The Marathon March of Folly

Boston does its little part in the long, mindless slog toward Forever War in Ukraine

Just two weeks before the start of the Boston Marathon, Russians (and Belarusians!) have been banned from participating.

Why exclude about 20 or so ordinary people, none of them professionals, from a peaceful citizen’s event? The organizers say it’s to show support for Ukraine. Swept up by the prevailing xenophobic winds, they have issued a convoluted ruling: You are primly disinvited from their 26-mile foot race if you are “from” Russia or Belarus, and also “currently residing” in one of those two nations:

The race organizers add that if they’ve kicked you out last-minute for being too Russian, they might also keep your money. They will make “reasonable attempts” to refund the $255 registration fee (and the $25 surcharge “to mitigate the spread of COVID-19”) — but any refund attempts fall “within the constraints [of] … international sanctions.” So if they end up keeping your $280, that’s also your fault, and maybe next time don’t get sanctioned.

Consider a Russian by birth and citizenship, a wealthy person who “currently resides” in New York City, perhaps even a diplomat in the Russian foreign service — a proud Russian patriot who supports Vladimir Putin. She is welcome to lace on her jogging shoes and join everyone in Boston. Because she’s “currently residing” here, and not there.

What if she was Ukrainian by birth, spoke Ukrainian at home, was horrified by the invasion of Ukraine — but her family of modest means found itself on the Russian side of the border upon the Soviet Union’s collapse, and was issued Russian citizenship? (This is a very common scenario.) She could well be cataloged as “from / currently residing in” Russia and told to stay home — in punishment for a war she did not start, cannot control, and does not support.

The Boston Marathon at its best is a peaceful citizen’s event, one that might have brought a handful of ordinary Russians and Americans together to exchange views and information. We need more of these sorts of citizen exchanges during these dangerous times, not less.

Instead, we’re engaging in casual, mentally lazy discrimination against ordinary people. Beating up on all-things Russian has become a mindless default.

More than 15,000 Russian doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers have signed an open letter calling for an end to the war. How have American doctors supported our bravest Russian colleagues? By telling recent Russian medical school graduates that they can’t come here anymore:

Statement by the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates

Thirty or so Russians want to run the Boston Marathon — we slam the door in their faces. Thirty or so Russian medical school graduates want to come study in America — we slam the door in their faces.

These are the sorts of Russians who we could be building bridges with.

Instead, we order them to stay home, ponder the sanctions we’ve imposed on their economy, and tell all of their friends and family how unwelcoming and sanctimonious Americans are — the same Americans who have never once reckoned with our own Vladimir Putin moment, when we saluted George W. Bush nineteen years ago as he marched us into a war of choice in the Middle East, a cataclysm that wrecked the lives of tens of millions, with violence that reverberates down through history to this day.

Never mind that. It’s much more fun to find fault with others.

So, you want to come play tennis at Wimbledon as an ordinary citizen, who happens to be from Russia, and who has called for peace? Not good enough. First sign a denunciation of your home country. Even then we might not let you play, because if a Russian won Wimbledon, my goodness, “it might bolster Putin,” whatever that means. Can you imagine our American reaction if the French Open had refused to let Roger Federer play in 2003, unless he first removed the American flag from all clothing and publicly denounced President Bush? (OK, sports people, I know Federer lost in the first round — I can Google too — that’s not the point.)

The Boston Marathon organizers ought to know better. It was just nine years ago that two brothers, Tamerlane and Dzhokhar Tsarnayev — Chechens on their father’s side and radicalized by their view of the Iraq invasion as a war against Muslims — detonated their homemade terrorist bombs at the finish line. The Tsarnayev bombs in 2013 killed three, including an eight-year-old boy and a graduate student from China. They left 17 people with amputations, and injured 264.

Afterwards, we learned that for years beforehand, Russian security officials had repeatedly warned U.S. counterparts that they needed to keep an eye on the older Tsarnayev. He was in and out of Russia’s roiled Chechnya region, and the Russians reported suspicions he was a potential radical terrorist. In fact, two years before the marathon bombing, the FBI — prompted, again, by Russian colleagues! — did interview the elder Tsarnayev. But nothing much came of it. Putin later offered condolences for the “barbaric” bombing and, as he often had before, expressed a desire for U.S.-Russian cooperation and friendly relations. “This tragedy should motivate us to work closer together,” Putin said then.

But by the one-year anniversary of the 2013 marathon bombing, relations had dramatically soured. Russia was accusing Washington of having engineered a 2014 coup in Kyiv. That event sparked both a Ukrainian civil war and Russia’s quick seizure of the Crimean Peninsula. Once again, Russia was out of fashion — and the idea that the Kremlin might have once tried to help us stop the Tsarnayevs and prevent the Boston Marathon bombing was promptly turned on its head: Now it was Russia’s fault, for not cooperating enough. Never mind that all agreed Russia had come to us with a heads up, and had done so repeatedly, for years; apparently the Russians hadn’t come to us repeatedly enough, or in enough detail, so now it was on them, and not the FBI or the U.S. intelligence community — a finding enshrined after an investigation of itself by, yes, the intelligence community.

Next year will be the 10-year anniversary of the marathon bombing. It was an incredible tragedy; there were heroics by first responders, medical personnel, ordinary citizens, and of course by the injured themselves, who got back up to soldier on, their lives changed. It was a tiny taste of the horrors unfolding in Ukraine — two homemade bombs on a crowded Boston street, 12 seconds apart.

In Ukraine, meanwhile, we continue to pour massive amounts of high-tech weapons into the conflagration. Now we are talking about offering tanks. Ukrainian forces uses the weaponry gratefully, putting up a stirring resistance — which, it must be said if we are going to be grown ups and not Marvel Comics fantasists, is only going to end in a crushing Russian counterattack of horrific dimensions.

One should be dismayed by the Russian invasion, but also dismayed by our foolishness in constantly dialing up the violence, assuming we can just fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.

With our sporting events approach to this war in far-off elsewhere, we have shown zero interest in supporting peace negotiations — on the contrary, Congress just got into the act and is sending the first-ever legislative sanctions of the crisis to President Joe Biden for his signature. Up until now, sanctions have been by Presidential decree. But if the latest sanctions become law, just because Congress wants to play at this too, then sanctions will forevermore be unavailable as a bargaining chip in peace talks — instead, they will be permanent-ish, largely inflexible, and so just as mindless as, say, banning Russian medical students from studying in America, or Belarusian joggers from spending a spring day in Boston.