Most people are not interested enough to find out the truth for themselves – instead, they are prey to absurd and dangerous simplifications. If their worldview is based on what they see from watching the television news with half an eye open, or flicking listlessly through the newspapers, then is it any wonder that they believe it when they are told that Putin is a devil?
Not long ago a friend of mine, Václav Klaus, who at the time was the honorary president of a prestigious university in the United States, made a statement highlighting how pervasive anti-Russian propaganda had become. Not long afterwards, the institution suggested, politely but firmly, that it might be a good time for him to resign from his post. That kind of stubbornness, that kind of inability to see beyond walls, to learn, to listen to others, always brings severe consequences in its train, and it fills me with fear.
In 2014, I was, along with a number of Russian officials and businessmen, placed on the US State Department’s sanctions list. It decreed that I am forbidden from travelling to the US, that any assets I might have had in the US should be frozen, and that US citizens and corporations are banned from entering into business transactions with me. It seems imposing, but in practice it does not change much; I do very little business in the States. But on a personal level, it has created an uncomfortable new status for me, one that also has ramifications for my family, affecting their lives and plans. It felt as if the sanctions were not used to target genuinely dangerous individuals, but to make a point: we have the ability and, furthermore, we also believe we have the right, to obstruct the lives of anyone we wish. This to my mind has been a grievous mistake, because the only concrete thing they have achieved by trying to turn a small group of Russians into pariahs is to have created an atmosphere of suspicion and suppression in their own society. They are like doctors who have been infected by the virus they were trying to cure; sanctions have introduced a disease into the Western community.
This attitude only serves to make regular Russians believe that the West represents an enemy and that as a result it is time to draw back from the world, consolidate and prepare to fight back. It devastates the chance of conducting any kind of meaningful dialogue. The same is true of the constant personal attacks made on Vladimir Putin. It is no secret that Russians can shoulder a great many burdens, and bear suffering like no other nation on earth, but they will not stand being insulted. They experience an insult to their leader as if it is an insult to them and their country too. (This is a sentiment articulated best by Alexander Pushkin in 1826: ‘Of course, I despise my fatherland from head to foot – however, I am annoyed when a foreigner shares this feeling with me.’) That is the greatest mistake committed by the leaders in the West. They just do not understand. The more the Russian people feel as if they are being attacked, the fiercer their reaction will be, and that is dangerous.
My life has been enriched by encounters with men and women from other cultures. I have been the recipient of spontaneous gestures of warmth and generosity, and witnessed the very best of human nature, such as the Americans who dropped everything to come to the aid of a crushed city many miles away in Armenia and the elderly former railway worker who gave so many of her possessions up to help those wounded in the attack on the Nevsky Express. None of these people behaved that way because it was their government’s policy; in some cases, they were in fact acting contrary to it. I was first elected, unanimously, to be the President of the International Union of Railways (the first ever Russian to occupy this post) in 2012, and reconfirmed two years later. During this period, one of heightened international tension, I never noticed any bad feeling from my peers in that professional community, not even a glimpse of it, towards Russian Railways, or Russia, or the Russian people. I received the vote of the American delegate even though I was the subject of sanctions imposed by his own party.
By contrast, I have also seen how so-called diplomacy can petrify a person’s natural inclination to reach out in friendship to others. The exchange I witnessed between the two Koreans exemplifies this officially sponsored degradation of the ability and will to communicate.
I spent enough time working as a diplomat to know that, these days, official channels are a fruitless way of conducting international dialogue, or even meaningful negotiations. There is rarely an attempt to create a mutual basis for understanding, even at a time when, with the international community more fractured and wounded than I have ever seen it, one would imagine that this kind of dialogue between civilisations is sorely needed. Diplomacy has been reduced to an exchange of prepared statements, an attempt at mutual manipulation, and I have come to believe that it requires either a stroke of luck – such as the one delivered by Kang Kyung Ho’s wife – or the kind of catastrophe that reminds both parties of their shared humanity – such as the earthquake at Spitak – to break through these barriers.
What is terrifying to me is that, while the world order – where capitalism faced communism – as we once knew it has broken into pieces, nothing has emerged in the time since that is capable of restoring any kind of stability and balance. The West wants to draw a new world map, but it does not recognise that, by doing so, it has created a set of circumstances that is already turning against it. This is partly due to the dubious relationships it has entered into. Nobody would claim that Saudi Arabia is a paragon of democracy or human rights, and yet silence prevails because the country is an important ally of the West. To my mind, that is a very dangerous precedent – a return to the kind of policy encapsulated by the comment Franklin Delano Roosevelt allegedly made about the murderous Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo: ‘He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.’
I feel a genuine sense of responsibility – to my children, to my grandchildren, to everyone I care for – to try to do what I can to de-escalate the tensions that threaten to plunge our world into chaos, but no matter how strongly one feels, it is hard for a lone voice to make itself heard. Harder still when you know that your arguments will be struck away by people who take one look at you, raise their noses into the air, and say, ‘He is Russian, he used to be in the KGB, he used to occupy a high-ranking position in Russia; whatever he is saying is just propaganda bullshit.’ This is primitive, and I cannot accept it. I can only hope that one day we will be able to change this attitude.
I cofounded the Dialogue of Civilizations, an independent NGO, in early 2002. I wanted to help create an independent organisation – one that did not belong to any country, any government, or even any single individual, and which did not have to wait for good fortune or a disaster in order to be able to encourage meaningful communication between nations. It was also, at least in part, a response to Professor Samuel Huntington’s influential book The Clash of Civilizations, which had been published six years previously. He suggested that increased contact between Western nations and the Islamic world would lead only to increased tension and confrontation. We felt as if we wanted to propose a different kind of programme for the future of human interaction. We wanted to use the Dialogue of Civilizations as an instrument to replace the harsh words that have become diplomacy’s currency, to replace conflict with conversation.
Too much is made of difference, and not enough of the many values we share. It is bizarre that people draw a fault line between Orthodoxy and the other Christian confessions, when in fact they have far greater cause to be united than divided. That is the emphasis we wanted to find in the Dialogue of Civilizations: communication founded on what we have in common rather than on what sets us apart.