18 February 2025
Martin Dewhirst reviews Harald Lipman, Memories Beyond Moscow: Memoirs of a Benevolent Lepidopterist, Mereo Books, Cirencester, 2024, xvi + 322 pp. ISBN 978-1-86151-841-5.
This is the perfect time, not least for people in the UK, to read the second half of Dr. Harald Lipman’s memoirs, covering the period after he retired as a Counsellor (equivalent, he writes, to that of an army Major General, p. 29) from the then Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but not from his vocation as a medical doctor. (Volume 1, Memories of Moscow: Memoirs of a Medical Diplomat, is still easily available.) In retirement, he seems to have travelled almost everywhere on earth, including the South Pacific, Yugoslavia, Kazakhstan, Bashkortostan, often for professional reasons, when he was recalled by the FCO to help out, and sometimes on holiday. But not, apparently, to Ukraine, perhaps for an understandable reason: his mother and his paternal grandfather left the Pale of Settlement before WW1 for the obvious reason (p. 182), which even today, with a Jewish President in Kyiv, makes some people, not least in Israel, a little wary of the country that Putin invaded in 2014.
Lipman was and is primarily interested in doing more than his bit to improve medical conditions, especially for children, in Russia, and not only in Moscow, but also elsewhere in the biggest country in the world. This account of his personal and family life – his amazing wife Nahid usually accompanied him on his travels – is regularly interspersed with his efforts to improve conditions for patients, especially children, together with their parents (pp. 61-2, 196-7, 221-5), via what I shall refer to here, for brevity’s sake, as the Tushinskaya Trust (see the two entries in the Index for the numerous page references). This involved the inevitable time-consuming and exhausting fund-raising efforts, involving the Princess Diana Trust and her visit to Moscow in 1995, and also, not surprisingly, close cooperation with the Great Ormand Street [Children’s] Hospital (GOSH). The main outcome, thanks to Lipman and those who helped him, was the training in London of over fifty Russian children’s medical personnel and the improvement of nursing services in several parts of the vastness of Russia (p. 139).
The author is rather coy when explaining why things eventually started to go seriously wrong in about 2015, when the name of the Tushinskaya hospital was changed. ‘Sadly, the United States and Western Europe had little understanding of Russian thought proccesses, or of the proud nationalistic nature of the Russian people. The West felt that it knew all the answers and merely had to graft their political and economic systems onto Russia, and set about this task in a rather “ham-fisted” way.’ (p. [xv]) Perhaps this reticence is intended to avoid the risk of a libel action? While writing this review I found a very helpful online article by Sergei Vetoshkin, ‘Klinika absurda’, which gives readers of Russian more information on how and why the medical situation in Moscow started to get worse about ten years ago: see svpressa.ru/blogs/article/447809.
I couldn’t help wondering – assuming this was possible – whether Lipman’s altruistic efforts might have continued longer and been even more successful if there had been closer cooperation between him and the BEARR Trust (‘British Emergency Action in Russia and the Republics’), which is still today doing a lot of very good non-political work to help ‘ordinary’ people in Russia who face a wide variety of problems.
As I hinted at the beginning of this review, this is a very timely publication, because the UK is itself experiencing serious financial problems with its own national health system, which should make it easier for us to sympathise with ‘ordinary’ people in Russia and everywhere else. And the hot war in Ukraine, with tens of thousands of casualties on both sides, should finally convince more of us that the cold war, after a very short break under Gorbachev, has been and still is continuing, but without most politicians and others admitting it. Ukraine, in my opinion, had largely become post-Soviet by about 2008, but Russia is still largely neo-Soviet in its thinking, as evidenced by Putin. Lipman’s books help readers to think about these matters and are a pleasure to read.
