“A case study of how an idea written on paper sacks in the midst of the gulag archipelago could one day be pronounced as a national idea by the heirs of the NKVD.”
– Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism

Charles Clover, the Financial Times’ former Moscow bureau chief, began the debate at the Frontline Club on Thursday 28 April by defining the idea of Eurasianism as, “essentially an artificial nationalism created in the 1920s by Russian exiles to rationalise and justify, in theoretical terms, an empire where Russia forms the core of a unique non-western civilisation.”

It was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union that these ideas were re-discovered and re-appropriated by “regime dead-enders who wanted to see a continuation of the soviet empire but on other terms,” through a different idea that would justify it.

Driven by the rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin and propagated by the media, “this is not an ethnic nationalism,” said Clover, but rather a “civilisational nationalism” with Russia at its centre.

While not a new idea, Eurasianism as part of official discourse only appeared very recently, said writer and broadcaster Mary Dejevsky.

Eurasianism was an attempt to bring some sort of concord between the pro-western and Slavophil strands of thinking that had dominated Russian society since the turn of the 20^th century, “at a time when Russia was looking for an identity for itself… especially in terms seeking a definition of nationhood,” said Dejevsky.

“The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left Russia with a huge identity crisis that took a long time to enter official consciousness, but that has really started to crystallise in the last two or three years.”

Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador to Russia from 1988 to 1992, said that Eurasianism is merely the “current phase of something that has gone on a very long time in Russian history.

“With a humiliating collapse, questions of identity – who we are, what we are – become vital and people produce fake answers which can then be exploited by politicians.”

Russian history, said Braithwaite, is a succession of humiliations and “the Slavophil-Eurasian idea is partly a compensatory device for the various disasters that have happened” – and a way of rationalising that with the idea of Russia as a great nation.

Clover said he would group this philosophy of Eurasianism with Russia’s changing relationship to the West as part of a multi-national nationalism designed to accomplish certain strategic objectives.

BOOK LAUNCH: @charles_clover 'Black Wind, White Snow', 27 April @YaleBooks https://t.co/kmdYY1B8GO pic.twitter.com/dJ4KSWF1iX

— Pushkin House (@Pushkin_House) April 17, 2016

At the same time confronted by a more nationalistic opposition during Putin’s third term, the Kremlin decided to equate this sense of national humiliation with the idea of a foreign conspiracy and promote a Eurasianism that “would ensure the integrity of a multi-national state and possibly expand it” said Clover.

Gabriel Gatehouse, chair of the debate and BBC Newsnight foreign correspondent, asked the panel to comment on the observation that a lot of the current official Russian discourse seems to be aimed at trying to return to a bi-polar world, reminiscent of Cold War divides.

For Dejevsky, many Russians are not looking to resurrect the old Cold War order, “but rather a multi-polar world where a smaller Russia co-exists but has an equal voice with other powers in the world.”

“There is a resort to Eurasianism, whether organised or simply as a concept, when Russia feels that is has been cold shouldered, especially by Europe, and is looking to a certain identity which has some justification, some basis, in a Russia that belongs to both Europe and Asia,” she said.

In this context, said Clover, the question of whether Putin himself believes in the idea of Eurasianism is almost irrelevant.

“We assume that Putin is a pragmatist at heart and only really cares about power. That has always and will always be true, but the context of his pragmatism has changed utterly over ten years.”

In the past, pragmatism was paying lip-service to nationalism, said Clover, but now national interests are denominated in completely different ways in terms of territory, making it pragmatic for Putin to seize Crimea and put troops into eastern Ukraine.

“The entire context of being Putin has changed. The playing field in Russia is now a totally nationalist one. So as a skilful, powerful politician, the way he plays politics has changed and as a pragmatist he must now be a nationalist.”

Both writers encounter people who are longing for a strong leader to bring back security and pride. They will be joining us to discuss whether, following the challenges to democratic structures in Russia, Hungary, and most recently Poland, eastern Europe’s new democracies are at risk.

Chaired by author and journalist Oliver Bullough, who lived and worked in Russia from 1999 – 2006. He is author of two books about Russian history and politics: The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame Be Great.

With:

Peter Pomerantsev, the author of Nothing is True and Nothing is Possible, Adventures in Modern Russia. He is a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute, where he runs a project on contemporary propaganda and how to deal with it.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh is the author of two collections of short stories, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and The Pleasant Light of Day. At present he is working on a book about the Jewish world of Eastern Europe and its destruction, as witnessed by its writers.

