*
LIVING WATER
I hurried to the greenest spot
among the lilies, followed
the shiny trail of water back
to the ancestral boulder:
from underneath the vertical face,
water as ancient as inner stone
pulsed forth to braid with light.
Deep fur of moss covered the rocks
in the newborn stream —
Moss! I was so used to desert, drought,
the gray-beige hillsides where I live
spiky with thorn-brush, chaparral,
thirsty, armored survivors —
Here I stood among the moist
corn lilies greener than green:
I will give you living water to drink.
I looked at the living water,
its endless giving of itself,
and memory of younger self
pulsed in me — my onward will.
If it were the fertile north,
this mountain stream
would grow to a great river —
not perish in the desert,
the monotonous miles
in the rain shadow of the Sierra.
And then I thought: They also serve
who perish in the desert.
~ Oriana
HOW DOSTOYEVSKY’S STRANGEST NOVEL, “THE IDIOT,” MANAGES TO ACHIEVE GREATNESS
~ Just 150 years ago, Dostoyevsky sent his publisher the first chapters of what was to become his strangest novel. As countless puzzled critics have observed, The Idiot violates every critical norm and yet somehow manages to achieve real greatness. Joseph Frank, the author of the definitive biography of Dostoyevsky and one of his most astute critics, observed that it is easy enough to enumerate shortcomings but “more difficult to explain why the novel triumphs so effortlessly over all the inconsistencies and awkwardnesses of its structure.” The Idiot brings to mind the old saw about how, according to the laws of physics, bumblebees should be unable to fly, but bumblebees, not knowing physics, go on flying anyway.
Picture Dostoevsky in 1867. With his bride, Anna Grigorievna, he resided abroad, not for pleasure but to escape—just barely—being thrown into debtors’ prison. To pay his fare, Dostoyevsky procured an advance from his publisher Katkov for a novel to be serialized in Katkov’s influential journal, The Russian Messenger. But the money was almost gone by the time Dostoeyvsky left Russia, for the very reason he found himself in financial straits in the first place. Generously but imprudently, he had continued to support the ne’er-do-well son of his first wife while also maintaining the family of his late brother. Anna Grigorievna complained that her sister-in-law lived better than she did.
In her memoirs, Anna Grigorievna described how, exasperated by her husband’s absent-minded generosity, she disguised herself as a beggar, got a handout from her oblivious husband, and confronted him with the donation. When she married Dostoevsky, she thought he had overcome his gambling addiction, but abroad he could not resist roulette, and, of course, always lost. They pawned her dowry, then their clothing. In one letter Dostoevsky begged Katkov for another advance, saying they would otherwise be forced to pawn their linen. It sounds like exaggeration, but he wrote to a friend confessing that he had understated the case, because he could not bring himself to say that they had already pawned it.
In such conditions, the novel Dostoyevsky was working on, to be called The Idiot, did not progress well. Five times, the couple was forced to move when landlords would extend no more credit. Dostoevsky was plagued by epileptic seizures, incapacitating him for days. When Anna Grigorievna went into labor with their daughter Sonya, he suffered an attack, and it was hours before she could rouse him to go for a midwife. When the baby died, he experienced guilt as well as grief because, he believed, if they had been in Russia, Sonya would have survived.
Dostoyevsky simply had to produce a novel, but refused to cheapen his work. “Worst of all I fear mediocrity,” he wrote to his niece. “I assure you the novel could have been satisfactory,” he explained to his friend, the poet Apollon Maikov, “but I got incredibly fed up with it precisely because of the fact that it was satisfactory and not absolutely good.” At last he abandoned his drafts. Nothing mattered more than artistic integrity.
Dostoyevsky resolved to start over with a new premise. The old Idiot dealt with a rogue who committed crime after crime, including rape and arson, but eventually found Christ and goodness. The problem was that Dostoevsky could not make the conversion psychologically convincing, and he was unwilling just to assert it. As it happened, at this very time, Tolstoy was serializing War and Peace in The Russian Messenger—has any publisher been so fortunate as Katkov?—and Tolstoy’s hero Prince Andrei does come to love his enemy in a way that is believable beyond doubt. No novel had ever achieved this feat before, and only one more would do so: Tolstoy’s next work, Anna Karenina. All the more galling, religion was Dostoevsky’s specialty, and so Tolstoy had beaten him at his own game.
Dostoyevsky wondered: what if he were to begin with an Idiot who was already a perfect Christian soul? Suppose the novel should ask not whether the Christian ideal is possible but whether it is desirable? Without supernatural powers, would a true Christian do more harm than good in a world of real people with damaged—Dostoyevskian—souls?
Dostoyevsky proposed “to portray a perfectly beautiful man.” He could think of only three novelists who had tried: Cervantes succeeded with Don Quixote and Dickens with Pickwick, but only by making them ridiculous, rather than psychologically deep. Hugo’s Jean Valjean (in Les Misérables) captures our imagination not by his realistically portrayed inner life but by his prolonged suffering. None of these books tested the Christian ideal itself.
Why might a true Christian cause harm? Plutarch recounts how Aristides the Just would help the illiterate record their votes for the person to be ostracized from Athens each year. Someone once asked him to write down “Aristides.” Since the man was illiterate, Aristides could have written down anything, but performed the task honestly. When he asked why the man wanted to ostracize Aristides, he replied: “Simply because: I am sick and tired of hearing him called ‘the Just.’
People tend to hate their moral superiors. That is why tabloids delight in reporting their lapses. When someone is better than we are, when we have shown our vileness in the face of their goodness, or when we suffer guilt for injuring them unjustly, our lost self-respect often provokes us to behave still worse. We hate them for having been the occasion of our suffering, and we want to change the rules of the game by violating them all the more. In The Brothers Karamazov, the loathsome Fyodor Pavlovich, asked why he hates a particular person, replies “with his shameless impudence: ‘I’ll tell you. He has never done me any harm, but I once played a nasty trick on him, and I’ve never forgiven him for it.’”
Innocence can be so provoking! When guilt is mild, we may resolve to improve, but when it is acute, we often make ourselves worse, and then still worse, in an endless cycle.
Dostoyevsky planned to devise situations to test the saintliness of Prince Myshkin, his perfectly beautiful man, on psychologically complex people. Creating scandalous scenes, he would examine each character’s emotions and record what each would do in response to Myshkin and to the other characters. Would Ganya, a good person blinded by greed and a desire to avenge slights, respond positively to Myshkin’s interventions? What about the novel’s heroine, the spectacularly beautiful Nastasya Fillipovna? Having been seduced when underage by her guardian Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky, she simultaneously regards herself as innocent and deeply sinful. When Myshkin treats her in the way she has always dreamed of but dismissed as impossible, and still more when he unexpectedly proposes to her, she first accepts him, only to sense herself, moments later, as unworthy of her own dreams. “Did you really think I meant it?” she laughs. “Ruin a child like that? That’s more in Afanasy Ivanovich’s line: he’s fond of children!” Instead she ruins herself all the more by selling herself to the wealthy philistine Rogozhin, who is erotically obsessed with her and publicly offers her a hundred thousand rubles wrapped in newspaper. She throws the money into the fire and runs off with him.
In scene after scene, Myshkin’s influence has a decisive effect, sometimes helpful, sometimes harmful. What would the final verdict on his goodness be? Dostoyevsky truly did not know.
Once Dostoyevsky had his theme, the first chapters came easily, and in January 1868 he sent them to Katkov. He didn’t have a clue what would happen next, much less how the experiment would end. Of course, he wanted the Christian ideal to triumph, but he would be guided entirely by psychological plausibility and artistic integrity. In a genuine experiment, after all, one does not know the outcome, and, as Dostoyevsky’s notebooks amply testify, that was surely the case with The Idiot.
The ending that finally did happen, one of the most thrilling in world literature, utterly amazed the author who had been considering alternatives only days before. It demonstrates Dostoevsky’s absolute honesty. The Christian ideal fails as the novel winds up demonstrating what Irving Howe memorably called “the curse of saintliness.” Myshkin’s goodness destroys almost everyone. Nastasya Fillipovna runs off from Myshkin at the very altar and returns to “Rogozhin and his knife.”
When Myshkin at last tracks her to Rogozhin’s dark mansion, Rogozhin demands silence lest they wake her up. He shows Myshkin the apparently sleeping heroine, which he recognizes as a corpse only when a fly settles on her face and she does not react. Rogozhin, who both loves Myshkin and has tried to murder him, lies down with him next to the body, and the rivals, one madder than the other, hug each other through the night. Rogozhin is sentenced to Siberia. Before the novel begins, Myshkin had grown up in a Swiss asylum and had only recently regained his sanity; now he returns there, this time for good, where he will live out his days as “an idiot.”
This description makes the novel seem more coherent than it is. The critics recognized it as a complete mess, as if it were written extemporaneously, with no overall structure in mind—as, in fact, it was. As Dostoyevsky explained his efforts to Maikov:
I turned things over in my mind from December 4th to December 18th. I would say that on the average I came up with six plans a day (at least!). My head was in a whirl. It’s a wonder I did not go out of my mind. At last on December 18th I sat down to write my new novel and on January 5th I sent off five chapters . . . . I took a chance as at roulette: “Maybe it will develop as I write it!” This is unforgivable.
The notebooks leave no doubt that he never knew what the next installment would contain.
As a result, inconsistencies and loose ends abound. Time and again readers get what seems like a promise of a future climax that never arrives. In the first of the novel’s four parts, Ganya three times calls Myshkin, ominously and eponymously, “an idiot,” and proclaims that they will either be great friends or great enemies. But no conflict ever takes place, and Ganya turns into a minor character.
Part One also makes a great deal of Myshkin’s expert calligraphy and his ability to read character from handwriting, but this rich theme is apparently forgotten. Early on Myshkin explains that he cannot marry because he is “an invalid” (impotent?), but, as if the author has forgotten about this ailment, Myshkin goes on to court the beautiful Aglaia. One character promises to tell Myshkin a secret, concerning his noblest action, but then postpones doing so—so far as we know, forever. We catch another character “listening in silence with an extraordinary interest, for which there were perhaps special reasons”—but the “special reasons” are never revealed. Over and over, the other shoe fails to drop.
Dostoevsky is obviously planting mysteries to resolve should he ever find himself unable to think of something to write. He also hit upon the idea of resorting to his own biography. Every reader would have known that Dostoyevsky, once a radical, had been arrested, imprisoned, and then one morning told that he would be executed that very day. Led out to the Senate Square, the condemned prisoners were given last rites and offered blindfolds. At the last possible moment, when rifles were trained upon the first group, an imperial courier galloped up with a message that Tsar Nicholas, Defender of the Faith and Emperor of All the Russias, had in his infinite mercy commuted their sentences to a term in a Siberian prison camp followed by exile from European Russia. One man’s hair turned white on the spot, another went mad and never recovered his sanity, while the third went on to write Crime and Punishment.
Whenever Dostoevsky needed material, Prince Myshkin’s mind turns to his favorite topic, capital punishment. His three descriptions of the last moments of a condemned man count among the most thrilling in literature, all the more so because we know they were not made up. The first ends with Myshkin musing that “perhaps there is some man who has been sentenced to death, been exposed to this torture, and has then been told ‘you can go, you are pardoned.’ Perhaps such a man could tell us [what it was like].” Every reader knew that there was such a man and he was telling us at that very moment.
*
The experience of execution reveals essential truths about life, especially about how people experience time. People always orient themselves to an uncertain future. Actions have meaning because our efforts matter and the future depends partly on what we choose to do. Time is open, and we must exercise free will. As W. H. Auden was to write, “we live in freedom by necessity.”
No matter what they may profess, determinists cannot help behaving as if choice were real and the future uncertain. No less than the rest of us, they experience guilt and regret, both of which imply that they might have acted differently.
