Prison letters

Often, it is the little lives that tell us most about a system. Perhaps that is why 19^th century Russian literature gave so much place to the “little man” – the humble individual usually subsumed into that slogan-friendly notion of “the people.”

            As I wrote my last blog post, about a big name, Alexei Navalny, and his tragic death in prison, I was thinking, too, of his fellow prisoners, some of them also known to the world, others faceless, last making it into the western media when Yevgeny Prigozhin began recruiting them en-masse to do a stint on the frontlines in Ukraine, in return for freedom.

            And I was thinking of Spartak, named after his sisters’ favourite football team. He was 14 when I first met him. A good-hearted but directionless kid, one of the millions growing up without a father, and with a mother busy trying to survive. The mother, back in the years of Soviet industrial enthusiasm, had left her native Tatarstan to build the Baikal-Amur railway, a young woman eager to contribute to her country’s development. And had ended up stuck in a mining town in southern Yakutia. Spartak was her son from a second marriage, to a Ukrainian, who died young, and when his older half-sisters came to conquer the capital, he soon followed, went to school, tried to settle down.

            He didn’t really settle. He went to live with his father’s parents for a time, but rural Ukraine wasn’t his thing and he returned to Moscow. He drifted, until the army called him up for military service. After a bumpy start, he blossomed, discovered new talents, motivation, a sense of structure and discipline. He was stationed in Ingushetia, amidst the simmering conflict in the North Caucasus. He was a conscript, not a professional soldier, but they sent him to a hotspot, and later gave him a document to prove it.

            He thought of going professional, staying in the army, going to the military academy, but he’d quit school too early and the doors were closed. And so he drifted in Moscow again, did some silly things, ran afoul of the law and ended up being charged with “hooliganism,” a kind of catch-all offence frequently used and abused.

            That he’d become a bit of a hooligan was without doubt, but he wasn’t beyond redemption. He was 20, a malleable age, and all he really needed was some guidance and structure in his life. Instead, he got a year in the Butyrka pre-trial detention facility in Moscow, enough to harden and embitter anyone, followed by 3 years in a prison colony in Mordovia, a region east of Moscow, which hosted some of the matches at the 2018 Football World Cup, but is far better known within Russia as home to countless prisons.

            When he returned to Moscow, the sisters and I looked for programmes or groups working on reintegrating newly released prisoners. We found just one, a Jewish organisation that said it was swamped. There was a big prison population, but practically nothing addressing the needs of those returning to their old homes.

            Spartak now had a criminal record, publicly accessible to any potential employer. Prigozhin, the late Wagner boss, had a criminal record too, but made his way up during the freer and wilder 1990s, and had the right connections. Spartak had no connections and found one door after another closed, even for the least prestigious jobs. The only connections he had were his fellow prisoners, who’d help each other out where they could with employment or other opportunities. A young man written off from the start. A young man who was still kind-hearted Spartak, but branded now, seemingly condemned to this drifting and easily manipulated life.

            He muddled along until last October, found a new job, a girlfriend, when a chance encounter with some men from the North Caucasus upended a life just beginning to shine with new prospects. As he tells it, the men provoked the dispute, and one of them lunged at him with a knife. He reacted fast, instinctive, not thinking, snatched the knife and made a rapid thrusting movement in the man’s direction. Scare him off. Only the thrust was too fast, too hard, and the man went down, trying to stem the blood.

Spartak headed for the police station, told it as it was, he’d left a man injured, a foolish altercation, self defence. Later, he learned the man had died, and he was arrested, charged with murder, despite his pleas that he’d never had any desire or intention to kill anyone.

            I happen to know a judge, an honest judge, and I set out the situation to her. Difficult, she said. Lawyers are costly and few are genuinely good. She put me in touch with a lawyer who also wasn’t cheap, but who she said was a conscientious man, who’d do his best. Spartak said no. He didn’t want to burden anyone. His family would be paying the cost. They’d hired him a lawyer the first time too, when he was up for hooliganism, and that had cost a fortune and hadn’t brought the slightest result.

            He’s onto his third state-appointed lawyer now. These lawyers also try to squeeze money from their clients. He’s in a different Moscow pre-trial detention facility. In his letters, everything is decent – the food, the facilities, his cellmates. The letters are read first by the authorities, of course.

            He has books, a chance to get some exercise. They were all taken to vote in the recent presidential election. No surprise who they voted for. Communication is by letter only, and the occasional visit, when permission is granted, which often it is not. They watched Putin’s recent lengthy address, and he writes about his impressions. He’s not a Putin supporter (that he doesn’t say in his letters, of course), but he can’t help but admire the man’s strong will and sense of purpose.

            Everything he, Spartak, never had. He recognises his foolishness in life, admits too, his ignorance of the law. He’s aware they’re playing a game with him. Everyone else is signing up for the “special military operation,” he writes. The war in Ukraine. People not yet convicted, but already presumed guilty and told they can buy their freedom this way.

            He hasn’t signed anything yet, doesn’t want to go to war – war against half of himself, war against that village where he spent part of his teenage years. But they keep shunting back the hearing date. No clear investigation, no proper lawyers, no case materials to see, no certain date, only the constant repetition that they’re going to sentence him for murder, so he’d be better off going to the front.

            And sometimes he says that maybe he’ll take that offer. Accept his fate. Prison or war, and he writes the word “war,” and it passes uncensored. To escape not the worst of cages, but nonetheless a cage, to breathe a breath of freedom before being killed.

            That’s his story so far. He’s 34 now, still waiting in his cell. Not a story with a hero, because Spartak knows he’s not a hero, and that he’s brought more grief and worry than anything in this life, but he wanted me to share it. He can’t concentrate on much for long, he writes, too battered by the gusts of his thoughts, the uncertainty, the choices ahead.            

And there are many Spartaks, many young men who’ve walked this same road, or are walking it now, but could have had very different lives. Some of them will be given guns and sent into the meatgrinder on the front, and for most, whatever breath of freedom they snatch will be brief and burning.  

Arctic Flowers

There was an apartment block I used to walk past all the time in Moscow. Nothing special about it. After October 7, 2006, my eye would always drift to that building and its entrance door. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya was killed there.

 

            I had to look up the year. I remember the day and month with no prompting, but the year, no. And I’d have to look up the years for many of these grim milestones. They’ve all blurred in my memory. A long litany of murders.

 

            One of the last big murders before I left Russia was in 2015, a bleak anniversary just ten days away now. The politician Boris Nemtsov was gunned down on a bridge by the Kremlin. I often crossed that bridge too. After Nemtsov’s death, there were always flowers there, and always someone watching over them, keeping the makeshift memorial intact. The authorities would clear it all away, but the flowers and the people always came back.

 

             Alexei Navalny joins the sombre list now, his bright star extinguished up in the Arctic reaches, where flowers don’t last and people don’t pass. Extinguished because the regime feared his charisma and his moral strength, his ability to rally people and give them hope.

 

            Another politician shut out from politics, like the journalists silenced, the activists beaten into retreat or exile, a courageous man who led by example, telling people not to be afraid and returning to a homeland he knew would imprison him, probably kill him, but that was who he was, the kind of person you could raise a monument to, only that’s what’s so tragic about Russia’s history – it’s all heroes, sacrifices, martyrs, monuments.

 

            Monuments in whatever form permitted. A few shy flowers deposited at the modest memorials to the millions of lives already long since stolen and gone. In Moscow, it was a stone from the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, where the Soviet state’s gulag began. Erected on Lubyanka Square, close to the old KGB, now FSB headquarters.

 

            Shortlived flowers in the winter snow. A climate of crushing silence. The rehearsals began years ago. And after 2012, the regime took no chances. Out and about in central Moscow, you’d see everything at the ready, men and equipment, as if in a city under siege, at every rumour of a possible protest. A regime that feared its own population, a regime ready to kill and torture to ensure its own survival, even if the threat was pitifully small.

