Category Archives: Russia

by | 12 February 2006 · 7:05 am

Khrushcheva on Putinism

In today’s Washington Post, Nikita Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, New School professor Nina Khrushcheva, gives her take on Putinism.

When I was growing up in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, it was President Leonid Brezhnev that I loathed. The dreaded Joseph Stalin seemed merely a name from a distant past. Back in 1956, he had been outed as a monster by my great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, in the famous “secret speech” at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and deleted from history….

After the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a period when democracy came to represent confusion, crime, poverty, oligarchy, anger and disappointment, it turned out that Russians didn’t like their new, “free” selves. Having for centuries had no sense of self-esteem outside the state, we found ourselves wanting our old rulers back, the rulers who provided a sense of order, inspired patriotic fervor and the belief that we were a great nation. We yearned for monumental — if oppressive — leaders, like Ivan the Terrible or Stalin. Yes, they killed and imprisoned, but how great were our victories and parades! So what if Stalin ruled by fear? That was simply a fear for one’s life. However terrifying, it wasn’t as existentially threatening as the fear of freedom, of individual choice, with no one but oneself to blame if democracy turned into disarray and capitalism into corruption.

This is why the country rallies behind President Vladimir Putin. Putin promotes himself as a new Russian “democrat.” Indeed, Russians view him less like the godlike “father of all nations” that Stalin was, and more like a Russian everyman — a sign of at least partial democratization. Putin often notes that Russia is developing “its own brand of democracy.” Translation: His modern autocracy has discovered that it no longer needs mass purges like Stalin’s to protect itself from the people. Dislike of freedom makes us his eager backers. How readily we have come to admire his firm hand: Rather than holding him responsible for the horrors of Chechnya, we agree with his “democratic” appointment of leaders for that ill-fated land. We cheer his “unmasking of Western spies,” support his jailing of “dishonest” oligarchs and his promotion of a “dictatorship of order” rather than a government of transparent laws.

“Putinism,” an all-inclusive hybrid that embraces elements of Stalinism, communism, KGB-ism and market-ism, is our new national ideology. A man for all seasons and all fears, Russia’s president pretends that by selectively adopting and adapting some elements from his predecessors’ rule — the Russian Orthodox Church of the czars, the KGB of the Soviets, the market economy of the Boris Yeltsin era — he is eliminating the extremes of the past, creating a viable system of power that will last. But his closed and secretive system of governing — the “vertical power” so familiar from the pre-secret speech era, with information once again manipulated by the authorities — suggests that his proposed “unity” is yet another effort to rewrite the past.

And so the secret speech is no longer seen as a courageous act of political conscience, in which Khrushchev, in order to secure justice for Stalinism’s victims and liberate communist ideals from the gulag’s grotesque inhumanity, called for reform of the despotic system he had helped to build. In the Russian media today, the speech is dismissed as something far more ignoble: Khrushchev’s effort to avenge his oldest son, Leonid, whom Stalin had allegedly persecuted for betraying socialist ideals by serving the Nazis during World War II.

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by | 29 December 2005 · 10:39 am

Vytautas Landsbergis on Putin’s Pipeline Politics

David McDuff of A Step at a Time performs an invaluable service by unearthing (and often translating) less accessible publications about the former Soviet realm. On 17 December, he posted a Korea Herald op-ed by Vytautas Landsbergis, Lithuania’s first president after the restoration of independence, and now a member of the European Parliament, who warns the EU about Putin’s plans for a new oil pipeline under the Baltic Sea linking Russia directly to Germany.

Russia’s strategic task is obvious: cutting off Ukraine’s gas currently means cutting off much of Europe’s gas as well, because some of its biggest gas pipelines pass through Ukraine. By circumventing Ukraine, Poland, and of course, the Baltic countries, the new pipeline promises greater leverage to the Kremlin as it seeks to reassert itself regionally. President Vladimir Putin and his administration of ex-KGB clones will no longer have to worry about Western Europe when deciding how hard to squeeze Russia’s postcommunist neighbors.