What’s more, if the future were fixed, if everyone were simply given whatever they might desire, as socialism promises, life would lose all meaning. As Dostoyevsky once explained, “people would see that they had . . . no will, no personality . . . that their human image had disappeared . . . that it is not possible to love one’s neighbor without sacrificing to him something of one’s labor . . . and that happiness lies not in happiness but only in its pursuit.”
Humanness entails choice and uncertainty, which is why not just socialism but also capital punishment is so horrible. As Myshkin explains in his first description of execution, once the sentence is passed, death is absolutely certain, and so our humanness, which depends on uncertainty, is stripped away:
Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood . . . must surely hope to escape till the very last minute. There have been instances when a man has still hoped for escape, running or begging for mercy after his throat was cut. But in the other case all that hope, which makes dying ten times as easy, is taken away for certain.
All three descriptions focus on how the condemned man experiences time running out.
Imagine being told, as Dostoevsky was, that one would be executed that day. The mind speeds up, as if it were trying to compress forty years of lost experience into a few hours. The road to the gallows seems endless. As one gets closer and closer, time speeds up all the more, so that forty years is concentrated into an hour, then into ten minutes, five minutes, a few seconds. The condemned man may be tortured by the thought that if he could only live experiencing the world with his present intensity, life would be an eternity and he would not waste a single moment: “This idea would turn into such a fury that he would long to be shot more quickly.”
When one lays one’s head upon the block, decades are concentrated into instants. One knows that the last sound one will hear will be the clang of the iron as the blade is released: “I would listen on purpose for it! It may last the tenth of a second, but one would be sure to hear it.” Imagine the intensity of the mind in that last tenth of a second. And now consider: some have suggested that “when the head is cut off, it knows for a second after that it has been cut off!” At that rate, a second is experienced as ten times forty years. “And what if it knows for five seconds?”
Was there ever a work that offered such a direct access to the author’s most intimate moments? For Joseph Frank, this intimacy explained the work’s triumph over its structural flaws.
Dostoyevsky also turned for material to his epilepsy, which readers knew about as well. The moments before Myshkin’s seizures resemble approaching execution, except that instead of absolute horror they confer transcendent bliss. Can it really be an illness, Myshkin asks himself, if he experiences “the acme of harmony and beauty . . . a feeling, unknown and undivined till then, of . . . ecstatic devotional merging into the highest synthesis of life”?
Through our senses we encounter one or another part of existence, not existence itself, but just before the fit Myshkin experiences “the direct sensation of existence itself in the highest degree” and concludes that “for this moment one might give one’s whole life!” He understands the paradoxical line in the book of Revelation that “ ‘there shall be time no longer.’ Probably . . . this is the very second that was not long enough for the water to be spilt from Mahomet’s pitcher, though the epileptic prophet had time to gaze upon all the habitations of Allah.”
*
At some point it occurred to Dostoyevsky that, apart from testing the Christian ideal, his work had acquired another theme: the nature of time as people experience it. In its psychological, political, and philosophical passages, the novel develops the idea that time is truly open. There are more possibilities than actualities, and whatever does happen, something else might have.
Dostoyevsky also realized that writing without an advance plan was in fact the best way to depict the openness of time. Determinism tells us that the future is already given, and for conventional novels it is. If freedom is an illusion, then we resemble characters whose efforts can only bring about the future the author has contrived. In The Idiot, that is not the case. The author found out what would happen only when the characters did. He was no less surprised than they were.
The novel’s most famous chapters seem to arise from nowhere, just as they occurred to the author. Ippolit Terentiev, a minor character who is obsessed with his own imminent death from tuberculosis, reads aloud his forty-page meditation on ultimate questions, especially the openness of time. He compares his imminent end to execution, making all effort pointless. He wanted to study Greek, he reflects, but gave up because “I will die before I get to the syntax.”
Ippolit recorded his meditations just as they occurred to him, much like (as we reflect) the work in which Ippolit appears. In the novel’s most quoted passage, Ippolit expresses Dostoyevsky’s idea that life can be meaningful and truly happy only when understood as a process, an uncertain sequence with many possible outcomes, and not as a finished product whose ending is a foregone conclusion:
“Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America but while he was discovering it. Take my word for it, the highest moment of his happiness was just three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew were on the point of returning to Europe in despair. It wasn’t the New World that mattered, even if it had fallen to pieces.
Columbus died almost without seeing it, and not really knowing what he had discovered. It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at all.”
Writing The Idiot, Dostoevsky discovered a way to overcome the bias of the artifact and represent freedom with unprecedented power. To be sure, Tolstoy hit upon a similar strategy for War and Peace, which, he explained, he was writing without determining what would happen to his fictional characters. The difference is that Tolstoy knew from the start that his theme was the contingency of events and from the outset planned a book with no advance plan. Dostoevsky did not. Appropriately enough, the idea of process occurred to him only in process. It came as a surprise, and the reader senses the unexpected discovery. For that reason, it is all the more effective. In literature of this sort, and especially in The Idiot, what matters is not just the final product but the everlasting and perpetual process. ~
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2018/5/the-idiot-savant-9753
Anca Garcia:
Dostoyevsky has always been my favorite author (at least since at 14, I almost set our house on fire hiding my lamp under my blanket to read The Idiot at night past my bedtime) and sadly, his Devils are nothing compared to the madness in Russia now.
Mary:
Excellent
article. Definitely places Dostoyevsky as a very modern artist. Here
form is process, undetermined. Antithetical to the Christian view of
history as in many ways already completed from sin through redemption to
judgement. D breaks the classical ordering of art,
inspiring an existential uncertainty...asking the astonishing
question--does a good man's acts bless or curse, can we know good from
evil well enough to choose??
Oriana:
Yes,
and just as Prince Myshkin (name derived from the word for "mouse") is
meant to be a kind of holy man, a saint (or, arguably, a holy fool), so
The Devils try to portray an utterly evil protagonist. But that is just
not very convincing, and Dostoyevsky needed to write The Brothers Karamazov to really pull off his "polyphonic novel."
For me, the unforgettable sentence in The Idiot (which I agree is quite flawed, as if it needed a good editor to thin it out) is: “Perhaps beauty will save the world.”
*
USE OF TORTURE IN KHERSON
~ A top Ukrainian human rights investigator on Thursday released a video of what he said was a torture chamber used by Russian forces in the recently liberated Kherson region, including a small room in which he said up to 25 people were kept at a time.
Dmytro Lubinets, the parliament's human rights commissioner, shared the video on social media after Ukraine's interior minister said investigators had uncovered 63 bodies with signs of torture after Russian forces left last week.
In the video, Lubinets speaks from a series of bare underground rooms -- with grimy walls and floors — that he says were used for detentions, interrogations and torture. Electric shocks were used to secure confessions, he said.
An unidentified middle-aged man in the video said he had been kept in one of the rooms for 24 days. He said he was tied to a chair and subjected to recurring electric shocks "until losing consciousness" and, after a break, the process resumed.
"They asked the questions they wanted and obtained the answers they wanted," the man said. "One after the other. They prepared a bunch of questions and wrote down everything they wanted.”
The premises, Lubinets said, were clearly not built for accommodating large numbers of people.
"You can see that people who were detained here were simply not allowed to go to the toilet," Lubinets said in the video, posted on the Telegram messaging app and Facebook.
Earlier on Thursday, according to Ukrainian media, Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky said on national television that 63 bodies with signs of torture had been discovered by investigators in the Kherson region, adding that "we must understand that the search has only just started so many more dungeons and burial places will be uncovered”.
Monastyrsky said law enforcement had uncovered 436 instances of war crimes during Russia's occupation of Kherson, which began shortly after the February invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces and ended last week. Eleven places of detention had been discovered, including four where torture had been practiced, he said.
A police station known as 'The Hole' was the most notorious of several sites where, according to more than half a dozen locals Reuters spoke to in Kherson city, people were interrogated and tortured during Russia's nine-month occupation.
Mass burial sites have been found in other parts previously occupied by Russian troops, including some with civilian bodies showing signs of torture.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-investigators-find-bodies-with-signs-torture-kherson-minister-2022-11-17/
*
“WE HEARD SCREAMS ALL NIGHT”: RUSSIAN TORTURE CHAMBERS IN KHERSON
~ Just talking in Ukrainian could get them arrested and even tortured, residents say. Displaying a Ukrainian flag was out of the question. They say they suffered daily indignities and lived in fear during the Russian occupation of this southern Ukrainian city.
"People didn't go into the streets," except to buy basics like food, says Maryna Zinevych, a 54-year-old who's lived in Kherson all her life. "We were under constant pressure, constant watch."
These were just some of the chilling accounts from residents in Kherson after 8 1/2 months under Russian occupation.
Now Ukrainians are celebrating and singing patriotic songs in the main square, one week after Russian forces retreated. But from behind the carnival atmosphere, a picture is emerging of what citizens endured under Russian rule. They describe instances of detention and abuse amid a climate of terror and suspicion.
As Zinevych speaks to NPR in the city's Liberty Square, she wears a shimmering Ukrainian flag wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. Residents all around her celebrate the Russian withdrawal. People are taking selfies with a plump watermelon — a symbol of Kherson.
The joyous scene would have been impossible just eight days ago, before Ukrainian forces took back control.
Zinevych says the Kremlin-installed authorities were constantly on the lookout for people they deemed "partisan" — anyone who might pass information to Ukrainian authorities that could undermine the occupation.
And, in public, every one had to speak Russian.
"For [speaking] the Ukrainian language or [showing] Ukrainian symbols, you could be taken to the basement and tortured," she says. By "basement" she means detention centers set up by the Russian forces.
One such facility was at a police station on the northern side of Kherson near the Antonivskiy Bridge.
Mariya Kryvoruchko, who lives a half a block from the police station, remembers some terrifying moments.
"We heard these crazy screams at night," Kryvoruchko says. "There were shouts from the jail of people being tortured at night. In the summer when you opened the window, we heard it very well.”
As she speaks with NPR, suddenly an explosion rings out in the distance. Kryvoruchko doesn't flinch. "That's outgoing," she says, "don't worry!”
The 70-year-old says she doesn't know who was being held or tortured at the police station.
"When I passed the police station I was even afraid to look. [The Russians] were there with guns," she says.
HE WAS SUSPECTED OF BEING PART OF THE UNDERGROUND
One man who says he was detained there is Maksym Negrov.
He has come back to the compound to find the cell where he was held from March until mid-April.
"The Russians arrested everyone who had a pro-Ukrainian position," Negrov says, standing inside the now-abandoned police compound. Three vandalized vans with their Ukrainian police emblems blotted out with red spray paint sit in the yard.
The Russian captors beat and tortured all of the detainees, he says, including him.
Negrov, 45, had served in the Ukrainian military when he was younger. "I was detained for suspicion of involvement in the resistance movement," he says. "But at the start of the war, I was just a businessman.”
Eventually, he says, the Russians let him go.
Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets says his office is investigating allegations of human rights violations and crimes against humanity by the occupying Russian military in Kherson.
These include torture in basements, forced disappearances, hostage-taking of civilians, and extrajudicial executions," he said on the Telegram messaging app.
Investigators from the United Nations and human rights groups also say they are gathering evidence of torture and other abuses.
Another man says he was part of what he calls the "peaceful" underground resistance in Kherson.
The 25-year-old only gives his code name, Ivan, because he says he's still involved in covert operations.
"They were constantly trying to arrest us," he says.
Ivan is the coordinator of a group called the Yellow Ribbon Movement.
"We were putting up graffiti and yellow ribbons to remind people that Kherson is still Ukraine," he says.
His group also distributed leaflets and posted flyers trying to help people resist the Russian occupation. One key message: Do not take a Russian passport.
