In a Twitter argument with the BBC journalist John Sweeney, I pointed out that I had been alert to the tyrannical nature of Vladimir Putin before most people had heard of him. This caused me to look in the archives and revive this article from 7th March 2004.
I have since then revised my view to some extent. That is, I’ve more or less abandoned the position I then held, that the internal affairs of other countries are our business. I don’t think I’d thought very hard about this in 2004, when I was still a recovering Cold Warrior. But I don’t in any way draw back from the general sentiments about Mr Putin’s aims and behaviour . I would stress rather more that this is Russian nationalist authoritarianism, not in any way a revival of Communist power or of the Cold War. I also wish I had made more at the time of Russia's resentment of its post-1989 humiliation. I was aware of it. But I don't think I imagined that the EU would try to push into Ukraine.
RUSSIA'S HARD MEN STAGE A QUIET COUP
Russia is holding an election, but you would never know it...because there's only one serious candidate and only one thing voters want - and it isn't democracy
Like a column of tanks in human form, Vladimir Putin slowly crushes the freedoms that flourished in Russia after the sudden collapse of the old Communist order - and nobody cares.
The world, and the Russian people, are now witnessing the KGB putsch that everyone feared back in August 1991, when I watched as real tanks rolled, halted and then mysteriously turned back.
But this time the coup d'etat is clever instead of clumsy; quiet instead of noisy, and its leaders icily sober rather than slurred, incoherent and drunk.
And what is worse is that this assault on liberty is actually popular at home and willingly excused abroad. It seems to me to be part of a new death of freedom taking place around the world, where more and more exhausted, insecure and frightened people are sinking into the arms of authority with sighs of relief.
Unless I am very much mistaken, the Russian people are about to vote for a tyrant who does not really think they have any right to choose him, and who despises democracy.
They will do this because the word 'democracy' has been poisoned here. To most Russians it means crime, chaos, the wiping-out of their savings, the loss of their jobs and the humiliation of their nation. They have had enough of it.
Perhaps that is why this election is being held more or less in secret. You would barely know it was happening if you had not been told. There is hardly a poster to be seen, though there are strange advertisements - including one on the backs of Tube tickets - urging people to vote. They do not say who to vote for, but they might as well.
For Comrade Vladimir Putin is the only candidate, or more accurately the only candidate who counts. For the sake of form, a few others have been allowed to stand, but not run.
They include a token Communist, Nikolai Kharitonov, so he can be beaten and Communism shown to be finished; a token nationalist, Sergei Glazyev, for the same reason; and a token Thatcherite liberal, Irina Khakhamada, ditto.
The authorities would be devastated if these fig-leaf contenders withdrew, the only action within their power that could seriously upset the Kremlin. The veteran dissenter Yelena Bonner, widow of the majestic liberation fighter Andrei Sakharov, has actually called on them to do so.
But when Ms Khakhamada said she would pull out if the others would, nobody took up the offer.
Here is an example of the shameless rigging of this poll: the campaign began with a 30-minute televised meeting between Putin and his supporters shown on the big national channels, all government-controlled.
But when the other candidates pleaded for equal time, the supposedly impartial election commissioner told them to get lost.
The President meanwhile appears constantly on the prime- time TV bulletins, floating above the phoney fray like an archangel on a cloud. He is portrayed sitting in an ornate, thronelike chair looking serious, rebuking ministers or meeting global notables.
His challengers, if they appear at all, are shown doing stupid, trivial things such as playing billiards.
A few heavyweight newspapers, with tiny circulations among the big city elite, discuss the poll and cover it properly. But there is no middle ground between them and trashy papers adorned with Russian nipples and packed with showbiz trivia, but which also find time to print large, damaging stories about Irina Khakhamada.
Ms Khakhamada, a young and slender 48, is by far the most appealing of Putin's challengers. A former economics teacher, she is a successful businesswoman and mother with a real if tumultuous family life. Her Japanese father was an ardent Communist who came here to build paradise and died disappointed. She sees the best hope for the future in a prosperous, free middle class, still a tiny force in this country.
