Vladimir Putin’s favorite book

The foreign affairs content of Vladimir Putin’s latest “Direct Line” annual live broadcast of Q&A with the general public was notable for more than his dismissing the possibility of World War III being ignited by the confrontation of Russian and British forces in territorial waters off the Crimean coast several days previous, about which I published my commentary yesterday.

The additional gems, which my peers in East and West seem to have overlooked came later in the program and in a wholly different context, when the Iron Man lifted his protective gear and gave us a rare look into his soul, which is quite broad in the positive, Russian understanding of that concept. He was asked about how he spends his free time and he said that on weekends he is just another Russian guy who enjoys a  tipple and loves to sing Russian songs together with his friends.  He also was asked to name his favorite novel and he did not pause for a moment before answering War and Peace by Tolstoy. Now that was a revelation worthy of all our residual Kremlinologist talent and experience.

There is vastly more to War and Peace than the romance between Natasha and Andrei which is the key element adored by successive generations of teenage girls everywhere or than the carefully built cinematic structure of unfolding scenes which facilitated the novel’s transposition into films made in Moscow and in Hollywood that won over still broader audiences around the globe.

War and Peace was used by its author to set out his thoughts about the broad sweep of history, about the driving forces and causality, about great men in history and the role of the masses. He did this not only in asides planted within the narrative but also in a lengthy Epilogue consisting of philosophical musings. Indeed, historiographical analysis was so invasive that literary critics of his day questioned whether War and Peace was a novel or something else.

I have written about these issues extensively in one of my most successful, and I believe, enduring political essays:  https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2019/01/27/war-and-peace-the-relevance-of-1812-as-explained-by-tolstoy-to-current-global-affairs/

Since study of causality has always been one of my own passions that I indulged by pursuing a doctorate in history, in reading War and Peace I considered very closely Tolstoy’s pronouncements such as his insistence that the war of 1812 was much more than a French invasion made in the name of Revolutionary principles to bring down the ancien régime of which Russia and its tsar Alexander I was a key bulwark.  Tolstoy reminds us that by its composition, the Grande Armée was a mass movement of the whole of Europe to the East, to Russia to engage in acts that in ordinary times are properly called out as counterfeiting money, murder and pillage. Aside from the well-known and substantial Polish contingent which was fighting for its national liberation, Napoleon’s soldiers included a great many volunteers from among Germans and other West European peoples.

Tolstoy went on to say that the realization of the invasion came about not because of directions of one man, Napoleon Bonaparte, but because of the willing participation of every last man at the bottom of society, both those in the army proper and those on the home front who supported them. It came about because every noncommissioned officer under Napoleon had re-enlisted when his time in service was fulfilled and had done so willingly. And their motivation was booty, the spoils of war.

When I read Tolstoy, this very point seemed questionable.  However, two days ago, I had to revise my judgment entirely when I visited the ongoing exhibition in the South Belgian city of Liege marking two hundred years from the death of Napoleon entitled “Going Beyond the Myth.”

The curators of this exhibition did not show much daring in their attempt to go “beyond the myth” surrounding Napoleon. However, in some small details which were included, whether wittingly or by negligence, they fully answered my doubts about Tolstoy’s identification of the motivation of those marching on Moscow in 1812.  In particular, I was struck by the remarks of the curators about Napoleon’s extraordinary rapport with ordinary soldiers under his command which explains the valor and success they enjoyed in combat. The curators tell us that just before one of the major battles Napoleon addressed his troops thus: “Our stores of supplies are empty. The enemy’s stores are full.  Go do what must be done!”

And then, in another room displaying the uniforms and equipment of foot soldiers in Napoleon’s army we are shown a typical back pack carried by every soldier and weighing 25 kilograms. This held alongside two spare pairs of footwear and heavy undergarments a container for war booty.  We are told that as that booty expanded in the course of a campaign the soldiers jettisoned the underwear to make room for more precious possessions.

And so, there you have it: Napoleon’s armies were motivated by spoils of war. The indiscipline that raged among them during the occupation of Moscow when Napoleon’s troops engaged freely in marauding led ultimately to his defeat and to the massive loss of life among his soldiers on the retreat.

It is one very small step from the vision of geopolitics that Tolstoy sets out in War and Peace to the present day concerns of the Kremlin over the new Grande Armée represented by NATO and poised to march East at any moment. The prominence of the Poles today among agitators and constituents of the anti-Russian hordes is just a cherry on the cake. It is one small step from the brigands of Tolstoy’s 1812 to those who would, as Putin said recently, like to take a bite out of Russia’s territorial vastness which they claim is too much for one country to possess. He went on to say that anyone who tries to take a bite now will have his teeth knocked out.

Continuity in historical trends is a theme which comes up in a recently published paper co-authored by one of America’s best known experts on Russia, Eugene Rumer, under the imprimatur of one of the country’s most highly regarded think tanks, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:  “Grand Illusions: The Impact of Misperceptions About Russia on U.S. Policy.”

To sum up their thinking in a nutshell:  “America is Back” – Good; “Russia is Back” – Bad. 

The Kremlin’s concern over national security, over loss of strategic depth essential to that security due to the eastward advance of NATO to its borders is all a matter of “perception” in the view of Rumer and his co-author, Richard Sokolsky. They tell us it is regrettable that American policy planners were so overwhelmed by hubris after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 and so struck by the economic and political shambles that Russia became as that decade proceeded that they could not imagine Russia returning to the table of great powers and took decisions according NATO membership to former Warsaw Pact member states and even former republics of the Soviet Union under terms that were unwise, as we see today. However, Messrs Rumer and Sokolsky lack the vision or, more likely, just the courage to say that these new Member States never should have been invited into NATO because their presence subtracts from rather than adds to the collective security of the Atlantic Alliance. Such frankness would not win them plaudits for speaking truth to power.

So long as Vladimir Putin and his entourage have Tolstoy’s War and Peace on their night table, the Collective West will do well to put aside any thoughts that Russian policy is the arbitrary result of decisions taken by one man only in an authoritarian regime. Russian policy is taken on the basis of the collective memory of a 145 million strong nation whose guard is up and whose perceptions of threat are razor sharp.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

Vladimir Putin’s annual “Direct Line” television program in which he takes questions addressed to him from the Russian public via their audio-video apps was held today.  As usual, it received a great deal of promotion on all state television channels days in advance. As usual, a special Kremlin call center received and analyzed questions sent beforehand so as to get a firm idea of which questions were most common and so select from among them for the live session today.

Otherwise, the format was changed, perhaps most significantly in that both moderators sitting on either side of Putin were women.  That was surely a calculated decision corresponding to the predominantly domestic – family budget nature of the incoming questions from the audience.  Big economic or foreign policy questions would be only a minor part of the planned program.

However, the organizers were very kind to international observers, like me, whom they knew had little interest in the local community or home economics side of the Direct Line questions.  Accordingly, less than 30 minutes into the program we heard exactly the question pitched to Vladimir Vladimirovich which made it worthwhile for us to tune in.  He was asked whether the clash with the cruiser HMS Defender inside Russian territorial waters off the coast of Crimea could have touched off World War III.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Putin said “no,” there was no such chance. Then he went on to give information about the event which had not previously come out in Russian media and which puts much of the commentary that has appeared in the West, even from highly experienced if not cynical observers, in a new light.

Specifically, he said that the event had both military and political dimensions.  On the military side, there was the fact that the British cruiser’s misadventure came hours after the United States completed a reconnaissance flight over the area via a spy plane based in Greece. The Russians followed that plane from start to finish, noted what information it was tasked to extract about the preparedness and operating efficiency of Russian coastal defenses and, said Putin with a mischievous smile, “we fed them what was their due.”

