One Year In: The View and the Lens from the Russian “Gas Station”**
(Senator John McCain,March 2014, “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.”)
The one-year anniversary is behind us and the “fog of war” has maxed out. People can’t even agree who the combatants are. Is this a war between Ukraine and Russia, Russia vs. the US/”collective West”, Russia vs. NATO, the old “rules based international order” vs. multipolar world, economic hegemony vs. globalized economy, good vs. evil, proxy war, “unprovoked” aggression by an imperial madman, regime change operation…?
Things are quiet, considering the enormity of events, how much the world has changed since a year ago. In the Siberian communities where I live (an Altai Village and scientific suburb of Novosibirsk), the war remains a part of everyone’s life, every day.
· Instead of sanctions, news exchange involves battlefield stories from family or friends serving as career military, volunteers, mobilized, or prisoners offered early release for 6 months of service. The reports describing near death experiences and the camaraderie are similar to what you hear from all sides in all wars.
· Some people left the country to protect a son from the draft, others to avoid mobilization or protest against the politics in Russia. Some have returned.
· Some anti-war people who stayed express their anguish on social networks. Some who left post vacation like pictures in their new locales.
· There are still occasional Z’s and V’s on cars, t-shirts, and buildings. Billboards honoring lost soldiers have appeared along the highway and murals have been painted on an apartment building and school. There is talk of honoring some by renaming streets in Novosibirsk.
· People share videos on our Village chat and social networks. A recent one featured the Governor bringing donated goods to the men serving in the Donbass. Another portrayed life for the Altai troops on the frontlines with throat singing in the background.
· Not once have I been harassed or challenged in any way because I am American.
On the American front, I am estranged from a couple of people, I have been accused of being the equivalent of a diarist in Dresden 1942, and told that it was for the best that my high school would not accept the Sputnik vaccine at my reunion because America would not be a comfortable environment for me now. I am not complaining, I offer these examples as a statement of fact and wonder.
The majority of my friends in the US have learned how to navigate the complexities of maintaining a relationship with someone who lives in a place they have been told is uniquely evil. Lifelong seekers they follow the news and some of them check in to see if I am OK and ask questions. In the beginning it was, “tell me what I don’t know”, now the questions are more specific. Most recently, wanting to know if it is true college kids are being conscripted (it isn’t), about the economy because “Lots of people in the US think the economy is in chaos, people starving, etc. “ (not starving, no chaos), and confirmation that more Ukrainian refugees fled to Russia than any other country, “this…confounds the conventional wisdom” (Yes, 1,300,000 more than second place Poland). Most notes begin or end with “thinking if you” and that means a lot.
Meanwhile, the State Department issued a travel advisory upgrade, “U.S. citizens residing or traveling in Russia should depart immediately.” I contacted an American friend in Moscow to ask if something changed there, “no”. For 30 years I have experienced the dissonance between life in Russia and how it is portrayed in the US. In the 90’s, the gap was filtered through the rose-colored glasses of a love affair.
Then, never has a country gone from “in” to “out” faster than Russia did on September 11, 2001. Overnight, Russia “experts” in the form of pundits, talking heads, journalists, and academics became irrelevant, vanishing from the airwaves and front pages of newspapers in pre-social media America. The largest country on earth no longer mattered. Russian language disappeared from University course catalogues along with scholarships and travel funding for students interested in studying Russia.
The media, academia, and US government were always Moscow-centric. But, since the beginning of the century the lens has progressively narrowed as the voices of human rights and opposition activists and liberal media were increasingly amplified in America. At the 2006 Civil Society leaders meeting with President Bush, 13 of the 15 participants were Moscow human rights organizations. Still, efforts were made to get a first hand understanding of what was happening at a grassroots level in the regions. My community and NGO development Foundation organized regular visits to Siberia for Moscow USAID staff and US Ambassadors who attended events and met with government, business, and NGO representatives. I was occasionally invited to Moscow to debrief USAID on the status of civil society in Siberia.
