There is a Russian proverb: don’t blame the mirror if your face is crooked. I first came across it as the epigraph to The Government Inspector, Gogol’s 1836 masterpiece satirising corruption and hypocrisy in the provinces of the tsar’s empire.
The phrase sprang to mind last week when I learned that a 21st-century government inspector is displeased with things I have written about Vladimir Putin and his imperial war against Ukraine – the land of Gogol’s birth. This I know because my name has been added to the “stop list”, a growing roster of undesirable elements – politicians, journalists, charity workers, consultants – banned from entering the Russian federation.
The Russian foreign ministry said this was a retaliation for “London’s continued confrontational course” in supplying weapons to “the neo-Nazi Kiev regime”. Since I’m not an arms dealer, my inclusion on the list must be for the subsidiary offence of spreading “anti-Russia narratives”.
Presumably, that relates to my characterisation of Putin as a venal despot and ideological crackpot, whose unprovoked attack on Ukraine was as strategically ill-conceived as it was murderous. I can see why the Kremlin’s inspectorate of media narratives might recoil from the sight of such blood-soaked crookedness, but like the proverb says, that’s not the mirror’s fault.
The statement of sanctions is sinister and absurd. It is written with the combination of bombast and menace that Russians recognise as the idiom of capricious, vindictive bureaucracy with deep roots. It is familiar to generations that grew up in the Soviet Union, steeped in the self-satirising pomp of a thin-skinned power that you can’t take seriously in private but are careful not to ridicule in public.
It is older even than that. Gogol was a master at capturing social deformations that arise from a duty of deference to dysfunctional autocracy, holding a mirror up to all the grotesque and preposterous contortions. At the end of The Government Inspector, the disgraced town mayor turns to the audience. “Who are you laughing at?” he asks. “You’re laughing at yourselves.”
The bleak absurdity of Putin’s rule is not lost on Russians, not all of them. But any jokes have to be coded, discreet, transmitted in glances and arch references. The country has a knack for dark humour that tracks its long habituation to repression. It’s one of the traits, first encountered in translation, that made me want to study the language, and then led me to fall in love with the place when I lived there as a student more than 30 years ago. It’s one of the reasons I stay invested in the relationship, albeit now in a condition of forced estrangement….
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Arms maker BAE Systems makes record profit amid Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars
After the truth-shower 