Mission to Moscow

Islamist radicals from the North Caucasus are nearly always at the top of the list of suspects when a bomb causes death and destruction in Russia.  All the more so, when the attack is carried out by female suicide bombers.  Guerrillas fighting to separate the republic of Chechnya from Russia adopted the suicide bombing tactic for the first time in 2000.  In 2002, women were members of the group that held a Moscow theatre audience hostage, until the building was gassed and stormed by security forces, with huge loss of life.  They were dressed in veils and bandanas that indicated their readiness to die in battle, and the following year came the first attacks by female suicide bombers...

...The question of why these women have been prepared to take their own lives in order to kill others has been given a partial explanation.  Two of the women who joined the Moscow theatre siege are reported to have been sisters seized from their homes in a Chechen village by Russian soldiers and gang-raped.  Over the past 14 years, Russian soldiers have left a trail of destruction in Chechnya that is psychological as well as physical.  Countless women have been widowed, or lost sons, brothers or fathers. Those who have been raped may find it impossible to marry and live a normal life.  Post-traumatic stress disorder is reported to be widespread among Chechen women.

BBC News, 3/29/10

Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001 -- and al Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse. The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 180 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan.

--George W. Bush, October 6, 2005

So terrorism did not begin with the Coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003, and it has not spared even those who opposed said invasion.  Shocking to learn that the world doesn't obey the syllogisms you invent to explain it, no?  While Bush is right that "we were not in Iraq on September the 11th" (the justification for that attack had been the corrupting presence of U.S. forces in the unholy state that happens to contain the holy cities of Mecca and Medina), and that "Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom," his lengthy speech betrays less complexity than a page-long BBC article.  

Operation Iraqi Freedom has contributed to anti-American radicalization worldwide, though likely less so than the localized effects of errant bombs, raids, and incarcerations in Iraq and Afghanistan themselves.  The idiocies of Abu Ghraib and the cruelties of Guantanamo's Room 101 contributed too, as did IDF blockades and invasions of Gaza.  Not all of the catalysts are exogenous: repression, unemployment, and unequal divisions of wealth in the rabidly-secular dictatorships of the Middle East (and in authoritarian, officially-Wahhabi Saudi Arabia) are key factors, factors that W. Bush, to his credit, was actually addressing at the time of his syllogized speech in October 2005.  In a human-all-too-human world, "the hatred of the radicals...will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse."

Desultory Eclecticism has been struggling with the emergence of conservative publicist Marc Thiessen as a legitimate voice in the national debate (see Jane Mayer deconstruct him here).  Pleading Marcus of Queensbury legalisms while employing an immoral, self-destructive adherence to the letter-of-the-law-as-interpreted-by-John-Yoo-and-Jay-Bybee, Thiessen uses blunt, fight-makes-right, Cheneyist, chicken-hawk rhetoric to hammer the testicular weaknesses imperiling Barack Obama's America.  The idiocy of torture has been fairly well established.  Without the coerced confessions of Ibn Shaikh al-Libi, W. Bush would have had a much more difficult time convincing the media establishment of the absolute necessity of the invasion that, as he so insightfully points out, did not (contrary to no one's belief) create the jihadist movement or supply its sole raison d'etre.  

The Manichaean epistemology that equates torture with safety and jihad with Iraq informs the same worldview that links communism with healthcare, healthcare with Obama, and thus Obama with future gulags.  In the past it allowed Russian, Chinese, and Vietnamese communists to be lumped together into an evil, monolithic conspiracy.  Today it conflates IEDs in Iraq with suicide bombs on the Moscow metro.  Russian armies and governments already have decades of Chechen blood on their leather gloves, and the innocent victims of this mornings attacks are suffering for it.  Reprisals are sure to follow, and Chechen radicals are sure to respond.  Simplified explanations will continue to use euphemisms like "reprisals" in place of "bombing," "torture," and "rape," and "Islamist" will continue to encompass the same broad, undefined threat that "Communist" once did.  The innocent blood in the metro cries out for vengeance-begetting vengeance, but it cannot solve an old problem.  The sound and fury will come to nothing.  Unknown-unknowns will continue to spoil the syllogism.          

