This fascism kills fascists.

Speaking today from a flag draped stage and surrounded by security services personnel in military uniforms carrying automatic weapons, president Putin warned against the dangers of the rise of Fascism in western Europe. Putin, a small man, from a provincial city and with an ambiguous military record, warned his adoring audience of oligarchs, senior military personnel and loyal journalists of the dangers of forgetting the dynamics behind the rise of Adolph Hitler.

“Germany” he said “had been humiliated by the events of history and, yearning for former imperial glories, had allowed itself to fall prey to the cult of the strong leader.” “Russia” he went on: “has a moral duty to save Europe from degenerates and foreign agents so that it might not fall prey to these old temptations.”

Reports that at this point Sergei Lavrov fell from his chair cackling before being dragged away by a cadre of close shaven young men wearing T shirts adorned with Putin’s face have since been denied by the foreign ministry. Video evidence showing this event was dismissed by an official spokesman as the result of Michelle Obama dropping a banana on the keyboard of a computer running video editing software.

Following this disturbance, which did not happen, the president went on to argue that Russia has a unique destiny and so has no choice but to save Europe from sinister foreign influences who would corrupt the purity of a noble race and lead the continent into a place of conflict and uncontrolled militarism. “It is Russia’s fate to save Europe from Fascism” he declaimed as the crowd of uniformed military personnel, state connected oligarchs and flag waving youths rose to their feet with a passionate roar of: RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA!”

The Birch Tree Murder

This is a true story.

Anastasia Sergeyevna had a tree: a sixty foot tall silver birch: as beautiful a thing as you ever saw. It stood in the bottom corner of her Dacha plot and when the sun sank in the evenings the white metallic bark glowed pink and red and orange, when the sun was high and bright half of the garden seemed to flutter and swirl in the shadows cast by its thousands of leaves, like the eddies of a stream or the wheeling motions of a flock of birds. In winter the bark glowed dully in the iron grey light and the branches were like a vast and erratic spider’s web where the spirits of the air might be caught

She and her husband Alexei Dennisovitch had planted it in 1953 when they had received the dacha from her workplace: the ministry of economic affairs. . The 60 square meters of land was a little boggy and it was a fair way from the city, but it was freedom nevertheless: a place to plant vegetables and fruit trees, a place to sit and watch the seasons change and, as soon as the children came, a place to take them for the whole of the summer away from the noise and dirt of the capitol.

The next plot, the one on the other side of the tree, was taken by Maria Ivanovna, a colleague of Anastasia’s from the ministry. Maria was not a well educated woman, she never read a book after finishing accounting college, but she was kind enough in her way and doggedly reliable so that soon enough they were looking after each others growing children and lending each other tea or coffee when the shops ran out.

Everything changed around them, the leaders changed, politics changed, even history changed, but the dachas and the lives led there each glorious summer remained the same: the rhythm was eternal and when times were hard, as they were often enough, the food they grew in those six hundred square meter plots made life bearable. Coups and fights and tanks in the street were irrelevant as long as there were evenings to spend watching the trees sway in the wind and long summer days beside the lake with the children splashing about or misty autumn mornings gathering mushrooms in the forest. Then there were grandchildren and better times undreamed of luxuries such as microwave ovens and colour televisions even at the dachas as the now grown children took to this new life in ways that the old could never do and made money and got cars and other such impossibilities and still, through it all, family remained the absolute centre of things.

And there were the sheds: each family built a second building down in the far corner of their plots and filled them with tools and jars for the fruit and old boots and all the things that were too good to throw away, and for a generation of Russians that had come to maturity under Khrushchev and the long years of Brezhnev pretty much anything was too good to throw away, who knew the next time that aluminium frying pans might appear in the markets? And their children could talk all day long about how everything was replaceable now, but it made no difference: scarcity was too familiar. And between the two sheds Anastasia Sergeyevna’s birch tree climbed higher and higher every year: that constant symbol of their confused country and inspiration to generations of poets, the silver birch, straight and clear and beautiful; all the things they would have been themselves if they had known how.

By the first years of the twenty first century both Anastasia Sergeyevna and Maria Ivanovna were grandmothers; Maria was even a great grandmother with a little boy and a baby girl frolicking in the shade of the tree. And this was the good life: plenty of food, long quiet retirements and children who made up for the paucity of the pensions. The television had more channels than you could count, newspapers still didn't much worry about telling the truth, but they told you everything else as they had long done elsewhere. Above all they told you of gruesome crimes and horrendous misadventures and after a time Anastasia Sergeyevna decided she'd be better off reading Chekhov and Pushkin again.

Maria Ivanovna, on the other hand, had a taste for the grim visions of the yellow press: a world full of dreadful deeds was a satisfying counterpoint to the long inaction of her retirement, a retirement that started at fifty five years of age and had continued unbroken by the time she read of the crushed man in the shed in her ninety second year on this earth.

Her Granddaughter's husband visited the dacha most weekends to see the children and brought with him a fear filled rag that unnerved its readership under the soviet title of Moscovsky Komsomolets. It was full of nonsense, but Maria Ivanovna was a devoted fan and summer evenings at the dacha were passed with her reading aloud from its catalogue of daily horrors as the family went about its pleasure. Crouched in her deck chair on the lawn, half blind she scanned the pages with a magnifying glass in search of fresh reasons to write the world off as a place of endless sorrow, eating her cinnamon cakes and drinking sweet tea as the sun blew golden light through the leaves of Anastasia Sergeyevna's birch tree, the laughter of children around her and the garden in glorious bloom, she became the long lost sister of the ancient Mariner, bound to tell her tales of dread to an uncaring world, and everyone, especially Maria Ivanovna, was as happy as could be.

But the man in the shed, the crushed man was something out of the ordinary run of dastardly fiends and murders most foul, for he had been killed by, of all things, a birch tree that had fallen over in a strong wind and brought the roof and walls of his humble shack crashing down on him where he lay in the arms of sleep.

A birch tree it was that had done for this noble father of three, this was another of those tales that grew in the telling, innocent he had been, as good a man as you could hope to meet in this veil of sorrows, and that poor widow, left with those three children, or four maybe, the story drifted somewhat.

It was only a matter of time really before her eyes fell once more on Anastasia Sergeyevna's birch tree, rising up above the shed where her granddaughter's husband often slept on the summer nights, only now it didn't rise so much as rear menacingly, loom even.

The family took little notice of this growing obsession, Babushka was ever given to exaggerating dangers: the woods by the lake were full of rapists and murderers in her world, the little old man who drove the ancient bus from the railway platform down to dacha land was a homicidal maniac, prone at any moment to wilfully smashing his bus into the wall of the cement factory with a demented cry of joy. Nonetheless she kept at it: there was no doubt that tree was a regular menace, look she had the article, she'd cut it from the paper, hold on... it was here somewhere, three children without a father, it was criminal to do nothing about such an inevitable menace as that evil tree. And they all remembered the winds last year, well they could come again and who was to say they wouldn't come when someone was sleeping in that shed? Oh it's all very well to say you wont sleep there if it's windy, but you'll forget, people do and then what might happen, think of the children if you can't think of yourselves.

