This state of affairs came to an abrupt end with Russia’s all-out invasion on 24 February 2022. Not only did the fighting reach deep into Ukraine’s heartland, but life far behind the frontline also became militarised. Russia frequently bombards civilian infrastructure as well as cities in a type of terror warfare intended to break the will of Ukraine’s defenders. There is no longer any hinterland.

How long will this slaughter last? In August last year I warned against overly optimistic expectations, writing that “supporters of Ukraine’s democracy should prepare themselves for long-term, costly support.” Another six months on it is even clearer that patience and endurance will be needed if we want to see Ukraine survive and strive. We have to stop thinking in terms of short and decisive campaigns. This war has become a war of attrition.

Like Vladimir Putin, we need to think in the geographical and historical categories of what historian Timothy Snyder has memorably called the “bloodlands” — the vast territories between Russia in the east and Germany in the west, with Ukraine in the middle. This viewpoint expands the time horizon dramatically. The last three wars fought in this region were far from short campaigns. The first world war’s “eastern front” lasted from August 1914 to March 1918. The wars of the Romanov succession began in Central Asia in 1916 and elsewhere in 1918, only ending, depending on the region, in 1920, 1921, 1922 or even 1923. The German Soviet war — constantly invoked by Putin both in the run-up to the war and during Russia’s continuing cultural mobilisation — extended from the (northern hemisphere) summer of 1941 to the spring of 1945.

Hence, the normal duration a full scale military conflict in this part of the world seems to be three to four years. Ukraine has survived two so far.

But it’s not just the region’s history that suggests a long haul. Once battle lines are fully entrenched, conventional war takes time. The first world war’s western front was bogged down in costly trench warfare, with massive casualties but little territorial gains, for four years.

By the time the second world war rolled around, military specialists in all armies had found the technical means to overcome trenches, barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements. And yet it took the Allies close to a year after the invasion of Normandy in 1944 to defeat Germany, a country under assault from the east by the steamroller of the Red Army, from the south by the United States, British Empire forces and the Free French, and from the air by indiscriminate attack by the combined power of the US and British air forces. Both Ukraine and Russia are in much stronger positions today.

Historical analogies are miserable predictors. But they matter when historical actors think in and through them. Putin is an avid reader of history, constantly pondering where he fits in. He thinks in categories and time-spans informed by Russia’s historical experience.

While he didn’t expect Ukraine to resist so effectively and survive the initial onslaught, he had long prepared his country for a drawn-out conflict with the outside world. One indicator is the effort his regime spent on making Russia’s food system relatively independent of outside supplies. At a time when everybody praised the virtues of globalisation and international networks of trade and mutual dependence, Putin insisted Russia should be able to feed itself.

As a recent study points out, this is the kind of food system you build when you expect a long-term confrontation that might throw your country back on its own resources. Putin embarked on it over decades, at a time when barely anybody in Europe could imagine a war of this magnitude on the continent.

Putin also entrenched his dictatorship, also an anticipation of war. First came the slide towards authoritarianism that began on the first day of his presidency. More recently came its acceleration. The death last week of opposition figure Alexei Navalny is just the latest escalation of a massive crackdown that began in 2021 and quickened with the start of the all-out war in 2022. Russia is now a full-blown dictatorship.

Thus entrenched in the Kremlin, Putin expects the democracies of Europe to have the shorter breath. The way Ukraine has become a political football in US domestic politics might well feed this expectation.

We need to appreciate that this is Putin’s theory of victory: to pound Ukraine with artillery and air attacks; to bleed the defenders white by sacrificing large numbers of his own citizens; and to wait until “the decadent West” loses interest and returns to business as usual, depriving Ukraine of the weapons and economic support it needs to defend itself.

As things stand, he might well be proven right. As I wrote a year ago about the then unlikely prospect of a Russian victory:

Winning the war would require Russia to ramp up its military production and mobilisation of manpower and increase the quality of its training and leadership. It could do that over the long run, just as the Soviet Union did during World War II… It could do so particularly if some of the countries which today are sitting on the fence decide to defy the United States, NATO and the European Union and circumvent or ignore sanctions; the United States reverts to isolationism; NATO disintegrates into squabbles between its members; and the European Union implodes among disagreements between old and new, and rich and less prosperous nations.

This pessimistic scenario has not yet come to pass. Yes, Russia currently has the whip hand. It has massively increased its armaments production, found ways around sanctions and continued to field large numbers of men while avoiding all-out mobilisation. Meanwhile, the United States has shaped up as the weakest link in the chain of democracies supporting Ukraine.

But Russia has not won yet. Ukraine still has “a viable theory of victory,” as two leading military analysts recently wrote. Its military has become expert at war by attrition, which it fights intelligently, minimising its own losses while maximising the enemy’s. Supplied adequately, it will become even better at this terrible art, denying Russia victory and eventually turning the tide.

For this to happen, though, Ukraine needs the continued support of the outside world: from NATO countries, from the Europeans and from friends further afield, such as Australia. But these friends need to appreciate that this war is now a war of attrition. And those wars are not won in a day or a season.

What about negotiations? A strong commitment to long-term support should unite all friends of Ukraine, no matter whether they think that ultimately the war will end in Kyiv’s forces retaking all occupied territories, if necessary by military means (the current official Ukrainian position), or in a negotiated settlement of some sort, with compromises on both sides.

There are indeed models for a negotiated peace which, while painful, might satisfy Ukraine and guarantee its safety rather than simply giving Russia breathing space to rearm for the next assault or the chance to insist on Ukraine’s unconditional capitulation. The much-discussed “West German” solution is one such proposal. It proposes that Ukraine be divided into a democratic west with some of its eastern territories occupied or even annexed by Russia. The west would be integrated into NATO and the European Union and developed with a massive aid program similar to the Marshall Plan. This is certainly not an acceptable solution for either side at the moment, but it might well become one once exhaustion eventually sets in.

The key term here is “eventually.” Negotiating now only aids Russia in its imperialist and anti-democratic goals. Forcing Ukraine to negotiate at a moment when, with delayed and insufficient support from its democratic friends, it is on the defensive amounts to asking a democratic nation to surrender to a dictatorship. Negotiations are best held from a position of strength. If not backed by the ability to resist and indeed to inflict damage, talks with a militarily stronger opponent quickly lead to a loss of territory and sovereignty.

The Ukrainians learned this lesson in 1918 when they signed the first treaty of Brest–Litovsk with the Germans and Austrians, who subsequently occupied the country and squeezed out food reserves to feed their own war effort. The Russian Bolsheviks learned the same lesson shortly thereafter, when, devoid of the fighting force they themselves helped dissolve, they had to sign a punishing peace with the Germans just to get out of a war they could no longer fight. And, in an instance of remarkable historical justice, the Germans learned the same lesson in 1919, when they could do nothing but sign the famously unfriendly Versailles treaty.

Ukraine needs to be helped to avoid such a situation and negotiate from the position of strength, if a negotiated settlement will indeed end this war. •

The post Russia’s war against Ukraine: a longer view appeared first on Inside Story.

Kurkov is right. Reading books about this war can have a soothing effect. Only once we look up from the pages that have captured our imagination are we propelled back to the awful knowledge that Russia’s war against Ukraine continues. Blood keeps flowing. People keep getting injured and killed. A country is being destroyed. There seems no end in sight.

Looking at the pages in front of them, historians have another experience as well. Trained to read for argument and to classify books into schools of thought, they begin to think about the books dealing with this war as part of its “historiography” — a corpus of texts engaged in a discussion with each other attempting to understand the past and its meaning for the present.

To see a historiography forming while the event it describes is still unfolding is unusual. Normally decades, even centuries, pass before historical schools solidify around a particular event. In this respect, the literature on Russia’s war against Ukraine resembles the historiography of Stalinism in its formative stages, but its historiographical schools are developing much faster in our present, pressurised environment.

Somewhat schematically, we can distinguish five schools of thought about the origins of this war. One group of writers sees the West at fault, and particularly NATO. Another blames Russia and the Russians, opponents of peace and democracy. A third group sees Russia’s imperialist past at the core of a war that expresses the legacy of a lost empire and the failure to overcome its culture. A fourth group, the intentionalists, focus on Vladimir Putin and his perhaps irrational, or at least idiosyncratic, motivation for waging war. A final group sees the war as a struggle between dictatorship and democracy reflected in Putin’s attempt to quash any potential challenge to his rule, at home or abroad. The war, on this reading, is part of Putin’s “preventive counter-revolution.”

There are, of course, combinations of these viewpoints. Blaming NATO can go together with a notion of Russia’s ongoing imperialism: given the latter, the argument goes, NATO should have abstained even more emphatically from expanding into Russia’s supposed backyard. Russia’s imperialism and continued quest for a great power status can be linked, in turn, to its hostility to Ukraine’s quest for democracy. Intentionalists, too, can see Putin as drawing on a wider Russian culture of imperialism, which can go hand in glove with a quest for dictatorship and therefore preventive counter-revolution.

Perhaps the most well-defined position in the debate on the war’s origins is the first: blaming NATO for provoking the conflict by expanding into Russia’s “sphere of influence.” This path has been taken most prominently by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer. As critics of this view have pointed out, it has its history backwards. It was not when NATO enlarged into Eastern Europe that Russia became aggressive but when it showed weakness — by failing to agree on a response to the accession hopes of Georgia and Ukraine at the Bucharest Summit in 2008, for example. Moreover, it is difficult to see Putin’s aggression, “riddled” as it is with “irrationalities,” as some kind of logical response to a putative Western threat.

NATO-blaming has recently lost some of its dominance over public discourse. But it continues to be popular on the far left, sometimes amended to an opposition to both Russian and NATO imperialism. Beyond the extremes lingers the view that, whatever bad things happen in the world, “the West” must be to blame.

Historian Philipp Ther is clearly affected by such sensibilities. He feels “comfortable” in the company of “leftists,” he writes in the introduction to his latest book, and he feels that “the West” (whatever that might be) has lost its way. The multiple crises we encounter today, including the war against Ukraine, are part of a “wrong turn” in economic policy after 1989–91. “The West lost the peace” after the end of the cold war, he says, because it became self-satisfied and embraced unfettered capitalism (or “neoliberalism,” defined as the conglomerate of “liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, the reduction of state influence on the economy, and global financial capitalism”).

NATO expansion, then, is not at the centre of Ther’s argument in How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War. A social historian, Ther is much more interested in political economy than international relations. He flags in his introduction that he feels uneasy about NATO expansion, and at one point suggests Russia should have joined the alliance. But he hastens to add that his critique is “absolutely not meant to relativise Russia’s attack on Ukraine.” The latter “deserves the full support of the West and the entire world — otherwise Russia’s pursuit of a multipolar world order with a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe will instead lead to maximum global disorder.”

Elsewhere in his book, Ther declares Russia’s enduring “imperial legacy” to be the core cause of the war. The early 1990s might have been a moment to cast off the legacy, but it passed, first because of Boris Yeltsin’s shelling of a recalcitrant (and imperialist) parliament in 1993 and then because of the rouble crisis in 1998, “when most of the Russian middle class sank into poverty again.” The latter is something of an overstatement, as a middle class continued to exist thereafter, but Ther’s overall point is well taken: “Neither of these traumatic moments had anything to do with the expansion of NATO or the EU; they were domestic problems first and foremost.”

Rather than an outcome of international relations, Russia’s trials and tribulations were part of the global malaise Ther is exploring. His great bugbear is the failed prophet of the “end of history,” Francis Fukuyama, whom he sees as the chief ideologist of Western triumphalism; his intellectual hero is the sociologist Karl Polanyi, analyst of the “great transformation” of the long nineteenth century.

Like Polanyi in the interwar years, Ther argues, we find ourselves at the tail end of another transformative period: the one that ran from 1989 to 2022. This transformation had two aspects — post-Soviet transformation in the former Soviet empire and “late-capitalist transformation in the West” — and they were held together by a shared framework of “neoliberal globalisation.”

Far from being the end of history, this period was one of profound economic, social and political upheaval, with winners and losers dotted around the globe, both between countries and within them. The claim that unfettered capitalism would somehow lift all the boats, making us all more prosperous, happy and democratic, turned out to be a pipedream at best and ideological obfuscation at worst.

Instead came the global financial crisis, followed by the annus horribilis of 2016, with Donald Trump’s victory in the United States and the Brexiteers’ in Britain. Then the “one-two punch of the pandemic and the biggest war in Europe since 1945… brought to an end the era for which historians have not yet found a name.” In line with Polanyi, Ther proposes calling the period from 1989 to 2022 “the age of transformation.”

Transformation to what? We don’t yet know, but it might not be good. Overall, Ther is quite pessimistic, but he does hope that his exploration of the history of our present will help open up “new opportunities for a progressive politics and society,” a political thrust that fits in well with other recent attempts to reconstruct the social democratic project for the twenty-first century.

To Ther, this is an existential quest. Like the unfettered capitalism of the nineteenth century, he fears that the new age of transformation might lead to some kind of fascism. The pendulum, to use his metaphor, having swung all the way towards a neoliberal abandonment of state protection, is now swinging back the other way. But Ther’s pendulum, in a hard-to-visualise twist, can swing in two ways: “left towards democratic socialism, or right towards fascism.”

Does any of this explain the war against Ukraine? Not really. Ther struggles to make Russia and Ukraine fit his explanatory scheme. True, the economic crisis triggered by Gorbachev’s reforms and deepened by the breakdown of the Soviet Union “plunged much of Russia’s population into destitution and misery,” which is never a good foundation for a democratic polity. But the same was true for Ukraine, which became democratic. And while Ukraine’s economy remained sluggish, Russia’s has grown by leaps and bounds since Putin came to power.

Neoliberalism, then, is of little use as a scapegoat for Russia’s aggression. Instead, Ther evokes a combination of the preventive counter-revolution argument and the anti-imperialist paradigm. Putin’s goal, he argues, is “to rewrite the end of history — with the creation of a new Russian empire.” The “larger dimensions of the conflict” also include the confrontation between “an authoritarian system” (Russia) that has evolved into a “hard dictatorship since Putin’s second term,” on the one side, and a country (Ukraine) that “has continually moved in the direction of liberal democracy ever since the Orange Revolution, and especially since 2014.”

Ukraine is far more democratic than Hungary, an EU member. Its governments have repeatedly transitioned smoothly and peacefully after elections, “something that unfortunately cannot be said for the USA since the storming of the Capitol.” Putin’s war on Ukraine is “also a war on democracy,” Ther writes, a “declaration of war against the EU and a free Europe.”

By evoking imperialism, a global transformation of capitalism, and a systemic confrontation between dictatorship and democracy, Ther avoids the position of authors who find the origins of this war in Russia’s national character, its history or its culture. I have argued elsewhere against such views as ahistoric and simplistic. Mikhail Zygar’s recent magnum opus War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance, can serve as evidence of some of their shortcomings: it is the book of a Russian democrat, a Russian anti-imperialist and a Russian enemy of this war. Were the arguments about Russia’s national character as militaristic, imperialist and anti-democratic correct, he should not exist. And yet he wrote a book — a long and eloquent one at that.

Zygar is a Russian intellectual, and he knows it. And he’s an anti-imperialist. His book is framed as a long letter to his Ukrainian friend Nadia, at whose house in Bucha — the scene of one of this war’s massacres — he wrote much of his earlier book, All the Kremlin’s Men. “Nadia no longer speaks to me,” he writes in distress. “Because I am Russian, she considers me an ‘imperialist.’” He hopes his book will change her mind, and the minds of his compatriots: “Nadia, I am not an imperialist, and I am writing this book so that others will not be either.”

War and Punishment is made up of two, very different, parts. In fact, it is two books pressed into one volume. The first is a series of historical essays on major moments in Ukrainian–Russian relations that have been turned into myths in both Russian and Ukrainian historiography. They include Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s ill-fated alliance with Muscovy against Poland in 1654, which Russian historians have used to claim that Ukraine voluntarily subjugated itself under Moscow’s tsars; Ivan Mazepa’s alliance with Sweden against Peter the Great in 1708, which was declared a “betrayal” by Russian imperialists; Catherine the Great’s destruction of the remnants of Cossack Freedom; the life and work of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet of the nineteenth century; the Ukrainian revolution and Ukraine’s independent state at the end of the first world war; the Great Famine, or Holodomor, of the early 1930s; and nationalist resistance against German and Soviet occupation during the second world war.

Zygar provides a fresh and readable account of the historical background of each of these episodes and how they persist as anti-Ukrainian myths in Russian historiography.

Like anti-Russian authors, then, Zygar is well aware of the imperialist mainstream of Russian culture. His book is an attempt both to condemn it and to reconstruct, or strengthen, its anti-imperialist counter-current. Like anti-fascist German intellectuals after 1933, and for similar reasons, he is scathing about the culture in which he grew up:

Many Russian writers and historians are complicit in facilitating this war. It is their words and thoughts over the past 350 years that sowed the seeds of Russian fascism and allowed it to flourish, although many would be horrified today to see the fruits of their labour. We failed to spot just how deadly the very idea of Russia as a “great empire” was… We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, “great Russian culture” belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them.

But his reaction is not to treat Russia as some kind of historical anomaly but to change what it means to be a Russian. “Russia as an empire has been consigned to the past, as a direct and irreversible consequence of the war,” he writes. What remains, however, is imperialism, a mindset, an emotional state, that needs to change, not just because of what it does to others, but also because of how it deforms Russia and the Russians:

Imperial history is our disease; it’s inherently addictive. And the withdrawal symptoms will hurt. But this is inevitable. We have to return to reality and realise what we’ve done.

We have to learn this lesson. To stop believing in our own uniqueness. To stop being proud of our vast territory. To stop thinking we’re special. To stop imagining ourselves as the centre of the world, its conscience, its source of spirituality. It’s all bunk.

Decolonising the Russian mind means democratising the country. Or, put the other way, democratisation can only succeed with the defeat of the imperialist mindset, which legitimises the subjugation of citizens as subjects:

We must strip the state of the right to impose its own view of the past on us. We have to roll up our sleeves and completely reinterpret our history, or rather the history of the peoples who fell victim to the empire…

Looking back, we see a horrific sight; our ancestors, indoctrinated to believe they were victors, were themselves victims. They were forced to kill, to rejoice in the killing, to take pride in the killing. And they were good at it. They were proud; they got high; they wrote beautiful poems, songs, and books glorifying blood and violence, the crunching of bones. And they forgot it was their own blood, their own bones.

This position is a radical departure from Russian liberal thought, both past and present, which often remained deeply imperialist (and racist), while espousing individual autonomy and democratic governance for Russians. At the same time it builds on anti-imperial Russian thinkers and the work of critical historians working, for example, in the now illegal organisation Memorial.

The second part of Zygar’s book is very different. It tells an integrated story, with a huge number of characters, reminiscent of the big Russian novels the title alludes to. This story begins in 1991 and ends in the present. While readers with little background in Russian and Ukrainian history will benefit greatly from the punchy and often inspired historical vignettes of the first part, they will likely get lost in the details of the second. It provides political history in its purest form: a tangled web of personalities and the relations between them; a history of power, corruption, loyalty and betrayal; and a history of powerful men and women: politicians and powerbrokers, oligarchs and gangsters, businesspeople and soldiers. In between, we learn about the unlikely rise of the comedian-turned-politician-turned-wartime-leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

This focus on personalities, their relations and the complex history of events over three decades — the same decades covered by Ther’s great transformation — sits somewhat uneasily with the framing of the book as an exploration of Russian imperialism. Given that many actors in Ukraine also pursued their own interests, connected to Russia as much as to Ukraine, the emergent story of oligarchic politics is much more messy than the subtitle of the book suggests: this is not just a story of Russian oppression and Ukrainian resistance.

When it comes to explaining the outbreak of the all-out war in 2022, Zygar is an intentionalist: the fourth emergent school of the history of this war. Intentionalists focus on the decision-makers and their motives. My own recent book, informed in many ways by Zygar’s earlier work, was intentionalist in this regard: while I saw, again like Zygar, Russian imperialism as one of the underlying structural causes, I also argued that the timing of the invasion becomes intelligible only when we understand that Putin, his seventieth birthday approaching, was looking for a legacy. He had spent the Covid years in splendid isolation, stewing in his own juices and reading Russian imperialist history. He wanted to get into the history books as an empire builder alongside Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Stalin.

Zygar tells a similar story, but he sees Putin driven less by his own historical ambition than by domestic politics. Spooked by the failed Belarusian revolution of 2020–21, the Russian president decided to remove the most prominent opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. Putin’s agents poisoned Navalny on 20 August 2020 but the attempt on his life failed. Evacuated to Germany, Navalny launched a counterattack: a YouTube video with the results of his team’s investigation into the poisoning, which was watched by some twenty million people at the time.

Navalny returned to Russia on 17 January 2021, triggering anti-regime protests and his own arrest. Two days later his team released a video about a private palace owned by Putin on the Black Sea coast. “This revelation,” writes Zygar, “strikes perhaps the most powerful blow to Putin during his entire reign. The video is watched by 120 million people, that is, almost the entire adult population of Russia.” Demonstrations have to be clubbed out of existence “Belarus-style.” The “damage to Putin’s credibility is colossal,” and he fears losing control. It is in this context, Zygar argues, that Putin’s administration is beginning to hatch new war plans: Ukraine can serve as the successful little war that saves Putin’s rule.

This is why Putin returns to history and, with the help of his former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, writes his notorious July 2021 essay on the alleged historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians — the historical treatise that part one of Zygar’s book is trying to counter. It is a historical justification for the coming war, but not its origin. The origin is the attempt to forestall revolution at home.

Here, then, Zygar partakes of the final emerging school of thought on the origins of this war: that it is an attempt at preventive counter-revolution. As the Australian political scientist Robert Horvath has argued, Putin has long attempted to immunise his regime against the “colour revolutions” that seemed to be breaking out periodically both in Russia’s immediate vicinity and further afield.

One way to link this anti-revolutionary quest to aggression against Ukraine is to see Ukraine as a vibrant democracy at Russia’s doorstep and hence an example of what could be for the domestic opposition. The problem with this interpretation is that there was no renewed democratic revolution in Kyiv in 2022, and hence no reason to quash it.

Zygar’s interpretation is closer to Horvath’s original reading: Putin went to war not because Ukraine posed a democratic threat to his rule but because he faced a democratic threat at home. The war was a distraction: an attempt to reignite the imperialist jingoism of the Crimea annexation of 2014 that propelled Putin’s approval ratings upwards.

Two interpretive problems remain. For one, Putin didn’t order the invasion when he needed the distraction but well after the domestic crisis had passed. The 2021 protests were well and truly over by the time he published his Ukraine manifesto in the middle of that year. By early 2022, when he sent in his troops, there was no challenge to his regime.

Second, as Zygar documents himself, the war plans were hatched in secret. If the regime as a whole was under threat and the war was part of an attempt to prevent revolution, it is hardly credible that even Putin’s closest advisers were not aware of the war plans even at the eve of the invasion.

Be that as it may: Putin’s invasion on 24 February 2022 started a new historical epoch. As Ther points out, that might well be true for the globe as a whole but it is certainly true for Russia and Ukraine. At the centre of this new epoch is the war, its history being written as events unfold.

We already have military history in the more narrow sense of the term: an appreciation of unfolding events at the frontline; analyses of the technical aspects of the fighting, the evolution of tactics and weaponry; and a focus on what lessons professional soldiers can learn from this fighting. More readable for non-specialists are initial narrative accounts of this war. Among the steady stream of these, some are penned by historians but more by journalists. The latest addition is Andrew Harding’s A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine, an account of the battle of Voznesensk in March 2022.

Harding’s slim volume is a gem. A masterpiece of journalistic storytelling, it has the qualities of a good novella. It may be the most readable book about this war published to date. Based on interviews with some dozen survivors of the battle — soldiers and civilians, men and women, Russians and Ukrainians — the book tells a tale of survival and resistance on Ukraine’s side as well as aggression and frustration on Russia’s. It also explores the sometimes unclear loyalties, and indeed identities, of both Russians and Ukrainians, and doesn’t shy away from unsentimental depictions of war crimes.

Harding’s book thus explores some of the complexities of the real history of this war without falling into relativism: it is clear that Harding’s sympathies are with the defenders rather than the aggressors and that he doesn’t find it difficult to distinguish between the two. He leaves us with the despondent nightmares of his interviewees. They are haunted, he writes, “by the notion that this conflict may never end, and by the fear that Russia’s capacity to absorb suffering and its unflinching willingness to continue inflicting it will eventually enable it to grind out some kind of victory.”

As Ther warns, such an outcome would be catastrophic. It can be avoided if Ukraine’s friends in what is left of the democratic world stay the course. The biggest threat to Ukraine’s independence today derives from phantasies that this war might be stopped if Russia were to be accommodated by reasonable diplomacy. As Zygar notes, Russia in its current configuration cannot be accommodated. Defeat, not victory, might set Russia on the path Zygar proclaims with grim optimism: “Future generations of Russians will remember with horror and shame the war that Putin unleashed. They will marvel at how archaic hubris came to dominate the minds of twenty-first-century people. And they will not tread the same path if we, their ancestors, bear the punishment today.” •

How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War
By Philipp Ther | Translated by Jessica Spengler | Polity Press | $36.95 | 304 pages

War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance
By Mikhail Zygar | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | $34.95 | 424 pages

A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine
By Andrew Harding | Bonnier | $32.99 | 160 pages

The post Writing the history of the present appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps emboldened by the university’s assent, the embassy responded with a further request. On behalf of the Russian government, it also wished to confer on the university’s chancellor, Australia’s former foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans, “a medal for promoting international cooperation.”

This new offer struck us both as an ingenious ploy to have the university’s most senior figure preside over the unveiling of the bust. The embassy could then inform the foreign affairs ministry in Moscow, and presumably the anonymous philanthropist, that it had pulled off a public relations coup.

The offer of the bust was unremarkable. One of the jobs of an embassy is to build networks of contacts that might prove useful in acquiring and exercising influence in its host country; and one of the assets Russian embassies can draw on is Russian literature — which, as Ernest Hemingway remarked in A Moveable Feast, changes you as you read it.

But the context was important. Relations between Australia and Russia had been tense since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. Since then the Russian president had been directing an “insurgency” by alleged separatists in eastern Ukraine, and Australia had responded with economic sanctions.

Australia strengthened the sanctions after the destruction of flight MH17 in July 2014, which it had concluded was Russia’s doing. Prime minister Tony Abbott had consequently expressed an intention to “shirtfront” Putin when he came to Australia for the looming G20 meeting in Brisbane. (Abbott’s verb captured media attention globally and baffled interpreters in both Russia and Australia.)

With its scope for building networks of influence in government and the public service much reduced by Russia’s actions, the embassy naturally focused its efforts on the media, the arts and academia. It seems a fair assumption that Russian embassies in other countries were also seeking to cultivate academic contacts and generate positive publicity for Russia by proffering busts of Pushkin and/or other Russian luminaries to universities, libraries and the like.

The acting dean asked me to draft some remarks for ANU’s chancellor to deliver at the handover ceremony. I had worked for Gareth Evans twice when he was foreign affairs minister: in 1991, as his interpreter on a visit to the Soviet Union in its last months; and later, in 1992–93, in a junior policy-advice role when he and the Keating government responded to the Soviet Union’s dissolution by Yeltsin and the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine.

This meant I was familiar with Evans’s exacting approach to public speaking, and his views on Russia in general, views influenced by his own circle of well-informed friends in Russia. (In this regard, with the possible exception of Kevin Rudd, Evans is probably unique among Australian politicians.) I drafted the remarks accordingly.

In the event, Evans left my work pretty much intact. But he polished it a little and gave it his own stamp — with, for instance, the following ironic flourish: “I am personally very honoured to receive this commemorative medal for contributions to consolidating international cultural cooperation, though a little embarrassed, because I’m not quite clear what I might have done to deserve it.”

He also strengthened a key paragraph regarding the destruction of flight MH17:

In Australia, the shooting down of MH17 just over four years ago continues to particularly burn in our collective memory. While it seems very likely that the militia member who pressed the button to fire the missile that caused so many Australian and other lives to be tragically lost did not intend to destroy a civilian airliner, unless and until that mistake is frankly acknowledged and redressed it is hard to see how any Australian government can invest our bilateral relationship with more substance.

He later told me that he’d found the ceremony “a very tricky occasion to navigate.”

My only cavil with Evans’s refining of my handiwork was his insertion of the words “the Russian soul” at one point in the speech. I could understand why a consummate diplomat chose to do so, but (as Vladimir Nabokov is said to have quipped) “as if a soul has nationality.” In my view, the expression supports the notion that Russians are somehow emotionally more profound than other peoples.

Exactly that claim was made a year after the ANU ceremony by one Valery Malinovsky, who, his Polish name notwithstanding, was a prominent figure in the pro-Putin claque in Australia. Russians, he said, “have deeper emotions; are more hardworking; stand for traditional values — we believe that a woman’s role is to preserve hearth and home, whereas Australian women are feminists who do not put the family first; and we are more patriotic.”

In the same vein, here is Putin in 2014:

So, what are our particular traits? It seems to me that the Russian person thinks mainly about the highest moral truths. Western values are different, focused on oneself. Personal success is the measure of success in life: the more successful a man is, the better he is. This is not enough for us… we are less pragmatic, less calculating than other peoples, we have bigger hearts. Perhaps this reflects the grandeur of our country, its boundless expanses. Our people have a more generous spirit.

I wasn’t at the ANU ceremony, but was given accounts by some who were. The bust itself, as I later saw, is a hefty bronze affair in the Roman and Russian martial tradition. It looks oddly extravagant in the cramped precinct that contains what remains of the university’s once proud tradition of the study of European languages.

In his own remarks for the occasion, Russian ambassador Grigory Logvinov claimed that “international specialists in literature had established that Pushkin is the most universal and greatest poet of all time in any language.”

This assertion recalls a memorable passage in the unpublished memoirs of Andrzej Walicki, an authority on the history of Russian thought, a friend of Isaiah Berlin and Nobel Prize–winning poet Czesław Miłosz, and for some years a professor at ANU. Walicki relates how, as a student at the University of Warsaw in 1951, he attended a series of lectures given by a visiting Soviet professor, one Fyodor Zhurko, who had set himself the task of demonstrating the impregnability of four postulates: that Pushkin was the world’s greatest poet; Tolstoy the world’s greatest novelist; Alexander Ostrovsky the world’s greatest playwright; and Vissarion Belinsky the world’s greatest literary critic.

At his first lecture Zhurko encountered unexpected resistance: most of the students knew that to engage in debate on this level was pointless, but one Tadzio, from a rural village, asked how it could be that Pushkin “ranked above such poets as Byron.” Somewhat flustered, Zhurko responded that he did not know foreign languages and had not read Byron, but Pushkin’s pre-eminence had been “proven by Soviet science.”

This response prompted Tadzio to retort that he “also does not know foreign languages” (Walicki writes that “the comic effect was unintentional”) but he did know Pushkin’s work, and in his view “Mickiewicz was no less of a poet.” Zhurko retorted that Polish literature undoubtedly was great, indeed possibly the third greatest after Russian and Ukrainian, but that Pushkin’s standing as the greatest poet of all time in any language was for Soviet science “axiomatic.”

Following this exchange, as Walicki relates, Zhurko said to his Polish hosts that he had no wish to proceed with the following lectures in the series, as “у вас национализм очень сильно развитый” (“nationalism is very deeply entrenched here”).

An inscription beneath the bust given to ANU records that it was donated not by a philanthropist but by the “International Charity Fund ‘Dialogue of Cultures — United World.’” A little research reveals that the partners of the “charity fund” include Russia’s foreign affairs and culture ministries. These ties suggest that, while purporting to be some manner of non-government organisation, the outfit is in fact an agency of the Russian state. The following excerpts, with their idiosyncratic English, are from a mission statement on the organisation’s website.

Since its establishment in 2005, «Dialogue of Cultures — United World» Fund has implemented more than 450 projects in different countries. The Fund works closely with international organizations, state authorities of the Russian Federation and Russian non-governmental organizations, educational institutions in the field of international cooperation, culture and education.

Each culture — a combination of unique traditions, customs and holidays, this age-old wisdom, passed on from generation to generation, this galaxy of outstanding writers, artists, musicians and scientists, this particular philosophy, vision and thinking — it’s what makes the beauty of the world around them depth and complexity, then, of which each of us draws inspiration daily. To preserve and develop national culture — the noble task of mankind.

Fund «Dialogue of Cultures — United World» retains and promotes the historical uniqueness of ethnic groups living in the modern world and to create a tool for cultural rapprochement of peoples, through the creation of worldwide sites for a living dialogue of cultures.

More exploration of the website reveals that in 2007 in Brisbane the fund established a monument to one K.E. Tsiolkovskiy, described by the site as “a Russian provincial teacher and scholar, founder of Soviet cosmonautics, who paved the way into space for all the mankind… The scientist was born in Russia, but his discoveries belong to the entire world.”

The website also reports that donated busts of Pushkin have been placed in Ulaanbaatar, Dhaka and Montevideo; and that the Mongolian bust was handed over in 2015 by the then minister counsellor of the Russian embassy, Igor Arzhaev. Arzhaev is currently Russia’s consul general in Sydney, and Russian-language publications in Australia suggest he devotes much time to liaising with those diaspora members in Sydney who support the current Russian leadership’s policies. Prominent among these is the self-styled “Aussie Cossack,” Simeon Boikov, with whom Arzhaev is pictured below in Russian diplomatic uniform.

More important, the fund’s website reveals ties between the fund and prominent members of Putin’s close entourage, including Sergei Naryshkin, a member of the National Security Council and head of SVR, Russia’s foreign espionage service, and Sergei Glaz’ev, “Advisor to the President for Eurasian Cooperation.” Glaz’ev, who is among the most energetic proponents of the forcible reabsorption of Ukraine into the Russian empire, also has ties to the Australian Citizens Party via the LaRouche movement, a longstanding far-right American activist group.

Middle man: Igor Arzhaev (third from right), Russia’s consul general in Sydney, with “Aussie Cossack” Simeon Boikov (in green). Facebook

The tale of the ANU bust contains a dual irony. If any Australian politicians deserve formal recognition for their promotion of international cooperation, surely none is more worthy than Gareth Evans, for none has done more in support of the ideal of a “rules-based order.” Conversely, no one, not even Donald Trump, has been more conspicuous than Vladimir Putin in their efforts to undermine such a mechanism to manage the inevitable conflicts between nation-states and great powers.

But there’s a third irony, more piquant and profound. It’s hard to think of a state that has killed or been complicit in the deaths of more of its poets than Russia. An incomplete but well-verified list compiled by literary scholar Vera Sokolinskaya contains the names of hundreds of Russian writers, journalists and artists executed, imprisoned or forced into exile by Russia’s rulers.

For various reasons, Pushkin is on the list. From the age of twenty he was internally exiled several times for his verses; in 1826 Tsar Nikolai I appointed himself Pushkin’s censor (though in practice the role was carried out by the chief of the tsar’s secret police); and in 1829 his request to travel abroad was denied.

But two other decisions by Tsar Nikolai combined to prove fatal for Pushkin. In 1831 the poet married Natalya Goncharova, a legendary beauty and thereafter an adornment at court. Two years later Nikolai appointed Pushkin to the humiliatingly lowly position of kamer-junker (gentleman of the chamber), which effectively entailed only one duty: his, and Natalya’s, regular appearances at court balls.

Probably sensing danger from would-be seducers among his wife’s jostling admirers, burdened heavily by debts and unable to afford life in St Petersburg, Pushkin sought royal permission to retire to his modest country estate — and was denied. In 1835 a young French officer of the Russian Horse Guards began provocatively wooing Natalya; by January 1837, according to the mores of the time and place, Pushkin felt compelled to provoke a duel. He was wounded fatally and died in extreme pain thirty-six hours later.

Had it not been for the tsar’s whims, Pushkin would probably have lived well beyond his thirty-seven years. (Pushkin’s final years and fate are an epic tragedy: see, among various accounts, Elaine Feinstein’s judicious biography.) Today, though, this victim of Russian autocracy is presented as a demigod whose writings prove the innate superiority of what Putin and his supporters claim is “Russian civilisation.” •

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Its population was ethnically mixed but with a strong dominance of Ukrainians, who made up 73 per cent of the people. Russians constituted a significant minority of 22 per cent, followed by people identifying as Jews, Belarusians and Moldavians, all making up just under one in a hundred. Other nationalities of the Soviet empire, from Bulgarians and Poles to Azeri, Koreans, Germans, Kyrgyz and Lithuanians, made up the remaining 3 per cent.

Regional differences in political outlook were strong. Although all regions voted in favour of separating from the Soviet Union in the December 1991 referendum, some were more enthusiastic than others. In Lviv, in the west of the country, 95 per cent of the people voted and 97 per cent of them approved the declaration of independence, which had been made in late August in response to the coup attempt in Moscow. In Crimea, an ethnically strongly Russian region at the other extreme, only 68 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls, with 54 per cent of them voting in favour.

Donetsk, an industrial region in the east of the country with strong economic ties to Russia, stood somewhat between these extremes. There, 77 per cent registered their vote and 84 per cent of those people voted for independence.

With the partial exception of the three Baltic republics, all post-Soviet nations have struggled with three interrelated crises: a crisis of democracy, an economic crisis and corruption. Outside the three Baltic outliers (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), the relatively well-performing Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are all resource-exporting economies. Everybody else is struggling.

In terms of wealth per person (measured by GDP per capita), Russia is about at the level of China (US$10,500), while even the rich Baltic countries are nowhere near the United States (US$63,500) or Australia (US$51,800).

The comparative poverty of the region is partly a legacy of the Soviet economy’s poor performance, and partly a hangover from the economic catastrophe of the 1990s. In Ukraine, agriculture continued to be run by the disastrously unproductive collective and state farms until 2000. Other economic reforms were also slow in coming.

Meanwhile, the unravelling of the integrated Soviet imperial economy, the economic burden of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, ageing and inefficient equipment, and dependence on Russian oil and gas were problematic legacies.

Moreover, Ukraine’s state apparatus had controlled no more than 5 per cent of Ukraine’s GDP before 1990 (the rest was under the direct control of Moscow). Officials thus “lacked the experience necessary to take quick and effective control” of the economy, as the writer Marco Bojcun puts it. The quick expansion of the share of the economy controlled by Ukraine’s officials — reaching 40 per cent on the eve of independence — only added to the problems.

Together, these issues combined to create a disaster: between 1991 and 1996, Ukraine’s economy contracted every year by at least 10 per cent and as much as 23 per cent. Overall, it had contracted to 43 per cent of its 1990 level by 1996 — a decline worse than the United States experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The main reason nobody starved after 1991 was similar to Russia’s: the existence of private gardening, a legacy of the Soviet period. “The overwhelming majority of workers have out of town kitchen gardens,” wrote a worker from the Dnipro region in 1996. These were “little patches of land given them by the factory management under an agreement with the agricultural authorities… People work five days in the factories and two days on their plots.” According to official statistics, by 1996 some 80–95 per cent of fruit, vegetables and potatoes came from such plots. Even a quarter of all livestock were raised in private gardens.

Ukraine’s economy has not recovered nearly as much as that of resource-rich Russia, and its economic growth has stagnated since 2009. Russia’s war by proxy in Donbas since 2014 again stunted economic growth: between 2013 and 2015, Ukraine’s GDP halved.

The current war will have catastrophic consequences for this overall picture. In early 2022, the World Bank predicted a contraction of the economy by 45 per cent. In the same year, 47 per cent of surveyed Ukrainians reported that they did not have “enough money even for food” or had money sufficient “only for the most basic items.”

Post-Soviet countries are not only poor, they are also among the world’s most corrupt. Among European countries, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are all known as deeply corrupt societies. Of the 336 politicians whose secret offshore financial accounts were leaked in the “Pandora Papers” of 2021, thirty-eight came from Ukraine, among them president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This was the largest number of any country in the world. Russia’s figure was nineteen.

Over time, however, Ukraine has improved its record. In Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a higher score means less corruption. Ukraine initially improved significantly after 2004. While this progress was undone after a few years, improvement has been steady since 2009. Meanwhile, Russia has stagnated since 2012 and is classified today as more corrupt than its neighbour.

Corruption and economic crisis do little to embed democracy. Maybe unsurprisingly, then, the majority of the societies that succeeded the Soviet Union are ruled by authoritarian regimes. (Nine out of fifteen of them, or 60 per cent, according to the 2021 classification by Freedom House, an organisation that measures democratic performance.) Only the three Baltic states, which are members of both NATO and the European Union, are classified as consolidated democracies. Three others, Ukraine among them, are hybrid regimes, where authoritarian elements compete with democratic ones.

Within this general context, Ukraine is doing relatively well. Between 2017 and 2022 it was classified as “partly free” by Freedom House, its score oscillating between 60 and 62 on a scale out of 100, where the higher number indicates a higher level of civic and political liberty. Such numbers do not indicate that Ukraine is a beacon of democracy, however, either in the region (where Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia stand out as the freest countries, with scores of between 89 and 90) or around the world (the troubled United States scored 83 in 2021, while Australia stood at 97).

But Ukraine contrasts positively with Russia, which has been categorised as “not free” with a score of 20, falling to 19 in 2022. And Vladimir Putin’s state, in turn, still compares favourably with other dictatorships in the region, which are even more repressive: Belarus with 11 and Tajikistan with 8. For comparison, China scored 9 in 2021 and North Korea 3.

To a significant extent, the predominance of authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space is a Soviet legacy. “In all parts of the former Soviet empire,” write two legal scholars who studied this problem in detail, “the socialist party-state structure left a shared legacy of an executive-dominated state.” Change depended on whether a postcolonial or neocolonial mindset won the day.

In other words: did people want to stay in the Russian orbit or not? If not, the obvious choice was an orientation towards Europe, which came with mixed constitutions stressing checks and balances, weakening the executive; if yes, the constitution would be modelled much more closely on Russia’s “crown presidentialism,” further entrenching the centrality of the executive. In Ukraine, the former tendency won out, but not without political struggles.

One rather basic aspect of democracy is that governments are changed peacefully by elections. Ukraine is doing quite well in this regard, particularly if compared with its two autocratic neighbours. In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko has been in power since 1994; in Russia, Putin since 1999. Ukraine, meanwhile, has seen seven presidencies since 1991: of Leonid Kravchuk (1991–94), Leonid Kuchma (1994–2005), Viktor Yushchenko (2005–10), Viktor Yanukovych (2010–14), Oleksandr Turchynov (2014), Petro Poroshenko (2014–19) and now Volodymyr Zelenskyy (since 2019).

The majority of these presidents were elected to office and left when they lost elections or decided not to contest them. Two were removed through revolutions, one peaceful (the Orange Revolution of 2004–05), one violent (the Revolution of Dignity, or Euromaidan, of 2013–14). But both revolutions resulted in elected governments again, not the imposition of revolutionary dictatorships.

Ukraine’s presidents ruled in competition with parliament, at first the one elected under Soviet conditions in 1990, then, since 1994, a post-Soviet one. This competition was formalised in the 1996 constitution, which put the directly elected president next to a one-chamber parliament that limited presidential powers to a much larger extent than in Russia.

Its unusually strong parliament became an issue because of the fragmented party system, however. First, there were too many parties; second, the existing parties were not based around major ideological positions or clearly elaborated political philosophies; third, there were many socially influential groups competing for power. As one observer puts it, this system was based “not on ideological factors, but on the competition of financial and industrial groups and regional elites” interested “in dispersing power in order to control at least a small segment of it.” The result was “political instability.”

Ukraine’s political system, then, constituted something of a unique case, both within the post-Soviet space and in the world at large. Its huge number of parties — more than 120 were officially registered in 2002 — were often internally divided as well. In the words of one observer, this fragmentation was “unprecedented for a modern democratic republic.” For another, it “hindered democratisation” by making it “difficult for the population to orient itself politically.” But the diversity also made it more difficult for would-be autocrats and their networks of clients to consolidate power.

The same can be said for the much-quoted regional fragmentation of Ukraine. On the one hand, regionalism has defined voting behaviour and hence fragmented the political system. In both parliamentary and presidential elections until 2019, voters in the more Russian and Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine and Crimea voted for one set of parties, while those in the more Ukrainian-speaking western Ukraine preferred a different set. “No party managed to elect candidates across Ukraine,” writes political scientist Paul D’Anieri. Presidential elections show a similar regional pattern.

At their extreme, regional divisions can define conflict lines within Ukraine, including the threat of secessionism and ethno-political conflict. On the other hand, regional identities and political networks also help balance power within the broader political system and prevent any one group of elites from monopolising power. Ukraine’s regional, cultural, religious and economic diversity can be seen as an asset as much as a liability. For historian Serhii Plokhy, it is “one of the main reasons for Ukraine’s success as a democracy.”

Of the three main regional power groups, one is based in Kharkiv in the northeast; the second in the industrial heartland around Donetsk in the east; and the third in Dnipro in central Ukraine, the heart of the Soviet Union’s defence and space industries. These were already part of the political structure of late Soviet times, and they led to a specific form of “patronal democracy” in which clans competed for political power within a republican set-up.

At the same time, winners often tried to replace this competitive structure with a single hierarchy of power. The first attempt came under Leonid Kuchma, who built a “patronal autocracy,” but the Orange Revolution of 2004 destroyed this system and reverted to dual competition between president and parliament on the one hand and multiple power networks on the other.

Yanukovych then tried again, and successfully neutralised competing clans — until ordinary citizens intervened to stop this usurpation of power. The 2013–14 Revolution of Dignity not only undid Yanukovych’s dictatorial slide but also led to an election labelled by two experts as “probably the fairest one in the country’s history.” This transformation of the political system was one-sided, however: while it did constitute a redemocratisation, it didn’t eliminate regional and patronal politics.

It was only with Zelenskyy’s election in 2019 that things began to change in this regard. Zelenskyy was “no chief patron and [had] no patronal pyramid” but instead gathered strong support from the new middle and creative classes, campaigning on an anti-corruption platform. He mostly spoke Russian during his campaign, which helped overcome regional differences between Russian speakers in the east and Ukrainian speakers in the west. He achieved what many thought impossible: his election was the first in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history where voting did not follow regional patterns. •

This is an edited extract from Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story, published this month by Melbourne University Press.

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The explanations for this attitude tend to focus on these countries’ past connections with Russia and irritation with the West more than their lack of sympathy for Ukraine. The governing African National Congress in South Africa, for example, recalls Soviet support in the long struggle against apartheid. India has found Russia a useful strategic partner in the past and a source of advanced weapons. China and Russia entered into what was described in glowing terms as friendship “without limits” prior to the full-scale invasion.

The West, meanwhile, has been criticised for its focus on Ukraine’s plight compared with its relative indifference to the humanitarian catastrophes of the ongoing wars in Africa and the Middle East. During the war’s early stages the Biden administration framed the conflict as one between democracy and autocracy, which did not impress many of the relatively autocratic governments in the Global South. Lastly, members of the Global South consider the United States and its allies, notably Britain, hypocritical about a “rules-based international order” given their actions in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere.

Yet this narrative has become more nuanced over the course of this year. Partly this is because of efforts by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Biden administration to mend fences with these countries. Partly the shift reflects irritation with Russia over its stubborn and wholly unrealistic stance on what might serve as the basis for a peace settlement. A third factor is the harmful impact of Russia’s actions on food and energy prices.

For all these reasons, countries in the Global South are starting to find an equidistant position harder to sustain and are starting to take diplomatic initiatives of their own. These may be harder for Russia to resist than those sponsored by the West.

The “Global South” is one of those convenient shorthands that can keep conversations on international relations going without the need to list lots of different countries. If taken too seriously — as if it represents a homogeneous group with a shared agenda — the label can soon become misleading. It is the latest in a sequence of attempts to group countries according to what they are not instead of who they are.

During the cold war the countries that deliberately stayed outside the main alliances became part of the Non-Aligned Movement. They eventually combined with states with a policy of neutrality (such as Sweden and Switzerland) to become Neutral and Non-Aligned. Those many developing countries outside the main blocs were lumped together as the Third World because they were part of neither the First capitalist world nor the Second communist world.

Once the cold war was over these labels appeared dated and unhelpful, doing little justice to the variety and agency of these countries. It also became apparent that several of these countries that were behind the West on many key economic indicators were nonetheless showing considerable dynamism. Not only were they catching up but they also had shared interests distinct from those of the West. The most important of these countries were identified as the BRICS, standing for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

As well as the group’s growing economic importance it also included the world’s most populous countries. Although it had started as a convenient shorthand, BRICS eventually became a political entity with its own summits. Each of its members tended to complain about attempted US “hegemony” and argue for more multipolarity. Their dislike of America’s regular resort to economic sanctions was reflected in proposals for the “de-dollarisation” of the world economy.

BRICS excludes countries in similar positions, however, including the populous Indonesia and the oil-rich Saudi Arabia, and is already debating whether to invite more members.

The West has its own institutions, of course, including NATO and the European Union, both of which have grown in size since the end of the cold war and provide a degree of integration that is absent from other regional institutions (such as ASEAN and South America’s Mercosur). A Group of Seven industrialised countries (the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan) meets annually, always with the European Union and usually with other invited friends and relations.

The G7 was the G8 until Russia was expelled after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, with one consequence being there is one less place for diplomatic communications between Russia and the West. The obvious place for that contact, the UN Security Council, has been paralysed by Russia’s veto.

One other grouping is large enough to bring together the main international players more inclusively than either the G7 or BRICS. That is the G20, formed in 1999 in response to an economic crisis but now with a wider agenda. It is made up of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union. Indonesia hosted the latest of the G20’s annual summits; India will host the next.

This is an altogether more complicated picture than simply “the West” versus “the Rest,” or one in which, other than the permanent members of the Security Council, few other states count. The complexity of this evolving international system has become more evident as countries work out their responses to the Russo-Ukraine war.

A common complaint from non-Western countries mirrors that of internal critics of Western support for Ukraine: far too much effort is going into stoking the fires of war by sending arms to Ukraine and not enough into “diplomacy” to end the war. A persistent hope is that “dialogue” might find a commonsense way out of the morass.

This line has appealed to those who wish to sound progressive even while supporting a vicious, nationalist aggressor state, or “realists” who take it for granted that at some point Ukraine will concede territory to Russia. Those taking this view also tend to assume that the United States is in the position to get a deal done because it can lever Kyiv into a compliant position.

This was always a dubious proposition. It would not be a good look for Biden, and certainly would be divisive within the alliance, to attempt to strongarm Ukraine into an unequal treaty that Russia would probably not honour anyway. Most importantly, Putin has not offered any encouragement to those urging active negotiations.

Early in the war the two sides were exploring a possible settlement, looking for language on the Donbas, Crimea and neutrality with which the two sides could live. That proved elusive, and the Ukrainian position hardened once Russian atrocities were revealed as troops abandoned their positions close to Kyiv. Now Putin demands that Ukraine agree to the permanent loss of territory unilaterally claimed for Russia, which is even more than it currently occupies. That is not going to happen.

The peace camp has thus faded in the West. The most serious proponents argue that preparations must be made for when the time is ripe, accepting that this is not yet and must await changing attitudes in Kyiv and Moscow. The agreed Western stance follows Ukraine’s: Russia’s behaviour, along with its claimed objectives, means that there is no basis for negotiations. The only development that is likely to shift Russian views is evidence that it is losing the war, and so the main effort needs to be put into helping Ukraine with its military operations.

This position has created a gap that many non-Western countries have been eager to fill, casting themselves in the role of peacemakers. The process began last February when China stepped forward with its proposals. Because of Xi Jinping’s “no limits” partnership with Putin, and his accompanying anti-NATO rhetoric, these were treated sceptically. Zelenskyy, however, appreciated at once that, taken at face value, they were more favourable to Ukraine than Russia. The core principles — staying in line with the UN Charter and respecting national sovereignty, territorial integrity and international humanitarian law — give no support to seizing the territory of a neighbouring state and bombing its cities. The plan was followed up by a discussion between Xi and Zelenskyy and closer diplomatic relations between the two.

Brazil, African countries, and most recently Saudi Arabia have since taken similar initiatives. The last of these was Brazil’s. Although it condemned the Russian invasion, it has not supported sanctions against Moscow or sending arms to Ukraine. After president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva welcomed Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to Brasilia and objected to Western arms deliveries as prolonging the war, he came under heavy criticism. He then declined an invitation from Putin to visit Russia, but repeated “Brazil’s willingness, together with India, Indonesia, and China, to talk to both sides of the conflict in search of peace.”

Lula da Silva has not spoken directly to Zelenskyy and now seems disillusioned. His initiative made little headway, leading him to conclude that neither Putin nor Zelenskyy were ready. “Brazil’s role is to try to arrive at a peace proposal together with others for when both countries want it,” he has said.

Africa’s initiative was announced by South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa on 16 May. In June, representatives from South Africa, Egypt, Senegal, Congo-Brazzaville, Comoros, Zambia and Uganda visited both Ukraine and Russia. The mission was not a great success. As the delegation arrived in Kyiv it was struck by Russian missiles. Then, when they met with Putin on 17 June, the Russian president showed no interest in a plan that required accepting Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders. One South African academic, Professor William Gumede, observed that the African leaders were humiliated: “Putin didn’t even bother to listen to the delegation, basically interrupting them before they’d even finished speaking, implying there was no point in discussing anything as the war would continue.”

This visit was followed in late July by the Second Russo-Africa Summit in St Petersburg, which had been postponed from October 2022 when it would have taken place in Ethiopia. At one level, Russia might have counted the summit a success, with forty-nine delegations attending, although this only included seventeen heads of state (compared with forty-three at the first summit in 2019). But some of the continent’s most important leaders were present, including Ramaphosa and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.

One of the odder features of the event was that Yevgeny Prigozhin was also in St Petersburg, also meeting with African leaders, apparently not in disgrace after his recent mutiny against the Russian defence ministry. Prigozhin’s Wagner group has a significant presence in the Central African Republic, Libya, Mali and Sudan (and now potentially Niger).

The summit came not long after Russia had decided to abandon the deal that had allowed Ukraine to export grain (some 32.8 million tonnes last year) from its Black Sea ports, on the grounds that Western sanctions restricting the export of Russian grain and fertiliser had not been lifted (though these are actually exempt from sanctions). The end of the deal means that shortages will grow and prices rise.

At the summit Ramaphosa and other African leaders pleaded with Putin to restore the initiative, the lack of which was already causing hardship on the continent, but to no avail. When Putin offered to donate some grain free to the neediest countries, the South African leader thanked him politely and then added that he and his fellow leaders “are not coming here to plead for donations for the African continent… our main input here is not so much focused on giving and donating grain to the African continent.”

Nor did the summit see any progress on peace negotiations. Putin had no objections to the African mission continuing, but he offered no hope that he was changing his position or withdrawing his transparently false claim that the West had really started the war.

Adding further to the chill, Putin acknowledged after the summit that he would not be travelling to Johannesburg for the BRICS summit, which started on 22 August, as this was less “important than me staying in Russia.” The real reason was that the South African government could not guarantee Putin would not be arrested and sent to The Hague.

The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Putin, issued in March, for the war crime of deporting Ukrainian children, is restricting his ability to travel. South Africa, along with 122 other states, has ratified the Rome Statute and is obliged to arrest Putin if he shows up in their jurisdiction.

The South African government did try to find a way out of this predicament, arguing to the ICC that arresting Putin would be tantamount to a declaration of war and would undermine peace efforts. In the end it had to abandon this effort. Without a guarantee of immunity, Putin clearly decided it was too risky to travel. Instead he will join the summit by video while foreign minister Sergey Lavrov will represent Russia in person.

The developing frustration with Russia was reflected in the most important peace initiative thus far — a two-day summit in Jeddah on 6–8 August, hosted by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (normally referred to as “MBS”). Saudi Arabia is another country with which Russia has been trying to improve relations. In particular, the Saudis have cooperated on oil production cuts to raise prices. Although Western nations encourage countries to buy Russian oil only below a US$60 ceiling price, for now it is selling oil at closer to US$65, helping push up revenues.

The Biden administration has also been making moves to improve relations with the Saudis, despite starting in a critical mode because of the kingdom’s human rights records (and especially the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018). It is actively engaged in an effort to get Israel and the Saudis to establish diplomatic relations. MBS’s sympathetic view of Ukraine was evident when Zelenskyy was hosted in May at an Arab summit, also in Jeddah. There the Ukrainian president urged Arab leaders not to turn “a blind eye” to Russian aggression.

Following that summit the Crown Prince called a large international conference and invited Ukraine but not Russia. Even more notable was that the other invitees (some forty states) didn’t appear to find this a turn-off. It was no surprise that the United States and the European Union turned up, but the presence of China, India and South Africa was significant. Had it been the other way round, and Russia had been invited and not Ukraine, this would have been considered an enormous diplomatic defeat for Kyiv and its supporters.

Russia made clear that it was unhappy with its exclusion. Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov grumbled that without his country the talks had not “the slightest added value.” He described the meeting as “a reflection of the West’s attempt to continue futile, doomed efforts” to mobilise the Global South behind Kyiv. At the same time he insisted that Russia remained open to a diplomatic solution to end the war, and would respond to any sincere proposals.

Around the same time, a New York Times journalist asked Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov whether Russia wants to occupy new Ukrainian territories. “No,” he answered. “We just want to control all the land we have now written into our constitution as ours.” Yet that land includes not only Crimea but also the territories of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, not all of which are currently occupied by Russia. “There are currently no grounds for an agreement,” added Peskov. “We will continue the operation for the foreseeable future.”

By contrast, the Ukrainian delegation was pleased with the event. Zelenskyy’s head of staff, Andriy Yermak, spoke of “very productive consultations on the key principles on which a just and lasting peace should be built.” No consensus position had emerged, but the conversation between the different viewpoints was honest and open.

Zelenskyy has said that he hopes that the Jeddah gathering will be a step on the road towards a global peace summit, possibly to be held later in the year. He has framed the talks as following the ten-point peace plan that he presented to the G20 last November. Saudi Arabia’s media ministry emphasised the importance of continuing consultations to pave the way for peace. Working groups are being established to consider some of the specific problems raised by the war.

China’s representative at the Jeddah meeting, Li Hui, was described by an EU source as having “participated actively” in the sessions. He had not attended another informal meeting in Denmark in June.

Also present was India’s national security adviser, who shared the consensus view: “Dialogue and diplomacy is the way forward for a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine conflict. There is a need to uphold territorial integrity and sovereignty without exception by all states… India has regularly engaged both Russia and Ukraine at the highest levels since the beginning of the conflict and New Delhi supports a global order based on principles enshrined in UN Charter and international law.”

India will be hosting the next G20 meeting in Delhi on 9–10 September. Unlike South Africa, it has not signed up to the ICC, so Putin would not be at risk of arrest should be decide to attend. He cannot, however, expect a warm reception, and should it come to talk of peace he will find little sympathy for his insistence on annexing a large chunk of Ukrainian territory. None of the leaders, other than Xi and perhaps Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, the host, will be keen on bilateral meetings with the Russian president.

Russian aggression was condemned at the last G20 meeting in Bali, which Zelenskyy attended. Putin is already seeking to prevent a similar communiqué emerging out of the Delhi summit. A preliminary meeting of G20 finance ministers in July failed to agree to a communiqué because Russia and China objected to a reference to “immense human suffering” and Western states would not sign one that did not condemn the aggression.

Should Putin decide to attend the G20, the event may serve to underline Russia’s isolation as much as its power. He has annoyed countries that now have significant clout in international affairs — countries that make a point of not following an American lead — by insisting on terms for ending the war that contradict the principles of the UN Charter and pursuing strategies that push up energy and food costs for all countries at a time when most are struggling economically. This behaviour has created an opportunity for Zelenskyy to improve relations with these countries and ensure that future peace initiatives are more likely to fit in with his vision than Putin’s.

For that reason we should not expect any early breakthroughs. Much still depends on what happens militarily. But it would be too cynical to dismiss the current diplomatic initiatives as being irrelevant. They reflect the changing character of international relations as Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia and other countries demonstrate their political muscle, and also the continuing importance of the UN Charter as one of the few fixed normative points.

We are moving from the idea of a mediated peace, in which a country able to talk to both Moscow and Kyiv, such as Turkey or Israel, tries to broker an agreement that leaves both sides with honour satisfied, to a process that involves developing global pressure on Putin to back away from his stubborn insistence on Russia’s right to annex Ukrainian territory. •

This article first appeared in Sam and Lawrence Freedman’s Substack newsletter, Comment Is Freed.

The post Putin’s isolation intensifies appeared first on Inside Story.

In Russia, what was already an increasingly autocratic regime has ramped up its repression and increasingly shrill propaganda to such an extent that some informed observers are viewing it as fascist. In Ukraine, Kyiv’s second big counteroffensive is under way, but the enemy troops have dug in and are fighting hard to hold on to the territories they managed to occupy in 2022. The counteroffensive is making progress, but it is agonisingly slow.

NATO’s decision to promise membership to Ukraine — but only once the war is over — has perversely increased Russia’s incentive to continue fighting, especially with the possibility of a Trump victory in next year’s American election. The longer Russia maintains its aggression, the longer Ukraine remains outside NATO; a Trump presidency might well herald a fracturing of support for Ukraine among its allies. And as long as Putin remains in power, and as long as his army can sustain the ongoing significant losses, Russia is likely to remain in the war.

Along the way, analysts have got many things wrong. From predicting Russia wouldn’t attack (just before it did), to assuming a quick breakdown of Ukraine’s defences and disintegration of its government, to making optimistic predictions about the instability of Putin’s regime: real developments continued to confound the futurology so prevalent in the commentary.

I mustn’t exclude myself from this critique. A month into the conflict, I published a short piece outlining possible scenarios about how this war would end. Like others, I couldn’t imagine the conflict still raging a year and a half later. Like others, I underestimated Russia’s economic resilience in the face of sanctions (although the full impact of these measures is only being felt now). “Given the sanctions regime,” I wrote, Russia will retain the capacity to resupply its troops for “months at best.” That was way off the mark.

I did better with the scenarios I offered. The first was escalation, by which I meant a tactical nuclear strike or, worse, a nuclear attack on NATO. I didn’t think that was terribly likely, but I wasn’t confident enough to rule it out altogether. Luckily, I was right. While such a course of action remains a possibility, sabre-rattling rather than action has so far prevailed.

The escalations we have seen, however, are significant. The blowing up of the Kakhovka dam caused catastrophic environmental damage and human and material losses for Ukraine. The heavy use of landmines will contaminate the country for years, and maybe decades, to come. And the continual air and artillery attacks on civilian targets are degrading Ukraine’s infrastructure and kill or maim its people in significant numbers.

But Russia’s most consequential escalation has been in the sphere of trade: its continuing attempts to shut down Ukraine’s grain exports are an open attempt to hold the world hostage with the threat of famine.

In effect, what we have seen is my second scenario playing out. “Russia,” I wrote, “will destroy as much of Ukraine’s military and civilian infrastructure as possible, broaden attacks on civilians to increase the costs of this war for the government of Ukraine, and threaten nuclear war against anybody who wants to intervene.”

The point of this brutality was to push Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy “to the limit of what he thinks his people can endure.” Thus far, however, neither Zelenskyy nor Ukraine’s population as a whole has cracked under the pressure. Instead, the defenders have become further embittered and many of their friends abroad increasingly convinced that support for Ukraine is essential.

On the other side of the frontline, too, Putin acted as I feared: he persisted in his war and escalated it considerably.

Back in March 2022, I saw some signs that both sides might be willing to bring the conflict to an end through negotiations. Such optimism has fully evaporated. After the liberation of Bucha in April last year and the detection of appalling war crimes committed by the occupiers, negotiations with Russia before a complete withdrawal is politically impossible. And it is now clear, anyway, that Russia was never really interested in negotiations.

With the battle of Kyiv lost by April 2022, one of Putin’s options was to annex the occupied regions in Ukraine’s east and south, and dig in his troops and declare victory in an attempt to save face at home and blame the ongoing war on Ukraine. He did the former, including in territories his troops don’t control. But he didn’t do the latter. He has clearly no intention of exiting this war.

I ended that piece last year with the least likely scenario: that “Putin’s long-suffering underlings would stage a coup against him.” No such thing happened, of course. Instead, the political elite rallied around Putin, who continued to be the final arbiter of their squabbling. The spectacularly bizarre Wagner uprising was not, as sometimes suggested, an attack on Putin and his system but rather an attempt by one player to elevate his own position, protect himself from competitors and prevent the integration of his lucrative private army into the state’s military. Its resolution reflects a paramilitarised regime in which the state’s monopoly of violence is threatened but not destroyed.

That analysts, journalists, pundits and scholars have often failed to predict the course of this war isn’t surprising. No predictive science exists to be called on, and historical analogies are a poor guide to the complexities of quickly evolving situations. We should therefore be careful not to get ahead of ourselves. Assumptions that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is already doomed, that the Wagner mutiny is a sign that Putin’s grip on power is seriously shaken, or that Russia’s disintegration is just around the corner — all these might well end up on the long list of wrong predictions this war has generated. They might also turn out to be right, of course, but making policy decisions on the basis of such shaky expectations is foolhardy.

At this stage in the conflict, too much is still up in the air. Some time is still left in this year’s fighting season. The extent to which Ukraine’s armed forces have managed to seriously degrade Russia’s military capability at the frontline might not yet be evident. New weapons are still arriving, bolstering Ukraine’s fighting potential. What’s going on inside the Kremlin is opaque, with outside observers having difficulty discerning whether a serious crisis of power is brewing.

Rather than dreaming of some magical diplomatic solution, a sudden victory by Ukraine or a sudden disintegration of Russia to bring this war to a quick end, supporters of Ukraine’s democracy should prepare themselves for long-term, costly support while carefully and probably secretly planning for all contingencies. •

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In his provocative new book, Russia Against Modernity, Alexander Etkind argues that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is part of a single, broad historical pattern. It is the last gasp of a failing, kleptocratic petrostate for which external aggression is a natural move. Rather than the Ukraine war itself, Etkind is interested in the conditions within Russia that have culminated so calamitously.

In what is more a pamphlet than a treatise, Etkind combines brevity and playfulness with a degree of erudition that other works covering the Russia–Ukraine conflict seldom manage, melding political economy, history, demography, social theory and social psychology. That range reflects Etkind’s eclectic polymathy: a native of St Petersburg (then Leningrad), he grew up in the Soviet Union, completed two degrees in psychology at Leningrad State University before earning a PhD in Slavonic cultural history in Helsinki, and has variously taught and researched — in faculties of sociology, political science, languages, history and international relations — in St Petersburg, New York, Cambridge, Florence and Vienna.

This smorgasbord of disciplines is reflected in his previous books: an analysis of Russia’s practice of imperialism and internal colonisation; a history of psychoanalysis in Russia; memory studies of the Soviet gulag and the second world war; and Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources. The latter, which foreshadows a central theme of Russia Against Modernity, argues that the drive to accumulate resources has long had a corrosive effect on societies, and on the planet.

Etkind’s big-picture approach means this is not a book to read for a detailed narrative or analysis of the events that led up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022. Nor will you find much discussion of Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden, NATO, Russia–Ukraine relations or Ukrainian history, or of the course of the war itself.

Most explanations of the Ukraine war tend to give primacy to either external or internal factors. The “externalists,” for want of a better word, include those who claim the war is a natural outcome of unwise/reckless NATO expansion. Going further, some even buy the Kremlin line — despite all evidence to the contrary — that the West’s fundamental, if unstated, goal is to weaken or destroy Russia.

At the other end of the externalist spectrum are those, including many Ukrainians and East Europeans, who believe an inherent imperialism is demonstrated by Russia’s aggression towards former territories. Some attribute this to the size of the country, its innate political culture, the “Russian psyche” or, in its crudest renderings, a kind of Russian DNA.

“Internalists” emphasise the domestic drivers of the war — notably an authoritarian state’s need to legitimise itself through nationalist and revanchist propaganda. In this view, the Ukraine war and other militaristic posturing or adventures are cynically deployed to further the interests of the elite. For some, Ukraine presented a threat to the Kremlin because it offered a democratic alternative. A handful on the left claim that the war’s roots lie in the ambitions of Russian oligarchs vying to capture Ukraine’s valuable natural and other resources.

Some analysts, of course, combine or reconcile internal and external elements in explaining the war, but Etkind is rare in drawing together multiple threads and focusing on general trends. It isn’t always clear whether he wants us to take the picture he presents as Constable-like realism, an Impressionist canvas or even a satirical cartoon. In parts, the book feels like a Dali-style exploration of deeper, unconscious truths, leaving the reader feeling that Etkind is getting at something without being clear quite what.

Etkind’s main idea is that the Russian state and society is an exemplar of “paleomodernity,” following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union in championing “grand designs, unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total transformation of nature.” For Etkind, Putin’s war is not only a “special operation” against the Ukrainian people, their statehood and culture; it is also “a broader operation against the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor.”

If paleomodernity — a conglomeration of steel, oil and gunpowder — reached its apotheosis in the twentieth century, then its twenty-first-century antithesis is “gaiamodernity,” a higher form of civilisation where small, sustainable, democratic and feminine are beautiful, and racial, sexual and intellectual diversity are cherished. Etkind seems to see this nightmarish scenario for Tucker Carlson or Sky After Dark’s pundits as both a utopia to be dreamed of and a kind of immanent social order, destined to emerge, echoing Hegel’s and Marx’s systems of thought.

Etkind’s key take is that the “oiligarchs” and bureaucrats running Russia saw this “advance of history” as an existential threat to its oil and gas exports, which make up a third of Russia’s GDP, two-thirds of its exports and half the state budget. The money was crucial to the stability of Russia’s currency, crucial for its military spending and crucial for maintaining the elite’s luxurious lifestyle. It was also the chief driver of corruption, inequality and declining social and demographic indicators. All of this fed popular disillusionment, growing authoritarianism and elite paranoia and the ideologies supporting aggression.

As an archetypal petrostate, Etkind argues, Russia is afflicted by the resource curse, whereby an economy as a whole underperforms because a single commodity is so dominant. Initially, in the 2000s, rising oil prices underpinned Putin’s success in restoring economic growth. The populace gained a welcome sense of stability after the economic and political turmoil of the “wild nineties,” leading many to accept the gradual erosion of civil liberties.

By the 2010s, however, not only were Russian incomes falling but so were a range of social and economic metrics. By 2021, life expectancy had fallen to 105th globally, per-capita health spending to 104th and education spending to 125th. Russia had the fourth-highest carbon emissions globally and among the highest rates of suicides, abortions, road deaths and industrial accidents.

Thanks largely to embezzlement, post-Soviet Russia witnessed the fastest rise in inequality ever recorded. Its income inequality was among the world’s highest and by 2021 it led all major countries in inequality of wealth: 58 per cent of national wealth belonging to the top 1 per cent, well above Brazil (49 per cent) and the United States (35 per cent). More than a fifth of Russia’s citizens, meanwhile, lived on less than US$10 a day, and the middle class had been hollowed out.

In excess of three trillion dollars had been stolen and squirrelled away abroad — more than the total financial assets legally owned by Russian households. “Economists from Harvard and Moscow alike believed that economic growth would be the source of all good in Russia, that accumulated wealth would trickle down to the poor, that the rising tide would lift all boats,” writes Etkind. “In fact, it lifted only the yachts of the rich. The boats of the poor leaked, and they drowned in the tide.”

The wealth gained from being the world’s biggest exporter of energy funded an enormous state machine, particularly a military, security and law-enforcement apparatus accounting for fully one-third of the budget. Russian military spending increased by a factor of seven between 2000 and 2020, compared with a factor of two in Germany and 2.5 in the United States. In the end, though, corruption has hobbled the Russian war effort in Ukraine and sanctions have stranded assets held abroad, including the mind-boggling superyachts of Putin, his top officials and Russia’s tycoons.

Etkind doesn’t really explain why the military–security sector became so bloated, beyond its being a very big trough for corrupt snouts. Most observers would point to Putin’s own reliance on and favouritism towards cronies from the sector — the so-called siloviki, or people of force — on top of his belief in restoring Russian greatness and the need for a strong repressive apparatus to quash dissent.

Etkind treats war as more or less a natural outcome of Russia’s political economy. The more a “parasitic state” relies on natural resources, the less it invests in human capital. The lower the human capital, the greater the state’s dependence on resource extraction. It accumulates gold, limits internal consumption, pursues domestic oppression and, sooner or later, launches a war of aggression. Yet this is only part of the picture, and doesn’t hold true for Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Qatar or other petrostates.

Some of Etkind’s most interesting, albeit speculative, chapters deal with the interplay between Russia’s political economy, its demographic decline and issues like gender inequality and homophobia. The latter have become a common theme of state-sponsored propaganda: TV pundits talk about fighting a degenerate West where genders proliferate; patriarchs and priests equate the war on Ukraine with fighting those Satanic “gay parades.”

Partly because of very high divorce rates, children are raised by only one parent, usually the mother, in one in three Russian families. Etkind pushes the envelope when he posits the growth of “fatherlessness” as a cause of authoritarian tendencies, as some postwar German theorists did in the case of Nazi Germany. High rates of domestic violence — which was actually decriminalised in 2017 in a nod to patriarchal opinion — have been another symptom of social dysfunction.

Etkind also highlights “granny power” as another bulwark against modernity: the heightened role of babushki (grandmothers) in many three-generation households, he says, imbues children with backward-looking and authoritarian ideas and attitudes. The three-generation household, with overburdened mothers and absent fathers, is a product of the inadequate incomes, housing, childcare and pensions generated by the parasitic petrostate, as well as men’s much lower life expectancy (sixty-five years, compared with women’s seventy-seven).

Etkind points to other elements of Russia’s demographic catastrophe — world-leading abortion rates, high rates of emigration among the young and educated — as signs of lack of trust and faith in a future governed by a corrupt and authoritarian state. “The birth rate,” he writes, “was the ultimate manifestation of public opinion.” A lot of these demographic problems were also present in the Soviet years, serving as a kind of canary in the mine presaging the Soviet Union’s decline.

Perhaps more telling, and more of a blow to male egos among the Russian elite, is Etkind’s suggestion that the homophobia prevalent in officially sponsored propaganda stems from the practice of bullying (dedovshchina, or the grandfather rule), often involving rape, in the military. And these super-wealthy grandfathers in the Kremlin, who Etkind notes are a generation older than Zelensky’s leadership circle in Ukraine, are natural allies of the impoverished grandmothers of the Russian suburbs, sharing the inherent conservatism of the three-generation family.

Etkind coins the term “stopmodernism” to describe Russia’s “special operation” against gaiamodernity. The war in Ukraine is just one weapon in its arsenal, alongside climate denial, election interference and others. Decarbonisation represents a huge challenge to Russia’s interests, and although Putin’s regime has played along at times with moves towards curbing emissions, it has also played a spoiler role. The biggest “gaiamodern” threat to the wealth of Russia’s elite have been the moves towards zero emissions by the European Union, its chief market for gas and oil, including the Transborder Carbon Tax announced in 2021.

Etkind also suggests that the 2009 Climategate hacks of emails, which purported to show climate change to be a conspiracy among scientists, was of a piece with Russia’s more recent hacking and online-disinformation efforts (including via Prigozhin’s infamous troll factories) to support right-wing politicians in the United States and Europe.

Etkind’s brushwork becomes a bit Dali-like in drawing lines between the petrostate’s political economy and motivations for the war, yet he makes some plausible points. He argues that rampant inequality led the elite to create fables to explain its privileged position and place blame elsewhere. He says that the kind of mystical nationalism encountered more and more frequently among the elite, including Putin, is a reworking of the idea of a chosen people to explain the fateful chance that endows some countries with an abundance of natural wealth.

The idea that Russia has a special, even divine, historical role is far from new — it featured in tsarist and Soviet times — but Etkind would no doubt argue that current conditions have given it greater appeal and currency.

For Etkind, conspiracy theories are a key part of the myth-making. He seems convinced they are a psychopathology and not just the cynical outpourings of a well-funded propaganda machine. Whatever its cause, the propaganda and media machine have become increasingly anti-American, Eurosceptic and homophobic, with “stopmodernism” encrypted into news channels, reality shows, sporting events and beauty contests. The very same people you might meet on a weekend in a posh Mediterranean hotel spend their working hours cursing “gay Europe” in Moscow TV studios.

Etkind paints Putin’s speech justifying the February 2022 invasion not just as an apotheosis of myth-making and conspiracy peddling, but also as a deadly rationale for genocide. For Putin, he writes,

Russians and Ukrainians are essentially the same, but some Ukrainians are Nazis and therefore different. The Americans had turned [Russia’s] Ukrainian friends into Nazis, the opposite of the Russians, who defeated Nazism and disliked the Americans… Putin was effectively declaring war against the US and its allies, not against Ukraine. Ukraine was not even a proxy: it did not exist, it was a terra nullius.

Ultimately, however, despite all these systemic factors, Etkind comes close to surrendering to a different kind of analysis by putting the onus on the personal: namely, Putin got bored and started a war. “A wiser tyrant would have deferred his inevitable end for another few years, even a decade. Impatient and bored, Putin was the unexpected nemesis of Putinism.”

A richer canvas might also have coloured in links between the authoritarian and corrupt Putinist system and his hubristic miscalculations about Ukrainian strength and resolve, Western unity and Russian military strength. This broader account might also help explain why a petrostate that in 2021 sent three-quarters of its gas exports and two-thirds of its oil exports to the European Union decided to risk all with the invasion.

Russia Against Modernity ends with a picture of the future: Russia will inevitably lose the war and begin a process of defederation. Its constituent national minorities, indigenous peoples and diverse regions will at last — after a long but hopefully not bloody transition period — gain real autonomy and democracy and move towards a gaiamodern world, leaving behind the petrostate that has exploited them. One can’t help feeling that this is more utopian dream than sober analysis, however much we might hope elements of it come true.

Sceptics may ask whether Russia is really so different from some or many developed capitalist societies in terms of the evils and dysfunctions Etkind outlines. I suspect he would say that they/we all cling to elements of paleomodernity to differing degrees, exemplified in different political and social forces competing with the gaiamodern. He would add that, as a petrostate, Russia is a more extreme and different kind of polity in terms of its interest in thwarting gaiamodernity.

Russia Against Modernity is a useful corrective for some on the left (and far right) who are instinctively suspicious of American actions and see merit in claims that Ukraine is a “proxy war” by NATO against Russia. Systemic factors in Russia are more than enough to explain the war, without having to disentangle the history of NATO enlargement or the contribution of Western blundering in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. As I have argued elsewhere, while we can debate the wisdom or morality of these actions, none represented a serious threat to Russia. And Etkind is right to see Ukraine’s treatment of Russian speakers and other internal issues as more of a “fetish” among the Russian elite, as he puts it, rather than a serious factor.

Etkind’s work is also valuable because he is a Russian with an intimate understanding of the country and broad international experience who brings to bear serious intellectual firepower. In one section, “The Unbearable Lightness of Western Pundits,” he beautifully skewers so-called experts like Niall Ferguson and Adam Tooze who pointed to Ukrainian weaknesses and the inevitability of Russian victory just before the 2022 invasion. Another target is international relations guru John Mearsheimer, who more or less justified the invasion by saying that, if Ukraine joined NATO, Russia would suffer “existentially.” Russia now has both Sweden and Finland rushing to join NATO, while Ukraine, of course, had no near-term prospect of membership.

One thing common to these generalist historians, economists and foreign policy wonks is a lack of real expertise in Russian or Ukrainian history and politics. That’s why it is vital to listen to independent Russian (and Ukrainian!) voices on the war, as well as real Western specialists. Only a few of the latter make excuses for Putin’s regime and many would see merit in the broad thrust of Etkind’s argument.

Likewise, the Russian democratic opposition almost unanimously sees the war as generated by systemic internal problems. They would agree with Aleksei Navalny, whom Etkind lauds as the champion of exposing corruption, in blaming the war on Russia’s “endless cycle of imperial authoritarianism.” •

Russia Against Modernity
By Alexander Etkind | Polity Press | $30.95 | 176 pages

The post Russia’s war with the future appeared first on Inside Story.

Similar scenes were repeated across the peninsula on that Kara Gun (black day), as units of the Soviet internal security forces surrounded Crimean Tatar towns and villages. From there, the captives were sent by rail 3000 kilometres to Central Asia, and mostly unloaded in eastern Uzbekistan. Soon, the entire Crimean Tatar population of nearly 200,000 people had been removed from their homeland.

Nearly 8000 Crimean Tatars died on the weeks-long train journey. The rest were forced to live in abysmal conditions in “special settlements” for the next decade. Tens of thousands — almost half of them, according to the Crimean Tatars — died of hunger, cold or disease during the first few years of exile.

To justify this collective punishment, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin falsely accused the Crimean Tatars of mass collaboration with the Nazi occupation, which had just ended. It’s true that some Tatars did collaborate — as others had in many places during the war — but many more fought bravely in the Red Army and partisan units. Six received Hero of the Soviet Union medals, equivalent to a Victoria Cross.

Shevkiye’s father Dzhemil was one of the men still with the Red Army at the front, fighting the same Nazis his people were accused of aiding.

A more likely explanation for the Soviet move is that the paranoid Stalin wanted to clear his country’s borderlands of Turkic or Islamic peoples in advance of a possible war with Turkey (which never happened). The Crimean Tatars were one of many peoples from the country’s periphery considered suspect and transported en masse to Central Asia or Siberia: others included Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Meskhetian Turks, Balkars and Karachai, as well as ethnic Koreans, Volga Germans and Finns.

The Crimean Tatars’ forced exile was but the latest chapter in a poorly known story that is as bleak and tragic as those experienced by many indigenous peoples following conquest and colonisation. It has rightly been described as genocide, not least by the Russian parliament in the heady, democratic days of 1991. The Tatars’ tale forms a crucial backdrop to understanding the current war in Ukraine, and its possible resolution.

That war really began when Russia invaded Crimea in February 2014. Troops in unmarked uniforms, dubbed “little green men,” fanned out from Russia’s Black Sea Naval Base in Sevastopol (leased from Ukraine) and seized key government buildings and installations. A few weeks later, after a sham referendum, Russia annexed the peninsula. It has been under occupation ever since.

Since Ukraine blunted Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, a big question hangs over whether Ukraine can mount a successful counteroffensive and go as far as retaking Crimea. And if it can’t, will it have to give up Crimea as part of a peace deal? The Tatars’ fate, as an indigenous people recognised by Ukraine and internationally, must be considered in such calculations.

Vladimir Putin portrayed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 as the long-awaited and rightful “return” of the peninsula to its proper home. “In the minds of people,” he said, “Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia.” But that was pure fantasy, akin to saying that Australia — or the Irish Republic — always was and will be British.

In fact, Putin’s was the second Russian annexation of Crimea. The first was in 1783, not long before Arthur Phillip’s First Fleet landed on Gadigal country in Sydney Cove. The first Russian annexation followed a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire, whose overlordship was acknowledged by the Tatars’ Crimean Khanate, a state with a rich culture dating back to 1441.

The Crimean Khan’s palace, at Bakhchysarai, circa 1840, as painted by the Swiss-born Italian artist Carlo Bossoli. Wikimedia

Tsar Catherine’s 1783 annexation breached a treaty with the Ottomans that had left Crimea independent, just as the 2014 annexation violated treaties that pledged to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and recognised Crimea as part of Ukraine.

Before the 1783 takeover, the Crimean Tatars formed the vast majority of the peninsula’s population, with hardly a Russian in sight. The core group was made up of Turkic-speaking Kipchaks, who had settled before the Mongol-Tatar conquest in the thirteenth century, which gave them their name. (Crimea comes from a Turkic word Qirim, meaning moat or fortification.) But many descendants of invaders and settlers over nearly two millennia — Scythians, ancient Greeks, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Byzantines, Genoese, Venetians and others — had merged to form the Tatar ethnicity.

After the takeover, the new Russian masters turned Tatar peasants into serfs, confiscated communal lands, and destroyed centuries-old mosques and bazaars. Almost half the Tatar population left after Tsar Alexander II blamed them for Russia’s defeat in the Crimean war and called for their removal from the peninsula in 1857. Their share of the population fell from nearly 80 per cent in 1850 to around a third by 1900, then to less than 20 per cent by the outbreak of the second world war.

A sense of Tatar nationhood nevertheless put down strong roots. Soon after the 1917 October Revolution in Petrograd, an elected Tatar assembly  proclaimed a Crimean People’s Republic with a vision of a multiethnic “Switzerland” for the region. Its national congress, the Qurultay, was elected by universal suffrage, with women able to vote — a first in the Muslim world and ahead of many Western countries. But the Crimean Republic was suppressed by Bolsheviks, who had emerged as the victors after Russia’s three years of bitter civil war.

Soviet Russia’s first leader, Vladimir Lenin, saw the need to gain the loyalty of the diverse nations of the vast Soviet Union by encouraging their cultures and inclusion in government. Under this “indigenisation” policy, Crimea became an autonomous republic subordinate to the Russian Republic, with Tatars taking leading roles. The communists promoted Crimean Tatar schools, theatres and publishing. Stalin’s purges and forced collectivisation of farms took their toll in Crimea as elsewhere, but Tatars’ sense of nationhood was further cemented.

Following the 1944 deportation, however, evidence of the Crimean Tatars’ presence was largely wiped out. Authorities changed upwards of 2000 Tatar names for towns and villages to Russian names. Shevkiye Dzhemileva’s village of Ayserez was renamed Mezhdurechye (“between the rivers”). The influx of Russian and Ukrainian migrants means that more than 90 per cent of all the current Slavic residents of Crimea now come from families who arrived after the Tatars’ expulsion. Stalinist officials explicitly sought to make “a new Crimea with its own Russian form.”

Deported Crimean Tatars working in a logging camp in Siberia in 1952. Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance/Wikimedia

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Crimean Tatars were banned from returning to their homelands, unlike most of the other Soviet “punished peoples,” such as the Chechens and other Tatar populations, who were fully rehabilitated. The Crimean Tatars embarked on a thirty-five-year campaign for the right to return, the most concerted movement of dissent in the history of the Soviet Union.

The Tatars defied the regime’s efforts to make them assimilate with other Turkic and Muslim peoples in Central Asia. Although it was a thoroughly nonviolent movement, jail sentences were handed out to hundreds of activists. Its foremost leader was Shevkiye’s baby brother, Mustafa Dzhemilev, six months old at the time of the deportation. Dzhemilev was a veritable Nelson Mandela of the movement, imprisoned six times and undertaking a 303-day hunger strike.

This struggle forged an even stronger national identity centred on the trauma of the Sürgünlik (exile) and a yearning for the lost homeland. Other displaced peoples have trod a similar path, including the Jews after the Shoah and the Palestinians following the Nakba (Catastrophe).

The Tatars finally won the right to return in 1989, just as the democratic reforms unleashed by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev were taking off. Crimea had long before become part of Ukraine, transferred from the Russian republic to Kyiv by Stalin’s heirs under Nikita Khrushchev in 1954.

When Ukraine became independent in 1991 many Crimean Tatars fulfilled their dream of returning to the peninsula. The 2001 Ukrainian census (the most recent) recorded some 240,000 Tatars, or 12 per cent of its population. Many faced numerous obstacles, however, and ended up in poverty, living in shantytowns and unable to reclaim their families’ former houses.

Yet the Crimean Tatars made progress. In 2001 the Ukrainian parliament enacted a consultative role for their representative body, the Mejlis, giving it a status similar to that proposed for Australia’s Voice to Parliament. They became ardent supporters of the newly independent Ukrainian state.

Fifty-six per cent of Crimean residents had supported leaving the Soviet Union in the 1991 independence referendum. Opinion polls over several years leading up to the 2014 annexation showed well under half in favour of leaving Ukraine and joining Russia.

Russia’s sham referendum just eighteen days before the 2014 annexation claimed that a wildly implausible 96 per cent of voters wanted to join Russia.  But even if there were now a majority preferring Moscow over Kyiv, the real history of Crimea undermines any Russian claims to the peninsula based on population. The Russian majority was created on the blood, bones and tears of the Crimean Tatars.

For the Tatars, Russia’s occupation has brought back the bad old days. The United Nations and other organisations have documented arbitrary detentions, torture, expulsions and harassment of Crimean Tatar (and ethnic Ukrainian) activists and protesters. Many have fled Crimea, and Tatar leaders claim that hundreds of thousands of Russians have moved in, contrary to international law on occupied territories.

Muslim communities have been attacked and religious literature burned. Members of the remaining Crimean Tatar population have been pressured to renounce their Ukrainian citizenship. Tatar-language media outlets have been denied re-registration. Tatars have also been subject to forced mobilisation into the Russian army, a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Russian authorities outlawed the Tatar Mejlis as an “extremist” organisation in 2016. The International Court of Justice upheld a challenge to this ban in 2017, but Russia has ignored the verdict.

Ukraine’s much-anticipated counteroffensive during the northern summer will be crucial to its chances of pushing Russian forces out of all or most of its territory. Even if Ukraine succeeds in the east and south, though, Crimea could be a much harder nut to crack. Some fear that Putin’s prestige is so tied up with his seizure of Crimea that he might resort to nuclear weapons rather than lose it.

With such concerns in mind, some pundits argue that Ukraine should or will be forced to make a deal in which Crimea is handed to Russia. But the permanent cession of Crimea would simply be a reward for aggression, an outcome that 141 countries in the UN have already rejected, affirming that “no territorial acquisition resulting from the use of force can be recognised as legal.”

Were Crimea to stay under Russian occupation, either permanently or in a Cyprus-like frozen conflict, it would be a dagger pointed at Ukraine. Its protected position makes it an ideal launchpad for renewed invasions and threatens Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea.

Practical geography also explains why Crimea’s future outside Ukraine would be difficult, as Khrushchev recognised in 1954. The largely arid peninsula relies on water pumped by North Crimea Canal, 100 kilometres from the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River, which supplied 85 per cent of its fresh water before 2014.

The canal’s flow was cut after the annexation, causing severe shortages, but then restored after the 2022 invasion of southern Ukraine launched from Crimea; along with creating a “land bridge” to Russia, the canal was undoubtedly an objective of the invasion. That link was highlighted again by the recent destruction of the Kakhovka dam, which controls the flow to the canal.

An equally strong argument against Russian control is the fate of the Crimean Tatars. After overcoming dispossession, deportation and genocide to slowly re-establish themselves in their homeland, they fear being left once again under the thumb of a Moscow regime they view as a longstanding oppressor.

Are they to be cast aside again in the interests of realpolitik? Should not indigenous people have a casting vote on the fate of their homeland? In the words of Shevkiye’s granddaughter, Elmaz Asan, “Crimea is no bargaining chip in a geopolitical game; it is my homeland and I will not give it up, just like my ancestors did not.” •

The post Crimea’s Tatars and Russia’s war appeared first on Inside Story.

Wasserstein has poured an extraordinary amount of research into this book. The bibliography lists thirty-four archives in seven countries (Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Israel, Britain and the United States) alongside oral history interviews, written testimonies, websites, unpublished doctoral dissertations, official publications from Austria, Britain, the United States and the Vatican, and a long list of published books and articles. These materials were assembled, read and digested over three decades of “digging ever deeper into what turned out to be an immense historical quarry.”

During his research, the historian built up “vast data banks of official records, newspaper dispatches, census materials, registers of births, marriages and deaths, electoral results, medical reports, maps and photographs, as well as meteorological, geological, ecological, ornithological, architectural, judicial, military, ecclesiastical and every other category of information I could find.”

Wasserstein’s biographical database alone includes information about “over seventeen thousand persons” who once lived in the small Galician town of Krakowiec (pronounced Krah-KOV-yets), the place where his grandparents were born and where, together with their daughter, they were shot at the end of the second world war.

With all this material, he could have produced a turgid multi-volume history of the town of his ancestors. At the very least, he could have written one of those doorstoppers commercial publishers somehow believe “the general public” has time to read. Thankfully, however, he has instead written a short and eminently readable account.

Wasserstein’s readers might recently have encountered Krakowiec — or Krakovets, as it is called today in Ukrainian — just across the border from Poland, in reporting about the refugee crisis created by Russia’s aggression. Founded sometime in the early fourteenth century, the town started life as a frontier settlement of the Kingdom of Poland. When Poland was partitioned in 1772, it became part of the Austrian-ruled Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. As it grew and became more prosperous, it turned from a Polish settlement into an increasingly Jewish town — a shtetl.

The Jewishness of the town was typical. In Galicia, landowners tended to be Polish aristocrats, the peasants were mostly Ruthenians (some of whom, by the nineteenth century, began to call themselves “Ukrainians”), and the town dwellers — tradesmen, tavern keepers, money lenders, and shop owners — were Jews. The division of labour was both functional and conflictual: its violent potential would be enhanced in the age of nationalism, racism and total war.

Wasserstein uses the history of this interaction between Poles, Ruthenians and Jews — and eventually a variety of invading military forces — to situate his own family’s history. He is not the first historian of East European Jewish heritage to embark on such a project. Shimon Redlich, in Together and Apart in Brzezany (2002), was among the earliest; most recently, that celebrated historian of the Holocaust, Omer Bartov, did something similar for another Galician town, Buczacz, in Anatomy of a Genocide (2019).

These accounts belong to a broader but relatively new genre of history writing: the transnational history of Eastern Europe. In books like Sketches from a Secret War (2005) and The Red Prince (2010), Timothy Snyder used the fate of individuals to chart new historical grounds between established national narratives. In A Biography of No Place (2005), Kate Brown presented an intimate portrait of how the borderland between Poland and Russia became a “Soviet heartland.”

At times of war, when national narratives are hardening, such books provide important correctives between and beyond national and nationalist history-telling. In each of them, the first world war plays a pivotal role.

As happened elsewhere in the region, that war came to Krakowiec as “a sudden, direct, and shattering blow.” The “unrelieved terror and carnage” it unleashed lasted not just four but seven years: it prompted the dissolution of both the Austro-Hungarian and the Romanov empires, and transformed seamlessly into a civil war and wars between successor states over real estate and the peoples of the fallen empires.

These years left “a residue of vicious collective suspicions and hatreds,” writes Wasserstein. “Ordinary human relationships collapsed into dog-eat-dog ruthlessness. The people of Krakowiec were plunged overnight into a dark realm. Their world would never be the same again.”

In this maelstrom, all sides distrusted the Jews: the Austrians no less than the Poles (who were soon in charge of their own state); the Russians of the Tsar no less than the Red Cavalry that came later from Soviet Russia to “liberate” the region from the “Polish lords” and the “capitalists” (the Jewish shopkeepers, mill owners and money lenders). Although the revolutionary Ukrainian state, formed in 1917 and declared independent in 1918, was originally committed to multi-ethnicity, the troops of the Ukrainian republic were soon engaged in pogroms just like everybody else.

Only the Germans, despite the harshness of their occupation in 1918, were not known for anti-Jewish excesses — a perverse legacy that convinced some locals two decades later that the stories of Nazi atrocities were Soviet propaganda and there was no reason to flee.

Eventually, the newly established Polish republic won out over its Ukrainian and Soviet Russian competitors. The Treaty of Riga of 1921 divided the Ukrainian state between victorious Poland and defeated Russia, and made Krakowiec Polish yet again. It would remain so until 1939, when Poland was invaded, first (on 1 September) by the Germans from the west and then (on 17 September) by the Soviets from the east. Krakowiec ended up on the Soviet side of the border and was integrated into Soviet Ukraine.

What followed would change the face of Krakowiec even more dramatically than had the first world war and the ensuing civil and inter-state wars. Stalin’s police went after political enemies of the Soviets as well as “class enemies.” Many of them were Polish, of course, but also Jewish: a shopkeeper, a factory owner, even the operator of an export business for Galician eggs (which were shipped to Germany and as far as England) were “capitalists” in Soviet eyes, particularly if they “exploited” (employed) others to do some of the work.

Many Jewish entrepreneurs were arrested and their families deported to the Soviet hinterland. Perversely, this saved many of them: life in Stalin’s concentration camp state was less lethal than being Jewish under the Nazis.

When the Germans invaded in the summer of 1941 they brought with them the genocidal Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that systematically murdered Jews. They had help from Ukrainian nationalists who had become inspired by fascism, like the radical right everywhere. An increasingly bitter four-way struggle developed between these radical Ukrainians, the Polish underground Home Army, German counterinsurgency troops and Soviet partisans, with Jews caught between all fronts. When the Red Army liberated Krakowiec in May 1944, only one Jew emerged from his hiding place. Of the 104,700 Jews who had lived in Krakowiec before the war, only 1689 survived.

Wasserstein’s grandparents, Berl and Czarna, and his aunt Lotte had originally escaped deportation to a ghetto and then the ghetto’s “liquidation.” But the Ukrainian neighbour who had sheltered them for a year eventually gave them up. The Nazis shot them in April 1944, just three months before the Red Army arrived.

Why and how the Wassersteins found themselves in Krakowiec when the war broke out, and why Wasserstein’s father Abraham (“Addi”) escaped their fate, is a history in itself.

A Small Town in Ukraine begins with the deportation of Berl and Addi from Berlin in October 1938, part of a mass expulsion of Ostjuden (“eastern Jews”) from Nazi Germany. Berl had been sixteen when the first world war came to his native Krakowiec. Like many Galician Jews, he and his family fled the advancing Russian army in 1914, eventually moving to Vienna, capital of the Habsburg empire, of which they were loyal subjects.

Perhaps trying to evade military service, Berl kept moving, first to Holland, then to Germany, where he married Czarna Laub, who also hailed from Krakowiec. The couple settled first in Frankfurt and then in Berlin, where Berl built a business producing raincoats. Neither he nor his wife ever became German citizens, but their children grew up speaking German rather than Polish or Yiddish. Nevertheless, for the Nazis after 1933, they were aliens in two senses: Polish refugees and Jews. The deportation of this group in 1938 marked one step in the radicalisation of anti-Jewish policies that would culminate in genocide.

Thus, the Wassersteins were forced back to the provincial Krakowiec they had worked so hard to escape. Berl was allowed a short visit to Berlin to collect the women of the family and liquidate his assets under rules that effectively meant confiscation. Addi, equipped with false papers, managed to travel through Germany, ostensibly en route to Latin America. He arrived in time to say farewell to his sister and parents at the Eastern Railway Station in Berlin. He would never see them again.

Like the family of historian Richard Pipes, who would do so a little later and under somewhat more adventurous conditions, he then moved on to Italy. When Germany went to war with Poland shortly after Addi arrived in Rome, Mussolini’s government suspended tourist visas. Eventually he managed to reach Palestine via Turkey. His survival — the result of quick decisions and chance encounters — was little short of a miracle.

Wasserstein’s book ends with an account of his own travels to Krakowiec after the fall of the Soviet Union and his deeply ambiguous encounter with contemporary Ukraine. The once multi-ethnic Krakowiec, now Krakovets, has been transformed beyond recognition. The Nazis destroyed the Jews, and a postwar, state-led campaign of ethnic cleansing in the border regions moved Ukrainians from Poland to the Soviet Union, and Poles and the few surviving Jews in the other direction. Today, the town is a thoroughly Ukrainian settlement.

Popular memories there diverge sharply from those Wasserstein reconstructs in his book. The town was the birthplace not only of Wasserstein’s grandfather but also of Roman Shukhevych, a controversial Ukrainian national hero. He served under the Germans during the second world war before deserting to fight his own war once it became clear the Nazis would lose. Among other deeds, he commanded a German-controlled unit that “shot all the Jews we encountered” in at least two villages, according to one of his subordinates. In the postwar years he fought a guerilla war against the Soviet occupiers until his death in battle in 1950.

Today’s Krakovets not only has a monument to its questionable hero; the school Berl Wasserstein attended is named after Shukhevych as well, as is a street.

Wasserstein completed A Small Town in Ukraine just as Russia attacked the country early last year. At a time when shades of grey seem to have vanished, when intellectuals are called on to unequivocally condemn “NATO expansion” as the source of the war or throw their lot in behind Ukraine, defender of freedom and democracy, he carves out a third position.

His feelings, he writes, are “mixed.” He shares “the general abhorrence at Russian aggression and brutality” and notes that “Russian claims about ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine are outrageous black propaganda.” Ukraine today, he notes correctly, “is a democracy, albeit a fragile one.” At the same time, he is filled with “unease” at the prospect of a Ukrainian victory parade “past the garlanded statue of Roman Shukhevych” on the square in which the town’s Jews were assembled for deportation.

The glorification of Shukhevych and his comrades from the second world war, Wasserstein warns, is not “harmless exuberance.” Collective identities based on false history “are inherently contaminated and potentially dangerous.” His book is the very opposite of such mythologies: a thoughtful exploration of a painful past that lives on in the present. •

A Small Town in Ukraine: The Place We Came From, the Place We Went Back To
By Bernard Wasserstein | Allen Lane | $35 | 320 pages

The post Eastern Europe’s faultline appeared first on Inside Story.

For NATO, therefore, policy has become risk management. On the one hand, it wants to prevent Ukraine from losing, force Russia to end the attack and deter future aggression in, for instance, the Baltic states. Besides hobbling Moscow with sanctions, this means giving Kyiv the intelligence information and weapons to kill thousands of invading troops and gut the Russian army. On the other hand, it doesn’t want to provoke a catastrophic reaction.

While US, French and British nuclear weapons add to the inherent danger of the crisis, only Russia has been flaunting its arsenal. Its thousands of nuclear warheads, divided between intercontinental range and shorter-range “tactical” weapons, are enough to reduce Europe to ruins, slaughter several million people and shatter civilisation. Even if the Kremlin had remained silent about them, these weapons are an existential menace.

But it has not stayed silent. President Putin, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and the Russian security council’s Dmitry Medvedev allude to the potentially dire nuclear consequences of Western support of Kyiv. Further down the food chain, the state media continues its blood-curdling commentary, in some cases insanely calling for the obliteration of NATO countries.

We don’t know if the Kremlin is bluffing. But three factors seem to give substance to its threats: Putin’s character; the high stakes involved; and Russian military doctrine.

Many say the key to understanding the nuclear risk lies inside Putin’s head. Before he invaded Ukraine a year ago, observers considered him a ruthless but shrewd player of geopolitics; since then, though, he’s simply appeared reckless. And rather than Putin being the leader who has mastered the global chessboard, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US president Joe Biden seem to have Moscow’s measure.

So, we have a frustrated control freak with no conscience and a finger on the nuclear button. Perhaps he’s deploying the “mad man” card, carefully playing his hand to limit Western intervention? Or has he become a rash gambler?

Without a proper psychological assessment and a fly on the wall inside the Kremlin, it’s unclear how far a character assessment can take us. We don’t know how much authority Putin has over Russia’s nuclear forces, with reports saying he shares it with senior officials. And although he licensed the current spate of rabid nationalism, we don’t know how much he now controls it. Still, as far as we can tell, he continues to call the shots.

Another reason the nuclear threat appears credible is the high stakes involved. Russia’s status as a great power and Putin’s survival is said to hinge on victory, or at least avoiding defeat. There’s also an ideological aspect to this, with Putin and nationalist zealots arguing that the war represents a civilisational struggle between righteous Russianness and degenerate Western Satanism. This is just the sort of binary or absolutist framing suited to prepping for an apocalyptic conflict.

Finally, some experts argue Russian military doctrine adds weight to the nuclear threat. In particular, they say the idea of “escalate to de-escalate” gears Russian forces to respond to an imminent decisive defeat of its army, or to conventional air attacks on the Russian homeland, with a limited nuclear strike to compel enemies to back off. (This echoes Washington’s refusal to rule out nuclear first use, and NATO’s cold war strategy of flexible response, which encompassed the concept of nuclear warning shots.)

In other words, the Russian general staff has institutionalised a crossover between large-scale conventional war and scenarios for nuclear strikes. While this doesn’t make it automatic, the potential for escalation is baked into strategy. An extra twist is Moscow’s annexation of about one-fifth of Ukraine, suggesting the conquered regions are now considered part of the homeland and so covered by its nuclear deterrent.

Whatever its end point, the Kremlin’s nuclear threat has so far worked, at least to a degree. Fear of precipitating world war three is the main reason NATO ruled out imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and it helps explain NATO’s initial reluctance to supply long-range artillery and tanks. Today, Western fear of escalation shows in the refusal to supply Kyiv with even longer-range artillery and combat aircraft.

In each case the West has been sensitive to Russia’s supposed “red lines.” NATO has even internalised them as an essential tool for crisis management. The principal red line here separates measures intended to aid Ukraine’s defence from those threatening Russian territory.

As conceptual tools go, red lines appear objective and clear. In practice, though, they have been more subjective and elastic. While there’s still a prohibition on direct NATO combat with Russian forces, everything else has become blurred. This is partly because the distinction between defensive and offensive weapons is largely artificial, depending as much on context as on technical attributes. Even the distinction between defensive and offensive operations can be problematic when the issue is reclaiming lost land.

This matter surfaced in the debate over the supply of tanks. Were the German-manufactured Leopards intended to prevent a Ukraine defeat while the country continued to bleed out, or to aid Ukraine’s victory and put an end to the war? And what would a victory look like?

Eleven months ago, many would have judged fighting the supposedly mighty Russian army to a draw along the current front line as equivalent to a Ukraine win. Today, most Western commentators say victory requires further embarrassing the humbled Russian army and recapturing the territory occupied since February 2022. Kyiv has set the bar higher: pushing the Russian army out of the land seized in 2014.

Hanging over all of this is the future of Crimea. Controversy over the peninsula is set to reshape the debate over red lines, not least in Washington. Kyiv and Moscow are both convinced of their historical and moral right to the place, but Ukraine’s legal claim is far stronger and would provide the basis for Western support of an offensive to expel Russian forces.

A solid legal case is not the same as sensible policy, however. Assuming it could be done, would retaking Crimea be worth a (say) one-in-ten chance of triggering a nuclear holocaust?

The answer is a matter of opinion. It’s interesting that the country most vulnerable to Russian nuclear forces — Ukraine — appears the least concerned. Kyiv is the most hawkish player in the debate about reclaiming Crimea and other lost territories; it seems, on the surface, prepared to pay any price and run any risk.

This is important because, while NATO and Ukrainian interests overlap, they’re not identical. Western commentators often forget to factor in autonomous Ukrainian decision-making, and assume that Kyiv will keep its strategy within guardrails established by outsiders. But while Kyiv has good reasons not to cross its international backers, the war is about Ukraine’s independence, not its subordination to Western interests.

Ukrainians don’t picture the conflict in geopolitical terms. They see what’s right in front of them: Putin’s trashing of their country’s sovereignty and dismissal of its national identity, his willingness to seize as much of their land as he can get away with, the millions of refugees, and the savagery of the Russian army and its mercenary associates. The resulting hatred is not conducive to a restrained response from Kyiv if it identifies an opening for an offensive that sends the occupying force into ignominious retreat. Throwing the Kremlin off balance could well become Kyiv’s aim, even if that disrupts Western ideas of escalation control.

Some people don’t see this as a problem. Social media is full of keyboard warriors wanting to pour weapons into Ukraine as though Russian nuclear weapons don’t exist. Even respected commentators advocate NATO going all-in, paying little regard to the potential nuclear consequences. Some experts advise facing down Putin’s nuclear blustering like we would a schoolyard bully. For these people, Russian huffing and puffing has run into diminishing returns, becoming little more than background noise.

NATO can’t afford to be so cavalier. The consequences of being wrong are too dreadful. So it’s intensely interested in scenarios showing how and when the nuclear threshold might be crossed. Start with a projected Ukrainian counteroffensive that overruns a large part of the Russian army on the border or employs air attacks to strike deep into Russia. This would lift the stakes and speed the pace of events. The resulting strategic adjustments could be hasty and prone to miscalculation, perhaps setting the scene for a limited Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine.

NATO might then respond with direct conventional military intervention. And, almost certainly, once the Kremlin had broken the nuclear taboo, America’s preparations for nuclear war would be ramped up. A different type of escalatory dynamic would pit Moscow against Washington in a starker form of brinkmanship.

Strategists on both sides think deterrence requires convincing the opponent that they won’t back down, that they’re prepared to climb the escalation ladder all the way to large-scale global nuclear war. Adding substance to the idea are elaborate plans matching individual warheads against specific targets. This is a surreal space in which potential casualties are counted in the millions and military officers are drilled in worst-case analysis.

Increased alert levels for Russian and American forces could thus become mutually reinforcing, intensifying fears of surprise attack and inadvertently creating pressure for massive pre-emptive strikes. Misunderstandings and accidents would become more dangerous, perhaps confronting decision-makers in Moscow and Washington with a kill-or-be-killed moment.

This is the apocalyptic picture Putin tries to leverage. But apart from some loose talk, there’s no evidence he actually wants to blow up the world. He probably has serious doubts about “escalate to de-escalate,” not least in terms of cost–benefit calculations. But even if he is, in his private moments, set against radical escalation, the conflict could take on a life of its own. The stresses of responding to pressing events on the ground or in the air above Russia might crowd out yesterday’s assessments. Whatever was in his mind could be altered by unfolding events that can be neither reliably predicted nor easily controlled. He might, at last, have to put up or shut up.

The recognition that the war could turn into a bigger catastrophe has obviously not paralysed the West. Apart from the domestic political price of abandoning Ukraine, NATO is concerned about the harm to global security if it fails to resist territorial expansion underpinned by nuclear threats — harm that includes exposing more countries to Russian, Chinese and North Korean aggression, a rush to proliferation, and the nightmare of normalising nuclear warfare.

During the cold war, Washington refused to intervene in Moscow’s sphere of influence when the Soviet army crushed anti-Russian movements in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). The reason for caution was fear of events spiralling into nuclear annihilation. Today, however, Washington is pushing the envelope by orchestrating military intervention inside the borders of the former Soviet Union, aiming to defeat Russia on its doorstep without tipping it over the edge. Only time will tell if it can master this necessary balancing act. •

The post Pushing the nuclear envelope appeared first on Inside Story.

What attracted less attention was the fact that many of the flag-wavers were members of the Australian chapter of the Night Wolves, a Russian biker gang that combines radical nationalism with paramilitary activities.

In a video of the incident posted by a pro-Putin activist, a prominent member of the Australian Night Wolves wears the gang’s t-shirt emblazoned with a flaming red wolf, a large white “Z” and its motto, “Where We Are, There Is Russia.” He addresses the gang’s leadership in Moscow, shouting “Brother Aleksandr Zaldostanov — greetings from Melbourne!” in Serbian. His next, muffled words, echoed by Srdjan Djokovic, have variously been interpreted as “Long live Russia!” or “Cheers, people!”

It was another small win for the Kremlin’s information warriors. Within a week, the video of this strange performance had notched up 187,000 views on the YouTube channel of the pro-Putin activist, “Aussie Cossack” Simeon Boikov. The content has been widely circulated on the Putin regime’s propaganda platforms, which hailed Srdjan Djokovic as a hero and denounced the Western media for persecuting him for his pro-Russian sympathies.

I have followed the enablers of this incident, the Night Wolves, for many years. My interest was sharpened by my research for a book about the place of a Russian neo-Nazi movement, Russkii Obraz, in the Kremlin’s manipulation of Russian nationalism. For the leader of Russkii Obraz, the Night Wolves were an object lesson in how an extremist movement could win the approval of the regime and carve out a niche in public life.

The Night Wolves represent a minuscule fringe of Australia’s Russian and Serbian communities. But there are sound reasons to be concerned about their activities.

The most obvious is their connection to the Russian state. From their first demonstration alongside neo-Nazi groups outside Sydney’s Russian consulate in 2016, Australia’s Night Wolves have acted as conduits of influence for the Putin regime. They joined Kremlin propagandists in a social media campaign against Aleksei Navalny. They organised screenings of Russian nationalist propaganda at cinemas around the country. And they tried to intimidate an anti-Putin protester outside a Russian consulate.

No less disturbing is the gang’s relationship to their Russian mother organisation, which is connected to the Putin regime on multiple levels. As well as their close links to the security apparatus, the Russian Night Wolves are beneficiaries of extensive state support, ranging from presidential grants to real estate and free advertising. In return for this largesse, they play a major role in the ecosystem of radical nationalist groups that sustains Putin’s regime and its war against Ukraine.

Uniquely among pro-Kremlin nationalists, the Night Wolves have a mass appeal. Their motorbike shows attract large crowds and television audiences with expensively choreographed spectacles combining fireworks, motorcycle stunts and patriotic rock bands. Behind the theatrics, each show presents a narrative about the eternal struggle between Russia’s pure traditions and a demonic monster representing the West.

These warped morality tales reflect the political vision of the gang’s leader, Aleksandr Zaldostanov (“Surgeon”), who makes no secret of his imperialist convictions. He is obsessed with the idea of a “Fifth Empire,” the blueprint for a new totalitarianism proposed by the novelist and neo-Stalinist ideologue Aleksandr Prokhanov. According to Zaldostanov, the Fifth Empire will unite the legacies of four historical Russian empires — from Kievan Rus to Stalin’s USSR — into a new global power under Vladimir Putin.

Underlying this project is the classic fascist dream of a violent, regenerative nationalist revolution. The aim is to save humanity from the moral decadence brought by Western democracy, which Zaldostanov defines as “global Satanism.”

What magnifies the danger of this ideology is the paramilitary force at Zaldostanov’s disposal. The Night Wolves’ business interests include a network of private security companies that employ ex-military and security personnel. The most important is Wolf Holdings of Security Structures, which was sanctioned by the US government in June 2017 for its involvement in the Ukrainian conflict.

These veterans played a conspicuous role in Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, when they operated roadblocks, kidnapped a Ukrainian general, and stormed a naval headquarters.

Later they participated in Putin’s onslaught on southeast Ukraine. They are particularly close to the leadership of the Russian puppet state in Lugansk. A monument to Zaldostanov’s Fifth Empire, titled “A Symbol of the New Russia in the Eyes of the Night Wolves,” stands in front of the Lugansk government headquarters.

The Night Wolves have also helped to project Russian power in Europe and the Balkans. They stage regular “club runs,” long-distance motorcycle rides that serve as rallying points for local nationalists and fuel for Russian propaganda. Their security structures are the backbone of a network of “Volk Systema” martial arts clubs that claim to provide training in special forces combat techniques to police and the armed forces. Investigative reporting in Hungary, a NATO member state, suggested that this poses a real security risk.

One of the Night Wolves’ most audacious interventions was the failed coup in Montenegro on the eve of elections in 2016. A co-founder of the Serbian chapter of the gang testified that Russian intelligence agents arranged for him to visit Moscow, where he was given encrypted telephones and more than US$200,000 for weapons and recruitment.

Today the Night Wolves are deeply implicated in Putin’s war against Ukraine. In April last year, Zaldostanov hailed the invasion as yet another “battle against Satan.” The combatants include the Night Wolves’ own paramilitary unit, Night Wolves Pyatnashka. “These lads came to the Donbass with a clear motivation and an understanding of what is happening here,” writes pro-Kremlin military journalist Pavel Kukushkin. “They didn’t come to take pictures. The boys are fighting like everyone else.”

The Night Wolves’ complicity in Putin’s aggression has not gone unnoticed in the West. As early as December 2014, the US government sanctioned the gang for actions that “threaten the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine.” Canada blacklisted Zaldostanov a few months later. An EU-wide ban was imposed in July last year. It may be time for Australia to open its eyes to the Putinists in our midst. •

The post Putin’s Wolves appeared first on Inside Story.

All of us on this mission, working to help Ukraine for many years, knew just how precarious the country’s situation was. And then, in February this year, all hell broke loose with Russia’s full-scale invasion.

I’ve spent a lot of time working in Ukraine, which is the only reason I wrote Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine: Invasion Amidst the Ashes of Empires. My book is the outcome of an eighteen-year relationship with travelling, living and working in Ukraine at different times.

Which is why it was galling to see Mark Edele, reviewing my book in this publication, egregiously misrepresenting my motivations and credentials for writing the book, and misrepresenting my overall argument. I have no idea why he chose to do these two things, but I can put the record straight here.

Professor Edele characterises me as an “international relations academic” and suggests I rely on a theorising approach in my book. This is simply untrue: I rely on my personal observations, and my judgement as a former diplomat, to explain the slow decline in contemporary Russia–Ukraine relations. I also look honestly at the inadvertent consequences of some of Ukraine’s foreign policy choices.

Professor Edele inaccurately summarises my argument as attributing the 2022 Russian invasion to a response to NATO expansion. I do nothing of the sort: I clearly argue that Russia’s elites, headed by Putin, have unhealthy dreams of empire. Hence the subtitle of my book, arguing that this is a war of imperial expansion. Another driver is that Putin sits atop a dysfunctional autocratic system that has afforded him a jaundiced view of Ukraine’s independent path.

Yes, NATO expansion — and Ukraine’s enthusiasm to join the alliance — is a third driver of the war. But it is one Russian motivator among several, which is precisely why Professor Edele and the headline of the review article mischaracterise my work. Professor Edele in effect claims that I am arguing that a complex war arises from a single cause. I do not argue for mono-causality, and I make this abundantly clear in my book.

To Professor Edele, I remark, “It’s the empire, stupid!” Russian dreams of Soviet and Tsarist empires have collided with what Putin, Lavrov and the rest of them see as a US-led neo-imperial project.

My book examines precisely why our benign view of NATO expansion, common in my country, Britain, and probably also common in some Australian circles, is not universally held. Any honest accounting of Russian motivations to go to war in 2022 in Ukraine must factor in differing interpretations of NATO. Let’s not bury our heads in the sand over these complexities.

Over many years, I have seen with my own eyes the oscillation in Ukraine’s political identity, and the consequent deterioration of relations with Russia. I have stepped far outside the university classroom and put myself in harm’s way to see what is happening in Ukraine’s remote regions.

My book may not be to everyone’s taste, but at least get the facts right about my professional background, my credentials for writing it, the time it has taken me to accumulate my insights, and the multilayered nature of my argument. •

The post Ashes of empires appeared first on Inside Story.

Samir Puri’s Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine is one of the first kind. “Rapidity was the key to writing this book,” he admits — and it shows. Puri’s opinions, strongly expressed throughout, oscillate between sincere shock at the invasion, empathy with Ukraine and the Ukrainians, and dismissal of Ukraine and Ukrainians as khokhols (a slur he claims is harmless slang) who might be creating “legends” about their heroic self-defence but are ultimately mere “pawns” in “the unforgiving world of geopolitics.”

Orthodox international relations theory, also misleadingly known as “realism,” sees the world as an anarchic place where the strong rule and the weak obey. Russia, a former empire, is strong; Ukraine, a former colony, is weak. The rest follows. That Russia might indeed be in the process of learning that Ukraine is stronger than expected, that Putin might be schooled by “the unforgiving world of geopolitics,” doesn’t compute.

You want to rebuild an empire? A perfectly normal aspiration, according to the theory. Just make sure that you have a functioning military and adequate economic resources before you try to take over neighbouring countries. Such preparation would probably show “realism.” Russia’s current behaviour certainly does not.

Why did Putin go to war? Puri doesn’t really know. An international relations scholar, he suspects that it has to do with another great power — NATO, the European Union, the United States or a coalition of all three — having encroached on Russia’s turf. The overall argument of the book: It’s NATO, stupid!

The problem is that this theory doesn’t fit the observable facts. It is true that neither NATO nor the European Union has covered itself in glory in interacting with post-Soviet Russia. Russia no longer mattered, they seemed to believe, and thus could be ignored, or maybe even bossed around. Among many Europeans, that arrogance was coupled with the utopian notion that the post-1991 world was all about “soft power.” Tanks were no longer needed. Dependency on one source of oil and gas was fine. We’re all civilised, after all. War is a thing of the past.

Writing earlier this year, Britain’s former ambassador to Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a historian of Russia, was scathing. “Western diplomacy,” he wrote, was “by turns arrogant and incompetent.” He was right: to dangle NATO membership in front of Ukraine without a consensus in the alliance, a plan of how to achieve it, or a mechanism to ensure Ukraine’s security while the details were worked through, was “an unserious position.” Not to think about how to manage the Russian reaction was, likewise, negligent.

But Braithwaite also argued that “Putin’s military posturing around Ukraine is several degrees more irresponsible,” a qualification Puri ignores when he quotes the former ambassador.

Did the issue of Ukraine’s putative NATO membership drive Putin to war? Puri tries hard to squeeze recalcitrant facts into this mould. The Russian government has indeed repeatedly expressed its irritation and resentment at NATO enlargement. But NATO didn’t expand into Ukraine in 2021–22. Quite the opposite. Russia’s expressions of discontent convinced enough members — Germany chief among them — to oppose a NATO accession plan nearly a decade and a half before the current escalation. Ukraine was snubbed by NATO in 2008 only to be told repeatedly that the door was open “in principle.”

Anybody who had even the slightest knowledge of NATO’s internal affairs knew that these assurances were gestures towards the never-never. NATO’s approach was, indeed, “unserious.” In 2021–22, as Puri admits in passing, there were “no immediate signs of Ukraine’s admission into the alliance that Russia could say it was retaliating against.” That should have been the end of this theory. But no: Puri spends another seven pages trying to make the case that Putin’s “paranoia” was perfectly understandable.

Historians are used to reading international relations scholarship with sceptical tolerance. This discipline doesn’t rest on detailed knowledge of any one time, place or culture; instead, it tries to construct universalising models to be applied to any case.

But Puri doesn’t just simplify. He also makes mistakes, at time egregious ones. Russia’s provisional government of 1917, in place between the abdication of the Tsar in February and the Bolshevik coup in October, was not, as he claims, anti-imperial. The people in charge might have been liberals but they were also supporters of the empire. Looking askance at Ukraine’s parallel revolution and requests for autonomy, they continued to prosecute a war with imperial aims. That was indeed a major cause of the provisional government’s fall.

The (second) Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which the Bolsheviks were forced to sign in 1918, did not, as Puri believes, afford “Ukraine’s Nationalists a rare opportunity to make a break for freedom.” The Ukrainian People’s Republic’s declaration of independence actually preceded the treaty and Ukraine signed its own treaty with the Germans, the First Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, before the Russian Bolsheviks.

Nor did the “independent Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania” spring from Lenin’s head in 1918 or 1919, as Puri implies. They were independent anti-Bolshevik states until Stalin brought them back into the empire in 1940, and only then did they become Soviet republics. Western Ukraine was invaded by the Red Army on 17 September 1939 and annexed in November of that year rather than “incorporated into the USSR only after 1945,” as Puri believes.

There was indeed a referendum in Ukraine on 17 March 1991, but 71 per cent voted not “for independence,” as Puri writes, but for a reformed union of Soviet republics. It was only on 1 December of that year that a majority voted for independence, but in that case the figure was 92 per cent.

Kazakhs, meanwhile, might more than quibble with the claim that “Ukraine’s suffering was worse than in any other part of the Soviet Union” during the great famine. A larger share of Kazakhs died than of Ukrainians, although in absolute numbers Ukraine — a much larger nation — lost more.

Puri’s account, in other words, is deficient on both empirical and analytical levels. Unless readers are looking for quick soundbites, his book is best left on the shelf.

Journalist Anna Arutunyan’s Hybrid Warriors falls into the second category. Based on her years of reporting since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, it combines a deeply textured knowledge of ground-level politics with a well-theorised sense of how Putin’s regime works.

Arutunyan’s Putin is no master strategist. Nor is he an all-powerful dictator. He’s indecisive and relatively weak, driven along by his more dynamic (and often more radical) underlings. He rules “by signal” rather than by command, issuing “vague directives that could, depending on the recipient, be interpreted as commands or mere opinions.” More often than not, political entrepreneurs, both in Russia and abroad, have “projected onto the Russian president’s cryptic words everything they wanted to hear.” In reality, Russia’s strategy has been “confused, convoluted, unformed.”

The Crimean annexation was the result of improvisation. Contingency plans for the operation had been on the shelf for a while, but when they were activated the exact goal of the operation wasn’t completely clear. What transpired was the interaction of a planned and well-executed special forces operation (the famous “little green men,” unmarked, polite, silent and well equipped), local militias enraged by the revolution in Kyiv, which they saw as a coup, and local politicians.

The staged referendum, in which the vast majority of Crimean residents voted to join Russia, lacked validity in international law. But annexation nevertheless had a significant degree of popular support, with a 1996 Gallup poll showing 59 per cent support among Russians living in Crimea and 41 per cent among Crimean Ukrainians.

In a way, the Russian government caved in to pressures from below, breaking the pledge to respect Ukraine’s borders that it had made in both the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the 1997 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership with Kyiv. But while Moscow was riding a popular wave and interacting with local pro-Russian forces, it was clearly Putin’s regime that took the initiative in Crimea.

Donbas was different. Here, local initiative was key. Yes, a gang of fifty-two military veterans and second world war re-enactors trudged across the border in April 2014 and took the regional city of Slovyansk, which they would hold until the Ukrainian army pushed them out in July. True, they were led by a retired agent with the Federal Security Service, or FSB, Igor Girkin (known as “Strelkov,” or shooter), but Girkin was a freelancer at that stage.

Elsewhere, it was angry locals — a militant minority, but still locals — who were inspired by the Crimean example to take matters into their own hands. “By early May 2014,” writes Arutunyan, “miners, truck drivers, an assortment of local pensioners and shady businessmen, and an army of local and Russian adventure-seekers had set up their own pretend governments with flags, parliaments, defence ministries, militias, declarations of independence and even proto-constitutions with formal elections scheduled for later in the month.”

