The BBC has a story today on the Kremlin's announcement of a new program to instill patriotism in Russian youth. As part of the program, the schools will reinstate military-style training for Russian kids.
During my last few weeks in Fort Worth shortly before moving to Seattle, I met an emigrant who left Russia in 1997. I was embarassed to admit then that most of the Russian words I knew had been picked up in Clancy novels, especially The Cardinal of the Kremlin. The two words we spent the most time discussing were tovarisch and rodina. She said that these Russian words captured much more than the weak English translations of "comrade" and "Motherland".
We spoke too, of the mentality of Russia as a frontier or garrison state, always unappreciated by those in the West ignorant of the price Russia paid to defeat Napoleon and Hitler. The Putin regime since 9/11 has sought to draw parallels between the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis and Russia's current struggle with Islamofascist terrorists. But unlike in 1941 and 1942, the regime cannot hide from the world the appalling waste incompetence and corruption have added to the butcher's bill. During WWII readers of the New York or UK Times had only the most vague details of the titanic encirclement battles in which Russia lost hundreds of thousands of men before turning the Nazi tide. Even the U.S. Army that spent decades preparing for a Soviet armored onslaught in Europe did not encourage its leading minds to dust off this forgotten episode, until near the end of the Cold War.
In contrast, anyone who cares to do a Google search on the 1994 Battle of Grozny can read of Defense Minister Grachev's decision to send a whole brigade into the Chechens' fortified urban kill zone. The Forbes writer Paul Klebnikov later claimed in his history of post-Soviet Russia, Godfather of the Kremlin, that Defense Minister Grachev was drunk when he gave the order.
In post-Soviet Russia, such criminal incompetence can only be explained by dark conspiracy theories - that the Putin regime was behind the terrorist bombings of Moscow apartment blocs that sparked the second major Russian Chechnya offensive in 1999; that a Kremlin regime in need of external enemies to centralize power promotes endless war as in Orwell's 1984 (paging Michael Moore); that the regime has made secret deals with Chechen Islamist leaders, and so on. The fact that Chechen jihadists use weapons looted from Russian armories and purchased from Russian-mafia controlled black markets - combined with media reports of leading terrorist commanders constantly slipping away - all fuel the flames of paranoid speculation.
Yet simply because Stalin needed an enemy and found it in fascism in the 1930s did not change the fact that Hitler had made his intentions towards Russia brutally clear in Mein Kampf. Similarly, simply because the Kremlin cites atrocities like Beslan to consolidate more power does not change the stated intentions of Chechen jihadists to carve out lebensraum in the Caucuses. Nor can there be any doubt about how disastrous such a malignant gangster/terrorist state would prove for America's war against terrorism, after we have spent so much to destroy the Taliban and topple Saddam.
Putin is definitely no Stalin, and in fairness to him, the Chechen war was a wreck he inherited from Boris Yeltsin. Russia's historic experience has proven that even paranoids have real enemies. As Russiablog has argued previously, Putin is a tragic figure, to be pitied rather than blamed. It is time the U.S. and the rest of the world's leading nations offered Russia more than criticism or top-down consultants, but genuine friendship and moral capital contributed in the hope of Russia's rebirth in freedom.
