Quality assessment:
On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 3/5. Justification: I knew just barely enough to treat my subject adequately within the limited scope I set myself. (I write as a person with exceedingly poor Russian, and with just the usual PBS-and-National-Geographic grasp of mediaeval Russian history, driven by the anxious desire to help.)
Revision history:
UTC=202201242T212500Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo uploaded base version. He then planned to continue producing, in a way not documented here, minor tweaks, over the coming 12 hours, as versions 1.0.1, 1.0.2, ... . .
Remarks as a Foreword,
to Assist Russian Federation Administrators
This "Open Letter" to President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (1) is published in the first instance as a 2022 January 24 posting at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com/, and (2) is on the day following first publication being forwarded by e-mail to the local Russian Embassy address, estonia@mid.ru, with the request that it be both (a) forwarded by Embassy personnel to appropriate Moscow desks and (b) somehow acknowledged.
Anyone (whether or not in the administration of the Russian Federation) is welcome to post a comment on this same blog, and also to post a full-scale guest essay on this same blog, under the two sets of rules set out some years ago at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com/search/label/AAAA--blog_intro under the two respective headings "Under what conditions may the public make comments-on-essays?" and "Under what conditions may the public post original ('guest') essays (as opposed to mere comments-on-essays) on this blog?"
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I am writing as a private individual, without formal or informal connections to any government, and possessing only the usual lay connections within the Catholic Church. I write as an aspiring Catholic lay hermit, outside the diocesan-hermit provisions of Canon 603, and therefore not bound by formal hermit vows. In proceeding as a hermit or hermit-wannabe, I am trying to follow, in a necessarily circumscribed and limited way, in the footsteps of Bl Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916) and - what is particularly relevant for this present piece of writing - Serv. of God Ekaterina Fyodorovna Kolyshckine de Hueck Doherty (Екатерина Фёдоровна де Гук-Дохерти, née Колышкина; 1896-1985). My readers, especially those within the Russian Federation government, might want to note two of my previous blog postings with a Russian theme:
- http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com/2017/03/toomas-karmo-open-letter-to-my-fsvsvr.html
- http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com/2017/03/toomas-karmo-anne-garrels-russia.html
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Monsieur le Président Vladimir Vladimirovich, politics has been rightly called the art of the possible, a seeking out of the merely second-best. I must stay mindful of this precept in what I respectfully write today to you and to your Foreign Ministry.
I write with a certain personal sympathy, I might venture to say "with a certain sympathetic pity", even while having in the interests of truth to become at various points in today's letter quite brutally frank.
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The following are the background essentials facing both you as an individual and the Russian Federation as the sovereign state presently under your care. For some of these points, a brutal frankness proves specially necessary:
- The Russian Federation suffers an economic stagnation paralleling the stagnation of the Brezhnev USSR, with its GDP (the vast Russian natural resources, and the large Russian population, notwithstanding) comparable to just the GDP of Italy.
- In particular, the Russian Federation lags in commercially relevant engineering, with few or no significant added-value manufactures on world markets. (Where are the Russian iPads, the Russian Toyotas, even the Russian Ikea modular furniture? They do not exist.)
- Also serious, indeed indicating decay at the core, is Russia's scientific decline. Your young, mobile, doctoral and post-doctoral, talent in mathematics and physics in my belief migrates (do correct me if I err) almost always from Russia to the West, only in rare instances from the West to Russia.
- You are yourself no longer young. More than one version of a story regarding compromised personal health has percolated even to me, as a none-too-assiduous consumer of the ordinary news media, far removed from the affairs even of my tiny Estonia.
- Your age notwithstanding, you seem not to have publicly articulated a conception for the shape of Russian governments following your retirement. In particular, you seem not to have proposed measures ensuring constitutionality, and so blocking a mere boyar-against-boyar power struggle (blocking, that is, a dismal contemporary rerun of the 1598-1613 "Time of Troubles", or of the post-1917 civil war).
One further background essential requires development at length. When the "Troubles" ended in 1613, it was the Romanovs who emerged on top. Only through a religious obscurantism paralleling the religious obscurantism of early-mediaeval Byzantine palace intriguers could such a process be said to have conferred political legitimacy on them in 1613. As of 1917 and 1918, however, their suffering, to the point of martyrdom, gives the Romanovs a solid claim to some admission into public life. Might not the path ahead for Russia, after your own departure, involve an eventual Dutch-UK-Nordic-style monarchy, in which the now-legitimized Romanovs exercise some limited right "to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn" (in the phrasing of UK constitutional-monarchy analyst Walter Bahehot), as they liaise with the Duma and Russia's successive Prime Ministers, under some strict new code of constitutional law? A cautious and limited embrace of the Romanovs would have a surgical effect, marking on the one hand a repudiation of that sterile utopianism which was Marxism-Leninism, and marking conversely a return to Russia's authentic living traditions. A recourse to the Romanovs might be thought radical: and yet in so ancient and conservative a society as Russia, no merely Western political gimmick could perform the surgery so urgently needed.
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It is against this background that the spectre of domestic unrest, notably the spectre of unrest consolidating itself around Mr Alexei Anatolievich Navalny, impels you to a dangerous military initiative. I think - though events over the coming hours or days may prove me wrong - that your initiative does not involve anything so insane as the wide-scale physical invasion of Ukraine. My current working hypothesis is, rather, that you seek a new Kiev government in the spirit of the deposed Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych. Under my current hypothesis, you seek to procure this régime change through backdoor processes illegal under the present Ukrainian constitution, in a context of military threat.
Even setting aside questions of public morality, we note not only the expense, but the outright military peril, of such a line of action: once an invasion force is mustered, lower ranks are liable to pressure their commander-in-chief to move his assembled force forward, rather than to lose face in a withdrawal This danger must be prominent in the minds of the well-meaning, potentially friendly, parties in the USA who last week professed their intention to construct a "diplomatic off-ramp" for the protagonists, working to defuse current tensions.
