THE MONROE DOCTRINE

The Monroe Doctrine is one of the most famous landmarks of American history for several reasons, one of which is the fact that it did not originate with President Monroe, nor did it end with him, becoming one of the mainstays of American foreign policy, supposedly up to the present day. Its essence is plain, and one can say simple, as shown by the following excerpt from Monroe’s historic Message to Congress:

“We should consider any attempt [by the European Powers] to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European Power we have not interfered, and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence, and maintained it… we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling, in any other manner, their destiny, by any European Power, in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States.” (Monroe’s Message to Congress, December 2, 1823.)

Historians tell us with factual authority that Monroe’s Message was diligently drafted by none other than the next sixth President of the United States, then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. However, with all due respect to the latter, there are two good reasons for President Monroe to get the recognition for the doctrine which bears his name. Number one is that he was the one who voiced it, and made it an official principle of American foreign policy. And number two is that this principle in fact did not originate either with Monroe or with John Quincy Adams. It goes back to the Founding Fathers as a group, who all advocated a resolute disengagement from the affairs of Europe, leaving ‘America to the Americans.’ It was already implicit in the 1793 Proclamation of Neutrality by President George Washington, and palpably unequivocal in his 1796 Farewell Address. Its bottom line is lucidly expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the following quote from his letter, written in 1808, fifteen years before President Monroe’s Message to Congress:

“…We consider the interests of Cuba, Mexico, and ours as the same, and that the object of both must be to exclude all European influence from this hemisphere.” (Letter to William Charles Cole Claiborne, October 1808.)

There are obviously numerous adequate representations of the essence of the Monroe Doctrine, but here is the short entry from my good reference friend, the Webster’s Dictionary.---

“Monroe Doctrine.--- The doctrine essentially stated by President Monroe in his December 1823 Message to Congress that the United States would regard as an unfriendly act any attempt by a European nation to interfere in the affairs of the American countries or increase its possessions on the American continents.”

It is important to realize that the Monroe Doctrine is not a particular document soon to celebrate the 189^th anniversary of its historical occurrence, but an essential expression of a foreign policy philosophy, and thus timeless. The world has indeed changed a lot in the last two centuries, and an unmistakable globalization of foreign policy has taken place. This is not to suggest that in the new age of borderless communications the classic definition of national borders has somehow become obsolete. Geographical proximity of nations has not changed a bit, and although we can instantly communicate with a person sitting ten thousand miles away from us, there is a clear difference between that person and our next door neighbor, which is what the Monroe Doctrine is really about. While our back yard is an area of vital interest to us, no place on the other side of the earth can be of a similar vital interest to us, although it must be of vital interest to those who live out there.

No nation in the world is powerful enough to project her power to every distant point of the globe without a detriment to her ability to control events in her immediate proximity. Moreover, having thus overextended herself, she may easily come in conflict with the legitimate denizens of those faraway places. It is no secret that in recent times the United States has been embroiled in unnecessary conflicts away from home, making no friends or profit in the process, while her prestige and physical presence in the strategically indispensable Americas has steadily reached the lowest historical point since James Monroe was President of the United States… One cannot possibly become a “Master of the Universe” having forfeited ground at home. No matter how many troops America keeps overseas, those troops cannot provide security for her immediate physical borders, nor create artificial zones of vital national interest where such an interest has no natural soil to be planted in.

MONROE AND THE ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS

In deference to the American Election week, I am now returning to my American Presidential Series, large parts of which have already been posted (throughout the month of June 2011, ending on July 4^th, 2011, plus the composite entry Assassination Of An American Dream, published earlier on January 18^th, 2011. In this new selection of entries, I am presenting some of the pieces which were not included in the earlier postings. The present entry is the first part of a two-parter, the second part of which, titled The Monroe Doctrine, will be posted tomorrow.

The presidency of James Monroe was a unique period in American history, affectionately known as the Era of Good Feelings. At no other time was the nation so much united relishing its victory in the British War of 1812-1815. In fact, it was during Monroe’s tenure that the oppositionist Federalist Party virtually faded out of existence. And as for President Monroe himself, he was triumphantly reelected for a second term in 1820 with hardly any opposition at all. Such was the spirit of the time, the American Zeitgeist.

To be fair to Presidents number four and number five, such a turn of events cannot be attributed either to a failure on President Madison’s part nor to a special accomplishment on the part of James Monroe, although he was a very attractive and capable person in his own right. But the Era of Good Feelings was a product of objective circumstances, and only as such it ought to be understood.

As for Monroe, here are a few remarks about him by some of his distinguished contemporaries.---

Thomas Jefferson says this about Monroe: “He is a man whose soul might be turned wrong side outwards, without discovering a blemish to the world.”/From his 1786 letter to Benjamin Franklin’s grandson William Temple Franklin.

The testimony of Monroe’s successor as President, John Quincy Adams contains some bitter nuances that, however, do not impugn any blemishes on Monroe’s character: “Mr. Monroe is a very remarkable instance of a man whose life has been a continued series of the most extraordinary good fortune, who has never met with any known disaster (such as a war of any kind), has gone through a splendid career of public service, has received more pecuniary reward from the public than any other man since the existence of the nation, and is now dying at the age of seventy-two, in wretchedness and beggary.” (Diary, April 27, 1831.)

These two remarks ironically go together. Apparently it is not unusual for a ‘soul without a blemish’ to end his days in financial misery, even if that soul was once a highly esteemed President of the United States. In Monroe’s case, some say that he did maintain an extravagant life style, which was the cause of his financial ruin. But I say that as a high-ranking public official and later President, he was entitled to a lavish life style, particularly having become the face to the world of a new and ambitious nation. On the other hand, he never profited from public office, but, on the contrary, having accepted an inadequate pay without a sufficient extracurricular remuneration, he ran into debt, overburdened by personal expenses, including his wife’s large medical bills. On leaving office at the retirement-ripe age of sixty-seven, he had to sell the rest of his property to pay his debts and less than a year after his wife’s death, he himself died in dire poverty on the Fourth of July, 1831.

With more than a slight touch of sad irony, considering the circumstances, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in his Diary that, like his predecessors Adams and Jefferson, both of whom died on the fiftieth anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence, Monroe, too, joined their company five years later: “President Monroe died on the Fourth of July--- a respectable man, I believe.” (Journal, July 6, 1831.)

...Merely as a reference supplement, it is time now to fill in a few short biographical notes.

Born in 1758, the fifth President of the United States, James Monroe, was a youngster during the American War of Independence, but in 1776 he dropped out of the William and Mary College in his native Virginia to take part in that war, and thus has earned an honorable mention among this nation’s Founders. In 1780, he studied law under Thomas Jefferson, and developed a lasting friendship with him, which greatly influenced his life and future career. Elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1782 at the early age of twenty-four he served in Congress from 1783 to 1786, and in 1790 was elected to the U.S. Senate.
His well-known sympathies for the Republican France were destined to set him on a collision course with the Washington Administration, but instead of disfavor, in 1794 Washington wisely sent him as Minister to France, where he received an enthusiastic welcome. In spite of engaging himself in a political intrigue over the British-American Jay Treaty, denounced by France, and being recalled as a result, in 1796, there was no significant damage done to his career. After serving three year-terms as Governor of Virginia from 1799 to 1802 President Jefferson sent him again to France in 1803 to facilitate the Louisiana Purchase and later that year he became the Minister to Great Britain.
Under President Madison, Monroe became Secretary of State from 1811 to 1817, and concurrently, in 1814 and 1815, Secretary of War.
In 1816 he was elected the fifth President of the United States, and in 1820 overwhelmingly reelected for a second term. The famous Monroe Doctrine was formulated in his 1823 Presidential Message, but it was to become known as such only posthumously, since 1852.

