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The War Between Ukraine and Russia Cannot Be Understood from ‘Book Learning’
The ‘secret Soviet sauce’ made it seem that war was impossible but now it makes absolute defeat impossible.
If you have never craved hard-boiled eggs served on a cheap aluminum plate covered with Soviet “Provenasal” mayonnaise adorned with a scoop of canned peas, then you probably will have a hard time understanding the lure of the Soviet Union’s soft culture. It is this existence of this “secret sauce” that so stunned Russians in February 2022 and the same one that now threatens to turn parts of Ukraine into Russia by cultural default.
I am writing this article not to “yet again” remind anyone how long I lived in Russia (from July 1994 to February 26, 2022). My first visit was to the Soviet Union in 1990 for three months, and then I lived there from September 1991, shortly after the failed coup in Moscow, to July 1992. After finishing graduate school at Columbia, I moved to St. Petersburg. I was an impressionable young man, and I fell in love with something that wasn’t the culture I was born into, which was obsessed with consumption.
I spent my first 15 years in Russia learning everything I could about the culture. I didn’t spend much time with the ex-pat community, but mostly only with…
