The annual Valdai Discussion Club gathering in Sochi took place over the course of four days during the week of October 17th and garnered a considerable amount of media attention following the delivery by President Vladimir Putin of the keynote address to its plenary session on October 21st. The Kremlin itself characterized the speech as Putin’s most important since his address to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007.

That was the verdict of television anchorman and head of Russian state news broadcasting Dmitry Kiselyov on his widely viewed Sunday show.  As we know, the Munich speech went down in history as a turning point in Russia’s relations with the West. In it Putin set out Russia’s rejection of US global hegemony in a monopolar world order, listed his country’s grievances with the U.S. and its allies’ infringement of its national interests and shabby treatment since the mid-1990s. What followed was ever greater confrontation between East and West.

Whereas the 2007 speech set out the military and geopolitical dimension of Russia’s alienation from the U.S. led world order, this latest speech to the Valdai Club addressed the growing intellectual chasm between the adversarial parties. Putin placed Liberal Democracy, globalism, newly formed “progressive” values on issues of feminism and transgender, as well as compensatory “reverse discrimination” in racial relations on the Western side and set against them what he calls “healthy conservatism” and repudiation of extreme or revolutionary changes in values on the Russian side. 

In effect, Vladimir Putin was detailing the Russian position in the emerging ideological dimension to the East-West test of strength. A simple military stand-off does not make a Cold War. But when an overlay of ideology is added, you do indeed have a full-blown Cold War II.

Cold War I was Communism versus Free World market economies and democracy. Cold War II, in the eyes of the USA and its allies is all about democratic countries standing up to authoritarian regimes, meaning Russia and China.

 To be sure, there was a bit of hyperbole in the Kremlin’s calling out this latest speech as marking a new turning point.  It was in fact one further step in the development of ideas first given public airing in Putin’s 27 June 2019 interview with the Financial Times on the eve of the Osaka gathering of the G20.  In that interview, Putin said that ‘the Liberal idea has become obsolete.” Those words touched off a firestorm of controversy and sharply raised the ideological dimension to the East West differences.

My peers in the global community of international affairs analysts are straining their minds to parse Putin’s speech, especially his notion of the conservatism that has been embedded in Russians’ DNA by the horrors of the 1917 Revolution and Civil War, followed by the decades of social engineering under Soviet Communism.  Some will be busy interpreting for their readers Putin’s references to Nikolai Berdyaev, an early 20^th century Russian philosopher who has guided his thinking on political values and on Russia’s place in the world.

What I will say is that the speech was brilliantly constructed. Putin touched on all the divisive social issues that form the template of domestic politics in the United States and Western Europe. His own views and the views he attributes to “an absolute majority” of Russians on these matters will be familiar to anyone who has read the American conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan. They come down to common sense or ‘homespun’ logic.

Whether one liked what he said or not, Putin came across as eminently reasonable. He said to the Progressive West: do as you like, we have been where you are now and it does not end well; just don’t try to impose your values on us, for we won’t accept them. This deliberate put-down of the arrogance and narrow-mindedness of the Collective West will certainly give great encouragement to political and cultural leaders of the Rest of the World who are trying to justify their own traditional values.

Of course, presidents have speech writers and however well Putin read from his text to the Valdai Club  it tells you little about the man. That is something we see only when we put the speech in its full context, beginning with the fact that the speech itself was 38 minutes long, but in this plenary session the President was on stage for another 172 minutes in a free Q&A with the moderator, political scientist Fyodor Lukyanov, and with the audience, including several from abroad who participated via video link.

In the Q&A, Putin, without notes, without hesitating for a moment, responded to a great number of questions dealing with all manner of issues both domestic and international. He did so in a substantial manner, summoning up figures to support his arguments, recalling the names of obscure terrorist organizations in places like Syria or Afghanistan and otherwise demonstrating fulsomely his absolute command of the facts which cross his desk daily. He did so without strain and smiling throughout. It is impossible to think of any other world leader who might equal such a stellar performance before cameras.

In saying that he projected reasonableness and a facts-based approach to political issues, I do not mean to suggest that he displayed no temperament. On two occasions in the Q&A he took sly pleasure in sarcasm. The first was in answer to a question from Dmitry Muratov, chief editor of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta and this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace. Muratov was hammering away at the alleged wrongs of Russia’s law on registration of news agencies as ‘foreign agents.’  Before explaining why Muratov was wrong, Putin congratulated him on the Prize, which, he said, put him in very good company with Barack Obama and Mikhail Gorbachev. In Russia, this was an unmistakable ‘left-handed compliment.’ 

The second moment when he allowed his personal as opposed to ‘official’ thoughts to show through was in his answer to a question about the need to reform the United Nations Organization and, in particular, the Security Council to better represent the current distribution of political, economic and military power in the world. Putin said that reform is due but that nothing can be done absent a full consensus of members. And if, for example, the decision should be taken to abolish the veto rights of permanent members of the Security Council, as many are now calling for, then the UN would on the next day cease to have any value and would become just a Valdai Club II.  This was a revealing slip showing his estimation of the Valdai Club I he was addressing and contradicted the spirit set by his repeated use of the terms ‘friends’ and ‘dear colleagues’ when speaking to the audience.

Apart from the live transmission from the hall on Russian state television, there were that evening and throughout the weekend airing of choice moments from Putin’s exchanges with the audience. This, I insist, is what the Valdai forum is all about: its plenary session amounts to the very best political talk show in a country that adores the genre. The scripting of the event, the ‘casting’ of participants fit a time proven formula of giving the microphone not only to friends of Russia and its ‘regime’ but also to Russians and foreigners who oppose Putin and his policies with greater or lesser aggressiveness. The defenders of the ‘regime,’ in this instance Putin himself, then demolish the arguments of the critics, proving to the Russian audience watching at home who is best.

Americans like Angela Stent of Georgetown University or Robert Legvold of Columbia University, identified by the moderator as ‘veterans of Valdai’ because of their participation year after year surely explain to themselves and their peers that they are unaffected by the blandishments of invitation to the Valdai Club gatherings and retain their distance from Russia’s President. After all, in their books and articles they publicly criticize the ‘authoritarian’ Putin regime, in line with America’s anti-Russian consensus in the political establishment.  However, their status as respected experts makes them perfect foils to Putin’s superior intelligence in the Valdai talk show.

The invited foreign guests generally remain respectful of the host when they are handed the microphone during live broadcasts of the Valdai club proceedings. There are exceptions, of course. I think in particular of one former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union who violated this protocol during an exchange with Putin. He had challenged the Russian President’s characterization of the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century, then went on to say that when he first heard that the USSR was no more he had opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate.  Needless to say, the gentlemen never again received an all-expenses-paid invitation to Sochi!

 In closing, I wish to share some background information on the setting for Putin’s annual talk show, the Valdai Discussion Club.

This was the eighteenth iteration of the Valdai Club annual gathering. At the very beginning, the event was held in the Valdai resort complex that borders an extensive national park of the same name situated midway between Moscow and St Petersburg. The luxury dachas within this complex on the shore of a lake were once summer residences for Stalin’s elite. These few accommodations are now available for rental by the day or week for the general public. However, most visitors to Valdai are put up in what might be categorized as a three to four star hotel. They get full board, meaning modest Russian institutional food. The complex supports a healthy life style, meaning no alcohol in the dining room, no smoking on the premises and participation sports. In winter there are excellent cross-country ski trails and in summer there is boating on the lake and hikes. The complex comes under the Presidential Administration and most visitors are employees who receive subsidized vacation packages, though a third or more of the guests are from the general public or foreigners, like myself, who reserve their rooms on booking.com and pay commercial rates.

Back in 2002-2003 when the idea for such a ‘discussion club’ with the President was first implemented, the Valdai resort complex was built out to include a conference hall accommodating several hundred. The facility is now used for showings of classic Russian and Western films every evening.  Despite these upgrades, it was understood very quickly that the resort was too small and too modest in comforts to serve the grand promotional purposes that the Presidential Administration was planning. Accordingly, the annual gatherings were moved to the far more fashionable Black Sea city of Sochi, which enjoys a warm and inviting climate in the late autumn when the forum takes place. Hence, the slightly confusing nomenclature of Valdai meetings in Sochi.

