My friend John and I did a Trans-Siberian train trip last July. I had been to Russia, and before that to the Soviet Union. My connection to that part of the world has to do with the fact that my parents were born there, but left the country in 1920 because they were on the wrong side of the Communist Revolution. The Russian language, however, remained the mainstay of my family’s life in exile… But you can see how my connection to a Russian identity could be a double sward. On the one hand, I grew up with the horror stories of the Bolshevik Revolution and Stalinism – and that was certainly reinforced by my later American identity, upon which I entered in my mid-twenties. On the other hand, growing up during World War II in places like Yugoslavia and Germany, and later Morocco and Australia, gave me an international grounding prone to question conventional narratives. So, when the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union filled the headlines in the 80s, I decided to use my knowledge of Russian to figure things out for myself.
I was still very nervous about stepping onto the territory of the “evil empire” but bravely travelled to Prague to and International Peace Conference, which was held there in 1983. To my utter surprise, the experience was positive: an international free-for-all rather than dominated, as I had expected, by a Soviet agenda. My real wake-up call came upon returning home. My late husband Rick had saved a couple of articles about the event, and it is there that I discovered the utter misrepresentation of facts in our wanted free press, facts I had personally witnessed in Prague. (example)
Having broken the ice with the trip to Prague, when a Quaker group organized a “people to people” trip to the Soviet Union the following year (1984) I jumped on the band wagon. After the visits of Moscow and Leningrad our East-West dialogue was to take place during a river cruise down the Volga. A group of Soviet “peace workers” joined us. At first, they shunned me: Americans are not known for their proficiency in foreign languages: was I a spy? But my obvious naivete must have reassured them, and it became clear to me that peace initiatives were, unlike in the U.S., government sponsored. That, in fact, peace promotion had also been the “Soviet agenda” in Prague as well. The argument was simple: the Soviets knew that they could not afford the arms race. Did we? You may not remember President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” initiatives – which were derailed by the War in Vietnam. So, even for us guns AND butter is a contradiction in terms.
Another telling discovery: one of the “peace workers,” who, incidentally, happened to be a Chechen, pointed out a man who always ate alone. “This is ours, he said, which one is yours”? I was baffled. What did he mean? The meaning finally dawned on me: he meant the man was a KGB agent. Didn’t I know which one of us was the CIA agent? I did not. Moreover, the very idea, that one of our Quaker “Friends” must be there to report on us was a shock – maybe something to think about.
My next trip of discovery took place in 1988. This time I was invited by the Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office to be their “instructor.” I was teaching at Rutgers University at the time, so giving background talks as we traveled around was a good fit. This time the trip took us all the way to Georgia and Azerbaijan. The change in the country since 1984 was palpable. Mikhail Gorbachev had instituted Glasnost or open speech, and Perestroika or “reconstruction” in 1985, and Chernobyl had happened in 1986. The Soviet Intourist guides looked the other way as small breakaway groups followed me on independent mini-excursions – to hospitals, to churches, to schools, to parks. Everywhere people surrounded us, eager to talk. They wanted to know how Americans live. They couldn’t wait to live freely like Americans do. (example).
Well, in the 90s the Soviets got their freedom. President Yeltsin opened the country to Western economic advisers. Public companies were taken over by private entrepreneurs, who became very rich, while the country suffered a 50% drop in GDP. Those events would require a separate presentation: maybe some of you are familiar with Naomi Klein’s book the “Shock Doctrine.”
Anyway, I travelled to what was now the Russian Federation in 1996 to do archival research. Entrepreneurial initiatives were in evidence everywhere. In Moscow men, their chests covered with World War II medals played the accordion and sang on street corners. An elderly woman, her treasures (a couple of silver spoons, an ornate photo frame, a roll of lace) laid out on a towel on the pavement awaited customers. She told me that her daughter, a teacher in Simbirsk, had not been paid for three months. Teachers there were on hunger strike. She told me about elderly people she knew who had been talked into signing their apartment over to helpful entrepreneurs. These helpful people had warned them that the state was about to repossess their apartments, allocated to them many years ago. When her friends found out that their apartments would not be repossessed, it was too late: the entrepreneurs now owned their apartments, and they found themselves on the street.
My late husband Rick was too busy with his own career as international economist for General Motors to accompany me on these trips. He was finally ready to venture out there with me in 2008. We boarded a cruise ship in Istanbul, which was to take us around the Black Sea, where we visited Yalta, Sevastopol and Odessa. Here we enter the much contested topic of Ukraine, which also could take a separate meeting… Let me just say for now that every single person in those cities spoke Russian, not Ukrainian.
