“The Turbulence Of The Post-Soviet Period”: Sochi’s Opening Ceremony Forgot To Mention A Few Things About Russian History
It’s fair to say that by the time the opening ceremonies began last night at 20:14, they were facing an uphill battle to impress. Russia, via Western journalists, had shown the world just how very corrupt and incompetent it is: $51 billion and years of preparation yielded upside-down toilet lids and yellow water and busted-through bathroom doors made of cardboard. There’s even a popular hashtag for the debacle: #SochiProblems.
And yet, the Russians put on a lush and wonderful show. It was grand pageantry and exquisitely choreographed theater, the kind the Russians have been so exceptional at for a century. The giant figure skating stuffed animals were a bit weird, “vodka” was missing from the alphabet of Russian cultural treasures that opened the show, and there was only one glitch to speak of: only four of the snowflakes turned into Olympic rings, a muck-up the Russians managed to fix via spliced rehearsal footage from the rehearsal. But on the whole, it was yet another exhibit, if any were needed, in the long show window proving the fantastic might of Russian artistry.
But the show was a very specific view of Russia, one that glossed over some of the cruelest parts of its history. Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, for instance, was all ships and marching cadets, without the bones and swamp on which the city was built. World War II, which is a hallowed, painful spot for all Russians merited just a sentence on the destruction—”the scariest hour in Russia’s 1000 year history”—and some searchlights slicing through the darkness. The Russian Revolution got the mixed treatment it deserved: it was portrayed as a gathering snow storm over the sumptuous imperial waltz of tsarism broken through by a locomotive glowing red as it screamed into the stadium. The benefits of the Revolution were praised, and its costs received an elliptically diplomatic acknowledgment: “The color red reigns, even though it is the color of blood,” the announcer intoned dramatically. “The country is galloping forward, but at what cost?” Early Soviet history was all gorgeous red constructivism and machinery, the perfect ode to the revolution in technology and the arts that it brought to the country. Malevich and the Constructivists were lauded, even though the Revolution that enabled them eventually turned on them and labeled their art counter-revolutionary.
This, by the way, is a curious, bitterly ironic element of contemporary Russian pride in its artistic figures. These days, Aeroflot planes are named for the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was brutally murdered by the state in 1938. So too the opening ceremony praised Leo Tolstoy, who became an outcast for giving up his landowner status. It reveled in Sergei Diaghilev, the flamboyant ballet master, who stayed abroad after the Revolution and whom the new Soviet state condemned in perpetuity. The opening of the opening gave the letter “N” in the alphabet to Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote his most famous works in English and outside a country where it was too dangerous for a son of the aristocracy to remain. When showing the post-War period, the ceremony showed the stilyagi in their poodle skirts, swinging and boogie-woogie-ing. They too were condemned for their emulation of Western “bourgeois” trends. And so on and so forth.
The spirit carried over into the march of the athletes, where the announcers on state-owned Channel 1, the biggest Russian channel, tried to take credit for every athlete with any Russian heritage, though, of course, there are usually profound economic and political reasons that so many millions of Russians—like me, for example—ended up living not in Russia, but in the West. (The announcers also took credit for the hats of the British team—”those are our Russian hats!”—but that’s another story.)
One glaring omission throughout the parade of Russian culture was any pretense of cultural diversity. The announcers importantly declared how big Russia is—”the biggest country in the world, as big as the ocean”—and that it contains multitudes, “180 nations, each with their own culture and language,” but we saw only one of them: the ethnic Russians. The world saw only traditional Slavic garb, with its lush brocade and big head pieces (kokoshniki), but nothing of the lezginka, the dance of the North Caucasus, or, say, the throat singing of Tuva. Putin is, after all, a Soviet man, and in the Soviet Union, the Russians were the first among the brothers of all the Soviet nations.
Missing also was the post-Communist period, the period that created Vladimir Putin. The world did not see how Russians see themselves today, but only that, even now, they view themselves as products of their history, forged in the cruel smelter of the centuries. It is a deft way of glossing over the turbulence of the painful, post-Soviet period, one that has produced very little of the kind of art and music and national treasure that Russia can flaunt before the world. (In fact, we did see modern Russia—in the upside-down toilet lids.)
And this is the cornerstone of Putin’s Russia: a historically significant nation but one that is still climbing back up to its historic heights after a historic fall, one that has many nations but of which one is dominant. Throughout Putin’s reign, this vision has been brought to life by his main showman, Konstantin Ernst, the head of Channel 1 and the director of the Opening ceremony. Joshua Yaffa wrote in The New Yorker of Ernst’s vision:
Programming on Channel One, Floriana Fossato, who worked on media projects in Moscow in the aughts and now studies Russian television at University College London, said, showed “people surviving a cruel but, to a certain extent, necessary system.” Above all, Fossato told me, Russia was shown as a heroic nation. Viewers could hear about some of the country’s mistakes but remain secure that, as she put it, “we didn’t waste our lives.” The picture onscreen should be grand, proud, and, most important, attractive.
