Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160
- 170)
THURSDAY 25 OCTOBER 2007
Sir Roderic Lyne and Mr Charles Grant
Q160 Chairman:
Thank you very much indeed. Mr Grant?
Mr Grant: I would agree with all that. I think
we do have to see Russia's current foreign policy in historical
perspective. I think many of us in the West—Rod is probably
an exception—did not understand how truly and deeply humiliating
the Russians found the 1990s. They had been a global super power
and then they were reduced to nothing, with a shrinking economy,
and a foreign policy where they tended to do what the Americans
told them eventually. Many people in the governing classes were
shocked and upset by this. Now they are getting their own back;
it is really as simple as that. They are feeling much more confident
thanks to the oil price. They do not have to come begging cap
in hand any more. They have decided to play this game of being
very assertive and nationalistic on the international stage and
pretty systematically blocking the West on just about every dossier
you can think of, and it is paying off because we are now forced
to come and seek bargains with them, which is what we are doing,
probably rightly so—I would say at the moment rightly so—and
they have not yet paid any price for being more stroppy and difficult
in their foreign policy, nobody has punished them yet, so from
their rather short-term view of things they are on a roll and
they like it and when they cut off the gas for a few minutes to
Ukraine, Europe gets terrified and gets scared, and they see we
are scared of them and I think they are rather happy about that.
Certainly, as I said right at the start, in Washington there are
two views about how to react to this. One view is the harder line
view which is also the neo-con view which is do not give an inch;
if you give the Russians an inch they will ask for a foot and
you should just take no notice of what they do, recognise an independent
Kosovo, contain Russia, exclude them, penalise them. However,
there is another view, associated with Henry Kissinger, which
is that we need some grand strategic bargain. Maybe there is a
method behind their madness. Maybe by being so difficult in so
many areas they are actually reaching out to us and they want
to do a big deal. To judge from press reports in the Herald
Tribune yesterday and on Saturday that seems to be the line
of the State Department in Washington. There does seem to be a
view in Washington now that it is worth trying a bargain on CFE
because there is a possible compromise on CFE. On missile defence,
whereby the current American line seems to be that we should promise
the Russians not to activate any system unless we both agree on
Iran and in return—
Q161 Lord Anderson of Swansea:
Kosovo?
Mr Grant: And in return they have to be reasonable
on Kosovo. Some of those directly involved in the Kosovo diplomacy
tell me that the Russians are being quite reasonable, or at least
the Russian member of the so-called Troika is apparently being
very reasonable. Whether his bosses will allow him to go on being
reasonable I do not know, but there is at least a possibility
now of some kind of bargain. Perhaps I will say one more word
on missile defence. The Russian opposition to missile defence—and
again Rod would know a bit more about this than me—seems
to me to be genuine rather than feigned. It is not just a tactic;
I think they are genuinely upset by it. I have heard American
diplomats say that in the 1990s we promised the Russians that
we would never put any "something" into the new members
of NATO until East European countries joined NATO. Some people
say advance military systems, some people say military bases,
some people say significant American forces, but there was some
verbal promise made to the Russians in the 1990s, and the Russians
think that America has reneged on it. As I said, I think they
are genuinely annoyed about this missile defence thing and upset
about it and therefore they probably would happily sell the Serbs
down the road in order to get a bargain on missile defence. As
several people have said, Kosovo is not a Russian interest, Serbia
is not a Russian interest; missile defence is. My own view is
that it is worth exploring this kind of bargain to see if we can
get some practical help on Kosovo. I would be happy to go along
with those who want to see some sort of bargain.
Q162 Lord Crickhowell:
I was interested in Rod Lyne's introduction to this because he
talked about American defence systems and China as well and almost
as a throwaway remark at the end he mentioned the Middle East.
Members of this Committee took part earlier this week in a debate
on Afghanistan, the Middle East, on our Report on Europe, the
Peace Process, and so on. The central area of foreign policy anxiety
for most of us in Europe and the West is in fact what is going
on in that broad area from Afghanistan across to the Mediterranean.
Could you say a tiny bit more about the Russian views about it
and how they are likely to evolve because this is the area, surely,
as much as anywhere, where Europe is likely to come up against
relationships on important foreign policy issues with Russia.
Sir Roderic Lyne: In the Cold War we automatically
found ourselves on the opposite side to the Russians in every
regional conflict around the world, including the Middle East.
