Posted on 05/14/2015 2:01:36 PM PDT by Kaslin
MOSCOW--Well, at least I didn’t end up with a broken nose or stabbed in the heart. One of the things I have noticed in Russia is that more than a few men have a nose badly bent out of shape, the centerpiece of an aggressively belligerent scowl. And for such guys the de rigueur T-shirt of the current moment features a thuggish looking Vladimir Putin smiling smugly above the slogan “Russians, the Most Polite People.” What is meant by “polite” is that Russia annexed Crimea with a stealth invasion of “little green men” against weak Ukrainian resistance and thus with relatively few casualties. (Perhaps less “polite” has been the civil war in eastern Ukraine largely initiated by the Kremlin with over 5000 deaths so far, including nearly 200 people shot down out of the sky by a Russian ground-to-air missile.)
So as I was walking on my way through central Moscow to go watch Russia’s May 9 Victory Day parade, I was physically assaulted by one of Russia’s so very polite broken nosed young men. Right in the middle of the main tourist thoroughfare in Moscow, just outside the doors of Starbucks, he came up to me violently screaming that he hated Americans. Somehow I had attracted his attention a few days earlier. He punched me in the head, breaking my glasses and knocking me to the ground. As I tried to get up, he punched me again. As he was punching me, not one of several dozen bystanders said a word, either out of passivity or out of silent approval. Unfortunately, I am inclined to believe the latter, as when I asked these same people who witnessed this event for help finding my glasses, nobody stepped forward as I struggled to find them. Not that it did me any good, the frame was broken and the lenses were shattered. I also suffered a badly swollen ear and a sprained ankle. But he didn’t fracture my nose, and as one Russian friend later consoled me, he didn’t stab me to death.
Barely able to see without my glasses, I went limping down the street to seek out the “tourist police” who patrol “historic" Old Arbat, since the guy who assaulted me actually works on this street hawking Red Army souvenirs. Their reaction was a bored shrug and a pointedly unfriendly suggestion that I go back to America. I was not in the least bit surprised, as Russian police are notoriously inefficient at crime solving and distinctly uninterested in any activity that doesn’t involve receiving a bribe. And as state employed and sanctioned thugs, they have their own particular animus towards Americans. It seemed that to them, assaulting an American was not really a crime at all, but rather an admirable act of patriotism.
Nowhere else in the world have I seen such open hostility and rabid anti-Americanism (and I have been to 75 countries around the world, including places like Venezuela and Syria where anti-Americanism is state ideology). But over the years I have spent in Russia I have been personally harassed and threatened on a depressingly regular basis. On the subway last year, I commented to an acquaintance that “Russia children are crazy about Spongebob.” In a heartbeat there was this huge strapping guy furiously shouting in my face in broken English “I spetsnatz (special forces) you say Russians crazy I kill you.” I considered for a nanosecond trying to explain the meaning of “crazy about” and who Spongebob was, and decided the better course of action would be to appear scared to death (not hard, because I was) and as we came to the next station to beat a hasty retreat off the train.
In microcosm, my being beaten up in broad daylight in the center of Moscow is mere reflection of the poisonous brew of nationalism, xenophobia, fear, and hatred that Vladimir Putin and his propaganda apparatus have deliberately striven so hard to stir up. These are all very old elements of traditional Russian culture, consciously borrowed from the traditional ideology of “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationalism” of Tsarist times. Today the drumbeat of Russian state propaganda has convinced the vast majority of Russians that morally inferior America and “Gayropa” are an existential threat to Russia, the solitary bulwark of cultural decency and the only country willing and able to stand up to American global hegemony. And the explicit message of the tanks and missile launchers snaking through Moscow for the Kremlin’s overtly militaristic parade is to try to demonstrate that Russia is a force to be reckoned with.
Passions have been especially inflamed since last year’s Maidan revolution in Ukraine and Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and the Russian supported civil war in eastern Ukraine. In the utterly false Kremlin narrative, the popular revolution in Ukraine was a fascist coup underwritten by the CIA and executed by Washington’s neo-Nazi puppets on the ground. The seizure of Crimea was justified on the absurd grounds that NATO was planning to grab the peninsula, where Russia has a naval base under a long-term lease with Ukraine, and launch a campaign of terror against Crimea’s ethnic Russian population. Sadly, most people have proven eager to whole heartedly believe such crude lies. And almost all Russians are still euphoric with pride at their “great victory” and desperate to believe that it proves that Russia is again a great super-power.
But beneath this giddy triumphalism is a raging insecurity complex. The loss of Russia’s “near abroad” when the Soviet Union collapsed is still a national humiliation. Russians are also aware that their country shamefully lags far behind the West by almost any measure. They have trouble reconciling their fervent pride in the belief that Russia should stand at the center of world civilization, and frustrated bitterness that the rest of the world fails to take serious Russia’s pretensions to greatness. They mistakenly ascribe to American foreign policy a mirror image of their own external aggressions against their nearest neighbors. And Russia’s “victories” against the vastly weaker post-Soviet states of Georgia and Ukraine has fed the delusion that Russia’s corrupt and incompetent military is truly a match for NATO. As a result, Russia is literally a country spoiling for a fight, especially with America. Today the consequences may be merely the beating of some random American in the middle of central Moscow. But this toxic combination of seething hatred and resentment mixed with false bravado is a a recipe for far more serious dangers for America, our allies in Europe, and for Russia’s most vulnerable neighbors.
Mr. Putin must be a real charmer, he got German chancellor Merkel to lay a wreath with him at the tomb of the unknown soldier.
