Show Me Your Ear!
A year into its invasion of Ukraine, how and why Russia has weathered Western sanctions
There’s a bit of Soviet physical comedy I remember from my student days in Leningrad that I’ve been thinking about ever since Russia invaded Ukraine. In the joke a doctor tells asks a patient: “please, show me your ear.” The patient lifts his right hand and then instead of reaching for his nearby right ear, bends his whole arm over his head and pulls on his left. “Here it is!” He declares with great, idiotic pride.
Patience, a mind for systems and numbers, a nose for corruption and a facility at working one’s network of connections are all that’s been needed to evade Western sanctions.
This habit of reaching the long way round to grab something that should be right at hand is baked into Soviet thinking. In the days of the USSR a married couple living in a tiny studio apartment in the boondocks of outer Moscow might over the stretch of decades make their way to a two-bedroom in the center by combining their property with a series of falsified leaseholds of dead relatives and a cluster of leveraged favors from various friends and relatives. Soviets who emigrated abroad often followed the same labyrinthine…
