Patrick Leigh-Pemberton: Russian Revelations

Last week, a single ten-ton meteor blew up over the Russian countryside. This was caught on many dash cams, which I would advise you watch on YouTube, as it really does make for fascinating viewing. What is more interesting though is the opinion of Russian Politician Vladimir Zhirinovksy, who as the leader of the LDPR has a fairly reasonable support base in Russia (12.5% of the popular vote – thank you Wikipedia). Zhirinovsky thinks this whole event was a product of an American Weapons test. Of course, this makes perfect sense – because if you wanted to test your new weapons, you would explode them harmlessly in the airspace of a superpower that hates you, thus giving away your new secrets, and proving that your new weapon is only useful for blowing out windows, right?  However, my sarcasm is not the point.  What is the point is that forty years ago, if this had happened, and someone like Zhirinovsky had had more power than he does now, we might all be dead. Now. Just like that.

I realise that this is a stretch of the imagination, given that Russia would never ever have put a megalomaniac neo-imperialist xenophobe in the position of supreme power during the Soviet era – especially not someone who would be willing to blame a scientific event on the Americans.

Now, I am not just saying that the Russians would do this, because I imagine that if the meteor had fallen over America, a bunch of nut-jobs with suspicious numbers of spare bed sheets would definitely have blamed the Reds, Al Qaeda, tourists, or liberals. Thankfully, we live in an era that is not based around a mutual fear of two superpowers (now we just have to worry about one zealot and a pot of Ebola).

Isn’t it weird how forty years could make so much difference in the way one event is seen? In 1972, we wouldn’t have heard about this. Either the Russian government would not yet have released any information about it, or at the other end of the spectrum, we would all be just imprints on a wall or hiding in a secret nuclear bunker, wondering if anything still existed on the surface.Today, we can watch hundreds of videos, made by private citizens, on the Internet. We can hear what they have to say, as it happens in real time. We can watch the windows of schools and office buildings smash by accessing their CCTV. The world has become tiny and it is amazing. When something like this happens, we can all be aware of it and marvel in the power of nature. This explosion was over three times the power of “Big Boy” in 1946. We can also be amazed at the incredibility of a cosmic coincidence, as this meteor had nothing to do with an asteroid that came within 12,000 miles of Earth the same day (which is, apparently, an very close distance these days in space travel).

Finally, we can be relieved that Mr. Zhirinovsky and his xenophobic rhetoric will not gain any traction outside of those that follow him already, as the writing is not on the wall – it is all over the Internet.