While their grievances were local and of long standing, these groups didn’t represent the local population. Independent opinion polls showed only 30 per cent support for secession. Also unlike Crimea, they were not guided by the Kremlin. As Arutunyan puts it, they “lacked the main thing… that they had fought for: Russia’s formal recognition and protection.”

Essentially, a militant minority — scared by the revolution that had driven president Viktor Yanukovych from office, saturated by Russian state television propaganda about “fascism” in Kyiv, and inspired by the takeover of Crimea — staged a coup and then appealed to Moscow to bail them out. But the weak dictator in the Kremlin refused. By the end of April 2014, the Kremlin had decided not to send troops to the Ukrainian mainland.

We don’t know why this decision was made, but it’s worth remembering that the European Union had suspended preparations for a G8 summit in Sochi on 3 March 2014, cancelled bilateral talks with Russia on 6 March, and begun imposing sanctions against Russian officials and companies on 17 March, 20 March and 15 April. Europe also threatened “broader economic and trade sanctions” should Russia further escalate its aggression against Ukraine.

These EU measures were synchronised with a set of executive orders by US president Barack Obama on 6, 17 and 20 March, which added sanctions against individuals in Russia’s elite. The timing suggests that the Kremlin retreated from exposed positions because it found the likely cost of escalation prohibitive.

Sanctions were indeed one of three reasons Putin changed his mind, according to Arutunyan. He also recognised that, in contrast to Crimea, Russia would have to contend with military action by Kyiv, which had announced its “anti-terrorist operation” on 15 April. And he understood that, wishful thinking aside, local support for the insurgents in Donbas was nowhere near as widespread as in Crimea.

But the tough EU and US response had a contradictory result:

Putin felt he was in a bind. Crimea had demonstrated that the Kremlin and its army was perfectly capable of decisive action — of securing an entire peninsula and enabling a parliament to vote to join Russia — swiftly and secretly, with the help of the local population. However, in the Donbas the risks were higher, the opposition greater and the support weaker. If he launched a full-blown military intervention, he would trigger a tougher Western response and quite possibly find himself trying to prop up a regime with no real constituency. Yet if he backed away entirely, he would show weakness to the Americans and to his own nationalists. He could neither advance nor abandon the Donbas project.

Thus, Russia continued to be involved in Donbas. By July 2014 the FSB and military intelligence were competing to command the Donbas insurgents in an attempt “to demonstrate their own value to the Kremlin.”

The FSB in particular became deeply embroiled in the Donbas mess. Its assessment that the revolution against Yanukovych was a CIA-inspired plot rather than a popular uprising had contributed to the decision to annex Crimea. Now it had “300 men in Donbas,” as one FSB major told Arutunyan, and was awaiting orders from Moscow. “Putin — give us orders!” they demanded. “We need just one day and Ukraine will be ours.”

The weak dictator was being bum-steered by his most devoted underlings. But he was resisting their push without being in a position to call back the FSB, which he had once led and which was full of his old comrades from KGB times. “His very power as president rested on their loyalty to him — and thus on his loyalty to them,” writes Arutunyan.

The support for the Donbas adventure went far beyond the FSB. To put a stop to it would have required a veritable purge of the power apparatus. Thus, the strange limbo in which the situation remained. Neither willing to escalate nor able to reverse, the Kremlin began imposing control over the separatist movement and its self-proclaimed “governments.”

Eventually, however, Putin did send troops. He had been hitching his political wagon increasingly to the ultra-nationalist right since 2012, when massive demonstrations against his return to the presidency had alienated him decisively from the political middle (to say nothing of the left). His new right-wing constituency supported the political freelancers in Donbas, so when Kyiv launched a successful operation to take Donbas back from the putschists, his new allies convinced him that it was in Russia’s interest to resist.

Russian troops, regular ones this time, were fighting in Ukraine by August 2014. This “covert Russian invasion of mainland Ukraine” halted the Ukrainian army’s attempt to re-establish control of Ukrainian territory. It was regular Russian troops that turned the Donbas insurgency into a frozen conflict; it was regular Russian troops that won the battle of Debaltseve in February 2015. Then the frontlines froze.

Once again, according to Arutunyan, no grand Russian strategy existed. Events were driven not by geopolitics but by the balance of power within the Russian dictatorship.

The right wing of politics, on which Putin’s regime increasingly relied, could only be contained if Ukraine could be stopped from taking back Donbas. This dynamic became self-reinforcing: the support of the nationalists, imperialists, monarchists and fascists at home required support for the Donbas rebels; the continuing existence and, as they saw it, martyrdom of the Donbas proxies propelled the domestic far right further into the mainstream. “For Putin,” writes Arutunyan, “it was paramount that these people continued viewing the West as their true enemy, and not the Kremlin itself.”

How did we get from this impasse to 24/2? Arutunyan doesn’t really know. Her account becomes much less richly textured after 2015, and in particular after 2019. Why negotiations with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president since 2019, were abandoned remains unclear. Why the decision was made to allow all-out war remains mysterious. The logic of her argument would point to some dynamic from below, some initiative by political entrepreneurs. But there is no evidence to that effect. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that the initiative came from Putin, and that it shocked even those closest to him.

Arutunyan’s explanation thus focuses on the Russian president, and his resentments and likely thought processes. The invasion, she writes, was “about one man, and his vendetta.” Earlier in the book she had dismissed such mind-reading, but what is the alternative given Putin’s centrality in Russia’s political system?

This centrality seems to have increased since 2014. The destruction of civil society, which hampered the left, might also have hampered the right. The disaster of the Donbas war, caused by freelancers, might well have made Putin more reluctant to take advice from the same or similar people. Coronavirus isolation in 2020–21 might have done the rest: Putin spent the pandemic reading history books, stewing in his resentments (about NATO expansion, about not being taken seriously), and pondering his legacy (he turned seventy this year).

Then there was Russia’s recent success in Syria, which suggested its army was top-notch. The FSB presented the Ukrainian army’s intensified training and improved equipment as a Western conspiracy to weaken and maybe destroy Russia. Yet the West also seemed weak. Maybe now was the time to solve this problem once and for all? Whatever the reasons, in the end it was Putin who pulled the trigger on 24/2.

What are the implications of Arutunyan’s analysis for policymakers confronting an aggressive Russia? She is unsure herself. “[I] gave up my futile attempts to come up with some sort of possible solution to this mess,” she writes in frustration. And she’s right: if the invasion was the result “of a Kremlin fumbling in the dark, staggering to respond to a multitude of real and perceived threats and opportunities, and proving itself largely incapable of distinguishing one from the other,” and if 24/2 was the result of an increasingly isolated and erratic dictator steaming in his own resentments and historical analogies, then rational outside action is difficult.

Arutunyan’s description of the complexity of the political environment in which Putin functions, moreover, serves to remind outsiders of how little influence their actions have on the Kremlin. This might chasten both the critics of NATO, who overestimate how much Putin was swayed by the perceived aggression of “the West,” and the supporters of sanctions against Russia, which Arutunyan’s account makes clear were just one factor, and mostly marginal, in Putin’s calculus.

What is left? For the time being, all we can do is try to support Ukraine as best as we can to give it a chance to survive and win this war. And when Ukraine is ready to negotiate with Russia, we should support this process with as much humility as we can. A lot of bitterness exists on both sides of the frontlines now, and it won’t go away anytime soon. If we take into account not just the war itself but also the rebuilding effort, we are talking about a long haul indeed.

Stamina will thus be required at a time when inflation and the climate crisis also call for sustained government attention.

Russia, meanwhile, won’t be defeated in the way Germany or Iraq were. Putin’s troops might eventually be pushed out of much or all of Ukraine’s territory, but nobody in their right mind will want to go further and march on Moscow. The regime might thus survive, more resentful than ever. Or it might be replaced by another, probably no less resentful or autocratic. In any case, Russia could require containment for some time to come. Here, too, stamina will be necessary — and a significant amount of humility about what can be achieved.

All things come to an end eventually. And maybe Arutunyan is right when she says that Russia’s younger generation will in time provide more rational leadership for this large, rich and beautiful country. The rising generation is “muzzled” but “watching, in horror” while “learning from the mistakes of this dying regime,” she writes. A “new Russia, with its own, new national identity, will eventually emerge.” Let’s hope she is right. •

Samir Puri responds to Mark Edele’s review

Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine: Invasion Amidst the Ashes of Empires
By Samir Puri | Biteback | $39.99 | 304 pages

Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine
By Anna Arutunyan | Hurst & Company | $44.99 | 352 pages

The post “It’s NATO, stupid!” appeared first on Inside Story.

But if its perspective is accepted as the left’s view, it will be a disaster for progressive democrats and the idea of socialism. The call is profoundly misconceived, with respect to both Ukraine and Taiwan, especially Ukraine, and also in the general political analysis it offers.

I say this with regret. One of the main drafters is American law professor Richard Falk, a comrade from the struggle against the US war in Vietnam. His outstanding work helped lay the basis for the development of modern international law and human rights. I’ve worked with and admire two of the lead signatories.* So far there are thirty-eight of them, including Jeremy Corbyn.

“All Who Care” says wise things, including making a call for “a massive global awakening of human wisdom and energy.” The writers explain: “Important as governments and international institutions are, the initiative for a coherent response to the challenges we face lies largely with the people, with civil society.”

But it is primarily an intervention in conflicts of the moment, and it is in this respect that it needs to be judged.

On Ukraine, a call for peace that sets out to be principled should state that any threat to use nuclear weapons is an outrage. It does not. It must state that invading other countries is wrong. It does not. It was wrong for the United States in Iraq, it is wrong for Israel in Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza, and it must now be reversed in Ukraine.

“All Who Care” demands that Ukraine be “neutral.” If its neutrality were guaranteed by military commitments from outside to safeguard the country’s independence in a way that satisfied the government in Kyiv and did not deprive it of weapons for self-defence, then this would be reasonable. Given the risk of a world war, those outside Ukraine have a right to say that it cannot become a base that might be used to threaten Russia, or any other neighbouring country.

But in any such call, tone and attitude are of vital importance: it has to be said respectfully as a request to the Ukrainian people. It is arrogant, and even a touch imperial, to demand the country’s neutrality without also making clear that this does not take away Ukraine’s democratic right to decide what economic and social trajectory it aspires to. Neutrality should not prevent Ukraine from joining the European Union if it so chooses (something even Putin’s Russia seems to have accepted). This, too, needs to be said.

The approach to Ukraine taken by “All Who Care” demands the “phased withdrawal of Russian military forces” and “an end to the delivery of lethal military aid to Ukraine.” Why should the withdrawal be “phased” but not the end of military aid?

The document suggests that the underlying cause of the conflict is “the cynical use of the Ukraine war by great powers intent on pursuing their geopolitical ambitions.” But it was the uncynical resistance of Ukrainians themselves, much to the surprise of both Washington and the Kremlin, that shaped the war. “All Who Care” disregards Ukrainian agency and the commitment of a huge majority of Ukrainians to their country’s integrity and independence. Instead, it frames Ukraine as being manipulated by the United States. This echoes Vladimir Putin’s perspective.

What is the thinking that leads the authors and signatories to their conclusion? They sum it up in four short paragraphs which need to be quoted in full:

More troubling still is the toxic relationship between the United States on the one hand and China and Russia on the other. Here lies the key to both conflicts.

What we are seeing is the culmination of decades of gross mismanagement of global security. The United States has been unwilling to accept, let alone adapt to, the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. It remains unwilling to break with outdated notions of global dominance — a legacy of the Cold War and the triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A global power shift is taking place. The West-centric world, in which first Europe and then the United States held sway, is giving way to a multi-centric, multi-civilisational world in which other centres of power and influence are demanding to be heard.

Failure to accept this new reality spells immense danger. A new Cold War is now in full swing, which can at any moment mutate into a hot war. In the words of UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”

But it is the authors and signatories who are unwilling to face up to new realities of the nature of the regimes now challenging the United States, the autonomy of the demands for democracy, especially those led by women, and the way these are responses to the fact of America’s irreversibly diminished role, which Washington is certainly aware of.

Historically, they are right: we are caught in the legacy of decades of gross behaviour by the US governing elite. But its ambition failed more than a decade ago. This in turn gave birth to monsters even worse than US hegemony. The problem the world faces is not that the United States has failed to relinquish “outdated notions of global dominance,” it is the struggle over how and by whom its dominance will be replaced.

The United States is not innocent nor a mere bystander in this process. Under Joe Biden it is striving to re-establish global “leadership.” But it is doing it from a position of weakness. A recent example of how emaciated US power has become is the behaviour of what historically was its client state, Saudi Arabia. Despite being courted by a humiliating personal visit from the US president, who wanted their help against high energy prices, the Saudis have cut back production to ensure the opposite.

This is a direct help to Putin as it keeps the price of oil high, as well as being an intervention in the American midterm elections designed to aid Donald Trump and his family by making Biden unpopular.

How did we get to a situation where Washington is so weakened?

A NEW WORLD: MULTI-CENTRED AND MORE UNEQUAL

In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, president George H.W. Bush celebrated US “primacy” and boasted that no other country need “dread” its influence. In fact, the United States exercised its post–cold war supremacy with catastrophic stupidity and greed. Across the Global South, the wealth extraction of colonialism was replaced with the wealth extraction of the “Washington consensus.”

In the West itself, the working and middle classes saw their incomes flatline as the financial system transferred riches upwards, generating unparalleled inequality. Russia, in particular, was treated to the most brutal “shock therapy” and its oligarchs were encouraged to loot the country, with the West providing safe havens for their theft. Ordinary Russians suffered a deep, humiliating loss of income and livelihood.

The rise and nature of Putin are rooted in the rage this engendered. Only China had the sense and political means to ensure its economy was governed rather than handed over to the “freedom” of Wall Street. It grew exponentially, while its low wages were instrumentalised to break and impoverish the working classes in developed countries.

The rise of China and its admission into the World Trade Organization in December 2001 birthed a genuine economic rival to the United States. Meanwhile, the US used the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to occupy Afghanistan and later to invade Iraq, to supervise the world’s second-largest oil deposits and almost encircle Iran. In this way, the world would understand that the United States’ unprecedented economic hegemony would be underwritten by an unparalleled military supremacy.

That was then. Unrivalled hubris led to catastrophic humiliation. Five years after the “shock and awe” of its assault on Baghdad, as it faced strategic defeat in the deserts and mountains on the other side of the globe, the great financial crash of 2008 terminated US primacy. It also put an end to the justification of its “neoliberal” economics — the claim that markets know best. Which in turn undermined the claim that voters are powerless, and the political fatalism essential to its ideological success.

With Washington’s global dominance shattered, the world became irreversibly “multi-centred,” as well as even more unequal. Because the left had been so systematically marginalised, it was the right that tolled the bell. Trump gained the leadership of the Republican Party by denouncing the Iraq invasion as “a big fat mistake” that cost the US$2 trillion and benefited Iran, and excoriated the globalists who had sold out American business and workers. He specifically abjured the ideology, as well as the costs, of US global leadership. He praised Russia, refused to condemn Lukashenko’s crushing of democracy in Belarus and admired China’s Xi Jinping for his strength.

In his last speech to the United Nations (unless he is re-elected, that is) he advocated a gangster’s division of the world. He told his fellow leaders: “I have rejected the failed approaches of the past. I am proudly putting America first, just as you should be putting your countries first. That’s OK. That’s what you should be doing.”

In this way, the US “accepted and adapted” to the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. Only it did so by proclaiming a pluralist modern fascism, built on corruption and surveillance, and expressed in the language of The Godfather. The fact that the Biden administration seeks to reverse this while also terminating US efforts at “regime change” in Afghanistan is welcome.

Today, the most pressing danger that humanity faces is the return to the White House of Trump or a Trump clone, who would rig the US system permanently. This is of world importance because once joined by the economic and military weight of a far-right America, the global network of authoritarian regimes would enjoy irreversible domination for at least a generation. Xi, Putin and Trump, together with India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, Iran’s Ali Khamenei and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, would ensure that more nations joined them in Trump’s mobster international.

REJECTING THE RIGHT: UKRAINE ON THE FRONT LINE

The front line of resistance to such an outcome is, tragically, Ukraine. It did not ask for this role, but it is not just fighting for itself. Our democratic future, too, is at stake in its battle. To defeat Trumpism outside the United States as well as inside, we have to defy and frustrate Putin.

Of course, politically, this is not a clash between socialism and capitalism, but between capitalist democracies with some regard to the rule of law, freedom of speech and an open politics on the one hand, and lawless, oppressive capitalism on the other.

In this situation, the only way forward for the left, after decades of defeat, is through unconditional support for more rule-based democracy based on universal principles. Without this there is no hope for the democracy of feminism, of racial justice, of a sustainable environment, of a fair economy, of human rights, of participation, pluralism, deliberation and national self-determination. Or, to borrow from the inspiring slogan of the protests in Iran, “Women, life and freedom.”

This also means that the people of Crimea have the right to decide for themselves whether to be part of Ukraine or Russia, and the people of Taiwan must be free to decide for themselves if they want to be ruled from Beijing.

Some fear a Western victory in Ukraine would take us back thirty years to 1992, with Francis Fukuyama celebrating the triumph of liberalism over history all over again. But the younger generations are not going to be easily persuaded into passivity or believing that “the market knows best.” The United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan and can be prevented from ever again engaging in “regime change.” China is now its economic equal and this cannot be undone. The process in Ukraine is not one of collapse, as in eastern Europe, but the result of decades of effort to slough off the corruptions of Stalinism. Nor are Ukrainians alone. From Iran to Chile the genie of popular agency has shattered the bottle of neoliberal fatalism.

The authors and signatories of “All Who Care” are right to sound the alarm in one important respect. These are very dangerous times that demand wisdom, not glorification or the triumphalism that feeds arms industries.

Our larger aim should be to welcome the emergence of democracy in Russia — maybe the last thing that the Western security establishment actually desires.

The alternative is rule by a mobsters international, which would ensure that the world will fry. It is as important as that. •

* Of the thirty-eight initial signatories, Victoria Brittain, a pioneering editor of coverage of the Global South, is someone I was proud openDemocracy published. I worked with Yanis Varoufakis when I helped a little with the draft of the original DiEM 25 call for democracy in Europe (which we discussed together with the much-missed Rosemary Bechler).

This article first appeared in openDemocracy.

The post A betrayal of Ukraine and the left appeared first on Inside Story.

The battle for Ukraine is part of a larger conflict over empire and decolonisation that reaches back to the period 1914–22, broke open again in 1989–91, and has simmered since the Soviet Union split into fifteen successor states in 1991. What we are witnessing, in effect, is one battle in one theatre of a potentially much more regional conflict made up of the (civil) wars of the Soviet succession. They have combined domestic and international struggles over independence and empire with contests between dictatorship and democracy.

Ukraine is only one theatre of these conflicts. In Belarus, mass protests against the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in 2020–21 were subdued with utter brutality. Russian support for the Belarusian dictator kept his regime going despite crippling sanctions, effectively turning him into a client of Moscow.

While the violence in Belarus was administered by domestic forces, similar anti-regime protests in Kazakhstan in January prompted the intervention of Russian, Belarusian, Armenian, Tajik and Kyrgyz troops to help prop up the government. Most recently, the conflict over landlocked Nagorno-Karabakh, in the South Caucasus, has turned from a frozen conflict between Russian-backed Armenia and Turkish-supported Azerbaijan into a shooting war after Azerbaijan, exploiting Russia’s distraction elsewhere, attacked Armenian positions on 12 September. Two days later, fighting broke out further east as well, at the volatile central Asian border between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

What all of these conflicts have in common is that they are rooted in unresolved problems stemming from the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1991.

Wars and civil wars are not unusual when empires break apart: boundaries between possible successors are unclear, loyalties fragile, legitimacies tenuous. When the Romanov empire imploded in 1917–18, the horrible fighting lasted until early 1920 in some regions, into early 1921 in others, and until 1923 in central Asia. The result, however, was a re-establishment of a new empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Only Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland remained independent, at least until the second world war. Then the three Baltic states were annexed, Poland made a satellite and Finland forced into neutrality.

What is unique about the current conflicts of the Soviet succession is that they took so long to gestate. The breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1989–91 was largely peaceful. This point can be overstressed: there was violence in Georgia in 1989 and in Lithuania in 1991, wars for and against independence in South Ossetia in 1991–92, Transnistria in 1992 and Abkhazia in 1992–93, a civil war in Tajikistan and a war-turned-frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh from 1992, and two wars to prevent Chechnya’s breaking away from Russia in 1994–96 and 1999–2000. Nevertheless, the Soviet lands were largely spared the horrors of the wars of the Yugoslav succession nearby.

One reason for this relative lack of violence was that the Soviet Union broke apart not through acrimony but from exhaustion. Anti-imperial feelings were rife not only in the non-Russian periphery of the empire, but also in the Russian heartland. Many thought their economic woes were caused by the drain the empire imposed on the state’s coffers. Better to let the non-Russians go and build a Russian national homeland.

Borders, too, were relatively well defined, with the Soviet Union’s republics providing ready-made territories for successor regimes. Again, there were exceptions (South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria) but the boundaries of Soviet times generally held firm, at least until recently.

The imperial centre, Russia, experienced not only decolonisation at the periphery but also state breakdown domestically. The years after 1991 saw economic collapse accompanied by a disintegration of the state’s monopoly over the use of violence on its territory.

This was not a state capable of maintaining empire, and that only began to change with Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power from 1999. At the heart of the current president’s longstanding popularity has been his ability to rebuild the state, coupled with his good luck when rising oil prices allowed economic growth to resume.

What is easily forgotten, however, is that this was an imperial presidency from the get-go. Putin’s first major political success was the brutal victory in the second Chechen war of 1999–2000, which prevented a further decolonisation of Russia and kept a prominent non-Russian region within Moscow’s control.

The victory in Chechnya was popular across the political spectrum. I remember discussions with otherwise thoroughly liberal Russian intellectuals who insisted that this was a necessary war: if Chechnya went, who would be next? Soon, nothing might be left of Russia beyond the heartland around Moscow, from where the old empire had grown since the fourteenth century.

The Chechen war provided a model for how to leverage imperial feelings for political gain. When the petro-dollar-driven economic recovery began to stutter, when internal opposition continued to challenge his regime, however ineffectually, and when neighbouring Ukraine showed that an East Slav nation could mount repeated revolutions against kleptocrats and Russian-aligned would-be dictators, Putin mobilised the imperial undercurrent of his regime.

The proxy war in Donbas and the 2014 annexation of Crimea seemed to provide a model for how this would work: no effective resistance would be encountered; Europe and the United States would wring their hands and impose minor sanctions but do nothing of substance. An alliance of pacifists, Russophiles and “realists” could be counted on to pressure Ukraine to submit to the invader; Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas would mute its response. The government in Kyiv would run away and Russia would annex more of Ukraine and make the rest a vassal state similar to neighbouring Belarus. Putin would enter the history books as saviour of Russia’s greatness.

This strategy failed miserably. The Russian invasion got quickly bogged down by incompetence, lack of training and poorly maintained equipment. Ukraine’s government stood firm and its army fought intelligently and effectively, supported by a surprisingly united NATO and European Union.

After Ukraine had won the battle of Kyiv, Russia focused on Donbas as well as the south of Ukraine, where it could leverage shorter supply lines. Progress was slow and grinding, however, relying largely on massive artillery bombardments of Ukrainian positions. While the battle for Donbas rumbled on, Russia was unable to complete the conquest of Ukraine’s coastline, where success had initially been swiftest.

Now the tide of war has turned. If Europe, the United States, Australia and other democracies continue to support Ukraine, chances are that it will eventually liberate the rest of its territory, quite possibly including Crimea. This outcome is far from guaranteed, but it looks much more realistic now than in the dark days of February and March.

Where does this military setback leave Russia? The wager on empire has clearly failed. With Russia weakened, the other theatres in the wars of the Soviet succession might well flare up again, further threatening Russia’s claim of hegemony over the region. We are already seeing this in the recent fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia as well as the Tajik–Kyrgyz border war. In Belarus, the opposition is subdued but not eliminated. It might rear its head again, threatening one of Russia’s client regimes in the west.

As far as Ukraine is concerned, Putin could finally declare his “special military operation” an actual war, and thus invoke conscription to replenish his by now anaemic forces. This is a course of action that many on the hard right as well as the Communists support. There is a reason, however, why Putin has thus far avoided such a move: it would be deeply unpopular with men of draft age and their families.

Even if it were mobilised, it isn’t clear that an army of poorly trained conscripts could make a difference now that the effects of sanctions are starting to limit Russia’s ability to resupply its army. Short of a desperate move like a nuclear strike, Putin has few good options at present. He has missed his opportunity to pull out of Ukraine in a face-saving manner. The military setbacks have weakened him both domestically and internationally.

What is far from clear is whether this weakening will translate into regime change. A popular revolution following the Ukrainian examples of 2004–05 and 2013–14 seems unlikely, although not altogether impossible. Belarus in 2020–21 has shown that even mass protests can be repressed if army and police remain loyal. And Putin’s dictatorship has toughened up dramatically since the invasion of Ukraine in February.

If the agents of organised violence remain behind him, Putin can politically survive the military catastrophe. But whether he will pull his troops out now he has clearly lost is another matter. He is more likely to try to stay the course and defend the territory he still controls. Thus Ukraine will continue to need outside support — including supplies of heavy weapons — to win this crucial part of the delayed wars of the Soviet succession. •

The post The long war of Soviet succession appeared first on Inside Story.

Commentators generally agree a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would involve the following elements, alone or in combination:

• a decapitation strike, using special forces to kill or capture the Taiwanese leadership and install a Beijing-aligned government

• a seaborne invasion, with a large force crossing the Taiwan Strait

• an extensive bombing campaign using aircraft and missiles

• a blockade of the Strait to cut off Taiwan’s imports and exports.

All of these approaches have been tried by Russia, under highly favourable conditions, since it attacked Ukraine. All have failed.

In the lead-up to the 24 February invasion, the Russians were able to assemble large forces on Ukraine’s borders while maintaining ambiguity about their intentions. For fear of inflaming the situation, Ukraine could do little to prepare, and its allies provided little or nothing in the way of lethal military aid.

These conditions were ideal for Russia’s opening move. A rapid assault on Kyiv was planned to begin with the takeover of Hostomel Airport by elite airborne troops, who would be followed in by a much larger airborne force. Things didn’t go to plan: the assault force was driven off with heavy casualties and the main force turned back. By the time Russian land forces reached Hostomel, the chance of a surprise attack was lost.

Even if the strike had not been a military failure, the political calculation on which it was based turned out to be absolutely wrong. Far from welcoming Russian invaders as liberators, Ukrainians fought back furiously. Even in Russian-speaking cities like Kharkiv, Putin found little or no support.

A decapitation strike against Taiwan would face immensely greater difficulties. There would be no possibility of surprise. Taiwan’s air defences have been built up over decades. Reunification has essentially zero support among Taiwanese. And even if the current leadership could somehow be eliminated, local replacements would be equally or more hostile.

The most commonly discussed scenario for forcible reunification is a seaborne invasion. Even before the Ukraine war this idea seemed far-fetched, as a comparison with the Normandy landings in 1944 shows. The Allies had complete air superiority, the narrow English Channel to cross, a wide choice of poorly defended landing sites and a numerical superiority of five to one. The Germans didn’t detect the attack until landing craft were within reach of shore. Even so, the Allies fell far short of their Day 1 objectives.

A Chinese invasion fleet, by contrast, would have to cross the 170 kilometre Taiwan Strait with no chance of avoiding detection, then land on one of a handful of well-protected beaches and face numerically superior defenders.

The Ukraine war drives the lesson home. Before the invasion, Russia’s Black Sea fleet was widely seen as a major strategic asset. When the initial attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv failed, a seaborne attack on Odessa was generally anticipated. Ukraine had only a handful of domestically produced anti-ship missiles, and its own navy had been wiped out on the first day of the war. Russia was in complete command of the sea.

Yet the attack never took place. The sinking of the Moskva in April by a Ukrainian Neptune missile proved that the Russians had been right to hold back. Russian naval forces were inadequate even to defend the famous Snake Island, kilometres from Ukrainian mainland. With Ukraine’s acquisition of increasing numbers of modern missiles, most of the fleet has been withdrawn entirely to the relative safety of Novorossiysk on the eastern shore of the Black Sea.

Ukraine repelled the Black Sea fleet with a handful of missiles. Taiwan has hundreds, including American-made Harpoons and domestically produced missiles easily capable of hitting Chinese ships before they leave port. Many are truck-mounted and effectively impossible to destroy even with an intensive air campaign.

All the evidence suggests that China understands this. While it is politically necessary for the government in Beijing to maintain that it has the capacity to reunify China by force, the announced plan for doing so is outlandish. It involves securing landing sites with a handful of craft then sending in the main force on lightly modified civilian ferries. No sensible person could take such a plan seriously.

Much the same points can be made about the idea of an extended bombing campaign. Bombing an enemy into submission has been tried many times since its initial success at Guernica in 1937 and has almost invariably failed.

Moreover, Russia’s massive air force has proved incapable of overcoming Ukrainian air defences, or even driving the much smaller Ukraine air force from the skies. With the exception of the mythical “ghost of Kyiv,” air-to-air combat has been almost non-existent, and crewed aircraft have played at most a marginal role. It is highly unlikely that the Chinese air force, operating under far less favourable conditions, could do any better against Taiwan.

Finally, there is the possibility of a blockade. Like the other options for an assault on Taiwan, this idea has always been problematic. It would be easy enough to close the South China Sea to shipping, but that would be more damaging to China than Taiwan, which could use air transport or develop ports on its eastern coast.

By contrast, Russia’s strategy of blocking Ukrainian exports through the Black Sea looked relatively easy, and for a while it seemed to work. But a combination of military failures (notably the loss of Snake Island) and global condemnation forced it to abandon the idea. The resumption of Ukrainian grain exports (billed as a “goodwill gesture”) has reversed one of the few successes of Russia’s war.

Taiwan is clearly aware of this, and has shifted its focus  from traditional air and naval warfare to a defensive “hedgehog” strategy based primarily on anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile warfare. (Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute has suggested a similar “echidna” strategy for Australia.)

If an invasion of Taiwan is militarily impossible, why is it continually discussed? The answer is that it is in the interests of all the major parties to pretend that an invasion is a real possibility. The Chinese government can’t concede that it lacks the capacity to unify the country by force. The Taiwanese government has every reason to present itself as being threatened by China. And the US military, particularly the navy, has no incentive to downplay threats that demand high levels of defence expenditure.

This continued focus on conflict over Taiwan, and more generally in the South China Sea, increases the risk of accidental escalation, possibly even involving nuclear weapons. Moreover, it distracts attention from arguably more serious threats, most notably the rise of North Korea as a rogue nuclear power under effective Chinese protection. It also undermines possibilities for cooperation, particularly in relation to climate change.

A realistic Western approach to China would accept that it is a powerful adversary in a number of strategic dimensions but a necessary partner in others. The same realism is needed on the Chinese side. Focusing on the chimerical idea of an invasion of Taiwan is counterproductive on both sides.

The post Why an invasion of Taiwan would fail appeared first on Inside Story.

Given that the person generally seen as Putin’s main opponent, Alexei Navalny, is in a labour camp and unable to campaign, United Russia’s malaise might seem surprising. Why is the perceived threat to Putin’s regime so great when the leading opposition figure remains behind bars? In this well-researched, engagingly written book, political scientists Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet and Ben Noble provide some of the answers.

Navalny came to the attention of many in the West after he was poisoned while travelling in Siberia in August last year. He was rushed to Germany for treatment and recuperation, and returned to Russia in January, only to be arrested and sentenced to two years and eight months in a penal colony. All the while, he blamed his poisoning on officials acting for Putin, a charge taken up broadly in the Western media.

Navalny, who was born in 1976, first became known within Russia as an anti-corruption campaigner. Using publicly available material, he investigated corruption among leading government officials and leading companies, and used his blog to publicise his findings. He trod on enough powerful toes for a criminal case to be launched against him in 2011, and was ultimately convicted of embezzlement and given a suspended sentence. One of the conditions of the suspension was that he report to the police on a regular basis, and it was his failure to do this while in hospital in Germany that was the official reason for his arrest in January this year.

Navalny wasn’t daunted by the 2011 verdict. The following year he established the Anti-Corruption Foundation, or FBK, which enabled him to continue his anti-corruption work with more resources, principally provided by sympathetic business figures and small donors. The FBK’s high point came with the release of two Navalny videos, “Don’t Call Him Dimon” (2017) and, just after his arrest, “Putin’s Palace” (2021).

“Don’t Call Him Dimon” alleged that then prime minister Dmitry Medvedev owned a string of luxurious homes, yachts, cars and vineyards, all redolent of a lifestyle that couldn’t have been sustained on a prime ministerial salary. “Putin’s Palace,” published, like the first, on YouTube, claimed that Putin owns an enormous mansion on the Black Sea coast complete with underground ice hockey rink, helipads, a disco, a casino, an amphitheatre, substantial grounds, and a private tunnel to the beach. Medvedev and Putin denied the allegations, and a powerful businessman claimed the Black Sea complex belonged to him.

Navalny’s anti-corruption activities seem to have radicalised him. He joined the liberal political party Yabloko in 2000, but within a few years quit and began flirting with Russian nationalism. But neither liberal politics nor nationalist sentiment seemed to promise the sort of change he sought.

It was the 2011–12 street protests against Putin’s proposed return to the presidency, and the electoral abuses evident in the 2011 Duma election that catapulted Navalny into mainstream politics. He became one of the public faces of demonstrations formally entitled “For Fair Elections” but characterised by posters calling for “Russia without Putin.”

Those posters crystallised the position towards which Navalny had been moving. Putin’s regime, he now believed, needed to be replaced with one more attuned to the needs and desires of the populace. The problem was how to bring this about.

Navalny’s attempts to participate in the electoral process proved a dead end. He was permitted to run in the Moscow mayoral elections in 2013, receiving 27.2 per cent of the vote according to official figures. While this was a creditable performance given the resources available to the incumbent, Sergei Sobyanin, it didn’t prevent the latter from winning the election in the first round and avoiding a run-off. Another setback came in the lead-up to the 2016 Duma election, when a new alliance of opposition forces broke down.

In both cases, Navalny had urged a vote for anyone but the United Russia candidate. With this approach seemingly ineffective, he adopted a new strategy in the lead-up to the 2018 presidential election.

After announcing he would stand for president, Navalny spent part of 2017 criss-crossing the country establishing campaign offices in the regions. As Dollbaum, Lallouet and Noble explain, he used protests to increase his name recognition, create a national network and put his representatives in contact with potential supporters. This new, national political machine was designed to sustain his candidacy.

When it came time to formally register, though, Navalny’s application was rejected because he still had the suspended criminal sentence hanging over him. Undeterred, he oversaw his network’s involvement in the presidential poll and a series of municipal elections, fostering a form of tactical voting called “smart voting.” In contrast to the earlier anyone-but-the-ruling-party tactic, the local Navalny machine identified the candidate most likely to defeat the United Russia candidate and advised voters to cast their ballot accordingly. Electoral support for individual opposition candidates rose, but the overall effect was modest.

This is how matters stood when Navalny was arrested in January this year. Following the arrest, though, matters took a distinct turn for the worse. Many of his supporters, including those who staffed his organisation, were arrested the following month, with a large number sentenced to short prison terms. And in April the FBK and Navalny’s network in the regions were officially labelled “extremist organisations,” rendering their leaders and employees vulnerable to imprisonment (of ten years and six years respectively), and laying their donors open to charges as well. The Navalny organisation collapsed.

In June this year, support for Navalny and his activities stood at only 8 per cent (with 67 per cent disapproving), far below Putin’s rating of 57 per cent support just last month. Navalny’s approval was higher among the younger age groups, but voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine tend to vote at a lower rate than older groups in Russian elections.

Why the subdued support? Many people object to Navalny on the basis of positions he adopted in the past. Racist comments he made around 2007, for example, keep being brought up in the press, and tend to alienate the liberal constituency to which he needs to appeal. The over-centralised nature of his machine, about which many of its local organisers complain, doesn’t sit easily with the democratic aspirations of many of his followers. And Navalny’s vagueness about many aspects of policy — something Dollbaum, Lallouet and Noble attribute to his desire to maximise support — has caused some to question what he really stands for.

As the authors argue, though, Navalny is important less for who he is than for what he represents. Discontent is rising in Russian society. The nationalist surge of enthusiasm following the reincorporation of Crimea into Russia in 2014 has ebbed. Economic difficulties stemming from a lack of reforms, the impact of external sanctions and the international downturn have placed pressure on living standards. Covid-19 has revealed tensions in Russia as it has elsewhere. The crackdown on dissent and the closing of the space for civic activity, reflected clearly in the 2012 “foreign agents” legislation and increased repression of demonstrators, concern some people, as do controls on the internet and other channels of information.

Lifting the retirement age and allowing visa-free entry to workers from Central Asia are unpopular among former Putin supporters, while policies like a hike in the VAT (Russia’s GST) have been generally unpopular. And some Russians share an overriding feeling that it is time for change: Putin has been in office since 1999, and last year’s constitutional amendments mean he can stay on as president until 2036 (subject to electoral victories).

But the regime retains significant strengths. It faces a weak and divided opposition with no key figure able to fashion its diverse parts into a viable political weapon. The electoral system favours parties with extensive national machines, and United Russia remains the best placed in this regard. New rules giving a vote to Russians in the separatist-dominated parts of eastern Ukraine will favour the pro-Putin party, while the low turnouts elsewhere (as predicted by the opinion polls) should also help. Stretching the election over three days and enabling online voting will maximise the opportunity for fraud while hampering observers’ ability to see it.

In all of these ways the regime has the capacity to blunt a potential challenge. But that doesn’t mean it is safe. United Russia’s drop in support means the gap between the number of votes it receives and the number needed to get the desired two-thirds majority could be quite large. When the gap has been smaller, it has been bridged by fraud, but it was fraud of this kind that sparked the protests of 2011–12, just as it prompted the widespread public demonstrations in neighbouring Belarus following its presidential poll last year.

The Russian authorities don’t want a repeat of that kind of unrest, hence the extraordinary efforts devoted to persuading the regime’s supporters to go to the polls. The danger for Putin is that widespread protests could further delegitimise the regime in the eyes of sections of the populace, with potential implications for the 2024 election. By then, Navalny should be free.

The problems at the heart of the regime won’t go away, and unless policies are developed to make the economy more efficient and productive and the political system more open, the opposition is likely to pose a greater threat by 2024. It remains to be seen whether Navalny is still politically relevant then, but anyone wanting to understand him as a political figure should read this book. •

The post Putin’s nemesis? appeared first on Inside Story.

After some initial cold war amnesia, historians in the English-speaking world have, by and large, accepted that the war in Europe was won by the Red Army. Most also agree that, on balance, this was a good outcome. While Stalin’s totalitarianism would victimise millions, it was the lesser evil. And until the Western allies developed significant amphibious capability relatively late in the war, there simply was no alternative: only the Soviets could fight Hitler on the continent.

Recently, however, a new generation of English-language historians have returned to the tune that it was Private Ryan and his friends, or the valiant boys of Bomber Command, who won the war. Stalin and his soldiers, at best, were conduits for American military aid (via Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease scheme).

Now, Sean McMeekin has joined this new assault on the Soviet war record. Born in 1974, he has taken great delight in publishing books designed to increase the blood pressure of historians of an older generation. His biggest coups were a tome about the first world war that claimed, in the words of one reviewer, that Russia was “responsible for everything from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand to the Armenian genocide,” and a history of the Russian Revolution that argued Lenin’s victory showed what happens if you let liberals run a country. Hilariously, it also warned darkly of the new socialism of a Bernie Sanders or a Thomas Piketty.

Stalin’s War might well lead to heart attacks among historians of the second world war. In short, this fast-paced and well-written account argues that the historiography is too obsessed with Hitler, has underestimated the importance of Lend-Lease to the Soviet war effort, and has failed to see that the Soviet dictator was at least as bad as his German colleague. British and US support for the Soviet Union was caused by the leaders’ irrational “Stalinophilia,” not by a realistic assessment of the balance of forces. The Soviets only won because of Western military aid.

Such judgements are based on a caricatured picture of the literature on this war. Neither the authoritative three-volume Cambridge History of the Second World War (2015), nor Evan Mawdsley’s masterful short introduction (2009), for example, apologise for Stalin or concentrate on Hitler. The role of Lend-Lease has been discussed at length, and with significant nuance, including by scholars McMeekin quotes. And historians like Robert Gellately have written damning accounts of Stalin’s goals in war and cold war, which, predictably, are passed over by McMeekin. Don’t let bibliographical research get in the way of a good story.

If McMeekin is cavalier with historians who came before him, he’s often tendentious when it comes to using primary sources. To give one example: the speech of Stalin to the graduates of the Red Army military academies on 5 May 1941 that starts the book, which was published in 1998 in a collection famous among historians. This book is not “out of print today and difficult to find,” as McMeekin claims, but freely available on the internet. To cite the relevant section of the source in full:

Major-general of the tank forces is speaking. He proposes a toast to the peaceful Stalinist foreign policy.

Comrade Stalin: Allow me a correction. The peaceful policy ensured peace for our country. A peaceful policy is a good thing. For the time being, we pursued a line of defence — until we re-equipped our army, provided our army with modern means of fighting.

And now, when we have reconstructed our army, saturated it with equipment for modern combat, when we have become strong — now we need to move from defence to offence.

In order to defend our country, we are obliged to act in an offensive manner. From defence [we have to] transition to a military policy of offensive actions. We have to rebuild our education, our propaganda, our agitation, our press in an offensive spirit. The Red Army is a modern army, and a modern army is an offensive army.

Historians have puzzled over these words. Did Stalin tell his soldiers that he was planning offensive war? Did Stalin have one drink too many at the reception and make off-the cuff remarks he needed to walk back later? Or was this a pep talk to bring the troops into line with military doctrine: that any attack on the Soviet Union would be repulsed aggressively and finished quickly on the opponent’s territory? Each interpretation can be made plausible by citing other evidence, but none is provable beyond a reasonable doubt.

Historians are of course not obliged to tell their readers about every step they took from reading the sources to producing their interpretation. But McMeekin does something else altogether in order to advance his case against Stalin. Here is how he renders the leader’s remarks in his book:

What transpired next was so dramatic, so unexpected, that no one present ever forgot it… Stalin leapt to his feet, cut off the poor lieutenant general, and reproached him for pushing an “out of date policy.” Stalin then moderated his tone, reassuring the officers and party bosses present that the “Soviet peace policy”… had indeed bought the Red Army time to modernise and rearm, while also allowing the USSR to “push forward in the west and north, increasing its population by thirteen million in the process.” But the days of peaceful absorption of new territory, Stalin stated forthrightly, “had come to an end. Not another foot of ground can be gained with such peaceful sentiments.”

The Red Army, Stalin told its future commanders, “must get used to the idea that the era of the peace policy is at an end and that the era of widening the socialist front by force has begun.” Anyone “who failed to recognise the necessity of offensive action,” Stalin admonished, “was a bourgeois and a fool.” The defensive doctrine that had animated strategic planning and war-gaming for a European conflict prior to 1941, he explained, was appropriate only for a weak, unprepared Red Army.

This is not history in the normal sense of the word: a disciplined, if imaginative rendering of the past constrained by what the sources say. The archival account of this speech simply does not have Stalin leap to his feet; he says nothing about an “out of date policy,” a thirteen million population increase, or a push to the west and north. No bourgeois fools and widening fronts. Where does McMeekin get this from? I checked the online version of the source, its hard copy version in the collection he cites from, and the version in the Stalin archive (for which he gives a wrong file number in his footnote). Nowhere could I find words even close to these.

A close reading of the convoluted endnote to this episode and a trip to my university’s library eventually revealed the source: an account by a German diplomat who was not present at the occasion. Published in 1956 and cited in 1985 in a notorious German revisionist history (translated into English in 1987), this version relies on interrogations of captured Soviet soldiers later in the war. It has been dismissed by most historians for obvious reasons, but McMeekin claims that it conforms to other eyewitness accounts. I checked these, too: no such words. Instead, they confirm the more boring Soviet archival version.

The most telling quotations, then, the words that allow McMeekin to prosecute his case against Stalin the alleged warmonger, come from an account far removed from the actual speech and published well before the Soviet archives opened. They have been called “embellishment(s)” by the most in-depth investigation, which McMeekin cites as if it supports his reading (it does not). So much for the revelations from the Soviet archives on which this book is said to be based.

The misleading use of the 1941 speech is not the only technical concern historians might raise with McMeekin’s account. He misquotes a famous Stalin speech of 1931 as having taken place in 1928 (with a footnote leading nowhere); he misplaces Stalin’s deportation of the Soviet Korean population (which happened in 1937 in response to the outbreak of war in Asia) to 1938, allegedly some kind of perverse victory celebration after the Battle of Lake Khasan; he claims that Britain was “grasping for legal straws to avoid entanglement with Stalin” by interpreting the phrase “European power” in the 25 August 1939 Agreement of Mutual Assistance with Poland to mean Germany only (in fact this was explicitly stated in a secret protocol to the agreement); he asserts that the April 1941 neutrality pact with Japan allowed Stalin “to concentrate everything he had on the West,” stripping “his Far Eastern defenses” (in fact, Soviet troop strength in the east never fell below 1.1 million men, with significant military assets deployed throughout the war); etc. etc. His account of the role of US and British aid — central to his argument — is a beautiful polemic that unfortunately obscures the real constellation of forces and is not infrequently undermined by his own evidence.

Most egregiously, McMeekin cites a 1939 forgery of an alleged Stalin speech as authentic, claiming that it was recently “discovered in the Russian archives.” There is, indeed, a copy — in an archive holding foreign-origin documents — and it is a translation from a French original. Even the article McMeekin cites for proof of the authenticity of this document notes that “it seems to originate from an article published in the French La Revue universelle” in 1944. As the most accomplished political historian of Stalinism wrote in a work McMeekin cites himself: “Most historians have never assigned much significance to this forgery. Neither the Politburo archive nor Stalin’s own files contain even circumstantial evidence of such a speech.” But McMeekin cites it — because it fits his plot.

Such examples undermine confidence in McMeekin as a historian. His book makes a lot of arguable points: that Stalin always had one eye on his own Eastern Front, the front with Japan; that he was a Marxist who saw little difference between an English Tory and a German Nazi; that his foreign policy was cynical to an extreme degree, exploiting his allies as much as he could; that in the run-up to the notorious Molotov–Ribbentrop agreement of August 1939 he was far from a passive figure, actively shopping around for the best deal he could get for his country; that the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 was more than just a bloodless sideshow; that the Sovietisation of the newly acquired “western borderlands” in 1939–41 and then again from 1944 was an incredibly violent affair; that Britain and France could have stopped both the German war machine and Stalin’s expansion into eastern Europe had they bombed the Baku oilfields in 1940; that the April 1941 neutrality pact with Japan was a major “coup” with serious strategic consequences; that the Soviets were busily preparing for war with Germany in 1941; that Roosevelt was naive in his dealings with Stalin; and that both the US president and the British PM adopted “an attitude of wilful blindness toward Stalin’s crimes.” He is right, too, in pointing out that many aspects of Stalin’s war make it impossible to tell the story of the second world war as a simple fight of good against evil. But his zeal to completely discredit the Soviet (read: Russian) war effort has seduced him into suspending the critical method his métier demands.

McMeekin has thus done a great service to the history warrior in the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin has long complained that Western historians downplay his country’s contribution to victory over Germany and Japan. The Russian president has also offered his own tendentious account of how to properly understand this history. McMeekin’s account is an equally misleading response in a new international history (cold) war. A gifted writer and a talented polemicist, he has lowered the historian’s craft to the level of propaganda. The result is a lamentable step back in our understanding of Stalin and his second world war. Those Russian historians who follow the line laid down in the Kremlin will have a field day with this book as an example of Western distortions of history. McMeekin has made their job rather too easy. •

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Navalny, a long-time critic of Putin, first made his name as a blogger who brought to light corruption throughout the country, including among those at the highest political levels. He has also sought to enter politics directly: as the figurehead leader of the 2011–12 fraudulent elections demonstrations, as a candidate for the Moscow mayoralty in 2013, and as a candidate for president in 2018. He has focused his criticisms on Putin, whom he accuses of being corrupt. For his efforts, he has frequently been arrested, has been held for short periods when he has sought to attend demonstrations, has been subject to criminal charges for fraud (which he denies), and was found guilty of embezzlement and given a five-year suspended sentence. His brother has also been arrested and incarcerated.

Most recently, while travelling in Siberia, Navalny was poisoned and nearly died. After being taken to a Russian hospital in Omsk in a coma, he was airlifted to Berlin — at the insistence of his wife and supporters — four days later. Navalny and his supporters claim he was poisoned by an agent of the Russian security services, the FSB, acting on the orders of Vladimir Putin; the German doctors say that the poisoning agent was a type of novichok, which is said to be available only to the Russian government. He appears to have made a full recovery.

Some aspects of that episode are curious, but I will not go into them here. What is important for Russia’s political trajectory is that Navalny’s supporters both within that country and in the West believe that the Russian government and Putin himself were responsible for the attempt on his life.

In an immediate sense, the Navalny episode poses three different sorts of challenge to Putin’s rule: direct action from the streets, delegitimisation, and increased economic hardship.

The potency of the street demonstrations depends partly on the strength of Navalny’s support. We don’t know for certain what proportion of Russians support him and what he is doing, and how many of them would be willing to risk engaging in protest activity. Supporters of Navalny always exaggerate the size of the crowds he attracts and the extent of his support, while opponents understate both; estimates of the crowd in Moscow on 23 January ranged from 4000 to 40,000 (with a lower reported number on 31 January).

What we do know is that when Navalny stood on the ballot for Moscow mayor in 2013 he officially received 27.2 per cent of the vote — and if the claims about falsification are accurate, presumably more. Given the sympathy generated by his poisoning, it is likely that his support has grown since then. Regardless, a solid core of support exists in the capital, but there is no evidence that this even approaches half of the capital’s populace. And it isn’t clear that even this level of support can be replicated throughout the country. We just don’t know.

Overall support is one thing, strategic support another. A loss of control in the streets of the capital is politically much more significant for the government than in other parts of the country. Election statistics show that the popular vote for Putin and the forces aligned with him tends to be lower in Moscow than elsewhere, so the capital would seem to be fertile ground for the Navalny forces. This is especially so because Navalny has become a lightning rod for the expression of broader grievances; many at the protests appear more motivated by the call to remove Putin than support for Navalny.

Since the colour revolutions in the early 2000s — and especially the “Maidan revolution” in Ukraine in 2014 — Putin has shown himself to be highly sensitive to anti-regime mobilisation. Over the past decade and a half a whole series of measures has been introduced to limit the capacity of the citizenry to protest and demonstrate. Perhaps most importantly, the demonstrations over the past two weekends (with more promised) were met with significant force from the police. The early introduction of force is new and clearly designed to deter people from continuing to take to the streets.

But even if we assume such demonstrations continue, do they pose an existential threat to the regime? Studies of regime change show that many more regimes fall as a result of division and conflict within the ruling group than in response to mass mobilisation. While the group around Putin stays united and the coercive arms of the state — military, security and police forces — remain loyal, the regime is likely to see off this challenge. That seems to be the lesson of Belarus: president Alexander Lukashenko has retained power despite months of popular protest because he still has the support of the ruling elite and its coercive apparatus.

The second immediate challenge is that of delegitimisation, of which Navalny’s movement supplies three potential sources. One is that the regime’s treatment of the demonstrators erodes the social contract — which swaps passivity for material welfare — underpinning Putin’s regime. That contract is already under pressure because of the economic slowdown, and an image of the regime turning on its citizens could test it even more.

Another source of potential delegitimisation arises from Navalny’s continuing campaign against Putin as corrupt. This hit a new height last week when Navalny’s organisation released a video claiming that a sumptuous palace on the Black Sea coast was built for Putin. Putin has denied that the palace belongs to him (the wording has been careful, and ownership has since been claimed by businessman and long-time Putin friend Arkady Rotenberg), but the video has had massive exposure through YouTube. The danger for Putin is clear: when Navalny released a similar video claiming to document evidence of the corrupt and luxurious lifestyle of prime minister Dmitri Medvedev, Medvedev’s public approval ratings plummeted.

The other source of potential delegitimisation is Navalny’s challenge to the idea that no alternative exists to Vladimir Putin as Russian leader. If his projection as a potential leader with gravitas were to take hold, the popular reluctance to oppose Putin may be considerably weakened. For this to work, Navalny would need to come up with a more substantial policy program and live down some of the public positions he has espoused in the past. Following the election of Donald Trump, who is to say this is impossible?

The third immediate challenge is increased economic hardship. There has been talk within both the United States and the European Union about the imposition of further sanctions on Russia in response to the Navalny arrest. Even before Covid-19, existing sanctions were affecting the country’s economic performance; expanded, they would presumably do further damage.

But intensified sanctions would also buttress one of the themes Putin has used to consolidate his rule: Russia is in a battle with the West. With the Biden administration yet to articulate a clear Russian strategy, the ratcheting up of sanctions would get any possible reset of relations off to a poor start. And it isn’t clear that this would have any effect on the regime’s policy towards Navalny; it would simply strengthen Putin’s argument about inveterate Western opposition and the consequent need for a strong leader to stand up to them.

But the greatest challenge posed by Navalny may only become manifest during the elections for the State Duma (the parliament) in September this year. One of Navalny’s successes lies in constructing a nationwide network of organisations to help voters cast their ballots against the ruling pro-Putin party, United Russia. Like the level of Navalny’s popular support, the dimensions of this network are unclear, but it has undoubtedly had some success in regional elections in different parts of the country.

The emergence of this network parallels the decline of United Russia, in terms of both its popular support as measured by opinion polls and, it seems, its capacity to act as an effective and efficient electoral machine. The party relies fundamentally on the support of Putin-aligned regional officials, something Putin may have tried to shore up with last year’s change to the constitution, which enables him to run for another term in 2024. By preventing his becoming a lame duck, the amendment may have been designed to deter officials from transferring their allegiance to someone who would be around after Putin left in 2024.

For some time, observers have been suggesting that United Russia is not the electoral machine it once was because of wavering regional officials. If the party is less able to get out the vote and the Navalny machine is active in the area, electoral support for United Russia could plummet. And that could lead to manipulation of the election campaign and falsification of the ballot to ensure United Russia is victorious, something which — as the 2011 and 2012 demonstrations showed — can bring people onto the streets in greater numbers than have been evident over the past two weekends.

No one knows where the situation would lead if September’s election is seen as fraudulent and many more protesters take to the streets. Would it lead to splits among the ruling group, or to sections of the coercive arms of the state deserting those rulers for the demonstrating citizenry? Would it make the immediate challenges outlined above more potent? If any of these were to eventuate, the possibility of regime change would increase. And this means that the key to regime change probably lies more in the medium-term consequences of the work of the Navalny machine than in the demonstrations we have thus far seen. •

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US nuclear planning is largely a legacy of the cold war, when the key aim was to deter a surprise Soviet attack, or “first strike,” on the American homeland. The Pentagon’s solution was to devise a system that guaranteed massive retaliation with thousands of weapons. This encouraged preparation for “launch under attack” and the overlapping “launch on warning,” which demanded extremely fast presidential decision-making and a military that appeared to Soviet worst-case planners to be geared to pre-emption. The result was a dangerously unstable situation in which both sides, fearing the worst, might be tempted to beat the other to the punch.

To meet another strategic aim — deterring a Soviet invasion of Western Europe — the United States developed options for limited, premeditated nuclear escalation (“first use,” employing perhaps a dozen warheads in a defined region). Clearly, this could easily have spiralled out of control.

Although much changed when the Soviet Union collapsed, cold war thinking left its mark. The American arsenal was scaled back, but a readiness for first use persisted, as did the system for promptly transmitting a president’s nuclear attack orders.

While the details are classified, the principles underlying the command of nuclear weapons are a matter of public record. The president, as commander-in-chief, has sole authority to order the firing of nuclear weapons. Although this authority can be delegated, and would pass down the line of succession in the event of incapacity, it still springs, undivided, from the office of the president. While they may be consulted, neither Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor cabinet has a veto. Once a presidential order is given, the only obstacle to implementation would be mutiny, or perhaps resistance based on the laws of war (such as the requirement for proportionality). It is this system that Biden inherits.

Biden’s presidency also comes in the wake of Trump’s toxic impact as a noisy disrupter. He panned and then withdrew from the carefully crafted 2015 multilateral Iran nuclear deal between Tehran, Washington, Moscow, Beijing, London, Paris and Berlin. (If this was meant to rein in Tehran, it backfired.) He withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty and 1992 Open Skies Treaty. He resisted Moscow’s invitation to extend the soon-to-expire New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty).

Trump also adopted a melodramatic approach to North Korea, making bombastic threats, boasting that he had solved the problem, and making bizarre references to “falling in love” with Kim Jong-un. In the real world, this performance did nothing to stop North Korea progressing towards an intercontinental nuclear weapons capability.

What can we expect from the new administration? There are plenty of clues because Biden has had so much time and reason to think about nuclear matters. He was elected to the Senate in 1972, and repeatedly re-elected, eventually chairing the Foreign Relations Committee before becoming Obama’s two-term vice-president.

Other clues lie in his picks for top national security positions, who are centrist establishment figures, many from the Obama years. This has disappointed some commentators, and reinforces a back-to-the-future tone. And it’s worth noting that Biden’s pick for secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, is a retired general who, until last week, was a well-remunerated member of the board of Raytheon, a defence contractor that makes, among other things, nuclear weapons.

Over the decades, though, Biden has argued that measured arms control ought to be considered integral to national security. As presidential candidate, he called for ratification of the nuclear test ban treaty, an extension of New START, and a relaunching of the Iran nuclear deal. He also wants to trim “excessive expenditure” on nuclear weapons, which might involve a review of the force structure, especially the balance between missile-firing submarines, intercontinental-range missiles based in the American heartland, and nuclear bombers like the B-2. In his more radical-sounding moments, Biden even says he wants to move towards a world free of nuclear weapons, an echo of Obama’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review.

A putative stepping stone came only days after the inauguration, when he agreed to a sensible but quite modest five-year extension of the New START deal with Russia. This will leave him in command of about 3800 nuclear weapons, with more than 1000 deployed to military units and ready for use at short notice.

But Biden shows no sign of significantly altering presidential nuclear launch authority, for instance by reinterpreting congressional war powers to allow broader participation in nuclear orders.

And his overall strategy for the use of nuclear forces? “I believe that the sole purpose of the US nuclear arsenal should be deterring — and, if necessary, retaliating against — a nuclear attack,” he wrote last year. “As president, I will work to put that belief into practice.” That this needs to be said will surprise many, but the comment suggests we can expect a review of current policy reserving a right to use nuclear weapons first. This would receive support in the arms control community, although some believe the Pentagon ought to stop short of unequivocally rejecting that longstanding option.

Any attempt by Biden to reform nuclear policy will face constraints and distractions. He has to tackle the more pressing pandemic, as well as climate change, the economy and the bitter political aftermath of the Trump presidency. He also has to deal with the Senate. Despite losing control of the chamber, Republicans remain well placed to block arms control ratification, a particular problem with the nuclear test ban treaty.

Only time will tell how congressional politics influence efforts to revive the Iran deal, but many members will run interference. Besides, Washington isn’t the only player: Tehran has long seen the United States as hostile and unreliable, a perception accentuated by Trump’s reckless abandonment of the painfully worked-out pact. In response, Iran has already moved past previously agreed limits on uranium enrichment.

Days after Biden’s inauguration, the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entered into force. But there’s no prospect of the new president, or his Russian and Chinese peers, ever signing it. As far as he (and Obama before him) is concerned, nuclear abolition is an aspiration pushed onto hypothetical future world leaders.

This leaves Biden set to steer policy to a modified version of the old normal. After the political vandalism of the Trump years, this won’t seem so bad to old strategy hands. And, given apparently intractable domestic and international constraints, it is all Washington seems capable of delivering. •

The post Biden and the bomb appeared first on Inside Story.

They also wore orange-and-black ribbons arranged in a neat bow pinned to their chests. This arrangement, known as a George’s Ribbon, was originally an insignia of the Russian imperial military, the orange symbolising fire and the black gunpowder. But since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 it has become a badge of devotion to Russia and fealty to its president. According to Moscow-based journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan — courageous and expert commentators on sometimes-delicate security issues — it is “an ominous and aggressive political symbol” of an “anti-Western, pro-Kremlin agenda.”

The mysterious men at the 9 May celebrations claim to be the descendants of Siberian Cossacks who settled in Australia mainly from around 1920 until the 1950s. Because the anniversary has become the most important date on the official Russian calendar — a day on which, they believe, wearing the ribbon should be compulsory — they attend the celebrations to monitor whether community members are displaying the symbol and, what’s more, displaying it correctly. They are prefects of patriotism, monitoring Russian expatriates’ loyalty to Mother Russia under Vladimir Putin.

Behind the activities of these men is the long, complex history of the Cossacks. Even the origin of the name — kazak in Russian, qazaq in Turkic languages — is disputed, but most historians say it’s Turkic, that it meant “free wanderer or exile,” and that by the fifteenth century it denoted the ethnically motley inhabitants, often Tatar and Slav, of self-governing fortified settlements along the lower Dnieper and Don rivers.

By the sixteenth century the Cossacks had evolved from brigandage into an effective light-cavalry-for-hire. Through agreements with successive tsars they were integrated into the Russian imperial army, with particular responsibility for protecting the empire’s southern borders. They were prominent in what Russian official histories call the “opening up” of Siberia.

Gradually the Cossacks took on another function, too, as a paramilitary police used to suppress dissent and internal unrest. By the nineteenth century they were both a border force and a national guard, with a reputation for brutal indiscipline in carrying out their gendarme function. As a New York Times writer puts it, “Before the Revolution, they had become infamous as the nail in the czarist boot, putting down peasant and worker uprisings and leading pogroms against the Jews and other minorities.”

Cossack historians might reject that charge, but there can be little doubt that the Cossacks took part in the pogroms against the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and those in the period 1903–06. In the early twentieth century, the Cossack motto, “For the Faith, the Tsar and the Fatherland,” was adopted by the anti-Semitic Union of the Russian People, which created armed squads (known as “black hundreds”) to carry out pogroms and assassinate those it identified as socialists or other brands of traitor.

Given their devotion to the Romanov dynasty, most Cossacks sided with the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian civil war of 1918–21; many then fled into exile, with some from Siberia finding refuge in China and eventually Australia. As a particular target of Stalin’s ruthless collectivisation campaign, those who remained were almost obliterated, and they continued to be suppressed throughout the Soviet period.

But in a remarkable revival, they re-emerged in post-Soviet Russia as a repository of militarist and ultranationalist values, with close ties to the Kremlin-dominated Russian Orthodox Church. Under Putin they have flourished, and he has eulogised them for their “well-known tradition of patriotism… so very important for the formation of Russian statehood in the minds of our people.”

The Russian government now funds Cossack cultural centres and martial arts and firearms clubs. And, under a law Putin signed in 2005, the Cossacks have been reincorporated into the state’s security and military structures.

Until Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, all Soviet leaders saw the large Russian/Soviet diaspora in two contradictory ways: as a potential source of opposition and as an asset to be mobilised, together with non-Russian sympathisers, in undermining any state perceived to be an adversary. Primary responsibility for neutralising members of the former (in some cases by assassination) and identifying and exploiting the latter group lay with the KGB, under that or its earlier names.

In Australia, the best-known instances were Moscow’s marshalling, and in some cases recruitment, of members of the Communist Party of Australia and Russian émigrés, some working in sensitive positions in the Australian Public Service. The effects of that policy were felt in Australian politics until recently, and may still colour perceptions of Russia.

As the Soviet Union began to falter in the late 1980s and Soviet-backed communist parties in the West shrank, the policy of recruiting émigrés and fellow travellers fell into abeyance.

Wearing the George’s Ribbon, Russian president Vladimir Putin (centre) watches this year’s Victory Day parade in Moscow. Sergei Guneyev/Host Photo Agency via AP

During the nine chaotic years of Boris Yeltsin’s rule, after the rout of the KGB-initiated-and-led coup to overthrow Gorbachev in 1991, the Russian intelligence services manoeuvred to adapt and survive. The KGB was divided into the FSB (the domestic secret police) and the SVR (the Russian foreign intelligence service) but was not reformed. Now, after two decades with one of their own as Russia’s ruler, they are probably better resourced and, in the FSB’s case at least, more independently powerful than ever before.

Under Putin, efforts to tap the Russian diaspora as an asset have been refined and strengthened. In October 2001, while still consolidating his power, Putin set out a concept of the diaspora as an attribute of a strong Russian state, proclaiming the notion of russkij mir, or the Russian World. (Mir is a capacious word meaning “world,” “community” or “peace,” depending on the context.) No matter where they may live, said Putin, all Russians and all those claiming Russian heritage would henceforth be seen not as “émigrés” but as “compatriots,” a global tribe dispersed but united by a commitment to the Fatherland.

Russkij Mir is also the title of one of a phalanx of new state agencies and “foundations” Putin has charged with creating this cohesion and maximising Russia’s global influence. Russia is not alone in this, of course: China, for instance, has a virtually identical policy of moulding and mobilising patriotic feeling in its diaspora, the implementation of which is coordinated by the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. The Russkij Mir Foundation also recalls the Overseas Compatriots Central Committee established by the Japanese in 1940.

The foundation was formally established in 2007. In 2009 its regional director for the Asia-Pacific approached a number of leading Australian universities, including Queensland, Sydney and the ANU, offering to fund “centres of Russian language and culture.” The offers were declined, partly because the Russians insisted on the right to appoint the centres’ directors.

More recently, the policy of marshalling the diaspora has also been underpinned by the Law on State Policy towards Compatriots Abroad, key provisions of which were reflected in recent amendments to the Russian constitution. The law defines anyone anywhere “who speaks Russian and identifies with/observes the [values of the] associated culture” as a “compatriot,” whose rights, as they are defined by the Russian state, the Russian state undertakes to protect.

As it happens, the Russkij Mir Foundation — which, like China’s Confucius Institutes, claims to focus solely on propagating culture and language — is headed by a prominent member of the State Duma, the parliament endowed with Putinist characteristics. That Duma deputy, Vyacheslav Nikonov, happens to be the grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, of the notorious Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Molotov played a key role in the fate of Labor Party leader H.V. “Bert” Evatt, the most prominent casualty of the Petrov affair, the case that shone a spotlight on Russian recruitment of émigrés and supporters in Australia.

Which brings us back to Australia, and the ribbon-monitoring Cossacks. In a New Year’s Eve address at the end of 2018, the then Russian ambassador, Grigory Logvinov, made a passionate appeal to the Russian diaspora in Australia:

Never before in its recent history… has Russia been subjected to such a coordinated, aggressive campaign of vilification, abuse and slander… on various anti-Russian themes, be it the MH17 disaster, the so-called Skripal affair or the use of chemicals [weapons] in Syria… We in the embassy would be most grateful for any support, moral and political, that our compatriots can give, within, of course, the bounds permitted under Australian legislation.

One group among Logvinov’s audience needed no urging: a self-proclaimed stanitsa (garrison) of “Siberian Cossacks” in Australia calling themselves “the Embassy to Australia of the Zabaikal’sk Cossack Host” (zabaikal’sk signifies a region in Siberia to the east of Lake Baikal, as seen from European Russia).

These Australians claim to be the descendants of Cossacks and the repository of their traditions. They first made their presence felt in 2014, the year of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the uprising by Russian proxy forces in eastern Ukraine, among whom Russia-based Cossacks were conspicuous. Citing no source for the figure, a Russian website asserts that 10,000 Australians have Cossack forebears.

Bedecked in locally tailored Cossack dress uniforms, Australia’s newly minted Cossacks began to mount demonstrations in Sydney and Melbourne in support of the so-called “Democratic Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk” — that is, the territory of Ukraine still held by Russian-led and -equipped proxy forces.

A leader, Semyon Boikov (also known as Simeon Boikov), had emerged, and was titled Ataman. (The word means “chieftain,” and is a cognate of “ottoman,” reflecting the strong Turkic gene in the Cossacks’ evolution.) A Russian website supplies the following information about him:

Ataman Boikov was born in 1990. The fifth generation of an original migrant family, he relates that his father is a Russian Orthodox priest, whose family succeeded in preserving the Russian language and raised its children to love Russia. “We never felt ourselves to be Australian, we were aliens there. I consider myself to be a Russian.” A period of study in the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow, which he undertook in 2008, was decisive in his identification [with Russia]. “One may say that while I was studying there I was, well, we must not say recruited, right? Basically, I fell under the influence of rightly thinking pro-Russian elements. They began to fashion a pro-Russian adult from a young Australian [citizen].”

He credits his transformation in particular to Father Tikhon Shevkunov: “this is a most influential person — in the church, in the state and in society. He has always supported strongly any activity connected with reuniting [Orthodox] churches outside Russia with the Moscow Patriarchate, and in general with reuniting Russian emigrants, the diaspora, with Russia.”

The Sretensky Monastery, which is close by the headquarters of the KGB in central Moscow, is reported to have close ties to the KGB’s successors, the FSB and the SVR. Father Shevkunov, now an archimandrite, is sometimes called “Putin’s spiritual adviser.”

Here is Boikov as reported by the Russian digital journal Vzglyad under the headline “Cossacks in Australia Speak of Supporting Russia in a ‘Hostile’ Country”:

“I consider myself a proponent of a strong Russian state. We’ll always support the policies of the [Russian] state, we respect very much our Commander-in-Chief, Putin. And we have a unique capacity to support Russia from within a hostile state. Even the FSB or a battalion of the Russian SAS can’t achieve that, because unlike them we are citizens of this state.” The group that Boikov leads claims to have about 150 members. Although the group is registered as “historical-cultural association,” its members appear to be militarised: they wear uniforms with epaulets and badges of rank, and carry out Cossack military drills. But according to Boikov, they see their main task as carrying out so-called people’s diplomacy… “We organise demonstrations in support of the return of Crimea [to Russia], in support of our army in Syria, in support of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.” The Ataman adds that while they cannot go into battle with sabres, Russian long rifles and Maxim machine guns, as their grandfathers did, they can prosecute another form of war — an information war.

Boikov seems to have been a key figure in securing funding from Russia for the publication of the “garrison’s” own monthly newspaper, Russkij Rubezh (Russian Frontier), twenty-six issues of which appeared from early 2015 to mid 2017, initially with a print run of 2000 later increased to 5000. The masthead carried the traditional Cossack motto and war cry: “For the (Russian Orthodox) Faith, the Tsar and the Fatherland.” The paper’s title suggests that its owners and editors see Russia’s frontier as running through Australia, which recalls the bon mot from Russian history that only a border with Russian soldiers on both sides of it is genuinely secure. The notion is also consistent with the Cossacks’ traditional role of protecting Russia’s borders.

Russkij Rubezh’s editorials, and its reports reprinted from ultranationalist Russian sources, reflected the group’s identification with the militarist-imperialist and authoritarian ethos of tsarist — and now Putin’s — Russia. Its members declared their support for the Russian campaign in eastern Ukraine, adopted the flag of the separatist entities as one of their own banners, and implied that some of their number fought there with the proxy forces. The paper branded as traitors any Australians of Russian origin who did not share its views. It routinely retailed luridly xenophobic and homophobic views and — in the edition of December 2015, for instance — anti-Semitic sentiments.

Russkij Rubezh ceased publication without explanation in June 2017, suggesting that the source of its funding had dried up. Three years on, in mid May this year, it reappeared, with a print run of 5000, a supplement in English and much wider circulation to all state capitals. Clearly, a new source of funding had been found, perhaps by Boikov during a visit to Moscow late last year.

“[We] remind all our compatriots in Australia who are enemies of Russia that our newspaper is back on the battle line,” said the May editorial. “Take responsibility for your words and actions lest you find yourselves exposed as the subjects of our publications.”

As before, the paper identifies its chief sponsor as the Institute of North Asia and Eurasian Integrational Processes, about which the internet reveals little other than an address in Chita, a city in the Zabaikal’sk region of Siberia. But the paper appears to owe its reanimation to Konstantin Malofeev, a figure conspicuous in Russia as “the Orthodox oligarch” — or to those he works for, or with.

Together with his ties to the nomenklatura of the Russian Orthodox Church, Malofeev is well known for his ultranationalism, championing of “traditional values” and propagation of conspiracy theories. Among the latter are his assertions that Bill Gates and “Western intelligence agencies” are the source of Covid-19, and that Gates plans to “enchip” the entire Russian population. The sources of Malofeev’s apparent wealth are mysterious.

Malofeev is best known for the role he played in the insurgency in eastern Ukraine. In April 2014, Igor Girkin, the former head of security for one of his “private equity” firms, Marshall Capital Partners Ltd, crossed from Russia into Ukraine with about fifty fighters to lead the first armed assault on a Ukrainian-government entity. Girkin eventually took command of the “People’s Army of the Republic of Donetsk” and then became its “minister of defence.”

Girkin served with the FSB from 1998 to 2005 and has since been identified by the European Union as an officer of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, or GRU. He’s better known by his nom de guerre, Strelkov — meaning “the rifleman” or “the shooter.” (Readers of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago may recall the ruthless Bolshevik commander “Strelnikov.”)

“By mid-2014,” reports the investigative website Bellingcat, “a clear pattern had emerged: the Kremlin used Malofeev as the initiator and proxy funder of active measures — including military operations — in Ukraine, providing deniability to Russia in case the operation failed.” In this way, Malofeev and his employees share responsibility for the deaths of thirty-eight Australians and 260 other passengers and crew on Flight MH17 in July 2014. Since 2014, he has been sanctioned by the European Union “for the destabilisation of Eastern Ukraine.”

Malofeev also claims to be the founder of the Society of the Double-headed Eagle for the Propagation of Russian Historical Enlightenment, which takes its name from the imperial eagle of the tsarist coat of arms, restored by Putin as Russia’s. The society heads a revised list of partners published by Russkij Rubezh; as its name suggests, its declared goal is to “enlighten all compatriots” by inculcating the correct view of history in the minds of all inhabitants of the Russian World.

This impulse to control not just what people do but also what they think has a robust tradition in Russia, stretching back at least to Peter the Great and reaching an apogee under Lenin and Stalin. Putin himself is a product of the training, practice and ethos of the KGB, the successor to the Cheka, the Soviet agency Lenin set up to impose and maintain this pervasive control.

Putin’s former culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, has written that “if a state’s elite does not strive to mould the consciousness of its citizens… their minds will either be a vacuum or polluted by foreign garbage.” Much preoccupied with controlling the past so as to mould the present, Putin recently arranged for the goal defined by Medinsky to be enshrined in the Russian constitution.

That was among more than 200 amendments voted on in Russia’s recent constitutional plebiscite, which ran from 25 June to 1 July. According to official figures, the amendments were endorsed by 78 per cent of the 69 per cent of eligible voters who participated. In an apparent misstep in orchestrating the result, though, or perhaps a display of arrogance, copies of the revised constitution were on sale in Moscow bookstores well in advance of the voting period. A group of well-known Russian political scientists who analysed the figures concluded that 37 per cent of the votes were falsified and that the real turnout figure was about 43 per cent, of which 65 per cent voted for the amendments.

Reportedly at the urging of the Russian Orthodox Church, the amendments also include an article pledging homage to the “ancestors who bequeathed to us their ideals and belief in God.” Yet Article 14, the foundational Chapter 1 of the 1993 constitution, defines Russia as a secular state and says that “no religion may be established as official or obligatory.” Another amendment describes marriage as a “union of a man and a woman,” thereby confirming traditional values and effectively outlawing same-sex marriage. And another pledges to protect historical truth and forbid “belittling the people’s heroic protection of the Fatherland” — that is, querying Putin’s increasingly mendacious version of the history of the second world war.

The State Duma also received a redraft of the existing federal law “On Education,” in which greater emphasis is placed on “the imperative of instilling patriotic sentiment in schoolchildren.” All of the goals defined by these amendments are pervasive themes in the re-emerged Russkij Rubezh.

According to Russian journalists who have investigated Konstantin Malofeev’s activities and links, he is close to Putin confidante Archimandrite Shevkunov, the “Father Tikhon” identified by “Ataman” Boikov as his primary mentor. Ostensibly serving under Malofeev in the Double-headed Eagle society is its executive director, Leonid Reshetnikov, a lieutenant-general in the SVR. Reshetnikov’s official biography, reprinted by Russkij Rubezh, has him “working in espionage abroad from 1976 to 2009.” From 2009 till 2017 he was director of the Centre for Analytical Research, a secretive unit in the Russian presidential administration credited by Reuters and the BBC with a significant role in the successful Russian campaign to influence the US presidential elections in 2016.

Officially, General Reshetnikov has retired from active service, but, as Putin famously said, there is no such thing as a former KGB officer. (On retirement, FSB and SVR officers are considered to be members of a “reserve” from which they can be recalled to active service at any time.) In Moscow, the Double-headed Eagle society is registered at an address shared with the Centre for Analytical Research. It seems most unlikely that a lieutenant-general of the SVR would take his orders from private citizen Malofeev.

To conduct the society’s campaign to ensure that all Russians in Australia, and their children, hold the correct views and beliefs, Reshetnikov has appointed Valery Malinovsky, a “young [Russian] entrepreneur going places,” as its Australian chief representative, with Boikov as his deputy. A letter of their appointment, published in Russkij Rubezh, charges them with “preserving the cultural identity and a correct historical memory of our compatriots.”

In an interview to introduce Malinovsky to its readers, Russkij Rubezh asked him what he sought to achieve. He replied that the society he heads “unites people of integrity, Russian patriots, who wish to change the situation in their homeland and perceptions of Russia beyond its borders for the better.” Asked how Russians differed from Australians, Malinovsky replied that Russians “have deeper emotions; are more hard-working; stand for traditional values — we believe that a woman’s role is to preserve hearth and home, whereas Australian women are feminists who do not put the family first; and we are more patriotic.”

Elsewhere in the same edition, the work of the Double-headed Eagle society is presented thus:

Russian history is one of the most slandered and traduced phenomena in human history. The task of recreating a genuine, multi-hued-and-faceted, objective reality of Russia in history is akin to a restoration: slowly, layer by layer, the accretions of recent periods must be peeled away to reveal the original image of Russia in all its pristine beauty.

To sum up, then, we have a group of Australians of Russian heritage, the Australian Cossack Garrisons, who are funded by a “Russian Orthodox oligarch” (or perhaps by anonymous state functionaries who channel money to him). They have a patron who was complicit in the destruction of MH17, who claims that Bill Gates and “Western intelligence services” created Covid-19, and who is supervised by a former senior officer of the SVR and therefore effectively incorporated into Russia’s security and military structures. And they themselves are dedicated to policing devotion to the Fatherland among Russians in the “hostile country” in which they apparently prefer to live. •

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The first sign of change came out of the blue, in January, when Putin released a series of draft constitutional amendments. Some were symbolic (a new mention of God in the constitution, for instance) and some concerned questions of social policy, but a series of proposals were designed to change Russia’s political structure. Among the most important were plans for the leading figures in the government to be appointed (rather than simply approved) by the State Duma, the lower house of the legislature; for the president to be limited to a total of two terms in office (rather than the current limit of two consecutive terms); and for the role of the advisory State Council to be enhanced.

Putin proposed that these amendments, once worked up into a satisfactory form, should be put to the people in a popular vote, though this is not formally necessary for constitutional change.

The ensuing debate in Western countries focused on how Putin could use the new rules to prolong his tenure at the top of Russian politics. They seemed to prevent his standing for another term as president, but it was widely conjectured that he could take up a position in the enhanced State Council and continue to exercise power from there. Putin publicly rejected the latter possibility, however.

The proposals were immediately sent to a specially formed commission, which was charged with preparing them for presentation to the Duma for formal approval. The commission appears to have received thousands of further suggestions for constitutional change, but in the end it recommended Putin’s proposals. They then proceeded smoothly through their first reading in the lower house.

Things got more interesting during their second reading, last Tuesday. Duma deputy Valentina Tereshkova, best known as the first woman in space, called for the president to be eligible for election an unlimited number of times. Another deputy suggested that the two-term limit be retained but the number of terms reset to zero when Putin’s current term ends. Later that day — reinforcing the impression that this was a choreographed process — Putin appeared in the Duma to respond to the deputies’ suggestions. The two-term limit should not be removed, he said, though he was open to a reset in 2024 providing it was passed by the Constitutional Court and approved in the public referendum due to take place on 22 April.

Putin’s proposed changes, along with the reset at the end of his current term, have now been adopted by the Duma. The Constitutional Court is unlikely to stand in their way, and the popular vote, ironically occurring on the anniversary of Lenin’s birth, is likely to produce strong majority support. The way is open for Putin to remain in power, theoretically until 2036.

We can only guess at what was in Putin’s mind when he devised his constitutional amendments. Many observers believe that the driving force was simply his desire to remain in power well into the future, whether it’s to protect himself and those around him from possible retribution or to satisfy a lust for power. For others — and this is consistent with the justification hinted at in Putin’s speech — he is simply the most competent and appropriate person to guide Russia through troubled times.

But does Putin really want to be president for more than the remaining four years of his term? By 2024 he will be seventy-two years old, which mightn’t seem old until you consider that the current male life expectancy in Russia is 71.6 years. In recent years his demeanour has seemed much more world-weary, giving an impression that while he may not be eager to give up power he recognises the job is taking a toll. He has also frequently complained of making decisions that his ministers don’t always carry out. Yet the proposed constitutional change providing for Duma appointment of ministers could make those ministers even less responsive to the president (although he or she would still be able to dismiss them).

Perhaps the “competence in the face of adversity” argument is stronger. Russia faces a range of international challenges at the moment, including Covid-19, the oil price war with Saudi Arabia, strained relations with the West, economic sanctions, and the conflict in Syria. Domestically, living standards are under pressure, reforms to the economy are overdue, the health service and transport need major refurbishment, and a small but vocal opposition still takes to the streets. Putin may see himself as having the steadiest and most experienced hands in a turbulent international environment.

What isn’t clear is whether he really wants to be president into the future. He has not committed to stand in 2024; all he has done is to make that constitutionally possible. In the past he has said that he will step down in 2024, and although his word may not meet the gold standard for reliability, there is little strong evidence of a burning desire to remain president. There is, however, another reason why he may have agreed to create the conditions whereby he could remain in office well into the future.

History shows that the leadership succession is a point of vulnerability under strong-leader regimes like Russia’s. In the post-Soviet states, strongmen become vulnerable when their public approval ratings drop and they are seen as lame ducks. The existing limit of two consecutive terms will soon expose Putin to this possibility — and his public approval rating has already been dropping. A leader on the way out starts to lose the loyalty and commitment of those around him. They will be concerned to look after their own interests, which may be best served by allying with the next leader, if that person’s identity can be discerned. Constraints are loosened as different groups within and around the leadership begin to compete for the succession. Conflict and instability become likely.

By opening up the possibility that he could continue in office after his current term ends, Putin may be hoping to block any mobilisation of this kind in the upper ranks of Russian politics. For some time there has been talk of factional struggles within the Kremlin, with different observers identifying different groups and factions. Tension clearly exists. Putin has very successfully kept such differences under control, but as a lame duck leader his ability to do this would be impaired. Freed of the term limit, he may be able to dampen down potential conflict while retaining the option of either continuing as president himself or naming his successor, as he did in 2008.

In this light, these latest manoeuvrings around the constitution and its amendment may well be part of the continuing struggle around the presidential succession, which is still most likely to come in 2024. •

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One of Lee’s duties hadn’t been mentioned when he was hired. Twice a day, after dark, he would tow a big tank of chlorinated hydrocarbon residue from the factory to the nearby Bayou d’Inde. After making sure he hadn’t been seen, he would back up the buggy, check the wind, and turn the tap. The pressure inside would propel the thick, noxious fluid into the marsh.

Years later, Lee confessed what he’d done to a roomful of angry locals who relied on the area’s waterways for their livelihoods. By now, PPG and other factories in the state had propelled Louisiana to the top of the country’s hazardous-waste league table. Authorities were warning that fish from the Bayou d’Inde should be eaten no more than twice a month and humans should avoid any direct contact with the waters.

Lee had been fired by the company after an accidental drenching with chlorinated hydrocarbons sent him on sick leave for eight months. Not altogether surprisingly, his experiences had turned him into an ardent environmentalist — but an environmentalist, Hochschild discovered, who also supported the Tea Party, a movement that wanted the Environmental Protection Agency abolished and companies freed of red tape.

This seeming paradox was the starting point of Hochshild’s book, Strangers in Their Own Land. What she learned from four years of visiting Lousiana — where just 14 per cent of white voters supported Barack Obama in 2012 — is that Tea Party supporters, many of whom became part of the Trump “base,” feel quite differently about the world from the people she mixes with back in San Francisco. They feel that way for a complex mix of reasons, some of them particular to the southern United States — a prickly resistance to northern liberal attitudes, for instance, that dates back through the civil rights movement to the civil war — and some that would resonate in Europe, Russia and even Australia.

Out of Hochschild’s attempt to scale what she calls the “empathy wall” came a “deep story” that attracted a great deal of attention when her book was published. She concluded that the Tea Party supporters she met in Louisiana — “white, older, Christian, and predominantly male, some with college degrees, some not” — felt like they were standing in a queue that was moving extremely slowly. Ahead was the American Dream, “the goal of everyone in the line,” and behind were people of other races, young and old, often poor.

This line had always existed, but what had changed was the feeling that other people were cutting in ahead — black people, propelled by affirmative action programs, as well as “women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers — where will it end?” And who was helping these queue-jumpers? It was Barack Obama, who seemed more sympathetic to the people pushing in than he did to the ones patiently waiting. “You feel betrayed,” Hochschild writes, addressing her informants. “The president is their president, not your president.”

This feeling is essentially why the people Hochschild came to know, and in many cases like, happily voted for Donald Trump, a man who vilified anyone who wasn’t white, who flouted the conventions of public discourse, who didn’t understand the difference between public and private interests, and who seemed to understand how they felt about being forced to stand stationary in the queue.

Political scientist Ivan Krastev and New York University law profesor Stephen Holmes also use a striking metaphor to explain the current political mood, though theirs is applied more boldly, and perhaps less successfully, across a wider canvas.

The Light that Failed is structured around the idea that Western history since 1989 has been shaped by three waves of imitation. First, the newly liberated countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union set out to imitate the fabled West that they’d envied for so long. Then, after Russia’s failed transition to Western-style democracy, Vladimir Putin created an authoritarian system that cynically imitated many of the features of Western democracy and began parodying America’s international interventions. And finally, taking a lead from Putin and other would-be despots, Donald Trump renounced America’s claim to exemplary behaviour and injected a dose of Russian-style authoritarianism into the US system.

“The future was better yesterday,” begin Krastev and Holmes. “The geopolitical stage seemed set for a performance not unlike George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, an optimistic and didactic play in which a professor of phonetics, over a short period of time, succeeds in teaching a poor flower girl to speak like the Queen and feel at home in polite company.” But it soon became clear that the East’s integration into the West wasn’t unfolding quite as expected. “It was as if, instead of watching a performance of Pygmalion, the world ended up with a theatrical adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Worse than that, the process of imitation had begun moving in the opposite direction.

Among the people of Central and Eastern Europe, the post-1989 euphoria fuelled hopes of dramatic improvements in living standards and general wellbeing: “Some thought it would suffice for communist officials to quit their posts for Central and East Europeans to wake up in different, freer, more prosperous and, above all, more Western countries.” When that didn’t happen, people began to leave for the West in an exodus that quickened once Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Latvia and other countries joined the European Union in 2004. Since 1989, two million East Germans — more than one in eight — have moved to West Germany. Latvia has lost a staggering 27 per cent of its population, Bulgaria almost 21 per cent. More than two million Poles, or one in eight, have left for the West. After the process accelerated again during the global financial crisis, more people left these countries than would later arrive as a result of the war in Syria.

As the historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote recently, “Emigration is the region’s real problem, but immigration is its imagined one.” The Light That Failed describes the psychic impact of that exodus on those who stayed behind — and how it fuelled fears of more broad-scale emigration — and suggests that loss helps explain support for parties pledged to restore the kind of ethnic makeup that had prevailed in 1989.

Something similar was going on in Russia — vast numbers of people leaving, Western-inspired economic reforms backfiring, disillusion turning to nostalgia — but with an important difference. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe had thrown off Moscow’s control, and now resented the feeling they were expected to exchange that subjection for another set of rules, these ones imposed by the West. Russia, on the other hand, was coming to terms with the fact that it had lost the cold war, and with it, territory and stature. Democratic reformers made less headway there, and its tissue-thin copies of Western practices and institutions — elections, parties, a constitutional court — were masking deep economic changes taking place with little or no public support.

Putin, now in control, preserved these “Potemkin” institutions but started planning for the future. Even at a time when the economy was doing well and his popularity was high, he blatantly rigged elections to display his strength and prepare for a time when sentiment might not be so favourable. Rather than having to look fair, the elections were designed to showcase his ability to “manipulate the accreditation, nomination and voting process in an orderly and predictable way and thereby, paradoxically, to demonstrate his authoritarian credentials as a man who can get things done.” Landslide victories, part real, part manufactured, were the result.

After relations with the West soured and the Russian economy hit the rocks, Putin’s strategic imitation of the West became more internationally assertive. The hypocrisies of American foreign policy — especially the humanitarian interventions that were actually designed to preserve strategic interests — became a template for Russian forays into neighbouring countries, most notoriously Crimea and Syria.

When Putin announced Russia’s annexation of Crimea he used whole passages from speeches in which Western leaders had sought to justify freeing Kosovo forcibly from Serbian control. “Just as NATO violated the territorial integrity of Serbia in 1999, so Russia violated the territorial integrity of Georgia in 2008,” write Krastev and Holmes:

Just as the American administration has blacklisted some prominent Russians, preventing them from entering the US, so the Kremlin has blacklisted some prominent Americans, preventing them from entering Russia. Just as the Americans and Europeans celebrated the dismantling of the Soviet Union, so Russians now celebrate Brexit and the dismantling of the EU. Just as the West has supported liberal NGOs inside Russia, Russians are financing far-right and far-left groups in the West to undermine NATO, block US missile defence programmes, weaken support for sanctions and European unity. Just as the West (in Moscow’s view) lied brazenly to Russia about its plan for NATO expansion and about the UN-sanctioned attack on Libya, so Russia lies brazenly to the West about its military incursions into Ukraine. And just as the US is aiding the military of Ukraine (traditionally in Moscow’s sphere of influence), so Russia is aiding the military of Venezuela (traditionally in Washington’s sphere of influence).

“Contagious imitation,” as the authors call it, didn’t end there. Far-right parties in Western Europe used the same fears to capture greater support (though never anywhere near majority support) and, depending on the local electoral system, translate it into control or at least bargaining power.

The third element of the imitation trifecta came with Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House. The Russians undoubtedly meddled in the election that put him there, but their main aim, say Krastev and Holmes, was to show that they were a power to be reckoned with. Supporting Trump was simply the easiest way to disrupt their ideological enemy.

Trump saw Putin’s calculating cynicism as refreshingly free of the hypocrisy he believed was limiting America’s ability to exercise power. For the new American president, being a great country didn’t mean being a beacon of freedom and democracy; it meant being a winner. He saw Putin — along with Hungary’s unashamedly illiberal Viktor Orbán — as winners, and hence as guides to how a leader could and should behave.

There is so much that is original and challenging in this book that it seems ungrateful to quibble about its overarching theme. But I’m not sure that Krastev and Holmes’s three varieties of imitation — Central and Eastern Europe’s post-1989 Western-focused euphoria, Putin’s retaliatory foreign policy imitation, and the illiberal copying by Trump and the far-right parties of Western Europe — fit together as neatly as that summary might appear.

In their discussion of the third of these trends, for instance, the authors challenge those who see the roughly simultaneous rise of “reactionary nativism” in the United States and Western Europe as more of a coincidence than a trend. Responding to their own question — in that case, why today? — they write: “One possible answer is ‘contagious imitation.’” That’s certainly a possible answer, but they have already given us the ingredients of another, more plausible, explanation for the simultaneous rise of the extremist right in Western Europe and the United States (and the illiberal turn in Central and Eastern Europe). This was the interaction of the global financial crisis with decades of bottled-up disaffection — in many countries, including the United States, fuelled by decades of stagnant incomes — which combined to produce an electoral rebellion.

The disaffection was driven by a mix of factors, some common across the West, others particular to different locations. Emigration was a longstanding problem not only in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, but also in parts of the United States and Western Europe, where it left regions and even whole countries with an older and more conservative population. The problem persists: Putin spent much of his recent state of the nation address outlining measures to encourage more births; Hungary has begun offering free in vitro fertilisation on top of its existing pro-birth polices; and Poland, Lithuania and Bulgaria are among the other countries using incentives (usually unsuccessfully) to try to lift birth rates.

Life expectancy was another canary in the mine. In Hochschild’s Louisiana, life expectancy at birth is three years lower than the United States’s not very impressive national figure of 78.6 years (and falling), which itself is four years lower than Australia’s 82.6 (and rising). In Britain, gains in life expectancy have stalled nationally and the figure is falling in some regions.

Although the point gets sidelined by their imitation thesis, Krastev and Holmes do acknowledge the impact of population ageing and decline in Central and Eastern Europe. “In a country where the majority of young people yearn to leave, the very fact that you have remained, regardless of how well you are doing, makes you a loser,” they write. “It also readies you to cheer anti-liberal demagogues who denounce copycat Westernisation as a betrayal of the nation.” Without the reference to “copycat Westernisation,” that passage could be referring to Louisiana, or to many other regions experiencing population decline in the United States, Britain or Western Europe.

Those population-related statistics are part of an alternative explanation for why the light failed. If a country is ageing unusually quickly — because of fewer births, more deaths or departures exceeding arrivals — then the shift in sentiment in those countries is at least partly a shift in demography. The views of particular individuals needn’t change in order for the balance of opinion within a country or region to shift. The political impact of that shift can be magnified by the electoral system and how it is administered. In some countries, electoral laws are used to discourage younger or poorer voters from voting; in some of the same countries, and in others, the system is weighted towards older, rural and more conservative voters.

In the United States, the second phenomenon is bad and getting worse: “By 2040,” political analyst Ezra Klein wrote recently, “70 per cent of Americans will live in the fifteen largest states. That means 70 per cent of America will be represented by only thirty senators, while the other 30 per cent of America will be represented by seventy senators.” With the presidential electoral college system following a similar trajectory, says Klein, Republicans “represent a shrinking constituency that holds vast political power. That has injected an almost manic urgency into their strategy. Behind the party’s tactical extremism lurks an apocalyptic sense of political stakes.”

In what are essentially two-party systems, the behaviour and leadership of the parties also matters when demography and other factors shift sentiment. Britain is still basically the country that elected Tony Blair three times; the United States is still the country that elected Barack Obama. The fact that British voters failed to elect Jeremy Corbyn prime minister and enough American voters in enough states knocked back Hillary Clinton doesn’t necessarily the country has changed fundamentally. In the case of the United States, the Democrats have won the popular majority in all but one of the seven presidential elections since 1992, including the one that brought Donald Trump to power.

One other factor was present in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe though not to anywhere near the same extent in the other countries discussed in The Light That Failed. That’s the sheer speed and intensity of change after 1989, propelled (especially in Russia) by Western-backed “shock therapy.” Within a few years, the political and economic system of every iron-curtain country had changed almost out of recognition, and maps had to be redrawn to show the new boundaries of the diminished giant on its eastern edge.

Demographic change and suspicion of elites have long been at work in Hochschild’s Louisiana, too. At around the time Lee Sharman came clean at the meeting of local fisherfolk, he also joined a tiny environmental organisation called RESTORE. It was hardly the kind of group that the big polluting businesses had much to fear from, but it seems to have come to the attention of at least one of the companies operating in the area.

One day, a schoolteacher who no one knew joined the group. Strange things began to happen. At first he seemed helpful, but then, on a shopping expedition for the group, he bought two GPSs and then told other members that Lee had bought them for himself with the group’s money. Left alone with the computer holding RESTORE’s records, he installed spyware. When this was discovered, there was a confrontation and the group fell apart. It later emerged, via a sworn deposition from a senior company executive, that chemical manufacturer Condea Vista had hired former Special Forces agents to infiltrate the group.

Yet, after all his experiences of the big polluters — the after-dark chemical dumping, the peremptory sacking, the infiltration — Lee still preferred the companies (and the state government, which had long been in cahoots with the companies) to the federal government, as did his fellow Tea Party members. How could this possibly be the case? It’s worth quoting Hochschild’s answer at length:

Lee’s biggest beef was taxes. They went to the wrong people — especially welfare beneficiaries who “lazed around days and partied at night” and government workers in cushy jobs. He knew liberal Democrats wanted him to care more about welfare recipients, but he didn’t want their PC rules telling him who to feel sorry for. He had his own more local — and personal — way of showing sympathy for the poor. Every Christmas, through Beau-Care, a Beauregard Parish nonprofit community agency, he and his wife, “Miss Bobby,” chose seven envelopes off of a Christmas tree and provided a present for the child named on the enclosed card…

Two events further soured him on the IRS [the US government’s tax office]. In one, he got a part-time job to earn a little extra money, but worked more hours than federal rules allowed, got caught, and had to wait a year to get back on Social Security… More enraging was the second event. “I made a date with a clerk at the IRS office to collect a tax refund of a certain amount, and nothing about the meeting did I like,” Lee explains. “The gal wore a see-through blouse, to distract me. Then she asked for every possible receipt, tallied the amount up wrong, and gave me less than I had coming. She cheated me. I needed the money, but I never cashed that cheque.”

I’m not sure whether Lee could ever be persuaded that federal welfare funds are always well spent, but even liberals can sympathise with his response to tight, zealously enforced rules and seemingly arbitrary decision-making.

So would his counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe. As Timothy Garton Ash writes, “All current European populisms feed off anger at the way in which liberalism was reduced after 1989 to one rather extreme version of a purely economic liberalism, without the ‘equal respect and concern’ for all citizens that the philosopher Ronald Dworkin identified as essential to a modern liberalism.”

It’s easy to forget the upsides of a different kind of liberalism from the version that has had the upper hand since the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — a kind of liberalism that combines pluralism, tolerance and generous help for people in need, and needn’t have neoliberalism as its necessary end-point. You might call it social democracy — which, as the New Statesman’s Jeremy Cliffe wrote recently, “might seem like an anti-climactic suggestion” but brings together, in theory at least, “redistributive taxation, social insurance, universal public services, non-market mechanisms of coordination (such as trade unions) and a strategic role for the state where the market falls short.”

For their part, Krastev and Holmes are optimistic in a characteristically idiosyncratic way: “We can endlessly mourn the globally dominant liberal order that we have lost or we can celebrate our return to a world of perpetually jostling political alternatives, realising that a chastised liberalism, having recovered from its unrealistic and self-defeating aspirations to global hegemony, remains the idea most at home in the twenty-first century.” •

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The central figure in Chernobyl (screening in Australia on Foxtel) is Valery Legasov, a nuclear physicist sent to assess the reactor immediately following the initial explosion on 26 April 1986. Jared Harris portrays him as a committed professional who becomes the voice of conscience within a corrupt regime, dominating the final episode with his testimony at the criminal trial of Chernobyl personnel in July 1987.

Legasov’s speech, aimed at the cohort of observers from scientific institutions who constituted an unofficial jury, overstepped the bounds of what the Politburo was prepared to hear. The rest of his story is all too predictable. Made a “former person” and relegated to obscurity, his interventions were largely wiped from the record. Shortly after the second anniversary of the meltdown, he committed suicide.

One of the few remaining traces of his presence is a brief interview on NBC’s News Today at the time of the August 1986 conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, to which he was sent as chief Soviet delegate, still bearing the Kremlin seal of approval. The American interviewer is keen to ask the leading questions: “Are you saying as much as you know?” and “Should all the reactors be closed?”

To the first question he responds that the detailed report he has submitted “tried to produce precisely the kind of material that would enable the experts to consider the measures and draw conclusions for the future.” As for closing the other sixteen reactors of the same design, he shrugs. (Yes, he really does shrug, in a slow, inexpressive movement.) It’s the first thing that occurs to anyone unfamiliar with the history of the breakdown, he says. “Experts” — a word he uses repeatedly — understand things differently.

Legasov’s expression is impenetrable throughout, that of a technocrat reciting an authorised doctrine. The fuller story of his involvement suggests that there was a complex, principled human being behind the mask, and therein was a key challenge for scriptwriter Craig Mazin and actor Jared Harris. Mazin avoids the obvious choices: there’s no attempt to portray Legasov as a family man, although he had a wife and daughter who stood by him throughout the ordeal. Instead, he sits alone in a dismal little apartment, with a cat as his sole companion.

The real-life Legasov was also a man of some national standing, an esteemed party loyalist who held a senior position at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. There was potential for high drama in the authority figure torn between symbolism and realism: a version of Thomas More behind the iron curtain. Instead, he is introduced as a conscripted subordinate, a thorn in the side of party official Boris Shcherbina, the man entrusted with the political management of the crisis.

Harris, who excels in the role of the ordinary man cast onto the frontline of history (as he did as the reluctant monarch George VI in The Crown), plays Legasov as someone driven by a stubborn fixation on technological accuracy rather than by any moral commitment to “the truth.” That comes later, as an evolution of his growing insight into the causes of the catastrophe. This psychological evolution, subtle and gradual, forms a central line of tension through the five episodes.

As Shcherbina, Stellan Skarsgård is a perfect dramatic counterpart to Harris. Harris is light-voiced, slightly built and unobtrusive; Skarsgård, a solid, conspicuous figure in the landscape of devastation, speaks as if he has swallowed a handful of gravel. Yet it is Shcherbina who gives way, the realist in him called out by the sheer scale of what he is witnessing.

According to Craig Mazin, this is a story “about the cost of lies and the dangers of narrative.” The culpability of a state apparatus built on a false narrative is a central theme, but herein lies the danger of another one-dimensional narrative — that of Chernobyl as the symbol of a failed state and its fallout. Those following the story in Western media, Mazin says, “had no sense of how multilayered the situation was.” So the series also sets out to show the forms of genuine heroism exhibited by the Soviet citizenry.

In the opening episode, viewers are subjected to an almost minute-by-minute re-enactment of the unfolding disaster as it is experienced by those in the control room, where a test experiment goes wrong. The quintessential irony is that they are running a safety test. But those pressing the buttons and pulling the levers are under pressure from a bullying supervisor who has himself been leant on by a superior determined to complete the required procedures in an arbitrarily imposed timeframe. And so the machinery of the state has an impact on the technologies of the reactor: it is almost as if the escalating rage of the supervisor is feeding directly into the system, driving the rapidly scrolling numbers on the electronic counter.

Then, in one of the most vividly realised scenes, miners from Tula are called on to dig a channel underneath the core and install a liquid nitrogen coolant. The coal industries minister emerges from his vehicle dressed in a pale blue suit and faces a group of forty-five men whose skin and clothing are permeated with coal dust. It’s a stand-off of the starkest kind. He issues an order; the leader of the miners stonewalls. Why should they do this? The minister signs to the two armed guards behind him, and threatens to shoot. The miner shrugs, “You haven’t got enough bullets for all of us.” The impasse is broken when the miners understand what is at stake and accept their role, each of them leaving a black hand print on the minister’s suit as they pass him to board the convoy to Chernobyl.

This is dramaturgy, not realism, but the actual courage of those miners is well attested, and the scene serves to convey another dimension of the “Soviet Union.” There was an extent to which it remained true to its name among the people, if not in its many levels of government.

Aware as they may have been of the dangers of narrative, the series creators also deal in it by infusing the dramatisation with conventional forms of stirring and sentimental encounter. Emily Watson’s role as Ulana Khomyuk, a nuclear physicist who enters the fray to offer a challenge to Legasov’s diagnosis, is a fictional composite. With her natural candour, Watson invests the character with rather too much moral colouring, especially when she incites Legasov to go out there and tell it like it is in the trial hearing. Was it really like that?

The final episode, in which scenes from the courtroom are intercut with flashbacks to the opening scene in the control room of the reactor, turns into a kind of show trial of the Soviet state. It is dominated by Legasov, whose lecture on the factors leading up to the meltdown turns at the last minute into a grand denunciation of the culture of lies in which they are all embroiled. “To be a scientist is to be naive… The truth doesn’t care about our governments, ideologies, religions. It will lie in wait for all time and this at last is the gift of Chernobyl. I once would fear the cost of truth. Now I only ask, ‘What is the cost of lies?’”

In the 1980s, Soviet Russia was, in the eyes of the Western world, the prototype for the failed state. Four decades on, Legasov’s words ring out as a statement for our times, an indictment of the fraudulent political cultures now well advanced in Western democracies. The global financial crisis might be seen as the capitalist equivalent of the Chernobyl meltdown, but what, ultimately, were the consequences? With the ascent of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson’s likely instatement as prime minister, we’re still waiting for the truth to catch up. It may be that the popularity of Chernobyl is a reflection of wishful thinking. If only the truth actually would come home to roost. •

The post Eventually the truth catches up appeared first on Inside Story.

The INF treaty’s symbolic importance dates back to the cold war manoeuvring of the postwar period. NATO had been established in 1949, tying together the United States and Western Europe to deter a Soviet invasion, and American troops had been based on the West German front line. They were followed by thousands of short-range “battlefield” nuclear weapons, designed to reassure Europeans that Washington could counter Moscow’s advantage in conventional forces. Not surprisingly, the weapons were controversial: they seemed likely to be used almost automatically against any fast-approaching Russian tank armies, and would devastate precisely the countries (like West Germany) they were supposed to protect.

The dilemma became stark in the late 1970s. NATO’s short-range nuclear forces were to be modernised with the “enhanced radiation warhead” — in other words, the neutron bomb. Outrage followed the media’s reporting of the plan. Moscow amped up its anti-NATO propaganda campaign, and in the West the peace movement mushroomed. “The shorter the range, the deader the Germans,” became a rallying cry. The Western alliance buckled under political pressure and abandoned the new warhead. NATO had shot itself in the foot; the Russians were delighted.

NATO revisited the issue in the early 1980s, aiming to repair the damage done to its credibility. This time the new weapons would be longer-range, capable of hitting Russia. They would provide a more powerful deterrent and be seen, it was hoped, as less dangerous to allied populations. NATO also fine-tuned the rationale, saying it needed to counter a new generation of Soviet weapons, especially the SS-20, a nuclear ballistic missile capable of reaching any location in Europe. More than 400 SS-20s were built, each carrying three warheads with the explosive equivalent of ten Hiroshima bombs. They seemed designed to intimidate Europe. The counter was the US nuclear-armed, Ground-Launched Cruise Missile, or GLCM, and the Pershing II missile, which were both deployed to Europe.

Again, there was an uproar, and a good deal of anxiety. This was an arms race many feared would end in a third world war. While the new missiles were packaged as symbols of NATO solidarity, they were formidable weapons integrated into serious plans for operations. Combined with their Soviet equivalents, they could easily kill a hundred million Europeans and lay waste to the continent from Portugal to the Ural Mountains.

Then, quite quickly, everything changed.

President Ronald Reagan proposed a “zero option”: why couldn’t NATO and Moscow simply agree to get rid of this class of weapon? Deterrence would remain in place, but the dangerous momentum would be reversed.

Reagan was widely ridiculed. The peace movement was convinced he was a warmonger and refused to take his idea at face value. Some conservatives believed he was strategically illiterate. The Soviet old guard refused to budge; the idea of giving up their newest and best weapons struck them as ludicrous.

The circuit-breaker was a new Soviet leader. Mikhail Gorbachev viewed the cold war as ruinously expensive, politically silly and reckless. He accepted Reagan’s offer, giving us the INF treaty. All the SS-20s, GLCMs and Pershing IIs were scrapped. It was a big step towards ending the cold war.

So why is the treaty being torn up? First and foremost, Vladimir Putin is no Gorbachev. He is resentful of NATO expansion, is prone to playing the nationalist card, and pushes his luck. He allowed (perhaps encouraged) the Russian military–industrial complex to proceed with a new missile that violates the treaty. Add to that a lack of transparency in Russia’s large arsenal of shorter-range nuclear weapons, and Putin’s provocations in Ukraine, and it’s hard to take him at his word.

In addition, Donald Trump seems uninterested in the implications of either abandoning the treaty or working to repair it. Playing tough, sidelining the concerns of allies and liberals, keeping issues simple and regurgitating slogans have become a program. He apparently views politics as a game of poker: convince the other side you can push harder, for longer, and can keep raising the stakes, and all will be well. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether his blustering is a considered strategy or simply a character fault.

Another factor is the passage of time. The treaty reflected a moment in history. It was bilateral — restricted to Washington and Moscow — with each side showing good faith. Today’s world isn’t so simple. Compared with 1987, trust is in short supply. And China is now more significant in Russian and American strategic thinking.

Lastly, there’s John Bolton. Trump’s national security advisor is considered smart but dogmatic. He’s been a pugnacious objector to arms control for decades. Many global security experts view him as the Prince of Darkness and suggest his opposition is almost pathological. He probably sees himself more like Dirty Harry: clear-eyed, making the tough but necessary calls that spineless, naive idealists run away from. For Bolton, there’s no merit in negotiation with dubious governments.

To a degree, he has a point. Bad arms control that discredits the brand and favours cheaters is worse than no arms control. But he takes the point to extremes. Bolton seems to relish ripping up diplomatic deals rather than fixing them.

The implications of the treaty’s end look grim. Three suggest themselves.

First, the scene has been set to abandon the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, for intercontinental-range missiles. Unlike the INF deal, this doesn’t have to be melodramatically ditched; it can simply be allowed to lapse in 2021.

Second, the door has been opened to a new round of proliferation. Russia has reportedly said it will respond to US withdrawal with new missiles. Trump’s stance means the Russians have been given a legal way to build new intermediate-range missiles while blaming Washington for the treaty failure. The United States had already begun a nuclear modernisation program costed at US$490 billion over ten years; scrapping the INF treaty could see this ramped up. But there’s also the awkward fact that few, if any, countries will want to host the American missiles. (Imagine the reaction to a request to base such weaponry in Australia, targeting China.)

This overlaps with the third point. NATO might be put under more strain. If the United States leans on its European allies to support a new generation of intermediate-range missiles, there will likely be political pandemonium. On the other hand, the Europeans won’t want to face an unconstrained Russia without American backing. Being caught between Trump’s trash-talking of the Western alliance and Putin’s imperious tendencies would be very unpleasant.

Now that notice has been given, the treaty is due to terminate in six months. Perhaps Trump and Putin will be persuaded to see reason and change their minds, but don’t hold your breath. •

The post Missile envy appeared first on Inside Story.

Until last week, that is. With the large expulsions of Russian spies, for the first time in years, the Western alliance began to resemble something worthy of the name in its dealings with Russia. What brought that about? And for how long will the unity be maintained?

Russia’s aggression had peaked again in the run-up to the March presidential election. Putin, scarcely bothering to campaign, had delayed his annual address (poslanie) to both houses of parliament until 1 March to serve as a pre-election gambit. When it was eventually delivered, most of the speech was devoted to implausible calls for economic reform, rapid growth and a swift rise in living standards. But its closing section turned to more colourful military matters. In particular, Putin promised new, game-changing nuclear weapons capable of breaching America’s missile defence shield, a favourite bugbear of Russian propaganda.

Up to this point, the elite audience had seemed somewhat bored. After all, the promises of prosperity were aimed not at them but at the voting masses. But the military triumphalism and the slick video accompaniments — one depicting warheads raining down on the United States — evoked delighted animation.

It was an example of that longstanding staple of Kremlin propaganda, nuclear intimidation — a gauntlet flung down to the United States to engage in a new arms race or perhaps even capitulate to a new world order fashioned to Russia’s requirements. The West had been warned more than once, Putin declared, but it didn’t want to listen and believed it could contain Russia. “Listen to us now!” he concluded ominously, to thunderous applause.

From Moscow’s viewpoint, the response from Washington was disappointingly muted, even dismissive. Donald Trump, as is usual when he is faced by hostile Russian behaviour, said nothing. But officials and commentators pointed out that the Kremlin already had a huge nuclear arsenal quite capable of overwhelming US anti-ballistic missile installations. Others suggested that the new weapons were mostly works in progress, on show mainly for domestic consumption.

Even some independent Russian bloggers found the audience’s reaction distasteful. But the audience’s delight reflected a strong feeling in Putin’s listeners that now, at last, they were paying the West back for the intolerable humiliations it had inflicted on them in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Since its seizure of Crimea and violent subversion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, Russia’s “hybrid warfare” — intrusive overflights, snap exercises, military build-ups close to target borders, hostile propaganda, underhand meddling in democratic elections, and efforts to exploit faultlines within target countries, especially where there are sizeable Russian minorities or pro-Russian parties — has been directed against a growing number of European countries, and occasionally countries further afield, like the United States and Japan.

Russian aggression towards the United States has been constrained somewhat by the United States’ formidable strength, but also recently by the hope that President Trump would deliver on his oft-repeated calls for warm and cooperative relations. Putin’s decision to use videos depicting a shower of missiles landing in Trump’s second home state of Florida was a sharp divergence from his usual cautious handling of his “asset” in the White House. Perhaps he was keen not just to get out the vote domestically and frighten Western populations, but also to remind Trump that it was time to speak respectfully and constructively with Russia about all outstanding points of contention. If so, it seems to have been a timely message, because Trump soon seemed to be proposing precisely that.

Within a few days of his nuclear threats, though, Putin presented the West with another sinister message, when Sergei Skripal, a former senior official of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence organisation, and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned in the English city of Salisbury. Skripal had been recruited by British intelligence in the 1990s but was later unmasked and sentenced to a thirteen-year prison sentence in 2006. Pardoned by president Dimitri Medvedev in 2010, and then included in an East–West spy-swap arrangement (typically asymmetrical — four for ten, in Russia’s favour), he chose to retire in Britain.

While it took some time for the British authorities to establish exactly what the poison was, the symptoms and the circumstances pointed strongly towards another ostentatious assassination operation by Russia on sovereign British territory. The Litvinenko case from 2006 quickly came to almost everybody’s mind. One or two ministers might have jumped the gun slightly, but prime minister Theresa May was careful not to rush to judgement publicly. She made it clear from the outset, however, that if the government’s extreme concerns about the event were borne out, Britain would respond vigorously.

On 12 March, May announced that investigations had revealed a military-grade nerve agent of a type known colloquially as Novichok (“newcomer”), developed exclusively by the Soviet Union. Together with the evidence of past attacks conducted on British soil (fourteen cases, some of them distinctly suspicious, are under re-examination), it seemed “highly likely” that Russia was responsible. Either agents of the Russian state had been involved, she said, or the Russian authorities had lost control of their weapon stocks. Whichever was the case, Russia was and should be held responsible. She gave Russia a day to provide a full clarification of the circumstances, or action would follow.

From the outset, the Russian response had been angry and aggressive. The usual blizzard of flat denials, obfuscations and confected conspiracy theories was launched through Russia’s formidable propaganda apparatus. Western media began to give wide coverage to these alternative facts and theories, probably unaware of their origins. Contrarians, Putinists and instant experts — of which Australia has an imposing rollcall — stepped into the fray.

After the ultimatum, the official Russian tone became sharper. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova declared indignantly that no one gives Russia ultimatums. Did Britain not realise, after President Putin’s address, that this was courting a devastating military response? Instead of offering any useful information of their own, Russian officials demanded, as they routinely do in such cases, that Britain supply all its evidence to them, presumably so that Russia could scrutinise British state secrets and intelligence methods and prepare fresh waves of propaganda. This was manifestly not the response of an innocent party, unjustly accused.

On the same day that Theresa May delivered her demand for an explanation, another Russian political exile, Nikolai Glushkov, was found dead in his London home. It soon became apparent that he had been murdered. Glushkov, a former Aeroflot senior executive and political opponent of Putin, had been granted political asylum in Britain after repeated convictions in Russia. He had close links with the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, another London political exile, who died in suspicious circumstances in 2013. As became apparent from his post-mortem, the manner of Glushkov’s death — “compression to the neck” — bore a close similarity to Berezovsky’s, which was initially taken by police to be suicide, though the inquest recorded an open finding. Glushkov’s murder was entrusted — as the Skripal case had been — to Britain’s counterterrorism police.

With admirable restraint, the police have been maintaining that “there is nothing to suggest any link” with the Skripal case. But two assassination operations on Russian exiles within a week in England might seem to the rest of us to be further confirmation of many things we thought we already knew. Carrying out “wet jobs” abroad has been one of the great and more durable of Bolshevik/KGB traditions over the past century, and one to which Putin himself paid public tribute in his annual Q&A session in 2010, the year Skripal was allowed to depart to Britain. ‘Traitors will kick the bucket,” he said. “Trust me. Those people betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those thirty pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.”

Various explanations for the Skripal case are on offer. Russian officials and propagandists have suggested variously that the Czech Republic, Sweden, the United States or Britain itself may be responsible. The idea that the United States or Britain itself may have sprinkled nerve agent around the streets of Salisbury to incriminate Russia may strike the Western mind as implausible, even self-discrediting, but this is the way Putin and his circle appear to think, for it is precisely the sort of thing they might do themselves. The provokatsia — staging a fake event to disadvantage adversaries or even provide a justification for attacking them in some way — is a standing operating procedure in the KGB Stalinist traditions in which many of them are steeped. Putin’s discreet but very effective promotion of that tradition and of Stalin’s persona is one of his most striking achievements.

To a considerable extent, Putin’s rise to power and popularity is built on Moscow’s brutal war in Chechnya, which involved huge civilian casualties, including of ethnic Russian residents. An important casus belli in that war were the so-called apartment bombings in Russia in 1999, which killed nearly 300 and injured more than 1000 people, creating a strong desire among Russians for vengeance against the presumed Chechen perpetrators. These events have been extensively probed by researchers, some of whom (including Aleksandr Litvinenko) have subsequently died unexpectedly. Their view has been that the bombings were a giant provokatsia conducted by Russia’s security agencies. The FSB, Russia’s principal security agency, was clearly involved in one such incident, but its role was explained away as a training exercise and further official enquiries halted.

Among the competing explanations, the overwhelmingly obvious one is that this is another act of revenge by, and a grim warning from, those agencies. Skripal’s daughter had been active on social media in Moscow, occasionally criticising Putin in fairly forceful language, so she was possibly targeted too. In fact, both of the other two members of Skripal’s family have died recently, a suspicious circumstance in itself. More generally, this gruesome attack is a clear warning to all the regime’s enemies that they are not safe anywhere, and particularly not in Britain, despite the fact that members of the Russian elite like to launder money, educate offspring and spend time there.

The second possibility in Theresa May’s ultimatum, that the Russians may have lost control of their weapon, or shared it in some way, opens up other possibilities for which Russia should not be absolved of responsibility. Until Moscow chooses to throw some genuine light on the subject, its reputation for murder and mendacious propaganda should incline us to settle for vengeance and intimidation as the most likely motives.

The question of why the attack occurred now is also of interest. Putin has argued, as have his apologists, that its proximity to the presidential vote was damaging to his chances of securing a good result, and that this is evidence enough that the regime wasn’t involved. Yet the claimed turnout figure and the vote for Putin were high regardless of the attack, and the characteristic falsification of results was enough to guard against any late turbulence.

In any case, the Skripal case was spun to remind Putin’s constituents that Russia is under siege from the West, and that Britain’s outrageous aggression should be forcefully rejected. A minority would not accept that message, but most consumers of state-controlled media appear willing. And, sadly, a majority of voters would probably also endorse the idea that traitors should be murdered wherever necessary. Russians seem again to be very malleable in their opinions. After two decades of Putinism, polling shows that the regime can quickly engineer hostile attitudes towards the United States, Ukraine or other targets.

The lead-up to the election precipitated much discussion about whether Putin would inevitably be a lame duck during his new presidential term, which the constitution prescribes must be his last. If he retains his present dominant position, it will be easy for him to manipulate the constitution in any way he chooses. But the stagnant economy and emerging clouds on the external horizon could conceivably impose a finite stamp on his tenure of office over the next few years, forcing him to eschew any constitutional games and gracefully withdraw when his term ends.

It’s hard to imagine that he would relish leaving office entirely of his own accord, or even feel that he could take the risk of doing so without finding a successor who would protect him, a role he himself once performed for Boris Yeltsin. He would be very conscious, for starters, that whoever takes over might at the very least trash his reputation (as he has done Yeltsin’s).

Putin’s nervous yet lethargic attitude to this latest presidential voting ritual seemed to suggest that he has no intention of going through such an undignified process again if he can help it. The Kremlin’s licensed buffoon-cum-presidential candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who sometimes offers the inside story on Russia’s political future, and the head of Putin’s flagship propaganda outlet RT, Margarita Simonyan, have both hinted broadly that this will be the last such presidential contest.

Simonyan even referred obsequiously to Putin as “our vozhd” (roughly, “our great leader”), a term closely identified with the personality cult that surrounded Stalin. To the Anglo-Saxon ear, “Führer” has many of the same connotations of absolute power and terror as well as mawkish adoration. In the Stalinist postwar years in Warsaw, a Polish primary schoolgirl of my acquaintance was required to memorise in Russian and recite before a large audience a paean of praise entitled “Yunost’ Vozhdya” (The Youth of the Great Leader). The words were certainly not dedicated to the Polish satrap of the time, Boleslaw Bierut. Simonyan’s evocation of Stalinist nostalgia would have deeply dismayed many, but she seems to have been implying, above all, that Putin should not need to undergo any more elections.

It is widely speculated that next time round Putin will follow the example of his good friend and strategic partner Xi Jinping and become paramount leader, for life, at the head of a Chinese-style state council. The consequences of these two parallel power grabs are not in the long-term interests of either of these increasingly bellicose countries, much less those who have to share the planet with them.

These and other recent developments have fuelled much intriguing discussion of the prospects for politics and policy during Putin’s next term. Apart from official pronouncements, neither Russian nor Western commentators are optimistic, mainly foreseeing economic stagnation and increasing international tensions. “Increasing tensions” is the Anglo-Saxon euphemism for increased Russian aggression, particularly though not only in cyberspace.

Two interesting discussants have been Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow, and Yevgenia Albats, the courageous and independent Moscow political scientist.

Wood sees Russia entering a phase of potential destabilisation. Putin’s era is approaching an end, economic stagnation is likely to continue, and a further decline in living standards is a realistic possibility. The military and the security services will continue to have privileged access to resources at the expense of health, education and infrastructure; rampant corruption will continue unchecked, to the anger of the population. Though repressive, the system is chaotic, and state institutions are in decay, which will make any future reform efforts the more difficult.

Putin himself, in Wood’s view, has little interest in serious economic reform. His regime’s central preoccupation is remaining in power, and from that point of view Putin rightly regards serious economic reforms as a risk. Most of the regional governmental structures are impoverished, yet they are being made to bear the burden of funding services for which the central government does not adequately recompense them; and Putin is restricting their autonomy and undermining the ethnic identities of some regions. Putin’s focus on Russia’s quest for great power status has propped up his popularity, but may not continue to do so.

Wood focuses on the evolution of domestic policies and politics, but makes pertinent points about Russia’s external policies. Some of Putin’s recent actions, notably the Skripal case, should serve as a warning to the West to be vigilant about “the real nature of the present Kremlin.” The West should bear in mind that its standing with any post-Putin political actors is likely to depend on the stance it has taken towards the regime’s domestic abuses of human rights.

Wood seems to hint at the possibility that Putin’s dysfunctional next six years could lead to some kind of discontinuity in Russia’s development, which just might offer a fresh start, a new Gorbachev–Yeltsin moment, but hopefully not one so blighted by low energy prices and mass economic disruption. This sketchy summary of some of its themes does not do justice to Wood’s observations, which contain much subtlety and good sense on a wide range of issues, with many apt encapsulations, forceful opinions and moments of mordant, undiplomatic humour.

In her excellent essay, Yevgenia Albats focuses on the way in which siloviki (“bureaucrats in epaulettes”), and especially the mindset of the FSB, have suffused the post-communist political system since early in Yeltsin’s time. Though the FSB’s predecessor organisations exerted a strong and baleful influence in Soviet times, they were subject to control by the Communist Party, and often suffered severe purging and massive executions. It is only now for the first time that the political police have escaped all control, as Albats puts it, and “have become power itself, its essence and its being.” And that pervasive influence has become much more pronounced since Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012.

Former KGB personnel have heavily infiltrated most non-security elite organisations. Albats stresses that people never leave the KGB, they remain KGB operatives forever, and their families imbibe the same culture and enjoy the same preferential career paths, whether in the security services, or in banking, business or administration. This has left a deep imprint on the structures and policies of the regime that will not be easy to eradicate. She offers this eloquent characterisation of the political culture involved:

The conspiracy-orientated mindset, a search for internal and external enemies, secrecy as a way of running a public office, a disregard for human rights, a disbelief in people’s ability for self-governance and protest, revanchism — all these characterise the current Russian nomenklatura.

