Anne Garrels (1951–2022)

I first read Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia back in 2017 and decided to reread it to see how it fared against the current situation with Putin invading Ukraine. Anne Garrels, a former NPR correspondent, visits Chelyabinsk, one city in Russia, and the various facets of that city and her people. She talks to people (who dare to speak with her) about what matters to them, their causes, and concerns.

Among the topics covered are stability at what cost, LGBTQ issues, Healthcare, show more Families, Religion, Freedom of Speech, environmental damage from nuclear waste, and the fallout of the 20th-century. Of course, Putin is center stage—hard to believe how long he has been in charge and this book was written about ten years ago.

I found the information on the Russian military to be particularly interesting—corruption, uneducated conscripts, hazing, bullying, and lies. She describes Russian parents searching through dead bodies in search of their sons after they’ve been left on battlefields. Corrupt officers don’t report deaths to grift off the system. Hard to not see how Ukraine's tractors are winning against tanks.

There are many parallels in the Russia of 2012 with what is happening in the U.S. now. Reading this now, you see what has led up to this moment of now. And more frighteningly, you see echoes happening in our own country and could very well be our own future unless we work to stamp out fascism here at home.

Here are a few parallels that struck me while reading:
*Accusing the LGBTQ community of grooming
*people believing state-run propaganda machines (in our case slipping into our tribe run machines)
*not caring about special needs children (there they encourage parents to give them up)
*having a healthcare system that doesn’t seem to work well
*putting the chicken farm on radioactive land (i.e. not cleaning up our messes)
*censorship and cancel culture combined in one system (don’t attend a rally and your boss will make sure the heat is turned off near your desk)
*bribery and corruption exhibited as normal by our last administration
Is Russia something we want to emulate? Personally, I’d take America’s can-do attitude, a military that leaves no man behind, and all of muh freedoms. F*** Putin. show less

Most people would agree that to look only at New York City or Washington, DC is to see the United States through a peculiar lens. You get a distorted image at best. By a similar token, many would also say that the political and cultural elites in the US have been doing just this and it is what paved the way for a non-establishment candidate, especially one who expressed the right populist and nationalist positions, to become a viable presidential candidate.

This, of course, in no way confined show more to how foreigners view the US: we all take this mental shortcut: Germany through Berlin and Munich, Egypt through Cairo, or Russia through Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Putin Country seeks to widen the lens through which we peer into the former Soviet Union. It takes us to a rusty, downtrodden land far from Moscow and distant indeed from St. Petersburg. The city of Chelyabinsk’s stands, in many ways, for Detroit or Memphis—and its one million souls are beset by many of the same ills: economic irrelevance, epidemic drug addiction, and the judgments of their more cosmopolitan fellows in the political and cultural capitals.

While I while I do not see any one slice of the United States as being more ‘American’ than any other, I do see where someone is coming from when they make such a claim about Detroit or Memphis or similar places. Certainly, by virtue of not being on the coasts, they have held on to aspects of their cultures that would have mutated under the constant and intimate contact with other communities experienced in the New Yorks of the world.

To be clear, I’m not making any judgments here: not about cultural mixing and melding and appropriation (which is more or less uncontrollable in any event) nor about whether one culture is superior to another. I am saying though, that the high-profile cities one typically views their host nations through are often quite different from the less travelled (at least by foreigners) places of those nations.

Chelyabinsk certainly falls into this latter category.

Just as a foreigner’s first trip into the US interior opens one’s eyes to its cultural variety so does a journey into Middle Russia, even if only by book. As you meet the people of Chelyabinsk and their land and learn their collective history, you cannot help but see a harsher reflection of post-industrial—some would say the real—America.

To make Chelyabinsk, take Detroit and add a history of nuclear waste dumping and general environmental devastation, deep-seated corruption, a couple decades of national humiliation, and a grossly mismanaged ‘transition’ to capitalism. As you travel through these travails, page by page, your sympathy for its people grows. You wonder that anyone still lives there, let along tries to make it a better place. And yet they do: just as Americans in Detroit do.

The situation is simultaneously so similar and so much worse, that if a bumbling real estate tycoon can make it with Middle American, you feel no surprise that a more skilled and cutthroat version enjoys sweeping popularity here.

In the eyes of many Middle Americans, the establishments of both parties have failed them over and over for decades. So, when they were given an alternative, even an obviously flawed one, they took it. In the words of a conservative friend, “What else can we do? Who else are we going to vote for?” Gorbachev and Yeltsin, as different as they were, both failed the Chelyabinskites of Russia so when a skillful, capable strong man who spoke to their complaints came along, they jumped at the chance to put him in office.

The final tragedy here then is that the Detroiters and the Chelyabinskites are still being failed. Trump embarrasses America and horrifies much of the rest of the world while being so mired in scandal he lacks the political capital to push his agenda. At the same time, while Putin has managed to prop up his popularity through pride-inducing military action, the plight of Russians remains little changed.

Like all analogies, Middle Russia as Middle American has obvious limits. Nevertheless even if Putin Country wasn’t as well written as it is, I would still tell you to read it for this experience of learning not just about a wider Russia, but of finding the echoes of a wider America in it. show less

Anne Garrels is a journalist and commentator for National Public Radio who has covered Russia for years. She wanted to examine the remarkable changes in that country since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but she felt it would be more informative to see the changes in the lives of “ordinary Russians,” away from the capital city of Moscow. She chose Chelyabinsk, formerly a military-industrial center a thousand miles east of Moscow at the southern edge of the Ural Mountains. The remote show more region of Chelyabinsk is known for being “one of the most polluted places on the planet.”

