The Paper of Record

National Review Online, May 14 2001 

Imagine, if you can, Berlin in November 1938, the grim capital of a savage ideology heading deeper into horror and cruelty. The New York Times correspondent has just emerged from an interview with the Fuhrer. It is an exclusive. His editor will be pleased. On the way home the Times man passes a looted synagogue, and the broken bodies of those who were worshiping there. Elsewhere, homes and businesses are being ransacked, and their occupants are under attack. Other victims are rounded up and dragged to the concentration camps from which far too few will ever emerge. Filing a report that night, the journalist prefers not to dwell on such distasteful events. Instead he contents himself with a comment that stories of a Kristallnacht pogrom had been exaggerated. Yes, there had been some scattered excesses, but they had been the work of a few hotheads, nothing more. Delighted by the coverage, the Nazi hierarchy gives the correspondent privileged access. He becomes the doyen of the Third Reich's foreign press corps, the essential contact for every new visitor to Berlin. In the ultimate accolade the journalist wins a Pulitzer Prize for the "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity" of his reporting from Germany.

In the years that follow, of course, it becomes impossible to deny the reality of Hitler's charnel-house state. The reporter is revealed for what he really was, evil's enabler, a greedy, venal man, whose soothing words had done much to calm the fears of an outside world that might otherwise have tried to step in to stop the slaughter. Amazingly, however, more than 60 years later his Pulitzer still stands, and with it, his distinguished place in the history of the New York Times. Last month, the newspaper, as it does once every year, proudly published the honor roll of its Pulitzer-winning writers. It is not difficult to find the name of the dictator's apologist. It is right up there near the top, fitting company, in the view of the New York Times for the other journalists on the list: Walter Duranty is still, it is clear, a man with whom the Grey Lady is in love.

It is a remarkable, and disgusting, story. Sadly, it is also true, with only one qualification. The journalist, Walter Duranty, was a propagandist for Stalin not Hitler, the evil that he was to witness took place in the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany.

For well over a decade, Duranty's influential reports from Moscow described a Soviet Union run by a tough, but dedicated, elite, who could, he conceded, be cruel, but only in the cause of improving the lives of the people. As the Times man liked to say, "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

To Duranty, Stalin ("the greatest living statesman") represented progress and the chance of a better future for the once benighted masses. In one typical passage he gushed that, "Stalin and his associates have carried with them the strongest and most intelligent elements of the Russian people, and have created a national unity and enthusiasm which the Tsarist Empire never knew. They have learnt by their own errors and pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, and the nation has followed them." It was, he wrote, "a heroic chapter in the life of humanity."

That this "heroic chapter" was to prove fatal for large numbers of that same humanity did not seem to trouble Duranty too much. "I'm a reporter," he explained, "not a humanitarian." In fact, he was neither, something that can be seen most clearly from his treatment of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3. This man-made famine, a deliberate attempt to break the Ukrainian peasantry, is one of history's most terrible episodes (In his Harvest of Sorrow Robert Conquest estimates the death toll in the Ukraine and neighboring regions at seven million). Walter Duranty of the New York Times, however, did what he could to cover it up.

It was behavior that puts the Pulitzer winner in the same moral category as the present day's Holocaust deniers, if not somewhere worse. Today's revisionists, I suppose, can at least claim the excuse that they were not there. By contrast, Duranty was right on the spot, in Moscow and briefly, even, in the killing fields of the Ukraine itself. He knew. Privately, he told British diplomats that as many as ten million people might have died, "The Ukraine," he admitted, "had been bled white."

Publicly, however, his story was very different. He claimed that tales of a famine were "bunk," "exaggeration," or "malignant propaganda." There was "no actual starvation." As other accounts of the tragedy filtered out, Duranty was forced to backpedal a little: his reports still avoided references to famine, but he conceded that the annual death rate in the affected areas might have trebled from its normal level of around one million to a total of three million. These unfortunates had perished not so much from "actual starvation as from manifold disease." It is an absurd distinction, as grotesque as any made by those revisionists who argue that many of the deaths in the Nazi camps were the product of typhus. Typically, such people will then sidestep the issue as to why it was that those victims were in the camps in the first place. Duranty took a similar approach. The increase in the death rate by two million was presented to his readers as an almost passive tense disaster: it just happened, nobody was really responsible.

In reality, of course, the famine was, as Duranty well understood, the organized product of a murderous regime. Had he told the truth, he could have saved lives. When today's revisionists deny the Shoah, their lies, thankfully, have little or no impact. They are simply irrelevant. Duranty's distortions, by contrast, helped mute international criticism of Stalin's lethal project at a crucial time, criticism that might, perhaps, have made the killing machine at least pause. Instead, the "Great Duranty" kept quiet, pocketed his Pulitzer, and crossed the Atlantic the following year in the company of the Soviet foreign minister, who was on his way to Washington to sign off on U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Stalinist state. Within four years an emboldened Stalin had launched the Great Terror.

As I said, it is a disgusting story, but not a new one. Back in 1974, Joe Alsop used his final syndicated column to attack Duranty's pro-Soviet stance, and Robert Conquest covered the same ground in rather more detail a few years later. 1990 saw renewed focus on this subject with the publication of Stalin's Apologist, S. J. Taylor's invaluable biography of Duranty. The New York Times responded with a favorable review of Ms. Taylor's book and an editorial comment that Walter Duranty had produced "some of the worst reporting to appear in [the] newspaper," citing, in particular his "lapse" in covering the Ukrainian famine.

That, at least, was a start, but eleven years later Duranty's name still features in the paper's annual honor roll of Pulitzer winners (the only change has been that he is now described as having won the award for his "coverage of the news from Russia," previously he was lauded for his "dispassionate interpretive reporting" of the news from Russia). For a journal that prides itself on its sensitivity this is another remarkable "lapse," one made stranger still by the Times's understanding in other contexts that the symbols of the past can still hurt. Its attacks on, say, the continued display of the Confederate flag might have more moral force if the paper could bring itself to stop its own annual celebration of an employee who was, in effect, a propagandist for genocide.

Nobody should ask the Times to rewrite history (that's something best left to Stalinists), but a Pulitzer Prize has, in the past, been withdrawn. It is a precedent that the paper should urge be followed in the case of Duranty, not for his opinions (loathsome though they may have been) but for the lies, evasions, and fabrications that characterized the reporting that won him his award. Beyond that, the paper should ask itself just what else it is going to do to make some amends to the memory of the millions of dead, victims whose murder was made just that little bit easier by the work of the man from the New York Times.