Albats tries valiantly, but less compellingly than in her diagnosis of the illness, to find reasons for seeing some prospect of Russia’s recovering from the deep KGB infection of its public life. She suggests hopefully that perhaps the conflicting business interests of siloviki will give rise to greater tensions among them, reducing the security services’ capacity to dominate society; or possibly, the younger generations of the KGB jeunesse dorée who are now moving into top jobs and receiving foreign educations and experience will bring a greater element of sophistication and humanity to bear on public life in Russia.

But the overall tone of most of the discussion of the Putinist future is pessimistic across the board. The next six years will indeed be hazardous for Putin, and while this might conceivably bring about a radical change for the better, it is perhaps more likely to lead to some new catastrophe. Putin is increasingly focused on his own security. The National Guard, with its 400,000 troops led by the former head of Putin’s personal security detail, is directly beholden to him, and he has shown in Chechnya, very probably in the apartment bombings, in the other North Caucasus regions, in Ukraine, in the numerous killings by “unknown assailants” of inconvenient dissidents, and most recently in Syria, that he is capable of massive crimes and brutal repression. He has an obsessive fear of “colour revolutions,” and he would see any discontent that appeared to threaten him as a Western-organised conspiracy and a grave threat not just to himself but also to the country.

In the last few years, the Western strategic community has come painfully and reluctantly to the beginnings of an understanding of just what a dedicated, skilful, unscrupulous and dangerous adversary they have in Putin. It’s possible that Western leaders will finally be so mobilised by events like the Skripal operation that they will conclude they must combine their forces and undertake strong and sustained counter-measures against Russia. After the unprecedented wave of sentiment and solidarity in support of that unexpected heroine Theresa May, such a moment may have come. But optimism on that score may be premature.

Despite the current surge of solidarity and apparent determination, the Western response so far has had some dismaying moments. After the voting ritual and the Skripal incident, EU Commission president Jean Claude Juncker tweeted to Putin: “Congratulations on your re-election. I have always argued that positive relations between the EU and Russia are crucial to the security of our continent… Our common objective should be to re-establish a cooperative pan-European security order.”

That objective is Russia’s objective, not that of the West, which is trying to preserve the current post-1990 security order rather than rewrite it. What Moscow wants is a new Yalta-like arrangement whereby Russia re-establishes its “sphere of privileged interests.” We have innumerable examples of how it has been pursuing that objective, with recruitment of potential allies in the enemy camp a vital element in the mix.

While the majority of EU–NATO members signed on to the UK-led response, doubtless with varying degrees of commitment and enthusiasm, nine did not. Even Germany, which has played a leading role in this effort, is clinging tenaciously to the Nord Stream 2 agreement with Russia, despite the opposition to it of the overwhelming majority of EU members and the evident damage it will inflict on Ukraine and other East European countries. German foreign minister Heiko Maas initially declared the Skripal episode to be an exclusively bilateral matter for Britain. He was evidently rolled on this issue, but that sentiment is widely shared in influential German circles. Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Austria, Hungary (despite its expulsion of one member of the Russian embassy staff) and others have often shown sympathy for Russian attitudes and behaviour; and much more could be said about the strength of support for Russia in many European countries.

The scene in the United States is even more worrying. President Trump began in similar style to Juncker, phoning Putin to congratulate him on his election victory, despite the urging of advisers. He also ignored their efforts to have him condemn the poisoning of Skripal, his main public reaction on that score being to call for the leakers of the advice to be found and punished.

But then, when push came to shove, as has often happened, the president’s words were belied by the actions of his administration. Washington came out with by far the largest contribution to the tally of expelled “diplomats,” in addition to closing down the Russian consulate in Seattle. This facility seems to have been a hotbed of military and technological espionage against important US naval installations and high-tech and cyber companies like Boeing and Microsoft.

Trump has recently appointed John Bolton, a fiery hawk on Russia as on everything else, to replace H.R. McMaster as his national security advisor. Compared to the firm but more measured McMaster, Bolton seems a mixed blessing. Even many of those who wish most fervently for a strong and sustained policy towards Russia will feel distinctly nervous about this choice. President Trump’s future trajectory on Russian matters remains cloudy. The one thing we can be sure of is his determination to sack anyone he can who he thinks wants to pursue the issue of the numerous contacts he and some of his close associates have had with Russia.

Russia’s aggression towards Britain continues, with further expulsions of British diplomats bringing the total to fifty identified intelligence operatives along with the closing of the British Council — all in response to Britain’s removal of twenty-three Russian intelligence operatives. As the British ambassador commented, it should be remembered that the British expulsions were a response to what looked very like an assassination attempt using an illegal chemical weapon on the sovereign territory of the United Kingdom that Russia has declined to explain.

It will be interesting to see how many of Britain’s allies respond vigorously to this grossly asymmetrical retaliation. Most are likely to be reluctant to repeat their gestures of solidarity, and that will enable Russia to use its customary divide-and-rule tactics in the hope of leaving Britain isolated.

Meanwhile, in Russia itself, local disasters and fiascos continue, fuelled by massive corruption and incompetence. In the town of Volokolamsk (population 23,000, 130 kilometres from Moscow), toxic fumes leaking profusely from a nearby waste dump have led to the hospitalisation of scores of children, and demonstrations that have lasted for weeks. Fifty-seven children were hospitalised on 21 March alone. On 29 March, the district leader finally announced a state of emergency, and plans are at last afoot to evacuate mothers with infants. Earlier, though, the local authorities had refused to close the dump despite numerous complaints.

The tragic fire in the Siberian city of Kemerovo highlighted similar failures of governance and official resistance to protests, but with more tragic results. More than forty children were killed in a fire in a retail and entertainment complex in a building clearly not fit for purpose. Locals are deeply sceptical of the official death tally of sixty-four dead and more than sixty injured. The local governor, Aman Tuleyev, an ex-communist in the job for more than twenty years, told Putin the demonstrators were trouble-makers and “vultures,” and in a classic kiss-up, kick-down manoeuvre, apologised to Putin rather than to the families for the tragedy that had occurred on his watch.

Tuleyev’s two deputies went further: one said the demonstrators were all oppositionists, many of them drunk, who were only trying to discredit the authorities; the other, Sergei Tsivilyov, a wealthy coal oligarch, accused a demonstrator of self-promotion, to which the demonstrator replied that he had lost all his family in the blaze. When faced with appalling breaches of safety regulations, Tuleyev finally resigned. His deputy, Tsivilyov, was rewarded by Putin with the governorship. Tsivilyov owns 70 per cent of his big coal-mining firm, with the other 30 per cent belonging to oligarch Gennadi Timchenko, thought by the US Treasury, among many other Western institutions, to be one of the custodians of Putin’s vast personal wealth.

Two senior Moscow officials also made noteworthy contributions. During a talk-show, Yelena Mizulina, a hardline legislator, offered her “condolences and support to our leader” and described the Kemerovo events as a “stab in the back” for Putin. The human rights ombudswoman, Natalya Moskalkova, accused the demonstrators of using any possible chance to destabilise the situation “to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of their ‘sponsors’” (read: the West).

In Russia, fire disasters in dodgy buildings are even more common than air crashes. There were 10,068 fire deaths in 2014 alone, compared with 3275 in the United States, which has over twice Russia’s population. And in a country where living standards have fallen steeply over four years, events of this kind, illustrating corruption, incompetence and official contempt for the rulers’ unfortunate subjects, could conceivably become a catalyst for a major outburst of popular discontent.

To a significant degree, incidents like these are a consequence of the lack of glasnost (freedom of speech, the first element of Gorbachev’s legacy that Putin closed down) and the unaccountability of local bosses (another of Putin’s achievements). With, or even without, the involvement of a galvanising figure like the opposition’s Alexei Navalny, the resentment might spread, potentially making even the consistently high poll ratings for the Great Leader look unreliable. A major turning point of the kind that occurred more than once in Russia’s twentieth century cannot be entirely ruled out. But with his vast and expanding security empire at his finger-tips, Putin’s chances of forestalling one would have to be rated highly. ●

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Survivors, they are now joined by another fatal event that might yet shape their respective political destinies.

Its site was mundane, the English cathedral city of Salisbury, ninety miles southwest of London. On the quiet Sunday afternoon of 4 March, two people slumped oddly across a bench were diagnosed as suffering from the effects of an organophosphorus nerve agent, later identified by the nearby Porton Down defence laboratory as part of a family termed Novichok (“newcomer”). The individuals were named as Sergei Skripal, a sixty-six-year-old former officer of Russia’s army intelligence directorate, or GRU, and his daughter Yulia, aged thirty-three. The next, unexpected report came on 29 March when the hospital reported that Yulia was responding well to treatment.

Skripal had defected to Britain while working in Spain, and went on to supply information to Britain’s MI6 when he returned to Moscow. Having been unmasked, he was tried, imprisoned and then, in 2010, exchanged (along with three other double agents) for a group of Russian sleepers in the United States. His liability to his old masters and usefulness to his new apparently over, he had lived openly if unobtrusively in Salisbury for seven years, now a British citizen, an affable neighbour and a pub regular. The period was tinged by loss: his wife and son were to die from different forms of cancer, the latter in Russia.

Media reaction to the Salisbury reports, instant and intense, had three strands: concern for the victims and public health (the first policeman quickly on the scene was also hospitalised), outrage at the nature of the attack, and finger-pointing that reached towards Moscow, 1650 miles away. Circumstantial evidence in that direction seemed compelling.

Seventeen putative enemies of the Russian state living in England, mostly out-of-favour business and their British associates, have died in suspicious circumstances since 2003. The latest is Nikolai Glushkov, former deputy director of Aeroflot, strangled in his London home on 12 March.

The highest-profile of these cases involved Alexander Litvinenko, a defector from Russia’s FSB security service, whose green tea was laced with radioactive polonium-210 at a Mayfair hotel in 2006. Four months earlier, Putin had passed a law sanctioning targeted assassinations abroad. Back in 2010 he had promised that traitors would “kick the bucket” or “choke on their thirty pieces of silver.” A criminal investigation and a belated judicial inquiry into Litvinenko’s death both identified an FSB spy, Andrei Lugovoi, as lead suspect. Safe in Moscow, and since 2007 a member of Russia’s Duma (parliament) for the far-right Liberal Democrats, Lugovoi suggested that Salisbury was “another provocation by British intelligence agencies.”

Just as the substance that killed Litvinenko after an agonising twenty days risked major contamination, so did the Novichok used in the assault on the Skripals. This is the first known example of chemical weapons being used in Europe since 1945. (Georgi Markov, the exiled Bulgarian writer whose leg was stabbed by the poisoned tip of an umbrella at a London Bridge bus stop in 1978, was a victim of KGB-delivered ricin, which is classed as biological.) That the aggression seemed to come from a state, rather than an IRA/Islamic State–style campaign of the kind Britain has been used to since the 1970s, gave it extra gravity. Any British government would be obliged to react firmly, even if the steps taken proved largely symbolic.

But what steps, and when? A considered pushback was surely needed. That meant a degree of coordination with Britain’s sometimes bruised partners, and taking into account Vladimir Putin’s inevitable use of any decision to bolster his defining Russia-as-victim narrative. With Theresa May’s most notable quality being caution bordering on paralysis, any response seemed likely to be delayed and carefully staged.

A strange week ensued. Its lack of action reinforced the broad view that Brexit had left Britain friendless. May, her standing recovered only a little from the depths of her election and Grenfell fiascos, was still seen as a leader only by default. At the same time, a certain sense of moral clarity was perceptible after Salisbury: this was an unambiguous test with the added attraction that it was not about Brexit and even offered a psychological escape — at least temporary — from the drudgery of that process.

The backdrop was a sobering police and counterterrorist investigation. While public communication was kept to a minimum, key sites in Salisbury (Skripal’s house, car, local restaurant, that bench) were cordoned off or shrouded in blue tarpaulins. By contrast, windy politicians competed for attention by barking extravagant insults or baroque advice at Russia. “Go away and shut up” was the neophyte defence secretary Gavin Williamson’s, making him a rival for foreign secretary Boris Johnson’s title of most retrograde leadership candidate.

Others in government rose to the situation. On 12 March, days after home secretary Amber Rudd, another contender, had charged Moscow with a “brazen and reckless act,” Theresa May took aim in the House of Commons. The Skripals “were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia,” she said in the first comprehensive statement on the crisis. The Russian state’s expertise and record of assassinations made its responsibility “highly likely,” either as a direct act or the result of having lost control of the agent. Which is it? Russia must answer by midnight on the following day, said May.

May’s lucidity was most unlike her blandness on Brexit’s eternal tangle. It also handed Moscow a new line and an opportunity to double-down on its reflexive contempt. The seasoned foreign minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed the abrupt “ultimatum” and, citing procedures of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, demanded a sample of the agent for Moscow to analyse. More broadly, without hard evidence of culpability — or being able to reveal such for intelligence reasons — London could not prove its accusation. Russia would continue to exploit this, its best card.

When the deadline passed, London made its move, announcing the expulsion of twenty-three Russian diplomats. Moscow’s retaliation was tit for tat with a spiteful kick: the closure of both the St Petersburg consulate and British Council operations in Russia, the latter devoted to cultural promotion, language teaching and literary exchange. In between, Berlin, Paris and Washington joined London in condemning an “assault on UK sovereignty.”

The diplomatic pace was quickening. A meeting of European Union states on 22–23 March, in which its chair Donald Tusk pushed for a tough stance, sealed the soon-to-depart UK’s closer alignment with its neighbours. Mark Sedwill, Britain’s national security adviser, had prepared the ground by briefing EU and NATO members on Salisbury’s intelligence findings. Several of these states — Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary and Bulgaria, for example — share historical, business, financial or political interests with Russia. So it is of some significance that nineteen EU members decided to expel Russian envoys, as well as five non-EU, Australia, Canada, the United States (which exceeded expectations by sending home sixty) and NATO headquarters. In total, 140 Russian diplomats will lose their posts or be denied accreditation.

Sergei Lavrov calls it “colossal blackmail” and blames Washington. The foreign ministry in Moscow dug in deeper on 28 March, saying an analysis of Salisbury “leads us to think of the possible involvement in it of the British intelligence services.” Without contrary evidence, it added, “we will consider that we are dealing with an attempt on the lives of our citizens as a result of a massive political provocation.”

Retaliation would be “guided by the principle of reciprocity,” says Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s suave spokesman. Konstantin Kosachev, foreign affairs chair in parliament’s upper house, also predicts symmetry in answering Western countries’ “unprecedentedly dirty and low game.” The process got underway on 30 March, with Britain ordered to withdraw more staff to equal Russia’s UK contingent.

While this slow drama was unfolding, Russia’s system and, to a less certain degree, its people delivered once more for Vladimir Putin. On the Sunday after Salisbury, his notional 76.67 per cent of the vote on a declared 67.5 per cent turnout guaranteed a further six years in the Kremlin. Completing it would enable him to celebrate a quarter century at the helm of the post-Soviet state, a run that began in 2000 with two four-year terms, then continued — constitutional rules limiting the head of state to two consecutive bites — with a spell as prime minister while his unthreatening protégé Dmitry Medvedev held the top job. When Putin returned in 2012, it was to a longer period in office. His position now consolidated, might the sixty-five-year-old vozhd (boss) seek to emulate his erstwhile strategic ally Xi Jinping and make the presidency an open-ended affair?

The Kemerovo fire and the eruption of discontent in its wake already cast a shadow. And a listless election had hinted at the gap between regime and people. As ever, the versatile tools of Potemkin democracy were on hand to make it look good. Before the vote, that meant the semblance of an actual campaign, including ritualistic media debates between the seven other approved candidates. (Alexei Navalny, a maverick opposition figure with a genuine following, was prevented by legal chicanery from running.) On the day, it meant polling-station treats to lure citizens, and away from prying eyes, in the Caucasus badlands for example, the darker arts of intimidation and ballot rigging.

The regime’s clever “political technologists” have alchemised the monochrome authoritarianism of old, with its crude propaganda and 99 per cent support for the wise leader, into multiple shades of grey. A “theatre performance directed by the Kremlin,” the analyst Igor Malashenko called the election. The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen was scathing too: “the particular hell of Vladimir Putin’s retro-totalitarianism” is to create choice “only between soul-deadening options.”

The election date itself, anniversary of Putin’s formal ratification of Crimea’s sundering from Ukraine in 2014, marked the leadership’s intent. It also revealed the nationalism that — another parallel with Xi — is now the sole ideological potion in the system’s locker. Putin’s glitzy victory rally in Sevastopol climaxed with him leading the crowd in a chant of “Ro-ssi-ya! Ro-ssi-ya!” The secret policeman’s moment of raucous populism over, it was back to the Kremlin and the brutal exercise of power.

The president’s rulership style is legitimised less through a democratic mandate than through his role as protector of Russia-as-fortress, besieged by a nefarious, encroaching West. In practice this defensive formula becomes the opposite. Under Putin and his circle, the Russian state’s core impulse is a commitment to wage an undeclared hybrid war against its adversaries.

Putin’s own tirade at the Munich security conference in 2007 was one marker, before military failures in the nonetheless victorious short war against Georgia in 2008 supplied momentum for expensive upgrades. General Valery Gerasimov’s influential article in 2013 provided doctrinal shape by outlining four aspects of future warfare: it is undeclared; coordinates kinetic and non-kinetic tools across a wide range; blurs distinctions between military and civilian instruments; and sees information spaces as well as physical spaces as the battlefield.

Russia’s past dozen years exemplify the doctrine. The massive three-week cyber-assault on tiny, democratic Estonia in 2007 — a landmark in this form of warfare — came three months after Putin’s Munich speech. The state’s repertoire includes further malware attacks, use of proxies and clandestine forces, implanting fake stories, buzzing Western defences, fomenting disputes, manipulating civic groups and allegedly (as in Montenegro) a coup attempt. Throughout all this, Russia’s well-resourced intelligence networks have been busy across Europe and beyond, as the coordinated banishment of its diplomats on 26–28 March would seem to confirm.

There is suspicion too that Russia continues secretly to develop a lethal strain of nerve agents. Boris Volodarsky, the former GRU operative and author of The KGB’s Poison Factory: From Lenin to Litvinenko, says that the state has also had a facility in Syria for many years, where the nerve agent used against the Skripals was made. Recalling that Russia’s former prime minister Yegor Gaidar, a significant figure in the 1980s and 90s, was poisoned in Ireland the day after Litvinenko’s ordeal, Volodarsky argues that Nikolai Glushkov’s murder, on the day of May’s Commons statement, fits the same pattern of attempted “distraction.”

This whole context, plus the precedents of Litvinenko, Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Perepilichnyy and company, would tend to suggest Salisbury as Moscow’s responsibility: shocking, yes, but in context unsurprising. Plausible as it may be, however, this understanding of the event, its background and implications was from the start widely contested. Russia’s diplomats and media outlets, and many British voices too, lost no time in throwing the kitchen sink and all contents over it.

The former led on indignant denial and insinuation with heavy dollops of sarcasm, the latter on diversion and conspiracism, though the respective talking-points had significant overlap. In a process heralded by the reaction to the numerous toxic gas attacks on rebel-held areas in Syria and the shooting down of a Malaysian passenger jet over eastern Ukraine in 2014, what happened in Salisbury became the latest battleground where facts and evidence are treated as weapons in a war over reality itself.

In this sense, Salisbury’s most illuminating aspect has been as exhibit of the Russian state’s present demeanour. A few days’ concentrated exposure seems designed to bludgeon you into accepting — like Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File — that you are in an Albanian dungeon, rather than five minutes from Holloway Road watching the red buses go by.

The least of it was Russia’s disavowal of any chemical weapons program and the subject’s deflection onto others. Senior envoy Aleksandr Lukashevich said that the British, Americans, Czechs and Swedes had laboratories for nerve agents of the Novachok — but not us.

Maria Zakharova, the ever-outraged voice of the foreign ministry, added the Slovaks for good measure. Nikolai Kovalev, another Duma member and Putin’s predecessor as FSB director, suggested a Ukrainian link. Few utterances were free of the Soviet “provocation,” the shortest route to losing an argument (and a prime candidate for John Rentoul’s banned jargon and clichés). Putin himself insisted that Russia had destroyed all its chemical weapons, and — fresh from a ball-juggling video with the president of FIFA, soccer’s world body — made a possibly revealing denial of his own: “It’s complete drivel, rubbish, nonsense that somebody in Russia would allow themselves to do such a thing ahead of elections and the World Cup.” All this with a straight face. From such an innocent party, the aggression of the denials is striking: a reminder that the bully cries victim when stood up to.

But there was jollity too. Russia’s foreign ministry posted a #HighlyLikelyRussia hashtag. Kirill Kleimyonov, veteran host of the flagship Channel One news program Vremya, warned his viewers: “[Don’t] move to England. Something is not right there. Maybe it’s the climate, but in recent years there have been too many strange incidents with a grave outcome. People get hanged, poisoned, they die in helicopter crashes and fall out of windows in industrial quantities.”

The mockery was also closer to home. Russia’s London embassy, long a twittersphere star for its facetious, image-laden jibes on Britain’s political scene, was in its element (“In the absence of evidence, we definitely need a Poirot in Salisbury!”). So too was RT, formerly Russia Today, a state-funded, pro-regime broadcasting group that holds open a door at its high-end Millbank Tower office for far leftists and rightists with reliably cynical, Kremlin-friendly — and at heart identical — views. Around half a million people tune in to its news programs each week, against 6.1 million to Sky’s and 10.4 million to the BBC’s. Its channels were avid to push Salisbury through the looking-glass. Even as actual reporters were out chasing an elusive story, its lines to take were pinging in every direction. In sum, these were: Russia blameless — could Britain be guilty? The Porton Down lab is only seven miles away — coincidence? Here are other suspects — what have they got to hide?

Moscow’s media drive was reinforced by a cavalcade of bots. There were also plenty of real bods with obsessions of their own. (Salisbury is an all too convenient diversion from domestic scandals or Brexit troubles; Israel was the true culprit.) This confluence of alt-reality tides once more recalls Ukraine and Syria, where Russia’s establishment media made common cause with self-styled “alternative,” “dissident,” or “truth seeking” voices in the West. The offline connections are extensive too, as shown by Anton Shekhovtsov’s book Russia and the Western Far Right and Péter Krekó and Lóránt Győri’s report Russia and the European Far Left.

The willed nature of this strategy from Moscow’s side is reflected in RT’s subtly appropriative self-description: “RT creates news with an edge for viewers who want to Question More. RT covers stories overlooked by the mainstream media, provides alternative perspectives on current affairs, and acquaints international audiences with a Russian viewpoint on major global events.” The tagline of the broadcasting hub Sputnik International, successor to RIA Novosti and Voice of Russia, with offices in London and Edinburgh — “Telling the Untold” — employs the same millennial schtick.

As with Russia’s cyber-disruption in foreign elections, these media outlets shrewdly customise their product to appeal to populist, radical, nativist, extremist or conspiracist tendencies in the West: anything that can sow confusion and division. In hybrid warfare, you always work at least one step ahead, including of the reaction. The professed astonishment of Canberra’s Russian embassy at “how easily the allies of Great Britain follow it blindly” is straight from the Gerasimov playbook.

Such bottomless cynicism differs from the Soviet-era use of “front” organisations in civil society, which for all the deception could be given a vestigial ideological sheen. If the appeal then was often to innocents and fools, today it is found in places where amoral relativism prevails.

The RT’s Afshin Rattansi, host there of Going Underground — Assange, Chomsky, Pilger, you get the picture — was himself a guest on the post-Salisbury edition of the BBC’s weekly hatefest Question Time, a distantly respectable show now, and indeed for years past, “[bordering] on hysterical” (as Jane Goodall observed in her rightfully scathing comments on Britain’s media discourse). As well as referring to Skripal and his daughter as “the two spies,” Rattansi stated that “Britain vetoed in the past few hours a UN Security Council resolution asking for an investigation into these atrocities in Wiltshire. Why did Britain veto that resolution?”

“Wiltshire,” not “Salisbury,” is a neatly insinuating touch, the point being that Porton Down is also in Wiltshire. This grain alone concentrates the entire RT desert. In fact, there was no such UNSC resolution on the day of the program, 15 March, and Britain last vetoed any such resolution in 1989. No one, neither anchor nor senior politicians on the panel, knew enough to challenge the claim. The previous day, the fine analyst Shashank Joshi had voiced the sentiment of many: “Depressing that for nearly a week we have had crank after crank on the BBC, when there are so many normal, talented and insightful Russian analysts and journalists who could articulate Russian perspectives, including UK-sceptic ones, on the crisis.”

It is hardly the most important thing when so much more is at stake, but to general surprise, Theresa May has been having a good crisis. Her poll ratings on the issue are positive; her visit to Salisbury featured eye-rubbing props: modest walkabout, flowers, baby, fist bump. (She left it late to visit Grenfell, and avoided meeting the public when she did.) Commentators note the tendency of people to rally round the leader of a wounded country, and ask whether May can build on this opportunity in tough domestic policy areas.

In any event, the Skripal investigation and Russia friction will persist, as will security threats from Islamic State and affiliates. On 28 March, the government published a fifty-page National Security Capability Review, whose new “fusion doctrine” proposes a framework unifying all branches of government in addressing vital security matters. The latter include coordinated intelligence, community engagement and “high-harm organised crime groups and corrupt elites.” It also puts the Skripal case in the context of a “well-established pattern of Russian State aggression.”

This review invites a belated focus on those Russia-related funds, properties and business practices that can be linked to Moscow’s kleptocracy. Some of the overnight super-rich of Russia’s 1990s since found a ready home in London’s hungry financial economy, using market access to create opaque structures without proper oversight or tax accountability. Governments indulgent of the revenues from a booming City of London have tended to ignore the many downsides. Transparency International estimates that a fifth of the “suspicious wealth” used to buy property in Britain, whose total is £4.4 billion (A$8 billion), is Russian in origin. More light is one essential remedy, new powers such as the “unexplained wealth orders” in the Criminal Finances Act of 2017, are another. British authorities’ neglect of the dark area where Russia’s political elite, security state and oligarchs meet is also part of the background to Salisbury.

What happened in that city, as attempted murder, is still understood only in pieces. As family tragedy, it is beyond outsiders’ grasp. As violation of international law, it is caught in Moscow’s wilderness of power. As diplomatic upheaval, it is unresolved. As British political crisis, it is the first for a while to hint that the light at the end of the tunnel might not, after all, be the oncoming train. As a story of authoritarian nihilism, it is, along with Ukraine and Syria, a test for citizens, media and democratic governments everywhere.

What will history say about the Great War, Georges Clemenceau was once asked. “It will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.” Vladimir Putin’s Russia is intent on proving history wrong. The test is there. •

The post Russia’s war on history appeared first on Inside Story.

Trump’s deference to Putin, his frequent words of praise and his desire to talk by phone and, when possible, have unmonitored one-on-one meetings suggest that the relationship is based in some measure on an awareness by Trump that Putin has some publicly undisclosed power over him.

James Clapper, the former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency and director of national intelligence between 2010 and 2017, believes that the relationship shows how well Putin “handles” Trump. “I think this past weekend is illustrative of what a great case officer Vladimir Putin is,” he told CNN on 18 December. “He knows how to handle an asset and that’s what he’s doing with the president. You have to remember Putin’s background. He’s a KGB officer. That’s what they do. They recruit assets. And I think some of that experience and the instincts of Putin have come into play here in his managing of a pretty important account for him, if I could use that term, with our president.”

Clapper was referring to Trump’s very warm words about a phone conversation he’d had with Putin the day before, in which Putin had thanked him for valuable intelligence that forestalled a terror attack in Putin’s home city, St Petersburg. He probably also had in mind Putin’s comments during his annual marathon Q&A session a few days earlier, where he had warmly praised Trump’s performance and rejected allegations of collusion as “spymania” designed to damage the president and prevent him from developing better cooperation with Russia. Not immune to flattery, Trump immediately responded by seeking a phone audience with President Putin, which was granted.

When pressed for further elucidation, Clapper said he was speaking figuratively, but most people following the Trump–Putin relationship closely would have assumed he meant to convey a literal truth.

The exact nature of the relationship and its impact on Trump’s campaign and the formation of his leadership team remain the subject of three dedicated investigations by congressional committees, as well as the occasional interest of some other committees — and, above all, the investigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller, which the president and his supporters have been doing their best to hamper or derail.

The signs that the president wants to sack Mueller were given greater specificity on 26 January when the New York Times reported that last June Trump directed his White House counsel, Donald McGahn, to have the Justice Department sack Mueller. McGahn refused, saying such a move would have a catastrophic effect on the presidency and he would resign rather than carry it out. After the president’s earlier and highly controversial dismissal of FBI director James Comey for pursuing the Russian trail, McGahn probably feared that a second unjustifiable dismissal would have led to impeachment.

There is a view, however, that while Mueller’s investigation is well advanced into the territory of possible obstruction of justice and money laundering, the prosecutor’s personality and respect for institutions could lead him away from indicting the president.

Trump and his loyal Republican followers have not given up. Having a majority in both houses of Congress, and with so dominant a position in congressional committees, they have sought to block or reshape investigations to protect the president and discredit his “adversaries,” above all the special prosecutor. In one case, the Republican leadership of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee failed to sign on to a report prepared by the committee’s staff on Putin’s attacks on democracy in the West, probably because of the negative light it cast obliquely on the president and the vigorous actions against Russia it calls on the president to undertake. The ranking Democrat on the committee released the text of the report anyway.

Republicans follow the president in raising ostensibly parallel issues about Hillary Clinton, but the parallels seldom look convincing; indeed they sometimes have an eerie similarity to the familiar Russian tactic of “whataboutism.”

The various investigations are still in progress. And yet the heart of the matter already seemed clear enough more than a year ago, on the basis of Trump’s strange pronouncements and appointments, and the sometimes bizarre behaviour of some in his entourage. The much- maligned Steele dossier was not the first cab off the rank in this debate, but the public discussion it generated did a great deal to set the debate’s parameters. Though much of it was not verified or indeed readily verifiable, the dossier rang true in many of its details. And material appearing since then has tended to strengthen the case it makes, regardless of legitimate differences of opinion about particular details.

It is perhaps a tribute to its insight that the Republicans in Congress still have their knives out for the dossier and its author Christopher Steele, as for Mueller himself. They seem to believe that if these two individuals can be eliminated the problem will go away. But the evidence in the public domain is copious and highly suggestive, and informal enquiries and exposures would be very likely to continue until such time as a credible and uninhibited investigation exonerated the president and the stranger members of his entourage, which seems unlikely to happen.

Perhaps the most egregiously Russia-linked of Trump’s intimates was general Michael Flynn. Flynn had been director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency until he was in effect dismissed — in itself, a good reason not to have cultivated him. He threw himself into Trump’s campaign in a raucously partisan way, publicly calling for Hillary Clinton to be jailed. Having set himself up as a consultant after his departure from DIA, he accepted a US$33,750 fee to be interviewed on RT (formerly Russia Today), Russia’s main external propaganda outlet. He also appeared at the high table of a glamorous celebratory dinner in Moscow in honour of RT, where among his neighbours were RT’s very skilful director, Margarita Simonyan, and her star guest of honour, Vladimir Putin.

According to Luke Harding’s fine new book, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, Flynn met and became friendly with a young Moscow-born woman at a Cambridge seminar on Russian espionage, where he had been invited to speak. He struck up a conversation with her about her graduate dissertation on the Cheka, the original Bolshevik secret police set up by Lenin. She drew his attention to some of the interesting discoveries she had made in the Russian archives while researching a book on the role of Russian military intelligence agents in infiltrating the US nuclear program in its earliest stages.

He was so struck by her that he invited her to accompany him as his official interpreter on a visit he was planning to Moscow as DIA director. She declined, but did subsequently conduct an unclassified email correspondence with him about Russian history, in which he signed off his emails as “General Misha” (Misha is the familiar diminutive from the Russian name Mikhail). Apparently Flynn didn’t report these contacts. Shortly after the Cambridge seminar, Putin annexed Crimea, and that particular trip to Moscow by General Misha failed to eventuate.

Flynn’s overall view was clearly that Russia represented no threat to US interests, and that Iran and Islamic terrorism were far and away the greatest threat to the United States and the world. This skewed perception would have predisposed him to accept the Russian propaganda line that the United States should abandon its sanctions against Russia, respect its sphere of influence in much of its former domain, and join with it in the struggle against “terrorism,” as defined by the Kremlin. In his post-DIA role as a consultant, he also accepted work from Turkey, despite that country’s increasingly hostile attitude towards NATO, the European Union and the United States.

Despite this erratic career path, Trump appointed Flynn as his national security advisor and only reluctantly relinquished him when it was clear that he was in trouble for lying about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the presidential campaign. It had not taken this development — or revelations from the Steele dossier, or leaks from official investigations — for many people observing Flynn’s publicly known dealings with Russia to find his appointment as national security advisor astonishing and deeply dismaying. Yet even after accepting Flynn’s resignation, Trump tried to lean on FBI director James Comey not to pursue Flynn any further.

There were other curious figures in Trump’s inner circle. To take one more conspicuous example, Paul Manafort, an American salesman of PR and lobbying services, mainly to distasteful foreign dictatorships, became the de facto head of Trump’s campaign team for six months during 2016. During this time, he is widely believed to have engineered a mysterious pro-Russian change to the Republican platform on policy towards Ukraine.

Manafort had worked for years in support of the pro-Russian Yanukovych regime, and even lent support to the successor party to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, the so-called Opposition Bloc, after the Maidan revolution had resulted in Yanukovych’s fleeing Kiev for Russia. For these and other services contrary to settled US bipartisan policy towards Ukraine and Russia, Manafort seems to have received large and dubious payments. He was also involved in some of the suspect dealings of Trump associates with Russian emissaries. As a result, he became the subject of the intense media publicity that led to his resignation. He has since become a person of interest to investigators regarding other dubious dealings involving Russia. Together with his close colleague Rick Gates, he is now under indictment by the FBI.

In addition to cosseting people with dubious Russian connections, Trump himself had contacts over the years with numerous Russian associates, including some very funny money people. In Collusion, Harding, a former Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, has assembled a mass of evidence on various aspects of the links with Russia, maintained sometimes over a long period, by Trump, his family and his dodgier associates (some of whom now face charges). Again, there may be reasonable differences of opinion about the weight of the evidence in this or that case, but the overall picture he presents is eloquent. In fact, Harding’s book should be compulsory reading for all involved in the current US debate.

(Michael Wolff’s instant bestseller, Fire and Fury, certainly provides a vivid and entertaining picture of the intimate politics of the White House, but is less illuminating on the Russian connections, the meaning and importance of which Wolff seems not quite to grasp.)

And so, for most long-time observers of the Russian scene, it seems clear that Trump is somehow in debt or even in thrall to Putin, as Harding puts it. But for some Westerners who welcome Trump’s economic policies or his robust positions on immigration, for example, the whole subject of his possible connections with Russia is just an unwelcome distraction they would prefer not to write, think or even hear about. For others it all still seems more like an overwritten spy novel.

Such people find it inherently implausible that Russian agencies could have bothered to assemble a thick dossier of compromising material (kompromat) on Trump with which they can now hold him to ransom. How could the Russians have possibly anticipated that this errant and in Russia not particularly successful businessman would ever end up as the president of the United States of America? And why should people like Manafort, Flynn, or Carter Page, another erstwhile member of the Trump team again in the news, be regarded as suspect simply because they liked Russia and Russians, enjoyed visiting the country, and tried to turn a buck there?

This is the natural perspective of people who’ve had the good fortune to live in relatively open societies. Russia has only briefly and very imperfectly been one of those. Tsarist Russia had a considerable penchant for close surveillance of suspect individuals, and their Bolshevik successors left them far behind in this and other techniques of oppressive rule. Putin’s Russia, some dissenting Western academics and broadcasters notwithstanding, is a KGB state in a very meaningful sense and, under the present leadership, bureaucracy generally and expenditure on the military and “security” in particular has expanded greatly. The appetite for kompromat has always been voracious in the Kremlin, and now is greater, thanks to the exponential growth of the technological means for collecting and exploiting it.

In the 1970s as a graduate student, I visited Moscow on a study trip funded by my university to collect materials not available in Australia. On my first day after arriving, I was sitting in a modest Moscow hotel hoping to be fed when a shabby-looking middle-aged man approached me and asked if he might join me. (Tables were often scarce in the under-resourced Soviet catering system, and this was standard practice.) Having quickly established I was a foreigner, he began asking questions: who was I; where was I from; what was the subject of my thesis; what was I doing in Russia; who had paid for me to come; where was I working the next day? When I said I’d be going to the Lenin Library, he immediately announced that he had a flat nearby and that I must visit him as he had some very interesting documents there which he was sure would be very helpful to me in my research.

By this time I was desperately trying to catch a waiter’s eye to pay and leave as soon as possible. Noting my haste, my interrogator began withdrawing what looked like identity cards or workplace passes from the inside pocket of his jacket, flashing them at me like naughty postcards. Averting my eyes, I paid and left.

Any visitors to the Soviet Union who struck the organs as interesting or untypical in any way would be given the treatment. And, as Luke Harding comments, Trump already looked extremely interesting to the KGB on the first of his several visits to the Soviet Union/Russia in 1987, much more so than an impecunious antipodean student.

Trump’s triumph in the presidential election was a delightful surprise for the Kremlin establishment. But not long after their first euphoric champagne cork-popping reactions, they began to feel disappointed, as media discussions and official enquiries into team Trump’s links with Russia multiplied and some of the most Kremlin-friendly in Trump’s entourage had to be jettisoned.

It’s often said that Putin is a master tactician, but a poor strategist. Some might reasonably object that his recent manoeuvres in the Middle East and North Africa demonstrate that he is quite capable of strategically outmanoeuvring the crumbly Western alliance under its current leadership. But in an important sense Putin, who never served west of Dresden in his KGB career, doesn’t “get” Western societies. He has learnt to plumb their growing weaknesses skilfully, but he has a poorer grasp of their complexity and their sometimes less than obvious resilience.

Having always existed in or presided over a top-down autocracy, it’s difficult for him to grasp that installing or helping to install someone at the apex of government in a pluralist society does not necessarily ensure radical and congenial changes in that government’s policies. Specifically, he didn’t reckon sufficiently with the US system’s checks and balances and the free media, and the limits that they place on the CEO.

Such pressures led President Trump to accept the replacement of Michael Flynn as national security advisor by the conservative general H.R. McMaster (whom, according to Wolff, he doesn’t even like).

Trump’s preference for military figures in key security roles may reflect, as Wolff also observes, Trump’s personal weakness for officers with plenty of “fruit salad” on their uniforms. But he would have sensed, given his domestic political vulnerability on Russia, that the nomination of the tough general Jim Mattis to the key defence portfolio would be a wise move also for him personally. On 19 January, this year, for example, Mattis restated US defence concerns forthrightly, highlighting China and Russia as the main potential threats to US interests, and relatively downplaying the significance of terrorism, which is neither Trump’s nor Putin’s preferred take on the international environment for bilateral purposes.

Trump also chose, first as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and later as his own chief of staff in the White House, another general, John Kelly. Kelly’s main aim in his present role seems to be to introduce order and decorum into the chronically chaotic scene that is the Trump entourage, as well as to smooth over the many rough edges introduced by the president’s ill-considered tweets and public statements. Kelly has not yet taken strong public positions on the bilateral relationship with Russia. But he seems unlikely to become another General Flynn.

What this illustrates is that Trump’s appointments to key security roles have been creating a circle of strong, traditionalist advisers who will not be easily persuaded to change US policy sharply in a pro-Russian direction. This phenomenon has been ironically labelled in the US media by terms like “adults in the room” and “adult supervision.” As used by the media, these terms do not apply only or even primarily to the Russian issue, but do include it, and are, perhaps, particularly applicable to it.

Two recent articles in particular, James Mann’s “The Adults in the Room” and Charlie Savage’s “Controlling the Chief,” both in recent editions of the New York Review of Books, take a broad and measured approach to their topic, focusing on such important issues as the future of civilian control of the military in the US and the possibility of an increased risk of ill-conceived foreign entanglements. They also provide much interesting detail about the “adults” themselves and some of their predecessors with similar roles and backgrounds. Surprisingly, however, they mention Russia relatively infrequently.

Other senior officials are also active on the Russia account. At Treasury, the new secretary, Steve Mnuchin, has been presiding over the implementation of what looked like some forceful policies. One that has riveted the attention of the Moscow elite is the preparation of a list of Russian oligarchs and siloviki with close ties to Putin, slated to be sanctioned as a response to Russia’s illegitimate meddling in the US election. This action was mandated by Congress in legislation, passed overwhelmingly in late July last year, that seemingly left President Trump with very little wiggle room.

Daniel Fried, a senior State Department official coordinating sanctions policy under Barack Obama, was reported on 19 January to be very enthusiastic about the Treasury-led process of formulating the list. As he put it, “It’s not been farmed out to some cabal of political employees who used to work with Mike Flynn and take money from RT… The pros are running with this. Straight, flat-out, serious pros.”

Treasury has also been pursuing intrusive inquiries into suspect bank transfers by US-based Russian diplomatic personnel that were identified as irregular and reported to Treasury. Until recent days, this all suggested that Secretary Mnuchin was not likely to give Putin a free pass.

Among other figures in key positions who are clearly sceptical about Russia’s intentions are general Joseph Dunford, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Nikki Haley, the US permanent representative to the United Nations in New York; and the experienced diplomat Kurt Volker, appointed special envoy to negotiate with Russia on advancing a settlement in Ukraine.

Even Rex Tillerson, Trump’s choice for secretary of state — undoubtedly in large part because of his long and successful experience of dealing with the Russian leadership on energy deals (and his Order of Friendship from Putin!) — has been doing his best to sound and act more or less like a senior American diplomat. At the launch on 23 January of a new organisation set up to identify and punish those who use chemical weapons, Tillerson roundly criticised Russia for its support of the Assad regime, its vetoing of UN resolutions on the use by Syria of chemical weapons, and its breach of an agreement with the United States on the removal of chemical weapons from Syria. He summed up the situation by saying that “Russia’s failure to resolve the chemical weapons issue in Syria calls into question its relevance to the resolution of the overall crisis.”

This sharper tone reflects the tougher approach that President Trump himself has adopted on Syria since the air strikes last April on the airfield in Khan Sheikhoun, which had been implicated in chemical weapons use.

Unlike Trump, though, Tillerson has severed his formal links with his previous high-profile role in business (as CEO of Exxon-Mobil), where he would have had, and may still have, huge potential conflicts of interest. People still worry, for example, about situations in which Tillerson is the only US official present at one of the president’s encounters in person or by phone with Putin, and perhaps rightly so.

Despite having installed his own man at its head, Trump is seemingly determined to destroy the State Department by huge cuts to its funding. He even actually applauded Putin for expelling 755 US diplomats in response to Congress’s passage of sanctions legislation last July, proclaiming it a valuable contribution to US budgetary savings.

Tillerson is seen as bearing full responsibility for this policy, having failed to stand up for his department and having left a large number of senior diplomatic positions vacant. He has also been criticised for not responding to Putin’s “hybrid warfare” on the West. Broadly, though, he does seem to be trying to hold the line against Russia’s policy overtures and manoeuvres while from time to time reiterating Trump’s message that a better relationship with Russia is what the United States would ideally like. So not an adult supervisor exactly, but perhaps not a pushover for Moscow either.

All in all, in fact, the Kremlin seemed to have relatively little to show for all its hybrid warfare efforts at the end of the first year of the Trump presidency. Not only were the key appointments often unpromising, the decisions taken and defended by those appointees seemed far from encouraging.

Disillusionment had set in early for Moscow. In March last year, the Kremlin launched its first big try-on, when a Russian diplomat reportedly presented the State Department with a comprehensive proposal for a total reset of bilateral relations across all areas in dispute. This démarche, which has never been publicly acknowledged by either side, but reports of which have not been categorically denied by Washington, looked very much like an attempt to take advantage of the fact that the Kremlin now thought it had a friend in the White House (and in the State Department) with whom it could surely do business.

Since soon after Moscow’s aggression in Crimea and East Ukraine, and in particular after the imposition of sanctions in the wake of the shooting down of MH17, Putin’s regime has been engaged in a peace offensive aimed at repairing relations sufficiently and for long enough to secure the easing or even lifting of sanctions, and to gain de facto Western acceptance of the annexation of Crimea and “autonomy” for Russia’s proxy regimes in Donetsk and Luhansk. This pitch called nostalgically for a renewed coalition as during the second world war. Moscow even began to speak positively about the one-sided Yalta settlement, which facilitated Stalin’s communisation of Eastern Europe.

These formulations betrayed Moscow’s hope that it could exploit any such grand coalition deal to regain as much as possible of its old sphere of privileged interests in Central and Eastern Europe. With President Trump in the White House, the collective Putin must have felt that a golden geopolitical opportunity had dawned.

Putin’s secret initiative went nowhere, Trump’s oft-repeated hopes for a good relationship with Russia and a great deal with Putin notwithstanding. As former US diplomat Steven Pifer of Brookings and others have argued, this was a classic case of “mirror-imaging,” when the leaders of one country project their own domestic understanding of how things work onto a country where that logic does not apply. Putin seemingly thought that Trump was now in a position comparable to his own, where he could make most things happen from the top down. But the US system is different.

President Trump was already surrounded by a network of senior officials who try to repair some of the damage caused by his impulsive tweets and the public insults he aims at countries and leaders around the world, especially key allies. They have also worked hard, and with considerable success so far, to hold in check his amorous impulses towards Russia and its president. While the Republican Party has begun to circle the wagons around the president, some Republicans, particularly in the Senate, have also acknowledged the need for adult supervision. Bob Corker, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and once a strong supporter of Trump as a candidate, declared last October that the White House had become “an adult day care centre.”

As a result of those efforts, Trump has found himself assenting to a series of key decisions and policy doctrines emerging from his administration that identify Russia as a major threat to US interests. Yet as a candidate, and even well into his first year in office, Trump had repeatedly cast doubt on article 5 of NATO’s Washington Treaty, spoken contemptuously of the European Union and asked aloud which other countries would follow Britain’s Brexit lead. Not only did he praise Putin repeatedly, at one point he seemed to be inclined to consider whether or not to accept Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. Against that backdrop, the actual outcomes, particularly in the latter part of 2017, have been reassuringly benign for the Western alliance.

Thus, for example, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act was passed by the Senate with an overwhelming ninety-eight votes to two, a veto-proof majority. (There had only been three votes against the bill in the House.) This emphatic result left President Trump with no option but to reluctantly accept it. Mooring sanctions in legislation makes it difficult for the measures it prescribes, primarily against Russian targets, to be modified by the executive, or repealed by the legislature. Moscow was furious, and many in Russia’s elite feared the possible consequences for themselves. As a result, capital flight from Russia increased sharply, leading to a run on Maltese and Cyprus passports and significant expatriation of Russian wealth.

As mentioned earlier, the US Treasury has also been examining financial records of transactions undertaken by Russian diplomatic staff in the United States. In accordance with US law, suspect records had been forwarded to the area of Treasury responsible for handling cases of money laundering and other financial misconduct. Treasury in turn had forwarded them to the FBI for consideration as possible evidence of Russian meddling in the presidential election. These activities and the documents themselves somehow found their way into the public domain via BuzzFeed.

Moscow has reacted indignantly to these leaks, describing BuzzFeed as a tool of US intelligence and demanding that Washington desist immediately. Disregarding for the moment the question of whether these accusations are well-founded, it is of course the case that sequences of events not dissimilar to those just described are typical of what Russia has itself been doing in recent times on a very large scale towards many of its Western adversaries, if with a thin veneer of deniability. Such tactics form an integral part of its hybrid warfare. Now it believes that the United States is turning these tactics against their originators; so the biter bit, it would seem, with BuzzFeed cast in the role of WikiLeaks. But maybe the Kremlin is mirror-imaging again.

So too for Europe and NATO. Despite Trump’s negative comments about NATO and collective defence, especially during his visit on 25 May to NATO headquarters in Brussels, just two months after that visit vice-president Mike Pence travelled to the Estonian capital, Tallinn, where he emphatically confirmed US commitment to both.

Moreover, the Trump administration has continued to implement and bolster the measures agreed upon at the Warsaw NATO Summit in 2016 to strengthen NATO’s defences in the east, and thus provide greater security for the new member states. The deployment of multinational battle groups to all three Baltic states and Poland, staffed on a rotating but ongoing basis, involves US forces as well as leading European militaries in key roles.

Despite its invasions of Georgia and Ukraine in 2008 and 2014, its hybrid war against Estonia in 2007, and its threatening posture in the region overall, Moscow professed to find this deployment aggressive and unprovoked. It argues that the deployments are a breach of the NATO–Russia Founding Act, whereby it was agreed that NATO would not deploy any significant forces to the new member states. Some Western member states, including Germany, were inclined to respect this provision, despite the clear evidence of Russian aggression inconsistent with the Act and in breach of other international legal instruments, in particular the Budapest Memorandum. But sustained pleas from the new members and Russia’s own aggressive posture finally produced a consensus in NATO.

On 17 December last year, the Trump administration released a National Security Strategy that identified Russia and China as the main disruptive powers in the world, repressing their own populations, building up their militaries and pursuing revisionist, imperialist policies abroad. Trump had obviously been persuaded to accept the document, but his public comments about its contents touched on none of the formulations to which Moscow had objected.

On the contrary, he used his speech on the new doctrine’s release to speak warmly about a phone conversation he’d had the day before with Putin, in which the Russian president had thanked him for intelligence provided by the CIA that helped avert a terrorist attack in St Petersburg. This played perfectly into Moscow’s current mantra that instead of objecting to its defence of vital security interests in Ukraine, Georgia, Syria, Venezuela and so on, the United States should join with Russia to combat terrorism. But while it contained a few relatively moderate Trumpist accents, the National Security Strategy was basically “sound” on Russia and related issues, so seemingly another win for the supervisors’ panel.

And finally, reluctantly and under sustained pressure from his advisers and Congress, Trump decided on 22 December to approve weapons sales to Ukraine that would include Javelin anti-tank missiles, which Kiev has been begging for since soon after the Russian invasion began. On at least two occasions (at Ilovaisk and Debaltseve), proxy forces in eastern Ukraine under pressure from Ukrainian forces were suddenly able to dramatically reverse the trend of events, win decisive strategic victories and inflict severe casualties, thanks to major cross-border reinforcements of personnel and heavy weaponry from the Russian regular army. Had the Ukrainians then been equipped with Javelins the outcomes might have been very different

Some Western commentators argue that the decision to supply the Javelins will inevitably “cause” a disastrous Russian response, making a “tragic” situation even worse. This is certainly a difficult and complex issue. But the alternative of maintaining an embargo that prevents Ukraine from obtaining the weapons it needs to defend itself, while Russia continues to arm its illegal proxies to the teeth, is unsatisfactory. Such a policy will encourage further Russian military aggression in breach of the post-1990 liberal international order. The West would essentially be left only with the option of accepting Moscow’s “escalatory dominance” as a given and seeking an opportunity to discuss with it the terms and conditions under which Russia would resume full control of whichever former vassal it was laying claim to.

Even without delivering on key bilateral issues, Trump has done a great deal, no doubt often unintentionally, to deliver on Moscow’s investment. The manifest unfitness for presidential office reflected in his tweets, his insults, his lies and his racist utterances has severely damaged his country’s reputation in many parts of the world. Although, in the opinion of many, he sometimes punctures political correctness or diplomatic niceties with robust common sense on particular issues, he usually spoils the effect almost immediately with a grossly misjudged comment or tweet. It’s not that his instincts are necessarily always wrong, but that his conversion of them into coherent, diplomatic and sustained policy is often woefully inadequate.

His alienation of many important allies will still be causing satisfied hand-rubbing in the Kremlin. Likewise, his heavy-handed attacks on selected countries and policies — Iran and its allies in the Middle East, for instance, or Chinese trading policies — can often help Russia to consolidate key alliances and pursue important strategic objectives. At the same time, though, thanks to the determined efforts of the adults in the room, Trump’s policy towards Russia and its region is gradually acquiring a certain predictability and solidity along traditional lines. And Moscow is finding it all frustrating and difficult to deal with.

Will the system of checks and balances be sustained? Or will President Trump break free and try to strike a grand deal with Russia? Of course, there is also the prior question of whether he will remain in office, as controversy and various investigations continue to swirl around him.

Will the Republicans continue to cover for him despite the scandals and the growing evidence of his entourage’s dubious links with Russia? Will they support him all the way in any attempts he makes to discredit and dismiss Robert Mueller or any others who appear to threaten his position? This coming year should give us the answers.

So far, the signs are not good. The 30 January decision by the Republican majority in the House Intelligence Committee to force through publication of the highly questionable memo prepared by committee chair Devin Nunes suggests that many of them will fight dirty and fight long. In this endeavour, it seems likely that they will enjoy the direct support of the Kremlin’s troll factories, who have already been hard at work whipping up support for the “Release the memo” cause.

President Trump obligingly declassified the memo, despite the pleas against release from his own recent appointee at the head of the FBI, Christopher Wray. Reportedly, there were dissenters in Trump’s White House staff, but General Kelly supported the president’s action — though, as chief of staff, he could hardly do otherwise.

Virtually simultaneously, the administration gutted the list of oligarchs and Putin’s complicit cronies that had been in preparation at Treasury, and instead published a roll-call of Russian elite luminaries derived from familiar public sources. Absent were the foreshadowed details about their kleptocratic wealth and their closeness to Putin and to the Kremlin’s recent decisions to attack neighbours and subvert democratic elections in the West. The defanged document came out from Treasury with Secretary Mnuchin’s formal endorsement. It is not clear who in the administration took the decision to change course on sanctions and the Kremlin List, but clearly it was an accurate expression of the president’s wishes.

It’s true that a classified document was attached to the package, but a central objective of the operation had been to name and shame publicly, and to impose sanctions provided for by the July 2017 legislation. And the administration also announced that no sanctions were being put in place at that point. There were ritual statements of indignation at the list in Moscow at various levels, but the relief in elite circles was palpable. Putin staged another of his displays of conspicuous moderation, saying there would be no response from Moscow for the time being. His wobbly asset had delivered.

Once the elite had taken in that the threat had been revoked, they began to cautiously exult. A hashtag proclaiming “Trump is ours” (#TrumpNash), a conscious echo of the euphoric KrymNash (Crimea is Ours) of 2014, began trending strongly.

To make matters worse, and raise suspicions even higher, it became known that the leaders of Russia’s three key intelligence agencies, the FSB (Putin’s former bailiwick, and the nearest thing to a successor organisation to the KGB), the SVR (external intelligence) and the GRU (military intelligence) had visited Washington a few days earlier for discussions with US counterparts. Whatever the reasons for, or the content of, this extraordinary visit, the optics quite clearly flew against the trend of what appeared to have become settled US policy, and would have dismayed many in both countries.

Enough Republicans, particularly in the Senate, seem sufficiently worried about these latest trends to allow one to hope that they will not cohesively support further reckless actions by the president. The House Intelligence Committee has voted unanimously to publish the Democratic counter-memo, subject to the president’s declassifying its contents, which looks like a conciliatory gesture.

But Trump has been furiously tweeting that the ranking Democrat who prepared the counter-memo, Adam Schiff, is “one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington… who must be stopped.” If he were to block the document’s release or, even worse, if he were to sack deputy attorney-general Rosenstein in order to replace him with someone who would accept direction to dismiss Robert Mueller, this could trigger a major constitutional crisis. And if, at this point, the Republicans decided to support their president through thick and thin in spite of their misgivings, it is possible the precarious system of adults in the room on external policy issues might in turn come under pressure. And the future of US domestic politics might similarly look uncertain, with the pub test and social media beginning to challenge the rule of law. •

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Early reports of the unrest in Russia, a key ally, focused on its implications for the war. But as 1917 wore on, and events moved at an ever-accelerating pace, avid newspaper readers found themselves in the uncertain predicament of Bob Dylan’s Mr Jones: something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you?

On 2 June 1917, the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate told its readers that the unfolding revolution was “the most tremendous event the war has yet produced.” The paper advanced several possible causes, some of which lay deep in the past while others, such as food shortages, were very much in the present. But at the heart of it was the ineffectual leadership of Tsar Nicholas II, “a simple and honest, though weakly obstinate mystic,” who was said to be dominated by his melancholic wife. (The tsar had abdicated earlier in 1917; he and his family would be murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918.) The revolution had popular support, said the paper, noting that “this upheaval would have been impossible were not all Russia solid for reform.”

On 9 June, the Catholic Advocate in Melbourne reported on “the general approval expressed by the press of Great Britain of the Russian Revolution” and the hope that a weak autocrat might be replaced by a stable democratic government. It was “certainly satisfactory to find that the Czar has been swept aside by the rising tide of democracy,” but what would happen next, the paper said, was difficult to predict.

The Advocate quoted a Russian émigré commentator’s remarks about a new movement, Slavism, which was the antithesis of the displaced autocracy. Slavism aimed to restore autonomy to all the smaller nations of Europe and, such being the case, “must be opposed to the Pan-German idea of world domination.” But the paper was sceptical:

We would be glad to share this optimistic view of the situation; but when the people who are to carry out this programme are considered, it will be found that there is room for misgiving. Even the optimistic view naturally taken of the position and intentions of the people of a great ally in the war cannot hide the fact that, taken as a whole, Russia contains the most ignorant of all the peoples of Europe.

The danger now, the paper said, was “that an irresponsible mob may get control.”

As for its impact on the war effort, there was still talk of a Russian advance westwards. “It appears that the most that can be expected, before the next winter settles down on Europe,” the Advocate reported, “is that the Russian armies will guard the eastern frontier, leaving the work of forcing the Germans back to the Allies on the other fronts.”

On 30 June, quoting a Sydney man whose brother was on the spot, the Singleton Argus carried a page-one story about German pamphlets being dropped behind Russian lines. The pamphlets warned Russians that they were being deceived, and that the English were to blame for deposing the tsar:

The English have deceived your Czar, and led him into the war in order to conquer the whole world with his help. At first the English went with your Czar — now they have risen against him because he did not agree with their cunning demands. The English have dethroned your Czar, who was given to you by God himself. Why has this happened?

The story was deepening. On 3 July, many Australian newspapers carried a despatch from the Times in London, quoting an English journalist who had reached Russia and, after talking to many people, was convinced that the revolution “was not only against the Czar but against the war.” Those leading the revolution held that capitalism was the root of all wars, and that no distinction existed between the sword-rattling German Kaiser and the pacifist American president, Woodrow Wilson. The correspondent warned that at the end of the conflict “delegates from ravaged States will have to discuss peace with idealists and fanatics, who are determined to put the whole world right.”

That month, as local skirmishes flared all over Russia with the final collapse of the old order, the short-lived provisional government of Alexander Kerensky took office. On 14 July, the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate carried a graphic account of a British nurse in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed after the war broke out) at the time of the February revolution. The nurse, attached to the Red Cross, had travelled from Romania and, having been warned that revolution would break out any day, found herself “right in the heart of the uprising of a whole nation claiming its liberty.”

She described how a maid at the hospital she was visiting called her excitedly to the window to watch a procession:

The soldier patriots in their grey coats, on foot and in motor-lorries and motor-cars, were going down the street in a steady, orderly manner, protecting a crowd of starving men, women, and children, who were walking in the centre of the procession. At their head was a band playing the “Marseillaise” and a large red flag borne aloft…

[Then] there was a sudden outburst of fierce firing from above, and soldiers and women and children fell to the ground, and the street soon became a shambles. The firing was from machine-guns controlled by the police, who were in ambush on the roof of this hotel and who tried to bring about a wholesale slaughter of the people below. It was astonishing how self-possessed the crowd was in the face of this murderous attack. I saw the soldiers who had not fallen immediately enter the hotel and make their way to the roof, where they shot the cowardly police, captured the machine guns, and brought them down to the street and fixed them on the back seats of the motor cars and the lorries.

On 23 July, the Bendigo Independent in Victoria tried to tell its readers a little about this far-off place increasingly in the news, explaining that “the country that is known as Russia occupies rather more than half of Asia.” Seventy times the size of Britain, the country’s population was only four times greater. “Russia, in general, is a country of magnificent distances, sparsely inhabited by nations who widely differ from each other in their origin, language, modes of living, religion, education and intelligence.” The Russian upper and middle classes, the paper graciously conceded, “are almost on an intellectual level with the rest of Europe,” but “the Russian peasantry are far down in the list of civilised nations… Force and superstition were factors that held Russia together as an empire.”

Of the dethroned tsar and his family, who were now interned in the Winter Palace near Petrograd, the Independent opined that:

the dismal political history of Russia for hundreds of years past is repeating itself in the reports by cable that he is endeavouring to destroy himself, and has to be continually watched by attendants… But revolutions within revolutions are evidently pending, and the political future of the great, disorganised country of so many mixed nations and degrees of civilisation is dark indeed.

On 11 August, the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate cautiously welcomed developments, but worried that “the Russian workers, who have just been emancipated from the rule of one of the absolute autocracies in the world, have not yet learnt to use their freedom. They are like prisoners who, after years in dungeons, are suddenly brought out into the sunshine and cannot bear the light.”

The paper urged statesmen and trade union leaders to go to Russia to help. “It is not too late for this proposal to be carried out,” it said, “and we are certain that it would be welcomed by none more heartily than by Russians who love freedom and their country, and who need all the help and guidance that the older democracies can give them.”

A fortnight later, the Sydney Morning Herald carried a review of Russia in Revolution, engineer Stinton Jones’s first-hand account of events in Petrograd. His enthusiasm over certain aspects of the revolution, wrote the reviewer, is “tempered with forebodings.” “In the earlier part of the book,” the review continues:

he is hopeful; later he begins to wonder whether the powers of law and order have the situation in hand; at the end there is a hint that the reformers, with a legitimate programme, may have invited the co-operation of forces that they cannot control; may have unsealed the bottle whence issues a baleful genie with an increasing sphere of malevolence.

In Melbourne, the Age reported on 17 September that a privately screened film about events in Russia, despite having apparently been heavily censored, allowed the “state of unrest” to be gauged “by the immense crowds in the streets.”

It was an accurate observation. The tottering remains of the provisional government were swept away by the Bolsheviks less than two months later. On 12 November, many Australian newspapers carried a widely distributed wire service account that read:

Yesterday’s revolution differed from the last. There was complete apathy amongst the population, who did not know another revolution had commenced until evening. The Ministers have taken refuge in the Winter Palace, where, with a small corps, they are pledged to fight to the last. In the evening the extremists had gained the approaches to the Palace.

Not surprisingly, the Brisbane Worker sided with the revolutionaries against Kerensky’s short-lived government. “From the chaotic accounts of the new revolution in Russia one fact now has become apparent,” reported on 22 November:

It is that the dictatorship of Kerensky is entirely overthrown, and that when calm has been restored government, both civil and military, will be in the hands not of the agents of compromise, but of the representatives of the masses. There has been bloodshed both in Petrograd and Moscow, but a neutral who has lately returned from Russia repudiates the stories of cruelty and atrocity. This man, M. Edstroen, president of the Swedish Electric Company, stated that he saw nothing of the bloody fighting chronicled in foreign newspapers. The military schools certainly were damaged, but he had heard nothing of the reported cruelties to the women’s battalion. On the contrary, the Bolsheviks, who are now in command, maintained excellent order.

By year’s end, commentators were trying to make sense of the tumultuous events. On 29 December, the Echuca and Moama Advertiser and Farmers’ Gazette worried that the world had turned “topsy-turvy” with all the “strange events brought about by the greatest war the world has ever witnessed.”

The anonymous writer feared that the Russian boast that the revolution had been brought about with less bloodshed than that of the French revolution of 1789 was not likely to be realised. “It is possible and probable that when full knowledge is gained of what has happened in Russia,” a tragic story outrivalling that of France might be revealed. “The mass of Russian people indeed seems to have been but little, if any, further advanced in enlightenment than those of France in those far-off days when Paris was a shambles and the whole land stricken to the core with fear and doubts.”

Presciently, the Daily Observer in Tamworth also detected the beginnings of the emergence of the United States as a world power. The year 1917 “has been more eventful than any other of which there is a record,” said the paper. “If only for the remarkable collapse of the great Russian Empire it would have stood by itself. But the Russian revolution is only one event, and not by any means the greatest. The intervention of America in the world struggle” — its entry into the conflict in Europe in 1917 — “will probably be reckoned by historians as the happening of greatest consequence in this war.” ●

The post Reading about a revolution appeared first on Inside Story.

This is not to argue that the American attack was reckless or high-risk. It could have been much more effective, though, if it had been more carefully planned and executed. Damage to the base was not extensive and the Assad regime has endured worse humiliations. The fact that president Donald Trump may have been partly motivated by a desire to be seen as decisive may have worked against the effective use of military power for defined ends.

Chlorine has been used as a weapon in Syria on several occasions since 2013, and not just by the government. But Assad’s decision to resort once again to binary chemical agents, such as sarin, represents an open defiance of the norms it agreed to be bound by under the inspection-and-disposal program overseen by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, and underwritten by Russia. For the outside world to turn a blind eye to use of the same weapons would amount to standing with arms folded while the level of savagery in this conflict rose to new heights.

Although the Syrian armed forces are the likely perpetrators, an independent assessment is vital in underlining the seriousness of the red line the regime has crossed. Reports relayed via Syrian opposition forces, particularly those close to al Qaeda, or by the Turkish authorities should be counter-checked carefully before being recounted.

Doubts have been raised as to whether the Syrian regime would have been bent on self-destruction so soon after its retaking of Aleppo on 6 December last year. But this is a total misreading of what is happening on the ground. The Syrian conflict has one key theme: the regime has huge difficulties in holding terrain because of two things: the poor quality of its conscript-based armed forces, and the capacity of its opponents to crop up almost at will, crossing the vast central steppe to suddenly appear in inhabited areas around the western rim and in the Euphrates River valley.

This misreading has been on vivid display in the news media’s reporting since Aleppo fell, which has overlooked numerous firefights along the southern rim of Idlib province, where Islamist fighters have been dumped following “ceasefire” deals concluded in and around Aleppo, Damascus and Homs. These fiercely committed forces (mainly al Qaeda offshoots) have been resupplied across the Turkish border and have begun pressing south towards the next provincial capital, Hama.

Hama is one of a handful of Syrian cities to have remained relatively quarantined from the conflict. It is no coincidence that it was the final battleground in the Muslim Brotherhood’s rebellion against the government thirty-five years ago. The punishment meted out in the regime’s bombardment of the city in 1982 was so brutal and decisive that Hama has remained in clampdown ever since. If Hama can be drawn directly into the struggle, the regime will suffer a moral loss that would more than outweigh the victory it has claimed in Aleppo.

The skirmishes over the past month in the Orontes Valley rim area between Hama and Idlib thus pose a new challenge to the government. Rather than Assad’s being on a high – and therefore concerned not to offend the community just as he hoped to be acknowledged as a winner – he was possibly experiencing the opposite, more like panic. The risk is that he might choose to echo his father’s brutal razing of central Hama. And being tough in the face of a US president who seems to have no stabilising principles (and is isolationist at heart) might seem like an opportunity not to be lost.

The probability is that Assad saw the chemical attack as a means of discouraging any drive by Islamist forces towards Hama. The Russians’ counter-claim – attempting to pin the incident on the town’s rebels, who were said to have concocted sarin in an empty shed – simply signals that there is no credible alternative explanation and that the Russians might have been caught flat-footed. Assad may not have told the Russians he was scrapping the 2013 agreement they underwrote, though it could not have escaped their notice given their shared use of the base at Shayrat.

Trump has promised a strategy, but does he have the makings of one? The OPCW admits that 5 per cent of identified chemical weapons have still not been accounted for. Trump’s improvised rhetoric tried to give the impression that the Shayrat raid addressed that problem. But the fact is that it was Obama’s measured working through of the options (now endlessly recycled as an example of irresolution) that saw the removal of 95 per cent of the nerve agents held in Syria. The Shayrat raid has done nothing to neutralise the other 5 per cent, sufficient for a few more Khan Sheikhuns. Obama had the credibility to engage the Russians in the OPCW process; Trump seems intent on using Khan Sheikhun to shake off the charge that he has been soft on Putin.

The only way of replacing Assad is to engage Russia (and Iran) in the process. Getting rid of Islamic State still remains the logical first objective in the fighting. Will Assad provide further distractions to taunt Trump, demonstrating that the president of Syria still calls the tune? He has never given any indication that he cares how long the war lasts and how many more die in agonising circumstances. He seems determined to wait out all his opponents.

Perhaps, though, Assad needs to be more careful with his friends. Moscow must wonder whether it should have him on a tighter lead. Trump, meanwhile, plays a dangerously short-term game, obsessed with old animosities, driven by impulses and uninterested in strategy, preferring the one-off deal. Given the big battles that still await Syria in Idlib province and around Raqqa, the conflict’s capacity to regenerate itself stretches on endlessly. Shayrat was barely a blip on that horizon. •

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The difference is signalled in the second part of the title. Victor Sebestyen concentrates on Lenin the person, with much attention devoted to his relationship with the two leading women in his life and to his physical afflictions. Relying in part on material found in the Russian archives since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sebestyen seeks to create a picture of Lenin that focuses less on Lenin’s professional work as a revolutionary and more on his personal life.

Sebestyen argues that Lenin’s most important personal relationships were with those two women. His wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, is presented as much more than the secretary and revolutionary colleague we find in Soviet accounts, with Sebestyen arguing that she was both a significant revolutionary in her own right and also a crucial personal support to Lenin. This latter aspect, characterised by love, admiration and a continuing, unwavering devotion, adds a human dimension to our understanding of Lenin that has all too often been ignored.

Krupskaya’s devotion to Lenin is perhaps demonstrated no more clearly than in her acceptance of the second woman Sebestyen discusses, Lenin’s long-time mistress, Inessa Armand. For lengthy periods, both outside and inside Russia, the three more or less lived together, with Armand and Krupskaya becoming close friends. Armand seemed to share a spark with Lenin that was not evident in his relationship with Krupskaya, but both women appear to have been equally important for his wellbeing.

Krupskaya was particularly important in caring for Lenin’s health. Most biographers have pointed to the intense nature of Lenin’s work: how he threw himself totally into conflicts with others, how he was unrelenting (and vitriolic) in his criticism, and how he was totally absorbed in the quest for revolution. The intensity had clear physical effects.

A series of strokes beginning in 1922 has often been seen as evidence of this. But Sebestyen shows that throughout his career Lenin was prone to psychosomatic disorders. High levels of stress seem to have produced headaches and a sort of physical semi-collapse that could only be reversed by complete rest. Krupskaya was the key to dealing with this condition, seeing when it was coming on and being able to get Lenin to take time off from the revolution and spend it in the countryside, away from everything.

While the focus on the personal is the main strength of this book, it does come at a cost. Lenin’s professional work, his struggle to build the party, his browbeating of his colleagues to seize power in 1917, and his role in building the new Soviet state and guiding it through years when its survival sometimes seemed less certain than its collapse – all appear in this book seemingly as mere addenda to the personal life. It’s true that the public side of the story is well-known, but it is this aspect of Lenin’s life that makes the personal focus valuable. Would we be interested in Lenin if he had stuck with his early career as a lawyer? Probably not.

More attention to Lenin’s political life would have helped with the book’s claim that his most important relationships were with Krupskaya and Armand. Why was he apparently unable to sustain close friendships with men? Sebestyen hints that Lenin could not accept any challenge to his authority, and he perceived such challenges to come from his male colleagues. Unless there is a psychological explanation for this perception, and Sebestyen doesn’t offer one, the reason must lie at least partly in the nature of the group and the relationships within it. Lenin’s drive for control may have been his response to the conditions faced by the movement – always in danger of infiltration by the tsarist secret police, who were often supported by the police of the West European countries within which most of its members lived – but the book leaves the issue hanging.

Another aspect of the relationship between Lenin’s private and professional lives concerns his writings. In most biographies, the subject’s writings are treated as important source material. But Sebestyen pays little attention to what Lenin wrote, even though it amounts to more than fifty-five volumes in Russian. He never explains why he gives this trove so little attention, but the answer may lie in his view that Lenin would say anything for immediate political effect. In other words, Lenin’s writings don’t reflect his actual views, but were a tactical response to circumstances. This is not a new claim, but it can’t be sustained without the extended analysis of his thought that is absent from this book. And it does not accord with many studies of Lenin’s thought and actions that certainly show flexibility, but also find strong strands of logic and continuity.

This personal-professional dimension is also reflected in the paradox of the title: an intimate portrait of a dictator. In fact, the book gives very little attention to the “dictator” part of his life, with no discussion of what this means or of how he became one. In the rambling final third of the book, which deals with the early years of Soviet power, Sebestyen seeks to link Lenin with major events. This is a valuable exercise, but without the broader context – institutional development, the roles of other leading members of the regime, and the civil war – it would be very difficult for someone without knowledge of the period to understand what was going on.

Having said this, it’s also the case that Lenin the Dictator is a very good read, well-written and with some real insights. It is also relevant to today in at least two ways.

First, its picture of the Russian revolutionary movement in exile, although it is incomplete, shows how much has changed. In the early years of the twentieth century, revolutionaries met in cafes for prolonged discussions over coffee and cake, and debated points both in writing and face-to-face, usually right under the noses of the police and often with the connivance of those police. Communication by post was slow, and if they were arrested, the revolutionaries were usually sent into an exile that in many cases was anything but harsh. And if they planned armed action, this was usually to be focused on the servants of the old regime, not the populace.

Contrast that with the terrorists of today: electronic communication, indiscriminate use of terror, the creation of armies, popular broadcasts of their messages and, at least in the case of the current batch, adherence to a religious dogma. The earlier period seems somehow more gentle, although for those involved it probably was not. We have come a long way, and not in a positive direction.

Second, this year marks the centenary of the Russian revolution, an event that shaped the politics of the entire twentieth century. Yet the centenary is likely to pass with little recognition in the West. There will be scholarly conferences, and presumably what remains of the “left” will mark it in some fashion, but for the mainstream it will largely be a non-event.

The question is how it will be handled in Russia. The Putin regime has been somewhat ambivalent about the Soviet period, acknowledging that the great achievements came at a prohibitive cost, but also seeing it as a period that needs to be integrated into Russian history. They just can’t work out how. And this means that in Russian public life there is enormous ambiguity surrounding the revolution and its aftermath.

This is well reflected in the debate that bubbles up every so often, including this month, about what to do about Lenin’s body. Currently it lies in the mausoleum in Red Square, where it has been since 1924. Some believe it should be reburied and the mausoleum torn down; others believe it should remain. This question mirrors the uncertainties surrounding how to handle the revolution, and projects its leader into contemporary Russian political debate. In this context, Sebestyen’s contribution to our understanding of Lenin’s personal life is to be welcomed. •

The post The other Lenin appeared first on Inside Story.

Even if the gunfire has fallen silent or become merely intermittent, Western policy-makers need to remind themselves that a Leninist kto-kogo struggle (who is defeating or dominating whom) is still being fought by the other side, and in a variety of ways. Putin wants to win, not to settle for an honourable draw, and his attention span is much longer even than German chancellor Angela Merkel’s, and certainly than French president François Hollande’s.

As von Clausewitz told us, war is the continuation of politics by other means. But for the Leninists and their modern legatees, the Putinists, politics (and information, culture, trade and the like) is the continuation of war by other means. They see many different paths to victory, and so it is with Ukraine.

In recent years, Moscow has essentially been replicating in countries to its west the sort of operation it undertook at the end of, and just after, the second world war to communise Central and Eastern Europe. This time the target countries are former Soviet republics rather than what were once Warsaw Pact countries-to-be, though Ukraine fits into both camps. The ideological bait and the mix of preferred instruments are also slightly modified to suit the times, and happily the use of military conquest and the violent repression of ungrateful new subjects are so far much less massive in scale.

But the pattern is broadly similar: outright invasion and seizure of territory; deployment of freshly minted partisan militias under Kremlin auspices; creation of pseudo-state structures, often with tell-tale Stalinist monikers like “people’s republic”; police state methods against whole categories of dissenters; negotiations on the basis of these faits accomplis; intensive propaganda to discredit the victims (“fascists”), legitimise the proxies (“rebels,” “separatists”), and reduce the outside world’s readiness to resist the new dispensation; and trade wars, using arbitrary and crippling sanctions for no legitimate reason to undermine the target country’s economy or generate coercive pressure (by cutting off sources of heating in winter, for example).

Also in the mix are exported corruption, especially bought or hired politicians; subverting and destabilising target states by organising violent takeovers of media outlets, administrative buildings and so on; bankrolling receptive parties; setting up pseudo-independence movements in areas where a military incursion might lend wings to a “national liberation movement” otherwise incapable of independent flight; and recruiting neighbouring states or peoples who may wish to cooperate in a possible carve-up of territory. (On the postwar events and present-day similarities, see respectively Anne Applebaum’s book Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956 and her article “Russia and the Great Forgetting.”)

Though skirmishes have resumed in Eastern Ukraine in recent weeks, the outright military phase seemed to plateau at a lower level several months ago. Negotiations, manoeuvres and contacts have continued in various formats, but they seem to match Moscow’s plans and desiderata less closely than before. Reinforced by the slump in oil and gas prices and Russia’s overall economic malaise, sanctions are holding Moscow back from attempting to create further “facts on the ground” in Ukraine. And Putin’s costly insertion of his armed forces into Syria has yielded added complications that threaten further conflicts on multiple fronts and reduce his room for manoeuvre.

The Ukrainian armed forces and associated militias have continued to display unexpected resilience in maintaining the line of contact with Russian-dominated proxy forces. Even more surprisingly, the West’s unity on the sanctions has proved greater than Russia, or indeed many Western observers, were expecting. But that unity is still precarious, and much of what Russia has been saying lately about the need for a new grand alliance against terrorism, in the spirit of the second world war, points to the Kremlin’s reasonable calculation that EU sanctions could be rolled back in the relatively near future.

The West has agreed that sanctions relief should be linked to implementation of the Minsk ceasefire agreements, which sought to end the fighting in Ukraine. But those agreements are less than fully clear, and appear to place much more definite obligations on Kiev than on Moscow or its proxies. Russia hopes that it will be able to persuade a few European friends and potential veto-wielders that it has more or less met the terms of Minsk. But it has not met the requirement to withdraw its forces and weaponry (indeed it still pretends it has not deployed either), much less to concede control of its “border” with the “people’s republics.” Few people really believe it ever will.

The last few months have seen renewed signs of pressure from the pro-Moscow camp in the European Union, notably via statements from EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and various senior national figures. But despite the growing agitation for a return to business as usual with Moscow, it is clear that sanctions will nonetheless be extended for another six months when they expire at the end of January.

Because a unanimous decision is required to extend sanctions, a determined veto by even one EU member state would be enough, in theory, to revoke them. In practice, it doesn’t seem to work that way. But if a stronger wave of sentiment were to develop with one or two senior and influential EU leaders behind it, the outcome may be different. In the second week of December, Italian premier Matteo Renzi caused a brief sensation by twice appearing to demand a reconsideration of the sanctions issue at the EU summit on 17–18 December, taking more adequate account of Russia’s “help” in the Middle East.

As of 14 December, however, his foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, was “clarifying” that Italy would not block extension of the sanctions. But Gentiloni did emphasise that EU states are increasingly keen to come to terms with Russia over Ukraine. So, if not now, perhaps sanctions will be lifted in six months. And Luxembourg foreign minister Jean Asselborn has reminded everyone that sanctions could end earlier if the situation in Ukraine improves. This is clearly a space to keep watching.

From the outset, the Minsk agreements had a number of disadvantages for Ukraine and the West. As the distinguished Chatham House expert on Russia and Ukraine, James Sherr, has commented, “If Poroshenko, Merkel and Hollande received military advice when negotiating, there is no sign of it.” To be fair, Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko might well have known that the deal had grave flaws from Kiev’s point of view, but he had limited influence over the negotiating tactics and objectives of his Western supporters.

The central problem was that the agreements recognised the invaders and fifth columnists in Eastern Ukraine as legitimate representatives of a domestic constituency rather than the placemen of a foreign power that had annexed by force a large part of Ukraine and was manifestly intent on doing more of the same. Russia was treated not as a guilty participant but as an honest broker with “legitimate interests” in the outcome of the “conflict.” (Ukraine has experienced tensions during its twenty-four years of independence, but never violent subversion of the kind that conveniently “broke out” across eastern Ukraine in the weeks immediately after the invasion of Crimea.)

Under the Minsk agreements, Ukraine was required to change its constitution to guarantee autonomy to “certain regions” in the Donbass – and to do this in a way that met with the approval of the Moscow-controlled cliques in charge of the nascent police states of Donetsk and Luhansk. (For a recent depiction of life there by a Russian reporter who has been on the ground throughout, see Pavel Kanygin’s article, “The Donbass War: Assessing the Aftermath.”)

Most Ukrainians don’t see why being attacked by Russians and their Trojan horses in the Donbass should mean that they must make constitutional changes that will shore up the position of the aggressors. Meeting this Minsk provision therefore requires Kiev to take an extremely unpopular decision at a time when the governing parties’ public standing is in steep decline. One of the key reasons for the decline is that they had to impose painful economic reforms on the population to clean up the fiscal mess left by predecessors, notably the deposed president Viktor Yanukovych, and meet the prerequisites for a desperately needed IMF bailout. While this has been going on, the Ukrainian economy has contracted by 7 per cent and a projected 12 per cent in 2014 and 2015, respectively, and incomes and living standards have slumped even more sharply. GDP seems likely to register a small increase in the current quarter, but any turnaround will be slow, and much damage has been done.

Given their own desperate situation, most Ukrainians have no desire to pay for the despoliation of the east of their country by Moscow and its proxies. Some even argue for cutting the people’s republics loose and allowing them to secede de facto to Russia, forcing Moscow to pay for the damage it has caused, and leaving Ukraine reduced but more united. The Minsk agreements, however, gave Kiev responsibility for the social security of the Donbass inhabitants and the rehabilitation of the war zone, presumably including the cost of mopping up after the looting and gratuitous damage the proxies inflicted on Ukrainian and foreign businesses, above and beyond the armed conflict.

For reasons of its own, Russia wants the Donbass people’s republics to be reintegrated into Ukrainian state structures but given such far-reaching autonomy that they can block any westward moves by the Kiev government. And for any national government to acquiesce legally to any further excisions from Ukraine’s sovereign territory after Russia’s military surgery in Crimea would be political suicide.

In fact, Kiev has curtailed much of its support for the population still living in the people’s republics. (Current estimates, almost certainly on the low side, put war fatalities at more than 9000, with at least three million displaced, many of them to Kiev-controlled Ukraine.) It is thereby pressuring a reluctant Moscow to come to the aid of the Donbass population. Some humane Ukrainian commentators deplore Kiev’s policy in this matter, saying it will lead to the permanent estrangement of the Donbass population, and reporting from the region suggests they are probably right. But the state’s coffers are bare.

Two years on from the Euromaidan uprising, the population in Kiev-dominated regions is growing impatient with the government’s weak performance in tackling Ukraine’s endemic corruption (a common feature of most of post-communist Europe, apart from the Baltic states and Georgia). Sympathetic Western leaders, notably from the United States, take a similar view and have been expressing it forcefully. Other major sources of public resentment include the notorious influence of powerful oligarchs and the failure to find and prosecute those responsible for the violent repression of protesters during the Maidan demonstrations.

Supporters of President Poroshenko and the prime minister, Arseny Yatsenyuk, argue that fighting a war, keeping a stricken economy afloat and implementing painful measures to restore the fiscal balance is exhausting their political capital, and that they cannot afford to alienate the powerful oligarchs and other influential figures they need to keep in the tent. As for prosecuting those responsible for the violent attacks on Maidan demonstrators, they claim nearly all of them have fled to Russia after destroying the evidence, making prosecutions hard to mount.

A corruption scandal has recently engulfed the self-styled “kamikaze” prime minister himself, whose popularity had already sunk through the floor. One of his close allies is being pursued for accepting bribes by Swiss prosecutors, and has been forced to resign his seat in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament).

Earlier it was revealed that President Poroshenko’s own wealth, despite punitive Russian measures in Russia and Ukraine, has surged above the billion mark since he took office, a point eagerly picked up by Russian propaganda outlets. He is also justly criticised for having failed to divest himself of much of his wealth, as he promised to do before assuming office. But while no clear evidence of corruption by the president or prime minister has emerged, the public is not convinced by the government’s explanations for its failures, and impatience is growing.

Meanwhile, populist and nationalist solutions to complex economic and political issues are starting to gain traction in the Verkhovna Rada and more widely. A battle is being fought in the Rada and beyond over a populist counterproposal to the radical tax and budgetary package proposed by the highly competent American-Ukrainian finance minister Natalie Jaresko, in consultation with the International Monetary Fund. The rival bill, which would bust Ukraine’s precarious fiscal position, has elicited an IMF warning that its further support (without which the country may face default) could be withheld.

There is a serious risk that ambitious and irresponsible political groups could use or somehow precipitate violence in their efforts to exploit the current volatile political situation. The issue of the special autonomy to be bestowed upon the people’s republics under the Minsk agreements has done so already, and could again be a trigger. Extreme turbulence accompanied the first stage of the relevant legislation’s passage through the parliament on 31 August, despite the measures falling far short of the expectations of Moscow and its proxies. A violent hand-grenade attack outside the parliament, staged by one of the militant nationalist parties, resulted in police casualties. Fisticuffs inside the parliament are not unknown, but violence of this kind is a most unusual and ominous development.

Given all this, the passage of legislation necessary even to meet Ukraine’s Western supporters’ expectations may yet prove beyond the Poroshenko administration’s capacity. For their part, Russia and its proxies will almost certainly say that whatever legislation is passed is insufficient. They have been demanding not just decentralisation or autonomy, but effectively “federalisation.” Cobbling together a parliamentary majority to pass the unpopular legislation will be very difficult, and possibly contribute to the Kiev government’s collapse.

Whatever their flaws, the Minsk agreements were presumably as much as Merkel and Hollande felt they could get from Moscow. With the total absence of the United States from the negotiating process, President Poroshenko had no real alternative way of gaining the reduction in fighting he desperately needed to rescue the gravely ill Ukrainian economy. Apart from the few weeks of calm after 1 September 2015, though, there never really has been a genuine ceasefire in place. And Russia has continued to supply heavy weaponry and infiltrate personnel through the over 300 km of border it jointly controls with its Donbass proxies.

Throughout the occupation, with Russian connivance, the proxies have denied monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or OSCE, access to the border and most other areas they hold. In recent months they have even been blocking charitable organisations seeking to bring relief to the suffering civilian population in the Donbas; these charities are acting as hostile “foreign agents,” the proxies allege, in another loyal echo of one of the worst xenophobic features of Putinism. The Donetsk and Luhansk regimes, on the other hand, have been very welcoming towards selected Western journalists, enabling them to see, record and display to the world the damage and suffering the civilian population has suffered. Often the news reports uncritically present the devastation as being essentially Kiev’s fault, without saying much if anything about the real causes of the conflict or the thuggish behaviour of the journalists’ hosts.

Russia has sent forty-five “humanitarian convoys” to proxy-held territory since the Donbass regions were seized, none of which they have allowed Ukrainian or OSCE officials to inspect. Many reports suggest that weaponry and other non-humanitarian cargo have been transported in this way. Russia has also provided financial support, but with its own economy under stress it doesn’t seem to see repairing its damage in Ukraine as a high priority. It does maintain close political control of the regions, however.

As it currently stands, the Minsk outcome only meets the Kremlin’s minimal requirements – to devastate the Ukrainian economy by means of arbitrary trade boycotts, and to seize enough territory to prevent the country from integrating with Western institutions. Even with the additional land the proxies grabbed after the Minsk II ceasefire supposedly came into effect last February, they occupy only about half of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Putin would like ideally at some point to take over both in their entirety, and more besides. Efforts continue aimed at destabilising the two largest and most Russified regions of Kharkiv and Odessa, the scene of repeated, mysterious bombings that were never typical of Ukraine before the Russian aggression began. The Transcarpathian region of western Ukraine, bordering Slovakia, has also been subject to transparently Kremlin-inspired attempts to create a separatist movement.

Where does this leave Putin’s Novorossiya project – the idea of seizing the entire eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, creating a land bridge to Crimea, and linking up with the Russian-sponsored breakaway territory of Transnistria in Moldova? This seems to have been the Kremlin’s preferred option at one stage, but Ukrainian resistance, Western reactions and the slump in energy prices and the rouble forced a reappraisal. Putin has not publicly mentioned it for well over a year, and he seems to have settled, for now anyway, on another “frozen conflict” in the Donbas.

As the Georgian precedent indicates, the Kremlin could easily decide to “unfreeze” the conflict at some opportune moment, but for the time being that seems unlikely. In recent months it has restrained some of the domestic hypernationalists, once tacitly encouraged, who have been calling for outright invasion of Ukraine and condemning Putin for failing to do so. Keeping Ukraine a failed state and out of Western institutions is the minimal requirement. But what the Putin regime would like ultimately is a Ukraine subordinate to Moscow, with a compliant government in Kiev, its economy integrated in the Eurasian Economic Union, its military industries closely linked to the Russian military-industrial complex, and Russian as an official, and effectively the dominant, language.

If the Ukrainians don’t oblige, the Donbass front could always be reactivated and the destabilisation of other regions renewed. But there are other ways of exerting severe pressure. Trade boycotts, “energy diplomacy” and manipulating prices have all been used frequently.

It is true that such measures may be exhausting their potential. As Moscow has intensified its trade boycotts, Ukraine has been tearing itself away from its dependence on Russian imports and exports. Quite recently, Russian and EU trade with Ukraine were each roughly a third of the total, but Ukraine’s trade with the European Union is now more than double that with Russia.

In an ideal world this would not be the optimal trade pattern between the two countries, but as Putin has turned trade – like culture and broadcasting – into a coercive weapon, Kiev feels that it has no choice but to greatly reduce contact with Russia in all fields. If Putin’s methods ultimately fail in the struggle to dominate Ukraine, he will have done severe and gratuitous damage to Russia as well as to his victim along the way.

But while the economic weapons are starting to lose effectiveness because of gross overuse, they are still potent. Moscow has foreshadowed yet another cut-off of gas supplies during the coming winter; it has abruptly curtailed all agricultural imports from Ukraine; and when Ukraine banned civilian Russian flights into Ukraine on ostensibly national security grounds, Moscow quickly responded in kind. These recent measures build on nearly two years of severe and punitive trade war waged by the Kremlin.

The gas is less potent than it once was thanks to efforts by Ukraine to build up reserves and acquire much more of its gas imports from other sources. But it has other vulnerabilities and Moscow will exploit them. As well as cutting off gas supplies, it has curtailed coal and nuclear fuel supplies. Kiev is partly to blame for this: it failed to contain the blockade of Crimea, mounted by mainly Crimean Tatar activists and aimed at preventing essential supplies being delivered from Ukraine to the peninsula. The Crimean Tatars have suffered heavily from Russian imperialism in various forms, including genocide at the hands of Stalin and systematic persecution by the new regime installed since the Russian annexation last year. But the activists went from obstructing land exports to sabotaging electricity supplies and then preventing Ukrainian services from carrying out repairs. In failing to block the blockaders, however understandable given Moscow’s behaviour in Crimea, Kiev gave Putin an excellent excuse to retaliate painfully. The ban on coal supplies in particular could be very damaging to Ukraine during the winter.

After blandly lying that he would not impose further sanctions on Ukraine, Putin has now ordered the imposition of tariffs on Ukrainian exports when Kiev’s free trade deal comes into force on 1 January 2016, on the grounds that without them, cheap EU goods would flood into Russia. EU officials and independent observers regard these Russian claims as specious, and an excuse for measures aimed at preventing Kiev from proceeding with its Association Agreement with the European Union. It has been estimated that this measure will cost Ukraine $1.5 billion annually.

Moscow is trying hard to damage the battered Ukrainian economy in other ways too. Not widely reported in the Australian press has been Russia’s unremitting campaign to use a $3 billion debt owed it by Ukraine to tip its unruly little brother over the economic precipice. The money, provided by Moscow to president Viktor Yanukovych just before he was deposed, has been described (not unfairly) by prime minister Yatsenyuk as a bribe to induce Yanukovych to abandon any thought of integration with the European Union.

As a condition for approval of a US$40 billion bailout package from the IMF, the Poroshenko administration was required to secure a negotiated restructuring of $18 billion owed to private creditors. After long and arduous negotiations, the creditors agreed to a 20 per cent haircut and some easing of the terms of repayment, which financial observers saw as a fairly favourable outcome for the creditors in the circumstances. Russia refused to negotiate on its $3 billion and maintained that the debt was state-to-state, not private. IMF policy has been not to disburse loans to states in arrears to other states.

In this case, though, the IMF let it be known that it would continue to disburse tranches of the bailout even if Ukraine remained in arrears to Russia. No doubt it was also taking into account the fact that, as the IMF’s president Christine Lagarde emphasised publicly, Kiev had taken some heroic decisions to meet the Fund’s tough conditions. Perhaps it also saw as relevant the fact that Russia had invaded Crimea after making the loan, seizing land and resources worth many tens of billions of dollars, and had also implicated itself heavily in the tens of billions of dollars’ damage done by the armed subversion of eastern Ukraine. All this suggested that Russia’s bonds might ultimately be judged to be odious debt in the technical legal sense.

As the IMF mood seemed to be hardening against him, Putin attempted to step round this obstacle by declaring a readiness to accept the $3 billion over three years, plus interest, starting with an upfront $75 million and subject to guarantees of repayment by Western institutions. Although the “offer” was conspicuously less generous than the deal accepted by the private creditors, it was widely hailed at first as a sign of Russia’s flexibility. Ukraine argued that it could not offer more generous terms to Russia than it had done to the other non-official creditors.

Last week the IMF announced that in Ukraine’s case it was prepared to set aside its usual rule of not extending support to countries in arrears to another sovereign. (“IMF Backstabs Russia by Lifting Loan Ban vs. Debt-Dodging Ukraine” is a sample of Western Putinist propaganda on this topic.) But shortly afterwards it announced that it upheld Russia’s contention that the $3 billion lent to Yanukovych by Putin was an official not a commercial debt, and called on Kiev to negotiate with Moscow on repayment of the debt. This is very unfavourable for Kiev, which will refuse to pay; and the issue will become another expensive matter between the two countries that will end up in court.

Another good example of Putin’s methods is Gazprom’s latest pipeline project, Nord Stream II, to be built in collaboration with big German and other West European companies. Like Nord Stream I, it will cost at least $10 billion but has no economic justification. (Existing pipelines through eastern and central Europe could do the same job.) The purpose is geopolitical: to bypass the East European countries, depriving them of transit fees and any leverage in price negotiations, and making it easy for Gazprom (Putin, that is) to cut off their gas supplies for punitive effect at any time without inconveniencing favoured customers further west, and charge them higher fees than those favoured customers. Western energy companies are apparently being drawn into a cosy deal with Gazprom to blackmail Russia’s eastern neighbours and profitably monopolise gas supplies to much of Europe.

After a lengthy period of considerable controversy, the European Union seems to be about to decide whether it should disallow this project as contrary to its Third Energy Package and anti-trust policies. In a more amenable age, Nord Stream I slipped through the net quite smoothly, aided and abetted by former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. His influence is still detectable. When Merkel’s deputy chancellor, Social Democrat leader Sigmar Gabriel, made a “personal” trip to Moscow, he spent two hours with Putin and Gazprom head Aleksei Miller, during which the visitor expressed the hope that the project would go through with as little “outside interference” as possible. For her part, Chancellor Merkel seems also to be a supporter, if more cautious, of Nord Stream II, while still envisaging some residual role for Ukraine as a transit state. Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland and other affected states have protested loudly against Nord Stream II, and EU energy commissioner Maroš Ševčovič (a Slovak) has also expressed deep scepticism. At the EU summit on 17–18 December, strong opposition was expressed by a number of countries against allowing Nord Stream II to go ahead.

If, however, Nord Stream II were to proceed, Ukraine will suffer a further loss of more than$2 billion in transit fees annually on top of what it lost earlier from the effects of Nord Stream I.

Given the desperate state of Ukraine’s economy and public finances, and even with the IMF support that has raised its reserves to a princely $13 billion, sums like $2 billion here and $3 billion there may be enough to bankrupt the country. Russia, by contrast, still has $375 billion in its reserves, despite the steady and damaging drain by Putin’s various geopolitical projects.

While it has noted progress by Ukraine in its regular reports, the IMF usually adds the caveat that the country’s already clouded outlook for economic recovery depends on no further worsening of the military situation in eastern Ukraine. For the moment, Moscow is constrained in that respect by its desire to observe Minsk sufficiently to get sanctions relief. But another “outbreak” of fighting in eastern Ukraine at some point could be economically ruinous for Ukraine; and it would not be too difficult for Moscow to devise other, more economic punishments that would bring Ukraine financially undone.

Moscow’s recent military restraint is thus not any sign of a newly felt moderation on the part of Putin and his siloviki colleagues, but rather a result of the pressure he is under because of low energy prices and Western sanctions on Russia’s economy. GDP growth had dwindled to close to nothing even before the sanctions were applied; a decline of some 4 per cent is expected this year, and if sanctions are not lifted, a further decline is likely next year. But with his heavy military commitment in Syria, and now his extensive economic sanctions against his latest enemy, Erdogan’s Turkey, Putin has demonstrated yet again that no economic price is too great for his adoring subjects to pay when his geopolitical projects demand it.

He would much prefer that sanctions be removed, of course, and he is working to that end with his numerous EU allies and sympathisers along the political spectrum – people like Sigmar Gabriel; Viktor Orban, the authoritarian right-wing prime minister of Hungary; Greece’s present leadership and Cyprus regardless of leadership; Miloš Zeman and Václav Klaus, president and former president of the Czech Republic; Slovak prime minister Robert Fico on some issues, though not on Nord Stream II; European Commission president Juncker; and EU “foreign minister” Federica Mogherini (though her sympathy for Russia may be fading) and her patron, Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi. More broadly, there is a widespread and apparently growing desire among many European elites to get back to “business as usual” with Russia, a sentiment Juncker embodies, together with a palpable distaste for US influence on European affairs. But these currents have been held in check with great determination by Angela Merkel.

Now, however, the chancellor’s capacity to maintain support for sanctions against such widespread scepticism is coming under greater pressure from various quarters, both domestically and in the European Union more generally. Moreover, her own political position has been weakened by her quixotically generous response to the huge influx of would-be migrants into Europe, which, like many in the humanitarian German intelligentsia, she seems to see as a chance for Germany to put the seal on its European leadership role and to atone finally and decisively for sins past. This has damaged her domestic standing both in her party and the population.

The migration issue has also preoccupied many EU members desperate to find a short-term fix, and has created severe tensions and divisions between member states. While still trying to defend her initial position, Merkel is now championing the idea, most clearly enunciated by European Council President Donald Tusk, that preserving Schengen and beginning to repair the whole desperate situation requires adequate protection of Europe’s external borders, a radical diminution of the inflow and the safe return of those not found to be refugees.

Along the way, and via the serious further preoccupations of Putin in Syria, the Paris atrocities, and President Hollande’s sudden lunge towards Moscow, the chancellor’s capacity and will to ensure that the European Union holds the line on sanctions may have been damaged. Rolling back sanctions while Russia is still ensconced in Ukraine would be a severe blow to EU and transatlantic unity and a huge boost for Putin’s fortunes both domestically and ly. Merkel, the pacifist and nuanced supporter of Putin’s Nord Stream II operation, is arguably at this point a more crucial pillar of Western resistance to Russian aggression in Europe than NATO itself. •

The post Ukraine, out of sight appeared first on Inside Story.

The underlying situation in Ukraine did not improve, but the steady drip of casualties suddenly halted. For many Western commentators and politicians, this fuelled a hope that lasting peace was not far off. Few sufficiently noted the point made by political scientist Alexander Motyl, that the sudden suspension of the proxy aggression against Ukraine showed that Russia’s claims that it hasn’t been involved in Donbass were absurd. And what can be so easily turned off can easily be turned back on again – and in recent weeks has been, to some degree.

Other crises affecting Europe have been competing with Ukraine for space. The many permutations of the Greek insolvency crisis were sorely preoccupying EU leaders as well as attracting media attention, until it was pushed into the background by a growing avalanche of migrants. Increasing numbers were coming from Syria (and elsewhere) via refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, and crossing from Turkey to adjacent Greek islands rather than taking the longer and more hazardous journey from North Africa. Then, while the European Union struggled with its migration crisis, Russia launched itself forcefully into the already crowded Syrian war zone.

Next came the downing of the Russian Metrojet passenger plane over the Sinai Peninsula, followed by the terrorist atrocities in Paris, both claimed by ISIS, and exerting their usual hypnotic effect on Western publics. Most recently, the shooting down of a Russian military aircraft on the Turkish–Syrian border, after its incursion into Turkish airspace, led to yet another crisis involving an aggrieved and aggressive Russia.

All of these things relate to Ukraine’s still very precarious position in significant ways. What they have in common is that not only do they occupy column inches, but they also take a heavy toll on the attention spans, financial resources, political capital and collective resolve of Western decision-makers, all necessarily at the expense of other priorities. From Putin’s point of view, they offer a chance to change the subject from Ukraine and sanctions.

Most independent Russian observers thought that pursuing a better settlement in Ukraine and relief from sanctions was probably the most important motivation for Moscow’s Syrian intervention. But it was clearly also aimed at other objectives: to shore up Russia’s oldest ally in the Middle East, to lay a claim to great power status and a place at any negotiating tables, to demonstrate that Putin, unlike Obama, is loyal to his friends (compare Assad with Mubarak), and to defend and extend Russia’s only military base in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The intervention may even have been motivated in part by a desire to take on ISIS, as Putin proclaimed at the outset, though for weeks 90 per cent of Russia’s attacks ignored ISIS targets and were aimed rather at Western allies among the anti-Assad forces. It was certainly intended to impress on Western minds that Russia was a necessary ally against ISIS, an ally worth placating to bring on board.

After it became clear that Western governments rejected Putin’s pretence to be taking on ISIS, and particularly after the attacks in Paris, Moscow changed its line, belatedly acknowledging that the Russian passenger jet had been blown up by ISIS, which till then it had energetically denied, and offering sympathy and armed support to French president François Hollande. Russia summoned other countries to join a united front against terrorism, which it presented as analogous to the wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, a line it has been pushing since well before its Syrian intervention. These siren calls often explicitly proposed that Western countries put issues like Ukraine behind them. But while indicating a readiness to coordinate efforts against ISIS, most Western majors made clear that they were not ready to overlook other issues dividing them from Russia. The politically beleaguered Hollande, by contrast, responded with alacrity and enthusiasm to Moscow’s appeal, raising further doubts in some minds about the strength of his commitment to maintaining a strong line over Ukraine.

Like the Metrojet disaster, the Turkish shooting down of a Russian bomber was a severe reverse for Putin. This time he immediately went on the front foot, moving more forces into the region, launching the usual Russian trade war despite the considerable cost to Russian consumers, tourists and small businesses, and demanding a public apology from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A rising crescendo of propaganda was directed against this new enemy, much of it personal to Erdoğan. All this was probably an expression of Putin’s personal feelings of humiliation, but clearly such an affront could not be tolerated by a great power. Russia is maintaining its rage, and further escalation is possible, though unlikely.

The rights and wrongs of the incident may take some time to become fully clear, but it should be remembered that Putin has been deploying aircraft close to, or in, other countries’ airspace for well over a year. These overflights, especially though not exclusively directed at NATO members, often seem deliberately provocative or intimidatory. The Russian aircraft fly with their transponders turned off so that the air defence and air traffic control systems in targeted countries cannot contact the pilots. Nor was this the first time Russia had treated Turkey in this way during the current operations. The Turkish claim that the Russian crew had not responded to successive warnings is therefore plausible. Moreover, the bombers were attacking ethnic Turkish anti-Assad forces rather than ISIS. Putin has made much of Russia’s supposed right and duty to protect anyone who can be classed as belonging to the rubbery entity known as the Russian world – ethnic Russians, that is, or even just Russian speakers in foreign countries. Why should Turkey not feel some responsibility to its own co-ethnics?

While it may not have been the primary purpose of these dangerous operational procedures near the Turkish border, Russia has shown signs of satisfaction with the nervous NATO response the border incident evoked. This seems to have been the first time a NATO country has shot down a Russian or Soviet aircraft. Moreover, Erdoğan is not flavour of the month with either NATO or the European Union. Though Brussels is offering Ankara some $4 billion in funding and other concessions to persuade it to cooperate in stemming the vast flow of would-be migrants who have come through Turkey, this is a sign of EU desperation rather than esteem.

NATO is, of course, obliged under Article 5 of the NATO treaty to consider what it can do to aid any member whose security is under threat. But some NATO members will be asking themselves whether they want to come to the aid of a Turkey that feels emboldened in ambiguous circumstances to shoot down a Russian aircraft. Russian commentators are clearly hoping this will prove to be the case.

What these events illustrate is that while Moscow may not have provoked or planned all these situations, it has been quick to turn them to its strategic advantage. If Russia deals with Turkey in a contemptuous and threatening manner and NATO responds mainly by declaratory support and mediation efforts, tempered by evident unease, this may suggest that NATO membership is of uncertain value. And if the Paris atrocities in tandem with the Metrojet disaster do generate a wave of sentiment in favour of a new alignment with Russia, that may well weaken Western solidarity in defence of Ukraine. Divisions and uncertainty within NATO or the European Union are always welcome in Moscow.

Even Moscow’s involvement in the Grexit issue was clearly aimed at more than simply supporting a traditional Russian ally, particularly one gripped by anti-Brussels sentiment. Mutual high-level visits between Moscow and Athens, and symbolic gestures of support were timed in such a way as to encourage Athens’s resentment of the tough conditions attached to the EU bailout. Of course, Russia itself was not able or prepared to come to the financial rescue, given the vast sums involved. But the contrast between warm-hearted, sympathetic Russia and mean, hard-hearted Germany was good political theatre and stirred up extra trouble in the European Union. In the end, however, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras proved more soberly calculating than Putin had hoped, and he did not withhold his support for extending EU sanctions.

Though some Eastern European commentators believe otherwise, Putin appears to have had no significant role in creating the migration tidal wave in Europe, though his intense bombing raids in Syria might well add to it and perhaps partly reflect a desire to bring about such a movement. And Russia has indeed facilitated a rapidly increasing flow of some 5000 would-be migrants into Norway across the remote northern border linking the two countries, overwhelming Norwegian reception facilities. Oslo has demanded an explanation and amended its regulations to stem the flow. The numbers are small at this stage, but the intent is clear.

Putin would be delighted with the spectacle of EU embarrassment and disarray in the face of this human rights policy debacle. It threatens to open up a new and damaging divide between “core Europe” and new members in the east who are vigorously resisting efforts to make them accept allocations of refugees for resettlement. The refugee crisis is also a gift for Putin’s allies and admirers on the European hard right, including Marine Le Pen and her National Front in France. Le Pen is frequently invited to visit senior figures in the Kremlin, and her party has received funding from a Kremlin-friendly bank. Moscow supports all hard-right Eurosceptic parties, as well as hard-left parties, valuing their disruptive role in a European Union staggering under the weight of successive crises. The migration issue promises to be the mother of all of them, and of long duration.

Russia itself has a severe problem with its increasingly radical Muslim communities, which comprise over twenty million in a total population of 142 million if migrant workers from the “-stans” of former Soviet Central Asia are included. This may have been a key factor inclining Putin initially to avoid stirring up ISIS unduly in Syria, as that organisation had been recruiting substantial numbers of Muslim radicals from Russia, and especially from the turbulent north Caucasus. Stalin committed barbarous crimes against some of those national groups, including the Chechens and also the Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatars who have strong links with and enjoy official and public sympathy in Turkey. The Chechens and Crimean Tatars, like the overwhelming majority of Russian Muslims, are Sunni.

For all these reasons the Sunni Erdoğan keenly resents Putin’s annexation of Crimea, and his support for Shiite regimes in Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, as well as for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In fact, Putin himself has done much to fan the flames of Muslim resistance in Russia and to push it in an increasingly Islamist direction, by his violent repression in the north Caucasus, especially in Chechnya. Having conducted a brutal war to pacify the province at the outset of his presidency (a war that greatly boosted his popularity), he has increasingly outsourced rule in Chechnya to the brutal but efficient and increasingly Islamist dictator, Ramzan Kadyrov.

So Putin has a serious problem with radical Islam domestically, which is one reason why he had till recently steered clear of armed involvements in the Middle East. The Soviet regime tended to support supposedly “modernising” anti-Western autocracies and movements in the region, including Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and the Baathist regime of the Assads in Syria. In the post-Soviet period, at least until recently, Russia has been less actively engaged in the Middle East, but Putin now seems ready to risk greater involvement.

Especially since Putin came to power, Russia has deeply resented Western support for regime change not just in former communist states in Eastern Europe, but also in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (where Putin seemed to take the fall and execution of Gaddafi personally). Moscow was, perhaps wisely, sceptical that the Arab Spring would lead to any kind of sweetness and light. Putin is convinced that the real Western motivation there is to strengthen its influence in the region at the expense of Moscow’s political and economic interests.

And he is apparently genuinely mystified that the West should repeatedly invest so much blood and treasure in such dangerous and volatile situations. It is not just damaging to Russia, it is damaging to the West as well, so why do it? To quote the rhetorical question in his UN address in September 2015 referencing Western-led regime-change operations in the broader Middle East: “Do you at least realise what you’ve done?!” It’s not an unreasonable question. Yet he now seems on the brink of a dangerous double investment of his own, first in the whole Middle Eastern Sunni–Shia civil war, and second in a vengeful feud with a man after his own heart, Erdoğan, which could severely damage his carefully cultivated relationship with Turkey, and possibly much more besides.

Russians generally, including opposition voices, find the Western attitude to the wider Middle East, and particularly to Muslim immigrants in their midst, deeply strange. The once prominent Russian banker Elena Kotova, writing about the Paris atrocities for the independent Russian online publication Snob, expressed amazement that Western elites react to all Islamist terrorist attacks in Western countries with the same clichés about solidarity, tolerance, courage, civilised values inevitably triumphing, and so on. After years of changing reality, she wrote, the tolerance mantras remain the same. They defy common sense, she argued, but more importantly they defy the wishes of the majority of ordinary citizens of Europe. And she went on to make some mordant observations about the tyranny of political correctness in Western Europe.

The common thread in all these recent headline issues from the Putinist perspective is that they carry the promise of, or present opportunities for, the weakening of NATO and the European Union, and the West generally. As Putin once frankly told a secretary-general of NATO, his mission was not to build a better relationship with NATO, but to destroy the organisation. And his attitude in recent years towards the European Union, especially its trade and governance outreach to its eastern neighbours, has become similarly hostile.

For Putin generally, as for his senior colleagues, the objective of policy is not to reach an honourable compromise, or to achieve peace as such, but to be in conflict with and defeat his numerous adversaries. All relationships are zero-sum games, and win–win solutions are an illusion – or would be if Russian had a word for them. What he wants is victory, not peace, domination not partnership (despite his frequent sly references to his Western enemies as “partners”). Kto kogo (who will dominate whom), as Lenin famously said; the weak get beaten, as Putin himself said. And he assumes that behind their hypocritical facades everyone else operates in the same way.

Because of the dismal state of Western education about the Soviet and post-Soviet operational code, Western foreign policy–makers (and often commentators, too) seem unable to internalise these sorts of basic Russian realities. They continue to try to create resets or peaceful win–win solutions, to “rebuild the relationship,” to reach out, until their patience runs out, or they lose the election, or they are replaced by a democratic party colleague with superior insight into the nature of things, who will also see a need to rebuild the relationship supposedly damaged by her predecessor. •

The post Making nice and making enemies appeared first on Inside Story.

The anecdote illustrates something about the post-Soviet Russia Peter Pomerantsev moved to early in the Putin years, which is reflected in the sharply observed vignettes that make up his book. This was a society stripped of its moorings, suddenly characterised by a few winners and many more losers. The glamour, pizzazz and cornucopia of (mostly theoretical) choices would have been unthinkable in Soviet times, but alongside these was a lack of security or predictability.

The wild west capitalism set in train by the abrupt transition from command economy to free market in the early 1990s had precipitated a torrent of inflation, sharp declines in production, nakedly corrupt mass privatisations, a widespread loss of personal savings, a crime wave seemingly linked to the new economic model, conspicuous consumption by the newly rich “new Russians,” and conspicuous poverty among pensioners and professors alike, who were reduced to selling their family possessions on the streets to get by. This was the chaos that Vladimir Putin has persuaded Russians was an unnecessary and unalloyed disaster visited on them by Boris Yeltsin and the reformers, who had senselessly dismantled the Soviet Union and everything its ordinary, loyal citizens held dear.

It’s true that the shock therapy was not optimal in either conception or execution. But the task of rapidly transforming a faltering command economy centred on a huge military/police apparatus into a functioning market economy was never going to be easy or quick. In fact, a major cause of the 1990s downturn was the sustained slump in the price of Russia’s oil and gas exports (just as it had precipitated the economic decline in the second half of the Gorbachev-era 1980s). And the spectacular economic recovery that largely coincided with Putin’s meteoric rise and first two presidential terms (for which most Russians still thank him) owed much to a boom in energy prices and those painful reforms of the 1990s.

Putin’s main contribution to this serendipitous outcome was to enable a group of liberal economic advisers from his Leningrad entourage to make some judicious adjustments to Russian economic policy in his early years in power. He still has competent economic advisers in his service, but as the years have worn on their capacity to influence policy has been greatly reduced. And, since 2011, the most influential of them, the liberal and principled former deputy prime minister Alexei Kudrin, has been rusticated from the power elite to the moderate opposition.

The elite that had emerged in the 1990s embraced not only the freedom of speech and freedom to participate in politics, but also, and more particularly, the freedom to become grotesquely, obscenely and publicly wealthy. In the 1990s, large black limousines would roar at terrifying speed down Moscow’s broad boulevards and through pedestrian crossings at eighty kilometres an hour while pedestrians cowered at the road’s edge waiting to attempt a crossing. These were not always, as in Soviet times, office-bearers with a fleet of vehicles and the capacity to close off roads at peak traffic hours; in many cases they were “new Russians” asserting and enjoying their ascent to traditional Russian privilege as they understood it.

Among the new entrepreneurs who seized the opportunity to make millions and then billions were a great number of former members of the nomenklatura, including KGB operatives, who had privileged access to the new opportunities, and often also to old funds cunningly squirrelled away by the old regime. Quite a few underworld figures also became prominent in the emergent plutocracy.

As in the Soviet period, there was symbiosis between crime, corrupt economic activity and the security organs. An analyst probing the transmogrification of organised crime dons and secret policemen into tycoons in the 1990s told a group of listeners that it wasn’t clear whether what we were witnessing was “the mafia-isation of the KGB or the KGB-isation of the mafia in Russia.” The accession of ex-KGB officer Putin to the top job did not, of course, do anything to diminish the prominence of ex-KGB figures in business. (The connections between crime, oligarchy, the state and President Putin are covered very well in Karen Dawisha’s 2014 book Putin’s Kleptocracy.)

Corruption also flowered beyond the circles of well-placed apparatchiki. Many business success stories involved people without Soviet-era connections who had talent, drive and an eye to the main chance in a ruthless dog-eat-dog environment. Respect for property rights hadn’t been a feature of most communist societies – in fact, ordinary people were often unconscious followers of the French anarchist Proudhon’s doctrine that all property is theft, and most assumed that other people’s property had probably been illegitimately acquired in the first place. Because the difficulties of daily life could only be overcome by corruption, a certain amount of it was in any case widely regarded as unavoidable and perfectly reasonable.

Following a visit to his country by a delegation of Supreme Soviet members in the late Gorbachev period, a Western official with extensive experience of the Soviet Union described how shocked he had been to learn that nearly all members of the delegation had not only laid waste to the hotel minibars without paying for any of it (which might have been a naive mistake in some cases), but had also removed quite a lot of the fittings in their rooms. He had been particularly dismayed that one strongly reformist deputy with a fine record as a dissident had been one of the more conspicuous offenders. Many Russians were thus well equipped for the conditions that emerged after the fall of the command economy.

The Putin years saw sharp improvements in living standards, but much more of the same as far as wild west capitalism was concerned, with the rapid expansion of the economy throwing up even greater opportunities. Putin is sometimes credited with having brought the oligarchs under control; all he did, in fact, was to jail or exile a few who impertinently aspired to take part in the county’s political life or were resisting his policies. Oligarchs continued to flourish, though their previous security of tenure and ability to make political choices were curtailed. Those who prospered were increasingly those who were responsive to Kremlin requirements and directives. Within those broad-enough parameters, they could usually enjoy their wealth in any way they wished.

This, then, was the freewheeling world that Peter Pomerantsev came to early in Putin’s reign. The son of Russian dissidents who had managed to emigrate to London in 1978, raised in England but having lived in various other European capitals, Pomerantsev arrived in Moscow in his twenties looking for work and a bit of exotic adventure. Western visitors and expatriates were still welcome, even sought after, in Moscow at that time, and he was able to find work as a director of television documentaries, exploring the extravagance, the giddy variety and the dark nether regions of the new Russia. Provided he managed to ensure a degree of “balance” by including some positive content in his films, his commissioners and producers were happy to run with politically more risqué material. At least at first, that is, for their resistance to his investigative zeal increased over time, and Pomerantsev began to feel progressively less welcome.

He returned to London from Moscow in 2010. After a briefly difficult transition, vividly described in his essay “In Between Tortures,” Pomerantsev quickly made a name for himself in Britain and the West generally as a commentator on contemporary Russian politics and society. He first came to the notice of many with his 2011 London Review of Books essay on Vladislav Surkov, the erstwhile éminence grise of Putin’s Kremlin, memorably entitled “Putin’s Rasputin.” He has also written persuasively on Russian propaganda techniques (see his report “The Menace of Unreality,” written with Michael Weiss, and also “Inside the Kremlin’s Hall of Mirrors”).

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is based mainly on his documentary films. The events and sociopolitical backdrop he describes are essentially those of Putin’s first two terms as president, not the economically stagnant and more oppressive and xenophobic Russia that emerged after Putin announced in 2011 that he intended resuming the presidency. The book should not be regarded as a portrait of the grim police state seemingly bent on unremitting confrontation with the West that Putin has since created, but a picture of something rather less malign. Some of the sour flavour of the most recent Putin years does come through in postscript chapters describing Pomerantsev’s contacts after 2010 with the upper echelons of Londongrad’s hugely wealthy Russian diaspora. His very interesting interviews with William Browder and Jamison Firestone about the tragic Magnitsky case, for example, dramatically illustrate much of the ugly and worsening symbiosis between crime, wealth and state corruption in Russia.

But much of that earlier Putinist landscape was grim enough. Pomerantsev gives us gripping eyewitness accounts of some major political events, including the Chechen terrorist theatre siege in Moscow of October 2002 in which over 170 people, including 129 of the hostages, perished, largely because of the brutality and incompetence of security officialdom. He gives us sometimes chilling portraits of significant players in Russian political life – people like Alexei Weitz, one of the leaders of Putin’s favourite patriotic bikie gang, the fascist-style Night Wolves.

Pomerantsev depicts features of Russian life well known to specialists and expats but still startling in vivid close-up: the monstrous bullying of Russian military recruits and the extraordinary efforts undertaken by their families, typically their mothers, to help them dodge the draft; the ubiquitous need to bribe officials at many levels, especially the police who randomly check pedestrians’ documents or arbitrarily pull over motorists, primarily if not exclusively to enhance their own incomes; the remarkably stylised and seemingly almost compulsory system for bribing your way through a driver’s licence test regardless of your level of competence; and the heroic, but ultimately futile efforts of the brave heritage architect Alexander Mozhaev and his hardy circle of followers to save historic buildings in central Moscow subject to mindless destruction in favour of huge and corruptly approved redevelopment projects. (“Over three years they have saved three buildings out of three thousand,” reports Pomerantsev.)

One particularly absorbing story recounts a businesswoman’s experience of a practice known incongruously in Russian as reiderstvo (“raiding”), whereby a person in a position of power, often an official, steals the victim’s property by having him or her arrested by compliant police and condemned by a venal judge (99 per cent of all accused are convicted in Russia). The victim then rots in jail while their documents of ownership are purloined by more compliant “investigators” and handed over for a consideration to the “raider.” Remarkably, this is a widespread phenomenon in Russia, and large numbers of small and medium entrepreneurs are in jail at any one time, which contributes significantly to Russia’s dismal investment climate and sagging growth rates.

The portraits of largely unknown people that Pomerantsev uses to illustrate the lives and fates of typical categories of Russian humanity are another absorbing feature of the book. The intelligent and literate Vitaly, a Siberian mafia gangster with a brutally disciplined retinue in tow, makes documentary films about himself and goes on to write picaresque bestsellers based on his life. Oliona, the professional mistress, has trained herself at considerable expense to have the necessary qualities in addition to natural beauty to win the patronage – typically transient – of seriously wealthy oligarchs. Benedict, the Western “lapsed economist,” came to Russia with a poor understanding of the country or the language but found employment in various places, including as a consultant for various well-meaning Western acronyms; he writes reports instructing Russian institutions on how to adopt Western organisational and business practices but is slow to recognise that their resistance to foreign ideas and desire to make corrupt use of any funds or schemes that come their way are undermining the whole purpose of his activity.

Then there’s Grigori, the wealthy businessman who throws rampantly extravagant parties which Pomerantsev delights in attending. He is a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist who built his flourishing business honestly enough and from scratch, and pours much of his wealth into supporting the arts. He also supports and funds a mendicant yurodivy (holy fool, a traditional Russian social category), whose dismaying personal hygiene Pomerantsev describes all too clearly, but who Grigori earnestly regards as a seer who will become the saviour of Russia. And various dissident performance artists from the milieu out of which Pussy Riot emerged also make their appearance intermittently in the narrative.

Some of the descriptions of conspicuous wealth and consumption may start to weary the reader a little, as could Pomerantsev’s interest in the often tragic stories of beautiful young women (roughly sixty pages of 282) who are preyed on by wealthy and powerful males or the numerous lunatic sects that emerged in the post-Soviet period. But while he tends to neglect ordinary, less telegenic Russian citizens and their daily struggles, he does focus very effectively on many of the key features of Putinist society – the harshness, the lawlessness, the impunity – and he has a deadly eye for the telling detail.

The longer Pomerantsev stayed in Russia, the more it became apparent to him, as it does to the reader, that the country’s political system was heading towards greater domestic oppression, and that lies and xenophobia had once again become key guiding principles. One of Pomerantsev’s favourite subjects is Vladislav Surkov, who was very much the high priest of the earlier “soft authoritarian” phase of Putinism, during which people were manipulated into compliance with relatively less crude coercion.

Surkov is shown devising ingenious but mendacious reasons for supporting the regime, which he invites intellectuals to adopt. Surkov himself flirted with performance artists and dissident ideas, and even published a book under a transparent pseudonym with somewhat subversive content. But the flirtation was ultimately all part of the radical relativism encapsulated wittily in the title Pomerantsev gave his book, and used instrumentally by Surkov and the regime to justify their grip on power and fuel their struggle against the decadent democracies of the West.

Beneath the intellectual brilliance and sophisticated facade, however, the real Surkov – himself of Chechen origins – is a good friend of the exceptionally brutal Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, who keeps the rebellious province under tight control on the Kremlin’s behalf. Though partly sidelined within the Kremlin in recent years, Surkov has been closely involved in the planning of Russian operations in Ukraine. He might have attractive qualities, but it’s difficult to class Surkov as a good guy.

The reader thus needs always to bear in mind that over the last four years Putin’s regime has morphed into something markedly less engaging than Pomerantsev’s in-country adventures depict. Pomerantsev is fully aware of these developments of course, as his other recent writings make clear. Surkov’s lighter domestic touch, which gelled reasonably well with the declaratory liberalism of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency (2008–12), has been supplanted by the more traditionally Soviet head-kicking style of Surkov’s successor as first deputy head of the presidential administration, Vyacheslav Volodin.

It was Volodin who gave us the lapidary formulation, “if there is no Putin there is no Russia.” Together with the hyperactive and hyperzealous but rubber-stamping Duma, the Putin administration is producing a never-ending avalanche of repressive neo-Stalinist domestic legislation and adopting a stridently aggressive anti-Westernism both domestically and externally. A Peter Pomerantsev would have great difficulty finding work in Moscow media today except as a Lord Haw-Haw. •

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Someone leaves the house, and then re-enters; the light goes out, and a big car moves away; a long train pulls into a station. Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) is meeting a friend from Moscow, Dmitri (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), a lawyer who may be able to help Kolya and his family save this house from compulsory acquisition by the local mayor, a bully intent on demolition and redevelopment.

They’re old friends, but it’s clear that life has not treated them equally. Dmitri is handsome and assured; Kolya, a motor mechanic, feels besieged by the community’s demands on him – a lot of unpaid attention to battered old cars – while the mayor’s threat overhangs. Multiple tensions begin to play out; Kolya’s young wife Lilya thinks they should move away. In a performance of sustained subtlety, Elena Lyadova communicates, from the outset, Lilya’s depression and lack of hope, and also her capacity for resolve. At the breakfast table Kolya’s adolescent son Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev), the child of a first wife long dead, breaks out in general resentment. Later, we’ll see Kolya hitting the vodka hard. Zvyagintsev packs more psychology and politics into the film’s first fifteen minutes than most others would manage in two hours.