And reason was little use against her, the strength of the tree, it's relative youth, it would take a tropical hurricane to knock that down and it wasn't their tree anyway, it was in Anastasia Sergeyevna's garden, and it was there long before they had built the shed and if the menace was proven moving the shed would make more sense and why won't you shut up about that tree for God's sake and finish your tea.

After a month or so of torturing her family with these visions of horror to no avail Maria Ivanovna took her stick and hobbled over to the fence to tell Anastasia Sergeyevna herself of the evil that dwelt in their midst. But Anastasia and Alexei Dennisovitch would have none of it, they even laughed a little at the silliness of the whole thing and kindly told Maria not to worry about it, even suggested she read less of these trashy papers and take it easy.

And that should have been that, short of Maria herself taking up an axe and ridding the world of this evil there was nothing to do, and she was far too frail to even think of any such thing: Nothing to do but brood.

But then the Uzbeks came. One weekday morning when Anastasia and Alexei were back in the city and Maria Ivanovna's daughter had gone into town to buy a few things, a group of young Uzbek guys came calling as they often do throughout the summer to see if there is any digging or weeding work to do so that they might make a little money to send back to families in Tashkent or Bukhara in the dusty reaches of central Asia. As America lives on Mexicans so modern Russia lives on the people of the Caucasus and central Asian regions: street cleaners, market traders, road repairers are invariably poorly paid immigrants from these fading corners of the USSR.

And so they came and they asked Maria Ivanovna if there was any work needed doing and there was, they worked cheaply enough and she had roubles enough to spare in the bag beneath her bed. If they would be good enough to cut down that tree that her neighbours wanted removing, they would have asked themselves but they were away for a few days and Maria Ivanovna was happy to help out such an old friend as Anastasia Sergeyevna, it was lucky that she was there when they called really.

When Svetlana, Maria Ivanovna's daughter, got back from shopping the damage was done, the sixty foot birch that filled the sky with it's dancing leaves was a pile of sawn branches in the middle of Anastasia Sergeyevna's lawn and the last of the stump was already half sawn off to leave a five foot tall monument to trickery and obsession hidden between the saved sheds. The money paid the Uzbek men left, not knowing that they had unwittingly taken part in a terrible betrayal of trust and somewhere in a dusty central Asian town a child got a bicycle for its birthday

The next day Anastasia and Alexei returned to the dacha. Svetlana was waiting by the fence, nearly in tears, to explain what had happened, and Alexei was kind enough to worry more about Svetlana’s tears than his own rage at what had been done. Anastasia Sergeyevna simply wept, sat quietly on the steps of her Dacha and looked at the huge pile of branches on her lawn and wept inconsolably. Maria Ivanovna sat inside watching the television with a look of grim satisfaction on her lined old face. Stubbornness had seen her through greater trials than this in her ninety one years. She had been right; it wasn't her fault if no one would listen to reason. If they didn't care to take responsibility for what needed to be done then it was a good thing she was still around to do so herself. God help them when she was gone, she hardly dared to think what would become of them so they might just as well forget about the stupid tree, what was done was done and there was no changing it now.

Only, the family didn't, couldn't let it go. When the arguments were exhausted and the shouting was done and the accusations were worn out, still they sat and looked at her in that way they had. Even her granddaughter's husband wouldn't sit with her in the evenings any more, and it was he whose life she had saved.

Stubbornness was effective, but they were being as stubborn as her and sitting alone in the main house in proud isolation was not easy for a naturally sociable woman. After a few days it was all simply to much and she took up her stick one more time and hobbled to the fence to hail Anastasia and Alexei where they were picking up the last of the leaves and tidying up their little garden.

She called four times before Alexei came over and stood at the fence tall, fine looking and proud with his strong kind face and his full head of white hair, and he asked her in the politest terms what she wanted of them.

She answered with an explanation, then, when he didn't reply she gave another explanation, then another then a plea then something that was as close as she would ever get to an apology and all the time Alexei Dennisovitch stood silent and looked her calmly in the eye until she had finished talking then he nodded gently and walked slowly away without speaking a word.

This was awful, she called Anastasia. Again she called and again, but the quiet old lady who had been her friend for fifty years and who had never spoken a harsh word in all that time didn't answer nor turn her head not give any sign that she heard the calls of Maria Ivanovna just ten feet away from her by the wire fence.

The summer was nearly over by now, and Maria Ivanovna had time enough for no more than three or four more attempts at speaking with Anastasia, each time with the same result. Peace would not come this summer and Maria made a few impassioned speeches to the family on how unreasonably stubborn some people could be, none of which met with much in the way of sympathy. Then the cold came and the birches, the other birches shed their leaves and bared their silver skins to the wind and the rain and the iron grey light of the winter sky as dacha land emptied and everyone returned to the city.

Lacking much in the way of imagination and having only her own emotions to guide her judgements Maria Ivanovna decided that the next summer all would be well, she decided this many times and in many different words and to any one who would listen. She decided it so many times that each new decision sounded a little more desperate than the last. After all, Anastasia was just angry, she would come round, it was only a tree after all, and a friendship as long as theirs had to be stronger than a tree, stronger than a silly disagreement like this, everything would be right again, of course it would, time heals and solves things as it has always done and time would heal this. It would come right. Things always come right in the end.

In February Alexei Dennisovitch called, Katya, Maria's granddaughter took the call. Anastasia had died the day before of heart failure, she had gone quietly. It had been a long life, hard at times, but a good one, she had happy and healthy children and grandchildren and a husband who had loved her dearly. The funeral would be quiet, family only, thank you for your friendship over the years; Anastasia had valued knowing such a good family and had been pleased that her own children had grown up alongside Svetlana and her grandchildren with Katya.

So time heals only the things that fate and death allows it to heal, and the death of Anastasia Sergeyevna was a deep shock to Maria Ivanovna. There had been no absolution; no reconciling and a ninety two year old woman can struggle to see beyond herself and her troubles into the sorrow of another. To die with things like they were was almost spiteful and she began to speak of the tree again to list the justifications, to number the horrors that had been so closely avoided. And her family was tired of it and would not listen: a man had lost his wife, children and grand children had lost a dear and lovely old woman and the tree was nothing but an emblem of Maria's stubborn refusal to think of these things. None of them actually allowed themselves to raise a quivering finger in the dead of night and whisper icily “You killed her, it was you Maria Ivanovna who took her life along with that tree, you, you, YOU!” But they wondered if the shade of Anastasia might be visiting the dreams of the ancient woman who was looking more haunted every day.

