Putin is Russia, and Russia is Putin

Having spent 15 years in Russia as ambassador of the Sardinian king, Joseph de Maistre (d. 1821) summed up his experience by saying that every nation gets the government it deserves.

Two centuries later, Vladimir Kara-Murza disagrees. He is one of the 16 Russian prisoners involved in the swap the other day. That operation flies in the face of the old proverb about fair exchange being no robbery.

Russia sends out FSB hitmen and spies, electronic or traditional, to do in the West what such people are trained to do: spy, hack and murder.

These are high-risk jobs, but those agents receive a solemn promise that, should they get nabbed, a grateful Russia will trade them back. The FSB then arrests foreign journalists and businessmen or else Russian dissidents known worldwide, sentences them to the kind of prison terms that haven’t been seen since Stalin, and uses them as a sort of exchange currency.

This is done with the cynicism characteristic of Russian secret services and the government behind them. Correction: these days the secret services are the government, led and staffed as it is by career KGB officers.

Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin are perhaps the best-known among the released dissidents, and they are remarkable men. Having been sentenced to 25 and 8.5 years respectively, they accepted their martyrdom with courage and dignity.

Both refused to cooperate with their jailers which earned them long stints in punitive solitary confinement. They also didn’t give Putin the satisfaction of pleading for mercy, even though they knew they’d be unlikely to survive their ordeal, the way their friend Navalny didn’t survive it.

Now they are in the West, and whatever is left of the free world should rejoice. But Messrs Kara-Murza and Yashin aren’t rejoicing. On the contrary, they insist that they didn’t want to be exchanged, and they certainly wanted to stay in Russia – even in Russian prison.

The swap, they insist, is banishment and exile, not liberation. They’ll go back at the first opportunity because Putin should be opposed from inside the country, not from Germany, Britain or America.

Alas, their first press conference in the West proves that, while Russia continues to produce heroic people ready to give their lives for the cause, the country still lacks effective opposition. For any successful resistance must start with an accurate, dispassionate assessment of the situation – not with consuming and purveying a diet of red herrings.

Kara-Murza, incidentally, is an historian educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a fluent speaker of English and holds dual British-Russian nationality. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, he disagrees with de Maistre.

“I care about my country,” said Kara-Murza, “and I think Russia deserves better than a corrupt KGB dictator. I want to make sure that Russia becomes… a normal, modern, democratic country.” He also wants “to remind people in democratic countries that Russia and Putin are not the same thing”.

If I didn’t admire Kara-Murza’s heroism as much as I do, I’d think that he and his fellow dissidents weren’t just released by Putin but sent out as his secret emissaries.

That’s the time-honoured strategy of the Russian and Soviet governments. While raping their own population and pouncing on their neighbours, they inundate the West with conciliatory messages sent through private channels.

Pay no attention to what our government is saying and doing, the messages go. These are just a few ghastly hawks who in no way represent the people. The good and freedom-loving people of Russia are staunchly opposed to whatever their leaders are perpetrating. So if the West could kindly ratchet down the tension, the opposition will triumph and Russia will become a worthy member of the Western family.

This sort of thing, a sustained campaign of disinformation designed to dupe the West into acquiescence, has been going on for over 100 years. A case that springs to mind is that of Nikolay Berdyayev, one of the Russian thinkers exiled from Russia onboard the notorious Philosophers’ Steamers in 1923.

His first stopover was Prague, at that time the nerve centre of the Russian emigration. The night after his arrival, Berdyayev found himself at a gathering in the flat belonging to Anton Kartashev, the last Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod. He and other prominent émigrés were discussing ways of fighting the Bolsheviks.

To everybody’s surprise, Berdyayev preached a different message. The Bolsheviks, he said, are the true practitioners of the Russian idea. Hence all Russians living abroad should renounce opposition and wait for the glorious Russian people to sort themselves out.

Once the initial shock subsided, Kartashev uttered his severe verdict: “We thought you were exiled, but it turns out you were infiltrated.” (It’s more poignant in the original: Мы думали вас выслали, а вас оказывается заслали.)

I wonder what Kartashev would say about the message delivered by Kara-Murza and his friends. Please, they said, stop sanctions against Russia because they hurt the good Russian people who are opposed to Putin and his dirty war. Instead, target specific officials with personal sanctions.

The Russians know they don’t deserve Putin and they certainly want to have no part in the war. Give them time, and they’ll create a democratic heaven on earth.

I don’t know what kind of history they teach at Trinity, but analysis of historical continuity and dynamic tendencies doesn’t seem to have been part of Vladimir’s curriculum. What does it mean that “Russia and Putin aren’t the same thing”?

This seems to suggest that Russia has had a long history of just government reflecting the people’s sterling quality and only occasionally put on hold by evil exceptions. But this suggestion is false.

Which just rulers would that be? Ivan the Terrible, the first Russian tsar, who only ever laughed when watching people being flayed or fried alive? Peter the Great, a sadist who personally tortured and beheaded dozens of people? His daughter Yelizaveta, who had society ladies knouted and mutilated for daring to wear the same dresses as Her Majesty’s? Catherine the Great who spread serfdom to the Ukraine? The tsars of the 19^th century under whom Russia became known as ‘the prison of nations’ and ‘the gendarme of Europe’? Lenin? Stalin? Khrushchev? Andropov? Yeltsyn? Who?

The newly released heroes woefully misunderstand Russian history, politics and indeed people. The problem with the country isn’t that it lacks democracy but that it lacks civilisation (not to be confused with culture).

In fact, Russian liberals have learned their misapprehension from their Western counterparts, who believe that democracy is a panacea able to cure the ills of the world. Yet civilisational problems have no political solution. Giving barbarians democracy is like giving a Stradivarius violin to savages. They’ll just use it for firewood.

Every attempt to disprove this observation is doomed to failure, as the Americans found out in Iraq. Egged on by neoconservative (in fact, nonconservative) liberals, the US invaded, set up a chain of voting booths and embarked on a programme of nation building. In short order, that created a blood-soaked chaos rapidly spreading over the whole region.

There are indeed a few thousand Russians who oppose the war, which isn’t many for a country of 140 million. And most of those protesters object not to the war as such but to its cost in lives and money. More Russians, perhaps as many as 30 million, are directly involved in the war effort, some in the military, others in the armament industry and related businesses.

Spontaneous support for the war – and Putin – is huge, which isn’t surprising given the state’s monopoly on propaganda. Democracy, on the other hand, has a bad name among the masses weaned on the notion of imperial chauvinism.

They still remember the 1990s, the only decade of supposed liberty in Russian history. Few people still recall the previously forbidden books that became easily available. Yet everyone remembers looking at shops full of goods – and having no money to buy them, what with rampant inflation and devaluations having wiped out people’s savings, and pensions and salaries sometimes not paid for months.

Kara-Murza and his friends doubtless love liberty, even though they are prepared to sacrifice their own at the altar of woeful misconception. Their heroism will be in vain: democracy may sometimes contribute to a civilisation, but it can’t create it.

The Saturn of the Russian state will avidly devour all the sacrifices offered to it, but it won’t change its essence – even if it may pretend to change its ways. This state is exactly what the Russians deserve. De Maistre was right, and Kara-Murza and his friends are wrong – much as I’m happy that these heroic if misguided people are now free.