I was born the year that Stalin died and have always thought that the exchange was a reasonable one. If nothing else, the confluence of those events has made me curious about Russia. As a child, I read Farley Mowatt’s description of Siberia (“Sibir”) and was impressed by what he wrote. This, of course, was before it became evident that much of what he wrote avoided basic elements of the truth.
All this to say that I grew up with a somewhat romantic notion of the Soviet Union and applauded the ability of the communists to pull their sclerotic and feudal society into the twentieth Century. I was impressed by their brave proclamations and heroic art. Then I read The Gulag Archipelago. Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s three book tour de force profoundly changed my views about many things. What I had been told was true about the Soviet Union was not, in fact true, and I have never believed the Western press on any substantive issue since then. To give the Pulitzer Prize to one of Mr. Stalin’s useful idiots who lied about the Ukrainian Holodomor was bad enough. For his employer to not return the prize when the lies were exposed is not a good look for Western journalism. All this and more I learned from Mr. Solzhenitsyn.
In 1982 I became friends with my first real Russian. He was an ethnic Jew who was kicked out of the country in the purges of 1978 and ironically, he loved Russia and bragged about it continually. When I first met Ernest, I asked him whether he had read the “Gulag”. He had spent a year in Rome and some time in Israel so I supposed that he must have come across the books. In fact, he read them in samizdat format while still in Russia. Every week he would receive a new chapter pushed under the door of his apartment, read it with a flashlight under his bed covers and then pass it to an unknown third party. He, and the other readers of the book, risked their own “tenner” in the gulag to know the truth about their country. That struck me as impressive.
Ernest was a mining engineer, making him instantly impressive, and we would banter about the relative merits of the Soviet versus Western system of mining. When we went on site visits, he would insist on driving his 1968 Mercedes Benz irritating me with the many stops to take pictures of him draped over his car and framed by the Rocky Mountains. In Russia, you have arrived if you own a Mercedes, vintage irrelevant. Guess where the pictures were headed. Along with the pictures, he would send inflation proof, Levi Strauss jeans so that his mother could augment her pension.
My favourite memory of Ernest was of him standing toe to toe with a Chilean engineer both of whom were arguing loudly and in broken English about some long-forgotten triviality. They were impossible to understand and the mystery of the topic added to the humour of the situation. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Ernest did well as an interpreter and guide to the many Canadian companies that rushed into Russia to “help”. Sadly, his chain-smoking caught up to him early in life.
Although I invested a lot of time in studying the history of Russia, Ukraine and the Soviet Union, I never anticipated spending money or time traveling to that part of the world. My son once had a Finnish girlfriend who explained that it was dangerous to go near the Finnish-Russian border much less to cross it. It was with some trepidation, then, that in 2010 I accepted a consulting assignment in Russia. I knew about the economic and social problems of the post-Soviet era in the 1990’s culminating in the crash of the economy in 1998. I was aware of the kleptocratic rule of the Russian oligarchs, and I knew that Russian men uniformly drank away their sorrows to the point of early death. But it was an interesting assignment and colleagues would be along for protection, so I accepted with reservations. I could not have been more wrong in my assessment of Russia, and I found it to be a delightful country. Over the next three years I made five trips and visited cities and mining camps from St. Petersburg to Okhotsk and Serov to Ekaterinburg. I talked freely about politics and social conditions with perhaps 100 people during that time and never felt a moments anxiety about my personal safety.
Any discussion about modern Russia will necessarily involve an assessment implied or stated about its current leader. For the record, I come to my views of Mr. Putin through the writings of Dr. John Meerscheimer, the late Dr. Stephen Cohen and, Mr. Putin himself as well as my conversations with the many Russians that I met. There are other points of view, of course, and these are expressed with great authority in the Western press. Mr. Putin is quite possibly an obscenely rich, revanchist, and kleptocratic Russian thug. But he also has access to the nuclear codes and for that reason must be treated seriously. He made a dreadful and murderous mistake in starting his military operation in Ukraine and he alone must bear that shame.
I was fundamentally interested in two things in my conversations with Russian citizens: had they read The Gulag Archipelago and what did they think of Mr. Putin. Everyone had read Solzhenitsyn and acted surprised that I was surprised that they had. I finally asked a young engineer how it was that everyone in Russia had read this book that was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet system. He told me that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was a hero to Russians and people read the book because it was required study in high school. When I first read the book, I went on record stating that it should be required reading in Canadian high schools. That never happened in Canada but in Russia it was apparently the law of the land. And who has the authority to make it required reading in all of Russia? Mr. Putin. A revanchist Soviet apparatchik from the dreaded KGB ordered the mandatory reading of the book that destroyed the Soviet Union. Astounding but apparently true. Maybe a false flag move on his part.
