France and Russia have a special cultural relationship, really quite adorable. I’m not enough of a historian to know why, maybe it’s something really obvious. But when the Iron Curtain girdled Mother Russia that relationship was challenged. And the seasoned smugglers and scamps on both sides of the curtain answered the call. Now, the soviets took a different approach to intelligence work, special forces, and law enforcement than the United States. While we proliferated bureaucracies, agencies, and military divisions they kept it simple. We have the FBI, CIA, NSA, et cetera. The soviets mostly just had the KGB. We have the SEALs, the PJs, Green Berets, Rangers, et cetera. The soviets had the Spetsnaz. That meant that the same grizzly beast men who faced off against the finest American special forces units also hit the streets to raid underground markets selling contraband blue jeans and rock music. For the smugglers of the soviet era black market, fighting back was not an option. They learned to run away. They crafted the finest technical system for evasion since the development of intonjutsu (Japanese art of evasion). And because French people were involved, they made it sexy.
I’m sure you’ve heard of parkour, or free running. Maybe you’ve tried it. If you have tried it, you probably noticed that it harshly punishes error. But maintaining the centuries old Franco-Russian cultural and commercial exchange was sufficient incentive for youth on both sides of the divide to devote themselves to the refinement of this new global cultural treasure. Score one for the riff-raff.
When the subject of self-defense comes up, someone always says something like, “I’d just run away.” Running away is not so simple an answer. It is, in practice, just another martial art. Go to YouTube, search “epic fail parkour montage”. Sorry, not sorry.
The rest of this chapter details many of the reasons that untrained people often fail tragically when they attempt to run away, even when they succeed.
The rest of this chapter will become available following the success of this Kickstarter campaign.
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