This is a guest post by Miranda Ingram, a well-known English international journalist. While we all watch in shock the events in Ukraine, this is what she has to say addressing the Russians.
To Sasha, my husband, and your Russian friends – our Russian friends…
Not only the best, but almost all the years of my life have been inseparable from my love of Russia, Russians. Russian-ness.
Those of us who are afflicted call it “the Russian disease”.
I had a mother who talked incessantly about Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn. About Lenin, even. When I was a child, she wrote an essay about Vladimir Ilyich for an international competition and won a tour of the Soviet Union. The local papers wrote about it.
Thus my enchantment with everything Russian was a fait accompli even before my first faltering words when I chose Russian as a second language at school.
I soaked up Russian literature through my teens, took my degree in Russian history and politics, visited the country both as a student and, later, for work.
I moved to Russia!
I got to know every inch of Moscow, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, spent weekends at dachas, swimming in rivers, picking mushrooms in the forest, eating new potatoes and dill and sour cream and berries.
I travelled right across Russia and all over the former Soviet Union.
I married a Russian, for God’s sake.
I have Russian children. Sasha doesn’t like me to say “half-Russian” – ‘they are both Russian and English’, he says.
Since we left Moscow, I have missed Russia more than he does. He calls me part-Russian.
I was with you in August 1991, outside the White House, watching tracer bullets in the sky and cheering for Yeltsin. I breathed that hope and joy that filled the air. ‘In two years, maybe five at most,’ my future husband promised, ‘Russia will be a normal country’.
We laughed; it seemed possible.
Of course, the 90s were wild, then along came Putin with a simple deal. He would put sausages into those empty shops and nobody need bother themselves about what was going on in the Kremlin.
Not rich, by any means, but comfortable, a Russian middle class started to shop at Zara and Ikea, drink Starbucks coffee and watch Netflix on tv.
Just like people all over the world.
A modest professional class also learned to travel, eat oysters, choose French cheeses. Civilised global participants, some of you emigrated - to the States, France, the UK. Some of you stayed. On Facebook, via WhatsApp, in person when possible, you continued to debate politics.
You were appalled by the death of Politkovskaya.
You bemoaned curbs on freedom and wrote articles that were just inoffensive enough to slip past the censor.
You admired, or didn’t admire, Pussy Riot and Navalny.
And now you are in shock. My husband, Sasha, rings Ukrainian friends to apologise even while he can’t take in what is happening.
He is depressed. He feels it is somehow his fault.
Don’t be silly, I comforted. It’s not your fault. We watched the news and grieved together.
And then I snapped. You know what – I turned on him – you are right: this is your fault. All of you - you, Andrei, Mikhail, Sergei, Lev, Alexei, Vasily…
Like the sausage-buying masses, you took your eyes off the Kremlin.
How could you? With your history? With your story?
A few years ago, I wrote a novel set in 1990s Russia in which I despaired that within a couple of years of the defeat of a one-Party state, “ordinary” Russians had already lost interest in politics.
And among you intellectuals, that post-putsch appetite for opening the files and learning the truth about the past quickly waned.
Who wanted to rake through all that?
Yet if you don’t know your past, I argued, what was done to you, how you responded – who you are, in other words – how can you hope to avoid the same mistakes again? Sleepwalking into yet another dictatorship?
This was your job - you, Sasha, and your friends, our friends, I ranted as I smashed crockery and burst into tears.
And you, Sasha, agreed with me, for once. You’re right, you said.
Oh, I don’t blame you New Intelligentsia entirely. I was uneasy with Western boasts of “winning” the cold war. I understood the humiliation of nozhki busha. I was livid at Britain’s spineless response to the Litvinenko murder in the heart of London and Europe’s and the West’s pusillanimous acceptance of Putin’s various annexations.
Nevertheless, I feel cheated. I must be like those true-believing communists who were told in 1991 that what they had believed in all their lives was a cruel joke.
I have loved, admired – romanticised, yes, been frustrated by, of course – Russia nearly all my life. And now those years of belief have been jerked from under me and my hand-woven Russian carpet turns out to be just a moth-eaten doormat.
After a lifetime of extolling the wonder that is Russia – the literature, art, music, science, warmth and that vast, vast nature – I no longer wish to recall my adventures, tell my anecdotes, bring out my photographs and souvenirs, cook Russian food for friends.
Will I be able to love Russia and Russians and Russian-ness again?
And you, does protesting that you “never supported Putin” make your hands feel clean when you introduce yourselves: “I am Russian”?
©M.Ingram 2022 ©publication A.Anichkin
, a book of Anna Politkovskaya's collected articles, comes out at the end of January in 