BRAIN DRAIN

Four cheers for the brain drain


I can understand pure protectionism more easily. That is selfish and
timid, but at least it's not disguised as altruism. But a lot of the
moaning about the "brain drain" from east European countries like
Latvia, Lithuania and Poland makes out that it is having a dreadful
effect on these poor post-communist countries (for which read
"aboriginal reservations"). The natives, so this patronising argument
goes, would be so much happier living their traditional lifestyle
(muddy, cold, vodka-soaked) than being spoiled by exposure to the
temptations of western culture.

Instead of celebrating the marvellous opportunities that migration in
a united Europe presents, the old rich countries are pretending that
it's a disaster. How dare those funny little people with their
incomprehensible languages search for a better life elsewhere? How
dare they respond to market signals that tell them that their labour
is more valuable abroad than at home? How dare they try to learn new
skills? They should stop having ideas above their station, and instead
stay at home and go folkdancing in those picturesque felt boots, and
wait gratefully for the nice new roads that the rich world is going to
give them later in the century.

In theory, of course, migration combined with bad government can make
a country collapse. Zimbabwe is a good example. There may be some sign
of that in the more benighted bits of central Asia (I am sure that
anyone who can leave Turkmenistan has done so). But what's happening
in the post-communist countries of eastern Europe is quite different.

For a start, the current wave of migration is quite small. Many more
people moved immediately after the collapse of communism: Jews,
Russians and Germans shifted around in their hundreds of thousands.
But this was less politically sensitive. Germany, albeit not very
enthusiastically, feels that it has to be the ethnic homeland of all
Teutons, however tenuous their connection. Israel feels the same about
Jews (who in some cases got their Israeli passports and moved on).
Russians in the former Soviet empire were welcome home, regardless of
whether they were really persecuted, or just unable to cope with the
end of their imperial privilege.

The difference now is that the migration is economic, not political,
and it's much more short-term. People are going abroad and trying
their luck. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Qualifications may be
unrecognised, or employers unscrupulous. But it's not the end of the
world: if Greece is no good, try Italy. If Britain is overcrowded,
there's Ireland. If nothing works, then there's a bus back home. And
if it does work, the pay-offs are great: money earned can be capital
for a business or pay for education, or a better house. Simply seeing
how a hospital, farm or office in another country works is a
mind-stretching experience.

In short: free trade in people, as in goods or services, matches wants
and preferences precisely, creating more winners than losers. True,
spending long periods abroad is not ideal for marriages, or for
parenting, or for caring for elderly relatives if people. But if
staying put means rotting your life away with ill-paid, boring work,
that's not exactly ideal either.

Some east European employers are complaining. Their nice pool of cheap
labour is indeed draining away. But if they want to tempt the migrants
back, they'll have to work at it, by offering better pay and
conditions, and raising productivity through better management and
more modern equipment. Help! At this rate, those muddy aborigines may
end up richer than us.

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist

ESTONIA

Restaurant critics give Estonia three stars

By Edward Lucas

In most of the countries I cover, the prime minister lives in a
bubble, travelling in a large black shiny car from one well-guarded
location to another, surrounded by obsequious advisers basking in his
reflected glory.

If he goes to a restaurant at all, it is a glitzy one with a private
room. If the bill is paid at all, it is certainly not something that
bothers him directly.
That's certainly true in Belarus, which I have just been discussing at
an excellent conference organised by the Open Estonia Foundation (part
of the Soros philanthropic empire).
I follow Belarus fairly closely (in so far as I can without being able
to go there), but I was struck by the fierce new rules on internet
access, which will deprive non-governmental organisations of their
broadband connections.
The draft new law on subversion threatens hefty prison sentences for
crimes such as "discrediting Belarus in co-operation with
foreign-financed organisations and the mass media".
But outside intervention will at best have a marginal impact. The real
problem is the deep Sovietisation of Belarussian society, which has
atomised and demoralised it to an extent unseen elsewhere in the region.
The building blocks of democratic change - impatient middle classes,
patriotism and religion - simply don't exist. So the most important
thing is to do no harm.
A lively debate about economic sanctions ended with a consensus (I
think) that a Soviet-style economic collapse was not going to happen,
and that making Belarus poorer and more dependent on Russia was
unlikely to stoke pro-western and democratic feelings.
The conference's high quality made up for the fact that my other
plans, to see some Estonian policy wonks, had been ruined by the trip
of my fellow-countryman, Tony Blair. His heavily guarded convoy of
limousines had brought traffic to a standstill for large chunks of the
day and the people I most wanted to meet were too busy, either because
of him, or because of the disruption caused.
But late in the evening I got a message that some government advisers
were at a restaurant and I was welcome to join them. That was nice
enough: they might have had enough self-important British visitors for
one day.
As we chatted about Russia's slide to autocracy, the psychological war
it wages against the Baltics, and the strange and dangerous way in
which Western Europe seems to ignore this, a couple more people turned
up, pulling up chairs to the table, sitting down and tucking into the
wine and tapas.
They included the Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip. I was
impressed with four things. First, he was not spending time with a
hand-picked group of top policy-advisers for a high-powered
discussion, but hanging out with a rather random bunch ranging from
very senior to rather junior, just to chew over the events of the day.
Second, the conversation flowed naturally. I heard nobody laughing
loudly at the boss's jokes, or falling silent when he spoke. Third,
the other customers in the (very unpretentious) restaurant, and the
staff, showed not the slightest bit of surprise. Fourth, before Ansip
left, he made a point of checking that somebody was dealing with the bill.
I told him how impressed I was, and why. "Estonia's like that," he
replied. "Some German tourists asked for my autograph in a restaurant
recently, just because they were so surprised that I would eat there
like a normal person."
Sadly, I can't imagine this happening in Britain with Tony Blair any
more than it would in Belarus with Alexander Lukashenko. Lucky Estonia.
# Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The
Economist.

POLAND

Poland's bravery is lost on Putin's poodles

By Edward Lucas

It's easy to caricature Poland as a country of dim, superstitious peasants. I
remember CNN's Ted Turner doing his unfunny impression of a "Polish
mine-detector"- putting his hands to his ears and hopping clumsily. A Polish
Deputy Foreign Minister, Radek Sikorski, forced him to apologise.