That is absolutely not the case now. I think the Russians are
playing some tactical games around the whole area of the Middle
East and Central Asia but I think that the broad strategic objectives
of Russia are broadly the same there as our own. I would even
go further; the Russians have been very much part of the same
diplomacy as ourselves over North Korea. They were extremely supportive
in Afghanistan in the early stages of the operation and they are
not obstructing it now. They did create difficulties in Uzbekistan
but that was because they believed that the Americans had said
they would establish a base and leave rather quickly, but they
are not actually wishing us to fail in Afghanistan, which would
be very bad for their own interests. They think we may well not
succeed there. They have not sought to make life difficult for
ourselves in Iraq, although the Russian Government felt, as a
lot of people in Europe felt, that it was a mistaken decision.
They will speak about it very much in the same terms as the European
debate. They take part in the Quartet on the Middle East. They
do not actually have a lot of leverage there. They are happy to
be included in the game. I do not think they are trying to make
that significantly more difficult. They wish to retain strong
relationships where they have them because they think that does
give them some leverage. That obviously means with countries like
Syria, to which they sell armaments. Then you come to the country
which is at the moment more or less at the top of the American
list and that is Iran. For the past five, six or seven years we
have been discussing with the Russian Government the problem of
the likely development by the Iranians of nuclear capabilities.
I think that President Putin has seen this as an area where he
has diplomatic leverage because Russia has a relationship with
Iran, America does not and the European Union does not have much
of one. Russia does not want a nuclear-armed Iran. It would be
much closer to Russia than it would to us, let alone to the United
States of America. I think the Russians are more pessimistic than
many people in the West about the chances of preventing that from
happening. Quite a lot of Russians will argue that we are going
to have to find ways of living with it, but I think what they
are trying to do on Iran is to show that at times they can be
helpful, at times they can be less helpful, and that therefore
it is very much in the Western interest to deal with them in a
way that encourages them to be more helpful. This is classic diplomatic
leverage. Again this is being played with enormous adroitness
by President Putin, but they are not backing Iran against us.
There are circumstances in which that could change and I think
we are approaching potentially a rather dangerous point here.
I think that if the Americans were to use military force against
Iran, the Russians at that point would come out on the other side
and there would be a risk that the Russians would actually send
additional armaments to Iran. I do not think they would send people
to fire them but I think that we would run into that risk. That
is the point at which they would part company, but for the time
being they have not parted company.
Q163 Lord Swinfen:
Following your remark on Russia's concern with a rising China,
Sir Roderic, is there any migration from a highly populated China
across the border into a lowly populated Siberia?
Sir Roderic Lyne: There are a lot of people
in Moscow who believe that there are two million illegal Chinese
immigrants in Siberia. These are people who never go to Siberia.
I do go there from time to time and when I was in Vladivostok
last year I was told by my driver that there were indeed two million
illegal Chinese immigrants, but they were not in Vladivostok,
they were in Moscow! There is a lot of mythology here. The short
answer is that there has not been a huge migration, although the
Russians are very worried about that, even though that area of
Russia is depopulating. The Chinese come across to gamble, they
come across to trade, some of them, in small numbers, come across
to work, but the Russian authorities are not prepared to do what
might be economically rational and invite them in in large numbers
to help develop the economy.
Q164 Lord Lea of Crondall:
Just on that point, when I was in Kursk I was talking to the Chairman
of the Oblast and this came up and he said, "Of course, have
you noticed how many Chinese restaurants there are around here?"
as if it was obvious that wink, wink, wink, they are not really
Chinese restaurants. I said, "No, I haven't seen any Chinese
restaurants; take me to one," sort of thing, and he shut
up and changed the subject. It is the same point—the paranoia
is there but I am not sure the Chinese illegal immigrants are.
Can I come to the question I was really wanting to ask about which
is what you might call non-state actors in all of this. We have
got a string of people mentioned here—the United States,
Europe, India and China—but of course, arguably, it is the
non-state actor called al-Qaeda which is the spectre haunting
Europe, it is the spectre of our times. For 100 years we lived
under the spectre haunting Europe of Communism; now haunting Europe
is the spectre of Islamism. A colleague of ours in this House
has written a very interesting book on exactly that theme. The
issue is Islamism, not state actors per se, but in all of the
manifestations, whether in Iran, Israel or Iraq and so on—is
the fear of the New Armageddon-ism, if I can call that an "ism".
The theory is that there is a very much more important spectre/issue
which we ought to discuss as such, and not just talk about bilateral
relations between Russia and whoever.
Sir Roderic Lyne: I think that is one of a number
of areas where we do have a very large common interest with Russia,
but it is not the only one, because proliferation of weapons and
dealing with the environment are other such areas. I do not think
that our analysis exactly coincides with the Russian analysis.