When I met her in a Moscow Italian restaurant, she explained her purpose in standing, though she has few illusions that she can win: 'I hope to provide strong opposition and to show that Putin is building a regime rather than a democracy.
'The President has huge power, his will rules everything and he is personally responsible for everything that goes on,' she explains. She complains of the self-censorship of the media and of 'the suppression of independent centres that express the will of the ordinary people'.
When I put to her that her cause is hopeless, she resorts to an optimism which seems completely unrealistic.
'The true democrat should carry on fighting,' she insists. In many ways, she is Putin's ideal opponent. Her Japanese ancestry and looks make her unacceptable to the racially prejudiced Russian masses. Her business background also repels many poor Russians who associate all commerce with sharp practice and corruption.
Another of Moscow's rare democrats, MP Vladimir Ryzhkov, 38, is even more scathing about the new Russia's fake freedom. 'It's a pseudo-democracy,' he says. 'It's impossible to have real competition with Putin and his group. As for the mass media, it can either be free or influential. Not both. The influential media are not free. The free media are not influential.' In recent years all three major TV stations have fallen under direct or indirect state control. They suppress or play down bad news within Russia, just as the old Soviet TV did.
One victim of this is Yevgeny Kiselyov, who was for a while as close as Russia could get to Jeremy Paxman; an irreverent and searching TV interviewer. Now not merely has he been taken off the air: his old TV station has been bought up by a state-controlled company and turned into a poodle channel.
Kiselyov admits this is not a full return to the old Communist days. Those who wish to think and speak freely can do so, but are simply denied any major platform. Books are published without difficulty. It is the TV transmission towers that are controlled. Kiselyov is infuriated by the way foreign leaders fail to criticise Putin for his tightening grip on the airwaves.
He recalls his one meeting with Putin, during the state takeover of his TV station. Putin began by being utterly charming, as he is to almost everyone, but switched to a cold, bullying manner the moment Kiselyov challenged him.
'He immediately became very angry, aggressive; accusing me of speaking words put into my mouth by others.
'He wagged his finger at me and asked, "Do you think I don't know anything about your hour-long conversation with your boss?" ' But when Kiselyov asked Putin outright if he was saying his phone was tapped, the President changed the subject and ignored him. Kiselyov believes Putin's charm is entirely false, instilled into him during his KGB training - for the best way to recruit and handle an agent is of course to pretend to be his friend.
Those grim initials KGB are never far away in any discussion of the new Russia. Recently details were published of an Eighties secret KGB plan to allow economic freedom but keep iron political control, more or less what Vladimir Putin now seeks to do.
Putin's potent private office is infested with KGB veterans with mysterious gaps in their official biographies, the so-called 'Siloviki', or 'men of force'; hard, quiet men from Russia's dark heart. They still openly admire Yuri Andropov, the KGB boss who briefly ran the USSR before his early death.
Putin himself recently declared that the 1991 collapse of the USSR had been 'a national tragedy on an enormous scale'. Yet outside the feverish, garish capitalist enclave of Moscow, the USSR more or less survives, merely waiting to be called back into being.
I travelled 120 miles south-east to the city of Ryazan and was instantly transported back to the old Soviet way of life, with a few important changes.
The town centre is still dominated by a statue of Lenin, but behind him is a brand new bank - the Zhivago Bank, of all things. And down the road, the churches of Ryazan's beautiful miniature Kremlin are being lovingly restored. A brash new newspaper tries to expose corruption.
The new Russia has realised it can dispense with the rubbish of Communism; the nationalisation of ice-cream stands and the suppression of faith, criticism and independent thought. In truth, kept under control, these things are no threat to central power.
Ryazan, a heavily military city whose factories once turned out components for Moscow's fleets of tanks, submarines and bombers, suffered badly from freedom. Amid dingy apartment blocks bundled, ill-looking people, aged before their time, still struggle through wildernesses of rubbish, wreckage and vast brown puddles. The new economy, dozens of unconvincing banks and people selling mobile phones to each other, is just topdressing here, failing to conceal the glum reality.
When I conducted a miniature opinion poll on Ryazan's streets, Putin won it. Many will vote for him out of a sort of habit, some because they reckon that if they do not use their ballots the authorities will steal them anyway.
