I’ve recently been thinking about one of the times I was in russia—in Saint Petersburg—in April of 2007.
People think this evil from Putin is a new thing. It’s not.
2007 was before russia invaded Georgia, and before they invaded Ukraine.
It was about a month before “Victory Day”, and already the entire city was covered in the black and orange ribbons, and Nevsky Prospect—the most famous street in russia—had multi-storey banners of propaganda and Putin’s face all over the buildings.
Because of my (Northern Irish) surname, the woman my brother and I were meeting up with assumed I wasn’t Ukrainian. And so when I said I was, she BURST OUT LAUGHING. She said “Sorry, but I always laugh when I meet Ukrainians. They sound so stupid when they speak.”
She was then horrified that my Ukrainian family didn’t like the Soviet Union.
russians say one thing to Westerners and something else entirely to the people they invade and colonise over and over again. They hide their racism when they speak to people in the West.
That same trip to russia, the building we were staying in ON NEVSKY PROSPECT was raided by two truckloads of men with machine guns. Tour buses were driving past, and armed men were raiding our apartment!
A few days later we were in Tallinn in Estonia. Bronze Night had just happened, when russian thugs trashed the city because the Estonians moved a Soviet statue. Every single window in the city centre was held up with wooden boards.
This was nearly twenty years ago.
I look at all these idiotic tankies in the West (and on Tumblr). And I’m shocked by their wilful ignorance when it comes to russia.
