An ordinary conversation needs a little room to be careless. We try out a thought, complain about work, say something badly and rely on the person opposite us to understand. If every sentence has to survive an imagined hostile listener, conversation becomes a different activity. Much of what makes it human gets edited out.
Western diplomats in Moscow have described life under surveillance and persistent apprehension to the BBC, with officials comparing working conditions since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to those of the Cold War. The supplied account does not establish the details of individual experiences. It does, however, bring a particular human difficulty into view: how do people continue to live and relate to one another when caution becomes a condition of daily life?
Privacy is often defended as the right to keep something secret. That leaves out an enormous amount. There are things we would willingly tell a friend that we would struggle to explain to someone determined to misunderstand us. A joke depends on shared understanding. An unfinished thought needs time. Even silence can mean several things.
Living under scrutiny can make a person feel obliged to settle all those meanings in advance.
Of course diplomats have professional reasons to be guarded. Discretion belongs to the work, and the risks described in this reporting should not be casually equated with feeling watched by a manager or worrying about a social media post. Those differences matter. Yet accepting the need for vigilance does not make its human cost disappear. Necessary precautions can still consume attention that might otherwise belong to friendship, rest or simple enjoyment.
There is a responsibility here for those of us receiving another person’s words, too. Do we allow people to revise a thought? Can a friend speak clumsily without finding that the clumsiest version has become the permanent record?
These are smaller freedoms than diplomatic security, and no substitute for it. They are nevertheless freedoms we can either preserve or steadily withdraw from one another. When someone has to prepare a defence before they can begin a conversation, something has already happened to the relationship. It is worth noticing before guardedness becomes the only way we know how to speak.