Should Europe really be providing Putin with this new imperial weapon? Worse, might Russia turn this weapon on an energy-addicted EU? That a German ex-chancellor is going to lead the company that could provide Russia with a means to manipulate the EU economy is testimony to Europe’s dangerous complacency in the face of Putin’s neoimperialist ambitions….

The EU has signed numerous agreements with Russia including one for a “common space” for freedom and justice. The Kremlin is very good at feigning such idealism. Its control of Eastern Europe was always enforced on the basis of “friendship treaties,” and the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 were “fraternal” missions.

But look how Putin abuses that “common” space: barbaric treatment of Chechens, the businessmen Mikhail Khodorkovsky imprisoned, foreign NGOs hounded, a co-leader of last year’s Orange Revolution, Yuliya Tymoshenko, indicted by Russian military prosecutors on trumped-up charges. If Europeans are serious about their common space for human rights and freedoms, they must recognize that those values are not shared by the calculating placemen of Putin’s Kremlin.

The same is true of viewing Russia as an ally in the fight against terrorism. Is it really conceivable that the homeland of the “Red Terror” with countless unpunished crimes from the Soviet era, and which bears traces of blood from Lithuania to the Caucasus, will provide reliable help in stopping Iran and North Korea from threatening the world? It seems more likely that the Kremlin’s cold minds will merely exploit each crisis as an opportunity to increase their destructive power and influence.

Read the rest at A Step at a Time

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by | 24 May 2005 · 12:13 pm

Reporting from the Crimean War

William Howard Russell [was], according to his epigraph in St. Paul’s Cathedral “the first and greatest” war correspondent. The greatest is open to dispute, and he was not the first …. But Russell’s coverage of the Crimean War [1854-1856] marked the beginning of an organised effort to report a war to the civilian population at home using the services of a civilian reporter. This was an immense leap in the history of journalism, so it is appropriate to begin with Russell, because, whether or not “the first and the greatest,” he was certainly, as he put it himself, “the miserable parent of a luckless tribe.”…

Russell returned to London and fame. The Times made the gesture every war correspondent dreams of: it put aside his IOUs for advance expenses and told him he could start again “with what tradesmen call a clean slate.” He was placed on the list of Times foreign correspondents at £600 a year, providing “you will render monthly accounts of your expenditure showing a clean balance so that we may both know how we stand.” He had breakfast with the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, who, mistakenly believing that Russell’s criticisms of the conduct of the war must have been inspired by his having evolved constructive alternatives, disconcerted Russell by asking him what he would do if he were commander-in-chief of the army. After the war Russell’s dispatches were published in book form, and while awaiting new battles to cover he went on a lecture tour.

Clearly, it would have been hard for Russell not to have made a name for himself in the Crimea. This was the first time that a British army in the field had been subjected to any form of independent scrutiny, and it would have been difficult to miss its shortcomings. Russell certainly chronicled them, but he failed to understand and expose the causes. He concentrated his attacks on Raglan rather than on the system, not knowing that Raglan, a humane and sensitive man, had done his best to overcome the results of years of government neglect. Throughout the campaign, Raglan had made repeated requests for all manner of equipment and supplies to overcome deficiencies in the commissariat and the medical departments, but most of his requests had been ignored. When public clamour led to a demand for a scapegoat, Russell’s dispatches helped make Raglan a convenient choice.

