A Christmas Lesson for Our Time

(Russian music and Russian lies)

Russian Troika [i]

One of the few Christmas pop songs which actually bears listening to is Greg Lake’s I believe in Father Christmas. The lyrics, suggest that Lake (or at least Peter Sinfield who actually wrote them) had a rather jaundiced view of the festive season – especially in its religious aspects – and of the deceptions that underlie it. And the song and, especially, the video lament the fact that Christmas is typically a time of war, rather than peace, on earth. But the music is jolly enough and is, of course, partially based on Sergei Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé Suite.

Despite what is often supposed, Prokofiev's piece has no connection with Christmas, though it does have a Troika movement named after the traditional Russian three-horse sled. This section does have a Christmassy vibe and, in the early 1970s, was used by BBC television as the theme music for its Christmas output announcements. I suspect this reinforced the popular association between Prokofiev's music and Christmas, and probably played a role in Lake’s choice of this theme for his song.

There are, however, connections between what Sergei Prokofiev's Kijé Suite is about and the war that will play out on our television screens this Christmas:

The Suite was composed in 1933 for a film of Kijé which was one of the earliest Soviet movies with sound. The film in turn was based on a novella by Yury Tynyanov (who also wrote the screenplay for the film). That novella was based on a short piece entitled Stories of the time of Paul I by the Ukrainian born Vladimir Dal (or sometimes “Dahl”) and Dal cited anecdotes told by his father as the original source.

The story grew in the telling but the basic idea throughout the various versions is that a clerical (or mishearing) error results in the promotion of a non-existent soldier to the rank of lieutenant. Because nobody dares admit the mistake to Tzar Paul I, a series of ever more elaborate deceptions unfold. These culminate in the holding of a grand funeral for Kijé when, having been summoned to meet Paul in person, he dies suddenly – and fortuitously.

The parallels with current events in modern day Russian hardly need to be spelt out. There are daily news stories about Vladimir Putin being kept in the dark as to the true state of Russia’s armed forces and their equipment, and the true progress of his war against Ukraine. Deaths-of-convenience – albethey, sadly, of real people – are also a regular occurrence.

We can only hope that on the coming Christmas morning, or one day soon thereafter, the Russian people will awake “with a yawn at the first light of dawn” and see their leader for what he really is.

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[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troika_%28driving%29#/media/File:Troika_akron.jpg (public domain)

Remember remember the ninth of November

 somewhere and anywhere

2022-11-09

Sixty-six years ago today, I was born; and thirty-three years ago today the Belin Wall “came down”.

Actually, it didn’t come down until rather later, but people were allowed to pass through its various control points relatively freely (they still had to show their ID cards) for the first time since 1961.

My father-in-law, Martin, was born in 1935 in Ostpreußen – then part of Germany. After the Red Army arrived in 1945, he, his mother, his grandmother and his sister made the journey to Berlin by rail in cattle trucks. His father – a farmer who had never fought for or even supported the Nazis - died in a forced-labour camp in the Soviet Union and Martin never saw him again.

From Berlin, Martin and his family walked 80 kilometres or so to a small village in Brandenburg where they had some relatives. They spent the rest of their lives there.

Ostpreußen was divided up between Poland and the Soviet Union; and what remained of Germany was subjected to many other border changes and divisions. The whole of Europe was being criss-crossed by high flows of people across its shifting borders.

In May 1949 the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD) was established in the West of Germany and, in October, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) was established in the East of Germany. West Berlin became an enclave of “the West” in the middle of DDR territory and divided from East Berlin “Hauptstadt der DDR”.

Nonetheless, though there were all sorts of controls and checks at various times and in various places, it was still possible to live and work and move around anywhere within the territory of the BRD, DDR and Berlin East or West with relative freedom. Martin would regularly cycle to West Berlin to buy things that were harder to obtain in the East and banter with the guards at the checkpoint (who were notionally there to prevent “smuggling”) on his way home.