A year later Maria Ivanovna passed away, on New Year’s Day in 2007 and the family's sorrow was leavened with the thought of what a long and fairly good life she had lived, the last months of suffering had been hard.

And that's all, one time a tree was cut down when it should not have been.

Saxon: heavy metal thunder

Saxon have learned nothing, from 30 years in heavy metal. I loved them at 13, grew wary at 14 and ran away at 15, they are still exactly where they were when I was 12. It's almost admirable how everyone in the band, from near 60 year old, original members to young guns who joined later shows the same utter lack of imagination and self awareness. You begin to suspect that they have long been secretly controlled by someone who gave all prospective members an IQ test and threw out anyone who had anything over 60.

And, their ex-manager is the same, and their ex members, and their fans and then  Lemmy rolls up with tales of how Saxon drank tea while he injected live rats into his eyeballs or something, and here’s Lars Ulrich telling stories whose point you are still waiting for ten minutes after he’s done. Until finally it sinks in; the vast and obvious truth you have evaded for so long: the world of metal was a world of cretins, even the stuff you still like was made by morons. Sabbath are ace, but Ozzy is the Sultan of Tardistan, all of Metallica with their therapists and their onscreen betrayal of the wounded and dim-witted Mustaine are so dumb that they don’t realize that showing themselves being themselves is about as wise as invading Russia in November using Ostriches as transport.

And the whole lot of em are filled with pride at the idea that Spinal Tap may have been based on them: “See that film, that one about a bunch of moronic, self-obsessed morally bankrupt cretins: that’s us that is!”

Sometimes they are fundamentally decent people, some of Saxon, some of Judas Priest, but they are morons to a man. If they were not they would have quit playing metal.

 The people who make films and write about metal are generally 1 level up from this troglodyte morass. Geoff Barton, allegedly a music critic, writing on Saxon's cretinous duh fest, 6th form girls, says: "I mean....in the hands of...of...a...lesser metal act....a song like that could be construed as being rather...crude" This is as opposed to this nuanced and delicate exploration of young womanhood apparently”

Sixth form girls, they're looking good

Skin tight jeans, they're out for fun

They drink wine late at night

Meet some man who'll make them laugh

Buy them drinks and make a pass

Take them back to a penthouse flat

Sixth form girls take their pick of men

They're learning fast the ways of love

Just sixteen, teenage dream

Sixth form can't get out at night

They keep them in, it's an awful sin

Should set them free and let them roam

Morons: the lot of em.

The point was that guitar sound, that’s all it ever was. Take that and give it to Cobain, or Korn or Faith No More and you have a chance, but leave it with the metal men and you are in for high volume cretinism, nothing more.

I’m sorry, but there it is.

Foreign media strategy

The aim is to get a lot of people in the room and get them shouting. What they are shouting matters, but it matters less than the very fact that they are shouting.

So pay a lot of people to shout a lot; you can pay some directly, the Kremlin spambots for example in their dingy st Petersburg troll centres: Bangalore upon Neva. Others you pay less directly, for example the botoxed soviet pop fossils the well-seasoned performers of the State Duma Collapsing clown car circus (SDCCCC), and the yellow complexioned denizens of a million state organizations who already know that that their first policy priority is to be loyal.

Passivity runs deep

2006 Moscow, the TV in the kitchen it switched to Kultura showing a documentary featuring Stalin. I am feeding my daughter as the pans of potatoes and beetroot bubble away on the rackety stove while Svetlana Alexeyevna moves pots and pans from one cluttered pile to another. Svetlana Alexeyevna has read Solzhenitsyn and Varlamov, and she knows all about what the thirties and forties meant to those living under Stalin’s rule: she is of the generation that came to full adulthood as the soviet dream was dying and she and her husband read about it all.

As Stalin speaks at some forgotten congress I make a vague remark to the effect that he was a bastard and she pauses nervously before answering: “well…. He was a complicated man.”

It is deep in them and there is some of it even in the best of them

The Great British Public Speaks

Dear everything else in the world,

  The reason we haven’t reacted more angrily to the things Mr. Snowden has told us is precisely the reason why the world he has so helpfully revealed emerged in the first place.

We don’t care.

We have our lives and our admittedly small, problems: we have stuff to do and stuff to get.

 Granted, we should pay more attention; maybe read more, who knows, even contribute more. But we simply don’t want to, we never really have and by this late stage it is very doubtful that we ever will.

We trust that governments and corporations are benign not because we are fools, but simply because we can’t be arsed to find out if they are not. We are idle, we are greedy, we are self obsessed, and we can be bought off very cheaply. (And we mean, really, really cheaply, we’ll even let you lend us the money to buy the shiny shit.)

 In return for allowing us to remain in this state of semi-comatose indifference we ask only two things.

   Firstly, you must allow us to endlessly call every last one of you a good for nothing bastard, who is only out for themselves and their sinister co-conspirators, regardless of how much of your lives you spend actually making our lives better.

  Secondly, what were we saying? 

No…it’s gone.

Tea?

The Portable Authors.

      

            This was a publishing venture begun by Penguin books in the 1950s.   Reacting to a public mood that had come to find irksome the notion   of carrying around, for example, the complete Henry James, the innovative folks at Penguin introduced their first editions in the spring of 1952.

            The portable Tolstoy was first off the production line and proved at once to be a resounding success. Some two thirds the size of the real Lev Tolstoy and moulded from a light yet durable plastic, this charming figurine proved to be all the rage at dinner parties from   Greenwich Village to Soho.

            The portable Faulkner, Melville and Twain quickly followed, each arriving at homes of delighted new owners in a hand crafted leather box, for the deceased authors, a charming coffin shape was chosen,  and for those still living an attempt was made at some thematic continuity with their work. The Faulkner case for example was decorated with images of teenaged Down’s syndrome sufferers   interwoven with a recurring pattern of lynched Negroes.

            The future success of the venture seemed assured and the artists were called in to begin work on Dr Johnson. However, no sooner had the great lexicologist begun to appear in the bookshops, than a chorus of complaints arose concerning the validity of the term   portable being applied to one who was clearly such a “Fat Bastard.”

            The adverse publicity soon presented a serious threat to a project whose modishness had been evident from the outset. Fashions are fickle in literary circles at the best of times and this coincided with the added difficulties caused by competition from Weidenfeld and Nicholson’s new range of “Inflatable Greats of World Culture.”

All might well have been lost were it not for the genius of Samuel Allavein Penguin, the grandson of the firm’s founder. Flinging his office chair at an underling one evening the gouges made on the face of the latter by the chair’s casters suggested a simple way out. Wheeled authors: what could be simpler? Girth would henceforth only add to the fun as eager literary enthusiasts rolled their shrunken writers over the marble floors of their salons with gusto.

            And so the venture took on a new impetus and the continuing fortunes of the Penguins were assured.  “Make it new’ Ezra Pound had howled at a stuffy Edwardian literary scene, well nigh half a century later the Penguins had heeded his call.

