Washington DC as a State of Mind

In 1961 the brilliant French astronomer Audouin Dollfus ruled that “Moscow is a state of mind.”

It was a rather innocent remark. Ever since the far side of the Moon was photographed by the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 in 1959, Soviet astronomers had been insisting that one of the “seas” on the far side be named Mare Moscoviense (the Sea of Moscow). American astronomers objected to the proposals reminding the world community of astronomers that the established tradition for naming the lunar maria was to use names that denote either a condition of nature or a state of mind. In 1961, while presiding over the meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Berkeley, California, Dollfus solved the problem by ruling that “Moscow is a state of mind,” and therefore there was no problem in naming a lunar mare after Moscow. Even though the ruling was on favor of the Soviets, they did not like Dollfus’s ingenious solution.

For once Dollfus, who was responsible for multiple discoveries on planets and satellites in the Solar System, made a discovery here on out own planet, without using a telescope, or spectral readings, or anything other specialized tool. Yes, Moscow at the time was a state of mind more than it was a capital of a nation.

Moscow was full of inner contradictions in the early 1960s. Just a few years after the death of Stalin, Moscow was struggling to cast off the memories of its Stalinist past, and yet it didn’t want to cast off the Communist doctrine that created Stalinism. It desperately wanted to prove its ability to create better welfare for the workers, and it constantly failed, lagging behind the capitalist West. Those were the years when the Soviets killed a few dozen of their best pilots in failed attempts to get man in space, only to prove how much superior they were to America. At the same time, 40+ percent of the territory of the Soviet Union was without electricity, and Russian families lived in komunalki. These were the years when Khrushchev used his shoe to bang on his delegate-desk in the United Nations; and these were the years when he promised America, “We will bury you,” while at same time buying millions of tons of grain and meat from America to feed the Russians, left starving from the successes of the collectivized agriculture.

Moscow was a lunatic asylum at the time; that’s exactly how it was described by many Russian dissidents living there. It was a collective case of schizophrenia, paranoia, and inferiority complex combined with maniacal behavior, not only among the Party elite but among the general population as well, being the victim of the official policies of a schizophrenic totalitarian government. So when Audouin Dollfus said “Moscow is a state of mind,” he said a truth that transcended the specific meaning he meant.

Washington DC is a state of mind these days. More specifically, schizophrenia.

MORE