This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column Who should pick the leaders of our political parties? Those parties, or a bunch of journalists? The answer seems simple to me. I don’t like the Labour Party, but it represents an important strand in British opinion. If its members choose Edward Miliband to lead them, according to their own rules, then that is their affair. The same goes for the Tory Party. In the days when Conservative leaders were still picked by the party rather than by the media, Iain Duncan Smith was fairly elected. The media later played a major part in the campaign to destroy and overthrow Mr Duncan Smith in a democracy-free putsch. Michael Howard, and later David Cameron, were anointed by jour nalists and chosen by them. In fact it was the absurd and well-organised adulation of Mr Cameron by the tiny clique of political writers and broadcasters that thrust this obscure Young Liberal into Downing Street. Now the same clique are enraged by the refusal of the Labour Party to do what they told it to, and had in many cases wrongly predicted that it would do. Most of last week’s coverage of the Labour conference was an extended scream, from the jour nalists’ playpen, of ‘Waaaah! We wanted David and you picked Ed! How dare you! We’ll get you for this!’ And they will, you just wait and see. A dull, flaccid speech by David Miliband was lauded as if it were some mighty oration by David Lloyd George or Abraham Lincoln. A dull, flaccid speech by Edward Miliband was sneered at as if he were barely coherent. This was much like the treatment, some years back, of David Cameron and David Davis by the same people. Everyone said the same thing.All opinions, in our supposedly varied and competitive Press, were the same. Ever wonder how this happens? And so it will continue. David Miliband’s petulant walkout from politics is treated as a heroic Shakespearean tragedy. Everything Edward Miliband does from now on will be a blunder or a gaffe. Every tiny quarrel will be magnified into a split the size of the Grand Canyon. Unflattering photographs of him (not difficult to find) will be chosen in preference to kinder ones. It’s a scandal. And this is only half of it. The other half is that this media clique, most of whose members make the average sheep look like a forceful individualist, are all agreed that the key qualification for being in office is that you must agree with them, Sixties liberals almost to a woman. Yet they are utterly unaccountable. Parliament is transparent and the Labour Party electoral college a model of democracy by comparison. It is time somebody told these people that they have too much power and not enough responsibility. New Labour is dead? Oh, ha ha. New Labour is alive and living in No 10 Downing Street, and all the happier because so many Tory dupes haven’t noticed that Blairism continues, pink in tooth and claw, to ravage what’s left of this country. Emma Thompson is right to worry about the verbal bindweed that is choking the English language. The power of speech is the main thing which distinguishes us from the animals – a point brilliantly made by C. S. Lewis in his Narnia books. It is closely linked to the power of thought – the thing which actually makes us people instead of highly sophisticated robots. If you cannot speak clearly and with expression, then your thoughts will also be muddy and half-formed. And if you allow fashion to dictate the way you talk, taking your style from the TV and the internet, you surrender your mind to conformism. Hardly anyone actually reads George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, though lots of people think they have. If they did, they would find that at the core of the Big Brother society is Newspeak, a language designed to make most things unsayable, and so unthinkable. Who would have thought our society would have volunteered to vandalise one of the most expressive and beautiful languages that ever existed? I visit lots of dictatorships, where I expect this sort of thing and put up with it because it’s their country. But here at home I enjoy the absence of such snooping. So I politely but firmly declined. ‘But it’s our company policy,’ intoned the check-in person, as if this trumped thought or reason. Actually it isn’t Hilton company policy. I’d faced no such demand from their Liverpool hotel the week before, or at the many American Hiltons I’ve stayed in. But in any case I replied: ‘Well, it’s my policy that I don’t accede to such requests.’ I pointed out that they had no lawful right to do this. And after a minute or two a deputy manager was produced who said I could check in anyway. Great. But I know several other people meekly submitted to this police-state demand. Which is why, five years from now, we’ll all be doing it everywhere and another bit of liberty will have gone for good, because it was too much trouble to save it. The masked avengers of the Metropolitan Police’s firearms squads scare the pants off me. It’s not just the street-fighting gear they sport, clothes designed to give the wearer a feeling of irresponsibility. It’s not just the IRA-style facewear. It’s not just the huge numbers of them – enough to invade Sierra Leone once the Army’s been disbanded by George Osborne. It’s not even the anonymity most of them are granted, like something out of the Middle Ages. It’s the fact that nobody notices. Liberal fanatics abolished hanging in this country nearly 50 years ago. Yet when we had the gallows, our police were unarmed. And if the state wanted to kill someone, it could only do so after a jury trial, an appeal and the chance of clemency. This was called ‘obscene’ and ‘barbaric’. The latest propaganda for the non-existent complaint ‘ADHD’ was torn to shreds on Radio 4’s Today programme by Oliver James, despite highly unhelpful interruptions by the presenter Justin Webb, who gave the pro-ADHD spokeswoman a free run. ‘Evidence’ of a genetic link is nothing of the sort. Even if it were, the fanatics who want to drug normal children and excuse our society’s selfish, horrible treatment of them, have to solve this problem. How can you have a ‘genetic link’ to a complaint for which there is no objective diagnosis? What is it linked to? I think these policies are wrong, and the slogans which sustain them are barriers to thought. And it is thought that I hope to promote. It's my job, and Edward's. Why else did he and I make those chilly, alarming, thrilling journeys into the dark east in 1989, from which we've never really returned? If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down. You do wonder, looking at these people, whether they have left their lunchboxes at home. Ed himself, with his wide, wide eyes and look of perpetual surprise, seems particularly in need of a mother's love and care. If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down.
02 October 2010 7:31 PM
Why should these bleating sheep decide who runs the Labour Party?
A Brief History of Crimea
Is Ed really Red? And other questions
Sunday, 3 October 2010
Emma is right... verbal bindweed’s throttling English
Stopping at the Hilton, en route to a police state
How does a free country become a police state? With your help. I arrived in Manchester last Sunday and checked into the Hilton. There, having given my credit-card details, I was asked for ‘photo-ID’.
So this is Liberal Britain: execution by masked gunmen
Now we have a heavily-armed police force whose members, masked like Henry VIII’s headsmen, deal out death as helicopters thunder overhead – no jury, no judge, no appeal. And those who said capital punishment was wicked refuse to see the connection. Oh, and please note the crazed, shotgun-wielding barrister Mark Saunders was taking ‘anti-depressants’ – another connection everyone refuses to see.
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My old friend Edward Lucas of 'The Economist' has responded to my article about Sevastopol with a vehement (his word) rebuttal on his blog. A search engine should find it under ‘Economist, Eastern Approaches, Peter Hitchens’, or you can click here.
I have submitted the following reply there, and am displaying it here too.
My thanks to Edward Lucas for a serious response to my article about Ukraine. I have a high opinion of Edward, whose courage and indispensable help in Prague in 1989 I will always remember. I have been fascinated, ever since, by the different courses taken by many of the reporters who experienced the extraordinary and exhilarating period which ended the Soviet Empire. I have watched with great regret the miserable slide of Russia into autocracy and corrupt squalor. I have also wondered if this could have been avoided. And I have been troubled by the way in which the newly-free nations of Central and Eastern Europe have all too often become subjects of a new supranational project, their brief independence blotted out in a new world which has little time for national sovereignty.
I don't think I have a soft spot for big countries. But I did live in Moscow for more than two years, and learned there to separate Russia, its people and culture, from Russia, state and power.
I am well aware of the wretched story of the Krim Tatars. But I did not (and do not) think it had much bearing on the point I sought to make.
Edward goes on to doubt my contention that many Ukrainian inhabitants would prefer to be Russian. He says:
‘It would be nice to see some polling data to support that. (None exists).’
I too would like to see such data. If it doesn't exist, then that is presumably because it has not been in the interests of anyone rich and powerful to obtain it. Polling - as Edward surely knows - is a device for influencing opinion, not a device for measuring it. From my own experience, I am confident that 'many’ (I shouldn't have been that vague if percentages were available) Ukrainian inhabitants would rather be Russian, particularly in the Crimea and in the Eastern part of the country.
He also says that my contention that Mikhail Gorbachev ‘had kindly dismantled the communist machine’ is ‘insulting to the millions of people who through their own bravery and vision helped overthrow the evil empire.’
