A sad ending to the year

Naturally, I wish every reader of this blog a very happy, prosperous and satisfactory 2016. For those of us who are concerned with the future status of this country, this will be an important year though, for what it's worth, I still think the referendum will be in 2017. But the various players in the campaign are emerging and lining up. There will be many other things to blog about as well and I have a few projects lined up that will take up time. I do, however, intend to be a little more attentive to Your Freedom And Ours.

In that connection I must turn to the sadness that overwhelmed many of us who care about that concept in the last few days of 2015. A couple of days after Christmas I was told of the death of Leonid Finkelstein (Vladimirov), a man who was well known among those who fought against the Soviet Union and have, more recently, resumed that battle against the Putin regime.

I have known Leonid for many years, first as a friend of my father's, then as a remarkably lenient boss at the London office of Radio Liberty, where I had a summer job in my undergraduate years, and for a good long time as a close friend. In fact, if it had not been for Leonid, his wife Kira (a colleague of my mother's when they were working on the Oxford English-Russian Dictionary and a good friend of mine) and, above all, their cat, Billy, my doctoral thesis might not have been completed. At a crucial moment in its writing when I was desperate for time and space they asked me to spend two weeks in their house cat sitting. Those two weeks gave me the time and space to write the missing chapter without which the thesis could not stand up. Billycat, as he was known in my family, did not complain.

Leonid came to London in the summer of 1966 as part of a journalistic delegation and found a suitable moment when he could move away from the group, walk into a police station and ask for asylum. For Soviet citizens to do so in the mid-sixties was hazardous business as the Soviet authorities were capable of almost anything to prevent such events. There were cases of failed and successful kidnappings, traffic accidents and even mysterious illnesses, sometimes fatal. Attempts to return Leonid were made but he managed to evade them though his desire to live and work in England meant that he did not see his family again for a good many years.

Using the name Leonid Vladimirov (from his patronymic Vladimirovich) he worked as a broadcaster for Radio Liberty in London and in Munich and for the BBC Russian Service; he reported on British politics as well as led discussions and compiled programmes about British life; he wrote articles and two highly regarded books, The Russians and The Russian Space Bluff. As a science journalist in the USSR he was particularly well placed to reveal the truth behind that country's space programme.

In fact, it is hard to overestimate Leonid's contribution both to Western understanding of the Soviet Union and, perhaps more importantly, Russian understanding of Britain.

Even after his retirement from the BBC he contributed various programmes, such as this short talk about his imprisonment in Stalin's gulag (oh yes, he was, just like many millions of people). He attended various events and contributed to talks and discussions. I particularly remember a discussion we had at the Centre for Research into Post-Communist Economies (CRCE) in 2004 about Samizdat in the Soviet Union. Leonid was not on the panel but he might as well have been, considering the importance of his contribution. The paper was published. [Scroll down] Other people will have other examples.

In the last few years Leonid and I met at events in Pushkin House as well as CRCE and at demonstrations outside the Russian Consulate. Once again, we all had to join the fight for the freedom of Russia against its state.

Let me not forget chess - one of Leonid's crucial interests. If I happened to call his home to find out how he was after an operation or an illness, I could find him only to be told that he was suffering from an incurable disease - age - or, much more likely I found his wife, Kira, who told me that he was not at home as he was taking part in some chess tournament, possibly in London, possibly somewhere else, near or far. Don't believe me? Here is an interview on the Hamilton-Russell Chess Cup site.

Though I have seen Leonid more recently, my best last memory is from the year before last when my daughter and I took Leonid and Kira out to Ognisko Restaurant in Kensington to celebrate his 90th birthday. It was an extremely jolly evening during which we all had ferocious discussions about Russian literature about which we all disagreed. (No point in discussing Russian politics - we all agreed on that.) I do not have photos from that event but here are two of Leonid and Kira from another dinner in the Polish restaurant, Patio, in 2010:

Rest In Peace, Leonid Vladimirovich. 

How much expertise did we have in the past?

The latest report from the House of Lords European Union Committee, The EU and Russia: before and beyond the crisis in Ukraine, has, quite justifiably, had a great deal of media attention. I wish more of those reports did - they tend to be very well researched and clearly argued. This one caught the media's attention because it was dealing with political events that are unfolding in an urgent manner and because it, again justifiably, criticized very strongly, indeed, the government, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Foreign Ministries of other EU member states and the EU itself, particularly the European External Action Service (EEAS). The immediate response from the FCO, which bleatingly tried to explain that nobody could have predicted anything merely proved that the report was accurate in its assessment of that institution.

There are various aspects to the report, which will need to be analyzed but, to start with, I should like to focus on something that has been repeated many times in the last few years as Russia morphed from a relatively friendly power (that was a long time ago) to an unfriendly and, more recently, completely hostile one: and that is that we, Britain as well as other EU member states no longer have the analytical capacity to understand what is going on there and to predict possible actions on that country's part.

