This book is on one level an archival achievement: the distillation of thousands of top-secret Kremlin documents, brought to light by the author’s ingenuity and determination in the brief window that opened after the collapse of communism.
But it is far more than that. It is the story of a terrible crime and three great scandals.
The crime is the decades-long despoliation of the countries and peoples held captive in the Soviet empire, at the cost of millions of deaths and hundreds of millions of blighted lives. The communist regime was not only responsible for misery and mass murder at home. It was also a grave threat to the freedom and prosperity of the rest of the world, a danger that we survived more by luck than by judgment.
Human history is studded with other great real and possible horrors. But it has never witnessed misdeeds accompanied by such deceit and willful ignorance. As Vladimir Bukovsky makes clear, the outside world never fully understood the Soviet system. This is the first scandal depicted in the book: the West’s deluded belief that the Soviet empire could be managed, dealt with, and even reformed. Bukovsky repeatedly juxtaposes accounts of Western leaders’ timidity, naivety, and worse, with documents detailing the internal deliberations of the regime. He shows what was really going on during the invasion of Afghanistan, the Moscow Olympics of 1980, the imposition of martial law in Poland, and much more besides.
The second scandal is that in the years following 1991, the perpetrators of this great evil were not held to account; there were no Nuremberg Trials of the kinds faced by the Nazis, no South African–style truth and reconciliation commission. Instead, sections of the old KGB and Communist Party elite rebuilt their power, in sinister alliance with the petty crooks and con men who flourished in the “wild capitalist” conditions of the 1990s. Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin exemplifies this hybrid creature, which fuses political, economic, and gangland power.
The third scandal concerns the book itself. Researched and written by a moral giant, it is the most important work to appear for decades on the Soviet empire and its aftermath. But it is only now, nearly three decades late, available to the English-speaking world. Elizabeth Childs and her small publishing house deserve plaudits for having stepped in where the big beasts of the literary world have quailed and failed.
It is easy to see grounds for hesitation. Bukovsky is sweeping and unsparing in his condemnation of Western cupidity and culpability. Some will find his judgments on individuals too harsh. Some of those named in the book may feel tempted to turn to their lawyers to rebut the allegations. Some of the author’s critique of Western Utopianism may irk readers, such as his distaste for feminism and environmentalism. His view of the European Union as Soviet-inspired is controversial.
But the book is worth reading for other reasons. At its heart is a still-unacknowledged gap in perceptions. The wily gerontocrats of the Kremlin saw the world about them, with its threats and opportunities, with surprising clarity. So too, despite censorship, propaganda, and intense official secrecy, did many of those imprisoned inside the Soviet empire (though not, the author notes, the cosseted and self-regarding intelligentsia). It was only in the free and supposedly well-informed West that the fog was thick, even when refugees from communism such as Bukovsky tried to enlighten their Western hosts about the real nature of the Soviet regime.
In one of the book’s many enjoyable aperçus, Bukovsky quotes another émigré, the late Andrei Amalrik, who noted that Western experts on the Soviet Union reacted to firsthand witnesses of Soviet reality rather like ichthyologists confronted with a talking fish. They were intrigued by the phenomenon, but they dismissed any thought that this strange creature might be saying something useful about fish.
That arrogance is still the West’s besetting sin. In the years when the Soviet threat was real, we refused to learn from those who tried to explain its true nature. Now we regard the lessons of the past as irrelevant. The Soviet experiment collapsed in failure, at horrendous cost. What does that have to do with us, thirty years later? Surely the aim now should be to put the past behind us, to normalize relations with Russia, to find common ground and to broker deals?
Clearly Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. It is much smaller and weaker. It is (at least since the Chechen bloodbath ended), less repressive at home. It has not, so far, resorted to the systematic use of coercive psychiatry that the KGB inflicted on Bukovsky and others.
But the similarities outweigh the differences. Russia is still an empire. It has “soft power”—a cocktail of Orthodox religiosity, half-baked history, social conservatism, and anti-Western bile—that wins friends and influences people. Through “hybrid warfare,” the Kremlin deploys weapons against the West of far greater sophistication than those available to the Soviet-era Kremlin. The internet has given wings—anonymity, immediacy, and ubiquity—to what we once called dezinformatsiya. The modern financial system allows the Kremlin’s dirty money to slosh through our politics and public life. We are vulnerable to bluff and physical intimidation, skeptical of confrontation, and eager for compromise. Our security cultures have decayed, our spy catchers are out of practice, our Kremlinologists out of date. As a result, Russia plays divide et impera, stoking polarization and mistrust between countries and within them, with increasingly potent effect.
Though our response to the Soviet threat was, as Bukovsky depicts, often too accommodating, we are even weaker and more muddled now. Vladimir Putin has a weak hand, but he is playing it well. He could win. We could lose. Few have reflected on what life would be like if our alliances splinter and hostile autocracies gain the upper hand.
It is not too late to learn the lessons of the past. For anyone who cares about the freedom, security, and self-respect of the West, Judgment in Moscow is alarming, painful, essential reading.
Edward Lucas
16 May 2018