*
THE EMPTY CHURCH
They laid this stone trap
for him, enticing him with candles,
as though he would come like some huge moth
out of the darkness to beat there.
Ah, he had burned himself
before in the human flame
and escaped, leaving the reason
torn. He will not come any more
to our lure. Why, then, do I kneel still
striking my prayers on a stone
heart? Is it in hope one
of them will ignite yet and throw
on its illuminated walls the shadow
of someone greater than I can understand?
~ R. S. Thomas
Oriana:
This is a beautiful poem about yearning for the divine. I think I understand this yearning, at least in part. Many people want an invisible protector, a caring and powerful mother or father in the sky. Others, whose lives are just as precarious and difficult, have found other sources of courage and support. “If you live long enough, you learn to be your own therapist,” a friend once told me. You know what thoughts to think to soothe yourself, to switch your mood from despair to gratitude. “This too shall pass” is an immortal classic. My personal affirmation, especially when I feel little or zero control control, is “May the best outcome manifest itself.” It’s instant acceptance not just of whatever happens, but also of my not knowing what the best outcome should be.
But aside from the need for protection, clearly a carry-over from the parent-child relationship, some yearn for some kind of superior wisdom and beauty, something awe-inspiring — “someone greater than I can understand.” With no solid evidence for such a being, it’s understandable if a person actually feels anger at god for not existing. Even R.S. Thomas senses that he’s dealing with a “stone heart,” though he’d settle for even the shadow of whatever divine being may be hiding its face from us.
There have been a few times in my life when I, an atheist in every cell of my body, would sadly sigh, “If only god would exist.” Of course the desirable god would be all-loving. But then it struck me that this is an unnecessary demand; something utterly beautiful would be enough. If that beauty were combined with great power or energy, Kant would call it the sublime. I have a few poems about my personal encounters with the sublime. The first example that comes to my mind is this poem:
LAST NIGHT OF THE LEONIDS
No moon. The pines like black wind
brushed the tips of stars.
Horses stood in their corral,
carved as if outside of time.
You said, “They are sleeping.”
But one horse,
the tallest, suddenly
ran toward us, a rift in the dark.
The other horses never stirred.
They slept, eternal statues. Only he
sensed us and needed to see —
shot through darkness like a marble flame.
We almost stopped breathing, struck
with pure rhythm, muscle and mind —
that shining horse starting up —
then standing still,
the frost of stars
braiding his tall outline —
And we too stood still,
face to face,
in the shivering starlight.
**
If we must worship something, there is always beauty.
There is also the golden rule, the principle of treating others as we ourselves would wish to be treated.
Are we alone just because there is no god? No, there are other people, and they become all the more precious as we grow older and friendship becomes more important than romantic love. We may not express it consciously, but we understand: no man is an island. We are a part of humanity. Talk about being part of something greater than yourself!
The principle of kindness includes what I call the contract of non-abandonment, especially in relationships. It’s most clearly stated in traditional marriage vows: “for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health.” Recently this has been beautifully shown in photos of Ukrainian refugees not abandoning their dogs and cats. You can tell a good person by the way they treat their animals. 
*
PUTIN’S RUSSIA VERSUS PUSHKIN’S RUSSIA
~ When Paolo Nori’s series of lectures on Dostoevsky at the University of Milano-Bicocca was canceled “to avoid any controversy … during a time of strong tensions” related to the Ukraine invasion, he replied: “I realize what is happening in Ukraine is horrible, and I feel like crying just thinking about it. But what is happening in Italy is ridiculous … Not only is being a living Russian wrong in Italy but also being a dead Russian.”
It isn’t only in Italy. In the Netherlands, an exhibit of avant-garde Russian art was canceled, as was a Stravinsky concert in Belgium and a Tchaikovsky performance in Britain. Even the board of the International Cat Federation (Fédération Internationale Féline, or FIFé) banned from its exhibitions not only Russian cat breeders but also cats bred in Russia. Here in the United States, Columbia University Press, having renounced Russian financing, is drastically curtailing its series of Russian classics in translation.
But as Dutch Russian expert Michel Krielaars observed, “there is Putin’s Russia and there is Pushkin’s Russia,” and the two could not differ more. In our frenzied rush to “cancel” everything Russian, we may throw away a literary tradition that displays an especially deep understanding of moral questions in all their depth and complexity. Who should grasp the nature of evil better than those who suffered so much under tzarist tyranny and then still more under the totalitarian regime that replaced it?
A character in one of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novels asks: “hasn’t it always been understood … that a major writer in our country … is a sort of second government?” If the regime represented political power, the writer embodied moral power. The very phrase “Russian writer” designated not just someone who produces literary works but someone who, like the ancient Hebrew prophets, acts as the people’s conscience.
When celebrated novelist Mikhail Sholokhov joined in the regime’s condemnation of dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Nikolai Arzhak, poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky wrote that he was now “a former writer” while novelist Lydia Chukovskaya declared in an open letter that, in siding with the government against the persecuted, Sholokhov had alienated himself forever from the Russian literary tradition.
In much the same spirit, Solzhenitsyn rejected those postmodern Russian writers who, in treating moral seriousness as passé, had betrayed the Russian literary tradition: “Yes, they say, Communist doctrine was a great lie; but, then again, absolute truths do not exist anyhow, and trying to find them is pointless. Nor was it worth the trouble to strive for some kind of higher meaning.”
But Russian literature is all about striving for “higher meaning.” The heroes of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina do little else. From Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades” to Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Varlaam. Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales about Soviet forced labor camps, human effort and suffering acquire significance precisely because they inform the quest for moral truth and higher meaning. “A book,” wrote Pasternak, “is a squarish chunk of hot, smoking conscience – and nothing else!”
Those who embrace moral relativism or formal play for its own sake, in Solzhenitsyn’s view, may be Russian and may be writers but they are not “Russian writers.” Human suffering, physical and spiritual, constitutes the central theme of the Russian classics. In her lecture accepting the Nobel Prize for literature, Svetlana Alexievich explained that in Russia “suffering is our capital, our natural resource. Not oil or gas – but suffering. It is the only thing we are able to produce constantly.”
Suffering is the raw material for Russian fiction, which raises questions of meaning and goodness in the shadow of death. Dostoevsky entitled the novel based on his time in a tsarist prison camp Notes from the House of the Dead. He chose as the epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov a Biblical line about how suffering can lead to redemption: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). The fruit of countless deaths inflicted by Russian rulers has been a literature of spectacular brilliance and compelling seriousness.
The great Russian classics address not fleeting issues of the day but timeless “accursed questions” – “accursed” because they could never be definitively solved. One could probe issues of meaning ever more deeply, but never reach bottom. Only politicians, like the Marxist-Leninists who took power in 1917 thought that these problems had been solved “scientifically,” once and for all. No major writer agreed.
Great writers addressed the broadest issues, as the titles of their works suggest. What is not included in War and Peace? What questions of transgression and responsibility are left out of Crime and Punishment? And how much pertaining to human experience is omitted by the title of Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece, Life and Fate? Such titles—the tradition of realist fiction about colossal antitheses—suggest the urgent questions posed in another tradition of Russian titles that include Herzen’s Who Is to Blame? and Chernyshevsky’s What Is to be Done? To answer those questions, perhaps, one must first address another one: What Is Art?
Have any people valued literature more than the Russians? When Anna Karenina was being serialized in a Russian “thick journal”—the usual way novels were first published—Dostoevsky expressed unrestrained enthusiasm. At last, he wrote in one review, the existence of the Russian people has been justified! I cannot imagine a Frenchman, Englishman, or American imagining that his people’s existence required justification, but if one of them did, surely he would not think first of a novel!
We usually presume that literature exists to reflect life, but Russians often speak as if life exists to be made into literature. For many, literature, even more than birthplace, constitutes their native land. When fiction writer Vladimir Korolenko, who was half Ukrainian and half Polish, was asked what he considered his nationality, he replied: “My homeland is Russian literature.”
Alexievich echoed Korolenko’s words when, at the end of her Nobel prize speech, she proclaimed: “I have three homes: my Belarusian land, the homeland of my father, where I have lived my whole life; Ukraine, the homeland of my mother, where I was born; and Russia’s great culture, without which I cannot imagine myself.” By “Russia’s great culture,” she made clear, she meant above all “Russian literature.” The fact that neither of her parents were Russian did not matter. As numerous Russian emigrés have felt, one lives in Russia through its books. Like Jews, Russians are “people of the book.” One might almost compare the status of Russian literature for Russians to that of the Scriptures for the ancient Hebrews when the canon was still open and books could be added.
One had to be prepared to die for this “homeland.” Given Russia’s oppressive politics, Russian literature has always been dangerous, for readers of forbidden books and, especially, for those who write them. The poet Osip Mandelstam, author of a lyric mocking Stalin, knew, as his friends told him, that he had in effect written a suicide note. In her memoirs—itself a classic of modern Russian literature—his wife Nadezhda observed:
~ In choosing the manner of his death, M was counting on one remarkable feature of our leaders: their boundless, almost superstitious regard for poetry. “Why do you complain?” M used to say. “Poetry is respected only in this country – people are killed for it. There is no place where more people are killed for it.” ~
One can kill poets—as Stalin often did—but poetry itself, Nadezhda Mandelstam explains, “is a law unto itself: it is impossible to bury it alive and even a powerful propaganda machine such as ours cannot prevent it from living on. ‘I am easy in my mind’ [poet Anna] Akhmatova said to me in the sixties. ‘We have seen how durable poetry is.’” The best-known line from Mikhail Bulgakov’s enchanting novel The Master and Margarita expresses a similar thought. When the devil restores the manuscript that the Master in despair burned to ashes, he remarks: “manuscripts don’t burn.”
When in the early 20th century, Russian literature first began to be read in the West, it struck writers, readers, and critics as unlike anything they had ever encountered. Virginia Woolf expressed the prevailing view most eloquently. Compared to Russian novels, she wrote, Western fiction seems relatively shallow; its “conclusions fade into thin air … [and are] superficial.”
Western storytellers prettify their pictures while the Russians sacrifice formal elegance for what they value most, “unmatched honesty.” “It is the soul that is the chief character of Russian fiction,” she added. “The novels of Dostoevsky are … composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul” and remind us that “whoever you are, you are the vessel of this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty, precious stuff, the soul.”
Reading Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, my students experience literature as never before. No more symbol hunting, artful theorizing, or smug political judgment: the Russians address the questions that really matter in a way that teaches readers something really worth knowing. Anna Karenina explores the nature of love with supreme moral and psychological profundity, and who is not vitally concerned with love? Students’ economics classes reinforce the idea they constantly hear, that people do, and always should, pursue their own pleasure and that life is about worldly success. And so Tolstoy shocks them. When students read The Death of Ivan Ilych, they encounter a character who could not have been more successful or enjoyed life more, but who now, as he is struck with illness and is slowly dying, realizes that he has never really lived. Having always adjusted his opinions to what proper people think, he does not know what he really believes. And having played each social and professional role perfectly, he now recognizes to his horror that these roles will continue but his “I” will not. My students realize: they must not live that way!
They also tell me: no other course they have taken has addressed such questions, which are, or should be, what college is all about. If not as students, when will they ask them? The heroes of War and Peace, Pierre and Andrei, quest for life’s meaning, and whenever one of them thinks he has found it, the other has just been disillusioned. Time and again, the novel presents their conversations about ultimate questions in which fervent belief and hopeless skepticism confront each other, as each friend reveals his deepest thoughts and feelings. In the famous conversation by the ferryboat, Pierre, who thinks he has at last discovered life’s meaning in the teachings of the Freemasons, thrills readers with his naïve enthusiasm. “You say that you cannot see a reign of truth and goodness on earth,” he confides. “Nor could I, and it cannot be seen if we regard our life here as the end of everything. On earth, here on this earth (Pierre pointed to the fields) there is no truth – all is evil and deception. But in the universe, in the whole universe, there is a kingdom of truth, and we who are now children of the earth are, in the eternal sense, children of the universe.”
Andrei’s despair derives from his earlier callousness to his wife, whose death has made it impossible for him to make amends. He wants to believe Pierre, and explains how, in spite of his razor-sharp rationality, his agonies of guilt have begun to suggest something beyond this material world: “All I say is that it is not arguments that persuade one of the necessity of a future life, but this: when in life you go hand in hand with someone, and suddenly that person vanishes there, into nowhere, and you yourself are left facing the abyss, looking down into it…” We recognize: our deepest convictions arise not from argument but from experiences that touch our deepest self and disturb “this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty, precious stuff, the soul.” Students now appreciate what they have dimly suspected: no social science or philosophical arguments will ever lead them to life’s meaning because the deepest convictions are not formed that way. The greatest novels show them the real way that life-shaping ideas come to seem true.
Pierre responds to Andrei’s yearning for belief with especially famous words: “‘We must live, we must love, and we must believe not only that we live today on this scrap of earth, but that we have lived and shall live forever, there in the Whole,’ said Pierre, pointing to the sky.” “Yes, if only it were so,” Prince Andrei replies. He does not yet believe in a meaningful world—such changes do not happen at once—but “something that had long been slumbering in him,
something that was best in him,” awoke. “Though outwardly he continued to live in the same way, inwardly a new life began for him.” Inwardly: the great Russian novels are all about what happens to us inwardly, invisible to outside observers and often even to ourselves.