The Moscow-backed administration tried to give residents Russian passports, saying it would make them eligible for food aid and other assistance.
"They would try to force you to take their passport," he says. And for young Ukrainian men, he adds, "their passport, it's like a ticket to their army.”
Hundreds of men from Kherson were conscripted into the Russian military, according to Ivan. There have been reports of Russia drafting Ukrainian men in occupied territories, but NPR has not confirmed how many.
As the Kremlin struggles to get recruits to the front line, Ivan says, "They want to have Ukrainians fighting against Ukrainians.”
He says now that Kherson is freed its celebrations have been inspiring.
He is working with activists in Crimea and other Russian-occupied areas on guerrilla information campaigns and spreading the message that, no matter what the Kremlin says, those territories are still part of Ukraine. ~
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/18/1137473863/ukraine-kherson-alleged-torture-russia
*
MANY WAYS TO DEFINE DEFEAT: RUSSIA’S MISSING PEACE-MAKERS
~ Even in a war that has gone poorly for Russia, the Russian Defense Ministry’s November 9 announcement of a full retreat from the city of Kherson marked a special kind of disaster.
Kherson was the first major Ukrainian city seized by Moscow after the invasion, and it was one of the four regions that Russia had illegally annexed just five weeks earlier, following sham referendums. In October, the city’s occupying authorities had plastered its streets with billboards declaring that Russia would be there “forever,” and Moscow had told Russian citizens that the city’s occupation was one of the war’s major successes. But by the time of the annexation, Russian forces were already struggling to hold their lines in the face of continued Ukrainian advances. Eventually, Russian leaders were forced to withdraw and to shore up defenses around Crimea and in the east.
This embarrassing retreat—which follows Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv province in September—has caused many Russian elites to question and challenge the invasion. People who opposed the war from the outset (but who stayed silent to stay safe) have been joined by many people who actively supported the war but are now convinced that the invasion has been mishandled from the start and privately want it to end. Some of them worry that Russian President Vladimir Putin is unfit to lead, prone to missteps, and overly emotional in his decision-making.
People from Russia’s prominent “patriotic,” pro-war political forces, who recently called on Moscow to fight until it reaches Kyiv, have now started to sound much more realistic. On the popular pro-military Telegram channel Obraz Buduschego (the Image of the Future), an anonymous correspondent wrote that Moscow should try to freeze the conflict and carry out domestic reforms. Yury Baranchik, a prominent Russian patriot on Telegram, argued that Moscow’s blitzkrieg had failed and that Russia should stop trying to push forward, and that it should instead entrench its existing positions and focus on domestic issues. The famous state television pundit Aleksander Medvedev recently said that Russia has to admit that the situation in Ukraine is poor, and he acknowledged that Moscow will face more defeats. Even aggressive nationalists, such as Aleksei Zhivov, have argued that the war shows that Russia’s political system has failed. Many of these analysts insist that Russia, instead of fighting in Ukraine, should do some housekeeping to deal with domestic issues—including corruption.
Some in the West may believe that Russia’s growing domestic discord presents an opportunity, and that there may even be an influential Russian constituency that wants Moscow to soften its rhetoric and engage in genuine negotiations with Kyiv and the West to end the war. But even if there is growing domestic demand to “rethink” the war and focus on internal problems, there are serious complications that make it hard for these realists to turn into peacemakers.
Russia’s realists are wary of any negotiations that might lead to a humiliating resolution, which could threaten their political future—or even their physical safety. Notably, no one in Russia’s leadership has publicly supported any form of territorial concessions, which would amount to an acknowledgement of Russia’s defeat and could lead to criminal prosecution. (Russian law forbids any calls for territory disintegration, and Moscow now considers much of Ukraine to be part of Russia.) For the same reason, the country’s elites will not dare turn against Russian President Vladimir Putin. For all his failures, Russia’s leader remains their best bet for preserving the regime that keeps them safe.
NO WAY OUT
In Putin’s Russia, there are many ways to define defeat. For its military leadership, defeat is an accumulation of battlefield setbacks; for the nationalist hard-liners, it entails allowing Ukraine’s “anti-Russia” state to exist at all; and for the security services, it means losing a major Russian confrontation with the West. For the regular elites, it means anything that threatens their personal and political security. But for almost all of Russia’s main constituencies, including the realists, withdrawing Russian forces to their pre-invasion lines of control would meet their criteria. Such a move would not only mark the end of Russian influence over Ukraine but also usher in a humiliating new geopolitical reality for Moscow.
And to Russia’s elites, a withdrawal would be more than humiliating; it would be dangerous. They do not think that if they simply agree to withdraw to Russia’s pre-February 24 positions and negotiate to control parts of Donetsk and Luhansk they can reconcile with Ukraine. They don’t believe that Moscow can end hostilities without risking losing Crimea. In fact, they believe that if Russia withdrew its troops to where they were at the start of 2022 it would leave Russia itself vulnerable to collapse. As Dmitri Trenin, the former director of the (now-shuttered) Carnegie Moscow, wrote in May, “the strategic defeat” that the West “is preparing for Russia” means that “the theater of the ‘hybrid war’ will simply move from Ukraine further east, into the borders of Russia itself, the existence of which in its current form will be in question.”
On Russian Telegram channels, many Russians have implied that the West would insist on dismissing Putin as a part of possible agreement. Many conservatives believe that if Putin fell as a result of such a deal, his regime would eventually be followed by a more pro-Western government that would betray Russia’s strategic interests and allow the country to physically disintegrate. To put it simply, the Russian elite sees the war against Ukraine not as expansionary but as a war for self-preservation.
Many Russians believe that the collapse of the state would be followed by international criminal investigations, perhaps even a war crimes tribunal. This prospect frightens even Russian elites not involved in the fighting. Since the war began, Putin’s regime has not allowed any leading members of Russia’s public or private sector to stay on the sidelines. Officials who tried to distance themselves from the invasion—as Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, central bank head Elvira Nabiullina, and Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin all apparently did—have been effectively conscripted into the war effort. Mishustin, for example, was appointed by Putin to lead the “special coordination council,” which Putin created to bring together civilian and military leaders to meet the government’s wartime needs. But far from empowering technocrats to check and balance the influence of the military and security apparatus, the council has been incorporated into the military’s agenda and made to act in accordance with the military’s priorities. Mishustin now serves the armed forces’ needs by securing the economy’s wartime mobilization. He has little time to move forward on his own peacetime agenda and focus on the development of Russia’s modern economy.
The war has also changed Sergey Kiriyenko, Putin’s domestic policy chief. Once a technocrat, Kiriyenko seemed to take advantage of the war to bolster his position, becoming responsible for the political integration of the occupied parts of Ukraine into Russia. But in reality, Kiriyenko was ill prepared for the challenges of military occupation, and he has been pushed to cooperate more closely with the security services. In response, he has begun imitating the hawks around him and largely shed his past reputation as a pragmatic, if sycophantic, operator.
Many other once moderate elites have had a similar trajectory. Today, the Putin regime has been adopting elements of a military dictatorship. Despite recent criticism of Russia’s war strategy, the hawks are ascendant, and political repression has destroyed any real opposition by quickly silencing displays of outright dissent against the regime itself. The pro-war fervor has made militaristic but previously marginal elites, such as Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the mercenary Wagner Group, even more noisy and provocative. And it has pushed many other figures within the regime to adopt extreme views they previously shunned. Even Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chair of Russia’s security council, who as president from 2008 to 2012 was considered a liberal, has started issuing wild diatribes against NATO and Ukraine over Telegram.
Today’s political mainstream consists of a rising univocal, powerful, and intolerant pro-war movement for which the invasion is existential. To them, victory must be secured by all means possible—including through nuclear weapons. They see no place for peace initiatives.
In this context, the rise of the realists could prove critical to ending the conflict. They understand that Russia’s current path is suicidal, and that carrying out more atrocities and wasting shrinking resources would worsen Russia’s already deteriorating position in a conflict that Moscow will eventually have to end. But even though they want to halt the invasion, they have a complicated path.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
For Russia’s elites, demonstrating support for the war—if not for the way it is currently being fought—is the key to political survival. Many increasingly voice support for escalation, a theme that has become mainstream. Despite the different interests in play, technocrats, security operatives, conservative nationalists, and business leaders are largely united in believing that Russia cannot lose, lest it result in the collapse of the regime on which they all depend.
But Moscow is becoming deeply divided on how to accomplish that task. The war’s biggest proponents, including ideological conservatives such as Nikolai Patrushev and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, want to carry out a full mobilization, conscripting Russia’s entire eligible population and putting the entire Russian economy on wartime footing, and hit Ukraine with everything they have—including nuclear weapons. (Russia has recently been carrying out a large-scale media campaign aimed at making the world believe that Russia can and would use these weapons if needed.) These ultranationalists still envision a clear victory, with Kyiv eventually falling into Russian hands. The growing chorus of realists, by contrast, has come to see that Moscow does not have the resources that it needs to win. Instead, they favor an approach in which Russia avoids more defeat by freezing the war where it is, digging defensive lines around their current positions and using reinforcements to stop the Ukrainian advance.
There is no one in the Russian elite who will support a Russian withdrawal to the country’s February 24 positions. It is possible, however, that the realists could publicly push for freezing the conflict in a temporary agreement with the West (sealed with Ukraine). First, however, they would need to overcome the radical hawks, who are ready to fight in Ukraine until the bitter end and who remain dominant in domestic political discourse. To do so, they will have to convince Putin to personally acknowledge reality and opt for a more sober approach to the conflict. But even if Putin gives up and admits that the best Russia can do is freeze the war, it will not assuage elite fears about Russia’s survival and territorial integrity in face of the West, which even the realists believe wants to subjugate Russia.
There is little that the United States and Europe can do to insulate realists from domestic threats. But if the West wants to strengthen its voice in the Kremlin, it should outline a proposal in which Russian-Ukrainian peace talks would result in a simultaneous Russian-U.S. dialogue over Moscow’s strategic concerns. This dialogue would be designed to firmly guarantee to Moscow that Russia would continue to be a stable, autonomous state. The United States could do this by agreeing to discuss the future of NATO. The West would also have to offer Russia guarantees that Ukraine will not be used as part of a Western “anti-Russia” project, as Putin alleges.
Given all the horrible things Russia has done, this outcome would not be terribly satisfying for Ukraine or its Western partners. But under the current circumstances, Putin believes he has no choice but to continue bombing and attacking Ukraine. And unlike many of Russia’s elites, Putin believes that Ukraine is still doomed. His present personal goal is tactical—stopping Kyiv’s attacks, holding the line, and then waiting until the Ukrainian state collapses, which he believes is just a matter of time. Putin could even escalate, turning to nuclear weapons.
Signaling to the realists that peace with Ukraine will not inevitably cause Russia to collapse is a dramatically challenging task. But it may be the only way to get the Kremlin to end its catastrophic invasion. Until then, even the realist elites have no choice but to bet on the strong state and the strongman. ~
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/russias-missing-peacemakers?utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR1zb8w0HAdArbDznjpzkEQeVL2RNixO-CVWM6W-I88yxammeNY626IzrxU
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"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” ~ Napoleon
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CORRUPTION IN RUSSIA (Dima Vorobiev)
~ By Russian standards, Russia isn’t more corrupt than any country we like to compare ourselves with.
We’re probably even less corrupt than them, because we’re upfront about our corruption.
Honesty is what differentiates our corruption from the hypocritical West.
During his last two terms, President Putin did a lot to exterminate poorly organized corruption that bloomed in the early post-Soviet era. Thanks to him, in Moscow you can go for weeks without being shaken down for bribe by a traffic police officer or a desk jockey at some government office.
Such grass-root corruption by rank-and-file government servants was a huge irritation factor for the mass of Russians. Now, it has hugely improved.
