Posted on 01/28/2006 8:00:43 PM PST by aculeus
I miss the Cold War. I know I ought not to, but I just can't help it. So I was naturally delighted by last week's spy story. Admittedly, as one of the papers here cruelly remarked, it was more Johnny English than James Bond. In a television documentary that had Kremlin fingerprints all over it, four British embassy staff were accused of being spooks. Blurred video footage purported to show them fiddling with a rock in a Moscow suburb.
Now, the young men and women the Foreign Office traditionally recruits are the type of people who do enjoy fiddling with rocks. Having read Classics at Balliol, they generally have an enthusiasm for archaeology. Very probably they had noticed a faded Cyrillic inscription and were, in all innocence, trying to date it. But they did not reckon with the ever-vigilant FSB, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB: according to them, the rock contained an illicit electronic device for communicating with Russian "accomplices".
Well, it's possible. Mobile phones or email are not terribly secure and walks in the park are rather passé. But why would Our Men in Moscow want to conceal what they were up to if, as the Russians allege, they were merely transferring funds to Russian non-governmental organisations? Only in the fevered imagination of Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB operative who now runs Russia, do NGOs figure as subversive entities.
Coming up soon at the British Council in Moscow - which has also come under suspicion - are such regime-threatening events as a conference on climate change and a presentation with the insidiously imperialist title: "Independent Schools in the UK."
Mr Putin's crackdown on NGOs is part of a wider pattern of behaviour that strongly suggests my nostalgia for the Cold War is shared in the Kremlin. For example, Russia's Atomic Energy Agency is currently blocking international access to four nuclear sites, thereby slowing down the procedures for decommissioning and verification that were set up in the 1990s to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology.
In recent weeks, first Ukraine and now Georgia have been made to feel their dependence on Russian energy supplies, which are firmly back under state control since the purge of the Yeltsin-era oligarchs.
Mr Putin's New Year present to the Ukrainian government was to turn off the gas supply just as the thermometer began to plummet. Last week the President of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, accused Russia of "outrageous blackmail" after the two pipelines that supply his country were blown up under mysterious circumstances (now that definitely sounds more Pierce Brosnan than Rowan Atkinson).
Mr Putin - or "Gasputin" as the Georgians now like to call him - has been openly hostile to the governments in these two former Soviet Republics, both of which came to power after revolutions (respectively Orange and Rose in colour) overthrew stooges of the Kremlin.
I do not know if Gazprom has lately increased its prices in Belarus, home of the last old-style Communist dictatorship in Europe, but somehow I doubt it. Meanwhile work is going ahead on a new gas pipeline along the Baltic seabed, designed to send Russia's prime export directly to Western Europe, cutting out the Ukraine and Poland.
Nobody can now pretend that Russia is just (as the old Cold War joke had it) "Upper Volta with rockets". Soaring energy prices have brought boom times to Russia, even if the returns mainly flow into the coffers of the new nomenklatura. The Russian stock market went up 80 per cent last year. So if Mr Putin wants Cold War II, you might be forgiven for thinking, he can certainly afford to have it.
Of course, I was not being entirely serious when I said that I miss the Cold War. I would never wish the Soviet Union back, not least for the sake of the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians and all the other peoples who won back their liberty in 1989. Though many Western Europeans still struggle to come to terms with this, the Soviet Union under Stalin was as murderous a totalitarian regime as Nazi Germany, and it improved only marginally under his successors.
What makes me nostalgic is that Soviet wickedness made politics so much simpler in my youth. Either you saw the evil empire for what it was, or you were one of the many suckers who fell for its mendacious propaganda.
Many of my contemporaries at university in the 1980s blamed the United States for the arms race and joined the Campaign for (Unilateral) Nuclear Disarmament. Others bought the idea of "convergence" between the economic systems of West and East. Fools. You only had to go to the Eastern Bloc to see what a real military-industrial complex looked like - and what the absence of freedom actually meant.
Every time I took the S-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse, the old gateway to East Berlin, I shuddered at the knowledge that I was entering the realm of despotism - a place where there were no rights to privacy, to property or to political representation. Now you need to take a trip to North Korea if you want to get that salutary feeling, which did so much to clarify my own political views.
So a new Cold War might be good for Western Europe, just as it would be bad for Eastern Europe, for the simple reason that we would be reminded of the value of our hard-won freedoms, which we increasingly seem to take for granted.
But relax; it isn't going to happen. The original Cold War had two distinct qualities that are now lost and gone forever. First, it was a remarkably close-run race - economically, militarily and culturally - though we tend now to forget just how close. Second, it was an exclusively two-horse race.
Today, by contrast, Russia is so far behind the United States as to be out of contention. Just for the record, US gross domestic product is now 20 times that of the Russian Federation. Moreover, today's world is multi-polar, not only economically (China's economy is now nearly three times larger than Russia's) but also militarily. Just think of all those other nuclear powers: Britain and France; China and North Korea; Pakistan and India; Israel and - perhaps soon - Iran. Each of those couples could quite happily have their own little regional Cold War.
The other key difference between the Cold War era and the present is, of course, the role in the world of Islamic fundamentalism. With the benefit of hindsight, 1989 was not the decisive turning-point of the late 20th century. That came 10 years earlier, in 1979 - the year of the Iranian Revolution. And militant Islamism is now as big a headache for Russia as it is for the West.
Around 10 per cent of the Russian population is Muslim, with heavy concentrations in republics like Chechnya, Dagestan, Kabardino- Balkaria, North Ossetia and Tatarstan. The first four of these republics are in varying states of political instability because of separatist movements that have an increasingly Islamist complexion.
In Dagestan, the police recently came under attack from an organization calling itself Shariah Jamaat. In Kazan last year, I detected the first stirrings of the same tendency among Russia's Tatars, symbolised by the enormous new mosque (built with Saudi money) in the city's Kremlin.
Indeed, when he contemplates the threat now posed by Islamist separatists to the integrity of Russia itself, Mr Putin must wonder how Russians like him could ever have been described as belonging to the "Eastern Bloc". The Islamists represent the real Orient; by comparison, Mr Putin is as much a part of the West as I am.
And that, come to think of it, is another reason why I can't help missing the Cold War.
• Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University www.niallferguson.org
© Niall Ferguson, 2005
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This is worthy for your bump list.
Beautifully written.
Putin is acting like a commie PING
Which means it was well worth fighting.
BTTT
Today, by contrast, Russia is so far behind the United States as to be out of contention. Just for the record, US gross domestic product is now 20 times that of the Russian Federation. ==
This one is pure stupid. But it is not only one of those.
If the author indeed Harvard professor then I'm sorry for Harvard:).
He's only visiting Harvard.
A Harvard Professor who understands that the commies are evil. Good to know that not all Harvard Professors are total and complete fools.
His regular tenure is at Oxford and he earned his doctorate at the same place, which I know still has a large remnant of relatively right-leaning professors among its colleges even today. I remember Oxford as a whole was hawkish during the Cold War as well when compared to Cambridge and cartainly the US's Ivy League. So sorry, he is not a product of Harvard.
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