The Kremlin Conspiracy E-Book

Douglas Boyd

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 591

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

What did it mean when Vladimir Putin stepped down from president to prime minister of Russia in 2008 and bounced to the top again in 2013? The Putin-Medvedev clique of mega-rich ex-KGB men and lawyers call their state machine kontora – the firm – and run it as though they own all the shares. They command the largest armed forces in Europe, equipped with half the world's nuclear warheads. Their air force regularly flies nuclear capable Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bombers into British airspace to analyse our radar defences and time in-the-air reaction. In a frightening foretaste of future warfare, the Kremlin launched a cyberattack on neighbouring Estonia in 2007 that crashed every computer and silenced every mobile phone, bringing the country to a complete halt. Was this just Tsar Vladimir bullying a small independent neighbour state that could not hit back – or a rehearsal for something far bigger? People call Putin's power strategy 'the new Cold War'. Author Douglas Boyd argues that it is the same one as before, fought with potent new weapons: the energy resources on which half of Europe now depends, and which can be turned off at Moscow's whim. Recounted often in the words of participants, The Kremlin Conspiracy is the chilling story of 1,000 years of bloodshed that made the Russians the way they are. Today, Ukraine. Tomorrow? The past points the way, for the men running the Kremlin 'firm' are driven by the same motivation as Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great.

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Douglas Boyd is probably the only British author who has confronted the KGB while enduring solitary confinement in a Stasi interrogation prison. He studied Russian language and history while training for signals interception at an RAF base in Berlin – snooping on Warsaw Pact fighter pilots over-flying East Germany and Poland. Back in civilian life, he spent several years at the height of the Cold War dealing with Soviet bloc film and TV officials, some of whom were undercover intelligence officers.

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

April Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine

Voices from the Dark Years

The French Foreign Legion

Normandy in the Time of Darkness

Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass

De Gaulle: the Man who Defied Six US Presidents

Lionheart

The Other First World War

This book is dedicated to all the political prisoners detained in the Stasi’s Lindenstrasse interrogation prison in Potsdam, and to our predecessors who suffered there under the KGB 1945–52 and under the Gestapo 1933–45

CONTENTS

Title

About the Author

Dedication

Preface to the Second Edition

Foreword

Introduction

Part 1: Hot Wars

1 Genghis Khan, Uncle Joe and Vlad the Gasman

2 Slaves, Amber, Furs and Terror

3 A Time of Giants: Peter and Catherine; Alexis and Napoleon

4 Collision in the Crimea

5 Lies, Spies and Blood in the Streets

6 Death in Sarajevo, Money in the Bank

7 The Rainbow of Death

Part 2: War by Other Means

8 The Comintern: War on the Cheap

9 Secret Agents in Skirts

10 Famine, Purges and Bundles of Used Notes

12 The Politburo Takes a Short Ride

13 My Enemy’s Enemy is also my Enemy

14 Poor Poland!

15 A Very Different Kind of Warfare

Part 3: Cold War

16 Big Bangs and a Long Telegram

17 Living on the Far Side of the Moon

18 A Daughter Back from the Dead

19 The Proxy War that Cost 4 Million Lives

20 The Deadly Game of Dominoes

21 Voting with their Feet

22 Khrushchev’s Sonofabitch

23 Spring Forward, Fall Back

24 Roll to your Rifle and Blow Out your Brains

25 And all Erich’s Men …

26 The End of the Evil Empire

27 The Making of the President, Russian Style

Part 4: Update For the Second Edition

28 The Pot and the Kettle

29 After Ukraine, the Deluge?

Acknowledgements

Glossary

Notes and Sources

Further Reading in English

Copyright

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

In the early summer of 2011, during the run-up to the 2012 Russian presidential election, I was contacted by a very successful international businessman from one of the former Soviet satellite states. Highly intelligent and fluent in several languages, he might well have struck me as a top-rank KGB First Directorate officer, had this been in the Cold War period. For the sake of his anonymity, let’s call him Dmitri.

From his first telephone call, it was apparent that he had done his homework: he knew a lot about me and my writing. This was borne out when he travelled from the Swiss frontier with his very beautiful Russian wife Sofia expressly to visit me at my home on the other side of France with a strange suggestion. It was that The Kremlin Conspiracy should be published in Russia. I replied that surely Russians knew their own history, so what would be the point?

Sofia had studied Russian history at Kazan University. According to her, the only history taught in Soviet schools and universities during the period of the USSR was what corroborated Marxist theory! Things, she said, had not greatly improved since and, although a history graduate, she had learned much from the first edition of my book. As to me finding a publisher in Russia, I explained that there were agents for that sort of thing, that not many books were translated into Russian, and …

Not having made all his money by letting problems get in the way of business, Dmitri said that he would help. The conversation was mostly in English, but in one of the Russian exchanges, I heard him mutter to Sofia, ‘Lebedev’. The oligarch father and son Alexander and Yevgeny Lebedev were famous as British press barons, and Alexander had recently been seen live on a Russian television channel chat show punching another participant several times for disagreeing with him. There were rumours that Lebedev Sr intended to compete with Putin in the coming presidential elections – motive enough, Dmitri thought, for him either to publish my book in Russia, or arrange for a friend to do so. All that was necessary at that stage would be to supply a copy of the book with a synopsis and a specimen chapter in Russian. I explained that, although I could translate from Russian into English, I could no longer pretend to be competent in the other direction. No problem, said Sofia, who had been a journalist after leaving university. She would do it for me.

Which chapter? I asked. Both of them said, ‘Oh, the last.’

Chapter 27 – the last in the first edition – entitled ‘The Making of the President, Russian Style’, explores the most likely origins of Vladimir Putin, which are not at all what his official biography would have us believe. I suggested that having it published in Russia would hardly amuse Mr P., so we might all end up drinking polonium cocktails, like Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.

Dmitri said he didn’t think that was a real danger and shortly after their visit I received an email from Sofia which began:

I went through her draft and asked for one or two points to be changed. Back came the fair copy. The next problem was getting it to Lebedev Sr because it is not easy to reach the super-rich. I asked a very persistent Russian friend living in what they call Londongrad for help. Within 24 hours she had dug up the address of Lebedev’s private office. The book, synopsis and specimen chapter were despatched by registered post. I waited for a reply, which did not come. Rumours, which may or may not be true, had it that some sort of deal had meanwhile been cut and Lebedev had changed his political plans, presumably with some kind of quid pro quo. I never did find out whether Dmitri and Sofia had been actors in a scenario masterminded by him.

