Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: The Vote in Russia

Here is something to munch on the weekend that Russia votes and, speaking of Russia, a weekend on which Trump stayed in Washington to brood and fulminate in the White House about, among other things, well, Russia of course

Russians will reelect Vladimir Putin as president March 18, 2020, which as this is written is tomorrow.

Why is it a foregone conclusion?

Because, given the chance to choose free, open, decent democratic government, Russians have failed history and themselves at every opportunity and will gladly and willingly do it again in the farce of their 2018 presidential election.

They have throughout history fought fiercely and without parallel courage against foreign invaders (e.g. Prussia, Napoleon, Austria-Hungary, Nazi Germany and, more than once and not just in the Cold War, against us,  the U.S.A. – see below as to that).

But in the parallel of their domestic history, they have never  defeated and forever surrendered to internal tyrannies.

In 1917, in 1953, in 1990 and beyond, down to this very moment, they have — ever and always as they will choose tomorrow — chosen to be repressed, to live in fear, whether of the Tsar’s secret police, of the Cheka, the NKVD, the MSB, the KGB or, now, the FSB (the Russian name translates to Federal Security Service) while submitting to a burden of economic poverty enforced by never-ending total economic and political corruption.

Those security organizations, no matter under what regime and to whichever despot they have been responsible, share the same lineage while serving the same functions in Russian-Soviet-Russian history. They have been, as the FSB is today, the overseers and administrators of state terror and the overseas agent (witness London) of that terror in service to the particular despot of the moment.

In October 1917 by promising bread and peace, with cries of “All Power to the Soviets” Lenin and the Bolsheviks overturned the nascent but inept democracy led by Social-Democrat Alexander Kerensky, who wanted to keep Russia in the war even as the Russian Army was deserting by the tens of thousands. The Bolsheviks kept their promises by finding money for bread and by withdrawing Russia from the war,  making a separate peace with Germany in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

(If the phrase  “All Power to the Soviets” strikes a bell then remember the film “Reds”? The story of John Reed and Louise Bryant, who were portrayed by Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton? “Reds” won Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director (Beatty) and Best Picture at the 1962 Oscars.

(After the premature death of Reed, author of “Ten Days That Shook the World”,  Bryant later married William C. Bullitt, who in 1933 was FDR’s choice to be first U.S ambassador to the Soviet Union and for a number of years became the unrequited love in the life of Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, FDR’s greatly powerful right-hand woman, who is portrayed by Jean Hagen — Best Supporting Actress winner for “Singing in the Rain”  — as FDR’s secretary in “Sunrise at Campbell”, a film for which Greer Garson, winner of the 1943 Best Actress Oscar for “Mrs. Miniver” got another Best Actress nomination for her role as Eleanor Roosevelt.

(Bullitt later served as our ambassador to France and was in Paris on May 10, 1940 when Germany invaded France during WWII. Louise Bryant Reed Bullitt? She and Bullitt divorced. She died relatively early of a rare disease complicated by alcoholism. Missy LeHand had two strokes in 1941 and died at age 48 in 1944. Doesn’t history give us a rich tapestry of extraordinary internecine and interwoven complications? You couldn’t make it up and there will be a few more historical intersections here).

But back to our story.

The Bolshevik Revolution ended the Kerensky government in the Duma with its ill-fated bid to keep Russia in the war and to govern after forcing the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March 1917.

At nearly the same time our entry into the war in 1917 provided fresh forces and arms desperately needed by the British and French to meet and defeat the onslaught of German divisions released from the Eastern Front after Germany’s peace with Russia.

We also know the Germans sent Lenin home to Russia in a sealed train to inject him into the scrum of Russia’s political and military upheaval in late 1917 with the aim of getting Russia to sue for peace and leave the Western allies alone to face the Germans.

The German ploy nearly succeeded with their huge March 1918 offensive but it fell short and left the Kaiser’s army badly battered as the allies held up against the fierce German attack, aided by the first major active American engagement on the Western front.

The ensuing allied offensive in the summer and fall brought Germany to its knees and to sue for an armistice signaling its defeat. The armistice became effective at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918 — the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, which we remember by celebrating Veterans Day. On that date, TCM usually shows “Sergeant York” starring Gary Cooper, who won Best Actor playing the role of Tennessee farmer, Sgt. Alvin York, who won the Medal of Honor leading an attack that killed 25 Germans, captured 35 machine guns and took 132 Germans prisoner.

While all that was going on the Bolsheviks, now in power but besieged, took a harder view of the situation at home in Russia. They believed that to truly end the monarchy and any foolish hope for its restoration, they had to kill it, literally kill it. So they did just that in the early morning hours of July 17, 1918 in the cellar of a house in Yekaterinburg.

There in that remote city, in the wee hours on that fateful morning, they executed the Tsar and his wife the Tsarina Alexander, she who had fallen under the spell of the Russian Orthodox monk Grigori Rasputin believing he had saved her son from death.

The Bolsheviks also shot their three princess daughters (there is no doubt that Princess Anastasia died that day no matter the later pretenders) and killed the family’s only son and thus immediate heir to the throne, the 14-year-old hemophiliac Tsarevitch Alexander, the son Alexandra believed had been saved by Rasputin (the monk was killed in 1916 by three Russian noblemen attempting to rid the Tsar’s court of him).

Incidentally, Alexandra, the last Tsarina, was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria while Kaiser Wilhelm II, the second and last German emperor was Victoria’s grandson — and known as Willy by his cousins Nicky (Tsar Nicholas II) and King Edward VII, eldest son of Victoria, who finally got his chance to step up to being king when his mother died in 1901 ending her 63-year reign. You can certainly say that World War I was a family affair.