Who is invited?  Overall, Russians predominate with foreigners of all stripes amounting to a minority of 20 per cent or less. The core invitees are political scientists holding professorships in major universities or leading positions in think tanks, people with a following who are recognized experts in their field. There are also journalists, historians, a smattering of statesmen and politicians.  Among the faces picked up by the television camera crews that I recognized this time were the Ukrainian political scientist Mikhail Pogrebinsky, who for a long time was a regular participant in Russian television talk shows, and the University of Kent historian- political scientist Richard Sakwa. Then there was another ‘veteran’ of Russian televised events, the German political scientist, historian, and former adviser to the German government on Russian affairs, Alexander Rahr. None put Vladimir Vladimirovich under much pressure.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

In the question and answer session that followed President Putin’s speech to the annual Valdai Discussion Club meeting in Sochi last week, Vladimir Vladimirovich said he was thankful to the European Union for imposing sanctions on Russia in 2014, because Russia’s counter-sanctions, banning food imports from the EU, resulted in an enormous boost to its agricultural industry. Russian farming coped magnificently with the challenge. Putin mentioned the $25 billion in agricultural exports that Russia booked in the last year and he went on to thank Russia’s workers in the sector who made this possible.

These remarks would suggest to both laymen and experts in the West the emergence of Russia as the world’s number one exporter of wheat and its leading position as global exporter of other grains. As we know, investments in industrialized farming by Russia’s oligarchs and agricultural industry giants have paid off in higher crop yields and insured their production volumes against weather imposed damage through farming in multiple regions. Moving beyond the traditional production centers in the ‘black soil’ belt of the south, Russian grain farmers have made excellent use of previously under or ill-used acreage in Western Siberia and elsewhere. Thus, when Canada or the United States have stumbled in wheat production from one season to another, Russia has carried on to new heights. Investments in grain storage and port facilities have made it possible to use the new surpluses to best advantage on world markets.

However, what Western readers know little or nothing about is how Russia’s agricultural sector has expanded into all food niches of the home consumer market during these years, so that supermarket shelves are now filled with a great variety of domestically grown fresh foodstuffs that rival the best and most sophisticated products Western Europe has to offer . This is something you will not find detailed in official statistics, and it is certainly not carried by mainstream Western media, whose only interest is denigration of Russia, serving propagandistic and not informational purposes. Nor is it covered by the Western ‘alternative media,’ who do not send journalists to visit Russia and least of all to report on what they see in the food stores.

 I will discuss the changes in food supply below based on my latest, ongoing visit to St Petersburg. However, my eye has been focused on the subject now from the very start of the Western sanctions and Russian counter-measures in 2014. I was surely the first Western observer to write about what the Russian farmers’ markets and supermarkets had on offer then and I have refreshed my information during periodic visits to Russia ever since.

The collapse of international travel since the onset of the Covid pandemic has meant that the numbers of foreign visitors who can do what I have been doing have been cut to nearly nil.  Even at present tourist visas are not being issued and apart from family members of Russian citizens, the visa category I enjoy, only a relatively small number of businessmen and other professionals arrive on narrowly defined missions.

* * * *

In keeping with the title above, let us begin with ‘greens,’ by which I mean salads and vegetables more broadly.

In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, this category of produce was almost non-existent.  Traditional Russian cuisine featured ‘salads’ among the first course appetizers. But what was meant was potato salad of one variety or another, including the highly esteemed ‘salad Olivier’ named after a French chef in Moscow at the turn of the last century; this has chicken or meat chunks added to diced cooked potato and mayonnaise.  Lettuce and other greens simply had no place in the Russian diet. This is not to say that there were no officials-dieticians preparing to change that reality. In 1979, at the invitation of the Ministry of Agriculture of the USSR, I accompanied executives from Castle & Cooke, the Hawaii based company that was then the world’s largest grower of iceburg lettuce, on a mission to set up such production in Russia’s south. That mission failed in the faltering days of détente.

Iceburg lettuce as well as other greens appeared on sale in Russia only in the mid-1990s when millions of citizens of the now free Russian Federation traveled the world and picked up new dietary habits including a high appreciation of green salads. At the time, all of these new delicacies for the arbiters of taste in the country and those with deep pockets were imported from Western Europe and sold at European prices.

Over time, early in the new millennium, the assortment of vegetables and fruits imported into Russia expanded quickly, in keeping with rising living standards and differentiated tastes of various demographic groups.  After the ban on European imports was imposed, a geometric progression in the variety and quality of Russian grown greens set in. Now when you visit even ‘economy category’ supermarket chains in the cities or in their branches in the countryside, you find on offer leaf lettuce in transparent wrap sitting atop the little plastic pots in which they were raised in greenhouses; or cut lettuce packed in plastic bags and given long shelf life by their protective atmosphere.  In higher category supermarkets for the middle and upper classes, there are mixed young shoots of beets and other highly fashionable salad components in protective atmosphere; or stalk green celery, a product until recently imported from Israel. Then there are extraordinary quality small cucumbers and tomatoes from various seed varieties produced in greenhouses year round.

The traditional Russian accompaniments to soups and main courses such as dill and green scallions are also now farmed locally year round and portion-packed in plastic.

By its nature, much of the new perishable produce is grown in greenhouse complexes on the outskirts of urban areas.  Other items, like the aforementioned celery, are grown in one location, Kursk in the given example, to provide for the entire nationwide market.

All of the above assumes enormous investments in greenhouse capacity these past few years, as well as the import of seeds and know-how. Presumably, The Netherlands, which is Europe’s leader in many categories of greenhouse produce, has been Russia’s partner in these developments. Russia’s own inputs are essential to the economic success of the new produce: it has very cheap natural gas to heat the greenhouses and cheap electricity for lighting.  It is no wonder then that the supermarket price for the produce I have described is several times below what you see in Western Europe.

Of course, not everything on the green grocer’s shelves is presently grown in Russia and there are imports to fill out the assortment: items like avocados and kiwis.  However, considering Russia’s vast territory that cuts across several climatic belts, one may expect over time to see many such items also filled by local producers.

Beef and Pork

In the ‘bad old days’ of the USSR, there were chronic meat shortages due to a variety of failures in the food chain, including disastrous grain harvests.  I knew the situation and its causes from the inside having in the late 1970s assisted a couple of U.S soy producers promote their meat extenders to the Meat and Dairy Industry. Lest anyone raise a critical objection about soy, I note that soy isolates or concentrates would have been far preferable to the potato or pea starch and similar that was then going into Russian sausages. As for fresh beef, it was not highly appreciated by consumers and for good reason. When available, it was tough and sinewy. Moreover, the butchers did not do their work with much professionalism, and what you got over the counter for the single official price per kilogram could just as easily be the worst cuts as it could be choice cuts.  Pork was by nature more edible, commanded greater consumer demand and was more expensive than beef, an unnatural inversion of pricing.

In the 1990s Russian meat production collapsed, and what meat there was imported. This even extended to the least demanding meat sector in terms of return on capital, poultry.

Domestic beef and pork returned to life early in the new millennium though quality was generally poor and visits to the butchers’ stalls in farmer’s markets could turn anyone into a vegetarian, conditions were so medieval.  However, in the last several years the situation has changed beyond recognition. First, at about 2018 premium restaurants began offering on their menus “marbleized” beef from grain fed cattle coming from the center of the country, in Kaluga and a few other production sites. Prize bulls were brought in from Japan and other countries to create admirable herds of beef cattle.

The beef industry moved on from its modest debut in luxury restaurants to enjoy in the past couple of  years a major presence on supermarket shelves.  Big corporations took the lead. One, in particular, Miratorg, achieved full vertical integration, from production of cattle feed through raising beef herds to slaughter, packaging and distribution.  Its high quality ‘pepper steaks,’ ‘minute steaks’ and premium cuts, as well as ground meat and other meat culinary products sealed in special atmosphere plastic packaging have long shelf life and an appealing appearance. Consumer demand is generated by active television advertising.

A similar development has taken place in pork, where there are numerous competing producers. Their packs of pork chops and other cuts clearly state energy value, fat and protein content.  This transparency is surely attributable to the producers’ confidence in their quality and pricing.  By contrast, the vast array of sausage products on the Russian market have made it very difficult to read nutritional values which, if not disguised, would put the consumer off, given the 30 or 40% fat content of so many.

Whereas in Belgium and elsewhere in W. Europe the accent is on grass fed beef, which summons up images of calm meadows but yields rather tough meat on the plate, the Russians have chosen the American way:  grain fed beef (250 days) and pork, placing a premium on tenderness.

Poultry

Chickens were no friends of Soviet agriculture.  They had a hard life and were not treated well after their demise, so that the black and blue marks on their carcasses in shops did not raise optimistic expectations about the cooked product.  In the years immediately after the crash of the Soviet Union, local production ended and what poultry you found in shops was nearly entirely imported from America, the popularly dubbed “Bush legs,” named for the American president under whom the imports began.

