Who Lost Russia?
by Peter Conradi, Oneworld, £18.99
Peter Conradi, Reuters correspondent in Moscow between 1988 and 1995 and now foreign editor of the Sunday Times, has written a balanced and informative account of what happened to Russia after the collapse of communism. I recommend it to all seeking a clear overview of recent history.
Returning to Moscow in 2016, Conradi describes his book as “a story of high hopes and goodwill but also of misunderstanding and missed opportunities”. He quotes former President Nixon who, in 1992, aged 79, said in a memorandum that Russia needed much more economic help than the US was prepared to give, stating: “The hot-button issue in the 1950s was ‘Who lost China?’ If Yeltsin goes down, the question ‘Who lost Russia?’ will be an infinitely more devastating issue in the 1990s.”
But Russia under President Yeltsin needed more than economic support – moving from a command economy to a market-based economy was itself a huge problem. As well as this, there were acute population issues, such as that after December 1991 when the Soviet Union finally split up, 25 million Russians found themselves on the wrong side of the borders of the newly independent Russia.
Underlying the whole question – which the West, naïvely believing that democracy would now prevail in Russia and that we had all arrived at “the end of history”, failed to appreciate – was Russia’s historical role and position, its sense of itself as a world power.
Many Russians, alongside President Putin, have since mourned the loss of the country’s former status. Predictably, this led to tensions with the former Soviet republics. Russia demanded a “right of influence” in what it newly defined as the “near abroad”.
Given its size and importance, Ukraine wanted a complete divorce from Russia rather than a remarriage. Nevertheless, Ukraine had its own population difficulties: after two decades of independence, Conradi reminds the reader, the country “remained almost equally divided between those who looked to Europe and those who looked to Russia”. Then there was the question of Nato and which of the newly independent former satellite communist countries should be allowed to join.
In an opinion piece in the New York Times in 1997, the respected diplomat George Kennan, who had formulated the principles of the Cold War strategy in 1946, warned leaders against immediate expansion, writing that “expanding Nato would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War in East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
This is exactly what has happened. But how could the West have resisted the legitimate requests of the Baltic states, which had always felt that they had been illegally occupied by Russia, as well as the longing of eastern European countries, such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, to distance themselves from their overbearing neighbour?
Conradi suggests that it was President Putin who “lost” Russia. Yet the situation he faced when he succeeded Yeltsin in 2000 was complex: among other issues, the war in Chechnya remained unresolved; Russia still had close historical and cultural links with Serbia; the loss of Crimea, a part of Russia for centuries, rankled; and the impoverished Russian people, living in a country where law and order had broken down, wanted a leader who could “restore pride and impose order”.
Conradi also reminds readers that, after 70 years of communism, people’s moral values “had been eroded by living in a system that was based on cheating and dishonesty”. This is the background to the current political situation in which President Trump, a newcomer to international diplomacy, now finds himself. One suspects that Putin, who has steered Russia with guile, effrontery, singular purpose and a firm hand for the last 17 years, will outmatch him.
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