The Monroe Principles comprised three main points: no further European colonization of the New World, non-intervention of Europe in the affairs of the American hemisphere, and non-participation of the United States in the affairs of Europe. It has always been known that the author of the non-colonization principle was in fact Monroe’s Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, while the other two were the desiderata of all Founding Fathers, from the beginning of the American nation,, but it was, indeed, James Monroe himself, who personally voiced all three principles together in his Presidential Message that he drafted himself, and to him goes the credit for such a formulation, legitimately known as the Monroe Doctrine.

The Monroe Doctrine is of such historical importance, and also of such pertinence to the Americana section of this book, that I am devoting a separate, entry to it, albeit a fairly short one, which follows next.

PORCELAIN FROM CLAY

This entry is about Russia’s first music genius Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804-1857). It is also symbolically significant in the context of Russian history that the very first Russian opera was a patriotic historical drama about the nation’s liberation from a foreign (in this case, Polish) occupation, while the composer’s second and last operatic masterpiece was a charming patriotic fairytale about a Russian hero’s triumph over the forces of evil, both foreign and domestic.

Curiously, Glinka was a music amateur who never received a formal musical education. He became serious about music at the late age of eighteen, taking private music lessons in St. Petersburg, then going to Europe to learn more, also informally. This self-taught amateurism he would share with Richard Wagner, nine years his junior, but, unlike Wagner, who tried himself in opera-writing several times without success, and also unlike Tchaikovsky who composed ten operas in all, of which only two (or three, if you are a Russian) have achieved the masterpiece status,-- Glinka wrote the total of two, both entering the gold reserve of world music.

After attending the premiere performance of Glinka’s opera Ivan Susanin (hastily, albeit reluctantly, retitled A Life for the Tsar, to appease an insistent censor, who, in turn, strove to please Tsar Nicholas I, personally interested in this opera and attending its premiere), Glinka’s great admirer and supporter Pushkin wrote the jocular poem, alluded to in the title of this entry, declaring that thereafter “our Glinka (the composer’s name means clay in Russian) is no longer clay, but porcelain!” Continuing our Glinka-Pushkin line, immediately after that glorious event, taking place near the end of 1836, the two geniuses enthusiastically agreed that the next opera Glinka was going to write would be based on Pushkin’s fairytale poem Ruslan and Lyudmila, for which Pushkin was going to make the stage adaptation and write the libretto. This incredibly promising and exciting project was thwarted however by Pushkin’s tragic death in a duel just slightly more than a month later. A distraught Glinka was nevertheless loath to abandon the project, and a different cast of writers that included the composer himself set to work on the libretto, and after five long years of work and numerous revisions, the opera was presented to the public at the end of 1842 to a cold reception and scathing criticism by the critics, who apparently misunderstood it completely. And even as the public attitude quickly changed after that to enthusiastic acceptance, the critical verdict remained that the opera was erratic and random.

The decisive critical reassessment came only in Soviet times, thanks in large part to the work of the leading Soviet music critic and a composer in his own right, Boris Asafiev. Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila has been considered ever since a conscientious and revolutionary musical experiment by Glinka who very well knew what he was doing and delighted himself in doing it.

Glinka was a great genius of Russian music. It would be ridiculous to rank his genius against that of Mussorgsky, or Tchaikovsky, or any other great Russian composer. He was the first, the true pathfinder of Russian music. In his assessment of Glinka’s historic role, Tchaikovsky thus commented on his eight-minute-long symphonic fantasy Kamarinskaya, written in 1848:

“…All Russian symphonic school, like an entire oak inside an acorn, is enclosed in the symphonic fantasy Kamarinskaya.”

This Tchaikovsky assessment is too modest, in my opinion. It was not just the Russian school, but all European music, the great Verdi prominently included, that benefited from Glinka’s fairytale experimentation, and who was better suited to provide the fairytale than the greatest giant of Russian literature, a descendent of an African negro, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin?

…There couldn’t be a better way to conclude this short but important entry on Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka’s musical legacy!

THE TRAGIC GENIUS OF RUSSIAN MUSIC

(See my other Mussorgsky entry Khovanshchina in the Religion section, posted on my blog on January 16^th, 2011, as the final item in the mega-posting And When She Was… Good She was Horrid!)

It is not pleasant to be relentlessly attacked by your enemies, but a far greater tragedy is to be misunderstood by your closest friends. Such was the fate of Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, undoubtedly, one of the greatest geniuses of music in human history, the author of two monumental historical music dramas: Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, unrivalled as such in the history of music. His greatest friend, admirer, and supporter, the otherwise great Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was, regrettably, convinced that Mussorgsky’s lack of proper music education had to be responsible for everything that he found incomprehensible in Mussorgsky’s music, and sincerely strove to correct all such mistakes. It was only much later, already well into the twentieth century, during the Soviet era, that Mussorgsky’s so-called “mistakes” were at last understood as revolutionary musical innovations, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “helpful” corrections and improvements were discarded, in favor of the author’s original drafts.

But at the time, the brutally negative opinion of Mussorgsky’s hopeless amateurism was prevalent in music circles. Even the greatest contemporary talents, such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, were merciless toward the hapless genius, who may just have been in some ways superior to them all.

This is what Rimsky-Korsakov wrote about Mussorgsky’s scores:

“They were very defective, teeming with clumsy, disconnected harmonies, shocking part-writing, amazingly illogical modulations, or intolerably long stretches without ever a modulation, and also bad scoring. What is needed is an edition for practical and artistic purposes, suitable for performances and for those who wish to admire Mussorgsky’s genius, not to study his idiosyncrasies and sins against art.”

Tchaikovsky was hardly more generous:

“Mussorgsky you very rightly call a hopeless case. In talent he is perhaps superior to all the [other members of The Five], but his nature is narrow-minded, devoid of any urge towards self-perfection, blindly believing in the ridiculous theories of his circle and in his own genius… In addition, he has a certain base side to his nature which likes coarseness, uncouthness, and roughness. He flaunts his illiteracy, takes pride in his ignorance, mucks along anyhow, blindly believing in the infallibility of his genius. Yet he has flashes of talent that are, moreover, not devoid of originality.”

Mussorgsky was of course no patsy, and did not accept his friends’ intrusion into his creative masterpieces with unquestioning gratitude and submission.---

“At the first showing of the 2^nd act of Sorochinskaya, I received proof of the basic lack of understanding by the musicuses of the broken [Mighty] Cluster of the very nature of [Ukrainian] humor… Such a chill was in the air from their views and demands, that the heart froze, to quote protopop Avvakum. Still I took a pause, thought about it, and not just once tested myself. It cannot be that I was wrong all round in my strivings, it cannot be. But it is so sad that with the musicuses of the broken Cluster one has to talk over the ‘turnpike,’ behind which they have been left.”

Thus, Mussorgsky’s vindication in his lifetime was only in his own eyes. It is most probable that this kind of rejection that he suffered so unjustly had pushed him into a downward spiral of alcoholism and, eventually, delirium tremens, from which he died having just reached the age of forty two (1839-1881).

Genius, like hero, lives and dies in the shadow of tragedy.

In my opinion, Mussorgsky’s genius ranks with that of Richard Wagner’s. By the age at which Mussorgsky died, Wagner had just completed his first opera of the Ring: Das Rheingold, still having a generous nearly thirty-year stretch of productive life ahead of him (which should put certain things in perspective).

