Russian Notebook

It took me more than three hours by taxi to get from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport to the centre of town. My Bulgarian friend, Ivan Krastev, a shrewd political analyst, describes the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union as one between traffic jams and queues. Queues were tedious, freezing in winter, but sometimes convivial. Traffic jams are just as tedious, warmer, but often lonely. Compared with the last time I was here, in 2001, I notice more ethnic diversity in the streets: dark Middle Eastern-looking faces from the Caucasus, Chinese-looking people from the various Asian republics, an area which a well known American expert once described as Trashcanistan. Moscow is a magnet for poor migrants, legal and illegal. The architecture of Moscow, of all periods, suggests imperial grandeur. Yet the city also feels deeply provincial: no foreign newspapers anywhere, not even in the hotels. Masha, a superb journalist, and her husband Sergei, a brilliant scholar, tell me over dinner that Russians have no common sense of nationhood. The Soviet Union made imperial sense. Russia, to most people, does not. Putin, depicted in today’s paper wearing motorcycle gear, avoids the word for ethnic Russians, Ruski. It excludes too many. He prefers ‘friends’, or ‘fellow citizens’.

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I am here to attend the Global Policy Forum, a conference convened under the auspices of President Medvedev in the old town of Yaroslavl, about 150 miles north of Moscow. We are taken there in a ‘special train’. Along the way, about once every half an hour, young women in blue uniforms enter our compartment to check our names. More uniformed people meet us on the Yaroslavl station platform. There are police everywhere, in a variety of impressive uniforms. For some reason journalists are not allowed to share buses with conference delegates. Ivan Krastev whispers in my ear that this is all for show.