In the mayoral office, where Dmitri presents documentary evidence of past conniving and corruption, the picture of Putin is up there, ominously watchful. In another sequence, a passage of ferocious comedy, images of past leaders are used for target practice on a drinking and shooting picnic; we see the heads of Lenin, Brezhnev and Gorbachev, none more recent. The host remarks that there was a picture of Yeltsin available, but that should wait for longer historical perspective.

We’re on a remote edge of northern Russia where there is less than no faith in the distant leaders, no Chekhovian dreams about life in the capital. The church, commanding authority and wealth, is entirely on the side of Leviathan, the Hobbesian state; the priest reassures the mayor of his right to greed under divine will, and preaches scripture in an opulent edifice among gold-framed icons. There’s another church in the film, the ruined, roofless edifice where Roma and other teenagers hang out for drink, smoking and general adolescent derision.

It has been observed that in Zvyagintsev’s films women are the principal carriers of pain; remember the maternal burdens in Elena (2011). In this much larger work, there are only hints of Lilya’s desire for a world beyond the village on the Arctic coast, but it’s there when she offers herself to Dmitri. We see them together in a strange, still, uncommunicative moment after sex – and while sex has clearly happened, love-making is hardly the word for it; there’s not the glimmer of a smile, not a tinge of comedy. It’s rather as though adultery was an inevitable part of the general bleakness, no more than a momentary distraction. While Dmitri will go back to Moscow with nothing accomplished, Lilya’s path is perfectly, horrifically Tolstoyan. Despite the comradeship of the women who work beside her in the fish cannery, she’s as much alone as Anna Karenina.

Women have another role here. Three of them preside in the courtroom, judges adjudicating Kolya’s plea for his property; are they the Fates, implacably indifferent to human wishes? The details of the case are recited in a relentless harangue, and it’s clear at once that Kolya hasn’t a chance. Later, the viewer is positioned within the house, in the place of a threatened inhabitant, as the giant excavator – which looks more like a prediluvian monster than a machine – smashes the glass walls; the familiar dinner table, and all it means about everyday life and sharing are trashed and swept away. Then Kolya is again before the judges, and again he hasn’t a chance. The one element of hope is with the boy, and what will save him is community, the links formed among women in the daily bus run and the assembly line in the cannery.

It is tempting to see this great film as an anti-Putin tract; the list of Russia’s martyrs grows, with Boris Nemtsov’s murder joining those of other journalists and activists – Paul Klebnikov, Anna Politkovskaya, Natalia Estemirova and others – through the past ten years, and people in the Russian street said of Nemtsov: Leviathan killed him. The term is current; Zvyagintsev has been publicly rebuked for a film that’s “unpatriotic”; while in the popular view, the state is a living monster, larger and longer-lived than any one of its agents.

With all that, the film is not to be reduced to a parable. Bring what responses you will to the clanging iron door, the thrashing sea, the beached whale skeleton, the machinery of destruction; let the implications play out indefinitely. At the end we’re back on this beautiful Arctic edge, with the stretches of dark land and pale water. Philip Glass’s music comes in, surging and hammering, retreating and returning like the sea. It doesn’t stop with the visible action, but rises, repeats, returns again across the final images and through the long flow of the credits, as though to say: there is no end to this tale of provincial life, and no release in sight for those who live it.

Ava DuVernay’s Selma is not so much about Martin Luther King as a story and argument built around him, a potent history essay angled necessarily to the present. We begin with the Nobel Prize, King’s installation in the line of official heroes; as they carefully fix his tie for the event, we take in the dynamics of the relationship with his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo). With Ejogo’s fine performance and David Oyelowo’s as King, we get a portrait of a marriage that was never tame or ordinary. There are two particular long moments, when their hands reach towards each other through the bars while King is in jail, and again when Coretta waits for his answer on his outside affairs – did he really love those others? There are several terrible seconds before he says, “No.”

A year later, the Nobel Prize wasn’t enough to convince Lyndon Johnson (superbly played here by Tom Wilkinson) that it was high time for legislative action, then in March 1965, to endorse the right of black citizens to vote. From King’s point of view the matter was urgent; too many, turning up at civic offices for registration, had been denied. In one unforgettable sequence the activist Annie Lee Cooper, vividly played by Oprah Winfrey, is refused her civil rights by an officious, racist functionary.

We don’t get the legendary “I have a dream...” speech; the texts of the actual speeches were denied to DuVernay’s screenwriter and collaborator Paul Webb, who did brilliantly in writing the words spoken here. The fiction in the film is not in those words, but rather, according to expert witnesses, in DuVernay’s version of King’s dealings with LBJ, who did not in fact hold out so long on bringing in the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, King led three marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma – one cut short by the battle in which Alabama state troopers attacked the marchers with tear gas and cattle prods, one aborted for the sake of peace by King’s own decision, and the third in which he led the marchers, peacefully, from the bridge to the state capital. Before the final ringing speech, the film negotiates huge crowds in turmoil, the surges of white support for civil rights, and the sheer ugliness of the racism which some, like governor George Wallace, held to be the natural order of things.

What matters now about Selma is its appearance in hard times and a reactionary climate, with the killing of young, unarmed black men in several cities, one a boy of twelve; racial persecution persists in the United States, fifty years since the events named in the film. Barack Obama marked the anniversary at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in a speech that called for a new civil rights movement, one that would include women, gay people, Latinos, Asian-born Americans and Native Americans among others.

At that point Australians, with our vaunted multiculturalism, might properly stop in our tracks. Our responses to the film called Selma should not be too comfortable, too muted; more could be made of our own present fiftieth anniversary, that of the freedom rides led by Charles Perkins. A film called Moree, or perhaps Brewarrina? •

The post Full circle appeared first on Inside Story.

Having achieved that key objective, the proxies did indeed become more compliant and some diminution of the fighting ensued. But on 6 March the Ukrainian envoy told the United Nations that Ukraine had registered 750 attacks by the “separatists” since 12 February, killing 64 Ukrainian soldiers and wounding 341 people. The West has now largely accepted the Debaltseve fait accompli despite the obvious and serious violation of Minsk Two. Nor does it seem over-concerned by other violations – near the large and strategic southern city of Mariupol, for example – or the continuing terrorist bombings in Kharkov and Odessa. And while Minsk Two was supposedly intended to confirm and reinforce the ceasefire provisions of the armistice agreements of 5 and 19 September last year (Minsk One), the German and French leaders accepted the territorial gains the pro-Russian side had made by serial violations of that ceasefire in the intervening months, and presumably felt they had to persuade the Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko that this was the best deal they could get for him.

The agreement itself uses lots of soothing words like Ukrainian sovereignty and “in accordance with Ukrainian law.” But tucked away in the text and an accompanying declaration are some significant concessions to both the proxies and their Russian sponsors. To mention a few:

• A blanket amnesty has been extended to all the pro-Russian forces, and by implication to the often-thuggish local regimes they’ve set up in Donetsk and Luhansk. The amnesty seems to extend even to those who shot down MH17.

• Ukraine is required to reach agreement with the “representatives” of Russia’s proxies in eastern Ukraine (legitimating them as negotiating partners for Kiev’s elected government) on constitutional changes that would decentralise government. This is thus a condition of its regaining access to that part of its eastern border now controlled, in tandem, by the proxy forces and the Russian army.

• The proxies are given the freedom to form cross-border cooperative arrangements with Russian authorities.

• The proxy “authorities” will be involved in all policing, judicial and other legal appointments within their “people’s republics,” an apparent legitimation of their clear intention to consolidate the police state regimes they already have in place.

• Kiev is required to undertake “full resumption of socio-economic ties, including social transfers such as pension payments” and “timely payments of all utility bills… within the legal framework of Ukraine.” The point at issue here is that Russia’s actions have resulted in huge damage, for which Ukraine is now expected to pay, while Moscow pockets the geopolitical advantages. Kiev had suspended a range of transfer payments, basically because it was broke. But it also took the not unreasonable position that as Russia had now introduced sixteen “humanitarian convoys,” of whose contents no one but Moscow and its proxies have any knowledge, it should accept responsibility for supporting the living expenses of the local residents whose lives and livelihoods it had severely disrupted or worse.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president François Hollande – who initiated the negotiations with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, apparently on Ukraine’s behalf, as “the last chance to end the fighting in Ukraine” – also persuaded Poroshenko to sign an accompanying political declaration that seems to call on Ukraine to make additional concessions to Russia. This document aligns Poroshenko with the Merkelist doctrine that “there is no alternative to an exclusively peaceful settlement” to the Ukraine situation, despite the fact that for a year, Moscow has been imposing military solutions on a daily basis. The declaration also states that “the Normandy Format” of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine should be responsible for oversight of this latest “ceasefire,” thus providing for the continued non-participation of the United States, Britain and Poland (neighbour to both Russia and Ukraine and prominent earlier in EU deliberations on Ukraine).

Trade war morphs to hybrid war

Perhaps most worryingly from Kiev’s point of view, the declaration says that the group endorses trilateral EU–Ukraine–Russia talks to achieve “practical solutions to concerns raised by Russia” in relation to the free trade agreement Ukraine signed with the European Union last June. The Maidan was sparked by Yanukovych’s retreat, after years of laborious negotiations, from signing essentially the same agreement. The post-Maidan government was hoping that its signature on the package (comprising an Association Agreement and a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement) would at last launch it on a process of EU-supported reform and integration with Europe.

In response to further Russian pressure and threats, the European Union had already postponed implementation of the agreement for twelve months. Now, it seems, Russia can use that period to seek to veto any parts of the DCFTA that it doesn’t like – and Moscow has made clear it would like to rewrite large slabs. Independent observers have analysed the Russian objections and find them largely specious. What Russia really doesn’t like about the Association Agreement, and the free trade deal embedded in it, is that Ukraine signed it at all, rather than joining Putin’s Eurasian Union.

Why would Kiev have agreed to such an unbalanced pair of documents? The answer, basically, is because it had no choice. It could see that it would not receive much military support from its Western friends, despite again having been defeated on the battlefield by a further injection of high-tech weaponry and skilled manpower from Moscow. And its economy, blighted by decades of mismanagement, especially in the Yanukovych years, was and continues to be on the brink of collapse. It is also acutely conscious that fighting “separatists” entrenched in residential areas in the Donbass can only deepen the alienation of Ukrainian citizens literally caught in the crossfire. But not to return fire with their inaccurate and obsolescent weapons would concede the terrain to Russia. This has been one of Kiev’s worst dilemmas from the outset.

Even without Russian trade wars and military aggression, the new government had much to do to repair and reform the economy. But the disruption and destruction in eastern Ukraine – a rust belt area that is also the location of much of Ukraine’s industrial and export capacity – have all but tipped the economy over the edge. Ukraine’s economy has normally relied on its foreign trade for 50 per cent of its GDP, and that trade collapsed abruptly in the second half of the 2014 – by 32 per cent in December alone. This was almost entirely due to the war in the Donbass and Russia’s punitive trade restrictions. The IMF has assessed that Ukraine’s GDP had declined by 6.9 per cent in 2014, and expected a further decline of 5.5 per cent in 2015. But the Kyiv government’s own prognosis for 2015 had worsened from minus 5.5 per cent (as assessed at the end of 2014) to minus 11.9 per cent by March of this year, with inflation expected to be somewhere between 27 per cent and 43 per cent. And those trends could worsen further.

Russia’s economy has also been sliding badly in response to the fall in the oil price, the consequential slump in the rouble, and Western sanctions. Estimates of Russia’s likely GDP decline in 2015 usually range between minus 3 and minus 5 per cent. But despite Putin’s irresponsible stewardship, Russia’s financial reserves are – though falling fast – still among the highest in the world, at $356 billion, whereas before Ukraine received the first tranche of its recent $17.5 billion IMF bailout, its reserves had slumped to some $6 billion, scarcely enough to cover one month of imports. And, in February, Ukraine’s economic freefall had become markedly more precipitate and damaging than Russia’s.

Whatever financial respite Kyiv had been hoping for, Minsk Two didn’t provide immediate relief. Russia’s stock market went up at the news of the agreement; Ukraine’s fell further. Despite the announcement of the IMF package having been timed to coincide with (and seemingly conditional on Kiev’s acceptance of) the conclusion of Minsk Two, the Ukrainian hryvnia collapsed spectacularly, causing panic in the population. Desperate measures by the National Bank of Ukraine, a flurry of economic reform legislation and the arrival of the first IMF tranche recouped the position somewhat in early March, but the hryvnia has only been shakily stabilised at twenty-three to the US dollar, roughly one third of its value a year ago. The extreme fragility of the Ukrainian economy was exposed, and with it its vulnerability to further Russian geopolitical vandalism.

All of this means that Kiev’s prospects for financial stabilisation, foreign investment and continued disbursement of IMF funds all depend on whether Russia chooses to refrain from further military or economic attacks on Ukraine. A gas war, a wider-ranging trade boycott, or major further military offensives against eastern Ukraine would possibly be enough to push the national economy over the cliff, despite what has been achieved. Even with the IMF bail-out secured and without any further Russian coercion, there would be serious doubts as to whether Kiev will be able to secure enough financial support to stave off default and disaster. Western support outside the IMF framework has been modest, and the Ukrainian government has been forced to try plugging an imminent $15 billion funding gap by seeking a “haircut” and extensions from the creditors in question. That includes $3 billion owed to Russia and due for repayment next December. Under its terms, Russia has the right to call the loan in early and has repeatedly threatened to do so. It may choose its moment to good effect.

Back to Yalta

Moscow clearly has further plans for strengthening its position in Ukraine; and its proxies have launched numerous attacks in the region of the southern port city of Mariupol, for instance, as well as conducting destabilising terrorist bombing operations in Kharkov and Odessa. With Minsk Two’s legitimisation of its pseudo-statelets of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, it has already achieved its minimal objective of establishing a frozen conflict in East Ukraine. (And it should always be remembered that frozen conflicts can quickly be unfrozen or otherwise transformed at times of Russia’s choosing. Moscow has recently been converting its protectorates of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia into virtually annexed territories.) Its ultimate objective is a compliant government in Kiev, but just for the moment, itself troubled by serious economic decline, the Kremlin may content itself with a client statelet in eastern Ukraine. This it can use to veto any European integration by Kiev while it continues working to undermine the very fragile EU consensus on sanctions.

It was reported earlier this month that despite the successful proxy advances in Debaltseve and Donetsk Airport, the European Union would not impose any further sanctions at this point because they might upset the delicate Minsk Two ceasefire. Though the EU Summit on 18 March was a little more robust on Russiathan expected, that prediction was confirmed. For his part, to strengthen the chances of Minsk Two succeeding, Barack Obama has cancelled an innocuous US training program for the Ukrainian military.

Moscow has learnt from such reactions that ceasefires can often be abused quite seriously without further penalties. Different views are evident within the broader Russian leadership elite about how far and how fast Russia can and should go in Ukraine, and some of those views are quite radical. So any sudden opening of another front in Ukraine – for example an all-out attack on Mariupol to establish a land corridor to the Crimea – should not surprise us. Putin thinks that with current Western leaderships in place, he need not fear pushback that would cost Russian lives. He does worry that Russian military losses would affect his popularity, and partly for that reason has gone to absurd lengths to pretend that Russia is not involved militarily in East Ukraine. But he probably calculates that if the divided Obama administration again seemed to be tilting towards arming Ukraine, an emphatic threat of marked further escalation, followed by the offer of talks on a Minsk Three, would be enough to see off the threat.

Putin’s broader plans clearly include a restoration of a sphere of influence over most of the territory of the former Soviet Union. But he seems to want to go beyond that, if he can, to restore a sphere of influence within Europe as well, including in NATO and EU member states. What he probably wants most after some more Minsk Ones and Twos would be the creation of a new European security architecture modelled on the Yalta settlement of February 1945, where Roosevelt and Churchill conceded to Stalin control over much of Central and Eastern Europe). Russian media and some senior officials have been warmly praising Yalta recently.

By February 1945, Stalin had a dominant military grip on most of what he was claiming in central-eastern Europe, and there was not very much that the Anglo allies, despite their formidable military, could do to wrest it from him or prevent him from communising it. Despite his huge military build-up in progress this decade, Putin is unlikely ever to cast the shadow that Stalin’s conventional forces once did over the Eurasian continent. But the Western alliance he is facing is also relatively much less formidable. Though boasting a larger number of members than the Western alliance of the cold war era, the Europeans are disunited, lack adequate security leadership, and are disinclined to pay much for their own defence. In many cases, they would be very happy to return to business as usual with Moscow, as long as it restricts itself to bullying and grabbing land from other countries and not from them.

Chancellor Merkel, Europe’s most energetic and capable leader, works the EU system very well, and has achievements also in the security domain. She has succeeded in keeping sanctions in place despite the objections of the more pro-Russian EU members and the at times egregiously Russophile sentiments prevalent among influential elites within her own country, including two of her predecessor chancellors. Even though Germans generally are starting to lose their enthusiasm for the Putin regime, the foreign country they often seem most worried about is the United States. Der Spiegel recently ran a major article about the extreme anxiety and hostility evoked in the German foreign and defence policy elite by NATO’s European Commander, General Philip Breedlove, for his supposedly provocative bellicosity towards Russia. The article seems to suggest that official Germany sees Breedlove as a bigger threat to peace than Putin.

While Merkel has spent many difficult hours trying to persuade Putin to modify his behaviour, she’s had very little success so far. She tirelessly repeats her favourite mantra about Ukraine – that there can be no military solutions to this crisis – while her principal interlocutor, Putin, continues to freely deploy military solutions in Ukraine, including right under her nose last month before the ink on Minsk Two was dry.

Merkel’s second-in-command in the Minsk negotiations, President Hollande, appeared not to be playing a major role. And perhaps that was just as well. Hollande has occasionally been forceful on African and Middle Eastern issues and commands one of the two strongest armed forces in Europe. But on Ukraine, to put it charitably, he has been wobbly. He was, for example, the first Western leader to visit Putin in the Kremlin after the annexation of Crimea. France often seems very hopeful that sanctions can be rolled back, and that it can at last sell its Mistral amphibious attack vessels to the Russians, despite the fears of Russia’s neighbours bordering the Baltic and Black Seas. On 13 February, immediately after signing Minsk Two, Hollande told journalists that while it was not yet time to do so, he hoped that France would be able to deliver the Mistrals to Russia.

Perhaps as significant as who was involved on the Western side at Minsk are the absentees ensured by the Normandy Format, a constraint that Putin clearly relishes. With President Obama having apparently outsourced the management of Western security interests in Ukraine to Chancellor Merkel and the European Union, the United States has been consistently missing from Ukrainian negotiations over the last year.

A second noteworthy absentee has been Britain, the other major military power in Europe. The Cameron government began by seeking its own reset with Russia, and has sharply lowered Britain’s defence budget. But latterly it has become more forceful in response to Russia’s aggressive policies, instigating a public enquiry into the Litvinienko case, identifying Russia as its key security threat, and talking of providing defensive weapons and training to Ukraine. Britain might have been able to strengthen the EU response to Russia’s growing belligerence, but with domestic euroscepticism growing in strength and Cameron not doing a great deal to contain it, along with the distraction of the Scottish independence movement, London’s influence in EU counsels has greatly diminished.

Likewise, Poland and former PM Donald Tusk have seemed to play a less prominent role in the EU response to Russia’s activities in Ukraine than used to be the case, despite Poland’s close knowledge of the Russian target, its size and common borders with Russia and Ukraine, and Tusk’s having recently ascended to the role of president of the European Council.

Since the fading of his reset policy, Obama has been publicly contemptuous of Putin at times. But he seems to wish to cling to whatever remains of the policy to pursue supposedly shared multilateral objectives, like curbing Iran, North Korea and Islamic State as well as pursuing the fata morgana of nuclear disarmament. Whether Russia has a strong and disinterested commitment to all or even any of these objectives may seem questionable, especially nuclear disarmament, but for Obama they all appear to have precedence over Ukraine, the Budapest Memorandum or the security of the European side of the Trans-Atlantic alliance. To its credit, the Obama administration has taken a strong and leading role on sanctions, seeking to keep pressure on the European Union to match it step for step. But it should be remembered that for the United States, a single country with a single decision-making process (however complex) and limited trade with Russia, sanctions are a much easier option than for the Europeans.

Though he recently approved a $75 million package of non-lethal aid for Ukraine, Obama has not shown much appetite for supporting Kiev’s armed forces, and has repeatedly ruled out providing defensive arms. Recently, many senior figures in the Obama administration have publicly mooted supplying lethal aid to Ukraine, and there is strong and growing support for such a step in Congress. Nonetheless, Obama still seems unconvinced. One reason for Obama’s hesitation is a perceived need to keep in step with the EU leadership’s doveish policy in this respect. Merkel’s sense of urgency about again engaging Putin in the Minsk Two negotiations was widely understood to stem from her concern that Washington might provide defensive weapons to Ukraine, with what Berlin is convinced would be disastrous consequences.

Even without any such “provocation,” Putin escalated again anyway. After more than a year of Russia’s serial aggressions, it remains unclear whether the Obama administration will do anything to arm Ukraine, but it seems unlikely. As mentioned, Washington recently cancelled a modest training program for the Ukrainian military in order not to provoke Putin or give Moscow a chance for propaganda about American interference. The training, far from the front line, involved such provocative activities as battlefield first aid, combating enemy radio-jamming and surviving heavy artillery fire from the “separatists.”

The question of whether defensive weapons should be provided to Ukraine has been discussed heatedly and at length in Western countries since early in the Russian intervention. It is not an easy issue, and one of the key arguments adduced against doing so is that doing so would lead supposedly to immediate Russian escalation and more death and destruction in Ukraine. But at present one side is being handsomely supported – with repeatedly decisive and escalatory effects – by its generous Russian backers. This has taken the form of high-tech weaponry, substantial numbers of “volunteers” and highly skilled special forces, intelligence, massive propaganda and diplomatic threats and persuasion. Meanwhile the other side is receiving some economic and diplomatic support, though not enough to safeguard it or its economy, but only very modest material support for its armed forces – blankets rather than anti-tank weapons.

As the strategic analyst Phillip Karber of Georgetown University has commented in a study of Russia’s so-called hybrid warfare in Ukraine:

While Russia has introduced thousands of weapons into the conflict, European and American political hesitation in helping Ukraine acquire replacements for its losses (and the political message it sends to others who would like to help) serves as a virtual military embargo on Ukraine. Ironically the most successful Western sanction has been in preventing a friendly country from defending itself.

Despite the undertakings given in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 to ensure Ukraine would be free from military or economic coercion in exchange for relinquishing its nuclear weapons, the signatories have failed to deliver. Signatory Russia has attacked Ukraine for attempting to reach a non-military bilateral agreement with the European Union, while the leaders of the Western world, the United States, Britain and France (also signatories) have failed to protect it.

So if Putin is less powerful than Stalin was at Yalta, he must feel increasingly confident that a little determination and guile on his part will be enough to brush aside Western opposition to his plans for perestroika of the post-1990 European security architecture. It is apparent that he has a certain amused contempt for Europe, its complicated decision-making structures, its unreadiness to pay for its own defence, and its “decadent” social fashions. He sees it as increasingly divided and lacking authoritative leadership, and is fully aware that several EU members are either sympathetic to his strategic objectives or at least afraid to contest them for fear of reprisals.

While Russia’s own economy was on a steady downward slide well before the imposition of sanctions, he also takes great heart from the sustained malaise in many EU economies, and the social distress and political volatility that malaise has engendered. Sanctions and the sharp drop in oil prices and the rouble are a constraint on his freedom of manoeuvre for the moment, but he feels confident that the increasingly compliant Russian population will endure the necessary belt-tightening until Ukraine is at least satisfactorily hamstrung. As soon as the economy starts to recover, if not before, he will probably feel ready to pursue further strategic gains.

If Ukraine, the largest country in continental Europe, is finally brought undone economically, politically or militarily by the battering it has suffered, that will also sound a potent message to any neighbouring country unwise enough to attempt to resist Russia’s designs for it. Already Ukraine’s economy is undermined, and not surprisingly, the government’s high popularity is starting to rapidly ebb.

Appeasement springs eternal

Appeasement is a rhetorical rather than an analytical term. One man’s appeasement is another’s judicious pragmatism. Western countries are often reproached by critics for their alleged hypocrisy in criticising Russia where they would not criticise, say, Saudi Arabia for similar offences. There is often some abstract justice in the criticism, although it seems to imply that Western countries have an absolute obligation to lead with their chins in policing the world without any regard to their own interests. Decisions whether to criticise, impose sanctions or intervene militarily are always the product of some combination of geopolitical interests, moral outrage, fear of retaliation, alliance or treaty obligations, domestic political pressures and other factors. But usually when the term is invoked in Western countries, it is because the invoker claims to see some point of comparison with the classic appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s.

Russian patriots and Western Russlandversteher become particularly enraged when any parallel between contemporary Russia and Nazi Germany is suggested. Nazi collaborators and alleged collaborators are denounced by Moscow as “fascists,” but so too are almost any other classes of humanity that the Kremlin wishes to discredit. To turn that longstanding weapon of hybrid warfare on its head against its inventors strikes Putinists and their sympathisers as particularly perfidious.

But the parallels are striking nonetheless: domestic xenophobia and revanchist irredentism, a charismatic autocrat whose constantly trumpeted superhuman qualities make him immensely popular among the masses, militarisation of society and the budget, relentless, mendacious propaganda, elephantiasis of the security organs, mass invigilation of the population and widespread repression of human rights, extensive regulation and uniformity of views in nearly all media outlets, a mobilised population that hates as it is told, a foreign policy that asserts the right to protect people of the same ethnicity, or even the same language by interfering with force in their countries of residence, a seemingly expanding appetite for further territorial conquest even after irredentist claims are satisfied… The list goes on.

Even Putin’s latest version of the Russian invasion of Crimea – to protect Russians supposedly in danger in Crimea and save the life of Yanukovych, all of which necessitated urgent military intervention and nuclear threats – starts to bear a resemblance to the 1939 Gleiwitz Incident, stage-managed by the high-ranking Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich to justify Germany’s attack on Poland.

To draw attention to such features is not to imply that Putin’s Russia will necessarily commit crimes of even remotely comparable magnitude to those of Nazi Germany. In addition to using the parallels to critique Putinism, such critics usually have one overriding objective in mind, namely to suggest that if Putin is not stopped, he will attack all neighbours who were ever part of Moscow’s empire, and quite possibly other countries as well. Attempts to conciliate him at other people’s expense are not only naive or unworthy and in breach of the appeasers’ obligations; they are also self-destructive, in that an appeased autocrat will simply pocket whatever he is given, and pursue further conquests.

A quote from Churchill is usually called for at this point. In a joint appeal to Europe to not betray the ideals on which the European Union is based, a former Czech ambassador to Moscow and a senior Slovak Green politician quoted Churchill: “You were given a choice between dishonour and war. You have chosen dishonour and will get war.” Cameron, Hollande, Merkel and Obama, they said, have chosen dishonour. “But now it is Ukraine that is getting the war, while Europe stands aside, even as its security is undermined and its values mocked.”

The proportions here have to be measured carefully, and an EU advocate would be quick to argue, among other things, that Ukraine is not a member of the European Union or NATO and therefore no duty is owed it. But Putin’s behaviour to date is certainly not inconsistent with the above line of analysis, and much of the public patriotic rhetoric in Russia goes further. In the face of Russia’s trashing of the post-1990 security architecture, its repeated brandishing of its nuclear weapons and its huge preponderance in tactical nuclear weapons over the Western alliance in the Eurasian theatre, Western Europe should at least be worrying about the risk of further whetting Putin’s appetite.

If it is unprepared to supply defensive weapons to countries that are under Russian attack, it should be ready to deploy sanctions with vigour and determination, and escalate in response to any escalation. So far it is not obviously doing so. The sanctions have been deployed slowly and reluctantly. Without the downing of Flight MH17, EU sanctions that really bite may not have materialised. Having materialised, the European Union collectively, and many EU member states individually, are continually undermining them by broaching the issue of their early release, or even denouncing them as own-goals. Any prospect of their early withdrawal should be removed from the table for the time being.

Putin will always be encouraged by the sight of EU seniors again absorbed in intensive discussions about whether to strengthen sanctions (they did not) or to extend or not to extend the most important ones due for renewal next July. As to the latter, they finally declared that those would be extended till the end of 2015, and moreover that their lifting would be made conditional on fulfilment by Russia of its obligations under Minsk Two. Passing the necessary legal instruments for doing so, we are assured, will occur nearer the time. The Russian propaganda outlet, RT, is claiming that extension of the sanctions due to expire in July to the end of the year is not yet a done deal. And a German Deutsche Welle commentator has suggested that a single pro-Russian member country could block the extension by a determined veto. While theoretically possible, this seems very unlikely, but there are a number of dissenting member states who are being eagerly courted by Moscow, so some doubt must remain.
 
Naturally, the Ukrainians find all these deliberations unsettling.Another to find them so is evidently Donald Tusk. After returning from a visit to Washington, he declared to Western media on his return, while the issue was still evidently moot, that Europe must maintain broad economic sanctions against Russia until Ukrainian control of its border with Russia is restored or risk a crisis with the White House. “Putin’s policy,” he said, “is much simpler than our sophisticated discussions. The only effective answer to Putin’s clear and simple policy is pressure.” He added that Putin’s policy is “simply to have enemies, to be stronger than them, to destroy them and to be in conflict.”

According to Tusk, Obama was not expecting the Europeans to step up sanctions (that issue was evidently already decided), just to maintain those already in place. “The comparison with appeasement applies…,” he said, “about the approach of some politicians who say Ukraine is too far from us, not our business… You know the melody.”

Whatever these comments may lack in subtlety in relation to the various categories of Russian sympathisers or appeasers in the European Union, whose views Tusk has the remit of endeavouring to bring into alignment with a broad EU consensus, they certainly lack nothing in clarity. In the event, at the EU Summit last week, Tusk and his close colleague Merkel seem to have carried the day. But more such deliberations will surely arise in response to Russia’s studiedly ambiguous hybrid warfare against its largest Western neighbour. There will remain in the approaches of both the Obama administration and the European Union much that will continue to unsettle the Ukrainians. •

The post Peace in our time appeared first on Inside Story.

A sharp rise in military expenditure has been accompanied by ever-greater missile rattling and threatening “exercises.” Aggressive and frequent overflights near or even occasionally into Western countries’ airspace have become a threat to civilian aircraft and indeed to peace itself. Those policies are backed by blanket anti-Western propaganda at home, and skilfully crafted and targeted disinformation abroad, all of it at levels of expenditure, reach, toxicity and effectiveness far greater than any later Soviet equivalents. To say that we have a return to the cold war is an understatement.

Putin’s primary objective is to re-establish a version of the Soviet sphere of influence. In the first instance, that means not just halting NATO expansion, which he’s already achieved, but also blocking the European Union from integrating any more former dependencies of the USSR. It seems unlikely that he will stop there of his own volition without attempting to roll back some of his earlier “losses.” He views his Western adversaries as weaklings who can be set against one another and intimidated. An enthusiastic if ungifted student of history, he sees himself as the successor to Catherine and Peter the Greats as well as Stalin, destined to gather together all the Russian lands, very broadly understood. His actions suggest he certainly has designs on the Baltic States, for example, and may have ambitions beyond them.

He also seems to be working towards systematic weakening of the European Union as an institution. Moscow’s traditional support of the hard left in the West, as well as Russophiles of all stripes, has now been extended to diligent courtship of the hard right, especially the Eurosceptic hard right. This has been going on for some time with minimal attention from Western publics, but the West is at last starting to notice. The recent scandal involving a €40 million loan from a Moscow bank to Marine Le Pen’s National Front war chest for the French presidential and parliamentary elections, due in 2017, has focused greater attention on this aspect of Moscow’s Western policy. That handsome gesture, part of a wider pattern that includes official visits to Russia by Le Pen herself, tends to confirm that the intention is to destabilise the European Union as a whole by promoting all forms of Euroscepticism, of whatever provenance, provided they are sufficiently malign.

The Kremlin hasn’t always been so hostile to the European Union. In fact, it was long thought that Russia objected only to its former satellites having any connection with NATO. By contrast, EU integration was viewed quite calmly in the Kremlin, and Putin once said as much. But by 2008 his hostility to NATO expansion had become so emphatic that European members of the alliance were reluctant to test him further. At the April 2008 Bucharest summit of NATO, the pleas of the pro-Western leaderships of Georgia and Ukraine to secure a Membership Action Plan for NATO were rebuffed. After the summit, and after the weak Western response to the Russian invasion and annexation of parts of Georgia that followed soon after, it was generally accepted that there would be no further eastward expansion of NATO within the foreseeable future.

The European Union’s Eastern Partnership scheme, proposed by Poland and Sweden in May 2008 and formally launched by the European Union a year later, was an attempt to offer former Soviet republics a softcore alternative to NATO membership, together with a form of EU integration, in both cases well short of full membership. Though light on explicit security content, it envisaged wide-ranging sociopolitical and economic dialogue, leading prospectively to an Association Agreement, in which the main attractions for the European Union’s partners would be a free-trade deal and visa facilitation. Some new EU members hoped that this process would be a stepping-stone to full EU membership for their eastern neighbours, but older EU members opposed any such connection being made.

The Eastern Partnership scheme seemed well designed to assuage Russia’s sensitive nature. But as all the former western republics of the Soviet Union became involved, to varying degrees, in the scheme, Moscow’s hostility became apparent. The European Union has tried to draw Russia itself into a similar process of progressive “modernisation” through partnerships of various kinds. But Russia has been proof against any such inducements, preferring to revert increasingly to its own highly successful sociopolitical models.

In 2010, in response to the Eastern Partnership scheme, Russia set up its own nascent version of the European Union in the form of the Eurasian Customs Union, which from the beginning of next year is to morph into the Eurasian Economic Union, aka the Eurasian Union. So far Putin’s Eurasian project has attracted Kazakhstan and Belarus, with Armenia and Kyrgyzstan actively preparing for membership. But the Kremlin has always seen Ukraine as the jewel in its Eurasian crown, hence the intense interest in coercing it into abandoning its European integration plans. Putin has said in the past that he plans to draw all the former republics into membership, including the Baltic States. His actions to date, and the example of the statelets set up in the various “frozen conflicts,” tend to suggest that Russia would prefer all its former vassals not only to join the Eurasian Customs Union but also to follow its own neo-Soviet, kleptocratic sociopolitical model.

The Eurasian Customs Union and the Eurasian Union have not exerted much genuine attraction on the six Western republics, apart from Belarus. But all six displayed some interest in cooperating with the Eastern Partnership scheme, though for various reasons Belarus and Azerbaijan never pursued an Association Agreement, and Armenia reversed its decision to do so. The other three, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, have now all negotiated and recently signed Association Agreements. For all three it has been a tortuous process, with Russia employing every means it can, including military force, to block any progress. Even post-signature, full and sustained implementation promises to be very difficult.

As happened with NATO and its would-be members at an earlier stage, the European Union and its Eastern partners are now the targets of concentrated pressure from Moscow to desist from any further courtship. So far, the European Union’s response to that pressure has been a strange mixture of polite persistence and indecisiveness. Putin seems to think he can stare down the Association Agreement candidates by a mixture of violence, propaganda, trade boycotts and intermittent invitations to Brussels to seek a “political solution” to the “problems” in Ukraine, Moldova or wherever else. We may soon see whether he’s right.

Despite some wobbles caused by Brussels’ objections to their highly undemocratic systems, Belarus and Azerbaijan continue to be low-grade participants in the Eastern Partnership scheme and both use the connection as a hedge against Russia and a means to pursue mutually advantageous trading and other links with the European Union. While Azerbaijan has leaned more to the West, Belarus is Russia’s closest ally, despite president Alexander Lukashenko’s tiffs with Moscow and fear of Russian domination. There is no interest in either case or from either side in an Association Agreement. Nonetheless, Moscow is constantly working to draw both countries into closer communion with itself and to dilute the Brussels connection.

Belarus joined Putin’s Customs Union, and will be a founding member of the Eurasian Union. Although Lukashenko wriggles at times as he observes the increasingly dictatorial behaviour of the Putinist regime towards its neighbours, he does not want to meet the European Union’s minimal requirements on governance or most other things. So Belarus is probably destined to be dragged further into Moscow’s embrace.

Azerbaijan’s dictator Ilham Aliyev is the son and dynastic heir of Heydar Aliyev, a former head of the republican KGB, who was Azerbaijan’s communist and then post-communist boss. The younger Aliyev has continued his father’s pragmatic autocracy, vying strongly with Russia in domestic oppression, but seeking links with the European Union as far as his own domestic imperatives permit, and particularly in trade and investment. The European Union, for its part, has a strong interest in Azerbaijani energy exports as an offset for its dependency on Russia, a policy direction that Moscow has been trying, with some success, to block. But during 2014 Aliyev has shifted ground. Sensing European Union weakness and Russia’s growing resort to hard power, he has tilted markedly back towards Moscow.

Armenia, though not a model of democracy, is more prepossessing in that respect than Belarus or Azerbaijan. It is heavily dependent on Moscow for security against Turkic Azerbaijan (from which it seized by military force the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s) and against the Turks, the authors of its greatest historical disaster, the Armenian genocide of 1916. Nonetheless, Armenia, which has one of the most ancient Christian churches still in existence, sees itself as belonging to the West in some general sense. It also has a large Western diaspora (including up to an estimated 50,000 Australian residents claiming Armenian ethnicity). For an extended period Armenia was active in the Eastern Partnership and seemed to be working steadily towards an Association Agreement.

Then, in a single day, Armenia abruptly and radically changed course. Putin had earlier applied heavy pressure, flirting publicly with Azerbaijan and agreeing to sell the Aliyev regime weaponry to the value of US$4 billion. The Azeris have been spending much of their energy wealth on what for Armenia is an ominously lavish armaments program. Putin was in effect threatening to cut the Armenians loose from their security ties to Moscow. Without prior announcements, on 3 September 2013, Putin received Armenian President Sargisian in Moscow, where they jointly announced to their respective publics, Brussels and the world, that Armenia was withdrawing from negotiations for an Association Agreement and seeking to join Putin’s Customs Union instead. Russia’s threats and inducements were not made public, but they were clearly persuasive.

Putin sees the Eurasian Union as becoming a fully fledged equivalent of the European Union, part of a multipolar world system in which the poles will be the United States, the European Union, the Eurasian Union, China and India. Not only will it be a rival organisation able to pre-empt integration into EU structures by any former Soviet republics, it may even, in the Kremlin’s eyes, be capable of attracting into its orbit other prospective members. (Syria and some forces in Serbia have, for example, given hints that they may seek some such relationship.) At this stage the Eurasian Economic Union, which has been hastily cobbled together, has done very little to enhance the dwindling trade among its members and is still generating disputes, even conflicts, about basic trading provisions yet to be agreed. It’s hard to avoid the impression that its whole rationale is much more imperial–political than economic.

While the other three Eastern Partnership members, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, have all now signed Association Agreements with Brussels, Putin is not giving up on any of them. In 2013, both before and after his Armenian triumph, he was progressively stepping up pressure on president Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine to withdraw from the laborious but well-advanced Association Agreement negotiations with Brussels. Although he is the most pro-Russian president of independent Ukraine’s five to date, Yanukovych was also seeking a hedge against Moscow. At the same time he needed to respond to strong opinion within the country’s elite, including in the more pro-Russian east, favouring a free-trade deal with the much larger EU market, with which Ukraine now has more trade than with Russia.

Yanukovych was hoping he could somehow gain advantage from both sides without fully committing to either. Putin was not going to give him that chance, however, hitting Ukraine with successive and severe trade sanctions on the usual bogus grounds and threatening worse. On 21 November last year, Yanukovych suddenly followed Sargisian’s lead, performing a 180-degree turn without any prior attempt to prepare the Ukrainian public for such a turn of events.

Ukraine’s civil society proved less submissive than Armenia’s. In response to Yanukovych’s abrupt change of course, several months of demonstrations in Kiev – the so-called Maidan or Euromaidan – began that night. In the weeks that followed, as the protests persisted, the regime began to resort to “disappearances,” arrests and forceful crowd control tactics against demonstrators. All this was quite a shock for public opinion, as hitherto there had been relatively little lethal violence of that sort in Ukrainian politics. But the shock only served to radicalise and strengthen the protest movement, which maintained its rage through successive waves of violent repression until Yanukovych finally fled the capital on 21 February. As his ruling Party of Regions began to crumble, a reformist and pro-European successor government was quickly formed. Despite Russian propaganda that this was a “fascist coup,” the legitimacy of the transition has never been seriously challenged and has been fully confirmed since by early and orderly elections to the presidency and parliament.

Putin’s response was so quick, it clearly had been well rehearsed and prepared. Within a week of Yanukovych’s departure. Russian special forces in unmarked combat fatigues had deployed across Crimea in conjunction with local irregular militias probably recruited by Russian military and FSB operatives well in advance. Together with Russian forces stationed in Crimea by bilateral agreement, they quickly subdued the bewildered Ukrainian units on the peninsula. And within three weeks, Crimea had been “annexed” by Putin at a glittering ceremony in the Kremlin. Moscow claimed implausibly that Russian special forces were not involved, but a few weeks later, Putin casually acknowledged that they had been, perhaps thinking that after annexation the lie was superfluous, and that the glory of his achievement deserved full public recognition.

The story in Crimea since the annexation, however, has been less glittering: steep economic decline, loss of most links to the Ukrainian hinterland, forced and disruptive adoption of detailed Russian administrative routines, corruption and criminality, petty tyranny, and persecution of non-Russians, notably the Crimean Tatars, deported by Stalin with mass casualties at the end of the second world war. Appropriately, the new “prime minister” gifted to Crimea by Moscow was Sergei Aksyonov, a Russian patriot from Moldova who originally came to Crimea hoping to join the Soviet military, but transited into criminal activity and then politics, where he led a minor party with 4 per cent support at the last free Crimean elections.

Having subdued Crimea, Moscow instituted similar operations in much of southeastern Ukraine. But there, unlike in Crimea, Russia had no regular forces stationed, and the ratio of local zealots and cross-border volunteers to Russian professionals in anonymous uniforms was greater. This often led to administrative chaos and crude abuses and criminality by the Russian and proxy forces, probably even greater than in Crimea, stiffening local resistance as well as military pushback from the new Ukrainian government, which had been initially at a loss how to respond. Moscow, meanwhile, continued its threatening deployment of massive forces on the border, which had helped ensure that for many weeks there had been virtually no armed Ukrainian response at all.

Over time, the grossly underfunded and ill-equipped Ukrainian forces managed to mobilise their resources, and with the support of a lot of volunteer detachments and much help from the public, began to gain the upper hand over the so-called “separatists.” By August, they had pushed the Russians out of most regions in the east, and were even making big inroads into the two most pro-Russian provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk. Faced with the possible defeat of their proxy forces (led by Russian citizens infiltrated into Ukraine, and staffed up to 40 per cent by ex-Russian military personnel), Moscow decided on another large injection of perhaps 6000 crack troops with high-tech weaponry. Within a few days, this further cross-border incursion had completely changed the course of the conflict, inflicting very heavy casualties and causing huge destruction of Ukraine’s antiquated military equipment.

Under growing pressure from Western sanctions, which had sharpened appreciably after the downing of Malaysian flight MH17, and having recouped the situation of his proxy forces, Putin was now disposed to agree to a ceasefire. For his part, Poroshenko had realised that Moscow would not allow him to restore Kiev’s authority in the east by force, and that given the dire state of Ukraine’s economy, he could no long afford the casualties or the destruction the conflict was generating.

Hence, the ceasefire that never really was, brought about by the so-called Minsk Protocol of 5 September. In fact there have been over 1000 fatal casualties since, with armed clashes occurring on a daily basis. The proxies have been particularly active, attacking strategic points in Ukrainian hands, especially Donetsk airport and the major port city of Mariupol. The pattern of their attacks suggests Moscow wants at least to establish a secure land corridor to Crimea, and could be contemplating a further major incursion into Ukrainian territory. During November, Russian forces and high-tech weaponry were again infiltrated across the porous border. Various Moscow voices, meanwhile, continued to speak threateningly of “Novorossiya,” a historical term for a large part of southern and eastern Ukraine, the seizure of which Moscow has occasionally hinted at broadly as an objective. If Russia were to do this, it could leave Ukraine landlocked, with Russia taking over its entire Black Sea littoral. This would also enable Moscow to link up with its protectorate of Transnistria in Moldova, further threatening Moldova’s fragile existence as a sovereign state and surrounding a rump Ukraine from three sides.

But the Ukrainians have managed to hold firm to their positions through the phoney peace, and Putin seems again disposed to settle for at least a temporary lull in military proceedings. Poroshenko has already reached an accommodation with the Donetsk and Luhansk leaders, and on 9 December Russian foreign minister Lavrov even spoke of a “postwar phase.” Since that date, for the first time since the September ceasefire, there has been an unambiguous reduction in clashes.

With the Ukrainian economy teetering ever closer to the abyss, and sensing he may never get adequate military or economic support from the West, Poroshenko has no choice but to grasp any ceasefire. Putin, by contrast, has plenty of options. But though it is much stronger than Ukraine’s, Russia’s economy is also heading precipitately south. While sanctions have made some contribution, the plummeting oil price and rouble have been a great deal more important. Russia’s finance minister, Anton Siluanov, recently estimated the cost to the Russian economy of the oil price slump at up to US$100 billion, compared with US$40 billion for the current sanctions. While Putin likes to declare that his loyal subjects will suffer as heroically as their forebears have often done, he seems reluctant to push them too hard.

Putin is also able to exert other, non-military pressure on Kiev that will not invoke fresh sanctions or prevent him from adroitly lobbying susceptible Europeans to veto their extension. All Moscow really needs at this stage in pursuit of its objectives is a secure “frozen conflict” in eastern Ukraine, like the ones it established in the early 1990s in Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and in Moldova. These structures enable Moscow to exert great influence on the involuntary host country, deploying “peacekeeping forces” there to support the “rebels,” and blocking national governments from joining the European Union or NATO, neither of which want as new members countries in which there is an ongoing civil conflict or standoff. And as in Georgia in 2008, such a bridgehead can easily be used at short notice in any all-out assault on the host country if the opportunity either presents itself or can be manufactured, a branch of statecraft in which Moscow is particularly accomplished.

Ukraine is in a dire state, weakened by the incompetence and venality of past governments, and devastated and polarised by Putin’s geopolitical vandalism. Its efforts to defend itself largely unaided against an infinitely stronger enemy have had a surprising degree of political and military success, as well as strengthening national identity and morale in much of the country. But they have also added to the damage and polarisation. At least it now has a fully legitimate and reasonably coherent administration to address these challenges: the new parliament elected on 26 October is dominated by pro-Western reformers, the great majority of them moderates, who have now formed a governing coalition, and published a draft program. Some critics find the program imperfect, and it will certainly be difficult to implement in Ukraine’s dire economic and military circumstances. But it represents a giant step forward from where the country’s governance was under Yanukovych.

Moldova’s circumstances are complicated in a very different way. This small, impoverished state – despite high growth in recent years, it is still commonly described as the poorest in Europe – has an intricate ethnolinguistic makeup and eventful history. In modern times, its population has been predominantly Romanian, but with a substantial Russian-speaking minority enhanced since tsarist times by Moscow’s encouragement for people from elsewhere in the empire to migrate there. Part of Romania between the wars, it was occupied by Moscow again in 1940 on the basis of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, whereby Hitler and Stalin divided Eastern Europe between them. Russia’s control of the territory was brutally reimposed by the Soviet Army and NKVD secret police at the end of the second world war, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moldova became an independent state. Putin clearly wants it back, like other Molotov–Ribbentrop acquisitions. He is not too embarrassed by the defects in his deed of title, recently telling an audience of young Russian historians that he couldn’t see anything bad about the Pact. Indeed, he appears to feel nostalgia for it.

He has extensive material to work with in Moldova: a large Russian-speaking imperial minority; a heavy economic dependence on Russian trade and energy supplies; a high degree of dependence on remittances from an estimated 400,000 Moldovan migrant-workers in Russia; a large communist party (still so-called) that tries to balance between the European Union and Russia but leans increasingly towards the latter; other large political parties financed or sponsored by Russia, one of which, the Socialists, unexpectedly topped the polls in the 28 November parliamentary elections; and Transnistria, an enclave between the Dniester River and the western border of Ukraine, where Russia has supported a corrupt breakaway regime of pro-Russian patriots and maintains a “peacekeeping” force that acts, in fact, as an agent for Moscow.

The politics of Moldova are also complex, but since 2009 there has been a coalition government of ethnically Romanian parties that has charted a consistent course towards the European Union and has now signed and ratified an Association Agreement with Brussels. In the run-up to national elections last month, there were huge pressures from Russia aimed at convincing the public to support parties that favour joining Putin’s Customs Union. Moscow has successively blocked Moldova’s key agricultural exports on bogus sanitary grounds, issued Russian passports to its local supporters, and threatened both to expel Moldovan guest-workers from Russia and to arbitrarily curtail vital gas exports to Moldova in winter. Putin designated his extremist deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, as his point man on Moldova. On one of his trips to the country, the former envoy to NATO declared to Moldovans, “I hope you won’t freeze this winter.”

Not content with the nuanced support of the Communist Party, till the November elections by far the largest in the country, Moscow recently sponsored the emergence of two fully subservient pro-Moscow parties, the Socialists and Patria (Fatherland). Both were red-carpeted in Moscow, received generous subventions, and were authorised to promise that they could secure the lifting of Moscow’s damaging trade boycotts and ensure the well-being of Moldovan guest-workers. Their electoral bottom line was that joining the Customs Union would solve all the country’s problems. Crucially, they were supported by heavy Russian TV propaganda coverage, beamed throughout Moldova.

Not to be outdone, the government responded by banning Patria from competing in the elections on the grounds that it had received illegal financial support from abroad. Patria does indeed look very much like a Kremlin project, even more so than the Socialists. But most of the Patria votes seem then to have been simply transferred to the Socialists. Using a “political technology” worthy of the Kremlin, the government also stacked the voting arrangements in the Moldovan guest-worker diaspora so that it would be much harder for Moldovans in Russia to vote than their compatriots in Italy and elsewhere. Thus, while international observers gave the actual election procedures in country the thumbs-up, neither side played fair. But Russia’s involvement was much greater, more menacing and unscrupulous, and also more effective.

The 30 November elections gave the three main pro-EU parties fewer votes than last time, but they did scrape through to a narrow majority of seats in the parliament. If the very pro-Russian Socialists can combine effectively with the merely pro-Russian Communists, they may be able to defeat some key parliamentary votes, including for the presidency in 2016. Both sides of politics are fractious, but the pro-Europe bloc perhaps more so, and Russia is much better than Brussels at wielding carrots and sticks. With the Socialists already agitating for votes on rescinding the Association Agreement with Brussels and joining the Customs Union instead, implementing the agreement could prove difficult or even impossible.

Moldovans have had rich experience of brutal imperial and military occupation. The election results suggest Moscow’s blunt messages about cutting off gas supplies and deporting Moldovan guest-workers gained traction. Either manoeuvre could inflict great damage on the economy, and many Moldovans have obviously decided that supporting the Customs Union may be the better part of valour. The latest opinion polls suggest that support for the Customs Union may have edged slightly ahead of support for the Association Agreement, despite the European Union’s efforts to frontload the trading and visa benefits of the latter. From Moldova, Brussels looks much further away than Moscow.

In case Moldovans haven’t yet got the message sufficiently, Russia is apparently preparing similar actions to the ones it has taken in Ukraine. It has been reliably reported that Moscow has recruited groups of pro-Russian enthusiasts in Moldova to travel to Russia for special paramilitary training in the civic arts of destabilisation, urban guerilla warfare and the seizing of public buildings. As in Ukraine, Russia could artificially stimulate conflict in Moldova by paramilitary intervention, then deploy its forces stationed in Transnistria or infiltrated into the country to act as a force-multiplier for its preferred partisans, and present its proxies later to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe as legitimate combatants.

The elections may not have decided the issue one way or the other. Formation of a pro-EU government based on a parliamentary majority may only lead to the outbreak of disturbances and demands for secession from Transnistria and other pro-Russian enclaves in the country. We could see further and more decisive action in and against Moldova quite soon.

To many Westerners, Moldova and Transnistria sound like places from a musical comedy, a kind of Ruritania suddenly come bizarrely to life. But a successful hybrid war in Moldova could be seriously bad news not just for Moldova, but also for Ukraine, which would then be much more vulnerable to a full-on Russian attack at some propitious future moment. And the European Union’s credibility, soft power and capacity for spreading peace and stability on the continent, already seriously damaged, would be dealt a further heavy blow.

Georgia has also signed an Association Agreement with Brussels, despite or perhaps because of its intensely sobering recent experiences with Russia. After Georgia regained its independence in 1991, Russia quickly stepped in to foster the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, encouraging and actively supporting the violent expulsion of ethnic Georgians from both regions (in Abkhazia, ethnic Georgians had actually been a majority). In 2008, after failing to win any real prospect of NATO membership, the pro-Western reforming president Mikheil Saakashvili unwisely tried to use armed force to put an end to the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages in South Ossetia, perhaps mistakenly thinking the West would support him. Moscow quickly seized on this pretext to invade the whole country, destroying much of its modest military capability and inflicting heavy damage on its infrastructure.

Russia increased its military presence in Abkhazia too, even though the Georgians had not taken any action in Abkhazia to restore to their homes over 200,000 ethnic Georgian refugees from Abkhazia. The two enclaves were then encouraged to declare their independence, which Moscow actively urged close allies and the international community to recognise, but with almost no success. Only one or two old Latin American friends of Moscow and a couple of Pacific Island states extended recognition to the newly cobbled entities. Even Belarus, seeing a dangerous precedent for itself, failed to oblige, despite heavy pressure from Moscow.

Saakashvili limped on for a few years beyond his 2008 fiasco, but in October 2012, he and his United National Movement party were defeated in what were, by post-Soviet standards, unusually free and fair elections. The victor was an ad hoc coalition of forces called Georgian Dream, led by a (then) Russian citizen and billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who had devoted his vast wealth earned in Russia to the campaign to bring down the Saakashvili administration. Since taking office, the Georgian Dream–led coalition has pursued a sustained campaign of repression against members of the former administration, despite their remarkable achievements in economic reform and suppression of corruption. At the same time, Ivanishvili has continued his predecessors’ pro-Western external policies, and retained some strongly pro-Western groups in his governing coalition. Some observers nonetheless suspect him of being a Kremlin project, and the defeat of Saakashvili had certainly been cause for celebration in Moscow.

The pursuit of Saakashvili and his United National Movement colleagues has continued to the present, and sometimes looks like selective justice aimed against anyone pushing a strongly Atlanticist line. In early November 2012, the very popular and pro-Western defence minister Irakli Alasania was dismissed after several of his senior officials were purged against his wishes. Foreign minister Maia Panjikidze, together with four deputy foreign ministers and the minister responsible for relations with Europe, resigned in response, claiming that the country’s Western orientation was under threat. Though strongly pro-Western, neither Alasania nor Panjikidze belonged to Saakashvili’s party, suggesting their main offence may have been to be too pro-Western.

President Giorgi Margvelashvili appears to share some of their concerns, whereas the current prime minister, Irakli Garibashvili, a close confidant of Ivanishvili, has dismissed the resignations and complaints as a political stunt. Ivanishvili, who left the prime ministership last year, has retired from formal political office, but is widely believed to still control Georgia’s political life from behind the scenes, acting mainly through his business protégé and right-hand man, Garibashvili. Georgia’s Western interlocutors were dismayed by the loss of the key officials who lent credibility to the Tbilisi government, and have repeatedly urged Ivanishvili and his allies not to continue their campaign of selective justice, but clearly to no avail.

It seems likely that Georgia, a strongly independent country very conscious of its European identity, will continue its path towards an Association Agreement with Brussels, if with less commitment than some in Georgia and Europe would like. But regardless of any contingency plans the secretive Ivanishvili may have (he once told an interviewer that he might join the Customs Union if that seemed the right decision for Georgia), Russia has many assets at its disposal in Georgia, including client politicians, the conservative Georgian Orthodox Church and military bases in both enclaves. And it is further strengthening its presence in Abkhazia after a Moscow-facilitated coup last May, which led to a more independent Abkhazian leader being replaced by a former KGB officer, Raul Khajimba, who is seen very much as Moscow’s man. On 24 November, Putin and Khajimba signed a far-reaching “bilateral” agreement that provides for close integration of defence, border control, customs policy, social policy and law and order.

All but the last vestiges of Abkhazia’s separate existence are removed by this “treaty.” It is likely a similar arrangement will soon be concluded with the smaller and more subservient South Ossetia. Russian forces are already in close proximity to Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, and could be easily and quickly reinforced, if that were judged expedient. So when the time is right, Russia could easily complete the job begun in 2008. There has been some semi-muffled debate within the Moscow establishment in the past about whether it should have gone the last few dozen kilometres to Tbilisi in the first place.

Russia’s threat to its Western periphery is primarily focused on preventing any further defections by former vassals to Western institutions. But it is also increasingly aggressive towards the entire global West, even including Japan, despite a mini-thaw with the Shinzo Abe administration.

This aggressive behaviour is not new, though it has sharply increased in the last year or so. In 2009 and 2013, Russia conducted very large military exercises entitled Zapad 2009 and Zapad 2013 (or West 2009 and West 2013), with aggressive scenarios. The 2009 scenario, for example, assumed Polish support for “terrorism” in Belarus and concluded with a nuclear strike on Warsaw. Overflights necessitating defensive reactions have also been increasing for some time, but during recent months have escalated towards a crescendo. Many have been directed at vulnerable NATO members, especially the Baltic States, and at the Nordic non-NATO members, Sweden and Finland. And Putin has recently made repeated threatening references to Russia’s nuclear capabilities, continuing a trend of nuclear intimidation that was always present in Soviet times, if usually sotto voce, but has become more explicit during his presidency.

This aggression has run in tandem with constantly expanding attacks on human rights and freedoms within Russia itself. Russia is becoming a police state domestically and a rogue state externally; and there is a clear link between the two. Putin has also enunciated a very unattractive new principle for the conduct of foreign policy: that Russia has a right, even an obligation, to protect the rights of supposedly ill-treated Russian populations in neighbouring states, or indeed anywhere in the world. This doctrine seems to echo Hitler’s assertion of a similar right in pursuing the Anschluss of Austria and coming to the rescue of supposedly oppressed Germans in Czechoslovakia and then Poland. It is in pursuit of this principle that Russia has been adopting the practice of distributing Russian passports to its “fellow-countrymen” (sootechestvenniki), for whose protection they might be later justified in interfering in the internal affairs of their country of residence.

Russian nationalists argue that because the break-up left over twenty million ethnic Russians in the former republics which then became independent countries, such policies are entirely natural. This was undoubtedly a misfortune for many of them, though not necessarily the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century. It should be remembered, however, that over the centuries many more non-Russians had become involuntary citizens of the Russian, then the Soviet empire, often in severely traumatic circumstances and with massive loss of life at the hands of Russian military and political police formations.

Russian nationalists seem unable to absorb the broader context of this issue, which can in any case scarcely justify comprehensive aggression towards the new states of the kind that is now unfolding. Moscow has been happy in the past to encourage the return of ethnic Russians to the homeland, where severe demographic problems are judged to have rendered the existing population less than sufficient. But for now, the policy of using the diaspora as a political asset in creating some lesser version of the Soviet Union under Moscow’s direction seems firmly on the agenda, with alarming implications for the new post-Soviet states and European security more generally.

Until recently it had been assumed in the West that the Baltic States, by becoming successful members of the European Union and NATO, were quite safe. But since the almost certainly Russian-inspired cyberwar against Estonia in 2007, and the accompanying campaigns of destabilisation by ethnic Russians in Estonia, their position has seemed less secure. Russian economic coercion and outright aggression against Ukraine over the last year or so has reinforced Baltic anxiety. Lithuania has substantial Russian and pro-Russian minorities, while Latvia and Estonia have very big Russian diasporas, about a quarter of the population in each case, and more if Russophone minority groups are included.

Most of the current Baltic Russian population is a result of immigration and border changes imposed by Moscow decision-makers in Soviet times. Many are military and KGB retirees and their descendants. They often have attitudes to the war on Ukraine similar to those of Russians in Russia itself. There are areas of local majority Russian settlement near the borders of both countries with Russia, in which there have been signs of unwelcome activity, including recruitment of Russians to fight in the Ukrainian conflict. And the increasingly chauvinist propaganda of Russian TV stations has been beaming into all three countries in recent years, though since the invasion of Ukraine, the Baltic states have been developing counter-measures.

What worries the Baltic peoples most is that though they are NATO members, the techniques used by Russia to subvert Ukraine could easily be employed against them: recruitment and covert training of co-ethnics and any other sympathisers to take subversive action in the country on signal from their controllers; export of corruption to the country with political strings attached; encouragement of ethnic Russian organisations to make increasingly radical and politicised demands on national or regional authorities; intense espionage facilitated by the presence of large pools of bilingual talent; creation of “provocations” or artificial incidents that Moscow could use as evidence of damage to legitimate Russian interests or mistreatment of Russian co-ethnics; infiltration of crack Russian forces ostensibly to protect the threatened Russians, but in fact to lead and mobilise local collaborators; unleashing propaganda campaigns against the victim country, complete with grains of truth and half-truth and larger dollops of outright lies, all to suggest that the victims were in reality the “fascist aggressors”; and deploying large and intimidatory Russian forces near the border, aggressive overflights of contiguous space, nuclear sabre-rattling, and so on.

These tactics might be more difficult to deploy in the Baltic States than over the long and porous Russian/Ukrainian border, and more difficult against countries with stronger allies, better organised defence and intelligence agencies, and a clearer understanding of the lessons of “hybrid warfare.” As against that, the Baltic countries have virtually no strategic depth. And while they have powerful allies, quite large sections of the publics in those allies, including in Germany, have very little stomach for coming to the aid of the Baltic states. As economist Paul Roderick Gregory asked, setting out an all-too-plausible scenario: if Russia does make a carefully crafted move against a Baltic state, which is less than a conventional military assault, and NATO does not rise adequately to the occasion, what will remain of NATO’s credibility?

Russia’s largely successful aggression against Ukraine has had other bad effects on the security environment in Eurasia. In Ukraine Russia has undermined, with Western connivance, a number of international agreements, perhaps most relevantly the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. Under this instrument, Ukraine surrendered the Soviet nuclear weapons stock located on its territory in exchange for assurances that its sovereignty and integrity would be respected and protected by the signatory powers, which included the United States, Britain and France, as well as Russia. The example effect for other would-be nuclear countries may be difficult to assess, but can hardly be positive.

It has made Russia, whose economy is less than one-fifteenth the size of the Western economies, look the strategic equal of any or all of them together in an arm-wrestle on or near its home turf. Several Western European countries have appeared to place business-as-usual with Russia ahead of the security of fellow members and not just victim countries beyond the European Union’s borders. Despite the skill and patient determination of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, many in the elites of the European Union’s leading country continue to suffer from an anachronistic devotion to Russophilia, heedless of Russia’s actions.

Russia’s successful trashing of “a Europe whole and free” has also led new democracies in post-communist Eastern Europe to reconsider their commitment to the Western strategic community and its values. Hungary (a right-wing autocracy with crypto-fascist tendencies) and Slovakia (a centre-left populist government) have both wobbled on Ukraine, and there are strong pro-Russian constituencies in many other new member states. Czech president Miloš Zeman, for example, supports Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has told Kazakh interlocutors that support for Russia’s stance on Ukraine is building in Europe (not what his hosts would have wanted to hear) and has called on his Western allies to curtail sanctions and recognise Crimea’s annexation. The Washington Post has described Zeman as a “virtual mouthpiece” for Putin. Serbia, a prospective member of the European Union, supports Russia on Ukraine, opposes sanctions, and in general seems to calculate that it can have excellent relations with Russia while continuing on a path towards EU membership. Serbian President Tomislav Nikolić seems to see Serbia’s relationship with Russia almost as a love affair.

More broadly, the events in Ukraine have demonstrated the weakness and divisions within the European Union and the Western alliance. The sanctions have been difficult for Brussels to coordinate, and have been contentious at every point. Without the wake-up call of MH17, it’s unlikely that the European Union would have mobilised even as much consensus as it has done. Despite Russia’s renewed incursions into Ukraine in November, the European Union could only manage to come up with a few Ukrainian “separatists” to add to its sanctions list. Moscow is now intent on finding sympathetic or self-interested EU members ready to veto further extension of the sanctions packages as they reach their expiry dates in 2015.

Even the MH17 seems to evoke embarrassment rather than plain speaking. No one close to the events in the West is in any doubt about what happened, and yet the tone is often hyper-cautious, “balanced” and euphemistic. The Dutch are saying any report elucidating the causes is still far off and the Kremlin’s various counter-narratives are treated with more respect than they deserve, even after the recent exposure of Russian TV’s fake footage purporting to demonstrate that a Ukrainian plane was responsible.

Putin’s 2014 has been a little less miraculous than his serial triumphs in 2013. He has had some triumphs, but also some serious reverses, including some – like his growing embrace of China and his disciplining of Ukraine – that he no doubt sees as at the very least qualified successes. Western push-back remains weak, but if the sanctions, at least, can be maintained until the point where, as Timothy Snyder remarked, they “start a conversation” in Russia, that could lead to some restoration of sanity, if not an open society in Russia. •

The post Putin’s westpolitik: back to the USSR appeared first on Inside Story.

Amongst you, there is not one leader who has shown to his citizens and the world that he is a real leader. A leader of a new, reborn nation and a great country… Not one of your presidents or prime ministers deserves or can become the basis for the naming of a new phenomenon in world politics, such as “Putinism” has become… Many politicians and ordinary citizens in your own countries are applauding my president and exhorting you to behave, somehow, sometime, as the President of Russia Vladimir Putin behaves.

Even the embarrassing photograph of Putin sitting alone and forlorn at a large breakfast table at the G20 was evidence of his ascendancy. One of the Kremlin’s most sycophantic propagandists, Vladimir Soloviev, explained on his weekly television program that in medieval times an emperor would dine in solitary splendour, while servants and hangers-on would gather elsewhere.

This strange adulation might be dismissed as the excesses of a propaganda apparatus that is increasingly disconnected from reality, but it has left its mark on Russian diplomacy. On 1 December, one of Russia’s deputy foreign ministers, Vasili Nebenzi, issued a gratuitously insulting statement about the decay of political life in the Western democracies, which were now ruled “not by leaders” but by “colourless managers, hired to work for a four- to five-year term.” In the face of these lacklustre functionaries, it was hardly surprising that Putin could dominate the world stage. “Where in the Western world is his equal?” asked Nebenzi. “I do not see a single one.”

On one level, the incessant assertion of Putin’s uniqueness is a kind of reaction to the breakdown of Russia’s relations with the Western democracies. The Kremlin is reassuring ordinary Russians that these former partners were unworthy of attention in the first place.

That breakdown approached the point of no return during the G20. Putin had evidently hoped to split the West with a proposal for a compromise on Ukraine. In return for Russia’s military disengagement from the separatist republics, the West would recognise the annexation of Crimea, promise to block Ukraine from joining NATO, and enforce Ukraine’s “federalisation.”

This gambit was a total failure. Never before has a Russian president been the focus of such unrelenting hostility at an gathering. The tone was set by a series of snubs from his hosts, which began with Tony Abbott’s demands for an apology for the MH17 atrocity, continued on the airport tarmac where Putin was greeted by the lowest-ranking member of the government, and climaxed with the summit photograph, where Putin was banished to the far edge of the frame.

Nor did Putin find much support from other guests. There was the curt rebuke from the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, who grudgingly shook Putin’s hand while bluntly demanding Russia’s withdrawal from Ukraine. There was Obama’s speech at the University of Queensland, where he again categorised Russian aggression in Ukraine in a list of threats to world order that included Ebola and the terrorists of ISIL. There was the joint declaration of the United States, Australia and Japan, which restated their opposition to “Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea and its actions to destabilise eastern Ukraine.” Little comfort was offered by Putin’s BRICS partners, who showed no willingness to complicate their own relations with the West for the sake of Russian territorial ambitions. No sooner was Putin airborne than Obama was meeting EU leaders to discuss a common strategy on Ukraine.

Putin’s status as an outsider at the G20 was aggravated by his own miscalculations. No other visiting leader found it necessary to dispatch a naval squadron to the South Pacific, where the guided missile cruiser Varyag conducted exercises at the head of a small flotilla on the eve of the summit. Of course, this was not the first time a Russian leader has been accompanied abroad by Russian warships. In 2010, President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to California coincided with the arrival of the Varyag in American waters. But that was clearly a goodwill visit. For a week, Varyag was docked at San Francisco, where it was opened to the public for guided tours. The show of force in the Coral Sea sent a very different signal. No one had any illusions that this was anything but a kind of gunboat diplomacy, a crude display of power which was probably intended as a reminder of Russia’s military might and as a ruse for distracting the media from its renewed focus on MH17.

The impression of a reckless, erratic leader was compounded by Putin’s premature departure from the summit. After a night of fruitless negotiations with European leaders about Ukraine, including a marathon four-hour confrontation with Angela Merkel, Putin was evidently exasperated and decided to skip the final session and working breakfast. The public resonance of his walkout was amplified by his press secretary’s insistence that Putin would stay to the end and by the implausibility of Putin’s own explanation that he could not wait another few hours because of his need for sleep and a busy schedule in Moscow.

The failure of Putin’s effort to split the United States and Europe was confirmed by Merkel’s address to the Lowy Institute two days later. At once strident and pessimistic, Merkel lambasted the Kremlin for the “outdated thinking” behind its assault on Ukraine. Clearly echoing the terms of her late-night clash with Putin, she noted that Russia regarded Ukraine as “part of a sphere of influence.” This approach, she lamented, “calls the entire European peaceful order into question.” To emphasise her outrage, she asked, “Who would have thought that, twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the end of the Cold War and the end of the division of Europe and the world into two blocs, something like this could happen in the heart of Europe?”

Russian democrats were no less outspoken about Putin’s performance at the summit, which they quickly termed his “Australian fiasco.” Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader who served as vice-premier in the late 1990s, contrasted Putin’s predicament unfavourably with the drunken clowning of Boris Yeltsin, who had once seized a conductor’s baton and tried to conduct an orchestra during a visit to Berlin. According to Nemtsov, Putin had inflicted far more damage to Russia’s position, because sobriety would not help him to regain the respect of foreign counterparts who now treated him as a “pariah.” The problem was aggravated by the fact that no one in Putin’s entourage “will dare to tell the ‘national leader’ that his policies are a disgrace and a dead-end. A dead-end for him and for Russia.”

Putin has given no hint of a change of direction since his return to Russia. Instead, he swings like a pendulum between assurances that everything is normal and fulminations about the insidious plots of his Western enemies. His optimistic side was on display during an address to the All-Russian Popular Front, the Kremlin-sponsored organisation that orchestrated public displays of support for his last presidential campaign. Here he praised the businesslike, “constructive” discussion in Brisbane and claimed that he had been touched by an outpouring of popular affection. “I was astonished by the warmth with which our delegation was greeted by ordinary citizens in the streets,” Putin explained. “I don’t know how to explain it, but really with applause, with signs of attention and very benevolently.”

More often, Putin has sounded hostile and paranoid. Perhaps the most reliable indication of his reaction to the G20 was the succession of meetings with military and security officials that dominated his agenda in late November. Particularly ominous for Russia’s beleaguered civil society was a session of the Security Council ostensibly devoted to “extremism.” Putin opened the discussion with a tirade about the “coloured revolutions” in the former Soviet space. For Putin and his propagandists, it is axiomatic that these popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes were coups covertly instigated by the West as part of a plot to destroy Russia as a world power. Since 2005, this conspiracy theory has been used to rationalise the Kremlin’s subjugation of Russia’s political and civic life. This year, it was recycled to justify the dismemberment of Ukraine.

The intensity of Putin’s loathing for the West was evident during his annual address to the State Duma on 4 December. Once again, he made an argument about relations that revolved around an implausible conspiracy theory. This time, he accused the West of supporting Chechen separatism in the 1990s as part of a “Yugoslav scenario” for the disintegration and dismemberment of Russia. Boasting that “we didn’t permit it,” he proceeded to draw a parallel between Russia’s current adversaries and Adolf Hitler, “who with his human-hating ideas intended to destroy Russia and throw us behind the Urals.” In a veiled threat to Washington and Brussels, he warned, “Everyone should remember how that ended.”

Putin also embraced the arguments of Russian nationalist ideologues like Natalya Narochnitskaya about the West’s innate hostility towards Russia. Western sanctions, declared Putin, should be understood not as a response to the annexation of Crimea, but as part of a containment strategy stretching back to Soviet times: “Whenever anyone thinks that Russia has become strong [and] independent, such instruments are applied immediately.” Conveniently, this interpretation minimises Putin’s personal responsibility for Russia’s isolation and the economic repercussions of Western sanctions.

The G20 has set the stage for a period of sustained confrontation between the Putin regime and the Western democracies. What makes this confrontation dangerous for the West is its permeability. In the Cold War, the boundaries marked by the Iron Curtain were easier to patrol. Now the Kremlin is exploiting Russia’s integration into the economy to employ against the West many of the techniques that were used to subvert Russia’s own democratic institutions. It is backing an array of ultranationalist parties in a bid to destabilise the European Union. It is demonising the United States in a global “information war” of unparalleled intensity. It is sponsoring numerous NGOs, websites and newspapers to distort public debate. And it is trying to co-opt Western elites with sinecures, business opportunities, and jobs in the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus.

Some Western leaders may hope that sanctions, plummeting oil prices and diplomatic isolation will precipitate regime change in Moscow or at least an amelioration of Russian conduct. The problem is that the most ingrained reflex of Putin’s political behaviour is to deflect domestic protest by anti-Western propaganda and anti-Western actions. The terminal crisis of his regime is likely to have dangerous repercussions. •

The post Putin’s fiasco appeared first on Inside Story.

In what follows, I will try to set out some of the main reasons why this parallel universe came into existence. What were the main factors favouring the re-emergence of a xenophobic autocracy in Russia and the high degree of acceptance it received from a stunted and passive civil society? I am not trying to suggest that there was anything inevitable about Putinism. Had oil and gas prices stayed higher for Gorbachev and the early Yeltsin reformists, things may have turned out quite differently, despite the strength of the reactionary back-to-the-USSR constituency. Had Yeltsin finally settled for some other successor than the KGB half-colonel from Petersburg Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Russia may not have become a police state domestically and a rogue state externally. Had some Moscow-based clique, say, successfully resisted the takeover of the state by a Leningrad push that originated in a dubious enterprise known as the Ozero Dacha Cooperative in the 1990s, things may have progressed otherwise, though not necessarily entirely for the better.

But the political culture of a country does not normally change quickly or easily. Changing it for the better requires favourable winds and good leadership. Neither factor was prominent in Russia’s abortive transition from state socialist empire towards market democracy.

Putin’s view of the world was no doubt imbibed from a very early age in the heavily ideological Soviet environment that led him, still a teenager, to attempt to volunteer for training as a KGB officer. But perhaps the most lasting influence on his attitudes was the turbulence in East Germany that led to the collapse of the hardline East German communist regime.

Ten days ago, much of the world marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Putin wasn’t among those celebrating. When the wall fell he was a middle-ranking KGB officer in the East German city of Dresden, and the breaching of the wall and the collapse of the German Democratic Republic were both a personal and professional disaster. By his own account, he was forced at one point to defend his KGB building from an angry crowd who were demanding with boundless impudence to know what was going on inside this anonymous structure in their city.

To paraphrase Graeme Allison, where you stand depends on where you were sitting – or standing – at the relevant time. For Putin, a Soviet true believer, the fall of the wall was a trauma. But for the overwhelming majority of Europeans East or West it was a joyous surprise.

And even worse followed for Putin when, two years later, the Soviet Union disintegrated – a circumstance that gave rise to his famous observation that “the break-up of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” For most of the people in the non-Russian republics of the old Soviet Union who were not ethnic Russians, this seems a strange sentiment, but for the overwhelming majority of Europeans, East and West, the collapse was a blessed relief.

Since Putin has become the leader of one of the world’s most incorrigible autocracies, those differences of perception have taken entrenched and institutional forms. Russia’s increasingly ideologised public domain is now dominated by the official Putinist view of everything, and the area of free expression is contracting to a few elite outlets and the internet (and even the internet is being squeezed). Opinion polling shows that after a brief euphoric period in the early 1990s, during which they were encouraged to feel – and indeed felt – more positively about the West, Russian attitudes have become reserved or even hostile. Although this owes a lot to increasingly wall-to-wall propaganda, Putin has not pushed his own personal perspective on an entirely unwilling Russian public.

For most Russians, the huge economic disruptions of the years of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency were severely traumatic. Yeltsin’s young economic reformers used “shock therapy” to convert Russia’s communist economy back into a market-based system, abolishing price controls and rapidly privatising state enterprises to forestall any attempt to restore the old order. They sharply downsized the huge Soviet military-industrial complex and tried to reorient the economy towards the needs of consumers. But it was all a risky experiment and they had little by way of experience to guide them.

Shock therapy had been applied in Poland and in other East European states, but in each case the economies were smaller and less heavily imbued with Soviet habits and attitudes. No one had any proven blueprint there either, of course, but after a very uncomfortable transition period the reforms began to pay dividends. There were winners and losers, to be sure, but for most people in Eastern Europe the increased freedoms and economic opportunities, and the new focus on the needs of ordinary consumers, made the pain worthwhile. And for all of the post-communist countries other than Russia, gaining national independence was a source of huge satisfaction in itself. For the Russians, by contrast, the economic disruptions were much more severe, and the escape of their imperial subjects was an additional trauma superimposed on the privation.

Ostalgie of the Goodbye Lenin variety certainly exists in East Germany, and perhaps to a lesser extent in other post-communist countries. But in Russia it is a much more mainstream phenomenon. For many Russians the transition was an economic disaster, a time when life savings and jobs were often lost. An offensive caste of grotesquely rich nouveaux riches – the New Russians – suddenly appeared, made wealthy (as it was often correctly assumed) by the fruits of corruption. Freedoms undoubtedly expanded, and these were valued at first, but for most Russians they did not outweigh the pain. Few understood that a major cause of their economic difficulties was the sustained slump in the oil and gas prices on which Russia’s economy rested. This had undermined Gorbachev’s reforms and greatly aggravated the economic disruptions of the 1990s in Russia.

Then, after the default and devaluation of 1998, the price of energy products began to rise rapidly, as if on cue for the appearance of the hitherto obscure Putin as Yeltsin’s successor. Together with his bloody but popular war against Chechnya in 1999–2000, the sudden prosperity established Putin’s reputation as a great Tsar. The heavy loss of life in Chechnya, including among Russian residents, the long insurgency that followed the war, and the periodic bloodshed and terrorist incidents on Putin’s watch have not seriously tarnished that reputation. The economic reverses since the global financial crisis and the largely intelligentsia-based revolt against election fraud and Putin’s growing authoritarianism in 2011–12 did start to threaten his approval ratings, but a combination of intense propaganda and the nationalist euphoria of “Crimea is Ours” (Krym nash) have restored them this year to almost Soviet levels.

During the 1990s, ordinary Russians largely lost the interest they had briefly felt in the crimes of communism, which had been such a talking point during Gorbachev’s glasnost. Despite the fact that they touched the lives of most Russian families, those crimes have progressively been swept under the carpet. And yet the first steps of the new tsar raised very similar concerns about the ruthless contempt of the state for the lives of its citizens. The casus belli of the war in Chechnya, for instance, was a series of mysterious bombings of apartment blocks in Russian cities in September 1999, officially judged to be the work of Chechen terrorists. But strong evidence suggests that at least some of those attacks, which caused heavy casualties, may have been provokatsii staged by the FSB (the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor organisation of the KGB, which the future president had briefly headed on his rise to the top job).

Those who tried to investigate the bombings tended to die of unnatural causes – they include Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by polonium in London, and the fearless investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya – and the enthusiasm for doing so naturally diminished. More generally, though, Russians seem to have been so consumed by the difficulties of daily life in the 1990s, then so gratified by the sudden improvement in living standards in the 2000s, that they were happy to slip back into the attitude of cautious discretion that had been their default position before Gorbachev.

Even fewer Russians continued to take any interest in state crimes perpetrated against ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union or their erstwhile vassals in the Warsaw Pact countries. When Putin started to reassure them that these had always been marginal phenomena, common to all countries, and not something to be ashamed of, they seemed quite happy to believe him. Recently he has even attempted to justify the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, whereby Hitler and Stalin secretly agreed to divide much of Eastern Europe between them, paving the way for the outbreak of the second world war.

One of the most dismaying recent developments in Putin’s police state is an operation aimed at banning outright the heroic and beleaguered human rights organisation Memorial, which has tried to investigate Soviet crimes and to find the remains of the victims and erect memorials to them. Long persecuted by the Putin regime, Memorial is now the subject of an Orwellian demand by the Russian justice ministry that the Russian supreme court disband the organisation. With characteristic servility, the court immediately listed the matter, but has now postponed the hearing, perhaps in response to a flood of international disapproval. The Kremlin may yet decide that an outright ban would be bad PR, and that it would be better to let Memorial struggle on under constant harassment. The collective amnesia of Russians about these matters is both amazing and depressing. The attitude of the regime, accepted passively by much of the population, is aptly summed up by the title of a book on the subject: It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway.

In addition to seeing their pay packets expand, and presumed Chechen terrorists justly chastised, the Russian public had further cause to appreciate Putin. Russians are an imperial people, just as the British and some other Europeans once were. People in modest walks of life are devoted to the idea of national greatness. The loss of empire was very painful for Russians, and still is. It isn’t just what is sometimes called “imperial phantom leg syndrome.” Like the Germans after the first world war, they felt the victory that was rightfully theirs in the Cold War had been plucked from their grasp by some kind of treachery or trickery. They must have been stabbed in the back by someone. And they were ready to believe that it was the West, which they’d been taught to hate from mother’s milk onwards. Nowhere was this sentiment more pronounced than in the ranks of the KGB, Putin’s finishing school and adult vocation.

Similarly, Russia’s economic misfortunes must surely be the result of the Western ideas – market reforms and democracy in particular – that flooded into the country with perestroika and glasnost. Demokratiya (democracy) was dubbed by some Russian wit as dermokratiya (shitocracy), and privatizatsiya (privatisation) rebranded sardonically as prikhvatizatsiya (grabitisation), an allusion to the widespread corruption observed at the time. Both forms of social organisation became identified in the popular mind with economic chaos and imperial loss.

That loss was all the greater because more than twenty million ethnic Russians suddenly found themselves living in new countries where local nationalisms, hitherto kept under strict limits, were burgeoning and in some cases making them feel most uncomfortable. The large Russian diasporas in the other republics of the Soviet Union had grown used to enjoying a higher status than the natives; now, stripped of that status, many of them chose to return to Mother Russia, where they found privation and disruption. The new freedoms, including the freedom to travel, were all enveloped in bitter experiences.

I have tried to set out here what might be regarded as the canonical Russian view of the transition from communism, the view constantly drummed into Russians who watch television (where over 80 per cent get their news). Understanding that narrative helps us grasp the nature of the growing standoff between Russia and the global West, which turns on diametrically opposed views of the key developments in Russia’s recent history. Someone coined the term “values gap” to characterise the growing mutual estrangement between Russia and the West; since Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, that gap has become a chasm. It has been deepened further by Putin’s touting of Russia as the true custodian of traditional European religious and family values, an ideological innovation aimed both at attracting the far right to his cause, in Europe and elsewhere, and pillorying his supposedly “effete” domestic opponents.

But the values gap was not apparent at first. While many in the West rejoiced at the demise of communism and the end of the Cold War, the reactions of key Western leaders to the implosion of the Soviet empire were not what one might have expected or what Russian propaganda now maintains. It is true that Ronald Reagan called on Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in Berlin in 1987. But many Western commentators and officials were dismayed by what they saw as a grossly provocative, even reckless, public statement by the US president.

And when two years later the people of Berlin actually took up Reagan’s suggestion, some Western leaders seemed almost as much taken aback as the Russians. The French president Francois Mitterrand and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher were both sorely troubled by the prospect of German reunification, Mitterrand joining many others in quoting the bon mot of the senior statesman of French letters, Francois Mauriac: “I love Germany so much that I’m glad there are two of them.” I myself can recall trying to reassure a slightly anxious meeting of Australian officials that reunification was not something to be worried about, and that West German democracy was hardy, moderate, reliable and very much in our interests.

In any case, reunification was all but unavoidable once the wall and communism had both fallen. Whether a reunited Germany could continue to be a member of NATO loomed as a difficult issue, and Western leaders felt called on to assure Moscow, in private, that there would be no NATO deployments further east as a result. This has given rise to the belief in Moscow’s political class that a binding commitment had been given that NATO would never deploy further to the east, and that any expansion of NATO was therefore a breach of faith. No such commitment was ever entered into, though NATO has continued to avoid stationing troops or weaponry in the new member states. In Latvia in August this year, responding to numerous pleas from new member states for NATO boots on the ground, Angela Merkel reaffirmed that NATO would not be basing troops permanently in the Baltic states.

As the rot spread from Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union itself, Western leaders became even more concerned about the instability that might result. They feared that this would be very bad for their highly valued partner Gorbachev, that it could lead to serious bloodshed, and that it might even compromise control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. The signs of impending break-up in Yugoslavia were another cause of great concern. Some Western leaders, like US president George H. Bush, worried that the example of a fragmenting Yugoslavia might exert a regrettable influence on similar trends already evident in the Soviet Union.

Bush senior also deplored the emergence of forces in Ukraine pressing for national independence, warning the Ukrainians in his celebrated August 1991 “Chicken Kiev” speech against “suicidal nationalism,” a phrase highly offensive to Kiev that he himself had added to the final version of his remarks. So not only was the role of Western governments in the break-up of communism and the Soviet Union extremely modest, they were actually more dismayed than triumphalist about what was happening.

Despite all this, Putin and his followers have imposed a narrative, currently accepted by most Russians, that the United States and its satellites are the eternal enemies of Russia, always scheming to cut it off from its natural sphere of privileged interests (its empire). Moreover, the narrative continues, NATO has deceptively drawn the nations of Eastern Europe into NATO, expanding the organisation aggressively right up to Russia’s borders in breach of binding commitments not to do so. Putinist patriots never acknowledge that the central reason for the enlargement of NATO was not aggressive Western expansionism but rather the desperate desire by East European nations to avoid a return to Moscow’s rule.

Nor is the Putin narrative a good fit for the early years of the post-communist era. Initially, much of the Russian political class rejoiced in unison with their Western colleagues, looking forward to a new era of amity and cooperation. Australian diplomats in Moscow at the time recall a veritable explosion of mutual goodwill, trust and understanding, and a desire to socialise freely without any of the traditional constraints. The new Russian foreign minister in the early Yeltsin years, Andrei Kozyrev, was probably the most pro-Western foreign minister Moscow has ever had.

I recall seeing a government document at that time that dared to hope for the possible emergence of a new zone of shared values and common strategic purpose extending from Vancouver to Vladivostok – not in any spirit of triumphalism, rather one of warm welcome to a Russia returning to its European values. Coral Bell and other Western strategic thinkers spoke at the time about the possibility not just of close cooperation, but also of inviting Russia into NATO itself.

But it was not to last. The first symptoms of Russia’s disillusionment with its new Western friends and the unfamiliar ways of market democracy became apparent well before the end of the Yeltsin era. With a few fluctuations, the sense of grievance has persisted ever since, deepening over time. The same people who had presented as born-again democrats in the Gorbachev and early-Yeltsin era reemerged a few years later as among the most aggressively anti-Western of the Kremlin-friendly apologists of the Putin era: among them the political scientists Sergey Markov, Andranik Migranyan (now the head of an official propaganda unit in New York) and Aleksey Pushkov (now a senior figure in the extravagantly anti-Western Russian Duma). Even the most intelligent and moderate establishment commentators like Dmitry Trenin and Fyodor Lukyanov are finding it extremely difficult to say anything that deviates from the aggressive orthodoxy of the current Putin presidency. Russia and its political class seem to have fallen victim to a collective case of relevance deprivation syndrome. Their insistent demand for respect appears to reflect above all a need, even a longing, to be feared.

Already in the 1990s some Western Russia-watchers worried about what was sometimes referred to as Weimar Russia: a Russia that, like post-imperial Germany, had lost its empire and had convinced itself that some foreign enemies and/or homegrown traitors must have stabbed it in the back. Some observers feared that something even not too unlike the Nazi regime might emerge in Russia: severe economic distress leading to domestic tyranny, cultivated xenophobia and external aggression aimed at restoration of empire. Despite some worrying symptoms under Yeltsin and the early Putin, this did not seem to be coming to pass. But perhaps in a longer retrospect, the Weimar Russia theory is now being at least partially borne out.

In their current state of aggressive self-righteousness, the Putinists see themselves as incapable of doing any wrong. Stalin’s crimes are increasingly whited out, as are the democratic achievements and important liberal economic reforms of the Yeltsin period. In all the regime’s rhetoric, media, propaganda and even educational materials, Russia’s 1990s are presented as an unredeemed disaster caused by the false Western gods of democracy and the market and their misguided or malign Russian disciples.

In recent years, Western defence budgets have been almost everywhere in decline: only three European members of NATO are currently maintaining military expenditure at 2 per cent of GDP. By contrast, the Kremlin has sharply increased its outlays, embarking on an ambitious rearmament program that will cost US$750 billion by the end of the decade. In 2015 alone, expenditure on the Russian military is to increase by 35 per cent. To paraphrase Robert Kagan, Russians, it seems, are from Mars, while Westerners, especially Europeans, are from Venus.

Outlays on domestic security have also risen sharply under Putin, and the Russian bureaucracy has expanded greatly since the early post-communist years. Education and health, on the other hand, have been increasingly squeezed, despite Russia’s poor performance in both of those areas. Spending on propaganda is rising sharply from already very high levels, with a recently announced increase of over 40 per cent for the external propaganda arm Russia Today. A new network of foreign-language propaganda outlets called Sputnik was launched earlier this month, with bureaus in over thirty countries, all built on the bones of Russia’s last surviving professional news agency, RIA Novosti.

These are not the policy patterns of a country at peace with itself and its neighbours, bent on cooperation and spreading sweetness and light. Yet, even now, much of the public Western discourse continues to be directed towards showing Russia greater understanding, accepting that it is primarily the West that has been at fault, and arguing that Moscow’s demands should be met at least half-way or better. Many are the calls still to “reset the reset” or “repair the damaged relationship.” But do such well-meaning Western opinion-leaders really have a partner ready for honest and creative dialogue?

Among most Western policy-makers, there has only been slow recognition of the nature of their adversary. The invasion of Ukraine and particularly the downing of MH17 – a totally adventitious event on the path of policy development – have brought a greater sense of realism and a slightly greater readiness to face up to Moscow’s reckless behaviour. But after the Russian assault on Georgia in 2008, with destruction inflicted well beyond the area allegedly requiring Russian “peace-making,” and Russia’s occupation and de facto annexation inter alia of half of Georgia’s Black Sea littoral, EU countries were quick to forgive, forget and resume business as usual. Now, too, despite Russian support for absurd “elections” in the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, and clear evidence of further Russian armed incursions into Ukraine, members of the European Union are looking eagerly for any hint of Russian “de-escalation” that would permit sanctions to be eased.

Shortly after Russia’s dismemberment of Georgia, the new Obama administration embarked on its “reset” of relations with Russia, which implicitly accepted both Moscow’s behaviour in Georgia and the justice of Russian reproaches about the policies of the Bush administration. For its part, Germany has continued until Responsibility to Protect? Despite constant disappointments, the persistent belief that Russia can be a valuable partner for the West in the world’s worst trouble spots motivates Western governments to avert their gaze when the Kremlin yet again chooses to bully a neighbour or to block efforts to check egregious behaviour somewhere.

Despite all the determined good will, Russia was not to be conciliated, cajoled or coopted into the Western consensus. Perhaps the earliest striking illustration of this came in 1999 in the former Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Russia’s angry attempts to block or condemn NATO’s efforts to put an end to bloodshed in the province are worth recalling because they illustrate much about the antagonistic relationship with the West that was already beginning to emerge.

The Serbs – whose position in the former Yugoslavia bore strong similarities, if on a much smaller scale, to Russia’s in the Soviet Union – have always seen Kosovo as the historic heartland of their state because of its role as the centre of Serbian culture in medieval times. (The parallel with Russian views of Kiev and Ukraine immediately suggests itself.) Despite having strong views on Kosovo, modern Serbs tend to have slightly hazy ideas about what has been going on in their historical heartland in more recent times, just as Russians are vague about developments in Ukraine. (When I lived in Belgrade in the late 1960s, my Serbian friends would often provide me with history lessons about the province and passionately explain its crucial importance to their homeland and themselves. I visited Kosovo on multiple occasions to photograph and admire the historic Serbian monasteries there, many articles about which I’d read or translated. On my return, some friends were somewhat puzzled to learn that I’d been to Kosovo at all, and when asked, often acknowledged that they’d not ever been there themselves.)

Despite the efforts of successive Belgrade governments over decades to strengthen the Serbian ethnic presence in Kosovo, sustained emigration and differential fertility trends meant that the Albanian majority, which had been strong since at least the nineteenth century, rapidly became overwhelming. Serbs were emigrating to escape the relative poverty and the ethnic tensions. Given the strength of ethnic Albanian nationalism and the extensive territories of Albanian settlement adjoining Kosovo, Serbian control of the province was fraught with uncertainty.

Tito’s solution to this dilemma in his later years had been to follow a conciliatory policy towards the Albanians, granting greater local autonomy to Kosovo and allowing ethnic Albanians to secure a powerful position in the local party/state hierarchy. Not unreasonably, the Serbs, who had been the paramount force in Kosovo life over many decades, saw this as a threat to their position.

Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian nationalist and emerging strongman of Yugoslavia in its last years, made his career out of the Kosovo dilemma, appealing directly, in a divisive and populist way, to the ethnic Serbs in the province and throughout Yugoslavia. In 1989 he abruptly rescinded Kosovo’s autonomous status. This made him immensely popular in Serbia and put him in a powerful position to pursue ethnic Serbian interests during the fragmentation of Yugoslavia that was to follow.

As various commentators had written in the 1970s, with the ethnic Albanians increasingly dominant demographically, crude coercion seemed very unlikely to be viable over the longer haul. In Milosevic’s time, Belgrade actually had a potentially constructive ethnic Albanian partner in the Kosovo Democratic League. The KDL, the largest ethnic Albanian party, was committed to non-violent methods, as was its undisputed leader, the poet and pro-European intellectual Ibrahim Rugova. But Milosevic had no intention of reaching any understanding with Rugova. Both Rugova himself and the policy of non-violence were discredited by Milosevic’s coercive policy choices. This led to radicalisation of the Albanians and the emergence of more militant and even terrorist groups, which coalesced to produce the Kosovo Liberation Army. The KLA effectively supplanted the KDL as the dominant Albanian party in the struggles that followed.

At the outset of the Yugoslav wars, Milosevic had still enjoyed quite strong support from some important countries in the Western alliance. But he used brutal methods, especially so-called “ethnic cleansing,” in his campaign to convert the strong ethnic Serb presence in parts of Croatia and Bosnia into a dominant political and military position. By 1999, a strong consensus had developed among the Western allies that, while there were many guilty parties, Milosevic and the Serbs were the worst offenders and the main source of the problems in Yugoslavia. Such atrocities as the Vukovar Hospital Massacre in Croatia, the shooting of 8000 men and boys by General Mladic’s Bosnian Serb forces at Srebrenica and the lengthy siege of Sarajevo, which involved huge civilian casualties, had decisively shaped Western opinion. Despite the growing hostility towards him among Western governments, Milosevic had nonetheless managed to secure for the Serbs – who only made up a third of Bosnia’s population – a 49 per cent share of Bosnian land as determined by the Western-brokered Dayton settlement of November 1995.

But in 1999, when Milosevic seemed to be bent on pursuing a violent solution for the KLA insurgency in Kosovo, including much more ethnic cleansing, Western leaders decided that enough was enough. NATO forces were directed to launch a campaign of air strikes on Serbian military and infrastructure assets, including propaganda outlets and other facilities in Belgrade. Milosevic responded by driving much of the 90 per cent majority Albanian population out of Kosovo, with heavy casualties.

The air campaign was a blunt instrument inflicting great damage on Serbian infrastructure. Despite efforts to limit the human costs, it also caused some 500 civilian casualties, and in the end the Serbs had to concede defeat. This was the beginning of the end for Milosevic, who was finally deposed by a people power rebellion in October 2000. It also pretty much brought an end to the wars of the Yugoslav succession, though some sporadic violence continued afterwards, mainly involving ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and offshoots of the Kosovo conflict in adjacent territories of Macedonia and Serbia proper.

The NATO action was not an ideal solution, but its results were seen by Western countries as on balance positive. Serbs, particularly in Belgrade, have naturally condemned the bombing campaign, but tend to forget that their 500 fatalities were dwarfed by the victims of Belgrade-supported Bosnian Serb violence at Srebrenica, or the 14,000 dead in the siege of Sarajevo, including 5400 civilians. Infrastructure damage to Serbia was great, but there had also been very severe destruction as a result of earlier fighting in many other parts of Yugoslavia, where in the early stages the Serbs had superior weaponry and were able to prevail. Serbia, though a key instigator of the wars, had until the Kosovo campaign, largely avoided damage to its own territories and residents outside Kosovo province.

Moscow was furious that NATO had acted without the approval of the UN Security Council, thus bypassing any Russian veto. It introduced a resolution of condemnation in the UN Security Council, but the resolution was only supported by China and Namibia, reflecting the widespread feeling that, for all its obvious downsides, the air campaign was a legitimate response to a difficult situation where further humanitarian disasters needed to be forestalled.

In the wake of the air campaign, Western leaders included Russia in the peacekeeping arrangements for Kosovo. But Moscow became offended that it was not given its own area of the province as a separate command. NATO leaders had blocked that, thinking that Moscow might seek to convert an occupation of Serb-populated areas in northern Kosovo into something more substantial, in a small-scale replay of East Germany and similar arrangements in the wake of the second world war. Frustrated by this blocking of what they saw as their legitimate entitlements, Moscow ordered some of its forces in the area to carry out a unilateral seizure of Pristina airport. With the support of surrounding states, NATO managed to block any reinforcement and resupply of the Russian contingent at the airport, and a compromise solution was finally reached. The Pristina airport incident was a good example of the increasingly adversarial nature of Russian foreign policy that was already evident under the later Yeltsin, and was a pointer to future Russian tactics in Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

Moscow maintained and intensified its denunciations of NATO’s actions in Kosovo with ever-greater intensity in the Putin period. Putin and the Moscow elite clearly identify with Serbian nationalist opinion, and vice versa. If Russia found it necessary to kill tens of thousands of people (estimates vary wildly) in its Second Chechen War, then it is its sovereign right to do so. In the Russian view, the Responsibility to Protect, like other human rights doctrines, is hypocrisy and humbug, used instrumentally by the West to undermine Russian (or Serbian, or Syrian) sovereignty and interests.

Moscow has also repeatedly waved the Kosovo argument in the air as justification for various self-interested neo-imperial ventures of its own. Western visitors to Moscow before the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 were often informed that since NATO had attacked Serbia in support of Albanian secessionism, everything was now permitted, and it would be only natural for Abkhazia or South Ossetia, for example, to secede from Georgia (though not of course for Chechnya to secede from Russia). Unlike Russia in relation to Georgia’s breakaway territories (which Russia itself had sponsored and nurtured), no European country was waiting eagerly to annex Kosovo to its own territory, or otherwise to profit from the operation. Kosovo was an onerous international policing burden undertaken to relieve and, it was hoped, curtail the humanitarian disaster that had unfolded in Yugoslavia. In a similar spirit, Euro-Atlantic institutions have accepted the responsibility of trying to ensure the peaceful postwar development of Kosovo and its reconciliation with Serbia.

Why preventing a further bloodbath in the former Yugoslavia was damaging to the security or other legitimate interests of Russia, a country whose borders were by that time quite remote from Kosovo, is not obvious. The Russian point of view in relation to US or Western interventions in Iraq, Libya or Syria, three other cases that figure constantly in the Putinist bill of indictment, is slightly easier to understand. Moscow stood to lose money and privileged access in all those countries, and arguably, given its large, restive Muslim minority, could potentially have been exposed to some kind of terrorist blowback from any Western intervention. But their own brutal policies in the North Caucasus were a much more likely potential trigger for any such development. And again, despite Putin’s emotional reaction to the death of Gaddafi, there wasn’t really any convincing threat involved to Russian security in the Libyan intervention. Whether US/Western involvement in all those cases was wise and/or in their own interests is another matter, but not one that need detain us here.

Under Putin, Russia’s most explicit concern has been with NATO expansion, which took a further leap in 1999, the same year as the Kosovo intervention, when Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary all joined the alliance at the NATO summit in March, and several other countries including the three Baltic States were given Membership Action Plans. Most of these countries, including the three Baltic States, subsequently joined NATO in 2004. Russia’s postwar claim to the Baltic States had ultimately rested on military conquest (followed by severe atrocities), and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact secret protocol, as well as the Yalta settlement. From that point of view, Putin’s recent public justification of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact is a particularly grim signal to the Baltic States, and illustrates graphically why they were so desperate to join NATO and the European Union.

By 2008, Russian anger and indignation that more former republics of the USSR were following the Baltic example of seeking a haven in NATO was heading towards a climax. Putin had launched his own anti-Western crusade with his bellicose speech at the Munich Security Conference in February of the previous year, where he compared the US to the Third Reich. At the same time, relations between the Bush administration and some leading countries of the European Union had become seriously strained. Georgia and Ukraine, two former republics of the USSR under strongly pro-Western and anti-Russian leadership, meanwhile, were seeking a membership path to NATO.

Bush lobbied hard for a membership action plan to be granted to the two countries at the Bucharest NATO Summit of April 2008. Moscow expressed emphatic opposition to any such development both before and at the summit, which Putin attended. Key West European NATO members were also opposed, largely because they didn’t want to antagonise Russia, and the pleas from Kiev and Tbilisi were duly rejected. In reaction to cries of alarm from some new Eastern members, NATO issued an anodyne statement without any dates (and without much credibility) that Georgia and Ukraine would at some time become members.

Putin was undoubtedly enraged by this statement, but he was certainly not deterred by it. Russia has since invaded both countries and annexed or de facto taken control of significant parts of their internationally recognised sovereign territories. Western resistance in each case was mainly rhetorical, and certainly not military, as Russia would have very confidently known in advance. There were significant arguments against extending Membership Action Plans to either applicant country, in the case of Ukraine not least because at that time there was nothing like a majority within Ukrainian public opinion in favour of such a step. But Russia’s opposition to the enlargement was clearly founded not on fear for its own security, but on concern that NATO membership might possibly make it harder for it to regain by force a position of dominance in the two countries in question.

The Bucharest Summit is generally seen as marking an end to further NATO enlargement to the east against Russian opposition, especially in the case of countries that had formerly been part of the USSR. And the new European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has made clear that there will be no further enlargement of the European Union on his five-year watch. So those urgently pursuing EU membership as a softer alternative to NATO to counter Putin’s mounting belligerence, are not likely to make much progress. The message for Moscow seems to be that aggression works, so why would one resile from it? •

The post Putin’s parallel universe appeared first on Inside Story.

On the defection of Vladimir Petrov, the organisation’s most public coup, ASIO had been right and the charges made against the organisation by Dr H.V. Evatt, leader of the Labor Party, had been fantastic and silly. Yet Bert Evatt seemed so certain that the organisation had been a dupe of a Russian false-flag attempt, or perhaps was a witting player in a cunning plot by prime minister Robert Menzies to rob him of an election win, that some mud stuck. Labor figures regarded the organisation with deep suspicion; ASIO officers, stung by the slur on their professionalism, began to do some of the partisan things Labor critics were alleging they had always done.

David Horner’s The Spy Catchers — the first of a projected three volumes — is a biography of the organisation rather than a history of the Case, the Petrov Affair, the Royal Commission into Espionage, or the Communist Party of Australia. But these were, of course, the focus of so much of ASIO’s attention between its birth in 1949 and the end of this volume. It’s a sympathetic but far from uncritical read, not least in its detail of how shenanigans at the royal commission disrupted ASIO’s early neutrality and made some of its members come to think of themselves as warriors in a war against communism, in which Labor was, at best, on the sidelines. It shows how, for perhaps fifteen years, some in ASIO ceased to be cool, careful and scholarly public servants focused on threats to the nation’s security, and instead focused rather more on justification, insurance and survival.

Of itself, little in the book is new. Any number of excellent studies have examined the early Cold War in Australia, the Communist Party, the highly secret Venona counterintelligence program inside what became the US National Security Agency, and the Case, Petrov and the personality of Evatt himself. Robert Manne’s The Petrov Affair, for instance, published after the story of Venona had finally emerged, was written after extensive interviews with Sir Charles Spry, who had headed ASIO from a year after its inception.

Horner had more access and more detail about what ASIO officers were doing, and has a few more names to add to the mosaic. But his story — so far at least — occasions no significant surprises. Its detail about the Case, though absorbing, tells little that is new, even as it again confirms, against continuing doubters, the reality of Soviet espionage in Australia, the involvement of people associated with the Communist Party, and the absolute need for some sort of security function in government.

But for those who have doubts, there are still questions, as the book itself acknowledges. It is plain, for example, that there were public servants, particularly in what was then the Department of External Affairs, who were passing on information they thought interesting to Wally Clayton, a mysterious and secretive member of the Communist Party’s senior apparatus. Clayton was in charge of maintaining the party’s internal security, especially against infiltration by agents of police and security services. He had managed many of the party’s “illegal” activities during that time, early in the second world war, when Stalin was in a non-aggression pact with Hitler, and the party was opposing involvement in the war. The party became legal again after Hitler attacked Russia, and by 1943 the Soviet Union had diplomatic and trade representation in Australia, as well as a number of Soviet journalists working for Soviet news services and undoubtedly acting as spies.

It is clear that Clayton was seeking out information, not least about politics and the war effort, that would be of interest to his party’s Australian executive. It is clear that at least until 1954 the Australian party followed all of the twists and turns of Soviet policy; that it was, in effect, controlled by the Soviets, and that its Australian members regarded the interests of the Soviet Union as their own. It is clear that Clayton passed on at least some of the material he gathered to Soviet spies, mostly those posing as journalists. And it is clear enough that Clayton took some direction about intelligence tasks from his Russian contacts, and that he tried, diligently, to carry out these tasks (or, perhaps, orders).

All of this was more or less known, as part of the Case, even before the defection of Petrov and, later, his wife Evdokia in April 1954. A trained but not very competent officer, Petrov had been assigned to keep an eye on the Soviet émigré community but had inherited a bigger task, unbriefed, when his senior officer left and was not replaced. By this time, though, the Communist Party’s attraction was much faded and the Cold War was under way, so there was hardly any effective espionage going on. Most of those who had cooperated with Clayton were inactive, or off the scene.

But if the documents Petrov brought confirmed earlier information about the Case, there were still questions about Soviet spying, the answers to which we still do not know. Information from Petrov, and from other Soviet defectors in Canada, Britain, the United States and Europe, showed that there were generally two Soviet organisations gathering intelligence information, usually without any reference to each other. What came to be known as the KGB (or the NKVD or MGB) was focused on political, diplomatic, economic and general scientific intelligence; a separate organisation, known as the GRU, collected military and defence intelligence, including anything that could be divined about weapons systems, missiles and nuclear bombs.

Typically, each of these organisations ran two separate networks of spies: one was “legal,” controlled by a person operating under diplomatic or trade cover; another was an illegal network, under much deeper cover, often controlled by a Russian who had been infiltrated into the country concerned, and reporting back via entirely different networks. In ideal situations, none of these networks knew anything about the others, although, in extremis, it was not unknown for agents of one network to be instructed, from Moscow, to make contact with a specified agent of another.

We “know” there was a legal KGB operation in Australia from the middle of the war, and we know that it had some successes, if hardly spectacular ones, from about 1943 to 1948. We know nothing about the operations of any illegal KGB network, although there is reason to believe that it existed. We know absolutely nothing about GRU operations during the period, but we do have reasons to suspect they were occurring (without any connection with Clayton). Neither ASIO nor other operations ever gained useful counterintelligence about such activities, or exposed any networks or spies.

It might be tempting to suggest that if any such spy networks had existed, they would have been found; ergo, they probably did not exist. If that is the case, we must ask why the Soviet Union, which tended to have a similar order of battle in all countries of interest, adopted a different model for Australia, and why Clayton might have been used as a spymaster despite a different pattern of practice elsewhere.

It is trite to add that a mole in ASIO might have been very useful in helping steer ASIO activities away from operations threatening to expose other networks. And we know that the more cynical agencies sometimes throw crumbs — important agents of legal networks, for instance — in the way of security services by way of distraction. Horner’s authorised, if uncensored, history is alive to all such speculation and self-doubt. But its access to the files leaves the reader no wiser or more able to judge.

Just as significantly, we are little wiser about whether those who passed on material to Clayton, or who gossiped with him generally about their jobs, knew that they were giving him information to be passed to Moscow. They could hardly have failed to know that they were passing it on to the party, but in that highly conspiratorial organisation — membership of which was more akin to being in the Society of Jesus or Opus Dei than the Gould League of Bird Lovers — there was nothing particularly odd about relentless discussion of politics, the awfulness of capitalist politicians and the plight of Mother Russia. Mere rules about security did not overrun comradeship, even if they should have done. And that’s quite apart from the attractions of big-noting oneself, and exaggerating one’s role in affairs, to progress socially or in party circles.

Clayton, wittingly passing on information, and particularly purloined documents, may have been gathering information more for party purposes than for direct transfer to Moscow. After all, he and his colleague Ted Hill were still the party executive officers most concerned with maintaining the party’s operations even if it were subsequently declared illegal again. They stashed printing presses, paper and equipment around the nation and bought safe houses. They also maintained stocks of unofficial members, whose help could be called on in emergencies, who were continually screen-ed not only for being in security employ, but also for deviation from the latest line from above.

Even ASIO itself is still unsure, after all these years, about whether those who gave information to Clayton did so wittingly. Or whether some others, such as Fergan O’Sullivan, Rex Chiplin and Rupert Lockwood, who gave briefing materials about Australian journalists and political conditions to the Russian embassy, should be regarded as spies. Unwise perhaps, disloyal perhaps, and certainly snide. But Chiplin published the materials leaked to him in party newspapers (and KGB reports quoted the paper not the source documents); and while it is undoubtedly true that the KGB “studied” the reports of O’Sullivan and Lockwood, it does not appear to have regarded them as sufficiently compromised, or “on the small hook,” to have given them intelligence duties.

Likewise, its close scrutiny of the Communist Party gave ASIO much information about membership lists, discussions at meetings, and strategies in trade union elections. It was clear enough that there were people in the party who believed in revolution against the established order; it is a good deal less clear that anarchy, or civil war or sabotage was being actively plotted. It was never quite clear who was dangerous, but always obvious who was zealous. The better ASIO got at surveillance, the more it came to appreciate that the party was full of personalities, factions, feuds, unresolved arguments and, increasingly, doubt. Doubt about Stalin and Stalinism. Doubt about the communist dream. Doubts after revolts in Poland, East Germany and Hungary. Doubts about the value of keeping on keeping on.

Among all this, the Case remains the most fascinating, the most exhaustively interpreted and perhaps — as reflected in our modern-day security institutions — the most enduring part of the ASIO story.

For thirty or so years, about a dozen Australians, at most, knew something about the Case. Even most of these knew only tiny bits, and had no idea of the big picture, or the big pictures beyond that. Around the rest of the world, perhaps another fifty knew any details of the Australian Case, and perhaps fewer knew how it fitted into the bigger picture.

It was a secret so important that the wrapping paper of the secret was more important than the secret itself. Indeed, even the next layer concealed secrets more important than anything outside it. They were secrets so big that Britain, after the war, had to contemplate whether its loyalty to Australia was more important than its alliance with the United States. For a long time, it seemed as if Australia might win that tug of war, if only because America scarcely trusted even Britain with some bits of the secret.

The Australian Case was different from the American Case, or for that matter the British Case, though they fitted into a pattern. In all Cases, the secret of the first veil was that spies had undoubtedly passed on political and defence secrets to Soviet agents in the 1940s and might still be doing so. The British Case had revealed the treachery, in relation to details of the atomic bomb, of the British scientists Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May, and had provided clues to Soviet networks in Britain and its colonies. The American Case showed how the Russians had obtained details of atomic bomb construction at Los Alamos from, among others, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Australian Case showed that Wally Clayton had been collecting political and defence information from contacts in the Department of External Affairs, and from the office of its minister, Bert Evatt, and passing it on to Russian agents.

To the Americans, the Australian espionage was all the more disgraceful because of what appeared to be a complete lack of security consciousness. Add to that the fact that Washington viewed the Chifley Labor government, and its foreign minister Evatt, as dangerously left-wing.

But if those in the know about the secret of the first veil wanted something done about the Soviet agents and their local helpers, they didn’t want that process to hint at the secret of the second veil. Indeed, it would be better to do nothing about the first secret than to put the underlying secret in jeopardy. The underlying secret was that American knowledge about the Cases came from decryption of Russian codes through a quantum leap in the sophistication of message-reading by what eventually became the world’s biggest and most secretive spying organisation, the National Security Agency.

The Soviet Union, a great home of mathematics, had impressive, virtually unbreakable codes. They involved double encryption using a code dictionary to turn words into numbers, and then applying one-time sets of random numbers. With the numbers used once only, and then for a limited volume of text, deciphering messages using all of the familiar forms of pattern-seeking seemed impossible, the more so in pre-computer days when the capacity to apply brute force, searching through billions of possible combinations, was very limited. Yet some brilliant intuition was used to solve major parts of the dictionary, helped by the fact that, for a short time, Soviet code-masters issued the same one-time sets to different areas.

Some of the messages spoke of the spying and gave clues about who the spies might have been. But the fact that American code-breakers could read some Soviet spy traffic was a secret much more important than the knowledge that espionage had occurred, or the catching of particular spies. These were merely battles; the ongoing intelligence might help the United States and its allies win a war. If the Russians didn’t find out that America was reading some of its secret intelligence, further cryptological breakthroughs might come, more traffic from more sources might be intercepted, and the Soviet Union might fail to realise that some of their spies had been compromised.

Behind that were other ultra-secrets of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s — that the British and the Americans had been intercepting, and often decrypting, the secret messages of the armies, navies and air forces, together with the diplomatic and trade communications, of their enemies and their friends for ages, ultimately reaching the point spelled out by the WikiLeaks and Snowden leaks of the 2010s. This intelligence had helped the allies win the war against Germany and Japan, but wartime security had concealed the extent of the contribution. Even the security-conscious in rival countries, and sometimes friendly countries, had no idea of how extensive and clever the processes had become.

Inside the Case was another secret that only a tiny few of those very few who knew the first layer were allowed to know. And inside that were other secrets, so secret that, for some guardians of the western alliance against the Soviet Union, whole nations were expendable in the interest of maintaining them. At one point in 1948, for example, the Americans asked Britain to choose, in effect, whether it wanted to be an ally of the United States or of Australia. It could not be both. Because the Case showed that Australia was lax about security, and because the Americans saw the Labor Party — which was in government at the time — as tantamount to communists, they would not show Britain anything it might pass on to Australians.

It was a secret so terrible, and powerful, that the initiates had to live all of their lives with restrictions on the right to travel. Indeed it became a gnostic faith into which one was “indoctrinated’’ in stages, after which one saw the world differently.

The first bits of the puzzle only passingly affected the Soviet Union; indeed, Moscow knew at least something of it. It was the fact that even before the second world war British and American cryptographers had succeeded in decoding some of the secret messages being passed between German and Japanese military units and diplomats. With some, particularly Japanese diplomatic traffic, they could decipher messages within twenty-four hours: indeed, had the Americans been more diligent, they could have deduced that Pearl Harbor was about to be attacked.

In due course, Americans, Australians and the British were able to listen to tactical messages between army, naval and air units; orders and reports going to Tokyo from local commands; a good deal of the material coming from Japanese embassies in Europe (including Berlin and Moscow); as well as information about merchant shipping, supply and reinforcement, and espionage activities.

The British, Polish and French were also reading a good deal of the German military traffic, after making critical breakthroughs in learning to decipher messages encoded by the “unbreakable” Enigma machines. Some of the techniques, some of the personnel (including Alan Turing), some of the places (including Bletchley Park), and the pioneering work on computers are now the stuff of thrillers and television series, but the secret — that the Allies could read much of the German army traffic, intermittently a good deal of the U-boat traffic, and a lot of the diplomatic codes — was an ultra-secret for more than twenty years after the end of the war.

So secret and important was the edge this gave that it was seen as more critical than winning any actual battle. It would be better to lose an army if some plausible explanation — aerial reconnaissance, say, or a human spy — could not be concocted to explain how enemy movements had been anticipated, because the moment the enemy suspected its codes were being read the edge would be lost.

Many admirals, air marshals and generals were out of the loop because they could not necessarily be trusted. When there was critical information to be passed on, even to people in on the secret, it would usually be attributed not to code-breaking but to some other source, in case the Germans were reading our mail (as, of course, they were trying, with some success, to do). Important “ultra” information was also passed, as information from spies, to Moscow once the Soviets became allies, particularly from 1943 on.

The official war histories, the generals’ memoirs, and the popular accounts of military campaigns made no reference to allied access to many of the enemy’s communications. Some reputations — Montgomery’s, for instance — may have suffered had it been known how much help had been received. For decades, however, the secret stayed safe. After the war, the intelligence partnerships became more formalised, more extensive, more effective and, of course, increasingly focused on the Soviet Union and its satellites. Australia, along with New Zealand and Canada, was a very junior partner to America and Britain in the exclusive “Five Ears” English-speaking club from 1943, but our geographic position in Asia and, later, the window on parts of the USSR and on China provided by Pine Gap and Nurrungar, made us a valuable provider of raw material.

In 1943, a few senior Australians, all military bureaucrats, knew something of these intelligence arrangements, although none had gone beyond the first layer of secrets. But no politicians knew, nor did they need to. But then came the Case, and in perhaps the most embarrassing way possible.

The Soviet Union was spying on Australia. Its ability to do so, at least in some form, was known, and followed the arrival of Soviet diplomats and journalists mid-war. Russia’s heroism in standing up to Hitler’s onslaught had earned it admirers, and the Communist Party of Australia, slavish in its following of every aspect of the Soviet line, was at a membership peak of more than 20,000. There were people of communist, or leftish views in the public service, the army and the intelligentsia — and in any event, was not the Soviet Union our ally against Germany and Japan? The Soviet diplomats and journalists were sending copious reports back to Russia, usually via radio to China’s wartime capital Chunking; but though they were recorded, they could not be read.

One day during the war, however, the Russians gave a Japanese diplomat a confidential British assessment of how the British colonial world might look after the defeat of Japan. The diplomat cabled it home, adding that he believed it had been obtained by a Soviet diplomat in Canberra. The Americans could read the Japanese diplomatic traffic, and were able to compare their knowledge of the contents of his cable with a Russian cable from Canberra. It provided one of the first significant insights into Soviet codes. On another occasion, a Chinese naval attaché passed on a report to Chunking in a code that was broken by the Japanese; carefully enough read, it could have tipped off the Japanese that their own codes were being read. The message from the attaché contained cabinet-level information to which he should not have had access.

The British didn’t tell Australia that some Russian diplomatic cables were being read and that these had pointed to spies in the Australian public service. They pretended that the information came from an agent who had defected from Moscow. Australia was told it had been cut off from intelligence sharing, and that it could only redeem itself, if at all, if it so improved its internal security that Americans would know material was not being leaked.

In time, a very few learned something about Venona. Most of those checking out the clues had no idea of the provenance of the information. Nor did those they confronted, some of whom confessed to their involvement.

Much the same information had disclosed the names of Klaus Fuchs, who was convicted in 1950 of supplying information to Moscow, and the Rosenbergs and chemist Harry Gold, who had helped pass nuclear secrets. In those cases, as during the Petrov royal commission, courts, tribunals and inquiries were told nothing of the role of code-breaking, or why Americans were so supremely certain of the justice of their case. Ultimately, the three judges of the Petrov royal commission were briefed about the specifics of their case, but only to persuade them to assist in devising a report that made no reference to how the Case had actually come about.

Venona was to be a secret for more than forty years. Details, and intercepts, are not on the National Security Agency’s public website. We know, thanks to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, how much further technological surveillance continues today. One cannot, however, fail to think that there are still secrets — about Russian spies, about spying on Russians, about spying in Australia, and about spies in ASIO — to emerge. It might well take an unauthorised history of ASIO to reveal them. •

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Juncker, who for eighteen years was prime minister of a tax haven called Luxembourg, spent over half an hour riffing on how he had given up his summer holidays to put together a team that reflected his vision for the European Union, and how everyone he had chosen was on the same page. It would be his name on the door (la Commission Juncker); he would be the one calling the shots.

In Australia, that illusion of independence usually lasts only until it becomes clear that the cabinet was a factional stitch-up. Backs have been scratched, large stakeholders appeased and a ministry set aside for Joe Ludwig. What’s more, just because the leader is clobbering reporters with the word “team” doesn’t mean everyone will be a team player – those with the support of powerbrokers know they are safe almost no matter what they do.

The European Union is not all that different, although it has the added complication of having twenty-eight factions in play: the twenty-eight national governments that make up the Union. Each gives the incoming president the name of the person it wants to send to the College of Commissioners (which is what the EU executive calls its cabinet – here, the word “cabinet” means something else); the national governments then demand a portfolio in keeping with their political priorities and their (perceived) status. This process gives the president no room to move in the selection of cabinet members and effectively ties his hands in the allocation of portfolios.

So it was that when the British government put forward its commissioner, Jonathan Hill (for you: Lord Hill of Oareford), it expressed the hope that he would end up with a “top economic portfolio.” By most measures he was an inappropriate choice: while other EU countries were appointing senior politicians with strong public profiles, Lord Hill was relatively unknown, was initially reluctant to move to Brussels and had worked as a lobbyist – something that won’t go down well with the European parliamentary committee vetting his candidacy this week. (The process has been dubbed “There will be blood” by local journalists.) Yet Juncker, bending over backwards not to antagonise Britain, wasted no time in handing Hill the portfolio of Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets. In short, he will be commissioner for the City of London.

It wasn’t the only controversial decision the factional bullying obliged Juncker to make. The French, for example, ended up with the portfolio they wanted, not the one they deserved, with former finance minister Pierre Moscovici taking over economic and financial affairs. It was a courageous appointment: France is a country that tends to ignore the EU austerity directives that Moscovici will now be required to enforce.

To this extent, it was business as usual. Europe’s factional bovver boys are still flexing their muscles as they attempt to impose their priorities on the EU executive. Yet in a few subtle ways the power dynamics are changing, and the process of cabinet appointments reflects this new landscape.

The main difference is that while Juncker may be the ultimate political insider, he will be the first Commission president in history who can claim an electoral mandate. He was appointed not by a backroom deal involving EU national leaders, but because he was the candidate of the political formation that got the most votes at the recent European parliamentary elections. That’s a big deal in the Europe Union, where political legitimacy is so scarce that those who have it can afford to throw their weight around.

More importantly, the twenty-eight members of the European Union appear to be changing their approach. They are no longer twenty-eight ping-pong balls bouncing around in a Hobbesian world of self-interest; they are all being pulled around by broader political realities. And there is no reality more real than a resurgent Russia getting physical with the European Union’s closest neighbours.

Here is how things unfolded. In 2007, conscious that the European Union was attracting bad press for being a distant, unrepresentative and unaccountable level of government, leaders signed off on a set of institutional reforms known as the Treaty of Lisbon. One of these reforms required member states to take into account the results of the elections for the European Parliament when appointing the head of the European Union’s influential executive, the European Commission.

It may not sound like much, but the appointment of Juncker was a break with the past. Before, Commission presidents had been chosen by what were then the twenty-seven leaders of the EU member states, something that curtailed the office’s political independence. And while Juncker was not directly elected to the post of Commission president, his strong showing in the elections made him the only choice and gave him the political authority to carve out a level of autonomy.

Because this is Europe, though, the winner doesn’t take all and power is carefully distributed. If the centre-right had claimed the presidency of the Commission then the centre-left would be granted the second-most prestigious role: the direction of the EU foreign affairs department (the official title is High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy).

It soon became clear that the job would go to an Italian, in no small part because Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi’s centre-left party had emerged triumphant from the European parliamentary elections in May while, in the rest of the European Union, the left had received a drubbing. The Italian centre-left delegation to parliament was the largest of all EU members and Renzi’s Democratic Party expected to be rewarded.

The Italians had chosen their candidate for the High Rep gig: foreign minister Federica Mogherini, a forty-one-year-old Democratic Party apparatchik who had the support of both Renzi and the party machine. Renzi strode into the European Council (the European Union’s super-senate, representing the twenty-eight national governments) before the summer break assuming it was a done deal; he emerged flustered once it became clear he was facing a revolt.

