I hope you won’t take this as a putdown, but I doubt you’ll be able to guess who he is.
However, a simple list of his credentials should tell you exactly what he is. This gentleman is a former professor of Russian politics at Kent University, and the author of several books on Russia. That’s about it for his British badges.
The rest of his CV is all Russian. The good professor is a senior research fellow at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. An honorary professor of political science at Moscow University. A regular guest at the Valdai Discussion Club, a sort of Russian equivalent of Davos. A member of the advisory board at Moscow’s Institute of Law. A commentator for RT. And I’m sure I’ve left a few things out.
If we continue with our guessing game, you don’t get any prizes to figure out what sort of messages this gentleman sends out to his students, viewers and readers. I hope he feels embarrassed about being so transparent.
In brief, he believes that describing Russia as expansionist is “wrong-headed in conceptualisation and dangerous in its consequences”. Russia “isn’t Nazi Germany”. On the contrary, “Russia under Putin is not a land-grabbing state, it is a profoundly conservative power and its actions are designed to maintain the status quo… [Russia] makes no claim to revise the existing international order, but to make it more inclusive and universal.”
According to this Putinversteher, Russia’s attacks on Georgia and the Ukraine were simply attempts to counteract NATO expansionism. The Western parts of that pernicious alliance are out to create a “Wider Europe”, while the Eastern European members are indulging in “revanchist aggression” against Russia.
That makes European security a “hostage to a faraway country”, meaning the Ukraine. The spirit of Neville Chamberlain came wafting in, but, to my subject’s credit, he didn’t add “…about which we know nothing”. He is an academic, after all, which makes him omniscient.
But that’s not all he is. This gentleman is testimony to the only tangible success of Putin’s Russia: creating a worldwide fifth column of Western agents of influence, witting or unwitting. That’s to be expected in a country 85 per cent of whose ruling elite, including its national leader, are former KGB officers or at least agents.
Recruitment is their stock in trade, and they can build on a strong legacy of tradecraft left by the previous generations of their colleagues. Then, GPU, NKVD and KGB case officers were buying or seducing Western left-wing intellectuals by the gross.
Many didn’t have to be either bought or seduced: they were genuine believers in a communist Eden punctuated by death camps. But a little bit of inducement didn’t go amiss either: fees for their books and articles published in the USSR, lecture tours made so much nicer by Lucullan feasts and multilingual girls.
Above all, those de facto agents basked in the glow of lavish admiration and respect, that balm on the wounds of intellectuals feeling underappreciated at home (as most do).
But my subject ought to do a better job checking his pronouncements against those made by those ‘conservative’ dreamers in the Kremlin. “Maintain the status quo”? Russia “makes no claim to revise the existing international order”? Really.
I detect a lapse of coordination here. For just about every speech by Putin, his permanently drunk stooge Medvedev, his sweary foreign minister Lavrov and any other member of his government preaches exactly that: revising the existing world order.
This, they believe, is being dominated by the West, with the US at the helm. In the past, the Soviet Union managed to maintain a balance of power, which is no more. It’s up to Russia, assisted by China, Iran and North Korea, to restore the equilibrium lost, or ideally to create a new one.
In other words, we are looking at global subversion inspired, underwritten and perpetrated by the kind of countries that used to be called “the axis of evil”, in George W. Bush’s expression. But our hero doesn’t think in such absolutist categories.
He fancies himself a practitioner or at least a prophet of realpolitik, a term that much too often can be used as a full synonym for ‘amorality’, ‘appeasement’, ‘struggle for peace’ or, in his case, ‘service to hostile foreign powers’. All such words denote non-resistance to, and adumbration of, a potential geopolitical catastrophe.
I’m especially touched by our hero’s implicit definition of the word ‘conservative’. This, he feels, is a fair description of Putin. Since this is also a fair description of such Western politicians as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, one has to assume that our hero must believe that Putin is their philosophical sibling, perhaps even an identical twin.
Looking for points of similarity, I searched the biographies of Reagan and Thatcher hoping to find a tendency to pounce on neighbouring countries with the ferocity of a rabid dog. No dice? Fine. So what about suppression of free speech? No? Murdering dissidents? Imprisoning people for saying a critical word about the government? Running a corrupt state sustained by global money laundering?
No, neither Mr Reagan nor Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) did such things. Hence they aren’t conservatives to our hero – they clearly have nothing in common with Putin.
You might think this is just playing with terminology, but terminology does matter. I’d suggest our self-styled ‘conservative’ intelligentsia is as stigmatised by association with Putin as our erstwhile ‘liberal’ intelligentsia was by its pandering to Lenin and Stalin.
In fact, the use of such terms brings into question our whole political taxonomy. My subject is no more conservative than, say, Kim Philby was liberal. Like Philby, he is an enemy agent committed to undermining Britain from within and rendering her unable to resist evil encroachments. Whether he acts in that capacity for money or out of genuine conviction is immaterial – in fact, I’m not sure which is worse.
His name? Oh yes, sorry, I’ve almost forgotten to mention it. Here it is: Richard Sakwa, the academic answer to Peter Hitchens.