Monthly Archives: November 2022

Next to the Bear

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The other day a Ukrainian TV station contacted me and asked me whether we could do an interview about what spending one’s life in the shadow of a large and aggressive neighbor is like. As, for example, the citizens of the German Federal German Republic (until 1989), South Korea, Taiwan, and of course my very own Israel all have done. As so often happens, I found the question intriguing. So having spent some time mulling over it—I do not claim to have done much research—I jotted down some answers.

Ere we start, though, it is important to note that much will depend on who you are. Including: age, gender, marital status, education, profession, whether or not you have children to look after, how close to (or far from) the security apparatus you are, any advance training you may have received, etc. Visiting the FGR for the first time back in 1976, I was impressed by the fact that every single bridge and tunnel was marked with data, complete with pictures of tanks, about the weight and dimensions of the vehicles that could pass through. On another, more recent, visit I witnessed some firemen and their families having their picnic suddenly interrupted as sirens called on them to present themselves for duty. It was merely an exercise and everyone was sure of it. Still I was impressed by the calm, orderly way in which the men went about their business (the women, burdened as they were with children, stayed behind).

That said, based on my experience in three out of the four abovementioned countries as well as some of the literature, here are some of the ways people react to such a situation.

First, the ostrich syndrome. People ignore the problem as much as they can; and rightly so, or else they could not exist.  This, my hosts during a short visit to Seoul (which is only some 50 kilometers south of the border with North Korea) is how the inhabitants of that city react. Having got used to it for seven decades, they simply refuse to take the announcements of their own security apparatus seriously but continue with their lives as usual. It has worked countless times in the past; so why not this one? Seoul at 1500 o’clock when young female office workers start flooding the streets—what a treat for the eyes!

Second, they share their worries with others in the hope of gaining relief. This is the Israeli method par excellence. For many years one of the most important words in the language was hamatsav (the situation). Humor, including black humor, helps. For example, German women during the last months of World War II used to tell each other that a Russian lying on one’s belly was better than an American flying high over one’s head. There were plenty of similar jokes floating about; by one story Hitler himself guffawed at them.

Third, they do, or at any rate pretend to do, something about it. As by laying down plans; cleaning up their air-raid shelters (those of them who have them); acquiring all kinds of emergency supplies such as water, canned food, batteries, first aid equipment, tools, and perhaps weapons; joining a civil defense organization; participating in all kinds of exercises; moving to a district or settlement less likely to be affected; and so on. In fact almost any kind of activity, by releasing dopamine or serotonin or devil knows what, can relieve the mind, redirect it and refresh it.

Fourth, they pray. That even goes for self-proclaimed atheists. I do not know how many times, I’ve heard Israelis say: I’ve just got a new baby. Pray that, eighteen years from now, he (much less often, she) will not have to join the military. Having three children and eight grandchildren, I should know.

Finally –

People, societies and circumstances vary enormously. However much thought governments, armed forces, social services and ordinary people invest in the matter, and however thorough the preparations they make, surprises are inevitable. Very often there is no knowing how the situation will unfold and how people will react when confronted with der Ernstfall, the real thing, as the Germans say. One moment the country is at peace. The next one the sirens come to life, bombs and missiles hit (or miss!) their targets, one finds oneself fighting for survival, and the chief of staff, having undergone a mental breakdown, resigns (this actually happened to the Norwegians when the Germans invaded them in 1940). Heroes become cowards and cowards, heroes. This may be carried to the point where heaven and earth literally change places.

But It Is All We Have

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In theory, wars should end when the defeated have no one left to fight and the victors can do whatever they likes. In practice, many if not most wars do not end in this way. As the end approaches and few doubts remain concerning the outcome, the loser will try and get the best terms he can; whereas the victor may be tempted to spare himself further effort, treasure and blood. Another possibility is for stalemate to prevail; causing both sides to have second thoughts about whether their goals can in fact be achieved and start to look for a way out.

