The famous Cathedral of St. Basil's in Moscow. If Australia is considered the lucky country what does that make Russia under Vladimir Putin? Photo / Getty Images
The famous Cathedral of St. Basil's in Moscow. If Australia is considered the lucky country what does that make Russia under Vladimir Putin? Photo / Getty Images
A DOG'S LIFE
If Australia's the lucky country - though I suspect its luck may be running out, what with fire, floods and Scott Morrison - which is the unlucky country?
There are numerous contenders: African nations looted by tyrants, South American nations brutalised by the military, Caribbean nations looted by tyrants, brutalisedby the military and flattened by earthquakes. But my money's on Russia. It keeps shaking off tyranny. But back tyranny comes.
This week Vladimir Putin signed a new law that permits him to remain president for the rest of his life. In other words he's now tsar.
Of course Russia's had tsars as long as it's been Russia, tsar being just the Russian word for king, and 19th century tsarist Russia was similar to other European monarchies. It had dumb tsars and visionary tsars, benign ones and cruel ones, surrounded and supported by an upper class who lived nice lives.
But the trickle-down theory of economics didn't work back then every bit as much as it doesn't work now. The Russian poor stayed poor and the serfs stayed hungry. And to be poor and hungry in Russia's climate is even less amusing than to be poor and hungry elsewhere.
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photo / AP
So the revolution of 1917, conducted in the name of the poor and hungry, must have seemed thrilling. The royal family was ousted, then murdered. The nobility fled into exile. Here was a chance to make something better. What hope there must have been.
But the hope foundered on the problem of power. You can take power away from a king but the power still exists and has to be vested somewhere. Unless you are careful it ends up in the hands of the people who want it most, and it is a staple truth of human society through the ages that those who want power most are the ones who should have it least.
The upshot was, as everyone knows, that 10 years after killing a tsar Russia had a new and worse one. His name was Joseph Stalin.
At least under the tsar a peasant knew where he stood, which was at the bottom of the heap and with little hope of happiness or justice. Under Stalin the peasant still stood at the bottom of the heap - if he hadn't been murdered in one of the frequent pogroms, or sent to Siberia in one of the frequent purges - and had even less hope of happiness or justice.
But he was now told the opposite. He was told that a glorious revolution had happened in his name with the sole purpose of improving his lot. In other words, the new tyranny was more galling than the old tyranny because it pretended not to be a tyranny at all. The cruelty was in the lying.
Now there's nothing new about a revolution turning rotten. Most do, from Venezuela to China via France and Cambodia and a hundred points on either side, but perhaps the most telling of all revolutions is a fictional one - Orwell's Animal Farm.
It distills the injustice into a single line: all animals are equal but some are more equal than others. It's a line of genius - the seductive, semi-plausible inversion of language and of truth. And it's based, of course, on Soviet Russia.
The regime took 70 years to collapse, 70 years of secret police, torture and propaganda, all in the name of the people. No wonder the people drank. Then finally in 1991 the system imploded under the weight of its own lies and the entire paraphernalia of corruption came crashing down.
Up went Russian hope once more. This time, surely, they knew what was what. This time they wouldn't fall for the old lies. It couldn't happen again.
It has happened again. A few dozen oligarchs stole the nation's wealth for themselves. The politician who enabled them is the former head of the secret police.
Thirty years later there's an ostensible parliamentary democracy but Putin's as omnipotent as Stalin. His political opponents are poisoned. They rot in jail. Investigative journalists fall from fifth-floor balconies.
Corruption starts at the top and seeps down through everything. If you wish to prosper you have to serve a lie. Russia's back where it started with a bastard tsar. Life's unfair. And the weather's still lousy. That's what I call unlucky.