An apology might be a start.

Lenin’s Last Stand

National Review Online, April 22, 2001

© Andrew Stuttaford

Shrines should be for saints, not killers, but no one seems to have told them that at Gorki Leninskiye. There, twenty miles outside Moscow, a holy place still stands, a tribute to a tyrant, and an insult to his victims. It is paid for by a state unable to cope with the truths of its terrible, barely acknowledged past. Its citizens have a better understanding. They know what is celebrated there and they prefer to avoid it. "Why would you want to go there?" I am asked, "there is nothing to see." "I'm interested in Soviet history." There is a shrug in response, no words, just silence. Navigation is difficult; there are no signs pointing the way, no billboards, no fluttering flags or excited crowds, just country roads, a few disheveled hamlets and the stillness of the Russian plain. Finally, after an hour or so, we drive up to a statue, more than twenty feet tall. Massive, monumental and an eyesore, Lenin still stands, eternal, hectoring, damaged now in one leg, forever gazing out at that radiant future that was never to come, still signaling to visitors that they had arrived in Gorki Leninskiye, the place where the father of the revolution was taken to die.

© Andrew Stuttaford

Before the Bolsheviks, Gorki (the "Leninskiye" came later) had been one of those pleasant country estates that are the backdrop to our sunny image of aristocratic Russia before the Fall: silver birches, a river, a yellow stucco manor house in the neo-classical style. In 1909 the widow of an early financier of the revolutionary cause bought the manor. Ungratefully, the revolutionaries nationalized the place in 1918. Lenin first came to stay that same year, despite, according to his wife, "exquisite embarrassment" over the size of the accommodations.

The Lenins evidently got over this shame and their frequent visits made Gorki a natural choice when the time came to find the Bolshevik leader somewhere to recuperate after a series of strokes. Despite the efforts of a team of foreign doctors (the Great Man eschewed the "usual Soviet bunglers"), recovery proved elusive. Deteriorating rapidly, Lenin spent most of the last 18 months of his life effectively confined to Gorki, and it was here, on January 21, 1924, that the "genius of geniuses" finally succumbed.

Past the statue, we find the road toward our objective. We are alone. There are no tour buses, no wheezing, dirty Ladas or struggling rusty Volgas, no Red Army trucks, no determined pedestrians. It was not always this way.

In the old days, half a million pilgrims would come to pay their respects each year. It was a patriotic excursion, a break from the factory, school, or barracks, a day in the country for all those young pioneers, kindergarten Octobrists, Komsomol kids, Party members, and plain, ordinary working folks.

Now there is just us. As we get closer, the site appears abandoned, the route to its empty parking lot blocked off by a needlessly locked gate, a gate without fences.

To reach the first, and newest, part of the shrine, the Political History Museum, it is necessary to climb up a slight slope. At one time, this must have been a reminder to visitors that to be worthy of their destination they were expected to elevate themselves to some higher level, an impression that the temple-like architecture of the museum was clearly designed to reinforce. It fails. Thrown up, with exquisite timing, in the later Gorbachev era, the building would have embarrassed Albert Speer. It is a gimcrack Parthenon, worthy only of some Neanderthal Olympus. Grass now peeps through the cracks of its empty, stone steps, but an open door signals that the faithful are still welcome.

They are not, however, expected. My wife and I are the only visitors. Sold our tickets by an astonished attendant, we walk up a sweeping staircase past a large statue of a pensive-looking Lenin. Another attendant switches on a wind machine and a red flag begins to flutter behind the marble revolutionary. As we reach the top of the stairs, the machine is turned off. It is a pattern that is repeated in each exhibit room. On our approach, an attendant darts ahead to switch on the lights, and on our departure the room is plunged back into darkness. Lenin used to say that Communism was "Soviet power plus electrification." It is a mark of progress that his successors have to contend with utility bills.

The exhibits themselves are worthy of that most bureaucratic of revolutions, production statistics, in addition to pamphlets, philosophical treatises, and proclamations. There are also some banners and photographs of the Communist leadership looking like Communists should, sullen, discontented, and filled with self-importance. Of the camps, the prisons, the mass graves, the famines, the torture chambers, there is nothing.

It is a disgusting omission, all the more so in an institution that is funded by the Russian state, but it is also typical of a country where there is no shared understanding of Communism's savage history. When the Soviets fell, too many of their myths were allowed to survive. An exhausted people and a compromised governing class had no wish to examine the past, preferring instead to reveal a few glimpses here, an archive or two there. The spirits of the gulag dead were to be appeased by no more than a few half-measures.

So, it should be no surprise that when, in 1994, the decision was taken to empty out Lenin's old Kremlin apartment (it had been a tourist attraction for privileged visitors during the Soviet era), the contents were neither destroyed nor placed in context in some proper place. Instead, they were taken to quiet, damp Gorki Leninskiye and dumped not far from the Political History Museum, in one of the original buildings of the Morozov estate, waiting, perhaps, for better days — out of sight, but not, quite, out of mind.

To reach this building, one must trek through silent woodland with only the crows for company. Unlike in the years of more closely shepherded visits, there are few signs to point the way, but another helpful Lenin (red granite this time and hoisted, appropriately enough, on the shoulders of the proletariat) tells us that we are on the right track. It is not a long walk, fifteen, twenty minutes at the most, and at the end of it we are back in the early Soviet era.

"It was all moved, almost overnight: 40,000 objects put into trucks and not even catalogued," the attendant explains, shocked by the sacrilege. She is a pleasant, educated woman, one of those intellectuals caught on just the wrong side of a changed Russia, with a degree, perhaps, in Marxism-Leninism and, maybe, a doctoral dissertation on some forgotten revolutionary. Too rooted, it seems, in the old order to adapt to or even understand the new one, she prefers to recreate the past, cataloguing, listing, and displaying the relics that she so loves, comfortable in this building that no one comes to visit, a place where it is still January 21, 1924, and where every clock is stopped, literally, at the moment of Lenin's death.

And what a treasure trove there is to see, souvenirs of the public man (complete with wall maps of the young Soviet Republic, the telephones, the long meeting table) and the private. We see Lenin's furniture, his bed (and, in a separate room, that of his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, dull, shrill, and neglected, a Rodham avant la lettre). Wait, there's more. Lenin's desk! Lenin's piano! Krupskaya's briefcase! A monkey bust from Armand Hammer! There is not much on the walls: a family photograph here, a pin-up of Marx there, but little else. We are led down corridors deep into the labyrinth of Leninist myth, into the realm of an ascetic philosopher-king. "He could read six hundred pages a day!" There are books everywhere, turgid treatises in plain brown covers, with broken spines, underscored, and filled with scrawled commentary, the giveaway spoor of somebody who had spent too much time in libraries.

