My Russian teacher is a hardy soul. She shepherds her London students, locked in an ongoing battle with the formation of past passive participles and six noun cases of her native tongue with panache. And we have always met on Zoom — so it never mattered if she was back home with her Russian family in the Baltics, or in south London.
She produces a poker face with academic precision as we translate screeds of Kremlin propaganda, become experts in the Lewis Carroll alike verbal inversions of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s chief propagandist, and watch fast-talking talk-show hosts thundering out the Putin doctrine.
On the latest call, however, she cracked. The subject of the day had been decided, and my comprehension task was: “What is the Russian leader’s reasoning in invading Ukraine and how does he explain it?”
At the end I asked her to connect me to some other sources we had discussed among the few remaining accessible stalwarts of liberal journalism in Russia following sweeping censorship of anti-war outlets.
Suddenly, my tutor’s eyes watered and her voice broke. She needed to rearrange the lesson the next week, she said, the only time I have ever heard her voice tremble. She needed to get home to see her Russian-origin family in the Baltics because she was worried about what might lie ahead.
She felt like she was “losing it” and “wobbly”. I felt a rush of embarrassment for somehow expecting the session to simply run as usual, and said how sorry I was about what was happening in Ukraine. “I am just so very ashamed,” she said softly and signed off, glassy-eyed. Here, undiluted by Zoom, was the palpable agony of someone who had had enough of being a fountain of knowledge — like so many of her fellow Russians inside its borders, the Russian-speaking populations of the former Soviet Union and its diaspora here in London and beyond.
It is the shock of a regime whose oppression was, in plain sight, moving to the next level of cruelty and dictatorship, and the moment all the whataboutery over whether Ukraine “belongs” to Russia in some way, which could justify the salami-slicing incursions in eastern Ukraine since 2014, became revealed as a shield for aggression, the starving out of civilians in Mariupol and the pitiless attacks on the desperate columns of refugees, the promise humanitarian corridors and then herded towards a hostile Russia.
It is the shame of seeing a mighty country of the great writers we make our way through valiantly now pilloried as a global pariah and images of children slain in indiscriminate campaigns that remind us of the worst of the Syrian conflict. From Moscow, a writer who is now also banned from TV, messages that he is “only happy my grandfather who fought in the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War through a Russian prism) died recently… because this grief would have killed him”.
For honourable Russians, the despair also means helpless anger that comes from seeing a culture they love in all its wonder bitterly dividing against itself, and the certain knowledge that there is worse to come and wounds which will cleave apart Russia and Russians for decades of retribution and blame.
Russia is bigger than Vladimir Putin and if I could say one thing of comfort to my distraught friends, it would be that he will one day too be in the past tense and in the history books — but not as the victor.
This war is such a tragedy because it is unwinnable. There will be an independent Ukraine, far better supported now by most of the world than it was before the bloodletting. And a better Russia will need to stagger out of the disaster that a savage and deluded leadership has visited on it and the world.
But this is a long haul, a battle not of West against East, but for civilisation and Russia’s place in it. I look up a text we had studied from Teffi, the waspish chronicler of the swirl of civil war in Russia and Ukraine after 1917.
Herded into Odessa station, she writes mordantly of the bizarre optimism of the human spirit: “We were not being searched and we were not being shot at — what more could we want?” Just over a century later, it feels horribly like it was written yesterday.
