The Moscow Times published an article by Alexei Bayer headlined 'How the Kremlin Created a Collective Sharikov' and devoted to the political situation in Russia and the country's relations with the United States.
"As is well-known, great novels remain relevant long after they are written," the article begins. "Mikhail Bulgakov's novel "Heart of a Dog" is the story of Professor Preobrazhensky, who implants vital human organs into a dog as part of a medical experiment. He transforms a sweet stray into a nasty, pushy oaf, someone known in Russian as a kham, or boor. Named Sharikov, the ex-canine promptly begins to harass and lecture Preobrazhensky."
"Written in 1925, this caustic satire responded to the issues of the day, when thousands of half-educated Sharikovs were scaling the rungs of the new Soviet bureaucracy and wielded power over engineers, doctors, artists and other professionals. Regrettably, the leitmotif of "Heart of a Dog" is equally relevant to the new brand of anti-Americanism that the Kremlin has spread over the past decade."
"Until the collapse of communism, the U.S. maintained that its opponent in the Cold War was not the people but the Soviet government, which oppressed its citizens behind the Iron Curtain. Washington's most effective weapon against Moscow was not its huge arsenal of nuclear-tipped missiles but the information it beamed into the Soviet Union through Radio Liberty and Voice of America as well as a handful of publications that debunked the myths of Soviet propaganda," Bayer writes.
"More interesting — and consonant with the mood of the day — is the new anti-Americanism taking shape today. It sees the conflict between Russia and the West in moral terms. According to this view, Russia is the last great hope of Christian morality in a corrupt, decadent and sexually perverted world led by the U.S. This is the theme of the resurgent official Orthodox Christianity and, by some weird logic, the basis for the recent law banning the adoption of Russian orphans by U.S. parents. A surprising number of Russians believe that Americans use Russian children to get welfare, force them to become homosexual or even — harking back to Bulgakov's novel — cut them up for organs."
"This narrative is straight out of "Heart of a Dog." Over the four postwar decades, Washington strove to make Russians free and prosperous. Once the goal was achieved, a collective Sharikov emerged from deep within the Kremlin laboratories, one that began to spout crazy tales of U.S. evil plots worthy of medieval blood libel," the author concludes.
