Robin Ashenden

In the wake of draconian laws against ‘LGBT Propaganda’ introduced in Russia at the end of last year – namely, speaking with anything but flagrant condemnation about LGBT matters in public – Russia’s politicians seem to have sunk to a new low: feminism could soon be reclassified as an ‘extremist’ activity. A draft law setting out this crackdown has been put together by Oleg Matveychev, member of United Russia, Putin-supporter and deputy chairman of a state Duma committee. It’s currently being chewed over by the ‘Commission for Investigation of Foreign Interference in Russia’s Internal Affairs’ and, if judged a runner, will then pass to the state Duma for ratification.

Few people in Rostov-on-Don will weep over the news that a local FSB building in the city caught fire yesterday. Just the mention of the acronym for the Security Services (formerly KGB) was, when I lived there, enough to still and silence a room. When a girl in one of my classes announced rather proudly that her boyfriend worked for the service, there was a ripple of discomfort in the room and, subsequently, fellow students once expansive got notably more guarded. At a local pipe club I attended, one of the members worked for them too, a well-built man with brushed back hair, a Stalin moustache, and a set – unlike the rest of us – of the most expensive Dunhill pipes (a decent income is just one of the job’s advantages). Everyone at the club deferred to him.

For three and a half years, between Autumn 2018 and 2022, the most thrilling words I could say to anyone – especially myself – were ‘I live in Russia.’ I had read about the country since I was a child – obsessively from my mid-twenties onwards – and it was Holy Land for me. Other people I knew had flirted with the place on study-courses, temporary work-placements or backpacking, yet always with an end in sight. But I had a child growing up in Rostov, in southern Russia, had put down roots, integrated into its society and planned to grow old there. For the rest of my life, I thought, I would be taking evening strolls down Pushkinskaya Avenue, experiencing its suffocating summers and snowy winters.

As Vladimir Putin seemingly dithers over the question of whether to send a further 500,000 of his citizens onto the battlefield this winter, one reason against – as reported on Coffee House – is surely a lack of basic equipment for them. Since the ‘partial mobilisation’ of up to 300,000 hapless men last September, there have been numerous reports of the army’s failure to properly kit them out. Russian soldiers have been sent to the front with children-sized gloves, uselessly thin rubber boots and, for facial protection, paintball masks. ‘They think we’ll walk around in this sh** like in Star Wars,’ one Russian soldier jokes in clip recorded by those sent to fight in Ukraine.

On a Russian Telegram channel, Svetlana from Samara is making a public plea. She has not heard from her brother since the shelling of Makiivka on 31 December, which may have killed up to 400 Russian soldiers. Enquiries to the military registration, the city governor, the Ministry of Defence have apparently turned up nothing. ‘After all my appeals, requests, calls, I became desperate that no one was listening to me. Ordinary, simple people are not needed by anyone.’  Another, older woman, Valentina, posts from the same region. ‘Please help me find my son,’ she says. ‘He was in Makiivka on 31 December. Since then, there’s been no news. He is neither [registered as] alive nor dead. In the military registration and enlistment office they say “wait”.

‘War is the realm of uncertainty’, said the Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz, and this would seem to apply very well to affairs in Russia at the moment. Following September’s shock ‘partial mobilisation’, rumours have swirled around since of another mass-mobilisation due imminently. Having got Russian New Year (the country’s main December celebration) out of the way, there were fears that Putin might announce the conscription of several hundred thousand more men.  This assumption was based on several factors, not least Putin’s original refusal to limit the mobilisation and the predictions of Ukrainian intelligence – who said 5 January was earmarked for a second wave.

In Ukraine’s Odessa, a new way of life is developing. As Putin targets there – as elsewhere – the city’s power-stations and general infrastructure, people are adapting fast. There are news reports of women drying their hair in electrical stores, or of men plugging in their shavers in shopping malls. One enterprising beautician has set up stall in an underground car park, and gives people manicures by battery-powered light. A local notary’s office, I’m told, finding the electricity cutting out just as they were printing a document, searched the neighbourhood for a café where they could plug in the printer and finish the job. ‘It takes so much of your energy, all this,’ says one Odessan resident. ‘And your time.

