a bonobo humanity?

just some blokes

As a generalist sort of pseudo-intellectual in quiet and calm Australia, I’m tossed between the best and the worst stuff to focus on, mostly in the top hemisphere of our planet, as if I know which way is up. War and Russia and the USA under Frump (talk about the world’s worst-ever own goal), and the grim future with global warming, and the runaway rich-poor gap in so many countries, and the worries over the rapidity of AI developments and who’s controlling them, and then JWST (no longer Just Wonderful, it seems) and the future Nancy Grace Roman and all the exoplanets to come into our purview, and dark matter as structure or whatever, and the Hubble Tension, and gravitational lensing trickery, and then back down to Earth and its rubisco abundance….

So I’m re-reading with difficulty, but also great admiration tinged with annoyance, Eating the Sun, which I’m committed to finishing even without full comprehension, for who has such a thing, but I’m also reading a vastly different book, not as an antidote (for that would require some planning which I’m incapable of), but because I try to contain multitudes, as we all do to some degree (do we?).

The Story of Russia, by Orlando Figes, was published in 2022, so presumably was written, or mostly written, before the current attack on Ukraine, but is of course being read by me with that ‘special operation’ in mind. Needless to say, I despise Mr Pudding as much as I despise Frump, while also realising they can’t help but be who they are. They are the products of very different environments, and have both exploited those environments very effectively indeed.

What I’m learning from Figes, much of which I sort of knew already, is that Russia has long defined itself in opposition to Europe – or rather its leadership has. Russia is vast, and its multitudes contain vast differences, but they’ve never really had a voice, and it seems that they don’t want to, or they don’t know how to. It doesn’t really have a single definable ethnicity, and it defines itself more by class than anything else. The owner class, the worker/peasant class, the political class. It has never experienced anything remotely close to democracy, and I think it has, historically, been more open to, or more easily persuaded by, that vague, hopeful, egalitarian-sounding concept called ‘communism’, in which you don’t even have to vote to be part of the government, somehow or other. The people seem to have been convinced that Europe is their enemy – evil, presumably debauched, and rapacious. Out to get them, to steal their identity, to rub them out as a proud ethnicity. Certainly this is the kind of propaganda that Putin makes use of, but what does that bizarre much-murdering individual really think? For example, he never for a moment believed that Ukraine was full of Nazis, but he did believe that this line would work in Russia. So what does he think of the average Russian, then, and is he correct, or at least close to it? How popular is the bloke? Presumably not as popular as five years ago, but even so…

As I learn, through Figes, of Russia in 1917-1920, with Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Social  Revolutionaries (a different group apparently) and of course Germans, at a time when so much was up for grabs – Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, Finland – when Petrograd, that all-too-European city, was switched out for Moscow, the pride of Russia, as its capital – everything was changing, Tsars gone forever, and supposed freedoms being fought for with ever-increasing brutality by the new men, Lenin, Kerensky, Trotsky and the grotesque Stalin. All seeking to impose something entirely anti-European while looking over their shoulders at the European powers with a weird and dismal kind of love-hate. And that’s a theme, of course, that continues to this day. A kind of spurned lover’s hatred for the west, and a desperate need to find some superiority to cling to. This appears to be Mr Pudding’s obsession, and he really seemed to think that some weakness, or some Old Russian-ness in Ukraine would deliver it to him. He has under-estimated the depth of contempt that Ukraine has for him – for him personally, rather than Russia itself. And of course he has also under-estimated that country’s western advancements and passions, as well as the real difference that separation from the horrors of his regime has wrought. He has absolutely nothing positive to offer Ukrainians.    

One can only hope, for Russia’s sake, that their 73-year-old dictator is their last. They deserve so much better than the thieving, murdering, backward-facing lot that finally emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 80s and early 90s. All that hopeful sense of glasnost and perestroika was brutally shattered. I’ll be interested to read what Figes thinks of Russia’s future in the final chapters of his book. 

Reference

Orlando Figes, The story of Russia, 2022

Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun, 2007