THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Woo-hoo! A story about scientific ignorance NOT starring American students!

The well-respected All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (hat tip to AOL.com via Johnson’s Russia List) has found that
46% of Russians think antibiotics kill viruses (I’d hate to see the US figures on that one).
32% think the sun orbits the earth.
29% think human beings coexisted with dinosaurs.
26% think lasers work via sound waves
17% think contemporary humans did not evolve from earlier types (I’d wager one or two limbs that percentage would be significantly higher in the US).

The headline figure was the number of Russians (55%) who thought radiation was a human creation. I’m not willing to read so much into that particular question–it’s easy to misunderstand. James Oberg, speaking with AOL, quite sensibly said that he’d want to see the Russian text. That text is “Vsia radioaktivnost’–delo ruk chelovecheskikh?” More or less, “Do you agree that all radioactivity is the work of human hands?” Of course, the correct answer is no, but given Chernobyl, widespread use of radiation for medical purposes, debates over the implications of nuclear testing, and widespread and legitimate public health concerns about the legacy of Soviet pollution, that doesn’t strike me as quite as ridiculous as believing in an earth-centered solar system.

The biggest point, it seems to me, is not that the Russian public is particularly ignorant of science. It’s that the sorts of things we see in the United States about popular ignorance of history or science need to be put in perspective. Things are bad everywhere. As Schiller said, “Against ignorance, the gods themselves contend in vain.”

The good folks at englishrussia.com have lots of great photo galleries on life in today’s Russia. Here’s one that’s more historical: a wonderful collection of Soviet work safety posters. The style of art and text is identical to posters covering more familiar political and propaganda themes, but without any sort of political content. Their gruesome explicitness is quite striking, and they offer a nice look at the physical processes of Soviet industrial production.

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan had an excellent piece in the January 6 Yezhdnevnyi zhurnal (hat tip to Johnson’s Russia List; discussed by Paul Goble here) on the activities of the Federal Security Service in 2010. Along the way, they provide some striking figures on just how bloody the North Caucasus continues to be, sixteen years after the start of the First Chechen War.

In 2010, 242 security service personnel were killed in the North Caucasus Federal District (population nine million). By contrast, in the United States (population 300 million), 162 police officers were killed in the line of duty in 2010. Many of those line-of-duty deaths were accidents; 77 perished from hostile action.

The Atlantic Monthly has reported (and other media have picked up on the story) that Rich Iott, running for Congress in Ohio, is a member in good standing of a historical re-enactment group. That in itself isn’t odd–lots of people are re-enacters. What makes it unusual is that this a group dedicated to the Waffen SS: specifically the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking.

Iott naturally claims that his participation doesn’t mean he endorses Nazism. The Wiking group’s website (I’m not linking to it, but it’s easy enough to find) proclaims that the group’s members are “in no way affiliated with real, radical political organizations (i.e., KKK, Aryan Nation, American Nazi Party, etc.) and do not embrace the philosophies and actions of the original NSDAP party), and wholeheartedly condemn the atrocities which made them infamous.” Moreover, “we salute their courage and loyalty to put their lives on the line in defense of their native soil, no matter what nationality or government.”

Iott argues that this is all just a way to teach and learn about history, but the most positive spin to put on Iott and his fellow re-enactors is that they are woefully ignorant of the history to which they claim to be dedicated . It’s very nice to say that SS re-enactment involves no endorsement of Nazism, just the heroism of the individual soldier. All sordid details of German conduct of the war in the east aside, the SS was created and existed not as a military unit but a Nazi Party organization. it existed precisely to not be a part of the German military, but instead a direct instrument of Adolf Hitler. Moreover, the fiction of “defending native soil” would be more persuasive if members of the SS took an oath to defend Germany, like the imperial German army did. The SS didn’t take an oath to Germany; they took a personal oath to Adolf Hitler.

How did I possibly miss this story from December 2009? My thanks to the good people at Cracked for correcting my oversight, though the article mischaracterizes what Stalin was actually doing.

As he got older and moved from his normal paranoid and ruthless to utterly out of touch with reality, Stalin developed a habit of writing scurrilous comments, many aimed at long-dead political opponents (some at his hand) on fine art prints of male nudes. Any comment would be superfluous.