Domestically raised chickens returned to Russian stores in the new millennium, but the poultry industry only became wholly modern in the last few years. Now you find exactly the same product assortments as in Western Europe: eviscerated, whole chilled chickens or, chicken parts, meaning breast meat, legs, quarters weight portioned in plastic packaging.

Ducks, quails and similar are to be found in farmers’ market and in specialty premium level food stores. Some items are strictly seasonal, like turkey.

What is missing, strangely, from the offering is game. Here alone one can speak of a step in reverse from what prevailed in Soviet days. In the 1970’s even common food stores offered frozen partridges (feathers and all) coming from Siberia.  Today there is nothing of the sort in the retail trade, although premium restaurants in major cities may have wild fowl and ‘exotic’ native game like bear or venison on their menus.

Fish

Going back to 2014, I commented on the fast growing trade in fresh fish that was reaching out from the capitals to the Russian countryside. I mentioned the new aquaculture industry in Karelia, producing wonderful salmon trout and fish farms in the Lower Volga producing starlet sturgeon that was being sold across the country. Then there were the choice flounder being shipped fresh to European Russia from the Murmansk region in the Far North.  Now, very recently I note the expanding variety of luxury frutti di mare coming from Vladivostok and Sakhalin. My neighborhood Perekryostok supermarket is selling small whole calamari from the Russian Far East.  More exclusive supermarkets offer mussels from the Far East and oysters grown in the Crimea. All of these delicacies are priced two to three times lower than in Western Europe.

Interestingly a similar price differential applies to several farmed Mediterranean fish that Russia is buying from Cyprus, which is not on Russia’s prohibited list, while Western Europe sources them in Greece. I have in mind sea bass and sea bream (daurade). By contrast, fresh farmed salmon bought in by Russia from Iceland is sold at only a modest discount to the banned Norwegian alternative. However, wild Baltic salmon, a seasonal Russia-sourced delicacy that is now in the markets is priced at a fraction of its cost in Western Europe, if you can find any there.

Though I have focused in the foregoing on fresh fish, the strong trend to resuscitation of long forgotten Russian smoked and cured fishes from the country’s interior has developed at a gallop in the last few years.  These high priced delicacies are mostly sold through farmers’ markets or specialty stores. I think in particular of omul’ coming from the Baikal region, though there are many others. We may expect to see a lot more of this in future, replacing in part the now almost defunct trade in wild Caspian sturgeon that in Western Europe was synonymous with Russian extravagance during Soviet days.

Much lower in price though still much beloved in Russia, smoked Baltic sprats are one more example of Russia rising from its knees in food production since 2014 and the sanctions.  The product was in the past produced and sold to Russia only by Riga fisheries-canners.  When those sales were prohibited by the counter-sanctions, Russian producers stepped in. Their first offerings were pitiful, and it was puzzling why the know-how seemed to be beyond the reach of Russian factories.  However, with time has come success.  I opened a premium quality glass jar of these little fish a couple of days ago and was pleased to note their conformity to the best Latvian traditions. The label of this “Captain of Tastes” product showed proudly the medallion recording its award as a winner of “import substitution.”

Wines

Russia is a hard spirits country, as we all know.  That was certainly true in the late 1990s when I was working in Moscow and promoting Absolut vodka and Smirnoff on behalf of my employers.

But even such givens are subject to change and have been changing since Russia came of age in the new millennium.  Wines moved on from being a women’s drink to the status of a sophisticated beverage for all adults. Early in the new millennium, sweet wines were gradually replaced on store shelves by dry wines coming not only from France, Spain and Italy, the Continent’s biggest producers, but also from California, Argentina, South Africa, Australia. These wines continue to be sold in Russia, but are being squeezed by much larger assortments of Russia’s own burgeoning wine industry.

Until several years ago, Russian wines were an expression of patriotic wishes and not much more. The few market entries of wannabe quality Russian wine about five years ago started out well. These were  from the Taman Peninsula along the Black Sea Coast of Krasnodar Region, just across the Straits from Crimea. But supply could not keep up with demand and the product was falsified, becoming  inferior and in sharp discrepancy with its high pricing.

That initial failure has been corrected.  Now when you visit premium wine stores or even the wine shelves of the better supermarket chains you find dry red and white wines from Taman and from Crimea which are serious and command respect.  The only caveat is that the price/quality ratio compared to French wines, for example, does not favor the Russian bottle. That is not uncommon in countries that do not have a long existing tradition as wine producers. The consumer is buying pride and not just the beverage.

Meanwhile in the past couple of years the Russian industrial association of wine producers, led by Dmitri Kiselyov, has been very active working with the federal government and Duma to enact strict regulations on wine production and imports so as to ensure quality and reassure consumers.  Kiselyov happens to be not only the owner of vineyards in Crimea but also the country’s director of state television news reporting.  That this defender of Russia’s reputation and national interests is leading the prestigious end of the food industry is fitting.

In conclusion, I invite all skeptics about having a good meal in Russia based on local ingredients to make the trip here when the borders open and to see for themselves how and why I am for the moment enjoying every trip to my neighborhood supermarket.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

In my intense, nearly daily exchange of emails with the late Professor Steve Cohen in 2015 before and during our incorporation of The American Committee for East-West Accord, Steve often expressed his deep regret that American political dialogue on policy towards Russia had become so consolidated and closed to dissenting views, which were now vilified and beyond the pale.

His words came back to me recently when, going through my home archives as I prepared my memoirs for publication, I came across a little brochure dated March 1982 listing members of the original American Committee on East-West Accord, in which both Steve and I were shown. Indeed we were on the same page in alphabetical order, 12 places apart. His professional affiliation was given as Director, Russian Studies Program, Princeton University. Mine was ITT Europe. To be sure, we had no knowledge of one another back then as we existed in parallel worlds of business and university life. We came together only in the new millennium when I transitioned from business to a new role as “public intellectual.”

March 1982 was a year before Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech targeting the USSR and almost two years before the launch of his “Star Wars” program, but it was well after everyone in the American political establishment understood which way the wind was blowing, what the policy direction from Washington would be, namely growing push-back, confrontation with Moscow in what could be a very rough ride.

The Wikipedia entry on The American Committee for East West Accord is very spare in its report on the original Committee, which existed from 1974 to 1992.  I quote:

Founding members included George F. Kennan, Stephen F. Cohen, Jerome Wiesner, and Theodore Hesburgh. The group, which was composed of businessmen, journalists, academics, and former elected officials, advanced the position that “common sense” should determine U.S. trade policy with the USSR, specifically, that the U.S. should avoid economic boycotts and sanctions against the Soviet Union as such measures rarely worked. Instead, it argued, expanding American-Soviet trade would help advance the cause of détente.  It also supported the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), increased scientific and cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union, and less confrontational rhetoric about the USSR.

This very brief description in Wikipedia, in particular the skewed list of Founding Members and the failure to identify the given “businessmen, journalists, academics and former elected officials” leaves the reader with no sense whatsoever of the moral and political strength of the original ACEWA as compared to its 2015 reincarnation that had only the handful of persons who are shown in the article. Indeed, naming names here and now demonstrates in black and white how over the past 30 years there has been near total collapse of free thinking, or shall we say of any thinking whatsoever as regards one of the fundamental, even existential issues facing the United States: how to deal with Russia. Numbers alone tell the story:  in 1982 there were approximately 300 very visible leaders from all branches of American society in the Committee.  In 2015, it was hard to find the 10 listed.  This collapse would be cause for alarm if anyone impartial were watching.

I will give below some of the best known people from the list of Committee members in 1982. But first allow me to cut to the quick. In any such organization there are names and there are movers and shakers.  Sometimes the two overlap, but rarely.

Contrary to what the Wikipedia article suggests, it was precisely businessmen who were the movers and shakers of the original Committee. I know, because starting from my joining The American Committee in 1976,  I attended its key gatherings on the sidelines of US-USSR Trade and Economic Council annual meetings. At that time, I still was running my own ship as chief executive of a consultancy serving a dozen major US corporations on their Soviet projects.

Former Trade Council chair Donald Kendall served as a co-chair of the ACEWA, and if anyone called the shots and helped finance ACEWA it was he. Kendall’s daytime job was, of course, as chairman of Pepsico, and in that capacity he had negotiated some of the most profitable and successful business deals with the Soviets in the entire period of détente.  He was a vigorous defender of these achievements.