President Putin, particularly in his earlier period, used to present
the Chechen War as being the front line of defence of Europe against
Islamic terrorism. There was quite a lot of evidence that there
was some direct involvement of al-Qaeda in the Chechen war, nevertheless
the Chechen War did not happen because of al Qaeda, indeed it
is a conflict that has been going on for the better part of 150
years, and it would have happened irrespective of al-Qaeda. It
was a situation that al-Qaeda perhaps tried to exploit but it
was not the main dimension of that. We have had some small elements
in the last few years of successful co-operation with the Russians
in dealing with specific elements of international terrorism.
There was one operation that interdicted the sale of Russian surface-to-air
missiles of a small kind to America through Britain that actually
led to a court case which therefore became a public affair, in
which British, Russian and American intelligence and security
agencies co-operated to interdict an operation. I do not think
that at this moment you have got a huge problem of Islamic terrorism
in Russia, but I do think that you have got a number of stresses
and strains of different kinds in different parts of Russia. There
is a lot of instability in the North Caucasus not just in Chechnya.
Some of that, but not all of it, is religiously based; some of
it is based on ethnic groups and subgroups of a very complicated
kind. There is a great fear in Russia that extremist Islam could
spread into cities to the north which have got large Muslim minorities,
but for the most part those Muslims have not been radicalised
and have lived very peacefully and in large number in Russian
cities with relatively little trouble, although there have been
a number of racial incidents, which I think I would separate very
clearly from terrorist incidents, where they have been in some
places demonised because of the colour of their skin and their
religion.
Q165 Lord Lea of Crondall:
You do think that their eggs are in the same basket as us in some
sense of Christendom versus Islam? It is impolite to put it quite
like that but it is not Islam it is Islamism, in other words Armageddon-ism.
40% of Americans believe in this Armageddon-ism reciprocally.
Do you see the ideology of the dispossessed now in the worlds
Islamism rather than Communism?
Mr Grant: I think Russians do see it that way
and that is why it is quite hard to have a conversation between
people from the EU and Russia on this because the prejudice and
hostility towards Islam that I have seen in Russia is quite unlike
anything you get in most parts of Europe. Despite the fact there
are quite a lot of Muslim people living in Russia most of whom,
as Rod says, are well integrated and not a problem, when you talk
to Russians about Europe and European values they immediately
start talking about Christianity. They start lecturing us for
allowing too many Muslims into European countries. They all seem
to think, bizarrely, that due to the rate of birth of Muslims,
30% of the British population will be Muslim in 10 years' time.
I have had very sophisticated, well-educated academics saying
that to me. They do think, rather like some people in Washington
think, that Europe as an entity is being undermined by rapidly
breeding Islamic terroristic fundamentalists in their midst. A
lot of Russians seem to say that. On the question of Islamic fundamentalism
spreading beyond the Caucasus, I do not think it has spread very
much, but I was quite recently in Kazan and there, where it is
an autonomous republic, certainly I picked up from a meeting with
Shaimiev, the President of Kazan, that they are very worried about
Islamism spreading. Some of the people in Guantanamo Bay are from
Kazan. I think there is a growing worry about that. If I may come
back to say one thing on China. I think the China-Russia relationship
is going to be one of the most interesting and important relationships
in the world in the next 50 years and you might want to talk to
a guy called Bobo Lo who is from Chatham House. He is just finishing
a book on the China-Russia relationship. I am not sure what is
going to happen. There is the Bob Kagan thesis which is that we
will see an axis of autocracies because values are going to matter
a lot in foreign policy in the future and therefore whatever mutual
dislike there is between Russian and Chinese leaders they will
be forced to work together to oppose the Europeans and Americans,
who will go round preaching democracy. That thesis is not impossible
but equally I take Rod's point that the dislike among the leaderships
is quite strong. I have spent some time in China talking to people
about Russia and they do not take Russia seriously. They see it
as a minor and unimportant country. The paranoia that many Russians
feel towards China is extraordinary. I have talked to Khloponin,
who is the Governor of Krasnoyarsk, and he was saying, "If
we do not do something the whole of Siberia will be yellow in
10 years' time." If you look at a map Siberia is nowhere
near where the Chinese people live—you have got the Gobi
Desert in the way, so I think there is a lot of paranoia there
that shows no signs of diminishing.
Q166 Lord Anderson of Swansea:
In Kazan I was told of quite substantial Wahabi money going into
the libraries there which was causing some concern. Obviously
the major Russian concern in terms of Islam would be in Chechnya,
Ingushetia, Dagestan and that area, but does it go beyond that
and, more importantly for our inquiry, to what extent are there
discussions between the European Union and Russia on counter-terrorism?
