And The Wall Came Tumbling Down

    I was so busy getting ready to come to Moscow, that I did not even think about being here for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, despite the fact that this event, more than any other, has influenced the way I live now.   We were not, however, flooded with invitations to Black Tie celebrations here in Moscow, where it was very much business as usual.  The celebrations in our household were also muted and modest, partly defined by my jetlag, but also by HRH’s very mixed feelings about the events of 1989 and Berlin itself. 

    HRH, though Russian, was born and spent his childhood in Berlin, on what most of my readership would consider “the other side of The Wall.”  This is an era he remembers not with barbed wire and check-point Charlie, but as the halcyon days of his childhood.  He grew up in a tightly knit, privileged, expatriate community of Soviet diplomatic, military and other official families.  My mental image of him as a teenager is always superimposed against The Wall:  HRH and his trusty sidekick, Boris Stepanov – the enfant terrible of the Soviet Mission, who, at the age of 11, had already cornered Black Market in West German Comic Books, thereby laying the foundations of his current construction fortune.  I see them both dressed in unfortunately cut leather jackets, grimy Eastern European jeans, with unfortunate ABBA haircuts, furtively smoking purloined Marlboros before they race off to hockey practice.   

    I was moved by the celebrations, as, indeed, I always am by any well-executed world scale event management, which features Barack Obama merely hinting at the Declaration of Independence; but I kept my emotions in check, casting furtive glances at HRH on the other end of the squishy sofa, as we consumed the remains of some really amazing Bouef Bourguignon I’d made, and channel surfed in a delusory fashion.  We flitted between BBC World, who was covering the event in its entirety, to Euronews (Russian Language), who covered the event in chunks, interspersed with features of “where are they today,” nostalgia pieces about East Germans, and the Russian News Networks, who stuck to their regularly scheduled programming throughout the evening, and led the news headlines with the death of Nobel Prize Physicist, Evgenii Ginzburg.  This Russian restraint did not come as a huge shock to me.   This summer, I toured the Newseum in Washington DC with our 14-year old Russian godson, who spent the summer in America with us. I directed his attention to the eight panels of the Berlin Wall on prominent display near the entrance of the museum, flanked by flat screen monitors rolling continuous vintage grainy CNN footage of the Fall of the Wall.   He had absolutely no idea what he was looking at – none at all.    Hadn’t heard about it in school, hadn’t been told about it by his parents, hadn’t even seen any reference to it on TV.    

    No, it was very much business as usual in Russia – a nation, as I have written elsewhere, very into anniversaries and round numbers.  Third story on the headlines, despite the fact that there was President Dmitry Medvedev sitting on the podium – next to Hillary, chatting in the vastly more relaxed manner he always adopts at an away game.  I certainly hadn’t expected Berlin’s VIP Guest, Mikhail Gorbachev, would create any spike the Russian TV ratings, as he is on an exclusive away games only circuit – being perceived very much as the unfortunate relation who sold off the family silver.   Gorbachev has to go abroad for speaking engagements, to be fêted, and invited to feature in glossy Louis Vuitton commercials, showing him riding alongside the Berlin wall.   I love that image – to me it sums up brilliantly the last twenty years of my life: a conjunction of where I came in, and a generation’s lofty political hopes purloined into rank materialism.  I keep trying to add it to my collection of ironic things on our Moscow fridge, but HRH refuses to sanction it.   Russians as a rule don’t put anything on their fridges except faux wood paneling, and HRH doesn’t think we need to give the man who broke up The Soviet Union any space on our German double-door deluxe Liebherr.   

And, since he is the Berliner in this family… it’s his call.