Captain Cook has a new shipmate. From next Thursday his statue in The Mall will gaze, perhaps with bemusement, at a space-suited newcomer: Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the Earth. To be unveiled by the cosmonaut’s daughter Elena (herself now director of the Kremlin Museums in Moscow), the life-size Yuri is a gift from the Russian Space Agency to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his historic flight in Vostok 1.
Though separated by two centuries, Gagarin and Cook are complementary. Both were intrepid. Both won fame for circumnavigating the planet. Both took mankind into regions unknown. And both died tragically. Gagarin was just 34 when killed in a plane crash.
But his new statue has significance beyond the honouring of a brave explorer. For several years the political relationship between Britain and Russia has veered between the suspicious and the outright hostile. That’s not simply down to ideological differences. Russia has changed bewilderingly fast. I’ve been lucky enough to visit Moscow a dozen times over the past 30 years. And although ordinary Muscovites strike me as being as endearingly glum, sardonic and warmhearted as ever, I have never been so confused by the identity of the place.
Life may have been grim in the Soviet Union, but everything was predictable (except the supply of loo paper). Now it’s a place of disorientating contrasts and what seems like an anarchic lack of constraints on the power of the elite to do what they like — whether driving at 70mph through central Moscow (zebra crossings have lost all meaning) or muzzling opposition to their political or business aims.
The confusion is not just on one side. For Russians, 21st-century multiracial Britain must seem just as hard to pin down. What are our core values? What is our core identity, if any?
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Most of us don’t lose sleep about that. But the British Council spends £700 million a year on cultural initiatives to foster understanding and good relations between us and the rest of humanity. Which is why the statue of Gagarin is being plonked very symbolically outside its London headquarters.
Some history here. Three years ago, when relations between Britain and Russia were rock-bottom after the Litvinenko affair (remember the KGB whistleblower allegedly poisoned in London by Russian spooks?), the Kremlin heavily curtailed the British Council’s activities in Russia, claiming that it was merely a propaganda tool for the British Government. “Even at the time there were many Russians who felt this was a mistake,” says Martin Davidson, the council’s chief executive.
Reconciliation has been slow. Even so, the council has started to clinch some remarkable deals. Earlier this year it helped British designers to exhibit at Russia’s Fashion Week, and Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll to be staged in Moscow. Soon the hallowed halls of the Hermitage will be opened to Antony Gormley, who will insert 17 new sculptures of his own into the Greco-Roman collection.
Later, Moscow will get a festival of new British films and its first William Blake exhibition. Next spring, Henry Moore will be the subject of the Kremlin Museums’ first-ever venture into modern art — a real coup. And in 2013, Russian opera companies will celebrate the centenary of Britten’s birth with almost as many new productions as we will see here.
Davidson claims that re-establishing such cultural exchanges is a vital first step towards scientific co-operation and trade deals. “A business relationship is first about the relationship, not the business,” he says. “The game we are in is building that relationship.”
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That’s probably true. It’s certainly wise for Davidson to argue that the council paves the way for British businesses to flourish overseas at a time when the Government is scrutinising every pound of public spending.
But cultural exchange isn’t just a bit of foreplay before the hardnosed business deals are struck. It’s an honourable end in itself. Russia, China, Egypt, India, Mexico: these are giant civilisations with a riveting past but also a fast-changing present and a wholly unknowable future. Understanding what makes them tick, and sparking a reciprocal curiosity, will enrich everyone’s lives. Not least by making the world a safer place.
D-minus for the examiners
Everyone in Moscow last week was talking about the great exams fiasco. The Russian Government, perhaps wistful for Stalinist uniformity, ordered that across the country schoolchildren in the same year would all take the same exam on the same hour of the same day. Alas, the hapless apparatchiks made a schoolboy howler. They forgot that Russia stretches across nine time zones. So not just the questions but the correct answers were being e-mailed and texted from east to west with the noonday sun. Hard luck on the kids in Vladivostok, but everyone in Moscow and St Petersburg got 100 per cent. The Government is appalled by the extent of the cheating. But Russia’s media-savvy teens say they are equally appalled to be governed by such idiots.