The Park Kultury train station smells like smoke and roses this evening. This was the first warm day after a winter that was brutal even by Moscow standards but people seemed to scarcely notice. There are thousands of flowers on the station’s lower platform, arrayed in an impromptu shrine to the memory of twelve Moscow commuters who were killed here yesterday. The rush hour is uncommonly silent, a quiet that seems to drown out even the clamor of trains entering the station. And candles. Dozens of memorial flames flickering in the defiled atrium of the building.

The world knows by now that two suicide bombers detonated explosives in two train stations during the Monday morning, rush hour, killing thirty-eight people, wounding more than a hundred and sending riots of black smoke furling to the surface. There is still an acrid quality to air this evening, a hint of charred metal that catches you at random moments. Moscow’s subways are a thing to behold. Designed to be functional museums, the stations have marble floors, massive stained glass panoramas and epic scale sculpture of revolutionary war heroes. But for several hours that morning those floors were given over to a less noble task as the dead were pulled from the carnage of the south bound red line train and laid out to be counted and removed.

The government declared this a national day of mourning. The president and prime minister of Russia have convened emergency meetings, offered condolences to families and vowed to bring justice to the as yet unknown perpetrators. Cell phone companies refunded the cost of text messages sent between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. yesterday, reasoning that no one should have to pay to check on a loved one. And today a new Russian flag hung outside the station as a sign of national unity in the face of tragedy. Still the people outside the station wore a kind of stunned resignation on their faces. This is a city given over to floral expressions. In some places it’s difficult to travel more than a few hundred feet without passing a sveti shop, its stands crowded with roses, carnations and tulips. A line of people stretched outside the shop beside Park Kultury and near the front a young woman pushed past me carrying two white roses and a face full of anguish.

Inside, the police, always a heavy presence in the subways, were virtually an army of occupation today, eyeing passengers, inspecting random bags but mostly trying to create the image of order where bedlam reigned 24 hours earlier. It was a losing battle. I saw women weeping as they rode the escalator up to their transfer points, I saw a man take a knee, overcome with grief near the entrance. Random travelers, young and old, genuflected as they made their way off the subway cars. The trains arrive every two minutes, which meant that the platform started to resemble a wake for a head of state. Thousands arrived at those two minute intervals, most stopped for a reflective moment at the memorial, a few adding to the harvest of roses and then weaved their way through the crowd heading home.

I am a visitor teaching American history at Moscow State University; I knew none of the victims, but there were all kinds of personal resonances. I’m a native New Yorker, who grew up with the World Trade Center as personal point of reference. Last week I taught about violence in the Jim Crow South and told my students that lynching was a form of American terrorism. I pass through the Park Kultury station a half dozen times per week. I will be there again on tomorrow, coming off the brown line from Octoberskaya, transferring to the south bound red line. The same one that exploded as it entered the station yesterday.

The early news reports were hesitant to ascribe the explosions to terrorism but coordinated blasts roughly thirty minutes apart left little room for any other conclusion. About an hour in they began saying it was the work of two suicide bombers and I immediately recalled reading about the grim algebra of bomb investigation. (Gather all the body parts and the head that is missing a torso is your prime suspect.) Later they made cryptic reference to evidence that suggested they were from the Northern Caucuses. Not that the public had drawn any other conclusions.

Vladmir Putin vowed to “destroy” the people responsible for these actions. It seemed a very Putin-esque thing to say but I doubted “destroy” was the verb Russia needed. At least not at that hour. This was not an act of random mania. The roots of the  Lubyanka and Park Kultury bombings go far past the topsoil of current events; they were the latest installments in a conflict the runs deep into Russian history.

Days before the attacks I began reading Robert Service’s History of Modern Russia and simultaneously beginning work on a book about 9/11. Service points out that the Russian empire staggered into the 20^th century as a collection of peoples sharing little sense of common national identity. The tsars were plagued by the nationalist ambitions of various parts of the sprawling empire. When socialist radicals toppled Nicolas II in 1917, their provisional government immediately split into factions over the question of how much autonomy each of the small states would be granted. That question reemerged eighty years later in the wake of Communism’s fall and been the bitter source of conflict ever since. Chechen demands for independence run counter to Russia’s economic needs – Chechnya has the nation’s only warm water port – but, more importantly, it is seen as an assault on the Russia’s identity. A nation that once helped define the history of the 20^th century saw itself collapse and dissolve in the 1990s. Chechnya has become a sort of line in the sand for Russian politics: the nation will grow no smaller.

