Russia is a Beggar

The Beggar Queen

I’m sure it will be no great revelation if I tell you I take no interest at all in beauty pageants.  You know the sort of thing; a succession of women whose breast size is in inverse proportion to that of their brains, telling some slavering old Jimmy Savile-type host that they want to help old people when they grow up, with hints, perhaps, of oral pleasures to come. 

I was amused to discover, though, that one of these contests is called Miss Earth.  What, Miss Earth?  Does the competition come from Miss Mars, Miss Venus and the rest, from the ultra hot Miss Mercury to the cold and distant Miss Pluto?  Now that might be something worth watching!

Earth girls come from all over the Earth.  It wasn’t really the name of the competition that caught my attention; it was the comments of one of the competitors.  She is Natalia Pereverzeva from Russia, different from the usual run of beauties in that she had some unusual things to say about her country. 

Asked what makes her proud of her country, she started off in a glowing if slightly eccentric fashion.  Russia, she said, “is bright, warm, patched, but it is pleasant to slumber under it on a winter evening when the storm rages outside.”  I get it: Russia is really just a giant duvet.  Wait; it’s more than that, it’s “a kind of cow with very big eyes, funny horns and always chewing its mouth oh, what sweet milk she gives!  Oh, how it smells – meadows, herbs and sun.”  A comfort blanket, kindly cows and fragrant herbs, my, my, Russia is obviously the lost Eden.

But it’s not.  In an instant bedding, cows and herbs disappeared, revealing something nasty in the woodshed.  Russia started to smell not of fragrant meadows but of corruption.  “But my Russia – it is also my poor long-suffering country, mercilessly torn to pieces by greedy, dishonest and unbelieving people.  My Russia is a great artery, from which the chosen few people drain away its wealth.  My Russia is a beggar.” 

The beggar cannot help its orphans and its elderly.  Engineers, doctors and teachers are fleeing, as from a sinking ship, because they can’t make enough to live on.  This is her country, she concluded, her dear, poor Russia.

Not the sort of thing one expects in this kind of bash, I feel sure you will agree.  It’s caused quite a stir in Russia.  Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the main tabloids, headlined the story on its front page.  Did our Miss Earth 2012 contestant slam Russia or tell the truth?, it asked.  No, she did not tell the truth, one of its commentators proceeded; her tirade was just a rehash of Western clichés about Russia.  That would not include the bit about duvets, meadows, herbs and cows, I suppose

Dmitry Steshin went on to accuse her of “trading her body in photographs to arouse the sexual instincts of the end consumer, thereby ruining her credibility.”  You can make of that what you will but I rather thought trading one’s body in photographs to arose the sexual instincts “of the end consumer” was what beauty pageants were all about.  Perhaps Dmitry is of a more innocent cast of mind, giving no thought at all to the girl’s future intentions towards old men. 

Alas, he seems rather out of touch with the rest of Russia, or at least the more than 90% of the thousands who responded in her favour in the paper’s online poll.  Clearly the end consumers’ sexual instincts have been aroused by the former Miss Russia’s body of photographs.  Either that or she speaks a deeper truth, one that explodes the self-serving illusions and forms of political deception that Putin’s gangster-state specialises in.  That is no beauty contest.  

Russia’s Historical Amnesia

  

There is a scene in David Lean’s movie version of Doctor Zhivago where Lara, the great love of Zhivago’s life, disturbed by the howling of wolves close to the dacha where they are staying, says to Yuri that this is a terrible time to be alive.  It’s Russia towards the end of the Civil War that followed the Bolshevik takeover in 1917. 

It was a terrible time to be alive but neither Lara nor Zhivago knew just how terrible it was to become.  She herself was eventually to disappear at the height of the Great Terror, a nightmare yet to descend.  This, particularly the year 1937, the so-called Yezhovshchina, named after Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the security police, was the very acme of suffering.  It was the Golgotha of the ordinary people of Russia, captured so memorably in Requiem, the poetic cycle by Anna Akhmatova.

Yezhov, Beria and the other apparatchiks of death and despair were only a front.  The beast at the heart of the labyrinth was Josef Stalin, conceivably the worst and bloodiest tyrant in human inhuman history, paranoid, vengeful and dangerous; a monster in monster’s clothing. 

Stalin was just a communist Hitler, though in some ways even more vile.  But Soviet Russia, despite the dictator’s best efforts, was never defeated in war.  Unlike Hitler’s Germany, it was never pulled up by the roots.  Russia, even post-communist Russia, has never had a proper reckoning with Stalin and Stalinism.  There has never been, and possibly never will be, a truth and reconciliation committee.  So much truth remains hidden; so many Russians are still in denial.  Even Khrushchev’s famed 1956 Secret Speech was but a partial break with the past.

Stalin, in a way, is the temperature of Russia, rising and falling with the circumstances of the day.  Khrushchev’s denunciation saw a partial reappraisal of his legacy, little better than a renaming without a re-evaluation.  Khrushchev’s fall in 1964 was followed by the stagnation and sclerosis of the Brezhnev years, in which Stalin’s memory underwent a partial thaw.

For a period in the 1990s, albeit all too brief, it looked as if Russia might finally come to terms with the full horror of its Stalinist past.  It was not to be.  For an instant Russia saw freedom only to retreat into age-old slavery.  It was a depressingly familiar pattern, so brilliantly captured by Vasiliy Grossman in Everything Flows, a novel unfinished at the time of his dearth in 1964.  “The implacable suppression of the individual personality”, he wrote, “ - its total, servile, subjection to the sovereign and the State – has been a constant feature of Russian history.”

Stalin is back; the temperature is rising.  He is back in Putin’s Russia, in a worse form than ever; he is back in a gangster state that does not even pretend to embrace an ennobling ideology.  He is back simply as an avatar of power, of the most demeaning and slavish forms of state worship.  The recent vindictive treatment of Pussy Riot, the female punk rockers accused of ‘hooliganism’, is but one small example of the new mood.

There is so much irony in ignorance.  In 2005, the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Stalin’s ‘achievement’ in leading the country to victory was lauded.  His earlier alliance with Hitler, a man in whom he placed implicit trust, and his gross errors in 1941, which cost so many Russian lives, was completely forgotten.  What a wretched fate to live with a partial memory.

Partial memory is the key to Russian history, the key to Putin’s approach to the past.  In 2007 his government decided on a restructuring of the national curriculum for schools, teaching children that the tyrant’s actions were ‘entirely rational’.  In the same year the archives of Memorial, an organisation set up to establish an accurate view of the past, were raided.  The police confiscated images of Stalinist atrocities along with twenty years worth of oral testament chronicling everyday life under the regime, as Emily Whitaker points out in the recent issue of History Today. 

The following year a television company organised a national poll on the ‘Greatest Russian Ever’.  Stalin came third, despite pleas by the station for people to choose someone else, another remarkable piece of ignorance, inasmuch as he wasn’t even Russian.  The television executives would have solved their problem by disqualifying him on those simple ethnic grounds! 

