As world travelers all know, one cannot learn about place from books. You can only learn about them from people who live and lived in these places.
In 1904, my material grandmother came to the U.S on the “bottom of a boat,” paupers. Every relative in New Jersey got one of the kids. My grandmother got a bad draw, sentenced to mirror Cinderella rather than attend school. She never learned how to read in any language. And for a good while, she ate with her fingers.
She spoke fluent Russian (yet the asinine assimilation goals of most generations deprived me of something that would have helped me survive in later years. T’was not to be. But Ukraine was not yet a modern country – although its roots can be traced back thousands of years to the chalcolithic and Bronz Ages. – and actually long before that, when humans began to inhabit it around 32,000 B.C. From Kyiv (my grandma pronounced it Kee-yev), my grandmother never used the work her entire life. She was Russian. So at about 80 (in New Jersey), when the Berlin Wall came down, and the KGB dismantled, Putin was likely about 50. But the elders in his country knew the Ukraine only as a part of Russia, conquered more recently, in the 14th Century by Lithuania and Poland, among others. But modern Ukraine only materialized in 1918, declaring independence after the Russian revolution.
The point is, it would be simplistic to blame the current war solely on Putin’s quest to recreate the old Soviet Union – knowing, as we learned here most recently, voting doesn’t work in countries filled with stupid and gullible people, and missing the two things it shared briefly in the mid -950s: A sensible and workable distribution of wealth. And a shared reliance on a semblance of truth. Few doubted Walter Kronkite. And under Eisenhower, the top tax rate was 92 percent – not 15 percent if one has the nation’s worst accountants, and largely zero with a good one. At the other extreme are the now 42M just deprived of their S.N.A.P. benefits, and soon perhaps, the Affordable Care Act (or “Obamacare”). And two completely separate schools of “facts” – both filled largely with lies and opinions, although to the non-Rich and non-snookered half of the country, one school seems far more truthful than the other. But returning to the 16th Century, we are approach a new Gilded Age – only one with exponentially more wealth than its forebearers, and the richest nation on earth with its wealth concentrated among a handful: One racist neo-Nazi actually has more wealth than the other 52 percent of the population. But estimates between 800 and 1500 of the Rich, who pay effectively no taxes, run things. And with voting – a short-lived aberration that worked for a few short spurts here (e.g., 1955 to 1955 or so), and more successful in northern Europe whose citizens still have both values and a sensible distribution of wealth (top tax rates linger around 60 percent), voting still works. Here, being elected is everything to those who spent their careers climbing toward to top of it. So of course the Republicans support Russia over the more-free and less-crooked Ukraine.
Now, back to Russia. In 1991, shortly after Yugoslavia civil war (echoing the independence of many new-again Eastern European nations), my Yugoslav business partners found themselves in Slovenia – which formerly held about 30 percent of Yugoslavia’s wealth with only seven percent of its population. But all its bankers and elected officials had attended college in the United States, where they mastered the tools of democracy. So Slovenia effectively began liquidating its population – most of whom were used to 55 or so year of socialism, with no poor, no homeless, no employment and few Rich – this task was simple.
But in Russia, it was a charade. With Russia drifting toward the West in the Yeltsin Regime, Bain & Company (owned by Mr. private sector, Mitt Romney) obtained a USAID loan to help restore the sales of a quickly-fading Russian bus manufacturer (Pavlovo Bus Company, in the city of the same name) which had sunk from producing roughly19,000 integral buses in 1994 (and almost impossible number to conceive today) to about 11,000 – and Mitt Romney, using subsidy funds from the United States to rescue them, relying mostly on a small stable of marketing Masters’ and Ph. D. candidates with degrees in marketing who, like Jeff Buttejeig, barely knew a rear axle from a giraffe. Failing dismally, this ground found me – an American who was just being phased on of a nearly-successful U.S.-Slovene joint venture company. I bought in a brilliant U.S. automotive engineer (the late Steve Kraus), and we rescued PAZ from “solving” its problem by building a second production line! Imagine. (Of course, the city’s owner of a huge cement company sat on the PAZ Board of Directors.) We helped squash their plans to this boondoggle, and Mitt’s team handed in my 40-page report as Bain & Company’s – which was only fair because he found, hired me and my crew, and listened to us.
But the culture was not that of the Gorbachev/Yeltsin era. Russia was still trading, without any tariffs, with the previous 14 USSR satellites, while tariffs on goods from more advanced nations (Germany was the foremost example) laid at roughly 100 percent. Forced to rely on mismatched former USSR parts, the buses’ engines – pirated from military vehicles – had to be shoehorned into engine compartments too small for them: Roughly have the product time was spent shoehorning in these mismatched parts.
Then there were the barters. Twelve divisions could barter for materials and components. For example, PAZ would trade a bus for a few hundred bus doors. Not needing them at the same moment, they lay in piles, where those at the bottom flattened out. So when these losers were finally assemble, the buses didn’t fit together, and at the end of the assembly line, they went round and round, each time having to epoxy in several millimeter spaces between body and subpanel parts. With everything purchased by barter, I asked to see a copy of an “average” barter deal. It had TWELVE steps – with, I’m sure, kickbacks skimmed off at every level. So of course the pieces of these vehicles did not fit together (while waste and corruption were rampant).
But that was only the physical manifestation of the “new Russia. The company’s General Director – a chief officer in the Brezhnev Administration, sported a signed, frame photo of him walking alongside President Brezhnev in some parade. But it was dwarfed by a sail-sized portrait of Lenin mounted to the wall behind his desk. Needless to say, he spoke no English.
So when one puts these few snapshots together – tariff-free purchases from former Soviet-bloc countries, the lack of compatible exports, a culture worshiping the old Soviet Union – I could see quickly that this new “Russia” was not going to last very long. (Unfortunately, I was among the first to recognize this, and a decade later, working his way up the ranks, Putin took over, and Russia was back to square one. So of course he is trying to reassemble the former dynasty – first swallowing up Georgia, poor Belarus a captive of history (one cannot truly understand Belarus without reading Bloodlands, by the brilliant Timothy Snyder), and then Crimea – with the Ukraine as the big prize. Why this surprises Americans is only a consequence of their naivety, isolation and gullibility.
Regardless, Vladimir Putin didn’t just grow new testicles. He grew up surrounded by Russians of my late grandmother’s age. And it should be no surprise that he feel justified in all his exploits.
The colossal stupidity of the United State is, and has been, its failure to form an alliance with China – even if it has to ignore many of its sins. Russia has little to offer China other than a large nuclear capability and enough natural gas and oil to increase mid-day temperatures in Cairo from 115 degrees Fahrenheit to likely 120 in a handful of more years, and all the wildfires, hurricanes and floods that come with it. In contrast, the United States has a treasure trove of consumers, and growing poorer and poorer, natural clients for far-less-costly Chinese products. Instead, thanks partly to the asininity of most Republican Senators who treat China as an enemy equal to North Korea, Iran and Russia, China is literally burying us competitively – just as Nikita Kruschev boasted that Russia would 75 years ago.
The next episode will leapfrog much of World War II, so that we can reach the foibles of new NYC Mayor Mamdani as he begins destroying the city with his formula for paying for rent control – “building!” The one think New York City needs the last of, and frankly, the opposite of. But the United State is not just the gun country and the car country. It is the money country. So “build” more stuff in New York is Mamdani’s solution to the mess NYC is. Stay tuned.
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