There are still situations where you need to grease some palms in the police, state attorneys’ offices, courts of justice and suchlike in exceptional situations.
For example when you or your family find yourself indicted or under investigation. Running business in Russia also requires frequent generosity toward government officials you come in contact with. “Sharing is caring”, or what?
But in everyday life a regular commoner like me often forgets about necessary “gifts to the Motherland”.
Tributary taxation
When people in the West talk about corruption in Russia, they most often mean something little-known and totally invisible to outsiders. It’s tributary taxation, the eternal companion of our Derzháva (“the mighty Russian State”).
Tributary taxation is part and parcel of our system. It secures our social and economic stability. It cements the cohesion of our political class in spite of the enormous distances and weak civil society. The “vertical of power” installed by President Putin has streamlined and perfected tributary taxation like never before in history.
A commoner like me often forgets about necessary “gifts to the Motherland”.
This is a kind of corruption to be exterminated. There’s so much money wasted by idiots and crooked servants. Billions are taken away from the society, siphoned off to Western offshores to the detriment of our motherland.
Fighting the beast
You grab your chance to make Russia a better place.
An upstanding citizen and resourceful networker that you are, you’ve got a couple buddies who are big shots in the police.
You tip them off, they bust the custom chief and his deputies and dig up a few hundred millions in small denomination USD bills. The customs guys lose their jobs, but walk free, because they promised to tell no one you’ve taken their money.
Success story
You deal another huge blow to the scourge of poorly organized corruption. The media have a blast covering the juicy bits of the bust. Patriotic Russian Quorans rub the case in the face of Russia-haters who say Russia is mired in corruption.
Isn’t that a good thing?
Besides, you’re now a 100 mil richer. You’ve strengthened your relationship with your police buddies. New very good people man the custom station. You can vouch for them, because they are best buddies with your police pals.
And your employees are now overjoyed with their brand new iPhones!
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In the picture, liberal maggots with faces of known Putin’s critics are gnawing on Russia’s gentle flesh. Words “corruption” and “bribe” are placed side-by-side with “the 5th column”, an established name for Russian dissidents. Most of the maggots have exaggerated Jewish facial features. A winged black angel of liberal democracy shouts: “Help! They’re exterminating us!” ~
John Holroyd:
What a delightful explanation, Dima.
When I read your articles on Russia’s organized corruption it does put me in mind of Samuel Pepys diaries that I read long ago.
They document a time when England was in the early stages of becoming a real and serious power in the world and where corruption, the correct sort of corruption anyway, was actually formalized and seen as quite Gentlemanly, in that a new Government minister would have to pay, in gold or silver, his predecessor in order to take the post.
If he couldn’t afford to do then he was either clearly unfit to take such a weighty role or unable to find a wealthy benefactor who believed in his determination to do the best for the good of the country and his friends.
An Army officer would purchase his commission similarly, and many government contracts, as such, had open kickbacks arranged around them to make sure everyone did what was necessary and kept their friends with enough wealth to prevent them joining opposing factions that were not truly patriotic.
Mild corruption that made people’s lives easier and made sure everyone got their proper piece of the pie was tolerated if not encouraged, and dangerous corruption that made life difficult was eradicated where possible with miscreants being hung.
The world of Hobbes’ Leviathan in action as the state became powerful and later expanded to Imperial dimensions ruling 1/4 of the world, with really only your own Ancestral empire as its true competition.
Roderick Kerr:
So, why does Russia have a GDP the size of Italy’s, albeit with twice the population?
Dima Vorobiev:
In our books, this is the residue effect of Communist rule, plus the chaos of the 1990s.
Titus Bobby:
It's not called “bribing", it's called “tipping,” which only encourages and rewards performance. It's the secret reason servers in the US are so attentive and customer service oriented.
more from Dima:
The confrontation with America is the core of President Putin’s internal politics. Nothing short of a New Yalta deal—although a withdrawal of the US military presence in Europe would be nice, too—would vouch for any reconciliation. A mortal threat to Russia from the global Western elites led from Washington is the ideological foundation of Putinism. We must allow our thieving state-oligarchical clans to keep having the run of the country, because enemies of Russia would be quick to take advantage of our splits and disorder.
The policy of Containment started with Truman in 1945–46. As our defeat in the Cold War showed, it was extremely slow-working but effective.
For us commoners inside the country, life in the early 1990s felt exactly like we lost a war: chaos, poverty, wars around the ethnic rim, and general misery.
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HOW YOUNG EDUCATED RUSSIANS FEEL ABOUT THEIR COUNTRY
Outlaw. Pariah. Aggressor.
Young, educated Russians are, as a rule, liberal. They don't have another set of values but Western. For 30 years, Russian government has not offered anything of its own. Except, maybe, for the vague thing the authorities call 'patriotism’. But if we are talking about the educated people, they quickly figure out that what the government is trying to force them to do is not to love their motherland, but to agree with their superiors and never criticize them. And that's bullshit. Because now the young and educated Russians are supposed to love their murderous, treacherous leadership, and not their motherland.
Of course, there are also young, educated Russians who are socialist. They also think that Russia is in the wrong here, because killing and dying for other people's capitals is also bullshit, and the government and the media can shove their quasi-patriotic rhetoric up their cowardly asses. But the socialists are so few, we can discount them.
There are young, educated Russians who are truly patriotic, who want the best for our country and its people, but unfortunately they have no power and no plan on how to protect Russia's national interests without killing the neighbors who are supposed to be your brothers.
Soviet ideology gave way to the modern Russian idea-less-ness. So, if somebody asked me what the future of Russia were, I would say NO IDEA. ~ Sergey Bereznikov. Quora
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"In Melitopol, the Russian flag was removed from the main square. Putinists reported that this was a scheduled maintenance of the flagpole.” ~ Quora
Oriana:
Everyone knows that flagpoles require a lot of maintenance, especially in wartime.
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THE QUESTION OF RUSSIA’S GREATNESS
~ I feel that most Russian people have realized long time ago that Putin won’t bring Russia “back to greatness”. The problem is that they often cannot admit it even to each other for the fear of being arrested for one of many “dangerous offenses against the state” that officially are punishable by 10–15 years in prison (and unofficially by getting sodomized/tortured immediately after the arrest in police/FSB quarters), as telling on each other is rampant.
However, Ukrainian security services published plenty of conversations where Russian soldiers and officers stationed on occupied Ukrainian territories criticize their superiors and Putin in their conversations with friends and family members, proposing various punishments they’d like to inflict on them.
The things that citizens of today's Russia are proud of are:
First human in outer space: Yuri Gagarin in April 1961.
Winning WWII against Hitler.
Both times it was the Soviet Union (collective efforts of people from 15 republics, including Ukraine) that was behind the achievement, and of course, the USSR had zero chance against Hitler without the massive financial and military help from the USA and UK.
Citizens of Russia also prefer to forget (or had never learned) that the Soviet Union sided with Hitler from the start (the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact), which led to the USSR occupying part of Poland alongside Hitler, and also attacked Finland and took 11% of its territory in 1939–40 aggressive war.
This is why probably Putin is trying to claim the history of Kyiv-centered Rus (now Ukraine) as the history of Moscow-centered Russian Empire.
Rus was indeed great; Kyiv’s prince Yaroslav daughters were married to French and other European kings.
At that time, Moscow was just swamps.
Russian Federation is the only country in the world with its historical center outside Russia (as per Russian history books — USSR historians wanted the state origins to be ancient; so the history of the Soviet Union began in 482 in Kyiv). That’s the real reason why Putin is obstinate about taking over Ukraine; this is where the greatness of Russia lies for him. Putin wants to be the leader of the state that takes origins from the ancient Rus, and not some runaway Moscow dukes bowing to the power of Mongol khans and siding with them against Kyiv.
Most Westerners don’t get this meta-historic view; it seems irrational for them. They still struggle to understand just how irrational Putin is.
I sometimes feel that Russia is God-chosen country to show the people of the Earth how not to live life. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Oriana:
And to make things even more complicated, Kievan Rus was founded by Vikings, mostly from what is now Sweden.
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PUTIN WILL NEVER LIVE UP TO THE IMAGE HE HAD CREATED FOR HIMSELF
~ Especially in the early months of the war, there was much excited speculation about his health, with claims that he had everything from blood cancer to Parkinson’s. Much of this has subsided, especially as the puffy aspect and odd twitches that were fastened upon as proof seem to have passed.
It was unsurprising that this would attract such interest, offering something of a deus ex machina for Western governments eager for a quick solution to the dilemmas of the conflict.
However, according to US intelligence officers who have studied the question, while Putin may well have recurring health issues – he has long been known to suffer from back problems and may even be suffering from a condition that has compromised his immune system, explaining the extreme measures taken to shield him from Covid-19 – there is no sign of anything likely to lead to his imminent death or incapacity.
For now, the chances of a palace coup are scarcely greater than those of Putin being toppled by protests in the streets. Multiple security forces balance each other: in Moscow, for example, the military garrison, a special division of the National Guard and the Kremlin Regiment, all report to different chains of command. The Federal Security Service watches all three – and the Federal Protection Service in turn watch them.
So long as Putin is able to control the heads of these so-called “power ministries” and they command the loyalties of their agencies, he seems hard to topple.
However, for all he looks firmly in control, what is happening is that his system is becoming increasingly brittle, losing the resources which in the past have provided the resilience to respond to unexpected challenges.
Obviously, this means financial resources. As sanctions bite and the costs of war escalate, money is getting tighter. Almost a third of the 2023 budget (more than 9 trillion out of a total 29 trillion rubles) will go towards defense and security. This leaves proportionately less to support regional budgets and keep struggling industries afloat.
However, it also means weakened legitimacy and the goodwill of the security services and local elites. Putin’s approval ratings have always been artificially high, given that there is no meaningful opposition for him to be measured against, but they are nonetheless falling.
The National Guard, the key force charged with controlling protests in the streets, has been decimated fighting in Ukraine. Members of the National Guard are also angry that they were used as cannon fodder in a war for which glorified riot police were neither trained nor equipped.
Meanwhile, while the grumbling within the elite remains carefully muted, it is evident. Just as he did during Covid-19, Putin is dumping the hard and unpopular work of raising “volunteer battalions” and keeping the war economy running onto his regional mayors and governors. While some, like St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov, have seized this as an opportunity to court Putin’s approval, many others are quietly appalled.
All this makes predicting the future of Putin and his regime even more difficult. Even brittle and stagnating regimes can hold on for a long time. Tsarist Russia was arguably brain-dead by 1911, when the brutally reformist Prime Minister Pyetr Stolypin was assassinated, but it still lasted through three years of catastrophe in the First World War before crumbling in 1917.
However, it does mean that Putin’s state is much less capable of dealing with the kind of unexpected crises that are at once hard to predict and yet ultimately inevitable. This could be anything from generalized rout in Ukraine to a cascading regional economic collapse at home, the security forces refusing to suppress protests on the streets or Putin falling seriously ill.
In these circumstances, as in March 1917 (February by the old Russian calendar), perhaps the commander-in-chief will be confronted by his senior generals and politicians and induced to step down for the good of the Motherland.
It seems hard at present to imagine such a scenario, but in the main the Russian elite, political and military alike, are not ‘Putinists’ but ruthless opportunists. They have supported Putin because it is in their interests; they continue to stay loyal because the risks in opposing him for now very much seem greater.
However, if they start to believe that he is vulnerable, they will likely distance themselves from him at speed. No one wants to be the last loyalist of a doomed regime.
Whatever happens, though, Putin’s dreams of establishing Russia as a great power on the back of its military strength are over, and so too are his ambitions of securing a legacy as one of the nation’s great state-builders.