And Ernst achieved it, this time, for a wider audience.
By: Julia Ioffe, The New Republic, February 8, 2014
“So What If the Syria Solution Is Messy”: President Obama Got Putin And Syria To The Table, And That’s What Matters
The U.S. came close (we are told, anyway) to bombing Syria in retaliation over the alleged use of chemical weapons in the civil war there. Since then, democracy-challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin has stepped in, and is helping to broker a deal by which another bad actor, Syria, would give up its weapons.
That should sound like a pretty good outcome, if it works out. But in Washington, the conversation has been all about image and what has become known in Beltway speak as “messaging.”
President Obama has been criticized for looking weak – first, more than a year ago, for not being tougher on Syria, and now, for vocalizing his understandable reluctance to bomb a Middle Eastern country. He’s been accused of offering mixed messages, by saying the U.S. needed to enforce the “red line” against chemical weapons, but then saying he took no pleasure in doing so. He was criticized for thinking about bombing without consulting Congress, then chided as indecisive for listening to those criticisms and asking for Congress’s opinion (though not its advance approval, Obama was quick to note).
Then Putin wrote a critical op-ed in The New York Times, criticizing the U.S. for its assertion of “exceptionalism,” and saying the rest of the world had grown tired of being pushed around by America.
There is some legitimacy to much of this criticism. But the more important point is, so what?
Who cares if Obama didn’t deliver an unequivocal, we’re-going-to-bomb-them speech, especially if such a speech would lock us more securely into a wartime box? Was it the threat of an attack that got Syrian leader Bashar Assad to talk to Putin? Was it Putin’s desire to gain some level of legitimacy and credibility on the world stage that led him to talk to Assad? Was it Putin’s own concerns about chemical weapons being used by insurgents in his own country that led him to get involved? Who cares?
Being an adult, being a diplomat, and, yes, being a leader means staying focused on the final goal – not on how you got there. So what if Putin wags his finger at the U.S. in an American newspaper? He can bully us on Facebook if he wants. Does it matter, if the end result is Syria giving up chemical weapons without the U.S. having to risk American lives or spend American dollars to make it happen?
Obama had indeed gotten himself into something of a box by drawing a “red line” against chemical weapons (and it should be noted that many of his critics on the right were some of the ones pushing him to get tough on Syria). But Assad was in a box, too. He didn’t want to get bombed. He threatened retaliation if he was bombed – and didn’t really have much to back that up. But politically, he couldn’t be viewed as giving in to Obama or to Secretary of State John Kerry. His only face-saving measure was to deal with someone like Putin – an “imperfect messenger,” to borrow a phrase from Anthony Weiner. But Putin was probably the only person who could deliver it.
Style points do matter, sometimes. But they are not an end in themselves. Looking tough or decisive is not success. Getting rid of the chemical weapons is what will count as a win.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, September 20, 2013
“A Befuddled Old Man”: John McCain Attempts To Publish A Column In A Communist Newspaper From The Distant Past
Sen. John McCain, a man of his word, published his editorial — a stirring defense of the rights to free speech, dissent and political expression — in Russia’s Pravda, just like he said he would.
One small problem: As people are now finally pointing out, this isn’t the famous Pravda. After the Soviet Union was made to collapse, its official propaganda organ was sold off and eventually closed. There is no more “Pravda,” omnipresent national newspaper in which the Kremlin disseminates the party line to the oppressed masses. There is now Pravda, the struggling, thrice-weekly organ of the remains of the Communist Party, and Pravda.ru, a sensationalistic online-only news site few people in Russia take seriously.
So, after Vladimir Putin published a provocative column in America’s most prominent and trusted newspaper, John McCain basically submitted his response to the Russian equivalent of the Daily Blaze. After you read his impassioned words, you can scroll down to Pravda’s enlightening “photos of celebrities” section. Or why not check out Lady Pravda for your love and beauty tips? McCain really couldn’t have found a better way to illustrate that he’s a befuddled Cold War relic with no idea whatsoever what Russia is like in 2013.
Sen. McCain was goaded into this by Foreign Policy’s John Hudson, and some, like Dave Weigel, did point out earlier that McCain was effectively being pranked into submitting his serious editorial to a conspiracy site capitalizing on a famous name.
But there’s no one McCain can blame but himself. A few minutes of research — or any working knowledge of modern Russia, I guess — would’ve saved McCain some embarrassment. He almost got it right, sort of. One of Russia’s bigger newspapers is Komsomolskaya Pravda, or Komsomol Truth — not to be confused with plain “Truth” — and today Komsomol Truth is straight-up mocking McCain. Here is the very bad Google translation:
Iron man, U.S. Senator John McCain. He promised to write a column in the “truth” and did. True, “Pravda.Ru”, but this is small. You could have a “spark” to write “, but did not find, I guess. Or did not know what was, and a newspaper.
