The Russia Conundrum

CHAPTER 13

ENEMY AT THE GATES

When I came to live in London after my release from Vladimir Putin’s prison camps, I knew I would not be returning to my homeland anytime soon. It made me sad, but I have always been a person who tries to make the best of his situation and minimise futile regrets. I already spoke a little English, but now I decided I must properly master the language of my new host country – something I am still working on. Like all students, I regarded television as an important tool. I watched the BBC news, dramas, thrillers, comedies and anything that could help my spoken English. One programme that caught my attention was the weekly quiz show Have I Got News for You. Some of the jokes between the panellists were hard for me to understand, but they were discussing the events of that week’s news, which gave me the key to what was going on. Having arrived from a country in which criticism of the authorities leads to unfortunate consequences (a similar Russian TV show was banned for mocking Putin), I was glad to see the freedom with which Have I Got News for You poked fun at the people in power. But what really struck me were the programme’s opening titles, in which cartoon figures acted out recent news stories.

About halfway through the titles, they showed an evil-looking Russian man in a fur hat and military greatcoat grinning wildly as he closed down a pipeline carrying gas and oil to the West, followed by a sequence in which Western Europe is plunged into darkness. It was so far removed from the self-image that Russians have of themselves that I jumped out of my chair.

The vast majority of Russians regard their country as peaceful and well-intentioned, a force for goodness and moral behaviour. In their eyes, the villains and aggressors, the real culprits behind the deteriorating global situation, are in the West. It was the West that historically invaded Russian lands; and the Russian people have been constantly told that the West has now pushed NATO military forces eastwards to the Russian frontier.

At his annual news conference in December 2020, Vladimir Putin was asked if he, as president of Russia, bore any responsibility for the dangerous state of East–West relations. Asked if he felt Russia was ‘whiter than white’ in terms of culpability for the ‘new Cold War’, he replied angrily, ‘By comparison with you [the West], yes we are! We are indeed whiter than white. We agreed to release from Soviet domin- ation all those countries that wanted to live and develop independently. We heard your [the West’s] promises that NATO would not advance eastwards to our borders, but you did not keep your promises!’

It can be shocking to discover that the other side has a very different view of us from that which we have of ourselves. It is a feature of the East–West standoff that we have developed distorted images of each other – stereotypical views that categorise others as villains while we ourselves are the ‘good guys’. If we are ever going to break down the psychological barriers between us, we need to overcome these stereotypes, to replace prejudice with open-mindedness and blinkered thinking with greater self-awareness. We need to look at ourselves with the same fierce glare that we shine on ‘the other’.

Is Russia Europe? This is an important issue that has been outstanding for several centuries. Geographically, Russia is undoubtedly Europe – 120 out of 144 million Russians live in the European part of our country. But from a cultural point of view, the answer is not so obvious. The question is an important one, because I believe the twenty-first century is an age of competition between civilisations: Euro-Atlantic, Islamic, Confucianist and so on. I happen to think that competition is good for the human race – it stops us stagnating and resting on our laurels. But competition also means struggle, the defence of one’s own interests and the choice of allies.

In this context, Russia is the last undecided country with a kindred European culture. Note that I say ‘kindred’ – perhaps even sisterly – but not totally the same. We are part of the European family, and inter-family conflicts are often the most difficult. Russia has always felt an ideological threat from Western Europe, which, given other geographical realities, means the threat of destruction and chaos. At the same time, Western Europe was and remains for us the model of an ideal future, which we sometimes try to adopt for ourselves. Suffice it to say that the ideologies of socialism and communism came to Russia from Germany, Great Britain and France. In Russia, they resulted in a tyrannical socialist state, while Western Europe also adopted them to some extent, but without the tyranny. Throughout the eras of tsarist autocracy, Soviet rule and now the two decades of Putin’s criminal gang, the West has been both an ideological enemy and the standard by which we measure ourselves. Every Russian recognises the old Soviet exhortation to ‘catch up with and overtake the West’ as the expression of our national inferiority.

Western Europe, on the other hand, has always felt threatened by Russia’s huge size, by its incomprehensible vastness and its disorderly nature. The West has tried to organise us in its own way or to distance itself from us, always without success. The West created strange images of the Russians: Western intellectuals saw us as terrifying Dostoyevskian characters, unaware that many Russians regard Dostoyevsky as a depressive outsider with psychological problems and his characters as incomprehensible in their sufferings, about which we have no desire to read. On the contrary, anyone who is familiar with popular Russian art and crafts – Khokhloma wood painting, Palekh lacquer miniatures, Gzhel ceramics – knows that they are distinguished by their cheerfulness and romanticism.

The psychological conflict between our branches of the common European civilisation did not begin with Putin, and his departure will not in itself put a stop to it. Up to the end of the Soviet era of stagnation, the government was promoting anti-Westernism, so the Russian people naturally regarded being pro-Western as a sort of protest. But Russians have made the usual error of psychological transference, assuming that because we love the West, the West must love us, too. That was bound to be a mistake. The West was busy with its own problems and the reduction of the threat from the east was simply seen as an opportunity to do business without interference. Western speculators and failed businessmen came to Russia, projecting their own problems on us. Russians took them to be examples of what all Western people were like (just as the West took us all to be Dostoyevskys).

The love began to fade. The symbolic turning point in the relationship was when Primakov decided to turn back his plane over the Atlantic after the NATO decision to bomb Yugoslavia in 1999. Those bombs hit us Russians in our hearts and created Russia’s version of our own Versailles syndrome. When Putin came to power, it allowed him to revive an anti-Western trope – that ‘the only thing the West understands is force’.

For a few years during his internal evolution, Putin understood the danger of such an approach, but his desire to get re-elected for a third term – and the need to keep Medvedev in his place – made the perpetuation of the image of a Western ‘enemy’ inevitable. Putin’s speech to the Munich Conference on Security Policy in 2007 was aimed at alarming the West, and also the Russian people: ‘the enemy is at our gates’, was his message to the domestic audience, ‘This is no time for thinking about democracy.’ The seed fell on fertile ground. The 2008 war with Georgia was the litmus test of this. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of the rest of Ukraine in 2022 signalled the beginning of a hybrid war with the West. It is no coincidence that Putin, according to several sources, chose Kiev at the start of the past decade to proclaim to his entourage that a Third World War was now inevitable, and he made the fateful decision to embark on a grandiose rearmament programme. The Russian economy and Russian society are now predicated on this concept. Russian foreign policy has been reoriented towards the east. Putin, in the spirit of Alexander Nevsky, is ready to sacrifice Russia’s political independence in order to enlist China in opposing Western ideas. But there is a massive gap between the interests of the ruling criminal gang in the Kremlin and the interests of the country. The Russian people and Russia herself have no antagonistic conflicts with the West. There is competition and a desire to preserve our own identity, but there is a clear understanding that historically we belong to a common civilisation, and an acceptance and willingness to draw on it to define the vision of our future.

The problem is that Putin and his entourage are unable to accept this vision. Democratic values, human rights, transparency of business, compromises and the refusal to use force as a tool of coercion and competition – all this is not just ideologically unacceptable to them, it objectively jeopardises their power and therefore their existence. The current generation of Russians have a choice of what relationship we wish to build when Putin is gone. We must decide if we perpetuate the insane paradigm of the Cold War, the paradigm in which ‘the only good [Russian] bear is a dead bear’, or whether we find a way to live together; perhaps not even together, but at least in friendly proximity …