Angles of view

At the heart of many misconceptions there often lies a semantic problem. Imagine if the United Kingdom was called "England" – and it contained not only England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but 80 further territories, many with distinct cultures, races, climates and modes of life, all connected in one landmass, across a surface area 100 times greater. Then you start to get a sense of the scale of the semantic problem!

Russia is a vast continent disguised by semantics as a mere country. Its size is hard for anyone to really grasp. But it's often seen to compensate for this by being relatively easy to conceptualise in terms of its variety. Even people in Moscow and St. Petersburg often think that outside the capitals there are no more than endless meaningless variations of essentially the same layout.

As with every country, the "story" - the one that is commonly told to everyone - floats over it like a haze. Certainly the story today appears to be one of sameness rather than variety. The official version of life (much like everywhere) is quite different to the way life really is. There seems to be no unified way of making sense of the change that's going on or any representation of the dozens of different native nationalities and languages, cultures, foods, religions etc. Russia is certainly one of the least understood places on earth and very rarely looked at with any degree of objectivity. This is primarily through a tremendous lack of information that begins in Russia itself. In a way this would not matter so much were it not for the fact that many people in Russia seem to have grown to believe the story told about them from abroad.

Here is a summary in my mind of these views of Russia: There's the 'lay of the land' - reminiscent of Saul Steinberg’s famous “view from 9th Avenue” (above). In this case stately Europe disappears into a grey haze roughly at the level where the Ukraine starts, (where a mental iron curtain seems to have drawn itself up), with a brief flash of gold domes and architectural frivolity at the level of Moscow and St Petersburg before losing itself again in endless steppe, despair, repetition and meaninglessness up to the Pacific ocean.

Its history is also seen from a similar vantage point: a grotesque procession of despots, the eternally suffering Russian populace as their plaything. The continual swell of hubris on a scale unknown anywhere else. A place where grandiose efforts to emulate Western ways and to advance technologically have simply laid bare a fundamental barbarism and disregard for human life or dignity. In the cannon of Western literature on the subject of Russia some very talented authors have paid particular attention to these aspects with the consequence of belittling much else about the country.

There's the politically aware view where the Russian government and particularly its leader, loom so large as to become of the same size and importance as 12% of the Earth's surface. Whatever happens in the latter is immediately tempered by indignation about the former. It has almost become a generalised emotional habit in the West to denigrate Russia's achievements with some acerbic, suspicious contextualisation. Question: What do people think about when they think of Egypt? Do they cleave away at their consciences and think of Hosni Mubarak? I don't think so. They tend to think about its climate, history and people and Mubarak is fairly small in comparison, if not invisible. People who think of America in terms only of it's head of state and his coterie generally realise they're being unfair on the country and its inhabitants. One really needs to question how it is that we've developed such reflexes when looking at Russia, such that at the mere mention of it, the state, like some large raptor, swings down and obscures the view of almost everything else.

The problem is not so much that too much is heard about the Russian state, it is rather that far too little is known about Russia itself. There might be more efforts not specifically to paint a positive portrait of Russia or gloss anything over but simply to provide a greater balance of information by focusing away from what is already known and examining things of equal importance that are less known.