Posts Tagged ‘edward lucas’
The Empire is Still Evil
Twenty-first century Russia has three famous faces: Anna Chapman, the failed spy, who came in from the cold to become a red hot sex symbol back home; Alexander Litvinenko, the spy-turned-dissident, who was poisoned by a radioactive polonium isotope in London; and Vladimir Putin, the KGB colonel-turned-president, who had himself re-elected for a six-year term last month. It is no accident that all three of these faces belong to former intelligence officers. The point of Deception is to explain how and why Putin’s Russia has succeeded in fooling us all, both about its own sinister nexus of espionage, politics and finance, and about its insidious corruption of the West. This important book is a sequel to the author’s last indictment of the Putin regime, The New Cold War, which came out four years ago. Deception is, if anything, even more devastating.
At this point, I should declare an interest: I have known Edward Lucas for a quarter of a century, ever since he and I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe that heralded the fall of the Soviet Union — he for the BBC World Service, I for the Daily Telegraph. In those days, Ed was a kind of one-man world service, rushing from press conference to demonstration, from the dungeons of the dissidents to the palaces of the politburos, reporting and commenting, sharing in the euphoria but never letting himself be carried away by it. He has not lost his missionary zeal to this day: as a senior editor at the Economist he is still unmasking the enemies of civilisation.
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Russia Explained, and It’s Not a Pretty Picture
If you have ever had the feeling that we never quite get the whole truth about Russia, Edward Lucas, in his new book, will explain why you have that feeling. Supposedly Russia is a democratic, market-driven capitalistic society, yet the country never makes any news other than when it’s shutting off gas supplies to Western Europe. Brazil makes business news. So do China and India. Those countries are making the world a more productive place. Russia, on the other hand, declares itself to be an economic power, but as you will learn in Lucas’s Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West, Russia verges on being nothing but a huge criminal organization.
While he’s painting a horrific picture of Russia, Lucas also gives a detailed accounting of the espionage business. “Outsiders catch only fleeting glimpses of life in the shadows,” Lucas writes. His book takes readers into the shadows where almost comical ineptitude mixes with harrowing accounts of spies who met their ends at the hands of the Russian intelligence agencies.
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An outdated sanction impedes leverage over Russia
What measures could be taken to exert pressure on the Kremlin without punishing ordinary Russians?
The US senators Scoop Jackson and Charles Vanik are dead. The country they sought to pressure – the Soviet Union – is gone, and Russia, for all its faults, does not restrict the emigration that they wanted to liberalise.
Yet the ghosts of the Cold War still haunt the US’s relations with the Kremlin. So too do other more recent ghosts, such as the ‘re-set’ – a useful gimmick in its day, perhaps, but now an embarrassment overdue for retirement.
The big argument in Washington, DC now is not about binning the re-set but about the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which restricts ‘most-favoured’ (ie, normal) trade relations with countries with non-market economies that restrict emigration.
In practice, Jackson-Vanik is an irritant, not an obstacle. The administration routinely waives its provisions. But would it send the wrong message to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin to lift it unilaterally, as common sense demands now that Russia is joining the World Trade Organization? And if so, would visa restrictions on those involved in the Magnitsky affair be a sufficient counterweight? (It may be worth reminding some readers that Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer who uncovered a $230 million – €175m – fraud perpetrated on the Russian taxpayer by corrupt officials, was jailed as a result, kept in horrific conditions when he refused to snitch on his client, and died after a savage beating.)
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Twelve More Years of Vladimir Putin? Nyet!
White is the colour of political protest in Russia: it stands for clean elections and clean government. Vladimir Putin’s ex-KGB regime might in theory be able to provide the first of these, organising a more or less fair contest in the presidential election on March 4. But the second is impossible: theft and deceit are not just problems in the Russian political system — they are the system.
Russian political life has awoken from a 12-year coma. After the upheavals of the 1990s, stability and rising living standards mattered far more than the openness of political procedures or the contestability of official decisions. Now that has changed. Politics, once dismissed with a weary shrug, is the hottest topic in Moscow and other big cities. The internet is humming with parodies, many savagely funny, of Putin and his cronies. One of the best is a Borat-style hymn of praise to the Russian leader by a Tajik crooner, so pitch-perfect in its rendering of the style of official pro-Putin propaganda that many found it hard to work out if it was indeed a spoof, or just a particularly grotesque example of the real thing.
A more brutal take was from some beefy paratrooper veterans, growling: “You’re just like me, a man not a god. I’m just like you, a man not a sod.” That too became an instant hit on YouTube. When the band appeared on stage at the latest big opposition demonstration on February 4, the crowd already knew the words. The song’s success highlights two important trends. One is the interaction between the internet and political protest. That is quite new in Russia, where in previous years people went online to play games, visit dating sites, and follow celebrity gossip. Now cyberspace has become the greenhouse for opposition political culture. The other point, no less sinister for the regime, is that the habits of mockery have spread to parts of society that used to be rock-solid supporters of the regime, such as veterans of elite military units.
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Putin and his cronies have plundered Russia for a decade, but though he’ll win Sunday’s sham election, his days are numbered
For the past four years, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, and his sidekick Dmitry Medvedev, who has the nominal post of president, have been engaged in a huge propaganda operation to fool Russians and the West.
With much fanfare, they have pretended to reform their benighted land. Mr Medvedev denounced corruption, and they pretended to be friends with the West, particularly through a warming of their relations with the U.S. in 2009.
But this has been a sham to conceal the truth: that Russia is shamefully misruled.
The ruling former KGB regime has squandered tens of billions of pounds and missed a once-in-a-lifetime chance to modernise the country.
It has no real interest in friendship or co-operation with the West, whatever our gullible diplomats and officials may think. It wants to launder money in London, but not to adopt our values of liberty or the rule of law.
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