Confronting Vladimir Putin: A Close Encounter

By BAGEHOT

T.H. MARSHALL, one of the founders of modern economics, and one of the most brilliant analysts of the economics of place, argued that “there was something in the air” in the English city of Sheffield that made it good at making steel. I think it is equally true that there is “something in the air” in Russia, that makes it good at spreading anxiety and grobulation. Bagehot has visited Russia on several occasions over the years—under Communism and Putinism—but has never had a normal day there. Everything that happens is tinged with a sort of sinister strangeness.

My first visit was in 1981, when it was still under Soviet rule, on a college trip led by Derek Parfit. This was a formula for strangeness in its own right. Parfit was one of England’s greatest eccentrics as well as one of its greatest philosophers. We were a group of young Oxford fellows, eager to find out about “actually existing socialism”. Parfit visited Leningrad every year to photograph the city in the snow and he approached his task with obsessive focus. Carrying a large quantity of photographic equipment wherever he went—several cameras, a tripod, rolls of film—he wore a large leather cape to protect his equipment from the snow and ice. He spent most of his time standing on the frozen River Neva in the middle of the city (pictured), snapping away, regardless of the fact that an ice-breaker was bearing down on him.

The hotel in Leningrad where we stayed provided further oddities of its own. Our fellow tourists were almost as strange as we were. There were several Communist Party members from Sheffield who construed everything around them, from the lack of plugs in the bath to the undrinkable coffee, as proof that Communism was working perfectly. There were several ladies from the Tunbridge Wells Conservative Association who had signed up for a big adventure. Then there were dozens of visitors from Finland who got blind drunk every evening and passed out in the hotel corridors. There were also rather a lot of attractive young women, who chatted to us in the bar. (Before I left for Moscow a senior diplomat and Russia hand had advised me that the best way to escape from a honey trap was to wear a pillow case over my head, with slits for eyeholes—“always carry a pair of scissors” was his parting advice.) And then there were the inquisitive men in badly cut suits who deposited themselves next to us whenever they could and, not too subtly, tried to find out what we were doing.

Parfit was away much of the time doing battle with the icebreakers. But whenever he appeared he did his best to engage everybody around him, from his Oxford entourage to the Sheffield Communists to the prying Russians, in a free-flowing seminar on the philosophy of personal identity. The men in bad suits joined us for dinner and tried to engage us in a philosophical discussion but got more than they had bargained for when,

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