 

            I used to do some translation for a group of lawyers who represented prisoners or their families seeking justice over their treatment within the Russian prison system. Torture was rife, and you didn’t have to be an opposition politician to be subjected to those levels of hell. Denial of medical treatment too. And everyday detention conditions that were already torture in themselves.

 

            We hear about the prominent names, but how many small lives chewed up and spat out in that inhumane system, how many obscure fates we never hear about. And Navalny, he had a knack for communication, willing to talk with anyone, whether in Moscow or the provinces, whether on the streets or in prison cells. A real politician. Unlike those men in the Kremlin, for whom everything has to be staged, vetted, planned, no adversaries, no surprises, no debate.

 

            I’ve been living in Vienna these last few years, and one of the first things I noticed here was the “Stolpersteine”, small plaques laid into the ground in front of buildings. They commemorate Jewish residents killed in the Holocaust. A primarily private initiative, as far as I know, relatives and descendants keeping alive the memory of their loss, and of a dark chapter in Vienna’s life. It creates a geography of murder, a map of crime spread across the city, but you walk and look down, and think, there were people living their lives, Viennese, until others decided to send them to their deaths.

 

            Back in Russia, a similar kind of initiative had begun. Posledny Adres – Last Address. Small plaques on buildings, with the names of those who’d lived there before being arrested and swallowed by Stalin’s prisons and camps. A way of keeping historical memory alive and part of that long, hard and painful task of digesting, and learning from the past.

 

            All that halted now, of course, by a regime that has no desire to study the past, but only to force-feed its people a manipulated, simplistic version that serves its own cynical ends.

 

            Putin has no need for real maps, only for those in his head. He never spoke Navalny’s name, as if to do so would be to acknowledge that here was a rival, albeit with far fewer resources in a system rigged from the start. He tried to banish and erase Navalny from Russia’s life, and hopes now the name will soon fade, the name he could never bring himself to say out loud.

 

            Out of fear. A regime that has to kill its opponents has no legitimacy, no genuine support of the people. At best – and for many in Russia – it’s simply “the devil you know”. Fear of the unknown, fear of chaos.

 

            I’ve been to the Russian Arctic. The summers are vicious, swarms of mosquitos and gnats, but then comes a brief, kinder season when the mosquitos stop biting, worn out perhaps after their bloodthirsty frenzy, and small flowers do grow, berries, mushrooms, hiding in the tundra. And these little piles of flowers laid in the snow in various Russian cities now, paying tribute to a hero felled, they may seem so few, so timid, but flowers grow again, even under Arctic frosts.

 

            A dark and tragic hour for Russia indeed. A long night, perhaps. But no one, not the greatest tyrant, has ever yet found a way to stave off dawn forever.    

Grodno Zoo

The saddest zoo I have ever seen was in Grodno, a city in western Belarus, tucked away in a triangle of land where Belarus, Poland and Lithuania meet. That was nearly twenty years ago. I was in Grodno for what you could call a festival of Soviet nostalgia, because the atmosphere was very Soviet retro, only it was a purely Belarusian thing – a cultural festival of the peoples of Belarus. Essentially, every group who had any kind of diaspora in Belarus took over the streets and the yards of various buildings, showcasing their songs, dances, and best of all, their culinary traditions.

I met some local journalists at these festivities, and it was they who had this idea of taking me to the zoo. They were proud of Grodno’s zoo, which, they said, was the only zoo in Belarus. It was a hot June day and most of the visitors at the zoo were families with young children, the kids eating candy floss or other sweets, and gleefully examining the listless, sad-eyed animals behind the bars of cheerless, cramped cages.

I talked politics with the journalists. They spoke like many Belarusian professionals I’d met. They weren’t fans of Alexander Lukashenko, the former state farm chairman who’d become president in 1994 and hadn’t even completed his first decade in power at that time. I remembered following that 1994 election from Paris, where I was living at the time. It had struck me as typical of the post-socialist bloc during that period. The harsh economic realities of the post-socialist transition were biting ordinary people hard and the euphoria of overthrowing the old system had waned. There was no Marshall plan in the wings, no West waiting with open arms, no quick road to a better life. And in that bleak-looking landscape, people like Lukashenko, a populist before populists were a big trend, promising to look after the ordinary folk and concentrate on social issues, had a hope of riding the backlash against painful reforms and winning an election.

Grodno was well-positioned to observe developments elsewhere. Poland and Lithuania were just a few kilometres away and people had always been shuttling back and forth. That became harder after Poland and Lithuania joined the European Union and the border became more of a real thing. On the other hand, Belarus had entered a ‘Union State’ with Russia at the end of the 1990s, and the post-Soviet border there ceased to be a real thing. People in Grodno were aware of what was happening in the neighbouring countries and aware that, in contrast, Belarus was looking increasingly like an archaic relic of the past in the midst of a continent that was advancing.

Putin had only recently taken over the helm from Yeltsin in Russia. Russia was a much freer place. Especially if you were watching from Moscow, Belarus seemed like a Soviet time capsule. Sometimes, friends or colleagues, knowing my interest in North Korea, would ask me back then if I ever contemplated going to North Korea, and I’d say, why go an expensive, guided tour of Pyongyang, when you could just take the night train to Minsk, and you didn’t even need a visa.

I went to Minsk several times, for various reasons. At its best, it was like stepping into an old Soviet movie, where the regime presented a smiling, sunny face, the streets were clean, life was orderly and stable and everyone seemed modest but happy. Moscow was a proverbial capitalist jungle of the more savage kind, so there was even a certain charm in this Belarusian version of what the Soviet Union had tried to be. But it wasn’t so charming in the grey of colder months, with poor heating, and with the constant fear of being denounced, followed, reported, arrested. And that was all real. I felt it. I saw it. I got my glimpse of the Belarusian KGB. Russia had changed the name of its security services, at least, but Belarus didn’t even do that. No, it was still the KGB, occupying a huge block on the main street, and ready to undertake whatever repression might be needed.

I’ll never forget a train ride back to Moscow, quaking in my boots when the police came to our compartment and led away an elderly Russian, who’d been visiting friends. I’d been attending a banned opposition gathering and had material for the articles I was going to write, but I had no official accreditation and knew how tough the Belarusian authorities were in such cases. The Russian pensioner returned, grumbling that this ‘union state’ between the two countries seemed to be a bit of a farce. He’d overstayed his three days without registration or something such.

Before the police came, this pensioner had been busy pestering a Belarusian man in our compartment about the odd goings-on in Minsk that day. Streets blocked off. Police out in force. The Belarusian dismissed all the questions. Nothing going on. He’d not noticed anything. But later, he suddenly asked us if were in Russia yet, or still in Belarus. We had already crossed into Russia. And then he said that he’d tell us what was going on in Minsk that day. He’d seen it all.

My new Grodno friends were well aware of all they were being denied, but, like so many other Belarusians I’d met, they said that they were willing to be patient. It was the attitude I most often encountered. Radicals did exist – I’d seen some, and I didn’t like what I saw – but they were a definite minority. People seemed to want evolution rather than revolution. That fitted with my general impression of Belarusians – a generally rule-abiding, industrious people, not beset by the great power complexes that afflicted Russians, not torn along regional and linguistic lines like their neighbours in Ukraine. Belarus had been one of the more prosperous parts of the Soviet Union, and every time I went there, I always found myself thinking that this was a country and people that really could do well, in the right circumstances.

