A Few Scrappy Thoughts on 'Our Friends in the North'

Unenthused by much that is on television (even University Challenge is losing its appeal, thanks to the absurd number of non-general science questions inserted to make up for the low standard of the rest) I use my set to watch old films or TV series.

 

And I recently watched, for the first time ‘Our Friends in the North’, which I ignored when it was first on 1996 because every left-wing person I knew kept telling me how wonderful it was, and as a result I dismissed it as some sort of dramatic prelude to the coming Blairite takeover and the resulting vengeance for the Thatcher Terror which had until recently stalked the land, laying waste to the country with cuts.

 

 

Some of it is. The episode concerning the miners’ strike, though it gives  a couple of nods to the fact that Arthur Scargill held no ballot and called a coal strike in the summer, is pretty bog-standard leftist stuff. The miners who want to return to work are (for instance) portrayed as ugly, shifty trolls, the police drafted in from the South as caricature baddies. If only it had all been that simple.

 

But for a lot of it one wishes that there was a novel on which it was based, rather than a long-ago stage play by Peter Flannery (an almost exact contemporary of mine, having been born in October 1951). For it is obvious that the author, and the characters, know a lot of things about each other which the audience never find out. The viewer dips into their lives every few years (often politically significant ones) and has to guess what has happened in between. Each episode fades out with a once-popular song. For me these songs ceased to be familiar very quickly, as I have absolutely no idea of popular music after 1969.

 

But it is a powerful work, well worth watching.  It deals with serious things – the loss of belief on the left ‘We wanted to be part of something that used to exist’; the fact that London had become a sort of Gomorrah long before the sixties got properly under way and that the 1950s, far from being a golden age, had been a pretty squalid and uninspiring period (though the Obscene Publications Act had indeed destroyed any basis on which the police could really keep the porn industry in check) ; the corruption that went hand in hand with town planning. I was rather surprised at how easily some of the characters manage to join the Labour Party in the North-East in the 1960s and 1970s. The joke at the time was that new applicants, who were not in on the tight circle of power,  would be told ‘It’s full’.

 

It even dwells on, though has no answer to, the corruption of life which produces criminal louts, and the desperate sadness that the socialist pursuit of the New Jerusalem, the new houses, the libraries, the schools, do not in fact produce a contented society on their own, and may even be followed by worsening behaviour and morals. For man does not live by bread alone, and never will. As the grime and darkness were swept away, and the smoke cleared, another, less visible shadow fell over the places where the poor lived, the disorder and (later) the drugs. Not but what there’s a pretty accurate portrayal of desperate drunkenness and the hopeless misery of it.

 

I have to say I find it a bit of a stretch that a bright girl such as Mary Soulsby could be inveigled into parting with her virginity in a park, but I suppose if people didn’t behave out of character, the plots of these things could never get properly going.

 

And I was momentarily manoeuvred into sympathy for her boyfriend Nicky, when a collection of newspaper reptiles bait and jeer at him about his rather tricky past and it his attitude to the IRA. Then I remembered that there was actually a sub-machine gun still buried in his father’s back garden, a relic of his flirtation with Angry-Brigade-type terrorism. I have to say that my lot of leftists would never have had anything to do with that sort of thing. We didn’t like it, or think it worthwhile, and we knew very well it would disgust the tough old war veterans who still inhabited the Labour movement in large numbers in those days and who as Linda Grant says in her book about that that time ‘Upstairs at the Party’ , had already had their minds expanded quite enough in the Western Desert or on the D-day beaches.

 

 

Much of the portrayal of the North in the 1960s and 1970s reminded me of my time in York in 1970 to 1973. The North at that time still had a strong savour of the industrial revolution, a deeper blackness in the soot on the railway bridges, a darker light even in summer, a colder, sharper snap in the foggy winter air than you’d find now.  I have never forgotten the symbolic end of the age of coal, when they burned off the old town gas in the pipes in York, before pumping in the new stuff from the North Sea, and the streets were full of great iron torches glowing red, mounted above manholes which gave on to the gas mains. It lent the shabby streets a slightly hellish, glamorous air. It also made me think of the scruffy bit of Cambridge around the East Road where I offered my public-school self to help canvass for Labour in March 1966, and the actual night of the election on March 31^st , out on the fringes of oxford, knocking up the last of the voters for Harold Wilson. I have it in mind as a grey, windy twilight. I wonder if it really was. If only I’d known what I was doing.

 

And, as an active Trotskyist troublemaker, I spent quite a lot of time on council estates and at factory gates, or outside docks and mines. Many of the scenes brought all that back, sometimes more than I expected.

 

But who were these people in the drama? A young man with a father in the Shipyards who went on the Jarrow March, has won a place at Manchester University, and spent the summer on Civil Rights marches in the American South (where almost nobody form Britain could go in 1964, not least because of the severe foreign currency restrictions and the lack of cheap flights or sea passages). How did he do that, when his father is a shipyard worker who went, as a child, on the Jarrow March? How can he and his girlfriend ( a near neighbour)  understand the dirty joke in French that they share during what I think is an episode of what we used to call ‘heavy petting’ (Is it just me? Do most people really like watching actors simulating sexual acts on the TV screen, or does everyone find it an embarrassing turn-off, as I do)?

I suppose it must be assumed that (as this is 1964, when university rare and French, then as now, not widely spoken on the banks of the Tyne, Wear or Tees) both of them went to grammar school.  But it still doesn’t explain the American trip.

 

Funny how this part of our great social revolution, the grammar schools, isn’t even alluded to, though without it these people would not have been who they were.

 

It’s always that which haunts me when I look back at that time, the wide-open door through which the shipyard workers’ sons and daughters could make their way to the very top of everything, and did.

 

Now there are neither shipyards nor grammar schools. I’m not sure which loss I feel more keenly.

Billionaires and Cannabis

I am asked from time to time why I refer to Billionaire backing for the Big Dope campaign. ‘Big Dope’ is indeed my own formulation, coined to mock the fairtrade, supergreen, anti-corporate types who yet lend their support to a cause whose effect will be to create a whole new global market for a product rather more harmful than fizzy drinks or greasy burgers.

 

Well, here, in the Independent on Sunday, is some evidence of billionaire backing for this campaign.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/cannabis-campaign-soros-adds-weight-to-the-cause-1287434.html

 

You may think this is a bit long ago.

 

So here’s another, from the Washington Times ( I know a lot of people don’t like the Washington Times but I have found that its news staff are pretty good at what they do, and I don’t think these facts are challenged)

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/2/billionaire-george-soros-turns-cash-into-legalized/?page=all

 

And this was picked up by my own group here

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2596471/George-Soros-spent-80million-pot-legalized-US-Uruguay.html

 

No doubt Mr Soros is moved solely by libertarian idealism.

 

But It seems likely to me that the campaign is also supported by others, not so well known, who might benefit materially from the legal sale of marijuana across the world.

What is happening in Colorado, since Dope was Legalised?

Big Dope’s smug advocates like to say that , if my warnings about cannabis were true, American states where it has been legalised would already be running with blood. Of course, this isn’t so and I never said it would be. The effect of legal changes often lags some time behind the actual moment of change, and most cannabis users do not go crazy overnight (most don't, but alas, some do, as you will see from this report). Nor does every cannabis smoker become a violent criminal. But some do, and quite enough for us to be extremely worried about further steps to make this drug even more readily available than it is. 

