… [C]hange management is a means not an end. Our prime purpose should remain objective, trenchant foreign policy advice. We used to be better at this. Overloading the successor to the Planning Staff with the responsibility for the process of change management seems to me a serious mistake. DSI2 should be writing incisive think pieces such as ‘Iraq. How did we get into this mess and how to extricate ourselves’. Or ‘Why are we so hated in the Middle East and what we should do about it’. Or ‘Balkan map-making. Time for a new Congress of Berlin?’ It’s been an excellent initiative to bring together senior Ambassadors from around the world twice a year but it would make better sense even if occasionally uncomfortable for the home team if we were allowed to debate foreign policy rather than corporate governance.
Too much of the change management agenda is written in Wall Street management-speak which is already tired and discredited by the time it is introduced. Synergies, vfm, best practice, benchmarking, silo-working, roll-out, stakeholder, empower, push-back and deliver the agenda, fit for purpose are all prime candidates for a game of bullshit bingo, a substitute for clarity and succinctness. A personal aversion is the Utopian mission statement (so 1980s) which should be dispensed with rather than affronting me every morning on my Firecrest screen and even appearing on my pay slip! I’m not suggesting a statement along the lines of Thucydides’ Melian dialogue ‘The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must’ – an obvious neo-con nostrum. But if we have to have one of these statements to get our CSR3 settlement, let’s make it either more realistic and sharper about promoting our interests or put it in the fully-fledged, caring department of looking after our citizens in a dangerous world. ‘We’ll BE there for you.’ Of far greater use would be the old-style individual despatch to Ambassadors departing for their post. Less than a side would do but it should be endorsed/written by a Minister. Jonathan Powell’s4 reported instruction to Christopher Meyer conveys the brevity if not the flavour.
As Chris Patten adumbrated, the bane of the FCO in recent years has been the explosion of use of consultants, many of whose recommendations (I’m talking specifically of Collinson Grant) do little more than reverse the recommendations of the previous consultants (Coopers and Lybrand) fifteen years ago. A more cynical observer than me might think they were all in collusion at the FCO’s expense.
1. the 60 rule: Until quite recently diplomats had to retire on their sixtieth birthday. The rule was less a cushy benefit, more of an acknowledgement that extended overseas service could take its toll. The 60 rule opened the door to many successful second careers after retirement. It also allowed new blood to come through.
2. DSI: Directorate for Strategy and Innovation.
3. CSR: Comprehensive Spending Review.
4. Jonathan Powell: Chief of Staff to Tony Blair. Powell’s reported instruction in 1997 to Christopher Meyer, who had just been appointed ambassador in Washington: ‘we want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there.’
3. Cold Warriors
As many of these valedictories suggest, diplomatic life behind the Iron Curtain was a strange affair. Alison Bailes, who retired in 2002 as ambassador in Helsinki, wrote in a recent collection of essays that service as a NATO diplomat in a hostile Communist state and the surveillance and suspicion that entailed did have some unexpected upsides:
… [S]ome diplomats and especially their families found the combination of minimal privacy and permanent vigilance much harder to bear, while all of us were marked by the need constantly to question the genuineness and motives of any local contact who behaved in a half-decent way towards us. On the other hand, I do not think I have ever felt physically safer than in my years in Hungary (1970–74) when I travelled alone in the remotest parts of the country and never thought twice about picking up hitchhikers in the hope of some revealing grass-roots gossip. The new generation of diplomats will never experience this particular combination of physical ease and a homely environment with a no-holds barred ideological threat.
(The Foreign Office and British Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Gaynor Johnson)
In this chapter’s extracts we encounter a very grave tone indeed. Directly or indirectly, they concern what was believed to be a threat to the whole future (and the phrase was used seriously) of ‘Western civilization as we know it’. The threat came from the Communist bloc.
Margaret Thatcher, in her ‘Iron Lady’ phase in Opposition when I worked for her, seriously misjudged the Foreign Office (under a Labour government) as a nest of pinkos inhabited by a naive belief in the good faith of the USSR. The opposite was true. I remember well the prevailing ethos in King Charles Street (the FCO’s Whitehall home) when I had been there, before working for Mrs T: it was an ethos of unrelenting hostility, wariness and scepticism towards the entire Communist bloc, but particularly East Germany and the Soviet Union; fear of its creep in Asia and in Europe (especially Italy); coupled with a certain negativity as to what, beyond containment and abiding mistrust, the West could actually do. There was a compelling sense of the constraints upon HMG itself.
What, however, none of us – neither the sceptical defeatists nor the cold warriors (and the Office contained both) – appeared to be institutionally aware of, was the incompetence and economic failure of the Eastern bloc as a whole. Communism was regarded as having produced formidable governments; the growing failure of Communist economics to sustain Communist politics was by many – particularly (perversely) free-marketeers – widely overlooked.
