(Illustrations: Saurabh Singh)
Patriotism works as applied passion in politics, and its effect is not as lofty as the rhetoric it generates. The grammar of Vladimir Putin’s rage against Ukraine, which he ironically portrays as a genetic part of Great Russia contaminated by fascism, is powered by patriotism. He is the last great patriot standing up to the cultural arrogance of the West— and to the phoney freedom fighters in Kyiv propped up by them. It’s a self-portrait that he uses to legitimise the invasion of Ukraine—a “special military operation” to regain what history and geography have taken away from him with such cruelty. In the delusion of the Last Patriot, the war is a requirement for making Russia glorious again, even if the cost includes his eventual fall. Pitted against a Ukraine armed by the belated Western solidarity on freedom is a Russia enslaved by one man’s idea of what Russia means in a world that defies his patriotic superiority. Putin’s war is not just against Ukraine as a fake republic that has disowned its true ancestry; it is a war for preserving patriotism.
In the play Patriots, written by Peter Morgan (of The Crown), which I saw at Noël Coward Theatre in St Martin’s Lane, the patriot who holds centrestage is not Putin but his mentor-turned-enemy Boris Berezovsky (played with tragic flamboyance by Tom Hollander), the original oligarch of post-communist Russia. It is the well-connected Berezovsky who introduces the ambitious but inscrutable Putin, a former KGB officer now suffering from the boredom of being the deputy mayor of St Petersburg, to Yeltsin. Putin, played with chilling precision by Will Keen, outgrows his ‘creator’ and tolerates nobody who doubts his methods. What he values most is loyalty, and he refuses to trade it for sentimentalism. Berezovsky’s fall begins with his failure to pass the loyalty test.
Wealth and influence only awaken Berezovsky’s conscience; his patriotism begins to clash with his protégé’s. The assassination attempts on the benefactor-turned-betrayer, whose television channel dares to expose Putin’s transgressions as Yeltsin’s chosen successor, are early indications of how Russia’s new leader deals with renegades. It’s a clash between two patriots. Berezovsky thinks he owns Putin, who thinks Russia’s destiny alone owns him. As an exile in London, Berezovsky gets the message when another exile-patriot who refuses to sell his conscience, Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, dies after a mysterious meeting with two fellow Russians. The polonium poisoning that killed him was finally traced back to the Kremlin. Putin denies Berezovsky the aura of martyrdom; he lets him rage in his isolation, rejects his plea for a quiet homecoming. Berezovsky loses everything, from his war with another protégé, Roman Abramovich (played by Luke Thallon), who would go on to become Putin’s favourite oligarch and a high-profile investor in London, to his will to fight. Patriots is a story of two delusionists. One of them, homesick, was found hanging in his Berkshire home; the other would become post-Soviet Russia’s supreme leader in whom Stalinist totalitarianism and Tsarist imperialism blend in the alchemical process of patriotism. Rupert Goold’s production provides a revelatory backstory to a present horror. A glimpse into the formative mind of Putinism clarifies that dehumanisation is not a provocation but an inevitability in a Russia subordinated to the unforgiving patriot. When you see Patriots in the time of Ukraine, the forebodings overwhelm you.
It’s as if in this London summer the West End can’t resist allegories and premonitions. Arthur Miller’s allegory in The Crucible is a familiar one: the ‘witch-hunt’ in America initiated by the House Committee on Un- American Activities presided over by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the Fifties. ‘Witch-hunt’ would acquire a resonance beyond McCarthyism, another patriotism test in history, and become an easy term in the glossary of political enmities. It was raining inside Gielgud Theatre, literally, before the witches and demon-detractors appeared on the stage in a new production of Miller’s 1953 classic by Lyndsey Turner. In Miller’s depiction of the witch hunts of 17th-century Salem, the persecuted and the persecutors are caught in a web of twisted human relations in which faith, fear and honour come together to demand the best and worst from the living. Why are the girls too scared to stand by their innocence? Why does Abigail Williams, the witness who could have made a difference, lie? Why does confession become an instance of punishment seeking a crime? And why does John Proctor, the last man standing, refuse to sign a confession and escape the gallows, cling on to the sanctity of being nothing but his name? Miller may have seen in 20th-century America the worst impulses of 17th-century Salem. Miller’s allegory continues to re-contextualise the time and place with its every enactment. The hunt never stops, but beyond Salem, some among the hunted have the smarts to turn punishment into opportunity, political or otherwise.
Maybe as in political London today, where ‘witch-hunt’ is the phrase Boris Johnson uses to describe his victimhood. The former prime minister, unarguably the most influential figure after Margaret Thatcher in post-Churchill conservatism, resigned as MP before the privileges committee of the Commons could suspend him for misleading the House on Downing Street parties during lockdown. It has now emerged that he would have been suspended for 90 days had he not taken the pre-emptive step. His grievances include Prime Minister Rishi Sunak “talking rubbish” after denying peerages to his political ally and his father. The Boris Derangement Syndrome has become the affliction of the season in the party he brought to power in a landslide four years ago. As the architect of Brexit, he has his dedicated place in history, and its legacy still polarises British politics. The character flaws of Johnson, who lost his prime ministership not in an election but in a parliamentary coup, are op-ed staple; you can only take him or put him on a show trial. All the polls predict a Conservative rout next year, and Sunak, a media favourite despite an ailing economy, is hardly seen as a redeemer. The possibility of a Comeback BoJo alone can scare Labour. Some Conservatives who owe their seats to his undiminished popular appeal, too, are scared. Johnson won’t leave the stage like John Proctor.
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