By the turn of this century, Russia was at last beginning to shed these traditions. The Russian economy was growing faster than the American. A class of genuine Russian capitalists was beginning to emerge. Farmers were being encouraged to displace their incompetent peasant brothers. A liberal legal and political system was beginning to strike tentative roots …
It is barely surprising, though we may now choose to forget it, that the fall of the monarchy in February 1917 was widely, and perhaps rightly, welcomed in liberal circles in the West and in Russia as well. The Bolshevik horrors which followed were a crude and brutal satire on the Russian political tradition, not a fundamental departure from it. No wonder George Kennan, another acutely perceptive observer*, wrote in 1944 as the Red Army was sweeping victoriously across Europe, of ‘the suspicion … latent in every Russian soul, that the term ‘Russia’ does not really signify a national society destined to know power and majesty, but only a vast unconquerable expanse of misery, poverty, inefficiency, and mud’.
Nearly fifty years after Kennan, that is still what most Russians fear. Yet my tentative thesis is that the last decade marks a qualitative change in the underlying thrust of Russian history. It is a large claim, which I cannot substantiate in the space of a despatch, or even perhaps of a book. But as one contemplates the present political and economic chaos, there are two questions which one needs to ask. Can Russia survive as a great nation? Can it become a modern and prosperous liberal democratic state?
To the first question the answer is unequivocal. The Russian state has survived assault, invasion, sometimes centuries of domination by Tatars, Poles, Swedes, Frenchmen, Germans. Its cities have been repeatedly destroyed, its governments dispersed. Yet the toughness and patriotism of the people have always prevailed. For the Russian people do have the strongest sense of the state, of the rightness of Russian glory. This sense is poles apart from the English genius for building state institutions, at which the Russians have always proved themselves incompetent. But not a single Russian that I have met, whether dissident country priest or Siberian provincial governor, is prepared to accept in his heart that Russia will shrink back to the size of Ivan the Terrible’s Muscovy. Last summer before the putsch a prominent liberal told me, with the greatest passion, that Russia could afford to do without the Balts, the Caucasians, the Central Asians, or even the Ukrainians. But if the Tatars thought they could reverse the verdict of 1552 he for one would be prepared to send in the tanks.
There is of course no likelihood that Russia will become a model democracy on Nordic lines. And Russian history from the time of Catherine the Great (I do not count Peter, who was a tyrant almost as bloody as Ivan or Stalin) is littered with failed attempts at reform. Yet today real political change is occurring, and has already gone far further than I or anyone else would have believed possible when I returned to Moscow in September 1988. At that time there were those in the West who still believed that the Gorbachev reforms were deliberate disinformation, or at least a pause to regroup in the Soviet Union’s secular advance under the banner of Communism. What has happened since then is that the political conditions described by … countless writers on the Soviet period, no longer apply. Since September 1988 we have seen the first parliamentary election with universal suffrage in Russian history. We have seen the Russian people choose their own leader, also for the first time in their history. We have seen a Russian leader ousted peacefully (though not quite by due process) and allowed to retire gracefully. We have seen the centuries old Russian empire crumble with – so far at least – less blood shed than at Amritsar2 and during the partition of India. And we have seen Communism – the menace to prevent which we once thought it would be worth blowing up the whole world – disappear in a puff, leaving a mere miasma behind.
There is a famous stage direction at the end of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov: ‘The people are silent.’ In the last four years the Russian people have not been silent. Time and again, supported by an increasingly free press, they went onto the streets to demonstrate their rejection of the age-old Russian lie, their abhorrence of the Communist regime, and their support for the chance at freedom which Gorbachev gave them. Such massive displays of civic responsibility and political maturity are unprecedented in the dismal tale of Russian history, in which long ages of political repression have been mitigated only by vicious outbreaks of mob violence. Sceptics argue that only a tiny proportion of the Russian people were involved on the Moscow barricades last August: as if the great democratic revolutions of 1688 and 1776 – so far the only successful revolutions in history – were made by the whole of the English and American peoples. The truth in my view is that we are witnessing a qualitative change in the nature of Russian politics, of a kind which occurs very rarely in the history of any nation; and that this is an event of the greatest importance for the whole world, as well as for the Russian people themselves. The political, constitutional, economic, imperial, and other difficulties have been reported almost ad nauseam by this post and will take decades if not generations to overcome. But I do not think it is an act of mindless optimism to look forward to a future in which Russia has developed its own form of democracy, no doubt imperfect unlike those which have sprung up elsewhere, but still a vast improvement on what has gone before.
Which leaves a question begged. When they contemplate their disastrous history and the chaos which now surrounds them, few Russians can understand why they remain so passionately attached to the country which has treated themselves so harshly. It is an intensity of passion which few other patriotic peoples can match. Even more remarkable is the impact which Russia exercises on the minds of foreigners … George Kennan, businessmen, journalists, and even members of this Embassy (though not Mr Turbervile) – who have become obsessed with this immense, shambling, muddy, disorganised, and ferocious country.