In my time here I’ve heard offhand comments, a kind of ambient racism directed at Chechens and other people from the Caucuses. The term “Caucasian” means something completely different here than it does in the United States. The olive-skinned, dark-haired people from the region are derogatorily referred to as “blacks” and accused of stealing jobs from Slavic Russians. They work in the lowest tiers of the economy, many of them, ironically, operating flower stands on Moscow’s streets. Yelena Khanga, a black Russian journalist in Moscow told me that these tensions are exacerbated by the bad economy and the belief among some business owners that the predominantly Muslim people of the Caucuses make better employees. Islam forbids alcohol and this is a country where alcoholism is a big enough problem that it is driving down life expectancy for Russian men.

But politics and history mean nothing to the families of 38 people who rode the red line yesterday. The scenes of people streaming up from the smoke-belching tunnels took me back to September 11th. I was teaching an American history class when the first tower collapsed. I told my students that the sum total of evil in history stems from the ability to view human lives as abstractions. None of those people on the train mattered to the two women who strapped on explosive belts yesterday morning. They were animate symbols, gears in the machinery of Russia. And thus another digit added to the tally of human failure, misery and, yes, evil.

A journalist told me that the red line was targeted because of the number of Russian civil servants who ride it. The first bomb was detonated in the Lubyanka Station, which runs beneath the headquarters of the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency. But it also goes to Moscow University. The second blast struck just four stops away from the campus. I have been preoccupied with the thought that students may have been on the train ever since.

People have asked if I plan to cut my trip short. Interestingly, the thought had not occurred to me. I made a commitment to my students; I intend to keep it. And I would be trading this experience for the false security of home. In the cruel lottery of terrorism, none of us is ever really safe. But I appreciated the question. After answering it I felt calm, rational, resolved. Like the Russians who I saw lined up at Shabolavka this afternoon to buy passes for the orange line, fully aware of what had happened and equally intent upon continuing with their lives. That’s what I felt this afternoon.

What I feel on Wednesday as the southbound red line leaves Kropotkinskaya and slips into the station at Park Kultury is another matter entirely.

History, like beauty lies in the eye of the beholder but ugliness is universal. Or at least it would be easy to believe so. Sometimes, though, the muddy reality finds you and complicates your assumptions.

I teach in a suite at Moscow State University dedicated to Franklin Roosevelt. Given the national regard for FDR I actually managed not to notice how significant this was on my first day at MSU. But after one of my classes I thought about how Russia’s premier university has devoted an area to our 32nd president but you would never find so much as a bathroom bearing the name of his WWII ally Josef Stalin in an American University.

The reason for that is fairly unambiguous: in America Stalin’s reputation is synonymous with dictatorship, anchored to the agricultural collectivization programs that cost the lives of millions of Russians and shorthand for the grand scale evil that the 20th century witnessed. But in Russia, the story is, predictably more complex.

I asked a graduate student what Russian youth are taught about Stalin and her reply was “the truth.” Her version of this truth is that Stalin erred in excess and brutality, but his ideas for economic development were sound. His elimination of his rivals in the 1930s weakened the Soviet Union on the verge of World War II and was partly responsible for the huge losses the country suffered. It was a portrait composed in grays.

Another student told me that Stalin was “the most controversial figure in our history,” and asked if he was similarly viewed in the United States. I replied “No — because there’s no opposing opinion.” Nor does there appear to be much controversy in the West in general.

Here, for instance, is how a BBC documentary summarized the life of Stalin:

His forced collectivisation of agriculture cost millions of lives, while his programme of rapid industrialisation achieved huge increases in Soviet productivity and economic growth but at great cost. Moreover, the population suffered immensely during the Great Terror of the 1930s, during which Stalin purged the party of ‘enemies of the people’, resulting in the execution of thousands and the exile of millions to the gulag system of slave labour camps.

