'Essential reading' – Review: Who Lost Russia...by Peter Conradi

Oneworld, £18.99

Review by Brian Morton

SIXTY years ago, the hot-button topic in Western politics was “Who lost China?” A popular, if not consensus, answer was that the world’s other giant was, after all, simply inscrutable. In the same way, the Russian bear might be deemed unpredictable and prone to force as a solution. Its current representative, Vladimir Putin, is not just a classic Russian strong leader but a man trained, not necessarily to lie, but certainly to conceal.

It may be that to Western eyes, he is simply hard to read. Or it may be that his and his country’s geopolitical circumstances are so different from our own that we don’t share the same basic premises. Putin subscribes to a grand Eurasian dream which, in its more extreme forms, advocates the reconquest of Alaska, the suppression of independent Ukraine, and has Russian soldiers washing their feet in the gentle waters of the Indian Ocean.

It is startling to recall that the Soviet Union fell almost half a lifetime ago, and harder still to remember much of what followed. Peter Conradi’s excellent, rapidly narrated account is a reminder that for a time Russia presented as a new democracy on the Western model, with a free market and without an ideological commitment to conflict with capitalism. There was even a moment when Putin openly welcomed the possibility of Russia joining NATO. In a new spirit of amity, the West reached out to the former enemy. NATO’s secretary-general George Robertson said that the formation of a NATO-Russia Council showed that “cold warriors can become partners in building a better world”. The argument ran that the two former enemies should reunite to combat the rise of Islamic terrorism. It was a view reinforced by the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and by the devastating siege at Beslan, which stands as Russia’s 9/11.

All stirring stuff, but much of it seems to have been lost. The doomsday clock is closer to midnight than ever. Vladimir Putin seems like a man to keep at arm's length and under careful watch, and not like a guy one might want to spend “quality time” with, as George Bush once said. Bush was echoing a line of US rhetoric that went back to Bill Clinton’s improbable friendship with “ol’ Boris” Yeltsin. Putin even chummed up with Silvio Berlusconi, not for bunga-bunga but with a seemingly genuine desire for political understanding. But this is all gone now. Only last month, too late even for Conradi’s up-to-date account, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov condemned NATO as a “Cold War institution”.

What went wrong? Or in Conradi’s formulation, who lost Russia? NATO is at the heart of it. Lavrov’s point is both a description and a criticism. When the Soviet Union fell, NATO’s main rationale seemed to disappear, and yet, instead of dismantling and reshaping the alliance, or helping to build a new cordon sanitaire out of the old Warsaw Pact nations, the West went down the palpably absurd route of NATO expansion, even to the extent of holding out membership to the three Baltic republics which, though they don’t seem to play a central part in Putin’s Eurasian dream, are part of the Russian landmass. It is as if the Iron Curtain were simply being rehung on Russia’s western border.

Some unexpected or previously unknown detail surfaces in Conradi’s account, like Margaret Thatcher’s resistance to a reunited Germany, but for the most part the story he tells was played out in full view. The mishandling of Russia, even when relations were warmest, was blatant and obvious. The NATO-Russia Council was an awkward 19+1 arrangement. The Russians, who had admittedly packed their delegation with spooks and used meetings as fishing trips for intelligence about Western capability and policy, were only told about decisions after the fact. It still looked a new and friendlier relationship, but it smacked to Russian minds of the old policy of containment, which George Kennan had advocated as post-war Russia became a nuclear super-power.

And there was the rub. Should America treat the former Cold War enemy as an equal partner or try to downgrade her as a middling state of awkward size? Russian pride demanded the former. Pouring Western money (not enough) into an inchoate economy and only partially reformed political structure led to disaster and resentment. Allowing Russia a free hand in Chechnya seemed like a recognition that she should be allowed to police her own perimeter and former constituent parts, but the West missed the wider implications of that vicious conflict. It wasn’t just a matter of national style. Russia doesn’t send in “military advisers”; Russia stamps hard on opposition. Two days before 9/11 Putin warned Bush of the imminence of threat. Now, faced by broken promises and a new policy not of containment but encroachment, Putin has withdrawn into his “vertical of power”.

Who lost Russia? No single president, prime minister or organisation takes the blame but it’s clear that the greatest opportunity for peace and co-operation in modern history was dreadfully muffed. What seemed a victory for Western values simply exposed the shortcomings of the Western system, which had always thrived on a rhetoric of Russian aggression and expansionism which was regularly exposed as just that: rhetoric rather than reality. Conradi’s book is essential reading and a sharp reminder that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.