The British naval mission was, on the other hand, strictly political, to demonstrate non-acceptance of the referendum which Russian authorities held before the union of Crimea with the Russian Federation in 2014 and so to reject Russian rule in Crimea and its coastal waters.

Putin went on to say that there was no chance of this confrontation touching off World War III, even if the Russians had sunk the Defender.  Why?  Because “they knew it would be a war they could not win.” Turning around Putin’s phrasing from diplomatic to Realpolitik language:  “because they knew it was a war they would lose.”

There are several interesting points here.  First, we note the Russian leader’s unhesitating confidence in Russian strategic superiority over the Collective West and his belief that they ‘get it.’  Second, we see the involvement of Washington in this mission from the get-go.  The advice to the U.S. government a couple of days ago by none other than Pat Buchanan that they make clear to Britain it would not enjoy U.S. protection if this provocation ended badly for them was advice that missed entirely the reality of who is calling the shots. Third, this incident puts in question the ability of Biden to override the Russophobes in his administration and in Congress and negotiate successfully a new strategic deal with Russia that puts an end to dreams of executing a first nuclear strike and enshrines Mutually Assured Destruction once again.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

The incident of 23 June off the coast of Crimea when the British destroyer HMS Defender intentionally crossed into the territorial waters of the Russian Federation and was shooed away by Russian coast guard vessels and fighter jets has received a modicum of coverage in Western Europe, much more coverage in the U.K., itself, where the fissures within Boris Johnson’s cabinet in advance of the adventure came to light, exposing the remarkable fact that the go/no-go dispute between the Defense and the Foreign Ministry was settled by decision of the Prime Minister himself. 

Adding to the piquancy within the U.K. was the direct conflict between what was reported by a BBC journalist on board the Defender and what was announced by the British Minister of Defense:  the former confirmed Russian claims that warning shots were fired and bombs dropped in the path of the British ship to force it to change course and leave the RF territorial waters; the latter said that no Russian warning shots were noted but called the close overflight of the vessel by Russian fighter jets risky and unprofessional.

Of course, British journalists lost no time taking the question of responsibility for the incident straight back to the Prime Minister, who on live television said that he saw no fault in what was done, because Britain does not recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea, hence the waters in question are Ukrainian, not Russian, and the British Navy was exercising its rights to innocent passage under international law.

One’s jaw drops at Johnson’s statements. This, and his assertion not to worry, that Russian-British relations had survived even greater conflict in the past, revealed a state of mind that goes beyond insouciance to pure idiocy.

The question of the prime minister’s fitness for office has come up many times in the past. First, over his dogged insistence on Brexit, and “hard Brexit” at that, cost what it may. However, he survived politically, got his Brexit across all hurdles, claimed victory and then recouped much of the spent political currency by successfully managing a vaccination campaign that put Britain way ahead of Continental Europe in protecting its population from the ravages of the Covid-19 epidemic. For these reasons it is doubtful that raised eyebrows among some British compatriots over the extraordinary risks taken last week to poke the Russians in the eye will cost Johnson anything.

Having just spoken of Johnson’s idiocy, I must take a step back and admit that there is likely reason to his madness.  The international context is clear.  Following Joe Biden’s 16 June summit with Vladimir Putin in Geneva and the changed course of US-Russian relations in prospect, towards greater pragmatism, less ideological posturing, Johnson, the visceral Russophobe, is odd man out. Moreover, even in the European Union, measures were afoot last week to change course on Russia. To be sure, the proposal for a similar EU summit with Putin advanced by Angela Merkel and seconded by Emmanuel Macron did not receive approval from the 27, but some kind of outreach to Russia at another level remains in prospect. Against this background, Johnson’s staged incident in the Black Sea was meant to stiffen the resolve of the anti-Russian forces both on Capitol Hill and among the EU’s hardline states, the Baltics, Poland, Romania and, most recently, the Czech Republic.  In this way, the UK reasserts its relevance as a great power. No matter that this last hurrah may end in the obliteration of the British navy by overwhelming Russian force at any time of their choosing.

In Russia, the incident was viewed as more than a passing curiosity. It was taken as a precursor to war. The next day Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Ryabkov stated flatly that any future incursions will be met by force. The Brits may expect not warning shots but direct attack from the Russian military.

And already on Saturday, 24 June, the Russians made their counter-move to remind the British of who is who and what is what. This time not in the Black Sea but in the Mediterranean, where they moved their previously planned combined submarine, surface vessel and air force exercises to within 30 km of the new British aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth in a position just south of Cyprus. The MHS Defender, it will be remembered, is part of that aircraft carrier’s task force as it makes its way around the globe on its maiden mission.

In a month or two, this aircraft carrier task force will enter the South China Sea where it is expected to make similar provocative actions in the exercise of Her Majesty’s rights of naval passage through international waters.  The Brits have already foresworn sending the task force through the Straits of Taiwan which would by general understanding be a step too far with respect to the People’s Republic of China.  However, something as foolish as the incident off the Crimea is surely planned.

In this regard, we may be sure that these past few days Russians have been exchanging information with their Chinese colleagues on how to keep the British Navy from doing anything really stupid and touching off a war.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

If I may use the vernacular of American baseball, my article entitled “A Reductionist Approach to the forthcoming Biden-Putin Summit in Geneva” published on 9 June scored a “home run.” The number of visitors to my website rose dramatically just after its publication and in the next several days the article was  republished on a good many alternative news websites that have their own very broad readership, including opednews.com

“Reductionist Approach” ran counter to what was being published not only in Western mainstream media but also in many of the “dissident” websites like antiwar.com, where the editorial tone was skeptical first that the Military Industrial Complex and related malefactors would allow the summit to take place at all (by setting out yet some new false flag scandal around Russia in advance of the scheduled date for the summit) and second, that the Summit, if it proceeded as planned, could amount to anything meaningful given the Russophobe, Cold War mentality of the handlers who supposedly are writing Joe Biden’s debating points for him, and not just reminding him in his crib sheets to address Putin as “Vova,” the easy to pronounce familiar form of Vladimir.

Meanwhile, on the Russian side, state television’s interviews of home team international affairs experts, including the preeminent Fyodor Lukyanov, produced, like their American counterparts, only shopping lists of the difficult issues which the two presidents were expected to discuss, without any particular prioritization among these different issues or any prediction of which ones, if any, might find success during the face to face meeting.

As we now know, the Geneva Summit both did take place on 16 June and did result in a couple of noteworthy agreements that even Russia haters in the West could not ignore:  the decision to return the respective American and Russian ambassadors to their work posts and to begin restoration of normal functioning of the consular and ambassadorial offices in both countries; and the decision to enter into arms control negotiations with the objective of establishing strategic stability.

Some American media outlets did pick up other lesser signs from the Geneva talks that suggested something big was under way.  One such broad hint from Biden was his remark at the opening of their session that it was appropriate for “two great powers” to meet and find points in common for cooperation amidst all their political differences.  That remark was, of course, intended to break with the past denigration of Russia that Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, laid down as Washington’s overriding policy line when he called Russia “just a regional power.” It was a declaration of respect for the country and for the man whom Biden had described publicly the day before as a “worthy adversary.” It thereby met Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s minimal requirement for successful negotiations.

In the past few days, Russian state media have moved out from what I would call their protective screen of downplaying the Summit before it took place to celebration of the Summit and open explanation of its logic from start to finish now that it is past. In this move, they surely were following signals from Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Ryabkov in his evaluation of the results of the Summit that came on the next day.

That explanation conforms totally to my own “Reductionist Approach,” namely identifying as the driver for the Summit America’s need to put a cap on an arms race that it was losing .