In almost every case, the opening of negotiations will be marked by some kind of ceremony, great or small. Once they get under way they may be either direct or indirect. Direct negotiations mean a meeting, or more likely a series of meetings, between the representatives of both sides; indirect ones, meetings in which intermediaries play a prominent, sometimes decisive, role. During the Middle Ages conducting them was normally the task of the Church; shuttle diplomacy, made famous in 1973-74 by U.S Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as he flew between Jerusalem, Cairo and Damascus, is by no means a modern invention. A similar role is likely to be played by some neutral party or else by the United Nations. Negotiations may be limited to the actual belligerents, or else they may involve other parties as well. As happened, for example, during the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, which was attended by delegations from almost every European state, and also during the Conference of Versailles in 1919-20.

Contrary to what many people think, peace-negotiations and fighting are by no means exclusive. Instead, very often they take place simultaneously. An excellent example was the so-called Hundred Years War. Starting in 1337 and ending in 1453, in reality it consisted of a whole series of wars, some simultaneous, some consecutive, with pauses in between. Throughout the hundred-and sixteen years it lasted there was probably not one in which peace negotiations did not go on; if not between the principals, i.e the kings of both countries, then between some of their subordinates who, under the prevailing decentralized feudal system, often enjoyed a considerable degree of freedom to do as they saw fit. One issue on which agreement was sometimes sought was an exchange of prisoners—just as it is today following the fall of Kherson.

The peace-negotiations surrounding the Thirty Years War started in 1635 but only ended in 1648 (not counting the closely related war between France and Spain, which went on until 1657). Attempts to end the Vietnam War got under way in 1969 but took four years to complete; just deciding on the shape of the conference table in such a way as to satisfy all the participants (the U.S, South Vietnam, the Viet Cong, and North Vietnam) required months.

Applying the above generalities to the current conflict in Ukraine, what can we reasonably expect?  Point number one: most likely, negotiations will be indirect at first but direct later on. At present Zelensky is determined not to sit down with Putin’s representatives, let alone the man himself. But not sitting down with Putin does not necessarily mean that any kind of negotiation between Ukraine and Russia must be ruled out. Some kind of intermediary, most likely the UN or else a country, such as India, currently not involved in the conflict may be called in to provide its good services. Another possibility is that Putin will be remeoved by his own people and that his successors will prove more amenable to negotiations than he has been.

Point number two: very probably, given how numerous the NATO countries are and the fact that Putin has very few close allies, he will reject a peace congress and insist on one-on-one negotiations. Formally at any rate other countries will be excluded, though they may try to position themselves on the sidelines so as to gather what crumbs they can.

Point number three: almost certainly, the negotiations will take a long time to complete. At least months, more likely years. As they go on, the shooting may stop—or else it will continue, albeit intermittently and on a reduced scale. See, by way of an example of the way the two things can mix, the Vietnam War.

Point number four: seen from Moscow, victory—whatever that may mean—seems far away, perhaps even further than it did on the day its armies first launched their invasion nine months ago. On the Ukrainian side, even taking into account Zelensky’s recent victories, it does not look as if his proclaimed aim of ejecting the Russians from all of the territory they have taken since 2014 is at all realistic. It being impossible to settle the issue by force of arms, it is very likely that, in the end, some kind of compromise will be struck. One that, while granting Ukraine much of what it wants, will at any rate enable Putin to claim victory; for example, by means of a NATO declaration that Ukraine will not be allowed to join that organization.

Finally: this short article is based on nothing else but history. Often in the past history has proved itself a poor guide to the future. But it is all we have

Everyman

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Ph. Roth, Everyman (New York, Vintage, 2007 reprint).

Not everyone considers this book an unqualified success. Female critics in particular tend to look at the hero, whose name we never learn, as a philanderer with nothing but cunt in mind. One whose sole wish in life is to objectify women, fuck them, and finally dispose of them like so much soiled wastepaper. I, however have read it many times and am still reading parts of it practically every night.

