I want to disagree but he’s right. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vote Republican because the alternative is much worse but still, the dude is right.

My mother and her sisters grew up in a completely Ukrainian-speaking village in the Donbas. It wasn’t only the language but the customs, the traditions (like the wedding traditions, for example), the music, and the sense of self as Ukrainians and very different, in a deeply positive sense, from Russians.

The first step towards Russification had been taken during my grandparents’ lives when they were forced to adopt Russian-sounding last names instead of their real names. In my grandfather’s case, he was forced to change his first name, too. Just so you understand the nature of the change, his first name was Trokhym. It was changed to Timofey, which is completely different. The man ended up with a completely different name when he was almost thirty.

My mother and her sisters all ended up having to learn Russian at different points in their life to get educated or employed. But they are completely pro-Ukrainian, hate Russians, very patriotic, etc.

In the younger generation, we have my sister and myself who are completely pro-Ukraine. We have a cousin fighting in the Ukrainian Territorial Defense. We have cousins who are illegal migrants in Russia and we don’t know what they think because they are too afraid to opine on anything. And we have cousins in the Donbas (daughters of a completely pro-Ukraine mother who pays the bills) who think that the worst fate that can await one is having to hear anybody speak Ukrainian.

The reason why I’m telling this story is this. My grandfather survived the Holodomor, Stalinism and WWII. None of that took away his sense of self as a Ukrainian. My Donbas cousins don’t remember the USSR. They were not coerced by a totalitarian regime. They weren’t terrorized, persecuted, or starved. But the ideological effect that wasn’t achieved on my grandparents or parents in the USSR happened in the generation of the grandchildren.

I’m not really talking about Ukraine, you know? I’m sure everybody is tired of me going on about Ukraine. But this is about ideology. Coercion is not that effective in imposing an ideology. Soft totalitarianism is a lot more effective in imposing ideological conformism.

Wow, Chesa Budín has been recalled in San Francisco! That’s amazing news. The guy is a total bastard. Good job, San Franciscans! Such a beautiful city deserves better.

Unfortunately, Michael Shellenberger has no chance to become California’s governor, even though he’s amazing. But at least the Boudin recall happened. Now George Gascon needs to get recalled in LA.

There’s a never-ending stream of articles about problems with American culture. “There’s rot at the heart of this culture!” people keep proclaiming. “There’s too much violence! Too many guns! Too few guns! Too little religion! Too much religion! Something is wrong with us!”

Yet those same people go into fits when I say that there’s something deeply wrong with the Russian culture. They seem to accept the idea that a culture can go in a wrong direction but only if this culture is American.

I’m especially grateful to the individuals who keep posting smug graphics about gun violence in the US and Europe. The gun violence in Europe completely excludes the gun violence that Russians have been inflicting on Ukraine for 8 years. But hey, I recently saw a graphic where World War II was neatly edited out of gun violence stats to demonstrate that even in the 1940s there was more violence in the US than in Europe. There’s no doubt in my mind that the creators of this graph are the kind of people who see imaginary Nazis under every bed. But it’s politically expedient to excise Nazi violence from the record, so why not?

Eight years ago on this day four Evangelical men were leaving their prayer house in the occupied Donbas. Russians arrested them, tortured them in horrible ways, and then murdered them. These men were among many victims singled out for their religious beliefs.

Russians have been murdering believers – Muslims in the Crimea, Protestants in the Donbas, Orthodox in Svyatohirsk and many other places – for eight years. There’s no religion they like more than another. Well, that’s not completely true. They really like their own cult of superiority.

The cult’s dogma is that Russians are superior and the world is evil because it refuses to recognize that superiority. They’ve been battling religion (any religion) for over a hundred years under one pretext or another.

I read 36 pages of a book in a 2-hour in-person meeting of administrators where I was one of the most active participators throughout. I’m usually intensely crabby in meetings but I would be a lot crabbier and probably downright intolerable if I couldn’t read during them. I hope people realize that I’m doing them a huge favor this way. Even I find myself unbearable in how curmudgeonly I get in meetings.