As a utopian impatient with anything less than perfect certainty, Pierre at last grows disillusioned with the fractious Freemasons. Delivering a fiery speech at one of their meetings, he is distressed not by those who disagree but by those who agree with him, since they do so “with stipulations and modifications he could not agree to since what he chiefly desired was to convey his thought to others exactly as he himself understood it.” If moral truth cannot be as unambiguous and clear as the propositions of geometry, and if people cannot exactly agree, then there will always be differences and conflicts rendering utopia impossible. “At this meeting Pierre for the first time was struck by the endless variety of men’s minds, which prevents a truth from ever appearing exactly the same to any two persons.”
My students dwell in a world where moral truth is supposed to be clear, simple, and well known, and where any disagreement marks one as an enemy of social justice. They are therefore struck by Tolstoy’s belief—shared by all great realist novelists, even if they do not explicitly state it—that individuality is an essential fact of life. Each person’s life belongs to that person alone and no individual exactly coincides with any other. What can be generalized about me is not the real me; “I” begins where “we” ends. As the novel concludes, Pierre looks at others differently because he has attained a new wisdom. It lies in “his recognition of the impossibility of changing a man’s convictions by words, and his acknowledgment of the possibility of every man thinking, feeling, and seeing things in his own way. This legitimate individuality of every man’s views, which formerly troubled or irritated Pierre, now became the basis of the sympathy he felt for other people and the interest he took in them.”
Journalists and academics too often regard moral questions as simple and so they readily pass categorical judgments. Russian history teaches us the danger of such thinking. And Russian literature, in response to the horrors of Russian politics and categorical thinking generally, teaches us that moral questions are complex, as are people and groups of people. It offers valuable lessons about the soul while showing us how to examine it with all the seriousness and attention it deserves. ~
https://quillette.com/2022/03/19/putins-russian-and-pushkins-russia/?fbclid=IwAR007QEq8GKx6CRz4Acbxb79HJqJ1kUkwRKZFg8wdjyKz4V_tv-dzdyUTtM
Pushkin's farewell to the sea; Ivan Aivazovski and Ilya Repin, 1877
Oriana:
I hope that right now there lives somewhere a great writer and/or poet who will bear witness to what is happening in Russia now. Some names could already be named, but ultimately time remains the judge of whose work will have sufficient depth to live on beyond the author.
Mary:
What nonsense to remove from discussion and study Russian literature..that smacks of a self righteous censorship that benefits no one. My first encounter with Russian literature was with "Crime and Punishment," and I was overwhelmed with its fearless tackling of big and important issues, as lived by human beings. "The Brothers Karamazov" takes that all to the next level of complexity, probing the most essential questions: suffering, love, redemption and forgiveness. In the face of such courage and power the usual run of English classics faded back almost into the wallpaper...here, I felt, was the Real Thing.
Not to know Russian literature is impoverishing, a tragedy, a true loss. And it won't stop any war, or punish Putin for his crimes. It certainly won't help us understand war, or the meaning of life....primary questions addressed with unparalleled depth and intensity in the works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn and their fellow writers.
As a teenager reading Dostoyevsky I felt exactly as described, that I had found my homeland, the real country of the soul, the place where we struggle to find and create meaning, no matter the circumstances of our individual suffering. The place where we learn to be human.
*
Oriana:
I’d also single out Chekhov and Turgenev, Pasternak and Mandelstam . . . and that’s just a start. There’s no need to deprive ourselves of these treasures. I don’t remember anyone telling us not to listen to Beethoven because of what the Nazis did during the war, or not reading Goethe or Thomas Mann for the same reason. Absolutely no logic there. But in the first decades after the war, stupidity seemed less powerful. Maybe I’m being myopic, but cultural greatness used to mean something and be revered.
*
Speaking of abandonment:
Zelensky: “To what degree of moral savagery and loss of all human coordinates it was necessary to bring soldier mothers under Putin to take for granted the fact that the bodies of their sons killed in Ukraine are lying around like trash, on foreign land, serving as food for stray dogs, because the Russian military command refuses, so that not spoil the report, take them on your side and pass them on to their families for funeral. This is a total moral decay. Something quite unimaginable. I do not know if this ever happened in human history.”
But this is not unique to the war in Ukraine.
Maureen Henderson:
I just listened to a podcast interview with a journalist who covered the second Chechen war. He said the same thing happened after huge Russian losses in Grozny: the Russians were given the opportunity to collect their dead and they declined, leaving the bodies to be eaten by dogs.
Valerie Sober:
Stalin abandoned tens of thousands of his soldiers, dead and alive, in Finland during the Winter War.
Oriana:
The spirit of Stalin is alive and well in today’s Russia.
*
Misha shared: “The last independent newspaper in Russia — Novaya Gazeta (whose editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, was last year's Nobel Peace Prize co-winner) — had to close down.
It was a heroic and noble run.” And from now on, it's only propaganda, i.e. Welcome to the Soviet Union, Part 2.
It seems all dictators become paranoid.
Where human life and individuality are not valued, there is the a likelihood that the average person will see himself as of little or no worth, and will become willing to accept all kinds of mistreatment and misery as his destiny without even feeling sorry for himself. Self-love and compassion toward oneself, if circumstances call for it, mark a mentally healthy person, raised by nurturing parents — and by a nurturing society. A society based on cruelty and greed and corruption, on disrespect for the individual, may produce people who are cruel not only to others, but to themselves.
*
“RUSSIAN PEOPLE DO NOT FEEL SORRY FOR OTHERS, FIRST OF ALL, BECAUSE THEY DO NOT PITY THEMSELVES.”
~ They lost this pity for themselves by going through the chaos of the 90s, through the robberies of the Chubaysov privatization and even more robberies of the Sechin nationalization, through unjust arrests, raids, the power of the police boot. All of this is not external, it is embedded in the theme of this war, it is the essence of this war.
The way to reverse the transformation of a Russian zombie into a human is the road of complex repentance and self-search. Russians need to love not Ukrainians at all, but themselves — they need to learn to treat themselves as people, and then only they will start to feel someone else's pain.
It is impossible, until, as Konchalovsky wrote a long time ago, the nation will be in front of a mirror, will see itself in it and will not be terrified. This is obviously still far away, and this won't happen automatically. Someone is going to have to put a mirror in the red corner where the TV is currently standing.” ~ Vladimir Pastukhov
*
The biggest fault of the Russian people is that they are always innocent in their own eyes. We regret nothing. ~ Yuri Nagibin, from the book Darkness at the end of the tunnel, 1994
Oriana:
This tend to be true of any country. Guilt is a very unpleasant sensation, one we try to escape from by manufacturing an alternate history (Putin is allegedly writing a “history of Ukraine”). That’s why it was magnificent to see Germany publicly acknowledge its wartime crimes. Not every German goes along with this acknowledgment, but I still say that it’s magnificent that the government does, and that holocaust denial is a punishable offense.
*
UKRAINE HAS MOVED TOWARD THE FUTURE; PUTIN LIVES IN FICTIONAL PAST
~ Putin’s language of "fascism," "nationalism" and "Nazism" revives Soviet-era shibboleths that suggest an ideology of protecting ethnic minorities, including Jews, from dangerous forms of ethno-nationalism. And yet Russia is now attacking a Ukraine that has one of the lowest rates of anti-Semitism in Europe (according to recent Pew studies), a diverse public sphere and a Jewish president.
The inconsistency between Putin's accusations and Zelensky's Jewishness has helped to clarify the deeply problematic premise for the current invasion of Ukraine: Russia claims it is attempting to "de-Nazify" a country that has, over the past decade, become not more ethno-nationalist, but less so. In the process, Moscow has exposed its own right-wing nationalist agenda, and its distance from the antifascism and even anti-colonialism it may have represented at various points during the Soviet period.
Putin's use of the term "nationalism" evokes a familiar Soviet accusation in which acts of self-determination threaten the power and centrality of Moscow. But what the Kremlin's narrative has attempted to deny is the fact that many Ukrainians have outgrown a dated understanding of identity, which relies on a monolithic ethnic understanding of a single Ukrainian people sharing a language, history and religious traditions.
Ukrainians have moved increasingly toward a civic understanding of Ukrainian identity, centered on citizenship as opposed to parentage. Zelensky's rise to the presidency, as a Russian-speaking secular Jew, is living proof of this shift toward a pluralistic Ukrainian identity. The fact that an ethnic Jew is now expertly commanding a war from besieged Kyiv has struck some outside Ukraine as ironic, for the history of ethnic relations in Ukraine includes terrible episodes of anti-Jewish pogroms. But Jews have long played positive roles in Ukraine.
Moreover, Zelensky's landslide victory in 2019 came at a time of open conversation in Ukrainian society about its diversity and the righting of past wrongs. Over the past several years, new Ukrainian art and literature has explored themes of the Holocaust and the multiple displacements of the Tatars; the government has moved to protect indigenous cultures and the cabinet of ministers has discussed the legalization of same sex civil partnership.
Zelensky himself has not only embodied Ukraine's poise under pressure (he is, after all, the entertainer who won Ukraine's "Dancing with the Stars" and dubbed the voice of Paddington Bear in Ukrainian), but has also reminded the world that Ukraine, far from being full of Nazis as Putin claims it is, has become more welcoming of religious minorities and more unified across geographical and linguistic divides than it was a decade ago.
When Russian tanks crossed the border in February, purportedly to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians, Zelensky addressed the people of Russia in their common native language: "The Ukrainian people are already free." On March 1, following multiple missile strikes, including a deadly missile strike near the Holocaust killing ground of Babyn Yar, Zelensky posted a Ukrainian language video-address to his Facebook page, accompanied by a translation into Hebrew.
The Ukrainian political scientist Volodymyr Kulyk dates the shift from basing Ukrainian identity on citizenship rather than blood lineage to the Maidan protests of 2013-14 and the Russian military intervention in Crimea, observing that these events "brought about a perceptible change in ethno-national identities, as many people felt both stronger attachment to Ukraine and stronger alienation from Russia.”
This civic understanding of Ukrainian identity represents an important evolution from Soviet definitions of ethno-national groups. The Soviet Union may have laid ideological claim to Marxist internationalism and anti-colonialism, but in fact, Soviet policy often drove a wedge between members of different ethnic groups.
Soviet Ukrainians, Jews and Russians were viewed as belonging to separate ethnic categories, and these identities were inscribed in their passports. As a result, ethno-national difference remained an important paradigm for many Ukrainians in the years immediately following independence in 1991.
Former President Viktor Yushchenko bestowed the title of "Hero of Ukraine" on the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, who collaborated in the 1940s with the Nazis to fight against the Soviet state. While some appreciated the acknowledgment of the historical struggle against Moscow, many criticized the posthumous embrace of Bandera as a fatal political miscalculation.
Even Petro Poroshenko, who led Ukraine during the difficult years after the 2013-2014 Maidan "Revolution of Dignity," ran for reelection on a platform of "Army, language, faith." That a Russian-speaking secular Jew from the industrial east defeated the incumbent Poroshenko in 2019 suggests that a majority of Ukrainians wanted a more unifying narrative. Zelensky, who spoke out against Putin's invasion and in defense of Russian-language culture in 2014, was a vote against both Ukrainian ethno-nationalism and Russian neo-imperial nationalism.
The civic energy that flowed out of the Maidan protests has also led to new artistic and political efforts to acknowledge Ukraine's multiple languages and religions, as well as individual group's past traumas. Non-Jewish Ukrainians have embraced Jewish history as part of the Ukrainian story.
The Lviv-based poet Marianna Kiyanovska published a haunting book about the massacre in Babyn Yar in 2017. In 2021 the filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa released a controversial film about Babyn Yar that provocatively presented the Nazi massacre of Jews in Kyiv alongside the fringe Ukrainian nationalist movement in the Western city of Lviv.
Although the film provoked much criticism for having potentially gone too far in connecting Ukrainian nationalism with Nazism, the fact that a film critical of Ukrainian nationalism was screened and discussed speaks to the general openness in Ukraine to engaging in difficult conversations about history.
The Tatar singer El'vira Sarykhalil has collaborated with the Ukrainian hip-hop group TNMK to raise awareness about the displaced Crimean Tatar community. Mustafa Nayyem, an Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, was one of the first organizers of the Maidan, and later became deputy minister of Infrastructure.
Russian-language literature has long thrived in Ukraine; even as the war in Donbas broke out in 2014, novelists like Andrei Kurkov, and poets like Iya Kiva and Boris Khersonsky wrote strong literary indictments of Russia's occupation of Crimea and military involvement in Donbas in Russian.
On July 1, 2021, Parliament passed Zelensky's bill "On the Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine," which granted special protection to the cultural heritage and language of Crimean Tatars, as well as two Crimean Turkic Judaic groups -- the Krymchaks and Karaites. These discussions of multiethnicity aren't easy or perfect. But a collective effort to acknowledge Ukraine's multiple histories has helped to define a pluralist vision for Ukrainian society.
As Ukrainians of different backgrounds have embraced a civic understanding of their identity, Kremlin representatives have doubled down on ethno-national categories to describe Ukraine, and Zelensky himself. Zelensky's "Indigenous Peoples" bill incensed Putin, who compared it to Hitler's race laws for its exclusion of special protections of the language and culture of native Russian speakers. Notably, the bill, which was aligned with the United Nation's declaration on indigenous peoples, omits groups whose identity is reflected by an existing state, including Ukrainians.
"What about people with mixed blood?" Putin asked on Russian television after the bill was introduced. "Zelensky himself is an ethnic Jew, he may have mixed blood." Putin's preposterous confusion of indigenous cultural preservation with race laws is part of the larger (and equally inconsistent) narrative that he has cultivated to equate Ukrainian government to Nazism and Russian speakers with Nazi victims.
