How the father figures: a mysterious Moscow killing

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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. In New York, I'm Jon Fassman.

And in London, I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Last weekend, Singapore's government announced it would repeal a colonial-era law criminalizing sex marriage between men. The city-state's gay community rejoiced. But with this one step forward comes a bigger one back.

And when the only speakers of a regional minority language are the elderly, the diagnosis is usually terminal. But Basque from the north of Spain has beaten all the odds. We look at the mixed successes of Europe's zombie languages. First up, though. On Saturday, a car bomb in Moscow killed a 29-year-old right-wing journalist named Darya Dugina. Like many on the nationalist right, she was a vocal supporter of Russia's war in Ukraine. A view she shared with, or inherited from, her father, Alexander Dugin.

"So we have our special Russian truth that you need to accept as something that may—" He's a philosopher, a lecturer, a media personality.

Pushing a hard-right nationalist agenda rooted in deep history. He supported the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and like President Vladimir Putin, thinks that Ukraine isn't really its own state. How much Mr. Dugin actually has the ear of the Kremlin is unclear. Whether he was the intended target of the blast that killed his daughter, also unclear. In fact, nothing about this assassination is clear, and that makes it useful for all sorts of groups.

This assassination took place in what's a wealthy suburb of Moscow. And it's pretty shocking to have a car bomb kill someone who's by no means a major celebrity, but a minor personality, who is the daughter of someone who has made his career as a sort of thinker of the far ultranationalist movement in Russia.

Edward Carr is The Economist's deputy editor.

It suggests a vulnerability. It's shocking. This is a country that's not at war officially. And so to see car bombs go off in a wealthy suburb is quite shocking.

And tell us about Darya Dugina, who's been killed.

So, her main way in her career has been through her father. And she has sort of piggybacked on him. And she's the sort of person who appears on talk shows at 11 in the morning or at 11 at night, rather than at 6 in the afternoon. So, not a primetime person, making her way. She's got some funding from an important ultranationalist oligarch. And she's a young woman, 29, so this was the beginning of her career. But she was known as the daughter of someone as much as being someone herself. And of course, one important thing is that by no means would she have been a household name in Russia, let alone in Ukraine.

You say she was known as the daughter of someone rather than someone in her own right, and a lot of people are speculating that it was her father indeed who was the target of this. And I know that you met him in the past.

What's he like? So he's been described after this event as a Rasputin figure in Putin's brain, and I think that's a misdiagnosis. That's characterizing him wrongly. He's better seen as a sort of political entrepreneur, one of the many figures in the constellation of the far nationalist right in Russia who makes a living from pitching a certain kind of ideology. And one reason he's prominent in the West is he speaks very good English. When we met him, he had no protection. He was in an office in central Moscow. We just wandered in and talked to him. And I guess there are a couple of features of his thinking that are relevant here. One is the sense of Russia as an exceptional power with almost a holy mission to unite and bring together and gather all Slavs. And as an important land power, a sort of balance against the maritime powers of the United States and its sidekick, Britain. That's the first dimension. The other dimension of his thought that's interesting is that he sees Putin as a sort of czar, and that the czar has a mystical and holy role in Russia. The czar, in a way, is the closest thing to the embodiment of the will of God. So this is a long way from Enlightenment liberalism. We're into a kind of mystical, exceptional Russia that has this holy duty. And in that context, Invading Ukraine, preventing Ukraine from being a separate nation, gathering it into Russia as a whole is completely within his worldview.

But at least some of that worldview seems to explain what's going on with Ukraine now.

The Kremlin agrees with a lot of this stuff, doesn't it?

Absolutely. There are a bunch of thinkers who hold this view in Russia, and Dugin is one of them. The thing is that it's not as if Putin's sitting there listening to the pearls of wisdom from Dugin's lips. It's rather that the Kremlin has its ideology, and people like Dugin and Dugina are sort of entrepreneurially making a career off that view as well. One opposition activist in Russia said that Dugin is someone who makes his living as a fascist rather than being a fascist.

And coming back to the assassination, who do investigators in Russia say is responsible there?

They've come up with immense amounts of photographic evidence to suggest that a Ukrainian woman called Natalia Vovk came into the country in July, stayed in the apartment block where Daria Dugina lived, followed her around in a Mini Cooper, of all things, and then supposedly planted the bomb under her car and got out of the country into Estonia. To put it mildly, this is fishy because they've solved this crime unbelievably fast with huge amounts of documentary evidence, some of which by the way, looks photoshopped. And it's almost an own goal in the sense that if the Russian security services were this tight on Natalia Vovk, why didn't they actually prevent the bombing if they were following her around that closely? So I, I don't think it's terribly plausible, but that's the story that they're putting around and saying that Ms. Vovk was an employee of the Ukrainian security service, that she'd been in the Azov Battalion, which if you remember was the battalion that defended Mariupol and the steelworks.

