British Waffen-SS Legion? Not likely...

Europe.view

Unoccupied Britain

Oct 15th 2009
From Economist.com

It looks simpler from across the Channel

TWEAK history a bit. Imagine that in 1940 Hitler and Stalin divide Britain between them. Both occupying powers behave abominably but in different ways. After a rigged election, Scotland is declared part of the Soviet Union. Stalin imposes a one-party state and planned economy with a terrifying secret-police apparatus, liquidating normal life and decapitating the country. Tens of thousands of people—lawyers, teachers, businessmen, priests, journalists, and even philatelists—are woken in the small hours, given ten minutes to pack and then deported to slave labour camps in northern Norway. Few ever return.

South of the border, the Nazi military dictatorship rounds up England’s Jews, supported by local anti-Semitic collaborators. Industry is commandeered by the Nazi war machine. Anti-Nazi activity is lethal; thousands are shipped off to work as forced labourers. Others, disgracefully, even volunteer as concentration-camp guards and for auxiliary police battalions in the hope of gaining privileges or settling scores. Life is dire, but for most of the non-Jewish population it is much less awful than in the Scottish Soviet Socialist Republic.

In 1941 Hitler attacks Stalin. As the Red Army flees Scotland, Jews suffer terrible pogroms. Many Scots blame them, quite unfairly, for being allied with the communists. (In fact, though many Scottish communists are indeed Jewish, Jews feature prominently among the “bourgeois elements” deported to Norway). Many Jews die of starvation or typhus in the Glasgow ghetto. Most are gassed in death camps, some on British soil, some further afield.

As the Nazis start losing the war they conscript thousands of teenagers into a “British legion” of the Waffen-SS. About one-third of this unit are volunteers, desperate to stave off another Soviet occupation at least for long enough for their families to escape to neutral Ireland. Some have ardently helped the Nazis. Despite last-ditch resistance, Soviet power is restored in Britain by 1944, with implacable vengeance. A doomed underground army fights on (its last partisan is killed only in 1975). Britain regains its freedom only when the evil empire collapses.

Digesting that historical trauma would take time. Britons’ views of their country’s SS troops would probably be rather ambiguous: few would call them heroes, but few would condemn them outright either. Many British people might focus more on their own suffering than that of the all-but vanished Jewish population. Outsiders would do well not to jump to conclusions. Stereotypes linking the Holocaust in Britain to “endemic anti-Semitism” before the war would clearly be ludicrously simplistic.

Amid the current row about the Conservative Party’s new alliance with Poland’s socially conservative Law and Justice party and Latvia’s nationalist Fatherland and Freedom/LNNK party, British commentators would do well to bear some history in mind. Fatherland and Freedom (which has roots in the anti-Soviet dissident movement) says Latvian SS veterans have the right to pensions and public gatherings. Yet Jon Snow, a British television presenter, misleadingly dubbed the party “neo-Fascist”. Also on the same programme, he failed to challenge a British comedian, Stephen Fry, who deplored Poland’s history of “right-wing Catholicism”, terming it “deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history, and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on”.

Mr Fry is entitled to criticise Poland’s record on gay rights and the Tories’ choice of friends. But it is horribly unfair to mention Auschwitz (a death camp run by German Nazis in an occupied country) in the same breath. The million-plus Poles, both Gentile and Jewish, who perished there deserve better. And commentators from Britain, which escaped the war unoccupied, should try approaching other countries’ wartime history with more humility and less self-satisfaction.

Lebedev: the spy who came in for the gold

Europe.view

Mission accomplished?
Jan 29th 2009
From Economist.com


An oligarch buys influence for a pound

HOW about this for a thriller plot: an ex-KGB officer in London in the Soviet era returns 20 years later to buy the capital's main newspaper. Trained at the Red Banner Institute to find out secrets and exert influence at the highest levels of the British establishment, he is now part of it.

Such a plot could be said to exemplify the success of the ex-KGB regime now running Russia. In the old days, the best they might have been able to do was to bribe or blackmail an individual journalist, and perhaps plant the odd bit of dezinformatsiya as a result. Now, however, dressed in capitalist clothes, they don’t need to infiltrate the western media: they can buy it outright.

