*
IN PARALLEL
In the morning we found we’d been
in each other’s dream.
Our dreams would disappoint
both Jung and Freud:
you were with me at a party,
I with you in Salt Lake City.
Yet the parallel fact
beat in us like a heart:
untouching, we touched,
silent, we talked,
unmoving, we walked together.
I invented instant metaphysics:
death as a dream
in which we still
go to parties, drive to Salt Lake City.
But I could be wrong:
in this dreamtime,
not long, let the tongues
taste and tell,
let the dreamers’ arms
repeat the gesture, gathering
the beloved body.
Tonight an orange half-moon
rises over the coyote hills
like one half of a wish.
Some eternal I do
is said without our speaking.
The moon’s mottled lamp
lights our good-nights.
Let us now turn it off, until
we meet in another dream,
beyond the white dream of the stars.
~ Oriana
Mary:
**
THE ATTEMPTED CANCELLATION OF GEORGE ORWELL
Is George Orwell About to be Cancelled?” That headline in the Daily Mail in October 2023 reflected a prolonged and ferocious barrage of attacks on Orwell as a villainous, philandering, abusive husband who had even pilfered his wife Eileen’s idea for Animal Farm and took the title for Nineteen Eighty-Four from part of the title of a poem by her—all of this, of course, without a murmur of acknowledgment or expression of gratitude of any kind.
Orwell himself “could soon become a candidate for cancellation,” observed a Daily Telegraph contributor, since he was “a misogynist who bullied his wife,” which rendered him suitable to become another “writer from the past . . . cancelled for thoughtcrime,” ironically.
Grieving that Eileen’s “brilliance” had so long gone unheralded, The Times of London deplored that Orwell “stole her ideas.” A Guardian writer got down to specifics: “Was Mrs. Orwell the real genius behind Animal Farm?” The implication was clear: yes, of course. And not just Animal Farm.
https://newcriterion.com/article/au-revoir-orwell/
[Here, alas, I was stopped by a paywall. Fortunately, there is always The Guardian]
Eileen Blair with adopted baby Richard, 1944
~ When Eileen O’Shaughnessy married George Orwell in 1936, she was 30 years old, highly educated, and knew her own mind; before the wedding, she told the minister that her vows would not include a promise to “obey” her new husband. But obey him she nearly always did: feeding his chickens, tending his goats, typing up his manuscripts. After their marriage, the couple famously lived (like the common people!) in a cottage belonging to Orwell’s aunt Nellie in Wallington, Hertfordshire, and it was within its dank walls that her husband swiftly established himself as a domestic tyrant. The house had no electricity and no indoor lavatory. Nevertheless, Eileen had to understand that the niceties were still important. Soon after the wedding, she put a jar of marmalade on the table – she was about to serve him one of his beloved cooked breakfasts – only to be instructed by Orwell that its contents should first have been decanted into a jam dish.
The difference between choice and sacrifice in a marriage is inevitably moot, particularly in the context of feminism. It’s easy – too easy, sometimes – retrospectively to discount the agency of a wife, and all the more so if she was married, as Eileen was, to the kind of man who repeatedly cheated on her (once with her closest friend); who relied on her for hard labor and, sometimes, for money; and whose fantasies about proletarian life were so determinedly fixed, he would only allow his friends to drink dark ale in the pub, irrespective of what they’d ordered.
But in the case of the first Mrs Orwell – the second was the more famous Sonia, who married the writer shortly before his death from tuberculosis in 1950 – there is, I think, no getting away from the fact that she knew exactly what she was doing; that some ardent part of her fully bought into his conviction that nothing mattered more than his career as a writer. As her biographer, Sylvia Topp, makes clear, moreover, her desire to be both his amanuensis and the digger of his potato patch existed alongside something far less meekly devoted. When she followed him to Spain in 1937, where he was fighting the fascists during the civil war, she had a fling with his commander, George Kopp, while he was away at the front. Other affairs would follow.
This is the first biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who died in 1945, only a year after she and Orwell adopted their only son, Richard (she went into hospital for a hysterectomy and never came out). It’s highly detailed; Topp leaves absolutely nothing out, which is part of the reason why it makes for such a dispiriting read (she reprints in full, for instance, the reports of her subject’s tutors at Oxford University, where she studied English).
However, there are other, graver problems at play here. Does Eileen really deserve a full-length biography? The book’s subtitle, The Making of George Orwell, rather suggests that she doesn’t; that the single most interesting aspect of her life – at least to us, at such a distance from her – was the fact of her marriage. Aware of this, Topp tries hard to show that she had a greater influence on Orwell’s work than his male biographers have so far allowed.
But her arguments are unconvincing. I don’t buy her suggestion that Orwell based Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four on Eileen (that was surely Sonia, Orwell’s second wife). Nor do I believe she was behind what some regard as the major improvement in his work with the publication of Coming Up for Air in 1939. He was getting better anyway, as writers do over time.
None of this, of course, would matter too much if Topp had been able to bring Eileen into the room. After 400 pages, however, I could still see her only darkly; it was Orwell, moth-eaten and rotten-breathed, whose presence was the more vivid. Examining him through the prism of his clever, energetic wife, I was struck all over again by his ineffable peculiarity. Cyril Connolly, whom he knew at Eton, has him at a cocktail party glamorously “gaunt and shaggy”, a John the Baptist figure whose effect on women was instantaneous (“their fur coats shook with pleasure”).
But as he appears in relation to Eileen, he strikes me as just another tedious sadomasochist. They both have to suffer, because he needs to suffer – and who knows precisely why. To what degree did his wife share this need? Were they co-dependents? I’m not sure. All Topp is able to tell us is that she never left; that she was apt to embrace his projects and his dreams, however inconvenient or crazy (the adoption was his idea, as was their planned move to the Scottish island of Jura, a fate from which she was saved by her early death).
Orwell was not straightforward about women; his view of them, as of homosexuals, was tinged with disgust. But for whatever reason, he noticed Eileen. From the moment they clapped eyes on one another, he was convinced she was the sort of woman he would like to marry – and for a certain kind of girl, at a certain moment in time, this would really have meant something.
If Eileen appears, to us, to have given up her own life – after a series of dead-end jobs, she was studying for an MA in educational psychology when they met at a party – it was surely only in the cause of finding a role for herself; of landing a job that really seemed to matter. I don’t believe, as some of Eileen’s friends did, that Orwell was oblivious to his wife’s suffering. Nor do I think that she longed seriously to escape it. Such strife was somehow necessary to them both. It bound them together. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/10/eileen-the-making-of-george-orwell-sylvia-topp-review
For a more complete picture, here is a more recent piece from The Guardian:
[To find my way out of a motherhood of wifedom] I turned to George Orwell’s famous essay, Why I Write. “I knew,” Orwell says, “that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.” I would read him, I thought, to help me face some unpleasant facts about the division of labor in my household. In exploring the tyrannies, the “smelly little orthodoxies” of his time, I hoped to liberate myself from mine.
I read my way through his work – so funny, so acute. And then as summer shifted into autumn I read the six major biographies of Orwell.
When I’d finished them I came across six letters from Orwell’s brilliant, whimsical wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, to her best friend Norah Symes Myles, with whom she read English at Oxford in the early 1920s. Discovered in 2005, after all the biographies were written, their correspondence dates from the beginning of the Orwell marriage, through the Spanish civil war, the couple’s time in Morocco, and into wartime London during the blitz. The letters are a revelation. More than half a century after his death, a door to Orwell’s private life has been opened, revealing the woman who lived behind it – and the man who wrote there – in a whole new light.
Eileen was born in 1905 in South Shields, where her father worked in customs. Her family was better off and better placed than Orwell’s (which he famously described as “lower upper middle class”). Eileen was head girl and a stellar student, winning a scholarship to read English at St Hugh’s, where JRR Tolkien was one of her tutors. She was disappointed to get a high second-class degree, rather than a first.
After graduating she took on a range of jobs, including in secretarial offices (at one of which she led a successful revolt against a bullying boss), and wrote feature journalism and poetry, including a poem called End of the Century, 1984, projecting a future of telepathy and mind control. At the time she met Orwell, she was undertaking a master’s in psychology at UCL.
In the first letter, dated November 1936, nearly six months after the wedding, Eileen tries to explain why she couldn’t write sooner:
“I wrote the address quite a long time ago & have since played with three cats, made a cigarette… poked the fire & driven Eric [ie George] nearly mad – all because I didn’t really know what to say. I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarreled so continuously & really bitterly that I thought I’d save time & just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished.”
Static buzzed through me. What are the arguments about, in these early days of marriage? Why does she want to kill him, even in jest? And why, having just devoured the six brilliant biographies, did I barely know who she was?
I went back to the biographers to find out. The newlyweds were living in a tiny cottage in Wallington, 30 miles from London, with no electricity, one tap and an outdoor privy. According to some of them, he’s “the happiest he’s ever been… Indeed, only in that summer of 1936 would there be such a combination of elements and circumstances as to fulfill an ideal of happiness for him.”
Orwell’s “combination of elements and circumstances” are, apparently, happy accidents rather than a situation tailor-made for him by Eileen. These conditions appear to exist without a creator, because the passive voice has made her disappear.
For mysterious reasons the biographers don’t directly attribute to Eileen, his writing suddenly got much better. ‘‘It is likely that the transformation in Orwell’s work from Wigan Pier onwards owes a great deal to the intellectual stimulus his marriage brought him,” one writes, by way of eliding understatement. Eileen had taken the word “obey” out of her marriage vows: the first radical act of the editing genius – she wrote “emendations” on his drafts, and they worked very closely together on Animal Farm – that would define her marriage.
But Eileen was there, working, dealing with his correspondence, organizing their social lives, doing all the shopping (involving a bus ride to a village three miles away) and much of the cleaning (there is, intermittently, a “char”), tackling the occasional flood, the cesspit, the house, the garden, his illnesses, the chickens, the goat and the visitors. And managing her impulses towards murder or separation when George doesn’t want his work interrupted by life. (He “complained bitterly when we’d been married a week that he’d only done two good days’ work out of seven,” Eileen wrote to Norah.)
But how was it then, for her? Biographers, including Eileen’s biographer Sylvia Topp in her 2020 crowdfunded work Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, imply Eileen’s willing consent to the sudden helpmeet role she found herself in. Comments in the Orwell biographies such as Eileen “even helped clean out the latrine” made it appear like her newlywed enthusiasm extended to helping George clean out the privy. But the truth is she did it alone, and remembered it all her life.
On top of the housework, Orwell’s needs keep her from visiting Norah:
“I thought I could come & see you & have twice decided when I could, but Eric always gets something if I’m going away if he has notice of the fact, & if he has no notice (when Eric my brother arrives & removes me as he has done twice) he gets something when I’ve gone so that I have to come home again.”
No one knows precisely when Orwell contracted the TB that killed him in 1950, but he’d had poor lungs all his life, and the hemorrhages began early in their marriage. From the very beginning, Eileen saw how he’d use them.
I kept reading. Then, as winter set in, I came across something Orwell wrote during his final illness. In his private literary notebook, he wrote in the third person, as if to distance himself from feelings that were hard to own.
“There were two great facts about women which… you could only learn by getting married, & which flatly contradicted the picture of themselves that women had managed to impose upon the world. One was their incorrigible dirtiness & untidiness. The other was their terrible, devouring sexuality… he suspected that in every marriage the struggle was always the same – the man trying to escape from sexual intercourse, to do it only when he felt like it (or with other women), the woman demanding it more & more, & more & more consciously despising her husband for his lack of virility.”
Orwell only ever lived with one wife. These comments refer to Eileen. Orwell’s thoughts are painful to read. He’s paranoid, feeling he’s been tricked by a politico-sexual conspiracy of filthy women “imposing” a false “picture of themselves” on the world. He sees women – as wives – in terms of what they do for him, or “demand” of him. Not enough cleaning; too much sex. But how did she feel? My first guess: too much cleaning and not enough, or not good enough, sex.
For a long time, I felt queasy about delving into their intimate life. It felt like an invasion of privacy that he would have hated – anyone would. But history has relegated Eileen to the private realm where she lived – and has remained. The more I felt I was invading his privacy by looking for her, the more I realized that to not go there would be to accept, when weighing up the right to privacy against the right to decent treatment, that male animals are more equal than others.
I went back to the biographers’ footnotes and sources and into the archives and found details that had been left out. Eileen began to come to life. A colleague in a political office considered her “a superior person” compared with everyone else there – a detail quoted by no biographer. She was “diffident and unassuming in manner”, another co-worker and friend said, but “had a quiet integrity that I never saw shaken”. I discovered a woman who saw things and said things no one else did.
Eileen loved Orwell “deeply, but with a tender amusement”. She noted his extraordinary political simplicity – which seems to have worried one of the biographers, who rewrote her words to give him an “extraordinary political sympathy” instead. And she objected to him being called “Saint George” on the grounds of his wizened, Christlike face. It was merely due, she said, to him having one or two teeth missing.
Eventually, as the evidence on the cutting room floor piled up around me, the biographies seemed to be fictions of omission.
Eileen made me laugh. Looking for her involved the pleasure of reading Orwell on how power works. Finding her held the possibility of revealing how it works on women.
How is a woman made to disappear? One of the more flamboyantly inventive instances of Orwell’s erasure of women comes from Down and Out in Paris and London. He recounts being robbed of all he possessed in his lodgings by a “swarthy Italian with side-whiskers”.
But the truth was that he was robbed by a woman, a “little trollop” he adored, who he’d picked up in a Parisian cafe and installed in his hotel room. Suzanne, a streetwalker and con artist, was the woman he “loved best” of all the girls he’d known before Eileen. “She was beautiful, and had a figure like a boy, an Eton crop and [was] in every way desirable.” But Suzanne can’t be given the power to con him because that would reduce, and therefore, shame him.
