Putin’s game plan of splitting the West is working well

Russia’s ruling regime is in a political and economic war with the Atlantic community

Within the last two months, a pair of dancers from Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet were denied American visas because there was a small mistake in their application, and a team of Russian wrestlers missed a competition in the United States because they had filed their papers late.

These cases, widely publicised in Russia, can be explained by a cut in the United States Embassy’s staff, which the Russian government demanded last month after Washington expelled Russian diplomats in response to the poisoning in London of a former Russian spy. It was the second such reduction in less than a year; the first came last summer with a tit-for-tat expulsion of American diplomats in Moscow, after the United States ratcheted up sanctions targeting prominent supporters of President Vladimir V Putin over what Americans insist was Russian meddling in their elections.

The difficulties of a few prominent travelers may seem inconsequential, even petty. After all, most Russians have not yet faced such barriers. But these are uneasy times here, when many already fear what rising tensions between the two great powers may bring. To them, even such small incidents hint at an ominous trend — an escalating tug of war between the two countries’ diplomatic communities that one day could strip Russia’s people of contact with the West.

Nikolai Svanidze, a liberal Russian author and a relative of Stalin’s wife, fed those fears recently in an interview in which he said, “What we’re seeing for the first time is the Iron Curtain being rolled down over Russia not by us, but against us.” In other words, the West is doing its best to isolate us.

Is that true? I disagree, but only because this grim tango requires a pair of dancers. The rhythm goes this way: What Americans see as affronts to their sovereignty lead them to tighten restrictions on Russia’s interplay with the global economy, which then leads the Kremlin to push back harder against Washington.

And Russians envision ourselves being caught in between, in our darkest imaginings if not yet in reality. Certainly, many here feel that we soon may find ourselves estranged entirely from the West.

The scariest thing about that premonition is our ambivalence. Why? Because we hear applause, not weeping, from the Putin elite whom the sanctions were supposed to target. For them, denying all contact with the West would be their best revenge.

The plain truth is that Russia’s ruling regime is in a political and economic war with the Atlantic community, one that the West takes as a serious threat to its values and policies. I personally believe that the war was started by Putin’s regime in a quest for political immortality, and in fear of the effects of its own incompetence at building a sound economy, keeping Russians safe from disasters, and emerging cost-free from intrusions abroad.

I must admit that pulling a curtain across the West’s border with Russia at this time, which increasingly resembles the Cold War, may be a natural security measure for the West to take. But Americans and Europeans should consider this: Among the things Putin’s regime most wants is a Russia in which its people are cut off from Western culture, as well as from freedom to travel widely. So, if the West responds in ways like slowing down on visas or making ordinary Russians feel unwelcome, the polarising effect will only please Putin and his acolytes.

While others of us in Russia may be disgusted at the street language and indecent gestures with which hoodlums in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs express themselves, we are dismayed to see the Western elite giving those hoodlums tit-for-tat responses that can be used to unite Russians in new grievances against the West. How much better it would be for us all if both sides could find a way to keep the diplomatic brawling at arm’s length from the Russian people, who suffered enough through the recurrent tragedies of the last century.

To be sure, Russians have long experience of being infected by jingoism, a superiority complex and outright aggressiveness. Now gigantic state propaganda campaigns have re-emerged to nurture these moral sins. And again, there will be a price to pay. Three decades ago, Russians had reason to hope that they were becoming family members in a world of proWestern values. Today, air-raid drills and videos of new missiles teach a new generation to live as if a hot war, begun by an antagonistic West, is just around the corner. However unlikely that prospect is, what the younger generation may not yet realise is how real the threat of a new Iron Curtain is, nor how much it would constrict Russia’s future.

I cannot hope that any recommendation I could make would impress the diplomats, security strategists and political scientists on either side who relish going toe-to-toe as they tamper with the zero-sum intrigue that they call geopolitics. But I can hope that people in the academic world, the media, humanities and science, and all of the “bleeding hearts and artists” outside “The Wall,” as Pink Floyd might describe them, will hear this cry of concern:

“Please don’t try to punish Putin by punishing ordinary people here — even if you don’t care very much about them. Because you’d be playing right into his hands. Any indiscriminate travel restrictions that the West might put in place would most likely be met with an exuberant tsiganochka dance by Maria Zaharova, the Foreign Ministry’s celebrity spokeswoman.” —NYT Syndicate Dmitry Volkov is a Russian journalist based in Moscow

Russians have long experience of being infected by jingoism, a superiority complex and outright aggressiveness