People are far more interested in what happens in their own country than in others; patriots put their birthplace first and “progressives” put theirs down. But both sides are united in the exceptionalism they display towards their homeland, either believing it to be better or worse than anywhere else.
For me, it’s always been different. The Soviet Union was hardly a wallflower at any stage in history; going from Tsarist empire to Communist superpower to an entire era of muscle-flexing under Vladimir Putin, up to and including Moscow’s Victory Day parades at the weekend. But that hardly put me off — for the simple reason that I was raised as a Soviet patriot.
When I hear friends’ horror stories about their parents, I always think how lucky I was. My dad was handsome and witty, generous and kind — even if he was a big fan of a system believed to have killed around 20 million people.
He wasn’t a big reader; it wasn’t the Communist theory he liked. Rather, he idealised the Soviet Union in a manner that reminds me of the images on the cover of The Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witness magazine; people wandering beatifically unharmed among wild animals, the lion and the lamb making eyes at each other.
He was, for example, obsessed with the cleanliness of the Moscow underground stations; in a television film I wrote about him, Prince, a young Sean Bean tells his daughter about Russia: “It’s very cold, very clean… and everybody’s happy. Because the country belongs to them. Their subways stations are immaculate — you could eat your dinner off the floor. Because nobody drops rubbish. Because it all belongs to them — the people.” Never religious, the USSR was his Promised Land.
A clever man from an illiterate, poverty-wracked home, he refused the promotions offered him at the distillery where he worked and instead organised his trade union, in the interests of not being bought by the bourgeoisie. After the factory closed, and before he died of the mesothelioma that he had contracted as a teenage builder, his last job was as a car-park attendant. He died seeing it as a triumph that he had made no advancement up the class ladder.
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