Presidential Press Service/Pool Photo via AP
U.S. President Donald Trump, left, shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, at the G-20 summit, Osaka, Japan, June 2019.
The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this edited excerpt.
Alexander Heffner: Is marginalization something that you recognize as having a derivation in Russia at all, or do you think that what’s developing in the United States is just this kind of global resurgence of populism and xenophobia?
Anastasia Edel: It has both. But if you look at dictatorships way back going back in history, you will see that the tactic of polarization of society is creating internal enemies. This is where it starts. Coming from USSR, I’ve seen it done on a grand scale. The marginalization was simple, there is us and there is them. And if you’re not with us, you’re against us.
This was a pretty binary situation in Russia: It was very strange to witness the return of something from the USSR, which I thought, as a child of perestroika, we have buried for good. Russia in 2000 was not the USSR. It was an heir to an empire, but it was a country, which had sort of taken steps towards a democracy, a democratic experiment.
You probably remember that very early in Vladimir Putin’s presidency, in fact, before his presidency there was this series of apartment bombings in Moscow that were immediately attributed to the Chechen terrorists. That has not been proven. In fact, other things have come out about who was involved in this.
But the fear among the people is a very powerful motivator to evaluate different courses. The course that Vladimir Putin wanted for Russia was lifting Russia off its knees, right? Which means that somebody has put Russia on its knees, right, and it wasn’t the oligarchs. So the Chechens were singled out, as potential terrorists that would subject Russia to violence.
Then over the years of Putin’s interminable stay in power, multiple communities, multiple groups, rather [were] singled out and ostracized.
[It was the] LGBT community. Now it’s generally the liberals, the liberals are the foes of Great Russia. And the guilt for Russia’s dire economic situation of the ’90s? I was there; I remember it, how bad things were when the country was transitioning from a socialist economy to the free market. The blame is now assigned to liberals and to democracy in general. So once you start down that road anybody can become a potential target.
Heffner: Are Russians beginning to recognize that the power is largely with Vladimir Putin and not the Russian people?
Edel: There were recently protests in Moscow where people took to the streets and demanded a very simple thing, that their candidates should be put on the ballot for the election to the Moscow State Duma. That was not a violent protest. Nobody was doing anything remotely similar to what you’re witnessing perhaps in Hong Kong, but those protests were pretty violently crushed.
The thing about authoritarian systems is that they get really upset about any show of people’s will. This is what dictators and authoritarians fear. So no matter how little the discontent or the expression of that will might be, it will be subverted pretty ruthlessly if you’re in a country like Putin’s Russia. Is there equivalence between Putin’s Kremlin and Putin and the Russian people? I don't think so. Just as there is no equivalence between President Trump and the American people.
Russia is a huge country. But, of course, what we see is what comes out of the Kremlin and their official sources. The reality is more nuanced and different. It’s interesting that with Russia, is that just when you least expect it you know, nobody expected this election to the local Moscow state parliament to bring any surprises. But it did. But why? Because opposition candidates were denied, not the victory; they were just denied the right to run and people were upset.
Heffner: You said about how our people are not synonymous with our political leaders is so salient and especially true with the American and Russian examples today.
Edel: What I see with America is that we are trending towards authoritarianism. What used to be an American identity for postwar democracy is no longer a criteria. There is a trend from and in a country where everybody is equal and where decisions are made democratically, trending towards authoritarian power. I don’t think we are there [yet] and my hope certainly is that this would not happen.
But the problem with trending towards authoritarian is that what comes with it is also nepotism. If America stops being a meritocracy, like it has always been, at least that’s how we perceived it out there in the old country, then the danger is that eventually you’re going to slip into what Lenin, you know, called the government of cooks.
Heffner: Andrew Jackson called that the spoils system. But I think there’s something more pernicious going on, dismantling of compassion.
Edel: There is definitely an attack on what we all cherish, all of us who came here at some point, newcomers like me: I’ve been here 20 years or a generation ago. There was always this dream when you live in a state of injustice, which the USSR was, there is a place where you can make it and pursue happiness. You, as long as you play nicely to others, work hard, you will be treated equally with everyone else and you will get the right to pursue it. It doesn’t matter whether you are rich or poor or healthy or not, so I knew about that. And so to me it’s emblazed in my head, you know, and no matter what other people say, this is what I believe my America is.
