The Russian strategy of exporting chaos to provoke extremism only works if liberals succumb to cynicism and despair
I
once spent an exasperating week showing a Russian friend around London. He insisted on seeing everything and admiring nothing. Museums, monuments, shops – all compared unfavourably with St Petersburg and Moscow. This got tiresome after a few days, so I asked my friend if there was anything at all about Britain that impressed him. “The stability,” he said without hesitation. “You can feel the stability.”
That was a different world; the late 1990s. I don’t remember the year, but I remember knowing what my friend was talking about because I had felt the same culture shock in reverse when first visiting Russia.
It was the decade of degenerate democracy under Boris Yeltsin. The Soviet Union had collapsed. It was not obvious where the unravelling would stop. Criminal violence was endemic. The drunk president was propped up by a lawless oligarchy, pillaging state assets and calling it privatisation. No one who witnessed Russia’s trauma in that period was surprised that it engendered nostalgia for the pre-democratic era. Soviet power was unaccountable but at least predictable.