Most are worried sick by poverty and deprivation, salaries of £50 a month, failing jobs, housing shortages. 'My son must wait for me to die to get a flat,' said one sad grandmother. A few believed Putin had helped them, including a pharmacist who had finally started getting her wages again after a long gap.
But perhaps my most interesting encounter was with Lydia Kryuchkova, deputy editor of the conservative local paper, the Ryazan Bulletin.
I say 'conservative' because she loathes pornography and swearing, crime and disorder, unpunctuality and low culture.
But Lydia, with her classic Soviet face straight out of the Sixties, is an unashamed Communist, even though she now wears a crucifix round her neck. 'We had so-called democracy,' she says. 'We never had real democracy. What's essential now is to get rid of crime, to bring back order.
Only after that will we install democracy.' What she - and millions of others - want is the security of the predictable.
If they cannot have the rule of law, and such a thing is terribly remote in this place, they would at least like to be sure that tomorrow will be much like today.
Putin hopes that is exactly what he can achieve, as long as the oil price stays high. And we, who in truth care more about Russia's oil than about her democracy, will look the other way as yet another brief, failed experiment in freedom slowly flickers and fades. How long before we decide that our freedom, too, is an expensive nuisance?
Here’s another article from February 2007, on the same subject. Once again, events since the ‘Arab Spring’ and the attempted overthrow of Syria have altered my view. There’s a small flicker, towards of the end, of doubt about the ‘Orange’ and ‘Rose’ revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. But again, I think it was the Syria episode that shifted my view of this:
I am more scared of Russia now than I ever was in the days of the Cold War, when silly disarmers fanned exaggerated fears of nuclear war.And so should you be. Then, we were the respected members of a great and potent alliance that stood united against an economically and politically decrepit Kremlin, whose colossal armies dared not move forward one foot, and whose rockets could only be fired in an act of global suicide.
Now we are a small and lonely country, singled out for the ire and spite of a reborn, vigorous Russian nation: ruthless, aggressive, rich; flushed with a revived national pride and armed with the entirely usable weapons of oil and gas.
Russia's state-controlled gas monolith, Gazprom, is an enormous energy power, second only to Saudi Arabia in the size of its reserves. It is the biggest extractor of natural gas in the world and the planet's third largest corporation. It is the sole supplier of gas to the three Baltic republics, as well as to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Finland, Moldova and Slovakia. It is by far the biggest gas provider to Turkey, supplying around 65 per cent of that country's needs.
It sells about a quarter of the gas used by the entire European Union. This includes
97 per cent of Bulgaria's gas, 89 per cent of Hungary's, 86 per cent of Poland's, almost 75 per cent of the Czech Republic's, two thirds of supplies to Austria, 40 per cent of Romania's, 36 per cent of Germany's, 27 per cent of Italy's and 25 per cent of France's.
At present it has only two per cent of Britain's gas market but this is expected to rise to 20 per cent during the next few years, and Gazprom is also talking about buying Britain's gas distribution company, Centrica.
Significantly, in recent disputes with Ukraine and Belarus it has been ready to turn off the tap to get its way.
Suddenly, it is believable that Russian agents might murder their government's enemies, blatantly and spectacularly on British sovereign soil – and that we will get no serious help in tracking the culprits. We are also being treated in general with snorting, bullying contempt designed to let us know just how far we have fallen.
Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador to Moscow, Anthony Brenton, who ought to be a figure of status and respect, is subject to a crude and unsubtle campaign of personal harassment, sometimes actually dangerous, and unashamedly winked at by the Moscow authorities. The BBC's Russian service is mysteriously told it can no longer broadcast on the FM band, thanks to alleged licensing difficulties. And now a strange whistling noise is interfering with reception on the AM band as well.
Britain's official cultural arm, the British Council, has been raided by tax inspectors, famous for their selective zeal against those who upset the President. And, laughably in this country of low safety standards, it has just been fined for breaking fire regulations in its Leningrad office – run, as it happens, by Neil Kinnock's son, Stephen.