Debaters should beware of people who claim to be 'insulted', by an idea that disturbs their own certainties. This sort of language is the enemy of cool reason. Is Edward saying that Mr Gorbachev's actions were not significant, and quite possibly decisive? Had he (or another leader) chosen the path of isolation, repression and massacre, what would have happened to those millions? Would the famous 'Velvet Revolution' we witnessed in Prague have taken place without his blessing, or the collapse of the East German regime? The Tiananmen option was available, and was very nearly used in Leipzig. I think we can credit Gorbachev with many things, while acknowledging his indecision and flaws as well.
Then he is cross about my remark that: ‘We sponsored annoying mini-states next door to Russia.’
He chooses to interpret this thus: ’Mr Hitchens appears to be arguing that they should have stayed inside Russia, volens nolens, and that the West should not have lifted a finger to help them.’
That's how it may appear to him. I cannot help that. But it isn't actually what I say, or what I think. As one who was present during the January days and nights in Vilnius in 1991, when the KGB murdered a number of Lithuanians and I found myself looking directly up the barrel of a Soviet tank, I don't take this view. I was interested in Baltic independence in the days when most people in the West had never heard of these places, and I am haunted to this day by the description of the deportations in Czeslaw Milosz's 'The Captive Mind', as well as by the nasty modern KGB violence I saw in Vilnius (and Riga). But it seems clear to me that the long-term independence of these tiny states is endangered, not protected, by bringing them into NATO. Russia's interest in them is, was and always will be strategic. If Russia believes they are likely to be bases for a hostile alliance, then it will seek to undermine their independence.
I have no idea what NATO's real purpose is since it completed its mission in 1991, except perhaps as the provisional wing of globalist interventionism. There are few places further from the north Atlantic than Afghanistan. But I can see without much difficulty why Russia regards this organisation as implicitly hostile to it. Nor do I think the Baltic countries necessarily benefit from abandoning their new-found independence to the EU, which steals the sovereignty of all the nations it absorbs. It seems to me that these countries would be better off outside both these bodies, and outside the Russian empire as well. It is this possibility that Edward and his fellow 'New Cold War' advocates repeatedly deny.
As for the 'annoying' bit, I was thinking much more of Georgia, which has been encouraged into foolish sparring with Russia by various Western politicians and thinkers. How can this policy be sustained? Who benefits from it? What purpose does it serve, save to strengthen the arguments of Great Russian Chauvinists in the Kremlin? Long after the USA (and the EU) have lost interest in the Caucasus, Russia will still be there. Claims that this policy forms part of some sort of campaign for liberty and democracy in former Soviet states are deflated by the Anglosphere's continuing support for the extraordinarily nasty regime in Azerbaijan, and by its similar closeness to some of the more squalid dictatorships in Central Asia.
Edward simultaneously quotes and dismisses another writer who suggests that I am part of some Russian PR effort. Well, if Edward thinks this is tripe (as he does, and as it is) he would have done better not to quote it at all. But it gives a hint of the sort of overheated reaction which the New Cold Warriors have to any suggestion that their actions and attitudes might have helped to create the Putin autocracy - which I happen to think they did, by bullying and belittling Russia, and flooding it with spivs and snake-oil purveyors after 1991. The very word 'democracy' is gravely discredited in Russia, thanks to the experiences of normal people in that period.
As for my 'alternative', I don't really offer one, except caution, modesty and the avoidance of hubris. Alas, the damage is largely done. I merely point out that the conventional wisdom is mistaken, that the open-mouthed sycophantic coverage of such events as the 'Orange Revolution' has done us no favours, and that the future in this part of the world is far from settled and we should perhaps prepare for further turmoil rather than imagine that we have opened a Golden Road of peace and prosperity for ever. Is it sensible or right, ever, to force a language on people who don't want to speak it? Is Ukraine, as at present constituted, a viable polity? Are the Anglosphere nations right to treat Russia as a perpetual threat and pariah long after its global ambitions have collapsed and its military power has rusted away? Its regime is miserable. But then so is that of China, with which we seek good relations.