Sir Roderic Lyne: I am not aware of discussion
between the EU and Russian on counter-terrorism. I think it is
mostly being done bilaterally between the major EU governments
and I think there is probably some of it in NATO rather than the
EU. By its nature it tends to be handled in a fairly confidential
way.
Q167 Lord Anderson of Swansea:
Is there co-operation?
Sir Roderic Lyne: To a degree, yes, there is
recognition that we are all against terrorism. I think the co-operation
is inadequate because it is extremely hard for agencies that were
so opposed in the Cold War, and in the case of Russian agencies
are still essentially I think fighting the Cold War, to co-operate
with their former opponents. I do not speak for those agencies
but that was my experience, that we had levels of co-operation
in this but we were always disappointed that we could not get
deeper in face of this problem.
Q168 Lord Anderson of Swansea:
Can I move on to the next area. Firstly, it would be very helpful
for me if you were to define what is "liberal imperialism",
in the Chubais sense?
Sir Roderic Lyne: I remember reading the phrase
when Chubais first used it and I felt sad that an intelligent
Russian economic liberal like Chubais was talking in those terms.
The short answer is I do not know, except that it was a reflection
of the need of a political leader (which he is partly) to chime
in with the nationalist mood in Russia which believed that Russia
should be the dominant regional force. It is not a suggestion,
as I understand it, that Russia should reclaim sovereignty over
the newly independent countries but the suggestion was that Russia
had a natural right to leadership—and sometimes we hear
Americans talking in those terms too, but that was my understanding.
I think there is a very, very deep-seated belief in Russia that
Russia does have a natural right to leadership of the neighbouring
countries. I think that when Putin described the collapse of the
Soviet Union as the "greatest geo-political catastrophe of
the last century", he was actually articulating a view that
is shared by 98% of ethnic Russians—I say ethnic Russians—not
because they want Communism back but because the Soviet Union
was their country and losing two-fifths of your population overnight
without warning is a terrible shock to people.
Q169 Lord Anderson of Swansea:
Is there a real difference between views in terms of lost influence
in respect of the former Soviet Union, hence the neuralgic reaction
to the loss of the Baltics for example, to Georgia, Moldova and
Ukraine and that of the former Soviet Empire, those countries
just beyond the borders? Is there a marked difference in the approach?
Sir Roderic Lyne: Yes, they knew they were occupying
countries in Eastern Europe that they did not really have a right
to occupy and that sooner or later they might have to pull out
and allow Poland to become Poland again or East Germany to become
East Germany. I think to a degree there was acceptance also that
the Baltic States, which had been independent between the wars,
had a right to independent statehood. After all, Gorbachev allowed
that to happen before the break-up of the rest of the Soviet Union.
I still think that most Russians find it very, very hard to think
of Ukraine and Belarus as separate nations, as independent sovereign
states, because I think they were seen as part of the Russian
heartland. If we come back to the notion of Christendom, the notion
of Russian Christendom is of course very different from ours because
you have a very illiberal, nationalistic, xenophobic, anti-modernistic
Russian Orthodox Church which again saw this as part of its bailiwick.
The Caucasus and Central Asia were areas that they were fairly
happy to get rid of, except that Northern Kazakhstan was really
seen as Russian territory and they developed all the resources
in Northern Kazakhstan and all the gas from Northern Kazakhstan
goes into the Orenburg collection centre and it was mainly populated
by Russians and they used it as a nuclear testing ground to horrific
effect. I think there is a distinction in there between what they
still feel to be Russian heartland and the rest.
Q170 Lord Crickhowell:
The last question on the list you were given is about comments
in the pre-electoral period. Can I take up two of Sir Roderick's
opening comments. I thought one was pretty pessimistic in that
in 40 to 50 years' time, I think you said, we might have something
that we would like to think of in the West as democracy, and then
there was a much more confident view about the developing economy.
We have got a rapidly declining population in Russia and a rapidly
declining workforce to cope with this economic growth. Is that
not going to be quite a problem in the developing economy? How
is that going to affect domestic politics and would you comment,
please, on sovereign democracy? Clearly at the moment the Russians
feel that instability is something that they do not like and prosperity
is something that they do, and sovereign democracy seems to be
a better way than the instability that arose as people tried to
move towards something like Western democracy. We are now into
an electoral period and I am not quite sure where Putin is going
to emerge from it. Would you comment on how you see the internal
political situation developing in Russia?
