In chess, a player sometimes sacrifices an important piece in order to win the game.

When the Soviets sacrificed their queen by temporarily disbanding the USSR and pretending to adopt democracy, the US jumped up from the table and ran away to celebrate the victory.

Walking away from a game is equal to acknowledging defeat. The Soviets waited for a bit, then made their move, and won the game.

The moral of the story: a war is not over and you haven’t won shit until the other side actually suspends hostilities and capitulates.

I just watched Russian news. Now I have no doubt that Russia will invade the Eastern part of Ukraine and annex the areas where Lugansk, Kharkov, and Donetsk are located. This is where all of my relatives reside.

Everything in the newscast made it clear that the invasion of these areas will happen.

1. The number of foreign movies allowed to be shown in Russia will be limited so that at least 50% of all movies shown are Russian. Of course, Russia produces a very limited number of films, but patriotism matters more than reality and math.

2. The governmental party United Russia that lost all support after the shamelessly rigged elections of 2011 now has 56% approval rating for the first time in 5 years. Patriotism, of course, matters more than honesty and a lot more than something as inconsequential as democracy.

3. University students are obligated to reveal their opinions on the annexation of the Crimea and those whose opinions are not the approved ones are castigated. Unanimity in the face of a foreign threat is a lot more important than freedom of speech.

4. Schools have to reintroduce “political information hours” we all remember from the Soviet times. During these info sessions, students are to be informed of the correct approach to the current political situation.

5. Stalin’s physical fitness norms aimed at keeping citizens prepared for military action are being reintroduced as “homage to our national historical traditions“. Of course, being prepared for battle and offering homage to Stalin is more important than respecting people’s right to control their own bodies.

6. Articles started appearing in Russian press, openly celebrating the return to the USSR. Of course, some of them are written by notorious anti-semites but the recovery of the Soviet Union means more than the unhappiness of some annoying Jews, all of whom are oligarchs in need of being disciplined anyways.

7. Russian troops are hovering on the border with Ukraine in massive numbers prepared for immediate invasion. More troops are being brought into the area. In the meanwhile, Obama is valiantly pushing back with an “our gays are marginally better off than your gays” speech, hoping to will the reborn USSR out of existence by appeals to “Western ideals and values of openness and tolerance.” Of course, a chance to make a beautiful speech matters a lot more than knowing what effect your words will have on your opponent.

8. In the meanwhile, even the most intelligent among the Westerners drawl that the Crimea “a small area inside Russia’s sphere of influence, hyped by our hawks into a world-shaking incident“. Of course, the freedom to pretend that the world outside of the nearest mall doesn’t exist is a lot more important than a return to the Cold War.

More great questions from twicerandomly:

You said once that immigrating was hard, both first to Canada and then to U.S. I can see that Ukraine to Canada would be a big adjustment, but I’m surprised Canada to U.S. was hard. What was difficult about each experience? How did you cope?

I had absolutely no cultural shock when I emigrated from Ukraine to Canada. What was shocking was how easily I got into the flow of life in the new society. There was no adjustment to make. Of course, the fact of emigrating is still an enormous trauma, but when I moved to Canada, it was the trauma of leaving, not of arriving. The new country was completely clear, easy to handle, and unquestioningly beautiful to me. Emigration was hard, but immigration was a breeze.

When I moved to the US, though, both emigration and immigration were extremely painful. I knew leaving Canada would be bad, but at least I was prepared for that. I didn’t anticipate the encounter with a new country to be so intolerable. I figured that if moving between such enormously different countries as Ukraine and Canada was easy, then going from Canada to US, countries that are supposed to be almost exactly the same, would be easier still. What I wasn’t taking into account was that I’d never lived in Canada. I was moving from Quebec to the US.

Arriving in the US

The very first thing I noticed when I crossed the Quebec / US border (we were traveling by car) was poverty. The more we progressed into the US, the scarier the landscape was getting. All I knew about America came from movies, TV shows, magazine, and books. I kept hearing that this was the richest country in the world. The possibility of driving for hours and hours and not seeing anything but devastation, abandoned houses, boarded up windows, dying industrial buildings, dusty small towns where every public building looked on the verge of collapsing simply never occurred to me. I knew this was a country of contrasts, but there were no contrasts to be found, just unrelieved poverty.

 

Continue reading “Emigration and Immigration” →

Reader twicerandomly asks some very good questions. Here they are:

Why hasn’t Ukraine figured out democracy and capitalism?

We are all products of our past. People pass on their unresolved problems to their children and grandchildren who, in turn, pass them on to their own children. We do this both on the level of specific families and of entire societies. In the Soviet Union, everybody who was enterprising and hard-working, who produced, manufactured, created, generated ideas, learned, and burned with enthusiasm to make, create, earn, transform and achieve was slaughtered, tortured, starved to death, or, at the very best, sent to concentration camps.

After Stalin’s death, forced starvation, murder and concentration camps were over, but any kind of initiative, originality or productivity still made one a persecuted pariah and made life very hard. And this is how things were for generations. Human beings have a very developed capacity to adapt to their surroundings. If entrepreneurship and enthusiasm become dangerous, people will eradicate these qualities in themselves.