Although Russell criticised the lot of the ordinary soldier in the Crimea, he was careful not to hammer too hard at a comparison with that of the officers, to whose social class he himself belonged. He did not write, as he could quite accurately have done: “While the troops, ill-clad to weather a Russian winter, try to ease their hunger with a watery stew made of doubtful horseflesh, tonight in the officers’ mess the menu consists of soup, fresh fish, liver and bacon, a shoulder of mutton, pancakes with quince preserve, cheese, stout, sherry and cigars.” Above all, Russell made the mistake, common to many a war correspondent, of considering himself part of the military establishment. The one thing he never doubted or criticised was the institution of war itself. He realised he had hit the right note in criticising the conduct of the war and that his dispatches suited The Times’ politics of the moment. (Russell tended to toe his paper’s editorial line despite his professional assessments.)…

It is clear that before the war ended the army realised that it had made a mistake in tolerating Russell and his colleagues, but by then it was too late. The war correspondent had arrived, and when the American Civil War broke out, five years later, 500 of them turned out to report the conflict on the Northern side alone.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 1-17

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by | 1 February 2005 · 5:48 pm

Millionaires Against the Billionaires in Russia?

On 27 January, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland shared an interesting take on Ukraine and its possible lessons for Russia.

A revolt of “the millionaires against the billionaires” helped fracture Ukraine’s corrupt power structure and lift Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency there. A similar upheaval may be bubbling next door against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

That is the well-buttressed argument put forth by Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist and former diplomat whose past readings of failure in the Kremlin and its political consequences have earned my attention and respect.

I first ran across Aslund in Moscow in the 1980s at the height of Gorbymania, as the West cheered Mikhail Gorbachev for pushing perestroika as a means of reforming and saving the Soviet Union. Aslund’s predictions that Gorbachev would be unable to manage the forces he unleashed and would be destroyed by them were seen at first as provocative, then profound — and ultimately prophetic.

Being right once is no sign of being right always, or even often. There is a human tendency to analogize from the past and to miss what has changed. The rough-and-tumble years of Russia’s robber-baron politics and capitalism under Boris Yeltsin’s government, which Aslund initially advised, must have changed something.

But in conversation the other day and in several recent articles he has written, Aslund persuasively illuminated domestic conflicts that he sees leading toward “an unraveling of the Putin regime.” Parallels exist both with Gorbachev’s failure and with the political success of the reformer Yushchenko, with whom Aslund worked at Ukraine’s Central Bank.

Corruption and mismanagement have begun to sap the strong public support that Putin commanded in his first term, Aslund reports. And the campaign to line the pockets of Putin’s former KGB associates by jailing, intimidating and/or dispossessing the “oligarchs” who assembled fortunes under Yeltsin has turned much of the business community against the Russian president — as corruption did for Ukraine’s former rulers.

Ukraine’s “millionaires” — the big, but not the biggest, businesspeople — helped create and finance a political opposition that they hope will implement the rule of law and let them keep most of what they have already made, suggests Aslund, who directs the Carnegie Endowment’s Russian and Central Asian projects from Washington.

Siberian Light also notes an article in Mosnews about the importance of big-city mayors during revolutions.

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by | 9 December 2004 · 10:19 pm

Siberian Light’s Russia News Again

Siberian Light has another roundup of news from Russia.

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by | 4 December 2004 · 1:06 pm

Siberian Light’s Russia News

Siberian Light is offering a roundup of news from Russia, which may become a regular feature if enough encouragement is received. By all means, go ye forth and encourage! Here’s a sample:

A gun amnesty program in Zmeinogorsk [in Siberia] got more than it expected when a man walked in demanding the $17.25 reward for surrendering his stash of plutonium.

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by | 25 November 2004 · 8:40 am

Russian Perspectives on Ukraine

All About Latvia, who fervently supports democracy but is not keen on either Yanukovich or Yushchenko, offers an interesting roundup of Russian views on the Ukrainian elections, including a translation of a cynical op-ed in Komsomolskaya Pravda.

The gloomiest predictions are about to be proven true. Ukraine once again is divided in half. The president of all-Western and Central Ukraine–Victor Yushchenko and the president of all-Eastern and Southern Ukraine–Victor Yanukovich both demand coronation.

Apart from Russia, the list of firm Yanukovich supporters is not very impressive.

Lenta reports that Belorussian president Lukashenko congratulated Victor Yanukovich with his presidential victory. So, officially or not, three leaders expresed their support for Yanukovich: Russian President Vladimir Putin, Lukashenko and the leader of the Trans-Dienstr breakaway Moldovan Republic Igor Smirnov.