In a long article published on the Kremlin website in July 2021, Putin argued that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, the heirs of ancient Rus', with a shared language and religion. Putin declares that Ukraine is a Soviet construct, and that, by rejecting Russia, Ukrainians are "attempting to create an ethnically pure state." He compares Ukraine's anti-Russian sentiment to a "weapon of mass destruction." The document, read in hindsight, was a declaration of war.
If such ideological rhetoric can be a weapon, Putin has mis-fired. In Putin's July 12 article he wrote, "Our relationship is passed down from generation to generation. It is in the hearts, in the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families.”
Few in the world can take this draconian insistence on the importance of "blood ties" seriously after Russia's bombing of Ukrainian hospitals, university buildings and theaters, wreaking particular violence on the largely Russophone cities of Kharkiv, Mykolaev and Mariupol. Ukrainians' unity in defending their country and protesting the invasion has been inspiring.
destroyed Russian tanks and armored vehicles in BuchaUKRAINIANS HAVE CHOSEN AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE OVER THE MYTH OF A GLORIOUS PAST
But in addition to the horrific human toll, Ukraine's embrace of a diverse civic identity may be at stake as the war progresses. If Putin succeeds in reinventing Ukraine in his own image, Ukrainian public discourse, which has become more nuanced and open over the past decade, could regress into the kind of nationalist rhetoric it has managed to resist throughout the Donbas war.
The invasion and the military buildup that preceded it has, understandably, aroused strong anti-Russian sentiment among Ukrainians. This has already created some rifts within the Ukrainian cultural sphere. In January, the government passed a law making Ukrainian the official language in public settings.
Although this law does not restrict belletristic literature in Russian, the Russian-language novelist Andrei Kurkov wrote to me that the "Russian language is almost officially in Ukraine now 'the language of the enemy.'" Some Russian language writers have shared on social media their intention of shifting to Ukrainian. Kurkov elaborated, "I will use my Russian for my novels but non-fiction I write now mostly in Ukrainian.”
n March 2022, Sergei Loznitsa, who sparked controversy with his film about Babyn Yar, was dismissed from the National Film Academy for his support of screening films by those Russian filmmakers who spoke out against Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky, for his part, has continued to call attention to the tolerance and open mindedness of Ukraine, in contrast to Russia, promising Russian soldiers, for example, that if they defect, they will be treated "as people, decently.”
Before becoming president, Zelensky created and starred in the TV show, "Servant of the People," about a high school teacher, Holoborodko, who is accidentally elected president of Ukraine. In one poignant episode, Holoborodko hallucinates a conversation with Ivan the Terrible, the 16th century Tsar who, among his many deeds, murdered his son and purged his opposition. "We are Slavs! We are one blood!" the Tsar tells him. Holoborodko disagrees. "You go one way, and we'll go the other. We'll meet again in 300 years.”
For the past decade, Ukrainians have chosen an uncertain future over the myth of a past greatness based on blood ties. In doing so, the country has ceased to be legible to Putin and Russians who support him. We must hope that Ukraine can emerge from the current war with renewed optimism about its future as a democratic society, that it will continue to avoid the trappings of nationalism that Russia has tried hard to awaken in it. ~ Amelia Glaser
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/26/opinions/zelensky-ukraine-putin-nightmare-glaser/index.html?fbclid=IwAR1U2J_o8bAuuq5Ze-wUJtSJNpCoiiqzZZ19VTYWFUYhtz5gEqGcRZJ92J8
Ukrainian soldiers on patrol near KyivOriana:
An excellent article. Ukraine has moved into the future, while Putin chose to retreat into the mythic "glorious" past. Putin is trying to make Russia "great again," meaning the second descent of the Iron Curtain and Soviet-like repression.
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Misha loves to be the bearer of good news:
“According to @IAPonomarenko, defense reporter for The Kyiv Independent newspaper, Russian military forces are no longer present anywhere in the Kyiv Region.
This is it.
The beginning of the accelerated phase of Russia's defeat in Ukraine.”
Mary:
On the discussion about Putin and Russia's direction, thinking about how those old divisions that talk about "blood" being such an important, essential connection, the importance of ethnic divisions, reinforced by the "mother tongue" argument ...all red flags indicating the intention to move backward, away from diversity and citizenship, toward "race/blood" identity trumping all else. A hankering back to a bygone essentially mythical time in a history rewritten to suit. Loud sirens here truly shrieking Nazi, the real ones, with their mythology of pure ethnicity as their own alone, and their mission to eradicate the mongrel human rabble.
If that doesn't look like a nightmare, just look at the results in Ukraine now. And it's still early days. I don't think Putin will go quietly into the ash heap of history.
I guess I'm not as optimistic as Misha. And I echo Lilith, thankful for the history of development since the Soviet fall. Greed, corruption and propaganda as operating principles. Something not unfamiliar — but more brash and unapologetic than we encounter here.
Oriana:
Misha tends to be an incurable optimist, but one can’t deny that it looks as though Russia has abandoned its plan to take Kyiv and install a puppet government. The campaign to conquer Ukraine (“a fake country”) seems to have fallen apart.
Unfortunately, the Russian forces are still causing brutal destruction. But the world is watching these war crimes, with millions dreaming of justice at the Hague. This prospect is unlikely, but I can easily imagine the scenario: one top-ranking Russian official after another saying “Not guilty,” and the collective cry of “But we didn’t know.” History repeats itself, not in detail but in the overall pattern.
A TERMINAL TYRANT?
On the other hand, nature itself may make Putin a “terminal tyrant.” Someone with a narcissistic personality disorder uses grandiosity to run away from shame and the feeling of being worthless. If deep inside he feels worthless, then he doesn’t believe anyone can truly love him. And without an input of love, of genuine emotional support, the immune system doesn’t work as it should; all kinds of ailments develop. If Putin is on steroids, and his bloated face looks like a classic case of the steroid “moon face,” his immune system is definitely suppressed, and any pathogen can be a threat — hence the need for very long tables.
Steroid rages? That’s perhaps the most infamous side effect.
A puffy face could also be a result of chemo.
If Putin is indeed terminal, fighting cancer, and both cancer and Parkinson’s, then he may have a sense of running out of time to carry out his agenda.
Whatever the truth may be, he seems to be a miserable man, in emotional and possibly physical agony. The irony is that he sought to present himself as a hyper-masculine, bare-chested, judo-champion specimen of health. But life seems to have a sarcastic sense of humor. Its jokes are cruel. But is anyone feeling sorry for the terminal tyrant? All we know for sure is that the world will be a better place once Vlad the Poisoner, Vlad the Invader, Vlad the Mass Murderer, is gone. 
Note that the splotchiness of the skin comes through despite heavy make-up
Also from Misha: NEED FOR NEW FAIRY TALES
~ The Russian myth, ruthless and merciless, infinitely infantile — about Ivan-Durak [Ivan the Fool], sitting on the furnace and having all by the wave of the magic wand; eternal evil dreams of the allegedly lost imperial greatness among the inevitable pious poverty.
Russia needs a new collection of fairy tales — others, less foolish and bloodthirsty. ~
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HOW FAIRY TALES SHAPE FIGHTING SPIRIT: UKRAINE'S CHILDREN HEAR BEDTIME STORIES OF UNDERDOG HEROES, WHILE RUSSIAN CHILDREN HEAR TALES OF MAGICAL SUCCESS
~ At the outset of Russia’s invasion, almost no one in the West expected that Ukraine would be able to offer Russia any kind of serious opposition to its unprovoked aggression.
Much has been written about how leaders, including allies, underestimated the leadership ability of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But beyond miscalculating how a comedian could transform into a Winston Churchill-like figure, military assessments of the Ukrainian army were also way off.
Several weeks into the war, it’s clear many overestimated the Russian army’s will and capability to fight and the Ukrainian army’s will to resist an opponent superior in number, equipment and positioning.
Underdog hero vs. magical thinking
Folklore is important for understanding people’s cultural narratives – story lines that describe something unique to the culture’s history and its people. They help to define a cultural identity and, in subtle ways, shape future choices. The master narratives that Ukrainian children grow up with – which serve as the dominant cultural script – are radically different from the ones Russian children absorb.
Traditional Ukrainian bedtime stories, such as “Kotygoroshko,” “Kyrylo Kozhumyaka” and “Ivasyk Telesyk,” all portray unassuming characters persevering against insurmountable odds. The character arc takes them through challenges, testing their will and transforming them from vulnerable to triumphant.
These fairy tales follow a well-known narrative arc of the underdog hero – a formula used for decades in bestselling books like “Harry Potter” and Hollywood blockbusters like “Star Wars.”
In Ukrainian children’s bedtime stories, the main characters often start out as unlikely heroes, but their courage, cleverness and grit help them succeed against the odds.
In contrast, Russian children’s stories often revolve around a central character named Ivan Durak – Ivan the Stupid. He’s the third brother, inferior to his older brothers, one of whom is typically smart, the other average. When the main character is not explicitly called “stupid” he is portrayed as lazy, lounging in bed all day while his older brothers work hard.
In Russian fairy tales such as “By the Pike’s Wish,” “Princess Frog” and “Sivka Burka,” the main character eventually prevails. He doesn’t win through his own virtues, though, but through the intervention of a magical being – a fish, a frog, a horse – that does all the hard work while the main character claims credit.
These Russian folk tales seem to suggest that the recipe for success is not to be too smart or work too hard, like the two older brothers, but to sit tight in hope that magic will take care of everything.
Facing the greatest challenge
Most adults don’t walk around thinking about the fairy tales they heard as children. However, these early stories, experienced through the magnifying glass of childhood emotions, shape our understanding about the world. They determine the repertoire of our actions, especially in times of crisis.
Fairy tales prepare us to recognize real-life heroes and villains, love and betrayal, good and evil. They guide our actions as we navigate these dichotomies.
The difference in traditional Russian and Ukrainian folklore might in part explain the difference between the Russian and Ukrainian armies’ performances. ~
https://news.yahoo.com/fairy-tales-shape-fighting-spirit-185834580.html
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HOW THE CAPITALIST “SHOCK THERAPY” HELPED CREATE THE RUSSIAN OLIGARCHY
~ The Russian oligarchy arose out of the mayhem of rapid privatization in the 1990s. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, a leader in the revolt against communism, had to figure out how to transition from a command-and-control economy to a market one. Yeltsin turned to the Russian economists Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais, who, with the aid of Western advisers, hammered out the details.
There were many economists — including even Gaidar and Chubais themselves before they became government officials — who believed that the transition to capitalism would best be handled gradually. They knew the transition would be complex and painful, and it made sense for Russia to first create the institutions that healthy, competitive markets need to flourish — like independent courts, functioning capital markets, and strong regulatory bodies.
But Yeltsin and his allies believed that time was not on their side. An attempted coup in August 1991 by Soviet hardliners against the reformers almost derailed the whole project. Entrenched Soviet industrialists and party insiders wanted a return to the old order. The Yeltsin administration decided that a program known as "shock therapy" — rapidly unleashing market forces — was the way to electrocute the old Soviet system and jolt Russia into embracing capitalism.
American advisors and global creditors, especially the International Monetary Fund, played a notable role advocating for shock therapy. But some influential shock therapists, like the economist Jeffrey Sachs, then at Harvard, believed such a radical program needed support. He proposed the United States and multilateral development agencies help Russian reformers succeed with a $30 billion aid package, akin to what America had provided Europe after WWII with the Marshall Plan. Sachs also called for the cancellation of Russia's debts. But these ideas were rejected by American leaders.
President Yeltsin delivered the first big shock to the Russian economy when he lifted price controls in December 1991. As the Soviet economy collapsed, however, the policy ended up unleashing hyperinflation. By 1994, consumer prices in Russia would skyrocket to almost 2000 times what they had been in 1990. That candy bar that had cost $1 now cost $2000. Hyperinflation devastated ordinary Russians.
Meanwhile, Chubais was tasked with overseeing mass privatization. That entailed transforming a nation whose almost entire economy consisted of state-controlled industries — manufacturing plants, oil refineries, mines, media outlets, biscuit factories, you name it — into private enterprises. It was, to date, surely the biggest transfer of state assets to private owners in world history.
Privatization was conducted in two waves. The first wave, which began in October 1992, had at least the veneer of being a fair and open process. Russia issued 148 million "privatization checks," or vouchers, to Russian citizens. These vouchers could be freely sold or traded. They could then be used to buy shares of state enterprises going private at public auctions around the nation. It was like the former Soviet Union was holding the world's largest garage sale and vouchers were the tickets to shop.
The people on their way to becoming Russia's first class of oligarchs scoured the nation, trying to buy as many vouchers as they could. Many of the oligarchs had come from nothing. They had initially gotten rich — but not quite buy-superyachts rich just yet — by hustling in the black market or through legitimate businesses when the Soviet Union first allowed private entrepreneurship in the late 1980s. For example, Roman Abramovich made his first pot of money selling rubber ducks and other random objects to Russians out of his Moscow apartment (seriously). He was also a mechanic. By the time privatization began, many soon-to-be oligarchs owned banks and had enough money to buy lots of vouchers.
The oligarchs went on a buying spree, purchasing hundreds of thousands of vouchers, each of which were worth 10,000 rubles, or about $40 or less back in the 1990s. Average Russians, who were struggling during hyperinflation, were often eager to sell. After amassing vouchers, the oligarchs — both come-up-from-nothing hustlers and former Soviet government insiders — used them at auctions to buy up stocks in newly private companies. By all accounts, many of these enterprises were shockingly undervalued — and those who were able to get large chunks of lucrative enterprises became fabulously wealthy in a very short period of time. Between 1992 and 1994, about 15,000 state-run enterprises went private under the program.
