The Perils of Russophobia

I promised to write about why Britain can’t see Russia straight, and why it is hard to forgive Germany for what she did in Petrograd in 1917.

 

Here goes. I shall start in the high, waste paces of the earth, where the Great game was played, because it helps to explain a general British blindnesson this subject, one from which I used to suffer myself.

 

Having been to Kashgar, Tashkent, Teheran Samarkand and Peshawar, and been overwhelmed by the sheer delight of being in these places, I loved almost every page of Peter Hopkirk’s ‘The Great Game’.

 

You see, to me, much of this part of the world always seemed to exist really only in the world of myth. I had seen faded gravure pictures of it in antique copies of ‘The Children’s Encyclopaedia’, with which I would shut myself away in the disused pantry of a holiday house we used to take each year in the then unknown village of West Wittering, later to be made famous by Keith Richards and Marianne Faithfull.

 

The very names, as George Macdonald Fraser once pointed out, sound like magic spells, especially Samarkand. I can still misquote at will from James Elroy Flecker: 'Sweet to ride forth at evening past the wells, where shadows stretch gigantic on the sand, and, softly in the silence, beat the bells, along the Golden Road to Samarkand. We travel not for trafficking alone. By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned. For lust of knowing what should not be known, we take the Golden Road to Samarkand’.

 

Flecker was a pretty odd fellow, who seems to have lusted quite a lot for knowledge of what should not be known, but goodness! He could evoke the Englishman’s idea of the East, remote, swept by hot unfriendly winds, above all a long, long way from Bromley, Solihull or Maidenhead, and likely to stay that way.

 

That was the way it looked, in the Encyclopaedia in those fuzzy old pictures, tightly sealed in a box marked ‘far away’.

 

To be pitched into it, pungent, dangerous and hot, was something of a surprise, especially since this happened because I had gone to live in Moscow and had only dimly appreciated that the Soviet capital was an easy gateway to the unknown wilds of Central Asia.  Of all my travels, I still tend to think that my visit to Samarkand was the most exotic and overpowering I have ever undertaken.  It wasn’t very safe, it wasn’t very clean, it was an explosion of odours and colours more intense than I had ever seen before. Even then, it was still the edge of the known world. To this day, I can be pretty sure that in any group of people I will be the only one who has been there.

 

I shan’t, I fear,  ever get back to Samarkand, not while Uzbekistan has its present government, and so will never get to Bokhara or Khiva at all, which I shall always regret. And while part of me longs to go once more to see if the Chinese have left anything of Kashgar

(which they were busy wrecking when I was last there http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233439/Special-Investigation-PETER-HITCHENS--Blood-fear-Happiness-Street-China-threatens-obliterate-ancient-culture.html )

... I somehow doubt it, though the old vineyards at the edge of town, dating from the time of Christ, may yet survive, and the unearthly stone hills, which lie to the West of the railway for some miles, will be there long after the Peking regime has passed into myth. Perhaps I'll go again one day. 

 

It is a great and uplifting journey, especially on the astonishing imperial railway which Peking has built to Kashgar.

 

But the point about all these back-of-beyond places is that we once believed that they were a battlefield between the British and Russian Empires, and a possible invasion route down which the Tsar’s Cossacks would one day come to steal the Raj from us. Read Peter Hopkirk’s book (the Great Game)yourselves to see what you think, but I am more or less sure that this was a phantom fear. If you read his accounts of the adventures of brave, wild men from both sides who first penetrated this lawless, mapless region, you will see that such an invasion was an almost impossibly hopeless task. Any Russian army that reached the Khyber, or Quetta, would be so exhausted, ill-equipped and half-starved that a well-led defensive force could have blown it to pieces.

 

Russia certainly wanted to own central Asia and to dominate Persia. It had quietly seized large chunks of China which are going to very troublesome in the years ahead. But what it really wanted (and would certainly have got, under secret agreements duly signed and sealed,  had the Tsar survived until 1918) was Constantinople. And it used its theoretical ability to threaten India as a counter-tease to Britain, when Britain got in the way of its plans to take over the mouth of the Black Sea.

 

Russia wanted Constantinople for its own purposes, to secure its southern flank against attack. An intelligent British government would have recognised this, rather than imagining that St Petersburg, as it then was, had a global plan to chuck Britain out of Egypt and deprive us of India.  This phantasmal fear was largely to blame for the futile war in the Crimea, whose only lasting benefit to anyone on either side was to improve the standard of hospital nursing. I have a feeling this could have been achieved without a bloody war.

 

Prominent among those spreading wild Russophobia was none other than The Times newspaper, which still continues in the same tradition today, though in a less direct and appealing way. It's interesting how often that great newspaper is wrong.

 

In 1838, long before Rupert Murdoch got hold of it, that organ was roaring: “From the frontiers of Hungary to the heart of Burmah and Nepaul…the Russian fiend has been haunting and troubling the human race, and diligently perpetrating his malignant frauds…to the vexation of this industrious and essentially pacific empire"(original spellings retained).

 

In 1842, after the self-inflicted catastrophe of the First Afghan War and the destruction of an entire British army, ‘The Times’ sought to blame St Petersburg, ‘whose growing influence amongst these tribes first called for our interference’. The Thunderer stressed that Russian agents were ‘examining with the greatest care’ the passes leading into British India . And it was suspicious that one of the first to be killed was the British political officer Sir Alexander Burnes  ‘the keenest antagonist of the Russian agents’.

 

In retrospect it is fairly easy to see that these suspicions were not really justified. How much  is written today about Russia by our media which will look just as thin 100, or even ten years hence?

 

There’s something about Russia – its different alphabet, its troublesome consonants,  its bearded intellectuals, its frozen climate, its ferocious vodka,  its onion-domed, oriental architecture and its deep dark forests and Siberian vastness, which makes most Western observers throw up their hands in bafflement and (in some cases) wrongly–assumed superiority.

