I recently posted my analysis of what appeared to be a piece on Russian propaganda. Duplicity has a has a long, long history in that country.
1947
I just finished reading John Steinbeck's 1947 "A Russian Journal". Here is page 193, towards the end of the book. A Moscow correspondent of an American newspaper , took a book from his shelves. "I want you to listen to this he said, and beginning and began reading slowly, translating from Russian. And he read something like this – this is not an exact transcription, but a close enough."
1634
"The Russians of Moscow are highly suspicious of foreigners, who are watched constantly by the secret police. Every move is noticed and sent into central headquarters. A guard is placed on all foreigners. Furthermore, Russians do not receive foreigners in their houses, and they seem to be afraid even to talk to them very much. A message sent to a member of the government usually remains unanswered, and a further message is also unanswered. If one is importunate, one is told that this official has left the city or is sick. Foreigners are permitted to travel in Russia only after great difficulty, and during their travels they are very closely watched. Because of this general coldness and suspicion, foreigners visiting in Moscow are forced to associate with each other exclusively."
There was a good deal more in this vein, and at the end our friend looked up and said, "What do you think of it?"
And we said, "We don't think you can get it past the censor."
He laughed. "But this was written in 1634. It is from a book called Voyages in Muscovy, Tartary and Persia, by a man named i Adam Olearius." And he said, "Would.you like to hear an account of the Moscow conference?"
And he read from another book something like this: "Diplomatically the Russians are very difficult to get along with. If one submits a plan, they counter it with another plan. Their diplomats are , of trained in the large world, but are mostly people who have ever left Russia. Indeed, a Russian who has lived in France is considered a Frenchman; one who has lived in Germany is considered a German, and these are not trusted at home.
"The Russians cannot go diplomatically in a straight line. They never get to the point, they argue in circles. Words are picked up, and bandied, and tossed, until in the end a general confusion is the result of any conference."
After a pause he said, "And that was written in 1661 by a French diplomat, Augustin, Baron de Mayerburg. These things make one much less restless under the present setup. I don't think Russia has changed very much in some respects. Ambassadors and diplomats from foreign countries have been going crazy here for six hundred years."
See the 1634 original of the first here. Images are beautiful.
Second, Baron de Meyerburg, is available on Amazon.
From the biographer of John Hay, who negotated with the Russian during the Russo-Japanese war
1906
Here we get to our subject. In his years as America's leading diplomat, no country vexed the patient Hay more, no nation drove him more to distraction, than Russia. I went back to Mr. Taliaferro's excellent 2013 biography, "All the Great Prizes," to quote some passages, and saw that I'd written in the margins "It didn't start with communism." It didn't start with Vladimir Putin. Russia has long bedeviled.
In the first years of the 20th cen-tury the Russians were pushing to expand east, to extend their sphere and dominate trade and rail lines in Chinese Manchuria. They wanted to tax there. They wanted to secure the deepwater port at Port Arthur, where they had a naval base. They were moving to annex Manchuria. Japan felt its interest threatened—if Russia took Manchuria, it would move next on Korea.
When Hay protested Russia's aggression, Russia responded with hurt feelings—how could you accuse us, we'd never hurt you. In time he told Roosevelt, "Dealing with a government with whom mendacity is a science is an extremely difficult and delicate matter."
The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05 was a human disaster, with land battles bigger than Antietam and Gettysburg. Near the end, at the battle of Mukden, an estimated 330,000 Russian troops went up against 270,000 Japanese, with more than 160,000 casualties. Russia lost that battle, as it had most of its fleet at Port Arthur.
America maintained neutrality. "We are not charged with the cure of the Russian soul," Hay wrote to Roosevelt. But all the way through he communicated with both sides, once comforting the Japanese ambassador, who had burst into tears. Privately Hay was disgusted by Russia's cavalier aggression, and Roosevelt, who had just taken up jujitsu in his daily workout and felt a special rapport with the Japanese ambassador, was privately rooting for the underdog. He wrote his son Theodore III, "For several years Russia has behaved very badly in the Far East, her attitude toward all nations, including us, but especially toward Japan, being grossly overbearing."
