By John Knox
Stability. That seems to be why 63 per cent of the Russian people – give or take a few million fraudulent votes – have re-elected Vladimir Putin as their latter-day tsar. The crowds in the streets of Moscow may not like it, but he has brought a kind of order to post-Soviet Russia which allows most people to get on with their lives. So what are we in the West supposed to make of it all?
This week in Glasgow the government’s trade agency, Scottish Development International, is running a conference entitled Doing business in Russia. It is fully booked. So the leaders of Scottish industry and commerce obviously believe our reaction should be “business as usual”, if not more than usual.
British business with Russia has been growing at over 20 per cent a year since Putin came to power 12 years ago. In 2010, the trade grew by over 50 per cent to £3.5 billion, in oil and gas, financial services, IT, renewables, life sciences etc. Scotland’s food and drink exports to Russia last year totalled £89m, mostly in seafoods and whisky.
The Scotland–Russia Forum also believes our reaction should be cultural business as usual. This week it is advertising “An Introduction to Russian Church Music”, an exhibition on Byzantium and the film Russian Ark. It is campaigning to have Russian restored to the school curriculum.
And I suppose “business as usual” has to be our response to what is going on in a very large country a long way away. But what Putin calls his “managed democracy” is worrying and a great pity, because it could end where it all started, in dictatorship.
People should not feel forced to vote for a strong man, a tsar, simply because they fear the only alternative is chaos. Everyone deserves better than to be terrorised by gangs of oligarchs, or soviet committees. This is the terrible aftermath of the real tsars and princes who misruled Russia for centuries.
The Prague spring and the Arab spring have shown us that the Russian winter could come to an end one day. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 under the pressure of people power and economic stagnation. The same happened last year in North Africa. Since the parliamentary elections in December, brave demonstrators have taken to the streets of Moscow to call for similar reforms and Putin has wisely bent like a tree in a strong wind.
He has allowed a certain amount of free speech and free assembly. Webcams have been allowed into the polling stations. As in the Arab spring, the internet has assisted the demonstrators. A protest song, written by a former paratrooper Mikhail Vistitsky, has attracted an audience of millions on the internet. Crowds in Moscow have been singing, at it were to Putin’s face: “You’re just like me, a man not a god / I’m just like you, a man not a sod.”
The jailed dissident and former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky has written an upbeat prediction from his prison cell that the white-ribbon demonstrations, still taking place after the election, will force Putin to concede more reforms. Within ten years, says Khodorkovsky, the growing middle class in Russia will form a majority and will insist on justice in the economy and freedom for the individual.
It is not easy to read the future in Putin’s inscrutable face. He is, as Churchill would have put it, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. But one thing we can be certain of is that Putin wants Russia to be great again, or at least noticed. Hence his independent stand on Syria.
He knows too that he has a stranglehold over Europe’s gas supplies. Since the end of the Soviet Union, the west has tended to forget that Russia is the largest country on Earth, with the largest oil and gas reserves, huge mineral deposits and forests, and a market of 143 million people.
Let us hope that when the great Russian bear comes out of hibernation, it is well nourished, at ease with itself and happy to do business with the rest of the world.
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