There is no self-care challenge this week, people, because I’m definitely not in a self-caring mood and I don’t want to be a hypocrite and tell people to do what I feel incapable of doing myself.
The news from Ukraine are too painful and present an unrelenting source of stress. Yesterday, a couple hundred provocateurs occupied the municipal administration building in Donetsk. They destroyed Ukrainian flags, substituted them with Soviet flags, and walked around, yelling, “Putin, come save us!” and singing the anthem of the USSR and The International.
My mother is from that region and she says, “I can’t believe my parents will now lie buried in the ground held by occupation forces.”
I watched a live streaming video from Kharkiv, the city where I grew up, yesterday. A big group of very angry people hovered around Sumskaya Street, looking for “Ukrainian nationalists.” Finally, they found somebody who they decided had to be a Ukrainian nationalist and started beating him. Sumskaya is the central street in the city, and this poor fellow was just walking there peacefully when people, drunk on propaganda and in a state of uncontrollable hysteria, attacked him.
I turned the live stream off because this is more than I can bear.
Later, we decided to watch a musical TV show from Russia. “It’s just people singing, how bad can it be?” we thought.
And of course it ended up being really bad. The participants declared that the USSR had been “a grrrrreat country!” and proceeded to offer an endless stream of sexist, racist, and xenophobic jokes and comments. The most offensive statements were directed at Indian people.
If I could only say, “This is all Putin, the Russian people are not to blame, it’s all their horrible government’s fault.” But that isn’t true. The people want their USSR back. They are very open and direct about it. They tried the alternative, didn’t like it, and now want the Soviet Union back.
Clarissa's Blog 
What kind of people are longing for a return of the UdSSR?
I can think of two kinds of people, on the top of my head: Those that were already middle-aged and older when it finally officially fell apart and are bitter over their broken dreams. And those that are really too young to have experienced soviet life and are imagining heaven on earth based on what the first kind has told them…
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Yes, exactly. And that is the majority. People have saturated their need if consumer goods and have now realized (and this is not my analysis, this is what they say openly and sincerely) that the price you pay for this wide variety of goods is too high. They say they prefer to go back to scarcity if in return they can be part of an enormous country that is feared everywhere in the world, if they can shed the Western values they see as alien, and if the insecurity and uncertainty attendant on living in a democratic capitalist society would just go away.
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I don’t know what to say, Clarissa. Ukraine and you have all my sympathy.
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Thank you! This is such a horrible situation and it’s not even close to being over.
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If most of Russian people want USSR back than why don’t most Ukrainians want it back? It seems strange since Ukrainians also experience “uncertainty attendant on living in a democratic capitalist society.” Seems like some Russians and some Ukrainians would be for USSR, while f.e. business owners in both countries – against it.
OTHER NEWS (quote from a pay site):
Banning the Muslim Brotherhood will leave Britain at greater risk of terrorist attacks, the group’s most senior leader in the UK said yesterday.
Speaking for the first time since David Cameron announced an investigation into the organisation’s alleged links to violent extremism, Ibrahim Mounir said that it risked alienating moderate Muslims.
“If this [ban] happened, this would make a lot of people in Muslim communities think that [peaceful] Muslim Brotherhood values . . . didn’t work and now they are designated a terrorist group, which would make the doors open for all options,” he said. Asked if he meant open to violence, he replied: “Any possibility.”
Mr Mounir, 77, added: “This would make more problems than we ever expect, not just for Britain, for all Islamic organisations round the world holding peaceful ideologies. If the UK makes this option, you can’t predict [what would happen] with Muslims around the globe, especially the big Muslim organisations close to the Muslim Brotherhood and sharing its ideology.”
– el
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“If most of Russian people want USSR back than why don’t most Ukrainians want it back? ”
Oh, I don’t know, the Holodomor perhaps? And the recent history of the Ukraine is kinda similar to that of Poland in that it has been a playball to the bigger kids. Everybody surrounding it wanted to get a nice chunk of it* and a nation can only be occupied so often before even the suggestion of giving up independence becomes abhorrent.
* Funnily enough, even Poland who itself has a history of being fought over.
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I will assign the self-care, then: racewalking. It is April and now it is at least warm enough. Everyone is to racewalk as many as 9 miles each day, or at least 1 km. This is for stress and is much better than, say, pacing around the house smoking, which is what watching developments like this Ukraine thing would have me wanting to do were it my country. After racewalking, bubble baths with some kind of fancy, skin smoothing bubbles.
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Thank you, Z. I understand Clarissa’s distraction, but I was really looking forward to a self-care suggestion.
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