The reason for the angst was the foreign policy tradition Mogherini represented, as well as Mogherini herself. While all EU members were caught unprepared by Russia’s invasion of Crimea in February, the countries with deeper commercial and investment links with Russia were particularly torn. France, Austria and Germany had all invested heavily in Russia (France had lucrative military hardware contracts in play), but no EU country was quite as exposed as Italy. Its state-controlled energy company ENI had a stake in a key piece of Russian gas infrastructure, and Russia was a key market for Italian bank Unicredit.

Like her predecessors at the Palazzo della Farnesina, Italy’s foreign ministry, Mogherini knew which side Italy’s bread was buttered on. Her approach to the crisis in Ukraine was, her critics argued, toned down by considerations that had little to do with the rights and wrongs of Russia’s invasion. During her now infamous trip to Russia at the height of the crisis, Mogherini ruled out a “military solution” and called for the respect of Russian minorities in Ukraine – comments that raised questions about Italy’s resolve in opposing Russian aggression.

Eastern European members of the European Union, in particular Poland and the three Baltic states, vowed to scuttle Mogherini’s candidacy. It was an unprecedented challenge to the appointment system and one revealing deep-seated foreign policy differences between the founding EU members in Western Europe and the relatively new members from the east (most of whom joined in 2004). The eastern EU countries had experienced life on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain and were terrified it could happen again; and the Baltic states had Russian-speaking minorities of their own, which made the Ukrainian crisis all the more worrying.

But Renzi would not back down. EU members used the European summer to regroup, lobby each other and find a face-saving way out of what had become a very public spat. At the time, one Italian foreign policy analyst in Brussels told me that the problem in Italy was that the issue had become one of “national pride.” “No one is actually asking whether Mogherini is up to the job,” she said. “Yet by outlining a policy towards Russia which was at odds with that of the EU, she undermined Europe’s position.”

But the Italians suspected – correctly, as it turned out – that the opposition to Mogherini was part of an ambit claim on the part of the eastern Europeans. Centre-left members of the European Parliament I met around parliament would pull their bottom eyelid down with their index finger – a gesture meaning furbizia, or cunning. “Italy’s foreign policy on this has not changed one bit over the years,” one of them told me. “If the eastern Europeans have an axe to grind with Russia, this has nothing to do with Mogherini.”

The Italians eventually won the day. Yet the appointment of Mogherini turned into much more than a Labor Party–style power-sharing brawl. It was a fight for the soul of something that most observers argue does not even exist: the European Union’s foreign policy.

Marc Pierini is a former EU career diplomat and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, a Brussels think-tank. He says that while the bargaining over Commission jobs is nothing new, the fight for the job of High Representative is startling because the job itself is not a centre of political power.

“Big member states are not any closer than five years ago to letting EU institutions direct the [foreign policy] game,” Pierini says. “Do you think French foreign minister Laurent Fabius or German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier will take orders from Mogherini? No, they won’t. And that reflects the current political balance between the big capitals.”

In short, the job is a poisoned chalice. If there is one prerogative of the sovereign state that EU members do not want to relinquish, that’s foreign policy. “The job [of High Representative] is an empty shell,” former Italian foreign minister Gianfranco Fini told me over the summer. “The EU has no foreign policy. If you look at the current situation in Ukraine and the Middle East, the EU’s position is the last thing people care about. This job does not really matter.”

In terms of prestige, though, heading up the European Union’s diplomacy can’t be beaten, which is why the European institutions had to devise the mother of all compromises to overcome the impasse. Eastern Europe got the strong voice it wanted with the appointment of Polish prime minister Donald Tusk to the presidency of the European Council, a role with real political power. In return, Mogherini’s appointment was given the green light – although Lithuania, by far the strongest anti-Russian voice in the Council, abstained from the vote.

That anyone would want to ponder the horse-trading that produced this outcome comes as a complete surprise to Elmar Brok, the stern conservative German chairman of the European Parliament’s influential foreign affairs committee. “It is a fact of life,” Brok told me. “Where is the problem? At the end of the day we find a solution together. In every country, in every city in Europe, there are different opinions. We don’t all think the same thing. But we come together, despite the differences.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the building, Italian MEPs from the anti-establishment Five Star Movement argue that Renzi’s pursuit of the foreign affairs portfolio was a strategic mistake. Fabio Massimo Castaldo, the articulate twenty-nine-year-old leader of Five Star’s delegation in the European Parliament, says Italy should have pursued the home affairs portfolio, which is responsible for Europe’s admittedly inadequate response to the growing number of asylum seekers arriving off the southern coasts of Italy.

“Home affairs would have enabled us to develop a stronger policy on immigration – that is the number one problem that southern European states have to deal with,” Castaldo said. “Or what about the energy portfolio, claimed by Germany? This area is a real challenge for Europe over the next fifteen to twenty years.”

Even with his hands tied, incoming Commission president Juncker has demonstrated greater political independence in choosing his cabinet line-up than would have been imaginable for his predecessor, José Manuel Barroso. Realising that an executive of twenty-eight was unmanageable, Juncker developed an inner-cabinet of seven, which will be able to override the decision of junior commissioners. This means that Moscovici will be kept in line by not one but two senior commissioners from the fiscally responsible countries of Holland and Finland. Paris would not be happy.

It is a streamlined cabinet system and all new members of the team received a “mission letter” from their boss, telling them what he expected. Building up foreign affairs credibility appears to be high on Juncker’s to-do list and Mogherini has agreed to work from within the cabinet. (While her predecessor, Catherine Ashton, was a commissioner in theory, she actually worked at arm’s length from the executive.)

The challenge for Juncker will be to ensure all members of his cabinet leave their passports at the door and work towards his undeclared goal: that of creating an EU government truly independent of the factional godfathers who brought it to life. The European Union’s institutional evolution is now in full swing. It will not be painless. •

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Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has wielded its “political technology” very effectively. (Roughly translated, this technique involves liberal doses of disinformation and outright lies to achieve a particular political objective.) Perhaps its crowning achievement has been what has become known as “hybrid warfare,” which has been on display in Ukraine, particularly since the lightning operation in Crimea over three weeks in February and March this year. In this kind of war, violence is relatively limited, and is cloaked behind a thick veil of information warfare (propaganda) to conceal not only its real perpetrators but also its purpose and objectives. (For an early and apt description and analysis of “hybrid warfare,” see Janis Berzins’s paper, “Russia’s New Generation Warfare in Ukraine: Implications for Latvian Defense Policy.”)

In the Crimean case, masked “little green men,” in fatigues without insignia, conducted highly skilled surgical strikes on key enemy targets with no warning or declaration. This was implausibly presented to a gullible international audience as a spontaneous outburst of resentment by mistreated ethnic Russians suffering under the heel of a “fascist” dictatorship set up by an illegal coup in Kiev.

The Kremlin has been labelling its enemies and victims as fascists for decades, seldom accurately but often with a high degree of success. Western media, with their ethic of “balance” (“the West says this, the X says that; we’re not sure which to believe, we’re just reporting the established facts”) always run the risk of blurring or even suppressing the real story that should be obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with the region and the situation. What we get is along the lines of “Armed men in unmarked battle fatigues have seized key buildings and installations on the Crimean peninsula. Western governments are accusing Moscow of being behind the raids, a charge which Moscow strenuously denies.” Six months later, the same convention continues to be followed.

Western publics are becoming increasingly familiar with and irritated by “spin” from their own governments, for which they are developing much more sensitive antennae. They find it much more difficult to handle outright lies and deliberate disinformation (a semi-truthful narrative, with large currants of lies embedded in it) from sources far less scrupulous than governments of open democracies.

The same sometimes goes for Western officials, particularly of the post–cold war generation. Most EU officials and politicians, for example, have become used to tough and complex bargaining and the lengthy hammering out of difficult compromises. But this all takes place within a peaceful atmosphere, following clearly set rules, with limited corruption or outright dishonesty. They can be tough on trading issues, but they are typically much less confident and effective in dealing with seriously unscrupulous purveyors of security challenges. Theirs is a fine civilisation, configured for peace, but suddenly confronted with war. As in the 1990s with the Yugoslav wars, they seem a bit lost. It must be seriously doubted that they are equal to the task of dealing with Putin’s Russia.

There are two key reasons why Russian aggression and mendacity have worked so well thus far. First, there was the shock factor. Western leaders, officials and commentators were taken by surprise by the Crimean invasion, and only after further surprises are they starting to realise what they’re up against.

Second, there’s the ignorance factor. The global West has by and large always had a poor understanding of Russia. Putin’s neo-Soviet yet postmodern modus operandi has reinforced that longstanding state of affairs. Since declaring victory in the cold war, which was largely won for them by brave Russian reformers and their East European counterparts, the West has been content to relegate Russia and its neighbourhood to the easy basket.

When conflict between Russia and Ukraine first entered the Western public awareness earlier this year, and Australian media were looking to bone up quickly, I noticed that a lot of the questions directed to me reflected very serious, even crippling misunderstandings. I was frequently asked not to discuss the overall situation or some important development, but rather the threat posed by the neo-Nazis known to be dominant in Kiev. Or could I please comment on and explain the reasons why Russians were in fear of their lives in Eastern Ukraine, where most people were Russian or pro-Russian and were in despair because use of the Russian language had been banned? Was it not the case that we’d been given fair warning of all this because the Maidan had after all been dominated by violent, far-right anti-Semites? The questions were often so wide of the mark it was hard to know where to begin.

Sometimes the questions carried the unstated implication that these alleged social pathologies not only existed, but also were peculiar to the west of Ukraine and therefore presumably absent from Eastern Ukraine or Russia itself. Moscow was assumed to be looking on from a distance with understandable dismay – suggesting that we should be supporting the Kremlin in its stalwart opposition to “the fascists.”

Some reporters rightly grasped that corruption was a massive problem in Ukraine. But they did not seem to have picked up the fact that resentment of corruption was probably the biggest factor in the Maidan protests in Kiev, that disgraced president Viktor Yanukovych had been responsible for a huge increase in the problem in Ukraine, or that corruption was an equally great or greater problem in Russia.

Many were also understandably sharply focused on Ukraine’s economic fragility, and wanted to draw an inference that any Western involvement would be a waste of money and effort. Let the Russians take over the problem and bear the costs of it; why should the West get involved? They seemed unaware that Yanukovych had sharply accentuated Ukraine’s economic debacle, not least by his own entourage’s theft of mega-billions; or that the seizure of Crimea would make things much worse; or that “giving Ukraine to the Russians” might amount to the trashing of the entire post–cold war security system in Eurasia.

From the early media coverage it became apparent, in short, that some interlocutors had swallowed whole some of the cruder falsifications of Russian propaganda. Little of the commentary seemed to betray any awareness of the degree to which, since Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, Russia was rapidly becoming a police state with increasingly fascist as well as neo-Soviet characteristics. Putin has become even more the Mussolini strongman with slightly flabby but much-exposed pectorals, heading what is essentially a one-party state; the rubber-stamp parliament, with grotesque stooge parties on the sidelines, has passed reams of repressive legislation while chorusing anti-Western slogans; all the human rights gains of the 1990s have been eliminated; Stalin and Stalinism have been restored to a place of public respect; and a uniform view of history and the world has been imposed on the media and the education system.

Since the fall of communism, Russia has of course become a society with gross inequality and increasingly run-down health and educational infrastructure. Under Putin, together with the Soviet flourishes, there has emerged a supplementary hard-right official ideology, sometimes misleadingly touted as “conservatism.” This comes complete with siren calls directed at the extreme right currently blossoming in many Western countries. This bizarre Putinist embellishment of the last few years, still scarcely noticed by many Western commentators, has featured, for example, visits from the French National Front’s Marine Le Pen to Moscow, where she was feted by senior members of the regime including deputy premier Dmitry Rogozin; xenophobic treatment of Russia’s own internal “immigrants”; gay-bashing, both literal and metaphorical, by tolerated vigilante groups and senior regime spokesmen respectively; elevation of the unreconstructed and KGB-penetrated Russian Orthodox Church to the role of joint arbiter with the state of public and international morals; and so on.

These persistent misconceptions of what Russia currently represents owe a lot to what the late Arthur Burns once memorably called “culpable innocence” – in other words, wilful ignorance by those presuming to instruct the vox populi – but also to Moscow’s skilful injection of huge amounts of well-crafted and adroitly directed propaganda. Russian propaganda now has a Goebbelsian supremo, Dmitry Kiselyov, who once proclaimed exultantly to his prime-time television audience, “Russia is the only country in the world that can reduce the United States to radioactive cinders.” In fact, nuclear intimidation has become a staple of Putinist propaganda, and not just at dog-whistle pitch. The buffoonish Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the Liberal Democratic Party (which is neither liberal nor democratic and scarcely a party, rather an officially cosseted Greek chorus), recently spoke publicly of a forthcoming major war in which Poland and other countries would be wiped off the map. Putin himself has declared publicly that Russia is a well-armed nuclear power and that no one should “mess with it.”

Crude as it often is, Russian propaganda is nonetheless highly skilful, much more so than its late-Soviet equivalent. It has acquired a mass international following through their external propaganda television network, Russia Today, a fact of which many Western officials remain unaware. There are, for example, eighty-six million subscribers to Russia Today in the United States alone. With a very large and expanding budget, Russia Today employs as presenters many Western native speakers who are enthusiastic critics of their own societies and enjoy the opportunity to go global, something they mostly would not have achieved on their home turf. Some of them are problematical, like a German “expert” who is editor of a neo-Nazi publication and one Karen Hudes, presented as a World Bank whistleblower, but who specialises in off-the-planet urban myths.

But Russia Today has also recruited more resounding names, including Julian Assange and Larry King. The formula is not to sing paeans of praise to Russia so much as to denigrate the alternatives. As the distinguished English Russia-watcher Oliver Bullough wrote in an excellent article on Russia Today for the New Statesman, “Deep into his fourteenth year in power, the president seems to have given up on reforming Russia. Instead he funds RT to persuade everyone else that their own countries are no better.”

Domestic Russian propaganda follows a similar strategy, with a strong and often xenophobic emphasis on the sins of other countries, especially in the West. As befits a KGB-run state, spymania is everywhere, and recently there has been a dismaying enthusiasm for finding and denouncing internal enemies (usually liberals and intellectual critics) and asserting they are in league with foreign enemies. Many Russians are becoming deeply anxious about what they see as a reversion to the atmosphere of the 1930s.

It has now been reported that a new series on predateli (traitors) has been launched on Russian television (where 85 per cent get their news), hosted by one Andrei Lugovoi, who is thought by British police to have been responsible for the polonium poisoning of the Kremlin critic Aleksandr Litvinienko. Moscow refused to extradite Lugovoi for questioning, then turned him into a national hero and arranged for him to become a member of the Duma (parliament) with immunity from prosecution. In keeping with his valiant service to Russia, host Lugovoi is introduced to his TV audience as chelovek-legenda (a living legend). Two days after reporting that news, the BBC reporter and his team were beaten up and detained for four hours in a provincial town in Russia.

For its part, the West has sharply downsized its own information outreach to Russian speakers over the past two-and-a-half decades. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the BBC World Service, which once beamed effective alternative versions to Soviet bloc propaganda, have lost much of their erstwhile coverage and prestige, and even if they were to be restored, might struggle for at least some time to gain any traction.

The lies and half-truths that Moscow launched to justify its invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine have faded somewhat, but retain a tenacious half-life. Some journalists and commentators seem to have ideological or programmatic reasons for sticking with parts of the Russian narrative. Others may simply feel the need to observe “balance,” and while Russia is still cranking up parallel narratives to put into circulation, they will go to pains to remain agnostic about which version of reality is the truth.

There are some interesting sub-categories of observers who advance the Kremlin’s cause. A distressingly large number of academics and former officials, including retired diplomats suffering from what is known in the trade as localitis (a tendency to become an advocate for the country in which they serve rather than their own), seem to be conscious advocates of the Russian narrative. In some cases they appear to have picked up a secondary complication from what Gareth Evans once luminously described as “relevance deprivation syndrome,” or RDS.

Moscow liberals, for example, tend to see Henry Kissinger as having fallen victim to RDS. He has continued to visit Moscow regularly, where he is reputed to be given elaborate red carpet treatment. His comments on Russian matters always seem to display warm empathy for the dilemmas of his Kremlin friends. For example, he has been undertaking to do all he can to ensure that Ukraine does not choose any Westward orientation even though that is what a majority of its population emphatically wants. Kissinger and former US ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock came in for some sarcasm from the prominent Moscow political scientist Lilia Shevtsova for such pronouncements, which, as she points out, closely parallel the Kremlin’s own declarations.

Some academic strategists follow similar lines of reasoning and activism, seeking to explain why certain victims have to be victims and certain bullies have to be bullies. They deploy their acumen rather like the RDS diplomat by setting out their very close understanding of the mindset of the adversary: Mr Putin’s objectives are quite understandable, they argue, and surely should be accommodated. No similar understanding or empathy is apparent for the victims.

The intentions of these strategists may be good, and it is certainly important to understand the enemy in order to respond to him more effectively. But at a certain point, perhaps, the important thing becomes not how to understand Putin, but how to stop him before he destroys all the agreements and understandings on which the international security system rests.

Otherwise the strategist may fall prey to one of the Kremlin’s most tried and true negotiating principles: “what’s ours is ours, and what’s yours is negotiable.” In the Ukrainian case, this becomes “what’s now already yours is clearly yours (Crimea and perhaps much else besides) and you and we can negotiate between ourselves about what should be left for (in this case) the Ukrainians, over their heads and in their absence.”

Recently a group of empathetic US luminaries arranged to meet with some of their old Russian colleagues to discuss a peace plan for Ukraine. Without going into the merits of their plan, the idea that a group of Americans should presume to launch such an initiative, at a time when Russian aggression had ratcheted up further, and without seeking the participation of a single Ukrainian representative, was emblematic of their appeasement mind-set.

The line of argument of the Russlandversteher (those who understand Russia) is typically that Putin is the ruler of a very large nuclear-armed country, which they like to affectionately call “the bear,” whose concerns about Western policy are entirely reasonable. In any case, they argue, irrespective of how reasonable they are, we should be very wary of “poking the bear.” NATO’s expansion to the east was an intolerable threat to Russia, and Moscow is attacking its neighbours not because it has a revanchist program to reinstitute a Soviet Union–lite, but because of its understandable hostility to Western intrusions into its “backyard.”

The sensitivities of 140 million Russians are paramount in this train of thought, not the interests of the 160 or so million East Europeans who live between Russia and core Europe. That NATO expanded not because of NATO’s desire to threaten Moscow but in response to the desperate desire of many East Europeans to be freed from would-be autocrats-for-life like Lukashenko or Yanukovych, or from renewed Russian aggression, is not seen as relevant.

The expansion of NATO was, they assert, a breach of solemn promises to Moscow. Oral reassurances about NATO’s future intentions were certainly made in cautious language at a certain point, but in the very different context of prospective German unification, and before the peoples of the region had fully had their say. Once they had, new states emerged whose sovereignty and integrity Moscow duly agreed to respect. For wholly natural reasons, many such states have chosen to pursue some sort of Western vector. Outraged by these sovereign choices, Moscow has breached its undertakings to respect their sovereignty repeatedly. (The issue of the West’s supposed undertakings to help sustain Russia’s East European sphere of influence is discussed by Mary Elise Sarotte in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs and by Ira Straus at Atlantic-community.org.)

On the other hand, Ukraine did actually receive some written assurances, which are on the public record. In 1994, under pressure from Moscow and the Western powers, Kiev agreed to divest itself of its nuclear weapons in exchange for written assurances that it should never become the subject of economic or military coercion and that Russia, the United States, Britain and France would stand ready to defend it in any such event. Those assurances have proven worthless.

The argument that NATO’s expansion to the east is an intolerable provocation to Moscow is in any case inherently unpersuasive. If Moscow was indeed so afraid of NATO expansion, why was it not reassured by the fact that for many years NATO has observed the self-denying ordinance, inscribed in the NATO–Russia Founding Act of 1997, not to deploy any significant military hardware or personnel in the new member states. It is quite clear that the new members are the ones threatened by Russia’s aggressive revanchism under Putin, not the reverse. On 18 August, during a visit to Riga, Angela Merkel reaffirmed that the Act meant that even now, despite Moscow’s multiple aggressions and transgressions, there would be no permanent bases in the Baltic states regardless of their desperate pleas.

Russia, meanwhile, has continued its aggressive overflights in and near the air space of its western neighbours, NATO and non-NATO members alike, particularly though not only in the Baltic/Nordic region. It conducted a cyberwar with backup action by the Russian minority against Estonia in 2007, and this month it abducted an Estonian security official from Estonian sovereign territory just two days after President Obama visited Tallin to reassure Estonia that it would not be left to stand alone if it were subjected to attack. The invasion of Georgia by Russia in 2008 – after a long history of aggressive provocation by Moscow and its proxies in Abkhazia and South Ossetia – and the huge military exercises up against western neighbours’ borders in 2009 and 2013 – one of which concluded with a simulated nuclear strike on Warsaw – all have a similar resonance. So too, of course, do the frequent trade wars Russia has unleashed against erring former vassals.

The confidence with which it pursues these aggressive policies strongly suggests that while Russia may be angry about NATO’s expansion, it is not afraid of it. Moscow regards the territory it gained under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, whereby Hitler and Stalin divided up the East European countries between them, as still valid. Its stridently aggressive behaviour suggests that it wants to restore them to its patrimony, and that it regards NATO as not much more than a paper tiger in the region. Yet despite this sustained aggression, the compassion of the Russlandversteher for Russia’s imperial phantom limb syndrome knows no bounds.

Another frequent line of justification by Western commentators for Russia’s pursuit of its neo-imperial objectives is that we must be more sympathetic towards Russian policies, because if we’re not, they’ll gravitate even closer to China. Official Russian spokesmen and patriotic scholars have deployed this argument for decades through all kind of vicissitudes in Russo-Chinese relations. On one legendary occasion, a Soviet official in Canberra, enraged by what he perceived to be an attempt by local interlocutors to exploit the then Sino-Soviet divide to threaten Moscow with bad outcomes in Afghanistan, responded, “Just you wait – one day we’ll get back into bed with our Chinese comrades and screw you from both ends.” More cerebral versions of this argument have been heard increasingly from Moscow propagandists in recent months, adjusted to fit the circumstances of the time. And predictably, some Western commentators have adopted it.

A common Western counterstrike has latterly been to hint that Russia’s growing strategic partnership with China will lead to its becoming China’s junior partner or even its neo-colonial vassal loyally supplying raw materials. Russian polemicists are even beginning to deploy this argument in attack mode to argue that if Moscow does indeed become junior partner to Beijing, that will be the West’s fault, and to its detriment above all.

Western experts on the region are likely to have a better grasp of Russian than of Georgian, Moldovan, Estonian or even Ukrainian affairs. As a result they often acquire a bad case of secondary Russian chauvinism, taking on unconsciously something of the dismissive attitude of the vast majority of Russians, both the highly educated and the bovver-boys on the street, towards smaller ethnic groups within Russia and on its borders. This makes them vulnerable to Russian propaganda, even though they are of course aware of that phenomenon in general terms and would believe that they were making adequate allowance for it. It also makes them more receptive to the thought that any troublesome smaller neighbour should, if necessary, be put back in its box to keep the bear contented and friendly.

That doing so might not only undermine the post-1990 security system but also help to recreate an aggressive, confident, anti-Western and expansionary Russia does not seem to trouble them. Likewise, that it might lead to an unravelling of the Western strategic community, with countries betwixt and between Russia and the European Union increasingly choosing to accommodate Moscow’s aggressive or seductive overtures because they can see no prospect of its being resisted by anyone. Some East European NATO members, including Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria, seem to be already flirting with just such a fundamental reorientation.

Working journalists are less likely to be involved in working creatively towards peace in our time by launching hands-across-the-Bering-Strait initiatives. After a scramble to catch up at the outset of the Crimean invasion, for the most part they are doing a pretty good job. But the language used to describe the unfolding events in Ukraine continues to be impregnated with assumptions and misconceptions stemming ultimately from Russian disinformation, and above all from its remarkably successful efforts to conceal its direct involvement in the conflict in Ukraine.

“The civil war in Ukraine,” “the Ukrainian crisis,” “separatists,” “pro-Russians,” “rebels” – terms like these are loaded with semantic baggage that helps Moscow to maintain, even now, that it is only a concerned bystander, worried about the tragic fate of its sootechestvenniki (“fellow-countrymen”) and seeking to find an honourable way out for all concerned. Even before the attack on Crimea, Russia had been working hard through trade boycotts, manipulation of energy pricing and heavy pressure on its wayward protégé Yanukovych to force Kiev to abandon its arduously negotiated Association Agreement with the European Union.

When Yanukovych finally complied, and huge demonstrations broke out in response on what came to be known as the Euromaidan, Putin pushed him to introduce police state legislation modelled closely on Russia’s own. When that in turn failed, Yanukovych resorted to mass shootings in an effort to suppress the protests. Such actions had not previously been part of his repertoire, so this was probably also a response to pressure from Moscow. And when that too failed, he fled, leaving Kiev to the Maidan coalition

The Crimea operation bore even more of Moscow’s fingerprints. Despite the unmarked uniforms and heavy weaponry, it was clear that Russian special forces were heavily involved, as well as the armed Russian units stationed on the peninsula (obviously all a crass violation of the Black Sea Fleet Agreement with Kiev). There was also an admixture of local Russian patriots and compliant politicians and administrators, some local and some spirited in from across the border. Russia’s Federal Security Service, the domestic successor organisation to the KGB, quickly established its presence by calling on the population to denounce any of their neighbours who had supported the Maidan revolt. In the months since the annexation, Crimea has descended into an economically depressed police state, complete with aggressive homophobia and all the other hallmarks of loyal, provincial Putinism.

Leaflet distributed in Crimea by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. It reads, “Citizens of Russia!!!/ PATRIOTS!!!/ Though peace has been established on our land, there are still scum who want chaos, disorder, war…/ And they are living among us, go with us to the same shops, travel with us in the same public transport…/ It’s possible you know people who were against the return of Crimea to Russia/ Or/ Who took part in local Maidan activities/ You must inform the FSB immediately about such individuals at the following address:/ Franko Boulevard 13, Simferopol/ Or telephone 37-42-76 (you can remain anonymous)/ WE MUST STOP FASCISM!”

A fortnight after the annexation, a very similar pattern of events began to be enacted in the Donbass and other regions in Ukraine’s southeast. Here again Russians from Russia were conspicuous in the leadership, and the military professionalism of most of the attacks made it clear that Russia was directly implicated in precipitating, staffing and managing the takeovers. The proportion of local zealots participating in the events, however, was greater than in Crimea, which contributed to the indiscipline of the proxy forces and perhaps also to their penchant for common criminality and gross human rights abuses (abductions, beatings, disappearances, arrests) against local residents.

As Kiev recovered its composure and managed to improvise an effective military response, the polarisation of the population between east- and west-oriented naturally increased. But that does not make the conflict that resulted a civil war. Before Yanukovych began shooting protesters, and before Putin launched his hybrid war against Ukraine, there had been very little loss of life through politics in the quarter-century of Ukraine’s independence. There were certainly political differences between many in the west and east, but they had essentially been regulated through the ballot box.

Insofar as the conflict has or may become something more like a civil war, if with decisive interference and involvement from Russia, it will be a civil war conceived by artificial insemination. Nor can it properly be called a “Ukraine crisis.” Perhaps the later and violent phases of the Maidan could be so described, but once Yanukovych chose to flee, the crisis was over. What followed was not a crisis, and certainly not a Ukrainian crisis, but an invasion of Ukraine by Russia coupled with active and violent destabilisation, in which local recruits, stiffened and led by Russian troops and administrators, were carefully steered towards Moscow’s objectives.

Nor can the combatants of Russian persuasion accurately or properly be referred to as “separatists” or “rebels.” While the exact proportions are difficult to determine, it is Russians from Russia who have been calling the shots, while cross-border reinforcements of weapons, supplies and personnel have been maintained throughout. To be a separatist you have to be in your own country and trying to detach part of it to form an independent entity. The so-called “separatists” in Eastern Ukraine may be irredentists, but their movement cannot be considered as genuinely separatist. For similar reasons, a foreign soldier cannot be classed as a rebel.

There is a genuine terminological difficulty here, but the solutions in common use are tendentious and serve to conceal Moscow’s decisive involvement. In other such cases, the fighters might well be described as “fifth columnists” or even simply as traitors. There is, moreover, evidence that quite a number of the combatants are not “volunteers” but paid mercenaries, originating often from the Russian north Caucasus and shipped in across the border.

Such terms as “fifth columnists” (now commonly used by Russian officials to describe liberal dissidents, by the way) might seem harsh or not fully accurate given the authentic strength of local pro-Moscow sentiment in southeast Ukraine, and past vicissitudes and disputes relating to state boundaries. But “rebels” and “separatists” are not appropriate, and nor should a militiaman who has allowed himself to be recruited to fight for a foreign imperial power be entitled to any other semantic fig leaves. It is striking that Kiev’s preferred term “terrorists” is studiously avoided by the Western press, even though a much better case can be made for that than for most of the locutions actually used (violence against legitimate institutions and civilians, mass abuse of human rights, avoidance of identifying insignia, deployment of weapons in residential areas, and so on).

The terminological difficulty has led to the widespread use of the term “pro-Russian,” usually as an adjective, but sometimes even as a noun to describe those fighting against the Ukrainian armed forces and their volunteer militia supporters. But that too is inadequate. Many of them are quite simply Russians, for starters. Why not “pro-invaders”? I personally would favour “proxies” or even simply “Russians,” which is what most would identify as, and which describes exactly where they stand. The only difficulty with “Russians” is that many ethnic Russians in Ukraine do not want to betray their country or see their home region attached to Russia.

The most recent turn of events in the fighting has unleashed a further avalanche of misleading descriptions which again have the effect of concealing Russia’s real role in events. As will be recalled, there was a time in the early months when the proxies seemed to be sweeping all before them, the Ukrainian armed forces seemed demoralised as well as hopelessly ill-equipped, and the local populations in the east seemed not to be fighting back against the proxies, despite opinion polling which showed that even in Crimea a majority of the population did not want to become part of Russia.

Then the Ukrainian armed forces began to find their feet, supported by volunteer militias and the financial contributions of many ordinary Ukrainians, as well as some key oligarchs. From May to mid August, the Kiev forces gradually took control of the situation, forcing the proxies back, and even recapturing most of the lost ground in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.

They faced difficult dilemmas in doing so. With the Russian forces well dug in, winkling them out in urban areas would inevitably require aerial and artillery bombardment to reduce the need for bloody street fighting. In addition Kiev would need to solicit and maintain the support of the oligarchs where possible, and also the enthusiastic but sometimes problematical volunteer detachments.

All such steps could increase the suffering and bitterness of both fighters and civilians in the disputed east. The pro-Kiev militias, like those on the other side, were in some cases led and/or manned by militant nationalists with hardline political views. Over the longer term, this could create a security problem for the Kiev government and reactivate the familiar Russian propaganda trope of “the fascists and Banderovtsy in the Kiev junta and Western Ukraine.”

A particularly worrying formation for Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has been the force led by the populist nationalist Oleh Lyashko. Lyashko has been using his militia not only against the enemy but also as a tool in his campaigns for the presidency (where he did dismayingly well, finishing a distant third behind Poroshenko, but third nonetheless) and in the parliamentary elections scheduled for 26 October, where polling suggests his Radical Party will do well. He and his militiamen have been involved in kangaroo courts, direct actions of dubious legality and other abuses of human rights.

Though not a fascist in the ideological sense, Lyashko is certainly an extremely dubious asset for Poroshenko. With a shady past, including a criminal record and onetime connections with Yanukovych’s party, his prominence in the war has enabled him to throw out very aggressive political challenges to the Poroshenko bloc. Fortunately, his popularity seems to be declining, but it remains uncomfortably high.

Another very mixed blessing for Poroshenko is the Azov Battalion, which has fought bravely but really does display neo-fascist insignia and has members given to hard-right pronouncements. Lyashko himself is from Luhansk, and interestingly quite a lot of the recruits to such hardline pro-Kiev detachments are ethnic Russians from the east of the country. (For a balanced appraisal of hard-right militias generally in Ukraine, see Alina Polyakova’s recent article for the Carnegie Moscow Centre, “The Far-Right in Ukraine’s Far-East.”)

Armed conflicts have a tendency to generate irregular forces like these, particularly at critical junctures in immature semi-democracies like Ukraine’s. Ukraine is fighting for its independence, perhaps even ultimately for its existence, with no reliable allies and an enemy much stronger and better-equipped than itself. There are many more such militant and extremist formations in Russia and on the Russian side of the fight in Ukraine, but while Moscow doesn’t choose to rein them in for the most part, it undoubtedly can do so when it judges it expedient. Poroshenko, despite his strong presidential mandate, doesn’t enjoy a similar capacity and has many other extremely urgent and difficult problems with which to deal.

So why do Western commentators focus so disproportionately on the pro-Kiev bad guys? They may represent some sort of threat to their local Russian enemies, but not to the Russian regular army, which can and has inflicted devastating damage on them. Even less do they threaten the Western countries, whose commentators focus on them with such keen attention. The hardline nationalist militias and their political allies remain a country mile behind Poroshenko in public opinion ratings. The only thing that might make them serious contenders would be if Russia continues to inflict defeat, destruction and yet more trade wars on the elected Kiev authorities while the West looks on disapprovingly, but does nothing effective to save them.

With some observers, it’s difficult to avoid the impression that for whatever reasons they want to exculpate the aggressor by blaming the victim. The blame-the-victim commentators are not much interested in the fact that the victor by an overwhelming margin in the recent presidential election was a moderate nationalist ready for compromises to preserve peace – perhaps even too ready in the view of some; or that the Ukrainian prime minister Arseny Yatseniuk, for example, is a pro-Western liberal economist and democrat, of partly Jewish heritage; or that the man who for a time took over as acting prime minister from Yatseniuk was a senior regional administrator called Volodymyr Groysman, also a Jew; or that at a time when the European Union is in considerable economic and political difficulty and losing much of its erstwhile allure, virtually the entire Kiev political class in its present configuration is desperate to join it.

By contrast with such groups as the Azov Battalion, the spectacularly bad guys among the Russian military colonists and their local supporters attract little enough media scrutiny. Take, for example, Igor Girkin (aka Strelkov), a Russian from Russia, former supremo of the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic, the very name of which reeks of Stalinism. In his long career as a soldier of fortune pursuing Russian imperial causes in the most expansive sense, Strelkov has been reported to have involved himself with Bosnian Serb forces in ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims during the Yugoslav wars. He is undoubtedly a Russian fascist, but also a nostalgic Stalinist, which makes him one of a hybrid type widespread in Russia at the moment.

Then there is the former Russian criminal Sergei Aksyonov, who is presiding over the communising of Crimea, also ignored by most of the West. Or take Alexander Borodai, another Russian from Russia, who miraculously emerged as the supremo in Donetsk and remained there till Moscow found it expedient to replace him with a local called Aleksandr Zakharchenko, a true-red loyalist to Moscow, but with a usefully Ukrainian-sounding surname. And probably most importantly, there is Vladimir Antyufeyev, the grey KGB eminence of Transnistria, and now, as of recently, of eastern Ukraine. Why is no one particularly aghast at their prominence?

Antyufeyev in particular gets minimal attention in the West. Yet his role as Moscow’s de facto viceroy in southeast Ukraine is obvious. It is clearly reflected in a recent picture of Strelkov holding court with his uber-imperial followers back in Russia where he is “on leave,” a photograph displaying the attractive features of Antyufeyev on the wall in the background, where Stalin might once have been.

Despite the country’s overwhelming burdens, for months the Kiev forces continued to make steady progress towards their objective of encircling Donetsk and Luhansk cities with a view to cutting them off from resupply across the Russian border. Moscow responded by changing their proxies’ leaders and providing more high-tech weaponry. This led to some spectacular victories in local skirmishes by the Russians as well as to rapidly growing downings of Ukrainian aircraft. But it also led to the MH17 disaster, which was obviously not a triumph for Moscow. Until well into August and despite the successive waves of Russian intervention, Kiev’s steady counterinsurgency progress seemed to be maintained.

Then suddenly came a 180-degree shift in the fortunes of war. Russia introduced into Ukraine a large number of its regular troops, probably some 6000 or so all up, including crack special forces, and with more high-tech weaponry. Abruptly, wholly against the flow of play, the beleaguered “rebel” forces turned their increasingly dire situation around. The siege of Donetsk was broken, and a large concentration of mainly volunteer pro-Kiev units near the strategic town of Ilovaisk was forced to retreat. As they retreated, responding apparently to an invitation to exit via a “humanitarian” corridor, they were ambushed by Russian forces with greatly superior weaponry, resulting in a massacre of hundreds of men and total destruction of their weapons and military transport.

The survivors of the Ilovaisk massacre feel bitter that they did not receive more back-up from Ukrainian forces, a resentment that may create strains as volunteer militias come to be reintegrated in the armed forces or civilian society of any post-conflict Ukraine. It was an attack well-executed and well-directed in every sense by highly professional Russian troops, part of a broader intervention that forced Poroshenko to sue for a ceasefire. He has been on the back foot ever since, offering concessions to the “separatists” and desperately pleading, largely in vain, for more help from the European Union and NATO.

Western countries, Amnesty International and other authorities have all said that this turnaround was the result of a clandestine but large cross-border deployment of Russian troops and armour. Russian internet sources and surviving independent Russian media and blogs accept the sharply increased Russian involvement as the cause of the sudden “rebel” triumph. The Russian Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, one of the few politically engaged NGOs still working effectively, has claimed that some 200 soldiers from regular Russian formations have now perished in the fighting in Ukraine. For making such a damaging claim, the St Petersburg branch of the NGO has already been denounced by the regime as a “foreign agent” (translated from the 1930s Stalinese, “spy” or “traitor”).

Among the Russian casualties have been members of the crack Pskov Paratrooper Division. A (legal) opposition politician in Pskov who attempted to view the graves of anonymously buried special forces soldiers there was beaten up by “unknown assailants” – a trademark of the Federal Security Service – and left unconscious with a fractured skull. The war is increasingly unpopular in Russia, and Putin is continuing to keep it hush-hush, both for that reason, and to maintain the threadbare fiction of Russia’s non-involvement.

The current shaky armistice, which the Russian side in particular has been breaking in an attempt to regain control of Donetsk airport and other strategic targets, is unlikely to be sustained. Poroshenko’s effort to shore it up by offering further concessions to the “separatists” may give Kiev some further respite, but that too is unlikely to remain stable for long. The only thing that will ensure stability is for him to further surrender Ukrainian sovereignty, recognising the “rebels” as a legitimate Ukrainian force representative of the local populations (which they never have been – their referenda were a farce), and accepting Russia as the paramount guarantor of stability in the region; in other words, in addition to the loss of Crimea, accepting that Ukraine would now have a large frozen conflict in its industrial heartland.

Even that would almost certainly not be the end of it, judging by the experience of frozen conflicts elsewhere in the post-Soviet area. The corresponding parts of Moldova and Georgia have been used as tools to try to block any Westward movement by those countries. A frozen conflict can also, if and/or when the need or opportunity presents, be rapidly unfrozen to form a Piedmont in a wider irredentist push. Georgia presented a classic case and Moldova may soon provide another.

Russia’s diplomatic choice to establish a frozen conflict is the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or OSCE, where, in recent times, US influence in relation to events in Russia’s western borderlands seems to have been relatively weaker, and where Russia has made good use of its veto power to make the OSCE’s work more difficult. The recent peace discussions brokered by the OSCE are unlikely to deliver either a permanent settlement or a just one. The OSCE is not in the business, for example, of suggesting that Russia was not a legitimate player in the “peace process” to begin with.

The OSCE format was publicly launched by Putin in May, when he welcomed in Moscow a visit by the Swiss president and chairman of the OSCE for 2014, Didier Burkhalter, and an OSCE blueprint for a settlement which Burkhalter brought with him. At that time, the Kiev forces had started to turn the tide against the Russian proxies, and Putin clearly was looking to hit the pause button before things got any worse for his proxies. The OSCE format keeps the United States out of the front line of the Ukraine issue, and the formation of an OSCE Contact Group consisting of a Swiss OSCE chair, Russia, the Donetsk and Luhansk so-called People’s Republics and Ukraine has enabled Putin to shape negotiations with Poroshenko in what is for Moscow a very favourable context.

Russia’s frequent use of its veto to pressure the OSCE and the lack, over time, of any effective US or Western push-back on OSCE involvement in frozen conflicts have ensured that the OSCE is now very sensitive to Russia’s priorities. Germany and France, who happen to be two of the EU/NATO countries most understanding of Russia’s security requirements, have had a modest involvement in the Contact Group process, mainly in pressing Ukraine to become engaged. But Britain, like the United States, is not involved. Thus Berlin’s Russlandversteher approach is virtually the only Western game in town. The Contact Group is headed by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, who produced a report on the Georgian war of 2008 which, in the view of some observers, tended to whitewash much of Russia’s responsibility for that event and for the extensive destruction it visited on Georgia.

In this unpromising OSCE format, not being comfortable in situations where force has been or may be deployed, Germany is looking for a peaceful solution and is happy to entrust the task of mediation between aggressor and victim to the OSCE. Kiev, however, is clearly outnumbered. At one point, the Group even brought into the talks as a separate participant one Viktor Medvedchuk, a close friend of Putin’s and the most pro-Moscow politician in Ukraine, where he has almost no popular support.

For Putin, the latest purpose, as in May, is to present Russia again as a concerned, peace-loving observer while this time locking in his sudden gains on the battlefield. The timing of his back-of-the-envelope peace proposal, reportedly sketched out on a flight to Mongolia, was also meant to weaken and further divide the leaderless and irresolute Western leadership just as NATO was holding a crucial summit on 4–5 September in Wales and the European Union was struggling to reach agreement on another round of sanctions.

In this, Putin was highly successful. Again the huge advantages of a single, autocratic leadership over broad coalitions of poll-ridden democracies were in evidence. After protracted agonies about whether to impose further sanctions on Russia for again invading Ukraine, the European Union finally approved a package, but in the same breath said that the sanctions might be reviewed within weeks if the ceasefire holds. That the “ceasefire” followed another damaging Russian military expedition was, like the Crimean annexation, seemingly forgotten or forgiven.

Brussels also mysteriously suspended till the end of 2015 the implementation of the DCFTA (Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement) with Ukraine, to which it had previously accorded accelerated passage. The reason for this unexpected additional reward for Russia’s bad behaviour was seemingly to enable further exhaustive discussions aimed at accommodating the Russians’ objections to the free trade deal. Moscow has demanded a virtual rewrite of roughly a quarter of the huge and exhaustively negotiated agreement.

The European Union has previously maintained that the agreement would not damage Russia’s trade and, more generally, that it could not, as a matter of principle, allow third parties to interfere in its negotiations with other countries. The Poroshenko government agreed to the postponement, reportedly because it feared that otherwise Moscow was planning to hit it with a crippling all-out trade war. The European Union has cushioned the blow of the postponement by extending trade concessions to Ukraine over the intervening months.

Nonetheless, the postponement sends yet another discouraging signal to Ukrainians and other countries under Russian pressure. A deputy Ukrainian foreign minister resigned over the issue, which is not reassuring on the question of what backroom deals were struck to secure Poroshenko’s agreement. The postponement also offers further encouragement to Russia to maintain its present aggressive stance towards the countries to its west, and their Western friends.

NATO, for its part, stalwartly reaffirmed that it would not deploy any boots permanently on the ground on the territory of the new members, but that it would provide “reassurance” in other ways. It also confirmed that it would continue not to supply any weapons to the beleaguered Kiev administration. It undertook, on the other hand, to provide non-lethal aid worth US$20 million. Subsequently, the Ukrainian defence minister asserted that some individual NATO countries were undertaking to supply weapons to Ukraine, but the countries he mentioned have denied it.

Last week Poroshenko visited the United States where he renewed his appeal to the Obama administration for lethal aid to resist Russian aggression on his country. He was well received, particularly in Congress, but his appeal was unsuccessful, though he did receive a further US$53 million in non-lethal aid. As he said when he addressed Congress, “Please understand me correctly. Blankets, night-vision goggles are also important. But one cannot win the war with blankets… Even more, we cannot keep the peace with a blanket.”

Short of another muscular intervention from Moscow, a trade war alternative is always near to hand. Recently Russia sharply reduced its gas exports to Poland, putting a stop to reverse-flow imports by Ukraine through Poland and Slovakia to replace the flows through Ukrainian pipelines that Russia blocked last June. If Poroshenko does not give satisfaction in the peace talks, the economic stranglehold on Ukraine can be strengthened at will, a far more immediate and deadly weapon than any Western sanctions that have yet been devised against Russia.

Conscious of his weak hand internationally and the forthcoming elections domestically, Poroshenko is bending over backwards to stay out of trouble. Following up on the Minsk ceasefire agreement of 5 September, he managed to push through legislation on 16 September offering a guarantee of autonomy for three years to local government in areas of Donetsk and Luhansk controlled by the proxies. The law is carefully drafted to avoid legitimising the authority of the “people’s republics,” but is domestically costly for Poroshenko even so, and will increase the criticism of him from radical rivals in the run-up to the vital parliamentary elections on 26 October. It is also very unlikely to satisfy Moscow or most of its proxies, which are continuing military actions to seize more territory beyond the ceasefire lines.

Meanwhile, Russia is at work in the Baltic states. Despite Barack Obama’s visit to Tallin, where he delivered a ringing address – a genre in which he excels – Moscow has launched a concerted series of provocations, beginning two days later with the abduction from Estonian territory of an Estonian anti-corruption official, and his almost immediate parading before Russian TV cameras as a spy.

Soon after, a senior Moscow official responsible for “human rights,” Konstantin Dolgov, visited Riga where he delivered an aggressive speech denouncing Latvian “fascism” and alleged mistreatment of the Russian minority, and calling on the Latvian Russians to show their “martial spirit.” (In fact they are already doing so; a high proportion of Latvian Russians support the annexation of Crimea, and there have been reports that some are being recruited to fight in Ukraine.) Given the atrocities committed by Moscow against the Baltic peoples after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, these are remarkably brazen and threatening claims.

Russia has recently revived and is pursuing through Interpol arrest warrants against Lithuanian citizens who refused to serve in the Soviet/Russian army at the time of Lithuanian independence. And it has in the last few days seized a Lithuanian fishing vessel, which the Lithuanians allege was in international waters at the time, and tugged it off to Murmansk with twenty-eight people on board.

So, a Baltic trifecta. Regardless of how these events develop further, their common purpose appears to be at the very least to suggest to the Baltic governments that their distinguished visitors and supporters live far away and can’t or won’t do much to help them.

With Western attention again becoming absorbed in very difficult Middle Eastern issues, it is hard to be optimistic about the further outlook for Ukraine – or for the future of European values in the post-Soviet space. •

The post Russian disinformation and Western misconceptions appeared first on Inside Story.

Mongolia’s position between two great powers, China and Russia, continues to shape its development in fundamental ways. Under Soviet Union domination until 1991, the country has undergone a political transition to parliamentary democracy. Yet this vast landlocked entity (it covers an area three times that of France) with huge mineral deposits is more dependent on the immense markets to its south, in China, rather than on sparsely populated Siberia, to the north, for its export sales. And the pattern of those sales sums up Mongolia’s predicament – it is hugely dependent on one country, with 90 per cent of its US$4.3 billion in 2013 export earnings coming from its southern neighbour.

Barely three million people fill Mongolia’s vast territory, and historically it has been claimed by both China and Russia. Russian influence during the Cold War was enormous, with the country’s leadership largely selected in Moscow. The country was a target of fierce rhetoric during the Cultural Revolution, with the radical leadership in Beijing claiming that it was encouraging separatists in Inner Mongolia, the autonomous region that was part of the People’s Republic.

For a China always hunting for competitively priced resources to service its immense industrialisation process and developing internal market, Mongolia’s significance in the twenty-first century is easy to understand. A country just over the northern border with plentiful reserves of copper and coal is of immense strategic importance. Discussions about how best to service these needs were at the heart of President Xi Jinping’s visit to the capital, Ulan Bator, earlier this month. China agreed to help establish rail links and provide access to Chinese ports for Mongolian goods.

Despite the common economic interests, though, China has until now been surprisingly neglectful of its northern neighbour. This is the first visit by a Chinese head of state for over a decade. That neglect has contributed to Mongolia’s sense of vulnerability and pushed it into seeking other alliances. The new strategic partnership agreement with China, signed during Xi’s visit, comes only after security agreements Mongolia has struck with the United States and Russia.

Mongolia’s need to balance its two huge neighbours is neatly illustrated by the scheduled visit of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, just a month after President Xi’s visit. Once again, the focus will be on creating the right infrastructure to exploit the country’s huge resources.

Mongolia is well aware that it is in a vulnerable position. While it has no practical alternative to dependency on the Chinese market, the urge to diversify is still strong. And having a relationship which balances Russia and China would suit Mongolia well, at least in terms of security. The signing of a LNG pipeline deal between Russia and China in May after many years of negotiations adds a new dimension. Both China and Russia have a mutual interest in a stable border across which the gas can flow, and a cooperative Mongolia is a vital element.

For Russia, irritated by Europe and the United States and feeling isolated by events in Ukraine, finding a new market for its plentiful energy resources was an urgent priority. For China, uneasy about its reliance on supply routes from an unstable Middle East largely controlled by the United States or its allies, the relatively free northern access routes has become more appealing. Complex and often fractious ties with Russia have given way to raw pragmatism; the two countries simply have to do business with each other, and Mongolia is sitting at the crossroads.

Whether Mongolia can avoid being overwhelmed by its two neighbours is unclear. It can’t become too close to either, and it needs to do everything to preserve its own sovereign identity. During President Xi’s visit the two countries committed to an extra US$5 billion in annual trade. But that deal might carry a hefty political price tag. China will expect diplomatic allegiance, and will certainly tie Mongolia closer to its own strategic interests. If it is to avoid the potential pitfalls of this relationship, Mongolia will need a supple and well-considered foreign policy. It has allowed foreign companies like the mining conglomerate Rio Tinto to operate mines in the country, but the degree of diversification is very limited.

All of this means that being part of a trilateral entity with Russia and China is reassuring for Mongolia, and creates the illusion, if not the reality, of economic and diplomatic diversity. It means that both Russia and China must commit to respecting the country as an partner, and must at least attempt to forge a framework for working together and a vision of shared security. This is fine as long as Russia and China sustain their current pragmatic relationship. Whether that will continue is a good question.

Xi Jinping made Russia his first destination after being appointed country president in 2013. In this he was emulating his predecessor Hu Jintao, who did a similar thing ten years earlier. Putin reciprocated with what was seen as a successful visit in May. At the moment, Russia is isolated and needs China more, perhaps, than China needs it. But these things can change quickly. It is quite possible that differences over the Middle East, for instance – until now, Russia has led the response on Syria at the United Nations, while China has followed – or other areas might cause the two to start drifting apart. In that scenario, Mongolia will be torn.

Mongolia occupies one of the toughest strategic positions of any country in the world. Sparsely populated, rich in resources, poor in infrastructure, and with countries to north and south that are far stronger than it is, it is truly forced to live on its wits. It is hardly helped by the very low profile that it enjoys ly. As many in its government have said over the last two decades, Mongolia is like the filling of a sandwich. The last thing it wants is to be devoured, which is why this new trilateral arrangement is so significant. Its most precious possession is its sovereignty; like any country, preserving that must be its main priority, even while it aims to optimise its economic opportunities. •

The post Uneasy neighbourhood appeared first on Inside Story.

On 7 May, after months of unrelenting economic, military and propaganda campaigns against his fraternal neighbour, Ukraine, President Putin suddenly signalled what appeared to be a change in direction. He called on the “pro-Russian” separatists in the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk to postpone their referendums on independence, and declared that the presidential elections scheduled by Kiev for 25 May were a “step in the right direction.”

Earlier, on 28 April, Russian defence minister Sergey Shoigu had claimed that the Russian forces deployed on the Ukraine border for months had returned to their bases, a claim Putin repeated on 7 May. As became clear in each case, no such withdrawals were observed by anyone able to do so, which seemed to suggest that any softening of the Kremlin’s line on Ukraine was an optical illusion.

Seemingly in defiance of Putin’s calls for a postponement, the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk held their hastily scheduled “referenda” on 11 May, with slightly farcical claims of huge turnouts and Soviet-style electoral margins in their favour. But their appeal for Moscow to annex them, as it had earlier annexed Crimea, elicited no response. Putin has since declared again his readiness to accept the results of the Ukrainian presidential poll and repeated his assurance that the troops would be withdrawn; and this time there are indications that the troops may indeed be embarking on a draw-back (though many of the units could be redeployed within a couple of days).

Despite the more conciliatory tone, Putin has continued to make some ominous pronouncements: renewed threats of another gas-price war to force Ukraine to pay the abrupt increase Gazprom is demanding; claims that Ukraine is in the grip of a civil war; and the polite suggestion that his close friend Viktor Medvedchuk (Putin is godfather of one of Medvedchuk’s children), the most pro-Kremlin politician in the Ukrainian political class, should become the mediator between the Kiev government and the “rebels” in the eastern provinces. But to Western capitals, desperately eager to find a solution to the problem that would relieve them of any need for sterner measures, any change of tone will be grasped as a sign that Putin is finally ready to “de-escalate.”

Putin is not known for any propensity to take a backward step, much less sudden about-turns. In the matter of Ukraine, he has shown a particular determination to prevail from well before the military operation against Crimea. So what are we to make of Putin’s unexpected amiability? What may have brought it about, how genuine is it, and how long may it last? Have his objectives changed, or is this merely a tactical shift?

The heavy media coverage of the Ukrainian issue recently has probably made its fundamental grammar and vocabulary more familiar to the general reader. But to judge by commonly recurring omissions and misconceptions in public discussions some salient facts might be worth recalling.

While Russians and Ukrainians are ethnically, linguistically, religiously and culturally close, there are important differences between them, only partly flattened out by tsarist and Soviet conditioning. And those differences are apparent within Ukraine itself. For historical reasons, central and western Ukraine have come under the influence over centuries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Poland. A substantial minority concentrated in the west are Uniate Catholics by belief or tradition, whose homelands had never formed part of Russia before the end of the second world war. Though Orthodoxy is the religion, at least nominally, of the overwhelming majority, there is an important difference between the followers of the Moscow and Kiev Patriarchates of the Orthodox Church. The Moscow Patriarchate has always been favoured by Moscow and its Ukrainian loyalists, but the more nationalist Kiev Patriarchate may actually have a slightly larger following within Ukraine. Their relationship is troubled. There is also a much smaller Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Moscow rulers have often sought to suppress Ukrainian language and culture. The Soviet leadership in its early years was more liberal in such matters, but for much of its subsequent history it was very oppressive. Even since Ukraine became an independent state, Russia has refused to tolerate more than the most minimal cultural facilities for the millions of Ukrainians living in Russia. In Moscow-ruled Ukraine, by contrast, Russian enjoyed a privileged status and the use of Ukrainian was informally or formally tabooed. Independent Ukraine has taken modest steps to improve the relative position of Ukrainian within the state, which has tended to anger some Russian speakers.

But the use of Russian is under no serious threat, and repeated suggestions in the media that the government that emerged after the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) protests wants to ban Russian are misinformed. The bill in question, though politically foolish given its timing, was aimed not at “banning” Russian, a totally impossible objective, but rather at restoring greater official status to Ukrainian in an attempt to rebalance very partially the wrongs of the past. It was, anyway, very quickly vetoed by provisional president Oleksandr Turchynov and withdrawn.

The Soviet period was a series of demographic disasters for most of the country. But it was worst of all for the “bloodlands” of Ukrainian, Belarusian, Baltic and Polish settlement. Per capita, Jews, but also Ukrainians and Belarusians, suffered far more than Russians. Slips of the tongue equating Soviet citizens with “Russians” and referring to the twenty-five or thirty million Russian dead in the second world war serve to erase a universe of suffering sustained in the west of the country, in which Stalin’s regime was partly complicit as a perpetrator. Similarly, in the 1930s Ukrainians were among those national groups, together with Jews and Poles, who suffered disproportionately in the purges.

The early Bolshevik leadership had encouraged strong development of the languages and culture of the national minorities, partly to ensure victory over the Whites in the civil war of 1917–22. The Ukrainian communist leadership of the 1920s was active in this respect. From the late 1920s, however, Stalin brutally reversed this policy to favour Russian, and the whole emergent generation of Ukrainian national communist leaders and cultural activists was decimated.

Worst of all, in the process of brutally collectivising agriculture in Ukraine (which had been the breadbasket of the empire), and then extracting grain from it for export, Stalin inflicted terrible casualties. The culmination was the artificial famine of 1932–33, which led to mass starvation and innumerable acts of cruelty aimed at preventing the victims from receiving any relief. Historians debate both the numbers of dead and the Kremlin’s precise intent in manufacturing this holocaust (known in Ukrainian as holodomor), but whether it was genocide by some definition or not, at least three million Ukrainians perished (and some estimates go higher).

The Soviet regime suppressed discussion of these monstrous events and succeeded in largely obliterating them not only from the public domain, but also to a considerable degree from popular awareness. The Russians who were encouraged to migrate into depopulated parts of Ukraine have even less awareness of the past. Through discreet and indeed hazardous family communication, Ukrainians have retained at least a fragmented folk memory of the great famine, which naturally doesn’t always dispose them positively to Moscow. For its part, the Putin regime greatly resented pro-Western president Viktor Yushchenko’s attempts to restore a basic historical understanding among Ukrainian citizens of the holodomor, which was at odds with Putin’s policy of progressively rehabilitating Stalin and his works. When Viktor Yanukovych succeeded Yushchenko in 2010, he moved quickly to de-emphasise the issue and de-fang it of any anti-Russian accents, a difficult exercise in the circumstances.

Until recently, despite the burden of history, Ukrainians and Russians have continued to get on reasonably well with one another in Ukraine. Ukrainians living side by side with Russians in other parts of the post-Soviet sphere mingle easily, intermarry with Russians, and often adopt Russian ethnicity and the Russian language. The same has been largely true of Ukraine itself. It was not the case, Kremlin propaganda notwithstanding, that ethnic Russians faced any threats of persecution from Ukrainian fellow-citizens in the east of Ukraine before the invasion of Crimea. At most they might experience irritation at the public use of what they regarded as an inferior but basically comprehensible rustic dialect in public places or on street signs.

The main resentments of Russians in eastern Ukraine centred on the fact that the central government in Kiev, controlled by the Donetsk-based Yanukovych clan, had done nothing to improve their standard of living, rather the reverse. Meanwhile, as they were keenly aware, he and his notorious familia were dipping into the public purse right up to their armpits. Because of the cultural and historical differences between the east and west of the country, some political polarisation also existed, reflected in differing regional levels of support for the main political parties.

But the differences were less than virulent, and in the twenty-odd years since independence they had been successfully managed by elections that tended to produce regular alternation between eastern-oriented and western-oriented presidents. Eastern Ukrainians were mostly unenthusiastic about the pro-Western Orange revolution of 2004–05 and the Maidan protests of 2013–14, though a substantial minority in the east, including Russians and Russian-speakers, supported them as movements that might improve their standards of living and increase probity in public life.

In fact, there was a degree of structural pluralism in Ukrainian society, which contributed to the retention of more democratic freedoms in the country than in neighbouring Russia or Belarus, for example. In that sense, Ukraine was a more democratic polity than any other part of the former Soviet Union, apart from the Baltic states and Georgia, and remains so despite the current artificially induced turbulence.

But if it is a little more democratic than the others, it is certainly not more economically functional than they are. Russia, with its huge resource endowment, has done better than Ukraine economically, and so too have Belarus (with its huge Russian subsidies) and Kazakhstan, for example. For many Ukrainians, however, the most telling comparison was with its western neighbour Poland, which was on the same level as Ukraine in 1990 but has since leapt far ahead, particularly after it joined the European Union in 2004. Its per capita GDP is now well over twice as big as Ukraine’s, and Ukrainians who travel to Poland in search of short-term work can see and feel the difference and want to follow Poland’s example.

The European Union therefore had strong appeal in Ukraine, reinforcing the Western orientation of those already so inclined but also attracting many others. The idea of seeking some degree of economic integration with Europe came to enjoy significant support both in the population as a whole (though only a minority in the east), and in the political and other elites. As a result, Ukrainian leaders mostly tried to couple good relations with Russia with some degree of rapprochement with Europe. Opinion polling in recent years has regularly shown a strong plurality in the country favouring an Association Agreement, or AA, with Brussels, well ahead of the numbers supporting Putin’s geopolitically motivated Customs Union.

Yanukovych disappointed some of his eastern followers by working towards an AA, and Russian propaganda was able to capitalise on the issue effectively. Russian TV, heavily favoured by Russians in the eastern provinces, pushed the line that the AA would be the road to ruin for those provinces whose trade was more directed towards the Russian market. Moscow repeatedly threatened to penalise Ukraine’s trade with Russia in retaliation for Kiev’s concluding any deal with Brussels. And in 2013, it did indeed conduct a trade war against Ukraine, closing off its border to Ukrainian exports for more than a week in summer, and selecting as one of its key targets the chocolates produced by Roshen, the large confectionery concern owned by the “Chocolate King” (and, since last weekend, the Ukrainian president), Petro Poroshenko, whose TV station was strongly advocating adoption of the Western vector.

Kiev’s negotiations with Brussels were undoubtedly a blow to Putin’s hope of restoring a Soviet Union–lite, dominated from Moscow. Once he realised that there was a serious danger the AA might happen, his hostility became quite explicit. Some Western observers, lobbyists and officials – of the kind widespread in Germany, where they are known as Russlandversteher (those who understand Russia) – suggest that the European Union should have conciliated Russia by involving it closely in all the tortuous negotiations that took place with Kiev over the AA. This would, they argued, have reassured Russia and dealt with any objections it might have had.

Unlike Putin’s negotiations with Kiev, however, the European Union’s dealings with Ukraine were largely transparent, and conducted according to well-enunciated principles. There was no compelling reason to suppose that increased trade with Europe would make Ukraine a worse partner for Russia. Poland, for example, had greatly increased its trade with Russia after joining the European Union, and in general developed much better relations with Moscow.

The reason why Moscow did not like the idea of Ukraine joining was that it wanted Kiev to remain a subordinate partner contributing to Moscow’s geopolitical objectives and responding cooperatively to its decisions and initiatives. Any attempt to involve Moscow in the negotiations would have been abortive, leading swiftly to a Russian demand for a de facto right of veto on anything that might ever be agreed. Putin’s attitude to all this has been eloquently expressed by the measures he took against Ukraine once it did attempt to fly the coop.

Nonetheless, eastern Ukrainians anxious about their economic prospects had good reason to fear EU integration. But the real danger to them was that, as they had been warned, Moscow would launch punitive countermeasures to any Ukrainian decision for EU integration, based not on economic but on geopolitical considerations. They could sense that failing to accept the offer that couldn’t be refused would lead to trouble first and foremost for their rustbelt industries. Not surprisingly, a majority of respondents in the eastern provinces regularly told opinion pollsters that they favoured Moscow’s Customs Union, not the AA with Brussels. This gave Moscow valuable material to work with.

It was never the case, however, that the Russians and Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine wanted to become part of Russia. Opinion polling over the years has shown that a great majority of eastern Ukrainians – including many who speak Russian by preference or, indeed, identify themselves as Russians – want their region to remain part of Ukraine. There is a regional national identity, as well as an ethnic one. And even in Crimea, a majority of the inhabitants up to the invasion declared to opinion pollsters that they wished to remain in Ukraine. Despite this, the phony referendum that the new post-invasion bosses conducted showed an implausible turnout with a huge majority supporting annexation.

Western commentators are used to spin in their own political systems and are growing increasingly fed up with it. They are not, however, used to dealing with what the Russians call vranyo (roughly, lies of a particularly brazen and shameless kind). Vranyo was one of the basic pillars of the Soviet regime, and it continues to play a major and indeed an increasing role in the Putinist system. When someone reports electoral results affected by vranyo to Western listeners, however, they are inclined to assume that those results must be somewhere near the mark, spun a bit perhaps, but otherwise okay, and certainly indicative of something. In this case they were wrong, yet we all heard and read phrases in our media implicitly accepting that the results of the fraudulent referenda had some meaning. They did of course have a meaning, but it was not as a test of public opinion.

Events since the invasion and annexation of Crimea, up to and including Putin’s recent shift of tack, need to be considered in the light of the above. Western reporting and comment have sometimes fallen victim to their practitioners’ sincerely held principles – the belief, for example, that the truth must be somewhere in the middle, or that the object of widespread criticism, in this case Russia, is some kind of underdog, so let’s try to understand it. Russians are very talented people, and one of their traditional strengths, in which they are again excelling, is propaganda. They have run a crudely mendacious but highly effective and skilfully differentiated information war against Ukraine and its Western supporters over the past few months, which has done a great deal to reduce the fallout from their seizure of Crimea and destabilisation of Ukraine’s eastern provinces.

How, then, do recent events in and around Ukraine look if they’re summarised with considerably less vranyo? Russia’s conquest of Crimea was indeed a masterly operation displaying a great deal of ingenuity and originality, and making adroit use of some historical precedents. Following the trade war skirmishes and with assurances that it had no aggressive intentions, Moscow conducted very large military exercises in the west of Russia deploying up to 150,000 troops. These provided cover for the preparation of a detailed invasion plan for Crimea, which was then implemented with considerable strategic surprise. The invasion saw deployed a modest number of highly trained Russian spetsnaz (special forces) and units based in Crimea in accordance with, but violating the terms of, the Black Sea Fleet agreement with Kiev. Putin initially denied that any Russian forces were involved, but later, after the triumph, acknowledged that there had been.

The weak and somewhat demoralised Ukrainian forces on the peninsula, like the new Kiev government, were taken unawares. Any serious response was beyond their immediate capacity, and in any case they feared that any armed resistance they attempted might have provoked Moscow to stage a wider incursion. The invading forces wore masks and no military insignia (another of many breaches of law) and liaised flawlessly not just with other Russian units, but also with local militias and politicians who had clearly, under cover of the Russian presence on the peninsula, been thoroughly prepared to perform their roles.

One of Yanukovych’s first acts in 2010 had been to extend the Russian Fleet’s tenure in Crimea and resume the traditional military and security cooperation with Russia that his pro-Western predecessor Yushchenko had been trying to minimise. Moscow had used the cooperation of the Yanukovych years to good effect. Sergey Aksyonov, a marginal Crimean politician with 4 per cent support, Kremlin links, a criminal record (like Yanukovych), and money and connections to lend to the task, was parachuted into the role of “premier” of the new entity. His “government” then proclaimed its desire to join Russia and conducted a rushed and fraudulent “referendum” which produced an allegedly large turnout and huge majority ratifying this new reality. Monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and other Western observers were bullied, harassed and excluded, though exceptions were made for some Kremlin-friendly right-wing European extremist groups to observe and enthuse about the referendum.

After hinting he would not quickly accede to the Aksyonov government’s request, Putin then abruptly staged a huge annexation ceremony in the Kremlin to mark this momentous development. There, he made a stirring patriotic speech reaffirming the new Russian doctrine that any people anywhere who spoke Russian would be regarded by Moscow as people it had a responsibility to regard as its own citizens and to protect against any harm that might come their way. This doctrine is one of the key items that induced a wide variety of Western observers, including Hillary Clinton and the Prince of Wales, to comment on the parallels with Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. The entire Crimean operation was accomplished within no more than three weeks.

Whereas Western experts had been critical of Russia’s military performance in their crushing of Georgia in 2008, this time, after getting over its initial surprise, they acknowledged that technically this was a classy performance, and one that indicated that Putin’s big military build-up – to which EU and NATO countries have basically failed to respond – is yielding impressive results.

Western countries appeared to be as much taken by surprise as the Ukrainians themselves. They spoke of costs and consequences for Russia, but were unable to agree on imposing any severe enough to worry Putin greatly. While Western countries have said they would never recognise the annexation as legal, there is a strong sense that most of the Europeans at least have accepted it as a fait accompli. There seems to be an unstated but widespread acceptance of Putin’s argument that Khrushchev’s decision to allocate Crimea to Ukraine was a silly misunderstanding that should be put aside. Crimea is Russian, end of story.

It should be remembered that reputable opinion polls had shown right up to the invasion that despite the fact that some 58 per cent of Crimeans identified themselves as Russians, there had never been a majority that favoured Crimea’s joining Russia. The Crimean Tatars (some 12 per cent of the population), who had been deported by Stalin towards the end of the second world war with 50 per cent fatalities, were particularly emphatic in their opposition. After making one or two conciliatory gestures in their direction, the Kremlin seemed to abandon the attempt and thousands have now chosen exile in central and western Ukraine. The Crimean Tatar leader has been banned from entering “Russia,” and their main political organ has been threatened with closure as an “extremist organisation.”

These events recall much that was done in the Stalinist era by way of territorial acquisition and the erection of totalitarian structures. The human casualties, it should be noted, have been much fewer; although it was carried out by highly armed and menacing troops, the Crimean operation was not gratuitously violent. But the parallels with the 1940s are nonetheless striking.

Meanwhile, Moscow and its fifth column in Ukraine have continued their work destabilising the provinces of eastern Ukraine where pro-Russian sentiment is strongest. At first glance, the modus operandi seemed to mirror the Crimean operation: heavily armed men in anonymous military fatigues with full face-masks and no insignia; strong evidence of a controlling Russian presence; and detachments of local sympathisers helping out, including civilian and babushka groups to provide a human shield for the operations and a local legitimation.

Again there was a high degree of coordination between assaults on public buildings of strategic importance in various major eastern centres, as the violence “spread” to different targeted cities, which formed a neat and strategic band running through eastern Ukraine down to the Black Sea. As Putin and others spoke ominously of Novorossiya (the tsarist name for much of present-day Ukraine), attempts were made to extend the insurgency into the Black Sea provinces stretching across the south of Ukraine.

Armed groups of militiamen and toughs roamed the towns looking for useful work for themselves. They particularly concentrated their violence and intimidation on locals who spoke Ukrainian, flew Ukrainian flags or took part in pro-Maidan demonstrations. They were helped in their activities by the passivity or even collusion of the police and security forces in the east, which had become wholly dominated in recent years by Yanukovych’s Party of Regions machine, and appeared to be quite happy for the pro-Russian militias to take over control of the region. The object of all this activity seemed to be to weaken resistance to the new order that was about to be instituted, as in Crimea.

But differences between the two campaigns became more apparent as time went on. Some targeted cities resisted, and effectively, even where there seemed to be a strong pro-Russian element in the population. Recovering from their initial shock, the Kiev authorities began to resist with armed force, using such loyal military and security units as they could muster to take the fight back to that new ethnic category, the “pro-Russians” in the east. Casualties began to mount. Local residents sometimes became angry with the militiamen who were undermining their way of life and behaving in an increasingly unpredictable way.

Key oligarchs, who had mostly been playing a waiting game or even colluding with the trouble-makers, joined the resistance. Some of them, who had been recruited as local governors by Kiev, used their economic power against the separatists. When Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, who had initially been virtually invisible, suddenly deployed some of his vast workforce to challenge the thugs and police the streets, there was a sense that the tide was turning.

The morale and discipline of the attackers seemed to slacken, and they seemed increasingly to involve themselves in common criminal activity, often directed against minority groups, especially Roma. As with Yanukovych’s crowd-dispersal operations on the Maidan, groups of titushki (hired thugs) appeared to be involved in the action, some of them reportedly admitting they were being paid to inflict violence on pro-Ukrainians. Media reporting began to focus on the criminal element in the east, as did the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission, whose second report on the situation laid the burden of responsibility heavily on the pro-Russian camp for the killings, abductions, beatings and harassment that they were observing.

Clearly, if Putin’s intention had been to overrun some of the eastern provinces as a preliminary to annexation, things were no longer running smoothly. Destabilisation was relatively easy; pacifying and then holding new territories in the east would be more difficult, even in Yanukovych’s home territory of Donetsk and Luhansk, where the “pro-Russians” were much stronger than elsewhere. It needs to be emphasised again that while there are more Russians and more pro-Russian sentiment in the eastern provinces, strong majorities there, including in Donetsk and Luhansk, favour remaining part of Ukraine.

This was no doubt one of the reasons why Putin reacted as he did when the Donetsk and Luhansk leaders organised referendums and declared themselves sovereign “people’s republics” (another bizarrely nostalgic formulation from the Stalinist past). He decided first to advocate that the votes be abandoned, and then to decline their request to be annexed. As well as distancing himself from his own agents and their zealot followers, he began to reach out to what looked increasingly likely to be a new leadership group in Kiev after the presidential elections on 25 May. While the sanctions to date had not seemingly made a huge impression on him, he was painfully aware that the Russian economy, stagnant already for some time, was heading into recession, and the possibility of more resolute sanctions being imposed, as had been threatened if he tried to disrupt those elections, was a serious potential danger.

As it became increasingly evident that the new president, with a huge and convincing majority, would be Petro Poroshenko, maintaining the fiction that Yanukovych was still the legitimate leader was becoming more difficult. Putin has recently repeated the claim that Yanukovych was still the rightful leader, but he has also said several times that he is prepared to engage with Poroshenko. He may well see in Poroshenko an opportunity as well as a challenge.

Poroshenko has emphasised his pro-Maidan credentials recently and declared his full commitment to European integration and the recovery of Crimea. But he is an oligarch who has become a billionaire mainly through his Russian trade links and investments, and has in the past been associated with Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, as well as with more pro-Western political formations. He mingles easily with Russians, has a Russian daughter-in-law and has emphasised his readiness to negotiate with Moscow – and with Putin personally, of whom he has spoken publicly with diplomatic respect. In a word, Putin may have felt that Poroshenko is more his kind of Ukrainian than any of the other post-Yanukovych leaders, like prime minister Arseniy Yatseniuk or the former provisional president, Turchynov.

If so, he may be heading for something of a disappointment. Poroshenko is a tough and experienced politician with a huge majority behind him, including wins in the eastern provinces. And he has begun very forcefully. Responding to a heavily armed ambush on a Ukrainian army checkpoint south of Donetsk, where the well-trained raiders’ objective was clearly to kill as many as possible (sixteen died and many more were injured), and the armed seizure of Donetsk airport several days later, Poroshenko ordered a major armed assault to recapture the airport, resulting in the deaths of nearly fifty separatists. And he repeated that EU integration and Crimea were for him not negotiable.

Russia’s sustained pressure on Ukraine – the manipulative gas pricing; the trade boycotts; the collusion with pro-Russian elements in Ukraine; even the carrots offered to Kiev for compliance; and certainly the seizure of Crimea, including Ukraine’s crucial offshore hydrocarbon assets, and the destabilisation of eastern Ukraine – looks very much like neo-imperial aggression. And it is neo-imperial aggression by a country with a very bad record in that respect. At a time when other European imperial powers have long since withdrawn from their imperial possessions, whether in Europe or beyond it, such behaviour seems anachronistic as well as unconscionable, and inimical to any decent security system for Eurasia or the world. Hence Obama’s lectures about Russia being on the wrong side of history – not terribly effective as a way of influencing Moscow’s behaviour, but an understandable sentiment.

Quite apart from the poor Ukrainians, who’ve been invaded and had a vicious civil war artificially inseminated in their eastern provinces, can any of this be good for security more broadly? The Russians were in breach of numerous instruments, including the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, whereby Ukraine agreed to divest itself of its nuclear weapons in exchange for assurances offered to it by the United States, Britain, Russia and, later, France that it would not be subjected to any military or economic coercion by anyone. Yet it has been subjected to both and multiple times.

Can that do anything positive for the nuclear non-proliferation regime? And what are other countries with large Russian imperial minorities to make of Ukraine’s remaining effectively undefended? What of Moldova, Kazakhstan or even Belarus’s surviving sovereignty? And what of the Baltic states, especially Estonia (which has already been subjected to a cyberwar backed up by organised turbulence within its Russian minority) and Latvia (where a high proportion of its big Russian minority has told opinion pollsters that they support Russia’s invasion of Crimea)?

Yet Russia’s view of the whole saga, especially the last few months of it, has been taken up by numerous Western commentators eager to set out what they obviously believe to be the deeper reality of the seemingly blindingly obvious: that Russia’s behaviour is reprehensible and needs to be restrained. There are some who blame the victim, pointing to the poor management of successive Ukrainian governments and suggesting that they are so irredeemably incompetent and corrupt that nothing better can ever be expected from them. The valiant efforts of the Maidan protesters notwithstanding, Kiev has exhausted all reasonable patience. In any case they are in Russia’s sphere of influence, so let them beg Moscow for mercy, while we wash our hands of them. This line of thinking seldom sees any security downsides for any country worth shedding a tear for.

Another school of thought sees this as yet another case for which the United States must take the blame, with its endless malevolent interference in other people’s affairs. It failed to give the new Russian democracy of the early 1990s any support and brazenly expanded NATO practically up to Moscow’s door. Any Russian leader would have reacted badly to that, justifiably fearing that Washington was trying to destroy it. Some of these thinkers seem to be guided by the principle that wherever the United States takes a stand, they can immediately sense where decent or insightful people should be, and that is on the other side.

Then there are the economists who argue that Russia has actually given its neighbours generous discounts and yet they have thrown the money away. Saving Ukraine from itself would be ruinously expensive for the West, so it’s fortunate that Russia wants to take it over. If we agree to their doing so, we will save ourselves billions of dollars, and how good is that? This line of thought is a subset of the blame-the-victim thinkers, and it shares their lack of interest in any possible security downsides of a Russian takeover.

Yet another prominent group are the perpetual friends of Russia. Often these are durable lefties who’ve retained a sympathy for Russia through all the purges, Hungaries, Czech Springs, Cubas, North Koreas and Venezuelas, all the way to the collapse of communism and beyond, and who still see Russia as a country to be protected from its enemies. They will sometimes be found on the pages of the Guardian or the Nation, and they are typically a subset of the blame-the-Americans school, despite Washington currently having its most liberal administration since Jimmy Carter’s, and possibly beyond.

Let us not forget the realists, who also see what Putin has done as what any Russian leader would have done. For them, there’s no point in being indignant; nature has taken its course and resistance would be dangerous folly. Despite their “realism,” these thinkers seem to be strangely insouciant about any possible strategic downsides of Russia being thus encouraged to make further land-grabs from other of its neighbours, till it finally reaches the next circumference of hostile encircling states which also need to be dealt with. The explanation for this paradox is probably that the morbid realists haven’t, for one reason or another, any affection for the current victims of the bear (a furry image they like to deploy to make Russian aggression seem more cuddly). If we give some of them to the Russians, the bear will be sated and we’ll all be able to enjoy some realistic peace in our time.

Both of the preceding two categories overlap with the left, particularly of course the friends of Russia, and sometimes the hard left. They are often particularly susceptible to the Kremlin propaganda line, which has stated from the outset of its aggression that Ukraine is mortally threatened by vicious Ukrainian anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. This line has actually been running since Moscow took over much of Eastern Europe at the end of the second world war, has thus given gallant service and still earns the Kremlin handsome rewards. People with a weak understanding of recent Ukrainian developments (and Russian for that matter) are particularly susceptible to it, and responding to it makes them feel both hard-headedly realist, and deeply virtuous.

It is not a matter of debate that Ukraine, like many other European countries, has seen in the past a great deal of anti-Semitism, a lot of it violent and nasty. And it is true that the Svoboda party and other smaller groups in the Maidan coalition were not free of it. But it was a weak component, given great prominence only by the fact that as Yanukovych increasingly resorted to violence the hard men at its fringes who were prepared to use physical violence gained greater prominence. But the overwrought commentators could not be consoled. The issue was grotesquely overestimated, while there was an equally grotesque underestimation of the presence of very similar forces in the east (which have since come to undeniable prominence). In fact, Jews were quite strongly represented in the Maidan coalition, and senior rabbis repeatedly emphasised that they did not feel seriously threatened in Ukraine either east or west.

Given Ukraine’s history, the amount of anti-Semitism, as opposed to militant nationalism (not the same thing, and not necessarily always “far right”), is at present modest. And as for the political representation of such forces in the country, the best measure is provided by the European parliamentary elections on 22–25 May: in France, Denmark and Austria, the far right got 20 per cent or more of the vote; in Ukraine it received only 2.2 per cent, despite the fact that Russia’s actions were the ideal catalyst for more of it to have developed.

Finally, in this incomplete list of Russlandversteher, we have the hard-right extremists. Recently the director of Sydney’s Lowy Institute, Michael Fullilove, deplored the relative absence of the left from the ranks of those deeply concerned about the events in Ukraine. He made a good point, and could perhaps with due qualifications have extended it beyond Australia, which was his primary concern. But some excellent pieces have also appeared in left-wing publications (see, for example, Brendan Simms in the New Statesman).

But it is the hard right’s enthusiasm for Putin and all his works that is perhaps even more dismaying, particularly in the light of their stellar performance in last weekend’s elections to the European parliament. It takes one to know one of course. While Putin has many Soviet characteristics, he has increasingly been selling himself and his regime as exemplars of traditional conservative values, while continuing to clutch the gullible old left to his bosom.

Putin’s conservative values include suppressing democracy, empowering the reactionary and KGB-subservient Russian Orthodox hierarchy, encouraging people calling themselves Cossacks to undertake bully-boy roles in public (including whipping Pussy Riot performers), denouncing and oppressing gays, and pursuing territorial aggrandisement. The European hard right reciprocates warmly. Marine Le Pen, for example, has twice visited Moscow recently and seemed to get on famously with that relentlessly aggressive nationalist with KGB connections, deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin. Representatives from such parties were invited to observe the Crimean referendum to attest to its strict conformity with best democratic practice. I was always taught that hard left and hard right have more in common than either would wish to acknowledge. In this case, it would certainly seem so.

But Putin and his foreign minister Sergey Lavrov are now sounding more reasonable. Is this a good thing? Well it’s an improvement on Putin’s annexation Sabbath in the Kremlin. And perhaps some good will come of it. But one would hope that Western leaders can show a little more resolution and unity than has been evident thus far.

It has always seemed that Moscow’s minimal demand beyond seizing Crimea is that Ukraine be constitutionally restructured to create a federal or even a confederal state in which the eastern provinces, and through them Moscow, would have an effective veto on major decisions, especially regarding the country’s external orientation. Alternatively, perhaps, Moscow might wish to see immutable constitutional provisions directly inserted that precluded Ukraine from seeking membership of NATO or the European Union or any equivalent arrangement (an AA through the Eastern Partnership program for example). Moscow also urges that the Russian language must have guaranteed status as a state language. It is evident, moreover, that its aspires to have these sorts of constitutional provisions guaranteed by some instrument.

Finlandisation is also being proffered by generous Western cheerleaders, free with other people’s favours, as the ideal solution for Ukraine, just at the time when Ukrainian events have led to another wave of anxious discussion in neutral Finland and Sweden as to whether their security arrangements are adequate for present circumstances. Ukraine’s post-Yanukovych leadership has repeatedly indicated a readiness to discuss greater devolution of powers to the provinces, but within the bounds of a unitary state.

Federalisation of the kind Moscow would like does not seem to be popular outside the separatist movements in eastern Ukraine. It’s hard therefore to see it being accepted by any credible domestic democratic process in Ukraine. Just how Moscow would be able to get what it wants is therefore unclear. Presumably it would respond to its disappointment with the outcome of any domestic or process in such matters in the usual way, by renewing its destabilisation of the eastern provinces or by inflicting another gas war or heavy-handed trade boycott on Ukraine. Similarly if Poroshenko proves to be less amenable to pressure than Moscow is hoping (he says he is going to divest himself of much of his business empire), it may regret having agreed to engage with him in the first place. Russia has a wide range of punitive measures to draw on in any such situation.

By their invasion and destabilisation campaigns, the Russians have in large measure discredited themselves with the Ukrainian mainstream for the immediate future at least. If they can’t annex part of eastern Ukraine, or secure special constitutional prerogatives for their proxies there, they would be facing a poor outlook. This leaves one with the suspicion that if the current tone of sweet reason does not yield adequate rewards, some incident may occur that will overturn the chessboard and confront Kiev with a renewal of violence or economic blackmail. •

The post Ukraine: time to cut a deal? appeared first on Inside Story.

RUSSIAN soldiers have sown a minefield to mark the new border between Crimea and the Ukrainian mainland, but it is unclear how long this monument to Vladimir Putin’s ambitions will stand. The future of Ukraine still hangs in the balance. As Russia celebrates the annexation of Crimea, there are disturbing signs that the Kremlin’s campaign to reverse the Ukrainian revolution has only just begun.

One glimpse of the geopolitical ambitions of Putin’s inner circle came from the well-connected Valerii Solovei, a distinguished historian and a professor at Moscow’s Institute of International Relations, the training school for Russian diplomats. On 3 March, Solovei revealed that he had discussed the current crisis with several highly-placed Kremlin “insiders.” They told him that the decision to invade Crimea had been made by Putin and a handful of top officials. If the community puts up no serious resistance, Russia would annex eastern Ukraine.

Such a move would deprive Ukraine of major cities like Donetsk, Kharkov, Odessa, and Dnepropetrovsk. It would tear away its industrial heartland, its shipyards, its coalfields and its agricultural breadbasket. For a country already brought to its knees by economic collapse and political upheaval, such a partition would be nothing short of a cataclysm.

That the Kremlin reserves the right to extend its conquests in Ukraine is suggested by its attitude towards the new Ukrainian government. When asked about Russia’s solemn commitment in the 1994 Budapest treaty to uphold Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, Putin endorsed the views of those “experts” who have argued that the uprising in Kiev caused an institutional rupture comparable to the Bolshevik revolution. The result was a new state, “and with this state and in relation to this state we have not signed any binding documents.”

The Kremlin’s spin doctors are unperturbed by the fact that Ukraine’s democratically elected parliament has restored constitutional continuity by announcing elections and voting for a new government. They have repeatedly likened Ukrainian MPs to hostages, incapable of rational judgement because of the neo-Nazi terror that is supposedly raging on the streets of Kiev.

No less ominous is the Russian state’s attachment to the ousted and disgraced president, Viktor Yanukovych. Even as they treat Yanukovych as a political pariah, Russian officials continue to recognise him as the legitimate head of state. In the process, they are buttressing their legal case for full-scale intervention. The letter from Yanukovych waved before the Security Council by Russia’s UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, was a call not merely to amputate the Crimean peninsula but also to invade the entire country.

The idea that Russian troops will be welcomed as liberators is being fostered by the so-called Russian Spring in the cities of southeast Ukraine. For several days after Yanukovych’s flight, conditions there appeared to stabilise with the news that a transitional government had been formed. In response, local politicians began to reintegrate into the Ukrainian political system by starting preparations for the May elections. But on the weekend of 1–2 March, groups of pro-Russian youths staged almost identical actions in cities across the southeast, marching under the Russian tricolour, attacking local supporters of the Euromaidan uprising, and attempting to storm local government buildings.

This tumult is far from a spontaneous uprising of the persecuted and the disenfranchised. There are clear signs that its radical core consists of ultranationalists. The ringleader in Donetsk was Pavel Gubarev, a charismatic local businessman, who emerged from obscurity to become leader of the People’s Militia of Donbass and then the self-proclaimed “people’s governor.” On 6 March, he was arrested by Ukrainian security forces and transferred to Kiev. His supporters have cast doubt on the authenticity of photographs, now circulating on the internet, of a younger Gubarev wearing the swastika-like symbol of Russian National Unity, an organisation overtly modelled on Hitler’s Nazi Party. But it is clear from Gubarev’s blog that he belongs to the ultranationalist subculture.

Other heroes of the agitation in southeast Ukraine have come from Russia, where social networking sites have coordinated an influx of volunteers to fight for the reunification of the motherland. The Russian flag was raised over the regional government building in Kharkov not by an oppressed resident but by one of these newcomers, who then tarnished the authenticity of his feat by boasting about it on the internet.

Perhaps the most exemplary “tourist” is Aleksei Khudyakov, a twenty-seven-year-old Muscovite who was at the centre of the agitation in Donetsk. Khudyakov was a prominent activist of Young Russia, a Kremlin-backed youth organisation that for nearly a decade has harassed Putin’s opponents and collaborated closely with extreme nationalists. Most recently, he headed Shield of Moscow, a gang of vigilantes who dressed in balaclavas and wielded baseball bats to hunt down illegal immigrants and hand them over to police. In September last year, he was arrested for his role in a raid on a migrant hostel that provoked a riot.

The presence of interlopers like Khudyakov may explain the extraordinary insensitivity of the “separatists” who disturbed the peace of Nikolaev, a regional capital near the Black Sea. Although the city was a hotbed of protest against police abuses, they chanted, “Glory to Berkut!,” the notorious interior ministry forces responsible for the brutal treatment of protesters on Kiev’s Maidan. The slogan was enough to inspire ten thousand locals to demonstrate the following day for peace and against the infiltration of provocateurs.

EXTERNAL subversion is undeniable, but it would be misleading to ignore the role of domestic factors in the destabilisation of southeast Ukraine. Local power structures were dominated by the corrupt elite of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, who are now weakened by the breakdown of his regime. On the one hand, this old guard is threatened by the efforts of the victorious democrats in Kiev to purge its most odious representatives. The mayors of both Kharkov and Donbass have been arrested on criminal charges. On the other, there is mass discontent over corruption and falling living standards. Understandably, some functionaries and law-enforcement officers have provided support to the secessionist agitation. Others have been grudging and inept defenders of Ukrainian statehood.

The most vociferous Russian advocates of the dismemberment of Ukraine are a phalanx of pro-Kremlin nationalists. Their standard-bearer is Egor Kholmogorov, a ubiquitous media commentator and one of the most influential and erudite ideologues of the post-Soviet generation of Russian nationalists. In his “Crimean Theses,” a forty-point manifesto released on 2 March, Kholmogorov set out a plan for the subjugation of Ukraine. His starting point was that “every people has the right to reunification within the boundaries of one state,” and that only expediency can limit the Russian people’s exercise of this right.

Kholmogorov took the Kremlin’s dogma about the non-existence of the Ukrainian state to its logical conclusion. “Russia has no reason,” he declared, “to recognise the rule of the illegitimate regime in Kiev over the southeast.” Any attempt by the Ukrainian military to use force should be regarded as the actions of “illegal armed formations” that must be disbanded. Russia’s task is not merely to absorb the Crimean peninsula but also to partition mainland Ukraine. Russian soldiers will guarantee the security of the “illegally severed territories and the Russian population of Ukraine” while referendums take place on reunification with Russia. In the western rump of the country, they will wage an “anti-terrorist operation” to secure nuclear power stations and detain those involved in anti-Russian acts of terrorism.

Kholmogorov’s belligerence is echoed by some of the Kremlin’s most trusted propagandists. Sergei Markov, a semi-institutional figure who sits in Russia’s Public Chamber, argued on 8 March in an op-ed piece that there would be war because the “extremists” who seized power in Kiev “want to see a bloodbath.” Russia did not need Crimea, but it would not leave the people of southeast Ukraine at the mercy of “Russophobic and neo-Nazi gangs.”

The “Russian Spring” in southeast Ukraine was supposed to legitimise Russian intervention, but it has disappointed the expectations of many of its Russian admirers. Nowhere has it become a mass uprising. Nowhere has it produced crowds large enough to establish a stranglehold over public space and paralyse state institutions. Nowhere have its leaders acquired the authority to speak in the name of the population when requesting Russian assistance against the “neo-Nazi junta” in Kiev. A week after fantasising about Russian soldiers guaranteeing plebiscites for self-determination in southeast Ukraine, Kholmogorov lamented on his blog that Putin had been ready to go beyond Crimea if the conditions were favourable, but it was only “enthusiasts” who rose up in support of reunification.

“People power” is not, however, the only available pretext for a Russian invasion of the Ukrainian mainland. Although its diplomats are intransigent opponents of intervention to protect civilians in Syria, the Russian state uses the jargon of the “Responsibility to Protect” when it suits its purposes. In 2008 the Kremlin justified the invasion of Georgia as a humanitarian measure to stop a genocidal massacre. Now warnings about imminent atrocities have become a leitmotif of Russian official statements about Ukraine. During his press conference on 3 March, Putin was asked about the risk of war. In his response, he struck a pose as a defender of all Ukrainians, not just the Russians of Crimea:

Listen carefully. I want you to understand me clearly: if we make that decision, it will only be to protect Ukrainian citizens. And let’s see those troops try to shoot their own people, with us behind them – not in the front, but behind. Let them just try to shoot at women and children! I would like to see those who would give that order in Ukraine.

This warning clearly made an impression on the ringleaders of the “Russian Spring.” Secessionist militants appear to have shifted their energies from civil disobedience to acts of mob violence that are likely to provoke bloodshed. On 14 March, they besieged the Kharkov headquarters of Right Sector, the alliance of radical nationalists and skinheads that had supported the Euromaidan. In an exchange of gunfire, two of the attackers were killed. The Russian foreign ministry promptly seized on the incident as proof that Right Sector was running amok. In its press-release, the skirmish between two groups of violent men became a provocation against “peaceful demonstrators, who had come to express their attitude to the so-called new regime.”

IN HIS ADDRESS to Russia’s Federal Assembly on 18 March, Putin appeared to step back from the brink. He cautioned Ukrainians against listening to the scaremongering of those who claimed that other regions of their country would follow Crimea’s path to secession. “We don’t want the partition of Ukraine,” he protested, “We don’t need it.” But he offered no olive branch to the new Ukrainian government. In Putin’s words, the revolution that toppled Yanukovych was nothing less than a “coup” led by “nationalists, Russophobes and anti-Semites” who used “terror, murder and pogroms” to seize power and who now dominate public life in Ukraine. He repeated his mantra that “there is no legitimate executive authority in Ukraine now, nobody to talk to.” Those who inhabit the corridors of power in Kiev were “impostors,” puppets of militant mobs, and “ideological heirs of Bandera, Hitler’s accomplice during World War II.”

There is nothing new about Putin’s efforts to brand an anti-authoritarian revolution as a fascist attack on Russia. For years after Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004, Kremlin propagandists used identical language to smear both the “orangists” and their democratic sympathisers in Russia. But it is a dangerous ploy. Ukraine is a fragile and complex multiethnic society, where bilingualism is a norm and where identities rarely fit into the rigid categories of nationalist ideologues. By attempting to transform a political struggle into an ethnic one, the Kremlin is fanning the very extremism that it pretends to oppose. By refusing to recognise the new regime in Kiev and by raising the possibility of further military intervention, it is forcing ordinary people in southeast Ukraine to choose sides. By using ultranationalists and paramilitary groups as proxies, it is helping to mobilise the potential combatants of a civil war.

Countless Russian intellectuals and opposition activists have raised the alarm about the dangers of the Kremlin’s confrontation with Ukraine. Many fear an irreparable rupture with a nation to which they are bound by history, by culture and by family ties. Putin shows no sign of listening to these voices of caution. Instead, he is silencing them. The cable television station Dozhd, the news website lenta.ru, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and four leading opposition websites, are only the most conspicuous targets of a crackdown on dissent that is inexorably narrowing Russia’s public sphere.

The effect has been to widen the gulf between Russians and Ukrainians. As Russia’s moderates become less audible, the Kremlin’s propagandists are defining Ukrainian perceptions of what Russia represents: an aggressive, mendacious power bent on crushing a popular uprising and restoring dictatorship. In the words of Anton Dmitriev, an ethnic Russian blogger based in Kiev: “One should not think that the Ukrainians hate Russians – they do not. But Russian propaganda is doing everything to kindle xenophobia and chauvinism.” For Dmitriev, the ultimate paradox is that the Kremlin and its ferocious media boss, Dmitry Kiselyov, “have done much more for the development of Ukrainian nationalism than the Soviet regime during its entire existence.”

The fracturing of a common cultural space is a tragedy both for Ukrainians and for Russians. But it may be dwarfed by what is to come. As they sow minefields, the invaders of Crimea are also sowing the seeds of ethnic hatred. We know from the history of the Balkans that it is the ordinary people of the region, inhabitants of a meeting place of cultures, faiths and languages, who will reap the whirlwind. •

The post Putin on the edge of an abyss appeared first on Inside Story.

MANY foreign observers have joined with commentators within the Russian regime to declare Vladimir Putin’s performance on the world stage during 2013 a triumph. Russians of dissident persuasion have tended to acknowledge his successes, too, while accentuating the downsides in the hope of descrying a trend, and I will be attempting to do something similar. But first the triumphs.

The one that has attracted most applause, some of it grudging, is Syria, where Putin stalwartly defended his ally Bashar al-Assad as he continued to use what are ostensibly national defence assets to massacre large numbers of his own population. Until the conflict broke out, Western observers had made favourable comparisons between Bashar, once a respectable London ophthalmologist, and his father, Hafez al-Assad (though the son was considered not nearly as smart). Even when Bashar far outstripped his ruthless father’s repressive death count, Putin’s support never wavered. Vetoes, watered down UN resolutions, smokescreens to throw doubt on evidence that Assad’s regime used chemical weapons on its own people – no exertion by the Russian diplomatic and propaganda apparatus was spared to defend its Syrian allies.

Correctly assessing that Western allies were reluctant to risk becoming involved in another unpredictable Middle Eastern conflict, Putin proposed that the United States and Russia lead a push to rid Assad of his chemical arsenal. This project, while worthy enough in itself, has served brilliantly to change the subject and get Assad off the hook.

Unabated are the slaughter (over 130,000 dead to date), the floods of refugees (six million internally displaced, over two million seeking refuge in neighbouring states and beyond), the destabilisation of the entire region along the Sunni–Shia faultline, and the opportunities for al Qaeda and other extremisms to flourish. Meanwhile, Assad’s minority-Alawite regime, with armed assistance from Hezbollah and continuing military and diplomatic support from Russia, has avoided meaningful negotiations and restored its military advantage.

Post-communist Russia presents its continued support for militant, anti-Western regimes favoured by Soviet rulers – those of Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, the Assads and the Teheran mullahs, for example – as part of its effort to curb Islamist infiltration of Caucasian terrorist groups in Russia: a contribution to the “war on terror,” that is, a line of argument that many in the West accept. It is certainly true that the insurgencies in Russia’s north Caucasus are becoming more Islamist as time goes on; and it’s true that Moscow is increasingly confronted with a very serious problem, of both intractable internal insurgency and recurring terrorist attacks aimed at civilian targets in the Russian heartland.

But it is also true that the Caucasian insurgencies were initially secular independence movements responding to generations of brutal Soviet and Tsarist oppression. The Tsarist conquest of the North Caucasus in the nineteenth century caused mass casualties, and Stalin’s wartime deportation in inhuman conditions of the entire Chechen population (and other national groups) led to a fatality rate estimated at one-in-four. Yeltsin’s and Putin’s wars to suppress Chechen independence after the fall of communism killed tens of thousands of combatants, mainly Chechens, and tens of thousands more civilians (including many ethnic Russians).

In Chechnya itself, Putin finally opted for “indigenisation,” and the Chechen Republic has now been largely pacified by the brutal dictatorship of the former insurgent, Ramzan Kadyrov, with generous funding from Moscow. Putin has also occasionally tried more conciliatory policies of economic development in the region more generally, but without great success. The insurgency once centred in Chechnya has meanwhile spread to neighbouring Muslim entities and acquired increasingly Islamist overtones. But the connections between Caucasian insurgents and Middle Eastern insurgencies should not be overstated; and in any case, they have come about largely as a result of failed repressive policies by Moscow.

Russia has also been active diplomatically elsewhere in the Middle East. In Egypt, for example, American disapproval of the military coup against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood gave Putin a chance to regain a foothold in a country where Russian influence has been minimal for decades. In Iraq, Putin has been courting the Shi-ite dominated Al-Maliki regime in pursuit of lost oil contracts, also securing in 2012 a $4 billion deal on the sale of arms to Baghdad. Western commentators largely agree that Russia is now “back” in the Middle East.

The Snowden windfall

One of Putin’s most dazzling triumphs over the United States seemingly just fell in his lap. Edward Snowden’s illegal release of tens of thousands of secret documents from the United States and many of its allies, including Australia, has been hailed by many Western intellectuals and politicians as a triumph for human rights protection. The issues raised incidentally by the leaks are no doubt a worthy topic for public debate, and wariness about the growing power of all states in the cyber-age is entirely understandable.

What is less understandable is why such a doughty fighter for human rights would seek refuge first in Hong Kong, where he was reported to have been accorded hospitality by an organisation linked to Chinese security, then in that exemplary champion of human rights protection, Putin’s Russia. Whether and how much Snowden has advanced the protection of citizens’ rights is not yet clear. But what is clear is that the steady dripfeed of documents, often seemingly chosen to embarrass, divide and damage Western democracies, has placed great strains on the effectiveness and cohesion of the Western strategic community. To take one example, on 20 January this year, Der Spiegel reported that the German federal prosecutor has declared that there is sufficient evidence “to open a politically explosive investigation into NSA spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.” Such developments strike the Russian foreign/security elite as great victories for itself.

Exactly when Putin became aware that this huge espionage windfall, perhaps the most copious if not the most crucial in the history of East–West relations, was being dropped in his lap is unclear. But given his intensely zero-sum approach to the United States, NATO, the European Union and the West generally, it is a gift that keeps on giving. No Soviet “active measures” to drive wedges through the trans-Atlantic consensus have ever been so spectacularly and publicly successful.

As has been often noted – and usually over-emphasised – Snowden’s presence in Russia is not without its embarrassing aspects for Putin. While the schadenfreude is delicious, it has enraged Washington to a possibly greater degree than Putin would have wished. It does, moreover, raise the question in some minds as to whether Snowden may now have become, if he was not before, a Kremlin project. (Recent allegations that Snowden was also a guest of the Russian special services in Hong Kong before his departure to Moscow, for example, are stirring interest in the US Congress.) Perhaps most seriously from Putin’s perspective, the massive publicity surrounding Snowden in the West could conceivably leak sufficiently into Russian awareness for a copycat Russian Snowden to emerge to haunt the Kremlin.

But these dangers, such as they are, all seem manageable. In deference to US sensitivities, Putin went through an elaborate show of reluctance before granting Snowden asylum for a year, claiming that while enjoying Russian hospitality Snowden would need to refrain from damaging the interests of “our American partners.” He maintains a similar tone whenever the subject of Snowden comes up in press conferences, implying that the whole matter is largely out of his hands as Russian justice takes its majestic course. Washington is unlikely to be persuaded, but gratuitous offence is avoided.

As far as damage to the Snowden brand goes, it would seem that the cult of Snowden’s personality is proof against any tarnishing by association with Putin’s Russia. He has been proposed for a Nobel Peace Prize and, even more incongruously, was shortlisted for a Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament. As for the danger of a Russian Snowden suddenly bursting on the scene, a state led by former KGB professionals can probably ensure that the chances of this happening remain minimal.

Ukraine: restored to its rightful owners

But Putin’s greatest success, and probably the one closest to his heart, came in November. Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych, after years of laborious work towards reaching an association agreement and free-trade treaty with the European Union, suddenly suspended those negotiations just before the finishing line. Then, on 17 December, following a series of secretive bilateral meetings, Putin and Yanukovych announced that they had reached a comprehensive rapprochement under which Russia would give Ukraine various short-term economic subsidies that would stave off the severe financial crunch Kiev seemed to be facing.

Though its largely unreformed economy has been struggling for many years, Ukraine has large industrial and agricultural resources. With a population of forty-six million and the largest landmass of any country in Europe, it is a geopolitical prize to be fought over. In recent years this has been precisely what Russia and the European Union have been doing. Putin is, of course, the author of the much-quoted tag, “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” He is also quoted as having said on another occasion that “whoever doesn’t regret the downfall of the Soviet Union has no heart, but whoever thinks it can be restored has no brain.” Despite that disclaimer, though, neo-imperial restoration efforts are central to his foreign policy.

The gas wars with Ukraine in 2006 and 2009, the shooting war with Georgia in 2008, the cyberwar with Estonia in 2006, the blatant interference in Ukraine’s presidential election in 2004 (in which he supported Yanukovych, whose fraudulent victory was, however, overturned by the “Orange Revolution”), the manipulation of “frozen conflicts” in the former republics of Moldova (Transnistria) and Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia) – these and numerous other salient features of Putin’s approach to the “near abroad” admit of no other interpretation. He may indeed recognise that the USSR cannot be resurrected in a unitary state, but what he wants is the closest possible reintegration of the Soviet patrimony under Moscow’s domination.

For Putin and most Russians, Ukraine is the indispensable link in this chain, not just because of its size, population and resources, but also because Russians see Ukraine as Russia’s historic heartland. To once more recall Zbigniew Brzezinski’s apt aphorism: without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire. For many Russians, the Ukrainians – including those who speak Ukrainian and avoid speaking Russian – are country Russians who just need to be taught to speak properly. And, in fact, many Ukrainian citizens from the Russified east of the country speak only Russian, and identify with Russia, and Soviet Russia at that. The many millions of Ukrainians who have migrated or been deported to Russia over the centuries have never been allowed any cultural or educational institutions of their own, and this remains the case despite the existence of a legally sovereign and independent Ukraine.

The tug of war for Eurasia

Within the alphabet soup of post-Soviet institutions, the key component aimed at achieving Putin’s restorationist objectives is the Moscow-led Eurasian Customs Union, which by 2015 is slated to develop into a Eurasian Economic Union. Moscow presents this multilateral project as being modelled on the European Union – a bridge, in what it claims to see as the multi-polar world of the future, between Europe and China, when the United States will at last be reduced to being, at most, one pole among others. In a sense, the Customs Union is a pre-emptive organisation not unlike the old Soviet bloc trade unions, writers’ unions, communist youth groups and so on, corralling its members in such a way that there is no danger they will form or join organisations that might authentically express their aspirations. Specifically, the Customs Union is meant to forestall integration with Europe through association agreements, free-trade agreements or worst of all, what Brussels calls a “European perspective,” or full membership of the European Union.

The European Union and NATO have done a great deal to integrate the former communist states of Eastern Europe into European and Atlantic structures. Both organisations had a powerful appeal to the newly independent governments of Central-Eastern Europe, which wanted security from Russia and the chance to catch up with EU living standards. They saw the NATO umbrella (even with a minimal military presence) and EU aid funding, market access and technical assistance as vital to their futures, even to their survival as sovereign states. Moscow made clear its great hostility to NATO expansion, in particular to any accession by former republics of the Soviet Union, and often claims that it was promised that such outrages would never occur.

But they occurred because the countries in question emphatically wanted them. NATO and the European Union were often skittish or reluctant, and in recent years have been operating something close to a de facto prohibition on further enlargement into post-communist countries outside the Western Balkans, largely in deference to Russian objections. To allow Russia to block further accessions from its “sphere of privileged interests” would be to concede Moscow a permanent right of veto over the decisions of ostensibly sovereign states.

In 2004, the Baltic states managed to sneak past Russia’s objections into NATO. But by the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, it was clear that Russia’s emphatic objections to accession bids by the Georgian and Ukrainian governments had been internalised by key member states, notably Germany and France. NATO’s pronouncements on the issue at the summit were ambiguous, reflecting the divisions within its membership, but it was clear that for the foreseeable future no further applications opposed by Moscow would be accepted.

After the Bucharest Summit, Moscow stepped up its goading of the pro-Western Georgian leadership of president Mikheil Saakashvili through its proxies in the pro-Russian enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In August 2008, responding to further expulsions of ethnic Georgians from South Ossetia, Saakashvili unwisely decided on direct action. This gave Moscow a splendid casus belli to invade and convert the breakaway territories into proxy statelets (still unrecognised by virtually any other significant countries, even close Moscow allies like Belarus). The war in Georgia served to reinforce the message to nervous EU and East European capitals alike that Moscow was best not provoked.

Further EU expansion into Russia’s “near abroad” was by now becoming problematical too, even though Russia long maintained that it was NATO membership rather than EU membership that it found truly objectionable. Particularly with the burgeoning internal EU problems triggered by the global financial crisis, growing “enlargement fatigue” in core EU countries was clearly going to make it difficult for any other former Soviet republics to achieve acceptance into the club.

Some of the relatively newer EU members, especially Poland, Sweden and the the Baltic States, wanted to strengthen the European Union’s relations with the former Soviet republics nearest their eastern borders. Recognising that the prospects for any of these countries to join the European Union, much less NATO, were slight, they developed a project known as the Eastern Partnership, or EaP, which gained acceptance in Brussels. Inaugurated officially by the European Union in 2009, the EaP was a kind of Clayton’s enlargement, expanding economic and cultural links with the former Soviet republics Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova in the west of the post-Soviet space, and Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia in the Transcaucasus region. Where possible, the EaP sought to reach association agreements with those of the six who were inclined to do so, the centrepiece of which would be a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement. Other prominent objectives included the encouragement of economic reform, rule of law and better observance of human rights, and the facilitation of travel and wider human contacts.

Azerbaijan and Belarus (both notorious abusers of human rights) were never serious candidates for association agreements, though the European Union did try to engage Belarus’s president Alexander Lukashenko, who chose to flirt for a time with Brussels in search of financial inducements, a hedge against Moscow and other practical advantages. The other four states seemed to pursue the negotiations more seriously. They were troubled, however, by the fact that Brussels was unable to offer them a “European perspective,” because doing so would have greatly worried EU members suffering most acutely from enlargement fatigue. Even Ukraine, under the pro-Moscow and very post-Soviet Yanukovych, seemed to become strongly interested in concluding an association agreement and joining the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area. As the EaP began to look serious, Putin’s hostility towards the idea became more overt, and his manner and tactics more peremptory, even bullying. For a time, this seemed merely to increase Yanukovych’s ardour for the Brussels connection.

Ukraine’s U-turn

By mid 2013, Moscow’s anxiety about the EaP had reached acute levels. The planned EU summit on 28–29 November in Vilnius, under the rotating presidency of the Lithuanians (in itself, an affront for Putin), was drawing close, and four of the six “partners,” Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova, seemed determined to sign association agreements with Brussels at that event. In Ukraine’s case, Yanukovych’s numerous breaches of human rights and departures from democratic rectitude (in particular his habit of locking up his opponents, notably the former “Orange” leader and ex-premier, Yulia Tymoshenko, for long jail terms), gave Moscow reasonable confidence that the European Union would not sign, or at least not ratify, an association agreement. But as Yanukovych made concessions, releasing lesser figures from the former government, Brussels began bending over backwards to accommodate him, triggering anxiety attacks in the Kremlin.

According to a plausible-looking document leaked to the Ukrainian press, Moscow had prepared a master plan to torpedo Kiev’s moves towards an association agreement. In July and August 2013, it unleashed yet another round of arbitrary trade sanctions against Ukraine, particularly targeting business interests known to be supportive of the EU connection. Ukrainian trade is about equally balanced between Russia’s Custom Union and the European Union. While an association agreement would give Ukraine increased access to a market some eight times the size of the Customs Union, it would also expose it to potentially very challenging competition.

Moreover, as Yanukovych was acutely aware, Ukraine could not afford to abruptly lose much of its trade with Russia, which would particularly affect the president’s own constituencies in the east of the country. And Moscow, unlike Brussels, could devastate Ukraine’s foreign trade balance and bring the country to its knees if it were to apply severe trade sanctions over a sustained period. When Moscow blocked Ukrainian exports to Russia for over a week in August 2013, it left lengthy queues of transport vehicles stranded at the border and forced many Ukrainian exporters to postpone or cancel dispatches, particularly of perishable goods.

Usually such measures against insubordinate ex-vassals are justified by alleged dangers to health discerned by Russia’s Kremlin-compliant chief sanitary inspectorate, the Rospotrebnadzor, which are typically shown to be baseless. Moscow’s actions in these cases – and there have been scores of them against neighbouring states, including EU members – are almost undoubtedly inconsistent with World Trade Organization rules. (After long hesitating, Russia joined the WTO with vital US support in August 2012.) WTO dispute mechanisms are complex and usually take a long time, however, and in the meantime Ukraine could be forced into default.

In trying to balance between two very large neighbours competing for its loyalty, Kiev knows that nothing similar to this kind of pressure would threaten from the EU side. If you are courted by one entity that behaves according to the rule of law and another that is ready to break laws in order to punish you, you may resent the latter more, but you are likely to give it priority in any tug-of-war.

And so it was with Ukraine in 2013. But not only did Moscow have excellent sticks to wield and no legal or other scruples about doing so, Putin and his intimates are also able to decide to deploy generous carrots at short notice without any public scrutiny or parliamentary or legal restraints. On 21 November last year, after his secretive tête-à-têtes with Putin and just a week before the Vilnius EU summit, Kiev suddenly announced it was suspending negotiations with the European Union and pursuing improved relations with Russia. It became apparent that Yanukovych and Putin had reached a deal including termination of the trade sanctions, at least for the time being, and the promise of much cheaper gas imports from Russia and the purchase by Russia of US$15 billion worth of Ukrainian bonds.

The money for this purchase was to be drawn from Russia’s National Welfare Fund (a sovereign wealth fund). In strictly economic terms, this procedure, which will greatly ease Ukraine’s desperate financial situation, is highly questionable for Russia and, indeed, illegal under Russian law. But none of that will restrain Putin in his pursuit of geopolitical objectives. The gas discount, if sustained, will greatly improve Ukraine’s balance of payments, although it’s worth noting that Kiev will still be paying far more for gas under Gazprom’s highly political pricing policy than does its neighbour, Customs Union member Belarus. These generous gifts will be dispensed in tranches to keep Yanukovych from welshing on any aspect of the deal.

Exactly what Yanukovych has promised in exchange for Putin’s munificence remains a secret, like most other features of the negotiations. Various rumours are abroad on the subject, including that Yanukovych has promised to lock his country into Russia’s embrace by joining the Customs Union. If he has, it is vital that it be kept quiet for the time being, as any public acknowledgement of such a massive capitulation would excite even more unrest in Ukraine. It has also been speculated that Russia has agreed to do whatever it takes to ensure that Yanukovych wins next year’s Ukrainian presidential elections, something that will again be in Putin’s interest, as it was in 2004.

But perhaps the most crucial undeclared clauses in the deal became apparent on 16 January when, in a farcical pseudo-legal coup d’état, Ukraine’s parliament passed what Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt has described as “the most solid package of repressive laws I’ve seen enacted by a European parliament in decades.” The bills were rushed through with grotesque haste, with no sign that the successive shows of hands were counted.

These laws bear Putin’s unmistakable stamp. Any organisation with foreign funding or investment is required to identify itself as a “foreign agent,” for example. Unauthorised street demonstrations will attract elaborate punishments, the offence of slandering public officials has been introduced, and the characteristically Putinist legal concept of “extremism” is freely deployed. In just a few minutes, Ukraine was converted into a police state by the ruling party’s loyal deputies. In doing so, as Timothy Snyder points out, they may have done themselves out of a job, as the institution of parliamentary immunity was also cancelled.

Since these measures passed, riot police have been deployed to disperse the entrenched and at times huge street demonstrations in Kiev against the regime’s abrupt lurch towards Moscow, rightly seen by the protesters as the prelude to all-out Putinisation of their country. The totalitarian coup and subsequent police actions were undertaken in a country where opinion polls had been showing a strong preponderance in support for the association agreement over the Customs Union.

The high approval ratings for the association agreement reflect not only widespread Ukrainian resentment of Russia’s tactics and its frequently contemptuous attitude, but also the fact that the association agreement with Brussels was something on which, to all outward appearances, the opposition and Yanukovych’s ruling Party of Regions had been in basic agreement. Outside the Russophone and Russophile heartland in the east and southeast of the country, most Ukrainians see the EU countries as a model for their own country. Many Ukrainians travel to Poland, for example, sometimes to work for short periods, and they like what they see and what they can earn. Since 1990, when the two countries were broadly on the same level economically, Poland has advanced to three times Ukraine’s GDP per head, and has benefited enormously from EU trading opportunities, funding and expertise.

Brussels upstaged

Though some in the European Union had been beginning to suspect a double cross, Kiev’s 21 November announcement that it was suspending negotiations came as a great shock, as have many subsequent events – the Putin–Yanukovych deal, the size and ardour of the pro–European Union demonstrations (garnering up to hundreds of thousands of participants, who were scrupulously well-ordered and non-violent until very recently), and now the Yanukovych coup d’état.

Trying to rescue something from their policy fiasco when Yanukovych changed direction, Brussels spokespeople tried to maintain that “the door remained open” up to and beyond the Vilnius summit. Showing impressive chutzpah, and despite the outburst of people power on the streets of Kiev, Yanukovych attended the summit and Ukrainian leaders made increasingly extravagant bids for financial support from the European Union. Clearly they already had something solid in their pocket.

Brussels should not have been quite so surprised. Yanukovych may have been angered by Russia’s efforts to use gas pricing and pipeline construction to isolate Ukraine and keep its industries under pressure. And like many other post-Soviet leaders he has often been offended by Putin’s personal displays of contempt. On one occasion, Putin kept him waiting for several hours for a bilateral summit while he made an unforeshadowed visit to a group of macho-chauvinist Russian bikies in the Crimea known as the Night Wolves. It would have been hard for Putin to have found a more insulting way of spending that time. It was probably also meant as a crude reminder to the Ukrainian leader that Russia could stir up very serious trouble for him by manipulating the uber-Russian patriots of Crimea into questioning Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

But Yanukovych is from the Russophile province of Donetsk and is a native speaker of Russian who does not know any West European languages. He is an adherent of the patriotically Putinist Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox church, and is in many ways a deeply Soviet person who has been running a “power vertical” (autocracy) in Ukraine very similar to Putin’s system in Russia.

In his first months in power in 2010, he granted some huge concessions to Moscow to repair bilateral relations after the pro-Western reign of the Orange president Viktor Yushchenko. At that time Yanukovych seemed more clearly pro-Moscow than any of his post-1990 predecessors. It was always on the cards that if Putin were to deploy more of either stick or carrot, Yanukovych would back off from his “strategic choice” of Europe. As a senior Polish official once said, “Putin’s contemptuous attitude towards Yanukovych and Ukraine is the best thing going for us to keep him on track for Brussels.”

There had also been clear warnings in the preceding months. On 3 September, Putin summoned Armenia’s president, Serzh Sargsyan, to Moscow, where Sargsyan, without the backing of any detectable political process in his homeland, declared that he was reversing years of negotiations with Brussels for an association agreement and would join Putin’s Customs Union. With a long Christian tradition, the Armenians very much see themselves as European. They had also sought better relations with the European Union in the hope of material gain and to secure a hedge against Moscow’s domination.

But they are squeezed between their mortal enemies, Turkey and Turkic-speaking Azerbaijan, part of whose territory, largely Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh, they had seized by armed force after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then, Azerbaijan has been using its oil and gas riches to build up a huge military preponderance over Armenia, which is totally dependent on Moscow for cheap arms imports and an effective security guarantee. A few months before Sargsyan’s volte-face on the association agreement, Putin reached an arms sales agreement with Azerbaijan worth US$4 billion, a very clear shot across Armenia’s bows.

Moldova and Georgia under pressure

Moscow had also made strenuous efforts to turn the other two candidates for association agreements, Moldova and Georgia, away from the European Union. The war with Georgia in 2008 had effectively destabilised Saakashvili’s pro-Western leadership. Despite signs of division on the issue within the Russian leadership, Moscow had desisted from sending its troops the last few kilometres into Tbilisi. But having extensively damaged Georgia’s infrastructure and taken over roughly half of its Black Sea coastline, it did all it could to discredit Saakashvili, running, for example, a determined campaign to convince ill-informed Western publics that he was mentally unbalanced if not deranged.

With Russian “peace-keepers” not far from his capital, and under severe economic pressure from the global financial crisis, Saakashvili did begin to contribute to the Russian propaganda campaign by taking repressive measures against his domestic opponents. His main target and most dangerous adversary was the so-called Georgian Dream coalition, a loose formation funded and organised by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Georgian oligarch who had made his $5 billion fortune in Putin’s Russia without ever falling foul of the Russian leader. Some felt Ivanishvili could not have achieved that without incurring some indebtedness to Putin and his entourage.

Saakashvili and his officials were thus strongly suspicious that Ivanishvili was not just someone who could buy and sell the entire country (the GDP of Georgia was $15.8 billion in 2012, just three times his fortune), but also that he was in some sense a Kremlin project. Some Georgian opposition politicians clearly were, and Ivanishvili strongly emphasised the need to mend bridges with Russia while blaming Saakashvili exclusively for causing the 2008 war. In doing so, he has used arguments that closely resemble Moscow’s. After coming to power and just one day after his neighbour Sargsyan’s about-face on the association agreement with the European Union, Ivanishvili declared that he was studying the Customs Union and might consider joining it if that seemed desirable. None of this is particularly reassuring.

The fact that the Georgian Dream was able to win the elections and summarily remove Saakashvili’s United National Movement from offices across the country is perhaps the best indication that for all its imperfections, Georgia was clearly the most democratic (as well as the most effectively reformed) post-Soviet country outside the Baltic States. Ivanishvili has repaid this democratic behaviour by pursuing criminal charges against several key United National Movement leaders, and repeatedly threatening to do the same to Saakashvili.

But regardless of any intimate views that Ivanishvili might hold about the Customs Union, or any concerns he may feel for the safety of his fortune in Putin’s Russia, he has deferred to the strongly pro-EU orientation of most Georgians, and at the Vilnius Summit last November Georgia was one of the two former republics in the Eastern Partnership which initialled the agreement.

The other was Moldova, a much disputed territory sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania, with a mainly Romanian and Romanian-speaking population, Orthodox, poor and socially conservative. It also has substantial minorities, which mostly speak Russian and have pro-Moscow inclinations. And there is a strongly pro-Moscow breakaway territory within Moldova’s ly recognised borders called Transnistria, where Russian “peacekeepers” are deployed. Transnistria is basically manipulated by Moscow in various ways to block moves by Moldova towards any form of Western integration. Moscow also supports the largely unreformed Moldovan Party of Communists (still known by that name), previously in government but currently in opposition.

In recent years Moldova has been ruled by a fractious and unstable coalition, the strongly pro-Western Alliance for European Integration. Because the Alliance has been in power during the European economic crisis, and because of its inherent instability, the communist-led opposition has latterly been making gains in the opinion polls. Moscow would like to see the government overturned. Most of the population probably thinks of itself as European rather than Eurasian, and many Moldovans travel to EU countries if they can in search of work, but many also travel to the Russian Federation. Remittances, both from west and east, are a vital part of the highly vulnerable Moldovan economy, representing between a quarter and a third of GDP.

During 2013, Russia repeatedly threatened to block any further economic immigration from Moldova, and even to expel Moldovan labourers. The political message was clear: join our Customs Union and you will be entitled as of right to come to Russia; don’t join, and we can bring your economy to its knees any time we like. Moldova is also heavily dependent on wine exports to, as well as gas imports from, Russia, either of which can be summarily curtailed. The pungently nationalistic Russian deputy premier Dmitry Rogozin, who is responsible for defence industries but also has a special brief on Moldova, visited the country in September 2013 and publicly threatened a cut-off of gas deliveries, declaring “energy supplies are important in the run-up to winter. I hope you won’t freeze.”

By such subtle means as these, Moscow was hoping to build up the pro–Customs Union constituency in the country, which is quite strong for obvious, pragmatic reasons. Moldovans want to eat and not to freeze, and sense that one side holds very effective weapons in its hands and will not hesitate to use them. The outcome in Ukraine must also suggest to them that the European Union is unlikely to win any struggle that develops in their case. But despite these highly intimidatory threats, Moldova went ahead at the Vilnius Summit with initialling the association agreement they had negotiated with the European Union.

The Vilnius initialling still leaves Georgia and Moldova some way away from signature. Chastened by their experience with Ukraine, EU leaders announced on 20 December 2013 they would work towards signature with Georgia and Moldova by no later than the end of August this year. Whether Russia will accept that timetable remains to be seen.

The Moldovan ruling coalition has been in precarious shape for some time, and it would not be surprising if Moscow’s huffing and puffing, trade manoeuvres or manipulation of the Transnistrian issue led to another political crisis there. That could possibly leave Georgia as the last surviving remnant of the EaP dependent on the political will of the erstwhile Russian oligarch, Ivanishvili, who might perhaps then revisit his thoughts of joining the Customs Union should the context seem right.

Germany clings to Ostpolitik

There have always been strong forces, especially among the older EU members, who are sceptical not just about Georgia and Moldova, but also about Ukraine and the whole enlargement agenda. Far from evoking in them stern resistance to Moscow’s thuggish tactics, the fiasco of the EaP seems to have strengthened their desire to “build a better relationship” with Russia.

The key country in all EU issues is now, of course, Germany. Under chancellor Angela Merkel, an East German, that country has taken a more sceptical view of Russia than under her predecessor Gerhard Schröder. In his last days in office, Schröder used his position as chancellor to arrange a big credit for Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipeline, an expensive project of dubious economic and ecological value but an important geopolitical instrument for President Putin with which he greatly increases his coercive influence over Ukraine and other former Soviet subordinates. The other pincer, the South Stream gas pipeline, will complete Ukraine’s energy encirclement, reducing if not nullifying the European Union’s struggling efforts to develop its “southern corridor” pipeline system, which is designed to diversify supply and reduce the European Union’s dependence on Gazprom. South Stream was actively and skilfully promoted by Putin.