It’s a sure sign of things when tyrant kitsch is all the rage.  Just imagine Hitler watches and other tat on sale in Berlin.  Now go to Moscow.  No need to imagine: there is Stalin tat aplenty. 

If Stalin is the mood in Putingrad, so are Stalinist policies.  New legislation been proposed, including increased penalties for violation of protest laws.  Non government agencies that receive international funding now risk being labelled as ‘foreign agents.’ The government is also being granted permission to censor certain internet pages. 

To resurrect a putrid past shows just how morally abject the present regime is, how deeply sunk in dissimulation and lies.  With some noble exceptions Russia itself is sunk deep in moral turpitude, especially tragic in that there can be few families without the victims of past wrongs.  This is a country, in short, suffering from a particularly degrading form of historical amnesia. 

You were taken away at dawn’s mildness.

I convoyed you, as my dead-born child,

Children cried in the room’s half-grey darkness,

And the lamp by the icon lost light. 

On your lips dwells the icon kiss’s cold

On your brow – the cold sweet … Don’t forget!

Like a wife of the rebel of old

On the Red Square, I’ll wail without end.

Great Catherine

Her name was Sophia Frederica Augusta.  She was a minor eighteenth century German princess of the minor eighteenth century duchy of Anhalt-Zerbst.  In the normal course of things she would have married a minor German prince, lived a minor German life and passed into history, minor and unnoticed.  But destiny had another path and another name for Sophia.  She became Ekaterina.  She became Catherine, Empress of all the Russias, known as ‘the Great’ even in her own lifetime.   

Catherine is one of those figures in history who has an enduring fascination for me.  I’m in Edinburgh at the present.  I came here specifically to visit the recently opened Catherine the Great – An Enlightened Empress exhibition in the National Museum of Scotland.  Marking the 250th anniversary of the coup d’état which placed her on the throne of Russia, it tells Catherine’s story through a collection of letters, diaries, jewellery, paintings, sculptures and dresses. 

Most of the items come from the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, including a recently restored giant coronation portrait, on show for the first time since the Revolution of 1917 which destroyed the Romanov dynasty.  The whole thing is a marvel, from the paintings, the porcelain, the grand dinner services and the intimate cameos.  It’s a story of Russia in peace and in war, a story of a Russia made even greater by a cultured, humane and civilized princess who took her adopted home to her heart. 

Catherine came to Russia to marry the Grand Duke Peter, the nephew of the reigning Empress Elizabeth.  If things had gone well she may have lived largely in her husband’s shadows and the shadows of history, like most other imperial consorts.  But they did not go well.  Peter and his new Grand Duchess developed a mutual loathing for one another, each taking a variety of lovers. 

Catherine was later to claim that her son Paul I, who succeeded her in 1796, was not the child of Peter but of Sergei Saltykov, one of her many paramours.  It’s almost certainly untrue.  Paul in character and attitude bore a striking resemblance to Peter, and was to fall from power for much the same reasons.  The two portraits on display in Edinburgh also show a remarkable physical similarity between father and son.

In the course of researching Catherine I came across an old movie called The Scarlett Empress, a 1934 historical drama directed by Josef von Sternberg, with Marlene Dietrich in the title role.  She’s really very good in the part, managing to catch the child-like simplicity of the young princess at one point and the scheming femme fatale at the next.  The movie has a marvellous Gothic cum expressionist quality.  The gargoyle thrones and the skeleton table decoration are really quite something.  The history, though, is as grotesque as the gargoyles, with Peter played as an inanely grinning imbecile by Sam Jaffe.

Peter III was, in truth, a competent and reforming emperor, but he managed to alienate just about everyone of significance in Russia, not just his wife.  With the support of the army and the leading Orthodox clergy, Catherine overthrew her husband in the coup of June 1762, after he had only been on the throne for a few months.  She went on to rule in her own right as Catherine II, while Peter was murdered. 

A black beginning did not presage a black reign; just the contrary.  Catherine was to prove herself the most cultured and civilized ruler ever to sit on the throne of Russia, the friend and correspondent of such luminaries of the Enlightenment as Denis Diderot and Voltaire.  I knew about this.  What I did not know is that she also had reason to be grateful to Charles James Fox, that old Whig bore.  His bust is one of the items on display! 

In the course of her reign, until the onset of the French Revolution introduced a note of caution, Catherine was instrumental in the pursuit of social and economic reform.  She was a great patron of the arts and sciences, encouraging all sorts of new enterprises.   In 1763 she founded Russia’s first College of Medicine.  Russia’s army and navy were hugely expanded, bringing success in war, particularly in successive conflicts with the Ottoman Turks.  Power, majesty and art; it was all a reflection of her glory. 

I loved it all; I spent over two hours in close examination of all sorts of marvellous things, walking in the footsteps of a remarkable woman, Matruschka, a petty German who became a great Russian.  I thought of her and her lovers, particularly of Prince Grigory Potemkin, the great passion of her life, shown here in portrait and sculpture.  

I loved Catherine’s formal paintings, pure expressions of power and majesty. But it was another kind of depiction altogether that wholly beguiled me.  Painted by Vladimir Borovikovsky, it shows Catherine, informally dressed, walking with her dog in the parkland of Tsarskoye Selo, a country gentlewoman, unremarkably remarkable.   The other remarkable painting is that entitled Catherine II in Travelling Costume by Mikhail Shibanov, formally accepted by the Empress though it is unflattering portrait, showing her as an old woman. 

Quite apart from being Russia’s most successful ruler, Catherine was an avid collector of all sorts of objets d’art.  The Edinburgh showcase was but a small cross-section of her collection, antiques and sculpture as well as painting.  And all that sumptuous table ware, porcelain, ceramics, jewels, gold and silver! 

It was such a pleasure also to see some of the court costumes and regimental dresses that the Empress herself wore.  When I was in Moscow I saw the boots that Peter the Great made for himself on display in the Kremlin Armoury Museum.  He was a giant of a man, reflected in his footwear.  Catherine was of more modest stature, reflected in her own costumes.  But as I stood and watched, knowing that she had been there, I still felt myself in the presence of one of history’s giants.  If Russians knew how to read, she once said, they would write me off.  Russians know how to read; they will never write Catherine off.  Such a thing is impossible.  

Satan in Moscow

Ding, dong, bell, Pussy’s in the well, so goes the opening of a traditional English nursery rhyme.  In the modern Russian version Pussy is not in a well but in prison.  She was told by a Moscow judge on Friday that she must remain there, poor beast, until at least January of next year, pending proceedings on a charge of ‘hooliganism.’ 

The Pussy in question is actually three members of Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist punk rock band.  Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Ekaterina Samutsevich, all in their twenties, have been in custody since March, arrested for their part in protests against Vladimir Putin’s re-election to the presidency earlier this year.  It’s a sign that the more things change in Russia the more they remain the same; that free speech is a right more often defined by its absence.

The whole case is tinged with some ludicrous colours, nothing more ludicrous than the offence itself.  They were arrested for performing an impromptu punk prayer in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, beseeching the Virgin to ‘Drive Putin Out.’ 