Regarding the support Mr. Putin enjoys, I did not find anyone who had not voted for him. Who in Russia is going to say they didn’t support the oligarchic thug who leads them and kills those who take a run at his power. I was skeptical about the authenticity of such “support” until I had a conversation with the managing director of the client company. We were sitting in the company cafeteria at lunch, and I asked if he would mind me asking some political questions. He shot me a look full of daggers and I thought I had just lost a good client. We ate in silence and when the room had mostly cleared, he turned to me and tuned me up.
“Look. You want to talk about politics and because I don’t, you think that it is because it is dangerous for me to do so. It is not dangerous. I just am not interested in politics. I support Mr. Putin because he gave my life back to me. Russia had fallen apart, and crime was out of control. For ten years we lamented what Mr. Gorbachev had done as we lost loved ones to alcohol, sex, and crime. Now I have a chance to live in peace and make a life for my family. Of course, I support Mr. Putin and so does everyone else.”
This sentiment became a recurring theme. “Mr. Putin gave me my life back.” Would you support someone who gave you your life back? Interestingly, I heard that sentiment often expressed in Peru as well in reference to the changes wrought by Mr. Fujimori.
Everywhere I went in Russia there was evidence of the Soviet period and the horrors of the calamitous 1990’s. I saw huge factories and military installations with not a pound of copper to be found in the large motors that once drove Soviet commerce. Tearing the factories apart for salvageable materials became the wages of a collapsed economy. I toured a military museum attached to a large chemical complex that was made available to the public for free by the oligarch who had seized the plant when the economy disintegrated.
In the West, we don’t understand Russia because we don’t know its history and we certainly don’t understand how dreadful the living conditions were prior to Mr. Putin taking power. A close Russian friend told me that two of his cousins were murdered on the street for their coats. St. Petersburg, in 2001, was the most dangerous city in the world. When I strolled around the canals of the city late one spring evening in 2010 it was the safest of cities.
“What changed?” I asked my guide.
“Mr. Putin changed things,” he said.
“And how did he do that,” I asked.
“I don’t know. He is KGB. They know how to do stuff like that.”
On one trip I stopped in an Orthodox church in the Urals north of Ekaterinburg and asked to buy a particular icon for a friend. This led to a fascinating conversation about Christianity during and after the Soviet period. My interlocutor was a sixty-year-old woman who told me about how the churches had been converted to factories by the communists. The one we were in had been a shoe factory until 2005. When I expressed surprise that such a large investment had been made to reconvert it to a beautiful church she beamed and told me that Christianity had never disappeared, but that the people were careful. When asked about who paid for the conversion costs she said,
“Mr. Putin is paying to reconvert the churches. Tens of thousands of them.”
I don’t want to make too much of it, but there were tears in her eyes as she described the return of her church and I often wondered whether there were similar tears in Canada during the covid shutdowns.
Does reducing crime and rebuilding churches balance the lives lost in an unnecessary war? Hardly. But perhaps that statement can be a mirror to the West. Are we happy to have thousands of lives lost in the Ukraine so that Mr. Putin is taught a lesson? The history of Ukraine is very complicated. The healing of the wounds caused by the Holodomor and the answering violence of Ukrainian fascism during World War II was reversed by Western interference in 2014. One can only speculate why we would do such a thing. Mr. Putin started this war, but does that mean that we should sustain it to the last Ukrainian?
From my perambulations in Russia, I learned that Mr. Gorbachev is viewed by many of his countrymen as the person responsible for the terrible losses of the 1990’s. I think that is an unfair assessment, but I didn’t live through those times and was repeatedly reminded of this by those Russians to whom I protested. Nevertheless, I think Mr. Gorbachev should be honoured for wanting the insanity of the Cold War to end and for taking steps necessary to do so. His was a heroic and lonely path and it is too bad he is not esteemed in his own country. I suspect history will be much kinder to him than his contemporaries have been.
I enjoyed my trips to Russia and I like Russians. Just as it is wrong for them to withhold honour from Mr. Gorbachev, so it is wrong for we in the West to hold Russians guilty for the bloody excesses of their leader. But I am biased so I will give the final word to Jordan Peterson who offers a more balanced perspective (Russia v Ukraine or Civil War in the West). He suggests that there are four ways to look at the war in Ukraine and gives evidence to support each of them. He posits that perhaps the special military operation in Ukraine results from a civil war in the West. It is a thought provoking thesis reflected in an interesting essay by Emmet Sweeney (The conflict between the West and Russia is a religious one). These authors ask if it possible that we have strayed so far from the moral path that has undergirded Western economic success that we cannot accept warnings from those who have recently emerged from the horrors into which we are so boldly marching. It bears some consideration.
I don’t purport to understand the many conflicting issues and “facts” about the war in Ukraine, but Mr. Solzhenitsyn taught me to not believe the Western press. Is Ukraine on the verge of a major victory? Is Russia going to steamroll to the gates of Vienna? Who knows? I am pretty sure that there are many villains in this larger story and, for the moment, I feel especially bad for the individual Ukrainians caught in the cross fire of geopolitical insanity.