Travel the length and breadth of Russia – as you could fairly easily before the outbreak of war last February – and you will find, in many cities, a museum called Russia: My History. These institutions have a clear message for visitors. Empire-building luminaries like Ivan the Terrible and the despots Nicholas I and Alexander III are depicted as heroes. Vladimir Putin is also exalted. The territorial gains strong rulers can achieve are something to celebrate, as is the state religion they aggressively propagate. But what many visitors don't know about these modern-day monuments to expansionism is the hidden hand that helped curate them: the Russian Orthodox church.

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's first novel, appeared 60 years ago this month. Vividly portraying a normal day in the life of a Gulag prisoner, it was followed by Solzhenitsyn's two great anti-Stalinist novels, The First Circle and Cancer Ward (both 1968), which helped establish the Soviet dissident-in-excelsis as a modern-day Tolstoy and a darling of the Cold War West. Soon after that, in 1975, came the third and final part of The Gulag Archipelago, his mighty takedown of the Soviet system. In the words of French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, it caused ‘a worldwide earthquake’, dissolving the ‘Communist dream...in the furnace of a book.’ Solzhenitsyn's reputation as one of the most famous writers in the world was confirmed.

The latest series of The Crown has arrived on Netflix. To its predictable advantage, the show has already had the advance-publicity of raised voices. Ex-PM Sir John Major, commenting on a particular scene in the series between him and the then-Prince Charles, said it was a ‘barrel load of nonsense’ and would be ‘profoundly hurtful to a family who are still grieving...’ Dame Judi Dench, in an open letter to the Times, claimed The Crown presented ‘an inaccurate and hurtful account of history’ and urged its creators (successfully) to add a disclaimer admitting the drama was ‘fictionalised.’ Now Sir Tony Blair has joined the chorus of criticism, letting it be known he considers aspects of the series ‘complete and utter rubbish.

Renata is a young paediatrician from St Petersburg who, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, keeps crying at work. Her colleagues are baffled: why is she sobbing over Ukrainian deaths when she doesn’t have relatives there? She’s surrounded, she says, by ‘complete incomprehension’ from her fellow-doctors, ‘and I’m quietly going insane.’ Her mother Vinera, a school headteacher, advocates the war, believes the West has its eye on Russia’s ‘inexhaustible wealth’ and that it envies Russia’s people for their ‘spiritual’ values. Renata no longer goes home to visit Vinera: ‘I find her disgusting, she’s a hypocrite, I’m disgusted by her views.’ Galya is a violinist from Samara, locked in a failing marriage to Vladimir, a former state investigator.

Thirty two years ago, on a cold November Thursday, Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister, pushed out of office following 11 years in government. In 2022, after just 44 days, Liz Truss stood outside Downing Street on another Thursday autumn afternoon, to tender her own resignation to the British public. It had taken a cabal of ministers to topple Thatcher, while Truss’s fate was decided by a single MP, Sir Graham Brady, Chairman of the 1922 Committee. These final differences aside, Liz Truss cosplayed her heroine Margaret Thatcher to the last. Liz Truss’s emulation of Margaret Thatcher always had a whiff of teenage fantasy or fairytale about it. She was the Talented Ms Truss taking on someone else’s identity and living out a dream.

Thousands of Russians are fleeing from Putin's forced mobilisation. To escape from a call-up – and probable death sentence – on the frontlines of Ukraine, men and women are leaving behind their friends, families and possessions. They must dodge patrols and mobile check points at the borders to catch those trying to evade the call up. The lucky ones make it out. But even once these people have escaped Putin's clutches, the terror and fear endures. I met one of these men, Maxim, in a bar in Tbilisi, Georgia. He and his wife had just fled from Russia, after Putin’s ‘partial mobilisation’ order of 21 September. Though it is now well into October, Maxim still seemed agitated from the trauma of the past few weeks.

Russia’s new crop of conscripts are a desperate, dejected bunch. A photograph showing an Orthodox priest blessing these men as they headed off to fight from the settlement of Bataysk in the Rostov region summed up their hopelessness. The names of such little known Russian localities must – to an English reader – all merge into one. They are simply over there, in Russia, where the suffering it has inflicted on a neighbouring country has finally come back to haunt it. https://twitter.com/phildstewart/status/1574444354026061825?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw But I know where Bataysk is very well. It is a dull suburb of Rostov-on-Don, a city where I lived for four years – a kind of nothing village of one-storey villas, inhabited by Rostov commuters.