Friday, August 8, 2014

AUGUST MEDITATIONS: POOR RUSSIA, OR PUTIN’S COMPLAINT



Poor Russia! Look how Russia has been humiliated by the West when NATO expanded to include its erstwhile Warsaw Pact allies and its former Baltic possessions, not to mention the promise to bring Ukraine into the EU, thereby threatening the 1500 mile-long border Russia shares with Ukraine. Isn’t Russia vulnerable enough already! Besides, shouldn’t a former empire – 63% of Russians believe Russia is a “great power” – be  able to exercise its influence over the territory it used to control while an empire? How can the Americans and the Europeans be so callous with such a peace-loving, cooperative, exceedingly friendly – and great – nation? How could Russia not feel vulnerable and threatened by the rich and powerful West? Doesn't the West understand that Russia has been on its knees far too long and now must rise again? Besides, who can take Ukraine seriously as an independent state, especially with a third of its population speaking Russian?

These are, in a nutshell, the sentiments of those both outside and inside Russia who advocate humoring Vladimir Putin with regard to Ukraine. For home consumption, the Kremlin and its media toss out to red meat about the Nazi takeover of Ukraine and, in the words of the Speaker of the State Duma, Sergei Naryshkin, “the genocide of the Russian people” there.[1] The campaign for the dehumanization of the Ukrainians (“fascists,” “Nazis”) has been going on for months, including the WWI-style favorite propaganda myth of the Ukrainian soldiers crucifying a Russian child in Slaviansk. The report appeared on Channel 1 on July 12 and is still there:  http://www.1tv.ru/news/world/262978.

Much of this rhetoric is predicated on the alleged deep, unbridgeable antagonism between Russia and the West. But first of all, Russia v. the West is a false dichotomy and Russia v. the EU, even more so. None of the EU member nations, separately or together, are interested in territorial expansion into Eurasia, nor NATO whose primary function has been to guarantee Europe’s post-WWII borders, nor its leading member, the United States. Putin himself has repeatedly proclaimed Russia to be a European power and seemed committed to this 300-year-old vision until he began to pivot towards Russian nationalism in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq. Still, the ambiguity persisted with profound political and economic implications. The difficulties the EU has been having with the sanctions in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea shows the high degree of Russia's integration into the web of the EU economic and cultural relations. Visa-free travel for Russians to the EU was about to be negotiated when the Crimea debacle put everything on hold. Indeed, by historical reckoning, Russia's integration into the West since the fall of communism has been truly fast-track and, as it appeared, perhaps, a little too fast-track for the EU, given its long hesitation in responding to Russia’s blunt aggression in Ukraine.  

But what about the issue of NATO expansion? When I was in Moscow in June, a die-hard Putin opponent told me he was sure that US and/or NATO had been planning to establish a military base in the Crimea and Russia’s take-over of the peninsula was meant to prevent it. I did my research. Apparently, the US requested a few years ago to be integrated into the old Soviet early warning system for missile defense against Iranian ballistic missiles. It is this request that has been morphed by the Russian propaganda machine into a menacing American plan to establish a military base on the Crimean peninsula. I have no doubt that a satisfactory arrangement could have been reached to allay Russia’s fears that the anti-missile defense system, still in the works, targeted at Iran, was “dual-use” and could have been pointed at Russia.

But what about the more general argument that seems intuitively right: Shouldn’t Russia feel legitimately threatened, as it is surrounded by NATO members? Seen from the United States (except through Sarah Palin’s windows), Russia may not loom too large (compare the 2013 US military budget of $640 billion to Russia’s $88 billion); however, seen from Western Europe, Russia’s might is far more menacing (Russia spends about twice as much on the military as do France, the UK, or Germany). Russia, in fact, is the unrivalled European superpower in the military, nuclear, and, increasingly important, the hydro-carbon sense. Such a high-profile military posture is pretty hard to maintain while standing on one’s knees. Furthermore, let us not forget that for half a century following WWII, when the Russians – or, rather, their leaders – held their heads high (under Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko), Russia’s legal antecedent, the USSR, oppressed its citizens and turned the countries of East-Central Europe into de-facto colonies. Who can, then, blame Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, as well as the Baltic states that had been occupied by the Soviets under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, for scrambling to assert their national sovereignty at the first historical opportunity and securing their statehood by joining NATO and the EU? Is there any rational reason for Russia to think that these nations are poised to start nibbling at Russia’s territory?

