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US, Russia differences run deep
By Howard Mettee
One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wisest observations in recent years was revealed when he commented on the American ability to perceive. He said that when we look at the Chinese, it is clear that they are different by the way they look. But when we look at Russians, they look the same as us, but they are different than us. Such a simple seemingly superficial remark.
To my mind this difference runs deeper than that between borscht and chicken noodle soup. It is a difference that reflects two rather different histories – one, based on more than 240 years of representative democracy, capitalism and individual and corporate free enterprise (for all but the poor and slaves early on); the other, 1,000 years of tribal and state coalescence around a centralized, paternal monarchy (known as tsars), a model which descended from an even earlier Chinese dynastic systems.
These differences might begin to explain why our two societies, and more importantly our two leadership classes, today simply don’t understand each other’s world perspectives. Quite naturally these two strands of historical DNA are relished by their respective inheritors, despite glaring instances of injustice and human suffering embedded in both (genocides, purges, famines), or extended by both beyond their borders (colonialism, world domination, imperial empires).
Nuclear weapons
It seems inevitable that two such systems will clash in a single world. When both are armed with nuclear machetes whose use can end natural life as we have known it, it is absolutely essential to understand how to avoid major war.
A Time magazine article of 21 years ago is unclassified testimony that we were as guilty of interfering in the Russian election of Boris Yeltsin in 1996 as we accuse the Russians of having been in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Can we not understand that the masters of manufacturing public opinion (we call it advertising) might have taught their pupils well, and now the Russians not only recognize these techniques being imposed on them, but are also capable of (primitively perhaps) extending them to their country of origin? Who would have expected differently? The secret is not to let propaganda defeat us – believing ours only, never theirs – but then, to find a peaceful way between the two, by slowly trusting and verifying, and civilizing our thoughts and rhetoric.
Dr. Howard Mettee is professor emeritus of Youngstown State University’s chemistry department. He is a student of Russia and has visited the country more than 20 times,