This event is organised by

On Wednesday 14 October a packed audience convened at the Frontline Club, eager to discuss worldwide censorship and the extent to which technology has increased the scope of surveillance. The event, titled Spies, Lies and Secrets, was held in collaboration with Index on Censorship – the international organisation that promotes and defends the right to free expression worldwide – to coincide with the release of their latest quarterly magazine. 

L-r: Robert McCrum, Xiaolu Guo, Rachael Jolley, Ismail Einashe and Stephen Grey

The distinguished panel included award-winning British investigative journalist and author Stephen Grey, whose recent book The New Spymasters looks at spying in the digital age and how it has evolved since the Cold War; Xialou Guo, fiction writer, filmmaker, political activist, and an outspoken critic of communist oppression in China; associate editor of the Observer Robert McCrum; and freelance journalist and associate editor at Warscapes Ismail Einashe. Index on Censorship magazine editor Rachael Jolley chaired the event.

Grey introduced the event: “It’s quite chilling to know the amount of information that can be unearthed about you [due to the internet], and not just about you but also your friends and family.”

He then questioned whether or not censorship was ever justifiable. “We want to stand up for freedom of expression but some censorship does seem logical. We want to stop our children from being taken into gangs or lured off to Syria.”

Robert McCrum responded to a question about censorship during the Cold War and in the present day: “The difference is that in those days it was simple, you knew who the enemy was and you knew what the enemy did. The big change now is this extraordinary explosion of global consciousness.

“The founders of this magazine were trying to defend literary freedom in the cold war. Now we’re trying to defend freedom of speech and thought and expression across the globe – that’s the big difference.”

Great debate on censorship @frontlineclub tonight with Robert McCrum, Xiaolu Guo @StephenGrey, @IsmailEinashe Rachael Jolley #indexfrontline

— Jacqueline Pietsch (@jjpietsch) October 13, 2015

The discussion moved onto the question of the internet and the impact it has had on freedom of expression and censorship.

Guo said: “The internet has great advantages because it de-centralises the power. There’s no one boss in the internet world – there are many controllers.”

Guo then commented on the strict internet controls enforced in her home country, China. “There are currently at least 2 million internet police there – cyber control in China is vast.”

Continuing on this topic, Grey said: “The freedom that the internet brings puts the fear of God into governments (…) They can’t defend some of the means that the internet provides.”

Einashe responded to an audience question on whether censorship has seen an increase in recent years. “I feel that in different East African countries that I know about that censorship has certainly increased, states are able to censor much more.”

He continued: “The link between social movements and online activity is really important too because you can’t really affect social change solely on the web – you have to connect to social movements too.”

For June’s BookNight we are pleased to welcome author and special advisor at Human Rights Watch Fred Abrahams, who will present his book Modern Albania From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe over an intimate dinner with Frontline Club members. You can now order Modern Albania with a 20% discount. Please use this code to claim your discount: CSF615MALB.

Modern Albania offers a vivid history of the fall of the Albanian Communist regime and the trials and tribulations that led the country to become the state it is today. The book provides an in-depth look at the Communists’ final Politburo meetings and the first student revolts; the fall of the Stalinist regime and the war in neighbouring Kosovo; and the relationship between Albania and the United States. A rich, narrative-driven account, Modern Albania gives readers a front-row seat to the dramatic events of the last battle of Cold War Europe.

Fred Abrahams is a writer who has worked for twenty years in areas marred by political crises and armed conflict, including the Balkans and the Middle East. In Modern Albania, he weaves together interviews with key Albanians and international parties who have played a role in the country’s politics since 1990.

Guests will be expected to have read the book, and to be ready and willing to contribute to the conversation. This will be an in-depth discussion rather than a standard format Q&A. The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, following by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM. We will get to know one another over starters before the introduction of the evening’s guest author.

The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at The Guardian and The Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

Menu £25 per person excluding drinks

In April 1953, George Blake returned to Britain as a national hero, one of a small group of British diplomats who returned alive from three hard years as prisoner of the North Koreans. When the new Queen was crowned a couple of months later, he was among the select few invited to celebrate the day in No 2 Carlton Gardens, a discreet building overlooking the Mall from where the men who ran Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service were watching the royal procession. Little did they know that during his time as a prisoner he had become a Communist and decided to work for the KGB.