I don’t read during the meetings that I hold myself because those are extremely compressed. I don’t believe in administrative meetings that are longer than 20 minutes (ideally, 15).

One the positive side, when the Russian faculty member arrives, I’ll finally have somebody refer to me with my name and the patronymic. I left Ukraine before I was old enough for anybody to use the patronymic. And in North America everybody calls me with my full first name (or Professor Last Name). The full first name makes no sense culturally. It’s either the diminutive form of the first name (Masha) or the full name with the patronymic (Maria Petrovna). Maria with nothing to follow it sounds weird.

I want to be addressed correctly at least once in my life, damn it. Let’s make Russians useful at least in this limited way.

The patronymic is based on the first name of one’s father, and it would mean a lot to hear it said aloud.

So we will get our Russian faculty member, after all. In a curious coincidence, this person has the same name and a very similar last name as myself.

This is only happening because of my efforts, which is deeply ironic. I will say honestly that I was sorely tempted to can the whole endeavor, and nobody would have judged me for it here on campus. To the contrary, I’ll be judged for proceeding with it but as we all know, I don’t care about these things.

I decided to proceed because it can be an important social experiment and a learning opportunity. If you place a brainwashed person who is under the age of 30 (so probably still not completely ossified) in a normal, friendly environment, can she recover? Can a whole year of new experiences, new people, new points of view and new information help a person change her mind at least a little bit?

This project will require from me inordinate feats of patience and kindness – the two qualities I have in very short supply – but what if it’s not in vain? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

Everybody I know thinks I’m completely insane, and maybe I am. I will be posting regularly about my progress, so we can all observe how it goes.

Kamil Galeev’s best thread so far is here. I call it the best thread among his multitude of amazing, well-informed threads because I never wondered about the causes of the phenomenon that Galeev describes.

This is absolutely true. Post-Soviet people tend to fall massively in love with “THE theory that explains the world.” To a huge degree it’s caused by the complete absence of the Humanities that were eradicated under the Soviets and never recovered. The first taste of a system of ideas makes them fall in love with it so deeply that they become fanatical.

I know how this feels. When I first came to Canada and discovered Hispanic Studies I was so enamored that I’d walk down the street and feel deep compassion for passersby because they weren’t learning about Hispanic Studies. To counteract the dangers of this kind of ideological fanaticism, I became so eclectic that it confuses everybody. Religion, psychoanalysis, theory of neoliberalism, conservatism and neo-Marxism are now my frameworks, and who knows what I’ll find next.

For many post-Soviet people, though, their romance with the single theory of everything never ended.

One added indignity of the translation project I had to undertake to honor my late father’s request is that the novel I’m translating has a lot of poetry by the poets from the Silver Age of Russian poetry. These are great poets but most of them have not been translated. So I have to provide the translations. The very last thing I want to be doing is translating any poetry and especially the Russian kind. But duty calls. Here is my rendition of a poem by Vyacheslav Ivanov.

First, the original:

Может быть, это смутное время
Очищает распутное племя;
Может быть, эти лютые дни —
Человечней пред Богом они,
Чем былое с его благочинной
И нечестья, и злобы личиной.

And here is my translation:

It might be that this tragic time
Is cleansing our perverted tribe.
Maybe the cruel days we see
Will more humane and godly be
Than our past that was so fake
And lacking honor like a snake.

I’m substituting the “ch” alliteration in the Russian version with the “k” alliteration in English because it has a similar effect.

And here is my translation of a poem by Natalia Krandiyevskaya.

The original:

Свидание наедине

Назначил и мне командор.

Он в полночь стучится ко мне,

И входит, и смотрит в упор.

Но странный на сердце покой.

Три пальца сложила я в горсть.

Разжать их железной рукой

Попробуй, мой Каменный Гость.

And the translation:

To me, preserving the rhyme is more important than anything else. I’m a poetry philistine, and to me it’s not a poem if it doesn’t rhyme.

But Lord have mercy, what extraordinarily weird things does one find oneself doing our of grief.