I'll once again point out to the people who claim that I have no knowledge of policing, crime prevention etc that I have written a book on the subject, involving plenty of factual research into the operation of the English criminal justice system and the police. Those who claim I know nothing of the matter are therefore simply mistaken. Whatever they may wish to say against me, this is something they cannot say, unless they have read the book and wish to challenge the validity of my research. The fact that they disagree with my conclusions does not mean that I am ignorant, merely that they disagree with me. The reasons for their disagreement are almost certainly explored in the book.
It was, as I have pointed out before, originally published as 'A Brief History of Crime' and then (with two chapters removed and one added) reissued in paperback as 'The Abolition of Liberty'. Those genuinely interested should have no difficulty in obtaining it through libraries or bookshops. Those who are not genuinely interested will of course not read it, because they already know they don't like it. But they really can't go about claiming I don't know the subject.
Likewise Mr 'Un', who I think may in reality be 'Miss' Un. People who try to tease or provoke me by going on and on about my brother Christopher reveal more about themselves than they do about the subjects I seek to discuss here. I have been candid in several articles about my disagreements and other quarrels with my brother, and have nothing further to say about it. I am -rather obviously, given the religious basis of our disagreement - constrained in what I say by rules which don't constrain him. I certainly won't be drawn into any criticism of him, when he is, as he is now, seriously ill. I know that some people have neither manners nor taste, and that others are incapable of arguing in a civilised manner. They are allowed to show that here if they wish to do so, but they can't expect much consideration in return.
My contention that we used to be a free and happy country (by comparison with our current state) is only partly measurable by objective methods (I think the shrinking of liberty is pretty measurable, in laws passed and protections destroyed, but happiness is harder to quantify). But it is supported in this book, and in my earlier publication (likewise easily available) 'The Abolition of Britain'. So are the unanimity, and dogmatic hostility towards traditional British customs, liberties etc, of our political class. These questions are extensively described and explained in this book. As I have often pointed out, many of my critics think they have read 'The Abolition of Britain', but turn out not to have done so when questioned on its actual contents. They have instead read hostile reviews of it, and imagined that they have read it. They would learn much if they did read it, which is presumably what they are afraid of.
A lot of hostile visitors to this site would have much more interesting things to say if they would examine my actual arguments in detail (this weblog is merely a shop window for my books, in my view), instead of engaging in lazy caricature and puerile mockery. Whom do they think they are fooling, by misrepresenting and distorting my positions, on a weblog which I write, and where many readers have read my books? They are their only victims.
I welcome disagreement, but only where it comes from someone who has considered my position and taken some care to understand it.
Now to the matter of the alleged 'Red Ed', the youthful Miliband whose election as Labour leader has prompted almost the entire political media. It contains two delusions. The first is that the trade unions are some sort of repository of revolutionary thought, longing to drag the Labour Party back to the days of Militant, Michael Foot etc.
Piffle. The unions have for years been a powerful and effective pressure group, operating mainly through the EU and its regulatory powers, who have under Labour and Tory governments alike suceeded in securing the imposition on this country of extensive and powerful laws on British workplaces, which the militant shop stewards of 30 years ago couldn't have dreamed of.
The idea that the battles of the 1980s - over nationalisation, union power and so forth, are still in progress is likewise nonsense. The left learned form the collapse of the USSR. It didn't learn that it was wrong. It learned that its methods needed revision. Specifically, it learned that direct state ownership of the economy doesn't work. Instead, they turned to regulation, which allows the state an enormous role in the economy, without the direct detailed responsibility required by nationalisation. Most reasonable people, having experienced privatised utilities - gas, electricity, telecommunications etc, can see that the problems of these industries under state control (especially for consumers) were much more to do with monopoly (which more or less persists) than with ownership. And also that there are some industries, notably railways, which only a wholly dogmatic person would privatise. They are plainly better run by the state.
The division between left and right is now really in the areas loosely described as 'sex, drugs and rock and roll', plus of course the use of the education system to impose equality of outcome on its victims. And on the abolition of national sovereignty and its replacement by global or supranational governance, backed up where necessary with liberal military intervention.
In this division, the Tory, Liberal Democrat and Labour Parties are all on the left, signed up to the sexual revolution, the moral revolution, the cultural revolution, comprehensive education, EU membership, etc.
