No doubt we learn from one another. If willing.
We sharpen one another. We grow. Become wiser. Learn more. And as passionate about our perspective as we may be, it is always prudent to invite the respectfully-stated perspective of another… especially from those closer to the situation and outside our insulated, likeminded “tribe.”
With what continues to evolve and digress in Ukraine, I invited a trusted friend — who has a far closer vantage point than most — to speak a little more into the issue. What’s it like inside Russia?
Listen. Learn. This isn’t fluffy stuff.
But it’s reality for another part of the world…
In the big-bangs era of the 80s, my university roommate, AR Miller and I used to stay up till 3am discussing whatever questions about life and the universe were niggling at us that day. Our bond was an insatiable joy in the art of curious wonder and reflective learning. Pay attention, look back, look right, look left, look ahead. Talk to each other.
I’ve worked my last 26 years consulting for small businesses in Eurasia and Russia, assisting families displaced by war. My foundational language-culture primer came from an ethnic Chechen, “You have to understand, shame, not guilt, drives us. We step towards the future with our faces to the past.”
Try that! Stand up. Walk forward while facing backwards. What’s that like? It changes your point of view. It changes the directional labels. It changes the frame of reference. What defines “forward?” And what is “backwards?”
Putin’s Kremlin has for 20 years held hostage an extraordinarily diverse citizenry as he faces the past, stepping towards his preferred future of a nationalistic, anti-western (even xenophobic), Russian-dominated Eastern Orthodox, totalitarian state. The 1800s were labeled “the great game” between the British, Ottoman and Russian empires. The 2000s, may one day be known as “the great get back.”
What does Mr. Putin want? By his own words, to avenge a generational dishonor — to create the conditions that Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia are heeled under the central authority of Moscow’s Kremlin and Russian Orthodox Patriarchy.
To synthesize from Alexsandr Verkhovsky, of the Sova-Center for information and analysis, Dominic Rubin, Fiona Hill, Anne Applebaum, Catherine Belton (UK), Oliver Bullough (UK), Karen Dawisha (U of Miami, OH), Mr. Putin is a man aggrieved from a visceral shame of dishonor unavenged; when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) broke up in 1991, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Caucasus Eastern Orthodox republics of Georgia and Armenia, opted for independence, rather than alignment with Russia. Mr. Putin leveraged his KGB foreign service experience, his law school education to become St. Petersburg’s foreign business kingpin. He meticulously, patiently developed a financially opaque global patron/client loyalty network of Oligarchs (super rich people) pilfering and privatizing state companies, so long as they paid tribute. Simultaneously, he decimated Chechnya, annexed Ukraine, decimated Syria, and is now again, decimating Ukraine. Putin never hesitates to wield first-strike, brutal, coercive violence to abuse power, to get subjects and clients to heel. Ukraine is just the most recent example. The result of this are people fear-conditioned into loyalty alignments, “subjects” not citizens. Since 2008, Putin carefully kicked out thousands of foreign NGOs, charities, and imposed increasingly central authority onto 90 nationalities across 11 time zones, where individuals are rendered powerless.
People inside of Russia are humiliated now, and deeply self-reflective: “Putin’s abusive power is a big problem, but not the sole problem.” We have a symptom of historical, authoritarian racism, where whole nations are relegated to the status of soil, dirt, and graves. While Slavic Russians are the majority, there are 4 million Tatar, 6 million Bashkir; 10 million people and 45 tribes in the North Caucasus — The Circassians, Chechens, Ingush, Nogai, Balkar, Kumyk, 34 tribes in Dagestan alone; Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis; Tuvans and 40 more Siberian tribes; the Kalmyk Buddhists. The soil of the Jews had already been taken during the Holodomor and Holocaust — what once was the Pale of Settlement is now Belarus and Ukraine, ethnically cleansed. The consequences have already cast their shadows over many generations.
Respectfully…
~ Name withheld
Having lived for years in Kharkiv (the perhaps second most targeted city in Ukraine) I can attest to the devastation. We get on the ground videos from those who remained.
While traveling in Russia not too long ago, our tour guide told us “the press shows Putin to be very popular-but no one you actually talk with likes him”.