The kitchen and dining room feature utilitarian furniture, mismatched cutlery, and a few old pots and pans. The message is clear, and false; we are told that the plain-living Lenin shared the tough times endured by the starving Russia of the early 1920s. That the always well-fed Soviet leader saw famine as just another political weapon ("Desperate hunger will give us a mood among the broad peasant masses that will guarantee us [their] sympathy … or at least their neutrality") goes unmentioned. There is no place here for the real man, the cynical murderer and didactic thief who destroyed a civilization.

No, the Lenin that haunts these strange, transplanted rooms is the Lenin of our guide's Soviet childhood; it is the Lenin of legend, the hero of the Finland Station, the austere visionary. And this, sadly, may be the Lenin of Russia's immediate future. Rather than reckoning with the past, Vladimir Putin is trying conceal it under the façade of a unifying national narrative, a narrative that will include, he says, "the best" from the Soviet years, a narrative that may well devote more time to the 40,000 objects in Lenin's apartment than the more than 20 million killed in Lenin's dystopia.

In the end, President Putin will probably be unsuccessful. The ghosts of the past will not be so easily exorcized. In the meantime, the shrine at Gorki Leninskiye will endure, dishonest and misleading, funded by the state but abandoned by its worshipers; in its own way, a fitting memorial to a god that failed.

Gulag Amazonia

Amazons of the Avant-Garde

National Review Online, October  22, 2000

Long, long before the NEA's chocolate-smearing Karen Finley, there was Natalia Goncharova. Tall, thin, and living in sin, the occasionally cross-dressing Natalia managed to scandalize turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg. She would cover her body with daubs and designs, a ziggurat, perhaps for the face, naughty drawings (why not?) for her breasts. Imperial Russia was not quite ready for this. Goncharova's "Pink Lantern" cabaret performances ended in riots, and her paintings were condemned as sacrilegious and obscene. They were neither. And, as we are reminded by a current exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum, in yet another contrast with the Finleys of today, her work was often very good. The exhibition, "Amazons of the Avant-Garde," is dedicated to Goncharova and five other women artists of early Twentieth Century Russia, Olga Rozanova, Liubov Popova, Alexandra Exter, Varvara Stepanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova.

Mercifully, despite its name, the show is no work of feminist revisionism. The description of these painters as "Amazons" dates from their own era. It is a quote lifted from the writings of one of their (male) contemporaries. Despite this, Goncharova and her friends were not generally seen as specifically "female" artists. Nor did they seem to have viewed themselves in that way, a dereliction of duty that appears to have disappointed Charlotte Douglas, one of the contributors to the book that accompanies the Guggenheim show. As Ms. Douglas sadly explains, the Amazons " accepted and worked almost completely within the male exhibition-and-sales paradigm." What vulgarity. Ladies, presumably, are not expected to do anything as grubby as selling their paintings. Worse, these traitors to their sex "considered themselves artists first…In this, a gendered identity seems to have played hardly any role at all." How disgraceful.

What the exhibition does do, however, is remind us yet again of the vibrancy of the late-Romanov period, a time too often characterized as a Lara's theme park of troikas, palaces, and pre-industrial peasantry. In reality, it was an age of rapid, and generally positive, economic and social change, and it had the art to match. Strikingly, for those of us used to the Soviet-nurtured notion of Russian "otherness" it was a culture that, at least in its avant-garde, played a full part in the wider European cultural scene.

The Amazons traveled in France and Italy. They moved in the same circles as Picasso, Braque, and Leger. Their art reflects this. There are experiments in Futurism, Rayonnism and Cubism, all part of a dialog with their counterparts in the West. Often, delightfully, these are combined with elements of the painters' own national traditions. In Goncharova's marvelous "Mowers," we see hints not only of Gauguin, but also of Russian vernacular lubok prints, while her "Evangelists" owe an obvious debt to the icon painting of earlier generations.

But tradition was not really where the Amazons' interests lay. In keeping with the restless spirit of their age they wanted to be innovators, increasingly testing the limits of abstraction along with fellow members of the Russian avant-garde, if sometimes a little derivatively. Some of Olga Rozanova's Suprematist works of 1916 add little to what Kasimir Malevich was doing a year or so before. On the other hand her extraordinary "Green Stripe" (1917) anticipates Mark Rothko's color fields by more than thirty years.

1917, of course, was also the year of the Bolshevik Revolution. This was no coincidence. The red flag and the Green Stripe were connected, both of them symptoms of the collapse in the existing economic, political, and cultural order. It should be no surprise that the Amazons rallied in support of the Communists. For years, they had, like many others in the world of Russian arts, spouted a hysterical Susan Sarandon-style leftism. They saw themselves as part of a more general assault on the ancien régime. These people may have drawn on the rich resources of Russia's heritage, but, when the time came, they were quite prepared to join in its destruction.

Given this political orientation, and the usefully dehumanizing Implications of the Russian avant-garde's "scientific" view of painting, this was welcome support for Lenin's new administration. The parallels with Soviet ideology were obvious. Both these artists and the revolutionary authorities wanted an absolute break with the past. They were determined to impose their own supposedly scientific rules, whether it be at the easel or on the population. The squares, circles, and triangles of the new art became the typeface of the new regime.

To artists this was heady, flattering stuff. Now they could live their revolutionary dream, remaking society on the streets as well as on canvas. To her frustration, Natalia Goncharova was out of the country, but the other Amazons were quick to take up jobs within the new system. They were content, it would appear, to support the work of a government that was already beginning to slaughter any possible opponents including, in the case of Nadezhda Udaltsova, her father. Interestingly, it was not a government that Goncharova was ever to see at first hand. She continued to proclaim leftist beliefs, but at a safe distance. She never returned to the Soviet motherland, opting instead for the West and relative obscurity. It was a wise choice.

Staying in Russia, however, was not. Popova and Rozanova were both to perish of ill-health within a tragically short time, victims of the terrible living conditions that prevailed in the early Bolshevik years. Exter got out in 1924, but, as an emigre, was never to recapture her former glory. Udaltsova, who should have known better, persevered in the workers' paradise, even managing to survive the execution of her husband in 1938. She lingered on, miserably poor, into the Khrushchev years. Stepanova enjoyed a relatively successful career in the USSR, at least for a while, as a propagandist for the regimes of both Lenin and Stalin. However, as Party orthodoxy changed away from her own brand, she found herself increasingly marginalized. Unlike so many discarded activists, however, she avoided the Gulag and died, largely forgotten, but untouched, in 1958.

