Putin marches onward as the bear ensures there is no ‘end of history’ in sight
Notebook
PEOPLE are often stumped when asked to come up with their best ever holiday. I don’t hesitate: it was the Soviet Union in 1983, back when it was a closed, unknowable, feared and grudgingly respected superpower. A bit like visiting Weimar Berlin in those early years of fascism. A glimpse into a world that was out of kilter with most everywhere else, and all the more fascinating for that.
Leningrad, in particular, stayed with me. Shabby, drab yet still hypnotically beautiful, there was still a sense of a city repressed but proud and defiant.
Forty years on from its infamous siege during the Great Patriotic War, painful memories seemed stitched into the fabric of old Petrograd.
Helen Dunmore’s brilliant novel ‘The Siege’, about those terrible years from 1941 to 1944, when a million residents died from starvation and disease, does a better job than any historic tome in recreating that nightmare world.
In particular, my visit to the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, a collection of 186 mass graves, left a profound mark.
Here was a nation that suffered more than any in defeating the Nazis. Twenty million Russians dead. Imagine.
When the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own political and economic dysfunction in 1991 there was a lot of gloating in the West.
American political scientist Yoshihiro
Francis Fukuyama wrote an influential and silly book called ‘The End of History’, which declared the liberal democracy had won the last great battle of civilisation.
Nobody’s reading that any more.
Rubbing Russia’s nose in it soon became a popular intellectual and political pastime. So as not to be left out, Nato rolled into the old Eastern Bloc and stayed, all calculated to humiliate and goad feeble old Mother Russia.
It was when it began sniffing around Ukraine that the wounded bear finally roused itself. By then Russia had found someone to cynically harness the hurt and anger. And so Tsar Putin was ‘elected’ president for another six years on Sunday.
End of history? Yeah, right.
Lock horns with the stag
NEXT weekend I am boldly going where I haven’t gone for a long time: to a stag.
Boldly, is the wrong word, however. Nervously would be a better one.
As you can see from that byline picture (the one where I look like a bouncer in a Chechnya nightclub) I have been around the block a few times. That journey has included a few lost weekends where the sacred Sacrament of Holy Orders was performed. The orders in question, it goes without saying, were the sort made in a public house rather than a house of God.
But that’s what stags are. Piss-ups. Where’s the harm in that? (Don’t answer.)
Thing is, I don’t really drink these days.
Well I do, but only in a middle-aged, wine-with-my-pasta sort of way.
Two glasses and I’m kind and mellow. Three and I want my bed. So how will I cope?
We’ll be starting fierce early, I’m told, and the itinerary is uncomplicated.
It begins in a pub. Then in the middle, for a bit of variety, there’s another pub.
Then it concludes, you guessed it, in a pub. One of which does food. Allegedly.
So do I pretend I’m on antibiotics to save face? A very Irish thing to do.
Do I go all metrosexual and drink sparkly water? Ah, now.
Or do I launch into The Pints like there’s no tomorrow? Which there mightn’t be.
It all sounds pathetic, but then I’m only a product of my cultural environment. I’d drink to that excuse, except I’m saving myself for the weekend.
A bit of Park life
FOUR senators have now expressed interest in running for the Áras. Three I’ve never heard of, the other only vaguely.
Shouldn’t anyone running for the Presidency already have a national profile?
Surely it has to be someone we know has the ability, pedigree and CV to pull it off?
The Park is no place for auditions.