Russians Love Their Children Too
With his song „Russians“, Sting in 1985 sang against the dehumanisation of supposed enemies beyond the Iron Curtain.
Hadn’t Sting overstated it? Has anyone ever doubted that Russians love their children – that they are, then, human beings like us in the West? Evidently the anti-Russian mood in Britain during the first Cold War was so bad that he felt he had to point out this self-evident truth. That was brave at the time. In between, especially in „Gorby’s“ era, one might have felt the song to be a superfluous lecture. And today? We have obviously reached the point once again where the cultivation of enmity makes any rapprochement impossible, at least on the higher political levels. We citizens of Western countries would do well to remind ourselves that Russians too are parents, children, lovers. And one further insight of the former „Police“ singer sticks with us: there is no such thing as a winnable war.
As a teenager in the eighties I was afraid of war. It was the age of „No Future“, of the NATO Double-Track Decision and of a truly enormous peace movement.
My fear was diffuse. I still remember my uncle asking me whether I actually knew what exactly had been decided in that Double-Track Decision. Back then you couldn’t just quickly look it up on the internet, and so I mumbled something about missiles.
But the fear was concrete. True, the fairy tale of a winnable war, as it was still being spread by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, was beginning to crumble, and yet one had the feeling that at any moment the danger existed that some madman on whichever side would lose his nerve and press that ominous „Red Button“.
It was the fashion for secondary-school pupils to take their notes no longer in exercise books but on individual sheets that were filed, more or less carefully, in ring binders. The inside covers of these binders were inscribed with mottos and words of wisdom. I wrote „I love all human beings“ inside mine, trying to avoid the faint embarrassment through the choice of English. My expression of the need for harmony in the context of the fear I felt.
In October 1983 I was on the human chain between Ulm and Stuttgart with my peace-movement friends. Nena had a huge hit with „99 Luftballons“; I can still recite the lyrics from memory to this day: „99 Kriegsminister, Streichholz und Benzinkanister…“ In the chain we bounced and chanted along: „Hopp, hopp, hopp, Atomraketenstopp!“
The Pershings were stationed in Germany all the same; the balance of terror was at a peak.
It was to the latter that Sting referred on his first solo album „The Dream Of The Blue Turtles“, released in 1985, and in particular with the song „Russians“.
The song illustrates the overheated mood of the time between East and West by way of two quotations. On the Russian side, Nikita Khrushchev is given a voice with the famous We will bury you!
By this he meant the ultimate victory of communism over capitalism. For the West, Ronald Reagan asserts, in his customary pithy, fatherly manner, We will protect you.
One recalls his Star-Wars fantasies of SDI, the „Space Defense Initiative“. This was meant to destroy enemy long-range missiles in space by means of laser technology. The spectre of a winnable nuclear war thereby took shape; so much for the matter of protection.
Sting takes up this idea with the line There‘s no such thing as a winnable war, it’s a lie we don’t believe anymore
and exposes the politicians as liars.
The central statement, however, is that he hopes the Russians love their children too. To cast even the slightest doubt on this at all seems strange to me from today’s perspective. And yet it is remarkable, for it foregrounds something I miss entirely in today’s discussion about the war between Russia and Ukraine: empathy.
That the Russians too are human beings recedes completely into the background. Vladimir Putin is the devil, and Russian soldiers are – if not all, then at least most of them – war criminals.
If you so much as think aloud, even tentatively, about negotiations with the Russians, or classify the events after the 2014 Maidan critically and a little from a Russian point of view, you count as a Putin apologist and an ally of evil itself.
Unlike Sting with his implicit distrust – I don’t subscribe to this point of view
– most media and people follow the narrative of the dehumanised Russian who must be defeated at any cost.
Yet any conflict can only ever be resolved in the long run if the two sides perceive and take each other seriously.
And to assume that we all love our children is, I find, a beautiful thought in this regard.
Listen & Watch
Audio version of this article
