Russia

Faberge egg with royal portraits.

What is it with the Russians? I have been asking myself that question since childhood. My maternal grandmother came from part of Russia, Belarus, in 1917. I have known Russians from the Old Country. When I was a child, we attended many Russian picnics, massive affairs held in parks during the summer months. I am told I spoke Russian in my early years. I cannot remember speaking it. I can remember those drunken picnics...with a shudder.

I have first-hand experience of Russian homophobia from my childhood and beyond. It is deeply entrenched in a culture dominated for centuries by Orthodox Catholicism, a particularly superstitious and pernicious form of religion. The Russian Orthodox Church colluded with aristocrats for centuries to maintain a form of slavery, serfdom, in the empire. That slavery was emancipated in the same century as slavery was emancipated here in the United States. However, the economic slavery continued until the Russian Revolution.

My grandmother and most of her siblings were illiterate and innumerate. Russia did not educate its populace under monarchy. This was intentional subjugation through ignorance, similar to conservative Islamist subjugation of women in modern times. Anyone who gets all gooey over the assassination of the last Czar may give this history of oppression some consideration. 

Russians, like much of the Muslim world, is emerging from this past of mass oppression by power. The Bolsheviks and subsequent Soviets inherited a population which was abysmally ignorant and superstitious. It was a vast part of the planet living in the darkness of enforced generational poverty and labor exploitation. The natural environment made the challenges of lifting up that population harder. Most of Russia suffers killing winters. Scraping a life out of the ground was hard when most of the produce was taken away by those in power to support their grand lifestyles. 

I agree with Russian politicians and celebrities who defend Russian homophobia and other cultural quirks on the basis that Russia's culture is different from the developed world's. It is quite. The government's use of the reliable Orthodox Church to quell dissent in the past twenty years has led to a revival of medieval superstition in the poor masses. Alcoholism, an accepted national epidemic, has blossomed. Cutbacks in public information, public health and public education for the masses have paralleled the massive fortune-building of the Oligarchs through corruption as Soviet resources have been plundered in the name of free-market capitalism. Ayn Rand must be smiling a smile of retribution from whatever level of hell she may occupy in an imagined afterlife.