Editorial monthly
Georgia on My Mind A new book titled Soviet Visuals by Varia Bortsova is a fascinating compilation of little-seen of icial and unof icial images form preand post-Soviet Russia, that were originally shared online. One of them is of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev
(on the cover of AM392 for the feature ‘Space Race’), who, when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, found himself marooned on the Mir space station, unable to return home.
When he did eventually return on 25 March 1992 a er ten months silently orbiting alone in space, he found everything changed, even his hometown of Leningrad had been renamed St Petersburg, reverting to its pre-communist name. Meanwhile, the all-powerful ruling Communist Party which had launched him into space had been overthrown, and Boris Yeltsin, now styled ‘president of Russia’, had replaced Mikhail Gorbachev, the last general secretary of the USSR. The Soviet Union was no more.
The speed with which the Soviet Union collapsed a er 70 years astonished everyone, but for Krikalev it must have seemed surreal. Out in space, in zero gravity, time must have seemed to stand still. Then, all at once, he was hurtling through the earth’s atmosphere to arrive back in a world that was ‘all changed, changed utterly’. Without wishing to stretch the analogy too far, there is a similar sense of surreality surrounding the present situation in the US, though in reverse: whereas everything seemed to have changed as a result of the election, at the same time nothing seems to have changed, not least because the 45th president has refused so far to concede to the 46th.
In case anyone has forgotten, which would be entirely understandable in the circumstances, the US election took place on 3 November 2020; however, mid count in Georgia, the last of the swing states to declare, an ‘audit’ was ordered by the Republican secretary of the state, Brad Raffensberger. A er a laborious count by hand, the result, in favour of President Elect Joe Biden, was announced on Friday 13 November – a date that will no doubt fuel further conspiracy theories. Even that is not the end of the process, however, because the losing party could still demand a recount by machine, the same method used in the original count. The inal outcome in Georgia will still not be known – further legal challenges being discounted – until the results of the senate run-offs have been counted on 5 January 2021, which will decide which party controls the Senate, the upper chamber of Congress.
President Trump, meanwhile, is as detached from reality as poor Krikalev, although the Russian had no control over his fate. When not playing golf, Trump carries on tweeting his denials, making wild and unsubstantiated accusations of election fraud while refusing to leave the White House, which, ironically, he refused to enter when he was elected in 2016. As a result of the stalemate, there is a strange sense of stasis in the Capitol. In the UK the opposite is apparently the case, as advisers Lee Cain and Dominic Cummings depart in quick succession and new advisers move in, and irst one minister then the next stands up to give contradictory announcements about the government’s policy on Covid-19, the EU and the economy.
It is one of the quirks of English English v American English usage that politicians in the UK ‘stand’ for of ice while in the US they ‘run’ for of ice, which seems particularly inapt, given the protracted nature of this latest US election. Alastair Cooke, the British-born American writer and journalist whose BBC Radio 4 series ‘Letter from America’ spanned almost 60 years, from 1946 to 2006, once reported that Americans were labbergasted at the speed of the irst-past-the-post electoral system in the UK, where a national election can be wrapped up in less than six weeks. In 2017, for example, MPs voted on 19 April to hold an early general election, which duly took place on 8 June – a mere seven weeks later; the most recent election, in 2019, saw an even faster turnaround: Parliament agreed on 31 October on a date of 12 December for the election, the results being declared the following day. Not bad for the oldest and creakiest continuous democracy in the world. As to which system is best, the present incumbents of both systems have shown them in their worst possible light.
In terms of relative age, it is either fortuitous or unfortunate depending on your point of view, that the Republican Party of the US is usually referred to as the GOP, which actually stands for the Grand Old Party but which is sometimes thought to stand for the Government of the People. It is a popular misconception that US elections are decided by the popular vote whereas, in fact, the results are presided over by the Electoral College (which will deliver the result of its deliberations on 14 December); the last time the GOP won the popular vote was in 2004, when incumbent George W Bush won narrowly over John Kerry. President Trump’s MAGA cap-wearing supporters, especially those camped outside the White House, probably still think that the good ol’ GOP also stands for the Government of the People. The people of Clayton County, Georgia, former seat of the late, great civil-rights activist John Lewis, know better. They are credited with lipping Georgia blue by turning out to vote in their thousands regardless of voter suppression, threats of intimidation and the danger of Covid-19 infection. As the lyrics to the song say, Georgia, ‘The road leads back to you’.
It is one of the quirks of English English v American English usage that politicians in the UK ‘stand’ for office while in the US
they ‘run’ for office, which seems particularly inapt, given the protracted nature of this latest US election.
Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021
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