émigré who has now become Poland's new defence minister and is making waves
again. He has declassified his country's Warsaw Pact files, handing them over to
the national archives. But the international reaction to this reflects another
caricature of Poland, no less offensive, and much more dangerous.
There were plenty of snide remarks about Sikorski's move, but the Financial
Times will serve as an example. It wrote that Poland "risked inflaming tensions
with Russia" and was "prepared to incur Moscow's wrath". Leaving aside the mixed
metaphor (a tendon can be inflamed, but not a tension) this seems a perverse
spin on the affair.
Russia has made no public protest about the opening of the archives. Nor,
according to Sikorski, has it complained privately. So Western opinion is
annoyed not because Poland is picking a fight with Russia, but because it is
doing something that might just possibly at some point annoy the Kremlin - with
the subtext that this would always be the wrong thing to do.
That's a strange way of looking at things and one that is increasingly prevalent
in Western capitals. Poland and the Baltic states are seen as faraway places
with incomprehensible habits, values and grudges, bent on disrupting the
important business of getting lots of cheap oil and gas from that nice Mr Putin.
If Russia hadn't thought about complaining about the declassification before, it
certainly has every opportunity to do so now.
It doesn't really matter what is in the archives; Soviet plans for nuclear war,
plus the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia will probably be the most interesting.
Other countries - such as the former East Germany - have already declassified
their bits of the files.
The point is that the new Polish government is serious about wanting to clean up
the remains of the country's Communist past. It is doing so promptly, to a
deafening lack of applause in the West. I find that baffling. Imagine if a
former Nazi-occupied country - France for example - still had a large pro-Nazi
party that had managed to block the release of the Wehrmacht's wartime archives
there. How cross everyone would be about it, and how glad if a strongly
anti-Nazi party came to power pledging to open the German military files (and
the Gestapo ones too, for that matter). That, roughly, is what has happened in
Poland.
The real reason why bien-pensant Western opinion-formers hate this sort of thing
is that it sabotages the cosy, sloppy, moral equivalence that marked their
thinking during the Cold War years. If you are confronted with incontrovertible
evidence that the Soviet Union was both a monstrous dictatorship and an
aggressive imperialist power, it becomes much harder to maintain that "the USA
and the USSR were as bad as each other".
The fact is that if it wasn't for America, Western Europe would have had a hard
job withstanding Soviet belligerence. Patriots like Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski -
NATO's top spy in Communist-ruled Poland - knew that, which is why for a decade
they risked torture and death to work secretly for the West. But that part of
history is something that many people whose freedom he helped preserve would
much rather forget, if they ever knew it in the first place.
# Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist.

ebrd

Compare and contrast in order to catch up

By Edward Lucas

Reading the latest annual survey from the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) of the progress of the
ex-captive nations in economics and institution-building, I wondered
about an ideal world where the engineers are Czechs, the chefs
Hungarian, the soldiers Polish, the bureaucrats Estonian and the
musicians Russian. And in a nightmare world, the bureaucrats are
Russian, the soldiers Czechs, the chefs Estonian and so on. Such jokes
are a good way to make friends - and lose them. No country likes to
dwell on its weak points (and I should say quickly, before my inbox
starts bursting with protests, that I have had many delicious meals in
Tallinn, know some very brave Czechs and highly efficient Russians).

But behind the more-or-less amusing stereotypes is a serious point
about the right way to look at the post-Communist world. There are two
traps. One is defeatism, the other arrogance. The best example of the
latter came in the 1990s, when Russia was the unfortunate beneficiary
of a great deal of enthusiastic and intrusive Western advice and
scrutiny. Locals and others complained with some justice that it was
wrong to expect the country to meet Swiss standards of administrative
efficiency, German altruism in foreign policy, American workaholism
and Dutch openness to foreign trade. It would be fairer to expect, at
least at first, Italian standards of public-sector efficiency, French
political maturity, German flexibility and Swiss cultural openness.
Such critics had a point. It was ludicrous, for example, to expect a
huge country emerging from decades of totalitarianism and isolation to
develop in the space of a few years the financial system of an
advanced capitalist country. The attempt to do so meant that hot money
sloshed round weak crooked institutions, leading to an inevitable
financial bubble that cost millions of Russians their savings in 1998.

But it is wrong for two reasons to take the opposite view and say that
post-communist countries are doing very well if they meet the worst
standards of old Europe.

The first is that the collapse of Communism did give the chance of a
fresh start. In countries like France and Italy, many people still
sincerely believe that the system of past decades can work, with a bit
of judicious tweaking. It was very hard, almost impossible, to believe
that about Communism in 1989. Different countries approached that
fresh start in different ways and with different starting points, but
it was there. Good policies paid off; bad ones brought a high price in
lost time, wealth, jobs and happiness. Hungary got it right with
privatisation for example; the Czech Republic got it wrong. Slovakia
wasted time under the dreadful Vladimir Meciar. Ukraine dithered,
while Russia at least tried to privatise and liberalise.

Second, post-Communist countries don't have the luxury of hanging
about. Italy can still just about afford its comic-opera politics, for
the same reason that it can afford grand opera at La Scala: because
it's a big rich country. Ukraine, if it wants to catch up this
century, can't.

What I'd really like from the EBRD is a detailed comparison that
includes old Europe as well as new. It's good to see that in some
respects ex-Communist countries' business environments are nearing
those in Germany - a country the report uses as a benchmark. But it
would be even more interesting to see further comparisons. How does
Hungary stack up against Austria? Or Estonia against Finland? That
would spur the ex-captive nations to greater efforts - and perhaps on
some fronts be a salutary shock to the richer countries' comfortable
complacency.

COMMIE TOOLKIT

The Communist tool-box still comes in handy


Some of the tools are rusty; others are just plain useless. The skills
I struggled to acquire in communist-era Eastern Europe now seem as
quaint as the ability to hunt a woolly mammoth or sharpen a flint axe.

Or do they? My biggest stumbling blocks: visas, communications and
staying fed, have all but vanished. Bluffing and subterfuge were
essential to get inside places like Ceausescu's Romania, Communist
Czechoslovakia, or the Soviet Union, and to work once there. Not any
more. I no longer envy colleagues for being dab hands at the telex
(remember that?), or for their wiles in getting planned-economy
restaurants to provide food.
Thankfully, it is no longer necessary to know the ins and outs of
Marxist theory, The ability to swap Lenin quotes with Communist
apparatchiks counts for nothing. Languages matter less too: in
pre-revolutionary Eastern Europe, you simply had to stumble through
your irregular verbs, suffixes and declensions. The alternative was to
talk only to a tiny bunch of polyglots; or else rely on a small pool
of imperfect interpreters who were easy targets for secret police
pressure.
Most importantly, there's no risk to life and liberty. Nobody beats
you up. I no longer feel overwhelmed by the moral courage of my
interviewees. Even the most unpleasant post-Communist politician is
unlikely to be as revolting a liar and bully as, say, a Soviet-era
secret policeman.
But some things have stayed the same. Despite a decade in the
limelight, plus EU and NATO membership for the lucky ones, much of the
region is once again below the Western editorial horizon. I remember
beseeching my bosses (I wasn't at The Economist then, I should add) in
the late 1980s to take Yugoslavia seriously.
Now the frozen conflicts of the Caucasus and Western Balkans are again
too complicated and faraway for Western public attention to focus on.
And ignorance is still amazing. Last week BBC World reported,
straight-faced: "Poland is struggling to catch up its richer
neighbours, Germany and [sic] Russia."
More importantly, history is still the key. Understanding Polish
politics is impossible without knowing the difference between the
London and Lublin governments, or the difference between Pilsudski's
and Dmowski's concept of nationhood. Russia is stuck in the cloven
pine of its history. In every country in the region, the simplest but
most revealing question is still: "What were you doing before 1989?
And what did your parents do?".
That touches the biggest similarity: Communism may be dead as an
ideology, but its psychological legacy lives on. Below a thin layer of
post-Communist polish, anyone with a background in the old regime is
likely to have a different emotional, social and moral wavelength:
more hierarchical, more suspicious, more verbose, more rigid (and
perhaps less principled) than the naive outsider might expect.
Cutting through that still requires sharp thinking. As Raymond Smith
explains in his classic work on the communist mindset, Negotiating
with the Soviets, the trick is to decide quickly whether to befriend,
bully or beg. A haughty approach (done with conviction) gets you
almost everywhere: kow-towing to higher authority is deeply ingrained.
If you can stomach it, getting friendly may work too - though you may
have to do a favour in return: personal connections were, after all,
the fuel that kept planned economies functioning. If all else fails,
grovel: humiliation is cheap if it gets you what you want.
It varies, of course. Belarus, Transdniestr and the like are the
worst. They just happen to be where I find my flint axe quite useful too.

