22 Monday January 3 2022 | the times
Comment
old bush really IS what you’re
looking for”.
It turns out that this lime tree has
survived about 2,000 years precisely
because it has been “coppiced”, or
cut back so many times. After each
cut it springs back to life with
renewed vigour. Once I’d adjusted
my expectations, I liked it. The
United States can have their priapic
pines; we need to celebrate our
dainty bush.
The coppiced lime has mastered
the art of reinvention. We can, in this
country, fixate too much on past
glories — once-mighty royal oaks
and all that — and not enough on
our punk ability to cut it all
down and start again. That’s the
key to survival in any creative
industry, and for a small
country, the way to stay nifty.
The bush is Britain: we
should swap it for the
unbending oak on our
national and political
branding. Also, on a
personal level, I
don’t much fancy
ageing as a process
of dignified
solidifying. I look back
at a less than ideal year,
having behaved less well
than I’d like, and think:
what a relief. This New Year
I can cut it all down and
start again.Picture perfect post
I
have just joined Snapchat, bursting
late to the party and unwelcome
like a snaggle-toothed Austin
Powers fresh from his time capsule. I
joined the app reluctantly because
my daughter said that Facebook was
an old people’s home and WhatsApp
was for PTA groups. She was only on
Snapchat and to communicate with
her I needed to sign up. I can tell I’m
the tragic lone adult. The app has
checked every one of my contacts
and come up with not a single friend.
I learnt that on this app you
“chat” through the medium of
“snaps” (mainly photos of
yourself) and when you
report this insight to a young
person they look at you with
pity and reply: “Yes, it’s called
Snapchat.” It’s tempting to
mock exchanging selfies
as a way of conversing,
until you try it. Sending
someone a photo of my
haggard “First Monday of
2022” face, raddled with
prosecco splotch, is by far the
easiest way to tell the whole
sorry story.The gift horse
T
here is a sushi
restaurant in
Brighton called
Happy Maki. We like to go‘C
ome on kids,” I said. “Let’s
go and see one of the
oldest trees in Britain.”
Sometimes I wonder why
my teenage children are
less interested in spending time with
me. In my defence I had in mind
sheltering under something like the
ancient sequoias of northern
California. I’d been to see those
when I was young, lain at the base
of their monumental columns,
looked up with reverse vertigo at
thousands of years of life, and felt
time-sick.
But we were at the Westonbirt
Arboretum in gloomy
Gloucestershire and when we got to
the spot shown on the map “one of
the oldest trees in Britain” wasn’t
there. Just a bit of scrubby bush that
you might find at the back of an
urban park, where young people file
their condoms and KFC cartons.
Then we spotted the sign that said —
I’m paraphrasing — “this rubbish
Russia, like China, wants to airbrush history
Putin’s attempt to silence critics of Soviet crimes is an attack on the future, as well as the past
or a South African-style truth and
reconciliation process. On the
contrary, Soviet symbols are now
revered — Russia’s ice hockey team
recently played a match in Finland
wearing USSR shirts.
Whitewashing Soviet crimes is a
chilling signal to people in all
countries that suffered from them.
Putin is in effect saying: “We are not
sorry for what we did to you. We can
do it again.” As Nicolas Tenzer, a
French academic, notes, the deeper
significance of this is that Putin is
resurrecting the Soviet notion that
justice and truth are not the basis of
civilisation but mere tools to be used
for political ends.
Mythmaking presents Russia as a
besieged fortress, justified in silencing
critics at home or in defending itself
from mendacious and threatening
outsiders — for example Ukraine.
Stalin’s artificial famine in that
country in the 1930s, which killed
untold millions, is one of many
reasons that modern Ukrainians
cherish their independence from
Moscow. The less Russians know of
this, the more they will support
Putin’s aggression now.
We could counterattack. One
priority should be to support
Memorial, if necessary by hosting its
staff and digitised archive abroad.
Another is to support Russia’s
neighbours in their attempts to push
back against the Stalinist version of
history and in being more honest
about our own. But the outlook is
grim. The Chinese Communist Party
has succeeded in obliterating swathes
of that country’s blood-drenched
history from public discourse. Putin
must fancy his chances too.safeguards not only Russian self-
esteem but legitimises Putin’s regime.
The line is simple. Stalin fought the
Nazis. Critics of Stalin must therefore
be Nazi sympathisers. Put like this
the syllogistic logic sounds ridiculous.
But it is exactly the charge against
Memorial. “By cashing in on the
subject of political reprisals of the
20th century, Memorial is
mendaciously portraying the USSR
as a terrorist state and whitewashing
and vindicating Nazi criminals,”
Alexei Zhafyarov, part of the
prosecution team, said. “Why should
we, the descendants of the victors,
have to see the vindication of
traitors? [Memorial] makes us repent
of the Soviet past, instead of
remembering its glorious history.”
In truth, the history is chequered,
to put it mildly. Communist and Nazi
totalitarianism overlapped. Stalin and
Hitler were allies before they were
foes. Stalin’s paranoia led him to
eviscerate the armed forces and
ignore warnings of the impending
Nazi attack. The same Soviet forces
that, with huge sacrifice, liberated
eastern Europe from the Nazi yoke
were harbingers of a new tyranny.
Modern Russians are not to blame for
this. But they should bear it in mind.
Germans certainly do. They regard
their country’s Nazi past with
revulsion, not pride. It is
unimaginable that modern Germany
would ban the study of the
Holocaust because it damaged the
country’s image abroad and morale
at home. Even today, ancient Nazis
sometimes totter into German
courts. But their Soviet counterparts
have not faced such risks in Russia,
which never held Nuremberg trialsW
hen I moved to
Moscow in 1998 one
of my first visits was
to Memorial’s offices.