(“Spark” was the pre-revolution socialist newspaper run by Lenin and his allies. It ceased publishing in 1905.)
If McCain had wanted to write in a Soviet-era paper for the symbolism, he could’ve picked one of the ones that are still publishing. Pravda was the official paper of the party, but the USSR had lots of newspapers, and not all of them are now defunct. The Soviet Union’s actual “paper of record,” Izvestia, is still around, and today it has a fun interview with the chairman of “Pravda.ru” in which it repeatedly asks him how and why McCain published an Op-Ed at his website instead of at an actual newspaper, like Izvestia.
Even if he’d picked an actual newspaper, McCain’s central conceit would still have been wrong. “A Russian citizen could not publish a testament like the one I just offered,” he wrote in his editorial after some boilerplate about the importance of self-determination. That is not remotely true. Russia has hundreds of daily newspapers representing a broad array of viewpoints. There are pro-Kremlin papers and pro-opposition papers. Russia has, in Novaya Gazeta, an award-winning investigative newspaper. Russians have access to anti-Putin journalism if they want it. The state, as I understand it, recognized long ago that controlling television is more useful than censoring newspapers. McCain could’ve easily placed his column in an actual newspaper that prints actual copies that actual Russians read, and I can’t imagine why any paper would’ve been scared to print it. (It’s far too ridiculous.)
If McCain’s mission was to prove that the United States is run by solipsistic buffoons who don’t even try to understand anything about the rest of the world before they go blundering out shouting hypocritical nonsense about freedom, well, mission accomplished. Way to make Putin look like a wise and prudent statesman, Senator.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, September 20, 2013
“The Shot Not Heard”: How President Obama Left The Neocons Feeling Foolish
“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”
–Winston Churchill, June 26, 1954
Before you make the mistake of taking President Obama’s most strident critics regarding the Syrian deal too seriously, ponder this: With few exceptions, those calling the Russian-American agreement to eliminate Bashar al-Assad’s nerve gas arsenal a capitulation, a sellout, and a shameful retreat also think bombing Damascus wouldn’t have been nearly enough.
Nothing short of a boots-on American invasion of Syria would have satisfied these jokers. Prominent among them is Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who views the diplomatic breakthrough as “an act of provocative weakness on America’s part.”
McCain, who has vigorously supported all nine of the nation’s last three wars on about 316 TV talk shows, is never happy unless the U.S. is attacking somebody. Only violent solutions strike him as realistic. That’s probably the single biggest reason he never became president.
Then there’s Eliot A. Cohen, founding father of the Project for a New American Century, a now-defunct Washington pressure group whose messianic schemes for a U.S. empire stretching from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan inspired the Iraq War. Featuring such luminaries as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, to these geniuses, overthrowing Saddam Hussein was only the beginning. Next on their agenda was Iran, in case you wonder why the mad ayatollahs have been tinkering with nukes.
So anyway, just as President Obama was getting ready to ask Congress to endorse a punitive strike against Syrian chemical weapon sites, Cohen published a Washington Post column scolding Americans for their cowardice. The families of the war dead, he allowed, were entitled to their sorrow.
“But for the great mass of the American public,” he wrote “for their leaders and the elites who shape public opinion, ‘war-weariness’ is unearned cant, unworthy of a serious nation and dangerous in a violent world…Americans can change the channel if they find the images too disturbing.”
Got that citizens? Shut up, pay your taxes and avert your eyes.
Next the Obama administration pulled a large Russian rabbit out of its hat, leaving the neocons feeling foolish. For all the hugger-mugger about “red lines” and the White House’s odd decision to position a naval task force within striking range of Damascus before deciding to ask congressional permission, the end result was nevertheless remarkable.
Clumsy? Definitely. But it’s not a Bruce Willis movie; it’s a foreign policy.
“By hook or by crook,” Kevin Drum writes “Obama (a) raised the issue of Assad’s chemical weapons to an international level, (b) got Vladimir Putin (!) to take a lead role in reining them in, (c) got Assad to join the chemical weapons ban and agree to give up his stockpiles, and (d) [did] it all while keeping military pressure as an active option, but without ever firing a shot.”
In other words, for all the nonsensical talk of “appeasement,” the very crafty President Putin and the Syrian dictator now own this deal. Meanwhile, U.S. military options remain unchanged. President Obama has bought himself considerable freedom of action.
Mike Tomasky has it right: “If Assad is mad enough to use [chemical weapons] again, Obama won’t mess with Congress or even Russia. He’ll be credited by most observers…for having shown restraint the first time, and more people will agree at that point that Assad must be punished.”
