Cossacks in the Trossachs?

The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming! Shut the doors, they’re coming in the windows.

It’s all very well for that Donald Trump to state, airily, that Russia and China pose no “existential threat” to the West and its way of life but what he doesn’t know (and there seems to be quite a lot of that going on, over an impressive and varied range of subjects), is they’ve been busy infiltrating away not just for decades, with their toxic umbrellas, polonium 210 in the tea and controlling entire expensive London neighbourhoods from the bank vaults of Vladivostok, but for millennia.

Repelling all boarders of a Slavic slant hasn’t been a notable success in recent times, whether you get exercised about Polish plumbers or Russian oligarchs. But it’s not the outsiders coming in we have to worry about, if a recent revelation about our national DNA is to be believed or even the ones allegedly living in our computers.

It’s the enemy already firmly ensconced within. Or, in the immortal words of Steven Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns: “Don’t bother; they’re here.”

We may think we are Celts, Picts, Vikings, even vaguely Anglo-Saxon, with the odd dash of input coming out of Africa, not to mention nomads stravaiging across the landmass of Europe from the Indus Valley, now part of modern-day Pakistan. Which raises interesting questions about attitudes to longer-standing aspects of immigration, however you look at it.

But according to Harvard University and the American Journal of Human Genetics, many people in North Britain (mostly Scotland) today, can trace their stock back to pastoral inhabitants of eastern Russia. Cossacks in the Trossachs, at the very least.

And all out of Steppe, as you might say, but oor Jock…

This, of course, might explain a lot of the more louche elements of the Scottish psyche although the particular brand of Russians who pitched up furth of the Forth back in the day seem to have been a creative and industrious lot.

They were, apparently, horse-riders, builders of chariots and wagons and some of the first to make use of the wheel which might make it a little easier to explain the later phenomena of Eric Liddell, Chris Hoy and Stagecoach.

Vodka, too, continues to play a major role in Scottish national life and can it be a mere coincidence that, with the noted Russian fondness for caviar, we currently have a First Minister called Sturgeon who comes from Ayrshire Nastrovye! British and Russian Second World War veterans have a toast during a trip to Archangel: drinking being just one of the many things we have in common. where there is, of course, a village called Moscow? Think on…

In the modern era, of course, in spite of sharing a patron saint (good old St Andrew), a passion for Robert Burns and cultural heroes like Lermontov hailing from the Learmonths of the Borders, we might just be put off our eastern cousins more than a little due to the current general appallingness of Vladimir Putin. Relationship But this scientific study of common roots may go some way to explaining the hitherto mysterious yet compelling relationship between President Putin and President-elect Trump.

There is still fall-out from the latter’s campaign, over the “sustained relationship” between servers linking the two men and the passing on of official secrets, unofficial secrets and post-truth information eg lies.

But if we take on board that Trump is half-Scottish, coupled with the above assertion that we are all tartan reds under the bed via history rather than hysteria, perhaps after all, it is nothing more sinister than a couple of distant cousins Skyping away. After all, The Donald certainly needs all the help he can get with international relations.

I think Mary MacLeod of Lewis and her forebears might have a lot to answer for.

Ironic, too, the current pre-eminence of the new Russia came about partly via a process of the knocking down of alltoo-real walls, or at least one of them, rather than the building of new ones.

The Iron Curtain, powerful symbol though it was, thankfully remained just that – a symbol. Even Stalin and co didn’t have anyone out on their western borders, running up the pencil pleats and a well-placed pelmet or two. Then sending Downing Street the bill.

Not, it must be said, that there’s been too much in the way of reciprocity and two-way traffic. One would like to think that if the postwar Soviet powers had been aware of the strong cultural influence to be had from these airts, we might have ended up with the Dreich War rather than the Cold War and all to everyone’s benefit, with the possible exception of John le Carre.

In spite of the work of the estimable Billy Kay on the Scottish diaspora to the east, there are notable holes in the cheese when it comes to Russo-Scottish cooperation and mutual meetings of minds, or anything else.

After all, Russian athletes may be finding themselves banned from major sporting events because of their doping record but let’s face it, the Scottish football team isn’t going to be making a return visit to the land of our alleged forefathers any time soon. Cold... or dreich? Already here