In Londongrad
Peter Pomerantsev
Russians love living in London: Berezovsky and Abramovich fight it out in a London court room, the Lebedevs buy the Standard and the Independent, minted Sashas and Pashas fill up the public schools, Russian hipsters spliff on London Fields, Russian shoppers throng Selfridges, Russian middle-class professionals walk their tots in Primrose Hill. London is known as ‘Londongrad’ or ‘Moscow on the Thames’; Russian media call it ‘Russia’s premier city abroad’ and even talk about ‘misty Albion’. Skinny bohemians and fat bureaucrats sip overpriced bitter at ‘Olde Englande’ theme pubs in Perm and Ekaterinburg; there’s a boy band called ‘Chelsea’ and Russia’s best alternative rocker has a song called ‘I dreamt of the sky above London’. Tell a certain kind of Russian you’re from the US or Germany and they’ll shrug; say you’re from London and they’ll sigh wistfully the way some Americans once did about Paris.
But there’s a flip side. During the Putin era, Britain has become an object of political derision and paranoia. Pro-government media rant about the nefarious Englishmen who ‘have always looked to destabilise Russia’; Putin invokes Kipling and castigates the ‘men with cork helmets’; Luke Harding, a British journalist, was denied access to Russia; when the KGB wants to pick a fight with ‘foreign spies’, British diplomats are accused and expelled.
Politically, Britain has a reputation as the home of liberty, the antithesis of Russia’s authoritarian tradition. In tsarist times Russian liberals based themselves in London; in Soviet times Russians who wanted uncensored news secretly tuned in to the World Service; today those who fall out with Putin, such as Berezovsky, instinctively flee to London. The place is fetishised by liberal Russians and loathed by advocates of the authoritarian tradition. But dissidents make up only a tiny percentage of anglophiles. Many of the Russians in London make their money in Russia and work hand in glove with the Putinoids. But they want their children to go to British schools, and keep their money in British banks and property. There’s a sense that Britain, unlike Russia, is inherently stable and reliable. The Russian idiom ‘as safe as an English bank’ isn’t ironic.
One reason for the widespread anglophilia is that many of the most popular TV shows in the 1970s and 1980s were beautifully produced adaptations of 19th and early 20th-century British writers: Brandon Thomas, Stevenson, Charles Snow, Priestley, Chesterton, and a terrific version of Sherlock Holmes. This is the TV that Russians who still remember the USSR grew up on, and their ‘light’ reading was full of Walter Scott, Dickens, Galsworthy, Jerome, Kipling. The historian Kirill Kobrin has called the phenomenon ‘late Soviet Victorianism’. One reason for it is that during the Brezhnev ‘stagnation’, most Russians privately stopped believing in Soviet myths and identities. Anglophilia offered a covert way of reconnecting to pre-revolutionary social forms officially censured by the ruling ideology.
Under Putin, the nostalgia has come out of the closet: members of the new Russian elite obsessively try to trace their family trees to pre-revolutionary aristocrats, and ape their manners; in international relations, Russia now thinks of the world in terms of 19th-century spheres of influence and great power politics. In this hyper-real recreation of the 19th-century worldview, Britain resumes its role as the ultimate imperial rival. So England is adored for allowing Russia to reconnect to its 19th-century identity, but then hated when a version of that identity is performed in the political sphere.
Comments
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/12/moscow-election-protests.html
All the same (still according to his own account), a week after his 'expulsion', Harding was again offered a visa. But by this time he was so freaked out by what are frankly fairly normal occurrences (he describes coming home to find that he, or someone else, had left a window open, and being scowled at by a middle-aged woman), that he voluntarily decided to return to the UK. All of the relevant passages appeared in excerpts from his book published in The Observer: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/23/luke-harding-russia
Don't get me wrong, terrible things happen in Russia, and some journalists have been killed for what they have uncovered (although the idea that killings have been ordered by the Kremlin is fanciful -- the issue is that the warlords and business interests upset by these reports are beyond the reach of the corrupt and ineffective police and judiciary). But Luke Harding is a victim above all of his own imagination.
As to the broader point, Britain is regarded with some suspicion for a number of reasons, some of which have a reasonable foundation (you don't mention the widespread perception that Berezovsky is a criminal being harboured by the UK and hence protected from prosecution).
But the USA will always be the foreign enemy that really touches a nerve. That is why this week, Putin has been highlighting US funding of many Russian pro-democracy groups (the fact that there is widespread US funding is not disputed -- the only question is whether you see that as perfectly legitimate support for NGOs, or as an illegitimate form of foreign interference in domestic politics). It is no great surprise that at a time of crisis, Hilary Clinton is a scapegoat with a bit more popular resonance than William Hague. Hague's lightweight status is an apt reminder that post-imperial Britain is a much less important player than some like to think.
Also I'm not convinced by your take on the visa infractions. It's probably actually advantageous for the Russian government to issue visas with conditions which journalists will routinely break, because then they have an easy excuse to target those of them that they don't like. If, as Harding claims, other journalists on the same trip did the same as him, then I can't how he could be seen as anything other than 'unfairly targeted.'