The 2009 “Reset” ended almost all of that regional outreach and input and the American perception of civil society in Russia became increasingly grim. Words like “crushed” appeared in contrast to what we were experiencing which was more and more people becoming active and sources of indigenous funding for NGOs continuing to grow. When community development activist Obama spoke at the US sponsored Civil Society leader’s summit there were only 5 community development representatives and 31 human rights and liberal media participants. 79 of the 91 Russian participants were from Moscow where 7% of the population live.
This was frustrating but I didn’t consider it dangerous until 2011 when Putin threw his newly smooth face into the Presidential election ring and street protests mobilized in Moscow. Russia was BACK only this time like Jack Nicholson in the Shining. One of the “Reset” leaders wrote an op-ed saying that Putin had never done anything positive for civil society. I contacted him to ask why he didn’t think Law #131 “On Local Self-Governance”, that mandated citizen input on issues of local significance, was not a step forward. He had never heard of it. The narrative was set, Russia, the disappointing problem child. Who lost Russia became the refrain, as if it was ever America’s to lose. And in 2012, USAID lost it’s authority to operate in Russia.
Levada Center’s March 2012 survey registered 68% support for Putin. That number did not impress Moscow based journalist Masha Gessen. During an interview with Charlie Rose, she described the most likely and best case scenario for Russia as, “the protest movement continues, there’s a large scale protest, Putin orders the use of force, decisive use of force, not what has been done the last couple of days and the interior troops do not obey the order. At this point he feels that he has no recourse, he has to negotiate for an exit, he has to negotiate for immunity from prosecution. That is when we get a transitional government that would essentially be technocratic for a year or two, rebuild the institutions that have been destroyed under Putin and hold new elections.” Rose follows up with, “How long will it take for Putin to be out?” Her response, “I think it is a matter of months, maybe a year or two.”
This type of anti-Putin frenzy was quaint compared to what happened when Trump arrived and Russiagate was launched. Escalating propaganda and sheer madness (both meanings of the word) characterized the post-Trump election media environment. During a 2017 visit to America, MSNBC blared from enormous flat screened TVs in homes of friends where I never noticed a TV before.
This situation left people who actually knew something about Russia unable to respond adequately when given the rare chance. Commenting on a Time Magazine cover with the blood red of St. Basil’s Cathedral drenching the White House “Carrie” style, real experts were reduced to, “and they are calling them domes when they are, of course, minarets”, anything to elevate the dialogue. Only in this case, the whole concept was stolen from Mad Magazine and the genuine merging of American satire, foreign policy, and news had occurred.
In 2018 things grew even more ominous when my Russian husband and I went to dinner at a friend’s fiancé’s family in Maine. An American, he was our neighbor for years in Altai before returning to the US. The next morning, he told us the liberal matriarch said we were not welcomed back. He apologized saying, “ she gets her new from Rachel Maddow”. Around that time, my teenage daughter asked me, “why are the Russians in American TV shows and movies always bad people?”
Distorting the reality in Russia to make it seem worse than it is has brought blowback to the very forces it was meant to support. It also set a precedent where the more complex truth became irrelevant and/or a victim in order to achieve an “end” that was often disconnected from the quality of life issues the majority of people consider a priority.
Flash forward to today and regardless of who you believe is fighting or for what noble cause, it is bringing us to the brink of WW III. I assumed there was a uniqueness to this insanity until I came across a letter from my Cousin Rennie who was a Marine in the early days of Vietnam (1966). He was responding to a question a former Soviet soldier, who served in Vietnam, asked me on a train to Krasnoyarsk in December 1999, what was it like from the American perspective? Rennie’s reply, “Marines hate doing combat landings next to sailors getting suntans. What kind of a war was this anyhow? …Nobody knew…. Then I realized what kind of a war it was. Nobody knew what kind of a war it was — that was the kind of war it was. There were no turning points., everything was a turning point. Who could tell?”.
Almost 50 years later and it’s deja vous all over again right down to the M113 armed personnel carriers and rumblings of a domino theory. I fear my life has its bookends.
