SUNDAYS AT VERONIKA’S: MIKE...

…had been visiting Veronika and her apartment-mate Marina for while and also been on an excursion with them to the (relatively) nearby city of Mariinsk. Mariinsk is Veronika’s hometown and one of the best-preserved “islands” in the gulag archipelago. Mike is mild-mannered guy, a retired photographer. Not an art photographer… he apparently took scientific photographs for textbooks in a lab (I think)… but that’s over anyway. He now works and volunteers part-time as a teacher in London’s state schools.

He shared his impressions of Siberia with the growing crowd: How everyone seemed much more trusting in Russia than in England; he was surprised people would trust strangers to pass their fare up to the driver on the bus. How the ill-kept the roads in Novosibirsk are… as he explained, if you see so much as a pothole in London, you can call a local office and they’ll send a road crew to fill it ASAP; that’s as compared with the canyons and ridges you have to negotiate on any side street in this city. He read some poems he’d written. He answered questions.

Most interesting to me was when he started talking about attitudes of ownership. Most people, according to Mike, had massive debts in England… most on their homes but some on something else. He said he had the sense that this wasn’t the case in Russia… that it seemed people didn’t buy things until they could pay for them. People in the room said yes: In Russia, if you haven’t paid for something in full yet, it’s not yours. It might just show how shamefully ignorant I am about the economy here, but this had never occurred to me as a major difference between Russian and Western economies. I knew credit cards were virtually never used here. I knew people lived with their parents well into their 20’s if they couldn’t get an affordable apartment. But I had the impression that any economic woe we were dealing with in the West would be not only present, but much worse here. I’ll look into this more…

After most of Veronika’s neighbors had left, I had a chance to talk with Mike personally. I’m sure this was one of the reasons Veronika invited me. Mike might have felt a bit left out if the Russian conversation started getting too fast or deep to translate…

I asked him about British politics, and if he’d be voting Tory or Labour in the next election—I’m never shy about asking these kinds of questions, and I always tell people they don’t have to answer if they don’t want, but they usually don’t mind. He said he’d probably be voting Conservative. I didn’t comment, didn’t want to preach or judge. I just said I understood that a lot of people had been fed up with the job Labour was doing, and he confirmed.

He said his biggest concern was with the growth in membership of far-right parties. He didn’t trust extremists like that, he said, but the strange thing was that if you actually listened to what they claimed to support, it didn’t sound that bad. They claimed not to want to stop immigration altogether, just control it. And he agreed it needed to be better-controlled, because England almost wasn’t England anymore.

Mike is open-minded person. He certainly got along well with Russians and seemed happy to spend time in the middle of Siberia, something that’s certainly not true of all Westerners you might meet. If this is how a kind-hearted, moderate voter in Britain thinks right now, it probably sheds some light on why far-right parties have been gaining ground in Europe lately. Mike is probably right: the younger generation is noticing the same demographic shifts in Britain that he is. But, being young, naïve, and hotheaded, they don’t understand (or don’t care) that when a neo-Nazi talks about the need for “controlling” immigration, it should be interpreted as a euphemism for something more extreme.

It makes you worry that the progress the West has made in attitudes about race is easily reversible, especially as memories fade and people forget what Nazis did when they were in power. Enlightened attitudes about ethnicity are supposedly one of the most important things that distinguish late capitalist European (and American) citizens from post-communist citizens… and it’s true, many Russians remain frankly, even innocently, racist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic, if the ones I meet day-to-day are representative. But the Russians’ low-intensity, pervasive, traditional prejudices are just objectionable. I think reactionary racism, of the kind represented by the Western anti-immigrant parties, has the potential to be a lot more dangerous.