In fact, Paragraph 62 states:

Sir Tony Brenton believed that UK diplomacy was "pretty good", but that it had "suffered because of a loss of language skills, particularly in the Foreign Office." This had had a direct effect on the capacity of the FCO to respond to recent events. There was "quite lot of complaint in Whitehall after the annexation of Crimea that the Foreign Office had not been able to give the sort of advice that was needed at the time."

Speaking as someone who used to teach Russian at the FCO I find that particularly shocking. Does he really mean that there are no longer people in that hallowed institution who can speak and read Russian and/or Ukrainian?

Sir Tony Brenton KCMG is, incidentally,former British Ambassador to Russia and Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and Mr John Lough, Associate Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House, and I should dearly love to know how good his Russian is or was but I may be biased as I do not think I ever taught him.

There is a deal of truth in the assumption that knowledge has disappeared but not totally. There have been many non-government institutions in the last few years whose analysts have produced useful papers, articles and even the odd book, which predicted various scenarios not too dissimilar from the one we are watching now. Why exactly were these papers etc not read by our boffins in the FCO or the EEAS?

We know that the BBC Russian Service has been eviscerated and that has deprived the country of much knowledge but also of the capacity to respond to Russian propaganda. Certainly, attention both in the FCO and the various security services veered away from Russia as another threat seemed more urgent though how anyone could think since the 2008 war in Georgia that Russia was not a problem on the international scene is beyond my capacity to understand.

What I want to look at is the myth because that is what it is, in my opinion, that in the past we had this astonishing network of people in academia, in the foreign and diplomatic service, in the media who really understood what was going on in the Soviet Union and the Communist countries, could predict certain scenarios and plan for them.

Sadly, this is not my recollection and when I point this out to those who complain about the present state of affairs, they often agree with me. What I remember is academics who, with very few exceptions, asserted that the difference between the Soviet system and a western-style democracy was one of degree rather than anything more fundamental. How many times did I read or hear the comment that people do turn up for various meetings and take part in them and that proves that there is a democratic process of a kind going on. These were people who held and continued to hold academic posts.

The FCO and its minions as well as the well paid academics failed to predict many things, starting with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (my father was one of the very few who insisted that the Soviet Union could not and would not allow the so-called Communism with a human face to survive) all the way to the collapse of the Soviet Union, though it was becoming ever more probable as things disintegrated under Gorbachev's attempts to reinvigorate the system.

I am pleased to say that a highly regarded witness would probably agree with me, as is clear from Paragraph 57, which then goes on to suggest that things have got worse:

Mr Klaus recalled that there had been a historic asymmetry, whereby former communist countries "knew the West much more than you knew the East", and that this asymmetry remained. His Excellency Dr Revaz Gachechiladze, Georgian Ambassador to the UK, also noted that there was "not a good understanding of Russia in the West". Turning to recent events, Mr Lukyanov recalled that on the day of the Crimean referendum, when the question had already been announced, he continued to receive disbelieving calls from European diplomats saying: "'It cannot happen. It is just a bluff'." He warned us that with "this level of analysis, I am afraid that more surprises are to come, and not only from Russia." Dr Casier agreed that there was a "huge need for more knowledge about the local situation both in Russia and in the Eastern Partnership countries." This was where "we have to build much stronger analytical capacity." Dr Casier pointed out that President Yanukovych's decision not to sign the Association Agreement (AA) "had been the subject of speculation in the Ukrainian press long before he announced his decision, but took the EU by total surprise."

While I am not sure about that asymmetry former President Klaus talks about (the Communist countries got many things wrong as well) I certainly recall the willful blindness of the West.

Randomly, I recall arguments with young ambitious academics who insisted that the way forward was to make friends with various Soviet representatives here, listen to them in a friendly fashion and use their statements as material. Some of these had been students of the great Professor Leonard Schapiro and were openly exultant in the fact that they took a very different stance and attitude from his. (The fact that he knew what he was talking about did not bother them - the man was a back number and his students, who took that very different route, were taking over.)

I recall a very public spat (in the columns of the Times Literary Supplement, no less) with a very eminent Oxford academic whose name, for the moment and with gritted teeth, I am going to keep quiet who was arguing that the Communist system under Gorbachev was evolving  into something resembling an open, democratic society. One of my several arguments against that was that the Soviet Union was the only one of the more or less developed countries that refused to allow hostile critics into the country. Not so, argued my opponent, they do sometimes refuse entry to people who might have family connections in the present or the past but otherwise they are very open.