If there is a certain sadness about this fascinating show, it is because it is a tale of six tremendously talented individuals, each of whose lives were to end in failure, mediocrity and waste. Like many of the cruelest tragedies, it was, at least in part, self-inflicted. It is an irony apparently too awkward to be addressed at the exhibition, but each of these women played a part in the building of the system that was to ruin their lives. In a way they were even lucky. They died in their beds, and in their art they at least have a monument. Millions of Russians were not so fortunate.

This raises another question. It is not a comparison that you will find made at the Guggenheim, but were its Amazons really so morally different from Leni Riefenstahl, the warrior queen of another avant-garde, that of Hitler's Germany? Goncharova may have been a cheerleader from the sidelines, but the other Amazons were active participants in the cultural support system of a Soviet regime that was murderous from the start. Like Riefenstahl, they were brilliant innovators whose talents were put to the work in the creation of a vicious totalitarian state. And so, just as Leni Riefenstahl's work, however spectacular, can never, quite, avoid the stink of Auschwitz, nor should the art of the Amazons be shown without any reference to its Gulag taint.

Sadly, in this exhibition, the Guggenheim is doing just that.

Red Affront

National Review Online, October 3, 2000

In some senses, Prague got off lightly. In London, after all, "anti-capitalist" demonstrators had recently spray-painted the Cenotaph with the suggestion that Britain's principal war memorial would make a good place to urinate. The mainly foreign protesters in Prague last week were far more refined. They merely chose to march into town under red flags and the hammer and sickle, symbols of a regime that not so long ago was murdering and imprisoning tens of thousands of Czechs.

The occasion, of course, was the joint annual meeting of the World Bank and the IMF. Such events now attract the protests of another set of anti-capitalists, the vicious travelling circus of the anti-globalization movement, and the intimidation and violence that it brings with it. This was the case in Seattle and Melbourne. Now it was Prague's turn.

Anti-globalization is the latest manifestation of the Left's seemingly indefatigable attempts to mess things up for the rest of us. Undaunted by the economic, environmental, and human disaster of socialism's last hundred years, they have now turned their angry attention onto free trade, and the supposedly sinister forces behind it, the World Bank and the IMF. There are, of course, differences from the past. This new Left is not as monolithic as its predecessors. The iron discipline of the Comintern has been replaced by a plethora of tiny cells, connected, strengthened, and somehow amplified by the power of an Internet able to create an impression of size even where none exists. So, the Prague action was meant to be supported by demonstrations across the globe, each of which was excitedly previewed on the web. In Melbourne, C.A.C.T.U.S. (Campaign Against Corporate Tyranny United in Struggle) was planning a carnival, while in Bangladesh the Garment Workers Unity Forum and the Revolutionary Unity Front intended "to make a demonstration waving black flags." In these United States, steelworkers in Chicago were apparently preparing to confront Harris Bank with a puppet show.

Harris Bank was left intact. Prague was not so lucky. Six or seven thousand protesters arrived from abroad, determined to shut down the city in the name of their version of global justice. Naturally, they were quick to move on Wenceslas Square, a sacred place for many Czechs, the heart of their Velvet Revolution, but a site of tragedy too: the spot where, in 1969, Jan Palach, a young student who really understood what idealism was, burned himself to death in protest against an earlier generation of invaders that had come to this city. Then, of course, it was the Soviet Army, but, as we have seen, the symbols of the anti-globalizers, those red flags, that hammer and sickle, they are just the same. And so was the message: "Do it our way, or there will be violence."

Of course, no one was ever that explicit. Most of the protesters were quick to come out with statements rejecting any violence, but their websites gave them away. One of the most prominent contained a list of suggested activities that included "occupations of offices, blockades and shutdowns, appropriating and disposing of luxury consumer goods, sabotaging, wrecking or interfering with capitalist infrastructure, appropriating capitalist wealth and returning it to the working people." That does not sound entirely peaceful to me.

The producers of www.destroyimf.org were more straightforward, running with the slogan "Turn Prague into Seattle." Many protesters tried to do just that. In the process they cost the people of what is still a poor country a great deal of money. Demonstrators fought with police, ripped up sidewalks, threw Molotov cocktails, and, in what is rapidly becoming an irritating cliché, stormed McDonalds, the franchised Winter Palace of their gimcrack revolution. The comrades at www.destroyimf.org could barely conceal their excitement at the drama of it all, a re-run, it seemed, of the glorious days of the Bolshevik rising. To one John Reed wannabe, September 26 had been "the day the IMF died." Judging by the breathless commentary on their website, it had been eleven hours that shook the world: "1215: Fighting begins; anarchist column takes the railway below the bridge. 1400: Protest columns fan out to the south and east. 1900: Column surrounds opera house. 2300: Minor running battles and windows smashed."

It seems that the revolutionaries were, at least in part, successful. The IMF and World Bank proceedings wound up a day early, the organizers unconvincingly claiming that they had completed all the work that they had come to Prague to do. Even if that were true, they should have stayed put, sipping champagne to pass the time and to make their point, occasionally, perhaps, hurling a few stale canapés into the baying mob below. The early retreat was a sign of weakness, and it was not the first from the supranational financial institutions. Since the whole anti-globalization movement started gathering pace, official reaction has been a blend of appeasement and apology. We caught a glimpse of this approach at Seattle in Bill Clinton's shifty "defense" of free trade, and we have seen plenty of it since then.

This is strange. It is not as if the foes of globalization have much intellectual force behind them. Their arguments are a blend of Al Gore greenery and Maoist economics, all wrapped up in a sort of sickly sentimentalism about the Third World that would, in fact, further impoverish that luckless part of the world. Bogus, economically illiterate, and potentially catastrophic, it is not a case that should be difficult to rebut, but none of our leaders seems to be trying hard to do so. Instead we see shame-faced equivocations or worse, the Uriah Heep-like pandering of those such as World Bank President Wolfensohn, a man pleased to pronounce that we live in a world "scarred by inequality." In between their bouts of savagery, the protesters in Prague were, he noted, "asking legitimate questions."

What nonsense. Here and there, you may find a true believer. There was the British schoolteacher who confided to Reuters that she was in Prague because her clearly rather odd child "often woke up in the middle of the night, frightened about global warming." For the most part, however, the game being played in the Czech capital was of a different, much nastier kind. It was partly about violence, the sheer Clockwork Orange fun that a punch-up can bring, and it was all about power, the right to boss everybody else around.

