‘Spare the Ukraine, Spoil the Russians’ – A Primer on Political-Philosophical Reconciliation

Subject:  Ukraine crisis and the need to educate on Russia
Date:  Thu, 20 Mar 2014
From: Paul Grenier <psgrenier@gmail.com>

‘Spare the Ukraine, Spoil the Russians’
A Primer on Political-Philosophical Reconciliation
By Paul Grenier

Former Russian simultaneous interpreter, author most recently of Terror, Torture and Human Solidarity. After advanced study in Russian affairs, international relations and geography at Columbia University, Paul Grenier worked on contract for the Pentagon, State Department and World Bank as a Russian interpreter, and at the Council on Economic Priorities, where he was a research director. He has written for the Huffington Post, Solidarity Hall, the Baltimore Sun, Godspy, and Second Spring, among other places, and his translations of Russian philosophy have appeared in the Catholic journal Communio.

“When you’re an egoist, none of the harm you ever do is intentional.”
  Metropolitan (1990)

Part I

Undoubtedly it is no one’s intent to start a wider war over the Ukraine. But it is entirely possible that that is what we will soon get if things continue on their present course.  The key antagonists here are Russia and the United States. Both are acting like ‘egoists.’ Ukraine is their pawn.

As of this writing, Russian troops are deployed on Ukraine’s northern and eastern borders; and Crimea, in the south, has been absorbed into the Russian Federation. Equally ominous: the Kremlin has suddenly cracked down on non-government-controlled media in Russia, just as it did on the eve of the war with Georgia in 2008.

I love the United States. But those of us who also love the Slavic world don’t like to see it needlessly torn to shreds. As someone who has studied both worlds a great deal, and has lived in both, I feel it is my duty to take a shot at educating our decision makers before, well, before they screw things up even worse.  There is no time for mincing words when one is teetering on the edge of the abyss.

The training in law and economics that America’s leaders typically receive prepares them poorly for understanding cultural realities generally, and it is only natural that they find the Russian civilizational type, so different from our own, particularly difficult to understand. At the same time, America’s leaders have an extremely exaggerated sense of their own country’s virtues — and zero understanding of Russia’s.  This dangerous combination is one of the main sources of our current difficulties. In trying to be terse, one must over-generalize, but this will do for a first approximation. Russia’s high ideals, which it never meets, are superior to America’s middling ideals, which America meets every day without breaking a sweat.

This aphorism may seem insulting (by the way, to both countries), but it is no more than to make the rather obvious point that America is quintessentially a product of the English and French Enlightenment, of Hobbes and Locke and Montesquieu. American values center on consuming, avoiding death, and being free to reject who we were yesterday. Russia, by contrast, has always managed to keep at least one foot, and sometimes both, in the ancient world. After a hundred-year hiatus, it now considers itself again a Christian country; but let’s not forget that even Marx was only partly a product of the Enlightenment. He was also an Aristotelian who believed the point of politics was to make men and society in some sense of the word ‘good’. I don’t want to exaggerate the extent to which Russia has not been modernized. It is a relative thing. But there is in Russian culture a yearning for perfection, and a certain rejection of the distinction between mores and laws, private and public, that is characteristically unmodern. The resulting culture has brought us Russian literature, Russian classical music, Yulia Lipnitskaya, and the jailing of the punk group Pussy Riot.

What in God’s name has all this to do with the battle over the Ukraine? A great deal.

It explains, for one thing, why Russia – neither its government nor its people – has any intention of being absorbed into the American political-cultural space. ‘And who is threatening to do so!?’ you ask.  You are, Mr. American Political Leader.  Very few Russians (and, to judge by their comments on the radio and in newspapers, few ordinary Americans) believe that America’s assistance in precipitating Ukraine’s revolution stemmed solely from devotion to that country’s welfare. Most assume, correctly, that the more important motivation here is to surround Russia with NATO allies and control its energy-export lifelines, thereby forcing Russia into political and economic submission.

Of course that is not how we put it. From the very beginning of the Maidan movement, the official line (repeated with remarkable consistency across U.S media) was that the protest movement represented Ukraine as a whole. There was no need to prove anything: it was always simply a given that all Ukrainians, barring perhaps a handful of eccentrics, yearned to adapt western liberal values, to join the U.S. and the Atlantic alliance. It was a case, again, of noblesse oblige. America’s leaders are simply incapable of admitting, either to themselves or to the public, that America’s values are not transcendent, pure, and universally shared. It is as if the very mediocrity of our aims (free choice of smart phones, dull jobs, duller politicians) obliges us to exaggerate their perfections, lest we lose the impetus for holding the country together at all. This also explains why we have such a yearning for enemies.

If we are obliged to pretend our ‘values’ are transcendent, we can hardly admit to ourselves that any rational people will not eagerly rush to embrace them, should they be so lucky, and so long as they are not restrained from doing so by a tyrant or the dead weight of ‘tradition’ (read: Religion – with the possible exception of Protestantism).   That is why America’s ideological leaders were so certain that toppling Saddam Hussein would instantaneously turn Iraq into an honorary 51st American state.  It is also why Senator McCain is absolutely certain that Ukraine, despite the glaring counter-evidence of the facts on the ground in Ukraine’s east and south, to say nothing of anti-liberal political movements such as Pravy Sektor and Svoboda – is anxiously waiting to join the American fold. Finally, it explains America’s media fixation on President Putin. Surely only a Tyrant could be holding Russia back.

Freedom, liberal freedom, for many in the former Soviet space, means ‘bespredel,’ literally, the absence of limits, though it may also mean, depending on the context, lawlessness or open-ended decadence. For a traditional culture, freedom has no positive meaning if it is not previously ordered toward some end which is itself clearly a good. Recall what was said at the outset: ‘Russia’s ideals, which it never meets, are vastly superior … ‘  That the ideal is never met by no means diminishes the ideal’s importance for a culture of this type. The striving is what defines the culture. But here is a crucial point: Russian culture does not improve if you rip away its inherent teleological structure (whether Marxist or Christian). What happens instead is this: cynicism, or something entirely vulgar, like money, criminality or pornography, becomes for a whole class of people a kind of new idol. This is the phenomenon that swept across the entire Slavic space (Russia, Byelorussia, Ukraine – all being essentially similar cultures) beginning in the early and mid-1990s, at precisely the point when Americans were most vigorously congratulating themselves on having brought the former USSR on board.

I will never forget the time, a few years after the break-up of the Soviet Union, when I was working as a translator for a high-level American military delegation in Minsk. The Byelorussian officers invited the Americans to the city’s main opera house, and when I got to the lobby, I was absolutely shocked by what I saw.  Ordinary-looking women in head scarves had set up card tables, such as one used to see on Broadway years ago, and were openly hawking hard-core porn magazines in the reception area of the opera house. I imagined how Americans would react if someone tried to pull such a stunt at the Kennedy Center. I turned to one of the Byelorussian officers, and asked, “How can you put up with this?”  He looked grim as he answered: “We won’t. For long.”  They didn’t.

The result has been Putin (Russian authoritarianism), Ukrainian right-wing political movements, and Byelorussia’s continuing dictatorship. None of this is very pretty. The evils of this trend stem from its sense of victimhood, which can breed violence and demonization of enemies.  But this need not be the case.