 

I would think a proper controlled study over five years would probably be needed to reach a serious conclusion.

 

Even so, I think this report from Colorado, one of US states which has legalised cannabis, called marijuana there, should be cause for concern. The newspaper involved, the New York Times, is far from being socially conservative.   

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/after-5-months-of-sales-colorado-sees-the-downside-of-a-legal-high.html

 

 

 

Obviously No Connection Here

These news items, just in:

 

Eddie Ray Routh, killer of the ‘American Sniper’ author Chris Kyle, and his friend Chad Littlefield,

was a marijuana user.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-31617308

 

Routh’s lawyers said he was ‘psychotic’ at the time of the shootings two years ago.

 

The report says (readers of my articles will be unsurprised by all that follows) : ‘Routh, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, was under extreme mental distress and was convinced the two men would turn on him on the day of the killing, his lawyers argued.

The court also heard that Routh was under the influence of marijuana and alcohol at the time of the shooting. In addition, he had been prescribed anti-psychotic medication often used for schizophrenia, reported the Associated Press news agency.’

 

 

Richard Gatiss, the mugger who attacked Alan Barnes, a disabled and defenceless pensioner, was last convicted in 2009 for, wait for it, possession of cannabis, an offence which you pretty much have to commit in a police station three or four times while making faces before anyone will prosecute you for it (if then) .

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2966650/Thug-admits-assaulting-disabled-pensioner-Alan-Barnes-shocking-attack.html

 

There are two things in common here. The actions of both men were appalling, well outside the range of normal behaviour even for wicked and criminal persons.  Both were users of a drug still officially believed to be ‘soft’. If that belief were to be revised, then authority might make a connection between the drug abuse and the unhinged behaviour. But as long as the potent dogma, that cannabis is safe and ought to be decriminalised is promoted by the billionaire Big Dope lobby and its addle-headed dupes, the connection won’t be made.

 

And so a cannabis-frazzled killer or mugger will come into more and more of our lives as the years go by.

 

Any hostile commenters on this article are asked to declare whether they are cannabis users themselves, or have any interest in commercial sale of this drug. . If they don’t give this information, readers will be reasonably entitled to draw their own conclusions.

 

 

My Riposte to the Twitter Twisters and Cannabis Comment Warriors

Perhaps Twitter should be renamed ‘Twister’. The cannabis comment warriors were busy yesterday deliberately misunderstanding my article about cannabis. They posted such things as  ‘Peter Hitchens says cannabis causes terrorism’  or ‘Peter Hitchens blamed the Lee Rigby murder on cannabis’, then mocked the claim I didn’t actually make.

 

Perhaps my mistake was in giving my readers information intended to make them think. I am very tired of the weary drivel about the supposed Islamist threat, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘lone wolves’, usually accompanied by demands from MI5 and the politicians for more powers, and more money with which to enforce them.

 

Now, there are plenty of Islamist blowhards in this and other countries, who mutter privately or publicly about beheading the infidel, or who propagate Judophobic verbal sewage. And from time to time there are dreadful incidents in which such people get hold of weapons (or in some cases simply use cars for their purpose – shall we ban cars?) and kill.

 

I believe we should examine these events rationally. Can we prevent them? Possibly we can prevent some of them, though not by turning this country into a secret-police surveillance state , with every mosque monitored, every campus meeting checked for ‘extremism’  every e-mail and phone call logged and listened to. I do not think these things are organised by some central group, be it the fictional ‘Al Qaeda’ or the actually existing but very localised IS.  There’s never been any evidence that the killers in Ottawa, Sydney, Copenhagen, Paris or London were under instructions from anyone but their own drug-frazzled and irrational minds.

 

In a rare break from the standard rhetoric, Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said last week that there was ‘no indication that Copenhagen shooting suspect Omar El-Hussein was acting on behalf of a larger terrorist network. 

 

She added, in words that must have infuriated securocrats from Washington and London; ‘“He was known by the police for several criminal acts, including severe violence, and he was also known to be linked to a criminal gang in Copenhagen. But I want to also make very clear that we have no indication at this stage that he was part of a cell.’  

 

It was soon afterwards that it was revealed that he had twice been arrested for cannabis offences.  As I showed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/01/what-do-we-know-about-the-paris-outrages.html this was also true of the Paris murderers, and of several other recent killings, including the murder of a soldier in Ottawa. I recently discovered that the culprit of another soldier murder in Canada (this killer, like Lee Rigby’s, also used a car to make his first attack) was also a long-term marijuana user. I am fairly sure that the Sydney killer was, too. His bizarre record of crime, fantasy and erratic, wild irrationality stretched back for years, and Iran, from which he fled to avid fraud charges,  has severe problems with drug abuse. But nobody has bothered to find out because of the desire, in Australia’s media and political worlds,  to explain this purely as an Islamist event. And I cannot investigate it at this distance.

 

Am I saying, by pointing this out, that cannabis is the *cause* of these actions? No. First, it is people who commit crimes, not drugs. But I am pointing out an intersection, between crazy jihadism and heavy cannabis use, which seems to me to be to so prevalent that it *must* be worth investigating. At the moment, the authorities are not interested. After a recent school killing, I strove to find out if the culprit was a cannabis user.

 

 But the police involved were very unwilling to answer the question, and I was left with the impression that they had never investigated it. Why should they?   My interest in the dangers of cannabis is not shared by most of the media or by the state. My main aim now is to make sure that they are at least interested, and that this factor is at least looked into in all cases of severe violence.

 

Someone will always pop up on these discussions and tell me I am seeking to ‘excuse’ militant Islam. I am doing no such thing. Intolerant ideologues obviously play their part in putting these terrible desires into the minds of impressionable young men. But I doubt whether they would often get to the point of action if drugs were not involved.

 

Sane people don’t usually want to spend the rest of their lives in prison, or to be shot by the police. Sane people also usually see the problems involved in killing a fellow human being. Mad people don’t.

Which is why this also affects non-Islamists, as I showed with the case of Jared Loughner, in the case of the Sheffield  church organist, Alan Greaves, and as I showed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/high-and-violent.html in a selection of court cases where violent or otherwise irrational offenders were stated in evidence to have been cannabis users. Like the Rigby killers, some of these attacked or destroyed with cars, others with sharp blades.

 

Finally, I reproduced the testimony of Matthew Parris and Jon Snow, who recounted the unexpected powerful effects of cannabis on them (and in Mr Parris’s case, mentioned the personality changes undergone by his respectable middle-class friends who were cannabis users) . I did so because I suspect many people are still beguiled by the drug’s image as ‘soft’, when in facts its immediate effect on the brain is violent and severe. Does it really seem unlikely that repeated exposure to such experiences render the user permanently damaged? And yet people still dismiss the correlation, saying that cannabis sue is no more likely to send people mad than drinking tea, growing a moustache or using a certain type of computer software.

 

We can now add to this the recent experience of the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd ( a policeman’s daughter), who bravely tried legal cannabis in a candy bar, so as to deepen her research into marijuana legalisation in Colorado.