Glory be to god

Thanksgiving

Glory be to god for dimpled twins From Idaho.

And for the web that wafts them here, on angel wings of Javascript.

 Aye, God be thanked for Christians, for we are blessed.

   Nightly are we gifted

Prestigious front row tickets

For this theatre of the Stupid

To deliver us from boredom.

Thanks be that “Dawkwin’s” just recanted, 

And that Einstein was a churchman

And that quantum is a crystal from on high.

Give praise to him for his gift

Of idiots with crosses,

And with broken, angry logic

And those clinching misquotations

From dear old C. S. Lewis.

   Praise be, above all, for their jazz spelling improvisations as they lie for Jesus.

Glory be to god for dimpled twins from Idaho,

Or Irkutsk.

William Blake

"When the chimneys of perception are truly cleaned, I will pay that scruffy little urchin, and not a moment before."

So asserted William Blake, 19th century poet, nutter and man who never really did figure out how to draw hands properly.

 Born in the eel basketers' district of south, north, south London in seventeen twenty twenty, to a Blacksmith's dancing assistant and the daughter of a mother, from an early age, the minor details of architecture seemed to him to reveal a path to the deeper mysteries of being.

 "The Doors of perception" was a concept that arrived only after much stumbling. "The window sills of consciousness", his first poetical work of note, opens with the memorable line: "Remember this line" and goes on to ask the startled reader:

"Did you remember that line?                         

Are you sure?                                                     

What was it then?                                                 

Eh?"

And so on for three hundred pages, richly illustrated with pictures of tormented souls slaving in the call centres of the mind and asking strange questions concerning feet: "Did those feet, just yesterday, walk past my bedroom door?"

After which he was committed to the Bedlam Home for Weird Citizens of North west south, in what was then East London, where it is said he dribbled.

Having given a squirrel to Thomas Paine and so started the French revolution, he married Molly McCormagillian, a daughter's mother from the western part of the east coast of Wales. Then he devoted himself to his greatest work: "The Chimneys of Confusion" Before being murdered by Wordsworth's grandmother in a brutal hammer brawl that erupted one night following an argument about ducks in a library in Wolverhampton upon Thames near Woollich.

On his simple gravestone, buried deep beneath his body in Buckingham Palace's famous Lizard Gallery, are written three simple words: "Leg, Vole" and "Sorry".

A fitting epitaph.

Indian

While killing time surfing the web, I randomly turn on a streaming Indian TV channel and see that there is a really classy looking show going on. An attractive middle aged couple in designer outfits is walking around a plush looking house laughing and joking with their teenage son who sits at the tableб being kind of sullen but hipster cool.     

It’s all really charming and I’m listening to the Hindi soundtrack seeing if I can pick up any words at all, I can’t. Then I notice English subtitles underneath and absent mindedly tune in as the mother laughs and says to her husband: “reports say that the rape victim had strangulation marks on her neck.”

He looks at her with a knowing smile and jokes that: “India’s rape crisis is proving likely to have serious political consequences.

Then the son chimes in with a smirk and points out that: “The latest victim is a 5 year old child” And the two parents hug as they all burst out laughing at his witticism. This is where my brain melts down and all of those recent articles about elements of Indian society being overly tolerant of sexual violence come flooding back. I had no idea it was this bad: this is an episode of Friends with rape jokes: I’m in a world gone mad.

I know loads of Indians, 30 % or so of my home town are Indians, my flat mate is Indian, I work at an Indian Pharmaceutical company regularly and none of them have ever said or even seemed anything like this. Have they just been acting politely out of respect for my delicate western sensibilities?  It is demented and I can’t deal with it.

Then the screen shifts to pictures of police men and ambulances and screaming women and it suddenly becomes apparent that what I have been watching was an advertisement with a badly designed low tech news ticker running along the bottom of the screen, a ticker that no one turns of when the ad break starts.

 The story has no moral, except maybe thank god my computer didn’t crash before the news show resumed, leaving me with a horrifying new understanding of just what middle class Indian culture is all about.

Democracy, what's that then?

We talk about democracy, like we talk about love, or freedom, as though we know what it is, as though it were soap or a pencil. Then we say that this country is a democracy and that country is not, and having said so we feel we have said something significant. All we have really said is that we approve of this country and disapprove of that one. At the extremes it’s easy: North Korea is evidently not a democracy, and Sweden is, so that even without considering what we mean we can be right sometimes, as a stopped clock is right twice daily. But when we talk about the places closer to the middle of that continuum we very quickly find ourselves saying nothing.

These obvious and largely ignored facts about what we mean by the word are sparked by Tony Blair on Radio 4 saying that Iraq is a democracy, albeit a flawed one. When one has got past the visceral hatred of Blair, and bear in mind that half the world never will, one sees that it’s true. They vote there and those elections decide who will be president: ergo in the world of simple where we increasingly live, it is a democracy. The fact that it is full of US soldiers and religious fundamentalists confirms that it is flawed, but does not negate the point about elections.

 John Stewart tells me daily that US democracy is flawed, that it is a commodity, and he appears to be right. They have elections there too, and they spend vast amounts of money to win them, then they changed the laws of the land so that they could spend even more money and that looks like a massive flaw to me. However, the fact that Mr. Stewart explains this to me on television daily, and has not been arrested yet, rather suggests that some of what we appear to mean by democracy is functioning very well over there.

After Mr. Blair a journalists appears and talks of young Americans in Iraq, politico types rather than soldiers, who were convinced with a kind of religious zeal that democracy could be installed in Iraq and the problems would go away. But it’s hard to install windows 8 when your computer is on fire, and so with democracy.

Obviously this is about Russia too, and right on time a Russian pops up on the radio to explain that democracy cannot be imposed by force. Instinctively I catch myself thinking: “well you would say that wouldn’t you.” He’s one of the United Russians, the ones who celebrate Russian Orthodoxy by stealing money from Russia and extol the Russian path by educating their kids in London. But then he says that democracy cannot be installed if the institutions and traditions are not in place, and the bastard is right.

People have to take responsibility for this stuff to work, and when I write people I mean ordinary working people. They have to do boring things like knowing who their elected representative is, and complaining and writing letters and talking to neighbors about practical ways to make everyday life a little better. A lot of what seems to work in democracy actually looks quite boring and even petty in action, and the Russians, on the whole, don’t do that stuff.

 Moreover a minister I spoke with told me once that the constitution here and many of the laws that are passed are actually perfectly democratic and well planned, having been developed by think tanks with the assistance of Germans and Swedes and so on, and that the problem is that when they are passed they drop into the morass of the civil service Kafka world and go down like a rhino in quicksand. On top of this the public don’t give a damn and so, unless you have Peter the great chopping people’s beards and heads off until stuff gets done, then stuff won’t get done: hence the amount of intelligent and perfectly decent Russians who yearn for a strong leader.

