Letter to a Russian Friend

Dear Andrei,

May 2001.  I tried to reach you at your Moscow office.  Your assistant transferred me to your mobile phone.

Is this Mr. Andrei Vasiliev?  (I’m using a pseudonym so as not to aid or assist the FSB).

Yes.  Who is this?

I introduced myself, in my professional role at the time:  academic director of the Stanford graduate program to which you had applied.

I can’t believe it.  I’m in a supermarket!

I’m calling to offer you admission.  

Then you screamed — a loud, extended yelp of joy — across continents and oceans, surrounded by fellow Muscovites shopping for dinner for their families, strangers who never expected to be treated with a moment of pure, full-hearted, exuberant happiness.

In the first moments of our first conversation you revealed core elements of your character and personality:  your fearless sincerity, your  joie de vivre, your refusal to hide the emotional truths of your human experience — elements that defined our friendship over the subsequent year when you were my student, and throughout the all of the years since., somehow, even though we have not seen each other in two decades.

My friend Andrei:  I miss you!   I miss your big subversive smile, your idealism and innocence.  You are much older now, but still, I imagine you have a frisky sparkle in your eyes.

Natsuko and I will never forget your delightful foolish playfulness with our son Kenji in our home when he was an infant 21 years ago, how you made us laugh watching you bow down to him as if Kenji was a beneficent and holy being, which of course he was.

Nor will I forget your words to the 400+ assembly of students and faculty who had gathered to honor every person murdered in the World Trade Towers just a few days before.

I am Andrei Vasiliev, from Moscow. 

Today, I am an American. 

All of us in Russia stand with you, in solidarity and brotherhood. 

Throughout the world, we are Americans today.

I will never forget that moment of shared humanity you gave us that day, across all national boundaries, in solidarity with this country following the tragic, horrific terrorist attack.

Perhaps the same day you spoke to our assembled Stanford community, Rev. Nathan Baxter, dean of the Washington Cathedral, spoke at the National Service of Prayer and Remembrance.  “Let us also pray for divine wisdom as our leaders consider the necessary actions for national security, wisdom of the grace of God, that, as we act, we not become the evil we deplore.”

But the United States squandered the moment of global fellowship you demonstrated to us, and we failed to heed Rev. Baxter’s warning.

Tested with the unique opportunity to strengthen the bonds of international community, to stand firm with international law as the basis for a just response, we followed the mass atrocity of the 9/11 attacks with crimes of our own, including the use of torture, “enhanced interrogations” and “extraordinary rendition” condoned by my government and practiced by agents including mercenaries and authoritarian states that did the dirty work for us.  Unable to restrain the forces of nationalist overreaction, and the thirst for revenge, the U.S. propelled the Middle East into two shameful decades of war, massive communal violence, and vast human displacement from which the region has not recovered.

Tragically, we became the evil we deplored.

I’m so sorry, Andrei.  We didn’t listen to you.

We didn’t appreciate what you were trying to say to us.

Now Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers lay siege to Ukraine’s cities, rockets, bombs and cluster munitions fall indiscriminately on civilian homes, buildings, gathering places:  apartment blocks, offices, hospitals, schools, supermarkets, churches, streets, broadcast facilities.  Russian President Vladimir Putin has unleashed a genocidal war:  a project of human destruction and national evisceration that he appears determined to carry out to the bitter end, even if nothing is left in Ukraine but a vast pile of corpses, filled with the bodies of his own soldiers as well as Ukrainian men, women and children.  Kherson has fallen.  The neighborhoods of Kharkiv, Mariupol, and Zaporizhzhia are being pulverized.  A 40-mile convoy of tanks and military personnel carriers encircles Kyiv.  As of today, 1.5 million people have been displaced from their homes, desperately searching for temporary shelter in the Kyiv subway, trying to get on a train or bus, becoming IDPs or crossing national boundaries to become refugees.  It is already the largest forced exodus of human beings in Europe since World War II.  One can only imagine how many will follow.  At the moment of flight, countless wives saying goodbye to their husbands, mothers to their sons, not knowing who among them will soon be dead.

In this dark and harrowing moment,  I reach out to you, Andrei — to extend my hand, to reaffirm our friendship.

A few years after we last saw each other, I’d joined a Canadian law firm to launch a practice in international conflict resolution. I’d become immersed in Russian politics, and Russian-European relations, in a way I could never have expected.   My firm was retained as strategic counsel to a London-based human rights advocacy team of lawyers in Canada, UK and France appealing to the UN, the European Union, Amnesty International, and world public opinion on behalf of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s most prominent political prisoner at the time, who had flagrantly disobeyed the then newly-installed President Putin’s basic rule:   Kremlin-affiliated oligarchs would be permitted to amass and keep vast fortunes on the condition that they kiss his ring and bend their knee in submission.  As you know, Putin finally released Khodorkovsky, after ten years in a Siberian prison cell, not because he cared about the European Court of Human Rights judgment against Russia, or the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which condemned the sham trial and harsh conditions of imprisonment, but because the timing was right — just before the Sochi Olympics — and because he’d made his point: only one person in Russia controlled oil and gas, money, law, justice, political discourse, elections, votes, freedom, everything.

If it were not for this experience I probably would not have become aware of the criminality that defined Putin’s accumulation and use of power; the obscene treasure he amassed and dispensed as the Russian people struggled to survive; his single-minded vision of Tsarist authoritarianism and imperial restoration; and the mass violence and immense human cruelty he inflicted to achieve it.   Nor would I have read Anna Politkovskaya, who was assassinated because she investigated and told the truth about all of this.  In her dispatches from Putin’s first presidential term, the years between 2000 and October 2006, when she was gunned down in Moscow, Politkovskaya wrote about Putin’s gangsterism, the death of Russian parliamentary democracy he engineered, and his war in Chechnya, the “small corner of hell” she and her immensely brave colleagues revealed to the world.

Putin’s savage “dirty war” continued for ten years.  In the end, Russian bombs targeted the civilian population of Grozny, destroying Chechnya’s largest city, and Russian riot police massacred its citizens as they tried to flee.

Re-reading Politkovskaya, recognizing her prescience, is chilling – because few listened, and few cared.  The Chechens were “others” — and there was a lot money to be made in the “emerging market” of the Russian Federation, if you had a taste for risk, if you could weather the market’s high volatility, and you knew the right people to direct your investments.

Nor did enough people watch or care ten years later, in 2015 and 2016 and 2017, when Putin joined forces with Syria’s butcher Bashar al-Assad to commit mass murder in Aleppo, Eastern Ghouta and Idlib, dispensing terror from the sky upon apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, markets, streets, neighborhoods, using barrel bombs, ballistic missiles, rocket artillery, incendiary and cluster munitions, and other banned weapons and targets, and deliberately starving people by cutting off food supplies in a protracted siege, tactics which Putin’s army is using now against civilian populations in cities throughout Ukraine, and in preparation for the siege of Kyiv.

These attacks and methods are crimes of war.  They violate customary international law as well as the Geneva conventions and their protocols, which Russia has ratified, law to which Putin adheres only in the breach.

When Putin occupied Crimea, in 2014, his troops marched in without a fight.  To take Yalta, less than a drop of blood would reunite the motherland.  Deluded by isolation and hubris, Putin imagined it would only take a few kiloliters to take the rest of Ukraine.  Humiliated by the weakness and incompetence of the first wave of this war, Putin has doubled down on terror, determined to produced submission throughout Ukraine the same way he did in Eastern Ghouta and Chechnya.

Andrei, your words in September 2001 inspire me to say, along with all people who love freedom throughout the world:   Today, we are all Ukrainians.

The people of Kyiv and Kharkiv are under attack, and we must stand with them, because we allowed the people of Grozny and Aleppo to be annihilated.

I believe in my heart that you feel the same way, and that we stand together in this moment of horror and international solidarity.

I believe that you share my understanding that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the total destruction that it has brought, brings, are heinous crimes against international law, and a catastrophe for all humanity.

Earlier in this letter I described Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a genocidal war.  I use the term “genocide” clinically, as a legal category.  You and I are lifelong students of international law, so you understand that I am not being loose with words.  Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as any acts of killing or destruction “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Putin has made it abundantly clear, repeatedly, that his intention in this war is to destroy Ukraine as a national group with sovereign independence from the Russian Federation.  Presumably by accident, based on Putin’s initial overconfidence, Russian State media published an article prematurely announcing Russia’s victory in Ukraine by declaring the death of Ukraine as a national entity and the reintegration of “Little Russians” (formerly “Ukrainians”) into the Russia family.  “Russia is restoring its historical fullness, gathering the Russian world, the Russian people together – in its entirety of Great Russians, Belarusians and Little Russians.”  This is genocide.

I pray for all Ukrainians, at the mercy of the forces of barbarism.

And I pray for Russia too, for your family and 99.99% of all Russian citizens.