A more monumental disappearing trick happens in Homage to Catalonia – one of my favorite books since my teens. You can read it again and again and barely register that Orwell was not in Spain alone – Eileen was there too, almost the whole time. You would never know from Orwell’s book, nor the biographers’ accounts, that she worked in the headquarters of the political party Orwell was fighting for while he was off in the trenches with his fellow infantrymen.
The whole time he was fighting, she was working on print and radio propaganda for the party, provisioning the men, dealing with communications, arranging the transport of medical supplies from London, lending money of her own when the party leader had none, and dodging Stalinist spies in the office and in the hotel where she lived. When she visited Orwell on the battlefield, they came under fire. He was shot, but she cared for him and saved his manuscript (which she’d been typing) and then, during a two-hour-long Stalinist raid on their room, she stayed in bed to conceal the passports and checkbook she’d hidden under the mattress, allowing them to escape. (Orwell does tell that story, though for him it’s not about his wife, but is rather a demonstration of the “decency” of the Spanish men – even when under Stalinist control – in not turfing a woman out of bed.)
In the end, Eileen got them both out of Spain by fronting up to the same police prefecture those men had probably been sent from, to get the visas they needed to leave. One biographer eliminates her with the passive voice, writing: “By now, thanks to the British consulate, their passports were in order.” In Homage, Orwell mentions “my wife” 37 times but never once names her. No character can come to life without a name. But from a wife, which is a job description, all can be stolen. I wondered what she felt as she typed those pages.
Stalin, though, could see her perfectly clearly. As they fled Spain, his operatives issued an arrest warrant from the Tribunal of Espionage & High Treason, in the names of “Eric Blair and his wife, Eileen Blair… Their correspondence reveals that they are rabid Trotskyites”.
As I came to recognize the methods of omission, they fascinated me. When women can’t be left out, they are doubted, trivialized, or reduced to footnotes in eight-point type. Other times, chronology is manipulated to conceal. But the most insidious way the actions of women are omitted is by using the passive voice.
Manuscripts are typed without typists, idyllic circumstances exist without creators, an escape from Stalinist pursuers is achieved, by the passports being “in order”. Every time I saw “it was arranged that” or “nobody was hurt” I became sensitized – who arranged it? Who might have been hurt?
I didn’t want to take Orwell, or his work, down in any way. I worried he might risk being “cancelled” by the story I’m telling. Though she, of course, has been cancelled already – by patriarchy. I needed to find a way to hold them all – work, man and wife – in a constellation in my mind, each part keeping the other in place. I was fortunate to obtain permission to use the six letters from Eileen to Norah, and from them I created a counter-fiction, to exist alongside the fiction of omission in the biographies.
We think we’ve come a long way in 80 years, but statistically, there is an irrefutable, globally intransigent heterosexual norm that pervades across ethnicity, color and class. Nowhere in the world do women have the same power, freedom, leisure or money as their male partners. Every society is built on the unpaid or underpaid work of women, an estimated $10.9 trillion of it a year. But to pay would be to redistribute wealth and power in a way that might defund and defang patriarchy.
Things in the rear-view mirror are closer than they appear.
Which reminds me, of course, of my own, unseen, unsung conditions of production. As my husband says, with a wry smile: “You couldn’t have written this book without me.” And he’s absolutely right. ~
Mary:
Orwell's wife Eileen eliminated by the passive voice is simply typical of the wives of artists, and women in general...history as a list of "great men"...and sometimes in our uneasiness with that narrative there comes an effort to unearth history...tell the stories that have been left out, under-reported, or forgotten..a worthy effort at correction. But the tendency to actually rewrite or reinvent should be avoided. At best an overcorrection, at worst a wishful fantasy. There is not much evidence that the ideas were all hers, or that she was the source of improvements in his writing.
*
QUESTIONS IN ROCKET-HIT SDEROT OVER WHETHER IDF CAN EVER DESTROY HAMAS
People in city bordering Gaza say Israel will never be safe while Hamas exists – but worry it cannot achieve its objective
~ The two men, faces blurred and voices disguised, are screened by a dense scrub of fig and trailing vine and thorns in northern Gaza as they film themselves loading a rocket launcher.
It is daylight and the fighters, wearing civilian clothes, work quickly and calmly, the sound of fighting audible around them as they prepare the weapon in less than a minute. Metal scrapes on metal as four missiles are slotted into tubes and wires connected to a red timer for launch against the nearby Israeli border city of Sderot and neighboring communities.
Posted on social media by the Al-Quds Brigades of Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the footage appears to show missiles being prepared for an attack last week that damaged a storage shed in a neighborhood of low villas lining narrow streets.
In neighborhoods of Sderot such as the one hit last week, it is hard to escape the consequences of the strikes. Damage is visible where rockets have struck walls or punched through red-tiled roofs, blue sheeting patching one badly damaged building.
Six months into Israel’s war against Hamas, a conflict that has leveled whole neighborhoods in Gaza and killed 34,000 Palestinians in the coastal territory, Sderot is still being hit.
While the city’s residents have long experience of rocket fire coming out of Gaza, the return to the situation that existed before the 7 October Hamas attack, which killed 70 people in the neighborhood, is causing anxiety.
The continued targeting of Sderot, long held up by Israeli leaders and officials as a security bellwether, has raised questions among Israelis about the war and the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu’s, repeated promise of a “total victory” against Hamas and other groups.
If Sderot has been here before, it is because when the threat of rockets fired from Gaza emerged almost a quarter of a century ago, it was one of the principal targets.
In those days, organized tours would take visiting politicians and journalists to see what life in Sderot was like under “grad” fire, to see remnants of rockets in the media center housed in a converted bungalow, and observe the damage done. The city, the guides would explain, was the “bomb shelter capital of the world”.
Today, those bomb shelters remain on every street, many painted with gaudy murals. All that has changed is that, in the aftermath of 7 October, many are now equipped with doors that can be locked from the inside, evidence that the threat, far from lessening, has developed.
And while rocket alerts have dropped significantly since the high point of the first weeks of the war, the threat has far from disappeared.
In the past two months alone 70 rockets have been fired towards the Sderot region, including several attacks in the past week.
Significantly, the rockets that targeted Sderot, Ashkelon, and Ashdod last week were fired not from Rafah, where Israeli leaders are threatening a new offensive, but from northern Gaza, whose distant ruins are visible from the edge of the city.
The rocket fire led to an IDF announcement that it was preparing to raid two neighborhoods in Beit Lahia, the site of the rocket launches.
This week a steady stream of tour groups came to view the site of Sderot’s now demolished police station, taken over briefly by Hamas gunmen on 7 October. A poster promised a memorial would be built there and flags were tied to the tangles of rebar still sticking from the ground.
Among the visitors were Lisa and Eli Ovadia, from Petah Tikva, a sprawling central city immediately adjacent to Tel Aviv.
“It’s still not safe here,” Lisa said. “It needs to be made safe. And if Sderot is not safe, then Israel is not safe.”
“It will never be made safe until Hamas is destroyed,” Eli added. “We need to go into Rafah and kill every last Hamasnik.”
Eli was skeptical that Israel had the international support for a ground incursion. “Biden won’t let us finish the job,” he said.
Others have suggested, in interviews with Israeli media, that a push by the authorities to get people to return to Sderot, including financial incentives, was driving the renewed efforts to hit the city.
“I have a bad intuition,” Oshrat Hazot told Israel’s Channel 12 while packing in Tel Aviv to return last month. “I feel that when we go back there, everything will start again because Hamas knows that they [the Israeli government] set us a return date.”
The bigger question for many is whether the IDF’s objective of completely destroying Hamas is an achievable goal. Recent polling suggests a majority of Israelis think the likelihood is “fairly low” or “very low”.
That sentiment was backed by an assessment by US intelligence agencies, released in March.
“Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from Hamas for years to come,” the report stated, “and the military will struggle to neutralize Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength and surprise Israeli forces.”
Israeli officials recently told the New York Times that about 3,000-4,000 Hamas fighters were still present in the areas of northern Gaza closest to Sderot, despite Israel’s claims to have completed major combat operations there.
Michael Milshtein, from the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, believes that while a lot of Hamas’s offensive military capacity has been degraded, the “catch-22” facing Israeli security policy is that without a full Israeli occupation, for which there is no political will or international support, Israel will be forced to confront the threat of Hamas in Gaza.
“There has been a reset,” Milshtein said. But what is clear is that the reset is not a return to the pre-rocket days. “We can’t erase Hamas. It has not gone away. It has suffered dramatic damage. But it will be around for dozens of years to come.”
Sderot: Running to bomb shelters
Outside one of Sderot’s strip malls, a man emerged carrying a toddler. He did not want to give his name but said he had returned a month before from staying with his wife’s family. “It’s strange being back here. We’re still at war. At night you can hear guns in the distance. They are still shooting rockets at us.”
In his wine shop, Yoav Buskila described how the outlook of those living and working in Sderot had changed since 7 October. “We lived with the rockets for 20 years,” the 61-year-old said. “And we accepted it. But now something has to change. We need a big war that finishes Hamas.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/26/israel-gaza-questions-raised-in-rocket-hit-sderot-over-whether-idf-can-destroy-hamas
*
from THE LAST TRAIN OUT OF RUSSIA (re-post, because it’s worth it, showing the human side of the exodus of educated people from Russia)
. . . Ever since the 1990s, explained one Russian woman with dual citizenship with an EU country, there were no long wait lines for anything in Russia, as there often were in the Soviet era. Before the Ukraine invasion, she said Russia’s big cities were prosperous and thriving, and her Muscovite friends considered Paris a provincial city because you couldn’t find a good meal there in the middle of the night.
But suddenly, she said, after the invasion triggered international sanctions, lines were forming for more and more things, and shortages were expected across the economy, including in medicine and health care. The closing of Western chains like McDonald’s and Ikea was a major shock to many urban Russians, she reported.
The privations of these Russians escaping by train paled in comparison to the horrors experienced by Ukrainian civilians under attack by the Russian military, of course. But they, too, are refugees from the Putin regime.
Maria, a 32-year-old technology professional from St. Petersburg, explained, “I am running away from Russia because of Putin. I am afraid Russia could become like North Korea. Yesterday my mother showed me her cemetery documents so I could find her if I ever do go back.”
“I was born in the Soviet Union,” Karina, a 50-year-old art director, told me. “It’s all coming back now. The army is all over Moscow. If you say something out of line they will stop and arrest you. There is fear everywhere. The problem is that there are many Russians who cannot admit our mistakes, cannot realize that we are trapped in a nightmare. Russians are very sensitive to criticism. They can criticize ourselves, but if it’s coming from outside, they take it very personally. People don’t want to admit mistakes. It’s much easier to watch TV and absorb the government propaganda. It is easier not to think.
We did it for the 70 years of the Soviet Union and now it’s the same psychology again. Anti-Putin people are probably in the minority. You have this vast country with many people who are poor and who have never traveled abroad. They are very isolated, with no communication, only their television. They work hard all day, come home exhausted and the TV is their only source. But the world needs to know that not all Russians are for Putin. I love my country. It’s a great country. I am proud to speak Russian, to be Russian. But now I must leave my country and not come back. My poor 81-year-old mother dreamed all her life for her country to be free. At the train station this morning she was crying as she said goodbye to me with the saddest words I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“I was born behind this wall,” her mother said, “and now I will die behind it as well.”
*
“There are two different opinions in Russia today: those who support the [Ukraine] operation and those who don’t,” Anatoly, a 30-year-old business manager, told me. “It seems to me that a majority of people support it, but I am not sure. The government propaganda tries to make it seem that a majority support it, but I don’t know. None of my friends, none of the people I know support it. I think the sanctions and pressure from other countries should be greater.”
Maria, a biotechnology expert, reported that among her friends, “I don’t think anybody supports the Ukraine invasion. It is a regime that nobody supports. Everyone was shocked when this happened. No one believed something like this could have happened anymore.” Despite Russian government efforts to block non-Russian sources of information, she explained that anyone who wants to access global news sources can still easily do so with a virtual private network (VPN) on their phone.
A self-described “middle class” woman from Moscow said everyone she knew was “totally shocked” at the news that Russia was invading Ukraine. “No one asked us our opinion of doing this,” she noted. “If they had, no one would have agreed to it.”
When most of the passengers had cleared off Platform 9 on Sunday night, I saw a tall Russian man step out of the rear car. At first he demurred when I asked if we could talk, but then he changed his mind.
“It all definitely feels like we are going very far backwards in history,” he told me. “It’s worse than the Iron Curtain, it’s worse than going back to Soviet times. I don’t have the words to compare it, but maybe if you’ve read Russian a bit you’ve heard of someone named Vasili Rozanov. He was the first one to coin the expression the Iron Curtain about Russia.”
“One hundred years ago, in 1918, he wrote that with a clang, a creak and a scream the iron curtain dropped on Russian history,” my interlocutor said, quoting Rozanov nearly perfectly. “An announcer declared the performance was over. The audience was told to put on their fur coats and go home. The people got up from their seats and looked around, but the fur coats and the houses had all vanished.” It was all lies, all an illusion. Not long after Rozanov wrote this in the wake of the Russian Revolution in a work titled “The Apocalypse of Our Time, and Other Writings,” he died of illness and starvation.
After several more weeks of harsh international sanctions, the man on the platform speculated, “As a consequence of believing the lies and spreading the lies on a national scale, maybe some Russian people will see that they won’t have any of these nice, good, warm, cozy comfortable things coming from the West anymore.”
“Maybe,” he said, “they should reconsider their attitude toward the propaganda they are listening to from the TV set. As an intelligent Russian man once said, the fridge will win the battle over the TV.”
When I asked for his name and hometown, the man graciously demurred.
