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25 June 2023 ~ Russia Big and Unpredictable You Cannot Help Love It

The Master of Understatement prompts me to comment that the past two days have been the most dramatic 48 hours in recent Russian history. Over here as distinct from over there, the first I heard about the ‘spat’ was when my brother tuned into the internet to check whether he could sue the Fat Busters company for having sold him an expensive tub of tablets that guaranteed to relieve him of 20 pounds in weight in a week but which so far had only succeeded in taking 20 pounds out of his wallet.

Russia Big and Unpredictable You Cannot Help Love It

I don’t have a television set, wouldn’t give one house room, literally, and although my brother has one, he uses it sporadically, as he finds the adverts disturbing (think about it), so, we glean our news mainly from the internet.

On 24 June, I received an email from Olga with two video links to what she described as ‘a mutiny in Russia’. She wrote that she was with two friends watching President Putin’s address on TV to the nation. There was an uneasy irony in the parallel that she drew, the recollection that the last time that she had listened to such an address it had been in the company of the same friends back in the 1990s. She noted that then it had been a different president and that the speech was slightly different, and ended on the foreboding note, “Whatever awaits us next …?”

Whenever a big story breaks, I read news from around the world, preferring not to rely on corporate western media, and then after reading several news bulletins or articles on a specific topic, draw my own conclusions. I did note that the UK media was not crowing as much as one might expect. Had the ‘mutiny’ so-called been favourable to the West, it would have been a different matter, but it was obvious in the absence of champagne corks popping and from the general sense of restraint and reticence percolating throughout the media that a possible outcome to the Russian scenario was not one that they favoured. As I wrote to Olga in the second of several emails that day, for the West it really looks like a case of ‘Be careful what you wish for!’

On Saturday evening, we took a walk across the fields enroute to the local pub. It was a warm night. The sun was low in a clear sky, a burning orange ball, and, with no cloud of which to speak, from the high plateau on which we were situated, we were offered a magnificent sun-drenched view out over a rural landscape that coined the immortal lines, “England’s green and pleasant land.” Descending from the corn fields, we passed through a typical English village, replete with manor houses and cottages so old and established in time that they looked as though they had been planned by nature rather than built by the hand of man.

On the bend, just outside of the village, the local pub was a picture: thatched roof, traditional pub sign, neat and tidy gravelled car park, a small, grassed garden with tables to the front and to the rear a naturally undulating beer garden backing onto open fields.

Sitting there, sipping at our beers, as the sun went to rest and the lights from the pub came on, I became conscious of a surreal distance greater than distance itself between my experience in the here and now and that of my Russian friends.   

I ruminated quietly over the emails that Olga and I had exchanged earlier this evening. I had read an article in the British press in which responding to someone asking if the UK government was urging all British citizens to leave Russia the reply was, we have been instructing British citizens to leave Russia since the outbreak of the troubles in Ukraine.

I wrote to Olga: “Did you know that the UK government has been advising British citizens to leave Russia? No one told me. Anyway, there’s no point in you celebrating. I shall still come back whatever the situation. I’m too old to let it bother me and, besides, it gives me something to write about.”

It was an odd feeling, most bizarre, but I felt as if by being in England I was missing out on history?

However, I knew that there would be at least one bright spark in the pub who given recent events would weigh in with: “Well, so what do you think about Russia now!” The reply I gave couldn’t have been more obvious: “I leave Russia for five minutes and look what happens!”

Copyright © 2018-2023 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

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