The only way you can overcome this kind of conditioning is by

1) discussing what happened. People need to talk about this, constantly, obsessively, repetitively, like the Spaniards are talking about the Civil War.

2) working specifically to heal the damage.

None of this was done in the FSU countries since 1991. And if you pretend that the trauma is not there, it will never begin to heal. If we talk about stages of grief, FSU countries are still sitting squarely in denial.

Does it make sense to bail out their economy with so much corruption?

I can’t answer this question. I haven’t been back to Ukraine for over 15 years. I’d need to go back and talk to people to be able to answer it. I want to believe that things are getting turned around, and when Ukrainian protesters in the Maidan started toppling statues of Lenin, that was, in my opinion, the central moment of the protests. If Ukrainians are making the connection between Lenin and Yanukovich’s corruption, that is huge.

Thank you, twicerandomly, for these great questions.

I’m not supposed to write about what happens in the sessions but this I just have to share because it is too funny.

“I’ve changed so much as a result of analysis!” I said. “I could have never imagined that instead of a favorite bar I’d have a favorite gym. Or that I would want to buy a house in a quiet street. Or that I wouldn’t feel restless in the evenings and just prefer to stay at home reading.”

“That’s not analysis,” the analyst retorted. “You’re just getting old.”

Before people say, “Oh God, what a cruel analyst,” I have to explain that I think the analyst is simply mirroring my way of interacting back at me.

I think that analysts adapt their communication styles to patients a lot. For instance, N’s analyst is so quiet as to be almost catatonic. Mine, however, is gregarious, exuberant, he interrupts a lot, waves his hands about, and is very loud. And I don’t believe this is at all natural to him. He just has to be this way with me because if he just sits there while I perform, no work will get done. The poor guy must be exhausted after these sessions because he’s a Scot, and Scots have a very different emotional range from Ukrainians.

The book the administration assigned for our book club is along the lines of, “Everything is feeenomenal in academia, everybody is happy and joyful, yip-dee-doo.”

As you can imagine, nobody at the club was satisfied with this celebratory vision. So we decided to lobby for a new book club that will discuss Ginsberg’s The Fall of Faculty. This book apparently discusses the problems arising from the mushrooming administrative positions and bureaucratization of academia.

A relative is complaining that I unfriended her on Facebook because of her political opinions. I wonder if people realize how old I am and how unlikely it is that I would even know how to unfriend anybody on Facebook. Is that even the correct word?

What I find fascinating in the section of Judt’s book that I’m reading right now is discovering how badly countries of the Soviet bloc suffered under Stalin’s rule. I wasn’t aware there had been this much persecution and horror inflicted on the poor Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Bulgarians, etc. We always saw their countries as being enormously better of that we were, and it never occurred to us in the USSR to feel compassion towards people whom we got into the whole sorry mess.

The part of the book that I don’t find particularly interesting is the one where Judt analyzes Stalin. For one, I know this stuff already. At the same time, Judt’s analysis is not as nuanced and profound as the one you can find, for instance, in this great book, which I can’t stop recommending.

One problem I have with Judt’s vision of Stalin is his insistence that “Stalin was an anti-Semite and always had been.” I see no evidence that Stalin’s persecution of Jews after 1948 was informed by some sort of a personal dislike of them. Stalin was perfectly fine with surrounding himself with Jews when it suited him, and, by the way, he allowed one Jewish comrade of his that had saved his life to run around spouting very nasty criticisms of Stalinism. This was a privilege never granted to anybody else. Stalin’s anti-Semitic activities after 1948 had, as did everything Stalin ever undertook, a practical purpose. Mind you, Jews were highly appreciated by the regime before 1948, while persecutions of Georgians, Ukrainians, etc. were massive.

Another issue I have with this section of the book is a lack of clarity as to Stalin’s plans for a new war. Here is what Judt says:

And Stalin in his last years seems genuinely to have expected a war; as he explained in an ‘interview’ in Pravda in February 1951, a confrontation between capitalism and communism was inevitable, and now increasingly likely.

Of course, Stalin expected a war if he was working towards starting it. I have read a variety of sources that claim very convincingly that Stalin was planning World War III. This is precisely where Jews would have come useful to him. Stalin needed to provoke the Americans into starting the actual hostilities, and massive persecutions of Jews were a way of making that happen. There is also overwhelming evidence that Stalin was planning yet another great purge of his closest subordinates. The previous such purge took place right before he started engineering WWII. So it is logical to assume that WWIII was his plan after this new purge.

Stalin was a passionate Leninist (which, of course, had not prevented him from usurping power from Lenin and driving the guy into an early grave), and as such he had to have as his #1 goal world revolution.

Since people don’t seem to object as much as I thought to posts about Russia, here is a fresh Russian joke:

A guy is suffering because he is a sick loser. Everybody else is suffering because he is the President of Russia.

In other news, this is Global Awareness Week at our cafeteria, so we are being served Greek food. Of course, Greek food in the Midwest means meat and potatoes. With a lemon wedge added on top. But at least students will become aware that there is a place called Greece. Where everybody eats meat and potatoes decorated with lemon wedges.