His military machine is broken; his country’s economy so scarred that it will take years to recover; his reputation as a geopolitical mastermind in tatters. Putin-the-man may still cling to power for years, but Putin-the-legend is dead. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/11/opinions/after-putin-power-health-regime-galeotti/index.html
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PHOTOGRAPHY AND SOVIET PROPAGANDA
~ The routine of heavy editing of photos was deeply ingrained in Soviet propaganda. Retouching tools, scissors and all that were a requirement for any professional trusted with picking images for public consumption.
For example, not a single official photo from the meetings of Party congresses at my time was released without editors doing a thorough clip and paste job on them. The luminaries sitting on the podium could not yawn, have closed eyes, talk to each other, or anyhow look like morons. Someone accidentally sitting in a place not corresponding to his rank in the Secretariat or Politburo? Clip and paste.
Sometimes this ended up in hilariousness. A classic tale was a half of someone’s bald head placed on the conference desk before another top boss as if a kind of festive meal. There were times when people were observed sitting in two places in the presidium in the same picture.
NATURALLY FAKE
Photo editing in our propaganda explicitly required retouching tools. How could it not be?
Communism is a radical progressivist ideology. It storms the skies, takes aim at a profound, irreversible transformation of society, conquest of nature and changing human nature. Man shall stop being the lazy, stupid, selfish, sex-obsessed jerk that evolution made him. Under communism, man shall be a “friend, comrade and brother” to another man (this is the line from our Communist program).
Naturally, from day one in power, the Soviet Communists went on painting the vision of that bright new world on all available surfaces. Including our brains. Letting imperfect “real life” look less than perfect would be worse than depressing. It would be anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary.
Add to that the inherent visual tilt of Russian civilization. Literacy came late to our part of the world. The grand mass of peasants, herdsmen, fishermen and hunters not only couldn’t read, they retained many elements of “double-faith”. Their apparent observance of Christian rituals had a strong undercurrent of paganism, subdued but not eradicated by the official church.
Since pagans didn’t have written texts, people’s spirituality sought projection on other people (Starets, the Russian holy men), alternative lifestyles (the stránniki wanderers, the yuródivye fools), relics and, of course, sacred paintings. Before the imperial Westernization, our culture was icons.
Especially in the fear-ridden era of totalitarianism, this obsession with visuals surfaces in everything. Lenin early said the apocryphal phrase that “of all arts, the most important for us are moving pictures”.
If you think about it, this also makes much sense. Take the textbook picture of Stalinist photoshopping, where people around Stalin keep disappearing.
Imagine yourself a Soviet propagandist: You see a photo of the respected leader of worldwide Communism, the head of the USSR, standing side by side with three known enemies of the people. How could a wise and perceptive man like Stalin be spending months and years side by side with these scum and not notice their treacherous nature? Why isn’t there revulsion on his face? If I publish this photo, doesn’t it say that I, faithful follower of Stalin, think it’s okay for everyone to keep company with enemies of the people?
Better safe than sorry. Who needs these ugly faces anyway? Snip, snip, paste.
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When during WW2 our government went about confiscating about a monthly salary from people’s annual pay in the form of compulsory “war bonds”, they circulated stories about simple peasants “buying” war planes and tanks for the Red Army with their private money.
One of this stories was about a beekeeper Ferapónt Golovátyi.
The photo below shows him handing over to an airforce officer an Ilyushin that he allegedly paid 100,000 rubles for. (At the official exchange rate of 1942, 1 USD: 5.6 SUR, it’s equivalent to about 280,000 USD in 2019.)
The peasant wears a padded jacket and pants, which has been a signature clothing of a “simple Soviet working man” ever since Stalin’s era. His boots however seem to be pretty new British military shoes delivered to the Red Army under lend-lease.
Those with knowledge of WW2 history also may notice that the padded gear was the winter uniform of a large part of Soviet infantry until the winter 1944–45. At the time when “everyone” had the first-hand knowledge of the war, this was a dead giveaway that the “peasant” in the picture is most probably just a stand-in from a nearby Red Army unit.
Someone decided that this motif wasn’t good enough. Cue in photo editors. The end result can be seen below. The peasant is now properly clothed, looks as clean-shaven, well-fed and self-assured as a Texan ranch owner—and the British boots no longer mar the picture
Edward Adamchek:
It’s a perfect example of the Stalinist establishment re-writing history, in order to suit their desires. It has obviously continued to this day, as Putin has been known (exposed) to do exactly the same; when people are “disappeared,” they’re actually erased, as if they never existed. That is why Russia remains an autocracy; anyone who opposes the actions of the government can never gain traction as a martyr, this way. This is why hundreds of thousands of USSR soldiers were “disappeared” after WWII (sent to Gulags, etc.), merely because they had been exposed to the freedoms, opulence and democratic rights Allied soldiers enjoyed.
This is how Putin can convince Russians that they have freedom which is the equivalent those of Western governments, much like Stalin was so careful to rename satellite governments something like “Peoples’ Democratic Republic of……. , when they were not remotely Peoples’ anything, nor Democratic governments in any way, and very possibly not even Republics. This is how Putin and the oligarchs are not only the wealthiest people in Russia and other European governments, but the most politically powerful. Since peoples’ perceptions determine their reality, by controlling what the Russians people perceive, Stalin and Putin completely control(ed) what Russians’ perceive, thereby controlling their realities.
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DIMA VOROBIEV ON RUSSIA’S NEAR FUTURE
~ I share President Putin’s approach: fools and paid charlatans predict the future, wise men bulletproof the present.
Or, as Friedrich Engels observed, history is made collectively by the entire bunch of individuals, each pursuing their own agenda—and at the end of the day it all turns out the way no one wanted.
The population is dwindling. The average citizen is aging. The number of young, reckless, and ambitious—those who “don’t have anything to lose but their chains”—stays comfortably low.
The most restless and talented of them move to Moscow where they successfully settle in wealth and comfort, or emigrate altogether. Yes, I hear dumb rumbling everywhere, but see no powder kegs.
Money is still sloshing around, despite a decade of economic stagnation. Smart technocrats at our President’s feet keep our war chest pleasantly puffy, so that Putin can easily splurge a hundred billions or two if a major firefight requires that.
President Putin is healthy, fit. He also knows well how to dodge bullets, poisons and malfunctioning aircraft engines.
The rich and powerful keep their money and their families in the very places which our wonder weapons are trained on. This is a much stronger guarantee that the missiles won’t be launched than a million peaceful agreements.
“Revolution” is a dirty word with the entire nation. What’s more important, the filthy rich have the sense to move their excess wealth to the West as diligently as they send their Ferraris and Bugattis to service, so that whoever comes for them with torches and pitchforks won’t find much to take home.
The middle class and the educated youth are politically anemic, but slowly mature and learn the virtues of self-organization. There’s no reason to think that their grandkids won’t find a way to bring to heel whoever occupies in the Kremlin in 50 years’ time. ~
Sinan Ozeren:
The workforce decline and continuing deindustrialization of the country since the collapse of the USSR are super serious problems. Furthermore, the widened income gap makes much more Russians unhappy than an average pampared-ass young Muscovite working for a multi-national realizes. So, a lot of things are at store and no one knows what will happen when pandora’s box is open. Most rich Russians who sent their kids abroad to study with the hope that they will play important roles in Russia’s state-oligarchy dynamic balance will be hugely disappointed and will likely join their kids in Nice, never to come back.
Oriana:
It's difficult now to check, but I'm pretty sure this article was written before the invasion -- hence the references to the filthy rich sending their money and kids to Western countries, or "keeping our war chest pleasantly puffy." Before February 24, 2022 means before the world got to see Putin in a different light than as an "competent ruler":
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HOW RUSSIA SAW THE UKRAINIANS BEFORE THE WAR
~ Read the book Red Famine by Anne Applebaum. It will tell you Russians thought Ukrainians to be backwards, uneducated and not sophisticated. And a lower form of life.
They were a nation of peasant farmers whose only talent was frowning crops. Like many of their Soviet countries, they were viewed as being below Russians in worth and value.
That is why Stalin had no problem starving 5 million of them to death in 1932–33. [the actual number of victims varies depending on the source, but the lowest starts at 3 million]
Russia has always viewed them as independent and rebellious and always causing problems. They were right about that.
Russia once again has underestimated their intellect, their ingenuity and their determination. ~ Brent Cooper, Quora
Monument to the victims of Red Famine
Dimitry Zolochev:
As a Ukrainian, I know all of this but even more. I know going back to WW2 how Stalin made sure Ukrainian fighters were required to die more and live and fight under brutal orders. Stalin made sure Ukrainians died more in that war than ethnic Russians, although Stalin was born and grew up as a criminal in Georgia. Stalin forced Ukrainian soldiers to fight from and into Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and finally to Berlin.
After
WW2, Stalin made sure Ukrainians had the least amount of rebuilding
money from Moscow. He made sure Stalingrad and Leningrad were rebuilt
better and faster than Ukrainian cities and towns.
Khrushchev was born by the Russia/Ukraine border but lived a number of years growing up and working in the Donbas. He was a native Russian speaker but learned to understand Ukrainian but not speak it. When Khrushchev assumed power in 1954, and until his termination in 1964, Ukraine had to endure “Russification Programs” and children were pushed to learn and speak in Russian. During that 10 year period, Ukraine was again deprived of funds from Moscow to build up Ukraine as had been ongoing in ethnic Russia. Ukraine held very little sway in USSR politics and decisions.
Under Brezhnev, Ukraine was further discriminated against in many ways as to culture, language, infrastructure, and particularly suppression of Ukrainian nationalism. Moscow closely decided the Communist party leaders in Ukraine. The object was to “Russify” Ukraine. Moscow regarded Ukraine as essentially southern Russia.
There was repression of Ukrainian scholars, intelligentsia, and professions. Universities required or taught in Russian. Moscow tightly controlled education policies and pro Russian orientation in the sciences and humanities. Ukrainians knew their lives were going to be more impoverished and rural with greater back-breaking labor jobs.
Prior to Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the bottomline was that Ukraine was merely looked at as brainless farmers, unsophisticated backwater people that had outdated culture and heritage customs. They were looked at as unskilled laborers and simple factory workers having no special or gifted creativity nor innovation. Overall, Ukraine had the lower end of housing quality, buildings, roads, medical care, and infrastructure. Chernobyl was a total Russia Moscow debacle imposed upon Ukraine. Blame for Chernobyl fell directly upon the incompetence and corruption out of Moscow, not Kiev.
Therefore, it is just impossible for the vast majority of modern day Ukrainians to be gobbled up by the likes of a fascist dictator Putin who was a fanatical KGB Agent and Minister of the despised secret police, the FSB, before drunkard Yeltsin plucked Putin out of obscurity into the presidency of Russia. ~
Ilona Chase:
I have read Anne Applebaum’s book you mention. I would also like to recommend a film “Mr. Jones” made by the Polish director Agnieszka Holland. It’s in English and relates a true story about Ukrainian famine.
Oriana:
Alas, I’ve missed ‘Mr. Jones’ when it was first released — and Ukraine wasn’t in the news. Here is a bit of a review:
~ The story of ambitious truth-seeker Gareth Jones is one of inspired vigor and rich with modern-day relevance. Jones was a journalist working as a foreign affairs advisor to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He’s best known for exposing the horrors of the Holodomor, Stalin’s state sponsored man-made famine responsible for the deaths of millions in Soviet Ukraine. Jones was discredited by many of the world’s Soviet sympathizing media but never quit fighting for truth. He was shot to death one day before his 30th birthday.
From there the movie takes on a much different look, feel, and tone. Jones secures a supervised trip to the Ukraine investigating claims that Stalin had been funneling grain and other resources out of the country leaving the Ukrainian people to starve. He shakes his Soviet chaperone and ventures into the country discovering horrific truths – barren villages, dead bodies in the snow, packs of starving children, and Soviet soldiers with a chokehold on the food supply. It’s a story the world needs to hear, but getting the truth out of the USSR proves to be no easy task.