It is a new experience for Britain, so long herself a feared power who could behave much as she wished, to be the weaker party in such a quarrel, and with no great hope of getting stronger.
We are, in my view, being warned crudely and bluntly that in future we must treat Moscow with respect, in the street-gangster sense of the word. There are to be no more grants of political asylum to foes of the Kremlin. There are to be no more lectures on human rights from diplomats or the BBC. Or else.
This is a calculated humiliation. At least America has been tactful as it has quietly deprived us of our empire and reduced us to second-class status.
The new Russia is as tactful as a teenager full of lager. This is a raw, adolescent society. Moscow, once somnolent and repressed, is now Europe's most exhilarating, exotic and expensive city. It glitters with money like a Gulf oil state. Significantly, its seven great Stalin-era skyscrapers, assertions of overbearing might dating from the last years of the great dictator, have been scrubbed and regilded as an expression of nostalgic national pride.
The Russian rouble, once a sort of joke money traded in wads, like wastepaper, on the black market and useful only for buying bottles of raw vodka or blue, diseased chickens, is now a petrocurrency available from exchange offices in London and accepted by airlines for duty-free goods.
At street level you see other significant signs of brashness, lawlessness and immaturity.
Bodyguards, dressed in obligatory black, sit next to hotel lifts guarding their rouble-billionaire clients, or march through the lobbies with their shut, blank faces and that strange, swaying gait. Shops display the gross bad taste of the new rich.
Within the fences that keep out the poor, the expensive women totter about, dressed as if to satisfy the sexual fantasies of 14-year-old schoolboys: no heel lower than five inches, every skirt tight and short.
Amid such scenes I briefly snatched a conversation with Andrei Lugovoi, one of the men suspected of playing a part in the death of Alexander Litvinenko.His two bulging bodyguards loitered, adopting boxers' stances, presumably ready to floor me if I misbehaved.
Mr Lugovoi had until then been ignoring my requests to see him but a Russian colleague tracked him down and bravely blocked his path while I caught up with him. Mr Lugovoi is a slight man in bizarre shoes with long, tapering toes. He bestows on me a disarming smile and twinkles as I try to question him. Will he be returning to London? 'I hope so,' he lies merrily before walking off. If this is a Kremlin hitman, he puts on a good act. But then such a man would, wouldn't he?
Shaped as I was by the Cold War and by two melodramatic years living in Moscow as the old regime collapsed 15 years ago, I had begun my enquiries by meeting Mikhail Lyubimov, now in his 70s but once a real-life KGB hood, expelled from London after he tried to recruit female Whitehall clerks at tea dances.
Compared with Russia's modern hard men, Lyubimov is Santa Claus. He still has a spy's instinct, insisting on sitting in the darkest corner of the pizzeria where we meet. He remains very much the loyalist, praising President Vladimir Putin as 'more sensible than Boris Yeltsin, more sensible than Gorbachev'.
He is plainly impressed by the revival of national self-confidence under the ex-KGB agent. 'Putin understands the mind of the people. He understands Russian pride.' Lyubimov doubts the reinvigorated Russian state would nowadays kill its enemies on foreign soil. 'The idea that he gave the order to kill Litvinenko, this is rubbish,' he says. In his time, the KGB certainly took stern vengeance in its cellars on such traitors as Oleg Penkovsky. But in a revulsion from the methods of the Stalin era, it was careful about killings abroad. He recalled: 'In the Stalin years, we killed a lot of people abroad.' But he explains this stopped under Khrushchev and never seriously started again.
'I remember there was a decision to kill Oleg Lyalin, the Seventies defector. This was sent to all KGB stations, "If you see this man you must do all in your power to eliminate him." I imagined I might meet him on the London Tube – what should I do? [Smilingly, he mimes a pushing action] Shove him under the wheels of the train? It was a typical secret service order. They knew it would not be done.' Nor was it. Despite having helped to wreck Russian spy networks in London for a generation, Lyalin died of natural causes in 1995, at an unnamed location in England.
All very comforting. But Alexei Venediktov, one of Russia's leading political commentators, widely believed to have excellent Kremlin access and the ear of influential billionaire Roman Abramovich, suspects things have changed. I spoke to him at the studios of the radio station Echo Moscow, a favourite forum for the capital's politically aware.