Whatever the nature of your initiative in its present form - perhaps I understand it accurately, perhaps I misunderstand it - it will at any rate be agreed by almost all analysts in almost all Foreign Ministries around the globe that you are now operating in a situation dominated by unknowns, in which the sheer pressure of events may cause you to lose control. More brutally put, it will be almost universally agreed, by friend and challenger alike, in Foreign Ministry upon Foreign Ministry, that you are now gambling, hoping (as a gambler might hope) for the retention of control - that you are now tossing successive volleys of dice onto the dark felt of a gaming table.
My own guess - perhaps I guess rightly, perhaps I guess wrongly - is that however exactly events play out, as you work with lieutenants of imperfectly tested qualities in a framework of incomplete information, your initiative may culminate in your becoming a still larger figure of public derision than either the Anthony Eden of Britain's 1956 "Suez Crisis" or the Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski of the 1981 "Solidarnosc" crisis. If you are lucky, some success may come in the merely immediate term, in other words over the coming year or two. If you are lucky, you may conceivably succeed in deposing the current Kiev government, and additionally during the next year or two in keeping some kind of lid both on Ukrainian and on Russian dissent, much as Jaruzelski at first did. Anthony Eden's fall from power was swift and terrible. Yours, by contrast, might instead follow a more gradual, that is to say a less British and more Polish, trajectory. But what drama comes after, either for yourself or for your political heirs, once Moscow's casino-table luck runs out?
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It is in some ways helpful to write, in a broad imitation of your analysis at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181 ("On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians"), not just of the Russian Federation but of "The Russias", or (this is much better) of "the Rus Nations". In surveying what a previous Russian administrator - in his helplessness paradoxically a benefactor of humanity - helpfully called "our common European home, from the Atlantic to the Urals", we find not just the Russian Federation, but Belarus. And in that same broad cultural space, we find Ukraine.
I do hedge this remark with the caveat "helpful in some ways". Ukraine has its own distinctive ethnological patrimony, even its own language, and in contradistinction from the Russian Federation is theologically partitioned between a Byzantine interpretation of Christianity and a straightforward canon-law allegiance (under Byzantine liturgical forms) to Rome. But the three "Rus Nations", distinctive Ukraine among them, do mark out a cultural mosaic for which many or all of the other Slavic nations, notably Poland, within our "common European home" are externalities.
What, now, is the cultural mission, the task or duty, of this trio of large "Rus Nations"? You and I, chronologically almost exact contemporaries, know the answer, perhaps about equally well: you, as a longtime head of government in the largest of the three big "Rus Nations", and I as a close, formerly Estonian-exile, observer of the decadent Anglosphere (with four years at Oxford, and with a history of employment in Australia, in that former British centre which is Singapore, in the USA, and above all in anglophone stretches of Canada). You and I are both painfully, even contemptuously, aware of Western decline and decadence, spearheaded as it has been since 1945 by Anglosaxonia, and evident also in such presently (temporarily?) respectable European-Union jurisdictions as Estonia. Only a terse recitation of illustrative points is necessary to recall for you and me, well informed as we jointly are, the downward communal trajectory:
- The eager following not of political opportunists alone, but even of superstitions (as when thousands upon thousands of English speakers stridently insisted that the current pandemic is a "hoax"; although they have given that up now, soon they will have something else, such as a revival of the extraterrestrials-in-our-midst meme; before the "hoax pandemic" talk, there was their strident numerological-superstition insistence that the world would end on 2012 December 12; or again that, media reports to the contrary, pop singer Elvis Presley was alive and well; or again their strident insistence that Adolf Hitler, alive no less than vinyl-recording idol "Elvis the Pelvis", was in the First Gulf War proffering military advice to Mr Saddam Hussein: it is characteristic of this mass mania - an Anglosphere phenomenon with notable resonances also here in Estonia - that it finds some new object every five years or so).
- The illiteracy (as with YouTube street interviewees, speaking English as their native language, who are baffled when asked to "name a country starting with U", or again to state the number of sides in a triangle).
- The spectacle in Canada, the USA, and the UK of thousands upon thousands of homeless sitting with their begging caps and begging bowls on the downtown sidewalks, in some cases outright incoherent - and in perhaps the majority of cases although coherent enough, nevertheless in need of psychiatric support (I have chatted with many, in Toronto) - with the Canada-USA-UK authorities cynically calculating that the homeless "do not vote", that in any case they are in some subtle sense "to blame", that things will be okay for them if they somehow "get jobs".
- As your last public act, when you stage your personal exit from an increasingly disordered situation (in 2024? in 2026? as late, even, as 2030?), you install some Romanov as some minor public Russian functionary. You do this by way of sowing a small, nonprovocative, seed, for possible gradual development by your increasingly beleaguered successors, conceivably in the 2040s or 2050s or 2060s.
- You retire from public life to some appropriate monastery, making a suitably austere transition from politics to penance, reflection, analysis, and scholarship. Here you influence the three-nation Rus evolution more deeply than you could hope to influence it from your increasingly insecure position as a Kremlin administrator. Your penance is a large component in your religious reclusion. - I need not develop that last point at length: it is enough to mention, with the utmost brevity, Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov and Salisbury, and to remark that there is likely to be more.
- Your monastic reclusion involves some degree of engagement with Katya Fyodorovna (the already-mentioned Екатерина Фёдоровна де Гук-Дохерти, née Колышкина), with whatever supplementary help the Holy See may be able to give you as you occasionally seek low-key Roman advice to supplement what good advice you are receiving from your own Byzantium-anchored Church.
