably sovietesque development.  I remember a visitor from Russia in the 1990's who, when I showed him my American telephone bill with all call records, immediately commented: "So, you don't even need any KGB [secret police, state security]."  I testify that the level of privacy in Russia under the watch of KGB was incomparably higher than in modern USA, if only you did not conflict with authorities or otherwise fall into focus of attention.  The loss of privacy in America has nothing to do with the Republicans. It has everything to do with the spontaneous development of technology and, as I believe, will be the best grease in case the American future slides closer to the Russian past.   7. Mythology .... 8. Party discipline ....  9. .... But this will do.  The similarity  between the two systems  are, of course, completely dwarfed by the differences, which I do not mention (they are well known) except the following three most sharp contrasts:       1. Dynamism.   Unfortunately, the eight years of the Bush presidency seem as sleepy, viscous, and wasted as the eighteen years of Brezhnev.  Well, I am going overboard, sorry.       2. Wealth.   The evolutionary importance of wealth is that the possessor can afford to lose more than somebody who bets on the last dollar (or ruble).  I am not qualified to judge this aspect  of the American Evolution. I would only remind with sadness about the convertibility of human life and money in the power game. This will give some global perspective regarding the power of old Russia and new China, not to mention the Islamic terrorism whose cash wealth is stored in the currency of death.       3. The magnetic attraction and magic of America is a difference of a non-rational nature for those who, like myself, became unhappy in their native land. One can be unhappy in America, too, because  unhappiness is like the turtle's shell, but the laws of gravity are different here and you can even try to fly with the load on your back, which you cannot shed.  This is the best lasting stock index for America in the world market of civilizations. Beware of its split.   Personal note   Oriana Fallaci, a bright and lonely star of modern world, who died on September 15, 2006, left a striking description of the American magnetism  in a language that could never come from a born American (in an article in  Il Corriere della Sera, September 29, 2001).   In her inimitable, heart wrenching documentary novel "A Man" (1979) Oriana Fallaci  lashed out (on p. 222 of the Simon & Schuster edition of  1980) at "the terrible Leviathan, the great monster, the self-elected champion of democracy" America for anti-individualism that is common for all tyrannies "of right and of left." This does not contradict her eulogy after 9-11, however, because all states are anti-individualistic and anti-Quixotic; this is exactly the idea of a state.  The great monster met the huddled masses yearning to breathe free at Ellis Island, but Don Quixote could be, probably, turned back.  And yet in America there is a place for Don Quixote, too, because once the great monster lets you in, it kindly forgets about you. Anyway, a long time passed between 1979 and 2001. It was a different era. Since then, Oriana Fallaci, who was not a US citizen and had a house in Manhattan,  happened to spend a few years under the protection of  the Leviathan, while my sister in Russia, whom I had not seen for twenty years, was denied an American visa in 1999  because she could not prove that she would go back to Russia after having visited me. She became an entry refusenik in USA while I was an exit refusenik in USSR. Oriana Fallaci's diatribe against the American Leviathan was triggered by an American refusal of visa to Alexander Panagoulis, the Greek terrorist-hero and her lover, in the mid 1970's. It was the period when the Soviet exit visa refusal to the Soviet Jews was about to hit me and my family in 1979.  Visas are the pebbles in the shoes of freedom. A monster is a monster, whether Soviet or American. That was the bitter lesson I learned after the American visa was refused to my sister. But that was not all that I learned. I am still a fortunate Don Quixote who had sneaked in with the crowd and found his place. And of course, having growled back at the monster, in the same book (p. 361), Oriana Fallaci writes about New York: "there I found an environment in which I had always felt at ease." That the Americans are still able to keep reasonable distance from the Leviathan of the Government, contrary to Thomas Hobbes' vision and Communists' aspirations to make everybody a little screw in the national machine, is part of American magic. Conclusion   I  believe that  all societies are built  from the same set of  Lego parts (ideograms), as all living organisms are built of the same amino acids, nucleotides, and a team of biochemical tricksters known as enzymes. A chemist is interested most of all in transformations of one structure into another, even if the final result is yet unknown. The science of chemistry, like the still hypothetical science of political sociology, is about stability and transformation of structures.  Like a politician, but with a guaranteed success, the chemist builds a structure that was floating in his mind  or destroys another, reserving the ability of reconstructing it. This determinism and reversibility are denied to human life, so that chemistry of molecules and chemistry of history overlap only partly. They overlap much more when we consider irreversible and non-equilibrium biochemistry, from which, after all, human history once emerged. What does not overlap is the uniqueness of acts and individuality of actors. And so we  move from stony and bony facts to ethereal patterns. We have to part  with determinism, but the game of life—and history—will still be worth playing.   