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.

 

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.

Battle of the birds

Alleged Russian interference around the world reached new heights recently when speculation swirled that murky Russian forces had helped the Hoiho penguin to win in New Zealand’s annual Native Bird of the Year vote. High stakes there for sure.

Back when the British Empire was rivalling with Russia for influence abroad in the “Great Game”, cannons were installed on strategic New Zealand hilltops to fend off attacks from Tsarist Russia, if they ever came. They didn’t. But penguins are clearly another matter. I doubt the troll farms were busy pushing their favourite among New Zealand native birds though. More likely, Russia has a lot of ornithologists and a lot of internet users with a fondness for anything quirky.

The whole point of the New Zealand annual bird vote is to raise awareness about the country’s native birds, many of which are endangered species. In the wider context, it fits with the broader efforts to get people thinking about nature in all its diversity, and its fragility, especially in the face of the human onslaught. Ultimately, such awareness raising activities want to provoke not just thought but action, of course. All the more important today, when the combined pressures on the planet are pushing it to tipping point.

We hear a lot of worthy words about joining forces to tackle these challenges. But what serious joint efforts can we really hope to see if the world is again gearing up for another arms race, Russia frets about NATO, NATO spies Russian threats all over the place, and the space for what the Russians like to call a “common, constructive agenda” is shrinking all the time.

Russian officials often say that the West is stuck in a Cold War mindset still, but this statement is true for both sides. The 1990s was an uncertain decade of casting around for new roles and meaning. It produced mostly disappointments, misunderstandings and frustration. The West, especially the defence lobby, was only too happy to revive a semblance of the good old days, with a familiar adversary, even if, in the new version, Russia has to share its “major threat” spot with China these days.

For Russia too, it’s familiar ground, and Russia too has its generals and its defence enterprises that want to be kept happy, not to mention that it is very useful to have an “enemy abroad” for the purposes of explaining to the public why their lives don’t improve, or even worsen, while what money doesn’t go into maintaining lavish lifestyles for the elite is directed towards developing new arms and upgrading old ones.

Russia has a proven track record of considerable success in this area. True to the old joke about everything turning into a kalashnikov, no matter how hard the factories try to produce other goods, it traditionally does better with missiles and bombs than with other areas of economic activity. True, it developed a whole host of very competitive IT companies, but the way the Russian state operates means that sooner or later, the temptation to get them all under tight state control becomes just too great. Better to have them creating potentially useful tools for an authoritarian regime’s needs than offering citizens an endless array of little windows on the wider world.

The Russian state is quite at home in mobilisation economy mode, so long as the mobilisation demands don’t extend to the elite. As for the West, one can’t help seeing that the kneejerk Cold War reflex is so ingrained that no one really ever stops to think.

Look at the talk surrounding Russia’s forays into Africa, for example. Basically, as I see it, at least, everyone wants to be in Africa – to make money, get resources, and sell things. No one has ever been very picky about who they deal with. Dictators are fine so long as they follow certain rules. The Soviet Union was present in Africa, and now the Russians are returning, mostly to sell arms and provide private military services. As if others aren’t already busy selling arms and providing similar services. But that’s the point. No one wants a competitor.

The Russians play a similar game elsewhere around the world, varying the arms sales with nuclear energy or fossil fuels deals. It’s no better and no worse than what the West and China are doing. For dictators though, Russian and Chinese overtures have the added attraction of coming free of all that human rights nonsense with which the West likes to dress up its dealings abroad. Although, some countries, Saudi Arabia, say, get more pragmatic treatment. Only business. No politics.

Having made its opportunistic grab to swallow Crimea, Russia isn’t about to set out on military adventures abroad. I agree with those who say that it is fundamentally a status quo power. It’s acting now in Syria precisely because it felt the status quo there was going to be radically upset in a way that would have been not at all in its favour. It opposes NATO expansion so vehemently not because it really believes that NATO is about to attack it, but because NATO’s plans are throwing the status quo into such disarray.

