The Soviet Monster is Really Dead - my reply to Edward Lucas
The nature of the dispute between Edward Lucas and Me
Edward Lucas has written this reply
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/10/the-realism-we-need
to my ‘First Things’ article on why we should resist attempts to get us into war with Russia
which can still be read here
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/10/the-cold-war-is-over
Glorious things of thee are spoken
First, I must deal with his repeated repetition of my one use of the word ‘glorious’ in the article, which Edward parades in chains as if I had written repeatedly of the ‘Glorious Russian People’s Triumph’ or some such, referring to Russian power or the Russian state in this way. Here is the context : ‘This modest street, Bolshaya Ordynka, could outdo Paris in loveliness. Here, under many grimy and bloody layers of Leninism, neglect, and about three wars, lay Russia, a very different thing from the U.S.S.R. Unlike the U.S.S.R., it was profoundly Christian, rather glorious, and no particular threat to the West. Perhaps the Bolsheviks had not, after all, destroyed and desecrated absolutely everything, and a lost nation was waiting quietly to return to life.’
Now, I have taught myself to seek and find glory all the time in unlikely places, in all cases the glory of God rather than of man . There is, as the first epistle to the Corinthians says, and which is quoted at length in the burial service: ’…one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory.’ I am certainly not speaking of medals or missiles. I formed this view on quiet rambles in the shabby, decayed but lovely streets of Moscow south of the river, where in those days few foreigners went. And I think Edward, who knows his prayer book and Bible, knows what my meaning is. So it is rather naughty of him to do what he does. Watch out for it.
Well, Edward, is it a New Cold War, or isn't it?
Edward begins: ‘Those of us who believe we are indeed in a new cold war do not argue that Russia is the Soviet Union or is trying to recreate it.’
Ah. Well, what then was he suggesting in this piece from the Daily Mail on 13th October 2006 : ‘The disinformation war is raging in a way not seen since Soviet times…
‘All that may be a nuisance for small countries on Russia's fringe, but why should we worry in Britain? The first reason is that small defeats now mean bigger ones later. Russia's petrocrats are determined to stem and reverse their country's geopolitical retreat. If they can derail Mr Saakashvili, it sends a powerful signal elsewhere. If Georgia falls, then others will be next. Russia's hold over Ukraine will strengthen. Moldova, the weakest country in Europe, will buckle too.
‘Then the shadow will stretch over the poorly governed and demoralised ex-communists of Central Europe and the Baltics. That will bring Russian neo-imperialism to our front door.’
This seems to me to suggest a revival of the Soviet threat, just a bit. By the way, he began this piece with the neo-conservatives’ reference to Neville Chamberlain. ‘If Russia is allowed to continue bullying its neighbour, its neo-imperialist appetite will spread to our front door. "A FARAWAY COUNTRY of which we know nothing." Neville Chamberlain may have been unfair to Czechoslovakia when he dismissed it so casually in 1938. But it is all too true of the countries on the fringe of Europe that now find themselves the front lines in the new cold war: Georgia and Moldova.’
In a July 2007 article on the youth movement ‘Nashi’ he made the parallel with Stalin thus :’ For the east European countries with first-hand experience of Stalinist terror, the Kremlin's rewriting of history could hardly be more scary. Not only does Russia see no reason to apologise for their suffering under Kremlin rule, it now sees the collapse of communism not as a time of liberation, but as an era of pitiable weakness. Russia barely commemorates even the damage it did to itself, let alone the appalling suffering inflicted on other people. ‘
In January 2008 he made this rather fevered comparison : ‘FEW things embodied Stalinist terror more than the midnight knock on the door. For millions of innocent victims it heralded interrogation, torture and a lengthy — and all too often lethal — sentence in the Communist concentration camps of the Gulag.
Now the heirs of Stalin's secret police are running Russia — and there could be few clearer signs of their true nature than the British Council's Russian staff being hauled from their beds to answer for the 'crime' of working for a foreign employer.
The harassment of the British Council on transparently bogus charges of tax evasion has prompted a protest even from our supine Foreign Office.’
