Seven deadly sins
and what I said about them in Prague
I’m just back from Prague where I was speaking at a conference organised by the ÚSTR (Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes). Here’s what I said.
I lived in Prague in the nine months leading up to the 1989 revolution, as the only Western freelance correspondent in this city. When I arrived Václav Havel was in jail. When I left, he was president.
But other stories ended less tidily. I have always wanted to know, for example, who killed Jan Masaryk, the only non-communist survivor in government after the 1948 patch. He “fell” to his death from his flat in the top of the foreign ministry.
That should have been a simple question to answer after 1989. It’s inconceivable that his death – if it were an accident — would not have been thoroughly investigated by the NKVD residentura, with a full account sent to Moscow. And if it were an assassination, as many including me believe, then the details of the operation would also have been recorded. Either way, the Soviet archives will solve the mystery.
When Havel was preparing for his first visit to the supposedly friendly Boris Yeltsin in April 1992, I urged him to ask Yeltsin, as a sign of friendship, to provide all files relating to Masaryk’s death. I even wrote an article called “Dear Mr Yeltsin, who killed our foreign minister?”
But other issues were on the agenda too, not least continued Russian gas supplies. The request was never made. The files have never been released.
Other loose ends abound. What really happened to the Communist Party money? What happened to those strange Soviet front organisations such as the wealthy, spy-infested International Union of Journalists? Or the International Union of Students, which was finally expelled from its hulking concrete headquarters in Prague only in 2006 (I wrote about that and other topics in the Economist here)? Where did the StB go? Indeed, what really happened on the streets of Prague on November 17th, 35 years ago this week? I know I was beaten up. But what was the KGB delegation doing in town that night?
The failure to have a full reckoning of the crimes of communism has blighted the region ever since. Not just because of the mysterious good fortune of those who were able to finance their careers in the post-communist world, and perhaps the even greater good luck of those whose past collaboration —obvious to everyone at the time — is so strangely missing from the archives.
Also because we have never really confronted the broader moral decay of communism. We have not properly recompensed the victims. We have not punished the perpetrators. And we have not made ourselves immune from a resurgence of totalitarian and imperialist thinking, and of the collaborationist mentality that enables it.
After I left Prague I moved to the Baltic states. From there, it was absolutely obvious to me as early as 1992 that Russia was not the democratic, friendly country that many of my fellow-westerners believed it to be. True, communism in the sense of the planned economy and the one-party state was gone. But the lies and mass murder of the Soviet past remained like poltergeists, malevolent spirits that disrupted and distorted normal life.
My Baltic friends and I struggled to explain this to the outside world. Our problem was that the biggest piece of evidence was history. If Russia could not accept the crimes of the Stalin era, then clearly there was something wrong with Russia.
But we were dealing with a Western mindset that even then was profoundly ahistorical.
Westerners, I believe, profoundly misunderstood the events of 1989-91. They believed that history was over. In a way, the democratic revolutions of those years were an uprising against history, against the grim geopolitical certainties of the past in favor of a fun and flexible future.
But for those paying attention, history never went away. Many in the neighborhood shivered when the Kremlin adviser Sergei Karaganov proclaimed his eponymous doctrine in 1993. This created a new political category of “Russian speakers” deserving of Kremlin protection. A year later, the then Estonian president Lennart Meri issued a withering condemnation of Russia’s amnesia towards the crimes of the Soviet past, in a speech in Hamburg on February 25th, 1994.
Why does the new, post-communist Russia, which claims to have broken with the evil traditions of the USSR, stubbornly refuse to admit that the Baltic nations — Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians — were occupied and annexed against their will and contrary to international law, in 1940, and once again in 1944, and subsequently brought to the limit of their national existence through five decades of sovietization and russification?
Meri went on to highlight that a deputy foreign minister, Sergei Krylov, had just stated publicly that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had joined the Soviet Union “voluntarily.” This, he said, “is little short of the statement that tens of thousands of Estonians, including my family and myself, had “voluntarily” let themselves be deported to Siberia by the Soviets.”
