← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
November 13, 2010
00:28:02
A dark portrait is painted by our correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes of millions of...
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Hi there.
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You've downloaded the BBC Radio programme from our own correspondent. We make two versions and if you'd like to hear our World Service programme, you'll find it on the BBC iplayer. This, though, is the edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's presented by Kate Ady.
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Today, millions of Russian lives lost in alcohol and despair. A bleak valedictory from our correspondent. Moving on from Moscow. Dreams of a new nation in Africa, but it'll mean a messy divorce for Sudan. We find out what a Chinese gourmet makes of an eight course banquet in the heart of Italy's travel country and learn why James Bond, a man dedicated to fighting the evils of Soviet Communism, spent so much time in the flesh pots of the West. David Cameron's announced he's to visit Russia next year. Diplomatic observers say it means that relations between the two countries, which have been chilly in recent years, have become a little warmer. Mr. Cameron's itinerary has not yet been worked out, of course, but a meeting with a man who's currently his opposite number, Vladimir Putin, seems inevitable and probably essential, given that Mr. Putin is widely expected to be elected President for a second time when his people go to the polls in 2012. It's 20 years now since the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia emerged as an independent country again. Rupert Wingfield Hayes, who's come to the end of his spell as Moscow correspondent, has been looking at the sort of nation the new Russia has become.
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More than half a century ago, Winston Churchill famously described Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It's an old cliche, but not without truth. To this day, outsiders still find Russia very confusing. I remember the day the Soviet Union began to fall apart. By a strange twist of fate. I was sitting in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, waiting for a flight to London. The terminal at Sheremetyvo said a lot about Russia then. It had been built for the 1980 Olympics, but it was one of the most uninviting places I had ever been. It was dark brown and smelled of industrial detergent. The officials wore granite expressions and ridiculous oversized hats. Of course, I had no idea there'd been a coup. It was a secret. Only when we touched down in London did I find out what was happening. It would be another 15 years before I would return to Moscow. On a cold and wet November day, my wife and I drove through the streets of what was about to become our new home. In those 15 years, Russia had changed enormously. Larders had been replaced by range Rovers and Mercedes jostling for space on on the now gridlocked inner ring road. Huge advertising hoardings shrouded the old Stalin era apartment buildings along Tverskaya Ulitsa. The outskirts of Moscow had sprouted enormous American style shopping malls. And sprawling out into the farm fields beyond, a chaotic jumble of dachas, some the size of minor stately homes. But Moscow was still a baffling and forbidding place. A leaden sky covered the city like a low slung ceiling. People still didn't smile easily, or rather at all. On that first day, I remember my wife looking at me and asking plaintively, are we really going to live here for the next three years? We did, and we survived. We made friends and even came to enjoy the fearsome Russian winters. I learned to drive on ice and to accurately gauge the temperature by how quickly my nose hair froze when I walked out of the house. And at work, I tried to solve the Russian riddle. The day 15 years earlier when I sat in the airport, unaware that the Soviet empire was crumbling, had unleashed a wave of euphoria in the West. Our leaders told us the world had changed and that Russia would too. It would embrace democracy and join Europe. Well, they were wrong. Instead, Russia has remained sullen and hostile and re embraced autocratic leadership in the shape of Vladimir Putin. And we wonder why. What you realize when you live in Russia is that so many of our assumptions are wrong. While we were celebrating Russia's release from Bolshevik tyranny, most Russians were being plunged into poverty, unemployment and misery as unbridled capitalism was let loose upon an unprepared populace. The trauma of the 1990s is deeply felt. Just before leaving Moscow this autumn, I went on a road trip. The weather was magnificent. As I drove through little towns and villages along the Volga valley, I began to feel a deep sadness that I was leaving this beautiful, maddening country. But then, at the end of a dirt track four hours north of Moscow, I arrived in Budishye. Fifty people live in the village now, and at two o' clock in the afternoon, most of them were drunk. The fields lay uncultivated. Many of the wooden houses were falling down. The tragedy of Butishche is that it is not special. It is typical. Since the collapse of communism, the Russian countryside has fallen apart. Those who haven't fled are slowly drinking themselves to death. It's one reason why the average life expectancy for Russian men is just 60 years. The next day, back in Moscow, I had an even starker reminder of just how different Russia still is in A darkened room, a group of young women in very short skirts were being taught how to pole dance and improve their sex techniques. This was not a class for aspiring lap dancers. The young women were learning how to catch a rich husband. When I asked them why they needed such a class, I was given a coldly practical answer. There are a very few rich men in Russia, they said, and the competition is intense. So young Russian women are equipping themselves with a range of techniques to gain a competitive advantage in the mating game. There are many things both wonderful and terrifying about Russia. But for millions of Russians, communism has not been replaced by something better. Instead, they struggle to survive in a thuggish, lawless society where a few have a lot and where most have very little. Given that, it's not really surprising that some choose oblivion at the bottom of a vodka bottle and others trade their beauty for the chance of financial security.
