Down the Russian Rabbit Hole

Recently I decided to descend somewhat tentatively down a very big rabbit hole, perhaps the biggest of all: Russia. One of the guides I’ve chosen to lead me on this journey is the writer who goes by the alias Edward Slavsquat. He is a self-exiled American who has lived in Russia for quite a few years.

You can read about him on his Substack here. I recommend that you start reading his dispatches from the Evil Empire, as an antidote to the safe, effective, and unbiased coverage of Russia by the Putin-hating glorious mainstream press, the Putin-worshipping alternate media, and everybody in between.

Now for a long-winded explanation of why I decided to go down this rabbit hole:

For reasons that are now lost in the mists of time, when I entered high school, a counselor advised me to take Russian, instead of Spanish, the usual choice in California. This turned out to be a life-changing moment. The Russian class was taught by a great teacher, Don Richardson, who also worked on weekends for the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Russian grammar turned out to be similar to the smattering of Latin I’d picked up in elementary school.

Despite my poor speaking abilities in Russian (I was much better at reading and writing), I was selected from the junior class to go on a month-long student trip to Russia in the summer of 1971. This trip was run by the Choate School, a high-toned prep school in Connecticut that had a good Russian department, and which ran these trips every summer. I was the only non-Choate kid in the group, so naturally I was scorned by some of the elite Choaties, who probably went on to become wealthy Leaders of Industry. But I digress.

The Russia trip was an eye-opening experience, despite the fact that the tour was corralled expertly and efficiently by Intourist, the official government tourism agency. We did have some free time in the cities we visited, but otherwise our travels were strictly controlled. Nevertheless, I did manage to get hints at how ordinary Russians lived, and I could see that they were just regular people who wanted to know more about America – and who had a strong lust for American goods, especially jeans.

In our class back home we eventually got around to reading bits of Russian literature in the original. I remember specifically a famous Pushkin story called “The Stationmaster”, and there were stories by Dostoyevsky and others in there too, though I can’t remember them now. This led me to read a number of Russian novels in English translations, including Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn.

In my first year in college (1972, UCSC) I also took a Russian class, and found that, as usual, college courses were much harder than in high school. All of us in the class subscribed to Pravda, which probably got us on an FBI list or something like it.

After college my Russian language skills languished, but I continued reading Russian literature, and went on a Nabokov craze for a couple of years. When I took up the piano again, I learned some music by Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev (just a couple of these). These three composers wrote some of the greatest music in the piano literature. Rachmaninoff is particularly popular in America, but Shostakovich wrote a little-known but masterful set of 24 Preludes and Fugues, and Prokofiev wrote what are arguably the best piano sonatas of the twentieth century (among many other great pieces).

Of course, now all of these writers and composers are off-limits to Good Ukraine-loving Americans, and should be shunned and forgotten. My admiration for these non-persons and my history with Russia and the Russian language demonstrate that I am likely to be a Russian agent, responsible in part for the election of Bad Orange Man. As you probably remember, Bad Orange Man and his opponent, Bernie the Commie, were both accused of being Russian agents by the safe and effective Democratic Party. We domestic terrorists were all working for that arch-criminal and all-around evil genius dictator, Vlad “The Impaler” Putin.

But seriously, after enduring years of anti-Russia propaganda in the mainstream press, and more recently, the equally deluded depiction of Russia as a beacon of anti-WEF/anti-WHO freedom in the alternative press, I decided I needed to look into learning how Russians really think. Not surprisingly, they seem to be much more distrustful of their government than Americans are of theirs. This gives me hope – not the false hope that their government will turn out to be a truth-telling bastion of liberty and light, but that the people themselves will be able to resist the insane actions of their government.