That there is no NATO threat to Russia should have become obvious even to the most thick-headed analyst in the wake of the Georgia War of August 2008. Resulting in loss of territory for Georgia, this conflict demonstrated that no outside power had the inclination (some say the ability) to challenge Russia in Russia’s own back yard, Senator McCain’s hollow saber rattling notwithstanding. In fact, the opposite argument has been legitimately made: the West’s demure reaction to Russia’s shenanigans in Georgia was realistic -- and a singular factor in Putin’s calculation when he decided to move into Crimea.  Today, according to NATO’s internal documents, disclosed in Der Spiegel on 19 May 2014, NATO lacks the ability to defend its members among the Baltic states, should Russia choose to invade them (http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/ukraine-crisis-shows-up-cracks-in-nato-a-970248.html).
  
The threat to Russia from the West, then, is literally a travesty: the reverse is true, if one understands “the West” as a stable political order that has governed European borders since WWII and, by mutual consent, since the collapse of communism. The "threat from the West" is nothing but a propaganda myth, a dusted-off  old Soviet saw about "capitalist encirclement" and the looming external enemy. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mikhail Gorbachev, Edward Shervadnadze and Alexander Yakovlev did a lot to demystify it but, apparently, not enough.

Now, as under communism, this propaganda assault on the people, amplified by the craven, state-controlled Russian media (with very few digital media exceptions) is meant to shore up the legitimacy of the political class and its leader, who have proven incapable of setting their country on a course that would diminish its monumental corruption and narcotic dependency on the export of hydro-carbons. As a result, Putin and his United Russia Party, the political machine he jerry-rigged from the rubble of the Soviet one-party national-security state, are feeling vulnerable. The world has changed, and Russia’s new cosmopolitan elite, the so-called creative class, that has arisen since the collapse of the Soviet Union and has established itself economically in the prosperous oil-rich Russia, instinctively resists Putin’s authoritarian and increasingly ineffective rule. One common denominator of their protests was their sense humiliation at the corrupt political process, a violation of their citizenship. After their protest demonstrations of 2011 and 2012, Putin turned away from this natural constituency for a modernizing leader, instead embracing the nationalism of the “silent majority” – populist, socially conservative, sanctimonious, and not infrequently chauvinistic. This must have been a desperate move on the part of the man who had previously condemned Russian chauvinism as a dangerous force that might lead to the break-up of the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Russian Federation. A student of history, Putin has to be aware that the Russian empire of the Romanovs fell, in part, because of the autocracy’s embrace of exclusive Russian nationalism. Is today's Russia next?

No need, then, to feel sorry for Russia or the Russians as victims of the powerful West. Rather, as throughout much of Russia’s history, Russians continue to be the victims – surely undeservedly – of their own government. True, there are many Russians, affected by the imperial visions of the Kremlin propaganda machine, who have been assiduously imagining themselves standing on their knees under the diktat of the evil West. Even under the best conditions of partnership, according to some of them, the West has treated Russia as a second-class citizen in the world community. This is what Tony Blair picked up during his friendship with Putin in the early 2000s: “Vladimir later came to believe that the Americans did not give him his due place (my italics, GF). Worse, he saw them circling Russia with Western-supporting 'democracies' who were going to be hostile to Russian interests.”[2] In a recent interview, Putin’s crony, billionaire Timchenko, echoed such sentiments and declared that his Western business partners had always treated him as “second league.” Complaints such as these, needless to say, involve what Max Weber called “the prestige of great powers,” ever hungry for self-aggrandizement and extra recognition, not the dignity of individual citizens. The former must have the pyramids and the most fearsome weapons; the latter, property and respect.