In sharp contrast to Schröder, who continues to hobnob socially with Putin and accepted a lucrative role as chair of the Nord Stream Board immediately after his departure from the chancellery, Merkel clearly does not enjoy Putin’s company nor approve of his policies. Even less so does German president Joachim Gauck, another East German, who was one of the first world leaders to announce he would not be attending the Sochi Winter Olympics. But Germany is heavily invested, both figuratively and literally, in the bilateral relationship, and the relatively pro-Moscow establishment is powerful in Germany, in the foreign ministry, in business circles and elsewhere.

Merkel’s Christian Democrats scored their best result in over twenty years in last September’s Bundestag elections, but their centrist partners, the Free Democrats, had their worst result ever, failing to reach the 5 per cent threshold for parliamentary representation. This forced Merkel into renewing the “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats. Under the coalition agreement, Frank-Walter Steinmeier of the Social Democrats regained the foreign minister’s position, replacing the Free Democrats’ Guido Westerwelle, who was a strong supporter of the EaP and an often forceful critic of the democratic failings of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. In his earlier time in the job in 2005–09, Steinmeier was markedly more positive towards Russia than Merkel, and it is already apparent that he will adopt a similar approach again now.

Perhaps even more significantly, Germany’s special coordinator for Russia, Andreas Schockenhoff, a vocal critic of Putin’s anti-democratic policies and human rights abuses, has been replaced by Steinmeier’s close ally Gernot Erler, a key author of the “modernisation partnership” with Russia drawn up during Steinmeier’s tenure in 2005–09. Despite the innumerable recent displays of Putin’s overt contempt for the West, Steinmeier and Erler seem bent on resuming their earlier approach. Even before Merkel finally reluctantly agreed to confirm him in the post, Erler went on the record to criticise the European Union for its “misjudgements” on Ukraine. In Erler’s view, the launching of the EaP itself was one such misjudgement. It is clear from his statements that he regards any EU policy that Russia strongly objects to as being best discarded. In justification of this stand, he cites the invaluable cooperation Russia has provided on Syria and other matters.

With German policy again led by this kind of anachronistic Ostpolitik, the chances of Europe adopting the kind of policies that would seriously threaten Putin’s restoration project in the former Soviet republics diminishes further. For its part, the Obama administration seems remarkably untroubled by the prospect of Moscow dismantling the post-communist and post-Soviet settlement of the early 1990s step by step. Putin’s year of triumphs in 2013 may be followed by more of the same. While it will probably be an unstable restoration, there seems a good chance that an eastward-oriented bloc of nations will be re-established, led by thuggish kleptocracies intent on retaining power and happy to accept subsidies funded by Moscow’s “energy diplomacy” in order to do so. On the other hand, as against all of the above, at least things are going splendidly in Syria. •

The post Putin’s annus mirabilis: changing the shape of Eurasia appeared first on Inside Story.

IF YOU were born in the early 1940s and were even dimly conscious of the emerging postwar world, you were aware of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. This was the pervasive global nuclear standoff that loomed over the second half of the twentieth century. Even if, like me, you were born and lived in remote Melbourne, Australia, you could not escape the shadow of uncertainty, of existential doubt and fear, that hung over life in the age of rising prosperity and shifting political and cultural values that followed the second world war. The cold war affected lives and behaviour, influenced attitudes, and formed prejudices and neuroses that persisted from the cradle to the grave. For many people it still defines their place and time in the slice of world history through which we lived.

As early as March 1946, barely a year after Germany’s defeat, Winston Churchill famously proclaimed that an iron curtain had descended across Europe “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.” The victorious American and British war leaders had become increasingly concerned as their former ally, the Soviet Union, ruthlessly consolidated its eastern empire. But there was little the West could do: Russian troops were on the ground in Eastern Europe and they had, after all, broken the German army. So the Western capitalist powers, generally tolerant and liberal-democratic, chose to prosper in peace, creating mass consumer economies that could deliver both guns and butter. Eventually they spawned and ultimately absorbed the dissident, sometimes anarchic, youth counterculture movements that were to sweep the world and challenge their own values and policies from the 1960s. The Soviets, meanwhile, under brutally authoritarian communist rulers, focused on entrenching one-party power, seeking to acquire more powerful arms than those possessed by the West, and crushing domestic resistance to their rule wherever it appeared in their empire.

So the cold war was a Manichaean forty-five-year struggle between liberal capitalism and authoritarian communism. During that time a nuclear sword of Damocles hung over the planet, even as the United States and the Soviet Union developed techniques for managing what became a stable balance of terror based on the notion of deterrence through mutual assured destruction (or MAD, to give it its chilling acronym). Despite periods of thaw and detente, and periodic arms limitation agreements, both blocs retained thousands of ballistic missiles, many armed with multiple independently targeted nuclear warheads, on permanent hair-trigger alert.

Yet, as it played out from 1945 to 1991, the cold war fell short of outright warfare. It was a tense and at times terrifying conflict in which the nuclear stockpiles were sufficient to destroy both sides as functioning modern societies. While it didn’t trigger a nuclear exchange, it was punctuated by frequent crises in which the use of nuclear weapons was contemplated by both sides. There were Berlin crises starting with the communist blockade of 1948 and including the construction of the Berlin wall in 1961, the Korean war (1950–53), the Soviet invasions of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), the Cuban missile crisis (1962), the Vietnam war (1959–75), and other proxy wars in which the United States and the Soviet Union supported and armed rivals in Afghanistan, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. It ended with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990.

THIS IS a personal memoir of the cold war in Melbourne and, more specifically, in the northwestern suburbs of Brunswick, Coburg and Pascoe Vale. It is also a memoir of how the cold war influenced my experiences as a child and my career in newspapers at home and abroad for more than fifty years. As a foreign correspondent in Europe and Washington, I covered some of the great world-changing events that eventually precipitated the end of the cold war, including the five summit meetings between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush between 1985 and 1990.

During my Australian childhood and youth, cold war tensions interacted with old sectarian social and political divisions between non-Catholics and Catholics in Australia, and particularly within the Labor Party. In 1955, Labor was split asunder by irreconcilable differences about domestic and international cold war issues, and at the heart of these differences was the role and influence of communism locally and globally. Both groups possessed some of the truth, but, blinkered by religious hatred in some cases and political fear in others, they retreated into hostile tribal camps that could not stay united inside the Labor Party.

In 1955 and 1963, Australia’s conservative government, as part of its contribution to the Western cold war effort, permitted atmospheric testing of British nuclear devices at Maralinga and the Montebello Islands with devastating long-term environmental consequences. By the 1970s Australia was hosting top-secret American nuclear early-warning systems at Pine Gap and Nurrungar, as well as a US navy communications relay station at North West Cape in Western Australia. These bases were called “joint facilities” and operated with full Australian knowledge and concurrence (as Pine Gap and North West Cape still do). But the presence of the bases intensified fears that Australia had made itself a potential nuclear target and fuelled the anti-American sentiment of disarmament advocates and the broader left.

Looking back on it all, much of the passion and anxiety of those years seems exaggerated, but it was deadly serious at the time – even in the dull tree-lined streets of Pascoe Vale South. But the smaller provincial cold war manifestations of my Brunswick childhood and youth loomed large at the time. So did the trade union and political conflicts that I witnessed as a young reporter covering industrial and political Labor affairs in the early 1960s. And in 1996, when it was all over and I was back at home, I sat down to talk with two of Australia’s preeminent cold war warriors, the Catholic political activist Bob Santamaria and the former Communist Party secretary, Bernie Taft. They were aged eighty-one and seventy-eight respectively, with all passion spent but with intellects undimmed. During a long conversation the two men seemed pleasantly surprised by how similar they really were, and seemed genuinely to respect and like each other. Both have since died, but their encounter in Santamaria’s North Melbourne office seemed to me a fitting and intensely personal conclusion to the vast impersonal and international contest, some of which I was privileged to witness and to write about.

IT STARTED early, at North-West Brunswick primary school. My father worked at the time on the tramways, the extensive state-owned public transport network that still covers much of inner Melbourne. His union was led by a well-known communist, Clarrie O’Shea, and when I was six or seven O’Shea called a strike over pay rates that stopped the trams for some six weeks. “Your old man’s a commo” was shouted at me daily in the school playground by playmates echoing the anger of parents whose lives were being disrupted by the strike. When I asked my father if he was indeed a commo, he said he voted Labor but because he thought that communist union leaders fought hardest for their members he supported them unreservedly in union matters. It was a common viewpoint among working men at the time.

Our Catholic neighbours, and they were many, believed that the godless Soviet communists were trying to destroy our democratic freedoms and that one of their strategies was to “hold the country to ransom” by winning control of the trade unions and weakening the economy. These were the tense early years of the cold war and attitudes in Brunswick were inevitably influenced by it. Berlin was the flashpoint and the Americans were running the Berlin airlift to ensure that the city, a non-communist oasis in the communist half of divided Germany, received supplies of coal and fuel after the Soviets closed ground access to the city. There was no airlift at North-West Brunswick State School, but we had to run the gauntlet of some tough Catholic kids when we were returning home. There were fights, name-calling, stone-throwing. “Catholic dogs stink like frogs,” we shouted. “Protty dogs go to hell,” they retorted. There were similar and frequent encounters between Catholic and non-Catholic kids in the street where I lived. Shamefully, some parents on both sides encouraged these hatreds, labelling each other “commo stooges” or Catholic fascists. Our little cold war at times seemed warmer than the big one – at least until the Korean war broke out in 1950.

North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in June 1950 caused deep gloom in our corner of Melbourne. Was this the start of the third world war? Would the Americans use the atom bomb? The Soviet Union was backing North Korea; the United States was backing South Korea. Although it was conducted under the flag of the United Nations, the defence of the south was a true proxy war. When China poured in eighteen divisions the gloom in Brunswick deepened: now the Yellow reds were making common cause with the Russian reds! It was the sum of all our fears of hostile outside invaders poised to pour over our country. So Australia, with little dissent, joined the UN action at America’s request, sending a RAAF squadron and an army battalion. When the armistice was signed three years later, Australian military casualties totalled 1500, with 340 killed. Even in Brunswick that was seen as a serious taste of the big cold war and a possible prelude to the next world war. “I just thank God that you and your brother are too young to be sent away,” my mother once said, echoing the eternal mother’s cry from the heart. They were frightened people.

Yet there were occasional outbreaks of rationality. Suddenly, in 1951, the words “Vote No” appeared on walls and railway overpasses and bridges all over Melbourne. They were painted at night by protesters opposed to the decision by the Menzies government to conduct a referendum to outlaw the Communist Party. By a solid majority, Australians did indeed Vote No in September 1951 on the grounds that the proposed ban would limit freedom of speech and association. It was a clear rejection of the government’s relentless efforts to exploit cold war uncertainties for political advantage.

But we got another dose of the big cold war with the high drama of the so-called Petrov affair in 1954. Vladimir Petrov, a Soviet KGB operative working under diplomatic cover, sought political asylum in Australia, fearing that he would be executed if he returned to Moscow. Offering Australian authorities evidence of Soviet espionage in Australia, he defected in April 1954. Soviet authorities sent two burly couriers to Australia to retrieve Petrov’s wife Evdokia, a cypher clerk at the embassy. She was photographed, minus a shoe and deeply distressed, being hustled to an aircraft at Sydney. In Darwin she was escorted from the plane to safety by Australian security officers. Photographs of this drama dominated the newspapers and shocked the nation: Red brutes had been caught and photographed in the act of dragging a hysterical woman onto an aircraft to return her to Moscow! The black-and-white pictures are still among the most dramatic Australian news photographs of the 1950s.

The Petrovs were granted asylum, and prime minister Robert Menzies played the issue for all it was worth, announcing a royal commission to investigate Soviet espionage in Australia. Things got even better for Menzies when the Labor opposition leader H.V. Evatt appeared before the royal commission as attorney for two of his staff members named in documents provided by Petrov, and when the commission withdrew Evatt’s leave to appear following his controversial cross-examination of a security service witness. Of course Labor was in league with the commos and even the party leader was ready to defend Red spies! Menzies went on to win the impending federal election and diplomatic relations between Australia and the Soviet Union were broken for five years. In Brunswick, my father said it was all a political conspiracy cooked up by Menzies to help him win the election; the Catholic neighbours saw only the evil hand of the Reds and praised Menzies’s actions.

By this time mistrust and suspicion were palpable in daily life. Australia’s domestic security service, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO, was by now photographing people entering or leaving leftist, particularly Communist Party, meetings. They were following people suspected of “disloyalty,” trying to infiltrate their meetings, and keeping files on individuals. The “special branches” of the state police forces kept their separate files. Together, they were the loyal and extremely active arms of conservative federal and state governments who wanted tabs kept on their critics and material amassed that could be used against them. The cold war had spawned the age of “reds under the bed” paranoia in which spies and spy-catchers pursued each other in a frantic and futile dance of deceit.

But the Petrov affair was only the prelude to the great political explosion of 1955, when the Labor Party split irreparably along sectarian and ideological lines. There was, at the time, deep unrest in the Labor Party over the zealous, secretive anti-communist campaign of Santamaria’s Catholic Social Studies Movement as it sought to break communist influence in trade unions. But the Split was precipitated finally by Dr Evatt who, in an explosive statement, referred to the damaging activities of a small group “largely directed from outside the Labor Party.” Evatt said Santamaria’s weekly newspaper, News Weekly, appeared “to act as their organ.” Within months the party was torn apart. The predominantly Catholic and anti-communist Democratic Labor Party, or DLP, emerged as an effective electoral force and split the Labor vote, especially in Victoria and Queensland, helping to keep Labor out of office until Whitlam’s victory in 1972.

These were bitter years in Brunswick and Coburg, where the Labor split was keenly felt. Protestants and moderate and militant Labor supporters loathed the DLP and all its fervently anti-communist works, and they loathed its intellectual leaders, Santamaria and the Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, who supported and inspired Santamaria (himself a Brunswick boy). During this time Menzies’s governing conservative coalition of the Liberal and Country (later National) parties promoted the view that Labor was soft on, and probably in cahoots with, the Soviet communists, while they themselves were loyal supporters of the ANZUS alliance, led by the United States, and would keep Australia safe in Uncle Sam’s enveloping arms from the horrors of expansionist Marxism.

Personal encounters sharpened the impact of the cold war for me, although I was mainly aware of only one of them at the time. In 1954, as a high school junior, I met and formed a life-long (and still strong) friendship with Juris Hrynko, a White Russian boy who had arrived in Australia as a “displaced person” with his parents and grandparents after the second world war. Juris’s father Anatol had been an agricultural scientist before the war but his qualifications were not recognised in Australia and he worked as a storeman in the state railways, where a well-known communist, J.J. Brown, was the local union leader. Anatol was fiercely anti-communist, a pillar of Melbourne’s Russian Orthodox church, a talented water-colourist, and a kindly and cultured man. He liked to talk to me about Soviet iniquities in Eastern Europe and insisted that Brown was, as he said in heavily accented English, “a red snake.” Obviously he did not share my father’s views and, because I liked and respected them both, I found myself wondering how to reconcile their views.

So even a Brunswick schoolboy faced personal dilemmas that sprang from cold war politics. Those dilemmas were sharpened in 1957 when the Soviet Union put its first Sputnik satellite into orbit. As we gazed upwards to see the tiny thing traverse the night sky we were told by the overheated media that the Sputnik showed how dangerously the Russians had forged ahead in the space race and how vulnerable we were to a Red attack. Even in Brunswick we didn’t relax until 1969, when America’s Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon.

The Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, separated by twelve years, had a direct impact on Melbourne because numbers of Hungarians and Czechs sought and were granted asylum in Australia. But it was the later Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam war that had the most profound impact on the collective psyche and political unity of citizens of my generation, and there was no hiding place in the suburbs of Melbourne.

In 1961 the Age appointed me as a shipping, and later industrial, reporter. Both jobs brought me into close contact with trade union leaders still scarred by the Labor split. They were a mix of communists, Labor Party militants and moderates, and DLP “industrial group” supporters known pejoratively as Groupers. The toughest group was probably the mixture of communists, Labor militants and groupers in the stevedore’s union, the Waterside Workers’ Federation, but the general industrial union officials headquartered at the Trades Hall and the Australian Council of Trade Unions also represented the full spectrum of non-conservative political attitudes. Their primary focus, of course, was the wages and working conditions of their members, but many were also heavily engaged in wider international affairs and were prepared to call “political strikes” on international issues. These trade union officials were intense and deeply committed men, and I was particularly impressed by the emotional engagement and dedication of the communists, however much their militancy discomforted some Labor Party officials and disrupted industrial plants. One in particular deserves mention: George Seelaf of the meat workers union, who almost single-handedly set about establishing a major trade union clinic and hospital in the industrial western suburbs of Melbourne.

“COMMUNIST influence” remained a high-profile issue. The Trades Hall provided rooms for something called the Victorian Labor College, at which trade union officials could attend lectures on mechanistic Marxism and purchase books and leaflets published in Moscow on Marx’s thought and theories. Soviet propaganda films were shown free in the evening to anyone who cared to attend; generally they showed happy peasants toiling in collective fields to bring in the bountiful crops, or heroic Soviet soldiers in heavy overcoats charging towards terrified German invaders. You could easily see this activity as a communist effort to establish a Leninist revolutionary vanguard elite in Australia. The most promising trade union officials were taken on trips to party schools in Moscow and Beijing and inevitably returned full of praise for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Labor Party declared that the names of Labor Party members could not appear with communist candidates on “unity tickets” for union elections. Finding and exposing unity tickets was a favourite sport of the media and anti-Labor interests. Some unions expressed support for the construction of the notorious Berlin wall by the communist authorities, and some actively anti-American unions vigorously opposed Australian participation in the Vietnam war and supported the Soviet Union and Cuba through the Cuban missile crisis. Even for a young reporter covering trade union affairs, there was no avoiding the political and foreign policy implications of the cold war.

The brief but desperate 1962 Cuban missile confrontation between president John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was arguably as close as the cold war superpowers came to a nuclear exchange. As allies of the United States, Australians found themselves wondering anxiously and impotently whether they would be targeted. When, after a tense stand-off, Khrushchev finally agreed to remove Soviet missiles shipped clandestinely to Cuba in return for the US withdrawal of missiles from Turkey, the sighs of relief in Australia were as heartfelt as they were elsewhere in the world. Even the Brunswick churches held thanksgiving services for a world reprieved. In fact, the year 1983 would be, as we shall see, even more dangerous.

The Vietnam war was a true proxy war between Soviet-supported North Vietnam and the US-supported South. At huge costs to the nation’s political unity, the conservative Australian government committed forces to the conflict. It argued that Australia’s participation was the premium that had to be paid to preserve the US alliance and to stop “the downward thrust of communism.” It introduced selective conscription of twenty-year-old boys to ensure a supply of troops and it threw conscientious objectors into jail. To Labor and its supporters, Vietnam was a dirty, unwinnable war that was really a nationalist insurrection aiming to reunite the country after centuries of colonial repression. Selective conscription was seen by Labor as profoundly immoral; the so-called conscription birthday ballot created social divisions and strains (reflected in the Save Our Sons movement, the burning of draft cards, and the mass Vietnam Moratorium marches through city streets) that had not been seen since the failed conscription initiatives of the first world war.

When the war ended in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans and 521 Australians had died in Vietnam, and the US-led Western powers had suffered a debilitating defeat. In Brunswick and elsewhere, the dead were mourned by their families, but the nation treated the returning troops with little glory. The new Whitlam Labor government simply didn’t want to know or remember. And the political agenda became determinedly domestic even as Whitlam brought Australia’s troops home from Vietnam, released the conscientious objectors, and headed the then burgeoning international push to recognise the People’s Republic of China.

POSTED to London in 1977 as European correspondent for the Age I was confronted afresh by the reality of the cold war in ways far removed from the anxieties of Brunswick and the conflicts of the Trades Hall. The security debate was about the British independent nuclear deterrent and the “special relationship” with Washington. There was speculation about a neutron bomb, which was said to be particularly desirable because it destroyed people without destroying buildings. The rising British politician was Margaret Thatcher, a hardline anti-communist called “the iron lady” by the Soviets. As British prime minister she was to play an influential role in the closing years of the cold war, when she met the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and pronounced him “a man I can do business with.” Visits to NATO headquarters in Belgium were obligatory, and the dominant topic of conversation was how NATO forces would stop and defeat a Soviet battle tank thrust across the North German plain.

It was immediately clear that Brunswick and the Trades Hall, while views were sometimes fevered, didn’t really appreciate the sense of danger that troubled the Western Europeans, especially the Germans. A trip to East Berlin and Weimar in the German Democratic Republic revealed how poor, shabby and isolated life could be for people in the police state on the other side of the wall. A visit to a Soviet officers’ mess outside Weimar revealed that the best time to end the cold war would be after nine o’clock on any Saturday night: by then, the Soviet colonels and their wives were drunk on very bad brown vodka. Even the ordinary old pubs in Brunswick were classier than that officers’ mess.

And then in 1979, only a year before the Moscow Olympic games were due to take place, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Western powers responded with a partial boycott of the games, and what was meant to be a sporting event become a cold war political story. The Americans stayed away, drug-enhanced East German and Russian athletes dominated, and the patchy Australian team put on a fitful performance. The Soviets plainly didn’t enjoy the presence of the reporters from the West. At the daily Olympic Games press conferences a certain Mr Popov, speaking in English, told visiting reporters they would be expelled from the country if hostile reports kept appearing in the Western press. The games went on, but the cold war cast its chilly shadow as Russian soldiers were killed in increasing numbers by the US-armed and supported Mujahideen in Afghanistan. By the time they withdrew in 1989, some 15,000 Soviet troops had been killed. It was the Soviet Union’s Vietnam experience.

By 1984 I was in Washington, where President Ronald Reagan, in his second term of office, was restoring American self-confidence after the Vietnam debacle by challenging Soviet military power with a major conventional and nuclear arms build-up and declaring that it was “morning in America.” Reagan had made his “evil empire” and “Star Wars” speeches in 1983, foreshadowing a “strategic defence initiative” that would use an impervious, space-based defensive shield to destroy any missiles targeted on the United States. A Soviet fighter jet had shot down Korean airliner KAL007 in September 1983, and in November 1983 the NATO military command exercise, Able Archer, so terrified the ageing Soviet leadership that it ordered a full-scale nuclear alert. In the judgement of many experts, 1983 was the most dangerous year of the cold war.

In June of the following year, prime minister Bob Hawke acknowledged the country’s cold war fears in an important statement to parliament. Hawke’s assessment of East–West relations was grim. He spoke of the devastation of nuclear war and made an unprecedented acknowledgement that hosting the Pine Gap, Nurrungar and North West Cape joint facilities involved “some degree of added risk of nuclear attack.” But he outlined for the first time the bases’ role in giving the United States early warning of a nuclear attack, insisted that they contributed to global stability, and rejected calls for unilateral disarmament and their closure. It was an argument that was never accepted by thousands of Australians who, over the years, demonstrated outside the bases and took to the streets in Palm Sunday parades.

BY 1985 the procession of decrepit Soviet leaders – Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko – had all died and the vigorous Mikhail Gorbachev, freshly installed in the Kremlin, was aware that the cold war contest was becoming economically, technologically and politically unsustainable for the Soviet Union. The size, cost and lethality of US and Soviet arsenals was out of control. Arms reduction talks were taking place as the two sides argued about intermediate-range missile deployments to Western Europe; in the United States there was deep concern that Gorbachev was “the Russian Kennedy” and constituted a threat to American global superiority; in Eastern Europe long-suppressed populations were increasingly defiant of their puppet rulers backed by Soviet military power.

And so, in Geneva in November 1985, Reagan and Gorbachev started the series of summit meetings that became the prelude to the end of the cold war. They were to meet in Reykjavík, Washington DC, Moscow and finally, in December 1988, on Governor’s Island in New York. Any astute observer could see the post–cold war world coming into being despite uncertainties and setbacks.

Visiting Berlin in 1987, Reagan made his famous “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech. Standing with Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate it was possible to sense that the world created in 1945 was starting to collapse under the pressure of history and popular feeling on both sides of the wall. In the end Gorbachev didn’t have to tear down the wall: the German people took matters into their own hands and, watched by the world, breached it with sledgehammers and joy in November 1989 and set in motion the events that led to Germany’s reunification. In Washington, my neighbour was Mario Dederichs, correspondent for the German magazine Stern. He and his family rushed to Berlin to witness the destruction of the wall and his daughter returned with a fragment as a gift for me. It is still among my most valued souvenirs, a memento of the cold war that had shadowed my life since the taunts at North West Brunswick state school more than forty years earlier.

It was another seven years before I had the wit to invite Bernie Taft and Bob Santamaria to meet for the first time. A full account of the meeting was published in the Australian Financial Review magazine on 29 November 1996. The two old cold war warriors – Taft, the German-Jewish communist, and Santamaria, the Italian Catholic anti-communist – found that their economic and social views had converged significantly since the collapse of the Soviet system and the rise of fundamentalist free-market economic orthodoxy. They shared a deep sense of the injustices created by prevailing maldistributions of wealth and power, and Taft acknowledged his pleasure at Santamaria’s declared sympathy for parts of the Marxist view.

For all their influence both men said they were somewhat disappointed at what they had achieved in life, but both said they were still fighting hard to change economic and moral values that affronted them and threatened the future happiness of their grandchildren. They obviously enjoyed the meeting and each other’s company, and Taft, deeply impressed, later said, “You know that man could have been prime minister.” Regrettably, we didn’t traverse the history of the cold war, but their personal rapprochement in Santamaria’s North Melbourne office seemed at the time a modest but appropriate coda to the vast, impersonal world struggle in which they had fought and that had started painfully for me when some kids at school called my father a commo. •

The post My cold war: from Brunswick to Berlin (via the Labor split) appeared first on Inside Story.

THE standard narrative about the last year and a half in Russian politics runs roughly as follows. In late 2011, Putin and his ruling United Russia Party’s ratings were sliding. The fact that the party performed poorly at the December 2011 parliamentary elections was a shock, though not wholly unexpected. But the largely spontaneous popular demonstrations against the falsification of the results gave Putin a seriously bad fright. Until he managed to engineer himself a win in the first round of the presidential elections the following March, he was very much on edge. The tears in his eyes on election night bore eloquent witness to the strain he’d been under.

Since then, however, Putin has recovered his usual confidence and belligerence. He has charted a course towards increasing repression at home and increasing assertiveness abroad, displaying particular venom towards the United States. The opposition has largely subsided and failed to press home any advantage it ever had. Putin is securely in the saddle for the next six years, until 2018, and possibly for twelve. We should prepare for more of the same.

The standard narrative isn’t necessarily wrong, but important qualifications need to be made. Though the strength of Putin’s position shouldn’t be underestimated, as oppositionists tend to do, it is less stable than it looks, and certainly less stable than it once was.

Putin’s legitimacy has been seriously damaged, and the chorus of criticism on the internet and in the remaining independent media is shrill. The urban middle classes are disheartened but also quite deeply alienated. Efforts at creating a coherent opposition leadership have had only modest success, and numbers at demonstrations are down, but when an issue does mobilise people, the opposition can still get a crowd out on the streets. (In January this year, for instance, over 50,000 marched “against the scoundrels” over the banning of adoptions of Russian children by US citizens.)

Opposition is taking various forms, typically via the internet, and can sometimes draw blood. Anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny’s current campaign of exposing prominent hardliners in the parliament for offences against Putin’s new strictures on property ownership by officials has demoralised the ruling party and led to a spate of resignations.

An opposition campaign is also being launched online against the widespread practice within the Russian elite of acquiring academic decorations by resort to ghost-writers and plagiarism. The opposition has already claimed some scalps and reportedly has something like twenty “investigations” in train. This trend is the more threatening because Putin himself is vulnerable on this count. Much less flagrant cases of plagiarism than seem to be common in Russia have led to ministerial resignations in Germany, a comparison commentators are making.

Although the Russian economy looks pretty solid compared to much of Europe, it is underperforming for a country with such a huge resource endowment. In the last quarter of 2012, growth slipped to the equivalent of an annual rate of 2 per cent. Cyprus permitting, that rate will probably recover somewhat in the course of 2013, but the current trend rate of between 3 and 4 per cent compares very unfavourably with rates of around 7 per cent during Putin’s previous terms as president.

To win re-election, Putin promised everything to everyone, placing a heavy and long-term burden on the state budget. The oil price at which the Russian budget breaks even had already been rising rapidly and has now reached $117 a barrel.  And there are looming threats to Russia’s dominant position in energy export markets from US shale gas, for example, and from the death of Hugo Chavez.

While Putin’s “power vertical” – his consolidation of centralised power in the Russian state – came together well enough to see off the immediate challenge from political opponents, there are signs of instability within the elite that Putin’s actions are accentuating. Hardline factions, to which Putin has always been closer, are tending to escape control in the way they did during the period before he handed the presidency to Medvedev in 2008. The elite as a whole has moved to the silovik (securocrat) right and there may be challenges from that quarter.

The neo-Stalinist tendency within the elite is quite strong and has an able and popular potential leader in Dmitry Rogozin, the combative former ambassador to NATO. Recalled to Moscow last year, Rogozin is now a highly visible deputy prime minister responsible for the defence-industrial complex. He has called for a renewed wave of military industrialisation – as in the Soviet Union in the 1930s – claiming implausibly that this could revitalise the entire manufacturing sector. He also supports renaming Volgograd as Stalingrad, and – perhaps attempting to outshine Navalny – has called for severe punishment for anyone found to be involved in corrupt activities. This populist platform has considerable appeal to much of the elite and the general population

Even the occasionally excessive zeal of the United Russia deputies in the Duma seems to be causing Putin some anguish. While the Kremlin has undoubtedly initiated the many legislative attacks of recent months on the opposition, some of the new laws have risked becoming caricatural in the hands of Duma zealots eager to please the leadership. Putin initially tried to moderate their proposed total ban on US adoptions, for example, and rubbed some of the harsh edges off their draft laws prohibiting Russian officials from owning property or bank accounts abroad. But this, too, was a Putin initiative aimed at curbing the tendency of the Russian elite to denounce the West for domestic political purposes while owning property, schooling their children and in general disporting themselves in Western countries.

Another clear sign of dog-fighting under the carpet is the public struggle by conservative forces within the regime against the government of prime minister Dmitry Medvedev. Putin has himself been openly critical of the government, and the attacks by conservative media sources have been frequent and abusive. Although liberals have tended to gather around Medvedev as prime minister, he is an even weaker reed in that role than he was as president. Putin is making costly demands – for huge military expenditure and the further concentration of energy industries at huge expense in the hands of his de facto number two, Rosneft chair Igor Sechin, for example – and it is left to Medvedev and his government to square any resulting fiscal circles.

This particular form of intra-elite instability may not be of long duration. Putin can easily turn Medvedev into a scapegoat to be sacked at any time of his choosing. In the meantime, Medvedev is being treated with contempt in public by the siloviki, including via an online documentary accusing him of weakness in capitulating to the West over Libya.

A similar, earlier video showed former senior military officers denouncing him for alleged indecision just before the outset of the Georgia war in 2008 while praising Putin, then prime minister, for having demanded more resolute action. While backbiting and policy squabbles have never been entirely absent from Putin’s rule, these are unusually public and explicit expressions of the tensions.

The fact that Medvedev is under such heavy attack may be more than just a reflection of his unpopularity with the dominant siloviki and their hostility towards his government’s policies. As prime minister, Medvedev would be in constitutional line to act as president should Putin die or be incapacitated. The rumours swirling in late 2012 that Putin may be suffering a potentially debilitating injury or illness evoked speculation about possible succession scenarios, and may explain some of the urgency in hardline attempts to tip Medvedev out of his prime minister’s chair.

Putin has always been a practitioner of what was known in Brezhnev’s time as “stability of cadres.” Bureaucrats in autocratic systems do not appreciate constant sackings and other such disruptions, much preferring to get on with feathering their nests undisturbed. And this they have been able to do spectacularly well under Putin, their numbers multiplying as well as their rapacity. But with the opposition scoring telling points by exposing their corruption, Putin now feels he must be seen to act, at least symbolically. Hence the strictures against members of the elite living a double life, denouncing the West at home while enjoying its fleshpots at every opportunity. These new rigours have been termed Putin’s “nationalisation of the elite.”

Putin’s drive to repatriate elite assets from Western boltholes has multiple targets. It is meant to stave off opposition attacks on “swindlers and thieves”; to increase the leadership’s purchase on its sometimes unresponsive bureaucracy by making an example of some of them; to reduce exposure to malign Western influences and reduce the West’s capacity to punish the regime by using selective sanctions against top officials of the kind launched under the US Magnitsky Act; and to address the burning issue of capital flight from Russia to Western destinations.

A particularly striking example of this capital flight, an unknown but not insubstantial proportion of which is illegal or downright money-laundering, is the vast flow of funds from Russia to Cyprus and back again. Bizarrely, that tax-haven (population 800,000) is responsible for about a quarter of foreign investment in Russia, and itself attracts about a quarter of Russian investment abroad. While most of this financial round-tripping involves at least tax evasion, some observers believe that what’s mainly involved is the need Russian investors feel to escape the dismal investment climate in their own country.

The European Union’s decision that the solution for Cyprus’s banking crisis should include a compulsory contribution from the wealthiest of its account-holders will certainly hit Russians and Russia hard. The angry protests from Putin and Medvedev are likely to be supported by many Russians, including people who would normally be on the other side of the barricades. Led by Germany, the decision is both an opportunity and a costly blow for Moscow. With more plausibility than usual, Putin can blame the West for nefarious conspiracies to damage mother Russia. And it gives an unexpected fillip to his campaign to repatriate Russian capital to the homeland where he can more readily get access to it for his own patriotic plans.

But being forced to put their often dubious earnings where their patriotic mouths are will stir great resentment in the elite. To make things worse, Putin also seems inclined to inflict collective punishment on the United Russia party as a whole for its poor performance, shifting his support instead to the All-Russian National Front, which he set up to support the regime in the parliamentary/presidential election cycle of 2011–12. There is even  speculation that Putin may dissolve parliament to help purge and punish the hapless United Russia. These are all uncharacteristically risky manoeuvres for Putin, suggesting that, for whatever reasons, he is agitated about the current state of affairs in Russia.

THE turbulence within the elite, which he is exacerbating, may make it more difficult for Putin to continue to maintain his role as the arbiter of last resort between the different factions. But he has always been closer by background and temperament to the Petersburg siloviki than the Petersburg tsiviliki (civilian lawyers and economists) who together form the core of his elite support. Despite presiding over a country with some of the greatest socio-economic inequalities in the world, he continues to pretend, quite successfully, to be a man of the people, a champion of the working class, a resolute supporter of the Russian military and patriots generally, and a determined adversary of the petty-bourgeois Russian intelligentsia.

Simultaneously, he manages to present himself as a social conservative, a devout Orthodox church-goer, and the scourge of unpopular minorities, including (sotto voce) Muslims and also pushy sexual minorities. (Internationally he has even managed to market himself successfully to Hugo Chavez and other latter-day state socialists as their like-minded ally.) These representational skills, which owe something to his KGB training, have been in prominent display in his fightback against the street protests of 2011–12.

Putin’s crackdown on the opposition was initially tempered by the fading liberal gestures of Medvedev’s last lamer-duck months as president. But since Putin returned to the presidency formally in May 2012, the tempo has increased sharply. With impetuous speed the Duma has passed a series of harsh new laws that create or extend criminal offences and provide for draconian fines and, often, prison terms. This takes Russia back to a level of repression not seen since before Gorbachev’s perestroika. These new laws:

• penalise those who organise or participate in “unauthorised’ demonstrations

• require all organisations that receive any foreign money to proclaim themselves “foreign agents”

• ban anyone holding foreign citizenship from working in an NGO in Russia or expressing views that are damaging to Russia’s interests

• recriminalise “slander,” which was decriminalised by Medvedev a few months earlier

• propose a new offence of insulting religious feelings (the law is still under consideration in the parliament

• expand the criminal offence of treason

• place restrictions on freedom of expression on the internet, ostensibly to protect minors (with more restrictions apparently under consideration).

A number of further such measures have been proposed in the Duma, most xenophobic and some bizarre, like the suggestion from the Duma’s longstanding resident buffoon, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, that foreign words be banned from use in Russian media, and a proposal that cinemas be penalised for showing too many foreign films.

Many leading opposition figures have been singled out for dawn raids on their apartments, indicted for offences carrying heavy penalties, or subjected to character assassination in television “documentaries”. And reports suggest a big legal case is being mounted against twenty or so demonstrators involved in the Bolotnoye Delo (Muddy Field case), which arose out of a demonstration on 6 May last year, just before Putin’s inauguration.

In the view of most independent observers, the physical confrontation that broke out that day was the result of provocation by police. Last week, a man claiming to have been a secret government operative surfaced on You Tube asserting that he had been offered money to cause an outbreak of violence at the demonstration. Regardless of the plausibility of the witness or his story, it does seem clear that the regime intends to use the event to prosecute and jail a significant number of alleged offenders.

So far, the regime has not been pursuing many of the new police-state laws with much vigour. They are very repressive on paper, but their implementation remains more consistent with the soft authoritarianism that has characterised Putin’s rule to date.

Many of the putative offenders, particularly the better-known ones, have still not been locked up, and some continue to defy the regime. Despite facing multiple charges that could attract lengthy sentences, Navalny has been particularly active. (The charges look very thin, but conviction rates in Russian courts are close to 100 per cent even in non-political cases.)

Will Putin now tighten the screws and make an example of some of these “offenders”? The Muddy Field case and the raids in recent weeks on hundred of NGOs suggest that the repression may be now starting to gather momentum. But tightening the screws would be risky, and not just in terms of Russia’s “reputation deficit”. A few martyrs might re-energise and refocus the opposition.

More heavy-handed tactics, on the other hand, might cow the critics, but at the cost of causing an exodus of talent that Russia can ill afford. Surveys have long pointed to high percentages of younger urban Russians wishing to leave the country, and in recent months emigration has again become a buzz word among the creative classes.

But in another sense Putin’s repressive measures have been more carefully and skilfully managed than their hasty adoption and their repugnance to a Western sensibility might suggest. From the outset of the protests, he sought to identify himself with the ordinary person out in the sticks, for whom these intelligentishki pooncing about in the capital had little appeal. He seized on one such salt-of-the-earth type, an industrial foreman in Siberia called Igor Kholmanskikh, as the epitome of this healthy core of society. During a TV call-in program in December 2011, he had offered to bring some mates to Moscow to help Putin sort out the arty types on the streets. Kholmanskikh was rewarded soon after for his sturdy good sense by being made the polpred (presidential representative) to Eastern Siberia, a job for which he appeared to have only very modest qualifications.

At Putin’s first big press conference after the elections in December 2011, he compared the white ribbons worn as symbols by the protestors to condoms. And he didn’t refrained from hinting that the protestors were sexual deviants of some kind. The aim was evidently to accentuate divisions in society, often drawing on the mass propaganda and ideologised education of Soviet times.

To make sure a wedge was driven between the urban middle-class protestors and the ordinary people, opposition leaders were presented as wealthy and corrupt, with even Navalny the volunteer scourge of official corruption being depicted – as corrupt. In a moment of inspiration during an online interview, Navalny had coined the phrase “the party of swindlers and thieves,” a phrase which cost United Russia heavily in the December 2011 elections and has haunted it ever since.

Navalny’s low ratings in public opinion polling suggest the counter-attack, however crude, has been effective. In any European country with free media and a mature democracy this tactic would hardly have worked, but it does still in Russia. From this point of view, the Pussy Riot trial was a gift to the regime, as were any efforts by opposition figures to try to prevent the victimisation of homosexuals, against whom a repressive campaign has also been conducted with growing intensity.

The Kremlin studies the Russian public’s attitudes very closely and knows how to target its conservatism. Opinion polling frequently appears to demonstrate that this or that repressive measure undertaken by the regime is wildly popular with a majority of respondents. While the timing and methodology of such enquiries may at times be dubious, it would seem that Putin’s tactics are effective. In short, he has developed a set of policies with which a transplanted Pauline Hanson would be more than happy.

Nina Andreyeva (the putative author of an article in Sovyetskaya Rossiya in 1988 denouncing perestroika) would probably also be pleased with Putin’s denunciation of the United States for bribing the demonstrators and funding monitors who cast doubt on the honesty of the elections.

She would be even happier with Putin’s efforts to discreetly restore “balance” to the official assessment of Stalin and rewrite school history textbooks to preclude undue emphasis on such difficulties as purges, concentration camps and mass starvation. In February, the independent public opinion polling organisation Levada published results of surveys showing that the number of people who see Stalin in a positive light has increased very significantly on Putin’s watch, and is now almost 50 per cent of the population.

If – to take a counter-factual scenario – a postwar Nazi government in a residual Third Reich, led by ex-intelligence officers from the Nazi era, were to have influenced public attitudes in the Reich to Hitler in a similar way, we’d all be extremely alarmed.

AFTER the street demonstrations of 2011–12, the Kremlin launched a strident campaign against their “reset” partners in the United States, starting with a campaign of harassment of the reset’s key architect, the then incoming US ambassador Mike McFaul, and continuing through to its extreme reaction to the Magnitsky Act.

The hasty passage in a highly patriotic atmosphere of Herod’s Law, as it has been called, banning any adoptions of Russian children by American parents, featured bizarre statements by some deputies. These included the assertion that the United States wanted Russian children in order to harvest their organs for resale or to use them as cannon fodder in a future war against Russia.

What all this points to is the fact that, while Russian foreign policy is undoubtedly the product of many factors, it is currently being  shaped substantially and at times decisively by domestic politics and by the mindsets, phobias and propaganda tactics of the people who dominate it.

The combination of increasingly repressive policies, adroitly selective use of left-wing rhetoric and appeals to the public’s conservative mindset seems to be working well for now. But some opinion surveys suggest that Putin’s popularity is slipping again quite markedly (though no alternative to him is in sight). And the domestic political situation is certainly less stable than it was before Putin and Medvedev swapped jobs in September 2011. The urban middle classes are unhappy, the economy is more fragile, and the balance between intra-regime factions is more tenuous, in considerable measure as a result of Putin’s own actions.

To complicate matters further, the ever-present threat of militant Islamism concentrated in the North Caucasus continues to bubble along, with a disturbing tendency to metastasise to areas not previously much affected, notably the Central Volga regions of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. Keeping all these factors under control till 2018 and beyond will be a challenge.

Although Putin’s repressive domestic policies and strident external policies will probably be maintained, and possibly strengthened, there are some important exceptions to this general picture. In some areas of domestic policy, for instance – in macroeconomic policy in particular, which has been in competent and responsible hands and whose importance Putin recognises – good sense will continue to prevail.

But it would be surprising if that competence and good sense were allowed to extend in any serious way towards tackling corruption (in which the regime is heavily implicated), improving the dismal investment climate or reducing the inefficient gigantomania of favoured economic enterprises, whether state or private. The recent prominence of Putin’s neo-Soviet economic adviser, Sergei Glazyev, and the pronouncements of Putin and Rogozin on the need for a massive 1930s-style defence-led industrialisation suggest that the effectiveness and independence of the key economic policy makers may just possibly come under threat.

The stridency of external policies could also be checked by signs of progress in relations with the United States and the European Union. If, for example, Washington were indeed to offer greater flexibility on missile defence (as Obama audibly promised Medvedev at the Seoul nuclear summit last March), Moscow may tone down its rhetoric somewhat.

But even that may be too much to hope for. While for reasons that are not yet fully clear, Moscow has muted somewhat its denunciations of the EU-imposed bailout, the fallout from Cyprus is likely to further inflame relations with the European Union. And when Defense Secretary Hagel announced on 15 March that Washington would not be proceeding with stage four of its proposed European missile defence shield (a feature of the plans the Russians had particularly objected to), the reflex action from senior Russian spokesmen was immediately and overwhelmingly negative. If the Putin regime hangs on, whether under Putin or, for example, his old ex-KGB colleague Sergei Ivanov, it could be a tough twelve years for East–West relations. •

The post Will Putin survive until 2018? appeared first on Inside Story.

SINCE announcing his intention to reclaim the Russian presidency, and especially since the outbreak of public demonstrations late last year, Vladimir Putin has been pursuing a hard line both domestically and externally. At home he is strengthening his “power vertical” by reinforcing his instruments of control and repression at all political levels and doing away with the wishy-washy liberal rhetoric of his placeholder predecessor as president, Dmitry Medvedev. Externally he is pursuing the anti-American and anti-Western line he adopted in his second term as president (2004–08), also stripped of the more emollient accents of Medvedev.

The urban revolt against Putin and his system has largely run out of steam for the time being. Discouraged by the failure to win any concessions from Putin, and probably deterred by the recent spate of repressive legislation, dwindling numbers are turning out for street demonstrations. In his last months as president, Medvedev tried to respond to the unrest with liberal reforms to the electoral system, but his successor has gutted virtually all of them.

But Putin and his system are no longer sacrosanct, and dissidence continues to spread on the internet and in local communities fed up with the Kremlin’s incompetence and venality. A further crackdown on the internet is likely (a move to ban YouTube from Russia is mooted, for example). But despite the growing repression, unrest could be reignited by a sharp economic downturn, some spectacular scandal, or disunity within the elite (an outbreak of overt conflict between Putin and Medvedev’s more liberal government, for example). If that occurs Putin could respond harshly.

A particularly important, if not the most important, foreign policy objective for Putin is to build up the existing rather feeble post-Soviet multilateral institutions into something he has called – by misleading analogy with the European Union – the Eurasian Union. Within this proposed bloc, Putin wants Moscow (led by his St Petersburg coterie) to play the role of both Brussels and Berlin. His aim is to bring in as many former republics as he can muster by using a mixture of persuasion and coercion (mainly economic, but he is also embarking on a very ambitious military build-up).

Kazakhstan, with its large Slavonic minorities, has joined the Customs Union and has maintained productive relations with Russia, but is also strengthening its ties with China and the West. Russia continues to have hopes of greatly expanding its influence in other former republics: in elections due next month in Lithuania and Georgia, for example, the strongly pro-Western and anti-Russian governments currently in place could face defeat.

A struggle for influence is taking place in Moldova, where the pro-Western government is making a determined effort to seek integration with Europe. On 11 September, Moscow delivered a public warning to the visiting Moldovan prime minister, Vlad Filat, that if Moldova wanted to pay less than the current US$392 per thousand cubic metres for its gas, his government would, in effect, have to renounce its Western orientation. Moscow is also holding Moldova responsible for the US$3.5 billion gas debt of Transnistria, a breakaway pro-Moscow province, which Russia has been cosseting and supporting for the last two decades. The European Commission president José-Manuel Barroso quickly responded to Moscow’s ultimatum with a declaration that an association agreement between the European Union and Moldova could be signed by 2013. Meanwhile, Moldova’s opposition pro-Moscow Communist Party is pressing for a referendum on joining the Eurasian Union.

Moscow is fighting a long-term positional battle for influence in most of the other former republics, with mixed and fluctuating fortunes. But the possibility that it will consider applicants to the Eurasian Union from countries further afield cannot be entirely ruled out. There is some sentiment in both Russia and Serbia in favour of Serbia’s becoming a member. The new president and government that came to power there earlier this year are markedly more pro-Russian than their predecessors. While for economic and electoral reasons they continue to emphasise their desire for European integration, this project could come unstuck over Kosovo or some other issues.

Both president Tomislav Nikolić and prime minister Ivica Dačić have interesting pasts – Dacic as Milosevic’s party spokesman and Nikolic as deputy leader of an extreme nationalist party – but both emphasise they are now pro-European. Nonetheless, during his two visits already to Moscow since becoming president last May, Nikolic has embarrassed some of his compatriots with his expressions of love for Russia. “The only thing I love more than Russia is Serbia,” he announced at one point. This and other Nikolic statements – including his apparent denial of the Srebrenica genocide – could yet cause serious trouble in Brussels, potentially opening the way for increased Russian influence.

But within Putin’s plans, a crucial role is accorded to the two Slavonic former republics of the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Belarus, which have many ethnic, political and cultural links with Russia. If they formed a stable alliance, or better still from Putin’s point of view, confederation with Russia, Moscow would be at the head of just under 200 million people, with much of the industrial capacity of the old Soviet Union again under its leadership. Individually and as a group, these three countries pose thorny dilemmas for Western policy-makers.

And none more so than Russia. Even when Moscow doesn’t deliver on such important issues as Iran and Syria, the United States still sees the need to struggle for its support in the UN Security Council. Because of its difficult relationship with Pakistan, Washington’s forces in Afghanistan rely on logistic support both from Russia and from former Soviet republics Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – where any American presence evokes strong objections in Moscow. And Obama’s nuclear disarmament agenda, a high priority for the president, depends crucially on Moscow’s cooperation.

The US administration has played down the differences over Russia’s incursion into Georgia in 2008 and the role of human rights in the bilateral relationship, and has modified its missile defence plans for Eastern Europe in deference to Russian sensitivities. But Moscow continues to argue that the missile plans are a deadly threat that is forcing it to rearm comprehensively, at the same time declaring that it could easily dispose of the installations and will target them pre-emptively in any future conflict.

The Kremlin has also threatened former vassal states that make decisions about their own defence of which Russia disapproves. And both the chief of the general staff, Nikolai Makarov, and (less bluntly) Putin recently threatened Finland with retaliation in the event of its pursuing any military cooperation with NATO. Makarov even queried why Finland should have military exercises on its territory at all, demanding to know against whom such exercises were directed and asserting that Finland should instead cooperate militarily with Russia.

Finland and the other Nordic states have been disturbed by the increased regional deployments and exercises Russia has undertaken under Putin’s ascendancy, as well as by its frequently threatening language. They were also unfavourably impressed by the heavy pressure unleashed against Estonia in April 2007 – including an apparent (but unprovable) cyberattack – when the government in Tallinn had the temerity to relocate a statue commemorating the Soviet “liberators” of Estonia from a central square in the capital to a military cemetery.

Washington has responded to pressure of this kind by acceding to East European requests for a more visible NATO military presence. Again in deference to Russian sensitivities, Washington and NATO long refrained from placing any significant hardware or conducting any military exercises in the region, but that policy has now been modified. The Obama administration has also been reluctant to export arms to Georgia since the conflict with Russia, despite the fact that Moscow has been militarising the territories it detached from Georgia after its invasion.

Back home, the Obama administration has done its best to persuade Congress to repeal the Jackson–Vanik Amendment – a restrictive trade provision routinely waived by the president – in accordance with World Trade Organization rules, now that Russia has finally joined the organisation. (US support and assistance, including helping to short-circuit a threatened Georgian veto, helped facilitate Russia’s membership.) And it has sought to head off the pressures in Congress for sanctions against Russia over a spectacular case of alleged high-level official corruption against a foreign-owned company in Moscow and the imprisonment and suspected murder of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer employed by the company, who blew the whistle on the affair.

While he was still in the presidency, Medvedev made a typically ineffectual attempt to look into the Magnitsky case. But that led nowhere, and the Kremlin has responded to complaints with bluster and threats of counter-sanctions. Not wisely, though also not surprisingly, Congress has dug in its heels and still not repealed Jackson–Vanik. For his part, Mitt Romney has come out in favour of introducing Magnitsky sanctions as a precondition for repealing the Amendment. More bilateral turbulence on this and other issues can be expected.

On 19 September, Moscow announced that it was expelling the US Agency for International Development from Russia, demanding that it close its doors by 1 October. USAID supports some fifty-seven Russian NGOs concerned with human rights, election monitoring, AIDS prevention, disability support, governance and environmental issues. Golos (Voice), the Russian volunteer election monitoring group that earned Putin’s rage and indignation during the electoral season, is among the organisations, and will find its work much more difficult. Russian oligarchs will not be risking their fortunes to support them or any of the others. USAID activities and outlays in Russia have been declining under the Obama administration and the administration’s response to this development was characteristically mild and forbearing. But this looks like yet another Putinist punch in the eye for the “reset” in relations between the two countries.

In Europe’s relations with Russia, the central underlying geopolitical issue is probably the fact that, to a greater or lesser degree, Russia has still not accepted the sovereignty of the countries that it used to dominate in Eastern Europe. Given their historical experience of Moscow’s attentions, those countries feel understandably anxious, and have very often sought reassurance in EU and/or NATO membership and support. To the extent that they are successful, Russia declares itself threatened and takes counter-measures; and so the cycle continues.

Russia wants to re-establish influence, if not control, over as much as it can of the territory it once dominated; and it is prepared to do so by political infiltration, using its energy exports as a geopolitical tool, exploiting Russian minorities or applying military pressure, at times including nuclear intimidation. It is an awkward neighbour.

Moscow’s energy diplomacy is best exemplified by the operations of its national gas corporation, Gazprom. Gazprom’s primary role is not to make a profit, though it has often done that, but rather to set prices, build or dismantle pipelines, and satisfy or not satisfy customers, all in such a way as to further the president’s geopolitical objectives. It is a subject close to Putin’s heart: in a remarkably short time in the mid 1990s, he wrote a thesis on the optimal management of national resources. Energy diplomacy has brought both Belarus and Ukraine to heel in the recent past, and Moscow is doing all it can to ensure that it remains an effective weapon.

But now it has begun to encounter some pushback. The European Union and individual EU countries cooperated with Gazprom projects for many years, and some still do. But in 2004, with the acceptance into the European Union of former Soviet-bloc countries heavily dependent on Russian energy imports, the tide began to turn. Moscow’s subsequent “gas wars,” especially those against Ukraine in 2006 and 2009 with their collateral damage for West European consumers, increased Europe’s disquiet about Gazprom’s hardball tactics.

On 27 September last year, European Commission officials raided a series of Gazprom-connected firms in ten EU countries, seeking evidence that Gazprom was in breach of anti-trust laws. A sensational sequel came when Brussels announced on 4 September that it was launching an anti-trust case against the Russian giant. Gas is not the only commodity that Russia uses as a geopolitical weapon, but it is the main one; so this is a significant volley across its bows. The prima facie case seems strong: Gazprom’s prices in Europe vary wildly, reflecting Moscow’s view of the country in question. The prices are often discreetly held, but Belarus is understood to be paying around $165 per thousand cubic metres while Poland is paying well over $500.

Putin has responded to the announcement with characteristic pugnacity, declaring that Russia would not subsidise East European countries on behalf of Brussels, and issuing a hasty decree forbidding Gazprom or other “strategic” Russian enterprises from providing information to EU authorities on any such matters without the regime’s explicit approval. He also announced, with heavily implied menace, “In Asia they are waiting for us.”

Putin has deployed threats to redirect Europe’s gas to Asia many times before, but of course Russia’s pipelines (Gazprom has been very slow to embrace LNG) are not easily diverted. And Putin knows all too well that his “strategic partner,” China, has been wary of allowing itself to become too dependent on Russian energy, and also drives a much tougher bargain than any European country. It is clear, however, that Russia’s relations with the European Union on this and other topics could be in for another torrid time.

WHERE do Ukraine and Belarus fit into this pattern? Russia’s attitude can be summed up very briefly: it wants them back. Putin once said, very quotably, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” Many ethnic Russians living both inside and outside Russia would agree with him. Though large numbers of them migrated to Russia from the former Soviet republics after 1991, there is still a heavy concentration of Russians and Russian speakers in several former republics, including Ukraine and Belarus.

In Ukraine, a little over eight million of the country’s forty-five million (or 18 per cent) identify as ethnic Russians. But a larger proportion (around 30 per cent) give Russian as their native language to census-takers, something approaching half tell researchers that they use Russian at home, and a much larger percentage again are fluent in Russian. Of Belarus’s 9.6 million, about 8 per cent identify as ethnic Russians and fully 70 per cent acknowledge Russian as the language they speak at home. In both countries Orthodoxy is clearly the strongest religion. Despite the turbulent history of relations, public attitudes towards Russia remain positive, reflecting much common experience and shared culture. Putin has enjoyed very high popularity ratings in both countries, higher at times than any local politicians.

But there are important differences between the two countries. In Ukraine there is a much stronger attachment to the native language and to the country’s distinct cultural traditions. Most Ukrainians tell enquirers that they are not religious or do not clearly identify with a particular group. Those who identify as Orthodox are divided among the Moscow Patriarchate (about 30 per cent), the more nationalist Kiev Patriarchate (formed in the early 1990s after independence – 40 per cent) and the Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church (about 3 per cent). Greek Catholic or Uniate Christians (15 per cent) are concentrated in the west of the country, where historical connections to Russia are weakest and attitudes broadly hostile.

A strong majority of Ukrainians tell pollsters that they favour Ukrainian independence (which they voted for resoundingly in 1991). But Ukraine is also the country Russians most regret losing, with Kiev widely regarded as the historic heartland of their state and of national culture. As Russian president, Boris Yeltsin found it politically expedient to agree to the secession of Ukraine and Belarus in December 1991, but Russians still find it absurd that Ukraine has somehow become a separate country, complete with the Crimean peninsula and access to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. As Zbigniew Brzezinski once said, also very quotably: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.”

Putin has been at pains to draw Ukraine back into close communion with Mother Russia. In 2004, he overtly interfered in the presidential election, strongly supporting Viktor Yanukovych who, he rightly judged, was much more pro-Russian than his Western-leaning rival Viktor Yushchenko. But Yanukovych’s rorted victory was overturned by popular resistance, with some involvement from the judiciary and – mediated by the Polish and Lithuanian presidents – from the European Union. This treacherous involvement of former vassals enraged Putin, who always sees a political reverse anywhere in the former Soviet Union as the product of Western plotting. He had nonetheless learnt a lesson: during the 2010 presidential election in Ukraine he kept his distance, and Yanukovych won with full acceptance.

In the current election cycle in Ukraine, both Moscow and Putin personally have been discreet, though their sympathies are obvious. Yanukovych awarded Russia a series of major unilateral concessions early in his term as president, most notably striking a deal on allowing Russia unfettered access to its naval facilities on the Black Sea coast. But Putin does have mixed feelings about Yanukovych because, when it became apparent that Russia was not planning to reciprocate with more than a temporary cut in the price of its gas, he became stubborn and started playing his Western–EU card more frequently, something Ukrainian leaders often do to ward off Russian pressure or strengthen their leverage.

As the price of gas resumed climbing, reflecting the rising cost of oil (the two typically being linked in Gazprom contracts), Ukraine desperately sought further price relief. Innumerable meetings have been held to discuss the subject, but each time Russia has insisted that concessions would only come if Kiev agreed to sell its gas pipelines to Russia and join Moscow’s Customs Union. (Apart from Russia itself, only Belarus and Kazakhstan have signed up so far.) Putin continues strongly encouraging Kiev to consider how much it is paying as a non-member of the union ($425 per thousand cubic metres) and how much Belarus pays ($165).

Meanwhile, Moscow continues to push its South Stream gas pipeline project, which, like the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic, is designed to bypass Ukraine and Belarus (and Poland and other unfavoured states). Moscow’s purpose is to deprive these governments of their transit fees and negotiating leverage, and to ensure that Russia is able to cut off their vital gas supplies to enforce its will while still servicing important customers like Germany and Italy further afield.

I recall a prominent Russian economist recounting how he and others like him had sought to remonstrate with Russian policy-makers about the huge and, as they saw it, unnecessary costs of the bypass gas pipelines to north and south. They were told emphatically to back off; this was “strategic.” The total costs are undoubtedly much greater than the alternative, an upgrading of Ukraine’s and Belarus’s ageing pipelines. But the Russians have turned a deaf ear to Yanukovych’s pleas that they desist from constructing the new pipeline and invest instead in upgrading a friendly pro-Russian neighbour’s infrastructure.

As the elections and South Stream’s construction draw nearer, Yanukovych has shown signs of capitulating to Russian pressure. In August, he introduced a major change to Ukraine’s language policy that greatly strengthens the position of Russian (something Moscow has long demanded, but which is extremely divisive within Ukraine). And on 25 August, on the margins of a meeting with Putin, he hinted broadly at his readiness to make unspecified concessions in exchange for cheaper gas.

One of Yanukovych’s biggest problems is that he has all but burnt his bridges with the European Union, which further undermines his bargaining position with Moscow. Determined to rig the forthcoming parliamentary elections more effectively than he did during his presidential bid in 2004, he has used his manufactured majority in parliament to change the electoral act to disadvantage the opposition and has restricted freedom of the media, particularly television.

To make doubly sure, he has prosecuted several of the previous government’s ministers, including, above all, the former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko (whom he only narrowly defeated for the presidency in 2010) and the former interior minister, Yury Lutsenko. After lengthy periods in pre-trial detention quite disproportionate to the flimsy charges against them, both were duly convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. After both then appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, further charges were laid to ensure there would be a legal pretext for keeping them out of circulation beyond the elections if the court demanded their exoneration on the earlier charges.

The jailings are a misstep by Yanukovych on two grounds. While they have kept a formidable campaigner, Tymoshenko, off the hustings, they have also restored some of her erstwhile popularity and stimulated the opposition to work harder and cooperate better. And they are the single clearest red line for the European Union and its member states. Brussels has repeated over and over again that the association and free-trade agreements laboriously negotiated and initialled with Kiev will not be signed while Tymoshenko and Lutsenko remain behind bars.

But winning the election by whatever means was clearly more important to Yanukovych and his party than EU integration, despite his repeated claims that this was Ukraine’s primary objective. He may be calculating that once his Party of Regions gets over the line he can make some magnanimous gestures to bring the deals with the European Union back to life. But if he does win the election by one means or another, he may decide his next objective should be to ensure that the opposition is disabled more permanently, which would attract a further reaction from Brussels.

Ukraine’s difficult economic position means that it desperately needs financial support from somewhere. It was granted a US$15 billion credit by the IMF in 2010, to be dispensed in several tranches, but the agreement was suspended after disbursement of the second tranche and has not been renewed. Kiev continues to try to extract further credits from the IMF, but without meeting the fund’s tough conditions. Doing so would have affected the government’s domestic popularity in the run-up to the elections. Again, this may be a matter that Yanukovych plans to come back to after the elections.

In the meantime Ukraine is developing a number of credit arrangements with China that may, if all come to fruition, serve as a partial substitute for the IMF, as well as a warning to Moscow that Kiev has other and worrying options. Russian banks (no doubt in consultation with the Kremlin) have also been more forthcoming than the IMF, providing Ukraine with credit facilities to help pay for its expensive gas imports from Russia. But clearly such loans have the effect of helping secure Ukraine’s head in Gazprom’s noose. Yanukovych knows he could get more from Russia if he were prepared to sell more sovereignty. While so far he is holding out, he seems to be weakening.

BELARUS’s president Alexander Lukashenko has also tried repeatedly, and with some success, to strengthen his freedom of manoeuvre by playing the European Union off against Russia. But despite intermittent family quarrels with Moscow, he has always been closer to Russia than any of his Ukrainian counterparts. And now he has backed himself into a corner. During the economic crisis into which his mismanagement plunged the country in 2011, he finally agreed to sell Gazprom the rest of Belarus’s gas pipelines, and he also appears to have agreed in principle to further privatisations of big Belarusian companies in favour of Russian purchasers. And he has not returned to the testy, even hostile relations with Russia that prevailed in the period leading up to the December 2010 presidential elections.

Since Yeltsin’s time in the later 1990s, Belarus and Russia have ostensibly been working towards some kind of unification. The Union State of Russia and Belarus, created under a different name in 1996, has passed through several mutations, but it has never amounted to much. Russia has always expected subordination, whereas Lukashenko, for all his Russophilia and intermittent enthusiasm for the project, was clearly only prepared to agree to unity if it involved a very senior position for him, perhaps even as president of the new entity. There is activity and enthusiasm from Lukashenko again on this front, however, and it can’t be ruled out that progress might be made.

Lukashenko’s flirting with the European Union has probably always been entirely cynical, intended only to gain ad hoc goodies and greater leverage in his dealings with Russia. Periodically, Brussels has held out inducements for him to embrace democracy, rule of law, human rights and so on, but with little success. Lukashenko’s domestic regime has been so retrogressively Soviet that even Putin, himself something of a Soviet nostalgic, views both the president and his regime as slightly pathetic. Ideally, Lukashenko would like to see the return of some Soviet world in which he was the leader and the resources of the entire country were available for import into Belarus at bargain prices.

In their bilateral dealings, however, Putin has usually tried to pursue Russia’s pragmatic national interests, especially its economic interests. His recent resumption of generous subsidies for Belarus’s unreformed economy, which extracted it from its 2011 slump, was well timed to pull Lukashenko back onto the reservation. But in the near future, Minsk will be under great pressure to sell its crown jewels to Russia and embrace some Russian-led economic reform. At that point, Lukashenko will revert to holding out his cap to Brussels; but it may be very hard for him to play that game again.

During the first half of 2012, Belarus’s export performance and balance of payments position underwent a somewhat mysterious improvement. Lukashenko also chose again to distribute wage increases to voters to sweeten the pre-electoral atmosphere. It seems that this further apparent economic uptick on what Moscow’s tactical generosity had already given him had resulted from a scam Lukashenko had employed against his Russian benefactors. Having access to Russian oil imports free of export duties at preferential prices for domestic consumption, Belarus had been processing and refining a substantial proportion of the oil and re-exporting it at a big mark-up, disguising it as solvents and diluting agents. When it became apparent that Moscow was onto this scam, Lukashenko appears to have attempted a similar manoeuvre in exports to Ukraine.

But the game is up. As the relatively independent Nezavisimaya Gazeta commented (“Minsk prikidyvayet kak obmanut soyuznika,” 5 September 2012), “Moscow is dealing with this problem quietly… but is not intending to let Lukashenko off the energy hook. His dependency will be long-term, and he must settle accounts for the subsidies he has received either by selling property in a best-case scenario, or in a worse one by surrendering his own grasp on power and the independence of his country.”

The scam taps into the rich strain of farce, sometimes dark, that runs through public life in Lukashenko’s Belarus. Speaking of farce, the parliamentary elections on 23 September have predictably resulted in yet another resounding win for Lukashenko’s regime. Opposition representatives who have been excluded from parliament since 2004 were again prevented from taking any effective part in the contest. Some of Belarus’s brutalised oppositon parties decided to boycott the election from the outset; others did so demonstratively in the last days before the poll.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s observer mission severely criticised all aspects of the conduct of the election. A rival Moscow-led observer mission pronounced it fully kosher. It would be tedious to enumerate even the main abuses, but by way of example, over one quarter of all registered voters cast their votes before election day in voting precincts where there was often no supervision. Opposition groups said the turnout was overstated by about 20 per cent.

But for Lukashenko the splendid victory demonstrates that the deep economic and social malaise and the political unrest of 2010–11 have been overcome. And in a sense they have been – thanks to a mixture of Russian economic subsidies, relentless repression and society’s own relapse into passive resignation. The only threat to Lukashenko’s power at this point comes from Moscow. But that is a real one, with which no doubt he will now be forced to come to terms.

LUKASHENKO’s regime is far more dictatorial than either Yanukovych’s or Putin’s, though Putin’s current course suggests Russia may be taking more and more leaves from the Belarusian book. What is clear is that all three regimes are moving progressively further away from the democratic and national promise of the early 1990s towards deepening autocracy, marked by high levels of corruption and repression, muffled public discourse, increasing estrangement from their European neighbours, and a regrouping – if at times acrimonious or reluctant – around Moscow as their shared cultural capital.

Neither Lukashenko nor Yanukovych wants to be a provincial administrator in a Russian-dominated Eurasian Union. But that is the unavoidable logic of Lukashenko’s attitudes, political system and unreformed economy. Yanukovych still tolerates greater pluralism at home, defends his independence more stubbornly and displays more interest in achieving some sort of European orientation. But that interest does not extend to European values. For him, as for Lukashenko, the most precious thing that Moscow offers is an external guarantee for his autocracy. Both of them also look with interest to China’s potential as another munificent patron, whom they could hope to play off against Moscow without having to endure any hectoring about human rights and the like. China is displaying interest in these and other post-Soviet states and building up its trading links with them quite significantly. But that may still be a hedge too far.

Over the past two decades the European Union has managed, with a remarkable degree of success, to use the attraction of its model to integrate most of post-communist Eastern Europe. And despite deepening “enlargement fatigue,” it is continuing to work with the tougher cases of the former Yugoslavia and the non-Baltic Western republics of the former Soviet Union. It does not want – and its most eastern members emphatically do not want – to share a border with prickly autocracies falling in behind a rearming and increasingly nationalist Russian Federation.

Brussels has consistently left the door open for erratic wannabe members to turn over enough of a new leaf to qualify for some level of integration, and even potentially membership. It is prepared to reward those who show some commitment to taking on EU values and the acquis communautaire. It also reproves and sometimes sanctions those who flout those principles. But as the new cases get harder and the European Union continues to struggle with its long-running internal crisis, its power to attract and the force of its sanctions become weaker, and Ukraine and Belarus seem to slip further away from its outstretched hand.

Some would argue that the European Union should try to reduce the two countries’ dependency on Russia by bending its rules as far as it takes to draw them into some kind of integration, in the hope that the values might start to filter in at a later date. But given the behaviour of the two regimes, it’s highly unlikely that any such hard-nosed agreements, even if they could be reached, would be ratified by all EU members. For the moment a weakened Brussels seems to have no good options.

Conditions for Putin to pursue his ultimate goal of a Eurasian Union are currently about as favourable as they are ever likely to be; and they are particularly favourable in the Slavonic core. The European Union is in crisis and Putin has pro-Russian autocrats in place in Kiev and Minsk who need his support and for whom Russian is a native language and Russia a second homeland. Gas prices are under some economic and political pressure ly, but gas blackmail is still a strong weapon for the time being. Oil prices, though always volatile, have so far been holding up well. And all three regimes seem headed very much in the same direction.

But since 1991 the non-Russian former Soviet republics have become used to being their own masters, and drawing them firmly into the post-Soviet orbit and keeping them there has been like herding cats. In that respect the culturally and linguistically close Ukrainians and Belarusians have not been very much more amenable than the others. Keeping them all in the tent will probably involve long-term retention of expensive subsidies, which Putin’s successors may find unattractive.

For their part, Russian generals, diplomats, intellectuals and political leaders seem to have been unable to restrain themselves from being all-too-nakedly imperious and imperial. And the urban populations of all three countries have a growing desire for dignity, democracy and respect. It’s not yet an overwhelming majority taste, but there’s enough of it around to make any structures Putin succeeds in launching more than a little unstable. •

The post The Slavonic Autocrats’ Club appeared first on Inside Story.

THE months between early December last year and late October this year may come to be seen as a time when the Slavonic core of the former Soviet Union took a further, and perhaps decisive, turn away from European democracy. In December 2011 and March 2012 Russia held parliamentary and presidential elections that seem, after a season of excitement, to have confirmed Vladimir Putin’s grip on power for at least another six years and initiated a trend towards a police state. Parliamentary elections are scheduled in Belarus for 23 September and in Ukraine for 28 October, and although Belarus’s are a formality, Ukraine’s are much less so. Both are likely to confirm autocratic continuity with distinct downside risks.

Outside the Baltics and one or two other former Soviet republics, elections in the successor states of the Soviet Union don’t normally count for a great deal. The results are usually predictable, and the events themselves elaborately stage-managed. Nonetheless they can at times cause a boilover of sorts, as occurred in December 2011 when Russia’s parliamentaries, despite all the rigging on a sloping deck, saw a shockingly bad result for Putin’s ruling United Russia party, which lost seventy-seven of its parliamentary seats. While United Russia failed to get an absolute majority of votes, it did manage still to win a slim absolute majority of seats over the largely docile opposition parties permitted representation in the legislature. It has used that majority to pass a series of repressive laws aimed at neutralising the opposition and minimising their activities on the street and the internet.

At 64 per cent, Putin’s winning vote in the presidential poll last March was more convincing. Despite the considerable unrest, mainly affecting the urban middle classes, this comfortable margin was not surprising given his near-complete control of television (where most Russians get their information) and of who might be allowed to run against him. Observers saw evidence of extensive fraud on the day, but nearly all felt that, regardless, Putin would have scraped over the line in that first round.

Belarus’s last elections – the presidential contest in December 2010 – produced a similar surprise to the recent Russian electoral cycle – a phoney outcome leading to an outburst of popular anger, then a crackdown. The preordained winner, Alexander Lukashenko, was duly declared to have secured a fourth straight victory with a totally implausible 80 per cent of the vote. Nine candidates had been permitted to run against him and were given slightly less restrictive conditions than usual as part of an effort to mollify the European Union as a hedge against the pressure Belarus was under from Moscow.

A few days before the poll, Moscow ironed out its bilateral dispute with Minsk by renewing subsidies for Belarus’s energy sector worth, according to Putin, over US$4 billion per annum. Seeing no further need to hold out an olive branch to the European Union, Lukashenko unleashed a ferocious crackdown on the peaceful crowd that had gathered to protest the results on election night. Many were manhandled, 639 were arrested, including several of his fellow presidential candidates, and dozens of people were ultimately sentenced to lengthy jail terms. Conditions for political prisoners in Lukashenko’s jails are particularly harsh: they are often, for example, put together with murderers and other difficult inmates.

Despite the regime’s brutality, opposition on the streets continued for many months afterwards. In response, Lukashenko progressively sharpened his legislative provisions to the point where people could be arrested for applauding in a public place, or even for being silent in a public place. The regime has essentially maintained the crackdown ever since. In 2011 the national economy fell into a severe slump largely caused by Lukashenko’s reckless pre-election spending. As a consequence, opinion polling shows the president’s real support falling to around 30 per cent.

Like Putin, Lukashenko had enjoyed a considerable degree of real popularity in earlier years, and like Putin he had now been given a clear signal by popular unrest that he would need to take sterner measures to maintain himself in power. With the opposition cowed by the regime’s unrelenting repression, and the economy picking up considerably thanks to further increases in Russian subsidies, the parliamentary elections on 23 September will almost certainly result in a win for the regime.

When it comes to repression, Lukashenko leaves little to chance. In July a group of Swedish activists managed to get a light aircraft into Belarus and drop a few hundred teddy bears holding a freedom of speech message in their paws. Lukashenko was so incensed that he expelled the Swedish ambassador, closed the Swedish embassy, sacked his foreign minister and the head of his airforce, sacked another general for good measure, and had arrested a young man who placed an image of the bears on his own website.

Judged by neighbourhood standards, Ukrainian elections are less predictable and its politics a little more pluralist. Governments and policy directions have changed more than once since the fall of the Soviet Union. In November–December 2004, when Ukraine’s current president, Viktor Yanukovych, was implausibly declared the winner of the presidential election despite widespread reports of gross irregularities, public indignation was so great that the result was overturned. Yanukovych was defeated in the rerun by Orange Revolution leader Viktor Yushchenko.

The coalition of Yushchenko and firebrand orator Yulia Tymoshenko, who became prime minister, soon fell apart. After a giddying series of political changes and a severe slump in 2009 because of the global financial crisis, popular support for the Orange forces fell away. At the next presidentials in early 2010, Yanukovych made a comeback, narrowly defeating Tymoshenko in the run-off. The Orange leadership, with its endless internal feuds and failure to implement promised reforms, had been a great disappointment to its supporters at home and abroad. But it had at least established and maintained a large degree of democratic freedom and propriety, as Yanukovych’s victory itself demonstrated.

On taking power in March 2010, Yanukovych and his Party of Regions quickly converted a narrow victory into a near stranglehold on power by highly dubious means. Democratic freedoms were whittled away and opposition politicians were bribed into joining the government, enabling it to control the parliament. The powers of the presidency have been expanded with the compliance of the judiciary, whose independence has been systematically undermined. Key opposition leaders have been jailed on trumped-up charges to prevent them from presenting any kind of threat at future elections.

Yanukovych, who above all represents the Russified east and southeast of the country, has taken several big steps towards closer alignment with Moscow. At the same time, he has continued to assert that membership of the European Union is his prime objective, and that he will not accede to the various post-Soviet multilateral organisations that Putin is pressing him to join. But the constant abuses of democratic principles have effectively put any progress towards Europe out of the question, despite the technical negotiations for an association and free-trade agreement having been successfully concluded. The imprisonment of Yulia Tymoshenko, who is now being threatened with a further series of implausible charges, including one for alleged conspiracy to murder, is only the best-known of these abuses.

Despite Yanukovych’s consolidation of autocratic control and his free use of administrative resources and legal chicaneries to neutralise the battered Orange forces, it still seems possible that the elections on 28 October could produce another changeover in parliament. Opinion polls show the Party of Regions and the united opposition party list, led by Tymoshenko and former foreign minister Arseny Yatsenyuk, running neck-and-neck. Much will depend on how successfully the regime can use its access to the machinery of government to massage the vote, and whether other parties that win seats choose to ally with Regions or the opposition.

Money often buys support in Ukrainian politics, and Regions has more of it at its disposal. One smaller party, Forward Ukraine, which broke away from Tymoshenko’s Bloc, has been running an intellectually vacuous campaign (“new people for a new country”) backed by extremely expensive advertising. It has latterly recruited as a candidate Andriy Shevchenko, Ukraine’s world-beating soccer star, who joined the party soon after an audience with President Yanukovych. The party leader, Natalia Korolevska, claims that they are a true opposition party, but it is far from clear where their money is coming from, and most expect them to do a deal with the Party of Regions as soon as the elections are over.

Another sporting hero, world heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, is also leading a party that seems destined to win quite a few seats. Klitschko sounds more oppositionist than Korolevska, but he has maintained some ambiguity about his future intentions.

If Yanukovych does prove able to cobble together a clear win in the elections, or assemble a financially lubricated coalition after them, it seems likely that what remains of Ukraine’s democracy will be under serious threat.

IN MOSCOW, after the humiliations and anxieties of the parliamentary and presidential elections, during which he was booed in public and street demonstrations became almost commonplace, the old Putin has re-emerged with most of his customary swagger and self-confidence restored.

The recovery in his demeanour was slower than we might have expected. His formal inauguration was held during a quiet time in early May, with his motorcade’s route to the Kremlin sealed off from ordinary Moscow residents and protesters. The televised event made the city of some thirteen million look eerily like a ghost town. Elsewhere in the city, scuffles broke out between smallish groups of opposition supporters and police, as had happened on the day preceding the ceremony.

Since then, though, the Kremlin has undertaken a consistent campaign to cow the opposition and get its members permanently off the streets. Prosecutions, house searches and confiscations of property relating to the May street clashes are continuing. Despite its own embarrassments, the ruling United Russia party has regained its vigour and resumed doing what it does best, guaranteeing that legislation required by the Kremlin is passed in quick time with scant regard for procedural niceties. Some members of the tame parties allowed into the Duma have put up a bit of a fight but have been swept aside.

Draconian penalties (US$9000 – roughly equivalent to the average Russian’s yearly income) were legislated for anyone participating in an unauthorised public demonstration, or breaching the conditions of authorisation. The new penalties for organisers are even more severe, rising to US$30,000 for any groups involved.

Libel and slander have been recriminalised, a rebuff for Dmitry Medvedev – former president, now prime minister – on whose watch such offences had been decriminalised only a few months earlier. Like many Russian laws, this is likely to be an instrument of “selective justice,” wielded against those identified as enemies of the regime.

Another new law subjects the internet to close invigilation and sanctions, including the summary closing of websites, ostensibly to protect the young and vulnerable from pornography and the like, but with ample scope to be used against websites critical of the regime. And any NGO that receives money from abroad must register and declare all such sources, and identify themselves publicly as “foreign agents.” With its strong Stalinist redolences, this tag should suffice to make many Russians wary of having anything to do with them. Other such measures are reportedly under consideration in United Russia’s suddenly hyperactive law-making circles.

Putin’s determination to stamp out opposition was also reflected in the recent trial of three members of Pussy Riot. The arts and entertainment communities have turned against him in recent years, and the Kremlin clearly judged that the group was a suitable target to be made an example of. Putin’s faithful allies in the Orthodox hierarchy (Patriarch Kirill is widely believed to have been a collaborator of the KGB since Soviet times) called for the young women to be punished appropriately, and most of Russian society also strongly disapproved of their antics in the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. In fact, the three young women disported themselves there for only forty seconds before cathedral officials removed them; most of the impertinence was spliced in later.

As time went on, the public, including Orthodox believers (not actually a huge group within the Russian population – many identify as Orthodox, but only a small minority are devout or observant) began to feel that the accused should not be punished too severely. The legal basis for the trial was manifestly shonky and condemnation became intense. Even Putin himself, who was undoubtedly angered by their call on the Virgin Mary to “drive him away,” seems to have had second thoughts – or at least affected to have second thoughts as he observed reactions – and expressed the disingenuous hope that they might not be punished too severely. Whatever the propaganda value domestically, the trial was clearly becoming severely damaging ly. As Stephen Sestanovich, the distinguished Russian expert and former senior official in the Clinton administration remarked in commentary on the trial, “Russia has not seemed as unattractive or unappealing as an player in a long time.”

Another target of Putin’s wrath has been Ksenia Sobchak, the daughter of his former boss and close friend, Anatoly Sobchak, the Yeltsin-era mayor of St Petersburg. Putin, not known for his tender emotions, was seen to cry at Sobchak’s funeral, and Ksenia is widely rumoured to be his god-daughter (though she has denied it). A glamorous and successful media personality and socialite, she has in recent months emerged as an oppositionist. As a reward for this public-spirited makeover she has been removed from her roles in the state-controlled media, but she has become a star on the internet, gradually overcoming the initial mistrust of opposition activists.

Along with other leading opposition personalities, she was subjected to a sudden house search by police early on the morning of 11 June. The police, who were obviously expecting to find her current live-in boyfriend present, read aloud love letters they found in her flat and confiscated over a million dollars in cash.

The purpose of this operation was to show the Russian public that oppositionists are very wealthy, probably thanks to their treacherous contacts with Western organisations, and that they lead enviably dissolute lives. There is an old Russian saying: a peasant is happy to be poor as long as his neighbour doesn’t prosper; envy has been one of the emotions Putin’s election campaign and recent policies have used to excite popular resentment against his middle-class opposition.

The longstanding family friendship makes it likely that Sobchak’s selection as a victim of this operation was cleared with Putin; so too does the fact that Ksenia’s mother, Lyudmila Narusova, is the widow of Putin’s guru, at whose funeral he publicly wept. Narusova is a member of the upper house of the Russian parliament, where she too is under official fire for opposing recent authoritarian legislation.

Repressive action has also been launched against two other leading oppositionists: Alexei Navalny, the very popular anti-corruption blogger and author of the politically effective phrase “party of swindlers and thieves” to describe United Russia; and Gennady Gudkov, a Duma deputy from the tolerated opposition Just Russia party. Navalny has been charged with stealing a large amount of timber in a period when he was working as an adviser to a liberal and ex-dissident provincial governor. The charges have been used against him in the past but collapsed even in Russia’s accommodating judicial system. This time they may be forced to succeed, leaving Navalny facing a possible ten years’ imprisonment.

Gudkov, who has been the most active oppositionist in the Duma, has been charged with owning a private business – suddenly an offence for public officials – even though he divested himself of any managerial responsibility. Many United Russia deputies are known to be in the same position, but no charges have been laid against them. Gudkov, curiously, is an ex-KGB colonel like Putin, but his recent activities would have struck the president as a case of inexcusable treachery to his former service.

INTERNATIONALLY, a major contributor to Russia’s image problem has of course been the Kremlin’s determination to protect the Assad regime in Syria as it continues to slaughter its domestic adversaries in a sectarian cause. More generally, Putin has continued much of the anti-American and anti-Western animus of his election campaign pronouncements. Disregarding the fiscal objections of his old comrade, self-exiled former finance minister Alexei Kudrin, Putin has returned to his election theme of a huge arms build-up with a new twist: as in the Stalin years, to which he often looks back with nostalgia, he argues that a build-up would catalyse a new flowering of industry and technology in the country.

Even with oil prices as high as they currently are, Russia’s public finances are vulnerable; in the absence of any plausible enemy, the build-up makes little financial or strategic sense. Yet Putin is planning to sink an additional US$970 billion into defence equipment by 2020, with an increase of overall defence expenditure of about one third by 2014.

Western leaders enjoyed the four-year holiday from Putin while the more emollient and liberal-sounding Medvedev was supposedly the custodian of Russian foreign policy. Some even appeared to genuinely believe that this was the case, or at least to behave as though it were, in the hope that this would somehow help Medvedev to grow into the job. But he either could not or chose not to.

Following on from his humiliation last September, when he had to announce publicly that he would vacate his post in favour of Putin because of Putin’s superior merits, Medvedev has now had to endure attacks on his courage and competence in handling the outbreak of hostilities with Georgia in August 2008. In an internet documentary marking the fourth anniversary of the war, a group of retired generals blame him for his allegedly slow and hesitant response, which they claim cost lives. They take the opportunity to praise Putin for having administered a kick to those in Moscow who were holding the high command back from getting on with the task. Putin has also made public statements implying that, though he was away at the Beijing Olympics at the time, he nonetheless stayed in touch with (read: in control of) events by telephone.

Though he is still prime minister, Medvedev’s position looks weaker than ever, as Putin builds his Presidential Administration into a dominant force able to second-guess or overrule ministers and ministries as required. Some economic liberals still remain in the upper reaches of the elite, and many in governing circles are thought to be unhappy about Putin’s repressive course domestically and his belligerence on the scene. But for now they don’t seem to be exerting much influence.

So Western leaders are stuck with Putin, possibly even for twelve years, and while there is not a great deal they can do about it, they clearly are not enjoying the prospect. Even Germany, where Putin spent his only foreign posting with the KGB and where his interpersonal skills and strong command of the language won him a good deal of initial sympathy, seems to be tiring of him. The economic links will undoubtedly remain very strong, but Chancellor Merkel and President Gauck, both East Germans, clearly find him distasteful. And the German press has become sharply critical. Der Spiegel reported that on his last trip to Germany, Putin forced Merkel to wait for an hour for a meeting with him. This curious form of discourtesy towards foreign interlocutors seems to have become more frequent – he recently infuriated the Ukrainian leadership by keeping Yanukovych waiting for five hours for a bilateral meeting while he met with a group of Russian bikies.

US ambassador Mike McFaul, a key architect of Obama’s “reset” policy towards Russia, was subjected to months of crass harassment earlier this year, clearly officially inspired and publicly endorsed by the Russian foreign minister. If Obama is returned to office, and Putin’s belligerence towards the United States persists, Washington’s approach to Russia may become cooler, particularly once the US drawdown of forces from Afghanistan (for which Russian cooperation is very important) is well advanced. If he is not, a Republican administration’s approach could be rather different, as the Romney team has already signalled.

Having embarrassed their reset partner Obama with sustained public anti-Americanism through the Russian election season and since, Putin and his spokesmen have now joyfully grasped Romney’s tough campaign pronouncements about Russia, which were made in response, as proof that they were right to see the United States as a dangerous enemy in the first place.

MOSCOW was recently buzzing with excitement about a new report produced by the Minchenko Consulting Group, based on interviews with experts and well-placed figures in the elite, which sought to analyse how Putin’s inner leadership circle operates. According to the report, this “politburo,” as it is described, contains key oligarchs and others who are hardly household names in the Western media. Putin is described as a primus inter pares – first among equals – an arbiter who settles all disputes that arise between the various competing clans and factions but does not enjoy a position of complete dominance. Surprisingly, the consensus seems to be that Medvedev remains a significant player with some prospects for regaining greater influence.

The biggest sensation in the report, perhaps, was that the inner circle allegedly envisages the possibility of a crisis arising in which it might become necessary to change the leadership. Depending on the circumstances, the decision might be to entrust the country and the elite’s joint fortunes either to former finance minister Kudrin, an economic dry and political moderate, or to the belligerently anti-Western deputy premier responsible for defence industry matters, Dmitry Rogozin, a talented populist with KGB connections and strong support from Soviet nostalgics and hardline nationalists. On the face of it, Kudrin is still out in political no-man’s land, running a think-tank that produces statements and reports critical of the regime and calls for dialogue with the opposition. Rogozin’s likely approach as leader would be the diametrical opposite of Kudrin’s.

Some might think that the report underestimates Putin’s position, while overestimating Medvedev’s. Putin is more than an arbiter deriving his power from his role in keeping powerful warring clans apart. Russia has a history of powerful supreme leaders into which Putin fits quite nicely. Capo di tutti capi, or boss of bosses, would probably be a more accurate term than primus inter pares, with its prime ministerial connotations. One also wonders whether a change of leadership could really be brought about coolly and rationally in quite the way suggested by Minchenko. But the report is probably indicative of a certain turbulence close to the surface of Putin’s third term.

Will the move against the opposition result in mass repression, or only the imprisonment of some on trumped-up criminal rather than explicitly political charges? Outside Chechnya and its neighbours in the mainly Muslim-populated region of the North Caucasus, where there is a slow-burn insurgency, Putin has largely sought to avoid bloodshed in dealing with domestic opponents. Inconvenient individuals have frequently been killed by “unknown assailants” and the crimes never satisfactorily explained or resolved. And at the very beginning of Putin’s ascendancy in Moscow, just after his period at the head of the FSB, the main successor to the KGB, a series of mysterious bombings of apartment buildings in Russia, officially attributed to Chechen terrorists, caused heavy loss of life. These events remain murky. Many observers suspect they were a provocation staged by the FSB, whose fingerprints were clearly visible on the last of the series.

Generally, though, Putin’s rule has been a soft or consensual autocracy resting on his authentic popularity as well as on manipulation and coercion. Now that his popularity seems to be fluctuating downwards, a greater degree of force may be deemed necessary to strengthen the “power vertical.” My sense is that Putin will try to make telling examples of particular individuals who have earned his wrath but will avoid mass repression. It is hard to feel confident, though. There are anxious rumours circulating, for example, that recent steps taken or threatened against officials with private businesses or property abroad could morph into a wider purge of the bureaucracy.

Putin’s recent political travails have left him eager, at the very least, to reinforce his power and end the indignities that he’s been forced to suffer in the past year or so. As his legislation moves from autocracy towards the police state paradigm, the leader too may transition from autocrat towards dictator. Fear is never too far away in Russia, and many once-venturesome public commentators can now be seen hedging their bets with respectful references to Mr Putin as a very intelligent man, who may, they hope, decide to become another Stolypin, and so on. (Stolypin was the Tsarist prime minister, 1906–11, who ruthlessly suppressed disorder but pursued small “l” liberal reforms. Putin seems to like this comparison, so those seeking his favour probably see it as the way to his heart.) But on his record, one would have to say that just as Dan Quayle was no John F. Kennedy, Putin does not appear to be a Stolypin.

Commenting recently on Putin’s latest macho stunt (assisting a group of threatened Siberian cranes to return to the wild), Gleb Pavlovsky, a one-time insider, asserted that the optics of this operation were less than optimal. Bloggers had been unkind, one insider even claiming that some of the cranes had died or been injured during preparations for the hang-glider flight, though this item was quickly removed. In Pavlovsky’s view, Putin should have been advised against making this mistake. But “now there is no one who would tell him ‘Nie nado Vladimir Vladimirovich’ [‘Best not, Vladimir Vladimirovich’].”

Pavlovsky’s comment about the absence of any effective opposition to Putin’s political impulses within the regime is probably applicable to all issues, not just endangered cranes. His use of the respectful first name and patronymic is telling: the former finance minister and deputy prime minister Alexei Kudrin, who was one of the very few people reputed to have addressed Putin using this more intimate form, was renowned for defending fiscal rectitude against heavy pressure from above. Indeed, he resigned his post on just such an issue, Putin’s proposed massive arms build-up.

Putin is clearly increasingly exercised by the growing tensions in society. One matter of particular concern to him is Islamic militancy. In recent weeks the once-nationalist, but now increasingly Islamist, violence that is endemic to the North Caucasus region has suddenly manifested itself in violence against moderate clerics in Tatarstan, a mixed but mainly Muslim-populated republic on the Volga in the Russian heartland. Tatarstan has always been regarded till recently as a multicultural success story, where Russians and Tatars lived together in harmony.

This is an ominous development for Putin and for Russia. If pressed, Putin might well argue privately to a European critic of his domestic regime that Russia, with its 15 per cent Muslim population and other potential ethnic stresses, faces a much more serious problem of social cohesion than any West European states. The presence of Muslim immigrant communities in Western Europe that are much smaller than Russia’s, he might argue, has nonetheless led to the emergence of virulent anti-immigrant movements and parties which have sometimes entered governments. Should Russia proceed along that path, he might ask rhetorically.

But the radicalisation of Muslim ethnic minorities in Russia has been greatly facilitated by the brutal war in Chechnya and indiscriminate use of force in the North Caucasus region generally during Putin’s ascendancy. Moreover, in the past Putin has often flirted with Russian nationalism in various forms. Lately it has become clear that he recognises the dangers in that phenomenon. Nationalism, however, remains a pillar of his domestic support and one that could be exploited by potential rivals like Rogozin if Putin seemed to be renouncing or downplaying it. While continuing to push Russian “patriotism,” he is trying to soften its edges, and increasingly inveighing against nationalist extremism of any sort. The country’s burgeoning right-wing Russian extremist movements have at last been encountering more pushback from the security services. But the genie seems to be out of that bottle.

Domestic developments in Russia do not seem particularly propitious at present for a smooth transition to a more open, pluralist and tolerant society, despite the growing pressure for such an evolution coming from the urban middle classes. Similarly, a more authentic “Europeanisation” of Russia, despite the greatly increased people-to-people contacts of the last twenty-five years, does not seem to be imminent. As well as his domestic policies, Putin’s foreign policy seems to stand in the way. And the unending euro crisis has done much to reduce Europe’s attraction as a role model. Europe’s declining influence is evident not only in Putin’s periodic slighting public references – for example, to the “hamsters” of Europe – but also in the attitudes of his counterpart autocrats in Ukraine and Belarus. •

John Besemeres is an Adjunct Fellow at the Centre for European Studies at ANU.

Next week: Can Russia draw Belarus and Ukraine into the nucleus of a new Russian Empire?

The post Towards a Greater Putistan? appeared first on Inside Story.

Today, even Putin’s most sycophantic admirers would hesitate before indulging in such an extravagant panegyric. Indeed, Alexey Chadaev, who helped to codify “Putin’s ideology” in a Kremlin-authorised volume, boasted that Putin’s early liberal rhetoric was a kind of “instrumental language,” a set of empty, ritualistic formulas like the invocations of Lenin in the speeches of late Soviet leaders. During Putin’s second presidential term (2004–08), he abandoned these word games and laid the foundations of a new kind of authoritarian regime, which combined repression of opponents with the mobilisation of supporters. Credible opposition leaders were ousted from their parties and “Stop Lists” banned them from appearing on state television. A succession of draconian laws circumscribed the rights of NGOs and turned elections into a regimented farce. Protest demonstrations were dispersed with ostentatious brutality. At the same time, the Kremlin created a host of militantly loyal youth organisations, which staged anti-Western spectacles and fought a “counter-revolutionary” war of attrition against the regime’s adversaries. The foot soldiers in this war included gangs of soccer hooligans, who were implicated in a series of violent attacks on opposition youth.

Masha Gessen’s new study of Putin’s ascendancy offers a compelling explanation of how the “flawless democrat” became the gravedigger of Russian democracy and an authoritarian strongman who presided over Russia’s degradation into one of the world’s most corrupt states. Her essayistic narrative intertwines two strands of argument. The first is psychological. She traces the mafiosi-like aspect of Putin’s rule to a brutal childhood in the apartment courtyards of postwar Leningrad. Here the young Vladimir made a name for himself as a violent youth whose uncontrollable temper led to his expulsion from the Young Pioneers, an unusual expedient that was reserved for particularly disruptive delinquents. Nostalgically recalling these years in his official autobiography, Putin boasted that “I was a real thug.” What saved him from a life of conventional criminality was his discovery of martial arts, which taught him to focus his aggression. He also found a career that matched his persona. During his school years, Putin was obsessed by the idea of joining the secret police and idolised Yan Berzin, a founder of Soviet military intelligence.

Little is known about Putin’s years in the KGB. Gessen raises doubts about Putin’s insistence that he played no role in the repression of dissidents. She cites a memoir by the Soviet defector Vladimir Usoltsev, whose sympathetic account of Putin notes in passing that he served in the Fifth Directorate, which targeted dissidents as manifestations of “ideological diversion.” She might also have mentioned an interview that the young pro-democracy activist Roman Dobrokhotov conducted with Mikhail Kheifets, the distinguished Leningrad literary scholar. According to Kheifets, his interrogation for samizdat activities was attended by a young man who had been courting the daughter of a family friend. That young man, he alleges, was Vladimir Putin.

The Putin myth celebrates his patriotic service in foreign intelligence during the Gorbachev years, when he defended the Soviet motherland against the intrigues of the West during a tour of duty in East Germany. In fact, Putin was posted to Dresden, a relative backwater, which offered few opportunities for cloak-and-dagger combat. Gessen suggests that the defence of the motherland was not uppermost in Putin’s mind during these years. In August 2011, she tracked down one of Putin’s West German contacts, a former Baader Meinhof terrorist, who spoke to her on the condition of strict anonymity. What amazed this terrorist was not merely Putin’s acquisitiveness but his brazenness. “He always wanted to have things,” he told Gessen. “He mentioned to several people wishes that he wanted from the West.” Items on Putin’s shopping list that the terrorist was able to procure included a Grundig shortwave radio and a Blaupunkt car radio. Unlike Stasi agents, who would at least go through the motions of offering to pay for gifts, Putin “never even started asking, ‘What do I owe you?’”

This avarice was one of the sources of the explosion of corruption that took place during Putin’s presidency. Not only did his wishlist grow to include foreign bank accounts and a Black Sea palace, but he also became increasingly reckless. Gessen recounts two bizarre incidents in 2005, when Putin appropriated objects – a diamond ring and a replica Kalashnikov rifle filled with vodka – which American hosts had shown him. She speculates that such conduct was a symptom not of conventional kleptomania, but of pleonexia, the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others.

The second level of Gessen’s indictment is political. She debunks the carefully fabricated myth of Putin the idealistic democrat, who was inspired by Sobchak, his former law professor, to break with the KGB and join him in resisting the August 1991 coup. Exposing the mass of contradictions and implausible claims in the account of this period in Putin’s autobiography, Gessen argues that there was one simple reason why Putin found himself in the milieu of democratic politics: he was a KGB plant. At the end of his term in Dresden, he had received the unusual honour of a visit from Yury Drozdov, a legendary KGB major-general. The only possible reason for such a meeting, one of Putin’s ex-KGB colleagues told Gessen, was to give Putin an important new assignment: the infiltration of the inner circle of one of the rising stars of the democratic movement.

What enabled Putin to fulfil that assignment with flying colours were Sobchak’s own authoritarian leanings. Putin’s supposed “democratic” mentor was a skilful manipulator of liberal rhetoric but his political instincts were those of a local communist party boss. Sobchak’s attitude towards St Petersburg’s grassroots democrats, the intellectuals who had risen from the ranks of the “informal” movements of the perestroika years, was contemptuous. No sooner had they voted him into office as chairman of the city council than he castigated them for their obsession with “democratic procedures for the sake of democratic procedures” and nominated a communist vice-admiral as his deputy. During the tense days of the failed putsch in August 1991, when Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank in Moscow to denounce the usurpers, Sobchak and his trusted aide, Vladimir Putin, went into hiding in the basement of the Kirov industrial plant. There they played a waiting game, keeping lines of communication open to both sides.

Gessen claims that Putin was not merely an opportunist but also the coup organisers’ mole in Sobchak’s entourage. She points to his role in negotiating a contract for the purchase of foodstuffs, which were redirected from St Petersburg to Moscow as part of a plan to flood the capital’s empty shelves with food in the aftermath of the coup. This is a plausible but unproven conjecture.

WHAT is clear is that Putin played a sinister role in the protracted economic and social crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Sobchak’s deputy, he headed St Petersburg’s “Committee for International Relations,” which was supposed to coordinate efforts to feed the city and avert social breakdown. Confronted by a real prospect of famine, Yeltsin’s bankrupt government had given federal units like St Petersburg the right to export raw materials to raise cash for the import of foodstuffs. During the first half of 1992, Putin signed $92 million worth of such contracts, but the food never came. An investigation by Marina Salye, a leader of the democratic bloc in the city council, revealed evidence of corruption that was extreme even by the lawless standards of the early nineties. First, each of the contracts contained a deliberate drafting error, which made them legally unenforceable. Second, they involved massive commissions, sometimes over 30 per cent, which were presumably kickbacks for corrupt officials. But what was most extraordinary was the fact that none of the promised food was ever delivered. Not only was $92 million siphoned off into foreign bank accounts, but an estimated billion dollars of primary materials – oil, aluminium and cotton – had also vanished into thin air.

Salye’s report was tabled in the city council, which voted to send it to Sobchak with the recommendation that it be submitted to the prosecutor’s office and that Putin be dismissed. Sobchak refused to act against his deputy. Undeterred, the indefatigable Salye took her report to Moscow, where the case was taken up by Yury Boldyrev, another Petersburg democrat, who had just been appointed director of the Kremlin’s new auditing department. After a review of the evidence and a private confrontation with Sobchak and Putin, Boldyrev submitted a damning memorandum to Yeltsin. What saved Putin was the fact that Yeltsin was then locked in a mortal struggle with the parliament and could not risk weakening his position by a clash with the rulers of Russia’s second largest city.

The bloody climax of that struggle provided Sobchak with a pretext to dissolve the city council. Now unassailable as the power behind Sobchak’s throne, Putin helped to transform St Petersburg into a frightening, authoritarian metropolis, where the former KGB cast a long shadow over public life. Half police state, half the criminal capital of Russia, the city was decrepit, impoverished and oppressive. It became a place where journalists were kept under surveillance and murders of political and business leaders were routine. In short, observes Gessen, it was a place “very much like what Russia itself would become in a few years, once it came to be ruled by the people who ruled St Petersburg in the 1990s.”

But there was one important difference. During the nineties in St Petersburg, elections were still a mechanism for competition for power, rather than the puppet show that they became during Putin’s presidency. As a result, in 1996 the unpopular Sobchak was voted out of office and lost his immunity from prosecution. Soon he was the target of a major criminal investigation centred on shady property dealings. Putin, who had taken up a position in the Kremlin, arranged his former master’s escape on a private jet to Paris on Revolution Day 1997. This act of loyalty impressed Yeltsin, but Putin’s intervention was hardly selfless. His own abuses of office would inevitably have been exposed if Sobchak had been put on trial.

The obstruction of justice would become a central theme of Putin’s year as director of the Federal Security Service, a crucial moment in his career that receives surprisingly little attention in Gessen’s book. He went to great lengths to silence Alexander Litvinenko and a group of rogue officers, who called a press conference to allege that they had been ordered to conduct assassinations of public figures. Putin was also suspected of producing a compromising video of the prosecutor-general, Yury Skuratov, which derailed a major investigation of corruption in Yeltsin’s circle.

The apartment bombing campaign that killed some 300 sleeping Russians in September 1999 transformed Putin from a political nonentity into a national saviour. Like Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Litvinenko and the American commentator David Satter, Gessen contends that the bombings were the product of a conspiracy to create an atmosphere of national crisis that would enable Putin to take power. The key exhibit in their case is the so-called “Ryazan Test.” Nine days after the fourth and final blast, a team of Federal Security Service agents were arrested for allegedly planting explosives in the basement of an apartment building in a provincial city. During the ensuing months, the authorities appear to have done everything humanly possible to create the appearance of a cover-up. But the conspiracy theory has been harshly criticised by some of regime’s most outspoken adversaries. They include the liberal journalist Yulia Latynina, who contends that there is abundant evidence that jihadi elements in the Chechen resistance were responsible for the blasts. By failing to address this alternative explanation, Gessen weakens her own case.

Gessen is on stronger ground in her account of two major corruption scandals that have become emblematic of the degeneration of the Russian state under Putin. The first is the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a courageous lawyer who was arrested by corrupt policemen in retribution for his efforts to expose the embezzlement of $230 million of state funds. For a year, he was incarcerated in Moscow’s notorious Butyrka prison, where he was pressured to withdraw his accusations. In an effort to break him, he was transferred to the worst parts of the facility, and denied food and medical assistance as his health failed. He died in November 2009.

The other case involves Sergei Kolesnikov, the whistleblower who exposed the financial dealings behind “Putin’s Palace.” A former business associate of Putin’s in the 1990s, Kolesnikov had supervised a scheme for oligarchs to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a philanthropic venture for the purchase of medical equipment. In fact, he now claims, the entire scheme was a front for Putin’s personal enrichment. At the beginning, Kolesnikov acquiesced in the diversion of funds because the lion’s share of the oligarchs’ largesse was being invested in the Russian economy. What drove Kolesnikov to go public was an order to devote more and more of the fund’s resources into the construction of a baroque palace on the Black Sea, a billion-dollar anachronism that was reminiscent of Nicolae Ceausescu’s self-aggrandising architecture.

Despite the growing evidence that Putin enjoys all the impunity that a corrupted state apparatus and a manipulated political system can provide, Gessen concludes on an optimistic note. The apparently impregnable regime, she argues, is vulnerable because it has been constructed around one, deeply flawed individual. It has no other durable props: no viable political parties, no normal politics, no coherent ideology. Hence, those who seek to overthrow it “would not have to overcome the force of an ingrained ideology – they would merely have to show that the tyrant had feet of clay.”

Gessen has succeeded in exposing the dark side of Vladimir Putin, but she underestimates his ideological creativity. Since 2004, Putin and a cohort of pro-Kremlin commentators have forged a potent ideological synthesis uniting the defence of Russian sovereignty, virulent anti-Americanism and anti-oligarchic rhetoric. Incessantly promoted by state television, by pro-Kremlin youth organisations and by the ruling party, the regime’s “managed nationalism” celebrates Putin as an exemplary patriot and smears the opposition and uncooperative NGOs as traitors.

A classic statement of this propaganda was the documentary Anatomy of Protest, broadcast on Russia’s NTV network on 15 March this year and repeated three days later, which demonised those protesting against election fraud as opportunistic hirelings and accomplices of the US embassy. It is doubtful whether such crude exercises in agitprop can save the regime, but they have contributed to the rise of Russian ultranationalism. Conspiracy theories that were once the preserve of a lunatic fringe are today the conventional wisdom of Russia’s national broadcasters. It is possible that Putin’s most enduring legacy may be this poisoning of public discourse.

As a portrait of a ruler’s moral degeneration, Gessen’s work is worthy of Suetonius. Almost nothing remains of the once imposing myth of Putin the energetic moderniser, a man on a mission to rescue the Russian state from the oligarchs. As an eyewitness to the anti-Milosevic revolution in Belgrade in 2000, Gessen suggests that the collapse of Putin’s rule could happen very suddenly. One sign of his loosening grip was the scale of the mass protests after the Duma elections, which Gessen recounts in an epilogue. It has become plausible to contemplate a post-Putin Russia. What remains unclear is whether a more liberal society or a new dictatorship will emerge from the ruins of his regime. •

The post A “thug” in the Kremlin: unmasking Vladimir Putin appeared first on Inside Story.

BOTH before and since the poor showing of the ruling United Russia party in the December 2011 parliamentary elections, there have been commentators who expected to see Putin return as a reformist for his third term as president. Some looked back to the first-term Putin, who surrounded himself with competent economic officials like German Gref (economic development and trade minister) and Alexei Kudrin (finance minister), and introduced a few sensible economic reforms. Some looked back further, to the 1990s, when Putin’s boss was the reformist mayor of St Petersburg (and his former university law professor) Anatoly Sobchak, who reportedly inspired in him a deep respect for the law – a kind of counterpoint to his KGB training.

With high oil and gas export prices delivering fewer windfall benefits, and years of high budgetary outlays weighing heavily on the budget, it has also been suggested that in his third term Putin will have little choice but to be an economic reformer. Moreover, with popular dissatisfaction growing and his and the regime’s opinion poll ratings in decline, some maintained he would need to introduce liberal economic reforms to stave off impending Brezhnevian stagnation (zastoi) and secure his place in Russian history. With liberals in the establishment also calling for such reforms, it was argued that Putin would need to ensure, as the chairman of the regime factions, that such views were reflected in decision-making.

Some observers have discounted the sharply anti-Western tone of Putin’s second term as president from 2004 to 2008 as an understandable reaction to the West’s failure to respect Russia’s sovereignty. NATO and EU leaders, it was felt, should have rejected the desperate efforts of former Soviet vassals in Eastern Europe to join their organisations. This line of analysis sometimes acknowledges that the Obama administration’s “reset” of US–Russian relations has created a more stable bilateral and environment, in which Putin finds it less necessary to defend Russia from external meddling.

There is a subset of this school of thought, however, which is disappointed by Obama’s policies towards Russia, seeing Washington as having lost yet another of the opportunities since the late 1980s to establish cordial and cooperative relations with Moscow. Prominent among them are the distinguished historian Stephen Cohen and a group of thinkers associated with the influential Washington journal, the National Interest. While their bottom line is usually summarised in modest formulations like “all Russia is really asking for is to be treated with respect as an equal partner,” after two Bush administrations and two Democrats in the White House it begins to seem that their policy advice may never be sufficiently heeded.

Most of these critics focus primarily on the hypocrisy and unrealism of Western policy towards Russia, which they see as far more aggressive and misplaced than Russia’s towards the West. As for Moscow’s domestic policies, their view is typically that Putin’s Russia is a vast improvement on Yeltsin’s, and that Western critiques of Putinism are selective, unfair and a reflection of the cold-war attitudes their exponents are still unable to shed.

Both those who predict Putin will return a born-again reformer and those who say he deserves a better press and warmer response from his Western counterparts seem likely to be disappointed by his third term. It is doubtful that Putin will make the domestic changes that would validate more optimistic views. And the pessimists who have waited so long for better Western policies probably won’t be too surprised to see Obama II (to say nothing of any Romney I) letting them down again.

Yet March has actually seen some positive signs for the troubled US–Russian reset. Addressing a Congressional committee this month, a senior US Defense Department official foreshadowed that the United States might share sensitive data about its European ballistic missile defence shield in an effort to reassure Russia that it could not possibly threaten its nuclear deterrent.

In addition, the Russian press has reported that Obama unexpectedly changed the venue for the forthcoming G8 meeting on 18 May from Chicago to Camp David. This would enable Putin to attend the G8, then give the NATO summit a miss without its being too conspicuous. The change of venue may seem like a modest concession, and almost any concession on the missile defence shield is unlikely to satisfy Russia, which has been clinging to its grievances in the matter with remarkable tenacity.

More recently the world has overheard Barack Obama at the Seoul nuclear summit on 26 March asking Medvedev to pass on to president-elect Putin a request for a little bit of bilateral understanding. Unaware the microphone was still live, Obama requested that Medvedev let Putin know he hoped to be able to offer Russia some greater flexibility on the missile defence shield once the US presidential elections were out of the way. Medvedev can he heard assuring Obama that he would pass the message on to “Vladimir.” This microphone mishap instantly became an election issue in the United States, which may now make for further bilateral difficulties.

In the meantime, though, some earlier positive signals must have been favourably received in Moscow. On 14 March, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov announced that the Russian government would consider allowing US and coalition forces to use an air base near Lenin’s home town of Ulyanovsk to transit troops and supplies into Afghanistan. Lavrov sought to reassure offended patriots in the Duma that this was an investment in Russia’s own security against terrorists and illegal drugs coming in from the south.

This is a valid argument, but not one that would appeal greatly to many Russians in either official or unofficial circles. Resupply to Afghanistan, one of the fruits of the reset, has been permitted through Russia since 2009, but this would be the first time use of a Russian facility has been offered to NATO in this way. That such an outrage might be perpetrated in a town named after Lenin will strike many Russians as sacrilegious.

These gestures are all the more noteworthy because they followed months in which Putin repeatedly denounced the West and especially the United States for interfering in Russia’s elections and undermining stability more generally. Along with other Kremlin figures he described street protesters as traitors in the pay of the US State Department and Hillary Clinton.

Clinton and other Western officials had been critical of the conduct of the Duma elections in December, and milder reservations were also expressed about the presidential elections on 4 March by some official outsiders, including the electoral observer team from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. But Clinton, to the dismay of the Russian opposition, acknowledged that Putin was the “clear winner” this time around. The European Union made a similar pronouncement. So perhaps a degree of normality is now returning to Russia’s relations with Western countries after an unusually torrid election season.

BUT any such normality is relative. The reset has been in trouble for some time. Apart from cooperation on Afghanistan and successful US efforts to secure Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization (overcoming both Georgian objections and Russia’s own ambivalence), progress has been modest. Relations with NATO have been increasingly cool and unproductive – hence, Putin’s desire to skip the summit. And relations with the European Union are not much better; EU–Russia summits have also become strained and light on substance.

The lack of enthusiasm for the prospect of another Putin presidency was palpable throughout much of the Western world. Obama, for his part, took several days to respond to his counterpart’s “clear” victory. The most conspicuous exceptions were Putin’s close friends Gerhard Schroeder and Silvio Berlusconi. The former German chancellor Schroeder pronounced Putin still a flawless democrat, and Berlusconi skipped a planned TV appearance to visit Russia and congratulate Putin in person.

Obama seems to have poor personal chemistry with Putin, and his administration has made a policy of dealing preferentially with Medvedev, with whom relations are warmer. While there have been obvious protocol reasons for dealing with Medvedev during his period as president, Washington seemed almost to be hoping thereby to contribute to building his authority. Other Western leaderships also seemed happier dealing with the more emollient Russian president. Whatever their motivations, after Putin’s inauguration on 7 May they will be deprived of that option.

Russia’s relations with Western countries are still snagged, however, over a number of issues, including Libya and Syria, the US ballistic missile defence shield, the UN’s “responsibility to protect” doctrine and national sovereignty, Russia’s purported zone of privileged interests, energy security and Arctic resources. But Russian domestic developments and the commentary they have attracted in the West have generated much of the East–West tension since Putin’s bloody counter-insurgency in Chechnya and his dismantling of the Gorbachev–Yeltsin democratic reforms. What course Putin decides on domestically in his third term will do much to shape his relations with the West.

While he did show some liberal leanings in his first years in power, that phase in Putin’s life now seems far behind him. He may enact some pragmatic reforms to strengthen Russia’s dismal investment climate, but nothing in his election campaigning suggested he was about to restore democracy without adjectives in Russia.

Putin is not given to public displays of empathy or emotion. His glistening eyes at his victory address to the well-organised multitude in Red Square were for himself. They recall another occasion in 2000 when he was seen to shed a tear or two at the funeral of his jurisprudential guru and career facilitator, ex-mayor Sobchak. But his sentimental regard for Sobchak is evidently coming under some strain now.

Putin is widely believed to be the godfather of Sobchak’s daughter Ksenia, who has become a glamorous TV personality and prominent member of the Putin-era glitterati with a huge Twitter following. During recent months, however, she has resoundingly aligned herself with the opposition, regularly attending their rallies. Her political chat show was removed from state-controlled TV after she invited opposition leader Alexei Navalny to make an appearance. She also attracted official notice by appearing in a viral YouTube video satirising a series of TV spots recorded by prominent public figures – sometimes, reportedly, under official pressure – declaring why they intended to vote for Putin.

Ksenia has since been accused by a Kremlin-connected media outlet of attacking and taking hostage two of its reporters. She claims that she had them ejected from her restaurant because they were attempting to film her in a private conversation. But her restaurant was visited soon after by Russia’s sanitary inspectorate, headed by one Gennady Onishchenko, who has loyally fought many a trade war – involving such things as wine, mineral water and cheese – for the Kremlin against stroppy former Soviet republics and other difficult partners. The deployment of such heavy artillery suggests that the president-elect’s godfatherly patience has been fully exhausted.

INCIDENTS like these don’t suggest any major modification of the traditional Putin style of handling dissent. But there must be some doubt also about Putin’s commitment to strengthening normal market mechanisms in Russia. For much of his twelve years at the top, things have been heading in the opposite direction, towards high-level corruption, heavy concentration of ownership in inefficient parastatals controlled by political allies, a form of “corporate raiding” that amounts to mega-larceny with menaces, and a general lack of the rule of law.

As for transparency, Sergei Ivanov, a long-time colleague and ally of Putin at the KGB and more recently, has said that surveys of investment conditions like those produced by Transparency International are biased against Russia, and that Russia should therefore produce its own. Ivanov was recently named head of the presidential administration, a decision not likely to have been made by the current nominal incumbent. President Medvedev actually got the nod to keep Putin’s place warm for him in 2008 ahead of Ivanov, who had been widely seen as Putin’s most likely successor.

Most of the liberal and democratising reform proposals that have emerged in recent years have emanated not from Putin, of course, but from Medvedev. He has proposed reversing Putin’s abolition of direct elections for regional governorships, for example, and the removal of the severe restrictions he had placed on forming parties and standing for public office. But Putin quickly made it understood that he would expect selection of gubernatorial candidates to be coordinated with the president.

The Duma is now processing the relevant reform legislation on formation of parties with unusual haste, and it is expected to be signed soon while Medvedev is still in office. There are indications that it will be shaped in such a way as to produce a proliferation of parties and yet, at the same time, it will remain possible for the Kremlin to disallow parties it doesn’t like by deploying other objections against them.

Medvedev also announced a review of the Khodorkovsky case (something advocated publicly within his entourage for some time). No one who has followed Putin’s past pronouncements on this subject, however, could feel confident the review will produce results. Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov probably got it right when he noted pointedly, in response to a question, that the order to review the conviction was under the competency of the current president, declining any further comment.

While many are sceptical of Medvedev’s motives, he probably sincerely believes most of the liberal sentiments he has launched into public discussion during his presidency. But one must have very grave doubts about whether he can make any of it fly.

PUTIN has reaffirmed that he will nominate Medvedev for the job of prime minister in May. This may be a gesture towards the liberal wing within the leadership group, which felt energised by the protest movement. But Putin’s own instincts lie clearly nearer the other end of the spectrum. And the satirical buffeting he has received from the opposition in the streets and on the internet is not likely to awaken the flawless democrat in him any time soon. In fact, his main motive for putting Medvedev forward is probably not any perceived need for a liberal gesture, or loyalty to the job-swap deal with his old colleague, but rather his confidence that, as prime minister, Medvedev will not challenge him any more effectively than he has ever done as president.

If liberalising change is to come to Russia under Putin, it will have to come more despite him than because of him. While economic pressures will push him towards reforms of a sort, these will probably only be pragmatic–technocratic, not political–democratic. This brings us back to the opposition. While discouraged and diminished for the moment, they are a new factor in the mix, which Putin will find it very hard to neutralise. Their spontaneous irruption from the margins to centre stage in December will be hard to completely reverse, though Putin will give it his best shot.

Their chronic ideological divisions, and the lack of an agreed, realisable program or any dominant, charismatic leader, make the opposition vulnerable to counter-attack. So does the current tendency of some of their leaders to seek confrontation on the streets in the hope of artificially maintaining the rage. Russians have a well-based fear of revolutionary ferment, something which Putin successfully played on during his election campaign. If the courageous, but not always judicious, Alexei Navalny tries to lead them on marches to the Kremlin in present circumstances, the crowds will thin out further and be easily dealt with.

Putin has a certain contempt for most of his Western counterparts. He thinks they are weak and unstrategic, and that they can be readily outmanoeuvred. He relishes the protracted economic crisis in the West and hopes that it will persist, without getting too severe, believing that this should give him the opportunity to pursue restoration of Russian influence in the post-Soviet space. But after eight years of presiding over economic success as president, Russia’s own 8 per cent downturn in GDP in 2009 reminded him of his country’s economic vulnerability. And he does recognise the need for Western investment and know-how, the key factor leading to the tepid rapprochement with the West of the past couple of years.

This being the case, Putin is unlikely to embark on a major crackdown even if or when looming economic problems trigger a renewed wave of public opposition. Despite the violence of his language under stress in recent months, he has not generally been a gratuitously violent autocrat, except in relation to the North Caucasus insurgencies. Selective repression of individuals, and attempts to curb the independent media and the internet are more likely.

To wedge the opposition, he will probably also cultivate a few pseudo-independents from the tame parties, or popular apolitical public figures, perhaps by offering them ministries of door-frames and silly walks. He may even try to co-opt some susceptible opposition figures hungering for positions of importance. Consultative bodies may be formed with fanfare. But short of bringing back his old friend and colleague Alexei Kudrin as prime minister, none of it is likely to amount to much. Kudrin is the only politician currently on the scene with not just the economic competence, but also the necessary personal and political clout, determination and standing to push Putin nearer genuine reforms. And he has given some indications of sympathy for the opposition and their political program.

Despite Russia’s huge resource endowment, high energy export prices and minimal indebtedness (a legacy of Kudrin and his colleagues’ good management), the Putinist model is heading for serious trouble. In the last five years or so, despite Kudrin, the budgetary situation has become more unstable. Where an oil price of US$28 a barrel was not so long ago sufficient to balance the Russian budget, now the figure is over $100, and rising. Kudrin has warned that even a price of $80 would precipitate a crisis. Given the risk of a worsening slowdown in Europe, its main customer, Russia’s fiscal position is potentially fragile. It was over this issue, in particular the US$650 billion defence program slated for the next few years, that Kudrin resigned.

While Russia desperately needs increased expenditure on infrastructure, health and education, money continues to be poured not just into defence and internal security, but also into high-profile extravaganzas like the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, the World Cup in 2018, and the APEC meeting in Vladivostok this year. Putin’s ambitious project to coax often reluctant former Soviet republics into his new Eurasian Union also threatens to be very expensive.

The election campaign has added to the fiscal overhang. It has been estimated that the campaign promises Putin made on the fly will cost the budget a further US$161 billion over his next term in office. And the economy has other severe problems. Labour productivity and the investment to GDP ratio are significantly lower than in most other comparable countries. It will be difficult, if not impossible, to restore the high growth of the early Putin years because, for demographic reasons, the labour force will be shrinking sharply over the next few years while other key demographic indicators – the dependency ratio, for instance – will continue to deteriorate markedly into the future. It can be doubted whether Putin III will be equal to all these challenges.

It seems therefore highly likely that economic troubles will trigger renewed unrest at some point in Putin’s term, possibly even as early as mid-year 2012 when the utility price hikes postponed until after the election season are scheduled to be introduced. In the meantime, the increasingly articulate, sophisticated and demanding urban middle classes are not going to remain passive. After the Putinist idyll of the noughties, politics could be returning to Russia. •

The post Which Putin will stand up? appeared first on Inside Story.

SINCE the governing United Russia party’s setback at Russia’s parliamentary elections on 4 December, Vladimir Putin has been struggling to regain the initiative against a chaotic, hydra-headed opposition. With high energy prices sustaining the economy throughout his 2000–08 presidency, and buoyed by a bounce-back in prices since 2010, Putin’s luck seemed to be holding. His subordinate, President Dmitry Medvedev, was there to take the worst of the blame for Russia’s 8 per cent slump in 2009. Then, after a few ineffectual efforts to present himself as worthy of a second term, Medvedev meekly proposed Putin as the regime’s officially endorsed candidate at this Sunday’s presidential elections. Magnanimously, Putin responded by indicating that he would, in turn, appoint Medvedev as his prime minister.

But then came the shock rebuff at the elections for Russia’s parliament, the Duma. The result revealed a growing weariness among many Russians, particularly within the urban middle-class intelligentsia, at being taken for granted by their rulers. The job swap that Putin and Medvedev brazenly announced in September – quickly labelled “the castling” (rokirovka) by chess-playing Russian intellectuals – was rightly seen as a display of contempt for the voters. The prospect of Putin returning for up to two further terms of six years each suddenly struck many people as intolerable.

Even before December’s result there had been other shock developments, including, most spectacularly, the public booing of Putin at a martial arts contest a fortnight before the poll. For an extended period there had also been smaller rebellions staged by local citizens’ groups against the ever more pervasive scourge of official corruption. Yet Putin seemed ill-prepared for the electoral reverse. The regime’s initial reaction was to arrest and jail some of the participants at the large post-election protest against the rigging of the vote, which had been exposed more clearly than previously by internet sources.

Then, realising the strength of the protests, the authorities adopted more nuanced tactics, allowing a second and larger rally to proceed without hindrance on 10 December. A mini-thaw began to seep into public life, which in the following weeks started to resemble the early phases of Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. Opposition figures banned for years from the state-controlled television made brief reappearances; liberals within the establishment spoke out in seemingly unscripted ways, calling for new budgetary priorities, greater “dialogue” and even the release of the jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a sentiment likely to enrage Putin.

Though there was an element of manipulation in these reactions, the situation seemed to have become genuinely unpredictable. Senior politicians appeared to be repositioning themselves, and even expressing some personal opinions. Medvedev announced a set of proposed electoral reforms, including restoration of the direct election of regional governors and the removal of onerous restrictions on who is eligible to run for the presidency or the Duma. These changes would undermine key components of Putin’s system of “managed democracy,” but it quickly became clear that they were not to be brought into effect until after the presidential poll in March, and were thus years away. Putin also cast further doubt by suggesting that candidates could only run for governorships with the consent of the president. In such circumstances, excuses will be found for any concessions to be withdrawn.

Medvedev’s proposed reforms were seen as too little, too late by the protesters, who were demanding, among other things, a rerun of the Duma elections and the dismissal of Putin’s devoted ally, the Central Election Commission chairman Vladimir Churov. (Medvedev described Churov as “the magician” after he announced United Russia’s wafer-thin majority in the new Duma.) Despite the promises of future reforms, these opposition demands have not been met, and responsibility for securing a win for Putin in this weekend’s presidential poll still remains in Churov’s capable hands.