By 1994, when the voucher program ended, around 70 percent of the Russian economy had been privatized. But some of the biggest, most valuable industries remained in the government's hands. Chubais had plans to privatize these state enterprises and raise much needed funds for the government by selling them off for cash to the highest bidder in legitimate auctions. However, politics got in the way of the increasingly unpopular privatization drive — and even threatened to reverse it. That's when the Yeltsin administration resorted to a much shadier form of privatization.
By 1995, Boris Yeltsin was very unpopular. Hyperinflation. The decline of law and order. The rise of the mafia and execution-style killings on the streets of Moscow. Russia's inability to pay government salaries and pensions. The sense that unscrupulous men in suits were the only ones winning in the new economy. Plus, Yeltsin was a notorious drunk with serious health problems. Just a year away from reelection, Yeltsin's approval rating fell to the low single digits, and he faced the specter of an increasingly popular Communist challenger who looked like he could win the 1996 presidential elections.
With privatization stalling, the government desperate for money, and a growing fear that Russia was about to slide back into communism, Chubais and the Yeltsin administration turned to a shady scheme known as "Loans For Shares." The secret plot basically worked like this: the richest oligarchs loaned the government billions of dollars in exchange for massive shares of Russia's most valuable state enterprises. When the government defaulted on paying back the loans, as the schemers expected they would, the oligarchs would walk away with the keys to Russia's most profitable corporations. In exchange, the government would get the money it needed to pay its bills, privatization would keep moving forward — and, most importantly, the oligarchs would do everything in their power to ensure Yeltsin was reelected.
Between November and December 1995, twelve of Russia's most profitable industrial enterprises were auctioned off to the oligarchs, including a mining company, two steel companies, two shipping companies, and five oil companies. The auctions were a complete farce. Chubais and his team had predetermined with the oligarchs who would get what and for roughly how much. And the prices the oligarchs paid for these corporations were a steal — almost literally. For example, Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, now well beyond his days of selling rubber ducks, got a large stake in the oil company Sibneft for about $200 million. In 2009, when Putin renationalized the company, Abramovich sold his stake back to the government for $11.9 billion. Talk about a payday.
Roman Abramovich. He became an orphan aged three but went on to become one of the world's richest men. Now Roman Abramovich's links to Vladimir Putin have stripped him of his businesses and reputation. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-60708450
"Chubais never advertised it publicly — he attempted to keep the goal obscure so as not to alarm the opposition— but loans for shares should really have been called 'tycoons for Yeltsin,'" writes David Hoffman, the former Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post, in his book The Oligarchs: Wealth And Power In The New Russia. "Chubais was willing to hand over the property without competition, without openness, and, as it turned out, for a bargain price, but in a way that would keep the businessmen at Yeltsin's side in the 1996 reelection campaign.”
Despite waving the banner of free markets and democracy, the reformers of the 1990s — perhaps ironically — did much of their reforms undemocratically, often by presidential decrees that were hammered out through backroom deals with the rich and powerful. Thanks in no small part to the oligarchic beneficiaries of these deals, Yeltsin beat the odds and won reelection. Russian-style crony capitalism was here to stay.
Weeks after the victory, Boris Berezovsky bragged to The Financial Times that he and six other Russian oligarchs controlled half of Russia's economy. That number seems to have been significantly inflated. Nonetheless, by 1996, the world could see that Russia had a new class of industrialists and bankers who wielded enormous power. A class that made their fortunes not through society-improving ideas, consumer-pleasing products, or technological innovations — but rather through corruption, skullduggery, and the plunder of Russia's raw materials. Many Russians would come to resent the oligarchs and the liberal reformers who empowered them.
As Yeltsin's health continued to deteriorate in the late 1990s, the oligarchs began to worry about who would be his successor. The natural heir to Yeltsin would be whoever occupied the post of prime minister. If Yeltsin stepped down, the prime minister automatically became acting president and would have the advantage of incumbency during election time.
In 1999, Boris Yeltsin and his oligarchic allies agreed that an obscure former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin was the man to become Yeltsin's prime minister, and soon Russia's next president. He was a nobody, barely a public figure, but he had a reputation for loyalty. They trusted that, once in power, he would look after their interests. Little did they know that they were unleashing a monster they soon would be unable to control. ~
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/how-shock-therapy-created-russian-oligarchs-and-paved-the-path-for-putin
Lilith:
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PURGES WITHIN PUTIN’S INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
~ I recently spoke by phone with Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and an expert on the Russian state’s intelligence apparatus. Currently in London, Soldatov—along with Irina Borogan—has written “The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia’s Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad”; the pair also founded and edits the Web site Agentura.ru, which reports on Russia’s security services. (On Sunday, the site was blocked in the Russian Federation.) I called him to discuss recent reports of purges within the security services after Russian diplomatic and military failures in Ukraine, but our chat ended up touching on a wide range of topics, including the possible reasons for Vladimir Putin’s turn against his intelligence agencies, the increasing power of the military in Russia, the changes and contractions within Putin’s inner circle over the past decade, how ordinary Russians view the current conflict, and why Soldatov himself left Russia in 2020. The conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
What do we know about internal changes that have occurred in the Russian military and security services since the war in Ukraine began?
What we know is that, since the war began, Putin’s attacked the agencies already, as far as we know. So the war started at this now infamous meeting of the Russian Security Council, where Putin publicly berated the director of the S.V.R., the foreign-intelligence agency, which is a direct successor to the spy section of the K.G.B. Two and a half weeks later, we got news about the F.S.B. foreign-intelligence branch, because the F.S.B. also has a foreign-intelligence branch coming under attack. We now know about two people, two top-level officials at this department, being questioned and placed under house arrest.
Then, last week, we got news that the deputy head of the National Guard was forced to resign, and he will also probably face some sort of a criminal investigation. And he is not just National Guard. This guy is a former security-services person. He was with Putin’s personal security detail before he joined the National Guard, so he’s known personally to Putin.
How did we, or you, come by this information? And what do we know about the reasons for the moves?
Well, we know about the director of the S.V.R., Sergey Naryshkin, being humiliated, because it was done publicly, and this meeting was broadcast. We know about the F.S.B. purges because I’ve been investigating this particular unit of the F.S.B. starting in 2002, when actually I learned that there was such a thing inside of the F.S.B., which is supposed to be purely a domestic agency. But it’s obtained new powers, and they were given authority to conduct operations abroad, specifically in the former Soviet Union, meaning in Ukraine.
Last week’s news about the deputy head of the National Guard was first broken on some Telegram channel, which we know is close to the F.S.B., and a few hours later it was confirmed by official sources. But, while the Telegram channel said that the guy was detained, the official version is that he was just asked to resign.
How much do you feel comfortable speculating on the reasons for these moves? There’s some sense that the war is not going well for Russia, and so that’s what’s behind them. Do you have any sense, specifically, of why Putin might have gone after these people, and what that might suggest?
Yeah, I’ve been asking all my sources, and not only me but many Russian investigative journalists are now talking to their sources inside of Russian security and asking them, “What is going on?” It looks like Putin is getting really unhappy with the operation, but it looks like he still believes that the original plan was fine but that there were some problems with some elements. And that is why his attack on the foreign-intelligence branch of the F.S.B. is not just about bad intelligence but also about something else.
This unit is also in charge of conducting political warfare operations in Ukraine, meaning cultivating networks of agents and supporters of political groups that might be pro-Kremlin and that would support the Russian invasion. But that never happened, and, as far as I know from my sources, one of the investigations is also about how they used funds allocated to political groups in Ukraine. Maybe now it looks like Putin has gotten angry with the lack of popular support in Ukraine for the Russian troops.
But it looks like this story is developing really fast, and now we have news that it’s not only about the use of funds but also that military counterintelligence is looking into the activities of this particular department of the F.S.B. And that could mean that, finally, people in Moscow started asking themselves why the U.S. intelligence was so accurate. Military counterintelligence is mostly about mole-hunting, identifying the sources of leaks. So it looks like now Putin is getting angry, not only with bad intelligence and the bad performance in Ukraine but also about the sourcing of the U.S. intelligence about the invasion, and why U.S. intelligence was so good before the invasion, and why the Americans knew so many things about what was coming.
So Putin doesn’t think the over-all invasion plan, or the military dimensions of it, were necessarily wrong. But he’s upset with both how much intelligence America had and the political response within Ukraine to the invasion?
Yes, exactly.
There have been a lot of reports in the Western press that Putin is isolated now, whether this is because he’s been in power so long or because he doesn’t meet with many people owing to the pandemic. Do you have a sense of whether those types of reports are accurate? And do you have a sense of who Putin does talk to and what type of inner circle he has now? It feels like maybe people had a better idea of who was in his circle ten years ago.
Yeah. That’s true, and there is a reason for that. Ten years ago, Putin listened to at least several dozen different kinds of people. It might have been a very strange collection of characters: at one point, it was a film director with crazy ideas about the Russian imperial past. And, at another point, it was a journalist who was a big fan of Pinochet. There were some priests. So it was a multitude of people, but now it looks like, starting in 2016, 2017, this circle has been getting smaller and smaller. And what I’m getting from my sources is that, these days, Putin listens to only three or four people. There is Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu, whom he trusts, and that is why Shoigu has played the main role in this invasion. [Shoigu may have had a recent falling out with Putin]. There is Nikolai Patrushev, his head of the Security Council, and one of his oldest friends, who’s still close to him and was his successor as the director of the F.S.B. And probably one or two other friends from St. Petersburg, but that’s about it.
And so, in addition to the smaller circle, is your sense from people that his mindset has really changed in some way, or his character has changed in some way? I don’t want to go too far into psychoanalyzing him—
I’m not an expert on psychology. But I see, and everybody can see, that he’s still very quick at responding to people. Or, judging by his public performances, it looks like he is very quick at reacting to what people say. So it means that mentally or intellectually he’s still fine, but he might have developed some ideas from people’s adulation of him.
Basically, when you are surrounded by people who just listen to you, you come to believe that you are the smartest guy in the room, and know better—and I think that was the biggest challenge for security and intelligence agencies reporting to him about what is going on in Ukraine, because everybody knows that Putin has his own strong opinions about Ukraine. He’s writing articles about the history of Ukraine, and he’s talking incessantly about Ukraine. How can you challenge him?
It’s not very clear how you can do that, especially due to this atmosphere of fear over the past seven years or so because of what I would say is selective repression against the élite. And it’s a big thing now in Russia. It’s not only that Putin tried to poison Navalny and expelled political opposition from the country. It’s also about governors and ministers in jail. You have so many people now in jail, even people from the F.S.B. So if you think, from the point of view of a military general, is it really safe to say something to Putin that he would not like? I think it’s a big challenge for them.
It seems like you’re describing a problem with a lot of autocratic political systems where bad news doesn’t filter upward or honest news doesn’t filter upward.
Yes. And, actually, it’s even worse because, within the agencies, there is a huge problem of mistrust between, say, mid-level officers and the generals. So you have the middle-level officers who might understand what actually is going on in Ukraine, but they are quite unwilling to report this to the generals, and the generals obviously think twice about whether to channel this information to Putin.
When we read about Russia ten or so years ago, obviously Putin was the most powerful person. But it did feel like there were all these different power centers, whether it was friendly oligarchs or whether it was the security services. What are those other power centers that still exist, whose opinion will be important to keeping the war going and keeping Putin in power? Or do you think that basically there are almost no other power centers?
Things changed, especially after Western sanctions were introduced in 2014, and mostly because of money. Before 2014–2016, we had these oligarchs, and they were, at least to some extent, independent. They had their contracts in the West, they had their contracts in the country, so they’re quite powerful. And maybe back then they could say something to Putin. This option was there.
Now it’s completely changed because of the sanctions. What happened is that Russian oligarchs, many of them, lost their contracts in the West, and Putin was really smart about offering them financial help by providing military contracts. So you had some people who own huge enterprises producing metal, engines, this kind of thing, and they lost their contracts in the U.S. and in Europe. All of a sudden, now they had something of a problem, but because of the sanctions and because the military-industrial complex is getting bigger, they got this military contract. And that made many of the oligarchs much more dependent on the state funding.
And not just some state funding but the funding provided by the military. This is why the Army became so important recently, and it’s absolutely clear that the Army understands that really well. And the Army is getting more and more ambitious, and the Army has a say in Russian ideology, too. For instance, we have the Youth Army, a nationwide movement that is used to brainwash kids in schools. The Army recently built one of the biggest churches in the country. They built this enormous military park as a propaganda exercise. They interfere with the way history is taught. So, all of a sudden, the military became really ambitious, and I would say that now it’s not about oligarchs and siloviki, the current and former security-services people. Now you have the military and the military-industrial complex, and oligarchs are dependent on the military-industrial complex.
That’s really interesting, because it seems like the purges that you’ve talked about happening so far are not mainly from the military, despite what a lot of people perceive to be military failures having to do with Russian military strategy and Russian military performance.
Absolutely. Yeah, that’s right.
Do you see the military as an alternate power center to Putin that could develop?
That’s a good question, because, here, we are in some uncharted territory. On one hand, Shoigu, the Minister of Defense, is a very shrewd politician. He’s been around for thirty years. He became Minister of Emergencies and Disaster Relief back in the nineteen-nineties, and he’s still a minister. Now he has a much more powerful ministry, but nevertheless it’s still the same guy. And while we have had so many changes, so many political crises for thirty years, Shoigu always survived. But his thing was always to show his complete loyalty to Putin. It might be a game, but Putin believes him and trusts him and believes that Shoigu is absolutely loyal to him. [Russian President Vladimir Putin and one of his closest advisors have fallen out over the war in Ukraine, according to US intelligence. ~ https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-top-aide-rift-over-ukraine-report-2022-3]
I saw a quote from you where you suggested that opposition to Putin among average Russians was likely to gather steam on social-media and Internet platforms, and that Internet companies pulling out of Russia for reasons of wanting to punish Putin or the Russian state could have negative effects. Is that still how you feel?
