The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

Yeltsin caused further incredulity by declaring that Putin would be the next President. The incredulity swiftly disappeared, however, when Putin launched a brutal, full-scale attack on the breakaway republic of Chechnya which achieved far greater short-term success than Yeltsin’s offensive five years earlier. Putin’s popularity in the opinion polls soared in only three months from 2 to 70 percent. On New Year’s Eve, Yeltsin sprang his final surprise on Kremlin-watchers by stepping down from the presidency before the end of his term and announcing that Putin was succeeding him as acting president. The striking contrast between the infirm and alcoholic leadership of Yeltsin’s final years in office and the tough no-nonsense leadership style successfully cultivated by Putin during his first months in the Kremlin won him victory at the presidential elections in March 2000.

THE SVR AND FSB ARE GUARANTEED powerful roles under the Putin presidency. Neither foresees a return to the Cold War. Both, indeed, now have well-established, though little-advertised, liaison arrangements with the main Western intelligence agencies. The SVR and FSB none the less expect a continuing conflict of interest with the West.

They have good reason to do so. The collapse of the Soviet system has revealed a much older East-West faultline which has more to do with events in the fourth century AD than in the twentieth century. It follows the line not of the Cold War Iron Curtain but of the division between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity which began with the establishment of Constantinople as the New Rome in 330 and was made permanent by the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic churches in 1054. Though the Orthodox East was invaded by Islam and the unity of the Catholic West fractured by the Protestant Reformation, the cultural divide between East and West persisted. “From the time of the Crusades,” writes the historian Norman Davies, “the Orthodox looked on the West as a source of subjugation worse than the infidel.”⁷¹ It is precisely because the faultline is so deeply entrenched that it is so difficult to overcome.⁷² Those east European states joining NATO at the end of the twentieth century, those likely to do so early in the twenty-first and the most probable future entrants into the European Union are all on the western side of the divide.⁷³ There is still no very promising candidate in Orthodox Europe.

To most Russians, the welcome given by Western statesmen in the late 1980s to Gorbachev’s ambition of establishing Russia’s place in the “common European home” now seems hollow, if not hypocritical. “A Russia shut out and disconnected,” argued historian Jonathan Haslam, “will inevitably be troublesome.”⁷⁴ Despite Russian membership of the Council of Europe, the Russia-NATO Joint Council and other Western attempts to bridge the East-West divide, the enlargement of NATO and the planned expansion of the European Union confirm Russia’s relegation to the margins of Europe. The SVR, unsurprisingly, is resolutely opposed to both. Its opposition is strengthened by resentment at Russia’s national decline. In the space of a few months in 1989 the revolutions in eastern Europe destroyed the Soviet Bloc. Two years later Russia lost, even more suddenly, almost half the territory previously ruled from Moscow and found itself smaller than in the reign of Catherine the Great. The signs are that some—perhaps many—SVR officers share the belief of the current leader of the Russian Communist Party, Gennadi Zyuganov, in a long-term Western plan first to destroy the Soviet state and then to prevent a revival of Russian power. Russia’s historic mission, they believe, is to bar the way to American global hegemony and the triumph of Western values.⁷⁵

The Yeltsin presidency was far too short a period for Russia to adjust to the disappearance of the Soviet Bloc and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Like post-war Britain, post-Communist Russia has, in Dean Acheson’s famous phrase, “lost an empire and not yet found a role.” But, whereas for Britain the loss of empire came at a time of political stability and economic recovery, in Russia it has been accompanied by economic collapse and political disintegration. Russia is in the unusual position at present of having a national anthem but little prospect of agreeing on words to go with it—one sign among many of its current crisis of national identity.⁷⁶