Long Memory

I note this week a certain nostalgia for the Cold War.

It arrived noticeably as I watched Torn Curtain on TCM. Paul Newman portrayed a double-agent defector tricking an East German egghead into revealing a missing mathematical equation needed to finish an ABM system which will end nuclear war.

Right.

Unlike the cardboard version, and more like thousands of the 'Greatest Generation' who are passing each day, a real espionage player, Wolfgang Vogel, the lawyer at the heart of the most famous Cold War spy swap, Gary Powers for Rudolph Abel, has died at age 82. Abel was the first modern 'James Bond' I read about in the Classic Comics Illustrated Story of Espionage which began with Joshua at Jericho and ran straight through the Pinkertons and Mata Hari to the contemporary times of my childhood.

In aid of manning the last vestigal Cold War ramparts, I worked, upon coming to Washington in the late 1970's, alongside folks who drew concentric circles around major U.S. cities to estimate survivable fall out should the Russkies drop the Bomb. I'd been prepped for this sort of employment at UCF where we'd studied Herman Kahn's 'On Thermonuclear War,' and 'On Escalation,' discovering among other quaint theories, it would be alright for the elderly to consume radioactive food since they'd die naturally of old age anyway before the inevitable cancers ate them alive.

There's a nostalgia afoot in Russia too these days which pre-dates the Cold War.

We've just learned their Supreme Court has recognized Czar Nicholas II and his family as victims of the Revolution and consequently rehabilitated the Romanovs ninety years after their execution in a Siberian basement.

Why now?

After KGB archives released in the 1980's revealed the full extent of Stalin's crimes and the sham of constructed Soviet history around them, the nation required a new national mythos to justify its legitimate accomplishments in the 20th century and its status today as a great nation which it has seemingly always needed to confirm since Peter of Great insisted on it. What's emerging thematically now is the same pre-1917 patriotic and Orthodox panorama Stalin himself employed to rally the country in World War II and the same supposed golden age touched upon in the last book by Solzhenitsyn.

Upon Solzy's passing, Rod Dreher, the Dallas Morning Herald editorialist, condemned liberals for turning against him after the famed Harvard speech. What Dreher has failed to internalize, as a non-minority American, is a revitalized Imperial Russia, even under a sort of freely elected Putin, or a puppet, is impossible in lieu of welcoming home the vicious ancient running dogs of chauvinism and anti-semitism.

The Bolsheviks weren't all wrong in sweeping away despotic royalty - they just replaced it with something worse, and its return doesn't bode well for anyone.

Or, more plainly, its return means settling obscure European scores like ones represented by the beautiful silk topographical map I possess once used by the Kaiser's General Staff to plan for war in remote Salonica.

In the 18th century, Catherine the Great, in another example, invited Germans, and their technical modernizing influences, to settle on the Volga. Alongside other ethnic minorities, like the Chechens, Stalin eventually deported them all to Siberia. After his death, a small number returned, but as time moves on, unless more Germans emigrate to bolster the region's identity, this cultural enclave will disappear. As long as an agressive Russian nationalism constitutes the basis for foreign policy such emigration is unlikely.

After the hard-line coup attempt, and genuinely democratic reformer Boris Yeltsin on the cusp of power in 1994, the obvious question was 'will democracy hold?' Tragically, it wasn't to be, since Yeltsin's authority ended similarly to DC's own Marion Barry -- addicts who became footnotes and punchlines. Putin, in contrast, photographed this week in martial arts togs in that wierd Red style (Mao swimming the Yangtse) bridging past and future: a steely-eyed KGB-cum-Czar black belt.

Last week I noted I was reading Figes' The Whisperers about the nature of private life in the Soviet Union. As a third-generation American of paternal Polish Shetl descent, I embody an old country Eastern Slav soul as much as the maternal English half which most often fails to balance things out.

Rather than The Whisperers, the book of my life yet to be written is called The Brooderers.

This biography floats impossibilities of political idealism minus fatalism - in America where flexibly bends left or right according to the times, fatalism is positively negated and culturally approrpriated. In a country otherwise lacking checks and balances, and a marketplace insufficiently vast to subsume all in its wake, it's far easier to express existential doubt and grief through aggresive internal and external policies while looking contemptuously upon those who struggle through the confusions of choice and freedom.

While witnessing first-hand the critical contempt in the sad doe eyes of Eastern emigre summer vacation waitresses on the Outer Banks, I asked a friend just back from Russia if she thought youth there were moving beyond politics to American-style consumerism. She confirmed fashion and traffic in Moscow were decidedly Western. Most folks crinkle their noses at American pop culture; I'd rather see people shopping than committing genocide.

Why would any foreign policy today want to play to the worst fears of the Russian psyche by encircling the Motherland with missile systems and antagonistic neighbors? How better to supply a rationale for a super-nationalist patriotism needed to overcome an eternal national inferiority complex?

--For dwindling world-wide gas and oil resources, of course, and to indefinitely feed an industrial-military complex which not only must fight active guerilla wars but can only sustain itself, long-run, through promoting the idea that conventional wars amongst major powers over seemingly obscure issues like the rights of Volga Germans are still a nostalgic desirability and in the national interest.

And so the forces of capitalism ever ignite the dialectic fires of fascist totalitarianism, no longer Communist, but attired in the royal finery of Czars.