Right now, it’s not about resistance. It’s more about an ability to talk and to get uncensored information about Ukraine. It’s about an ability to talk with your friends about what is going on. And, unfortunately, social media is basically the only place we actually can do that in the country. Given how strong Russian censorship is, where you cannot call the war a war and all that, social media is the only means to get access to this information.
In the past, yes, it was a tool to mobilize people to go to the streets. But, right now, maybe it’s not the right moment for that, because Russian restrictions on public gatherings are so horribly strict. You can face prison time for putting a Ukrainian flag up in your window. But it’s still relevant. Social-media access is still of the utmost importance for Russians.
Do you have any sense of what public opinion is about the conflict within Russia?
The big propaganda win for Putin is that he and his media are still capable of convincing people that the fighting takes place only in Lugansk and Donetsk. So they think nothing is going on in Kharkiv or Kyiv, and it’s a big, big win for Putin. Lots of ordinary Russians actually believe that the Russian army is there only to defend these two popular republics, and that’s all.
I have lots of friends and relatives in Moscow, and I’ve been asking them constantly about this. And it looks like ordinary Russians still believe this picture. They also think that all the civilian casualties are caused by nationalist gangs, so this propaganda line is also quite successful. So that’s how it is.
There are some cracks, but it’s not about more sympathy toward Ukrainians. It’s more killed soldiers, because it looks like the casualties are really big in the Russian military. I know from my relatives in the Volga region, quite far from Moscow, that now in small towns they have people who have had their kids killed in Ukraine. So society started talking about it because there are so many deaths. But, unfortunately, I don’t see any sympathy for Ukraine, which is a very hard thing to say.
Why did you leave Russia?
I’ve been writing about Russian security services, starting in the late nineties, for more than twenty-three years now, and it’s been my topic. But in 2020 the Russian government made it absolutely illegal to report on Russian security services. And because I wanted to keep going, because I think it’s an important topic, I thought I needed to leave the country. Then the Russian government sent me some signals that it would be better for me to leave the country. I have a Web site, which my partner and I established back in 2000. It’s a Web site that monitors the activity of the Russian security services. And it used to have a media license, because in Russia you need to have a license to be in media. So, in the beginning of 2020, our Web site was stripped of its license. But the reason provided by the Russian censorship agency, which is in charge of these media licenses, was the death of [Agentura.ru’s] editor. And, because I’m the editor, I took it as a kind of perverse humor by the Russian censors. I got several signals of the same sort, enough that, in September of 2020, we decided to leave the country.
And the remaining journalists who are doing great work in Moscow—what have you heard from them?
Every day, I hear from my friends that they just left, so journalists are leaving the country right now. And I have friends now in Yerevan, in Vilnius, in Montenegro, and Prague and Berlin, but mostly in countries like Armenia and Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, because they didn’t have time to get European visas and they needed to leave the country really quickly.
I have friends who live in a garage in Yerevan because it’s really desperate for them. So I would say that most of my friends have already left the country, but there’s still some people there. But we have only one independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, which is sort of capable of writing something—at least something—about the war. And they had at least one correspondent who wasn’t Ukrainian reporting from Ukraine, but that’s about it. And this newspaper is under enormous pressure. [It currently is closed down.]
For instance, maybe you’ll remember this story that, during a state-TV newscast, there was a woman who held up a sign against the war. It went viral, but nevertheless Novaya Gazeta was forced to blanket the sign in published photos because it had these antiwar words. It’s horrible.
What are you hoping to happen here? I mean, obviously, I’m sure, for the war to end, but is there an off-ramp you see for Putin and Russia? How is Russia going to reconstitute itself?
It’s a very hard question, to be fair. We are always trying to make these comparisons with the late nineteen-eighties, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then we got perestroika and all of that. So maybe is it possible to repeat the same thing? I was fifteen years old, but still I remember that back then there was this cheerful mood that people were good, and it was just the system that was bad. So back then maybe I was naïve, maybe my parents were naïve and my friends were naïve, but we had this idea that it was only because of the Communist Party and the K.G.B., and if you could get rid of them everything was going to be fine. People are good. Even the people, say, in the military and in the security services. They were just pressured to be bad and to serve the system.
These days, unfortunately, we don’t have this excuse. We do have lots of people who support the war, unfortunately. Yes, I understand that it’s about propaganda, and it’s about fear, and people are really fearful. They understand what is at stake, and these select repressions were quite successful at freezing society. But, nonetheless, there’s so many people who support the war, and, to be honest, I just don’t know the answer. I don’t know how to get them back as humans.
You are talking about average citizens and people within the state itself who believe in the war in a way that they did in the Soviet system?
You have ordinary people, and people in the security services, and people in the military, and they are supportive of this war. And I don’t quite understand how we can humanize them back. I just don’t see a way. That’s my problem.
And not just the war, but you see them as supportive of Putin and Putinism in some way, too?
Well, yeah. The war is a function of Putinism because it’s so aggressive. Putin is famous for having no sympathy, actually. So, if I remember what struck me when I was with Novaya Gazeta in 2006, when Anna Politkovskaya was killed and some journalists finally asked Putin this question, like, “You had a journalist killed in your country.” And he was absolutely horrible, because he expressed no sympathy at all. Like, “Well, yeah. Blah, blah, blah.” He said that she was absolutely insignificant, and you think, Wow, you can’t find some words to express sympathy. Just maybe you feel sorry. And I think that’s what we have here with Ukraine. It’s just a manifestation of his complete lack of sympathy for other people. ~
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-purges-in-putins-shrinking-inner-circle?source=cm_paid_social_midfunnelcampaign_customaudience_single_ukraine_control&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=cm_paid_social_tny_paid_content_midfunnel&utm_social-type=paid&utm_brand=thenewyorker&fbclid=IwAR2gl2-SmqMqkK_bS2PYjKsROiYc6IZh8VU-gnLrbV9f2czDh22ZC7SJFXU
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NO COUNTRY FOR SMART PEOPLE
~ Russia’s tech workers are looking for safer and more secure professional pastures.
By one estimate, up to 70,000 computer specialists, spooked by a sudden frost in the business and political climate, have bolted the country since Russia invaded Ukraine five weeks ago. Many more are expected to follow. ~
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-putin-immigration-kazakhstan-technology-c041eb0b7472668087bb94207de2f71d?fbclid=IwAR3jXUfcgbSYj4_yexI1Pw_Ge2p0WKyAHCOtsWL6IARLVr0UvIZB7oYVDas
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THE LAST TRAIN OUT OF RUSSIA
~ It was the final train out of Russia by way of Finland. For the previous 31 days, after Russia launched an unprovoked war against Ukraine, it had been a slender escape route for disaffected and despairing Russians fleeing to the West.
I live a few blocks away from the train station and heard that the twice-a-day Allegro was bringing in an unusual number of Russian passengers carrying heavy suitcases. I was curious about their perspective on conditions and opinions in their home country, so starting in mid-March, I starting meeting some of the incoming trains, bringing a tape recorder.
Then last Friday, the Finnish company that operated the high-speed train as part of a partnership with a Russian rail company announced that the Allegro service would stop on Sunday, March 27, severing Russia’s last passenger rail connection to Europe.
So I was there on Sunday as some 340 passengers disembarked from the final Allegro, along with four pets in travel cages, and a squad of stern-looking Finnish border guards who joined the train at the border and inspected the arriving Russians on board as the train sped to Helsinki.
Some of the passengers declined to talk. The day before, a middle-aged man responded by saying cryptically, “If I talk to you they will come for me,” before rushing off.
But many Russians did want to talk on the arrivals platform over the past few weeks, often asking that their real names not be used, as they stood at a gateway of history from an increasingly tyrannical Russia onto the soil of neighboring Finland, one of the freest countries on Earth. Some of them carried suitcases so heavy they could barely pull them. Many spoke good-to-perfect English.
Many appeared middle-class or well-to-do, but not all. I learned that one young man sold all his furniture and car to exchange deeply devalued rubles into euros to pay for the train ticket, and arrived with very little remaining money. He wandered off into Helsinki in search of a hostel. A young woman came off the train weeping, and a woman who offered to comfort her told me her pro-Putin family had disowned her and vowed never to see her again. Many had jobs or spouses in Europe or Canada and had travel documents enabling them to travel more freely than the average Russian. All of them were required to have an EU-approved Covid vaccination, which does not include Sputnik, the vaccine most widely used in Russia.
A handful of the Russian passengers insisted to me that everything was nearly normal at home, that life went on, most shops were open and bank cards were still working for domestic transactions. But many others described a nation gripped by shock and disbelief, where sanctions were starting to upend daily life.
Ever since the 1990s, explained one Russian woman with dual citizenship with an EU country, there were no long wait lines for anything in Russia, as there often were in the Soviet era. Before the Ukraine invasion, she said Russia’s big cities were prosperous and thriving, and her Muscovite friends considered Paris a provincial city because you couldn’t find a good meal there in the middle of the night.
But suddenly, she said, after the invasion triggered international sanctions, lines were forming for more and more things, and shortages were expected across the economy, including in medicine and health care. The closing of Western chains like McDonald’s and Ikea was a major shock to many urban Russians, she reported.
The privations of these Russians escaping by train paled in comparison to the horrors experienced by Ukrainian civilians under attack by the Russian military, of course. But they, too, are refugees from the Putin regime.
Maria, a 32-year-old technology professional from St. Petersburg, explained, “I am running away from Russia because of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, along with many people who are young and in the IT field. Everybody wants to leave. On the metro, on the street and at the airport, police are stopping people and reading their phone messages. Some people think I am not a patriot, that I hate my country. But I love my country so much. I don’t like the government. A patriot is somebody who also sees the negative side. When I criticize my country, I am like a good mother, who loves her children but helps them understand how to work on negative things and become better. I am afraid Russia could become like North Korea. Yesterday my mother showed me her cemetery documents so I could find her if I ever do go back.”
“I was born in the Soviet Union,” Karina, a 50-year-old art director, told me. “It’s all coming back now. The army is all over Moscow. If you say something out of line they will stop and arrest you. There is fear everywhere. The problem is that there are many Russians who cannot admit our mistakes, cannot realize that we are trapped in a nightmare. Russians are very sensitive to criticism. They can criticize ourselves, but if it’s coming from outside, they take it very personally. People don’t want to admit mistakes. It’s much easier to watch TV and absorb the government propaganda. It’s easier to not think. We did it for the 70 years of the Soviet Union and now it’s the same psychology again.
Anti-Putin people are probably in the minority. You have this vast country with many people who are poor and who have never traveled abroad. They are very isolated, with no communication, only their television. They work hard all day, come home exhausted and the TV is their only source. But the world needs to know that not all Russians are for Putin. I love my country. It’s a great country. I am proud to speak Russian, to be Russian. But now I must leave my country and not come back. My poor 81-year-old mother dreamed all her life for her country to be free. At the train station this morning she was crying as she said goodbye to me with the saddest words I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“I was born behind this wall,” her mother said, “and now I will die behind it as well.”
“There are two different opinions in Russia today: those who support the [Ukraine] operation and those who don’t,” Anatoly, a 30-year-old business manager, told me. “It seems to me that a majority of people support it, but I am not sure. The government propaganda tries to make it seem that a majority support it, but I don’t know. None of my friends, none of the people I know support it. I think the sanctions and pressure from other countries should be greater.”
Maria, a biotechnology expert, reported that among her friends, “I don’t think anybody supports the Ukraine invasion. It is a regime that nobody supports. Everyone was shocked when this happened. No one believed something like this could have happened anymore.” Despite Russian government efforts to block non-Russian sources of information, she explained that anyone who wants to access global news sources can still easily do so with a virtual private network (VPN) on their phone.
A self-described “middle class” woman from Moscow said everyone she knew was “totally shocked” at the news that Russia was invading Ukraine. “No one asked us our opinion of doing this,” she noted. “If they had, no one would have agreed to it.”
BACK TO ROZANOV’S THE APOCALYPSE OF OUR TIME
When most of the passengers had cleared off Platform 9 on Sunday night, I saw a tall Russian man step out of the rear car. At first he demurred when I asked if we could talk, but then he changed his mind.
“It all definitely feels like we are going very far backwards in history,” he told me. “It’s worse than the Iron Curtain, it’s worse than going back to Soviet times. I don’t have the words to compare it, but maybe if you’ve read Russian a bit you’ve heard of someone named Vasili Rozanov. He was the first one to coin the expression the Iron Curtain about Russia.”
“One hundred years ago, in 1918, he wrote that with a clang, a creak and a scream the iron curtain dropped on Russian history,” my interlocutor said, quoting Rozanov nearly perfectly. “An announcer declared the performance was over. The audience was told to put on their fur coats and go home. The people got up from their seats and looked around, but the fur coats and the houses had all vanished.” It was all lies, all an illusion. Not long after Rozanov wrote this in the wake of the Russian Revolution in a work titled “The Apocalypse of Our Time, and Other Writings,” he died of illness and starvation.
After several more weeks of harsh international sanctions, the man on the platform speculated, “As a consequence of believing the lies and spreading the lies on a national scale, maybe some Russian people will see that they won’t have any of these nice, good, warm, cozy comfortable things coming from the West anymore.”