For all the talk about the working classes, the dispossessed seamstresses of Latin America, and the impoverished women farmers of Africa, the demonstrators tended to be Western European and university-educated. For such people, protests of this nature reinforce their bourgeois sense of moral and social superiority over the lower orders, the class they feel born to rule. As one of the organizers, Martin Shaw, a "Nottingham University graduate and anarchist" explained to the London Daily Telegraph, "Working people do not have the benefits of an educational system and they are afraid of losing their jobs." Not only that, but these blue-collar saps are couch potatoes, sitting back "in front of their televisions," grumbled another activist, rather than joining the battle against world capitalism. The corollary of this is that the "working people" need the Martin Shaws of this world to put things right for them. If you think that this sounds like the early 20th-century revolutionaries, you would be right. There is the same apocalyptic language, the same overweening sense of self-importance, the same absence of a paying job.

Unfortunately, too, there are the same prospects of some very real success. For, at bottom, these protesters are speaking the language of those very organizations that they claim to oppose. To take one, closely related, example: Environmental activists used to perform the same outsider role as the anti-globalizers do today, but much of their belief in regulation and control proved appealing to the soft-left consensus that prevails in our international institutions. And so, to their barely concealed delight, environmentalists found themselves co-opted into the global bureaucratic process. Their unelected, unaccountable pressure groups were magically transformed into "Non-Governmental Organizations." Better funded, but still unelected and still unaccountable, these NGOs were given consultative seats at the supranational legislative table. The result, at least in part, was the ludicrous Kyoto treaty.

A similar future beckons for some appropriately house-trained anti-globalizers. The cluttered WTO agenda in Seattle was evidence that officialdom is open to some of their ideas, an impression that Mr. Wolfensohn's platitudes will have done nothing to contradict. In Prague, indeed, certain pressure groups were invited to meet and debate with the IMF/World Bank delegates. This will only be the beginning of a prolonged courtship and, as for those other Non-Governmental Organizations, you and me, well, you can be sure that we will not be invited along.

Ghost Town

National Review, March 27, 1998

Stalin, behind Lenin, Moscow, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

You wouldn't have wanted to live there, but the Evil Empire was fun to visit. Every empty shop was an ideological vindication, each dismal meal the basis for a grimly amusing anecdote. The tourist could play Dissident (Visit an oppressed church!) or Spy (Lurk outside the Lubyanka in a raincoat!). And what about that air of menace? You could be tailed by the police, harassed by goons, or even, if you were very, very lucky, get caught in a KGB sex trap. Everything was forbidden, and thus enticing. Pointlessly, but excitingly, train stations could not be photographed. Nor could bridges. Take that, Mr. Reagan! And as for bringing in Samizdat? Try explaining freedom of the press to the suitably surly ("You want to make trouble in our country?") border guards as they confiscate The Hunt for Red October. These were people who wanted to bury us. And they were not going to apologize. And they still aren't. Which is why, even now, Moscow remains the place to go for a sinister, Stalinist thrill. To be sure, there have been changes, but many of the old Soviet ways persist. That Russian talent for the gothic and the just plain weird has also survived. And so will most visitors.

Even if, as true nostalgics should, they check into the Hotel Ukraina. Not the usual Intourist concrete block, the Ukraina is one of the six Stalinist wedding-cake skyscrapers that still dominate the Moscow skyline. It is a grimly lit and exuberantly totalitarian hulk, festooned with crumbling concrete stars, hammers, and sickles. Other Cold-War relics can be found inside, including seedily threatening security men, a jolly mural of Soviet Ukraine, and, incredibly, a group of earnest Americans over to talk "people to people" about peace. In a few years, the Ukraina will be a place of luxury and pseudo-sophistication filled with New Russians and old investment bankers. But that moment has not yet arrived. Like Russia itself, this hotel is in transition, and the journey can be a little rough. Which is why it is better to dine elsewhere.

Ukraine Hotel, Moscow, 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

Just down the road, in fact, by the cheerfully unrenamed Barrikadnaya (Barricades) Metro station. Le Gastronom is one of the best restaurants in Moscow. Located at the bottom of another Stalinist tower, it promises yet more dictatorship chic. Vast, dominated by overlarge chandeliers, over-officious security men, and clumsy marble pillars, it is a Cecil B. De Mille, nose-pressed-to-the-window idea of how the rich should live, something all too suitable for the Stalinist bureaucracy and the morbid tourist. It's bogus, unfortunately. Gastronom was a food store, not a restaurant. Stalin never ate there.

Nor did he dance his cares away at the nightclub called Titanic. In his day, the evening was for arrests, not discos. Now there is a nighttime scene as shifting and evanescent as anything found in Manhattan. If a bit tougher. That explains the airport-style weapon detectors at the entrance to many of the better spots. In New York they may be the sign of a bad high school. In Moscow they herald a great night out.

And having them may be prudent. At Titanic, notes one English-language paper, "you won't get laid, but you might get shot." But then this is typical of an expatriate press only too pleased to wear its "aren't we tough to be in Moscow" credentials on its sleeve. Amid the stock prices and the guides to eating out, the pages are filled with entertaining summaries of recent scandals, crises, and crimes. Cannibalism seems unusually popular at the moment. Perhaps the restaurants are to blame.

The determined tourist can also visit the sites of earlier, more traditionally Soviet atrocities. NKVD boss Lavrenti Beria's Moscow mansion, for example, still stands. These days it's the Tunisian Embassy. Tunisian diplomatic intrigues take place over the network of cells in which Beria's victims were tortured, raped, and murdered. For the Tunisians have left the basement much as they found it. The cells are dank and sinister, accessible by dark stairs and gloomy passages. "I don't believe in ghosts," explained one diplomat.

That's strange, as Moscow is a city where the dead don't always know their place. Hitler's jaw is on a shelf in the archives of the Russian Counter-intelligence Service and, some say, can be viewed for a fee. Meanwhile, at Moscow's Brain Institute they have Lenin's brain, sliced into 31,000 pieces and carefully preserved on microscope slides. Famously, the rest of the old Bolshevik's remains remain in their mausoleum above ground, as embalmed as the attitudes of his supporters. In the Duma they continue to talk of the proletariat, imperialism, and the Glorious October Revolution. Outside, where the Lenin Museum used to be, unpleasant old people still gather, Stalin banners in their hands, anti-Semitic pamphlets in their pockets. A tape of some of Stalin's better speeches can be bought for $1.