In which case the real problem is not 'Red Ed', but 'Red Dave' Cameron, 'Red Nick' Clegg and indeed 'Red Dave' Miliband, whose political differences with his brother are too tiny to be perceived without a powerful electron microscope.
And that leaves aside the very strange but true development - that the main qualification for high office these days is not experience, but the lack of it.
Imagine some future Brussels edict has finally broken up Britain and handed Devon and Cornwall over to rule by Wales.
Imagine the Royal Navy, much shrunk and renamed the English Navy, being told it has to share Plymouth with a new Welsh fleet; that is, if it is allowed to stay there at all.
Picture the scene as cinemas in Plymouth and Exeter are forced to dub all their films into Welsh, while schools teach anti-English history and children are pressed to learn Welsh.
Street signs are in Welsh. TV is in Welsh. Police cars patrolling Dartmoor have ‘Heddlu’ blazoned on them, banks have become ‘bancs’ and taxis ‘tacsis’.
Meanwhile, Devon and Cornwall are cut off by a frontier from the rest of England, closing down industries with English links, and people are issued with new identity documents with Welsh names.
Utterly mad and unthinkable, you might say. And you would be right. But something very similar has happened in what used to be the Soviet Union, and we are supposed to think it is a good thing – because Russia is officially a bad country, and its former subject nations are therefore automatically good.
Remember how the world’s media reported on Kiev’s ‘Orange Revolution’, which lasted from November 2004 until the following January, with gushing approval?
Remember how you were supposed to think the Orange-clad crowds were a benevolent expression of popular opinion?
Remember talk of a ‘New Cold War’, in which wicked Russia was the enemy and ‘we’, the European Union, were going to extend ‘our’ rule deep into the former Soviet lands?
Well, if there was such a war, we are busy losing it because ‘our’ side is misguided and wrong, and because it was always absurd to try to dislodge Russia and the Russians from the great plains of Ukraine and the shores of the Black Sea.
In this part of the world, Russia just is. You might as well try to shift the Himalayas with a bulldozer.
If you thought that political madness in Europe ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, then you should visit present-day Sevastopol, perhaps the most absurd city in the world.
Sevastopol belongs to Ukraine, but hardly anyone here is Ukrainian. Two rival fleets ride at anchor in its majestic harbour. Two rival flags fly from its public buildings.
But now this absurdity may be – slowly – coming to an end. A few months ago, in a crucial event largely ignored in the West, Ukraine’s parliament voted to give the Russian navy a new long lease on its base in Sevastopol.
This was the end of the flirtation between Ukraine and the West. It was greeted by opposition MPs with showers of smoke bombs and eggs (the parliamentary speaker sheltered under an umbrella, presumably a Russian one).
I am not sorry about this. I always thought that destroying the old Communist Evil Empire was quite enough. Why did we then need to rub Russia’s nose in the mud?
They are an old, proud people and most of them didn’t want to be communists.
As for the defeat, anyone could see it coming. It always happens. Britain’s war in the Crimea in 1854 (launched by a drunken, half-asleep Cabinet in what seems to have been a fit of pique) was officially a victory, but all its gains were reversed less than 20 years later.
So the Charge Of The Light Brigade was not just a blunder. It was a pointless one. Imperial Germany seized Ukraine in 1917, and lost it again the following year. Hitler’s Germany repeated the action in 1941, and we all know how that ended.
Now the creation of a fanciful new country called Ukraine, less than 20 years ago, is running into trouble as many of its inhabitants prefer to be Russian.
So why did anyone think it was a good idea to challenge Moscow, on the same repeatedly lost ground? Why are our airwaves and newspapers still full of scare stories about Russia, when the real danger to our independence comes from the EU, and the real threat to our peace and prosperity comes from rather further east?
Why do commentators still peddle tales of a Russian menace, when Russia is a military weakling, its ill-disciplined forces largely equipped with scrap metal?
I think our treatment of Russia since the fall of communism has been almost unbelievably stupid and crude. We complain now about the autocratic rule of Vladimir Putin. But it was our greed and our bullying of the wounded bear that created Putin and his shady, corrupt state.