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That was Rupert Wingfield Hayes and he's just made two films about Russia. You can see them on Newsnight on Tuesday and Wednesday. A year ago this week, the people of Hanover in Germany were being told the news that the captain of their football team in the national side had committed suicide. He'd stepped in front of a train. This week, thousands of fans made their way to the stadium to mark the anniversary of Robert Encke's death. Senior figures from German football joined members of his family in a ceremony at his graveside. Eleanor Oldroyd, who's just back from Hanover, tells us that Encke was suffering from depression. It was a condition he felt he had to keep secret.
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Standing beside the grave, you can hear the trains rushing through the farmlands of northern Germany. They're the only sounds which break the stillness of a chilly autumn day. On a day just like it a year ago, Robert Encke stood at that spot, perhaps watching the autumn leaves fall, saying a final goodbye to his daughter Lara, who died three years earlier at the age of two. It was part of a plan he'd been considering for some time. Finally, he turned away, went back to the car, drove just a few hundred metres up the road and stepped onto the railway line. His death at 32 years old, at the peak of his career, with a new baby at home and a loving wife, seemed inexplicable to those in the football world. He'd had his ups and downs, ill fated spells at Barcelona and Fenerbahce in Istanbul. And he'd suffered the terrible loss of Lara, born with an incurable heart condition. But he and his wife Teresa, seem to have coped with Lara's death, insofar as that is ever possible. They'd just adopted a baby girl, Lila. Robert was playing well, better than ever, and was the first choice for Germany's national coach, Joachim Loew, as he prepared for the following summer's World cup in South Africa. What Teresa and those closest to him knew, and the football world didn't, was that Robert Enke was suffering from depression. He was desperate that those outside the family didn't know. He was afraid. Afraid of failure as a sportsman, of dropping the ball at a crucial moment in conceding a goal, and afraid of losing his job if his condition became known. Footballers are supposed to be heroes. Powerful, dominant, afraid of nothing, especially goalkeepers, the last line of defence you're not supposed to be unable to get out of bed in the morning. Most tragic of all, Robert Enke was afraid that if the authorities knew about his mental condition, baby Lila would be taken away from him and Theresa. A year after his death, I visited Germany to talk to those who knew Robert best, or thought they did. In Cologne, I spoke to his close friend and agent, Joerg Nablung, part of the inner circle. And as he described to me the frantic hunt for Robert on his final day, culminating in Theresa's discovery of a suicide note, it was hard to keep back the tears. The next day, the press officer of Hannover 96 showed me around the club's stadium with pride. At the heart of the city and renovated for the 2006 World cup, it had been enjoying some success that season and. And Encke was the hero, the captain. His death threw the place into a ferment. As club president Martin Kint told me, there was no rule book for such a moment. When Enke's funeral was held in front of 40,000 people, some were shocked. Public outpourings of grief not for a statesman or a great artist or musician, but for a footballer. It wasn't the German way, or certainly not before that traumatic week. As the fans returned to the stadium on Wednesday's anniversary to sign books of condolence and representatives of the club, the national team and the German Football Federation joined Teresa Enke at Robert's graveside, an uncomfortable question was being has the world of football changed since the suicide of Robert Enke? And the uncomfortable conclusion seems to be no, it hasn't. As fellow German goalkeeper Rene Adler sees it, the pressure on sportspeople to show commitment and passion, but no weakness remains the same. Someone may be the Messiah one day, and then three days later they are seen as a failure, he said. And some of the reaction from football fans here has been predictable. How could a mollycoddled footballer be depressed? They will say. With all that money and adulation, attitudes in sport change slowly. But maybe in reading the story of Robert Enker, more people will understand that depression is an illness which doesn't make any distinction for status, wealth or fame. And perhaps the next high profile footballer for whom the dark clouds descend will be less afraid to seek help than Robert Enker was.