In ‘The Times’ of February 5th the same year, he wrote ; ‘Sixty years ago the Berlin Airlift highlighted the menace of Stalin's Kremlin. Forty years ago Soviet tanks crushed both the Prague Spring and any remaining illusions about the Kremlin's grip on the captive nations. Twenty years ago we began dropping our guard, as totalitarianism withered under Mikhail Gorbachev. Now it is time to acknowledge the inconvenient truth. Russia is back: rich, powerful and hostile. Partnership is giving way to rivalry, with increasingly threatening overtones. The new Cold War has begun - but just as in the 1940s, we are alarmingly slow to notice it.’
Kremlinology returns?
Then there’s this in the Sunday Telegraph of March 2008: ‘We are back to the era of Kremlinology, when analysts of Soviet politics would scrutinise every nuance in Pravda for faint reflections of the power struggles in the Communist Party's politburo.
Writing about the crushed Prague Spring in the Daily Mail of 23rd August 2008, he said : ‘The parallels with the present are as disturbing as they are thought-provoking.
Then as now, the United States was weakened by ill-planned and costly overseas adventures. Back in 1968, Vietnam had destroyed America's moral capital and will to fight, just as George W Bush's 'war on terror' is sapping them now.
‘Then as now, Europe was distracted and timid. In 1968, it was hot-headed students and silly hippies who derided our institutions and eroded our sense of purpose. Now it is corruption in politics and the cynicism and apathy that it breeds.
‘Perhaps more sinisterly still, the invasion of 1968 highlighted Western impotence — just as Russia's occupation of Georgia has done now. No European country is prepared to cut their lucrative trade ties with Russia, particularly in energy, in order to prevent the dismemberment and destruction of Georgia, any more than the West was willing to go to war with the Soviet Union for a captive Czechoslovakia struggling for its freedom. Then as now, we bleat but do not act. Then, as now, the message to the Kremlin is clear: we have lost the will to stand up for our values.’
I could go on but it would become boring by repetition. Archives are a terrible thing. I am really not sure that it can truly be said these articles, or indeed the book title ‘The New Cold War’ don’t argue that ‘Russia is the Soviet Union or is trying to recreate it.’ As it happens, I have on occasion come close, while examining the undoubted death of liberty in Russia, to similar sentiments. But I now regret them as crude and misleading.
Edward corrects his steering
Edward rightly corrects his steering by saying that Communist ways of thinking are gone; ‘It does not bear comparison with the grim but sophisticated edifice of Marxism-Leninism. The latter involved, for example, the compulsory study over many years of Dialectical Materialism (known unfondly to Soviet-era students as diamat). Nothing of the kind exists in Putin’s Russia.’
But then he makes this curious assertion: ‘What Hitchens fails to spot is that the Soviet Union was not just about Communism, or about Russia. It was an empire. One hundred twenty million-plus of the Soviet Union’s two hundred eighty-six-million population were non-Russians. Almost none of them were Soviet by choice, any more than the one hundred million people in the other Warsaw Pact countries wanted to be under Soviet tutelage. To view the collapse of the evil empire solely from a Russian point of view is therefore misleading. It would be like writing about Irish history solely from the point of the view of the British. Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other captive nations are real people, too. They have real languages, real histories, real dreams, and memories of statehood.’
Did Russians really support the Soviet System?
First, does he believe (as this seems to imply) that ethnic Russians were any less oppressed by Bolshevism than the other peoples he names? The Bolsheviks reconquered their lost territories in the name of the Workers’ State, not of Great-Russian Chauvinism which (for obvious reasons) was not much beloved by the CPSU.
Does he believe or claim that ethnic Russians were somehow keen supporters of the Soviet system? What is his evidence for this? They fell involuntarily under Bolshevik rule in a German-backed Communist putsch in 1917, a putsch which extinguished Russia’s nascent civil society and liberties for the most cynical of reasons. Nobody asked their opinion for the next 70 years.
Russians also died
Russians were not spared Stalin’s murders and famines. Russians, as well as Ukrainians, Belarussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians died in great numbers in the 1941-45 war, whatever we call it. Likewise, some Russians took the other side, mainly under Vlasov, though this is perhaps rather more the case among Ukrainians and some of the Baltic peoples. I’m aware of it. Is it actually the case that ‘*most* of the casualties and destruction of World War II involved these non-Russian countries’ peoples and their territories? I don’t see what this has to do with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. I don’t defend it. It’s dead, like many cynical pacts of the time, one of which was concluded six years later at Yalta. Rightly, these events are not forgotten. Other actions and movements of the era, which ought to be remembered better in the West, are often by contrast forgotten here, such as Poland’s 1934 pact with Germany, Poland’s participation, as jackal, in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the homicidal and sometimes enthusiastic Judophobia under German rule in some of the territories we now discuss.
