Mother Russia

Recent murders of those who criticise Putin would seem to indicate I was ridiculously optimistic about the man.




I recently received an email from a friend of mine working in the Russian Media, specifically in Samara. I believe that the place has just elected a Communist mayor (to the immense chagrin of the government; I believe the chap has had to suspend his membership of the Communist Party. Oh how times have changed.) but I may be mistaking it for one of a million other places in a country that, until recently, represented nothing more than a vast amorphous blob on the map. Well...that's not strictly true actually. It also represented secrecy and fear, sleepless nights consumed with worry about "The Bomb" and when (that's when, not if) it would be dropped because simply everyone in the UK knew that the USSR/Russia (ignorance being what it is, the terms were interchangeable) wanted nothing more than to bomb us out of existence. Of course, now that I come to think about it, no one knew why...

It's none of those things now of course. Well, if it is it's to a much lesser degree, but it's not that long since information about Russia and the USSR was defined by the lack of it. Up to age 10 I can remember the news reports that concerned the nations east of the Iron Curtain. They were always speculative rather than based on any hard facts, and invariably an expert on Soviet thinking was wheeled in to try and give an interpretation on whatever little tidbit of information had come to light. Having been raised on a diet of Spy films such as James Bond, I always imagined that this piece of information had only been won at the cost of the life or liberty of a brave spy or defector and so I was generally rapt with attention as some self important fart explained how the Godless Communists were Up To Something.

I actually became rather good at USSR news interpretation myself; any announcement that any dignitary had a cold was a sure sign that the person in question would soon be shuffling off this mortal coil. When Premiers Chernyenko and Andropov (apologies for misspellings) developed such a condition, everyone braced himself or herself and the media did their (actually quite pitiful) best to guess whom the successor would be. Yet we never even knew exactly when they did die. I remember waking to Breakfast news many moons ago to find Nick Ross looking seriously into camera and intoning the rhetorical question "Is President Chernyenko dead or not?"

This of course seems absurd nowadays. With the advent and advance of mass media communication one can make a decent stab at guessing what time any given world leader went to the toilet, never mind whether he or she is still drawing breath. But back then the only thing we had to go on was Russian radio and television; specifically the fact that they had apparently been playing sombre music all day. So either the premier was ill, the premier was dead, or the entire Soviet nation was suffering from a hangover so colossal that the premier had ordered slow music until everyone had had a chance to have a fried breakfast and a cup of tea. As there had been an announcement some weeks early that President Chernyenko was suffering from a cold, I knew that the poor man had joined the ranks of the dearly departed and a few days later I had the smug satisfaction of being proved right.

And that was pretty much the pattern for the 80's. The east was inaccessibly and so the media concentrated on the west, specifically America. Denied the chance to take any cultural influences from Russia et al due to a mixture of anti communist feeling here, and a perceived veil of secrecy there we embraced American culture with open arms. Today almost all of our slang terms, marketing ideas, TV programs and program ideas etc. spring forth from America. The only example of Russian culture influencing English media that springs to mind is, regrettably, A Clockwork Orange. The gang in this book speaks in slang called Nadsat, a mixture of Russian and English phrases. This sounds outlandish to us today, but if one were to stop and think about the amount of Americanisms used in our day to day speech one could see just how strong the Western influence is. The language of A Clockwork Orange is, in my opinion, an example of the way we might speak today had East been given an equal chance to West in our media.

The dawn of the 90's and the events in the East were always seen as a great victory for the Western Way of Life as far as the media in general were concerned. We heralded the collapse of Communism and looked forward to the former USSR taking it's place on the world stage as an equal partner (well...I did anyway). Not least amongst my own personal causes for celebration was the end of the Cold War and an end to the constant, almost paralysing fear of a Nuclear War. Later events were to prove me almost 100% wrong on this particular issue. I had thought that the end of the Soviet Union would mean an end to 2 superpowers threatening each other with Mutually Assured Destruction. In that respect I was correct. What we instead got was about 9 nations with Nuclear Weapons, all of which were pointing here, there, and everywhere. If I was rigid with fear beforehand, I should by rights have been comatose with terror now.

This was not the case though. Instead of the media calmly and neutrally scaremongering about the threat of Nuclear War as they had done in the 80's, a new tactic was used. Whilst before Russia was regarded with fear, hostility and suspicion it was now gradually becoming regarded with a certain derision, head-shaking amusement, and a few condescending smiles. And suspicion. What had caused this change in the media view of Russia? Two words; Boris Yeltsin.

Actually, that's not entirely true. When the Emergency Committee usurped Gorbachev, the world held its breath. Seemingly we were about to plunge back into the Cold War years with the added bonus of political instability in the East as well as the aforementioned fear etc. The media in the West then saw Yeltsin as hero, certainly. When he stood up to the tanks in the streets he took on an iconic status similar to that held by the poor brave Chinese gentleman who, armed only with his briefcase, stopped a column of tanks from attacking the protesters in Tianamen Square. When he replaced Gorbachev the media swept the fact that the handing over of power was not entirely seamless, and any chords of unease about the mans ability to actually run the country were treated dismissively by those in the know.

In fairness to him, it was a while before he became regarded as an unstable semi-alcoholic liability. Not because of any statesmanlike actions on his part, but mainly due to a combination of the goodwill felt toward him after the Emergency Committee debacle, and partly because of the actions of Vladimir Zhiranovsky or "Mad Vlad" as he was christened here.

Here was a man who punched his political opponents on air, who made grandiose plans to invade Europe and annex Japan, and who held his party conference in a strip club. I think it was his actions that broke the ground for the western media to really belly laugh at the Russian Leadership (though not the Russian People; I think the English have an inherent respect for any nation that can effortlessly drink so much).

So despite the fact that Russia still had the capability to blow the world up about 4 times over, and despite Yeltsin's alarming love of having the big red button with him at all times of the night and day no matter what his relative sobriety, the media regarded Russian Politicians with an undisguised contempt and brevity. We in our turn began to laugh at them. I think in part this has to do with all of those years of nuclear fear; if we didn't laugh now we would surely cry.

And so here we are now in the 21st century. The Eastern media seems to the casual observer to be working in much the same way as the Western, with some sections slavishly devoted to a political stance, others funded by questionable sources, some with an iron hard integrity that usually translates into insufferable self righteousness. Putin is the president and the Western laughter has stopped. The general view of him seems to be that he is a good man for Russia, but this view is tempered by an air of unease as that is what the chattering classes said of Hitler in the 30's. The Chechen War (as it is known here) seems to rumble on, but in truth there is little news about it. Despite the fine words and high ideals we supposedly hold, it would seem that we care little for the implications of Russia putting it's house in order. And so we ignore the few reports on it that are actually deemed newsworthy by the West.

Yet despite this, there may be a light breeze of change blowing in our media. With Dubya on the throne in the US we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being allied to a moron who will act unilaterally and demand that the rest of the world follow suit. Doing in fact exactly what the media spent so long warning us the USSR would do. As President Putin tentatively begins to sound out his traditional allies concerning opposition to the US Missile Defence Shield, can it be too much longer before we in Europe find that we have a lot in common concerning that issue and perhaps make overtures of our own? And if we find concord on that issue, could there not be others? As in everything, time will surely tell.