But don’t shed tears for the Romanovs, who never were and are not now worthy of anyone’s sympathy much less empathy (Yes, there is a movie about how they met their end, including scenes of the murder of Rasputin but it is not very good and won no awards).

Turning away from Yekaterinburg and back to Moscow, as the Bolsheviks consolidated power, Lenin turned to one of his most trusted henchmen, Felix Dzerzhinsky, to establish the Cheka, in every way the successor to the Tsarist secret police, modeled exquisitely on that organization that, for decades, had hounded, persecuted, imprisoned, assassinated and executed Russia’s revolutionaries — whether Bolshevik or Menshevik or their populist predecessors.

These included Lenin’s older brother, Alexander, executed in 1887 for his role in a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III, father of Nicholas II, the last Tsar. By executing Alexander Ulyanov, the Romanovs made a bitter enemy of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who one day changed his name to Lenin.

Assassination? It’s what Russians do.

Dzershinsky was not a nice man oh no, not at all. But if he was a hard man and he was, then he was also a measured man, who kept state terror within certain boundaries as he developed it to suit Lenin’s design.

But, by comparison to the pedophile Lavrentiy Beria — who principally ran the NKVD, the Cheka’s successor organization under Stalin during and after the great purges of the 1930s, including the purges of Beria’s predecessors in charge of terror — compared to Beria, Dzershinsky was a pussy cat.

Of course neither of them had available the nerve agents used in recent assassinations of Russian defectors in England. They were not so particular. Their political reprisals, selections and murders were at first under Lenin in the hundreds; then, under Stalin and Beria, in the tens, even hundreds of thousands.

They were the inventors and keepers of the Gulag, the real world authors of the days “…In the life of “Ivan Denisovich” (little known film of it made in 1970 starring Tom Courtney – no awards).

Do we bear some responsibility, some culpability for this? Yes, because immediately following the armistice that ended WWI, even while negotiating the Treaty of Versailles that settled the peace and redrew the map of the world (sowing the seeds for our War in Vietnam — but that’s another story), Americans joined British, French, Czech and even Germans in fighting against the Bolsheviks and arming their opponents in the civil war that raged across Russia and into Poland from 1918 through 1921 (see “Reds” again).

Woodrow Wilson was, beside a virulent racist, myopic as to foreign affairs, including for a while the west’s British inspired postwar misadventure against the new Soviet Union and its nascent Red Army; a force created and led by Leon Trotsky, who himself would be assassinated by order of Stalin in 1938 in Mexico City.

Assassination, it’s what Russians do.

One of the foremost proponents of that misadventure in the Soviet Union/Russia was the then British Colonial Secretary, a fellow named Winston Churchill, who early became an implacable foe of the Soviet Union although, 20 years or so later, he enjoyed Stalin’s company at Moscow, Tehran and Yalta in their common battle against Nazi Germany. (“Darkest Hour” anyone? Or how about 1972’s “Young Winston”).

Churchill, who died at 91 in 1965, remains a strong current influence on the United States today in our ongoing  stupid adventures in the Middle East, but especially Iraq, because in his day as Colonial Secretary he fulminated the creation of Iraq as a British dependency,  and of Jordan too, out of former Ottoman Turk territory.

The Brits gave both countries kings, one of whom, the Lord Feisal portrayed by Alec Guinness in “Lawrence of Arabia”, became king of Iraq while his brother Abdullah became king of the new country called Jordan, today ruled by his great-grandson, Abdulla II, who is negotiating the grand Israeli/Palestinian solution with? With Jared Kushner!

And who was one of Churchill’s principal advisors in all that and worse and more in the Mideast?  (Think BP)  Who did Churchill look to for advice? Yes, right, Col. T.E.Lawrence, otherwise known as “Lawrence of Arabia” (1963 Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director).

Aren’t the movies a grand way of seeing, telling and distorting history!

Lenin and his men had their own cruel, hard view of history and the ugly necessities of revolution and would have managed to create a terror state without outside provocation. But the West, allied with armed remnants of the Austro-Hungarian army and with White Russian nationalists and tsarists, provided them with all the proof they needed that only a state built on terror would protect their revolution.

Given all this, today the eternal certain choice made by Russians is, as it has ever been, to place themselves under the heels of tyrants and put themselves at the mercy of corrupt and corrupting despots.

They have chosen always, given the choice between an open free society and repression, to be ruled, not governed, by a despot, whether he is called the tsar, the general secretary or the president.

Their bad choices are the reason their’s is a corrupt, corrupting and corrupted nation: because they have yielded themselves and continue to yield themselves to autocratic despotism at every turn of history’s pages.

Putin is not their destiny. He is their historic and historical choice. When he goes there will be ferment again with the odds all but certain that out of that next ferment will come yet another autocratic despot to whom Russians will surrender themselves.

Out of all this history, from everything we know of Russia and the twisted Russian national ethos, is the Mueller investigation to discover the extent of the now very clear Russian interference — and likely manipulation — of our 2016 presidential election a worthy endeavor and one essential to assure the security of our democracy? You bet it is.  Could it be that Trump was Moscow’s Manchurian candidate? Time will answer that and probably sooner than later.

With Trump’s presidency, Russia today is for sure a lesson Americans should learn, take to heart and take to the voting booths this November and again in 2020 — before we find ourselves alike to Russia and the Russians.

We Americans, we are all making a movie right now. It’s up to us how it’s ends.