I don’t know if NATO military planners seriously believe that Russia is contemplating attacking NATO, but I find it a very implausible scenario for a regime that is far busier trying to maintain the delicate balance between great power games and needs and keeping public discontent at manageable levels. This last week saw a Siberian pensioner go down on her knees before Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, begging him to do something about the absent hot water supply. Now, if you want Cold War-era responses, that really looks like the “Upper Volta with rockets” label that the Soviet Union managed to earn itself back then. Such a country will rattle its sabres a bit and engage in some provocation, to keep up the show, but undertake serious offensive operations of any sort? Highly unlikely. From the Kremlin’s point of view, yes, NATO must not be allowed to just breeze in wherever it wants, but those pensioners can’t be allowed to get too desperate either.

Putting the trolls to work on propaganda is another matter. It’s easier. Cyberattacks, hacking. All worrying developments, especially when you consider how internet-dependent everything has become now. The potential for disruption is huge, but the threat here is far more amorphous than some simple “bad state” abusing information and communications technology.

This is an area where it would be very good to see states work together to establish a new framework of rules and agreements along the lines of all the hotlines, treaties and verification measures set up during the Cold War period in a bid to keep the world from stumbling into nuclear war.

Now, unfortunately, not only are we not seeing any real attempt to address the challenges new technologies and the rise of non-state actors, as well as states, are bringing our way, but even the old weapons are being freed from their past constraints as the arms control system unravels.

There are mutual recriminations between the Russians and the US on arms control, but those issues could be ironed out if there were genuine political will. To me, it looks as though the US simply wants to have its hands free so that it can address the “China threat”, as it sees it. And Russia isn’t exactly enthralled, but nor is it exactly devastated either. The Kremlin doesn’t mind having its hands free when it comes to weapons, but as a status quo power, it didn’t want to be the one to publicly break the status quo the arms treaties had established.

So, we not only have a collapsing natural environment to deal with, but all these myriad weapons issues too, old and new, and much more besides. And amidst all of this, Russia managed to meddle in a vote on birds at the other end of the world? Well, if they did, the victorious Hoiho penguin certainly doesn’t care. It’s reputed to be a very anti-social bird in any case. But from my point of view, looking at all of this, I really have to wonder sometimes about the priorities of those who seem to wield the most influence in our world and their willingness to follow the same old well-trodden paths even when signs keep warning them that there very well could be an abyss ahead.

Notre Dame

In the wake of the latest series of terrorist attacks to shake our world and take so many lives this Easter weekend in Sri Lanka, mourning a building could seem secondary. But that would be to suggest that our capacity for mourning and sympathy is circumscribed, like a water reservoir, the resources of which only go so far.

One does not exclude the other. It seems normal, natural even, to mourn for human lives destroyed, and to feel sorrow too for the destruction of the marvels we human beings have created.

I lived in Paris for five years when I was younger. I couldn’t say I loved it, but I grew to know it, became familiar with its streets and landmarks and ended up attached to it in my way. I grew up in a place where no building was older than the nineteenth century, a place of earthquakes and the constant knowledge that nothing was constant and that what seemed solid could be reduced to rubble at any moment. For me, Paris was above all a sense of permanence, continuity, solidity you could trust.

The Gothic cathedrals summed that up with their soaring forms towering mighty over seas of city roofs. And Paris, unlike many modern cities, refused to let the lesser buildings grow too tall. I remember in class once, being told about how Europe’s cathedral-building mania began with fears that the end of the first millennium after Christ would bring the apocalypse and penitent nobles and merchants began building monuments to divine glory in the hope of staving off hell. And then it became a kind of urban rivalry, rather like today’s unspoken competition to build the tallest skyscrapers.