The downside of Mr. Kendall’s stewardship came out only in the mid-1980s, when the launch of Star Wars and the noisy clash with the USSR over its SS20 intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe to be countered by American Pershings in Germany was heating up. At that point, a large swathe of American university students and professors sought to join ACEWA, seeing in it a possible vehicle for applying political leverage on the Reagan administration to back off.

As Steve explained to me in 2015, Kendall, as a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, did not want to go up against a Republican president in a public fight, and he did not open ACEWA’s doors to these large numbers of potential new supporters. Thus, ACEWA was rendered irrelevant precisely at the moment when it could have become a political force.

At Kendall’s side as President of the original American Committee was Robert D. Schmidt, a top executive of Control Data Corporation. Schmidt took personal oversight of publications, including their Common Sense in U.S.-Soviet Trade issues to which I contributed as an expert on food technology cooperation with the Soviets.

To be sure, the other co-Chairmen of ACEWA were George Kennan (at this point a retired academic) and John Kenneth Galbraith (one of Harvard’s best known academics at the time). But they were present as ballast, not as drivers of policy. I exclude the lesser officers of ACEWA from our nose count because they were just implementers.

I offer below lists grouped by professional orientation of some of the most prominent members of the original ACEWA according to the 1982 publication.  Of course, in some instances the attributions equate to their past careers; for others, generally younger members, their public importance lay in assignments yet to come.

Business                                                    

Ball, George W.  Former Under Secretary of State; Senior Managing Director, Lehman Brothers

Hammer, Armand  Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Occidental Petroleum

Jacobson, Jerome  Vice Chairman, Burroughs Corporation

James, John  Chairman and President, Dresser Industries

Makush, Walter  Vice President and Area Director, Westinghouse Electric Corporation

Oztemel, Ara Chairman of the Board, SATRA Corporation

Pisar, Samuel  Author; Attorney, Pisar and Huhs [stepfather to the current U.S. Secretary of State Blinken]

Scott, Harold   Chairman of the Board, Givaudan Corporation; Former President, US-USSR Trade and Economic Council

Skouras, Spyros  President and  Chief  Executive Officer, Prudential Lines, Inc.

Stroebel, Paul Director, International Business Relations, The Dow Chemical Co.

Verity, Willliam  Chairman, ARMCO Incorporated; Co-Chairman, US-USSR Trade & Economic Council

Academics

Baltimore, David   Professor of Biology, MIT; Director, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research

Berman, Harold   Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Black, Cyril Director, Center for International Studies, Princeton University

Bowen, Howard Professor of Economics, Claremont Graduate School; Former President, the University of Iowa

Doty, Paul   Director for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University

Feld, Bernard  Head, Division of Nuclear and Particle Physics, M.I.T., Editor-in-Chief, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Goldman, Marshall Professor of Economics, Wellesley College; Associate Director, Russian Research Center, Harvard

Hoffmann, Stanley   Chairman, Center for European Studies, Harvard

Howard, John Former President, Lewis and Clark College

Kistiakowsky, George  Former Science Adviser to President Eisenhower; Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, Harvard University

Leontieff, Wassily  Nobel Laureate; Director, Institute for Economic Analysis, NY University

Reischauer, Edwin Former U.S. Ambassador; University Professor  Emeritus, Harvard

Riesman, David  Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus, Harvard

Robinson, Olin  President, Middlebury College

Rome, Howard  Mayo Clinic President Emeritus; Past President, World Association of Psychiatrists

Sanford, Terry   President, Duke University; Former Governor of North Carolina

Starr, S. Frederick  Vice President for Academic Affairs, Tulane University; former Secretary, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies

Steinbruner,John Director, Foreign Policy Studies Program, Brookings Institution

Stern, Fritz  Provost and Professor of History, Columbia University

Tucker, Robert  Professor of Politics, Princeton University

Von Laue, Theodore  Professor of History, Clark University

Wiesner, Jerome  Former Presidential Science Adviser; President Emeritus, MIT

Politics

Carter, Hodding III Former Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs

Church, Frank  Former U.S. Senator (D-ID) Former Chairman Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Clark, Dick  Former U.S. Senator (D-IA) Senior Fellow, Aspen Institute

Clusen. Ruth  Former  President, League of Women Voters; Former Assistant Secretary, Department of Energy

Culver, John Former U.S. Senator (D-IA) and Member of Senate Armed Services Committee

Earle, Ralph II  Former Director, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

Fulbright, J.W.  Former U.S. Senator (D-AR), former Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Harriman, Averell Former U.S. Ambassador to USSR; Former Governor, New York

Haskell, Floyd  Former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)

Javits, Jacob  Former U.S. Senator (D-NY)

Klutznick, Philip  Former Secretary of Commerce; former President World Jewish Congress

McCarthy, Eugene, Former U.S. Senator (D-MN)

McGovern, George Former U.S. Senator (D-SD)

McNamara, Robert Former Secretary of Defense,; Former President, World Bank

Newsom, David  Former Under Secretary  of State for Political Affairs; Director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University

Ribicoff, Abfraham  Former U.S. Senator (D-CT)

Roosa, Robet Former Under Secretary of the Treasury

Shriver, Sargent  Former U.S. Ambassador

Stevenson, Adlai  Former Senator (D-IL)

Symington, Stuart  Former Secretary of the Air Force; Former Senator (D-MO)

Tunney, John  Former Senator(D-CA)

Public figures

Benton, Marjorie  Board Member, Arms Control Association. International Editorial Board, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Davidson, William  Institute for Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs

Douglas, Kirk   Actor

Forrestal, Michael  Former President, US-USSR Trade & Economic Council

Fraser, Gerald   President, United Auto Workers

Gayler, Admiral Noel  (USN-Ret) Former Commander-in-Chief, all U.S. Forces, Pacific; Former Director, National Security Agency

Lee, Vice Admiral John Marshall (USN-Ret) Former Commander, Seventh Fleet Amphibious Force in Western Pacific

Mott, Stewart Rawlings   Philanthropist

Salisbury, Harrison  Specialist, Soviet Affairs; Former Associate Editor, New York Times

Woodcock,Leonard  Former U.S. Ambassador; President Emeritus, United Auto Workers

Note:  Ball, Hodding Carter, Cohen, Galbraith, Gayler, Hammer, Hesburgh, Kendall, Kennan, McNamara, Mott, Oztemel, Schmidt, Scott, Wiesner and Woodcock were among the 33-man Board of Directors, that is to say, one-tenth of the overall membership.

The business list set out here is brief because I have only called out the top executives of best known major companies. A good many business members of ACEWA were lawyers or owners of smaller companies that would not be recognizable to a general reader today.

Out of the 12 former U.S. Senators, each and every one was a Democrat. This is all the more remarkable given that it was the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter, which, guided by Zbigniew Brzezinski, had buried detente in 1979-1980. Moreover, it contrasts with today’s Democratic Party which has been leading the charge against all things Russian ever since 2016 with no naysayers on board.

I call attention to the several public figures who were prominent labor leaders (United Auto Workers).   And, of course, we see several top name personalities from the Kennedy administration.

As for the academics, I have only reproduced here professors and officers of Ivy League and best known universities.

Despite these cuts, I think it is fairly obvious that the membership of the original American Committee on East West Accord was drawn heavily from both Center Left (academics, labor) and center Right (business) America.  It is safe to say that virtually none of the practitioners of the professions represented in the membership in 1982 would dare to sign up to a similar program of détente with Russia today. 

Was Soviet Russia a more likable entity in 1982 than the Russian Federation of Vladimir Putin?  The answer is obviously “no.” 

The inescapable conclusion is that the inability of the 2015 reincarnation of the American Committee to attract any meaningful support from all of the public spheres listed above demonstrates the refusal of society today to deal rationally and in a facts-based manner with the issue of relations with Russia.

* * * *

Following the death of Steve Cohen a year ago, his widow, Katrina van den Heuvel, owner-publisher of The Nation and main financier of the American Committee for East West Accord folded its tents and established a successor organization bearing the name American Committee for US-Russia Accord. The remaining Board members from ACEWA stayed on in the new body and several new members were added, including Ms. Vanden Heuvel herself.

Prior to the roll-out of this new ACURA, I had made the suggestion that the group’s mission should be expanded for the sake of better traction, broader outside funding and effectiveness. If the name remained East West Accord, it would be possible to add China to the “East” part of the equation and so to deal with the ongoing New Cold War as it is actually developing, meaning a simultaneous confrontation between the United States with its allies on one side and a closely bonded Russia-China on the other side.

