Prescient words
George Smiley on the Bear
Spa Creek is beautiful today but I have shown you that a couple of times this week. Annapolis is gloriously in the hands of those of us who live here, it seems, with tourists mostly gone for the year. My family eats a somewhat more traditional Thanksigiving meal than I do so I have no preparations calling my name today. Instead, I want to finish a book on loan from the Annapolis library on my kindle, John Le Carre’s The Secret Pilgrim (London: Penguin 1990).
I don’t read much fiction as I feel guilty avoiding the current events material that so energises my thinking. However, I realised some time earlier this summer that probably I was remiss not to be conversant about LeCarre’s works which I had never opened. I remember seeing a Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy several years ago, which I enjoyed, but was also aware I did not have context for it from a long line of his books. I spent several afternoons over the past month catching up.
As I come close to finishing Pilgrim this afternoon, I found the following material on page 363-4 of 389 on my Kindle.
“‘You ask’ he went on, ‘can we ever trust the Bear? You seem to be amused, yet a bit unseated, by the notion that we can talk to the Russians like human beings and find common cause with them in many fields. I will give you several answers at once.
The first is no, we can never trust the Bear. For one reason, the Bear doesn’t trust himself. The Bear is threatened and the Bear is frightened and the Bear is falling apart. The Bear is disgusted with his past, sick of the present and scared stiff of his future. He often was. The bear is broke, lazy, volatile, incompentent, slippery, dangerously proud, dangerously armed, sometimes brilliant, often ignorant. Without his claws, he’d be just another chaotic member of the Third World. But he isn’t without claws, not by any means. And he can’t pull his soldiers back from foreign parts overnight, for the reason that he can’t house them or feed them or employ them, and he doesn’t trust them either…That’s the first answer.
The second answer is yes, we can trust the Bear completely. The Bear has never been so trustworthy. The Bear is begging to be part of us, to submerge his problems in us, have his own bank account with us, to shop in our High Street and be accepted as a dignified member of our forest as well as his…The Bear longs to wind back his dreadful history and emerge from the dark of the last seventy or seven hundred years. We are his daylight.
The problem is, we Westerners do not find it in us naturally to trust the Bear, whether he’s a White Bear or a Red Bear, or both kinds of bear at once…”
LeCarre wrote those words in 1990, after the Berlin Wall fell but before the Soviet Union’s formal dissolution. Anyone familiar with the novel recognises that LeCarre answered the initial question above by providing answers to whether we could trust the Bear as we figured what the end of the titanic struggle known as the Cold War meant.
I am struck, in this period of reflecting which we do Thanksgiving week, by how fundamentally well LeCarre’s description for not trusting Moscow hits the mark on where we are with Putin’s Russia thirty plus years later. We tried ‘trusting’ the Bear but we saw it as possible on our terms. Russians for the most part have not chosen the terms we offer.
Assistance to reform Russia in the 1990s resulted from our infatuation that the democrats who Boris Yeltsin ‘led’ early that decade would triumph over centuries of the fearful Bear. Yeltsin turned out to be a drunken bore, democracy was false hope, the pain of economic ‘shock’ to ‘help’ the Russians became seen as yet another western plot to undermine Russia, and Valdimir Putin moved from St. Petersburg to the Kremlin itself.
The ‘former’ KGB officer (and aspiring President-for-life) Putin launched a war against Ukraine twenty years later for reasons still seeking justification; he has offered no justifications that the west finds credible. Russia’s increasing incompetency, not to take away from Ukrainian political will, energy, and military discipline, has shocked many analysts who spend their careers calibrating assessments of competencies. Few beyond Alexander Vindman consistently provided public confidence in late February and early March 2022 for why Ukraine had a strong chance of holding off Russia’s massive numerical advantage. Brutal fighting still continues between the two militaries but Kiev’s persistence, guts, and prowess remain front and center, though they have no guarantee of a near term outright victory over the invaders.
What is startling to me about LeCarre’s words is how they describe an enduring Russian condition. My overwhelming sense as an outsider and admittedly a non-specialist is that Russians daily confront a sense of fatigue, chagrin, and yet national pride. Russia, regardless of the problems it confronted with Napoleon or the annual weather challenges, or anything else, has endured for centuries. The Romanov dynasty ended and the Soviet Communist Party collapsed but the basic framework of people’s lives continued. They are hearty survivors.
Russia will, I suspect, always be fearful. Geography matters in the world. Let me repeat that: geography matters regardless of the technology developed over the decades or the seemingly invincible strength of the west. Russia’s geography leaves its regimes perpetually feeling exposed. And that exposure has proven menacing as the Nazi invasion so devastatingly illustrated eighty years ago.
Russians don’t seem to believe anyone else in the world should ignore them, either. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine clearly had multiple intended audiences, not the least was those in Washington who increasingly discuss Beijing as the capital that matters. How could, Putin and his nationalists wondered, they ignore Moscow’s nuclear teeth and physical expanse? Somehow the quality of the Russian groundforces would somehow benefit from these factors, apparently.
LeCarre’s work of fiction held truth about fundamental motivating behaviours the West has come to recognise again. Thus far we have managed to get through this immediate anxiety by the Bear without a nuclear weapon detonated; there is no guarantee that can continue but no similar reason it cannot. LeCarre’s words, however, do remind us that we only have control over our actions in potentially raising or lowering the rheostat for Russian fears; we have no clear understanding how much we can control those fears.
Instsead, we return to the reality that states pursue their national interests as defined by the leadership of those individual states. The United States can attempt to bring others to see their interests as coincident with ours but should not be surprised when other states see things differently. I find it extremely hard, as LeCarre indicated, that Russia will ever align too closely to us for the long term.FIN