The Russian Bear Has No Teeth
But what happened in Russia (and is happening again) could happen anywhere. Even in America. Here's why.
“Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness,” President Barack Obama said during a 2014 presser at The Hague. “Russian actions are a problem. They don't pose the number one security threat to the United States. I remain much more concerned about the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.”
I actually remember that presser. It was shocking to me that anyone considered Russia a mere “regional power.” Was Obama toying with President Vladimir Putin? Trying to humiliate him in some elaborate game of geopolitical one-upmanship? At the time, I had no idea what Obama was talking about. Russia wasn’t a regional power—they were a menacing presence in the east, a country with eleven time zones, rich in oil, vodka, and ushanka hats, who bore no love for America.
It turns out I was wrong.
In the years following Obama’s blithe dismissal, my fear of Russia deepened. We had Trump to worry about at that point, a Roy Cohn protégé and Mafia don of a property developer/racist game show host who not only had a decided preference for Eastern European women, but admired Putin personally. If that wasn’t enough to send a chill up our collective spines, there was the discovery that Trump sycophants Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort had all colluded with Russia in one way or another during and after the campaign, and that a meeting had been orchestrated with Russian nationals at Trump Tower to obtain dirt on political rival Hillary Clinton.
There’d been an online Russian disinformation strategy (a largely successful one, in my opinion) to get Trump into the White House. There were secret computer servers connecting a Trump business with a mysterious Russian entity known as Alfa Bank. There were a million smoking guns that seemed to evaporate into thin air, leaving those of us who were paying attention terribly concerned about the future of democracy.
A country that fails to punish malfeasance in its public officials establishes a dangerous precedent. The structure of democracy itself collapses, leaving a power vacuum that is always filled by the worst, most criminal, most thuggish among us. We have the long lesson of history to show us what happens when we politely look the other way.
If after two obstructed impeachments, an armed insurrection against the nation’s capital, not to mention the multiple federal and state investigations, Trump isn’t prosecuted and made to suffer the consequences of his actions, our failure to see justice done in this country will have profound psychological consequences. America will no longer be a nation of laws, but a quasi-criminal enterprise, proving more than ever before that if you’re rich and white, no one can touch you. America will stand for nothing. More importantly, Americans themselves will feel disempowered, frightened, helpless, and bleakly nihilist.
Just like the Russians.
The BBC put out a seven-part docuseries last month called Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone created by British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. I watched all seven hours, and then watched two episodes again, taking copious notes.
Rarely have my expectations been so upended.
I won’t lie—watching TraumaZone wasn’t easy. John, who is equally fascinated by Russia, insisted he couldn’t watch so much unrelenting misery, but then kept peering over my shoulder. The docuseries doesn’t conform to a standard film crew/voiceover format. Instead, Curtis went through thousands of hours’ worth of raw footage sitting inside a BBC film vault, carefully quilting together his narrative. In fact, there’s no music or voiceover at all. What we have is a harrowing seven-hour look at post-Soviet Russia, one that will fill any human heart with wonder, rage, angst, empathy, and bewilderment.
It was a wise decision to forego the commentary and allow the extraordinary footage to speak for itself, permitting us to see at a street level what it was like to live through the fall of communism and democracy.
To be sure, watching it didn’t make me feel superior to the Russians—I am far too aware of what can happen to any country in the throes of economic collapse. Just a few years ago, Venezuela, once the most prosperous country in South America, was devouring its own zoo animals when Maduro’s government defaulted on its debt repayments and people starved.
But societal collapse tends to follow the same trajectory: corruption at the highest levels, non-redress of same, disastrous and self-serving economic policies followed by hyperinflation, shortages of basic goods, unemployment, poverty, disease, high child mortality, malnutrition, and violent crime. Anyone who thinks the United States is somehow immune to all this hasn’t been paying attention. Capitalism is no hedge against disaster. We have the Great Depression directly in our rearview mirror to prove that.
Equally troubling is the idea that what happened in Russia from 1985-1999 is continuing to happen there, just in a different costume. As communism fell apart, then-president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, attempted to save the system by giving power to the managers of state-run factories—who then allied themselves with Russian gangsters. At the Togliatti car plant, for instance, managers sold cars directly to gangsters, then wrote them off as defective or having never existed to begin with.
The Soviet State Planning Committee and organization network in charge was called gosplan. Established in 1921 to oversee production and distribution of crops, goods, labor, etc., gosplan staggered beneath the weight of its own corruption and incompetence all the way until 1991. In an effort to make the system functional, Gorbachev decided to computerize everything. This modernization was called Intensification 90.
The problem, of course, wasn’t just the insufficiency of data sharing. It was the Soviet Union itself. The rot came from inside. Soviet satellite countries were sick of it. Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia all declared their economic independence. In places like Romania, the revolution turned violent, leading to communist dictator Ceaușescu's overthrow and execution. On November 9, 1989, the wall separating communist East Germany from democratic West Germany came down and people were free to cross that country’s borders. In Poland, Lech Wałęsa led the crusade against the Soviet Union and became that country’s first democratically elected president since 1926.
