Douglas Weiner's Essay: To Russia with Vitriol

A: What nation on Earth is most like Heaven?
B: The Soviet Union.
A: How is that?
B: We have nothing to wear, we have only apples to eat, and they tell us it is paradise.

That joke was apparently popular among citizens of the Soviet Union, and, in his positively scathing essay on the "predatory tribute-taking state," Douglas Weiner strives to let readers know just how far removed the Soviet Union of reality was from the "paradise" of theory for workers and the very environment both. The USSR is indubitably the target of most of his venom, but the czarist Russian Empire of yore and the unsettled "democratic" Russia of today garner more than enough criticism of their own for it to be said that they, too, are victimized by diatribes. I believe that there have been several works of history stressing the remarkable preservation of "ancien regime" practices after the violent changeover from absolutism to Bolshevism, relating to politico-military matters. To the best of my knowledge, Weiner's essay is the first to highlight environmental aspects of that peculiar reliance on the familiar amid rhetoric of convulsive change, that consumption of "old wine in a new bottle". And he goes even further, saying that the stance of Russia's rulers toward subjects and resources has never, from the Viking invasions that laid the groundwork for the first Russian states to this very moment, undergone true alteration, always being a blight-- of ravenousness and unsustainability-- on humanity's record.

Weiner treats Russia across history as a reckless gambler, rushing into damaging projects which were sometimes irrationally Brobdingnagian in scale (especially under the Soviet Union) and only rarely bore enough fruit to validate having been pursued in the first place; I do not know how exactly the death-wish "game" Russian roulette got its name, but it appears as if Russian leaders have, in Weiner's view, been playing it as regards their environmental policy for over a millennium-- playing the much more pernicious version, in which five chambers are loaded with one empty, instead of the reverse. It seems hard to me to periodize the history presented in the essay, since Weiner's whole argument is that there have been no fundamental, epoch-making changes in Russian "environmentalism" at any time-- and to this argument of constancy the fact that the first 75% of the essay is together as one section is almost certainly related. That said, individual projects seem the best way to get at the specific content of Weiner's work. I found the section about the Aral Sea (which is still being depicted on world maps as having the same size it did generations ago but, as Weiner says, will likely have to be removed from them as a body of water altogether within twenty years) to be grippingly tragicomedic and, based on my conversations with a Kazakh person I knew when I was an undergraduate, who spoke of the "Aral Pond," absolutely accurate. I had no idea about the biological weapons storehouses in environmentally degrading locations before perusing the essay, and I only hope that the chances of the facilities being disturbed (with outbreaks ineluctably following) are not as high as Weiner suggests. If Stewart Brand is to be believed at all, however, Chernobyl was not that much of a catastrophe and the surrounding area is now little different from other temperate, forested ones, with Weiner of the more traditional opinion that the meltdown was an abomination and the vicinity ought to be quarantined for centuries to come; Brand gives hard science in support of his viewpoint while Weiner does not even attempt as much, so it would be ill-advised to take everything the latter states about the retired plant-- "Ukraine's shame"-- at face value.

To offer some more criticism, I think Weiner should have tried to work some direct talk of culture, which should easily be recognized as one contributor to the predatory governance he alleges has been in place in Russia from the outset, into this. Did Russians who were not giving orders themselves have attitudes destructive to the environment? Whether they did or they did not, could you, Mr. Weiner, take a stab at telling us the why and the wherefore? My own definition of culture (by which even individuals living shoulder-to-shoulder in the same locality may be said to differ culturally) is "pattern of production". In light of that, I would have been sure to integrate discussion of Russian culture into any such account of depraved depredations. By the way, my definition of class (in which, obviously, even individuals living shoulder-to-shoulder in the same locality differ) is "pattern of consumption"-- and the "pattern" only rarely changes over the course of one's life, as Mike Tyson, who was born into a "lower class" situation of living hand-to-mouth, i.e., spending basically all that he had acquired as soon as it had been acquired, and continued to burn through his earnings rapidly even after his income skyrocketed, by purchasing an albino tiger as a pet, throwing a $400,000 birthday party for himself, etc., leading him to cry bankruptcy once he was no longer a force between the ropes, helps to demonstrate. Some class analysis definitely would have enriched this essay as well. The maneuvering to build a "classless society" (which, by my definition, would mean a society in which there would be little variation in clothing and diet and little stimulus for the development of genuine personality-- limitations of which socialist regimes have in actuality been accused, in the joke appearing above and elsewhere) under Marxism should have justified some major, perhaps misguided efforts toward fast development because the early Soviet leaders knew only too well that Russia was not where Marxism (according to the theory itself) should have become the guiding light of the state first, in consideration of its underdevelopment, but Weiner displays no such understanding, no such sympathy. At the end of the essay, I was expecting some mention of the environmentalism (or the neglect thereof) of the Commonwealth of Independent States, but Weiner never even mentions that organization, only treating "successor states" individually. Finally, I would like to proffer some factoids that I think would have strengthened Weiner's essay had he included them: to buttress the claim that Russia is currently in dire social straits, that the difference in life expectancy between men and women there (14 years) is greater than it is anywhere else in the world and that former serfs had to pay heavy taxes in the first years after their emancipation to compensate the "bereaved" boyars, to show just how rotten-to-the-core some of Russia's rules and rulers in truth have been.

P.S.: Speaking of Russian roulette, I have been trying to come up with a way to combine it and solitaire into a single game. Can anyone help?