Over subsequent years, I often recalled those Grodno journalists and our conversations. I often wondered, how patient would the Belarusians be? I knew from Russia that even when people were willing to give someone a really long run and swallow all kinds of slights to their dignity and intelligence, patience did eventually wear thin, even if you weren’t looking a revolution. That’s why people in Moscow were so infuriated in 2011, when they realised that Dmitry Medvedev really had been no more than a temporary placeholder, allowing Putin to return to the presidency. That’s why people in Khabarovsk, in the Russian Far East, have been protesting the removal of their governor. Yes, the man might be a murderer, and yes, the LDPR party he ran for isn’t even a real opposition party at all, but he was their governor, they’d voted him in, and as governor, he’d done things they approved of.

Essentially, even the least politically-minded people simply get sick of the same old, same old, and people don’t like being treated like fools that you can bamboozle with any old nonsense. The problem is, authoritarian rulers have a much harder time than most getting their heads around that. Not that they can’t see it coming, oh, they can and they do, but they’ve often backed themselves into so tight a corner that they see no choice but to fight to the bitter end for power.

It seems now, two decades later, that in Belarus, patience is running out. Lukashenko’s past record suggests he will attempt to use all possible means, no matter how repressive, to stay in power. Russia has already congratulated him on his victory. As the quintessential status quo power, Russia will always congratulate an incumbent declaring victory. In reality, Lukashenko is a real bane for Russia, a difficult partner, and they’d probably love to have someone more pliable to deal with, so long as a change of power wouldn’t mean the unravelling of the union state and Belarus withdrawing from the post-Soviet integration organisations such as the Collective Security Treaty Organisation and the Eurasian Economic Union and begging instead to join NATO and the EU.

The problem is, you can never tell what a change of power will bring in practice. The Kremlin already had the experience with Georgia, when Eduard Shevardnadze, the longstanding president, had become a troublesome partner for Moscow, and so Moscow did not support him when the people rose up and even quietly encouraged him to step aside. But the result was Mikhail Saakashvili in power instead, and clashes of personalities and visions that eventually led to the tragic conflict of 2008.

Everyone in Russia is watching with bated breath the events unfolding in Belarus now. In some quarters, as to be expected, they echo Lukashenko’s accusations of foreign hands meddling in Belarus’s affairs. One can always assume that a certain degree of international meddling is taking place, in various forms. But it isn’t Russian mercenaries or American NGOs that are bringing people out onto the streets in Belarus. Lukashenko was accusing Russia before the election of preparing to destabilise the country, and now he’s accusing the Czechs, the British and others. Russian journalists have been arrested in Minsk. State media journalists, opposition journalists. And there are all the theories linking everything to Ukraine.

In reality, or at least, in my understanding of reality, the situation is very much up in the air with Lukashenko precisely because, although he is disliked in all quarters, to the east and to the west, in the current state of confrontation between the west and Russia, he appears to all as the lesser evil. The EU and the US have happily courted this ‘last dictator in Europe’, as he was famously dubbed (before Putin tried to steal the limelight). Regimes do commit massacres and get away with it. Think of Tiananmen Square in 1989. For now, it seems that everyone is waiting and watching, wondering just how far Lukashenko will go.

During that visit to the Grodno zoo, I remember thinking that Belarus itself was a bit in that position, on display as if some authoritarian regime theme park, and it seemed to me terribly sad for a people that had such resilience and dignity. Belarus was so devastated by World War II, its cities destroyed and population decimated, destruction isn’t what people want. I doubt that Lukashenko would risk a fate like that of Gadhafi in Libya, or even Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine. But his earlier political instinct seems to have been failing him lately, especially with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic. Some have compared Belarus to Sweden there, because the absence of lockdowns and restrictions, but Lukashenko was no cautious Swede, no, he practically drove the population to attend mass events in what looks more a cynical means of relieving the state of some of the elderly and infirm it might otherwise have to care for.

I would like to think that people with the needed communication channels are working quietly behind the scenes to persuade Lukashenko to reach a deal and step aside. And I would like to hope that the Russian-Belarusian border – real again for now, because of the pandemic – doesn’t become a wall in the future. I would like to hope that someday, no one on either side will be waiting to cross to the other before daring to speak. I don’t know what Grodno zoo is like today, but thinking on zoos has changed over the decades in general, with people realising that life in captivity just isn’t really life.

 

What Legacy Ahead?

I read earlier in the year, in a Spanish newspaper – I think it was El Pais – a little piece by a young woman who had noticed an elderly couple out walking, hand in hand, clearly enjoying each other’s company. This seemingly ordinary scene set off a whirl of reflection in her head. It came as something of a revelation that the elderly were not an alien tribe, but had all the same richness of emotions and character as people like herself, and that emotional ties could be lasting, commitment could actually be a thing – something that didn’t necessarily fade and fray with time.

I remember also, a little earlier again, reading numerous comments about the “OK Boomer” meme doing the rounds of social media. There seemed to be an awful lot of discussion in general about how this army of selfish, resource-guzzling boomers not only had stolen the young generation’s future, but didn’t even really care, since they would be dead and gone before the real consequences hit home.

Personally, I thought that, coming from a generation that seems so obsessed with labels, or rather, with avoiding being labelled themselves, or being able to choose their preferred labels from an ever-growing selection, it was a bit hypocritical to throw blanket accusations over a whole generation.

Indeed, at that moment, I thought of my mother – a boomer – who seldom flew and never went abroad at all until she was in her late sixties. She doesn’t own a house, didn’t guzzle resources, and her lifetime environmental footprint at now 74 is probably far lower than that of many of the young people eager to blame everything on the boomers.

But all of that seems a world away now as we plunge ever deeper into the Covid-19 reality. Suddenly, as pundits and politicians warned about the economic costs of lockdowns, people all over the place remembered that they have parents and grandparents, not anonymous future-stealing, planet-destroying boomers, but loved ones who were now at risk.

Yes, suddenly, we all wanted to save the elderly. Suddenly, these lives were valuable and we had a moral duty to keep them safe from a very real threat. At the start of the crisis, I kept waiting to see if someone would allow themselves a bit of schadenfreude, but no. I saw many economic arguments against strict lockdown measures in the press, but I didn’t see anyone arguing that the world would be perhaps be better off without all these old people, who’d grabbed the lion’s share of everything and left the young with nothing.

I’m obviously not questioning individual people’s feelings and love for elderly relatives and friends and the sincerity of their desire to help and protect them. But I think a lot of this loudly declared concern for the elderly is just lofty talk. It sounds better to say, we all have to go into lockdown for the sake of our elderly loved ones’ lives, than to say, we decided for years that healthcare wasn’t such an essential sector and we could strip it down to the bare bones in the name of rationalising costs and keeping things efficient, and so now, either we stand by and let the elderly die, or we hospitalise those who fall ill and push our limited facilities into a state of collapse.

Some might think privately, destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs and plunging economies into recession isn’t worth it for the sake of some old people who’d have died soon anyway. But at the same time, they would think, I must ensure my mother, father, grandma etc is safe. Such are the constant contradictions of our nature.

And so governments have responded with all kinds of measures. What I really notice though in all of this is that the elderly themselves don’t seem to get a say. We don’t hear their voices. Oh yes, they’re all deep in isolation, busy being saved, for their own good.

In Moscow, for example, given that Covid-19 hits the elderly hardest, the authorities decided that everyone over the age of 65 is not allowed out at all, save for trips to the nearest shop. For most people, the nearest shop really is very near. If your nearest shop happens to be an upmarket supermarket catering to the wealthy, and your budget only stretches to the discount shop further away, tough luck.

Many elderly in Moscow are effectively prisoners in their homes now. Many of them do not have computers, internet or smartphones. They cannot get their pensions. They cannot obtain the now obligatory code for any journey requiring the use of transport (the code is sent to a smartphone). They are basically abandoned without any means of support, strictly confined to their apartments, as if criminals under house arrest, and not even allowed to take a little walk or go sit outside for a moment. Ah, you could say, but at least they are safe from Covid-19.

