Strongman (14 page)

Dan Fried said in an interview: ‘It was not sustainable to argue that the interests and freedoms of other countries, which suffered under Soviet occupation, should be held hostage to a
Russian sense of deprivation of empire. I mean, to some degree the Soviets had achieved a sphere of influence in Europe thanks to Mr Molotov and Mr Ribbentrop, or if you prefer, Hitler and
Stalin.’
³

Over breakfast in a London hotel I put it to Nick Burns that Russia might have legitimate concerns in seeing NATO expand right up to its doorstep, and America installing new weaponry there. It
was, after all, their ‘backyard’. His answer was quite uncompromising: ‘Tough! They lost that right. This was in the American national interest.’
⁴
It was an answer that seemed to me to preclude accommodating even a reformed, ‘democratic’ Russia: it had ‘lost the right’ to influence affairs in its
backyard, apparently by having inherited the sins of the Soviet Union, whereas the USA did have the right to influence affairs there because it was ‘in the American national
interest’.

He went on: ‘When it came to admitting the Baltic countries into NATO, there were really furious arguments about it – both with the Europeans and within Washington. Even George Tenet
[the CIA director], for example, was against it. But many of us had essentially lost hope that we could trust the Russians or integrate them into the West. By 2002, there was a growing suspicion
that Putin wasn’t the person they thought he was, that he couldn’t make Russia a reliable ally. We concluded that we wanted a good relationship with Russia, but the most important
target in the region, post-Cold War, was the freedom and liberation of Eastern and Central Europe. There was lots of opposition in the US, and we had to fight hard, but we thought we had to be
careful about the Russians. We thought it was more important to lock in the one real gain of the fall of the USSR. George W. Bush was a strong believer in that argument.’

The neo-cons believed the policy of putting faith in Russia in the 1990s had failed. ‘I knew Russia would try to become dominant in Europe again, and we had to protect the Eastern and
Central Europeans,’ said Burns. ‘Putin is all about bringing power back to Russia. This was becoming clear by late 2002.’
⁵

That phrase was revealing: making Russia powerful again was precisely what Putin wanted – and precisely what many in Washington could not stomach.

The administration’s ‘Russophiles’ found their views echoed in Western Europe, but not in Washington. One of them says: ‘There seemed to be a viewpoint that by
understanding and laying out the Russian point of view you were endorsing it and legitimising it. This was not the view you find in Europe. This is why we were at odds with the Germans and even the
UK because most of the European interlocutors were trying to factor in what Russia felt about things, because they didn’t want an open confrontation.’

There were many reasons why France and Germany felt closer to the Russians than the Americans. It was not that they underestimated the former Warsaw Pact countries’ longing to join the
West’s structures and to protect themselves from the country that had oppressed them for 50 years. Germany, in particular, was still revelling in the joy of reunification after the collapse
of the Berlin Wall. Nor was it just a matter of pragmatism and trade, although the latter was important for Germany. Rather, there was an ill-defined sense, especially in European intellectual
circles, that Russia ‘belonged’ to Europe, that they shared a history and culture, and the time was right – whatever the shortcomings of Russian democracy – to welcome them
‘home’. Indeed, the argument went, welcoming them home would be precisely the best way to improve democracy there.

President Jacques Chirac of France epitomised this view. He had a strong personal interest in Russia. His parents had had a Russian émigré in their home in the 1930s, and Chirac
himself had learned Russian and even translated Pushkin’s novel in verse,
Yevgeny Onegin
. According to his diplomatic adviser, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, Chirac felt there was
something ‘eternal’ about Russia, that it was neither fully European nor fully oriental. He had got on well with Yeltsin, who gave him the sauna and caviar treatment, and although he
was cool towards Putin at first, he was willing to put his reservations aside, even regarding Chechnya.

