I don't want to take this analogy too far, but I had an experience lately that was more than a little like watching your ex-wife bring a hairy pervert with stains on his pants and a gold medallion swinging between his chubby pecs to live in her home with your two beautiful kindergarten-aged children, of whom you no longer have custody. I'm talking about watching the New Statesman reporter John Lloyd write about Alexander Pushkin.

There is a genre – some might even describe it as an anti-genre – of Russia reporting that, year after year, never fails to boggle my mind. In it, some notorious villain of the Russia-reporting game departs from his usual business of supporting thieves and dictators to compose elegant, long-winded hagiographies of the celebrated, and safely dead, saints of Russian culture.

Try to imagine this from the Russian point of view. Better yet, turn it around and imagine a similar thing happening in America. It is 1930. A Russian reporter living in Chicago writes a long article, published all around the world outside of America, which celebrates Al Capone as a sensitive lover of the arts who cares deeply about small children and sponsors soup kitchens for the poor (it is worth noting that such articles were written by scores of American and foreign reporters at the time). This same Russian reporter had also repeatedly written articles applauding the Palmer Acts for their utility in controlling the American rabble and describing, say, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti as triumphs over evil and inequity.

Then this same journalist turns around and writes, from the comfort of his luxury hotel suite, a touching tribute to that wonderful "poet of the great American river," Mark Twain, who so elegantly championed the cause of the ordinary American, be he poor, black, or without family.

Are you feeling sick yet? Then try this on for size. John Lloyd, occasionally of the Financial Times but on a more permanent basis an editor at the New Statesman, has written a Dec. 7 review of a Pushkin biography in which he tosses off phrases like one describing Pushkin as having a "genius that can produce the most passionate fiction in the world, often with the highest social ambitions riding on it."

This, ladies and gentlemen, from a man who once wrote a 4,000-word article about Roman Abramovich entitled "The Miracle Worker," an article that, I kid you not, compared that stubbly underworld monster of Chukotka to Santa Claus. The offending Financial Times piece was even accompanied by an illustration showing Santa-Abramovich in a sleigh with a sack full of toys. Here is a quote from that delicious piece of earnest academic inquiry:

"He has taken critically ill people to have treatment in Moscow. He has bought textbooks, and even computers, for the schools. Best of all in the minds of the people of the region, he paid for 3,700 of their children to have extended holidays in the sun last year – children who had rarely seen the sun, never seen the sea, who ate everything in sight and then stuffed bread in their pockets to bring back for their parents."

Gosh, what a shocker. Not only is Abramovich a nice guy who is not the ruthless gangster and convicted train robber that most of the world knows him to be, but he fed Oliver Twist!

I can almost guarantee that the Dickensian waifs-stuffing-bread-in-their-pockets image was not an accident, because Lloyd has a well-recorded history of making absurdly pretentious literary allusions in his articles. He once obliquely compared the setting of a high-level meeting of "reformers" in 1991 to the Garden of Eden. And forget about comparing Abramovich to Santa Claus; Lloyd one-upped himself on this one by once comparing none other than Yegor Gaidar to Hercules, explaining that Gaidar had cleaned out the "Augean stables" of Russian corruption.

There are facile gestures in this life, and then there are facile gestures. You can massacre a thousand students in Lumumbashi and then make up for it by bringing Abba to Kinshasa for a free concert, but you still have to pay the band. On a smaller scale, you can sleep around on your wife with a dozen diseased hookers and then buy her a dozen roses as a bridge-mender, but the flowers still costs you 30 bucks.

But the most meaningless of meaningless gestures can be found in the journalism world, where a writer like Lloyd can compensate for years of vicious indifference to a people by sitting on his fat keyster over martinis one afternoon and tossing off a weepy paean to some long-departed artist. I, not care about Russia? What do you mean? Just look what I wrote about Pushkin!

One of the unfortunate problems with journalism is that many of the people practicing it (although, amazingly, not most of them) are highly literate people who've read a book or two in their time. Particularly among the British contingent, there are a few here and there who are able, without straining, to force Tatyana Dyachenko into the role of Iphigenia in order to fill a missing 120 units of their word count.

This creates an illusion that these reporters are sensitive, feeling people whose moral structure is identical to that of the writers they pay homage to. But it goes without saying that anyone who can call Roman Abramovich a "miracle worker" has not absorbed many moral lessons from art. History proves over and over again that being familiar is very different from being immersed. Even Lester Maddox was said to be a big fan of Huck Finn, though, had he been there, he would have been the first to send Jim back home for a whipping.

Lloyd seems to be aware of this paradox and correctly points out that Pushkin was a mass of contradictions, an imperialist and a liberal at the same time, a man capable of writing literature infused with the highest ideals and yet insisting, at the end, that it was all "just a story." In other words, his art was for all of us, even for John Lloyd.

True enough. But Pushkin the artist was interested in truth, even if it was just dramatic and poetic truth, and that's why his work endures. John Lloyd is – and always has been – a professional liar. I don't begrudge him his trade. It's a living. But he should have enough decency to keep his hands off real people. God save us from the fraud who cries at operas.