It seems that almost every Russia’s foreign adventure comes as a surprise to the West. This includes Russian-Georgian war of 2008, the annexation of Crimea, the aggression in Donbas, and the Russian interference in Syria. The question is: why did it happen? Why did no one in the West notice any dangerous trends in Russia beforehand? Indeed, literally before the annexation of Crimea and the start of the Russian aggression in Donbas, many had kept their hopes for Russia’s democratization. The Day has asked Andrew Wood, former British Ambassador to Russia, who participated at Kyiv Security Forum, to explain this phenomenon.
“PUTIN MADE THREE MISTAKES WHICH ARE HAUNTING HIM”
“That’s a very complicated question. I left more or less as change took place between Yeltsin and Putin – I thought at the time that there was at least a possibility of liberal change coming as a result of the changes that came in under Yeltsin. I thought there was a possibility of a better relationship between the Duma and the executive, and a better regional structure. That was actually pretty clear very quickly – that would not be so.
“The first thing that Putin did effectively, apart from waging a brutal war in Chechnya, was to begin with the suppression of the press, the media. That was followed quite quickly by taking grip on federal regions and, eventually, abolishing the direct election of governors. There was also greatly increased control of the economy. So that meant more or less straight away that the gains that I had hoped would follow a change of president were a nut.
“The pretty absolutely defining moment came when Putin returned to the Kremlin in May 2012. Again, I wrote a book with Lilia Shevtsova pointing to the possibility that he chose then to go down the road from which there is no retreat. I think he has made three mistakes which are haunting him. One is to make the sort of changes that were being discussed under the presidency of Medvedev – to choose control, suppression. It is better called tyranny, it’s more vertical tyranny than it is effective government from the top. It’s a source of necessary corruption, it’s a source which cannot exist with the rule of law. So that’s one choice. The other choice was to make the economic change impossible, and the third was to try to compensate in a way, eventually, the necessarily result of those choices by foreign adventures as a search for legitimacy.
“The trouble with that is not in numbers of victims of such adventures like it, but it’s also a system which requires increasing doses which you can’t do. So it’s very brittle. I do not believe the Russian public will be satisfied forever by that sort of policy, but I can’t see how Putin can contain it for the personal reasons. So I, along with many Russians, take a very pessimistic view of future until eventually Putin goes.”
“ALL COUNTRIES HAVE TO FACE WHAT THEY HAVE DONE IN THE PAST”
Maybe it’s in the nature of Russians who see the state as patron and adore Putin? Ukrainians are completely different, they rely only on themselves...
“You love to argue. No, that’s very healthy, that’s how a society develops, because another trend in Russia that’s a closing of intellectual avenues. Ukraine was in a sense liberated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, became something different anyway. Russia feels itself to have been deprived and it does not feel it was liberated, or has not felt for long it has been liberated. So, we have a different tradition. The result is, far from there being a reexamination of Russia’s past, there has been a construction of a very poisonous myth out of it. I also spent a long time in Yugoslavia, and Serbia in particular, but not only Serbia, also Croatia, to some degree, became a prisoner of their own ideas of their own history. That’s one of the most distressing small signs of the very recent past is the decision by the Investigative Committee to ask the Library of the Ukrainian Literature to give the names of the people who borrowed the books about the Holodomor and similar subjects in the past seven or ten years. First of all, it’s an enemy of any freedom of thought, secondly, it’s unbelievably mean-minded. I can see why individuals might do it, because they think it will them favor. But it’s a further sign among many of the suppression of free thought in Russia. The Russian people do not deserve this, it won’t bring them prosperity, it won’t bring them the cultural inheritance that they have, it would destroy it. It won’t make their past history in any way productive. I mean, all countries have to face what they have done in the past. Many countries find it difficult, but it is necessary.”