The group’s cramped
rooms were cluttered with the fruits of
a recent appeal to school children to
ask grandparents for memories of the
Stalin-era Great Terror. In childish
script on flimsy paper, each account
was a tiny particle of historical truth
and knowledge, unearthed from a
generation that had expected to take
its secrets to the grave.
In three decades of legal existence,
which ended with court-imposed
liquidation last week, Memorial has
meticulously documented the Gulag
and its victims. But it is far more
than a historical research charity. It
is a large part of what is left of
Russia’s civic conscience.
Not only did the Soviet regime kill
20 million people, it made the topic
taboo. Stories about denunciations,
show trials, interrogations and
deportations, and of deaths by hunger,
torture and mass execution, were
shared in private whispers, or not at
all. Official accounts were amnesiac.
“It was a long time ago and it never
happened anyway”, is how the
historian David Satter characterises
this institutionalised deceit.
By chronicling the crimes,
Memorial exposed the lies. Its
founders included the moral
godfather of Russian democracy, the
physicist-dissident Andrei Sakharov.
It exemplified the hopes of the late
1980s and 1990s for a country that
would be at peace not only with its
own tortured past but with its
neighbours: many of Stalin’s victims
came from outside Russia.
Those hopes are dead. The pretexts
for Memorial’s closure include
breaching Russia’s sweeping “foreign
agents” law, which in effect bans
accepting any money from abroad.
Another is “destabilising the country”.
The group has been charting modern
Russia’s descent into authoritarianism.
Its list of political prisoners, forexample, now numbers more than- Officials claim that this “aims to
sow negative views about Russia’s
judiciary and disinform the public”.
But the real danger it poses is
deeper. President Putin’s legitimacy
rests increasingly on a nostalgic
narrative, eliding modern Russia
with the Soviet Union’s finest hour,
its heroic, single-handed battle to
free the world of the Nazi plague.
(British readers may find this
solipsistic, simplistic approach to
wartime history oddly familiar.)
An obvious weak spot in this is
Stalin’s record, which undermines
any attempt to depict him as a hero,
genius or liberator. Restoring the
taboo about Stalin’s crimes thus
Stalin fought Nazis. So
critics of Stalin must
be Nazi sympathisers
there on day trips to see the sea and
what also feels fun about it is that
they don’t charge a price, they ask
you to donate what you see fit. But
now these sweet hippies are
unhappy. On only one day in ten
months have the donations covered
their costs, says their website.
Set prices protect both buyer and
seller, preventing you from paying
too much as well as too little.
I’m glad, for instance, that
anaesthetists don’t run on the “gift
economy”. On day two of labour I
would have gladly gifted the
anaesthetist our house to get an
epidural, and thrown in the baby to
close the deal.It’s a knockout
I
don’t think I’ve ever seen a more
electrifying museum exhibit than
the statue of Edward Colston. If
I’d passed this slave millionaire
as he was, upright, in the street, I
wouldn’t have even glanced. But
flat on his back at the M Shed
museum in Bristol, his leg graffitied,
next to a window, where you can
see the spot of his toppling into
the harbour, and less than a mile
from Bristol crown court, where
the trial of “The Colston 4” accused
of damaging him continues
tomorrow, I felt forced to stare,
and think. He looked like a chess
piece: the king flipped over in
the endgame.Helen Rumbelow Notebook
Punk ability
to cut it all
down is key
British skill
Young must start
saving at 18 if they
are to have pensions
Imogen Tew
T
here is rarely a government
policy decision that is
considered by almost
everyone to be a “good
thing”, but automatically
enrolling 10 million workers into a
pension is probably as close as it gets.
Since auto-enrolment was
introduced in 2012, full-time workers
aged over 22 who earn more than
£10,000 a year have been given
retirement savings for the first time.
Take a bow.
There’s a problem though. Ten
years on and the government is still
celebrating this achievement, rather
than building on it. Guy Opperman,
the pensions minister, is forever
making bold pledges about turning
pensions into a down-the-pub topic
of conversation, making them
greener and introducing a dashboard
(essentially an app that lets you see
all your pensions in one place).
Worthy ambitions but none will
help significantly improve the
retirement of younger generations,
who do not have generous defined
benefit pensions. The single most
effective step he could take today is
to boost auto-enrolment.
Step one should be to raise the
amount workers and employers pay
in. It is currently 8 per cent, of which
5 per cent comes from workers and
3 per cent from employers. This
should be increased to 7 per cent for
employees and 5 per cent for
employers to get an overall rate of
12 per cent. This small boost would
increase the pension pot of someone
working for 40 years from £270,000
to about £405,000, according to
calculations by the wealth manager
AJ Bell.
The second change should be
reducing the age for auto-enrolment
to 18, down from 22. Four more years
of pension savings at the start of
their career, at a 12 per cent
contribution rate, would add £12,365
to the pension pot of the above
worker — and that’s before
investment returns.
And the third is to make sure
pension contributions are calculated
from the first pound of someone’s
salary. As it stands, the first £6,240 of
a worker’s salary from one job does
not have to be pensionable. This
hurts those who may work multiple
jobs, more likely to be women. So in
total someone could earn £18,000
from three jobs and still not receive
a pension.
The Department for Work and
Pensions looked at making some of
these changes in 2017 and the
government has said that it is
“utterly committed” to introducing
the measures by “the mid-2020s” —
but so far there is no action. While
the government’s focus on making
pensions greener, engaging and
accessible are commendable, the
primary goal has to be to make
them bigger.Imogen Tew is Money reporterEdward
Lucas@edwardlucas