In passing: the notable lives lost in 2022

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Most weekdays, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Today, though, we'll be looking back at some notable lives, the inspired and inspiring figures who died this year. In Britain, 2022 brought a moment that had been as anticipated as it was dreaded.

A few moments ago, Buckingham Palace announced the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

The whole of the country, it seemed, came to a halt.

The palace has just issued this statement. It says the Queen died peacefully.

The country's longest reigning monarch died surrounded by her children at her Scotland home in Balmoral. She was 96. It's hard to overstate, even to explain what and how much the Queen meant to Britain, if only because of how long she reigned. As the tributes poured in, one of the most common words to be heard was duty. Her reign was filled with ribbon cuttings and meet and greets, proof of her sense of obligation to the people of Britain, all of them, not just the politicos and the elites. Our Britain correspondent Catherine Nixie looked back at Her Majesty's lifetime of service.

It's an incredibly evocative piece of film.

Let me begin by saying thank you to all the thousands of kind people who have sent me messages of goodwill.

It was made in 1947. Through the crackling, you can hear Princess Elizabeth speaking to what would become her empire on the occasion of her 21st birthday.

I am grateful and I am deeply moved.

She makes a famous bow. You can hear it ringing out in her high, clear, and unmistakable tones.

I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.

Few would have thought when she made that speech that she would be called upon to fulfill that promise. As soon as she was. When the Queen was born, there wasn't any expectation that she would be Queen. She was merely the niece of the heir to the throne, who was Edward. And then, out of the blue, when she was still a girl, came this thing which no one could have predicted, no one would have foreseen. And that was Wallis Simpson.

King Edward and Mrs. Simpson have been pictured together on many occasions, and in this topsy-turvy world, it may be time for an American woman to marry a British king.

Wallis Simpson was a glamorous American socialite, and Elizabeth's Uncle Edward fell passionately in love with her, which would have been fine had it not been for the fact that she was also divorced. And so when the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, came to the conclusion that No one was able to marry a divorcee and be king. Edward did the thing that nobody expected and abdicated. It's said that when her father found out that he would now be king, he went to see his mother, and he's recorded as having said, "When I told her what had happened, I broke down and sobbed like a child." When Elizabeth heard that her father was going to be king, she began to ardently pray for her brother. She didn't get one, and she submitted willingly to her destiny.

It was announced from Sandringham at 10:45 today, February 6th, 1952, that the King, who retired to rest last night in his usual health, passed peacefully away in his sleep earlier this morning.

She had lived through the horror and the glory of the Second World War. But the glory was fading, and now the country was in a pretty grim and tedious period of austerity. And she saw her role and the monarchy's job as bolstering the country's sense of unity and continuity. And you can see this in her decision, which was a radical decision, to have the coronation televised for the very first time. She did the job in the same way decade after decade, dutifully going about opening things and meeting ordinary people.

No day has ever dawned that rivaled this.

And she was instantly recognizable to everyone in Britain. She was a monarch of habit. She would often wear the same brightly colored, often fuchsia suits, and those same buckled brogues. You could recognize the Queen from her shoes alone.

In the courtyard of Buckingham Palace, fresh from the Queen's first investiture, are three who received the Military Medal. Lance Corporal Martin.

Thanks to Through a combination of dedication and longevity and sheer hard work, the Queen was able to scatter this fairy dust over a vast number of people. As well as seeing the British public through their own difficult times, the Queen had to guide the monarchy and, of course, her own family through some challenges as well. In a single infamous year, 1992, she witnessed the public unravelling of 3 of her children's marriages and a fire at her main home of Windsor Castle.

In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis.

But however bad that year of 1992 might have seemed, it would be eclipsed by what was to come. Because 5 years later, there was the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Outside St. James's Palace, people queued quietly to record their tributes in a book of condolence. 200 people each hour step through the lower corridor to sign one of the two books which are being kept open throughout the night.

There was a general feeling after Diana's death that the Queen wasn't mourning enough publicly. This was a moment of mass outpouring of emotion from the British people. The press, who sensed less blood than bloodlessness, started their attack.

And the Queen did eventually speak out, but there was a feeling for some time afterwards that it had been too little, too I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana's loss and gratitude for her all-too-short life. It is a chance to show to the whole world the British nation united in grief and respect.

The Queen was always the most discreet of monarchs. She knew that to take a position on anything which might lendear her to one group of her subjects would very likely alienate her from another group of them. To take any political position was anathema to her because her role, in her eyes, was to unify her country, not to divide it. On those occasions when she did get involved in politics publicly, it was only to heal and to unify. She had one very important visit to Ireland after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to the conflict in Northern Ireland. And the fact that she used some words of Irish in her speech went down beautifully.

Ar uachtarán, agus a chéise.

