Russian Politics Through the Looking Glass

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of the Russia essays.

Several days into my trip, I had a meeting with Vladmir Zhirinovsky, one of the most famous, infamous Russian politicians of the past twenty years. In 1990 he founded the Liberal Democrat Party (LDPR), the first real independent political opposition to the Communists. In the 1993 parliamentary elections, the LDPR gained about 23% of the vote. Zhirinovsky had positioned himself as a kind of Huey Long of Russian politics, with a comic touch. He once promised to give out free vodka to one and all if he were elected president.

He is an unapologetic nationalist who wants to remake Russia into an independent superpower. In 1994, he ran for President against Boris Yeltsin. The powers that be were frightened enough of him to orchestrate a powerful advertising campaign against him and the Communists who were Yeltsin’s main rivals. Zhirinovsky lost and has since seen his power and popularity dwindle, although he and his party continue to garner a big enough share of the vote to remain a force in the Duma (the Russian parliament).

Zhirinovsky is a walking contradiction. He is half Jewish, but often spouts anti-Semitic remarks. He is quite intelligent, very well-educated (his knowledge of literature and history far exceeds that of your average American politician), yet his nationalism often rings crude and demagogic. He was good friends with Saddam Hussein and he is proud of this.

He is an aspiring actor and musician (he recently recorded some hip hop songs he wrote), and he happily engages in public fights with other politicians, sometimes coming to blows with them (on one famous occasion throwing orange juice in the face of a rival). Some see him as a buffoon, many see him as quite lovable and embodying something very Russian. He happens to admire my books, and so a meeting was set up at his offices in the Duma.

In person, he was as I had imagined. Larger than life (physically and personality-wise), he struck me as the kind of politician you might have met in 19th century America. As soon as the “meeting” began, he launched into a two-hour monologue, broken up only by the constant puffs on his cigars that he chain-smoked, the breakneck translations of my interpreter who tried to keep up with him, and my own occasional comments. His politics veered left and right. At one moment he sounded like Noam Chomsky as he dissected American foreign policy; at another moment he sounded like Pat Buchanan (with whom he is friends), as he railed against the immigrants he thinks are ruining Russia.

He wore his emotions on his sleeve. In America, political appeals to emotions tend to be rather subtle and expressed through codes. Karl Rove likes to find emotional hot-buttons embedded in certain words, like the often used “liberal”–associated with words such as “taxes”–or around issues like abortion. Using these coded words protects the politician from seeming too obvious in his demagoguery; he can have plausible deniability: “Well, I never meant it that way.” These forms of manipulation are insidious and exist on the left and right. They’re used by the politically correct on both sides.

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Zhirinovsky is a relic of an era when demagoguery was more open, more obvious and quite theatrical. It reveals to me how primitive Russian politics can seem, although this primitiveness is charming and appealing. It comes from a leader who wants to infect you with his own emotions, rather than heat you up with veiled language and codes. On the charming side, it brings to mind a kind of latter-day Andrew Jackson; on the dark side, it can veer into something Hitlerian.

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The Future Empire

Read Part 1 of the Russia essays.

On the thirteen hour flight from Los Angeles to Moscow last month, I ignored the various entertainments that Aeroflot was offering, and concentrated on two things: finishing a book I had started on Russian history (Russia: The Once and Future Empire, by Philip Longworth) and looking out the window at the strange and impressive sights.

In the history book, I had arrived at the 20th century and the catalog of tragedy and catastrophe (compacted into a few hundred pages) was almost too much to take. First there was the story of the Russian Revolution, born amid the hardships of World War One, and which involved the wrenching of a country from one system of living and governance to its virtual opposite, in an incredibly short period of time. This was intensified by Stalin’s sudden push to modernize the country in the late 20s and early 30s, which created untold suffering and loss of lives.

Then came World War II. In our minds, we played a decisive role in this war, and that is true to some extent. In terms of casualties, some 300,000 Americans were killed, a high price to pay by any standard. Russian casualties totaled some 20 to 40 million (military and civilian), depending on whom you read, and how such things are calculated. The only country that comes close is China, with some 10 million people killed in the war; China has a much larger population, and so the percentage of Russians who died in the War is astronomical and almost impossible for us to fathom.

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Russia and Power

Almost everyone is drawn somehow to the exotic, whatever is most different to what they know. It is the root of many a seduction. In California, where I grew up, the exotic was mostly represented by Asia. In the 1970s, this meant dabbling in yoga, Buddhism, Taoism, the I Ching, etc. I would develop an interest in things Asian much later in life. For me, what was most exotic was Russia. It began with my first Dostoyevsky novel (he remains my favorite writer to this day). The characters in his novels contained these powerful contradictions; they would say something and yet do the opposite. They were morally complex; and to me, this seemed the height of realism. Dostoyevsky is the greatest master at mining human nature.