“Maybe,” he said, “they should reconsider their attitude toward the propaganda they are listening to from the TV set. As an intelligent Russian man once said, the fridge will win the battle over the TV.”
When I asked for his name and hometown, the man graciously demurred.
“Let me remain ‘a person on the train,’” he smiled as he vanished into the Baltic twilight. “The last person on the last train.” ~
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/29/last-train-out-of-russia-00021263?fbclid=IwAR0QDmjRptarRW0XsYCinJb6Nd6Y_GgKXYwhHMVixdeJTlaY5CYIXIRK9Zw
Oriana:
It’s difficult to be an immigrant. But these Russians are leaving because they feel they have to — they don’t want to be part of Putin’s USSR, Part 2. They don’t want to live in isolation from the world. They want to breathe.
In the end, they’ll manage to make a new life and contribute their skills to their adoptive country. They may start having recurrent dreams about wandering around their home town, but not being able to find their way. Some of the time, they’ll feel they made a terrible mistake; at other times, they’ll feel triumphant and super-enterprising. They’ve escaped entrapment. They are winners — at a heavy price, but winners nevertheless, because life rewards action.
Immigrants are not a typical sample of the population they come from. They are indeed more enterprising and risk-taking. They need to be good at learning a new language and adjusting to new circumstances. They are generally an asset to the new country. If they weep, it’s in private.
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One bit of good news is seeing how many try to help the refugees, and those inside Ukraine. Here is a Slovak man, Vlad Benc, who has organized delivering humanitarian supplies to Ukraine.
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MILITARY LESSONS FROM THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR
~ Manned, non-stealth aircraft are done. Finished. Scrap metal. At least when in airspace that is credibly contested. Abhirup Sengupta has been calling this for quite some time, and his views and evidence have been proven correct. Against an opponent with even a mildly competent IADS network, legacy fighters can’t operate.
If infantry can’t operate at night, they are dead.
It’s all but impossible to take ground from an actively hostile population in the 21st century.
Drones are critical to the future of warfare.
While the vulnerability of tanks has been clear really starting in Yemen, the full scope of this is now on display. Tanks require supporting forces to include aerial assets. Tanks are no longer the tip of the spear. (Drones are).
Comms are both critical and vulnerable. I expect to see major investments in making better, more secure communication systems that are harder to direction find.
Soviet style tightly controlled planning systems are essentially suicide. Modern warfare requires flexibility and individual decision making at every level.
Logistics is still what professionals talk about.
The advantages that modern ATGM’s and related weapons provide isn’t just about stopping tanks. I’ve long advocated for infantry units that routinely incorporate heavier weapons and have less focus on the rifle. I think that this conflict proves this correct.
Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
~ Chris Everett, Quora
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Enough about Putin. Putins come and go, romance remains. Wait — perhaps “romance” is the wrong word? The relationships that last rely on many things to make them endure, the thrill of the initial infatuation being now just the beginning of the complex story. A long-term relationship is a marriage (even if the partners aren't legally married), not romance.
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JOE MILOSCH: THE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN PUTIN AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
I found your blog especially interesting, and especially enjoyed the articles on Putin.
Sometimes when I am listening or reading about Putin’s invasion, I’m struck by the news ignoring how rich, greedy people believe in the same thing regardless of their country. When I think how Putin is one of the richest men in the world, and his closest advisors or rich Russian capitalist, I can’t help but think of the Republican Party. Over the past days I came up with a list of the similarities between Putin and the Republican Party:
Putin’s War with Ukraine
· Labels opposition (Ukraine Government) as Nazis.
· Use of Conservative Christians (Russian Orthodox)
to enforce will at polls
· Use of Afghani (Brown Skin) refugees to cause
controversy about the border.
· People want to save them from Neo-Nazi oppression
· “People will see us as liberators”
· They will great us with flowers like the French did in WWII.
· Those who resist are really mercenaries
· When the war goes badly Putin says or does:
· Hires mercenaries (Syrians)
· Bombing and brutalization and execution of civilians.
· Russia controls a few cites.
· Resistors control a large portion of country.
· The majority of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians fight for Ukraine
· Putin says the West hates Russia.
· Putin has no plan on how to get out of his quagmire.
· Most countries consider Putin a War Criminal.
Republican war in Iraq & Afghanistan
· Labels opposition (Democrats) as Pedophiles: Hillary Clinton sex ring in Pizza parlor, Supreme Court nominee, Katanji Brown Jackson.
· Use of Conservative Christians (American Conservative Evangelicals)
to enforce will at polls
· Use of Latin-American (Brown Skin) refugees to cause
· controversy about the border.
· People want us to save them from Taliban oppression.
· People will see us as liberators.
· They will great us with flowers like the French did in WWII.
· Those who resist are really mercenaries.
· When the war goes badly Republican party says or does:
· Hires mercenaries (Black Water)
· Bombing cities and the brutalization and execution of civilians.
· America controls a few cites.
· Resistors control a large portion of country.
· The majority of the Afghanis who fought for the USA to feed their families, joined the Taliban when US left.
· Republicans said the Afghanis hate the West because we are free or Christian.
· Republicans (Bush & Cheney) had no plan on how to get out of his quagmire.
· Most countries regard Bush and Cheney as War Criminals.
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Oriana:
Enough about Putin. Seems that each century has to have its Hitler. But at least Hitler's army was first rate. And we've escaped annihilation through sheer luck and the courage of the Norwegian resistance (Germans had their "heavy water" plant in Norway, and were on their way to develop nuclear weapons).
Still, Putins (Hitlers, Stalins) come and go; romance remains. Wait — perhaps “romance” is the wrong word? The relationships that last rely on many things to make them endure, the thrill of the initial infatuation being just the beginning of the complex story.
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WHAT IS THE KEY TO A SUSTAINABLE LOVE RELATIONSHIP AND WHAT CAUSES THEM TO FAIL?
You'll find lots of answers but here's one that may be under-represented because it’s a little unromantic:
Relationships work when both parties want or need them. They fail when they don't. When we want or need them – for benefits gained or costs avoided – we do what it takes to make them work. It’s not magic. It’s practical. It’s even practical to be romantic when you need to be.
And then there's music. I've long said that sex is music for non-musicians. I get a lot of my sensual pleasure out of playing. ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
And of course a lot depends on one's stage or life. Having at least one reliable relationship is actually more important as one get older and more fragile. But that relationship can be a strong friendship. It’s no longer a question of hormones. Thank goodness there is also no drama of hormones upending one’s life. (Still, it's possible to fall in love at sixty. But now you know too much; you know the romance part of it will end.)
Asked about the most important things in life Freud said: work and love. I agree, but would add that how we see work and love changes according to the stage of life.
And as Freud began to guess, there are also unconscious factors at work. Perhaps someone looks like the cousin who was your first secret love. But once the romance phase is over, concrete benefits need to prevail over the undeniable costs. Also, any creative work becomes more important than sex. Old friends become more important than lovers. There are no songs about that . . .
"Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored." ~ Nietzsche
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“I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves in spring. I love the blue sky." ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Oriana:
Those sticky chestnut buds and new leaves are irresistible. In the North, spring breaks forth with such vitality that any wallowing in despair, any thoughts of suicide are ridiculous. The sky is too blue for that, the air too moist and intoxicating.
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CAREER ADVICE FROM WARREN BUFFET: THREE THINGS EMPLOYERS LOOK FOR
~ While different employers desire different qualities, the financial wizard Warren Buffet has offered one of the better insights on what employers often look for in workers.
“We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity,” the Sage of Omaha has said. “And if they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you’re going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb.”
What Buffett is saying, essentially, is that intelligence and initiative are important, but integrity is what matters most. But what is integrity?
The word is defined as “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.” This definition is helpful but it’s also a bit limited, and it doesn’t quite tell us what Buffett is getting at.
What Buffett is saying, I think, is that he wants employees he can trust to get things done.
In about 30 years of working jobs high and low, the one thing I’ve noticed above all else is there are people who know how to show up on time, meet deadlines, and complete the tasks they say they’ll complete, and there are people who know how to make excuses and avoid taking responsibility.
I once had a writer who begged to write a story. I gave him the assignment, and the first thing he did was say he couldn’t meet the deadline he had proposed. I don’t remember the excuse he gave, but I do remember telling myself I’d never use that writer again.
Leaning Into Responsibility
When Warren Buffett says he wants workers with integrity, I think he’s saying he wants workers he can trust to complete the tasks they say they’ll complete, and people who take responsibility.
This last part is key, because there will be times when we don’t get the job done; we come up short. When this happens, many people will be tempted to point fingers at people or externalities that frustrated completion of the task.
This is the wrong approach.
A worker with integrity will look at the situation and instead of blaming others ask, What could I have done differently? How could I have helped us achieve a better outcome?
This might sound simple, but the reality is it’s hard for humans to do this. We want to blame others. We want to find excuses. We want to pass the buck. It’s a trait we see in the powerful and the weak; in our children and politicians; in our families, co-workers, and (yes) even ourselves.
“There is a logic to the desire to avoid punishment, and since so many people grow up in similar circumstances, the habit runs deep,” Ryan Ferguson, co-host of The World Wanderers Podcast has noted. “But as you make the transition from childhood to adulthood, it is a habit you have to learn to leave behind.”
“Taking responsibility when things go wrong is crucially important to building trust with others and learning from your mistakes,” writes Ferguson. “It is one of the most important parts of creating a satisfying life, but a lot of people learn the opposite growing up.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-3-traits-warren-buffett-says-he-looks-for-in-an-employee_4354004.html?welcomeuser=1
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YOU DON’T “FIND” YOUR CALLING — YOU FIGHT FOR IT
~ Chances are someone has talked to you about how to “find your calling.” It’s one of those phrases people toss about. But StoryCorps founder Dave Isay takes issue with it … specifically, the verb.
“Finding your calling — it’s not passive,” he says. “When people have found their calling, they’ve made tough decisions and sacrifices in order to do the work they were meant to do.”
In other words, you don’t just “find” your calling — you have to fight for it. And it’s worth the fight. “People who’ve found their calling have a fire about them,” says Isay, the winner of the 2015 TED Prize. “They’re the people who are dying to get up in the morning and go do their work.”
Over a decade of listening to StoryCorps interviews, Isay noticed that people often share the story of how they discovered their calling — and now, he’s collected dozens of great stories on the subject into a new book, Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work. Below, he shares 7 takeaways from the hard-won fight to find the work you love
1. Your calling is at the intersection of a Venn diagram of three things: doing something you’re good at, feeling appreciated, and believing your work is making people’s lives better. “When those three things line up, it’s like lightning,” Isay says. He doesn’t suggest that a person has to be a surgeon saving lives to feel like they have a calling; think of the diner waitress who talks to customers and makes them feel loved. How do you find this overlap? “You have to shut out all the chatter of what your friends are telling you to do, what your parents are telling you to do, what society is telling you to do,” Isay says, “and just go to that quiet place inside you that knows the truth.”
2. Your calling often comes out of difficult experiences. What lurks in that quiet place will be a defining experience — quite possibly a painful one. Isay points to an interview in Callings with 24-year-old teacher Ayodeji Ogunniyi. “He was studying to be a doctor when his father was murdered. He realized that what he was really meant to do was be a teacher,” says Isay. “He says that every time he walks into a classroom, his father is walking in with him.” This theme of people turning their hardest experiences into a new path runs throughout the book. “Having an experience that really shakes you and reminds you of your mortality can be a very clarifying event in people’s lives. Oftentimes, it leads to changes,” he says. “We spend a lot of time working, so it can really change your priorities in terms of work life.”
3. Calling often takes courage and ruffles feathers. Elsewhere in Callings, we hear about Wendell Scott, who became the first African-American NASCAR driver in 1952, and kept on driving despite threats against his life. From scientist Dorothy Warburton who dealt with extreme sexism as she conducted research to break the stigma around miscarriage. From Burnell Cotlon, who opened the first grocery store in the Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina because he wasn’t about to let his old neighborhood’s spirit fade. Calling, says Isay, very often starts with taking a stand against a status quo that simply isn’t acceptable, and then dedicating your work to changing it: “It’s work ignited by hope, love, or defiance — and stoked by purpose and persistence.”
4. Other people often nudge you toward calling. Sharon Long had worked odd jobs most of her life. As Isay tells it, “Her daughter was going to college, and as the bursar was helping them with financial aid forms, she said quietly to herself, ‘I wish I could’ve gone to college.’ The bursar responded, ‘It’s not too late.’” Sharon enrolled in an art program, and on her advisor’s suggestion, took forensic anthropology as her science. “The advisor suggested it for no other reason than he thought it was the easiest science course for the science requirement,” says Isay. “But the minute she sat in that class, it was boom — this is what she was meant to do.” Isay tells this story to illustrate how calling, while very personal, is also relational. “People bump you this way and that way,” he says, often without realizing it. “When people find their callings, they want to honor those people who helped them get there.”
5. What comes after identifying your calling is what really matters. The old ‘finding your calling’ phraseology makes it sound like a calling is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow — you find it, and the story’s over. But Isay stresses that your calling is an ongoing process. “Understanding what your calling is — that’s very different than the blood, sweat and tears of actually doing it,” he says. Pursuing a calling may require going back to school or apprenticing; it may require starting a business. Often, notes Isay, it leads a person into a line of work that’s in service of others. “This book is basically a love letter to nurses, teachers, social workers — the people who don’t often get celebrated for the work they do,” he says.