 

Most Russians are pretty unhappy about their own country’s politics. But they understand all too well how it is that their choices are so limited. Indefensible frontiers make a country put security first and liberty second, authority first and law second, and it would be interesting to see how much English liberty there would be if our small culture had sought to survive on the banks of the Volga or the Don (or come to that the banks of the Loire or the Danube or the Rhine) .

 

Of course, if people wouls stop attacking Russia, it might develop more towards the liberty and law model (see below) . But it gets few chances to do so. 

 

I am very glad of the sea, which has served Britain so well over so many centuries. But it is not a virtue for which we , the British, can claim credit. It is just a piece of good providence, which the poor Russians don't share. The only thing we can claim to have done is built a Navy to ensure that nobody else controlled it, but now we have abandoned that security, there’s nothing to boast of at all.  I think the general British inability to understand continental politics, and to mess up interventions on the continent most of the time, stems from this simple, total inability to understand that, without a deep wide saltwater moat, your life is entirely different from that of someone who lacks this treasure. I am increasingly nauseated by people who sneer at the French for collaborating, who would themselves have collaborated just as swiftly under the same conditions – but just lack the imagination to see that.

 

When I came to know individual Russians, I began to admire them for their humorous stoicism in the face of a harshness of life, from the moment of birth, which would have shrivelled the vitals of most English people I know.

 

So perhaps we might consider it possible that Russians are like us, but cursed with different circumstances. And so to consider those circumstances a bit more intelligently.

 

And so to Richard Pipes.

 

My edition of his ‘The Russian Revolution 1899-1919’ has a clever joke on its cover, which only the assiduous reader will discover. It shows a scene of panic and violence on the streets of Petrograd

No obvious danger is visible, but it is full of terror. People are lying prone, perhaps dead, perhaps taking cover. Others are running. Hats lie abandoned among the tramlines. Great buildings, erected by authority and order, stare down on an alarming chaos. Soon, you sense, they may be in flames. And nobody will be coing to put them out. 

 

On page 429, the picture is reprinted in the text. But here we learn that it is not what most people think of as ‘The Russian Revolution’, of October 1917. It is a scene from the failed Bolshevik putsch in July of that year, which collapsed because its leaders, principally Lenin,  lost their nerve,

 

The actual ‘October Revolution’ was not significantly violent at all. Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 film ‘October’, scenes from which are often quite wrongly used in ‘documentaries’ to illustrate the Leninist coup d’etat , is a work of fiction. The alleged ‘Storming’ of the Winter Palace did not take place. The building was not really even defended by the time the Bolsheviks walked in. The event portrayed in Eisenstein’s film is a pantomime with almost no basis in fact.

 

The truth is far, far less romantic and much more squalid. Lenin was an agent of the German government, who had transported him to Petrograd and who (by clever means described in the Pipes book) channelled very large sums to the Bolsheviks in the justified hope that they would overthrow the Provisional Government and take Russia out of the war, freeing them to begin their ‘Federative Empire’ in the East at Brest-Litovsk ,and defeat Britain and France in a  final one-front offensive in the summer of 1918 (as they almost did) .

 

There had been a real revolution, a vast convulsion and moral collapse of the old order, in Petrograd in February 1917. This had created, for the first time, a free and potentially law-governed modern Russia, which might have become a normal country. Alas, despite being warned, and despite being offered the support of the army to put down the Bolsheviks when it would have been easy, by the interesting and far from Tsarist General Lavr Kornilov , Russia’s Provisional Government and denocratic socialists failed to save themselves and fell needlessly to a feeble, foreign-backed putsch – so condemning the country to nearly 80 years of hell. Looking at the events of these few months in Petrograd, it is as if all the good people have been hypnotized by the Bolshevik cobra.

 

They knew that the Bolsheviks planned a coup. They had already seen them try and fail.  They had real information which could have allowed the arrest and execution of the Bolshevik leadership for treason. Perhaps they simply did not believe or understand - as few did then – that so much evil could follow their failure. But they would never have faced this danger without Imperial German gold and scheming.

 

This intervention by Germany must surely be one of the worst actions ever committed by a civilized nation.

 

By comparison with the conspiratorial overthrow of the last best hope of Russian freedom, using a man of boundless evil to accomplish it, invading Belgium seems to me to be a minor sin. How strong must the historic impulse have been to persuade liberal, civilized men in Berlin to hire the merciless bladder of hate, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, and his Bolshevik pirates, to smash a beacon of hope and replace it with the world’s biggest prison camp? And all this was done to secure victory in a warwhich Germany had herself started in 1914, in the hope of defeating and destroying Russia. 

 

What baffles me is why people are so uninterested in the origins and nature of this tragedy, and why they still seem so relaxed about Germany’s repeated efforts to prevent Russia developing as a modern and prosperous country. Of course, this is a reasonable self-interest up to a point.  A powerful,  rich and stable  Russia would not necessarily suit Germany’s needs (read 'the needs of the European Union') and would be an annoying rival for resources and access to the sea in central Europe, Ukraine and the Caucasus.  

But how many times must the rest of us be drawn into this, let alone asked to approve of it, and - worse - frowned on and slandered as apologists for tyranny when we criticize it?

If there is to be peace in Ukraine, and surely we must hope for it above all as Christmas approaches, it would help if we learned a little history, used a bit of arithmetic and stopped blaming the victim for defending himself.  How strange that a retreating, shrinking power should be accused of aggression, and an advancing, expanding one not even acknowledged to exist, let alone criticised or restrained.

 

Still, a world that can use Eisenstein's fiction as documentary footage for 70 years can believe practically anything.