Even Vladislav Surkov, the puppetmaster and leading ideological phrase-maker in the Kremlin, emerged from the closet as a born-again liberal, for which he was soon demoted from deputy head of the presidential administration to the much less significant post of deputy prime minister in charge of “modernisation.”

But the most significant deviation from the party line came from Putin’s old friend, Alexei Kudrin, who was Russia’s finance minister and a deputy prime minister for many years. Kudrin had resigned from government after a public argument with Medvedev over planned budgetary expenditures, notably a huge build-up in military spending. In fact, his differences were probably more with Putin. Since Kudrin’s resignation, Putin has reaffirmed that he would like to see him back in a senior position, but also that he plans to greatly expand the defence budget. Kudrin, for his part, has tried to position himself between the authorities and the demonstrators. He has called for new elections in eighteen months (not immediately, like the opposition), attended the 24 December rally and addressed the crowd – to a mixed reception – and has offered to mediate wide-ranging discussions between the Kremlin and the street.

Most opposition leaders view Kudrin with respect, but there are suspicions that what he really wants is to return to power as prime minister. If Putin were to renege on his promise to appoint Medvedev and instead choose Kudrin, it isn’t clear that any major political liberalisation would follow, however. On budgetary matters, Kudrin would certainly be at least as determined a defender of fiscal good sense as he has always been as finance minister. But for that very reason, given his expansive plans for military expenditure, Putin may be reluctant to have him back.

OUTSIDE the Duma, the conditions for opposition forces have not been ideal. The Kremlin has systematically harassed them and worked to keep them fragmented. Although opposition leaders have contributed to their own ineffectiveness by their constant disputes, in recent months they have played down their differences and organised the big protest marches that have imparted such dramatic public visibility to the powerful currents of discontent increasingly evident in Russia’s cyberspace. The ostensibly oppositionist parties tolerated in parliament and public life are essentially parts of the Putinist system and can safely be ignored for most purposes. But they have performed a useful function for the real opposition since the leading rebel blogger, Alexei Navalny, popularised the tactic of calling on everyone to vote for anyone other than Putin. This worked well in the Duma elections, but may not be sufficient to force Putin to a second round this Sunday.

Since the high point of the 24 December demonstration, the opposition has sustained a certain loss of momentum. Anti-Putin sentiment is still very alive on the internet, often in forms that would be deeply wounding to any politician, much less an alpha-male autocrat like Putin. But it now seems likely that Putin will win and, at least as recorded by Churov, win well and in the first round. With temperatures falling below minus 20 and remaining there over an extended period, Generals January and February – traditional allies of Russian leaders – have contributed to deterring political ardour on the streets.

Sardonic attacks on Putin and his system have continued in cyberspace, but the opposition have not managed to devise any political formula to encapsulate their objectives. They have not put forward their own candidate for president (though had they sought to do so, would certainly have been blocked by the redoubtable Churov). The usual suspects from the three tame opposition parties are in the presidential race yet again, two of them – the communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and the populist court jester Vladimir Zhirinovsky – each running for the fourth time. The only candidate who looks slightly more interesting is the billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who has made some independent remarks but has been unable to fully convince the opposition that he is more than just a Kremlin project.

Meanwhile, the regime is engaged in visible preparations to get out the vote and rig it where necessary. Social security officials have revealed that they have been called on to collect as many votes as possible through “facilitated voting,” where officials help grateful pension recipients to cast their votes at home. Governors and military commanders understand that they will be held responsible for any poor outcomes in the election. And the Chechen tyrant Ramzan Kadyrov will no doubt be looking to improve on his 99 per cent result for the regime in the Duma elections.

Although he seemed a bit at a loss just after the Duma elections, Putin quickly regained his composure. In a series of statements and programmatic articles he has repeatedly evoked the spectres of internal subversion and external military threats, while promising generous budgetary support to all at considerable cost to Russia’s financial stability. Putin was also generous with other people’s money, publicly demanding Russian airlines offer free passage for Russian football fans to attend European Cup matches in Poland and Ukraine. One of the articles made a pitch to rekindle a kind of Soviet notion of Russian nationalism – one that ostensibly welcomes all those who speak Russian and see Russia as their home. While seemingly condemning Russian chauvinism as well as other shades, the article clearly sees Russians having pride of place – a pitch to xenophobia both internal and external, part dog-whistle, part explicit. As one legacy of their Soviet past, ordinary Russians already have a tendency to ethnic intolerance and jingoism, and opinion polls have detected an increase in these sentiments in the run-up to the presidential elections.

Increasingly, the regime is seeking to organise counterblasts to the opposition demonstrations. Groups of core constituents from factories, government agencies, provincial cities and Kremlin-controlled youth organisations have been bussed into demonstrations in support of Putin. And despite conciliatory noises emerging from the Kremlin, there has been a strong hint of artificially fanned class warfare, often promoted by Putin himself. In this narrative, the honest workers and ordinary citizens of Russia are pitted against the wealthy and pampered layabouts of Moscow and St Petersburg – people who seem to think that they are the creative classes, when it is the workers who built a giant dam or a new railway line who are truly creative. According to this view, the spoilt rich of the capitals are traitors who are quite prepared to sell out their country for a few pieces of silver offered by the CIA et cetera.

These are somewhat shop-soiled methods and storylines, however. While they still work up to a point, the air of fatalistic acceptance at pro-Putin gatherings contrasts sharply with the unmistakable exuberance of the opposition crowds. Participants in the Putin rallies have often told journalists quite openly that they are only there because they were pressured or bribed. And Putin has continued to feel uncomfortable about public appearances, keenly aware, it would seem, that his once genuinely strong popularity has largely evaporated. On the relatively few occasions he has addressed the mass rallies organised on his behalf, he has looked less confident than he once did. Still, it may all be enough to get him over the line.

PUTIN’s autocratic rule has been relatively consensual to date, and neither gratuitously violent nor ideologically rigid. Compared to Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus, for example, it has been a haven of pluralism. But that may be about to change. Putin has been reluctant to suppress opposition activities or go after their leaders too aggressively during the trimester between the elections for fear of provoking a backlash. Once he is safely ensconced back in the presidency, he may well remove the gloves. Already there have been some ominous signs that the phoney war is about to end. Some of the key opposition media outlets have been subjected to various forms of attack, either directly via the compliant law and justice system, or through pressure on owners already known for their responsiveness to Kremlin requirements.

The celebrated Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow), one of the very few independent non-print outlets with any reach (currently over a million listeners daily), has recently come under pressure from its two-thirds owners, Gazprom-Media. As the name suggests, this is an offshoot of the huge parastatal company that is a willing executor of Moscow’s “energy diplomacy,” frequently making decisions of dubious economic rationality that happen to serve the Kremlin’s strategic interests. Putin has usually taken a semi-tolerant approach to the station, but in a meeting with media figures a few weeks back he angrily reproached its editor-in-chief, Alexei Venediktov, for retailing rubbish from morning till night and “pouring shit all over me.” Now Gazprom is moving to reshape the station’s board, which Venediktov has described as an attempt to reshape its editorial policy.

There have been other such attacks. Novaya Gazeta (New Gazette), the leading independent newspaper, has lost four of its bravest and most eminent journalists, including Anna Politkovskaya, to murder, typically by unidentified assailants. Now the Central Bank, no less, is conducting an investigation into the business affairs of its part-owner, the controversial but seemingly independent oligarch and ex-KGB officer Alexander Lebedev (Mikhail Gorbachev is also a part-owner); last week, as a result, Novaya Gazeta was reportedly unable to pay its staff’s salaries.

Some of Putin’s key personnel decisions in recent weeks also point to a looming policy adjustment. The extravagantly anti-Western ex-ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, has been appointed deputy prime minister responsible for defence, and the reputedly hardline Vyacheslav Volodin has been elevated into the vacancy left by Surkov in the presidential administration. Putin’s rhetoric against opposition members – whom he has repeatedly labelled national traitors in foreign pay – has been consistently venomous through the election period. While the charges would be ridiculous if they were not so ominous, his anger is not simulated. If and when he feels he can deal with this dangerous threat to Russia’s sovereignty and, coincidentally, to his own political survival, he may well take severe measures.

His relatively benign treatment of most Russians has not extended to all his subjects. He came to power and popularity fuelled not just by oil and gas price surges but also by a brutal war against the Chechen rebels, a war which is still not over and which has increasingly become a jihadist insurgency as it has spread to neighbouring Muslim-populated regions. That war was partly justified by a sudden spate of mysterious apartment bombings in Russia in 1999, when Putin was prime minister. Doubts have been expressed about the attribution of blame for these atrocities to terrorist organisations, and some of those who raised such doubts have subsequently been assassinated.

And now we have this week’s remarkably well-timed official reports of an assassination plot against Putin himself, in which Caucasian terrorists (one with reported British connections) have been found to be implicated. The bruised and bleeding body of one of the arrested men has already been displayed on TV, leaving little doubt as to what their judicial futures will be. In the meantime, they may have a variety of instructive roles to play. For the moment their arrest is clearly meant to boost Putin’s election result.

It is noteworthy that these culprits were nabbed with the assistance of security forces from Ukraine, where that well-known Europhile, President Viktor Yanukovych, recently appointed two ethnic Russians with strong Soviet Russian (and in one case KGB connections) to head the key ministries of defence and internal security. Perhaps this valuable cooperation will improve the troubled bilateral relationship and, who knows, it may even help get Yanukovych a desperately needed gas price discount.

None of this necessarily means that Putin is preparing to declare a state of emergency or anything of the sort, though such a development at some point can’t entirely be ruled out. Barring a steep economic downturn or some other event that sharply elevates domestic tensions, however, it seems much more likely that we will see incremental repressive steps to restrict the internet, immobilise the main centres of opposition and sever the protesters’ links to the broader population.

PUTIN has been politically damaged by the recent outburst of popular resistance, and by the withering mockery to which he has been subjected in Russia’s cyberspace. He is coming under some pressure even from hitherto loyal business circles, and possibly other quarters in the elite, to consider declaring his intention not to seek a further six-year term in 2018. It may be that popular resentment and resistance will continue to mount even if, or indeed perhaps because, he unleashes a crackdown against his tormentors. According to one recent line of argument, Putin’s “power vertical” – his centralised control over all parts of the Russian establishment – was always a mirage, and he is really no more than a chairman-like figure, precariously balanced over a whirlpool of conflicting silovik and oligarch groupings all of them pursuing separate corrupt interests and largely out of his control.

It is certainly true that Putin’s position has been damaged, and also that any autocratic power structure is likely to have a latent brittleness that can precipitate an abrupt collapse if habits of obedience and compliance are suddenly punctured. But there is quite a gap dividing potential brittleness from hapless impotence. It still seems likely that Putin retains the confidence of the military and security establishments, even if the doubts of some of its denizens about this or that may be growing. He hasn’t recently given them all a massive pay increase for nothing. If we are seeing the beginning of the end of Putin’s reign, it may take quite some time yet to run its course.

We will probably get some pointers to some of the key imponderables quite soon. If Putin appoints Medvedev prime minister, as promised, or if the apparent coolness between them in recent months means that deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov or former deputy PM Kudrin gets the job, we might expect the more moderate elements in the elite to have continued influence. But if there were a surprise appointment, now or in a few months, of someone like Volodin or the Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin, we could see a more self-willed and hardline Putin, unconstrained by liberal reformers in his midst.

What will he do to curb the internet? He doesn’t use it much or have a good understanding of it, but he has recently been made painfully aware of what it can do to him. His past assurances about internet freedom were never credible, given the regime’s regular deployment of computer hackers to advance government policies domestically as well as externally.

Will he continue his sharply anti-Western rhetoric of recent months? It’s all vintage Putin, but how will it affect his actual relations with the West in the years ahead? Will he further strengthen his “strategic partnership” with China in order to make the world safe for the Assads and their like and to finally expunge the ugly threat of coloured revolutions from the post-Soviet scene?

Or will we see, as some have argued, a more relaxed and confident Putin, prepared to seek economic and other reforms and dialogue and reconciliation with the opposition and the West? We shouldn’t have too long to wait. •

The post Putin’s phoney war appeared first on Inside Story.

VLADIMIR PUTIN will be viewing his date with the Russian voters on 4 March 2012 with some apprehension. The presidency seemed his for the taking, and it still seems most unlikely that anyone will be allowed to defeat him. But what should have been another victory lap before a grateful public is starting to look more like an ordeal, in which he is on a hiding to nothing. The first round victory that he took for granted may slip beyond his reach unless Vladimir Churov, the “magician” (Dmitri Medvedev’s term) of the Central Electoral Commission, can pull off another miracle. Opinion polls are suggesting that Putin’s percentage of the votes in the first round will be only in the forties. Veteran Communist boss Gennadi Zyuganov, who is again standing for the presidency, may well pick up some of the anti-Putin protest vote, making him a likely second-round opponent. A run-off against Zyuganov more than twenty years after the fall of communism could prove uncomfortable from various points of view.

But the candidates of the officially tolerated “establishment” parties, which have the resources (and the privileged access to the media) to run a presidential campaign, are unlikely to go all out against Putin. Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov is offering himself ostensibly as a non-establishment candidate, but many have their doubts about how genuine an oppositionist he is. The Just Russia party has put forward its leader, Sergei Mironov, who has made conciliatory noises to the Kremlin since the ruling United Russia’s reverse at the parliamentary polls on 4 December. Many in and outside the party would have preferred to see the much more popular Oksana Dmitriyeva from Just Russia’s Petersburg machine stand for the top job.

The growing numbers of voters sceptical about Putin do not have any obvious alternative in view. For its part, the Kremlin will do whatever is necessary to keep potentially dangerous wild cards like the charismatic anti-corruption blogger Aleksei Navalny out of the contest. One way or another, Putin should get over the line in the second round even if Churov is unable to award him victory in the first.

After he was publicly booed at a martial arts event on 21 November, Putin postponed his annual televised Q&A session until after the elections. When it was finally held on 15 December, he appeared less assured than usual. He was certainly very angry, however, especially with Hillary Clinton for her criticism of the conduct of the elections. While he made a show of accepting that the protesters on the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg were moved by honest democratic emotion, he also asserted that many of them were working for or inspired by Western governments, and made his usual suggestion that such people were traitors.

Putin expressed particular passion, and compassion, about the tragic fate of Gaddafi, for whose death he blamed US drones. And he returned to his obsession about “colour revolutions” (the Orange revolution in Ukraine, for instance) instigated by sinister forces abroad. In other words, he seems unable to accept that many of his own constituents might simply be getting sick of him. None of this bodes well for a peaceful resolution of the situation if the unrest and dissatisfaction with Putin’s re-election plans persist.

Since the severe crackdown on the first post-election demonstrations, the regime has pursued a more moderate approach. It avoided repressive measures against the big Moscow protest on 10 December, and permitted some more honest media reporting. But there is no sign of any serious move towards reconciliation or reform. It appears, rather, that the regime wants to avoid provoking public opinion while it waits for the protest momentum to subside.

On 20 December, a website owned by one of Putin’s extremely wealthy friends published transcripts of one of the leading opposition figures, Boris Nemtsov, making derogatory remarks about another one in a private phone call obviously tapped by the security organs. Nemtsov apologised, his apology was accepted and the two made an amicable joint appearance. While the opposition is notoriously divided, this incident was hardly helpful, although the restive urban intelligentsia may not be impressed by the regime’s nakedly dirty pool.

If the opposition cannot get substantial numbers out on the street at the next big demonstration on 24 December, however, the regime will start to breathe more easily. For the moment they are comparing the demonstrators with the Occupy movements, which may prefigure the kind of endgame they are planning.

On 22 December, two days before another planned demonstration in Moscow, Medvedev unveiled a package of electoral reforms that would make it easier to form a new party, restore elections for the position of regional governor, and so on. This looks very much like dangling a few carrots to weaken the protesters’ resolve, especially as the reforms are not to take effect until after the presidential election on 4 March and Putin has said that candidates for the governors’ positions will still need to be approved by the president (that is, him). And above all, these proposal come not just from a lame-duck president, but from one who has repeatedly called for reforms that have never eventuated. Medvedev’s undertakings have had no credibility since he declared publicly that he had only served as a placeholder while Putin took leave from the job. Medvedev also said that that there must be no threats to stability – that trouble-makers and “extremists” would not be tolerated, particularly those who have foreign connections. The intention is transparent, but if it gets a few people off the streets then it will have served its purpose.

IN THE two months between his 23 September announcement of his intention to resume the presidency and the booing incident on 21 November, Putin had seemed brimming with self-confidence and eager to pursue his key foreign policy objectives, notably restoring strong Russian influence over the former Soviet republics. His trademark truculence towards the West, perceptibly distinct from Medvedev’s more emollient approach, was again in evidence. He took great pleasure in making allusions to the West’s economic difficulties, particularly the euro crisis. And recently he has been able to chalk up quite a few successes.

Putin has always deeply regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union and did so again in his Q&A session. He has always tried to do whatever he can to create and advance multilateral structures that bring as many as possible of the former republics together under Moscow’s leadership. His “energy diplomacy” involves manipulating the supply and pricing of Russia’s abundant oil and gas exports to favour the cooperative and punish the others. Similar trade practices involving commodities like wine and even mineral water, exploiting sometimes imperial monopsony rather than monopoly, have been routinely deployed against recalcitrants like Georgia and Moldova. Nor have these tactics been confined to the former republics or non–European Union members. Poland and the Baltic states, for example, have been on the receiving end at times.

Fearing that Moscow’s leadership will mean domination, some former vassals have sought safety in the European Union, where possible, or have at least avoided joining the various trading or security acronyms that Russia has established. In consequence, progress for Moscow has been slow. But now, with the European Union less able to attract and less willing to accept new members, and with Washington under Obama pursuing more pressing priorities elsewhere, Moscow’s opportunities have expanded.

The most recent of the multilateral bodies Moscow is pressing on its neighbours are the Customs Union and the newly minted Eurasian Union, a concept Putin set out soon after announcing his intention of resuming the presidency. Very roughly, he envisages the Eurasian Union as a kind of European Union to the Customs Union’s Common Market. In addition to former republics of the Soviet Union, Moscow has spoken about the desirability of attracting countries traditionally sympathetic to Russia and its culture – Venezuela and Cuba, for example, Serbia and Montenegro and even Finland and Hungary.

Putin is also declaring that the Eurasian Union, as the final step in the process, would seek collegial relations, trade agreements and so on with China on the one hand and the European Union on the other, subject only to the ostensible proviso that all must be treated equally. There is, however, a clear expectation that Russia will be more equal than others, dominating its union far more than Germany, for instance, dominates the European Union. And it will undoubtedly continue the policy, extending back to Soviet times, of seeking to divide EU members the better to influence them and weaken trans-Atlantic ties. Presumably, too, Putin would wish to establish arrangements precluding any contacts between these friendly blocs in the new multi-polar world that might lead to greater electoral transparency or even more coloured revolutions.

To date, Belarus and Kazakhstan have signed up to the Customs Union and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have expressed interest. Moscow is working on other republics to join, but is focusing particularly on Ukraine, potentially the jewel in the crown. The biggest country in Europe (if Russia and France’s overseas territories are excluded), it has large Russian, Russian-speaking and Russophile communities, and is seen by most Russians as the historic core of Russia and quite simply “ours.” Together with the largely Russian-speaking Belarus, and Kazakhstan, which is the most Russified of the “Stans,” this would give Russia a kind of Slavonic Union, the dream of many Russian nationalists, a unit with well over 200 million inhabitants, and most of the resources and industrial capacity of the old Soviet Union.

But even the Yanukovych administration, the most pro-Russian in Kiev since the Soviet era, has been very reluctant to join the Customs Union, preferring instead to continue its predecessors’ quest for an Association Agreement with the European Union, which would incorporate a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement. Negotiations for such an agreement were finalised in the last days before the Ukraine–EU summit in Kiev on 19 December. Some months ago it seemed very likely that the Association Agreement would be initialled at the December summit and possibly come into force in 2012. The European Union was keen for this to happen, though some lingering scepticism remained about Ukraine’s suitability. But it was not to be, at least not yet, and not perhaps for quite some time to come.

YANUKOVYCH has long been under fire for eroding the democratic gains of the Orange revolution of 2004. But what comprehensively undermined his standing with the European Union was his decision to launch a criminal prosecution against Yulia Tymoshenko, the Orange leader and ex–prime minister, whom he had narrowly beaten for the presidency in 2010. Tymoshenko was charged with exceeding her powers as prime minister in concluding an allegedly unfavourable deal on gas prices with Moscow in early 2009, a deal designed to end a punishing “gas war” that was threatening to freeze much of Western Europe. On 11 October, she was sentenced to seven years’ jail, disqualified from public life for a further three years beyond that, and fined $186,000,000. Innumerable representations were made to Yanukovych by senior EU figures making clear that this decision could block his EU aspirations. Kiev’s response was to prepare a further nine (sic) criminal cases against Tymoshenko and to subject her to various other chicaneries.

The Tymoshenko/gas deal saga is part of a very complex story. Much has been made of the argument that Kiev was convicting Tymoshenko to show Moscow that the current gas deal was “illegal” and should therefore be renegotiated. Some were impressed by an alleged Putin preference for Tymoshenko over Yanukovych as an opposite number, despite her strong Western sympathies. Others have claimed that the poor president is powerless in the face of an overwhelmingly strong pro-Moscow lobby in his ruling Party of Regions. Much of that seems increasingly implausible as the persecution of Tymoshenko continues.

Concurrently with its EU bid, Ukraine has been pursuing sometimes acrimonious negotiations with the Russian gas giant Gazprom (essentially an instrument of Kremlin policy), seeking lower prices for its vital gas imports. The current prices for Ukraine are higher than for most western European customers, some of whom have succeeded in getting price concessions from Gazprom in recent months.

It does seem, however, that Yanukovych was not using the EU bid simply as a bargaining chip in its negotiations with Moscow. Ukraine’s trade with Russia and the European Union is roughly equal, and a majority of Ukrainians and many heavyweight local oligarchs want EU integration. But his pursuit of Tymoshenko in the face of all the warnings does make one wonder how serious Yanukovych’s commitment really is. To compound matters, in the last weeks before the summit he began to demand that the Association Agreement provide a clear “perspective” of EU membership down the track. Had it not been for the Tymoshenko case and some others like it, this might conceivably have been doable. As things stood, it was just the kind of negotiating gambit to raise EU hackles even higher. In the end, a drafting fudge was devised to get past that problem. But while the agreement was ready, it was not even initialled at the summit, though another fudge was deployed to hold out the prospect of that happening in the early months of 2012.

And so the long-running story of Ukraine’s two-faced relations with Russia and the European Union remains open. But the balance has swung markedly towards Moscow. There have been hints lately that a deal on gas prices is imminent. Some expect this will be paid for by the surrender of more sovereignty by Kiev, perhaps in the form of conceding Gazprom a controlling interest in Ukraine’s gas pipelines, a key objective of Putin’s energy diplomacy. Russia is also eager to take over Ukraine’s struggling and much smaller Gazprom equivalent, Naftohaz. But despite both inducements and threats from Moscow, whatever else he concedes, Yanukovych is likely to continue holding out against the Customs Union, aware that joining would preclude integration with Europe.

UKRAINE’s northern neighbour, Belarus, provides some oblique insights into Yanukovych’s dilemma. Since last December’s brutal crackdown on the unusually large demonstrations in Minsk against falsified election results, Belarus has experienced spectacular economic decline, thanks partly to irresponsible election promises by the incumbent, with average purchasing power declining by about 50 per cent. President Alexander Lukashenko, once hopefully styled by Condoleezza Rice as the last dictator of Europe, has responded to the resulting discontent by thorough-going neo-Stalinist repression, proscribing even “silent protests” by tiny groups of people. This has worked quite well for him, and his loyal security organs, headed by the local KGB, ensured that only small numbers of people turned out on the anniversary of the crackdown, 19 December, to renew the protest.

But Lukashenko has decided that his own stalwart defence of Belarusian sovereignty (which translates essentially into defence of his own power and importance) should not be taken to pedantic extremes. The European Union had offered him generous inducements to repent, but they also demanded some democracy and human rights in return, which Lukashenko decided he would prefer to do without. Having failed also to win unconditional sympathy from the IMF, which had demanded the quid pro quo of serious economic reforms, he decided to throw in his lot with Moscow. As a reward he was given a much reduced gas price of US$165 per 1000 cubic metres, a long way below market rates. A US$10 million loan and other goods were also proffered. In exchange, Lukashenko sold off to Gazprom the rest of Belarus’s gas pipelines, hitherto rightly regarded as a vital strategic asset, and became much more cooperative and respectful towards Moscow on other issues.

This reward was also intended as bait for Ukraine, which is currently paying US$400 per 1000 cubic metres for gas, with the prospect of further hikes ahead. In that perspective, membership in the Customs Union must look much more attractive to the leadership in wintry Kiev.

Moscow’s pacts hold other attractions for distressed autocrats. At its August summit this year, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation – a weaker version of the Warsaw Pact (Ukraine for example, is not a member) – discussed proposals to use the organisation to strengthen the defences of all member states against colour revolutions or any spillover of the Arab Spring. President Lukashenko seemed particularly interested in this idea, which he and others saw as an invaluable security guarantee for any member leader under domestic threat.

Another leader keenly interested in this issue was reportedly President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, immediate past chairman of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In power for over twenty years, Nazarbayev has in recent days put down a workers’ uprising in a town in the west of his country by dint of armed force and a total blockade of telecommunications in the region. Initial reports spoke of at least ten fatalities, but the information blackout has effectively reduced the flow of reliable news. How far the ideas under consideration in the Collective Security Treaty Organisation will go towards becoming a new Brezhnev doctrine remains to be seen. If so, it could be very attractive to some potential new members as well as veterans like Lukashenko and Nazarbayev.

Moscow has had some successes on other fronts. In Kyrgyzstan, for example, a strongly pro-Russian president, Almazbek Atambayev, came to power last October. One of his first public statements was to foreshadow that he would terminate US access to the Manas Air base, a vital supply link with Afghanistan, when the lease runs out in 2014. Observers take differing views about how serious a threat this is. But should Moscow wish to apply pressure to their “reset” partners in Washington at some point, having such a president as a warm and cooperative Eurasian Union colleague in Bishkek would clearly be advantageous. Atambayev’s predecessors were much less accommodating in that respect.

Putin’s energy diplomacy received a big public boost with the 8 November opening of the Nord Stream gas pipeline to Germany. The pipeline, in which Putin’s key collaborator has been his close friend, the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, bypasses Belarus, Poland and Ukraine and gives Russia a capacity to cut off gas supplies to those countries temporarily without incommoding their more important customers further west. It also serves as a warning to Ukraine and Belarus that they can expect to earn much less for transit fees in future.

Despite desperate assurances from President Yanukovych of his readiness to cooperate in delivering gas exports for Gazprom, Moscow has also persisted with its plans to develop a southern equivalent called South Stream which would further deprive Kiev of income and energy security. The objective of South Stream, which would be much more expensive than any purely economic alternatives, is to draw countries of southeastern Europe into closer energy links with Russia, and at the same time to kneecap Nabucco.

Nabucco is a strategic pipeline project intended by the United States and the European Union to weaken the Kremlin’s strong grip not only on gas exports to southern Europe, but also on potentially competitive gas supplies originating in Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. Nabucco has had a chequered career thus far, with many EU members and would-be members quite happy to conclude bilateral deals with South Stream that ignore Brussels’ endorsement of Nabucco as vital for EU energy security. Nabucco has suffered quite a few defeats in recent months and Moscow will certainly see all these as important victories in their long-running South Stream campaign.

VLADIMIR PUTIN might well have felt satisfied with the way his domestic and foreign priorities were shaping up in the weeks before the booing. As another noted Russian leader once said, life had become better, life was becoming more cheerful. But then came the domestic setbacks, which revealed again Putin’s very strong anti-Western instincts. With his overt takeover of Medvedev’s supposed bailiwick, foreign policy, we have seen a growing inflexibility and sharpness of tone in relations with the West, reminiscent of pre-Gorbachev times.

Putin is worried about China, but he tries to keep it well hidden, He never uses the belligerent, mocking or contemptuous accents with Beijing that have become almost routine in his public comments about the West. After eleven years it is perhaps time to say that this is the real Putin standing up. Strong rumour has it that he will appoint the obsessively anti-Western ultra-nationalist ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, as defence minister. With a resentful Putin – convinced his domestic troubles are all a Western conspiracy – in the presidency for at least another six years, expect strains in East–West relations to increase further. •

The post Setbacks at home, successes abroad: the mixed fortunes of Vladimir Putin appeared first on Inside Story.

ON 21 DECEMBER 1989, Romania’s neo-Stalinist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu called a mass rally in Bucharest to shore up a brutal regime under pressure from galloping reform in the communist states of Eastern Europe. The unthinkable happened: the crowd herded into the city square to endure yet another tedious address suddenly morphed from cheering to jeering. Television cameras recorded the look of horror and disbelief that spread across Ceausescu’s face, as if he were glimpsing the apocalypse. And in a personal sense he was. In those few seconds, the latent brittleness of his tyranny was exposed. Events began to accelerate, and within a few days his regime had fallen and he and his wife had been executed.

Vladimir Putin’s recent experiences might be less drastic, but he must be aware of the unsettling parallels. Opinion polls have been pointing to growing discontent within the Russian population, particularly among the urban middle classes. Official media – especially television, from which 80 per cent of Russians derive most of their information – betray little of this. But the blogosphere is full of robust discussion about the regime’s failings. And with over fifty million Russians now using the internet, cyberspace – of almost negligible political significance when Putin came to power – has become a serious threat to regime stability.

While Putin’s own personal approval ratings have fallen markedly in recent months, they remain enviably high. Those of his governing United Russia party, on the other hand, have been declining further and faster, and more or less collapsing in some major urban centres. But Putin seemed brimming with self-confidence until quite recently, staging macho electioneering displays, offering sharp and contemptuous comments on the West’s economic travails (“the little hamster” – the European Union – “has bitten off more than it can chew”), and announcing grandiose plans for a new Eurasian Union to embrace much of the former Soviet empire.

In announcing the job-swap with Medvedev, whereby Putin would resume the presidency while magnanimously passing the prime ministership to his Petersburg protégé, the pair told voters that the two of them had agreed on this manoeuvre several years before to enable Putin to return to the top job. This patrimonial approach to the highest, ostensibly elective, offices in the land showed a self-confidence about the public’s compliance bordering on the solipsistic.

Many observers believe that this “castling” manoeuvre by the pair, and the manner in which it was announced, were important factors in exhausting the patience of the long-suffering Russian public. And there were other surprising lapses in judgement by Putin – for example, when he told members of a group of partly Western interlocutors what a great leader his old friend Silvio Berlusconi had been, describing him as one of the last of the Mohicans of European politics. Coming on 11 November, this was not the most opportune moment for Putin to be referring to his and Berlusconi’s high mutual regard.

Pride cometh before a fall. Just ten days later, Putin had his Ceausescu moment. At a martial arts contest between a Russian champion in indifferent form and an American opponent, who some said had been carefully chosen to give the Russian a certain victory and the premier another suitably macho electoral photo-opportunity, Putin entered the ring to congratulate the burly Russian on his victory. When he began to speak, booing and jeering broke out in the crowd. Putin managed to complete his remarks and beat an orderly retreat, but the damage had been done. His aura of invincibility had suddenly been pierced, like Ceausescu’s nearly twenty-two years before. The Kremlin went into damage control, seeking to argue that the crowd had been booing the American for putting up a poor fight. But few believed it, and many of the fans present went to the trouble of posting their real views on the subject online, including on the American’s own website, where they assured him of their utmost respect.

The warning signals had begun earlier in the campaign when attempts by the ruling party to tie United Russia’s campaign to the public appearances of popular Russian celebrities had ended in public irritation and heckling. But for Putin himself to suffer such a public indignity was unprecedented. He was clearly shaken, and though he is typically a very confident public performer he began avoiding potentially hazardous public appearances in the run-up to the elections for the Duma (parliament) last weekend.

Under Putin the Kremlin has closely followed and itself commissions public opinion surveys. The regime’s nervousness about the elections was palpable. Despite the steeply tilted playing field and the strenuous exercise of what is known euphemistically as “the administrative resource” (including ballot stuffing, intimidation and bribery of voters, and requiring key officials, employers, university rectors and so on to reach a required target vote for the ruling party in their bailiwicks), the results appear to have been worse than the regime feared. Putin’s brief public appearance to claim victory at party headquarters displayed none of his usual panache.

United Russia had not only lost its two-thirds constitutional majority; it was also struggling to reach a simple majority of votes cast. Exit polling suggested a vote for the party of somewhere between 46 and 48 per cent. Some observers guestimated that the real figure may have been well below that. In Moscow, Petersburg and some other big cities United Russia was running in the low thirties, or lower, according to exit polling, though official results were sometimes massaged upwards.

By various means Putin has effectively excluded most serious opposition parties from participating in Russian elections or the public media. In their absence, the three tame parties tolerated in parliament (the Communist Party, the grotesquely misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of the chauvinist buffoon Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the left-leaning Just Russia party, which the regime had been hoping to oust) all did very much better than before. They had campaigned with more vigour than usual, and benefited from the fact that many “illegal” oppositionists had called on their followers to vote for any party other than the ruling party.

The Central Electoral Commission headed by the faithful functionary Vladimir Churov has indicated that United Russia’s vote will be sufficient to give them 238 seats, a narrow absolute majority in the 450-seat Duma. This result probably owed something to outright manipulation in the commission and elsewhere. In the indigenised tyranny that is Chechnya, for example, there was reportedly a truly Soviet turnout of over 99 per cent (compared with 60 per cent nationwide), of whom we are told 99 per cent voted for United Russia. Indeed, the party was heavily dependent on Russia’s Caucasian regions, many of which are experiencing an ongoing armed insurgency, to reach its bare majority of seats.

Despite periodic rhetorical flourishes, the tolerated parties haven’t represented a major threat to United Russia’s dominance of the Duma. Notwithstanding their sharply increased numbers, the situation is probably still manageable for the regime, barring any further increase in turbulence. Nonetheless, the spate of unusually large demonstrations in Moscow and Petersburg in recent days suggests further troubles may lie ahead in the run-up to presidential elections on 4 March. What was expected to be a shoo-in may prove unpleasantly exciting for the anointed candidate, though in the end it’s hard to see him not winning.

In the meantime, Putin will probably work on shoring up support from the other three parties by offering them perks and sinecures, and maybe even some minor and safe portfolios. Despite its recent feud with the regime, Just Russia has already indicated it would be prepared to cooperate in the new parliament. Zhirinovsky and his chauvinist mates have been under Kremlin control since their first emergence on the scene in the early Yeltsin years, and will surely continue to support the government. Even the communists shouldn’t find it hard to sign on to more state largesse for various underprivileged groups, a big military build-up and stoking tensions with the West.

UNTIL now Putin has had a dream run. Plucked from relative obscurity in the Petersburg city apparatus to serve in President Yeltsin’s administration in Moscow in March 1997, he made a giddy ascent. Starting as deputy chief of staff to Yeltsin, in less than three years he progressed through ever more senior posts to become successively head of the Federal Security Service (the domestic successor to the KGB), secretary of the Security Council, deputy prime minister, prime minister, acting president and finally the elected president of Russia. Yeltsin had decided that this young man – Putin was not yet fifty – could best guarantee his legacy and his family’s vital interests.

That was just the beginning of his good fortune. Despite enjoying only modest public recognition, he quickly converted his standing as president into genuine popularity. This was based, above all, on three factors: unlike his predecessor he was young, healthy, sober and intelligently articulate; he had relaunched the war against the armed Chechen rebels and done so with apparent success; and, most importantly, the price of oil and gas had soared following a slump under Yeltsin. After the hardships of Russia’s feel-as-you-go transition from a command economy with a huge ballast of imperial defence expenditure to a market economy via a corrupt privatisation process, GDP stabilised from its steep decline in the 1990s and then took off through most of the noughties.

Putin reaped the political benefits of this turnaround. As he set about rolling back the political freedoms of the Yeltsin era, the Russian public seemed to be happy to accept a bit of traditional Russian autocracy as long as their pay kept increasing and arriving on time. Nor were they averse to the strongly anti-Western edge to Putin’s foreign policy. Like him, they had been reared to hate the West, and the tribulations of market democracy had inoculated them against the pro-Western euphoria that had briefly swept over the Russian political elite and the population at large in the Gorbachev and early Yeltsin years.

Then came the global financial crisis. At first, Putin seemed convinced that this downturn for his Western adversaries must be good for Russia, which, he confidently expected, would sail through the turbulence with all flags flying. But in 2009 the Russian economy shrank by 8 per cent. The painful downturn must have dented Putin’s reputation as an economic manager. While his stellar approval ratings stood up pretty well at first, they later began to decline, and surprisingly continued to do so even as the economy partly recovered. That trend has accelerated in 2011. While overall economic performance has been quite solid, opinion polling this year has consistently pointed to progressive erosion of Putin’s, Medvedev’s and the ruling party’s standing.

WHAT we can expect next from a chastened Putin is probably a little bit of carrot and rather more knout. On the carrot side, there have already been big concessions on salaries and social security expenditures, but we may now see more such budgetary largesse. With former finance minister and close Putin ally from the Petersburg years Aleksei Kudrin disciplined for having questioned the proposed ballooning of military expenses, there will be less effective resistance to any such dubious fiscal measures. Thanks to Kudrin’s legacy, Putin has a better starting point from which to commit fiscal vandalism than most European leaders.

The big build-up in military expenditure is a carrot that will please the military and nationalist lobbies, both of which are large and powerful. Unlike the security organs, the military have not had an easy time of it under Putin, who has sanctioned a long-running effort to move the military establishment from its traditional reliance on a large conscript army towards something smaller and more high-tech. Expenditure on personnel has been pared back to make funds available for more sophisticated weaponry; the oversized officer corps has been thinned out. All of this has been painful for the military and resisted by many senior officers. Compensatory salary hikes for the military were already on the table.

But Putin may decide to conciliate it further with a change of leadership in the defence portfolio, as well as intensified anti-Western themes in his foreign and security policies. A winding back of the “reset” with the United States, further shrill criticism of NATO, support for Iran, Bashar al-Assad, Kosovo Serbs and so on, and more anger and indignation about the proposed missile defence installations in Eastern Europe could all be on the agenda. There have been rumours in the Russian press that the intensely abrasive Russian ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, who has been in Moscow recently for discussions on military matters, could be appointed defence minister.

Articulate and combative in several European languages, and reportedly the son-in-law of a KGB general, Rogozin’s appointment would be a fairly robust signal in itself to Washington and Brussels. If he stayed in the job, it is likely he would deliver further robust signals at regular intervals. None of this would necessarily diminish his popularity with much of the Russian public, who liked the cut of his jib when he headed an earlier Kremlin-backed party called Rodina (Motherland), which the Kremlin dismantled because its strident nationalism was becoming too electorally competitive.

Still on the carrot side, we can expect some conspicuous and condign punishment for unpopular officials. Medvedev, who is actually still president despite recent appearances, has already called for a reckoning with provincial governors who failed to deliver sufficient votes for the ruling party in their domains. Despite his liberal leanings, Medvedev has a much more off-with-their-heads style than Putin, and we can expect to see it in action. Putin prefers to dress down his senior colleagues on prime-time television, and we can expect some of that as well when he recovers his balance. To what extent that will placate the public remains to be tested.

The Kremlin’s political manipulator-in-chief, Vladislav Surkov, has been speaking since the elections of the need to create a right-wing opposition party to broaden the Putinist system’s bizarrely skewed political spectrum. Surkov had been working on such a party some months back, using a once semi-authentic right-wing party called True Cause as the building block. But the Kremlin-designated leader of the revived party, oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, threw himself into the project with too much enthusiasm, leading Surkov, doubtless in consultation with Putin, to organise a coup against him.

Prokhorov then resigned with a clatter, publicly denouncing the “puppet-master” Surkov. None of this conformed to the script and was itself a sign of a new current of unpredictability beneath the glossy surface of Putin’s “managed” or “sovereign” democracy. Whether Surkov will have any more success with his new project than he had with the earlier one remains to be seen, but activity of that kind to provide the appearance of more democracy can be expected.

There have already been signs that Putin will try to adjust his own image for something more modern and consultative. After twelve or more years in the public eye, though, he has a rather fixed persona. He may find it easier to project a new image through prominent appointees who have greater reformist credibility. He may set up a new body to tackle corruption with a relative cleanskin at the head of it, for instance. The Public Chamber, an advisory body attached to the parliament, may be called on to look at pre-trial detention and other such issues. In extremis, he may even order a review of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s case, despite his consuming hatred for the imprisoned businessman. But public scepticism won’t easily be overcome.

PUTIN and his inner circle will also place a very high priority on bringing an unruly public back into line. The Moscow and Petersburg demonstrations against the election results have made visible a massive police presence in the two capitals and led to over 1000 arrests. Among those arrested and sentenced to fifteen days’ detention was the extremely popular anti-corruption campaigner, Alexei Navalny. A lawyer by trade and a highly skilled blogger by avocation, Navalny’s website and other cyber pronouncements have built him a great following. In particular, his coining of the now universally quoted phrase “the party of crooks and thieves” did more to bring about the downturn in United Russia’s fortunes than almost any other single factor.

Navalny has launched an increasingly full-on challenge to Putin in the blogosphere, and Putin has probably decided he needs to meet it head on. People like Navalny have sometimes been killed or maimed in the past by “unknown assailants.” But he is something of a nationalist, which together with his fame and popularity makes him harder to deal with than most traditional opposition figures. Before Solzehnitsyn was driven into exile in 1974, he told a Western interviewer that despite death threats he felt safe: not a hair would fall from his head or the heads of any of his family without the consent of the KGB, he said, because they knew they would be blamed for it. On that logic, the Kremlin may wish to avoid making a martyr of Navalny, but they will increase their pressure on him.

More generally, harassment and punishment for obdurate opposition figures is likely to increase, quite possibly in parallel with calls for a new spirit of dialogue and discussion in the public sphere. Putin controls the security organs and has made their workforce, the siloviki, central to the functioning of the state, the economy and society. He is extremely unlikely to come under pressure from that quarter. Insofar as the organs have – as they surely must – heightened professional concerns about stability, which is one of Putin’s most cherished political values (and one he reaffirmed in his very brief victory remarks on election night), he can easily make gestures in their direction, and indeed may now be eager to do so.

In July this year, the Federal Security Service called for the introduction of restrictions on the internet to counteract “terrorism.” Medvedev – who has made a thing of advancing computerisation of Russian society, is personally cyber-adept, and uses social media to broadcast his views and policies – quickly let it be known that he opposed this initiative. Putin who by contrast is cyber-challenged, offered no immediate public reaction, but in early September was reported as declaring publicly that in “modern states” internet access should not be restricted.

That affirmation should not be taken too seriously. There have been for years quite a lot of hacking and denial-of-service attacks in or from Russia which have looked very much to be officially inspired. During the acrimonious dispute between Russia and Estonia in 2007, the tiny Baltic nation’s highly sophisticated and extensive national internet systems were the subject of coordinated attacks sourced from Russia, which were widely believed to have been sanctioned by the Kremlin.

There have been intermittent attacks against websites in Russia in recent years, though never massive or sustained. But before, during and after last weekend’s parliamentary elections, hackers temporarily crippled a large number of oppositionist websites, and even legally sanctioned media outlets deemed too independent. In particular, attacks were launched against an NGO called Golos (“voice” or “vote” in Russian), which, like Navalny, had particularly infuriated the Kremlin in the months leading up to the elections. Golos maintains an interactive site known as Karta Narushenii (Map of Violations), on which were recorded all reports they have received of “the administrative resource” being deployed to skew the elections in United Russia’s favour.

Putin has expressed particular hostility towards Golos because he has been trying to limit or even squeeze out independent election monitors, and Golos, though a Russian volunteer monitoring organisation, has received funding from Western sources. He has referred recently to Golos volunteers as “Judases,” and further action against them seems likely. Putin’s regime has long been deeply anxious about the possibility of a coloured revolution like those in Georgia and Ukraine. Until now any such popular uprising in Russia has seemed highly unlikely, and probably for the time being remains so. But where there is fear within a regime like this one, oppressive measures may not be far away.

In present circumstances, the Kremlin may decide that its hacking resources are not a sufficient defence against the burgeoning menace from the blogosphere. If so, they may look again at the successful measures their strategic partner China has applied to filter and control the internet. Any such policy initiative by their former boss would of course be warmly welcomed and enthusiastically applied by the Federal Security Service.

While he feels some distaste for the provincial enthusiasms of the Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Putin may even look more closely at how Lukashenko has succeeded in crushing major unrest in his country despite an unfolding economic disaster that has reduced Belarusians’ real incomes by more than half. Any president who can keep that kind of situation in check must be well worth bailing out – which is precisely what Putin has recently done for President Lukashenko.

In considering his next steps, Putin needs to decide what to do with Medvedev. When they swapped jobs, the younger man was also given the task of heading up the United Russia election campaign, a curious assignment, constitutionally speaking, for a president and, moreover, one who wasn’t even a member of the party. It seemed at the time that Putin was thereby flicking his tandem partner a hospital pass. United Russia’s ratings were known to be floundering. Now that Medvedev has predictably failed to revive them, he could be punished for having sought for a few months in early 2011 to assert himself against the paramount leader. Putin might even have been thinking of reneging on his promise to appoint Medvedev as prime minister when he resumes the presidency.

If so, he may now be reconsidering. His own position has been weakened, and any attempt to scapegoat Medvedev might lead to more trouble. In a sense, the events of the last few days in Petersburg and Moscow are fuelled by a loss of illusions among those who had dared to hope for improvements during a second Medvedev term. Better perhaps to appoint him as PM, allow him to resume enunciating his more liberal opinions and perhaps even to make a few liberal ministerial appointments and then actually to do a few things. The problem with trying to deploy Medvedev as a carrot is that Medvedev, in meekly agreeing to vacate the presidency for Putin without visible resistance, has lost most of the credibility he had gained by his liberal pronouncements, perhaps irretrievably. Either way, what happens to Medvedev should be a pointer of things to come.

DESPITE the recent turbulence, in the short to medium term any further major increase in levels of unrest seems unlikely. So net emigration outflows, disproportionately of the best and brightest, look set to continue, though that will not be as a matter of deliberate policy choice aimed at ensuring “stability.” The presidential elections on 4 March will be a worrying time for the regime, but candidate Putin has not allowed serious rivals to present themselves, and any that were to emerge at this late stage would be expediently dealt with. But if he manages to restore calm by whatever combination of knout and carrot, and thereafter chooses not to make any serious concessions to growing opposition sentiment, tensions could rapidly surge again.

Since the October revolution, Moscow has most typically dealt with unrest or opposition by severe repression and emigration. In the last decade, 1.25 million people have left Russia, many of them young and highly qualified. Opinion polls suggest that some 20 per cent of Russians would currently like to emigrate despite the economic improvements of the Putin era. Putin worries about Russia’s grim demographic situation, and is unlikely to welcome a major outflow. But he also wants a deal on mutual visa-free travel with the European Union, and reintroduction of Soviet-style border controls seems unlikely.

In the longer run, that leaves comprehensive democratic reform or repression as the central policy dilemma for Putin 2.0. Putin’s instincts are undoubtedly hardline; and they will have been reinforced by his recent humiliations. Up until now his autocracy has been based more on manipulation and delivery of tangible benefits than brute force. But his violent crackdown in Chechnya and surrounding regions, and the stark language he has often used in public about domestic adversaries suggest that in the interests of domestic stability and Russia’s return to great power status, if thwarted and defied, he may see harsher measures as necessary. If he does, the Arab Spring scenarios that some domestic critics have foreseen may indeed start to come into view.

After a decade of Putin’s increasingly predictable restorationism, Russia has entered another period of flux and uncertainty. If the hamster’s struggles with the euro crisis prove unsuccessful, we may see another sharp economic downturn in the West. Putin’s impulse will first be to rejoice. But another 2009 will be the last thing he needs. •

The post Putin’s Ceausescu moment appeared first on Inside Story.

IMAGINE you have been allocated a kind of Buggins’s turn at presiding for six months over the exclusive business association you’ve only fairly recently joined. Like the rest of the city, the Occidental has hit bad financial trouble, and the fear is spreading that some members, or even the club itself, hitherto a pillar of solvent respectability, might be facing bankruptcy. Other new members who joined at the same time as you did have already had their turn at the rotating presidency, but some senior members weren’t impressed by their performance and, indeed, had been sceptical about their joining the club in the first place. One had muttered audibly that the newcomers didn’t seem to know when to shut up. Another had reproached the new members collectively for their “bad manners.”

Once the colder financial winds started to blow, some establishment members were quick to point their fingers at the newcomers, suggesting that their shiny trousers and unsafe business practices would only bring discredit to themselves and financial damage to the club as a whole. But luckily the new members proved financially more resilient than some of the older ones. This was a relief in one way, but some establishment figures were now in such strife that it seemed the whole club might go down the gurgler, at which point degrees of culpability might seem less relevant. The president’s role had been downsized a bit after the new boys joined, but you still felt a heavy weight of responsibility when you assumed the mantle.

The two most senior members, who had traditionally run the club’s affairs de facto, had begun to feud publicly about what was to be done. Despite their disagreements, they organised crisis meetings, to which you and most new members were often not invited. You tried to speak up for the excluded members, but it was an invidious position from which to try to broker a solution.

On the other side of town, meanwhile, the rival Eurasian Club, of which you and other new boys had once been reluctant members, is staging something of a comeback after years of crisis and disintegration. You and some of the other new members feel that Eurasian’s resurgence is likely to take the form of hostile, legally dubious takeovers and even standover tactics, for which that club’s Mr Big has long been notorious. Two big neighbouring firms who had defected from Mr Big and have been showing interest in your association are under heavy and increasing pressure from Mr Big to go back to him.

You are very conscious that some of the influential older members of your own club feel Mr Big actually deserves more respect and attention from them than you think he does. You try very hard to establish polite and productive relations, but you are far from convinced that he is a reformed character. So to prevent his again becoming a dominant force in the city’s politics, and especially in your immediate neighbourhood, you are doing your best to persuade your midtown neighbours to come over to your side. Though schooled in the same tough neighbourhood as Mr Big, they seem wary of him, but unable to make up their minds.

Many senior club members are preoccupied with their own problems and have lost interest in attracting new members. One was even heard to snort from his deep chair in the members’ bar that riff-raff like would-be members B— and U— would be better off with Mr Big. “Let him sort them out.” Despite these discouraging signals you work on the seniors to keep the membership doors open. And you keep trying to persuade the wannabes to press their claims as persuasively as possible, almost in spite of themselves.

But suddenly one neighbour you were trying to sneak past the ethics committee gets involved in a dismaying spectacle of street violence, which convinces most of your club members that he is totally unworthy of a place in their midst. Even after that you don’t give up, but wipe the egg from your face and organise a very attractive rehabilitation package for him in exchange for a show of penitence. But he treats the offer you made on behalf of your club with public contempt and, to make matters worse, publicly abuses your club’s hard-working CEO in highly colourful language. You strongly suspect that Mr Big’s emissaries have nobbled him.

Then your other nearest neighbour also makes fresh trouble. Despite some increasingly visible peccadillos in his own life, he had been buttering up your senior members quite skilfully. You have done all you could to strengthen his commitment to your club’s values. But he seems to have a split personality. While one half of him seems genuinely to want to become a member, his behaviour at home suggests exactly the opposite and risks his being imminently blackballed. And you know that he is also talking with the Eurasian Club about joining them.

Suddenly he too becomes involved in nasty public violence against a business rival who evokes strong sympathy among your club members. You beg him to desist, fearing that your colleagues will recall reports of similar behaviour by him earlier in his career. Despite everything, you keep meeting with him, imploring him not to sink his chances of club membership and all the respectability and business advantages that could provide. You desperately want him to be given the nod by the club’s management committee before your term as president expires. And you still have the support of the club’s external liaison manager, despite her doubts about his suitability.

As that date approaches, you feel more and more desperate. You have nightmares he will suddenly appear on TV with Mr Big vowing his total commitment to the Eurasian Club. Or that one of your fellow club members will tell you in quite explicit terms that regardless of what your neighbour finally decides, they will veto him anyway.

But your biggest worry is the most senior and influential member of your association, by tradition the CEO of the most powerful company in the region, a position currently held for the first time by a woman – and from the other side of the tracks, which raised quite a few eyebrows at the time. She’s a brilliant negotiator and can work a committee room far better than any of her male detractors. You’ve cultivated close links with her and have a healthy respect for her company. But you feel very strongly that because of some unhappy episodes in the company’s history, on key issues affecting regional business confidence she’s got the wrong end of the stick. Finally you summon up your courage, and during a visit to her head office, launch a carefully calibrated but sharp critique of her whole approach. And now you’re anxiously awaiting the outcome of this risky manoeuvre.

SPARE a thought for Premier Donald Tusk, President Bronislaw Komorowski and Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski. They don’t have an easy life. And yet, despite all the troubles they are grappling with, reportedly not always in perfect unison, they are still getting a pretty good press abroad, as well as the usual bucketing at home from their domestic opponents. They must be doing something right. •

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RUSSIA’s parliamentary and presidential elections are scheduled for 4 December this year and 4 March next year respectively. Opinion polls suggest that ordinary Russians, habituated to expecting little from elections, don’t see themselves as having much say in these ones either. And the authorities have been even more assiduous than usual in seeking to ensure that voters don’t have much to be excited about. The most plausible opposition party, the People’s Freedom Party, was prevented from registering on a technicality, and prime minister Vladimir Putin has reached for an old Soviet bloc expedient – the All-Russian National Front, into which whole organisations have been press-ganged holus-bolus – to maximise the pro-government vote.

Most interest ly has turned on whether the relatively liberal and Western-friendly Dmitry Medvedev would again contest the presidency, or whether the senior partner in the so-called ruling duo or tandem, Vladimir Putin, would return to the office he occupied between 2000 and 2008. If Putin does return, it will be for a recently constitutionally revised term of six years rather than four, with the prospect of a further six years after elections in 2018. That could mean a quarter-century of de facto Putin rule in Russia.

Fearing this prospect, liberal figures within the regime have pushed vigorously for a second presidential term for Medvedev. Most Western governments would also have a clear preference for Medvedev rather than Putin. And Medvedev himself would like the job. But it appears that even the decision to stand is not his to make, as Medvedev himself has more or less acknowledged. Earlier this year, following the 8 per cent decline in GDP and other severe economic symptoms of the global financial crisis in Russia, and with popular dissatisfaction rising, the Medvedev camp seemed to be issuing a serious challenge to Putin’s paramount leadership. Medvedev made a series of critical statements about the existing direction of the government, and some of his prominent supporters went out on a limb to make strident demands for his re-election.

Then, in May, Medvedev called a press conference at Skolkovo – Russia’s would-be answer to Silicon Valley, which the computer-savvy president has been promoting – where many believed he would formally declare his intentions. But the event proved to be a fizzer. There was no announcement, and apart from a couple of sly digs at Putin (including a suggestion that no one should wish to be in power for twenty years), Medvedev again assumed the respectful protégé role that has been his usual posture since he first worked with Putin in the Petersburg city administration in the 1990s.

Although Medvedev is still making it known that he wants the presidency, or at least something nice in lieu, he seems to accept that he needs Putin’s support to get anything. Nearly four months on, he has still made no announcements, unilateral or otherwise. The rumour mill is again suggesting that an announcement on the presidency is imminent. But it’s far from clear that the decision about who stands for the job matters all that much.

Even in May, many Russian and foreign observers had become somewhat jaded by the drawn-out game of hide-and-seek the tandem couple had been playing over the presidency. Subsequent events were to make them more so. On the same day as the Skolkovo press conference, it was announced that the leader of the Kremlin-approved Just Russia party, Sergei Mironov, who had been increasingly stroppy and critical of the government in parliament, had been ousted. Putin has effectively eliminated all overtly oppositionist parties from the parliament, but the parties that are still allowed to get in, like Just Russia, sometimes take their role more seriously than was intended.

Just Russia seems likely to be eased out of parliament in the forthcoming elections. Mironov will be replaced as speaker of the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, by a close Putin associate, former Petersburg governor Valentina Matviyenko, who is expected to ensure that greater decorum is observed in the chamber. For her part, Matviyenko had to be translated into the parliament by a series of deceptive by-election manoeuvres exceptional even by the standards of Putinist “managed democracy”.

The reason for these exertions was that she had become extremely unpopular in the home town she shares with most of the Putin leadership. St Petersburg is the fourth largest city in Europe, and the Kremlin is naturally very keen to secure the best possible election outcome there. To do so, it needed a more locally popular politician to head up the Petersburg campaign of the governing United Russia party. Matviyenko, a reliably loyal Putinist, could be of more use in charge of the slightly restive law-makers in the Federation Council.

Simultaneously, a great many other manipulations have been in progress in preparation for the polls. These broadly conform to the pattern of “political technology,” as it’s known in Russia, or “virtual politics,” to use the term coined by the distinguished British expert on the post-Soviet scene, Andrew Wilson. What these terms indicate is a determination by the authorities to ensure by any means that, with their popularity having ebbed somewhat, they get the kind of election results they want.

THIS is not to say that the Putin regime is deeply unpopular, or that it is unresponsive to signals of popular discontent. The authorities pay very close attention to the opinion polls and commission quite a few themselves. Even the more independent polls consistently show both Putin and Medvedev with the sort of ratings that would make Julia Gillard green with incredulous envy. (Medvedev’s results, though also very good, always seem to be slightly lower as if in deference to Putin’s, and lately have sagged slightly).

Russians expect less of their politicians than most Western voters do of theirs. But Putin in particular is seeking to please, with his recent macho displays including the remarkable dive in the Black Sea where he miraculously happened upon two ancient and extremely valuable Greek amphoras. Following on from last year’s Playmates-style calendar produced by student volunteers in support of Putin, a group of nubile young women known as Putin’s Army has recently recorded videos of its activities, in which by graphic example their members call on other young women to tear off their tops for Putin. On a more serious note, Putin has been at pains to identify himself as the main person responsible for the expenditure of large sums on defence, security and social welfare, all of which are very popular with key constituencies.

Not to be outdone, the Medvedev camp has come up with its own group of engagingly attired young women to organise happenings aimed at boosting Medvedev’s flagging fortunes. And Medvedev still makes some public statements aimed at rallying his troops. For the most part, though, his heart doesn’t seem to be in it, and Putin’s return to the presidency has been looking increasingly likely.

But the line-up at the top may yet be rearranged in surprising ways. Medvedev’s popularity has become an important asset for a Russian leadership keen for the moment to cultivate good relations with the wealthier and technologically more advanced countries. Even domestically, it has been suggested that if the ruling United Russia party nominates Medvedev as their candidate for the presidency at their congress on 23–24 September, it will draw in the liberal-reform constituency behind the party in time for the parliamentary polls in December.

So a return to the presidency by Medvedev with the true pecking order privately but clearly reinforced can’t be ruled out. Nor can a Medvedev prime ministership. But power does not reside in the prime ministership as a matter of course in Russia: many prime ministers since the fall of the Soviet Union have been minor figures, now forgotten or relegated to lesser roles. It has been a dominant position recently only because Putin has been occupying it.

Medvedev might be dropped to a dignified but much less prominent role as president of the Constitutional Court (not anywhere near as politically important as Australia’s High Court) or as chief executive of Skolkovo. But wherever he ends up, he is unlikely to be numero uno or even numero due. Under Putin, the latter position has been occupied and continues to be occupied, de facto, by Igor Sechin, an ex-KGB officer and old colleague of Putin’s, whose formal role is as deputy prime minister responsible for energy matters. “Energy diplomacy” – using Russia’s vast energy resources to exert geo-political pressure and influence on other countries, especially its near neighbours – is vital to Putin’s overall approach to foreign and strategic policy.

In one of his assertive interventions earlier this year, Medvedev issued a decree requiring senior government ministers and officials to withdraw from leading positions in large corporations. This forced Sechin to make what was seen by many as a humiliating retreat from his concurrent position as chief executive of Russia’s biggest oil corporation, Rosneft. Rosneft was formed largely from the dismembered Yukos corporation of the Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose long prison term was recently extended further on the basis of unusually implausible charges. Medvedev has said publicly several times that Khodorkovsky presents no threat to the Russian state, implying that he could or should therefore be released. But he is still in jail. And when Rosneft and the US giant Exxon-Mobil recently struck what has been described as the biggest Russian energy contract with a Western company ever, it was Mr Putin and the ostensibly rusticated Rosneft chief executive Igor Sechin who presided, beaming, over the signing of the deal.

Among other things, the Exxon-Rosneft joint venture illustrates that Mr Putin is nothing if not pragmatic. For much of the time since his ascent to the presidency in 2000 he has displayed the strongly anti-Western instincts that his KGB past always led observers to expect. Since resuming his dominant position in the tandem more overtly this year, those anti-Western instincts have been on frequent display. Recently, for example, he referred to the United States as a parasite on the world economy. While Medvedev can also take a hard line sometimes when trying to impress the establishment with his readiness for high office (recently, for example, he called for Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to be placed before an criminal court), in recent months he has been increasingly drowned out by his senior partner.

Regardless of whether Medvedev gets a senior role in the new disposition Putin may well seek to maintain some of his younger protégé’s more Western-friendly approach to issues. And domestically he has in the past tinkered with economic reform and may do so again. He has retained very competent people in key economic portfolios and clearly respects their advice, despite the more liberal inclinations that some of them (finance minister and deputy PM Aleksei Kudrin, for example) occasionally display. Even with a fully dominant Putin back in the presidency, Russian domestic and external policies may not shift far – not least because the Medvedev camp’s efforts to tilt Russia in a more liberal direction didn’t achieve very much in the first place. •

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DURING a fortnight divided between Warsaw and Moscow, from where we have just returned, my wife and I were struck by the similarities and contrasts between the two cities. Anna is Polish, and we spent three years together in Warsaw during the communist era, returning many times since then for weeks and sometimes months. Both of us have also visited Moscow many times over the past few decades.

Both countries have legislative elections later this year that promise to be interesting, but will hardly be game-changers. While there have been losers from the economic transformation in each capital, both are enjoying a relative prosperity that is quite striking after the privations of communist times. After decades of empty roads, traffic is roaring, with considerable collateral damage and terrifying effects for those, like us, who – while they still remember sardine class in public transport – once found crossing a road not too stressful. Shopping, once a time-consuming and frustrating battle against the odds, has become relatively straightforward. The abusive and contemptuous attitudes of salespeople and service personnel have largely disappeared. The aggressive and unhelpful attitudes once almost universal in public places have been replaced by courtesy, even cordiality.

Marxism–Leninism is probably beyond resuscitation in either country, though in Russia there are dismaying signs of nostalgia for Stalin. Freed at last from the inhibitions of official communist ideology, nationalism is running hot in both countries, which makes the recent tentative rapprochement between them all the more fragile. Religion has also been freed from those constraints, leading to a sharp rise in the visibility of Orthodoxy in Russia, though in Poland, paradoxically, there’s been a noticeable decline in the Catholic Church’s moral authority.

But for all the superficial similarities, and despite the tactical warming of bilateral ties, these are two countries which, in political and civilisational terms, are headed in diametrically opposite directions. And each is trying to draw the countries that lie between them along with it. After centuries in which Russian domination was superimposed over an earlier Polish sway in much of the territory between them, a competition between Moscow and Warsaw for cultural influence in the region is on again. Warsaw tries not to be too blatant about its efforts to tug its Eastern neighbourhood towards Europe, but Moscow of course sees what’s going on and deeply resents it.

For those like Anna and me, whose sympathies are Polish but who have very good Russian friends and a great love of Russian language and culture, the mutual hostility and suspicion are painful. At the interpersonal level, Russians and Poles have much in common. To my Anglo-Saxon perceptions, both are extraordinarily warm and hospitable. They are courageous and resilient, and have a strong streak of human kindness. In particular, their respective intelligentsias (in the Eastern European sense of the word) remain deeply impressive in their intellectual seriousness and civic courage.

But despite the tentative signs of reconciliation between the two nations at the popular, intelligentsia and governmental levels since 1990, their development trajectories seem set to diverge further. The elections in Poland on 9 October will almost certainly see Premier Donald Tusk’s centre-right Civic Platform win its third successive election victory. Its main adversary is the anti-communist Law and Justice party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the surviving twin of ex-president Lech Kaczynski, who was killed with ninety-five other members of the Polish elite in a plane crash near the western Russian city of Smolensk in April last year.

Tusk has sought better relations with Russia, but he is even more intent on strengthening Poland’s standing within the European Union and doing what he can to bring Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and even Georgia and Armenia towards European integration. If by some strange chance Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his party have a sudden resurgence in the polls sufficient to win government, relations between Warsaw and Moscow would take a nosedive.

Poland, which holds the presidency of the European Union for the second half of this year, has largely shed its old streak of Euroscepticism. The peasants have been won over by generous cohesion fund payouts and, despite its doubts about the secularism and sexual liberationism of Western Europe, the Church has now largely accepted the EU choice. Even Law and Justice has mellowed in its attitudes towards Brussels and its German neighbours. As Poles become more aware of the huge financial benefits of EU membership and increasingly see gaining greater influence within EU corridors of power as their primary objective, the earlier strong ties with the United States have weakened.

In Russia, meanwhile, developments in recent weeks have made it even plainer that Putin’s autocratic system is being reaffirmed domestically; and a string of characteristically aggressive statements and manoeuvres suggests a return to the assertive anti-Westernism of the later years of Putin’s presidency (2000–08). During our visit, there was a press “leak” citing government sources to the effect that Putin had made up his mind to take the presidency back from Medvedev. As Medvedev and his followers have been responsible for most of the more liberal domestic and foreign policy pronouncements of the last three years, his departure from the presidency would be seen by most Western chanceries as a bad sign.

But for many observers of Russian politics inside and outside Russia, the tandem political game during the period in which US–Russian relations were “reset” has come to be seen as a bad joke anyway. Medvedev has been unable to convert virtually any of his more resounding reformist declarations into reality. During our time in Moscow, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s business partner and fellow prisoner Platon Lebedev had his appeal for early parole contemptuously dismissed by an obscure provincial court near Arkhangelsk in northern Russia. This was despite Medvedev’s having repeatedly indicated publicly that the key member of that duo, Khodorkovsky, represented “no threat” to Russia.

An attempt to reopen the investigation of the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer working for the Western firm Hermitage Capital Management, was also recently brushed aside by the Russian Interior Ministry. Magnitsky was jailed and allegedly murdered in custody for investigating corruption by Russian officialdom affecting his Western employers. Pleas from Medvedev’s presidential Human Rights Council for a thorough investigation and repeated representations by Western governments had no evident impact. While another arm of the Russian government is reportedly opening its own enquiry into the Magnitsky case, official reactions so far (including promotions and awards for some of the officials involved) are not encouraging.

In response to pressure from the US Congress, the State Department has announced that it has placed individual sanctions on a lengthy list of the officials identified as connected with Magnitsky’s mistreatment. Washington’s move seems to have been an attempt to forestall legislative action in the matter by Congress, which might have endangered the “reset.” Moscow’s rubber-stamp Duma, in a move richly redolent of Soviet times, had responded to the bill in Congress by threatening to legislate for counter-action against US officials.

The key figure in Hermitage Capital is William Browder, an American businessman resident in Britain, who is ironically the grandson of a former leader of the US Communist Party in the Cold War years. For many years he was a very big and determined investor in Russia and supporter of Mr Putin. Increasingly outraged by the corruption and bureaucratic obstruction that he encountered in his business dealings, Browder attempted to expose those involved. This seems to have sealed Magnitsky’s fate.

The Lebedev and Magnitsky cases typify some of the growing strains in the US–Russian relationship, which seem to have intensified in the last few months, as Medvedev’s always forlorn bid for real influence has come up against Putin’s overt re-emergence as the paramount leader. With the parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled for 4 December 2011 and 4 March 2012 respectively, this trend could strengthen. Though Moscow often tries to pursue better relations with European countries while enjoying Cold War–style stoushes with the United States, the Lebedev and Magnitsky cases also typify the kinds of issues that will ultimately stultify the Russian relationship with Europe, including Poland.

When we arrived in Warsaw, the main event on the Russian–Polish agenda was still the Smolensk air disaster of April 2010. The investigation of the crash by the Russian-led Intergovernmental Aviation Committee had abruptly reported last January that the blame lay entirely on the Polish side. After lengthy delays, as of late July the parallel investigation headed by Poland’s interior minister, Jerzy Miller, was about to report its findings. The report was a hot potato both domestically and bilaterally.

Conspiracy theories have repeatedly been generated by the Law and Justice camp, which has suggested in effect that this was a “second Katyn.” (The late President Kaczynski and his party had been traveling to Russia to attend a commemoration of the massacres of some 22,000 Polish officers by Stalin’s NKVD secret police at Katyn Forest and other sites in 1940.) In other words, it has been darkly hinted, Moscow had in some way deliberately caused the deaths of Poland’s president and many of his closest colleagues in the crash, with the complicity – never clearly explained – of Poland’s government. During our visit, we encountered the latest of these conspiracy theories, which asserted that the plane had somehow been mysteriously disabled before it hit the ground – and that this proved it was all a zamach, an assassination operation.

The Miller report, which was finally released on 29 July, found no basis for such lurid theories. Not surprisingly, though, it did come up with plenty of evidence of sloppiness by Russian as well as Polish officials. The main emphasis was on Polish errors – and indeed its publication led swiftly to the resignation of the Polish defence minister, with the prospect of other high-level casualties to follow. But the Miller report’s less than total exoneration of the Russian side was sufficient for the Russian-controlled committee to issue an immediate rebuttal of those parts of the report that suggested any degree of Russian culpability.

The Russian committee was no doubt antagonised by the interminable and hostile discussion of the case in parts of the Polish media and among the political elite. After initially cooperating fully with the Poles, it had become increasingly evasive, and then brought down and is now resolutely defending a one-sided finding. This is typical of what is wrong with judicial and quasi-judicial enquiries of all sorts in Russia, which are often all too clearly subject to “justice by telephone” (that is, political direction). Conversely, the fact that the Miller inquiry came up with what seems like a reasonably balanced assessment – an assessment that, despite intense domestic pressure, criticises Poland’s role – is much more in keeping with an open democracy and the rule of law. In a way the two enquiries epitomise where the two countries currently seem headed.

OUR TRIP to Warsaw and Moscow had little to do with this political backdrop. We were in Warsaw visiting family and friends en route to Moscow where Anna was due to receive a prestigious prize named after the famous Russian mathematician Roland Lvovich Dobrushin. This was both a highly gratifying and somewhat surprising award given that Anna is a linguist rather than a mathematician. But more of that in a moment.

As on all our visits since Poland’s transition to democracy, we found Warsaw looking slightly more orderly, prosperous, contented and mainstream European than on the previous visit. Not everyone has benefited, but most people have, and Poland’s strong economic progress continues, with over 4 per cent growth expected this year. Like Australia, it was one of the few Western countries to stay out of negative-growth territory during the global financial crisis. It has also had the good sense not to fast-track its mandatory entry into the euro-zone. And while neither its public finances nor the present government’s approach to debt are impeccable, it seems unlikely to join the growing list of EU countries directly affected by the euro debt crisis.

One of Poland’s many achievements is the decline of the petty corruption that used to mark many everyday transactions. One small subset of these involved travellers, especially foreigners, at Warsaw’s airport. Once known simply as Okecie, it has now been ponderously renamed the Frederyk Chopin Airport. It’s much bigger and slicker, and the swarms of illegal or amateur taxi-drivers that used to surround the airport looking for huge mark-ups have gone.

But their spirit still lingers. We took a taxi from a company recommended by the family. Although the car seemed roadworthy and the driver was pleasant and courteous, he took us on a circuitous route into another zone, which allowed him to double his fare. But it was a small enough surcharge to pay for the pleasure of staggering, jetlagged, straight into a waiting taxi whose doors closed properly and which then ran smoothly and swiftly though the dense traffic. And while the meter was rigged, at least it had one.

There was a time when this and most other human needs had to be satisfied “on the left hand side” – corruptly and often expensively. In communist Poland, petty corruption was almost universal; though it was maddening, in a way it was what made life bearable and innumerable difficulties soluble. As Poles used to say: “In Poland any problem can be fixed” (U nas nie ma nic nie do zalatwienia.

Shopping is now a delight for any visitor who recalls the communist era. Goods are no longer rationed by queues. The network of commercial outlets for all goods and services seems adequate, where once they were as undersupplied as the goods and services themselves. The absence of an obscene excess of choice between brands is a bonus. And the rude contempt with which one was greeted at the end of the wait in the queue is also long since gone.

We stayed with family in the outer suburb of Miedzeszyn, a sleepy village during the communist era with a few urban dwellings dotted among the fields and woods and a small group of modest semi-detached units. Once a relative luxury by Communist standards, the semi-detacheds have been increasingly outclassed by huge, often fortified villas, with “beware of the dog” signs. Gone are the picturesque, rustic wooden houses nestling among the pine trees. Gone, too, are the last of the prewar signs on the small concrete commercial premises, which have now been joined by larger, slicker competitors.

The new public politeness is well established in Miedzeszyn. In one shop I spotted a tag on the tunic of the young woman at the cash register which read, “How can I help?” Once or twice I did things in the shop that were obviously not part of the received order of things, but without any anger or moral disapproval the proper method was smilingly pointed out to me. And on leaving came the phrase, “Thank you and please come again” (Dziekujemy bardzo i uprzejmie zapraszamy jeszcze raz) – a little cloying perhaps, like “Have a good day,” but a vast improvement on what used to take place.

Miedzeszyn traffic also reflects the broader transformation. Potholes that had endured for decades have been replaced by sealed roads. And the once-sporadic traffic is now intense on the main roads running through the suburbs. Even on the side streets, one must be more vigilant. There are pedestrian crossings, but woe betide the visitor who takes them at face value. The same was true elsewhere in Warsaw, of course. And similar principles apply in Moscow, though we felt that the murderous exuberance with which the post-communist Russian nouveau riche used to drive through pedestrian crossings may have diminished slightly.

Road fatalities in Poland currently stand at 14.7 per 100,000 people per year, and 28 per 100,000 cars. Russian fatalities are 25.2 per hundred thousand people. I could find no figure for Russian fatalities per 100,000 cars, but the Polish statistics suggest that – given the roughly equivalent levels of motorisation in the two countries – the Russian figure for 100,000 cars is probably over 50. The equivalent figures for Australia, for comparison, are 5.2 per 100,000 people and 6 per 100,000 cars. So if you go to either place look out! More local colour on this a bit later.

In the past, a vital part of the public transport system in Poland, like in many other communist countries, were the small kiosks selling newspapers, toiletries, small toys and tickets for the chance to fight your way on and off the bus. They kept long hours, and in a shopper’s hell they were a great boon. This time, looking for a popular newspaper one day, I went to four kiosks before I could get served. The first three had helpful signs displayed in the window which brought memories flooding back: “Kiosk not open, try the one nearby” (there wasn’t one); “Temporarily closed” (but with no indication of when it might open); and “Pause – receiving goods” (the proprietor could be seen though the glass walls doing something about four feet away, but after five minutes I realised that the pause might be a long one).

Public transport in Poland, always good if one was young and strong, now seems simply wonderful. The buses and trams are seldom crowded, private buses are offering better and quicker services, there is an urban train service and the beginnings of a metro, and it is all still relatively cheap and reliable. The reason for the new comfort is of course the fact that many passengers have bought cars. Traffic on the roads is much heavier, and korki (jams) are not infrequent. Tokyo it isn’t, but why so many prefer their cars when public transport is such a good option is a mystery.

Warsaw’s historic main drag, which extends for several kilometres from Wilanow palace to the scrupulously restored Old and New Towns (both late medieval) and Royal Palace, still looks splendid. Commercialisation is held in check and for the most part is well-matched to the premises. Why some visitors call Warsaw ugly is another mystery, though it obviously wouldn’t win in a competition with Krakow or Prague. The visual attributes tend to fall away quickly the further you get from the main drag, though more striking new buildings are multiplying among the Stalinist stodge and there are many pockets of older charm and extensive and attractive parklands not far from the city centre.

The people on the streets look very mainstream European, with many stylish young women (as there always were, even when I first visited in the 1960s), and rather less stylish though well-to-do everybody else. Drunks and beggars seem less in evidence, which might reflect favourable underlying social trends. Poland has always been a hard-drinking country, but the statistics (always difficult in this area) seem to have improved after the Solidarity revolution of 1980 and to have held steady since.

Flower shops, once an absolute and indispensable staple for anyone visiting anyone at almost any hour, are harder to find. Another striking and ubiquitous feature of communist Poland, the gentlemen (of all ages) kissing the hands of ladies (of all ages) on greeting and parting, seems to be in decline. The polite third-person mode of address also seems to be ceding ground to the familiar second person singular. Worshipper numbers are down and the numerous churches are now usually locked to casual visitors during ordinary hours. With communism gone, some of its most cherished social objectives seem at last to be coming within reach.

Our Polish friends and relatives had varying views about Polish politics, but we noticed a certain weariness of the topic. The endless febrile discussion of the Smolensk tragedy had exhausted the patience of many. There was also a widespread scepticism about the radical right-wing politics of the Law and Justice Party, which in government had set about radically transforming Poland’s democratic institutions on the grounds that they were still dominated by a sinister establishment composed of former communists and “collaborators.” Even Lech Walesa and other prominent Solidarity figures were contentiously characterised in this way by Law and Justice–controlled institutions.

The polls suggest that, as a result of their experience of Law and Justice rule in 2005–07, many Polish voters see Law and Justice as a slightly scary, even subversive party. Without necessarily feeling great enthusiasm for Civic Platform, which seems headed for a further four years in government after the October elections, they want to cast a negative vote against Law and Justice. Our contacts often fell into that category

OUR superficial observations of Moscow at street level were very similar to those of Warsaw. Much of our daily movement was in a relevantly affluent area on the architecturally charming and charmingly named Ostozhenka Street (a pre-communist name, now restored, deriving from the word for haystack), and this may have coloured our impressions. Among the many nineteenth-century buildings on the street was a recently renovated house with a classical façade where the novelist Turgenev once lived, which is now the Turgenev Museum. A few doors further down was another mansion with a plaque on the front wall indicating that it had once been inhabited by another distinguished figure from Russian history, Kim Philby.

Near the Philby residence one already warm morning we were disturbed to see a young well-dressed man lying in the grass by the side of the road, apparently unconscious. People were hurrying past him without paying any attention. When we lived in Warsaw we often rang the ambulance service to advise them of drunks lying in snow and in danger of freezing to death (a very common cause of death in Moscow). In summer we felt less alarmed, but there was something about the young man’s appearance that worried us. We went into a pharmacy a few yards away to draw it to their attention. The chemist looked very uninterested. Like Poland, but more so, Russia has a severe alcohol problem. In recent decades it has also acquired a terrible and multi-faceted substance abuse problem, including a sinister designer drug known as krokodil. Pharmacists – and Russians generally – have probably become grimly blasé about it all.

Alcohol statistics are always a bit dubious, but by any standards Russia is up there with the heaviest drinkers: by one estimate 15.7 litres of pure alcohol equivalent per capita per annum (compared to Poland’s 13.25 litres). Both those estimates allow for substantial amounts of illegal booze (Russian samogon and Polish bimber are both basic words in the respective vocabularies), but that is an especially fraught area. According to the Public Affairs Chamber of the Russian parliament, alcohol was responsible in one way or another for 500,000 deaths in Russia in 2009. Successive leaders have tried to tackle this demographic and social scourge, including the sober Mr Putin, who sets an excellent example in this respect. But success has been elusive.

The Putin years have seen a big increase in prosperity fuelled primarily by high energy prices, but with major expansion of agricultural production and consumer goods and services. Studies have shown that income differentials in Russia are very high, but living standards overall have improved greatly, and poverty is much less apparent on the streets of inner Moscow than was once the case. Shopping has improved in much the same way as in Poland, and the atmosphere of mutual hostility between consumers and shop employees seems to have largely disappeared. There are more shops and service outlets and the queues are much smaller. In fact, the queues I saw didn’t compare with those in typical large Australian supermarkets.

But we saw or heard about both major and minor signs of traditional Russian disorder. In one shop, for example, I noticed bottles of once-fresh milk on ordinary non-refrigerated shelves, though the temperature during our stay did not fall below 20 degrees at night and 30 degrees in the middle of the day. At the same time, there were radio warnings to Moscow residents to be wary of consuming dairy products brought from shops as refrigeration in the city’s transport and supply networks were said to be unable to cope with the exceptional summer heat.

At the same time, Russia was still righteously maintaining its extended bans of all fruit and vegetable imports from European countries (especially those like Poland which it wanted to punish politically), because of the much earlier German E.coli scare, which hadn’t occurred in the countries still under sanction in the first place. Moscow has imposed innumerable trade boycotts on its neighbours in recent years, ostensibly on phyto-sanitary grounds, though often in fact for visibly political reasons.

We were in Moscow in the immediate aftermath of the sinking of the Bulgaria pleasure cruiser, in which over a hundred people died including many children; Moscow continues to be a world leader in disasters of this kind. Plane crashes are also still quite common, though a senior Western businessman friend who travels a lot by air assured us that Aeroflot is no longer the “Aeroflop” of legend and now has a good safety record.

Moscow’s public transport is also very good in a way similar to Warsaw’s. The Metro was much less crowded than it used to be (even allowing for the summer holiday season) but traffic on the roads is much denser and the probki (jams) more challenging than in Warsaw. The Metro has a much better reputation than Aeroflot, and deservedly so. But to record a trivial example of a more general problem in Russian life, at one point, for no reason, a computerised turnstile at the entrance to a Metro station identified me as an interloper with an invalid ticket (I was innocent) and sent a metal bar thudding down on my knee. An attendant, manifestly unsurprised by this turn of events, told me in a kindly second-person singular simply to bypass the turnstiles via the space he was guarding.

Medvedev has endorsed a plan for Moscow’s further development in which, to relieve congestion, much of Moscow’s central government business would be moved to the outer regions of an expanded capital territory. Our friends were sceptical that this would happen, illustrating among other things the widespread expectation that anything Medvedev proposed was almost bound not to happen.

People are visibly better off. The women are usually quite stylish, though at times young would-be vamps achieve an over-the-top effect of Lady Gaga proportions. The once ubiquitous babushkas in black selling sundry goods are much sparser than they once were. The new mayor of Moscow, Sobyanin, who last year replaced the corrupt long-term mayor Yury Luzhkov (and his equally corrupt wife), has conducted a blitz against informal merchandise outlets, which may have contributed to the disappearance of the babushka, but it’s probably also a demographic and economic trend. As for the new mayor, he and his wife have also recently become embroiled in allegations of possible corruption.

While Putin has put the non-print media through the blander, some Russian papers are still worth a read and there are a couple of radio stations which are listenable. A lot of interesting books are available on cultural and even political themes. Outside television, the autocratic system relies much more on selective bans and sanctions than blanket controls in the publishing and scholarly domains. The internet is still very lively, though there are ominous signs that the authorities would like to control it closely in the way that their much-respected Chinese “strategic partners” do.

AND SO to the awarding of the Dobrushin Prize to Anna. Our worry was that the choice of a linguist as the recipient of one of the two prizes awarded by a highly distinguished group of mathematicians might prove to be some sort of excruciating misunderstanding. The fact that Anna’s acceptance address was scheduled as the first paper at the mathematics conference in which the Dobrushin celebrations were embedded seemed to increase the chances that questions from the audience would assume high mathematical competence.

But our anxieties were misplaced. Anna’s work often deals with Russian semantics and has been extensively published in Russian, where her insight into the language is appreciated. Her semantics paper was very well received, no one wanted to ask impossible questions, the discussion was good and everyone seemed pleased with the event. The fact that a foreigner spoke fluent Russian and so obviously loved the language and understood its subtleties was enough to ensure approval. But it is probably also the case that in Russia, compared to the Anglo-Saxon world, the barrier between C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” is less rigid.

There was something slightly sad about the fact that this distinguished group, many of them survivors from the Soviet scientific elite, appeared to be ageing and a bit depleted. Many Russian academic stars spend a good deal of their time at foreign universities while retaining links with the profession in their home country. Young people no longer want to study science as the pathway to prestige in the way they did in Soviet times. At the outset of the post-Soviet era, able young people typically wanted to go into business, above all to make money. Now they often tell sociological researchers that they want to join the bureaucracy to make money, reflecting the growing blight of corruption and bureaucratisation. And recently came the startling official news that over the past three years some one-and-a-quarter million people had emigrated from Russia, including disproportionate numbers of the young, educated and entrepreneurial. Opinion polls suggest many more would do so if they could

Like the mathematicians, friends and other people we met demonstrated again the exceptional warmth and hospitality of Russian people. Smallish tables in smallish flats were covered with an impossible array of food, and people were crammed in around the table for several hours of eating, drinking and togetherness (obshchenie). Conversations of impressive erudition raged, usually several at once and in competition, people interrupted, contradicted and outshouted one another unceremoniously, and no one took offence. Less fluent speakers of Russian like myself were at a serious disadvantage, but again the discussants showed a remarkable tolerance.

Those we met who spoke of politics were divided sharply into those who were broadly happy with the Putinist dispensation and those who were deeply unhappy with it. The opposition remains hopelessly fragmented and the regime, in any case, uses various devices to deny its opponents access to public media or the chance to compete in elections. Whether and to what extent the opposition might be more popular in a more democratic framework is hard to judge. People who deplore Russia’s rejection of a more Western course feel beleaguered, much as they did before Gorbachev and perestroika. And polls suggest that the popularity of Putin and the ruling United Russia party, though it has fallen significantly, is still fairly high by democratic standards.

Yet, as prosperity returned after the sharp downturn during the financial crisis, Putin and the regime’s ratings might have been expected to stay as high or even climb further. The fact that they haven’t suggests that there is considerable resentment at the regime’s large and widening democratic deficit. In particular, there are strong indications that Russians are deeply unhappy about what is perceived to be growing official corruption up to the highest levels.

The very popular anti-corruption blogger, Aleksei Navalny, coined a phrase for the United Russia party which has had very wide resonance: “a party of swindlers and thieves” (partia zhulikov i vorov). We noticed the word vor (thief) and its cognates vorovstvo (theft) and vorovat’ (to thieve or steal) recurring in our conversations, often used with great passion. This is a worrying issue for a regime that has certainly noted the Arab Spring. Navalny, though not an easy target for the authorities because of his strong nationalism, is now being subjected to legal pressures.

Another subject that greatly distressed many of our Russian contacts was the continuing respectability, indeed popularity, of Stalin, including among the young. Putin did a lot to contribute to Stalin’s partial rehabilitation at a certain point by ensuring that a “balanced” view of the murderous despot was mandated for school textbooks. Medvedev has struggled hard to get a new wave of de-Stalinisation launched in Russia, but to date the results, as with nearly all his projects, have been modest. One interlocutor described Russia in this context as a “gravely ill society.” Another angrily asked us why, given Stalin’s standing in Russia, and the fact that the country was now run by the KGB which even the communist party had never permitted, so many Western governments and businessmen were tumbling over one another to deal with it as if it were a normal country. If Hitler had anything remotely like that status in Germany, he said, the world would be in uproar.

Putin’s response to Medvedev’s pleas for a second term as president has been a combination of economic populism aimed at various voting blocs, macho public displays, occasional anti-Western rhetoric and revival of the old Soviet tactic of the national front, in this case the “all-Russian National Front” (Russian acronym ONF). Taken together, these manoeuvres look very like a pre-election campaign.

Whole organizations have been recruited into the ONF, often after minimal consultation with their members. In a moment recalling Stalin’s celebrated speech about “giddiness from success” at the height of collectivisation in the 1930s, Putin even found it necessary at one point to remind the organisers of the Front that they should not overdo things.

We may see on 4 December how successful the ONF manoeuvre has been (though whatever happens, the intended electoral results will be achieved). But it is evident that Russia is again taking a turn away from most of the rest of Europe. It is true, as our interlocutor charged, that to date Russia has been cut a lot of slack in Europe. But Mr Putin’s credibility may be wearing thin even in countries like Germany, where he has been held in greater esteem.

Recently a high-profile German NGO, Quadriga, announced that they were awarding one of their prestigious annual prizes to Mr Putin, apparently for his leadership of Russia and his services to Russo-German relations. The annual prize, which is described as being intended for people who are in some way role models for Germany, has in the past been awarded to various luminaries including former Czech president Vaclav Havel. On hearing of the proposed award to Putin, Havel threatened to send his own prize back. His intervention added to a growing groundswell of concern within Germany itself, and the group decided to cancel all its awards for 2011. That incident might suggest that even Germany’s resolutely positive engagement with Russia at the level of business and government may be coming under some strain.

This may be good news for Mr Medvedev. Putin and his advisers may decide that they still need Medvedev in the ostensibly top job as a front man who goes down well with Western leaders. We shall see, but in any case recent events seem to confirm that whether Putin or Medvedev or some third person ends up in the presidency might not affect the country’s real direction much anyway.

So Poland is headed west while Russia, alas, seems headed east. This is more than a bilateral matter. Depending on the outcomes in countries like Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, there is a fair chance of a new division appearing in Europe on the current eastern border of the European Union. It will be less ideological than the last one, but there are certain defining characteristics nonetheless: on one side, open societies, human rights, free markets and democracy, if at times flawed; on the other, autocracy, whether softer or harder, economies marked by heavy corruption and state intervention, the absence of rule of law, and a tendency to look to the People’s Republic of China as the best developmental model.

In the shadow of growing “enlargement fatigue” in Europe and the seemingly never-ending financial crisis in the West, and given vigorous Russian countermeasures, the European Union’s chances of convincing its eastern neighbours to adopt its civilisational model seem less than assured. •

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Monday, 17 August 2009. The first day in my new job with a humanitarian agency. I am eager to meet new colleagues and introduce myself. I have even prepared a little speech. I worry about mundane things. Will my team welcome me? What is my office like? Will I have a computer straight away? Looking through the window of the car that delivers me to my office, I get some first impressions of Nazran, the largest city in the Republic of Ingushetia. Very scenic, a few people on the street, poor roads… Then there is a very loud noise. “Something happened,” my driver says. “We were lucky.” A terrorist has driven a vehicle loaded with 400 kilograms of TNT into the courtyard of police headquarters, only a few hundred metres ahead of us. Twenty people have been killed, 150 injured. We stop and look at the devastation. Lucky?

Humanitarian workers are trained in “rapid assessment,” a phrase that suggests an orderly and objective response to a crisis. But the scene confronted me professionally and personally. What is the scale of the disaster? Do we have a mandate to help? Would the local authorities welcome our involvement? What resources do we have and what is the best kind of intervention? Should I call my mum to tell her that I’m okay? In this case, rapid assessment meant walking around, observing, dealing with the panic, and trying to talk with people who might have answers but don’t speak the same language as I do.

We were not permitted access to the site of the incident, so we went to our office, met our medical team and planned our next steps. We decided to focus on the local hospital, which was overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster and needed help. By the end of the day we had organised the delivery of medical supplies from our warehouse, diverted from another, now less urgent project. I came as a humanitarian worker to help: that was now the only relevant issue. There was no time for my speech.

It was two weeks before I went to my first proper staff meeting. By then I had realised that I didn’t need a speech – that a clear mind and an open and brave heart were the essential requirements for a humanitarian aid worker.

I spent more than a year in the North Caucasus, among people from Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan and Ossetia. I didn’t meet jihad warriors but I did meet people of faith who were praying for a better tomorrow and a peaceful today. Living among them and working with them was anything but easy. I frequently asked myself what I was doing there. But I stayed.

THE Russian Federation has eight federal districts. Seven of them were created in 2000 by Vladimir Putin to strengthen the central government’s authority. The eighth, the North Caucasus Federal District, is the youngest of them; it consists of seven republics – Karachaevo-Cherkessk, Stavropolski Krai, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia-Alania, Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan – and stretches from the Black Sea to the Caspian. It was formed on 19 January 2010.

The seven republics in the North Caucasus have experienced varying degrees of instability over the past two decades, the most severe incidents being the two wars in Chechnya. The first war, between 1994 and 1996, was a conflict between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria over the latter’s independence. The second, from 1996 to 2006, was fuelled by the Russian Federation’s response to the Chechen-based separatist movement in Dagestan, which spread to other republics in the North Caucasus. These conflicts have officially ended, but explosions, mined roads, kidnappings and random attacks on security forces continue.

The UN Department of Safety and Security reported over 400 violent terrorist or anti-terrorist incidents in 2009–10, including many in which civilians were killed. In February 2010, for example, fourteen militants and four civilians were killed on the Chechnya–Ingushetia border. In September 2010, an explosion at the central town market in the capital of North Ossetia, Vladikavkaz, killed sixteen and injured over one hundred people. During 2009 alone, at least seven people (one of them a child) were victims of mines; two of the victims died.

This region is very poor. The UN Development Programme’s latest Human Development Index, which ranks countries according to indicators such as life expectancy, income and mean years of schooling, has the Russian Federation in sixty-fifth place, well behind Australia (second) and the United States (fourth). But the index is significantly lower in all republics of the North Caucasus Federal District: according to the United Nations report published in 2010, Chechnya was ranked seventy-first and Ingushetia seventy-fifth out of the eighty Russian republics. In 2009, the average salary in Russia was 17,226 rubles (slightly less than US$600); in Ingushetia it was only 9400 rubles. More than 55 per cent of the economically active population in the region is unemployed, compared with a national average of 6.4 per cent.

Material poverty leads to poor health and is combined with low education standards throughout southern Russia. The situation is worse for Chechens who have sought refuge in other republics, where their access to health and education services is restricted. Education is offered only in Russian, and many Chechen children start school with little or no knowledge of the Russian language.

Humanitarian organisations have been trying to improve the conditions for people in the North Caucasus. The original mandate for their presence in the region was the humanitarian crisis precipitated by the wars in Chechnya. After the second conflict was over, many of these organisations left, but eight of them (based either in the United States or in the European Union) have continued to provide food and non-food aid, as well as shelter and educational opportunities for vulnerable people.

My ride in Nazran in the summer of 2009 was my first glimpse of the Russia I had come to work in as part of a team of humanitarian workers. My responsibility was to measure the aid program’s success and to develop cost-effective interventions. The organisation was aiming to shift its emphasis gradually from humanitarian help towards forms of sustainable development. During the time I spent there, we provided income-generating opportunities, preschool educational support, and health assistance to local communities. A medical centre in Ingushetia opened its doors to more than 3000 internally displaced people from Chechnya and North Ossetia living in Ingushetia. In 2009–10, preschool preparatory classes began in six schools in Ingushetia and two schools in Chechnya; some 370 children, the large majority of them internally displaced people, received vital skills to start school. Through a community centre in North Ossetia, we offered drama sessions, sport and music events and daily play sessions for children; over 200 children attended different activities each year.

To maximise sustainability and “leave a trace,” we trained people – school teachers, nurses, psychologists and mothers – in the fields that were most relevant for their private and professional development, including child protection, management of addiction, and other health-related skills. In cooperation with the local administration we created jobs through infrastructure projects, offered educational opportunities (driving lessons, an accounting class, computer lessons and a sewing course), rehabilitated local schools and repaired roads. We provided grants of up to US$8000 for people to start their own businesses.

I WAS trying to help, but there were moments when I felt totally helpless myself. Subway bombings… plane bombings… train bombings… special operations. On my daily journey between home and office I crossed four checkpoints guarded by armed soldiers. Sometimes they would thoroughly search us, at other times they would just check our documents. Every time it was stressful, not only because we were often insulted but also because we knew the checkpoints were terrorist targets. Every minute we stayed there increased the possibility of becoming victims of an attack. Every day I was happy just to reach my destination alive. Every day I counted the checkpoints: first, second, third, fourth – we are in the office! And then on the way back: first, second, third, fourth – I survived the day! Travelling in the North Caucasus is definitely about the destination not the journey. This was the first time in my life when I felt that a successful day is one where you make it to the end. Every time I talked to my parents and friends back home I made sure they knew I loved them, in case something happened to me.

I found the restrictions on my movements very difficult. Once I was in my office, I was prohibited from leaving. It is bizarre to spend days and months in a city but know nothing about it. Were there cafes and shops? Going somewhere involved advance notice and an armed escort, whatever I wanted to do. The noise of gunfire and shouting, sometimes lasting all day long and sometimes at very close quarters, was very disturbing. All the information I could get was that the noise was associated with “special operations.” I hoped that my organisation would not be the target of a “special operation.”

I had a breathtaking view of mountains from my office. I wished I could go there, but the mountains were also on the “not to do” list in the North Caucasus. A trip there required the special permission of local authorities, which many of us never received.

I soon became aware that the local people had lived this way for a long time – some of them since the day they were born. The most common reason for absences from work was attendance at the funerals of cousins or neighbours who had died in explosions as innocent, collateral victims of the conflict. In a place that creates tragic news you don’t learn about those tragedies from the news bulletins. You hear tragedy itself. You see it. You touch it. You feel it with all your senses. This feeling changed my life and my feelings.

In the end, the help the local people gave me was more significant than the help I gave them. They taught me how to live in a hostile environment, and even to enjoy it. They showed me how to live in the moment, because I might not get another chance. I learned to appreciate every sunrise and sunset but also to live with my own fears. I also learned to be thankful for every meal and every chat, every cup of tea and every smile. Life in the North Caucasus made me understand all that I had taken for granted: a country, a language, an education in my native language, freedom of movement.

Living in the North Caucasus also helped me to understand better who I am. I came there as a humanitarian worker, a sociologist with some political ambitions who wanted to help local people to live a better life. But my profession, name and vocation were seemingly of little relevance. I was a single, Slavic, Christian woman in a predominantly Muslim, anti-Slavic and family-oriented patriarchal society. I quickly learned that how others see us is as important as how we see ourselves.

I had to learn to live with others’ perceptions. In this part of the Russian Federation there is a high rate of early marriages and bride kidnappings, and routine stigmatisation of unmarried women, single mothers and women without children. It was bizarre to be afraid that I could be kidnapped, not for money but to be a wife. But it was even weirder to learn that almost all my local friends thought I would be lucky if I were kidnapped. For them I was very unfortunate to be single at my age.

To understand gender equality in the North Caucasus it is not sufficient to know how many seats women hold in the local parliament. In Chechnya a woman can’t even decide what kind of wedding dress she wears and cannot travel without the permission of her father or brothers. Women are not allowed to date men. In fact, they are not even allowed to shake a man’s hand.

Having been brought up in Serbia, I consider it normal to shake a man’s hand. But I didn’t in the North Caucasus. In the lingo of humanitarian aid workers, I was “showing respect toward the local community.” But really there was just no alternative. I simply knew I should not shake a man’s hand in the same way I know not to swim in a sea full of sharks.

IN LIFE, you can usually choose our own battles. In humanitarian work, you can’t. They are defined by the mandate of your organisation. This may have been the most difficult part of my work. You see human rights violations but you are not allowed to talk about them, because the consequences for you or your organisation could be severe – the organisation’s registration could be cancelled, say, or its staff put in personal danger.

Both beneficiaries and providers of aid face this irony of humanitarian work: you can help but only as much as a donor or the local community and authorities let you. But humanitarian work is not only about helping others. It is also about compromises, both personal and organisational. The moment you step in, you are a part of the community; like the rest of the community, you must operate within limitations. You have more money but you have less right to react to an injustice.

In Ingushetia I could not be a human rights activist, or a woman who feels her rights are violated. I was a humanitarian worker by position and a woman by social status – take it or leave it. Now in Australia, I can make other choices. I hope that a time will come when the choices will be different for the people of the North Caucasus too – that the natural resources, history and culture of the region will no longer impede development but rather will provide an efficient, developed economy. •

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RUSSIA’s relationships with Belarus, Ukraine and Poland are all delicately poised just at present, as indeed is the domestic situation within Russia itself. How these relationships and Russia’s internal politics play out in the near future will go far towards determining whether Russia pursues a path towards democratic normality, or reaffirms its recent trajectory towards corrupt, anti-Western autocracy, taking Belarus and Ukraine with it.

For a few years before his deeply flawed re-election on 19 December last year, President Lukashenko of Belarus, dubbed the “last dictator of Europe” by Condoleezza Rice, had been flirting with the European Union in search of financial backing and a hedge against Russia. In an attempt to meet EU expectations, he had even allowed a presidential election campaign to proceed that bore some faint resemblance to the real thing. Then suddenly on election night, in response to a large opposition demonstration against the implausible result announced by the regime, his security forces unleashed a brutal crackdown, arresting hundreds, beating up many (including most opposition presidential candidates) and charging over forty opponents with crimes against the state. Some have already been sentenced, others remain incarcerated. In this way, despite his burgeoning economic problems, Lukashenko opted to cut himself off from any further support from the West.

Belarus’s economic crisis is now galloping downhill. Lukashenko continues to perform a dance of economic death to stave off devaluation, inflation and mass panic-buying, but a denouement cannot be far off. Moscow is offering Lukashenko a short-term bail-out, but on conditions which could threaten his sovereignty. The sinister terrorist strike in Minsk during peak-hour traffic on 11 April, which resulted in thirteen deaths and over 200 injured, has no logical explanation; but it will give Lukashenko a further opportunity to brutalise his already cowed opposition. He seems bent on attributing the attack both to them and to their putative paymasters in “Strasbourg,” by which he presumably means the European Union. Doing so will further deepen his alienation from the West but won’t necessarily shore up his position against a Russia that wants to buy his strategic economic assets in exchange for keeping him afloat a while longer.

Ukraine, meanwhile, seemed to gravitate rapidly towards Moscow after Viktor Yanukovych’s election as president in February 2010. But now, having quickly conceded nearly all of what Russia wanted on security, national identity, religious matters and “historical policy”, Yanukovych is digging his heels in and trying to defend his economic independence against pressure and economic inducements from Moscow. Russia is competing with the European Union for influence in Kiev, seeking to draw Ukraine into the Customs Union it has created with Belarus and Kazakhstan. The European Union is offering negotiations on a free-trade agreement as a stage towards possible membership in the future. Ukraine is trailing its coat in both directions, hoping to get the economic benefits of each without having to choose between them.

Yanukovych has erected a system of autocracy strikingly similar to the system Putin established in Russia after succeeding Yeltsin as president. But he has repeatedly emphasised that economic integration with Europe rather than the Russian-sponsored Customs Union remains his priority. Now Russia is raising the stakes, playing on Ukraine’s economic vulnerability after the global financial crisis. (In 2009 alone, it suffered a 15 per cent slump in GDP.) On 12 April, Putin visited Kiev seemingly at short notice. During the visit, he promised his Ukrainian counterpart that joining the Customs Union would entail savings of between US$6 billion and US$9 billion a year on Ukraine’s gas bill. He also warned that not choosing the Customs Union would mean that Russia (Ukraine’s main trading partner) would have to impose heavy duties on Ukrainian exports. Moscow will maintain its pressure in an attempt to drag Ukraine fully into its sphere of influence

Poland’s Western choice is probably accepted by Moscow. But it would like to strengthen bilateral ties to avoid Poland’s using its growing influence in the European Union against Russian interests. The plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski and many other members of the Polish elite near Smolensk on 11 April last year seemed to greatly strengthen an incipient warming of relations between Poland and Russia. But the strongly anti-Russian main opposition party, led by the dead president’s brother, Jaroslaw, refused to accept the rapprochement. With little evidence, he blamed the Polish government and Russian officialdom for the crash; he has since maintained a barrage of criticism, hinting at conspiratorial links to conceal the “true” causes of the disaster.

Now, one year after the event, the issue of the Smolensk disaster and its real and purported links with the Katyn massacre – the subject of last year’s apology by Moscow – has risen to the surface again. Just days before the Polish president was due to pay an anniversary visit to the site of the crash, Russian officials decided to remove a commemorative plaque placed there a few months ago by a Polish opposition delegation, on the grounds that the wording on the plaque was offensive to Russia. Buoyed by this fresh affront, the anti-Russian camp of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has returned to the offensive with renewed vigour.

Russia: De-Stalinisation?

Russia’s “tandemocracy” – President Medvedev making the pronouncements, Prime Minister Putin calling the shots – is showing serious strains. Recently Medvedev has increasingly been challenging his mentor, even appearing at times to dress him down.

The most widely noticed challenge was Medvedev’s rebuke to Putin on Libya. Putin had declared that any attempt by outside powers to interfere in Gaddafi’s military onslaught against his own population would be illegitimate and reminiscent of the medieval crusades against Islam. Putin made this typically neo-Soviet statement, repeating arguments deployed by Gaddafi himself, in a missile factory where he was talking up the need for Russia to rapidly expand its strategic arsenal to deal with external threats. Expressing what he called a personal opinion, Putin denounced UN Security Council Resolution 1973 which provided the legal basis for the French-led intervention to create a No Fly Zone in Libya, an objective endorsed by the Arab League.

Russia chose not to use its veto in the Security Council, allowing the resolution to pass with five abstentions, including China, Russia itself and Moscow’s preferred EU interlocutor, Germany. Foreign policy is ostensibly the prerogative of the president, as Putin acknowledged, and within hours Medvedev responded. He reaffirmed his view that the abstention was appropriate and reproved those who referred to “crusades” for risking a “clash of civilisations,” which he characterised as “unacceptable.” A spokesman for Putin then repeated publicly that the president was responsible for foreign policy matters. Even more remarkably, Putin’s earlier statement, initially given wide coverage, abruptly disappeared from the media.

Putin and Medvedev’s public declarations have long diverged in spirit and at times their spokesmen have exchanged sharp words. But between the tandemocrats themselves, a certain decorum has always been maintained. Typically, Medvedev would make a speech or place a text on one of his websites full of liberal phrases and calls for reform and “modernisation.” Either there would be no policy response or Putin would issue an oblique rebuttal. Over the three years of Medvedev’s presidency, observers hoping for democratic reform had become accustomed to this choreography, and disappointment and cynicism had set in.

But recently the challenges from the junior tandem partner have become more overt, even strident, and the liberals are daring to hope for another thaw along the lines of Gorbachev’s or Khrushchev’s. There is even a feeling in certain quarters that the Putin era may be approaching some kind of crisis, though the price of oil and related encouraging economic data, and declining but still very high public approval ratings for Putin (and Medvedev for that matter), seem to suggest otherwise.

Still, the policy skirmishes between the two camps continue thick and fast. The Medvedev camp’s hopes of burying Stalinism once and for all and the Federal Security Service’s (FSB – the KGB’s domestic successor) proposal to ban the use of foreign-based internet services like Skype, Gmail and Hotmail are two recent examples. In both cases Medvedev’s view is clear: he has been at the rhetorical forefront of the anti-Stalin drive and he uses some of the internet services in question himself. Although the presidential administration has only mildly opposed the internet plan, Medvedev is unlikely to favour major restrictions.

By and large Putin has hitherto tolerated blogging dissent. Computer attacks on foreign enemies like Estonia and Georgia have been plausibly attributed to pro-Putin Russian youth groups in the past, but lately some domestic bloggers have been getting close to the bone with corruption stories aimed at Putin. There have been reports this week of extensive hacking attacks on opposition blogs, suggesting another reverse for “modernisation.”

On Stalin, the proposals emanating from the Medvedev camp are essentially that Stalin should be removed from any honourable place in the public domain, that memorials to his many victims should be erected across the length and breadth of the country (there are remarkably few at present) and that officials who deny his crimes should be dismissed. The tentative steps towards de-Stalinisation were accelerated after Moscow re-acknowledged last year that Soviet forces were responsible for the Katyn massacres in 1940.

Stalin’s standing in Russia is particularly relevant to the relationship with Poland, but it also affects relations with the Belarus and Ukrainian leaderships, both of which hold the late dictator in rather higher esteem than does Medvedev.

Another long-running and increasingly obvious difference between the two Russian leaders concerns Medvedev’s campaign against official corruption. Putin has made occasional populist gestures in the same direction, but during his presidency corruption greatly increased, and Putin himself is believed by many to be an extremely wealthy man. At first, Medvedev’s moves against corruption seemed no more serious than Putin’s. He instituted, for example, an ultimately absurd ritual of requiring all officials, including himself and the prime minister, to make annual income declarations, though the published results have lacked all credibility.

But recently he has announced sharper measures aimed at creating a better investment climate and has set out a series of goals for the government to achieve by an early deadline. Most strikingly, he has demanded that senior government officials withdraw from the high-ranking positions they often have in large state-run or ostensibly private companies.

Among other things, these measures involve removing Putin’s key ex-KGB ally, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, from the position of president of Rosneft, the Russian oil giant. Rosneft was directly involved in, and benefited from, the stripping of the assets of jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Yukos empire. Sechin, often seen as the de facto number two in the regime after Putin, has obediently withdrawn from his position in Rosneft. Whether this will reduce corruption or the politicisation of the most important commercial decisions of big Russian companies remains to be seen. But on the face of it, this was a remarkable intervention by President Medvedev, especially when compared with his earlier efforts.

What are we to make of this belated search for relevance by Medvedev? While most observers have long agreed that Putin was the dominant partner in the tandem, interpretations of the relationship have varied significantly. Some saw no serious political differences between the two and believed that the different shadings of emphasis that sometimes seemed to emerge were minor nuances in a wholly harmonious and functional political partnership. Others maintained that the differences were completely phoney, all part of an elaborate charade intended to deceive and manipulate observers and interlocutors, especially naïve foreigners ready to be duped by a good-cop, bad-cop routine.

Others again held that the differences were psychologically real and potentially even important politically, but that Medvedev had no hope of making his writ run on any of the disputed issues. He had always been in Putin’s shadow and would remain so unless the global financial crisis or some other external shock reshaped the political chess-board. When the crisis failed to deliver any perceptible destabilisation or liberalisation, these observers concluded that that Medvedev would never challenge his mentor.

It seems unlikely that Medvedev does expect to overcome Putin and his governing United Russia Party, which is overtly sceptical of the president’s recent moves. Nor would he expect to tame the security establishment, of which Putin is the paramount leader. Medvedev has never belonged to either of these key structures in the power elite. In fact, his assertiveness of late might be the boldness of desperation. But hope springs eternal, especially in the minds of politicians, so it should not be ruled out that he really believes he can convince enough of the elite and the public to be given a second term as president.

Even if he is resigned to being nudged out of the top job, it seems clear that at a minimum, whatever the views of Putin and his camp, he wants to set out clearly where he thinks the country should head. He may calculate that if he is rejected for a second term he will at least be awarded a worthy post from which he could keep his career alive while waiting for some game-changing shock. When the oil price slumps again or something else crystallises latent public discontent, he might hope to return as the man whose time has come.

Belarus: Re-Stalinisation?

While the situation in Ukraine, which has more than four times the population, is probably of greater strategic significance, events in Belarus have certainly been much more newsworthy. Since the mass detentions after 19 December, there has been a steady stream of reports of further repression: new detentions, use of torture, suppression of media, denunciations of the West and threats against the opposition. Then on 28 March, the Central Bank in effect devalued the currency by 10 per cent, amid reports that Belarus was lurching towards disaster. On April 19, the bank further liberalized the exchange rate.

Lukashenko has maintained much of the old Soviet command economy and, thanks to generous Russian subsidies on oil and gas inputs, till recently the system worked quite nicely. By avoiding reform, he also avoided some of the pain encountered elsewhere in post-communist economies. But Lukashenko, despite his loyalty to Soviet Russian traditions, did not wish to subordinate himself to the Kremlin. He is popular in Russia itself, especially with die-hard Stalinists and Soviet nostalgics of whom there are many. Indeed he has sometimes seen himself as the natural leader of Russia as well as Belarus. His vanity and insubordination irritate Putin, who may even feel threatened by him. And Moscow became tired of subsidising him. So in recent years they have been forcing him to pay something nearer to market prices for his energy inputs.

Instead of adapting to his new station in life, Lukashenko essentially continued with a Soviet-style economy and sought to stave off the need for reform by obtaining loans, whilst hiking public sector wages extravagantly in preparation for last year’s elections. The trade deficit deteriorated sharply, nearly all of it down to trade with Russia, with foreign debt increasing by 30 per cent last year. Foreign currency reserves are naturally slumping rapidly towards zero, declining by 20 per cent in January/February this year to $4 billion and still under pressure. Goods shortages and inflation have set in and Belarusians have become afraid that if a large devaluation occurs their savings and assets will be dissipated. Naturally they have sought to obtain foreign currency as a hedge, increasing the drain on reserves. Bizarrely, amidst all this, GDP is supposedly continuing to grow by over 7 per cent a year, but much of what is produced is unsalable and simply consigned to warehouses, another traditional Soviet practice.

The economy was beginning to show the strain last year, but this year all these processes have accelerated. Economists are expecting a 40 per cent devaluation, whether acknowledged or de facto. The government meanwhile is thrashing around with ad hoc bans and prohibitions. Having slammed the door on the IMF, Lukashenko’s best chance of relief, probably his only one, is to secure the $3 billion in loans being offered by Russia. But Moscow too is insisting on conditionality. It wants to see some economic reform measures adopted in Minsk. And it also wants its own state and crony capitalists to be able to buy up some of Belarus’s best and most strategic industries. Even if the $3 billion is forthcoming, without sharp reductions in state expenditure – and hence in wages – a hefty devaluation and other painful reforms, it won’t postpone a severe crisis for long.

In this deepening economic gloom, the terrorist attack in the double subway station in Minsk during peak-hour traffic at 6 pm on 11 April, which resulted in thirteen deaths and over 200 injured, looks like a bright ray of light for Lukashenko. The president summoned together his security forces, headed by the sentimentally-named KGB, and exhorted them to seek the support of their Russian counterparts and find the culprits without delay. The KGB, in keeping with its best traditions, had cracked the case inside thirty-six hours. “At 5 am this morning,” reported the president proudly on 13 April, “the crime was solved.” Having earlier hinted that the first detainee was of swarthy appearance, the authorities later corrected themselves to say that the five arrested terrorists were all Belarusians from the same provincial town. So efficient was the KGB that, within these same thirty-six hours, the malefactors had also confessed to two earlier bomb incidents in 2005 and 2008 in which there were no fatalities, though some 50 people were injured in each.

Those two earlier incidents had been most unusual in a country with no tradition of terrorism and, unlike Russia, no Islamic insurgency or significant Islamic minority or other well-documented violent groups. Apart from announcing comprehensive success in the investigation, Lukashenko and his security chiefs were very sparing with details. The event seems incomprehensible. There is no evidence that has been made public that adequately explains it, though it has been suggested by an anonymous source in the investigation that the main perpetrator is a psychopathic sadist. But the timing, adroit execution, and use of explosives claimed by the regime to be unique in the world all suggest a degree of planning, even professionalism, scarcely credible in Belarus.

Moreover, the fact that the bomb was stuffed with lethal metal shrapnel suggests a malign violence totally uncharacteristic of the opposition and indeed of any group in Belarus society, with the possible exception of Lukashenko and his security forces. He and his administration are the only people who stand in any sense to gain from the disaster. But at this stage there is little evidence to point to anyone other than the detainees, one of whom was reportedly identified on a security camera.

Lack of evidence is not, however, constraining the president from suggesting that a vast conspiracy of all his enemies is involved. He has demanded an exhaustive enquiry into “all statements by activists and politicians… Question them all, regardless of democracy and the cries and groans of their foreign sympathisers.” And he has darkly hinted that the domestic criminals have employers beyond the country’s borders.

Almost before the noise of the explosion had abated, opposition spokesmen were gloomily predicting a fresh wave of arrests, interrogations and repression. And already there are reports of security forces zealously carrying out the president’s requirement that all “politicians” (that is, oppositionists) be called in for questioning.

Coming on top of the rorted elections and the sudden economic freefall, this latest dismaying event has reportedly shaken the population in the capital and probably further afield as well. But for Lukashenko, the bomb blast is a splendid way of changing the subject. Clearly people must now forget about petty economic tribulations or political disputes and prepare for the iron discipline that the president is promising them. Any contacts with the evildoers to the west should be eschewed forthwith. Backsliders and panic-merchants will deserve any punishment they get. In a word, the scene seems set for repression and rigid controls in all spheres of life.

Some speculative explanations turning on machinations within the Belarusian security apparatus with possible Russian involvement have been launched. The cui bono test and the location of the metro station next to the presidential compound may be consistent with theories of Belarusian KGB involvement. But though terrorists active in Russia may conceivably have passed on some of their skills and modus operandi to the perpetrators, it seems unlikely that Russian officials or agents would have been involved. Moscow now has plenty of other more conventional means at its disposal to influence events.

More liberal-minded figures in the Moscow leadership will deplore Lukashenko’s resort to further repression. But most, regardless of whether or not they feel that the president is a primitive throwback to an earlier era, will feel strong satisfaction that Belarus’s flirt with the West has been decisively curtailed and that the task of bringing him to heel as his economy sinks begins to look much more manageable.

Ukraine: Leaning east, but keeping a European option open

After coming to the presidency in February 2010 by a narrow margin, Viktor Yanukovych quickly re-established autocratic rule in a country that had seen five years of turbulent but democratic rule by the leaders of the 2004-05 Orange Revolution, ex-President Viktor Yushchenko and ex-PM Yulia Tymoshenko. It had, moreover, been devastated by the global financial crisis, sustaining a 15 per cent drop in GDP in 2009 alone. By dubious constitutional means and with some alleged bribery of backsliders from other parties, Yanukovych set up something similar to Putin’s “power vertical” in Ukraine, centred on his own Russophone and Russophile home province of Donetsk. In the year since he has further consolidated his domestic control, though as he has sought to grapple with Ukraine’s continuing economic problems, his initial relative popularity has declined sharply.

His domestic regime is now widely seen as becoming progressively more undemocratic. Judicial independence has become a mockery and selective prosecutions, typically on trivial or dubious charges, have been pursued against many senior members of the former Orange governments, including in particular Tymoshenko. This has resulted in many cases in the accused being held in pre-trial detention, that is, jailed, for months at a time. One of the former ministers so treated has successfully sought political asylum in the Czech Republic. Pressure has been exerted against the media, particularly non-print media, to toe the line. Television now almost exclusivelydepicts the doings of the government, with little coverage of other views. Freedom of assembly has also been subjected to significant restrictions.

These trends have not passed unnoticed by monitoring agencies like Freedom House. The US State Department and the European Union have both expressed official concern and Ukraine has been warned by senior EU representatives that backsliding on democratic norms would not assist its progress towards EU integration.

In foreign policy, Yanukovych moved quickly to restore warm relations with Russia. Moscow had felt uncomfortable about the free-wheeling democracy in Orange Ukraine (many Russian journalists, for example, moved to Kyiv to ply their trade, including hard-hitting commentary on Russia). And the Kremlin hated the Orange leadership’s nationalist policies, in particular its desire to join not just the European Union but also NATO as quickly as possible. This latter prospect Moscow had been particularly determined to prevent. Yanukovych was quick to oblige them by explicitly ruling out NATO membership, something none of his post-communist predecessors had done. In many other ways he quickly showed himself to be a loyal Russophile ex-Soviet citizen, like most of the rest of the population in the Russified eastern and southern provinces of Ukraine.

Yanukovych promptly cancelled Yushchenko’s efforts to secure recognition of the deliberate starvation of over 3 million Ukrainians by Stalin in the 1930s as an act of genocide. He appointed an extremely Russophile Education Minister, celebrated for his public contempt for Ukrainian-speakers, who set about reversing all the Orange policies aimed at removing the Russian and Soviet bias from the educational system. He also cultivated close relations with the Moscow Patriarch Kirill, a deeply divisive figure in Orthodox Ukraine, where the Kiev Patriarch has a larger flock than his Moscow counterpart. Kirill has since made a special personal project of trying to Russify the Ukraine Orthodox Church. And there was much more of the same. Ukraine seemed to be heading rapidly back into Moscow’s orbit.

After an initial flurry of economic agreements and numerous bilateral visits in both directions, however, Moscow began to push too hard on the economic front, proposing to take over many of Ukraine’s most significant enterprises. In particular, in keeping with Putin’s “energy diplomacy” (using energy supplies and acquisition of neighbours’ energy infrastructure to establish a potentially coercive control over their key decision-making options), they proposed that Russian gas giant Gazprom should “merge” with (that is,. take over) its much smaller Ukrainian counterpart, Naftohaz. This would have obviated the need for any more “gas wars” of the type that created havoc, for example, in Ukraine and many countries further west in January 2009.

For Yanukovych and his governing Party of Regions, in which many of Ukraine’s biggest oligarchs have a strong involvement, this was a step too far. The bilateral ardour suddenly cooled, and in recent months contacts have dropped off somewhat. Relatively few new cooperative agreements have been concluded lately, though Russia has continued trying to achieve a decisive break-through in drawn-out negotiations on the gas sector.

In parallel with its dealings with Russia, Kyiv has also been working on negotiating an Association Agreement (AA) and within that framework a deep and comprehensive free-trade agreement (DCFTA) with the European Union. The DCFTA is particularly important for Yanukovych and his oligarch supporters, as the European Union is, after Russia, Ukraine’s largest trading partner. The European Union, for its own strategic reasons, is eager to encourage Ukraine’s waning Western orientation and, while it has been critical of Ukraine’s progressive slide away from democratic norms, it has tried to be flexible in advancing the negotiations. Moscow seems to have become aware recently that there was a serious danger the free-trade deal might materialise before the end of the year and has unleashed a threat-and-charm offensive to stave it off.

Russia has been pushing its own counterblast to the European Union, the Customs Union, to which so far only Belarus and Kazakhstan have signed on (though Kyrgyzstan has just announced it will join the group next year). Moscow is particularly keen to inveigle Ukraine into the arrangement, partly as a way of kneecapping the DCFTA. The European Union has declared and recently again confirmed that Ukraine could not proceed further with the free-trade agreement if it joins the Customs Union.
Ukraine has been officially cool on the Customs Union, but it still has serious economic problems and associated domestic discontent, and Moscow’s short-term threats and promises are potentially persuasive to both political and business leaders. However, the fact that the gas pricing formula is in itself highly contentious, and that Ukraine has been charged by Moscow more for its gas than nearly all other customers, cannot be reassuring for the Ukrainians who might accept the bribe and then find that it is again confronted with an unpalatable pricing ultimatum some time in the future.

Moreover, Moscow is vigorously pushing a project to build another bypass route for its gas exports to Europe (called South Stream, mirroring the one already well advanced in the north, known as Nord Stream). Both projects are intended to avoid Ukraine and thereby cost it valuable transit income. They will also make it possible for Moscow to cut off gas supplies to Ukraine to enforce its will on any disputed bilateral issue without completely cutting off its customers further west in the process. Yanukovych probably assumed that Ukraine’s highly cooperative approach to Moscow should have led to the abandonment of the scheme, which was originally devised as a weapon against the Orange leadership. He has protested against South Stream repeatedly, but in vain. Some observers believe that South Stream will prove unviable, but Kyiv can’t be sure of that. In the meantime, the Nord Stream/South Stream pincer movement is another weapon that Moscow can hold to its fraternal neighbour’s head and it is therefore probably another, if concealed, element in the negotiations.

Despite its coolness towards the Customs Union and its frequently reaffirmed preference for the free-trade agreement with the European Union, Ukraine’s final decision cannot yet be confidently predicted. The benefits of doing a deal with Russia are short-term, whereas the European Union is promising some initial pain and only then larger mid-term benefits. Politicians in volatile domestic circumstances are always seized of short-term advantage, and so it may yet prove in this case. Moreover, the Ukrainian leadership is divided on the issue and there are some out-and-out Moscow sympathisers in their midst, as well as those, seemingly including Yanukovych, who want to keep a door open in both directions.

The Yanukovych government’s expressed preference for the EU option is not a choice of the heart. In most ways Yanukovych feels more naturally at home with Russia. His interest in the EU is purely pragmatic. Kyiv does not relish criticism of its democratic shortcomings from Brussels and, though it does throw up propaganda smokescreens and claim to be committed to democratic norms, one suspects that despite the protestations of an intention to ultimately join the European Union, it would be happy to settle for the DCFTA and an agreement on visa-free bilateral travel, without the lectures on democracy.

Recently the Ukrainian Prosecutor-General, a self-confessed old crony of the president, initiated proceedings against the former president Leonid Kuchma in connection with the murder of a prominent independent journalist Hryhorii Gongadze, whose headless body was found in a forest near Kyiv in 2000. One of Kuchma’s bodyguards had secretly taped and then leaked some of the president’s intimate political conversations, in one of which he appeared to be calling in colourful language for Gongadze to be somehow removed from the scene.

Yanukovych had been Kuchma’s anointed successor in the fraudulent presidential election of 2004 which was ultimately overturned. Their relations have since frayed somewhat, but after years in which for whatever reason even the Orange leadership did not pursue the Gongadze case effectively, it was startling that Kuchma should now apparently be prosecuted at the behest of his former close ally. There are various theories about this enigma, but the most plausible explanation seems to be that Yanukovych wanted to give the lie to the widespread conviction in the West that he was practising at best selective justice against his Orange enemies. Going after or even pretending to go after a big fish from the same side of politics like Kuchma might get EU critics of his democratic credentials off his back.