There were a couple of other “touristy” trips with Rick, but he was reluctant to do the Trans-Siberian, and I finally got to do it last July with John. Things changed as we got further and further away from Moscow. I happened to speak with a lot of ordinary people. Although the young people sported Nike sneakers and Adidas tea shirts (probably made in China), most people were nostalgic about the good old days when life was not always easy, but they could count on jobs, and reliable healthcare and decent education. The cab driver who took us to the airport in Vladivostok was happy to inform us that their mayor had been in jail for corruption for the last three years.
Among my Moscow friends, however, politics were lively. Some blamed Putin passionately for all of their ills, while others defended him just as passionately. Had he not stopped the raiding of Russian resources by the multinationals? And what about all the sanctions? Did he not use them to get the oligarchs to invest at home? Most of all, they are grateful that he is standing up against NATO encirclement. When the Secretary of State James Baker and Gorbachev met to discuss the reunification of Germany in 1990 – the understanding was that NATO was not to move “one inch” East of Germany. Obviously, the agreement was ignored by the U.S. NATO is in the Check Republic, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and inching its way into Ukraine. The Russians also praise Putin for holding on to Crimea. After all, was the Back Sea not full of nuclear-armed American submarines?
It had looked for a while that nuclear arms treaties were being signed, and we all expected a peace dividend. But as we know, there is a new arms race, with “new and improved” nukes. The UN resolution to ban nuclear arms altogether is well intentioned, but as I see it, unrealistic. Do you remember what happened to Saddam Hussein and Muamar Qadhafi after they relinquished their nuclear or other so-called weapons of mass destruction? They had been mercilessly demonized and sanctioned first – and then brutally killed. Do we really expect the Russians, diminished as they are after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union – not to heed the lessons of Iraq and Libya? Can they afford NOT to keep up with the U.S. in the new arms race?
A young girl from Sweden is telling us that the empire has no clothes. Is it not a demonstrable fact that the largest carbon footprint belongs to our military? Isn’t it time to reassign our huge war budget to dealing with real issues? It took me a long time and much effort to step out of the comfort zone of received opinion. And my conclusion is that there is method to the madness. This questions everything my very nice parents taught me – and it resists everything our respectable media assault us with 24/7. As Marx demonstrated way back when, Capitalism is hard-wired into the profit motive and therefore blind to long-term solutions.
And because World War II exhausted the Soviet Union and Europe, the Socialist experiments attempted there were eventually disempowered. After all, the U.S. came pretty unscathed from World War II. After being somewhat checked by FDR’s New Deal, the captains of industry couldn’t help noticing that it was the arms industry that really paid off. That’s when NATO was born, and they took over the colonial resources from under Britain and France, and became the latest, and now global empire. The capitalists had opposed the Russian Revolution of 1917 but had to wait until the desolation of World War II and their own hegemony to attempt supreme domination. President Clinton had hoped that Yeltsin would be succeeded by another, sober Yeltsin. Instead they got the little street fighter Putin who just doesn’t get it. And now China ups the ante and they bring up the notion of multi-polarity.
So here we are, at a historical moment when American supremacy is waning despite our fearsome military power. This contradictory situation is very dangerous. We are not used NOT to be top dog. As John Pilger, the Australian war correspondent put it, “American exceptionalism is driving the world to war.” This certainly is the case in the Middle-East and the NATO expansion and President Obama’s “pivot to the Pacific,” not to mention that we feel we need 900+ bases around the world. And if all we can produce is President Trump’s grandstanding – or Hillary’s talking down to the “deplorables,” we are in deep trouble.
So, What Is to Be Done? This is also the title of a short book written by Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. He knew his Marx, and Marx’s argument that Capitalism was, sooner or later, heading for self-destruction. Things looked that way to Lenin even though the Russian Empire of his day was not in a stage of advanced Capitalism. Just the same, he seized on World War I as a chance for Revolution. He told the Russian peasant soldiers to stop fighting their German and Austrian brothers, and go home to take over the land. But the more advanced Capitalist countries, on whom he counted for revolutionary support, supported the war instead. Jean Jaures, the Socialist French minister who preached peace was assassinated by a patriot. And the German Social Democrats voted for the war budget.
So, the Socialist experiment started in a country of peasants and landlords, had to struggle every step of the way against Capitalist opposition, culminating in its guise as Nazi invaders in World War II, and continuing relentlessly through the Cold War. John likes to say that it is amazing that it did last as long as 70 years.
Of course, so much more could be said about all this, but for now let us focus on the here and now. It took me a lifetime to figure all this out – but you don’t have that option: you have to learn fast. Where the world is heading now is that it offers two suicide options: global warming or nuclear winter. The war drums are beating and I do want to sound the alarm because no one is listening. At least I can speak my mind with you: elsewhere I would be labeled a Russian Asset. So, thank you for letting me say my thing.
Rise and Shine: Galina DeRoeck's Website 