Why? Not because of what it has to say about life in America, a problem to which I’ve devoted an entire book (which, however, being politically incorrect, only found a publisher in Russia). And not because it tells me much more about the nature of Jewish-American life than I’ve learnt from my Jewish-American friends over the last four decades or so. True, the hero is Jewish. So were his parents. Very decent, very supportive, New Jersey folks, buried in a Jewish cemetery where the hero himself will be buried soon enough. At one point in the book, hospitalized after an operation, he leaves the rubric “religion” on a form he is given empty. The reason? He does not want to attract the attention of some rabbi who, unasked, will visit him in his bed and talk “the way rabbis talk.” And the representatives of other religions too, I suppose. But because, as the book’s title tells us, it presents the reader with the story of everyman. Including myself, of course. It is my life over the last decade or so—I am seventy-six, only slightly order than Roth when he wrote this—that I am reading about.

The harsh sound of the sod covering one’s deceased parents’ wooden coffins. The tendency to forget any problems you may have had with them and remember only the good things. The slowly vanishing impression of most of the people, including the women, one has met during one’s life and used to associate with in one capacity or another. The slowly, but oh so painfully, evaporating illusions about one’s children from one’s first marriage whose love, once so strong as to encompass the entire universe, one has been unable to retain.

The slowly vanishing memories of times, long gone, when one was careless and free. In Roth’s case the apex of that freedom came at the age of ten when he was being carried towards the beach by the waves of the Atlantic. In mine, aged twenty or so, of running, barefoot and wearing only swimming trunks, for miles over the beaches north of Tel Aviv. A true miracle that: feeling, or perhaps ceasing to feel, one’s body function. Like God, or at any rate like some perfect machine operating in automatic mode. Without constraints, without any kind of aches, even without feeling tired. By now I am no longer capable of anything of the kind. Much worse, the beaches themselves, having been taken over by developers, have all but disappeared. What miserable stretches remain are too short and too crowded to allow for any serious running at all.

A topic on which Roth, master of brevity that he is, only spends one sentence: The gradual, often not so gradual, destruction of memory itself. Mainly, but not only, the kind known as short term. It is a strange process. One searches for something one knows is present in one’s head, but one cannot dig it out. A few minutes, or seconds, later one cannot even remember what it was that one wanted to remember. Suddenly it pops up again, often at the most unexpected moments and when it is no longer of any use. Or it does not. Each time, it is as if a part of oneself has gone missing.

The longing for the time before one’s biography became identical with one’s medical record (as Roth so aptly puts it). The decline of health, as reflected by the growing frequency of one’s visits to one’s doctor. As is also the case in Everyman, my doctor, as well as most of the other medical personnel one goes to, is friendly, generous with his time, and does his best; but when everything is said and done his powers are rather limited. The better he is, the readier he is to admit that fact.

The fairly constant humiliation of having to ask for help. In moving anything that is a bit heavy, as when my car blew a tire the other day. In working one’s computer, as I am doing right now (I could not run this blog without the assistance of my stepson, Jonathan Lewy). In finding one’s way. I particularly remember one rainy evening when, driving around in Tel Aviv, my glasses (I am near sighted) became clouded over. With them I could not see the street signs; without them I could not see the signs either.

The curious feeling that everything that matters happened long ago; in that sense, one is already dead. The fear, and the knowledge, that life is a one-way street that leads to—what?

Not-being, of course. Turning into a smelly mess with no memory and no consciousness. Most of these things, and many others beside, may be found in Roth’s slim masterpiece. May the critics say whatever they like: I on my part am going to read it again. And again. And again.

Except that having written this, I feel enough may finally be enough. Time to move on? But where to?