A Russian once spent 1300 pages threshing out some of this:

As the sun and each atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, and yet at the same time only a part of a whole too immense for man to comprehend, so each individual has within himself his own aims and yet has them to serve a general purpose incomprehensible to man.


A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee's existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension.

All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to other manifestations of life. And so it is with the purpose of historic characters and nations.         

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, First Epilogue, Chapter IV

A Belated Happy Birthday to Mikhail Gorbachev

Gorbachev's birthday, it arbitrarily turns out, fell last week.  Desultory Eclecticism features him today because 1) Gorbachev had an op-ed published in the Sunday Times 2) Desultory Eclecticism was recently reminded of a relic from the early post-Communist past 3) Desultory Eclecticism has been too busy to provide you with its usual probing analytic insights and just needed to throw something together.  Promises of better stuff to come this week.


An excerpt from the Times op-ed, which provides some nice first-hand context for Russia 25 years after Перестройка (perestroika for the less pretentious):


...What were our goals, what did we want to achieve? We came a long way in a short time — moving from trying to repair the existing system to recognizing the need to replace it. Yet I always adhered to my choice of evolutionary change — moving deliberately so that we would not break the backs of the people and the country and would avoid bloodshed.


While the radicals pushed us to move faster, the conservatives stepped on our toes. Both groups must bear most of the blame for what happened afterward. I accept my share of responsibility as well. We, the reformers, made mistakes that cost us, and our country, dearly.


Our main mistake was acting too late to reform the Communist Party. The party had initiated perestroika, but it soon became a hindrance to our moving forward...


And a relic from the ensuing chaos of the Yeltsin years (extra context: Desultory Eclecticism recalls this commercial airing during the seminal tragedy of the 20th Century):

Desultory Eclecticism Readers in the News

Desultory Eclecticism is not a personal blog; however, some first-personish narrative is necessary for today's post.  Desultory Eclecticism has spent a reasonably significant portion of its recent past in Ukraine.  It has some friends there.  It grabbed an early morning beer with one of them on a visit to Kiev in early January.  A few weeks later, a new issue of The New Yorker arrived in the mail.  Desultory Eclecticism put the magazine in its bag for later subway reading.  It came across an article about the recent Ukrainian Presidential elections and began to read...

"...A young man named Sergey showed me around..."

Desultory Eclecticism thought, "I know a young man named Sergey."

"...Sergey, it turned out, was the [Yushchenko campaign] press center's Ukrainian language copy editor. 'I have perfect Ukrainian, which is very rare,' he said..."

Desultory Eclecticism thought, "Sergey said something about working in the press office of the Yushchenko campaign over morning beers last month.  And he does speak Ukrainian."

"...In non-election times, Sergey is a translator of foreign films and TV shows.  He did the entire Ukrainian run of "Everybody Loves Raymond" and also several episodes of "Miami Vice," which helped explain his handsome two-day growth of beard..."

Desultory Eclecticism thought, "I remember a former student of mine telling me that her brother worked in Kiev translating English-language media into Ukrainian.  I also remember that this brother of a former student is the very Sergey who said over morning beers last month that he had a new job working in the press office of the Yushchenko campaign.  And this Sergey often goes days at a time without shaving."

"...[Sergey] invited me to the tiny two-bedroom apartment he shared with a couple of old friends, both named Sasha, in a decrepit Brezhnev-era apartment on the east side of the Dnieper.  We drank beers until four in the morning..."

Desultory Eclecticism thought, "I know a Sergey who works for the Yushchenko campaign, translates English media into Ukrainian, likes beer, and lives in a Brezhnev-era apartment on the east side of the Dneiper with two old friends, but the apartment is bigger than mine, and one of the friends is not called Sasha, but 'Galanich'.  Ah, perhaps they call him 'Galanich' because having two 'Sashas' around would get too confusing.  No, no, something here just doesn't add up."

"...I had met people like Sergey, who felt themselves pulled toward Europe and the West ("You've seen the film 'The Secret.'  You haven't seen 'The Secret'? What do you mean you haven't seen 'The Secret'?)..."

Desultory Eclecticism thought, "I'll have to write Sergey an email and tell him he's famous."

Congratulations, Serogia!