Throughout her latter years, she had a lot of family difficulties. Including the death of her husband, who she had always loved so passionately and who had been at her side supporting her through all of her adult life and her reign.

The Duke's coffin was borne on the shoulders of a bearer party from the Grenadier Guards. The coffin was covered with the Duke's personal standard and surmounted with his sword and naval cap and a wreath from the Queen.

And then there were the family troubles and the public split with her grandson Harry, who chose to leave the family and go to America. And then her son Andrew was then revealed to have links with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and that put an end to his career as a public royal. But during the pandemic, when the nation needed bringing together again at a time when it was quite literally kept apart, she was there.

While we may have more still to endure, better days will return. We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again.

In life and in history, the importance of luck is often underestimated, and Britain just really got lucky in 1953. It got a monarch who was wise enough to understand that she had to put her duty before herself, and who was selfless enough to do so. She did her job with extraordinary skill and tact and devotion. She is going to be a very hard act to follow.

In 2022, there was the death of another figure who helped to shape the 20th century. Although he didn't intend to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev saw Russia through the end of the Cold War. He died in hospital in Moscow, aged 91. Our Russia editor, Arkady Ostrovsky, reflected on the legacy of the historic leader.

Mikhail Gorbachev oversaw the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the evil empire. He gave freedom to a country which had been stuck in totalitarian rule. For more than 70 years. He was one of a very, very few Russian leaders, in fact the only Russian leader, who managed to leave power alive, lead a productive public life, and remain admired by many of his own compatriots. Today he is a divisive figure, and that's the bitter irony of it. To the people who are waging the war and those who are supporting the actively in Ukraine, he's a traitor. He's a man who, out of maliciousness or out of stupidity, betrayed the great empire, allowed it to collapse, who was too weak or too stupid or both not to use force to keep the Soviet republics in, who allowed referendums in Soviet republics to declare their sovereignty. And for people who hoped and still hope that Russia may one day become a normal and civilized country. He was a hero who gave people freedom. How the country used that freedom was not his fault, but in a way, the period of his reforms were probably the best period in Russia's history. And I think for people who believe in freedom and who want Russia to be free, he's a hero. To people who want Russia to be an empire, who base their power on the hatred of others he is an enemy, a traitor, and a weak man.

Jiang Zemin led China from 1989 to 2002. When his death was announced last month, the flag in Tiananmen Square was put at half-mast. It was in that very square in 1989 that students gathered, calling for the ousting of leader Deng Xiaoping. Deng Xiaoping. That gathering was brutally suppressed. When Mr. Jiang came to power, he stifled further protest and oversaw the country's economic growth. Our China writer-at-large James Miles looked back at the making of an unlikely strongman.

Jiang Zemin didn't really have an illustrious start as a politician. He didn't look like a man of great ambition. He was part of the nomenclatura, if you like, of China, a technocrat. And shortly after the Communist Party came to power, that was the kind of role he played. He was a very unusual figure. We had thought of him as a somewhat gray apparatchik before he took power, but it turned out he was much more colorful than that. And he was a bit of a show-off. He loved having the stage. He loved to use his English. He loved to show when he met foreign leaders that he had a command of the language. And one of his favorite tricks, if you like, in such meetings was to recite snatches of the Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln.

247 years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceiving liberty and dedicate to proposition that all men are created equal.

And it went further than reciting from American speeches. He also loved to sing, and much to the astonishment of foreign leaders who he was entertaining, he would burst into song. And there was an example in November 1996 when he joined the president of the Philippines, Fidel Ramos at that time, in a rendering of Love Me Tender. And he followed up his singing by dancing a waltz.

Abe Shinzo, Japan's former Prime Minister, was assassinated in July. He was shot twice while giving a campaign speech. Our Tokyo bureau chief, Noah Snyder, attended the funeral of Japan's longest-serving prime minister.

Yesterday afternoon, Abe Akie, the wife of former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, emerged from a black car wearing a black kimono. Carrying her husband's ashes. She walked alongside the current Japanese Prime Minister, Kishida Fumio, past an honor guard dressed in crisp whites into the Budokan in central Tokyo, where I was seated alongside foreign dignitaries, Japanese elites, and other members of the press who had gathered for the state funeral for the late prime minister who was shot during a campaign speech in July, stunning a nation where gun violence is extremely rare. [FOREIGN] Mr. Kishida delivered the first of several eulogies, praising Mr. Abe for leaving a transformative legacy in foreign and defense policy especially. Yet outside the venue, a different scene played out, one that hinted really at the divisive legacy that Abe left behind here in Japan. Some well-wishers left flowers outside the venue. One woman who my colleague Moeka Iida spoke to called Abe the best prime minister we've ever had. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] And said that she always thought that as long as Abe was around, Japan would be safe. Nearby, another group had come to protest, rallying against the idea of the funeral itself and against Abe's own legacy. [CHANTING] The scene shows just how far the killing of Mr. Abe has rippled through Japan and the really profound consequences it's left in the Japanese political scene.