West or East

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For a number of years now, I have been receiving regular emails from an outfit calling itself Russia Beyond. An offshoot of the government owned and run Russian news agency TV-Novosty, it specializes in what one could call “soft” propaganda—short, often quite amusing, stories about what life inside the world’s largest country is supposedly. One which, for good or ill, also happens to be one of the politically, militarily, economically, and culturally most important among them. Each issue is accompanied by the following warning:

Dear readers,

Our website and social media accounts are under threat of being restricted or banned, due to the current circumstances.

So far, I am very happy to say, this has not happened. This week the most important headline reads, “Is Russia Europe or Asia?” The text provides five short—a couple of hundred words each—vignettes of the lives and works of prominent Russian people who, each in his own time and his own way, have busied themselves with this question.

I quote.

1. Vasily Tatishchev (1686-1750) – Russia belongs to Europe.

This 18th century Russian historian and author of the first “Russian History” book was one of the first to argue that the hypothetical border between Europe and Asia should go through the Ural Mountains. Until then, it had been proposed that the River Yenisei or the River Ob should be the dividing line (and authors of antiquity even suggested that such a border should run along the River Don and through the Black Sea to Constantinople). Tatishchev, however, presented various arguments based on natural history to support his ideas – for example, beyond the Urals, even the nature of river flow patterns is different (and there are different fish species), while many trees that grow in Europe are not to be found beyond the Ural Mountains.

As far as Tatishchev was concerned, Russia was undoubtedly a European country, “just like the Kingdom of Poland, Prussia or Finland”. Describing the history of ancient Russia – before victory over the Khanate of Kazan and the conquest of Siberia – Tatishchev comes to the conclusion that, “on the grounds of natural circumstances”, Russia belongs “without a doubt to Europe”.

2. Historian Nikolay Karamzin (1766-1826) – Russia has almost caught up with Europe.

This historian, whose work spanned the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, is regarded as the author of the concept of the “Russian European”. Karamzin considers Peter the Great’s turn towards Europe as an unmistakable blessing for the country, given that Russia had succeeded in making use of the achievements of the European mind – primarily in the sciences, arts and military science and in terms of state structure.

“The Germans, the French and the English were ahead of the Russians for at least six centuries; Peter propelled us with his powerful hand and, in a few years, we almost caught up with them. All pathetic jeremiads about a change in the Russian character, about a loss of Russian moral physiognomy, are either nothing but a joke or come from a lack of thorough reflection. We are not like our bearded ancestors: So much the better!” wrote Karamzin as he traveled around Europe.

3. Writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) – a mistake to think that we are only Europeans.

After many years, when public opinion was preoccupied exclusively with Europe, Dostoevsky proposed that Russia’s view of Asia be “revitalized”. “The whole of our Russian Asia, including Siberia, still exists as a kind of appendage, as it were, in which our European Russia seems reluctant to take any interest,” laments the author.

“We need to dispel our servile fear that in Europe we will be called Oriental barbarians and described as being even more Asian than European. This shame that Europe will regard us as Asian has been dogging us for close to two centuries.” Dostoevsky calls this shame mistaken, just as mistaken as it is for Russians to consider themselves exclusively European and not Asian – “something that we never stopped being”. Dostoevsky was also irritated by the fact that Russia was “imposing itself” on European affairs and bending over backwards to get Europe to see us as one of their own “and not as Tatars”. Dostoevsky reaches the conclusion that it is perhaps in Asia that Russia needs to seek a path to a bright future for itself.

4. Historian Vasily Klyuchevsky (1841-1911) – Russia as a bridge between Europe and Asia.

Russia’s complex geographical situation determined its historical and cultural destiny, according to 19th century professor and historian Vasily Klyuchevsky. Russia had always experienced foreign influences – but these had invariably been reshaped and redefined on Russian soil. First, it had been Byzantium and the Christianity it brought to Rus’ and then, Western Europe, with its sciences and also the common political space which Russia only finally joined after Peter the Great. It was in the 19th century, according to Klyuchevsky, that Russia had started wondering about belonging to Europe, while forgetting its Eastern bearings. And the idea of Russia’s European character had become firmly established when a German by birth – Catherine the Great – had reigned for decades.