Really, do we need to be so extreme? A sixty-five year-old with the likelihood of a fair chunk of life still ahead might be eager to stay well-protected from a disease that could rob them of these years ahead. But someone in their nineties, acutely aware that their time is limited, might prefer to take the risk of still seeing loved ones and enjoying what time they have left, rather than spending their remaining time in isolation, locked away for to protect them from death. Because we younger people tend to fear death, of course, but we do bother asking the elderly what they really think?

Right now, we’re still dealing with so many unknowns. Lockdowns were perhaps the only possible way to avoid the even bigger problem of a total collapse of entire health systems. But I just do not see how they can become a go-to solution for each successive wave of the virus, if such waves should come again, and until such time as a vaccine is found or the much-talked-about herd immunity is reached.

In the short term, I think, of course, about when I might be able to start working normally again, which, at present, no one can say. I think about when I might be able to see my family, who are thousands of miles away. I think about when I might be able to finally go to the physiotherapist for the appointment cancelled at the start of the lockdown. But these are the tiny, trivial things.

I think also about the longer-term solutions governments are likely to adopt. Some people talk of potential opportunities – for the environment, for a shift to a more sustainable economic model. Oh, I wish. And I do hope.

But I also hear the calls from those who are afraid, uncertain, and are looking for some big brother out there to come and protect them. A benevolent big brother who’ll use all the ever-growing array of tech solutions at our disposal to keep us safe.

It’s the easier road. Why build infectious disease hospitals that might only be needed now and then and invest in personnel and resources that are not strictly essential all of the time, when you can invest instead in surveillance equipment to ensure that people don’t leave their homes.

The police, at least, have no shortage of work. Even in Moscow, with its facial recognition network of cameras all around the city, the technology doesn’t work as well as simply having police on the ground to stop anyone who looks aged or seems to have no valid purpose or destination.

And it’s a perfect opportunity for the police to test the limits, to give our freedom a little nudge with every passing day, knowing we can’t come out to protest in the streets. It’s a perfect opportunity to get rid of swathes of the media, who, for all their flaws and growing shrillness over these years, play such an essential part in keeping democracy alive. It’s not the government shutting down media outlets, after all, it’s the economic situation, with owners deciding to close businesses that had been becoming ever less profitable in any case.

It’s the perfect opportunity to weaken civil society, to undo the associations and networks that had built up, to let the informal safety nets people had put into place fall apart and leave the vulnerable and marginalised to fall through the cracks. And it’s the perfect opportunity to push us ever deeper into a virtual world, shift as much as possible online, reduce human interaction in an already atomised society where loneliness is a scourge. This will be helped along by people’s fears and anxieties post-pandemic, all those who’ve become afraid to go out, all those looking out for possible carriers of germs.

I wrote in my last post about the danger of xenophobia and how it would be likely now, following the anti-Asian displays in the West, to crop up in Asia, and that is precisely what is happening, with talk in China, for example, of getting rid of “foreign refuse”, and with the African community in Guangzhou facing blatant discrimination.

You would think that in the current situation, we would be getting serious about solidarity, local and global, and about genuine reflection on how we can learn from each other in order to build the best strategies for the future. But no, I see a fragmented, politicised squall of reactions.

I see Taiwan still disgracefully shut out of what is meant to be the world’s universal healthcare organisation, the WHO. Because China doesn’t want it there. Because of politics. I see Trump behaving so irresponsibly that I can’t help but think, uncharitably, that there is one old man I’d not mind seeing felled by this virus. I see China doing its usual blustering act, turning any criticism of the country into ‘racism, prejudice and anti-Chinese sentiment’. I see Russia and China attempting to turn events to their advantage with soft power drives. They, at least, are actually delivering aid to others, even if some reports suggest it is not always very useful aid. Trump claimed to be delivering medical supplies to Spain, for example, but the Spanish authorities seem not to be aware of any aid on the way.

People keep using the imagery of war and battle, talking of the greatest crisis since World War II. But in World War II, an alliance was forged. It was a strange alliance in many ways, a not very sustainable one, but it did achieve its purpose and it left us with a legacy – the United Nations.

What legacy will the current crisis leave us with? That is a very big question right now. Yes, right now, while everyone is still busy following daily updates, seeing if that notorious curve is anywhere close to being flattened yet and wondering when they might be able to leave their homes.

If we don’t start asking these questions, it’s not going to be about the boomers stealing the future, it’s going to be about all of us and our part in making very clear our commitment to a world in which basic human rights are still respected, and in which all of us still have a voice.

 

Times of Plague

When I was a student in Paris, there were trips organised to various places for the holders of French government scholarships. The idea was that we would imbibe all this French culture and history and take it back home to the countries where, hopefully, we would become leaders, or people of influence, at least, and remember and build on those ties to France we had developed.

I would like to apologise to the French state for not having become a leader or a person of influence. But I do remain grateful for the education, and for the trips. One of them was to Rouen. I don’t actually remember much about it other than plague and war. We had a guide taking us through the old town. Darkened, narrow streets, buildings pushing up against each other in dense tangle, grey and dim. A sense of time and wear. It was exactly the kind of setting I pictured when thinking about the old epidemics, the plagues that once swept through Europe.

The guide showed us a plague hospital, another grim, age-blackened building, where the infected were brought to die. I peered through the windows into the gloomy reaches and recalled schoolbook passages about the foolish notions people had back then – doctors going about with bunches of flowers pressed to their noses, because people believed that sickness was carried in the fetid air. And you could imagine how fetid the air must have been back then, before proper sewerage. It was bad enough in Paris on a scorching, windless summer day, when the accumulated waste products of countless pet dogs would scent the streets.

I remembered that trip to Rouen last night, listening to a discussion on the Russian radio station, Ekho Moskvy. One of the participants, worried about the future economic and social cost of this pandemic and the measures to contain it, said that governments must think ahead and weigh up the potential risks of prolonged quarantine against the actual risks of the disease itself. The epidemic that became known as the Black Death, he said, lasted a century. Europe, he said, just got used to it and life went on around it as best as possible.

The other participant remarked that back then, people were just left to die and society was willing to accept that. But we human beings have made progress since then and it is a sign of greater humanism now that we are not willing to make the trade off – let a small proportion of the population die for the sake of saving the economy.

I remembered that plague hospital, and the guide telling us that, effectively, most people brought in were indeed just going to die. Certainly, death was a far more familiar companion back then. People saw it all the time and knew that it was never far away. That probably did condition attitudes in many ways, but I don’t think things are as linear as the discussion I listened to suggested.

If you look at just the history, just the statistics, then yes, the picture seems quite clear, but if you read also the literature, the poems and so on, it is equally clear that people were not indifferent and could feel grief, pain and loss just as acutely as we do. The difference is, I think, that even if they had wanted to fight for every life, they simply did not know how. They did not have the means and the understanding of what they were fighting against.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a doctor for a time and read all manner of books on medicine. The story that most stuck in my mind was that of Ignaz Semmelweis, who you could call the father of hand-washing. Mid-nineteenth-century Vienna, where he worked, no doubt thought itself a cultured, advanced sort of place. Semmelweis achieved a further advance – reducing post-childbirth mortality at the hospital where he worked by a huge amount, simply by getting all the medical personnel to wash their hands. You’d think he would have been thanked, at least, for his contribution to science, but no, he was ridiculed and hounded into a nervous breakdown.

That was a long time after the plague first came to Europe. Clearly, until very recently, humanity did not even have adequate means for manifesting a real value for human life, in terms of medical responses, at any rate. True, our forebears also engaged in all kinds of devastating wars, and devised all kinds of tortures and punishments, but sadly, our present world is not exactly free of those things, even if we have become shy about it at least and would rather think it consigned to the past.

