For example, Putin declared that there was no need to review
the Dima Yakovlev law – also known as the Law of Scoundrels – which bans almost
all foreign adoptions of Russian orphans. The law, it should be recalled, was
signed by Putin on the Massacre of the Innocent day in 2012. This year, just
ahead of Christmas, which celebrates God the Child, Putin confirmed his
reputation as King Herod and Scoundrel in Chief.
Putin also gleefully praised Russian bombings of Syria, in
which plenty of civilians have already been killed, as a cheap way to test
weaponry.
These are particulars. More to the point, Putin has displayed
not only hatred for those whom he criticized or ridiculed, but contempt for his
own nation as a whole, whom he told to bug off on a variety of economic,
political and legal issues. The the entire event was, as usual, a five-hour
hatefest. Even the one instance when he offered praise, it was lavished on
Donald Trump, a narcissistic hate-monger in his own right.
Russian observers often note that Russians live in a state of
low-intensity warfare of all against all. In this regard, Putin is the right
figure to lead Russia: a hate-filled president of a nation built on hatred.
There is a historical anecdote about Stalin, who derisively
asked Churchill: “How many divisions does the Pope have?” The Pope, of course,
had none – but he had something better. He had intangible authority that
eventually helped John Paul II play a crucial role in the collapse of Russia’s
Eastern Europe empire which Stalin had created.
Hatred and love may be intangible concepts but they are crucial
in creating a sense of national identity, too. Just look at Israel, which was
melded together out of very different men and women coming from Eastern Europe,
Germany, France, North Africa, Ethiopia, the United States and elsewhere. What
strikes me every time I come to Israel is the friendliness most Israelis show
toward each other. Goodwill shines through even though Israelis are often rude
and blunt. It is probably the glue that has kept this diverse nation together.
The paradox is that early Jewish settlers in Palestine were
pretty much the same people who were active in the Russian revolution, fought
in the Civil War and, in many cases, staffed the Bolshevik secret police CheKa
and, later, Stalin’s brutal NKVD. Jews played an extremely prominent role in
the Soviet State until the anti-Semitic “rootless cosmopolitans” campaign of
the late 1940s and early 1950s rooted them out. In fact, the Soviet Union and
Israel were initially built on very similar socialist principles and often by
men and women who grew up in the same Pale of Settlement towns, on the same
streets.
Both Rozalia Zemlyachka and Golda Meir, for example, began life
in Kyiv; both were socialists but took very different paths.
Indeed, the result could not have been more different. The
Soviet Union was built on hatred. It started with wholesale executions of class
enemies and went on to build the Gulag, starve its peasantry and exile entire
nations. It perpetrated a historically unprecedented destruction of the
country’s economic, cultural and human potential. The Russian Empire, which at
the start of the 20th century was developing as rapidly as the United States
and Germany, degenerated to “Upper Volta with missiles” and by the end of the
century was getting food aid from the United States.
Israel, despite being socialist in its early years, managed not
to persecute other Jews, rich or poor, who didn’t share the philosophy of its
leaders. It had a kibbutz movement, the equivalent of Soviet collective farms,
which avoided internecine violence. While Russia, a country of boundless
natural resources, succeeded in pauperizing its people, Israel, which had
nothing but rocky terrain and semidesert, built a beautiful country and a
successful modern economy.
Both countries moved away from socialism roughly around the
same time, but Israel only became richer while Russia, if you subtract the
temporary effects of bloated oil prices, got poorer still and more decrepit under
its perverted kleptocratic capitalism.
Israel was built on mutual affection and protection for Jews
everywhere. The Soviet Union claimed to represent the interests of the world
proletariat, but it mercilessly exploited its own working people, effectively
turning them into slaves of the state, and opportunistically used workers’
problems abroad for cynical propaganda purposes.
Meanwhile, class hatred split the Russian nation into class
enemies. As a result, there is no concept of nation as a community of shared
values – unless you accept hatred as such value. This is why the country’s
elites, from Putin down to every member of his government, functionary and Duma
deputy sends stolen millions to offshore accounts, buys property abroad and
undermines Russia’s economic and social development. Family members of Russia’s
elites are living abroad and loving it – while hating their native country and
everything in it.
Hatred perverts the notion of patriotism, too. The Russian
people hail the army of parasitic locust devastating their land as Russian
patriots – only because they profess hatred for outsiders.
Note also how easy it has been to make Russians hate. Hatred of
Ukrainians flared up in a few days after Viktor Yanukovych’s flight from Kyiv,
and of Turks immediately after the downing of the Russian military aircraft.
The hatred of all against all consumes Russia like some sort of
virulent disease. The “patriotic” pro-Putin milieu is forever spewing hatred
against the liberal Fifth Column. But universal animus is not limited to those
circles. I follow several Russian bloggers whose common denominator is
opposition to the Putin regime. Amazingly, they hate just as much other opposition bloggers,
corruption fighter Alexei Navalny, former Yukos boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
chess champion Gary Kasparov and the entire white-ribbon democratic opposition.
Accusations of being on the pay of the Kremlin are rampant.
The Dima Yakovlev law is indicative of this hatred. It reveals
a deep-seated hatred of children on the part of the Russian political
establishment and insipid indifference to their fate on the part of the rest of
society. Only a nation that hates its children could pass it and keep living
with it for three years. Children, of course, represent the future, and nations
that have no future naturally despise them.
Eventually, the Russian nation will have to be rebuilt from
scratch, based on some set of principles other than mutual hatred. And yet, it
is hard to imagine how this vituperous environment could ever produce anything
viable.