“RUSSIA NEEDS TO LOOK WHAT THE SOVIET UNION DID TO ITSELF, HONESTLY AND PROPERLY”
Would you consider it necessary to carry out de-Stalinization of Russia, which would be similar to denazification of Germany?
“Well, in a sense, the Germans had to do it. It has been very beneficial, it’s one good reason why Germany is an outstanding country today – they did it. The Japanese are finding it much harder. The French, for a very long time, have found it extraordinarily difficult to face what happened to them in the war. And the Italians, too, have. But they have not tried to deny it or suppress it. That’s very harmful for Russia.
“It needs to look what the Soviet Union did to itself, honestly and properly. You look at the film I like, Leviathan, it’s a fine film. I don’t know if the Ministry of Culture now regrets financing it. It shows you a lot of what Russians themselves understand is going on in their country. But they can’t tackle it, because that regime is based on denial.
“I have faith in the Russian people that will not be permanent. I cannot see it being a change from the top. There is a good reason why there is Natsgvardia. There was talk about color revolutions for good reasons, because they are – at the very top – quite frightened of the Russian people as well.”
“IT IS NECESSARY TO MAINTAIN SANCTIONS”
What do you think should the EU, US, Canada, and Japan do in order to make Russia fulfill its part of the Minsk agreements?
“It is necessary to maintain sanctions, it is necessary to hold out the implication that if they do something worse – which they are capable of – there will be worse sanctions to follow. I have personally little faith that the Minsk Agreement is going to be the solution. We, the British, weren’t directly involved in this. I have heard statements it [the Minsk Agreement] should be abolished, but the essence of it is the border should be closed. I don’t know what in practice the federalization of Ukraine can possibly mean. In Donbas – occupied Donbas, I mean – the authorities here have no legitimacy at all, and Minsk Agreement implies to have them somehow recognized, but I don’t see how it can work in practice. Besides which, their personal interest is the maintenance of violence, and possibly expanding their area of control too. It’s a trap for Putin, first of all, because that sort of anarchy spreads, and because the perception is that he is seen to accept in effect Russian withdrawal that is lost.
“I’m not an authority on the psychology of Putin obviously, but he and his circle have been powerful for a very long time. That does something dangerous to the mind of anybody. If you leave an ambassador, for example, in post, for too long, he starts to become less the representative than his own power and one can feel the process. To be isolated as they are, to be given information which only conforms not just what they believe but what the people giving them information suppose they want to believe, is a very dangerous process. Personally, I would compare Putin with Macbeth.”
“THE IDEA THAT RUSSIA IS A HEARTLAND OF THE SLAV CIVILIZATION IS LUNATIC, IT’S NOT GOING TO WORK”
Britain is one of the signatories of the Budapest Memorandum, which guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. Do you think that a new agreement should be prepared now to provide our country with binding security guarantees?
“I think it’s irrelevant, as Moscow doesn’t accept anything it has signed. We support the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine, no question of that. We, if you wish to do that, we have to do that. To me, the problem of Ukraine, of course, is important, but the real problem we will face is the development of Russia and how Russia has it. The Russians like to present the issue of Ukraine as a kind of struggle between them and the West. It is not. It is the determination of Ukraine to decide for itself what it wants to be and how it wants to develop.
“It’s foreign to our thinking, it being expressed in that sort of way. Russia’s perception of itself as of the legitimate heir of the Soviet Union, entitled to a sphere of control. That seems to me deeply harmful to Russian people. If you were pursuing Russian national interest and wanted to have good and constructive relations in your neighborhood, you might have behaved rather differently than to try to force people be your friends – it doesn’t work. So, their policies are actually, in that regard, deeply foolish. If they manage by force to secure control of Ukraine, or Belarus, or whatever, they will just be creating huge problems. They could not possibly maintain it. The idea that Russia is a heartland of the Slav civilization, it can be present in people’s hearts in Russia, and it is, but it’s lunatic, it’s not going to work. Once upon a time, France used to belong to the King of Britain.”