Kaisers, Presidents and Empires
Second, in what way do I ‘fail to spot’ this imperial element? I have written extensively about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the origins of the modern crisis in the imperial struggle between Russia, Hohenzollern Germany and Austria-Hungary, dwelling on the significance of Mitteleuropa, Richard von Kuehlmann’s far-seeing foreign policy, and the significance of the treaties of Brest-Litovsk. How could I, in doing this , be unaware of the empire which existed before Lenin, which he sought to recreate and Stalin sought to extend? Indeed, the reactionary in me (which regrets the fall of Austria-Hungary in the light of what followed it) is tempted to say that Russia’s pre-1914 borders may be more legitimate than the new ones created by the aggression of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the utopian meddling of Woodrow Wilson, the renewed aggression of Hitler and by Stalin’s ultimate crushing of that aggression. I wonder how many people who engage in this debate know that it was aggressive German force that first wrested the Baltic states from the rule of St Petersburg? But in fact I, like all sensible people, recognise that the power of the USSR is gone for good, and that if Russia wishes to be, once again, an influence in this part of the world it will have to achieve this through soft rather than hard power, softer as it happens than the militarily-linked NATO and EU advances into the area.
Soft or Hard Power?
It was, as Edward knows, the defeat of Russian soft power (the economic offer to Kiev) by Western hard-power (the NATO and US-backed Kiev mob which overthrew Ukraine’s legitimate government and ripped up Ukraine’s constitution) which led to the first significant instance of hard power use by Moscow since the 1990s – a reaction, be it noted not an initiative. I don’t attribute this slowness to virtue, but to a hard-headed recognition of weakness. Russia is not that strong. Russia is not that rich. As Tony Brenton recently wrote in words which immediately put this whole debate in a proper perspective: ‘Russian military expenditure is one tenth of Nato’s and their economy one twentieth.’ The open Crimea annexation (and the covert destabilisation of Eastern Ukraine) were hesitant and risky actions taken under immense provocation, falling well short of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine predicted by many panic-mongers at the time.
Something similar could be said of the famous 2008 Georgia War, which the EU’s own Tagliavini report concluded (annoyingly for Edward and his friends) had been started by Georgia.
Yes, I am an ex-imperialist
It is true that my view of Russia’s imperial withdrawal is influenced by my own experience as a child of a Naval officer closely involved in and directly affected by British imperial decline. My view is that there will always be empires, that it is idle to pretend this is not so, and that it is in general preferable to have one than be in someone else’s. I also hold to the view that great land empires are very hard to erase. They have physical reasons for existing and will arise again in new forms if they are defeated. The EU is the very successful continuation of Germany by other means, largely unresisted by nations and forces (including Russia) which would never have tolerated such an expansion of influence through direct conquest.
These are facts that cannot be altered by sentiment. I am less impressed by anti-Imperialist manifestoes and pleas than I would be had I grown up in an Irish nationalist home. But I should have thought that any conservative would see the importance of at least noticing and comprehending the point of view of the empire as well as that of the colonised. And it is one of the great paradoxes of history that Sinn Fein has ended up campaigning *against* Irish independence, preferring membership of the EU empire. This makes my point about the permanence of empires rather well.
No, the British Empire was not peacefully wound up
As it happens, while prepared to defend many aspects of the British empire, by comparison with its rivals from the Spanish, the Russian and the German, the Chinese, the EU and the American, I do not join in the chorus of praise for its dissolution. It was a disaster, caused by a defeat. We made a terrible mess of India, a mess which still plagues the world. Likewise Palestine and Cyprus, not to mention Africa. The bloody partition and the scuttle which accompanied the Indian withdrawal were not peaceful. Nor did we give up voluntarily. I am always amazed by how few British people (or American admirers of Churchill) manage to recall the catastrophic defeat of British arms at Singapore in 1942, the worst defeat ever suffered by this country and the end of the British empire in the East. Try as we might to re-establish ourselves, we lacked either the wealth or the standing to do so (having been shown by Japan to be far from invincible at Singapore). Like the Norway campaign, the PQ-17 episode, the Dunkirk evacuation and other sidelined or misunderstood episodes in the 1939-45 war, it is ignored or passed over quickly.
