Mail Online

What a world without God could look like...

I HAVE at last found the time to watch the best thing on TV. This is Trauma Zone, and you can only watch it on the BBC iPlayer.

Hundreds of hours of forgotten recordings, made during the collapse of the USSR, were found in a cupboard in the BBC’s Moscow office. The quirky genius Adam Curtis has gone through them to knit together a profoundly moving, surprising and disturbing picture of this colossal event.

I can vouch for the accuracy of the atmosphere and direction, having lived through many of these moments in what was then the filthy, desperate and exhausting city of Moscow. I also managed to get outside the capital, to remote places where the water came out of the taps brown and stinking, or where fresh meat was an event.

But this goes much further. Three things are especially well done. They are the Western rape of Russia under the drunk Boris Yeltsin, and the USA’s complacency when Yeltsin (long before Putin mattered) smashed Russia’s young democracy by ordering his tanks to fire on Parliament, and telling his police to shoot down unarmed demonstrators. And we smiled, and helped him win re-election in a shamelessly rigged poll.

Next is Yeltsin’s barbaric war on Chechnya, designed to bolster his shrivelling authority, likewise winked at by Westerners who later prosed moralistically about Putin’s war in the same place. And third is the portrayal of Soviet and Russian women who, as usual, had to endure the worst while their menfolk sank into a vodka coma.

Look out for the courageous, determined mother who rescues her soldier son from the Chechnya war by sheer force of personality; and for the other mother, frantic to find the vanished body of her soldier son, because if she cannot find it she will not get a pension.

God save us all from such fates but do not be sure you are immune from these things. I constantly asked myself what I was being told during my time in Moscow. I now think I was being warned of what the world would be like without God and that such a world was only a few mistakes away.

Peter Hitchens

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2023-05-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-05-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://mailonline.pressreader.com/article/282067691309835

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