Russia, Land of the ... what?

 

Moscow skyline

Do we all have shackled streaks of cruelty lurking in our deepest selves? Is war capable of breaking the chains that hold the tiger down in peace time? A friend who did some prison chaplaincy before becoming a pastor remarked to me that what struck him was how similar the murderers were to himself, or "there but for the grace of circumstance, go I."

    In the Russian Revolution and through WWII, innocents were made to suffer grievously at the hands of Russian soldiers: in Ukraine, in Germany in its retreat. The pattern is being repeated; some of the most virulent victimizing being reserved for Ukrainian cousins. Why has that been the case? Why is it the case again?

There's a considerable body of opinion that NATO--the West--is responsible for the current debacle, and certainly their mistakes vis-e-vis Russia must be called out. But to excuse Russia's destruction of Ukraine on the West's failure to do what it should have is playground, "he hit me first," logic.

I find it unsurprising that the worshippers of Donald Trump would be first in line to eulogize Putin; If you follow a dictator who possesses hypersonic nuclear weapons, you can beat up and hog tie the rest of the world. You be like, THE WINNER.

    A superman-dictator knows how to release the tiger!

But what of the Russian citizenry generally? Have they got "the government they deserve," as the saying goes? Without some historical and current familiarity with the Russian entity, simplistic pronouncements on these questions persist. (The same is true of the USA, Britain, France and Canada, actually.) The brutal overthrow of the first "oligarchy," the Romanovs, is just over 100 years in the past; the Russian people are technically, artistically, commercially as advanced as any country in the world; the nation is so vast that when the sun sets in the west, it has already risen in the east.

St. Basil's Catheral, Red Square, Moscow

The combination of many influences has produced in Russia both a persecution complex and an air of defensive superiority, and its history and geography are foundational to a legacy of great writing, great art, great ballet, technical know-how … and, unfortunately, a tendency to be vulnerable to manipulation where prospects of conquest are offered.

Tsar Nicholas along with his entire family were executed by firing squad; Hitler shot himself in shame in his bunker; two days earlier, Mussolini had been executed by a citizen, his desecrated body hung upside-down in the public square in Milan for days. Abe Lincoln and JFK were assassinated by citizens, and I myself am not feeling that great these days...

… I've no idea what point I was planning to make here; perhaps you do?