Today is different in that we know that our world does have the technology and the means for saving lives. We know that people with the coronavirus symptoms can pull through if they get the proper medical help in time. And so yes, it would seem blasphemous, somehow, to suggest that we just leave people to die when we know that, theoretically, at least, they do not have to die, not of this particular illness, anyway.

That all comes back to the question of priorities. There are always enough immediate pressures and demands to take care of as it is, and preparing for future possibilities is not even much of an option in many poor countries with limited resources. In some countries, the priority has long been personal enrichment of a small elite. In other countries again, resources are there, but there are lobbies with more clout, clamouring for money to go into, say, financing credits for governments elsewhere to buy your country’s weapons systems.

Well, it’s always said, isn’t it, that you reap what you sow. If we sow a landscape in which the threats all come in the form of an adversary’s military hardware, it’s not really surprising that we find ourselves ill-equipped to deal with threats of an entirely different nature. Even here in Europe, where the memories of past epidemics infuse the historical surroundings. I walk past the plague column all the time in central Vienna, and every time, I have thought about what Vienna must have been like during those dark days, and whether it could ever happen again.

As for the other point in that discussion I listened to last night – the need to think ahead now about the possible consequences of the measures countries are taking – I agree completely that this is important.

A lot of the talk I hear is on the lines of, what’s important now is to flatten the curve, get the disease under control. And yes, this is imperative right now, which is precisely why we are sacrificing so much in order to achieve this goal. I have also heard talk about how willingly citizens of Europe’s – and other – democracies are giving up their freedom for the sake of making these measures work. It is a wonderful thing that societies do have a sense of solidarity, sometimes, at least, and that people can make voluntary sacrifices. It is precious that we can make things work without having to be forced.

But at the same time, I would also keep very close watch on what is going on. We already see how some governments are using the emergency situation to bolster authoritarian powers. We have to keep watch over how surveillance will be used and make sure that governments do not develop a liking for this rule by decree kind of thing. Democracy is hard work, after all, often messy, slow, and the authoritarian regimes can seem to shine at a moment like this with their speed, efficiency and conveniently compliant populations.

And we have to remember that people have a breaking point and that we are all in extremely unequal situations here. Millions of people in poor countries will surely start to ask how they can be expected to choose between perhaps dying from a virus, and almost certainly dying from hunger and other diseases if they cannot work. Not to mention that they are now often confined in cramped, unsanitary spaces with not even the respite of being able to move around freely. That is in itself a kind of torture.

Even in rich countries, where returning travellers, say, are quarantined in hotels or military bases, there are reports of people saying they accept the need for quarantine, but a couple of weeks confined to a room, with no choice about what you get fed, and with not even any fresh air, no books to read, no packages passed on – it’s not an experience you’d like to repeat.

Even in prisons, there are certain expectations about conditions. It’s considered pretty normal that a prisoner shouldn’t be kept in solitary confinement for long, because of the psychological consequences, and that a prisoner should be able to have a daily walk, even if just in a concrete yard.

Given the possibility that we might be living with something that is going to circulate and provoke fresh outbreaks here and there until a vaccine is ready, we perhaps do need to think about how to quarantine people in a more bearable fashion. And even when we do get a vaccine, how much of the world will get it, and how much of the world will be left out, as so often.

And we need to think, too, about the lingering effects of fear. There was a lot of reporting in the Western media when the virus began about Asians being insulted and abused. Now, foreigners in China report fear and discriminatory attitudes towards them, as most of the cases in China now are imported. A white person in China might just have everyone trying to give them a wide berth. A black person might have a harder time – blacks have never had it easy in Asia in the first place.

I’d not like to be a foreigner in India at the moment, or in African countries hit by strict quarantine measures. You’d risk being perceived as this privileged rich person who has brought the virus in, doing all this travelling around the world, and bringing with it untold new suffering for people already struggling as it is.

In short, it’s all a potent breeding ground for other viruses – the eternally dangerous viruses of ignorance, prejudice and fear.

The most dangerous thing of all would be for that curve to finally flatten, the pandemic to die down, and everyone – governments, big business – to just go back to their old complacent ways. Business as before. A return to normal. But this normal would be just an illusion. The old normal was a fairy world as it was, with people imagining that walls and border patrols and tough visa policies will keep the world’s problems at bay.

To go back to the old normal would be to akin to living on the thin crust atop a seething volcano. That’s not being alarmist, just pragmatic. We’ve had the supposed pragmatists saying for so long now that it’s all very good and necessary to want better healthcare, education, clean water, sewerage, that kind of thing, but the real world – the one in which numerous politicians and corporation bosses live – demands more bombs, missiles, more oil and coal, more junk food and bottled water, more fast fashion, more cars and all kinds of superfluous things as well. To keep the economy going and counter threats.

The thing is, unlike the French people living in those narrow Rouen streets during the time of plague, we do know for sure that we have the means to address the challenges that we face. We do have knowledge and capabilities that our forebears didn’t have. The old normal meant not using this to its full potential. Surely, now is a good time to change that.

A Solitary Promenade

This weekend brought beautiful spring weather to Vienna, where I currently live. The trees in blossom and the sun still gentle call and entice. How lucky we are here that taking a walk is not prohibited. Yes, sometimes, the small things become very precious indeed.

The solitary promenade was long a pastime favoured by philosophers, poets, writers, and it has produced much literary fruit over the centuries. It’s something I always indulged in anyway, pandemic or not. But it is different now in feel and in the kind of contemplation it arouses.

Part of Vienna is ringed by hills and that is where I went when the sun called me, up to the vineyards and the trails snaking over ridges, from where you look down at the shining Danube and the city roofs and spires in dense, hazy spread. And perhaps this is one of the reasons why Vienna places so high in all those world’s most livable city rankings – because it is fairly compact and you can quickly find yourself in a some forest or field scene that feels far away from the urban rush, though you’ve only gone to the end of a bus or tram line.

That little spring idyll is all the more cherished now, in these otherwise bleak and uncertain times. The new flowers, the flourishes of colour dabbing still spindly, naked trees – they have a medicinal, hope-giving effect, like the cheering sunshine, the pine scent and the simple act of walking.

It seems a trifle, but it is a tremendous privilege. Lives are so vastly different to each other in our world as it is, but now, with a huge swathe of the global population living in lockdown of varying strictness, the inequalities are starker than ever.

Even taking just the rich world, up there on the hills above Vienna, I thought how, had quarantine found me in Moscow, my old home, I would have had enormous streets, flyovers, construction sites and apartment block towers as the surroundings to survey. We had a balcony in Moscow, at least. It looked on to a factory and a worker’s hostel, but also a couple of trees. We could see the sky from our windows.

I thought also, up on the hills, how glad I was not to be in Paris, where I spent several years. The narrow streets hemmed you in, the apartments often dim and tiny, and the views were likely of a neighbouring facade or someone’s window. How not to get claustrophobic in such places even when you could go out freely.

Vienna itself isn’t all like the spacious villas with gardens that dot the slopes of the hillier areas. Here too, people find themselves now cooped up in city apartments, surrounded by all the shades of grey – a concrete world. The city parks have been closed and so, if you haven’t the good fortune to live within walking distance of a greener area, you have either city streets to walk, or you can go farther afield, but risk being called one of those irresponsible people taking public transport without necessity, or driving the car in search of a nicer spot.

We, at least, have this choice to make. Knowing how vital I find fresh air and walking to my health, I hate to think of the people not even allowed to venture beyond their doors. Of course, were it a matter of life or death, I’d survive a time of enforced confinement. I’d put on music and dance, I’d revive all the taekwondo I haven’t practiced for some years.