After Dostoyevsky, I moved on to Gogol, and then a growing interest in Russian history. Figures like Rasputin and Stalin attracted me with their mix of the repellent and the charismatic. And then I discovered Ivan the Terrible, and I could not read enough about him. While others are drawn to Peter the Great, Ivan represented everything that fascinated me about Russia. For some reason, I identified with the story of his childhood.

I was also interested in the iconography of the Russian Revolution and the strange habits of life under the Soviet Union (how did these people live without money?). Perhaps this predilection of mine could be explained by the Russian blood in my family. Probably it had more to do with the violence, the drama, the intense power struggles that are so clear throughout Russian history and in their literature.

When The 48 Laws of Power came out in Russian in 2001 I was very excited. The cover was different and weird: the figure of a giant chess piece, the King sprouting wings, with a ball and chain holding it down. (What did this mean?)

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Angles, Hustlers And Suckers

I forgot something important that you must remember until you go six feet under…. There are only two kinds of people in the whole wide world, grifters and suckers…. [With suckers,] let their stupid brains stay asleep in their chump world. Keep your own brain honed to razor sharpness in the secret world of con. –Iceberg Slim

A few years ago, to help my mind get over the grind of the WAR book, I bought a pool table. After a hard day’s work, I would settle into the game of pool and make myself completely focus on the green felt, the cue stick, the stripes and solids. It ended up being the perfect choice of a diversion. Pool, it became clear to me, is all about angles. First, there are simple angles, as you must hit the cue ball to either side when you are not straight on. This is often not as easy as it seems. Then, there are the angles you take when you bank the targeted ball off the sides, an entirely new game in and of itself. This goes further with the double bank shot.

There are the angles of the combination shots, and even more slippery combinations, when you use a solid to slide off of a stripe and knock in a solid. Then there is the whole language of angles that comes into play when you are thinking ahead and trying to keep the cue ball in solid position, working with the open spaces of the table.

Finally, there are the abstract angles in psychological space and time: playing with your opponent’s mind, letting him get ahead, but putting himself in a corner in relation to the final balls on the table, or snookering him into impossible positions (the trick bag), or seeing the entire table and how you will run it in short order. In other words, there are layers of angles, all more subtle and artistic as you go up the ladder and improve your game. I am no longer a rank beginner, but I am certainly no hustler, not yet.

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OODA and You

A few weeks ago I gave a talk at a company convention in southern California. This company has offices worldwide, is very successful in its line of work, but on the horizon are some dangers. They brought me in to address those dangers. The specifics here do not matter much, only to say that, like a lot of companies that were successful in the 80s and on up to the present, they have come to rely upon a particular business model that is part circumstance and part design.

Loosely put, their upper-tier employees operate more like entrepreneurs, each one out for him or herself. Each office tends to think of itself as an island, competing with the other branches across the globe. This works to some extent, as these entrepreneurs are very motivated to expand the business. On the other hand, it makes it very difficult to create an overall esprit de corps.

As I was preparing the speech, for some reason an image kept coming to mind–the jet-fighter pilot, and the theories of Colonel John Boyd as it pertains to this form of warfare. Many of you might be familiar with Boyd’s most famous theory: the OODA loop. I will paraphrase it for those who are not familiar with it, with the understanding that it is much richer than the few words I am devoting to it here.

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Hugo Chavez

In 1984, I spent several months in Nicaragua, trying to write several articles on the war between the U.S.-backed contras and the Sandinistas. I had been ostensibly sent there by the magazine Mother Jones, but the article–on Americans living there and working for the Sandinistas–was never published, for reasons I cannot remember. In any event, the experience was incredibly memorable, an endless series of eye-opening adventures. I went there with an open mind, but left with a depressing impression, as if history were a kind of revolving door in which we are all trapped.

What I mean is the following: the Sandinistas were reacting against the extreme disparities of wealth and poverty that had been part of the country for decades, and were heightened by the Somoza period. In exchange for being given essentially untrammeled power to rule the country, the Sandinistas gave the people health care, education, and a sense of participating in the construction of a new country. This participation was heightened by the numerous public events that were constantly staged–parades, speeches, anniversaries for this and that, all of which were very seductive. (I was there when the Pope visited Nicaragua and the stage-managed event was unbelievably entertaining.)

In addition, there were all of these community councils that everyone could belong to and were there to give local control to communities. The reality, however, was that any overall challenge to the government would not be tolerated. In the tense atmosphere of the war with the Contras, anyone who did not buy the party line was seen as a counter revolutionary and completely marginalized. You could dissent about the amount of butter sent to your community, but not about anything larger and ideological.