The last one to cite is the Marquis de Custine's 1839 "Letters from Russia." First a few paragraphs from the editor on the importance of the book, then a couple of passages I have selected to show the tone of the book. From the editor:
1991
Since the moment of its publication, Custine’s work has been compared with Alexis de Tocqueville’s more measured Democracy in America, which had appeared a few years earlier.13 The Marquis had in fact set out to rival this book, and for a time his sales eclipsed it comfortably. Unlike Tocqueville’s classic, however, the Letters fell out of fashion as the European setting changed, and by the end of the nineteenth century they had been forgotten almost everywhere (the exception was Russia itself). No one wanted a bloodthirsty tyrant next door, so the tsarist colossus was reimagined as a member of the concert of civilized European nations, a partner for royal marriages and capital investment. But Custine’s work was rediscovered in the 1930s and 40s, under Stalin, when the Russia of Tchaikovsky and Fabergé had again become an empire of fear. Impeded by bureaucracy and lies, surrounded by secret police and all too conscious of the Soviet state’s terrible power, diplomats stationed in Moscow fell on the hundred-year-old prose with what one of them, George F. Kennan, described as ‘exquisite delight’.14 They even claimed uncanny prescience on the Marquis’s behalf. He had not merely noticed everything that mattered about Nicholas I’s Russia, they argued, but he had grasped the fundamental character of Russian political culture, and in so doing had predicted Stalinism.
This notion still haunts readings of Custine. He gives us Russia as an object-lesson, and there are certain moods in which we want it to be little more. But we should not miss the grand panorama that also held him spellbound. Custine’s expressive, cut-glass prose, beautifully translated in this edition by Robin Buss, brings the court of St Petersburg to life, and never does it seem more enticing than on his endless summer nights. The Marquis steps into a palace filled with the exotic perfume of flowers and lit by thousands of beeswax candles. At one end is a limpid pool, elsewhere the candlelight is playing through a mass of palm fronds and fountains so bright that they remind him of diamonds. ‘One lost one’s bearings,’ he marvels, ‘all limits were dissolved, everything became space, light, gilding, flowers, reflections, illusion.’ The Custine who predicted Stalin here becomes the Marquis of the Winter Palace in Alexander Sokurov’s film, Russian Ark.15
But that leaves moot the question of significance. His Cold War admirers believed Custine to have described Russia’s inner continuity, the flaws – genetic defects, almost – that still doom it to tyranny. No other explanation seemed to cover the uncanny parallels between the Russias of their era and his own. But his real genius was to grasp core truths about authoritarian states, and these truths are not limited solely to Russia’s case. It takes a sensitive eye to notice the symbolic importance of the future to autocratic national regimes, or to remark that ‘real tyrants want you to smile’, but similar things could be written about a string of modern despotisms. And Custine got his Russia wrong almost as often as he touched a real nerve. He dismissed its entire literature, past and future, for instance, despite the recent efforts of Pushkin and Turgenev. He condemned the peasants to an eternity of servitude, but twenty years after his book appeared they had been freed. And he missed his glimpse of Russia’s coming railway age because, in high summer, at harvest-time, his mind was fixated on snow.
That same fixation blinds us all to Russias we choose not to see. Like Custine, too, we owe our prejudice, in part, to myths of Russia’s own making. It was the rulers in Moscow themselves, often presiding over fragile and beleaguered courts, who first wove the fable of a unique, continuous Russian path, a destiny that set their sacred land apart. As for the question of Russia’s place in Europe (and the allegedly barbaric pull of Asia and the steppes), no one has worried over that with more tenacity than Russia’s intellectual class. The very notion of Russia as concept, something to be approached more as a question than a culture, is Russia’s own. Custine converted these ideas into the currency of western European thought, but his work also shows what happens, what we miss, when we use Russia as a mirror for ourselves. Reading the Letters in an age of tourism and digital communication, we might consider the most striking continuity to be our own susceptibility, in the teeth of all the information and experience we have, to treat this vast neighbour as parable instead of place. Catherine Merridale, 2014
From Custine himself
When you reflect on the diplomatic and other conquests of this power, until recently counting for nothing in the affairs of the civilized world, you may wonder if what you see is not a dream. The Tsar himself did not appear to me entirely familiar with what happened in front of him, because he frequently left the prie-dieu on which he was kneeling to walk around from one side to the other correcting the faults of etiquette committed by his children or his clergy. This demonstrated that the Court itself is still progressing in Russia. If his son-in-law was not in the right place, he moved him backwards or forwards a couple of feet. The Grand Duchess, the priests, the chief officials were all subject to his commands, minute in detail, though supreme. I would have thought it more dignified to let things proceed as best they might and, once in the chapel, I would have preferred him to think only of God, letting each carry out his duties without scrupulously rectifying the slightest mistake in religious discipline or Court ceremonial. But in this singular country, lack of freedom is revealed everywhere: you find it even at the foot of the altar. Here, the spirit of Peter the Great dominates all spirits.