It is worth noting that this mild admonition provoked the head of the Russian delegation to lead his colleagues in a walkout, slamming the door demonstratively behind him, before they had a chance to eat dinner. That official, at the time the head of the St Petersburg committee for foreign economic relations, was to become better known in later years. His name was Vladimir Putin.
A politicised interpretation of the past is now the battering ram of Putinist ideology, particularly fetishising the Soviet victory in 1945, but also myth-making about the Soviet collapse, the expansion of NATO, and other historical ills real and imagined.
History is also central in the opposition to Putin’s war. The idea that Putin’s ethnonationalist policies echo those of Adolf Hitler towards the Volksdeutsche of the Sudetenland 80 years ago used to be shocking. Now it is commonplace. In 2008, the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism put Nazi and Soviet crimes against humanity into the same category of 20th-century disasters that had blighted the European continent, though it also said that each system of terror should be judged separately. This breached several taboos: some thought it undermined the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Others thought it was an attempt to smear left-wing politics as essentially totalitarian. And those who venerated Soviet sacrifice against the Third Reich found it, to use a favorite Russian word, “blasphemous”
Yet this discourse has not just survived but thrived. Every year since then has seen new signatories, initiatives, declarations, and commemorations. Countries that had for decades regarded the Soviet Union as a wartime ally began to recognize the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocols, and to see that the death toll under Communism rivaled or exceeded that of Nazi butchery.
But they were not willing to draw the most important lesson. That Russian blindness to the crimes of the past spelled war in the future. Perhaps the most interesting question for future historians is why, given all these efforts, and warnings about Russian imperialism dating back to the early 1990s, Putin’s history-led war in Ukraine was not foreseen and forestalled.
One answer is epistemic privilege. The agenda-setters in the West were more powerful than the Cassandras in the east. The efforts of Meri, and his counterparts Václav Havel and Vytautas Landsbergis and others were enough to get Western countries to rethink the past, but not to rethink its relevance to the present.
This privilege alone was not the problem. It was the mindset behind it that did the damage. This was afflicted by seven sins. Ignorance, arrogance, naïveté, complacency, stubbornness, cowardice, and greed.
It starts with ignorance. One of the effects of the Iron Curtain was that elites in Western Europe and North America typically had only the haziest idea of the languages, history, and culture of the captive nations. The countries of Eastern Europe were backward, muddy, cold, and even comical. Their languages were incomprehensible and unpronounceable. The epitome of this attitude is the Borat films, with their mockery of Kazakhstan’s language, culture, history, and statehood.
Ignorance begets arrogance. Westerners believed that it was their version of democracy and capitalism that had won the Cold War. Easterners should be grateful, both for their liberation and for the chance to join Western clubs. And they should be quiet. Nobody is interested in your neuroses. Raking over historical wrongs only stirs up resentment. Complaining about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is as pointless as demanding compensation and apologies for the Spanish Inquisition or the Counter-Reformation.
Arrogance begets naïveté. When you do not understand what is going on, and do not want to understand it, you risk being cheated. The epitome of the naïve approach to Russia was the Obama-era reset of 2009. Let’s treat interim president Dmitri Medvedev as if he is a serious reformer. What can go wrong? A lot, as it turned out.
Naïveté begets complacency. The assassination of Anna Politkovskaya? An internal Russian matter. The poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko? A rogue intelligence operation. The Chechen wars? They were asking for it. The cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007? A one-off. The war in Georgia in 2008? Saakashvili started it.
The more the warning lights flashed, the more stubbornly Western decision-makers insisted that their big picture was still correct. Russia was a nuisance, not a menace. It was still possible to make money there. We need the Russians on nukes and climate change. Don’t push them too hard. Behind the stubbornness lurked an intellectual and moral cowardice. Accepting that the Western line on Russia had been dramatically wrong for decades would mean taking responsibility for errors. It would require costly changes in policy, on defense spending, and on energy security. It might even mean apologizing.
