Wednesday’s Child: A Broken Home

Whatever Tolstoy may have opined, unhappy families are also all alike, at any rate all those that produce violent criminals. Indulging my vice by perusing yellow press these past few weeks, I was engrossed in two death row cases in the US, one in Tennessee and one in Texas.

Both convicts are women. Eighteen-year-old Christa Pike tortured and murdered a classmate after carving a pentagram into her chest; Taylor Parker, after pretending for many months she herself was expecting, stabbed a friend who was pregnant and cut the baby from her womb. In both cases the defense was nearly identical, pleading a broken home, troubled childhood, parental neglect or abuse, and all the textbook rest of it.

Then there are the divorces. How many times have we witnessed, in person or through the endoscope of the media, couples who literally want for nothing – the husband is rich, the wife good-looking, “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess is warbling in the background, Instagram accounts are revved up to show wealth does buy happiness, and maybe she’s even about to run for Congress, but then bang, out come the suits of Greedy, Mean & Unscrupulous. Everybody says: “But it was all going so well for them! They were the perfect couple! They seemed so happy together! Who would’ve guessed?”

A long preamble, as is my wont, to gently lead the gentle reader into the thick of things. It occurs to me that the analogy of the unhappy family is a good way to explain what happened to Russia in the last fifty or so years, my supposition being that nobody will deny that the country has had a troubled adolescence and suffered abuse in childhood. But mature communism under Brezhnev is really when the story begins.

What looked like a messy and very public divorce from communist ideology, funnily enough, was actually part of the polity’s happy time. It was its Instagram phase, complete with midnight swims in the Olympic pool of democracy, shopping in the Galeries Lafayette of conspicuous consumption, and kissing under the mistletoe of political illusions.  No, the real, ugly split came later, and it was a divorce well out of the public eye.

The fact is, it had all been going so well. Had the Instagram phase continued, by now a tunnel would be connecting Russia to Alaska, Britain would have scrapped its Trident, nobody in Germany would so much as remember what a missile looked like, Ukraine would not have bolted, Kazakhstan would not be baring its teeth, and so on. The West was doing business, disarming, still celebrating “the collapse of the Soviet Union,” while Russian mercenaries roamed Africa, Russian spies attached themselves to industrial concerns throughout Europe, and there was talk of Russia’s membership in NATO.

Who would’ve guessed? Who would’ve guessed that, unbeknown to the world, the polity was divorcing itself from the principle originally laid down by Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s last chief of secret police, which asserted the primacy of appearances over substance, a principle that presaged Instagram.  Be as totalitarian as you like, Beria argued, but give the West a convincing simulacrum of political freedom and it will eat out of your hand. Show the West some loving, because while steel is used to conquer the uncivilized, the civilized – that is to say, the nuclear-armed – are conquered by love.

In the famous argument between Orwell and Huxley, Beria was squarely on Huxley’s side, and indeed the entire thrust of Russia’s secret-police-directed policy after Stalin’s death was aimed at Brave New World and at consigning Nineteen Eighty-Four to the dustbin of history. Who would’ve guessed that, in the last ten to twenty years, this marvelous train of thought would be so irresponsibly derailed? I mean, invading Georgia! Invading Ukraine! Shutting down the internet and poisoning people publicly at home and abroad! Important businessmen falling from windows like errant kittens! Finland in NATO! Germany rearming! Rheinmetall working overtime! Sanctions!

And it was all going so well for them!