Slash that Metaphor

"Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.


Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers."

George Orwell, from "Politics and the English Language" 1946

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The Dog That Won't Stop Barking?

Coverage of Ukraine's Presidential election has focused more on runner-up Yulia Tymoshenko's insistence to fight on than it has on winner Victor Yanukovich and the future of the country.  Were Desultory Eclecticism a Ukrainian citizen, Ms. Tymoshenko would have lost by one fewer vote; still, all indications do point to a free, fair, transparent, and not very close loss.  House speaker and Yanukovich supporter Alexander Litvin rightly tells Ukraine's Newsweek-inspired Russian language weekly, Korrespondent, "The outcome is evident: the winner is Victor Yanukovich.  And this fact, I think, should be admitted by all, first in line being his rival Yulia Tymoshenko."  Litvin then adds, "She did not lose.  She really grew her place in politics"--this, fortunately, is incorrect.

Even before balloting began, Tymoshenko vowed to take any loss to the courts.  True to her word, Bloc Yulia deputy Alexander Turchinov has informed Korrespondent of the camp's readiness to "present concrete proof of vote falsification by international observers, journalists, and the public, and to hand it over to the courts."  Though they will almost certainly find a handful of irregularities in the Yanukovich-dominated East, these claims border on the absurd.

Tymoshenko has been characterized in both the Western and Ukrainian press as power hungry and unscrupulous.  Some coverage, like Foreign Policy's November hit-piece, read like Kremlin propaganda; however, much of the criticism is justified.  With Tymoshenko ensconced as Prime Minister until Yanukovich can maneuver the Rada into new elections, her committed party of "Ni!" will ensure that the new President temporarily fails to deliver on any of his campaign promises.  With solid support in the western oblasts, Tymoshenko will remain a shrill voice in Ukraine's political wrangling, but any obstructionist victories will likely prove pyrrhic, further isolating her from the majority of the country.

For all the talk of voter apathy, turnout for the final ballot topped 68%, with 4.36% braving the snow just to choose Option C: None of the Above.  Korrespondent provides a breakdown of the final vote.  The geographical divide is far more stark than the U.S. map of 2004, with only central oblasts Kirovograd and Poltava, and far-west Trans-Carpathia registering competitive results.  Desultory Eclecticism is reminded of the eminently sane prognostication of a disillusioned Orange nostalgist in Mikolaiv (Yanukovich: 71.53%) last month: "Michael, maybe the best thing would be for Yanukovich to win, so then everyone in the east can be as disappointed as we've been."

Tymoshenko and Yanukovich, along with former President Victor Yushchenko, have divided the Ukrainian electorate for the past six years.  Yushchenko is now less popular than George W. Bush; Tymoshenko is now a kicking-and-screaming Al Gore; the Hryvnia now stops at Yanukovich's desk.  Look for new faces Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Serhei Tihipko--the only pol who polls well nationwide--to be the top challengers to another unpopular President in 2015.

Чехов - Радость

It was twelve o'clock at night.

Mitya Kuldarov--excited, disheveled--flew into his parents' apartment and ran through every room.   His parents had already lay down to sleep.  His sister lay between the sheets reading the final pages of a novel.  His schoolboy brothers slept.

From his astonished parents: "From whence comest thou? What's with you?"

"Oh, don't ask! I never expected such.  No, I never expected such!  It's...it's simply unbelievable!"

Mitya burst out laughing and sat in an armchair, too overjoyed to hold himself up on two legs.

"It's unbelievable! You cannot imagine it! Look!"

His sister jumped out of bed and, throwing on a blanket, approached her brother.  The schoolboys woke.

"What's with you? It's like your face isn't on you!"

"It's me overjoyed, Mama, for now all of Russia knows me!  Everyone!  Earlier only you alone knew that in this world existed civil servant Dmitri Kuldarov, but now all Russia knows about it!  Mama! Oh, Lordy!"

Mitya galloped off, ran through all the rooms, and again sat.

"Well, what happened? Just do tell!"

"You all live like wild beasts: not reading the papers, not paying the slightest attention to publications--but in the papers there is so much of note!  Now all is known as it happens--nothing is hidden!  How happy I am!  Oh, Lordy!  For the papers only publish about famous people, and here they've taken something about me to print!"