Sharpened shovels in Tbilisi, bullets in Vilnius
The USSR did not in fact undergo such events. It sometimes behaved atrociously, especially in Tbilisi in 1989 when Soviet troops murdered protestors with sharpened shovels, and in Vilnius in January 1991 when (overshadowed by the first Gulf War) Gorbachev ordered special forces to attack the TV tower. I was there, and so know especially well what happened that day and that night and how stupid and horrible it was. I could barely speak to Russian friends and colleagues for weeks afterwards, being in those days unable to separate ‘Soviet’ from ‘Russian’ in my mind. And yet, once the August 1991 putsch (which I also witnessed) had collapsed, Moscow gave up the fight. Baltic independence, which the supposedly liberal Gorbachev had furiously opposed, became a fact, and was left unmolested by Moscow for many years before the Baltic states joined the EU or NATO. The loss of Ukraine was likewise simply absorbed a blow upon a bruise. The small states of the Caucasus, too, broke away. Yes, there were episodes of divide-and-rule, designed into the old Soviet map by Stalin when he deliberately gave his Soviet republics awkward minorities. But these have their parallels in other empires and, while unlovely, were marginal events until the EU’s bold and predictably fraught effort to end Ukraine’s sensible non-alignment and draw it into a politico-military alliance with the West.
I do not know what Edward means when he asserts ‘the Soviet Union and Russia did not “withdraw” from these countries and the Warsaw Pact. Of course they did. It sin indisputable physical fact. Three Shock Army has left Germany, along with a huge tonnage of artillery, planes, missiles and materiel. Soviet forces have likewise left Czechoslovakia and Hungary , and the Baltic States, and Ukraine, and Belarus. Why suggest it is not so? Yet there was no Soviet or Russian equivalent of our Singapore in 1942.
I am interested that he adds ‘The Russians, the supposed masters of the whole system, revolted against the lies, brutality, and incompetence with which they were being governed.’ Quite. This corrects the weird implication, earlier, that ethnic Russians were enthusiasts for Soviet rule. He adds ‘Many of them revolted against the idea of empire, too.’ Perhaps. No doubt some Moscow liberals took this view, but my experience is that normal Russians were as wounded and demoralised by their truncated nation’s diminished status as the British working class were after Suez left us naked. This was not because they loved Stalin, but because this is how patriotic people feel about the public defeat of their country.
Like Moscow, I accept the permanence of the withdrawal
Edward writes as if I am urging some compromise between the withdrawal that happened and another, smaller withdrawal. Not a bit of it Like most sensible Russians, I recognise that the dissolution of the USSR had to come and is permanent. What did not have to come was the maintenance and extension of NATO up to Russia’s borders, and the campaign to align Ukraine and the Caucasus with a clearly anti-Russian alliance.
It is this silly aggression which is endangering the perfectly workable settlement of 1991.
If the countries involved ‘fear invasion’, it is because they have been urged to do so by us, and because they have been aggressively recruited into an alignment they had no need to join. Ponder this. Were the Baltic States at more risk from Russia ( assuming they are at any risk at all) before or after they joined NATO? As Richard Sakwa so eloquently points out in his ‘Frontline Ukraine’ : 'In the end, NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage the security threats provoked by its enlargement. The former Warsaw Pact and Baltic states joined NATO to enhance their security, but the very act of doing do created a security dilemma for Russia that undermined the security of all…NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence’.
I notice that Edward barely replies at all to my fanciful but carefully drawn portrait of a defeated USA undergoing humiliations similar and comparable to those endured by Russia. This is because it is unanswerable. The USA, even truncated and impoverished, would never submit to such treatment by and through its neighbours as Russia has endured. Nor should it do so. No sovereign nation, intending to stay in being would put up with such manoeuvres on its frontiers. Edward knows this. Why doesn’t he publicly acknowledge it? It is no good switching the subject the internal governance of the countries involved. It is not, and he knows it, the issue. Countries fortunate enough to live safely behind the barrier of the ocean are able to develop free institutions and the rule of law, if they wish. Those without this blessing are not.
