Most people in the West’s perception of Russia is based on out-dated, prejudiced Cold-war stereotypes of thuggish, unthinking military automatons who swirl large quantities of vodka at night, whilst feverishly plotting the downfall of the West. A type of dystopian “Pinky and the Brain” with nightmarish consequences for all of us who were taught to fear communism and the “red threat” above all else. Or perhaps an evil twisted version of “Little Red Riding Hood” with the ever ravenous wolf representing Western propagandist iconography of Russia? Like little Red Riding Hood, more than 50-years of unrelenting anti-communist propaganda by the Western media has stunted our abilities to think rationally of Russians other than them as hapless villains in James Bond movies. The McCarthyism period in American recent history, may be characterised as the first full spectrum government sponsored brainwashing project, through the use of an increasingly indolent mass-media to distort its own citizens perceptions in order to fulfil a politico-military objectives.
Post the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990/91, and barely two decades later we are assaulted with a very familiar siren call, the “Red Scare” 2.0. This time its Vladimir Putin’s turn. Evidently it doesn’t matter to Pentagon power brokers that Putin is no communist, believes in God and The Russian Federation isn’t the old USSR. All that matters to these war mongers is the familiar noun, Russia, originally the place where a group of Swedish merchant/warriors established themselves around Kiev. It seemingly doesn’t matter that the USSR, comprised of 15 countries that formed the first modern economic and political union, similar to today’s EU, European Union, isn’t the same entity?
So how exactly has Russia contributed to the modern world? Here are just some of their (Russian) scientist’s contributions to the fields of scientific discovery not often explored:
- Dimitri Mendeleev – formulated the “Periodic Law” and created his own periodic table that is widely used by all scientists today.
- Pafnuty Chebyshev – designed 40 mechanisms still used in the modern automotive and instrumentation industries today.
- Alexander Popov – designed and built the first state-of=the-art radio receiver in 1895.
- Sergey Botkin – created the theory of a living organism as a unified whole.
- Nicolay Pirogov – is considered the founder of the field of modern surgery.
- Alexander Mozhaysky – designed, built and tested one of the world’s first airplanes in 1882.
- Ivan Pavlov – famous for his experiments with dogs and founder of the physiology of higher nervous system activity.
- Elie Metchnikoff – made contributions to the fields of immunology and founder of gerontology.
- Nikolay Zhukovsky – is the founding father of Russian aeronautics and the founder of modern hydrodynamics.
- Vladimir Zworykin – Engineer and inventor, he is one of the founding fathers of modern day colour television. He invented the cathode ray tube in 1929.
- Sergey Korolev – leading Soviet rocket engineer and spacecraft designer, the father of practical astronautics and the man responsible for the successful earth orbit of Yuri Gagarin (the first man to fly into space) in 1961, almost a full 10-years before the moon landing.
Now of course I can continue but I hope the point is made, if you consider that Russia has in effect been invaded 9-times, the last two being the most brutal in the annals of warfare, I argue that in the absence of any verifiable or empirically provable facts, the Russian Federation doesn’t represent an existential threat to either NATO or the United States. Back in the Cold-War era, the USSR had more than 200 tank divisions that would’ve taken no more than three days to push to the other side of the Atlantic if they so wished. Today, Russia doesn’t have a sufficiently large enough standing army to invade Europe, nor does it possess the maritime or naval capacity to safely escort a million soldiers across the Atlantic Ocean to invade mainland America. So I end on this offbeat note readers, chuckle
Because of falling birth-rates, the ruling party together with the Russian Orthodox Church has agreed to designate 12th September as “National Conception Day,” perhaps the best reason for a holiday, and they’re given prizes if their babies are born in exactly nine months?