“Mr. Jones” feels like a neglected slice of history that’s finally being exposed. It’s story digs into a horrifying period that has been terribly underserved on our screens. And considering our current age of misinformation and biased “news”, this film packs a stinging modern-day applicability. I only wish it had plowed deeper into the Holodomor, specifically Stalin’s twisted motivations and unthinkable justifications.
Still, this British-Polish-Ukrainian co-production does a good job immersing you in its setting and leaves you wanting to learn more. Holland and her screenwriter Andrea Chalupa deserve a ton of credit for the glance they give into Stalin’s propaganda machine and their vivid portrayal of the Soviet atrocities in the Ukraine. ~
https://keithandthemovies.com/2020/06/01/review-mr-jones-2020/
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Vladimir
Putin ruined Saint Petersburg. Then he ruined Russian Federation. Then
he ruined Ukraine. And now he’s trying to ruin the world. ~ Misha Firer
Putin in 1980
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THE NIGHT THE STARS FELL
~ In the pre-dawn hours of November 12, 1833, the sky over North America seemed to explode with falling stars. Unlike anything anyone had ever seen before, and visible over the entire continent, an Illinois newspaper reported “the very heavens seemed ablaze.” An Alabama newspaper described “thousands of luminous bodies shooting across the firmament in every direction.” Observers in Boston estimated that there were over 72,000 “falling stars” visible per hour during the remarkable celestial storm.
The Lakota people were so amazed by the event that they reset their calendar to commemorate it. Joseph Smith, traveling with Mormon refugees, noted in his diary that it was surely a sign of the Second Coming. Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, among many others, described seeing it. It became known as “The Night the Stars Fell.”
So, what was this amazing occurrence?
Many of those who witnessed it interpreted it as a sign of the Biblical end times, remembering words from the gospel of St. Mark: “And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken.” But Yale astronomer Denison Olmsted sought a scientific explanation, and shortly afterwards he issued a call to the public—perhaps the first scientific crowd-sourced data gathering effort. At Olmsted’s request, newspapers across the country printed his call for data: “As the cause of ‘Falling Stars’ is not understood by meteorologists, it is desirable to collect all the facts attending this phenomenon, stated with as much precision as possible. The subscriber, therefore, requests to be informed of any particulars which were observed by others, respecting the time when it was first discovered, the position of the radiant point above mentioned, whether progressive or stationary, and of any other facts relative to the meteors.”
Olmsted published his conclusions the following year, the information he had received from lay observers having helped him draw new scientific conclusions in the study of meteors and meteor showers. He noted that the shower radiated from a point in the constellation Leo and speculated that it was caused by the earth passing through a cloud of space dust. The event, and the public’s fascination with it, caused a surge of interest in “citizen science” and significantly increased public scientific awareness.
Nowadays we know that every November the earth passes through the debris in the trail of a comet known as Tempel-Tuttle, causing the meteor showers we know as the Leonids. Impressive every year, every 33 year or so they are especially spectacular, although very rarely attaining the magnificence of the 1833 event.
The Leonid meteor showers are ongoing now and are expected to peak on November 18. But don’t expect a show like the one in 1833. This year at its peak the Leonids are expected to generate 15 “shooting stars” per hour.
November 12, 1833, one hundred eighty-nine years ago today, was “The Night the Stars Fell.”
The image is an 1889 depiction of the event.
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GLOBAL POPULATION IS SET TO SHRINK, AND IT WILL BE IRREVERSIBLE
~ The magic “replacement number” is 2.1: If women on average have more children than that each, the population of the world grows. If fertility rates are lower, the population shrinks.
And that’s where we’re heading.
“We have now reached peak child,” Dr Charles-Edwards says. “There will never be more children alive on the Earth than there is today.”
Fertility peaked in the 1950s when women were, on average, having five children each.
That number varied dramatically between regions of the world.
But since then, fertility rates have reliably fallen. In fact, in some parts of the world, including Australia, Europe, North America, and some parts of Asia, fertility rates are already below that replacement number.
The differing fertility rates across regions mean that population declines will be seen in some regions before others.
It has already started in some nations.
The nations of Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia and Serbia are all at least 1 per cent smaller this year than they were last year, according to the UN’s figures.
Ukraine shrunk by considerably more — a consequence of emigration sparked by the ongoing war.
Scores more countries are expected to have smaller populations in 2050 than they have now.
They’re the countries with low fertility rates and immigration levels that are not high enough to make up the difference.
Because fertility rates are falling everywhere, as the decades continue, more and more countries will be affected.
And gradually, the world will get older.
Humans like to focus on the start of life and not the end. We’re not good at talking about aging and death.
But the change in the world’s demographics will transform our society, and we can’t hide from it.
“If you want to think about the future demographic challenges, I think population aging is probably number one in terms of people needing to change the way they do things, their expectations, governments needing to change public systems that support the older population,” Mr Willmoth says.
Some of the consequences are relatively obvious, such as greater demand for health and aged care services.
The IHME’s Amanda Smith says as part of that we should expect “a shift toward a larger burden of disease coming from non-communicable diseases,” and that in many countries the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed weaknesses that will need to be addressed.
Dr Charles-Edwards says our tax base will have to support more and more people.
Countries with government-funded aged pension schemes will see welfare costs go up, and then there’s the issue of having enough workers.
“We’re going to have more and more countries where there are more older people than young children,” she says.
“This is going to really shape the way we make decisions about how we govern, how we spend our money. It’s a massive cultural change.”
Families are getting smaller, and downsizing houses for the elderly is already on the agenda in many aging countries, Australia included.
“We do need to be designing cities, for example, in somewhere like Australia, with a view that there are going to be many more older Australians here, so thinking about walkability and accessibility is all really, really important,” Dr Charles-Edwards says.
It will change workplaces, too. With fewer workers available and more caring jobs required to look after the aging cohort, companies may have to look to automation, artificial intelligence and robotics to help fill the gaps.
Entrepreneur and artificial intelligence expert Vaibhav Namburi says workplaces may look very different with the increased use of automation.
“I think in the next 10, 20 or 30 years we’re going to see a lot of ‘mundane’ or repetitive jobs be phased out, and those people [will] be retrained to be focused on more upper-level skills,” he says.
So maybe we’ll all be working smarter, but will we also be working harder? After all, during the pandemic, remote work has led to many of us working longer hours.
“[That] was actually counter to what the entire remote flexible work lifestyle was meant to bring,” Mr Namburi says.
“I’ve fingers crossed that the next hundred years is more focused towards the mental health aspect of our work-life balance.”
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Some parts of the world are facing a different problem.
Africa is one of the fastest-growing places on Earth right now.
Just eight countries are projected to be responsible for more than half the world’s population increase by 2050.
One of them is India, which is set to overtake China as the most populous country in the world next year.
Pakistan and the Philippines are also on the list, and the remaining five are all in Africa: Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Egypt.
Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, is growing fast.
It is projected to contain about a third of the world’s population at the end of the century, although there is a lot of uncertainty about projections that far out.
Africa is projected to have 38% of the world's population in 2100.
That’s a lot of extra people in a region of the world with some of the highest levels of extreme poverty.
Ensuring food production keeps up with the twin pressures of a growing population and the effects of climate change is the focus of a lot of development attention.
World Vision’s CEO Daniel Wordsworth says it’s a significant challenge in places such as Somalia, which is currently facing its worst drought in decades.
Dr Rachel Carey, a sustainable food systems expert from the University of Melbourne, says growing enough food isn’t really the biggest problem.
“To date the world has managed to keep pace with food production, the world has produced enough food,” she says.
“Certainly we see local shortages of food at different times, and that could be due to issues around climate change, also conflict and war, but there has been enough food produced around the world.
“The key issue has been about how that food is actually distributed and the inequality in the way that is done currently.”
The world is also being shaped by rapid urbanization, which accelerated in the 20th century.
More people have lived in cities than rural areas since 2017.
The share of the population in our cities will continue to grow from the 55 per cent it currently is.
Dr Carey says that’s likely to impact how much prime agricultural land is available, and could put pressure on food production in future.
“Cities are often built in fertile plains and close to rivers, close to good sources of food,” she says.
“As cities grow, many are growing out as well as growing up, and often growing into highly fertile areas of farmland.”
Researchers are working on technology that could help, including at the University of Sydney which is working on robotic farming technology.
There’s a lot of work being done, but ultimately, Dr Rachel Carey says we’re not yet doing enough.
“We need to do much more, and I think we need to do it much faster,” she says.
So what kind of life will 9 billion people on Earth live?
Fewer babies will lead to fewer workers, and will that lead to a smaller economy? How will we solve the challenge of providing a comfortable retirement for all? Do we need to rethink how we design cities for more and more older people who aren’t commuting to offices? Will the robots and artificial intelligence of the fourth industrial revolution finally deliver the promise of less work and more leisure?
You might think this sounds like the start of a sci-fi dystopia, but the experts say it’s not all doom and gloom.
“As a demographer, we’re really optimistic people because we’ve seen massive change over the past 100 years,” Dr Charles-Edwards says.
“Everyone’s living longer, fewer babies are dying, fewer women are dying.
“Across a whole range of metrics, we’re doing better than we did. We’ve seen lots of small actions creating massive change for people.”
But, like most global problems, the impacts won’t be shared equally and richer countries face the linked challenge of what they’re prepared to sacrifice to help others.
“We know that some of the most vulnerable communities are going to be the most impacted,” Dr Elin Charles-Edwards says.
“If you’re rich, you are able to adapt in a way that you just can’t do if there’s not the resources there.
“Climate change is the big elephant in the room here. We know that some of the places that are going to face the most impact are the least resilient, and so that is something that we need to be mindful of as well.”
The challenge is set. It’s up to humanity to work out what to do next. ~
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-13/earths-population-reaches-eight-billion-people/101643854?utm_source=pocket-newtab
from CNN:
ONE BILLION PEOPLE HAD BEEN ADDED TO THE GLOBAL POPULATION IN JUST 12 YEARS
~ Middle-income countries, mostly in Asia, accounted for most of the growth over the past decade, gaining some 700 million people since 2011. India added about 180 million people, and is set to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation next year.
But even while the global population reaches new highs, demographers note the growth rate has fallen steadily to less than 1% per year. This should keep the world from reaching 9 billion people until 2037. The UN projects the global population will peak at around 10.4 billion people in the 2080s and remain at that level until 2100.
Most of the 2.4 billion people to be added before the global population peaks will be born in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN, marking a shift away from China and India.
Rapid population growth combined with climate change is also likely to cause mass migration and conflict in coming decades, experts say.
And whether it’s food or water, batteries or gasoline, there will be less to go around as the global population grows. But how much they consume is equally important, suggesting policymakers can make a big difference by mandating a shift in consumption patterns.
Carbon emissions of the richest 1%, or about 63 million people, were more than double the emissions of the poorest half of humanity between 1990 and 2015, according to a 2020 analysis by the Stockholm Environment Institute and non-profit Oxfam International.
Resource pressure will be especially daunting in African nations, where populations are expected to boom, experts say. These are also among the countries most vulnerable to climate impacts, and most in need of climate finance. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/world/global-population-8-billion-un-intl-hnk
A market in Kolkata
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“I’M AFRAID TO HAVE CHILDREN”: FEAR OF AN OLDER FUTURE IN JAPAN AND SOUTH KOREA
~ It is not hard to spot the grey hairs among the late-morning shoppers on Jizo-dori. Their owners have come to buy discount underwear and colorful blouses, have lunch with friends in retro cafes and, if they are over 60, have their nails done at huge discounts.