“Historically, Russia is not of course Asia, but geographically it is not Europe either. It is a transitional country, an intermediary between two worlds. Its culture has inseparably tied it to Europe; but nature has imposed peculiarities and influences on it that have always drawn it towards Asia or drawn Asia into Russia,” Klyuchevsky wrote in his ‘Course of Russian History’.

5. Lev Gumilev (1912-1992) – Russian Eurasians will overtake Europe.

The prominent historian and ethnologist Lev Gumilev (son of famous early 20th century poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolay Gumilev) is famous for having coined the term “super ethnos” to denote a group that has emerged from a mosaic of ethnic groups within a single region. The Western European Christian world and the Muslim world were super ethnoses of this kind. The Russian people, too, which, until the 18th century, had encompassed other ethnoses with the progressive conquest of Siberia and Central Asia, had emerged as a super ethnos in the course of its historical development. The Russian ethnos was much younger than its Western European counterpart and thus found itself on a slightly lower rung of development – but, according to Gumilev, it was destined soon to experience an upsurge.

Gumilev was an exponent of “Eurasianism” – in other words, he believed that Western European culture was in crisis and that the East would take over its dominant position. The Russian super ethnos, combining European Slavs and the non-Slavic peoples of Asia, would become one of the standard-bearers of the culture of Eurasianism.

Lev Gumilev studied Asia for many years and was enchanted by its culture. “A banal Eurocentrism is sufficient for a layman’s comprehension, but it is unfit for a scientific understanding of the diversity of observable phenomena. After all, to the Chinese or Arabs, Western Europeans appear inadequate,” Gumilev wrote in his book ‘Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of Earth’.

To which list I, Martin van Creveld (1946-), retired historian writing from Jerusalem, Israel, would like to add:

6. Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin (1883-1954) – Russia is different.

 Russia and the West do not mix. On one hand, the country is too large and heterogeneous—in its current configuration, it comprises a hundred and five different nationalities, no less—to be democratically governed the way the West is or claims to be. On the other, it is the carrier of a civilization with differs from that of the West on many essential points. One that, seventy years of Communism notwithstanding, often sees itself as is religiously-minded rather than secular. Greek-Orthodox rather than Catholic or Protestant. Authoritarian rather than democratic. Community-minded rather than individualistic. Pristine and honest rather than hypocritical, oversophisticated and effete. To paraphrase a phrase which, a century and a half ago, some Germans used to apply to themselves: the Russian spirit will prevail—and, as it does so, cleanse the rest of the world of its numerous self-inflicted evils.

7. Finally: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (1952-present). Only a strong government with strong native roots can save Russia from losing its identity to the West.

If ever Ilyin had a follower it was Putin—who even paid for moving the great man’s bones from Switzerland, where he died, for reburial in Moscow. Based on several biographies of his I’ve read, the way Putin sees it Russia has long lagged behind the West which, in its turn, has looked down on Russia as a barbarous country hardly deserving to be called, civilized. Repeatedly, Russia saved the West from its own internal demons. So in 1814-15 when Tsar Alexander I headed the coalition whose armies entered Paris and did away with the remnants of the French Revolution. So in 1914-15 when German militarism almost succeeded in taking over Paris and, with it, the continent. And so again in 1941-45 when Hitler launched the greatest challenge of all and came within a hair not only of occupying the Kremlin but of putting an end to the West as we know it.

The immediate cause of the current war was formed by NATO’s efforts to incorporate Ukraine. Seen from a historical point of view, though, the war is but another phase in this great and holy struggle. One which, on pain of ceasing to exist, Russia must and will win—even if it takes decades, as Peter the Great’s struggle with the Swedes did.