George Blake worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union until he was discovered in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison. He escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and fled to the USSR.

All traitors are complicated, but no one more so than Blake. In The Righteous Traitor, director George Carey speaks to Blake’s close acquaintances, historians and other former spies to chronicle his curious history. A close friend of his, Louis Wesserling, describes Blake: “He was a gambler…He spied to fill a void. It gave him a sense of enormous importance”. According to Tim Weiner, the famous historian of the CIA, “the revelation of Blake’s treachery did more damage to relations between Britain and America than all the Cambridge Five put together.”

Directed by George Carey
Duration: 90′
Year: 2015

Rabbit a La Berlin, a film by Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosołowski which will be screened on Wednesday 20 August, examines the plights of a colony of rabbits which lived between the two barriers of the Berlin Wall. Enclosed in this space, the animals lived undisturbed lives – until the Wall was taken down. Then the rabbits had to readjust, and learn to live in a new environment (much like the people, of course, who had to unify what was once West and East). The rabbits who inhabited the “death strip” between the West and the East are not the only example of nature caught in human conflict.

The Animals in War Memorial in London. Tamsin Slater CC

Animals such as horses and dogs have long been used by the military, but the impact of war can go far beyond such matters of “utility”.  As a human endeavour, war and armed conflict can have a profound impact on the environment and natural systems: landscapes, for instance, have been transformed by advancing militaries and migrating populations. What is more, this impact is not only inflicted during the fighting of war. Military preparations, such as training and the development of a military infrastructure, also affect the environment. And in the aftermath of war, reconstruction once again leaves a mark.

The Cold War, in this respect, presents a specific example, in which a conflict was not actively fought (at least in the European arena), but nonetheless dictated human activities and shaped their movements. It therefore also affected the natural elements of this continent. The rabbits in the “death strip” lived happy, untroubled lives because no people or natural enemies were present in the enclosed space.

In another case which mirrors the Berlin rabbits’ story, groups of deer also felt the effects of the Iron Curtain, which stretched into what was then Czechoslovakia. At the time, three parallel electrified fences presented a heavily guarded border: over the years, 500 people were shot as they tried to escape into West Germany. The barrier would now traverse a combined German/Czech national park, where a wildlife crossing has been made to aide red deer who migrate in the summertime. However, a recently concluded study shows that the animals in the Sumava Natural Park in the Czech Republic now balk at crossing the area where the fences once stood. The animals on the German side present the same behaviour. Where people are now freely crossing political borders, the deer seem to have kept the Cold War distinction “in mind”.

With the 25-year anniversary of the fall of the Wall, none of the deer living today would remember the fence as it stood. Red deer typically live for 15 years, meaning that the animals now fearful of the traverse are at least of the second generation since the fall – implying that fawns would have adapted their mothers’ migratory behaviours in avoiding the barrier.

The Cold War is not the only case of a conflict that is characterised by a stand-off. It still echoes in the relations between North and South Korea that have been restrained for decades, a fact that is represented by the so-called Korean Demilitarised Zone. It lies on the original boundaries between the US and USSR brief administrations of Korea post-World War Two, and was reinstated in the 1953 Armistice Agreement that ended the Korean War. The DMZ roughly divides the Korean Peninsula in half: it is 250 km long and four meters wide, extending on both sides of the front line. It is a buffer zone, with large numbers of troops still stationed alongside it.

Only two small villages remain within the boundaries of the DMZ; the rest of the zone is a deadly place for people as the area remains heavily patrolled and tensions are still high. As a result, the DMZ has become an involuntary, unintended wildlife park. The area encompasses a unique geography including mountains, prairies and swamps – and thus is a unique temperate habitat. It is home to a number of near-extinct species: the Korean tiger, Amur leopard and Asiatic black bear are free to roam this “green ribbon”. While the guns and land mines are keeping people out, they are de facto keeping other species alive.

A deer runs along the train tracks at the DMZ

One important note, however, is that this ecosystem has a precarious future: demilitarised zones might not remain in that stage indefinitely, and especially not if a war were to break out. Should the tensions between the two Koreas become hotter, the troops now lurking on the border will  cross the DMZ, destroying its unique ecosystem. In a telling occurrence, South Korea’s submission to UNESCO to create an official wildlife park in the southern part of the DMZ, has been blocked by North Korea as a violation of the armistice agreement.