Outside the old Lenin Museum, Moscow, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

An even less reliable record of the past is available down the road, at the Lubyanka. K, G, and B have been replaced by more tactful initials, but the old yellow building still holds secret policemen and a small museum that details some of their achievements. With a few gaps.

Elsewhere, Moscow could do with a few more gaps, particularly where statues are concerned. For all the changes, the hugely increased freedom, and the chance of a greater prosperity, this is still too much the city of the Soviets. Its buildings, its monuments, its manners and morality still deliver that old malevolent charge. Looking at the St. Petersburg of the 1830s, the waspishly reactionary Marquis du Custine snidely noted that it was "barbarism plastered over." Well, at least someone had tried.

It would be more difficult to say the same of the Moscow of the 1990s. Lenin still enjoys his public spaces. Lenin in iron, Lenin in concrete, Lenin as statue, bas-relief, or painting, thoughtful, brave, and wise. His victims? They get a bare rock taken from the site of the first Gulag. It sits across from the Lubyanka, just a few minutes' walk from a monumental statue of Karl Marx.

That comes as no surprise. To be fair, some streets have been renamed, and a Bolshevik statue or two taken down, but for the most part the relics of the ancient regime survive alongside, or under, the shiny construction of the new era.

And so Stalin's Metro, the showpiece that actually worked, continues to function. Its escalators still thunder at alarming speed down past marble torn from a cathedral. And the idols still stand in its halls: Red Army men, workers, and peasants reminding you that the State will prevail and that, yes, the train will arrive soon. And it just might.

On the Edge

Anne Applebaum: Borderlands

National Review,  January 23, 1995

Trakai, March 1994  © Andrew Stuttaford

As Anne Applebaum writes in the introduction to this evocative and entertaining book, "Warsaw gave me a taste for instability." It is no surprise, therefore, that 1991 saw her heading toward the disintegrating Soviet Union. Rather than visit Moscow or Leningrad, however, she chose to journey down the empire's western frontier, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In earlier times much of this region was known to Poles as the "Kresy," a word for "borderlands" that implies "a lack of demarcation, an endless horizon with nothing certain beyond." A vast flat plain, these borderlands have attracted invaders from east and west for centuries. The only remotely indigenous power capable of resistance was the spectacularly disorganized and short-lived Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As a result the people of the Kresy never developed the sense of nationality enjoyed by their more fortunate neighbors. Most were simply "Tutejszy," a Polish word meaning "people from here."

In time the invaders were followed by settlers. By the turn of the century the region was populated by an extraordinary mix that included Slavs, Balts, Germans, Jews, Hungarians, Rumanians, and many others. It was, as Miss Applebaum points out, thoroughly messy. Such a state of affairs was unacceptable to Hitler and Stalin, who turned the region into a charnel house. By 1945 both the Jewish and German populations had been largely eliminated, and the Poles had been pushed back a long way west. As for those who remained, they were to become "Soviet." "The idea was simple, beautifully clear. Gradually all of the subtle dialects that had been spoken in the borderlands, all of the national variations and differences in costume and taste, all would be submerged in an onslaught of Russification. Difference would be destroyed."

Many, particularly on the embarrassed Left, now prefer to look on the USSR through the prism of the chaotic Gorbachev years. They see it as just another empire, something, perhaps, that might have been run by a socialist Habsburg. Refreshingly, Miss Applebaum is under no such illusion. "The region had been conquered before, but the Soviet empire cast a deeper shadow than any of its predecessors. Whole nations were forgotten: within a few decades the West no longer remembered that anything other than 'Russia' lay beyond the Polish border . . . it was as if the many and various peoples of the region had simply dissolved into . . . the vast, muddy Belarusian swamp."

Appearances can be deceptive, however, and Miss Applebaum wanted to see whether something of the old diversity still remained. At times movingly, the book tells what she found. The approach she took was simple — she let people speak for themselves. Miss Applebaum is clearly a well informed and sympathetic listener. As a result, much of the book is made up of interviews that vividly bring these too long neglected peoples to life. The survivors of the Soviet years are rapidly rediscovering their voice—and pretty cranky it can be, too. In a region of blurred identity and shifting borders, the old divisive obsessions have returned. Poles remind Lithuanians that Vilnius was once Wilno, a Polish city, while a Ruthene compares Ukrainians to wolves, that gather "only in packs, in mobs, at rallies."

It is easy, however, particularly in a book focused on nationality, to overstate these divisions. In fact, as is the case anywhere, people in these parts are generally more preoccupied by their economic circumstances than by their ethnic origins. Fortunately, Miss Applebaum has advanced appreciation of the ridiculous and is largely successful in keeping a sense of proportion about today's often absurd but generally harmless disputes among the peoples of the region. Rumors that records exist of speakers of an archaic form of Lithuanian in "Polish" villages near Vilnius may give rise to "hysteria," but only in "the tiny world of nationalist language studies."

Above all Miss Applebaum does not fall into the contemporary trap of seeing every Eastern European nationalist revival as a prelude to Yugoslavian-style disaster. In words that need to be read in Washington by those who view Russia as this region's policeman, she reminds us that "the stability so beloved of international statesmen had also been a prison." Post-Soviet nationalism may indeed "prove to be dangerous, destabilizing, and uncomfortable for diplomats," but it may be essential if successful and prosperous democracies are to be built in this devastated region. In this she must be right. There is, after all, not much else. Most of the ingredients of civic society have been obliterated. There is little or no history of self-government, and commercial traditions are weak, to say the least.

All that is left is a patchwork of half-remembered traditions that are part myth, part reality. That may not seem like a lot, but if, as Miss Applebaum demonstrates, it was tough enough-just-to withstand Soviet rule, it may be tough enough to provide the foundations of societies in which the people of the borderlands can at last be free do define what it means to be "from here."

Note: I have almost always been lucky in my editors, but not on this occasion: the idea that the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was "short-lived" was theirs not mine. In fact it lived on for several hundred years...

Out of the great unknown

The Baltic Independent, November 24, 1993

STRANGE AS it may seem, Algirdas Brazauskas is not a household name. As citizens of a continent-sized superpower, Americans have never felt the need for information about other, much smaller, countries such as those on the Baltic, thousands of miles away. The US media generally reflects this lack of interest and, it its own way, does its best to add to the confusion. Take, for example, the most basic question of all. Where are the Baltic States? For fifty years they were nowhere, erased from the map and lost in the vast mass of the Soviet Union. Now Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (or rather Lat., Lith., and Est.) have finally returned to the maps used by American newspapers and TV, but as nomads. Ignoring all international treaties, Latvia becomes Estonia and Estonia becomes Latvia. Meanwhile Lithuania lurches towards Belarus, ignoring the threat posed by a ballooning Kaliningrad oblast.

