Debunking myths behind smirking bogeyman of the Facebook era

Tony Wood’s study ‘reads like a repudiation of the view of Putin’s Russia as a post-modern mafia state’

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RUSSIA WITHOUT PUTIN – MONEY, POWER AND THE MYTHS OF THE NEW COLD WAR By Tony Wood

IT’S difficult to have a sensible discussion about Russia under Vladimir Putin. The involvement of Russian trolls in the Brexit referendum has led to a febrile atmosphere verging on paranoia. Everyone is looking for fake accounts and Russian Fancy Bears stalking social media.

Is Putin in league with Donald Trump, Julian Assange and Arron Banks to subvert democracy?

Is Jeremy Corbyn Putin’s useful idiot because he didn’t immediately condemn the Russian president as personally responsible for the Skripal novichok attack?

Is his director of strategy, Seumas Milne, who has criticised the West’s involvement in Ukraine, in Putin’s pocket?

Any suggestion that irresponsible Nato expansionism in eastern Europe might have provoked a militarist response from a defeated post-Communist Russia is likely to be portrayed as a “Kremlin narrative”, even though many US defence analysts think precisely that.

Putin is the sinister bogeyman of the Facebook era, his eurasian smirk lurking like the Cheshire Cat’s over every right-wing, alt-right movement on the internet.

America seems almost as obsessed with Russia now as it was during the Cold War. Which is odd since, as Tony Wood points out in this convincing and cool-headed account of the Putin phenomenon, Russia is a minnow compared with the superpower of the past. In the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s population crashed, its empire collapsed, its economy crumbled. The mighty Soviet military lost 60 per cent of its manpower and 95% of its funding. It would’ve been remarkable if something disturbing hadn’t emerged from that social and economic catastrophe.

Yet, as Wood tells it, Russia spent the early years of the 21st century trying to join the Western, liberal democratic club. Putin even wanted to join Nato, the military alliance formed during the Cold War to contain Communism.

He appealed to Bill Clinton in 2000 to let Russia in, and the US president apparently agreed. But somehow it never happened. Instead the West reinforced its military bases on Russia’s western border and looked to the “colour revolutions” in countries like Georgia and Ukraine to chip away at what remained of the old Soviet empire.

Nato’s expansionism was “a fateful error”, according to the US diplomat and historian George Kennan, who was the architect of the Cold War policy of “containment” of Communism. Looking back, continuing to regard Russia, all evidence to the contrary, as a strategic enemy made little obvious sense. Bolshevik expansionism was ancient history, as Russia introduced flat taxes, privatisation and dismantled the last remnants of the Stalinist state. The real challenge for the Pax Americana was surely the rise of China as the next communist superpower.

It’s hard not to believe that a historic opportunity was missed to bring Russia firmly into the European geopolitical orbit. Just as Hitler was in part a product of the punitive thinking at the Versailles Treaty in 1918, so Putin is in part a product of Nato’s punitive response to the implosion of the USSR in 1991.