View the trailer for Rabbit à la Berlin here:

“Good breeding and good manners are no guarantee of loyalty.” On Friday 11 October 2013, the Frontline Club screened Philby – The Spy Who Went Into the Cold. Kim Philby acted as a Soviet double-agent while serving as chief British intelligence officer in the United States, and while heading MI6’s anti-Soviet section. The BBC Storyville preview delved into Kim Philby’s conflicted past.

Moderator Nick Fraser (L) and director George Carey (R) Photo by: George Symonds

Before the lights went down, moderator Nick Fraser introduced director George Carey:

“While I’m a mild connoisseur of, as one might be, the deviant behaviour of the British upper classes, he is a true obsessive [laughter from the audience]. If there were a Mastermind of errors and stupidities committed by the British upper classes, George would score 40 points [more laughter].”

“I’m not sure I would have written that script myself,” Carey was quick to qualify:

“I came to Philby with a slightly more open-minded view [even more laughter]. I hope you all enjoy the film.”

As the lights went up, Fraser engaged the Q&A:

“The very charming but overweight KGB man says he was a romantic who believed in Karl Marx, . . . but when you went to his lair, there was P.G. Woodhouse there, not Karl Marx. What evidence did you ever uncover that he wasn’t just trapped by the decisions in his early life, but actually continued to believe in all the plumbery of Marx and Lenin?”

“I think the two can both be true. He was certainly trapped,” said Carey.

“I think he missed lots of things about England, and I think he felt the Communism that he thought he was fighting for and had done those things for had not really delivered. . . . What puzzled me more than if he’d kept the faith or if it was a burnt out faith, was how on earth he’d got away with it. And it seemed to me he’d got away with it because everyone in that world was like him, like us. They were a gang as it were, and it was too easy.”

Many of the interviewees from the film were present in the audience. “A hopeless cause” was how one attendee described the idea of pursuing the Freedom of Information Act to find out exactly what Philby had done:

“It’s a hopeless cause to the extent that the secret service has never – and will never – disclose documents under any kind of legislation or statute as exists today, because they are in the business of keeping secrets. . . . And they have promised individuals today, yesterday and tomorrow that identities of people who have given information and cooperated will never be disclosed. So quite simply, it’s bad for business to make those kinds of disclosures.”

Fraser put it to Carey:

“You still didn’t quite explain to me in the film, though I love the film deeply, how it was he believed in all this shit for all this time. Because intelligent people like Arthur Koestler or Orwell could have set him right very early on, George.”

“Well,” responded Carey:

“Like many communists themselves, I’m sure he became disillusioned. The point is that was the side you reckoned you belonged to. You’d signed up for it. He’d committed himself to it.”

In reference to a comment on Philby being a product of his time Carey expanded:

“How on earth Philby thought his way through the Soviet–Nazi pact, given that the impetus of his spying was anti-fascist, goodness knows. But the general view amongst KGB I talked to, who kind of went through the same thing themselves was, ‘Oh well, our leader knows best,’ and ‘In the end it’s just expediency,’ ‘In the end it’s the way to defeat themselves,’ but I agree it’s a very difficult question to answer.”

“It was a kind of cast,” opined Fraser, “of upper-middle class intellectuals from places like Winchester, Eton et cetera:”

“Surely now, they would be more likely to be making a ton of money in the City with financial instruments. And the ideologies now – wholly unfashionable.”

In terms of the human cost of espionage, the film was unequivocal:

“Spies may have good causes, but few things they ever do is good.”

Upcoming documentaries on BBC Storyville can be found here.

On a stormy night in January 1963, Kim Philby, a charming Englishman with a tendency to stutter, failed to meet his wife at a dinner party in Beirut and instead defected to the Soviet Union. It was the end of a unique career, which at one time had seen this long term double agent rise to become head of the anti-Soviet section of MI6.

Veteran director George Carey captures the extraordinary story of what happened to Philby, from the moment he first came under suspicion in 1951, to his death in Russia just before the end of communism. Several people who knew him well – in London, Beirut and Moscow – talk frankly about his character, and the weaknesses in the British establishment that made his double life possible.

Directed by George Carey
Duration: 70′
Year: 2013

This screening is in partnership with BBC Storyville, the BBC’s international feature documentary strand.

