Lost in translation

Reports say Russia is banning smoking on apartment balconies.

It’s actually part of new fire regulations but it's smokers on whom it will have the greatest impact.

According to the head of the All-Russian Movement for Smokers' Rights, Andrey Loskutov:

“They've banned it everywhere they could. Now they remembered they forgot about balconies," he told Interfax news agency.

Andrey Loskutov. The name rang a bell. And then, prompted by Chris Snowdon, I remembered.

I met Andrey in Zurich in July 2014. The meeting was instigated by an intermediary who wrote:

The proposal is for a smokers' rights conference two weeks in advance of the next COP meeting [in Moscow]. Preliminary dates are 9/10 October. The goal is to have international speakers from Austria, Denmark, the US, Ukraine and more. The objective will be to launch an official paper/document about smokers unions around the world.  

As I wrote here, Andrey doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Russian so we were joined by a translator.

Also at the meeting was an Austrian who had flown in from Vienna. ‘I was beginning,’ I wrote, ‘to feel like a character in a John le Carré novel.’

I had been briefed that Andrey was the founder of a consumer organisation in Russia called the All-Russian Movement for Smokers' Rights, also translated as Smokers Union (literally, a ‘movement’). Founded in 2012, it grew out of a cigar club.

Andrey had plans, I was told, for an international smokers’ rights conference to be held in Moscow shortly before the sixth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP6) to the WHO FCTC, and he wanted me to be the main speaker.

My notes at the time read:

Andrey is very charming but he was unable to provide much information about his plans. We had a good translator so nothing was lost in translation! He said he had invited participants from a number of countries – including China – but I understood that they were all from cigar groups.

Andrey himself was keen to embrace cigarette smokers but [the Austrian] made it clear he did not want to support cigarette smokers. He wanted to defend cigar smoking and to do that he felt cigar smokers should be differentiated from cigarette smokers. 

I said I understood his position but said that Forest could not take a similar position. We support and defend all tobacco smokers.

To cut a long story short, the date of the event was changed to September 30, 2014, which meant I couldn’t go because it clashed with events Forest was hosting at the Conservative party conference and the Global Tobacco Network Forum in West Virginia that began a day or so later.

Originally billed (without my knowledge!) as one of the three conference organisers, I was disappointed because it would have been good to meet smokers’ rights activists from other countries.

I would have also liked the opportunity to go to Moscow in less stressful circumstances than my only previous visit in 1981 - ‘What did you do in the (Cold) War?’.

Nevertheless I did get some feedback, and I posted one or two details here (Russian smokers behind international movement for smokers’ right).

You can read a Russian journalist’s report about the event here (the original, in Russian, can be found online here), and there are photos of the conference here (scroll down).

Sadly, I heard nothing more of Andrey’s plans for a worldwide smokers’ rights movement, and nothing more of Andrey until yesterday.

In hindsight I do regret a lost opportunity. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts and a willingness to cooperate, something must have got lost in translation.