This interpretation was driven home by the top manager of the Russian news establishment Dmitry Kiselyov in his very widely watched News of the Week program last night.  Kiselyov put on the screen images of the various new cutting edge weapons systems that the Russians have developed and now deployed in their armed forces, including  hypersonic cruise missiles that can evade all known Anti-Ballistic Missile systems and ensure a devastating counter-blow should the USA be tempted into making a first nuclear strike.

Nineteen years after the United States began the process of cancelling the treaties that ensured Mutually Assured Destruction and so made nuclear war unthinkable, at the 16 June Summit in Geneva, President Biden took a step back and agreed to negotiate a new stability that will be enshrined in an expanded version of the present New START treaty. 

Kiselyov also directed attention to the declaration of the two presidents in Geneva which reconfirmed the statement in 1985 by then presidents Reagan and Gorbachev that no one can win a nuclear war. That conclusion should be self-evident but it was tacitly denied by the Americans for the past 19 years in their failed quest to overwhelm Russian defenses with deployment of new short range missiles all around the perimeter of the Russian Federation in order to establish global strategic superiority.

Finally, in his coverage of the Summit, Kiselyov did not fail to mention that other motivation of the Americans to find some working relationship with Russia at this time– namely to draw Russia away from any possible alliance with China, which is a nightmare scenario for Washington. This is an issue which Vladimir Putin dealt with extensively in his interview with NBC that preceded the Summit by several days.  Here, the ambitions of policy makers in Washington are overblown, just like their fears.  Neither Russia nor China has any desire to lose its geopolitical independence by entering into alliances. That has been and will remain only a fallback position in the face of unrelenting pressures from Washington to “contain” their economic, social and, yes, military growth.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

Travel Notes: Russia, June 2021

On 14 May, not long after we took off from Brussels airport on our Aeroflot flight headed for Moscow, with onward flight to our final destination, St Petersburg, the lead stewardess announced on the public address system that it was mandatory for all passengers to remain in their face masks during the entire flight. She went on to say that if any violators refused to comply, the captain would put the plane down at the nearest airport, eject the offenders and all costs relating to this maneuver would be charged to them. That announcement got our entire attention and put us on notice that official Russia takes the Covid pandemic very seriously.

Indeed, my traveling to Russia at this time was quite exceptional in that the country has been closed to foreigners since March 2020. Business visas, e-visas, tourist visas: all were cancelled back then and are still not being issued today. The only exception is for those who, like myself, are the spouses of Russian citizens accompanying them to their homeland on two-entry visas valid for three months. To all appearances, on our flight from Brussels, there were no other foreigners, just Russians. 

Our flight was full, but that is not surprising given that all air traffic has been greatly curtailed since the onset of the pandemic. Brussels Airlines had wholly suspended its Russian service early in the first wave and Aeroflot offers only two flights a week, both only to Moscow.

On the continuing flight to St Petersburg, no announcement about the penalties of not wearing a mask were made. Scattered passengers did not wear them, or had them under their chins, in a show of defiance. One of these exceptional individuals happened to be in our row and my requests to cabin staff to intervene elicited no great interest on their part.  It began to become clear that the situation with respect to hygienic regulations was not as it first appeared. 

The days that followed in Petersburg and the countryside to the south of the city confirmed this confused and disturbing state of affairs where “deconfinement” is the rule. That being said, the rates of infection, hospitalization and death are similar to those of Belgium and Western Europe, which still have a much more restrictive regime in place and are opening up much more slowly. However, the trend in Russia is headed ever so slightly in the wrong direction and surely a major factor is a low take-up of the vaccinations on offer, about which I will .offer some explanations below. Otherwise, in what follows I will share impressions about current daily life, about the economic and social impact that Covid appears to have had since my last stay in Russia.

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Much has changed in Belgian and Western European society since the onset of the Covid pandemic.  So it should come as no surprise that the Russia of today, is not the same as what I left behind 18 months ago.

The economic impact of Covid is immediately obvious. Platforms for small vendors like our Gostinny Dvor shopping complex in downtown Pushkin have lost half or more of the shops; the entire second floor of the building is now vacant, representing the loss of dozens of small enterprises.

Here we see the consequences of the Russian government’s very low level of financial assistance to business generally.  Measured as a percentage of GDP, Russia remained fiscally conservative from the start. It did not take out massive new loans to assist recovery from Covid as did the USA and the European Union. It mainly directed its outlays to assisting families with children, through one-time grants and new monthly allowances, building on pre-existing social programs.  Similarly, it extended a program of cheap mortgage loans both to support the important construction industry and to help people with limited means to improve their living conditions. It put new money into medical services, hospitals, salaries to doctors and nurses. But, overall, the economy was left to its own resources.

Public sector employees, a large part of the work force, were largely protected against financial loss from the lockdowns.  Meanwhile, for their part, the big industrial and agricultural enterprises had sufficiently deep pockets to avoid lay-offs and pay salaries to those who were not working normal hours. They could survive the crisis on their own.

It was the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) who needed help and who did not receive it. Highly regrettable stinginess on the part of the Putin government has opened wounds in society that will not easily heal even if the economy as a whole plows ahead and returns to its pre-Covid levels thanks, in particular, to the recent sharp rise in the price of gas and oil, as well as of agricultural commodities that Russia exports in vast amounts.

Other social and economic losses resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic arose from the closing of borders. For the reasons noted above in my introductory remarks, foreign tourists have disappeared. The most visible such groups were, of course, the Chinese, who came through the Hermitage, the suburban tsarist palaces and other cultural and historical centers of interest in enormous groups. They had been a source of irritation among locals, who found their own access to these facilities limited as a result and who questioned whether the Chinese groups, taken around, fed and housed by enterprises run by their compatriots, really contributed much to the economy. Such questions are no longer relevant: there simply are no Chinese, almost no Americans and West Europeans. To a limited extent, luxury establishments like the Hotel d’Europe, are now taken over by wealthy Russians. But there are not enough of them to go around. As a result, hotel vacancy rates are high and ‘must visit’ gourmet restaurants are nearly empty.

The closed borders also have cut down substantially on the numbers of Gastarbeiters from Central Asia who had been performing all sorts of menial but essential jobs in construction, public works and miscellaneous services. Their gypsy cabs that 18 months ago provided us with instant transportation in the outlying districts of Petersburg are today a distant memory. Now we are reliant on Uber, Yandex and the other cartelized taxi providers operating only by phone or internet reservations. They are thin on the ground outside of the city center.

On the positive side, in Russia, just as in the West, the pandemic lockdowns supercharged online shopping. Russia’s answer to Amazon, a company called Ozon, has vastly expanded its presence. And major supermarkets have offered facilities for placing orders online that are delivered to the shopper’s home.

Meanwhile, as regards Covid itself, the picture which emerges from the month I have spent in Russia’s second largest city, St Petersburg, and in the countryside 80 km to the south, in the Gatchina district of the Leningradskaya oblast, is more complex than what one might assume from reading reports in mainstream Western media. Our journalists stress only the low vaccination rate across the population as a whole without any differentiation. They speak about the public’s uncertainty over the Russian vaccine Sputnik V due to its “rushed” approval. And they cite mortality figures from Covid which are several times those officially published by Russian authorities.

What I found by talking with people on the spot revealed a big cleavage in acceptance of the vaccination program, as well as in acceptance of the sanitary regulations surrounding wearing of masks and social distancing between city people and country people, between the “intelligentsia” meaning educated folks, thinking society, and everyone else.

 The country folk we met with in the hamlet of Orlino, population 400, had been vaccinated at the first opportunity, without hesitation or discussion. They all wore masks in stores, as required. Otherwise, they walked their streets mask-free, so that to anyone driving through it was as if there was no Covid.

But, of course, Covid reached into even the smallest and remote communities. Our immediate neighbors on one side of our property all came down with Covid just after New Year’s 2021.  Where did they get it? Answer – at work.  Apparently, their illness was only moderately serious: no one was hospitalized and all appear to have fully recovered. We saw them last weekend planting and tending their potato patch, which is back breaking work.

In our St Petersburg borough of Pushkin (Tsarskoye Selo), we have no acquaintances whom we might ask about vaccinations. But we do see that the respect for Covid sanitary regulations is less uniform. To be sure, in the major supermarket chains Pyaterochka, Perekryostok, Magnit and Fix Price which I frequent, all the staff wear masks and most but not all customers do as well.

At Pyaterochka, a gal in her early twenties in line just after me approached the cash register mask-less and was asked by the cashier, also in her early twenties, to take one of the free masks offered to shoppers at the entrance. She did that without complaint. That in itself was testimony to the remarkable civility today of Russians in their settlement of differences and contrasts starkly with the shouting and cursing that often accompanied enforcement of rules in the Soviet past.

In downtown St Petersburg, the general observance of Covid-related sanitary regulations is much more lax and, frankly, cause for concern.

The latest daily reports on new Covid infections in Russia are heading in the wrong direction. From a low of less than 8,000 daily a couple of weeks ago, the figures have risen to more than 13,000 now. Of that roughly half the new cases are in Moscow, a significant rise.  St Petersburg’s daily count is said to be stable at around 860 cases. Bear in mind that the general population of St Petersburg is less than half that of Moscow. The incidence of new Covid infections is therefore about three times less than in Moscow.

How may we understand the relatively worse situation in Moscow than in St Petersburg given that medical facilities in the former are much superior to those in the latter? The question is all the more intriguing given that Moscow is governed by one of the most sophisticated and energetic mayors in the country, Sobyanin, whereas St Petersburg is run by the nonentity Beglov, of whom the best people say is that “he has done no harm.”

Possibly the difference is found in the relative isolation of St Petersburg to the outside world at present, with almost no international flights, in contrast to Moscow which is virtually the only port receiving international passengers from all over the world, including “red zone” countries.  Then, as a second possible contributor, there is the mass transit system.  Moscow’s metro is by far the biggest carrier of commuters in the country. It is far larger and far more needed given the vast territory of the capital and the outlying residential areas feeding in commuters each day.

I cannot say how secure is the Moscow metro from spread of Covid, but I can offer an observation about its St Petersburg counterpart, which as presently run must be a significant spreader of infection.  Only a small minority of passengers are wearing masks and the level of occupancy of the railcars is very high even in off hours. Surface transport in Petersburg also appeared to be hit or miss with respect to mask observance.

Meanwhile, in St Petersburg public entertainments are being offered as if there were no pandemic.  I went to two operas and two ballet performances at the Mariinsky and Mikhailovsky theaters. All the performances were sold out, all seats were occupied, and only some spectators wore masks.  For its part, Horeca is operating normally, both restaurants and bars.

Russia has taken a stand as a front-runner internationally in reopening and normalization of public life. The St Petersburg International Economic Forum is often referred to as a Davos-scale event of international importance. But whereas Davos remains on hold and will be largely a virtual event this year, the St Petersburg forum attracted more than 2,000 foreigners, which though substantial is about half the normal contingent. The arriving foreigners all had been issued special forum-related visas and all were required to undergo a PCR test before being admitted to the event premises.

Similarly, St Petersburg is host to UEFA competition matches, whereas other European capitals like Brussels did not agree to take the risks this year.  Two days ago, we witnessed the opening of a fan zone in the city center. Hundreds if not thousands of young people were streaming towards the entrance gates, almost none of them wearing masks. By contrast, the Rosgvardia and city police officers present to maintain order were nearly all in masks.

In a word, apart from the daily news broadcasts that highlight the latest infections, hospitalizations and deaths, judging by the behavior of most city folk, there is little to remind  you that we are still in the midst of a pandemic that has infected more than five million Russians, killed more than 100,000 if not three times that figure.

Our city friends are nearly all well educated people. For the most part, they have not been vaccinated. Some say they are waiting for availability of new Russian vaccines later this year which they think will be safer. Others say they have no intention of getting vaccinated at all. The reasons they give can be amazing in their ignorance and disregard for the advice of medical experts and the authorities generally.

“Why should I get vaccinated? I haven’t been sick!”  This bit of illogic I heard from both ends of the urban social spectrum. At the top end, the speaker was a late ‘30s, early 40’s woman with a musical education. She is happily married to a much older music professional. She says that very likely a year ago they both came down with Covid. Given his age and comorbidities he was greatly at risk of complications. Yet, she refused to take him to a clinic or hospital, reasoning that they would put him on a drip and progressively see him to the grave. Instead, she nursed him at home, gave him aspirin initially and then after a week, when the fever abated, gave him standard antibiotics. They both recovered.  Fine, you may say. However, she refused to see a doctor even after recovery or to undergo PCR tests, saying they give contradictory results and are worthless. Accordingly, they now have no proof that they recovered from a Covid infection. As they plan foreign travel, she intends to buy counterfeit certificates of vaccination, which are now coming onto the Russian consumer market for a price of $60 each.

In her case, her aversion to the vaccine and to the entire Russian medical establishment is part of a broader refusal to believe anything coming from official sources, whether Russian….or foreign. When I presented statistics showing the dramatic effect that the first strict lockdown and now mass vaccinations have had on the incidence of infection, hospitalization and death in Belgium, she refused to listen, saying that all statistics are phony.

My case from the bottom of society is the Uzbek vendor of dried fruit in one of the city markets where I have made regular purchases for more than five years. Fine fellow! But when I asked if he had been vaccinated, he gave the same response as my lady acquaintance above. No mask on him. No interest in hearing about Covid.

The identical wording of their rejection of vaccinations and of expert medical advice possibly suggests a common source in one or another of the widely followed social networks and celebrity bloggers.  However, I believe that the cause-effect linkage of these gurus is the inverse of what is popularly assumed: namely, people choose to follow bloggers and celebrities who say what they want to hear.

In the West, media commonly speak of the “authoritarian regime” in Russia as if the populace were cowed and docile. However, as the resistance to Covid prevention measures here indicates, there is a strong undercurrent of what I would call elemental anarchism in this country. It goes back a long way in  national traditions. It was best formulated in the last quarter of the 19^th century by the theoretician-political activist Prince Piotr Kropotkin.

So far, this anarchist mind-set has not resulted in any bunt or spontaneous outbreak of violence. Surely it has revealed itself in the outpouring of support for the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who offered no political program as such, to attract his followers, only a rejection of everything. Commentators in the West refuse to see this side of the pro-Navalny demonstrations of several months ago following his arrest and internment. For them Navalny is but an instrument, a lever to be used in their quest to disrupt Russia and bring about regime change. I see the outpouring of demonstrators in the streets as a generalized expression of frustration over the Covid restrictions and worsening standard of living they engendered.

Before closing, I offer one further observation of what has changed here in the 18 months I was away: respect for the United States and the Collective West has fallen sharply among all of our acquaintances, even those who were formerly Anglophiles, Liberals and sworn opponents of the “Putin regime.”  The sanctions, the never-ending flow of bitter denunciations of Russia coming from Western media have arrived together with news of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, mass shootings by madmen and abuses of the militarized police forces in the US, providing stark illustrations of the double standards being practiced in the West in contradiction with their supposed values. All of this disillusionment comes on top of the Russians’ generalized feelings of frustration over the Covid restrictions.  Moral of the story for anyone willing to listen on Capitol Hill: this is not a propitious time to bait the bear if ever there were such a time.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

Post Script, 19 June 2021:  My remarks about the rising Covid-19 infection and hospitalization rates in Russia offered a week ago were prescient.  The latest infection figures announced by Russian state radio yesterday were above 17,000, of which half the cases were recorded in the city of Moscow. And in Moscow itself more than 80% of new infections are of the newly arrived Indian variant, all of which suggests that the city’s being the sole point of entry for international flights explains its particular vulnerability to new waves of Covid. 