And
It is almost always from a blind respect for authority that the Russians disturb public order. So, if one is to believe what is whispered here, without the Tsar’s remark to the peasant deputies, they would not have taken up arms.
[…] The monarch knows the character of his people better than anyone and I cannot imagine that he provoked the peasant revolt, even involuntarily. However, I should add that many well-informed people disagree with my views on this.
[…] I must add that bloody scenes are still enacted daily in several parts of the same region where public order was recently disturbed and re-established in so fearful a manner. You see that it hardly befits the Russians to reproach France with its political disorders and to see in them an argument in favour of despotism. Let them give freedom to the press in Russia for twenty-four hours, and you would start back in horror at what you would learn. Silence is indispensable for oppression. Under an absolute government there are indiscretions that are equivalent to high treason.
If there are better diplomats among the Russians than among peoples more advanced in civilization, it is because our newspapers warn them of all that happens and is planned in our country; and that instead of prudently disguising our weaknesses, we are ardent to reveal them every morning; while their Byzantine policies, on the other hand, working in the shadows, carefully conceal from us what is thought, done or anticipated in their country. We step forward in daylight, they advance in the dark: the match is unequal. They leave us blinded by ignorance, while our sincerity enlightens them; we have the weakness of ready speaking, they the strength of secrecy: it is this, above all, that explains their craft. […]
In conclusion, the lying, double dealing and deceit that characterize today's Russia has very deep roots. People like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson who imagine that it would be possible to sit down at the table and come to a deal are historically mistake. It was not true after their October Revolution, in the 1930s, or during the Cold War. It is not true now. The countries closest to Russia – Ukraine, Poland, the Baltics, the 'Stans – know it.
Ukraine has no alternative except to fight until the Russians leave the country. They understand nothing except force, and their promises have never been reliable. Fortunately for us, the duplicity that characterizes their dealings abroad is abundantly present domestically. We can cheer the chaos as Wagner, Prigozhen, Kadarov et. al. squabble among themselves and waste their resources and initiative.
I often listen to podcast interviews on unherd, a wanna be news channel out of the UK run by a guy named Freddy Sayers. He has been arguing for some time that the US should negotiate with the Russians because the risk of nuclear war is too great and it is irresponsible to put the world at risk.
About a month ago, Sayers interviewed Fiona Hill, formerly a National Security Advisor in both the Obama and Trump White Houses. She put Sayers in his place in a very nice way. Several times in the interview, Sayers asked questions based on his assumptions that negotiations were possible with the Russians. She had to correct him more than once. She said, if I may paraphrase, that the Russians never negotiate with sincerity. They are only interested in what concessions they can get, and then they move on with their agenda, no matter what has been discussed or agreed to.
Fiona Hill is an expert in this situation. She knows Putin personally, has eaten with him, and has had many encounters with the top Kremlin officials. It was my feeling that any negotiations about the war would be a waste of time after listening to this interview. Although I thought she was completely clear and totally understandable, Freddy Sayers did not want to let go of his opinion that the west must negotiate with the Russians.
To be honest, most of those who I have heard speak about the Russian invasion, the ones who argue that it is a border dispute or we should not interfere in an area which is not our concern, are afraid of Russia, afraid that Putin will use his nukes against the west. It's the ultimate threat. They seem to feel that Ukraine can be sacrificed in order to prevent World War III. In my opinion, this is cowardice. We cannot be motivated by fear.
Here is Hill's interview with Freddy Sayers. I don't think there is anyone in the world who understands the complexity of the Russian psyche better than Hill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKNeyCIpfs4