While I was otherwise engaged for a few days, my friend Vlad Putin went to town.
Delivering the Russian answer to the US State of the Union Address, Vlad implicitly established the priorities of his perpetual government. Poverty, pensions and healthcare received 10 minutes in toto.
That shows keen awareness of reality. Had Vlad lingered on those boring subjects, he would have had to comment on the 10 per cent of Russians who, by the government’s own figures, live below the poverty line.
Since in Vlad’s realm that line is drawn at about £200 a month, this means they starve – as do most pensioners. As to healthcare, the less said about it, the better. Russian hospitals act mainly as anterooms to the cemeteries.
Vlad’s friends, all coincidentally billionaires, wouldn’t be caught dead (pun intended) in Russian hospitals. Whenever something’s wrong, they hop on the plane to one of the enemy countries, which is to say the West.
Of course the situation with the rubrics that rated 10 minutes of Vlad’s time could be improved had Russia kept the two trillion dollars currently sitting in the enemies’ banks, half of it in those belonging to the US, Enemy Number One.
But that money belongs to Vlad and his friends, family, bodyguards, cooks and judo partners. Repatriating and, God forbid, spending it on those undernourished crumblies, would mean disrespect for sacrosanct private property, and that just wouldn’t do, would it? So it’s best to keep shtum about it.
Skipping over the unpleasant stuff, Vlad gave his compatriots the good news. Thanks to the new generation of weapons, he declared triumphantly, Russia could put an end to life on earth, and certainly the part of life that unfolds within the confines of the US and other mortal enemies.
Vlad illustrated his point with a few animated cartoons, and let me tell you: Bambi or Snow White they weren’t. The cartoons showed Vlad’s unstoppable missiles doing graceful pirouettes around America’s pathetic defences before reducing US cities to the nuclear ash so beloved of Vlad’s propagandists. The cartoons were actually produced in 2012, but such masterpieces live for ever.
This evoked my fond childhood memories of Khrushchev informing the Americans that Soviet scientists had developed a nuclear device that could blow all of the US in one whack.
Nikita was exaggerating: no such device existed then, nor exists now. That was bluster used for blackmail purposes and above all to push Russia’s claim to be treated as a superpower.
The trick worked, encouraging imitation. You’ve refused to speak to us, thundered Vlad, but you’ll speak to us now. So we will, as one would try to engage in conversation a madman brandishing a razor and threatening to slash our eyes.
To what extent Vlad’s razor is real, as opposed to coming from Props Central, is immaterial. For example, many experts think that the nuclear-powered missile Vlad boasted of is a figment of his imagination. It does have some nostalgic value in that Khrushchev was scaring the West with something like that back in 1959.
What’s undeniable is that Russia is putting all her resources in the military basket, an ability she has demonstrated many times before. That’s why it’s dangerously ignorant to claim that the country is so poor that it’ll never be able to match up to America’s military muscle.
Russia was poorer by orders of magnitude in the 1930s, when millions of people were starving to death, more millions were being exterminated and many more dying in Arctic labour camps.
Food rations barely kept the rest of the population alive and working three shifts in munitions plants until they keeled over their lathes. And yet, having started the decade without any discernible industry, the Russians ended it with the largest and best-equipped army in the world. In some weapon categories, such as tanks, the Red Army outnumbered the rest of the world combined.
The USSR wasn’t exactly prosperous in the two decades I remember personally, the 50s and 60s. Bread and potatoes weren’t just the staples but the sum total of most people’s diets; most families (such as mine) inhabited one room in a communal flat.
And yet the Soviets stayed neck and neck with the Americans in the arms race. True, they couldn’t sustain it in perpetuity, but Vlad may have a shorter timeframe in mind.
One way or another, Russia is capable of straining every sinew in pursuit of strategic military objectives. If that entails having a life expectancy 15-20 years lower than in the West, then so be it. Nobody cares about that.
But what does Vlad care about? What in his mind justifies such a gigantic effort?
Vlad’s propaganda screams as loudly as Khrushchev’s did about the West encircling Russia and only waiting for a propitious moment to strike. That many Russians swallow that bilge is understandable: like most people, they rely on TV to form their view of life.
Yet amazingly a couple of months ago I heard a British professor lecturing in all seriousness on the validity of such fears. He stopped just short of saying that NATO plans a first strike on Russia, but he did say that the Russians’ fears are justified.
