Russia Now
Wow, excellent book review/essay at The Claremont Institute today about James Billington's Russia in Search of Itself. Unless you're already terribly well-versed with respect to Russia's history and current situation, it's worth the eight minutes it'll take to read. Link.
There are many great excerpts to choose from. Here are a handful:
For Russia, the last century was one bitter cruelty after another–the Tsar, war, revolution, famine, Stalin, war, Communism. Her people lived under totalitarianism for seven decades, longer than any one else. Something happens to a society under the total state. In time, fear, lies, denunciation, and arrest fray the bonds that hold a healthy society together. In Russia's case, these strains have left it much like an ocean: cold, vast, and swarming with strange creatures. . .
. . . Throughout her history, Russia's misfortune has been to watch mounting discord reach a breaking point, and then snap violently in one direction or the other. Billington observes that each time Russia has reconstituted itself–in 1861, with Alexander II's abolition of serfdom; in 1917, with the Bolshevik's seizure of the state; and in 1991, with the USSR's dissolution–it has been swift, unexpected, and a self-declared break with the past. . .
. . . Fascism has once again invaded Russia, this time without the aid of an army. It seems inconceivable in the land that lost 20 million of its own to Nazism, yet walls in Moscow are defiled with swastikas. Skinheads carry out hundreds of attacks annually against minorities–one Moscow rights-group estimates skinhead ranks at 50,000–and the number of attacks rises by a third every year. Meanwhile, in Russia's parliament, a thriving Red-Brown alliance unites those nostalgic for departed glory and order. Marxist theory was always an overlay, but nationalism is not. According to Billington, the appeal of the new xenophobia has yet to peak. . .
. . . If you wish to understand the nature of arbitrary power in Russia, look no further than a little flashing blue light, the migalka. Available to elites with cash and connections, it confers on its owner the right to disregard any and all traffic laws. I've seen migalka-equipped Mercedes 600s and Land Rovers drive on sidewalks and fly through red lights at busy intersections.
During the Yeltsin era, a handful of "oligarchs" built financial-industrial clans that came to control nearly half the Russian GDP. Such a concentration of wealth, especially in the absence of reliable legal and financial institutions, distorts the growth of markets. Some estimate that this thievery has created a gap between rich and poor wider than the one that preceded the Revolution. By most indicators, Russia is now a Third World country, yet it is second only to the U.S. in its number of billionaires.
Concluding paragraphs:
Remarkably, Russians see America as a country much like their own–large and multiethnic, unfurled across a continent. They also see the society–creative, open, tolerant, rich, and free–they wish for themselves. This gives Billington hope. But a fair prediction is that Russia's fate is unpredictable. In the course of the last century, Russia made an unlikely metamorphosis from the bastion of reactionary monarchism, to the exporter of world revolution, to a struggling, dysfunctional democracy.
But one thing is certain. Russia possesses one-third of the world's natural gas, 7% of its oil, one-fifth of its precious metals, endless forest and farmland, ports on seven seas, the world's second-largest nuclear stockpile, and 140 million patient and educated citizens–all spread across eleven time zones. This means that no matter how stormy its progress, Russia will matter. Like the ocean, the strength of a nation is a matter of ebb and flow.
