Ukrainian journal

27 June 2024
A Russian opposition group called the Congress of People’s Deputies, consisting of over sixty exiled politicians who were once MPs in the State Duma, has met this week in Warsaw to discuss their plan to overthrow the Putin regime. They argue that it can only be done by force and this means assassinating key oligarchs and propagandists, presumably culminating in Putin. The group’s military wing, the Freedom of Russia Legion, has already killed two important pro-Putin figures inside Russia. The Congress’s ‘Victory Plan’, whilst also calling for tougher sanctions and more weapons for Ukraine, states that ‘it is no longer an option but simply the duty [of the West and NATO] to encourage revolutionary action’ within Russia. They argue that it is morally justified.

One can see that it might be morally defensible in the state of brutal war that exists between Russia and Ukraine, on the analogy, say, of the assassination of the architect of the Holocaust, Heydrich, in a joint British-Czechoslovak operation. But, quite apart from the fact that we did not think it politic to kill Hitler during the War, I’m afraid that in the perspective of Russian history it would be a very bad idea indeed to unleash a campaign of assassinations inside Russia. Impatient for ‘progress’, in 1879 the Russian Populist movement split into two parties, of which ‘The People’s Will [or Freedom]’ was dedicated to assassinations. International terrorism as we know it today is traceable to this development. Lenin and the Bolsheviks inexorably followed suit. The last thing any Russian political party should be doing today is perpetuating Russia’s 150-year-old cycle of party/state violence, which is simply a death cult that mutates into genocide. The Congress of People’s Deputies is falling into a trap. I would much rather hear from them what structures they are going to create when in power to ensure the survival of democracy, the rule of law and an open society in Russia for longer than the usual ten minutes.

It is also depressingly predictable that Russian oppositionists are telling the West that it should be solving Russia’s political problems for it (‘no longer an option but simply the duty’). This is what I call Russia’s ‘Invited Ruler Syndrome’, going back to the supposed founding of Rus’ when foreigners were implored to come in, ‘rule and reign over us and establish order’. It was the father of cop outs. Under communism both dissidents and emigrés demanded of their western sympathisers that the West transplant democracy for them and massively invest in their country; then Russians changed their minds and decided the West was interfering. Nothing is really going to change in Russia until they themselves want real democracy and they themselves establish and safeguard it.

29 June
Another lesson that Russia’s nineteenth century history offers us is that defeat in the Crimea (1856) can lead to rapid political and social change. I am convinced that if Ukraine could swiftly recapture Crimea it would precipitate the end of Putin’s regime and the war. One can see how it could be done, as Crimea is attached to Russian-occupied territory by a not too wide neck in the north and the very vulnerable Kerch Bridge in the east. The Ukrainians have now sunk most of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the rest of it is holed up in the Azov Sea and Havana Harbour. God forbid they should attempt to retake the peninsula with seaborne landings à la Gallipoli. But they are slowly disabling Russian air bases on Crimea and one can see that a surprise multi-directional attack involving drones, missiles, special operations and an invading force from the north could succeed. However, the Russians have (apparently) packed Crimea with troops, and the Ukrainians simply would not be able to rustle up a big enough crack force to take it. That, of course, is Ukraine’s direst need now: people for their army. How long can they go it alone?

In an article in the Spectator today by Ivan Krastev, political scientist and founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, he argues that fear of a declining population is actually what has driven Putin’s military operations. At its present rate, Russia’s population of 146 million is projected to fall to only 140 million in 2039. ‘The biggest single boost in recent years came when the country annexed Crimea in 2014, adding 2.4 million inhabitants.’ Certainly, demographic need is entwined with Putin’s messianic fantasy of restoring the Russian Empire. Putin has only his own criminality to blame for Russia’s human hollowing out: 600,000 of its citizens have left the country since 2022, at least 150,000 Russian soldiers have been killed so far, in 2010 a respectable poll in Russia indicated that 73% of the population did not want to live in their own country. Mind you, the drain started ten years before Putin came to power: between 1990 and 2010 four million Russians emigrated to the USA — over 1% of the latter’s population.

