Pussy Riot Invades America and Everything in Russia is Awful as Putin’s Olympics Begin: A Historical Perspective

Subject: Pussy Riot Invades America and Everything in Russia is Awful as Putin’s Olympics Begin:A Historical Perspective
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2014
From: Sarah Lindemann-Komarova <echosiberia@gmail.com>

Pussy Riot Invades America and Everything in Russia is Awful as Putin’s Olympics Begin: A Historical Perspective
By Sarah Lindemann-Komarova
[Siberian-based civil society development activist]

Over the last few weeks the Western media “everything in Russia is awful” wall of sound, has achieved a screech so loud it reminds me of a crashing meteorite. Like the 2013 one that landed in Siberia according to the NY Times and other western media outlets. Only, it landed in Chelyabinsk, a City in the Urals Region, a place not known for increasing ratings. This escalation in sound is, no doubt, in honor of the upcoming Sochi….I mean “Putin’s” Olympics. I refer to it as “sound” because it is hard to consider most of what you see, hear or read as meaningful analysis or solid reporting. Denver is not in the Midwest, Chelyabinsk is not in Siberia. This sloppy or agenda driven journalism is scary, like a meteorite, the extent of the damage is impossible to assess as the sonic boom is followed by a descending flash across sky before it hits. All you know for sure is this can’t be good.

I shared my concerns via e-mail with an old friend Yarik. A linguist and assistant professor in America now, we met in 1992 when he was my student at Novosibirsk State University. He first impressed me there as the only person I ever met who wrote a Gothic Reader complete with Gothic-Russian glossary. In response to my fear and desire to try to do something about “it”, meaning the wall of sound, I received a crash course in the history of what Yarik refers to as Russian “bad press”. It is worth passing along for the historical perspective it provides and as testimony to witty, brilliant nerdiness and the relentless pursuit of truth that are not characteristics you associate with Russians in the West lately. I give you Yarik:

“Wow… Nothing can be done, probably, but it is so heart-warming to know that there are people who care. I do myself. I have even tried to pinpoint the moment in history when Russia became the demonized “other”. The oldest I have got back in time so far is 1559 when the Polish-Lithuanian king Sigismund wrote a letter to Queen Elisabeth of England telling her that she should stop all English trade with Russia, because Russia is a tyrannical aggressive monster (the accusations read very modern).

“Of course, the REAL reason for Sigismund’s paranoia about Russia was not “human rights” violated by the Russian czars. I doubt the situation was much better in Poland. Rather, it was the fact that Poland had occupied half of Russia (the areas that we now know as “the Ukraine” and “Belorussia”), and Muscovy was on the rise as an economic and military power and was surely going to claim all the Polish-occupied Russian territories back. In fact, at the end of the 15th c. Ivan III of Russia stated something to that effect to the envoys of the Lithuanian ruler, “…the entire Russian land is by God’s will our rightful patrimony, from time immemorial, from our ancestors. We care for our patrimony. His patrimony is only the Polish and Lithuanian lands. Why should we give up to him the Russian towns and counties, our patrimony that God gave us? For our rightful property is not only the towns and counties that are now, de facto, ours, but all of the Russian land including Kiev and Smolensk and other towns which he now has as part of Lithuania…” But the way Sigismund presented the case to the English was: watch out, beware the Russian monster, we the enlightened European nations should stick together in confining the barbaric Asian beast.””

Amazing the similarities isn’t it? Only now, with the rise of China and the wealth it generates for the West, Russia has become a singular beast.

“Then there were the two major shocks when Russia defeated the Swedes in the Great Northern War (1700-1721), and the Swedes were the strongest nation on Earth at that time, and the second shock came of course when Russia emerged victorious from the Napoleonic wars (when all other nations in Europe had been defeated). When the Europeans realized what a menace a strong Russia was, the pitch of anti-Russian hysteria in Europe, especially France, became very high.

“Then came the “Spring of Nations” of 1848 when the Russian army assisted the Austro-Hungarian emperor in quenching the popular uprisings in Austria-Hungary… We were HATED in Europe for that. Czar, a bloody tyrant, impeding Europe’s march to progress, liberte, fraternite, and so on. Bad press.