That’s it; for that they will be held for a total of ten months in detention.  When the case eventually, if ever, goes to trial they could face another seven years if convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”  Bail has been repeatedly denied despite the fact that two of the women have young children.  There have even been calls to deprive them of their parental rights along with their liberty. 

How Stalin, sleeping fitfully under the Kremlin Wall, would marvel at modern Russia.  The Orthodox Church, which he and his comrades subjected to systematic persecution, is once again a power in the land.  The hierarchy, which has close ties to Putin, supports the continuing incarceration of the three women, though the majority of ordinary believers want them to be released.

Boris Akunin, a popular writer of crime fiction, has described the “state’s malice” towards the women as “disgusting.”  It certainly is, but there is more than simple malice here.  The whole process is acquiring Gothic overtones, reminiscent of past prosecutions for witchcraft.  Salem, it might be said, has flown east.

On Thursday, Mikhail Kuznetsov, a lawyer acting for one of the Cathedral guards, accused Pussy Riot of being motivated by the same “Satanic forces” that carried out the 9/11 attacks on America.  The punk band is apparently the "tip of an iceberg of extremists, trying to break down the thousand year edifice of the Russian Orthodox Church by creating a schism, guiding the flock through trickery and cunning not to God, but to Satan. Behind this stands real enemies of our state, and Church."

A heavy indictment indeed, if one believes that opposition to Putin has demonic overtones.  Democracy and free speech would also seem to have a devilish character in modern Russia.  Well, by and large, they always have. Satan is back in Moscow.  Readers of Mikhail Bulgakov will surely love the irony.  

Russia without Putin

In my previous article I said that Russian democracy was a hollow façade, based not on respect for the people but on condescension and contempt. But the Duma elections earlier this month brought a major shift, a bloody nose for the Putin’s United Russia, “a party of crooks and thieves”, a title given to it by Alexi Navalny, a Russian blogger.

The crooks and thieves won but on a greatly reduced majority, with their share of the vote falling to under fifty per cent. This is all the more remarkable because the whole election was rigged, blatantly so. The principle followed here is based on one of Stalin’s maxims, that it is counting rather than voting that matters. But even positive counting and ballot rigging could not stand against an adverse tide; the ballot boxes could not be stuffed fast enough. According to independent monitors, the real figure for United Russia might be as much as fifteen or twenty points lower.

Putin has long been a puzzle to me. He’s a colourless apparatchik, a bureaucrat of little imagination and less charisma, Soviet man at his dullest. But at least he brought stability after the chaos of the Yeltsin years; and for Russians ‘managed democracy’ was far more tolerable than drunken anarchy. Managed democracy and stability is one thing; cronyism, corruption and stagnation quite another.

In my previous piece I said that Russia’s democratic institutions were a joke, that elections were no more real than they were in Soviet days. I now have to amend this view. Russia has spoken with a different voice. Politically speaking the country may be a little like the dull-witted giant of fairy tales, but even giants can be prodded too far.

Putin may long for the Brezhnev years (the former leader is promoted as a positive figure by his government) but things have changed. The present is a foreign country; we do things differently here. We do things differently in the age of instant communication, the age of the internet, the age of Twitter and Facebook. In Russia’s former days heterodox opinions circulated around a small number of people in printed samizdat. Now communication takes the form of an electronic hydra; cut off one dissenting view and dozens more appear. People had enough of United Russia.

The election was never going to bring real democracy; it’s open to question if the Russians even want such a thing, tainted as it is with past miseries, but it acted as a popular referendum on the party of Putin and the way things are being managed in Russia.

Putin has been highly effective in the past, promoting himself as a patriot and re-establishing national self-respect after the nadir of Yeltsin, but he has allowed the weed of corruption to grow to the point were it is a serious danger to Russia’s economic well-being and his own political future.

Russia is a gas giant. It depends on its natural resources. Its prosperity is tied into the price of energy. But so much of the national wealth is being siphoned off in shady deals that the budget will not balance if the price of oil does not remain high, which is unlikely given the world’s present economic woes. With foreign investors already being frightened away by graft, intimidation and a weak system of contract law, guarantees which guarantee nothing, the Potemkin mirage is already beginning to break up.

We’ve been here before, this predictable cycle of Russian history, where unresponsive and sclerotic governments buckle under tectonic pressures, Tsarist days and Soviet days, it’s all much the same. Putin is not yet ready to go the same ways as Nicholas II or Mikhail Gorbachev, but he has received a warning. If I can put the point another way, the Duma elections is his 1905, not his 1917 or his 1991.

He is likely to survive, at least for the present; he his likely to dump United Russia, too horribly tainted as a political vehicle, he is more than likely, given the system, to win the coming presidential election. But the system he stands atop of, the bureaucratic hydra based on a monopoly of power and wealth, a parasitic state, looks vulnerable.

December 2011 may be dress rehearsal for something bigger. “Russia without Putin”, demonstrators shouted on the streets of Moscow after the results were announced, before they were dispersed by the army. It may yet be.

Prince Putin’s Façade

This is another article I wrote for Broowaha under the heading Putin’s Potemkin Democracy (subsequently stolen by a Russian English-language publication!). It was clearly written before the recent Duma elections and I intend to follow it up tomorrow with a fresh assessment of the new political realities in Russia in the light of the drubbing of United Russia, Putin’s party, at the polls.

A Potemkin village, if you’ve never heard of the expression, is one of the enduring myths of Russian history. The reference is to fake settlements, hollow façades supposedly set up on the orders of Prince Grigory Potemkin, chief minister of Catherine the Great, to impress the Empress when she toured the Crimea in the late 1780s, territory recently conquered from the Ottoman Turks. It was simply a way of increasing his political prestige.

I say it’s a myth but in Russia myths have a habit of fleshing out into a reality, which really is nothing more than a myth! In the 1930s various western intellectuals, a group more easily fooled than most, toured the USSR, there to be shown rich settlements, model factories, happy rustics and beaming workers, the whole thing a shabby lie hiding an ugly truth.

Now Russian democracy itself is turning into a kind of Potemkin illusion, an empty shell around an authoritarian core. I suppose I should be generous and say that some honesty has entered the system, that the illusion has been partially lifted. Dmitry Medvedev has been exposed for what he always was – a Potemkin President. He’s been there, sitting in the Kremlin, keeping the seat warm for Vladimir Putin, the once and future king.

Like the mummy, Putin, the present prime minister, is set to return, in deal worked out with his manqué some years ago; set to return, incidentally, after a ‘free and fair’ election to be held in March of next year. Yes, that’s the way they do things in the brave new Russia – the result is known in advance!

There is a kind of massive joke here, all at the expense of the people of Russia. They now know with a certainty that their democratic institutions are a joke, that elections are no more real than they were in Soviet days, that Medvedev was no more than a placeman, not at all the liberal reformer that many had supposed, a placeman that fifty million people were fooled into voting for in 2008.

