But then I turned on my computer, and saw the news: Russian tanks were in Georgia. That's not to say that it was unexpected. Moscow has been rattling the sabers in Georgia's direction virtually since the Rose Revolution brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power in 2003. I saw firsthand the almost nightly anti-Tbilisi propaganda on Russian television during the two months I recently spent in the country (I returned home just last Sunday). It was always a matter of when, not if. Indeed, the violence of the past few days is not really about South Ossetia or even Georgia, specifically; it is part of the megalomania of Putin and his Moscow cronies, part of a desire for absolute control over anything and everything they can get their hands on.
I remember very well my first day in Russia, just over two months ago now. I arrived in St. Petersburg around noon on a Sunday, and was picked up at the airport and driven to the apartment where I would be living for the next couple of months in an old Lada that probably would not be street legal in the US or Western Europe (not to mention what seemed to be an intentional flouting of every traffic law on the books). Upon arrival, I met with my host, a man educated in the Soviet days as an engineer but working in construction as a result of the troubles of the 90s. We got the "Putin conversation" out of the way surprisingly early: while he did not agree with the Russian Prime Minister's anti-democratic tendencies, he told me in his limited English (my Russian then was far worse than it is now) that "Russia needs a tsar." Putin, he said, was that man: someone who could bring stability to a troubled Russian realm, but at the expense of freedoms for the Russian people.
Yet despite his acceptance of Russia's de facto leader, this was a man who did not completely trust his government, and in a very different way from, for example, the widespread lack of trust in President Bush in the United States. My host got his news from the western media - he read news online (itself rare in Russia) on a website that printed translations of articles from the New York Times, the Financial Times, the BBC, etc. He didn't watch Russian television news either, since virtually all of the major stations are little more than Kremlin voiceboxes. Instead, he watched EuroNews, a 24 hour news channel that broadcasts across Europe in many languages. He told me during my first week in St. Petersburg that it wasn't worth watching NTV or Channel 1 or Vesti - all you could ever get from them was what United Russia wanted you to know. Not to mention that by law in Russia, half of every news broadcast must be good news, usually consisting of reports glorifying Putin's policy decisions for that day and congratulating Medvedev on visiting another factory or museum.
What every western visitor to Russia will notice, regardless of knowledge of the Russian language, is the bloat
ed police force, or militsiya, with groups of its officers on every street corner. It is virtually impossible to walk the length of a block in Petersburg without passing a police officer. And when any gathering of people is expected, the number of increases to the point that they form human walls around whatever area they are protecting (and I use that term loosely - it is common wisdom in Russia to avoid getting involved with the militsiya if at all possible). To walk the streets of a Russian city is to be watched at all times; the country has enough men in uniform to give the impression of being a true police state.And indeed, they often behave in a similar manner. It is entirely normal and legal for an officer to stop someone and require him to show his internal passport with no cause. In the case of a foreigner, the range of documents is somewhat wider - in addition to the passport, the visitor must also produce a valid visa and registration documents (the Russian government still requires foreign visitors to register in every city that they visit for more than about a day). But the people who are actually stopped for document checks are in fact a very small group - those with dark hair and dark skin (meaning anything darker than pale white). In other words, those who look as if they are from the Caucasus region. And if that were not bad enough, officers are always overjoyed to find passports that are doubling as wallets - a few bills between the pages are expected if one hopes to avoid a trip to the station itself.
Perhaps what is most disturbing is the general population's embrace of Putin and his ultranationalist policies, often translating into xenophobia. More than once while in Russia, merely the fact that I was not speaking Russian with my American friends led to not-so-discreet pointing and whispering of inostrantsy - foreigners. Often, the Russians around us had no idea what language we were speaking (we were asked if we were speaking, among others, Turkish, Uzbek, and Hebrew), but the fact that we were "other" meant that we were never truly welcomed by much of the population. Certainly, there are places that have something of a national superiority complex - the United States probably falls into this category - but Russia's nationalism goes far beyond that. Many Russians believe that they deserve to control the areas that were lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that the successor states are obliged to look up to the Great Motherland.
And throughout this conflict, the Russian media, which I am closely tracking online partly to try to get both sides of the story and partly for the entertainment value of its often-absurd claims, has not let up on its assault against everyone not in lock-step with its aims in Georgia. Its claims have run the gamut from ethnic cleansing of South Ossetia to an assertion that the United States Government is directly responsible for the outbreak of violence. All media sources, of course, have some bias, and neither the Russian nor the Georgian side can be taken as gospel truth. But what the people of the Russian Federation are being fed goes beyond normal wartime patriotism - it is deliberate ignorance of the truth. Worse, few seem to question what is reported. Perhaps it is part of the still-strong Soviet cultural legacy. Perhaps it is misplaced confidence in the current government. In any case, my host in Petersburg notwithstanding, those even informed about current events from multiple perspectives in Russia are very few.
The Russian language has a word that is used when everything is as usual or ordinary - нормально, normal'no. When I heard of the Russian actions against Georgia, my first reaction was surprise, but soon after, it was this thouroughly Russian concept that, for me, best described the situation. Yes, Moscow's tanks were a few miles south of where they had been on the 7th. But was this a change in the Putinist policy of the past eight years? Not at all. Was this at all unpredictable or unexpected? No. Those watching Russia closely knew that something like this would happen some day. Now it is time for the world to wake up and realize what Russia is become as it nears twenty years of existence in its current form.