Few will deny that the average middle-class Russian has been enjoying the best standard of living in all of Russia's history, replete with vacations abroad, separate apartments, country dachas, and late-model German, French, and Japanese automobiles. Aleksander Yakovlev used to say that Soviet citizens could not feel free because they did not own any property, for him the necessary condition of freedom. By this token, many of his compatriots may feel free these days and indeed they do hold their heads high. For years now, my undergraduate students at Stanford who havd gone to Moscow to study alongside their Russian counterparts have complained that they felt a bit diminished by their colleagues’ off-campus spending habits. Yes, these are elite students, but I also remember my Stanford undergraduates traveling to study in Russia in the 1980s and telling me how shocked they were by the limited horizons and economic insecurity of their Russian counterparts. The 1980s are long gone! In my seven days of pounding the pavement in Moscow (after a twelve-year absence), I was able to spot only one Russian Zhiguli sedan, the most ubiquitous vehicle in Moscow circa 2002, but I noticed that Bentley has a  dealership in the, yes, Revolution Square next to the Kremlin (in case you are wondering, you can get one, slightly used, for just half a million dollars). Luxury cars aside, as individuals, middle-class Russians feel as proud and dignified as at any time since 1917, whatever their politics. It is the political class that runs the country and its leader Putin, a deeply corrupt regime, presiding over a profoundly corrupt bureaucracy, who feel the need to buck up their sagging prestige with a “little victorious war” while conjuring up the spectre of the big bad US and NATO and the “fascist” Ukraine. 

Surely, there may be an occasional clash of interests over this or that tariff or import/export issues, but there has not been a fundamental antagonism between Russia and its Western partners. Quite the opposite. The new, post–Communist Russia was embraced by the West, cautiously, to be sure, but embraced nonetheless, as well as aided considerably by governments and NGOs as it struggled with the transition from Communism. It was the United States, to use just one example, that was the strongest supporter of Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

The benign international climate, perhaps, the most benign in all of Russia’s history, the absence of actual military threat from the West or elsewhere, and Russia’s deep integration into the EU seem to have been taken by Putin’s government for granted while Russia had a free hand in preventing a newly independent nation from electing the government it likes and the form of economic modernization it chooses. This is what happened in Ukraine (and before it, in Georgia). By some accounts, Putin's decision to annex Crimea was an intemperate reaction to the sudden resignation of Ukraine’s president after months and months of popular protests against him. A sly tactical move taking advantage of Ukraine’s weak care-taker government, the annexation of Crimea was strategically an irrational act: it produced the opposite effect of anything one could wish for one’s own country – it diminished rather than enhanced Russia’s security by turning the world’s most powerful nations, economically and militarily, against Russia. But above all, it united  against Putin the politically and ethically diverse, as well as historically fractious, Ukraine and forced the EU states, ever a quarrelsome lot, to step back and agree, at last, on some concerted action to raise the stakes for Putin in his “big game” and to force him to reconsider his policies. After all, who wants a super-power bully in the EU's own back yard, a bully on the scale of a Stalin or a Hitler? With Western support for Ukraine now assured, Putin's adventure is liable to result in continuing turmoil on Russia’s borders that Putin himself may not be able to control – and a substantial strengthening of NATO’s Eastern and Northern borders. Poland used to have about a dozen US soldiers stationed on its soil prior to the annexation of Crimea. There are now about 500 US and NATO troops there and more are coming.