I am buoyed and moved by the many thousands of immensely courageous Russians who are resisting the war passively and actively, secretly and in the open.  The denizens of many cities throughout your country who are making their opposition known through speech and action.  The scientists and journalists, academics, medical professionals, teachers, and tech workers and business people who are condemning the war.  They are deeply inspiring, especially knowing the risks and the costs involved.

I know that you are with these protestors, in spirit if you are not able to join them in person, as you are now the father of your own children you must protect.

No one knows what will happen next in your country.  But the red line has been crossed, domestically as well as internationally, and it difficult to see how going forward Putin’s regime can maintain power in Moscow and St. Petersburg and many other cities without a radical intensification of repression, and a brutal crushing of dissent, the Russian people haven’t seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union, when you were just a child.

So many courageous people have been banned, silenced or arrested under Putin’s rule, increasingly during the past year — culminating last week in the arrests of opponents to the war, and the closing of the last remaining independent newspapers, radio and TV stations and other media sources in your country — and I fear that far greater numbers will be banned, silenced and arrested in the coming weeks and months.  Anna Politkovskaya showed her fellow citizens this bleak Russian future before she herself was killed, alerting them to Putin’s authoritarian delusions, his determination to crush whatever remained of Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, the expansion of the FSB under his control.  When new monuments to Stalin began to appear under Putin’s blessing, Politkovskaya quotes a statement by Russia’s Human Rights Association:

After all that our people have learned about the superhuman brutality and vileness of Stalin, his moral and political rehabilitation could only mean that in our country any political immorality is permissible and any crime committed by the state can be justified if its enormity is sufficiently mind-numbing.  We must never forget that the main victim of Stalinism was the Russian people.

That was in May, 2005.  Ten weeks ago, in December 2021, Putin made Memorial and the Memorial Human Rights Museum criminal organizations.

From Politkovskaya’s murder in 2006, to the erosion of civil society in the intervening years, and the banning of Memorial, there is a direct line — just as there is a direct line from Grozny to Eastern Ghouta to Kyiv.

With the world’s attention on the evisceration of the Ukrainian nation, and the mass murder of its people, we must not forget that the main victim of Putin and Putinism remains the Russian people, whose fledgling democracy, basic economic well-being, and hope for the future he has also destroyed.

That is why today, as the international community stands with the Ukrainian people, against Putin’s dictatorship, we must stand with the Russians people too, for the same reason.

For centuries Russia has been riven by the struggle between reincarnations of Tsarist despotism, propaganda, toadyism and submission, on the one hand, and courageous visions of social enlightenment and political liberation, on the other.  Tragically, Lenin and Stalin surpassed Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny) in repression, terror and mass death and imperial control.  But across two centuries at least there has been an alternative, authentically anti-imperial intellectual and political history.  In 1863, for example, following the uprising of Poles against Russian imperial domination, the socialist intellectual Alexander Herzen published a manifesto of solidarity with his Polish brothers:

The authors extend the hand of young Russia to the Poles, and appeal to soldiers and officers to refrain from criminal acts.  This voice was essential, and with it begins the rehabilitation of Russia, and for that reason one is deeply grateful to those who made it possible.

The lackeys of the word, literary oprichniki and police messengers, both homegrown and those living abroad, call both them and us betrayers of Russia, and say that we stand in the ranks of its worst enemies, etc.  We will not answer them.  They have gone beyond a moral boundary, beyond which there is neither insult nor offense.  They enjoy special privileges, like people who declare themselves bankrupt, like legal prostitutes…

We are for Poland because we are for Russia.  We are on the side of the Poles because we are Russians.  We want independence for Poland because we want freedom for Russia.

Today we are for Ukraine because we reject barbarism and oppose genocide, because we stand with the people most victimized by Putin’s terror.

We cannot turn away from them.  We must hold them in our hearts and minds.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny,” Martin Luther King, Jr. always reminded us.  “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

We are for Ukraine because we are fellow human beings.

And we are for Ukraine because we are for Russia.

We affirm Ukraine’s nationhood because we want freedom for Russia.

We are for human rights and justice in both countries, human security, well-being and peace.

I have more to say, Andrei, in this terrible time.  I will continue writing you.  I have turned for guidance to Albert Camus and Dr. King,  and other inspiring figures who hated fascism, and loved humanity, justice and freedom.  I want to share some of their words.

And I want to talk with you about how we can, together, fight against the rise of white supremacist ethno-nationalism whose avatars are Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.  We need each other Andrei to ensure that their terrible project will be defeated.

And we must work together to rid the US, Russia and the world of the terror of nuclear weapons.

I will write you soon.

Until then, please give a hug to your children for me, as you hugged Kenji when he was a baby, and please keep faith.

Love and friendship,

Jonathan