23 September 2024
Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Cambridge graduate historian and scion of a Russian family with opposition to autocracy in its DNA, has given an interview with The Times following his release from a 25-year prison sentence for ‘treason’. Instead of suddenly being led out of his Siberian cell to be shot, as he thought, he was deported as part of the exchange that included Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter jailed by Putin for 16 years for ‘espionage’. Kara-Murza is a leading member of Open Russia, the organisation founded by Khodorkovsky which advocates civil society and democracy in Russia, and I must say he talks more sense in this interview than many Russian oppositionists.
Vladimir Kara-Murza (2017)
The fact is, Kara-Murza knows Russian history, he is very well informed about Russia today, and he knows Russian life intimately. In the interview he reminded us that more than 20,000 people have been arrested across Russia for opposing the war since 2022 and at least 300 protesters imprisoned. In these conditions, he continued,
does anybody expect large numbers of people to speak out? I did and got a 25-year sentence in prison. I don’t think you would find many people who would be prepared to pay such a price. [Yet] what amazes me, and makes me proud of my country, is that there are so many people who are doing this; tens of thousands who have openly protested against this war, despite the repression, despite the fear.
This is a salutary corrective for those who believe Russia is completely devoid of conscience or hope. But what pleased me most was that he is ‘sure’ that the Putin regime will ‘eventually collapse’ because ‘political change in Russia usually happens suddenly, unexpectedly, when nobody sees it coming, and nobody is ready for it’.
Unbelievable though this must sound to us in the West, it is true. The reason it is true is that for interminable periods of time nothing appears to happen in Russia at all, so when the accursed power finally breaks, everybody is caught on the hop and things move very fast. I am reminded of the nine-year-old Nikolay Andreyev, who when Nicholas II abdicated was ‘stunned’ and kept saying ‘Don’t things happen fast in Russia!’. Only people with Kara-Murza’s experience and antennae know this, and know how imminent it may be. When Andrei Amal’rik’s Will The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? came out in 1970, very few sovietologists believed his predictions, or even took the book seriously, but his antennae and knowledge of Russia were better than theirs. Two days after I arrived in Moscow in the spring of 1981, I knew Amal’rik was right.
The psychopathic KGB man’s ‘special operation’ has been an abject, humiliating disaster and he faces threats all round. For instance, he knows the Russian people will not stand for conscription; if instead he is going to bring in thousands of troops from North Korea, Russians know that regime from Soviet times and detest it; freeing tens of thousands of convicts to fight (be mown down) in Ukraine has produced a doubling of organised crime and an explosion of violence in society; certain generals won’t stand for Russia being the first to use nuclear weapons merely to keep the fantasist in power…
10 October
So is Putin bluffing about using nuclear weapons? Yes. At the moment. It is shameful and ridiculous for the West to be bowing to his blackmail. But the determining paradigm in the criminal’s head is the cornered rat’s behaviour of his youth: he and his fellow street louts closed in to kill it, when it went for them full frontal and survived. So if his ‘special operation’ were terminally cornered, and with it himself, I believe he would use tactical nuclear weapons and cause a stain of radioactivity across Europe to equal Chernobyl. His 20 July generals might well not have time, or be organised enough, to stop him. The fact that, having used nuclear weapons, he would certainly be finished by plotters, is, of course, small consolation. At the moment, he is using Russian and Iran-supplied missiles to devastate Ukrainian power stations. The proportionate response is to allow Ukraine to use NATO-supplied missiles to destroy targets inside Russia. This would sober Putin up a bit and incense Russia’s citizens (already furious that their president has not retaken the Kursk salient inside Russia); it would free Ukraine’s hand tied behind its back and give Putin a taste of real, proportionate war; but I doubt whether it would drive him into that ultimate corner of a nuclear response. Indeed, it might help drive him to a peace deal.
Reminder
20 October
What is the current situation in the war? It is complex, as there are so many literal and figurative fronts, but I believe the important features are as follows.
Putin lost his war in 2022. His aim was to take Kyiv, assassinate key figures in the Ukrainian government, occupy Ukraine from north and east, and destroy Ukraine’s statehood. He has failed in all these objects, and especially the last one, as his barbaric war with Ukraine has been the making of Ukraine as a nation. Ukraine has not won the war, but it is no longer possible to imagine that Russia can annex and enslave it.
