The Russians are paranoid - just like the Yanks

When our lame duck President George Bush first met Russia’s Foreign Minister Vladimir Putin, former president of the Russkys, he said: “I looked into his eyes and got a sense of his soul.�

If I had l looked into Putin’s baby- blue eyes I would have, first, seen a top official of the KGB, the Soviet’s secret service and official killing machine, but also I would have seen the scary image of Grigory Efimovich Rasputin, a Siberian peasant who became the trusted advisor to the Czarina before the Bolshevik.

Note the resemblance between Putin and Ras-Putin. Does today’s Putin have a relative in the closet with the first name of Ras? Why do I ask? I’ll tell you.

Though Rasputin was only supposed to be a healer to the Czarina’s hemophiliac son, it was widely believed he was exerting strong influence in Russia’s foreign policies.

For these reasons, and because the self-avowed monk appeared pious and saintly in front of the royals, others, namely the Russian nobility whose powers he was usurping, accused him of being a sex craved, alcoholic peasant.

They launched a plot to murder him. They finally succeeded, but the killing was like the ending of the movie “Fatal Attraction,â€� in which Glenn Close’s  character has a love affair with Michael Douglas and then won’t go away. She comes to his apartment and in a knifing and shooting melee keeps popping up when we all are certain she has been killed.

So it was with the Rasputin. The nobles tried to poison him; it failed. Then they took him outside in the frozen winter and shot him. He kept rising and coming at them. They pumped him full of lead until he had more bullets in him than King Kong atop the Empire State building. Like the poor ape, who had all my sympathies, the monk finally expired. They wrapped his body in a blanket and dropped him in a hole in the icy river.

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I only started fooling around with Rasputin because I saw the possibility of a kinship, given the Putin part of both names. But, to paraphrase the judge, who would say in a trial when dismissing some evidence: “The readers will disregard my allegation that Putin is the descendant of a sex-craved, alcoholic monk.�

What I would like to say about Putin and the Russian people — and don’t start accusing me of being a Communist sympathizer — is they have been paranoid for a very long time. With some justification.

In good part, it’s because, like nearly every other major country, they have sought to expand their borders and take over their neighbors.

Japan grabbed Korea and only lost it at the end of the Second World War. All the European countries, with the exception of Andorra, sent their armies out and created colonial empires in India and  Indonesia, but mainly in Africa.

We would have loved to incorporate Canada into the United States, but it didn’t happen. So we grabbed Arizona, New Mexico and California from Mexico by force — and irony of ironies, they’re taking it back by immigration!

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Let’s get back to Russia. Last time around, I wrote about the misadventures of the English in trying to capture Afghanistan more than 100 years ago. I didn’t have space to include one of the reasons the British moved into Afghanistan — it was because the Russians were poised to send in their armies  in a try to colonize that heretofore unconquerable land. (When they finally got their chance, they wished they had stayed home.)

After the Second World War, when Winston Churchill delineated the borders of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union, we settled in some 50,000 troops in West Germany and in large bases in Italy, Turkey and Japan.

During that time I was on a travel junket to Moscow. Our girl guide, who spoke perfect American English, even though she had never been to the States, engaged me in conversation. She pointed out that the Soviets felt encircled by our bases. “We watch every move you make. Remember, during our great Revolution, you Americans sent troops to Russia to fight on the side of the White Russians.� I hadn’t thought of it that way until she pointed it out.

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Today the First Cold War has ended, but I fear the second is about to start.

We have enlisted in NATO a military alliance of countries bordering or close to Russia that were only recently part of the Soviet Empire. Think of them: Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary. Is it hard to understand what has motivated Putin to send his armored forces into Georgia and then dare us to  chase them out? Not a chance.

Once again the Russians feel that we are encircling them. And we in turn can once more be afraid that we have awakened “The Great Bear.�

Freelance writer Barnett Laschever  remembers being followed during a visit to Moscow. When the phone in his hotel room didn’t work, he hollered into the chandelier: “I want my phone working when I return this evening.â€� It was.