It’s a very Russian story. As Winston Churchill said on the BBC in October 1930, ‘Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ Nothing changes.

Douglas Boyd

South-west France

Autumn 2014

FOREWORD

Ex-prisoners never forget the first time the cell door slams shut and is bolted from the outside. The absence of a handle on the inside symbolises the loss of freedom. To that, the Judas-hole, through which the guard can see but the prisoner cannot, adds loss of dignity and privacy. Identity shrinks to a cell number. Cell No. 20 in the Stasi’s Lindenstrasse interrogation prison in Potsdam measured just three paces by four, the floor space encumbered by a bed, a table and a chair. There was no running water. A smelly lidded bucket served as my toilet, emptied by a trusty during my brief exercise periods in a cobbled yard, where every step was watched by a guard with loaded sub machine-gun on a platform atop the 4m-high wall. To complete a tour of the yard took thirty normal paces.

Once a day during my solitary confinement, I was brought a tin jug of cold water and a chipped enamel basin in which to wash my face and try to clean my teeth. In the absence of any towel, I used my underwear, washing it every few days in the same bowl and drying it on the central heating radiator. Once a week, I was escorted to a warmish shower and given a small towel, already damp from previous users. Every two or three days I was given a mug of tepid water and a safety razor with much-used blade with which to shave. Three times a day a warder brought food: a slice of black bread and some unidentifiable brown jam with ersatz coffee for breakfast and noodles or potatoes with something like a meatball for lunch. Supper was even less exciting. When I stopped eating in protest at my detention, the prison governor was concerned enough to come and eat some of my lunch himself, explaining that it was the same food he and the guards ate. I started eating again to show that I was prepared to behave, if only someone would pay attention to me.

Always wearing a cheap civilian suit, my Stasi interrogator Lt Becker would arrive at any hour of the day or night and repeat the same questions to me about my duties at RAF Gatow, the names of my fellow servicemen and my German friends in Berlin. The questions were interspersed with his lectures on how good life was in the GDR, where I could apply for citizenship and be guaranteed a job as tractor driver on a collective farm in Saxon Switzerland, with a pretty blonde partner thrown in as part of the package. When I queried the automatic availability of the blonde, Becker assured me that she was there. An obedient party member was how he described her. The price for the job and the girl was to show that I was truly vernünftig (reasonable) and answer all his questions. I might not have been quite so courageous had I known that, under paragraph eight of the GDR law dated 11 November 1957, the penalty for my crime of entering the country illegally was a sentence of up to three years in a labour camp.

Some of my fellow prisoners had been caught trying to escape from the GDR, which was more rigorously punished. Other ‘crimes’ they had committed included telling a political joke or retailing news from Western radio or television. Their interrogations were much tougher than mine and frequently lasted all night, to be followed by a sleepless day in their cells, sitting bolt upright on the edge of the chair or standing without leaning against the wall. If Becker’s visits in the small hours interrupted my sleep, they were not frequent enough to constitute maltreatment and nobody hammered on my door to wake me up if I dozed in the daytime because I was a Cold War pawn to be traded. Yet, in the Lindenstrasse, terror pervaded my cell like every other, as ubiquitous as the smell of the latrine buckets because it was inside every prisoner’s mind, a product of the sheer impotence of being imprisoned without any idea for long it would last, in a totalitarian state where there was no right of trial or legal representation – in fact, no rights at all.

The guards were forbidden to talk to me. Between Lt Becker’s irregular visits there were moments when I would, from utter loneliness, have told him anything he wanted to know for the sheer relief of exchanging words with a fellow human being. Fortunately, he lacked the interrogator’s flair for gauging the state of a prisoner’s morale, so none of his visits coincided with my moments of despair.

Although I had convinced him that my job in Gatow consisted of filling in forms for catering supplies and equipment, making tea and polishing floors, my real job as an RAF-trained linguist was to transcribe in Russian shorthand the intercepted transmissions from Soviet fighter pilots flying the latest MiG and Sukhoi jets over Eastern Germany and Poland. The real-time transcriptions were flown back to the Government Communications HQ in Cheltenham for analysis. For that reason, I have never been more frightened, before or since, than the morning when I was shown into the interrogation room and found, not Becker, but two men and a woman. As soon as the door was closed behind me, the woman said, ‘My predstaviteli praviteltsva sovietskovo soyuza.’ ‘We are representatives of the government of the Soviet Union …’

It was difficult to keep the fear inspired by her words from showing on my face. While it was not hard to bluff Becker that I was a lowly clerk doing a boring administrative job, these KGB officers knew exactly what went on in the Signals Section of RAF Gatow. The two men fired questions at me in rapid succession, using the woman as translator. From time to time, she pretended to forget to translate a simple question. ‘Zanimayetyes sportom?’ – ‘Do you play sport?’ ‘U vas skolko lyet?’ – ‘How old are you?’ And so on. Each time, pulse racing at the narrow escape, I smiled as though it were all a joke while I waited for her to put the question into English. At the end of this real-life nightmare, I pretended to go along with their plan to ‘spring’ me from the prison and release me at the border of the British sector of Berlin, to make my own way back to Gatow. On one condition, they said: I must on no account tell Becker that they had been in the Stasi prison, in case he spoiled ‘our’ plan.

The last thing I wanted was to fall into the hands of the KGB. So, I kicked up such a fuss with the guards after being returned to my cell that Becker came to see what was wrong. He was visibly furious when I told him of the Russians’ visit. His reaction was my first intimation that, even in the neo-Stalinist GDR, the half-million Russian troops stationed there were regarded as occupation forces, not brothers-in-arms. My Stasi file indicates that Becker’s masters resented being pushed around by Big Brother: to spite the Russians for their intrusion, Department 3 of the Stasi’s 7th Directorate recommended on the day after their visit that I be handed over through the East German Red Cross to the British Red Cross – a back-channel used by the two governments from time to time.

Not being informed of this, I became increasingly uneasy. At 6 a.m. on 12 May 1959 my breakfast was brought by a warder who wore a high-crowned cap with slashed peak, riding breeches and polished jackboots. He was always accompanied by a black Alsatian dog that used to sniff my crotch as though checking where to bite when given the command.