“Let me remain ‘a person on the train,’” he smiled as he vanished into the Baltic twilight. “The last person on the last train.” ~
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/29/last-train-out-of-russia-00021263
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DENTISTRY IN THE SOVIET UNION
James Stewart, dentist:
I have had native Russians who lived under the Soviet System as patients, and some have great teeth, and some do not, just like anywhere else.
There were two tiers of dental care in the Great and Gone Soviet Union, one for the Communist Party elite, and another for the peasants. One was top notch, and the other was laughable. You figure it out. ~ Quora
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HOW STALIN’S GREAT PURGE WORKED
“In the last year of her life, my grandmother managed to record her memoirs, speaking into a dictaphone. So, now I’m listening to it,” writes Yelena Shevchenko.
“Naturally, she spoke about the ‘Great Purge’ of 1937. Understandably, the father got arrested; understandably, he was executed; understandably, after the arrest, everything was taken from them — even the furniture, even the cutlery.
But they believed that after the verdict ‘10 years with confiscation of property, without the right of correspondence’, that he was still alive — because until 1941, the NKVD was accepting parcels for him. Tea, sugar, cigarettes, crackers.
It’s only later they found out that the father, who was arrested on April 18, 1937, was shot in just a week, on April 25, and buried in Donskoi monastery. But they were still taking parcels for him. For 4 years, the NKVD stooges had been robbing the family of the man whom they killed. And the relatives had to stand in a long queue, to hand in the parcels. At the time when they themselves didn’t have much food. That was what shocked me.
And what also shocks me, it’s when people post about their ‘heroic grandfathers’ who worked in the NKVD, post their photos with medals, brag about it. They don’t mention these parcels for their dead victims.”
Stalin’s regime was pure evil. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
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RUSSIA AS NORTH KOREA AND OTHER POSSIBLE FUTURES OF RUSSIA
~ Vladimir Putin happened to turn 71 last October 7, the day Hamas assaulted Israel. The Russian president took the rampage as a birthday present; it shifted the context around his aggression in Ukraine. Perhaps to show his appreciation, he had his Foreign Ministry invite high-ranking Hamas representatives to Moscow in late October, highlighting an alignment of interests.
Several weeks later, Putin announced his intention to stand for a fifth term in a choiceless election in March 2024 and later held his annual press conference, offering a phalanx of pliant journalists the privilege of hearing him smugly crow about Western fatigue over the war in Ukraine. “Almost along the entire frontline, our armed forces, let’s put it modestly, are improving their position,” Putin boasted in the live broadcast.
Putin is not Stalin. The Georgian despot built a superpower while dispatching tens of millions to their deaths in famines, forced labor camps, execution cellars, and a mismanaged defensive war. Putin, by contrast, has jerry-rigged a rogue power while sending hundreds of thousands to their deaths in a war of choice. The juxtaposition is nevertheless instructive. Stalin’s system proved unable to survive without him, despite having an institutionalized ruling party. And yet, amid the breakdown that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union but lasted well beyond 1991, Putin consolidated a new autocracy.
Putin’s regime styles itself an icebreaker, smashing to bits the U.S.-led international order on behalf of humanity. Washington and its allies and partners have allowed themselves to be surprised by him time and again—in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and central Africa. This has provoked fears about the next nasty surprise. But what about the long term? How, in the light of inescapable leadership mortality and larger structural factors, might Russia evolve, or not, over the next decade and possibly beyond?
RUSSIA AS FRANCE
France is a country with deep-seated bureaucratic and monarchical traditions—and also a fraught revolutionary tradition. Revolutionaries abolished the monarchy only to see it return in the guise of both a king and an emperor and then disappear again, as republics came and went. France built and lost a vast empire of colonial possessions. For centuries, France’s rulers, none more than Napoleon, threatened the country’s neighbors.
Today, these traditions live on in many ways. As the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville shrewdly observed in his 1856 work The Old Regime and the Revolution, the revolutionaries’ efforts to break definitively with the past ended up unwittingly reinforcing statist structures. Despite the consolidation of a republican system, France’s monarchical inheritance endures symbolically in palaces in Versailles and elsewhere, in ubiquitous statues of Bourbon dynasty rulers, and in an inordinately centralized form of rule with immense power and wealth concentrated in Paris.
Even shorn of its formal empire, France remains a fiercely proud country, one that many of its citizens and admirers view as a civilization with a lingering sense of a special mission in the world and in Europe, as well as a language spoken far beyond its borders (60 percent of daily French speakers are citizens of elsewhere). But crucially, today’s France enjoys the rule of law and no longer threatens its neighbors.
Russia, too, possesses a statist and monarchical tradition that will endure regardless of the nature of any future political system and a fraught revolutionary tradition that has also ceased to be an ongoing venture yet lives on in institutions and memories as a source of inspiration and warning.
To be sure, the autocratic Romanovs were even less constrained than the absolutist Bourbons. Russia’s revolution was considerably more brutal and destructive than even the French one. Russia’s lost empire was contiguous, not overseas, and lasted far longer—indeed, for most of the existence of the modern Russian state. In Russia, Moscow’s domination of the rest of the country exceeds even that of Paris in France. Russia’s geographical expanse dwarfs France’s, enmeshing the country in Europe but also the Caucasus, Central Asia, and East Asia. Very few countries have much in common with Russia. But France has more than perhaps any other.
A man wearing a shirt depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin, Saint Petersburg, May 2022
Contemporary France is a great country, although not without its detractors. Some decry what they deem its excessive statism, the high taxes necessary to underwrite uneven services, as well as a broad socialistic ethos. Others find fault with what they perceive as France’s great-power pretensions and cultural chauvinism. Still others lament France’s difficulty in assimilating immigrants. But it is possible to be disappointed in these or other aspects of the country and still recognize that it provides the closest thing to a realistic model for a prosperous, peaceful Russia. If Russia were to become like France—a democracy with a rule-of-law system that luxuriated in its absolutist and revolutionary past but no longer threatened its neighbors—that would constitute a high-order achievement.
But only hagiographers believe that one man created today’s France. Notwithstanding the country’s moments of instability, over generations, France developed the impartial, professional institutions—a judiciary, a civil service, a free and open public sphere—of a democratic, republican nation. The problem was not mainly that Yeltsin was no de Gaulle. The problem was that Russia was much further from a stable, Western-style constitutional order in 1991 than France had been three decades earlier.
RUSSIA RETRENCHED
Some Russians might welcome a transformation into a country that resembles France, but others would find that outcome anathema. One could imagine an authoritarian nationalist leader who embraces those views and who, like Putin, is unshakable in the belief that the United States is hell-bent on Russia’s destruction but who is also profoundly troubled by Russia’s cloudy long-term future—and willing to blame Putin for it. That is, someone who appeals to Putin’s base but makes the case that the war against Ukraine is damaging Russia.
Demography is a special sore point for Russia’s blood-and-soil nationalists, not to mention the military brass and many ordinary people. Since 1992, despite considerable immigration, Russia’s population has shrunk. Its working-age population peaked in 2006 at around 90 million and stands at less than 80 million today, a calamitous trend. Spending on the war in Ukraine has boosted Russia’s defense industrial base, but the limits of the country’s diminished labor force are becoming ever more evident even in that high-priority sector, which has around five million fewer qualified workers than it needs. The proportion of workers who are in the most productive age group—20 to 39—will further decline over the next decade. Nothing, not even kidnapping children from Ukraine, for which the International Criminal Court indicted Putin, will reverse the loss of Russians, which the war’s exorbitant casualties are compounding.
Productivity gains that might offset these demographic trends are nowhere in sight. Russia ranks nearly last in the world in the scale and speed of automation in production: its robotization is just a microscopic fraction of the world average. Even before the widened war in Ukraine began to eat into the state budget, Russia placed surprisingly low in global rankings of education spending. In the past two years, Putin has willingly forfeited much of the country’s economic future when he induced or forced thousands of young tech workers to flee conscription and repression. True, these are people that rabid nationalists claim not to miss, but deep down many know that a great power needs them.
RUSSIA AS VASSAL
Defiantly pro-Putin Russian elites boast that they have developed an option that is better than the West. The Chinese-Russian bond has surprised many analysts aware of Beijing and Moscow’s prickly relations in the past, including the infamous Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, which culminated in a short border war. Although that conflict was formally settled with a border demarcation, Russia remains the sole country that controls territory seized from the Qing empire in what the Chinese vilify as unfair treaties. That has not stopped China and Russia from bolstering ties, including by conducting large-scale joint military exercises, which have grown in frequency and geographic scope in the past 20 years. The two countries are fully aligned on Russia’s grievances regarding NATO expansion and Western meddling in Ukraine, where Chinese support for Russia continues to be crucial.
Chinese-Russian rapprochement predates the rise of Putin and Xi. In the 1980s, it was Deng Xiaoping who performed a turn away from Moscow more momentous than the one Mao Zedong had carried out in the 1960s and 1970s. Deng gained access to the American domestic market for Chinese producers, the same trick that enabled the transformation of Japan and then South Korea and Taiwan. Deng’s divorce from the communist Soviet Union for a de facto economic marriage with American and European capitalists ushered in an era of astonishing prosperity that birthed a Chinese middle class.
Nevertheless, societal and cultural relations between the two peoples remain shallow. Russians are culturally European, and few speak Chinese (compared with English). Although some elderly Chinese speak Russian, a legacy of Moscow’s erstwhile centrality in the communist world, that number is not large, and the days when Chinese students attended Russian universities in great numbers are a distant memory. Russians are apprehensive of China’s power, and many Chinese who hold weakness in contempt ridicule Russia online. Stalwarts of the Chinese Communist Party remain unforgiving of Moscow’s destruction of communism across Eurasia and eastern Europe.
RUSSIA AS NORTH KOREA
Russian service members march in a military parade, Moscow, May 2023
Russia and North Korea could scarcely be more different. The former is more than 142 times as large as the latter in territory. North Korea possesses the kind of dynasty that Russia does not, even though each Kim family successor gets rubber-stamped as leader by a party congress. North Korea is also a formal treaty ally of China, Beijing’s only such ally in the world, the two having signed a mutual defense pact in 1961. (Some Chinese commentary has suggested China is no longer obliged to come to North Korea’s defense in the event of an attack because of Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons, but the pact has not been repealed.) North Korea faces a rival Korean state in the form of South Korea, making it more akin to East Germany (which of course is long gone) than to Russia.
Despite these and other differences, Russia could become something of a gigantic North Korea: domestically repressive, internationally isolated and transgressive, armed with nuclear weapons, and abjectly dependent on China but still able to buck Beijing. It remains unclear how much Putin divulged in Beijing, in February 2022, about his plans for Ukraine when he elicited a joint declaration of a Chinese-Russian “partnership of no limits” that soon made it appear as if Xi endorsed the Russian aggression. Not long after China released a peace plan for Ukraine, Xi traveled to Moscow for a summit, at one point appearing with Putin on an ornate Kremlin staircase that, in 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister under the Nazis, had descended with Stalin and his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, while cementing the Hitler-Stalin pact.
RUSSIA IN CHAOS
Putin’s regime wields the threat of chaos and the unknown to ward off internal challenges and change. But while keenly sowing chaos abroad, from eastern Europe to central Africa and the Middle East, Russia itself could fall victim to it. The Putin regime has looked more or less stable even under the extreme pressures of large-scale war, and predictions of collapse under far-reaching Western sanctions have not been borne out. But Russian states overseen from St. Petersburg and Moscow, respectively, both disintegrated in the past 100-odd years, both times unexpectedly yet completely.
There are many plausible hypothetical causes for a breakdown in the near future: a domestic mutiny that spirals out of control, one or more natural catastrophes beyond the authorities’ capacity to manage, an accident or intentional sabotage of nuclear facilities, or the accidental or non-accidental death of a leader. Countries such as Russia with corroded institutions and legitimacy deficits can be susceptible to cascades in a sudden stress test. Chaos could well be the price for a failure to retrench.
Even amid anarchy, however, Russia would not dissolve like the Soviet Union. As the KGB’s final chief analyst lamented, the Soviet federation resembled a chocolate bar: its collective pieces (the 15 union republics) were demarcated as if with creases and thus were ready to be broken off. By contrast, the Russian Federation mostly comprises territorial units not based on ethnicity and without quasi-state status. Its constituents that are national in designation mostly do not have titular majorities and are often deeply interior, such as Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Mari El, and Yakutia. Still, the federation could partly disintegrate in volatile border regions such as the North Caucasus. Kaliningrad—a small Russian province geographically disconnected from the rest of the federation and sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland, more than 400 miles from Russia proper—could be vulnerable.
CONTINENTAL CUL-DE-SAC
A Russian future missing here is the one prevalent among the Putin regime’s mouthpieces as well as its extreme-right critics: Moscow as a pole in its version of a multipolar world, bossing around Eurasia and operating as a key arbiter of world affairs. “We need to find ourselves and understand who we are,” the Kremlin loyalist Sergei Karaganov mused last year. “We are a great Eurasian power, Northern Eurasia, a liberator of peoples, a guarantor of peace, and the military-political core of the World Majority. This is our manifest destiny.” The so-called global South—or as Karaganov rendered it, “the World Majority”—does not exist as a coherent entity, let alone one with Russia as its core. The project of Russia as a self-reliant supercontinent, bestride Europe and Asia, has already failed. The Soviet Union forcibly held not just an inner empire on the Baltic and Black Seas but also an outer empire of satellites, ultimately to no avail.
Russia’s world is effectively shrinking despite its occupation of nearly 20 percent of Ukraine. Territorially, it is now farther from the heart of Europe (Kaliningrad excepted) than at any time since the conquests of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. More than three centuries after appearing on the Pacific, moreover, Russia has never succeeded at becoming an Asian power. That was true even when World War II presented it with opportunities to avenge itself against Japan for the defeat Russia suffered at its hands in 1905, to reestablish the tsar’s position in Chinese Manchuria, and to extend its grasp to part of the Korean Peninsula. Russia will never be culturally at home in Asia, and its already minuscule population east of Lake Baikal has contracted since the Soviet collapse.
Russia’s influence in its immediate neighborhood has been diminishing, too. The bulk of non-Russians in the former Soviet borderlands want less and less to do with their former overlord and certainly do not want to be reabsorbed by it. Armenians are embittered, Kazakhs are wary, and Belarusians are trapped and unhappy about it. Eurasianism and Slavophilism are mostly dead letters: the overwhelming majority of the world’s non-Russian Slavs joined or are clamoring to join the European Union and NATO. Without Russia menacing its European neighbors, NATO’s reason for being becomes uncertain. But that means Russia could break NATO only by developing into a durable rule-of-law state, precisely what Putin resists with all his being.
Russia’s future forks: one path is a risky drift into a deeper Chinese embrace, the other an against-the-odds return to Europe. Having its cake and eating it, too—enduring as a great power with recaptured economic dynamism, avoiding sweeping concessions to the West or lasting subservience to China, dominating Eurasia, and instituting a world order safe for authoritarianism and predation—would require reversals beyond Russia’s ability to engineer.
IS THERE A BETTER WAY?
Russia’s basic grand strategy appears simple: vastly overinvest in the military, roguish capabilities, and the secret police, and try to subvert the West. No matter how dire its strategic position gets, and it is often dire, Russia can muddle through, as long as the West weakens, too. Beyond Western disintegration, some Russians quietly fantasize about a war between the United States and China. West and East would maul each other, and Russia would greatly improve its relative standing without breaking a sweat.
The upshot would seem to be self-evident: Washington and its allies must stay strong together, and Beijing must be deterred without provoking a war. The conventional options, however, have severe limits. One is accommodation, which Russian rulers occasionally need but rarely pursue—and, when they do, they make it difficult for the West to sustain. The other is confrontation, which Russian regimes require but cannot afford, and the opportunity costs of which are too high for the West. The path to a better option begins with a candid acknowledgment of failures, but not in accordance with received wisdom.
As strange as it might sound, to create the right incentives for retrenchment, Washington and its partners need a pro-Russian policy: that is, instead of pushing Russians further into Putin’s arms, confirming his assertions about an implacably anti-Russian collective West, Western policymakers and civil society organizations should welcome and reward—with visas, job opportunities, investment opportunities, cultural exchanges—those Russians who want to deconflate Putin and Russia but not necessarily embrace Jeffersonian ideals. It would be a mistake to wait for and reward only a pro-Western Russian government.
OPPORTUNITY ABROAD, OPPORTUNITY AT HOME
The supreme irony of American grand strategy for the past 70 years is that it worked, fostering an integrated world of impressive and shared prosperity, and yet is now being abandoned. The United States was open for business to its adversaries, without reciprocation. Today, however, so-called industrial policy and protectionism are partially closing the country not just to rivals but also to U.S. allies, partners, friends, and potential friends. American policy has come to resemble China’s—right when the latter has hit a wall.
To be sure, technology export controls have a place in the policy toolkit, whether for China or Russia. But it’s not clear what the United States is offering in a positive sense. A strategic trade policy—reflected by initiatives such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which Washington crafted but then abandoned—might be a nonstarter in the current domestic political climate. A nimble administration, however, could repackage such an approach as an ambitious quest to secure global supply chains.
World order requires legitimacy, an example worth emulating, a system open to strivers. The United States was once synonymous with economic opportunity for its allies and partners but also for others who aspired to attain the prosperity and peace that the open U.S.-led economic order promised—and, for the most part, delivered by reducing inequality on a world historic scale, raising billions of people out of poverty globally, and fostering robust middle classes. But over time, the United States ceded that role, allowing China to become synonymous with economic opportunity (as the leading trade partner of most countries) and manufacturing prowess (as a hub of technical know-how, logistics mastery, and skilled workers).
To recapture lost ground and to restart the engine of social mobility at home, the United States, which has a mere 1.5 million mathematics teachers and must import knowledge of that subject from East Asia and South Asia, needs to launch a program to produce one million new teachers of math within a decade. It makes little sense to admit students to college if, lacking the universal language of science, engineering, computers, and economics, they are limited to majoring in themselves and their grievances.
The turret of a destroyed Russian tank near Robotyne, Ukraine, February 2024
The government and philanthropists should redirect significant higher education funding to community colleges that meet or exceed performance metrics. States should launch an ambitious rollout of vocational schools and training, whether reintroducing them in existing high schools or opening new self-standing ones in partnership with employers at the ground level. Beyond human capital, the United States needs to spark a housing construction boom by drastically reducing environmental regulations and to eliminate subsidies for builders, letting the market work. The country also needs to institute national service for young people, perhaps with an intergenerational component, to rekindle broad civic consciousness and a sense of everyone being in this together.
Investing in people and housing and rediscovering a civic spirit on the scale that characterized the astonishing mobilizations of the Cold War around science and national projects would not alone guarantee equal opportunity at home. But such policies would be a vital start, a return to the tried-and-true formula that built U.S. national power in conjunction with American international leadership. The United States could once again be synonymous with opportunity abroad and at home, acquire more friends, and grow ever more capable of meeting whatever future Russia emerges. The American example and economic practice bent the trajectory of Russia before, and it could do so again, with fewer illusions this time. ~ Steven Kotkin
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/five-futures-russia-stephen-kotkin?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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BEHIND THE NEW IRON CURTAIN
Russia has become, to observers in the West, a distant, mysterious, and hostile land once again. It seems implausible, in the age of social media, that so little should be known about the country that has shattered the international order, but the shadows surrounding Russia have only grown since the days of the Soviet Union. Of course, it is one thing to observe the country from the outside; it is another to try to understand how Russians experience the war and react to sanctions from within, and what they hope the future holds. If Russia seems to have become another planet, it is largely because its regime has also waged war on foreign journalists, preventing them from straying beyond established perimeters.
Over the summer, hoping to do precisely that, I spent a month traveling down the Volga River. In a land of great rivers, the Volga is the river. They call it matyushka, the mother; it flows from the Valdai Hills to the land of the Chuvash, the Tatars, the Cossacks, the Kalmyks, and into the Caspian Sea. It’s where Europe and Asia meet or part, are bridged or blocked, depending on whether the compass of Russian history is pointing east or west. It’s where it all started, after all, where the empire took root.
Along the river one finds many of the cities that have established Russian culture and faith—from Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Lenin, to Stalingrad (now called Volgograd), the site of the infamous World War II siege. This is a history that weighs heavily on Russian identity today, as the country continues to look backward, sifting its vaunted past for new myths of grandeur. It seems prepared to resist and to suffer, acts at which Russians have always excelled, and to have resigned itself to a future of isolation, autocracy, and perhaps even self-destruction.
Before starting down the river, I met with Mikhail Piotrovsky, who is an old acquaintance and the director of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, in his office on the museum’s ground floor, where he has carved out a space for himself among piles of books, stacks of paper, and various sculptures. The photographs crowding the room, of him with eminent Western leaders—a smiling Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth—are now themselves relics, not unlike the tapestry of Catherine the Great hanging above his desk.
I asked him about the river. “The Volga was everything, and is still everything,” he told me. “Because it makes you aspire to greatness. It has a sort of intimacy, sheltering and bright skies, not like the wide-open spaces of the steppe or Siberian rivers, which make you feel like a speck in the cosmos.”
Piotrovsky is an illustrious scholar of Arabic studies. I’ve known him for years, but we would normally talk about Canaletto and Byzantium, the great Islamic explorers and his beloved Sicilian wines. This time I found him in full war fervor. And, I was convinced, it was not only to defend his prestigious position: At his age, seventy-nine, he could easily keep his head down and carry on quietly, like most Russians have elected to do. He spoke with his usual calm but looked feverish, as if something were devouring him from the inside.
Piotrovsky, who is mild-mannered and cerebral, and who wore his jacket loosely over hunched shoulders, seemed to have become a warrior. “Russia is many people, but one nation,” he asserted. “Russia along the Volga was able to incorporate everyone. Islam is just as much a religion of Russian tradition and identity as is Christian Orthodoxy. In Europe, in America, you speak of nothing but multiculturalism, but your cities are bursting with hate. For us, it didn’t take much to include everyone, because we’re an imperial civilization.” Then he grew more animated. “Look at the Hermitage!” he said, opening his arms to the room around us, widening his eyes. “It’s the encyclopedia of world culture, but it’s written in Russian because it’s our interpretation of world history. It may be arrogant, but that’s what we are.”
He took a deep breath, and began to talk of Stalingrad, his Jerusalem. “I don’t call it Volgograd, but Stalingrad,” he clarified for my sake. “It is our reference point now more than ever, an unparalleled symbol of resistance, our enemies’ worst nightmare. During the Great Patriotic War, we used it to defend the Volga as a vital corridor.” He continued to press the analogy: “And it’s been the same in the last few months. The Volga and the Caspian feed our trade with Iran to oppose the sanctions, while we use them to export oil to India and import what we need.” He removed his glasses and cleaned them with his jacket. “Stalingrad is a lucky charm, it’s destiny. If the Nazis had taken it, they would have cut off the Volga and conquered all of Russia. A very material thing that became spiritual. A warning. Whosoever tries it will meet the end of all the others—Swedes, Napoleon, the Germans and their allies.” He went on. “Russians are like the Scythians: they wait, they suffer, they die, and then they kill.”
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On the delta, which fans out for sixty miles before reaching the Caspian Sea, pairs of fighter jets zoomed by at low altitude. I tried catching a glimpse of customs at the commercial port, but I couldn’t see past the checkpoints, and the tourist port was closed. Even the ferry was no longer in service. But one could still see cranes loading and unloading a dozen cargo ships, and three barges waiting at the widest point. Sixty-three miles long, the Volga–Don Canal was built under Stalin with the labor of seventy-five thousand prisoners, and opened in 1952. It is part of the waterway that connects the Volga to Rostov on the Don River, from which one can reach Mariupol, which is now controlled by the Russians. South of Volgograd, I tried taking a dirt road leading to the mouth of the canal but was intimidated by the presence of a helicopter hovering some three hundred feet above me. I decided instead to gather wild strawberries.
In Astrakhan, it was rumored that the Iranians had invested billions in the development of the Caspian-Volga-Don corridor. There was talk of trafficking agricultural products and oil, but also turbines, spare mechanical parts, medicine, and nuclear components. I couldn’t verify this, but it was clear that Astrakhan is central to the anti-Western economic bloc’s efforts to turn east.
Among the first to fire up an oven was fifty-four-year-old Andrei Kovalev, who knew nothing about baking bread until three years ago. “I learned to use zakvaska, a bread starter,” he told me in his large bakery in the Red Square of Rybinsk, where a statue of Lenin replaced one of Alexander II and has loomed ever since. Kovalev was popular among the locals—he hands out samples to passersby, sporting a beard and a rough tunic made of linen and burlap.
He saw opening a bakery as a political act, one salvaging rural Russian values “against consumerism copied from America,” as he put it. “Over the past thirty years people hated Russian bread,” he said, “they thought it was beneath them. They wanted baguettes, the little brats! Mine are old recipes, from long before the perestroika, from back when we were happy.”
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Ivan Kazankov is eighty-one years old and has a gray, wolf-like gaze. He’s tall and robust, a wide red tie resting on his belly. He showed interest in my unexpected visit without too much reservation: you could tell he’s a real boss, one who doesn’t answer to anybody—a top dog of this agrarian Stalingrad, this rural empire on the Volga, paradoxically inspired by the greatest peasant exterminator in history. His office seemed to have been designed with the express purpose of disorienting anyone hoping to understand Russia in 2023: busts of Stalin standing alongside Russian Orthodox icons, a portrait of Nicholas II looming over a Soyuz statuette, a picture of Vladimir Putin hanging next to an image of St. Andrew, the patron saint of Russia.
To the chaos of this pantheon was added a general sense of opacity about the nature of the combine itself, which at first was presented to me as a “state-run agricultural coop, exactly like in the days of the USSR,” but had turned out to be a private family holding. Ivan had made his daughter director after his son left to join the Duma. “What matters is that it runs as before,” he explained. “Profits are used to increase the salaries of the four thousand employees and grow the business.”
In Kazan, they would later tell me that amid the robbery and corruption of the Nineties, when hardened racketeers pilfered Soviet industrial and military equipment, Kazankov had taken his own modest cut. He had gotten his hands on a run-down farm and deftly transformed it into this industrial colossus that had adapted the socialist combine production system to the wild post-Soviet market. The sausage oligarch Kazankov knows just how much Russian consumers still suffer the loss of state collectivism.
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To think that the anti-Western ideas coursing through the country’s veins are simply the fruits of regime indoctrination would be to overestimate Putin—and to ignore what has driven Russia throughout its history, at least since the time of Peter the Great: a fascination with the West, paired with a proud and slightly overbearing defense of its own vast territory and resistance to assimilation. Russians have always vacillated between wanting to be included and fearing contamination or corruption, from harboring an inferiority complex to delusions of grandeur.
It’s a clash that could be understood in terms of the intellectual conflict between the pro-Western Turgenev and the Slavophile Dostoevsky. Unfortunately, we’re no longer cruising at that altitude. There is arguably even less debate today than in the days of the USSR, and it’s clear that Russians are now more fully in a Dostoevsky phase: their desire to lock themselves in a small but boundless world is reemerging, even among those who reject Putin and the Orthodox Church’s revanchist narrative.