EMIGRES

Bringing back Eastern promise of brainy émigrés

By Edward Lucas

I first came across them in the 'Infobiuras' of the Lithuanian
pro-independence movement, Sajudis, in early 1990.

Young, bright-eyed Americans, Canadians and Australians, steeped by
fervently patriotic parents in the history of countries they hardly
knew, bent on fulfilling their historical destiny. They translated
documents into English, briefed journalists, advised politicians and
generally brought a blast of optimistic, confident radicalism to the
nervous, blurry world of collapsing Communism.
Sometimes the results were more spectacular than productive. During
one of the hairier moments of the Lithuanian independence struggle,
when it seemed as though the West, with the honourable but minor
exception of Iceland, was going to abandon Lithuania to the mercies of
Soviet stormtroopers, I remember hearing one beefy young Lithuanian
émigré bellowing down the phone "Don't be such a f***ing jerk!" I
asked him who he'd been talking to. "The American ambassador in
Moscow," he replied tersely.
There were grown-ups too. The most impressive, Stasys Lozoraitis, ran,
unsuccessfully, for president of Lithuania in 1993. He had spent his
whole life as ambassador to the Vatican and United States, in quixotic
service to a country that most of the world thought had disappeared in
1940. He was urbane, polyglot, amusing, and charismatic, with an
Italian wife who added a rare touch of glamour and sophistication to
the drab, stodgy world of Lithuania. Elsewhere, these high-powered
émigrés included a deeply impressive Canadian-Latvian professor of
linguistics, a forceful young man who ran the Estonian section of
Radio Free Europe and an ambitious Polish refugee-journalist, who
after studying at Oxford in the early 1980s spent time in
Soviet-occupied Afghanistan with the resistance.
The galaxy of talent had some black holes too. There was one adviser
to a Baltic foreign ministry whose sole qualification was a diploma in
bar management and a hard-drinking old bat in an economics ministry
whose previous job was as a junior public relations woman for a theme
park. One of the most energetic and engaging Lithuanian émigrés turned
out to have been working for both the KGB and the Americans (in what
order was never completely clear).
But the presumption then was that even the most modest émigré talent
was badly needed. Even the most superficial knowledge of the way the
West worked was a big advantage. Knowing how to use a computer, handle
phone messages, talk politely to strangers in English and organise
travel to faraway places were all rare skills.
That changed quickly. But the best émigré talent is still around. The
Canadian professor, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, is now president of Latvia
and one of the few East European politicians with a claim to world
status. The young man from Radio Free Europe, Tom Ilves, is now a
leading member of the European Parliament. The Anglo-Polish
journalist, Radek Sikorski, has just been sworn in as defence minister.
But the political balance has changed. Now the diaspora appears
provincial and out of touch. In Toronto, Ealing and the Chicago
suburbs, they are still baking the old recipes, learning folk songs,
sending children to Saturday school and keeping the church afloat. But
the diaspora is no longer the political lungs of nationhood: the
source of free ideas and discussion, a constant reminder that the
Communist version of the past, present and future was an evil fiction.
In politics, it's the homeland that's humming.
But not in economics. A million East Europeans or more have gone
abroad in search of jobs and education. That raises a big question for
the ex-captive nations: can they ever attract these bright, mobile
people back home?

belarusaitis

Belarusaitis used to be a rare affliction. One symptom is visiting
Minsk frequently, a clean and spacious city, but not distinguished by
its aesthetic attraction, to put it mildly. Another is a love of
inflicting obscure details of Belarussian history on unsuspecting
people. "Did you know that there used to be two rival Belarussian
governments-in-exile? One dates from 1918 and the other—which has now
folded—from 1944". As my eyes light up and start swivelling, my
interlocutors look increasingly puzzled and start edging away.

That's just embarrassing. But a more dangerous symptom is wishful
thinking about the chances for political change. I know: I was so fed
up with the bureaucratic, corrupt regime of Vyacheslav Kebich that I
longed for Alexander Lukashenka to win the presidential elections in
1994. To my lasting embarrassment, I even wrote favourably about him
in The Economist. A populist with a strong anti-corruption message,
who genuinely engaged with people when he campaigned, seemed a welcome
breath of fresh air.

It soon became clear that things were going wrong. A couple of years
later I interviewed the president, when Ford opened a car plant
outside Minsk (they soon had to close it). His answers were so erratic
and off-the-point that it was hard to fit them into the article. Even
the bits I could use didn't make it into print: the Economist crunched
them into the anonymous "Some top Belarussians think this [the plant]
is the start of something big". His press people, who had been
expecting a cover-story, have never allowed me near him since.

Now I worry that other people have Belarusaitis worse than me. A
country that used to be a black hole is now attracting a lot of
western interest. This chiefly manifests itself in a rich programme of
seminars and handouts for Belarussian opposition organisations. The
aim is to present a real challenge to the Lukashenka regime in the
elections next year.

It's easy to see why excitement is growing. The opposition has agreed
on a single candidate, the multilingual physicist Alexander
Milinkevic. When I met him a few years ago I found him not just clever
and honest, but sane and sensible—which is more than can be said for
many of the chancers, scroungers, losers and nutters who have made up
much of the Belarussian opposition in the past.

He faces formidable obstacles—and not just that the election campaign
and count will be rigged against him. Another is the Belarusaitis of
his own foreign supporters. What many westerners fail to realise is
that support for Mr Lukashenka and a close alliance with Russia, plus
suspicion towards Poland, the West, and the opposition are not just
the product of the regime's propaganda, but also the sincere feelings
of a large chunk of the population. There is evidence to show that
these feelings are eroding (for which three cheers) but they are still
strong.

The Belarusaitis-driven enthusiasm of Mr Milinkevic's western
supporters threatens his appeal to potential voters at home. The
regime is longing to present him as the representative of a Polish
fifth-column that wants to bring Belarus under the cultural, political
and economic domination of the west: ie joining not just the EU but
Nato, fighting in Iraq, sponsoring Chechen terrorism and being an
Al-Qaida target (no it isn't logical, but that's never bothered them).
Plus he supposedly wants to sell the country to foreign speculators.
Which (caricatures aside) is pretty much what Belarus needs. But
saying it loudly won't help the good guys win.

commie toolkit

Belarusaitis used to be a rare affliction. One symptom is visiting
Minsk frequently, a clean and spacious city, but not distinguished by
its aesthetic attraction, to put it mildly. Another is a love of
inflicting obscure details of Belarussian history on unsuspecting
people. "Did you know that there used to be two rival Belarussian
governments-in-exile? One dates from 1918 and the other—which has now
folded—from 1944". As my eyes light up and start swivelling, my
interlocutors look increasingly puzzled and start edging away.

That's just embarrassing. But a more dangerous symptom is wishful
thinking about the chances for political change. I know: I was so fed
up with the bureaucratic, corrupt regime of Vyacheslav Kebich that I
longed for Alexander Lukashenka to win the presidential elections in
1994. To my lasting embarrassment, I even wrote favourably about him
in The Economist. A populist with a strong anti-corruption message,
who genuinely engaged with people when he campaigned, seemed a welcome
breath of fresh air.

It soon became clear that things were going wrong. A couple of years
later I interviewed the president, when Ford opened a car plant
outside Minsk (they soon had to close it). His answers were so erratic
and off-the-point that it was hard to fit them into the article. Even
the bits I could use didn't make it into print: the Economist crunched
them into the anonymous "Some top Belarussians think this [the plant]
is the start of something big". His press people, who had been
expecting a cover-story, have never allowed me near him since.

