The Russian affair in Salisbury

Oh, here we go again! The now traditional English sport of demonising Russians has kicked off once more. A Russian poisoned on the law-abiding streets of Britain leads to lurid headlines within hours. Russia responsible for a spy’s poisoning… we’re told. Speculation is rife. Vladimir Putin is quoted as saying that spies will never go unpunished. The deduction is made that Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia are victims of Kremlin vengeance.

Salisbury Cathedral

The police and security services urge caution in attributing responsibility until investigations have led somewhere, and Russia experts do the same, but still Boris Johnson, our really quite bright Foreign Secretary, described Russia as “a malign and disruptive force”. The incident gave rise to a meeting of the national emergency committee, COBRA, although it’s not clear to me at least in what way it is a “national emergency”. However, one thing that’s clear is that it’s in the Government’s interest that this story should run and run, as it brings to our headlines a tale of espionage and intrigue which does a great job in covering the incompetence of our Brexit negotiations, the imposition of a young dictator as a royal lunch guest and the cardboard thin presentation of, for example, its house-building initiative. No doubt we are in for days of speculative journalism and counter-terror activity that will be useful in giving an appearance of governmental activity.

Russia is a very convenient cockshy. Russian sportsmen are the targets for doping scandals – for example, did you know there were four competitors disqualified for doping from the Winter Olympics, from Japan, Slovenia and Russia? The ones we heard about, of course, were the Russians. I’ve written before about the sophisticated use of TUEs (Therapeutic Use Exemptions). I’ve no doubt that more than a few honoured athletes and coaches from wealthiest nations know how to play that system.

However there’s a more significant aspect to this convenient "malign" narrative. The more you demonise someone the harder it becomes to recognise your common humanity. The harder it becomes to remember that Russia is the country that paid the highest price in defeating both Napoleon and Hitler, and to remember that this is the nation that launched both Helen Sharman and Tim Peake into space and brought them safely back. This is the nation that gave us Tchaikovsky and sublime ballets, Rachmaninov and haunting orchestral music and Shostakovich and Stravinsky. It’s the homeland of Pushkin, Chekhov, of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, of Solzhenitsyn and Akhmatova, Kandinsky and Chagall. All right, it’s the land of borsch and frozen steppes. But perhaps most of all it’s the land of the gulags and the unparalleled history of courageous dissidence.

If you start with a demonic presuppositions, you will miss the human and see only the sinister, even in the good. You will engender fear and antipathy in the other side. And you will interpret the resulting defensiveness as aggression – and so begin a vicious cycle endangering them and yourself.

St Petersburg, Church of the Resurrection

From my limited experience of Russian people, they are very like me, albeit a bit braver. Shylock, the Jew demonised by the Christians in The Merchant of Venice, should surely have taught us what common humanity means?

“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”

I suggest that our Russian xenophobia is as unpleasant and unproductive as the Venetians' anti-Semitism in Shakespeare’s play. It may be politically convenient, but it will not lead to a more just and peaceful world.