Both men were radical music innovators, both were creators not just of operas but of “music dramas,” writing their own librettos to them… This is by no means comparing their music, for each of them is incomparable. But in terms of the profound originality and sheer power of their genius, they do stand together as the ultimate expression, the apotheosis of music as Schopenhauerian “pure will,” with none of those who have come after them, great geniuses included, measuring up.

WAR AND PEACE OF A PERPETUALLY REPENTANT ROGUE

This is a Leo Tolstoy entry, but a patently unusual one, taking the reader off the beaten track of the standard Tolstoyan fare, and following a line that is very seldom followed. Yet, it is the untrodden path that I always find of greatest interest to me, and I hope that the reader, especially one with a previous knowledge and a particular interest in Leo Tolstoy, will appreciate the surprise of its novelty.

Like so many Russians, Count Leo Tolstoy was larger than life in more ways than one. In his younger days he was already a great writer and still a promiscuous rogue. They said, with complete credibility, that at his family estate Yasnaya Polyana, not very far from Moscow, most of the villagers below a certain age were either his children or his grandchildren, and that his wife Sofia happily welcomed his “peasant ties” because these were taking his insatiable appetites off her poor exhausted body.

It is also known that in his mature years he began to suffer very severe fits of guilt, on account of his carnal incontinence, but, being unable to cease and desist, satisfied his conscience by perpetual repentance and by writing about the sinfulness of carnal sins. It was only at a very advanced age that his habitual repentances were no longer accompanied by sinful acts, which fact perhaps accounted for his loss of interest in living, his famous flight away from home, and a thoroughly penitent death, at the age of eighty-two, at a travelers’ horses-changing station.

His most ambitious novel War and Peace (which, incidentally, uses concurrently three languages: Russian, French, and German, in the original) makes, among other better-known things, an attempt to demythologize the ghost of Napoleon, whose influence on the minds of Russian aristocracy had kept growing in Tolstoy’s time, especially, after the posthumous repatriation of his body in 1840, and his enthusiastic reinstatement in France as that nation’s greatest hero. Tolstoy thus had a specific agenda here to counter Napoleon’s legend with his own unattractive depiction of the man behind the legend. In that sense, Tolstoy’s monumental novel was a total failure, as Napoleon’s supernatural halo had by no means been extinguished by Tolstoy’s effort to bring him down to earth, from the heroic heights of a monumental history in the making.

Tolstoy’s perpetual state of repentance, noted earlier, was not limited to his sexual promiscuity. Here is a fine example of his social penitence, bringing his argument uncannily close to the case made by the detractors of “capitalism with a human face”:

“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am so sorry for him and wish to ease his burden by all possible means except by getting off his back.” (This superb specimen of socialist agitprop is quoted from Tolstoy’s 1886 pamphlet What Must We Do?)

It is a great pity that Tolstoy had not lived to welcome the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. I am sure that he would have become a sort of Russian Philippe Égalité, but only in so far as his repentful enthusiasm goes. It is most unlikely that he could ever be harmed by the Soviet regime, the way his French predecessor had been harmed by the French perpetrators of State Terror. After all, both Lenin and Stalin were endowed with an acute sense of aesthetic appreciation, and with good taste too. I think that Leo Tolstoy would have fared just as well under the Soviet regime as his relative Alexei Tolstoy fared in actuality. Besides, Tolstoy and Lenin shared a singular passion for Beethoven. Tolstoy immortalized the Kreutzer Sonata in literature, while Lenin made the Appassionata a household word all around Soviet Russia…

The following is an added bonus, which deviates from the subject of Tolstoy’s repentfulness into the fragile world of aesthetics, where, as the reader will see, Tolstoy has something interesting to say, as well. And so, two more exceptionally insightful and highly provocative thoughts of his on the nature of art and aesthetics are now winding up the short list of the unusual Tolstoy selections that I have chosen for this entry. Please, do compare them with the other entries on aesthetics in this section!---

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” (The Kreutzer Sonata.) Talking about the two types of beauty: outward and inward, would have been rather trite, but Tolstoy’s well-taken point concerns the delusion of mistaking outward beauty for goodness, while ignoring or shunning away from the inward kind of beauty, if it is not accompanied by the outward kind.

“Art is not a handcraft. It is a transmission of the feeling, experienced by the artist.” (From Tolstoy’s 1898 pamphlet What is Art?) This is quite a remarkable definition of art, which Schopenhauer would have appreciated. If only Nietzsche could have commented on it, too!.

(Very few people otherwise familiar with the name and work of Leo Tolstoy are aware of his impressively deep inroads into the subject of aesthetics, as represented by these last two selections…)

POGIB POET

(This is the final entry of a triptych on the great Russian poets Pushkin, Mayakovsky, and Lermontov.)

The title of this entry is taken from the famous poem by Mikhail Lermontov, written in commemoration of the death of Pushkin, the greatest Russian national treasure, tragically killed in a duel. Its author, a colossal genius in his own right, repeated Pushkin’s fate at the incredibly young age of twenty-six, yet in the course of his pitifully short life he managed to rise to the height of the second tallest peak of the Russian literature, both as an endearing romantic poet and as an exceptional author of deeply psychological prose. (Mind you, the first ever description of the deadliest version of the so-called Russian Roulette, belongs to his eerie story The Fatalist, which is a part of his novel Hero of Our Time.)

While he was alive, Lermontov had numerous admirers of his precocious talent, but even more sworn enemies. His was an angry and bitter genius much akin to the tragic hero of his famous long poem The Demon. “I am better than I appear,” Lermontov says about himself, and he is absolutely right. There is a vulnerable good and kind genius underneath the protective façade of an abrasive and wicked offender which appeared to all those who either did not know him well enough, or were not sensitive enough to the wounded soul of his poetry.

There is a telling story about his second and fatal duel, in which, like in the first, he deliberately shot away from his opponent, but this time his foe, whom Lermontov’s wicked personal satire had turned into the butt of every joke, was intent on shooting to kill. Having said that, I am not totally averse to thinking that Lermontov may have played the role of his own fatalistic character, with a death wish at that, eerily assuming that being tragically killed at such a young age was doubly assuring him of historical immortality.

Thus, at the tender age of twenty-six, died one of Russia’s most promising geniuses. A great romantic poet, a prodigiously skillful playwright, a writer of exceptional psychological prose, a true artist,--- he was one of those incredibly fragile beautiful flowers that needed very special tender and loving care, and did not get it. Once again did Russia mistreat one of her best, only to recognize him as one of her greatest just a few years after his tragic and totally preventable physical departure from this world.

(More on this unusual poetic troika will be found in my future entry on… Mikhail Bulgakov.)

LOVE BOAT WRECKED ON DASEIN

My love for the genius of the great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky has by now become as well-known as my love for Nikolai Gumilev, and, yes, I love just as much to recite to myself his marvelous verses, many of which I still remember by heart.

But this is not an entry about Mayakovsky’s poetry, although, at a future time, I might think of expanding it into a large essay on his art and his life. Meantime, my limited purpose here is to make a short observation on what he wanted and did not get from life, and why he committed suicide at the early age of thirty-seven, in 1930.

Mayakovsky was in all ways larger than life, and what he always wanted from life was for life to measure up to him. In his pre-Revolutionary poetry, I find a profound sadness, and even bitterness, as he was not born to be satisfied with any “status quo,” reactionary, or revolutionary, or whatever, as long as it was an institutional status quo.

He welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 with a great and perfectly sincere passion, and now, in his poetry, he suddenly exudes an optimism and energy beyond belief. I am convinced that he was completely happy with the onset of the Soviet regime, because it satisfied his urgent need for earthquakes, cataclysmic changes, and titanic struggles.