‘Chirac said everything possible to help Putin and not to criticise him, and to help him appear on the world stage as a responsible leader having to deal with enormous stakes – how
to catch up from Soviet times and become a modern country,’ says Gourdault-Montagne. ‘Chirac thought there was no evidence for Russia going back to Soviet times. They had jumped into a
new world, but it was a long task, and they had to be supported. And it was in the interest of the West to help the Russians as much as possible because we have common interests. Chirac thought the
stability of the continent was on the axis of Paris, Berlin and Moscow – hence all these trilateral meetings we had until 2007. It was fascinating to see how the three got on
together.’
⁶

German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the third in the trio, was like most of his compatriots eternally grateful to Russia for withdrawing its troops without fuss from Eastern Germany. As a
gesture of goodwill he later wrote off €6 billion of debt that Moscow owed the former German Democratic Republic.

The relationship, it is true, did not get off to a very good start. During the German election of 1998 Schröder had promised to stop pouring vast amounts of cash into Russia, as his
predecessor Helmut Kohl had done. He wanted a pragmatic relationship based on business interests and a certain diplomatic reserve – none of the bear-hugging that Kohl and Yeltsin had indulged
in. His foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, almost caused a diplomatic incident during his first meeting with Putin in January 2000 by denouncing his Chechen campaign and demanding an immediate
ceasefire. Schröder himself did not shy away from visiting the three Baltic republics (something Kohl had refused to do for fear of offending the Russians) just a week before President
Putin’s first visit to Berlin in June 2000.

But the visit itself changed things dramatically. The two men talked for five hours, without an interpreter, thanks to Putin’s command of German. Despite Tony Blair’s attempts to
‘get in there first’, it was clear that Putin regarded Germany as Russia’s paramount European ally. Schröder himself understood that close collaboration with Russia was the
best means to encourage democratisation: ‘Russia has always been successful,’ he wrote, ‘when it has opened itself up to Europe, engaged in a lively exchange and linked itself
with the economic and intellectual development in the rest of Europe.’
⁷
The two men initiated something unique among the European nations: the St
Petersburg Dialogue, an annual Russian–German event which combined intellectual discussion with intergovernmental talks and intensive business-to-business deal-making. Soon Schröder
would be drawn into Putin’s sauna-and-vodka circuit. They became close friends, often visiting each other with their families. Putin would even fly out to the chancellor’s home town of
Hanover just to celebrate Schröder’s 60th birthday with him. Putin enabled Schröder to adopt two children from St Petersburg. After leaving office Schröder became chairman of
Nord Stream, a Gazprom affiliate that would bring natural gas straight from Russia to Germany (which he had supported as chancellor), and dropped all criticism of Putin’s policies. (Chirac,
by contrast, turned down Putin’s offer of a highly paid job with Gazprom.)

In an interview, Schröder looked back at his relationship with Putin and described him as a ‘man you can trust’. ‘He was open, and in contrast to his image he has a lot of
humour. He is very family-oriented, and he doesn’t let down his friends. He’s someone I would be glad to have a beer or glass of wine with even if I didn’t have to deal with him
politically.’
⁸
Those were clearly the words of a man who had no intention of disparaging a colleague who was still in office and with whom he
maintained close business and personal ties. But that does not make them irrelevant. On the contrary, the close relationship between Putin and Schröder – and between Putin and Chirac
– was a major factor in the early 2000s as Russia tried to position itself in the world.

With the UK balanced somewhere between the ‘European’ view and the American, compromises had to be thrashed out – among them NATO’s two major decisions of 2002. In May
the NATO–Russia Council was set up, bringing Russia
closer
to the club. But six months later, at a historic summit in Prague, NATO invited seven former Soviet satellites to become
members
of the club. It wasn’t quite what Putin had in mind when demanding to be treated as an equal.

