Sir Malcolm Rifkind
Churchill’s Quote on Russia: ‘A Riddle Wrapped in Mystery Inside an Enigma’
Sir Malcolm Rifkind | Churchill’s Quote on Russia A Riddle Wrapped in Mystery Inside an Enigma | 05.02.23
- So a very, very warm welcome and thank you very much, Sir Malcolm Rifkind for joining us today. It’s an absolute honour and a privilege to have you with us. And before I hand you over to Trudy, I just want to give you a brief introduction. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, for those of you who don’t know, served as Foreign Secretary, Minister of Defence and subsequently as Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, which had oversight of M16, K15 and GCHQ. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. I’m sure that I could go on and on and on, but this is what I was given to introduce you. So it is an absolute pleasure to have you with us. And we are all looking forward to today’s presentation. Thank you, over to you.
- Well, thank you very, very, very much indeed. For me too, it’s a pleasure and a privilege to be here. And we discussed the subject matter that I might use and the subject is Russia, but we start with a particular, very well-known remark about Russia made by no one less than Sir Winston Churchill way back in 1939, when he said that Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. And then he went on to say, but if you want the key to Russia, try and identify what is their national interest as they see it. And that goes back a long way. When two years after Churchill’s remark in 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Churchill, Stalin, I should say, Joe Stalin, knew that he was very unpopular with half the Soviet people because of the purges, the executions, all the dreadful things he had done. So he did not call upon them to unite in order to save the Soviet Union or to save communism. He explicitly called upon them to fight for the Russian motherland. And the war was always referred to in the Soviet Union, then and subsequently as the great patriotic war.
Note the word patriotic, not much to do with communist ideology. So we have a long history of Russia or as it became in the 20th century of the Soviet Union, seeking to build on its national identity and to do so very often, sadly, at the expense of others. If we’re going to this evening look at Russia, but bringing it up to the contemporary, then I think the defining years that we need to start off with are the extraordinary years of 1990 and 1991. This is when Gorbachev was in charge of the Soviet Union and we saw not one, but three separate events, this is often not appreciated, that took place almost simultaneously, each of them with massive consequences for the world as a whole. The first was the end of the Cold War and the Cold War was a struggle between the Soviet Union and the West. And that could easily have become a hot war at any stage. And if it had become a hot war, that would have been nuclear with all the horrors and possibly the very destruction of the planet. So the Cold War came to an end after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And then within a year or so, the Cold War effectively had ceased. And we had not close friendship, but we had a much more relaxed working relationship.
So that was the first event, the end of the Cold War. The second was the end of communism in Europe because the Soviet Union was not just a state, it was not just a Russia with a national aspiration, it was the ideology called communism after Marx in Lenin and it was not just a Russian ideology, it was a global ideology. And so that global ideology meant that the Soviet Union was not just seeking to expand the power during the Cold War of the Soviet state, but it had aspirations for its ideology, Marx in Leninism, communism, to become the global ideology. And indeed it had many allies. It not only had the satellite states in Eastern Europe, which it had liberated from Hitler, but then imposed communism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and others. But there were also huge communist parties in France, in Italy, in Spain, and elsewhere, that had very strong roots and which supported much of what Moscow was saying. So when communism collapsed, and it collapsed essentially because it could not deliver the economic aspirations of the Russian and Soviet peoples.
Somebody once said marvellously that communism only worked either in heaven where they did not need it, or in hell where they had it already. So economically it failed. And when economics fail, then politics fail thereafter. The whole system becomes discredited. So I said, first of all, you had the end of the Cold War. Secondly, you had the end of communism in Europe. We still have a communist party in China, but communism in Europe, and that has never repeated itself. And Putin, for example, has no interest in resurrecting communism. He has other aspirations, but communism is not one of them. But I said there were three events, and it’s the third one which is most significant to where we are today. Because the third was the end of Europe’s last empire. And of course, the Soviet Union was not just the Soviet Union, it was the Russian empire. The empire of the Tsars, built up since Peter the Great in the 1600s, and renamed the Soviet Union in 1917 after the Bolshevik revolution.
That wasn’t the only European empire. There was the British empire, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and others. But they had all disappeared during the earlier part of the 20th century. The Russian empire, called the Soviet Union, imploded unexpectedly. Virtually no one had predicted this was going to happen. But as Gorbachev became discredited, domestically, not internationally, but with his own people, and as the Cold War was over, and as communism had been rejected, so the Soviet Union as a state began to implode, and effectively disintegrated into 15 separate countries. A word about Gorbachev, because he is one of the most extraordinary figures of the 20th century. And if we see that the Cold War ended peacefully, which it did, he can claim much of the credit for that. I had the privilege of meeting him when he came to see Margaret Thatcher in Chequers five, six years earlier, when he was not yet in charge of the Soviet Union, senior member of the Politburo.