"What? You? Where?"

His father turned pale.  His mother glanced at an icon and crossed herself.  The schoolboys galloped in together as if wearing the same short nightgown and approached their older brother.

"Yes-siree! They've published about me!  Now all Russian will know about me!  You, Mama, will save this edition for remembrance!  We'll read it from time to time.  Look!"

Mitya pulled from his pocket an edition of the newspaper, handed it over to his father, and stuck his finger to the place, highlighted in blue pencil.

"Read!"

The father put on his glasses.

"Read it!"

Mama looked over at the icon and crossed herself.  Papa coughed and began to read: "On the 29th of December, at 11 o'clock at night, civil servant Dmitri Kuldarov..."

"See? See? Continue!"

"...civil servant Dmitri Kuldarov, exiting the Kozihina tavern on Little Bronnoi Street and finding himself in an unsober state..."

"I was with with Simon Petrovich... Everything is described to the smallest detail!  Continue! Onward! Listen!"

"...and finding himself in an unsober state, slipped and fell beneath the nearby horse of cabman Ivan Drotov, a peasant from the village of Durikin in Yukhonovska District.  The startled horse--stepping over Kuldarov and dragging over him the harnessed sleigh along with its occupant, Moscow merchant of the 2nd Guild Stepan Lukov--raced along the street before being detained by a group of maintenance workers.  Kuldarov, initially found in a semi-conscious state, was led to a police station and was examined by a physician.  The blow that he received to the back of the head..." 

"It was the axle, Papa.  Onward!  Read on!"

"...that he received to the back of the head, was classified as minor.  The occurrence was entered in the public record.  The victim was given medical assistance..."


"They wrapped my head in cold, wet bandages.  You believe me now?  Ay?  So there it is!  It has gone out to all of Russia!  Give it here!"

Mitya snatched the paper, folded it, and put it in his pocket.

"I'll run to the Makarovs and show them...I also must show the Ivanovs, Natalia Ivanova, Anisim Vasilivich...I'm off!  Farewell!"

Mitya put on his cockaded hat and triumphantly, blissfully ran out to the street.

(trans. Michael Wasiura)

(h/t Lingq.com)

Obama the Ющенко?

Desultory Eclecticism was in Ukraine on November 7, 2006, the day Democrats retook the U.S. House and Senate in that year's midterm elections.  On November 8, 2006, nearly two months before the 110th Congress was to convene, he was asked by a politically aware Kievan, "Well, what have they done so far?"

Victor Yushchenko lost popular support within months of assuming office in January 2005, having failed to fulfill inflated expectations immediately.  A lame duck for the bulk of his term, his main accomplishment remains overcoming Russian propaganda and poison to lead a peaceful revolution, ensuring at the very least that his successor will be freely and fairly elected on February 7th.  Yushchenko was a sub par president; at 56, he may live long enough to die a hero.  

Traveling through Ukraine over the holidays, Desultory Eclecticism was frequently asked about American attitudes toward Barack Obama.  He generally responded that expectations for Obama were very high, that many supporters were already disillusioned with the President's performance, and that many vocal detractors still harbored irrational fears about the President's Marxist-Pacifist allegiances.  His Ukrainian interlocutors were generally surprised to learn that delusional propaganda exists outside the Kremlin's sphere of influence (Yushchenko is still compelled to deny allegations that his American-born wife is an FBI agent) and that after 221 years of democracy, Americans still do not appreciate the inability of politicians to accomplish just about anything.

Obama, like Yushchenko, has an immortal place in his country's history for symbolic reasons alone.  Realistically--even looking ahead to shrinking Congressional majorities after the 2010 midterms--Scott Brown is probably the nadir of Obama's first term.  With a Republican Party still fractured between the David Frum center-right and Glenn Beck's minutemen, it's hard to imagine a Republican nominee capable of going 2 for 3 in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida in 2012, Nader or no.  Here's to the unlikely hope that the Left can separate the perfect from the possible, a moderate Republican or two can call a Tea-Bagger a tea-bagger, and a President who's likely headed for two terms anyway can win more than just symbolic victories.