What is all this about the Crimean Tatars? Does Edward, who writes ‘ that they ‘have a better claim to the peninsula than do the Soviet-era military pensioners and dependents who moved there after the war’, seriously advocate the re-Islamisation of the Crimea? This takes Russophobe dog-in-the-manger attitudes beyond the giddy limit. If not, he shouldn’t say such silly things. He’ll be urging the handover of the Malvinas to the Argentines, next, and sitting on some UN anti-colonialism committee.
He says the Tatars see Ukraine as 'their only hope’? I can’t think why. The Tatars were deported and horribly persecuted by Stalin and restored to their homes by Gorbachev, both under the USSR and long before Ukrainian independence. I know of no evidence that their position, as a people, is significantly worse under Russia than it was under the rule of Kiev.
Natural History
I do indeed see ‘one power bloc expanding into the area another bloc has vacated.’ This is the normal process throughout the history of our continent (See the fate of Ireland, discussed above), and I see no reason why it should be suspended now, even if the weapons these days are ‘people power’ and ‘civil society’ organisations, euros, dollars and 24-hour TV, rather than mangonels or siege engines or long-range artillery or tanks.
I have no doubt that the elites of the new NATO countries and the new EU countries keenly supported their accession into these organisations. It is easy to see why. Elites love such organisations, and are loved in return by them. But I do not think their poorly-led peoples were really offered any choice, and recall (for instance) the forgotten period when Polish coalminers stormed through Warsaw protesting at the EU’s threat to their jobs. Now they and their children plant and pluck beetroot in Lincolnshire instead. In modern Europe, anyone west of the River Bug must belong the EU or NATO bloc, or both. Be there, or be square. Only Switzerland, Finland and Ireland now resist both or one of these memberships (and perhaps Britain may eventually quit the EU). But they could not have done so had they achieved their independence since 1991.
Edward says :’ To equate the Russian pull-out from the Baltic states, say, with those countries’ subsequent membership in the EU and NATO is to regard kidnapping and marriage as fundamentally the same thing.’ But I don’t equate them. I say that the one need not have been followed by the other. They had no *need* to swap one bloc for a rival bloc. It would have been perfectly possible for Russia and the EU to have maintained civilised economic and political relations with the newly-liberated countries without requiring them to align with Moscow or Brussels.
Surely it was independence they wanted, not a change of master? With their markets and borders thrown open to Germany, and their laws made in Brussels and Luxemburg to German design, how are they now independent? Germany gets on well with the countries on which it once made war because they have accepted, after two (in some cases three) hard lessons, that it is better and easier to let Germany get its way peacefully, which is the foundation of the EU. These countries have no borders of their own, don’t make their own laws, treaties, trade agreements or foreign policy. Most don’t even have currencies. Do we regard them as real countries? Do we not ‘blast them with propaganda’, especially if they vote the wrong way in referenda? Revanchism is fine, it seems, if done politely.
I have written little about Ukraine because it is not the subject of this discussion. It is and ought to be an independent country. I wish it was better-governed and not so willing to be used as the toy of others.
I do not think I underplay Russian foreign policy or Russia’s internal repressions. I think Edward exaggerates Russia’s aggressive designs, not least because Russia lacks the money and muscle to adopt the policies he attributes to it. I am a consistent critic of Russia’s internal regime and have never deviated from my view that Vladimir Putin is a sinister tyrant. I here repeat it.
I do not ‘privilege big countries over small ones’. The natural order does that. I just think it idle to pretend that this isn’t the case., or to try to act as if great powers aren’t different from small ones. I only make the point about the unpleasantness of our allies because Edward makes the internal arrangements of Russia such an issue. We did not oppose the USSR because it was a tyranny, but because it was a dogma-driven aggressive empire with a blue-water navy and global ambitions to extend an ideology which threatened the liberty of the world. To that end we were even prepared to sustain apartheid South Africa against the Soviet-backed ANC.
Russia is a sordid despotism, but it is not a dogma-driven ideological global empire whose ideology threatens our liberty. . China, Saudi Arabia etc are likewise sordid despotisms, and China is unquestionably aggressive and expansionist in a way that Russia is not, as we now see in the South China Sea, and also in Tibet.
If we can get along with China and Saudi Arabia, we can certainly get along with Russia. The comparison is *not* the same as the ‘whataboutery’ of the Cold War, which confused authoritarian and despotic states with a global aggressive Communist monster quite different in character. To grasp that this monster is dead is to grasp the whole matter. . .
