The Ossetian conductor of a Russian orchestra recently led the first performance of an Austrian's symphony (Mahler No. 3) in Shanghai. Afterwards, he was invited to spend an hour with the politburo, China's supreme political leadership.
"Earlier that day, I had seen a thousand giant cranes on the city skyline" Valery Gergiev told an audience in London this week. "I have seen a lot of the world, and I realised this was really something special. And one of first things I said to [former Chinese communist party leader] Jiang Zemin was 'The change is so fast'. 'No!', he replied, 'You are wrong! It is very slow'. "
Maestro Gergiev was puzzled. Then he realised that Jiang was making an implicit comparison between Russia, which dismantled communism rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, and went through hell as a result, and China, which was doing so cautiously, and achieving what may be the biggest economic miracle in world history.
Russia's last dozen to fifteen years have been one of the great nightmares of modern times: economic contraction verging on outright collapse, plummeting life expectancy, plunging birth rates, skyrocketing crime and violence, ballooning rates of HIV infection and other diseases, homelessness and legions of children on drugs, in prostitution or grossly neglected where few had been before.
Most of the blame must fall on the Soviet leaders and their successors, especially Boris Yeltsin. But western ideas and influence that promoted a grossly simplistic vision of rapid change to make Russia part of a globalising world also played a part (just how often does Jeffrey Sachs think about shock therapy these days?).
In his London address, Gergiev, who is director of the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, spoke gently but with power about western classical music as a force in world culture that could help unlock a path to peace. His commitment to music festivals for different nationalities in the Caucasus and for Arabs and Jews in Israel were part of his small effort to help. But the focus of his concern in the speech was for the country where he lived.
Throughout Russia's history, he said, it had only been under the strong Tsars that, for all their cruelty, there had been any progress.
What balance, Globolog asked Gergiev, should be struck between a free press and democracy on the one hand and firm leadership on the other?
Democracy is a wonderful thing, Gergiev replied. But Russia today is like a very sick man and it is a mistake to expect the country to run in the Olympics against the United States, Europe and Japan. "The overwhelming need in Russia", he said, "is for stability and for leadership by people with clean hands".
Living in the corporate world
A little context here. This was the BP Annual Lecture on World Civilisation at the British Museum. Gergiev was speaking just a few days after what some analysts think is the most significant development in Russian politics in recent times: the detention of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the multi-billionaire director of the giant Yukos oil company. Around 25% of Russia's GDP comes from its oil and gas resources.
Khodorkovsky the oligarch, it is said, had ambitions to challenge the president Vladimir Putin and the hold of the Siloviki, the forces of power and the not-so-secret state. For an excellent set of links to articles on this topic see this page from the Carnegie Endowment (which has been a recipient of funding from Khodorkovsky, reportedly $500,000). Also worth a look is Martin Wolf's Putin Puts Prosperity at Risk [Financial Times, 4 November 2003 (subscription only)].
Putin's crackdown on the oligarchs is said to have caused panic in the west among major investors. But the evidence is mixed. John Dizard, for example, argues that "the fundamental story in Russia continues to look very good"(Yukos Investment Opportunities, Financial Times, 3 November 2003 ).
BP, the company sponsoring Gergiev's lecture, is one company going from strength to strength, thanks in no small part to its operations both in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. Its market capitalisation is already around $160 billion equivalent - at least before the recent slide in Yukos share price - to 17.78 Khodorkovskys. This may increase substantially - perhaps to near that of Exxon Mobil - as a recent joint venture with TDK, another Russian oil giant, begins to look like a gamble well taken.
And the 4 November announcement that the World Bank will loan $125 million for the construction of a controversial pipeline from the Caspian to the Mediterranean in which BP has the major share looks to be another boost to the company's fortunes.
(The loan represents only a small part of the cost of the 1,760 kilometre pipeline, which is likely to exceed $3.6bn, but it is designed to facilitate the involvement of other players in the Caucasus. The Azerbaijani government, for example, has agreed as a condition of the loan to issue audited reviews on how it spends $29 billion in projected oil revenue from a flow of 1 million barrels of oil a day to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan by the beginning in 2005).
Music and power
This context may lead some to dismiss Valery Gergiev's lecture as corporate window-dressing, his quiet tribute to last year's speaker Sergio Vieira de Mello a chance for those in comfort to let a safely controlled tear swell in the eye, his encomium to the amazing achievements of the Soviet education system evoking a frisson akin of the naughty delights of Ostalgia.
Such a reaction may come especially to those who ridicule or loathe the "high" culture of western classical music, especially opera, dependent as it is on subsidy and patronage.
But Valery Gergiev is made of harder stuff. He is part of a tradition that has lived through the most terrible episodes in the relationship between the 'soft' power of art and the 'hard' power of terror. And he finished his lecture not with words, but with pictures from his recent production of Götterdämmerung, where power corrupts absolutely, the greatest heroes are betrayed and murdered, and all good intentions come to nothing.