What happened recently to the former University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday strikes me as a distinctly “Soviet-style” tragedy straight out of my first, Soviet, life.
Let me explain why.
One of the most disgusting Soviet clichés was “Vse kak odin”—“all as one”, or “unanimously”, used in the official propaganda to describe collective approval. For instance: “We all unanimously support the Communist party and our great leader Comrade Brezhnev”. Or more frequently, it was used in collective condemnation, as in: “We all condemn the impudent machinations of British imperialists”, or “We all -unanimously denounce the anti-Soviet stance of Aleksandr -Solzhenitsyn”.
At times, those collective condemnations sounded even more oxymoronic (or simply moronic): “Having not read any of Solzhenitsyn’s dirty writings myself, I nevertheless strongly condemn them as anti-Soviet lies and libel.” Indeed, one couldn’t have read any of Solzhenitsyn’s (or other dissident writers’) “libels” even if you wanted to, since the latter had all been removed from libraries and bookshops.
There’s nothing more dangerous and oppressive than collective emotion—be it unanimous joy and admiration, or compulsory denunciation and dislike. The targets of such frenzied outpourings feel helpless and insignificant to the point that life itself starts looking meaningless. That is perhaps what happened to Jason Arday.
I won’t get into the already widely known details of his ordeal whereby he found himself on the receiving end of a relentless character assassination, justified or not as the accusations may have been. Instead, I want to talk about my deep disappointment with the way we all (I mean British society, myself included) behaved towards him. It is a complicated sociological matter (Arday himself, incidentally, was a sociologist), and the real culprits aren’t easy to identify.
On learning about Arday’s death, I was immediately reminded of one of the favourite poems of my Soviet youth: “A Picture of Childhood”, by the brilliant Soviet-Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017).
Yevtushenko knew only too well how it felt to be bullied on a national scale. He was regularly castigated in the Soviet media for his brave poems, such as “Stalin’s Heirs”, and “Babi Yar”, and for his
A Precocious Autobiography, published in the west without the Soviet establishment’s approval. I still remember the sentence from a 1970s editorial of Literaturnaya Gazeta, the official organ of the Soviet Writers Union: “Isn’t it time for Yevgeny Alesandrovich [Yevtushenko] to climb off the political swing he seems to be always riding?”. No wonder he often felt confused and insecure. I could see this frustration clearly when interviewing him at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 1995.
I knew many of his poems, including “A Picture of Childhood”, by heart. -Written in 1963, when Yevtushenko was in his thirties, it described an episode in the market of a small Siberian town deep in the Soviet rear during the Second World War. A hungry youth tried to steal some veggies from an open-air stall in a market square. The holders of that and other stalls caught him and started beating him mercilessly with boots and metal bars, “with ingenuity, with relish, with weighty righteousness”. In vain did the victim whisper: “Brothers! What for?” That only added to the crowd’s sadistic rage. “The crowd was deaf and enraged. They grumbled at those who weren’t hitting the thief hard enough. They trampled his body in the dirty spring snow”.
In the middle of that collective execution, one sweaty stall owner turned to Yevtushenko, then just a 10-year-old, and shouted: “Come on, kid! Hit him too!”.
“But I, a boy, burst out crying with shame instead,” Yevtushenko wrote before ending the poem with the following (rhymed in the original) three-liner:
And if a hundred, howling wildly,
Beat one—even if he deserves it,
I will never be the hundred and first!
To me, these lines are among the most powerful in the world’s poetry. If most of us shared the poet’s stance, Jason might still be alive.
It is unseemly to quote one’s own work, but here I can’t help remembering my Guardian column of the 8th September 1997, in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death—“Diana—bullied to the end”:
She was bullied by the society as a whole—the press, the politicians, the royal family and the crowd... It was happening on the national scale, for bullying, after all, is but a violent intrusion of privacy... A deeply vulnerable human being, who had largely lost control of her life, she simply could not cope with this brutal force; couldn’t survive a leering crowd of... bullies... Diana is gone. Who will be next?
Now, 29 years on, we know how little has changed.