The analogy with Hitler's Germany and the 1930s has been surfacing repeatedly since the annexation of Crimea (first made on 1 March 2014 by Professor Andrei Zubov of the prestigious Moscow Institute of International Relations). Well, similarities stare us in the face. The Germans, some Germans, did feel sorry for themselves. To paraphrase the rhetoric of the day: Oh poor Germans! The Treaty of Versailles brought our proud nation to its knees! And now Germans must rise! Hitler saw to it. Germany got up and raised its head. This rising from the knees began in March 1936 with the re-militarization of the Rhineland in direct violation of the treaties of Versailles and Locarno. Putin’s annexation of Crimea invites itself as an analogy: he violated the solemn agreement made by Russia, Great Britain, and the United States with Ukraine which agreed to get rid of its nuclear weapons in exchange for the affirmation of the inviolability of its present borders (The Budapest Memorandum of December 1994). Back in 1936, no significant reaction followed from the international community, except for phony outrage while Hitler’s action merited an iron-fisted push-back. This was appeasement Act 1. Two years later, Hitler swallowed Austria. No reaction followed. That was appeasement Act 2. The analogy today would be the take-over of Eastern Ukraine by the Russian-sponsored irregulars, who have their sights set on a still larger chunk, the entire “Novorossia,” including Odessa. Act 3 was, of course, the Munich Agreement and the resulting fall of Czechoslovakia – the archetypal appeasement. Here we must gasp at the analogy: the Munich moment was followed by WWII; further appeasement of Putin raises the spectre of WIII.

To be sure, analogies are imprecise, which is why they are analogies, not equivalences. Putin is no Hitler. In Putin's case, what seems to be driving his expansionist agenda is not so much the wounded pride of the son of a former Great Empire (there is that, too, and yes, it hurts), but his fear for his own position as a head of state with his apparent aspirations for a life-time tenure. Back in 2011-12, when he realized in the wake of the shamelessly rigged parliamentary elections that he no longer enjoyed political support among the professional and cultural elite of the capitals (the cosmopolitans), he turned to the anti-cosmopolitan silent majority. Members of this constituency are far easier to convince of the just causes for their resentments (xenophobia, ethnic prejudice), as they have been sidelined during Russia's most recent spurt of modernization (a common enough phenomenon in the age of globalization and all too familiar to us in the United States – just watch Fox News). Putin spoke to them in language they could well understand, ratcheting up the rhetoric of incitement: first, the persecution of Pussy Riot, then the jailing of the demonstrators in the 2011 and 2012 protest rallies, and now the crescendo proclaiming Ukraine a nest of fascists.

Of course, if you happen to run into Putin in your neighborhood bar and ask him, why, Vladimir, why did you do it? He would say he was afraid, no, not for himself, but for Russia, lest it disintegrate in a political free-for-all, and for that reason and it alone, he had to tighten the screws and start the little bloody war. But motivations, ultimately, are beside the point. A nationalist bully is a nationalist bully - whether because of the “stolen victory” in the Great War (Hitler’s well-known beef) or the insufficient magnanimity on the part of the Cold War victors (Putin’s whine). For unless a bully is stopped right away, his appetite will grow as it feeds on appeasement. To wit, unless Putin is stopped through diplomacy and other forms of soft power, including sanctions, we – meaning all of us here and in Russia -- will soon be staring into the new guns of August, and this is not a prospect that any of us will enjoy.

August 7, 2014
Berkeley-Stanford




[1] Naryshkin’s speech in Belgrade on 5 May of this year.
[2] Tony Blair, A Journey: My Political Life (Knopf Vintage Canada: Toronto, 2010).

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

The Kitchen Sisters and I







Some time a year a go, I received a call from Davia Nelson, one of the famous Kitchen Sisters, whom I had met earlier while having drinks with our mutual friend Tom Luddy (yes, at Chez Panisse, of course). Davia wanted to do a whole program on the Soviet Kitchen, especially the Soviet kitchen as the locus of civil society in the late Soviet Union. I have heard their features before, and I loved them but it never occurred to me that something this colorful could be done with my "native realm."
Although I like cooking and at a certain point in my life spent quite a bit of time learning Chinese and French cuisine, I had never thought about the kitchen and food as a significant subject in Soviet history, even Soviet cultural history. A good conversation piece, a cute object of the ambivalent Soviet nostalgia, a subject for jokes, perhaps even a shibboleth for the Soviet cognoscenti, but an object of serious study? Well, I scratched the surface and saw -- gold! I realized that my own and at the time inexplicable obsession with learning to cook Chinese, French and Italian dishes had to do with my deep desire to create a distance between  my Soviet past and myself.