But for others it will be a matter of life or death. For many, lockdown means being left in the hands of an abusive partner. And with the attendant financial and employment stresses, how many previously not abusive partners might start to lose it now? Others will see health conditions become neglected as attention goes to Covid-19 instead. Others again will not cope psychologically. Depression, anxiety and loneliness were already widespread in our societies before the virus came. They will increase now.

People have been talking about the digital gap ever since digital started becoming important in our lives. This gap will yawn wider than ever now. Some countries will be able to provide poorer children with the tools they will need at home, at least, but others will not. And it’s not as if technology alone makes or breaks an education. Children whose parents are in a position to help them educationally are at an advantage in any times, but even more so now.

The housing gap, the environment gap, the gap between those who can stock up on food and those who can only hope to find a way of getting the day’s meal. The gap between those who can do as the health authorities say and wash their hands, and those who have no soap or clean water for doing so. No wonder that I found it sickening to hear endless reports of toilet paper panic and all this hoarding in general.

Some have been comparing things to a Hollywood movie. To me, it’s more like a rehearsal for the brave new world the “disrupters” promise us. You know, smart machines do all the mundane tasks for us and we’re free to live our dreams and spend our days, well, kind of like now. Maybe we should start getting used to it all. After all, it’s what was in store for most of us sooner or later anyway, if the predictions about where the world of work is going are to be believed.

And then there’s the whole ethical debate, with some accused of putting economics over people’s lives, and others accused of taking over the top measures that will destroy the economy, all for the sake of saving people who in many cases would die soon anyway of one cause or another.

Seems to me that the measures are only over the top because governments and planners failed to see this kind of threat coming. They’re so excessive so as to save health systems from being swamped and collapsing. When you think how much many governments put into weapons, how much surpluses they have in that domain, stockpiles of even weapons they are highly, highly unlikely to ever use, but don’t have stockpiles of basic medical equipment, protective gear for healthcare workers, well, what alternative is there but to take drastic measures when the crisis hits?

I’ve seen the praise for China, with its ultra-drastic measures and its impressive, determined national effort. Think though of the delay involved. Reports suggest the very first signs of a new disease in Wuhan started emerging in mid-November, but the government did not start taking action until later into January. No wonder they had to take drastic measures. And why did they not act earlier? Because they preferred to play cautious, brush over things, silence those trying to sound the alarm.

I’ve heard people say, it’s not the time to point the finger now and assign blame. Of course, we get nowhere by just sitting back and saying “it’s all your fault.” We get nowhere by letting ignorance and prejudice run wild. But we also get nowhere by just keeping silent.

The Chinese government would love more than anything for us to all forget that the virus originated in Wuhan. That’s why they spread the fable about the American army bringing it in. And they’d love their citizens to forget the long delay between the disease’s emergence and the start of government action to contain it. That’s why they have launched propaganda actions such as the “thanksgiving” campaign. This involves getting everyone to express their thanks to the Communist Party and its leaders for all they’ve done in these difficult times.

I’m not at all belittling the very real efforts made by countless people on the ground in China, or the Chinese, Russian, or Cuban medical personnel and other specialists who’ve been roped into their governments’ soft-power aid initiatives to countries like Italy and Spain. But that is not going to stop me from seeing the propaganda intentions behind these actions, and it’s not going to make me forget that we’ve absolutely nothing to thank the Chinese Communist Party for.

It’s also not going to make me keep silent about questions that need to be asked. If we don’t ask them, we’ll end up making the same mistakes again and again. I remember travelling in China not long after SARS, for example. I had the most awful flu and cough I’ve had in my life. Signs were everywhere about SARS symptoms and there was a barrage of people at the airport to screen arriving passengers. I was on my way out with my terrible cough, taking it from Beijing to Moscow, so no one paid any attention. Not that we’d had much attention on arrival, either. People’s memories are short and fear fades fast.

That can be a good thing in terms of getting over trauma, but it’s not a quality for planners and politicians. Complacency has a high cost. We have to realise that these kinds of viruses will come again, especially as urbanisation continues and human activity comes into ever closer contact with the wildlife reservoirs of diseases that could make the leap into human populations. Not to mention other practices that can inadvertently cause diseases – remember the mad cow scare in 1990s Britain and France, caused by feeding animal-based feed to normally herbivorous livestock.

So no, we can’t just hope things will go back to normal and we’ll be able to resume where Covid-19 so rudely interrupted. Before the pandemic came, with its travel-disrupting force, NATO, for example, was preparing enormous military exercises in Europe, aimed at preparing for countering that ever-so convenient supposed Russian threat. And Russia was pumping money into weapons to counter that ever-growing NATO threat. And everyone forgets the more likely threats we might actually have to face.

 

A Persistent Plague

When I heard the news that Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who first tried to alert people to the existence of a new, virulent virus in the city, had died of this same virus, I found myself thinking of Albert Camus’ novel The Plague.

In that novel, the valiant doctor survives the deadly epidemic, though his main companion in the struggle, who could have just as easily chosen not to risk his life, falls victim to the disease. Real life was sadder and Wuhan’s brave doctor, who simply did what any professional should do in his situation, did not pull through.

What any professional should do – warn colleagues about a new danger glimpsed so that they can prepare for any eventuality. But it earned him only the ire of the authorities, the label of rumourmonger and the humiliation of having to put his signature to a confession of a supposed crime.

Even in the heavily censored Chinese media and online space, Li’s deed and his death have not gone unnoticed. Now the censors have the job of sweeping away the protests and anger and stifling the calls for freedom of speech as an antidote to another deadly illness – the suffocating climate that led to this whole chain of events in the first place.

Camus’ The Plague is an allegory of World War II, and the epidemic in question is the fascist ideology and Nazi onslaught that swept through Europe. Some of the characters try to flee the beleaguered Algerian city where the novel takes place, others attempt to hide and hope it will pass them by, others again see opportunities for profit and speculation, and only a few are brave enough to take up the fight.

The plague allegory could fit all manner of other human woes, not just the Nazis and the storm of destruction they unleashed. There’s always a brave doctor somewhere at hand, or someone who is not even thinking of courage or heroism, but simply following the rules of common sense and speaking out when needed because that is the logical and also decent thing to do.

Unfortunately, the tale of officials covering things up, delaying and pretending, and punishing those who do attempt to get the truth out, is as age-old as the plagues and scourges that come to sow fear among we ultimately very fragile, vulnerable human beings.

If even in more open and transparent societies, attempts are made to quietly sweep political scandals under the carpet, and big corporations that try to make themselves ubiquitous in our lives turn out to be misleading us, deceiving us, lying to us, then what to expect of the countries where openness, transparency and accountability were never welcomed in the first place?

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the Chernobyl mini-series was such a hit recently, in this climate of general mistrust, or that it has made its way beyond the great firewall too, to become another addition to that great Chinese tradition of allegorical, veiled references and criticism.

This lack of openness, with its sometimes fatal results, is not a problem of any one country or system, but it is does become more problematic the more authoritarian the regime.

It’s not as if leaders, even very autocratic ones, haven’t been aware of the problem. Back in the days when autocracy was quite normal in most of the world, in the early 18th century, Yongzheng, the Qing dynasty emperor reigning in Beijing, was looking for a way to get reliable information about what was actually going on in that vast country beyond.

The usual source of information was reports sent in from the provincial officials, but the provincial officials were reluctant to report bad news, fearing it would show up their incompetence or reveal their negligence or the scale of their corruption, and so they would hush up disasters, famines, floods etc. “Rumourmongers” were punished back then too.

