Sorry Stephen Colbert, but I can't laugh at the distress of Russians

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

Advertisement

This was published 2 years ago

Sorry Stephen Colbert, but I can't laugh at the distress of Russians

By Ben Groundwater
Russians queue to withdraw cash from an ATM in St. Petersburg last month after Western countries introduced sanctions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Russians queue to withdraw cash from an ATM in St. Petersburg last month after Western countries introduced sanctions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.Credit: AP

You expect the jokes about Vladimir Putin. Watching American late-night TV shows, as I sometimes do – Seth Myers and Stephen Colbert, they're masters – you figure there will be gags in their little newsy intros about the bad guy du jour, Russia's president and dictator, and that's what you get. Fair.

But then something weird happened last week. Colbert was doing his bit, riffing on the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine and the bizarre nature of Putin and his yes-men gathered at comically large tables discussing the downfall of civilisation, when Colbert pivoted slightly and began making fun of Russian people too, laughing at video footage of Russians queuing at ATMs desperately trying to access cash, chuckling at Moscow residents locked out of their metro system because suddenly Apple Pay and Google Pay didn't work.

And I thought: that ain't it. That's not the joke here. The Russian people aren't the joke.

Of course, the invasion of and ongoing war in Ukraine is devastating, it's shocking. My sympathies are primarily with the Ukrainian people, who are going through unimaginable trauma. I'm not here to wave the flag for an invading nation.

However, if we can agree that Vladimir Putin is a dangerously unhinged autocrat, a man with supreme power and very little regard for human life – and surely, we can do that – then you have to save just the tiniest sliver of understanding for the people of Russia, who are also suffering under Putin's regime, if in ways that are less obvious than Ukraine.

I can't laugh at everyday Russians in distress, fighting for roubles, the value of which is plunging, attempting just to go to work and finding it impossible, trying to understand the world through a fog of misinformation and propaganda and laws that prevent them and their friends and their neighbours expressing any sort of public disagreement with the Putin regime.

Credit: AP

If you've been to Russia, even just as a tourist, if only for a few weeks, I don't see how you could make fun of these people.

Advertisement

Russia to me is an amazing place, a place of high culture and history, a place of writers and composers and dancers and creators. It's a place that we from the west struggle to comprehend, and to travel there just reinforces that feeling of confusion; only, the more you realise you don't understand about Russia, the more you realise that this country is probably misunderstood.

Plenty of us have been to Russia, by now. The popularity of the Trans-Siberian railway in particular means everyone from backpackers to retirees has given this country a go, has clacked through the endless beauty of Siberia, has stopped into cities like Irkutsk and Novosibirsk, outposts that feel like the ends of the Earth, has gloried in the beauty and the history of St Petersburg, and felt the power and the majesty of Moscow.

Russians, when I first arrived back in the early 2000s, were so strange to me. Here were people who wouldn't return the smile of a stranger; there seemed to be no immediacy of goodwill, no easy way to break down solid, grim-faced exteriors. Like their Cyrillic alphabet, which is cosmetically familiar and yet absolutely baffling to the uneducated, so were the Russian people to me, European in looks and yet culturally impenetrable.

But the longer I've spent in this country, the more layers of Russia I've been able to peel back, and the more I've been welcomed to do so. I've shared a love of AC/DC with a Moscow-based tour guide. I've been invited to pick nettles in the forest with a family in Yekaterinburg. I've discussed Russian literature with a fellow drinker in St Petersburg. I've been befriended by strangers on trains everywhere, shared food, shared vodka, shared beer, been touched by our commonalities while coming to appreciate even more our differences.

It's easy to see the world in black and white, to think of Russia as Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin. But then you forget Peter the Great (inventor of decimal currency), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Baryshnikov. To travel in Russia is to grapple with these contradictions, these extremes of character, and to go some way to appreciating that a country and a people can be both and all and none.

So no, I can't bring myself to laugh at Russians in distress, even if those jokes are just a coping mechanism, a way to try to make the horrors of war somehow more acceptable. Because that horror is being visited upon Russians as well, the everyday people of the country who suffer under a dictatorial regime.

You can't laugh at people who shared food with you, who drank with you, who allowed a confused visitor just the smallest crack of a window into their lives.

All you can do is hope, for everyone's sake, that the madness comes to an end.

Have you travelled in Russia? What were your experiences like there? Did you understand more of the country, or less? Would you go back there for another holiday?

Email: b.groundwater@traveller.com.au

Sign up for the Traveller Deals newsletter

Get exclusive travel deals delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up now.

Most viewed on Traveller

Loading