By the time when his life had come to its tragic end, it must, in all probability, have become painfully clear to him that even the new dimension of Russian life, as provided by the Soviet experiment, had not prodded life to measure up to him. How could it, when it has been a universal law of life that after every revolution comes the period of stabilization into a… status quo! His bitter twilight complaint: “The love boat is shipwrecked on (the prose of) living,” has far less to do with his unhappy love life, than is generally assumed. Quite conversely, it was his love life falling victim to his utter disappointment in life in general, and it was that disappointment which then caused his premature tragic demise.

I repeat that it was not his disappointment in the Soviet experiment as such, but only in its insufficiency to satisfy his superhuman needs. He required a superpower to live in. His tragedy was that he succumbed too early. Had he witnessed the giant steps Russia would take in the 1930’s, on its way to superpowerdom, had he witnessed Hitler’s rise, and the ensuing titanic struggle between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, with the Russian nation emerging victorious and supermighty out of it… perhaps, he would have wanted to live until a hundred, and to write until a hundred, and as a result, both the Russians and the human civilization as a whole would have continued to benefit from the lightning strikes of his incomparable genius.

PUSHKIN

No matter how much Western Russian experts may boast of their vast erudition in Russian culture, they do not understand Pushkin. For them he is primarily a great Russian poet, arguably the greatest. But Pushkin is vastly more than anything that can be expressed in biographical or professional terms. He has become an inalienable part of the Russian national soul. His genius is harmoniously attached to the strings of the Russian spirit, and one might even say that Russia herself has been attuned to his lyre, like a grand orchestra receiving the pitch from its concertmaster.

It is always inadequate to talk about Pushkin’s life or his art, whatever one can say about it. A true Russian may just as well start reciting Pushkin from memory, as everything else feels inferior and disrespectful. In this book Pushkin dwells in every section and in numerous entries, which is a far better tribute to him than even the best laudatory special entry about him.

There is just one rather unusual point that I want to make in this particular special Pushkin entry. Since the onslaught of the iconoclastic madness of the 1990’s in Russia, many icons have been attacked, and Pushkin, being one of the icons, has been attacked as well. The anti-Soviet crowd of attackers has effectively accused Pushkin of serving as a poster-child for Soviet propaganda! Pushkin’s personality cult in the former USSR, they have alleged, was helping to promote the personality cults of the Soviet leaders, such as Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, plus it served to buttress the whole edifice of the Soviet State!

…Why should I even be talking of such obvious ridiculous nonsense?, a Pushkin-loving reader may ask. Well, even such apparent nonsense may serve us well to make a valuable point. It is true that there was a veritable Pushkin cult in the USSR, but it was perfectly justified. Pushkin and Russia are so inextricably tied together that a Pushkin cult is by the same token a cult of Mother Russia, and, conversely, no Russian patriot can ever be indifferent to the genius of Pushkin, which naturally amounts to a full-blown and ever-blossoming cult of one of her greatest heroes.

A Postscript and Reminder: In the recent academic/national poll Imya Rossiya (see a large cluster of entries earlier in this section), designed to vote “The Greatest Russian,” Russia’s greatest Saint, Prince Alexander Nevsky won this title in every round. Pushkin was second in the first round and fourth after Petr Stolypin (a rather artificial choice, to be quite honest) and Comrade Stalin who came third in the final round. Coming either second or fourth is still a huge ranking, considering that it was a serious contest among all Russians of history, which long list included at least three hundred (out of five hundred) bona fide geniuses and Russian national symbols.

VODKA AND THE PERIODIC TABLE

Having previously called Russia “mother of genius,” I am at a loss to single out one scientist, one composer, or one anything at all, at the expense of all the rest. Sure enough, I have my sentimental favorites here and there (usually more than one in each area of creativity), but when it comes to science, rules of sentimentality hardly ever apply, which makes it easier for me to come up with rankings of the greatest Russian scientists, based on strictly formal, rather than subjectively personal criteria. For me, there are two sets of such formal criteria, and the first one is chronological. The reader may have noticed the importance that I am attaching to the fact of chronological precedence in my treatment of the greatest American presidents in the Twilight section. By the same token, I have already honored the first great Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov in my entry A Native Russian Nugget in this Russian section.

My second formal criterion, particularly relevant to the Russian list of greats, is tied to the already profusely quoted Imya Rossiya project, where the initial selection of five hundred candidates was made by respectable members of the Russian academia, and the subsequent two-round public vote was monitored and effectively controlled by a body of responsible professionals. This doesn’t mean of course that the project was flawless, and various omissions, oversights, biases, etc. have been demonstrable. But at least some things were done right, and the otherwise strong possibility of weird flukes and intrusions of vulgar taste and mass ignorance and tastelessness, characteristic of similar European “Greatest” polls, was thus significantly reduced.

Well, according to the results of the Imya Rossiya poll, for whatever it is worth, the title of Russia’s greatest scientist goes to Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907), chemist, creator of the groundbreaking Periodic Table of Elements (1869), which was so superior to all previous scientific efforts at such classification, that it can be fully credited to the genius of Dmitri Mendeleev in a class by himself. No wonder that the Western history of science, which has never been generous to such Russian pioneers of science as, say, Yablochkov, or Popov, bows to Mendeleev’s creation as a no-contest case.

So far, so excellent, but there is far more to Mendeleev’s name and credit than the Periodic Table alone. His other contributions to chemistry, to physics, hydrodynamics, meteorology, and even economics, are great by themselves, and even without the Table would have brought him international fame. He is also known as an energetic champion of introducing the metric system to Russia, giving a huge impetus to the standardization process which harmonized Russian measurements with those accepted in most of Europe.

But there is one more achievement of his which makes a heck of a story and a treasure trove for trivia buffs and such. It starts with the popular Russian quasi-legend that Mendeleev “invented…vodka.”

Calling Mendeleev father of vodka is a huge stretch, of course, which stretches credibility beyond the limits of the acceptable. Vodka had existed in Russia since times immemorial and its actual “inventor” has to be a collective, and not a proper name.

And yet there’s some truth to the legend. In 1893 Mendeleev was appointed Director of the Russian Bureau of Weights and Measures, and one of his immediate responsibilities was to develop the official standard for vodka distillation. He diligently applied himself to the task, and in 1894 came up with such standard, which he determined as 38% by volume, equivalent to 76 Proof. Attention trivia buffs! Mendeleev considered this 38% to be the optimum number for vodka distillation, but the Russian authorities were dissatisfied with that number, allegedly for practical reasons. In order to count the tax on vodka distillers more easily, they needed a round number, and set their sights on the obvious round number 40%, which would from then on become the gold standard of vodka distillation. Whether or not Mendeleev willingly complied with the government-imposed round number is extremely unimportant. Having come up with the number 38%, all the rest would now be out of his hands.

Having nothing more illuminating to say on this subject, here is where my entry on Mendeleev, vodka, and the Periodic Table ends, take it or leave it.

OBAMA-ROMNEY: THE THIRD DEBATE

As a foreign policy expert, I am supposed to mount my hobby energetically, and run it a long distance with this third Presidential Debate “on foreign policy,” which has just ended. Yet, frankly, I have very little to say about it, and this is hardly a paradox, since this was a vacuous debate, and a complete lack of substance was unfortunately to be expected.

Apparently, the two contenders did not feel comfortable with the subject of foreign policy as such, and were most eager to skedaddle from it at the slightest opportunity into the friendlier waters of the domestic agenda, such as the economy, education, etc. Not that the economy is something to cheer about, but at least there is something to talk about there, whereas foreign policy is quite another matter.