It’s really the nature of the Russian state that’s at fault here, a state that has never come to terms with its past, a Model-T state, where you can have whatever colour you like as long as it’s black; you can have any president you like as long as its Putin. This is the state, as I pointed out in a review of Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and his Henchmen, that is effectively run by the apparatchiks of the FSB, the Federal Security Service, the colourless Putin its most typical example. Just imagine the FBI announcing the result of the American presidential election a year in advance! Yes, that’s Russia.

Vasily Grossman, a writer of unique and biting genius, wrote that Russians have a ‘slave soul’, that they are wedded by history to a long tradition of servitude. We really have to ask how much has changed since the days of Stalin. Yes, the terror has gone, the coercion less obvious, but the moral corruption is still in place, they still have a polity “unrestricted by law and based on force”, the definition Stalin gave of the dictatorship of the proletariat in The Foundations of Leninism. They have political system where a prime minister is inside a president is inside a prime minister, like a nest of Russian dolls.

Serfs they are, serfs they will remain, giving Putin a 50% approval rating, seemingly unaware that they are being treated with contempt, that the Kremlin justifies its actions by describing its own people as ‘mindless.’ There they are, a people without a civil society, without a mature tradition of law, abused and taken for granted by their political masters, like cattle.

Meanwhile the Potemkin democracy gets hollower by the day, creating clowns and clones, as a report in the Economist said, to keep up a pretence of democratic choice. Why bother, what’s the point, who’s being fooled? But this is a country much given to illusions, even when they serve no purpose at all. Myth simply becomes reality and then myth again, in and endless and pointless pavane, a dance with a meaningless destiny.

Putin’s Potemkin Democracy

Lieutenant Kijé is a soldier who never was. He was born by sleight of bureaucracy and he died by sleight of bureaucracy. The anecdote dates back to the late eighteenth century, to the time of Tsar Paul of Russia. First published in the 1870s, it tells of man, originally named, Kizh, created by a misprint on a list of officers. Paul sees the name and promotes him from second to first lieutenant.

Having come to the attention of the Tsar, nobody dare admit that there is no such person as Lieutenant Kizh. Bit by bit he is promoted, until he becomes a full colonel. At such an elevated rank the Tsar now demands to see him, only to be told that he is dead by the nervous officials. “What a pity”, he says, “he was such a good officer.”

This splendid little satire on the stupidity of bureaucracy and the blindness of autocracy was turned into a novella by Yury Tynyanov, a Soviet author, in 1927, with Kizh now as Kijé. Still later it was made into a film with a marvellous score by Sergei Prokofiev.

In so many ways it’s the perfect parable, illustrating the absurdity that has long formed part of Russian history, where openness and freedom are constantly imperilled by servility in the face power, the power of the state and the power of the ruler. It immediately came to mind when I read about the six month travel ban imposed on Boris Nemtsov, formerly deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and a leading critic of Vladimir Putin, the increasingly autocratic prime minister.

What was Nemtsov’s offence? Oh, it was terribly serious. Last year he published a pamphlet drawing attention to Putin’s relationship with Gennady Timchenko, a billionaire energy trader. Following legal instructions, a correction was printed by a newspaper in March. It was too short, the judges said, and because the author was determined not to have co-operated fully with the court a travel ban was imposed. The connection and the logic here is quite beyond me.

It’s laughable in its absurdity, an indication that Russia has moved full-circle back to Soviet days, when such devices were regularly imposed on those critical of the regime. It’s also an open admission that Russian law is an ass, Putin’s ass. In general the treatment of Nemtsov provides evidence of the premier’s increasing paranoia in the run up to next year’s presidential election.

Official intolerance against any form of opposition grows by the day in Putin’s Potemkin democracy. The reference here, of course, is to the artificial settlements allegedly put up by Prince Grigory Potemkin, chief minister to Catherine the Great, to impress the empress on the value of the new conquests he had made in the Crimea, an illusion, hollow and unreal.

Recently the Justice Ministry refused to register the People’s Freedom Party, co-headed by Nemtsov, preventing him fielding candidates for the parliamentary election scheduled for December. No such ban was placed on the pro-Kremlin Right Cause party which registered at the same time. This selectivity comes despite President Medvedev’s promise to encourage greater political competition. But Medvedev seems himself to be little more than a Potemkin head of state, keeping the place warm for Putin.

Competition and openness, any kind of freedom really, have always been problematic when set against the kind of court politics that have changed so little from the days of Paul to those of Putin. It’s all cronyism and intrigue set against an obsequious and fawning officialdom, falling over itself to carry out the will of the throne. Russia may have a modern face but it is little more than a mask, behind which little has changed.

Beer and squirrels

I always keep a look out for the more unusual news items and one of the most unusual came recently from Russia. Beer, it seems, is to be classified as alcohol. Beer is to be classified as alcohol?! What was it before: apple juice, perhaps? No, it was food. Seriously, Russians quaffing a glass or several were just having a jolly good meal!

This comes as part of the Kremlin’s latest anti-alcohol campaign, the toughest since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russians have long had a serious problem here. In communist days a combination of cheap vodka and personal despair over the frustrations of life in the Soviet paradise led to a huge upsurge in alcoholism. The last serious attempt to tackle the issue was in the time of Gorbachev, an anti-alcohol drive that caused the last of the communist puritans to be nicknamed Lemonade Joe.

Now the special status of beer is to be ended, a special status that has given many Russians the impression that it’s actually a soft drink - apple juice with attitude! Actually, they may not be quite alone here. I remember reading that F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American writer, in battling with his own alcoholism gave up spirits in favour of beer, consuming the latter by the crate load! But when Russian teenagers can be seen during school intervals downing a can or two in the local park something really has to be done.

President Dmitry Medvedev recently declared that Russia’s drinking problem was a “national disaster.” There is really nothing new here; it always was a national disaster in a country where people are estimated to consume thirty-two pints of pure alcohol per capita per year, more than double the World Health Organisation’s recommended limit, and where some 500,000 die annually form alcohol-related diseases.

But there is an added dimension, an added worry; for Russia is dying, the Russian people are dying. Between 1991 and 2009 the population of ethnic Slavs fell by over six million. Federal estimates suggest that it could fall by a further fifteen million between now and 2031.

So something has to be done, but what? The reclassification of beer is one solution; the other is to warn Russians of the adverse effects of overconsumption, no matter that they have resisted the message in the past. They didn’t respond to the lectures of Lemonade Joe. Perhaps a squirrel might serve better. A squirrel?! Yes, that’s right, a drunken squirrel, which made its way into the television screens last December.

I’m not quite sure if it’s managing to achieve the ends the Kremlin intends, but the said squirrel has acquired a huge cult following across the world, now with well over three million hits on YouTube, my own included! I don’t speak Russian but I’ve been told that he’s ranting on about chasing spiders up the wall and offering to kill his neighbour’s wife because she is the devil.

The mad squirrel was not chosen by chance. The Russian slang word for delirium tremens, that condition of deep alcoholism where people start to hallucinate, is belochka, meaning little squirrel. It’s now to be seen if Little Squirrel is any more effective than Lemonade Joe, who was mad for other reasons altogether. God save Russia, because Russia may not be capable of saving itself.

