Portrait of the week | 16 April 2015
From our UK edition
Home Launching the Conservative party manifesto, David Cameron, the party leader, told voters he wanted to ‘turn the good news in our economy into a good life for you and your family’.
Russia
Thursday
Thursday
James Bond
From our UK edition
For fans of the franchise who remain unconvinced by Daniel Craig’s time on her majesty’s secret service, the stories leaking from the production of the latest film Spectre are further evidence that the time has come to hand 007 a glass of scotch and a revolver. Craig’s Bond always had less of an air of an expense-account gentleman spy and more the demeanour of a spornosexual plumber. This is a Bond who’d sooner take photographs of his abs in the bathroom mirror than go bird-watching. Stumbling after the surefooted remake of Casino Royale, there is no disguising the tedious drivel that was Quantum of Solace, nor that Skyfall borrowed heavily from the Home Alone franchise.
Crossing cultures
From our UK edition
For an Indian woman to make a dancework about La Bayadère is a promising prospect. This classical ballet of 1877 by Russia’s French-born genius Marius Petipa tells the simple story of an Indian temple dancer — essentially a religious sex slave — whose potential salvation by an amorous young soldier is dashed when he expediently marries the rajah’s daughter. Death and transfiguration ensue in some addictively gorgeous balletic poetry, along with all sorts of improbable exotica to please the tsar’s eye. Londoner Shobana Jeyasingh, born in India, trained as a traditional Bharatanatyam dancer, and is a contemporary dance choreographer of keen intelligence, if sometimes letting her brain get the better of her choreographic imagination.
Switch over to the Greek debt drama: the final episode must be coming shortly
From our UK edition
Bored with the election? Switch over to the Greek debt drama. In this week’s cliffhanger, silver-tongued finance minister Yanis Varoufakis visited IMF chief Christine Lagarde on Sunday, promised to meet his country’s obligations ‘ad infinitum’, and was expected to meet a €450 million repayment to the IMF on Thursday. But more troublesome members of the ruling Syriza party denounced the IMF and Brussels for treating Greece as ‘a colony’, threatening a snap election ‘if creditors insist on an inflexible line’, and warning that public-sector salaries and social security payments must rank ahead of debt as cash runs out. Which it will before August.
Tuesday
Snowden now faces the traitor’s fate – worship from hipsters and Hollywood
From our UK edition
New York Brooklyn is the hipster heaven of New York, which is perhaps why it was there that a bust of Edward Snowden was unveiled yesterday. Not that it stayed long. The bust of the former National Security Agency contractor was put on a pedestal sometime on Monday with the word ‘Snowden’ glued on the base at the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument at Fort Greene Park. It was taken down a few hours later by parks and recreation employees. I don’t want to read too much into this, but the brief deification and bringing down of Snowden’s image does seem apposite.
Saturday
Britain might want a holiday from history, but we’re not going to get one
From our UK edition
The more I think about the debate on Thursday night, the more I think it was a disgrace that there was no question on either defence or Britain’s role in the world. This country might want a holiday from history. But, sadly, we don’t look like getting one on. On Europe’s Eastern border, the Russians are behaving in an increasingly aggressive fashion. The Times' account of a recent meeting between ex-intelligence officials from Russia and the US shows just how bellicose Putin is and reveal that Britain might well soon have to decide whether to honour its Nato Article 5 obligations to the Baltic states. On Europe’s Southern border, Islamic State is a threat to the civilised order.
Thursday
Spectator letters: the Rowntree legacy, and a suggestion for the Met police
From our UK edition
Betrayal of Trust Sir: Rod Liddle has traduced the Quaker values of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust that include non-violence, equality and truth in his piece, ‘Jihadi John, Cage and the fools who give it money’, 7 March. Mr Liddle identified three recipients of JRCT grants: Jawaab UK, Cage, and Teach na Fáilte. Jawaab UK was not set up by an extremist Islamic maniac. On the contrary, it works to help young Muslims play their part in a democratic society. Cage, which JRCT ceased funding in January 2014, has in the past played an important role in defending the right to fair trial and due legal process. Finally, JRCT has not given money to the Irish National Liberation Army.