I conclude with a question.   What was the main reason that the system as unnatural as Soviet Russia was able to  stabilize after it had emerged from the post-WWI poverty and destruction, Russian historical heritage, and the Marxist ideas?   My answer is:   It was mainly  because of its very unnatural and unprecedented properties that turned all the so called "civilized" nations of the world against it. In other words, the repressive Soviet totalitarian society and the permanent martial law were a natural and common response to hostile environment. The gradual recognition of Russia by the world, it inclusion, was the very beginning of the slow process of the decline and dismantling of Communism.    As a very tentative hypothesis, I consider the "sovietization" (just a metaphor!) of modern America, or, to be more accurate, a trend to revise and make tougher its constitutional foundation, to be the result of the rising violence, hostility, antipathy, or coldness of the rest of the world.  America, whether justly or not, responds to that in a hisorically quite traditional way.    In general, what leads to decline and degradation?  Growth and success. Nevertheless, let us celebrate growth and success and let the old Don Quixotes fret over the suggestive shadows of the future.   NOTE 1 (January, 2007).  The Republican Revolution is over, but the future of America is uncertain.    The Western hope for a civilized Russia has been deeply dented.  The Russian history begins to repeat the roller coaster of the French history after the French Revolution: ups and downs of the authoritarianism, or, in a different language, fading aftershocks  of the earthquake. Unfortunately, Russia does it in the crude gangster style.   Russia and America have more common interests than dividing issues. It is fashionable today to quote Winston Churchill  who said that America would do everything right after having tried all the wrong directions. I consider it a historical compliment against the background of many nations always doing something wrong, never doing anything right, or never doing anything at all.   There is one big point of similarity, which I am not sure anybody has noted: both Russians and Americans despise the government in their hearts and love to cheat on it. What is called American individualism is called Russian anarchy.   NOTE 2 (March 2007).  The  recent  developments in Russia, the murders, the München speech of Putin, and his proclaimed goal of "going beyond oil" are best understandable if expressed in German. They sound to me like Russland über alles, the slogan that has the greatest potential to bind  the Russian people to their Führer or his heirs. Putin uses the main Communist and Nazist trick: substitute the promise of great future for the uncomfortable reality.  Nevertheless, I am for active and positive policy toward  Russia, however troubled I am by the déjà vue. By accumulating wealth and Western education Russia has a chance to become more civilized. Civilization means putting personal grand future above the national one. This is why all grand civilizations perish. I may be wrong.  Foreseeing a trick of substituting grand American past for bleak American future, I wish to be wrong.    NOTE 3  (February, 2009).  It is impossible to understand Russia without the story of its Gulag: the giant slave labor enterprise launched after the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917.  Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum  (Anchor Books, 2004) is a unique definitive research, brilliantly conceived, written, and deeply felt. This book made me feel sick, I had nightmares, but I could not drop it.  It told me more than anything else about Russia, my native country, although I had lived there for 50 years and even was myself swallowed by Gulag for three years. I need to remind that Goulag was the second enterprise of this kind. The first was the Russian system of serfdom, abolished only in 1861. Gulag has not been abolished and is still used as an industry and a political weapon.                                                    POSTSCRIPT (2016):  Putinism. Russia is an aggressive mafia state. Trumpism. The shadow of Donald Trump covers USA from coast to coast. Having re-read this Essay, I have made a just a few minor corrections. But ten years after 2006, I have new worries reflected in my last essays [12 MB] and other parts of spirospero.net. Inequality. Instability. The war in Syria. Terrorism. WW3. Pessimists have imagination. Optimists have beliefs.   Putinism is already an entry in Wikipedia. I repeat here a NOTE (2016) from Essay 45, The Place of Philosophy in Science: Indeed, Napoleonic complex is a pattern well beyond French history. The pattern of a dictator with continental or, in our days, global power is alive and well. Some people like me, who have lived long enough, were contemporaries of Hitler and Stalin. The Western analysts are trying to take apart and look through a magnifying glass at the inside screws and gears of Putinism, while it is the view from a long historical distance that matters most: it is one of the kind nuclear dictatorship of a global caliber that remembers its victory over Napoleon and Hitler, as well as its defeat by a nuclear democracy of a global caliber.