Now I worry that other people have Belarusaitis worse than me. A
country that used to be a black hole is now attracting a lot of
western interest. This chiefly manifests itself in a rich programme of
seminars and handouts for Belarussian opposition organisations. The
aim is to present a real challenge to the Lukashenka regime in the
elections next year.

It's easy to see why excitement is growing. The opposition has agreed
on a single candidate, the multilingual physicist Alexander
Milinkevic. When I met him a few years ago I found him not just clever
and honest, but sane and sensible—which is more than can be said for
many of the chancers, scroungers, losers and nutters who have made up
much of the Belarussian opposition in the past.

He faces formidable obstacles—and not just that the election campaign
and count will be rigged against him. Another is the Belarusaitis of
his own foreign supporters. What many westerners fail to realise is
that support for Mr Lukashenka and a close alliance with Russia, plus
suspicion towards Poland, the West, and the opposition are not just
the product of the regime's propaganda, but also the sincere feelings
of a large chunk of the population. There is evidence to show that
these feelings are eroding (for which three cheers) but they are still
strong.

The Belarusaitis-driven enthusiasm of Mr Milinkevic's western
supporters threatens his appeal to potential voters at home. The
regime is longing to present him as the representative of a Polish
fifth-column that wants to bring Belarus under the cultural, political
and economic domination of the west: ie joining not just the EU but
Nato, fighting in Iraq, sponsoring Chechen terrorism and being an
Al-Qaida target (no it isn't logical, but that's never bothered them).
Plus he supposedly wants to sell the country to foreign speculators.
Which (caricatures aside) is pretty much what Belarus needs. But
saying it loudly won't help the good guys win.

ev september 2005

The disgraceful 'party line' on Eastern Europe

By Edward Lucas

Twice at parties in the last week I've found myself gasping for
breath. Each time I was chatting to pillars of the right-wing British
establishment, solid Cold Warriors with whom I used to agree about the
big questions of Europe's future - America in, Germans down, Russia
out - and so forth.

But Euroscepticism is corroding those comforting and commendable
certainties. One of my pals, a newspaper editor, interrupted me as I
praised the flat-taxes and other reforms sweeping across Europe from
the new member states. "Oh, I'm not interested in that now. I'm for a
pull-out." In vain I tried to explain that the Central Europeans and
Balts would regard his idea of a new EFTA - backed by NATO - as dotty
and unworkable. The constitution had failed, he insisted, so the EU
was dead.
Two days later it was one of Britain's leading right-wing polemicists,
a man who as speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher honed some of the
choicest phrases of the Cold War. I was trying to interest him in the
problems of Europe's eastern fringes, so brilliantly outlined by my
predecessor, Robert Cottrell, in his recent survey in The Economist.
He wasn't interested. The EU would collapse, and Britain should pull
out as soon as possible. But what, I stuttered, would you do about
Moldova, or Belarus? "Those countries," he replied loftily, "will have
to look after themselves." I could hardly believe my ears. A man who,
only 20 years previously, had championed the captive nations' right to
be free of Soviet rule was now consigning the most vulnerable victims
of Communism to the scrap heap of history.
There is something very odd going on here. Britain and British ideas
of a wide, Atlanticist Europe have never been so popular in Eastern
Europe. Memories of betrayals, real or imagined, of Munich, of the
Warsaw Uprising, at Yalta, of the Cossacks, of Hungarians in 1956 and
Czechoslovaks in 1968, are fading into history. Instead, there is
enthusiastic support for British ideas about EU reform, for Tony
Blair's ideas about deregulation, dynamism, flexibility and so on.
Countries wanting to join the EU see the British presidency as their
big chance.
By contrast, the Franco-German axis has never looked more out-of-date
and disreputable. In particular, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks have fallen
out of love with France in a way I would have regarded as wildly
unlikely when I covered Central Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.
Yet the people who should be celebrating as the winds of history blow
their way have given up and are huddled below decks, sneering and
jeering, lost in their own world of defunct sentimental nationalism
and vainglorious wishful thinking.
Fuelled by champagne and indignation, I asked both people for an
alternative. If consolidating democracy and stability in the Western
Balkans matters, what possible alternative is there than the big
carrot of EU membership for countries that do the right things, on
institution-building, the rule of law, treatment of minorities,
crime-fighting, intelligence-sharing and so forth?
I would like to report that they came up with ingenious solutions that
would bring all the prosperity and other benefits of the EU without
any of the bureaucracy, waste, corruption, pomposity and jargon that
fuels Euroscepticism in Britain and elsewhere.
Not a bit of it. For the champions of the Cold War, Eastern Europe, it
seems, is once again a collection of faraway countries of whom we know
nothing. That was a callous and disgraceful phrase when used in 1938
by Neville Chamberlain of Czechoslovakia. And it is callous and
disgraceful now.

gulag/applebaum

Gulag gets short shrift from Putinland publishers

By Edward Lucas

Imagine a book, well written, accurate and moving, that gives the
first really thorough account of America's slave trade, told through
painstaking research in previously hidden archives.

A Pulitzer prize? Certainly. World-wide syndication? Certainly. Now
imagine that despite all that, no American publisher is willing to
publish it.
Inconceivable? Not if the subject is the equally shameful one of the
Soviet Gulag and the publishers are not American, but Russian. My
friend Anne Applebaum's accuracy, stylish prose and original research
won her a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the camps. It has sold
hundreds of thousands of copies in 28 editions around the world -
except in Russia, where the book is taboo.
Yet there is huge interest in the former captive nations of Eastern
Europe, where the book-buying public tends not to go for translations
of foreign non-fiction (the elite read such books in English, the rest
lack the time, money or inclination to read them at all).
The hardback Gulag alone has sold a startling 70,000 copies in Poland.
Her agent, the worldly wise New York-based Georges Borchardt, says the
level of interest is "really quite amazing".
Yet the country which suffered most from communism, providing
countless millions of victims to the terror machine, has no
local-language version of the best-available account of what really
happened.
One reason for poor sales in Putinland might be fatigue. During the
glasnost era (and golly, we miss those days now) memoirs, histories
and other works about the crimes of Stalinism were everywhere. By the
1990s, Russians were bored by miserable accounts of their miserable
history. The new fashion in books was escapist detective fiction. Fair
enough: even in Germany, where VergangenheitsbewŠltigung (conquering
one's past) is a matter of solemn private and public conscience, I can
see people have a limited appetite for yet more books about the Nazis.
But does that explain why no Russian publisher wants to publish Gulag?
As a devout believer in free markets, I concede the possibility that
the book would sell so badly - worse, say, than an Icelandic cookbook
- that translating and publishing it would be irrational. But I think
it is more likely that the Russian publishers are practising
self-censorship.
As Paul Baker and Susan Glasser point out in their excellent new book
Kremlin Rising, Russian history is now a matter of high politics,
where the Kremlin intervenes even against specific textbooks that they
think cast the Soviet Union in an excessively (read: any) unfavourable
light.
Anne is trying to raise money to have it published by a brave
non-profit outfit, the Moscow School of Political Studies. But I have
another suggestion. Why not try selling the all-Russian rights to a
publisher in the Baltic states? At a minimum, it could sell among the
new generation of modern-minded Yevrorussky (European Russians) there
who find the cultural and political climate in the motherland
increasingly repellent. Second, it would at least be available to
readers in Russia proper (who mainly order books via the internet anyway).
The best thing would be if Kremlin then denounced the Baltic edition
as a "provocation", or tried to respond by sponsoring a sanitised
account that put the Gulag "in the right perspective". There are too
many lies already. But the more that official Russian history sidles
away from the democratic perspective and scholarly approach of the
Yeltsin years and back to the fawning, distorted junk of the past, the
easier it is to see Vladimir Putin and his "useful idiot" sycophants
in the West for what they really are.

