Flashback 2008: Russia too big to ignore — Best beware as world's largest nation turns away from democracy

     Vladimir Putin, the Butcher of Moscow, popped across the Bering Strait to ruff the hair of his lapdog, Donald Trump, who talked big, as always, prior to the meeting, but can be relied upon to give up the ranch when actually in the presence of his master.
    Wondering what I've written about Putin over the past, I noticed this warning to readers against ignoring Russia just because they've descended into chaos. But ignore them we did, and now they own us. Or, more precisely, our president. This is back when the column filled a page, and I've kept in the original subheads.

OPENING SHOT ...

     Quick geography quiz: What is the largest country on earth? In land area, I mean. Think hard. Imagine the "Jeopardy!" music playing. . . .
     Give up? Of course you do. Nobody knows these things anymore. It's Russia -- even after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the loss of various republics, it's still enormous, the largest nation on earth, almost as big as the United States and China combined.
     So why is it that Americans are utterly indifferent to Russia -- except, I suppose, for the growing number who actually hail from there? We don't care that Russia, having briefly flirted with democracy, is steadily sliding back toward Stalinesque dictatorship, first under former KGB man Vladimir Putin and now with his cipher puppet replacement, president Dmitry Medvedev.
     Maybe we're indifferent because we spent such a long time terrified of Soviet nukes and felt such relief now that the threat is gone (at least the direct threat. The real possibility of those weapons being passed on to third parties remains, too dire to contemplate, apparently).
     Maybe we don't care because Russia is so economically crippled (Have you ever purchased a product made in Russia? A product more complex than vodka, I mean). We don't feel threatened the way we do by China or India. We're glad the place has become one knot of organized crime funneling the nation's wealth to kleptocrats.
     That's too bad. Because -- as the Islamic world has shown us -- it's the places that we allow to fall off our radar that come back when we least expect them to bite us in the ass.

A HOMEMADE SPOON IN HIS BOOT

     Alexander Solzhenitsyn died last Sunday, and his passing made me want to re-read his work, which I hadn't looked at since I was in high school. But I was busy, and Solzhenitsyn is not a ball of fun, so I let a few days slip by before heading over to the Northbrook Public Library.
     At that point I almost didn't bother, because I figured my fellow citizens, moved by the same impulse and not dallying, would have by then stripped the shelves clean of the great Nobel Prize winner's work.
     Naive. One copy of The Gulag Archipelago was checked out, but Cancer Ward, August 1914 and a dozen others were on the shelves. I grabbed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, an early, accessible work, and loped on home to read it.
     It was as I remembered, a bleak, heartbreaking tale of life in the Russian labor camps, where Solzhenitsyn, then a soldier, was sent in 1945 for making a joke about Stalin in a letter home. It tells the story of an average day, after eight years in captivity, of Shuhkov, the nickname for Ivan Denisovich (like any Russian novel, each character has several names, just to make it more confusing). It is 16 below zero, and most of the day is spent bricklaying.
     The book is a quick read that any literate person can polish off in four hours and should, as a reminder of the 2 million -- or 5 million, or 15 million, nobody really knows -- Soviets who died during the 75 years of Communist misrule.
     Thinking about the regime's institutionalized crimes — and those of Communist China, Nazi Germany and all the other oppressive systems — clicked a tumbler into place and helped me understand why I bristle, slightly, whenever somebody gripes about America's crimes, from Guantanamo Bay to the World War II internment of Japanese American citizens to the Palmer Raids. It isn't that these things aren't stains on our history. But compared with the horrors inflicted on millions elsewhere, they're causes of pride in their isolated quality and limited scope.

ON SECOND THOUGHT . . .

     Or am I giving the United States too much of a break? After I wrote the above, I noticed I had omitted slavery and the extermination of the Indians, which though lodged in the remote of the 19th century, were also large-scale horrors. Is this evidence of the screening quality people use to ignore facts that undermine their permanent opinions? It's easy to see in others; not so easy to see in yourself.

SAUNA! FREEZER! SAUNA! FREEZER!

     Is the Thompson Center too hot or too cold? I raised the issue Friday, figuring I would hear from occupants. I did, and the answer is, "Yes."
     "I work there," wrote a friend. "It's a friggin' meatlocker."
     "It's kinda toasty," said a 20-year state employee, who naturally didn't want his name used. "In the summer it's like a greenhouse."
     "I spent two years in the office of communication," writes a reader, whose name I shall shield. "Perhaps it was the chill of thought control from the propagandists in the Gov's office on the 16th floor, but many of our offices were freezing several stories below. I wore heavy warm sweaters during the summer months. But other offices were sweltering, particularly where the sun shone."
     The rumor is that it was inferior glass that caused the initial problems.
     "The design was right, but when the Thompson Center was first built, we had such massive cost overruns, they changed the glass specs," said the long-time employee. "It was supposed to be heavy duty glass to account for the greenhouse effect, but it was over so much, they didn't use it. They'll never fix it."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE ...

     Generally I avoid sexist jokes — I found myself agreeing with a bumper sticker that read, "I'll be a post-feminist in the post-patriarchy." But this one works too well to ignore, and I think we can get away with it.
     In the Garden of Eden, in that brief, happy period before the Fall, the first man and the God who created him would sometimes converse.
     "Why did you make Woman so beautiful?" Adam asked.
     "So you would love her," God answered.
     He thought about that a while.
     "Then why did you have to make her so dumb?" Adam wondered.
     "So she would love you."
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 10, 2008