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Until a few days ago, almost nobody outside his native land had heard of Ivan Kuliak.Not many people, after all, follow junior artistic gymnastics.
Even when, a few days ago, the 20-year-old Russian won bronze in the sport’s World Cup in Doha, he seemed an unlikely candidate for infamy. But then Kuliak took his place on the podium, and suddenly it seemed all the world was staring at his chest.
For there, clear for all to see, was a taped white Z — the same symbol painted on the Russian tanks grinding into Ukraine, a reminder of their naked violence.
It’s tempting to say that it’s just a letter.But, of course, it’s more than that.
Military experts first spotted the Z signs during the Russians’ so-called exercises a few days before their brutal invasion.
Until a few days ago, almost nobody outside his native land had heard of Ivan Kuliak
Nobody is quite sure what it means: some analysts think it stands for Russian zapad (‘west’), while others think it’s a way to distinguish the two sides.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Russians and the Ukrainians don’t agree on a definition, with the Kremlin claiming the Z stands for the phrase za pobedu (‘for victory’), while the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine says it denotes units from Russia’s Eastern Military District, and — if encased in a square — Forces from Crimea.
Kuliak maintains it stands for ‘victory and peace’, and insists he would wear it again, even though he now faces a lengthy international ban. But to most of us, he’s at Best Private University a brainwashed stooge, at worst an apologist for slaughter.Either way, Ivan Kuliak surely has no place in world sport.
Across Russia, the letter Z — which doesn’t actually exist in the Cyrillic alphabet — has become a symbol of ultra-nationalist obeisance to Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin is selling T-shirts and hoodies with the Z symbol, and his cronies have organised nationwide Z-themed demonstrations.
Pro-Putin celebrities have taken to wearing Z badges, and youth activists have released videos of themselves in Z‑branded T-shirts, screaming: ‘For Russia!For Putin!’
This week a video posted on social media by German journalist Julian Roepcke showed students with the letter Z emblazoned on white hooded pullovers raising their hands in a clenched salute and chanting in support of the invasion at a mall in Kazan, Russia.
Roepcke appeared to draw comparisons with the Hitler Youth and the Nazi salute during World War II.
Perhaps most sickeningly, terminally ill patients at a children’s hospice in Kazan were taken outside to form a giant human Z, to be photographed from the air.
Outside Russia, however, most of us view it as an endorsement of horrendous military aggression — support for the destruction of cities and the massacre of children.
So when, earlier this week, it emerged that Amazon was selling military T-shirts emblazoned with the letter Z, there was an overwhelming backlash — just as there would have been if, say, Marks & Spencer had sold swastika-branded outfits in the summer of 1940.
Quite rightly, Amazon has promised to remove the items.But the whole saga is a lesson in how apparently harmless symbols can acquire chilling meanings, so that even a letter of the alphabet can send a shiver down your spine.
Perhaps you think that’s a bit overstated. If so, just consider the political symbols we already take for granted, many of which carry an enormously powerful charge.
The most obvious is the cross.It became associated with Christianity about a century after Jesus’s death, during the heyday of the Roman Empire.
Over the centuries, countless people have lost their lives in defence of that sign — not least in Russia. There, in the late 17th century, thousands of ‘Old Believers’ were executed or set fire to themselves after the Orthodox Church ordered all Russians to make the sign of the cross with three fingers, which they considered blasphemy.
After the Communists seized power in 1917, public displays of the cross became extraordinarily risky.Across Moscow and St Petersburg, crosses were torn down and replaced with the hammer and sickle — a symbol chosen by the new Russian leader Lenin, following a public competition.
The winner was a Communist cartographer called Yevgeny Kamzolkin, who claimed that the hammer and sickle, representing workers and farmers, embodied working-class solidarity.In reality, though, it soon became a symbol of repression and cruelty.
When we see it today, few of us think of gleaming tractors and grinning peasants. We think of Stalin’s Great Terror and the Siberian prison camps; of cruelty and conformity, backwardness and lies.
Army tanks approach the Perekop checkpoint on the Ukrainian border on February 24
History is littered with similarly evocative symbols.Think of the Roman eagle, still widely seen as a sign of power and mastery. Or the letters SPQR, which stand for ‘Senatus Populusque Romanus’ — ‘The Senate and People of Rome’.
You can see those letters on public buildings all over Europe.To the Victorians, they represented power, order, stability and civilisation. We rarely consider that to the Romans’ enemies, they must have represented brute military might.
Today the letters SPQR have lost much of their power.But there’s one symbol that will never date, a badge synonymous with unspeakable evil: the Nazi swastika. The irony is that few signs have such a long and rich history.
Swastikas have been found on prehistoric stones all over the world, and it remains a near-sacred symbol for both Hindus and Buddhists.You can find swastikas in Roman mosaics, in Renaissance frescoes and even on a medieval bishop’s tomb in Winchester Cathedral.
At the turn of the 20th century, the swastika enjoyed a resurgence, widely seen as a symbol of good luck.It appeared on wallpaper, banknotes and tableware, and nobody saw anything wrong with it.
Its sheer popularity, however, was its undoing. In Germany, various far-Right groups used it as their badge, and in 1920 the Nazis formally adopted it as their party symbol and flag.
Ever since, the swastika has been doomed.You merely need to catch a glimpse of it, and you think of Hitler on the platform at Nuremberg, his stormtroopers rampaging through the streets, the bloodbath of World War II and the horror of the Holocaust.
The rising sun flag of the Japanese navy evokes similar memories in the minds of Koreans and Chinese who suffered under Tokyo’s imperial rule during the 19th century and, of course, among British servicemen who fought the Japanese in World War II.
More recently, the sinister black-and-white flag of Isis has gained a similar power to instil fear and loathing.
So will Z acquire quite the same terrifying charge?Perhaps not. The swastika and the hammer and sickle are highly distinctive. By contrast, we all use the letter Z every day.
Even so, it’s striking how quickly those white-painted letters on Russian tanks have become indelible signs of wickedness and cruelty.And that, I think, is the lesson of this whole business.
For most of us, the swastika has always been a historical relic. Yes, there have always been neo-Nazis, but we imagined that crimes on such a scale could never happen again — at least not in Europe.
We deluded ourselves into thinking that the war against evil was won, and that we had learned the lessons of the past.Defence spending dwindled, and we turned a blind eye to atrocities further east.
The idea of taking up arms to defend our continent seemed like something from vanished history, just as the swastika itself belonged in documentaries and war films.
So the Z is not only the symbol of Vladimir Putin’s burning resentment, his nationalist ambitions, his bloodthirsty brutality and callous disregard for human life.
It’s also a searing reminder of two decades of Western pusillanimity — a period when we sat back and watched as he pulverised Chechnya, attacked Georgia, used chemical weapons in Syria and sent his army to seize Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
So no, it’s not just a letter.And no, it’s not just Russian patriotism.
It represents lies and hatred, aggression and greed. It represents the murder of children in Kyiv and Kherson, Irpin and Mariupol. And it represents our own failure, our own weakness and our own shame.