 

She wrote

'I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

‘I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

‘It took all night before it began to wear off, distressingly slowly. The next day, a medical consultant at an edibles plant where I was conducting an interview mentioned that candy bars like that are supposed to be cut into 16 pieces for novices; but that recommendation hadn’t been on the label.’

 

Yes, I know which bit of that the comment warriors will seize upon, and so do you. But it is the wrong bit. even in 16 pieces, this is *not a ‘soft’ drug. Later in the article, she said: ’But the state is also coming to grips with the darker side of unleashing a drug as potent as marijuana on a horde of tourists of all ages and tolerance levels seeking a mellow buzz.

 

‘In March, a 19-year-old Wyoming college student jumped off a Denver hotel balcony after eating a pot cookie with 65 milligrams of THC. In April, a Denver man ate pot-infused Karma Kandy and began talking like it was the end of the world, scaring his wife and three kids. Then he retrieved a handgun from a safe and killed his wife while she was on the phone with an emergency dispatcher.

 

‘As Jack Healy reported in The Times on Sunday, Colorado hospital officials “are treating growing numbers of children and adults sickened by potent doses of edible marijuana” and neighboring states are seeing more stoned drivers.’

 

The whole article can be found here http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/dowd-dont-harsh-our-mellow-dude.html?_r=0

 

Yet we do not simply face complacency over this. We face aggressive abuse and distortion of any attempt to combat it. That is something many of us will live to regret.

An RAF Reminiscence

I publish the following with the permission of the author, whose identity is known to me but which I will not reveal.

 

‘My father was in the RAF during the war, as a flight sergeant. I had never heard him talk about that time. When he was staying with me one I suggested we might go to the RAF museum in Hendon, thinking he would be interested in it. We did go, but he seemed very quiet and subdued during our visit. On the way home he told me that he didn’t like to remember his time in the RAF, because so often he had been preparing planes for men to fly off in, men he knew well and liked, who were not going to come back.

 

‘He also said that they were well aware of what the bombing was doing to the German people and their cities and this too preyed on his mind. Our family comes from Plymouth, which suffered badly from bombing in the war, but they knew the raids on Hamburg and Dresden were far worse. My father said that he and his fellow-servicemen did what they were ordered to do, but had no interest at all in revenge and thought the raids contributed little to the war effort.’

 

 

The real mind-blowing terror threat in our midst: cannabis

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Can you put two and two together? Have a try. The authorities, and most of the media, cannot.

Did you know that the Copenhagen killer, Omar El-Hussein, had twice been arrested (and twice let off) for cannabis possession? Probably not.

It was reported in Denmark but not prominently mentioned amid the usual swirling speculation about ‘links’ between El-Hussein and ‘Islamic State’, for which there is no evidence at all.

El-Hussein, a promising school student, mysteriously became so violent and ill- tempered that his own gang of petty criminals, The Brothers, actually expelled him.

Something similar happened in the lives of Lee Rigby’s killers, who underwent violent personality changes in their teens after becoming cannabis users.

The recent Paris killers were also known users of cannabis. So were the chaotic drifters who killed soldiers in Canada last year. So is the chief suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings of April 2013.

I might add that though these are all Muslims, who for rather obvious reasons are to be found among the marginalised in Europe and North America, it is not confined to them.

Jared Loughner, who killed six people and severely injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in 2011, was also a confirmed heavy cannabis user. When I searched newspaper archives for instances of violent crimes in this country in which culprits were said to be cannabis users, I found many.

One notable example was the pointless killing of Sheffield church organist Alan Greaves, randomly beaten to death by two laughing youths on Christmas Eve 2012. Both were cannabis smokers.

By itself, the link is interesting. I wonder how many other violent criminals would turn out to be heavy cannabis users, if only anyone ever asked.

But put it together with The Mail on Sunday’s exclusive story last week, showing a strong link between cannabis use and episodes of mental illness.

And then combine it with the confessions of two prominent British Left-wing figures, the former Tory MP and BBC favourite Matthew Parris, and Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow, who both tried ‘skunk’ cannabis (by far the most commonly available type in the Western world) for a TV documentary.

Mr Parris wrote: ‘The effect was stunning – and not (for me) in a good way. Short-term memory went walkabout. I would forget what I was talking about even while talking. I became shaky. Time went haywire.’

But immediate effects are one thing. What about long-term use? Mr Parris recounted that he had ‘too many friends’ for whom cannabis had seemed destructive. He quoted one as saying: ‘I think it changed me permanently as a person.’

He said his mainly socially liberal friends, including health workers, generally agreed that ‘heavy use of cannabis, particularly skunk, can be associated with big changes in behaviour’.

Jon Snow said simply: ‘By the time I was completely stoned, I felt utterly bereft. I felt as if my soul had been wrenched from my body.

'There was no one in my world. I was frightened, paranoid, and felt physically and mentally wrapped in a dense blanket of fog. I’ve worked in war zones, but I’ve never been as overwhelmingly frightened as I was when I was in the MRI scanner after taking skunk. I would never do it again.’

This is not some mild ‘soft’ thing. It is a potent, frightening mindbender. If it does this to men in late middle age who are educated, prosperous, successful and self-disciplined, what do you think it is doing to all those 13-year-olds who – thanks to its virtual decriminalisation – can buy it at a school near you, while the police do nothing?

And yet it is still fashionable in our elite to believe that cannabis should be even easier to get than it already is.

It is hard to think of a social evil so urgently in need of action to curb it. Why is nothing done? Need you ask?

Led into another disaster by a bunch of ignorant poseurs

The wild warmongering of our Government and our elite grows louder as our Armed Forces grow smaller.

Are these people up to the job? Can they read a map? Do they know any history? Do they have a clue what they are doing?

As you listen to the Defence Secretary’s bizarre raging about the Russian threat, remember that our Army is now even tinier than the token force Hitler allowed Vichy France to keep after 1940.

Under David Cameron, both the Army and the Navy have, in the past few years, thrown away huge amounts of valuable equipment, and got rid of a vast body of experienced men who cannot be replaced.

So why the belligerence? They surely do not intend to be tested. If they really believed that Russian tanks were about to roll into Riga, then we would be rearming like anything, not disarming as fast as we can.

So they don’t believe it. So why should we believe them? I used to scorn the Left-wing idea that small politicians sought conflict abroad because it made them look big at home.

But our Government’s amazing decision to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi seems to me to show that these clueless beings really are that bad.

They had no idea what they were doing, and now stand, dumb and amazed, as the country they claimed to be liberating descends deeper and deeper into murder, theft and fanaticism.

Even if they don’t care about that, they must surely worry about the resulting disaster, the unstoppable flight of countless economic migrants from Libya’s lawless coasts across the Mediterranean and on, across and throughout a borderless EU.

This, not terrorism, is how the Islamisation of Europe will come about, sooner than most people think.

It is this act of folly that we should be investigating, not the long-ago Iraq War. And these people should be banned from any further bloviating about war or foreign policy till an independent report on the Libya disaster has been published, and we know in detail that we are governed by third-rate, ignorant poseurs.

How can killing 350,000 be right?