But just five hundred meters from the chaos, we encountered a sobering scene. Osharskaya Ulitsa is still known as the brothel street, because of its reputation in Gorky’s day. A building that once served as a brothel now supposedly hosts military offices. Anyone dragged in there at night has a high chance of being sent to a training camp the next morning, and then to the front. Fomenkov seemed to reconsider his earlier comments. “The kids you saw are actually terrified, they drink much more than before,” he said. “They know not to be found in certain places alone, drunk, and without a solid alibi, or at least an important last name.”
*
Stalin, as far as I could tell, had a totemic figure along the lines of Che Guevara. Lenin may be one of the most common statues in the world, with seven thousand in Russia alone—but it is no longer Lenin’s arm that points to the future. Stalin is experiencing a Second Coming, his name recurring like a mantra. He even has his own namesake sausage brand. His biggest sponsor, perhaps, is Putin, who knows that by invoking him he is pulling on a magic string that will reawaken secret dreams of glory.
“Putin can’t compare himself to Lenin,” the historian Dmitry Rusin told me. “He was too intellectual and complex in these days of easy approximations. It’s too European.” Rusin is a professor at Ulyanovsk State University. In 1970, they built an enormous Lenin memorial in the city center. “Putin prefers to be compared to Stalin, just as Stalin drew his ruthless idea of Russian power from Ivan the Terrible,” said the professor as we approached the memorial.
“Not a European idea, but an Asian one, that doesn’t take the life of the individual into consideration. I find this return to the cult of Stalin, especially among young people, horrifying. I feel a catastrophe coming.” The fountain in front of the complex had run dry. “They closed the complex for renovations five years ago,” Rusin said. “It was supposed to reopen in 2020, now they’re saying 2025. But no funds are coming from Moscow. They want to make Ulyanovsk poor.”
Stalin built a secret bunker under an old Communist Committee building in town in 1942, just after the narrow Soviet victory at the Battle of Moscow. These days it’s a pilgrimage destination. I went on a tour of the bunker, in which at least half my group consisted of people in their twenties. We descended to find the control room and apartment for the head of the USSR. The bunker was never used, but the guide explained that it was updated during the Cuban Missile Crisis and again after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Today it can hold up to six hundred people for five days and “even gets cell phone service.”
Andrei, a twenty-four-year-old electrical engineer who was visiting from Moscow with three friends, spontaneously told me of Stalin that “he was a winner.” We were in front of an original military map of the Soviet counteroffensive. “For us young people, Stalin is number one. We must fight evil like during the Great Patriotic War.” Did any negative associations come to mind? “They say a lot of things, but what matters is the results,” he said. “I think there were more deaths in the Nineties with the gang wars and alcohol. That was our first experience with democracy—the worst period of our history.”
*
I know Russian priests fairly well—they tend to be rough and arrogant. Mikhail Rodin was different, at once modern and archaic. He uses social media and medieval mannerisms. He has traveled a bit, but for him there is no place like Russia. I asked him what being Russian meant to him. “We’re influenced by the immense nothingness around us, and by the harsh climate,” he said. “In a land like this, you have to have an objective, a dream. We Russians need to have something big to strive for. We dreamed of communism, equality, and of a life where no one is exploited by anyone. Every person the same as the next.”
He went on: “If Russians believe in something, they believe until the end. They believe in God. They’re ready to die for their faith. They believe in communism. They’re ready to die for that. They believe in Russia and they’re ready to sacrifice themselves for Russia.”
Even the atomic bomb, batyushka? [“batyushka” = Father, when spoken to an Orthodox priest]
“Of course,” he replied quickly. “We’re ready to sacrifice ourselves. Because if we don’t win, we’ll burn it all down. If we can’t achieve this bright future, then what’s the point in living?” He grew more heated. “Our president is saying what everyone is thinking. If we don’t have the Russia we want, we’re ready to martyr ourselves, sacrifice ourselves and the whole world if it’s unjust and evil. There’s no need for a world like that.”
I was back out on the street when I saw that I had a voicemail from Albert, from Shubert Island. He had composed a new reggae song: “At sunset the Volga is bathed in pure light,” he sang, “when illuminated by love, my heart is the same.” ~
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/behind-the-new-iron-curtain/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
*
Oriana:
It reminds me of the poem that inspired the Polish movie "Ashes and Diamond." When our life is reduced to ashes, will there be a starry diamond at the bottom of the urn?
*
THE COLD WAR NEVER ENDED
It must have been in the summer of 1992, as a young man I was in the back of a pickup truck, driving down the highway of Cape Cod. The sun was bright, the air streaming by me cool, and I was carefree. Still in college, I was impressed by the fact that the Cold War was finally over. The Soviet Union was no more, and the ideological pillars on which it had been built had crumbled. Though many of us believed the conflict that had defined the latter 20th Century was over, today Putin’s war in Ukraine dispelled that notion. His invasion is based on the phantasm of redeeming the power lost in the breakup of a Soviet Empire; an illusion he is vigorously pursuing at enormous cost in blood and treasure.
We certainly had good reason to believe that the Cold War was over. Yet in reality, it was put on the back burner, the heat turned to low. The ideological part of the war may have concluded, with Marxism having failed in Russia and China slowly coming to seek out alternatives too. But the fact of the matter is that the Cold War was not just about the defeat of a Marxist ideology. The belief that a State-run economy is best for all consumers and their prosperity is an illusion, something revealed by the lack of ardent Communists in Russia and China today.
Even so, the zealous pursuit of a socialist utopia had left its indelible impact, for the Cold War was not only about economics, but also about democracy, and whether a genuine religious faith could support rule by the people. In pursuit of Marxism, Russia and China had thoroughly repudiated both democracy and religion, championing an authoritarian state against the will of the people while denying the necessity of religious guidance and illumination for its people and leaders. Decades after the demise of the old Soviet Union in December of 1991, the governments of Russia and China still do not believe in democracy. Until those latter two factors are changed, diplomacy and solving the world’s pressing problems will be more difficult.
We must remember that full-fledged democracy and the need of its people to believe in and value something (religious or not) is essential to a nation’s legitimacy. Capitalism on its own becomes corrupted without reference to transcendent principles and when people do not see their will reflected in government and fair business. Marxist-Socialist interest in this country waxes whenever the capitalists’ dedication to fairness and justice wanes.
I believe firmly in a free market, but it must also be fair. What precise economic arrangement is the most “fair” is a philosophical question, but a fair economy must avoid extreme inequality where the abuse of power is more likely, but also not fall into an egalitarian Marxist deception where political tyranny becomes inevitable. Meanwhile, the Russian and Chinese people are deprived of participatory democracy, the free flow of information necessary for democracy, and must capitulate to this: the authoritarian specter left by the Marxist vacuum, a ghost that believes in its right to power but has no lasting foundation in legitimate human beliefs, religious or otherwise.
Many years ago, Francis Fukuyama suggested in The End of History and the Last Man that the model of the democratic free state was the end of history. I hope this progressive trend exists, yet it’s hard to ignore the evidence to the contrary. The world’s largest country and its most populous seem to give no recognition of his thesis. They do not advocate Marx anymore, yet Marxism paralyzed belief in freedom in both countries.
Isolationists who pretend this problem does not exist have found it comes back to haunt us in Ukraine and Taiwan. For years our foreign policy aimed to prevent a Russian-Chinese alignment. If we do not convince either country of the need for freedom and legitimacy, we will continue that juggling match.
The truly tragic thing is that there are urgent problems facing this world which necessitate cooperation between America, China, and Russia. Climate change, preserving Earth’s biodiversity and food-resource base and other threats to the marginalized are all examples. At a time when we desperately need cooperation among great powers, we see the true spirit of consensus a long way off. It is important that the Ukrainian war end, but a just resolution seems nowhere near.
When countries do not align on the three essentials of basic beliefs, practices, and principles, real diplomacy and goodwill will be in short supply to solve the world’s most pressing problems. Shooting down spy balloons and the rattling of military sabers is an inevitable but minor offshoot of such misalignment, a reminder that, ironically, the embers of the Cold War still burn.
When these three essentials are aligned in Russia, China, and the United States, perhaps we will be able to at last put the Cold War to rest. It was founded on at least three pillars: the belief in Marxism, which has been defeated, but also the belief in authoritarianism and the repudiation of religious values to inform society and government. These last two factors are still very much in place in China and Russia. Perhaps, in the future, another pickup truck ride awaits me, when I can say the embers of the Cold War at last and finally dead. ~
https://providencemag.com/2023/05/the-cold-war-never-ended/
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WHY WE CANNOT TRUST RUSSIAN PUBLIC OPINIONS POLLS
38-year-old Moscow resident Yuri Kokhovets openly expressed his views in a street survey in July 2022. Now he’s facing 5.5 years in prison for that.
8 months later, on March 24, 2023, a criminal case was opened against Kokhovets because of that interview.
Somebody recognized him and reported him to the police, he was detained and questioned for 2 days. After that, the police gave him 500 ruble fine ($5) for “petty hooliganism” — and things seemed to have been resolved.
But then, in a few months, the case was re-qualified; this time Kokhovets was accused in “military fakes motivated by political hatred.”
The article of law (introduced in March 2022 after the start of Russian invasion) provides up to 10 years in prison for that — a “military fake” is any view that differs from what is voiced on the mainstream Russian TV.
Journalists of ‘Radio Svoboda’ asked passers-by on the streets of Moscow about their attitude to the war in Ukraine. 37-year-old technician Kochovets said that the war was started by the Russian government and it is them who had to stop it.
The prosecutor demanded 5.5 years imprisonment for Kokhovets for saying these words:
“Our government unleashed this: Putin and his gang. Russia created all these problems for itself. For some 20 years they have been saying that NATO is a big problem… I don’t see any problems in NATO at all; they are not going to invade anyone. What propaganda tells us is that for 20 years now NATO has been getting closer and closer, it wants to attack us... and that’s their excuses. Well, I see that it’s all just old bureaucracy from the Soviet times.
“Our government says that it wants to fight nationalists, but it bombs shopping centers; in Bucha, our military from Buryatia and Dagestan shot civilians — for no reason at all. And people begin to loathe this whole thing. All this needs to be stopped; one person can stop it. As soon as he stops this, we will have detente in relations with NATO and with all other countries. We need to end all these actions, and that’s it. Everything is very simple. Our economy will improve after this, the stock market will immediately jump [upward].”
Until today, Kokhovets wasn’t imprisoned, he only had to sign the request to remain in town. But today the state prosecutor demanded that he is taken into custody in the courtroom.
Can you trust public opinion polls in the country where one can be imprisoned for simply speaking his mind?
Rhetorical question. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
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THREE BUDDHIST PERSONALITY TYPES
Long before Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams or William James opened his first psychology laboratory at Harvard, Buddhist thinkers sought to understand the inner workings of the mind and personality.
Buddhist personality types were first described in the text The Path to Purification by the Indian scholar Buddhaghosa almost 1,500 years ago.
The three personality types stem from the belief in Buddhist philosophy that unhealthy thinking grows from three primary roots: Greed, Aversion, and Delusion.
The first, the
greed temperament, is compelled by desire and seeks comfort and pleasure. This type will wake up slowly, will enjoy their meals unhurriedly and savor rich and delicious foods, will drive through traffic with ease, will sleep well, and will seek harmony and avoid conflict in interactions with others, even if that means being dishonest.
In the process of grasping for more and more can come problems such as over-indulgence, pride, self-centeredness, jealousy, deceitfulness, and addiction.
The second, the aversive temperament, is characterized by judgment and rejection. This type will wake up annoyed or anxious, worried about the obligations of the day, will rush through meals, will feel tense and rigid when driving, will be quick to note and point out problems, will sleep fitfully and may become contentious in interpersonal relationships.
If the aversive nature is left unchecked, problems like anger, hatred, aggression, disdainfulness, and cruelty can arise.
The third, the deluded temperament, becomes easily lost in uncertainty and confusion. This type will miss their alarm and wake up late, will eat messily, will feel scattered at work and will feel unsure of how to interact in groups, often copying what others are doing. This way of being can give rise to doubt, negligence, ignorance, inaction, and anxiety.
Wondering which type you are? Keep track of your answers to the following quiz, courtesy of Amita Schmidt:
When you go to a friend's house for the first time, what is the first thing you notice?
(A) The handsome sub-zero fridge you'd love to have in your own kitchen.
(B) The cluttered living room that would be much more welcoming if she got rid of a few chairs and rearranged the rest.
(C) You don't notice much, and when you go home you can't remember a single piece of furniture.
2. When you go to the beach, what is the first thing you say?
(A) "The water looks perfect."
(B) "Look at all the seaweed. There's no way I'm going in the water."
(C) "I can't believe I forgot my towel again."
3. In the morning:
(A) You like getting up early because it's a great time to get things done.
(B) You wake up grumbling, with reluctance (another day already!?) and a sense of obligation.
(C) You have a Ph.D. in sleeping late, and when you do get up, you must contend with brain fog for several hours.
4. After watching a movie with your partner, you are mostly likely to comment:
(A) "I love seeing movies by that director. Let's get another one when we return this."
(B) "I can't believe how badly they butchered the story from the book. From now on it's only foreign films for me."
(C)"Why were they shooting at that one guy?"
5. You consider shopping:
(A) A sport, and you're in the major leagues.
(B) A necessary evil. You go in, get what you need, and get out again before someone pisses you off and you have to kill them.
(C) A nightmare. With 20 brands of cereal on the shelves, how are you supposed to pick one? And let's not even talk about clothes shopping...
6. What do you have in your home?
(A) Imported chocolate, an extensive DVD collection, and some fine art.
(B) Extra blankets (the heat is so low sometimes guests complain), closet and office organizers, emergency flashlights.
(C) A hodgepodge of furniture and small piles of papers and projects that you're going to get to one of these days.
7. In school, you were usually:
(A) Chatting with your friends.
(B) Correcting the teacher.
(C) Doodling or daydreaming.
8. When you're being honest with yourself, you'll admit that you’re:
(A) Grandiose.