But in August 1961, the DDR walled (or fenced) off West Berlin and the BRD from its territory. Martin had his own family by this stage and got wind of the government’s decision to take control of its borders. He could have tried to flee and once more become a refugee in his own or (depending on how you look at it) a different country. Needless to say, he had mixed feelings about such a radical step, and a deciding complication was that his baby daughter – now my wife – was being looked after by her aunt for a couple of days in another village.

So he stayed, and his days of cycling over the border to the West came to an end.

Like millions of others in the DDR, he was however, allowed to visit the West many years later. “All” he had to do was “fill in a few forms”, but I can imagine the hollow laugh he would have produced if I had ever put it to him like that. Rather like the laugh I produced when somebody told me in 2016, after the Brexit vote, that all my wife would have to do to remain in the UK would be to “fill in a few forms”.

Of course the contexts are very different. Notwithstanding Suella Braverman’s gleeful talk of deporting refugees to Rwanda or putting them back in rubber dinghies to cross the Channel back to France, nobody in the UK government is yet considering opening fire on people who cross our borders “illegally”.

But then in November 1989, everything changed again; and for the better this time. Martin was overcome with emotion.

He and my mother-in-law were free to visit us in the UK (and go anywhere else in Europe) by simply showing their new all-German ID cards. My wife got a shiny new all-German passport and was able to use it to travel in and out of the UK without having to apply months in advance to unelected bureaucrats at the UK Home Office for a visa.

Martin lived just long enough to see his daughter stripped of her status in the UK by the Brexit decision in 2016 and our life here plunged into uncertainty. He did not live long enough to see her spend years and a couple of thousand pounds trying to acquire a replacement status that would allow her to maintain at least some of the freedoms she had acquired after 1989[1]; nor did he live to see his wife having to queue for hours outside in the blazing sunshine in a socially distanced queue outside the townhall so she could acquire a full passport in addition to her ID card and visit us here again (though only for 90 days maximum in a year now).

When the EU expanded in 2004, Germany, like the UK, experienced influxes of large number of people from other central and eastern European countries – especially Poland. There were complaints – even from Martin who had made the same journey himself earlier in life.

But neither Martin nor anyone else in Germany I have ever encountered or heard/seen in the media thinks that their national democracy or identity would be enhanced by turning back the clock and preventing people from the rest of Europe and its own citizens from moving freely across Germany’s borders to visit, work, live, fall in love and raise families whenever they might choose to do so.

They would regard any such suggestion as completely unhinged.

Twenty-three years on, the divisions of Germany – and Europe generally – are slowly healing. Our own country and its relationship with the rest of our continent have, however, been rent asunder. These wounds will not heal in my lifetime.

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[1] Five Years

A Tale of Two Citizens

What “taking back control” really means: 

Many moons ago, the Finnish branch of the IT firm I recently retired from hired a Frenchman. He was able to move there without any formalities or fuss accompanied by his wife (who also found work there) and his two small children. No visas, no forms to fill in, no permissions required from unelected bureaucrats in Brussels (or Helsinki), and no negative implications for the family’s pensions or benefit status or healthcare.

He just went there, rented somewhere to live, worked happily at his job. There were some cultural hurdles: “You ‘ave to sheck^[i] them sometimes …. or give them a drink” he once explained to me when speaking of his dealings with his rather taciturn Finnish colleagues. He also accidently set fire to his sauna – and wrote a song about it: “The Burning Sauna Blues” (he is, in addition to being a professional IT specialist, an amateur musician).

Though the Finnish fire brigade managed to get his sauna-fire under control, nobody there ever tried to control him.

After a few years of Finnish winters, he and his family elected to return to France where he set up a highly successful French branch of the firm.

#####

Like Finland, the modest UK branch of my firm has not always found it easy to recruit the expertise we required at home. We work in a rather niche area and IT skills tend to be in high demand everywhere. Even before Brexit, we had never successfully recruited from the rest of Europe – where people with the skills we required could usually find higher salaries and better weather than in the UK.