Today in Brazil, 3 days of mourning have begun.

He was just a kid, aged only 17, when during the World Cup final of 1958, Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known by known by his nickname of Pelé, showed off the poise and skill that would become the hallmarks of his career.

Mike Reid writes about Latin America for The Economist.

As his team, Brazil, led Sweden 2-1, he received a high pass in the penalty area. With a defender on his shoulder, he controlled the ball with his chest, took one pace and looped it high over a defender. Running to meet the ball, he drove it in an unstoppable volley low into the corner of the net. In all, the young Pelé scored 6 goals in 4 matches in that tournament. While he arrived as a relatively unknown youngster, he left as a rising star. It was the first of 3 World Cups Pelé would win, more than any other player has ever accomplished. 3 Argentines—Alfredo Di Stefano, Diego Armando Maradona, and Lionel Messi—all have their claims to to be the world's greatest footballer. But many in the game, or at least the older ones, believe that this accolade truly belongs to Pelé. The legendary player who transformed the game has died in São Paulo, aged 82, after a long battle with cancer. He leaves behind him a legacy that is extraordinary. Including a world record of 1,279 goals in 1,363 matches that is unlikely to be surpassed. There have been a number of great footballers who have racked up goals over the years. But with Pelé, it wasn't just his ability to find the back of the net that made him so singular. He was the complete player, a team man who often provided the killer pass for others to finish. As Bobby Moore, the England captain who lost to him in the World Cup in 1970, put it, he was the greatest because he could do anything and everything. On the pitch. Lovely dummy by Pelé for Tarcísio, picking up Rivelino. Pelé was born in poverty in a town in the southwest of Minas Gerais state of Brazil. Football was in his genes. In an era when players were poorly paid, his father was a promising professional footballer whose career was prematurely ended by injury. So Pelé's father dedicated himself to training his son, improvising with whatever was available. They would use old socks, a grapefruit, or rags as a ball to practice with. It paid off. By the time he was 15, Pelé was snapped up by Santos, a professional Brazilian club. Largely because of him, it became the best team in the world in the early 1960s, twice winning the World Club Championship. Nelson Rodrigues, a Brazilian playwright and journalist, saw Pelé play for Santos when the young player was still only 17. Pelé has a considerable advantage over other players, he wrote. He feels that he's a king from head to toe. The epithet stuck. Pelé would be unofficially crowned as the king of what, largely because of him, was dubbed the beautiful game. At 5 feet 8 inches, or 1.73 meters, Pelé was not particularly tall, but he was strong and fast. He had an instinctive ability to read the game and a supreme positional sense. Not only would he anticipate opponents' moves, but he would place himself almost magically at the right place at the right time to receive the ball. He was a skillful dribbler. He seemed to be able to bemuse defenders effortlessly with his feints and sudden stops and starts. He had a powerful, sometimes curving shot with both feet, and despite his average height, he was a formidable header of the ball. Those whose unfortunate job it was to defend against Pelé often suffered. Tarciso Bergnic, an Italian defender given the job of marking Pelé in the 1970 World Cup final, said that he told himself before the game that Pelé is made out of skin and bones just like everyone else. But as he ruefully put it, he was wrong. Pelé outjumped him to score the first goal. 100 goals for Brazil in World Cup competitions, and Brazil take this 1-0 lead. Pelé was already larger than life in his own time. He would have been even larger now. He played before the era of football as a global business. Half his career was captured in black and white, and it took up to a month before Brazilians see his exploits in Sweden in cinema newsreels. European clubs sought him, but Santos and Brazil's government refused to allow him to be transferred. In today's game, he would have been a billionaire. As it was, he showed a sharp eye for money in deals off the pitch. At 35, he came out of retirement to help to launch soccer in the United States. Joining the New York Cosmos.

His real name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento. To millions of soccer fans, he is known as Pelé, number 10, the most celebrated player in the history of the game. He has led Brazil to 3 World Cup titles, scoring more goals than any professional player in history. Today he joins the New York Cosmos and the North American Soccer League.

He was also a global ambassador. Ambassador for football. But despite his global stardom, Pelé never lost touch with Brazil. He refused to have much to do with its military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985, but later, when a democratic president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, asked him to be sports minister in 1994, he accepted. During his time as minister, he piloted a law to clean up Brazilian club football, but it was neutered in the Congress, where a powerful lobby defended corrupt vested interests. Always a sportsman and gentleman on the pitch, Pelé's private life was less disciplined. He was married 3 times and had at least 7 children. Controversially, he refused to recognise one daughter born of an affair. Despite living in a time of rampant racism, Pole commanded an enormous amount of respect. His great-grandparents were slaves. Never an activist, just by being himself, he was the embodiment of Black dignity. Along with Muhammad Ali, he was the first Black global sporting superstar. Nelson Mandela said of him, to watch him play was to watch the delight the light of a child combined with the extraordinary grace of a man in full. Now gone, that is how Pelé, the king of the beautiful game, should rightfully be remembered. Goal! Brazil! In World Cup competition, and Brazil takes this 1-0 lead.