It is not at first sight the physical look of the place, a boundless plain on which even the oldest cities sit precariously like nomadic encampments. Nor is it the art, the literature and the music, which are among the glories of European culture.* Nor is it even the marvellous Russian language, in the view of one of our friends the only thing the Russians have produced whose value is beyond all doubt. All these exercise a fascination which is easier to experience than to explain. But in the end it is the people themselves who constitute the riches of the country. This judgement is none the less true for being wholly unoriginal. Political oppression, the atomisation of society, and generations of poverty have forced the Russian people back on one another. Only in small groups have they been able to muster enough trust to guard against the informer. Only in their kitchens have they felt free to talk – endlessly, ineffectively, and beguilingly – about the problems of life and the universe which their political system has never allowed them to tackle direct. Because they are so vulnerable, human relationships in Russia have an intensity which they lack in the more orderly West. Foreigners can be admitted at least in part to these relationships: Russians are embarrassingly generous with their time and their few possessions, in a way which is wholly uncharacteristic in the West. We would not dream of sharing our last piece of sausage with a guest, not least because either of us could just slip down to the supermarket for another. It is the lack of these things which all Russians notice as soon as they go abroad, and which makes exile so hard for them to bear.
Above all, Russia is an epic country, not only in its size but in its moral quality. Because it is a land where the lie has been erected into a principle of conduct, concepts such as Truth, Honour, Loyalty, Courage have a real meaning for the most ordinary of people, who are continually having to make the kind of choices which Englishmen have not had to make since our Civil War three hundred years ago. To us these big words are an embarrassment. For Russians they are an inescapable part of everyday life. Because Russia has always been a land of villains, it is also a land of heroes and saints. Without Stalin, there could have been no Solzhenitsyn and no Sakharov.3
My immediate
predecessor as Ambassador to Russia, George Buchanan, left Petrograd in January 1918 exhausted after eight grinding years of war and revolution. He wrote in his diary: ‘Our last day in Petrograd! – and yet, in spite of all that we have gone through, we are sad at the thought. Why is it that Russia casts over all who know her such an indefinable mystic spell that, even when her wayward children have turned their capital into a pandemonium, we are sorry to leave it?’
Buchanan writes with the grating condescension of a British diplomat of the old school. But I recognise the sentiment. Russia is an addiction to which there is no sure antidote. [The despatch seems to end here.]
1. Krasnoyarsk radar: In 1989 Eduard Shevardnadze (Soviet Foreign Minister, and latterly President of Georgia) finally admitted the existence of a secret early warning radar system at Krasnoyarsk after years of complaints from Washington. In the spirit of glasnost Shevardnadze told the Soviet parliament the station was ‘as big as an Egyptian pyramid’ and ‘directly and openly violated’ the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
2. Amritsar: See p. 127.
3. Sakharov: The nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov helped Stalin develop the hydrogen bomb. His later writings in favour of arms control and human rights won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, which he was not allowed to leave Russia to collect.
Czechoslovakia
‘A symbol of hope in the midst of a dark nightmare life’
SIR DERWENT KERMODE, HM AMBASSADOR TO CZECHOSLOVAKIA, JUNE 1955
In the field of foreign affairs it is important to know who one’s real friends are. Here in Czechoslovakia that is not hard to know. Our friends are not the Government but the broad mass of the people. In the course of my two years in Czechoslovakia my wife and I have motored little short of 30,000 miles, on main roads and off the beaten track, through town and village, among woods and over rolling agricultural country, in industrial as well as rural areas; and everywhere we have gone we have flown the flag. As workers in the fields or streets have seen and recognised it their sad faces have lit up and they have waved to us or saluted as we passed, and children have excitedly shouted ‘England!’ And sometimes, when the car has been parked in a Prague street, men have come up and reverently touched and even kissed the flag. I have seen women’s eyes fill with tears, tears both of memory and of longing, with our flag, like the flag of the United States, as a symbol of hope in the midst of a dark nightmare life.
‘A pretty girl can walk through Prague at 2 a.m. with a bulging hand-bag with little fear of violence’
RONALD SCRIVENER, HM AMBASSADOR TO CZECHOSLOVAKIA, APRIL 1974
Very occasionally, despatches in the mid-Cold War period reflect a readiness to acknowledge the positive side of Communist life alongside the overwhelming negatives. Any such sentiments were stamped on hard within the Office. Scrivener’s valedictory from Prague, making the rather mild claim that grasping materialism was pleasantly absent in Prague, is one such example. A less-than-impressed senior clerk sent it on up the bureaucratic chain with a note attached: ‘Of course there is less “materialist vulgarity” in Prague than there is in New York or Paris or London … It would be fairer to compare Prague with, say, Edinburgh … It is a (perhaps regrettable) fact too that materialist vulgarity appeals strongly to many people. There would not be so much of it about if it did not.’