On balance, the heart says Russia and the Customs Union, while the head says the European Union and the Association Agreement. Having thus come to a fork in the road, Yanukovych might simply wish, as was once said of Bill Clinton, to take it. While reaffirming his commitment to the EU negotiations, Yanukovych has also been pitching for 3 + 1 trade negotiations with the three Customs Union members, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Deputy Premier Sergiy Tigipko, one of the relatively few committed liberal reformers in Yanukovych’s team, has made the obvious point (though not universally obvious in Ukraine) that the European Union’s huge market would be a decisive advantage over the longer term, and that eastern countries who’ve joined the European Union have usually done very well economically as a result. Tigipko advocates integration with the European Union and “friendship” with the Customs Union, another version of 3 + 1.

This difficult choice is about much more than trade. As Oleksiy Kolomiyets, an independent Kyiv think-tanker has said: “The Customs Union is a camp of authoritarian regimes, and our political system would follow the economic logic if we became part of it.” Acknowledging that Yanukovych has publicly rejected the customs union, he added: “There is intense political struggle over this issue, and it’s only just beginning. Ukraine’s economy is very fragile and extremely vulnerable to Russian blackmail.”

Moscow remains keen to re-establish some latter-day incarnation of the Soviet Union, and the Putinist version of that would be likely to be pretty much as Kolomiyets described – unless, that is, Russia again reverses course and pursues the more reformist path that Medvedev and his followers are trying to lay out. But on form to date, that looks a long shot.

Poland: An uneasy rapprochement

The sudden warming of Polish-Russian relations at governmental level that followed the Smolensk air disaster of 11 April 2010 has more or less survived the following year, though with occasional discord, mainly relating to official investigations into the causes of the accident. The Russian enquiry, which suddenly announced its findings without having previously offered them to their Polish colleagues for comment or proposed amendments, placed all the blame for the accident entirely on the Polish side. Polish officials accepted that the blame lay more on the Polish side (for which view a good deal of evidence has emerged from both the Russian and the Polish enquiries), but emphasised with some heat that there was contributory negligence on the Russian side as well and submitted a long list of objections to the Russian report. As the months went on, Warsaw also increasingly blamed Russian authorities for being slow to respond to requests for information from the Polish enquiry.

But at the level of public opinion, particularly on the Polish side, relations have been more torrid. The main Polish opposition party, the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice (LaJ), headed by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has maintained a tireless campaign against the Polish government for having allegedly been complicit in covering up malfeasance both by themselves and the Russian authorities. Over the last year Kaczynski and his followers have fought elections and the daily political battle largely on this issue, hinting darkly at alleged conspiracies by Polish and Russian authorities to somehow cause the accident, then conceal their traces.

As evidence has accumulated pointing not surprisingly to some typical Russian disorder at the provincial Smolensk airport on the day, and as the Russian side has increasingly sought to play down or deny any fault of it own (partly in response to the endless accusations of murder from some Polish press and politicians), LaJ have seized every opportunity to renew their accusations or devise fresh ones. The anniversary last week produced a fresh crescendo. In the absence of any solid evidence to substantiate the more extravagant conspiracies, senior LaJ politicians have become carefully vague: “President Lech Kaczynski had to die because he was a true Pole” and similar.

LaJ sympathisers, including some of the bereaved, had laid the memorial plaque the Russians removed at the crash site last November, without seeking the agreement of local Russian authorities. The plaque, which was only in Polish, linked the crash to Katyn by saying that President Kaczynski and the other passengers had been on their way to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the “Soviet genocidal war crime” committed against Polish officers in 1940. The Russians were reportedly unhappy about the word “genocidal.” They now acknowledge that the massacre was a crime, but maintain that Stalinism committed similar and worse crimes against people of all ethnic groups, including above all Russians, and that therefore this was not a case of genocide.

The argument is unpersuasive to a Western ear, but there is a further aspect to the case. Medvedev’s campaign for de-Stalinisation has acquired some of its current momentum from the decision to restore the Yeltsin position of apologising for Katyn, a decision taken in the first instance primarily for foreign policy reasons. For Medvedev to meet President Komorowski of Poland on the anniversary, as was planned, and lay flowers on a plaque in Polish, of unofficial Polish composition and including the words “Soviet genocidal war crime” would be severely embarrassing for him at a delicate time in the ongoing struggle over Stalin’s place in Russian history. In the event, the two sides agreed that the presidents would instead jointly lay wreaths under a birch tree at the site of the crash, not on the Russians’ new, bilingual plaque, hopefully thereby postponing the issue until a better moment.

None of this satisfied LaJ which denounced it as yet another sign of Polish official servility towards Moscow. While the governing Civil Platform party of Prime Minister Tusk and President Komorowski has maintained a clear lead over LaJ over the last year, with LaJ sometimes looking electorally marginalised by its own anti-Russian obsessions, recent events seem to have contributed to a revival in LaJ support and a lessening in that of Civic Platform. The national elections expected in October this year could yet prove difficult for Civic Platform and, in the run-up to them, Kaczynski will not be holding back from his denunciations of the government’s “eastern policy.”

Though they overstate the case and are given to implausible conspiracy theories, there is justice in some of LaJ’s reproaches, The Polish government has, for example, concluded in the last year a long-term agreement on gas supplies from Gazprom which seems disadvantageous to Poland, placing it in a state of high dependence on the one problematical supplier, at high cost ($336 per thousand cubic metres) and for a seemingly unnecessarily long period. Warsaw has been working towards creating LNG import infrastructure as a partial alternative to Russian gas. Moreover, while this was not fully apparent in the earlier stages of the negotiations, Poland is on the cusp of developing its own very extensive shale gas deposits. So the pressing need for such a deal was not obvious.

The Gazprom agreement was also at odds with Warsaw’s own campaign within the European Union in recent years for diversification of gas imports away from Russia as a politically-motivated, often expensive and unreliable supplier. Ironically, Poland was only rescued from reaching an even worse deal with Gazprom by the intervention of the EU Energy Commissioner who insisted on becoming involved in the negotiations at the eleventh hour to ensure that Poland complied with the European Union’s new legal requirements. The so-called EU third energy package insists inter alia on competitive market access of other suppliers to energy infrastructure, like, in this case, Gazprom’s gas pipelines to and through Poland, which the final draft of the deal had not ensured. In the last stages of the negotiations, various improvements were introduced, including scaling back the date of termination of the agreement from 2037 to 2022.

The Polish government did its best to keep key details of the negotiations out of the public domain, but they have recently been exposed in the leading conservative newspaper Rzeczpospolita. The government’s reticence on this matter is understandable. The deal was disputed within the government, and it is difficult to believe it would have gone ahead with it, were it not for the rapprochement it had reached with Moscow. The late President Lech Kaczynski opposed the deal and, as prime minister before 2007, Jaroslaw Kaczynski would hardly have negotiated one like it.

In retrospect, given the bilateral difficulties that have arisen, LaJ’s criticism that Poland was not sufficiently energetic about seeking a greater direct involvement in the enquiry into the Smolensk disaster also seems persuasive, and their explanation that the Warsaw government did not want to ruffle Russian feathers may not be far off the mark.

But in general, the endless harping of LaJ politicians on the subject and the extreme polarisation of political life that they have thus engendered may be a double-edged sword for them electorally. Opinion polling indicates a majority of Poles disapprove of LaJ’s partisan exploitation of the tragedy. However, for as long as the issue remains alive, there is great potential for the Polish-Russian détente to run aground. Other bilateral disputes could well arise and there are plenty of long-standing differences between the two countries that will continue to generate tensions of their own. If at the parliamentary elections in October, through a strong performance at the polls and adroit coalition manoeuvring, LaJ were to regain a place in government, the bilateral relationship would come under great strain.

Putin was clearly involved in and supportive of the warming Polish-Russian ties, and to that extent the specific case of Katyn is less likely to become one of the growing number of issues that divide his camp from Medvedev’s. But his support came before LaJ decided to use the Smolensk issue in a way that in most Russian eyes tends to discredit the rapprochement and would do so much more if Kaczynski manages to regain aplace in government.

SUMMING up, there is some chance of liberal and more pro-Western policies gaining greater traction in Russia, but their chances of doing so are tied closely to the weak-looking reed of Medvedev’s aspirations for a second presidential term.

Belarus is heading from provincial neo-Stalinism to something much worse in the short term, after which it is likely to fall under stronger influence from Moscow. This, however, depending on how things play out in Russian politics, could conceivably be a moderating factor and might, together with Lukashenko’s declining popularity and the economic meltdown, lead to a change in the Belarus leadership. But in such an event, any new leader would have to be to Moscow’s taste.

Ukraine is at a crossroads, torn between its current leadership’s strong preference for the ethno-political comfort zone of Russia and its recognition that its future economic health can probably be best assured if it keeps some essential links with Europe alive.

Poland is likely to see the moderate Civic Platform party returned to power later this year. This will help to maintain Poland’s increased status in Europe as it undertakes its first rotational presidency of the European Union in the second half of this year. It will also shore up the fragile rapprochement with Russia, which should in turn reassure the Russian governing elite that its apologies for Katyn were not a misplaced political investment. Such an outcome would be a positive, though not decisive, factor favouring continuation of the latest de-Stalinisation tendency in Russia itself and a more constructive course in Russian external policies generally. •

John Besemeres is a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for European Studies at the Australian National University.

The post Russia and its western neighbours: a watershed moment appeared first on Inside Story.

ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, Triumphal Square in central Moscow resembled a military encampment on the eve of battle. Pedestrians emerging from Mayakovskaya metro station confronted an intimidating array of manpower and equipment: rows of police buses, massed ranks of police, and a large contingent of OMON Interior Ministry anti-riot troops, colloquially known as “kosmonauts” because of their surreal metallic black helmets. One of the largest squares in Moscow, a symbol of the striving for freedom since the 1960s, had become a cordoned, regimented parade ground.

This army of occupation would have been an appropriate response to the rampage near the Kremlin three weeks earlier. On that occasion, the security forces were caught unprepared by a mob of thousands of ultranationalists who had attended a meeting in memory of Egor Sviridov, a football fan killed in a brawl with a group of men from the Caucasus. To avenge his death, the mourners had marched to Manezh, a shopping complex adjacent to Red Square. When the police dispersed the crowd, the militants fanned out across Moscow’s subway system, and beat up anyone with a complexion dark enough to be suspected of origins in the Caucasus or central Asia. According to a report by Sova, an organisation which monitors racism and xenophobia, some forty people were victims of racially motivated violence that night.

On New Year’s Eve, however, the security forces were confronting a gentler menace. A few thousand law-abiding citizens were preparing to stand quietly in sub-zero temperatures and hear predictable speeches from human rights activists, elderly dissidents, opposition politicians and an ecologist at an officially authorised demonstration. Occasionally they would chant “Putin resign!” or “This our city!” They were attending the latest instalment of Strategy 31, a series of gatherings on the last day of every month with thirty-one days in defence of article 31 of the Russian constitution, the article that affirms that “Citizens of the Russian Federation have the right to assemble peacefully, without arms, to hold assemblies, meetings and demonstrations, festivals and pickets.”

Strategy 31 is the brainchild of Eduard Limonov, the mercurial leader of the outlawed National Bolshevik Party, or NBP. There is perhaps no more controversial figure in contemporary Russia. A young poet in the literary underground of the 1960s, Limonov emigrated to the West in 1974, published an erotically candid autobiographical novel, and established a reputation as an opponent of liberal, pro-Western dissidents like Andrei Sakharov. During the terminal crisis of the Soviet Union, he returned to Moscow and became the enfant terrible of the anti-Yeltsin opposition. The NBP, which he established with the ultranationalist Aleksandr Dugin in 1994, outraged the liberal intelligentsia with its inflammatory rhetoric and its totalitarian symbolism. At demonstrations, its activists chanted “Stalin! Beria! Gulag!” and waved banners that mixed Nazi and Soviet symbols. On one level, this extremism was parodic. The core of the NBP’s membership comprised alienated youth from the heavy-metal rock scene, where the use of totalitarian motifs performed an aesthetic rather than a political function. But Limonov’s writings and conduct during the 1990s offer plenty of material for his detractors. In one essay, he celebrated the Gulag as a defence mechanism that had protected a multiethnic society from the nationalist fanatics who were now unleashing carnage across the ruins of the Soviet empire. A 1992 documentary film records him exchanging small talk with Radovan Karađić on a hill outside Sarajevo and then firing a machine-gun at the besieged city.

Limonov’s metamorphosis into a critic of dictatorship began with his arrest in 2001 on implausible charges of plotting an invasion of Kazakhstan. He served almost two years of a four-year prison sentence. As he experienced Russia’s unreformed penitentiary system first hand, his enthusiasm for the Gulag waned. He criticised the “totalitarian climate” created by the war in Chechnya and reflected on the failure of the democratic revolution of 1991 to open up the political system to people outside the ruling nomenklatura. Taking their cue from their imprisoned leader, the young activists of the NBP played a conspicuous role in the resistance to Russia’s slide into authoritarianism. In a series of sit-ins in government offices, they underlined their embrace of non-violent protest. The authorities retaliated with the full force of the law. In the courts, the young protesters were punished with excessive sentences. In the streets, they became targets of gangs suspected of links with the security forces. Their fortitude in adversity earned cautious admiration from liberal intellectuals like Anna Politkovskaya, who contrasted their idealism with the compromises of the older generation.

The result was a gradual convergence of Limonov with liberal opposition leaders in a coalition called The Other Russia (Drugaya Rossiya), also the title of a collection of Limonov’s prison writings. During 2006–08, The Other Russia staged a series of Dissenters’ Marches, which were intended to challenge the regime in the streets during the lead-up to the next cycle of parliamentary and presidential elections. The violent dispersal of many of these marches became landmarks in the relentless constriction of public space during Putin’s second term. By the time that Dmitrii Medvedev launched his presidential campaign with a denunciation of “legal nihilism,” there were few more glaring examples of that nihilism than the routine flouting of the right to the freedom of assembly guaranteed in article 31 of the constitution.

Strategy 31 was Limonov’s response to the decline of the Dissenters’ Marches and the breakdown of The Other Russia. On both a practical and an ideological level, the linkage of a date and an article of the constitution was an astute move. With the information blockade on state television, as Limonov explained on his blog, demonstrations on a recurring date in a particular place minimised the need for advertising and could facilitate the creation of a protest tradition. The focus on the constitution also had the potential to overcome the factionalism, personal rivalries and ideological disputes that had repeatedly frustrated efforts to coordinate opposition protests. “The most fearless forces of society, regardless of party differences,” argued Limonov in August 2009, “can unite around a living struggle for article 31.” In an effort to assuage the objections of some liberals, he reminded them that Strategy 31 drew upon their own traditions: “You, like everyone, are invited... The Strategy is simple, a continuation of what [Andrei] Sakharov and the dissidents did.”

It was a plausible argument. The dissident movement had begun on 5 December 1965, the anniversary of the adoption of the Stalin constitution, with a small demonstration in Pushkin Square. Among the banners that were quickly ripped down by police officers was the slogan, “Respect the Soviet Constitution,” which was held by the mathematician Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin. Within minutes, the demonstration was over, but Esenin-Volpin had set the tone for decades of protest by activists who became known as pravozashchitniki, a term which is usually mistranslated as “human rights activist,” but which literally suggests a defender of law and of rights, an upholder both of the letter of the law in the constitution and of the inalienable human rights proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of 1948.

Strategy 31’s development was propelled by the convergence of Limonovites and liberal intellectuals around the heritage of the pravozashchitniki. On 12 December 2009, the anniversary of the adoption of the Yeltsin constitution, a group of activists from the liberal Solidarnost (Solidarity) movement staged a “flash mob” in Old Square outside the offices of the presidential administration. Each protester carried a letter of the alphabet. When they lined up, they spelled the exhortation, “Observe the Russian constitution.” Forty-four years after Esenin-Volpin’s bold experiment, the security forces reacted with undiminished aggression, pushing the activists to the snow-covered ground and handcuffing them. Two were punished with forty-eight hours of detention. The contrast between the two protests became the subject of an open letter to President Medvedev from a veteran dissident, Ludmila Alekseeva, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group. Recalling the events in Pushkin Square on Constitution Day 1965, which she had personally witnessed, Alekseeva lamented that “in contemporary Russia the reaction of the authorities was rather harsher than in Brezhnev’s USSR.”

Alekseeva became one of the first liberals to respond to Limonov’s entreaties. In August 2009, she earned his gratitude by attending the gathering at Triumphal Square as an “observer.” After the brutal suppression of Solidarnost’s flash mob, she reflected in her blog that Strategy 31 was a “wonderful idea because it is easy to remember: every 31st there is a meeting.” A week later, she came to the New Year’s Eve gathering as a participant, dressed for the holiday occasion as Snegurochka, a Russian fairy-tale character who is the helper of Grandfather Frost, Russia’s Santa Claus. The security forces were undeterred by her festive attire. Photographs of Alekseeva, a diminutive and frail woman in her mid-eighties, being hustled to a police van by burly riot police became a public relations disaster for the Kremlin.

TO BEGIN WITH, Strategy 31’s gatherings were effortlessly dispersed by the authorities. Massively outnumbered by police and OMON “kosmonauts,” a few hundred demonstrators were a reminder of the regime’s stranglehold over the public arena and of the demoralisation of the opposition. The brute force of the “kosmonauts” was supplemented by various Kremlin-sponsored youth organisations, which occupied Triumphal Square for functions that ranged from charity to entertainment. The most macabre took place on 31 March, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the Moscow subway. At a time of national mourning, Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”), the ruling party’s youth wing, staged an outdoors “mourning disco,” with throbbing upbeat music, for thousands of dancing adolescents.

The breakthrough for Strategy 31 came two months later, when one and a half thousand protesters appeared at the square. This influx was heralded by a highly publicised plea for liberalisation from Yurii Shevchuk, the lead singer of the popular rock group DDT, at a meeting between Putin and members of the creative intelligentsia in St. Petersburg. In response to Shevchuk’s impudent query about whether the next round of demonstrations would be smashed by the OMON, Putin lashed out at the demonstrators for obstructing access to children’s hospitals and for inconveniencing people travelling to their dachas. This intemperate diatribe was promptly matched by the batons of the “kosmonauts,” who suppressed the protest on 31 May with their customary brutality.

Opinion-makers were also beginning to acknowledge the existence of Strategy 31. Yuliya Latynina, an outspoken liberal journalist, explained to her listeners on the radio station Ekho Moskvy that she had not commented on the earlier demonstrations “because the 200 people who had assembled, however much one might sympathise with them, are marginals.” But the appearance of a mass of 1500, “despite a strict ban and obvious physical danger” meant that “these are no longer marginals, this is a conscious protest.”

The summer of 2010 also brought signs that the authorities were taking Strategy 31 seriously. In mid July, functionaries from the state’s human rights bureaucracy suggested to the organisers that the demonstration might receive official approval if an application were submitted by a different group of activists. At issue was Limonov, the movement’s founder, who had assumed demonic proportions in propaganda from both the Kremlin and its militant youth organisations. A tentative response to this overture came from Alekseeva and another veteran dissident, Sergei Kovalyov, one of the authors of the constitution’s human rights chapter, which included article 31. In an open letter, they argued that the names of applicants were less important than their common cause. Only a dialogue with the authorities could transform the constitution into a living document. For this dialogue to take place, they argued, it was essential to refute the accusations of the regime’s hawks, who were telling the doves, “Look, these marginals are incapable of negotiations, they don’t need meetings, only scandal!”

This intervention reflected both humanitarian impulses and a deep conviction that opportunities for constructive dialogue with the authorities should not be missed. Unsurprisingly, Alekseeva’s proposal provoked an angry rebuttal from Limonov, and a storm of criticism in the Russian blogosphere for undermining the basic principle of Strategy 31: the unconditional assertion of the constitutionally guaranteed right of all citizens, including the troublesome Limonovites, to freedom of assembly. According to one of her detractors, she was now campaigning for nothing more than the political rights of a privileged caste of human rights activists, not ordinary citizens.

The growing tension between the liberal rights-defenders and the Limonovites culminated in an open rupture at the October demonstration. Against Limonov’s objections, Alekseeva negotiated an agreement for 800 demonstrators, far fewer than the expected figure, to attend an authorised demonstration in part of the square, a substantial expanse of which had now been fenced off because of purported “construction works.” Limonov denounced “Alekseeva’s mutiny” as a regression to the days when the opposition was paralysed by backroom deals with the Kremlin, and demanded: “Freedom for everyone! Freedom without Fences! Freedom without conditions!” The result was the arrival of several thousand people for simultaneous demonstrations, one authorised and one unauthorised, in a relatively confined space. At the end of the meeting, the two crowds merged into one, broke through police lines, and marched in the direction of the government headquarters. Some liberals were euphoric. Ilya Yashin exulted that “Triumphal Square is ours!” Oleg Kozlovskii called the day “a breakthrough, in several senses of the word.” But Limonov, who had been forcibly dragged by “kosmonauts” to the authorised demonstration, claimed that he had never witnessed such “infamy” as this “partnership between the Gestapo and human rights activists.”

The rift within the movement was aggravated by the ultranationalist riot on Manezh square on 11 December. In liberal circles, the rampage provoked hysteria. Limonov dismissed it as the mischief of a small group of racist troublemakers. When his press secretary, Aleksandr Averin, proposed inviting participants in the Manezh events to the next Strategy 31 demonstration, Alekseeva’s organising committee declared that further cooperation with the Limonovites was impossible. Although Averin had made it clear that his invitation was not addressed to racists, only to those who demanded that Sviridov’s killers be brought to justice, he lent credibility to the regime’s new line of attack on the movement. In an interview with Izvestiya, Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of the presidential administration and the unofficial ideologue of Putin’s presidency, blamed Strategy 31 for creating the “fashion” for unauthorised demonstrations that had culminated in the riot.

Official attitudes towards the next gathering were confused by conflicting signals from the ruling “tandem.” On 16 December, at his annual “conversation” with the nation, a carefully choreographed marathon television broadcast, Putin was asked about the motives of three liberal opposition leaders, Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Ryzhkov and Vladimir Milov, all participants in Strategy 31. In a moment of pure fury, he replied that they wanted “money and power.” This trio, “together with [disgraced oligarch Boris] Berezovskii,” had stolen many billions in the 1990s, before being “dragged from the feeding trough.” Now they wanted to gorge themselves again, but “if we permit them to do this, they will not limit themselves to billions, they will sell off all of Russia.”

It was a misrepresentation of the past worthy of Stalinist historiography. During his time as deputy premier, Nemtsov had been Berezovskii’s mortal enemy; Milov had only served briefly as a deputy minister after Berezovskii’s departure; and Ryzhkov had never been in government. That Putin could indulge in such mendacious calumny, while ignoring his own personal history as Berezovskii’s candidate for the presidency, was a tribute to the impact of five years of rigid television censorship. Eight days after this anathema, President Medvedev struck a much more relaxed pose in his Christmas Eve interview with three television executives, to whom he suggested that television was diverging from reality. In response to a question about which politicians he regarded as possible allies or rivals, he expressed the heretical proposition that “Kasyanov, Nemtsov, Limonov, Kasparov,” all leading members of the extra-systemic opposition and all banned from state television, were “public politicians,” who each possessed “an electoral base.”

The events of New Year’s Eve in Moscow confirmed that Putin’s invective, not Medvedev’s liberal rhetoric, is the most reliable guide to the conduct of Russia’s security forces. Limonov was seized as he was leaving his apartment. Boris Nemtsov and Ilya Yashin, both Solidarity leaders who had delivered strident anti-Putin speeches in the square, were arrested as they left the demonstration, which was still in progress. As they were dragged to police vans, Lev Ponomaryov, the veteran human rights activist who was chairing the proceedings, made a plea from the platform for the police to explain why they had broken their promise not to interfere with law-abiding participants. There was no response. Dozens of other participants were detained around the square.

When Ilya Yashin was released after five days in captivity, he was careful to downplay the significance of the crackdown: administrative arrests could not be compared to the long prison sentences that had recently been imposed upon Mikhail Khodorkovskii and Platon Lebedev. What had taken place around Triumphal Square, he suggested, was an act of intimidation, “the malevolent gnashing of Putin’s teeth.” That gnashing sent a clear message about the futility of compromise. The fact that Limonov, the paragon of intransigence, and Nemtsov, one of the main orators at the authorised demonstration, were both sentenced to fifteen days of incarceration suggested that the regime drew little distinction between its radical and liberal opponents. This fact may yet facilitate a rapprochement between the two factions. With leading activists behind bars, the squabbles over the timing of applications to the Mayor’s office and over the ownership of the Strategy 31 brand paled into insignificance. By reminding the rights defenders and the Limonovites of their common cause – the defence of the right to freedom of assembly – the regime may have helped to heal the schism that threatened to destroy the movement. •

The post The gnashing of Putin’s teeth appeared first on Inside Story.

EVEN before the polls closed in Belarus’s presidential election on 19 December, supporters of opposition candidates were planning their protests. Although the conduct of the campaign was remarkably liberal by recent standards, opponents of Alexander Lukashenko’s regime confidently expected another rorted result, so no one was surprised when the president claimed an implausibly huge victory late on polling day. His return to authoritarian form was dramatically displayed when the government’s security force – the nostalgically named KGB – beat up protesters rallying in the centre of the national capital, Minsk. At least 640 people were arrested, including seven of the nine opposition candidates.

The leading opposition candidate, Vladimir Neklyayev, was seized and bashed on his way to the demonstration, suffering severe concussion. He was taken to hospital, where a group of plain-clothes thugs burst into the ward, dragging him off to jail. Neklyayev, who has serious vascular problems, has been denied treatment and there are fears for his life. Another leading opposition candidate, Andrei Sannikov, also injured, was stopped by traffic police and pulled out of a car on his way to hospital. His wife tried to hold on to him, for which she was also assaulted. Beatings in jail are reported to be widespread, and some protesters have been forced to recant, Iranian-style, on television.

Just over a week later, in Moscow, came the conviction of Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and a fellow Yukos Oil executive for allegedly stealing and laundering the proceeds of most of the oil produced by their own company. A few days earlier, well before the verdict, the Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin had met a handpicked audience to respond to pre-approved questions. Asked about Khodorkovsky, he said that “a thief should stay in prison,” putting paid to any idea that calls by President Dmitry Medvedev and his entourage for respect for the rule of law would be heeded. Khodorkovsky’s real offence before his first show trial in 2003 had been to try to play a role in politics and even contemplate standing for the presidency against Putin. He has now been convicted a second time, in effect, for that same offence.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the regime of President Viktor Yanukovych, who narrowly defeated the former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, in the presidential elections in early 2010, has recently charged his rival with various criminal offences, warning her she may not leave the country. On 26 December one of her former ministers, Yury Lutsenko, was arrested while walking his dog, taken to jail and charged with embezzlement. Lutsenko, a man with an unusually clean reputation in a country in which corruption is widespread, was the latest in a long list of former Orange government ministers and senior officials jailed or indicted for such offences.

The contrast with the way the Orange leadership treated Yanukovych and his allies, who blatantly rorted the presidential election in 2004 then lost on the rerun forced by the Orange revolution, couldn’t be greater. The Orange president, Viktor Yushchenko, even appointed Yanukovych to the prime ministership for a time. Yanukovych and his Party of Regions were able to regroup and successfully contest the 2010 presidential elections, which were widely accepted by observers as free and fair. But since his election, Yanukovych has not reciprocated his own generous treatment, having systematically abused the Ukrainian constitution to set up a centralised autocracy while persecuting his former opponents through a corrupted court system.

In other words, the authorities in each of the Slav-dominated former republics of the Soviet Union – Russia, Belarus and Ukraine – are displaying overt contempt for democratic norms. The curious thing is that they are doing this precisely at the time when each of them is seeking closer relations with the European Union. In Russia’s case, the declared motivation is to pursue a “partnership for modernisation.” In Ukraine’s case it is a pitch for trade concessions and visa-free travel, but ostensibly with an ultimate aspiration to join the European Union. For Belarus, the “last true dictatorship of Europe” as Condoleezza Rice once said, it has been a flirtation with Brussels to hedge against growing pressure from Moscow.

For Brussels, the primary motivation is to use “engagement” to improve relations with each of these three difficult neighbours, encouraging transparency, good governance, financial probity and democratic norms. With Ukraine and Belarus there is the additional objective of succouring their independence against attempts by Moscow to resubordinate its smaller Slavic neighbours in some kind of Russian-led quasi-federation or close alliance.

After years of frustration in pursuing this objective, Moscow has latterly been making progress. Yanukovych’s victory last February more than restored the close relations between Russia and Ukraine that existed before the Orange revolution of 2004. Political, security, ethno-linguistic and economic ties have all been greatly strengthened. When Putin began to press forcefully for a takeover of the commanding heights of the Ukrainian economy, Yanukovych’s key Ukrainian oligarch supporters felt their vital interests were threatened, and Kiev’s resistance stiffened. But the two governments remain very much closer than they were a year ago.

As with the Ukrainian presidential elections, Moscow looks the biggest winner from the recent spectacle in Belarus, which suggests that the friction between the two countries has begun to lift. And in the last year or two there have been encouraging developments elsewhere in the “near abroad” for Moscow, notably in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. In various ways Russia is bringing some of its wayward former provinces back home.

BUT Belarus has never been regarded as one of the more wayward former republics. So how did the recent conflict between Lukashenko and Moscow come about?

Despite a brief flowering of national independence on either side of the fall of communism, Belarus once again became virtually a Russian province in the years after Lukashenko won the presidency in 1994. He set about creating a neo-Soviet autocracy at the same time that the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was starting to retreat from his earlier westward tilt. The neo-Soviet trends in the two countries strengthened after Putin came to power in 2000. For a time, it even seemed likely that the “union-state” of Russia and Belarus, proclaimed in 2000, might become a reality.

But in recent years, as Russia reduced its energy subsidies for Belarus as for other former republics while pushing to secure control of their key economic assets, Lukashenko became anxious. He might have gone along with a Russo-Belarus confederation, but only if it guaranteed a very prominent role – even the presidency – for him. As Russia’s intentions and Putin’s distaste for him became more evident, however, he began to seek and welcome EU overtures.

Under courtship but also pressure from Brussels, Lukashenko looked to improve his image and the country’s foreign investment climate, which now sits well above that of Russia or Ukraine on rankings. More surprisingly, he eased his notoriously repressive regime, presenting himself almost as a born-again liberal reformer and allowing opposition politicians to gain official acceptance as presidential candidates for the December 2010 poll. In early November 2010, the German and Polish foreign ministers promised Lukashenko support for a large IMF-led loan package on behalf of the European Union, as well as progress towards free trade and visa-free entry for Belarusians if he agreed to democratise his country.

Relations with the United States also improved. In pursuing its “reset” policy with Russia, the Obama administration has placed less emphasis than its predecessor on promoting democracy in the former republics of the Soviet Union, though it continues to welcome any moves in that direction. For his part, like Yanukovych earlier in 2010, Lukashenko has also courted American approval by offering to eliminate his stocks of highly enriched uranium, a key priority for President Obama. He was still sending out some positive messages to the United States in meetings with visitors from Washington think tanks just a few days before the crackdown.

While this opening towards the West was taking place in the months before the elections, Russia had been increasing its pressure on Belarus. Moscow was angered by Lukashenko’s efforts to resist increases in energy prices and even more by his failure to support key Russian projects. In particular, Lukashenko was refusing to join the customs union Putin had launched with Kazakhstan, into which Moscow was keen to inveigle other former republics, especially the fraternal Slav states of Belarus and Ukraine. Nor would he recognise the “independence” of breakaway territories South Ossetia and Abkhazia, after Russian forces “liberated” them during the 2008 war with Georgia. When Russia applied its usual tactic of manipulating energy trade to enforce compliance – suddenly and sharply reducing gas deliveries to Belarus in June 2010, for instance – Lukashenko responded by seeking further credits and subsidised energy elsewhere, including from China, Venezuela and Iran.

Responding in July 2010, state-controlled Russian television ran a series of denunciatory documentary programs about Lukashenko, depicting him as an autocrat with a contempt for human rights, referring to the violent deaths and disappearances among his opponents, and highlighting a comment he had allegedly made in praise of Hitler. Much of the material was not far off the mark, though it was also eerily applicable to Putin’s Russia.

But with the violent crackdown on 19 December, both the pro-Western and anti-Moscow trends in Belarus policy seemed to have been abruptly reversed. The leopard’s familiar spots were again fully in evidence. Having blitzkrieged the domestic opposition he had been tolerating for months, Lukashenko belligerently dismissed Western concerns, saying he would put an end to “senseless democracy.” The president’s swashbuckling, bully-boy style at a news conference after the violence recalled Putin at his most colourful. It also recalled Lukashenko himself after the previous presidential elections, when he’d threatened to wring oppositionists’ necks “as one would a duck.”

Such language and behaviour are typical for Lukashenko. It has been reported that when the openly gay German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle and his Polish counterpart Radoslaw Sikorski were visiting Minsk in November to offer aid in return for democratisation, they enquired about Belarus’s treatment of sexual minorities. “We don’t have people like that here,” the president allegedly responded, “but if we did, we’d put them in cattle wagons and ship them off to camps.” Nonetheless, despite his well-known track record, both the brutality of the crackdown and the aggressive rhetoric seemed deliberately intended to alienate his erstwhile Western interlocutors.

What brought about the change? Essentially, it was the sustained Russian pressure. While he had remained defiant in response to Moscow’s campaign against him during the course of the year, Lukashenko was keenly aware that Belarus’s economy depends heavily on Russia, with which about half of its foreign trade is still conducted, including some 70 per cent of its machinery exports and 90 per cent of its exports of food products. In particular, Belarus’s relatively steady growth under Lukashenko has owed a great deal to the continued inflow of heavily subsidised Russian oil and gas. Even with that support, the economy was heading for trouble under the stress of the global financial crisis. Belarus has a serious and dramatically worsening balance of payments deficit, by one estimate likely to reach US$7 billion for 2010. This has led, in turn, to a sharp increase in its foreign indebtedness. Belarus’s debt repayment obligations are set to worsen in the next few years, threatening an uncontrollable spiral.

Lukashenko probably always knew that Moscow could ultimately draw the noose as tight as it chose, until finally he would be left with little recourse. The European Union was offering him less, and with the price-tag of a democratisation agenda that might ultimately have cost him power. By contrast, Russia was “only” seeking to reduce his country’s national sovereignty and might well accept his continued grip on power if he were more cooperative. In similar circumstances earlier in the year – facing growing energy bills and debts to Russia as the financial crisis bit deeper – Ukraine’s Yanukovych had opted to sell off some surplus sovereignty by reaching a deal to extend Russia’s lease on its Crimean naval facilities to 2042 in exchange for a reduction in the price of gas imports. Lukashenko has apparently now made a similar choice.

At the height of Moscow’s anti- Lukashenko campaign some observers were beginning to speculate that Russia was seeking regime change in Minsk, but it was probably always more likely that Russia would be happy to reach a compromise on energy if Belarus toed the line on its neo-imperial agenda. On 9 December, ten days before the election, Lukashenko met with the Russian leadership in Moscow and agreed to enter the Common Economic Space with Russia and Kazakhstan. At the same time he reached an agreement for an effective reduction in the price of imported Russian oil that will save Belarus an estimated US$4 billion a year, more than the one-off IMF credit that the EU emissaries had been talking about.

By election day, with the bilateral deal with Moscow more or less settled, Lukashenko no doubt felt that he could afford to treat his domestic opponents and the West with contempt. For its part, though it was mildly irritated by the fact that some Russian journalists had been caught up in the wave of detentions and weren’t immediately released, Moscow was quick to express its satisfaction with the conduct of the election.

WHILE the reasons for Lukashenko’s volte-face are not too mysterious, it is curious that he struck out against his opponents with such venom, even though this was bound to damage his relations with his Western interlocutors. It may be that he was responding to the fact that the elections went rather worse for him than he was prepared to acknowledge. Independent polling in the relatively free atmosphere before the ballot showed his support slipping and suggested that in a fair fight he might only get somewhere between 30 and 50 per cent of the vote, and would need to go to a second round to win.

Applying his usual tactics – stacking the voting booths with trusties (excluding all but a few token opposition representatives), abusing the bizarre system of “preliminary voting” by people employed in government institutions who are ferried en masse to cast early votes, and common-or-garden ballot stuffing – would probably have given him a comfortable victory anyway. But he could well have faced the embarrassment of the solid opposition support becoming visible and contrasting sharply with his sweeping majorities on previous occasions. The Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, has suggested this as an explanation for the fury of his attack on the protesters, citing information that he had attracted no more than 40 per cent of the vote rather than the nearly 80 per cent officially claimed.

But thuggery is Lukashenko’s style and always has been. He is a deeply Soviet figure, more devoted to the less edifying aspects of the Soviet tradition than is Putin himself, who tends to view him as a naive provincial bumpkin. So perhaps his response reflected, above all, exuberant relief that the pretence of a mini-democracy could be flung aside once concessions had been wrung from Moscow, and that smarming up to the West was no longer necessary. After the people power revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, all post-Soviet autocrats, including Putin, feel a slightly irrational fear that despite their popularity (in some cases) and their elaborate security/propaganda empires (in all cases) they could suddenly be pitchforked out of office by an angry mob. They see such events not as largely spontaneous domestic revolts but as sinister plots orchestrated in the West.

This mindset may help explain Lukashenko’s violent reaction and anti-Western rhetoric, but there is also evidence that the crackdown last month was carefully choreographed. Provocateurs reportedly encouraged protesters to ignore their leaders’ calls for restraint, and broke windows in government buildings to provide the pretext for the crackdown. This line of interpretation sometimes goes further, arguing that from the beginning Lukashenko’s contacts with the West were an elaborate feint meant to extract a better deal from Russia, which, once it was in his pocket, meant that “stupid democracy” and his tiresome opponents could at last be dispensed with.

Whatever his thinking or instincts in discarding the Western card, Lukashenko may have done himself a mischief. Moscow can, if it so desires, retract its concessions or find other ways of pressuring him whenever it likes. Lukashenko might be calculating, probably correctly, that Western governments will eventually swallow their pride and lift any sanctions against him, allowing him to resume tactical manoeuvres on both the eastern and western fronts. But in the meantime, he may need to reach an accommodation with Moscow, without the benefit of other options.

He could probably live with that. He detests democracy and impertinent challenges to his autocratic supremacy. In a close embrace with Putin’s Russia, he can be sure of one thing: that he will be under no pressure to introduce democratic reforms. And for Moscow, a stable “power vertical” (Putin’s term for concentrated top-down power) in Belarus to match Russia’s own would not cause any great distress, except in some liberal circles still cleaving to the fading hope of a Medvedev-led perestroika.

The two regimes will continue to have their differences. But for the time being they will be reconciled, and Moscow will feel it is making progress towards Putin’s objective of at least partially repairing what he regards as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” the break-up of the Soviet Union. Putin will also be pleased that in Ukraine and Belarus there are no longer any democratic experiments that might conceivably turn the heads of his own constituents.

After a period of perhaps one or two years of indignation and some sort of sanctions against Belarus, many or most Western countries will probably conclude that sanctions are only isolating Lukashenko unproductively, and will again look for ways of engaging the dictator. And having made his point, Lukashenko may well again display interest in any fresh inducements. Western policy does not seem to have many viable alternatives in these situations. Despite Russia’s seizure of parts of Georgia in 2008 and its contemptuous dismissal of Western objections, its breach of Sarkozy’s ceasefire agreement and so on, within a few months the reset button had been pressed in Washington, and the European Union and NATO were both offering their own peace overtures to Moscow.

The main drivers of the current conciliatory trend in Western policy are the United States and Germany. For the Obama administration, the new policies relate not so much to Russia or Europe as to other concerns, especially nuclear disarmament, Iran and Afghanistan. WikiLeaks revelations have confirmed that official Washington has no illusions about Moscow, but President Obama is still eager to establish the best possible bilateral relationship to advance other priorities.

Germany’s conciliatory policy towards Russia has a long history, but the main factors at the moment are probably its huge and profitable economic relationship with Russia (including an element of energy dependency); Germany’s memory of its Ostpolitik towards the Soviet Union in the 1970s, which it feels led to détente, perestroika and reunification; fear of provoking Russia by adopting too forceful a policy in relation to former Soviet and Soviet bloc territories; and probably an element of historic guilt for the barbarous Nazi occupation of Soviet lands during the second world war. Berlin still feels grateful for reunification in particular, and believes that other Western countries pushed Moscow too far after Gorbachev had conceded so much. Germany is the main conciliator, but there are others, notably France under Chirac and increasingly also Sarkozy, Italy under Berlusconi, and Spain and Greece.

Between them, the United States, Germany and France have done much to pursue engagement with Russia. At the recent Lisbon summit of NATO, to which President Medvedev was invited as an honoured guest, the rhetoric of both sides was extremely positive, despite the important differences that continue to divide them. Before the summit there was a tripartite summit involving Germany, France and Russia – but not the United States – at Deauville in France, at which security issues were discussed in a positive atmosphere. France has now confirmed it will sell Mistral amphibious assault vessels to Russia despite the objections of Baltic NATO member-states and desperate would-be member Georgia. Paris has justified this unprecedented sale with the surprising reasoning that if NATO wishes to engage Russia on security and other issues it should be prepared to display trust towards it.

Given these determinedly positive atmospherics, it would be surprising if the developments in Belarus were to derail East–West rapprochement for long. Yet for all the talk of engagement, modernisation, renewed security architecture and so on, the current situation is rather different from the détente of the 1980s. In Gorbachev, the West had a leader with whom it could indeed do business, a leader seeking to meet Western expectations at least halfway and to achieve domestic reforms that would make the Soviet Union a more democratic, transparent and normal society.

In Putin they have someone who bitterly regrets most of what happened under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and who is heading to a large extent in an anti-Western, even xenophobic direction – certainly domestically, and usually externally as well. Medvedev represents a different strain of thought within the elite, but though it might suit the Putin leadership that Medvedev presents a smiling face to the world, he seems unable to make his writ run on virtually any important issues.

The easy passage of New START through the US Senate will give the overall East–West dynamic some momentum. Sooner or later, however, the key US–Russian relationship will keep snagging on issues like Belarus, as Moscow continues its determined pursuit of restoring Russian great power status and recapturing former dominions.

WHAT of Belarus itself? Will its society be content to accept Lukashenko’s latest diktat without demur? If there is resistance, will it seriously threaten the ex-collective farm chairman?

Generally speaking the degree of resistance by vassal states to Moscow’s domination during the Soviet period, and the development of stable and prosperous democracies since then, have depended on the strength of national sentiment and the maturity of civil society in each country or region. Despite some revival of civil society in the last couple of years, Belarus has not been one of the stronger post-Soviet states in either respect. The national language – close to Russian – has not had a secure hold in most of its territory in recent times. Russian is dominant in most of Belarus in the same way that it dominates some parts of Ukraine. A small minority speaks Belarusian by preference, but Russian is overwhelmingly the language of public discourse. (In this respect it is unlike Ukraine, where in the west and much of the central regions Ukrainian is dominant or holds its own.)

Although it had its own representation at the United Nations when it was part of the Soviet Union, Belarus was essentially a loyal Soviet province rather than a recognisable nation or centre of nationalist resistance like the Baltic states, for example, or even Ukraine. Despite rediscovering Belarusian nationalism when it suited his interests, Lukashenko is probably still a typical Soviet Russian as much as he is a Belarusian. Though he recently startled an audience by speaking fluent Belarusian in public, he does so seldom and appears to care little about its status or future. Nationalists and some oppositionists try to keep the language alive, but they are up against not only the Russifying policy of the authorities but also the apathy of most of the population.

Belarus suffered far greater casualties and devastation than Russia during the second world war. The once large and culturally influential Jewish and Polish minorities were largely destroyed as a result of war, genocide, Stalinism and discriminatory policies in the later Soviet period. Eighty per cent of Belarusians are now Orthodox, like the Russians, and the Jews and Catholic Poles have been replaced by a large (12 per cent) Russian, mainly immigrant, population fostered by Moscow. So the population is now ethnically and religiously largely homogeneous and increasingly Russified.

Moreover, most of the country fared relatively well in the later Soviet period, receiving a disproportionate share of industrial investment. And conservative economic policies and Russian subsidies since 1990 have helped Belarus avoid some of the disruption in living standards seen elsewhere in former republics. All these factors have meant that the population is broadly pro-Russian in outlook. Indeed, some of the leading opposition candidates in the presidential elections were rumoured to be accepting support from Moscow, and they certainly explicitly favoured better relations with Russia, as well as with the West.

Discontent with Lukashenko’s rule had already been growing in recent years, as became evident during the last two presidential election campaigns. And even if some Russian support is reinstated for now, Belarus is heading for a difficult period. As harder economic times set in, Lukashenko’s stocks could sink further. But neither democratisation nor a colour revolution by the spirited but divided opposition seem likely any time soon.

SINCE the crackdown, Lukashenko has purged his leadership, appointed a new prime minister and issued a decree ordering further liberalisation of the economy, suggesting he is looking to Chinese rather than European economic models. Furthering links with new friends like China and Venezuela will also help him to hedge against overbearing behaviour by Russia. They have the additional advantage that they won’t be asking tiresome questions about human rights and democracy. •

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IN OCTOBER 2008, nineteen years after my family left the not-yet-former Soviet Union for Australia, my twelve-year-old daughter Billie and I travelled to Russia and Ukraine. I knew before we got on the plane that I was going to write a non-fiction book, if not explicitly about this trip then directly linked to it. And just in case I was tempted to forget about it, I had a contract and an advance from the publisher (spent on airfares and visas) to remind me. Yet to most of my friends in Russia and Ukraine, many of them easily in the category of people I would die for, I said close to nothing. At most, I muttered something vague about maybe doing some writing connected to this trip… You know us writers, we cannot help ourselves. Give us a spoon and a bowl of pea and ham soup and we’ll write about it. If asked what kind of book it was, what it was about, in what way connected to this place and this moment, I would get desperately ironic: the definitive post–Cold War tearjerker of course, the hitchhiker’s guide to the mysterious Russian soul, Putin’s Russia for dummies… If irony was inappropriate when, say, talking to a dear friend’s grandmother who was in her late eighties, I would become deathly serious and, with my vagueness acquiring a distinctly sombre tone, I would point to the twentieth century – revolution, gulags, two world wars, you know the kind of stuff… Big bad stuff that needs to be written about. Big bad stuff I could hide behind.

I cringe as I recall my inability to say a single straight word about the book, which was burning a hole in my pocket like a shoplifted Cherry Ripe. Don’t rush to excuse me – if such is indeed your first impulse – because I must tell you that to some of my friends I said nothing. Not a word. I remind you that I had a contract to write this book. So my omissions or non-disclosures, whatever you want to call them, were pretty alarming, perhaps even inexcusable. Morally I was elbows-deep in the grey zone.

Now I must tell you that it is not my style to withhold. I have written about my unexpected pregnancies and failed marriages and my disastrous delusions as a parent – not exclusively, and not at the expense of other things, but nonetheless fairly frankly. I don’t withhold much in real life either (see the previous point about pregnancies and marriages), yet on our trip to Russia and Ukraine I felt distressed, sometimes overwhelmingly so, about not disclosing my writerly intentions. This distress consisted of many elusive kinds of debilitating unease, all contributing to a growing conviction that this hypothetical book of mine was a dangerously foreign substance in the alchemy of our trip.

It was not like I was planning to write a nasty exposé, though I did intend to go into all manner of deeply intimate stuff – friendships battered by geopolitics (when we left in 1989, we thought we would never see our friends and family again), grief and love, doubts, silences in the no man’s land between those who stayed and those who left. I was uneasy that the book would not simply report our experiences on this trip after a respectable period of time, but was, to some degree at least, a catalyst for these experiences. I had not seen my childhood friends in Ukraine for almost two decades; to them, and especially to my best friend who turned sixteen on the day my family emigrated, our leaving was nothing short of a tragedy (as it was for me). It took nineteen years for me to come back and I was coming back so I could write a book – now that smelt. I imagined my friends questioning my every motive on discovering that the book was about this trip. I was, after all, a double agent on a mission, my loyalties ambivalent and fickle. Who knew what I was really after? Was I looking around ever so intently so I could pepper my stirring prose with some telling details? Was I asking questions about prices and jobs so I could write about “Russia’s tired and poor, the huddled masses”? And, perhaps most importantly, who were my friends to me? What did I see when I looked at them through my thick writer’s glasses: losers, characters, caricatures, ghosts? Was I not, for all intents and purposes, coming into their world, into their lives, not as their friend but as a journalist or a literary tourist on the prowl?

WHEN I told my second cousin in Dnepropetrovsk about the book – she was one of the very few people I did not conceal it from, knowing that I would not write about her – she retorted, “So you are going to write about how everything is dirty and falling apart.” But no matter how much I jumped up and down, no matter how many times I uttered, “God, No!” I could see that my cousin still didn’t believe me. “I can only imagine what you must be thinking,” was all she said after I’d finished my emphatic protestations. Oh the debilitating, trust-eroding second-guessing! Caution and self-consciousness muffling conversations, the spectre of the book hanging over the flow of love and grief between us. I could not bear the thought of any of this happening so I made a pact with myself – I hope it was with myself, not with some kind of devil – and I kept my mouth shut for much of the trip.

And because I equally could not bear the thought of bullshitting my friends, I made myself forget about the book. I did not go to see colourful characters from my past in search of the picaresque and quirky. I did not stage any poignant encounters. I lived day to day, thrown around by emotions and experiences, in accordance with the implicit logic of my journey and my relationships with others. I had managed to dissociate from my writerly persona, almost completely. The book dictated nothing and made me do nothing. It became a vague apparition belonging to my life in distant Australia; the only thing I did in its name was to keep a diary and to make sure Billie kept one too. This was how I got through the trip without feeling like a cheat and a backstabber.

It is quite possible, of course, that I have imagined much of this and that my friends could have dealt quickly with the initial weirdness of this book and trusted me not to slip and slide too much between my dual identities and purposes. For all I know, it could have become a running joke (as benign as they come) or it could easily have been forgotten altogether. Perhaps the heaviness of my heart primarily reflected my own ambivalence about the simultaneity of writing and living, my own sense of how intrusive and distancing literary ambitions and sensibilities can be, my sneaking suspicion that being a writer and being a friend often do not flow neatly into each other. At various points in the trip, I told myself that I simply wouldn’t write this book (to hell with the contract and my future as a writer!) or that I would write such a glorious book that so brilliantly and truthfully honoured my friends and our shared experiences that my friends would forgive me and it would be obvious to them why saying close to nothing was the only right thing to do.

It occurs to me that till this day I have not been able to let go of my unease – first hiding the book, then hiding behind it, as if standing next to it in full view has proven quite beyond me. Since Otherland came out in April, I have posted it to all my friends who appear in it. Surprisingly, despite the Russian and Ukrainian postal services’ casual attitude towards delivering mail – if it happens, it happens, but don’t get too hung up about it – all of my friends have received a copy of the book by now. Armed with dictionaries, they are pushing through my prose in the language some of them know well and others remember only vaguely from rock music or sub-standard school and university courses. I am finally out of the closet. I have handed myself over to the people’s court. But whether my friends forgive me or condemn me, whether they laugh at the ridiculousness of my fears or feel wounded by my evasions, I still won’t know whether I had any right to keep this book from them or, equally, whether I could have written Otherland if I were a braver soul with absolutely nothing to hide. •

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In the end the race was so tight – with only 5 per cent between the two run-off candidates – that it may prove more of a victory for Komorowski’s opponent, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the twin brother of the late President Lech Kaczynski, whose death in the tragic air crash at Smolensk in April triggered the election. The accident also took the lives of many of Poland’s political and military elite, who were on their way to commemorate the massacre of Polish officers by the Soviet secret police at Katyn in 1940. It seems to have contributed to Kaczynski’s surprisingly strong showing, and has reinforced a tentative thaw in relations between Poland and its largest neighbour, Russia. But support for the rapprochement in Poland remains fragile.

Both Komorowski and Kaczynski represent parties on the right of the political spectrum, but there the similarity ends. Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party is populist, clerical, strongly nationalist, even at times a shade xenophobic, and socially conservative – though on the economy it opposes privatization of communist-era enterprises and defends the welfare state. Civic Platform is more secular and centrist on social issues, but favours liberal economic reforms; externally, its nationalism is muted and it seeks cooperative relationships wherever possible, including with former adversaries.

Where Law and Justice has been acerbically Eurosceptic, Civic Platform has embraced the European Union and is trying to build Warsaw’s influence within that grouping by drawing closer to its key players. When Law and Justice used its period in government from 2005 to 2007 to begin to alter state institutions radically to create what it called a “Fourth Republic,” purged of the communist influences it claimed were endemic in the post-communist Poland, Civic Platform saw these efforts as sectarian and dangerously anti-democratic. Although both parties emerged from the communist-era dissident and Solidarity traditions, in which their leaders played prominent roles, the enmity between them has become sharp.

After winning the presidency from Law and Justice, the governing coalition headed by the Civic Platform premier, Donald Tusk, now holds all the key positions. The presidential veto, which Lech Kaczynski wielded regularly to block Tusk’s policies, has been neutralised. In theory Tusk should be able to press ahead with his domestic and external priorities unhindered.

But Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s strong showing suggests that Polish politics will remain polarised and evenly contested. Parliamentary elections are due next year, and Kaczynski now seems likely to lead his party to a strong showing there. And if he continues his present policy of seeking allies in the two post-communist parties – the Polish People’s Party (currently in the governing coalition led by Civic Platform) and the Democratic Left Alliance, whose stocks are again rising – he could quite possibly emerge after next year’s poll as the leader of a different coalition government. The situation until recently of a Civic Platform government in cohabitation with a Law and Justice president could be neatly reversed.

Initially the presidential campaign was remarkably mild. The horrifying air disaster that precipitated it, and the period of national mourning that followed, enveloped campaign exchanges in decorum and euphemism. The mutual hostility of the two main parties was briefly placed on hold. Kaczynski, an adroit but very forceful politician, presented himself as a changed man. Belying his reputation as a Russophobe, he appealed for reconciliation with the Russian people in a special internet message addressed to them. He also called for an end to “the war of Poles on Poles” (in which he had always been the key combatant), and subtly distanced himself from the aggressive campaign tactics of many of his followers.

Media aligned with the Law and Justice party were less magnanimous, producing conspiracy theories alleging official Russian involvement in the crash, even accusing Civic Platform leaders of complicity in a “second Katyn.” Though not terribly plausible to outsiders, this was strong, mobilising stuff for the constituency. The division of labour worked well for Law and Justice: Kaczynski, far behind at the outset, began to gain on Komorowski in the polls, just as his brother had gained on Tusk in the 2005 presidentials before going on to beat him in the second round.

Komorowski, an uncharismatic figure prone to mistakes (“a nice uncle not a leader” as one of his supporters characterised him), felt constrained by Kaczynski’s bereavement. But he did use his period as acting president to allow through legislative measures aimed at dismantling his opponents’ control of two of the hallmarks of the “Fourth Republic,” a politicised Institute of National Memory (which had published a book denouncing Walesa as an alleged police agent) and the Law and Justice-dominated agency supervising the non-print media. These and other relics of the 2005–07 period had been protected by Lech Kaczynski’s veto power after Civic Platform won government following parliamentary elections in 2007.

With one eye on next year’s parliamentary elections, Kaczynski may continue to present himself as a moderate. But the gloves are now off on both sides. And despite his tactical courtship of the post-communists, it is hard to see Kaczynski becoming a dove on Russia. There will be plenty of support within the Polish electorate for a reinvigorated Law and Justice party next year, particularly if Civic Platform seeks to carry through necessary, but unpopular, economic reforms it has long foreshadowed, while maintaining the rapprochement with Russia.

Like many other East European peoples, Poles are anti-communist and anti-Russian, but more so than most. The Katyn massacre, about which the Soviets erected a dense smokescreen of lies for decades, has remained the touchstone issue. Most rulers in Moscow since Stalin have been reluctant to come clean about it (Gorbachev and Yeltsin were honourable exceptions), and until recently Putin was again seeking to backtrack. Moscow has also refused to face up squarely to the implications of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, which secretly divided East Europe between the German and Soviet partners, enabling Russia to invade eastern Poland with little resistance soon after the Nazi onslaught from the west in 1939.

The 2005–07 Law and Justice governments took a robustly anti-Russian stance both on these “historical issues” and on many other more contemporary disputes. The Kaczynski twins also behaved very assertively towards the German government, despite Chancellor Merkel’s strenuous efforts to conciliate Poland. In addition, the Kaczynskis’ marked Euroscepticism led them into disputes with the European Union, which Poland had only just joined. Often, they were quick to wield or to threaten a veto, testing the patience of influential EU members.

After the 2007 parliamentary elections, Tusk’s new Civic Platform government reversed these and other Law and Justice policies, both foreign and domestic. Law and Justice had been fighting diplomatic wars on all fronts, and Civic Platform saw the need to mend fences in Europe. To secure EU support in the inevitable disputes with Russia they needed to show West Europeans they were not typecast Polish Russophobes. Despite opposition from President Kaczynski, Tusk worked hard towards building a better relationship with Moscow, including with Putin personally. Trying to ease the burden of history seemed like a good place to start. The two sides set up an expert joint Commission for Difficult Matters, which discreetly worked towards accommodations about historical issues like Katyn.

In September 2009 Putin accepted an invitation from Tusk to attend the seventieth anniversary of the Polish defence of Westerplatte, near Gdansk, in the early days of the second world war. Moscow likes to stick close to the Soviet script on the war, which they conveniently date from the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, in order to sidestep some very “difficult matters.” So in accepting, Putin was already entering tricky territory – celebrating Polish resistance to Nazi Germany when Moscow was in a collusive alliance with Hitler and about to attack Poland from the rear. At the ceremony, Putin spoke in a way that was broadly conciliatory, and it appeared some modest bilateral progress was being made.

Putin’s invitation to Tusk to attend a joint commemoration of the Katyn massacre on 7 April this year was a spectacular step forward. Putin spoke frankly about the massacre and about Soviet totalitarianism, though there were some exculpatory accents as well. Following the air disaster he was even more forthcoming. Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s stark film about the massacre was screened to a mass audience on Russian television, contributing to an unprecedented outburst of warm sentiment between the Polish and Russian publics. And the Russians went to great lengths to involve Polish officials in their investigation of the disaster.

President Lech Kaczynski had not been invited to the joint Katyn commemoration on 7 April, prompting him to make his own ill-fated flight there three days later. A separate visit with many Law and Justice dignitaries on board looked like a rebuff to Tusk for agreeing to a joint commemoration with Putin that excluded the president. It was also an early shot in the presidential elections then scheduled for September, which Lech intended to recontest. Jaroslaw has described his brother’s prepared speech for Katyn, never delivered, as conciliatory towards Russia, though for the most part that is not how it reads.

So perhaps the Kaczynskis were planning to modify their party’s line on Russia even before the crash and all the public emotion that followed. But regardless of to what extent, if at all, Jaroslaw is a convert to moderation, the media coverage shows that the party as a whole is certainly not converted. Sooner or later Law and Justice is likely to revert to type. Conspiracy theories about the “second Katyn” will probably continue to surface, and the many other issues that cause friction between Russia and Poland – NATO, energy security, US deployments in Poland and so on – will not go away. The Polish side of the bilateral relationship will remain volatile.

As a result of the Katyn dramas, Russian popular awareness of the issue and sympathy for Poles increased markedly. But the public does not make policy in Russia; it is made by a small coterie of leaders, many of them with anti-Western mindsets and KGB backgrounds. And public opinion in Russia is easily manipulated.

President Medvedev, who does not have a KGB background, and some others in the elite represent a different strand of opinion. They have been pushing for a liberalisation of Russia’s approach to some important domestic and external policies. On most issues they haven’t made much progress, but a shift in Moscow’s foreign policy attitudes has become evident in recent months.

A leaked document and insider commentary published in Russki Newsweek last month casts interesting light on this change of direction. The material, said to come from the Russian Foreign Ministry, looks plausible and Moscow has not denied its authenticity. It shows that the global financial crisis, and particularly the slump in energy commodity prices, which sent Russian GDP down by 8 per cent in 2009, led to a decision to realign foreign policy. The document advocates a more pragmatic orientation towards the West, particularly the European Union, with a view to attracting renewed foreign investment and generally maximising economic benefits from foreign relations for the “modernisation” agenda being fronted by Medvedev.

Medvedev’s liberalism, or indeed the extent of his influence on Russia’s political agenda, should not be overstated. While the president would have pushed for this decision, the leaked material suggests that Putin was also closely involved and that his decision to organise a joint commemoration of the Katyn anniversary last April was crucial in catalysing energetic implementation of the new line. The purpose in Poland’s case, the leaks make clear, was to bring Warsaw on side to ensure it would not use its influence in the EU to block any breakthrough by Russia with the EU as a whole.

The document also makes clear that Russia, while seeking to improve relations with the West, is not lessening its efforts to draw former Soviet republics back under its wing. It calls for economic penetration of a range of strategic industries in the post-Soviet space, explicitly including those that once belonged to the Soviet military-industrial complex. Even the Baltic states, now NATO and EU members, are to be targeted for “strategic” investment, exploiting their economic vulnerability following the global crisis. And other adversarial features typical of Putin’s foreign polices in recent years are also still apparent.

In short, all this looks more like a change of mind than a change of heart in Moscow, with significant implications for Poland. Even on Katyn, it remains possible that the Kremlin could again obfuscate. Russian media have recently given space to a new conspiracy theory alleging that Katyn documents aired in Yeltsin’s time were an elaborate forgery.

Until Russia confronts its Soviet past squarely and consistently, and draws the necessary conclusions from doing so, its relations not just with Poland, but with many other neighbours and Western partners may continue to oscillate between the fragile and the fraught. •

John Besemeres is a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for European Studies at the Australian National University.

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IN A RECENT review of Anna Politkovskaya’s Nothing but the Truth: Selected Dispatches, Francesca Beddie offers her take on Politkovskaya’s brand of journalism: “She sees things in black and white. She does not shy away from judgments. She preaches rather than analyses.” All of it, of course, is in the past tense because Politkovskaya has been dead for almost four years, gunned down by an assassin – still at large – in her apartment building in the centre of Moscow.

Beddie, who was a diplomat in Moscow in the 1990s and, until recently, a member of the Australian Press Council, is clearly an ardent advocate of the cold-headed school of journalism. If only Politkovskaya could have suppressed “her anger and indignation,” she writes; if only she could have seen “the virtue in a more tempered use of language.”

Beddie’s review of the posthumous collection is a sterling example of cold-headed penmanship. It would have been easy, after all, to bake readers in the rhetorical fire, evoking a female reporter of legendary fearlessness, undeterred by repeated threats, beatings and a poisoning. But Beddie is not interested in turning Politkovskaya into a martyr or a pin-up (a refusal that would no doubt have pleased her). For Beddie, the murdered journalist’s life seems in many ways wasted. Not just because Politkovskaya was only forty-eight when she was killed, but also because – so Beddie believes – she had poured too much of her energy and talent into all manner of proselytising. This was at the expense of offering her readers an objective and cold-headed analysis of Putin’s Russia and of the situation in Chechnya – Politkovskaya’s principal subject matter in later years. (Not unjustly, some commentators call Chechnya Russia’s Vietnam.)

Beddie is intent on making a larger point here, of course – that a journalist no longer in possession of a cold head is likely to turn into a zealot, a crusader, someone who campaigns rather than reports. Hot-headed journalists, in other words, cannot help but put the cart (their emotions and convictions) before the horse (the story itself). No wonder journalism of this kind is doomed to self-destruct. Or so goes the rather well-rehearsed argument.

What is it with the fetishisation of cold heads in journalism? Granted, certain professions – the ones that land planes and perform keyhole surgeries – cannot adequately function without them, but don’t we have a cluster of rather distinguished hot heads to thank for some of today’s most powerful and enduring reporting? The late and much-loved Australian journalist Pamela Bone comes to mind, described in a eulogy by Michael Gawenda as “the most authentic journalist” he has ever known. And if you look up the most recent Pulitzer Prize winners in the investigative reporting category – the natural habitat for most of Politkovskaya’s dispatches – these guys and gals come across as very much the hot-headed types. I am not starting a list here, although if someone else does (“the best of hot-headed journalism”), I’d be eternally grateful.

American journalist Philip Gourevitch who, like Pamela Bone, was in Rwanda in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, said subsequently – in a statement decidedly at odds with the usual journalistic objectivity and impartiality mantra – that an insistence on cold-headed journalistic neutrality in the face of a human catastrophe was “obscene.” In real emergencies, Gourevitch continued, this much-prized neutrality was frequently no longer morally neutral. For Politkovskaya, Chechnya was precisely this kind of an emergency, not only for the people of the region but for the whole of Russia. Any insistence on dispassionate reporting from the Chechen conflict – with the pain, anger and shame diligently filtered out – seemed to her the height of cynicism.

It is a fundamental misjudging of Politkovskaya to suggest that she had an agenda or an intractable, ideologically inflected reading of the situation in Chechnya. She wrote the way she did because she refused to believe that her role as a journalist was to speak to the entrenched cynicism of her readers and her society. She loathed the “abhorrently cold, calculated cynicism” of the Russian state elevated to the level of politics (and she also wrote scathingly about European cynicism that allowed Chechnya to be largely forgotten). And she loathed, too, the cynicism that pervaded her own profession, dominated by reporters anxious not to inconvenience the authorities and their readers.

Even on a good day Politkovskaya was too much – too relentless, too opinionated, too acerbic, too direct and too desperate to be heard. She was too much of a party pooper, too much of a nuisance. Invariably and on more than one occasion she was wrong, sometimes infuriatingly so. But we expect that from people who work the way she did, writing about the most desperate and degrading of situations that human beings can find themselves in.

For the record, Politkovskaya’s head was cool enough to handle the Russian secret service, FSB, when they poisoned her, and to handle Russian soldiers when they threatened to rape her before – as a pièce de résistance – staging a mock execution. Her head, whatever its temperature, allowed Politkovskaya to walk into a theatre filled with hostages and guarded by (rather short-tempered) men with machine guns and women in black with explosives strapped to their bodies.

The issue here, of course, is that Politkovskaya was after justice, justice not just for any specific group, ethnically or ideologically defined, but for everyone – for mothers of Russian solders killed in Chechen wars and for mothers of Chechens killed by those very Russian soldiers, for families of children murdered in the 2004 Beslan hostage tragedy by Chechen terrorists and for the next generation of Chechen boys and girls being groomed to become “freedom fighters” and martyrs.

Politkovskaya did not appoint herself the judge or the jury, but she was by no means a faithful follower of the separation of powers. A member of the fourth estate, she could not delude herself into believing that the first three were functioning in a remotely plausible way or even maintaining a pretence of independence and integrity. She was after justice, not just the facts. On the basis of Politkovskaya’s reports, at least thirty-nine legal processes have been instigated: a startling record considering how much of a pariah Politkovskaya was in her later years and how adept Russia’s judiciary has been at protecting those in power.

We can debate, of course, the Russian journalist’s trespassing ways as well as her conviction that for any decent journalist reporting facts alone is never even remotely enough. But it is important we understand that her conviction was not born out of the instincts of a propagandist or powered by any strand of personal fanaticism.

A unique database has been created recently to provide information about “all the violent, premature or unexplained” deaths of journalists in Russia from 1993 to the present day. The list had 324 names when I checked it. I entered the word homicide in the “motive” drop-down box and got a list of 168 journalists. Politkovskaya’s name was on the first page, her death unsolved, her murderer and the client who paid for the hit neither found nor brought to justice. This would have hardly surprised Anna; after all, this is precisely what she had been saying for all those years: there is no such thing as a little bit lawless.

Bruce Shapiro, the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and a regular on Radio National’s Late Night Live, called the practice of journalism at its best “the fullest expression of citizenship.” This was Politkovskaya’s kind of journalism. Following her death, the Russian journalist Dmitry Dibrov wrote: “She embodied the spirit of journalism, which neophytes should study so as to preserve at least some respect for this profession.” He added: “Without Politkovskaya” Russia “will turn into the nation of commodity experts and aluminium exporters” at best.

In 2000 Anna Politkovskaya wrote an article for Novaya Gazeta about the ambush of a column of Russian soldiers on the border of Chechnya and Ingushetia. During her investigation, she came across all kinds of unclaimed objects scattered across the area – private things belonging to young boys from across Russia who would not be coming home. She gathered these belongings and brought them back with her to Moscow, so that families of Russian soldiers would have something of their sons in the eternity that was going to follow their death.

This is one story from her life. There are hundreds, probably many more than that. People came to her from across the country and Politkovskaya, knowing she was their last stop before complete despair, felt personally responsible to these people.

Did she get it fundamentally wrong? I am not so sure. If someone who is badly injured screams “Is there a doctor here?” a real doctor does not say, “Sorry, guys, I’m only an obstetrician.” Remember Dr Rob Carson – a GP in Maryborough who had to make a hole in the skull of a twelve-year-old boy to save him from dying. He did follow the phone instructions from a Melbourne neurosurgeon, but to operate he had to use a standard-issue household drill. “This little boy was dying in front of me,” Dr Carson said in an interview afterwards, “and that was actually more scary than anything I did.”

This doesn’t mean that we should advocate for a drill to become the medical tool of choice or that we should encourage doctors to get all gung-ho with household appliances. This story had such an impact because it was about what it meant to be a real doctor (and we have almost forgotten).

When we talk about the importance of cold heads in journalism it might look like we are taking journalism seriously, with cold heads standing in for impartiality, ethics and all the crucial checks and balances. Yet journalists are not diplomats and neither are they bureaucrats, they have (or should have) an altogether different function. Taking the job of a journalist seriously means that we recognise that sometimes journalists (just like Dr Carson) have to do everything – whisper, shout, analyse, throw hand grenades at their readers, whatever it takes to make something invisible visible, to push the weight of their stories through the walls of apathy and cynicism. Politkovskaya took her job seriously – in fact, as seriously as it could ever be taken. She left us with some of the true jewels of hot-headed journalism, works that for a moment seem to suspend all boundaries between people in her stories and us, her readers.

Of her brand of journalism I would say this. She saw people first in every situation. She was deterred neither by the colossal personal risks nor by the sheer scale of human tragedy she was compelled to cover. She told stories others did not dare touch.

All of this in the past tense, of course, because, tragically for all of us, Politkovskaya has been dead for almost four years, shot on her staircase by a man with a seriously cold head. •

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THE VICTORY of the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, in February’s Ukrainian presidential elections evoked curiously little concern in the West. Senior Western figures from President Obama down were quick to offer congratulations. Representatives of NATO and the European Union expressed confidence they would work with the new president to build on the strong cooperation that already exists.

In Moscow the reaction was euphoric, but discreetly so. After President Putin’s counter-productive intervention in the 2004 election, which helped trigger the Orange Revolution, the Russians were especially careful not to call the race till others had done so. The Kremlin had been studiedly neutral before the first round, except towards the outgoing president, Viktor Yushchenko, who was unrealistically seeking a second term but was so low in the opinion polls as to present little danger. During the run-off campaign between Yanukovych and then prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, Moscow maintained decorum. Tymoshenko had been conciliatory towards Russia in the months leading up to the poll, and from Moscow’s point of view, either she or Yanukovych would represent improvement. But it was clear that Yanukovych’s ultimate success was very welcome.

Some commentators suggest the outcome will not greatly affect Russian–Ukrainian relations one way or the other, and Western leaders seem to be implying that this is their judgement too. The fact that the new president travelled to Brussels ahead of his first trip to Moscow has been widely cited as confirmation of his declarations that he will seek to have good relations equally with Russia, the European Union and the United States. On 12–13 April, reinforcing the point, he will visit Washington. But he has said rather different things to his East Ukrainian constituents and Moscow interlocutors. And in fact his first significant meeting after the election, a fortnight before the Brussels visit, might well have been a long session one on one with Sergei Naryshkin, a senior emissary from Moscow.

All of which raises three important questions. Why did the Orange Revolution fail? Why has that failure evoked so little dismay in the West? And is it true that Yanukovych will not change Ukraine’s strategic direction?

“Ukraine fatigue”

The Orange forces did themselves few favours after they came to power in early 2005. Within months their leaders were at loggerheads. Having appointed Yulia Tymoshenko, the charismatic braided heroine of the Orange events, as prime minister, President Yushchenko sacked her before the year was out. Tymoshenko had adopted populist economic policies that former central banker Yushchenko rightly feared would be damaging. But there was also a jealous rivalry between them that grew as time passed, and by the time of this year’s election Yushchenko seemed mainly preoccupied with ensuring that their erstwhile common adversary Yanukovych would beat Tymoshenko for the presidency.

When Yanukovych used a coalition he had cobbled together in the fractious Ukrainian parliament to revise the electoral laws in his favour three days before the 2010 poll, Yushchenko signed the new legislation with indecent alacrity. In the run-off campaign Yushchenko called on all his supporters to vote against both the presidential candidates (which the voting forms permitted). Over a million did so, more than Yanukovych’s winning margin. And many voters in Orange strongholds stayed at home. It’s plausible to argue that Yushchenko’s campaign against Tymoshenko made the crucial difference.

Yushchenko’s actions can be explained partly by his reservations about Tymoshenko’s policies as prime minister. But in his last period in office, seeking to secure his western base in a forlorn campaign for a second term, Yushchenko pursued some populist issues of his own. It was perfectly legitimate for him to pursue the question of Stalin’s role in the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s that killed millions (the order of magnitude as well as the precise motives remain disputed); to try to advance the cause of Ukrainian, long suppressed, as the national language; and perhaps also to push for some re-evaluation of the role of Ukrainian nationalist groups involved in the bloody events of the 1930s and 40s in western Ukraine (and pre-war Eastern Poland). But the way he went about it was divisive within Ukraine and at times damaged Ukraine’s interests ly.

While Yushchenko may have done more to launch their feud, Tymoshenko responded in kind, at times cooperating with Yanukovych to frustrate the president. Her populism reached its apogee in her second stint as prime minister when her failure during 2009 to meet the terms of an International Monetary Fund bailout led to its suspension. Tymoshenko can certainly claim extenuating circumstances. Ukraine was in diabolical trouble as a result of the global financial crisis (its economy shrank by 15 per cent in 2009) and any leader in her place – particularly one with presidential ambitions – would have been desperate to get financial support and keep voters happy by maintaining unaffordable handouts. But during all this she sorely tested the patience of her Western partners and creditors.

The Orange forces have been justly blamed for the dismal state of the economy. But despite its relatively modest resource endowment, Ukraine’s economic growth was actually outstripping that of its larger neighbour, Russia, throughout the noughties. Its nosedive in 2009 was an extreme product of the global crisis, but not without parallels elsewhere, both West and East (Ireland, Latvia). Ukraine was particularly at risk because of Moscow’s abrupt price hikes of its oil and gas imports, and the deep slump in the price of steel, its staple export. Even accepting Russia’s argument that its gas prices were merely being raised to market levels (though other customers were paying much less), the hikes were particularly hard on Ukraine, whose economy was heavily gas-dependent. In brief, the Orange forces were a bit unlucky to be caught when the music stopped.

EU governments and creditors are hoping that if Yanukovych decisively pursues the stability he has proclaimed as his prime objective then the basket case may start to recover, requiring less external attention and largesse. And they hope that gas deliveries to Western Europe might continue undisturbed by the gas wars that had become almost an annual mid-winter event during the Orange ascendancy. Yanukovych’s makeover as a Europe-friendly democrat (partly the work of his American PR advisers) encourages them to see him as a safe pair of hands.

Enlargement fatigue

More broadly, much of Western Europe now feels that the reasonable limits of EU and NATO expansion have been reached. The poor performance of some countries involved in the most recent large expansion of the European Union, in particular Romania and Bulgaria, has led to impatience and cynicism in Brussels. That these two are both Orthodox (rather than Catholic or Protestant) countries, which in Eastern Europe seem more prone to corruption and other problems of concern to potential EU paymasters, is a factor that counts against the largely Orthodox Ukraine.

Hostility towards enlargement has seeped into many EU electorates as well, and core EU governments have become much more assertive about expressing it. Exceptions may ultimately be made for some small Western Balkan countries, largely for security reasons, but not quickly. The disruptions caused by the global financial crisis in core Europe have reinforced the mood and the recent sharp economic downturns in the Baltic states and Hungary have added to it. The fact that the troubles have now affected a long-term EU member like Greece, and are threatening to spread to other existing members, does nothing to help supplicants further east. Not the least of Yanukovych’s advantages is that while he says he wants to join the European Union at some point, he may be less committed to it than he says he is. As for NATO, he makes it quite clear he won’t be applying.

The broader scepticism about enlargement contributed to the souring of attitudes towards the pro-Western Orange forces. Similar considerations apply to the pro-Western governments in Moldova and Georgia. Many Western Europeans saw the Georgian war as a warning against further eastern entanglements. In that respect, Ukraine raised even more worrying possibilities than Georgia. Yanukovych’s victory will offer reassurance that no alarming crises over the Russian Black Sea Fleet or similar Crimean issues are now likely to arise.

In fact, since the Georgian war, a feeling has been strengthening in some key European governments that flirting with Kiev or Tbilisi about possible NATO membership will damage relations with Russia, which must have priority. This kind of thinking, together with domestic economic factors, has led the French government to negotiate to sell four advanced Mistral amphibious assault vessels to Russia. Given that a senior Russian military commander has said that having these vessels in its armoury would have enabled Russia to deal with Georgia much more expeditiously, it’s not surprising that this prospective sale is causing acute alarm not only in Georgia but also in new NATO members whose territories are located on the Baltic Sea. Meanwhile, a group of former senior German officials (including a defence minister) have called for Russia to be invited to join NATO.

The United States, for its part, is keen to secure the support of Russia on issues of prior concern to the Obama administration, including Iran, Afghanistan and nuclear disarmament, and does not wish to antagonise it unnecessarily. So pressure from that quarter for enlargement of Euro-Atlantic structures is much diminished. The West’s growing reserve did not help the Orange forces domestically. And Ukrainian public opinion seems to be reciprocating. Support for NATO membership was always in the minority, something which Yushchenko’s ineffective and divisive leadership may have accentuated. But EU membership has also become a minority preference.

Yanukovych’s mandate

Some commentary about a stunning victory notwithstanding, Yanukovych’s starting position looked weak. He is actually the first Ukrainian president to have been elected with less than 50 per cent of the votes cast. His total vote was down on the last presidential elections by hundreds of thousands and his majority of 3.5 per cent over Tymoshenko much less than once seemed likely. Moreover, the powers of the presidency had been reduced by the constitutional deal that accompanied the Orange victory and played a big role in the unproductive stalemates of the past five years.

In any case, Yanukovych’s win is the proverbial poisoned chalice. While the economy is showing signs of stabilising after its free fall, there is a long way to go, and he will have to meet tough demands from the financial institutions and/or Moscow if he is to get the help he needs to overcome the crisis. Some necessary austerity measures will be hard to get through parliament and politically damaging to the leader attempting to do so.

More generally, any Ukrainian leader has to reckon with the tribal divisions in Ukrainian society and politics. Voting patterns in this election were as regionally divided as ever, with Yanukovych winning big in the Russophone east and south, and Tymoshenko easily carrying all the Ukrainian-speaking west and centre, thereby winning seventeen of Ukraine’s twenty-seven electoral districts.

What can we expect?

Whether the new president will seek to consolidate his authority to meet these challenges by using what in Moscow is called “political technology” remains to be seen. But some of his first steps do suggest it. After changing the electoral laws just before the run-off in his own favour, he then had himself and his chosen government confirmed by that same majority in a way widely regarded as unconstitutional. That majority – achieved by seducing defectors away from other parties by alleged bribery – was also used to postpone inconvenient local elections scheduled for May. The opposition has appealed the government’s formation to the Constitutional Court, but it seems unlikely that they would wish to overturn everything that has happened. Yanukovych has said that if the Court rules against him, he will call a snap election, a dismaying prospect for many. Tymoshenko has claimed that Yanukovych is exerting heavy pressure against the Court; he would not be the first Ukrainian president to do so.

Many are comparing Yanukovych with Leonid Kuchma (president from 1994 to 2004), who won the presidency by campaigning “from the east” but then sought to rule from the centre, including by improving his Ukrainian. Curiously, all of the three recent key protagonists are actually easterners by birth and upbringing. Yushchenko came from the east but was bitten by the nationalist bug while studying in western Ukraine, adopting Ukrainian as his preferred language and advancing it officially wherever possible. Tymoshenko comes from Russophone and Russophile Dnepropetrovsk (the home of Brezhnev’s push), but she too earnestly enhanced her Ukrainian and uses it widely. This was a winning card for her in the Orange events, and has helped moor her main base in the centre and west.

By contrast, Yanukovych is an easterner in sentiment, style and language. Many Ukrainians of Russian heritage in the east see themselves as both Russian and Ukrainian and perceive no difficulty in doing so. A minority identify simply as Russians. It would not be politically wise for Ukrainian politicians of national ambitions to present themselves as Russian in this latter sense and Yanukovych does not. He has made some efforts to improve his Ukrainian but, orally challenged in general, he seems not to relish speaking it. He has little rapport with the twenty million who prefer Ukrainian, especially the militant nationalists in the west. He will be more at home in Moscow than Brussels or Washington, and probably feels more comfortable in his native Donetsk than in Kiev, where Western sentiment and the Ukrainian language have made inroads since Soviet times, when Russian was dominant.

In his inauguration speech on 25 February, Yanukovych lamented the present state of the nation and the economy. He promised reform of governance with a cabinet of professionals, working transparently in tandem with the president. On foreign policy he pledged neutrality, and said he would seek the best possible relationships with Russia, the European Union and the United States.

Consistent with this even-handed pitch his first foreign trip was to Brussels on 1 March – four days before his first visit to Moscow, a fact widely commented on with satisfaction in the West. But according to the liberal Moscow paper, Kommersant, the head of the Russian Presidential Administration (and reportedly a former KGB official), Sergei Naryshkin, visited Yanukovych in Kiev on 13 February and spent six hours with him, one on one, discussing matters of mutual and evidently urgent interest. Naryshkin is a longstanding ally of Prime Minister Putin and seen by some as Putin’s man in President Medvedev’s entourage.

During his Brussels visit, Yanukovych certainly talked the EU talk (though he did not visit NATO). But some of his actions and pronouncements on the campaign trail and since have been less reassuring. He has said he will renegotiate the gas contract with Russia in a way that would appear to restore murky middlemen to the transactions, one of the murkiest of whom, Dmytro Firtash is a key Yanukovych backer, with close allies now elevated to high office. He has also said he will seek to create a three-way consortium, including one-third shares for Russia’s Gazprom and EU interests, to run Ukraine’s gas transit system. (It is a basic principle of Putin’s “energy diplomacy” that Gazprom – in other words, the Kremlin – should gain control where possible of other countries’ oil and gas infrastructure.) Tymoshenko, to her credit, had opposed both of these policies.

Yanukovych is obviously hoping these concessions to Russia would give Ukraine’s desperately cash-strapped gas importer, Naftohaz, some pricing relief and make it easier for the national economy to stay afloat. He also hopes they would dissuade Russia from diverting much of its gas exports from the Ukrainian pipelines (through which 80 per cent of Russia’s exports to Europe are currently channelled) to the controversial Nordstream and South Stream pipeline projects meant to bypass Ukraine. These projects represent a serious economic and strategic threat to Kiev, and advance Russia’s agenda of seeking a stronger hold over energy supplies to Europe and greater leverage over former vassal states to its West. It therefore seems very unlikely that Russia would agree to forgo them.

Yanukovych has also indicated he would consider favourably an extension of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s lease in Crimea, due to expire in 2017, which Yushchenko strongly opposed. The Crimea is strongly Russophone and Russophile, and the issue has been a source of great tension. There will also be European countries that would receive such a move with discreet relief. But some observers worry that Yanukovych might be prepared to accept a deal that would threaten Ukraine’s sovereignty.

On NATO, he has envisaged continuing existing cooperation in the near term, while ruling out accession. But despite the frequent comparisons, he seems to have rather less enthusiasm for NATO than did President Kuchma. His attitude towards the European Union has been more positive, and he clearly hopes to benefit as much as possible from economic co-operation with it. The European Union and the European Parliament, for their part, are holding out the prospect of future membership, and in the meantime a deep free-trade deal and visa-free travel for Ukrainians, both big attractions. Indeed they are more welcoming towards Yanukovych than they ever were towards the Orange leadership.

Whether Yanukovych is seriously intent on becoming a member is less clear. His earlier indications of readiness to consider joining Putin’s rival Russia–Belarus–Kazakhstan customs union (for which Putin suddenly last year demanded the right to negotiate entry into the World Trade Organization as a unit, thereby setting back Russia’s long-running WTO negotiations) cast some doubt on his personal commitment to either Europe or even to the WTO, of which Ukraine is already a member. Some influential oligarch supporters of Yushchenko’s Party of Regions want the deep free-trade deal with the European Union, which would rule out the customs union. But Yanukovych’s new prime minister is known to be a strong supporter.

On the campaign trail, Yanukovych held out the prospect of making Russian the second official state language. Reversing some of Yushchenko’s vigorous boosting of Ukrainian, including in areas where Russian is strongly dominant, would ease tensions and not be unreasonable. Elevating it to the status of second language would be more controversial and, like an extension of the Crimean lease, politically and constitutionally difficult. Since becoming president, Yanukovych has distanced himself from any such formal proposal, while trying to reassure his Russophone supporters. But that is probably a change of tactic rather than a change of heart. Certainly the opposition expects that Russian will become the de facto official language in government circles.

On the day of his inauguration, Yanukovych accepted a blessing from the Moscow Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a provocative gesture towards Ukraine’s Greek Catholics and followers of the two Ukrainian Orthodox churches. Kirill has proven to be a very active and skilled supporter of the Russian imperial interest in Ukraine, which he is promising to visit again soon. He has a large following in the Russophone regions, but his visits to the country have not been uncontroversial. Symbols like these may point to Yanukovych’s likely choices over the longer term. They may also be damaging to the country’s fragile internal balance.

Very controversially, Yanukovych has in the past intimated his government might recognise the “independence” of Georgia’s breakaway territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. If it did so, Ukraine would join a select group of countries made up of Russia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Nauru. Even the Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko has so far resisted Moscow’s blandishments to recognise Russia’s two client statelets. Such a move would certainly damage Kiev’s relations with Western countries from whom it needs financial and other support. So recognition by Kiev seems unlikely, but if it did happen, it would be a very clear indication of Ukraine’s trajectory.

Yanukovych will offer Russia other opportunities. Russian businesses and investors will be favoured more than at present, provided that they do not walk all over Yanukovych’s Ukrainian oligarch backers, who are increasingly interested in Western markets. Purveyors of Russian language and culture will be made very welcome in the media and elsewhere. Efforts to check Russian espionage and penetration are likely to become a thing of the past. Military access in the Crimea and elsewhere, despite Yanukovych’s professions of neutrality, may be extended. Ukraine’s links with Georgia and other Russian bêtes noires will be phased down or out. Security cooperation with NATO will be scrutinised far more critically than under Yushchenko. And so on.

Finally and more broadly, there is the question of the extent to which Yanukovych will preserve the gains of the Orange Revolution. Notwithstanding some recent commentary, these are actually considerable. While Ukraine has not been improving on corruption and investment climate ratings, on a range of indices of socio-political progress it has strengthened its position since 2004, whereas Russia has declined. On the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (examining a wide range of socio-economic and governance issues) Ukraine went from forty-fourth place in 2003 to thirty-seventh in 2010 (Russia from forty-first to sixty-fifth). On Freedom House’s freedom of the press index, Ukraine went from sixty-eighth in 2004 to fifty-fifth in 2009 (Russia from sixty-seventh to eightieth), and other related indices – civil rights, for example – recorded a similar pattern. Reporters without Borders indices gave Ukraine a score of 51 in 2004 (zero would be ideal), and 22 in 2009 (while Russia declined from 51 to 61). Even on one index of corruption, for which it is acquiring proverbial status, Ukraine comes out ahead of Russia, with Georgia incidentally markedly better again.

Whatever their limitations, these findings clearly depict a pattern, the same pattern that many less systematic observers broadly agree on. Ukraine is corrupt and chaotic (though not uniquely so) but it has made good progress in the last few years towards democracy. It is for this reason that a number of prominent journalists frozen out of the public space in Russia have departed to Ukraine to practise their craft. And it is also for this reason that Putin seems chronically worried that Russian politics may become “Ukrainianised.”

Will Yanukovych maintain this progress? Despite some of his recent pronouncements, he is not one of nature’s democrats. And he will be facing very difficult problems and a strong, unrelenting opposition. The temptation to cut corners will be great. This was, after all, the man who sought to steal the 2004 presidential election and has never acknowledged or publicly regretted doing so. At the very least, it seems a safe bet the next presidential elections will be less democratic than the ones just past.

Yanukovych’s people

Where the new president goes will depend substantially on his key advisers. Yanukovych is often presented as being the creature of his patrons and handlers. And he is routinely mocked for his gaffes and inarticulate presentation, not only in his laboured Ukrainian, but also in Russian. He once referred to Russian playwright Anton Chekhov as a Ukrainian poet, and identified the celebrated Russian poet Anna Akhmatova publicly as Anna Akhmetova (the tasty irony in this being that his biggest backer is Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov). All the gibes about Yanukovych overstate the case. He is clearly a capable politician who has successfully maintained the cohesion of his diverse party. But given that diversity, where Russophile zealots mingle with pragmatic moderates, his personnel choices are important pointers both to his intentions and to likely outcomes.

Yanukovych’s first appointments were to his presidential administration. The choice of Serhiy Lyovochkin as head of the administration was not encouraging. Lyovochkin has links to some intermediary companies in the gas trade from Russia through Ukraine to Europe, involving murky arrangements widely seen as facilitating corruption and damaging Ukrainian national interests. Yanukovych, however, has said he wants to return to those old arrangements, which Tymoshenko had finally succeeded in dismantling.

Lyovochkin’s deputies are a mixed bunch. Most are veterans of the later, more autocratic and Russia-leaning phase of Kuchma’s government or are old mates of the president (or both), one of them having worked in Yanukovych’s electoral headquarters when and where the fraudulent results were manufactured in 2004. Two senior women in the presidential administration, noted economist Irina Akimova and Hanna Herman, are more centrist and pro-European. But the new prime minister (a very close ally of Yanukovych and of whom more in a moment) has declared that economic reform is not women’s business, to the outrage of women’s groups. He has no women in his cabinet of twenty-nine.

After winning the run-off Yanukovych named his three preferred front-runners for the premiership: Serhiy Tyhypko, Nikolai Azarov and Arseny Yatseniuk. Tyhypko and Yatseniuk are both political technocrats with past exposure at the top, who performed strongly in the first round of the presidential elections, presenting themselves as a “third force” between the opposing sides. As premier, either would have been a sign that Yanukovych indeed wished to rule from the centre.

But his choice fell on Azarov, a partisan Regions Party politician, regarded by many as a Soviet-style statist in his approach to financial management. He came to Ukraine from his native Russia only in his thirties, does not speak Ukrainian and, as a deeply pro-Russian figure, will be alienating for the Orange constituencies.

The cabinet appointed to serve under Azarov is even more discouraging in its composition. Few appointees are remarkable for their competence. Thirteen of the twenty-nine ministers are from just two Eastern provinces: Donetsk (Yanukovych’s home province) and Luhansk. Eastern oligarchs are particularly heavily represented, including the Gazprom-friendly Firtash group, to which the gas sector has been substantially entrusted. Bizarrely, the gas lobby has also been given charge of the State Security Service. The new security chief has denounced his Orange predecessor for having opened too many Soviet-era files, and has said that under his control the agency will concentrate on guarding secrets rather than exposing them. He has also called for radical extension of his right to tap phones without court approval.

The new minister for education is a well-known pro-Moscow figure who has declared in the past that western Ukrainians are not really Ukrainians at all. His appointment has predictably outraged the Ukrainian-speaking western provinces. To their further outrage, several diehard Russophiles have been appointed to internal security positions in those provinces. The new defence minister is a former naval commander in which capacity he had excellent relations with Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. And the deputy premier for humanitarian affairs (language, culture and matters pertaining to identity politics) has recently called for “discussion” of a union of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. That was not a good look just before Yanukovych’s forthcoming trip to Washington, and his office has reportedly rejected the proposal. But it was Yanukovych who gave the deputy premier his job.

None of this looks like ruling from the centre. In fact Yanukovych’s appointments and his government’s first steps and pronouncements look more like a sharp turn towards both Moscow and winner-takes-all, despite his precarious majority. The Orange opposition, meanwhile, true to form, is continuing to fragment and squabble.

Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven

Yanukovych’s native Donbas was a loyal region of the Soviet Union, and Yanukovych one of its typical products. His instincts, behaviour and, so far, most of his policy declarations all point to that fact. And Russia will be bending all its efforts to draw him into a close, cooperative and preferably subordinate relationship. Few Russians can accept the idea of Ukraine as a separate country. With an eastern-led Ukraine more or less obediently at its side, nationalists in Russia, who include many in the present regime, could again aspire to empire. Theirs would be an entity of nearly 200 million, with much of its old Soviet-era military potential again fully under its control. Belarus, and other fragments of Moscow’s former domains – and not just South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria – might then feel more impelled to embrace its leadership. The geopolitics of the region could be transformed in Moscow’s favour.

There can be no doubt that many in Russia and a smallish but active minority in Ukraine feel drawn to this vision. But even if he nurtured such impulses himself, Yanukovych would understand that to set off down that path could lead to serious turbulence within his domain that could threaten his own undoing. Cordial fraternal ties with Russia would be as much as the market could comfortably bear.

In any case, few in positions of power wish to embrace a diminution of their own role. Even Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus (who calls his KGB the KGB, who for most of his tenure has run his country like a Soviet theme park, and whose population is much more Russified than Ukraine’s), has been increasingly defiant of late.

Nonetheless, Ukraine’s weakness and Yanukovych’s ethno-political inclinations present Russia with some serious possibilities for future gains if their man can consolidate his grip on power. Russia knows its target far more intimately than its Western rivals ever will. Provided it can restrain its customary impulse to treat its prodigal little brothers with imperial arrogance, it should be able to make some solid headway over the next few years. One thing it will not be doing is encouraging the new Ukrainian leadership to lovingly preserve the fragile democratic achievements of the Orange Revolution.

A sharp turnaround?

Yanukovych’s first official visit to Moscow on 5 March produced few visible results. But he naturally struck a very different tone to the one he had adopted in Brussels a few days before, foreshadowing a “sharp turnaround” (krutoi povorot) in bilateral relations. He made clear again that joining NATO was off the agenda, that he looked forward to strategic partnership with Russia, and that the question of the Black Sea Fleet could be resolved to the mutual satisfaction of both countries. He also promised to rescind Yushchenko’s decrees declaring prominent anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalists of the 1930s and 40s to be Heroes of Ukraine. Rather ominously he praised Russia’s political stability and spoke disparagingly of Ukrainian politics and politicians. And he issued an invitation for President Medvedev to visit Ukraine before mid-year. The sides agreed to set up a joint commission to examine bilateral issues in the meantime.

Both Yanukovych and Azarov, on a separate visit later in March, sought a substantial reduction in gas prices for Ukraine, which is currently paying more than most other European customers, east or west. Recently Gazprom has felt obliged to relax its tough contractual terms to meet the needs of key Western clients, in recognition of the fact that the spot price has declined markedly because of falling demand and greater and more diversified supply in Europe. But while Kiev has again dangled the possible consortium to manage Ukraine’s gas infrastructure as an inducement, Russian statements seemed to offer little encouragement, emphasising rather that existing agreements would have to be carried out. Putin suggested Ukraine should join his customs union if it wanted cheaper gas.

In early March Kommersant reported that the Ukrainian side is already under pressure to move on a number of “delicate” questions. There is the matter of an agent of the Russian Federal Security Service detained under Yushchenko in a special security prison. And Russia was seeking the removal of US personnel from Ukraine. At the same time it was said to be demanding that the Russian Federal Security Service be able to resume its work in the Black Sea Fleet (it was required to leave late last year), and made clear to the Ukrainians that it expected all military cooperation with Georgia to cease.

Medvedev’s visit to Kiev, scheduled for 20 May, should tell us something, but it is too early to say how the relationship will develop. Reporting on the spate of bilateral meetings that have occurred so far would seem to suggest that Russia is playing hardball. On 5 April, a week ahead of his trip to Washington, Yanukovych made another, supposedly “private” visit to Moscow (during which he met his counterpart Medvedev), but nothing has yet emerged from it into the public domain. He seems prepared to meet Moscow more than halfway on matters relating to language, culture, hard-core security, sentimental ties and what might be loosely termed identity politics. On economic issues though conciliatory, he will not be a pushover, not least because in Ukraine’s present straitened circumstances he cannot afford to be, but also because some of his oligarch supporters want that free-trade deal with the European Union. His Washington visit will be intended, among other things, to send a message to Moscow that it should not take him too much for granted. The West’s best option at this stage for retaining a solid foothold in Kiev may be to talk nicely, offer incentives, and hope Putin oversteps again, as he did in 2004. •

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IN MID OCTOBER a Russian historian researching the treatment of Germans in the Soviet Union during the second world war was arrested and charged with breaching privacy laws. The Guardian reported that Mikhail Suprun was detained by Russian security service officers, who searched his apartment and confiscated his research archives. His arrest came as a reminder of how the Stalinist era remains a live issue in post-Soviet Russian politics.

As if reminders were needed. Last year the Russian Academy of Sciences and the government-owned television network, Russia Channel, instituted a nationwide search for the historical figure that best represents the Russia of today. Modelled on the BBC’s 100 Greatest Britons, the project commenced with five hundred potential candidates for the title of “The Name of Russia.” By the end of the process Joseph Stalin had gathered enough votes to finish third, and rumours strongly suggested that the organisers had resorted to tampering with the votes to avoid the scandalous possibility that the Soviet leader would finish at the top of the list.

On the broadcast itself Stalin was presented as a flawed and ambiguous character. (“Flawed” must be the euphemism du jour of the early twenty-first century.) Yes, viewers were told, the man was known for occasionally pillaging and plundering, but let us not forget that he also turned a backward, agrarian and deeply dysfunctional country into an industrialised superpower. He was making an enormous omelette so can we please stop counting the broken eggs. Then, of course, the extra-heavy weaponry was wheeled out – the Stalin-led Soviet victory in the second world war. As achievements go, you can’t beat stopping Hitler from enslaving Europe and wiping the Soviet nation off the surface of the earth. In Britain, by the way, 100 Great Britons was won by Winston Churchill, who beat Diana, Shakespeare and Charles Darwin to the title.

The millions of votes cast for Stalin would have been simply inconceivable in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But by 2008, seventeen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, things had changed. There were, of course, protests from democratic and human rights organisations and historians, who argued that the very fact that Stalin was on the list was completely unacceptable, particularly while his victims and their families were still alive. In Germany, as protesters pointed out, no Third Reich figures were allowed to be nominated in a comparable contest because they had long since been recognised as criminals. Not so in Russia. The organisers responded by appealing to the always handy principles of democracy. Surely an open discussion of Stalin’s significance in the history of his country was a sign of a healthy and robust civic society. As a Russian saying goes, “You cannot throw words out of a song.”

How do we make sense of the rehabilitation of the Soviet regime – and particularly the figure of Stalin – in present-day Russia? In the independent Russian media and in the western media, this phenomenon is rarely explained without reference to some kind of caricature. It may be the supposed masochistic craving for an iron fist deeply ingrained in the Russian psyche, or a case of a nationwide über-forgetting of mythic proportions. Or it might reflect the power of mass hypnosis attributed to the government of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.

THERE is no denying that the current government is engaged in a concerted campaign of rehabilitating all things Soviet – its leaders, its achievements and its legacy – minus, of course, the regrettable “excesses” of purges and forced collectivisation. After all, when he was still president Putin famously described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century. This campaign of rehabilitation can be seen in government rhetoric and in messages laundered through government-controlled media outlets, in the shutting down of archives and culling of history textbooks, and in the unlawful raids on the offices of the human rights and historical preservation society, Memorial – the most important voice for preserving the memory of Stalinism in Russia.

The rehabilitation of the Soviet era is also evident in the emergence of youth movements such as Mishki, the Russian word for teddy bear. Mishki’s full name is the Youth Organisation for the All-Round Development of Personality, Patriotic and Moral Education of Children and Youth. Yulia Zimova, its twenty-something-year-old founder, has told journalists that the movement’s aim is to teach children pride in their town and country, responsibility, independence and concern for others. It would sound like a harmless version of the Scouts if it had not been set up by members of Nashi, a youth organisation with strong links to the Kremlin, conceived as a Russian response to the Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution.” Some journalists who do not share Nashi’s devotion to Putin as Russia’s saviour have referred to the young members of the movement as “nashists,” and references abound to fascism and Hitler-Jugend, as well as to Soviet-era youth groups such as the Octobrists, Young Pioneers and Komsomol.

What does Nashi want? They want a full and swift restoration of Russia’s greatness. They want people to be dripping with pride in their country. They want the rest of the world, America and Britain in particular, to sit up and listen. (Shaking in fear will be the next step, of course, all things going to plan.) They want a “clean,” “strong” and “united” Russia, and that means sweeping the country with a big, long broom to rid it of all kinds of scum – ethnics, democrats, prostitutes. Nashi does not limit itself to ideological warfare; the movement offers paramilitary training to give its members the important life skills for breaking up opposition rallies. As a phenomenon, Mishki is both obscene (forced political participation of children is illegal even in Russia, to say nothing of being deeply immoral) and unintentionally hilarious, especially in its infantilisation of the political sphere. In all seriousness Mishki has asked Putin to become the head of their movement – the Chief Teddy Bear.

When Putin was still president one of Mishki’s slogans proclaimed, “Thank you Mr Putin for our stable future.” As the journalist Lev Rubinstein noted, this time Putin had outdone even Stalin. In Stalin’s times, the slogan was “Thank you to Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood.” Now Putin was being thanked for the future he apparently has rendered stable.

In fact, analogies between Putin and Stalin abound in popular culture. As do the jokes.

Stalin’s ghost appears to Vladimir Putin in a dream. Troubled by the crippled economy, Putin asks the Great Dead Leader for advice. “Round up and shoot all the democrats, and then paint the inside of the Kremlin blue,” Stalin replies. “Why blue?” Putin asks. “Ha!” says Stalin. “I knew you wouldn’t ask me about the first part.”

or

Putin gets up in the middle of the night and goes to the refrigerator. When he opens the door, a dish of jellied meat begins to tremble. “Don’t worry,” says Putin, “I’ve only come for a beer.”

It is, of course, all too tempting to think of Putin as the direct heir to Stalin and his brand of neo-totalitarianism as a far more moderate, modern and ideologically savvy version of Stalin’s iron fist. But like most historical analogies, this one is not particularly illuminating. As the Russian writer and journalist Dmitriy Bykov argues, “In the case of Putin we are dealing not with the cult of personality – since the personality barely manifests itself and, plus, it is hermetically sealed from strangers’ eyes – but with the cult of substance.”

This substance is virtually impossible to define. Because it encapsulates “collective expectations which are greater than any kind of logic,” it is “a phantom of mass self-hypnosis.” The way Bykov sees it, Putin’s rule is not comparable to Stalin’s cult of personality because Putin is not a personality but the archetypal man without qualities, the medium for the masses.

Arseniy Roginskiy, the chair of Memorial, argues that the rehabilitation of Stalin, as such, was not the objective of the current government. Rather, it was a by-product of the rehabilitation of the idea of Russia as a great nation and of the concerted campaign to re-legitimise the authority of the state, which began in the early 1990s. The vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet regime was filled by certain heavily mythologised moments taken from Soviet history, with the Soviet victory in the second world war foremost among them. Sociologist Lev Gudkov points out that the victory of 1945 is, in fact, “the only positive reference point for the national consciousness of the post-Soviet society.” Surveys show that the identification of the war and the Soviet victory as the most important historical event of the twentieth century has only grown (and grown significantly) in the last decade or so. And the war is so inextricably linked with the figure of Stalin that any growth in its symbolic power is bound to increase Stalin’s legitimacy. In fact, the more the figure of Stalin is associated with the war, the weaker his links appear to be to the history of political terror and mass repressions.

Russian sociologist Boris Dubin suggests that contemporary Russia is “a society lacking in depth, characterised by flatness.” Quick to tire of anything complex or burdensome, it has been unable to hold on to a historical awareness of the crimes committed by the Soviet leadership, which were revealed under Gorbachev. Dubin believes that the outpouring and wide public circulation of memories of Stalinism in the late 1980s and 1990s was a tool of political confrontation between the reformers and the old regime. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, this confrontation was essentially exhausted and the urge to remember and to bear witness seemed to lose its cultural and social imperative. The idea that a strong and self-aware civic society is dependent on the active historical consciousness of its members has, he says, become an abstraction.

And, indeed, in a country in which, if you so much as scratch the surface of most family histories, you are likely to discover first-hand experiences of gulags, deportations and state terror, there are no legal processes by which the atrocities of Stalinism can officially be recognised and condemned as crimes against humanity. Unlike, say, South Africa or Argentina, Russia has had no Truth Commission, no Never Again report, no mechanisms to enable the nationwide work of testimony, witnessing and mourning. Russia has had nothing like the wholesale memorialisation of its traumatic history that we have seen in Germany or the United States. There is no central monument to the victims of terror. The location of most mass graves remains unknown, and streets across the nation still carry the names of Stalin’s henchmen. That victims of Stalinism and their families could receive an official apology like the one delivered by Kevin Rudd to Indigenous Australians is unimaginable.

ON THE SURFACE, this looks almost like a clinical picture of collective amnesia or, in psychoanalytic terms, the mass repression of mass repressions – only this is not quite the case. On the contrary, in today’s Russia can be found not an absence of memories of totalitarianism and Stalinism but a profound surplus. There is an incredibly rich, voluminous and constantly growing body of highly credible literature that painstakingly chronicles both specific experiences and the broader historical narratives underpinning the fate of millions of Soviet citizens killed, imprisoned, deported, sent to gulags or forced to live in constant terror. There is so much material, much of it available freely on the internet, that you could spend a lifetime reading. The historical legacy of Soviet terror, in other words, is being painstakingly remembered and just as painstakingly forgotten.

It must be said that the situation in Russia is markedly different from that in many other post-Soviet nations (and in countries of the former Eastern bloc more broadly). Ukraine and the Baltic states, for instance, are experiencing the process Ukrainian historian Gregoriy Kasyanov calls the “nationalisation” and “privatisation” of history. This kind of oppositional national history is used as the cornerstone for the revival of national consciousness and identity, an argument first for sovereignty and then for an unbroken tradition of a unified (and invariably democratic) national consciousness. And with historical narratives so firmly ensconced in the “politics” corner (however noble we may judge all aspirations of sovereignty and self-determination to be), what people choose to remember in public or semi-public forums very quickly becomes a question of allegiances and loyalty.

In Russia the picture is significantly more complex. While claims about the past are an integral part of political debates, the vast body of testimony and historical documents relating to the Soviet regime, and specifically to the history and legacy of Stalinism, has not been able to counter widespread forgetting or misremembering. By and large, attempts to mobilise this massive and constantly growing repository of private memories, public documents and historical work to act as an effective antidote to the falsification of historical accounts have failed. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it seemed as if social memory was the force that was going to put an end to the deployment of history as pure ideology – and then something went awry. It seems clear that the outpouring of people’s memories about what happened under Stalin did become part of Russia’s civic culture through the publication of survivor accounts, archival documents and serious works of history, through TV programs and films, but ultimately this outpouring has not been able to reconfigure Russia’s public sphere in any profound or lasting sense. The hardware has remained the same.

Russian historians based at Memorial point to the need to counter the persistent immateriality of the memory of Soviet totalitarianism as one of the most important historical battles they are facing today. For any true social change to occur, the victims of Stalinism, they say, need to be named. Their families need to know where their loved ones are buried. The material remains of gulags, prisons, mines and other types of industrial projects built on the slave labour of the camp inmates and special deportees need to be identified and marked. A central museum needs to be built. Memorials need to spring up in city centres rather than on the outskirts or as part of cemeteries. Plaques need to be put on the buildings where people were tortured and from which they were taken. Nothing, historians say, will stop people from forgetting until the memory of Soviet totalitarianism becomes part of the material fabric of Russian cities and towns, until children simply bump into things on their way somewhere and feel compelled to ask questions of their parents. It is a tragedy that at present their wish list seems outrageously implausible – almost as implausible as Stalin narrowly missing out on becoming “The Name of Russia.” •

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IT IS DIFFICULT to imagine a less likely firebrand than Dr Evgenii Gontmakher, the mild-mannered head of a social policy research centre in the Russian Academy of Sciences. Even one of the Putin regime’s most militant defenders has described him as “unimpeachably loyal.” But last November, Gontmakher ignited a political firestorm by publishing an article titled “Novocherkassk 2009” in Vedomosti, a leading Russian business newspaper affiliated with the Financial Times. His title alluded to a notorious Soviet-era massacre of workers protesting in 1962 against rises in food prices and work norms in the town of Novocherkassk. Gontmakher set out to explain, in fourteen steps, how a similar social explosion could erupt today in “N-sk,” one of 700 Russian “mono-towns” whose economic life revolves around a single industrial employer.

In Gontmakher’s narrative, the crisis in N-sk is triggered by the decision of the employer to begin mass layoffs in a bid to avert bankruptcy. The social impact of this step is magnified by the fact that the corrupt local bureaucracy has stifled small business, so there are few alternative sources of employment. The city administration, paralysed by its dependence on orders from Moscow, flees its offices when faced by mass protests. When the local police fail to intervene against their fellow townsfolk, the demonstrators occupy administrative buildings and begin to create their own alternative power structures. The collapse of local authority is completed by the resignation of the regional governor. By the time the Kremlin has finally taken action to restore order by offering credit to the bankrupt employer, a similar chain reaction has started in “town M-sk.”

The fact that Gontmakher’s scenario became a political sensation was partly a result of the kind of bureaucratic ineptitude that he portrayed. A senior official of the government department responsible for overseeing mass communications sent a warning letter to Vedomosti, claiming that the article could incite “extremism.” In Putin’s Russia, this nebulous term is one of the markers of the limits of the permissible, and in theory the very existence of the newspaper was under threat. Legislation passed in 2006 outlaws incitement to extremist activity and public statements that excuse such activity. Although ostensibly directed against Islamist terrorism and skinhead violence, the anti-extremism legislation has been repeatedly invoked by the security organs in their campaign against the mainstream political opposition. Its application to Gontmakher seemed to mark a new stage in the suffocation of public debate. As the journalist Yuliya Latynina remarked, “If Gontmakher, a highly scholarly man, can really be equated with Bin Laden, I certainly do not know who can consider himself safe in our country.”

What makes the vilification of Gontmakher particularly ironic is the fact that officials from Putin’s office contacted this “extremist” to thank him for a “timely warning” that would be incorporated into the government’s crisis-management strategy. The lessons they learned may have been reflected in a decision, several weeks later, to send units of Interior Ministry troops from Moscow across six time zones to suppress protests in Vladivostok, where, as in Gontmakher’s “N-sk,” local forces could not be trusted.

The controversy surrounding Gontmakher reflects the ambivalence of his analysis. If he offers useful tools to Putin’s crisis managers, he has also become emblematic of an increasingly vocal faction within the Russian elite which is questioning the basic tenets of the authoritarian, corporatist state that emerged under Putin. One of the bastions of this tendency is the Institute for Contemporary Development, a think tank linked both to the presidential administration and to powerful business circles. It was launched in March 2008 by President Medvedev, who heads its board of trustees. Its director, Igor Yurgens, is the vice-president of Russia’s pre-eminent business lobbying association, the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.

In February this year, Yurgens used the occasion of the launching of a report on anti-crisis measures to propound a subversive thesis about the necessity of democratisation. He argued that in the years after Putin’s accession to the presidency “the social contract consisted of limiting of civil rights in exchange for economic well-being. At the current moment, economic well-being is shrinking. Correspondingly, civil rights should expand. It’s just simple logic.”

Yurgens’ “simple logic” is vehemently rejected by the architects of Russia’s “managed democracy.” The most strident is Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s deputy chief of staff, who is widely regarded as the regime’s unofficial ideologist. During Putin’s second term, Surkov supervised the creation of the pro-regime youth movement “Nashi” and popularised the term “sovereign democracy” to legitimise uncompetitive elections and controls over non-government organisations. On 3 March, Surkov lashed out at the advocates of democratic reform in a speech to a conference marking a milestone in the history of “sovereign democracy”: the first anniversary of Dmitrii Medvedev’s victory in tightly controlled presidential elections. “Of course,” he declared, “this model will survive the crisis.” To justify his confidence, he extolled the advantages of strong government over the chaotic pluralism of the 1990s, when economic troubles inevitably precipitated the fall of governments. Mocking the pretensions of Russian liberals as “free people,” he contended that, if realised, their dream of liberalisation would lead only to the extinction of the remnants of liberty in Russia and the establishment of a durable dictatorship. “With all due respect for free people,” he sneered, “those free people would have stirred up so much trouble here that, afterward, someone who does not love freedom would have come along and introduced order for another 100 years.”

Surkov’s defence of the Putin model came the day after a more sinister attack on the liberals by Gleb Pavlovskii, a former dissident who is the Kremlin’s leading spin-doctor. In an interview with the pro-government newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, Pavlovskii argued that the real threat to the regime came not from the streets but from the enemy within, a “pro-crisis party” in state institutions who want to trigger “a little new coup,” a “farcical remake” of the failed putsch of August 1991 or Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. According to Pavlovskii, this “party” was numerically small, but it included “people at the pinnacle of the federal authorities, big business, circles in the capital, [and] some of the [regional] governors.” If the regime faltered, these turncoats would come into the open and attempt to instigate mass protests and assume the mantle of revolutionaries.

WHAT THE PUTIN REGIME’s apologists can no longer deny is the fact that the Russian economy is reeling from the double impact of plummeting oil prices and the credit crunch. Russia’s much vaunted gold and foreign currency reserves, the third-largest in the world before the crisis, may be exhausted by the end of this year. During the second half of 2008, the Russian stock market lost over 70 per cent of its value. Even Oleg Deripaska, Russia’s richest man and Putin’s favourite oligarch, has fallen on hard times. According to some estimates, his wealth contracted by 85 per cent; only a state bailout saved him from defaulting on loans to Western banks. Meanwhile ordinary Russians face rising unemployment and soaring underemployment. As demand collapses, factories are idling and many enterprises have reduced their workforce to a two or three day week.

The contribution of the Russian government to this escalating internal crisis is now a focus of bitter debate. At every opportunity, Putin and his entourage lambast the incompetence of the US government and the recklessness of Wall Street. For them, Russia is an innocent victim of an American contagion.

No one in the liberal opposition denies that the origins of the current crisis are to be found across the Atlantic, but there is now a chorus of voices drawing attention to the ways that Russia’s economic malaise has been aggravated by the actions of its own government. The most outspoken are Boris Nemtsov, a former vice-premier, and Vladimir Milov, a former energy minister, who marked the end of Putin’s presidency with a major critical study of his economic record. In early March, they updated their project with a new report on the response of the Putin–Medvedev “tandemocracy” to the global economic crisis. They showed how the regime believed its own self-congratulatory propaganda about Russia’s special position as an “island of stability” in the global financial storm. As late as October, Putin was still insisting that “we have complications but no crisis.”

The result of this self-delusion was a sequence of catastrophic blunders. First, Putin’s government squandered a third of its hard currency reserves, over $200 billion, in a futile defence of the rouble, whose devaluation was inevitable because of the collapse of energy prices. Second, it provided the banking sector with a massive injection of roubles, which were promptly spent on hard currency, increasing the pressure on the Russian currency. Third, capital flight was aggravated by Putin’s latest round of intimidation directed at business leaders, which began in July with his mafiosi-like suggestion that “we send a doctor” to Igor Zyuzin, the director of the coal-mining conglomerate Mechel, who had failed on health grounds to attend a discussion of allegations that he was charging excessive prices to local industry. The ensuing collapse of Mechel’s share price triggered a crisis of business confidence and a rapid outflow of capital to the West. This surge became a torrent in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Georgia and its aggressive anti-Western posturing on the stage. At this point, Putin presided over a debacle that Nemtsov and Milov hailed as the “apotheosis of government’s incompetence,” the November budget, which was based upon utterly unrealistic estimates for inflation, the exchange rate, GDP growth and oil prices. The Russian state was left without a viable budget for the first time since the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

In their conclusions, Nemtsov and Milov threw down the gauntlet to the apologists for dictatorship. They argued that the closed, authoritarian, corrupted model of the state created by Putin has demonstrated its ineffectiveness in dealing with the challenges of the global economic crisis. Therefore, “the dismantling of Putinism and the restoration of democracy is the most important instrument of anti-crisis action.” This dismantling, they insist, “should begin with the resignation of the government of Vladimir Putin.”

But dismantling an authoritarian state is easier said than done. Dmitrii Medvedev’s accession to the presidency inspired many with hopes of a political thaw, a gradual opening up of the political system. Medvedev’s liberal instincts are suggested by his repeated criticism of “legal nihilism” and his connections with institutional critics of Putinism like Gontmakher and Yurgens. His meeting with the editor of the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta after the murder of the journalist Anastasia Baburova contrasted spectacularly with Putin’s spiteful reaction two years earlier to the murder of her co-worker, Anna Politkovskaya.

But Putin remains Russia’s dominant politician. As premier, he supervises the daily work of government. As the head of United Russia, the “party of power,” he sits at the centre of a network of bureaucratic influence that extends across the country. As a former KGB agent, he is the pre-eminent representative of the siloviki, the security officials whom he ushered into the upper echelons of government. Informally, he enjoys a symbolic status as “leader of the nation,” a designation that was coined by United Russia officials as part of an abortive proposal for the perpetuation of his pre-eminence after his departure from the presidency.

Certainly no challenge to Putin is likely to originate in the parliament, the State Duma, which is little more than a rubber stamp for his whims. The Duma’s ethos was summed up by its speaker, former interior minister Boris Gryzlov, who boasted in 2004 that it is “not a place for debate.” The illusion of a multiparty system is sustained only by the continuing existence of the Communist Party, an ossified totalitarian relic in terminal decline. The other ostensibly left-wing party, “A Just Russia,” is a fabrication of Kremlin “political-technologists.” A tame liberal counterpart, “Right Cause,” was unveiled last November after the dissolution of one of the remaining liberal parties, the Union of Right Forces.

Nor are there any signs that the mainstream media will repeat the experience of their Soviet-era predecessors as flagships of reform during Gorbachev’s perestroika. Whilst vigorous debate and honest reporting can be found on the radio station Ekho Moskvy and in the pages of three newspapers, the major television networks adhere closely to government guidelines for political coverage. A host of opposition leaders and prominent commentators have been placed on “Stop Lists,” which effectively ban their appearance on national television. In one notorious incident, the economist Mikhail Delyagin was filmed as a member of a discussion panel on a current affairs show, and had to be digitally erased during the production process. All that remained of his participation were his legs.

BUT BEYOND the carefully policed borders of Russia’s public sphere there are signs of ferment. The leaders of the democratic movement, long divided by personal rivalries and backroom deals with the Kremlin, have at last begun to rally around a common program. Despite a massive campaign of harassment, a new democratic movement, named Solidarnost (“Solidarity”) after its Polish predecessor, held its founding congress on the outskirts of Moscow on 12 December last year, the anniversary of the adoption of the Yeltsin constitution. Its leadership council unites many of the most charismatic and effective opposition activists: Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Milov, Garry Kasparov, Lev Ponomaryov and Ilya Yashin. Solidarnost’s programme, “300 Steps to Freedom,” is the most elaborate statement of democratic demands in over a decade.

Now Solidarnost is testing the limits of Russia’s “managed democracy.” Exploiting the fact that mayoral elections are not yet subject to the controls that have stifled competition in national elections, Nemtsov is running as a candidate for mayor of Sochi, a city on the Black Sea coast with a population of 400,000. Widely regarded as Russia’s summer capital, Sochi is a favourite site for high-level meetings, and a playground of the Russian elite. For the Kremlin, Sochi has immense symbolic importance because it is due to host the Winter Olympics in 2014, one of Putin’s pet projects.

For many observers, the fact that Nemtsov was even registered as a candidate represented a minor miracle. Both the security forces and the pro-regime youth movement “Nashi” appear to have fixed him in their sights. Two attackers, including a man dressed as a woman who was later exposed as a “Nashi” activist, sprayed a cocktail of Coca-Cola and ammonia into Nemtsov’s face. Then, $US5000 was paid into his bank account by a Russian emigrant in New York in an apparent effort to put him in violation of regulations outlawing foreign funding of political campaigns. Whilst these efforts failed to derail Nemtsov’s registration, official pressure shows no signs of abating. The police have confiscated truckloads of his election leaflets and the local media are conducting what his campaign manager, Ilya Yashin, calls an “information war.”

The Sochi poll, due on 26 April, has become a microcosm of the struggle over Russia’s future. The authorities’ fear of Nemtsov’s bold campaign – which threatens to force its candidate into a second round of voting – refutes the claims of many Western commentators that Russia’s democratic movement is a spent force. Undeterred by dirty tricks, street thuggery, public vilification, and the likelihood of major electoral fraud, Solidarnost has begun to illuminate not merely the brutality but also the incompetence of Putinism. For the first time in a decade, Russian democrats have reason to hope. •

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The runaway success of Suite Française (“A masterpiece… ripped from oblivion,” shrieks the cover, courtesy of Le Monde) led to a minor republishing explosion once it was realised that a whole clutch of short Némirovsky novels, or novellas, had been out of print since before her death. So far, four of these early works (the originals all being in French, although Némirovsky’s childhood language was Russian) have been translated into English.

The first, David Golder, was originally published in 1929 when the author was twenty-six, earning her instant fame. Its republication in 2007 fuelled a trans-Atlantic controversy. Némirovsky, the literary heroine and Auschwitz martyr, was accused in some quarters of being anti-Semitic, a “self-hating Jew,” with David Golder cited in evidence. Golder is the rich, Jewish father of Joyce, a beautiful, spoiled and self-obsessed eighteen-year old, who both exploits and despises the luxury and self-indulgence of her parents and their friends. Living by and for money, or what it can buy, Joyce and her mother take for granted the champagne, holidays, jewels, cars and lovers that are of course paid for by Golder, who at sixty-odd has grown heavy, tired and ill. Besotted by his daughter, he allows her to relieve him of huge sums of money.

The circles Némirovsky describes are not only unpleasant but highly stereotyped, doing little for her reputation as a writer. But Golder himself saves the novel by breaking out of the mould. Frightened by the suicide of an associate and by his own increasing heart pains, he begins to give his life some meaning, first by examining it, and then, more surprisingly, by withdrawing from it. The revelation of his slow, painful awakening and precipitous descent into loneliness and despair is deeply touching; it redeems the novel artistically while putting paid to crude political denigration.

The most recent offering by translator Sandra Smith is another short novel, The Courilof Affair, first published in 1933. Set in Russia in 1903, the year in which Némirovsky was born, it fictionalises a specific historical event, but one typical of the many terrorist acts from the 1860s onwards that were portents of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 the regime had become increasingly oppressive and the people, especially students, correspondingly radical. In January 1901, following a wave of demonstrations, the education minister, Bogoliepov, forced 200 student leaders into the army. In February a student named Karpovich shot Bogoliepov in the neck, wounding him fatally.

Némirovsky’s novella tells the story of a student known as Léon M, the child of Russian revolutionaries, brought up in Switzerland; the education minister is called Valerian Alexandrovitch Courilof. M studies medicine, more or less, in a clinic rather than a university, and is appointed as a kind of personal nurse to the ailing Courilof. The minister, unaware of M’s Russian parentage, speaks freely in front of him while M waits for the order to kill him to come through.

Rather like Golder, Courilof, who at first appears quite repellent, is slowly humanised through familiarity and then pity – thus posing a dilemma for M. The gradual, credible softening of attitude is by far the most successful part of the novella in terms of the writing, but it comes close to the climax and more cannot be said without disclosing the plot. Unfortunately, until that point is reached, there are enough weaknesses to make one wonder whether this book would ever have been published did it not form part of the Némirovsky juvenilia (as it were), or perhaps the translator’s pot of gold.

One annoyance is that Smith has retained Némirovsky’s Frenchification of Russian names, which makes them sound unnatural to anyone used to English transliteration (Kourilov, Alexandrovich) when reading in English. Another is that although her rendering of Suite Française was pleasing, here there are grating errors such as the use of “lay” instead of “lie” and “hung” instead of “hanged.” But Smith cannot be blamed for one of Némirovsky’s own ineptitudes: an “elderly,” white-haired Jewish widow comes to plead with the minister on behalf of her denounced son. She is pathetic enough until it turns out, unbelievably, that the son is sixteen and the “old woman” the mother of three still younger children.

These quibbles may seem trivial, but they add up to a feeling of inauthenticity; and while the emergence of a Courilof as a man to be pitied rather than reviled is well done, there are many better accounts of Russian revolutionary activity in English, starting with Dostoevsky’s The Devils. The revolution, even that of 1905, was a long time acoming. •

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