The Alex Boot Lecture at the Freedom Association

Thank you, Peter. I’d also like to thank the Freedom Association for inviting me to speak to you today.

And thank you all for coming. Unfortunately not everyone could make it. For example, I invited my good friends at the Russian Embassy, of whom I have, in round numbers, none. Predictably all none of them have turned up.

Now to serious matters. A dialogue was overheard the other day at Heathrow between an immigration officer and a foreign visitor. This is how it went:

Officer: Nationality?

Visitor: Russian.

Officer:

Occupation?

Visitor: No, just visiting.

Of course Russia’s partial occupation of the Ukraine has put Colonel Putin’s fiefdom into sharp international focus. Various commentators bemoan the fact that our intelligence services and indeed Kremlinologists failed to see it coming. Yet again one hears regrets that Russia is too mysterious to be permeable.

Repeated ad infinitum is Churchill’s phrase “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.

Russia is indeed full of mysteries. Some of them, however, are relatively easy to solve. For example, and I cite this fact in my book, in 2010 Russian sports shops sold 500,000 baseball bats, but only three baseballs and one baseball glove. Even assuming that this great sporting nation plays the game to a different set of rules, this is indeed a mystery, but it won’t remain one for long.

Some mysteries, however, are indeed real. Yet there are several million people in the world who may sometimes be surprised by Russia but never mystified by her.

These people are called Russians, and their knowledge of the country is native, absorbed with their mothers’ milk. Or is it?

How do we acquire the inside knowledge of our native lands? There are all sorts of theories on this subject, and I discount all those based on blood, genetic memory and that sort of thing.

I say take a newborn Russian baby, have him adopted by an English family and he’ll grow up preferring cricket to ice hockey, tweeds to polyester and – mysteriously – warm beer to cold vodka.

I’d suggest that the native, intuitive understanding of a country is acquired the same way as the native command of its language: through exposure, a sum total of experiences.

Well, if so, than a sequential recording of such experiences may just impart native understanding on foreigners, especially those who are adept at drawing their own inferences.

To put this theory to a test, I wrote this book which Roper & Penberthy have kindly published. The idea was to show how my own understanding of Russia, where I lived the first 25 years of my life, was informed by various episodes, some amusing, some tragic, some elevating, some soul-destroying.

These I set out to record in as entertaining yet deadpan a manner as I could, eschewing telling for the sake of showing. The aim was ambitious: to give the reader a DIY guide to Russia, to help him make his own accurate judgment of the country.

I hope you’ll have the chance to judge for yourselves whether I’ve succeeded in this undertaking. For, especially in the light of current events, there’s no denying the  significance of understanding Russia, and nor is there any doubt that the absence of such understanding may lead even intelligent people into appalling errors of judgment – witness Peter Hitchens’s revolting panegyrics of Putin who, according to Peter, is a strong but fair leader who desperately wants to be our friend and is only aggressive because we don’t love him enough.

I can’t claim any intellectual superiority to Peter, at least not publicly, but for the last 20-odd years I’ve been writing articles on post-communist Russia. The main thrust of all of them is that, mutatis mutandis, there is no such thing as post-communist Russia. It’s same old, same old, albeit in a different guise.

This I knew right from the start, from the word ‘perestroika’. The personalities of the new leaders, from Gorbachev onwards, told me all I needed to know. I knew that top Party and KGB officials could not under any circumstances rise to their positions without being profoundly evil men. All communist countries had this in common, which incidentally raises interesting questions about Angela Merkel, who held a high-ranking nomenklatura position in the East German Young Communist League.

This is the kind of knowledge no reasonably intelligent Russian would need books to acquire. We just know it intuitively, and those who are then interested in fleshing out their intuition with facts will know where to look.

Even as it takes an Englishman two words out of his interlocutor’s mouth to pigeonhole him demographically, the Russians instantly know who’s who. Here, if I may, I’d like to read a short passage from my book in which I enlarge on this subject:

“Mama never had such lapses. She believed the Party was infallible and attempted to instruct me in the same vein. Unfortunately, she forgot that one’s success, or indeed survival, in Russia hinged not on what one did, not on what one believed, and not even on what one professed, but on what one was.