(CONFIDENTIAL) Prague,
17 April, 1974.
Sir,
On leaving this post I realise that my three years in Prague have been marked by a certain frigidity in Anglo-Czechoslovak affairs. There have been a number of reasons, all in one way or another reflecting the Czechoslovak Government’s view that international relations are (to quote the Foreign Minister) ‘not some diplomatic tea party but a platform of the class struggle’ …
To live alongside the present Czechoslovak social system has been an interesting experience. There is much that Czechoslovakia can be proud of. The very largely effective conservation and restoration of its urban magnificences do not owe a lot to the absence of much personal choice in the matter of domicile. A pretty girl can walk through Prague at 2 a.m. with a bulging hand-bag with little fear of violence. The schoolchildren and university students work; they neither streak across their campuses nor mob their Vice-Chancellors, and I doubt if they would engage in such capers even if the consequences fell short of exclusion from a worthwhile career. Entertainment and the creative arts may be banal and unoriginal, but they do not peddle violence and smut. The drug problem exists, but on a barely perceptible scale.
As a young man in the Foreign Ministry put it to me, ‘of course our system is a lousy one; but when I see the materialist vulgarity of New York and Paris and London I prefer it to yours’.
This is the brighter side of the Czechoslovak scene, reflecting not the merits of the present political system but rather the heritage of respect for law and custom, learning and craftsmanship without (because statehood was for so long denied to the Czechs) the profligacy and jingoism which went with national power and wealth in the heyday of the nation states.
But there is another and less attractive side: the intrigue, the backbiting and the corruption which accompanies rule by an apparatus enjoying power not by popular will but by its capacity, buttressed by the support of a Super Power, to lift up one person and cast down another. To find somewhere to live, to get the best education for one’s children, to spend a holiday in Dubrovnik and to deploy one’s talents in work or even in recreation means that someone has got to be squared. For some the squaring represents no problem, particularly if the process can be taken to the point of acquiring party membership. This self-perpetuating elite can build private country cottages, or even substantial private villas in the favoured Prague suburb of Barrandov, travel abroad with a generous allowance of foreign exchange, acquire a Government Tatra or an imported Saab, and be sure that their children will enjoy the best of the educational system. But for the vast majority of Czechoslovaks who have no marketable political or professional status the daily problem is how to square those who have. By informing; by gifts; by sycophancy. To get decent service in the shops the tip can range from a packet of 20 to a carton of cigarettes. For the doctor to look at one’s daughter’s tonsils, a bottle of Scotch. To join a (bear-led1) group on a package tour to Italy, several bottles, a carton or two, and friends in the right places. In the more perilous field of ideology the prices are higher. A misplaced political observation by someone of ‘bourgeois’ origins, a friendship with a known dissident, and goodbye to the office with the secretary and the potted plants, followed by a job stoking the boiler in a block of flats or as an hotel porter. Or the minimum pension – with a purchasing power of £2 per week.
As the supply of consumer goods and the availability of housing improves, so the need for economic fiddling should ease off. But there is no sign that the ideological climate is going to become more benevolent. Rather the reverse. It follows that Czechoslovak society is endangered by precisely those evils which the leadership ascribes to ‘the West’: the adulteration of human values, and class strife created by the existence of an unmeritorious elite.
Of these two aspects of the Czechoslovak condition I believe that in time the good will oust the bad, firstly because there is in the Czech character a strong built-in sense of morality which goes back to the Hussites2 and the Moravian Brothers,3 secondly because the ideological poison is, fundamentally a foreign import. But for some time Czechoslovakia will continue to be two nations – not Czech and Slovak, but Ins and Outs; and Czechoslovakia will show two faces – the windy rhetoric and folkloric festivals for the foreign visitor, and the nocturnal telephone calls and aggressive tailing by the ‘heavy mob’ experienced by foreign residents whose Governments or media happen at the time to be in hot water with the Czechoslovak authorities. We should not allow this to repel us, for here is at bottom a worthy and productive community of people who for geopolitical reasons will always merit attention. Particularly I believe by us, for whom the Czechoslovak pe
ople have a regard out of all proportion to our very modest interest in them.
1. bear-led: Russian led.
2. Hussites: Early Protestant revolutionaries. In 1419 the Hussites rose up against King Wenceslas (who was not so good, after all) in the First Defenestration of Prague, throwing seven city leaders out of a Town Hall window on to pikes below. Their one-eyed leader, Zikka, defeated five Catholic crusader armies sent into Bohemia after him. After Zikka’s death his followers stretched his skin over a drum so he could continue to lead them in battle. In short, an unsqueamish crowd.
3. Moravian Brothers: A Hussite religious movement.
Poland
‘The country is living on a lie’
SIR NICHOLAS HENDERSON, HM AMBASSADOR TO POLAND, APRIL 1972
CONFIDENTIAL
BRITISH EMBASSY
WARSAW
14 April 1972
The Right Honourable
Sir Alec Douglas-Home MP
etc etc etc
Sir:
POLAND: VALEDICTORY
Outstanding Impression
If you were to ask me to express in a sentence the most important fact about Poland relevant to the UK (and perhaps to other Western countries) that has impressed itself on me after three years here, it would be this: that the country is living on a lie and that it remains, after 25 years of the present regime, marked by irreconcilable conflicts and instability.
Parting Shots Page 16