Review
Books
Change
Politics
4 min read

Russia’s waiting reformation

Putin’s world is not the only take on Russia.

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Graffiti on a wall, spells out in Russian character the name Navalny.
Anti-Putin pro-Navalny graffiti, Saint Petersburg.
Dor Shabashewitz via Wikimedia Commons.

When I presented the book I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko for purchase at the counter, my only thought was for what the bookseller would think.  Was I a Putin sympathiser and apologist for the war in Ukraine?  It says a lot about how we have unconsciously embraced Putin’s world as the only take on Russia.  There is an indigenous saying that Russia is not Moscow and Moscow is not Russia.  By the same token, Putin is not Russia, however much he would like us to think this; it is naïve and prejudiced of us to allow the largest country in the world to be defined by its dictator. 

Elena Kostyuchenko, and Alexei Navalny in his posthumously published book Patriot, belong in different generations to Putin and inhabit another moral universe.  Navalny has done more than anyone to call out the epic levels of corruption and dark cynicism of the Putin era.  This is a Mafia state, as Luke Harding observes.  Navalny believes there are twenty people who rule in Russia, with staggering levels of visible and hidden wealth, and a further one thousand who eat from their trough.  The rest of the country includes those who are duped by state media, those who don’t want to know or keep their heads down or don’t care, and those who testify to the truth.   

This latter cohort shows remarkable courage, because they are being silenced, one by one, through prison or murder.  Navalny died in prison after previously being poisoned in Siberia; Kostyuchenko was poisoned while in Germany and has been targeted for assassination elsewhere.  Before them lies a sobering roll call of journalists and politicians like Anna Politkovskaya, Boris Nemtsov and Igor Domnikov whose murders are clearly attributable to what they have said about the crimes of Putin and his associates. 

Elena Kostyuchenko’s journalism takes her to Russia’s abandoned people and places.  Derelict and decaying hospitals where the young, the addicted and the dispossessed gather; the mothers of Beslan who are beaten up and persecuted because they want the truth about that fateful siege; psychiatric hospitals with no resources or patient care; landscapes depleted by corrupt extractive industries.  She is inspired by the fearless reportage of Politkovskaya and her writing bears the imprint of Svetlana Alexievich, with its gift for listening and attention to the wonderful ordinariness of human life.  Her walk down the dark parade of Russia’s casualties is a tribute to the finest traditions of journalism, which carry the echo of the voice of Christ in their attention to those who lose out in this world. 

In prison, Alexei Navalny learned the Sermon on the Mount by heart; his conversion from the routine atheism of his Soviet upbringing being triggered by the birth of his and Yulia’s first child, Dasha.  He is wry, sardonic, stubborn, implacable – displaying an other-worldly willpower.  It is hard to compute the courage it took to return to Russia after being poisoned with Novichok, knowing it would surely lead to imprisonment, mistreatment and death: 

One day I made the decision not to be afraid.  I weighed everything up, understood where I stand – and let it go. 

Of the pain inflicted on him in prison for speaking the truth about Putin’s Russia, he says: 

I have decided that this is my own pared-down version of suffering for the faith, a moment of suffering for being a believer.  Happily it does not entail being dismembered, stoned to death, or having the lions set on me. 

And yet the totality of his life was not far short of this.  He skates over much of the abuse, but references being woken every hour of every night for a personal roll call.  When other prisoners were primed to shout at Navalny for long periods from close range, it is deeply moving to visualise him shouting back and not backing down.  Over time, his bespoke prison regime became steadily more abusive and isolating, directed in his view from the Kremlin. 

There is absurdity at the heart of the system and he confronts those responsible for it, rather than meekly submitting to it.  In the late Soviet era, criminal law was so comprehensively drafted that anyone could be picked up for an infringement if this was politically expedient.  In Putin’s Russia, we have returned to the Stalinist period where offences are simply made up in a dark Wonderland.  It is rule by law, not of law. 

The editor of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov, uses a particular metaphor.  He says that Putin and his Kremlin officials act like priests who mediate a believer’s relationship with God.  They have become intermediaries for how Russians are supposed to experience their country, telling them what to think and feel about it.  If so, then Russia is ready for a new reformation, where people claim their own organic relationship with a nation that means so much to them.  There are already enough martyrs for this new reformation while Putin continues to speak power to truth.  Those of us who care about its people and its future do not need Putin’s malign priesthood to interpret Russian life.  There is a different Russia, waiting to be discovered.      

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Review
America
Culture
Film & TV
Politics
5 min read

Trump: from apprentice to master of contempt

The Trump biopic is a morality tale for our times
An 1980s business man looks contemptuously at the camera.
Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump.
Scythia Films.

He won. Donald Trump is, once again, the President of the United States. The controversial property tycoon, controversial ‘billionaire’, controversial reality TV star, and highly controversial one-term (or so it seemed) President, has done it again! Sweeping not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote, Trump will have another four years to ‘Make America Great Again’…whatever that means. The question on most pundits’ lips today is: how? The man who was written off from the first moments he descended into his campaign on that golden escalator; the man who was guaranteed to lose his first (let alone his third!) Presidential bid; the man who has been mired in sexual, financial, constitutional, and legal scandal…how could he win again!? 