One wonders what there is left to like in Crimea. Small businesses, especially IT start ups, soon left in 2014 faced with Russian interference and expropriations. Now, according to Twitter, even resorts like Koktebel’ are empty. In the Soviet period, it seemed, everyone could take a cheap holiday in Crimea offered by their workplace. I visited Yalta in the summers of 1970 and 1973. The most sunny, colourful, inspiring place was Chekhov’s villa and garden, where I was shown around on my own by a wonderful friend of his sister’s. Of ‘sunbathing’ on Yalta’s uncomfortable slate beach I have only monochrome memories:

Yalta beach, June 1970

15 July
Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, has warned today that Russia is preparing another attempt to invade from the north and take Kyiv. He is doubtless right and NATO is well aware of it. Quite simply, because Russia does not have a problem with cannon fodder and is running a war economy (about 40% of government spending), it could well mount an attempt to reverse the fiasco of its armoured column assault of 2022. Again because of Ukraine’s shortage of troops, it is feasible that the Russians capture at least a northern swathe of Ukrainian territory, if they don’t actually reach Kyiv. It would be yet another front for the Ukrainians to fight. I want Trump’s ‘Peace Plan’ as little as Zelenskyy or the Ukrainians do. But it looks increasingly doubtful that enough hardware alone can be supplied by the West fast enough for Ukraine to inflict defeat or a stalemate. We are helping the Ukrainians fight but not win, as the saying goes. If Ukraine continues to lose the ground war, the only solution is for the sovereign countries of the US, Poland, Britain and France to send their soldiers in — not ‘NATO troops’, you understand. According to a Polish government source, the Americans have already threatened to ‘defeat the Russian occupiers with superior American conventional forces if Putin attacks Ukraine using nuclear weapons’. We need here to define ‘A Third World War’ as a nuclear one of mutual assured destruction, not as the offensive participation of Ukraine’s allies’ ground forces in the defeat of the Putin fascist state by conventional means.

Kyrylo Budanov: a tough nut

20 July
Yesterday Zelenskyy addressed a meeting of the British cabinet — the first foreign leader since Bill Clinton in 1997. His key message was the need for his de facto allies to ‘permit’ Ukraine to launch long-range missiles into Russia to destroy the bases from which Russian missiles have reduced Ukraine’s electricity output by 61% and killed hundreds of civilians. His message at the European Political Community Summit the day before was the same. At the NATO summit the week before, Zelenskyy’s thrust was the same. There, Starmer told Zelenskyy that the UK’s military aid, including (Anglo-French) Storm Shadow missiles, could be used as the Ukrainians saw fit. Next day, a Ministry of Defence spokesperson said that ‘the policy on this has not changed’. So is NATO permitting Ukraine to use these long-range missiles defensively-aggressively, or not? Can Ukraine do with the Anglo-French missiles what Starmer has ‘permitted’, or not? Can the UK take unilateral decisions where the Ukrainian war is concerned, or has it to abide by a NATO consensus partly determined by decisions like Germany’s refusal to hand over Taurus missiles in case they are ‘used to hit targets in Russia’? Is NATO brain dead as Emmanuel Macron warned five years ago? Can it win a war already being waged against it?

If Trump wins in November, what price the EU’s and NATO’s repeated promise to stand by Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’? If they should break it now…as Hamlet said.

27 July
Putin’s purge of the military goes on. Shoigu was moved sideways from being Minister of Defence, Gerasimov seems under threat since his deputy was detained pending trial, and at least four other top brass have been arrested. As far as we know, none have been shot, so the comparison with Stalin is not quite exact. They have ostensibly been removed because of corruption. From day one of the ‘special operation’, however, I have never been convinced that the Russian general staff’s heart is in it. They project a kind of deep stupor. They were never warned about the invasion in advance and Putin’s intelligence men were so wrong about Ukraine’s morale that they made the military look fools. Soldiers don’t forgive that. I still believe that a younger generation of generals could mount a coup. There is no tradition of that succeeding in Russia; historically, it has been members of the aristocracy who have taken things into their own hands — i.e., today, oligarchs.

31 July
What are Russia’s writers doing, people might ask, why aren’t they protesting against the war and the regime? To ask that would be the height of naivety. At the start, along with scores of Orthodox priests, writers did speak out, loudly and bitterly. But they have been forcibly gagged or terrorised into silence by Putin’s martial laws. Last week Yevgeniia Berkovich was jailed for six years for her poems about the war. Others have simply gone to live abroad like the hilarious satirist Viktor Erofeev, who declared: ‘I didn’t leave Russia, Russia left me.’ Russkii dom (‘The Russia House’) seems culturally empty. It indeed gives you the feeling of those bleak, monochrome photos of Stalinist Russia. OK, then, I’ll end with a colour photograph I took of the windows of Chekhov’s study in his house Buiurnuz (Tatar for ‘As You Like It’) at Yalta; a house with inimitable, unforgettable feng shui.

Yalta, July 1973

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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.