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Eleanor Earl Droid, now another of our colleagues he's not on today's program, has a challenging ambition. He wants to visit every one of the world's countries. Trouble is, the number of them keep keeps going up. And there could be yet another to add to his itinerary in January, when the people of South Sudan are widely expected to vote in a referendum for secession. The vote was promised as part of the peace deal which ended the country's long civil war. Will Ross has just been to Sudan to see how its people feel about the prospect of the birth of a new nation.
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Strolling along the banks of the wide, dirty brown river Nile in Khartoum, I found several university students singing Arab love songs. One was tapping out the rhythm on a drum as the voices of two girls, their heads veiled, soared above the group. As the sun dipped and the weekend began, this was one of many huddles of young Sudanese relaxing by the Nile. All the students I met there were from the north of the country. I wanted to know how they felt about the prospect of their southern neighbours breaking away to form a new nation. When I asked the drummer, he started sliding his hand back and forth across the top of his leg. There was no need for the interpreter, but just to check I was getting his message, I started hopping up and down on the spot. They all laughed and clapped. Yes, the drummer was telling me that if the south broke away, it would be just like losing a leg. Another student sudan is the largest country in Africa, and by the proud look on his face, he didn't want to see the nation toppled off that perch by being chopped in half. They all spoke of the need for a united Sudan, even though they admitted never having visited the south. The students were probably relieved when I left them to their love songs. After all, the referendum on southern independence is extremely sensitive. There's bad blood and mistrust, especially between the politicians in the north and the south. The fact that the border area is rich with oil raises the possibility of a messy divorce. I only found northerners by the Nile, but Khartoum is also home to more than A million southern Sudanese who migrated to escape the lengthy civil war. But the number is dropping right now. Driving past the mushrooming apartment blocks, I came across a vast expanse of barren, baked and dusty land where long lines of trucks were piled high with mattresses, pots and pans, water containers and the odd bicycle. Sheltering in the shade were dozens of families, all waiting to make the two or three day journey back home to the south. We've been here for two weeks hoping for a lift home, angelina told me, barely audible above the wailing of a baby. Angelina has been in Khartoum for 10 years. With virtually no formal education, she's been surviving by washing people's clothes. Now she sits beside her heaped possessions, awaiting a new life back home in what she hopes will be a new country. Like all the people I met there, Angelina said she would vote for separation of the south. Mother of four, Mary was also eager to get back to her village where she'll grow crops and look after cattle. We're not treated well here, she told me. The police always cause us problems. That's because she gets caught brewing alcohol, another woman whispered to me. In the Islamic north, this is of course illegal. A week earlier I'd been in southern Sudan. Thanks to the war, it's surely one of the least developed parts of the planet. There are none of the dual carriageways that criss cross Khartoum or the flashy high rise office blocks and apartments. There are hardly any tarred roads in southern Sudan, but there is a feeling that a new nation is about to be born and and a lot of talk of an end of oppression by the Islamic north. On a parade ground in the middle of the main southern town of Juba, it sounded as though the brass band was playing several tunes at once. But you can hardly blame the piccolo players, saxophonists or those hugging the tubers. I'm not sure how many people in the world could sustain a note whilst being cooked under the sun. As the temperature tops 40 degrees, students who were too young to vote had clearly been coerced into holding up banners reading a very big no for unity. Freedom is coming and Dr. John Garang memorial Secondary School says yes for separation. Although some fear the north may try to prevent the oil rich south from breaking away, preparations for the arrival of a new country are certainly in high gear. At Juba University, a choir had just won a competition when I paid a visit to the tiny run down two roomed faculty of music. I found a teacher, Dennis, at the piano playing Mozart and Scott Joplin. But he soon made way for the choir which proudly belted out the verses of a brand new song. Arise, shine, raise your flag with the guiding star. Another verse pointed to a land of milk and honey and hard working people. South Sudan may not yet be a country, but after the climax of a talent contest, it has a national anthem.