In retrospect this surprises me – as, when the Berlin Wall fell, the speed and finality surprised most of the West. A hawkish Western media had assured us that Communism was on the march. Perhaps British ambassadors behind the secure walls of the diplomatic compounds in Moscow, Peking or Bucharest were not aware of the economic and bureaucratic basket cases that their host nations had become, but did our intelligence services offer no report?
However, the first of these despatches, from Sir John Killick in Moscow, does give some hint of recognition of incapacity, as opposed to malevolence.
Russia
‘Much too good for its inhabitants’
SIR JOHN KILLICK, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE SOVIET UNION, OCTOBER 1973
(CONFIDENTIAL) Moscow,
29 October, 1973.
Sir,
Two years in the Soviet Union have given me a bare minimum of confidence to embark on some first impressions! Even at this stage, the impenetrable nature, not only of this very strange society but of its people, makes me hesitant to come to any firm conclusions.
Somebody must have said it before, but I think the basic feeling with which I leave is that the Russian Revolution has not yet taken place. For one autocracy has been substituted another, and although the faces of the accompanying aristocracy have changed, their lifestyle and general attitude of unconcern and even contempt for the interests, feelings and concerns of the people often seems very much the same. The established Church, with its Saints in the mausoleum on Red Square and in the Kremlin Wall, has failed badly in its attempt to provide a spiritual alternative to the Orthodox Church as the opium of the people, and its liturgy carries less and less conviction; but its role is intended to be much the same … Below the upper crust aristocracy of the Party, the various ranks of the chin1 throughout the lower level Party Structure continue to provide much the same avenue to respectability as they did under the Tsars. They are also peopled by much the same characters from the pages of Gogol or Chekhov. The uniforms are lacking, but the decorations are not. The secret police and Siberia play an unchanged role, save only that so far as I know, the arestanti no longer have to walk all the way. Finally, and at the lowest level of all, the serfs, now essentially the property of the Soviet State, continue to toil on much as they always did – without much incentive to effort and on the basis that it is best to do the minimum compatible with avoiding a beating; the minimum plus five per cent positively curries favour and may even lead to advancement. The industrialisation o
f the country does not seem yet to have made much difference to their essentially Russo-Slavonic attitudes. I feel that Tolstoy would be as exasperated to-day as he was with his peasantry 120 years ago … The masses … remain largely inert on a diet of bread and very boring circuses (both literally and metaphorically) …
Lord Trevelyan, in his latest book, argues that an Ambassador must do his utmost to like and take a genuine interest in the country in which he is living and its people. I hope I am not inadequate by his standards. My interest in both has been keenly whetted. My liking for the country is real; but I think it is much too good for its inhabitants, whom I do not have it in my heart really to like. Having lived in the countries of both Super Powers, I find many similarities between them – a tremendous ‘Victorianism’ (for want of a better word) in different ways in both internal attitudes and foreign policies; in the case of the former a marked conservatism and of the latter a sense of ‘manifest destiny’. Yet there is one great difference – Americans want and need to be liked, and respond immediately to a foreigner who fills Lord Trevelyan’s bill; Russians have no such need, and indeed are suspicious and even contemptuous of those who court them too eagerly. They want respect in all its forms, and in turn respect those who insist on the same treatment. I respect them and even admire them in many ways.
On the fly-leaf of his well-known (but not really very profound) book about Russia in his day, the Marquis de Custine quotes the advice of Vladimir Monomakh to his sons, 800 years ago: ‘Above all, respect foreigners, and if you cannot heap presents on them, at least be prodigal with marks of goodwill, because on the manner in which they are treated in a country will depend what they say of it – good or ill – in their own.’ In saying that I have not exactly been overwhelmed with goodwill, I am not thinking of the superficial manifestations to which some foreign representatives are treated as a matter of policy by the Soviet Government or, on instructions, by well-known front organisations like the Friendship Societies, the Supreme Soviet, the All-Union Council of Trade Unions or (sometimes) Intourist and the foreign currency shops. I have in mind such fundamentally more revealing things as the blank stare and total absence of helpfulness usually met with in any Soviet shop or office and the total lack of the more elementary courtesies and consideration encountered in any public place. I am bound to admit that all this does have the merit that it is non-discriminatory – they are no less bloody to each other! Nor am I under the illusion that the lot of the foreign visitor to Britain – even if he speaks some English – is ideal! Possibly one of the troubles in Anglo-Soviet relations is that we do at bottom have a certain amount in common. At all events, I look forward to pursuing the subject with Lord Trevelyan.
In conclusion, two reminiscences. First, of a quotation from Chekhov on a wooden board in a flower bed in the garden at Melikhovo, where he once lived and wrote. It reads ‘If each one of us, on his own piece of land, would do everything he could, how lovely our land would be.’ An exhortation which would not be there if it did not have official approval. Yet the ‘If …’ is also still there, and the ‘own piece of land’ has been taken away. Second, a treasured memory of the delighted and helpless laughter at lunch of a Soviet factory management, whose director had been expressing some pretty forthright criticism of Soviet bureaucracy, both Ministerial and Party. A rather pawky Scottish engineer, working there under contract on the installation and commissioning of some British machinery, remarked dryly that it reminded him of the old saying ‘The higher a monkey gets up a tree, the more you see of his behind!’ He did not in fact say ‘behind’ but it all came out in the wash of the translation. There’s always some hope for those who can laugh at themselves, and Russians certainly can; but they’re a long way from taking the mickey freely out of their Royal Family and their established Church.
