EPILOGUE
The past is always with us. It is never over; it will never lose its power. No action or event ever really disappears, even if sometimes it may seem as though it has receded from view.
In 1991 I thought that the cold war had died along with the Soviet Union. I wondered if everything we had lost would, in part, be compensated by all that we would gain in a new era – one in which the tensions and suspicion that had characterised the decades since 1945 would ebb away. It did not. Perhaps for a while it went into something like hibernation, but now it is becoming clear that it never really left.
Perhaps to you it may seem as if Donald Trump has radically altered the direction of the United States’ foreign policy; that under Putin’s influence (as some people argue) the President has relaxed his country’s position towards Russia. But the way I see it, although he has largely eschewed the kind of rhetoric Hillary Clinton would probably have employed had she won, in real terms this makes little difference. Consider, for instance, the decision by Congress earlier this year to impose an extended range of sanctions and to use its influence in Western Europe to ensure that the force of the sanctions is felt. Or the US’s newly published National Security Strategy, which casts Russia (along with China) as a ‘revisionist power’ that seeks to ‘challenge American power, influence and interests’, while ‘attempting to erode American security and prosperity’.
The skeletons of the cold war are up and walking about once more. And with every passing day they become stronger. Some politicians in both Russia and the West have avoided using the term, and yet I cannot see that they will be able to do so for much longer. It is high time to start calling it what it is.
Of course there is no longer the same wide ideological gap; one can find few places in the world now where the markets do not reign (although places like China, India and Russia have all modified the model to suit their own particular circumstances). And yet while classic capitalism is no longer ranged against pure socialism, and loyalties across the world have been realigned (the Warsaw Pact now seems as much of an anachronism as the Hanseatic League or the Triple Entente[23]), it seems that once more the West is at odds with Russia.
After 1991, we never felt as if we were welcomed into the international community as an equal partner; it seemed as if there was an expectation that we should behave like a supplicant. And yet those days now seem like a brief golden age of cooperation and hope, when something better seemed possible. That hope has been replaced by suspicion and the old temptation to demonise Russia has returned.
One could perhaps argue that to a large extent, the security, political and military establishments of Russia and the West alike are still populated by people who came of age when the cold war was at its height, and have never managed (or wanted) to rid themselves of the assumptions and prejudices that were instilled in them more than three decades ago. This situation has been exacerbated by the pressure placed by US-led Western institutions on Russia in the years following 1991 to adhere to an economic and political model that was inimical to its traditions and historical experience. Russia was never fully integrated into the new global order that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union; instead we have seen the kind of cultural friction predicted in Samuel P. Huntington’s theories about the clash of civilisations.
It feels to me now as if all the black spots on the face of human existence are laid at Russia’s door. I can understand why. There is after all something seductive about the idea that one nation alone is responsible for the world’s problems. It allows people to forget for a moment how phenomenally complex a planet we live on and to convince themselves that if only this one nation could be brought to heel, its leader muzzled, then all would be well. It also enables them to overlook how comparatively weakened Russia really is. Sometimes I wish we really were the omnipresent, omnipotent force we are sometimes painted as being!
But this situation also means that people are afraid. A climate has emerged which means that they do not feel comfortable any more making the connections that are so sorely needed if we are to diffuse the tensions that are growing around us all the time. In 2017, we invited three prominent German writers to attend an event at the Dialogue of Civilizations in Berlin, a contemporary cultural interaction and exchange between Europe and the East under the title ‘European Comedy’. Initially they were all eager to come, but when news of their potential participation became known, a couple were summoned to the institutions they worked for and were warned against involving themselves with a ‘Kremlin propaganda organisation’. To attend, it was suggested, would prejudice their career prospects. It is an unpleasant paradox: without dialogue, the situation we are in will become ever more severe; and yet any attempts by people from the West to forge meaningful links with their Russian counterparts are treated with suspicion. Even in the US, Congressmen are afraid of talking with the Russian ambassador in case they find themselves embroiled in accusations of collusion and conspiracy.
I hate the idea that we have allowed ourselves to become so frozen by the new chill in relations between Russia and the West. Our ability to think for ourselves is under threat. It sometimes feels to me as if there are people on both sides of the divide trying to get into our brains in order to reshuffle the ideas and emotions they find there – manipulating information and filling us with propaganda in order to try and turn us into zombies who will do whatever we are ordered.
And we should never underestimate how profound an impact the messages that children are absorbing now will have on their outlook on the future. I do not want them to internalise the propaganda and the lies that have once again become common currency. If Russian children see only criticism of the West in their parents’ newspapers, if English children only hear how evil Russians are when they turn on the television, it will entrench mentalities that will take years to overcome. There is no word spoken today that will not stay lodged inside the souls of those who will lead the world of tomorrow.
There is, in my opinion, a substantial discrepancy between the beliefs of the vast majority of most countries’ populations, and those espoused by the cultural and political elites who govern them. Much of the information we have access to is controlled by a small number of people – the politicians, businessmen and newspaper editors who all frequent the same clubs, who all eat at the same restaurants – and so it tends to reflect a narrow perspective: it is rare that in either Russia or the West you will see any positive reflections on the other camp. The tone on both sides is overwhelmingly negative. And yet if you talk to men and women in the streets of the West, or of Russia, then the opinions they hold of each other’s nations diverge greatly from those articulated by the people who claim to speak in their name. This, though, is of little use if they are consistently presented with a narrative of hostility and otherness.
23
This may read like a crude characterisation, but I would argue that a new divide has split the world. On one side there are all the nations in the West who adhere to a neo-liberal model of politics and economics, and believe that the rest of the world should be encouraged to adopt the same values. For them, there is only one route to prosperity and civilisation. I see this as a form of chauvinism that is not only insensitive, but which, it is becoming increasingly clear, has failed on its own terms. There is no attempt to understand local conditions or listen to local terms, which means that their interventions invariably come to resemble the damage caused by a bull in a china shop. The other side bears little resemblance to the relatively cohesive socialist bloc of the twentieth century’s second half. In comparison to the united Western system, it is dispersed and disparate. There is little that China, or the Arab nations, or even the central European countries that have joined the EU but have remained on its periphery, have in common, except that they have chosen to push back against attempts to force their culture and economies into a shape that pleases the politicians of the developed world.