Sir Roderic Lyne: Perhaps I will take democracy
first. The Duma elections which will take place on 2 December
will not be fair, but nevertheless are important. They are not
fair because the terms of the election have already been rigged
by setting a percentage threshold and only having people elected
to the Duma on party lists, and by the central and regional electoral
commissions making it extremely hard in many areas for smaller
parties to get registered, plus the fact that central television
is controlled by the Kremlin and appearances on it will be manipulated
to support United Russia. Despite all of that, the voting will
not be a total fraud or farce. The extent to which you can manipulate
voting varies from region to region. It is more manipulable in
the North Caucasus than it is in most of Russia and it is being
seen as a real trial of strength to show how well United Russia
with Putin at the head of the list (albeit curiously not a member
of the party whose list he heads) do, whether the Communists are
anchored at their 15% and so on. The general attitude to democracy
in Russia is that democracy equals the 1990s equals a complete
nightmare, and if that is what you are offering the Russian population,
they do not want that. They would like to have more law and order.
They would like to have much less corruption. Corruption is very
high on the list of complaints of the Russian populace, but they
are much more comfortable with Putin and the sort of rule he has
given them than with what happened in 1990s, and anyway they think
that those leading democratic figures were all tainted and a lot
of them were allied with big business and oligarchs. I think there
is a very important distinction to be made between freedom and
democracy. Essentially what Gorbachev and Yeltsin gave Russia
was freedom, although Gorbachev did institute what has probably
been the fairest election in terms of voting that Russia has had
in the 1989 elections to the Congress of People's Deputies. Democracy
in Russia has never ever happened; it has no history. The country
has not yet really started down the road to democracy. Certainly
Putin in his seven years in power has talked the talk about democracy,
or sovereign democracy or managed democracy but almost always
qualified democracy, but he has done nothing genuinely to develop
democracy because it has all been top-down. Parties have been
invented by the Kremlin top-down. Russia has not yet got to the
start line. We need to remember how many hundreds of years it
took us to develop democracy in this country, that it came bottom-up
and it was based on things like property-owning middle classes.
You have now got in Russia a property-owning middle class of maybe
30 or 40 million—it depends how you classify it—maybe
50 million people that did not exist 15 years ago, that at the
moment is not terribly involved in politics but as we go down
the road in future generations will wish to be more so, many of
whose leading lights have had exposure to the world that their
parents never had so at least they have some understanding of
how democratic countries work. That is why I believe that it cannot
happen quickly. I will not guarantee that it will happen at all.
There are those who say that Russia is doomed always to remain
authoritarian but, as I said, I think there is a better than evens
chance that over a period of about two generations Russia will
develop a model of this kind, partly because Russian leaders keep
saying "this is what we want". I would rather Mr Putin
says, "I am a democrat like Mahatma Gandhi and I want democracy
in this country," even if he is not doing it, than the reverse.
Putin himself at the meeting that Charles Grant attended in Sochi
(which I was not at) essentially recognised a) that he had failed
to develop democracy in his time in power, and b) that Russia
needed it. It was a very striking sentence he used there where
he said it does not provide a stable future for the country if
it depends on one man and one institution, it needs a broader
base, and he is absolutely right. If I can turn briefly to the
economy, I think the private sector of the Russian economy is
developing in quite an effective way. You are seeing better run
companies and companies that are run according to principles of
governance that we can at least begin to recognise. That gives
me considerable hope for the future of the Russian economy because
the better private sector companies are beginning to show that
they can compete on a global stage. The problem at the moment
is that too much of the economy is lumped in the state sector
and is under Kremlin control. As I said earlier, until that model
is proved once again to be inefficient then it will remain. One
of the factors that will put it under strain is precisely the
one you mention of demography, that over the next 10 years Russia
is set to lose maybe seven million people over a period when,
if the economy continues to grow at 6 to 7% a year (which it may
not do) it will need more millions of people and that will cause
huge pressure on productivity, on investment, on efficiency, all
the things that these great big state agglomerations do not stand
for.
Mr Grant: I agree with all that. I think sovereign
democracy for Putin means autonomy and it is defined in relation
to the US. It is about Russia not having to do what the US wants
it to do. There is a paranoia about the US that is very strong
in the Russia ruling elite and sovereign democracy is an answer
to the problem they have about America dominating the world and
CNN ruling the airwaves and so on.
Chairman: I would like to thank you both
very much. We really have appreciated the time you have given
and indeed the wisdom you have given to us this morning. I cannot
remember witnesses ever having been heckled quite as much as you
were this morning by various interruptions but thank you very
much. We may well be coming back to Charles. We are going to be
looking into the foreign affairs aspects of the Reform Treaty
and we may want to talk to you about that. In the meantime, thank
you very much indeed.
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