History Repeats When Its Lessons Are Not Learned
In the morning, as I am lying in my bath, a particular thought pays me a visit: there is a 99,99% chance that in all of Russia, I am the only one reading The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation. I do not give anything special to this fact, but it makes me smile: one person in almost one hundred and fifty million people. Look at how insignificant I am.
On the contrary, there is another person the same as me in number but significant as none other in the country. During his recent presidential visit to Ocean, a kids’ center in Vladivostok, Russia, Vladimir Putin gave a speech in which he confused the Great Northern War with the Seven Years’ War and immediately was corrected by a schoolboy. His remark made breaking news in Russian media of every scale and accidentally or intentionally put a few traditional values to the test.
In Russia, seniors should be respected on the grounds of being seniors, even if they make mistakes or are wrong; Vladimir Putin is turning 69 in October. Julia Ryabtseva, the principal at the boy’s school, reprimanded and shamed the student, calling Nikanor’s witticism, natural in young men of his age, insolent. Elena Groznykh, his school curator, approved of the boy’s passion in indicating the error in a presidential speech on history: “I think he’s great. The fact that he corrected the president suggests that the child cannot hide something wrong and, in principle, will not lie. There is such fearlessness. Maybe I would have kept quiet. Maybe other boys too would do the same, because they did not know the subject or were shy. Nikanor, perhaps, somehow impulsively succeeded, but it seems to me that there is nothing terrible here.” Putin thanked the boy for his remarks; the Kremlin stepped in. “We are convinced that no one will expel a child, especially such a talented one,” commented Dmitry Peskov, the Press Secretary for Vladimir Putin. “This is not insolence. We strongly disagree with the principal. We hope that, after all, the boy will not be criticized by the seniors. The President himself said that that was a lesson in the form of a dialogue.”
During the speech, the president also expressed his views on the past and the present of Russia: “After the 1917 revolution, the Russian Empire ceased to exist. Russia has lost colossal territories, gradually recovered, and then there was also the collapse of the Soviet Union. We have to carefully analyze what was the trigger, what was the trigger to these dramatic events. If they hadn’t happened, we would have had a different country. Some experts believe that our population would now be about 500 million people. Just think about it.“
Then he commented on Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan: “For twenty years, American troops were present in this territory, and for twenty years they have tried — one can openly say this, without offending anyone — to civilize the people who live there, to introduce democratic norms and standards of life in the broadest sense of the word, including the political organization of society. The result is tragedies and losses on both sides — for those who did it — for the United States, and even more so for those people who live in Afghanistan. The result is zero, if not to say negative.”
History repeats when its lessons are not learned; many of us would like to go to the past. One of the major characters in my novel Truth with Ornaments reflects on making things right:
“Evan took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled smoke right into the window. The transparent glass played a simple trick with the gray-blue fumes, and they scattered sideways on encountering this masterful deception. Sometimes we make it so close to our goals that, blinded by the light of the prospect of success, we fail to notice invisible obstacles in our way, and crash like smoke against them. All it takes to reach the best outcome is to account for these obstructions. Why can’t we turn back time and be more careful? Why do we start to value it only when it has run out?”