We insisted on humiliating the Kremlin, when Mikhail Gorbachev had kindly dismantled the communist machine. We sponsored annoying mini-states next door to Russia.
We pushed the anti-Russian Nato alliance (who else was its target?) ever further eastwards as if there were still a Soviet threat. We flooded Russia with spivs and carpet-baggers, and called this disgrace ‘democracy’. Then we wondered why they didn’t love it.
And still it is fashionable to posture in the think-tanks of London and Washington with babble about the need to ‘contain’ Russia, and to side with self-proclaimed people-power ‘revolutions’ in the capitals of Russia’s next-door neighbours.
And if Russia objects we throw up our hands and gabble that a ‘New Cold War’ is in the making.
No, I am not an apologist for Comrade Putin. I like Russia, and wish it had a better government. I think it would have done if we had been more thoughtful after 1991.
But I am against stupidity in foreign policy, and this has been a particularly foolish, short-sighted episode. Let me show you just how foolish it has been by taking you first to the beautiful Crimean seaport of Sevastopol, once the pride of Russia, now absurdly part of a supposedly independent Ukraine.
I went there long ago, under tight escort and carrying a special permit, because this handsome city of white-pillared buildings, shady parks and mighty warships was then a secret, closed city, the most important base of the Soviet Union’s global navy.
Not any more. Things are better, and things are worse. In two decades, Sevastopol has gone from being a sort of Stalinist Sparta, austere and warlike, to a seaside Babylon of pizzerias and nightclubs.
Nearby Balaclava, once one of the world’s most heavily fortified submarine bases – where the boats hid from nuclear attack in a hollowed-out mountain – is now a rather tawdry seaside resort.
Most of Admiral Sergei Gorshkov’s ocean-going navy has long ago been scrapped and turned into washing machines and razor blades. Now, two navies compete for space in its harbour (designed long ago by a British admiral).
One is Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, a shrivelled remnant that can just about sink a Georgian patrol boat (Georgia has a population of 4.7 million) but which has quietly conceded mastery of the Black Sea to Turkey. And this is supposed to be a threat to the mighty and prosperous West?
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to a man I shall call Yuri, an English-speaking officer of the Black Sea Fleet, who mourned: ‘Yes, I remember when we had one of the world’s great navies – but these days we can’t even challenge the Turks for control of the Black Sea, for the first time in 200 years.’
What’s left of the Black Sea Fleet can be seen tied up in Sevastopol’s harbour. The seductive, sleek lines of the beautifully designed ships can’t conceal the fact that these vessels date from the age of the Ford Cortina and the Boeing 707.
Several of the best-surviving ships now form part of the new, pro-Western Ukrainian navy, which shares the port with Russia – thanks to the wholly unexpected creation of an independent state of Ukraine.
This sublimely silly development meant that Russia’s main naval base was suddenly in a foreign country, and its inhabitants became aliens in their own land. It gets more ridiculous. On one side of the harbour, a fortress bears the slogan ‘Glory to the Russian navy!’ A strongpoint a mile away is adorned with a banner proclaiming ‘Glory to the Ukrainian navy!’
Sevastopol’s deputy mayor, Pyotr Kudryashov, knows all about this rivalry. By an accident of history, his son Sergei, 30, and his daughter Anna, 35, are both serving at sea as naval officers – but Anna is in a Russian ship, and Sergei is in a Ukrainian one.
Both wanted to join a navy, and each joined the one that was recruiting when they graduated. In theory, if the New Cold War ever turns hot, they could be firing missiles at each other. Mr Kudryashov, who thinks such a conflict most unlikely, jokes: ‘They get on very well – just like brother and sister.’
If you stroll down the city’s pleasant, sunny Lenin Street, past the elegant 19th Century naval museum, you will meet officers and men of both fleets strolling by in their crisp uniforms.
The Russians, with their shoulder boards and hats the size of large pizzas, still look very Russian. The Ukrainians, in their crisp khakis, look almost exactly like US navy men on shore leave in San Diego. Both, of course, speak Russian to each other.
But, thanks to the New Cold War, the Ukrainian sailors are supposed to speak Ukrainian. For Sevastopol, officially a Ukrainian city, is not very keen on its new status.