If it was wrong (as it was) for the Germans to kill 43,000 British civilians by deliberately bombing their homes, why was it not also wrong for us to kill 350,000 German civilians by deliberately bombing their homes?

If you can’t answer this, then please don’t bother writing me rude, thoughtless letters because I – even more than the Archbishop of Canterbury – think we shouldn’t have engaged in this form of warfare.

This flock of easily-led sheep looks so familiar...

As I watched the new Aardman animation, Shaun The Sheep – The Movie, and its flock of all-too-easily led and conformist woolly creatures, I struggled to work out who they reminded me of.

Then it came to me in a flash – Britain’s monstrous regiment of political journalists.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

A (not so) Brief History of Crimea

All right, I admit it, it’s not that brief. I didn’t have time to shorten it. But what follows is a condensed history of the argument about who should control Crimea, one which still rages and which (as usual) is not as simple as politicians like to claim it is.

 

I’ll begin with a question.

 

What do you reckon is the date of this Reuters News Agency dispatch? I’ve slightly doctored one or two things in it, but only to conceal the date.

 

‘Elected officials in the Crimea voted on Monday to hold a referendum to resolve heated debates on the future status of the region.

 

‘A Moscow news agency said the regional council voted to issue a declaration restoring the Crimea's "statehood" and also to hold a vote to determine the future of the attractive peninsula on the shores of the Black Sea.

 

‘Moscow television suggested the referendum could take place early next February. It said the region, part of the Ukraine but with a large population of ethnic Russians and other groups, was sharply divided between maintaining its present status or rejoining the Russian Federation.’

 

Well, it was 12^th November 1990, nearly a quarter of a century ago.  And it forms the opening page in a fascinating file compiled for me by a friend and colleague in Moscow.

 

What it shows is that the issue of Crimea’s relations with Ukraine ( and of the Donbass region around Donetsk) was a live and troublesome matter even before the break-up of the USSR at the end of 1991. And it also shows that at one stage the recently-established Ukrainian  government  in Kiev acted with considerable ruthlessness to prevent a referendum in Crimea on independence, a referendum which had been requested by 246,000 of the peninsula’s 2.5 million people. I’ll come to the details of this forgotten scandal later.

 

This is especially paradoxical, since Moscow did nothing to prevent Ukraine from declaring its own independence from the USSR, nor did it act to prevent the referendum which confirmed this. At the time, it seemed as if pretty much anyone could declare independence from Moscow. But nobody could declare independence from Ukraine. Or else.

 

One explanation of this was that Russia had, by and large, been liberated from Soviet rule by democrats, or would-be democrats. But in the non-Russian parts of the USSR, liberation tended to be accomplished by nationalists. Nationalists are out of fashion now and frowned on by the EU, especially. But at that time, before and since, in this part of the world, they served a useful purpose in dismantling the Russian empire, as long ago suggested by our old friend Herr Richard von Kuehlmann, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Foreign Secretary, in 1918. So you will find that Ukrainian Georgian and Polish nationalism are viewed as nice nationalisms, in the post-modern halls of Brussels, where the idea is generally despised.

 

Russia, belatedly waking up to the danger,  has now turned nationalist itself, and that is very much not approved of. For Russian nationalism does not serve Kuehlmann’s prescient purpose, continued in modern times by his successors,  in dismantling the old Russian empire and creating a new liberal empire of ‘limited sovereignty’ dominated by German interests. Thus, it is the *wrong* kind of nationalism. Whereas Ukrainian nationalism (if anything even more chauvinistic, virulent and intolerant than the Russian version) is the *right* kind. Which shows that it is its effect on the European map, not its innate characteristics which decide which nationalism is cool, and which despicable.

 

But back to the day before yesterday, by the sunny, rugged shores of Crimea.

 

The BBC Monitoring service , on 19^th January 1991, picked up a report that the government of the Crimean Oblast (region) had scheduled a referendum on the legal status of Crimea, for the 20^th of that month.

 

On 21^st January, Dow Jones reported an overwhelming vote  (93% of an 80% turnout) for Crimean autonomy  - that is, separating the peninsula from the direct authority of Ukraine. This, of course was before Ukraine had declared its own independence. Russians in Crimea had long resented Krushchev’s 1954 transfer of their region to Ukraine from Russia.

 

But Ukrainian nationalists rightly realised this was a canny pre-emptive move, designed to prevent a new Ukrainian state seizing control of Crimea, and opening the way for a reunion with Russia.

 

The Ukrainian nationalist movement Rukh declared ( according to Reuters)

‘the referendum is an assault on the territorial integrity of the future Ukrainian state’.

 

In the following March, in a vote on Mikhail Gorbachev’s curious and murky ‘Union Treaty’ , a last attempt to hold the USSR together by consent instead of force,  87% of Crimean voters voted to stay in the Soviet Union and become independent.

 

This is outwardly puzzling, as the two seem contradictory. But there is an explanation. Presumably they believed a form of Crimean independence would be available within a loosened Union.  And they feared (with reason) the effects of Ukrainian independence on their lives.

 

Then came the failed KGB putsch in August 1991, which finally discredited the USSR and the Soviet Communist Party in the eyes of almost everybody, and spelt the end of both.

 

But very soon afterwards, on August 26^th 1991,  a statement issued in the name of the then Russian president Boris Yeltsin warned that borders would have to be redrawn if Ukraine and other republics quit. It’s often said these days that , though the Soviet borders between Russia and Ukraine are quite unfitted  for use as international frontiers, there was never any concern about this at the time of the split. The following newsagency despatch shows that this is not true.

 

 

 

‘Russia warned neighbouring Soviet republics on Monday that it would not let them secede from the Soviet Union taking large Russian-inhabited areas with them.

 

A statement issued in Russian President Boris Yeltsin's name said the Russian Federation reserved the right to review its borders with any adjacent republic which left the Union.

 

His spokesman, Pavel Voshchanov, who signed the statement, told reporters at the Russian parliament this referred mainly to northern Kazakhstan and to the Donbass region and the Crimea in the Ukraine.’

 

The ‘Donbass Region’ is of course the area around Donetsk and Lugansk, now in flames.

 

Instantly, Ukraine’s President Leonid Kravchuk reacted. Reuters reported the following day ‘Kravchuk said on Tuesday Soviet republics were concerned by Russia's warning that it would not allow those with large Russian populations to secede.

 

"(The statement) sent reverberations through the republics...Territorial claims are very dangerous and could end in problems for the people," Kravchuk told a news conference in the capital Kiev.’

 

Within a day, Boris Yeltsin had backed down (I suspect that when the archives are opened, if they ever are, it will turn out that he did so under pressure from the USA, but what do I know?)

 

Reuters reported :’PARIS, Aug 28, Reuter - Russian President Boris Yeltsin said on Wednesday Russia would respect the frontiers of republics that decided to sign the Union treaty.

 

"As for republics that stay in the (Soviet) Union, we will of course respect their frontiers, the Union treaty caters for frontiers to be respected," he said in an interview with French radio.

 

Yeltsin added that a joint Soviet-Russian delegation which flew to Kiev on Wednesday would tell Ukrainians that Russia would have no territorial claims on their republic if the Ukraine decided to stay in the Union.

