Some countries do learn from past mistakes. Take for example Germany, blamed for two world wars and left in mostly ruins after the second one. Today most of its people (save for a few neo-Nazi types) have become quite satisfied with democracy where everyone can have a say without fear of arrest or being killed. They are part of a collective military defense that is treaty bound to protect their way of life. Today, Germans are about as pacifist a people as they come in this world. Of course it is probably useful to keep in “practice” to see if you still got what it takes when it actually comes time to join in that mutual defense.
Now let’s take another country, Russia for example. While we can speculate about the Chinese presence in this country, some of whom have been arrested for being part of “sleeper cells" stealing technological secrets while posing as “businessmen” or “students,” Russians have always seemed to be “apart.” Russian immigrants in this country seem to be self-conscious and conspiratorial, setting themselves apart, quite unlike South Asians who run businesses out in the open and are quite happy to take your money.
I once found a Russian language Yellow Pages in a Laundromat and thumbed through it; I couldn’t believe that here in King County there were so many hidden Russian businesses catering to the needs of the hidden Russian community. The Russian “mafia” also has a thriving business few talk about; I once worked at a sports apparel company when one morning we discovered a completely stripped car behind the building. One of my colleagues—a Polish immigrant—looked at it and said one word: “Russians.”
Russians do seem to be a paranoid bunch; yeah sure, I know that once upon a time Napoleon invaded Russia and Moscow was burned (probably by Russians), and later on by the Germans in two world wars, and many Russians were slaughtered in the latter. But so were the citizens of a lot of other countries—like Poland, for example, by both the Nazis and the Russians, and the Russians conducted their own mayhem when they plowed through Germany.
Today, Russians are acting out their paranoia on other countries, like, say, Ukraine which just wants the Russians to stop making threats against their sovereignty. If Russians are their “brothers,” then why don’t they act like one? Perhaps because they are only “half-brothers” and Russians feel they can beat on them just because they are smaller and need to take out their angst on someone.
But can this explain why Russians are peculiarly indifferent to the crimes committed by its government in their “name”? Have they no clue that the behavior of its government reflects on themselves as well? Today you hear people on the street mostly say one of two things: embarrassment about the way the war is going—and worse, belief that the government knows what the hell it’s doing. You don’t hear anything about all the soldiers who have died for an unjustified “cause,” or the Ukrainian civilians massacred. Of course who knows what people are saying behind closed doors, since thousands of people who have spoken out against the war have been arrested in the thousands.
Or found dead under “mysterious” circumstances. So let’s talk about that, since the “secret” killing of people perceived as enemies of the state in Russia has been an open secret in the country for a century. Beginning in 1921, the Soviets established laboratories especially to concoct poisons to kill those persons considered a threat to the government. Of course, what that government would be was still in question and the only tool at hand was to keep the Bolshevik “movement” alive before other forces “killed” it, and that meant by whatever means “necessary.”
We should remember that the intention of the Marxist movement was government by the “people”—the “proletariat”—and not by the few “elites” it eventually would become. But the closest that Marxism came to a theory of government was the Paris Commune, which lasted a few months in 1871; while it supported many progressive principles that today we take for granted, many of its members were keen on keeping power through violence, and the commune went down in a literal blaze of “glory” as it went down to defeat against government forces, leaving Paris in ruins.
That of course is not what the Soviet Union ended-up being, but rather a totalitarian state where few people had any rights. Of course there were those who favored government “by the people”—like, say, Leon Trotsky—and those people needed to be eliminated, because people like Stalin saw enemies everywhere and “the people” were not to be trusted; after all, they were too stupid and childlike to “govern” themselves.
Trotsky was murdered in faraway Mexico, so it was safe to employ an assassin to bludgeon him to death. During the “Great Purge,” those declared enemies of the state were simply rounded-up, and executed, with or without sham trials. But there were other people who could not be so easily done away without people being somewhat disturbed by it—say, for example, world-renowned novelists and poets. That is where places like Laboratory One came in, where secret experiments, often on human subjects in the Gulags, were conducted to create poisons that were “undetectable” or mimicked “natural” causes of death.
