Posts Tagged ‘standpoint’
Friends of Russia or Friends of Putin?
The recently-established lobby group Conservative Friends of Russia (CFOR) is doing little to dispel suspicions that its sympathies lie with the Russian government.
Last week it published an article on its website accusing the Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Russia, Chris Bryant, of “incompetence” over his failure to hold an annual general meeting at the required time. To accompany the piece, which has now been taken off their site, CFOR selected the snapshot of Mr Bryant in his underwear, originally posted on a gay dating site, which circulated in the tabloids years ago. The relevance of that particular photo to his stewardship of the APPG was not explained.
This most recent episode of sophomoric hackery has induced Honorary Chairman Sir Malcolm Rifkind to resign his post, and Robert Buckland to step down as Honorary Vice President. According to the Telegraph, “A spokesman for Sir Malcolm said he was ‘very unhappy’ about the article and it was the ‘final straw’, adding to long-held concerns about the way the group was being run.”
Bryant has responded by accusing CFOR of engaging in crude, Kremlin-esque tactics to discredit him and force his resignation as the Chairman of the Russia APPG, and suggested that the group is acting at the behest of the Russian embassy: “I gather the Conservative Friends of Russia have covered themselves in homophobic glory,” and “clearly [they] would prefer a Putin patsy to run the all-party group on Russia. Did the Embassy pay for them?” CFOR chairman Richard Royal responded by accusing Bryant of using alleged homophobia as a “smokescreen [to] divert attention from the real issue”.
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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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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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Moscow Martyr
When David Cameron arrives in Moscow this month for the first visit by a British prime minister since the Litvinenko murder five years ago, both sides will be keen to downplay the issue of human rights. In his talks with President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin, there will doubtless be echoes of Margaret Thatcher’s remark when she first met Mikhail Gorbachev in 1984: “We can do business together.”
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