Trump fires Comey —now what? A lesson from Russia.
In the early winter of 2004, my Russian host mother in St. Petersburg scolded me for being “too left.” I was confused by the label, since I was still consciously undoing much of my right-wing upbringing. But I had just complained to her about the tepid reaction to Putin taking away her right to vote for governor. It was a swift death for federalism in Russia, which from my American vantage point was vital for democracy.
It’s not that she didn’t agree — she was one of a few stubbornly brave people who continued to protest outside — it’s just that she found my expectations naive. I don’t think she had ever uttered the phrase: “It can’t happen here.” As a small girl, she survived World War II after being sent to the countryside by her family to avoid starvation under the Nazi siege.
She was a challenging woman, a Russian/Polish translator who hated intellectual laziness even more than she hated the government. We were placed together because we both smoked. She had a smoker’s gravelly drawl, so deep my mother was confused at first, thinking I’d been placed with a man. Her first words to me were, “Here’s your room, and here’s an ashtray.”
The governor controversy was not the first nightmare to happen during that semester abroad. The horrific siege of the school in Beslan happened shortly after I arrived in Russia, taking place on September 1, everyone’s first day of school. My friends and I only found out about the attack after a visit to Cafe Max for internet, finding emails from worried friends checking in from the States.
Our school failed to properly explain the situation, sending us home with sheets of propaganda. My host mother took the papers they gave us and tossed them. She set me listening to Radio Svoboda (Radio Liberty) for my news. It didn’t take too long for me to catch on, as she had it on 24/7.
In retrospect, she gave me the best education I’ve ever had on comparative politics. We cared about the same things and shared the same values, but in the Russian system, her rights were trampled on so much more easily than mine. Corruption meant that there was no recourse when someone more powerful and well-connected wanted to teach you a lesson. We watched the strong dominate the weak just to signal their strength. I still remember our shared horror over the poisoning of Anna Politkovskaya as she went to report on the Beslan atrocities.
As unbelievable as it may seem, we’re approaching that point here in America. Yesterday Trump dramatically fired FBI Director James Comey just as Comey was ratcheting up his investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Today, he’s loitering around the Oval Office with Ambassador Kislyak and Foreign Minister Lavrov, flaunting his consolidation of power and laughing while trampling our press freedoms.
Until now, our rhetoric has been about regression, as we try to avoid a return to the past. Yes, progress is not guaranteed, but let’s not ignore that the future might bring unimaginable horrors if we let our current administration break our political system and society. Many of us have been shielded from the world’s uncertainties for so long that we’ve forgotten what humans are capable of doing to one another.