And what do the Ukrainians say about the suggestion that this is essentially a Ukrainian hit job?

They say that it's a complete fantasy. They had nothing to do with it. That they, unlike the Russians, are not terrorists. So that you have their absolute denial.

But what are the other possibilities then, if not this hypothesised Ukrainian hit job?

So I think there are two other possibilities which are highly conspiracy-minded. The first is that this was actually done by the FSB or the Kremlin. One explanation, which I don't find convincing, is that this is done as a pretext to unleash attacks on Ukraine. I don't think Putin needs any sort of justification or reason to do that. He's quite capable of doing that just when he chooses. So I don't find that convincing. Slightly more convincing is that these kinds of things have been used in the past as the— I'm talking about the 1930s, 90s past here rather than the recent past. But they've been used as a reason for a crackdown because the FSB's failed to do its job, or there's some plotters and schemers must be in Moscow. So it sort of starts the whole process of rounding people up. That's one possibility. Another very conspiracy-minded idea is that the ultranationalists did this against one of their own. And that might sound crazy, but the logic is that there are people who are critical of Putin in Russia, not for having a war against Ukraine, but for not doing enough, for not prosecuting it with enough vigour. You know, it's still not called a war, it's called a special military operation. There hasn't been a general mobilisation. Ultranationalists are very critical of Putin for not pushing harder and doing more damage in Ukraine. So this logic is that by showing that in theory that Ukraine supposedly has killed Daria Dugina, they've crossed the red line and that Putin is being kind of feeble and weak unless he now starts to prosecute the war against Ukraine with more vigour. So you can see there is an explanation and a culprit for pretty much anybody who comes at this from any direction. And the fact that the FSB has supposedly solved this crime within 24 hours means that we may never find out. Who is responsible.

Which means that, that all of those hypotheses remain equally potentially valid. How do you think that changes the situation in particular between Russia and Ukraine?

Yes, it does mean that. And there's even one more explanation that's been put forward by a Russian opposition MP who's in exile in Ukraine, Ilya Ponomarev, who says that there is a new previously unidentified militia called the National Republican Army, who are trying to dislodge Putin from power. So the thing to watch, I think, here is not to try and guess which of these possible explanations is true, but to see how each side uses them to pursue their own narrative and their own sense of the direction of which this is going. I will be watching very closely whether this leads to more aggression from Russia, whether the pressure on Putin grows to have some sort of mobilisation. I'll also be looking very closely in Russia to see whether this triggers a roundup of troublemakers. And we will see whether similar attacks behind the lines continue and see if any of those sort of suggest who might be the actors here, whether it's a rogue part of the Ukrainian security services, whether it's this shadowy group of Russians who are against Putin who may not even exist. This is sort of classic shadowy stuff and people will try and exploit it for their own ends.

Edward, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

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There is a thriving community of LGBT people in Singapore. Every year, there's a local gathering called Pink Dot, held in support of what the organizers call the freedom of love. This is tolerated by the authorities, even though they tend to frown on protests. But the city-state has also maintained a colonial-era law known as Section 377A, which outlawed sex between men.

Because of Section 377A, we deal with discrimination every day. Tear down this law!

Gay Singaporeans have been challenging it for years. On Sunday, the Prime Minister finally relented.

The government will repeal Section 377A and decriminalize sex between men.

But this may not be quite the great victory that activists were hoping for.

On Sunday, Singapore's prime minister announced that the government would repeal Section 377A, which was a provision in Singapore's penal code which outlawed sex between men.

Amy Hawkins is a news editor at The Economist.

That law hasn't been enforced since at least 2007. And actually, back in February, the government had decided to keep the law on the books on the basis that it wasn't enforced. But over the weekend, just a few months after that decision, the Prime Minister announced that the law would in fact be repealed.

I believe this is the right thing to do and something that most Singaporeans will now accept.

So many Singaporeans are happy with this change.

I think this 377A is a very outdated law, repealing it sounds like it makes a lot of sense right now.

At the same time, the change may mask an overall attack on gay rights in the country. How so? Later in the same speech, the Prime Minister announced that he would limit other rights for same-sex couples even as he legalized sex between men.