Of course, people with family connections may well speak the language well and can find their way around the place and the system without any official help, which may be the reason why they were not allowed in, a problem that did not bother the eminent academic in the slightest. Nor did he seem perturbed by the fact that he could research and study only carefully vetted material.

One more recollection. During my time of teaching Russian in the FCO one of my tasks was to help people who had been seconded to the Cabinet Office but were about to be sent to the USSR to revive their knowledge of the language. Although this was taking place in 1990 - 1991 there was no suggestion that anyone in the FCO was thinking about the possibility that the Soviet Union would not last.

In February 1991, as some readers will recall, John Major visited the Soviet Union and had meetings with President Gorbachev, Lithuania President Landsbergis but not Yeltsin who had, by this time "elected chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), in spite of the fact that Gorbachev personally pleaded with the Russian deputies not to select Yeltsin". In effect he was the President of Russia and as the Soviet Union was on its last legs, he was going to head the largest and most important of the successor states.

Why, I asked one of my students, fresh from his stint with the Cabinet Office, in our Russian discussion of politics and related matters, did Mr Major not meet Boris Yeltsin? I was told that there had been a great deal of heart searching in the FCO and it was decided by all those highly intelligent and knowledgeable experts that it would be better if there was no official meeting between the two.

As I wrote in my obituary of President Yeltsin on my erstwhile blogging home:

In March 1989 Yeltsin was elected to the Soviet Parliament and in 1990 he became Chairman of the Russian Parliament, the Republic’s effective President, the first one to be elected.

You would think that by this stage it would have become clear to the experts in the West that the Soviet Union was probably doomed. Not so but far from it. While many of us, interested in the country, realized this, the solid cohort of Foreign Office experts and academic sovietologists continued to extol Gorbachev as the country’s hope. Yeltsin was apparently dismissed from too many calculations even though he obviously represented the future with Gorbachev unable to keep up with him.

I rest my case.

The report is correct in that the situation is now probably worse than it was during the Cold War as, it would appear, that the skills the FCO and other institutions look for have little to do with knowledge, learning or analytical skills. It is also true that for years, far longer than was justified, there has been an official view that Russia was not really a problem and even if it was not quite as friendly as we thought it would be, it was not really all that unfriendly though the evidence was mounting. What I find hard to accept is the view of some wonderful past situation when this was all completely different.

I wish I could leave the subject alone

There was this vague hope that I might be able to write about something that is not Syria today but that will have to wait. There were too many articles, blogs and columns as well as cartoons in the media for me to link to them all or even most but one or two stand out in interest.

First of all, however, I should like to express some surprise and annoyance with the hacks, both as writers and as cartoonists, who appear to think that being voted down by the House of Commons is a shameful thing for David Cameron to have to endure. From being Obama's poodle (untrue) he is being described as going on to being the Commons' poodle. That is a curious view of what representative democracy and a balance of power between the legislative and the executive might be. In fact, we do not have proper balance of power but last week's vote made a tiny step towards creating one, a tiny step in the centuries' long struggle that our media hacks do not seem to have heard of.

I am even less impressed by the suggestion that once Congress has voted (I am coming to that) and voted the "right" way, the Commons should be asked to vote again. Perhaps they would have changed their minds by then. Ahem. Isn't there a political construct that does just that: makes people vote again and again until they come up with the required answer? Is that what representative parliamentary democracy is in these people's opinion?

In yesterday's posting I wrote at length that I do not think our position in the world requires us or depends on us rushing into every war or civil war that happens to have good photographers around (even if the photos sometimes get muddled like those of the bodies in Syria .... ahem ... Iraq did), adding that, despite John Kerry's posturings and President Obama's obvious dislike of this country, the Anglo-American special relationship is likely to survive and flourish in the future.

Which brings me to a curious development. It would appear that President Obama is following in the Boy-King's footsteps, possibly hoping for the same outcome. Although it is not required by the US Constitution and although the President has stated that the US was about to launch an attack on Syria, he is, nevertheless, going to seek Congress's approval on September 9. Apparently, this last-minute decision surprised his advisers, who told him that he can go ahead without consulting Congress. How will this affect the forthcoming fiscal negotiations with Congress? There was a suggestion in The Hill that the strike on Syria would help the President "to reverse the automatic spending cuts to the Pentagon known as sequestration". That, however, was written before the decision to seek Congress's approval for military intervention of whatever kind.

Fraser Nelson says that President Obama's decision to consult Congress is a compliment to David Cameron who went to Parliament. Possibly. It could easily be the action of a desperate man who simply cannot make up his mind what to do.

There are only two other links I want to put up. One to a somewhat unimpressive article by Charles Moore, who thinks the world has not become a better place because of Thursday's vote, a ridiculous and meaningless statement. The world is never a good place and rarely becomes better as a result of political decisions by a country. But then, he also says

Yesterday morning, Britain woke up and found it no longer had a functioning foreign policy. “We might as well turn all our embassies into car showrooms,” one Cabinet minister told me bitterly.

