The drama theater in Europe and North America was greatly
influenced by the works of Chekhov, Gorky and Stanislavsky. Diaghilev’s Ballet
Russe was a trend-setter in modern music, visual arts and dance.
Russian artists worked in Paris, Berlin and Munich, creating
highly prized works, including the first abstract paintings. If not for the
disaster of the Bolshevik revolution, Moscow and St. Petersburg could have
rivaled Paris and London as Europe’s cultural capitals of the 20th century.
Russian scientists Ivan Pavlov and Ilya Mechnikov did pioneering
research in biology, behavioral science and immunology, winning early Nobel
Prizes.
Even the Bolshevik Revolution was made based on what were at
the time progressive ideas and slogans, which eventually spread around the
world: to put an end to the bloody, pointless war, to offer self-determination
to colonial nations, to distribute land to peasants, to guarantee equality to
women and institute universal suffrage.
Things started to go wrong immediately upon the Bolshevik
takeover – and got progressively worse. After that, Russia continued to set an
example to the rest of the world, but it was mostly in the form of cautionary
tales.
The Soviet Union became the first state to be shaped entirely
by ideology and ruled by a dictator for life – well before the 1930s, which
came to be known as the age of dictators. The havoc they wreaked in Europe
could have been avoided if the Germans and the Italians had been willing to
learn from Russia’s experience.
Bolshevik Russia was the first country to set up concentration
camps on a national scale and to exterminate its own citizens based on their
origins not during only wars or revolutions but systematically in peacetime. It
pioneered ethnic cleansing, exiling entire nations – a practice that was then
successfully applied in former Yugoslavia.
Post-World War II rivalry between the Soviet Union and the
United States was, upon the whole, good for the United States. Under President
Dwight Eisenhower, America lastingly benefitted from something Russia did. The launch
of the first Soviet Sputnik in 1957, which had been readied in absolute
secrecy, created a shock in the United States, engendering nationwide
educational programs in mathematics and other exact sciences and a drive to
train more engineers. The Space Race, which America eventually won, pushed its
technological development and lay the groundwork for the IT revolution of the
1970s.
Notably, the Soviet people benefited very little from their
country’s Cosmos Program.
But in recent decades, Russia has been providing plenty of
negative examples and cautionary tales for the United States, which have gone
mostly unheeded. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan – and had to
withdraw with its tail between its legs a decade later. America also invaded Afghanistan
– and topped it off with an invasion of Iraq. It is still very much involved
there, but the eventual result of those wars seems like a foregone conclusion.
After the collapse of communism, Russia quickly went from
egalitarian society to sharp divisions of property and wealth. It got its own
1% well before America did. By the end of the 1990s, its oligarchs controlled
most of Russia’s productive assets and wealth.
They also got into politics in a big way, acting as kingmakers
and deploying their financial resources to buy elections.
If this sounds in any way familiar, it is because the top 1 percent have been doing the same thing in the United States. Enabled by the Citizens
United Supreme Court ruling, the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and many less
conspicuous billionaires have been getting their pocket candidates elected by
pouring more and more money into elections at all levels.
Russia’s oligarchs spent their money in vain. Worse, the
president they handpicked because he seemed willing to do their bidding turned
the tables on them, put some of them in jail, forced others out of the country
and made everyone else tow the line.
America’s super rich are also seeing their millions go to
waste. In this presidential elections, their favored candidates have already
been defeated or are losing, while a blatant populist is taking over the
Republican Party which they had always assumed would do their bidding in return
for generous contributions.
Speaking of populists. Russians seem enthralled by Putin, who feeds them nationalistic, xenophobic rhetoric and gives them a heavy
dose of blah-blah-blah about resurgent national greatness. Some 86 percent of Russian
consider him a great patriot while he and his cronies shamelessly pilfer
Russian national wealth and doom the country to a Third World status for
decades to come.
On his watch, Russia has become an inconsequential pariah
state.
Poverty and privations are spreading while Putin’s propaganda blares
about the country’s fearsome global might.
This too should sound familiar. Unmindful of Russia’s pathetic
experience, millions of Americans are falling for a shameless con artist and
know-nothing windbag.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are even similar in many
ways – from philandering to hypocritical Christianity and from narcissistic
love of hearing themselves talk tough to atrocious taste for nouveau-riche
luxury.
Not surprisingly, the two have expressed mutual admiration and
right-wing Russian nationalists have been falling all over themselves endorsing
Trump. Whether America will benefit if its citizens follow Russia down the same
path and elect President Trump is another question.