The USSR was powerless to stop it.
The Soviet experiment was in freefall. Loyal Politburo member Boris Yeltsin abandoned the Party and became a staunch supporter of shock therapy capitalism, which would prove to be an even greater disaster than the old system. Enriched by American investment capital, he bulldozed ahead, trying to ram “democracy” and capitalism, both, down the throat of Mother Russia. Prices rose by 2,520% in one year. People were selling the shoes off their feet to survive, erecting makeshift cities in forests or living in filthy sewers. In their desperation, they also sold off the vouchers they’d been given to invest in the new employee-owned factories. These vouchers were snapped up by clever men like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who made millions, thus becoming Russia’s first oligarch.
A once-prosperous Bolshevik biscuit factory worth 80 million dollars was bought by an oligarch using vouchers. His cost? 475,0000 dollars.
Meanwhile, people were starving. Some looted the graves of German WWII soldiers, looking for medals and gold fillings. The Lenin Museum closed. The paintings were carted off and statues smashed. The Museum of Space Achievement in Moscow was turned into a discotheque. Another cosmonaut museum morphed into a used car lot—old Soviet cars sitting alongside space capsules. During the long cold nights of winter, Muscovites crept into their city parks and chopped down trees to keep their families from freezing to death. The Moscow Circus could no longer afford to buy food for its tigers. Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov was left stranded onboard the Mir space station.
What few industries remaining in government control had either closed their doors or were in the process of failing. The oligarchs offered to loan their looted money back to the state in exchange for shares in those companies. Now, just seven men held most of the vast mineral wealth of Russia. The rest tried drinking themselves to death.
Yeltsin, himself a robust drinker of Russian vodka, now appeared in public in obvious states of inebriation. Per one of his bodyguards, Yeltsin would stare blearily at the wall and say [in reference to the power of the oligarchs], “They are stealing Russia.”
In a desperate attempt to consolidate power amid massive public protests, Yeltsin, with the full support of the oligarchs, invaded Chechnya. Then, as now, Russian soldiers were underpaid, ill-prepared, and demoralized. Chechens threw tarpaulins over Russian tanks so that soldiers could no longer see out of the firing ports. The Battle of Grozny, a city which the Russian generals boasted they would take within two hours, quickly turned into a disaster.
All of this happened within the span of a few months. And out of this vacuum came Putin. Most Westerners fail to remember that Putin never actually sought power for himself. He was appointed by the old KGB (Russian spy agency now known as the FSB) as one of their own, a technocrat who wouldn’t challenge the power structure of the oligarchs. Putin flooded the country with money, and improvements were made. But absolute power corrupts absolutely, and in the end, Putin became like all the rest of them: duplicitous, murderous and greedy, with a reputed net worth of 200 billion.
This had and continues to have a devastating effect on the Russian people, and perhaps now is not the time for me to pitch you on the idea that the Russian people are not the same as the Russian government—no more than “Americans” should be conflated with Trump. The Russian government is odious. The Russian people, however, are traumatized, which is the point Adam Curtis skillfully makes.
Desperate people do desperate things, and it doesn’t much matter where they come from. In Curtis’s deft hands, we understand the impossibility of the situation in Russia. Over 100 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Russians are still serfs, just serfs to a different master. Even in their frequent attempts to fight back, they were thwarted. During Yeltsin’s attempt to dissolve Parliament by cutting power to the lights and phone lines, a music concert held outside the building in support of the besieged Parliament was attacked by riot police at Yeltsin’s behest.
Sound familiar?
This is what you get with oligarchs, even American ones. This is what you get with self-described “mavericks” who “play by their own rules.” The Russians were promised a new world, but in truth, it’s an unfixable situation. And as is true of all fragile ecosystems, parasites take over. American evangelicals preyed upon penal colonies of youthful Ukrainian offenders. Even multi-marketing stalwarts like Mary Kay came to Russia to fill the void. In one of the creepiest scenes in an already creepy docuseries, a clueless Mary Kay lady says to an audience of grim-faced Soviet women: “We’re practicing our smile school since I’ve been here, aren’t we? We’re learning how to smile with our lips closed, our lips together, and then with our lips together and a nod.”
We can see her confusion as she looks out at these women whose hardships she couldn’t begin to understand. With the aid of a translator, she continues: “Did you have a good time? Show me by smiling and nodding. How does your skin feel?”
Rows of Russian women lift their hands to appraisingly touch their own faces, but you already know how their story ends. It ends in misery and disappointment. More than the internecine violence even, Russian society exhibits the most degrading, sexist, appalling behavior I’ve ever seen. Check out this 45-minute documentary, if you don’t believe me.
Watch TraumaZone. I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject. And while you’re at it, remember that any country, even America, can always be destroyed from within.
Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
I've never been to Russia, but the country has always fascinated me. It seems like Exhibit A for what happens when a society lets its worst impulses run riot with no governor and no brakes. It's like 1984 taken to the worst possible degree. Now I'm going to have to watch Trauma Zone, even though my faith in humanity is already at rock bottom.
Ye gods!