Only to spit it out, of course, for who wants to digest such sick meat?
It is remarkable, the transformation of Russia as last and least of Europe, to the last, and most unequivocal, defender of its values, that of manliness, love of one’s native land and, of course, Christianity.
Just 400 years ago, Muscovy was so backward and unEuropean, it had no painters, sculptors, architects, composers or even poets, so no artistic achievements of any kind. By contrast, Poland in the 16th century already had painter Martin Kober and poet Jan Kochanowski, and architectural marvels mushroomed across Bohemia and Hungary from the late 15th century.
What do you expect of a tribe who had to kiss Mongols’ asses and mingle with blood quaffing Tartars, with their northern reaches called “Region of Darkness”? Napoleon in 1812, “Scratch a Russian, you find a Tartar.” So what if their DNA seemed more than OK. After encountering Russians in 1271, Marco Polo reported:
The men are extremely handsome, tall, and of fair complexions. The women are also fair and of a good size, with light hair, which they are accustomed to wear long. The country pays tribute to the king of the Western Tartars, with whose dominions it comes in contact on its eastern border. Within it are collected in great abundance the furs of ermines, arcolini, sables, martens, foxes, and other animals of that tribe, together with much wax. It contains several mines, from whence a large quantity of silver is procured. Russia is an exceedingly cold region, and I have been assured that it extends even as far as the Northern Ocean […]
Reigning from 1682 to 1725, Peter the Great modernized Russia, and with the appearance of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekov in the 19th century, Russia didn’t just catch up with but surpassed most of Europe. Still, this land on its edge retained an aura of backwardness.
Consider, for example, Chekov’s “Gooseberries.” Though this 1898 story is best remembered for its philosophical musings, there’s this striking descriptive passage. Caught in a thunderstorm, two men ducked into a friend’s home:
It was a big two-storeyed house. Alehin lived in the lower storey, with arched ceilings and little windows, where the bailiffs had once lived; here everything was plain, and there was a smell of rye bread, cheap vodka, and harness. He went upstairs into the best rooms only on rare occasions, when visitors came. Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were met in the house by a maid-servant, a young woman so beautiful that they both stood still and looked at one another.
“You can’t imagine how delighted I am to see you, my friends,” said Alehin, going into the hall with them. “It is a surprise! Pelagea,” he said, addressing the girl, “give our visitors something to change into. And, by the way, I will change too. Only I must first go and wash, for I almost think I have not washed since spring. Wouldn’t you like to come into the bath-house? and meanwhile they will get things ready here.”
Beautiful Pelagea, looking so refined and soft, brought them towels and soap, and Alehin went to the bath-house with his guests.
“It’s a long time since I had a wash,” he said, undressing. “I have got a nice bath-house, as you see—my father built it—but I somehow never have time to wash.”
He sat down on the steps and soaped his long hair and his neck, and the water round him turned brown.
“Yes, I must say,” said Ivan Ivanovitch meaningly, looking at his head.
“It’s a long time since I washed...” said Alehin with embarrassment, giving himself a second soaping, and the water near him turned dark blue, like ink.
With spare, unused rooms and a beautiful servant, our gracious host was obviously not poor, yet he’s dirtier than a beast, and also dressed pitifully, “He had on a white shirt that badly needed washing, a rope for a belt, drawers instead of trousers, and his boots, too, were plastered up with mud and straw.” Hardly the bloodsucking landowner of Communist propaganda.
Dying in 1904, Chekov would not see his nation enter a decades-long Jewish nightmare, unlike millions of us. Those who yearn to be heroically progressive will get their wish, plus interest.
By 1995, Russia was still a sad, desperate mess. In Ingo Schulze’s 33 Moments of Happiness, there’s this most memorable summation, as translated from the German by John E. Woods:
Russia—all you can do is leave it! All week I had been wondering why I was doing this to myself, why I was in this city and not in Paris or Italy. It was as if the people here had only recently come in from the village and didn’t know how to walk down a street. They plod along, yelling, shoving, elbowing, spitting. No one says “Excuse me.” They pay no attention or just bellow swear words. You have to kick them! And no sooner have you worked your way free than they push you onto a bus or into the path of a car. Or you save yourself by standing flush against a wall like a beggar and don’t know what to do next. And everywhere, like some peculiarity of the climate, is this stench of old farmer cheese, embedded filth and cigarette smoke. At the airport, on the bus, in the hotel, on the street—you can’t escape it, only the blend changes. Sometimes there is a little gasoline in it, or garlic, or toilet bowls. From courtyard doors drift odds and ends of meals, stairwells reek of piss. In grocery stores the odors hang so heavy that yesterday’s heat is still sticking to them. And when it comes to people, you don’t know if they have taken on the stink of their surroundings or if it’s coming from them.
