A Brief History of Crimea
My old friend Edward Lucas of 'The Economist' has responded to my article about Sevastopol with a vehement (his word) rebuttal on his blog. A search engine should find it under ‘Economist, Eastern Approaches, Peter Hitchens’, or you can click here.
I have submitted the following reply there, and am displaying it here too.
My thanks to Edward Lucas for a serious response to my article about Ukraine. I have a high opinion of Edward, whose courage and indispensable help in Prague in 1989 I will always remember. I have been fascinated, ever since, by the different courses taken by many of the reporters who experienced the extraordinary and exhilarating period which ended the Soviet Empire. I have watched with great regret the miserable slide of Russia into autocracy and corrupt squalor. I have also wondered if this could have been avoided. And I have been troubled by the way in which the newly-free nations of Central and Eastern Europe have all too often become subjects of a new supranational project, their brief independence blotted out in a new world which has little time for national sovereignty.
I don't think I have a soft spot for big countries. But I did live in Moscow for more than two years, and learned there to separate Russia, its people and culture, from Russia, state and power.
I am well aware of the wretched story of the Krim Tatars. But I did not (and do not) think it had much bearing on the point I sought to make.
Edward goes on to doubt my contention that many Ukrainian inhabitants would prefer to be Russian. He says:
‘It would be nice to see some polling data to support that. (None exists).’
I too would like to see such data. If it doesn't exist, then that is presumably because it has not been in the interests of anyone rich and powerful to obtain it. Polling - as Edward surely knows - is a device for influencing opinion, not a device for measuring it. From my own experience, I am confident that 'many’ (I shouldn't have been that vague if percentages were available) Ukrainian inhabitants would rather be Russian, particularly in the Crimea and in the Eastern part of the country.
He also says that my contention that Mikhail Gorbachev ‘had kindly dismantled the communist machine’ is ‘insulting to the millions of people who through their own bravery and vision helped overthrow the evil empire.’
Debaters should beware of people who claim to be 'insulted', by an idea that disturbs their own certainties. This sort of language is the enemy of cool reason. Is Edward saying that Mr Gorbachev's actions were not significant, and quite possibly decisive? Had he (or another leader) chosen the path of isolation, repression and massacre, what would have happened to those millions? Would the famous 'Velvet Revolution' we witnessed in Prague have taken place without his blessing, or the collapse of the East German regime? The Tiananmen option was available, and was very nearly used in Leipzig. I think we can credit Gorbachev with many things, while acknowledging his indecision and flaws as well.
Then he is cross about my remark that: ‘We sponsored annoying mini-states next door to Russia.’
He chooses to interpret this thus: ’Mr Hitchens appears to be arguing that they should have stayed inside Russia, volens nolens, and that the West should not have lifted a finger to help them.’
That's how it may appear to him. I cannot help that. But it isn't actually what I say, or what I think. As one who was present during the January days and nights in Vilnius in 1991, when the KGB murdered a number of Lithuanians and I found myself looking directly up the barrel of a Soviet tank, I don't take this view. I was interested in Baltic independence in the days when most people in the West had never heard of these places, and I am haunted to this day by the description of the deportations in Czeslaw Milosz's 'The Captive Mind', as well as by the nasty modern KGB violence I saw in Vilnius (and Riga). But it seems clear to me that the long-term independence of these tiny states is endangered, not protected, by bringing them into NATO. Russia's interest in them is, was and always will be strategic. If Russia believes they are likely to be bases for a hostile alliance, then it will seek to undermine their independence.
I have no idea what NATO's real purpose is since it completed its mission in 1991, except perhaps as the provisional wing of globalist interventionism. There are few places further from the north Atlantic than Afghanistan. But I can see without much difficulty why Russia regards this organisation as implicitly hostile to it. Nor do I think the Baltic countries necessarily benefit from abandoning their new-found independence to the EU, which steals the sovereignty of all the nations it absorbs. It seems to me that these countries would be better off outside both these bodies, and outside the Russian empire as well. It is this possibility that Edward and his fellow 'New Cold War' advocates repeatedly deny. As for the 'annoying' bit, I was thinking much more of Georgia, which has been encouraged into foolish sparring with Russia by various Western politicians and thinkers. How can this policy be sustained? Who benefits from it? What purpose does it serve, save to strengthen the arguments of Great Russian Chauvinists in the Kremlin? Long after the USA (and the EU) have lost interest in the Caucasus, Russia will still be there. Claims that this policy forms part of some sort of campaign for liberty and democracy in former Soviet states are deflated by the Anglosphere's continuing support for the extraordinarily nasty regime in Azerbaijan, and by its similar closeness to some of the more squalid dictatorships in Central Asia.
Edward simultaneously quotes and dismisses another writer who suggests that I am part of some Russian PR effort. Well, if Edward thinks this is tripe (as he does, and as it is) he would have done better not to quote it at all. But it gives a hint of the sort of overheated reaction which the New Cold Warriors have to any suggestion that their actions and attitudes might have helped to create the Putin autocracy - which I happen to think they did, by bullying and belittling Russia, and flooding it with spivs and snake-oil purveyors after 1991. The very word 'democracy' is gravely discredited in Russia, thanks to the experiences of normal people in that period.
As for my 'alternative', I don't really offer one, except caution, modesty and the avoidance of hubris. Alas, the damage is largely done. I merely point out that the conventional wisdom is mistaken, that the open-mouthed sycophantic coverage of such events as the 'Orange Revolution' has done us no favours, and that the future in this part of the world is far from settled and we should perhaps prepare for further turmoil rather than imagine that we have opened a Golden Road of peace and prosperity for ever. Is it sensible or right, ever, to force a language on people who don't want to speak it? Is Ukraine, as at present constituted, a viable polity? Are the Anglosphere nations right to treat Russia as a perpetual threat and pariah long after its global ambitions have collapsed and its military power has rusted away? Its regime is miserable. But then so is that of China, with which we seek good relations.
I think these policies are wrong, and the slogans which sustain them are barriers to thought. And it is thought that I hope to promote. It's my job, and Edward's. Why else did he and I make those chilly, alarming, thrilling journeys into the dark east in 1989, from which we've never really returned?
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