Photo by Jaanus Jagomägi
‘We are about to face Putin, the withdrawal of US military support, American tariffs, and a propaganda assault from the US right – all coming at us at once,’ wrote UK journalist Nick Cohen at the weekend. This was just as Ukrainian forces were launching fresh attacks from Cherkasskoe Porechnoe toward Berdin in the Kursk Oblast.
To think that before all this, before Putin had begun his fruitless march to Kyiv, where UK intelligence by the way now talk of as many as 760,000 Russian casualties, relations between the civilians of the UK and the civilians of Russia were pretty much tickety-boo. Even after the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London and the Skripals in Salisbury, certainly wealthy Russians were still welcome here.
Furthermore, occasional Londoners and Muscovites would walk hand in hand in the pulchritudinous city. Art-loving Brits would witness galleries light up when Russian collectors entered. Gallerists would leave journalists mid-sentence to make their professional beeline. English Premier League football clubs enjoyed Russian largesse. Unloved Scottish country estates, some on their last legs, welcomed Russian-paid interior and garden designers. Even the Waterstones bookshop chain benefited from the Russian rouble. And of course our very own London Evening Standard, after being bought by Russian businessman Alexander Lebedev in 2009, too. And that was just what we knew about.
Even recently, Russians did not so much dominate as assist London with continued global prowess, despite the forefinger and thumb of Brexit having pinched much of the oxygen supply from Europe. To keep this so-called love from Russia going, the UK had one of those Golden Visa schemes, where any investment of at least £2 million ($2.5 million) granted Russians residency here. Slick fashion shops in Mayfair continued to prey upon their Russian clientele just as the bejeweled property agents of Chelsea did. Now, sadly, Londoners squint nervously at the news from Ukraine instead. Mir, as Russians say for peace. Mir!
‘I think Russia is a bad place and Putin a bad person,’ one international businessman said to me recently, before adding: ‘I don’t think Russia is a threat and will likely fragment when oil prices drop soon and their economy cannot keep it all glued together.’ He believed Putin at fault for failing to diversify the Russian economy during nearly three decades of power: ‘The idea that they would invade Western Europe I find laughable. Putin can barely control what he has already.’
Who really knows what is going on? Owen Matthews is good on Russia and recently wrote of Westerners actually fleeing to Russia. Apparently, around 3,500 Westerners have settled there since 2021. Not a huge number but not insignificant either: ‘Of these, 31 per cent are from Germany, 25 per cent from Latvia and the rest, in descending order, from Italy, France, the USA, Canada and Australia.’
Some of our better known writers here have made a bomb over the years courting on the page overly romantic notions of the Cambridge Spies. This even after the bloody revelations about Kim Philby. The Hungarians of 1956, however, we genuinely remembered for their courage, as we did the people of Prague a dozen years later. Even then, though, more than taking sides, was it not the case that some Brits were as interested in the essential ‘otherness’ of this massive tract of land to our East as they were its status as perpetual foe. Extinction of the planet was—and is—simply too much to bear, otherwise. Just as the US held its ground to our West. Even the extensive instrumentals on Bowie’s Low album recorded in Berlin were full of semi-respectful as opposed to hate-fuelled nods to the Cold War.
Given the state of relations today, many Brits would struggle to believe formal relations between London and Moscow actually began as long ago as 1553. To put this into perspective, that was over 220 years before the American colonies separated from British rule. Famously the Brits became close allies to Russia against Napoleon, though later fought each other in Crimea. My own well-leafed copy of The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk brings together nineteenth century Victorian Brits and Tsarist Russians squabbling fiendishly but weirdly admiringly over Central Asia. (Extraordinarily, the last president of Afghanistan backed by the Soviets—Mohammed Najibullah—translated Hopkirk’s book into local Pushtu before being murdered by the Taliban in 1996.) Not forgetting the fact that London for a long time was the go-to place for Russian political exiles and refugees, anyway.
Today my favourite Russian—and now British citizen—is writer Zinovy Zinik. He recently sent me a remarkable piece of writing he had just finished called My Diversities: ‘Like many of my contemporaries of similar backgrounds, I speak and write in two, if not three, languages.’ (Zinovy left the Soviet Union fifty years ago.) Of someone asking him recently where he was from, he wrote: ‘I am aware that the guy is not Professor Higgins—he is unable to trace straightaway my origin by accent; so to cut the game of guessing short, I confess: I was born and grew up in Russia.’
In the same piece, Zinovy writes of plenty Russians living still in London, despite my suggesting otherwise. ‘But no community,’ he adds. He tells us that this is because they are ‘in fear of each other’ and find it difficult to get collectively together: ‘Even if there were a Russian community, I would have done my best to stay away from it. I hadn’t parted with the place of my birth to get stewed in the stale suffocating atmosphere of a small community of my former compatriots. And who, in my interlocutor’s imagination, does this “Russian community” consist of? Bearded Tolstoys and Dostoevskys around the table in the company of Doctor Zhivago and Anna Akhmatova, drinking vodka out of samovar, watching Sputnik in the night sky under the accompaniment of Gypsy guitars and then murdering each other for the sake of some Radiant Future?’