NATO’s sun shines on eastern Europe

The lights go down in the seventeenth-century Spanish Hall of Prague castle. On a stage two dancers perform a hilarious piece by a Czech-born choreographer, Ji
ř
í Kylián, to music by Mozart. The dancers are dressed (somewhat scantily) in period costume and wigs. In one part of the performance they leap about like fleas,
performing crazy mating rites on a huge four-poster bed. But the audience is not composed of President Václav Havel’s bohemian buddies from a Prague theatre: they are the heads of
state and 700 guests from NATO’s present and future member states – not all of them expecting such a raunchy curtain-raiser to the alliance’s enlargement process.

The Prague summit on 21 November 2002 was Havel’s swansong as president of the Czech Republic. The playwright-turned-politician wanted it to be remembered both for its artistic panache and
its historic significance. He had spent most of his life as a dissident, stubbornly resisting communist rule and protesting at the Soviet occupation of his country. His own country was already a
member of NATO; now he wanted to celebrate the freedom of seven more nations.

It was hard for the Russians to understand that this really was about celebrating freedom (from communism), not threatening Russia. The foreign ministry spokesman, Alexander Yakovenko, spoke
darkly about ‘the appearance of NATO’s military potential at Russia’s borders, just a few dozen kilometres from St Petersburg’.

The foreign minister himself, Igor Ivanov, put a positive gloss on the event: ‘Moscow no longer considers NATO’s eastward expansion as a threat, since the alliance has undergone a
radical transformation since the end of the Cold War and now concentrates on the fight against global terrorism.’ But the Russians did not really understand why enlargement was necessary. It
was not just that they believed that Gorbachev had been promised it would not happen. They also could not understand why, if Russia was accepted as a partner, anyone should feel they needed
protection from them – and they understood perfectly well that despite all the protestations to the contrary, NATO
would
defend its new members against Russia if necessary. After the
handshake of the NATO–Russia Council, Prague came as a slap in the face.

What the Russians failed to do was make any connection between their policies and behaviour
at home
and the way they were perceived
abroad
. This was a problem I had to grapple with
a few years later when I worked as a media adviser for the Kremlin: my clients were unable to grasp that the key to improving their ‘image’ abroad was not better PR but better
behaviour. (I will look at this in detail in Chapter 9.) My impression from working closely with them is that they genuinely do not comprehend why many East Europeans – and particularly the
Balts – remain deeply uneasy about their big neighbour.

Naturally no one at the Prague summit spoke openly of their fear of Russia. But you did not have to dig very deep into history to understand its roots. Almost all of the East European leaders
attending Václav Havel’s show had personally, like him, lived through the horrors of Soviet occupation and life in a totalitarian regime. There were many open sores. The Poles felt the
Russian government had not done enough to acknowledge (far less apologise for) the murder by Stalin’s secret police of thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals at Katyn in 1940. The
Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians had not just been occupied by the Soviet army but incorporated into the Soviet Union, where they had had to fight for their survival as nations. Thousands of
their people had been sent to the Gulag. Their tiny republics had been swamped with Russian citizens, who brought with them their language and culture, and a Moscow-based Communist Party
bureaucracy that turned them into second-class citizens. Native Latvians comprised less than half the population of their own capital city, Riga. There was widespread resentment of the Russian
presence, and the three Baltic nations were the first to rise up against Soviet rule when Gorbachev’s reforms opened the lid a little in the 1980s.

But their independence, restored in 1991, did not put an end to all the problems. Russia came to terms politically with the situation, but more than a million Russians lived in Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania, and the Kremlin felt it had a right and duty to protect them. The new independent governments did themselves no favours by not always treating their Russian minorities with much
consideration. In their hearts, most Balts felt the Russians should never have been there in the first place: it was they who had colonised the Baltic and subjugated its people, so they had only
themselves to blame. Language and citizenship laws which rendered most Russians stateless in Latvia and Estonia were criticised by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the
European Union demanded changes as a condition for the two countries’ accession. Over the years since independence, Russia had kept up a litany of complaints about civil rights in Latvia and
Estonia (Lithuania’s Russian population was much smaller and had few complaints). At times the rhetoric was very hostile, so it should have come as no surprise to the Russians that Baltic
nations were welcomed with open arms into NATO.