According to western intelligence, Russia has lost about 300,000 men killed or injured, and with its present ‘meat grinder’ strategy on the eastern front is losing 1200 killed and wounded a day. The meat grinder, which sends hardly trained Russian troops across a 300-metre no man’s land to be mown down by machine gun fire and shelling, is even beginning to be criticised and questioned in the Russian media.
Nevertheless, the meat grinder depletes Ukrainian munitions, picks away at Ukraine’s overstretched forces, and works: in the past two months Russia has gained territory in the Donbas at a rate not seen since 2022. It has not redeployed troops from Donbas to Kursk; clearly, seizing Donbas is more important to it and seems feasible. Ukraine simply does not have the military capacity now to retake Crimea, which would have been a turning point. Iran and North Korea are efficiently supplying Russia with shells and missiles. Ukraine is still under-supplied by the West and hamstrung by the veto on long strikes.
Meanwhile, the intensified degrading of Ukraine’s power grid using cruise missiles and drones means that it will have only half the generating capacity that it had last winter. Ukraine is boosting its renewable energy and will import some energy from the EU, but the winter will be a very severe test of national morale. On the analogy of the Blitz, people believe morale won’t collapse, but Ukraine has been at war for ten years now. At the front Ukrainian commanders frankly admit they are exhausted and their motivation lower than a year ago. More than 57% of Ukrainians now support negotiations to end the war.
Despite all that, I do not agree with Owen Matthews’s view in this week’s Spectator (‘Ukraine’s NATO fantasy’) that ‘Kyiv finds itself in the worst of all possible worlds’ because no state can join NATO that has disputed borders and ‘no state in modern times has more viciously disputed borders than Ukraine’. If, as I believe, the only saver for Putin now is to sign a peace, then if Ukraine forced itself by referendum to recognise de jure the new borders (Zelenskyy would surely resign over this) it would qualify to join NATO, start the process forthwith, and Putin would be forced to accept his worst nightmare.
28 October
Does Putin want peace and would he accept his worst nightmare? Of course not! I am afraid that Matthews does not know his Russia if he believes that the invasion was ‘fundamentally about preventing Ukraine from joining NATO’ and ‘Putin’s theories of the unity of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples were ideological window-dressing’. Putin believes in restoring the Russian/Soviet empire as genuinely and madly as Hitler believed in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and the ‘Third Reich’. Before the invasion there was absolutely no question of Ukraine joining NATO, because of the disputed borders blocker, so that was the ‘window-dressing’ to the invasion and Putin’s imperialism was the reality.
Putin does not want peace, he wants to carry on annexing Eurasian states that were part of the Russian empire in about 1893, and if Ukraine joined NATO as an outcome of the war he launched it would indeed be his worst nightmare. ‘Russia’ has almost always been an empire, not a country, much as for two hundred years ‘England’ was synonymous for the world with ‘British Empire’. As Gary Kasparov has been saying recently only Putin’s complete defeat in Ukraine could kill the ‘virus of imperialism’ in Russians’ minds, and lead to the real Russian homeland and its true values being reborn.
But the consequences of the dictator’s war now threaten his power, so he will have to make a peace — a peace, of course, as tough as he can make it, with a lot of bluff suggesting that he is the injured party (because he has to put up with having democracy on his door step), or that he can walk away at any moment as he doesn’t really need a deal. There are clear signs this week that he is orchestrating his climbdown to a peace. All of the foreign participants in the Brics summit in Kazan have been denigrated for shaking the hand of an internationally proscribed criminal, but in fact the key players (even Xi Jinping) publicly called for de-escalation of the war and the conclusion of a peace. Above all, Putin himself said he welcomed Donald Trump’s ‘sincere pledge’ to end the war if he becomes president. This is a plain warning: Putin and Trump intend to do a Trumpian deal. The cost of such a ‘peace’ for Trump and the West would be Ukraine not joining NATO.
So the choice is between a Trump ‘peace’ that sells Ukraine out, a tough peace that would recognise Crimea and Donbas as de jure Russian but enable Ukraine to join NATO, or (if Harris becomes president, presumably) the US and Europe finally taking the war seriously and enabling Ukraine to defeat Russia militarily. (Slava Ukraini, heroiam slava!)
2 November
I have decided that I shan’t write about Ukraine again until quite some time after the outcome of the US election…
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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.
