Reading about social identity in the Soviet Union, in our “Stalinism” book, got me thinking about some recent readings in my Russian Politics course. I am struck by the continuation of the problem of income inequality. Of course, this is a problem that people face around the world, including in the U.S. However, Russia has been particularly affected by this problem of the divide between the haves and the have-nots.  I have read about how, following the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s economy was thrown into chaos, as the markets liberalized and the means of production were privatized. For many people, their situation actually worsened significantly following “shock therapy”. A privileged few managed to ride the wave of capitalism and come out on top, with unprecedented wealth. These “oligarchs” were quite visible in society and many became a household name.

I am struck that in both of Russia’s huge political upheavals, in both 1917 and 1991, the purpose was to help the Russian people, the working man and woman. In the time following both these upheavals, the reality of the situation strayed far from the original dream, much to the suffering of the very people that were supposed to be helped. It seems that only a privileged few are able to reap benefits from political and economic change, regardless of the original intent.

Some family friends a few years back adopted a young boy from Russia when he was very young. His name is Ian and he’s now nine years old, and a very sweet, happy boy living in my hometown. While his adoption was a success story, the recent adoption ban on Russian children by Americans has been a continuous controversy and has increased strains between Russia and the United States.

The death of the Russian-born three-year-old Max Shatto – who died in January in Texas, where his adoptive parents live – was the impetus for the ban. A march of over 12,000 Russians through the street of Moscow occurred in response to the death being ruled as accidental by the state of Texas. To quote the article I read regarding this event, “Carrying signs with slogans including “Children are our future” and “America – hands off our children”, activists mixed bitter criticism of the United States with calls for improvements in Russia’s own care system.”

According to the article, there are approximately 650,000 orphans in Russia, with 110,000 of them living in state-owned institutions. Americans have adopted more than 60,000 Russian orphans since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, but since the ban on adoptions by Americans on January 1, 2013, only a few dozen previously approved adoptions will be fulfilled.  After reading this, I wondered why the ban was implemented. To an outsider, the action seems sudden and aggressive. Through further research however, I learned to what extent relations between the United States and Russia were strained. With the uprisings in Libya and Syria, and subsequently Putin’s accusations of United States meddling, as well as Putin’s own treatment of his opponents since his return to the Russia presidency last May, there are certainly many other factors that can be contributed to the tension between the two nations. To be quite honest, before taking this class, not only did I know next to nothing about Russia and its politics, I also didn’t care. I knew of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States but after the fall of the Soviet Union, I was naïve in thinking that relations between our countries were stable. There is a lot of history between Russia and the United States, and can’t be completely and instantly eradicated with the fall of a government. This article about the adoption ban clearly epitomizes that idea.

The article notes that “Russia added the adoption ban on to legislation it passed in December in response to the United States Magnitsky Act, which bars Russians linked to the 2009 death of an anti-corruption lawyer and other alleged rights abuses from entering the United States.” Initially, many Russians protested this ban, and called Putin a “child-killer”. Putin argued that the ban would increase national pride, and believed that Russia should take care of its own children. However, there is a reason for so many adoptions of Russia children; the Russia orphanage system is corrupt. There have been countless cases of neglect and abuse reported, and who knows the actual number of crimes committed within the system that have been covered up?

After reading this article, I honestly wasn’t quite sure what to think. I honestly was mildly angered by the actions of the Russian government, because to me it seemed like they were taking orphans and making them political pawns. Yes, it is extremely sad to hear of the death of a young adopted child, but taking that event and turning it into a political move doesn’t seem right to me. The child could have been of any nationality and it still would have been upsetting. The Russian government seemed to take this event and use it to give their actions legitimacy. However, thinking of the event in that context reminded me that our own president is attempting to do the very same thing. With the Sandy Hook Elementary Shooting, President Obama is arguably politicizing that event in an attempt to advocate the need for gun control in the United States. Thinking of this event in that context isn’t necessarily a bad thing in mind, because it’s being implemented to hopefully improve our society.

In a way, that’s what the Russian government is doing as well. By banning adoptions between the United States and Russia, the government is striving to improve their own society’s orphanage system. I would like to see the adoption ban lifted, but if this action does indeed ultimately lead to improvements within the Russian orphanage system, then that’s arguably the most important thing.

One thing that has stuck me as interesting as we have continued learning about the Soviet Union is how the communist dream was drastically altered from the point of the Bolsheviks taking power to the Soviet Union’s fall in 1991. During the revolution and through Lenin’s reign, the Soviets were pushing towards a pure Marxist system; however, after Stalin took power this drastically changed.

Of the many problems that the Soviet Union had throughout its existence, I believe that Stalin was the most detrimental. After Stalin took power the Soviet Union took a drastic turn in the other direction. Stalin took away many policies that Lenin put into place, including the NEP, weakening the economy and thus slowing the creation of a more powerful state. Along with this, Stalin is also credited with being one of the worst mass murderers in history. However, unlike many others like Hitler, Stalin slaughtered his own people, thus further weakening the Soviet Union.

Another of Stalin’s detrimental behaviors was his enormous ego. In creating the Stalin “cult of personality”, he further moved the Soviets away from true Marxism and further towards the creation of his own private state. One such example of this would be the hipsters we talked about in class today. Many of these teenagers went back and re-read the things that Lenin had wrote and realized that Stalin was changing Lenin’s ideas in order to fit his agenda. These teenagers were among the many people that Stalin had executed or thrown into work camps.