Outside the émigré community and a few specialists, Americans know little of the Baltic States, Arvo Pärt  may have his listeners and Jaan Kross some readers, but Baltic culture remains something of a mystery. Larger bookshops might stock phrasebooks for the languages of Southeast Asian hill people, but not for the languages of those remote tribes inhabiting Tallinn, Vilnius and Riga. Avowedly, Baltic products other than dusty piles of amber in “Russian”, shops, are equally difficult to find.

Amusing as it may be, American ignorance of the Baltics is not without its dangers for a region very dependent on Western support. For example, “the Baltics” are repeatedly muddled up with “the Balkans” (Slovakia and Slovenia are faced with a similar problem) and at times it seems that this confusion has also coloured, if only subconciously, the American media’s response to the question of the Baltic’s Russian population. There is little real awareness of the region’s history and it is not unusual to see discussion of “Eastern European nationalism” that draws little distinction between, say, Serbia and Estonia. This, of course, can then be exploited by a Russia all too ready to describe Baltic citizenship laws as a form of ethnic cleansing.

Such talk is well received by America’s liberal intelligentsia with their guilty nostalgia for the Pax Sovietica. Meanwhile their old adversaries, the cold warriors, who in the past could always be relied upon to take up the cudgels for a “captive nation” are hopelessly divided as to how to respond to a Russia that is no longer an evil empire.

All is not lost, however. Memories of Baltic resistance to Soviet rule from 1989-91 have not entirely faded and there are still many here who wish the republics well, even if they do not know exactly where they are. Ever larger numbers of American tourists are returning from a Baltic increasingly touted as an attractive if still somewhat off-beat, destination. In addition, not all the stories coming from the region have been negative. Economic reform, particularly in Estonia, has attracted favourable attention and even The New York Times recently felt free to talk of the “Baltics’ new glow.”

Further positive reports can be expected if the Baltic States can show that they are heading in the direction of the free market and liberal democracy. As these come about, Americans will increasingly come to think of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as Western and (perhaps an obscure) part of their world, rather than Eastern. This would not exactly constitute a security guarantee, but it would be a good second best. Besides, the Clinton administration is not in the business of offering guarantees to anyone, but that is a different story.

Back to Normal

National Review, November 1, 1993 

Tallinn, August 93  © Andrew Stuttaford

AFTER JFK or Moscow's Sheremetyevo, the airport in Tallinn is something of a shock. Passport inspection takes no more than a minute (visas are not required for an increasing number of Westerners), and customs is a quick walk-through. Taxis are plentiful, and the drive downtown is easy. In short, for the Western traveler all is normal—and that is just fine with the Estonians. Mart Laar, the cheery 33-year-old historian who is now this Baltic state's prime minister, explains, "We are trying to build a normal, open European society." Pointing to the physical and psychological devastation left by fifty years of Soviet occupation, Laar warns that this will not be easy. "We didn't promise the very good life, the very big and quick success. . . . The only thing I promised was an enormous lot of work." Undaunted, Estonia is pressing on with radical free-market reforms. These are currently the work of the Center-Right coalition led by the Isamaa (Fatherland) Party, but most parties seem to support the free market. Socialism is widely seen as a failure, and disagreement mainly concerns the details and pace of reform.

Raekoja Plats, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

The early fruits of these reforms can already be seen in Tallinn, Estonia's capital. Restaurants and bars abound, and, to those familiar with Moscow's chaotic sidewalk retailers, Tallinn's shops are impressive. Other private businesses are appearing, with success usually evidenced by sleek mobile phones and even sleeker receptionists. The streetcars wear Coca-Cola's colors and "erootika" has long since replaced Pravda on the newsstands. From grey concrete suburbs to grey plastic shoes the Soviet inheritance is still visible; but, overall, the visitor is left in little doubt that this is a city rapidly rejoining the European mainstream.

Pikk, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

The consensus behind the economic reforms also reflects the current composition of the electorate. This is dominated by ethnic Estonians, despite the fact that today they account for only some 60 per cent of the population of 1.5 million. The preponderance of ethnic Estonian voters stems from the fact that the franchise at the time of the September 1992 elections was in effect restricted to citizens (and the descendants of citizens) of the independent, and largely homogeneous, Estonia annexed by the USSR in 1940. This has led to an electorate inspired and brought together by a common culture and history. In particular this electorate remembers the independent Estonia that emerged from the ruins of the Russian Empire in 1918 after centuries in which the Estonians had been dominated by (as one Tallinn museum glumly concedes) "German, Danish, Swedish, and Russian conquerors."

The development of the Estonian republic was far from smooth, but, by the time of its reconquest by Moscow in 1940, Estonia's per-capita income was roughly on a par with that of Finland. This is essential to understanding the drive behind today's reforms. Things may be difficult today, but Estonians can at least look back and see that it is possible to build an independent and prosperous Estonia.

In the two years since regaining independence in August 1991, Estonia has made extraordinary progress toward its goal of establishing a "normal" economy—despite suffering a (relatively modest) share of the post-Soviet disorder.

Tallinn, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

Most importantly, perhaps, in June 1992 Estonia replaced the ruble with its own currency—the kroon. The kroon was linked to the Deutschmark at a fixed rate of 8 to 1. Devaluation is prohibited by law. The kroon is fully backed by Estonia's hard currency and gold reserves. The Estonian Central Bank, Eesti Pank, may issue new kroons only in line with increases in these reserves. Eesti Pank is not allowed to lend to the government, nor may the government run a deficit. In 1992, a year of deep economic crisis, the government's budget surplus was equivalent to 1.7 per cent of GDP, an achievement beyond the ability of most Western governments. By June 1993 foreign-exchange reserves had tripled, and even an initially skeptical IMF was impressed.