American foreign policy in the twenty-first century is reduced in public perception (probably justifiably) to the terribly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the no less unpopular potential wars in Syria, and especially the one against Iran. Ergo, the public equates foreign policy to war, and naturally does not want… a foreign policy! Hence, President Obama tries to minimize foreign policy and maximize domestic policy, while Mr. Romney has by now understood it too, and switched gears down on his external bellicosity quite a bit. As a result, both of them were visibly trying to run away from “foreign policy,” shielding themselves from the questions by a few standard declarative clichés.

There was little to run from, though, as the respectable newsman Bob Schieffer was unequivocally committed to playing by the rules, that is, to following the narrow parameters of politically correct questioning and giving all unpleasant deviations from the moderator’s manual (specifying what is debatable, with everything else anathemized) an extra-wide berth. Incidentally, a much livelier, and infinitely more substantial, foreign policy debate might have been possible, hypothetically speaking, if none of the moderator’s ‘questions’ had been asked in the first place, in favor of a few uncensored ones… But wouldn’t that be way too much to be desired of America’s present-day rigidly controlled political process?!

Whatever there was of foreign policy, spinned around the Middle East, with such issues as support for Israel and inadmissibility of a nuclear Iran dominating the pseudo-discussion. There was hardly any disagreement between the candidates, except for some pathetically feeble declarations to the contrary, which may have satisfied the partisan cheerleaders, but could never fool a nonpartisan outsider.

So, they did talk most of the time about Israel and about the chaos in the Middle East, but not a single word about the key source of the regional instability: the Palestinian issue. So much for the subject of their attention going down the drain with a vengeance... By the way, I do not think that Israel can be too pleased with the recent practice of undermining and overthrowing stable secular regimes in her back yard, releasing the jihadist genie out of the previously tightly corked bottle. Yet discussing this unsettling subject along these lines is definitely yet another taboo du jour…

Mr. Romney took several shots at a “nuclear” Iran being the biggest threat to American national security. It is easier of course to frighten little children with a threat that does not exist as such, as opposed to the grim reality of a nuclear-armed Pakistan balancing on the verge of a meltdown, yet although Pakistan was briefly mentioned, it was the nuclear-armless Iran that dominated the nuclear threat discussion. Apparently, once you have the bomb, you fall into a qualitatively different, “untouchable” category, with due respect and all!

Talking about nuclear weapons, the issue of nuclear arms control and of other weapons of mass destruction was conspicuously left off the table, even sharper underscoring the sheer absurdity of the discussion of the non-existent Iranian nukes. Although both Russia and China did pop up in the debate, they were obscenely low-priority, seemingly accidental topics. It would have been much better for the three men on that stage to pretend to forget about them at all, than to treat them in such a careless, dismissive manner.

It goes without saying that all other geographical areas of strategic importance to the United States, Latin America prominent among them, received scandalously little or no attention whatsoever, turning the debate into yet another political joke.

My general impression of the third Presidential Debate reinforces my pre-existent opinion that the United States is still so much intoxicated with that Cold War “victory” that it simply does not have a foreign policy anymore, and I am afraid that the recklessly spurned ghost is sure to come back to haunt Washington, if not as early as this coming Halloween, then certainly in the not too distant future.

A NATIVE RUSSIAN NUGGET

There have been several polymaths of genius in history, applying themselves to numerous and diverse areas of human activity and bringing their genius to all of them, as though their talents were unlimited in specifics, and were only a matter of application. Among this super-prodigious group stands an amazing Russian fountain of talents-galore Mikhail Vasilievich Lomonosov. Perhaps, the greatest of his talents was an insatiable drive for learning, in which admirable and stupendous quality he was undeniably second to none throughout all ages and nations.

Soviet mini-biographies used to cite his class origin as “peasant,” and many biographies still do, but such a characterization is rather misleading. He was a “pomor,” born on the edges of the Northern Seas, and all his family for generations had been in the rough-- and should I say rough-and-tumble?-- seafaring business. No offence to the peasants, a pomor is something else.

He had been brought up to be a laborer of the sea, and would retain certain qualities of that trade, including an incredible stubbornness and abrasiveness, bordering on rudeness, in his later life. But unlike all the people around him, he had far greater aspirations, and his thirst and unbounded capacity for learning would sooner or later come in conflict with his surroundings, and in a most radical way, at that.

By the age of fourteen, he was already well-literate and educated in the basics of math and science, thanks to a local church scribe, and to reading the best books available in the Russian language at the time, on these subjects. (There were not too many of them, though…) At the age of nineteen, having learned all that could possibly be learned there, he literally walked away from home, joining a caravan of fish merchants going to the great city of Moscow, which was the next stepping stone of his own ambition, reaching it in three weeks of an exerting Winterreise. He did not know a soul in the city, of course, but his incredible self-reliance and self-confidence buoyed him through all the difficulties that had to be expected from such a challenging undertaking. The farther he progressed, the more he thrived on his radically new experiences, as though he were born for them: to experience them, and then quickly to move on, to newer and more challenging ones.

Not at all embarrassed to be by far the oldest student in each class that he would subsequently be taking, his prodigious talents and quick learning skills were immediately and favorably noticed, and he moved on from Moscow’s Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy (1731-1735) to St. Petersburg’s Academic University (1736), from which he was sent, in the same year, to Germany, for further study (1736-1740). He returned to St. Petersburg in 1741 to great honors, as Professor of Chemistry and Physics--- the two disciplines which he would be the first person in history to tie in together, into one, that is, into physical chemistry. In 1755 he was the power behind the establishment of Moscow University, subsequently bearing his name. Having been elected honorary member of several foreign academies, he was now receiving so much recognition from Russia’s royalty and the Court, that his many enemies were literally trembling for fear that their animosity toward him might cost them the Court’s favor. Shortly before his death, in 1765, he was visited by the Empress Catherine the Great, who treated him, deservedly, as Russia’s foremost national treasure.

Overall, Lomonosov’s legacy has been incredibly large. He was Russia’s first world-renowned natural scientist and the world’s very first physical chemist, whose philosophy of physical chemistry happened to be virtually the same as it remains today. By the same token, his molecular-kinetic theory of heat was a precursor of the modern theory of the structure of matter and of the basic principles of thermodynamics. He is also unequivocally acknowledged as the father of the science of glass, to which effect the great Euler would give him an exuberant credit.

He was also a great astronomer (who discovered the atmosphere of Venus, among other things), an inventor of several optical devices and of other scientific instruments, a geographer, a mineralogist, a metallurgist, a geologist, an artist and mosaicist, author of several famous works of mosaic art, a historian, a philologist, as well as a writer and a poet who laid the foundation of the modern Russian literary language. As a poet, he is considered, with Derzhavin, one of the two greatest Russian poets before Pushkin. He was also a champion of Russian education, science, and economic progress.

This is what Pushkin says about him:

“Combining an uncommon willpower with an uncommon power of comprehension, Lomonosov embraced all branches of arts and sciences. A thirst for science was the greatest passion of this soul overflowing with passions. Historian, rhetorician, mechanic, chemist, mineralogist, artist, and versificator, he experienced all and penetrated all; he is the first to go in depth into the history of fatherland, establishes the rules of its civil language, provides the rules and examples of classical rhetoric, with the hapless Richmann (German-born Russian physicist, close friend and colleague of Lomonosov, Georg Wilhelm Richman [1711-1753] was killed while conducting an experiment with electricity… what a beautiful death! Lomonosov then went out of his way, cashing in on the royal favor to arrange a decent lifelong pension for the family of his late friend and colleague…) presages the discovery of (Benjamin) Franklin, establishes a factory and builds his own machines, gifts artistic mosaic works, and, finally, reveals to us the true sources of our poetic language.”