Vladimir’s Vest

“Flash, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the earth.” These immortal words by Dale Arden came immediately to mind in reading a report in the Times on Friday about Obama’s stalled nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. He has only three days – that was three days ago! – to persuade a single recalcitrant Republican senator to agree the plan. And if he does not, well, Premier Putin is rattling his nuclear sabre, saying in ominous terms that Russia will be obliged to “ensure its security by different means.”

Poor little Vladimir, always so keen to appear tough, even so far as being photographed in his vest, a rather absurd Slavic Rambo! Well, when I say poor I don’t really mean that he is poor, at least not in financial terms. At the head of his FSB (a new bottle for the old KGB wine) secret state, he has, so it is said, amassed billions of dollars in personal wealth, a modern example of the excessive greed that Bastiat warned of in The Law. This has come out in WikiLeaks but it’s nothing new; as long ago as 2007 Stanislav Belkovsky, a Russian political analyst, alleged that Putin was the richest man in Europe, his fortune acquired by shady energy deals, not stopping short of outright extortion and expropriation.

There really was not much in the way of virtue in the Soviet Union, but the corruption of the old Kremlin is nothing compared with that of the new. It would be interesting to know exactly by what process handbag FIFA, another corrupt organisation, awarded the 2018 World Cup to Russia, a virtual mafia state. That’s not my view, I should add, it’s the view of the State Department, revealed in leaked cables. I really had to say that just in case some plutonium assassin is preparing to make yet another journey to England.

Sorry, I just can’t help myself: I have to say a word or two more about that vest! There he is, the Russian Rambo. This sort of thing must go down well in the East. After all, they don’t do humour or satire there, or, if they do, they end up dead. Look at him, a man in his late fifties displaying himself dressed down in such a low class fashion. Just imagine if, say, Barack Obama or David Cameron disported themselves like this. The response would be waves of uncontrollable laughter, the sort of thing that greeted ‘that picture’ of Andrew Neil. But Russia is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

There was a time, though, when politicians, all politicians, were expected to dress in a sober fashion, to behave always with dignity. Friedrich Ebert, the first president of the Weimar Republic, was unwise enough to allow himself to be photographed in a swimming costume, one of those old-fashioned affairs that covered the upper body as well as the lower. Ever after he was greeted by right-wing opponents of the regime waving these costumes on flagpoles. So, if you don’t like Putin you know what to do: wave a vest on a flagpole! Yes, you could, but only if you really want to see some of the more obscure parts of the Lubyanka. :-)

Delusions of Empire

In the wake of the 2008 war with Georgia, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, made mention of his country's “zone of privileged interest”, which I take to mean that the Russians still maintain, or pretend to maintain, a watching brief over the constituent republics of the old Soviet Union. It was a warning, in other words, to NATO and the West to maintain a respectful distance.

But events earlier this year in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan have made this neo-imperialism sound ever so hollow. The ethnic clashes in the latter and the failure of Russia to send a peace-keeping force, requested by the Kyrgyz government, is arguably the greatest demonstration of the limits of both power and ambition. After all, here is a country that is still not freed itself from the wars in Chechnya, or lost sight of its disastrous involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The official line from Moscow was that it could not interfere in Kyrgyzstan’s internal affairs, a curious contrast with the previous intervention in Georgia.

If anything the growing divisions with Belarus are an even greater blow to Russian esteem and pan-Slav ambitions. Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the president of Russia’s western neighbour and the closest Europe now has to an old-style dictator, is proving to be particularly bloody-minded in his determination not to fall under the servitude of Moscow. There have been disputes over the price of gas. Lukashenka, moreover, is even more awkward over sensitive issues of Russian political prestige. He has refused to recognise the independence of South Ossetia or Abkhazia, the two breakaway Georgian territories that served as a cause for the 2008 war. He also gave refuge to Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the former president of Kyrgyzstan, a figure much despised in Moscow.

The fact is, despite the power it derives from reserves of gas and oil, Russia is weak both politically and militarily, something that Lukashenka clearly understands. Quite apart from fears of being trapped in another swamp, the unwillingness to intervene in the Kyrgyz situation is an indication that the army is simply not equipped for a prolonged peace-keeping mission. The Russian ‘sphere of influence’ is clearly little more than a geo-political dream, pretence at a power that has vanished and vanished for good.

The winter of bureaucrats

History moves in mysterious ways its wonders to perform; it always has. It’s like the tension between tectonic plates: for prolonged periods, for generations even, little seems to be happening on the surface, at least anything of any significance, until the underlying pressures can no longer be contained, with earth-shattering consequences.

The revolution of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the revolution which brought the end of communism across the whole of the old Soviet block was an event of unparalleled significance, I have little doubt the most important historical event in the lives of most who may come across this blog. It was as significant in its own way as the European revolutions of 1848, as significant…and as disappointing.

The fall of communism offered the prospect of a new birth of freedom, as well as an opportunity for a new and better understanding of Russia, emerging from decades of sclerotic bureaucratic tyranny. But the springtime of peoples was smothered in a new blanket of bureaucratic tyranny, softer but no less invidious, in the onward advance of the European Union, not anti-democratic, just post-democratic. It’s the one-dimensional Europe of the one-dimensional man, something anticipated long ago in the thinking of Herbert Marcuse.

Not only this but also the opportunity for a better understanding with Russia was squandered by a process of gung-ho pseudo-imperialism which saw Western expansion into Eastern Europe. It saw the support of various ‘coloured’ revolutions which had the effect of belittling and humiliating one of the most important nations in Europe, deliberately so, it seems to me. The consequences of this could be clearly seen in the conflict between Russia and Georgia, a piece of adventurism on the part of the latter, encouraged by the irresponsibility and ignorance of the European Union and NATO. If the Putin state is a Frankenstein monster, something I have little doubt over, it is our Frankenstein monster.

These thoughts were brought in reading a first class feature article in the Mail on Sunday by Peter Hitchens, who reports from Sebastopol (The world’s most absurd city.) Sebastopol is part of the republic of Ukraine, though its inhabitants, like most of the inhabitants of the Crimean Peninsula on which it stands, are of Russian ethnic origin.

The thing that Hitchens neglects to mention is that although the Crimea is geographically part of the Ukraine it was politically part of Russia, at least until it was ‘gifted’ away by Khrushchev and the then leadership of the Soviet Union in 1954. Hence the absurd situation where few in Sebastopol, the main city, speak any Ukrainian, though they are obliged to have street sign in Ukrainian, just as the schools are obliged to teach Ukrainian history, which has been given a distinctly anti-Russian slant. The whole thing is bizarrely absurd, a potential source of future trouble, all the more worrying because Sebastopol continues to be an important base for the Russian as well as the Ukrainian navies.

Hitchens makes reference to the ‘New Cold War’ in which Russia was cast as the enemy, a war in which ‘we’, the European Union, were going to extend ‘our’ rule deep into former Soviet lands;

Well, if there was such a war, we are losing it because ‘our’ side is misguided and wrong, and because it was always absurd to try to dislodge Russia from the great plains of the Ukraine and the shores of the Black Sea. In this part of the world Russia just is. You might as well try and shift the Himalayas with a bulldozer.