Then there’s Charles Krauthammer, the Post columnist who accuses Obama of “epic incompetence,” complaining that the Russians prefer to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. He worries that “Assad is the key link in the anti-Western Shiite crescent stretching from Tehran through Damascus and Beirut to the Mediterranean.”
Hmm… Isn’t something missing here? Let’s go to the maps. It’s roughly 900 miles from Tehran to Damascus via, oh yeah… Baghdad. See, it’s precisely the U.S. invasion of Iraq championed by Krauthammer and his chums that created this supposedly scary alliance. Sectarian strife among Sunni and Shiite Muslims has erupted there at irregular intervals for almost 1,400 years. Shouldn’t these brilliant thinkers have thought of that before now?
So what do the Russians want? In a word, stability. Unlike the U.S., Russia has a large Muslim minority. Roughly 1 in 6 Russians is Muslim. Like the Tsarnaev bothers of Boston, MA, nearly all are Sunni. What Putin definitely doesn’t want is Chechen separatists getting their hands on nerve gas. Driving overland, Syria’s roughly as close to Chechnya as to Iran.
Can Putin be trusted? To do what’s good for Russia, yes. As President Obama explained to George Stephanopoulos, the Cold War is over. “I don’t think that Mr. Putin has the same values that we do,” he said. “But what I’ve also said to him directly is that we both have an interest in preventing chaos, we both have an interest in preventing terrorism. The situation in Syria right now is untenable.”
And he also quoted Ronald Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, September 18, 2013
“The Beginning Of An Exceptional Friendship”: The American People’s Reply To Comrade Vladimir Putin
Dear President Putin,
Thank you so much for your letter to the American people! I am an American person, and when I learned on Thursday from the official Russian news agency, the New York Times, that you wanted “to speak directly to the American people,” I thought: How sweet!
I know I speak for many American people when I congratulate you on your English. It was flawless, with none of those dropped articles that plague so many of your countrymen. Please don’t be offended, but I have to ask: Did Edward Snowden help you with your letter?
It’s not just your English that impressed me. Your geopolitical points were smart — da bomb, as we American people like to say. (This is not the kind that would be used in Syria.) You were so thoughtful to bring up those memories of our days long ago as allies, and your references to “mutual trust” and “shared success” make me think that maybe we could be friends again. Your favorable mentions of Israel and the Pope remind me that we have so much in common.
Although some of us think it’s a good idea to have the U.S. military strike Syria, most of the American people agree with you that it would be a bad idea. (President Obama, you may have heard, is on both sides of the issue.) Your arguments against attack were creative, which is why it’s such a shame that, at the very end, you kind of stepped in it. When you told us that Americans are not “exceptional” — well, that hurts all of us American people.
I was surprised by this lapse because I think you really “get” Americans. When we saw photos of you shirtless in Siberia, you brought to mind one of our most celebrated American lawmakers, Anthony Weiner. When we watched you navigate around Russian laws to stay in power, you brought to mind another quintessentially American figure, Rod Blagojevich. The Harley-Davidson, the black clothing, the mistress half your age — you are practically American yourself.
This makes your crack about “American exceptionalism” all the more perplexing. “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional,” you wrote. “We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.” (Thank you for the considerate mention of God, by the way; American people respond well to that.) But I’m guessing what went wrong here is your translators let you down when they defined exceptional for you as luchshyy (better) rather than razlichnyy (different).
Americans do not believe they are better than other peoples. If you doubt this, you need only look at Congress. If we really thought we were superior, is there any chance we would choose them to represent us? There are exceptions — we think we are better than Canadians, for example, but please don’t tell them, because they’re awfully nice — but generally we accept that all countries have their strengths. We know, for example, that Russians are better than us at producing delicacies such as caviar and dioxin. (Kidding!)
When we say we are exceptional, what we really are saying is we are different. With few exceptions, we are all strangers to our land; our families came from all corners of the world and brought all of its colors, religions and languages. We believe this mixing, together with our free society, has produced generations of creative energy and ingenuity, from the Declaration of Independence to Facebook, from Thomas Jefferson to Miley Cyrus. There is no other country quite like that.
Americans aren’t better than others, but our American experience is unique — exceptional — and it has created the world’s most powerful economy and military, which, more often than not, has been used for good in the world. When you question American exceptionalism, you will find little support from any of us, liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, doves or hawks.
I hope you won’t take this criticism badly, because I offer it in friendship. I was in Slovenia that day in 2001 when President George W. Bush looked into your soul and liked what he saw. And had your ancestors not chased my ancestors out of Eastern Europe, I would not be here today, participating in the American experiment.
Anyway, it was such a pleasure to get your letter. Please write again soon. I think this is the beginning of an exceptional friendship.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 12, 2013
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