Anna Fedorova

There are times when the arguments may be finely balanced. The terror being wreaked on Palestine and Lebanon was preceded by Hamas’s barbaric attack on a music festival; thus in the unlikely event that the Israeli government and its principals appear before the International Court of Justice they can plead that the massacre of Gaza’s women and children, while manifestly unjustified and a prima facie breach of international law, at least had the benefit of an underlying rationale. It might of course, be a difficult one to grasp if, say, you were a six-year-old with your soft tissue pierced by shrapnel from the missile that killed your family, and the hospital you were being treated in was being shelled. Not much moral equivalency there, it must be admitted.

The war in Ukraine is being played out by similar rules, but for different reasons. Vladimir Putin, who dreams of re-instating the empire of Peter the Great and controls his country’s media with an iron fist, perhaps imagined his invasion would be over in a matter of weeks, and the bulk of the local populace would be grateful for their liberation from the alleged ‘Nazis’ who were ruling over them. President Volodymyr Zelensky happens to be Jewish, so this was not an easy argument to sustain, though Kremlin foreign minister Sergei Lavrov tried his best by announcing in an Italian TV interview that since Adolf Hitler was himself of Jewish stock, then that was hardly a get-out-of-jail free card for Ukraine’s elected president. Mind you, a Belgian magazine in 2010 suggested old Adolf may also have some distant African ancestry, so what can one do?

Mr Lavrov’s bizarre revelation must have come as something of a shock to historians of the Second World War,  though presumably any urge to burst out laughing would have been qualified by the fact that lies like this are never funny, given the destruction Russia has been inflicting on Ukraine’s cities. Barely six months after the invasion, UNESCO identified 183 of the country’s destroyed or seriously damaged cultural buildings, including Odesa’s Transfiguration Cathedral, almost every significant building in Mariupol, and a host of theatres, libraries, museums, and university buildings in Kharkiv, as well as its National Opera and Ballet Theatre and Assumption Cathedral. If you seek to destroy a nation’s identity, it seems you should always start by destroying its culture.

As individuals, of course, we are powerless to act, other than through street protests, or letters to our politicians. On the other hand some acts of state-sanctioned violence are so brutal and egregious that we feel compelled to go that extra mile. In the case of a feisty journalist from Shetland, Jen Stout, the response was to visit the war zone to file reports back to the UK on the atrocities she was witnessing. Having risked her life in the service of the truth she then set about writing a book, Night Train to Odesa, which is clearly destined to become a classic. Ms Stout comes across as the sort of deeply committed, yet eminently sensible, person who, if you were to call her Jen of Arc, would tell you not to be daft. Her status as a heroine, however, is not in doubt.

For this scrivener, who eschews such acts of heroism, the no-turning-back moment was a Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol during an agreed ceasefire. Successive attacks on other medical facilities, including the children’s hospital in Kyiv, have since demonstrated that such breaches of international law are conscious acts of policy emanating from the Kremlin. Chto delat, as they say in Russia – what the hell can one do?

Not a lot, is the answer, but that’s hardly enough. One recourse, it occurred, would be to organise a benefit concert with a superstar, and so it came to pass that Anna Fedorova, one of Ukraine’s – and the world’s – outstanding pianists, whose “miraculously fluent” (Classical Explorer) Rachmaninoff’s 2nd has notched up more than 40 million views on YouTube, will be performing a benefit concert in Edinburgh’s Queens Hall on October 28th. The beneficiaries will be those Ukrainian music students in exile who have been given refuge in her Davidsbundler Foundation Academy in the Hague, which she supports with her international performance fees.

Since this is a player who can pack out New York’s Carnegie Hall, where she “left her audience stunned” (The Pianist) tickets for her Edinburgh concert are expected to fly out of the door fast, despite being a fraction of the cost of an Usher Hall perch for Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways gig the following week – not that your scrivener would for a moment denigrate a resilient 60s icon who can still strut his stuff, despite being two years older than Joe Biden.

Anna Fedorova is rapidly becoming a legend in her own right, and should not be missed. Tickets are available here while A GoFundMe page has been established here. As an extra bonus, Jen Stout’s book will be available on the night.