Coffee with cold milk in Telemark

I spent the Summer of 1967 on a traineeship with Norsk Hydro in Oslo. This was arranged with an international organisation called AIESEC, which at that time organised unpaid placements (they would now be called ‘internships’) with employers in different countries for students studying economics or commerce. My first AIESEC placement had been in the previous year with a small printing company in Reykjavik, where all the employees knew each other by sight. Norsk Hydro was a very different enterprise. It was the largest industrial enterprise in Norway, involved in mining and metal-processing, chemicals and fertilisers, and oil. I was based in its headquarters, and supervised by a kindly man called Mr Falkenberg. I stayed at first in the University student village, and later in a room in the Eastern suburbs. I visited the Viking ship museum, the Munch museum and the Holmenkollen ski jump. I swam in lakes and walked through the woods that surrounded Oslo. I also spent a lot of time strolling round the City centre, and was surprised to find that its citizens enjoyed eating in open-air cafes and drinking excellent coffee. Neither of these activities were common in England at that time.

Part of my traineeship involved a tour round the various industrial sites in Southern Norway that were operated by Norsk Hydro. Mr Falkenberg drove, and we stayed in hostels owned by the company. One of the places we visited was Rjukan in Telemark, located in a deep-sided valley. In the Second World War, Norsk Hydro had been taken over by the German company IG Farben, and had produced heavy water, important in the production of nuclear weapons. Norwegian commandos destroyed this facility in 1943.

After we left Rjukan, Mr Falkenberg steered the car along a heavily-potholed mountain road, which eventually led to a rather alpine-looking hotel. We stopped for coffee and a cake. There was a strange atmosphere in the place. After we left, Mr Falkenberg expressed his disgust with the hotel’s owners, who had been notorious collaborators with the German forces. The local authority took its revenge by refusing to repair the road leading to the hotel. What made matters even worse for Mr Falkenberg was the way the hotel served its coffee: “No cream with it”, he said, “not even warm milk - just cold milk”. Ever since then, I have associated coffee served with cold milk as fit only for Nazi collaborators.

Mr Putin takes off his shirt.

In the old days, before television and the Internet, dictators made themselves known to their subject populations by displaying posters and erecting statues. The most extreme example of this form of display was Rafael Trujillo, who ran the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Posters and statues of the dictator were mass-produced, while his name even appeared on car number-plates. The capital city, the highest mountain in the country and many streets and buildings were renamed after him. Even churches were required to have signs saying "Dios en cielo, Trujillo en tierra" (God in heaven, Trujillo on earth). Needless to say, Trujillo ruled by mass-murder and intimidation, and ensured that most of the wealth of the country was controlled by his family and cronies.

Nowadays, the main visual images of dictators are provided by television, the press and the Internet. But the visual image of the dictator remains a clue to what he intends to say about his country. Rafael Trujillo always appeared wearing the most expensive suits - intended to signify that his regime had brought greater prosperity to his country. Fidel Castro was usually seen in army fatigues, to indicate that his regime was a product of revolution and was still in a state of revolutionary struggle against the USA. Vladimir Putin is different: he is often shown stripped to the waist in various athletic pursuits. Stripping to the waist is of course not practicable for much of the year in Russia, and so there are alternative winter depictions of Mr Putin playing ice hockey, skiing or shooting a rifle in the snow. All these images are intended to display macho strength, and support his political programme of restoring Russian power after the national humiliation suffered with the collapse of the USSR.

In this respect, Vladimir Putin resembles Benito Mussolini who could be seen on newsreels stripping off his shirt to join with Italian peasants gathering the harvest. There was the same muscular male body with a surprising absence of chest-hair. Mussolini thereby (like Putin) sought to project an image of strength to a country in which there was a sense of weakness and humiliation. Macho politics went beyond visual display: for Mussolini, it meant authoritarian rule shading into gangsterism. As with Putin’s regime, political enemies were murdered, the resources of the state were sequestered among family and cronies, and there was a particular dislike of homosexuality. Gay men were depicted as the very antithesis of masculine strength - a sign of the weak, feminine, degenerate liberalism of the democratic states.

The problem with macho rulers is that taking off your shirt is sometimes not enough to demonstrate your strength - it is much more effective to invade a weak neighbour. For Mussolini, it was Ethiopia (which bordered Italian-controlled Eritrea) in 1936, followed by intervention in the Spanish Civil War in the same year, the invasion of Albania in 1939, allying with Germany against France in 1940, and then invading Greece in 1941. The outcomes of these wars was catastrophic, for the locals and ultimately for Italy. The Italians used mustard gas in Ethiopia and killed over a quarter of a million people. Entry into the Second World War in 1940 resulted in Italy being the scene of fighting for two years and over 450,000 Italians killed.

Putin has been more politically adept than Mussolini, seeking to build alliances with other authoritarian nationalist regimes and politicians such as Victor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front in France (which has received a ‘loan’ of 9 million euros from Russia). Putin’s authoritarian nationalism is also much-admired by the leadership of the UKIP in Britain.

He has also exploited the resentments of Russians living in countries outside Russia after the breakup of the USSR, as well as exploiting the various nationalist rivalries in neighbouring states. So far, this has included the invasion by Russian forces of two multi-ethnic parts of  Georgia in 2008 (South Ossetia and Abkhazia), the occupation and annexation of the Crimea in 2014, and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine in the same year. In each case, the disputed area was one with multiple ethnicities, often living side-by-side or in adjacent communities. Russian intervention has involved alliances with local nationalists and criminal gangs, supported by various groups of irregular military tourists. The outcomes have been the usual forced expulsions that are the product of nationalism, and the stripping of local resources. In Georgia, a quarter of a million ethnic Georgians were driven out of Abkhazia and a further 30,000 from South Ossetia. These areas remain some of the poorest places in Europe and have a grim future - totally dependent economically on sparse Russian handouts.

The outcome of the Russian war against Ukraine is difficult to foresee, as indeed is the future of Vladimir Putin himself. He must hope for a better end than Mussolini, who was last seen hanging upside-down from a lamppost in Milan - without his shirt.