14 May 2015
Snubbing Putin; should the British Lion have accepted the invitation to the Russian Bear’s party after all?
by Neil Tidmarsh
Last Saturday, the allies who defeated Nazi Germany in 1945 celebrated the seventieth anniversary of their victory. The celebrations were inevitably sober and tinged with sadness, given the high price of that crucial victory. The United Kingdom lost almost half a million citizens – almost four hundred thousand servicemen and women, and over sixty-seven thousand civilians – a death-toll of almost one percent of its population. The United States lost four hundred and twenty thousand – four hundred and seven thousand from the services, and twelve thousand civilians – a third of one percent of its population. France lost over half a million – two hundred thousand from the services, and three hundred and fifty thousand civilians – one and a third of a percent of its population. Staggering figures, ungraspable in their tragic immensity. And consider Russia; the USSR lost somewhere between twenty and thirty million – military deaths somewhere between eight million and fourteen million, civilian deaths somewhere between thirteen million and eighteen million – over fourteen percent of its population.
It would have been fitting for the Allies to have celebrated that hard-won victory and commemorated those terrible deaths together, but there were no Western leaders at Red Square. They boycotted Russia’s celebrations in protest at Moscow’s actions in the Ukraine – seizing the Crimea and sponsoring the pro-Moscow rebels in the eastern regions. The reason for snubbing Putin was simple enough, but it is worth considering three reasons why it was perhaps a mistake.
The first reason is controversial, based as it is on the notion that the West’s efforts over the Ukraine have been cack-handed from the start and the suggestion that the boycott of the Moscow parade simply aggravates the whole diplomatic cock-up. The failure of Western diplomacy over the Ukraine is a direct result of a failure of imagination, of an inability or reluctance to try to see the world through Russian eyes. Given Russia’s historically defining fear, even paranoia, of encirclement by hostile powers, any attempt to push NATO and the EU right up to its borders is rather like walking through the backstreets of a rough area of town at two o’clock in the morning, alone and naked and carrying a bag of gold; one can argue one’s moral right to do so if it is the wish of the Ukrainian people (and it seems that it is not the wish of a sizable number of pro-Moscow Ukrainians), but it is more difficult to argue about the wisdom of actually trying to do it.
The most cursory review of Russian history and literature would have lead to an understanding of why Russia felt it should not abandon the Crimea, and indeed would have made it clear that Russia could not abandon the Crimea. “The one central, reassuring conviction you have come away with is that it is quite impossible for Sebastopol ever to be taken by the enemy” Tolstoy wrote in The Sebastopol Sketches. “Long will Russia bear the imposing traces of this epic of Sebastopol, the hero of which was the Russian people.” Such sentiments recently became geopolitical reality in the Crimea, in spite of Western protest; so it might have been better if the West had accepted them as reality in the first place, and used the subsequent goodwill to foster and broker talks between Kiev and Moscow about Eastern Ukraine, talks which might then have averted the tragic and chaotic conflict which still festers there, talks which might have prevented the initiative passing to rogue elements over which Kiev and Moscow seem to have only limited control.
The second reason is cynical real politics. Is it really in our best interests to isolate and alienate a country like Russia, when such a policy could damage our economic prosperity and our military security? Do we really want to drive Russia into rival military and economic agreements with other parties – agreements and parties whose concerns and ambitions might not be aligned with our own and might even threaten them? President Xi of China was present in Moscow on Saturday; since then, President Putin has announced trade agreements between Russia and China, and the two countries have embarked on joint naval exercises in the Mediterranean.
Luckily I’m not a politician, so I can indulge in controversial arguments without having to act on them, and I don’t have to pursue real politics, cynically over-riding questions of right and wrong where they’re contrary to our interests. So we can discard these two reasons if we wish. The third reason, however, is much harder to dismiss.
What happened in World War Two no longer overshadows current European politics to the extent that it did for the latter half of the last century, but it continues to dwarf it. What Britain and Russia and the USA and France did together then is much bigger than anything they are not doing together now. A sense of historical perspective went missing when the decision not to go to Moscow was taken. What we did in partnership to defeat the common enemy of Nazi Germany remains a mighty and magnificent feat; our debt to each other remains. Particularly our debt to the people of Russia – the Russian front was the biggest, most hard-fought and most critical front of the whole war, the cost to the Russian people was unsurpassed, and the opportunity to acknowledge this in Moscow on Saturday was unfortunately lost and wasted. If we were worried that sending politicians to Putin in Moscow would send the wrong political message to our Western partners or to Putin’s government, couldn’t we have sent a non-political message to the people of Russia by sending a Royal? I for one felt sad that there was no one from Britain to represent us in Moscow when President Putin thanked “the people of Great Britain, France and the United States for their contribution to victory.” No one was there to express our gratitude and return our thanks to the people of Russia. Whatever we think of President Putin, last Saturday was probably a day to see him as nothing more or less than the representative of the people of Russia.
Corrupt, aggressive, lawless and repressive regimes don’t last forever, usually end badly, and often disappear into the footnotes of history. For instance, who now knows anything about Napoleon III, the dictator whose twenty-year rule of France restored his country’s stability, prosperity and international standing at the expense of his people’s rights, liberties and blood (shed at home and abroad) before his regime collapsed in defeat – and who was, as it happens, the man behind the 1854 invasion of the Crimea? But history will never forget the epic sacrifice and heroic struggle of the Russian people against Nazi aggression in World War II. And it’s a shame that Britain had no representative in Red Square to acknowledge it, respect it and give thanks for it on its seventieth anniversary.