 

The Ukraine's parliament declared independence from Moscow on Saturday subject to confirmation by a referendum in December.

 

The Soviet-Russian delegation's mission is to try to defuse Ukrainian alarm over Yeltsin's announcement on Monday that Russia reserved the right to contest borders with any republic that quit the Soviet Union.

 

His statement stirred historic suspicions of "Russian chauvinism" in the Ukraine, which contains two areas -- the Donbass and the Crimea -- populated mostly by Russians.

 

"Relations with Russia are becoming more and more complex as a result of Yeltsin's statement," an official in the Ukrainian administration earlier commented.

 

In the radio interview Yeltsin said questions of territory, frontiers, frontier security and diplomatic relations would all have to be settled by negotiation and "without shedding blood.

 

"When I speak of frontiers I am basing myself on laws and international treaties. If a state or republic leaves the union, then we will have to establish state-to-state relations by discussion around a table."

 

Soon afterwards, AP reported:  

 

‘MOSCOW (AP) - The Soviet legislature, backing Mikhail Gorbachev's bid to stem the collapse of central authority, voted today to send a delegation to the Ukraine to discourage the breadbasket republic's secessionist drive.

 

The delegation also will discuss potential border disputes with the Russian republic, which has thrown a scare into some of its neighbors by saying it reserves the right to review its borders with them.

 

Gorbachev put his political future on the line yesterday, threatening to resign if the Soviet Union cannot somehow be preserved and indicating he would settle for a loose alliance of sovereign states.’

 

These efforts would be a complete failure. The break-up of what was left of the USSR was complete by the end of the year, and the old Stalin-Krushchev borders survived.

 

But shortly before the final collapse, Crimea’s local parliament tried to throw a spanner in the works. On November 23^rd. AP reported :’ SIMFEROPOL, U.S.S.R. (AP) _ The Crimean parliament laid the groundwork for secession from the Ukraine when lawmakers approved a measure enabling the region to hold a referendum on its political future.

 

On Friday, lawmakers also sent a message to the Ukrainian parliament, asking it to continue to participate in Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's plan to hold the Soviet Union together as a loose federation.

 

The Crimea is an autonomous republic of 2.5 million people in an area that juts from the southern Ukraine in the Black Sea.

 

Its parliament, dominated by former Communist Party members, voted 153-3, with two abstentions, to hold a referendum to decide whether the Crimea should stay under Ukrainian jurisdiction, reunite with Russia or become independent. No date was set.

 

On March 17, voters in the Crimea gave 87.3 percent approval to Gorbachev's federation plan.

 

Ethnic Russians comprise 67 percent of the Crimea's population. Many of them worry that the Ukraine might try to exert more control on the region after the Ukraine's presidential election and referendum on independence, set for Dec. 1.

 

Crimean lawmaker Yuri Ryzhkov said he expected a referendum on Crimean secession within a month of the presidential election.’

 

On the 27^th, reuters reported ‘SIMFEROPOL, Soviet Union, Nov 27, Reuter - Angry and frightened Russians in the Crimea are vowing resistance to the idea of their fertile sunny peninsula becoming part of an independent Ukraine.

 

"I don't want to find myself living in a foreign country," shouted 67-year-old war veteran Georgy Malyshev, one of hundreds of Russians who demonstrated here last week outside the Crimean parliament.

 

Inside the parliament, still dominated by the old communist elite, deputies failed narrowly to approve an appeal to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev for the Crimea to be returned to Russia.

 

For nearly four decades, formal subordination to the Ukraine barely mattered as all vital decisions were taken in Moscow and official policy favoured Russian interests.

 

But now, with the Ukraine likely to opt for complete independence in a referendum on December 1, fears are growing that the Crimea could become a flashpoint of tension between Moscow and Kiev.

 

Anatoly Los, a Russian deputy to the Crimean parliament, said he expected the Crimea to vote "No" to Ukrainian independence in the referendum while the rest of the republic votes yes.’

 

On 1^st December AFP (Agence France Presse) reported a low turnout in Donbass and Crimea (and other heavily Russian regions) in the Ukrainian independence referendum

 

‘The Kharkhov and Odessa regions reported turnout of 62 percent, while in the Crimea just under 59 percent of the voters went to the polls.

 

In Donetsk, turnout was put at over 67 percent, while the lowest participation in the election -- 51 percent -- was in Sebastopol, the officials said.’

 

In Western Ukraine turnout was 87.8%, in Kiev, 80%.

 

On the 6^th January, the Wall Street Journal reported :

 

‘CRIMEA, Ukraine -- When empires start disintegrating, at what point do they stop? Ukraine has now firmly established itself as an independent state, but within Ukraine, there is the Crimea.

 

Home to 2.5 million people, with some 105 different nationalities living on its territory, Crimea, an autonomous republic located in the south of Ukraine, is like a miniature Soviet Union. It, too, is facing a shakeup.

 

While a surprising number of people here say they had never thought about the question of their own independence -- being an autonomous republic within a vast empire was enough -- they are now saying that with the Soviet machine having broken down, the Crimean people now want a shot at their sovereignty.

 

Only 52.6% of Crimeans voted in favor of the Ukrainian independence referendum that elsewhere passed overwhelmingly on Dec. 1. Many Crimeans would like to see their region affiliated with Russia…’

 

 Later in the report, it noted:

 

 

‘Mr. Kravchuk made a fact-finding visit to the autonomous republic on Oct. 23-24 after reports of civil unrest here and to persuade local deputies to vote yes to an independent Ukraine….

 

‘In no uncertain terms, he told the legislators they were not ready for independence -- the Crimea had neither a constitution nor other important laws in place that would guarantee success as a separate nation. Mr. Kravchuk drew applause, however, when he promised that under an independent Ukraine, the Crimea would maintain its current autonomous status, including a guarantee that all languages and cultures on that territory would be respected.

 

‘In a later press conference, Mr. Kravchuk said, "Ukraine will not be cut up into pieces. No one is going to look at all the painful points . . . with a red pencil. We won't sit at a table to cut up the territory. That would be the beginning of the end."

 

‘He noted Ukraine was ready to work with the Crimean parliament and people to build one unified country -- Ukraine.

 

"Today we want to create a nation. The majority of the Crimean people understand the only way to live is with Ukraine," he stressed.’

 

Round about this point, a movement began to collect signatures demanding a referendum on Crimean independence, a legal entitlement under Ukrainian law.

 

In the background, tension was growing between Moscow and Kiev about the future of the Russian naval facilities in Sevastopol.  The Russian Parliament, after the referendum crisis was over, even voted symbolically to rescind Krushchev’s transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. Plainly this had no practical effect at the time.  As Boris Yeltsin had discovered when he briefly sought border revision, Russia was too weak to reincorporate what it regarded as Russian parts of Ukraine.  But it staked an implied claim.

 

In February 1992, worried by the threat of an independence referendum, Kiev offered more autonomy to Crimea. By then, the independence campaigners, plainly with Russian backing, had already gathered 50,000 signatures.

 

On 21^st February, BBC Monitoring gave this account of a Kiev press conference given by President Leonid Kravchuk

 

‘Is the president of Ukraine going to hamper the collection of signatures and the holding of the referendum on the new status of Crimea? The answer to this question has clearly defined the attitude to processes which are taking place in Crimea and the possible solution of the Crimean issue.