Meanwhile, the authorities have decided at last to take firm action on behalf of the vaccination program.  In Moscow city, then in the surrounding Moscow Oblast in the past week they introduced mandatory vaccination for workers in various spheres who have contact with the general public, exceptions being made only for those who have medical justification for not undergoing vaccination. The order has immediately made itself felt in the past few days. Nationwide, the vaccination rate went up by 5%. In Moscow itself, the daily number of vaccinations has increased by 30%. 

However, in proudly announcing that more than 40,000 vaccinations are now being administered daily in the capital, the city fathers miss the point that in the state of Belgium which has roughly the same number of inhabitants as Moscow, the daily vaccinations reached more than 200,000 as the country hit its stride a month ago.

Yesterday, we had tea with a long-time friend who is well educated, very sophisticated in her artistic, gastronomic and other tastes. You might call her a perfect intelligent if it weren’t for her having become very patriotic in the past few years and if it weren’t for her having gotten vaccinated at the first opportunity. As we discussed the Covid situation here, she remarked that “Russia needs to be ruled with an iron fist.” Indeed, the broad population is only confused and annoyed by gentleness in matters that concern its own welfare, like countering the pandemic.  The Kremlin has finally taken notice.

Further thoughts on the forthcoming Biden-Putin summit: U.S. policy built on false foundations

In my last essay proposing a “reductionist approach” to identifying the driver of Biden’s initiative for a meeting with Putin so early in his presidency, I spoke of putting a cap on the nuclear arms race, which is proceeding adversely to U.S. security interests.

In this brief essay, I will explain why acknowledgement of Russia’s military achievements over the past decade, both in strategic and in tactical forces, is so difficult for the American foreign policy establishment, and why this fact is a major hazard for the forthcoming summit to succeed.

But in making my argument, I am obliged to broaden our survey to take in China as well as Russia, given that recent U.S. doctrinal papers have in one breath dealt with both as leading competitors and/or potential adversaries.

My point is that official U.S. threat analysis of these two countries is based on wrong-headed estimates of their respective military strength today and in the future.  The abstract notion underlying these wrong estimates is the equation of economic strength, measured by GDP, and military strength. As we all know, China is rated number two after the USA; Russia rates itself as number 10.

As recently as 6 years ago, the President of the United States was saying that Russia produced nothing that the world needed or wanted, that its economy was a shambles.  A U.S. Senator who enjoyed wide respect of his colleagues in both parties was saying Russia was nothing more than a ‘gas station’ parading as a sovereign state.  And while we do not read these ignorant and defamatory declarations about the Russian economy today, the recent ignorant and defamatory statements about Russia’s Covid 19 vaccine Sputnik V, the first such vaccine in the world to be registered, perpetuate the notion that Russians are incapable of world-beating innovation of any kind.

For all of the above reasons, mainstream media tells us endlessly that Russia is a declining power, that it only occupies the role of spoiler, whereas China is the world’s second greatest military force as well as being the world’s second largest economy and so is the strategic competitor and potential adversary worthy of our rapt attention.

I do not mean to suggest that China does not pose a potential military threat to U.S. global interests. Indeed, China’s military and geopolitical posture is changing as we talk, precisely because of the very aggressive attempts of the US to “contain” China and hinder its international ascent commercially and geopolitically.

What I mean regarding China is that until Trump began his frontal assault on the country by his trade war and confrontation in the South China Sea, by attempts to round up all the neighboring states and Europe in a common front against China, i.e. before the unleashing of a new Cold War against Beijing, Chinese military ambitions were limited in scope to their own back yard, not global or strategic.  Now things are changing. The Chinese are adding to their nuclear arsenal, which was, by intent, very modest. It is arguable that China is now starting a build-up of strategic arms usable as deterrence against the USA that it would otherwise have started only 20 years from now. 

The same factors have pushed China into Russia’s arms. The Chinese – Russian embrace is typically described as coming from the Russian side due to the pressure they are under from NATO and the U.S.-led sanctions. However, whereas China was doing splendidly pre-Trump in its economic relations with the West and had no reason to jeopardize this boon by coming too close to Russia, the pariah state, those inhibitions have been swept away by hostile U.S. actions.  Today China is the suitor in an informal global alliance with Russia.

So, where is Russia as a security threat to the United States?  It is without question today the single greatest opponent to US global hegemony in the world. It alone has the capability of leveling the USA in 20 minutes. And it has moved maybe 10 years ahead of the U.S. in the most advanced nuclear weapons delivery systems, ICBMs, hypersonic cruise missiles, deep sea nuclear drones, you name it.  Though no one talks about it, de facto Russia probably now has a first strike capability backed up by its own iron dome ABM system. 

Here in Pushkin, a close suburb of Petersburg, where I write to you from today, 10 minutes by car from our gated community apartment complex there is what looks like an S400 unit standing out in the open.  Pushkin happens to have some of the main naval training centers with foreign students enrolled (we see Guinee trainees in uniform when we shop in the supermarkets here), and there is a helicopter center and military air field close by.

How long can the Russians keep this up?  Forever would be my guess. Putin has said in the past 10 days that Russia will be lowering its military expenditures as percent of GDP in the coming two years to just 3.5%, which is wholly sustainable for the indefinite future.

Mutual respect is what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has demanded as a starting point for diplomatic negotiations with the Americans. Respect is not conferred on an interlocutor “from a position of strength,” the typical American approach to such talks.

The problem for Washington is that no one on Capitol Hill or in the foreign policy community wants to acknowledge the obvious facts about Russia today. Everyone is happy with the vision of a slovenly, chaotic Russia ruled by a merciless dictator, whose regime is fragile and just needs a little push, like Nicholas II’s autocracy, to tilt over and collapse. This is rubbish and if it remains the foundation of U.S. policy towards Russia under Biden then we can expect nothing much to happen to reduce the dangers of nuclear war or move towards calmer waters in international relations

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

In the past several days, ever since a firm date and location were announced for a summit between the US and Russian presidents, 16 June in Geneva, American political scientists and journalists have been working overtime to fill newspaper columns and broadcast time with speculation on what should, what could be the agenda for such a meeting. As we all know, meetings of heads of state must be programmed in detail in advance to succeed.

We have heard, read that possible agenda items will include global hot spots such as Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine as well as the management of the Covid pandemic and implementation of the Paris agreement on cutting greenhouse emissions, among others. 

Indeed, the foregoing discussion points are “highly likely” to receive attention of the principals and of the task forces in their suites. We may even see some agreements reached on common positions when the leaders present their conclusions at the press conference following their talks.  However, this type of discussion leapfrogs over the question which analysts should be asking first:  why exactly has the Biden administration moved so quickly to schedule a face to face meeting with Vladimir Putin, whom the American president, as a leader of the Democratic Party, had vilified for the whole of the Trump years in office. Biden was one of those who insisted that the Russians had intervened in the 2016 presidential elections to do dirt on Hilary Clinton and help elect Donald. He believed the Russians were guilty of the Novichok poisoning of the Skripals in English Salisbury in 2018. In his programmatic policy article published by Foreign Affairs magazine at the start of the presidential race early in 2020, he detailed how the Russians had pursued malign policies in Syria and elsewhere.

Most recently, Biden was in line with fellow Democrats in condemning the Russian imprisonment of opposition activist Alexei Navalny. In short, the Democrats, and Biden at their helm, had made Russia into the great villain behind most every development domestically or internationally harmful to American interests. The culmination was Biden’s confirmation a little more than a month ago to a television reporter that Putin “is a killer.”

So why is Joe Biden pressing ahead with a meeting so early in his tenure in office?  We are told that the objective is to achieve “greater stability” in bilateral relations.  But I have not heard from our commentators what stability is to be addressed.  In the brief essay which follows, I will attempt to fill that void. In doing so, I will ignore all the aforementioned agenda items, which I consider to be little more than a distraction to draw public attention away from the essence of the forthcoming meeting, from what is driving the American side since it is simply too embarrassing for hubristic American elites to swallow this truth.

In my reductionist approach,  the summit has one driver behind it, namely to put a cap on an arms race that the United States is losing, if it has not already irrevocably lost, and to prevent the adverse shift in the strategic balance against America from getting still worse. The side benefit would be to strike down planned military expenditures budgeted for well over a trillion dollars to modernize the nuclear triad alone. This would thereby free funds for the massive infrastructure investments that Biden is presently trying to push through Congress.

In saying this, I am not guessing or engaging in wishful thinking. I am basing myself on facts that go back to March 2018. These facts are not being marshalled today by my peers, firstly because foreign policy commentators in the public domain tend not to have memories that go back more than a month or two, and secondly because the facts themselves were officially suppressed at the time and never appeared in the mainstream media.  What publication there was occurred in the so-called alternative media, by the efforts of myself and a few other contrarians, as I will detail below.

The events I am alluding to relate to the dramatic disclosure of Russia’s latest cutting edge strategic weapons systems by Vladimir Putin in the last third of his lengthy address to Russia’s joint session of its bicameral legislature, what we commonly call his State of the Nation address. Putin described in detail the operational capabilities of new systems that were ready for release to the active military forces or were far advanced in the testing and production pipeline. These included hypersonic missiles flying at Mach 10 and more. He claimed that the new weapons systems marked the first time in history that Russia had moved ahead of the West in innovative, unparalleled performance of its arms, whereas in the Soviet past, from the end of the Second World War and advent of the nuclear age, they had always been playing catch-up. Moreover, he insisted that the new weapons systems signified the restoration of strategic parity with the United States.

Since the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM treaty in 2002 under George Bush, US policy had aimed at enabling a first strike knocking out Russian ICBMs and then rendering useless Russia’s residual nuclear forces which could be shot out of the air by U.S. anti-ballistic missile systems.  Russia’s new, maneuverable and ultra-high speed missiles could evade all known ABMs.  According to Putin’s text in March 2018, the new Russian strategic arms relegated the hundreds of billions that the Americans had invested in achieving superiority to the status of a modern day Maginot Line. Whatever Washington could throw at Russia, the residual Russian forces would penetrate American defenses and wreak havoc on the American homeland.

In the days following this “shock and awe” speech, the mainstream U.S. media reacted to Putin’s claims with incredulity. The notion that his relatively poor country could move ahead of the United States in strategic weapons, working from a budget 10 times less, seemed improbable to many. Moreover, skeptics pointed to the context of Putin’s speech, which was in effect his electoral platform for the presidential elections later in the same month. They argued that his grand show before parliament was for domestic consumption, to defend himself against Russia’s Liberals, who had made corruption and theft of state assets their battering ram and who argued, like Yabloko candidate Grigory Yavlinsky, that the country could never be a military match for the West given its low GDP and manufacturing industry.

However, in official Washington, and surely inside the Pentagon, there were those who did not let ubiquitous arrogance and supposed exceptionalism blind them to the facts Putin had produced. If his presentation were a bluff, it would put in jeopardy tens of millions of his compatriots and it was out of character for a leader who had always been restrained and consequential. Among those who were alarmed by Putin’s roll-out of the technical capabilities now possessed by the Russians were four U.S. Senators, three of them full-fledged Democrats and one Independent who otherwise ran as a Democrat when he sought the presidency. The two Senators I call particular attention to here were Dianne Feinstein of California and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the nominal Independent. 

I mention Sanders, because he was one of the more visible Putin-bashers among the Democratic Party leadership when he ran for the presidency in party primaries. Feinstein is notable because at the time she was one of the longest serving members of the Senate Intelligence Committee where, from 2009 to 2015, she was the chair. Therefore, we may well assume that what Putin revealed at the start of March 2018 had not figured in the assessments of Russian military might by the whole U.S. intelligence establishment. This was an enormous intelligence failure, but it was not unique as regards U.S. understanding of Russia in those years. Time after time, the Americans had found themselves clueless about Russian demarches, including, for example, the Kremlin’s military intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015, the establishment of its joint intelligence command with Baghdad, its receiving overflight rights of Iran and Iraq to carry on its mission in Syria. These “surprises” had come despite the presence of thousands of U.S. intelligence officers in Iraq.

In an open letter to then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson published on the Senate website of one of the four signatories, Senator Jeff Merkey (D- Oregon) these four Democratic Senators called upon him to immediately enter into arms control negotiations with the Russians, notwithstanding all of the differences with the Russians in so many other domains. 

I quote from the opening paragraphs:

“We write to urge the State Department to convene the next U.S.-Russia Strategic Dialogue as soon as possible.  A U.S.-Russia Strategic Dialogue is more urgent following President Putin’s public address on March 1^st when he referred to several new nuclear weapons Russia is reportedly developing including a cruise missile and a nuclear underwater drone, which are not currently limited by the New START treaty, and would be destabilizing if deployed.”

Specifically, they proposed that the new Russian weapons systems be brought into the SALT treaty, which they urged him to extend. This would ensure strategic stability.

I quote from their closing paragraph:

“There is no guarantee that we can make progress with Russia on these issues. However, even at the height of Cold War tensions, the United States and the Soviet Union were able to engage on matters of strategic stability. Leaders from both countries believed, as we should today, that the incredible destructive force of nuclear weapons is reason enough to make any and all efforts to lessen the chance that they can never be used again.”

This letter by four U.S. Senators published on the Senate website of one was picked up by the agency RIA Novosti, RBK and Tass within hours of initial posting, from where it went into mainstream Russian news. However, mainstream U.S. and other Western media did not give a single line of coverage to it and it disappeared in days as if down a black hole.

However, all traces of nervousness in official Washington did not end there. Later in the month, following the victory of Vladimir Putin in the elections which took place on the 18^th ,  The New York Times carried on page one a report of Donald Trump’s remarks about his phone call to congratulate his Russian counterpart:

“We had a very good call,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “We will probably be meeting in the not-to-distant future to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control.”

Yet, even the words of a president led to nothing, and the issue of Russia’s possibly having achieved strategic parity with the United States and reinstated Mutually Assured Destruction was left without public discussion in Washington. The President called for and Congress reacted positively to raising the defense budget and in particular to funding a massively expensive modernization of the country’s nuclear weapons potential.

A year later, in his February 2019 State of the Nation address Vladimir Putin returned to the question of Russia’s new strategic arms and what they meant for bilateral relations with the United States. As he said explicitly now, the country’s new hypersonic weapon systems would enable Russia to reach targeted American cities within the same 10-12 minutes that the Americans would enjoy by lobbing their slower missiles at Moscow from perches in Poland and Romania. Still the United States did not react. America was very busy with its domestic political wars.

In 2020, Russia, the United States and the world at large were wholly absorbed in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. However, in 2021 the Kremlin has repeatedly called attention to those of its most advanced weapons that are now integrated into its armed forces and are fully operational. As Vladimir Putin remarked in an address to one professional organization a week ago that was covered extensively on state television’s evening news, the firings of its newest missiles have been followed closely by American intelligence. With more than a dollop of contempt for American pigheaded self-indulgence and denial of reality, Putin said that the Russians stood ready to share their telemetric recordings with the United States so that they could see better what they were now up against.

The caustic disdain for Russia’s ill-wishers implicit in that statement is fully symptomatic of the latest hard line that we see in Russian foreign policy ever since Biden assumed the presidency. Putin is not coddling Joe the way he did Donald. The Kremlin has no illusions about the Cold War mentality of its American and of its European adversaries, and it is responding in kind. This pertains to diplomatic expulsions, to economic and personal sanctions, to whatever slings and arrows come its way.

In recent weeks, we have seen how every affront to Russian national pride and to international diplomatic norms has been met by a Russian response that went one step further against “unfriendly states,” of which the United States is now listed officially.

In this highly charged atmosphere, we may assume that sober reports on Russian military capabilities have been fed to the President by senior Pentagon officials. While politicians have engaged in their blather, for many weeks these military men in the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been engaging their counterpart in the Russian military establishment, General Gerasimov, to keep the peace, avoid misunderstandings where U.S. and Russian forces act in close proximity and to maintain “stability.”  It is a safe bet that their concerns are what is driving the agenda for the summit, and it is a safe bet that the Biden-Putin meeting will end in some agreement on procedures for negotiating a broader and deeper arms control treaty. Whatever else happens at the summit in Geneva will be cherries on the cake.

References:

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2018/03/02/missile-gate    –  lengthy analysis of the defense part of Vladimir Putin’s speech to the bicameral Russian legislature and of the reasons for the collapse of U.S. intelligence reporting on Russia over several decades

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2018/03/10/gang-of-four-senators-call-for-tillerson-to-enter-into-arms-control-talks-with-the-kremlin/

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2018/03/20/u-s-raises-the-white-flag/

https://gilbertdoctorow/2019/02/20/vladimir-putin-on-national-defense-in-his-annual-address-to-a-joint-session-of-the-russian-parliament-threats-or-a-bid-to-negotiate-on-arms-control/

In my observations yesterday on the Victory Day parade in Moscow I omitted mention of the speech President Putin delivered at the outset of the event. To be sure that speech was one other element of the day which broke with tradition, and so contradicted my overarching generalization of “déjà vu” to characterize the day. Now that one of Russia’s leading journalists and television personalities, Vladimir Solovyov has publicly called attention to what he called Putin’s “extremely tough” statements from the reviewing stand yesterday, I feel obliged to take a step back and add my comment.

Indeed, as Solovyov has remarked, Putin yesterday underlined the unique contribution of the Soviet peoples to the victory over fascist Germany, their massive sacrifices that spelled the turning points in the war. His hands were free to do this, given that this year there were no “Allies” or other state leaders with him on the tribune apart from Rakhmon from the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan. These remarks were clearly issued as an antidote not only to efforts in the West to airbrush from history the decisive role of the USSR in the Victory by equating Stalin with Hitler, and by praising the contribution of the Allies via Lend-Lease and via the second front  so as to diminish the role of Russia itself in the victory.  This antidote is all the more relevant given that the poison is spread in Russia itself by a pathetic minority of Russians who declare themselves to be sworn enemies of the “Putin regime” but are in reality enemies of their own compatriots, whom they despise.  We think in this connection of the friends of Ekho Moskvy, of Meduza and…of Alexei Navalny.

Another measure of the “toughness” in Putin’s speech per Solovyov was his taking on directly the issue of neo-Nazi ideology in European countries as represented by the naming of streets and monuments for known and exposed war criminals of WWII who, as Putin said, had the blood of hundreds of thousands of civilians on their hands.  This was a direct challenge by the Russian leader to the ruling ideology in Ukraine and to the unseemly revival of Nazi scum in their midst, celebrated for their supposed pro-Ukrainian, anti-Soviet views.  Putin’s direct mention of this issue was all the more telling given the silence on this subject from U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken during his visit to Kiev days earlier, a silence that was especially shocking given Blinken’s status as the step-son of one of the most widely known and celebrated internees of Nazi death camps, Simon Pisar.

Solovyov also calls out the lightly veiled condemnation of Western leaders in Putin’s address for their indifference to the rise of Hitler and gleeful anticipation of a war to the death between Fascism and Communism

In my capacity as an “independent” observer who is not constrained by raison d’état, I will go one step further than Vladimir Putin and his semi-official interpreter Solovyov. 

Readers of my Memoirs will be aware that I lived and worked in Germany for more than 4 years in the period 1988 – 1993. I mastered the language reasonably well, enjoyed life in the culturally appealing metropolises of Frankfurt and Cologne.  In the time since, I have on occasion tossed bouquets to present-day German elites for their purposeful remembrance of their parents and grandparents’ savage and deadly persecution of Jews and others in the 1930s and 1940s.  But in the context of Vladimir Putin’s address to his people yesterday at the start of the Military Parade celebrating the 76^th victory over fascist Germany, I want to deal directly with an issue that only comes out obliquely from Official Russia but bears directly on all of European – Russian relations today and going forward:  by the barbaric behavior not only of SS units but of the entire German armed forces on the Eastern Front, representing the German nation at large, Germany has forfeited for the 500 years to come any right to stand on a podium as Angela Merkel has done, as current German Foreign Minister Heiko Haas has done, and reproach Russia for violation of  “European values.”  Indeed, Russians today are not angels, but it is not for the devils to call them out. Let us all just proceed in establishing international relations on the neutral grounds of respectful acknowledgement of national interest and non-intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states.  In a word, the validity of Westphalian principles is timeless.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

                           

The title of this essay may be misleading as regards what took place and what did not take place this morning during Moscow’s celebration of the 76^th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day.

I will begin my account with those elements which broke with the traditions of the past, some large, some small. Then I will turn to the way today’s Victory Parade highlighted facts about today’s Russia which hark back many years if not centuries. Indeed that last point may have been crystal clear in the West to knowledgeable observers from European television programming, about which I will write in the concluding section of this essay.

To begin with, what was new?  First, I direct attention to who was the foreign guest of honor at the reviewing stand seated between President Putin and Defense Minister Shoigu:   President Rakhmon of the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan.

In the pre-pandemic past, many world leaders accepted Moscow’s invitation to attend the military parade. In 2020, the event was postponed by more than a month due to the pandemic and almost no one aside from the leaders of former Soviet Republics came to what was the very important 75^th anniversary.  This year, out of health considerations, the invitation list was cut back to one sole president. 

Why Tajikistan?  That was clear from the news coverage of Putin’s meeting with Rakhmon in the Kremlin the day before, on Saturday. Secondarily, they met to discuss migration and labor questions of mutual interest given that more than 250,000 Tajiks are working in the Russian Federation as Gastarbeiter. In what was surely a remark to preempt any criticism of this situation from Russian nationalists, Putin emphasized that these Tajiks were an important contribution to alleviate Russia’s labor shortage.  Primarily, however, Rakhmon was given special welcome status because of the geopolitical and military importance of his country as a bulwark against Islamic extremists from neighboring Afghanistan now that U.S. and NATO forces are leaving.

