Vladimir Yakunin - The Treacherous Path - An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

Forget about it. It would be better to forget everything. You don’t pay, you don’t enter into any communication, but nor should you approach anyone in law enforcement. There’s no point. Nobody knows who they are, or where they are based, and law enforcement won’t have the resources to be able to find out.

Who now is willing to show the same self-restraint as that Roman emperor? Our capacity to inflict harm has decisively exceeded our abilities to discern the moral consequences. The dream of unlimited progress has turned sour; it is as if we have forgotten that mankind is, before it is anything else, part of the natural world. Technology has leapt so far ahead of any ethical or legal restraint that the only logical conclusion, if we continue along the same route, is the total dehumanisation of society. Control of the future will be shared by those who possess wealth and cyber power. The rank and file will be involved in a desperate attempt to preserve what is left of their exposed and pillaged privacy.

This technological threat is exacerbated by the proxy war that is being played out in the world’s newspapers and television sets. I am privileged enough to be able to watch both the Western and Russian mass media, and I can see how both manipulate their audiences. To my mind, the neo-liberal consensus that still dominates in the US and Europe bears terrifying similarities to the worldview of the Bolsheviks. Like them, it will not allow even a glimpse of anything good on the other, demonised side, and it certainly looks as if our critics abandoned the presumption of innocence a long time ago.

Consider this: when was the last time you read anything positive in your newspaper about Russia or Putin? When was the last time that even activities that fall outside the political sphere, like ballet or science, received any recognition in the Western media? Why does every article about Russia seem to be accompanied by a photograph of its president? If a story appears in the Russian press, or if a Russian official speaks, then it is immediately damned as propaganda. When, in the midst of an international crisis, Russia calls for moderation and negotiations, we are criticised. In those cases where we do employ military force, then the worst possible construction is placed on our every move. Is it any wonder that, with every passing day, my country and the West are drifting further apart?

It can feel sometimes as though people in the West slip almost without thinking into an attitude towards Russia established well over a hundred years ago. Britain’s first serious outbreak of Russophobia came in the late 1870s, but the suspicion of its motives dates to before the Crimean War two decades previously, and I do not feel as if this mindset has ever been shrugged off.

Most people are not interested enough to find out the truth for themselves – instead, they are prey to absurd and dangerous simplifications. If their worldview is based on what they see from watching the television news with half an eye open, or flicking listlessly through the newspapers, then is it any wonder that they believe it when they are told that Putin is a devil?

Not long ago a friend of mine, Václav Klaus, who at the time was the honorary president of a prestigious university in the United States, made a statement highlighting how pervasive anti-Russian propaganda had become. Not long afterwards, the institution suggested, politely but firmly, that it might be a good time for him to resign from his post. That kind of stubbornness, that kind of inability to see beyond walls, to learn, to listen to others, always brings severe consequences in its train, and it fills me with fear.

In 2014, I was, along with a number of Russian officials and businessmen, placed on the US State Department’s sanctions list. It decreed that I am forbidden from travelling to the US, that any assets I might have had in the US should be frozen, and that US citizens and corporations are banned from entering into business transactions with me. It seems imposing, but in practice it does not change much; I do very little business in the States. But on a personal level, it has created an uncomfortable new status for me, one that also has ramifications for my family, affecting their lives and plans. It felt as if the sanctions were not used to target genuinely dangerous individuals, but to make a point: we have the ability and, furthermore, we also believe we have the right, to obstruct the lives of anyone we wish. This to my mind has been a grievous mistake, because the only concrete thing they have achieved by trying to turn a small group of Russians into pariahs is to have created an atmosphere of suspicion and suppression in their own society. They are like doctors who have been infected by the virus they were trying to cure; sanctions have introduced a disease into the Western community.

This attitude only serves to make regular Russians believe that the West represents an enemy and that as a result it is time to draw back from the world, consolidate and prepare to fight back. It devastates the chance of conducting any kind of meaningful dialogue. The same is true of the constant personal attacks made on Vladimir Putin. It is no secret that Russians can shoulder a great many burdens, and bear suffering like no other nation on earth, but they will not stand being insulted. They experience an insult to their leader as if it is an insult to them and their country too. (This is a sentiment articulated best by Alexander Pushkin in 1826: ‘Of course, I despise my fatherland from head to foot – however, I am annoyed when a foreigner shares this feeling with me.’) That is the greatest mistake committed by the leaders in the West. They just do not understand. The more the Russian people feel as if they are being attacked, the fiercer their reaction will be, and that is dangerous.

My life has been enriched by encounters with men and women from other cultures. I have been the recipient of spontaneous gestures of warmth and generosity, and witnessed the very best of human nature, such as the Americans who dropped everything to come to the aid of a crushed city many miles away in Armenia and the elderly former railway worker who gave so many of her possessions up to help those wounded in the attack on the Nevsky Express. None of these people behaved that way because it was their government’s policy; in some cases, they were in fact acting contrary to it. I was first elected, unanimously, to be the President of the International Union of Railways (the first ever Russian to occupy this post) in 2012, and reconfirmed two years later. During this period, one of heightened international tension, I never noticed any bad feeling from my peers in that professional community, not even a glimpse of it, towards Russian Railways, or Russia, or the Russian people. I received the vote of the American delegate even though I was the subject of sanctions imposed by his own party.

By contrast, I have also seen how so-called diplomacy can petrify a person’s natural inclination to reach out in friendship to others. The exchange I witnessed between the two Koreans exemplifies this officially sponsored degradation of the ability and will to communicate.

I spent enough time working as a diplomat to know that, these days, official channels are a fruitless way of conducting international dialogue, or even meaningful negotiations. There is rarely an attempt to create a mutual basis for understanding, even at a time when, with the international community more fractured and wounded than I have ever seen it, one would imagine that this kind of dialogue between civilisations is sorely needed. Diplomacy has been reduced to an exchange of prepared statements, an attempt at mutual manipulation, and I have come to believe that it requires either a stroke of luck – such as the one delivered by Kang Kyung Ho’s wife – or the kind of catastrophe that reminds both parties of their shared humanity – such as the earthquake at Spitak – to break through these barriers.