Why are some Russians still in denial about their troubled past?

Few books change your life but one that heavily influenced mine was Among the Russians (1983), Colin Thubron's travel book about the late Brezhnev-era USSR. Catching me as a 20 year-old, it launched me on a lifetime of living and travelling in the former Soviet Union. Returning in 1999 from a long trip to Minsk, Kazan and Volgograd I reread it, marvelling at how uncannily it evoked my own experience of the country. Other travel books merely informed you about Russia – this one, dense with metaphor and luminously described human encounters seemed, in its 200 or so pages, to transport you there and make you feel it. You couldn't quite remember afterwards whether the experiences were Thubron's or your own. Pronounced by Count Nikolai Tolstoy a 'magnificent achievement', lit by a strange magic, it was a foundational text for so many of us who went on to make Russian culture part of our lives.

The trip on which the book was based took place in 1980, between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war. Thubron, having discovered he was legally entitled to drive across the USSR (heavily monitored), set out to traverse the country from Minsk to Tbilisi, taking in Moscow, Leningrad, the Baltic States and Kyiv as he went. It wasn't everyone's idea of a pleasure-jaunt: the Cold War was still arctic and Communism, though moribund, as yet untampered with by Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika. Lenin slogans were everywhere and people habitually sank their lives in alcoholism, hopelessness and snaking food-queues. Soviet citizens begged him for blue jeans, Western books or to sell them (or just let them touch) his Morris Marina, which transfixed them with its otherworldly Western beauty (!). Pre-consumerism, pre-oligarch, pre-internet, pre-McDonalds, it's a vanished world.

'The suppression or distortion of history,' Thubron wrote, 'has persuaded a whole people of their virtue.'

Or is it? Forty years old this year, the book has worn well. Though its lyricism may be out of sorts with modern tastes – Thubron's was the generation influenced by the lapidary style of Freya Stark and Patrick Leigh Fermor – it has much to tell us about Russia now, particularly its last, grisly year of waging war.

Repeatedly, things chime with the present day. The Tsars of antiquity were 'convinced of their divinely ordained mission, and of the degeneracy of other peoples.' When Thubron writes of the tsar cleansing his hands 'after the touch of European ambassadors', you think of Putin's paranoid, prolonged self-isolation, the absurd length of that table.

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Even in 1980, at a low point in Brezhnev's stagnation period, the country was stuffed with militarism. 'Only since entering Russia,' wrote Thubron, 'had I understood the dead weight of patriotism in this persecuted land.' War memorials, he was told, were Russia's 'national altars.' The country bristled, then as now, with 'bullying monuments…tanks and field-guns elevated on concrete plinths… eternal flames, sculptured heroes, obelisks, symbols, epitaphs.' They seemed to maintain the country on a constant war-footing which fed on itself – a paranoia not only provoking to opponents, but also vital for holding the vast country together: 'War readiness is like a fever here: the aggression of a dangerous and insecure child.' The reminders of past victories everywhere seemed a kind of death cult – the book is littered with graveyards, ossuaries and catacombs. You can't help but think, as you read, of last year's countless killings in Irpin, Bucha, the battlefields of the Donbass, and the dead that lie abandoned there.

Yet amidst the invasion of Afghanistan, many Russians – then as today – clung to the notion that they were the good guys and could never be anything else. When Thubron mentioned the 1940 Katyn massacre to a Soviet guide – in which 22,000 Polish prisoners of war were executed by the Soviets in a Smolensk forest – the man simply refused to believe him: 'We would never do a thing like that.'

Later Thubron was asked repeatedly how any country could possibly be afraid of Russia: the thought was 'preposterous…manifestly silly.' The recent assault on Afghanistan, they assured him, was to defend the 'friendly peoples' against 'foreign interventionists who were exploiting the backward state of the country' (sounds familiar?) and that it sprang from 'Russia's deep desire for peace…We have to defend our borders.' The names of places Russia menaces may have changed – not so the self-rationalising duplicities. 'The suppression or distortion of history,' Thubron wrote, 'has persuaded a whole people of their virtue.'

Other scenes too could have sprung straight from 2023. Seeing a group of Soviet schoolchildren obediently drawing street-pictures on the theme of 'Peace', Thubron was unsettled: they 'might equally well have inscribed 'War' for they were drawing only the government's temporary requirement. They were perfect tools, pure reflections.' While the children went on actively inheriting their Empire's self-deception, 'chalking their bears on the tarmac of Kalinin,' the Soviet army is committing terrible atrocities in the Hindu Kush. Again, unchanging Russia: as Bakhmut is flattened by Prigozhin's armies, and his soldiers, we are told, slaughter children and the elderly, posters went up in Volgograd recently decorated with tulips, a sky-blue dove and the word 'Peace' in five different languages.

Among the Russians might read like a bleak, beautifully written Cold War tract – an 'ours is better' polemic – were it not for the vividly described encounters with Russian citizens. 'The concept of the West might be abhorrent,' Thubron wrote, 'but the Westerner himself was human and susceptible, and the Russians' open nature embraced him.'

Some of the conversations – snatched against a background of surveillance – had a distinctly healing quality to them. As he and ordinary Russians traded opinions, Thubron felt 'a weight of fear and suspicion, unconsciously carried all my life, lifting from my shoulders with the ease of a natural event, of something rectified. Then I would realise by the depth of my pleasure how profound the fear had been.'

One massive change since 1980 is the standing of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Religion may loom large in Among the Russians, but back then it was proscribed, monitored, barely tolerated. Though there had been a limited (state-sanctioned) revival of Christianity, most churches remained closed, turned into cinemas, restaurants or planetaria. Orthodox belief Thubron saw as a deeper Russia, biding its time under Communist dogma, but what I wonder does he make of the ROC today? Of Patriarch Kirill's assurance to the military that they had chosen the 'correct path' in life, or that death in battle would 'wash away all the sins' they had committed? How would Thubron write about the Cathedral of the Armed Forces near Moscow, whose mosaics crow over the invasion of Georgia in 2008 or the annexation of Crimea nine years ago?

Again, nothing new. In a scene whose modern parallels won't need stating, Thubron described the weird, time-honoured Russian confluence of religion and politics. Rulers, we're told, even governed from within cathedral walls where 'their most secular and atrocious decisions took on the sanctity of gospel… Momentarily, perhaps, as the tsar clasped in his jewelled hands the flower-shaped chalice of the Host, a decision to attack Poland or eliminate a too-successful boyar hung unconcluded in the bluish air. Then the cup's enormous calyx spilt into his mouth the absolving blood of Christ.'

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