Wanted: a party leader willing to talk about defence
From our UK edition
[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/the-death-of-childhood/media.mp3" title="James Forsyth and John Bew discuss the lack of foreign policy in the election campaign" startat=928] Listen [/audioplayer]In the 1984 US presidential election, Ronald Reagan came up with an effective way of embarrassing his rival Walter Mondale over defence. ‘There’s a bear in the woods,’ ran his television advert, showing a grizzly bear wandering through a forest. ‘For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it all.’ During the British general election campaign, the Russian bear isn’t making any attempt to hide — it is standing on its hind legs and pawing at the trees with its claws.
Thursday
Shelling, militiamen and shattered villages: welcome to eastern Ukraine’s ceasefire
From our UK edition
Eastern Ukraine For a moment, the sound of shelling is drowned out by a thumping beat coming from a camouflaged van. ‘Separatysty [Separatists]!’ says the rousing chorus: ‘The day of your death is here!’ We are with a Ukrainian nationalist militia in a village outside Donetsk airport, which is in the hands of pro-Russian rebels, usually referred to by the Ukrainians as terorysty or bandyty. But despite their bravado, the war is not going well for the Ukrainian side. There have been a series of disastrous setbacks, towns and territory lost, whole units put to panicky flight. The shattered village, Piesky, reminds me of Chechnya or Bosnia, the houses’ red roofs caved in, shell craters in the soft earth, rubble everywhere.
It’s Nato that’s empire-building, not Putin
From our UK edition
[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/putin-s-empire-building/media.mp3" title="Peter Hitchens and Ben Judah debate Putin's empire building" startat=33] Listen [/audioplayer]Just for once, let us try this argument with an open mind, employing arithmetic and geography and going easy on the adjectives. Two great land powers face each other. One of these powers, Russia, has given up control over 700,000 square miles of valuable territory. The other, the European Union, has gained control over 400,000 of those square miles. Which of these powers is expanding? There remain 300,000 neutral square miles between the two, mostly in Ukraine. From Moscow’s point of view, this is already a grievous, irretrievable loss.
Monday
Vladimir Putin’s Russia is no longer just an authoritarian state; it is a dictatorship
From our UK edition
The murder of Boris Nemtsov, even more than previous assassinations of journalists and other figures deemed unhelpful to Vladimir Putin's regime, feels like a moment of grim significance. It represents a watershed, dividing Putin's past from his future. It is true, for sure, that Putin has rarely bothered to conceal his darker side. True, too, that too many people are prone to forgetting his actions - or rather the actions of people close to and supportive of Putin - in the Moscow apartment bombings which eased his path to power. Nevertheless, for a long time now, many people have preferred to turn away from the reality of Putin's Russia. Reality is a heavy puncher, however, and after the Crimea and the Ukraine comes this.
Friday
Does Evgeny Lebedev fancy being Mayor of London?
From our UK edition
While the Tories scrabble around for a candidate for the 2016 London Mayoral election, Mr S hears one millionaire is already eyeballing the 2020 race. Barely an edition of the Evening Standard fails to feature either an interview by (or with) their proprietor Evgeny Lebedev. His face is regularly found across the pages of both his publications the Standard and the Independent, most recently in an awkward interview with David Cameron. His father Alexander must have been proud, as he uploaded a photo of the two to Instagram: Evgueny recently interviewed D.Cameron.Hope a question about UK/Russia relations was raised.
Thursday
The dos and don’ts of the Russian art scene
From our UK edition
They’re doing fantastic deals on five-star hotels in St Petersburg the weekend the Francis Bacon exhibition opens at the Hermitage. With tensions between Russia and the west at their highest since the Cold War, ‘no one’, I’m told, wants to come here. No one, that is, except large numbers of elderly but well-heeled people from the Norwich area, many of them trustees and friends of the University of East Anglia’s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts — co-organisers of the exhibition — who have flown out here for the gala opening. If 2014’s UK-Russia Year of Culture passed virtually unnoticed for political reasons, the western visitor won’t experience the slightest sense of tension on the placid streets of St Petersburg.