Yes, my wife was an American, a New Yorker, I had been living in the US since the fall of 1971 and have been an American since 1974, went to Cal, taught at Stanford since 1977, and yet I now realize that my migration had not been complete without a retreading, so to speak, of my alimentary tract with the tastes, flavors, and textures of non-Soviet cooking. I emphasize Soviet because I love Russian food -- caviar, lox, herring, various salads, bliny, milk products, pickled mushroom, cabbage, apples, and its Georgian/Armenian/Azeri iterations of the Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean dishes.

To make a long story short, I started reading up on the history of Soviet food since 1917 and the origins of ОБЩЕПИТ (Communal Food Industry). A whole new angle of the Russian experience began to come into view: what happened after the whole way of life was destroyed in the 1917 revolution and the civil war that followed, what replaced the tavern (кабак, трактир), the diner, the restaurant, how the kitchen evolved, how the scientific Soviet "diets" emerged, and how everything changed once again with the Stalin revolution of 1929 when all private and semiprivate little shops and eateries were shut down practically overnight, and the country moved toward the centralized industrial, American-style food production. It was so interesting that I started writing up on the subject.

Before long, Davia dropped by, and we spent a couple of hours talking about food and Soviet and Russian history and how it offered a fascinating view, but also the feel of what Soviet life was like. She had her tape recorder on. A year later, we got together for breakfast of lox and bagels (no bagels but the "crackles" from the Cheese Board Collective in Berkeley) and listened to the incredible feature on the communal kitchens in the Soviet Union that she and her "kitchen sister" Nikki Silver produced. Three cheers for the Kitchen Sisters!

Next week the NPR Morning Edition will be running a follow–up feature, "The Dissident Kitchens," that I very much look forward to. In the meantime, you can hear the fabulous "Communal Kitchens" at this NPR URL:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/05/20/314054405/how-russias-shared-kitchens-helped-shape-soviet-politics

"Dissident Kitchens" broadcast of May 27 is here:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/05/27/314961287/how-soviet-kitchens-became-hotbeds-of-dissent-and-culture


20 and 27 May 2014
Berkeley

Thursday, April 24, 2014

LEO TOLSTOY, MAX WEBER, LOVE, AND WAR (Introduction to a Podcast)

Entitled Opinions (About Life and Literature) has just released a podcast of my conversation with Robert Harrison about Tolstoy and Max Weber. These two names - one, perhaps the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century, the other, the father of modern sociology - rarely appear in one sentence. They should.

During the winter quarter, I taught a seminar at Stanford called "Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Social Thought of Its Time." We look at Tolstoy great, perhaps, the greatest novel as a kind of an upside-down Noah's Ark transporting us from the optimistic shores of nineteenth century onto the shores of the twentieth - the age shrouded in grand illusions but serving up wars, revolutions, the gulags, the holocausts, as well as the prospect of total annihilation of humanity... Yes, I sigh, stay tuned...

Like all great works, Tolstoy's was in dialogue with his contemporary master thinkers, and I structured the course in such a way that after immersing ourselves in the novel for three weeks, after following all the love and the heart break, the ball rooms and the salons, the barn yard and the races, the meadows and the railroad tracks, after figuring out how Tolstoy could produce a hybrid of Jane Austen and Gustav Flaubert, after grasping the effect that the Crimean War and the Great Reforms had on Russia, we could start re-reading the novel yet again.

Week after week, we paused over a section to catch the echoes of Plato (on love), Freud (on dreams and the unconscious), Marx (political economy), John Stuart Mill (women's emancipation), Nietzsche (ethics, truth, and power), Emile Durkheim (community and religion) and, as a culmination, the response of a thinker who was one of the keenest readers of Tolstoy and one who put together systematically all of the above aspects of the modern condition - Max Weber.

Weber knew Russian (he learned it to follow the events of the Russian 1905 revolution). He even thought that if a new world religion were to arise in the modern world (a small chance), it would most likely happen in Russia. In part, this was due to Russia's unfinished, hybrid modernization, combining extremes of traditionalism and modernity, stemming from  Russia's separation from the rationalism of Western Christianity transformed by Protestantism and Counter-Reformation that Russia had not experienced. No doubt, his reading of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had a lot to do with this conclusion as well.

But I believe that it must have been the sociological sophistication of Tolstoy's genius, that drew him ever deeper into Tolstoy's art. Weber was captivated by Tolstoy, and he spoke about this to his students after the end of the Great War in a public address that we know as "Scholarship as a Vocation" (parts of it were "recycled" from the seminal 1916 essay “Religious Rejection of the World and Their Directions,” aka Reflections on Stages and Directions of Religious Rejection of the World). In "Scholarship as a Vocation," the address the father of sociology was offering the younger generation, he concedes that social science cannot find an adequate answer to Tolstoy's killer question "what is a good life," even though, it is "the most important question for sociology." However, what social science can do instead, is to "help sort it all out." For the final two weeks of the seminar, we let Max Weber guide us, as we attempted to sort out Tolstoy's conundrum.

What, then, is a good life? Tolstoy thought he had figured it out. As we know, in the course of writing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy underwent a conversion, and the novel, written over four years, served him during this time as a kind of a diary. Especially the last part of Anna Karenina, Book Eight, resonates with what Tolstoy understood as his new understanding of life following his "conversion" - a turn to what came to be known as Tolstoyanism, or in Russian, tolstovstvo. Filled with new insight and donning the mantle of a prophet, the author of Anna Karenina felt inspired to re-write, not just the ending of his novel, but the New Testament! His new Gospel (and he referred to it as "my Gospel") affirmed without compromise a distilled, rationalized Christian ethic of love (love thy neighbor as you would yourself, turn the other cheek); what it denounced was the modern civilization, in particular, the modern state and society that he saw as vehicles for spreading desire, carnality, and violence, be it under the guise of the cult of romance, the veneration of the arts, emancipation or women, general progress, nationalism, communism, capitalism, or other modern ideology.

This is why the main emphasis in Anna Karenina falls on a vehicle - the locomotive. Generally, it serves as a key symbol, the metaphor and the allegory for, progress. Tolstoy inverted it, making it a symbol and an allegory for the perdition awaiting human beings on the path of modernity.  The novel's love story, by comparison, the tragic romance of Anna and Vronsky, as the reader must realize, is nothing but a honey trap meant to deliver the lovers to modern hell. As inevitably as carnal love fades away and disappears altogether in the novel, its other side - aggression, violence and war - comes to the fore. Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents" comes to mind. But Weber's thought, too, resonates with Tolstoy's, and so at a deeper level. "The more sublimated it is," Weber wrote about the erotic passion of the modern sophisticated sort, "the more brutal" it is. And before you stop to catch your breath, Weber goes on to define erotic love as "the most intimate coercion of the soul of the less brutal partner."

According to Marian Weber's biography of her late husband, Weber was planning a book on Tolstoy, and I believe that his famous 1916 long essay ("Zwischenbetrachungen" or "Reflections") may have been, apart from other things, a sketching out of his own dialogue with the prophet and last author of Anna Karenina. His several men references to Tolstoy's work, the essay's structure, and its very title  - Reflections on Stages and Directions of Religious Rejection of the World - compel us to read Tolstoy and Weber together.

My friend and Stanford colleague Professor Robert Harrison, who has been running Stanford's radio show, has been asking me to do a show on Tolstoy for a few years now. Over the last few years, we've had coffees and lunches and talked about the subject. Finally, the stars aligned perfectly: I had just finished the course, Robert had an opening in his schedule. We pounced. You can now hear this conversation as a podcast on the the Entitled Opinions site: GrishaFreidin on Leo Tolstoy

My deep gratitude to Robert Harrison. I am proud and honored to be among his interlocutors.