Each week in The Economist, our obituaries editor Anne Rowe tells the stories of extraordinary lives. Among them are heads of state, cultural titans, people who have furthered human knowledge. But they also include individuals who have changed the world in less trumpeted but still profound ways. Among them was a conductor in a port city of Ukraine whose refusal to cooperate with the occupying Russian forces eventually cost him his life.

When Yurika Patenko received an invitation sometime in September to conduct an International Music Day concert, he could take it as flattery of a sort. He was a well-known figure around the city. He had been a member of the Kherson Regional Philharmonic. And he was in charge of the Gilier Chamber Ensemble, their chief conductor. That ensemble was a group of 15 or so players from the Harrison Philharmonic. He was pretty popular, and certainly in the Music and Drama Theatre, when you came in in the evenings and he would be there in his black tie, and it was always a good sign to see Cavatelli. Tchenko there and realize you were in for a good evening's entertainment. His own instrument was not particularly suited to the orchestra. It was the accordion. He'd been a prize-winning accordion player ever since high school. He traveled abroad to play it. And he'd studied it at the conservatoire in Kyiv, together with conducting and composition. He loved the accordion because it was the sound of the land of Ukraine, together with the violin. However, when the invitation to the International Music Day concert came and he was asked to conduct, he gave an uncompromising no to it. And the reason was that Kherson was then a city under Russian occupation. It was occupied from March 2nd, and there was no way that a good patriotic Ukrainian could take part in this concert as far as Kerpetenko was concerned. What the occupation had done was put the whole city under military rule, make rubles the currency, encourage the speaking of Russian rather than Ukrainian. The citizens had risen up in revolt and had protested in huge numbers at first, but they'd been dispersed with live rounds, and many hundreds have been arrested. Those who were not arrested sometimes simply disappeared, were abducted. So many people had left, but Kepotenko had not left. He was determined to stay, and his mood on his Facebook page was extremely defiant. He found it extremely hard to stomach the Russia of the present day. He put up posts on his Facebook page that said, you know, what is Russia now? It's just a place of KGB types. It's a concentration camp. And here is Putin pointing his guns at me and trying to turn my country into Novorossiya, the New Russia. He didn't want any of this, and he was going to make sure everyone knew he didn't want Under the occupation, music-making had gone very quiet. And that seemed right to him, that there shouldn't be too much music playing at a time of such stress and grief in the city. This gave him something of a reputation of being an awkward customer, but others saw him as a man of principle who was not prepared to compromise music and always wanted to defend the interests of his orchestra and his players. When he considered the invitation to the International Day concert, he could see it as a simple bluff, a simple lie. The concert was meant to prove that life was normal again, that everyone had settled down to a peaceful existence and there were even concerts being staged. Of course, nothing was further from the truth. But he couldn't get his point of view across because there was a new chief conductor of the Philharmonic and there was a new artistic director there. Both had been appointed appointed by the Russians, and both were determined that the concert should go ahead. If Kapotenko didn't want to conduct it, they would find someone else to do it. Some of the players needed threats in order to play, but there were quite a few others who were very happy to go along with the concert, and this wounded Kapotenko more than anything else, that there was this kind of collaboration going on in the city. So sometime in September, when the invitation came and when he refused it, he went back home and seemed to fall very quiet. No one knew quite what was happening to him and why he was no longer putting posts on the Facebook page. Members of the Russian Secret Service went along to see him and to try to persuade him to change his mind. They went to his flat and he gave them a pretty curt answer, and they said they would be back. And when they came back, it was with a machine gun, which they fired at full volume through the front door and killed him instantly. He was killed defending music and defending art, defending them from being compromised. Because after all, the whole purpose of art is to uplift people, and the whole purpose of war is to bring them down. And he knew decidedly which side he was on.

Anne Rowe on Yuriy Kropotenko, who was probably murdered sometime in September, aged 46. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. The show's editors are Marguerite Howell and Chris Impey. Our sound engineer is Will Roe, with help this week from Timo Syla. Our senior producers are Sam Westrin, Jat Gill, Jonjo Devlin, and Rory Galloway. William Warren is our creative producer, and Stevie Hertz is our US audio correspondent. Our producers are Alizée Jean-Baptiste, Kevin Kainers, and assistant producer Barkley Bram. We'll all see you back here in 2023.