Spy v/s Spy and East v/s West
As a Second Cold War hovers on the horizon, one cannot but wonder why Vladimir Putin so unimaginatively expelled exactly the same number of British diplomats as Theresa May did Russian diplomats. Moscow should have sent 46 Brits packing and proclaimed loud and clear that one Russian spy was as good as two from Britain. Of course, the posturing may be part of the propaganda of two groups that need each other’s enmity. Thanks to the crisis, the lacklustre Mrs May’s ratings have never been higher. As for Mr Putin, the united hostility of all the Western powers must have played some part in his landslide victory last Sunday in being re-elected president for the fourth time. It now remains to be seen whether worsening East-West relations will also inspire cultural creativity as the First Cold War did.
Of course, Mr Putin wasn’t content with expulsions. He has stopped all British Council activities and revoked permission for a British consulategeneral in St Petersburg. Mrs May could have taken action against Russian capital of which there is a great deal in London. Instead, she telephoned Donald Trump, who gallantly weighed in with sanctions targeting five Russian entities and 19 individuals, the toughest the Trump administration has taken against the Kremlin.
The drama followed the March 4 nerve gas poisoning of a former Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal, 66, who resided in Britain, and his daughter Yulia, 33, visiting from Moscow. According to the Russians, Skripal remained a British spy. Mrs May accuses Russia of trying to kill him with the nerve gas Novichok, a military-grade agent developed in the Soviet Union towards the end of the first Cold War. Apart from traditional East-West rivalry, the British say the attempt to murder the Skripals by spraying, sprinkling or otherwise administering the world’s deadliest nerve agent in a suburban shopping mall in southern England endangered public safety. One of the first people to respond to the crisis, a police detective sergeant, was also poisoned. All three are in hospital at the time of writing.
Mr Putin’s denial of any Russian role in the attack hasn’t prevented another British woman politician, the home secretary, Amber Rudd, saying the police and intelligence services are probing allegations of Russian state involvement in up to 14 deaths in the UK. The first Cold War was a state of tense polarisation between the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact communist countries on one hand, and the United States, Britain and other Western democracies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation on the other. It lasted from the late 1940s to 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolved and the Warsaw Pact dismantled. But the opposite side made no concessions. On the contrary, NATO not only continued in full vigour but extended membership and operations into what used to be the former Soviet area of influence.
The most public first Cold War stand-off was the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics to protest against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The closest the two adversaries came to full-blown nuclear war was during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when the American president, John F Kennedy, threatened military force after the Soviets began secretly installing nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, close to US shores. This time, Mrs May says, no British dignitary will attend any World Cup event scheduled to take place in Russia in June-July.
Eight days after the attack on the Skripals, British police found the body of Nikolai Glushkov, 68, a former Aeroflot executive, at his home in London, the cause of death being unclear. Britain had granted Glushkov political asylum in 2010. He had links with other Russian exiles who have also died in mysterious circumstances. The British claim they were all critics of Mr Putin. Glushkov was an associate of Boris Berezovsky, a Russian billionaire, who had fled to Britain after falling out with Mr Putin and who threatened from exile to topple the Russian president. Berezovsky was found dead in 2013 in a locked bathroom at his Berkshire home, with a ligature around his neck. It seemed like suicide but the coroner recorded an open verdict after his cause of death could not be established.
The most infamous attack in Britain before the one on the Skripals was the 2006 poisoning of the ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died three weeks after drinking a cup of tea laced with deadly polonium-210 at a London hotel. A British inquiry found that Litvinenko was poisoned by two Russian agents on orders that had “probably been approved by President Putin”. The former Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, was very nearly another victim, surviving a 2004 attempt on his life by someone, who laced his soup with TCDD dioxin.
Although, counter-terrorism officers see no connection between these cases, the fierce verbal battle continues. Moscow has vowed to take action if Britain imposes sanctions and the Russian Embassy sent out a series of scathing tweets threatening the “crooked” UK with retaliation. Despite an earlier rocky UK-US relationship, the White House responded magnificently, pledging “solidarity with its closest ally” and promising “to provide any assistance the United Kingdom requests for its investigation.” Mr Trump agreed with Mrs May that the Russian government “must provide unambiguous answers regarding how this chemical weapon, developed in Russia, came to be used in the United Kingdom.”
This public assurance of US support warns that a bilateral dispute might blossom into a full-fledged second Cold War. But conditions have changed since the explosive era of those diligent Cold War stalwarts Nikita Khrushchev and John Foster Dulles. Even a repetition of the Cuban missile crisis is unlikely, although the two sides seemed to be moving towards it in Ukraine and over Crimea. But, if war is avoided, we can hope the arts surrounding war will flourish. The first Cold War spawned music, movies, books, television and other media and spy spoofs like the classic 1960s TV series Get Smart, as well as sports, social beliefs and behavioural patterns. Spy stories became part of pop culture in East and West, with Russian audiences lapping up dramas about KGB agents beating their American, British and Israeli counterparts from the CIA, MI6 and Mossad. Western audiences revelled in exactly the opposite version. The first Cold War inspired John Le Carre, author of bestsellers like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and The Honourable Schoolboy; Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October); Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate); and Ian Fleming’s immensely popular James Bond novels.
Laced into the gripping excitement of cloak-anddagger espionage was the ever-present threat of nuclear hostilities, and the end of the world. Global civilisation will be the gainer if, avoiding physical friction, the two sides are as culturally productive this time too.