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.  

Everyone was happy in Syria

“Before the war began, everyone lived happily in Syria”. I heard this recently from a British doctor, himself involved in humanitarian work. He got this message from the Russian media, which he said woke him up. The Western media, he said, gave such an incessantly biased view.

“Everyone was happy before”. Yes, people usually are happy even in difficult circumstances compared to war, death and destruction. I’ve heard this same phrase from people who had fled conflicts in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. I heard it again after conflict began in Ukraine. It’s a common sentiment in conflict situations.

It so happened that I met a couple from Damascus not long before the conflict in Syria began. They were artists, secular in outlook, young and cosmopolitan, and they were happy. They told me so, spoke fondly of their lives in Syria. I believed them too. What reason not to believe them? Every regime imaginable has its happy contingent.

Most people would agree that North Korea is a pretty grim place to live, but there are happy people there too, most of them in Pyongyang, which is an automatic sign of status and greater guarantee of happiness in itself, and where some people live not grim lives at all, but quite pleasant ones.

I can easily imagine a post-Kim dynasty future in which Pyongyang residents lament the ‘good old days’, when they had stability, a guaranteed state minimum, and a clear set of rules and clear road in life. And they wouldn’t be making it up either. It’s all a problem of who is ‘everyone’, and whose ‘everyone’ is more representative.

The Russian media like to repeat that there was no terrorism in Syria, Iraq or Libya before they were plunged into chaos or had their regimes toppled. There was no terrorism in the Caucasus either during the Soviet period, or in Central Asia, though both of those regions have become prominent suppliers of jihadi soldiers since the Soviet collapse.

Terrorism is seldom a problem in authoritarian regimes. That’s one of their attractive aspects, only it’s rather like meringue, solid-looking, but in reality very brittle.

We’ve seen this in enough countries when the repressive lid has lifted a little and the pent-up steam comes out in dangerously uncontrollable rush. Perhaps people forget now after several years of war that before the terrorists descended on Syria, the initial standoff was domestic and the problems and built-up frustrations were local. Bashar Assad’s potential negotiating partners were local too, and a lot less radical in their aims and demands than those who came later.

Another common view here in Russia is that ‘secular regimes’ in place in the Middle East were the guarantees of stability, and that their demise would inevitably open the road to chaos.

This is just another variation on the myth of ‘countries that need a firm hand’ – most of the world outside of Europe and North America, it seems. Not that it is fair to slap such labels on societies that are trapped in the pendulum swing of stubborn authoritarianism that pushes the motion so far one way that it has very little chance of not then swinging the far to the other extreme.

Assad did have other choices. He could have acted sooner to undertake meaningful reform that might have made Syria’s soil less fertile for more radical seeds. He could have used the hopes and trust many placed in him when he first came to power, but he didn’t, and when the Arab Spring came to rattle his windows, he was more concerned with trying to bolt them tight and ride out the hopefully passing storm.

The process of creating fertile soil for extremism continues elsewhere. In China’s Xinjiang, for example, where the Muslim Uighur population faces increasing discrimination. Uighurs face growing restrictions on their mobility, linguistic and religious rights. One of Beijing’s latest moves requires all Xinjiang residents with a foreign travel passport to leave it with the police. This law, adopted ostensibly for security concerns, officially applies to all residents of the province, but in reality, it is designed to keep watch on Uighurs, who will be allowed to travel abroad only with official permission.

Yes, it is true that there has been increasing violence in Xinjiang over recent years, and this violence has spilled over into other parts of China too. But will more repression and discrimination fix the problem? Will making Islam ‘more Chinese’ – ie, more hollowed of any real religious substance and under state control – which is what new recommendations seek to do, defuse the tensions?

If Xinjiang ever explodes, which, sadly, it very well could, one can easily imagine the voices crying that everyone lived happily there under the communists, and there was no terrorism. Fewer will remember the repressive spiral that stockpiled the explosives in the first place, just as they forget now the long chains of events that preceded uprisings and subsequent conflict elsewhere.

Certainly, when people in Syria started calling for change, they did not have in mind the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda spinoffs, and all out civil war. Obviously, life under Assad’s repressive but not imminently life-threatening regime might even look like ‘happiness’ comparatively. Before we start saying that everyone was happy though, let’s remember that happiness is a very relative thing. There have been happy people under even the grimmest tyrants, and Assad is only a minor one on that scale. But whether the less satisfied sections of this ‘everyone’ have channels for expressing their disatisfaction and whether there are means to address different groups’ demands and hopes before the powder keg reaches danger point is quite another question altogether.

A cold wind blows

My childhood coincided with the Cold War’s tail years. I was just a kid when I saw a British movie called Threads. It was one of those nuclear apocalypse dramas that the Cold War era, with its fears of global annihilation, produced. It was realistic and unrelentingly grim. I was far away at the moment from either superpower or their allies, seemingly about as safe as one could be, but I didn’t feel safe. It was one of those turning point moments in my childhood, the realisation that the world was terribly volatile, that events could easily spiral in a bitter, bloody logic of their own, and that we would all share the consequences, no matter what the miles of ocean between us.

I remember too the day my father came home and announced that Mikhail Gorbachev had become the new Soviet General Secretary. “We’ve all got a few more years to live now”, he said, as if he knew already on that day in early 1985 that Gorbachev would radically change the global climate.