Define terms carefully and agree on what you have defined, then talk about democracy or freedom, or else don’t do that, and instead spend hours saying nothing in an impressively rhetorical manner. As you prefer.

Lie to me

We complain that Politicians just tell people what they want to hear, and we’re right, we’re always right.

 Anyway here’s what we want to hear: That we can have loads of stuff without paying for it, that the problems we face are the fault of Immigrants/Bankers and that it’ s all going to be ok if we can just hammer the rich/the poor hard enough. Tell us that and we’ll vote for you, but remember to say it good and loud, cos the other fellow’s saying it too.

  In Britain Blair and his minions figured it out first: they understood that it was nothing to do with being right or wrong. You could be right all day, but if the mail and the sun were telling everyone you were wrong then it didn’t matter. So they focused on the papers and they won and we, the ones who had been reading those papers and putting Major in number 10 long after we should have stuck a fork up his arse and turned him over, because he was obviously done, well we got all indignant about spin. We howled about focus groups and political consultants as though their emergence was not a direct result of our own behavior.

And the media was the cheerleader for this anti spin rage, they devoted acres of newsprint and untold hours of airtime to exploring how the media worked until finally their heads were so far up their own arses that you couldn’t really hear what they were saying anymore. But it was ok, coz they were telling us that none of it was our fault, and we knew that anyway.

  Then, leading by example as ever, our American brethren showed us the next logical step by putting a millionaire president’s son in the white house because he was, like an ordinary guy and stuff. It was a wise move, and obviously designed as a warning to demonstrate to the world what would happen if we all continued along this path of rampant, debt driven consumerism and self righteous egotism. “Look” they said: “This is what happens to uninformed morons, is this what you want?” And the world looked on in awed bewilderment and said: “No.”

  A teachable moment, a cry for help, an astonishing practical joke, whatever it was it was clearly not something any sane nation would care to emulate. Then our Saudi friends changed the punch line and we all went mad. Greed and fear were what drove the stock market they always said, and having reached the point where greed no longer looked like a viable path to stability and contentment, we went with fear. Wars and torture and lies, all of them working under cover of fear. Yay we shouted:  no need to lose the SUV after all and all that scary thinking and reading stuff that was looming up was irrelevant suddenly: everything was black and white again. And it didn’t matter what side of the political fence you were on: Osama or Bush, both were cartoon devils and, how perfect was this, now we could:  “like if we loved freedom” or: “share if we hated Cheney”, ah, the heady winds of people power.

 Meanwhile in Russia and China those inscrutable, unknowable, mysterious men looked on and learned. Democracy = a sham, check, freedom = just a word, check, open global markets = you are thinking we are blind? Money = everything, check. And what did we really want from them? Well oil and Iphones would be a nice start and they could manage that no problem.

 But of course we’d spent all the money by this point and we couldn’t afford stuff anymore, so we looked to the politicians and cried with one pure voice: “tell us what we want to hear” and they, knowing the deal by now, did just that. So we carried on buying houses with no money and wide screen TVs to put in them, we carried on demanding better hospitals and tax cuts and those nice young men in the city juggled stuff so that everyone, including their selves, could keep on buying shit until it all exploded in a great big mess.

And whose fault is it?

Well the bankers’ obviously, I mean the bastards kept giving us money, and the politicians, why the hell didn’t they tell us to stop and in doing so plunge into humiliating electoral defeat, what were they thinking? Not to mention the satanic corporations who made the stuff we wanted, the bastards: hang em all!

Pass me my Ipad, I need to sort this out by posting a pic on Facebook. No it’s over there, under those credit cards, next to my Samsung galaxy, yeah that’s it, ooh look Kanye has a new album coming out…

The Truth will send you mad

“I read a book” he says.

“Just the one?” I ask, but the punch line dies as he says: “yes.”

He’s driving a ford, I’m in the front, my son in the back giggling and whispering: “what a twunt” into my ear as I try to focus on what the guy is telling me.

 The key point is that I must consider the Kremlin. I do. Then I apparently have to ponder that it was built in the year 546.ad. So I try that, but before I can really pull it off, he is pointing out that Westminster palace was built only in 1927 and it is the only building in England that might be compared with the Kremlin apparently.

He is clearly about to explain how this demonstrates Moscow’s vast historical superiority, but my son chimes in and tell him it was built in the 1200s and was made of wood.

Ignoring the child, he asks me if I know how old London is. I tell him I know it was Roman city once, but I have unwittingly triggered the heart of the theory he is heading towards.

You see the whole of western European history was rewritten by the Pope in the 1600s, prior to that it had been a benighted land of bogs and forests where fur clad men wept at the realization that they were not Russian. Dante, Chaucer, the Magna Carta, the ruins of all those medieval towns? All of them built by a seriously busy pope in the 17^th century, a pope whose name escapes my teacher.

“why did he do this?”

Because… because… because of the reformation, that’s when this pope stole all of Germany’s money. Germans eh? Even in a Stone Age wilderness of weeping they had a thriving economy, the bastards.

“What a twunt!” says Zhenya as I look to my new found guru. He doesn’t seem to be obviously insane: he is well dressed and driving a newish car attentively. Nor is he obviously a cretin: he speaks well and in joined up sentences.

I inquire whether he has ever been out of Russia, and he tells me he hasn’t because he doesn’t need to, there’s this book you see, its name escapes him as does the name of the author and he is not forthcoming on the question of whether it was written in green ink and on toilet paper.

The boy in the back is waiting for me to rip into our driver, but I can’t do it: he’s warm and friendly and is clearly telling me all of this because it is helpful for me to know these things.

He pulls up at our destination and turns to beam at me, clearly deeply content at having dragged another poor soul out of the valley of darkness. I tell him I really had had no idea of these matters, thank him for his wise words and wish him all the best.

“what a twunt!” says the boy as we walk off.

The Short Lived Cult of PR Truthfulness.

This would have been in the mid 2000s: a time when it didn’t feel too comfortable being a foreigner here. I was teaching a PR professional. Usually this is essentially an editing job: I turn up and they have a load of texts that have been written in bad English by the young woman who got her job with the company on the strength of her perfect English. Nobody else in the company would know perfect English if they saw or heard it, not that this stops them pronouncing on live journal at great length concerning grammar rules that were taught to them in soviet times by people who had this perfect English too.

When I roll up, the people with the perfect English go hide in cupboards in case I speak to them in a crowded room and unmask them. I never would, but fear is a powerful thing.

On the day in question my PR hero had a new project that was something to do with the Kremlin, whether he was bidding for a tender, had won one, or was involved in some other way I never knew. Still at the time the wise folks in the corridors of power appeared to be spotting that Russia’s image in the world was not all it could be, and discussions were afoot concerning what was to be done. What was done involved employing foreign PR firms, and over time the moments where you read a quote from a prominent Russian politician and cringed in shame and horror grew less and less common, which is nice.