Even as we repeal 377A, we will uphold and safeguard the institution of marriage. Under the law, only marriages between one man and one woman are recognised in Singapore.

For example, currently there is no explicit mention of marriage as being between a man and a woman in Singapore's Constitution. But the government wants to prevent the marriage laws from being challenged on the basis of the constitutional right to equal treatment. So the government is introducing a constitutional amendment which will protect Parliament's right to define marriage as being only between a man and a woman. And so that will make it harder for activists to challenge marriage laws on the basis of the constitutional right to equality, which is what activists have done in many neighboring countries. And this constitutional amendment will be done without a referendum.

Amy, why do you think Singapore's government wants to do this?

They want to do it because of the sizable conservative community in Singapore who were against the removal of Section 377A, which was the penal code about sex between men.

But I like the fact that we also went a step ahead to reinforce the family nucleus definition, that marriage is actually between a man and a woman, and that should not be contested in the court.

And the Prime Minister made clear in his speech that he thinks Singapore is still a conservative country which wants to protect conservative family values. And so by playing to this group, the government is ensuring that they're keeping the support of this large political group and voting base. And as things were, there was also the risk that restrictions on gay couples' rights could be challenged in the courts successfully around things like housing rights. And so by changing the constitution in this way, the government is able to prevent those challenges from being successful. There's also another angle in that the government of Singapore has previously been accused of pinkwashing— that is, putting forward seemingly gay-friendly policies while actually denying the LGBT community equal rights. So this could be seen as another example of that.

What impact could defining marriage in this way have on gay couples in Singapore?

So one major area where there could be an impact is housing, and that's because Singapore is a very small country and it's very heavily populated. And so housing is unaffordable for many young people. Young married couples are able to get help to buy houses, but that's not available for same-sex couples. And so by outlawing same-sex legal partnerships, any hopes that gay couples might be able to access equal rights to public benefits such as housing will become even more remote. And then there are other areas in which you can see an impact, such as hospital visitation rights, parenthood, inheritance, and other rights that straight couples take for granted, which will become even more difficult to access.

So do you think it would have been better if things had stayed as they were?

It's hard to say that completely. It's a bit of a double-edged sword. So While it may seem like a win for the gay community that Section 377 was repealed, given that it was so rarely enforced, some might argue that actually overall this is going to make life harder for gay couples. And moreover, Singapore is being quite undemocratic by trying to shield major public policy decisions from legal challenges.

There are, as you said before, gay rights activists in Singapore. Do you think they could see this as an opportunity to be more vocal? Could they challenge the change in law?

Yeah, they could. There's a chance that it will kind of fire up the activist community. A lot of activist groups have very quickly noticed the drawbacks of this change. But at the same time, the courts in Singapore have tended to be conservative and side with the government on issues relating to LGBT rights. And so this is only going to entrench the government's position.

To what extent is Singapore an outlier regionally in its stance on gay rights?

So elsewhere in the region, other countries that were also part of the British Empire, such as Malaysia and Sri Lanka and many other countries, still have legal bans on gay sex, which is a relic of the Imperial Penal Code. But in other countries in the region that don't have that, such as the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, progress on LGBT rights is happening a bit faster. So for example, Thailand looks likely to legalize same-sex partnerships within the next year or so. But in Singapore, although it has quite a liberal international reputation, it has always been quite a conservative country where LGBT communities don't have many rights. So while it's overall a good thing that sex between men is no longer criminalized, it doesn't look like other rights are going to be making much progress anytime soon.

Amy, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Minority languages are often neither dead nor fully alive. Spoken by a small number of people, they are at risk of fading away. Think of Scots Gaelic, Spoken here by Rosemary for Wikitongues, a nonprofit that keeps a record of endangered languages. Or Gallo, a Romance language native to eastern Brittany, spoken here by Toen. Despite activists' efforts, These languages are neither widely spoken nor used, but things look rosier for one minority language spoken in northern Spain.

[SPEAKING BASQUE] Basque is one of the only non-Indo-European languages in Europe, which means it's been there for thousands of years, since well before the invasion of the Indo-European languages, which include almost every other one in Europe a few thousand years ago.

Lane Green is The Economist's language columnist and Spain correspondent.

Its structure, its grammar, its vocabulary are all completely distinct from those of its neighbors. There have been attempts to try to connect it to other languages, some as distant as things like the Caucasian languages around Georgia and Armenia and Azerbaijan, but it has no known proven relatives anywhere in the world.