(B) Obsessive-compulsive.
(C) Clueless.
9. When things aren't going your way, your first thought is:
(A) "No worries, it will improve soon."
(B) "It's someone else's fault, and I should help them see the error of their ways."
(C) "Hmm, I wonder if I did something wrong?"
10. When you are collaborating on a project, you mainly:
(A) Have faith everything will work out.
(B) Get concerned about the details being overlooked by your team members.
(C) Act in a supportive role, letting others lead.
If you answered mostly As you're the greed type, mostly Bs you're the aversive type, and mostly Cs you're the deluded type. We can have characteristics of all three types, but one type often predominates.
Now that you know your type, you may be wondering, how do I transform?
"Nothing is lost, everything is transformed." -- Antoine Lavoisier, founder of modern chemistry
When we first start to recognize our personality type, we sometimes don't like what we see. None of these types sounds particularly flattering (Oriana: to put it mildly). To see ourselves clearly can feel discouraging and scary.
Trying to reject or erase your underlying nature, though, is a mistake. These types are not character flaws that you should blame yourself for -- they are intrinsic aspects of human nature that everyone experiences. This is not a "you" problem, it's a human problem.
The goal is to understand our nature so we can transform these unhealthy patterns into healthy ones. Our temperament is not a weakness, but a place where we can cultivate strength. Instead of trying to be someone else, you can strive to become the best version of yourself.
I identify most with the aversive type. When I drive I grip the wheel, get easily annoyed at the idiocy of other drivers, and always feel like I'm in a rush, even when I'm not (especially in LA...). At my worst I'm harsh, judgmental, and critical of others (and even more critical of myself). I can get easily frustrated at the problems of the world and feel like every injustice is a battle I need to fight.
But at my best, I am discerning and insightful. I care about justice and fairness more than I do about my own self-interest. I want to understand what's true and communicate clearly. I am not afraid of difficulty and act with integrity, even when it's hard to do.
These positive qualities are the other side of the same coin. They flow directly from my aversive nature. Instead of getting upset at the way I am and trying to be someone else, my task is to cultivate these natural strengths.
Each temperament has its unique strengths as well as unique challenges, and therefore, the task for each temperament is different.
The greed type has a natural ability to appreciate beauty and abundance. This temperament will tend to see the good in others and promote harmony and generosity in relationships. The task for the greed type is to learn to have a wise relationship with desire. Instead of feeling compelled to act on every desire that passes through the mind, this type will need to learn how to tolerate discomfort and watch the rise and fall of unwise desires without acting on them.
The aversive type has a natural discriminating wisdom and ability to see underlying truths in difficult situations. This type has a comfort with obstacles and can unite opposing views with clarity, strength, and integrity. The task for this type is to learn to let go of imperfections and appreciate moments of joy and spontaneity in everyday life.
The deluded type has a natural ability to approach situations with a "beginner's mind" — without assumption. This frame of mind gives rise to creativity, spontaneity, and equanimity. The task for this type is to learn how to reel in their minds and pay attention to find a place of balanced steadiness.
Understanding the different temperaments can help us get along better with others.
We all have friends, family members, or coworkers who are boastful and prideful, who are overly critical, or who are disorganized. Instead of getting upset that these people are the way they are, we can appreciate that they are struggling with their own nature in the same way we are struggling with ours.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/personality-types_b_4125852
Oriana:
I think everyone is a mixture of these (and other) personality types. It depends on the circumstances which trait becomes dominant — and then only for a while. I may be “aversive” in some social situations, but become very supportive to those I perceive as kindred minds and allies (this includes my readers, as I imagine them).
Likewise, I may be very interested in beauty and comfort — but if there is hard work to be done, it certainly gets priority.
Deluded and confused? In today’s complex world, it’s impossible to know enough to always make rational choices — not to mention that it may be humanly impossible to be consistently rational. The heart wants what it wants, no matter how steep the price. Do we really have to label it "greed"?
From a distance, it’s fairly easy to classify someone’s personality. But as soon as we get to know that person up close, a much more complex picture emerges. It also becomes obvious that personality is not fixed, but rather fluid, as we adapt to new circumstances. The more I learned about how difficult everyone’s life is — in different ways, of course — I gradually became less and less judgmental.
Pondering that fluidity, I began wondering if anything about myself has remained stable in my adult life. The first trait that came to mind was my intellectual curiosity. Even if I think back to childhood, that remains — since the age of eight or so, I have always been insatiably curious.
Aside from that, I “bark back,” as one college professor put it. Blind obedience is alien to me. I am rarely awed by anyone’s credentials. I don’t automatically trust MDs (much less worship them, as I’ve seen some people do — though this is less frequent in the age of the Internet, when we can seek information with much greater ease).
I don’t automatically trust authority, period. It may have something to do with having grown up in an oppressed country with an illegitimate government. But it may also be the result of my independent streak; I need to be my own boss. The first condition of happiness is living alone. Alone = freedom.
One of my most positive traits that has been fairly constant has been my fidelity to the Golden Rule: treat others as you yourself would want to be treated. Much follows from that.
*
THE U.S. HOUSING SHORTAGE
Finding an affordable place to live in the U.S. can feel pretty impossible whether you're a renter or a buyer.
To begin with, there's a massive shortage of homes — somewhere between 4 and 7 million. And those who are able to find homes are spending a much bigger chunk of their paycheck than in recent years.
Natalie French was renting an apartment with a roommate in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when they received a notice that their rent was going up by more than 200 dollars a month. With the added pet fees, they were put out of their price range.
French and her roommate ultimately decided to move out and part ways — and for French, that meant leaving Albuquerque altogether to go back home to live with her mother,
"I would love to be able to afford a place on my own, but with my salary, that is not feasible.”
It's a difficult situation not just for renters, but also for prospective home buyers. Ellen Lamont lives in Denver, Colorado with her partner. They put down offers on more than twenty homes because they kept losing out to other buyers, before finally closing on one.
"This idea of having your dream home is not realistic. Even at my age, it's just – where can I live? Where can I even get a place?”
All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly spoke with Alex Horowitz, the director of Pew's Housing Policy Initiative, to help understand why affordable housing feels like a pipe dream, and what can be done about it.
She began by asking about the shortage of 4 to 7 million homes in the U.S., and whether that was a shortage of all homes or affordable ones.
Alex Horowitz: We're short on all homes. Full stop. There just aren't enough of them. And that means that existing homes are getting bid up because we see high income households competing with low income households for the same residences since just not enough are getting built.
Mary Louise Kelly: And what's driving this? Why?
Horowitz: Restrictive zoning is the primary culprit. It's made it hard to build homes in the areas where there are jobs. And so that has created an immense housing shortage. And each home is getting bid up, whether it's a rental or whether it's a home to buy.
Kelly: I want to ask if there are any cities getting this right. Can you give me an example of one that has looked at it's zoning laws and said we could actually make this more affordable if we change things?
Horowitz: There are definitely cities that are getting this right. And we've seen a lot of changes in recent years to allow more homes, especially the kinds of homes that are in short supply, namely apartments, townhouses, duplexes and homes that don't cost as much as a detached single family house. Minneapolis is a great example. Minneapolis updated their zoning to make it much easier to build apartments near commerce and near transit, in part by eliminating parking minimums and also by making permitting easy. And it worked. They're producing housing at triple the rate of the U.S. and the rest of Minnesota, and that has meant that they've kept their rents flat for about seven years.
Kelly: Is there a downside? I'm thinking of people trying to find a parking place, for starters.
Horowitz: So we see that in places that have actually eliminated parking minimums, that we see fewer people driving at all and having cars and we see vehicle miles traveled decrease because people can get around via other means. But look, change can be disconcerting. And we certainly see some local elected officials and some residents concerned about changes in their community, even though the evidence suggests that allowing more homes is mostly beneficial by improving affordability and reducing homelessness.
Kelly: Okay, so let's drill down first on the renters side of this. We heard from Natalie French, the renter who had to move out of her apartment when her rent went way up. How typical is that? Is that happening to people all over the country?
Horowitz: That is happening. And rents have been rising rapidly, up about 30% in the U.S. since 2017, with median rents now hitting about 1400 dollars a month. And we've never been at a time before where half of renters were spending 30% or more of income on rent. But that's happening for the first time.
Kelly: And then on the home-buying side, we hear a lot about mortgage rates. They keep climbing. They don't look like they're coming down anytime soon. Are there other factors that make this a tough time to buy?
Horowitz: A lack of starter homes is really keeping it difficult for first time homebuyers to crack the market. And that is because traditionally starter homes are small homes. That means a home on a small lot, maybe a townhouse. And we're seeing far fewer of those come onto the market. Many jurisdictions require large minimum lot sizes, and that means that land costs end up being a big part of the equation. Houston is the place that has had the most success in bringing starter homes into the market. And it was by reducing their minimum lot size. And then 80,000 townhouses followed.
Kelly: So does it boil down to the double whammy of: there aren't enough homes full stop, and even if there were a home, it's really hard to afford a mortgage in an era where mortgage rates are sky high.
Horowitz: Mortgage rates are a piece of the puzzle, but at a fundamental level, even when mortgage rates were low, it was hard to buy a home for the first time because there simply aren't enough of them. And a lot of the ones that we have are bigger than what people need. U.S. household size is at an all time low of 2.50 people per household. And so we see homes that are bigger than what a lot of residents are looking for.
Kelly: What about financing and lending? Setting aside what mortgage rates are, is it more difficult than in generations past just to get a loan to buy a house?
Horowitz: Oh, it's gotten much more difficult to get a mortgage. The availability of mortgage credit tightened dramatically during the Great Recession, and it never bounced back. So for someone who gets a mortgage today, they're likely to have a higher credit score than someone who's gotten a mortgage in the past. And that means simply fewer people are eligible for homes. And the cost to originate a mortgage has roughly tripled since 2009. And that has meant that lenders don't offer many small mortgages because they tend not to make money on them unless the mortgage is for over about $150,000.
Kelly: So many different factors at play here. You know, when we call you back, Alex, in two, three, four, five years from now, are you optimistic that more Americans who would like to buy or rent our home will be able to do so?
Horowitz: I am. I'm optimistic because of the steps that are taking place at the state and local level. It's really been remarkable how quickly we're seeing states and cities act to legalize lower cost homes, to reduce the parking minimums that have made apartment buildings difficult to build. And we haven't seen this kind of state level action before, because when a state acts, it increases the housing supply everywhere in the state. A state government has to act in order to fix regional housing affordability. But we're seeing that happen for the first time over the past few years.
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/23/1246623204/housing-experts-say-there-just-arent-enough-homes-in-the-u-s
Oriana:
New houses are being built, but just how affordable are they? As for seniors “sizing down,” it’s never easy to move. Moving upends your life, and past a certain age there just isn’t the energy to organize such a huge project. Add to this the trauma of the “loss of familiarity.” It’s goodbye not only to the neighbors you’ve known for decades, but also to the familiar stores, parks (could I really part with Balboa Park forever?), walkways, cinemas — favorite places of all sorts.
Two of my senior neighbors did move, but their motivation wasn’t downsizing — it was wanting to live close to their grandchildren. Some retired people move for the sake of a warmer climate — that I can understand. But on the whole, it seems that most people like to stay put in the dear old place they’ve come to love, in spite of all the drawbacks.
“New data from the American Advisors Group shows that the overwhelming majority of seniors do not intend to sell their homes in older age and have no intention of ever moving.”
“82% of seniors say they want to live in their home for the rest of their lives and 92% of seniors said they would prefer to live their later years in their current home rather than moving to an assisted living facility or nursing home,” the report says.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/80-seniors-not-selling-homes-113205314.html?guccounter=1
(Funny, as I was pondering why seniors hate to part with their homes, I got a phone call asking if I would be willing to sell my house. My answer was of course No. Meanwhile mail offers come in every week.)
*
SCHOPENHAUER AND MID-LIFE CRISIS
Arthur Schopenhauer is notorious for preaching the futility of desire. That getting what you want could fail to make you happy would not have surprised him at all. On the other hand, not having it is just as bad. For Schopenhauer, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you get what you want, your pursuit is over. You are aimless, flooded with a ‘fearful emptiness and boredom’, as he put it in The World as Will and Representation (1818).
Life needs direction: desires, projects, goals that are so far unachieved. And yet this, too, is fatal. Because wanting what you do not have is suffering. In staving off the void by finding things to do, you have condemned yourself to misery. Life ‘swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents’.
Schopenhauer’s picture of human life might seem unduly bleak. Often enough, midlife brings with it failure or success in cherished projects: you have the job you worked for many years to get, the partner you hoped to meet, the family you meant to start – or else you don’t. Either way, you look for new directions. But the answer to achieving your goals, or giving them up, feels obvious: you simply make new ones. Nor is the pursuit of what you want pure agony. Revamping your ambitions can be fun.
Still, I think there is something right in Schopenhauer’s dismal conception of our relationship with our ends, and that it can illuminate the darkness of midlife. Taking up new projects, after all, simply obscures the problem. When you aim at a future goal, satisfaction is deferred: success has yet to come. But the moment you succeed, your achievement is in the past. Meanwhile, your engagement with projects subverts itself. In pursuing a goal, you either fail or, in succeeding, end its power to guide your life. No doubt you can formulate other plans.
The problem is not that you will run out of projects (the aimless state of Schopenhauer’s boredom), it’s that your way of engaging with the ones that matter most to you is by trying to complete them and thus expel them from your life. When you pursue a goal, you exhaust your interaction with something good, as if you were to make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.
Hence one common figure of the midlife crisis: the striving high-achiever, obsessed with getting things done, who is haunted by the hollowness of everyday life. When you are obsessed with projects, ceaselessly replacing old with new, satisfaction is always in the future. Or the past. It is mortgaged, then archived, but never possessed. In pursuing goals, you aim at outcomes that preclude the possibility of that pursuit, extinguishing the sparks of meaning in your life.