‘Mach’s schnell!’ It was the first time he had spoken to me. He stood waiting while I ate, the dog watching. Then, ‘Komm mit!’

Expecting to be taken to the interrogation room, I was led instead to the small courtyard just inside the main gate of the prison. There stood Becker with two Stasi heavies in the front seats of an ancient Mercedes. Ushering me into the rear seat without saying where we were going, he handed me a packet of sandwiches as we erupted through the gate with a screech of tyres on the cobbles of the Lindenstrasse. I ate the sandwiches, which tasted delicious after all the bland prison food, as we speeded along the Autobahn to the Marienborn/Helmstedt checkpoint. A few hours later, after six weeks in solitary confinement, I was walking across the no man’s land between East German territory and the British-occupied zone of Germany.

The sensation of unreality was unwittingly increased by the astute and charming lady in British Red Cross uniform to whom Becker handed me over. Without giving them a single quotable quote, she chatted to the Stasi officers for 20 minutes while the clock slowly ticked away the seconds to the agreed hand-over time. All their leading questions were parried with her innocent queries. One sticks in my mind: ‘Do you drink tea in Eastern Germany? Really? How very interesting. I thought you drank coffee.’ It was hard to contain the hysterical laughter that bubbled up inside me when I realised from her oh-so-English small talk that she had to be genuine.

On the British side of the crossing-point designated Checkpoint Alpha – Baker and Charlie were in Berlin – she handed me over to RAF Intelligence officers, after which came a long round of debriefing interrogations to ascertain how much I had given away. Opinions in the RAF hierarchy ranged understandably from wanting to sentence me to several years’ imprisonment for getting caught on the territory of a Warsaw Pact state while engaged on classified intelligence work to patting me on the back for wriggling out of the KGB trap. Fortunately, the latter school of thought won, under the discerning judgement of Air Chief Marshal Sir Hubert Patch, who gave me a personal grilling in his office at Adastral House – and subsequently a reference for my first job on civvy street.

Apart from barber’s rash, the only outward price I had to pay for my frightening six weeks in what inmates later ironically called das Lindenhotel in Potsdam was that Britain’s recently introduced system of positive vetting of applicants for sensitive posts precluded any chance of continuing my linguistic intelligence career inside GCHQ at Cheltenham, as I had planned. Instead, I became an international sales executive for the Rank Organisation and went on to head the BBC’s Eurovision office before becoming a staff television producer/director. In all these capacities, my knowledge of German, Russian and other European languages led to professional contacts with Soviet citizens and satellite officials who continued my education in the history of their countries’ relationship with the bear next door. During the Cold War, they had to make detailed reports on everyone they met in the West, but we got along fine, especially after a few drinks, because my unsought learning curve in Potsdam gave me an understanding of their situation, spied on by the KGB clones imposed on their countries by Moscow. Thus, one way and another, I experienced the Cold War from both sides.

Whether it was really hot or cold depended, of course, on where you lived.

Douglas Boyd

Gironde, France

2014

***

A more ample account of this episode may be found in Daughters of the KGB (The History Press, 2015).

Sources used for dates and other details above are:

a MfS file 11626/62, released to the author by the Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsministeriums der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik on 1 October 2008 in Berlin.

b Das ‘Lindenhotel’ – Berichte aus dem Potsdamer Geheimdienstgefängnis G. Schnell Berlin, ed. Links Verlag 2007.

c unpublished transcripts of her interviews with ex-prisoners loaned by Gabriele Schnell.

d the author’s visit in autumn 2008 to the Normannenstrasse Stasi HQ and the former Lindenstrasse prison in Potsdam, which is now a memorial to the 4,000 people sentenced there to forcible sterilisation in the Nazi era and the thousands imprisoned there by the Gestapo prior to 1945, by the KGB 1945–52 and by the Stasi 1952–89.

INTRODUCTION

After the Gorbachev-Yeltsin restructuring of the economically stagnant USSR failed to prevent its collapse in 1989, optimists decided that the east–west confrontation which had dominated the second half of the twentieth century was over and the greatest danger left was the accidental launch of an ill-maintained Russian ICBM or an explosion in some ageing nuclear facility within the former Soviet Union. After Yeltsin resigned in favour of fast-track KGB officer Vladimir V. Putin, people in the west talked of Putin’s power strategy as a ‘new Cold War’, with his most potent weapons being the huge reservoirs of oil and gas on which half of Europe now runs.

It is not a new war, but the same one. And it did not begin in 1945, as conventional histories assert, but can be traced very clearly all the way back to 1919, when Lenin founded the Communist International, or Comintern – an organisation specifically designed to foment worldwide revolution through Moscow’s strict control of all the national Communist parties and the subversion of trade unions and other political parties in the democracies, with the aim of world domination.

But even that was not the beginning. The Comintern was Lenin’s clever way of rebranding the expansionist imperative of his Tsarist predecessors, of whom Vladimir Putin and his clique of mega-rich ex-KGB officers and lawyers are worthy successors. Although many things about his parentage and career are deliberately concealed, Putin’s first name – politely translated as ‘noble prince’ – contains two Russian roots: the stem of vladet, meaning ‘to control or master’, and mir, meaning ‘world’. Revealingly, the traditional title for a Russian ruler was not korolev, meaning king of a nation, but Tsar – a corruption of ‘Caesar’, i.e. ruler of an empire – with Moscow and St Petersburg at different times claiming to be the third Rome.

In 2008 Putin swapped titles with Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, but this does not mean much in a country where Stalin used titles like General Secretary of the Party to conceal for three bloody decades his absolute control of the vast Soviet empire. Under whatever job titles they choose for themselves, Putin and his close associates command the largest armed forces in Europe, equipped with half the nuclear warheads in the world.

Admired by many Russians for his physical fitness and martial arts prowess – which put to shame the ailing gerontocracy that ruled the USSR for so long – from time to time Putin also flexes his military muscles. Aerial photographs in this book show a long-range Tupolev-95 bomber (NATO code name Bear) being intercepted in British airspace by fighter aircraft from RAF Leuchars in Scotland during August 2007. Capable of delivering a nuclear payload, the Tu-95 was on an electronic intelligence mission, analysing British radar defences and timing in-the-air reaction. These missions are regularly flown against targets in Europe and all the way round the globe to US bases on Guam in the mid-Pacific.