As a final curiosity, we must not forget to mention that none other than Lomonosov was the earliest developer of the helicopter principle, which he, however, never intended for “manned” flights, but only for launching certain meteorological instruments sufficiently high into the air to facilitate the conducting of various scientific experiments he had in mind. Still, the great Russian-born “father of the helicopter” Igor Sikorsky never failed to acknowledge his indebtedness to the genius of Lomonosov, which, most regrettably, very few people today would even know about, and still fewer would care about, as History herself has become a hopelessly old-fashioned fossil of a lady.

But all of us belonging to the diminishing breed of those who still know and still care, must do our duty to keep such memories alive.

PATRIOTISM AND AGGRESSION

Bertrand Russell describes patriotism as the willingness to kill and to be killed for trivial reasons. There can be no doubt that this is a very sarcastic observation, but the question is how true it is. On another occasion, Russell’s erstwhile colleague and collaborator on the monumental Principia Mathematica Alfred North Whitehead aphorizes to the effect that “there are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths, it is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.”

In this sense, Russell’s saying is only a half-truth, of course, but being a true philosopher, he makes us think about which half of it is true, and which is not. It is true that a patriot driven into a patriotic frenzy is indeed ready to kill and to be killed just on the wing of his passion; but there are two distinctive types of patriotism here: one which is benign and honorable and the other which is vainly chauvinistic, shallowly bellicose, and unwarrantedly aggressive.

Russell’s description of patriotism can be found offensively cynical in some quarters, but I don’t blame him at all for it. The expansionist patriotism of the British during the Imperial era was essentially gung-ho at the time when Britain herself was in no immediate peril. German aggressive chauvinism has also been of a not-so-pleasant variety: even those wars in which Germany ended up as a victim in the last three centuries or so were either explicitly initiated by Germany herself, or, as in the case of the Napoleonic wars, were her punishment for an excessive belligerence, anyway. In today’s world, American aggressive patriotism (or, rather, chauvinism, plain and simple) is manifestly unattractive, and even obnoxious to the outsiders. There could have been a theoretically imaginable rationale for an American war in, say, Canada, or in Mexico, for some valid strategic reason, but definitely not in Iraq or elsewhere, against a minor, conspicuously unthreatening nation, far away from the American shores.

Summarizing all these cases, where similar displays of “patriotism” have deserved Russell’s skepticism, in each of them we are talking of the hubris of the aggressor.

Russian patriotism is of a different kind, and although every Russian patriot is willing to kill, or to be killed in the service of his nation, none would agree that their nation would ever allow them to die without a good cause and for a trivial reason. My personal experience of the Russian patriotism has been of the wholesome and honorable kind with the memory of the horrific German aggression against the Russian nation in World War II still fresh in the national psyche. Such defensive patriotism is qualitatively different from the cheeky hubris of aggressive patriotism, and these two types ought to be judged by different standards.

Of course, there had been a Soviet war with Finland in 1939-1940, which despite its aggressive appearance, was indeed a defensive war, in anticipation of an imminent war with Nazi Germany. Moscow had a reason to suspect that Finland would join the war on Hitler’s side, and demanded from the former dependency within the Russian Empire, a relatively small, but strategically indispensable, piece of land in close proximity to the city of Leningrad, to be returned to the USSR, so that, when the war started, Leningrad would not find itself unprotected from the north-western direction, and be quickly overwhelmed. And so the war was fought. After a heroic Finnish defense, earning a genuine Soviet respect for the Finnish nation and for its great statesman Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, the contested territory was reannexed to the USSR, making an important difference in the future war against Hitler.

Then there was a 1979-1988 Soviet war in Afghanistan that does not seem to fit the defensive pattern at all. Yet it was fought for a very understandable reason too: to protect the secular government of an immediate Soviet neighbor from a jihadist Taliban threat. (Does it ring any kind of bell?) Still this war was an aberration of sorts, and the Soviets paid for it dearly, while the secular government they had been trying to protect paid even more dearly, collapsing soon after the Soviet retreat and being savagely massacred.

There used to be a very popular Soviet song Do the Russians Want a War? with the powerful words by the Russian/Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The answer to the song’s title question is, in my expanded paraphrase, no, we do not want another tragic loss of life that is in the nature of all wars, but yes, we know how to fight and how to win wars, if that is what it takes to win peace. And whenever there is a threat to the Russian Motherland, defensive patriotism, and whenever the Russian Fatherland is in peril, patriotic passion, the Russians are ready to strike back or even to strike first, whenever mother nation calls them. Thus Russian patriotism, the veiled half of Russell’s truth, is possible to describe in his terms as the willingness to kill or to be killed, yet by no means for a trivial reason, but only for a very good cause.

TALENT FOR... COMMUNISM?

In my two entries placed in different sections, according to each one’s leitmotif, one (not yet posted), under the title Weber’s Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism, in the Contradiction section, and the other (posted on September 21^st, 2012), Talent For Religion, in the Religion section (both these sections precede Russia in my book), I have already sounded themes very similar to the theme of this entry. In this Russian section I am getting back to them again, but in a new setting.

 

In his best-known book The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism (1904-1905) Max Weber comes to the rather unexpected conclusion, in my view, that it is not the Jewish spirit of entrepreneurial ingenuity, but the thoroughly Gentile ‘Protestant’ character, which defines and epitomizes capitalism, constituting the best guarantee of capitalist success, at least in so far as Germany is concerned. Weber notes the significant statistical correlation in Germany between successful business ventures and the Protestant background of the entrepreneurs in-point. He then attributes this connection to certain accidental consequences of the notions of predestination and calling in traditional Puritan theology as developed by Calvin and his followers, which contributes to the emergence of the “workaholic” type, religiously committed to his worldly calling, coupled with an ascetic abstinence from the enjoyment of the profits of his labor, which, in practical terms, leads to a swift accumulation of capital… (For the record, and as a fascinating piece of by no means trivial information, the close connection between religious [implicitly Protestant] zeal and the workaholic propensity of the individual was proposed by the already mentioned on several occasions great American homeopath Dr. James Tyler Kent six years before Weber’s book came out.)

Now, opening the present entry proper, and in keeping with the subject matter of the previous one, here is Nietzsche again, with this shocking suggestion from his Jenseits (48):

“It appears that Catholicism is much more intimately related to the Latin races than all of Christianity in general is to us northerners, and unbelief means something different in Catholic and Protestant countries. Among them, a kind of rebellion against the spirit of the race, among us, a return to the spirit of the race. We, descendants of barbarians, have little talent for religion.”

This quasi-racial approach to the religious differences dividing the nations of Europe makes no pretense to a comprehensive sweep of the subject of their connection. As usual with Nietzsche, this is rather a teaser, but what a fruitful teaser! It opens up a whole new field of virgin soil, and with a multitude of outside links. There is no point in starting a scholarly disputation here on whether he is on or off target in this case, as he is always quick to contradict himself with yet another intellectual challenge born out (sic!) of his fearlessly random fancy. What is important is to pick up his challenge, and to play with it, carrying it even further in our double dare.

Applying this splendid idea-generator and proliferator to the subject of Russia, we may start our riposte by asking whether Russian Orthodox Christianity, unmentioned by Nietzsche in the above passage, relates to Catholicism more than to Protestantism, in this case, and the answer is: yes, of course. The Russians have an amazing talent for religion, an even greater one, perhaps, than their Latin counterparts. And, conversely, the spirit of Protestantism is conspicuously alien to the spirit of Russia.