Another new element (second year) directly related to the ongoing pandemic was the elimination of the till recently very important public dimension of Victory Day celebrations, the March of the Immortal Regiment, in which Russian families have carried aloft placards with photos of their parents and grandparents who were participants in the WWII war effort either on the home front or on battlefields. These afternoon marches gathered a million or more participants in each of the two capitals and also large numbers in cities across the country.  This year the Immortal Regiment was made into a “virtual event,” meaning posting of those relatives’ photos online.  This was a very sad reminder of the extraordinary times Russia and the world are passing through. And so, the authorities were compelled to remove the “human” dimension that had become so important to everyday Russians as they mark the most important date in the civil calendar.

Otherwise, the military parade celebrating Victory went according to the traditional script, hence, as I say, déjà vu.  Some of the latest military hardware from among tanks, tactical and strategic rockets, as well as fighter jets and helicopters was shown with remarkable precision.  We were reminded most powerfully that notwithstanding all the shocks of the post-Soviet period to its economy and most importantly to its manufacturing industry, Russia today stands unique as developer and manufacturer of cutting edge military equipment on this Continent, enjoying a status that no, I repeat NO, European state can begin to rival.  Were it not for U.S. equipment sold to NATO members through application of overwhelming political pressure from Washington, the Continent would be no match for the Russian military industrial complex.

At the same time, as a pure layman I dare to share one observation regarding the ground vehicles put on display by the Russians. They are purely functional; they declare loudly their military as opposed to civilian allure: clunky in design terms and in many respects a throw-back to Soviet aesthetics.  Perhaps Washington pays too much attention to the Hummer look and overspends accordingly.  Meanwhile, the latest Russian tank, the Armata, breaks with this design tradition and looks sleek enough.  And the Russian aircraft in their fly-over at the conclusion of the parade, whether large or small, are outstanding exemplars of elegance in flight, none more so than the strategic bomber TU-160, nicknamed the ”White Swan.”

The May 9^th celebrations fall this year just one week after the celebration of Orthodox Easter in Russia, and for some reason the German-French classical music television channel Mezzo has used this week to broadcast Russian opera and ballet performances.  It all began on Sunday, 2^nd May with a traditional staging of Boris Godunov performed by the Bolshoi Theater which touched off the train of thought expressed in the title of this essay, namely déjà vu.

Two scenes from Boris bear on today’s international events and draw into high relief the continuity of national contradictions in Eastern Europe. Lest the reader think I am overdoing the argument of continuity, I refer to another set of circumstances in real life, not on the opera stage: Britain’s dispatch of naval vessels to the waters of the Channel Islands to protect these British possessions from French militants protesting fishing regulations they see as discriminatory. This naval stand-off reminds us of the near millennium of British-French military conflict.

The first of the  two scenes in Boris that I have in mind takes place in a tavern near the Russian-Lithuanian border, where the renegade monk Grigory Otrepiev, the “False Dimitry,” is on his way to recruit Polish-Lithuanian backers for his claims to the Russian throne as the surviving son of Ivan the Terrible. The following scene takes us across that border to the noble estate of Marina Mniszek, who agrees to be his bride and return with him to Moscow on the strength of Polish arms and in the company of a contingent of Polish Catholic clergy intent on converting the heathen (Orthodox) Russians.  One would have to be totally blind to miss the updating of these events today in the person of one Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who fulfills the tradition of Russian runaways seeking and finding support for their claims to the Russian (Belarussian) “throne.” One would have to be blind to miss the continuity in Polish aspirations to dominate the Central European space between Berlin and Moscow from North to South, “od morza do morza.”

And then there is a third scene in Boris which never fails to inspire me:  the monologue of the monk chronicler Pimen in his cell, speaking to himself and then to Grigory Otrepiev before the latter’s flight in pursuit of fame and riches. Pimen tells us that he records the terrible times that Russia is living through in the vague expectation that some day hundreds of years later his chronicles deemed to have been written by an “anonymous monk” will be read and will open the eyes of future generations to the catastrophes of Pimen’s times. It is in this spirit that I pursue my own scribblings in the fairly bleak present day.

 ©Gilbert Doctorow 2021

As we all have been taught, at its creation what is today called the European Union was conceived as a “peace project.”  True, its first iteration in a French-German understanding on managing trade in coal and iron was purely economic.  True, a later iteration was the European Economic Community or Common Market, all of which call attention to the economic dimension. However, the framers of these institutional arrangements were motivated by the need to put an end to Europe’s century long civil war, to the cleavage between the biggest economies of the Continent, France and Germany.

Regrettably, that past is now being buried day after day as the European Institutions, in particular the Commission and the Parliament, turn the 27 into NATO by another name, that is, into a war-fighting alliance directed against….Russia under the micromanagement of Washington.

Last week we learned that the Parliament passed a resolution empowering the expulsion of Russia from the SWIFT monetary transfer network and also called for an embargo on Russian gas.  It is hard to imagine any action that could do more damage to European economies by “cut off my nose to spite my face” thinking.

Removal of Russia from SWIFT would instantly end the means of paying Russia for its natural gas which covers 40% of Europe’s current imports.  And it would also end the means of paying Russia for the very large shipments of crude oil it now receives.  Incidentally, the same would impact the USA, for which Russia has become the single biggest source of imported oil, thanks to the “cut off my nose to spite my face” policy of Washington to utterly crush the petroleum industry of Venezuela, which was the traditional supplier to US refiners.  As wits in Moscow commented, expulsion from SWIFT would mean that Europeans and Americans would be ferrying suitcases stuffed with cash to Russia if they wanted to keep the lights on.

Meanwhile, the Commission is busy working at cutting all other normal ties with Russia.  And that is not merely by means of expulsion of Russian diplomats and closing of diplomatic facilities, which is proceeding at a quick pace on the basis of totally fabricated accusations against the Kremlin. The case in the Czech Republic is only the most glaring; it was accompanied by “solidarity” actions of the other usual Russia- baiters – Poland, the Baltic States, Bulgaria and Slovakia.

 A favored vector for poking the Russians in the eye is now the domain of “vaccine diplomacy.”  Today’s New York Times has a spectacularly tendentious feature article on how the Russians are supposedly using their vaccine to create havoc within the European Union, turning Member Country against Member Country over the acceptability of Sputnik V for use in Europe. Of course, that report is turning the facts on their head. It is Brussels that is playing politics with the vaccines to ensure that the Russians are frozen out of the Europe pharma market in this as in all other dimensions. All for the purpose of denigrating and isolating the neighbor to the East.

The latest development in the vaccine war being pursued by Europe against Russia was announced on Russian news yesterday but does not seem to have found space in Western mainstream, namely the cancellation of the planned UK tour of the Bolshoi Theater, cancelled at the last minute by the UK because it now says it will not admit onto its holy soil anyone not vaccinated with a vaccine approved in the UK.   Needless to say, these purists have not approved Sputnik V. The same anti-Russian policy is being implemented by the EU 27 Member States.  All of which is very curious insofar as some Member States, notably Hungary, have vaccinated a substantial part of their population with precisely Sputnik V within their successful program to achieve the highest rates of vaccinated adults in all of Europe.

I do not wish to paint a totally black picture of European media.  It was a very pleasant surprise to find in  the mainstream Libre Belgique newspaper on 27 April an interview with the Lebanese-origin political scientist Rudolph el Kareh entitled “Biden is building on what Trump made.” Without any commentary from the editorial board, this lengthy interview overturns absolutely everything one would otherwise read in the same newspaper and in other European media about American foreign policy and its anti-Russian direction. El Kareh states openly that the whole of U.S. policy continues to be containment of Russia and China for the sake of propping up the failing U.S. global hegemony. He states openly that the United States has no allies, only vassals and slaves, and that Europe falls in the former category.  To the editors, I take my hat off. But in my letter extending to them a bouquet for this interview, I ask why they otherwise print only the fake news they are handed by Washington and by lackeys that pass for governments on the Continent.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021