…to turn even clever men into blithering idiots.
Ideology is virtual faith without God, virtual rationalism without reason and virtual morality without morals. As such, it’s always pernicious, regardless of its slogans or institutional symbols.
And ideologues are always obtuse, regardless of the intelligence they may display in unrelated areas. Enter my favourite subject, Peter Hitchens, Putin’s typical right-wing fan.
When ideology isn’t involved, Hitchens, though saying nothing original, at least doesn’t say anything manifestly inane. Then Russia comes up, and suddenly he loses whatever modest mind God gave him.
British people are wary of rants, which is why Hitchens always sneaks a disclaimer in: “I risk being classified as an apologist for Vladimir Putin. I am not. I view him as a sinister tyrant. The rule of law is more or less absent under his rule. He operates a cunning and cynical policy toward the press… crimes… can be traced directly to Putin’s government…”.
And yet, “as all around me rage against the supposed aggression and wickedness of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, I cannot join in.”
Why, pray tell, not? Surely it’s fine to detest “a sinister tyrant” who “operates a cunning and cynical policy toward the press”, suppresses “the rule of law” and murders political opponents? Especially if he constantly threatens the West with nuclear annihilation?
Hitchens explains why not, displaying not only his personal failings but also typical journalistic hubris. Hacks believe that visiting a place gives them unique insights. It doesn’t, especially not with notoriously enigmatic countries like Russia for which duping foreigners is stock in trade.
Hitchens spent two years in Moscow in the early 1990s, and at that time a Westerner in Russia was treated as a demigod. Visiting illiterate students, never mind marginally more erudite hacks, would puff up with pride when Russians twice their age and ten times their intellect sought their views on involved issues, hanging on every word.
Add to this a KGB trying to limit a correspondent’s contacts to trusted comrades and equally trusted ‘honey traps’, while his stock of caviar was never depleted, and you can understand how a man, especially one unremarkable at home, could fall in love with Moscow.
Hitchens certainly did: “The experience of living in that sad and handsome place brought me to love Russia and its stoical people, to learn some of what they had suffered and see what they had regained.”
My native city is indeed a “sad and handsome place”, and some Russians are indeed lovable, stoical and long-suffering. However, much of their suffering is self-inflicted.
Speaking of nineteenth century Russia, Joseph de Maistre remarked “Every nation gets the government it deserves”. Contemporary Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov brought that observation up to date: “Everybody is raging about Stalin, rightly. But somebody did write those four million denunciations.”
This sense of perspective is absent in Hitchens’s musings, which makes him your normal Russian groupie, like those impressionable girls on the make who roam the salons of New York, London and Paris. But Hitchens is worse than just that.
Having claimed he isn’t “an apologist for Putin”, he proves that’s exactly what he is. “Despite the fact that Moscow has abandoned control of immense areas of Europe and Asia, self-appointed experts insist that Russia is an expansionist power. Oddly, this ‘expansion’ only seems to be occurring in zones that Moscow once controlled…”
While wondering exactly who appointed Hitchens as a Russian expert (believe me: he isn’t), one has to point out that Moscow “abandoned control” when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. Putin was then a Mafioso deputy mayor of Petersburg, placed by the KGB to keep an eye on the mayor Sobchak. Hence said abandonment had nothing to do with him.
Said expansion, however, began when Putin described the collapse of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” and set out to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. Thus there’s nothing “odd” about Putin seeking to restore Russia’s control, violently if need be, over the post-Soviet space.
“The comparison of today’s Russia to yesterday’s U.S.S.R. is baseless. I know this, and rage inwardly at my inability to convey my understanding to others. Could this be because I have been unable to communicate the change of heart I underwent during my more than two years in the Russian capital?”
No, it’s because it’s hard to peddle a falsehood successfully, especially to people who don’t give a flying hoot about Hitchens’s changeable heart.
Of course today’s Russia isn’t a carbon copy of the USSR, or for that matter of Nazi Germany. Those two weren’t carbon copies of each other either. Yet there were many similarities – as there are between both and Putin’s Russia.
Putin takes his cue not from single-minded communist ideologues like Lenin and Trotsky but from synthetic despots like Stalin, who came up with a fusion ideology. Shaken into the new cocktail were aspects of communism, Russian chauvinism, time-honoured imperialism and even – in seeming defiance of constitutional Soviet atheism – Orthodoxy. That’s this tradition that, mutatis mutandis, Putin is restoring.
Communism is gone from the blend, replaced with ‘free enterprise’ (institutionalised gangsterism), while the proportion of the other ingredients has been increased. The resulting blend represents history’s unique kleptofascist government by secret police (with its clerical extension) and organised crime, operating with the violence and perfidy characteristic of both constituents.
It takes a mind neutered by ideology to defend such a regime. Hitchens does so by first saying that Putin is “a sinister tyrant”, then claiming he isn’t, then arguing, with a lamentable absence of logic, that, even if he is, he isn’t the only one. Just look at Yeltsyn’s Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and China.
“Erdogan… locks up many more journalists than does Mr. Putin,” he claims. That may be, but Erdogan doesn’t murder as many: Putin has had 250 Russian colleagues of Hitchens bumped off without wasting time on legal niceties.
Then of course there’s the torrent of nuclear threats streaming out of the mouths of Putin’s spokesmen – something even China refrains from. I doubt Hitchens’s Russian stretches to the task of following what he himself describes as Russia’s “controlled media”. If it were, even he would be horrified by the strident anti-Western hysteria being whipped up by every TV programme.
Or perhaps he wouldn’t be. Ideology does work in mysterious ways, all of them revolting.
According to an article included in the 50th anniversary edition of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess also had the wool pulled over his eyes by the Russians, pretty girls and that.