How was it able to survive when, when other languages did not?

Well, the Basque territory is quite mountainous. It's, it's high mountains and then river valleys in which most people lived and held small farms. In other words, it's pretty inhospitable territory. A lot of invaders have either just not bothered or have gone right on by it. So the Basques have been hanging out there and not been assimilated into the neighboring populations all this time.

What has the relationship been between the Basque language and Spanish officialdom?

Well, during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, which is from 1939 to when he died in 1975, all of the non-Spanish languages were pretty well clamped down on, and that very much included Basque. You weren't allowed to use it for any official purpose. Even speaking it in public could get you in trouble. They didn't try to stop you from speaking it at home, but they did everything they could to force people to, as they put it, speak Christian, which meant to the regime to speak Spanish. So when Franco died, the Basque-speaking population was mostly in rural areas and quite elderly, and that's usually a very bad thing for a language. If all of your speakers are old country folk, that usually means you're on a fast track to the language dying out. Instead of that, Basque against all odds has actually survived and even thrived.

How has Basque managed to halt that death spiral? And more broadly, how do minority languages halt death spirals when they do?

Well, the schools are a really important part of the puzzle. Today, the young people are the age group most likely to speak Basque, and that's been thanks to a big push, especially in the school system. In the 1980s, just about 1 in 6 or 7 Basques went to school in the Basque language. Today, about two-thirds of Basques study in entirely Basque-medium schools, except that they learn Spanish as a foreign language. Every other subject is taught in Basque, and that has meant that nearly everybody, about 87% of 10- to 14-year-olds, are reckoned to speak the language. So the Basque-speaking population has recovered from a dangerously low one to almost greater than the non-Basque-speaking population in the Basque Country. In other places, you can require every student to learn the language as a second language. That can spread a broad knowledge of the language. In Ireland, for example, virtually every school pupil is required to study Irish. And as a result, Irish has been kind of stabilized, and today about 30% of people in Ireland say that they speak the Irish language. Welsh too has actually been revived due to a big push both in culture and, you know, on street signs and things, but also through the educational system. In New Zealand, the Māori language, for example, has been in something of a revival thanks to immersion programs that take young Māori people and put them in Māori immersion environments so that they can be surrounded by the language. The language kind of skipped a generation in the Māori community so that middle-aged people are the least likely to speak it. It's the oldest folks that learned it at home and still speak it fluently as their first language, and then these young people who are learning it in these pretty innovative immersion programs.

And Lane, we've been talking about how many people know these languages. What about usage in daily life? What does that look like?

One of the things I heard on my recent trip to the Basque Country is that the language is growing in knowledge of the language and in prestige of the language. It's certainly quite visible on street signs and road signs. You feel surrounded by the language in one way, but you don't, you actually don't hear it on the street nearly as much as you see it. So in the Basque Country, for example, just about 376,000 or so people of the 2.4 million 1 million population, have it as their first language. And what some Basques will tell you is that if you're in a mixed group where almost everyone is fluent in Basque but one person is not, the others all can and do quickly switch to Spanish to accommodate that person. So that means the language is really more known than used, and that's something that worries those activists and cultural nationalists who are trying to propel the Basque language back to top-tier status in the Basque Country. You could even tell a similar story of Irish. You might have almost a third of the population saying that they can speak it. Just about 1.7% of people told the Irish census that they do in fact speak it on a daily basis outside of school. So this too is a dramatic example of a language that is widely known but is almost hardly used. There was even a miniseries called No Béalá, which means No English, made by an Irish journalist going around the country trying to speak Irish all the time, trying to carry out daily ordinary tasks in Dublin, doing things like trying to get an auto mechanic in Irish, and people just laugh at him. It's absurd to think that you could just do ordinary things like that in the capital in the language that's the historical language of the country and even recognized as the national language in the Constitution.

Lane, what would it take to bring back languages that are not in ordinary daily use?

There's a couple ways that you could do that. Basques could insist more stridently than they in fact do that in a mixed group, the person that doesn't speak Basque do their very best or try to try to follow along if they have a passive knowledge of it. In the case of what the government could do, it could require shopkeepers to address people in the minority language first, or essentially make it difficult to live without the language. The problem is that those tools are— they're a little unpleasant, they're coercive, and in free societies, in liberal countries, we don't like the idea of forcing people to speak a language. That's what Franco tried to do, after all. And so it might fall to social pressure of a sort of subtle but hopefully persuasive kind in order to keep these languages really fully used and fully vibrant.

Lane, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks very much, Jon.

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