NOTE 1 (January, 2007).  The Republican Revolution is over, but the future of America is uncertain.  The Western hope for a civilized Russia has been deeply dented.  The Russian history begins to repeat the roller coaster of the French history after the French Revolution: ups and downs of the authoritarianism, or, in a different language, fading aftershocks  of the earthquake.  Unfortunately, Russia does it in the crude gangster style. Russia and America have more common interests than dividing issues. It is fashionable today to quote Winston Churchill  who said that America would do everything right after having tried all the wrong directions. I consider it a historical compliment against the background of many nations always doing something wrong, never doing anything right, or never doing anything at all. There is one big point of similarity, which I am not sure anybody has noted: both Russians and Americans despise the government in their hearts and love to cheat on it. What is called American individualism is called Russian anarchy. NOTE 2 (March 2007).  The  recent  developments in Russia, the murders, the München speech of Putin, and his proclaimed goal of "going beyond oil" are best understandable if expressed in German. They sound to me like Russland über alles, the slogan that has the greatest potential to bind  the Russian people to their Führer or his heirs. Putin uses the main Communist and Nazist trick: substitute the promise of great future for the uncomfortable reality.  Nevertheless, I am for active and positive policy toward  Russia, however troubled I am by the déjà vue. By accumulating wealth and Western education Russia has a chance to become more civilized. Civilization means putting personal grand future above the national one. This is why all grand civilizations perish. I may be wrong.  Foreseeing a trick of substituting grand American past for bleak American future, I wish to be wrong. NOTE 3  (February, 2009).  It is impossible to understand Russia without the story of its Gulag: the giant slave labor enterprise launched after the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917.  Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum  (Anchor Books, 2004) is a unique definitive research, brilliantly conceived, written, and deeply felt. This book made me feel sick, I had nightmares, but I could not drop it.  It told me more than anything else about Russia, my native country, although I had lived there for 50 years and even was myself swallowed by Gulag for three years. I need to remind that Goulag was the second enterprise of this kind. The first was the Russian system of serfdom, abolished only in 1861. Gulag has not been abolished and is still used as an industry and a political weapon.                               POSTSCRIPT (2016):  Putinism. Russia is an aggressive mafia state. Trumpism. The shadow of Donald Trump covers USA from coast to coast. Having re-read this Essay, I have made a just a few minor corrections. But ten years after 2006, I have new worries reflected in my last essays [12 MB] and other parts of spirospero.net. Inequality. Instability. The war in Syria. Terrorism. WW3. Pessimists have imagination. Optimists have beliefs.   Putinism is already an entry in Wikipedia. I repeat here a NOTE (2016) from Essay 45, The Place of Philosophy in Science: Indeed, Napoleonic complex is a pattern well beyond French history. The pattern of a dictator with continental or, in our days, global power is alive and well. Some people like me, who have lived long enough, were contemporaries of Hitler and Stalin. The Western analysts are trying to take apart and look through a magnifying glass at the inside screws and gears of Putinism, while it is the view from a long historical distance that matters most: it is one of the kind nuclear dictatorship of a global caliber that remembers its victory over Napoleon and Hitler, as well as its defeat by a nuclear democracy of a global caliber.

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