 

[Kravchuk] If people are collecting signatures in order to determine their political situation in their region, I do not see anything unusual in it. Whether or not it is necessary to do that at present is another thing, in my opinion, since the referendum has already taken place and this peninsula has expressed its attitude both during the referendum on 1st December and during the other referendum [all-union referendum] and in a great number of resolutions of the supreme soviet of the Crimean republic - well, that is another matter.

 

But the president will not be able to ban or cancel this referendum. (My emphasis, PH)

 

 We can only pin our hopes on common sense, and the existing legal foundations and legal norms along with the Constitution of Ukraine and the paragraph concerning the Crimean republic which was made part of the constitution. This is the situation here. I somehow think that the supreme soviet of Crimea must show its attitude to this even if those signatures are collected - the supreme soviet must give its assessment of them and I would like it to be the supreme soviet of Crimea.’

 

Four days later, AP was reporting that the independence movement had collected enough signatures to trigger a vote: : ‘Crimea has ancient Greek ruins, Tatar castles, a stunning Black Sea coast, an important navy base and an angry majority of Russians who want independence from Ukraine.

 

‘Russians have gathered nearly 250,000 signatures, enough to force a referendum on Crimea's status. Such a vote would likely increase friction between Ukraine and Russia.

 

"Ukrainians are nationalists," said Alexander Tsitov, a Russian who works in a cooperative in Simferopol, the capital. "They want to introduce their language, and that is no good for us. They want us to be their colony.

 

"There is a danger the tension here could be transformed into armed conflict."’

 

Later President Kravchuk warned that bloodshed was possible if the Crimea went ahead with the referendum, placing established frontiers in question.

 

 

On the 5^th May,  things were speeding up, as AFP reported : ‘SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine, May 5 (AFP) - The parliament of Crimea Tuesday voted for secession from Ukraine, subject to confirmation by a referendum to be held soon.

 

The regional assembly of the Black Sea peninsula approved the independence bid by a large majority and offered to enter into immediate negotiations with Ukraine on a future bilateral agreement with the republic, local sources reported.’

 

Reuters elaborated: ‘SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine, May 5, Reuter - The Crimean peninsula passed a declaration of independence from Ukraine on Tuesday, a move likely to inflame relations between Kiev and Moscow.

 

Deputies in the Crimean parliament in Simferopol stood and applauded loudly after passing an "Act of Independence" by 118 votes to 28. The decision must be confirmed by a referendum.

 

Several thousand people standing outside the rambling, modernistic building in the sunshine waved banners and cheered as the decision was announced over loudspeakers.

 

The act stated: "In view of the threat posed to Crimean statehood...and expressing great alarm about worsening relations between Russia and Ukraine, the parliament of the Crimea declares the creation of a sovereign state, the Republic of Crimea."

 

Parliamentary leader Nikolai Bagrov told reporters: "The Crimea is a republic and should have its own statehood."

 

The declaration will infuriate Ukraine, which considers the Black Sea peninsula part of its territory. The referendum is likely to take place on August 2.

 

Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk has said that any referendum on Crimean independence could lead to bloodshed.’

 

Events now became bizarre, and readers will have to form their own conclusions as to how an entire regional assembly can totally change its mind on a central issue in the course of one day. Severe outside pressure seems to me to be one possible explanation.

 

For on the 6^th May, we see this despatch:

 

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine, May 6, Reuter - The Crimean parliament on Wednesday appeared to reverse the previous day's declaration of independence by changing its constitution to say the peninsula formed part of Ukraine.

 

"The republic of Crimea is part of the state of Ukraine and determines its own relations with Ukraine on the basis of treaties and agreements," the amendment said.

 

It was passed by a big majority.

 

The Crimean parliament had on Tuesday declared the Republic of Crimea a sovereign state. Independence was to be confirmed in a referendum, likely to be held on August 2.

 

Tuesday's vote was a reaction to a Ukrainian parliamentary resolution giving the Crimea a measure of independence which the local parliament said fell short of its demands.

 

But Wednesday's apparent reversal of the independence vote may be an attempt to find a face-saving compromise which will give deputies more say in running their own affairs but which will not trigger a complete break with Kiev.’

 

Perhaps a clue to  the explanation can be found in these words of President Kravchuk, on a visit to Washington DC at the time :

 

‘"But I would have to say that the voting in the parliament of Crimea is not the last instance," he said during a ceremony marking the opening of Ukraine's embassy in the United States.

 

"We can say one thing for sure that what has been voted in the parliament of Crimea is against the constitution of Ukraine," Kravchuk added.

 

On May 8^th Reuters reported :

 

‘KIEV, May 8, Reuter - A campaign by the Crimean peninsula to break away from Ukraine could plunge the region into a conflict similar to that in Northern Ireland, a top aide to Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk has said.

 

Alexander Yemets, Kravchuk's top adviser on legal issues, also said in an interview on Thursday that Ukraine would never give up the peninsula, populated mainly by ethnic Russians but given to Ukraine as a "gift" by Russia in 1954.

 

Speaking a week before a summit of leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States, he accused prominent Russian leaders of stirring up confrontation in the run-up to Tuesday's declaration of independence by the Crimean parliament.

 

"The problem is difficult and complex and could take on a violent character," Yemets told Reuters in his office, once part of the headquarters of the now-banned Communist Party.

 

"If we cannot solve this through political dialogue, the situation will resemble that of Northern Ireland in terms of the violence involved. That is, partisan-like actions by different groups pursuing different aims, violent confrontation," he said.’

 

On 13^th May, we learned from AFP: ‘The Ukrainian parliament on Wednesday declared unconstitutional a recent declaration of independence by the Crimean peninsula, where the former Soviet Union's huge Black Sea fleet is based.

 

The parliament called on the local authorities in the peninsula, which was ceded to Ukraine by Russia in 1954, to "return to legality" by rescinding the declaration of independence they issued on May 6.

 

The Crimean authorities have said they will organise a referendum on independence on August 2.

 

And on 14^th May, the London Times reported : ‘Ukraine's parliament yesterday moved to bury the Crimea's growing Russian separatist movement by issuing a five-point plan over-riding the peninsula's independence vote and threatening direct presidential rule.

 

In a rare show of strength by the Kiev parliament, deputies voted by an overwhelming margin to declare last week's actions by the Crimea's supreme soviet unconstitutional, and banned the Black Sea peninsula's government from holding an independence referendum this summer

 

On 30^th June, we learned from Reuters; ‘KIEV, June 30, Reuter - Ukraine's parliament on Tuesday granted the Crimean peninsula wide-ranging autonomy, allowing it to determine its own foreign economic relations and social and cultural policies.

 

The power-sharing arrangements were detailed in amendments to a new law aimed at satisfying the territory's aspirations for self-rule while keeping it under Kiev's jurisdiction.

 

And on the 9^th July 1992, Reuters said: MOSCOW, July 9, Reuter - The Crimean parliament voted on Thursday to suspend plans for a referendum on independence from Ukraine, local journalists in the regional capital Simferopol said.

