When the Prime Minister of the UK tweets ‘selfies’ of himself on the phone to the President of the USA, discussing the situation in the Crimea, we have to ask what sort of a nation we have become?
The PM will have been concentrating on what he looked like in his selfie – firm jaw, tightened lips etc – rather than listening to what the American President was saying – which presumably did actually matter?
If, on the other hand, Cameron didn’t take the selfie during the phone call but set the shot up afterwards, the fact that self-promotion was at least as important – if not more – than the very serious matter he was supposed to be engaged in, underlines the shallowness of our political and even of our national life.
The handling and the outcome of the current situation in the Ukraine and the Crimea will set the direction of travel of our politics for some time ahead. What we do – and do not do – could not be more important.
Hypocrisies
The attitudes adopted in the west are bedevilled by hypocrisies.
In the past year, the UK has sold over £86 million worth of arms to Russia – snipers’ rifles, ammunition, drones and laser technology. In the five years to 2013, the UK licensed more than £406 million of military use products to Russia. We currently have no fewer than 271 arms export licences to Russia still active – for arms, military aircraft and espionage equipment.
Yet in 2013 Foreign Secretary William Hague told the House of Commons’ Committees on Arms Export Controls that ‘the British Government will not issue licences where we judge there is a clear risk the proposed export might provoke or prolong regional or internal conflicts, or which might be used to facilitate internal repression.’
So if we see Putin’s actions as internal repression we should have stopped the arms sales; and if we do not see them as repressive, why the false gravity of ministerial posturing, if not, yet again, to curry favour with America.
Profiting from the sales of weapons of destruction en masse is one of our hypocrisies. It would be foolish to imagine that America’s arms dealers are not also selling into Russia as hard as they can go.
Then we have America – which virtually licences Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip, often – as in the case of the mercy ships – carried out in full public view. But America protects Israel defiantly against negative consequences of such aggression – and has sent the pompous John Kerry to take the high moral ground with Russia.
And of course, behind this we have the Gulf War where, with no evidence of illegal production of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the USA, with the UK as bag carrier and flag partner, undertook a commercially motivated and aggressive war against Iraq – which has left us a target for ramped up international terrorism.
In this disgraceful excursion, the UK may have been a minor partner but, under Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell, helpfully concocted ‘evidence’ to justify supporting the USA’s initiative and, en route, disposed of the nuisance of the principled weapons expert, Dr David Kelly.
We – WE – and they have left Iraq in a state which can easily be argued to be significantly worse, even today – than it was before we chose to go to war.
Yet we are again dangerously following America in outdated and crude political posturing, in painting Russia in cold war terms, back in to an isolated corner.
A wiser head
Question Time on 6th March on BBC One spent much of its time on the Ukraine/Crimea/Russia situation. Former Deputy Prime Minister, Michael Heseltine was the one impressive member of the panel, never afraid to think differently and the possessor of a rigorous intelligence lacking in the other UK recruits around him.
The first question was whether Russia is too powerful, unpredicatable and scary for the European countries to deal with… While Times columnist, David Aaronovitch, went for a rabble rousing anti-Russian tirade that brought the house down, Heseltine persisted in putting the contrary view, coldly rational and eminently sensitive to the complex nuances of the nature, concerns and impact of Russia.
Pointing to our own and the Americans’ unconstructive interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, Helsetine made the point that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine had stopped down the bloodshed within that country.
He highlighted the fact that at Russia’s southern borders are a host of unstable states – and underlined the need for the west to reappraise its stance on Russia, to have some humility and to see the sense of helping to make Russia secure.
He expressed himself ‘frightened’ by the language currently being used [by the USA] which is directed at pushing Russia back into isolation.
He raised the issue of the unhelpfully light fingered intervention of the EU, trying – for its own political interests, to lure Ukraine westwards into eventual membership.
Ukraine ought to be a wealthy country but is so riven by a degree of corruption – which Russian President, Vladimir Putin, amusingly described to journalists as ‘even worse than ours’ – that it is carrying a huge debt burden and cannot pay its bills.
Putin, who had been a KGB officer, finally with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel [So what? Do we have no spooks?] – took over as Russian President at a point where the country could not have faced a wider or more profound set of challenges.