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The question is what to do about this. For Schopenhauer, there is no way out: what I am calling a midlife crisis is simply the human condition. But Schopenhauer was wrong. In order to see his mistake, we need to draw distinctions among the activities we value: between ones that aim at completion, and ones that don’t.
Adapting terminology from linguistics, we can say that ‘telic’ activities – from ‘telos’, the Greek word for purpose – are ones that aim at terminal states of completion and exhaustion. You teach a class, get married, start a family, earn a raise. Not all activities are like this, however. Others are ‘atelic’: there is no point of termination at which they aim, or final state in which they have been achieved and there is no more to do. Think of listening to music, parenting, or spending time with friends. They are things you can stop doing, but you cannot finish or complete them. Their temporality is not that of a project with an ultimate goal, but of a limitless process.
If the crisis diagnosed by Schopenhauer turns on excessive investment in projects, then the solution is to invest more fully in the process, giving meaning to your life through activities that have no terminal point: since they cannot be completed, your engagement with them is not exhaustive. It will not subvert itself. Nor does it invite the sense of frustration that Schopenhauer scorns in unsatisfied desire – the sense of being at a distance from one’s goal, so that fulfillment is always in the future or the past.
We should not give up on our worthwhile goals. Their achievement matters. But we should meditate, too, on the value of the process. It is no accident that the young and the old are generally more satisfied with life than those in middle age. Young adults have not embarked on life-defining projects; the aged have such accomplishments behind them. That makes it more natural for them to live in the present: to find value in atelic activities that are not exhausted by engagement or deferred to the future, but realized here and now. It is hard to resist the tyranny of projects in midlife, to find a balance between the telic and atelic. But if we hope to overcome the midlife crisis, to escape the gloom of emptiness and self-defeat, that is what we have to do.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-schopenhauer-s-thought-can-illuminate-a-midlife-crisis?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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CLEAN ENERGY’S DIRTY SECRET
~ As vast solar plants multiply, so does the scrap, set to reach 19m tons by 2050. But disposing of the waste often falls to informal traders who risk injury when dismantling broken panels. The anti-reflective coating on solar glass, which gives it a blue tint, is shredded into tiny pieces. However, there is little value in much of the waste from solar plants.
Under the scorching sun, a sea of solar panels gleams in the semi-arid landscape. Pavagada, 100 miles north of Bengaluru in southern India, is the world’s third-largest solar power plant, with 25m panels across a huge 50 sq km site, and a capacity of 2,050MW of clean energy. India has 11 similarly vast solar parks, and plans to install another 39 across 12 states by 2026, a commitment to a greener future.
Yet this solar boom has a downside: the waste it generates from the panels, made of glass, aluminium, silicon, rare-earth elements; as well as power inverters and wiring. “While manufacturers claim decades of longevity, degradation of these panels sets in much sooner,” says Atif Mirza, director of Fusion Sprint Recycler, a solar-farm waste contractor in Uttar Pradesh. Panels can break during installation and transport or through exposure to monsoons and typhoons.
India’s solar ambitions come with a hefty amount of waste. With the nation targeting output of 280GW of solar power by 2030, of which 70.1GW is already installed, one study forecasts an accumulation of more than 600,000 tons of solar waste by then, with this projected to increase 32-fold to more than 19m tons by 2050.
About two-thirds of the waste is expected to originate from five states – Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh – which house eight of India’s 10 largest solar parks. Naranaiah Amaranath, general manager at Karnataka Solar Power Development Corporation, which oversees the Pavagada solar park, acknowledges that while there are basic regulations regarding waste management, the responsibility largely falls on the private firms that own the solar plants.
Protocol dictates that solar waste from the plants must be transferred to e-waste contractors, authorized by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), within a specified timeframe, typically 90 or 180 days. However, practical and economic challenges abound. Site managers in Pavagada note that the selection of contractors is centralized. One company manages logistics for plants across India.
“Most solar plants are located in remote areas, so the logistics and transportation is expensive, and once dismantled there is hardly any money from each individual part,” says Srinivas Vedula from EPragathi, a Bengaluru-based e-waste recycling company. “Plus, the solar glass has no value.” Mirza, who is the official contractor for Ayana Renewable Power’s plants across India’s solar parks, including in Pavagada, says he sells dismantled parts to traders but admits: “We don’t know what they do with it.”
Because authorized e-waste contractors are often unwilling to handle the waste in accordance with the CPCB protocol, a network of informal operators – who dismantle, aggregate, transport and recycle panels – have stepped in to fill the gap.
Tayyab and his family work at the tail end of this waste-management chain. In a dimly lit and poorly ventilated room in Bengaluru, the 20-year-old and his younger siblings spend their days dismantling broken panels for their valuable metals and other materials. “I take apart the metal frame, separate the glass and sort out different metals that can be sold separately,” says Tayyab. There is no safety equipment in sight to prevent cuts from glass and sharp metals.
At a clandestine worksite in Goripalya, just outside Bengaluru, Tayyab skillfully manoeuvres through the hazardous process with bare hands and crude tools. His friend and siblings pitch in wherever they can. Using a small three-wheeled auto-rickshaw, Tayyab’s friend Imran makes the rounds of warehouses, collecting about 50 solar panels a week. Tayyab’s story is just one among many in the informal solar-waste sector, where workers find ways to extract value from the under-regulated but booming renewable-energy sector.
Hussain is from a family of e-waste dealers in household appliances, computers and televisions, but has carved out a niche for himself handling solar waste. He operates a factory on the outskirts of Bengaluru, described online as a solar manufacturer. “There are few [people] who actually do this work,” says Hussain. “These big recyclers, who claim they deal in e-waste and solar waste, often offload their waste on to us.”
Despite lacking a license, Hussain collects solar waste from plants across the country. “Sometimes they [plant managers] do not ask for any papers,” he says.
Hussain has more than 50 workers dismantling panels to sell the individual components to traders. “Silver is most valuable to us,” he adds. India’s E-Waste Management Rules 2022, which came into force last April, require solar-panel manufacturers to oversee the return of their products’ waste by arranging collection, storage and dismantling, as well as the recycling facilities. They also need to store panel and cell waste up to 2035, according to CPCB guidelines.
Solar detritus was included for the first time in the 2022 e-waste rules but Rudresh Murthy, environmental officer at Karnataka State Pollution Control Board, admits: “There is still a lot to be done.” “Economic viability remains a critical concern,” he says, citing the abrupt closure of a solar-waste recycling firm in Tamil Nadu in 2021 due to the economic downturn during the pandemic.
Murthy is unsurprised an informal solar-waste sector is thriving, claiming e-waste dealers often “don’t even properly manage e-waste, let alone solar waste”.
Srinivas says: “The government policy on solar waste is: let’s cross the bridge when we come to it.”
For people such as Tayyab, Imran and Hussain, the chance to make a living outweighs the risk of injuries. “We have gotten used to it,” says Tayyab. ~
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RELIGION: HOPE, IDEAS, AND REALISM
Religion is an idea rooted in hope. Between waking and sleep we are caught between a world of hope and despair. The world of hope has dream clouds lit with silver lining, illumined by a sun that does not falter. In this world our religion is true, love wins, and we are happy with those we love. In the world of despair, a gloomy night hangs over us like a fog that does not lift. All the grimmest details of life glare at us like skulls in sharp relief. Neither the dreamiest ideals nor the dimmest realities possess us for too long; for we are somewhere betwixt and between. We cannot cave in to doubt nor be misled by a too sugary optimism.
This is I think our human predicament: we are between an idealist hope that we cannot let go of, and a pessimistic realism. Religion is the idealism that gives us hope, and atheism the skeptical doubt that tells us to look only at what is. I cannot imagine giving in wholly to one nor the other, but being led by a torch of religious idealism, and a good roadmap of sober realism. ~ James Rowell, the author of Making Sense of the Sacred, a book about comparative world religion, and also Gandhi and Bin Laden: Religion at the Extremes.
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The lion and the lamb may indeed lie down together, but the lamb is not going to get very much sleep. ~ Woody Allen
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RELIGION AS AN IDEA
Religion is an idea in our heads. It is an idea that can neither be proven nor falsified. What kind of an idea is it? It is sometimes good, for many have done good by religion. It is sometimes bad, marred by those with a foul and rotten heart. Without us, the idea of religion cannot exist, so the health of the religious idea depends entirely on our own psychological well-being. Religion can make a good person better, or a bad person worse.
The idea of religion is myth. Not myth in the primitive, childish sense. Myth in the sense of being a story of our existence. Myth is the story that says our lives matter, even after we die. That is a hopeful idea, and if this hope injures none nor deludes any, I see nothing wrong with this hope, if that is all that religion is. But religion may be much more than a hope in our minds, it may be the eternal fire in our hearts, the human dream of affirming ourselves. The myth, the story of religion, can be a good one to abide by. ~ James Rowell
https://www.meaningofreligion.com/post/religion-is-an-idea
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HOW MUCH PLASTIC IS IN OUR FOOD?
“How much plastic will you have for dinner, sir? And you, ma’am?” While that may seem like a line from a satirical skit on Saturday Night Live, research is showing it’s much too close to reality.
Ninety percent of animal and vegetable protein samples tested positive for microplastics, teeny polymer fragments that can range from less than 0.2 inch (5 millimeters) down to 1/25,000th of an inch (1 micrometer), according to a February 2024 study. Anything smaller than 1 micrometer is a nanoplastic that must be measured in billionths of a meter.
Even vegetarians can’t escape, according to a 2021 study. If the plastic is small enough, fruits and vegetables can absorb microplastics through their root systems and transfer those chemical bits to the plant’s stems, leaves, seeds and fruit.
Salt can be packed with plastic. A 2023 study found coarse Himalayan pink salt mined from the ground had the most microplastics, followed by black salt and marine salt. Sugar is also “an important route of human exposure to these micropollutants,” according to a 2022 study.
Even tea bags, many of which are made of plastic, can release enormous amounts of plastic.
Researchers at McGill University in Quebec, Canada found brewing a single plastic teabag released about 11.6 billion microplastic and 3.1 billion nanoplastic particles into the water.
Rice is also a culprit. A University of Queensland study found that for every 100 grams (1/2 cup) of rice people eat, they consume three to four milligrams of plastic — the number jumps to 13 milligrams per serving for instant rice. (You can reduce plastic contamination by up to 40% by washing rice, researchers said. That also helps reduce arsenic, which can be high in rice.)
Let’s not forget bottled water. One liter of water — the equivalent of two standard-size bottled waters — contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles from seven types of plastics, including nanoplastics, according to a March 2024 study.
Dangers to human health
While microplastics have been found in the human lung, maternal and fetal placental tissues, human breast milk and human blood, until recently there was very little research on how these polymers affect the body’s organs and functions.
A March 2024 study found people with microplastics or nanoplastics in arteries in the neck were twice as likely to have a heart attack, stroke or die from any cause over the next three years than people who had none.
Nanoplastics are the most worrisome type of plastic pollution for human health, experts say. That’s because the minuscule particles can invade individual cells and tissues in major organs, potentially interrupting cellular processes and depositing endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as bisphenols, phthalates, flame retardants, per- and polyfluorinated substances, or PFAS, and heavy metals.
“All of those chemicals are used in the manufacturing of plastic, so if a plastic makes its way into us, it’s carrying those chemicals with it,” Sherri “Sam” Mason, director of sustainability at Penn State Behrend in Erie, Pennsylvania, told CNN in a prior interview.
“And because the temperature of the body is higher than the outside, those chemicals are going to migrate out of that plastic and end up in our body,” Mason said.
“Those chemicals can be carried to your liver and your kidney and your brain and even make their way across the placental boundary and end up in an unborn child,” she said.
“There currently is no scientific consensus on the potential health impacts of nano- and microplastic particles. Therefore, media reports based on assumptions and conjecture do nothing more than unnecessarily scare the public,” a spokesperson for the International Bottled Water Association, an industry association, told CNN previously.
All types of proteins contained microplastics
In the February study, which was published in Environmental Research, researchers looked at over a dozen commonly consumed proteins, including beef, breaded and other types of shrimp, chicken breasts and nuggets, pork, seafood, tofu and several plant-based meat alternatives, such as nuggets, plant crumbles similar to ground beef and plant-based fish sticks.
Breaded shrimp contained the most tiny plastics by far, at well over an average of 300 microplastic pieces per serving. Plant-based nuggets came in second, at under 100 pieces per serving, followed by chicken nuggets, pollock fish sticks, minimally processed White Gulf shrimp, fresh caught Key West pink shrimp and a plant-based fish-like stick.
The least contaminated proteins were chicken breasts, followed by pork loin chops and tofu.
After comparing the results to consumer consumption data, researchers estimated the average exposure of American adults to microplastics could range between 11,000 and 29,000 particles a year, with a maximum estimated exposure of 3.8 million microplastics per year.
Fruits and vegetables tested high in plastics
The oceans are filled with plastics, and a number of studies have captured how those are ending up in the seafood we eat. However, fewer studies have looked at vegetables and land animal proteins, such as cattle and hogs, according to an August 2020 study.
The study, published in Environmental Science, found between 52,050 and 233,000 plastic particles under 10 micrometers — each micrometer is about the diameter of a rain drop — in a variety of fruits and vegetables.
Apples and carrots were the most contaminated fruit and vegetable, respectively, with over 100,000 microplastics per gram. The smallest particles were found in carrots, while the largest pieces of plastic were found in lettuce, which was also the least contaminated vegetable.
Plastics are everywhere
There are a staggering number of plastics in the world, today, according to a recent analysis — 16,000 plastic chemicals, with at least 4,200 of those considered to be “highly hazardous” to human health and the environment.
