In an interview, Schröder looked back at his relationship with Putin and described him as a ‘man you can trust’. ‘He was open, and in contrast to his image he has a lot of humour. He is very family-oriented, and he doesn’t let down his friends. He’s someone I would be glad to have a beer or glass of wine with even if I didn’t have to deal with him politically.’8 Those were clearly the words of a man who had no intention of disparaging a colleague who was still in office and with whom he maintained close business and personal ties. But that does not make them irrelevant. On the contrary, the close relationship between Putin and Schröder – and between Putin and Chirac – was a major factor in the early 2000s as Russia tried to position itself in the world.
With the UK balanced somewhere between the ‘European’ view and the American, compromises had to be thrashed out – among them NATO’s two major decisions of 2002. In May the NATO–Russia Council was set up, bringing Russia closer to the club. But six months later, at a historic summit in Prague, NATO invited seven former Soviet satellites to become members of the club. It wasn’t quite what Putin had in mind when demanding to be treated as an equal.
NATO’s sun shines on eastern Europe
The lights go down in the seventeenth-century Spanish Hall of Prague castle. On a stage two dancers perform a hilarious piece by a Czech-born choreographer, Jiří Kylián, to music by Mozart. The dancers are dressed (somewhat scantily) in period costume and wigs. In one part of the performance they leap about like fleas, performing crazy mating rites on a huge four-poster bed. But the audience is not composed of President Václav Havel’s bohemian buddies from a Prague theatre: they are the heads of state and 700 guests from NATO’s present and future member states – not all of them expecting such a raunchy curtain-raiser to the alliance’s enlargement process.
The Prague summit on 21 November 2002 was Havel’s swansong as president of the Czech Republic. The playwright-turned-politician wanted it to be remembered both for its artistic panache and its historic significance. He had spent most of his life as a dissident, stubbornly resisting communist rule and protesting at the Soviet occupation of his country. His own country was already a member of NATO; now he wanted to celebrate the freedom of seven more nations.
It was hard for the Russians to understand that this really was about celebrating freedom (from communism), not threatening Russia. The foreign ministry spokesman, Alexander Yakovenko, spoke darkly about ‘the appearance of NATO’s military potential at Russia’s borders, just a few dozen kilometres from St Petersburg’.
The foreign minister himself, Igor Ivanov, put a positive gloss on the event: ‘Moscow no longer considers NATO’s eastward expansion as a threat, since the alliance has undergone a radical transformation since the end of the Cold War and now concentrates on the fight against global terrorism.’ But the Russians did not really understand why enlargement was necessary. It was not just that they believed that Gorbachev had been promised it would not happen. They also could not understand why, if Russia was accepted as a partner, anyone should feel they needed protection from them – and they understood perfectly well that despite all the protestations to the contrary, NATO would defend its new members against Russia if necessary. After the handshake of the NATO–Russia Council, Prague came as a slap in the face.
What the Russians failed to do was make any connection between their policies and behaviour at home and the way they were perceived abroad. This was a problem I had to grapple with a few years later when I worked as a media adviser for the Kremlin: my clients were unable to grasp that the key to improving their ‘image’ abroad was not better PR but better behaviour. (I will look at this in detail in Chapter 9.) My impression from working closely with them is that they genuinely do not comprehend why many East Europeans – and particularly the Balts – remain deeply uneasy about their big neighbour.
Naturally no one at the Prague summit spoke openly of their fear of Russia. But you did not have to dig very deep into history to understand its roots. Almost all of the East European leaders attending Václav Havel’s show had personally, like him, lived through the horrors of Soviet occupation and life in a totalitarian regime. There were many open sores. The Poles felt the Russian government had not done enough to acknowledge (far less apologise for) the murder by Stalin’s secret police of thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals at Katyn in 1940. The Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians had not just been occupied by the Soviet army but incorporated into the Soviet Union, where they had had to fight for their survival as nations. Thousands of their people had been sent to the Gulag. Their tiny republics had been swamped with Russian citizens, who brought with them their language and culture, and a Moscow-based Communist Party bureaucracy that turned them into second-class citizens. Native Latvians comprised less than half the population of their own capital city, Riga. There was widespread resentment of the Russian presence, and the three Baltic nations were the first to rise up against Soviet rule when Gorbachev’s reforms opened the lid a little in the 1980s.
But their independence, restored in 1991, did not put an end to all the problems. Russia came to terms politically with the situation, but more than a million Russians lived in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and the Kremlin felt it had a right and duty to protect them. The new independent governments did themselves no favours by not always treating their Russian minorities with much consideration. In their hearts, most Balts felt the Russians should never have been there in the first place: it was they who had colonised the Baltic and subjugated its people, so they had only themselves to blame. Language and citizenship laws which rendered most Russians stateless in Latvia and Estonia were criticised by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the European Union demanded changes as a condition for the two countries’ accession. Over the years since independence, Russia had kept up a litany of complaints about civil rights in Latvia and Estonia (Lithuania’s Russian population was much smaller and had few complaints). At times the rhetoric was very hostile, so it should have come as no surprise to the Russians that Baltic nations were welcomed with open arms into NATO.
By common consent, it was Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, the Latvian president, who stole the show at the Prague summit with a powerful, eloquent speech, delivered without notes. She herself had not personally endured the years of Soviet rule, as she had escaped with her parents at the age of seven, just as the Red Army ‘liberated’ her country and imposed communism there. But her words summed up what the event was all about: