Hallo Spacebo

The only time I’ve been into the house of a Russian family I was fed repeatedly with enormous quantities of homemade cake. Massive amounts, which I felt unable to decline for fear of giving offence. While some may construe this as an ingenious technique of attempted assassination, a lethal spike of hyperglycemia undetectable at autopsy, I prefer to see it as a mark of generosity and desire for friendship.

I speak as I find; I don’t have a problem with Russia or with Russians in general. Like us, they are proud and clever, with much to boast of in the arts and the sciences; they are a rightfully stroppy people who down the ages have regularly been screwed by their leaders – and to an unimaginably greater extent than we have. During the twentieth century they suffered immensely, and their role in defeating Nazism was crucial. They were, and should be, our ally. Like all groups of people they include a few who are unattractive in various ways. I do hope this spat we’re having with them can soon be resolved, that the bogus accusations of Russophobia can be demonstrated to be false, and that Russia can be readmitted to the great family of European civilisation where it belongs. As part of The West. We don’t need Russia as The Enemy.

However, a couple of weeks ago we learned a new word: novichok. The Russian news agency had the insolent but amusing insight to suggest that this was our invention because it sounds Russian. As indeed it does. The Russian language, like all languages, has an aura, a flavour, an accent that tinges the items it names. It smears them with a patina, or even a putina, of Russianness. The American cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter has discussed this idea at length, and used as an example the word “squaw” - which simply means wife or woman - but which has an indelible association with what for most of my life  were known in this country, without harming anyone, as Red Indians (folk who presumably now inspire the politically correct game of Cattlepersons and Native North Americans  - no guns, please, not even toy ones). Etymology has subtler consequences than the dictionary would imply.

Growing up through the 1960s, for me the idea of Russia was intimately connected with science and technology, especially with nuclear physics and space exploration. I was never worried by the Cold War, oblivious to the Cuban missile crisis, unaware of the gulag, unfazed by that little man banging his shoe on the table (why is it always little men?); I noticed only the good bits. The first Sputnik, in 1957, was as much a premature opener for the Swinging Sixties as was Elvis or ‘Look Back in Anger’; Yuri Gagarin was the first space superstar, whose boyish visage outlasted them all, right up until Tim Peake. This was the future, this was modernism at its most dentally whiter than white.

I think it was the ‘Sunday Express’ that did a two-page spread on the Russian language, and at an impressionable age I was captivated by its appearance. It was a long while before I heard it spoken. When you don’t understand it properly, spoken Russian sounds sexy, hence John Cleese (him again) and his seductive use of it in “A Fish Called Wanda”, and Anthony Burgess’s adoption of Russian vocabulary into Nadsat, a street patois suitable for the horrorshow cheenas, malinki malchiks and other assorted chelovyeks of Thamesmead, S.E.28.

Also, as befits our Soviet-era-and-beyond suspicions, it’s a sneaky language full of false Cyrillic friends, letters like B, C, H and P which are not what they seem; R and N exotically reversed; the numbers 3, 6 and 61 as letters; Os leaning phonetically into As; characters with curly bits strangely reminiscent of Uncle Joe’s moustache; others resembling pairs of letters krushchsched together; miscellaneous twiddly bits. And all those liquid consonants and dark Ls and glo’al stops. A language for the Sixties - let me hear your balalaikas ringing out, all you need is lyubrication. A language impersonal and objective, economic on verbs and articles both definite and indefinite; everything so matter of fact. They even had cities that sounded scientific and futuristic and surreally radioisotopic – Akademgorodok, carved out of the frozen tundra near Novosibirsk; Magnitogorsk and Elektrostal; Chelyabinsk-60, a putative droogie for strontium-90 and uranium-235. Much to admire.

Though not polonium-210. While not in any way wishing to condone or belittle recent tragedies, we can perhaps remind ourselves of a central component of fictional popular culture over the last half century or so – the crazy dictator bent on world domination, the psychopathic doctor with an unhealthy interest in pain mechanisms, the unstoppable invention that will inflict megadeath, the antidote-less toxin effective in sub-microscopic doses and injectable via a fiendishly adapted fountain pen, the whole humour of espionage and counter-espionage, terror and counter-terror, paranoia and counter-paranoia. Because at one level – though not for the victims – it can be hilarious. Where would James Bond and half the film industry be without it? Even the dalek is named after the Russian word meaning ‘far away’. Is there anything more homely than a dalek? Since the mid twentieth century we’ve laughed with vicarious terror at SPECTRE and SMERSH as dastardly foes; and I expect KGB and FSB employees have done likewise, perhaps as research for role models.

Fact and fiction sometimes crossed over, it was as though one inspired the other. In real life we enjoyed the Krogers and their microdots in a stunningly ordinary little bungalow, Georgi Markov and his brolly wielding assailant, Eugene Ivanov and his lady friend, countless deceits and defections.  It was simply what went on, it became a sort of expectation, toxicology and betrayal as tropes of international behaviour. Perhaps in some quarters it still is, which doesn’t mean that it’s right.

The coolest fictional agent ever was one of ours but had a Russian name – or should I say a Russian sounding name – Ilya Kuryakin. I offer this as idiotic proof-lite that our cultures were never that far apart. The actor concerned was born in Glasgow. “Mr Kuryakin, please go and find THRUSH and sprinkle some deadly clotrimazole on it”.

 
OK, let’s be quite candid about this. Silly is silly, sinister is sinister, and we need to remain cautious and to complain and condemn when we have to, while not getting carried away. We should open Channel D (for diplomacy). We ought to be – we need to be - friends. Thank you and dasvidanya.