That stuck with me and I recalled it often when walking past Notre Dame. I loved to wander past at night, in the mist, when the gargoyles looked like they were about to leap down with all the eerie appearance of beasts intended to put the fear of God into superstitious mediaeval minds. At least the builders and financers of those times left a legacy worth preserving, works of wonder and faith, living embodiments of history and human endeavour.

Once, in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, I entered a small café that was decorated with photos of pre-war Minsk. Minsk, like most of Belarus, was bombed to ruins during World War II. Modern Minsk was rebuilt in the Stalinist classical style, which is imposing in its way but not exactly endearing. The old photos showed it to have been a beautiful city of mingled influences, as one would expect in that part of Europe. And as always in Belarus, I thought of how much Europe lost in its many wars, especially that last one, by which time weapons made it entirely possible to raze entire cities to the ground even without the soon-to-be developed nuclear bomb.

All too often, people only realise what treasures they had once they are gone. The reactions to the Notre Dame fire are not surprising. Yes, it’s good to see solidarity, good to see the wealthy so ready to donate, people say, but at the same time ask, why didn’t it come earlier? After all, we always hear about how this or that monument is in need of repairs but money is short. Yes, but then, we always hear too about how our very planet is in urgent need of repairs, but little is done about it. Why? Because it took fear of hell and judgement day to get the people pouring money and effort into such feats of construction a millennium ago, and it takes a destructive fire today to get the donations needed for repairs. It took World War II and its bloodbath to get Europe to build a different model of relations and get the world to create the UN. What it would take us to take real action to help preserve the balance on our planet, one hardly dares to think.

My experience living in Paris suggested to me that solidarity was in fairly short supply in everyday life, but turmoil or tragedy were a sure way to galvanise people and bring them together in sometimes quite astounding fashion. The response to the fire in Paris itself shows this. I usually end up writing about Russia and China, and here too there were some remarks and commentary that struck me. For example, the surprise one commentator expressed about the fact that English-language media were explaining to their readers and viewers the symbolism and place in French life of Notre Dame, while Russians needed no such explanations because Russians are so universal and their generous souls have oceans of sympathy enough for the entire world. Well, he did not use exactly those same words, but that was the gist of it.

Whatever one thinks of that idea, overall, Paris and France in general hold a fond place in Russian hearts and are indeed known, even if only from afar, and loved. That is the reality of cultural and historical ties that persist in people’s feelings even when politicians do their best to superimpose narratives of mutual distrust. It isn’t surprising then that Russians should feel genuine sorrow over the fire in Paris. But, as many in Russia itself have pointed out, it is sad that the same desire to help and act has so often been lacking at home. Indeed, Russia has lost tremendous amounts of heritage. Much was destroyed by war, yes, but much was destroyed too by the Russians themselves in their ideological fits of short-sighted frenzy. Much has been simply left to rot and crumble out of indifference and lack of money, and much is still being demolished to make way for profit rather than preservation.

As for China, Victor Hugo is well-known for having given Notre Dame literary fame too, and in China he is remembered, aside from for his literary works, as one of the European intellectuals of his time who spoke out against the barbaric destruction by the French and British armies of the Yuan Ming Yuan palace complex during the Opium wars in the mid-nineteenth century. At the time, Yuan Ming Yuan was a summer residence of the Qing imperial family. A short distance from Beijing, it was a fairy tale place where the emperors spent their days amidst lakes, woods, gardens and the curious ensemble of European-style buildings built by Jesuits in the imperial service in the eighteenth century. It was not just buildings that were destroyed, but also numerous objects, art treasures and books, including one of the only copies of a Ming dynasty encyclopaedia.