But the British Foreign Office, I was a junior minister at the time. I wasn’t foreign secretary. Geoffrey Howe was foreign secretary. But I was the minister dealing with the Soviet Union on a day-to-day basis. So I had the privilege of being present at Chequers when Gorbachev came and met Mrs. Thatcher. And you’ll remember that was the occasion when she said at the end of the various meetings they’d had, he is a man with whom we can do business. And the reason she said that was not because during the talks they had, they had reached agreement on anything of substance. She was still the iron lady. He was still a convinced communist. And soon to become the head of the Soviet Union and the leader of the Communist Party. So they didn’t agree on much, but two things happened during these meetings. Very important to international relations.
The first, they began to understand where each of them came from. And understanding requires dialogue to some degree. But even more important, they began to trust each other. And trust can exist even when people don’t agree with each other. Trust doesn’t mean you agree. It means that you sense that this person’s personality, their character, their integrity is such that you can assume they mean what they say and they will deliver what they promise. And if both sides feel that about the other, then you get not automatically, not overnight, but you get the beginnings of a relationship of trust, which on this occasion, not always, on this occasion turned out to be more than justified. My own recollection of that extraordinary weekend at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence with Gorbachev, he came with his wife, Raisa Gorbacheva. And normally you never met Soviet wives. And normally they had no role to play in public affairs, but she was different to her predecessors. And she was a philosophy graduate, very well-educated. And she was also very elegant, beautifully dressed.
And when Gorbachev went off with Margaret Thatcher to have their tete-a-tete, I was asked to look after her. And I took her a tour of Chequers, including the library. And she spoke a little English, but we needed the interpreter, the British ambassador interpreted for us. And I will never forget as she was walking around the library of Chequers, she stopped and looked at some of the books on the shelves. And she was a philosophy graduate, I’d mentioned. So she turned to me and through the interpreter, she said, you know, I am delighted, Mr. Rifkind, to be in England. I’ve always wanted to be in the country of Hobbes and Locke. Now here was the wife of a Soviet communist leader, referring to two English philosophers of a few hundred years ago, not what you normally got from Soviet leaders and certainly not from their wives. So we recognise that these were different people, Gorbachev and his wife. They represented the new generation and they represented more a pragmatic than a hard ideological generation. So let’s get back to a little bit of the history.
Why did the Soviet Union implode in 1991? Because remember, Putin, the current president, the man responsible for the invasion of Ukraine, he has said publicly, he said it years ago, that the greatest disaster of his political life was, and he didn’t say the end of communism or the end of the Cold War. He said it was the collapse of the Soviet Union, by which he meant the collapse of the Russian empire. Now that empire, as I’ve said, went back hundreds of years. Why was it the last to disappear? Well, there are several reasons one can give, but the most important is that it was a different kind of empire. The British empire was Australia, South Africa, India, Canada, the West Indies, all territories in other parts of the world. When we lost those territories, when they became independent countries, it affected our prestige. We can no longer claim to be a global world power, but it didn’t make us feel more insecure in these islands. We didn’t need Australia or Canada or India to protect Britain. It was a different kind of empire.
In Russia’s case, their empire was one that had spread out from the Russian core to control all the territory around it. And if you want a historical precedent, you have to really go back to the Roman empire. Think of the Roman empire, starting in Rome, and gradually, in order to secure Rome, they had to control the territory around Rome. And that meant they eventually controlled the whole of Italy. But then Italy was threatened. So they had to control the countries around the Italian core. And so it went on, and Russia likewise. And so that meant that as they lost that empire, when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, they suddenly felt justifiably or not. And they weren’t entitled to, but they felt insecure. And of all the countries that, because it disintegrated into 15 countries, the three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Central Asian states, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, three others. But the biggest one after Russia itself was Ukraine. And Ukraine’s not a small country. The others were quite small, most of them, in population or in land area. But Ukraine is 41 million people. It’s a vast area, as you will have seen on the maps recently.
But the crucial point, Ukraine was also a Slav country, which most of the Russian empire wasn’t. So you had the Russians, you had Belarus, you had Ukraine, both of whom, all of whom had a Slav background. And this was very, very important. Putin likes to imply that the collapse of the Soviet Union was because of some NATO plot, that the West somehow were plotting the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Not only can I say that that’s complete nonsense, but there’s hard evidence that at least in the early stages, the West was at least ambiguous about whether it wanted the Soviet Union to collapse. And on one very important occasion, the President of the United States, tried to stop it collapsing. What am I referring to? I’m referring to the fact that before the Soviet Union disintegrated, everyone recognised that Ukraine was the most important potential breakaway state. But at that time, one of the big problems was that the Soviet Union’s stock of nuclear weapons weren’t all in Russia. During the Cold War, many of them were in Ukraine, some were in Belarus, some in Kazakhstan.
