The missed opportunity
with Russia
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF
Associate since 1991
Comments directly to
JonatPower@aol.com
February 20, 2007
LONDON - When I tuned in this morning to Danish radio’s
classical station it was to hear the opening bars of Rachmaninov’s
third piano concerto. It draws on Russia’s deep repository of folk
music but turns it, moulds it and polishes it into one of the most sublime
pieces of music ever written. Who says Russia’s deep beyond cannot
join with the pulse of civilized Europe?
Is Russia not part of the “European house”, as former Soviet
president, Mikhail Gorbachev, used to say? Catherine the Great said the
same in 1767- “Russia is a European state”. Muscovy has been
an integral part of Christendom since the tenth century.
Churchill was right to regard the Bolsheviks as “a baboonery”.
But even Lenin saw himself as heir to the French revolution and in the
early 1920s the Commitern discussed the possibility of a United States
of Europe. When the chains of communism fell away many Russians, especially
the educated, thought in Vaclev Havel’s phrase, of “the Return
to Europe.”
Back in 1905 when Russia basked in its liberal political progress and
imbibed the giants of world literature that it had produced - Pushkin,
Lermontov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov (Which other country
can equal this achievement? - perhaps only Britain and France, but then
we have only to mention the marvellous music of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov
and Mussorgsky, and the performances of the Ballet Russe, to realize that
Russia was at that time in a class on its own.) All that was needed then,
as the historian, Norman Davies, has written, was “an indefinite
prolongation of the European peace.”
At that moment in time all seemed possible. Peace was very real and of
long continuance. No one imagined that political leaders could be so crass
or small minded to be rolled by the petty conflicts that launched the
continent into its worst ever war, and then, failing to clear up the mess
that created, be dragged into one even worse a generation later.
Today, a decade and a half after the end of the Cold War, we are in danger
of missing the greatest chance that history has ever bestowed of making
Russia part of Europe. It is easy for Europeans to blame America for the
present state of growing hostility. Indeed, the Americans have not been
wise. President Bill Clinton’s decision to break a solemn promise
made to Gorbachev and expand Nato’s membership up to near Russia’s
borders (“the most fateful error of the entire post Cold War era”
in George Kennan’s words), and the constant effort to undermine
the traditional Russian reach into the Caspian basin have been highly
provocative and little understood by Russia’s intelligentsia much
less the patriotic man in the street.
More recently, the abrogation of the Anti-Missile treaty, in which President
George W. Bush won President Vladimir Putin’s concurrence, is being
undermined by the Pentagon’s decision to build interceptor missiles
in Poland and radars in the Czech Republic.
But it is the European Union that had the influence, the reach and the
power to call a halt to all this. The trouble is it never made a convincing
case or could develop a coherent alternative policy. When German Chancellor,
Gerhard Schroeder, went out of his way to embrace Putin he was simply
derided by most of his peers.
When nobody is pushing the other way the American juggernaught fills the
vacuum, as Robert Kagan argues in his recent book, “Dangerous Nation”.
That is in the nature of a superpower in what was for a time a unipolar
war. One senses that President Bush started off with warm personal feelings
towards Putin, but it is to misread the power of the military-industrial-academic-journalistic
complex to think even a president can halt America’s age-old proclivity
to be expansionist if there is no resistance.
Russia has not made it easy for itself - the chaos of the liberal Yeltsin
years and the subsequent reaction by the puritanical, hard-minded, Putin,
not least the war in Chechnya which was won by using evil tactics that
western armies can only dream of.
Yet Putin-bad is overwhelmed by Putin-good and Europe, if it had developed
the will, could have made it Putin-better. Even today in Russia www.Polit.ru
and similar websites keep the intelligencia well informed. The Russian
elite, especially the scientific one, is totally plugged into its western
counterparts. The arts are flourishing. Putin will respect the constitution
and stand down at the end of his second term.
The question today is how to draw out the best in Russia and how not to
provoke the worse. This means that Europe as a whole must devise a muscular
policy, worthy of its own political and economic clout. This means not
letting the Americans set the pace with Russia, any more than they are
allowed to in French, Swedish or British politics.
Copyright © 2007 Jonathan
Power
Last 
Next
Jonathan Power can be
reached by phone +44 7785 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Follow this link to read about - and
order - Jonathan Power's book written for the
40th Anniversary of Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
Tell a friend about this column by Jonathan Power
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
Get
free articles & updates
|