From: "Frederick Andresen" <fred@andresen.com>
Subject: A response re "Historians: Russia Less Free Than After 1917 Revolution"
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008
From Frederick Andresen, author of “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia.”
I am responding to the article in the JRL 2008-18 from the St. Petersburg Times, "Historians: Russia Less Free Than After 1917 Revolution."
About the article from the St. Petersburg Time “Russia Less Free than After 1917 Revolution” I don’t know what to think except this is a prime example of my adage that “In Russia there are not only two sides of the coin, but often three.” When one stands off a bit and looks at Russia today with its revanching autocracy (one side of the coin) or its bewildered liberalism (the other side) there is a third side that should be looked at. To me it is like two wrestlers in a Russian river, one fighting to bring his opponent to the right bank and the other struggling to reach the left one. But in their short-sighted immersion in personal combat, they are being swept down stream to the ocean where all nations sooner or later have to have some form of responsible social democracy to succeed and prosper and live together. It’s inevitability we have known since Aristotle and Plato explained it to us. In the case of Russia, although the river of change is deep and the current slow, it is moving. It really has no choice.
I think of Pasternak’s prophetic words from his Dr. Zhivago returning from the front (yes, in 1917), “Just now, I was looking out of the window in the train I thought, what is there in the whole world worth more than a peaceful family life and work? The rest isn’t in our hands.” That is, in one sentence a summation of the stereotypical Russian mindset. It is true for any of us with one very big exception. The rest is in our hands. The “lack of enthusiasm…toward liberal ideas” is explainable. Personal responsibility is the cornerstone of a real social democracy and national progress and that is what is missing. In my book, “Walking on Ice” I claim Russia suffers (Russians like to suffer) from an inconvenience of geography. I am convinced that what makes a people are two things: geography and religion, and in the end it is geography. But today the defining geography, that which creates the religion or thought matrix of a people is slowly washing away with all the technology as we know and the open minds of the many young. That does not at all diminish the pride of nationality, but rabble rousing power seekers would want us to believe so. The orthodox fatalism so deep in the Russian thought is being contested today. Another Zhivago thought, “Men who are not free,… always idealize their bondage.” I don’t ignore the much publicized two sides of the Russian coin, I just say there is a third that must be recognized. Fatalistic Russian historians and Western self-proclaimed experts can sit and shake their heads in dismay, but still, the river moves on.