In cultural terms, the loss was huge. China’s communist rulers have made a big thing out of the Yuan Ming Yuan’s destruction and every Chinese now knows it as a bleak chapter of national humiliation and foreign barbarism. It was an unnecessary and wanton act of destruction, of course, and the entire Opium wars were a disgraceful chapter for the European powers involved. Now, with the news from Paris, some in China felt it was almost like a karmic payback for that destruction of all those years before. Only the ironic thing is that Mao, for example, cared nothing for preserving the past. He wanted to have the Forbidden City torn down, so what would a bunch of European-style architectural caprices of a defunct dynasty have mattered? China is another example of a country that has torn its own history up by the roots and shown little sentiment over erasing vestiges of the past. Where a bit of “old culture” is needed, you just build a pretty modern lookalike version and set it aside as a commercialised reservation where consumers can take selfies.

The other thing to remember, of course, is that, given the commercial interests involved, defending historical landmarks and trying to preserve the past can be a difficult and even dangerous undertaking. It’s not easy as it is in democracies, where business can be just as rapacious and politicians just as corrupt, but it’s even harder in authoritarian countries, where protesting too insistently and getting in the state’s way can land you in prison or worse. There are brave people in both Russia and China working locally to try to save their history, including its material vestiges – the houses, temples, churches etc that have survived to this day. But it is perhaps easier and safer to chip in one’s bit for Notre Dame, far away in France, where everyone agrees that it’s worth repairing and keeping for future generations.

 

Questions and rallying cries

The Cold War era produced a whole cultural output, not just the movies and the spy novels, but songs too. There was the powerful “Two Tribes”, by Frankie goes to Hollywood, with the video banned by some countries back then as “too violent”. Basically it turned the UN into a boxing ring, with the Soviet vs US battle descending into a wild free-for-all. It looks extremely tame by today’s standards. Perhaps it just hit too close to home with its message that all violence was ultimately senseless and only bred more violence.

And then there was Sting’s “Russians”. A nice tune with well-meaning but corny words. “I hope the Russians love their children too…” A seemingly unnecessary hope to express, as if they might be somehow programmed differently in their basic human instincts. But with the world divided by the “iron curtain” , ideological confrontation and propaganda that peddled all manner of stereotypes and division, it was perhaps not surprising that people had their doubts about the “other’s” humanity.

At least that song was a question to the living, to the people who were feeding the arms race and the fears of nuclear annihilation on either side of the divide. It was corny, yes, but it was a hope for the positive force of conscious commonality to save us while we were all still there to be saved.

Today, we are not separated by iron curtains. We have faster, cheaper, more effective tools than ever before in history, supposedly offering us innumerable possibilities for contact and opportunities to learn more about each other and build the kind of understanding that would make songs like “Russians” unthinkable.

But over these last years, I have a constant sense of deja vu. The world around me becomes shriller. In the competing cacophony of simplistic portrayals, ignorance, propaganda and manipulation, hatred and mutual recrimination, it is ever harder to even hear or find a space for the quieter and less attention-grabbing voices of moderation, understanding and respect.

Every so often though, death and destruction come along to jolt people out of their familiar routine. The question in Sting’s song becomes a statement. Horrified at whatever latest tragic way the background bigotry and hate-mongering takes solid shape in our here and now, people cry out the modern equivalent of yes, the Russians do love their children too, they are just like us, we are all one and the same.

We are all Americans after 9/11, all a refugee boy’s corpse washed up on a Turkish beach, all murdered journalists, or hapless commuters, plane passengers, concert goers, nightclub revellers, worshipers at churches, synagogues, mosques. All of the many different victims in these periodic outbursts of terror and killing.

It’s a profoundly human reaction to want to show in whatever small way one’s solidarity, sympathy and sense of shared grief. And yet, these small symbolic gestures also create their share of friction. Some in Russia, for example, have asked why it’s so easy for the Western world to “be” Paris or whichever Western city hit by tragedy, but why so few beyond Russia’s borders could “be” that plane full of Russian holidaymakers blown up over the Sinai Desert a few years back, or the many ordinary Russians who have been victims of terrorist attacks or other tragedies on Russian soil.