baltic blues

When an Estonian official once asked me about a suitable mission
statement or motto for his country. I suggested, only half-jokingly,
"We told you so".
Estonian smugness is of course legendary. But it is odd but true
that on most important questions the Estonians (and usually the
Latvians and Lithuanians) have been right, whereas outsiders have been
wrong, sometimes wildly so.
I remember being told forcefully in 1988 by one of the BBC's best
Russian-speakers that the "tiny Baltic Soviet republics" wanted only
autonomy from the Kremlin. A handful of "nationalists", mainly
emigres, dreamed of full independence, but it was never going to happen.
Luckily the Estonians took no notice. They never considered
themselves to be a "Soviet republic", but rather an occupied
territory. And they certainly did want independence. They went ahead
with the remarkable Congress of Estonia. Like its Latvian counterpart,
this was an independently-elected alternative (ie non-Soviet)
parliament which sought to recreate the republic abolished in 1940. It
was an important reminder that the Baltic states were not seeking to
gain independence, but to regain it. This was the political equivalent
of raising the Titanic—but most outsiders simply couldn't understand
it, and dismissed the Congress as a nationalist stunt.
Luckily the Estonians took no notice and focussed on restoring the
prosperous, lawful country that was still—just—in living memory.
That included modest attempts to restore Estonian as the state
language, and to try to induce the hundreds of thousands of Soviet-era
migrants to regularise their residence. The outside world (which
mostly has far harsher rules for migrants wanting to naturalise) was
sure this would mean "Bosnia on the Baltic". There were countless
monitoring missions and working groups. But the result was that
hundreds of thousands of people have learnt Estonian (or Latvian) and
gained citizenship. It's worked amazingly well.
Then there was the senior IMF official in 1992 who told Estonians
to back "a common currency from Tallinn to Tashkent", rather than
reintroducing (very successfully as it proved) the kroon.
Luckily the Estonians took no notice. The government of Mart Laar
also ignored outsiders who told them not to privatise rapidly and
fully, but to give state industry a lengthy, gentle transition. The
speed of economic change did feel rather alarming (I was running a
newspaper in Tallinn at the time) but it was the right policy. So was
the decision to abolish tariffs and subsidies (now, sadly,
reintroduced as a condition of EU membership). Equally successful—and
accompanied by dire warnings at the time—was the flat tax.
I still remember a western ambassador who was reduced to
helpless giggles in the mid-1990s when I suggested that all three
Baltic states would be EU members in ten years' time. The combination
of outside competition and Brussels bureaucracy would cause them
collapse overnight, he told me. And Nato membership was not even a
joke, just dangerous nonsense—as late as 2000, much of the
foreign-policy establishment in western Europe was convinced that such
a step would destroy relations with Russia.
It's quite a long list, which might make Estonians and their
Baltic colleagues rather sceptical of outside advice. It might also,
perhaps. make outsiders cautious about offering it, and keener to
learn from Estonia's example. So I am pleased that British
commentators are now writing enthusiastically about Estonia's flat
tax. But there is some way to go: the Sunday Telegraph two weeks ago
wrote enthusiastically that: "Mr Laar is tipped as a European
commissioner when [sic] his country joins the EU in 2007."

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist
edwardlucas@economist.com

Transdniestria

Finally, here is the previous week's column from European Voice

Birthday parties have an added frisson when they celebrate a highly
controversial birth. There was quite a bash the other day in the
streets of Tiraspol—a city that few Europeans would find on the map,
although well known to arms-dealers, drug-smugglers, spies and
suchlike. For Tiraspol is the soi-disant capital of the soi-disant
state of Transdniestr.
Depending on your political standpoint, Transdniestr is a valiant
bastion of Russian language and culture, battling against fascists
wanting a Greater Romania, and against American global hegemony. Or it
is a corrupt tinpot dictatorship in a breakaway province that survives
thanks only to being useful to some very nasty strands of Russian (and
to some extent Ukrainian) political and economic life.
But like it or not, Transdniestr was 15 years old this month. It
celebrated in style with a huge fun-fair, bombastic speeches—and most
importantly "official" delegations from the other three unrecognised
statelets of the post-Soviet landscape: Nagorno-Karabakh, South
Ossetia, and Abkhazia.
There is an intriguing air of unreality about the idea of
non-countries conducting pretend diplomacy with each other. During the
Cold War, the Polish government-in-exile in London used to have
meetings with the surviving Baltic diplomats, stranded there in dusty
embassies while their countries were de facto part of the Soviet
Union. Their status was a bit different though: the Balts still had
diplomatic status (because Britain didn't recognise the Soviet
annexation) whereas the Poles were private citizens—at least until
President Lech Walesa invited them to Warsaw in 1990, and, gloriously,
retrospectively recognised their legitimacy.
For less noble reasons, Transdniestrians also hang on, hoping that
stubbornness will eventually bear fruit. But they don't exactly exude
confidence. The official news agency, Olvia-press, recently published
a fascinating commentary "exposing" the various western plots aimed at
destabilising Transdniestr by means of a "coloured revolution". The
first stage was the "transformation of society within Moldova" by
"discrediting Soviet values, forming a pro-Western mentality and, most
importantly, creating…total dependence on American bosses". The first
two of these sound highly desirable. And the third has not happened:
American investors, sadly, are conspicuous by their absence; the US
embassy seems rather underpowered, and the best-known American there ,
the OSCE Ambassador William Hill, is something of a hate-figure for
Moldovan nationalists.
But never mind. Olvia-press goes on to outline the other scandalous
tactics of the Anglo-American hegemons, particularly a highly sinister
programme called "Community Connections" which sponsors "leaders of
public organisations, the intelligentsia, journalists and
representatives of small and medium business" to go on short trips to
America. There, it claims, they are "brainwashed".
That paranoid, exaggerated tone highlights the Tiraspol
propagandists' problem. If their system is so wonderful, then why are
people so eager to go to horrid America? And why is it so easy for
Western propaganda to persuade Transdniestrian youngsters that EU and
Nato membership via a united Moldova will make them freer and richer
than living in a rogue statelet propped up by Russia? Grudgingly,
Olvia-press blames a "certain complacency" among the Transdniestrian
authorities in dealing with the local youth. But it ends up insisting,
with beautiful contradictoriness, that a) the American puppets are
useless; b) they steal their backers' money (that implies that the
brainwashing wasn't that effective); c) Transdniestrians love their
government so much that no revolution is possible; and d) that the
American behaviour is highly provocative and should stop at once.
I decode that to mean that America's democracy-promoters are
beginning to have quite an effect, and the regime is getting worried.
Which is good news.

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent for The
Economist.
edwardlucas@economist.com

wilder europe Poland worries

The less-than-august omens for Poland

By Edward Lucas

If your job involves Eastern Europe, August looks like a good time for
holidays. As in most of the continent, it is a month when officials
are unavailable, government shuts down and people leave the cities to
the tourists.