6. Age is irrelevant. Isay found his calling when he was 21 and interviewed a man who’d been part of the Stonewall riots. “The minute I hit record, I knew that being a journalist and interviewing people was what I was going to do for the rest of my life,” he says. “I feel very lucky that lightning struck when I was very young.” But collecting stories for the book reminded him that a calling can be discovered at any age. The book includes an interview with someone who knew they wanted to be an NBA referee at age 15, and another who worked as an accountant for 30 years before discovering his passion for slicing lox. “Doing the work you’re meant to do is one of the most satisfying, remarkable experiences that a person can have,” says Isay, “so never give up.”
7. Calling often doesn’t come with a big paycheck. Another trend Isay sees in stories of people who find their calling: they often involve leaving a high-paying job for one that’s lower-paying but more satisfying. “The message we send to young people is that you want to do as little work as you can to make as much money as you can — that’s the dream,” says Isay. “But the wisdom in the StoryCorps archive is that there’s another, much more rewarding dream of taking risks and working very hard to live with integrity.” In the end, that’s the lesson he took away from writing this book. “There are no millionaires, no billionaires, no celebrities, nobody with a big Twitter following,” he says. “Just stories can teach us a lot about lives fully lived.”
https://ideas.ted.com/7-lessons-about-finding-the-work-you-were-meant-to-do/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_content=2022-03-28&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=social
Oriana:
It’s the stories that make this article interesting.
People can nudge you, I suppose, but people can also significantly delay you by nudging you the wrong way and sometimes downright discouraging you.
Based on my experience, don't let anyone tell you you don't have talent. There is no way to judge a beginner's talent; when you look at the juvenilia of some great poets, without knowing who wrote these awful efforts at "poesy," you tend to think that here is someone utterly hopeless.
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MARJORIE KEMPE, THE FIRST WOMAN MEMOIRIST, MOTHER OF FOURTEEN
~ The Book of Margery Kempe is mostly the kind of text you read if you’re a medievalist, or maybe an English major at a women’s college, although I was an English major at a women’s college and I didn’t read it until I was in graduate school. It’s a shame that The Book isn’t more widely known, because we’re missing out on an important entry—possibly the very first—in the writer mom canon. The Book’s depiction of Margery’s spiritual reinvention is also a startling portrayal of a woman who strains against the parameters of her life and then reimagines them. And it is the story of a woman who becomes a writer because she believes that what she has to say is something that others should hear, even though she doesn’t fit neatly into any of the categories of people whose stories are understood to matter.
Like any story of religious conversion, The Book describes Margery’s pre-visionary life. She tries her hand at running a brewery and a grain mill, both common in-home businesses for late-medieval women in England, but both businesses ultimately fail. Then, after a spiritual awakening precipitated by mystical visions, Margery decides to pursue a religious calling and dedicate her life to Christ. The problem is that when you are a 15th-century married woman with young children, dedicating your life to Christ is a complicated proposition. When she makes this decision, Margery is no longer of the right age or virginity status to become a nun, but is still too young and married to enter a convent as an older widow, as some women did at that time.
Instead, she creates her own idiosyncratic path. She travels widely, visiting various pilgrimage sites in England, throughout Europe, and even as far as Jerusalem. Everywhere she goes she confuses people by blurring boundaries. She insists, for example, on wearing white clothing, a symbol of virginity, despite the undeniable existence of her 14 children. She also adopts the kind of intercessory role usually reserved for priests. She is repeatedly asked by her fellow Christians to pray for them and at one point develops a reputation for being able to tell others if they are saved or damned. At the same time, she becomes known, and widely despised, for her loud and boisterous weeping, which she does every time she thinks about Christ. She thinks about Christ a lot.
The question of who possessed the authority to speak and write about God and the Bible was very much a live one during Margery’s life. Biblical interpretation and other religious writing was mostly a man’s game, mostly priests. The exceptions were women who experienced mystical visions, often understood to confer a kind of parallel, if slightly inferior, form of authority. Even so, those visions and their religious meaning were often filtered through a male scribe, usually a confessor, whose involvement in the production of that text was another, necessary authorization. Most medieval female visionaries were cloistered virgins, not married mothers of 14, so it is an uphill battle for Margery to be taken seriously and to get her book written.
She fights for her book just as she fights for her unusual spiritual role. Serving as an intercessor between God and her fellow Christians meant stepping into a role that was parental but patriarchal. Perhaps because she becomes a visionary and a mother almost simultaneously, Margery attempts to reinsert motherhood into the spiritual parentage conversation from which it had been excised. In one of my favorite passages of The Book, Christ tells Margery that she should “make every Christian man and women your child in your soul…and have as much grace for them as you have for your own children.” In a spiritual economy in which women could either be spiritual mothers or physical mothers, this vision of Christ suggesting that it is precisely Margery’s physical maternity that makes her a great spiritual intercessor is nothing short of radical. It is, perhaps, the strongest affirmation of physical maternity in Middle English, making the case for the physical, lived experience of motherhood as a prerequisite for spiritual care rather than a disqualification. Margery can no longer be a virgin visionary, but she refuses to be a silent mother.
It is important to note that The Book of Margery Kempe is a book written by a mother but it is not a book about being a mother. It mostly ignores the years Margery spent birthing and raising her children. But motherhood, and the way it changed her, is suffused throughout the text. The story that The Book tells, one that Margery works hard to get down on parchment, suggests that the experience of becoming a mother was integral to Margery’s spiritual and literary aspirations. The first story she tells us is of a childbirth so difficult that she thinks she may not survive. Wishing to confess before death, she sends for her priest. But he is “too hasty” with her and she never ends up fully confessing. A period of madness follows, almost nine months of terrifying visions. There are devils and the flames of hell; she tears at her own skin trying to end her life. Finally, when her first baby has been out almost as long as it was in, Margery is restored to herself by a vision of Christ promising love and acceptance.
It is not hard to see how this experience is reflected in the religious role Margery ends up creating for herself. Many of the people she encounters are put off by her tears and her refusal to adhere to socially acceptable religious categories, but there also seem to be plenty of others, including members of the clergy, in need of a boundary-blurring spiritual mediatrix. The relationships between Margery and those who come to her for counsel are sometimes described using the language of motherhood. One priest who looks to Margery for spiritual guidance calls her “mother.” The Book notes that he is comforted by her words and that he treats her “as if he had been her own son born of her body.” I probably don’t need to tell you that tying spiritual comfort and authority to the language of bodily maternity was radical in the 15th century, just as it is radical today.
Notably, The Book suggests that Margery had a particular ministry among women. She visits with one woman suffering from temptations so great they render her unable to engage in any devotional activities. Later, The Book describes how she goes to see a woman who is “out of her mind” after childbirth. The woman’s husband tells Margery that his wife “roars and cries so that she makes folk terribly afraid.” They have put manacles on her wrists, he says, because she “will both smite and bite.” But when Margery enters the house, the woman speaks to her calmly. She tells Margery she is comforted by her presence and asks her not to leave. Margery continues to visit the woman every day, even when her behavior with other people becomes so violent that she is bound in iron chains. She prays for the woman to be restored to her wits, which she eventually is.
Writing about this episode, scholar Lynn Staley notes that in helping the postpartum woman, Margery “seems to offer consolation to her former self.” It is not hard to imagine why Margery might have been popular among married and childbearing women. When she arrives in Leicester the Mayor there accuses her of coming to town in order to lead all of their wives away from them. I will always wonder what she was saying to those women in Leicester, and other women in other towns, just as I will wonder whether, when she finally succeeded in getting her book written, those women or their daughters read it and, seeing something of themselves, found comfort in it.
There are fewer gates to keep these days than in Margery’s time, or maybe the gates are just different, but we all need to feel authorized to write. There are some who would use motherhood as a cudgel or a cautionary tale in an attempt to convince us that becoming a mother—or too much of a mother—means locking ourselves out of the writing life. But the truth is that, like Margery, I found that motherhood unlocked something in me. Maybe it was surviving four days of labor or fourth months of no sleep, but when I emerged from the fog, I had more to say and an increasingly fiery need to say it. Those first weeks and months of motherhood threw me for a loop, but in retrospect the hormones saturating my brain were preparing it for a messier but more fertile creative stage. The reality is that children require the very same things to thrive as writing: time and sustained attention. I am always making a choice, even if sometimes that choice is doing both with less than ideal devotion. This is why I need Margery Kempe—and maybe you do, too.
There are scholars who argue that Margery’s Book was like a For Your Consideration screener for sainthood, that she was hoping it would get her the exposure she needed for canonization after her death. Christendom never recognized Saint Margery, but it’s time we think about how The Book can serve as a spiritual balm for women looking for a literary reflection of the ways in which motherhood can elevate rather than impede writing, or for women who seek a third option when it seems like the only choices are art monster or intellectually absent mom. Here’s what we can learn from Margery Kempe, patron saint of writing mothers: cry if you must, then bulldoze your own path. ~
https://electricliterature.com/margery-kempe-had-14-children-and-she-still-invented-the-memoir/?fbclid=IwAR1L7_l8gL7ezF5uW47pdycJpcOGZ675okudDqAWLpv-6-iPN-T4FnBHCJY
Oriana:
All gods are devouring and demand sacrifice. But an example of an indomitable woman helps. Whoever doesn’t fall apart, whoever doesn’t commit suicide when the going gets rough (terminal illness aside), helps strengthen all of us.
Mary:
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SKY, HEAVEN, FIRMAMENT
~ English (uncharacteristically) has two, if not even three, words for the sphere above us: sky, heaven, and firmament. The case of English is not unique but rare: usually a single word suffices. Sky and heaven can be used in the plural (for heavens’ sake; praise to the skies, and in more mundane contexts), while earth is just earth. We stand on the ground with both feet, and even though we distinguish between earth, land, ground, and soil, each word has its sphere of application and refers to something solid.
But what is the sky, that infinite expanse over us and the habitat of the gods? In the past, people had the same trouble defining the home of the sun, the moon, and the stars as we do. The medieval Scandinavians distinguished at least three skies. In the highest of them, the goat Heiðrún (ð = th in English this) lived, devoured the leaves of the world tree, thereby accelerating the end of the world, but produced a never-ending stream of mead for the gods and the warriors of Valhalla.
Firmament means “the vault of heaven.” Apparently, it is firm. In ancient astronomy, the firmament was the eighth sphere, containing the fixed stars that surrounded the seven spheres of the planets. The sky is indeed the limit.
The plural use of heaven and sky goes back to the oldest Hebrew tradition. By way of postscript, I may add that in the ancient mythology of the Indo-Europeans, the sky was represented as a male impregnating the earth. With great regularity, the words for “earth” are feminine and the oldest words for “heaven” masculine. Latin caelum (it will reemerge below), which is neuter, has not preserved the original grammatical gender.
Atlas and the Hesperides; John Singer Sargent
From an etymological point of view, the most interesting word of those mentioned above is heaven, going back to Old English heofon. To begin with, it sounds like the related Old Saxon noun but does not quite match Dutch hemel ~ German Himmel. The difference between the final syllables –el and –on (Old Saxon –an) can probably be explained away: they were either always different or changed, for whatever reason, in Old English and Old Saxon. Since in Gothic, the earliest Germanic language from which we have a long consecutive text (a fourth-century translation of parts of the New Testament), the word for “sky” was himins, it seems that the ancient root was hem– (in Gothic, every short e became i), rather than hef-.
The meaning of this root remains an object of debate. The earliest guess was that heaven is something that has been heaved. Indeed, in some mythologies, the sky does mean a sphere raised, but we need a clue to the root hem-. The great German language historian Friedrich Kluge suggested that the word’s root is hai– and cited Modern German hei-t-er “bright.” This was a clever move. Old English hādor (from haidor) means “serene,” and close by we find the Latin word cael-um “sky, heaven” (cf. English celestial).
Contrary to the Scandinavian-English cloudy sky, the southern sky of the Romans was bright. But the root Kluge cited meant too many things. Thus, the Modern English suffix –hood (as in childhood; Old Engl. –hād) and its cognates, meant “quality,” with many ramifications, from “sex” to “rank.” It did also refer to brightness, but only among others. Also, let us not forget that we need a root sounding like hem-.
Kluge’s successors preferred to compare Himmel and heaven with words referring to “cover,” such as Old English hama “cloth; skin,” German Hem-d “shirt,” and so forth. Himmel ~ heaven emerged from this interpretation as “the cover of the world.” Old Engl. heofon-hūs ~ hūs-heofon, literally “heaven-house ~ “house-heaven” meant “the ceiling of the house.” One can find this etymology in several good dictionaries. Latin cam-ur “vaulted” (as well as nearly the same word in Greek) also corresponds to the Germanic root. (I need hardly remind our readers that k in Latin, Greek, and other non-Germanic languages corresponds to Germanic h by the First Consonant Shift, as in English heart versus Latin cor, cordis.) As regards meaning, “vaulted” and “heaven” certainly belong together.
Environmental sculpture by Andy Goldworthy
I am now coming to the last hypothesis for today. The root of Himmel reminds us of the word hammer. Can the sky (heaven) be associated with a hammer? The most ancient hammers were made of stone. Consequently, our question should be reformulated so: “Can heaven and stone have anything in common”? In the text of the Avesta, a collection of religious texts in an old Iranian language (and it seems only there), the word asman– means both “stone” and “heaven.” The idea that in the past, the sky and stone were in some way connected in people’s minds was offered long ago (I believe, in 1913) and has both opponents and supporters. At present, supporters seem to predominate. We have already met the Old Scandinavian goat. We can now turn to the formidable god Þórr (Thor), the fearless giant-killer, but originally Thor was a (or the only) thunder god of the medieval Scandinavians. His main weapon is the hammer Mjöllnir, transliterated in English texts with one l (Mjölnir or Mjolnir).