I completely agree with his assessment that our treatment of Russia since the fall of communism has been unbelievably stupid and crude. It was this stupidity that created Putin, Hitchens continues, and his shady, corrupt state. Russia was never a threat to our freedom. While we watched the bear dance liberty here and across the rest of the Continent was being eroded by the ghastly apparatchiks in Brussels in their relentless pursuit of uniformity where there is only difference. The promise of 1989 has been betrayed. The springtime of peoples has turned into the winter of bureaucrats.

A story about a lie

Katyn is a movie not so much about the infamous wartime massacre of Polish officers by the NKVD, the Russian security service, as about a lie. It's about the 'little lie' that it was the Nazis and not the Soviets who were responsible for the crime, and it's about the 'big lie' that forced Poland and the Poles to deny the truth -or face the consequences - behind the event for decades after the war in the name of 'communist solidarity.'

Directed by Andrzej Wajda, one of the great figures of post-war Polish cinema, Katyn was premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007. So far as I am aware it has never been screened in this country. I only found out about it recently from an advert in the press, immediately sending away for the DVD on Amazon.

Now I've seen it and I'm so glad I've seen it. It's not an easy movie to watch for various reasons. There are too many themes, too much ambition of scope, which makes it somewhat plodding and incoherent at points. But it is no less powerful for this criticism. It's uncompromisingly Polish, in that the message it carries is clearly intended for a domestic rather than an international audience, no bad thing in my estimation.

Take but one small example. It's 1939; Poland is conquered, savaged from the west by the Germans and betrayed from the east by the Soviets; refugees flee from the west only to be turned back by refugees fleeing from the east. In their zone of occupation, one of the bones allotted to the Soviet dog by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Russians have rounded up thousands of officers, taking them away to an uncertain fate. A large group are shown held temporarily in a ruined monastery. Their commander addresses them in solemn terms. It is their duty to survive, he says - "Gentlemen, you must endure. Without you, there will be no free Poland."

Just consider the significance of this, the dual significance. These men did not survive; there was no free Poland, not for fifty years after the end of the war, which across the whole of Eastern Europe simply substituted one tyranny for another. No Pole would fail to recognise the symbolism here.

I thought the depiction of the actual crime, carried out in the spring of 1940 on the orders of Stalin, would be the central event of the movie. Wajda's far too clever for that: it comes right at the end for good reason. For, as I said at the outset, the movie is really about a lie and the truth only appears when falsehood is finally swept away.

Instead the action, both during and after the war, focuses in large part on those left behind; on the mothers, wives, children, sisters of those who have disappeared, people who, firstly, want to know where their sons, husbands, fathers and brothers are, and secondly, want to know the facts behind an unravelling tragedy, a truth partially told, more deeply obscured by a lie, one perpetuating the pain.

There continues to be a lot of anger in Poland, possibly less now over the massacre itself as the subsequent official line given out by the Soviet and Polish governments in the days of communist control. But Wajda, whose own father was among the victims, has resisted any temptation to make an anti-Russian diatribe.

The site of the massacre in Katyn Wood near Smolensk was discovered by the Germans in 1943, who immediately tried to use it for the ends of their own propaganda. Their 'sympathy' with these victims of communism stands in sickening contrast to their own conduct in Poland, which the director alludes to in his depiction of the 1939 Sonderaktion in Krakow, when the teaching staff of Jagellonian University were shipped off to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, there to be murdered. This was the Nazi Katyn, part of a wider attempt to exterminate the Polish elite.

The wife of one of the senior officers killed at Katyn has his medal returned to her by the Germans, with official expressions of sympathy from Hitler. She is then asked to take part in a propaganda broadcast, refusing to do so, recognising the ugly cynicism at work.

No sooner did the facts of the tragedy emerge than the Soviet denials began: they were not responsible; it was the Germans. This was the position they continued to maintain even so far as the Nuremberg Trials - where it was shamefully supported by the British government - and for decades after, until the full truth was finally admitted in the 1990s.

Part of the movie is concerned with the Poles who were forced to live in the shadow of a lie, including Agnieszka, played by Magdalena Cielecka, who, in the manner of Antigone, is obsessed with paying proper rites to her dead brother, with her attempts to erect a marble headstone in his memory bearing the true date of his death - April, 1940. A time, in other words, when only Poland's 'fraternal' ally could be blamed.

Katyn was the Calvary of modern Poland. Salvation was only found, as ever, in resurrection, in the resurrection of truth. This is a bold, uncompromising movie, an excellent depiction of a great tragedy. It's a victory over the lies, little and big, a great tribute to the director's father and all the other ghosts of Katyn, hopefully now at peace.

Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła,
Kiedy my żyjemy.
Co nam obca przemoc wzięła,
Szablą odbierzemy.

Magic Moments

I mentioned the other day that I had just finished Molotov’s Magic Lantern – a Journey in Russian History by Rachel Polonsky. This is one of the books that Orlando Figes, another specialist in Russian history, tried to cheapen by an Amazon review, written supposedly by his wife, while talking up his own work. The whole affair was really quite sad because he is a decent historian, one whose work stands on its own merits, one who did not need to attempt assassination by review. Being a decent historian, sadly, is no guarantee against being a foolish human being.

Molotov’s Magic Lantern is a superb piece of work, idiosyncratic, playful and learned. It reminds me in some ways of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in that it is also part travelogue, part history and party intellectual exploration, though Polonsky is far less intense than West.

Her quest, yes, it’s also a kind of quest, begins from an apartment block in Romanov Lane in Moscow, centred in an elite district, the home of important officials in both Tsarist and Soviet times. There she found herself staying beneath the apartment once occupied by none other than Vyacheslav Molotov, once Stalin’s foreign minister and collaborator in the great tragedy that overtook Russia in the 1930s. After he had been expelled from the party during the days of de-Stalinisation his wife made a personal appeal to Khrushchev for his readmission. In response he took her to the state archives, there showing her the numerous execution lists her husband had signed.

But the paradox, the great paradox of the twentieth century, is that Molotov was no brute, as Polonsky discovered after she was allowed to explore his empty apartment. There she found not just his magic lantern but the remains of his library. She discovered that the monster was a bibliophile with a particular love of Chekhov. A lot of the books in the collection had been annotated by him in person. This is the heart of the paradox- humane, erudite and, yes, even loving people, people like Molotov, can be dehumanised by an almost total failure of the imagination, an inability to empathise with real people, people beyond the pages of books; dehumanised in the name of a human idea.

Having thrown a stone into the pond Polonsky follows the rings out across Russia; from Taganrog in the south, where Chekhov was born, through Novgorod the Great in the west, to Murmansk in the north, all the way east to Lake Baikal in Siberia. She moves outwards and inwards at the same time, exploring the history of a people and its culture through places.

