Not much happens in Russian families without the say so of the babushka. Russia’s high divorce-rate, and a situation where fathers are often absent and the mother out at work, makes it normal for grandmothers – who often hold the family purse-strings – to raise children themselves.
This doesn’t, of course, mean that the younger and older generation see eye to eye: babushka tends not to use the internet or understand modern technology, and might hold conservative opinions radically different from the grandchild’s. Yet there is often a spirit, in the political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann’s words, of ‘hopeless obedience’ to her.
Something similar is at play in the way many Russians view Putin. You might not like Russia’s political class and groan at their opinions but they are going nowhere. You have to humour them and give at least the appearance of complying. Putin, in fact, rather than being Father of the Nation, is – as Schulmann puts it – more like the great ‘All-Russian Babushka’.
Putin has sneered at the Church of England
In few things does this seem truer than in Putin’s attitude to Western liberalism. The West, Putin said at the Victory Parade last week, are ‘destroying family values, traditional values that make everyone on this planet human.’ He has sneered at the Church of England’s entertaining of a ‘gender-neutral God’, and accuses the West of normalising paedophilia. Russia’s mission is to ‘defend our children from monstrous experiments designed to destroy their consciousness and their souls.’ When he says these things, a collective groan goes up from the Western media. Words like ‘hysterical’ and ‘rant’ are thrown around, and Putin is accused of being ‘more angry taxi driver than head of state.’ Granny, from her rocking chair in the corner, is sounding like a mad old bigot, and we wish she’d put a sock in it.
Yet even a stopped clock, as the saying goes, tells the right time twice a day, and the West swats away Putin’s comments at its peril. Indeed, they should ask themselves frankly how much help over the past ten years they’ve unwittingly given him to stay in power. This depiction of the West – comic overstatement though it may be – hasn’t come out of nowhere and has traction. With every rainbow police car, every ‘edgy’ Sam Smith video, every sacked gender-sceptical worker or trans-bested female athlete, the Kremlin has had reason to thank us. It’s easier to present yourself as a gatekeeper if some of the things that threaten to sweep through that gate repel sufficient numbers of people – even many in the West.
Perhaps you support gay marriage but find the ubiquity of rainbow flags in Pride week a little over the top. Or consider yourself a live-and-let-live liberal but still feel nonplussed to see your local supermarket, your local takeaway, even your bank-machine vehemently supporting LGBT rights. Do you feel unease at the push in some quarters to rebrand paedophiles as ‘minor attracted persons’? Then imagine how these things seem from a country where the combined juggernaut of state, church and media is denouncing them daily and highlighting them as menacing, unwanted imports. And Russia, be assured, has been watching us like a hawk.
This became clear from the four years I spent there. What took place abroad, Russian friends told me, was never difficult to discover – the Russian news was full of it: ‘It’s finding out what’s going on in our own country that’s the challenge.’
‘What’s happening in the West?’ demanded my neighbour Galya, a pensioner who lived upstairs from me in Rostov, and though I knew she’d been tuned into anti-Western propaganda (a fact which, tellingly, affected our relationship not at all) in some ways I was asking myself the same question. What was happening? Why were Mermaids and the Tavistock clinic suddenly in the news so much? Why was a conservative government introducing proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act, potentially the most seismic and divisive piece of legislation for decades? Why did ministers like Penny Mordaunt push the trans-agenda so vigorously? Or Sajid Javid, then Home Secretary, seem so eager to introduce new categories of hate crime, stymying our social interactions even more? Most crucially, where did you go politically when changes you were so dubious about were cheer-led even by the party whose designated political mission it was to put the brakes on them? It was all more than a little troubling.
Russia, of course, had its own problems. You knew Putin was a thug and a murderer and that his ‘managed democracy’ was a joke, but Russians lived much of their lives in another dimension – and sometimes he came out with things that felt uncomfortably close to the bone.
When he accused the West of destroying ‘its tradtional values from above’, you couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. When he said that the liberal idea had become obsolete and was no longer serving the majority of its citizens, it at least seemed worth entertaining, even if you quibbled with it – or didn’t like the messenger. When he insisted that people coming to live in Russia ‘need to realise they have to observe our laws, they have to respect our culture, our history,’ it seemed the kind of obvious statement our own politicians sometimes shied away from. It didn’t occur to you until last February – though God knows, there was plenty of evidence before, from the Salisbury poisonings to the 2008 invasion of South Ossetia onwards – that this was a rule he considered inapplicable to himself or his countrymen, when they were being the worst visitors imaginable in countries not their own.
Russia has since then stood in increasingly grotesque contrast to the West, with its new punitive laws against discussing LGBT matters in public or its proposal to label feminism a form of ‘extremism’. The Putin regime may not be abandoning its vulnerable young to the trans movement, but is killing them en-masse on the battlefields of Ukraine.
It is all too easy in the ‘us’ and ‘them’ of wartime to see only your enemy’s faults – ‘War is Peace’ as Orwell’s slogan has it – but this is self-defeating. When Putin speaks about Western shortcomings, we should interrogate ourselves about how much these are the grumblings of a querulous, agenda-driven geriatric, and how much he is simply telling us, in exaggerated form, how we appear to onlookers.
We should do this not to navel-gaze or berate ourselves but for one reason only: because in the answer to such questions lies the clue of how to beat him. Putin the grand babushka, like all babushkas, may not be long with us. Putinism, with its deep roots in the country’s psyche, will be much harder to dislodge.
The West cannot do this merely with bombs, bullets or self-righteous homilies. But it can perhaps do it by example: by reining in its more garish aspects, by working out the differences between tolerance and submission, freedom and excess, reason and unreason. And by becoming a hemisphere no longer so easy for Putin and the likes of him to ridicule, shrink from, caricature or reject.
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