In the 1990s, the cost of the armed forces inherited from the USSR was crippling the budget of the Russian Federation and it seemed that a bankrupt Russia would have to sack the millions of men in its armed forces and neutralise its nuclear arsenal as a condition for obtaining the Western subsidies that appeared vitally necessary. Now, with massive oil and gas reserves already on-line and highly profitable, modernising Russia’s still enormous military machine is a luxury the Putin clique can afford.

Increasing at 10 per cent per annum, the current defence budget is $190 billion for the period ending 2015,1 until which time the most potent weapons in the Russian armoury are the enormous gas and oil reserves themselves, dependence on which gives Putin and his clique the power to plunge many European countries literally back to the dark ages. The three Baltic states – Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – are totally dependent on Russian gas supplies that can be, and have been, turned off at will. So are Bulgaria, Slovakia and Finland. Romania, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic and Greece are 60–80 per cent dependent on Russian gas and even Germany and Italy rely on Moscow for 40 and 32 per cent of their gas, respectively.

In a bizarre foretaste of future warfare, the re-siting by Estonians of a Soviet memorial in Tallinn to the Red Army’s reconquest of their country in 1944 was punished in April 2007 by cyber attacks from Russian-controlled Transdniestria targeting the Estonian government, banks, media and communications facilities including internet servers. With no functioning computers or mobile phones, the country was brought to a standstill. The government’s emergency radio bulletins asked all 900,000 Estonians to stay at home and not make any provocative moves. With 400,000 ethnic Russians implanted on their soil, there was no need to say against whom.

Was this attack just a warning shot for the recalcitrant Estonians who had dared to move a reminder of the Soviet ‘liberation’ of their country? Or was it a rehearsal for something else? Various Russian authorities have denied they had anything to do with the cyber attack, but the consensus among IT experts is that, while some of the techniques used, like ping floods and rentals of botnets, are within the capability of renegade hackers, the overall sophistication of the Estonian cyber attack required massive resources only available with state backing.

In Russian accounts, the Second World War is known as the Great Patriotic War, with official histories glossing over the awkward fact that Stalin chose to be Hitler’s ally for the first twenty months of hostilities. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in summer 1941, he swiftly begged help from the Western Allies he had been trying to undermine for two decades. Yet, throughout the wartime alliance, his secret police spied on Western diplomats and harassed Westerners who risked their lives to help the Soviet war effort. In Britain and North America, the freedoms regarded as normal in democratic states were exploited by undercover Soviet agents working against the Western Allies. In Russia, the Comintern trained dissident nationals of many countries to exploit the inevitable post-war chaos by seizing power in their homelands as pro-Moscow puppet governments.

After 1945 Moscow confused the innocent by calling its spies and agents of influence ‘peace-loving people’. The puppet states were ‘democratic republics’ or ‘people’s republics’ and the United States was glavny vrag – the main enemy – with Britain in second place. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) sealed its captive millions off from the west, allowing only apparatchiki and intelligence agents to emerge. The only westerners allowed in were politicians and journalists of the left on ‘fact-finding’ tours, businessmen at risk of blackmail from honeytraps and the politically innocent and impressionable young.

Having grabbed Finnish Karelia, Besserabia, the Baltic states, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, the Kurile Islands, South Sakhalin and half of Germany during the Second World War, Stalin continued to expand what US President Reagan called ‘the evil empire’ with Albania and Bulgaria (1946) and Czechoslovakia (1948). France, Greece and Italy just missed Communist take-overs because of civil war. In this, the Soviet dictator was a fitting proponent of the Kremlin complex that drove Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great – as is his successor Vladimir Putin.

This book is not an attack on the Russian people or their rulers, although they may think it is. Its purpose? In the global village we now inhabit it is vital to understand our neighbours, and the best way to do that is to know their past, which has made them what they are.

Russian history can be summed up as a thousand years of conflict that expanded the realm of Muscovy from a wooden fort – the original meaning of kremlin – at a trading post deep in the forests of central Russia to a vast empire. Russians justify this expansionist tradition to themselves as ‘the drive to the sea’ of a landlocked people desperate to gain the freedom of the oceans. It was a long drive, ending in Tsar Nicholas II’s nineteenth-century empire that spread across eleven time-zones from the Baltic to the Pacific – and to which, after the October Revolution, Canterbury’s ‘Red Dean’ Hewlett Johnson gave his blessing as ‘the Socialist sixth of the world’.

How does one begin to tackle so vast a subject?

1

GENGHIS KHAN, UNCLE JOE AND VLAD THE GASMAN

On 4 March 1936 William Bullitt, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, sent an unusual cable to Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Washington. He listed what he called ‘personal observations’ about life in Russia: the climate was harsh; government officials were suspicious and secretive; accurate information was hard to obtain; the censorship was rigorous; the constant surveillance was oppressive; Russian diplomacy was adept at worrying a diplomat without even insulting him; and the overall conditions of life were disagreeable and tyrannical. Bullitt ended with the comment that the despatch presented ‘an accurate picture of life in Russia in the year 1936’.

The observations, however, were those of his predecessor Neill S. Brown, who served as US Minister to Russia 1850–53.1 In the intervening eighty years, bloodshed and famine had ravaged the country in the Russian revolution of 1905, the two revolutions in 1917, and the First World War. Although more than 100 million Russians had died violently and/or prematurely in these eight decades, the essentials of life in their country were unchanged. Political repression, perpetual surveillance by ubiquitous legions of spies and informers and the suspicion and hostility with which Western diplomats were treated even during the Second World War, when they were Russia’s allies in its hour of great need, were not Soviet phenomena but Russian. They were not imposed on the Russian people by their Soviet masters with whom Bullitt had to deal, but on the Soviet system by its Russian creators.

Ambassador Bullitt had been given copies of Neill Brown’s despatches by a secretary in the embassy named George Kennan after they were discovered among refuse in a building that had served as stables for the American legation in St Petersburg during the mid-nineteenth century. The United States then being the only major Western nation that did not have a professional diplomatic service, Brown had started life, in his own words, ‘as poor as any man in Tennessee’. He worked as a farm labourer to finance his studies, qualified as a lawyer, fought as a sergeant major with the Tennessee Volunteers in the Seminole Indian Wars and was governor of his state before being made Minister to Russia as a reward for supporting the campaign of President Millard Fillmore. Speaking no language other than English, Brown communicated with the Russian authorities through his French-speaking secretary, French being the language of the Tsar’s court and the educated classes.

