The day Ukraine was invaded, one of my friends texted a former Russian colleague, expressing his shock. The reply was chilling. In an instant, a man he had known and liked for years seemed to have become a stranger. Not only did he endorse Putin’s behaviour, but he cast the blame onto Ukraine. When my friend pointed out that the facts did not support this view, he received no answer. The texts ended, all communication ceased, and a long association seemed to have foundered on this single point of difference. Will they ever speak again?
Could you be friends with someone who upholds Russia’s invasion, and thinks Putin is in the right? It’s a thorny question. More than a few of my friends hold opposing views on subjects close to my heart: Brexit, Scottish independence, following Covid rules … A relative’s best friend is a staunch anti-vaxxer, yet despite the frustration and annoyance this has caused – doubtless on both sides – they remain close.
Some of my chums are Boris Johnson fans, but I just change the subject. The same goes with religion, where I part company from half my circle; they probably find our diverging views as sore a point as I do, but are unfailingly polite. It’s called being tolerant and mature.
I certainly couldn’t hug a Brexiteer, but grudgingly I have to accept it is possible to take another perspective on membership of the EU without deserving to be labelled a short-sighted fool. I seethe with resentment knowing how they cast their vote, but with the debate long past, what’s the point in falling out now?
As for independence, I have no trouble seeing it from both sides. I understand those who sit at the other end of the spectrum from me, and so I should, since many friends and family disagree with me, and don’t hold back. Thanks to them, in the way of university debaters who can argue from any position at two minutes’ notice, I could probably – like Boris Johnson who swithered between Remain and Leave – write a column in favour of a position I didn’t hold, but which might advance my career. Unlike him, though, I wouldn’t publish it.
But an invasion, masquerading as a crusade, in which millions of civilians are displaced, and thousands more targeted and killed is another matter entirely. Can anybody reasonably suggest there are two sides to that argument, another perfectly valid angle from which to view the tragedy we watch deepening with every hour?
It seems that people can, and do. Millions of Russians – many of whom still yearn for the Soviet era – swallow everything the state broadcaster tells them, their heads stuffed with Putin’s anti-West propaganda. In a country bred to authoritarianism, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Perhaps the old notion, “My country, right or wrong”, in part explains why the Russian population thinks the Motherland has the moral high ground in the conflict with Ukraine. Yet that jingoistic phrase continues: “if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” With the machinery of the Russian state expressly designed to quash doubt or debate, it will never concede it might be wrong.
Blind patriotism can be understood, up to a point. Although, as Russian prison cells fill with courageous anti-war protesters, you have to wonder why legions fail to ask whether everything they are told can be true.
It is those living beyond Russia’s borders who uphold Putin’s invasion, or at the very least refuse to condemn it, that are more baffling. Of course there are two sides to every story, as a misguided Edinburgh University academic recently tweeted, getting himself into hot water. But sometimes a story is just that; it is not verifiable truth. Then there are those like the publisher who recently emailed a round-robin essay, putting the war into a context stretching back centuries. The history lesson was interesting, its conclusions less so. Putin, he idiotically wrote, is “an elected leader with a system which is just as democratic as most of the Western governments (admittedly a fairly low bar).”
If Russia can be called a democracy, then the word is meaningless. How democratic is a country where the merest whiff of dissent sees people imprisoned, sometimes for years; where enemies of the regime are hunted down in foreign countries and murdered; where allegiance to the party line is not a matter of personal choice, but of basic survival.
One of the most illuminating books you could read about Russia under Putin is the New Yorker’s Russian correspondent Joshua Yaffa’s Between Two Fires, which won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing last year (full disclosure: I was one of the judges). Based on a brilliant series of interviews with those living under the regime’s thumb, such as a prominent broadcaster, orthodox priest, zoo keeper and humanitarian, it shows how these individuals negotiate the constraints within which they live. They might appear to be free citizens, able to do as they like, but this is only because they exercise astonishing guile and intelligence in circumventing or accommodating the tripwires on all sides. Trigger one of these, and their world might collapse.
I find it hard to fathom those who wish to cast the war as a conflict between a decadent, imperialist and capitalist West – whose chequered past none of us would den – and a noble, embattled nation, feeling threatened on all sides and hoping to reclaim its old territories.
Are the pros and cons of the Putin’s strategy a discussion to be had over dinner as you pass the caviar? Given the horrors the Kremlin has unleashed, I wouldn’t trust myself not to tip the plate over a Putin apologist’s head. Nothing about Ukraine – its wish to join NATO, its fascist gangs, its regret at giving up its nuclear weapons – can excuse the invasion. It was wholly unprovoked.
As such, I see little middle ground for conversation with friends of a different viewpoint. The war would either have to be off limits, or the friendship put on ice until the conflict is over. Given how long that might be, not to mention the impact of wider repercussions, I doubt we’d recognise each other by the time our private Cold War came to an end.
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