AGGRESSIONS ON RUSSIA

I speak with a dear colleague from Moscow who asks me for my impressions about the elections in Russia that are being held in tandem with the Spanish ones (I trust that with less acrimony and so much mud thrown in the eyes, with less personal insult, low blow and without so many shots to the belly ) and I express my perplexity and my reluctance at the resentment and ignorance shown by our Fourth Estate in the face of such an important fact. They say that Russia is the heart of the world on which peace, progress and harmony on this planet depend, but many here do not want to see it. One reviews the dispatches of the correspondents from Madrid on the banks of the Moscova -Bonet, Utrillo, respective of the newspapers with the largest circulation "El Mundo" and "El País"- and it seems that instead of objective correspondents at the service of objective truth for their readers they look like the propagandists of an obscure foreign power. His chronicles show a face of that great territory that does not match reality. Everything is negative. They must be old nightmares weighing down the "cold war" mentality from distorted prisms. About Russia, custom is the cliché, mental inertia and this apathy seems to me [I always said it] a dangerous deviationism for world peace. One feels ashamed of being a journalist. They are unaware of the culture and great literature of that country, the enormous scientific progress, that Nikita Mijailov cinema that we used to see and no longer see, that Chekhov theater that excited us decades ago, those beautiful songs like those of Ala Pugachova of the most lyrical beauty or popular songs on the air such as “Post Sledge” that I have listened to as I have been on the radio for several decades from the beloved VOR have helped me get through the harsh winters of the transition, the dismantling of the political system to which we were accustomed – balance balance of powers - but today, unfortunately, everything has become unbalanced as a result of globalization, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unipolar and interactive world where it was supposedly believed that freedom of expression and thought would grow. Unfortunately it has not been like that but Russia continues. We always have the polyphony of the choirs or the lower octave of the diaconal chant reciting the Song to the Virgin (Akathistos) or the wonderful solemn litanies of the Slavonic rite.

The Putin era, to the astonishment and confusion of many Russophobes, has shown a whole matryoshka with an impenetrable montage. A box of surprises. The great nation that its detractors called the "prison of the peoples" or tiorma narodna" has not been annihilated, nor has it handed over the spoon. It is an amazing country that always has a card up its sleeve and when everyone believes in its defeat it suddenly comes back to life, since it has always been the country of Resurrection. Hitler and Napoleon knew this from experience. Let's hope that the Americans and the English do not have to go through the same problem.

“Russia, the mold of an enigma” is the title of one of my books written by someone like me whom almost since I was a teenager, ever since I used to buy Turguienev's books in Paris with the francs from my lunch at the Livre de Poche publishing house or those of the Austral and the Prometheus collection that popularized the masters of the great Russian novel from the 1920s to the 1960s and that I read avidly squeezed together on the Sol-Cuatro Caminos subway, a country that always surprises the world.

Now in my golden senescence I continue in that same demand, trapped by Russian magic. My muses are Rusalkas – the undines and elves that submerge and emerge – from the banks of the Volga to make me dream and fill my heart with hope. We have to continue believing in the human being

They arrive amid whiffs of mist (tyman) and the songs of boatmen chained to the great boat of life. Oh that immense sadness of the infinite steppe (taská), that beauty of its women! Many European singles go to St. Petersburg to find a girlfriend. That landscape where the horizons never end where the vegetable silver of a birch forest shines in the background! If Russia did not exist, it would have to be invented, like God. It has been my spiritual homeland in these times of change and persecution. I regret that Spain - it is said that the Spanish and Russian people are the most similar in the world due to their fatalism, their courage and their ability to endure - has not had its own independent policy, but my eyes have looked with nostalgia towards Moscow, which was host land for children of war. It is the country where Don Quixote has been studied the most and Hispanic science is very widespread in its universities.

Say it, if not, my dear colleagues from the Voice of Russia Spanish department. There are journalists and political scientists as magnificent as Luis Ardiaca, María Ivanova, Valentina Yushina, Leonardo Kosichev, Pancho Rodríguez and so many others who express themselves in an enviable Spanish that many of my colleagues from the vociferous emis would like for themselves.