These purges severely depleted the Red Army, and despite repeated warnings, Stalin was ill prepared for Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. His political future, and that of the Soviet Union, hung in the balance, but Stalin recovered to lead his country to victory. The human cost was enormous, but was not a consideration for him.

After World War Two, the Soviet Union entered the nuclear age and ruled over an empire which included most of eastern Europe. Increasingly paranoid, Stalin died of a stroke on 5 March 1953.

Add a few notes about the early Cold War, atomic espionage and the show trials and you more or less have the American assessment of Stalin as well.

But one thing that becomes apparent if you spend any amount of time here is that World War II is present in a way that it simply is not in the United States.  This might be expected given the fact that some 400,000 American soldiers died in that war but the USSR lost nearly 25 million soldiers and civilians. The 900 day seige of Leningrad was, itself, worse than anything the US suffered during the war.

The popular view seems to hold that no matter his other flaws, Stalin is also the man responsible for defeating fascism. And that, at least in this country, still counts for something.

The day started with me breaking the buckle on my belt as I left for campus, so I was forced to walk around Moscow with pants sagging like a rapper. Then some students escorted me to the subway and I stopped at a newsstand and requested a bottle of “vodka” instead of a bottle of “water” (the words are similar in Russian because “W” is pronounced as “V”). Then after making it onto said subway with one of the students I managed to trip and land squarely in the lap of a Russian Army officer.

But the students loved my talk on slavery and the origins of the civil war so I’m putting this one in the “W” column. Even the other situations had silver linings — I learned the word for “belt” (pronounced Ree-Mean”), learned that the difference between vodka and water is largely in the accentuation and that Russian military look very dour in those gray uniforms and fur hats but can be very tolerant of uncoordinated Americans.

On the other hand, not everyone on Moscow mass transit is so tolerant. I had a fascinating experience on the trolley. An elderly man looked at me and then began speaking curtly to the student I was with and abruptly turned his back to me for the rest of the ride.

Thinking like an American, I assumed this was something racial but it was something far more subtle and interesting than that. The only word I caught during his tirade was “Americanski.” The student (who introduced himself to me as “Andre, like Dr. Dre”) later told me that he’d said “At one time Americans knew not to come to Russia and speak so loudly.”

Yesterday was “Red Army Day,” kind of the Russian equivalent of Veteran’s Day. I’m told that crowds, distinctly skewed toward the older set, gather to chant old slogans and praise the “protectors of the motherland” in tones that betray a strong sentimental streak for the old days.

Come off that kind of sugar high onto a crowded rush hour trolley car to see a large American laughing it up with a young Russian who speaks perfect English, is writing a thesis on Lyndon B. Johnson’s civil rights policies and carrying a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in his hand and you can see how it might make a man go Kruschev, so to speak.

I suspect he was, in effect, pining for the good old Cold War days when Americans were kept at arm’s length, not invited to campus to help shape the minds of Russian youth. It goes beyond simply the stark lines of East and West that were perilous but, ultimately, fairly simply to comprehend. Yuri Rogoulev, a historian at Moscow State who specializes in FDR and the history of the New Deal, told me that people long for the status and sheer geographical size of the world power that they once lived in.

But there were also practical considerations. The breakup of the Soviet Union meant the dissolution of more than political bonds. Families were strained as relatives in one place found themselves in a separate country from their siblings, aunts, children. It’s as if people in New England one day woke up and found that they needed a passport to get from Connecticut to Massachusetts to visit relatives and depending upon how the two states were getting along they might not be able to enter at all.

Moscow itself is a fascinating blend of those currents. There are staid Soviet era buildings being crowded out by high rises and bathed in pink neon light from the billboard ads for Samsung computers or the latest BMW sports car. (I told Andre that I have a habit of taking photos of advertisements when I’m abroad because it gives me insight into what people think about. He said “Yes,” and then pointed to a sign above a medical office and said “We Russians think about gynecology.”)

