Sunday, March 11, 2018

The Long Hangover: Putin's New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past 1st Edition by Shaun Walker (Oxford Universiy Press)





Russian nationalism and nostalgia in a former Moscow correspondent’s account of Putin’s rule

Shaun Walker, for several years the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, describes his book as neither an apology for Vladimir Putin’s policies nor an anti-Putin polemic. It’s a fine line, but he is more successful than most of his western journalistic competitors in exploring the often contradictory attitudes that Russians hold towards their president and the hybrid system he is building on the basis of Russian nationalism, Soviet nostalgia and a striving for international respect.

Walker reports several illuminating interviews with people who hold “an often intangible longing for a past, if not the actual Soviet past, then at least for the sense of meaning that went with it”. There’s a strange but revealing encounter with Ivan Panikarov, a retired power station worker in Kolyma in Siberia, who has created a Gulag museum in his own flat. Amid the evidence of horror that he has spent years collecting, he shocks Walker with the claim that the western view of the Gulag is one-sided: “People fell in love in the camps, people got pregnant, it wasn’t all bad.”

At a higher level Russian politicians and historians have largely failed to make a proper analysis of Stalin’s crimes, Walker writes. They acknowledge the terror but not the guilt, refusing to see that almost everyone who lived through the Stalin period was partially both a victim and a perpetrator. But Walker argues that the west is wrong to contrast Russia’s failure to come to terms with the grimmest aspects of its history with Germany’s success in doing so. A better comparison is Spain where, after Franco’s death, all sides agreed not to inquire into past crimes.

More than half the book deals with the war in Ukraine, where Walker spent many weeks over the past four years. He does not go into detail on the more controversial episodes, such as the downing of a Malaysian airliner or the issue of who started the shooting that led to the toppling of the Ukrainian government. He gives a good account of the unsavoury views of many Ukrainian nationalists and the rehabilitation of wartime leaders involved in anti-Jewish and anti-Polish atrocities, but seems more interested in the attitudes of anti-Kiev, pro-Russia separatists. Walker points to their class component, which he likens to pro-Brexit attitudes in the UK and the new populism in the US and EU. In eastern Ukraine, people who had done well out of the post-Soviet economic chaos opposed links with Russia: those who had lost jobs and status supported pro-Russian separatism.

Walker makes friends with Alexander Khodakovsky, an unusually reflective officer in Ukraine’s special forces who joins the rebel side and becomes its No 2, but hates the corruption of many of his colleagues. Khodakovsky misses the warm social relations of the Soviet past, yet hates the Kremlin’s way of exploiting history in its struggle with Kiev.

Russian politicians have not made a proper analysis of Stalin’s crimes. They acknowledge the terror but not the guilt

Walker’s book promotes a variant of this accusation: Putin is cynically using pride in the Soviet Union’s victory in the second world war as a vehicle for creating a post-communist national identity. There are two weak points in this argument. The victory narrative is not new. It was used extensively during the Stalin and Brezhnev periods, with annual military parades as a reminder of past glory and regular school visits by veterans to inspire the next generation.

Nor are morale-boosting and public anger in the face of post-imperial decline confined to Russia. Coming of age in Britain in the 1960s, I remember the constant spate of war films, the unruly demonstrations by Empire Loyalists protesting at decolonisation, the We Won the War envy over Germany’s economic recovery, all coupled with resentment at the US for hastening Britain’s loss of global status and inheriting its benefits.

Russians resented the way the US treated their country in the 1990s. Putin’s anger over triumphant American boasting that we had moved to a world with only one power centre was shared in many countries. Unipolarity and “end of history” smugness led Washington to the relentless expansion of Nato and the invasion of Iraq. Walker ignores the Nato issue, which upsets almost all Russians, including much of the liberal intelligentsia. They applaud Putin’s resistance however critical they are of his authoritarianism.

The liberals reluctantly accepted the Baltic states’ adhesion to Nato but the flashpoint was Washington’s campaign to bring in Ukraine. Even though most polls until the crisis of 2014 showed Ukrainians preferred non-alignment, Nato would not accept that. It constantly wooed the Ukrainian military and political elite while the US Republican and Democratic parties had offices in Kiev pumping out pro-Nato propaganda. The EU, led by traditionally anti-Russian Poland, pushed the economic case for Ukraine to “make the Euro-Atlantic choice”, arguing that could not look east as well as west. These were strategies that were doomed, if not intended, to split the country and to lead to the war that Walker describes so graphically from the frontline.

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