I feel that it could definitely be argued that Stalin was the worst thing that ever happened to the Soviet Union. His many ridiculous policies along with his practice of deifying himself led to many problems within the Soviet Union including deviation from the true Marxist doctrine, lack of initial economic gains, and massive loss of population. Had Stalin never taken power I feel that the Soviet Union could have achieved a much greater level of power and would have lasted significantly into the current century. This goes to show that while communism is arguably a good system in theory, human flaws and errors have the potential to ruin the system in ways that capitalism would never allow.

One thing that has struck me as unique about Russian history is the people’s dedication to a scientific manner of thinking even in inappropriate contexts. Somehow, even artistic venues for thought were broken down systematically with a direct objective and means of achieving said goal. To me, this is a very scientific way of thinking. Socialist Realism, for example, could be seen as something of an equation. Russians always had an end goal in mind, but the means of achieving these goals were often unfinished, sloppy or simply flawed.

In some ways, Russia appears to be very ahead of it’s time. A want to understand cause and effect or system and function is a sign of an intellectually developed country. However, science was still at an extremely limited state even in the 1930’s (by comparison  of course, to science since the 1990’s). I think Russian societal culture is a perfect allegory for human scientific progress in the early 20th century. We had ideas, concepts that were understood but yet so much was left in a void. Russia was influenced so intensely by the push in science (such as Darwinism) that they themselves became a perfect representation of it’s faults within that era.

Perhaps every single aspect of life can be broken down into a system with rules (“recommendations”) for success. But there is still a level of humanity that science and Russia in the early 20th century failed to address, or rather work around. Even now there are many doors closed, but I will be curious to see how science effects the progress of Russia in the upcoming decades during our class.

Something that I have been musing on since our discussion of Stalin’s cult of personality last week is the difference between power and authority and how these concepts were manifested in the beginnings of the Soviet Union.

I would define power as en essence that is projected outwards, implying a control given over the people that often results in their fear.  Authority is an essence more given from the outside, as in a ruler’s influence and their people’s subsequent respect.  After talking about the cult of personality, it became clear to me that Stalin was a manifestation of the latter idea, the essence of power, than that of authority.  The fact that he had to rely on propaganda to grant him legitimacy as the father of the nation is evidence of this.  His creation of an image that is all-knowing and infallible, and his reliance on the threat of the gulag and secret police to inspire correct action all stem from a need to control and manipulate the people through fear instead of aiming to gain their respect.  He never gives the people an opportunity to question him or rethink their loyalty to him, and he would punish them if they did.  It is this fear that kept him in control.

At the same time that Stalin was being feared by Russia, he also established a balance between power and authority in dealing with the national groups.  He “directed” them back to their old nationalities without providing much choice, but then Stalin allowed for those groups to maintain their traditions until they joined the Soviet Union.  This probably gave him authority among those people, since he was not imposing the Soviet ideal on them from the start, however he never would have held as much authority as the local rulers he set up to enforce the Soviet ideology.

The thing about ruling through power instead of authority is that it is short-lived and unstable.  Just as was the reasoning behind the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in the first place, people will only live so long under oppression and fear.  Despite Stalin’s claim to be liberating the worker, he was just intimidating them into another hierarchal scheme, like his predecessors the Tsars, that would ultimately begin to be questioned and undermined.  I do not think he ever established and garnered true respect from the Soviet people in practice, though ideology would disagree.

One key thing that I drew from watching the movie Circus was that no matter what society is represented, racial stereotypes seem to prevail. Going along with the racial oppression of the time, Circus was about an American woman who became pregnant with an African-American’s child. She flees to the Soviet Union in order to escape the persecution in the United States, yet she still fears to reveal her child.

Throughout the movie, the child is referred to in terms that are unfitting of an animal, let alone a human being. For instance, at one point Marion tries to escape her abuser and get her child out of the circus and while her friend is running away with the child, he stops and says “oh look at how black you are, I must have gotten you dirty.” This blatantly racist comment shows that despite the communist views that every race is equal, the society is still incredibly racist.

I was particularly surprised by the content of this film as I was under the impression that in a communist system, racism would be almost nonexistent. However, Circus proved me to be completely wrong as most of the dialogue towards the African-American child was laced with racial comments. Having been proven wrong, I got to thinking that maybe racism is something that cannot be completely eliminated from a society no matter what the governmental or societal policies are. For instance, in the United States there are plenty of laws prohibiting the subjugation of people over race, yet does our own culture not promote it? How many racist jokes have you heard just in the past few days? How many racial slurs have you heard in popular music?

I came to the conclusion that while racism is a terrible, completely ridiculous idea, it will never be completely solved as long as society continues to promote it. Many people have embraced the idea that race is completely irrelevant in the quality of a person; yet there are still holdouts and as comedian Ron White boldly states “you can’t fix stupid.”

Today I read an article assigned by my Russian 100 professor about the recent legislation pushes against the United States by Russia.  To the Kremlin, being free of American influence is essential for the free will and sovereignty of the country. Russia now no longer wants to part of the west and no longer wants to be recognized as a prominent country in the west.  Instead it wishes to become its own entity.

In a way I see this as a relapse of the not-quiet-dead-yet Soviet ideals of the last century.  The government wishes Russia to become a super power of all things and in part, its own world.  It almost sounds as if the ideas of the government are taking a turn towards a cyclical pattern.  They have even suggested banning foreign films and words to further cut the population off.  Can we consider this to be attempt to isolate Russia into another utopia or is it simply a phase that is going to wear off? I believe that this could be a slippery slope for the Russian government and any future actions taken in the same direction may be severely frowned upon by the world scene as a whole.