If Not Putin, Who?

With terrifying photographs leaving absolutely no doubt as to who and what the Russian "Opposition" really is, Peter Hitchens writes:

I like Vladimir Putin. I wish I did not. But I cannot help it. I know that by saying so, I will trigger the lofty wrath of the right-thinking lobby which wants to portray modern Russia as the Evil Empire in a new Cold War. In that war, which they are trying so hard to start, they will see me as a traitor. But it is exactly because I love my own country that I can see the point of Mr Putin.

He stands – as no other major leader does in the world today – for the rights of nations to decide their own business inside their own borders. He has underlined that by refusing to join in the rash American-backed effort to destabilise the Assad regime in Syria. He has dared to wield a real veto (unlike David Cameron’s disposable cardboard one) and face the consequences. He has used his country’s huge oil and gas reserves to maintain an independent state. And he has rejected the current mania for privatisation and market forces as the cure for all ills.

Russia, he believes, has had quite enough privatisation. And that is why the searing beam of selective outrage is being turned on him by the global media and many Western foreign ministries, not to mention the ‘activists’ who roam the world deciding which governments are bad and which good. That is why you are being invited to rejoice at the anti-Putin demonstrations in Moscow, while dozens of other equally justified protests in other countries go unreported. That is why you are expected to hope that he is badly bruised in the presidential election next Sunday, March 4. It is why you will one day be invited to applaud some sort of mob revolution aimed at his overthrow.

It may even succeed. If so, it will be followed by the usual disappointment. Who now cares about squalid Ukraine, whose ‘Orange Revolution’ was supposed to be a new dawn of humanity? But by the time their revolution goes sour, Mr Putin’s high-minded critics will have swivelled their searchlight on to another target. Russian corruption and repression will suddenly be acceptable and forgotten in a Moscow that will have been forced – – as it was in the Yeltsin years – to accept Western interference in its economy and around its frontiers.

Let us not be blind here. Mr Putin is without doubt a sinister tyrant at the head of a corrupt government. His private life and wealth are a mystery. His personality cult – bare-chested tough-guy, horseman, diver, jet pilot – is creepy and would be laughable if it were not a serious method of keeping power. The lawless jailing of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky is his direct fault. The hideous death in custody of the courageous lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is a terrible blot on Putin’s thuggish state. The murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko are symptoms of the sickness of modern Russia.

The general cynicism of the Russian government is breathtaking. It does all the things that men of power want to do in the rest of the world but daren’t because of restraints of law and custom. If you doubt that, look at the way Western states behaved during the ‘war on terror’. Meanwhile, who can deny that despotism and corruption are endemic in this sad, ravaged country? I should know. I spent two of the most important years of my life in Moscow when it was much, much worse. It was the very heart of an evil empire whose aims and ideas threatened the whole happiness of mankind.

This is where, 22 years ago, I came to live in a dark and secretive building where my neighbours were KGB men and the aristocrats of the old Kremlin elite. Here, in this mysterious and often dangerous place, I saw what lies just beneath our frail and fleeting civilisation – bones, blood, death, injustice, despair, horror, loss, corruption and fear. I grasped for the first time how wonderfully safe and lucky I had been all my life in the unique miracle of freedom and law that is – or was – England. I learned to respect, above all, those who managed to retain some sort of integrity amid the knee-deep filth of communist Moscow. I also learned not to be too unkind to those who made compromises with it. I was there as a privileged person. Would I have been able to stay clean if I had lived as they did? Would you? I very much doubt it.

I saw the last hammers and sickles pulled down, and the braziers full of smouldering Communist Party membership cards the day the all-powerful Party died. I saw the tanks trundle along my street as they tried to restore communism, and I saw them, and their cause, depart for ever. I witnessed oppressed peoples throw off Soviet rule. In the course of that struggle, I saw for the first time what a human head looks like after a bullet has passed through it, and also what a human face looks like when it is telling direct lies about murder. When I finally left, I was sure that a horrible fog of lies and perversion had been scoured from the surface of the earth when communism ended.

