In Russia’s Caucasus mountains in the 1980s the travel writer Colin Thubron met an old man who told him what he knew about Britain. It was, the man said, a country ruled by a queen. Her name was Mrs Churchill and he had seen a picture of her driving a tank. He was nearly right. Britain was ruled by a woman but she was not a queen. There was a picture of her on a tank but she was not Mrs Churchill. She was Margaret Thatcher.
To judge from posts on Facebook, Twitter and even in highly regarded newspapers, there are people — and they are not old mountainy men — who are prepared to give emphatic views on today’s Russia based on a similar sketchy knowledge of their subject. In his new book The Story of Russia the distinguished historian Orlando Figes takes them to task.
Figes states that much of the burgeoning punditry on Russia is based on too narrow a perspective, including: “a focus on Putin as the embodiment of the ‘kleptocracy’ or ‘mafia state’ — descriptions of a system that is too complex to be explained by the corrupt pursuit of personal wealth or the machinations of one man and his oligarchic entourage.” The prevailing view, he writes, is that of the liberal Russia of Moscow and St Petersburg, which does not reflect the true situation.
The events of 1991 which led to the fall of the Soviet Union, Figes states, differed significantly from those that caused the overthrow of communism in eastern Europe. What took place was not a revolution. There was no mass uprising; there were no civic forums or parties ready to take power as there were in Poland and elsewhere. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union abdicated under pressure, leaving a corrupt system to be taken over by others, who in turn magnified the corruption before handing it over to others, who in turn passed it on to the current regime.
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In other words Putin did not invent the “kleptocracy”. He inherited it and he was not and is not alone. This is borne out by my own experience of Russia in the 1990s where avowed communists became billionaires, participants in the 1991 coup ended up as bankers and immunity from prosecution for corruption was a condition attached by Yeltsin when handing over power to Putin.
Figes’s book and Rodric Braithwaite’s Russia: Myths and Realities together provide the historical background needed in order to make a decent judgment on where Russia is going. They both take us through the extremely complex process of Russia’s history from its earliest days and how this broad historical sweep has influenced today’s culture, politics and how Russians think of themselves.
There are differences of emphasis which do not warrant comparison in the short space available here. It is enough to say that the two men occasionally approach subjects from different perspectives.
Figes, the professional historian, provides the reader with amazingly detailed information down to what Kerensky’s ministers were eating when the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace to arrest them in 1917: borscht, steamed fish and artichokes.
Braithwaite, now in his 91st year, was British ambassador in Moscow in the period leading up to and including the attempted hardline coup of August 1991. Perhaps the most significant of his observations on Russia’s modern history is on the vexed subject of promises to Gorbachev that Nato would not expand to Russia’s borders. He is adamant that the West made this promise and also cites a British foreign office telegram of March 7th, 1991 stating that US, British, French and German officials had “agreed that Nato should not enlarge eastwards”.
Most Russians, he writes, felt they had been double-crossed by false promises. Going further, he states that George W Bush’s offer of Nato membership to Ukraine raised an unacceptable vision of Russia’s Black Sea fleet being stationed on Nato territory.
Figes agrees that, whatever the reality about promises made and reneged upon, eastward expansion poisoned the relationship between Nato and Russia.
Putin is a product not only of that poisoned relationship but of his highly personalised interpretation of his country’s history. He might do well to read both books being reviewed here. He has also never viewed Ukraine as a separate country but this is a fairly common belief in Russia and is shared by Putin’s political nemesis Alexei Navalny, a Russian of Ukrainian heritage.
Neither book lays major emphasis on the non-Russians who ruled from the Kremlin in the Soviet era. Figes refers to a “bitter legacy of hatred towards Russia” among Ukrainian descendants of those who died in the appalling Holodomor famine of the 1930s. But the famine was instigated and seen to its conclusion by a Georgian. That Georgian, Stalin, is described in Braithwaite’s book as one of Russia’s three great tyrants with Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, without emphasising he was not Russian.
Neither book sufficiently avoids the conflation of “Kremlin rule” with “Russian rule” in the Soviet context. In his definitive work All the Kremlin’s Men, Mikhail Zygar points out that the “Ukrainian clans” within the Communist Party can be said to have ruled the Soviet Union for decades. The Soviet experience has not always been a case of Russians dominating Ukrainians but also of Ukrainians being dominated by their fellow countrymen.
Lastly, Braithwaite lays undue emphasis on attitudes to truth based on the uniquely Russian concept of vranyo. He puts it this way: “Russian reality is coloured by the disconcerting and deeply rooted phenomenon of ‘vranyo’. This is akin to the Irish ‘blarney’, but lacks the overtone of roguish charm. Individuals, officials, governments tell lies if they believe it serves their interests, or those of their bosses, their organisation or the state.”
In fact vranyo is a sort of game in which an outrageous lie is told in the clear knowledge that people won’t believe it but may pretend they do. Lies deliberately intended to deceive come under the Russian concept of lozh. In any event, Braithwaite might have omitted the Irish reference and made a more accurate comparison by citing the behaviour of his compatriot Boris Johnson.
Seamus Martin is a former Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times