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Corners

In almost all board games–chess, go (wei chi), backgammon, etc. –the corners spell defeat and death. In each game, the corners are configured differently, but as someone who plays them all, I know the feeling that first hits me in the gut as I sense that I am finding myself trapped in a corner. My pulse increases, my emotions get tugged at (anger, frustration, impatience) and often I end up making mistakes that aggravate the situation. The key in the end is to minimize the damage and regain control of the center. But the real key lies in the mind and the feeling you have as you are cornered.

This mental aspect of the corner becomes much more physical in sports such as boxing, football (pushed to your own end of the field), basketball, martial arts. You physically cramp up, your throat constricts, your body tightens as you move into the confining space. Musashi had much to write about on this subject, and I cannot do better.

In WAR, I theorize where this comes from, in the Envelopment chapter. We humans for millions of years were nomadic. We associated freedom and well-being with the ability to move into open spaces, to find places more suited to hunting. The years we have spent settled in cities is miniscule compared to the years of nomadism. But even to this day, the thought of confining spaces, of limited options, of feeling cornered instills in us panic and confusion. Obviously, in warfare the corner meant instant death, although this could be turned around in the dynamic of the death-ground strategy.

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Machiavelli for Our Times

For the past twelve years, I have this ritual in which every December I reread some work of Machiavelli. This year it was the Discourses. What struck me this time was how many ideas in the Discourses dominate my own way of thinking. I read it some twenty years ago, and it must have unconsciously seeped its way into my belief system. The book is so full of ideas that sparkle to life the more you think about them that I found myself transported back to my early twenties when reading a book like this could make my head spin for weeks. Here are the main themes that struck me this time:

Necessity governs the world. This is a thought that finds great expression in The Prince and is scattered throughout his work. At first glance it might seem rather obvious, but for Machiavelli it goes to the heart of everything. When you feel necessity biting at your heels, you are moved to respond in some way that is creative. It is either that or die. When you do not feel necessity, your actions lack purpose, your spirit wanders, you grow fat and dependent.

This can be seen in terms of your environment and how tight or loose it is. When your environment presses upon you with limitations, you feel it all of the time, and you are called to respond in some way. The tightness makes you hungry for more, to break beyond the limitations. This is what will afflict people who are poor, who start with nothing. And Machiavelli, like myself, is drawn to what he calls New Princes, those who rise to the top from the very bottom. Princes, those born to privilege, find themselves in an environment that is loose, that has few constrictions. Most Princes create nothing worthwhile in this world; they are good at squandering what others have accumulated.

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An Experiment in Counter-Stupidity

Originally I had proposed to do my third book on the history of human stupidity. It would basically be an offshoot of the transgression part of the 48 Laws, each one of those being a form of stupidity. I had the book mapped out in an interesting way, but the publishers felt it was too negative, and so I plowed ahead with the more general idea of a book on War and Strategy. This was probably for the better, but I will return to the idea of stupidity some day and make that book.

It is all centered around the Greek concept that more harm is done in life through incompetence and stupidity than outright evil. Stupidity is seen as a form of imbalance. Animals have their instincts to depend on in danger. We have our reason and rationality. When we lose those reasoning powers, it is like falling between two stools: we cannot depend on our instincts, and we cannot depend on our intelligence. We fall and create waves of problems. I have developed this concept in Strategy number 12, but a full treatment awaits my book. I would want it to be the ultimate analysis of the universal phenomenon of stupidity, full of historical examples, and both tragic and funny.

One of the most obdurate forms of stupidity is the frozen idea. We all suffer from this. What I mean is the following: we develop some idea about life. This could come from things we read and hear in the media, or from our own experiences. These ideas freeze into an opinion about something. As time goes on, this opinion of ours tends to lose touch with reality. Sometimes we hold on to such opinions because to admit they were wrong or irrelevant causes us emotional turmoil and anxiety; out of vanity and laziness we don’t ever want to admit we were mistaken. Listen to people in their 60s or 70s; almost every idea they express is some kind of hardened cliché formed in their youth.

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The Art of Interviewing

The future lies in new forms of communication. The old ways are dead and dying. People have short attention spans, are inundated with information. The future I am speaking of is more indirect, strategic and conscious. Everything is a sign, not just what you say, but how you say it and how you lead people to certain ideas or conclusions. If this concept eludes or leaves you cold, then you should probably not frequent this site. It is the core of everything I write about. It is Machiavelli for the 21st century.

One banal but revealing example is the interview. By this I mean TV or radio talk shows, magazine interviews, job interviews, etc. In other words, any forum or medium where interviewers have the time to make their questions directed towards a purpose, and strategic.

For publicity for my books I have been interviewed countless times, and I can recall only a few instances where I could sense that the interviewer had put some time and thought into the questions, and was working with some kind of plan in mind.

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