The thing was, Yongzheng had had enough contact with this world of officials and their intrigues before becoming emperor to know that he was often being lied to. The elite had their vested interests to protect and little incentive to speak the truth, and so he organised for various underlings, often people he’d handpicked himself for their frankness and resolve, often outsiders, who’d come from other sections of society and not through the usual channels of Confucian schools and imperial exams, to write secret reports of their own, which would be sent directly to him.

In other words, these were his spies. The old elite hated him, of course, for spying on them, and for undermining their tenacious hold on political life. The problems began when the spies in their turn rose up the ranks and gained interests to protect, careers to further and failures to cover up. And so new spies were sent out. Spies to spy on the spies.

Yongzheng worked very hard, wading through enormous piles of reports and attempting to keep up with even the smallest details of what was going on in the empire. And still, he was misled some of the time, deceived, even by his most trusted officials. He trod on numerous toes and made countless enemies, dismissing dishonest, corrupt and incompetent officials, but he could get away with that, of course, not having to face voters and elections. He was an autocrat, after all.

Most autocrats are not of his type. Perhaps it was his good fortune that he reigned only thirteen years, not long enough to grow weary of the effort. His son reigned for sixty years, long enough to start out with good intentions and a dose of youthful determination, but gradually falling prey to the flatterers and the desire for a positive image, an untarnished legacy, a touched-up picture of reality. And that required good news only from the officials on the ground.

It’s all a cautionary tale, but who really pays attention to these stories? The bubonic plague in Camus’ novel seems a dark threat from a distant past, not something that still lurks in today’s ultra-connected, ultra-technological soil with all the progress and advances around us. But it is still there, and so is the allegorical plague of fascist ideas and all kinds of other spores that float about and set off outbreaks of hatred and destruction here and there.

It might seem tempting to think that perhaps countries such as China have an easier job dealing with emergencies such as the coronavirus. They can decree all kinds of measures, put cities with millions of people into the strictest quarantine, build new hospitals within mere weeks to deal with the influx of stricken people. It all looks orderly and relentlessly efficient. But what if Doctor Li had been listened to? What if action had been taken when he first sounded the alarm? Would we be having all of this disruption today? Would there be so many lives lost and so many people sick?

Russian state TV might be trying to link the new virus to nefarious American plots, not seriously, but nonetheless giving publicity to the latest conspiracies hatched in whatever Kremlin-sanctioned depths, and people might be saying that if only the Chinese stopped eating weird food such as bats and pangolins, but this is not the real problem. Protecting endangered species from consumption or use in traditional potions is a valid issue that should be addressed, as is ensuring proper hygiene conditions and safety precautions. But the real problem is the deadly lack of responsibility, the cover-ups, the delays and the punishment of those who deserve our thanks and admiration. And the antidote is more, not less, transparency, openness and accountability.

Much ado about Nothing

I used to dread Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federal Assembly. I had to translate it. It was long and never very inspiring. True, he later spiced it up with animation showing the latest Russian weapons and where they might strike, but I just missed that one.

This time, Putin’s address has set off a great flurry of speculation. Not surprising when you glance at the headlines – Government resigns, constitutional reform, a national referendum.

My first thought was that surely this is all just much ado about nothing. Yes, history has known cases of sudden conversions and transformations, but Putin and the Russian power system as it exists today? No. This is not some great new transformation in process, not some big turning point or harbinger of new policies and approaches. It’s a bit of minor fiddling with the system dressed up as something with far greater importance and implications, and there are reasons for that.

Constant talk is the bread and butter of life these days. In Russia too. Right from the minute Putin got re-elected in 2018 people have been chattering away about what will happen in 2024, when his final mandate under the current constitution ends, and who his successor might be.

What will happen in 2024? No one knows. Not even Putin. It’s a cliche that we live in a fast-changing world, and an interconnected one too, and so it’s awfully difficult to predict what the situation will look like in 2024, for Russia, for the wider world, and for Putin personally. Sure, working within an authoritarian system, Putin has the luxury of much longer term planning, as he’s not bound to the uncertainties of fickle voter whims and short election cycles. But he’s always been more of a tactician than a strategist, and he doesn’t have a crystal ball at hand.

As a tactician, it’s no doubt pretty clear that there is too much of this US-borrowed “lame duck” talk, too much idle speculation about who might be next in the line of succession, and also the annoying background chatter about environmental protests here, social gripes there, pensions, rising costs, the irritating buzz of those opposition mosquitos with their talk of thieves, crooks and corruption, and gossip about intra-system clan rivalries and jostling for influence. Not to mention that the old fallbacks of Ukraine and other assorted enemies are losing their former reliable lustre. Poland, the current whipping boy for offended patriotic sentiment, doesn’t quite make the cut. The 75th anniversary of the end of World War II is sure to provide numerous occasions for patriotic pathos and efforts to unite the country, but the twittering class prefers other subject matter.

So here it is: constitutional reform and government shakeups. That’ll keep everyone busy speculating and deflate this “lame duck” talk somewhat. Meanwhile, things will keep working as they always did.

One can forget about the State Duma and the Federation Council – the lower and upper houses of parliament – undergoing any real transformation in their roles. Their roles are so minimal as it is, but they play a useful part as symbols – the decorative trappings of democracy.

One can forget about the State Council, too, I think. That rather mysterious body with a vague role, set up when Putin was creating his streamlined “vertical of power”, which meant bringing the regions into line and binding them more tightly in a centralised system. Some of the regional governors, relics from earlier, less centralised and more demanding days, were quite prominent and powerful figures, and the State Council was their nice little retirement place, a face-saving reward and continuation of the Soviet-era tradition that once in the system, you stayed in. You might be removed from a post, but unless you’d really messed up and trodden too painfully on the wrong toes, you’d pop up in another post, less powerful, perhaps, even purely symbolic, but still within the system. That was, and still is, a good way of creating a sense of vested interest in keeping the system going.

If the State Council could be set up on decree, it can surely be given some kind of constitutionally-enshrined status too, if that’s what the Kremlin wants to happen. But at this point, there’s little sense in reading too much into these vague statements.

As for the government, Dmitry Medvedev, the now former prime minister, was always in a tenuous position there. He’s taken plenty of flak over this time, but that also doesn’t mean much. Part of the reason why Putin is Putin, holding the special place he holds, is because for the system’s solidity, it is mighty useful to let public discontent target officials all the way up the ranks, from corrupt or inept local bureaucrats to government ministers or the prime minister himself. Just think of the number of times Putin has stepped in as the arbiter from above, chastising, ordering, urging, mending wrongs and generally looking moderate where others look extreme, or looking decisive where others are fluffing around with little effect, or sharing popular indignation over negligence here and stupidity there.

Medvedev’s seeming demotion doesn’t mean he’s in disgrace in Putin’s eyes. It’s hard to say what plans Putin might have for him, if any, but one thing is sure – the two of them have had and do have their differences, but they are a loyal tandem, tried and tested, and in Putin’s eyes, that kind of longstanding, verified loyalty counts for a lot.

Medvedev is now in the Russian Security Council, directly under Putin himself. In the old days of “Sovietology”, analysts used to look at who was standing where on the Lenin Mausoleum during the annual military parades, and would try to deduce from that what was going on within the Politburo – the decision-making body of that time.

If I was going to watch anything now, I’d watch the Russian Security Council. It’s another vague body within the system, but unlike the State Council, it is where the real decision-making goes on. If you look at its composition, you see that it is always weighted to the security side of things. That fits with Putin’s mindset. He is himself from the security side of things, after all, ex KGB/FSB, and these matters are utmost on his mind. Security first. Everything else as can be managed without detriment to security.

Medvedev isn’t a security guy – that, to Putin’s mind, probably explains why he agreed to let the UN Security Council bring in a no-fly zone over Libya back during the Arab Spring, which other countries than used to intervene in the course of events there. A mistake, in Putin’s way of thinking.