This valedictory is written without benefit of any consultation with my colleagues here, but I believe such an essay should be of a personal nature. They may well disagree with much of it; with more experience, I might come to declare some of it ‘inoperative’ myself. I hope they will freely send any comments they have to the Deputy Under-Secretary supervising the East European and Soviet Department, who faithfully guarantees them immunity from prosecution.
I have, etc.,
J. E. KILLICK.
1. chin: A grading system introduced by Peter the Great in 1722 dividing the upper echelons of Russian society into 14 classes, or chins.
‘Russians have many attractive qualities but they are and always have been natural bullies’
SIR BRYAN CARTLEDGE, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE SOVIET UNION, AUGUST 1988
The perils of forecasting! In this valedictory, Sir Bryan predicts the survival of Communism in Russia into – perhaps – the twenty-first century. Fifteen months after it was written the Berlin Wall came down. Events snowballed with incredible speed, outpacing the predictive powers not just of HM Ambassador in Moscow but of virtually every other foreign policy expert in the West. The timescale for lasting change in Russia was not twenty years, nor ‘a generation’. The Soviet Union had, as it turned out, just over three years left to run.
But one cannot help feeling that Cartledge has been proved more accurate than a mere calendar of events might suggest. He badly miscalculates the timing of the tipping point at which Soviet political institutions will collapse but he forecasts, even more emphatically than his successor Rodric Braithwaite (see the next despatch), the innate resistance of the national culture and mindset to bottom-up, grass-roots reform.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika (‘reform’) may have yielded a ‘virtual absence of tangible results’ by August 1988, but it was a slow-burning fuse. The addition of glasnost (‘openness’) – the birth of which Cartledge records here as the regime’s ‘political coming of age’ – provided the spark. Gorbachev’s political reforms, which gathered pace once he assumed the Presidency in 1990, were designed to weaken the ossifying control of the Communist Party over government, but in doing so they fatally weakened its ability to keep the Soviet Union together. A string of breakaway states asserted their sovereignty the following year. Freedom of expression – a product of glasnost – gave life to independence movements in the Baltic states, which quickly spread to inner Soviet satellites like Georgia and Ukraine. The Soviet Union was eventually dissolved on Boxing Day, 1991.
Cartledge was entirely right in drawing from Soviet history the lesson that reform at the centre leads to trouble on the periphery. And he might well have been correct in predicting slow-going for Gorbachev’s reforms within Russia, had the track along which they were pushed been solely internal. But in the event Communism in Russia was overthrown partly from the outside. And while it was indeed ‘explosive’, the interaction between change at the centre, war at the periphery and satellites jostling for independence actually conspired to accelerate reform rather than put a brake on it.
SOVIET DEPARTMENT: GENERAL DISTRIBUTION
Her Majesty’s Ambassador at Moscow to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.
A LAST LOOK AT PERESTROIKA
BRITISH EMBASSY
MOSCOW
8 August 1988
Sir,
My impending departure from the Soviet Union, for the last time as a government servant, naturally tempts me to draw broad conclusions from my experience of dealing with this country over a quarter of a century and particularly from the eight years which I have spent in its capital. Before the yawns begin, I hasten to assure you that I shall resist the temptation. I am leaving the Soviet Union at such a critical point in its history that the best use of my final despatch would, I believe, be to provide a snapshot of the Soviet political scene at the moment of my exit, which happens immediately to follow a momentous Party Conference and a crucially important Central Committee Plenum.1 Perestroika is about to enter a new phase: what are its prospects? …
The virtual absence of tangible results from three years of attempted perestroika was not, perhap
s, surprising given the scale of the problems which Gorbachev faced … The ‘Law on Cooperatives’, approved by the Supreme Soviet2 in May, represents a major attempt to revitalise Soviet agriculture by legitimising and encouraging independent activity by small teams of farm workers. The new emphasis on political reform, reflected in the agenda (‘theses’) for the 19th Party Conference stemmed from Gorbachev’s growing recognition of the strength of the forces in Party and government, at all levels, which have a vested interest in resisting change …
Of the Conference itself, a frequent comment by participants and Soviet spectators alike is that they still cannot believe that it really happened. It left few taboos untoppled, the main exceptions being the sanctity of Lenin and of the KGB. The Conference marked, I believe, the Soviet Union’s political coming of age – a qualitative change in its political life. More immediately, some of the unscripted interventions from the Conference floor – especially those which exposed the shortcomings of Soviet daily life – appear to have completed the progressive refinement of Gorbachev’s objectives and priorities …
Parting Shots Page 14