The official status of the Russian-supported Transnistrian portion of the former Moldovan SSR is still unresolved.

Beyond the control of any strong national government, the region has become an international transit center for smuggled goods. A Russian-sponsored peace plan for the region was rejected by Moldova in Nov., 2003, after Moldovan demonstrations against it; the deal would have permitted Russian troops to remain until 2020.

UPDATE: The Head Heeb has an interesting take on the reactions of Ukrainian Jews, in general cautiously favoring ‘the devil you know’. Zackary Sholem Berger elaborates further. Also see the Head Heeb’s earlier post, which opens with a segue I feel sure has never, ever been uttered before:

As most of you are no doubt already aware, French Polynesia is no longer the only country with two presidents.

UPDATE: Now China, Kazakhstan, and Armenia are reported to have joined the list of countries recognizing Yanukovich as president. And Economist.com has an update that concludes on a cautionary note.

International pressure may also have a significant effect on the outcome. As well as the pressure from America and the EU, a key determining factor will be the attitude of Mr Putin. The crisis in Ukraine is bound to overshadow his summit with EU leaders this week (see article [with map!]) and he risks serious difficulties in his relations with both Europe and America if he backs Mr Yanukovich in repressing the protests. Towards the climax of the Georgian revolution last year, Mr Putin seemed to lose patience with Mr Shevardnadze, perhaps contributing to his downfall. Does the Russian leader’s even-handed call for both candidates in Ukraine’s conflict to obey the law suggest he has already begun to hedge his bets?

All along, both Russia and the West have been taking a close interest in Ukraine’s election, not just because it is one of eastern Europe’s largest countries, with 49m people, but because the outcome could have important consequences for the whole region. Mr Yushchenko presented himself as a pro-western, free-market reformer who would clean up corruption and enforce the rule of law. Mr Yanukovich, in contrast, stood for deepening Ukraine’s close links with Russia. If Mr Yushchenko had gained the presidency and led Ukraine towards becoming a westernised democracy with European-style prosperity, voters in Russia and elsewhere in eastern Europe might have begun to demand the same. Thus a win by Mr Yushchenko would have been a huge blow to Mr Putin, whose attempts to exert control over former Soviet states would be greatly diminished.

Though Mr Yushchenko is now hoping for a Georgian-style bloodless revolution to deliver him the presidency, there are also some less promising precedents among the former Soviet states: only two months ago, Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenka, “won” a rigged referendum to allow him to run for re-election. The EU decided this week to tighten its sanctions against those in his government it blames for the “fraudulent” ballot. But so far there is no sign that Mr Lukashenka will be dislodged from power. Azerbaijan and Armenia also held flawed elections last year: in Azerbaijan, there were riots after the son of the incumbent president won amid widespread intimidation and bribery, but these were violently put down; and in Armenia, voters reacted with quiet despair at the re-election of their president amid reports of ballot-stuffing. If Ukraine follows these precedents, hopes for change there, and in other parts of the former Soviet Union, may be dashed.

Siberian Light asks Why is Russia afraid of democracy? In his answer he acknowledges:

Russia has plenty of legitimate interests in Ukraine. It has a massive naval base in the Crimea, there is a large ethnic Russian population, and a big chunk of Russia’s oil and gas exports go through Ukraine.

Time and again Russia meddles in the affairs of its neighbours. It almost never supports democratic opposition groups, preferring to prop-up regimes, good or bad (mostly bad). It seems pretty clear that Russia has made the decision that its interests are best served by opposing the spread of democracy through the Former Soviet Union.

And of course this rarely causes even a ripple of protest in the West.

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by | 24 November 2004 · 6:07 pm

Some Backgrounders on Ukraine

Ukraine-based Le Sabot Post-Moderne explains how the system works there:

You have to understand the situation in Ukraine. The country is run by a series of oligarchic clans that actually found their beginnings in the Soviet Union, and then grew fabulously rich during the early days of “privatization”.

