Experimental Blog #81

Comments on "Neodnazhdy v Amerike" by Svetlana Bukina

The author of this book, Svetlana Bukina, has been described as the most popular blogger in the Russian language in America.

The last word of the title is obvious to anybody, but the first word is not found in the Russian-English language dictionary. Maybe the title could very loosely be translated as something like, "Events, People, and Topics of American Life", and, actually, a lot more. Anyway, the book consists of a minor portion of the author's many blogs, and perhaps a few other additions.

Svetlana Bukina, who says that she is "pureblood Jewish", came to America from Moscow in December of 1990, and is now an American citizen. However, she "blogs" in Russian and apparently has a large audience in Russia; and this book was, in fact, published and printed there.

Among many other things, Svetlana Bukina writes very originally and provocatively about society and politics. For instance, she very broadly defines democracy as "predictiveness{or dependability} of the political process combined with the relative unpredictiveness{or undependability} of the outcome." In another piece she remembers that 25 or 30 years ago Valentin Zorin {who was either the Soviet ambassador or UN represetative} explained that both the American Democratic and Republican political parties are capitalist parties, so are basically not different from each other. Svetlana says that both parties represent various combinations, or coalitions of "leftists, rightists, libertarians{she says most Russian speaking immigrants are more or less libertarian, besides being Jewish}, statists, and centrists."

A few pages farther on she says that means that America is politically stable, that is, although both Democrats and Republicans are capitalist parties, we have only one regime; so "Zorin was not so far from the truth, thank God"{actually, she writes "slava bogu"}.