Dear Mr Moore, we have not had a functioning foreign policy for quite a long time and, as long as we stay in the EU, we do not need or require embassies. If there were not so many people in the FCO who need appointments abroad we could have closed them down long ago with nobody noticing the difference. In the end, Mr Moore seems to come to no obvious conclusion as to whether the vote and the control it exerted over the Prime Minister and the Royal Prerogative was a good thing or a bad.

Finally, there is a well argued though very angry piece by Caroline Glick, with whom I do not always agree but whose thoughts in this case are very well worth reading. Interestingly, she along with numerous Israeli commentators, does not think that an American strike would be a good idea. Supporting the rebel groups is not in anyone's interests and one cannot strike at Assad without doing that.

Which brings me very neatly to my last point. This afternoon I took part in a programme on the BBC Russian Service, a large part of which was a discussion of Syria and the various reactions to the crisis, including that vote. I had a good deal of fun explaining that to Russian listeners.

There was also a long discussion with a Syrian journalist who lives and works in Beirut but keeps in close contact with his home country and who could speak good Russian as well as an Israeli journalist who spoke excellent Russian.

Neither of them could explain clearly the various groups and divisions in Syria, especially as far as the rebels were concerned. The Syrian expressed the view that Assad's rule was highly unpopular and people served in his forces only for financial reasons. Nevertheless, he repeated several times, nobody wants Western intervention either. This has been echoed by other Syrian commentators as well.

The Israeli journalist talked of the situation in her country, which is not, she maintained, nearly as difficult as the media makes out. The mobilization has been on a very small scale and, while there are queues in shops and for gas masks, the atmosphere was no longer one of panic. To the question of whether the Israeli government preferred Assad to stay as many of the rebels were Islamists and linked to Al-Qaeda she said two interesting things, one of which I have heard before.

As has been said in various places, people with wounds of various kinds have been crossing the Israeli border to be treated in their far superior hospitals by their far superior doctors. Treatment is given to all and no questions are asked as to where the particular fighters had come from. I would like to think that, while doctors ask no questions, other people in different uniforms also turn up to find out one or two things about what really goes on in Syria.

Secondly, she said that it is well known that the Israeli government has been making contact with one or two of the bigger rebel groups' leaders. That is hardly surprising. Unlike Western governments and commentators the Israelis will have to live with the outcome of the present crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. They can have no exit strategy.

We have abandoned the real soft power

On Tuesday I attended a talk at CRCE (Centre for Research into Post-Communist Economies) given by Masha Karp, formerly of the BBC Russian Service Features Department (do they even have such a department nowadays?) on what she termed "Unilateral Disarmament" that is the West's surrender in the information war with Russia.

Russia, one may add, has not followed suit but has been spending ever larger sums of money on media outlets to the West, which happily chirrup away their Kremlin propaganda and take in a surprisingly large number of people here. Inside the country there is practically no independent, that is non-Kremlin controlled, media outlets left and only a minority of the country has access to the internet, particularly broadband or reads blogs though it must be said that the growth of the Russian blogosphere has been one of the few hopeful developments there in recent years.

Masha, who is a good friend, spoke of the appalling evisceration of both the BBC Russian Service and of Radio Liberty, the latter taking place within the last year. I am glad to say that Radio Liberty appears to be recovering somewhat as the people who put in the changes that pleased the Russian authorities so much, have gone and a number of the hard-headed and knowledgeable journalists who had been fired last autumn have been reinstated. We shall watch developments keenly.

Meanwhile, here is the text (more or less) of the talk, first published by Human Rights in Russia. It is well worth reading.

It is extraordinary that our politicians, media and analysts are always rabbiting on about "soft power", influence and other suchlike matters, whether through the EU and the egregious Cathy Ashton, the incompetent and highly paid Lord High Panjandrum of European Foreign Affairs or through millions given in aid that is then wasted, misused and stolen yet the one thing that does give us influence and soft power: highly professional and informative broadcasting, both Britain and the United States are doing their best to destroy.

My solution is simple: shut down DFID and actually lay off all its civil servants both at home and in various comfortable hotels around the world. Stop all development aid and make humanitarian post-disaster aid strictly limited and well accounted for, distributed by the military or people who know what is going on in particular locality. The amount of money saved will be stupendous. One tenth of it will restore the BBC Russian, Ukrainian and Belarus Services as well as the various Central Asian ones to their former glory. And while we are at it, separate the World Service from the domestic BBC; the World Service is part of our international relations and a very successful one at that (or used to be). Otherwise the still far better World Service news will turn into the pathetic excuse for it that the domestic news broadcasts are.