THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 12, 1997 TAG: 9701100655
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: DAVE ADDIS
LENGTH: 62 lines
Over there to the right, on the other side of the page, you'll find a rather nasty assessment of democracy, Russia-style, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate who wrote The Gulag Archipelago.
The article is a lot easier to read than his name is, so don't be scared. Give it a look.
You could find good cause to ignore Solzhenitsyn - he's been something of a full-time contrarian for many years. When he left his comfy Vermont hideout to return to the motherland, he unloaded on westerners in general and Americans in particular as a bunch of fat, decadent whiners.
When he got back to Russia he embarked on a cross-country train trip, during which he pretty much pronounced the place a complete sewer at every stop.
He might be right on both counts, but that's not the sort of thing a citizen of either society likes to hear. (A Russian friend told me they'd pretty much given up reading Solzhenitsyn: ``It was fun when he was banned. Now that he's legal, we just find him boring.'')
Solzhenitsyn is on point, though, when he complains that our view of Russia is tied too closely to Boris Yeltsin's blood pressure, that our confidence in Russian reform is too skewed by an ailing Yeltsin's breathy promises.
The rot is right beneath the surface, Solzhenitsyn says. We're just unwilling to look at it.
I came to believe him a couple of days ago when a little blurb moved across the Associated Press wire about the Russian government's latest attack on crime. It said:
MOSCOW (AP) - About 10,000 Interior Ministry troops will help city police patrol the Russian capital's streets this year, a senior officer said Friday.
That might sound like a bold stroke, but Interior Ministry troops - they're known as OMON, never mind what it stands for - have been patrolling the city for years.
Having OMON police the streets of Moscow is like having linebackers from the Oklahoma Sooners police the streets of Tulsa. The OMON boys are a nasty, swaggering bunch who dress out in military gear and don't trouble themselves over niceties like due process or civil rights.
A colleague, J. Andrew Stanford, spent a shift with OMON when the two of us were working for a Moscow news magazine in 1993.
It was a slow night. The most exciting moment came when a drunk had the misfortune of banging his car into the rear of the black bus that the OMON boys were riding.
They beat the guy bloody with rubber truncheons, then grabbed him by the hair and held him up for display, like some scalped Presbyterian settler, so Stanford could get a nice, clear photograph for the magazine.
Later, bored, they stopped at a street kiosk - a sort of curbside 7-Eleven fashioned from shipping crates - and ``liberated'' some vodka and a couple of cases of beer, which they drank while on duty.
They made Stanford promise not to write about the liquor theft. Having seen what happened to the drunk, he wisely agreed. At the end of the shift they presented him with a rubber truncheon as a memento. Or a warning.
Solzhenitsyn was on the blunt end of this sort of ``justice'' under the Soviets. If he says Moscow still has a whiff of the gulag about it, then President Clinton, who is to go there in March for a summit meeting, would be wise to pay attention. MEMO: Dave Addis is the editor of Commentary.