– Daniel Trilling reflects on reporting upon the BBC

– Lilith Verstrynge and her father discuss their departures from Spanish politics

– Elina Alter describes the twists and pitfalls of translating Russian

Daniel Trilling

How difficult was it to convince BBC insiders to talk to you?

Talking was not so much of a problem, since journalists are gossipy – and I’m a journalist, and gossipy. The people I found were really unhappy about the situation and were desperate to speak out about it, but were extremely worried about being identified and victimised, losing their jobs or getting blacklisted.

But when I do these sorts of pieces, trying to build a composite picture of an institution from the voices of the people within, I find the trickiest thing is working out why I’m talking to people. With conventional investigative journalism, you’re looking to uncover hard facts: documents that definitively prove wrongdoing, for instance. With this kind of story, what I like to do is to start with a set of facts that are largely out in the open but, for one reason or another, aren’t fully acknowledged – and then to ask the people involved why they think that is.

So the challenge with this BBC piece was to work out my starting point. There’s a way of approaching this story that would be to say: “Okay, the BBC has clearly been under pressure from sympathisers with both the Israeli and Palestinian perspectives in the past two years. My task as a journalist is to report on the demands of those rival camps, and to assess how well the BBC has mediated between the two.”

That approach has been taken by others, in fact. For me, it’s not sufficient. The truth hiding in plain sight is that we’ve witnessed a historic failure of Western institutions over Gaza, and that it’s been possible to see that failure ripple through the BBC. This then guided my decisions on whom I talked to and what I asked them.

What do you make of these two big resignations?

Throughout my reporting, I had the sense that the BBC’s contortions over Gaza were both the symptom and a cause of something bigger. The sense that, after years of sustained political pressure, mainly from the right, its management had become unable to either defend the BBC’s journalism or make the wider case for why public service journalism is necessary. Instead they were making concessions aimed at keeping a lid on this pressure.

Perhaps in more stable political times, that’s an unpleasant, somewhat cowardly, but sensible way of running a public institution. The more I spoke to people within the BBC, the more I got the sense that the ultimate result would be the institution fatally undermining itself. As I was making what I thought were final revisions to my piece last Sunday – a few hours before Tim Davie and Deborah Turness resigned – I added a line saying that the BBC had “come unstuck.” I’m wary of overly neat narrative arcs, so I thought: “Is that overstating it a bit?” Then I checked the news...

And what has the reaction been inside the BBC?

My BBC sources were dismayed at this development, as you might expect. They saw it – correctly, in my view – as a right-wing attack on the BBC’s independence. Some thought that Davie and Turness should have stood up to the board, and that their departure, in the words of one, “makes it look like the BBC is admitting to being fundamentally biased.” Others, frankly, found it frightening.

I mean, let’s be real: the editorial mistake that pushed Davie and Turness over the edge concerns a far-right American president who we all know encouraged his supporters to attempt a putsch on 6 January 2021. He’s clearly been trying to make that unsayable now that he's back in power. The British right seems only too keen to help a foreign leader maliciously interfere in the UK’s affairs. (I am aware, being British, of the historical irony of complaining about this.)

Lilith Vestrynge

Lilith Vestrynge interviewed her father about his political migrations and the advice he had for her.

LV: You once told me: “When you leave politics, they never let you come back.” Was that the case when you were in politics? Is that still the case?

JV: Of course, it’s still the case. If you leave a gap, someone else comes along and fills it. And once you’ve lost your place, it’s very difficult to get it back. 

There are figures in history who’ve shown it can be done. Winston Churchill was a man who always landed on his feet. Even if he changed parties, or was expelled from a party, he always landed on his feet. Why? Because he came from a very wealthy family and was therefore part of the British oligarchy. But you, Lilith, are not part of any oligarchy.

Another case was that of Charles de Gaulle. He resigned in 1946 when France, newly liberated after the Second World War, was heading towards a kind of return to the Third Republic. He advocated an approach based on popular power but with strong leadership, and he resigned, thinking that he’d be brought back to power. But he was out of politics until 1958. Imagine what a journey through the wilderness that was – and he was De Gaulle!

Look at the current situation: the case of Carlos Mazón, the president of the region of Valencia, after the catastrophic floods last year. He was glued to his chair, not moving an inch, because he knew that if he moved, it was goodbye forever, and he might as well go and set up a bakery or something.

LV: What were some key moments that transformed your view of politics and triggered your journey from the right to the left?

JV: A few moments come to mind.