Tallinn, August 1993 @ Andrew Stuttaford

A "normal" money is the first step to a "normal" economy, and the kroon is, in the words of Eesti Pank's governor, "good for anything, from the latest model of Western car to a call girl." The contrast with the recent past is striking. In the dying days of the ruble, inflation was running at an annual rate of over 1,000 per cent. There was rationing, and many products were unavailable for those without hard currency. Inflation is now 40 per cent, a very good level by Eastern European standards, and falling. Goods have reappeared in the shops and are available to all, foreign or local, although to the average Estonian they remain expensive. To be sure, change has been far from painless. GDP has fallen by over 40 per cent since 1989, real disposable household income fell by more than 50 per cent in 1992 alone, and unemployment is many times higher than the official figure of 3 per cent. Estonians themselves, however, do not appear unduly downcast by this turn of events. Rather, they appear to relish their liberation from the lunatic Soviet economy. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the economy has bottomed out and that, particularly in Tallinn, the private sector is showing real growth, much of which is not reflected in the official statistics. This is almost certainly true of the service sector, while so far as manufacturing is concerned, it is interesting to note that energy consumption has fallen by far less than would be suggested by official figures of falling production. Equally, one small indicator of the real development of the Estonian economy may be found in the fact that, throughout Eastern Europe, only Hungary has, per capita, more cellular-telephone subscribers.

Times remain hard, notably for the heavily indebted state businesses, and maintaining a sound monetary policy has not been easy. Nevertheless, Eesti Pank's tough line has already survived a commercial-banking crisis. Despite pressure, the government appears to be adopting a similar approach to economic policy, resisting, so far as possible, a regime of bail-out and subsidy.

Tallinn Town Hall, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford 

Prime Minister Laar clearly rejects protectionism and, as Economy Minister Toomas Sildmae explains, with a well-educated work force and wage rates a tenth of those in Western Europe, Estonia wants trade, not aid. More generally, Sildmae sees his job as creating "the framework for the normal development of business" rather than managing that business. The hope is that the private sector will take up the slack left by the retreating state sector.

Privatization is obviously critical to this, but, as is typical in Eastern Europe, it has not been a smooth process. There are the usual allegations of corruption and "spontaneous privatization," although there seems far less evidence of this than elsewhere.

Attempts to provide restitution for former owners unlawfully expropriated in the 1940s have also led to delay. Mart Laar defends this in terms that would astonish the United States Congress. "Western countries have forgotten that the basis of their economic system is [private] property." Laar feels that it is impossible to have an effective free market without restoring the value of property. Therefore, he wants to show that it is possible to give property back to its rightful owners—even after fifty years. There is more to this policy, however, than the restoration of incentive. Put simply, it was made clear to me in a number of conversations with different officials that the government wants to return this property because, morally, it is the right thing to do.

Pikk Jalg, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

Despite the delays and difficulties, much of small business is now in private hands. In the important agricultural sector, the collective farms have been broken up. Overall, Economy Minister Sildmae estimates that 40 per cent of industrial production is now outside the state sector.

The larger enterprises continue to be a major economic problem, however. Although a surprising number have been sold, and more will be, others are clearly doomed. There is a general view that many of these factories are "too big for Estonia." They were built to satisfy the needs of the now-collapsed Soviet command economy, and, in the words of one official, they "are not exactly world class." Perhaps most seriously, they are largely manned by imported Russian workers and thereby combine the Soviet period's disastrous economic and demographic legacies.

THE FIRST Estonian Republic was a consciously ethnic state, home for a small nation denied self-determination for nearly seven hundred years. This was reflected in the racial mix; ethnic Estonians made up some 90 per cent of the population. Today's figure of 60 per cent is a direct result of the Soviet annexation, which led to massacre, deportation, and emigration, followed by a period of sustained Russian immigration.

Toompea, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

There has been some Russian emigration over the past two years, but Estonians seem to recognize that there can never be a return to the old homogeneous republic. The new citizenship laws reflect this. In essence, most Russians will be eligible for permanent resident status. A substantial number are also immediately eligible for Estonian citizenship and many more will become so after a period of residence. Russians will enjoy full social rights, and there will continue to he access to Russian-language schools. Applicants for Estonian citizenship will have to pass a fairly basic language test; with little more than one million Estonian speakers worldwide, such a requirement is understandable.

Nevertheless, this has been a difficult period for Estonia's Russians, many of whom have lived there for decades. In the Soviet era there was no need to learn Estonian. Few Russians had any real consciousness that they were living in another country. Literally overnight this population found itself "abroad." Despite this, Mart Laar feels that ethnic relations are improving. "The hate that existed five years ago is gone."

Certainly this appears true in Tallinn, where Russians make up about 50 per cent of the population. Lenin Boulevard is no more, but Russian-language street signs remain unmolested. More of a problem are a number of towns close to the Russian border. Their inhabitants are predominantly Russian, moved there by Moscow to man the large factories that no one now wants. Narva, the largest of these towns, still displays a statue of Lenin and has politics to match. Poorly informed, somewhat apathetic, and with little visible economic future, the people there have proved relatively easy to manipulate by a Soviet-style leadership. It is primarily to this population that Laar is referring when he says, "The main problem that we have with the Russians is that they are not Russians. Most of them are not feeling themselves as Russians. They are feeling themselves as Soviets. ... If they become Russian all the problems are solved."

Tallinn, August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

Undoubtedly it is more complex than that, and it is surprising that more Estonians will not consider transferring Narva and its problems to Russia. Nevertheless there are signs of hope. There is certainly ethnic tension in Estonia, but it has led to less violence than in, say, Germany, where the standard of living is far higher and the immigrant population is comparatively small. Russian opinion also appears far from monolithic, not least, perhaps, because many Russians in Estonia are well aware that they are economically far better off than their counterparts in Russia itself.

Ethnic relations in Estonia are never going to be easy. To Estonians their Russian population will always be a living reminder of the Soviet occupation. Equally, transformation to minority status will be difficult for the once imperial Russians. Nevertheless, if Estonia is left to itself and its innovative economic policies succeed, there is a chance that a modus vivendi can be found.

The problem, as always in this part of the Baltic, is that Estonia may not be left to itself. Six thousand Russian troops remain there, including a sizable detachment in Tallinn itself. In increasingly threatening terms Moscow has made it clear that further withdrawals will be dependent on what it deems to be fair treatment of Estonia's Russian population. This is in line with a general shift on Russia's part toward greater assertiveness in protecting what it feels to be its interests in its "near abroad"—the republics of the former USSR.

Red Army 'liberator', August 1993  © Andrew Stuttaford

Much of this is no more than saber rattling, reflecting an increasingly complex political situation in Moscow. Nevertheless, the continued presence of Russian troops only serves to polarize opinion in Estonia. Equally, threats of external intervention give nothing but encouragement to hardliners on both sides.

Even with its current problems Estonia is (as I was repeatedly told) no Yugoslavia, but, if Russia continues to meddle, that is what much of the Baltic region may become.