How to handle Russia

The Economist has a new editor. I learnt that she is a woman, a fact given away by John Micklethwait, in his excellent valedictory editorial. A bit of work on Google this morning reveals her name as Zanny Minton Beddoes.

I don’t know if it is a co-incidence, but this week saw by far the worst article I have ever read in the magazine, entitled “From Cold War to Hot War”, about Russia.

The piece could have been written by a retired colonel from the seventies. I remember at school that once a year some old guy in a faded uniform would come to speak to us. It was always the same, the purpose was to scare us with propaganda. I guess they thought public school kids might become opinion formers, or future recruits to military or intelligence. More likely, sensible schools wouldn’t have let these people near their kids. I remember misleading charts full of outsize Russian tanks seemingly on the point of invading Eastbourne – captain Mainwaring could not have done it better.

At college, I met my first Russian, a girl with many of the same quirks as the rest of us, a bit weird but in a normal, reassuring way. Before that, I seriously thought that all Russians were rabid communists. Once I had made the connection, I vowed never to be fooled by such nonsense again.

It was a good lesson, and one that has stood the test of time. I have developed a nose for censorship and a healthy scepticsm about the judgement of others. Such antennae have been especially active since moving to the US. Yesterday’s Russians have become today’s Muslims. But now it seems the Russians are back in the frame as well.

From the Economist, I have come to expect rigour, balance and some practical options. This article lacked all three.

I hated the regular twinning of EU and NATO. From the article, you could almost think they were the same organisation. In reality they are very different.

The EU promotes economic and human development among its member states. It does not threaten anyone, has admirable governance and attempts to be transparent. NATO is a military alliance. It aims to project military power and threat to promote the interests of its member states. It was formed specifically to contain Russia, and is dominated by the US. Its governance is far from transparent.

Viewed from Russia, the EU and NATO will appear completely different. One is a potential trading partner, a forum for development, and a threat only in terms of rule of business law and as a demonstration to Russian people that alternative economic models might be stronger than the Kremlin’s. The other is a direct, military threat, aimed at the throat of the bear at all times.

I hated the box “In the Kremlin’s pocket”. We were supposed to conclude that many political parties across Europe were somehow stooges for Russia. As far as I could tell, the only so-called evidence was that the FN in France had accepted a loan from Russia. The rest was innuendo, and pretty pathetic innuendo at that.

I hated the chart comparing Russia’s defence spending and NATO’s. It used the puerile device of starting from a year where Russia’s spending was lowest and then indexing – so that Russia’s spending now appeared more threatening.

But also striking, an ultimately more worrying, was the lack of ideas. The article noted how Putin was fighting on many fronts, and the tactics he uses, such as cycles taking military ground and then negotiating a pause. But I didn’t really see any thoughts about what to do about the situation. There was not even an opinion about the extent to arm the Ukrainian government – correctly pointing out that this would play into Putin’s hand by validating his story about the conflict being stoked from behind by the US.

I am no apologist for Putin. He was schooled in the KGB and shameless in tactics and disrespect for humanity. Actions in Chechnya, Abkhazia, Transdniester and Crimea are pretty indefensible, as was his cynical and inhumane reaction to the downing of the Malaysian airliner. The Litvinenko story is frightening and consistent.

But Putin and his coterie will only be controlled if we try to understand the world from their eyes. We can hazard some guesses.

Russian history of the last hundred years has been repetitive humiliation. Losses in both world wars were horrific. The state collapsed in the 1980’s. Afghanistan showed the ineptness of the military. They were lectured by Reagan and then Bush. The country was led by an alcoholic stooge – when Yeltsin danced at conferences or failed to get off a plane in Dublin, the rest of the world laughed, but just imagine the hurt that would cause in a patriot. For all his flaws, the only one that seemed to project any authority was Stalin. And the Russian Orthodox Church gives God’s cover for doing what it takes to restore greatness.

Then there is the world map. Go back far enough and choose your date, and Russia encompassed much of Europe. Even now, its sheer scale is truly awesome. When Putin was growing up, the borders with places like Ukraine or Lithuania were more like between administrative regions than nations. He’ll have been raised on pictures of a Russian Crimea or Georgia. In his mind, that is probably the correct order of things.

Then, as a KGB man, he must take a cynical but perhaps realistic view of the CIA. He will know the extent of covert operations during the cold war and the tactics employed, and how nothing much was dismantled after 1990. Small wonder he sees CIA plots in Kiev, Tbilisi and everywhere else – and is he wrong? Responses about democracy and the will of the people wear pretty thin when we see the democratic weakening of congress and the double standards over Crimea.

Finally, he’ll take a jaundiced view of the US itself. Here is a nation that undermines international organisations, defends an occupation, invades at will, seems to have a congress controlled by sinister money, and rescinds on agreements at will. When poked by tiny Cuba, the US went into a fifty-year sulk, but it still has the gall to talk of freedom and values. Now there is ill-disguised cynical economic war too, from a nation supposedly espousing free markets.

I guess that will be a large part of the Putin perspective. We can add in some paranoia and politics at home, a perpetual fear of everything and everyone and a controlling manipulation to manage the indefensible. Further, he will feel a horrible shame and jealousy of others that have shamed Russia economically.

This has to be the start of a basis to respond. A report for the UK government today found that poor diplomacy meant that the UK and EU did not realise what a threat the purported Ukraine/EU agreement at the end of 2013 would be seen in Russia. True, but surely you don’t need an army of diplomats to deduce this, merely a simple willingness to see the world through other eyes. This does not seem to have been a strength of US or UK foreign policy lately.

It will be hard now to find a workable accommodation over Ukraine, without more loss of life or loss of face or risk of escalation. The only place to start, as always, is to gain the high ground by respectful use of genuinely international institutions, for example by involving China, and by scaling down the military rhetoric.

The Economist was right about one thing: in the end the only way to offer a better life for Russians is to demonstrate stronger values: then the Russian people will in the end come around. It is a shame that our Western values are so easily diluted. Up until now, one beacon has been the Economist itself. We can only hope that this poor article is a one off, and that the magazine does not start to become part of the problem too.