The game of Russian whispers

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine found himself at a New York dinner party sitting next to Pyotr Aven, one of the men inaccurately called ‘Russian oligarchs’.

Mr Aven is under sanctions and criminal investigations in both Britain and the EU, and just a few days later he was also sanctioned by the US government.

An oligarch [olig– ‘few’) +‎ –arch (‘ruler’)] isn’t always, and never merely, a very rich man. Above all, he is a member of a small clique wielding political power. Such a group may have existed in Russia in the ‘90s, when billionaires like Berezovsky and Abramovich could deliver (or veto) appointments to Yeltsyn’s government.

By now Russian billionaires have vested all political power into the person of one man, Putin, and possibly a shadowy KGB cabal hiding behind him. Some of the erstwhile oligarchs are allowed to hold on to their billions, but theirs is only a leasehold.

In the good Russian tradition going back to the tsars, the ruler treats the whole country and everything in it as his patrimonial estate. The wealth of the wealthy is strictly contingent on their proximity to the throne. Only if they are in the ruler’s good books will they be allowed to use their capital as they see fit – provided they loosen their purse strings without demur whenever the great leader needs some quick liquidity.

The closer they are to the ruler, the richer they’ll be. That’s why whenever you see an extremely rich Russian, you can be assured he is close to Putin, part of his inner circle. And Aven is one of the closest and hence one of the richest.

One stays close to Putin by toeing the line, supporting every action and tacitly, or not so tacitly, conveying the great leader’s thoughts to the world. Mr Aven too is willing to act as dummy to Putin’s ventriloquist, which is why my friend was hanging on to every word. Aven was moving his lips, but it was Putin talking.

At the beginning, Aven (Putin) said, Putin simply loved the West. His dearest dream was for Russia to be integrated into it, perhaps even becoming a NATO member. All the West had to do was meet him halfway.

How? Simple. By making Russia the recipient of another Marshall Plan. The West, or specifically America, should have helped Russia out to the tune of some trifling amount, a trillion dollars or two – and Boris is your uncle, Gorby is your aunt. Russia would have become the West’s best friend and a paragon of peace, democracy and general goodness.

And what did the West do? A square root of sod-all. America was happy to help Soviet satellites, the Polands of this world, but not Russia. So what was Putin, chopped liver? A poor relation?

Naturally, he was mortally offended. You don’t want to scratch my back, he thought, I’ll bomb yours. It was then that he became an implacable enemy of the West, and it was then that he decided to rape any former part of the Soviet empire that sought genuine rapprochement with the West.

In other words, a mere pittance offered with alacrity could have bought Russia’s virtue for ever, and it would have prevented the current bloodshed Putin wholeheartedly regrets.

My friend recounted that conversation without comment, but I made a mental note that what he had heard was the current Kremlin line. Unsaid but probably implied was a hint that perhaps it wasn’t too late even now. A few trillion here or there, and Putin would be ready to talk peace.

It was possible, however, that Aven was speaking strictly for himself. The idea that it was – perhaps still is – possible to buy Russia’s good behaviour might have been his own, not Putin’s.

Hence I refrained from commenting on that conversation until I got a confirmation. If that indeed was the Kremlin line, Aven couldn’t be the only communication channel. The message had to be refracted through reliable Western prisms, and few are more reliable than our own dear Peter Hitchens.

I’ve pointed out a thousand times if I’ve done it once that everything Hitchens says on this subject faithfully echoes the current Kremlin position. This could be an osmotic connection, ESP or something more prosaic and less commendable. One way or another, if you want to know what Putin thinks, read Hitchens. You can’t go wrong.

He didn’t disappoint. Hitchens’s article today is a faithful reproduction of Aven’s – actually Putin’s – pronouncements.      

We must “stop being swayed by crude emotion, especially in matters of politics… It suited us all (me included) to believe that the Cold War was a simple conflict between good and evil. And so we rejoiced when Moscow’s Evil Empire fell.”

The implication is that the Cold War wasn’t a conflict between good and evil, and those who felt that way were driven by crude emotion.

Now, I’d suggest there is nothing crude or especially emotional about opposing a regime that has murdered some 60 million of its own subjects and systematically threatened the world with nuclear annihilation. That sort of thing strikes me as unequivocally evil, but Hitchens’s thinking is evidently more nuanced.

Then comes the Putin-Aven line: “Look at Poland, ruined by Communism in 1989, then wisely rescued, subsidised and helped, so that it is now a wealthy, reasonably free and democratic country. Why could we not have achieved the same in Russia? It would have been a bigger job but it would still have cost us far less than the current mess is costing us and will cost us.”

Alas, that dastardly West wanted to keep Russia on her knees: “Was it perhaps because certain people in the West still felt bitterly towards Russia and wanted that country to remain weak and poor? It is a possible explanation.”

It’s not. The West pumped billions, nay trillions, into Russia, as both capital investment and payment for Russia’s natural resources. For, unlike Poland, Russia had things to sell. And there was no shortage of Western buyers.

I’d suggest this was a better way of helping a country prosper than delivering uncountable handouts would have been. The late economist Lord Bauer defined foreign aid epigrammatically as “a transfer of capital from the poor people in rich countries to the rich people in poor countries.”

That’s exactly what happened to the money rushing into post-Communist Russia in a mighty stream. Somewhere between one and two trillion dollars of it (estimates differ) were recycled back into the West to finance the palaces and yachts of assorted gangsters, from Berezovsky and Abramovich to Aven, Deripaska and ultimately Putin.

They lived the life of Riley a millions times over while much of the country starved. That’s what would have happened to any funds transferred to Russia, either as investments or payments or alms.  

And look what we have instead, continues Putin-Aven-Hitchens with a touch of fulsome emotion: “There are now credible suggestions that 70,000 Ukrainian young men, sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, have been killed in the war in that country, which I believe was totally avoidable… Still more have been wounded, maimed and disfigured.”

Alas, “Any attempt to discuss bringing this war to an end with a lasting compromise is dismissed as little short of treason.”

This is a cri de coeur, a not-so-subtle reference to those who correctly identify Hitchens as a Kremlin stooge. And the lasting compromise Hitchens-Putin-Aven envisage is the Ukraine’s surrender to the klepto-Nazi country Hitchens has been describing for over 20 years as “the most conservative and Christian in Europe”.

A few trillion dollars later Putin would thaw and graciously agree to become our friend again. Happiness all around, hats are being tossed up in the air to the accompaniment of regimental bands playing ‘God save Putin’.

I’m not going to say what I think of this vision – you can infer that easily enough. I’m just satisfied that Aven’s dinnertime chat was indeed the current Kremlin line. It has now been confirmed.