Page 60 - Buy Russia - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine April 2017

ARTS
60 I CULTURE bne April 2017 & PEOPLE
BOOK REVIEW:
Peter Conradi asks “Who Lost Russia?”
By Nicholas Watson in Prague
Now that the sometimes prickly yet largely con- trolled relations between the West and Rus-
sia since the end of the Cold War have given way to first mutual suspicion, then acrimony, and now full-blown crisis, Peter Conradi, foreign editor of The Sunday Times and once Moscow correspondent for Reuters, asks pertinently in his recent book: “Who Lost Russia?: How the World Entered a New Cold War”.
Of course, putting that question to the myriad of Russian ver- steher who opine on the subject these days in the traditional, social and now fake media will inevitably elicit two answers. The first is “the West”, from the odd grouping of leftists, rightists, populists, isolationist libertarians, and those who want to mark themselves out from the rest of the Western press pack. The second is “Russia’, from the traditional Rus- sophobes and the growing numbers who are simply tiring of Russian’s antics and can no longer ignore its descent into a nasty authoritarian police state with imperialist ambitions.
Conradi, however, is much more curious and even-handed, and takes the reader by the hand through the seminal events in the history of diplomatic relations between the two old foes over the last quarter of a century or so in the search for the answer: from the collapse of communism
in Central and Eastern Europe, to the demise of the Soviet Union itself, to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, on past 9/11 and into George W. Bush’s “entirely new relationship with Russia” and the signing of the Nato-Russia Council accord, leading to the disillusionment, then the war with Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, the subsequent sanctions, and now what is widely considered to be a new Cold War.
No guarantees
The writing is solid, embellished with great detail and research, giving some new information here, reminding of some forgotten nugget there, though it lacks any penetrating new insight or newly uncovered revelation.
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Where Conradi does a much better job is busting a few myths and misconceptions that have grown up over the years into what are now shibboleths held by one side or the other.
For example, Russia (disingenuously) and Kremlin stooges, such as Stop the War’s Lindsey German (credulously),
still insist, without providing any proof, that the West had given guarantees to Russia that Nato would not expand into the former Soviet bloc. Nato’s expansion was certainly a bone of contention, especially when it took in the Baltic states that had once been part of the actual Soviet Union,
“Russia, fed by its deep-seated paranoia, thought it was next for regime change”
and Western leaders and policymakers had disagreed among themselves whether it was advisable, but “despite the opening of countless records and releases of archival material, it is clear that the assurance remained just that. No legally binding written guarantee has ever emerged.”
When the Russians are being honest among themselves on the subject, criticism has been levelled at the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for a failure to secure that binding guarantee. But he has written that, “German reunification was completed at a time when the Warsaw Pact was still in existence, and to demand that its members should not join Nato would have been laughable... No organisation can give a legally binding undertaking not to expand in the future.”
Of course, while the question in the title might seem reasonable enough, like most things in life the answer is never so simple: yes, there were various missteps