“Where I stand now, it is my guess that it was the Poles who started Russophobia in Europe. They had benefited from Russia having been destroyed by the Mongols, they had built an empire by incorporating West Russian lands and they knew perfectly “whose meat they had eaten”. And the fact that we were Orthodox (“schismatics”, as the Poles called us), while the West was Catholic, did not help us either.””

Lest you think Yarik is too generous in his assessment of Russia as faultless in the evolution of it’s “bad press”, he goes on:

“An expose of the background of Russophobia must also include the two Polish uprisings when Poland was part of the Russian Empire (1830 and 1863). They are important to mention, because, again, they gave Russia a lot of bad press in Europe. This time understandably so as an occupied European nation was trying to free itself from the suffering and oppression of an oppressive regime. We should have NEVER touched Poland. I don’t know why Russia decided to incorporate Poland Proper (which used to be a German possession) after the Napoleonic wars. The Poles had joined Napoleon in his attacking Russia, but this is not the reason to occupy part of Poland. I could never get it. We should have stopped where Ekaterina the Great of Russia stopped at the end of the 18th c., when Polish Empire was partitioned and Ekaterina reclaimed Little Russia (the Ukraine). This would have and should have been ENOUGH. We only returned what was ours, and Ekaterina issued a medal to commemorate that, which said in Church Slavonic “ottorzhennaia vozvratikh (“what had been taken, I reclaimed”). But after Alexander I, her son, incorporated Poland PROPER, Russia could no longer say that it had only liberated Russian lands from the 450-year long Polish- Lithuanian occupation. We gave everybody in the world to understand that we are a plain and simple imperialistic aggressor. WHAT A DUMB DUMB DUMB DECISION!!!”

This leaves me wondering how different the trajectory of Russian “bad press” would have been if Ekaterina the Great had been as good a mother as she was an Empress. Then I am reminded that if people in the West know anything about “Catherine the Great”, it undoubtedly has something to do with sex and a horse, bad press. This brings us back to today, the state of journalism, punditry and expertise about Russia, and why it is scary. It is the role of journalists, as authors of “the first rough draft of history”, to check under the hood. Too often what is under the hood has been reduced to “conventional wisdom” that fits an unquestioned “narrative” that has evolved on the basis of “expert” assessments that are too often based on information from a very small group of people. The result is even the educated public gets less educated, it is the essence of propaganda. That, in the parlance of democratic development, is what is referred to as an unintended negative outcome. This particular negative outcome could lead to disastrous consequences as the hot-spots involving Russia and the West continue to multiply. These times demand passion not emotion and by passion I do not mean ruthlessness, I mean dedication to the pursuit of what is always going to be a nuanced truth, like Yarik. In my development work I have found that the path to moving forward has always been in the nuances. These will only appear if you not only listen, but hear what the true concerns are for everyone involved.

Today, challenging the “narrative” about Russia requires real knowledge, analytical skills and most daunting, could involve risking your reputation as an expert or journalist and marginalized as a Putin apologist. There are people out there doing this, Stephen Cohen and Mark Adomanis come to mind and they haven’t been marginalized. I am also always excited to read the work of academics I have met who took the time and considerable resources to come to Siberia. We may still disagree in our assessments, but, I know theirs has been enlightened by voices outside the Moscow based human rights box that gave birth to the narrative. I am reminded of an academic couple who brought their twins to visit us at our home in a village in the Altai Republic. One of the boys slipped on the river bank and needed medical care. He was fine and the insane Where’s Waldo adventure of finding the hospital in a town where street numbers bear no relation to their location is now the stuff of family lore. This experience outside the realm of academia, as parents, links us to a greater understanding of the issues people care most about in Russia and who are we to say these are misplaced priorities? On any given day, they are ours.

Sadly those challenging or adding nuance to the narrative are the exception and their voices not loud enough to challenge “conventional wisdom” or influence this first draft of history as we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the end of the Cold War and hosting the Winter Olympics. If they could, they would never express surprise at the construction still going on in Sochi because everything in Russia is done at the last minute and, regardless of outcome, it will be “normalno”. They would also know that the Winter Olympics is the realization of a Russian dream that was not just held by Putin, there is nothing Russians like more than hosting.