A final reminder that I will be pausing the substack for a couple of months from this week, and this is the last paid post until I return. Payments will automatically go on hold, so if you’re a paid subscriber, you will not spend anything during this period. If you have questions, please contact me via email, Twitter or the substack direct message function, and I’ll be happy to deal with any problems or queries.
A Putin loyalist is in his office listening to The Rest is Politics. His friend is appalled that he chooses to follow enemy propaganda, and asks him ‘how can you listen to that rubbish?’ He explains how depressing it is being a Russian, concluding ‘…but when I listen to British centrists, I find that we Russians control the media and rule the entire world.’
I think of that old Jewish joke whenever I read or hear about ‘Russian interference’ in British politics, most recently the claims of the current Prime Minister that the Kremlin played a significant part in the Brexit vote.
The comparison doesn’t quite work, of course, because the Moscow newspapers are not full of depressing news, Russia being an authoritarian state where critics of the regime have an unfortunate habit of falling out of windows. But it’s still true that a certain type of Englishman credits the Kremlin with a degree of global power that veers into conspiracy theory.
The British and Russians have a history of mutual suspicion that verges on the hysterical, dating back to the 19th century rivalries of the Great Game. Even at the time, some British critics thought their countrymen’s fears of the Russians washing their boots in the Indian Ocean slightly absurd.
Looking back, we might have been a bit unfair to Ivan at times. While British Liberals saw the tsar as the worst of all autocrats, Russian rule was sometimes quite benevolent, at least to minorities such as the Baltic Germans. It was certainly better than what followed. It’s also true that a Russian victory in that Great Game might have been better for the Middle East’s Christians, whereas British involvement in the region was disastrous for their co-religionists.
For their part, Russian commentators and politicians today seem to have an absurdly exaggerated idea of Britain’s power, the puppet-masters behind American global domination, still pulling the strings, rather than a country run by naive humanities graduates who place our ‘international standing’ above national interests. Rabid threats to nuke London by tipsy Russian politicians are the last crumbs of dignity and self-respect we have left, for which thank you.
