The video recording of yesterday’s presentation of “Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s” has now been released on http://www.youtube.com. I offer below the link to the video and the full text of the speech.

Speech:  Presentation of “Memoirs of a Russianist, volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s”

First, I wish to thank the Russian House, Brussels for kindly inviting me to present the book today and for organizing this Zoom show.

Though it would be wonderful to be able to appear in person in the Russian House auditorium as was the case before Covid, there is an undeniable advantage to the Zoom technology in that the audience today extends across several countries – Belgium, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, the United States.

Moreover, it is thanks to Covid that I have books to present today.  The self-isolation imposed on us by the pandemic led me to carry out a project that I had long postponed.  The project of writing and publishing my Memoirs goes back more than ten years. Indeed, as you can read on the back cover of Volume II, it was already in my thoughts in 1998 when I was writing the diaries that are the basis of the Memoirs. 

Five years ago I set out on the floor of my home office the 15 linear meters of files that went into Volume II, but they just sat there gathering dust. With no other distractions now and with the fear of imminent doom spurring me to act, over several months I spent my days transcribing the paper documents onto MS Word computer files. And from that I distilled the material now published in the books.

I speak of “books” because there are two – volume II which I will talk about today, covers the period when I worked as an expatriate manager in St Petersburg and Moscow, 1994 – 2002. Then there is volume I, which was also published in this past “year of the plague,” in November 2020 to be precise, and which covers the period from my childhood through my college years and work experience as consultant and as corporate manager looking after business in Russia and Eastern Europe from offices in Brussels, in London, in Frankfurt, all the way up to 1994.

I speak about Volume II today because it is the volume with greatest interest to the broad public. The 1990s were volatile, with dramatic changes in the economy, in domestic and foreign policy almost weekly. The times set the stage for the East-West confrontation of the 21st century and so have immediate relevance to today’s reader.   However, Volume I has its own merits to recommend it to your attention: it helps you to understand  where the author of Volume II came from, what intellectual baggage and life experience I brought with me to my assignments as expatriate manager in Russia in the 1990s. And within the narrative and diaries of Volume I there are chapters which the general reader can enjoy.

There are two high points of Volume I worth mentioning here. The first was the period when I headed my own consulting company and took the senior executives of a half dozen major U.S. corporations in the food processing and agricultural sectors to negotiations for major turnkey projects in the USSR. That is 1976-1980. The highest point within that period was my participation as a guest at the dinner in honor of Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin in December 1978. At that point, as a company president,  I was among America’s 150 captains of industry singing “Happy Birthday, Dear Leonid Ilyich” to the General Secretary of the Communist Party.  The second period of greatest interest in Volume I is the four years from 1989 to 1993 when I was employed by the logistics company United Parcel Service to create and then to operate a parcel delivery system in what had been the East Bloc, and within the USSR to create and co-manage a Joint Venture delivery company with Russia’s biggest ground transportation company, the trucking firm Sovtransavto. My adventures traveling across the Soviet Union as far as Vladivostok in the East, down to Central Asia where Uzbekistan became our main hub, and through the Baltic States and Ukraine are set down in diary entries which read like a time lapse recording of the final couple of years of the Soviet Union when it was in progressive dissolution and the local populations of the borderlands were trying to find new identities.

Volume II will soon be launched in a properly edited Russian translation by the St Petersburg publishing house Liki Rossii.  It will have a new name:  not “Memoirs” but “Diaries of a Russianist.”  That name change will better reflect the true nature of these volumes.

Many people publish memoirs, often written decades after the events described and based on sketchy recollections.  In my case, 75% of both volumes consist of diaries, a further 10% is news clippings and 15% is overarching narrative placed at the start of each book to orient the reader about the blocks of time that will follow.

 As a professionally trained historian, with a doctorate based on research in state archives the contents of which tend to be dry and impersonal, I knew the value of diaries very well from when I was lucky to find such documents in the collections of university libraries. That value goes well beyond the details that our memories tend to lose later. Rather, the greatest value is to convey the thinking of the author and of his/her interlocutors at the time of the events, without any changes that are always introduced in memoirs written much later as personalities evolve over time and as social values change.

In keeping with this approach and not to compromise the status of these volumes as “primary sources,” I have kept the lessons I draw from the diaries largely to myself. You will find very few generalizations in these volumes. It is largely up to you to extract what you wish from the diaries depending on your interests.

However, today I will violate that principle and share with you in this presentation some of my conclusions from the diaries. These are in several dimensions worthy of note: domestic politics in Russia at the time, the challenges of doing business in Russia back then, foreign relations and culture. 

Since the host of this book presentation is the Russian House was until recently known as the Science and  CULTURAL Centre, I think it is appropriate to begin with and to devote most of my remarks to what my book tells us about Russian cultural life in the 1990s. That is all the more justified when you browse the diaries themselves and find, as I did, that a great deal of my time and attention was spent on Russian culture.

I will go into that in a moment. But first the overriding conclusion that I draw from the diaries in this particular dimension:  that the performing arts in what we call High Culture were, are and likely will always be a defining characteristic of Russia and “Russianness.”  Even in the very difficult times of the 1990s when the Russian economy had shrunk by 50% (compare that to the US loss of 30% of GDP in The Great Depression) Russia had one of the world’s richest offerings of high culture that we foreign residents, often living without our families, had the time and interest to explore.

However, I was not just a consumer of Russian culture. My work and my interests gave me the opportunity to participate in the creation of cultural events.

 As the general manager in Russia of multinational corporations at a time when sales were in the hands of our local business partners, not run directly by our employees, and when most strategic direction was given by corporate headquarters in London or New York not by people in the field like myself, I had primary responsibility for public and government relations, for brand image, not for daily sales. This was all the more true during my two years 1998 to 2000 working for United Distillers/Diageo, the world’s largest liquor company then, and today, since the number one issue facing the company in Russia was the challenge to its ownership of the Smirnoff vodka brand by a local offshoot of the Smirnoff family, Boris, who had set up his own vodka brand and was capturing market share. His legal challenge was not only intended to drive our Smirnoff off the Russian market, which he successfully did, but also to collect billions of dollars in damages for the sale of Smirnoff around the world on the basis of wrongly claimed ownership. Since you have seen a lot of vodka brands on supermarket shelves, allow me to explain that in the period under review Smirnoff was the world’s best- selling vodka and the second best-selling hard liquor brand after Bacardi rum.

Besides the law courts, the defense of Smirnoff was carried out in the domain of public and government relations, which I answered for.  Sponsorship in the arts was and is an important tool of public relations in the luxury goods sector. I was given a relatively free hand in choosing where and on what to spend the funds entrusted to me for these purposes.

For those of you unfamiliar with the workings of international business and who may believe that sponsorship is a crassly commercial activity motivated directly by profit targets, let me inform you that the relationship between sponsor and beneficiary is much more subtle and mutually advantageous. I will explain in detail in a moment.

First, I want to stress that the sponsorship activities which I oversaw were generally on a limited budget. Not all of them to be sure. Indeed, when I was general manager for United Distillers/Diageo my single biggest project was not cheap. I headed the board of the Russian Booker Literary Prize, because my company paid the bills of the competition, which came to about $200,000 per year. Of this $15,000 went to the first laureate of the Prize. The rest went into supporting and building out the infrastructure of the competition: the Long List and Short List announcements at press conferences, which entailed generous hospitality for journalists, and the Awards Dinners which were organized on a lavish scale. We engaged the main ballroom of the Metropole Hotel in downtown Moscow, opposite the Bolshoi Theater; we entertained our guests with a chamber orchestra conducted by a deputy to Valery Gergiev and with appearances by known stars including at the time Bolshoi Theater tenor Nikolai Baskov, who is today a leading television personality in Russia and crooner at every televised New Years celebration.

Otherwise, however, I was able to achieve considerable impact with spending far less money. This was all the more possible in St Petersburg, where I chose to hold many of our sponsorship events, partly because many could be executed there at a cost 10 times less than in Moscow.   In 1996-97, on behalf of my employer Seagram & Sons, the Canadian liquor company, I arranged to sponsor four concerts of the St Petersburg Philharmonic Society to mark the 75 years of their founding.  These were events with high visibility in St Petersburg to which I was able to purchase tickets for our VIP guests, including government officials of importance to our business, such as the head of the city’s customs office, the directors of our main importers and distributors with their wives. At one concert the star performer was the singer Barbara Hendricks, then in great demand across the world. At another the conductor was Sir Georg Solti. Our contribution to each concert was just $2,000.   By an agreement with the managers of the magnificent Grand Hotel Europe across the street from the Philharmonic, we hosted post-concert receptions for the lead performers which were highly appreciated.  In this we were recreating the tradition of such receptions that was widely practiced before the Revolution.

Another key cultural event for which I arranged sponsorship was also done jointly with the management of the St Petersburg Philharmonic: this was the first ever Russian performance of Dimitri Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” (known only till then in its censored version “Ekaterina Izmailova”).  This was to celebrate the anniversary of Shostakovich’s birth. The performances, two in Moscow and two in St Petersburg, under the direction of Mstislav Rostropovich, had national importance.  That cost us a total of $20,000.   In Moscow the proceeds of ticket sales were contributed to the reconstruction of the Christ the Savior cathedral, a project that enjoyed the patronage of Mayor Luzhkov, so that the donation made business sense in terms of our visibility before the authorities.

I do not mean to suggest that all events sponsored by major international companies in St Petersburg were cheap.  On the same day as we had Sir Georg Solti at the Philharmonic, Mercedes Benz sponsored the performance in the Mariinsky Theater of the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Claudio Abbado.  That must have cost Mercedes several hundred thousand dollars – to bring the entire orchestra to St Petersburg, and to host their VIP guests in loges at $600 per loge. Add to that the cost of the direct broadcast of the concert to Germany by German television.

Nonetheless, my point is that brand building activities in public and government relations do not have to be very expensive in cash, though they are very demanding of management time. The best payback is what I heard from Yasha Gordin, the editor in chief of St Petersburg’s literary journal Zvezda, after one of our sponsored concerts: “I see that your company Seagrams not only comes here to take but also to give back to Russian society.” That is what every sponsor wants to hear.

It takes two to tango, and I wish to point out that especially in St Petersburg we had very good partners in the general director Anton Getman of the Philharmonic Society and in the Mariinsky Theater, where we established excellent relations with the Intendant, Schwarzkopf.

Over the course of the six years I was working in Moscow from major corporate offices, my cultural activities began primarily in music, then moved to literature and finally to drama theater.

Aside from financial affordability, a major reason for concentrating on music in St Petersburg rather than Moscow was that at this time the Mariinsky theater of opera and ballet under the musical directorship of Valery Gergiev was unquestionably the leading house of music in the whole country. After the forced departure of choreographer Grigorovich, the Bolshoy was in disarray, ruled by committee.

In the 1990s, the Mariinsky Theater was my second home.  Our closest friends in St Petersburg were the Kalagins. Sergei was one of a handful of conductors performing in the orchestra pit several times a week and also taking the orchestra on some foreign tours. For many of the performances which Gergiev himself conducted the preparatory work with the orchestra was carried out by Sergei or other assistants.

Thanks to Sergei, Larisa and I sat in the Director’s Loge several times a week. After a show we would leave with Sergei and often with his wife Irina and his daughter Nastya, then a student of the Conservatory and protégé of Larisa Gergieva in her group of young singers, to take champagne at the most prestigious meeting place in the city at that time, the Grand Hotel Europe.  Anastastya Kalagina is today a soloist – soprano – in the Mariinsky. We also were introduced to Kalagin’s circle of friends among the opera singers – I name here Victor Chernomortsev and Sergei Naida, who were known in Europe and in the Metropolitan Opera in New York. All of these get-togethers were recorded in my diary and are largely reproduced in this book.

The Mariinsky meant still more to us. For a couple of years we rented an apartment from the first and second viola players in the orchestra, the Safarovs, and they invited us to their dacha, which Seva built in an artistic community outside Petersburg. We went to the debut performance in the Conservatory of their violinist daughter, who today is second violin in the Mariinsky.

Now a word about my involvement with Russian literature in the 1990s, or to be more exact, during the years 1998 to 2002 when I was the chairman of what was then Russia’s most prestigious private literary award, the Russian Booker Prize.  For the first two years of my chairmanship, my position was directly attributable to my employment with the Prize’s general sponsor. However, after my departure from United Distillers/Diageo in 2000 I was kept on as chairman at the request of the U.K. Booker Prize in recognition of the substantial work I had been doing to expand the activities of the Prize in Russia and bring it into line with the formula for success that had made the UK Booker the world’s leading literary competition, attracting the attention of the British middle and upper classes, and yielding book sales of the laureates on the order of hundreds of thousands of copies.

When I came to the Booker, the Russian off-shoot needed excitement, to capture popular imagination. It also needed to do some work with the publishing industry and with booksellers to revive the supports to literature which had collapsed with the Russian economy from the late 1980s into the 1990s.  In this regard, with the assistance of the British Embassy we arranged events bringing together these critical contributors to literary production and consumption. The lady general manager of the St Petersburg Dom Knigi, Samokhalova, was a strong supporter of these initiatives.

When I joined the Russian Booker, not a single novel nominated for the Prize was actually published as a self-standing book: they all had been appeared only in literary journals. We paid for a retrospective publication of the past laureates as hardbound volumes.

Adding well known authors to the Advisory Committee that oversaw the awards process was one task to raise the visibility of the Prize. In this regard, I can name one outstanding writer who joined at our invitation – the satirist Vladimir Voinovich. Still more important was the addition of popular personalities from the arts to the jury. The fact that the Booker jury changes every year was a key part of their success formula – to ensure that the personal taste of a permanent jury is not the determinant of winners year after year. With changing juries recognition is given to the highest quality in various literary trends. Thus, together with the Advisory Committee I brought onto the jury, Dmitry Bertman, enfant terrible and director of the fashionable boutique opera house beloved by Moscow intelligentsia, the Helikon Opera. Also the film maker Valeri Todorovsky. And actor Sergei Yursky  ….

These appointments are all set out in the diaries.

Of course, everything comes to an end. When Diageo wound down its funding of the Booker in 2002 and a local sponsor stepped in, The Open Russia Foundation of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, it was time to turn over the chairmanship to a Russian and for me to move on. However, the moment of transition was by itself unexpectedly interesting and I recorded in my diary, published in Volume II, a verbatim account of my meeting with the new “owners” of the Russian Booker. That meeting sets out a clear rebuttal to anyone who says that Khodorkovsky stood for civil society in Russia. Quite the contrary, he and his foundation had no respect for our free jury and behaved like authoritarians.  Thus, in 2003 the winner of the Russian Booker Prize was dictated by none other than Mikhail Khodorkovsky himself, who overrode the jury and issued the winner’s name from the prison cell where he was then.

In Moscow, there was still another cultural establishment with whom I brought my employers into a sponsorship relationship. I have in mind Yuri Lyubimov and his Taganka Theater in the period 1998-2002. Our “sponsorship contribution” consisted of wine and hard alcohol for their frequent receptions in the theater. These allowed them to be generous hosts to visitors of great importance, for example, the lady President of Finland. Or when they hosted the 80^th birthday celebrations on stage for Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  I was there and took down my notes on these extraordinary days.

At such events it is expected that luxury beverages will be served with the buffet table food. However, under rules of the Russian state Treasury, institutions receiving government funding were not allowed to spend money on liquor. We helped them out of this embarrassment repeatedly and regularly.  In return, we were invited into the inner sanctums of the Taganka.

I think of the gatherings in Yuri’s offices where we could meet some very interesting personalities, as for example, our meeting with the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who was invited in to see Yuri since the latest show then in rehearsals was made possible by money from the award Triumph that Berezovsky sponsored. It was a revelation to see that Berezovsky, who was flattered by Katalin Lyubimova as “The Brain” in the room, could not remember her name when he was proposing a toast and addressed her as “Yuri’s companion for life.” These and similar notable events were captured in my diaries and are published in Volume II.

I mention here that Yuri Lyubimov first entered my consciousness in 1972 when my future bride Larisa Zalesova  talked our way into the sold out Taganka performance of “Hamlet” starring the already then famous bard Vladimir Vysotsky. We were given places on the stairs. Then I had first met Lyubimov in person at the end of the 1980s when he was living in exile, based in Jerusalem, traveling the world and largely employed by opera houses, including nearby Bonn.  He was here in Brussels for a couple of days staying with the dissident writer-publisher Maksimov, a friend and collaborator of Solzhenitsyn. Maksimov owned a house in the Brussels borough of Foret. I drove Lyubimov down to Namur for a day of mushroom hunting. These events are set out in Volume I of the Memoirs.

Doing business in Russia

When I arrived in Russia to live and work in 1994, there were at the time 50,000 expatriate managers and their families living there. Some in senior positions were my age. Many others were quite young, 15 or 20 years younger than me. Many of these comparative youngsters came to Russia to study the language and literature, saw the opportunities to get good jobs immediately and stayed to make their fortunes.  I write about this cohort in the chapter of Volume II entitled “Who were we, the expatriates?”

I point out here that while some of the young foreigners were unprincipled opportunists others were highly talented and trained professionals who were using the vacancies in their chosen field to get invaluable experience in a major emerging market. This concerns journalists in particular.  It is worth mentioning that the current Deputy Prime Minister of Canada Chrystia Freeland was in the late 1990s a reporter in Moscow for “The Financial Times.”  Her well composed articles on many different facets of life in Russia were published several times a week. There were also some very smart journalists in what I would call the “underground” English language press in Moscow working for “The Exile” and other publications that exposed the hypocrisy of both expat and official Russian communities.

As regards doing business, the generalization I offer today is that it was very difficult, almost impossible to do business legally in Russia in the mid-1990s. The picture of Russia as a normal country governed by law that the Big Accounting firms were presenting to the headquarters of multinational corporations was nothing more than a Potemkin- village that contradicted the chaotic reality.

The problem was not an absence of law, although to be sure there were entire domains with respect to share trading, truth in advertising and so forth where the law did not yet reach.  The bigger problem was the body of law that was inherited from the Communist past that was in flagrant contradiction with the market economy being introduced. This was the legacy of 70 years of Communism and was based on the assumption that all private business was run by criminals. Hence, there were restrictions on all business transactions. The Central Bank forced the commercial banks to act as policemen. Both income and expenses of more than a few dollars had to be justified to the bank managers. The situation was impossible.

Privatization was uppermost in the minds of Russian “reformers” and their Western backers but it did not address this critical dimension of the market economy in formation. Western mainstream media and Western politicians spoke of Russia’s problems as being the mafia, corruption.  These were lesser evils. Meanwhile many Western consultants arriving on assignments for US Government and European Community agencies were abusing their fiduciary responsibilities when serving as advisers to the Russian reforms and engaging in their own corruption. I discuss this in the diary notes, backed up by news clippings.

The further problem facing business, both foreign and local business, was the never ending flow of new decrees and regulations supposedly to implement laws but in fact taking the place of laws. The many years’ war between President and Duma during the Yeltsin period meant there was no proper legislation during the whole time. The decrees were often contradictory and confusing as power shifted to and from among Yeltsin’s entourage between reformers and conservatives.

The alcoholic beverages industry in which I worked for most of the period 1994 to 2000 was one of the most criminalized in all of the Russian economy. It was also highly politicized.  Taxes on liquor had accounted for about 30% of the Russian state budget in the days of the Soviet Union.  They were still 23% when the Soviet Union collapsed.  That is to say, liquor was as important to the Russian state then as gas and oil are today.  For that reason, the taxes and regulations governing the alcohol industry were a point of contention among the politicians at the top.  I was following closely the political fortunes of Anatoly Chubais back then because his policies on the alcohol industry were of decisive importance to our daily work. Hence the extensive diary notes on who was who in the Presidential Administration.  These may not be of interest to every reader, but they will have importance for historians of the period.

Russian Domestic Politics

As I leafed through my diary notes, I found many entries reporting on speeches behind closed doors delivered by leading Russian politicians of the day, for example the governor of Novgorod oblast, Mikhail Prusak, or the deputy minister of Finance or the head of the Tax Administration.. But the speakers were not only members of the government, federal and provincial. They also included important people from the State Duma, such as the chairman of the Committee on Taxation.  These gatherings were often organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Moscow, which despite its name, was the largest business club of all international companies operating in Russia.

 Then there were also industry association gatherings that I attended such as those organized by the alcohol producers and bottlers Rosalko. They were busy preparing to lobby the government to save the industry which in 1996 was operating at only 10% of capacity for a number of reasons that the government could remedy if it took an interest. At these meetings the leading figures in the Government responsible for excise taxes and other issues of vital importance to the industry spoke.   What emerges from my diary entries is in direct contradiction with what we are accustomed to think about the domestic political situation in Russia during the Yeltsin years, namely that a Reformist minded Executive was in never ending conflict with a Communist dominated legislature, compelling the use of presidential decrees to get things done.

What I saw before me was very often incompetent or wholly impractical people from the Ministries and presidential administration and very competent and patriotic legislators from the Duma who knew their economics very well. And while we in the West celebrated the Liberal Reformer Boris Nemtsov for the supposed economic miracle in his Nizhny Novgorod oblast, which never happened in fact,  the quietly efficient and business friendly governor of Novgorod oblast situated between St Petersburg and Moscow,  had captured several of the country’s biggest manufacturing investments, including the 200 million dollar Cadbury chocolate factory and the Stimorol chewing gum factory thanks to focused assistance to overcome bureaucratic obstacles in such matters as fire inspection and housing for workers. Prusak did not offer tax breaks and that did not harm to his attractiveness to foreign investors.

Then there is the issue of good and evil in the Russian political world, a never ending refrain in Western commentary on Russia up to the present.  Those Russian politicians who provided favors to Western business were by definition Reformers and their opponents were by definition retrogrades, Neanderthals.

However, as one sharp tongued political analyst writing in the “underground” English language press in Moscow observed in his commentary on Boris Nemtsov as a phony Liberal and de facto defender of the status quo:  we Westerners always painted Russian political fights as between good and evil when most often they were, like political contests everywhere, a fight over power and the perquisites of holding office and not much more. We very easily forget that in the 1990s nearly all of those occupying office within the government or elected to office by popular vote were former Communists with the same education and life experience.  Liberals took to authoritarian behavior and to corruption once in power like ducks to water.  The reality was that Russia was ruled by presidential decree and by implementing regulations issued for all new and old laws which had the power of laws themselves.  There was a constant flow of regulations from the top down. The political direction of these edicts and regulations changed at any moment depending on the shifting balance of power in the Executive, with Liberals like Chubais in favor one day and out of favor the next.

International Relations

Of course my diary and the news clippings record the developing international relations and the growing alienation of Russia from the US led International Community. Russia’s liberation from Western tutelage was signaled by the retirement of “Mr. Yes,” Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev and his replacement by Evgeni Primakov, a strong defender of national interests and “realism” in foreign policy.  What is less noted in Western accounts of the period but what impressed me was how the Duma elections of 1995 and emergence of strong nationalist and pro- Communist voters fed the argument in the West that Russia might turn from the liberal democratic path, and so NATO enlargement would protect against any resurgent Russia.  

I also direct your attention to my description of one of the turning points in Russian –Western relations, the murder of American investor Paul Tatum in November 1996. His gangland style execution just outside the hotel-business center of which he was co-owner together with Mayor Luzhkov’s Property Office, showed that Western businessmen were as likely to see any disputes with Russian partners settled in gun battles as were purely Russian bankers and businessmen. That was a shock to the entire Western business community.

Closing Remarks

These are some of the highlights of Volume II in my reading.  The book is vast, nearly 800 pages.  No doubt every reader will find what interests him or her most and will skip material that is outside that focus of interest.   I do not expect the average reader to go through this book word for word, page for page. But I do believe there is enough variety to satisfy both specialists who will use this book in university courses as a primary source and general readers who want to learn about those fateful years in Russia from a very personal perspective of someone whose feet were on the ground and had the advantage of being an outsider recording the views of the expatriate community as well as of Russians in all levels of society.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

I stopped watching Russia’s premier political talk show “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov” about two years ago, because it had gone completely stale with the same guys and gals chewing the cud show after show about Ukraine’s imminent collapse.     However, I tuned in last night and was surprised to hear some rather good commentary on Putin’s Address to the Nation. 

As one analyst remarked, the foreign affairs section was notable as much for what Putin did not say as for what he did. No country was named. It was all rather abstract except for the specifics of the Belarus assassination plot.  The idea was to leave the US and the Collective West guessing about Russia’s next moves.  Not a word about Biden and the proposed summit. Not a word about the intended use of the troops massed at the Ukrainian border. Not tipping his hand in any way.   At the same time, the intent of the segment on foreign affairs, just as in the all of the speech devoted to domestic issues, was to calm the Russian public, to say in effect, don’t worry, don’t be alarmed by the news, everything is well under control. We are ready for anything sent our way!

Incidentally, in the morning yesterday, hours before Putin went on air, the Russian news wires carried a quote from Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov that the Federation Council (upper house of Parliament) is expecting a message from Putin directing them to vote without delay on any legislative resolution authorizing the President to send the armed forces into action outside the borders of the Russian Federation. Zyuganov said he would vote for such a resolution.   That shoe did not drop during the Address to the Nation.  But when/if it comes the Russians will be doing exactly what US law requires in the States – receiving from Parliament authorization for what is, in effect, a declaration of war.  Given that such formal declarations have for decades been dispensed with in America while the White House pursues war by stealth in various hot spots across the globe, should Putin put military action in Ukraine to a vote, he will show which country in fact is a Rechtsstaat, or nation under law, and which is, as the title of one of books by Robert Kagan, Neocon theorist and husband to incoming Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, says outrageously, the Dangerous Nation.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

President Putin’s annual address to a joint session of the bicameral legislature which was held today in Moscow with a considerable presence of invited representatives of civil society generally followed the tradition of the past two years in terms of allocation of time to domestic and foreign policy. Now as then the lion’s share of his talk was devoted to what he called the “everyday issues” (бытовые вопросы) that are of greatest interest to the average television viewer across the country:  financial assistance to families with children, improving medical services, investments in high-speed auto routes passing through St Petersburg and Moscow to Kazan and Yekaterinburg, keeping food prices under control under conditions of pandemic caused inflation, vaccinating the whole country.

Foreign policy and the deployment of the latest strategic weapons systems took up just 10 minutes at the end of his speech of nearly one and a half hours. But for the “Kremlinologists” among us, those last minutes were golden, meaning they contained substantive material for discussion, bearing in mind that for speeches such as this every word has been weighed in advance and nothing is spontaneous or superfluous.

It was remarkable that Vladimir Vladimirovich began his survey of international issues with mention of the attempted assassination of Belarus President Lukashenko, which he described as entailing more than the liquidation of one man. According to Putin, the coup d’etat would have been accompanied by a massive cyber-attack provoking the shutdown of electricity and all infrastructure. All of this, he was beyond the pale. And yet, he further added, it received no condemnation from the Collective West. Finally, Putin likened the foiled plot to what happened in Kiev in February 2014 when Ukrainian President Yanukovich was forced from power by a coup and attempts were made to murder him as he fled the capital and made his way to the Russian frontier to find refuge.

In fact, these likenesses follow ironclad logic of responsibility which goes back to the United States.  So far from Belarus itself we have heard that the plotters were funded by United States intelligence operatives. Surely that was also true in 2014.  But behind them stood diplomats, in particular a certain Victoria Nuland who ran the show apparently without oversight by her nominal bosses in the State Department or in the White House of Barack Obama.

In fact, the Collective West has not merely failed to condemn the Belarus operation, it has not acknowledged in any way the Belarus-Russian claims of a foiled plot, though all the elements of their activities on the project at a downtown Moscow restaurant were shown on Russian television prior to their arrest and transfer to Minsk for interrogation. And there has been a total blackout of news coverage in US major media, a near total blackout in European media.

One may speculate variously on the reasons for this blackout.  A couple of days ago I wrote that the revelations of the foiled plot made by Russia’s premier weekly news program on Sunday caught Washington by surprise, and since they had no way of knowing how much the captured plotters would reveal about Washington’s implication in it all, they ordered everyone to just shut up.   Today, I see an additional and more persuasive factor to explain Operation Silence:  these days that very same Victoria Nuland has been passing through the vetting in the Senate of her appointment as Under Secretary of State for Policy. Her approval seemed to be in the bag.  It would have been most inconvenient for the February 2014 events, for Victoria’s famous “Fuck the EU” remarks on an intercepted telephone conversation with the US ambassador to Ukraine to be brought up in connection with the very similar operation now in Belarus.

By placing the Belarus assassination plot in his Address to the Federal Assembly, Putin has made it very difficult for the Western press to continue to ignore the issue.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

In his last book “War with Russia?” my friend and colleague Steve Cohen wrote about the flagrant censorship of news being carried on by The New York Times in support of its Russia-bashing editorial policies. Said Cohen, the newspaper’s century old slogan of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” has been turned into “All the News that Fits” when it comes to coverage of Russia.

But the problem goes far deeper than the professional malpractice of one leading newspaper in America. The censorship of news carried by mainstream media by U.S. authorities covers not only the domestic press but also the mainstream of Allied countries.  News blackouts are imposed when something ugly arises implicating the United States in violation of international norms of state behavior for which the State Department has no ready explanation or white wash.

This very situation seems to have arisen over the weekend, when news broke in Moscow over the arrest of two conspirators plotting a coup d’état in Minsk, to be carried out by the Belarus armed forces tentatively during the 9 May parade celebrating victory over fascist Germany in the Second World War.

Other leading English-speaking papers such as The Guardian and The Financial Times have front page reports on Alexei Navalny’s near death condition in a prison camp but not a word about Belarus. Ditto the Frankfurter Allgemeine and Le Figaro.  Curious, n’est-ce pas? Warum?  Let’s look into the story in its full dimension.

Last night’s News of the Week program hosted by Dimitry Kiselyov, Russia’s top manager of state news programming,  began with a 20 minute report on the extraordinary arrest of two conspirators plotting armed rebellion entailing the murder of Lukashenko and his family, abolition of the post of President, installation of a Committee of Concord such as previously had been headed by the opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

But these were not empty allegations. The arrests followed on a meeting by the two conspirators with Belarus military officers held in a downtown Moscow restaurant which was filmed from start to finish by the Russian state security agency, the FSB.  Lengthy segments of recordings from their meeting and discussion of their treasonous plans were aired on the Kiselyov program. Moreover, the accused are not some unknown pawns such as the British presented to the world press when they released their accusations against Russia over the Skripal poisoning.  No, one of the two arrested was the former press secretary of Lukashenko, a person who would have had all the contacts necessary to organize such a rebellion. The other plotter has dual US-Belarus citizenship and was well known as a fighter against Lukashenko’s rule.

The two were turned over to the Belarus KGB for interrogation in Minsk.  Surely further information about the links of the plotters to Ukraine, to Poland and to the United States will come out in the next few days.

What we have here is “very likely” (to use current Anglo-American political jargon) involvement of the United States in yet another regime change operation.  The revolution from below in Belarus led by Tikhanovskaya with support from Poland and Lithuania failed. The anti-Lukashenko street demonstrations led to nothing. And now Plan B, a putsch from above, was being organized to achieve the objective of removing Lukashenko both politically and physically. We have not seen such openly murderous plans with “likely” U.S. backing since John Kennedy’s days when the assassination of Fidel Castro was the hot game in D.C.

On the same “very likely” logic, I permit myself to take this all back to the door of the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Policy designate Victoria Nuland.  The links to Warsaw and Kiev that appear present are all in line with what she was doing to precipitate the Maidan in 2013 and violent overthrow of the sitting President in Kiev amidst attempts to murder him as he made his escape to Russian territory in February 2014.

From all of the foregoing, it looks as though U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s pledge several weeks ago that the US would no longer pursue “orange revolutions” was either an out and out lie or made without his knowing that control of foreign policy no longer is in his hands, but is being carried out by his nominal subordinate, Mme Nuland.  No wonder that the U.S. has ordered “stop the presses” on this story until it can put together some plausible response.

In the meantime, the same news program delivered the Kremlin’s response to the Czech action over the weekend to expel 18 diplomats from the Russian embassy in Prague over allegations that Russia was involved in blowing up an arms depot near the capital back in 2014, an event which previously the Czech authorities had blamed on the owners-managers of the depot.  Per the Kremlin, these new and absurd Czech charges of Russia’s nefarious activities were agreed with Washington to direct attention away from the pending story about U.S. involvement in plans to murder the Belarus head of state.

Are we headed to World War III?  If the war machinery today were like what existed in August 1914, the answer would be unquestionably yes.  It is our good fortune that until someone on either side of the East-West divide pushes the Red Button, there are ways back from the abyss. However, we are still heading in the wrong direction, towards the abyss, and the United States is the prime mover.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021 

Yesterday, shortly after the White House issued its four-page Fact Sheet on the sanctions about to be imposed on Russia (“Imposing Costs for Harmful Foreign Activities by the Russian Government”), I was invited by RT International in Moscow to be a “first responder” and provide an analytical comment at the top of their 16.00 news hour program.

I did this with considerable pleasure since before we went on air I was tossed an opening question that played into my game perfectly:

“The new sanctions come despite Washington saying it wants a ‘stable relationship’ with Russia…Are sanctions really a good tool to reach such a goal?”

As I pointed out, the question assumes that ‘stable relationship’ means a ‘good’ relationship and that is a fallacy. The American notion of a ‘stable relationship’ is one that they control unilaterally.

Question two was another soft ball pitch:

“Just days ago Joe Biden called Russian president Vladimir Putin – offering him a personal meeting. Why are we seeing such a swing in sentiment now?

Here I must admit that my first thoughts which I delivered on air were wrong. I saw the imposition of sanctions now as indicative of warfare within the Biden Administration between doves and hawks.  No, the situation is more complicated as I will try to explain here..

Yes, one might conclude there is chaos in Washington decision making, with the advocates of caution in dealing with Russia, who no doubt urged upon the American President an outreach to Russia and a summit being undercut by the authors of the sanctions –the  enemies of Russia camp in the State Department, where Victoria Nuland, once again calls the shots as Under Secretary for Policy, and the Treasury working group on Russia sanctions which have stayed in place since before the Trump administration was an active contributor of content.

Were the sanctions intended to sabotage the call for a summit meeting? As a practical matter the sanctions will at a minimum postpone the setting of any date for a summit, and quite possibly end in the cancellation of any meeting.  But I doubt this was the intent of the sanctions’ sponsors or of Biden himself. Rather it is a demonstration of the utterly ignorant and self-focused way that U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle propose to deal with the world.

U.S. policy is based on scenarios written by political scientists with the intellectual capacity and life experience of college sophomores. Victoria Nuland, is an outstanding case. In a recently issued article deconstructing the writings of Nuland and her Neocon ideologist husband Robert Kagan, my Canadian colleague Patrick Armstrong rightly compared these highly dangerous fools in high places with the idiot savants described by Jonathan Swift in the chapter on Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels.

The introduction of new and seemingly tough sanctions just after President Putin was invited to a summit meeting was surely intended to serve a specific US domestic purpose, namely to show that, unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden would meet with Vladimir Putin “from a position of strength,” the only negotiating stance that America’s anti-Russian political class accepts as legitimate.

Let us define this “position of strength” notion in very contemporary and instantly understandable words: it means the U.S. knee on the neck of a supine Russia. “I can’t breathe” is the only response that these militants want to hear from the Russians before they sit down and talk about the way forward in mutual relations.

This is precisely what Russia under Vladimir Putin resists tooth and nail, saying that Russia will negotiate only under conditions of mutual respect and equal treatment of national interests.

Close inspection of the sanctions reveals that there is nothing in them to elicit an “I can’t breathe” response. An article on the front page of today’s Financial Times tells us all we need to know about the practical effect of the single most impressive punishment to be applied to Russia, the prohibition on U.S. financial institutions participating in primary auctions of Russian state ruble denominated bonds: “Western investors brush off US bond sanctions on Russia.”  Indeed, the bonds will now be sold to Russian state banks like VTB who will then resell them to the very same Western banks on the secondary market, which is not sanctioned and which investors do not expect to be sanctioned in future now that the Biden bag of tricks has been emptied and all the listed malicious doings of Russia have been punished. Other notable sanctions such as the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats will surely be followed by the expulsion of 10 or more American diplomats by the Russians. End of story.

All of the other verbiage in the Presidential “Fact Sheet” and in particular the litany of accusations of wrongdoing in many different areas can only serve to vilify Russia and spoil the atmosphere.

The sanctions were bombast, which Google Search defines as “high-sounding language with little meaning, used to impress people.”  The ‘free world’ and ‘democratic values’ defenders who pack the Biden administration are big talkers and cowardly actors.

The Russians understand that very well, even if it eludes nearly all American commentators.  The Russians point to the decision taken by the U.S. on Tuesday NOT to send its two warships into the Black Sea, as had been previously announced.  Instead the vessels turned back before entering the Dardanelles and were sent to Cyprus to do some unspecified repair work.

The decision on the warships, whose mission in the Black Sea could only be described as highly provocative, came at the same time that Biden issued his outreach to Putin for a summit. There can be little doubt that both measures were taken under advice of the Pentagon who have the clearest and least ideologically compromised understanding of Russian power and intentions among anyone in the U.S. capital.  They knew that with 80,000 troops on the ground at the Ukrainian border versus the 40,000 troops that the US is mobilizing along the Western frontiers of Russia to conduct its pending military exercises, the outcome of any military confrontation with Mr. Putin in coming days would be devastating for the U.S. military.  They knew that the Russians could and would, if necessary, neutralize the two US Navy vessels in a matter of minutes by electronic warfare weaponry.

What are the lessons to be learned from this week’s otherwise confusing developments in U.S.-Russian relations?

First, that the political, meaning diplomatic, channels between the countries are virtually useless at present. On the U.S. side they are manned by determined fools, among whom I include our brilliantly dressed and superficially eloquent Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. In response to those who claim, rightly, that Blinken is highly intelligent, I say “stupid is as stupid does” and in his exercise of office, particularly in his recent conduct with a top-level Chinese delegation, Blinken showed himself to be dumb as they come. His subordinates are no better.

If Russia were to follow its interests to the logical conclusion, they would now recall the rest of their staff at their Washington Embassy and order the U.S. embassy in Moscow to shut down.  Daily communications between Russian General Gerasimov and his counterparts in the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington are the best way to keep the peace.  These chaps alone can both walk and chew gum. These chaps alone understand who is who and what is what in projection of military force.

Second, there is absolutely no sense to convene a U.S.-Russia summit at present or in the foreseeable future. It will resolve nothing.

Third, the question of Ukraine has willy-nilly become the single biggest issue in U.S.-Russian relations. It may well be that it can be solved only by force of arms, given the obtuseness of both American political elites and of Ukrainian President Zelenski’s entourage. They still push for recapture of the Crimea. They still push for Ukraine’s accession to NATO. Both ambitions are inimical to Russian national security and are sufficient reason for Russia to go to war.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

Post Script –

The Russian counter measures have now been announced and they appear to be even more severe than what Biden imposed on them. While they have not ordered the US Embassy to close, they have done far more than expel a matching number of American diplomats. They have revoked a 1992 agreement with the United States on free movement of their diplomats around the Russian Federation; they will now be limited to 25 miles, as in the days of the Soviet Union. They are now prohibiting the U.S. diplomatic missions to hire Russians or third country nationals to work for them; this will immediately hobble the activities of the diplomatic missions in every dimension.

At the same time, the Russians are ordering the closing of US Government sponsored NGOs and foundations, which they say are conducting subversive activities on Russian soil, read “meddling.” And they have issued a list of former and present U.S. government officials who will be barred entry to the RF. These include the U.S. Attorney General, the heads of U.S. intelligence agencies and notorious Russia-bashers Susan Rice and John Bolton. Moreover, they have publicly recommended that the U.S. ambassador to Russia go home for extended consultations, effectively decapitating the embassy and winding down its work.

The very severity of the Russian response suggests to me that they have cleared the decks for a possible summit on equal footing. Furthermore,to avoid any confusion in Washington about negotiations proceeding from a “position of strength” the Russian Ministry of Defense has announced today the transfer of Army units from the Northern Caucasus to Crimea for very extensive military training exercises, further expanding the Russian military pressure on Ukraine and its backers in Washington.

In recent months it has not been just Covid that raised the temperature in Europe’s hotheads: Cold War fever has set in among the Brussels leadership, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel rallying the troops against public enemy number one, the Russian Federation.

In the United States, ignorance about and disinterest in the world at large influences the judgment of the Opposition just as it shapes the policies of those in power. The prevailing assumption among the tiny minority of public critics of US foreign policy is that the United States calls all the shots, that the positions on any given international issue taken by our European allies, for example, are dictated from Washington or, if developed on their own, serve the single purpose of gaining favor with Washington and bolstering the “special relationship” held by London or Paris or Berlin.

If only things were that simple.  In this essay I argue why they are not. Nor have they been that simple for many years now. As I look over my writings going back a decade that I published in a succession of “non-conformist” books, I was calling out the home grown nature of Neoconservatism in Europe which arose in parallel with but independent from the movement in States that gave us the horrors of the Iraqi invasion and the viciously anti-Russian policies culminating in the Maidan in Ukraine, with the change of geopolitical course in Kiev as wished by the US, namely inimical to Russia.

 Intellectual leaders like Sweden’s Carl Bildt and Belgium’s Guy Verhofstadt were the equals of their buddy Robert Kagan in Washington as creators of Neocon ideology and they were its implementers from positions of power within Europe.

Today I see a similar parallelism in the roll-out of Cold War policies in the USA under Biden and in Europe under von der Leyen.

Why is this relevant to day-to-day developments?  Because the latest appeals by my fellow thinkers in the USA addressed to Joe Biden and urging him to step back and reflect on the possible consequences of aiding and abetting a military strike by Kiev against the Donbass at present will not achieve much if Brussels continues on its merry way as arsonist.  You may have no doubts that today Brussels is lighting delusional fires of revenge in Zelensky and his entourage, encouraging what would be a suicidal strike against Russia’s vital national interests in the belief that NATO will come to his rescue. It won’t.

Now why would von der Leyen espouse Cold War ideology and present Russia as Europe’s enemy number one?

Let us just consider for a moment whence she came: von der Leyen had been serving in German Chancellor Merkel’s cabinet as Minister of Defense. She was deeply involved in NATO affairs, and within NATO the “Russians did it!” mantra has been cynically exploited by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to rally members to his side even when Donald Trump’s verbal blows put the alliance in jeopardy.

For von der Leyen, the same rallying Russia-bashing talk helps her to address specific challenges to the Union at this moment:  the problem of relations with Britain post-Brexit and the problem of taming Poland and preventing the formation of a socially conservative, pro-national sovereignty and anti-Brussels bloc between Poland, Hungary and Italy.

When it was within the EU, Britain was the loudest voice denouncing Russia at every turn except for the New Member States from the former Soviet bloc. Now that the EU’s relations with Britain are strained since the finalization of Brexit, a call to arms against Russia can bring Britain back into the European fold.  Meanwhile, the formation of a socially conservative bloc of Hungary and Poland, joined by Salvini’s forces in Italy hinges on one contentious issue among them: how to deal with Russia. The Hungarians and Italians want to step back from sanctions and restore normal relations with the Kremlin, while Poland is the leading New Member State, alongside the Baltics, in denouncing Putin and raising Cold War ideology.  Clearly von der Leyen sees political advantage by appealing to the foreign policy side of Polish politics to prevent any anti-Brussels coalition from forming over domestic policy issues like abortion, the LGBTQ movement and similar.