So potentially if these countries became independent, instead of just the Soviet Union being a nuclear weapons state, we would have three countries of which the biggest would be Ukraine, all of whom would possess nuclear weapons. And at that time, nobody knew who would rule Ukraine. It could have turned out to be some ghastly despot that would be like Kim Jong-un in North Korea, or indeed like Putin in Russia. So there was alarm at this. And President Bush, not the second President, the first President Bush, went to Kiev before the parliament had voted for independence. And he tried to persuade them to reconsider independence. Maybe some new arrangement might be preferable. And the Ukrainians were so angry at the American president trying to discourage them from going for independence, that ever since his speech in Ukraine, in Kiev, has been known to the Ukrainians as the chicken Kiev speech, for reasons that you can imagine. So I’m not saying the West was unhappy about the Soviet Union disappearing.
Of course, we realised that if it did disintegrate, and then the new Russia would be far weaker than the old Soviet Union, as indeed has happened. But there was a balance to be assessed. And until the question of the nuclear weapons could be addressed, that then pointed to caution. Now, let me also say that, again, Putin’s grievance, one of his main grievances, is the expansion of NATO. That when the Cold War was over, NATO, instead of disappearing, not only continued, but became larger and larger, as many of the old countries, not just bits of the Soviet Union, more important were this so-called satellite states, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, all of whom wanted to join NATO, as did the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
Now, again, Putin’s allegation that the West was desperate to get all these countries into NATO, could not be further from the truth. I was in government at that time. I was foreign secretary between 1995 and ‘97. And three years before that, '92 to '95, I was defence secretary. So I was very much involved in the discussions that were taking place during those very extraordinary years. And the initial response, original view of the NATO countries, was that with one exception, we were not keen on NATO expansion. The one exception was East Germany, because when the German, the GDR, the East German Republic collapsed, and German reunification became possible, West Germany was already part of NATO, a leading member of NATO. Inevitably, East Germany, if it became part of a single German state, would become part of NATO.
So that was the first issue that had to be addressed, and that was successfully negotiated. So far as the other countries were concerned, we didn’t have strong views either way. And I remember going as defence secretary to Riga, the capital of Latvia, in about 1994, '93 or '94. And the president of Latvia saying, why aren’t NATO allowing us to join NATO now that we’re an independent country? And I said, look, you must be patient, Mr. President. This is 1994, three years ago, you didn’t even exist as an independent state. It was still the Soviet Union. If somebody had suggested then, in three years’ time, the president of an independent Latvia would be saying to the British defence secretary in Riga, why aren’t you allowing us into NATO? We’d have all been thought to be completely crazy. So I said, let’s give it time and we’ll see what develops. And essentially what did develop, and it’s ironic, but it can’t be avoided, is that all these countries that had come under the Soviet Union, either as part of the Soviet Union or the satellite states in Eastern Europe, they were all terrified that one day, not immediately, but one day, somebody would come to power in Moscow who would want to grab control back. And if they were not part of NATO, then they would be in a very weak position and would probably be exploited. And of course, what they were predicting is what we’ve seen in the last few months. So essentially they said to NATO, to the United States, to Britain, to France, to Germany, we are no longer communist countries. We’re now independent states, truly independent. We want to join the European community. We want to join NATO. We’re democratic. We’re adopting market capitalism, market economics. Why shouldn’t we be allowed to be members?
And it was an appeal impossible to reject. Now let’s go forward now, because I don’t want to speak for more than another 10, 15 minutes before we can get into a discussion and try to answer any questions that you might want to raise. I said a few moments ago that Putin always has said that the greatest disaster of his lifetime was the collapse of the Soviet Union. And what’s upset him most is the emergence of an independent Ukraine. And it’s worth remembering that this whole, this paranoia, because it’s the best word one can use, about whether Ukraine is entitled to be seen as a nation, as an independent country. This isn’t something that Putin invented a few weeks ago or a few months ago. For years, he has been expressing questions about this. And last year, there was a very long article published in his name.
I don’t know if he wrote it, but he put his name to it so that it appeared that he was the author. And in it, he used the language of the Tsars. He said that you have to realise that the, what the Tsars used to say, they never referred to Ukraine. They said there is Russia, which they called Great Russia. There is Ukraine, which they called Little Russia. And there is Belarus, which they called White Russia, the three Slav parts of the old Russian Empire. And the Tsars essentially believed what Putin today believes, that Russia’s, not just its security requirements, but also its cultural and historic identity, not just justified, but required a single state control from Moscow over these parts of the old Soviet Union. And of course, they also expected, as Putin does, that as far as the rest of the old Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, the Baltic States, Georgia, the Caucasus, they may not be part of the Russian Federation, but they must be seen as a Russian sphere of interest with Russia determining their foreign policy and not allowing them to join NATO or the European Union or other Western organisations.
So what Putin aspires to, he’s not completely stupid. He knows he can’t recreate the USSR, but he wants to get as near as he can to that. And essentially to control Belarus and Ukraine and to control the foreign policy, if not the domestic policy, of all the other former states of the Soviet Union. So I think we ought to see Putin today not as some unique expression of Russian history, unlike all his predecessors. Sadly, it’s the other way around. He’s like most of his predecessors with the exception of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who succeeded Gorbachev, because Russia’s history has always been autocratic. The Tsars had no time for democracy or for self-determination of their subject peoples.