Such worries come to mind amid the takeover of London’s Evening Standard by Aleksandr Lebedev (pictured), an “economics attaché” at the Soviet embassy in London in the late 1980s. He is a retired lieutenant-colonel from the Sluzhba Vneshnei Rozvedki, the successor to the First Chief Directorate of the old KGB. A billionaire thanks to his holdings in Aeroflot and other leading Russian businesses, he has bought the paper for £1: the price of just two copies.

But Mr Lebedev is not one of the steely tycoon-spooks around Vladimir Putin, such as Igor Sechin, the mastermind of Russia’s overseas energy diplomacy. They lurk in the shadows. He courts publicity, and comes across as urbane, amusing and liberal-minded.

Nor is Mr Lebedev a mere tycoon-playboy, cruising the streets of London or the ski-slopes of Switzerland with a musclebound entourage and highly decorative women. He shuns ostentation and is a conspicuous supporter of good causes.



Asked about his KGB past, Mr Lebedev speaks fondly of the English way of life and insists that his job was mainly to monitor the British press, particularly for economic news. The foreign-intelligence service of the KGB, he maintains, had nothing to do with the Gulag and domestic repression.

Indeed, he has a fair claim to be countering that era’s dark legacy in Russia now. He is a co-owner of Novaya Gazeta, which is the most widely read opposition newspaper in Russia. He is an outspoken defender of its brave journalists (one of whom was murdered earlier this month).

In short, if any former KGB officer should be allowed to buy an influential London newspaper, surely it should be him. But whatever Mr Lebedev’s motives now, his business interests in Russia could—at least in theory—make him vulnerable to Kremlin pressure in future. His blithe dismissal of his KGB past does not square with the evidence we have of that organisation from other sources. In the early 1980s, as Mr Lebedev was signing up for the KGB, Oleg Gordievsky, its station chief in London, was already risking his life to warn the West about the true nature of the Soviet system.

The only legal restriction on taking over a newspaper in Britain comes from the last-resort powers vested in the Secretary of State for Business, Peter Mandelson. Just this summer he was enjoying, controversially, the hospitality of Oleg Deripaska, another Russian tycoon (who is unable to visit the United States).

There is no reason to question Lord Mandelson’s integrity (he insists his much-discussed visit to Mr Deripaska’s yacht was entirely personal). But the whole saga shows the way in which Russian business influence has seeped into Western public life. Probably it is all fine. But, just theoretically, suppose it isn’t. Some may be less confident that a Russian-owned Evening Standard will investigate that subject with the fullest possible vigour.

Europe View: Damian and the Duma

Power, money and principle

Dec 4th 2008
From Economist.com
Defending political freedom in Russia and Britain

IMAGINE the outrage if the Russian police raided the Duma and arrested a leading opposition politician on the grounds that he had obtained leaked information embarrassing to the Kremlin. It would prompt pompous lectures from Western politicians and lobby groups about the dangers of autocracy, the need to maintain the separation of powers, and so on. When the same thing happens in Britain, it is not just bad for the political system in a country that likes to think it is the mother of parliamentary democracy. It also weakens the argument that tussles between Russia and the West are based fundamentally on values rather than geopolitics.

“Whataboutism” was a favourite tactic of Soviet propagandists during the old Cold War. Any criticism of the Soviet Union’s internal repression or external aggression was met by asking “what about” some crime of the West, from slavery to the Monroe doctrine. In the era when political prisoners rotted in Siberia and you could be shot for trying to leave the socialist paradise, whataboutism was little more than a debating tactic. Most people inside the Soviet Union, particularly towards the end, knew that their system was based on lies and murder. For all its shortcomings, the West was not that bad.

The modern Russian version is getting harder to counter. Many pro-Kremlin Russians seem sincerely to believe that no moral difference now exists between their rulers and those of other countries. Vladimir Putin is a former KGB officer? Well, George Bush senior ran the CIA. Chechnya was bloody, but Iraq was worse. Bombing Serbia and recognising Kosovo disqualifies the West from making any criticism of Russian behaviour in Georgia. These are all flawed arguments, but they are believed nonetheless.

Privately, the cynicism could be deeper still. Some may think, “We have learned that when we need something from the West, we find powerful people in a big country and pay them and then we get what they want.” The rule of law, contested elections, free media and so on are just fictions: they look nice and may fool the voters into thinking that their system is different. But in the end it is all about power and money.