"There’s a definite lack of leaders [today]," documentary producer Richard Symons commented to a Frontline Club audience on 8 October.  "Where are they?"

Symons had just screened the third film in his and Joanna Natasegara’s series The Price of Kings, which explores the weight of leadership.  Previous films have focused on Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres.

One true leader, the latest Price of Kings film suggests, has been Oscar Arias, two-time President of Costa Rica.

In 1987, he famously defied American and Soviet insistence – "an incredible amount of pressure," one aide put it – that Costa Rica pick a side in the Cold War proxy battles that were tearing Central America apart.

"I had to fight Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev," Arias reflects in the film.  "It was not gonna be easy, to say to Goliath, ‘well, here’s David, little David, but we’re gonna fight for our convictions, for our principles, for our ideals."

Peace was Arias’ ideal.  With no military behind him – Costa Rica’s disbanded in 1948 – he nonetheless broke from Washington and Moscow to bring ideologically-opposed Central American leaders to a negotiating table.

"Dial back to 1986," Symons said, "if you looked at those guys and what was going on in their countries, Arias must have been absolutely off his tits to think he could even get them on the phone!"

The Esquipulas Peace Agreement resulted, settling bloody conflicts that raged between Kremlin- and American-backed groups fighting for power over Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.  His efforts earned him the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize.

"In person, he’s an oddly persuasive man," Natasegara shared.  "He’s not necessarily hugely charismatic, and yet there’s something right about what he says, and you see how he could have convinced them."

In 2006, Arias risked his legacy by serving once more as Costa Rica’s President; the film shows how his dogged support for an unpopular mining project left his reputation among Costa Ricans in tatters. 

Today, he campaigns – so far unsucessfully – for an International Arms Treaty that would halt the flow of weapons from idustrialized nations to the third world.  

"Use the dividends of peace," Arias says simply, "[and] the world would be quite different, it seems to me."

After the screening, an audience member wondered why so many people in the film, even those very close to Arias, did not speak entirely positively about him.  Natasegara answered, 

"Ironically, I think apart from two people in the film […] everybody was very warm about him.  And I think that’s what’s nice […] that they feel so much trust in him that they can speak openly about his flaws […]  So if they speak badly towards him, it’s only because he allows this kind of openness."

The trailer for The Price of Kings:  Oscar Arias can be seen here.

Watch the event here. 

With detailed insider knowledge David E Hoffman told the story of how the president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev and the US president Ronald Reagan prevented the escalation of the Cold War into a full-blown conflict.

As a reporter for the Washington Post Hoffman followed Reagan throughout his campaign and subsequent presidency but found him to be something of an enigma – “he was a terrific actor, he played roles”.

Neither Hoffman nor his fellow journalists knew what his private papers later revealed, that Reagan was in favour of disarmament.  Today support for nuclear deterrents is one of the foreign policy benchmarks for Republicans, said Hoffman, but Reagan held a different perspective, which became more apparent later in his presidency.

Gorbachev was a similarly unlikely candidate for change – as a Soviet Communist he rarely deviated from the party line. According to Hoffman, by the time Gorbachev was made General Secretary in 1985 he had already concluded that by reducing the vast sums spent on defence and the Cold War he could bridge the gap  between what Hoffman termed “the rotten lives” that most Russians led, and the country’s substantial resources.

The title of Hoffman‘s book The Dead Hand refers to a semi-automatic system developed by the Russians in the 1980s whereby three people who remained in the bunker were able to start the nuclear retaliation should everyone else be wiped out by a US attack.

The major problem, said Hoffman was that the Americans never knew about it – the Russians forgot that an effective deterrent needed to be common knowledge, said Hoffman.

It is not known how much Gorbachev knew about the development of biological weapons in the 1980s and he denied all knowledge when questioned by a concerned British prime minsister Margaret Thatcher and Reagan’s chief of staff James Baker.  Whether the real Gorbachev was a “participant or saviour?” remains unknown, said Hoffman.

But if a more hawkish character been leading the Soviet Union, things could have turned out very differently.

Instead of following through with the Generals’ plans, Gorbachev “put them in the bottom drawer” and ignored them, said Hoffman, who added that “without Gorbachev the Cold War would not have ended”.

As for Reagan, he “played an enormous role too” in ending the Cold War, but, concluded Hoffman “needed a partner” in order to do so.