I thought it superficial but the first thing I noticed about Moscow was how incredibly well-dressed people are. I mean, they are, like, New York stylish. (I saw a woman wearing a purple fur coat and managing to make you wish more people knew how to wear a purple fur like she did.) But even that is part of this dynamic of pushing the old ways deeper into the recesses of history. As Yuri pointed out to me “For nearly a century we were forced to dress like proletarians. Now people want to run in the opposite direction.”

Interestingly, Andre wouldn’t translate the old man’s outburst until we got off the trolley (and I do wonder if he told me everything the man said) but I burst out laughing at the thought of me be decried as an agent of western encroachment, globalization and probably espionage for good measure. “Dre” felt a bit of empathy for him, though. “There are really old people who miss those days. It’s sad.”

As for the lecture, I talked, they took notes; I cracked jokes, they laughed. They asked questions, I answered. A cellphone went off and I was polite but firm about them being on silent during class and they all were eager to talk to me more afterward.

Happy about all of it.

My car was broken into last week. Under normal circumstances this would be a routine hazard of urban living. You see a parking spot; someone else sees an opportunity. But these are not normal circumstances – or even more disturbing – they may come to be. This is the eighth break-in on my block this summer (one neighbor’s car was stolen, likely used in a robbery and then totaled in an accident.)

These are the nuisance crimes but they’re also part of a much bigger picture: the friend who looked out the window to see someone kicking in the door of her neighbor’s house, the gang-related shootings and armed robberies. The general feeling of peril, or at least lack of safety, that seems to be creeping across the city.

I suppose that it is something of a left-handed blessing that if you’re going to have a crime wave at least it can occur in an election year. One, the people in office are forced to pay attention to the issue. Two, there’s always a chance that you might just elect someone capable of making serious improvements.

I met city council rep Ceasar Mitchell last year at the Democratic convention (he’s now running for President of the Atlanta City Council) and it occurred to me that it might be worth talking to him about what he thinks it will take to move the city beyond these bullet days and back toward something at least a little less forboding.

WJC: A neighbor’s car was stolen for the 3rd time. A cop comes and says that there are only eight officers patrolling the entire zone. If two crimes occur in the zone at the same time they cannot possibly respond to both of them. Now, I’d hate to have my car stolen but on the other hand what if I called the police and they get to my house and are then delayed responding to a homicide across town? How does the city council president address that?

CM: I think that’s part of our experience. We’re not just elected officials. We live and work in the community. We’re impacted by taxes and water rates and crime just like everyone else. In December I went to an event at Hammonds House and when I came out my car window was broken. They stole only one thing – my computer was in the car, my checkbook, they only thing they took was my Ipod. It didn’t matter that I was a councilmember. I had to call 9/11 like everyone else. We bring our experiences to bear. I live in West End, my experiences there are not different from anyone else there.

The city charter says we have to provide for the safety, health and welfare of the residents. I served as chairman of the public safety committee for years. My father was a police officer. Years ago I authored legislation and got it passed despite a mayoral veto that requires all graduates of the police academy to spend 8 weeks on neighborhood foot patrol. That’s about community policing. That came from having a father who patrolled in Perry Homes and from hearing residents in South Atlanta saying they wanted to see police officers walking in the community because that has an impact on crime. Community policing makes a difference. It’s really about preventing crime, not responding to crime.

The original plan was to create a program called COPTAP to create a foot patrol over in every zone in Atlanta over a 16-month period. I still hope to do that. I want to see that happen. I plan to really push that as council president.

WJC: How can you pay for these programs given the state of the budget?

In this current environment we’re faced with a somber choice about whether we want to raise taxes in order to continue delivering services at a certain level plus eliminating furloughs. Right now furloughs are killing our ability to deliver services. We’ve rolled back taxes for the last 6 years. We have to continue to look for other sources of revenue. For instance, we fired the person handling parking enforcement and now are not generating any revenue from parking. When I was chair of public safety I introduced legislation that would require a fee for pre-trial intervention for ordinance violators. If you violate a city ordinance and go through a pre-trial intervention we should collect revenue. We’ll have to be creative about fees and revenue.