But our PR man was struggling with a different notion of what national PR might be: somehow he had landed on the notion that the secret was to tell the truth. Now, you don’t have to spend much time around PR people to see that truth is a tricky concept: if they were genuinely worried about it one suspects they would have continued working as journalists, not that that was any guarantee of probity in recent years, but still, a passion for truth is not a PR professional’s best friend, not in any country.

What he said was that, if we could only communicate to the outside world the actual lived reality of Russia, then they would understand and thus sympathize and welcome her into the community of nations. I inquired as to whether the “lived reality” that needed communicating was the one that people actually lived: the one where they ranted against bureaucracy and corruption and policemen and dirty roads; the one he too had dismissed on numerous occasions. It turned out that it was not that reality at all, but rather one that had been discovered elsewhere, and accepting it was an act of faith, apparently, for it had no obvious basis in reality.

  I suggested, tentatively, that an honest admission of the problems the country faced, combined with a call for recognition of just how much had already been achieved in less than two decades, would probably be a wiser move, if truth was absolutely necessary, well there was a truth there that wasn’t all that bad. But I had confused the truth with what actually exists, and it had nothing to do with that. As he explained this to me his eyes took on a certain shine, and his voice gained in conviction and I understood that we were at the point where my job was to smile kindly and shut the fuck up.

 I came across the same notion quite often around that time: the idea that there was no need to lie to the world about Russia, but simply to communicate a truth that was deeper, greater, more profound and yet unhindered by facts. It reminded me of Rove et al deciding that they could determine reality and all that remained for the journalists was to write that reality down until they were provided with a new one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

Maybe because I am a foreigner some people assume that they can get away with this nonsense, but I have talked to Government ministers with a far more negative assessment of the nature of the country’s problems, and to journalists in real papers and agencies, Russian and foreign, and they are as far removed from this sort of RIA Novosti optimism as the taxi drivers and accountants.

It is what it is, and it’s not hard to find out what it is. The problem is not that foreign media are incapable of understanding Russia; the problem is that they can come here and look and ask people. That’s not to say they will get it right even then, but offering a beautiful new “truth” ain’t gonna cover it, which may be why this notion failed to last.

In the years since, I have thought a lot about this encounter and other similar ones that took place at the time, and I’ve discussed it with Russians. Some call it a cult, and suggest that the way to understand what’s going on is essentially the same as when trying to make sense of a religious persons views: they may be good and sincere, but there is a fundamentally skewed premise underlying their conclusions and thus they can’t but be wrong.

  The other aspect that seems to me central stems from asking the question “Who are they talking to?” When editing texts for PR folk for large Russian and Foreign companies you rapidly gain the impression that they are going to great lengths to persuade the public of points on which that same public has no opinion whatsoever, have no desire to form an opinion and, indeed, are utterly ignorant of, and indifferent to, the whole question of what this bank plans to do with its corporate lending strategy over the next quarter. Then it occurs to you that the only people who are concerned with this question are working in various state organizations. Much of PR in an autocratic society is necessarily GR: that is government relations. The public could care less if you change your interest terms for corporate clients, people at the central bank and the ministry of finance are more interested, as well as having far more power to hurt you and your company. I have wondered since whether this strategy of “truth” that briefly seduced many in the communications industry had a similar cause.

Dacha Season

Summer begins and along with it dacha season.
The whole dacha insanity industry kicks off in millions of Russian families as soviet era parents start trying to persuade the younger generations to load themselves up with stuff, get onto overcrowded suburban trains, and go start the potato farming fantasy that sustained their parents, spiritually and nutritionally in 1983.
 Boxes full of nonsense need to be carried to a 600 square meter plot 50, 100, 150 miles outside of Moscow, where they will sit for the summer before being brought back on those same trains in the autumn. Cucumbers that you could buy in shop 20 yards away, on your way home after a 12 hour working day must be planted in your own private agricultural dream world. There will be no laying on Saturday, Friday evenings that could be spent walking the green boulevards of a half deserted city, must now be given to ill tempered hours in traffic jams on the filthy highways out of Moscow, or for the poorer, crowded metros and trolleybuses, the trains and then death trap minibuses at the other end.
 If it were my choice I would kill every last vegetable in that dacha and plant grass and flowers instead, then let then grow wild around us as we sat on a summer’s day determinedly idling. I would take the broken fridges and the sheds full of half empty paint tins and huge bails of rusting wire that: “might come in handy one day” and throw them all. I would burn the wooden frames of the rickety green house and all of the old papers, the astrological, gardening almanacs and 9 year old TV guides featuring lifestyle pieces on Oleg Gazmanov. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv_OgysforQ And as it all burned I’d get the kids and we would go all Shawshank and dance around it like wind injuns.
 But it’s not my choice, it’s the choice of someone whose brain lives in a world without supermarkets full of fresh produce and where a week’s work is 30 hours of cake eating, tea drinking and grumbling about the sausage shortage. The dacha was the only place that many people worked: the middle classes or the intelligentsia or whatever we call that huge swathe of soviet society who worked in research institutes planning to reverse the course of rivers and build radio links to Absurdistan, they went to the dacha in April and felt good to be planting and sawing and hammering.
Everything else has changed, but suburban trains full of old people with sacks full of gardening gear sitting next to tired and irritated adult children: that doesn’t change.

Stuff that Russians do well

They are exceptionally good at friendship these Russkies, most of them anyway. They make friends at kindergarten, school or college and then tend to remain close friends until they die. You tell them this and they say: “No, no, no: that’s not particular to Russia.” Then they tell you about their oldest friend who they met in a maternity home incubator in 1973 and who has just borrowed $50 000 from them to buy a car. They also help their friends in very concrete ways.

What set me off was a show where Fry and Laurie were reunited in front of the cameras recently and the narrator said how rare such a long standing friendship is. It struck me as nonsense until I realized that all of the examples I can think of are Russians. It happens in England too, of course, but it happens a lot less.

Of course, you can construct a thesis about the ways in which an absent or indifferent state leads people to stick closer together: when there is no stability in the place you live you have to build your own networks. The people who fall through the cracks fall really hard here: there is no safety net to speak of, but if you have friends they will catch you.

Or you could raise the specter of how this family and friends closeness is part of a wider tendency towards tribalism, and that dubious word Nashi (ours) but why do so?

Better to admire the way they have of staying best friends forever without posting glittery “best friends forever” shit all over their worlds while bitchin about each other constantly.

 You don’t hear so many stories of betrayal and nastiness listening to Russians talking about their friends as you do listening to Americans or British people. They are forgiving of faults and pretty used to being forgiven for their own and that’s no less brilliant for being every day and undramatic.

It might be a case of making a virtue of necessity, but it’s a virtue nonetheless.

Russopedia cabbageonomics

Russopedia: Economy: Early Developments.