My father, an astute political observer, was right to be optimistic about Gorbachev. I didn’t share the ebullient euphoria of some after the Soviet Union’s transformation and ultimate collapse. There was and could not be an ‘end of history’ and triumphant march of freedom and democracy all around the world. But the nuclear ‘doomsday clock’ got set back a bit at least and it seemed we could forget those Cold War-era documentaries of horror and the soppily naive songs asking if the ‘Russians love their children too’ and suchlike.

Like with fashions of other kinds, we can’t really forget though. There’s something of those Cold War days breathing a growing chill into the air now. I can’t help but think that part of the reason why the Cold War never did become a large-scale ‘hot’ war was because most of the people waging this ‘cold’ confrontation had gone through World War II and had living memory of what war meant.

People have lost that personal memory now. War has become more abstract. You glimpse this in the discussions on this or that possible strategy. Nuclear weapons have lost some of their fear-inspiring awe. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was shocked in his time when China’s Chairman Mao suggested that a nuclear war wasn’t something so unthinkable, after all, China had people aplenty to spare, even if a good portion got decimated. The Soviet Union was not known for attempting to minimise human losses during World War II, on the contrary, it threw its millions into the flames in often ruthless fashion, but Mao’s attitude towards nuclear war shocked even Stalin’s former henchmen.

These days, some in Russia suggest that it might be even rather useful to carry out a preventive nuclear strike or two. Not just out of the blue of course, but in response to some threat or other, most likely from NATO and the US, of course, who are depicted as practically chomping at the bit to give Russia a military mauling.

The Cold War was an absurd time in many ways, but it at least had a logic of confrontation between two opposing ideologies competing for global domination. Real wars never stopped during those years, and the superpowers were involved, but always either through proxies, or at least never with both sides openly fighting each other in the same place.

Today is different. Russia and the US are both fighting openly in Syria. They are also locking themselves increasingly into a logic in which it is hard for either side to retreat. Neither side actually wants war. Putin needs this climate of real or imagined external enemies and threats for domestic aims. It helps him maintain stability at home and keep his regime safe. Certainly, he does have a particular geopolitical vision of the world and idea of how international relations should be conducted, but he is not a Hitler and we are not in a repeat of Munich in 1938, when ‘appeasement’ would be simply giving the green light for a dictator’s insolence and appetite to grow with renewed vigour.

It is harder for Russia to be the side that starts toning down the hysteria and taking a more sober approach. Putin has more to lose and he has few other solutions to offer in any case. Unless oil prices suddenly surge and the Russian economy undergoes a miracle recovery, the world is likely to have to continue living with a prickly and hysterical Russia for now, a provocative Russia that will attempt to demonstrate what strength it can, and this strength happens to be military, but the muscle-flexing is more about domestic policy than some sign of a genuine expansion strategy.

Putin has practiced judo for years. Judo takes it name from an idea in Chinese Daoist philosophy about the ‘soft’ vanquishing the ‘hard’. Like water, which skirts all obstacles in supple flow or patiently wears them down. The best way to vanquish someone bent on a ‘hard’ approach, is to let them be, let them reach their zenith, for after the zenith begins the decline. Or you conserve your force, wait for the opponent to attack and only then turn the inertia of that attack against the attacker himself.

Putin’s Russia has been taking the ‘hard’ approach these last few years. The outside world has been hearing a lot of sabre-rattling and bellicose language. They don’t always see that the same shrill tongues heaping abuse on the West send their children to that same West to study, buy property there, stash assets there, procure residence or passports there, and generally prepare a bolt hole or just a future investment. Oh yes, the Russians love their children too.

I can understand Baltic and Polish concerns about steps such as Russia’s Iskander missiles being redeployed to Kaliningrad Region. History weighs heavy, no matter what the reassurances given. And I can understand the frustrations, the desire to do something about what looks like bullying behaviour on the international stage and a brazen boldness that has plunged Ukraine into such tragic conflict.

I only worry that events these days move so fast and in such unexpected ways, and the players might be so obsessed with not losing face and not looking weak as to miss the opportunity to retreat before the destructive spiral spins out of control. This might sound alarmist, but I read history, not just today’s news, and many conflicts in history started more out of just these sort of unexpected skids and an inability to extricate oneself from the logic of tit-for-tat than from any real plan or desire for confrontation.

I don’t hope like Sting back in the 1980s that the Russians love their children too. The question does not even need to be asked. I hope only that among the politicians and generals in our world today are people who know the power of their arsenals but know too the full senselessness of adding suffering and destruction to a world that has enough of it already and challenges enough to face as it is.

There are no simple recipes and miracle solutions for today’s situation, but a careful and sober approach is essential, even if we’re all not sure exactly what we’re doing and where it will lead us. Khrushchev was a notoriously hot-headed and unpredictable man, and he and J.F. Kennedy held the world in fearful thrill between them during the Cuban missile crisis, but fortunately for humanity, even stubborn, hot-headed Khrushchev was wise enough to back down then.

Some of the nuclear strategy experts, who follow all these strategic games and geopolitical manoeuverings, say that we are now closer to nuclear war than at any other moment apart from the Cuban missile crisis. I suppose that’s why I remembered that long-forgotten British movie that so frightened me as a kid.