Every year the city council is required to draft a resolution with our budget priorities. This year I took the leadership and drafted a resolution communicating one priority — to fully fund public safety and eliminate furloughs. We reserve the right to institution a tax increase if we deem it to be appropriate. But how does that impact the community?

One of my ideas was to host two town hall meetings in zone four. I did that for two reasons. The first was to give residents a chance to interact with public safety officials. The second was to really show and exemplify just how big zone four is. We had two meetings, 15 miles apart, both in the same zone. That was to make the point that the zone is too big. The problem that the police officer was trying to express to you is that you have a zone and a beat. You have a number of officers in a beat and umbrella officers without any particular beat. When you have eight officers, you don’t have umbrella officers on that shift, there are beat officers missing. It means that the police officers are undermanned. If we had two officers per beat and an umbrella, I think we can improve the situation and prevent crime.

WJC: This sounds like it would require a serious increase in taxes. To the ordinary resident in Capitol View, for instance, worried about a break in or another crime, it would look like he or she was being penalized because the city didn’t budget correctly in the first place.

CM: The old saying is that you never raise taxes in an election year. We could easily skirt the issue and try to save our political hides and fake the funk with the people telling them that they’ll have a city government that can actually deliver services. I think we’ll put ourselves in a real state of emergency if we don’t make up for the revenue that didn’t come in because of the economy. The focus is on public safety and we’re going to continue to look for ways to cut costs.

The final episode in the series that was Michael Jackson’s life aired last week and as you would have expected the ratings were gold. It’s easy to forget that in addition to his widely credited musical innovation Jackson is the godfather of a much more dubious offering to modern life: the reality series. He started out stealing plays from PT Barnum’s book, turning himself into a spectacle knowing that adoration generates even more money when it’s mixed with a touch of condescension. Thus the storylines – each of them as real as cubic zirconium – about sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber and buying the bones of the elephant man. Those were the things you could get away with in the old three-network and daily paper days. But it was his skewed fate to actually become more eccentric at the precise moment when media became the new Jesus.

Back when the ten-year old Michael trilled and crooned with an old soul’s knowledge and a master artist’s self-possession, the television was built to more human dimensions. It shut down in the wee hours, as if transistors needed shut eye too. But the arc of Michael’s life is a curious Benjamin Button series of events. Go back to that clip of the little man with his brothers on the Ed Sullivan show singing “I Wonder Who’s Loving You” and you see no raw talent. It’s the level of nuance and dexterity, the effortless blend of lilt and coarseness, that still gives you chills. To simply call him a prodigy would be to diminish him somehow. Now reconcile that man-child with the childish man – the taupe-skinned curiosity dangling a newborn over a balcony. The grown ass man in need of a mama’s rebuke, “Boy, act like you got some damn sense”. The one eating through money and having his face carved into abstract art. Then consider that all this occurs within a media that has become a digital deity of sorts – never tiring, perpetually in motion, twenty-four hours, omnipresent, all-knowing.

John Steinbeck surveyed the wreckage of the Great Depression and observed that a bank was more than the sum of its human parts, that where individual men might feel sympathy toward those whom they evicted and dispossessed, the Bank was immune to such sentiments. Jackson’s demise illustrated that media is our version of a bank. Some lone soul with a pen, iPhone and laptop might have recognized that he was part of precisely the kind frenzy that drove Jackson into the abyss but that is a fleeting thought. Pixels have no conscience.

The complete piece is posted here ]]> http://americanexception.com/?feed=rss2&p=538 http://americanexception.com/?p=536 http://americanexception.com/?p=536#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:47:24 +0000 AmericanException http://americanexception.com/?p=536

I continue to work at finishing my book but I did take time to knock out this “Thanks, but no thanks,” piece on the Congressional apology for slavery for politico.com.

Here’s the cornerstone:

The House is likely to soon pass legislation offering a formal apology for slavery. The Senate passed the same resolution on June 18, acknowledging the “injustice, cruelty and brutality” of slavery.

The timing was a sad irony — it passed the Senate the day before Juneteenth. June 19 marks the annual commemoration of the day when slaves in Texas received word of emancipation, more than two years after Lincoln issued his proclamation.