He points out that in 2004, two Russian agents were convicted by a Qatari court of killing a Chechen rebel exile in the Gulf state. The pair have since been returned to Russia, supposedly to serve their sentences there, but actually to an official welcome and likely release. And he draws my attention to a new law signed by President Putin last July, specifically allowing Russian special service agents to kill 'terrorists' abroad.
He also explains that Britain's stock is low in the new Russia. 'Our ruling elite believe Britain is not a country with its own policies, but one which follows American policy, so there is no sense in talking to the British when they can talk to their American bosses.' But it is more than that. There is a specific dispute, and it is personal between President Putin and Anthony Blair. It is caused by an argument over extradition. The treatment of the British Ambassador, Anthony Brenton, has been personally permitted by the Kremlin and is a sign of its displeasure over the asylum given to anti-Putin billionaire Boris Berezovsky and to the Chechen leader Ahmed Zakayev.
Venediktov, referring to Kremlin potentates as 'the people from behind the walls', says: 'The Russian authorities are also displeased that Berezovsky travels on a British passport under what they regard as the false name of Platon Yelenin.
'They are sure the decision about this asylum was not taken by the courts but by the Home Office, and we know Putin talked to Blair about that. Putin thought Blair was not being helpful. They think, surely, there is a way to overrule the courts in Britain.' Apparently – in a bizarre throwback to old Soviet propaganda ideas about Britain – Putin's advisers believe Ministers and judges belong to the same clubs and communicate with each other privately there.
When I suggest to him that the Russian Embassy in London must surely know this is all wrong, Venediktov replies that Russia now has the sort of government whose foreign envoys tell it what it wants to hear.
The dispute is personal. 'Putin's disbelief of Blair was the start of the sudden cooling of relations with Britain. The Russian government thinks the British Government has not met expectations. Putin thinks Blair fooled him when he promised tight co-operation against terrorism. Putin is very personal in his relations with other political leaders.' He would do them personal favours, and presumably expects the same in return.
Boris Berezovsky is regarded by Putin as a sort of terrorist because of his open calls for the overthrow of the Russian government.
But the Kremlin had got used to that. The incident that really damaged relations was the granting of asylum last summer to executives from Yukos, the oil company now effectively seized by the Russian state but once owned by Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, currently doing time in a remote jail for supposed tax offences. Russian prosecutors were livid that they were prevented from extraditing the Yukos men.
And soon afterwards the troubles of Ambassador Brenton began. To some extent they are his own fault. He spoke at a meeting of opposition groups under the umbrella of an organisation called Another Russia, which he was absolutely entitled to do. But among these groups was the repellent National Bolshevik Party, led by Eduard Limonov, a creepy writer of dirty books, accused by his enemies of being an open supporter of discredited Stalinist and National Socialist ideas. Certainly his party's symbols are startlingly – and intentionally – similar to those used by Hitler's Nazis.
But this cannot be the reason why Mr Brenton has since been singled out and harried, as we shall shortly see. Two American diplomats spoke at the same gathering and the French ambassador was present, but nothing has happened to them.
Venediktov says the treatment of Mr Brenton is the first of its kind since a dangerous frontier quarrel between the old USSR and China in 1969. Then, an officially sponsored demonstration was unleashed against the Chinese embassy. Since then, there has been no action comparable to this by a Moscow government. But the pursuit of Mr Brenton is obviously happening with official support.
'There is no doubt they are acting on the orders of the Kremlin,' Venediktov says.
Who can doubt he is right about that? The organisation that pursues Mr Brenton is a supposed patriotic youth movement called Nashi, which means, roughly, 'Our thing'.
Nashi is as spontaneous as North Korea. If it is a popular youth movement, why is its Moscow headquarters bare of any indication of who operates within? Why have its leaders met President Putin three times?
Why are its finances such a mystery?
Nashi's campaign against our man in Moscow is an elaborate, malicious and sometimes risky tease, which in my view could not have been dreamt up by a few teens and which clearly has official sanction and help. Mr Brenton called for a 'civil society' in Russia, with freedom of expression. And that is what he is getting.