At regular intervals along the street, signs indicate the presence of defibrillators; and at Koganji temple, people pause to waft “cure-all” smoke from smoldering incense sticks over their aches and pains.
The Tokyo neighborhood of Sugamo has long been a mecca for members of the capital’s older population. But Japan’s skewed demographics indicate that, in the decades to come, it will not be alone. It is a glimpse into a future that is older and less populated, battling the consequences of a depleted workforce and shrinking economy.
The population of the world’s third-biggest economy, where adult incontinence pads outsell babies’ nappies, has been in decline for several years and suffered a record fall of 644,000 in 2020-21, according to government data. It is expected to plummet from its current 125 million to an estimated 88 million in 2065 – a 30% decline in 45 years.
While the number of over-65s continues to grow – they now account for more than 28% of the population – the birthrate remains stubbornly low. A Japanese woman can expect to have an average of 1.3 children during her lifetime – well below the 2.1 needed to sustain the current population size.
Official encouragement to have more children – backed by modest financial inducements – and warnings that long-term population decline will damage the health of the economy, have had little effect.
In 2021, the number of births totaled 811,604, the lowest since records were first kept in 1899, a faster decline than projected by demographic experts. By contrast, the number of centenarians stands at more than 90,500 – compared with only 153 in 1963.
Like their counterparts in neighboring South Korea, Japanese women are increasingly reluctant to marry and have children – deterred by the financial pressures and traditional gender roles that force many to give up work as soon as they become pregnant and shoulder the burden of housework and childcare duties.
“I used to think I would be married by 25 and a mother by 27,” said Nao Iwai, a university student in Tokyo. “But when I look at my eldest sister, who has a two-year-old girl, I’m afraid to have children.
“When you have a child in Japan, the husband keeps working but the mother is expected to quit her job and look after the children. I just feel that it’s hard to raise children, financially, mentally, and physically. The government says it will provide better support for families with young children, but I don’t have much faith in politicians.”
The low fertility rate is partly a symptom of the advances Japanese women have made in recent years, says Yuka Minagawa, an associate professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.
Better educational attainment and a rise in the number of women in the workplace mean they are marrying, and having children, significantly later than their mothers and grandmothers.
“A possible factor for the reluctance of Japanese women to marry is the increasing costs of marriage,” Naohiro Yashiro a professor at Showa Women’s University, wrote in a recent essay for the East Asia Forum website.
“With higher education, more young women have similar wages to men, so their average search period for spouses is longer. Currently, the average age of first marriage for women is 29 years, well beyond the 25 years in the 1980s – when most women were only high school graduates.”
While the government last month announced increases in financial pre- and post-natal support, it has yet to address long-term pressures on the birthrate, such as the cost of pre-school child care and compulsory education, and the rising cost of living.
“Japan is not a place where just anyone can have one or more children,” said Minagawa, adding that many mothers struggled to juggle work and family life. “Women continue to take on the lion’s share of household chores, even if they also work outside the home.”
Less than 14% of new fathers took paternity leave in Japan last year – well below the government’s target of 30% by 2025. A quarter took fewer than five days off, according to the health ministry.
“The government is encouraging men to take paternity leave – and the rate is increasing – but traditional ideas about the division of labor are still very strong,” said Machiko Osawa, a professor at Japan Women’s University who has served on a government committee for work-life balance.
“And long working hours prevent men from taking time off to be with their newborn children. All of the child-rearing responsibility is being shouldered by women, and as long as this continues, it is hard to see the fertility rate increasing.”
A similar story is unfolding in South Korea, which has the world’s lowest fertility rate and a rapidly aging population. Concerns are growing about the strain on the economy and the pension system, which may become depleted in the coming decades.
The population shrank for the first time on record in 2021, and is projected to fall further, from the current 52 million to 38 million, by 2070. The country’s fertility rate last year was 0.81, the lowest in the world.
Local governments have implemented programs to encourage people to have children. They are given cash handouts, help with fertility treatment, support for medical expenses, and loans.
But Jung Chang-lyul, an associate professor of social welfare at Dankook University, says cash incentives are “completely useless”.
“While the low birthrate problem may seem important on the surface, the real issue is that no one is taking responsibility,” Jung said, referring to the high cost of raising a child and real estate prices – not least in Seoul, where the average price of an apartment in has doubled in recent years.
“In a society where children start receiving private education as early as age two or three, and their achievements or wages are determined by their parents’ wealth and the cost of their private education, those who are not financially well off think that giving birth to a child is like committing a sin.”
Choi Jung-hee, a newlywed office worker, has no plans to have children. “My life and my husband’s come first,” she said. “We want a fun life together, and while people say having a child could bring us happiness, it would also mean having to give up a lot.”
Lifestyles are changing. For the first time, the proportion of single-person households has surpassed 40%. Last year, the number of marriages reached an all-time low of 193,000, in a country where half the population now believes that marriage is not a necessity. Some, particularly women, prioritize personal freedom and willfully rule out marriage entirely.
Despite changing attitudes, women have traditionally been expected to give up their jobs and become full-time housewives. South Korea currently has the OECD’s worst gender pay gap. The country has been ranked at the bottom of the Economist’s glass ceiling index, which measures where women have the best and worst chances of equal treatment at work, for the 10th consecutive year.
Traditional attitudes also persist. The government recently reversed a policy that sought to extend the legal definition of family to include those not bound by marriage. Influential conservative Christian lobby groups blame the country’s low birthrate on homosexuality, and oppose anything less than the traditional family unit.
Ultimately, addressing people’s well-being is one of the most important things when it comes to tackling the low birthrate problem, said Jung. Among OECD countries, South Korea has one of the lowest levels of life satisfaction, and the highest suicide rate.
“People will start having children only when we create a society in which children grow up to be happier than us.”
While Japan and South Korea have reluctantly opened the door to some foreign workers, there are few signs that either country is willing to embrace mass immigration to help defuse their ticking demographic time bombs.
“An inflow of an immigrant population with high fertility rates would help address the birthrate issue,” Minagawa said. “But that is unlikely to happen in Japan in the near future.
“Instead, it needs to find a way to encourage women to have multiple children to sustain the current population size. But that would require a fundamental change in the structure of Japanese society, starting with gender equality in the home and workplace.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/19/fear-older-future-japan-south-korea-birth-fertility-rates-population
Oriana:
When a woman feels happy and fulfilled pursuing her own goals and dreams, it’s hard to persuade her that having a child (and especially children plural) would improve the quality of her life, especially if she can’t afford help, and can’t count of in-laws to help out (grandmothers now work too). Remember that this woman has probably witnessed scenes like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum at a supermarket, or going off like a siren at a restaurant or on a plane.
Now, there is no denying that there is an existential threat to humanity as more couples perceive children as an expensive nuisance rather than a “bundle of joy.” Is there some way to make parenthood less stressful and expensive?
I visualize affordable 24/7 child-care centers. Parents should not be forced to take a young child along to a restaurant or a supermarket just to save money on babysitting. I remember a female college instructor telling us that once, in a grocery check-out lane, she heard the wail of “Mom! Mom!” She responded angrily with “What? What?? What do you want??!!” — and only then noticed that it was someone else’s child who was wailing.
I know I’ve said it before, but let me say it again. I have only two words to say to you: “Affordable childcare.”
Why do we have an excellent hospice system for the dying? What about creating a system of help for new (and not so new) parents? Why are we, as a society, willing to spend money on the dying, but not on the newborn and their struggling parents? It seems that the “dying with dignity” movement has been amazingly effective; could we have “parenthood with dignity”?
Finally, let's not forget that aging population brings with it certain benefits as well. Perhaps the main one is much less violent crime. Another one might -- just "might" -- be more wisdom and less extremist views.
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HOW BLACK DEATH SHAPED OUR IMMUNITY
~ An international team of scientists who analyzed centuries-old DNA from victims and survivors of the Black Death pandemic has identified key genetic differences that determined who lived and who died, and how those aspects of our immune systems have continued to evolve since that time.
Researchers from McMaster University, the University of Chicago, the Pasteur Institute and other organizations analyzed and identified genes that protected some against the devastating bubonic plague pandemic that swept through Europe, Asia and Africa nearly 700 years ago. Their study has been published today in the journal Nature.
The same genes that once conferred protection against the Black Death are today associated with an increased susceptibility to autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's and rheumatoid arthritis, the researchers report.
The team focused on a 100-year window before, during and after the Black Death, which reached London in the mid-1300s. It remains the single greatest human mortality event in recorded history, killing upwards of 50 per cent of the people in what were then some of the most densely populated parts of the world.
More than 500 ancient DNA samples were extracted and screened from the remains of individuals who had died before the plague, died from it or survived the Black Death in London, including individuals buried in the East Smithfield plague pits used for mass burials in 1348-9. Additional samples were taken from remains buried in five other locations across Denmark.
Scientists searched for signs of genetic adaptation related to the plague, which is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis.
They identified four genes that were under selection, all of which are involved in the production of proteins that defend our systems from invading pathogens and found that versions of those genes, called alleles, either protected or rendered one susceptible to plague.
Individuals with two identical copies of a particular gene, known as ERAP2, survived the pandemic at a much higher rates than those with the opposing set of copies, because the 'good' copies allowed for more efficient neutralization of Y. pestis by immune cells.
"When a pandemic of this nature -- killing 30 to 50 per cent of the population -- occurs, there is bound to be selection for protective alleles in humans, which is to say people susceptible to the circulating pathogen will succumb. Even a slight advantage means the difference between surviving or passing. Of course, those survivors who are of breeding age will pass on their genes," explains evolutionary geneticist Hendrik Poinar, an author of the Nature paper, director of McMaster's Ancient DNA Center, and a principal investigator with the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research and McMaster's Global Nexus for Pandemics & Biological Threats.
Europeans living at the time of the Black Death were initially very vulnerable because they had had no recent exposure to Yersinia pestis. As waves of the pandemic occurred again and again over the following centuries, mortality rates decreased.
Researchers estimate that people with the ERAP2 protective allele (the good copy of the gene, or trait), were 40 to 50 per cent more likely to survive than those who did not.
"The selective advantage associated with the selected loci are among the strongest ever reported in humans showing how a single pathogen can have such a strong impact to the evolution of the immune system," says human geneticist Luis Barreiro, an author on the paper, and professor in Genetic Medicine at the University of Chicago.
The team reports that over time our immune systems have evolved to respond in different ways to pathogens, to the point that what had once been a protective gene against plague in the Middle Ages is today associated with increased susceptibility to autoimmune diseases. This is the balancing act upon which evolution plays with our genome.
"Understanding the dynamics that have shaped the human immune system is key to understanding how past pandemics, like the plague, contribute to our susceptibility to disease in modern times," says Poinar. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221019111321.htm
Mary:
The genetic study of how the bubonic plague acted in a selective way on our immune systems, so that those with certain alleles were much more likely to survive is a lesson in how evolution works. More people with the protective alleles survive and propagate, bearing children with more chance of inheriting that protection. But, as noted, it's always a balancing game, just as the immune response of inflammation is both part of the body's defense, and also a threat, if the immune response becomes so great it can also kill, in an overreactive inflammatory storm. This happened with covid in some sufferers.
So the immune response is a weapon of defense, but a dangerous one, as experienced also in autoimmune diseases, and overwhelming allergic responses that result in anaphylaxis. A familiar example of this immune response duality is sickle cell disease, a genetic condition that confers protection from malaria, selected for in populations where malaria was endemic. However, that genetic condition can itself be a devastating, chronic and even fatal disease. The "protective" action becomes a destructive one, an exaggerated overreach, an inappropriate sensitivity that can overwhelm and even kill.
