Why this has to be different

I have been thinking carefully about the direction this Blog is taking and have decided to keep it away from politics. Not because it does not matter. On the contrary. If we take the view that politics and political theory shape and are shaped by ideology which is the reflected by and reflects specific aspects of culture and lifestyle then politics really matters.

There are a billion political Blogs out there some of which will be about Russia and some of which are bound to have greater insight than mine because they are better placed, have greater access to that kind of information or simply a clearer grasp of some issues.

They can also be done while the writer is sipping cocktails in Honolulu.

This is different, I am in situ and I can see, hear, sense, feel the minutiae which make up every day life heree. This is the intrinsic value of these posts. I will have to be your eyes and ears, your senses, more than your mind. Reporting rather than analysing.

There is value in the accumulation of observation which expands way beyond what is simply observed and becomes a snapshot of a cross section of society.

This is where I am of real value. So, I will have to take things from the beginning and try to describe what I see and hear and feel. I am, here, truly a stranger in a strange land and these posts come from another place.

This is why I kept silent while Yeltsin was being mourned and buried. While the outside world reported heavily on Russia about this Russian television kept is as just another event.

In the West we tend to think of Yeltsin as instrumental, hugely important because he brought democracy and much needed market reform to a country which had neither. He was important and he did all that and in the process gave Russia and its people a short, sharp, shock from which they are still reeling.

There is a very real sense that they do not know exactly who they are. They lost the pride they had felt in themselves as a nation and they lost the pride they had had as being unique, outsiders in the great world schema, daring a brave social experiment which would in time succeed no matter what sacrifice they had to make.

Yeltsin transformed them into a failed nation grasping desperately for the dollar and realising, for the first time, that the outside world thought Russia was a sad basket case, a joke. A place of thieves and prostitutes and lawlessness where corruption and connections ruled above anything legal or democratic.

We will ge to that reality now in due course but let's for a moment examine how Russians feel.

Yeltsin may be responsible for taking away the lies they had been told they should believe in and holding up a mirror where the Russian soul looked none too good, but for that the West will remember him with far more kindness than Russians themselves.

They, as a people, had been taught to instinctively reach for each other, foster solidarity and a sense of togetherness because these were ideals. They had been taught to fear individualism, suspect loners and live in a communal way which reflected in everything, from the way they organised their social life to the way they worked at work and lived at home.

In a Communist Paradise where there was no such thing as unemployment there was no reason for anyone not to feel fulfilled. No reason for anyone to feel unhappy or to voice that unhappiness, unless of course, they were sick and needed to be hospitalised.

As a society they had all been conditioned to look out for deviant behaviour, signs of unhappiness and anti-social actions and report them. Were they all happy? Were they all unhappy?

No. I don't think they could have been. But whatever sacrifice was being demanded of them to make was in the cause of a higher ideal. They all truly, really believed that they were building a better world and doing so in bitter isolation from the jaded, imperialistic and decadent West. They truly believed that and that, hard as it may be to understand, also gives us the first clue as to why things are the way they are, why they were the way they were.

If you believe that you will feel both bitter and proud. Bitter perhaps that thinsg are not better, that the outside world does not understand, but proud because as a nation you suffer and this becomes the common, underlying thread that draws everybody together and creates a weird, specific, sense of pride that is hard to explain to outsiders.

Think of a high-pressure kitchen where poorly paid stuff labour under appaling conditions to cater to well-fed, spoiled and demanding clients and yet, even as the deadlines grow shorter and the demands increase the kitchen hands feel a certain sense of pride in managing to deliver, in managing to pull through the pressure together, to work in poorly lit, unventilated conditions and produce a fantastic meal for the demanding patrons of their restaurant, and in their pride, they feel that it will only be a matter of time before other restaurant goers realise just how great this restaurant is and forego going to all the other restaurants where the staff are better treated and better paid because what is delivered here is put together with passion, which makes its deficits overlookable, while what is delivered out there is soulless. The product of bought labour that is performed because the staff in other restaurants need the money, and nothing more.

It was like that here.

And then one fine day a new owner rolled in and told them they did not have to work in the badly ventilated, poorly lit environment of their kitchen. He was knocking down the walls and making it open plan like it was in most of the other restaurants he had seen and they would have to work in the same conditions and produce the same exquisite meals as everyone else. Shortcomings in food quality were inexcusable. Passion counted for nought when patrons wanted clean food and hygiene.

Except he forgot to teach them how. And they had forgotten how to learn.

And with the passion gone they were all suddenly left alone. To perform their job and find new status in a kitchen environment that had suddenly become unfamiliar. One which when examined under the better-lit conditions of the new set up and under the gaze of the patrons, now looked unappealing and incapable of producing anything beyond basic fare because it did not have the equipment and the staff did not have the skills.

Some, the better ones, left to work for other restaurants. And those who stayed, well, they could go nowehere else. But the sense of passion had gone. The solidarity had gone. And the pressure they felt being under, now incapable of being shared, went deep inside. And there it began to fester.

This is how it is.