A decade and a half ago, in the year 2000 (which now seems so far away that it is hard to imagine that it ever existed), on the eve of his first election, the young and progressive Tsar Vladimir, answering the question of his confidants as to what was meant by the national idea in Russia, answered briefly: ‘being competitive’. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then – and now much blood, too – but if we take that as the definition of national interests, then everything in Russia has been turned on its head. It seemed that at last national interests would include investment and technology, the strengthening of human capital, available education and healthcare, working institutions, freedom of speech and association and free and fair elections. These were the slogans with which the liberal opposition took to the streets; and it is they who today still represent the genuine – and not the false – national interests of Russia.
On the other side are those who are committing acts of aggression against a neighbouring state; who have unleashed a dirty war right under their very noses; who send Russian soldiers to be slaughtered and try to cover up this crime; who have torn up the whole system of links with the West, from arms control to investment and financial instruments; who have turned Russia into an international outcast; who are destroying the very capability for economic growth and modernisation. These are the people who are destroying Russia’s national interests.
Today Russia does not need geopolitical myths that lead us to war and mobilization, but a programme of national demobilization and a lowering of the temperature of hatred and confrontation with the West. The Cold War is over; it’s time to build our house and bring up our children, not send them to the slaughterhouse. We are faced by a multitude of small wars – with the Islamic State, with drugs, poverty, cancer, the Ebola virus – and in these wars the West is our ally. We need to take back the concept of ‘national ideas’ from paranoid people and charlatans, and forbid them by law from using the term ‘geopolitics’ as a false science, on a par with conspiracy and astrology.
PROFESSION: INVADER
In Russia, they love jokes about invading other countries. After Prague in 1968, there was a joke doing the rounds about who uses which mode of transport: the Frenchman said that he goes to work on a moped, on holiday in a Renault, and abroad by aeroplane. The German goes to work on a bicycle, on holiday in a Mercedes, and abroad by ship. The Soviet citizen answered that he goes to work on the tram, on holiday by train, and abroad in a tank.
In the well-fed, post-Soviet era, there’s a popular joke about the Russian tourist who is being questioned at the border on arrival in a Western country:
‘Nationality?’
‘Russian.’
‘Occupation?’
‘No, just visiting.’
Now the jokes have been turned around. On the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, a video, called ‘I Am a Russian Invader’, went viral across the Russian Internet. Created in the infamous studio, My Duck’s Vision, the film is an apologia for Russian colonialism and gives a list of the blessings that the ‘invader by birthright’ has brought to the occupied territory. Yury Degtyarev, the studio’s general director, who is known for his links to the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi (‘Our people’), acknowledged that the video was ordered by people close to the state. The film has been translated into ten languages, including Polish and Chinese. It should be noted that, curiously, the link to it was placed on the Facebook page of the Russian Embassy in Finland, which caused quite a stir in the Finnish press.
The video itself is not worthy of attention. My Duck’s Vision has already produced a string of trashy film clips, from the ‘scandalous truth’ about McDonald’s and Apple to one where the hero grabs the breasts of thousands of girls and then, with the same paw, shakes hands with Putin at a youth gathering at Lake Seliger in the Tver Oblast. The point is the avalanche of popularity achieved by ‘Invader’. In the first week it was watched on YouTube nearly five million times and received six times more ‘likes’ than ‘dislikes’. When such a viral video explodes on the Internet, it causes an even deeper virus within the Russian subconscious: it helps create a false impression of superiority, confidence in our infallibility and a painful nostalgia for the empire.
The droning voice of the presenter stresses the advantages of civilization that Russia has brought to its conquered lands, creating an almost Kipling-like impression of the ‘Russian man’s burden’. Look, in Siberia, where previously ‘they sold women for a bundle of sable pelts’, we have begun to extract oil, gas and aluminium, and we have built cities with nurseries and hospitals. Farmsteads in the Baltic States have been turned into electricity stations and factories producing radio technology and cars. And, guess what, in the steppes of Central Asia, we constructed cosmodromes and stadiums, and we grew wheat and cotton.
The voice forgets to say that the advantages of the modern era, which were imposed upon the native peoples of the North, destroyed their traditional way of life, took away the feeding grounds for their reindeer and soaked these grounds with oil, tore children away from their nomadic families and stuck them in boarding schools, killed off shamans and healers, destroyed the knowledge of pre-European civilizations and brought with them the main exterminator of the aboriginal peoples: vodka. The voice forgets to say that cotton became the curse of Central Asia, drying up the Amu Darya and Syr Darya Rivers for the sake of irrigation, turning the Aral Sea into a desert, and every year forcing the men, women and children of Uzbekistan to take part in the compulsory harvesting of this ‘white gold’. And in any case, Uzbek cotton cannot compete on global markets: it is much poorer in quality than Egyptian cotton. Equally uncompetitive were the RAF minibuses and Rigonda radiograms made in Latvia. These clumsy creations of the Soviet automobile and radio industries were in demand only in the semi-closed socialist camp; they had no chance on the world market against ‘Toyota’ or ‘Sony’. And the Baltic peoples could remember much more besides: their occupation by the Red Army and the deportation of tens of thousands of people to Siberia, the destruction of farmsteads and their enforced replacement with collective farms, and the ecological disasters they suffered. The apocalyptic scenery of the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker was shot at a disused electricity station near Tallinn.
The Russian Empire and then later the USSR behaved towards their outlying districts in the classic manner of an agent of modernization, smashing the traditional way of life with the iron fist of industrialization, creating modern infrastructure but, at the same time, destroying the natural environment and reshaping the map of the nations. Over the course of hundreds of years, Russia expropriated neighbouring territories, reaching out in what the historian Paul Kennedy called ‘imperial overstretch’. But by the end of the twentieth century this gigantic territorial project had run its course and collapsed under the weight of its own ambitions and responsibilities. It is enough today to compare the standard of living on the Karelian Isthmus in the Leningrad Oblast, which was occupied by the USSR during the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939–40, with the standard of living in neighbouring Finland. Travelling by train or car from Helsinki to Vyborg is an existential act. It seems that when you cross the Russo-Finnish border the very quality of the space around you changes. The houses are dilapidated; the roads get worse and worse; there are neglected forests and abandoned fields, in which lies a huge amount of scrap metaclass="underline" rusting rails, old car bodies, severed cables – the remains of a great dream of modernization, long-forgotten. The ‘Russian invader’ may have been able to conquer territory (‘at what price?’ is a separate question), but he was not very capable of making it fit for habitation.