But now what we’re witnessing [is] a historical revision of a grand proportion, which I normally associate with a country like Russia that can not stop rewriting its own past, is this strange dynamic when a country of immigrants is at war with immigrants, which if you extend logically, it’s a country at war with itself. It still blows my mind that we’re talking about America and not some other place. But it is what it is.
Heffner: Is it possible we are getting more xenophobic and the Russian people are actually democratizing?
Edel: Think about it this way: Here in the United States, you can still go on the street and protest and do whatever you want. Most people just, you know, like on Facebook and do that sort of, it’s still a very early stage, but you know, there was the Women’s March. In Russia, people [protesting] are getting real prison terms; they were not even protest leaders. They were opposition candidates who wanted to get on the ballot.
Heffner: There is no First Amendment. I mean there’s really no freedom of assembly.
Edel: I grew up when the USSR was still standing and perestroika happened when I was 15, 16, 17, so it, it kind of formed me, and you witnessed this incredible revival and awakening of a nation’s consciousness. It was truly tremendous. You realize that Russians are not prone to totalitarianism. They were forced into it. But then all of that fell apart and we emerged as a very different nation.
There were certain good things in [those] years. I saw at least an attempt at good things like internationalism, for instance. We were in the vein of proletarians of all countries unite, we were all supposed to be internationalist and we were given this one identity, the super identity of the Soviet person and were encouraged to give up our ethnic identity though, you know, they never quite got it right because there was a passport entry where you were either Russian or Jewish or Armenian or whatever.
But what we witnessed with Putin’s arrival was really the subversion of this idea. The resurgence of nationalism in Russia under Putin is very, very clear, and, of course, the thing about nationalism is it’s something that is easy to give to people. It doesn’t cost you much. You just start, hey, be proud because you’re Russian. Be proud because you are American.
Heffner: [Can] the next generation trigger reform that would overthrow, if not Putin, a set of repressive qualities that are now the norm there.
Edel: Repression is never the norm. Even people who grew up with just Putin would never be able to accept this reality of a repressive state. Like when the USSR collapsed, it was a shock for everyone, including ourselves, because literally five years ago it seemed like that it would never end, but you never get used to it. You never get used to repression, to injustice and it’s so it simmers. So at some point it boils over, but in Russia change always comes from the top.
Had it not been for Gorbachev or Khrushchev who decided to liberalize the country just a little bit to make the USSR better—both of them tried—who knows where it would have gone? But my hope is that those people who are growing up today, they’re very cosmopolitan, very Western. They’re not like me. They don't know what the USSR was other than from some propaganda films that they might be shown.
Heffner: When you say it always comes from the top or from economic circumstance that embroil the top, it is economic catalysts that are going to trigger reform because it’s not going to come from Putin stepping aside honorably, right?
Edel: No.
Heffner: Trump would like to actualize that here. And he makes statements that are in effect him fantasizing about having powers that he doesn’t have, because of that sacred Constitution here. How can we try to avert what might be a further exacerbation of that kind of rhetoric?
Edel: We just have to call it out and stand up to it because this rhetoric doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. But you throw out these extraordinary statements and people get all worked up and it doesn't matter, you know, it could be purchase of Greenland or it could be anything.
This drives us to react in a certain way. People are jittery. That’s what this administration is really good at—is raising our collective fever and we should remember that this is a tactic and not, and try as much as possible, not participate in that.
It is important to understand that the majority doesn’t think this way: [But] look at radicals that seized power in Russia in 1917; was Lenin the majority? Well, the Bolsheviks, nobody had heard of them, you know, months before the revolution. And [then] they hijacked the entire country and held it hostage for over 70 years.
One of the things about America that struck me as a newcomer was actually the absence of nationalism, of forced nationalism. What you saw were the American flags just hanging above people’s porches or portraits of the presidents cut out of the magazine and taped in school classrooms, not handed out like portraits of, you know Brezhnev or Gorbachev. Here was this organic feeling of people loving their land.
What is coming out of this administration under the guise of patriotism is not patriotism. It is something that is forced, and this rhetoric of being un-American now it is used to single out people whose point of view you don’t like. One of the things that I don’t want to see happening in this country is the hijacking of who can be patriotic and who is not, who loves the country and who does not. We all love this country.