Now in a sane world such fears would only be justified if an unprovoked NATO attack were a possibility, however remote. But it isn’t: no US president will push the red button with blithe disregard for the likely retaliation.
Vlad knows that. So why the muscle-flexing posturing, in line with Vlad’s much photographed bare torso?
It could be merely an attempt to blackmail the West into some concessions, such as the lifting of sanctions. But it could also be something more sinister than that.
Every state has to have a claim to its legitimacy, such as a time-honoured constitution or, say, divine right. The legitimacy of every Russian government has always been based on the promise of growing strength and imperial expansion. In Soviet times, those who were sceptical about that promise were subjected to no-holds-barred violence on a scale never before seen in history.
Putin’s state is history’s unique blend of secret police and organised crime, which at this point still uses violence selectively – it hasn’t yet got to a point where it has to murder millions in order to survive.
So much more does it depend on the traditional promise being accepted: take imperial sabre-rattling out, and Vlad’s junta must either go out of business or start culling Russians on a Stalin scale.
This explains why Vlad incongruously extolls both tsarist Russia and the regime that destroyed it. He accepts neither in its entirety; what appeals to him is the element on which they overlap: a show of imperial force. Without this he knows he not only won’t stay in power, but may not even be allowed to live to enjoy his purloined billions.
Hence his increasingly aggressive policy aimed at restoring the tsarist-Stalinist empire. Vlad’s forays into Chechnya, Georgia and the Ukraine have received but a mild slap on the wrist – the West was sufficiently scared of the razor Vlad was brandishing already.
That he now deems it necessary to wave more diabolical weapons may suggest that he plans actions that the West might otherwise punish more decisively. This can only be something Khrushchev didn’t dare launch: an attack on Russia’s neighbours that happen to be NATO members.
If so, the West must scrape together as much resolve as possible. We must take seriously not the metaphorical madman, but the razor in his hand – and be prepared to respond in kind.
“most families (such as mine) inhabited one room in a communal flat.”
Sharing a bath and a kitchen with ten other families??
Only five; we were the lucky ones.
I think Nikita’s bomb (claimed to be able to destroy everything between New York and Philadelphia) was far too heavy to put in a rocket so it could only be delivered by a lumbering jet aircraft . This would have been literally a suicide bomber because if it got through without being shot down, it would have been too slow to get away from the effects of any super bomb it dropped. Likewise, Vlad’s threat is shallow because his supposedly sophisticated smart rockets would destroy all the cash that he and his mates have had frozen in the US .
Vlad is doing a lot of boasting as it was also in the days of Nikita. We have the biggest bomb, the biggest missile, the biggest submarine drone, the nuclear powered torpedo and cruise missile, etc. Bombastic rhetoric often to an extent true but often consisting of systems unworkable or downright dangerous to the user [the Russian military man]. But it is occurring [rhetoric] once again as it was in the days of Nikita.
There is no doubt that Russia punches way above its economic weight. Despite having an economy roughly the size of Italy, they spend a huge percentage of their GDP on weapons, to the detriment of health care, pensions, etc., as you point out. The corresponding point to be made is that the gigantic U.S. defense is nowhere near as impressive as it seems. Very large parts of the Pentagon budget go to veterans benefits, pensions and health care. I read somewhere that half of the vets who served in Iraq have filed for some type of disability payment. Then there’s the extremely inefficient weapons procurement system. Armaments purchases are often driven more by what congressional district the plant is in than by actual defense considerations. We seem to overpay for everything, favoring extremely complicated, expensive weapons like the F35. The Russians seem to favor lower tech, but greater quantity, and this has served then well in the past. Especially since many of the weapons end up going to client states in proxy, lower tech wars. Then there’s the price the U.S. pays for politically correct programs. A huge percentage of the U.S. force is female. It costs the same (or more) as males to train them, but the additional force element they add is nearly non-existent. They go through basic training, but are not deployed in combat. Finally, Putin is able to concentrate on land and air forces, spending little on naval assets. Meanwhile the U.S. has around a dozen nuclear carrier battle groups, which are extremely costly to build and deploy, and increasingly vulnerable. They also have hundreds of other ships and subs at sea at any given time. Very costly. So the spending gap between the U.S. and Russia, and China for that matter is not as great as many would have you believe.