In contrast, George Kennan was a career diplomat – a fluent Russian speaker who had studied in Berlin and served his country in Germany and the Baltic states before his first posting to Moscow. He was also perceptive enough to appreciate the historical value of Brown’s despatches. The two diplomats shared not only similar experiences in the daily execution of their duties, but also a similar lack of appreciation by their masters in Washington. On one occasion Brown was driven to lament that he had not heard from his Secretary of State in over a year.2 Similarly, while acting as chargé d’affaires in the absence of an ambassador during 1946, Kennan complained that President Truman’s administration seemed not to care what its representatives in Russia were doing. Near despair drove him to compose what he called his ‘long telegram’ as a desperate plea for someone in Washington to pay attention to what was going on in post-war Moscow.

Since the establishment of diplomatic links between the US and Russia in 1808, the two countries based their relationship on a mutually profitable trading relationship, the avoidance of conflicts of interest and a common wariness of British sea power and French continental ambitions, which culminated in an Anglo-French fleet bombarding Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka peninsula in 1855.3 As Tsar Nicholas I said to a predecessor of Neill Brown, ‘Not only are our interests alike, our enemies are the same.’4 But there were also areas of conflicting interest when Brown arrived in St Petersburg on 23 July 1850. American whalers had bases on Siberia’s Pacific coast; Russian fur-trappers worked out of Kodiak in Alaska, a Russian possession until 1867. America’s Pacific seaboard had seen other incursions as far south as California, where the Russian colony at Fort Ross, just north of San Francisco, was only sold off in 1841.5 Russia was suspicious of American designs on Sakhalin Island and had recently annexed from China the estuary of the Amur River; America was uneasy about Russia’s designs on Japanese territory.

Presented three weeks after his arrival to the Tsar and royal family at the Peterhof Palace, built by Peter the Great, Neill Brown found Nicholas I friendly, praising Maj George Washington Whistler of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, who had just died of cholera in St Petersburg after constructing the railway between the capital and Moscow. While commending the Tsar’s exceptional energy, Brown also deplored his inability to delegate – and his ‘relentless hostility to democratic institutions’.6

All the problems Brown encountered in carrying out his duties in Russia can therefore be seen as normal parts of life there and not acts intended to make life difficult for the representative of a potential enemy state. Had he arrived before the Decembrist uprising of 1825 and the several European revolutions of 1848, after which Nicholas I introduced additional repressive measures, he would have found the atmosphere slightly less oppressive, but the pages of Russia’s history are splattered with episodes of bloody repression by paranoid rulers and nothing Nicholas had done was new.

Neill Brown’s assistant Edward H. Wright came from affluent New England stock. He frequented the beau monde of St Petersburg society – an endless round of glittering balls, private receptions and elegant parties. He, too, commented on the soldiers and police everywhere, and wondered at the crowded streets where people moved about silently. ‘There is,’ he wrote, ‘no noise, no busy hum of life – no laugh, no hearty salutation.’ He also noted that the common people worshipped their autocratic ruler and blamed the cruelties of his rule not on Nicholas, but on his underlings.7

At the time of Brown’s mission to the Imperial Court, the European colonial powers proudly proclaimed their destiny to civilise the world with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. Even in the anti-colonial United States there was a convenient belief that Protestant Europeans had what they called ‘the Manifest Destiny’ to expand the boundaries of their Christian civilisation westward to the Pacific and beyond. Implying a divine mandate and concomitant absolution for the genocidal violence and greed involved, the Manifest Destiny was used to justify extermination of Native American peoples and the acquisition of Texas, Oregon, New Mexico, Northern California, Hawaii and the Philippines.

Most people in the developed Western countries today like to believe that we have moved on from the philosophy of the colonial era. Yet in Russia, what Neill Brown called in his despatch of 28 January 1852 the ‘strange superstition’ still lives on. It has motivated Russia’s rulers from the beginning, was the most important single cause of the Cold War, and flourishes still.

‘A religious belief founded on fear or ignorance’ is how the dictionary8 defines superstition, its etymology indicating that such belief has the power to overcome rational thought and defy logical analysis. Yet, is it possible that fear and ignorance of the outside world are an intrinsic part of the mindset of Russia’s past and present rulers? For most English speakers, whose countries were historically protected from hostile neighbours by sea or ocean until the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles and ocean-going nuclear submarines, it is hard to appreciate the world-view of a people surrounded from time immemorial by enemies who may attack at any time, simply by marching or riding for a few days across the empty spaces that separate them from us. Yet for peoples dwelling on a continental landmass without any natural barriers like mountain ranges or great rivers to protect them from sudden attack, paranoid fear is both so natural and sensible that it becomes an ingrained characteristic.

But ignorance? Can ignorance of the outside world be an evolutionary advantage? The answer is yes, because it enables such peoples to demonise their neighbours, making retaliation and first-strike, allegedly pre-emptive, aggression against these neighbours a knee-jerk reaction to contact, executed swiftly, ruthlessly and without scruple time and again.

No modern ruler of the Russian people epitomises these characteristics better than Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili. Under his revolutionary name of Stalin, meaning ‘man of steel’, he directed for three and a half decades a regime of state terror that held in thrall a population of 250-plus millions – a third of whom were not ethnic Russians. Like fellow dictators Hitler, who was not German, Napoleon, who was not French, and Herod, who was not a Hebrew, Stalin was not Russian. He was a Mingrelian-speaking Georgian from the Caucasus, who came to power after the 1917 October Revolution by sheer cunning, and held onto that power by ruthlessly eliminating any rival, killing millions of his innocent subjects and exiling millions of others to forced labour in sub-human conditions for no crime at all. Yet, because he was elevated by the professedly atheistic Communist Party to the status of living god, it used to be said by his long-suffering subjects that all the crimes committed against them were the work of his minions, acting without the personal knowledge of the man they called ‘the little father of his people’ or simply vozhd, meaning exactly the same as der Führer.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Among the women in his immediate entourage who hero-worshipped him, Stalin imprisoned and had tortured the wife of his faithful, long-serving personal secretary Alexander N. Poskrebyshev. Equally well known to Stalin was Polina Molotova, the wife of his foreign minister, who fell victim to his paranoia and went overnight from being the privileged head of the state perfume industry to the wretched status of a political prisoner, whose whereabouts were concealed by Stalin from her anxious husband.