And it seems the immune system continues to develop, to evolve over time, so that once-protective measures become more problematic. It's like a learning system...encountering something it never knew before, a new pathogen, the system fumbles for a response. Whoever has an edge, even a small one, will withstand the threat better. As the interaction between pathogen and immune system continues through time both sides of the equation change, learn, in a way, from their interactions. The evolution progresses in the direction of effectiveness...producing either more effective attacks or more effective defenses. An exaggeration of either can spell disaster...a pathogen so deadly it burns through the supply of hosts, a response so overwhelming it kills rather than cures. The interaction like a dance ...a danse macabre, so often pictured during the plague years.
Oriana:
I feel our own immune system sooner or later goes wrong and becomes our own executioner. We say “heart disease,” disregarding the fact that it was the person’s immune system that attacked and kept destroying own tissue. Of course eating sugar and other inflammatory foods doesn’t help, but in the end it’s not the slice of cake that destroys your arteries, but your own immune system, aka our own “friendly fire.”
To be sure, the immune system is great against infections, but these days people in developed countries don’t die of infection all that much. They die of auto-immune diseases (and heart disease is basically that), and, in case of infection, of an over-reaction by that internal army. 
The plague doctor -- perhaps the most famous image associated with Black Death
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ZOMBIE CELLS TIED TO AGING COULD ACTUALLY HELP HEAL TISSUE DAMAGE
~ Senescent "zombie cells" that contribute to age-related diseases also help heal damaged tissues, so wiping them out could come with major downsides, a new study suggests.
The zombies, scientifically known as "senescent" cells, are cells that stop multiplying due to damage or stress but don't die. Instead, these cells release a slew of molecules that summon immune cells and spark inflammation. The immune system clears these zombies from the body, but with age, it becomes less efficient; thus, the cells accumulate and drive inflammation that contributes to diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's disease and osteoarthritis.
But zombie cells aren't entirely bad.
The new study, conducted in lab mice and human cells, suggests that senescent cells help repair lung tissue after damage by encouraging stem cells to grow. Killing these cells with dasatinib and quercetin (DQ) — a drug duo that's been studied as a potential treatment to combat aging and age-related disease — disrupted this repair, the researchers reported Oct. 13 in the journal Science.
"We are not the first lab to implicate senescence as a wound-healing process," said senior author Dr. Tien Peng (opens in new tab), an associate professor of pulmonary, critical care, allergy and sleep medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. A 2014 study in the journal Developmental Cell (opens in new tab) found that zombie cells help mend wounds in the skin and that their repairs can also be disrupted by zombie-slaying drugs, or "senolytics."
This suggests that using senolytics could come at a cost, so the drugs will have to be designed to block zombie cells' bad effects without disrupting their good ones, Peng told Live Science.
how zombies heal damaged tissue
To find senescent cells in the lung, researchers genetically modified mice to carry a glowing protein on the gene that codes for the protein "p16," which is overactive in many senescent cells. Whenever a cell switched on the gene, it would also churn out fluorescent proteins and start to glow.
The researchers used a technique to "really amplify this signal," Peng said, and thus revealed cells that carry low levels of p16 and may have otherwise escaped notice.
Glowing cells appeared in mice's lungs shortly after birth, and their numbers increased over the rodents' life spans. The cells included fibroblasts, which make connective tissue, as well as immune cells, and resided within a sheet-like tissue called the "basement membrane" that supports the lining of the lungs' air sacs, air tubes and blood vessels. This sheet blocks harmful chemicals and pathogens from entering the lungs while also allowing oxygen to pass into the bloodstream.
The p16-carrying cells act as guardians of this crucial interface.
After an injury, immune cells rush in to repair the damage and release a flurry of signals that call p16-carrying cells into action. The immune cells increase in number, and the fibroblasts gush compounds that summon more immune cells and spur stem cell growth. Giving the mice DQ [dasatinib + quercetin] cuts off this signaling cascade and thus prevents the stem cell growth, the researchers found.
Moreover, p16-carrying cells extracted from donated human lungs can also promote stem cell growth — at least in lab dishes. This finding hints that, as seen in mice, drugs like DQ could also disrupt healing in humans.
"This combination treatment is currently in multiple clinical trials," and in general, scientists have been on the lookout for signs that senolytics disrupt healing, said Dr. Danny Roh (opens in new tab), an assistant professor of surgery at the Boston University School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. The new research suggests that this caution is warranted, Roh told Live Science in an email.
What this means for anti-aging drugs
While senolytics have been shown to mess with healing in the lungs and skin, some labs have found that the drugs speed up healing in fractured bones. So what gives?
"Is bone different from lung and skin? Possibly," said Dr. Sundeep Khosla (opens in new tab), the leader of Mayo Clinic's Osteoporosis and Bone Biology Laboratory, who oversaw one of the previous bone studies. But Khosla favors another hypothesis.
In the lung and skin studies, researchers gave the senolytics every day, but in the bone studies, there were longer breaks between doses. This strategy may hit a therapeutic sweet spot, "where there's enough inflammation for repair but not too much where you're actually starting to see negative effects," Khosla said. "In terms of clinical development of therapeutics, the devil is going to be in the dosing," he said.
The study also raises questions about what types of zombie cells senolytics target best, Khosla added.
Senescence is more like a dial than an on-off switch, so zombie cells sit on a spectrum from least to most senescent, Peng said. Zombies in aged mice seem especially inflammatory, and Peng and his colleagues are now investigating how that might affect healing. ~
https://www.livescience.com/zombie-cells-heal-tissues
Oriana:
Cycling (drugs, diets, etc) is not a new idea. But, again, it’s not something that can make Big Pharma even richer, so in terms of research it’s utterly neglected.
Quercetin is widely available as a supplement, and dasatinib can be roughly approximated as theaflavin. While drinking black tea probably doesn't supply supply enough theaflavin to worry about, theaflavin is also available as a supplement. This article indicates the need for caution when it comes taking any theaflavin supplements on a chronic basis.
It is all a lot more complicated than it seems.
Mary:
Oriana:
Still, I am thrilled that metformin has turned out to be a life-extension drug, and that its action can be approximated by taking berberine. When your blood sugar gets lower, your whole health improves, along with your life expectancy.
*
HOW THE ALZHEIMER’S GENE RAVAGES THE BRAIN
~ No gene variant is a bigger risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease than one called APOE4. But exactly how the gene spurs brain damage has been a mystery.
A study has now linked APOE4 with faulty cholesterol processing in the brain, which in turn leads to defects in the insulating sheaths that surround nerve fibers and facilitate their electrical activity. Preliminary results hint that these changes could cause memory and learning deficits.
And the work suggests that drugs that restore the brain’s cholesterol processing could treat the disease.
“This fits in with the picture that cholesterol needs to be in the right place,” says Gregory Thatcher, a chemical biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Inheriting a single copy of APOE4 raises the risk of developing Alzheimer’s around 3-fold; having two copies boosts the chances 8- to 12-fold. Interactions between the protein encoded by APOE4 and sticky plaques of amyloid—a substance tied to brain cell death—in the brain partially explain the connection. But those interactions are not the whole story.
As neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and her colleagues report today in Nature, APOE4 triggers insulation-making brain cells known as oligodendrocytes to accumulate the fatty molecule cholesterol—a type of lipid—in all the wrong places.
This interferes with the cells’ ability to cover nerve fibers in a protective wrapper made of a lipid-rich material called myelin. Electrical signaling in the brain then slows, and cognition usually suffers.
Tsai’s team had previously linked lipid changes to malfunctions in other cell types, including some that offer structural support to neurons and others that provide immune protection for the brain. The latest findings add oligodendrocytes and their essential myelin function to the mix.
“It’s really pulling all the pieces together,” says Julia TCW, a neuroscientist at Boston University in Massachusetts.
CHOLESTEROL TRAFFIC JAM
Working with MIT computational biologist Manolis Kellis, Tsai and her colleagues started by analyzing gene activity patterns in tissue from the prefrontal cortex—the brain’s cognitive center—of 32 deceased people who had two, one or no copies of APOE4 and a range of Alzheimer’s histories.
When the researchers examined APOE4-affected brain cells, they noted abnormalities in many systems for metabolizing lipids. But defects in how oligodendrocytes processed cholesterol seemed “particularly severe”, Tsai says.
The team created cultures of human oligodendrocytes with various forms of the APOE gene. Cells with the APOE4 variant, the group found, tended to hoard cholesterol inside internal organelles. They expelled relatively low amounts of cholesterol, which made them less adept at forming myelin sheaths.
The researchers then treated APOE4-carrying cells with the drug cyclodextrin, which stimulates cholesterol removal. This helped to restore myelin formation. The researchers also found that in mice with two copies of APOE4, cyclodextrin seemed to flush cholesterol out of the brain, improve the flow of cholesterol into myelin sheaths and boost the animals’ cognitive performance.
The mouse findings dovetail with the experience of a person with Alzheimer’s who took a similar formulation of cyclodextrin under a special drug-access program, as reported in 2020 by the drug’s manufacturer, Cyclo Therapeutics in Gainesville, Florida. The individual’s cognitive functions remained stable over 18 months of treatment, the company says.
However, cyclodextrin might not be ideal for correcting lipid imbalances in the brain. “It’s kind of sledgehammer,” says Leyla Akay, a neuroscientist in Tsai’s lab and a co-author of the latest study. “It just depletes cholesterol from cells.”
But better therapies could emerge now that Tsai and her team have helped to put cholesterol dysregulation on the Alzheimer’s research map. “This study highlights the importance of cholesterol in the brain,” says Irina Pikuleva, a biochemist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, “and we now need to try all available strategies to target brain cholesterol.” ~
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/this-is-how-an-alzheimers-gene-ravages-the-brain/
Oriana:
Cyclodextrin dissolves cholesterol crystals so they can be excreted. It’s a promising cardiovascular drug that has been shown to reduce plaque in blood vessels.
Niacin is a vitamin (Vitamin B3) that helps regulate cholesterol. I have found a way to take niacin in a way that doesn't cause the unpleasant itching -- divide the tablet into four parts, and take only one part at a time -- with meals.
Niacin has been found to be effective in stroke prevention. If stroke runs in your family, you might consider niacin. Talk about cheap prevention!
And berberine, which I call the miracle supplement, lowers LDL levels without side effects.
Curcumin (I recommend exclusively the Omax brand) is also known to lower risk factors for dementia.
Unfortunately food contains only trace amount of cyclodextrin. You'd have to eat a lot of bread and drink a lot of beer.
However, cyclodextrin is available as a supplement on Amazon.com. Whether it’s wise to take cyclodextrin at this point, when our knowledge of its effects is incomplete, is another question. The body needs a certain amount of cholesterol to function correctly. You don't want to deplete your cells of cholesterol. Too little cholesterol raises the risk of hemorrhagic stroke.
Also, it's the liver that produces most of the body's cholesterol. It has practically nothing to do with eating or not eating eggs (in fact eggs are good for liver health).
I hasten to say that cholesterol isn’t the whole story. Insulin and glucose metabolism are also out of kilter — that’s why Alzheimer’s has also been called “type III diabetes” or “diabetes of the brain.” It would probably also help to shift the metabolism away from glucose to ketones.
But Big Pharma isn’t interested in research on diet and Alzheimer’s or cyclodextrin (or methylene blue, or curcumin) — since it’s not a super-expensive new drug. As one insider said to me, “It’s not enough that a cure exists. Someone must also get very rich off it.”
ending on beauty:
A blessing on the eyes that do not see me as I wish.
A blessing to the ears that can never hear the far inward
footfall of my own shy heart. A blessings for the life
in you that will live without me, to the open door
that now and forever takes you away from me;
blessings to the path that you follow alone and blessings
to the path that awaits you, joining with another.
~ David Whyte, A Blessing for Unrequited Love
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