The Economist May 31st 2008
Books and arts
Russia
Horses and vodka
Russia: A Journey
to the Heart of a Land and Its People. By Jonathan Dimbleby. BBC Books;
563
pages; £25
SPENDING time in Russia
is a bit like taking the
psychotropic anti-malarial drug Larium: anyone with a propensity to
anxiety
should probably avoid it. Jonathan Dimbleby, an accomplished British
broadcaster, was by his frank admission in a state of considerable
emotional
turmoil when he travelled from the Arctic city of Murmansk
to Vladivostok.
The overwhelming landscape and the people who were often so rude did
not help
his mood, but his responses-awe, horror and frustration-were perhaps
more acute
as a result.
The ugly authoritarianism of
Vladimir Putin's Kremlin
and Russia's
hydrocarbon fuelled diplomatic bolshiness are now well documented.
There are
fewer worthwhile accounts of ordinary life across the vast, eccentric
Russian
continent in the Putin era. Mr Dimbleby's perceptive travelogue is one
of them.
He describes the spookiness of St Petersburg;
the micro cultures (and pointy shoes) of the Caucasus;
the desolation of Beslan; the magic of Tolstoy's country estate; the
ludicrously dangerous roads and dreadful hotels. He captures the way
Russians
are transformed by toasts, the romance of long distance train rides and
the
squalor of train stations. He encounters a Karelian witch, a Siberian
shaman
and wild horses in the Altai mountains.
He
visits a plush Moscow
banya. He drinks a lot of vodka.
Along the way he offers
lively summaries of some of
the key dramas of Russian history, including the exploration of
Siberia, the
tragic nobility of the Decembrists and the unspeakable siege of Leningrad. He
meets the
kind of near-saints that only places with so much bad history can
produce:
suicidally brave journalists in Samara; campaigning environmentalists
in the
Urals; a heroic AIDS worker in Irkutsk.
They vary what might otherwise have become a dismal parade of villainy.
"We steal," a Caspian
sturgeon poacher says,
"and we think nothing of stealing because everyone is stealing." Mr
Dimbleby notes the gangsterism of government at all levels, the brazen
rackets
and the cradle grave corruption that Russians must negotiate to
survive. He
nicely portrays the fatal combination of savage indifference on the
part of the
country's rulers and the enraging fatalism of the ruled. He is
perpetually
baffled by what, to his Western ears, sound like contradictory
attitudes: the
Russians he meets are sophisticated, acquisitive and yet cynical to the
point
of hostility towards democracy. "Crypto-fascist" is his label for the
system Mr. Putin has built.
Mr. Dimbleby loves Russian
literature, and he hears
Tolstoyan and Gogolian echoes as he travels. But he is not a Russia expert (he undertook the journey
for a
BBC television series), and makes some mistakes and simplifications,
over Chechnya
and
the Yukos affair, for example. That, however, is also his book's main
virtue.
His novice's eye sees the moral outrage in everyday injustices-the use
of
malnourished teenaged conscripts as slave labor, say, or the routine
persecution of migrant laborers-to which more practised Russia-watchers
are too
often desensitized. His disgust is mitigated by the fascination that Russia
somehow
inspires too, even in the most sceptical visitor •
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