The realization that I might have made my last visit to the country made me think of my first trip in 1987. I feel that Russia has come full circle – back to the totalitarianism, aggression and isolation that defined the Soviet era. In 1987, the Soviet Union was on the verge of death – though we did not know it at the time. I was in Moscow to cover the arms talks between the United States and the USSR. The big story for local correspondents was the opening of the first private restaurants in the country. Things changed and this was reflected in the almost playful way of Gennady Gerasimov, the Soviet representative at the time. It was typical of Gerasimov that he later used a joke to effectively announce the end of Soviet imperialism. Brezhnev’s doctrine was a code of conduct for Moscow’s self-proclaimed right to invade its neighbors, to ensure that they remain in the Kremlin orbit. Asked in 1989 if it was still valid, Gerasimov said it had been replaced by the “Sinatra doctrine” – from now on, everyone could do it their own way. This development frightened the young Vladimir Putin, who was then a KGB agent in East Germany. He later recalled with bitterness that as the communist regime in East Germany collapsed around him, he had asked for military support, only to be told that “Moscow is silent”. When I started visiting Russia more often – since about 2004 – Putin was in charge. Superficially, the country had changed beyond recognition. The National Hotel near the Kremlin – a Soviet-style landfill when I stayed there in 1987 – was now too bright and expensive to think about. The statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, was removed from the center of Moscow and placed in a fallen monument park. The transition from despotism to globalized capitalism was symbolized by the changing fortunes of the Solzhenitsyn family. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had won the Nobel Prize for his novels about Soviet gulags and was forced into exile. His son, Yermolai, was now a consultant to McKinsey, based in Moscow. But the fact that so much had changed since the communist era made it very easy to overlook how many remained the same. Under the Western consumer surface, totalitarianism, violence and imperialism were still fundamental to Putin’s rule. Political opponents of the regime continued to be persecuted and sometimes killed. Boris Nemtsov, a leading liberal I met in both Moscow and London, was assassinated just meters from the Kremlin in 2015. Russia invaded neighboring Georgia in 2008 and attacked Ukraine in 2014, annexing Crimea. As these actions made clear, Putin and his associates had never really accepted the independence of countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Countries like Poland, which was in the wider Soviet bloc, are worried that Russian imperialist instinct continues to extend to them. Fyodor Lukyanov, an academic close to the Russian leader, once told me that Putin was driven above all by the fear that Russia, for the first time in centuries, might lose its status as a great power. With an economy ranked 11th in the world (measured by nominal gross domestic product), the Kremlin’s remaining high-powered claims are based on the country’s military power and nuclear weapons. The elite’s reverence for my war came home in 2014 in a conversation in the Russian parliament with Vyacheslav Nikonov, a member of the Duma and grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov, who was Stalin’s foreign minister. When discussing Russia’s relationship with the Bric countries, which includes Brazil, Nikonov told me that there was a big problem with Brazil as an ally: “They do not understand the war. “They have only fought one war in their history.” “And that happened with Paraguay,” he added contemptuously. As Nikonov saw it, Putin’s annexation of Crimea was a modest step: “Molotov would have invaded Ukraine and taken it in a week.” Putin, in fact, shared the same arrogance and aggression towards Ukraine. It led him to dangerously underestimate the resistance that Russia would face when it launched a full-scale invasion this year. In Putin’s time, as in the Soviet era, imperialism abroad goes hand in hand with oppression at home. For many years, Russia under Putin left much more room for political disagreement than the Soviet Union. I witnessed large-scale anti-Putin protests in the streets of Moscow in 2012 and 2019. But Putin used the cover of his special military operation in Ukraine to finally stifle any internal political opposition. Thousands have been arrested for taking part in anti-war demonstrations and the opposition movement, led by prisoner Alexei Navalny, is being dismantled. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also plunged the country back into an international isolation that is even deeper than that experienced by the Soviet Union. I flew from London to Moscow with a direct flight in 1987. These flights no longer exist. I am not optimistic that I will see them restored soon. [email protected]