Monday
The henchmen who prop up Putin need to be hit where it hurts
From our UK edition
If anyone thought Russian President, Vladimir Putin, was a strongman the West could do business with, that delusion has been punctured. Last week, Russian Bear bombers skirted by British airspace. In January, a UK public inquiry into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, KGB agent turned UK-based dissident, heard he was murdered at Putin’s behest in an ‘act of nuclear terrorism’ on British soil. And Kremlin-backed rebels are ensuring a cease-fire with Ukraine crumbles, leaving the West looking impotent as Putin’s stare shifts menacingly to the Baltic countries of the European Union. But, are we in Britain doing everything we realistically can to curb Putin’s bullying?
Thursday
Will the real Swan Lake please stand up
From our UK edition
It is the end of an era — the Royal Ballet’s extravagant Fabergé-egg Swan Lake production by Anthony Dowell is on its last legs. When this 28-year-old production finishes the current run on 9 April, that will be it for one of the most controversial classical productions of the past half-century. It’s the one set in Romanov Russia, festooned with ribbons and golden squiggles, with swans in champagne ball-gowns rather than pristine white feathers. Hallucinatory, glamorous and opulently symbolist? Or hectic, fussy and tatty? Adjectives divide between the adoring and the withering for Yolanda Sonnabend’s Gustave Moreau-esque designs and for Dowell’s hyperactive staging.
How Vladimir Putin is waging war on the West – and winning
From our UK edition
Last month, the speaker of the Russian parliament solemnly instructed his foreign affairs committee to launch a historical investigation: was West Germany’s ‘annexation’ of East Germany really legal? Should it be condemned? Ought it to be reversed? Last week, the Russian foreign minister, speaking at a security conference in Munich, hinted that he might have similar doubts. ‘Germany’s reunification was conducted without any referendum,’ he declared, ominously. At this, the normally staid audience burst out laughing. The Germans in the room found the Russian statements particularly hilarious. Undo German unification? Why, that would require undoing the whole post-Cold War settlement!
Michael Fallon worries about Putin’s next step: this is what the Russian President plans to do
From our UK edition
Michael Fallon is worried about Vladimir Putin repeating his tactics in Ukraine with other countries. The Defence Secretary told newspapers that he was ‘worried about his pressure on the Baltics, the way he is testing Nato’. This morning Nick Clegg said that while there was ‘no evidence right now’ that the Russian President was seeking to do the same in the Baltic states, ‘we should be vigilant when a leader of a nation like Russia starts throwing his weight around in the way that he does, in such an arbitrary and acceptable way, of course we need to be vigilant’. So what is Putin’s strategy? Well, in this week’s Spectator, Anne Applebaum examines the Russian President’s plan to draw a new Iron Curtain across Europe.
Why Putin is even less of a human than Stalin was
From our UK edition
LBC likes to tell us it’s ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’, though in the case of weekday pre-lunch presenter James O’Brien you’ll have to sit through a series of bombastic monologues from the host before any punters get a word in edgeways. O’Brien knows everything, and he doesn’t mind telling you. Still, I understand that running a talk show is no job for timid introverts who might burst into tears if callers start giving them a hard time. The trick is pretending to listen sympathetically while being ready to drop the guillotine without compunction (after all, these people aren’t your friends, they’re just statistics for the business plan).
Wednesday
The Kremlin is dictating Russian culture once more – and it’s neo-Soviet and anti-Western
From our UK edition
It’s suddenly gone icy-cold in Russia’s arts relations with us and the US. Last year’s Russia-UK Year of Culture just snicked under the wire before the political chill started building up ice in all sorts of unexpected places. The international acclaim for the epic Russian film Leviathan, up for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, was sneered at by the feverishly nationalistic culture minister Vladimir Medinsky. Recently he denounced the film as 'perfectly calculated to pander' to western views of a bleak modern Russia, and he has previously proposed that only movies properly celebrating today’s Russia should be allowed either public funding or a release.
Thursday
How Putin turned Russian politics into reality TV
From our UK edition
‘We all know there will be no real politics.’ A prominent Russian TV presenter is speaking off the record at a production meeting in 2001. ‘But we still have to give our viewers the sense that something is happening. They need to be kept entertained. Politics has got to feel … like a movie!’ When Peter Pomerantsev, a Brit of Russian descent, sat in on this meeting he had recently graduated and moved to Moscow to work as a TV producer. A decade in Russian television has now provided him with the material for his chilling first book. Nothing is True… is more than an evocative travelogue or an insight into a new system of authoritarian control, although it is both of these.