And as for “being” Afghan, Iraqi, Somali Syrian or Yemeni, say, you’d have to be engaged in it every day with the frequency and scale of violence in those places. Or “being” Israeli or Palestinian, or the people on either side of the conflict in Ukraine’s Donbass region, say – it’s too complicated, too political, too much pressure to take one side or the other.

I used to wonder with Sting’s song, “why is this question even being asked?” And I can’t help but wonder today, why are we stating loud and clear the commonality of all only when tragedy strikes?

Tragedy strikes every day, after all, not just as killings and terrorist attacks, but as countless small manifestations of prejudice, racism and hate-mongering. I see it all the time, all around me. True, there is no obvious trail of blood and carnage. No, it is just so many small scratches, a little comment here, an unthinking affirmation there, a tiny nudge to spread further whatever myth or distorted fact. Like cigarettes or the carcinogenic substances that lurk in food and so on, so low-level as to be easily dismissed as nothing so terrible really, and yet the cumulative consequences over time are devastating.

The tragedy is that there is so much willingness to let these harmful seeds flourish, so much appetite for them. People will note the outpouring of sympathy for the victims of the terrorist attack in New Zealand, but it will nevertheless be a kind of blip of heightened awareness that will be soon be eroded once more by the unhealthy general environment and the many manipulative forces plugging away at their low-level ongoing destructive work.

Just witness the appetite for information about the perpetrator and his motives. Yes, on the one hand, it’s human too to want to know what drove someone to such violence. But ultimately, it’s always the same old drivel. You can take Hitler, or Stalin, for example, and make a psychological study of their childhoods and life experience etc to identify all the inner wounds, complexes and traumas that triggered particular behaviours and choices later on. And yes, it makes them more human and offers potential explanations.

And yet it always seemed to me that it’s simply a given that of course they’re human, and what interested me was not why Hitler or Stalin became what they did, but why countless others, who have gone through even worse adversities and humiliations, have not been overtaken by vengeance, ruthlessness and disregard for human life.

Why is it that there is such appetite to understand those among us who wreak destruction, rather than trying to identify what it is in we human beings that creates a willingness to keep living and loving and even forgiving in sometimes the most adverse and horrific conditions?

And after each new tragedy the media and the pundits talk about combating extremism in all forms and promoting tolerance and respect. It’s natural, but it boils down to the equivalent of telling people to avoid the growing problem of child obesity by ensuring that their kids eat healthy food and live a healthy lifestyle, while so much in the surrounding environment is geared to promoting just the opposite. You walk into a shop, past the aisles of junk food and processed poison, all so much cheaper and more readily available than the healthier but more expensive goods. Or try encouraging active time outside when the lure of screens is so ubiquitous and people are scared for their children’s safety at every turn.

I realise, of course, that destruction has an inherent fascination. I was one of those kids who loved TV shows that had, as we put it then, “a lot of blowing up stuff”. Imagine if you’d tried to get me to watch a programme about people building bridges rather than blowing them up. One would have been slow and dull. The other enticingly fast and dramatic.

That bigoted, murderous fool who stole so many lives in New Zealand yesterday claimed to act in defence of the white race. Somewhere else around the world, some other misguided fool will have seen this and will want to get revenge and will repeat the act. And so it will go on, against Muslims, against whites, against blacks, against Jews, gays, whoever, in a stupid spiral of violence of the kind that that Cold War song “Two Tribes” was portraying. Until people realise, if ever, that there is in fact no “us” and “them” to break down the divides between, for we are everywhere, always common, always part of the same great human continent.

It’s symbolic that yesterday, young people all around the world came out to demonstrate against climate change. Sadly, the event was overshadowed by the tragedy in New Zealand. But it shouldn’t be. Because although we humans have an inherent capacity for and even love of destruction, if we can start to see that building bridges, for all its slowness and difficulty, is essential because we are all going to have to walk across them if we don’t want to fall into the abyss, we’d maybe take more interest in it and we’d give more time and effort to the things that truly can and should unite us and be our rallying cry today.