All people were divided into two sharply, if subliminally, defined categories: ‘one of us’ (nash) and ‘not one of us’ (ne-nash). The former belonged in Russia and were prepared to do anything at all – lie, dissemble, inform on friends – to make sure they continued to belong. The latter didn’t belong, and wouldn’t no matter how hard they tried: there was that elusive something about them that simply didn’t fit. Every Russian knew which category he fell into and also knew that everybody else knew.

While many intellectuals were ne-nash, far from all ne-nash were intellectuals, and the overlap between the two groups couldn’t possibly exceed 50 percent or so. Thus my uncle the Academician was a nash, and my illiterate Byelorussian nanny, who talked to me about God, wasn’t.

Communism played a certain role in this polarity, but not in any straightforward way. Most people who honestly believed in that quaint idea were in the 1930s shot ‘like mad dogs’, in the prosecutor Vyshinsky’s appropriate phrase. However, the jargon remained, acting as a sort of password one uses to gain entry and then forgets. The difference between the nash and ne-nash in this respect was 1) the readiness to use it and 2) the ability to keep a straight face when doing so. The nash had both. The ne-nash sometimes had 1) but never 2). I had neither.      

Much like Americans who know class distinctions exist in their country but hate to talk about them, Russians will seldom discuss the nash/ne-nash watershed. But they are all aware of it and won’t be misled by any paradoxes that could throw an outsider off track.”

People who grew up the way I did knew instantly that every member of the new ruling Russian elite was a nash, meaning someone who had struck the Faustian deal. Moreover, they came from the most evil end of the nash spectrum, mainly the KGB.

That’s why we knew that Western triumphalism about the collapse of communism was misplaced. Communism didn’t collapse. Following the First Law of Thermodynamics is was simply transformed into something else, evil by any other name. We were puzzled why even intelligent Westerners could talk about the end of history in that context, vulgarising Hegel who was somewhat vulgar to begin with.

After all, the precedent of Nuremberg trials established the legal fact that membership in a criminal organisation, in that instance the SS, ipso facto constituted a crime. Yet the SS was responsible, at most, for 10 million murders. The KGB, in which most Russian rulers including Putin served, murdered 60 million Soviet citizens – and yet its members are respectfully received in the West as statesmen.

There’s an important difference between the SS and the KGB however. The German government has repented Germany’s sins and atoned for them, which Peter will tell you goes a long way towards absolution.

In Russia there was no repentance and no atonement. On the contrary, Colonel Putin and his gang are openly proud of the Soviet Union and its criminal history. “There’s no such thing as ex-KGB,” Putin once said. “This is for life.” On another, more recent, occasion he described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century”.

Not the First World War that put the traditional Western civilisation in a coffin. Not the Second World War that nailed the lid shut. Not the Soviet, Nazi and Chinese holocausts. To Putin the real catastrophe was the alleged collapse of the most evil regime in history. Really, the absolution granted Russia came free of charge.

Had Western leaders and commentators had the benefit of the kind of experiences I describe in the book, they would have been less enthusiastic about the post-Soviet leaders Gorbachev, Yeltsyn and Putin. They would be less prepared to disarm, with the British army, for example, being reduced to a size it hasn’t seen since Napoleonic times.

And they certainly wouldn’t be singing hosannas to Putin who, according to Peter Hitchens and many other reasonably conservative Brits, is exactly the kind of strong leader Britain needs. One can understand their frustration: looking at our so-called leaders it’s easy to pine for someone different.

In general, the need for a strong leader only seems urgent in the absence of strong society and strong institutions. When those are in place, the leader’s personal traits hardly ever matter.

For example, before Alan Bennett’s play and subsequent film, only the educated people in this country knew that George III was mentally unbalanced. However every Russian child knows this about Tsar Paul I, who reigned roughly at the same time. The difference is that in some countries mad kings are, and in some others they aren’t, allowed to create mad kingdoms.