Indeed, the New Cold War differs from the Old Cold War in this very sense. Its ideological content, created and propagated by the United States and its allies is precisely to defend democracy against the authoritarian regimes that both China and Russia are said to represent.  This, of course, is a smokescreen for the true content of containing and doing whatever harm is possible short of war to the two major powers in the world which openly resist U.S. global hegemony.

The advantage of expanding the ACEWA tent to take in China was, I thought, inescapable:  whereas U.S. views of Russia have hardened over two decades in their disregard for facts and primitivism, and whereas this obtuseness is manifest across the political and social spectrum, the same is not true of American attitudes to China, particularly the views of American business.  The Russian economy is largely irrelevant to the United States today, but that is hardly true of China, despite all the efforts under Donald Trump and now under Joe Biden to force “de-coupling”.  You simply cannot decouple from the world’s second largest, soon to be first largest economy.  The net result of the foregoing, is that discussion of Russia in American society would profit greatly from its being attached to the question of relations with China.  Financing would be easy to come by.  Venues for debates would be found, whereas no Harvard, Princeton or the other academic centers noted above will find any time or space for discussion of Russia.

Regrettably, Ms van den Heuvel took no notice of this recommendation.   Perhaps someone else and some other advocates of a sane policy towards Russia will.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

A week ago I concluded an 11 day sojourn in Dubrovnik. The trip was a kind of Rip Van Winkle return to a city that I had visited at least once a year from 1980 to 1987 when I served as the Country Manager, Yugoslavia for the telecoms conglomerate ITT. We had no business as such in this historic coastal resort city, but it was the venue of the annual gatherings of the US-Yugoslav Trade Council, of which my employer was a member. The center of these events was the then newly built Hotel President on the outskirts of the city, 10 minutes drive from the Old Town.  

In the 1980s, the Hotel President was a much talked about architectural landmark: built into a hill that descended to the sea, it offered guests spacious, well-appointed rooms with terraces and unobstructed panoramic views of the magnificent seacoast and sea lanes below while respecting and fitting well into the natural topography. The structure was very representative of the Yugoslav concept of public space: generous open areas overlooking the sea were available for holding cocktail receptions of the business-government events such as ours.

To savor our return completely, my wife and I booked that very same luxury hotel for five nights of our stay. That was a calculated risk, as I was aware that the hotel had served as center of refugee housing in the midst of what is now called the Croatian War of Independence.  However, we were well rewarded,  because the hotel has benefited from substantial improvements and capable management in recent years, along with the entire hospitality infrastructure of the Dubrovnik region.

My long absence from Dubrovnik and more generally from Croatia was prompted by my “knowing too much.”  In my seven years as a regular monthly visitor to Yugoslavia, I had watched up close the country’s long slide into economic collapse and political turmoil under Marshal Tito’s successors. The young technocrats who replaced retiring veterans of the Tito administration lacked the reputation for military valor, revolutionary zeal and charisma to make things work by ignoring petty bureaucrats and stifling regulations in their path. Moreover, the enormous public debt load from Yugoslavia’s decades-long status as the Continent’s biggest investor in (duplicative) manufacturing capacity dictated by political balancing among the republics was becoming unmanageable. The final nail in the coffin was precisely the approaching end of the Cold War in the rapprochement between Gorbachev and Reagan, and most particularly the Soviets’ acquiescence in the fall of the Berlin Wall and end to their hegemonic control of Eastern Europe. With that, Yugoslavia’s geopolitical balancing act between East and West became irrelevant, and the Great Powers left the country alone with its economic plight.

Following my departure from ITT in 1987, I resumed business travel to Yugoslavia, though at irregular intervals, in my capacity as Business Development Director, Eastern Europe for the logistics company United Parcel Service. Thus, I witnessed the onset and early stages of the Yugoslav civil war that economic collapse facilitated.

I literally had a seat at the table in the months before Yugoslavia imploded. At the 1990 Zagreb Fall Fair we brought together representatives of our various delivery partners in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. Tensions and mutual animosity between these communities was running so high that had anyone been carrying firearms there would have been a shoot-out at our banquet table.

Just nine months later came the June 1991 declarations of independence of Slovenia and Croatia. The first led to a military clash that was short-lived, just 10 days before Belgrade let go of its northernmost republic.  The Serbs had no intention of pushing troops and weapons up to the Italian/NATO border in pursuit of unity and Slovenia as such was not critical to the survival of their state as was Croatia.  

In short order the Yugoslav army began brutal air and land assaults on Croatia about which I heard directly from our delivery partners in Zagreb. I was also in regular contact with the little airline based there which provided us with daily carriage of our sacks of documents and parcels into the country; they went on to become what is now Croatia Airlines.  In a touching gesture of war fatigue and plea for outside support, one of their managers gave me several bottles of white wine as a souvenir of one of the towns in central Croatia that had just been destroyed by incoming Yugoslav Army units. I took these back to Brussels and opened them only when peace came to that unhappy land.

As for Dubrovnik, by December 1991 this UNESCO Heritage site was under siege, cut off from electricity and water. The Old Town was bombarded regularly by Serb artillery from the mountains which loomed over the harbor. Residents were prohibited to leave by the local authorities lest the city’s defense forces be reduced.

The devastating civil war finally ended in 1998 when NATO effectively destroyed the war-making potential of Serbia, the moving force in the entire tragedy, though by no means the only party  guilty of what we would call “war crimes.”  Indeed, under its first president Tudjman, independent Croatia was both the aggrieved party in some territory and an aggressor both to minority populations on its land and in territories beyond its borders.  On a visit to Ljubljana in 1993, I found that several of my former business associates from Iskra Commerce, ITT’s agents in country, were now actively engaged in illicit arms trade with one or another former Yugoslav republic.  I could see no entirely innocent actors in what had become a national tragedy.

And so I lost my appetite to revisit the lands of former Yugoslavia, though I knew them well to offer some of the most beautiful seacoasts and alpine resorts in all of Europe.  Several years ago, we relented and made a short visit to Slovenia for a cultural festival in Maribor to which my wife had been invited as a journalist. We used the occasion to revisit parts of the country which we knew much better from the past, Ljubljana and the mountain retreat of Lake Bled, the nearest reaches of the Julian Alps.  Our impression from that trip was mildly disappointing, because the distinctive culture of the country seemed to be fading into European Union standardization and blandness.  The local high cuisine in particular was already long forgotten.

This summer, after 18 months of lock-down in our Brussels home, my wife and I were keen to travel abroad, to resume normal living. We made four lengthy trips abroad, the final one being Dubrovnik. As in the case of the other three destinations, we were guided both by considerations of Covid risk, meaning the rates of local infection, and by considerations of weather, seeking an escape from the cold and rain that descended on Belgium and on much of Western Europe from June through August.  In this context, we looked first to the North, and visited St Petersburg in May-June. The weather was good and the Covid wave now lashing Russia had not yet made itself felt.  This was followed by a July trip to Helsinki, about which I have already written separately. The weather in Finland that month was exceptionally warm and the sanitary situation was exceptionally good.  Next came a trip to Venice in August which proved highly successful on all counts. The waters of the Lido beach were delightfully warm, the beach itself was sun-drenched and under-visited by foreigners so that social distancing was never an issue.  The Venetian experience directed us to think about the coast further down the Adriatic, and we followed the logic by ordering our flight tickets to Dubrovnik for the first week in September, when the 40 degree heat of August diminished to very tolerable daytime readings in the mid-20s.

The overriding impression of our visit to Dubrovnik, to its nearby Elafiti islands and to the further removed island of Korcula, home town of Marco Polo halfway up the coast to Split and today the producer of superb white wines that are served in all the best restaurants of Dalmatia, was one of high professionalism of the domestic hospitality industry, daring private investment in state of the art hotels and bold public investment in resort infrastructure, meaning in particular public beaches and seaside walks, that are enjoyed by local residents and visitors from abroad in equal measure.

I put the emphasis on “in equal measure.”  It may be that due to curtailment of some traditional tourist flows as, for example, from Australia, which remains under lockdown, foreign visitor numbers were still down this season and the percentage mix with guests from elsewhere in Croatia or the Balkans was not quite “normal.” That being said, we encountered large numbers of Americans and British, goodly numbers of Germans and Russians in the four and five star establishments we visited. 

However, in the most expensive places, and in particular on Korcula island, there is no question that the wealthiest guests, the owners of the multimillion dollar yachts in the port, were Croatians, not foreigners.  This is a “sea change” from the Yugoslavia that I knew, where the guests at prestigious, though never excessively ostentatious, establishments were most likely to be government officials, not business people, as is clearly the case today.