But loyalty comes first – even over poor grasp of security matters, and so, why not keep Medvedev there alongside him on this body that debates the real meat of things? Maybe, with time, Medvedev has learned from his past mistakes?

I doubt we are about to suddenly get a much more public and transparent Security Council. I used to love Security Council days – they gave me the least work. It would be a brief roundup of who attended and the general subjects discussed. But this was where those tactics and decisions were being planned and debated. No need to enlighten the public about the details of important matters of state.

The prime minister usually attends Security Council meetings. The new prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, is being described as a technocrat. Some compare him to Mikhail Fradkov, an earlier Putin appointee to that post. Fradkov was seen as an obscure technocrat, but he actually came from a security and intelligence background. Mishustin has a tax service background, which, in Russia, amounts to something of a security background too.

Judging by the content of Putin’s address, the government will attempt to deal with various social issues and mitigate some of the discontent that has built up here, especially after the pension reforms. But the overall focus will still be security. This is always priority number one.

One more point that drew attention in Putin’s address was the issue of international law having primacy over the Russian constitution. Putin wants to reverse that and ensure Russia’s legal sovereignty too. Sovereignty in general is a big thing for Putin, ever since the days of “managed” or “sovereign” democracy and through to ensuring Russia has digital sovereignty.

This legal sovereignty won’t change much. The international law in question here is the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, and Russia already takes a selective approach there. The court passes verdicts, but actually getting them enforced is another matter.

Other international law, arms control treaties, for example, is a simpler case. Russia makes it a point to emphasise its commitment to international law and leaves it to the US to unravel it or to set precedents that Russia can then use, saying, we warned you that this would have consequences in the future.

 

Collateral Damage

When I was a child, Iran was, in my mind, a threatening land full of crazed fanatics bent on imposing a violent, backward religious vision on as great a scale as they could. I never imagined then that I would end up studying Farsi at Moscow’s Institute for Eastern Studies.

A friend talked me into that particular linguistic endeavour. As with any real language study, you can’t just learn grammar and vocabulary and not learn also about the country’s culture, history and life in general. Our Farsi study coincided with the US invasion of Iraq, and so we were particularly interested in talking about not just Iran but the wider Middle East, using our rudimentary Farsi knowledge to attempt to talk about politics, war and what it would all mean for the future.

Unfortunately, I never pursued it long enough to really learn it well and I have now forgotten a lot of what I studied back then, but it comes back surprisingly quickly, and when I hear it or read it or hear about Iran, it makes me want to resume it.

Sadly, one hears little good about Iran. Iran makes the news for earthquakes, plane crashes (usually domestic), or protests, or for its nuclear programme, or as a “rogue state”, a member of the “axis of evil”, a sponsor of terrorism and destabilisation.

That’s not to say that Iran has never had a hand in terrorism and destabilisation, or that the religious fanatics of my childhood fears are just a myth. But having lived a large part of my life in Russia, also with its many ominous labels and its certain hand in all kinds of shady affairs, plus the general image of an authoritarian regime that tramples on human rights, I know that the reality is far more complex.

US President Donald Trump seems to glean this too, even tweeting in Farsi about the wonderful Iranian people. Those same wonderful people he’s not keen at all to let enter United States soil, even if his tweet suggests that he sees a difference between a state’s government and its people.

They maybe weren’t so wonderful to him when they were out en masse, protesting against the extrajudicial killing of Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad’s airport. After the recent wave of protests in Iran, this sudden show of national unity wouldn’t have gladdened those abroad who are just waiting for the regime to topple.

Quite a number of people inside Iran would happily see the regime topple too, but not with help from Trump, and having another country decide arbitrarily to murder your citizens on a third country’s soil is demeaning and humiliating, no matter what you think deep down about what those citizens were up to.

After all, courts, laws and international treaties exist to attempt to prevent such arbitrariness from taking over, because, as we know all too well, one man’s hero is another man’s terrorist, and once you set that snowball rolling, there’s no telling where it will stop.

I remember back in the days of my Farsi classes, people who had been in Iran, collecting opinion there, said the frustration with the regime was high, especially among the youth. That was nearly two decades ago. Imagine all that pent-up discontent, not just one generation of it now.

But it always seems to get set back again by outsiders’ (especially US) clumsy meddling in the region, producing new bursts of rallying round the flag and muddling onwards in the besieged fortress.

Trump might be happy now that the Ukrainian International Airlines plane has had the side effect of undoing that short-lived unity his actions produced. One always hopes that a tragedy such as this might sober everyone up and bring about some kind of positive change, but this seldom seems to happen.

Iran only owned up to mistakenly firing a missile at the plane because the mounting evidence was making it impossible to continue lying. It would have, had it been possible. In the end though, the Iranian officials had to make the best of a bad situation. Most of the people on the plane were Iranian or of Iranian origin, people with families and relatives in Iran, people who’d succeeded abroad, people with achievements to their names. Continuing to lie would only have worsened the outrage of those they left behind.

In Russia, of course, Iran’s admission and apology set of comparisons with MH17, shot down over Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, in 2014. Now, people are asking, if Iran could apologise, why couldn’t Russia?

If a country can get away with it, it will never apologise officially and publicly for such acts, even if it tacitly recognises its mistake. At best, it will reach a compensation agreement, punish a few of those directly responsible for the error, and hope the affair will quietly be forgotten. Such was the case when the Americans accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger plane in the late 1980s, or when a Russian passenger plane was mistakenly shot down over the Black Sea during Russian-Ukrainian naval exercises in 2001. The Ukrainians seemed to be responsible for that tragic blunder, but the two countries reached an agreement that avoided public blame, and the victims’ families failed in any bid to take matters further.

MH17 is a particularly sensitive case because, even if the plane was mistakenly shot down by pro-Russian separatists, using Russian weapons, Russia has always maintained that it is not involved in the Donbas conflict, and to admit a share of responsibility would be to admit that it is, in fact, a party to the conflict.

No one learns the lessons, sadly. The MH17 disaster could have been avoided if Ukraine had closed the airspace over the conflict zone, and this latest disaster in Iran could have been avoided if Iran had closed its airspace while in a state of heightened military alert.

Ultimately, all of these lives lost are just so much collateral damage for governments that have more important matters to pursue, geopolitical ambitions, for example, and holding onto spheres of interest. They’ll apologise only if circumstance forces them to, otherwise, why not lie if you think you can get away with it?

And what about the threat coming from Iran, which we’ve been hearing about for decades now? The nuclear programme and missile threat. It was precisely to deal with that threat that the Joint Programme of Action was agreed on, which Trump decided wasn’t good enough and pulled the US out of the deal. At the same time though, he wants Iran to keep respecting a deal he himself has decided is not worth implementing.

I don’t welcome any country attempting to acquire nuclear weapons, but several countries already have them without being formally recognised nuclear powers. It’s a bit of a bind – the official nuclear powers haven’t the faintest intention of giving up their nuclear weapons, indeed, with the US busy dismantling arms control agreements, the ground is set for a new arms race. But so long as the official nuclear powers make no move towards giving up their weapons – which they are supposed to do under the international agreements in this area – other countries will continue to try acquiring them.

I’m not sure if Iran is really more of a threat to the world than Saudi Arabia, say, another country with its share of fanatics and extremists, and most likely with the technological ability and know-how already in place to very rapidly obtain nuclear weapons should it feel the need to do so. Oh, but then Saudi Arabia is a US ally, despite having a human rights record probably even more dismal than Iran’s.

A complicated situation, in short. And saddest of all is that it won’t end here. Ordinary Iranians will continue to suffer, and so will ordinary people elsewhere across the Middle East and beyond. Collateral damage for these geopolitical “great games” and opportunist swings of course in a region that has more than enough problems already as it is.