Letter From the Editors

Vladimir Putin quoted this Russian saying seemingly at random during a conversation with Chinese citizen Peng Pai during the president’s official visit to Beijing on May 20. However, longtime Kremlin correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov, who overheard the exchange, makes it clear that nothing about it was random. First, Putin’s interlocutor had studied in the Soviet Union back in the day, before returning to China to work in the construction sector. Second, during Putin’s trip to a Beijing park in 2000, someone had taken a photo of him with a young Peng Pai. And finally, this kind gentleman just happened to hail from Hunan, the native province of Mao Zedong.

Even the date of the conversation was fortuitous. Putin told the smiling Peng Pai: “I recall that in 1972” – actually, it was 1970 – “on May 20, [Mao] called on the entire world to fight American imperialism.”

Thus was an ordinary citizen not only graced with the attention of a head of state (like the Russian peasants given alms by the benevolent “Tsar-batushka” back in imperial times), but he got swept up in the tide of world history.

The very next day, Putin was on a video call with the modern-day batushka (that’s right, Belarussian President Aleksandr Lukashenko) where the two leaders congratulated each other on a splendid joint exercise of their countries’ nuclear forces, including test launches of missiles. Not that they were trying to scare anyone, of course. Krasnaya zvezda reports that Lukashenko “fully supports Vladimir Putin’s view that our countries pose absolutely no threat to anyone.” On the other hand, “we have such weapons, and we are ready to defend our Fatherland in every way from Brest to Vladivostok . . . – and we will do so.”

China’s youth are well aware of their neighbor’s power: According to an opinion poll summarized by NG, Chinese residents aged 18-35 believe that Russia is strongest in its “military sector” (51% of responses) and “energy and raw materials” (40%). Marina Kholod, researcher at Russian Economic University, explains that these criteria are “the traditional, ‘hard’ set of attributes that define power.” However, she added, “it’s not soft power.”

Russia’s neighbor on the other side, Ukraine, is looking to the EU for whatever power it can muster. And Artyom Sokolov writes that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is ready to give it – sort of. “In essence, Merz is proposing to create a kind of European ‘antechamber’ for Kiev by establishing an ‘associate membership’ format.” However, it will be contingent on two tall orders: consensus among the current EU members, and political reforms in Ukraine that conform to European standards.

Or was Kiev “meant to be where it was born” – i.e., the purported cradle of the Russian Empire? Yabloko leader Sergei Mitrokhin writes that although Russia’s parliamentary system superficially resembles the Western one, it was born of a fundamentally distinct model, the feudal sobor (council). “The decisions adopted by a boyar council would typically open with the standard formula: ‘As instructed by the tsar, the boyars have decided the following.’ . . . The core idea . . . is that everybody was expected to provide unanimous support for the tsar. . . . This is the key difference between Russian sobors and European parliaments, where voters were principals.”

So, does this confirm Kipling’s old adage, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”? Nonsense: The Moscow Times reports that Russian bartender Ksenia Belousova proudly posted a video of a lovely intercultural fusion: a hookah that she fashioned out of a traditional kulich Easter cake. Granted, she’s now facing three years in prison for offending the feelings of religious believers, but don’t let that spoil the main point: The tools of world understanding are in our hands – they just haven’t hit home yet.