Recently in Russia Category

Speaking of political gossip, Bill Clinton dropped a bomb on writer Taylor Branch:

He also relayed how Boris Yeltsin's late-night drinking during a visit to Washington in 1995 nearly created an international incident. The Russian president was staying at Blair House, the government guest quarters. Late at night, Clinton told Branch, Secret Service agents found Yeltsin clad only in his underwear, standing alone on Pennsylvania Avenue and trying to hail a cab. He wanted a pizza, he told them, his words slurring.

The next night, Yeltsin eluded security forces again when he climbed down back stairs to the Blair House basement. A building guard took Yeltsin for a drunken intruder until Russian and U.S. agents arrived on the scene and rescued him.

Can you imagine? And some Americans wonder why the Russians appreciate Putin.

Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt reports that Russia is literally drinking itself into oblivion. Aside from the collapsing birth rate Excerpt:

No literate and urban society in the modern world faces a risk of deaths from injuries comparable to the one that Russia experiences.

Russia's patterns of death from injury and violence (by whatever provenance) are so extreme and brutal that they invite comparison only with the most tormented spots on the face of the planet today. The five places estimated to be roughly in the same league as Russia as of 2002 were Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. To go by its level of mortality injury alone, Russia looks not like an emerging middle-income market economy at peace, but rather like an impoverished sub-Saharan conflict or post-conflict society.

Taken together, then, deaths from cardiovascular disease and from injuries and poisoning have evidently been the main drivers of modern Russia's strange upsurge in premature mortality and its broad, prolonged retrogression in public health conditions. One final factor that is intimately associated with both of these causes of mortality is alcohol abuse.

Unlike drinking patterns prevalent in, say, Mediterranean regions--where wine is regarded as an elixir for enhancing conversation over meals and other social gatherings, and where public drunkenness carries an embarrassing stigma--mind-numbing, stupefying binge drinking of hard spirits is an accepted norm in Russia and greatly increases the danger of fatal injury through falls, traffic accidents, violent confrontations, homicide, suicide, and so on. Further, extreme binge drinking (especially of hard spirits) is associated with stress on the cardiovascular system and heightened risk of CVD mortality.

How many Russians are actually drinkers, and how heavily do they actually drink? Officially, Russia classifies some 7 million out of roughly 120 million persons over 15 years of age, or roughly 6 percent of its adult population, as heavy drinkers. But the numbers are surely higher than this. According to data compiled by the World Health Organization, as of 2003 Russia was Europe's heaviest per capita spirits consumer; its reported hard liquor consumption was over four times as high as Portugal's, three times that of Germany or Spain, and over two and a half times higher than that of France.

Yet even these numbers may substantially understate hard spirit use in Russia, since the WHO figures follow only the retail sale of hard liquor. But samogon--home-brew, or "moonshine"--is, according to some Russian researchers, a huge component of the country's overall intake. Professor Alexander Nemstov, perhaps Russia's leading specialist in this area, argues that Russia's adult population--women as well as men--puts down the equivalent of a bottle of vodka per week.

Eberstadt points out that while European nations are suffering similar collapses in population, and a rise in illegitimate births, they live in prosperity, with strong guarantees of material care for their populations. Not so in Russia. Putin's ambitions for Russia's resurrection don't factor in the disastrous fact that there won't be enough people around to accomplish what he hopes for.

Dmitri Rogozin, Russia's ambassador to NATO:

Until things get really tough, they are going to keep pretending that Russia is their opponent. I think that in the XXI century, the real threat is posed by a certain bunch of people who think that you and I are second-class people. Those close-minded people simply don't recognize our right to live. They don't care who they are dealing with - Russians, Jews, Tatars, French, or British, or whoever, - they are all the same to them. To them, we are just a worthless civilization that must be destroyed. Let's hope our Western counterparts realise that those guys threaten us all in equal measure and that this plague advancing on the European continent will engulf us while we are all arguing. Today, we talk about existing threats such as terrorism, extremism (political or religious), drug trafficking, and piracy.

