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He Did It All Right!

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He Has Good Reason to Worry

Back in February 27, 2022, I submitted a blog post entitled Putin Screws the Pooch. In it, I wrote:

I cannot help but think that Vladimir Putin has made a serious misstep in his assumptions regarding Ukraine’s willingness to abide by his thuggish behavior. The Russians made the same assumptions that Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney made when we invaded Iraq in 2003: We were not in fact welcomed with flowers and candy, and, moreover, we are still there.

Now Putin is in a worse position politically than Nikita Khrushchev was in after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Not only has Putin failed in his attempt to walk all over Ukraine, but he had to put down a quasi-coup by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group mercenaries.

When one is a totalitarian dictator, one cannot afford to look weak. And Vladimir Putin at this time looks a lot weaker than Khrushchev did in 1964 when Brezhnev and Kosygin replaced him as top dog of the Soviet Union.

And how can you be top dog when you’ve screwed the pooch like Putin has?

Blaming Russian Literature for the Ukraine War!?

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Ukrainian Writer Oksana Zabushko

A week ago, I was reading a back issue of The Times Literary Supplement when I encountered an article that made me sit up straight. A Ukrainian author of some note—Oksana Zabushko—was blaming Russian literature and Russian culture for Putin’s invasion of her country.

While I regard Vladimir Putin personally responsible for the war, I do not go so far as to blame Russia as a country. Even when the man on the street in Petersburg or Moscow appears to back up Putin, I write that off as being careful what to tell a foreign journalist in view of the Draconian punishments in store for those not backing up Putin.

Why blame Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin, and Chekhov for an invasion that they would in all likelihood opposed? Ukraine is certainly suffering from the invasion, which is targeting innocent civilians. At the same time, Russia is suffering, perhaps equally, from a war Putin did not expect would drag on for so long. He did not anticipate the disproportionately high Russian casualty rates, the incompetence of his generals, the sudden backbone shown by NATO, the global isolation of Russia from the world economy, and the disinclination of young Russian men to fight the war.

As much as I loathe Putin, I continue to read Russian literature and see Russian films. Although most of my fellow Americans avoid Russian literature like the plague, I think it is one of the great world literatures. Currently, I am reading a book of essays by Polina Barskova about the German siege of Leningrad during World War Two.

When Russia invaded Ukraine last February, I didn’t stop reading Russian literature. Instead, I made a point of adding more Ukrainian literature to my TBR (To Be Read) pile—including Oksana Zabushko herself, who is a pretty good author herself. Even when she makes an error in judgment.

He’ll Probably Get Away With It

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Vladimir Putin Shows Us He’s a Man’s Man

Vladimir Putin Shows Us He’s a Man’s Man

As far as the Crime of the Crimea is concerned, Vladimir Putin will probably not only get away with it: He’ll come out ahead in the hearts and minds of the Russian voters. He stood up for the poor Russian majority in the Crimea, where they were being harassed by Ukrainian thugs, such as the notorious Svoboda Party skinheads, who are actually part of the government in Kiev.

We are dealing with a part of the world where good guys are few and far between. All the leaders of the Ukraine, including the somewhat cute Yulia Tymoshenko, were corrupt to varying degrees, with the deposed Viktor Yanukovych bidding fair to be the worst. Admittedly, we’re not talking about people who are as bad-ass as Putin himself. (If you want some background about Putin’s crimes, read whatever you can find by Anna Politkovskaya, the Novaya Gazeta reporter who investigated the Chechen War and who Putin had assassinated at the door of her flat.)

If you go back a few years to the Second World War, you will see some strange things happening: there were guerrillas who were simultaneously fighting Hitler and Stalin, and conducting their own pogroms just for fun. (These are the goons who morphed into the Svoboda Party.)

So was it “right” for Russia to annex the Crimea? Strictly speaking, no. But then, the Crimea was a gift to the Ukrainian SSR from Nikita Khrushchev, himself a Ukrainian, some fifty years ago. Before then? It was a part of Russia. Demographically, it’s heavily Russian; so it was perhaps inevitable. But do I think well of Putin for pulling his strong man act? Not really, he is to my mind a contemptible cur, a murderer at arm’s length, and quite possibly a Dick Tracy villain. (But then, that is true of many of our politicians as well, no?)

One final note: Two days of a run-up in the stock markets of Europe and the United States indicates to me that most of the talk about sanctions is pure swamp gas. It would only strengthen Putin.