In my essays of the past month dealing with Covid, I pointed to the EU’s going slow in approving the Russian Sputnik V vaccine for use in Europe. I said there was “no way in hell” that von der Leyen would allow its approval.  The justice of my analysis was supported this past week by the announcement of a new dimension to the approvals process of Sputnik V: one that violates directly the maxim of our day to “follow the science” and shifts the approval process to a purely political plane.  I refer to an article in The Financial Times of 7 April entitled “EU regulator to probe ethical standards of Sputnik vaccine trials.”

The European Medicines Agency will now examine whether Sputnik V trials met ‘good clinical practice’ – not in its technical dimension but in its ‘ethical’ dimension. In particular, the EMA is questioning whether military servicemen and state employees who took part in trials did so under pressure from their superiors. It is crystal clear that the intention of EU regulators is to disqualify Sputnik V on the basis of spurious denunciations that have been solicited for this purpose.

All of these machinations come at a particularly interesting moment when Europe, already far short of vaccines to raise the general level of vaccinated population to herd immunity by autumn, has just suffered another blow to its ambitions by the revelations of rare and deadly blood clots associated with administration of the Astra Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, compelling authorities to limit their use to specific age bands.

“Sticks and stones…”

There are many loyal supporters of Putin in Russia who wonder, or who are dismayed, by the Kremlin’s very restrained response the slings and arrows being hurled at Russia from Washington every week or two. The Kremlin speaks of its response being “asymmetrical” but that gives little satisfaction to many Russians who fret that their national pride is being insulted by Washington without a price being exacted.

In the most recent case of this kind, Vladimir Putin made light of Joe Biden’s televised characterization of him as “a killer.” With Putin’s certain approval, Russian state television decided that portraying Uncle Joe as “senile” was the best way of defusing the issue. Russians may have had a laugh, but Americans were not aware that their verbal aggression had been pushed back.

I see this as the Russian application of our old folk expression about “names will never harm me” and so can be excused, whereas “sticks and stones” do elicit a determined and unmistakably militant response from the Kremlin.

In this regard, I insist that what is saving us all from a hot war today is not the efforts of our minuscule peace movements or of the few reasonable politicians on Capitol Hill or in the European Quarter of Brussels. It is the almost daily telephone exchanges between the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon and their counterpart, General Gerasimov in Moscow.

Most recently Dmitry Kozak top security advisor to President Putin on Ukraine matters, has said publicly that an all-out attack on the Donbass by Kiev in an effort to restore direct rule through military force would result in the end of Ukrainian statehood.  In this case, deeds have moved ahead of words, following the overall principles of Putin in power:  Russian military exercises and build-up of forces directly adjacent to its borders with Ukraine leave no doubt about its ability and will to crush Kiev if and when Zelensky decides to tempt fate and attack.  It would be nice if von der Leyen and Michel also paid attention.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

The Russian Cultural Centre – Brussels has just put up online the registration page for my book presentation on the 22nd April, 7pm Brussels time

Memoirs of a Russianist, volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s

The book presentation is open to the public subject to advance registration.

The Cultural Centre website operates in 3 languages – English, French and Russian. For the link below, I have selected the English page, which is what will appear on your screen after you click on it.

I will be delivering my talk in English and there will be simultaneous translation into French and Russian from which viewers may choose.  The whole event will take one hour, split evently between my talk and the Q&A.

see you then

https://www.rushouse.be/post/%D0%B3%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B1%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%82-%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2?locale=en_gb

Going back to the appointment of Ursula von der Leyen a couple of years ago, it was hard to understand the enthusiastic support from French President Emmanuel Macron that spelled her successful candidacy.  What, we wondered, could he see in her to justify such backing other than the odd fact that she had grown up in Brussels and was a fluent French speaker. Now we know better from her and his words and deeds: they are both unscrupulous political chameleons at the tactical level while pursuing purely ideological objectives at the strategic level, divorced from national interests, divorced from common sense, divorced from the people they purport to serve.

The ideology in common that they pursue is federalism and ever greater union as the guiding principles for the EU. Fanning the fire of Cold War enmity towards the big neighbor to the East is one way of holding power and bringing all EU elites into line with Diktats from Brussels.

 It was in the same time frame as von der Leyen’s election that Macron pooled his Republique en marche party’s Members of the European Parliament with the liberal democrat – pro federalist bloc ALDE that was long headed by Guy Verhofstandt.  That also seemed a bit peculiar when the successor bloc in the European Parliament named Renew Europe was formed. Verhofstadt’s MEPs had been among the loudest and most obnoxious Russia-bashers in the Parliament, sponsors of a “European Magnitsky Act”, buddies of Bill Browder, who was a leading force behind adoption of the original Magnitsky Act by the US Congress, buddies of Boris Nemtsov and any/all opponents to Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, Macron was talking outreach to Putin and accommodation with Russia in the common “European House” and spouting détente clichés going back to the DeGaulle period.

However, more recently, Macron has sidestepped his positions on Russia dating from 2019 as if they never existed and has become a full-blown Cold Warrior.  In the past week, he spoke out publicly against the “new warfare” supposedly being waged against the West by Russia and China in the form of their “vaccine diplomacy”, meaning the promotion of their respective Covid-19 vaccines to both developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and even to Member States of the European Union.

Macron’s ideological positions as Cold Warrior now match up perfectly with those of former German Defense Minister, today’s President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. Among the many tell-tale signs of who she is and what she is about, I point to her re-programming the EU’s senior diplomat Josep Borrel after his missteps in the Kremlin in early February when he spoke flatteringly of the Sputnik V vaccine, as something that would soon be welcomed in the EU.

Though her public utterances are vague, von der Leyen’s feet are pointed unmistakably:  no way in hell will she see the Russian vaccine approved. Every trick in the book is being deployed to delay, read stymie it.

In this context, and keeping in mind the pending gross violation of the overarching rule of all EU etiquette “Go along and get along” we must give our full attention to what the The Financial Times reported an hour ago about Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. He is said to be in negotiation with Russia to buy 1 million doses of the Sputnik-V vaccine following a direct telephone discussion with…Vladimir Putin.

This is, says the FT, in line with Kurz’s fierce criticism of the way the European Commission has mismanaged the entire procurement and distribution of Covid vaccines from the get-go. And this mismanagement goes back to the desk of one person:  Ursula von der Leyen.  Such a reading of the situation is, by the way, widely shared in neighboring Bavaria and more generally throughout Germany. 

If anything brings down the CDU-dominated coalition government in Germany in their September elections it will be the way Chancellor Merkel agreed to von der Leyen’s scheme for Brussels to take charge of the Covid vaccine program.  Now Kurz, by his latest actions, will be actively feeding that German discontent.

Returning to my opening remarks about the Cold War ideology being spouted by Macron and implemented by von der Leyen, it is well worth listening to Sebastian Kurz’s thoughts as quoted in the Financial Times online edition a few minutes ago:

“When it comes to the vaccine, there must be no geopolitical blinkers. The only thing that should count is whether the vaccine is effective and safe, not where it comes from.