Underlying all these sins was greed. It is hard to persuade someone of something when his livelihood depends on not understanding it. Most of the people dealing with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union had a personal financial stake in things going well. Being hawkish or gloomy was a career killer. The pipers followed those who were paying for the tunes. As the Moscow correspondent for the Economist in the late Yeltsin and early Putin years, I recall all too well how the Western bankers, lawyers, accountants and diplomats would berate me for my cynicism and scaremongering. I wonder where they are now.
Perhaps the most striking example of this collection of sins is Germany, which has elevated greed, sanctimony, sentimentality, and dithering to an art form. Older members of this audience may remember the mystifying infatuation of “Gorbymania” in the late 1980s. What followed was worse. Germany shunned the new eastern democracies in favor of lucrative bilateral deals with Moscow, notably the two Nord Stream natural gas pipelines across the Baltic Sea. German decision-makers repeatedly ignored warnings from me and others about the dangers of Russian hybrid warfare tactics — the cocktail of disinformation, economic coercion, subversion, espionage, and threats of force that Russia uses against its neighbors. Russian spies, crooks, and thugs to run wild, stealing secrets, assassinating critics, and building bastions of influence in Germany.
Germany’s approach represents the overlap of historical, geographical, and geopolitical blind spots. These are linked. Allergic to nationalism because of its abuse by Hitler’s Nazi regime, Germans flinched at the role that patriotic sentiment played in overthrow of communism. East Europeans were “nationalist,” Germans muttered disapprovingly (though Russian nationalism, a far greater and more toxic force, was conveniently ignored.) Credit for ending the Cold War, Germans told themselves, was really due to their own Ostpolitik (Eastern Policy) of the 1970s and 1980s, which focused on rapprochement and confidence-building with the Soviet bloc. Moreover, the Soviet Union had given the nod to German unification and pulled its military out of the former East Germany: Gratitude, not skepticism, was the appropriate response.
In the modern world, German policy wonks piously intoned, problems should be solved by dialogue, not arcane confrontation. The way to avoid conflict was to boost trade and investment. Russia would never attack its customers. We see now how that worked out.
Germans wallow in guilt about their country’s Nazi-era crimes, but are barely aware that Soviet Ukraine suffered immeasurably more than Soviet Russia during World War II. And even as they claim to have learned the right lessons from their history, Germans maintain a self-satisfied ignorance about how those lessons might apply to other crimes and dangers. Germans remain so stuck in the uniqueness of their own history that they refuse to apply the lessons they say they have learned.
Sins are grave, but virtues deserve scrutiny too. Chief among them is righteousness, which can easily turn into a self-defeating and self-satisfied self-righteousness.
In the words of Vaclav Havel
Držte se těch, kteří hledají pravdu; utečte od těch, kteří ji nalezli
(Hang close to those who seek the truth, run away from those who have found it)
Selectivity about the errors, wounds, and misdeeds of the past is still all too often a hallmark of national discourse in the ex-captive nations.
Self-righteousness may fuel patriotic sentiment, but it blunts the edge of our arguments. The great temptation in this kind of political argument is to cherry-pick the precise intersection of history and geography that makes your favorite people look good, and your least favorite people monstrous, silly, or both. This is what Germans might call Doppelgedächtnis: my history is my business, but your history is my political football.
A useful principle is to start from the view that it is unlikely that any country or people are solely victims and never perpetrators. I wouldn’t presume to give advice to Czechs on this, but I can speak from a British or even Anglo-American point of view
This means in particular taking a bleak view of the sentimental and self-righteous approach in which World War II is remembered. A transatlantic historical consciousness that sits happily on the political contours of films such as Casablanca and the Sound of Music.
The comforting portrayal of the war as a well-timed one-dimensional struggle between good and evil, featuring neatly framed episodes such as the Blitz, the Battle of Britain, and D-Day, is both toxic and misleading. Uncomfortable questions are skated over, not least our treatment of Czechoslovakia. Without a thorough and knowledgeable exploration of the darker corners of the West’s wartime history, any attempt to challenge the current interpretations of the 20thcentury in countries such as Russia risks looking hypocritical and one-sided.
Given the urgent need to challenge Russia on exactly that, and the consequences if we fail, it is imperative to make the case with maximum clarity and the maximum moral authority.