24 April 2014
Berkeley

PS. He and I also did a show on Isaac Babel that you can listen to here:
Professor Gregory Freidin on Isaac Babel


Monday, March 3, 2014

PUTIN'S BUBBLE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT


Many who have held supreme power recall the sense of finding themselves inside an invisible but impenetrable bubble. Boris Yeltsin in his memoirs complained about what he called a “rubber balloon,” and a friend of mine, who was once close to Mikhail Gorbachev, described to me his encounters with the USSR's last president in almost the same words. President Clinton, like Yeltsin, complained about this effect. It is difficult to get a sensible picture of the world when you are surrounded day after day, year after year by a circle of approval-seeking advisors. Bad enough in the US, imagine how much worse it must be in Russia where power is traditionally centralized and concentrated in the top executive. Fortunately, the US President is limited to only two terms.

If Yeltsin’s bubble was made out of some invisible rubber, Putin’s, especially after the Olympics in Sochi, is made of far sturdier and more modern stuff. I imagine an array of life-like screens flashing nightmare scenes of victimized and humiliated compatriots, alternating with the Russian version of The Triumph of the Will (Bondarchuk’s recent Stalingrad or some grandiloquent film epic by Nikita Mikhalkov).  For fourteen years Putin identified his own person with the destiny of Russia, and this is not counting his previous career of service under oath in the Services. Now he finds himself caged in his own presidential bubble – a humiliated superman of Russia – and is very hard for anyone to reach.

His friend and colleague on the political Olympus, Angela Merkel, tried. She called him. They talked. What of it? She later telephoned Obama and told him that she found Putin unreachable. Relying on a White House source in the know,  the NYT (03.02.14) cited Merkel as saying to Obama: “He is in another world.” How can we get him back ours?

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 comes to mind. How remarkable it is that Nikita Khrushchev had the presence
tof mind, inner courage, and some deep humanity that had somehow survived Stalin’s tutelage, to back off and step away from the brink. How equally remarkable that Jack Kennedy had the instinct to go against his advisors and to have the political courage and patience for defusing the crisis. Despite the obvious differences, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the Crimean crisis of its own day, though of course, much more dangerous in the short run. Russia felt encircled by the might of the US and its Western allies. In those days, before the Soviet ICBMs became truly operational, the US could reach Russia with bombers and rockets carrying nuclear charges (some were stationed a stone’s throw from Crimea in Turkey), and all the USSR had then was a strategic bomber that could reach the continental US but did not hold enough fuel to return home from its mission. Some general suggested to Khrushchev that it could land in Mexico after bombing the US, to which Khrushchev retorted with characteristic brash humor, saying something to the effect that Mexico wasn’t Russia’s mother-in-law. But of course, both Khrushchev and Kennedy, especially Kennedy, were only beginning their careers at the top – mere rookies compared to Putin with his fourteen years in the driver’s seat.

‘Travesty’ by Konstantin Altunin,
The main question is: how to shake Putin out of his bubble? During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a special role was given the secret back channels, and there was no direct line between the Kremlin and the White House. Now, of course, there is plenty – chat away! President Obama called Putin twice. Like teens in love, they spoke for two and a half hours in two days! Chancellor Merkel called Putin. They chatted for an hour. Nothing worked. Direct communication has failed. Clearly, Putin is convinced the West is inviting him to play the game with loaded dice, and should he agree, would cheat him  and then, his worst horror, given the latest homophobic legislation in Russia, will set him up, a bachelor, with some LGBT type…

Let us hope he is wrong on both counts. So, how can he be convinced that the West is not scheming to cheat him? Let us invite Russia to join NATO and EU. And perhaps, just to break the ice, Obama should solemnly promise Putin that he won’t have to have sex with a gay guy. Then, after all of this has been settled and the crisis diffused, the world should let Ukraine, its post-Soviet territorial integrity assured, to sort out its own maddening mess.

Copyright © 2014 by Gregory Freidin (gfreidin@stanford.edu)

PS.  "Travesty" by Konstantin Altunin shows President Putin wearing a tight-fitting slip and brushing the hair of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who is wearing knickers and a bra. The painting was seized at a gallery in St. Petersburg in August 2013.