In case you were wondering
– and I doubt if you were - I’ve fallen a little further behind with the
challenge. I accept that this is not very encouraging news to report, but I
have reasonable excuses, I assure you. However, my concern about my
inadequacies in keeping up (and yours too, gentle reader), should mean nothing.
For no, of more concern to all of us at this time should be the impending
collapse of the world order. In short, it’s the end of the world.
Do you
remember the optimism that we all felt when the Berlin Wall came down and when
almost the whole of the Eastern Bloc in Europe emerged from behind its curtain,
blinking into the sunshine, to join the rest of us as we skipped along in our
happy democratic freedoms? How simple everything seemed then, and how
refreshing. The Soviet Union was no more, and the Russians - who for years had
been blamed for everything that went wrong in our lives, from the weather to the
decline of the butterfly and even to the reducing size of Mars Bars - were now
our new best friends. Hurrah! A new era of world peace had dawned.
Leningrad
became romantic St Petersburg once more. Our old view of the USSR where there
was never anything in the shops, where everyone wore drab grey clothes, where the
only car you could drive was a Lada and where everyone was unhappy, was
replaced by a glittering confetti of newly independent countries, including
Russia. The Russian Federation, as it became, seemed to be restored to its
former status as a vibrant and exotic land of delicious mystery; a land of golden
domes, sleigh-rides on the ice, and fur hats. It was all rather jolly, wasn’t
it?
Were we
being deluded, naïve, or were we just being plain crazy? Boris Yeltsin - as the
first President of this new, exciting and freshly free-market country - emerged
as an avuncular, slightly bumbling, lovely old bear of a man. Someone from whom
we had nothing to fear. But poor old Boris soon fell from grace and his
attempts to pull Russia into the twentieth century soon got completely out of
hand with widespread corruption, inflation and economic collapse. His
popularity fell and although he struggled hard to hold things together, he
finally left office with a public approval rating of only 2%.
Waiting in the wings, like the evil
fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening party, was an up-and-coming young
politician who, only a few months before, had been appointed almost from
nowhere as Russia’s Prime Minister. Yes, dear reader, the man to succeed our
bumbling bear as President of the Russian Federation was none other than the
shirtless pin-up we all know as Vladimir Putin. That was December 31st
1999 and almost fourteen years later, Mr Putin has never been far away from the
seat of power. In a convenient job-swap with his Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev
in 2008, our dashing Vladimir managed to swerve around the Constitution which
bars a president from holding a 3rd consecutive term, only to swap
back again in 2012. In the eyes of the world, however, it was always Putin who
was pulling Medvedev’s strings throughout these apparent ‘wilderness years’ and
we can be confident that his power and authority have never waned.
None of
this would matter, of course, if the President had simply stuck to the new
order, and hadn’t decided to revive some out-dated imperialist ambitions for
his once happy land. The West, which considers itself to be the arbiters of
democratic reasonableness of course, was keen to embrace Russia into the New
Age of Freedom. We wanted the handsome and macho Mr Putin to come to our party
– we like having new friends who will dance with us, drunk, into the oblivion
of the night. But Vladimir had other ideas, and now seems hell-bent on
reforming the old USSR in his own image. Crimea was just the start, and he only
succeeded there by appealing to the jingoist emotions of its inhabitants, but
he plans to spread his net wider and seemingly will not rest until he has
restored the Empire to its former glory.
I despair. Like most of us, I had
fondly imagined that war-mongering in Europe was a thing of the past. It seems
that I was wrong. The current situation threatens to escalate into an outright
conflict of ideologies, something that could soon become very dangerous for us
all. Why, Mr Putin, could you not exercise some restraint and leave things well
alone? Why risk more misery and bloodshed than we need? Isn’t there enough of
that elsewhere in the world? Why not just come to our party instead? We could
be friends. If you did that, we could all have a jolly good time and we could all
happily dance together until dawn. Please come – and bring a bottle. Vodka, of
course.