This adulation of Putin, now somewhat abating because he yet again is acting in character, has always seemed frankly risible to every intelligent Russian. One look at Putin’s face, one word out of his mouth, was all they needed to acquire intuitive knowledge even if they didn’t know any biographical facts. Nor did we have to rely on any hard facts to comprehend the nature of Putin’s regime. However, such facts are in the public domain, accessible even to Peter Hitchens.

When I was a child in Khrushchev’s Russia, I was taught that wealth was relative. Though most people in the West were richer than us, they were poor by comparison to their own rich. That’s why, because we were all equally hungry, we considered ourselves better off.

We knew the party elite were wealthy. They lived in large flats. Had country houses. Owned decent furniture and electronic equipment. Ate good food. Wore good clothes. What we didn’t know at the time was that they lived – at best – only as well as middle-class Westerners. When they themselves realised that, old-style communism had to go.

Glasnost and perestroika were wheeled in to change that lamentable situation. A giant transfer of Party and KGB capital abroad ensued, with the elite using “appointed” oligarchs as the conduit. But all those Abramoviches and Berezovskys only acquired the use of the capital, not its ownership. They were the leaseholders, with the freehold in the hands of a new elite made up of party functionaries, KGB officers, and underworld types.

Overnight the new elite’s language acquired a new noun (dollars) and a new numeral (1,000,000,000). Gorbachev, immediately after leaving office in 1991, started a foundation initially capitalised at $8 billion – not bad for a man whose salary had been around $2,500 a month.

Putin has gone Gorbachev one better. In an interview to the German paper Die Welt, the political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky estimated Putin’s personal wealth at $40 billion. Belkovsky provided a quick rundown of Putin’s business interests: a 4.5% holding in the world’s largest gas producer Gazprom, along with 37% of Russian oil and gas giant Surgutneftegaz, and “at least 75%” of the oil trader Gunvor.

I have read the Russian-language facsimile of the old FSB dossier on Putin first published in the Russian papers Moskovsky Komsomolets and Versia. The dossier is in the standard format used by the FSB to collate embarrassing material on high government officials. In this instance it chronicles Putin’s activities in St Petersburg where, before his transfer to Moscow, he was second in command to Mayor Anatoly Sobchak.

The dossier states that Putin’s “quest for personal enrichment and absence of any moral barriers became obvious at the very onset of his career.” As early as 1990 a group of Municipal Council deputies “conducted an investigation of Putin’s activities in issuing licenses for the export of raw materials.” In particular, the investigation dealt with export licenses to exchange raw materials for food. Such materials dutifully left Russia. No badly needed food came back.

According to documents cited by Russia’s then-Deputy General Prosecutor Mikhail Katyshev, Putin also used the children’s home of Petersburg’s Central Borough to “export” children abroad, a practice outlawed in Britain since 1807.

The dossier states that Putin was responsible for licensing a number of casinos, charging between $100,000 and $300,000 for each license. He also made a personal bid to acquire 40% of the Hotel Astoria, which was then being privatised. Having lost the bid to the owner of a vodka-factory. Putin allegedly threatened the lucky winner that he would destroy the factory along with its owner. The terrified vodka producer settled the grievance by paying Putin about $800,000. From 1992 to 2000 Putin also sat on the advisory board of two German estate companies, which German authorities have since investigated for money laundering.

The dossier documents that in cahoots with Sobchak and Vice-Governor Valeri Grishanov (ex-Commander of the Baltic Fleet), Putin had a former naval base converted to a port called Lomonosov. This was used for two-way contraband activities, with various goods entering Russia and natural resources leaving it.

Warships, including submarines, were also sold at bargain prices to unidentified foreign buyers. The organisation nominally in control of the warships did not always go along with the racket, as witnessed by the murder of its deputy general manager in 1994. Sobchak lasted longer: he and two of his aides all died simultaneously under mysterious circumstances in 2000.

