America and Anna Karenina: What do they have in common?

by Galima Galiullina, Ph.D. for VT

The image of America as a beautiful woman has been preserved in my memory from the memorable last issue of the magazine “America” ​​in Russian, in which it was announced that the goals of the magazine were achieved and that the editors say goodbye to us. A woman in a red dress was on the cover with her back to us. This was the 1992 edition. The USSR has already been killed. America celebrated its victory.

Twenty-eight years have passed since then. And now I again see the image of America, but no longer celebrating the victory over the existential enemy – the Russians, but in the image of Anna Karenina, ready to lay on the rails under the steel wheels of a huge train slowly departing from the station.

America, like Anna Karenina, had everything to enjoy life – belonging to her upper-class world, being wealthy, and enjoying the love of relatives and friends. But everything turned into an endless crazy dream when passion appeared in her life.

In the case of Anna Karenina, it was officer Alexei Vronsky, in the case of America, a passion for war as a means of satisfying national pride and greed. Anna Karenina cheated on a respectable and caring husband, forgetting about the honor and her oath of allegiance, America changed the covenants of the fathers – the founders of the Republic, the oath of allegiance to the pillars of democracy hewn out of the mistakes of European states unable then to throw off heritor governance.

In a rapture of passion, Anna destroyed the family hearth, lost her beloved son, and found nothing but a new destructive disease – an addiction to morphine. America, having tasted the rapture of a ghostly victory over an entire empire, continued the bloody path of violence against other nations and announced to the whole world that history had ended with only one master of the world remaining.

For those who did not want to fit into this picture of the world, the choice was not great – direct aggression of NATO, perfectly armed against weak countries, or a color revolution at the hands of venal elites and fooled masses. For those who did not want to participate in the endless pornography of wars or returned from them crippled forever physically and mentally, opium or heroin was always at hand in a variety of forms. And now the country is plunged into an opioid epidemic to further add national desolation.

Heartland: A Space of Unprecedented Opportunities

But where is the steam engine approaching America? Is someone going to attack the country? Of course not. A huge train led by a powerful steam engine with a red star is the continent of Eurasia, Brzezinski’s crazy dream, Hitler’s coveted land, the territory of the Heartland, which is now gaining an inexorable and unstoppable movement into the future. A new, or revived, existential challenge or unapproachable obstacle.

Eurasian integration is a process of reviving the Silk Road, bewitching by its scale and prospects, but not in the form of old caravan routes, but ultramodern highways and railways, new seaports and airports, this is an old friendship of peoples, shaking off the ashes of betrayal and oblivion, these are the hands of billions of people, outstretched for a friendly handshake.

This is the Eurasian Union and the One Belt, One Road Initiative in the process of pairing, already begun by joint efforts. This is the phenomenal intellectual capital of Russia, the grandiose economic breakthrough of China, the passionate and cultural power of Iran.

About Galima Galiullina:  Born and raised in the Kurgan Oblast area of the southern Ural Mountains, Galima Galiullina quickly was recognized as an exceptional student. She taught herself several languages while a schoolgirl listening to radio broadcasts beamed into the then Soviet Union. After passing examinations, she entered Chelyabinsk State Institute of Culture becoming a student of the Library Faculty. Upon graduating at the top of her class she moved to the Moscow State Institute of Culture as a postgraduate student earning a Master’s Degree in Information Science.