In this regard I think back of the refrain I heard many times from one of my colleagues in Ljubljana in the Iskra office representing our products and technologies in country: “We are Slavs, not slaves.” There was back than an obvious defensiveness related to their own relative poverty compared to our West European and American managers. There was a particular sensitivity to Germans which came down from the horrors of the Second World War.   All of that insecurity is now history, from what I observed over the past few weeks.

As for the civil war, there are in Dubrovnik streets wall signs bearing photos of the destruction of this or that building by Serb artillery. In one of the historic palaces just next to the cathedral, there is a room dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives during the siege.  But this is exceptional.  We spotted an Air Serbia plane at the Dubrovnik Airport and I have no doubt that the Croats just want to move on with their lives, including having normal relations with their neighbors.

The Yugoslavia of my memory was to a great extent a fun-loving place where the business people with whom I associated had a well developed a sense of humor, cultivated witticisms, enjoyed immensely good food and good drink.  Their standing joke was “call us whenever you want a problem arranged in some very nice place.” That mindset has clearly survived very well into the present-day Dalmatian coast.

Aesthetically the development of Dubrovnik and the surroundings has been world-class. This comes at a cost: the region is not cheap, prices for food and lodging are entirely in line with Northern Europe. But the value is there, you get what you pay for, and more. The natural beauty of the region has been maintained. Everywhere we looked, including in the marinas and commercial port, the sea water was transparent, sparkling clean and inviting.

As for Covid, all the hotels and restaurants were operating with keen attention to the sanitary rules. All of the hotel guests were observing mask requirements and social distancing indoors. It was very reassuring.

Having cast these bouquets, I now will turn to another set of impressions from this visit. The Yugoslavia of my past was more than a place valuing joie de vivre. It was a country with ambition, and it managed to serve a very important role globally, hitting way above its weight in the mission to preserve peace and stability in a world divided by two armed camps, the United States with NATO versus the USSR with its Warsaw Pact. Tito’s Yugoslavia, alongside India, was a founder and leader of the so-called Non-Aligned Bloc of Nations. 

The six nations which have resulted from the break-up of Yugoslavia have no such ambition. Nor do they have the demographic or economic weight to support such ambition if ever it existed today. Their biggest hope is to grow as equals within the European Union which is today just another word for NATO, meaning vassals of the United States. Croatia is thus willy-nilly aligned against Russia and surely soon to be aligned against China.

The disappearance of the Non-Aligned Movement deepens the lines of cleavage in the ongoing and deepening New Cold War and makes the world a much less safe place than it was when I was a frequent visitor to Yugoslavia and a once a year visitor to Dubrovnik

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

Readers of my travel notes will know that I often use anecdotal evidence to support my conclusions about this place or that, meaning that I set out my personal observations based on a small sampling, but one which is entirely my own. At times, this sampling may not be truly representative of the given country or city. That is a calculated risk that is common in journalism. It usually pays off, but not always.

I write now to reconsider the dismal picture of Finland which I painted nine years ago following a lengthy visit to the country’s provincial eastern region of Karelia.  This region, especially its southernmost district just across the border from Russia, had been described to me glowingly by friends in St Petersburg, who went there periodically to do shopping for smoked fish and other Finnish delicacies or who were crossing over to Finland at its nearest point to satisfy the requirements of the Schengen visas which Finnish consulates were giving out with abandon to Russian tourists for the sake of anticipated hard currency earnings during mandatory stops in Finland on the way West. These friends were greatly impressed by the smooth asphalt of the roads and high quality of infrastructure generally, by the cleanliness and orderliness of the towns and countryside. As one observed, “Finland is Russian landscapes plus civilization.”

My own visit to this eastern province of Finland was made in August 2012 when my wife and I went to the Savonlinna Opera Festival, which was marking its hundredth anniversary. The management generously accorded to my wife free tickets in her capacity as accredited journalist, which, of course, favorably disposed us to the festival organizers. What we saw there on stage and on our follow-on visit to the “black heart” of Karelia to the north, in Kuopio, a university town and center of environmental studies, was described in some detail in my unflattering essay:

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2012/08/19/finland-oy-oy-oy-travel-notes-from-karelia/

Since Finland then, as today, figures among the most desirable nations on earth in which to live in the tables compiled by travel experts, not least of all due to the supposedly healthy life style, I imagine that readers of that essay may have been surprised by my remarks on the sickly or deformed specimens of humanity that we saw around us in Karelia:  I called out in particular the high numbers of obese or grossly overweight ladies and gents, the high number of deformed or disoriented people resulting from alcoholism.  And lest anyone would suggest that this was a lower class phenomenon from which I was generalizing, let me remind the reader that Savonlinna during the festival is the musical center of the country, attracting the prosperous audience of the Helsinki Opera as well as from the rest of the country. The dead drunk lady who was looking in vain for her seat in our row was holding a ticket that cost her 140 euros. The passengers on our river and canal cruise north to Kuopio had paid a handsome fee for the right to be served alternating rounds of sparkling wine, beer and spirits nonstop over the ten hours of the trip. And after we disembarked another restrained couple of fellow passengers went straight to the hotel bar before check-in and were in no rush to go to their room.

In the years since 2012, I have visited Finland a couple of times but in the mode of my 1990s travel to the country, not as a destination but as a stopping off point on the way to or from Russia. On one such overnight visit we stayed in a business class hotel in the Helsinki harbor before proceeding to Russia on the newly opened fast trains to Petersburg and Moscow.  The impression of that trip was favorable but not sufficiently so for me to have bothered to reexamine my earlier published remarks on Karelia.

This summer is an entirely different case. Helsinki was our destination for a 12 day holiday and our impressions are so very positive that I am compelled to bring this to the attention of my readers so as to set right what may have been a spoiled or shall we say unrepresentative sample of Finland taken nine years ago.

Why Helsinki of all places for a summer holiday?  It bears saying that our original plans for this July had been to spend a month at our country house 80 kilometers south of St Petersburg, Russia. We had been there in May, after a Covid mandated absence of 18 months, and, at great pains, had put the grounds in order in preparation for a relaxing stay in July.  The meteorological reports indicated a Russian summer of unusual warmth, underscoring our sense of anticipation.  However, Covid intervened yet again: in late June the third wave of the pandemic hit St Petersburg and Russia generally, a wave led by the Delta variant which greatly increased infections, hospitalizations and…deaths. It was clear that this was a risk to be avoided, notwithstanding our full vaccination records. Moreover, and decisively, we understood that any visit to Russia just now would place us in a social void, because we would not meet with our friends and acquaintances, nearly all of whom were anti-vaxxers or as they call them in Russia vaccination dissidents. We had our fill in May of arguments over the benefits of vaccination, of wearing masks, as well as over the value of Belgian (not just Russian) official statistics that weigh in on these matters.

And so to enjoy the rare pleasures of White Nights and the unusually warm northern summer, we looked to Finland. The decisive point was that Finland from the start of the epidemic had very low infection rates and that has continued to the present, notwithstanding the Delta variant. Indeed, Finland is one of the very few “green” countries in Europe, with much better current indices of infection, hospitalization and death than our country of residence, Belgium, which recently moved up to “orange.”

 Since we have no interest in driving, an indispensable feature of renting a dacha in Finland, and since we were not attracted to “fine urban views” from the windows of up-market hotels in provincial towns like Tampere, we looked more closely at Helsinki and discovered to our great pleasure a five-star Hilton hotel at comparatively modest room rates situated in a secluded shoreline residential area within city limits, at Munkkiniemi, the terminus of the number 4 tramline northwest of the city center. Here our balcony looks out directly at a protected inlet of the sea. Here the hotel’s private stretch of shore and the adjacent public beach measuring perhaps 250 meters each attract only a handful of swimmers, so that “social distancing” occurs entirely naturally.

The hotel itself appears to have a respectable occupancy rate, though it is certainly not sold out. The guests, as confirmed by Reception, are about 90% Finns, mostly young families, with an admixture of visitors from Germany and Estonia. The absence of foreigners generally is attributable to Covid travel restrictions. An international branded hotel like this in normal times would have a large foreign contingent of guests. The Finns staying here are not only out-of-towners, visitors from the hinterland, but also some Helsinki residents who were driven by the intense heat earlier this month to escape to the park-like surroundings of this residential district, about which they, unlike me, were long well informed.

They would know, as I didn’t, that this district is home to the official residences of both the premier and the president of Finland, as well as of the Guest House where foreign dignitaries are put up. When you consider the beautiful natural setting of mixed pine and deciduous forests and the vast expanse of the sea inlet which these houses border, the location speaks for itself.  Meanwhile there are also two noteworthy tourist sites here. One is the former official presidential residence, now a museum open to the public (Tamminiemi), where the country’s longest serving president, Urho Kekkonen lived most of his 27 years up to 1981.  The other is the Seurasaari Island, fifteen minutes walk from our hotel, which is one of the main tourist attractions of Helsinki thanks to its open air “museum” of architecturally interesting wooden buildings of various usage moved here from all around Finland and dating back mostly to the late 18^th and 19^th centuries.

I was once a frequent visitor to Helsinki going back fifty years.  It was, as I said, a transit point to the Soviet Union. This ceased in the 1990s when both Finland and the new Russian Federation, headed in different directions and redefined their commercial and political identities. I had been a visitor to Helsinki in the late 1990s when I had business partners in the country for whom I was performing consultancy. But all this time I had stayed downtown in business class hotels and knew well only the area running from the main railway station to the Finlandia concert hall and nearby Hotel Hesperia and similar. Now, just 25 minutes away by tram, I discovered this other Helsinki that is a splendid resort with conference facilities as well.

The 90% of guests in our hotel as well as the visitors we see on the beach, the folks playing at the nearby clay-courts tennis club, riding their bicycles or taking their morning jog are decidedly healthier looking than the people we saw in Karelia, even if they also line up at all the ice cream kiosks and order a lot of pastries and other sweets in the cafes. I would say that no more than 20% of the adults we see are seriously overweight, of which perhaps a third are classically obese. In this day, when Americans and Brits tend to need two chairs on an airplane to be comfortable, the weigh-in of the Finns I see around me is not exceptional. 

Meanwhile, the restaurants and cafes that we find here in our hotel complex and also in downtown Helsinki, are definitely offering healthier food than I remember from the past. They nearly all feature salads consisting of greens to which are added “toppings” such as baked salmon that are perfect for the diet conscious.  Moreover, these offerings are taken up by many diners. And in the supermarkets, boxes of healthy salads kept fresh in controlled atmosphere are put out daily, meaning that they sell out.

 Hamburgers with fries are almost nowhere to be seen outside of specialized fast food outlets, of which there are relatively few.  In the cafes, soft drinks are available but generally passed up. Instead, most everyone takes advantage of the free water. Among alcoholic beverages, we see only beer and to a lesser extent wine enjoying favor. Few take more than one glass of wine. In our 10 days we have not encountered a single drunk or a single instance of exuberant drinking. 

The Finns we see around us have other remarkable features that we did not notice so clearly in Karelia: the men in particular are very big, very tall.  A great many males are over two meters. A great many of them also have wide frames and developed musculature.  Women, when they are fit are very fit.

But the real kudos goes to the kids, who are almost without exception slim and well proportioned from toddlers through early adolescents.  They are well-behaved, quiet and cute. 

This observation about the kids reminds me of the comment made by one Russian taxi driver in St Petersburg at about 1995 who said that he would not buy a Russian car because his countrymen were not good at manufacturing anything, though to their credit they “produced very cute little kids.”  I don’t think his point about poor manufacturing has any relevance to Finland, but his remark about kids does.

At 1.3 million residents, Helsinki is about the size of Brussels. It goes without saying that it has a more limited cultural offering than the Belgian and EU capital. In this regard, my observation from the past about Helsinki being quite exciting when arriving from the East and quite boring when arriving from the West still holds.  Nonetheless, what high culture it does offer is of good, international quality.  The musical life in season is worthy of respect. The musical establishment includes very well respected

schools such as the Sibelius Music Academy. The cultural calendar which restarts in late August features in particular symphonic music, opera and dance.

And the national art museums are today under good management, as we understood at once upon visiting the ongoing temporary exhibition of Ilya Repin at the Ateneum.

This exhibition has to be called the cultural event of this summer in Helsinki. The Ateneum’s website urges visitors to buy tickets in advance online and they are very right. When we arrived before the museum’s entrance this past Tuesday we found a line stretching around the corner, meaning a good 45 minutes to get in and buy a ticket. However, the effort would be worthwhile. The exhibition presents 130 paintings and drawings by Repin, including several that are signature pieces by the artist known the world over.

At the entrance to the exhibition, Repin is identified as “a Finnish-Russian painter.”  To Russians, this may seem peculiar, though it is truthful:  as from 1918, following the Revolution, the Finnish-Russian border north of Petersburg was moved several dozen kilometers to the south and Repin’s residence cum studio Penates at Kuokkala, just 30 kilometers from Petersburg, fell within the new Finnish state. Repin lived out the remainder of his life there, to 1930.

Though Repin donated several of his paintings to his new homeland, the Finnish holdings of his works are clearly very few.  Nearly all of the paintings and drawings come from Russia, mainly from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the State Russian Museum in Petersburg, who are co-organizers of the exhibition together with the Petit Palais fine arts museum, Paris. Smaller museums across Russia such as in Saratov and in Irkutsk and elsewhere also have contributed paintings.

The most famous large scale canvases on display include the Barge Haulers on the Volga, the Reception of Volost Elders by Emperor Alexander III in the Courtyard of the Petrovsky Palace in Moscow,  a Religious Procession in the Kursk Governate, the  Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom.  Importantly there are sketches and oil studies for these master works also shown.

Given the tense relations between Russia and the European Union these days of Cold War 2.0, given the open hostility towards all things Russian by the Finns’country cousins across the Gulf in Estonia and by the other neighboring Baltic States, it bears emphasizing that this important exhibition has been curated with the highest professionalism and will bring great pleasure to all art lovers who visit. Ideology and geopolitics are totally absent, as well they should be.

I have no easy answers as to why this stay in Finland produced a so much better impression than the one of nine years ago. To be sure, dietary habits in Finland may have evolved in a positive way just as they are changing across Europe. Infrastructure investments are in evidence in downtown Helsinki and the city looks that much better than it did just a few years ago, with more pedestrian zones and less congestion. I freely acknowledge that we were staying this time in a particularly prestigious part of town which has been meticulously planned for the comfort and pleasure of residents and visitors alike. There are splendid walks and riding paths along the shores of the sea.  Traffic is free flowing and public transit runs at frequent intervals on clean, new and well-designed vehicles.  To all of this, I say “bravo.”

In these signs of prosperity and superior management, the capital factor has to be taken into account. Helsinki has nearly one quarter of the country’s 5.5 million inhabitants.  It surely presents the best that Finland has to offer.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

I write to you today from Helsinki, this summer’s vacation destination chosen not only because Scandinavia is enjoying an usually warm and sunny season, unlike Central Europe even putting aside the latest, once in five hundred years devastating floods that have struck Germany and Belgium; not only because the White Nights, even in these final weeks, lend a magical quality to the trip, when we can enjoy 20 hours gazing at the calm sea that stretches out below our balcony; but also because Finland is one of the very few “green” countries on the Covid map, meaning that the infection rate remains far lower even that in Belgium, newly upgraded to “orange,” and we can delight in a hotel stay without worrying unduly over anyone around us who may sneeze or cough once or twice.

Apart from swimming in the sea and visiting some downtown museums that escaped our attention on past visits to Helsinki, these lazy summer days are given over to reading. I am  now wading through Bulgakov’s brilliant novel Master and Margarita (in Russian) and mentally cross-referencing what the author was saying very boldly and insightfully about Soviet society of his day, namely 1935, and what I see around me in American and West European society and politics.

I was a latecomer to this novel. In my student days I had read only Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, which I found only mildly interesting.   I discovered Master with the help of my wife, when she bought and we watched the many hours long serialization of the novel made in Russia in 2005 and shown then on the state television channel Rossiya before release as a set of DVDs.  There was a long-suppressed movie of Master that preceded the television serial and another movie is said to be underway in Moscow studios at present. But that 2005 serial captured the very best of Master and may be credited with fantastic direction by Vladimir Bortko and very successful casting. It is hard to imagine anyone presenting a better Voland than Oleg Basilashvili, a better Pontius Pilate than Kirill Lavrov, a better Margarita than Anna Kovalchuk or a better Azazello than Alexander Filippenko. The original musical score was also extraordinary.

The only possible criticism one might make pertains to the final installment of the serial, where the director, who apparently also was responsible for the script, went beyond the novel to make explicit what otherwise is implicit in Bulgakov’s text:  that the whole of Soviet society in the period of the Great Terror was experiencing mass hypnosis. It is such hypnosis which the head of the security services (NKVD), a Goebbels-like figure, uses to explain to the public gathered in the city planetarium or listening to his talk remotely on national radio the bizarre events that have accompanied the visit to Moscow and demonstration of “black magic” at the Varieté theater by the foreign “consultant” Voland (Satan). Those impactful visual images draw on the matter of fact presentation in the novel’s Epilogue of the conclusions drawn by the investigators. In these conditions, sane and reasonable people were locked up in madhouses, as was the Master and several of the other characters in the novel. The truly insane were out in the streets.

As I now read the novel, I am led to draw comparisons with what has been going on in the United States ever since 9/11 tipped the whole country into paranoia. Two thousand people died in the attack but you would think it had been millions and that the attack had been made not just on two buildings in NYC and one in Washington but on the nation at the level of every hamlet. What was punctured was the belief in the inviolability of the United States. What followed from that was naked fear, and from fear came the readiness to point fingers.

There have been recurrences of this madness, of mass hypnosis ever since Putin’s 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference, which touched off a vicious and never ending vilification of Putin, the Kremlin, Russia and Russians led from the White House and amplified by all state controlled media, meaning ALL MEDIA.

Yes, this hypnosis was very effective. The whole country was brainwashed, including my sister in New Jersey and a great many of our now former friends and acquaintances. The entire Russiagate story about the theft by Russians of documents from the DNC server for the purpose of destroying candidate Hilary Clinton’s reputation, the Steele dossier on the alleged mad behavior of candidate Donald Trump and other featured fake news ever since the summer of 2016 are just variations on that theme.

In my occasional appearances as interviewee on RT International, I am often asked to comment on the lack of proper proofs for allegations of violations of international law, egregious misconduct by the Kremlin, whether it be large issues like the Skripal poisonings or small charges that arise almost weekly. I disappoint my hosts by saying that the details of the case are irrelevant because the overriding issue is the campaign led by the United States and supported by the European Union to blacken the reputation of Russia and punish it as a pariah state. And this denigration has nothing “personal” about it: the final objective is to knock out the Russian Federation as a challenger to US global hegemony. Regime change is just a means to that end.

The same issue arises in my periodic interviews on Belarus television, one of which took place just two days ago. I was asked to explain why the Federal Republic of German does not respond to the new complaints by Minsk that it is harboring terrorists who are planning attacks on Belarus.  My answer was not to be surprised in the least, given that Germany and the EU as a whole were dead silent when less than two months ago the Russians showed on state television plotters from among Belarus opponents to the regime with support from Lithuania and the USA planning the assassination of President Lukashenko and his family so as to install a new pro-Western government.  The point, as I said, is that Belarus is only an instrument in the hands of certain EU member states, with financial and technical backing from Washington, to strip away another critically important buffer state protecting Russia from NATO on its borders. The objective is precisely the same as noted above: to compromise Russian security and remove the challenge to US global hegemony.

And yet again the same kind of issue arose a day ago when colleagues asked me to help “debunk” the latest set of empty, unsupported and unsupportable allegations published in The Guardian about Putin’s measures in 2016 to assure the victory of Donald Trump in the presidential elections. Reference was made to a meeting in Moscow in January of that year at which Putin supposedly gave the green light to such plans, believing that the mentally unbalanced Trump would do great damage to US society and impair the country’s defense capabilities.

My answer to this request was that the best “debunking” was the name of the single best known author of this article in The Guardian, Luke Harding, a Russia-hater and vicious propagandist of long standing whose credibility as expert on Russia is close to zero.

I have identified above a raison d’état for the Russophobia which controls public policy in the United States. But that is at the level of top policy makers. Below that level and in the broad public the logic is precisely the witch hunt, finger-pointing directed at the Kremlin as the source of all the world’s ills.  The separate allegations, such as a supposedly aggressive Russia keen to destroy democratic nations and to raise the fortunes of its own autocracy, do not stand up to any reasonable analysis. What we have here is political science at the kindergarten level, where one and one, if ever totaled, come to four.  That no one calls this out is a sign of mass hypnosis or hysteria.

I appreciate that some of my friends’ writings take apart the Russiaphobe fabrications, challenging them technically and otherwise bit by bit.  Someone should do that and my comrades in arms do that very well and professionally.

However, my own position on these matters is rather different.  It is not just that you cannot beat card cheats, that you cannot dissuade propagandists from their mission, but that you cannot beat mass hysteria, which is what is going on. You waste your breath.

You cannot argue with mass hypnosis.  You can keep a diary, write a chronicle that reveals the falseness of the spirit of the age to hopefully enlighten future readers, because, as we hear in another of the main points of Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita, “manuscripts do not burn.” That is what I do….

How bad has this mass hypnosis – hysteria in the USA been? Well one piece of evidence that I have not yet revealed until now is that my daily correspondent in 2015 at the time when we co-founded the American Committee for East-West Accord, Steve Cohen, put up the money for the Committee’s foundation and assembled the august board of directors including Reagan’s ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock for one purpose only: to save his own neck should he be called to testify before a revived Un-American Affairs Committee in Congress, and should he then be thrown into prison. Then there would be this august Board to reach out to the public to get Steve released.  Like the Master, it was not Steve Cohen who had schizophrenia but society at large.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

Frank Sportolari, in Memoriam

The amazon.com page of my recently published Memoirs of a Russianist: From the Ground Up carries one five-star review signed “Frank Sp” and headlined “Unique insights into a fascinating business era.” The reviewer was my one-time colleague in United Parcel Service at the beginning of the 1990s, Frank Sportolari.

Frank’s untimely death was announced yesterday and I hasten to record my reminiscence of this extraordinary person who left the most positive impression on me and surely on everyone who knew him.  His life and career offer pointers to all those who enter the service of leading multinational corporations or other large bureaucracies. I use this occasion to share them with as broad a readership as possible.

 Frank was ten years younger than me and at the time we worked together he was on the first rungs of management in the Finance department of UPS Deutschland.  His raw talent in this domain was appreciated by his superiors, who were already then giving him increasing responsibilities. The company was completing a massive expansion as it transitioned from being a predominantly domestic delivery company in the United States to being a global logistics provider with major operations across Europe. The expansion was implemented with great haste and with great waste. The Finance function was tasked with clean-up, to bring costs under control and cut losses. It was a time when talents such as Frank possessed were rising to the fore. And yet at the time the pecuniary benefits accruing to his cohort in Finance were not in evidence.

Though he was an American passport holder, Frank was hired by UPS under the terms of German nationals, because he had been working in the country already for six years and was not considered to be an “expatriate” brought over from the States for the assignment.  This meant that Frank had  compensation package that was significantly lower than mine or of the senior management levels who were all enjoying expat benefits.

Frank bore this discrimination with neither rancor nor envy. Overall, he showed humility and acceptance of the hand he was dealt. We knew very little of his important educational accomplishments in the United States before he came to Europe.

UPS at the time placed great emphasis on working class values of its drivers who became top managers and shareholders. We all knew of colleagues who were millionaires at age 40 after having put in 25 years with the company. Among personal qualities, the company valued loyalty, readiness to work 60 hour weeks when required, “street smarts” and toughness. Many top managers had risen through the ranks by their talents in labor relations, dealing effectively with the semi-criminal units of the Teamsters.  Education as such was just beginning to rise in value as the company culture absorbed the highly trained engineering achievements of its pilots and others working in its air fleet, which became already at the start of the ‘90s one of the world’s largest airlines.

Frank was a keen observer of the contradictions of this corporate milieu in transition which was grist for his wit.  Traveling with him on business was always a pleasure, thanks to humor and his light touch.

I left the company in 1993 to pursue opportunities in Russia, which just then became a major Emerging Market that was attracting a large foreign business community.  Frank stayed with UPS. Over time, his forebearance was handsomely rewarded: he made a brilliant career as senior manager in Italy, in Spain, in Belgium and in Germany which was then and remains today the most important UPS operation on the Continent.  His long term of service as the head of UPS Deutschland ended only recently due to the health problems that in short order led to his demise. He was twice elected President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Germany, where he had very important representational duties and met official and business leaders of both countries. Frank’s gifts as a linguist combined with his gregarious nature to make him a very effective communicator in his postings across Europe.

Over the past twenty-five years, I met a number of times with Frank in his home, met with his wife and growing family. He always wore his responsibilities lightly and retained his keen sense of humor at life’s foibles. He had the rare quality of projecting “one of the guys” modesty while possessing rare financial-management skills and experience. He was in the best spirit of UPS – a “people person.”

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

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