Putin is a tyrant, but his rival is no saint...

WHY do we seek so often to reform other people’s countries, while making such a mess of our own? Is it because we don’t think very hard about either? I watched in despair the applause for the Arab Spring, especially in Cairo, where the ‘freedom demonstrators’ were often nasty antisemites, and the outcome was bound to be an Islamist regime. This duly followed, as did a savage and gory military coup which it’s not polite to mention.

Now the West likes to despise Russia’s sinister tyrant Vladimir Putin. But who do they think will replace him? Before him, we had Boris Yeltsin, who (everyone now forgets) called up tanks to shell his own parliament. Yeltsin, having come to power on a pretence of hating corruption, was so corrupt it shocked even Russians, who, shall we say, are no strangers to corruption. While I was living there you could do hardly anything without a bribe.

And now we are supposed to admire ‘opposition leader’ Alexei Navalny. Yet the very people who promote Navalny would shy away from any Western figure who had his record of militant nationalism and bigotry. He has appeared at rallies next to skinheads. He once took part in a video where he appeared to compare people from the Caucasian regions, often unpopular with ethnic Russians, to cockroaches. While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he said, for humans he recommended a pistol. His defenders dismiss this a joke. Well, maybe. He has also spoken in favour of Russia’s repossession of the Crimea, saying ‘the reality is that Crimea is now part of Russia… Crimea is ours’ – a view I think reasonable, but which is hated by the BBC and liberal types who currently laud him.

I have my own view on Russia’s miseries, which is that you cannot immediately recover from nearly 75 years of Marxist terror and stupidity, and that the West did little to help when Communism fell. But I also think that we rage against poor, weak Russia mainly because we are scared to take on rich, strong China. If President Putin is overthrown by Navalny or someone like him, we may come to wish for the devil we knew.