However, the West is not rushing to buy life insurance or security services from the ‘Russia’ defence factory. The racketeer’s strategy works when he manages to tie the client into his ‘protection’, his defence; but the West is not exactly falling over itself to enter into talks about ‘a new security system’, and it does not see Putin as a new Stalin of the 1945-type, with whom you have to sit down around the map of the world and divide it up into spheres of influence. That is why it is more accurate to compare Russia less with a racketeer than with a small-time thug. As they say, Russia may have got up off its knees, but it is still only squatting. Since he doesn’t have real strength, the thug holds the neighbourhood in fear and manipulates the law-abiding parts of society by issuing small threats. All he has in his arsenal is a collection of petty ritual gestures (such as beating up a weakling, nicking a mobile phone, cheeking the police, flashing a knife, baring his chest), all designed to show those around him that he’s prepared to break the law and violate convention. But the thug immediately shrinks in the face of any outside force or organized opposition. For that to happen, though, such opposition must be evident, and in the current system of international relations, with Obama on the way out and the EU weakened by Brexit, that strength simply isn’t there.
What next? At first glance, it seems that the aim of this hybrid war has been achieved: the world has started to listen to Russia and started to fear it; but this is on a par with the fear that the world has for Iran or North Korea, which have been global scarecrows for decades. Russia has not so much returned to the club of the leading world powers, which it was a part of before 2014, as turned into a worldwide horror story. And in this it should be compared not with Libya or North Korea, but with the Soviet Union at the start of the 1980s. In the very same way, that country squandered the resources and the respect it had, lost all its allies and, not having the strength to solve global problems, carried out a destructive foreign policy, from the arms race to the war in Afghanistan. Pathetic in its global pretensions and its dreams of past greatness, inflated on the outside, but empty within, the Soviet Union turned into a warhead stuffed full of rubbish, a shadow of what it once was. It seemed to be eternal and unshakeable – until it collapsed overnight. ‘This was forever, until it ended’, as the sociologist Alexei Yurchak wrote in his book on the collapse of the USSR. But projects such as this always end unexpectedly, ridiculously and unstoppably.[18]
THE TORCH PROCESSION
In the build-up to the Sochi Winter Olympics, the Olympic Flame continued its march around Russia’s wide expanses, accompanied by hundreds of security personnel, police, guard dogs and patriotic bikers (who nowadays carry out the role of the emperor’s mounted guard). Life along the route of the VIP cortège came to a standstilclass="underline" whole towns froze; roads were closed; trains came to a halt. From being a celebration on the move, the Olympic Torch Relay became a mobile police operation. The centre of Moscow shut down for three days; in St Petersburg, thousands of soldiers cleaned Palace Square and cordoned off the city’s main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt.
The mind boggles at the scale of this gigantic performance. Ever since the first Torch Relay took place – the idea of Josef Goebbels before the Berlin Olympics of 1936 – this one became the longest, the biggest and the most technologically accomplished relay ever. It lasted 123 days, covered 65,000 kilometres, involved 14,000 torch bearers and used every form of transport possible: from atomic ice-breakers and spacecraft to dog-sledges and teams of reindeer. When it travelled by railway, the Flame was transported by a Russian Railways staff train, made up of eleven carriages, including two restaurant cars, and accompanied by five hundred people. The Olympic Flame went to the North Pole, into outer space and on the International Space Station (ISS). There followed a trip to the bottom of Lake Baikal; it was taken down a coalmine and to the summit of Mount Elbrus. The Olympic Torch Relay even became a religious ceremony: in the railway carriage and on the ice-breaker, the Flame travelled in a special sacred case; and when he sent the Torch on its way from Vladivostok to Khabarovsk, the Head of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin (who also happens to be a patron of the Orthodox Church, and who has experience of transporting the Blessed Easter Flame from Jerusalem to Moscow), made the sign of the cross over the Flame.
Like an animal in the forest, Russia was marking out its territory. With precise points, here we had Kaliningrad (Russia’s outpost inside the European Union); Sakhalin (a message to the Japanese: don’t even think about the Kurile Islands); the North Pole (relevant for the dispute over the territorial ownership of the Lomonosov underwater ridge, where the polar explorer, Artur Chilingarov, hoisted the titanium flag of Russia in 2007). Most important of all, though, was the parade of Russian sovereignty in the North Caucasus, where the last two weeks of the Torch Relay took place before it reached its final destination in Sochi. The true meaning of the holding of the Olympics in this troubled region was that it conclusively confirmed Russian sovereignty over the North Caucasus – the final victory of the two-hundred-year Caucasian war.
And it was no coincidence that the Olympic Torch Relay took place against the background of a discussion of the sovereignty of the Russian Federation. In the State Duma a draft law was being considered that would make the propagation of separatism a criminal offence: ‘The spreading in any form of views, ideas, or calls for action that would question the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.’ It was proposed that the punishment should be severe: for the thoughtcrime against sovereignty, a twenty-year prison term was suggested – much longer than for murder! However, in Russia crimes against the state were always punished more harshly than crimes against individuals. The Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Rogozin, even proposed renaming the Russian Far East ‘Our Own East’ in order to prevent it from moving even further away.
Oh, this childish belief in the power of the word – that if you forbid people from speaking about a problem, it will disappear all by itself! The taboo about having any conversations about the territorial make-up of Russia brings on a generic trauma in our political elite. There is a phantom pain after the collapse of the USSR – ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’, as Vladimir Putin called it – and a panic attack about the threat of further disintegration.
Where does this fear come from? Why has ‘sovereignty’ suddenly become such a painful place for the regime? There are two problems here, neither of which is caused by external (and, indeed, imaginary) threats to sovereignty, but by Russia’s own internal psychological hang-ups. The first is the deepening post-Soviet identity crisis of trying to understand what Russia is: a country for the Russians or a multinational empire? And where do its borders lie? In the Baltic States? In the North Caucasus? In Crimea? In Eastern Ukraine? In Northern Kazakhstan? It is not the separatists who want to dismember Russia, but the Russians themselves who cannot understand where the borders are; this is where the paranoia and hypersensitivity springs from whenever the issue is raised of sovereignty or of Russia’s borders.
18
Alexei Yurchak,