This has been the _constant_ lament of the Russian intelligentisia for over 200 years, so it's utter crap to attrubute this observation to Western prejudice. Now that this stuff is online, just do a search on "backwardness" within same paragraph as "Russia" or "Russia" in Lenin's Collected Works, see what he thought of it. Or read Trotsky's brilliant little book on Problems of Everyday Life. The Soviet Union improved things some by providing education and industrializing the nation, but also cultivated antisemitism deliberately; it also didn't do much about isolation. When communism fell, there was a great deal of regression from a bad state. And now Russian culture, indeed culture in all the Slavic countries, is falling off considerably from relative heights under Communism. This is a common observation among the intelligentsia and chattering classes in all the ex-Bloc, and it's ignorant to deny it.
Slavic culture is also virulently antisemitic, as surveys and experience show, it wasn't just because there were a lot of Jews nearby that they built the camps in Poland; and it is the worst kind of self-deceptive pandering to deny it. It has to be confronted to be defeated. DEenying it will only allow it to fester.
Doug is right, Slavic food generally sucks badly. The Russians can cook when they care to, though. (Had my son's bar mitzpha dinner at a local Russian resuarant, gave the chefs a free hand, glorious results.)
Nor is backwardness peculiar to Slavic cultures. No culture is more backward and more racist than American culture, especially the culture of the South. I mean the white South: the black South gave us most of what culture the South has. The racism is improving (that is, there is less of it), partly because of sixty years of resistance which was not possible in the Slavic countries. (That may be changing, though not in Putin's neoStalinist authoritarian Russia, which has many of the defects of post-Stalinist Stalinism without many ofits virtues; however, there are relatively few Jews left in the Slavic nations to fight antisemitism.) The lack of culture in America shows no signs of improvement and is in fact probably worse than it was fifty years ago.
In the case of America the lack of culture cannot be attributed to an antidemocratic history, much; it has deeper and more twisted roots that I don't fully understand. Maybe it is due to a majoritarian democratoc culture. People have been meditating on this since Tocqueville ("In no other country is there so little freedom of thought.") We';ve discussed thsi now and then.
I trust that I will not be accused here of anti-Western racism in saying that Americans, especially white Southerners, are just as if not moreso nikulturny as Slavs.
--- On Tue, 8/5/08, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Anti-Semitism in Russia, and Britain
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tuesday, August 5, 2008, 12:32 PM
> On Aug 5, 2008, at 1:14 PM, sawicky at verizon.net wrote:
>
> > Speaking of Borat .. . (I laughed, I'm guilty.)
> >
> > . . .
> >> it is just that it is an element of west
> Europe's anti-Slavic racism
> >> that east Europeans must be portrayed as
> endemically backward.
>
> And they've got some of the world's worst cuisine
> (outside the British
> Isles).
>
> Doug
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk