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| By sanctioning journalists, the Kremlin admits how much the truth hurts | By sanctioning journalists, the Kremlin admits how much the truth hurts |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| I’ve been accused of ‘anti-Russia narratives’ but Russia has many stories – including resistance against tyranny | I’ve been accused of ‘anti-Russia narratives’ but Russia has many stories – including resistance against tyranny |
| There is a Russian proverb: don’t blame the mirror if your face is crooked. I first came across it as the epigraph to The Government Inspector, Gogol’s 1836 masterpiece satirising corruption and hypocrisy in the provinces of the tsar’s empire. | There is a Russian proverb: don’t blame the mirror if your face is crooked. I first came across it as the epigraph to The Government Inspector, Gogol’s 1836 masterpiece satirising corruption and hypocrisy in the provinces of the tsar’s empire. |
| The phrase sprang to mind last week when I learned that a 21st-century government inspector is displeased with things I have written about Vladimir Putin and his imperial war against Ukraine – the land of Gogol’s birth. This I know because my name has been added to the “stop list”, a growing roster of undesirable elements – politicians, journalists, charity workers, consultants – banned from entering the Russian federation. | The phrase sprang to mind last week when I learned that a 21st-century government inspector is displeased with things I have written about Vladimir Putin and his imperial war against Ukraine – the land of Gogol’s birth. This I know because my name has been added to the “stop list”, a growing roster of undesirable elements – politicians, journalists, charity workers, consultants – banned from entering the Russian federation. |
| The Russian foreign ministry said this was a retaliation for “London’s continued confrontational course” in supplying weapons to “the neo-Nazi Kiev regime”. Since I’m not an arms dealer, my inclusion on the list must be for the subsidiary offence of spreading “anti-Russia narratives”. | The Russian foreign ministry said this was a retaliation for “London’s continued confrontational course” in supplying weapons to “the neo-Nazi Kiev regime”. Since I’m not an arms dealer, my inclusion on the list must be for the subsidiary offence of spreading “anti-Russia narratives”. |
| Presumably, that relates to my characterisation of Putin as a venal despot and ideological crackpot, whose unprovoked attack on Ukraine was as strategically ill-conceived as it was murderous. I can see why the Kremlin’s inspectorate of media narratives might recoil from the sight of such blood-soaked crookedness, but like the proverb says, that’s not the mirror’s fault. | Presumably, that relates to my characterisation of Putin as a venal despot and ideological crackpot, whose unprovoked attack on Ukraine was as strategically ill-conceived as it was murderous. I can see why the Kremlin’s inspectorate of media narratives might recoil from the sight of such blood-soaked crookedness, but like the proverb says, that’s not the mirror’s fault. |
| The statement of sanctions is sinister and absurd. It is written with the combination of bombast and menace that Russians recognise as the idiom of capricious, vindictive bureaucracy with deep roots. It is familiar to generations that grew up in the Soviet Union, steeped in the self-satirising pomp of a thin-skinned power that you can’t take seriously in private but are careful not to ridicule in public. | The statement of sanctions is sinister and absurd. It is written with the combination of bombast and menace that Russians recognise as the idiom of capricious, vindictive bureaucracy with deep roots. It is familiar to generations that grew up in the Soviet Union, steeped in the self-satirising pomp of a thin-skinned power that you can’t take seriously in private but are careful not to ridicule in public. |
| It is older even than that. Gogol was a master at capturing social deformations that arise from a duty of deference to dysfunctional autocracy, holding a mirror up to all the grotesque and preposterous contortions. At the end of The Government Inspector, the disgraced town mayor turns to the audience. “Who are you laughing at?” he asks. “You’re laughing at yourselves.” | |
| The bleak absurdity of Putin’s rule is not lost on Russians, not all of them. But any jokes have to be coded, discreet, transmitted in glances and arch references. The country has a knack for dark humour that tracks its long habituation to repression. It’s one of the traits, first encountered in translation, that made me want to study the language, and then led me to fall in love with the place when I lived there as a student more than 30 years ago. It’s one of the reasons I stay invested in the relationship, albeit now in a condition of forced estrangement. | The bleak absurdity of Putin’s rule is not lost on Russians, not all of them. But any jokes have to be coded, discreet, transmitted in glances and arch references. The country has a knack for dark humour that tracks its long habituation to repression. It’s one of the traits, first encountered in translation, that made me want to study the language, and then led me to fall in love with the place when I lived there as a student more than 30 years ago. It’s one of the reasons I stay invested in the relationship, albeit now in a condition of forced estrangement. |
| I have spent a lot of time engrossed in the works of novelists and poets, giants of world literature to whom monuments are erected and after whom streets are named, who would be denounced for disseminating “anti-Russia narratives” if they were writing today. I have enough Russian friends to know that there are stories other than the ones told by Putin’s propagandists about a president who is the incarnation of heroic national destiny. | |
| I know liberals who have fled their homeland, and more who have retreated to that place of interior exile, where the clear-eyed dissident spirit takes refuge from public delirium. I know there is more than one Russia and that describing atrocities perpetrated by the state is not synonymous with hostility to the people. | I know liberals who have fled their homeland, and more who have retreated to that place of interior exile, where the clear-eyed dissident spirit takes refuge from public delirium. I know there is more than one Russia and that describing atrocities perpetrated by the state is not synonymous with hostility to the people. |
| Dictators always conflate those things. Nationalists always seek a harmonious alignment of governing institutions, ruling party and cultural identity. The regime decides which traits, symbols and opinions qualify as correct expressions of nationhood. Divergence is anathematised as degenerate or treasonous. This might start as a process of narrowing, pinching and whittling to fit the subtle, complex contours of a variegated nation into a rigid doctrinal frame. It soon turns to pressing and beating, hacking away at awkward protrusions of independent thought. | Dictators always conflate those things. Nationalists always seek a harmonious alignment of governing institutions, ruling party and cultural identity. The regime decides which traits, symbols and opinions qualify as correct expressions of nationhood. Divergence is anathematised as degenerate or treasonous. This might start as a process of narrowing, pinching and whittling to fit the subtle, complex contours of a variegated nation into a rigid doctrinal frame. It soon turns to pressing and beating, hacking away at awkward protrusions of independent thought. |
| As nationalism turns more radical it tends inevitably to violence, first rhetorical but soon physical. Disloyal thought must be excised. The seditious imagination must be suffocated. Political opposition must be cast as the pawn of nefarious foreign nations, against whom war must be waged to galvanise patriotic spirit. | As nationalism turns more radical it tends inevitably to violence, first rhetorical but soon physical. Disloyal thought must be excised. The seditious imagination must be suffocated. Political opposition must be cast as the pawn of nefarious foreign nations, against whom war must be waged to galvanise patriotic spirit. |
| Putin has marched Russia a long way down that road, deep into the bloody quagmire in Ukraine. Less documented, also violent but more successful, is the Kremlin’s campaign against Russian pluralism. It is a war on the very idea of Russia as a people whose history transcends the martial cliches trotted out by their banal brute of a president; whose cultural greatness is expressed in the tradition of resistance, not the demand for submission. | Putin has marched Russia a long way down that road, deep into the bloody quagmire in Ukraine. Less documented, also violent but more successful, is the Kremlin’s campaign against Russian pluralism. It is a war on the very idea of Russia as a people whose history transcends the martial cliches trotted out by their banal brute of a president; whose cultural greatness is expressed in the tradition of resistance, not the demand for submission. |
| Maybe I am a partisan of that cause, but it isn’t an anti-Russia narrative. It isn’t the people holding the mirror who make Putin’s regime crooked. Who are you blaming, guys? Blame yourselves. | Maybe I am a partisan of that cause, but it isn’t an anti-Russia narrative. It isn’t the people holding the mirror who make Putin’s regime crooked. Who are you blaming, guys? Blame yourselves. |
| Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist | Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist |
| Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist | Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist |
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