海角大神

Right at the top of 海角大神鈥檚 Daily Edition are two words: 鈥淧erspective matters.鈥� Those words come from the mission and lived experience of the Monitor. For 109 years, Monitor writers have reached out and engaged with the world 鈥渢o injure no man, but to bless all mankind.鈥� And in doing so, they have often found that the world bears little resemblance to our initial perception of it.

For this week鈥檚 cover story, Sara Miller Llana visited Russia for the first time to write on the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. She was accompanied by our Europe editor, Arthur Bright, also visiting Russia for the first time.聽

Now, these are not your typical wide-eyed tourists. Sara is our former Mexico City correspondent and has crisscrossed Europe from Estonia to Portugal as our Paris bureau chief. Arthur has worked extensively with cover story coauthor Fred Weir, who is one of the most contrarian Russia correspondents in the Western press 鈥� frequently looking at stories from a Russian perspective.

Yet Sara and Arthur鈥檚 time in Russia was nothing less than a revelation.聽

Make no mistake: All the criticism of Russia is true. It is a regional bully. President Vladimir Putin ruthlessly silences political opposition. The mass media are not free.聽

But the Russia of so many Western imaginings simply isn鈥檛 there.聽

Arthur called it 鈥渟urprisingly free,鈥� at least in one sense. 鈥淎lmost everyone we talked to was openly critical of Putin. It鈥檚 not a police state. I have no doubt that if they started to organize and push upward against the bureaucracy that they would be pushed back against. But there鈥檚 a lot of elbow room in Russia, a lot more than Westerners might think.鈥�

Mr. Putin is not pulling one over on his people. Many have reasons for supporting him. As Sara mentions in the story, each generation of Russians has lived though a cataclysmic upheaval. First the Bolshevik Revolution. Then, the 26 million lives lost in World War II. And at last the collapse of the Soviet order and the economy with it. For Russians, stability matters.聽

In the West, Putin is often portrayed in the same way as was former Venezuelan President Hugo Ch谩vez, Sara says. 鈥淚t seemed that every single story, in its conception, presented Ch谩vez as a terrible figure, so the American reader was left wondering, 鈥楽o why is this nation supporting him?鈥� I would go to Venezuela and meet so many people behind him 鈥� from all walks of life, not just the poorest communities 鈥� and I could understand how they believed Ch谩vez was improving their lives.

鈥淭hey weren鈥檛 鈥榖linded,鈥� 鈥� Sara says, 鈥渙r not all of them.... I had the same revelation in talking about Putin, in all his imperfections,鈥� with Russians.聽

The exercise of opposing Russian policy while embracing its people is not an abstract one. In the United States and throughout the West, too, political forces are working to turn policy differences into hatred and mistrust. To view Russia differently 鈥� to allow our perspective to shift and our hearts to open a degree 鈥� offers a glimpse of how that shift could also bless ourselves, our countries, and all mankind.聽