From Pussy Riot to Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Putin Has Been Underrated
Before criticising Russia's president, the west should recognise its own history of betrayal towards his country
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
The Guardian, Friday 20 December 2013 15.30 EST
A very merry Christmas to Pussy Riot, Greenpeace and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, not to say to Vladimir Putin. At his somewhat bizarre annual press conference, with 1,300 journalist waving flags to capture his attention, Putin announced that Khodorkovsky, like the others, would be released from prison. Putin may not be a very lovable or gentle creature, but yet again he has shown himself to be unusually cunning, for all that he has been not only derided but consistently underrated.
Since the implosion of the Soviet Union, more than 20 years ago, the west has made every conceivable mistake in dealing with Russia. In what was meant to be the End of History, with the universal triumph of liberal democracy and market capitalism, American zealots attempted to impose free markets on Russia after more than 70 years of what had passed for socialism. The unhappy outcome should have been no surprise.
This is not a defence of Putin's in many ways unlovely regime. No journalist can feel much fondness for a country where troublesome investigative reporters have a habit of turning up dead. But external policy is a quite different matter, even if the inability to distinguish between the internal character of the Russian regime and its foreign concerns is a very old story. Successive generations of starry-eyed people in the west were enchanted by the Soviet myth, and then disenchanted by what Malcolm Muggeridge sarcastically called "the left's stations of the cross": the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939; the Czech putsch in 1948; the suppression of Hungary in 1956.
Now it may be little consolation to Poles, Czechs and Hungarians, but on each occasion Russia was behaving like a great power. Beating up smaller neighbours is what great powers do: see the US record in Latin America. On Friday Putin said that Stalin was no worse than Oliver Cromwell, which may seem a little quaint, but it was Stalin who almost apologised for bullying demands on Finland with the words, "I am not responsible for geography."
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/20/pussy-riot-khodorkovsky-vladimir-putin-russia
