Down, But Still Russian

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Down, But Still Russian
by John Derbyshire

December 08, 2011

Walking around central Moscow, the thing you notice is the Russians—I mean, the near-total absence of non-Russians.

There is, of course, a tourist element. Appearance is not much to go by here, but I can recognize—not necessarily understand, but recognize—most of the world’s major languages by ear, and Chinese seems to predominate. The Chinese travel in groups of half a dozen or so, middle-class academic or professional types mostly, exchanging scandalized comments in Mandarin about the price of everything. (Moscow is a very expensive city.)

That small tourist element aside, well-nigh everyone here is ethnically Russian. The cab drivers are Russian. The waiters and waitresses are Russian. The staff in barbershops and nail salons are Russian. The maintenance men in the subway and the ladies issuing subway tickets are Russian. The beggars are Russian. The guy selling fags and candy from a sidewalk kiosk labeled PRODUKTY (“stuff”) is Russian. The girl serving me in the pharmacy is Russian. The models shown in ads for escort agencies and “Private Club and Restaurant” are Russian (just as they are in New York, come to think of it).

Even—good grief!—the lady who cleans our hotel room is Russian. She spoke fluent Russian, anyway, though her features had a slight Mongolian. To make sure, I asked her. Yes, Russian—from Yugra, up in the north Urals somewhere, and so presumably with some Siberian-aboriginal blood contributing to the physiognomy. Where in the Anglosphere nowadays would you have your hotel room cleaned by a native of that country?

Not that Moscow has been totally resistant to Third World-ization. The young woman clearing tables in the food court at GUM department store (the best place to eat cheap good food in central Moscow) looked so Chinese, I addressed her in that language. She smiled in a friendly way but obviously had not understood. I tried Russian: Kitayskiy? She laughed and said no, she was from Kyrgyzstan. Did I know Kyrgyzstan? Not very intimately, I confessed.

You notice a trace or more of Asia in the features among workers in the lowest occupations. I suppose some are remnants of the Mongolian peoples who once ruled much of the country; some are part-aboriginal like our room cleaner; and many come from the Muslim Stans of Central Asia.

Does this tell us that there are Jobs Russians Won’t Do? I doubt it. There are plenty of fair, blue-eyed Russians down there among the Kyrgyz and Buryats doing the drudge work. The overwhelming impression in central Moscow is of a city populated almost entirely by Russians. I have not had the opportunity to call any major firm or government office in Moscow, but I feel fairly sure that if I did, I would not be instructed to press “1” for Russian.

To see how striking all this is, imagine yourself wandering around central London, Manhattan, Los Angeles, or even—more rapidly this past few years, it seems—Washington, DC.

London is the really outstanding case. I haven’t been back for some years, but visitors—not all of them cynical reactionaries such as myself—report that an ethnically British person is now an oddity in large swaths of Britain’s capital. Such a person is positively dicing with death if he dares show his pasty British face in parts of the East End.

Britain’s Third World-ification began in the same way that, according to a famous historian, the British Empire itself began: in a fit of absentmindedness. As that empire’s dissolution commenced in the years after WWII, it seemed only fair to let some of Her Majesty’s overseas subjects go settle in the imperial homeland.


Then, in the 1960s, at about the same time as their American cousins, British socialists and love-the-world globalists realized that mass Third World immigration was a marvelous weapon to wield against both their native working class, who were getting ideas above their station, and domestic conservatives and traditionalists of all kinds, whom the globalists needed to delegitimize so that Davos Man could take over.

Forty years on, one in eight of Britain’s population was born abroad, most in the Third World—that is to say, in places whose net contribution to human civilization over the last millennium has been zero, if not actually negative.

The consequences fill Britain’s newspapers. They filled them rather spectacularly in August this year, when the ineducable, unemployable, and unassimilable descendants of those Third World settlers burned and looted British town centers.

They have filled them this past few days with the story of Emma West, a British woman who, admittedly in salty language, had the audacity to lament her homeland’s demographic transformation in public. Ms. West is in jail as I write, charged with “a racially aggravated public order offence,” though no disorder seems to have ensued. Ms. West’s children have been “placed in care,” which is to say, sent to reeducation camps where they will be taught to hate their mother in between sessions of sex play with the pedophile camp staff. “Being the child of an enemy of the people” was the charge in Stalin’s time.

You will comb the records of British courts in vain to find anyone but a native Briton charged with “a racially aggravated public order offense.”

(In France the authorities are more tolerant. You can even, in a public-transport vehicle, call aloud for the extermination of an entire race, as in this case...except that…wait a minute…oh, forget it.)

The USA has come to the same place by a slightly different route. America has been multiracial from the beginning, so American patriotism based on ethnic solidarity has always been problematic (though the Founding Fathers seem not to have noticed). The globalists’ task in smashing up any kind of national feeling, including even a mere attachment to national sovereignty, has been correspondingly easier. It has been further assisted by the energetic romanticizing of immigration, so that complaints about, say, the mass importation of Somali refugees are drowned out by loud evocations of Ellis Island and the Famine Ships.

None of this has got much purchase in Russia—an odd thing, since Russia’s ruling classes are even more corrupt, unscrupulous, and contemptuous of their lower-class citizens than are Britain’s and America’s. If they thought it was in their interests to swamp Russia with millions of Mexicans, Somalis, or Pakistanis, then Putin and Co. would undoubtedly do so.

Still, Russia is in a bad way. The early post-Soviet years’ hopes have all faded. On Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2011, Russia is ranked at 143, tied with Uganda and Nigeria, actually below Pakistan. A wave of emigration is underway. The country’s demographics are terrible—African levels of mortality combined with East Asian birth rates.

Still, great numbers of Russians love Russia. In a conversation with a young Russian woman—college graduate, worldly, excellent English—I mentioned having dined at the Yesenin Café, which is named for a Russian poet, an old favorite of mine. She said she was a Yesenin fan, too. “I love his verses. So patriotic.” Imagine hearing that from a college-educated American girl!

Perhaps that’s why Russia’s rulers, as cynical and ruthless as they are, hold off on bringing in Muslims and Africans to break the ethnic back of their people. Nobody has yet managed to make any large number of Russians hate their own ancestors.

Russia’s post-Soviet rulers are certainly very wicked people. They have sucked their country’s precious natural resources out of the ground, sold them on world markets, and pocketed the proceeds, leaving Ivan and Katya to trudge through freezing mud for a lousy wage or starvation-level pension.

But are they more wicked than the Anglosphere’s rulers, who have swamped their own people with millions of hesperophobic welfare-dependent foreigners from regions of low mean IQ and high mean criminality—mullahs, muggers, and moochers—just for the satisfaction of humiliating their own domestic enemies? Will they, in the long run, have done more to destroy their nation than our rulers have done to destroy ours? History will tell.
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