A Meditation on the Russian Character

INTRODUCTION

At the heart of Russian Communist Internationalism lies an age-old and traditional Russian idea: all-human brotherhood. Real understanding of Russia and Russian Communism is impossible without an awareness of that aspect. Actually Russians are also Europeans, albeit more cosmopolitan than most, much more so than inward-looking Americans. Dostoevsky was the embodiment of the Russian concept of all-human brotherhood. Until the great wars of the twentieth century even nationalism was largely foreign to Russian mentality. Nicolas Berdyaev, existentialist thinker and prolific writer, who broke with Marxism and Bolshevism and left Russia for West Europe in 1922, wrote that Russian Communism was the transformation and deformation of viii the Russian messianic idea of international brotherhood, in that sense a reflection of the Russian religious mind. Even though history demonstrates that universal brotherhood is utopian, Berdyaev insisted that Soviet Internationalism derived from that ancient, deep-seated Russian idea.

Both Fernandez and Levi mean that many characteristics of the seventy-year Soviet era did not represent a dramatic rupture with Tsarist Russia. Now that enough time has passed and some minds are free of Cold War brainwash, we can see that the Soviet Union was ALSO the continuation of former Russia to a more “modern” state, that is, to the Communist state. Fernandez writes that though the positive traits remaining from the Communist system are gradually being erased today—austerity and moral dignity are ceding to the vulgarity of imports from the West—nonetheless, degradation is slower than elsewhere because Russians have an exceptional force of passivity and resistance. Also because of the enormity of the country and the isolation of entire regions in the long winters thus far it has been saved from the fate of Prague, once one of the world’s most beautiful cities, which the thirst for money has transformed into a tourist souk. The essence of today’s new Russia is most visible in the big cities, especially in Moscow, a sensation of a kind of void remaining after the disappearance of the old eras.

The qualities and characteristics of Russians must account for their feeling of “differentness” and for the distinctive quality of Russian Communism. Communism elsewhere, Nicolas Berdyaev predicted, would be less integrated than in Russia, more secular and … and most likely it would be more bourgeois.

Bourgeois! The theme has run through Russian letters since the revolutionary period. The artistic work of the great poet Alexander Blok, the lyrical poem The Twelve, reflects the people’s instinctive hate for the bourgeoisie. The Anglo-Saxon worship of bourgeois dissimulation is distant from Russian mentality. Reserve is considered a false social role. One reason for the initial success of the Bolsheviks around the world was their overt hate for the falsity of the bourgeoisie. Russians mistrust the surface of things. The raw and the crude are ix more likely to be free of deception. Form exhibits the lie while concealing the truth. Human greatness and a too well turned phrase are suspect. Systems and rules are departures from the human. Russians prefer living life to playing roles. So today, despite the threats, Western hostility and the temptations of capitalist values, this northern people with a southern mentality and a capacity for levitation has returned. The Russians are back, and how!

Ron Ridenour’s book, The Russian Peace Threat, about these Russians is destined to endure and inform future readers, writers and researchers about both what has been reported and what truly took place in the one hundred years from the 1917 Russian Revolution until the eruption of the distinct harbingers of the collapse of the US empire in the early twenty-first century. Events often just seem to happen, caught up in the swirl of history. But still, we try to interpret them and to understand. And then, in many cases, take a stand for or against. Understanding is like discovering a new world, like converting to a new faith. Revolt invades your life and everything is different from what it once was. Ridenour’s book helps us along the way to first remembering the historical facts so that we can then understand. His new work documents clearly facts about the early years of the Soviet Union’s relations with the West, its difficult steps toward socio-political maturity and Communism, and its enormous sacrifices along the way: its defeat of Western intervention during the revolutionary and civil war period; its regulation of state economic planning and the reforms required for the industrialization of the nation; its defeat of the German Nazi military juggernaut at the gates of Russia’s major cities and the coup de grace in the ferocious battle in Stalingrad, defeating German invaders and crushing Nazi Germany before the USA even entered the war; and finally the arduous salvation of Russia after the collapse of the USSR under US post-WWII economic firepower and the most treacherous anti-Russian policies which have marked US foreign policy since the early 1900s. Those Western policies continue to determine US-Russian relations today.99999 Throughout this long work Ridenour recalls and clarifies diverse significant historical details, obscured by time and by Western propaganda, facts that are so easily forgotten or that were never learned: such ignored truths as the importance of the USSR in the defeat of Japan in WWII and the timing of the US use of the atomic bomb in Japan. Not x many people are aware of the extent of the destruction of many Japanese cities which the author details here. He points out that the Soviet Union kept its word to help the United States by its intervention against Japan, the decisive reason why Japan was defeated even before the atomic bombs fell. A stunning but little known fact is that in response Operation Unthinkable and Operation Pincher in which first Churchill and later Truman were prepared to launch a surprise war against Soviet forces in Europe, included the potential use of nuclear bombs.

Dealing with the more well-known US capitalist involvement with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Ridenour reveals lurid details concerning the background to that involvement that are overwhelming. The story of the I.G. Farben Concern is a story in itself. Headquartered in its mammoth Frankfurt offices, once the biggest office building in Europe, it was “miraculously” spared by Allied bombing which leveled the city of Frankfurt. I.G. a chemical-pharmaceutical giant closely linked to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and its affiliates during the Nazi era, the war itself and in postwar. It was the producer of the insecticide Zyklon B, used then in the holocaust and was the notorious exploiter of tens of thousands of slave workers. The spared building became General Eisenhower’s headquarters in the post-war and the CIA European headquarters and offices of related military intelligence agencies. In the 1990s it was returned to the German government to become the seat of the University of Frankfurt.

The Russian Threat concentrates on revealing Yankee hypocrisy and double speak about Russia. Ridenour says that the degenerate Yeltsin period in the 1990s and the Putin bashing and Russiagate got him involved in this book in the first place: “I think that the main point of my approach to the Soviet Union and Stalin is my conviction based on my own experience and research that neither were ever a threat to world peace, nor to the United States. While the Kissinger approach included the ideology of good is bad and the domino theory, Stalin, on the other hand, kept his agreements with the Yanks and Brits from their three big wartime meetings.”

Concerning the crucial 1930s, the author provides a rich chapter dedicated to Spain, almost a mere historical niche for educated people today, offering for example marvelous information about the numbers and fate of American volunteers to the Republican side in the Civil War on their return home, a chapter in which he underlines George xi Orwell’s important point that the Spanish Civil War was above all a class war.

Ron Ridenour who lived and worked for many years in Cuba presents a realistic view of the revolutionary island state that has exerted such wide influence in all of Latin America. Here his views are not those of the armchair analyst or superficial observer; his vision is more that of Cubans themselves caught up in the swirl of history. He writes of US Operation Mongoose against Cuba:

The author today is impressed with the statesman-like qualities of Russian President Putin: his self-control in avoiding the trap of the US Deep State’s provocations concerning Russiagate; his preventing war against Iran and total US war against Syria, while at the same time improving the social-economic lives of the Russian people.99999 The notes section at the end of some chapters of The Russian Threat is magnificent, covering many lesser known aspects of relations between Russia and the United States and, at the same time, the major events of the last century. The vast number of sources used in this work, all now available in one place, is most certainly a remarkable achievement. Thus, we have in our hands a guide, a trove, for anyone writing on these subjects. The author’s research, tenacity for the discovery of little known details and his integrity make the book a reliable source for researchers and scholars, and most useful tool for anyone writing about the myriad aspects of US-Russian relations of our times.

—Gaither Stewart
Rome, Winter 2018