  Archeological records, in combination with the ancient Chronicles of Gutran the Somewhat Apologetic have revealed that, for the first thousand years of her history, Russia’s was predominantly a cabbage based economy. Indeed, even as late as the 19^th century there were regions of this vast land where the most significant date in the calendar was that of the annual cabbage fair, usually held in a market town or, in lieu of that, in a cave, bears allowing.

  Here the cabbage traders from the snowy wastes would gather, once yearly, to display their wares and swap lore concerning the noble vegetable, while the locals celebrated the spring cabbage festival, or Karpustitchstvo, with a variety of games and competitions devoted to this food staple. The most famous of these was the Smertelni Karpushichboi, or Fatal Cabbage Fight, wherein the mightiest warriors from the various communities would pummel each other to death with cabbages, while the spectators placed, cabbage based bets on the potential victors. Russian folklore is rife with tales of simple but noble young men who made their names, and their fortunes, in these contests. Gleb Karpustpobed and the Snow Cabbage of Glomsk is perhaps the most famous of these, primarily due to of Rachmaninoff’s opera of the same name.

 It is a little known fact that centuries before the founding of the Moscow Stock Exchange, the Boogoslavl region of central Russia was home to no less than three Karpubirzhi, or cabbage exchanges, or that the wealth generated by these markets led to the creation of generations of cabbage oligarchs, some of whom were able to manage their vast wealth with sufficient wisdom that they gained the status of princes and held sway over vast areas of Russia for centuries before the coming of Christianity.

  Whether it was the coming of metal money, the rise of the Moscow princedom or exasperation at the sheer absurdity of cabbage based economics that led Russia to largely abandon these practices in the late medieval period, is unknown. But with the arrival of the tartar yolk the fate of the noble Cabbage of Russ was sealed.

The Tartar Yolk.

Quite how such a people as primitive as the central Asian Tartars managed to create an egg with a yolk large enough to cover the bulk of European Russia is a question that remains unanswered to this day…

Podolski: Polish German Russian

Russian football commentators think that Lucas Podolski is one of theirs. This chap Podolski, who is of polish descent and has German citizenship, is playing for an English team, and not playing particularly well. Even so, every time he gets the ball, the two Commentators get all breathless with excitement just as they do when a Russian gets it.

The problem is there aren’t any Russians here who might get the ball, not even a Ukrainian, which is the same thing when you are desperate for all this excitement to say something to you about your life. Somewhere in the stadium though, there is actually, one Russian. By chance too, this one Russian is the best Russian there is in matters of football. This one Russian is the gnome faced genius of Petersburg. The legendary, well, you’d have to say, “nearly legendary”, or “almost brilliant”, or “so close to being astounding that it hurts”, the nearly man’s nearly man: Andre Arshavin.

 Arshavin, played incredibly well in front of the world once or twice, about 5 years back, and so he naturally concluded that he was God and must, as a result, be embraced at once by the heavenly host that is F.C. Barcelona. But Barcelona didn’t want him and so he went to that year’s Barcelona light, which was Arsenal, in London.

  He did some great things for a bit and then he stopped doing them. He said something about the food not being any good and his wife missing Russia, but you could see his heart wasn’t in it, even when he meandered back to Petersburg recently he didn’t do much there either.  This is an old tale for fans of Russian football: the sudden shining star that turns out to be merely a comet passing.  

So they are forced to live vicariously through the exploits of any player having a connection to Russia: the Ukrainian Andre Shevchenko, for example, used to send them into paroxysms of delight, though less so when his free kick kept Russia out of an international championship. The London club Chelsea, or Chelski, is owned by a Russian Jewish oligarch. Football fans here are not famed for their love of Jewish people or oligarchs, but you have to take what you can get, and so about half of Russians, who express a preference, are Chelsea fans.

They used to have a Serbian playing at Spartak Moscow who went to Manchester and he got lots of love for a while until the passing years made the connection too tenuous and, even worse, it turned out that this Serbian was traitorously striving to stop Chelski from wining whenever he played against them. Hence they must look elsewhere when they need to shout the word “our” before the name of a player doing something outstanding as they always did with “our Andre Shevchenko.  But Podolski, A German pole? At least the Andre, and the perfidious Serbian were from orthodox countries.

There’s a joke: A Russian and a Ukrainian are walking through the country ravenous with hunger when they spot a huge, tasty looking cake cooling on the windowsill of an old lady’s cottage. They know they shouldn’t, these two friends, but needs must when the devil drives, so they grab it and run off into the forest. There the Russian takes out a knife and prepares to cut the cake, but his Ukrainian friend stops him, asking how they will divide it. “Why, we will share it like the Slavic brothers we are” replies the Russian: “is that not the way?” But the Ukrainian replies: “I thought this time we might go 50/50.

Like Shevchenko, the joke is Ukrainian.

received defective George pants or why rich countries are not happy places

“In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away” Auden

Jeremy Hardy says that people from telesales cold call him and ask if he knows how much he is paying for his house insurance. He replies, or wishes to, by saying: “No, if I knew how much I was paying for my house insurance I would kill myself.”

Life is short and death is coming, getting and spending, the hell that is other people and, what Larkin calls: “the whole intricate rented world”, it all takes too much from us and we find no time for what matters.

So why then would we rush headlong to meet that flood of money driven, bureaucratic banality when it is painful enough to simply endure it.

Why then would we do this:

“He had been looking forward to wearing his new George pants”, imagine his pain, imagine being a man who looks forward to wearing new George pants, go on, imagine it because I can’t. I can imagine plunging to my death from a high building moments after the realisation that pant wearing had become a thing I looked forward to.

“I guess I just unlucky”(sic) So unlucky that defective pants seem like a thing worth spending time posting about: that would seem pretty lucky to most of the world. She had checked reviews of George pants previously too.

“What are you doing honey?”

“Oh just checking George pant reviews on the wallmart site”

Is this how it was, can it all really get this small, can pants matter so much? Can we be mortified by defective pants? And can we really spend our fragile lives considering whether our problems “speak to the overall quality of those pants”?

I need to believe not, but there it is: a couple received defective George pants, and nothing can ever be quite the same again.

Really? I haven't seen you in church

   Ex pats come in various forms. We touched previously on the drunken twat spouting superficial analysis at a bunch of overly tolerant Russians who are all hoping to get out of their motherland and have made the unfortunate error of talking to a bumptious cretin to discover what that might mean.

  Then there are the English teachers, young folks who are basically doing a second gap year but calling it a job, or middle aged divorces who seem to be here because they have no idea what the fuck else to do. There are the businessmen. CEOs and CFO’s in big companies travelling from a western style business centre to western style flat in a western car with everything except arse wiping dealt with by western style assistants. There are also those lower down the corporate chain who are here too, specialists or middle managers, jabbering about supply side economics and how easy Russian girls are.   What all of these ex pats have in common is that they are not here for long and so they have little invested emotionally, intellectually or financially in Russia. They seldom get anywhere near fluency in the language or anywhere near empathy in their understanding, because they don’t need to: Russia is not a country so much as a posting, or an opportunity or an adventure.