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Will Ross One of the great features about eating out in Britain is that we've got it all. Perhaps because our own cuisine used to have such a poor reputation, we diligently gathered in those from other nations. The result today is that every high street sports the menus of a dozen different countries. It's not like this everywhere. In Italy, for example, opportunities to sample foreign cooking are much fewer and further between. And the same is true in China. The food writer Fuchsia Dunlop has just been to the so called Slow Food Festival in the northern Italian city of Turin. It gave her an opportunity to introduce a gourmet from southern China to some of Italy's finest restaurants.
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We drive through the Piedmont landscape, a beautiful patchwork of autumn colors, red, orange, yellow, purple and green. In the front of the car, my Chinese friend Adai and Monica, a slow food volunteer, are having a lively discussion about football, despite the fact that they don't speak a common language. Juventus? No. AC Milan? Yes. Adai may be a restaurateur from southern China, but he knows much more about European football than I do. And finally, we've teamed up with someone who shares his enthusiasm. Adai's other passion in life is food, which is why he's come to Italy for the conference. Adai is here to share his experience of running a restaurant serving what he calls yuan shengtai food, that is food made with natural, organic and artisanal ingredients. And in our spare time, I've been trying to make up for a lack of football related entertainment by taking him to some of the city's best restaurants. We've sampled what seem like hundreds of different salamis, eaten exquisite pastas and tasted the finest meats. It's not the first time I've been on an eating expedition with a Chinese gourmet, and Adai is unusually adventurous. He'll try anything, including the kinds of delicacies that normally appall Chinese palates, such as raw veal and ripe blue cheese. But despite his open mindedness, he sees northern Italian food through the prism of classical Chinese gastronomy. He may be willing to eat cheese, for example, but he is struck by its oily mouthfeel and overwhelming taste. Like other Chinese restaurateurs with whom I've Dined in Europe, Adai finds Western menus somewhat repetitive in their tastes and textures and can't believe that a special meal can consist of a mere three or four courses. In China, he says, we have more than that number of appetizers. He has a point. Despite the superior quality of the produce available to European chefs, it's rare over here to experience the spectacular variety of a Chinese banquet, with its numerous dishes and roller coaster sensations. Above all, although Adai appreciates many of the individual dishes he tries, he finds the northern Italian diet as a whole dangerously unbalanced. Like many Chinese, he's used to eating mainly grains and vegetables. Look at our teeth, he says. We humans have only 4 of the sharp teeth of carnivores and 28 flat herbivore teeth. In his opinion, this offers a clue as to the right proportions of meat and vegetables in our diet. In China, he says, he really does eat about seven times as much vegetable food as meat. Here, it's the other way round. In Chinese medical terms, devouring meat, cheese and buttery starches like this stokes the body's inner fire. And every evening when we return to our hotel, Adai drinks infusions of green tea and ginseng in an attempt to cool down. On our last day together in Italy, Monica takes us to a rural restaurant in the heart of truffle country. After a long drive, we park the car and enter the clamorous dining room. The food is as good as Monica promised. The scent of the white truffle shavings scattered over our handmade pasta is transporting, and Adai is bowled over by the tender ox cheeks, melting and gelatinous. In terms of Chinese gastronomy, they are perfect fer bu ni, richly fat without being greasy. And the vegetables, red peppers and cardoons, though few in quantity, are. Are stupendously tasty. I'm thrilled by this lunch, the best meal of the trip. But somehow I know that Adai, in the midst of his pleasure, must be fantasizing about bamboo shoots and lightly blanched greens and comparing our eight course meal with the 20 course banquets of southern China. And I have a feeling he'll be drinking double measures of ginseng tea tonight. At least on this occasion, Adai's appetite for football related experiences is satisfied. A man he noticed when we entered the restaurant turns out to be, as he'd suspected, the footballing legend Giovanni Trappertoni, a veteran player who is now coaching the Irish national team. Thanks to the intervention of our waiter, Mr. Trappatoni comes over at the end of his meal and shakes Adai warmly by the hand while I take photographs. And I'm secretly relieved because even if my Piedmontese gastronomic tour didn't quite meet the exacting standards of a Chinese gourmet in football terms, this trip to Italy has been a roaring success.
