But this year, a fateful event occurred a couple of days earlier, on July 29th, when Russia’s United Nations Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, acting on behalf of his government, vetoed the U.N. Security Council’s proposal for an international tribunal on the downing of the MH17 passenger airliner over Ukraine. By this action, Russia has taken another giant step away from universally accepted principles of morality and into the wilderness.
Whatever the explanations Churkin provided in his 1,100 word speech at the UN, to the rest of the world the reason for Russia’s veto was crystal clear: the responsibility for downing the Malaysian airliner, either intentionally or not, most likely rests with the Russia-sponsored terrorist gangs in the Donbass, Russian military personnel, the chain of command of the Russian armed services and, ultimately, with the government in Moscow. It stand to reason that if the chief suspect in a crime has the ability to quash an investigation into that crime he will most certainly avail himself of this opportunity.
There is, however, another aspect to what Russia has been doing ever since it annexed Crimea in early 2014. It is shifting domestic standards of morality – or, more precisely, removing those standards altogether.
Along with many other people my age, I have felt that over the past 18 months the Putin regime, for all its well-supplied stores, lack of censorship at least as far as books, movies and the Internet are concerned, the freedom to travel abroad and to own property, has become worse than the grim and shabby Soviet Union of the Brezhnev era. The difference is that the Soviet Union was at least making a show of staking a high moral ground. It was painfully concerned with appearances and propriety, and at least in theory claimed to share universally accepted moral principles.
Putin’s Russia has rejected those principles, proposing in their place the jailbird ethics: everything goes if I can get away with it. Russia grabs a chunk foreign land and openly boasts of it – because no one at this point can take it away and punish the aggressor. The Kremlin brazenly sends its agents and military personnel into foreign territory and bombards it from across the border, but denies it just enough to avoid an official designation as an aggressor. Somebody at the high level of government or security services orders the assassination of a prominent opposition leader a stone’s throw away from Red Square, and then the Kremlin mounts a sham investigation.
And now Russia has rejected an international tribunal on the MH17 after claiming that it had nothing to do with it and coming up with s bunch of theories of what actually happened, one more preposterous than the next. At the United Nations, Churkin went on to mouth a load of deliberate lies, designed to turn the idea of an impartial investigation of this crime into a circus.
The Russian government is flaunting international standards of civilized behavior as well as its own laws, and it is laughing at the fundamental principles of morality. In this respect it has become worse than other pariah states, like the Ayatollahs’ Iran which abides by the moral precepts of the Koran. Since stirring the current crisis in Eastern Ukraine, Russia has become an international freak show, on the par with North Korea and Syria.
Russia has moved beyond good and evil and the Russian people are joining its leadership in that unchartered territory. I was recently meeting somebody at the Kennedy Airport when a Moscow flight came in. Several people – teenagers as well as portly middle-aged dudes – were sporting T-shirts with pictures of gun-toting soldiers in camouflage and taunting signs such as “The Well-Mannered Green Men.”
Whether deliberately or not, this new Russian morality – or rather the absence of any moral principles – justifies and even glorifies the mind-boggling kleptomania which over the decade and a half of Vladimir Putin’s rule has permeated Russian society, from the top of the Kremlin down to the lowest-level bureaucrat, the judge on the bench and the cop on the beat.
Graft and corruption used to be considered repugnant by most Russians only a few years ago, and one reason ordinary people thought of the Stalinist terror with nostalgia was because government officials were afraid to enrich themselves and because “Stalin used to put corrupt officials against the wall.”
The new Russian ethics dispenses with all these restraints. It is almost out in the open now: people in Putin’s entourage spew ardent patriotic rhetoric while keeping both hands in the till and buying up properties in France, England and the United States. Opposition figures like Alexei Navalny are hated because they’re fighting corruption and investigating officials who have used their position to assemble enormous illegal fortunes. Fighting corruption has become unpatriotic while thieving bureaucrats have become national heroes. I suspect soon they’ll be writing best-selling memoirs: “How I Stole a Billion and Got away with It”
Soviet leaders had a real problem with legitimacy. Every new leader was constrained to reject the legacy of his predecessor, accuse him of perverting or corrupting the communist creed and promise to return to “true Leninist norms”. The new Russian immorality, widely shared by the population, may actually become the glue that sustains the Russian regime even after Putin is gone. His successors could hail him for amassing a huge personal fortune, for allowing his buddies to enrich themselves, for flaunting international rules and treaty obligations to Ukraine and for shooting down a passenger airliner – and not having to answer for any of it. A nation without a more core needs to have a thoroughly amoral founding father.
Woody Allen’s latest film, “Irrational Man” is a reflection on the moral message of “Crime and Punishment” – whether fundamental moral principles can be violated even for apparently justifiable reasons without opening up the abyss. It is bitterly ironic that great 19th century Russian writers can still be relevant in discussing the moral dilemmas of the 21st century America – and all the more so in light of Russia’s final slide into immorality that is occurring before our own eyes.