Compare the situation to Russia, where an authoritarian Putin faced off against corrupt oligarchs. In Ukraine, authoritarianism and oligarchy are fused. Yanukovych isn’t just another unscrupulous candidate, he’s the main man of Akhmetov — the duke of Donetsk and the richest man in Ukraine. The current president, Kuchma, is the head of a different clan, Dnepropetrovsk. The presidential administrator is Medvedchuk, who happens to run the Kiev-based Medvedchuk-Surkis clan. He also owns the two biggest Ukrainian TV stations, which is awfully convenient.

While there is jockeying for control among these clans, the overall effect is for them to sustain one another in power. They all depend on the same system for survival, and actively collaborate to keep it in place.

A good example of the clan system in action was the recent privatization of the Kryvorizhstal factory. Western firms offered 2.1 billion dollars. It was sold to the presidents son-in-law for 800 million. His son-in-law is Pinchuk, the head of the Pinchuk-Derkach clan.

Do you start to see how life works here? This isn’t about a few stolen votes. It’s about an entire system of fine control over the political, social and economic life of the people. Economics and politics are incestuously fused here in a way that is difficult to imagine for those in the West.

Ukraine-based TulipGirl quotes an essay by Ukrainian novelist Oksana Zabuzhko in Monday’s print edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Never before — even 13 years ago, on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union — has Ukraine witnessed such a massive upsurge of national solidarity. People who’ve always remained politically indifferent and had missed voting in all previous elections, were disseminating self-printed leaflets from the Internet (samizdat is back — any piece of information was voraciously devoured on the spot!) in public places, and volunteering to monitor the elections on behalf of opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko. At a peasant food market a merchant first asked who you’re voting for — the right answer (with which you could count on a generous discount) was “Yushchenko,” while incumbent Prime Minister’s Viktor Yanukovych’s supporters were more than likely simply refused service. In the playgrounds children were playing a game called “Yushchenko beats Yanukovych.” To quote my seven-year-old neighbor, “in our class Irka alone stands for Yanukovych, and no one wants to play with her.” The slogan chanted by protesting students at demonstrations reads in English as “We’re together! We’re many! We won’t fall!” And just how may of “us” there are, one can easily see in the streets. These days Kiev, as well as other major Ukrainian cities, is defiantly demonstrating its political sympathies by wearing orange, the campaign color of opposition candidate Yushchenko.

A special term has come into use — “The Orange Revolution.” It looks like people have dragged all shades of orange, from yellow to vermilion, out of their wardrobes and adorned themselves with them simultaneously — vests and sweaters, scarves and purses, coats and umbrellas. Orange ribbons flutter everywhere — on trees, fences, lanterns, and cabs. Drivers joyfully beep to each other, and pedestrians (traffic police included!) salute them with smiles and raised fists. It feels like the capital of three million has been transformed into a sea of brotherly love! The windows of shops are lavishly decorated with things orange. Among my favorites is the stunt of my neighborhood coffee shop — its windows glow with pyramids of oranges! …

Here I have to clarify one important point. A widespread cliche used by many Western journalists to describe the major collision of our dramatic elections is that the establishment candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, is “pro-Russian,” and that opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, is “pro-Western.” This version has as little to do with the feelings of an average Ukrainian voter as with those of the belligerents of the Trojan war. Mr. Yanukovych is perceived not so much as being “pro-Russian,” but as, first and foremost, being “pro-criminal” — a Ukrainian Al Capone, who has under his belt two prison sentences for robbery and assault, and publicly uses criminal argot compared to which even the boorish tongue of retiring President Leonid Kuchma sounds as innocuous as a school textbook. A former governor of Donetsk, Mr. Yanukovych in power represents the so-called “Donetsk fellas” — a business clan with a notorious criminal background. That the latter have close ties with similar mafia clans in Russia seems to be the most immediate explanation for the pre-election outburst of a passionate love between Russian and Ukrainian leaders, an affair of which Yanukovych-as-president had been designed as a mutually satisfying offspring.