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Fuchsia Dunlop in Turin Now, James Bond is better known for his drink, shaken, not stirred, of course, than for his eating habits. Although once quoted as saying he preferred ordinary, plain food, he did manage to force down the odd spoonful of beluga caviar. Kevin Connolly, who's coming to the end of his spell, as our man in Washington says, reading again Those stories about 007 reminds one just how much the
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world There must have been a time when the business of business travel in the United States was a pleasure. But whenever it was, it's not. Now you are these days downtrodden more than you're upgraded. You are squashed into your seat on the plane beside someone who makes Hardy look like Laurel, so you feel like you're sharing a ski lift with a rhinoceros. Purchase a snack and you get thin, miserable slices of salami as cold and hard as the pennies off the eyes of a corpse. Now, there was a time when it wasn't like this, when your linen napkins were snowy of fold and your flight attendants dewy of eye, your earf Vala Neige had just eneuf neige. In this lost universe of comfort, the greatest business traveller of them all was James Bond. I found myself re reading the Bond books as I boxed them up to ship them home from America, and I noticed how often he'd been here and how much thought he'd given the place. In fact, for a man who consecrated his life to an epic war of ideologies with Soviet communism, 007 spent a surprising amount of time in Jamaica, Florida and New York. You can almost hear the dark mutterings of 00s, 1 to 6 inclusive, as they covered for him in Sverdlovsk or Simferopol. Bond was conceived in an age of post war austerity exchange controls and rationing. And so in a way, he was Britain's ambassador to to a world of indulgence, reporting back on the better times to come. The butter on his broiled lobster oozed and dribbled on behalf of us all. The astringency of the shavings of lemon peel in his martini refreshed the nation. Firm of jaw and purpose, hard of heart and stomach, 007 was a coded signal to the United States that, clapped out threadbare old Britain remained a force to be reckoned with in the post war world, a supplier of courage, ingenuity and experience to set alongside American stockpiles of guns, money and broiled lobster. That's not to say he couldn't be a little sniffy, of course. Naturally taciturn, Bond reckoned you could pass yourself as a North American by communicating in laconic grunts. Huh? Hum. Hi. Guess so. That so? And sure, he reckons, will meet most contingencies. I find it hard to reconcile that with my own experience with this cheerful, loquacious nation. But then, Bond is a man who thinks the best things about the United States are oyster stew and chipmunks. Where, if I had to choose, I'd probably go for the Constitution and the national culture of hospitality. It's food in general, though, that brings out a touchingly pooterish quality in Bond. Surely no one could listen to him ordering a martini without feeling like thumping him. But he exhibits a whim of iron elsewhere on the menu too. He is quick to notice the notes of strawberry in the bouquet of a glass of pink champagne. But he notes sniffily that Americans put milk in their scrambled eggs and that bad coffee here is the worst you find anywhere. Part of the fascination, of course, lies in Bond's magisterial way with casual judgments based on nationality. Americans make boring cars, for example. The only bread rolls worth a damn are to be found in France or Italy. And he personally can identify Germans and Russians by the way they smell to modern ears. There is something bracingly illicit in that swashbuckling small mindedness. And it comes from a man poetic enough to notice that when twilight comes to American skies, the darkness rises rather than falls. His oddest prejudice, leaving the chipmunks aside, is against the old. When he visits the retirement capital of the south in St. Petersburg, Florida, he is fascinated by the frailty of the inhabitants, with their clicking dentures and their over 75 baseball teams. He writes with horror of the bald, bony heads of the men and the fluffy sparse balls of blue hair on the women. And somewhere beneath the uncomfortable edge of disdain, you sense a certain vulnerability. It's almost as though the man whose every footstep was dogged by a dark sense of danger can't bear to be brought face to face with the prospect of his own mortality. Maybe that's why we can forgive him his extravagant ways between battling Her Majesty's enemies and paying her tobacco taxes. You sense Bond was never destined to make old bones at one point, when a daring underwater operation calls for a supreme act of athletic conditioning, Bond's response is to cut down to 10 fags a day. You find yourself instinctively not worrying about the long term cost of his public sector pension. All men, it is said, want to be like Bond, although the closest I'll ever get is a shared enthusiasm for the bread rolls of France. But reading his views on American life, I did feel a certain stab of recognition. He is not the only person to find that the things that matter start to look different as you look at them from different places. Or that the old world comes into clearer focus when you see it from the new. I bet he never packed his own books when he moved house though.
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The man with the Golden Pen Kevin Connolly bringing this edition to a close. I'll be here again next Saturday morning with more from our own correspondence. Do join us. Goodbye.