In the west, Russia, it seems, is considered to be somewhat of a mystery. Churchill said of Russia that it was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.
I am currently reading Jonathon Dimbleby’s book “Russia, A Journey to the Heart of a Land and its People”. Written to accompany a BBC tv series, it purports to be a “revealing” portrait of modern Russia, and to get beneath the skin of the Russian culture.
A “revealing” portrait of Russia? You’ve got to be joking!
The book could never “reveal” much at all about Russia, for Dimbleby, a “distinguished broadcaster and author”, is simply not up to the task.
Firstly: his demeanour. Dimbleby is pushy. He’s aggressive. He’s domineering. He interrogates. He’s high profile. He has a set of pre-conceived questions that he wants answers to. He interrogates Russians he meets in an attempt to satisfy those questions. (This is, after all, what he spends most of his broadcasting life doing i.e. he interviews/interrogates slippery, wily, devious, tricksy politicians.)
No, no, no, no, no. That’s NOT how you find out about a foreign culture. You don’t impose yourself on the culture. You don’t swagger in and issue a challenge to the Russians to tell you about themselves, or to justify why they do not like democracy. For one thing, if you swagger, you just get people’s backs up. Instead, you must allow the culture to “speak” to you — and Dimbleby simply can’t do that. He doesn’t know how to be “low key”, how to take a back seat, how to adapt, how to be unassuming, how to be “invisible”. Actually, the crux of the matter is that he doesn’t know how to communicate. And if you can’t communicate with people, you’ll never find out anything about them.
Secondly: Dimbleby has gone into Russia with a set of pre-conceived ideas. He believes, for example, that democracy is superior to all other political systems. It is also clear that these ideas are not his own: he is merely spouting what he’s read in western newspapers and heard from the mouths of western politicians. His only concern, therefore, is how Russia compares to those western ideals. In other words, when Dimbleby travelled to Russia, instead of going in with an open mind, instead of going in a spirit of enquiry, he took his own culture with him and spent much of his time imposing that on the Russians, instead of listening to what they had to tell him.
So, in summary, the book is, in fact, a portrait. But not of Russia. Did he but know it, it is a very revealing portrait of Dimbleby himself. It is a portrait of someone who lives in a closed universe — nothing in, nothing out.
PS: By the way, the man’s shameless — what a name-dropper!