Except for the bread and tea, hardly anything is edible. Every bite bloats in your mouth, and is another sin against your body. Even the milk is musty, the champagne sugary, the beer sour. No matter where you look, there is nothing that is not dented, defective, mended, crooked, scruffy, askew, loose, dirty, as if it all came from a dump and had just been crudely patched together again. Only imports shine.
The madness of the czars is the only culture they have, but they manage to ruin even that, crap all over it. And all the while they talk about Pushkin, fate and the Volga. Their metal roofs are the hulls of shipwrecks; doors and windows hint that the creatures housed inside do not speak a language—you think you can hear snarls, whimpers and howls. Russians in general seem to have been so conditioned by some lifelong experiment that apathy marches in step with an astounding ingenuity for humiliating others. Everything is contrived to cause people the greatest possible unpleasantness, whether it’s a lack of benches, mirrors hung too low, repairs that go on for years or the shopping, which requires standing in line three times for a pat of butter. Functioning toilets are to be found, if at all, only in hotels. Be it a floor monitor, a waiter, a travel guide—they are all permanently offended, foul-tempered, testy, gruff. They speak without even looking up; if you ask them something, they squint as if they are about to spit at your feet. If a woman is beautiful, she can be bought, if a car is new, the owner is a criminal. Never, not in any other country, have I felt so vulnerable, so defenseless. I knew: If something happens to me here, no one will help me. If I stumble, they’ll trample me down, if I scream, they’ll rob and strip me. They can spot foreigners at a glance. As if we were a different color. There is hardly any opportunity in daily life to mix with Russians and just stand aside for a moment and watch—and that’s what makes travel worthwhile.
Today’s Russia is not anything like that, but even worse, if you believe Western media. Ruled by a new Hitler, it’s hellbent on self-destruction, with rioting on its streets, nothing in its stores and most people just trying to get out, except no one wants them, for Russians are just degenerate barbarians. Switching pronouns compulsively when not castrating itself, the righteous West will prevail.
Extolling God and nation, Russia has scandalously ditched its recent internationalist, Jewish mindset to recover its soul, its core Russianness, so it must be punished. This transition echoes Shatov’s in Dostoyevsky’s Demons. Rejecting socialism, Shatov doesn’t just embrace nationalism but even conflates nation with God! To his outraged comrades, Shatov articulates:
[…] The people are the body of God. Every people is a people only as long as it has its special God and excludes all the other gods in the world without any compromise, as long as it has faith that it will triumph through its own God and will drive all the other gods from the world. That is what everyone has believed from the beginning of time, all the great peoples, at least all those who were in any way singled out, all who stood at the head of humanity. You can’t go against facts […] If a great people does not have faith that it alone embodies the truth (in itself alone, and in it exclusively), if it does not have faith that it alone has the ability and is called to resurrect all peoples and save them with its truth, then it immediately ceases to be a great people and immediately turns into ethnographic material, and not a great people. A genuinely great people can never reconcile itself to playing a secondary role in humanity or even a primary one, but must stand in the front rank, absolutely and exclusively. If it loses this faith, then it is no longer a people. But there is only one truth, and therefore only one out of all the peoples is capable of having the true God, even though the remaining peoples also have their own special and great gods. The only “God-bearing” people is the Russian people […]
Such chauvinism is extreme, I agree, but that’s usual enough when fanatics swing to the other side. I doubt many Russians, including Putin, think that way.
For such heresy, Shatov would be killed, and this fictional crime is based on an actual murder, of one Ivan Ivanov. If you disagree with progressives about anything, they’ll brand you a moron, reactionary or Nazi. With a genocidal rage, they’ll scream that you’re a hate monger, when all you want is to be left alone to love what’s yours.
For protecting Russia and Russianness, that great nation is being attacked by deranged idiots so brainwashed, they’re committing suicide by a thousand cuts, but you don’t have to go along.
At the end of the Cold War, Russia tried to join NATO, but nothing came of it, for NATO has been an American weapon deployed against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and, now, Russia! Repeatedly shunned by other whites, Russians have had no choice but to move closer to the Chinese and other Orientals.
Vostok, it is then, as the sun sinks in the muddled West.
[Amarkhuu Borkhuu singing “Moscow Nights” in 2007][Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Anna Netrebko singing “Moscow Nights” in 2013]
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