NIall Ferguson: Missing the Cold War
MISS THE Cold War. I know I ought not to, but I just can't help it. So I was naturally delighted by last week's spy story. Admittedly, as one of the papers here in London cruelly remarked, it was more Johnny English than James Bond.
In a television documentary that had Kremlin fingerprints all over it, four British Embassy staffers were accused of being spooks. Blurred video footage purported to show them fiddling with a rock in a Moscow suburb. According to Russian counterespionage, the rock contained an illicit electronic device for communicating with Russian "accomplices."
Well, it's possible. But why would Her Majesty's Men in Moscow want to conceal what they were up to if, as the Russians allege, they were merely transferring funds to Russian nongovernmental organizations? Only in the fevered imagination of Vladimir Putin, the ex-Soviet spook who now runs Russia, do NGOs figure as subversive entities.
Putin's crackdown on NGOs is part of a wider pattern of behavior that strongly suggests that my nostalgia for the Cold War is shared in the Kremlin. ...
Nobody can now pretend that Russia is just — as the old Cold War joke had it — "Upper Volta with rockets." Soaring energy prices have brought boom times to Russia, even if the returns mainly flow into the coffers of the new nomenklatura. The Russian stock market went up 80% last year. So if Putin wants Cold War II, you might be forgiven for thinking he can certainly afford to have it.
Of course, I was not being entirely serious when I said that I miss the Cold War. I would never wish the Soviet Union back, not least for the sake of the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians and all the other peoples who won back their liberty in 1989.
What makes me nostalgic is that Soviet wickedness made politics so much simpler in my youth. All you had to do was to go to the Eastern Bloc to see what a real military-industrial complex looked like — and to feel for yourself what the absence of freedom really meant.
Every time I took the S-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse, the old gateway to East Berlin, I shuddered at the knowledge that I was entering the realm of despotism — a place where there were no rights to privacy, to property or to political representation. Now you need to take a trip to North Korea if you want to get that salutary feeling, which did so much to clarify my own political views. ...
Read entire article at LAT
In a television documentary that had Kremlin fingerprints all over it, four British Embassy staffers were accused of being spooks. Blurred video footage purported to show them fiddling with a rock in a Moscow suburb. According to Russian counterespionage, the rock contained an illicit electronic device for communicating with Russian "accomplices."
Well, it's possible. But why would Her Majesty's Men in Moscow want to conceal what they were up to if, as the Russians allege, they were merely transferring funds to Russian nongovernmental organizations? Only in the fevered imagination of Vladimir Putin, the ex-Soviet spook who now runs Russia, do NGOs figure as subversive entities.
Putin's crackdown on NGOs is part of a wider pattern of behavior that strongly suggests that my nostalgia for the Cold War is shared in the Kremlin. ...
Nobody can now pretend that Russia is just — as the old Cold War joke had it — "Upper Volta with rockets." Soaring energy prices have brought boom times to Russia, even if the returns mainly flow into the coffers of the new nomenklatura. The Russian stock market went up 80% last year. So if Putin wants Cold War II, you might be forgiven for thinking he can certainly afford to have it.
Of course, I was not being entirely serious when I said that I miss the Cold War. I would never wish the Soviet Union back, not least for the sake of the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians and all the other peoples who won back their liberty in 1989.
What makes me nostalgic is that Soviet wickedness made politics so much simpler in my youth. All you had to do was to go to the Eastern Bloc to see what a real military-industrial complex looked like — and to feel for yourself what the absence of freedom really meant.
Every time I took the S-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse, the old gateway to East Berlin, I shuddered at the knowledge that I was entering the realm of despotism — a place where there were no rights to privacy, to property or to political representation. Now you need to take a trip to North Korea if you want to get that salutary feeling, which did so much to clarify my own political views. ...