But history suggests that it is a very good month if your job is
journalism. Among the stories you might have missed if you regularly
take holidays in August are the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the building
of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the birth
of Solidarity, the first big hole in the Iron Curtain, the botched
coup in Moscow that marked the end of the evil empire, the collapse of
the Russian financial system and the sinking of the Kursk submarine.
Against that background, how did August 2005 measure up? There have
been interesting rumblings from Transdniester, and worrying ones from
Macedonia; a Serbian army helicopter planted a church on the top of a
mountain in Montenegro and the Czech prime minister apologised for the
deportation in 1945 of Sudeten German anti-Nazis. But the month's
really big news has been from Poland.
I don't mean the 25th anniversary of Solidarity's founding, or the
opening salvos in the two upcoming election campaigns. Far more
important are Poland's rows - a Cold War in miniature - with Russia
and Belarus.
Belarus is Europe's only remaining dictatorship, where the regime's
latest target is the country's biggest ethnic minority organisation,
the Union of Poles (UPB). This might seem an odd target. Poles in
Belarus are not highly politicised and the UPB's activities are
inoffensive: chiefly Saturday schools for children, and folk-dancing
events. But the Belarusian authorities are not worried about the
intellectual firepower of their opponents. They just dislike the fact
that they exist at all. Any independent organisation, especially one
with foreign financial and other support, is a direct challenge to the
closed, monolithic society that the regime desires. So it has
dissolved the UPB and installed a more compliant leadership. It has
jailed Polish-language journalists, harassed activists, and denied
entry to, or deported, visitors from Poland.
Although the regime has murdered people in the past, it has not used
force this time. That's not the case in Poland's row with Russia,
which began with the mugging in Warsaw of three teenagers from the
Russian embassy. Russia treated this as a diplomatic incident
resulting directly from Poland's Russophobia, and demanded a formal
apology. The verbal outbursts were followed by physical retaliation:
in quick succession, two Polish embassy officials, and then a Polish
journalist, were beaten up in Moscow.
What's ominous here is not that Russia and Belarus are behaving, as
usual, unpleasantly. It's that the EU seems to have given up trying to
defend its members, like Poland, who most need support. Where were the
protests from other European embassies when Poles were being beaten up
in the streets of Moscow?
When the new member states joined the EU last year, the bold aim was
to convince Russia that it could be friends with Western Europe only
if it dropped its historical grudges against former captive nations in
the continent's east. That policy has, so far, failed totally.
Instead, Russia is enjoying the sight of the powerful countries of
Western Europe scurrying away from any possible conflict. It would be
nice to think that this is just an August blip; that when the
important people return from their holidays, the EU will come out
toughly in defence of Poland.
But I expect they'll play safe. And that, of course, is far more
dangerous.

wilder europe What did communism look like, Daddy?

By Edward Lucas

To raise money for church repairs in my home village in south-west
England, I have just given an illustrated talk there on 'Scrapes,
scoops and spies' in Eastern Europe.

The first problem was showing how countries could appear and disappear
- that's startling in a region that has not been near an international
frontier since 900 AD.
But I found maps showing Europe in 1914, 1922, 1945 and now, which
illustrated well the crucial interplay between history and geography.
Nor was it too hard showing resistance to communist rule, and the
authorities' response.
For the communist seizure of power in 1945-48, I used pictures of two
of my Czechoslovak heroes, Jan Masaryk (the last non-communist foreign
minister, who fell to his death, probably not unassisted, from the
window of his flat high up in the foreign ministry building) and
Milada Horakova. She survived a Nazi concentration camp only to be
hanged after a communist show trial in 1950.
There were excellent pictures, too, of the East German workers'
uprising of 1953, of Hungary in 1956, of the Soviet-led invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968 and of Solidarity in Poland in 1980-81.
But what was missing from the internet were images of the communist
system itself. (I thought it would be cheating to use commercial photo
libraries, so I was relying only on what the general public can find
via the internet search engine, Google.)
I searched in vain for illustrations of the degradation and
frustration of everyday life, of empty shops and squalid housing.
I did find one picture of the world's worst car, the Soviet-made
Zaporozhets - but it was a lovingly restored one owned by an eccentric
American collector, not the usual stinking rusty deathtrap.
Illustrating the moral dimension, of collaboration and deceit, was
even harder.
Some extracts from works by Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky and Milan
Klima would have done the job perfectly, given the time to read them
aloud: the real face of totalitarianism is sad, shabby compromises
made by sad, shabby people. That is ideal material for novelists, less
so for photographers.
It was hard too to explain wear and tear on my own nerves. Western
journalists behind the Iron Curtain worried often that we were
endangering our contacts, or (occasionally) that they might compromise
us. Soviet-block foreign correspondents in the West were almost
invariably spies; the communist authorities assumed we were too. That
meant a regular diet of hassles (ranging from blocked phones to
honeytraps) and threats of expulsion.
Sometimes these were comical. In Prague the authorities complained
about my frequent visits to the British embassy.
I was happy to explain that I was going not to pick up secret
instructions, but in the hope that the little shop there might have
new supplies of life-preserving Marmite (a yeasty gunk that Brits eat
spread on hot buttered toast).
In Soviet-occupied Estonia I was the first Western journalist to
interview the head of the KGB in Tallinn. I started the interview by
asking: "Am I the first Westerner to come into this building?" He
replied coolly: "Let's say that you will be the first Westerner to
leave it." I got goosepimples: remembering that anti-communist
partisans sent by Britain (and betrayed by British traitor Kim Philby)
had been tortured and murdered in that very building in the 1950s.
When the KGB collapsed in 1991, the Estonians found a machine in the
basement that, seemingly, had been used for mincing up bodies. Perhaps
I should have got a picture of that.

[ps from Edward: we did use a picture of that mincing machine in the Baltic
Independent when I was editing it]

Wilder Europe Oh My Stalin

The unbearable brilliance of post-Soviet songs

By Edward Lucas

It wasn't tuneful, but it was memorable. I was chairing a conference
about `Empire"' in Sweden and on the final evening I got bored with
the official entertainment and suggested a sing-song. These are big
features of British political life, sometimes staged to raise one's
own morale and sometimes to annoy opponents.

When I was a student, in the days when there were still real
Communists who thought the Soviet Union was a "workers' paradise" we
used to wind them up with what to my mind is the greatest political
song of all time. It is sung to the tune of Clementine and the first
verse goes like this:
In old Moscow, in the Kremlin/In the spring of '39/Sat a Russian and a
Prussian/Working out the Party Line.(Chorus)
Oh my Stalin, Oh my Stalin,/Oh my Stalin Party Line/First he changed
it, then rearranged it/Oh my Stalin Party Line.
(It goes on: anyone interested in the rest can e-mail me). Next came
Rule Britannia – the rarely heard full version, which includes the
proto-Blairite lines:
Other nations not so blest as thee/must in their turn to tyrants
fall/whilst thou shalt flourish brave and free/the dread and envy of
them all.
To my surprise, that proved popular, especially among the Swedes, who
have not had a maritime empire for some time. But as the evening went
on, politics began to intervene. The Brits wanted the Wacht am Rhein
(for those who don't know it, the Nazis sing it in the film
Casablanca) but a senior German journalist vetoed it as "contaminated".
Someone else wanted the East German anthem. Admittedly, it has a nice
tune and unobjectionable words. But my ex-wife was from
Soviet-occupied Germany and this was the song of the state which would
have killed her to stop her escaping. So I squashed that one. We
compromised on Lili Marlene – but only the first verses. The final
stanza, an erudite American objected, was a militaristic afterthought
quite out of synch with the melancholy humanism of the rest of it.
And then came the Internationale. Everyone knew the tune. Most people
knew at least some of the words, in some language or another. But was
it right to sing it? My mind went back to another sing-song, studying
German in West Berlin in the summer of 1984. Someone (I hope it wasn't
me) started up with Wacht auf, verdammte dieser Erde and most people
joined in. But two classmates – Polish nuns, friends since our first
subjunctive three months previously – looked at us with silent disgust
and walked out of the room.
And that's the thing about post-Communist songs. There are some
splendidly catchy ones which are so laden with political baggage that
they are utterly unsingable. Hearing the Anthem of the Estonian Soviet
Socialist Republic (available, if you're interested, on sovmusic.ru)
makes my flesh creep in the same way that the Horst Wessel Lied does.
When this song ruled, the real national anthem (My Native Land, My
Pride and Joy) was banned. Whistling it could lose you your job, or
land you in Siberia.
I think the solution is parody. Anti-Nazi Germans in the 1930s
produced stinging alternative versions of the Horst Wessel Lied and
the Polish politician Radek Sikorski (now a Washington think-tanker)
has a brilliant, unprintably obscene parody of the Soviet anthem. That
way you get the fun of a good tune and none of the bad vibes. So does
anyone know a good parody of the Internationale?
# Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The
Economist.