They were autocrats, and they were succeeded by Lenin and then by Stalin in a different way, but fundamentally, the same approach to human rights, to democracy, to freedom of expression, to the rule of law. And then you had this extraordinary interlude, and sadly, it was an interlude, of Gorbachev and then Yeltsin, who genuinely were trying to create a more open society, not necessarily a Western one, but certainly one that shared Western values, that saw Russia’s vacation as part of Europe and knew that that meant massive reform, not just the end of communism, but the emergence of representative institutions, freedom of speech, human rights, and issues of that kind. So let’s fast forward. We’ve had this invasion, and it is an invasion.
Nobody in their right mind suggests it’s simply a military operation. What has happened is something none of us predicted. Even those like myself, who were firm friends of Ukraine, strong supporters of Ukraine, feared for the worst. When we saw that this was an overall invasion, then I did not believe that Russia could permanently control Ukraine. It’s too big. But I did assume, as did most, that at least in the first few weeks, they would take Kiev, the capital city, they would effectively demolish and remove the Ukrainian government and Zelensky as its president, that they would instal some puppet government and Ukraine would suddenly have a government which declared itself to be the closest ally of Russia. And then slowly and slowly, the process of integration with Russia would take place. That’s the sort of thing one anticipated. But I also anticipated that if that did happen, there would be a mass insurgency. Ukrainians, it was already clear to those of us, I’ve been to Ukraine a good number of times.
I know quite a reasonable amount about that country. And I did not believe the Ukrainian people would take that lying down, that even if their armed forces were defeated, what they would do was start an insurgency rather as we saw in Afghanistan, rather as we have seen elsewhere. And that ultimately, though it might take 10, 15 years, the Russians will be pushed out. What I did not anticipate was that the Ukrainian armed forces would prove so impressive that Zelensky would turn into a Nelson Mandela figure with of enormous courage and an enormous sense of leadership. And also that the Russian armed forces will prove so hopeless, at least until now. We cannot predict what the future might hold. So I won’t go through what has happened. You’ve read it all, you’ve seen it on television. You know as much as I do about what has been happening.
But I think the point I would leave with you on this particular aspect is that what you see is partly caused by the fact that however big the Russian armed forces might be, they have not fought a serious land war since 1945. They have had no experience of combat on the massive scale that is now operating, nor have the Ukrainians. But the crucial difference is Ukrainians are fighting for their own country. They are motivated in a dramatic way. And the military have said for years that if you are fighting people who are in their own country, who fear the extinction of their own national identity, then they will fight back. They have nothing to lose. And you need a ratio of three to one, four to one, perhaps even more than that to have any chance of defeating them. And so we saw the ignominious way in which Putin had to withdraw his troops from Kiev from the whole of the North of Ukraine. And we’re also seeing as we speak today, if he’s making progress in the Donbass and in the East, it’s incredibly slow and it’s not yet certain what that is going to lead to. But he’s also shown Putin an extraordinary incompetence for someone who’d like to be seen as a strategic genius.
If his objection has been the increase in the size of NATO, isn’t it ironic that within a few weeks we are likely to have Finland and Sweden joining NATO? Sweden that has been neutral for 200 years, Finland since 1945. So the enlargement of NATO, if that happens, which now seems almost inevitable, will be the direct consequence of Putin’s poor judgement . But we’ve also seen that he’s destroyed his own energy policy. In the time of the czars, it was said that the Russian empire only had two friends, its army and its Navy. Somebody more recently said that Russia today only has two friends, its oil and its gas. Now, so far as gas is concerned, which is where Europe has become very dependent to not Europe as a whole, but Germany and several other countries. That is one of the two major markets for Russian energy. China being the other. Putin by his own stupidity has destroyed half their gas markets.
Even if it doesn’t happen immediately within the next two or three years, Europe is not going to be buying any gas at all from Russia. And that is very, very damaging to Russia’s future. But it’s even worse than that. He’s lost control of his foreign currency. NATO is more robust than ever before. And most important of all, Putin has done more to unite the Ukrainians and to create a sense of Ukrainian nationhood than anyone other than Ukrainians themselves. Think of Israel’s experience in the late 1940s when it declared independence, less than a million people attacked by the Arab States, hugely greater in number. And that helped create, did more to create the sense of Israeli national identity than anything else might have done. So final points in these opening comments. What are the prospects for a resolution of this conflict? I don’t know, is the honest answer. But I can give what I hope is an informed speculation as to what I think is most likely. And I’m only saying is most likely.
One possibility will be that he achieves his immediate objectives, having given up Kiev, and that is to control the rest of the Donbass. And he’s already controls a lot of what’s called the land bridge that links Russia to Crimea. If he does that, then he could say, right, I have got more control over Ukraine than I’ve had before. Therefore, I claim this to be a great victory, a great success. It won’t be a great victory because his objective was to destroy Ukraine as an independent country. It’s still a huge defeat. But in Russia with a totally controlled media, he could sell that argument, which many Russians might be willing to accept. That might happen. And if it does happen, we should know in the next two or three months in my judgement . If it doesn’t happen, if the Ukrainians are as successful as they have been up till now in resisting the Russian armed forces, then obviously it’s much more uncertain.
