Russia

By Ana Hurtado on June 12, 2024 from Havana

When the world was in agony; when Europe was burning in flames and the great cities were covered in ashes, the Russian people came to lay down blood and life and deliver the rest of us from an evil that could well of lasted more than a hundred years. Of suffering and pain. Hopelessly of loneliness. But loneliness next to what could have been, would be a pleasure. It would be peace.

I was going to write this article much earlier, but I preferred to wait for the European Parliament elections.

Shame, I do not know if that would be the right word. But the Europe that was the cradle of social movements, uprising, enlightenment, holocausts and so many miseries, seems to have forgotten the past.

At a time of constant absence of ideology, this is the punishment that seems to have arrived.

Europe needs Russia and so does the world. As it was needed in the early forties of the last century.

A few days ago, the Russian language day was celebrated on June 6. And in these days I was reflecting with Professor Oscar Villar, a man who teaches me to broaden my knowledge about the history of the country, its current historical context and its changes over time.

Relations between Cuba and the largest country in the world are long-standing and growing stronger. I hope they continue to do so every day.

There are many fanatics on the loose who write on social networks and digital platforms as if they were experts. It is so important to be careful of who issues us information; or at least select which source we are going to consume it from. Information, especially current information, must be extracted from experts, or from counter-hegemonic media that honestly strives to show us the face of the truth that the West does not want us to know.

And in an attempt to learn truth first hand I attended an activity organized by the Technological University of Havana José Antonio Echeverría (CUJAE), in which, among other speakers, Alexander Korendiasev, the first secretary of the Russian Embassy in Cuba, joined Professor Villar.

His lecture was entitled: “The Circular Business of Russophobia”. And after days of this activity there was much to reflect on what was said

In 1991 we all well know that a political change took place with the fall of the USSR, which changed the course of the world. The socialist camp meant prosperity, ties between countries in pursuit of progress and the dignity of men and women, elevated to the highest levels. Not perfect, but perhaps close enough to the term. Taking into account the propagandistic garbage that poured out against it and the human mistakes made, which no one is exempt from committing. They are recognized, accepted and are overcome in order not to repeat them.

It was not perfect, but it was good.

The Russian Revolution came with a strong breath of wind to give oxygen to a people that had been mistreated for centuries. A Revolution, with its five-year plans to which the people gave themselves with conviction (like the sugar harvest in Cuba). When World War II broke out, the USSR was already carrying out its third five-year plan.

Looking at the history of the USSR we can continue to save every day the rest of the revolutions that are there and to come.

In Russia they forgot Lenin. They started from the government to dismantle Soviet symbols, for example, to speak ill of Yuri Gagarin.

Gagarin was a boy who symbolically was everything. A peasant who reached space. Humility and development in a person loved by all.

Boris Yeltsin, his alcoholism and his wickedness (surely directed by foreign agencies), began from his executive to question everything Soviet, climbing on top of the mistakes of Mikhail Gorbachev the poor wimp who proceeded him.

The Soviet Union was wiped out with drunkenness and shots of vodka in front of a people that supported its history, but with the pressure of capitalism knocking on the door of the country’s borders in order to make clear one of its first symbols of cultural colonization: the opening of the first McDonald’s, and hundreds of people lining up to get inside in Moscow’s Pushkin Square.

They even changed the national anthem, for a new one with odes to the gods, which fortunately with Putin in power, was replaced by another one created by the father of filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, who had already created the 1943 anthem.

Barbarity after barbarity on the international scene in the 1990s while Cuba was plunged into a dark special period, remaining “alone-solita” as Fidel said on the Malecon, but well knowing that this was not a soft people.

In Russia, people began to become disenchanted even though they were socialists, with the poisonous danger of the shoddy propaganda of “in and out”.

Yeltsin and his ilk, among so many thousands of other issues, left a divided country and gave rise to the Chechen war. As time went by, that division was replaced by unity, an economy saved and morale and dignity as high as the peaks of St. Basil’s Cathedral.

Sometimes there is something that is curious to me and at the lecture at CUJAE, Alexander Korendiasev made me think about it and I never forget: that you are studying means that someone is paying for your studies. That you are being treated by doctors means that someone is paying those doctors. It’s not that you deserve it because you deserve it. It is because there is a state behind you that makes an effort for its citizens and provides them with social services, with the effort that this entails.

I think about so many ungrateful citizens who criticize, without reasoning, the free services in Cuba, a country that is under an iron blockade, but is a cradle of medicine, with its material deficiencies. Without understanding that if in the United States they break a leg, cut themselves in an accident and do not have money to pay for the operation, they might get gangrene because of the possibility of not being able to pay for private health care. For that it is necessary to go out into the world and see, or to have class consciousness and logic that allows us to understand why the planet is and works as it does.

And just as there are capitalist and fascist critics to all those who defend themselves against attacks, turning history upside down, they did the same to Russia. In 2014 the picture changes and it is the first time in the post-Soviet era that the country has to defend its interests as a nation in the face of the Crimean conflict. All European civilizations have wanted to take it over throughout history.

Starting from the fact that the USSR was divided into fifteen independent republics, each with its own national ideology, the case of Ukraine was different. Ukraine did not have this national ideology, because it always belonged to Russia. In fact, Russia was born in Kiev, the well-known: Kievan Rus.

Russian was spoken in Ukraine until the end of the 19th century, and then the Ukrainian language was commonly spoken.  In Soviet times in the USSR the languages of its constituent peoples were respected, especially in the western part of the country. Hungarian, Ukrainian, etc. were spoken.

How is it possible that now on the territory of Ukraine it is forbidden to speak any language other than Ukrainian? Who are the tyrants? If this were the only aspect of their tyranny?

Ukraine, in order to develop a nationalist ideology, took examples from fascist politicians in Europe who promoted “anti-Russian” policy, from people who once even went so far as to collaborate with Hitler’s forces. People who in Nuremberg were accused of genocide.

That is why the modern Ukrainian state sought its identity in this type of characters giving rise in time to a plague of fascists within the military sector of the country and infecting the armed forces of the country with these ideas.

Nazis appearing in the military forces in Ukraine already influencing its policy.

A referendum was held for the independence of Crimea from Ukraine, which won positively with more than 95 percent of the votes. With international observers certifying that it was not forced, and that it was transparent.

Russia, in the face of non-compliance with the agreements, defended its interests and those of its people, as any land with a memory would do.

As any mother would do. As it is appropriate to do with a people who said in a referendum almost one hundred percent, that they want to be Russians.

Russia was the mother of war children and Spanish Republicans, of so many Cuban students who came to their lands with everything paid for. Of thousands and millions of people who came to her heart to nourish themselves with all the best of her, and she welcomed them, asking nothing in return.

In a world of hyper imperialism, where socialism seems far away, we must know who is with the good and who is with the evil. To be clear about the sense of the historical moment and the current conceptions.

Right now our greatest enemy is Zionism and the American government that finances it. Russia is no longer the USSR, but it is worthy and stands up to all those who incarnate evil right now.  And that as far as it is possible, in this world of madness and aberration, we can still consider her a mother.

Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English