As for piracy, there are pirates rampant in Somalia, and tomorrow, I think, the entire African coast will be swarming with pirates, and there will not be enough warships to keep them at bay. There is an enormous distance between Europe and the Third World. There is a new civilization emerging in the Third World that thinks that the white, northern hemisphere has always oppressed it and must therefore fall at its feet now. This is very serious

If the northern civilization wants to protect itself, it must be united: America, the European Union, and Russia. If they are not together, they will be defeated one by one.

Hmm. "Northern Civilization" = the West + the Orthodox lands. America's relationship with China will of necessity be the most important one to Obama and likely his successor too. But in the long run (that is, this century), there is no reason for Russia and the US to be at odds, and real cultural reasons for us to be more closely united than we now are -- especially given the steep projected decline in European and Russian populations.

My column from Sunday's Dallas Morning News discusses the unwisdom of the US getting drawn into war-fighting on Russia's periphery, and raises Dr. Bacevich's point that the American people are unrealistic about what the US military can and should be asked to do. It concludes like this:

We are all Georgians now, said John McCain, whose approach to the crisis with Russia differs from his opponent's chiefly in vehemence. Most Americans endorse that confrontational stance. Note that less than 1 percent of Americans serve in the military, which would have to do the fighting and dying should the tie-eating Thomas Jefferson of Tbilisi decide to keep poking the nuclear-armed Russian bear. That's not a coincidence.

The hate mail I got off this column all reads more of less like this one:

I hoped that you were the one conservative columnist on the DMN. After reading your column on Russian genocide in Georgia and your praise of KGB Putin Stalinist punk,i've changed my mind. A "must see television interview with far left Bill Moyers?"No thanks, Dreher. What I would like to see is a trio of F22's blowing those smoke belching T72's off the road. I'm sure most Americans don't appreciate big bad Russia shooting elderly people in the back of the head. Read "The Rape of Berlin." Whining pacifists make me ill.

Or this gem:

Coming from a family of Southern men that stand for America I can only ask that you start each commentary with the note that few people agree with you and you speak neither for the Dallas Community or anyone that loves this country. That having been said It seems you know nothing of world politics and a lot about being a cowardly carpet bagger. For those of us that have travelled extensively and have friends, family and associates in Georgia, Ukraine and other Soviet Era countries I assure you the threat to them (and us) is real. Because of that I trust you will use your influence at the paper to write meaningful articles about the re-emergence of a world threat and less time writing and portraying yourself (and by implication all Dallas Citizens) as sniffling cowards more afraid of standing up for ourselves (and others) who are threatened and bullied by the "Putin's" of the world. We need fewer people like you and more men that will stand for freedom and justice. Cory p.s. I'm copying the newspaper editor because I want him to know I cancelled my subscription today. When he replaces you with someone that loves this country I'll re-start my subscription.

J-I-N-G-O, and Jingo was his name-o...

Spengler's latest column about Vladimir Putin exemplifies why I love reading him. Excerpt:

The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards. A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry. The Russians cannot believe that the Americans are as stupid as they look, and conclude that Washington wants to destroy them. That is what the informed Russian public believes, judging from last week's postings on web forums, including this writer's own.

These perceptions are dangerous because they do not stem from propaganda, but from a difference in existential vantage point. ...

More:

Again, the Russians misjudge American stupidity. Former president Ronald Reagan used to say that if there was a pile of manure, it must mean there was a pony around somewhere. His epigones have trouble distinguishing the pony from the manure pile. The ideological reflex for promoting democracy dominates the George W Bush administration to the point that some of its senior people hold their noses and pretend that Kosovo, Ukraine and Georgia are the genuine article.

Think of it this way: Russia is playing chess, while the Americans are playing Monopoly. What Americans understand by "war games" is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers' pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

America's idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a "moderate Muslim" government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.

Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces: everything on the periphery combines to control the center of the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent's king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the individual pieces on the board. It is as stupid as that. But there is another difference: the Americans are playing chess for career and perceived advantage. Russia is playing for its life, like Ingmar Bergman's crusader in The Seventh Seal.

Read the whole thing. As I write, we still don't know who Obama's running mate will be, but the buzz is thick around Joe Biden. Whom Obama recently praised for pitching a $1 billion "humanitarian" aid package to Georgia. Stunningly stupid -- and he's better than his counterparts among the Republicans!