It is not just the strength of the pro-Kremlin business lobby, particularly in the energy industries, in countries such as Germany and Italy. It is remarkable that politicians from both main British parties see nothing wrong in hobnobbing with Oleg Deripaska, a Kremlin crony and tycoon who is unable to visit America because of FBI concerns about his business practices and partners.

Events such as the police raid on the home and parliamentary office of Damian Green, a leading British Conservative politician, make it worse. Senior police officers saw nothing wrong with locking Mr Green up for nine hours and taking his private documents, computer, mobile phone, fingerprints and a DNA sample.

Nobody has resigned or been punished. One could easily get the idea that the British authorities not only believe they are above the law but act that way, with impunity.

Actually, things are not yet quite that bad. Voters will decide what they make of it. Unlike in Russia, nobody knows who will win the next general election in Britain, just as nobody knew in advance who would win the American presidency. Contested elections are the ultimate backstop. But real political freedom needs more than that. It is not just what happens at elections but all the other things in between them that matter—including opposition politicians being able to go about their business without being humiliated or intimidated. That’s worth fighting for; in Russia and in Britain.

Europe view 106 Perfidy from Albion

Britain needs to stiffen its spine when dealing with the Kremlin

AFTER the Russian-Georgian war, Britain stood out as the only big European country willing to talk tough to the Kremlin. On August 27th in Kyiv, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, berated Russia for its “unilateral attempt to redraw the map” and spoke of “the moment when countries are required to set out where they stand”. Britain was a big part of a coalition—which also included Sweden, Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states—that stiffened the European Union’s position on freezing talks on a new partnership and cooperation agreement with Russia.

In London, the Foreign Office started a thorough review of Britain’s Russia policy, drawing on planners at the Ministry of Defence, the spooks of MI6, the spy-catchers of MI5, and other government experts. “Project Russia”, as the review was named, also invited selected outsiders (but not this columnist) to contribute. The process was secret and so is the result.



One aim was to nail down what motivates the Russian authorities: are they nationalists salving their country’s wounded pride, aggressive mercantilists, a criminal conspiracy of ex-spooks, or all, none or a mixture of the above? The other was to work out what Britain should do about it: contain, engage, counter-attack and ignore were among the options considered.

But hopes that the British establishment had finally decided to take a tough line have been dashed. Gordon Brown, the prime minister, wants above all to strengthen his alliance with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Both men want to launch a big global financial reform. Mr Sarkozy wants the Nice summit this month to be a success, where he can declare that the EU is ready to relaunch talks with Russia. So Britain has switched sides and backed him, infuriating its former allies.

Critics say that Russia is not allowing EU monitors to operate in Georgia’s separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia has bolstered its military presence there to far above pre-war levels. The extra troops have not stopped the ethnic cleansing of many thousands of civilians from these territories.

So shouldn’t the EU at least maintain its modest freeze on relations with Russia until the end of the year? That might also give the West a bit more clout in efforts to persuade Georgia’s increasingly erratic president, Mikheil Saakashvili, to talk more to the opposition and less about a renewed military build-up. Those arguments apparently count for nothing with Mr Sarkozy—or with Mr Brown, who has flatly overruled his officials.

Britain is also neglecting its soft power in Russia. The BBC Russian service, already sadly diminished in listeners, transmitters, and editorial clout, is being pruned again, shedding eight staff (including, some fear, the journalists who are the sharpest critics of the Kremlin). Carefully crafted features will give way to cheaper phone-ins. A beefed-up website is some compensation—but most Russians, especially in the provinces, have no access to the internet. A protest letter from Britain’s best-known Russia-watchers is gathering signatures. Don’t get your hopes up.

And “Project Russia”? Its voluminous pages call for “robustness” and “resilience”. It recommends more British attention to countries threatened by Russia. That may be good news for Norway, for example, which feels its allies have failed to help in the “High North”.

The most interesting bit is probably the recommendation that Britain should actively seek out coalitions of like-minded countries to counter Russian mischief-making. But for this to work, Britain itself must look credible. Mr Brown’s cynical deal with Mr Sarkozy, and a sense of general squishiness on Russia lately, have created the opposite impression.