Putin ready to play ‘the great game’ with Trump

HE was an elf of a man. Like a tiny Trotsky, with round spectacles and bird-like features, like a timeless bureaucrat from a Kafka novel. We were there to film this lowly official from the newly formed privatisation ministry as he bubbled like a free market frontiersmen about fuelling a new revolution.

This was Moscow in 1991. Centre stage in this murky room off Red Square was an old-fashioned pencil graph listing the state enterprises to be sold off during the following year. The run-rate reached as high as 400 a month: factories and businesses all over Russia, employing thousands and supposedly to be turned over to longsuffering workers. Almost inevitably, all the money-making ventures landed in the hands of the few.

I made two trips to the collapsing Soviet Union that late autumn, the first following a group of oil and gas executives seeking to parlay their North Sea skills into new work. They chased round the Caspian and out to Siberia in pursuit of deals. We arrived in Baku just as the locals finished tearing down Lenin’s statue, which lay where it fell on the road into town. In Kazakhstan we were met by a grinning bunch in familiar uniforms, Soviet badges removed. They didn’t laugh when we pointed this out.

In Moscow we met some US bankers whose take on all this was breathtaking in its conceit. These were the days of George HW Bush’s “new world order”, when free market capitalism was in rampant celebration of the collapse of cold war-era communism.

The bankers were camped behind barbed wire in a luxury hotel. They were ferried by limo to and from Kremlin buildings. Their contact with ordinary Russians was nil. They and their highly-paid consultants sensed a bonanza. They exulted in “democracy returning to Russia” – where it had never really been – and urged sweeping changes including mass privatisation.

Mikhail Gorbachev, once exalted by the West and recently released from house arrest at his Crimean dacha, pleaded for a “social democratic” society on the European model. He was ignored. Russians wanted security and food on the table. After a decade of turmoil, when neither seemed certain, there emerged Vladimir Putin. Here was the strong man for whom Russians yearned. He took on oligarchs grown fat on privatisation, rode the wave of a petro-economy, and continues to enjoy huge support. Yesterday he boasted that Russia was stronger than “any potential military aggressor” because it had modernised its nuclear arsenal, amongst other military spending.

Russia flexes its muscles over Nato and former Soviet neighbours like Ukraine. It acts viciously, but decisively, in Syria. Suddenly it is Russia that is brokering futures in the Middle East, ready to play “the great game” with the Trump administration.

The West created Mr Putin. Or, rather, it created the circumstances for his ascendancy. Instead of complaining, we might reflect on “new world order” politics and how they have played out in Europe. Russians were taken for granted at the very moment when they might have embraced Western-style democracy. In many respects, the West has only itself to blame for Russian assertiveness.

‘‘ Russians were taken for granted at the very moment when they might have embraced Western-style democracy