Robert Service

Would it really be strange if Vladimir Putin started playing off America against China in geopolitics? If he had greater vision, he would have been doing this in all those years when he fulminated against the US as the global Satan. I wrote about this in 2019 in my book Kremlin Winter as evidence of his long-term ineptitude. But Russian policymakers long ago ceased to offer Putin ideas for a more flexible foreign and security outlook, and his aggressive paranoia dragged Russia into a needless and barbaric war in 2022. Donald Trump was the one American leader whom he always exempted from his tirades. They continue to get on famously. Now Trump, a worshipper of strong-arm rulers, has delivered him the largesse of a Russo-American rapprochement.

The word ‘oligarch’ returned to the media lexicon at Donald Trump’s inauguration this week when some of the world’s biggest technology entrepreneurs took their seats while US cabinet ministers were asked to sit dutifully behind them. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg felt the need to demonstrate loyalty to Trump. The President did not insist on them kissing his ring but allotted them places as if they were school prefects listening to their headmaster on speech day. Zuckerberg could not disguise his facial discomfort. The others were better actors. Earlier this century it was Russian big business that was famous for its so-called oligarchs. Under President Yeltsin some of them received posts in government while continuing in business.

President-elect Donald Trump has in recent years talked about ‘buying’ Greenland. Until recently his comments attracted little attention but recently he shocked the world by threatening the use of economic coercion or military force to fulfil his wish. Male gorillas in the forests of west Africa engage in chest-beating to see off their rivals but Nato, to which the Kingdom of Denmark has belonged since its foundation in 1949, is meant to be a zoo park in which all the wardens sign up for a working partnership. What is behind this public breach in diplomatic etiquette? Americans can point to earlier times when they expanded their territory by purchase, not to mention conquest.

Russians are notorious for an aggressiveness at the negotiating table. In 2017 I met a group of diplomats from eastern Europe who highlighted this. They made the point that western commentary understates, if anything, the Russian habit in official talks to insult and intimidate. Apparently Putinite finger-wagging is the least of it and street-language curses and threats are completely normal. Countries to the east of the river Elbe are still regarded in the Kremlin as Russia’s eternal zone of influence. But Russian politicians also know how to diversify their table manners. They can recognise an opportunity when they see one, and Vladimir Putin expects to deploy gentler manners with Donald J. Trump.

As if the Russian political barometer hasn’t fallen low enough, news comes that it has yet to reach the bottom of the glass. Official symbolism is a reliable indicator of trends, and an announcement by Georgi Filimonov this week marks a new low. Filimonov, recently appointed as governor of Vologda province, plans to erect a life-sized statue of dictator Joseph Stalin in the provincial capital. Not to denounce him but to ‘commemorate’ him.  Probably, Putin always had an admiration for Stalin Decades have passed since Nikita Khrushchëv spread the word in the Soviet Union that Stalin was a despot and a mass killer. Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin expanded the story to cover the millions who died at his hands.

British riots are not a new phenomenon. They were regular occurrences throughout history and usually the spark that lit the tinder was a sense of grievance that the authorities were refusing to deal with. In our century, governments have better technological means to stay attuned to public opinion. But the recent outbreaks of violent protest have taken government and parliament by surprise, and the rioting and looting may not have reached its peak. Far-right political militants have undoubtedly helped to instigate the troubles on our streets, and the question arises: are they employing a model of far-left activism that led to the Bolshevik seizure of power Russia in October 1917? Some features are very reminiscent.

Today is the centenary of Vladimir Lenin’s death. His Moscow funeral was marked by official communist solemnity, as if a messiah had come and departed. Trams and buses were halted and boats were tied to mooring posts. Factory whistles were sounded at the moment when his corpse, not yet embalmed for the mausoleum that stands today on Red Square, was lowered into the ice-cold earth. Those who refrained from lamenting his passing joked that people who’d had to applaud him in life were whistling when he died. Vladimir Putin does not worship at Lenin’s shrine or memory. He holds him culpable for the 1922 constitutional settlement that gave ‘artificial’ recognition to Ukraine and laid the conditions for the current war about frontiers and the Russian zone of influence.

Loyalty cards in the West are used by supermarket chains to influence our shopping habits. They are fortunately absent from our politics, and we can freely speak our minds about public affairs, history and morality. In Russia it is different. The Russian TASS news agency reported on Wednesday that the Ministry of Internal Affairs has prepared a mandatory ‘loyalty agreement’ for all foreigners entering Russia. Our supermarkets do not demand a personal declaration of loyalty, and our governments make no such requirement of visiting foreigners. But travellers to Russian parts will run into as yet unspecified trouble if they are thought to engage in ‘distorting’ the record of Soviet people in the defence of its Fatherland between 1941 and 1945.

Popes may make claims to infallibility but they certainly make mistakes, and Pope Francis is likely to get a dressing down in heaven from his predecessor-but-one, John Paul II, for what he has now said about Russian imperial greatness. What Kyiv least needs at the moment is a blundering intervention by a well-meaning Argentinian who speaks with the supreme authority of the Holy See John Paul was born and baptised in Poland before the second world war and rose to become Archbishop of Kraków before being elected to the Papacy. He had spent decades under communist rule and experienced the brutal ways of Soviet imperialism. He knew his Russian history.

Joseph Stalin knew better than Vladimir Putin. After world war two, as the Cold War began, the Soviet dictator took the view that it was more trouble than it was worth to invade Finland again, as he had done with humiliating setbacks in the Winter War of 1939-1940. Too many parents or grandparents of those in the Finnish audience had died in the 1939-1940 war for suspicion of Russia to have faded And so the Finns were spared the fate of Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians and other peoples of eastern and central Europe who were occupied and then communised. They had to pay a price for this absolution. The country was compelled to adopt neutral status during the decades of confrontation between the Warsaw Pact and Nato.

It is a full year since Vladimir Putin started his latest war against Ukraine, and only optimists expect that the next anniversary will occur in peacetime. There is little comfort to be taken from the twin possibilities of victory or defeat for the Ukrainian forces. If they win, Russia will remain a potent threat on their borders even though Putin would be likely to fall from power. And if Ukraine loses, it will sink back into the corruption and maladministration that plagued the country before 2022 – with the additional curse of a Russian colonial oppression. Many people had assumed that such invasions could no longer be perpetrated by one European state against another. But it did not shock opinion in the countries of eastern Europe that broke away from the USSR’s grasp in 1989.