I’m ambivalent about the Russkies on a number of grounds but there are some connections that amuse me.
I grew up in San Francisco and there were about 60,000 White Russians there, many of them having been shipped there by the Japs who didn’t know what else to do with them when they invaded Manchuria and found them there.
The Russkies I knew in Europe and I shared many a joke about the way we trashed Germany in WWII.
I always maintained that it was a pissy little technology park that just didn’t understand real countries.
They couldn’t even build a good four engine bomber or an airplane engine with enough power (partly because of poor fuel) to spin a four bladed prop so were incapable of strategic bombing.
They had no concept of the sheer size, mass, and power of countries like the USA and USSR. And so they marched off into Russia without even covering their backs (from the West) and then ran out of fuel, tanks, trucks, etc etc.
There seems to be a strong residual respect in the Russkies for the fact that either of our two countries could have licked Germany by itself. They know it and we know it and those Germans that survived that long certainly knew it by 1945.
I was in a Long Range Patrol Company in W Germany in the mid-1960s and used to visit E Berlin until I got a security clearance that made it inadvisable.
Whenever I crossed over at Checkpoint Charlie in uniform I would walk past the queue, push my military ID card up against the window, give them 5 or 6 seconds to see it and walk on.
If one of the Vopos/border guards stopped me or called me back I would say, “I’m not talking to you, get a Russkie”. Because Berlin was still technically an Occupation Zone and those DDR people with guns technicall illegal there was always a Russian soldier on duty there and at Freidrichstrasse U-Bahn Station, the other crossing point.
The always amiable Russian would amble over and we would start bagging the Germans and making jokes about the war and that sort of thing and we’d send the Germans up which REALLY annoyed themand then they would pat me on the shoulder and wave me on my way.
We had Germany in common.
I feel sorry for most Russians. They make Poles look ebullient.
And I’m ambivalent about pushing them and their paranoia into a corner by moving our forces into eastern Europe. But the gauntlet is down now. Subtlety might not be our strong suit but we are going to need some of it in eastern Europe until Russia runs out of oil. By then they won’t matter.