 

The decision, approved by 106 of the 137 deputies attending parliament, will help remove a possible source of conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The referendum had originally been scheduled for August 2.’

 

But it hadn’t really gone away. In summer 1993, BBC monitoring noted :’ A regular congress of the Crimean Electors' Movement [Ukrainian: Rukh Vybortsiv Krymu] was held today [29th May] under the slogan "Away with independence! Give us a referendum!". The movement is made up of adherents of joining the peninsula to Russia. Several resolutions were adopted at the congress, and on the situation in the Black Sea Fleet too. Those present called on the presidents of Ukraine and Russia to hold their meeting on problems of the Black Sea Fleet only in Sevastopol, and to adopt at the meeting an unequivocal decision - on the impossibility of dividing the fleet, and on preserving Sevastopol's status of Russian Federation naval base. In the event that this demand is not fulfilled, says the resolution, the participants of the movement reserve the right, following the sailors's example, to hang Russian flags on their buildings.

 

‘A decision on setting up a civic committee to safeguard the referendum on Crimea's state status was adopted. The movement intends to organize a warning strike of work collectives on 2nd August in support of this referendum...’

 

I have assembled this account because I had not seen a proper explanation of the history of the Crimean independence issue. I think it helps to explain the origin of the dispute. I also think it once again raises the curious and ever-fascinating question of title in international affairs.

 

Who really owns which piece of land? On what is his claim based? Why are some units permitted to declare independence from large countries, and others not? And if there is no consistent legal or moral answer to any of these questions, what lessons should we learn from that?

Putin's Bite is Worse than His Bark - should we have been surprised?

I have not yet had time to read the entire report by the House of Lords EU sub-committee on Russia, which can be accessed here http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201415/ldselect/ldeucom/115/115.pdf

 but I do urge my readers to study it, especially the section beginning on page 53. ‘the crisis in Ukraine and the EU’s response’. I suspect the whole thing has benefited by the presence on the sub-committee of Lord (Norman) Lamont, who knows a thing or two about the EU. There is also quite an impressive list of witnesses, who might be expected to know what they were talking about, including Vaclav Klaus, former President of the Czech republic, and Sir Tony Brenton, former British ambassador in Moscow.

 

But it also has a pleasingly sober willingness to examine things that are generally ignored in the ‘Putin is Hitler’ hysteria which has engulfed so much of politics and the media.

 

In his evidence, Mr Klaus said some very interesting things (it is easily found by clicking on the red numbers opposite his name in the list of witnesses)

 

For example , after opening by saying :  ‘I am also no a prioristic advocate or defender of Russia or Mr Putin due to our communist experience. I am the last one to be motivated to speak positively about that country. However, our life with communism taught us something. Since then, I have always tried to oppose lies and manipulative propaganda, which I see in this case just now. ‘

 

He then says :‘Moreover, in April in our commentary on the situation in Ukraine we stated that Ukraine was a heterogeneous, divided country, and that an attempt to forcefully and artificially change its geopolitical orientation would inevitably result in its break-up, if not its destruction. We considered the country too fragile and with too weak an internal coherence to try to make a sudden change. I am sorry to say that it developed according to our expectations. I am afraid that Ukraine was sort of misused. The West suddenly and unexpectedly offered Ukraine early EU affiliation.

‘I am afraid that the West, especially western Europe, has accepted a very simplified interpretation of events in Ukraine. According to the West, the Ukraine crisis has been caused by external Russian aggression. The internal causes of the crisis have been ignored, and so are the evident ethnic, ideological and other divisions in Ukraine.

‘The developments that have taken place since the spring of this year have proved that this approach cannot lead to a solution of the problem. It only deepens the division of the country, increases the tragic costs of its crisis and further destabilises the country. So I do not see that the politicians in Ukraine are looking for a political solution. They do not have any compromise proposals that they could offer to the people of eastern Ukraine to win their confidence. They rely on fighting, on repression and on unrealistic expectations of western economic and military aid.’

 

He then adds: ‘ I cannot see inside the heads of leading Russian politicians but I do not believe that Russia wanted or needed this to happen. My understanding is that Russia was dragged into it. Dragging Russia into the conflict is a way of making Ukraine a permanent hotspot of global tensions and creating permanent instability in a country that deserves, after decades of suffering under communism, a quiet and positive evolution.’

 

He says  (Q.211) that he suspects that the EU had got into the habit of making vague future promises of EU membership to Ukraine .

 

But this answer , from a leading statesman of a formerly-Communist Central European state,  who cannot conceivably be accused of being a Kremlin stooge or of desiring the return of the USSR, is absolutely gripping:

 

 ‘ I am afraid that just reading the misleading headlines in the media and watching CNN or BBC news is giving such a distorted picture of the situation. I am afraid that the knowledge is missing. I was shocked two weeks ago. There was a long interview with a 21 year-old Ukrainian student in Prague, a lady from western Ukraine. She was on the side of western Ukraine politically. A question was put to her: “What about the Crimea?”. She was a 21 year-old student abroad, which means that she was a literate person. “I visited Crimea for the first time in my life last year, when I was 20, and I was absolutely shocked that no one understood my language. They supposed that I am from Moldova”. For me it was eye-opening that there was such a problem. The eastern part of the country is really, really different, and the question is whether we can help.

'I would suggest one thing in a negative sense: do not support the Maidan demonstrations in an unconditional way. That is the best recommendation that I would dare to give to anyone in western Europe and in Britain.’

 

The report itself, in the passage I named above, also shows quite clearly that the EU simply did not take seriously the Russian objections to the Association Agreement . Nor did it understand or take seriously Russia’s very real fears about the possible cancellation of the treaty by which it retained fleet basing rights at Sevastopol.

 

There is, of course the general problem about so many people in the West assuming that Russia’s supine, stunned posture under Yeltsin after 1991 was normal and likely to endure.  A Russian witness, Fyodor Lukyanov, said the European Commission never showed any interest in discussing Russia’s concerns over the planned agreement.

 

The Russians never even saw the planned text until the summer of 2013, and plainly assumed that a resolution was still a long way off, not least because the EU were still very hostile to Ukraine because of the continued imprisonment of Yulia Timoshenko.

 

Even so, there was alarm. Another Russian official witness, Dmitriy Poliyanskiy, said ‘The detail in the annexes “clearly showed to [the Russians] that with such an agreement Ukraine would no longer be able to maintain the same level of relations” with Russia’.

 

And from August Russia began to fight against it, using ‘coercive economic  diplomacy’. Andrii Kuzmenko, Ukrainian Acting Ambassador to the UK, spoke of a “number of different ‘wars’—a customs war, a gas war, a milk war, a meat war, cheese war, a chocolate war”, which “the Russians started against Ukraine with the solemn purpose of pursuing us to postpone and then refuse European integration.”

 

No doubt these Russian methods were unpleasant. But the point is that they were a reaction to an EU initiative. And by November 2013, Russian hostility to the agreement was so obvious and fierce that the EU were at last aware of it. Whether they understood its depth and power is another matter.

