Defending the Palace of Western Culture

The catastrophe at Moscow’s Palace of Culture invites comparison with that of 9/11 in New York. Both involved the sudden intrusion of an outside force into the heart of a grand and peaceful city. Both were calculated to create as great an impact as possible. Both resulted in massive loss of life among innocent civilians. Both were caused by desperadoes, inflamed to fundamentalist fury by resentments against ‘imperialist’ powers.

But I have noticed a difference. Muscovites are not New Yorkers, as I was reminded by the anxious phone calls I have been making over recent days to friends in Moscow. The tragedy did not seem to be uppermost in any of their minds. Elena wanted to talk about the film she’d just seen: ‘Have you seen the new Almovodar – what a talent!’ Nadia did not even understand why I had rung: ‘How are we? Well, Yura’s done his back in again….’ As for Dimitri, he laughed out loud: ‘You were worried! Surely you know us better than to think we’d go to a musical like that….’

Their sangfroid took me aback, until I recollected what these people, who had been brought up in a society as stable as my own, had been through over the last twelve years. They had braved tanks on the Moscow streets to resist a coup attempt. They had witnessed a shoot-out between Russia’s parliamentarians and the army. They had endured the collapse of a fossilised economy, the disappearance of their savings in spiralling hyperinflation. They had lived with the discovery that over half the remaining economy was controlled by organised crime and that their new democratic leaders were almost all corrupt.

For a while these people, when they planned a journey by rail, had had to brace themselves for the likelihood that, among the bodies of the homeless over which they stepped as they headed for their train, there would be a corpse or two that had not survived the frozen night. Reduced to subsistence living, my friends have seen the impact of this social collapse within each of their families: elderly relations dying in epidemic numbers, blue-eyed Komsomol sons joining the gangs of the racketeers, and university-educated daughters selling their bodies to buy a chic long winter coat. For them, the death of 120 innocent theatre-goers is no more than the next ghastly hazard of living with ‘freedom’, Western-style.

This phlegm may delight me, but I am much less confident about the longer-term impact that last week’s hostage debacle is likely to have on many of the Russians I know. An argument I had with a visiting Muscovite friend over the weekend reminded me how vulnerable even the most sophisticated Russians are at this juncture to a kind of primitive, racial elitism, which has a long tradition in Russian history.

Anatol knew several people who had been caught in the theatre that night. All were musicians, members of the orchestra that had been playing when the guerrillas burst in on the theatre. ‘Of course, I opposed the army’s going into Chechnya in the first place. I thought it was barbarous.’ (self-deprecating shrug of the shoulders, deep drag on the cigarette) ‘I was a typical member of Russia’s intelligentsia. But as I watched those scenes on television I realised that there was nothing we can do but rally to Putin. The Russian army may be brutal, but it stands between us and barbarism.’

(Me, interrupting) ‘Come on, Anatol what’s barbaric is the behaviour of the Russian troops in Chechnya – the innocent people picked off the street, blown up with explosives; families mown down by gunfire in order to reinforce the rule of terror.’

‘You sound just like a Russian intellectual! I’m fed up with the self-indulgence of these people who turn up at demonstrations, denouncing their own government and the army for doing what they have to do. This fight for freedom the Chechens are waging – it’s meaningless! What is freedom unless there is something to defend? They complain about the way our army has destroyed the capital Grozny – but they seem to forget that it was we, the Russians, who built Grozny!’

‘Meaning that it’s yours to destroy?’

‘No – meaning that without the Russians there would be nothing there! What have the Chechens ever produced, century on century, but war and more war?’

‘Back in 1991, when the tanks went into Vilnius, killing fourteen people, whose side were you on?’

‘The Lithuanians, of course! But that was different! They were a civilised people.’

‘Ah, I see what you mean – it’s Lithuanian “culture” which justified their having their independence. Well, when the Soviet troops grabbed Lithuania the Germans were just as snobbish about the Lithuanians as you are now about the Chechens. Potato farmers, they called them.’

‘That’s not fair – back in the 17th century Lithuania’s empire stretched right across…’

‘My point exactly – these things come up, and they go down. And you can’t use your definition of culture as the measure of people’s “right” to their independence…’

By now Anatol and I had consumed several bottles of wine and we were becoming inarticulate. Sobered up, I am left with two thoughts. Firstly, the different responses to these tragedies in New York and Moscow have forced me to make a choice. Just as once, faced with the choice between Stalinism and capitalism, I had to choose capitalism, so now, if forced to choose between the culture on show at that Moscow’s Palace of Culture last week and the lachrymose melodrama played after 9/11 in New York, I’d have to opt for New York.

For all my revulsion at the histrionics, hysteria and lack of imagination, which characterised the American response to their own tragedy, the value at the heart of it is humanism.

For all my admiration for the stalwartness of my Russian friends, the dark side to that quality is a ruthlessness that is unacceptable.

Potato farmers must be allowed to be potato farmers. If Chechen culture remains stuck in the ancient code of mountain warriors, this is not a sufficient reason to blow them to pieces.

Secondly, most worryingly, when I look into the mirror held up by the Russian army’s behaviour at the Palace of Culture, I see reflected my worst fears for the course of action on which America has embarked.

At Moscow’s Palace of Culture one massive act of brutality was countered unhesitatingly with another. This was not true after 9/11. There, the aftermath allowed us to hope that America would prove wise enough not to answer indiscriminate violence in kind. Now finally, in his Axis of Evil speech, Bush has exploited the sympathies of Americans in order to legitimise just this course of action. There is still time for America not to take the Russian way, but it is running out.