oh my stalin


In Old Moscow, in the Kremlin
In the spring of '39
Sat a Russian and a Prussian
Workign out the Party Line

(Chorus)
Oh my Stalin, Oh my Stalin,
Oh my Stalin party line
First he changed it, then rearranged it
Oh my Stalin Party Line


Leon Trotsky was a Nazi
We all knew it for a fact
Pravda said it, We all read it
'fore the Hitler-Stalin pact

Once, a Nazi, would be shot see
That was then the party line
Now a Nazi's, hotsy-totsy
Volga boatmen sail the Rhine/
I can bend this spine of mine.

Now the Fuhrer and our leader
Stand within the party line
All the Russians, love the Prussians
Trotsky's laying British mines

Party comrade, Party comrade,
What a sorry fate is thine!
Comrade Stalin does not love you
'Cause you left the Party Line.

Oh my Stalin, Oh my Stalin,
Oh my Stalin Party Line;
Oh, I never will forsake you
for I love this life of mine.

To the tune of Auld Lang Syne

And should old Bolshies be forgot,
and never brought to mind,
you'll find them in Siberia,
with a ball and chain behind.
A ball and chain behind, my dear,
a ball and chain behind…
Joe Stalin shot the bloody lot
for the sake of the Party Line.

Wilder Europe Mari

Mari – the language the Russians want to kill

By Edward Lucas

I like to think it was the only time in the history of journalism that
non-Estonians have used Estonian as a common language. I was in Yoshkar-Ola, the
capital (readers will instantly recall) of the republic of Mari-El, 800
kilometres east of Moscow.


“Used Estonian” should probably read “tried to use”. My active vocabulary
doesn’t go much beyond pleasantries and ordering meals in restaurants. But the
students I was with spoke it fluently. Their native Mari is part of the same,
Finno-Ugric, family of languages, and they had all spent time on scholarships in
Estonia. They did not want to talk Russian with me if they could help it: that,
they told me, was the “language of the occupiers”.
I thought they were joking. But they weren’t. They talked of Russian linguistic
and cultural chauvinism with the same resentment that I had heard from Estonians
and Latvians in the Baltic states a decade earlier.
Their hero was a local journalist and activist called Vladimir Kozlov. I liked
him a lot: he was clever, funny and sensible. There was no point, he argued, in
even talking about independence. The republic is landlocked, remote and the
600,000-odd ethnic Mari are outnumbered by Russians. But it was urgent, he
argued, to save the Mari language and culture from extinction. Television and
radio broadcasts, and Mari-language teaching, had been cut back very sharply. If
that wasn’t reversed, the language would be lost within a generation.
That was three years ago. Since then things have got worse, not better, for the
Mari. Many Mari-speakers have been sacked from jobs in officialdom. The governor
of Mari-El, an abrasive man called Leonid Markelov, used police to stop the main
Mari political movement holding a congress in December last year. In February,
my friend Mr Kozlov was beaten up — on the orders of the authorities, he says.
Recently, Mari activists have resorted to meeting in secret forest locations to
dodge the authorities. That’s highly symbolic: Mari is the last bit of Europe
where traditional pagan worship, largely centred on sacred groves, still
survives.
Now news of the Maris’ plight has spread. The Parliamentary Assembly of the
Council of Europe has investigated the issue—although thanks to pressure from
Russia, its report has not yet been published. In May the European Parliament
voted unanimously to deplore the Mari-El authorities’ ethnic policies. This is
thanks to lobbying from the Maris’ ethnic cousins: the Finns (who’ve been
quietly involved for years), the Estonians (much more noisily) and the
Hungarians. Last week the speaker of the Hungarian parliament, Katalin Szili,
said that legislators from the three countries wanted to start formal
cooperation with elected representatives from the bits of Russia with
Finno-Ugric populations.
I doubt the dialogue will be very productive. The Kremlin thinks outsiders’
criticism is just a tit-for-tat tactic, aimed at distracting attention from
Estonia and Latvia’s “discrimination” against Russians on language and
citizenship issues. There may be something in that: it is certainly tempting (if
risky) for former captive nations like the Estonians to tweak Russia’s tail when
they can. But there is a real issue about the Maris’ rights, and it won’t go
away.
And help, from an unlikely quarter, is at hand. This August, the “10th annual
International Congress of Finno-Ugric Studies” will take place in Yoshkar-Ola.
Admittedly, philologists and literary critics are not everyone’s idea of a
revolutionary force. But the Mari are thrilled. The conference shows that far
from being useless peasant gobbledegook (as the authorities regard it), the Mari
language is something interesting and important. If only my Estonian was better,
I’d go myself.

Wilder Europe Belarus propaganda

One minor plus of my years as a cold warrior was that Soviet-bloc
propaganda, though usually mad and horrible, was also
thought-provoking and even useful. Partly, it gave clues about their
thinking: "Why does the Kremlin think this is our weak spot right now,
and why are they attacking it this way in particular?". But it also
helped me think about what aspects of our own system were easy to
defend, and what were vulnerable to criticism.

That stimulus has largely withered with communism, and I rather miss
it. There are still echoes of it in Russia, but the focus is narrow:
even the apologists who defend the Stalinist version of history do so
for reasons of neo-imperialism and nostalgia, rather than out of
conviction that Soviet ideology of the time—dictatorship of the
proletariat, dialetical materialism and so forth--was actually right.

But that gap is at least partially filled by Belarussian state
television programmes. They are direct heirs of now long-forgotten
Cold-War offerings such as East Germany's Schwarzes Kanal [Black
Channel], whose venomous denunciations of West Germany's decadent
warmongering were the highlight of my week when I was covering the
"German Democratic Republic" in the late 1980s.

This week, for example, a top Belarussian propagandist, Yawhen Novikaw
(that's the Belarussian spelling: in the Russian that he broadcasts in
he would be Yevgeny Novikov), turned his attention to the BBC and
press freedom in Britain.


"A large-scale political punishment of journalists is taking place
right under their very nose, in their own city of London, and all
British democrats have buried their heads in the sand: we do not see
or hear anything. If such a shame were happening in any other country,
they would come to that country like a clan of crows" he argued.