The best-read ruler of Russia since Catherine the Great, Josef Stalin was a bibliophile with a personal library of 20,000 beloved books. When Shalva Nutsibidze was imprisoned simply because his wife had aristocratic connections, Stalin discovered that this famous Georgian poet spent the hours in his cell translating into Russian the medieval epic Knight in a Panther’s Skin. Each day, the current pages were removed by guards, brought to the Kremlin and edited anonymously by Stalin. After being released, the incredulous Nutsibidze was invited to the Kremlin to meet his mysterious editor, who asked the poet’s wife, ‘Did we torture you too much?’ as though there were a limit up to which torture was decent. Diplomatically, she replied, ‘The past belongs to God.’ On one day in 1940, Stalin personally signed 329 death warrants. Oh yes, he knew.

But few inhabitants of the USSR knew anything about the flesh-and-blood man who terrorised them all. For the last two decades of his life, Stalin lived almost entirely in the Kremlin fortress, emerging from time to time in a heavily armed convoy that sped through Moscow cleared of all other traffic to one of his two dachi outside the city boundaries, each guarded by several cordons of security troops. On his trips to the Crimean Riviera for winter sunshine, he travelled, as did the others of the Soviet elite, in a personal armoured train that sped non-stop for 1,200 miles along similarly cleared tracks, every mile of which was closely patrolled by armed security troops.

During much of the Second World War, for propaganda reasons the Western media dubbed the Red Army ‘our gallant Russian allies’. Hailed as ‘Man of the Year 1942’ by Time magazine’s edition of January 1943, Stalin was given the affectionate nickname of ‘Uncle Joe’ and pictured with suitably avuncular smile on the cover. He could afford to smile. In its March 1943 edition Time described the Soviet Russians as people ‘who look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans’. To Winston Churchill’s horror, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed all his own propaganda and fell completely under Stalin’s spell, which was all the more dangerous for the postwar world because the American president arrogantly declared that he could handle the Soviet leader ‘better than (the British) Foreign Office or my State Department’.9 He also repeatedly tried to cut Churchill out of the decision-making circuit by meeting Stalin alone, expecting Churchill to take this in good part as the junior partner in the Atlantic Alliance. The British bulldog did not take it in good part, and said so, at which Roosevelt lied barefacedly by pretending that this was all Stalin’s doing.10

Only a handful of other foreigners ever met Stalin, to make an assessment of the Soviet dictator undistorted by the continual terror in which he kept even his closest associates. One who did was George Kennan, whose US Foreign Service years included two long periods in Moscow. He described the vozhd for Washington’s guidance when the Second World War neared its end in autumn 1944 as, ‘courageous but wary; quick to anger and suspicion but patient in the execution of his purposes; capable of acting with great decision or waiting and dissembling as circumstances may require; outwardly modest and simple, but jealous of the prestige and dignity of the state he heads; not learned, but shrewd and pitilessly realistic; exacting in his demands for loyalty, respect and obedience.’11

Reading between the lines of Kennan’s tempered diplomatic language, he could have been describing such despots as Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great. Yet Kennan was far from being hostile to the Russian people. An astute observer of them and their leaders, he experienced both pre-revolutionary and Communist regimes at first hand and was later to make himself unpopular in Washington at the height of the Cold War by arguing that the tendency of Western political leaders and especially the Western military elite to demonise the whole Communist bloc was dangerous because it failed to take into account that decisions and actions taken in London, Paris, Bonn or Washington affected the other side’s moves in the great confrontation of the twentieth century, which threatened to exterminate all human life.

Short, stocky, with one arm shorter than the other, Stalin walked with a curiously uneven gait from injuries to his legs sustained in two childhood street accidents. His face was heavily pockmarked by smallpox in infancy, the whites of his eyes yellowish, his teeth bad. He spoke Russian with a thick accent that betrayed his origins as the son of a Georgian washerwoman. His father was either her illiterate alcoholic husband or, more likely, his unpriestly drinking companion, Father Charkviani. Young Josef grew up a kinto, or street-urchin, nearer in spirit and geographically to Teheran and Baghdad than Moscow or St Petersburg. His hometown Gori lay 50 miles from Tiflis, capital of the ancient Georgian people, finally subdued by Russian arms in 1879, the year of his birth.

In Father Charkviani’s school at Gori, the street-urchin taught himself to read ahead of the other pupils and graduated early to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, where he was an exemplary student, attending services and singing enthusiastically in the choir. He then discovered the writings of Karl Marx, and took to the clandestine world of terrorists and revolutionaries of all political hues like a fish to water. Under the revolutionary name ‘Koba’ and a succession of false identities, by 1900 Stalin was fomenting industrial unrest all over the Caucasus with such callous disregard for the workers in the front line who were the targets of police bullets and the sabre slashes of mounted Cossacks that even his fellow conspirators were appalled. Arrested seven times and exiled to Siberia by the Okhrana12 – the Tsarist secret police – Stalin escaped so easily each time that many Old Bolsheviks suspected he was a double agent, playing the situation both ways.

Intelligence officers, and especially those who defect, are all liars. With that caveat, an odd light was thrown by NKVD defector Alexander Orlov on this lingering suspicion among the Old Bolsheviks whom Stalin had executed on trumped-up charges. Orlov told the FBI in his debriefing that an NKVD researcher had found an Okhrana file dating from before the revolution, in which there were numerous denunciations of fellow Bolsheviks, written in Stalin’s very distinctive handwriting. Of a small circle of trusted friends who saw this, only Orlov was still alive two years later – and that was because he was safely in the West. Among the others, Marshal Tukhachevsky was one of the first executed in Stalin’s otherwise unexplained purge of the Red Army in June 1937. He was shot within 24 hours of being sentenced, in defiance of the Soviet law requiring a delay of 72 hours to permit an appeal.13

Orlov made this public in an article for an April 1956 edition of Life magazine. In the same issue, Russian-born journalist Isaac Don Levine wrote about a letter dated 12 July 1913 from Okhrana headquarters in Moscow to its Yeniseisk station that had allegedly been brought secretly to the US by a Russian émigré. The letter outlined Stalin’s role as an informer beginning after his arrest in Tiflis in 1906, continuing through 1908 with his reports to the Okhrana in Baku and later in St Petersburg. Tests of the paper and the typewriter that had been used confirmed the authenticity of the letter, but Orlov thought it more probable that the letter had been forged by ‘someone who knew the truth’.14

Of all this Kennan was unaware, or perhaps just being diplomatic, when he wrote:

Stalin’s youth is shrouded in the mists of underworld revolutionary activity – largely in his native Caucasus. From that he graduated into the Dostoievskian atmosphere of revolutionary conspiracy in European Russia. His life has known only what Lenin called ‘the incredibly swift transition from wild violence to the most delicate deceit’. The placid give and take of Anglo-Saxon life, in particular the tempering of all enmity and all intimacy, the balancing of personal self-respect, the free play of opposing interests – these things [are] incomprehensible, implausible to him.15

Despite his non-Russian origins, Stalin fits well into the long line of brutal Russian rulers that stretches from a Danish Viking named Rurik, who settled in Novgorod during the Dark Ages, to Yuri Long-Arm, Alexander Nevsky, Boris Godunov, Peter the Great, Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev – whose name, incidentally, means ‘Mr Bear’, an appropriate name for a Russian ruler.

The expansionist imperative noted by Neill Brown has been the driving force of Russia’s rulers from the beginning, surviving many setbacks to rise phoenix-like from the ashes each time. The 1917 revolution killed the priests who prayed for the ‘strange superstition’ when Brown was en mission in St Petersburg, but during the seven godless decades that followed the October Revolution it throve again, served as never before by the apostles of Marx and Lenin, who invented a new religion that claimed to be scientific and infallible.

The promises of Communism seduced millions of discontented workers in the Western democracies and hundreds of thousands of liberal intellectuals who were unaware of, or closed their eyes to, the true conditions of life inside what they idealised as ‘the workers’ paradise’. Most of them had no idea that the Kremlin exercised iron control over the national Communist parties through the Comintern, and later the Cominform. Nor did they dream that Moscow regarded its best and brightest converts as dupes to spy on their own countries for military and commercial purposes, or that the mass of ‘fellow-travellers’ were intended as a fifth column to destabilise Western society, weakening its ability to resist Russian expansionism.

The casualties in the front line of this conflict were rarely Russian, which made them totally deniable. As a way of waging war, it was very cheap. It was also very effective in confusing uncommitted citizens in the democratic countries, who were often unable to see that the legitimate wage demands and industrial action of working people desirous of a fair share of the fruits of their labour were exploited by Communist activists taking orders directly from Moscow which had nothing to do with the welfare of the union members who had elected them. All the weak points of Western society were probed and exploited: poverty, racial tension, industrial disputes, and the women’s movement. Like political smart bombs, this kind of subversion could be fine-tuned to divert the leverage of legitimate protest.

When the Berlin Wall was breached in 1989 and the USSR imploded with startling speed, the world relaxed after four and a half decades of living in fear of nuclear war. The architects of glasnost and perestroika, Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his politically savvy wife Raïssa, behaved and talked not unlike a Western president and his wife – which eventually cost them the presidency. If Gorbachev’s successor Boris Yeltsin seemed a thoroughly Russian character – a boisterous, bottom-pinching boozer – he did not frighten us by threatening annihilation. It truly seemed that the Russian Bear was hibernating and might not wake up with a sore head.

Yet, a century before the Cold War began, British Foreign Minister and Prime Minister Lord Palmerston commented, ‘It has always been the policy and practice of the Russian Government to expand its frontiers as rapidly as the apathy or timidity of neighbouring states would permit, but usually to halt and frequently to recoil when confronted by determined opposition; then to await the next favourable opportunity to spring upon its intended victim.’16

Palmerston would not have been surprised that, a couple of years after apparently accepting the loss of its satellites in Europe and Asia, Russia was using new weapons to bully its neighbours again. Weapons in the current Russian armoury include oil and gas, but there is nothing new about the strategy. With hindsight, it can be seen that the collapse of the USSR was just another Palmerstonian setback, after which the new generation of men in the Kremlin, with the Putin-Medvedev clique at the helm of the Russian ship of state, are obsessed with that ‘strange superstition’ identified by Neill Brown a century and a half ago. Like the Romanovs before the revolution and the Communists after 1917, today’s oligarchs are in thrall to what one might call in modern usage ‘the Kremlin Complex’.

HOW AND WHY DID IT ALL BEGIN?

Many modern Russian faces indicate a mingling of Tartar or other Asiatic blood in the past. So some people say it can all be traced back to the Mongol conquest of Russia when Genghis Khan’s shaman Kokochu told the Great Khan that it was the will of Heaven for him and his family to rule the whole earth.

In fact, it goes back even further than that.

2

SLAVES, AMBER, FURS AND TERROR

Zhili byli, dyed i baba …. ‘Way back in Granddad’s and Grandma’s time,’ is how Russian fairy tales begin.

The origins of the Russians are as vague as a fairy tale, lost in prehistory not because they predate Greece and Rome, but because the people living in the heartland of modern Russia at the end of the Dark Ages were still illiterate herdsmen and foresters many centuries after numeracy and literacy had spread around the Mediterranean basin. Like all illiterate people, they took pleasure in telling, listening to, and singing sagas of great deeds – as Russians still do.

Slavery was not restricted to the Africans shipped across the Atlantic or the million white slaves of Islam. The buying and selling of people is so general in primitive societies that it comes as no surprise to learn that these remote forest- and plain-dwellers were the natural prey of human traffickers from the slave-owning countries south of the Black Sea. The very word Slav is derived from the words for ‘slave’ in Greek and Latin. Invading the USSR in 1941, Hitler played on this with his slogan Slaven sind Sklaven – Slavs are slaves – to justify treating as sub-human the millions of inhabitants at the mercy of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS and the Einsatzgruppen death squads in the vast territory conquered during the first months of Operation Barbarossa – his surprise attack on the USSR in summer 1941.

Although traders in furs and amber travelled through the area along primitive trade routes at least as far back as 1500 BC, they left no written records. Between the fourth and ninth centuries AD, various migrating nomadic peoples including the Huns, Avars, Goths and Magyars passed through what is now Russia, leaving little archaeological evidence of their passage. Nor do we know where the first Russians came from, although the language contains clues suggesting that the people who originally evolved it were pastoral nomads living with their herds in the grasslands of the steppes. For example, the Russian verb to find is na’idti or nakhodit’ – meaning literally to step on something otherwise invisible in long grass.

