Behind the interviews

Reflections on my visits to Moscow and Washington to visit two of the leading lights of the cold war
February 29, 2008

The stereotype of pre-revolutionary Russia lives on—a despotic tsar, a serf economy that lived long after the abolition of slavery by the Europeans (but not the Americans), and a malign, primitive, Asiatic influence rooted in the savage conquest by the Mongols and the Tartars.

But as the great historian of Europe, Norman Davies, has written, "[Late imperial Russia] was Europe's chief source of agricultural exports… Russian aristocrats, merchants, artists and professors were thoroughly integrated into every aspect of European life… Politically, Russia was thought be making serious liberal progress after 1905."

War with Germany threw Russia off the rails. But now it is back on them, where is Europe? When I put this question to Georgi Arbatov in Moscow last year, I could see him wring his hands with despair as he answered. When, in Washington DC a couple of months later, I asked Zbigniew Brzezinski more or less the same question, he answered that he thought that there was a real possibility that Russia would be invited into the EU within 20 years, but he also seemed to imply that in Yeltsin's time, a blinkered western leadership meant that a great opportunity had been lost to bind Russia closer into the west.

One of the joys of Moscow today is the seemingly infinite number of small, restored Orthodox churches, with their golden domes pointing skywards. Nearly every time I poked my head in, people were praying, often a choir singing or a priest dispensing incense. Russia in fact is the inheritor and guardian of the part of the Christian church that the Roman emperor Constantine moved to Constantinople when he made it the capital of his empire and the founding seat of Christian power.

In 1204, when the 1,000-year-old Christian capital was sacked—by Christian armies from the west—it led to the rooting of Orthodox Christianity among the Slav peoples (although Christianity had arrived in Russia over two centuries earlier). When the Ottomans finally captured Constantinople in 1453, the Orthodox church became the heritage of Russia. A Muslim Russia would have meant a very different history for the west. A Christian Russia means it is an integral part of European civilisation.

The Reformation and the Enlightenment never deeply penetrated Russia. The tsar wielded a kind of power that the rulers of Britain and France could only dream of. Yet the greatest of them, Peter, used that power to do what Atatürk later did to Turkey—give Russia a westernised makeover.

The EU must now pick up the unfinished business of modernising and stabilising Russia that ended in 1914. This is far more important—and should be more natural—than any of its other far-flung ambitions. This should not be just a Russian self-help exercise. It has to be actively joined by the EU—and this means more than foreign investment. It means Russians being brought to EU countries in large numbers to be given postgraduate training; and it means stepping up the political and human rights training offered to Russian legislators, journalists, academics and bureaucrats. It means, in short, bringing Russia up to European speed over a 20-year programme.

Many will say it is too late: Russians have already retreated into their nationalistic shell. I well understand their reaction. I saw the same response in Turkey after Europe started to backtrack on its promise of EU entry two years ago. Before that point, Turks were becoming more enthusiastic pro-Europeans by the year. A welcoming light by Europe would turn Russian opinion around. The Russians and Turks, both of them, need to be able to see that European green light.

My trip to Washington to visit my old sparring partner from the Carter days, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was less mind-blowing than my journey to Moscow, perhaps because I was seeing everything through the eyes of my 17-year-old daughter, Jenny, who was making her first trip to America. The things she wanted to see surprised me. I took her to the Lincoln memorial to show her the steps where Martin Luther King Jr made his "I have a dream" speech, but she made me walk the length of the Mall to look at the Vietnam war memorial. Instead of the eagles and rifles, as with older war memorials, all we saw were stark slabs of black marble with names of the American dead on them. As Michael Mandelbaum has written, "It represents the soldier not as hero but as an innocent and literally faceless victim." I was left to wonder how they will fashion the war memorials of Jenny's generation. Is there anything left to say after Vietnam? Will America ever learn in the way Europe has through its two horrific 20th-century experiences? Let's see how it will handle the aftermath of Iraq.

During the cold war, Brzezinski was a hawk among hawks, albeit an exceedingly clever and, in many ways, sensitive one who never underestimated man's spiritual needs in the materialistic fight between godless communism and consumerist, selfish capitalism. But he also had a propensity for political adventure—hence the famous photo of him peering down the Khyber pass through the sights of a machine gun some months after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Now, if not exactly a dove, he has become America's most articulate critic of Bush's warmongering. If Obama, a foreign policy novice, makes it to the presidency, he is going to need Brzezinski's steadying hand and his vast experience.