I am confident that it will not come back. From now on, it is just Russia – heartbroken, ravaged, afraid, desperate and cruel, but no longer a menace to us. Nor is Putin’s frosty rule comparable to the gangster chaos of Boris Yeltsin – a drunken, debauched disaster that reduced millions of Russians to selling their personal possessions on the street to stay alive. It is not just me saying this. The distinguished Russian film director Stanislav Govorukhin – whose devastating documentary We Can’t Go On Living Like This helped end the communist era – is now working for Putin. He recalls that the Yeltsin era was ‘a thieving outrage, open plunder. Billions were stolen, factories and whole industry sectors. They destroyed and stole, they ground Russia into dust’. But, now, he says, ‘we have returned to “normal”, “civilised” corruption’.

This is, on the face of it, an astonishing thing to say. But most Russians readily understand it. Their country, almost always subject to absolute power, has been corrupt from its beginning. One of the greatest of pre-revolutionary Russian historians, Nikolai Karamzin, asked to sum up the character and story of his country and people, replied with just one word ‘Voruyut’ – ‘They steal’. But in the communist era, the state and the Party stole their private lives, their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers, and dragged them to death camps. And in the Yeltsin era, when Western ‘experts’ stalked the land, the nation’s rulers stole the whole country. I am not arguing in favour of this state of affairs, just pointing out that if the only alternative is even worse, you might see its advantages.

But I can see no reason at all why Britain should seek to undermine Russia’s government. And I can see many reasons why we should in future be friends. One of them is that Vladimir Putin, alone of all the major national leaders of our times, refuses to be pushed around by supranational bodies. It would be good to see our own government doing the same thing. After all, how many of us are as keen as we used to be on the supposed cure-alls and blessings of human rights, privatisation, the United Nations, the European Union, open borders, political correctness and free trade? Mr Putin’s Russia is refreshingly free of these things. I suspect that private speech and thought are – paradoxically – more uncontrolled under Mr Putin’s iron tyranny than they are in liberal Britain.

Russia also spotted long ago that the New Globalists – led by Anthony Blair – wanted to dissolve independent countries and replace them with dependent, subservient provinces in a New World Order. When that process pushed into Ukraine and the Caucasus, Putin angrily resisted, and was lied about by Western media and politicians as a result. To this day, a lot of people believe that Russia was in the wrong in its war with tiny Georgia in 2010. In fact, Georgia’s leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, provoked a dangerous conflict in the hope of manoeuvring the United States into supporting him. Saakashvili, supposedly a democrat, came to power in a mob-bolstered putsch nauseatingly named ‘the Rose Revolution’. Since then he has used Putin-like methods to crush opposition. In November 2007 he sent his police on to the streets of Tbilisi to club and gas anti-corruption demonstrators, and shut an opposition TV station. But because he is on the side of globalism, his sins are unknown.

This is what everyone should remember as they read and view the current wave of media unanimity about the evils of Vladimir Putin. The world is full of corrupt despotisms. But you never hear anything about most of them. The selective outrage about Russia pretends to be morally driven. It has another purpose. Here is an alternative report from Moscow, the one you won’t read anywhere else. Let its theme be the slogan on the smart, expensive banners of official pro-Putin demonstrations, most of whose participants are bribed or cajoled into attending.

‘If not Putin, who?’

The same question has occurred to Anastasia, which is not the real name of a TV reporter who knows in nasty detail how censorship has operated for years in Russian broadcasting. So Anastasia, who regards freedom of speech in Putin’s Russia as an illusion, might be expected to be keen on the anti-Putin protests. Yet, much as she loathes the repression, she is ‘totally disappointed’ by the opposition, which is amateur and offers no serious alternative. When she stops to think about the future of her country, she sighs: ‘The only rational conclusion is despair.’ She is – like many intelligent, informed Muscovites – unimpressed by and suspicious of Alexei Navalny, the fashionable Western-educated blogger who has made a name for himself by exposing corruption.

