Hiding under the table.............(jk)

The Patriotism of the Beaten Child

It isn't easy to write about Russia. It is like living with a big dysfunctional family with a scarred and tortured past but which has welcomed you into the home and treated you well. It is easy to simplify things and make archetypes, goodies on one side and baddies on the other, but it's much more complex. Any attempt to put Russia into words seems to come unstuck. You have a chunk of words which seem to make sense, which say exactly how you felt about something. But this chunk of words is like a snowball. You put it on the windowsill and it's solid and white, you made it with your own hands. But when you return a bit later it's gone, it's just a pool of water.

It has changed it's form , in the same way that emotions and ideas change their form and depend on the stance you take on a particular subject at one moment. Attempts to express anger, frustration at aspects of Russian life are inevitably followed by "the snowball effect", by a feeling of guilt or sadness that you have somehow tried to put the boot into a man who is already down and out for the count, badly beaten, and that what you thought you were angry about wasn't what it seemed. Usually it's something deep down in ourselves.

It was simply the way you chose to see it. Only a child would expect to put a snowball on a shelf and for it to still be there half an hour later. Adults should be aware of the more subtle ways the world around us and inside us is always shifting. Once, in France many years ago, I saw a man attacking his girlfriend. He had her pinned on a car boot and was punching her in the face. In such situations there should be some hesitation or doubt in a healthy mind about what to do. There should be a voice urging caution about intervening. That voice was there, but nevertheless, my legs in such situations seem to drift of their own free will, like an insticntive reaction, like a cat towards a mouse's tail. As I came close the woman screamed at me to "f*ck off" and mind my own business.

It's a lesson that William Burroughs spoke about when he said "Never interfere in a boy girl fight". The same could be said for domestic rows in the Russian family. Any inlaw who finds him or herself married to a person with a dysfunctional messed-up family, will know the dangers of getting involved in their arguments. It's as if you didn't marry the person you love, but a whole tribe of warring enemies. There are usually those in such families who hate the scenes and rows, the decent peaceful ones who just want life to be quiet and normal, who crave a small corner a million miles away to crawl into and escape the madness. But it is impossible to completely stand outside it. Such families are hyper-sensitive to outside criticism and will band together to defend themselves and attack the aggressor. The more they have suffered , the more they have been through together, the more they have hurt and hated and scarred each other, the more tightly they will band together to defend against anyone attacking from "outside", from "out there".

The Russian experience is something similar. There are many here who are crawling, or trying to crawl, away into the corners. So many young ambitious and usually talented Russians who don't want to start families here, want to leave to work and study in other countries: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, the USA, etc etc. Russia has been haemorrhageing her best people for many generations, and the flow has gushed more since it all fell apart.

Putin has exploited this "us us against them" mentality very well. There is a new kind of patriotism in Russia now which is based on a kind of desperate need to believe that things are not as bad as they seem, and will get better, if we just trust the great hero leader flexing his torso on a stallion with a rifle in his hand.
Russians are not complainers. To whom would they complain? About what? There aren't the structures or avenues for complaint that Western Europe has. Mr Angry is treated badly by a shop assistant in Wolverhampton, or there is a strange smell of sewage in his train station, so he gets home and writes a letter to some public organisation or watchdog or solicitor and some process of complaint is started which may or may not solve the problem, but will, Mr Angry thinks, at least be addressed. If not, he can go higher up, maybe down the legal road. One of my students is a solicitor in a prosecuting office in Moscow. She is very self-effacing, modest and intelligent. She told me: "One of the worst things that can happen to a Russian is to find himself caught up in the Russian legal system, because it isn't about laws or right or wrong or justice, only interests, power and money. You don't stand a chance".

It's like the son who's father came home drunk every night and beat him with a leather belt, but still loves him and protects him when the police come to investigate complaints from the neighbours about the screaming and crying. For children like this, the tears and the pain and the guilt and the pity are love. Their love. The only kind they ever knew.

There are different kinds of censorship in such environments, but the most powerful one is 'self-censorship'. There is no need for the State to apply a great deal of force and control to a population which already has the "beaten child" syndrome, and has already been conditioned not to look father in the eyes when he comes home drunk, that it's safer just to stay out of his way and hide under the table.