Among the victims of death under “mysterious” circumstances was the then famous genetics scientist Nikolai Koltsov, whose main crime was that he was an international embarrassment to the regime with his nonsense about eugenics and scientific racism, which to the “credit” of the Soviet regime it didn’t aspire to given the polyglot nature of the state. Meanwhile it was suspected that Nobel Prize for Literature nominee Maxim Gorky died from slow-acting poisoning because of his unconventional beliefs regarding the Stalinist regime. Religious leaders were not immune either; in 1947 an archbishop of the Russian Greek Catholic Church, Theodore Romzha, died from suspected poisoning. The church served mostly Ukrainian parishioners, and today it is still under a partial ban because of its “unorthodoxy.”
But the KGB is no longer in that business, the FSB is. We have seen numerous poisonings of Russian dissidents since Vladimir Putin took power, which should be no surprise since he is a former KGB and FSB agent and is aware of the uses of poison. Journalists like Anna Politkovskaya and Yuri Shchekochikhin, former FSB agent and whistleblower in exile Alexander Litvinenko, and liberal politician Vladimir Kara-Murza all died “mysteriously” of apparent poisoning. Others who have been poisoned but did not die are imprisoned anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny and former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.
But since it seems that poisoning isn’t always “reliable,” Putin and his FSB cronies have apparently decided that murder the old-fashioned way is the way to go, since Russians are seemingly immune to the effects of other people’s lives as long as it isn’t their own. The latest deliberate bombing of a residential apartment in southeastern Ukraine, killing three-dozen civilians, naturally elicited no protests in Russia, and is proof enough of that. I mean, Russian security forces killed hundreds of innocent Russian civilians just to get at a handful of Chechens, and the FSB was suspected of conducting “false flag” bombings of apartment buildings that killed hundreds, and still the Russian citizenry trusted that their leaders were doing “right.” Why should they care about the crimes against humanity committed by their war criminal leaders in the Ukraine? They have no “morality” left to spare anyways.
So today we see oligarchs, businessmen, politicians journalists and generals falling out of windows, committing suicide or first killing their wives and children, and then killing themselves, which The Atlantic calls “Sudden Death Syndrome” in Russia. In the past year there has been 23 such death, and probably more counting lesser-known individuals. Sausage oligarch and politician Pavel Antov fell out of a window in India, Sergey Protosenya allegedly axed to death his wife and daughter while on vacation in Spain before allegedly hanging himself; neither of those two governments thought the quotation marks around the word “coincidental” was big enough to question what exactly happened in those cases. A general in charge of tank production. Alexei Maslov, died mysteriously hours before a meeting with Putin was cancelled. “Coincidental” too?
The murder-suicide gig seems to be a popular way to lead to the demise of those deemed expendable; a more recent example is oil company executive Vladislav Avayev, whose inexplicable death could only be explained by his knowledge about “where the money went.” His wife and one of his daughters were found shot to death along with him. Now why would oligarchs who have money want to just kill themselves and their families? I suspect that initially, these family members were witnesses who needed to be silenced, but once the Russian public seemed not to be concerned about questionable details and the trail of improbable “coincidences,” murder-suicide was deemed a “reasonable” way to explain to what I’m sure is a Russian public that may not wish to question anything too openly these days, since it calls into question their own lack of moral backbone.
After all, why should Russians concern themselves with the odd political murder in Russia when government security forces had routinely killed innocent people in the name of the “security” of the state before—and they bought that line hook, line and sinker, if for no other reason they think they don’t have a choice? But everyone has a “choice,” if they only want to fight for what is moral. Ukraine had its “orange revolution” from 2004-2005, when pro-Russian puppet president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted after winning a sham election against pro-West Viktor Yushchenko, who subsequently also suffered poisoning under “mysterious” circumstances. He survived, and so did Ukrainian democracy, which is what this war there is supposed to be about. We don’t want what Russia is “about.”
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