A quarter of a century ago the West won the Cold War. Did we use the opportunity that followed that “victory” wisely? Forgive me if I mix the analytical with the personal. Twenty-six years ago a woman in Moscow whom I hardly knew offered me a home there. My Russian “mother”, as she became, is old now, but her daughter’s flat remains my second home. She is my “sister” and dearest friend. But this spring, I became fearful of contact with her.
It was then that the Kremlin reclaimed total control over the media to launch a vitriolic war of words against Ukraine and the West. In retrospect, this was clearly phase one of the strategy that has now been rolled out militarily in the proxy war pursued against Ukraine.
Before this could happen, Russia’s rulers needed to turn the Russian people against their own kind, against their fellow Slavs in Russia’s “borderlands” (the Slav translation of Ukraina). In order to do so the Kremlin reached for the verbal nuclear option. It ordered the media to call them “fascists”. Day in, day out, the word was repeated and repeated. Ukraine’s rulers (who for all their faults have nothing military about them) have become the “junta”. If it were not so wretched it would be comical.
This is just what the Soviet Union’s rulers did after the Wehrmacht attacked in June 1941. Overnight, friends had to be turned into enemies. The Soviet Ministry of Love, as George Orwell memorably dubbed it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, had to turn white into black. It succeeded so well that for decades afterwards the Soviet Union’s considerable German minority continued to feel the impact of that hostility.
That is why I was fearful of emailing my “sister” in Moscow. I dreaded her having fallen under the sway of that propaganda bombardment. It takes resilience to withstand such a blitz.
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I should have had more confidence. By the time she grew up, the Soviet empire was old and no longer driven by terror. But doublethink is a language you do not forget.
Her response to my email was immediate. Recalling Boris Pasternak’s image of fate pursuing us “like a madman with a razor”, she wrote: “I am no poet. I don’t have the tragic gift. There’s no madman coming after us with a razor, only a drunken woman with a kitchen knife. Her name is History. I can’t work out what she wants right now. Is she trying to kill us, press a slice of pie onto us, or give us a kiss? Or is she going to fall on her own knife?”
I wish I were sitting with her now. This image is the nearest I can get to grasping what it is like to be a thinking, feeling person in Russia now.
Communism fell at the moment when western leaders had convinced themselves that all they needed to do to ensure the future prosperity of their old adversary was ensure the Communist party was destroyed and the economy privatised. The same seers who foresaw democracy springing up in Iraq once Saddam Hussein was removed were at work here.
So it was that a handful of young men with sharp elbows and old men who were in the right place at the right time when the Soviet music stopped divvied up the assets of the old empire and squirreled them away offshore. Did it not occur to all those western advisers and management consultants that the entire framework of the law and of social institutions would collapse along with the economy?
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Soaring oil prices in the next decade restored an illusion of health. However much the ruling cabal stole there was enough left over for much of the population to feel richer than before, rich enough to fit a new kitchen, buy a car, take holidays abroad. But no economic investment strategy accompanied this boom. Had it done so, Ukraine would not be under attack today. Instead, Russia’s security elites, now in power following Putin’s coronation, spread like fungi and used the boom to consolidate and protect their wealth and destroy all vestige of opposition.
Once energy prices stopped rising, this kleptocracy could see trouble ahead. Their popularity was not going to survive a downturn for long. So they anticipated the popular displeasure by diverting it towards an external enemy. The fact that the enemy they have turned on in Ukraine are people with whom they are connected by profound ties of family and history just makes this a more Russian story.
What now? We will need to offer Ukraine the comprehensive support that we failed to offer the post-Soviet space after the fall of Communism. This will not be easy and it will cost us. But the best way of encouraging a different political model in Russia itself is to ensure that all of Ukraine can be transformed from a corrupt basket case into a flourishing independent state under the rule of law.
Susan Richards is the founder editor of the website openDemocracy and the author of Lost and Found in Russia