As these chemicals break down in the environment, they can turn into microplastics and then nanoplastics, particles so small science struggled for decades to see them.
A recent study that utilized brand new technology found the number of nanoplastics in three popular brands of water sold in the United States to be in between 110,000 and 370,000 per liter, if not higher. A liter is the equivalent of about two 16 ounce bottled waters. (The authors declined to mention which brands of bottled water they studied.)
Prior research using older technology had identified only about 300 nanoplastics in bottled water, along with bigger microplastics.
Ways to reduce plastic
The levels of contamination found in bottled water reinforce long-held expert advice to drink tap water from glass or stainless steel containers to reduce exposure, Mason said. That advice extends to other foods and drinks packaged in plastic as well, she added.
“People don’t think of plastics as shedding but they do,” she said. “In almost the same way we’re constantly shedding skin cells, plastics are constantly shedding little bits that break off, such as when you open that plastic container for your store-bought salad or a cheese that’s wrapped in plastic.”
While science learns more about the plastics we consume, there are things people can do to reduce their exposure, according to experts.
· Try to avoid eating anything that has been stored in a plastic container. Look for food stored in glass, enamel or foil.
· Wear clothing made from natural fabrics and buy consumer products made from natural materials.
· Don’t microwave in plastic. Instead, heat food on the stove or by microwaving in glass.
· If you can, eat as much fresh food as possible, and limit purchase of processed and ultraprocessed foods wrapped in plastic.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/22/health/plastics-food-wellness-scn?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Mary:
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SHOULD WE BE AFRAID OF LECTINS?
Since childhood we’ve been subjected to incessant praise of “fruits and vegetables.” Hearing this constant Hallelujah, it’s easy to forget that plants also contain all kinds of harmful compounds.
Dr. Steven Gundry has pointed out that plant food is full of toxic proteins called lectins, which cause gut lining injury, weight gain, and may be involved in auto-immune diseases.
Lectins are a type of protein that can bind to sugar.
They’re sometimes referred to as anti-nutrients. Animal studies suggest that certain lectins can reduce the body’s ability to absorb nutrients. Lectins are thought to have evolved as a natural defense in plants, essentially as a toxin that deters animals from eating them.
Lectins are found in many plant- and animal-based foods, yet only about 30% of the foods you eat contain significant amounts.
(Yes, animal food also contains lectins — that’s why the meat of grass-fed cattle is regarded as better for us than the meat of corn- and wheat-fed cattle, and wild-caught fish is preferable to farmed fish, fed corn and soy beans.)
The good news is that lectins are water-soluble and disintegrate at high temperature, so cooking your food in water gets rid rid of them. Pressure cooking is especially effective.
Of course there are some foods that are best enjoyed raw. Peel and de-seed them if you can — this goes for cucumbers, for instance. As for tomatoes, they are actually more nutritious when cooked.
And there are of course lectin-free foods. Some people benefit greatly from a lectin-free diet. Below is a list of common low-lectin or lectin-free foods:
- Avocado
- Asparagus
- Broccoli, Brussels sprouts and other cruciferous vegetables
- Celery
- Cooked sweet potatoes
- Garlic
- Leafy green vegetables
- Mushrooms
- Onion
- Pasture-raised meats
Beans and whole grains, on the other hand, are examples of high-lectin foods. (Oriana: I don't touch whole grains, but canned beans are fine: the canning process involves pressure cooking, eliminating lectins.)
Humans are unable to digest lectins, so they travel through your gut unchanged.
How they work remains a mystery, though animal research shows certain types of lectins bind to cells on the gut wall. This allows them to communicate with the cells, triggering a response.
Animal lectins play important roles in several bodily processes, including immune function and cell growth.
Research suggests that plant lectins could even have a role in cancer therapy.
However, eating large amounts of certain types of lectins can damage the gut wall. This causes irritation that can result in symptoms like diarrhea and vomiting. It can also prevent the gut from absorbing nutrients properly.
The highest concentrations of lectins are found in healthy foods like legumes, grains, and nightshade vegetables. Luckily, there are several ways to reduce the lectin content of these healthy foods to make them safe to eat.
Research shows that by cooking, sprouting, or fermenting foods that are high in lectins, you can easily reduce their lectin content to negligible amounts. [Oriana: again, pressure cooking is a very effective way of getting rid of lectins.]
Below are 6 healthy foods that are high in lectins.
RED KIDNEY BEANS
Red kidney beans are among the richest sources of plant-based protein.
They are also a great source of carbs that are low on the glycemic index (GI).
This means that they release their sugars more slowly into your blood, causing a gradual rise in blood sugar rather than a sharp spike.
What’s more, they’re also high in resistant starch and insoluble fiber, which can aid weight loss and improve general gut health.
However, raw kidney beans also contain high levels of a lectin called phytohaemagglutinin.
If you eat them raw or undercooked, they can cause extreme nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. As few as five beans can cause a response.
A hemagglutinating unit (hau) is a measure of lectin content. In their raw form, red kidney beans contain 20,000–70,000 hau. Once they’re thoroughly cooked, they contain only 200–400 hau, which is considered a safe level.
When properly cooked, red kidney beans are a valuable and nutritious food that shouldn’t be avoided.
Oriana: WARNING: BEANS SHOULD BE COOKED AT HIGH TEMPERATURES -- unless you are using canned beans.
Please note that people have ended up in ER after eating red beans cooked in a slow-cooker, i.e. those beans were not exposed to temperatures high enough to destroy lectins.
Canned beans are safe since they have been pressure-cooked as part of the canning process.
Soybeans
Soybeans are a fantastic source of protein. They contain one of the highest quality plant-based proteins, which makes them particularly important for vegetarians.
They are a good source of vitamins and minerals, particularly molybdenum, copper, manganese, magnesium, and riboflavin.
They also contain plant compounds called isoflavones, which have been linked to cancer prevention and a decreased risk of osteoporosis.
Research shows soybeans can also help lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes.
That said, soybeans are another food that contains high levels of lectins.
As with red kidney beans, cooking soybeans nearly eliminates their lectin content. Yet, make sure you cook them for long enough at a high enough temperature.
Research shows that soybean lectins are almost completely deactivated when they’re boiled at 212°F (100°C) for at least 10 minutes.
In contrast, dry or moist heating of soybeans at 158°F (70°C) for several hours had little or no effect on their lectin content.
Fermentation and sprouting are both proven methods of reducing lectins.
One study found that fermenting soybeans reduced the lectin content by 95%. Another study found that sprouting decreased the lectin content by 59%.
Fermented soybean products include soy sauce, miso, and tempeh. Soybean sprouts are also widely available and can be added to salads or used in stir-fries.
Oriana:
Listen to your body. I tried soy protein powder, and immediately felt bloated and unwell.
Wheat
Wheat is the staple food for 35% of the world’s population. Yet some people get much healthier when they stop eating wheat. [Oriana: rice-eating populations are on the whole healthier than wheat-eating populations.]
Refined wheat products have a high glycemic index (GI), meaning they can cause your blood sugar levels to spike. They’ve also been stripped of virtually all nutrients.
Whole wheat has a similar GI, but it’s higher in fiber, which can benefit your gut health.
Some people are intolerant to gluten, a collective term referring to many types of protein found in wheat. However, if you tolerate it, whole wheat can be a good source of many vitamins and minerals, such as selenium, copper, and folate.
Oriana:
Some degree of gluten intolerance is universal, according to my conversation with a CDC scientist who specialized in celiac disease. Gluten causes inflammation — it’s just a matter of degree, depending on the individual.
Whole wheat also contains antioxidants like ferulic acid, which has been linked to a lower incidence of heart disease. But considering the inflammation that wheat can cause, you can choose from many anti-inflammatory foods instead.
Raw wheat, especially wheat germ, is high in lectins, with around 300 mcg of wheat lectins per gram. However, it appears that the lectins are almost eliminated by cooking and processing.
Compared to raw wheat germ, whole-wheat flour has a much lower lectin content at about 30 mcg per gram.
When you cook whole-wheat pasta, it appears to completely inactivate the lectins, even at temperatures as low as 149°F (65°C). In cooked pasta, lectins are undetectable.
Moreover, research shows that store-bought, whole-wheat pasta doesn’t contain any lectins at all, as it’s usually exposed to heat treatments during production.
Since most whole-wheat products you eat are cooked, it’s not likely that lectins pose a significant problem.
Peanuts
Peanuts are a type of legume that’s related to beans and lentils.
They are high in mono- and polyunsaturated fats, making them a great source of energy.
They are also high in protein and a wide range of vitamins and minerals, such as biotin, vitamin E, and thiamine.
Peanuts are also rich in antioxidants and have been linked to health benefits like a reduced risk of heart disease and gallstones.
Unlike some of the other foods on this list, the lectins in peanuts don’t appear to be reduced by heating.
A study found that after participants ate 7 ounces (200 grams) of either raw or roasted peanuts, lectins were detected in their blood, indicating that they had crossed through from the gut.
One test-tube study found that peanut lectins increased growth in cancer cells.
This, alongside the evidence that peanut lectins can enter the bloodstream, has led some people to believe that lectins could encourage cancer to spread in the body.
However, the test-tube study above was carried out using high doses of pure lectins placed directly onto cancer cells. No studies have investigated their exact effects in humans.
Thus far, the evidence demonstrating peanuts’ health benefits and role in cancer prevention is far stronger than any evidence of potential harm.
[Oriana: while raw peanuts contain lectins, peanut butter has only a fraction of these.]
Tomatoes
Tomatoes are part of the nightshade family, along with potatoes, eggplants, and bell peppers.
Tomatoes are high in fiber and rich in vitamin C, with one tomato providing approximately 20% of the daily value.
They are also a decent source of potassium, folate, and vitamin K1.
One of the most studied compounds in tomatoes is the antioxidant lycopene. It has been found to reduce inflammation and heart disease, and studies have shown it may protect against cancer.
Tomatoes also contain lectins, though there is currently no evidence that they have any negative effects in humans. The available studies have been conducted on animals or in test tubes.
In one study in rats, tomato lectins were found to bind to the gut wall, but they didn’t appear to cause any damage.
Another study in mice suggests that tomato lectins do manage to cross the gut and enter the bloodstream once they’ve been eaten.
Indeed, some people appear to react to tomatoes, but this is more likely due to something called pollen food allergy syndrome or oral allergy syndrome.
Some people have linked tomatoes and other nightshade vegetables to inflammation, such as that found in arthritis. So far, no formal research has supported this link.
Lectins have been linked to rheumatoid arthritis, but only in those who carry genes that put them at a high risk of the disease. The research found no link between rheumatoid arthritis and nightshade vegetables, specifically.
Potatoes
Potatoes are another member of the nightshade family. They are a very popular food and eaten in many forms.
Eaten with the skin, potatoes are also a good source of some vitamins and minerals.
They contain high levels of potassium, which has been shown to decrease the risk of heart disease. They are also a good source of vitamin C and folate.
The skins, in particular, are high in antioxidants, such as chlorogenic acid. This compound has been associated with a reduced risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
Potatoes have also been shown to be more satiating than many other common foods, which can aid weight loss. That said, it’s important to consider how they are cooked.
As with tomatoes, some people report experiencing adverse effects when they eat potatoes. Animal and test-tube studies have shown that this could be linked to lectins. However, more studies in humans are needed.
In most people, potatoes do not cause any adverse effects. In fact, one study found that some varieties of potatoes were linked to a reduction in inflammation.
The bottom line:
Only about a third of the foods you eat likely contain a significant amount of lectins.
These lectins are often eliminated by preparation processes like cooking, sprouting, and fermentation. These processes make the foods safe, so they will not cause adverse effects in most people.
Nevertheless, nightshade vegetables may cause problems for some people. If you’re one of them, you may benefit from limiting your intake.
All the foods discussed in this article have important and proven health benefits.
They’re also important sources of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. Currently, knowledge about their lectin content indicates there is no need to avoid them.
Oriana:
On the other hand, if you are concerned about autoimmune disorders, you may consider a lectin-free diet.
lectin-free meal
And remember that pressure cooking inactivates almost all lectins. All you need to avoid is wheatgerm and raw peanuts — those lectins apparently can’t be inactivated.
Also, make sure never to eat undercooked beans or undercooked potatoes. Beans and potatoes need to be thoroughly cooked in order to be safe.
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ANTI-INFLAMMATORY FOODS
Inflammation can be both good and bad.
On the one hand, it helps your body defend itself from infection and injury. On the other hand, chronic inflammation can lead to disease.
Foods like fruits, vegetables, and spices contain anti-inflammatory compounds and may help reduce inflammation. The most anti-inflammatory foods may include:
berries
fatty fish
broccoli (and other cruciferous vegetables, including arugula and kale)
avocados
green tea
peppers
mushrooms
grapefruit
turmeric and ginger
extra-virgin olive oil
tomatoes
cherries
dark chocolate and cocoa
nuts
dark leafy greens (e.g. spinach)
Many people falsely believe that eggs cause inflammation. “However, a 2019 study on adults found no connection between egg consumption and inflammatory biomarkers in the blood.”
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/eggs-and-arthritis-symptoms#research
[Oriana: However, an allergy to milk and eggs is fairly common
. Most of the allergy-causing protein in eggs in concentrated in the white. Toss the white, eat the yolk. Egg yolks are extremely nutritious.]
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Ending on beauty:
IT GOES AWAY
I give everything away and it goes away,
into the dusty air,
onto the face of the water
that goes away beyond our seeing.
I give everything away
that has been given to me:
the voices of children under the clouds,
the men in the parks at the chess tables,
the women entering and leaving the bakeries.
God who came here by rock, by tree, by bird.
All things silent in my seeing.
All things believable in their leaving.
Everything I have I give away
and it goes away.
~ Linda Gregg