That there was some trading contact with Mediterranean visitors during the prehistoric period is shown by early coins and artefacts unearthed by archaeologists. However, since history is made of written records, it is true that there is no Russian history before 988, when Grand Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev welcomed Greek Orthodox missionaries sent by the patriarch of Constantinople and had all his male subjects baptised. These missionaries translated religious texts into a form of Russian for their eastern Slav converts, using their own uncial script with extra characters for sounds that did not exist in Greek – like ch, sh, shch and ts. With St Cyril being the best known of these missionaries, the modified Greek alphabet used by Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Belorussians and Serbs is still called Cyrillic. The downside of this gift of literacy was that the Greek alphabet isolated them from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, whereas the western Slavs – Poles, Czechs and Slovaks – given a modified Latin script by their missionaries, merged naturally into the mainstream of European evolution.

If Russians are understandably sensitive about the idea of being descendants of primitives regarded as slaves by the civilised world, Slavophile Russian historians also tend to reject the otherwise generally accepted etymology of russkiy and Rossiya – meaning ‘Russian’ and ‘Russia’ respectively – being derived from rus, a Viking word for oar. Island dwellers like the British envisage the Vikings leaping ashore from their drakkar long ships powered by single square-rigged sails, yet it was more often by oar-power that the Norsemen penetrated the interior of the continent along the great rivers, against current and wind.

The first permanent settlements in what is now the Russian heartland were established by Scandinavian trader-raiders who settled in the Ryazan area, south-east of Moscow, early in the ninth century. At this time Moscow was just a kreml or stockaded trading post in the forests. Intermarriage with local women, after the native males had been disposed of, produced the varyagi or Varangians, a mixed stock whose loose federation was ruled by a single leader or khagan, replacing the previous tribal chiefs. The first Russian dynasty, which lasted in parts of the area from 1157 to 1598, owes its name to a Varangian knyaz or princeling called Rurik who originated in Danish Jutland. From his base at Novgorod – literally, ‘the new town’ – the Varangians raided and traded in amber, furs and slaves far down the Volga River to the Black Sea, reaching Constantinople in 860 and roaming onwards to Baghdad, as testified by hoards of coins dug up in Russia and dated to this period.

The earliest extant Russian history text is dated 1377. It is a copy of Povest vremennykh let – the account of bygone years – originally compiled in Kiev about 1113. Based on Byzantine sources and orally transmitted sagas, it tells of an earlier ruler named Svyatoslav (936–72). Possibly a grandson of the legendary Rurik, he spent most of his adult life conquering one neighbouring tribe after another while his redoubtable mother Olga directed affairs of state back home.

Svyatoslav’s usual technique was to send messengers to his neighbours one after another, announcing his intention to attack them. The ultimatum to submit or die was remarkably successful. He defeated the Khazars on the lower reaches of the Don River and the Ossetians and Circassians in the north Caucasus. After he conquered both the Volga Bulgars and their Balkan cousins, the end of the story has a familiar ring: Svyatoslav had embarked on this military expedition at the request of the Byzantines, with whom he was at the time allied, but afterwards he refused to hand over the territory and spoils of war because he wished to establish a Russo-Bulgarian empire of his own. Having bitten off more than he could chew, he was defeated by a larger Byzantine army in 971, to be killed the following year when ambushed by the nomadic Turkic Pechenegs.

It fell to his son and successor Vladimir (960–1015) to weld together the conquered peoples into a cohesive state based on Kiev in modern-day Ukraine. At its apogee, Kievan Rus stretched from the open steppe in the south-east northwards to Lake Ladoga and the upper Volga basin and owed its prosperity to trading and raiding via the great riverine routes from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The benefits of contact with Byzantium were many: with the new Orthodox Christian religion came the first code of laws, architecture, art, music and a faint whisper of literature. Although Vladimir’s twelve sons and numerous grandsons inherited considerable territory, none of them was powerful enough to take overall control of a society where ninety other princelings had retinues of up to 2,000 warriors. Like the knightly vassals of Western European kings, these men did no productive work and their requisitioning of horses, food, clothing and weapons must have placed a great strain on the primitive economy. Unlike their Western counterparts, they had no long-term loyalty based on fixed fiefs, and thus honed the paranoia of their leaders by frequently changing allegiance.

Extent of Kievan Rus (c.1050).

Exploiting the internecine struggles between these Kievan princelings and their supporters, Turkic nomads from Central Asia fought first on one side, then another. The settled towns were natural targets for the Pechenegs and Kipchaks, whose pastures on the steppe lay only a day’s ride from Kiev, and whose repeated savage incursions led a sizeable part of the population of Kievan Rus to emigrate northwards, where the rigours of a savage winter were a small price to pay for the comparative safety of forests in which their mounted enemies, travelling with families and herds, could not easily pursue them. The inevitable end came after a Byzantine princess named Helena Komnene was given as wife to Yuri Long Arm, Grand Prince of Kiev (1099–1157). Their son Andrei Bogolyubsky, Prince of Rostov and Suzdal, stormed Kiev and sacked the city in 1169, his followers burning monasteries and churches, raping women, slaughtering men and enslaving the survivors.

The earliest well-documented Russian hero was Grand Prince Alexander of Vladimir (1220–63), still revered as Alexander Nevsky in memory of his victory at the Neva River in 1240 over a Swedish army blocking Russian access to the Baltic. Triumph going to his head, Alexander took his courtesy title of prince somewhat too seriously and was exiled from Novgorod. Shortly afterwards, Pope Gregory IX had the idea of converting the whole Baltic hinterland to the Roman church and despatched the Teutonic Knights to ‘pacify’ the area. In panic, Novgorod invited Alexander back. After a series of skirmishes, in April 1242 he defeated the invaders in a famous battle on frozen lakes near Pskov, and continued fending off Swedish, German, Lithuanian and Finnish advances from the west.

Already, the precondition of ‘healthy’ paranoia was in place, for the Russians were constantly surrounded by enemies. To the south and east, the Kipchaks had moderated their raids and now sought an alliance against ‘terrible strangers from the east’, who turned out to be the Mongol hordes from Central Asia. Reasoning that, if the buffer zone where the Kipchaks pastured their herds fell to the Mongols, they would be next in line, two Kievan princes called Mstislav joined forces with their former enemies to confront the new common foe, only to be roundly defeated at the battle of the Kalka River in 1223.

For whatever reason, the Mongols withdrew, reappearing thirteen years later in greater force: 35,000 mounted archers led by Batu Khan. Learning from Sun Tzu’s Art of War