Chelyabinsk had been badly treated under the Soviet regime. It was a center of nuclear power research, and the Soviets were inclined to sacrifice safety in the interest of rapid progress. A number of accidents occurred, and there were hundreds of incidents of radiation sickness. Few if any of these events were admitted at the time by the government or reported in the news. (Horrifying accounts are now available; you can read about them here.) Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the successor state has made progress in cleaning up the environment, but is still very secretive about any problems that occurred in the past or that continue to exist.

In addition to the environmental problems, the economy of Chelyabinsk is now suffering as well. As Garrels observes, the Russian economy boomed overall when oil prices were high, and many fortunes were made by a new class of “oligarchs.” Moscow, the capital, has become vibrant and prosperous. But Garrels reports that things are not so rosy in the hinterlands, where austerity has resulted from the lowering of oil prices.

Money is still being spent in some sectors. The Russian state allows freedom of religion, actively favoring the Russian Orthodox Church. In Chelyabinsk just as in the big cities, many of the Church’s splendidly ornate cathedrals and monasteries have been restored to their original brilliance, once again supplying the "opiate of the masses" scorned by Karl Marx.

Garrels sees Russia as going through something of an identity crisis. The gene pool was severely depleted by the horrors of World War II and Stalin’s purges. Women still outnumber men by a significant margin. The Russian military complains that it has difficulty finding suitable recruits. Alcoholism and drug addiction are quite prevalent among Russian males.

Nevertheless, most Russians, she avers, are happy with or at least satisfied with the job Vladimir Putin has done. His approval rating is in the mid 80% range! This high rating results in part because most Russians strongly disapproved of Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, of whom Garrels says, he “and the ‘liberals’ who took the reins of government in Russia [from the Soviets] were unable to resist the lure of getting rich quickly by corrupt methods.” Moreover, under Yeltsin, criminal gangs often used violence to achieve their goals. Corruption under Putin remains rampant, but at least order has been restored, and the economy is vastly better than it was before, even with setbacks from lower oil prices.

Garrels found some Russians who strongly disapproved of Putin. There are civil and human rights advocates who feel constrained by a strong atmosphere of state-sponsored censorship and the self-censorship that inevitably follows. Garrels says there is an “unbridgeable gap” between Putin’s supporters and Russians who think country is on wrong track — much like the current situation in the USA. It should also be noted, however, that Russians in general are not as wedded to the ideal of “individual liberties” (versus policies reflecting the good of the collective) as we are in the West.

In addition, most Russians are dependent on state-sponsored news media, where Putin has been able to shift the blame for many of Russia’s problems to the West, at least in the eyes of his enthusiasts. Russians also resent the fact that the West seems unaware of the sacrifice they made in WWII, having sustained 95% of the military casualties inflicted on the three major Allied powers (the U.S., the U.K., and the U.S.S.R.) To ask Americans, you’d think they won the war practically single-handedly.

In any event, the improvements in Russia since the Soviet government and since the tenure of Yeltsin are striking. It is not unreasonable for Russians to felt grateful to Putin for all the advances of the country generally and in their own economic situations in particular.

Garrels tells the story of Chelyabinsk in a series of chapters that read like features on NPR. They are full of interesting revelations, such as in the one titled “The Forensic Expert” about Alexander Vlasov, the region’s deputy forensic pathologist, who worked on excavating a mass grave from Soviet times.

My wife and I visited Moscow and St. Petersburg, and found them delightful. But obviously what one sees as a tourist, and in only the big cities, does not reveal much about life away from big urban centers. Garrels’s book provides an interesting counterpoint.

Evaluation: These snapshots of a Russia away from the big cosmopolitan areas of Russia are entertaining and shed light on a lesser-known region of that country.

(JAB) show less

I began this audio book thinking I would like the subject. I lived through the Iraq war, following it closely before, during and afterward. I was curious to see how NPR would handle the topic. I finished the book liking Anne Garrells and her adoring husband Vint Lawrence. Anne is tough and resourceful, very creative at working around the restrictions of the Iraq police state to get the views of the average Iraq. Vint is clever and provides stay-at-home counterpoint to Anne risky war show more correspondence.

Anne is relentlessly neutral in her reporting, not partaking in the pro or anti war rhetoric. Rather, she reports on human interest and man on the street viewpoints of the war--a perspective I have not had before, despite my reading on the topic.

My major criticism is from the opposite perspective from Anne's: she doesn't provide perspective on why the war happened, the expectations before the war on casualties and the time it would take and what actually happened. She is great at describing what is happening, but doesn't supply cause and effect analysis. She answers how things happened but not why. Despite her engaging personality and that of her husband on the audio book (they read it themselves) and the moving descriptions of the war and its effect upon the Iraqi people, the book comes across as flat and shallow.

One example: when the US troops took Baghdad, a US tank fired at the Palestine hotel where the journalists were staying. Two were killed, and others were injured. Anne was outraged: didn't the tank commander know the journalists were in the hotel? It was in all the news reports. I was stunned: Doesn't Anne know she and the Palestine hotel are in a war zone during a battle? Anything may happen at any time! If the tank felt threatened, the normal course of action is to attack the threat. During a battle, the rule is kill or be killed. There is no thought nor consideration for bystanders. There are no safety zones. I'm sorry for the deaths of the reporters, but I cannot think of a more dangerous place to be than being in Baghdad during an invasion. show less