I scroll through a variety of possible responses to this, pocketing and zipping my passport.
“No. Really. It’s wrong, what you read. Daniel Radcliffe is not a drug addict.”
The kid nods resignedly as if he’d love to believe me, but knows better. He waves my driver and me back towards our car and turns back to the sagging tent of camouflage netting by the roadside.
Poor kid. He used to love his Harry Potter. But now he’s grown up, and the world has disappointed him.
3
Six months that changed the world
The Ukraine crisis has turned Russia sharply, in the space of a few short months, into an older, more vicious version of herself.
On 21st November 2013 a small group of protesters gathered on Kiev’s Independence Square. They were mostly students, summoned by a Facebook appeal posted by a popular young journalist. There were no more than 200 of them. They came to come to protest that their President, Viktor Yanukovych, was dragging its feet over signing a cooperation deal offered by the European Union. They called their movement Euro-Maidan, after ‟Maidan”, the Ukrainian name for the Square. No-one paid them much attention.
Six months later, Russia and Ukraine were effectively at war. President Yanukovych and his mistress had fled the country. His private palaces had been ransacked by protesters. Russian forces had annexed Crimea, the first such land-grab in Europe since the Second World War. Chunks of eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk provinces had declared themselves “People’s Republics”, independent of Kiev’s rule, supported by Russian regular troops, armour, and surface-to-air missiles. Central Kiev had been turned into a war zone after running battles between tens of thousands of protesters and riot police. Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 had been blown out of the sky by a missile fired by rebels, killing 298 people. In all, over 4,000 people have been killed in Europe’s newest civil war.
As a result of all this, two important things happened.
The first is that Ukraine became a country in a meaningful way. In the 23 years since it became independent from the USSR, Ukraine could not decide whether it was going to become a law-abiding, European nation of shopkeepers like its Western neighbour (and some-time ruler), Poland, or take its place alongside Belarus and Kazakhstan in a revived Russian Empire of kleptocratic dictatorships.
Vladimir Putin settled that question once and for all. Without the Russian-speaking population of Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk, there will never again be a pro-Moscow government in Kiev. At the end of October strongly pro-European parties swept to power in the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament — defying, in the process, Russian pundits who predicted that war would give the ultra-nationalists a boost. At the same time the European Union and NATO found, for the time being at least, the mettle to agree on sanctions in Russia and economic and logistical support for Ukraine.
Ukraine’s turn Westward is not over, of course. The war for the east continues, and Ukraine cannot not win it as long as Russia continues to support the rebels. The economy teeters. The ultra-nationalists may not have done well in elections but they are armed and organised into self-governing “patriotic battalions” fighting independently of the government’s command. When in a bad mood, these thousands of heavily-armed vigilantes threaten to occupy the Maidan once again. A recipe for disaster of Yugoslav proportions, perhaps. And yet most Ukrainians remain surprisingly hopeful. “We found out who we are. And who were aren’t,” says Ruslana Khazipova, a young singer with the band Dakh Daughters. “We are free. And we aren’t Russia’s bitch any more.”
The second thing that happened — the more serious thing, the thing that has made the world sit up and listen, the thing that could yet hatch global disaster — is that Russia has been changed by the Ukraine crisis. Or better to say, Russia has plunged into one of the reactionary frenzies to which it is historically prone. Political repression, isolationist nationalism, paranoid creation of foreign enemies: Russia has seen all this before, though barely in living memory. The Ukraine crisis has turned Russia sharply, in the space of a few short months, into an older, more vicious version of herself.
It’s true, of course, that all the immediate lineaments of what came to pass this year in Russia existed already, just under the surface. For years liberals have criticised Vladimir Putin for his crackdowns on free speech, his use of ‟justice” as a tool against his opponents from oligarchs to street protesters, his admiration for the old Soviet Union. But suddenly, the soft authoritarianism of the old Putinism has begun to look positively quaint, and almost benignly liberal, by comparison to the post-Ukraine order.
“This time it’s different. Really,” one of the bravest and best Russian journalists I know whispers to me, in her cups, at a late night dinner at Mama Odessa, a Ukrainian-themed restaurant in Moscow, painted in Ukraine’s yellow-and-blue national colours. The place is popular with the remnants of Moscow’s liberal opposition. “We always said, Putin, you’re a dictator! We showed up outside courtrooms and shouted, “Russia without Putin!” But now, now, I think he really means to turn the screws.” She asks if I have any contacts in the Federal Security Service — “someone who can give a signal. Someone who can warn me if they are coming for me so that I can run away in time.”
She’s a tough cookie, veteran of the whole roller-coaster of Putinism, from Chechnya through the Nord-Ost theatre siege and the Beslan school hostage crisis to the trials of jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and feminist punk rockers Pussy Riot — and most recently the orgy of nationalism that followed the annexation of Crimea. But now, for the first time, friends and colleagues are being sacked from their jobs for ideological impurity. Outspoken critics of the regime are having their houses searched and are arrested on the flimsiest of charges. Journalists and bloggers run the risk of prison under a fearsome new law banning, in an exquisite irony, “disseminating extremism.” The State media speaks of “traitors,” Putin speaks of a “fifth column”. Duma deputies call for the return of the Soviet-era institution of exit visas and all Russians with dual nationality must declare themselves to the police, or face criminal charges.
“Right now I am — finally — really scared,”she says. Her name and photo have been published on a Russian ultranationalist website as an “enemy of the people.” “I’m scared for myself. For my family. For my country. From this point on, forget reforms. The future is economic collapse and some mad, fascist revolution. And then we will look back and say: Putin, oh, Putin: he wasn’t so bad.”
It is the first time in nearly twenty years of friendship I have ever heard her say a good word about the man.
4
The borderland
I should say, at this point, that I have a personal interest in the history of this turbulent borderland.
Ukraine means by the edge, the borderland. It has always been a marcher country, a frontier. Today, Ukraine is where the Eastern Slavic, Orthodox world meets the Western, Catholic one. Two centuries ago it was also where the Russian Empire met the Muslim world of the Ottoman Turks, the slave-raiding Tatars of the Crimea, the unruly mountaineers of the Caucasus.
The edge of Russia, then. But it is on these margins that Russia’s history has turned, suddenly, on its heel.
The pagan Prince Vladimir chose to baptise his people into Christianity in 988, either at his capital at Kiev on the Dniepr river or perhaps at the newly-captured ancient Greek colony of Khersonesus in Crimea. At Poltava, on the plains of Western Ukraine, Peter the Great defeated the Swedish king Christian XII in 1707. That victory allowed Russia to truly became an empire with a new capital on the Baltic, formerly a Swedish sea. The siege of the Crimean port of Sevastpol by the British and French and the eventual defeat of the Russian Empire in the Crimean war of 1853-6 signalled the inability of the old feudal Russia to function in a modern world. Within five years, a reforming Tsar had abolished the institution of serfdom. And it was