The Guardian: The Russians are back

In Edward Lucas’s The New Cold War, Moscow’s new battle with the west is not about ideology but power, writes Angus Macqueen

Saturday February 23, 2008
The New Cold War
by Edward Lucas
352pp, Bloomsbury, £18.99

This book reads like a throwback to an era we hoped had passed into history. Painted in black and white, the anti-hero is a Kremlin with evil designs upon the world and Europe in particular. Facing this conspiracy is a naive, disorganised west, supposedly gullible in its liberal openness and democratic values. There are dissidents and fellow travellers – no longer the muddle-headed ideological souls of the left but, ironically, corporate businessmen in their pursuit of a short-term buck.

The events feel strikingly familiar, like updated versions of our favourite Le Carré novels: Russian bombers flying over the North Sea, a mysterious murder on the streets of London, followed by cyber-attacks on Estonia, a member of the EU no less. Now, newspaper headlines scream of diplomats harassed in St Petersburg, and the British Council’s Russian employees are visited in the middle of the night and interrogated by the secret police.

Is it serious? Should the British government, seemingly isolated, be standing up to the Kremlin and banging its drums so loudly about what President Vladimir Putin and his friends are up to? Surely these are the same Russians who have been pouring money (“laundering” might be the right word?) through the City; they own Belgravia, seemingly love our public schools and yet, here is Edward Lucas claiming we face a new cold war.

We are not keen to hear that London is so popular because our financial regulations are so much looser than those in New York – that just maybe our Russian investors don’t want to answer too many questions. The main reason the Russians have invaded is not the football but our famed lightness of financial regulation.

We have also been slow to wake up to the fact that Kremlin power can no longer be ignored. Over the past few years, Russia has steadily acquired a hold over our future energy supplies. Not only is it sitting on vast reserves of gas and oil, but it uses this domination of supply to acquire control over distribution in our open markets, building pipelines and buying stakes in energy companies across Europe.

This power has grown with the huge price increases of oil and gas. Lucas traces how Putin has centralised power, and so can manipulate Russia’s energy policy at will. He uses this as a dangerous nationalistic weapon with which to bully his near neighbours such as Georgia and Ukraine – and could in the longer term possibly use it to blackmail the EU. If you need a convincing argument for a joined-up EU foreign policy, look no further than chapter seven.

Lucas argues that the “order” Putin claims to have brought is largely superficial. Russian capitalism functions almost entirely at the whim of the authorities. Note how easily the Kremlin closed down Shell’s and BP’s investments in Siberia, contravening every international business norm – all in favour of state-dominated companies such as Gazprom. It is the same for your local Russian entrepreneur. Lucas quotes Moscow’s prosecutor general claiming that annual bribery stands at $240bn, the equivalent of the national budget. He emphasises the almost total failure to produce a competitive economy outside the energy sector. Yet compared to those of China and India, Russia’s workforce is educated and equally eager.

But there is a worrying tone to this book. For the past decade most books about Russia have been sympathetic, though tinged with a sense of patronising pity for a people who will have to suffer another generation until they can really aspire to be like us.

The New Cold War tells the new Russia narrative with an old cold war voice. Lucas explains Putin’s extraordinary popularity and the reasons we must be worried, giving little feel for the perspective of the Russians. It is difficult to convey how deep the trauma of the end of the Soviet Union was for many. This was not just the end of a decrepit socialist system, but the almost instant collapse of an empire that had stretched back to the days of Peter the Great, an empire that the average Russian believed stood for something significant in the world. With the advent of “democracy” (or shitocracy as it became affectionately known) in 1991, nearly all that Russians experienced was penury, theft and a state that was the laughing stock of the world. Humiliation.

Lucas correctly makes some excuses for the Yeltsin years but it is a tough argument to win with your unpaid worker in Omsk or Tomsk. Under Putin that sense of failure has been transformed. He may have been lucky with the fivefold increase in oil prices, but he has used it to change the way Russians see themselves.

This has involved the uprooting of any green shoots of an open society and a return to old Soviet orthodoxies. So the new history textbook in schools says that Stalin’s murders of the 1930s created “a new class of manager … loyal to the supreme power and immaculate from the point of view of executive discipline”. Stalin is “controversial”. This is serious, particularly when inconvenient voices are regularly silenced, not least that of the last author I reviewed in these pages, Anna Politkovskaya. It is worth noting that the theory that the secret police blew up blocks of flats in Moscow, killing hundreds in order to reignite the Chechen conflict and help Putin to power, now seems to be almost accepted fact. But many Russians feel Putin’s sovereign democracy has returned the country to an authoritiarian tradition that they understand, and Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo have undermined the west’s right to stake out the moral high ground. Even Lucas, hardly a Putin fan, admits that “never in Russian history have so many Russians lived so well and so freely”.

Lucas believes that this bandit economy cannot flourish without the rule of law and a functioning opposition to nourish it. Yet you do have to wonder. With an energy-starved world and a new friend in China, another exploding economy that seems happy to ignore some of the niceties of western democracy, Russia looks safe to continue its belligerence for a while. For this new cold war is not one of ideology but of simple power. Not of ideas but of money. It is a war of raw capitalism, and the Russians are happy to engage.

The Putin leadership, almost exclusively made up of ex-KGB members, may have abandoned its Leninist ideology and any pretence of bringing equality to all, but it seems to have remembered its Marx: power stems from controlling the levers of capital. As Lucas puts it: “The people who run Russia own it.” To prove the point, the rumour is that Putin will become chairman of Gazprom when he steps down from the presidency next month. And Putin’s choice for the next president of Russia? His old pal, the chairman of Gazprom.

· Angus Macqueen is a documentary film-maker

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2259142,00.html

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