Rather than seek answers in the election coverage of last night I went to an alternative source of information. I popped down to my local cinema to watch The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi’s biopic of Trump’s rise to power and prominence, focusing on his ‘apprenticeship’ under pugnacious, pugilistic, flamboyant, and flamingly foul-mouthed lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn. Whether consciously or not – and believe me, it’s so consciously on the nose as to feel like a punch to the nose – the film draws a ruler-straight line from Trump’s early days as Cohn’s disciple to his electoral success in 2016…and now in 2024. 

How did Trump win, not once but twice…? 

…by selling his soul to the Devil. 

We meet Trump and Cohn in an exclusive New York Members Club. Trump is shy and awkward – none of the bombast we know him for – clumsily trying to impress his date by mentioning how he is the youngest member to ever be admitted. Cohn is holding court with some mob-coded friends. Cohn stares at the handsome, golden-haired ingénue (Trump, not his date) across the room through sunken domes. He invites Trump to join him for dinner. The date has gone to ‘powder my nose’ and seemingly has made a lucky escape through the lavatory window. Trump joins Cohn. Cohn bloviates, always with his hand firmly gripping Trump’s thigh. Trump is enamoured…smitten…in love. Cohn becomes his lawyer and Trump his protégé. 

The film goes on to chronicle how, under Cohn’s tutelage, Trump becomes the man we now know. Cohn is committed to winning – under the guise of being committed to America. He teaches Trump his three rules for success:  

  1. Attack, attack, attack. 
  2. Admit nothing. Deny everything. 
  3. Even in defeat, claim victory.  

There is a nice bit of mirroring in the final scene as we see Trump regurgitate these rules, introduced pithily and wittily in the first 30 minutes of the film, in his final exaggerated and bloviated style to a ghost-writer employed to write The Art of the Deal. This is how Trump wins. Throughout the film we watch Trump evolve from the nervous young man, protective of his alcoholic brother and under-the-thumb of his overbearing father, into a monstrous, ad absurdum form of Cohn…a man who will demand absolute submission to his will. 

The film, I wager, is partly a morality tale. It gives us a (slightly) sympathetic young Faustus, and chronicles his descent into Hell, but without a hint of real redemption or pity.

The film is sickeningly enjoyable. Sebastian Stan gently invites us to root for Trump in his timidity, and transforms with a subtlety which leaves the audience questioning their own culpability. Maria Bakalova brings a good-natured innocence to Ivana Trump (née Zelníčková) which steals the few scenes she’s afforded. Jeremy Strong – always watchable – brings his magnetic charisma to the screen. His Cohn is akin to Pacino’s John Milton in The Devil’s Advocate: delightfully chewing the scenery and ingratiating himself to the viewer while being hateful. The film is just over two hours long but doesn’t feel it. Never dragging, never boring. The soundtrack revels in the period, and the needle-drops are near perfect. It’s a really rather fun watch. 

However. 

The film is not nourishing. It is the cinematic equivalent of the junk food that leads to Trump’s expanding waistline (and the liposuction scene that is so difficult to watch). The film painstakingly draws parallels between Trump’s early success and his later political career. Cohn’s rules, Reagan’s campaigning slogans, the arrogance, the (sexual!) violence…everything we associate with Trump today is found in its nascent form in his 1980s career. Yet, none of it really matters because we have no character we want to attach ourselves to. No one, except perhaps Trump’s mother and his first wife, neither of whom have the chance to make enough of an impact, is likable or redeemable. Cohn is slime personified, until a sudden AIDS related conversion to conscience, and we don’t see nearly enough of the pathetic and put-upon Trump to care about his descent into the demonic realm of absolute self-absorption. The script is razor-sharp, but not incisive. The characters are riotously funny, but nowhere near emotionally engaging enough. 

The film, I wager, is partly a morality tale. It gives us a (slightly) sympathetic young Faustus, and chronicles his descent into Hell, but without a hint of real redemption or pity. Mortality makes Cohn recognise the monster he has been the Dr Frankenstein to, but in about ten minutes. We see a relative innocent made villain, but barely having had the chance to care for him in his infancy. No amount of slick script or genuinely bravura performance (Jeremy Strong deserves an Oscar) can make up for the cold and emotionless lens that the film has. In a sense, this gives us a more realistic explanation of Trump’s victory than the film seeks to muster…disdain. 

Like Trump, I deployed ‘alternative facts’. 

I lied. 

I did watch some of the election coverage in the early hours of the morning. As the Trump victory became inexorable, I watched pundit after pundit – who had been excoriating Trump supporters as either stupid or malign only 24 hours before – earnestly explain that it was a lack of engagement with middle-America which had lost it for the Democrats. Tony Hinchcliffe may have made a predictably unpleasant joke about Puerto Rico being a ‘garbage island’, but it was Biden calling even reluctant Trump voters ‘garbage’ which swung the election. We live in a new polarised age where the genuine concerns of the ordinary man or woman, if they can be associated with someone as aesthetically and morally compromised as Trump, make them functionally fascist.  

The Apprentice, simply by being unable to empathise with anyone not in favour, gives us the secret to Trump’s victory. It wasn’t Cohn’s rules. It was his overactive ability to demonstrate his contempt for everyone, and therefore seem to have contempt for no one. His detractors demonstrated the reverse. In the end Trump hasn’t needed to attack, or deny, or claim illegitimate victory. He simply has had to be himself. 

Saaaad. 

 

**** Stars