In 1999, having held several important jobs in Yeltsin’s government, Putin took over the country. Within weeks of assuming office he consolidated his position by starting the Second Chechen War, using explosions in four Moscow apartment blocks as a pretext. Rumors immediately circulated that Putin had ordered the bombings, taking his cue from the Reichstag Fire.

Putin’s KGB colleague Alexander Litvinenko put together a dossier of evidence to that effect. He then published it as a book (Blowing Up Russia), eventually attracting rather toxic literary criticism from Putin’s lifelong employer.

After the explosions, Putin made his immortal speech on the fate awaiting Chechen terrorists: “We’ll find ’em wherever they hide,” Putin promised. “If they hide in a toilet, we’ll whack ’em in the shithouse,” he added in the underworld slang used throughout the KGB.

And he was as good as his word. Over a hundred thousand Chechens, most of them not terrorists, were “whacked” in the next few years. When they tried to fight back by taking hostages, they were all “whacked” together. One such action was undertaken in a Moscow theater, when the “whacking” was done with a poison gas whose composition still remains unknown.

In Putin’s Russia, the “whacking” is not limited to real or presumed terrorists. Opposition politicians and journalists are a particularly high-risk group. Many of them, including at least 40 journalists, have died violent deaths.

Yuri Shchekochikhin, opposition MP, died of a mysterious illness, with his internal organs collapsing one by one (remember Litvinenko?). His skin went blotchy and he lost all his hair. Paul Klebnikov, the American editor of the Russian Forbes, was riddled with bullets in Moscow. Andrei Kozlov, of Russia’s Central Bank, who had tried to stamp out money laundering, was shot dead. Anna Politkovskaya, who had publicised Russian brutality in Chechnya and attacked Putin as a dictator, likewise. Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer who blew the whistle on a major corruption scam reaching all the way to the top, died in prison. The Kommersant reporter who had exposed Russia’s secret supplies of arms to Iran and Libya just happened to fall out of a window. Human-rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov was shot in broad daylight, together with the young journalist with whom he was talking, Anastasia Baburova. Just tell me where to stop.

Under Putin more and more businesses have been brought under state control. Owners who objected too loudly have been either killed or, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky , imprisoned. The press, which for a short while under Yeltsin enjoyed some freedom, has been reined in.

The media, especially of the broadcast variety, are used exactly as they were used under Stalin et al: for government propaganda. In fact, in response to the derisory sanctions introduced by the US government, Dmitry Kisiliov, the star presenter at the TV channel RT1 kindly informed the Americans that Russia is capable of reducing their country to radioactive dust.

This is the language of my childhood. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as the French would say.

Until last week at least electronic media were free to criticise Putin and his kleptofascist state. Now they’ve been blocked in Russia, though they can still be followed here.

That’s why the Russians have nowhere to go in search of answers to such questions as “Is Putin now milking all of Russia the way he used to milk St Petersburg?” “How realistic is the $40 billion estimate of his wealth?” “Is he about to plunge Europe into a major war?”

We too may ask some of the same questions, along with some others, such as “Is Col. Putin really the kind of strong leader we need, as Peter Hitchens tells us?”

When I called Putin’s Russia a kleptofascist state, I used the term advisedly. The klepto prefix is inseparable from the way business is transacted in Russia, whose economy Putin and his predecessors have turned into the greatest crime syndicate the world has ever known.

And every characteristic of  a fascist state is clearly visible there: jingoism as the principal ideology, a quest for aggressive outward expansion, suppression of freedom of expression, murder and imprisonment of political opponents, proximity to the leader as the principal mode of advancement.

The facts supporting this assessment are easy to find. But, as I suggested earlier, it takes an intuitive knowledge to embark on such a search.

This is what I tried to help the reader acquire in this book. Thank you very much for coming.

Visit Alex Boot’s blog at – http://alexanderboot.com/blogs/alexander

Purchase his latest book at – http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/how-the-future-worked-russia-through-hte-eyes-of-a-young-non-person.html