I like commie stuff too, brought a Mosin-Nagant from Vietnam & have a pistolet Makarov & a Nagant revolver. SKS, too.
Is the “Nashi” group still popular? I was a big fan of Oktyabrianna once.
I have SKS too. Haven’t heard about Nashi for a long time.
My favorite youtube song is “Podmoskovnye Vechera” - the original.
Have you learnt it from Uzbekistan? :)
You are almost right! Young Uzbeks admired everything Russian when I was there so I asked them about “Moscow Nights” but they did not know that title.
Later I learned that the music authorities insisted it be called “Evenings in the Moscow Suburbs”.
BTW in Samarkand there is an enclosed block around the old Orthodox church where all the signs are still in kirilitsa.
True. Samarkand is quite a spot. It is very old and represents quite a rich ancient culture. People used to laugh about Uzbeks but they were quite an advanced civilization ahead of any Arab counterpart including Iraq at the time. It was basically a center of Islamic Golden Age in medieval.
I learned over there that the 1,001 tales of Scheherazade in the so-called “Arabian Nights” were originally published in Samarkand. Very likely in that golden age.
However, the Uzbek girls told me that Aleksandr Makedonsky paused before invading India to take an Uzbek wife. And that Uzbeks with blond or red hair got that from Macedonian ancestors.
Xorosho......!
;^)
Arabian Nights are 100% borrowed from Shaherizada. A lot of other Arabian things are actually of Uzbek origin. As for Alexander many of them consider him Uzbek too, probably because he has spent a lot of time there(which is quite silly but you would find him on any Greatest Uzbeks list anyway).
The Uzbyechka’s told me that their national heroes were either poets or conquerors.
Saw Tamerlane’s tomb in Samarkand. There was a curse on anyone who disturbed it. Stalin did, and then the Nazis invaded.
I remember “Moscow Nights” on shortwave as the repeated melody before the broadcast began. It was the first ten notes.
On youtube the Gilberto Serodio post of Podmoskovnye Vechera is the original 1956 recording.
Not only that. Avicenna and al-Kharezmi both Uzbeks who lived in a first millenia are probably among the greatest scientists ever. The latter was first who theorized modern decimal mathematics and brought the concept of algorithm on which computer codes are working (he did it 1200 years ago). He also was an astronomer and cartographer, making maps which are very precise even by European standard of 17 century.
As for Tamerlane tomb I don’t know is it true or myth but as far as I know an Intourist hotel was getting built nearby and on June 16, 1941 a water pipe was damaged by earth moving machinery. in order to save it from flooding it was decided to excavate the site and move relics including mummies of Tamerlane and his relatives to Moscow.
There was a warning written on a tomb that the one who disturb his rest would unleash unimaginable troubles and there won’t be peace on Earth anymore. There was some mysticism around Tamerlane for locals and Muslims started rioting over this fact but excavation took place anyway and ended on June 21, 1941. Hitler invaded on a next day.
In 1942 Stalin ordered to load Tamerlane’s bones into aircraft and flew it over Germans. It has allegedly improved morals of Muslim troops on Soviet side.
Wow, what a story about Tamerlane’s tomb!
Speaking of Muslim riots nearby, in 1985 I wrote my master’s thesis called “The Ethnic Factor in the Soviet Army Officer Corps”. One of my sources (CIA pub) had mentioned draft riots in Karshi in 1916 when Imperial army began drafting Uzbeks due to terrible Russian losses in WWI.
Thousands of Uzbeks were killed each day in these riots. Nowadays I am unable to find much info on the Karshi incident on the internet, for some reason.
How strange that I would later be deployed to Aviabaza Karshi Khanabad just outside Karshi, with the U.S. Army.
Stalin was much more willing to sacrifice the lives of Ukrainians, than Russians.
Take it and like it, lib.
Looks like Pooty-Putin wants to follow Stalin’s lead.
Millions of Ukrainians perished in the NKVD-caused famine of the early 1930’s. It was understandable that they would welcome the invading Nazis as liberators.
Ironic that N.S. Khrushchev, son of Ukrainian peasants, would become Soviet premier following the death of Stalin. For his role in the famine exterminations, Khrushchev was already well known as “the hangman of Ukraine”.
Stalin was not even Russian & spoke the language with a thick Georgian accent.
My take was that Khrushchev felt so guilty about what he had done, that he gave the Ukrainian SSR, the Crimea, to try to win them over. Of course back then, it was meant more as a symbolic gesture, little did he know the ramifications it would have many years later.
Christian Science Monitor———Dec. 19, 2012
New gun laws? Don’t aim at only mass shootings like Sandy Hook
I don’t think you are being honest here, Russian troll. I am not surprised at all that some “Russian patriot” will take on this professor. “Bloody glasses wearing intelligent from pindostan who looks like a jew”. As for other pedestrians not stepping up an stopping the beating ... this is just not something that Russians do.
‘“Bloody glasses wearing intelligent from pindostan who looks like a jew”’
You should contact author and recommend him to include this wording into his next opus and improve his lies. Too bad he haven’t mentioned any of the above and you had to step in.
‘As for other pedestrians not stepping up an stopping the beating ... this is just not something that Russians do.’
I ‘d bet you are completely wrong and it is just opposite. I don’t remember I ever saw a brawl here without interference of complete strangers. People here loves to put their noses into someone else business and I don’t actually think it is a good thing. Moscow might be somehow different from the rest of Russia as they tend not to see anything around (or pretend they don’t see a thing) but certainly not to the point described here.
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