Tomato beer? It’s quite refreshing, like a lightly brewed gazpacho. I found it in a Moscow art cafe. It’s just one reason, albeit the most trivial, to be curious about at what’s happening inside Russia now.
In September this year, Moscow hosted the inaugural World Public Assembly. Around 4,000 participants, including many from the Global South, gathered for a series of roundtables, performances, networking sessions and plenaries aimed ostensibly at fostering peaceful global collaboration. Despite its scale and topicality, it did not rate a mention in Western media.
I had been invited in my capacity as representative of the World Crafts Council, which is committed to craft as a universal interest that is beyond political divides. Despite DFAT’s stern ‘Do Not Travel’ advisory, my entry and exit from Russia were disarmingly smooth. I felt strangely invisible during my stay, despite seeing no other recognisably Western persons during my four days in Moscow.
I had studied Russian at Melbourne University in the late 1970s when the department was visited frequently by dissident writers and directors of the Moscow Theatre. Meanjin founder Nina Christesen would host soulful Russian parties at her Eltham property. In 1981, the then Meanjin editor, Jim Davidson, christened Melbourne as St Petersburg to Sydney’s ‘tinseltown’.
Since then, my interest in Russian culture had waned with its growing authoritarianism under Putin—an upgraded version of the Mongol yoke. So I hadn’t visited Moscow for 20 years. Instead, I developed contact with craftspeople in Ukraine and learnt about the toll that Russian brutality has on their nights.
But knowing how Russia can be a mystery to itself, I was still curious how life on the street had been affected by the war. Life seemed good. The Moscow metro was still free of advertising, but now every seat had two USB chargers. I asked around what brand of phone people were using, expecting it to be a Huawei or Xiaomi. But everyone had iPhones, which come into Russia via Kazakhstan. I asked about access to other Western goods: there were apps that could access anything they needed via third parties. Copies of brands like Starbucks made the malls look like anywhere else in the world.
The World Public Assembly was all ‘peace’ and no ‘war’. There was not a single mention or reference to Vladimir Putin, nor was there a single military uniform or weapon in sight. Instead, roundtables and plenary sessions conjured a festive atmosphere of music and dance. The event began with the ceremonial stamping of an envelope, which all participants received at the end as a gesture of peaceful dissemination. It concluded with the chiming of church bells, accompanied by the ringing of thousands of hand-held bells that each participant had been given.
Most talks converged on the principle of multipolarity, in contrast to the ‘cancel culture’ prevalent in the West. A key connection for the widely different cultures was spirituality. The roundtable titled The Spiritual Culture as the Space for the Formation of Meanings and Values included a Buddhist nun, a Hindu priest, a monsignor from the Vatican and a representative of the Israeli Living Ethics Society. Besides a shared humanism, there was a pragmatic consensus that spirituality makes societies stronger.
It’s easy to dismiss this event as ‘peace-washing’. A serious attempt at peace would have critically considered the wars being conducted around the world, particularly next door. It’s unclear who funded the event, but it is likely to have received direct and indirect government support.
But even so, it seems strategic to take the Russians at their word. An expression of cynicism about this event would be easily dismissed as anti-Russian bias. Endorsement of even symbolic initiatives at least opens up an alternative path.
The path is well-trodden. This event commemorated 100 years of world peace festivals in Russia, the largest of which was the 1957 6th World Festival of Youth and Students (attended by my parents-in-law). While the talk of ‘multipolar world’ on the main stage was formulaic, there were more practical conversations on the sidelines that complemented the BRICS network. These initiatives involved skill-sharing between countries in the Global South. The buzz of diverse peoples coming together was similar to the World Crafts Council General Assembly. The networking (and singing) at the stand-up mass dinners was electric.
While all this was familiar, there was a new, uncanny element. While most of the assembly seemed very well planned, I was puzzled by the blatant use of AI-generated images in the presentations. Projected behind speakers and in promotional videos was imagery you might only expect to be used as examples of AI ‘slop’. The skin tones were marzipan, and the facial expressions were generic. Couldn’t they have used real photos from the countries of the Global South that were in attendance?
The best answer I can come up with is that AI offers a utopian narrative that is otherwise missing with the demise of Marxist-Leninism. For the organisers, AI enables them to source imagery outside the copyright system that is largely controlled by the West. They don’t have to make complex political decisions about which person to feature. It’s a symbolic version of generic medicine.
This was a distinctly different way of thinking about AI than in the West where concerns about private property and its appropriation by AI are particularly prevalent (as eloquently argued by Arena’s Richard King). I saw a different side of that when visiting an underground artist in Moscow who was inspired by magazine covers. She took a perverse pleasure in painstakingly recreating them in crochet. She had wanted to use Japanese magazine covers but was refused permission, so she used a Russian app called Kandinsky to generate them artificially instead. She told me that with AI, ‘I feel like I have a conversation with the world. AI brings together all humanity.’
It reminded me of a conversation with an Indian artisan weaver, who was an earlier adopter of ChatGPT. For him, as a non-native English speaker, it helped him write captions for Instagram posts about his work with confidence.
While we would be naturally sceptical of an event like the World Public Assembly, it’s still worth noting in terms of what it reveals about the current state of affairs in the Global South.
Those who make it to the epilogue of Tolstoy’s War and Peace can find the defining statement, ‘The whole difference between war and peace is only a question of reconciling thought with reality’. While there was plenty in the World Public Assembly that reflected the thought behind the invasion of Ukraine, it opened a critical space on the margins for understanding the reality on the other side.