Youths, including 19-year-old computer student Tikhon Chumakov, have been demonstrating outside the British Embassy and wherever Mr Brenton goes. They are mysteriously well informed about his movements. They even follow his official car through the hellish Moscow traffic, which can be dangerous. How do they do it?
I spoke to Chumakov, a slim fair-haired character who looks a little as the young Putin must have done. He is slightly vague about how the protests began or how he came to be involved but he now has a personal grudge after being thumped by a (Russian) security guard during a protest outside the Ambassador's beautiful residence just across the river from the Kremlin.
The Ambassador has since said sorry for this excess of zeal. But Chumakov wants a broader apology for associating with the 'fascists' of the National Bolsheviks. He is currently planning a trip to London during which he hopes to appeal to the Queen about the matter.
He claims to be outraged. But he is curiously passionless as he says he is motivated by disgust at the National Bolsheviks and similar types. 'We in Nashi think such people are just scum. Since we are an antifascist youth movement, we were outraged.' He asks: 'Can you imagine the Russian ambassador to London going to an IRA conference, or the Russian ambassador in Washington at a Ku Klux Klan rally?'
Mr Brenton has offered to have tea with Nashi representatives to explain his position but they have responded by displaying banners saying: 'We don't want your tea.' Chumakov says they want a proper apology, not a nice meeting. 'I will carry on pursuing him until he either apologises or leaves the country.' Surely, I asked him, Nashi is a front organisation for Putin? He replies: 'We do support the ideas of the President. But to say that my actions are ruled or ordered by the Kremlin is untrue. I am doing it on my own.' He admits he has been given some travelling expenses when he has pursued Brenton to distant cities such as Samara but says only small sums are involved.
He is, obviously, only a footsoldier in someone else's army. I get a more subtle explanation of how the group works from Anastasia Suslova, 21, a Nashi official.
While unable to say where Nashi gets its money (it is said to come from pro-Putin businessmen, as it happens), she explains that: 'In 2005, with the "orange" and "rose" revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, we realised we needed a young generation which would understand that Russia is equal to the other European nations, and we would need a young generation that would not blindly follow such revolutions.
Our job is to bring up young patriots from the generation of people who grew up to survive the failure of democracy in Russia.' That phrase 'failure of democracy' is very important. The Gorbachev-Yeltsin years are seen as a time of chaos and national humiliation. Many refer to it in Russian as 'Dermokratiya' which translates rather unpleasantly as 'The rule of s***'.
'Our ideas and tasks coincide with what Putin wants from youth. We support the political goals of the President,' adds Anastasia. Which is a very happy coincidence for Mr Putin, who was severely shaken by the outbreaks of 'people power' in neighbouring countries, seeing them – with some justice – as the manipulation of crowds and public opinion to overthrow authoritarian governments much like his own. Had such a thing happened in Moscow, I think we would have seen hordes of Nashi supporters holding gigantic counter-demonstrations and waving their symbol: a combination of the Tsarist St Andrew's Cross and the old Soviet red flag, which is a good summary of Putin's view of Russia.
Putin, aided by his brilliant spin doctor Vladislav Surkov, has shown some skill in creating or backing – at arm's length – political movements that serve his purpose at the time, and dumping them later. Nashi is just the latest and Britain is its present target. Once we have learned to do as we are told when Russia wants to extradite someone, the outrage over Mr Brenton's behaviour will mysteriously die away.
At approaching elections, President Putin rather wittily plans to back two parties at once: United Russia to get the patriotic vote and Just Russia to pick up support from the old Communists. Real opposition parties will disappear or get tiny totals. The battle will be so hollow it will make our own bloodless contest between New Labour and Cameron Toryism look like a real struggle for the soul of the nation.
Under the leadership of this clever, secret police-trained cynic, the new Russia will go on getting stronger, more authoritarian, more confident; casting a longer shadow over a Europe which has yet to realise the size of the threat that this new oil and gas state poses, or of the resentment it feels over the way it was humbled by a triumphalist West at the end of the Cold War.
Now it is getting its own back. There will be worse to come.