Perhaps the sky was associated with thunder, and thunder made people think of a shower of stones falling from the sky (or of meteorites?). In mountainous regions, the sky god is usually associated with thunderbolts because of the terrifying echo, while in the landscapes with predominating plains, the supreme sky god more often kills his victims with lightning (as did Zeus-Jupiter).
Such is the state of the art. English has sky, heaven, and firmament. They have divided their spheres of application and coexist in peace. The sky is not always cloudy, the heavens are not necessarily made of stone, and only the firmament remains firm. It will be fair to say that the origin of heaven remains undisclosed. Yet we seem to be wandering not too far from the truth. In etymology, the goal often evades us, and movement toward it is sometimes all we can offer. The same is true of our journey heavenwards. ~
https://blog.oup.com/2021/11/the-skys-the-limit/?utm_campaign=1478683699113882032&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid%20social&utm_content=media%20post%20with%20link&utm_term&fbclid=IwAR3OCFnKn87XsFS8RJIeS8r1H-F0cRfyypsPVwY_1G4mK99aOfzA0macZUY
Thor and his hammer
Oriana:
In Polish, there is only one word: SKY. So it’s “Our Father who are in the sky.” Archaic on the face of it, isn't it? A sky god. The concreteness of that — not the metaphorical heaven but the visible sky above our heads — helped me see how religion is mythology. As a child, I’d look at the sky and try to imagine legions of angels and a huge crowd of the souls of the dead up there, flying from cloud to cloud — and somehow it didn’t make sense.
I could easily imagine clouds as animals, so it wasn’t that I lacked imagination. And I always loved clouds. Perhaps that's why I didn't need angels.
Or the Golden Throne, or throngs of Catholics souls singing church songs.
And once I learned about the stratosphere and the ionosphere, and how cold and dark it gets as you go higher and higher — I felt no soul would really like to live there for eternity. And remember, in Polish, when you die, you “go to the sky.”
VERY FEW EUROPEAN CHRISTIANS BELIEVE IN THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST
~ They conducted a survey on attitudes to religion in several European countries a number of years back — they asked several thousand people all over Europe "Are you a Christian?"
80% answered “Yes.”
Then, later on in the same questionnaire, they asked the respondents "Do you believe that a god-incarnate was walking around Palestine 2,000 years ago?”
Only 5% answered “Yes."
This is perfectly consistent with Christianity, considering that most Christians of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD didn't think of Christ as a god-incarnate either.”
Slavoy Zizek quoted this survey in a magazine article — sorry not to have more information.
I was somewhat surprised by the extremely low percentage of literal believers in the divinity of Jesus; surprised, but not astonished. The sheer incredibility of the proposition that any human could be a god is most likely the primary factor here, since such a idea violates our common sense, especially once we move into adulthood. Not only that, but Jesus does not seem at all similar to Yahweh in his teachings or personality. Yahweh receiving animal sacrifice at the Temple and Jesus saying things like blessed are the peacemakers, render unto Caesar, turn the other cheek — Yahweh and Jesus never met.
And then there is the widespread view that we are all divine. We all contain the “divine spark,” and we are all the sons and daughters of god. The Gnostics believed this, and many others. My educated friends believe this — I don’t personally know a single orthodox Christian, though I've run into them.
But maybe the foreignness of Jesus was an additional factor in the difficulty of accepting him as god. Assuming that the Jesus of the gospels was based on a historical figure, he lived 2,000 years ago and in a remote tiny corner of the Near East, an apocalyptic preacher like many others. God was Jewish — why? Why should we revere all this Near-Eastern stuff? It started out as a local, culture-bound religion. This culture-bound baggage is still obvious and I suspect it is creating an extra barrier as the Western culture moves farther and farther away from the ancient world.
Then there is the Council of Nicea and how long it took to standardize the Trinity: human, all too human.
Another thing I learned from that Facebook thread is that theologians don’t really believe in god — at least not the god of orthodoxy. They prefer abstruse discussion about ontology, eschatology, divine kenosis (emptying out) and the hiddenness of god. Even as a young teen I already suspected that a significant proportion of priests and nuns didn’t believe in the god of the bible, or in any god. Some of them seemed to believe in Satan, though.
Of course there were always mystics to whom god was the Lover and the soul the Beloved and not a hell-bound sinner — I discovered that later, and that struck me as a particularly attractive rejection of orthodoxy. Still later, I met openly agnostic rabbis and learned about atheist Protestant ministers. True, it makes sense that every believer picks and chooses which parts of the doctrine make personal sense to him or her. But there was never so much openness about this. Times, they are a-changing.
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“Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn't already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.” ~ Thomas Merton
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EVEN MILD PHYSICAL ACTIVITY IMMEDIATELY IMPROVES MEMORY FUNCTION
People who include a little yoga or tai chi in their day may be more likely to remember where they put their keys. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and Japan's University of Tsukuba found that even very light workouts can increase the connectivity between parts of the brain responsible for memory formation and storage.
In a study of 36 healthy young adults, the researchers discovered that a single 10-minute period of mild exertion can yield considerable cognitive benefits. Using high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging, the team examined subjects' brains shortly after exercise sessions and saw better connectivity between the hippocampal dentate gyrus and cortical areas linked to detailed memory processing.
Their results were published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"The hippocampus is critical for the creation of new memories; it's one of the first regions of the brain to deteriorate as we get older -- and much more severely in Alzheimer's disease," said project co-leader Michael Yassa, UCI professor and Chancellor's Fellow of neurobiology & behavior. "Improving the function of the hippocampus holds much promise for improving memory in everyday settings.”
The neuroscientists found that the level of heightened connectivity predicted the degree of recall enhancement.
Yassa, director of UCI's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and the recently launched UCI Brain Initiative, said that while prior research has centered on the way exercise promotes the generation of new brain cells in memory regions, this new study demonstrates a more immediate impact: strengthened communication between memory-focused parts of the brain.
"We don't discount the possibility that new cells are being born, but that's a process that takes a bit longer to unfold," he said. "What we observed is that these 10-minute periods of exercise showed results immediately afterward.”
A little bit of physical activity can go a long way, Yassa stressed. "It's encouraging to see more people keeping track of their exercise habits -- by monitoring the number of steps they're taking, for example," he said. "Even short walking breaks throughout the day may have considerable effects on improving memory and cognition.”
Yassa and his colleagues at UCI and at the University of Tsukuba are extending this avenue of research by testing older adults who are at greater risk of age-related mental impairment and by conducting long-term interventions to see if regular, brief, light exercise done daily for several weeks or months can have a positive impact on the brain's structure and function in these subjects.
"Clearly, there is tremendous value to understanding the exercise prescription that best works in the elderly so that we can make recommendations for staving off cognitive decline," he said. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924153424.htm
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LOWER TESTOSTERONE IN MEN TIED TO GREATER SEVERITY OF COVIID
While men have been shown to have greater risk of COVID-19 illness compared with women, a new study shows that the lower the testosterone level in men, the higher the likelihood of severe COVID-19 disease.
“During the pandemic, there has been a prevailing notion that testosterone is bad,” senior author Abhinav Diwan, MD, a professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said in a statement.
“But we found the opposite in men,” he said.
“If a man had low testosterone when he first came to the hospital, his risk of having severe COVID-19 — meaning his risk of requiring intensive care or dying — was much higher compared with men who had more circulating testosterone.”
For the study, published in JAMA Network Open, Diwan and his colleagues looked at 152 patients, including 90 men and 62 women, who were treated for COVID-19 between March and May 2020 at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. Of those patients, 143 were hospitalized for COVID-19.
Among 66 men in the group who had severe COVID-19, median testosterone levels on the day of admission and at day 3 were about 65% to 85% lower than in the 24 men who had milder disease.
And overall, the vast majority – 89% -- of the COVID-19-infected men, including those with mild disease, showed testosterone levels below what’s considered to be the normal range when they were admitted to hospital.
The men in the current study with severe COVID-19 had average blood levels of testosterone of just 53 ng/dL when they entered hospital. Any testosterone level of 250 ng/dL or below is considered ‘low’ in adult men.
By day 3 of hospitalization, their average testosterone levels dropped even further -- to only 19 ng/dL.
Also, the testosterone level among men who were admitted to ICU was 49 ng/dL, versus 142 ng/dL among men who did not placed in ICU.
In general, the lowest testosterone levels were associated with the highest risks of requiring mechanical ventilation, ICU admission or of dying.
“The groups of men who were getting sicker were known to have lower testosterone across the board,” said study author Sandeep Dhindsa, MD, an endocrinologist at Saint Louis University.
“We also found that those men with COVID-19 who were not severely ill initially, but had low testosterone levels, were likely to need intensive care or intubation over the next 2 or 3 days. Lower testosterone levels seemed to predict which patients were likely to become very ill over the next few days.”
The scientists looked at other hormones but found that only levels of testosterone were linked with COVID-19 disease severity in men. Among women, there were no differences in any hormone levels according to COVID-19 disease severity, including levels of testosterone (women have small amounts of testosterone), or estrogen.
The testosterone concentrations in men with severe disease were not affected by other known risk factors for COVID-19 severity, including age, body mass index, underlying conditions such as diabetes or heart disease, smoking and race.
However, the low testosterone levels did significantly track with signs of inflammation.
Importantly, however, the results don’t necessarily prove that lack of testosterone is causing more severe cases of COVID-19, the researchers said.
They note that testosterone concentrations are known to drop by as much as 50% when men are admitted to the hospital, even for routine elective surgeries.
Drops in testosterone are also normal after traumatic brain injury and heart attack.
To further test the relationship between testosterone and COVID-19, the researchers are now focusing on the hormone’s effects on long-term symptoms of COVID-19.
“We are now investigating whether there is an association between sex hormones and cardiovascular outcomes in ‘long COVID-19’, when the symptoms linger over many months,” said Diwan, a cardiologist.
In the meantime, the results should give pause for researchers studying whether hormonal treatment may help fight COVID-19. For example, one study was looking at giving estrogen to men with COVID-19.
“These data suggest caution should be practiced with approaches that antagonize testosterone signaling or supplement estrogen to treat men with severe COVID-19,” the authors stress.
“Our study results suggest that, unlike the common presumption, testosterone may not be a propagator of COVID-19 severity in either gender,” they conclude. “On the contrary, it may be protective in men.” ~
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210527/lower-testosterone-in-men-tied-to-severe-covid-cases
Oriana:
Giving estrogen to men? That is dumb beyond belief. For men, testosterone is the hormone connected with health and vitality.
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LOW TESTOSTERONE, FINGER LENGTH, AND COVID HOSPITALIZATIONS
~ It is widely recognized that a longer ring finger is a marker of higher levels of testosterone prenatally, whereas a longer index finger is a marker of higher levels of estrogen. Generally, men have longer ring fingers, whereas women have longer index fingers.
Most people who contract the virus only experience mild symptoms. But when it comes to patients who need hospital care, the rates vary depending on age (with elderly people the most affected) and gender (with males experiencing a higher severity than females).
This has led scientists to examine the link between testosterone and Covid-19 severity more closely. One hypothesis implicates high testosterone in severe cases but another links low levels of testosterone in elderly men with a poor prognosis.
Now Professor John Manning, of the Applied Sports Technology, Exercise and Medicine (A-STEM) research team, has been working with colleagues from the Medical University of Lodz in Poland and Sweden's Karolinska University Hospital to look more closely at digit ratios (ratios of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th digits) as predictors of severity of Covid-19 symptoms.
The researchers observed that patients with "feminized" short little fingers relative to their other digits tend to experience severe Covid-19 symptoms leading to hospitalization, and more importantly patients with large right hand — left hand differences in ratios 2D:4D and 3D:5D — have substantially elevated probabilities of hospitalization.
These preliminary findings have just been published in Scientific Reports.
Professor Manning said: "Our findings suggest that Covid-19 severity is related to low testosterone and possibly high estrogen in both men and women.
"'Feminized' differences in digit ratios in hospitalized patients supports the view that individuals who have experienced low testosterone and/or high estrogen are prone to severe expression of Covid-19. This may explain why the most at-risk group is elderly males.
"This is significant because if it is possible to identify more precisely who is likely to be prone severe Covid-19, this would help in targeting vaccination. Right-Left differences in digit ratios (particularly 2D:4D and 3D:5D) may help in this regard.”
There are currently several trials of anti-androgen (testosterone) drugs as treatment for Covid-19. However, in contrast, there is also interest in testosterone as an anti-viral against Covid-19.
He added: "Our research is helping to add to understanding of Covid-19 and may bring us closer to improving the repertoire of anti-viral drugs, helping to shorten hospital stays and reduce mortality rates.”
Professor Manning said the team's work would now continue: "The sample is small but ongoing work has increased the sample. We hope to report further results shortly.”
His previous work in the field highlighted how the length of children's fingers relate to mothers' income level and point to susceptibility to diseases that begin in the womb.
Researchers led by Professor Manning revealed that low-income mothers may feminize their children in the womb by adjusting their hormones, whereas high-income mothers masculinize their offspring. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220325122653.htm
Oriana:
It’s also known that progesterone — another androgen — protects against severe Covid. The mechanism by which androgens protect health may have to do with down-regulating the immune system, which is prone to overreact by causing a massive inflammation.
I'm also still digesting the last sentence of the article.
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ending on beauty:
How can the world be ending
while this mockingbird performs
an aria at the top of the walnut tree?
Look up at his smooth grey belly,
watch his throat swell with song.
~ Patricia Scruggs, Questions on the End of the World
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