Western liberals seldom mention Navalny’s other side, a caustic Russian nationalism that has led him into the sordid company of neo-Nazis. Westerners tend to accept his claim that a creepy video, in which he used the word ‘cockroaches’ to refer to terrorists from the Caucasus, is a joke. Some joke. While actual cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says in the 2007 recording, ‘for humans I recommend a pistol’. Guardian readers and BBC types, currently lionising Navalny, would rightly cast him into outer darkness if he were an Englishman who held comparable views.

The same point was made to me by Dmitry (I have decided not to use his surname), a worker for a Moscow small business, introduced to me by a Putin critic, and absolutely not a plant. ‘Foreigners like meeting people who are protesting against something,’ he scoffs. ‘If I look at the whole political spectrum from Left to Right, I can see only one candidate to whom we can trust the future of my country, and that is Putin.’ His main motivation is a hatred of the Western-dominated Yeltsin era, and a strong patriotic pride. Dmitry says Putin saved the integrity of the country by crushing the Chechen revolt – something Yeltsin tried and failed to do, with equal brutality but much less foreign criticism. ‘In 1999, our country was on the edge of falling apart. If we had lost Chechnya, we could have lost the whole North Caucasus and been reduced in the end to a rump state of Muscovy. That would have been the end of Russia.’

We should not underestimate the feeling of wounded patriotism in a country which – not unreasonably – feels itself constantly vulnerable to invasion. Nor should we neglect the millions of older people who have – under Putin – received their pensions regularly, and been able to save without fear of inflation, thanks to the Moscow government’s prudent and astute use of oil revenues. The mother of an old friend of mine, a naval widow who lived most of her life in conditions of unbelievable Soviet drabness, now looks forward to regular holidays on Turkish Mediterranean beaches.

As for corruption, Dmitry snorts at Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption campaign. And, as so often, the loathed name of Boris Yeltsin comes up. He recalls Yeltsin, in the Eighties, as Moscow’s Communist Party boss, abandoning his chauffeured car, travelling on a crowded trolleybus and making a great show of his incorruptibility. ‘It made him very popular. But he ended up as the most corrupt of all. He destroyed everything that was good from the Soviet times. It was wasted and given away. The gap between the very rich and the very poor was greater than ever. He ended up totally, totally corrupt and gave everything away to the oligarchs.’

To get the other view I visited Anna, a beautiful young mother, a member of Moscow’s gentle, bookish intellectual class. Like so many Muscovites, she lives her life behind a grey-painted steel front door that looks as if it has been cut from the armour-plating of a warship, and tells you more about the nervous, lawless reality of Russia than anything I can say. I asked her to answer that persistent question: ‘If not Putin, who?’ And she could not. Instead she complained – with justice – that Putin has destroyed, or prevented the rise of, any serious challenger. ‘There is no adequate leader because the stage has been swept clean of rivals,’ she mourned. She did not dwell on the other side of this, that Russia’s liberals discredited themselves for ever by being associated with the hated Yeltsin years. Anna saw Navalny as inspiring, and a possible future challenger. She made light of his nationalism – even though people of her class and politics would normally loathe such views.

It was frustrating to talk to Anna, so intelligent, so concerned for her country and worried about how her son would grow up under Putin’s iron rule. But she admitted that Putin’s nature had been clear for many years, and had not just suddenly emerged. He had crushed media dissent and rigged elections since he first came to power in 2002, yet nobody had complained. So why be so militant now? Anna and today’s protesters are, in fact, angry at their own past complacency. So they may well be. They are fine, admirable people and, in some unforeseeable future, I hope against hope they will get the Russia that they want.

But this grim part of the planet is not like our secure, gentle island. Fear – fear of invasion, fear of chaos, fear of want – presses in from every direction. Fear is, in fact, normal. The best they can hope for is to neutralise it. Despots thrive on fear, for it gives them a pretext to gather power into their fists. When Russians get rid of their fear and scrap their armoured-steel front doors, they may be ready for an ordered, lawful and incorruptible free state.

Until then, if not Putin, who?