I found Gregory Feifer’s book depressing. “The vast majority of Russians will continue to endure the grinding bureaucracy… [G]overnment repression, waste, shoddiness and corruption remain prominent.” Between the oligarchs and the vast majority there is a “jarring contrast between extravagance and the heart-wrenching shabbiness of the great unwashed.” Westerners who try to do business through the visible government structure are disappointed because the real power is hidden in traditional cronyism, corruption, and bribery.
Feifer says he is pessimistic that Russia will “Westernize”. He asks: “Have they learned nothing from their painful past?” They don’t seem to; Russia has a “political culture that has shaped the country’s history for centuries.”
Feifer covers tsarist, Soviet, and recent history, including the history of St. Petersburg and Moscow. (Being a Russian peasant has always been a misery.) World War II is still prominent in Russian thinking: while seventy years of Soviet rule killed as many as 20 million people directly through execution and imprisonment, or through state-orchestrated famines; WWII killed 30 million in a few years, including 40% of men aged twenty to forty-nine.
While Russian leaders have traditionally sought the respect of Europe, today there is a faction that believes Russia’s future lies in turning away from Europe to the Middle East and Asia, which may explain why a shift towards Europe by Ukraine (a long-time Russia satellite and trading partner) seems threatening to Russia.
As early as 1835, a British writer predicted that America and Russia would “sway the destinies of half the globe.” Today, “Moscow’s imagined rivalry with the world’s most powerful country” offers Putin opportunities to appeal to Russian pride and patriotism by confronting America. Putin fought against democratic reform and turned Russia away from the westernizing path it had begun.
While the Russian history may be the most important part of the book, the stories related to average people stick with me.
After the fall of Communism, there was a “common expectation” that Russia would soon be “enjoying the West’s previously unimaginable freedom and prosperity,” but the reality was an economic collapse and the rise of crony capitalism. Russians responded with nostalgia for the Soviet Union.
In 2008, when a TV show asked viewers to vote on the greatest Russian in history, Stalin came in third. “Unfathomable as it may have been to foreigners, [this] outcome coincided with…[opinion] surveys.”
Every chapter tells of misery. Alcoholism is rampant and the drinking culture so ingrained that Feifer says even his friends became deeply offended if he declined to drink with them. And not just drink, but become falling-down, passed-out drunk. While this is a long-standing problem, alcohol consumption has tripled since the collapse of Communism. The same sort of dismal tale seems to play out in every aspect of Russian life: racism, neo-Fascism, xenophobia, and general intolerance; even Siberia’s permafrost is melting, tumbling its infrastructure of roads and power lines.
There is a general sense of fatalism; that “only those who steal get ahead”. This sense seems to have started under the tsars, continued through the Soviet dictatorship, and remains today. I don’t wonder that there is a “weak work ethic.”
I found it difficult to read the unrelenting story of Russia’s plight. I found myself skimming the last half of many of the chapters. Perhaps there is some hope in Feifer’s summary: “Despite its extravagant squalor, waste, greed and indifference, Russia remains full of life, inventiveness, and beauty.” But I doubt Russia will break free of its authoritarian culture anytime soon, and today Putin is positioned to be “the longest serving leader since Joseph Stalin.”