Chicago-based international relations professor Dan Drezner is more pessimistic:

A few years ago there were sizeable protests in Kiev because of “Kuchmagate,” in which tapes came to light suggesting that President Leonid Kuchma played a role in the disappearance of Ukrainian journalist Georgy Gongadze in September 2000. There was tangible evidence that Kuchma personally ordered Gongadze — who was investigating corruption in Kuchma’s administration — to disappear. Despite months of protests, however, Kuchma stayed in office (click here for an exhaustive World Bank study [PDF] on this case).

Not to put a damper on what’s going on right now in Ukraine, but that example should be kept in mind when speculating whether the protests at the rigged election results in Ukraine will actually cause a change in government a la the Rose Revolution in Georgia [Quickly: opposition leader/reformer/nationalist Viktor Yushchenko led by double digits in Western-run exit polls over Kuchma stalwart/Russophile Viktor Yanukovich. However, the preliminary election results had Yanukovich winning by three percentage points. Outside observers are pretty much unanimous in their belief that there was massive vote fraud].

The two most salient facts in assessing what will happen are that:

a) Leonid Kuchma wants Yanukovich to win;

b) Vladimir Putin really wants Yanukovich to win.

I would love to be wrong about this, but it doesn’t look good for Yushchenko.

Canada-based Randy McDonald weighs in on Ukraine’s Underestimated Strength.

I’m skeptical, in short, that Ukraine is at real risk of splitting apart along ethnolinguistic-cum-political lines. And yet, I can’t help but remember Andrew Wilson’s The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, which suggested that the most likely and the most stable course for Ukraine would be a broadly centrist position, relying on slow Ukrainianization and a Ukrainian balancing act between the European Union and Russia. Going to one extreme (a strongly Ukrainianizing regime intent on immediate European integration) or another (a strongly Russophile regime intent on Eurasian integration) could, Wilson suggested, disturb the equilibrium. Mass secessions wouldn’t be the result so much as growing alienation, the formation of more coherent ethnic groups with stricter frontiers. This would be a problem for Ukraine, needless to say.

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by | 2 November 2004 · 6:53 am

Appreciating Solzhenitsyn

I grew up reading more works by Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn than by any other Russian author: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, The First Circle, The Gulag Archipelago, August 1914. In fact, I’ve probably read as many pages of Solzhenitsyn (in English translation) as I have any of my other high page-count favorites: Barbara W. Tuchman, V. S. Naipaul, Robert D. Kaplan, and Tom Wolfe.

So I was pleased to come across a recent retrospective in First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life entitled “Traducing Solzhenitsyn” by Daniel J. Mahoney, from which I’d like to quote a few excerpts.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the great souls of the age. He is also among its most maligned and misunderstood figures. It is hard to think of another prominent writer whose thought and character have been subjected to as many willful distortions and vilifications over the past thirty years….

Some of his critics soon reasoned that if Solzhenitsyn was not a conventional liberal, then he must be an enemy of liberty. The legend grew that he was, at best, a “Slavophile” and a romantic critic of decadent Western political institutions, and that he was, at worst, an authoritarian and even, perhaps, an anti-Semite and a theocrat….

Serious, informed, and measured engagement with Solzhenitsyn’s writing is all too rare in America. Some of Solzhenitsyn’s critics are content to sneer at him without bothering to produce quotations that would support their characterizations of his thought….

Solzhenitsyn has meditated on this problem of conjugating Russia and the West, liberty and the moral contents of life, with great penetration and finesse in the various volumes of The Red Wheel. These books include profound reflections on the character of political moderation and the requirements of a statesmanship that would unite Christian attentiveness to the spiritual dignity of man with an appreciation of the need to respect the unceasing evolution of society. Solzhenitsyn takes aim at reactionaries who ignore the inexorability of human “progress,” at revolutionaries who take nihilistic delight in destroying the existing order, and at “false liberals” who refuse to explore prudently the necessarily difficult relations between order and liberty, progress and tradition.