 The long termers are those who have, in one way or another, fallen in love. Maybe it was with the country, or the language or a person. In this latter group there are some teachers, a few businessmen, quite a few journalists and some arty types. And there are the diplomats, about whom I know very little.

Here’s what I do know.

 They are middle or upper class on the whole: nobody from my school made it into the civil service, never mind the diplomatic service. There are the public school people, and none the worse for that: a good education is a fine thing. I wish I had had a better one. Secondly, they tend to freeze and remain in the cultural moment they were in when they left England. I feel this myself, when friends ask me how it is in England I feel, more so with each year that passes, that I only know how it “was” in England. How it was when Blair and just been elected Oasis were promising. But what if you had come here 20, or 30, or even 40 years earlier, what then?

  I first found out in Austria, going to a consulate to get a new passport with a British friend of Indian descent. We were taken into a room where an old gentleman was sitting among pictures of the Royal Family and watercolours of dear old bloody old England. And it took him a minute to grasp that my friend was English: he asked her if she was sure, and if it wasn’t so obvious that he had no idea what world he was living in she might have taken offence at that. But it was clearly not racism as much as the fact that England was pretty much a distant dream for him, where white Oxbridge buys rowed along rivers in the watercolours behind him.

When we had established that we were all British he sorted the passport stuff and then invited us to the Norman Wisdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Wisdom film evenings they had once or twice a month, saying they would be glad of some new blood. We made our excuses and left.

Then, and I may have mentioned this before, I went to the British Embassy here in Moscow for one of the Queen is not dead yet functions they hold every few years, a garden party in the old Embassy over the River from the Kremlin.

Going in my wife, being far to charming and open for her own good, failed like everyone else to head straight through the building to where the free food and beer was and somehow got herself in a line of people meeting members of the diplomatic staff and other VIPs. I couldn’t leave her there and so went over and found myself being introduced, along with a bunch of random Russians to the plum in the mouth brigade who worked in various capacities representing the interests of Great Britain, or at least the parts of great Britain where wearing a string of pearls was still the done thing.

Halfway down the line I found myself shaking hands with a very refined old lady, who clearly took me for a Russian or maybe for a British businessman, rather than for the half drunk idiot I was. But Katya, my wife, had decided to engage her latest hand shaker in conversation and I was trapped in front of the dowager duchess having run out of polite meaningful nothings. So she, having grasped that I was not Russian by this point, asked how long I had been in Moscow. This was 2002, so I answered “5 years already” and she rejoindered: “Really, I haven’t seen you in church.” That’s a line that would last have been possible in England itself in about 1952, and then only in a village in Shropshire. Perhaps she imagined that every British person arriving in Moscow, got off the airplane and then set about looking for the nearest Anglican church http://www.standrewsmoscow.org/, or maybe she had simply been driven insane by the city, I would like to think that she amused herself in these formal boredom fests by resorting to a viciously ironic parody of Englishness, but it seemed unlikely.

Anyway, I made my excuses and left. Now I wonder: is this my future?

Race: notes towards a basic mind map

Race nations divisions

Because in recent years race and nationality has come up again and again in conversations, it seems worth making an effort to define some basic notions and divisions that, I certainly knew nothing of before I came to live here.

In the Soviet Union passports carried information on ethnicity: this is no longer so: however all of those races and all of the nations that made up the USSR continue to exist and to play a role in the Russian understanding of the world.

First of all we have the Russians themselves, about 80% of the population. A wise man tends to avoid notions of purity, but in general a great number of Russians you talk to have varied ancestry. A group of 4 people I spoke to yesterday could count Russian, Azerbaijani, Polish, German, Ukrainian, Tartar, and Jewish elements in their ancestry. Then, when you come to look at non Russians, it helps to divide things up with some binary divisions. After a while one is tempted to draw Venn diagrams.

Westerners/Ex Soviet

I am English, and so foreign in a way that the Uzbek people living and working in the city are not. The complex and ancient “Russian and the West” issues continue to matter, and, we westerners are seen in various ways, but these are more cultural than ethnic understandings. After a decade and a half here I am still to some extent a visitor: no one ever begrudges my poor Russian as they might resent the lack of Russian of other ex-soviets.

“Some of these French people can’t speak Russian” is not a phrase I’ve ever heard, replace “French” with anyone of a number of post-soviet nationalities and it is otherwise. Or consider the following exchange: I was standing by the lift in my apartment building with a neighbor, a young, dark skinned guy of Caucasian origin, though a third generation Russian Immigrant. As we were standing waiting for the lift we were looking at the fresh graffiti on the wall saying “Russia for Russians” and as he looked at me with a weary smile I said “That’s for me yeah?” He was still chuckling as we left the lift five floors up. I am never accused of stealing their jobs and chasing their women, though I have clearly done both.

Slavs/non Slavs

The non-Russian Slavs most evident here are Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Moldovans. To most Russians they are seen as essentially the same people as the Slavs inside the boundaries of Russia, and, for me, being in eastern Ukraine a few years back was indistinguishable from being in Russia for as it was for the Russian friends I was with. A young Moldovan guy told me recently, he had said in company that he was not Russian and all of the folk around him had said warmly: “of course you are”. Basically the boundaries on the maps feel to most people to be no more than just lines.

Inside Russia/ outside Russia

Some groups such as Dagestanis, Chechens, Tartars are people of republics within the border of the Russian Federation, others such as Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and the numerous central Asians are not, though all are ex-soviet peoples.

Muslim/Christian

Georgians, Armenians, the other Slavs and the Baltic states are primarily Christian countries, at least in the sense that they, like Germany, or England have a Christian heritage. Azerbaijan, Chechnya and the central Asian states amongst others, are Muslim.

Caucasian/non Caucasian (meaning here people of the Caucasus region)

Generally the Caucasus region is seen as a space that is defined neither as European nor Asian, in the way that Ukraine is European and Kyrgyzstan is Asian. This is not about geography, but perception: I remember 20 years ago travelling around Eastern Europe, we would arrive in town after town and find tourist brochures telling us we had come to the very place where “East meets West” until finally it struck us that there is no point on planet earth where east does not meet west, not north, south. There is something of that in the Caucasus of Russian perception.

All of this is obviously skimming the surface, and anthropologists, or even a Wikipedia writer can tell you there were over 100 distinct ethnic groups in the USSR, or that Dagestan alone has over thirty language groups. But, just as I can’t describe every nuance in a blog post, most Muscovites don’t think on such a complex level in day to day life any more than Greeks or Canadians do. That said, as a basic categorization of what people here are understanding when they speak of nationality, or race etc, I am confident it’s pretty much right.