 

Paragraph 181 is worth quoting in full : ‘Mr John Lough, Associate Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House (Britain’s premier foreign affairs think tank),  informed us that Russia “suddenly woke up” to the challenge, having believed the AA to be “a totally under-resourced and hopeless initiative that was being conducted by an organisation with so many divisions in it.”266 Mr Lukyanov agreed that Russia was surprised that the signature was imminent, because the situation in Ukraine—“corruption, dysfunction” and the detention of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko—suggested that Ukraine was far from meeting the requisite conditions. However, when the issue of Tymoshenko’s fate was “removed from the picture and the decision was made that it should be signed anyway”, then “Russia woke up’.

 

There’s some dispute about whether, at this stage, the EU was ready to listen Russia’s concerns.

 

In any case, the putsch against Yanukovych followed soon afterwards. The report recounts ‘By February, Sir Tony Brenton explained, the “Russians had decided that there was a great western plot against them, probably more American than EU, to displace them from their oldest and closest friend, Ukraine”. 291 The trope of a western-fomented plot was one that recurred in Russian political thinking: in the words of Dr Alexander Libman, Associate of Eastern Europe and Eurasia Division, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, in the “eyes of the Russian leadership, Euromaidan is just one more step in the sequence of events, which were initiated by ‘the West’”.

 

This was greatly reinforced by moves in Kiev to de-privilege the Russian language, and to make NATO membership a Ukrainian national strategy.

 

But most pressing of all was the issue of Sevastopol,. Paragraph 193 relates:

‘In particular, Moscow feared that the 2010 Kharkiv Agreements, which had extended the Russian Navy’s lease of Sevastopol as a base for 25 years from 2017 until 2042, would be renounced. Professor Roy Allison has pointed out that even in 2010 “President Yanukovych’s approval of this extension was virulently opposed by Ukrainian opposition politicians, suggesting that efforts may well be made to revise it in the future.” On 1 March 2014, three former Ukrainian Presidents, Leonid Kravchuk, Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yushchenko, called on the new government to renounce the Kharkiv Agreements. Mr Lukyanov said that President Putin’s “real motivation was national security and the risk that the new rule in Kiev would very quickly denounce” the agreements of 2010 that prolonged Russia’s base in Crimea for 25 years.’

 

I think that is very probably the case. Here’s a good line, too ‘Sir Tony Brenton said that “the assumption that ‘the Russians don’t like this but they will probably live with it’ was reasonably consistent with the Russia that we thought we had prior to the Maidan revolution.”

 

Yes, ‘the Russia we thought we had’. But that Russia had been,  for many years, an illusion. President Putin’s speech in Munich in February 2007 was  a clear change of tone, for anyone who wanted to know. But it was ignored.  In the end, we tested him by action, and found that , after all, he did bite, and his bite was worse than his bark, an unusual thing in modern politics. Now we complain about his teeth, but is that a rational attitude towards events?

Lack of Moral Fibre

An aspect of the Bombing War that seldom gets much attention is the terrible squandering of young lives – British lives. I’m told from time to time that Arthur Harris was popular with his crews, and that their nickname for him of ‘Butch’ (short for ‘Butcher’) was affectionate.

 

Maybe so. I am not sure how one can know the whole truth of this, thanks to the 44% casualty rate which meant that so many of them were dead long before they could make a considered assessment of their commander.

 

In round numbers that means that, of 120,000 Bomber command aircrew, 55,573 were killed, (this includes more than 10,000 Canadians) . Only one in ten of those flying at the start of the war survived to the end. Of every 100, 45 were killed, six seriously wounded , 8 were captured and so only 41 escaped unhurt.

 

This carnage is comparable only with that of the First World War’s worst battles.

 

As Siegfried Sassoon wrote in a different context

 

 “ ‘Good morning; good morning!’ the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead

And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

‘He’s a cheery old card’ grunted Harry to Jack,

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack

….

 

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.”

 

Though I am repeatedly (and stupidly) accused of attacking the fliers when I attack the British state policy of bombing civilians (over which serving airmen had no control at all, and about which I think they were told little) , I am in fact lost in admiration for the aircrews, and cannot imagine how they did what they did. I’ll come to that in a moment.

 

Arthur Harris wasn’t so admiring. Richard Overy writes on p.353 that Harris thought only a quarter of his crews were effective bombers, the rest merely there to give the Germans something to shoot at.

 

I was thinking about this anyway, because of the Dresden anniversary. But I thought about it even more after reading Helen Dunmore’s recent short novel ‘The Greatcoat’, a sort of ghost story featuring an airbase and a pilot, whose plot I will not here give away. Helen Dunmore wrote a superb novel about starvation and war in Leningrad (‘The Siege’), and she has a particular skill in describing cold, the way it surrounds us, and the ways in which we seek to escape it, which I (who love the cold ) find particularly moving.

 

But this book has another feature, which I think I can give away without spoiling it. It mentions a cracked, yellow little song (as George Orwell might have put it) , which in the book is sung by some airmen.

 

It runs (to the tune of Haydn’s ‘Austria’, used for that great hymn ‘Glorious things of Thee are Spoken’  (or ‘Deutschland Ueber Alles’ if you prefer):

 

‘I don’t want to go to Chopland

I won’t want to go at all

I don’t want to go to Chopland

Where our chances are f***-all’

 

And it sends a chill right through me because I can almost hear it being sung in a low, miserable flat tone in Nissen hut in a sea of mud one foggy night, by a man (or maybe a couple of men) and I can hear the angry Flight Sergeant yelling ‘Will you shut up! If I hear you singing that ****ing  **** again, you’ll be on a charge!’ And then a long sullen silence. Best not talked about, eh? But who can doubt that something of the sort happened? How would any of us have coped with the more or less 50% chance of a screaming, fiery death some night very soon, while living in reasonable comfort on an air base by day?

 

If the book is right (and purists criticise some of Ms Dunmore’s technical facts, so who knows?) the word ‘chop’ had a very special significance in the language of RAF crews. It was the way in which the unsayable – that most of them were going to die horribly - could be said.  Doomed crews,  who had run out of luck,  before their 25 or 30 missions were up,  would (it is claimed)  *look* doomed . They would have ‘the chop look’. And if they did, they wouldn’t come back.

 

I don’t know where she got this from. It’s obviously the sort of superstition that flourishes on the edge of the pit of death.  I’d be interested if anyone had read anything substantial on morale among the Lancaster crews. I suspect that, like so much else to do with this episode, it’s something those involved weren’t then and aren’t now that keen to talk about.

 

 

Apparently 3% of flying officers (3% of those who survived) were removed from flying status before completing 25 operations. Some, it’s very hard to find out how many, were categorised with the harsh words ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’, humiliated in various ways, stripped of rank  and sent off in disgrace to do menial tasks elsewhere.

 

I would guess that most flyers put up with it rather than look weak in front of their fellow airmen. That’s generally what keeps soldiers form running away in battle, the fear of letting their mates down.

 

But it is very hard to imagine how they felt, physically, as they set off on each flight towards the storm of steel that waited them. Hard, also, to imagine how they lived by day in the English countryside, went to the pub, courted girls, knowing that so many of their comrades had already made the journey into the dark and not come back. And having, in many cases, seen aircraft from their own squadron shot down close to them, so needed no imagination to know what fate awaited them.

 

They deserve their memorial. Who can question it?