The odds were on chaos but he has prevented that from happening.
Russia’s chaotic change
The unforgettable brilliance of the trio of former President Mikhail Gorbachev, with his core team of Edouard Schevardnadze as Foreign Minister and Gennady Gerasimov as the spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry – essentially the Communications Chief – had liberalised the international world’s perspectives on Russia as well as bringing change internally.
Each of these three were highly able, temperamentally open – and Gerasimov was endlessly amusing, with a light touch that always ran counter to the stereotype of the dour Russian apparatchik.
Together they raised the iron curtain to a significant degree, making Russia both more physically accessible and more alluring to visit.
The external trinity of Gorbachev, American President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, formed a mutual understanding that went a long way to dissolving cold war suspicions and fears.
But Gorbachev’s attempts to move his country into economic and political change were too fast for so huge and complex a union to achieve. The increased contact with the seductive choices, comforts and money making possibilities of the west were arguably corrupting. They certainly weakened the bonds, often forceful, that had held the mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics together.
Rivalries, old enmities and self interest in some of the states – along with an increasing sense of individual national identities, began to threaten the stability of the edifice of the USSR.
The USSR suffered an extreme economic and political crisis in 1990, with widespread shortages and chatacteristic endless queues for even the most basic essentials.
Gorbachev went to the USA to ask President Reagan to grant the USSR the status of ‘most favoured nation’ – essentially a valuable national trade discount scheme, which would have stabilised his position in bringing relief to his country. For whatever reason, despite their relationship, Reagan refused.
That failure of imagination on the part of the American President was responsible for the loss of the Gorbachev presidency, followed by events that threw Russia hard away from its socialist political philosophy.
Gorbachev had to go home empty handed. His failure played into the hands of the hard line members of the Communist party, opposed to his reforms.
They took their chance in ‘the August Putsch’ of 1991, the famous coup against Gorbachev while he was on holiday – ironically today, on the Black Sea and in the Crimea. The detail of this is dramatic and fascinating in its own terms but, in short, Gorbachev and his family were confined within their dacha, with their communications with the outside world cut off by the KGB. Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, previously a strong character, never recovered from the shock of this assault and died much earlier than she ought.
In Moscow, Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, staged a dramatic resistance to the coup, standing on a tank outside the White House, the Russian parliament building, drawing widespread popular support which unnerved the coup leaders.
Gorbachev was freed and, as legitimate President, reversed all decisions the coup group had taken. He returned to Moscow for what became the end of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He resigned from the party leadership. Yeltsin, as President of Russia, annexed all party assets to Russia, moved the party archives to the control of the state archives, had the old imperial colours restored as the national flag and ended the presence of the party in Russia, banning all party activitiies in the country.
The USSR then began to fall apart, with Gorbachev accepting bloodlessly the successive declarations of independence of the republics. The Baltics had gone before the August coup against Gorbachev, departures which had indeed precipitated that coup in the anxieties of the Communist Party at the coming dissolution.
By November 1991, only Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan remained. On 1st December Ukraine held a referendum with over 90% supporting the Act of Independence of Ukraine. On 8th December, Yeltsin, with the leaders of Ukraine and what was now Belarus, met with the prime ministers of the republics and established the Commonwealth of Independent States [CIS], in place of the former Soviet Union.
An interesting note for today is that, as Russian President, Boris Yeltsin agreed that Crimea [which had been given to Ukraine by the Cold War Russian President, Nikita Kruschev, who was Ukrainian] could remain in Ukraine when it became independent in 1991 – with Russia’s Black Sea fleet remaining at Sevastopol under lease arrangements – recently extended to 2042.
On 24th December, Russia, with the permission of its allies in the CIS, informed the UN that it was the inheritor of the USSR’s membership and its seat on the Security Council.
On 25th December Gorbachev resigned as President of the USSR; and on 26th December the USSR formally ceased to exist.
Russia also took responsibility for settling the USSR’s external debts, even though its population made up just half of the population of the USSR at the time of its dissolution. This debt burden was a factor in Russia’s financial crises in the 1990s and its fall in GDP.
In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin had become the first President of Russia. Following the creation of the CIS and the end of the USSR, he remained in office as President of the Russian Federation and was elected to that position in 1996.