Several Russian thinkers of the early twentieth century (well summarized in Merezhkovsky’s Last Russian Saint/Serafim Sarovsky and in his religious-philosophical push for Russia’s adoption of a New Christianity) must have been profoundly struck by Nietzsche’s implicit call to return to the spirit of the race, but their common mistake had been to misunderstand the nature of the Russian spirit that has proven itself alien both to the spirit of Protestantism and to the idea of a New Christianity. (For more on this, see my posted entry Merezhkovsky And His New Christianity (October 16^th, 2011) in the Religion section.) As a matter of fact, the spirit of the Russian race focuses on the blessed nature of suffering (see my entry The Blessedness Of Suffering, posted on August 24^th, 2011), and thus provokes the interesting question of whether such ready acceptance of suffering contradicts the spirit of human nature or, on the contrary, provides an antidote to its sting once we realize that suffering is an essential part of the human condition anyway.

 

(This is very similar to Camus’ argument on the acceptance of absurdity in his treatment of the myth of Sisyphus. In my not yet posted entry My Take On Sisyphus, I observe that the absurdity of Sisyphus’ “life in hell” was no laughing matter, involving not just the sheer senselessness of his job, but also a great suffering, if we should believe Homer. Thus, Camus, without ever stating it this way, invites the reader/Sisyphus to seek some kind of happiness in a life of suffering, in close parallel with the peculiar Russian/Christian way of looking at it.)

Now, having repeatedly said that the spirit of Protestantism with its relative disregard for religion is alien to the Russian spirit, let us superimpose this line of thinking, like a piece of see-through paper for tracing, on Max Weber’s idea of the positive spirit of Capitalism, as tied to the Protestant ethics. Thus superimposing religion on the politico-economic forms of social organization, we arrive at the idea of Protestant Cultures, such as the British and American cultures, with a greater propensity for capitalism than Catholic Cultures. Bringing Russia into this discussion on the side of the church-controlled Catholic cultures, we are getting in a light-hearted manner of course, to a litmus test of who is better fit to be a capitalist and who is better fit to be… what… a socialist?!

But wait, aren’t we running into a contradiction already? Nietzsche clearly identifies the Germanic race as Protestant, and, therefore, by Max Weber’s definition, a Capitalist-spirited race. Yet, it was Germany that embraced socialism at the time of the Third Reich…

Nothing contradictory here, though, once we remind ourselves that the national-socialist idea had come out of the Catholic quarters of Germany, and not from her Protestant North.

Well, once we have established that “serious” Christians gravitate toward the socialist principles of social organization, how come that in modern Europe socialism has been embraced by all northern, traditionally Protestant nations? The answer is that perhaps traditional religious identification is no longer important and pertinent in modern Europe, and that the socialist idea has taken over the European nations as part of their earlier childhood upbringing, over the objections of the much later spirit of religious Reformation.

Returning now to the summarizing question of my Weber entry, let me pose it here again:

If we should assume that the spirit of capitalism is somehow tied to Protestantism, does that mean that the spirit of socialism is tied to Catholicism? On an even more reflective note, it may perhaps even go without a challenge that the spirit of communism is certainly alive in the body of Russian Orthodox Christianity.

The question is now reformulated quite seriously as a positive statement. Consistently with the insights of Nietzsche’s talent for religion, and Weber’s identification of nation-religions with their politico-economic preferences, and also consistently with Russian history and her predominant trends in religious philosophy, we may thoughtfully conclude that Russia, as a nation, possesses an unquestionable talent for communism, not to be confused with the bungled experiment in social engineering, characterizing the Soviet era, but as the principal idea underlying her philosophical approach to self-realization.

CONSPIRING TOGETHER: RED PERIL AND THE YELLOW DEVIL

This delightfully subtle title plays on the title of Nancy Graham’s erstwhile political magazine Surviving Together (with which I used to have a rather strange, although always friendly, relationship, described in the Mirror section), devoted to American-Soviet relations. The “Red Peril” in the title is self-explanatory, while the Yellow Devil comes from Maxim Gorky’s classic caricature of America. (Incidentally, the former title of this entry, The American-Soviet Conspiracy Of Convenience, conveys its content with a commendable straightforwardness, although at the expense of subtleness.)

So far, we have been discussing the question whether Russia is really important as a world leader within the new post-Soviet global power structure. Realizing that indeed she is, and yet we have to prove it again, and again, and again, as if this fact immediately turns into some nonsensical fiction at the very moment that we are done proving it, the next question that arises, is: why is this so?

Justice in a court of law is only possible when there are two sides in direct opposition to each other. Where there is no conflict, there is no justice. Provided of course that the conflict is real, and not a sham. There are situations, however, when both the prosecution and the defense may find themselves in bogus opposition to each other, while in reality working on the same side, in cahoots, in order to guarantee a mutually acceptable verdict, something like when the defendant is in no hurry to prove his innocence, but on the contrary is bent on flaunting his alleged guilt, well knowing that he can get away with it anyway but with an extra clout as a result. In such cases, there can be no justice in the court, and the truth is always the victim.

This is not a contrived scenario, but the actuality behind the former Soviet phenomenon. The Russians were anxious to convince the world that their strategic goal was, indeed, world domination, even though they had neither the desire, nor such power to control the world, and their real goal was a much more modest projection of the Russian antithesis to the Western Capitalist (later American) thesis. But the West was quick to buy into the idea of Soviet world domination. In fact, the West not only loved, but very much needed the idea of the Red Peril, the Russian Internationalist threat, because the leaders of the Western world were smart men who understood the value of the strong enemy to society, just like the leaders of the Church had from the very beginning realized the immense value of Satan for keeping their flocks under control. And so the West was anxious to perpetuate the Red world domination Scare, and the Russians loved it back, because, as far as they were concerned, it carried the realistic promise of a much greater power than they could ever dream of, or even ever cared to possess.

This conspiracy of convenience had become the mainstay of the world order in the twentieth century during the early years of 1917-1937(?) and the later period of the Cold War (1946-1991), interrupted by the rise of Nazi Germany in between. The lie at the bottom of it did not upset the applecart too much because the main parameters were unaffected: America did have an enemy and so did Russia, and everybody was happy with the big picture. It was only when the Soviet Union unexpectedly fell apart, the snake shed her skin (see my explanatory entry Allegory Of The Snake, posted on August 26, 2011), and only because the lie had been so inextricably fused with the old skin, that America could not help falling into the lie’s hidden trap, having to accept Russia’s new skin as some new and positive quality, whereas it was all so wonderful only from the standpoint of the invigorated snake.

But returning to the empty substance of the Red Peril, which was the cornerstone of American propaganda throughout the Soviet era of history, the Russians had, in fact, been the first in launching their own type of anti-American propaganda, shaped in the Karl Marx tradition, aiming at exposing the evils of capitalism, of which the United States had been the embodiment. Russian anti-capitalism was cleverly encapsulated in the image of the Yellow Devil, conjured up by the great Russian writer Maxim Gorky back in the early 1930’s. The great irony of this, however, was that, in their mutual perceptions, American propaganda (aimed at the American public) about Soviet Russia: The Red Peril, was a lie, accepted as the truth, while Soviet propaganda (aimed at the Soviet public) about Capitalist America: The Yellow Devil, was the truth, dismissed as a lie…

 

OBAMA-ROMNEY: THE SECOND DEBATE

I don’t know about you, but with me yesterday’s debate left a heavy, sad aftertaste. The American political process has become a caricature of itself, and last night served as an illustration. The main criterion of success between the two contenders was how pugnacious each would be coming across. President Obama’s redemption, after the last debate’s alleged “fiasco,” would be the intensity of anger he was supposed to project this time, to indicate that he still wanted the White House job. Incidentally, I liked Mr. Obama more in the first debate, and he lost it. I liked him less in the second debate, and he won it. As for the so-called substance, it was entirely lost among the “binders full of women,” and other such telltale nonsense. But who would care for substance, anyway? The debate was not authentic enough, to make substance matter. Both candidates were unapologetically scripted, using each question from the audience to segue to their pre-fabricated talking points, and when on a couple of occasions the transition appeared too hard to find, Mr. Romney simply ignored the question altogether, and took the desired “highway exit” no matter what.