The book is far from exhaustive and it is by no means a history of Russia in the most complete sense. Still less is it a biography of Molotov, who is at best of incidental importance. It’s her journey, and where she stops, in both place and time, is largely determined by personal reasons. Though she takes nothing for granted it helps, at least I believe so, if one has a little background knowledge. It’s not absolutely necessary; it just makes a reading a little bit richer.

Molotov’s Magic Lantern is a clever, bold and imaginative book with just a soupcon of whimsy, a celebration of greatness and a lament for a tragedy, so much a part of the epic that is Russia.

The Third Rome

In her Molotov’s Magic Lantern – A Journey in Russian History Rachael Polonsky describes coming across what she describes as a ‘creepy’ book in the Lenin Library in Moscow. It’s called The Formation of the Russian Character on the Example of the Historical Fate of the Staraya Russa Region, published in 2003.

In this she discovered that Staraya Russa, the setting, fictionally disguised, for Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and the place were he completed Demons, is being used to cultivate a mystique, to serve what she describes as “Russia’s new era of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality.” This quiet backwater, the very heart of the old Orthodox Rus, has become the heartland of a kind Slav version of a blut und boden mythology.

The book was published under the auspices of the FSB, the successor to the old KGB, the security apparatus from which Vladimir Putin emerged. It comes with the approval of all sorts of people, soldiers and security specialists, detailing, as it does, the primal superiority of Russia, her God-bearing mission, all proved by the presence of salt in the soil of Staraya Russa, the ancient homeland of the Rus, who are the "salt of the earth."

The book, according to Polonsky, is full of all sorts of bogus claims backed up by ‘scholarship’ of the most tendentious kind. Putin is mentioned every few pages, his name invoked in ever more reverential tones. The hagiography also draws on a spurious etymology, even associating the root of the name Putin with Christ himself!

There is something odd happening in Russia, a kind of regression, if I can put it like that, though into what I have no clear idea. All I can see is the outline of some peculiar hybrid, uniting elements that are uniquely Russian, even if they are as contradictory as Stalin and Dostoevsky, paganism and orthodoxy.

Russia is clearly attempting to ‘rediscover’ itself, a rediscovery that appears to be based on some highly dubious ideological foundations. It’s perhaps not too outrageous to suggest that there may even be a place for the Black Hundreds, the notorious anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalist movement of Tsarist days, in this witches' cauldron.

I admire Russia; I admire its history and its culture. It’s also true that every country relies on myth to some degree or other in upholding the idea of nation. But the country seems to be heading in a somewhat perverse direction, evidenced by the current prosecution for blasphemy of the organisers of an exhibition of modern art, headed by Yuri Samodurov, accused by a group of militant religious radicals who claim to be backed by the Orthodox Church. What they most certainly have is the support of the state prosecution service, which has agreed that the Sakharov Museum, where the exhibition was held, is guilty of “anti-state” and “anti-Orthodox” activity, an unusual return to a distant past.

Ana in Moscow

I spent Christmas in Moscow five years ago, the winter of my twentieth year. We only had few days in the city, a brief time to discover something of its secrets and its Byzantine charm. I do, I confess, have an exaggerated sense of romance and what a place to indulge this, the snow lying on the towers of the Kremlin and the domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral!

We stayed in the National Hotel, not too far from Red Square in central Moscow. Arriving late the day before Christmas Eve we decided to dine in the hotel restaurant rather than go out. On the passageway leading towards the entrance one has to run a gauntlet, rows of photographs of former residents and guests. I could not recognise them all but those I did were enough to induce a slight shiver. Lenin had been, as had Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Cheka, the forerunner of all agencies of the Soviet Secret police. I expect Trotsky stayed there also at one time, though I could see no portrait; for the National Hotel had been the temporary headquarters of the Bolshevik Party after the capital was moved from Petrograd in 1918.

On Christmas Eve we went to the Bolshoi, one of my long-time ambitions, having bought tickets in advance on the net for a performance of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Unfortunately the big theatre was closed at the time for repairs. The little theatre was impressive enough in its own right, so the big theatre must be truly splendid. The programme notes came with the chilling denunciation of the opera originally published in Pravda in 1936, and thought to be by Stalin himself, who ostentatiously walked out of a performance. The composer survived, but only after prostrating himself in the most abject way.

On Christmas Day – not a holiday in Orthodox Russia –we were taken on a personal tour of the Kremlin, discovering some of its hidden treasures, including the beautiful little churches where Ivan the Terrible once worshiped. There was a choir when we went in, beautiful singing that gave the place added atmosphere.

Elsewhere in the complex there was so much to see: the Faberge eggs given to the family of the last Tsar; the Severe Tea-set given by Napoleon to Alexander I after the Treaty of Tilsit. And then there were the boots that Peter the Great made for himself. Oh, what a giant of a man!

There is so much more I could tell, so much more we saw. And, yes, I did go and see Lenin on Red Square, though I’m not convinced that he is real. Still, if he is, he deserves no better fate, to be gawped at by the idle and the curious, forever denied the refuge and protection of the soil of Holy Russia.

Бог Благословляет Святую Россию

I spent a wonderful Christmas in Moscow three years ago, going to the Bolshoi amongst other things. I have friends in the city, people I know from university. It’s a beautiful, wonderful, magical and tragic place, a mighty heart in the great body of Russia.

Russian history and culture fascinates me; it has for a long time, perhaps more than any other in the world, excepting that of England. I count Dostoevsky along with Dickens as my favourite author. I also love Russian painting, music and folklore.

The recent outrage in Moscow in the metro draws from me a greater affinity and solidarity than ever. I pass no comment on the people responsible for this pointless and murderous gesture; they are beyond all comment.

Because of my name people sometimes ask if I am Russian. Well, today I am. God bless Holy Russia.

Spirits of the Water

I’ve been dipping heavily into Russian folk tales recently, having received a copy of A, N Afanas’ev’s classic collection at Christmas. Some of the stuff I already knew, the tales of the wonderful Baba Yaga, among them, but I’m making fresh discoveries. Amongst these is the Rusalka, the intriguing Russian nature spirits.

Rusalka, exclusively female, are associated with water, fields and forests. Often gathering in groups, they can be young and beautiful or old and scary, but never feeble. If the come as crones they also come with considerable power. They also have shape-shifting abilities.

Coming from the same roots as Rus and Russia, they are sometimes classified as primal Russian or totemic spirits, fertility spirits. Another suggestion is that they are the souls of women who have drowned, by accident or by design, again recalling older practices of human sacrifice. With the advent of Christianity a new explanation was offered: that they were the souls of women and girls who died anabaptised, clearly intended to frighten people into the bowers of the church. Quite frankly, I’m far more attracted to the notion of an eternity as a spirit of water than a soul in the Christian heaven…or hell. :-)

Because of their shape-shifting descriptions of their appearance naturally vary quite widely. Sometimes they are described as beautiful, wild-haired and big-breasted women, always appearing naked, occasionally with poppies in their hair. Other descriptions have them as bloated, pale and ugly like drowned corpses. Here a scene in The Shining movie comes to mind, that where the young woman emerging from the bath turns into a decayed hag!

