A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 4

23 April 2022

The procession has just set off through Stratford-upon-Avon. Foreground: the Shakespeare Institute’s delegation. Background: the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

It is St George’s Day, hypothetically William Shakespeare’s birthday, and we are in Stratford-upon-Avon witnessing the civic celebrations, which are beautifully done, inclusive, happy, humorous, almost a Spring flower festival, and a really moving tribute to Shakespeare’s ever-freshness. The previous evening, we had lived through a searing performance of Henry VI(2): Machtpolitik at its most brutal and realistic.

I keep coming back to the necessity of not letting our yearning for peace develop into wishful thinking about it. The problem is that reality is terrible, we would rather not have to face it, but if we lose our mental grip on it we risk fantasy and pure self-gratification (even virtue-signalling). A person born in Britain whose parents originated in the Donbas says that ‘any negotiations would be better than this killing’. It sounds true, stopping killing in order to negotiate sounds right, and a part of us wants peace ‘at any price’. But hostilities don’t usually stop during negotiations anyway, and the person who launched this criminal war against Ukraine self-evidently does not want genuine negotiations and peace. I heard Volodymyr Zelensky myself tell Clive Myrie ten days ago on television that he, Zelensky, ‘spent the first two years of my presidency trying to talk to Putin’.

24 April
A few days back, a GP Tweeted that judging by the activity of Putin’s left arm as he was sitting giving orders to his Minister of Defence, Putin has ‘late onset Rett syndrome’ and ‘probably has months to live’. Again, this might be a highly desirable diagnosis, but I don’t think it matches reality. Anyone who observed the way Putin from his earliest presidential years marched up a long red carpet, could see that he has a ‘torque’ in his body and swings with his right arm. We don’t know the origin of it, but the weakness in his left arm doesn’t seem to me to have got any worse. On the other hand, his face in recent years has become more and more bloated. Most people would assume he is on steroids. But what does this portend, and does it explain anything about his psychotic state?

26 April
Russian autocracy has a tradition of long-serving ministers of foreign affairs. There was Gorchakov, foreign minister for 25 years under Alexander II; Gromyko, Soviet foreign minister for 29 years; now there is Sergei Lavrov, foreign minister since 2004.

Lavrov is approaching Talleyrand’s genius for utterances that are so ambiguous, depending on the listener, that ultimately they mean nothing. Today in Moscow he said that he was convinced the war would end in ‘some kind of treaty’, but he added the wise-sounding rider that it would ‘depend, of course, on the military situations reached’. This could mean ‘stalemate as a result of Ukrainian successes’, or it could mean ‘Russian conquest of Ukraine and a deal with the puppet government we have always wanted to install’. Similarly, Lavrov opined that ‘in essence’ NATO was ‘engaging in a proxy war against Russia’. It sounds right, rather clever and persuasive in fact, but omits to mention that it was Russia invaded its neighbour Ukraine, brutally breaking international law, and it is Ukrainians who are defending their own country. Putin’s proxies in eastern Ukraine, e.g. the Wagner Group, have been Russians.

Sergei Lavrov in pensive mood

Actually, I believe that Lavrov is beginning to sweat. He is a ‘career diplomat’ who for years has made a more than comfortable living out of going along with Putin. Now the chips are down. The genuinely wise Andrei Kozyrev, who was Yel’tsin’s foreign minister and now lives in the U.S., said this of his former colleague when asked recently if Lavrov did not know that everything he was doing was wrong:

I’m not a psychologist. What I see is that people sometimes degrade morally. And again, it’s step by step. On the first step, you sell your soul. But the Faustian scene rarely unfolds immediately before you. The Devil doesn’t come in with a contract ‘dripping with blood’. It takes some time before you start to actually disregard human dignity.

The ghosts of Joachim von Ribbentrop, say, or Saddam Hussein’s long-serving foreign minister Tariq Aziz, should be troubling Sergei Lavrov.

28 April
Today The Times ran a long article by their Defence Editor entitled ‘Push to send arms before Russians encircle Donbas’. But really it could add nothing to what we have known since 19 April: the Ukrainians in East Ukraine are in a highly vulnerable situation and there’s no knowing how their attack/defence there will play out. The arms, of course, are vital, but so will be brilliant generalship. I am no military man, but I was brought up on Chester Wilmot’s 800-page The Struggle for Europe and I spent years immersed in World War 1 whilst writing my biography of George Calderon. I incline, therefore, to see the coming struggle in East Ukraine as a combination of WW2’s tank battles and WW1’s trench warfare (the Ukrainians have been dug in there for eight years). On paper Russia’s artillery and rocket power are overwhelming, so the trenches could be devastated. It will surely be vital for the Ukrainians not only to avoid being surrounded, but to withdraw to a hard salient which they can successfully hold and from which they can counterattack…

2 May
The Russian campaign has so far been a disaster for Putin: according to a leaked FSB assessment from last year, under sanctions the economy can survive only till June, the attack on Kiev and attempt to kill Zelensky failed spectacularly, the army’s atrocities have earned Putin global detestation and condemnation, the Russians still do not have domination of the air over Ukraine, Khar’kiv and Mariupol are still not securely in Russian hands, the Ukrainians have sunk the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet and other vessels, a quarter of a million young Russians have left Russia since 24 February and don’t intend coming back, now Russians are streaming across to Moldova from Transnistria as they don’t want to live under Putin either, and in David Petraeus’s words ‘the war seems to be forging Ukraine as a nation state even as it weakens Russia as an empire’. Putin has achieved the exact opposite of what he intended, then, as well as uniting and expanding NATO and personally bringing Russia closer to direct conflict with it. Andrei Kozyrev even believes the war is ‘unwinnable for Putin because he fights against the people’.

Yet Putin will continue, because he is doing it all for ‘Russia’…and La Russie, c’est moi. One can imagine him destroying everything around him like Hitler until he is left in a bunker. And as if the sheer relentless, sickening, senseless destruction and killing weren’t enough, he and his generals actually look sub-human: Gerasimov, Dvornikov, Mizintsev (‘the butcher of Mariupol’) are brutally ugly. I think of the mayor in Gogol’s Government Inspector: ‘All I can see around me are pigs’ snouts where there should be faces.’

4 May
Understandably, the question ‘why are the Russians like this?’ is still being debated in the press. One big explanation given is that Russia was deeply brutalised by seventy years of state genocide and ‘casual savagery is seared into its soul’ (David Aaronovitch). A second is that no one was ever held to account for the long night of terror. A third is that Russians have made no concerted attempt to come to terms with their twentieth-century past. That process started under Gorbachev and Yel’tsin, but was foreclosed by Putin.

Explanation (3) is what Russian dissidents and ‘catacomb Christians’ (i.e. Russian believers who reject the KGB-led Moscow Patriarchate) have long said. In the second volume of her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandel’shtam wrote of Russian society: ‘Until we have made sense of our past, there is no hope of rebirth.’ A Russian catacomb Christian wrote to me in 2010: ‘We are going nowhere because there has been no repentance, no recognition of our sins and errors, and no atonement for them.’

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.