©2008 UrbisMedia
Years ago I did a piece on KPBS about a trip I made to the ole USSR. In it I related an encounter with a heavy, Nina Kruschev-looking, Russian woman who was a custodian of one of the rooms in the Petrovorets summer house of the former Czars. She was wearing a paper, stick-on American/Soviet flag on her sweater that was years old from the visit of an American delegation. It was just about falling off and I could see that she was eying my shiny metal American/Soviet flag pin on my lapel. So I took off the pin and handed it to her, whispering “mir,” (peace), one of the handful of Russian words I was able to say. She was clearly touched by the gesture, as I am sure now you are, wiping away a tear on reading this account.
Her faded and curling paper flag was emblematic of much that I had encountered in the old USSR. It was a rather shabby, down at the heels place where people stood in lines for everything, even in front of shops that were not open. I recall that there was a Baskin and Robbins place near the old Rossia Hotel that never opened the entire time I was there (they should have advertised “negative 31 flavors”). Once, in Leningrad (again St. Petersburg) I saw someone rushing home with a half-dozen ice-creams on a stick (in plain white paper wrappers). I traced my way to their source by following people who were eating them and arrived at a large truck that was selling them out of the back. They were all the same flavor (vanilla). And if you wanted to wash one down there was only one soft-drink one could buy in Leningrad—Pepsi. No Coke, just Pepsi. Another incident was when a young Cambodian man who was part of my tour group lost his camera and needed to buy a new one. The store had two clunky Russian-made camera models that looked and functioned like something that Kodak had made forty years earlier. Those were his choices. This was also the time when people came to your room in the hotel wanting to buy the jeans, T-shirts, and other clothing right off your body. In return they could barter jars of caviar, or the nested dolls, or a few other hand-crafted items.
The Soviets were pretty good at building dams, making missiles and aircraft, not all that good at making nuclear power generation plants it turned out, and building other heavy infrastructure. But they didn’t make much else; their flags were paper, and their cameras sucked, both of them. They were, of course, a society that had pretty much jumped from feudalism to communism. No bourgeoisie were wanted to build an entrepreneurial class. Whenglasnost and perestroika came along and the Russians had to dump the old system (or if you want to believe the myth that Ronnie Reagan brought the USSR down), they weren’t much better at making stuff. It’s hard think of anything on our store shelves that says “Made in Russia.” Nevertheless, the Rooskies are “on a roll” economically, mainly helped by the fact that they have a load of oil and natural gas, and with prices for energy sky-high, they are running their economy and receipts. People have more money to buy things, things are more stable, they are relatively better off and they give a lot f the credit to Vladimir Putin, the man who’s soul George Bush “looked into” and thought he saw somebody who would like cut brush on his ranch and say grace before lunch. Talk about mis-reading a guy! Those receipts from $104/barrel oil will allow the Rooskies to flex some muscle they couldn’t afford to do not many years ago. Their subs were rusting and their planes couldn’t fly because they couldn’t afford to fuel them up and maintain them. Not any more. Russia turned out to be another case of “be careful what you wish for” for the Americans. They wanted an end to the USSR, now they might have another formidable adversary that is an energy giant and worrisome rogue economy that can sell that other energy, plutonium, into some dangerous hands. We wanted the same thing with the Chinese and now they make our Barbie Dolls and have four trillion of our bucks in their banks. We worry about them, too.
Presumably, Russia was becoming a democracy, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves about that any more than we should kid ourselves about our own democracy b y the time Bush and his Constitution dismantlers are finished with it. Putin has created a puppet named Medvedev, a guy even shorter than the Pooter, who as been elected president on the Pooter’s say-so, and who has, if you are going to say it correctly, an unpronounceable name—something like Meyyyedveyyedveyydeff—Oh forget about it, Pooter’s the guy in charge anyway. But this charade is the reason we should be watchful of the Russians because they might be slipping back into their old Cold War ways, except that this time the out-of-control ideology will be very close to ours, a rampant capitalism that puts profits above everything. What is particularly worrisome about that is that the old KGB apparatus never went away after the fall of the USSR. These were the guys who knew all the dirty little secrets and knew how to hurt and manipulate people. When a state-run economy comes down it still s the people who know where the keys are for things who end up running the new economy. Anyone who has been to a totalitarian society knows that there is surprisingly little street-level crime. It is too “disorderly” and, besides, it competes with the “criminals” who are running the society. So when the old system fell there were plenty of opportunities for the people who knew where they keys were. And also new opportunities for crime. Some new millionaires were made, but a really free press and other elements of an open society did not fully emerge. Russia became the kind of place where it could be dangerous to become too successful; a situation that was not too much different from when those guys from la cosa nostra visited your business to and offer you some “protection” from (you guessed it) la cosa nostra.
At present it seems that the Rooskies are much more interested in increasing their standard of living than they are in having a full-functioning democracy. Moreover, the Pooter is playing effectively to the need for this old super-power to get some respect that it lost from their Afgan war and their economic meltdown. They have some problems to overcome, the virus that haunts expanding wealth, inflation, being one of them. Now they just have to figure out whether the person to lead them into their new and prosperous age should be modeled on the Czar, Rasputin, or Al Capone.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 3.5.2008)