Street signs are still in Russian. When I asked the waitress in a cafe to explain an advertising slogan on the wall to me, she shrugged in an entirely Russian way before replying: ‘How should I know? I don’t speak Ukrainian.’
Yet a few months ago the cinemas in the city were obliged by law to dub all their films, even those in Russian, into Ukrainian – which is slightly more unlike Russian than Spanish is unlike Italian. This only stopped because the cinemas were empty. The schools, though most reluctantly teach their classes in Russian, teach Ukrainian history, often with an anti-Russian tinge.
As Yuri says: ‘It is infuriating for us, to have our children taught about how wicked Russia was.’
One particular annoyance is the hero-worship of the Forties Ukrainian partisan Stepan Bandera. Soviet history dismissed him as a ruthless brigand and Nazi collaborator.
Most modern Russians agree. But the last President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, had Bandera proclaimed a national hero, as popular among Russians here as an IRA parade would be in Protestant Antrim.
For this and other reasons, many Russians, especially navy families, send their children instead to a special Russian school – the best in town – built and paid for by Moscow in what looks to me like a direct challenge to Ukrainian sovereignty.
There is even a branch of Moscow University here. Moscow maintains a sort of embassy in the heart of Sevastopol, cheekily sited not far from a rather provocative statue of the Russian empress Catherine the Great, also paid for with Moscow roubles.
If all this is not ridiculous enough for you yet, meet retired Rear Admiral Vladimir Solovyov, former intelligence chief of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, now in charge of a welfare organisation for retired sailors.
The admiral, a stocky sea-dog type, says with a chuckle that he knows the East Coast of England well, as seen through a powerful telescope.
He was a real Cold Warrior, but now says: ‘I don’t think modern Russia is strong enough to wield power the way the USSR did in the Cold War.’
These days his enemy is different. When this proud Russian recently tried to obtain a residence permit to retire in Sevastopol, he was told that he had been compulsorily awarded Ukrainian citizenship (and was now ‘Volod omir’ instead of Vladimir).
Having gone through hoops to become Russian again, he now has to leave the country every three months – or face being fined for overstaying his permit.
He gets a Russian pension and lives in a Russian-owned flat. In all important respects, he is in Russia – but technically, he is a foreigner. Like many Russians stuck in a newly foreign land, he warns against attempts to turn him into something else.
‘They made a big mistake. We love many things about Ukraine, the food, the music, the culture, the literature – but when it comes to being told to watch films in Ukrainian, they went too far. And we have a right to see our children grow up thinking, speaking and writing the way Russians do.’
It is true that there are plenty of parts of Ukraine where people do feel and speak Ukrainian – mainly in the west around the city now called Lviv (though in the past 150 years it has also been the Austrian city of Lemberg, the Polish city of Lwow and the Soviet city of Lvov – in this part of the world you can move from country to country just by staying in the same place).
But travel east, as I did, to the old coal-mining region of the Don Basin, and you will find out why so many Ukrainian citizens did not support the 2004 Orange Revolution. I went to the decayed town of Gorlovka. Independence has done little for this place.
Cut off from its Russian hinterland and its markets, it is expiring. All around are dead slag heaps and ruined mines and factories, and tragic landscapes of collapse under a ferocious sun.
Gorlovka’s coal mines and chemical works fed the USSR’s industries. Now they are mostly dead and the town – twinned with Barnsley in the Eighties – is nearly as bereft of its traditional industries as its Yorkshire opposite number.
Sad, empty playgrounds are melancholy evidence of a city condemned to die. There is still a statue of Lenin in the main square but on its flanks are scrawled graffiti – a thing I have never seen before in the former USSR. The image of Lenin was once revered, and later hated, but never trivialised by drawings of Bart Simpson.
The mayor, Ivan Sakharchuk, is proud of his treaty with Barnsley and also insists that there are no difficulties with being Ukrainian. I am not so sure. Nobody uses the town’s Ukrainian name of Horlivka.
Many of the street signs are still in Russian. The names of shops are in Russian. The newspapers on sale are in Russian. In the rather smart Cafe Barnsley, the only beer on sale is Russian and the radio is tuned to a Russian station. I suspect the
people are hoping for – and expecting – a Russian future.
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