We did, however, once manage to recruit somebody originally from India who had studied in the UK and had actually specialized in our rather arcane area of work. He worked with us happily and successfully for many years too – until he finally moved on to bigger and better things.

But it wasn’t easy, and it took a long time for us to take him on.

First of all, we (and he) had to complete (and then maintain) a great deal of paperwork with the Home Office – whose permission we needed to employ him and keep employing him. Then we had to pay several thousand pounds to the UK Government every year as a penalty for employing one of those dastardly foreigners instead of a homegrown Brit – even after we had had to demonstrate that we needed his skills and could not currently find them among UK applicants.

Best of all, about a year after we first took him on, we had a visit from the Home Office. They sent two members of their staff about 250 miles by plane [sic], to a rather obscure regional airport, and then 50 miles by taxi to our office (instead of a two and a half hour train journey and a five minute taxi ride). The two HO operatives then proceeded to grill our CEO and then our recent recruit – preventing either from getting much work done that afternoon – by way of establishing that the latter really was working for us.

They asked our CEO where our recruit sat; what he did; who his line manager was etc, and whether he (our CEO) envisaged wanting to employ any more foreigners? Did he know, they asked, how many days our Indian employee was allowed to go AWOL before this had to be reported to the Home Office?

They were perfectly civil by all accounts (my colleagues kept me well away from them in case I said something untoward) but they demanded the names, addresses, national insurance numbers and birth-dates of all the other employees of the UK firm, and demanded these be emailed to them – with no encryption or other safeguards.

We double-checked they were who they said they were before doing this. We began to get worried at one stage that we were becoming the victims of an elaborate scam.

The costs and the efforts involved in all this were quite extraordinary and I could not help feeling that the theatre we were subjected to had less to do with checking up on our lone Indian worker and more to do with issuing a kind of veiled threat. The unspoken sub-text seemed to be: "I'd think twice about employing any more foreigners if I were you!".

And it worked. Our CEO told me he would almost certainly not put himself through all the hassle we had had employing this one chap again - even though we were very pleased with him and (as reported) are short of suitably qualified applicants.

Our two friends then returned by the same curious, and expensive, route.

As far as I know, our former (Indian) colleague is still in the UK under sufferance of the Home Office. One day he may return to India, but he would find it extremely difficult if he did, and then wanted to come back to the UK; and if he ever wished to bring a spouse or other family members to the UK, he his troubles hitherto would seem akin to buying a bus ticket.

#####

I relate these two stories not in relation to any arguments about what I think the UK’s general immigration policies ought to be (that is a debate for another day) but simply in order to illustrate what the ending of free movement for Brits in Europe and other Europeans (apart from Irish people) in the UK^[ii] means for UK firms who are trying to recruit. While the supply of labour from the rest of Europe has fallen off a cliff^[iii] (they have plenty of other choices), the supply from the rest of the world (especially Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, and India) has grown by leaps and bounds^[iv].

Now I appreciate the argument that somebody from Norway or Italy should be treated “just the same” as somebody from Nigeria or India, but this argument fails to acknowledge that what we had with Norway and Italy (and the rest of Europe) was akin to what we still have with Ireland: agreements on reciprocal freedom of movement between the UK and the country concerned. The “treating people the same” argument also fails to acknowledge that we now treat foreigners from any country apart from Ireland extremely badly. Any UK firm that does manage to continue to recruit other Europeans will henceforth pay a huge price in additional red tape, loss of flexibility, and Home-Office hostility.

I do not see how any of this gives UK firms “more control”.

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[i] Shake (in a French accent). 

[ii] Other Europeans still have free movement in the whole of the rest of Europe, and Europeans such as my wife who were here at the time of Brexit (and for 30 years previously) still have (partial) free moment in the whole of Europe including the UK.

[iii] EU Migration to and from the UK 

[iv] Huge rise in non-EU migrants to Britain 

edited 2022-05-24: para 3 added; link to Burning Sauna Blues added; "famously" changed to "accidently"