“If Austria gets 1 m additional doses of vaccine, an earlier return to normality would be possible and we can save many lives as well as jobs.”

Somehow these concerns are not shared by Macron, not shared by von der Leyen.  There is a good chance that Macron will lose his re-election bid next year for a host of reasons, including his government’s disastrous handling of the Covid crisis at home.  Von der Leyen was never popularly elected, but she can and should be recalled by the MEPs, the sooner, the better. 

©Gilbert Doctorow

     The latest spat with China which the EU initiated just days ago by imposing sanctions on a handful of Chinese officials and institutions over the alleged violation of human rights in the PRC’s treatment of its Uighur minority is yet another demonstration of how and why the Old Continent is doomed, above and beyond its flagrant failures in managing the Covid pandemic.

     There can be no doubt that the decision to publicly denounce and shame China has been closely coordinated with the United States so as to align behind the Biden Administration and their ‘get tough’ posture vis-à-vis the Chinese.

     An American delegation headed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with their counterparts from the PRC in Anchorage, Alaska last week at a summit that the Secretary opened with the recitation of a litany of Chinese wrong-doing. In his words, the Chinese are not only violating principles of universal human rights by their treatment of their Uighur minority but putting in jeopardy the ‘rules based international order’ decreed and operated by the USA and its allies.

     The Europeans seem not to have taken notice of how that remarkable summit played out.  In fact, during the more than half hour televised exchange of opening remarks, the Chinese flung back in his face all of his accusations, remarking that the days were long past when imperial powers can dictate to the People’s Republic.  In what was otherwise Cold War vintage soap box oratory from the Americans, the Chinese responded in the other fixed part of such scenarios, namely with “what about-ism,” telling the Americans to go fix their own egregious human rights abuses in treatment of Blacks before they dare to preach to others.

     One might say that for decades we have not heard such boldness and repudiation of American tutelage from the Chinese side.  Had they perked up their ears and paid better attention, the European Institutions might have taken more time to consider their options in dealing with the PRC – options which are, in fact, very, very few. Given the strength of the Chinese economy today and the likelihood it will bypass the GDP of the United States within the coming decade, the EU can ill afford to alienate the Chinese, still less to lose their respect.

     However, the EU’s decision to inflict a verbal lashing on the Chinese over their alleged abuses and to couple that with sanctions that are absolutely insignificant translates into what the Chinese have for decades going back to Mao described as ‘paper tiger’ status.

     Let us remember that major media in Europe routinely give the microphone to loudmouth spokesmen of NGOs who speak of the Chinese “re-education” program for Uighurs in Xinjiang province as “genocide.”  Very emotive language, to be sure.  If those charges have any substance, then the sanctions just imposed by the EU as punishment are ludicrous.  And if it is the substance of the charges that is overblown, then the public denunciations should be quashed at the source.

    In short, the EU has opted for the worst of all possible ways of dealing with both China and with the United States. Biden and Blinken are practitioners of a shop-worn, utterly ineffectual Cold War vintage foreign policy.

     The only net effect of the latest demarche by the EU has been to put in jeopardy the ratification of the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment that was seven years in negotiation, was signed off at the end of last year, ahead of the installation of the Biden presidency, and is said to provide substantial benefits to the EU in its trade relations with the PRC.

Meanwhile, the American verbal assault on the PRC led immediately to further close embrace between Moscow and Beijing. Two days ago Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in the Chinese capital for consultations over mutual self-protection against the Collective West. One of the key topics on their agenda was to further develop their mechanism for global bank transfers outside of the US-dominated SWIFT – this to preclude possible expulsion from SWIFT as the ultimate Western sanction on them both.

     Let us be very clear. The United States has its own specific reasons to be tough on China, namely to enforce a policy of containment aimed at preventing the country from overtaking it economically and militarily in the foreseeable future.  The United States has its own military hegemony in Southeast Asia to defend against China’s rise and pursuit of regional hegemony.  Europe has nothing of the kind to justify making the PRC its adversary. 

     Henry Kissinger said decades ago that the only thing more dangerous than being an enemy of the United States is being its friend.  The EU is unfortunately proving the wisdom of that judgment by its present, American-dictated policy on China.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

              

A few days ago, I mentioned that the same-day response on Russian airwaves to President Biden’s calling Vladimir Putin a “killer” was to consider the mental health of the American president, then to conclude that he was not suffering from dementia. This rough and ready appraisal of Joe Biden was based on his not showing disorientation and his apparently still good memory.

However, on reflection, it is clear that the Russian elites have concluded that the best way to deal with Biden’s verbal aggression is precisely to cast him as senile. That resonates with middle aged Russians who remember very well their own succession of Communist Party bosses who had one foot in the grave at the same time they had one finger hovering over the Red Button of their nuclear controls.

In his last years, Brezhnev may have been only in his low 70s, but he was suffering from debilities that could not be concealed from the public: wearing a bulky and visible hearing aid, speaking with a slur that was due either to a stroke or some serious dental problem, appearing puffy and walking with difficulty, Brezhnev was carried along by his aides more for their benefit than for his. His immediate successor, KGB boss Yuri Andropov, was seriously ill at the time of his appointment as General Secretary and held office for fourteen months before he was carried out feet first. Then came another member of the Old Guard, Konstantin Chernenko, who was suffering from emphysema and could barely breathe when he was elevated to the top post. He stopped breathing altogether nine months later

This past Soviet experience with overaged and underperforming leaders came to an end with the installation of the vigorous and youthful Gorbachev in the mid-1980s.  It was more than compensated for by the elevation of the still younger and more vigorous Vladimir Putin at the turn of the new millennium.

This recent history was recited last night on the country’s leading weekly news program Vesti Nedeli by presenter Dmitry Kiselyov, who happens also to be the general manager of all Russian state news programming. This, to help the Russian audience understand what is now transpiring at the apex of American political life, where Joe Biden is just an old, debilitated and psychologically abnormal commander in chief.

The preceding days provided Kiselyov with a fine harvest of video images to support this case, most notably of Biden stumbling badly when ascending the stairs to board Air Force One at the start of his trip down to Atlanta for consultations over the murder of eight Asian American women in massage parlors. Then there was the video clip of Biden presenting his Secretary of Defense but failing to remember his name and coming up only with “General”…. And there was Biden calling Kamala Harris the “President,” as if he forgot or was no longer aware of who is who.

All in all, Kiselyov took about 30 minutes on air to reduce Biden to a sniveling and senile “old fart,” as the Russians like to say about such cases.

This, combined with extensive reportage on Americans who have written to the Russian embassy in Washington to apologize for the gross violation of normal interstate civility by their president, with coverage of Turkish President and other world leaders condemning Biden for his grossness, made for an entertaining evening that, exceptionally in this spring of Third Waves, was not sunk by horror stories about the Covid pandemic.

The logic of this treatment of the Biden affair is clear. By responding to an ad hominem attack on their leader with an ad hominem attack on Biden, the initiator of this exchange, presenting him as an old fool, they have taken the sting out of the U.S. president’s remarks. At the same time the anti-Americanism implicit in the report is veiled by saying, in effect to America: “we know what you have in the Oval Office since we have gone through that same patch ourselves.”

And so, Russian elites had a good laugh at America’s expense and are well prepared for a sharp cutback in diplomatic exchange with the USA.

What, we may ask, has the U.S. gotten from Biden’s verbal indiscretions?

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021