It was a fake debate all around. A town hall meeting is supposed to be a celebration of freedom and democracy in action. I have my strong suspicions about ‘democracy’ in yesterday’s event, but it was a glaring fact that freedom was nowhere to be found. Freedom is spontaneous, but there was no spontaneity, except when someone put his foot in his mouth. Reciting your handlers’ talking points is an insult to the concept of freedom. As for the questions from the audience, they were an even greater mockery. I am sure that America is capable of producing plenty of brave questioners who wouldn’t need a cheatsheet to ask a question, yet yesterday’s participants could not even memorize their lines properly, and unabashedly read from the notes, as if that was the only proper thing to do, thus contributing to the shameful evidence of a prearranged circus for all the viewing world to see.

No person chained to a piece of paper with what is supposed to be his or her question written on it, is a free person. Regrettably, I have to repeat that there was no freedom in yesterday’s audience, and not much more freedom on the stage, either. As for the moderator Candy Crawley, although she was criticized for a couple of questionable calls, I think she did a fairly decent job, professionally speaking, especially considering the eagerness of both campaigns to turn the venue into a warzone. But, presiding over a fake event, she does not deserve congratulations.

And finally, the worst thing about last night’s event is that it was not an exception, but the rule of our times. I am, however, refusing to obey reason, and am looking forward to the next and last debate, number three, with an open mind.

CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS: WHO WON?

This entry is posted in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The reader may be reminded that I have several items published on my blog, directly related to this subject, in particular: ¡Viva Fidel!, posted on October 19, 2011, Cuba: Khrushchev’s Dangerous Windfall, posted on October 20, 2011, and Cuban Missile Crisis: An Inspired Idiocy, posted on October 22, 2011.

In so far as the timeline of the Crisis is concerned, it is generally accepted that it lasted several days, or even weeks. I hold October 22^nd, 1962, the day of President Kennedy’s Address to the American Nation, as the defining moment of the Crisis. There is a different opinion, of course, identifying October 16^th, 1962, when JFK was allegedly first told the old news about Soviet military activities in Cuba, as Day One of the Crisis. There is no point in bickering about the date, as it would be silly of me to wait, on stubborn principle, until the later date, while the actual commemoration, rightly or wrongly, has already started. So, here I am today, with my contribution.

The special purpose of this entry (I already discussed the pertinent details in my blog postings a year ago) is to raise the title question: who won?

It is common knowledge that America achieved a historic propaganda victory when the USSR retreated, and the crisis was diffused. How big was the victory? Huge, considering that perceptions in politics are invariably more important than substance.

Ironically, in tangible strategic military terms, Khrushchev scored unquestionably his biggest point against the United States. Having conjured up a bargaining chip out of thin air, he most successfully traded it for an existing strategic asset of Russia’s main adversary: American nuclear missiles in Turkey!!! Had American propaganda victory not been so overwhelming, the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis would surely have counted among the greatest Soviet achievements of the Cold War era… Amazing!

The biggest individual winner of the Crisis was certainly Fidel, exchanging a lethal powder keg, threatening to blow up his island, for the honey barrel of Washington’s solemn pledge not to ever invade Cuba militarily, thus assuring him and his government of longevity, and establishing him as a legend, a perennial symbol of successful defiance and perseverance of a tiny Latin American nation ninety miles off the coast of Florida opposite the superpower colossus of Western Imperialism.

…And one more thing. The conventional pseudo-wisdom calls the Cuban Missile Crisis the lowest point of American-Soviet relations during the Cold War. I would call it the highest point. It was only due to the very special personal chemistry between the two superpower leaders, Khrushchev and Kennedy, that their game of super-high stakes poker had been possible in the first place, and all the participants, the Cubans included, lived to tell their grandchildren about it.

WHY AM I HERE?

Twenty-nine years ago, during the Stanford International Symposium in October 1983, I was approached by Harper’s Magazine with the suggestion to write a 5,000-word article titled Why Am I Here? I wasn’t at all surprised, because following my renunciation of Soviet citizenship in March 1981, every person I knew in America, had been asking me the very same question. To everyone who knew me, including the FBI and all other agencies of the American Government I was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” In plainer words, I did not fit any stereotype of a person in my position. So, what was my position?

I wrote the promised article for Harper’s, and wasn’t a bit surprised that it wasn’t published. The advantage of stereotypes in politics is that they are safe. Nobody, notably including the press, likes unsolved riddles. If one found a riddle and for some reason couldn’t solve it in a hurry, there were two solutions: one to pretend that it never existed, and the other the Procrustes way, to stretch it or to chop it, until it would comfortably fit a pre-manufactured bed.

There was indeed an attempt to do a Procrustes job on me, characteristically by those who did not know me. I was called “a defector” by persons whom I never met; others called me in print “a KGB agent,” and some other "comprehensible" names as well.

Quite obviously, I was not a defector. I stole nothing, I sold nothing. I never intended to turn my coat inside out: I just wanted to toss it away, and remain the coatless me. For this reason, I resolutely said no to all jobs offered to me in Washington, which would infringe on my personal and intellectual independence. I wished to establish myself as an independent entity, and in case a regular income did not materialize right away, as a translator, to keep my pot boiing. (The quality of my translations had long been recognized as “out of this world.”)

But most importantly I wished to become an independent voice on international politics, particularly on the superpower relationship. I was uniquely qualified in this capacity, having been a fellow of the USA-Canada Institute in Moscow since 1972, as well as a United Nations official, “on the side.” I also had had a private access to the highest levels of Soviet decision-making, developing an uncanny feel for the smallest print in the US-Soviet interaction.

Everybody who’s been lucky enough to have a life’s dream will know what I am talking about, when I tell them that I had such a dream, and that it was to make my personal contribution to a better world, using my knowledge and understanding. But I also realized that unfortunately it would be an impossible dream for as long as I was constrained by my political limitations. There is no truth in politics. As Comrade Stalin used to say, telling the truth to your enemies makes you vulnerable to their machinations, therefore you must not tell the truth, lest it be used against you. (Saying “you,” he also meant the State, thus it was not a matter of personal vulnerability, but of national security first and foremost.)

It goes without saying that Stalin and the USSR have not been unique in this opinion. All great powers dissimulate and deceive as a matter of daily routine, and woe to any government employee or a politician, for that matter, in any country whatsoever, who either accidentally or intentionally spills the truth…

And yet, there is some truth, critically important truth, that must be told directly to the other side. Yet, the great irony in this is that as long as you are identified with your country, the other side is going to assume an angle of deception and trickery on your part, and the vital message will be misinterpreted, and lost. In other words, an established figure on either side can never serve as a messenger in such a vital communication. I am sure that an uninitiated reader will read this in disbelief, but those who have been there will silently nod their heads in agreement.

Thus, the only way to deliver a vital message is indeed to become coatless, sideless, or as I jokingly put it, to position yourself “neither here nor there.” Although you cannot do this physically, it is difficult but not impossible to achieve it intellectually. In my case, it involved an implicit trust in American freedom, a sincere confidence that I could pull it off.

The fact that today, after thirty-plus years of neither here nor there, I am still functioning, and these days being able to publish my stuff on my blog, is probably the best testimony to the fact that freedom in the United States is likewise alive, for which great blessing I am grateful to the American nation.

So, why am I here? To be myself!

Risky, but a risk worth taking.