But I don’t myself subscribe to the view that Putin would embark on a war lasting months and possibly one or two years. He can’t afford it. His army is being dramatically reduced. We heard only today a ninth general is likely to have been killed in the conflict so far. At least 15 to 20,000 Russian soldiers have died. 20,000 others must be injured or incapacitated. He cannot afford to keep a war of this scale going on for a very long period of time. So we could end up with some sort of frozen conflict. And we have frozen conflicts elsewhere. Russia’s relationship with Georgia, where they effectively tried to annex Abkhazia, South Ossetia, parts of Georgia. And likewise, the position we’ve had with Crimea and the Donbass for the last six, seven years. So there could be a frozen conflict of some kind, or there could be a deal. Very final comments that Ukraine and Zelensky have said, they know they’re not going to be a member of NATO because NATO won’t accept them, not just because Putin doesn’t want them to be.
So they’ve said, we are willing to become a neutral state but it has to be a neutral state guarantees as to the neutrality of our country and that is not going to be subject to further invasion. And there are various other details that I can go into in answer to questions if you’d like me to, which could form the core of a negotiated solution. It wouldn’t be a long-term solution but it might mean that the killing would stop, the war would stop, and Ukraine would continue to be an independent state. And if that happens, well, that’s a damn sight better than it seemed likely just two months ago. And the Ukrainians and Zelensky deserve more of the credit for that. And Putin, whatever happens now is damaged property. He cannot recover his reputation for strategic genius or being a great leader who always gets it right. He’s made the single biggest mistake that has happened in Russia in the last 50 years. And that will be his legacy, whatever now happens. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for an outstanding presentation. Very concise and very, very, very informative.
Lauren, do we have questions?
[Lauren] Yeah. Are you happy? Yeah, you happy to-
[Lauren] Yeah, I’m happy to read them. Did you or anyone else in the UK government identify potential successors to Gorbachev who shared his views? And if so, what happened to them?
Well, Gorbachev, if you remember, was the last president of the Soviet Union. And he was eased out of power by Yeltsin. Yeltsin who had been like Gorbachev, a leading member of the Communist Party. He was actually more radical than Gorbachev. And Gorbachev until quite a late stage thought he could reform communism rather than demolish it. He thought we could have it rather like Dubcek tried in Czechoslovakia, communism with a human face. And it became obvious that once you started to reform the system, it started collapsing. And Yeltsin came to the conclusion that one of the reasons why they failed was because they were an empire. They didn’t need to be an empire. Russia was big enough by itself. And therefore Russia, Yeltsin, along with others who agreed with him, so manoeuvred affairs that the Soviet Union imploded.
They’d hoped to create some sort of commonwealth, some sort of loose federal system. But once you started that process, countries like the Baltic States and Ukraine and Georgia knew this was a historic opportunity for them to recover the independence they’d lost many, many years ago. And so Yeltsin then handpicked his successor. And history will record that he got it terribly wrong. He picked this rather colourless but harmless administrative man called Vladimir Putin who had been working in Leningrad who was ex-KGB, rather colourless in manner, but fought to be a safe pair of hands. And to be fair to Yeltsin’s legacy, Putin in the first two or three years, much of what he said and seemed to believe was not that different from Yeltsin. But once a KGB man or always a KGB man, old habits died hard. Gradually he developed the authoritarian, the dictatorial, the uncompromising and very brutal approach of most Russian leaders sadly over the years.
[Lauren] Thank you. Another question about Gorbachev. Why did he become so popular in Russia? What went wrong?
Well, he didn’t become popular in Russia historically. And what basically happened was you had, you had Brezhnev who went on till he was pretty old and pretty decrepit. Then you had Andropov who took over, who was already a very sick man and only lasted about 18 months and died. And then you had Chernenko who was very, very, virtually senile. And so you had three leaders in a row who were clearly incapable of providing the leadership required. And that is why Gorbachev emerged relatively young by Soviet standards only in his 50s when he became the head of the Soviet Union, very vigorous, very energetic. And he was a breath of fresh air. And he was very popular to start off with for all the reasons that made him popular with the rest of the world.
But once you, once he reached the stage of realising he had to not just reform communism, he had to get rid of it, that you actually had to have market economics. You had to have what he called glasnost and perestroika. Glasnost was openness, which meant an end to censorship. Perestroika was reconstruction, which meant you were recreating the state along more democratic lines. Then although a lot of people had no problem with that, in economic terms, it meant that the Soviet Union went through a period of collapse, huge inflation. And in addition to that, many people economically suffered because although the Soviet system could never match the West for prosperity and for all the economic progress that the West and much of the world has made, although it couldn’t do that, it did give a guaranteed basic standard of living to the poor, to the elderly, to the lower income groups, the people who were not going to themselves benefit from a change of economic system, but suddenly found they had lost the subsidies and the social welfare system that this old Soviet Union, along with other communist countries, had provided.
It wasn’t a great system, but it meant that you actually had enough food to eat and you had a proper roof over your head and a basic standard of living. That made Gorbachev very, very unpopular. So Gorbachev has never recovered the popularity. He’s still alive. He’s a man now, I think he’s just turned 90 and he lives peacefully in Moscow and he’s not persecuted, but he’s never been popular in Russia because they see him as somebody either who did what I’ve just described or from the point of view of those who were more nationalist as being responsible for the collapse along with Yeltsin of the old Soviet Union, the old Russian empire and making Russia far less powerful than it was during the Cold War.
[Lauren] Thank you. Another question about the line of power. What made Yeltsin choose Putin? It seems like they have opposing senses of power.
Well, Yeltsin, I don’t know for certain. I’m not sure if people do know exactly what was in his mind, but he certainly was wanting somebody who he thought would continue with his approach to reform. And Putin had been working in St. Petersburg, what was then Leningrad and became renamed with its own historic name of St. Petersburg. And he had been working with the mayor of St. Petersburg, who was himself a great performer, very close to Yeltsin. And this person had recommended to Yeltsin that Putin would be a good man to bring into the team. So he was first brought into the administration and in the Kremlin, he wasn’t given one of the top jobs right away. And he was very competent and administratively careful. And he knew how to handle his responsibilities. And he was seen as very impressive. And so he was gradually promoted. And then Yeltsin made him prime minister, which still meant he was number two, but gave him a very significant power base. And Putin clearly in retrospect was recognising he had this extraordinary opportunity and he used that opportunity very well. You know, it’s not unusual.
It doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s not unusual in various countries, including in the West, for somebody who’s hardly heard of two or three years before to suddenly capture the public imagination or the confidence of the existing leadership and suddenly become a very, very popular and a potential leader. I’m going to make a comparison, which is grossly unfair to the person I’m going to mention, but Rishi Sunak, none of us had heard of Rishi Sunak two or three years ago, and then until recently, he was the likely successor of Boris Johnson, if Johnson had had to resign. So, you know, that’s the only thing that Sunak has in common with the Russians. I’m not making any broader point, but I’m just saying in politics that can sometimes happen. And then of course, people go up and people can come down both in the West and in Russia. Putin’s case, sadly, he kept going up.
May I jump in and just add, there must have been something very charismatic or something that sparked, that captured his attention about Putin.
And nobody, not even his worst enemy or his greatest friend would say Putin is charismatic.
And I agree, but there must have been something.
Charisma-free zone. But Russia was crying out for competence and for somebody who would be able to get the economy under control. And what he also impressed the Russians at the time when he first had power was there was a risk, even after the empire had broken up into 15 countries, there was also the risk that Russia itself, because Russia, even today’s Russia, remains in many respects an empire. The Russian Slavs are only about half the population. And the most obvious example of what then happened was Chechnya, which was about the size of Georgia or Armenia and tried to become independent. And Putin, very early stage in his presidency, used very brutal power, much as he’s doing at the moment, to crush the Chechens and force them to remain part of the Russian Federation. Now with Chechnya, it was relatively easy. Population of Chechnya is about 1.3 million. It’s a tiny place, not like Ukraine, which is 41 million.
Right. Astonishing.
[Lauren] Another question we’re getting a lot of people asking, do you think that Putin will stop at Ukraine or do you think that he will try and annex additional former Russian territories?
Well, I think that’s what he would like to do. I mean, he’s an opportunist, I basically, as have many others, I’ve seen him over the last few 15, 20 years, essentially as an opportunist. We’ve always known he was cruel and cunning, but he was also calculating. And to some considerable degree, his past aggression up till now, he got it right by the standards of what he set himself. Crimea, for example, when he annexed Crimea without a hardly shot being fired, the reason he was able to do that was for two reasons. First of all, even when Crimea was part of Ukraine, the Russians had a naval base, their major Black Sea naval base was in Sevastopol in Crimea, it had been reached agreement with the Ukrainians, they could keep that naval base. So they already had a military corps in Crimea. And secondly, there wasn’t a Ukrainian army.
The total Ukrainian army seven years ago was only 7,000, 10,000, 12,000 people. And now it’s 150,000. So Ukraine didn’t have an army to defend itself at that time. So he’s being very cunning. He’s made now this massive mistake in the ways that I mentioned a few moments ago. And that has seriously damaged, but he’s not, I don’t think he’s certifiably insane as some people fear he might be. I don’t think so at all. I think he’s rational, although his reasoning would be different to most of us this evening. It would be a much more barbaric system of options that he would be considering. But will he try and extend? He might in some local ways, but if he’s now finding it up till now, impossible to defeat the Ukrainians, and they are showing such courage, can he really contemplate an attack on NATO?