Rusalka were venerated for centuries as benevolent spirits, but they can also be dangerous. They sometimes live in rye fields as attendants of the Corn Mother, Baba Yaga, acting as guardians of the crop. In the Ukraine they perch on birch trees like birds, where they sit grooming themselves in the spring and weaving linen garments. In other legends they live in underwater palaces in the winter, coming to the surface and the trees in the warmer weather.

Getting bored of the quiet forest life, the Rusalka are said to seduce and kill mortal men. Whether this is a trace of distant human sacrifice or Christian defamation is now impossible to say. They were also said to have come down from the trees at might to perform a circle dance by the light of the moon. Those unfortunate to come across this spectacle are promptly drowned, water being the weapon as well as the home of the Rusalka. So, water is death, but it is also life; their water, taken from secret wells in the forest, was considered to have the power of healing.

Baba Yaga

I’ve been reading mythologies, fairytales and folklore since I was about six years old. I began with Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths in a version especially edited for children. I fell in love with the quarrelsome and all too human Greek Pantheon, from Zeus to Artemis, reading everything I could find. By the time I was eight I had graduated on to Homer!

These explorations stimulated my appetite for new sources of inspiration, new and different tales. I exhausted every library I could find, every anthology that was available, and I do not exaggerate! Oh, how I loved them all, the tales collected by the Grimm Brothers in Germany and Asbjørnsen and Moe in Norway, as well as Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books. But the folk tradition that made the greatest impact on me was that of the Slav people, especially the Russians. And the one character in Russian tradition that both delighted and terrified me was Baba Yaga, the great witch herself, the greatest of all the witches.

Baba Yaga epitomises all of the ambiguity of witchcraft, of nature itself, perhaps, malevolent and benevolent by turns. She is for me the most perfect symbol of witchcraft, the most perfect avatar, standing in total contradiction to Wicca, that crypto-hippie cult. She is scary, yes, but she is also grand; she can be terrifically wicked but she can also be just and solicitous.

In Russian tradition Baba Yaga, though the ultimate boogie-woman, represents something more than witchcraft; she is also a residue from pre-Christian days, perhaps the Corn Mother herself, banished to the woods by the missionaries of the new faith. But there she stayed and never went away.

As an underworld goddess controlling life and death, Baba Yaga was the last hope for the infertile. She could also perform miracle cures. But approaching her carried considerable dangers; for she was just as likely to curse as to cure. Yes, she knows all of the secrets of nature, all of the sources of botanical healing. Knowing is one thing; revealing is quite another.

So, Baba Yaga is the Mistress of all Witches, the Primal Mother, nurturing and destructive. But unlike more traditional goddesses or semi-divine figures she was not at all remote, living, rather, deep in the forests of old Russia in a cottage named Izbusha, which stands by tradition on chicken legs. This cottage will move at Baba’s command; Izbushka, Izbushka! Stand with your back to the forest and your front to me.

Izbushka is a fearsome looking place, made of bones collected by Baba Yaga herself. Leg bones form the doorstep; a mouth with teeth serves as the lock; the fence is formed from bones toped by skulls. If one approaches at night the first thing to be seen is light glowing from the eye-sockets. Inside there is a large oven which symbolises the cycles of life, from birth to death.

If the house is fearsome the great witch is even more so. She has iron teeth protruding like the tusks of a boar. Her hands are tipped with claws and she wears a necklace of skulls. She comes through the air not on a broomstick but in a huge mortar which she steers with a pestle, sweeping away her traces as she moves.

It’s while seated in her mortar that she grinds out life and death, just like a Corn Mother. Her flight recalls that of the Goddess Diana on the wild hunt, except her companions are not women but by crows, ravens and owls. Again, according to some sources, she is also like Diana in that she represents the moon. In this form she eats her own body in a cannibal feast and then regenerates, regulating the fertility of women and of the earth.

The moon, the waxing and the waning of the moon, also gives an indication when it is safe to approach her and when it is not. When it is full her door is open, as the witch is replete, happy and pregnant. But when it wanes her womb and belly are empty. Those who approach then are likely to end as her next meal. :-)

Always approach the witch with caution and reverence; always approach with care and understanding. Or else!

Living in the Past; the Illusions of Vladimir Putin

Russia is a proud country with a proud-and tragic past. It is also a country deeply uncertain of itself, uncertain of its future, uncertain exactly where it wants to go. At the moment, under the guidance of Vladimir Putin in the office of Prime Minister, it is drawing continually on historical capital to bolster its self-image, to overcome a deeply rooted sense of inferiority. And some of that capital is not particularly attractive. Stalin, once again, is a great leader, and authoritarianism, not democracy, the prevailing political fashion.

There is also a growing trend in political advertising, that if you say something loud and often enough it might very well be true. One billboard put up recently, depicting a frigate on the ocean, carries the message “Russia is a great superpower.” All of this, these forms of historical and political assertiveness, is, in fact, a symptom of a deeper malaise. For, you see, Russia is dying, literally, not metaphorically.

Yes, I know that this is a bold and alarming statement, one that really requires some substantive support. I’ve been reading a piece by Ben Judah in the latest issue of Prospect (Putin’s empire strikes out), in which he lays out some alarming facts. Russian GDP, for example, slumped by 10.3% in the last quarter, and is now lower than that of Brazil. Life expectancy is lower than that of Pakistan. The average Russian male, moreover, dies at the age of fifty-nine, significantly younger than that of China. The overall population is now lower than that of Bangladesh, with terminations now outnumbering live births. This confirms the projections made two years ago by the UN that by 2050 the Russian population could fall by a third. The decline of the ethnic Russians stands in sharp contrast to the rise in the Muslim population. In panicked reaction to this the Orthodox Church has said that Muslims may outnumber Christians before the end of the century.

The ‘greatness’ of Russia, the mantra of Putin, is based not just on a withdrawal of past capital; there is also a mortgage on the economic future. The swell in Russian power over the last few years has been shaped not by any deep economic strength but by the continuing exploitation of oil and gas reserves. The resources accumulated have been channelled into the ‘Putin Plan', a form of economic neo-Stalinism, vast projects with little in the way of practical results. According to Nikolai Petrov, a former government advisor, the state only has enough money to continue like this for another twenty months at the outside without reforms.

What Russia needs above all is open and rational debate on all of the problems it faces, a debate that will allow finite resources to be directed with greater efficiency, not frittered away on an empty imperial project, one governed by the illusions of the past. But under the Putin system of ‘managed democracy’ open debate is a highly unlikely prospect. So, caught, in the net of his own self-deceptions, he is likely to take the country into ever faster cycles of decay.

It gives me no pleasure to write this because in a way I quite admire Vladimir Putin. He deserves every credit for lifting Russia from the chaos of the Yeltsin years, giving it a new sense of itself, a new sense of its place in the world, a reminder of its place in history. But what was once the solution is now the problem. I wrote in a previous blog that the new ‘Time of Troubles', paralleling the crisis of the early seventeenth century, might not yet have ended. It’s obvious to me now that Vladimir Putin is not Michael Romanov.