A charismatic but erratic figure, out of scale and sometimes out of control, Yeltsin threw the Russian economic freight train, with its command economy, at breakneck speed towards the destination of the demand economy of the free market. Russia and the Federation were hurled into instant privatisation and free market prices in a chaotic process which saw many state assets swept into the pockets of the well-connected opportunists we now call the oligarchs, who were suddenly in possession of unimaginable wealth. God alone knows what happened to the ordinary Russians who had always had a state job to go to, however mundane and bread-line paid – and now had nothing.
The degree of corruption set in train was not just internal. Sharks from elsewhere immediately got moving, with, for example, George Walker, a well known but fading British entrepreneur of the day, scrambling to sell cigarettes into Russia with a disregard for health which would not have been tolerated at home. Others rushed to buy the great statuary of the Soviet era which was symbolically knocked over by the new revolutionaries. Black Felixes, Lenins, Stalins – the lot of them- were shipped out in short order – the important Soviet heritage pillaged and hoovered away by the sharp eyed fast buck brigade in the west.
Naturally the Yeltsin administration was never going to hold – and it did not, staggering from crisis to pantomime until, at the end of December 1999, he suddenly announced his resignation, in favour of the successor he had chosen – Vladimir Putin.
Putin: inheritance and performance
For Russia’s sake, that was probably the wisest decision Yeltsin made. It is in no one’s interests that Russia falls apart or that its influence over its surrounding states, some unstable and volatile, is weakened.
Putin inherited a hugely volatile Russia – a state in upheaval, a hen with few chicks left; that had no idea what it was or where it was going; reeling from an unguided diametric crash-change of economic direction; robber barons all over the place with an assassination rate that sees few of them survive long to enjoy the fruits of their thieving; and old hostilities, as with Chechnya and with Georgia, gingering up again. Herding cats is afternoon tea compared to Putin’s gig.
With the odds overwhelmingly against him, President-Prime Minister-President Putin has been able to hold the ring in this situation, a phenomenally difficult task – which we in the UK should be in a position to appreciate, since we face being unable to hold together four modest states in a tiny island.
In keeping Russia together, Putin has infringed legality and has ridden roughshod as he has seen fit – but he has by and large, maintained order without the acts of horrific oppression for which the old Soviet was famous. Today’s Russian ships obstructing the Ukrainian ships in the Crimea are no more than live board games in comparison to the days in 1968 when the Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Dubcek reforms; and the student Jan Palach set fire to himself in protest in Wenceslas Square.
Civilised society cannot proceed or develop in disorder. Images of Iraq in the last Gulf War of our making and of Syria under Assad’s inward-facing assaults today, raise the question of how a people can possibly build a nation again in the aftermath of that unrelenting scale of infrastructural destruction?
The challenge even liberal developed nations face is finding enlightened equilibrium between absolute freedom and totalitarian order. The UK has not always managed this, even in very recent memory.
No one should forget that Tony Blair, with David Blunkett an energetic home secretary in support, enacted and enforced the most illiberal and totalitarian legislation we have seen in our lifetimes, with people arrested under anti-terrorism laws for wearing anti-Blair t-shirts in Brighton during a Labour party conference; and the celebrated Maya Evans arrested under the same anti-terrorism legislation for quietly reading aloud in the precinct of Westminster the names of the British soldiers killed in Iraq as a result of that illegal war Blair made possible.
In our different cultures and with our very different pressures, this was the equivalent of Putin jailing the Pussy Riot girls for their Moscow protest.
And before anyone brings up the actions of the baton wielding Russian police in Sochi when the recently released Pussy Riot went for a reprise – remember that a City of London policeman killed Ian Tomlinson, an innocent and passive member of the public, during a G20 protest event in London on 1st April 2009. And this was not the first such incident.
The citizens of the UK who recoil today from what Putin is doing with the Crimea have a rather pustulous national navel of their own to contemplate. No one – no one – stopped Blair and Blunkett.
What Michael Heseltime said during Question Time has to be heard and considered wisely against the fearful cold war scaremongering going on today – before it is too late. The iplayer site for that episode of QT is here.
We British often say piously: ‘Each to his own’. We need to start to understand what that really means and to implement it.