I mean, America and NATO are probably 10 times stronger than Russia is in terms of military capability. So I don’t think any attack on any NATO country is likely, there’ll be lots of rhetoric, there’ll be implied threats. I don’t think there’s any serious possibility of an attack on NATO. He might try and do something in Moldova. Part of Moldova, Transnistria, is already separatist. He might try and do something in Georgia, where already the Russians have a significant position. And he might try and further absorb Belarus, which is a pretty weak state with its own dictator. He might try and draw that even further into Russia proper. Beyond that, the opportunities he has are very, very limited because none of these other countries are going to volunteer to join Russia. They’d have to be defeated militarily, and Russia’s military don’t exactly have an impressive reputation at this moment in time.
[Lauren] Now, to follow up on that, quite a few people are asking what you think about his potential use of chemical or nuclear weapons.
Well, I think you have to make a distinction, and a very fundamental distinction. I mean, any of these weapons are dreadful. There’s no question about it. If he uses chemical weapons, which he would do if he thought he could get away with it, it’s not just whether he’d get away with it. It’s whether it would make a military difference. Chemical weapons have been at their most effective, I’m sad to have to say, when you’ve been fighting urban warfare, that if you’re trying to fight your way through a city where there’s a large population, then obviously chemical weapons can inflict so much horrible damage on civilians as well as military that it can sometimes enable, as we saw in parts of the Syrian conflict, you to make military progress. It doesn’t necessarily help you win the war, but you might make military progress.
So I wouldn’t rule that out, although he knows by now that would lead to outrage of a kind even greater than has been felt up till now. The question of nuclear weapons is a much, much more fundamental one. And some people say he might use them. You’ve got to remember there’s different, it’s crazy to say this, but there are different kinds of nuclear weapons. There are the strategic ones, the ones that destroy the planet if they’re ever used. And there are what are called tactical nuclear weapons, which could destroy half a city or half a suburb and would be devastating, far more powerful than Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but not the weapons that would destroy the planet or destroy a country unless there was very large numbers of them being used. Now, in theory, Putin has been quite willing to use rhetoric and some of his trainees have that imply that remind people they have nuclear weapons.
Now, you might say, well, why are you reminding them unless you’re prepared to use them? I still take the view that I think that’s almost inconceivable. First of all, I can’t see any military benefit he would have that would justify it. Secondly, the people who would be upset would not just be the West or the United States. I think the Chinese in particular would be very, very angry and very hostile because nuclear weapons have not been used by anyone since 1945. There’s been an implicit understanding. They are weapons of deterrence that you do not use unless you are being attacked with nuclear weapons by some aggressor. So, and I think also you have a very large number of countries, the so-called non-aligned that have so far not condemned Russia terribly expressly, countries like India, South Africa, a number of Asian African countries. They don’t want to be pulled into this conflict on either side, but they are overwhelmingly countries that do not have nuclear weapons and are very hostile to nuclear weapons existing. And they would be very angry if Russia was to break that taboo.
So my judgement for what it’s worth, and I may turn out to be wrong, I hope to God I’m not. My judgement is that I think it’s extremely unlikely because there’s no military benefit that he would have and he would unleash such global opposition, including from his closest ally, China, in my view, that it would not be worth it.
[Lauren] Thank you. A few people are wondering as well why you don’t think that Ukraine will be joining NATO anytime soon.
Well, I think of myself as a great friend of Ukraine. And I’ve been in Ukraine, as I mentioned earlier, and I’ve known a number of the Ukrainian leaders over there. I don’t know Zelensky, but I’ve known a number of his predecessors, but I’ve never supported NATO membership for Ukraine for a very simple reason. NATO is not just a political alliance. It’s a military alliance. And under article five of the NATO treaty, if any member of NATO is attacked, all the other member states are committed. It’s not they have their option. They are committed to doing whatever is required, including military response. And that would mean going to war to save Ukraine.
Now, I’ve never believed that the United States or the United Kingdom or France or Germany, passionate though we are for Ukraine’s independence, would ever want to risk a third world war with Russia by becoming direct combatants in such a conflict. And that is almost exactly what President Biden said in his own speech a few weeks ago. And I think he was right. That it is one thing as we are doing, and I’m very pleased we’re doing this, to supply arms to the Ukrainians so they can defend themselves. It is quite a different matter, either in this war to become combatants with American aircraft or British aircraft and troops on the ground fighting Russians, which inevitably could then expand into what then might be a nuclear exchange of a much more serious kind. I think the risks of that are even greater than the risks of leaving it to the Ukrainians with our help to defend themselves.
It’s quite a harsh thing, harsh conclusion to have to come to. But the whole point of leadership is sometimes to take difficult decisions because you have to decide not what is a good solution or a bad solution, but what is a bad solution or a worse one. And I think that if the United States and Western Europe was to get a war with Russia over Ukraine directly, that wouldn’t just be a bad outcome. It’d be far more dangerous and far worse than what is happening at the moment.
