Way back when, I was a Cosmo Girl. I read Cosmopolitan
magazine and studied its barrage of tips on how to attract men.
One tip was to read an intriguing book on the bus to
and from work. I settled on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”.
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This literary
honey trap did not work. But after reading “Crime and Punishment”, I came away
thinking the Russian temperament was soulful and truthful.
Raskolnikov, the poor former student, kills an older
woman who is an unethical pawnbroker, as well as her half sister. He is
immediately filled with guilt and disgust and, in the end, turns himself over
to the police.
It got stuck in my 20-year-old head that
self-incrimination was a Russian trait, and that Russians understood on a deep
level that you cannot put yourself above the rules just because you think you
are superior.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, of course,
contradicts that notion, as did Joseph Stalin.
Putin is less Dostoyevsky than Euripides, a walking
revenge play. Like Medea — a searing production of the opera that kicked off the Met
season on Tuesday — Putin commits savage murder of innocents without worrying
about the consequences.
Medea feels disrespected — that is all she needs to
justify her carnage, murdering her own children and her husband’s new bride
with a poisoned robe and coronet. In some versions of the Greek myth, Medea
helped Jason get the Golden Fleece, killing her own brother and betraying her
father to assist him, and she was not about to see her husband happy in another
woman’s arms. Now she wants blood, summoning in the opera the “Black Furies”
and “deities of Hell”.
Putin, too, feels disrespected, still mourning the
breakup of the Soviet Union, content to murder any number of innocent
Ukrainians to slake his longing to stitch that lost empire back together.
At the end of the opera, Medea sets fire to the
temple where she has killed her two sons. It bursts into flames around her. The
horrified crowd runs away, singing:“Oh, terror!/Earth and Heaven are in
flames!’Let us fly from/the burning sky.”
In an eerie echo, Putin raised the chilling specter
of a burning sky in a speech on Friday at the gilded Georgievsky Hall of the
Grand Kremlin Palace. He darkly alluded to using nuclear weapons, which would
leave Earth and heaven in flames.
“The US is the only country in the world that has
used nuclear weapons twice, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
Japan. And they created a precedent,” he said.
Putin charged that “the dictatorship of the Western
elites” was an “overthrow of faith and traditional values”. It has, he said,
come “to resemble a religion in reverse — pure Satanism”.
The US is the only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons twice, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. And they created a precedent.
Wrapping up his own destiny with Mother Russia’s,
noting that his country must occupy its rightful place in the world as “a great
thousand-year-old power, a whole civilization”, he announced that he was
formally swallowing four provinces in eastern Ukraine following fake
referendums there.
We are awash in fear and anger at his unholy
brutality, but Putin does not care. Like Medea, he is unconcerned about the
cries of the Greek chorus.
To justify his unprovoked attempt to subsume
Ukraine, Putin made the absurd claim that the West is a “neocolonial system”
that has always “dreamed about” dividing, weakening, and breaking up Russia and
turning it into a colony.
While US President Joe Biden and officials in Europe
blamed Russia for sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines, designed to carry
Russian natural gas to Europe, Putin implied it was the work of the
Anglo-Saxons. “Sanctions are no longer enough, and now they have turned to
subversion,” he said.
Biden responded during a news conference at the
White House on Friday, announcing that the administration was imposing new
sanctions against Russia, and stating that the world would not recognize the
fraudulent referendums.
“He’s not going to scare us or intimate us,” Biden
said. “He can’t seize his neighbor’s territory and get away with it.”
The Ukrainians are making successful military
offensives in the northeast of the country, and Russian men are fleeing Putin’s
Russia in droves; by some estimates, more men have left Russia to avoid service
in Ukraine than have served there.
Donald Trump posted on his social media site: “The
Russia/Ukraine catastrophe should NEVER have happened, and would definitely not
have happened if I were President.”
He may be right. If Trump were president, he would
be in Putin’s pocket and America would not be helping Ukraine.
It has long been assumed that a nuclear weapon would never
be used again because of the consequences. But what if you are dealing with a
malefactor with no concern for consequences? A modern Greek tragedy.
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