One was seeing Spain’s army in Sidi Ifni – a Moroccan territory occupied by the Spanish – struggling to contain an attack by Moroccan guerrillas because they were so poorly armed. I remember seeing a photo in the French magazine Paris Match of a Spanish cannon with wooden wheels and thinking that Spain was far from being considered an international power. Spain was ruled in those years by Francisco Franco, who ordered the assassination of an honest, decent, and perfectly peaceful man named Julián Grimao, who was trying to revive the communist left but without any desire for civil war. Well, Grimao was thrown out of a window; he didn’t die, so then Franco ended up having him shot. Franco, who occasionally granted amnesties to corrupt people, was unable to grant Grimao an amnesty. 

Another was when when I realised that Manuel Fraga, a leader of the Alianza Popular, was at one point trying to see if the military might stage some kind of coup, forcing others to include AP in a coalition government. That, plus a propensity for rampant corruption that Fraga was just not trying to curb or reduce, made a big difference.

What also explains my political shift is that when my family left Morocco, my mother sent me to study in Nîmes, in France, which was a real earthquake for me. It shaped my entire political life thereafter. It was there that I discovered, for example, National Bolshevism. I went to the public library in Nîmes to read works by the German writers Ernst Niekisch and Karl Paetel, but also by Marx, Nietzsche and Feuerbach. Much more than specific events, these thinkers allowed me to make different, original analyses.

LV: What guidance would you offer me now?

JV: Everyone is different and their circumstances vary greatly. I think you made a good start. You knew that you had to resign when you realised that the option you thought you were fighting for was not a realistic option, nor what you wanted. And you left. I resisted much more than you did. Because losing power means losing the ability to help others. And yet, sometimes you have to be a little selfish. Losing power, first of all, if you do it right, means being able to save yourself. You always find ways to help others afterwards.

LV: As I wrote in my piece, you'd been hearing about Podemos well before it launched. What's your assessment of the party now, 12 years into their experiment?

JV: Podemos brought enthusiasm back to the Spanish people, enthusiasm for politics and political participation. They favoured those at the bottom, the forgotten. They championed feminism, which no political party had done with sufficient intensity. But the same problem that has beset the French left has also beset the Spanish left and Podemos. Along the way, they forgot about the people. They forgot about the working class; they forgot about what they stood for, which was first and foremost the working class and secondly the entire population of the country.

Elina Alter

In Steppe, the narrator’s relationship to her father is composed of silences and omissions. Monstrous as he is, he has a rough, carefree mystique that draws people toward him, though Oksana thinks his true family are the men he served with, other truckers, fellow small-time criminals. He spends his last years driving long routes, at home in the steppe sublime; HIV-positive in a country where the diagnosis still connotes shame, he neglects to get treatment and infects his girlfriend.

The text is her attempt to make sense of the man and the system that mangled him, in the aftermath of his death at 47. Interspersed with the narrator’s memories of her father, a truck driver and erstwhile criminal, is her argument that he’s a product of that very particular system, a rank-and-file man of Russian-Soviet-post-Soviet machismo. And that system has its own language, an accretion of pre-revolutionary Russian, Soviet lingo, and prison camp cant.

Hospitalised shortly before his death, his family mostly unaware of his diagnosis, Yuriy Vasyakin directs his rage toward the nurses at Astrakhan’s deteriorating hospital. Like most men of his generation, he went through compulsory military service; now he tells his daughter that he’s “run [the nurses] through the drills.”

Except, of course, he says something else in Russian: “устроил им муштру” (ustroil im mushtru), referring to a punishing system of military exercise and discipline that dates back to Peter the Great. “Mуштрa” (mushtra) is borrowed from the German "muster,” meaning example or model. Modern English has “passing muster,” from the same Latin root, but the English phrase seems to have lost its association with unforgiving discipline, and certainly with the threat of violence, which is alive and well in Russian. “Drills” brings the military back in.

But that’s not enough for Oksana’s father. Continuing to rage, he films a video of the ward to put online, imagining the internet as “as one large, Soviet-era community bulletin board.” What he’s actually imagining is the classic Soviet “стенгазета” (stengazeta), literally a “wall newspaper,” a typical Soviet portmanteau, invoking how, for 70 years, these papers pasted on walls were a fact of daily life for anyone who entered any institution – school, club, factory, office – at any time. “Bulletin board” gets across the material object but doesn’t convey its atavistic Soviet spirit; I hope this justifies my explanatory intrusion (“large, Soviet-era, community”) upon the text.

Sometimes luck is on the translator’s side, no intrusion required. When Oksana’s drunk father is brought home by his friends, insensate, his girlfriend Ilona refers to his incomprehensible mutterings as “бурчание” (burchanie), an onomatopoeia that easily becomes “the mumbles.” It isn’t the first time she’s heard it. The roaring and mumbling continue until he finally falls asleep.