[Lauren] Thank you. Another question we’re seeing a lot of, why is, what do you think is going to happen with Putin and Russia being held accountable for the war crimes they’re committing?
I will be astonished if that ever happens. I’d be delighted if it did happen, but it’s going to take an awful lot of change for that to happen. Perhaps a related question is, will he remain in power? How are the Russian people reacting to this? Now, I think we’ve got to be careful here. First of all, Russia, as we all know, has the government have total control, the Kremlin has total control over all television, all media, there’s virtually not a single media outlet where the truth can be presented without you committing a criminal offence. So in that situation, probably 70% of the Russian public do not have access to getting round these restrictions, but 20, 25% probably do. And that’s mostly younger Russians who’d know about the internet, can handle how you can get round various forms of censorship and get access to ways of finding out what is really happening.
So some of the polling that has been done, relatively independent polling, is still sometimes possible in Russia, but that suggests that the support for Putin is greatest amongst older people and is less among the younger you go. I think what is also relevant is, and this is quite a difficult thing to say, but I think, I hope that you will all recognise this as from our own experience, that when your country goes to war and your army is involved in a war, not just in Russia, but in most countries, the public tend to support their troops. If you think of how unpopular the Iraq war was when Bush and Blair went into Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein, I’m not getting into the rights and wrongs of that, but the country was divided. But once that war began, I think most, I was against that war, but most of us said, well, we hope the British troops will win, we hope they’ll succeed and their allies and bring this war to an end quickly. So I’m not surprised that most Russians take that view because you’ve got 150,000 Russian troops, they’re all the fathers, the brothers, the sons, the cousins, the friends of Russian families.
And they don’t want their next of kin to be killed or injured. And it’s not surprising that the evidence coming out suggests that the Russian public at this moment in time are saying, well, we want the Russians to win this war and the quicker they win it, the better. Now that’s not to say that there won’t be a longer term price that Putin’s going to have to pay because he’s not going to be able to say that this was entirely, he’ll say it, but nobody will believe when they see the end results that this was entirely justified. The Russian economy has been severely damaged. The Russians have lost, as I mentioned, 20, 30,000 people already and will lose a lot more the longer this war runs. And Russia has become a pariah in the international world. And even the oligarchs can’t be very pleased losing all these marvellous yachts that they were sailing around in. So he won’t have many chums around. And the people he must be most worried about are the army themselves, because they’ve been humiliated.
When he said there was not going to be a war, it was complete fantasy. It wasn’t just the West or the Ukrainians that heard this, it was his own soldiers, assuming they weren’t being sent into a war. And then suddenly found they were. And then they were blamed for not winning that war, which they had not had time to prepare for. So Putin has, remember that marvellous phrase, uneasy as the head that wears the crown. And when you have one man, who’s essentially a one-man dictatorship, that is, he can’t have many friends that he can take for granted, will be with him to the end of the day.
[Lauren] Thank you. And I think we have time for just one more question. And so I’ll ask the one that has been asked most in our Q&A, which is how do you think this will affect Chinese expansionist policy and a potential recapture of Taiwan?
That’s a very good question. And of course we don’t know for certain, but I would be astonished to see Jim Ping and his colleagues in Beijing aren’t deeply worried. First of all, I said earlier, part of the problem that Russia had was its army had never fought a proper war since 1945. Well, China’s in the same position. Its army may be a very huge army, very well supplied, but they haven’t fought a war since 1949. And when you’re thinking of invading a country, which unlike Ukraine does not have a land border with China, Taiwan’s an island three, 400 miles away. So all the troops have to be sent either by ship or by aircraft. And it depends entirely how the Ukrainians would fight.
If they fight like the Taiwanese, I should say, if they were to fight like Ukrainians, then China might still win ultimately, but it would be a long and very, very bloody war. So I think there will be a lot of questioning and also China will have been worried about how united NATO and the West have been and how savage the sanctions imposed on Russia have been. And remember when it comes to Taiwan, it’s not just the West, it is Japan, it is India, it is Southeast Asia, it is all China’s neighbours that including Vietnam, Vietnam given the history of astonishing says America is our friend and China is the country we’re worried about. So hopefully wiser heads will prevail in Beijing. I hope so.
Well, so Malcolm, thank you very, very much for a very interesting and thought provoking presentation. I must say, Putin is a very complicated and ruthless man. You know, he has this very strong belief system that it’s his mission to rebuild or reunite Mother Russia. So we can only just hope that he comes to his senses, I guess, and reassesses his options and I guess realigns his belief systems. It’s really very, very worrying, you know, as you quite rightly spoken about China and Europe. So what can I say? Thank you very, very much. Let’s just pray that we have peace. Let’s hope that we have peace very soon.
Of course.
Thank you. Thank you for joining us and thank you to everybody else. Thank you, Lauren, and thanks for all our participants for joining us this afternoon. We will hope to see you back on Lockdown University soon. Many, many thanks.