That's odd. On my many visits to Belarus, I never found any details of
British internal politics, let alone the problems of cost-control in
public-service broadcasters, greatly figuring in popular
consciousness. But Mr Novihaw's lengthy programme did its best to make
the subject of last week's BBC strike interesting and relevant. It was
not just that the BBC was the subject of a vindictive attack by the
"Blair dictatorship", but the "thousands" of human rights lobbies in
Britain were hypocritically silent about the BBC's plight.

Personally, I'm rather sympathetic to the BBC management's attempt,
albeit belated and very limited, to cut the grotesque overstaffing and
extravagance in the corporation. And Mr Novikaw's argument is
preposterous as his facts are wrong: the strike lasted for one day,
not five; even the BBC's most ardent defenders do not link the death
of the weapons scientist David Kelly (murdered by Blair's goons,
according to Mr Novikaw) to the current rows about job cuts.

But the interesting points are different ones. For a start, broadcasts
like these are signs that foreign human rights outfits have the
authorities in Minsk rattled. Belarussian television has been devoting
much time lately to attacking their funding of local opposition
activities. A few days earlier Mr Novikaw attacked "the information
war unleashed against Belarus by Western structures", saying that all
revolutions lead to "blood and devastation".

Secondly, it is precisely because Belarus is a place where
broadcasters are under government control, and where people disliked
by the authorities do end up dead, that commentators like Mr Novikaw
need to maintain that countries like Britain are no better. High
ethical standards and strong institutions create the "soft power" that
will eventually disprove Mr Novikaw and topple his masters. So let's
strengthen them.

WIlder Europe June 2005

Imagine that a gang of thugs in your neighbourhood abducted and raped
your grandmother 60 years ago, stole and ruined your family property,
terrorised your family, and somehow got away with it due to some
failure in the law. Imagine that the gang's grandchildren—who claim to
be respectable citizens—now want to have normal neighbourly relations.
Fine, you might think—except that their version of events is
different. It wasn't rape, but marriage, they say. The property was
legally transferred. And everyone got along fine. So there's nothing
to apologise for.

That's pretty much how the Balts and Poles feel about Russia's
attitude to history. And for the British, these kinds of arguments
can seem rather enjoyable. It is quite satisfying to sit with east
Europeans, agreeing that the Germans have really done quite well
(although of course they will never quite redeem themselves); the
Austrians were worse than the Germans and never denazified properly,
so we can tut-tut about that. As for the Russians, they really are
outrageous, with their falsified, one-sided view of history. They
don't acknowledge properly the murder of thousands of Polish officers
at Katyn; they haven't really renounced the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact;
they even feel nostalgic about Stalin and ignore their own gulags. No
wonder their democracy is skin-deep and everyone hates them.

But just to puncture the smugness, there is another side to British
history which is particularly on my mind at this time of year. That is
the dreadful events of 1945-47, when British and other allied forces
returned hundreds of thousands of Russians and Yugoslavs to their
death at the hands of the Soviet and Yugoslav Communists. These people
had surrended to the British and American forces because they knew
what fate awaited them if they fell into the hands of Stalin and Tito.
Admittedly they included Soviet forces who had switched sides and
fought for the Nazis, in some cases with exceptional brutality and
enthusiasm. In any event, they deserved war crimes trials, and some of
them, no doubt, the death penalty. But others had committed no
atrocities. Some anti-Communist Yugoslavs had actually been on our
side in the war -- at least until we cut off supplies and backed their
Communist adversaries in Yugoslavia's civil war.

British officials insisted—and sometime still insist—that they had
honour to the letter the agreements made with Stalin at Yalta and
elsewhere. Conditions were chaotic in 1945, with half the continent
starving, tens of thousands of British prisoners-of-war still in
Soviet hands, and Stalin extremely popular in both Britain and
America. But the story is still a dreadful one. British soldiers and
officials continued repatriating Russians and Yugoslavs even when it
was clear they were being murdered on arrival. They--we if you are
British—continued even when these people were killing themselves and
their families rather than be deported. We included people such as
Russians born outside the USSR, who were clearly not "Soviet citizens"
and therefore not covered by the agreement.

There's not much to be done about it now, apart from mourn and
remember. Most of the people who suffered as a result of Britain's
shameful behaviour are dead, so there is nobody left to rebuke us. But
when Brits endorse criticism of Russia's historical amnesia, their
censure carries most weight when they also recall that by this time in
June sixty years ago, the first of many tens of thousands of Cossacks
and other Russians, who had entrusted their lives to the British
authorities, were already dead.

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist
edwardlucas@economist.com

Wilder Europe June 2005

The Eurovision Song Contest is a rare chance for ordinary Europeans to
show their shared appreciation of cheesy music and tinselly smiles.
There were some nice notes of European togetherness too: the Croats
gave votes to the Serbs, and the Latvians to the Russians.

The single discordant note was that throughout the evening one country
was described only by a euphemism—the Former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia. In real life, though, only on-duty Greek officials and
their hangers-on actually use this clumsy formulation. The Greek
insistence on quibbling about Macedonia's name looks ever sillier,
more counterproductive and out of date.

It was understandable, perhaps, in 1991, when the British journalist
Neal Ascherson described Macedonia as the "Doomsday machine": the only
place in the region that could start a pan-Balkan war. Macedonia's
neighbours wanted it strangled—or dismembered—at birth: the Serbs
thought it was really southern Serbia, the Bulgarians considered it as
western Bulgaria, and the Albanians regarded it as eastern Albania. If
the Greeks, then the closest approximation to a western ally in the
region, were batty enough to believe it to be northern Greece, why
rile them?

Even so, the reasons why Greece found the idea of an independent
country called Macedonia so threatening were hard to grasp. I remember
an erudite Anglophile Greek trying to explain it with an analogy. It
was, he said, as if France broke up into ethnically distinct bits, he
said, and Brittany announced that it would in future be called the
Republic of Britain. How would we like that, he asked? Surely we
would see this a threat to the territorial integrity of the United
Kingdom, and insist that the new state be called something else—the
Former French Province of Brittany, perhaps.

I could, just, see his point. Given the dreadful way that Greece has
treated its "slavophone" (actually Macedonian/Bulgarian) minority, I
could see that policy-makers in Athens might be a bit nervous about an
independent Macedonia attracting allegiances across the border. But
even that didn't seem insurmountable. Rather than bash Skopje, the
obvious solution was to be nicer to the Slavs in Thrace.

More than ten years on, the Greek position looks indefensible.
Macedonia is a poster-child of post-cmmunist harmony and
reconciliation. It is friends with Bulgaria, with the awkward question
of the linguistic differences between the two languages elegantly
parked. Thanks to the common language, Bulgarian tourists love the
place. And to appease the large Albanian minority, and western human
rights doctrine, Macedonia has become in effect a bi-communal state—a
kind of Belgium of the Balkans. It is messy, but it is working.

Greek businessmen have shown no hesitation about trade and investment
with their northern neighbour, whatever they call it. So why do
officials persist in their mean-minded attempt to bully Macedonia into
a name change? Macedonia has already changed its flag and constitution
to underline the fact that they don't intend to attack Thessalonika
(though anyone who ever thought that was remotely conceivable should
try staying off the raki).

But Greece is still insisting that the country should call itself
(even in English) Republika Makedonija-Skopje. Bending over to be
conciliatory (and keen to get their EU agreement in December) the
Macedonians have even agreed that they will use this bizarre
formulation in bilateral dealings with Greece. Greece should accept
that offer at once, end this dismal feud, and get on with more
important diplomatic tasks—like preparing for next year's Eurovision.
Who knows, in future they might even get some votes from Macedonia.