The response to the resolution has been a sort of inverted Juneteenth. The holiday recognizes a grand federal proclamation about slavery that was deliberately withheld from black people. Now Congress is on the verge of passing a grand federal proclamation about slavery, which black America simply chose to ignore. The primary effect of this apology has been the synchronized rolling of 66 million eyes.

In 1989 the Iranian regime put a contract on Salman Rushdie’s head because  he wrote a book. In 2009 millions of Iranians took to the streets to with freedom of speech as a prominent demand. Progress, perhaps.

Two years after Ayotollah Khomeini of Iran declared a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses the author made a surprise appearance at Columbia University at a forum on the First Amendment.

Maybe he was ahead of the curve.

“Sometimes I think that, on day, Muslims will be ashamed of what Muslims did in these times, will find the “Rushdie affair” as imporbably as the west now finds martyr-burning. One day they may agree that — as the European Enlightenment demonstrated — freedom of thought is precisely freedom from religious control, freedom from accusations of blasphemy…

‘Free speech is a non-starter,’ says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”

– From Rushdie’s speech “What is My Single Life Worth?”

Iran has an electoral system that is similar in some respects to China’s or Vietnam’s. Elections are held periodically, but the lists of candidates are carefully vetted by the real controlling power structure — in Vietnam or China’s case, the Communist Party; in Iran’s case, the clergy — to ensure ideological compliance and loyalty. Moussavi passed through this system of ideological control; he’s no radical reformer. But what’s happened is that simply by representing an alternative, Moussavi became a vehicle for the expression of the hopes of people who are far more radical in their reformist hopes than anyone in the dominant power structure. Even though the players in the Iranian elections were all screened for their personal views, the simple fact of an election became a forum in which radical and unacceptable political views could express themselves and ultimately co-opt one of the candidates.

I’m far from an expert on Iran but I have to ask a question that I think may have been overlooked in the frenzy of election fallout. What is the end game here?

On another level I’m asking what do Mousavi and his supporters want because that it likely the key to how this will play itself out. And finally, on its most basic level, the question is: will Mousavi press his demands even if it places him in direct conflict with the Ayatollah?

Inspirational as they are there is a contrary logic to the protests — they demand new elections from the same government they believe stole the previous one. And if the Iranian government wants to be smart about stifling democracy they’ll hold new elections immediately. Despite the anger and the amazing displays of rebellion (for instance the hackers who responded to the shut down of twitter and facebook by crashing the government’s websites and the Tehran University faculty who resigned en masse) their demands are fairly conservative. This may not be a fatal flaw (the American Revolution began with demands for fairly simple reforms, as did the Cuban Revolution; the Montgomery Improvement Association initially fought for a more humane form of segregation, not its complete eradication.) But that said, the Iranian protests might not ever take such a radical turn.

The Obama administration has probably considered all this which probably explains the tepid tone of their criticism. The prevailing logic is that when the dust settles we will still be dealing with Iran’s ruling theocracy and the president of their choosing.

Even if the Iranian protestors  succeed in their demands and even if Mousavi were to win a new election, the end result would likely be the reinforcement, not the weakening of the theocrats. Flexibility, or even the appearance of flexibility, benefits even the most repressive regimes.

On some level it would be in the regime’s interests to have Mousavi, who is — whether justly or not — quickly becoming a Guevara figure in the West, succeed Ahmadinejad as President. Mousavi favors women’s rights, two weeks ago President Obama singled out women’s rights as a key concern in the Islamic world. You can imagine some future edict bolstering the status of women in Iranian society and a flurry of cable news commentary about whether this constitutes a diplomatic overture or not.

But since the real power rests in the hands of the governing clerics, Mousavi could just as well make for nice reformist window dressing — a situation that would make it that much harder to pressure Iran on nuclear weapons. Certainly it would complicate the PR angle of any Israeli attack on their nuclear sites.

Despite the reports of casualties from the protests and the threat of police using live rounds the regime has yet to go Tiannemen on the protesters. The arrival of tanks and a brutal crackdown would certainly be a bad sign. But the arrival of ballot boxes and new campaign posters might be even worse.