In nearly all of his major writings, Solzhenitsyn appeals to the indispensability of the spiritual qualities of “repentance” and “self-limitation” for a truly balanced individual and collective life. But he never turns the classical or Christian virtues into an antimodern ideology that would escape the reality of living with the tensions inherent in a dynamic, modern society. He is not, however, unduly sanguine about the prospects for these virtues in the contemporary scene. As he writes in November 1916, “In the life of nations, even more than in private life, the rule is that concessions and self-limitation are ridiculed as naïve and stupid.” Solzhenitsyn thus has no illusions about repentance and self-limitation becoming the explicit and unchallenged foundation of free political life. His more modest hope is to claim a hearing for the Good amidst the cacophony of claims that vie for public notice. Neither genuflecting before progress nor irresponsibly rejecting it, Solzhenitsyn insists that we must “seek and expand ways of directing its might towards the perpetration of good.” Solzhenitsyn’s moral vision has too often been politicized in ways that mistake his rejection of progressivist illusions for a reactionary refusal to admit the possibility of progress.

Solzhenitsyn is, in truth, a conservative liberal who wants to temper the one-sided modern preoccupation with individual freedom with a salutary reminder of the moral ends that ought to inform responsible human choice. Like the best classical and Christian thinkers of the past, he believes that human beings should not “neglect their spiritual essence” or “show an exaggerated concern for man’s material needs.” Thus, while he displays a rich appreciation of the limits of politics, he also recognizes that “a Christian must … actively endeavor to improve the holders of power and the state system.” And when Solzhenitsyn addresses specifically political questions he does so as a principled advocate of political moderation. His portrait in August 1914 of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin’s efforts to establish a constitutional order that would be consistent with Russia’s spiritual traditions and that would keep Russia from falling into the revolutionary abyss contains some of the wisest pages ever written about statesmanship.

The shamefully one-sided journalistic and critical reception too often accorded to Solzhenitsyn’s work thus serves as an unintended confirmation of the difficulty of pursuing what he has called the “middle line” in the service of human liberty and human dignity. Solzhenitsyn has used his literary gifts and moral witness to teach us, as he says in The Gulag Archipelago, “that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but through all human hearts.” Today, though he is eighty-five years old and has had some physical setbacks, he remains committed to his writing. Moreover, his stature and moral authority remain high where it most counts: in his native Russia. In response to the recent awarding of the Solzhenitsyn Prize to the actor and the director of the television series that brought Dostoevski’s The Idiot to the screen, the popular writer Darya Dontsova commented that “the great Solzhenitsyn is in reality a very modern man, and young of heart.” Most importantly, amidst the corruption and moral drift of the post-Communist transition, he has never ceased to remind his compatriots that they “must build a moral Russia or none at all.” He remains an intrepid defender of a freedom that is worthy of man and has thus maintained faith with the best in both Russian and Western traditions. He merits our continuing gratitude, respect, and admiration.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 19 August 2004 · 6:08 pm

Swimmer Ikarashi Goes for the Cold!

While all those fair-weather swimmers were going for their medals in Greece, a tough Japanese school teacher swam across Lake Baikal, where the water temperature is 9-11° C (48-52° F). Interfax reports:

IRKUTSK. Aug 13 (Interfax-Siberia) – Ikarashi Ken, 52, a Japanese school teacher, successfully swam across Lake Baikal from Cape Sredny to a bay near the community of Buguldeika on the lake’s western coast in 15 hours on Thursday….

Ikarashi Ken has set several records by swimming across Pas de Calais, the 28-kilometer wide Tatar Strait, the 40-kilometer strait between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, Lake Biwa-ko in Japan, and also the straight between Korea and Japan.

via SiberianLight, who’s back to blogging again after a hiatus.

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