Russia

Thursday

Andre Van Loon

The prophet Tolstoy and his dodgy vicar

One fine day in June 1896, a lone Russian nihilist visited Leo Tolstoy on his country estate. Come to hear the master, the stranger questioned Tolstoy about his latest beliefs. Satisfied, he left later that day. But then he returned with a written confession. He was an undercover policeman, sent to check on what Tolstoy was up to. Deeply ashamed of his deception, he begged for forgiveness. This vignette, recounted by Alexandra Popoff in her new book about Tolstoy’s later life, perfectly captures the author’s power. Whether through his fiction or radical Christianity, Tolstoy could fascinate and compel in equal measure. Though the government spy was dismissed for his bungling,

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Panic, profiteering and a mysterious girl in a Mini: notes from Moscow

 Moscow Here we go again. The rouble slides, then tumbles, and slides again. For those of us who remember the crash of August 1998, the drill is familiar. For Muscovites, the old instincts have surfaced from the 1990s like a sausagey burp. Shoppers besieged Ikea, Auchan and other mega-markets, desperate to spend rapidly devaluing roubles. Cynical expatriates such as myself did much the same with our newly inflated hard currency. I cleared my local posh wine shop of a thousand bucks’ worth of Burgundy, now half-price in dollar terms. A correspondent colleague raided the Moscow Apple store to the tune of two iPhones and a pair of laptops before they

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Old Vic’s Tree: Beckett plus Seinfeld – plus swearing

‘Fucking hell. You twat. Fuck off. Fuck. Fuck.’ These dispiriting words are the opening line of Tree, a newish play by the lugubrious comic Daniel Kitson, whose stand-up show once transported me into the heavenly arms of Lethe. His script opens with a chance encounter between two oddball smart Alecs. The outdoor setting, borrowed from Beckett, is a suburban cul-de-sac where a single tree is about to shed its autumn raiment. One man crouches in the branches, another stands below. They exchange confidences, observations, food and witticisms. At the end, one departs. This is a play of quips and anecdotes but no significant action. The tree-dweller is an eco-warrior protesting

Wednesday

The Spectator

Cameron’s reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attacks has been depressingly predictable

Last Sunday, David Cameron marched through Paris in solidarity, so it seemed, with those who stand up for free speech. Anyone who thought he meant it must now be crying out, ‘Je suis un right Charlie!’ Hardly had the march finished than the Prime Minister had rediscovered his other side: the one which reacts to terror by threatening yet more surveillance, more state control. He has promised to revive, in the Conservative manifesto, the ‘-snooper’s charter’ which would allow the state to retain indefinitely information about every email we ever send, every telephone call we ever make. Not only that. He added a further measure: he wants to ban all

Monday

Steerpike

Ed Miliband’s dinner date with Amal Clooney

Ed Miliband’s popularity may be at an all time low, but the leader of the Labour party is at least now moving in A-list circles. The Telegraph reports that Miliband recently enjoyed a supper at the mansion of Geoffrey Robertson QC, the human rights barrister, which both George and Amal Clooney attended. Mrs Clooney is a barrister at Doughty Street, Robertson’s chambers. While the quality of Miliband’s general dinner party chat remains unknown, he is thought to have discussed with the Hollywood couple proposals for ‘fresh sanctions on Vladimir Putin’s regime’ following the case of Sergei Maginitsky,  the Russian whistleblower who died after months of beatings in prison. And while the menu

Tuesday

Neil Barnett

The Saudis are playing a clever game with oil supplies. Here’s how to understand it

As oil prices continue to plummet, the rather sterile debate over Saudi intentions drags on. Some believe the Saudis are locked into a secret conspiracy with Washington to stiff Russia and Iran. Others prefer to take the Saudi oil minister at his word and believe that it’s all about market share. The truth is that the debate is founded on a false dichotomy: the Saudis are doing both things at once, and several other things as well. The best way to understand this is to try to step into the shoes (or sandals, rather) of a senior member of the al-Saud family. Your neighbourhood is convulsed in war and revolution,

Thursday

William Cook

Europeans no longer fear Germany. But do the Germans still fear themselves?

In the old Death Strip between East and West Berlin, which runs through the centre of the city, there is a graveyard full of German war heroes and a few war criminals too. From the Red Baron to Reinhard Heydrich, the best and worst of the German military are buried here. There’s also a mass grave full of civilians, killed by Allied air raids, and a memorial to the 136 East Berliners who died trying to cross the Berlin Wall — which ran through this cemetery. The Death Strip is still an empty space. Germany has been marking two anniversaries this year — one a celebration, the other a painful

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: Autumn Statement, Russia’s information wars and life inside Tatler

George Osborne appears to have delivered a successful Autumn Statement, but are there some dark secrets in the details? In this week’s View from 22 podcast, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth discuss the Chancellor’s last major economic speech of this Parliament, the political consequences of the new measures announced and what it means for the outcome of the next election. Anne Applebaum also discusses this week’s Spectator cover features on the quandary of Russia. Will the country put up with economic hardship in return for this experiment in rebelling against the West? How much chance is there for Russia to come back ‘on-side’ with the rest of the international community? And how successful has Russia Today been in promoting Vladimir

Anne Applebaum

The crash of the ruble — and what’s next for Russia

Since the Russian invasion of Crimea last February, many different phrases have been used to describe the tactics of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. Some have spoken of a ‘new Cold War’. Others have described him as ‘anti-western’ or ‘anti-American’. But there is another adjective one could also use to describe his behaviour: ‘experimental’. For apart from everything else he has said and done, Putin has, in effect, launched a vast experiment into whether it is possible to extract a large and relatively well-integrated country from the global mainstream, and to reject the rules by which that mainstream runs. In truth, the experiment began long before Crimea. For several years

Monday

Ross Clark

Why Vladimir Putin’s threats about cutting off Europe’s gas supply are all bluff

Has the West found a secret new weapon in its battle with Putin’s expansionist ambitions: reversible gas pipelines? Putin has never made a secret of his willingness to use energy as bludgeon against his neighbours. In 1999, the year before he became Russian leader, he wrote a pamphlet making the case that energy exports provided the means by which his country’s greatness could be restored. Putin’s behaviour over Ukraine has been typical. Over the past 15 years Russia has constructed a network of pipelines which can be used to bypass Ukraine. Starve Ukraine of energy, goes Putin’s thinking, and it might be forced back into Russia’s fold. What he didn’t

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How the US shale gas industry has changed the global economy

The year 2014 will be remembered for an unprecedented juxtaposition of events. Two oil-producing countries in the Middle East were in a state of crisis. Relations between the West and Russia slumped to a new Cold War low. And oil prices have slumped, to $66 a barrel for Brent Crude this morning, half its recent peak. This didn’t used to happen. The modern history of oil prices is characterised by a series of spikes, each one coinciding with a crisis in the Middle East. It is a mark of how US shale gas and oil production has changed the oil market – and thus the prospects for the global economy.

Monday

James Forsyth

How worried should the West be about Russia?

The most sobering column you’ll read today is the FT’s Gideon Rachman, no doom monger, warning about the risk of a nuclear war. Rachman is concerned about how quick Vladimir Putin’s Russia now is to rattle the nuclear sabre. Now, as Rachman points out, part of the reason that Russia does this is to make the West think that it might just use these weapons. But the worry is that Putin might miscalculate. For instance, if the Russians did in one of the Nato member Baltic states what it has done in Ukraine, the situation could get out of hand very quickly. What makes this more alarming is the possibility

Friday

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Russia and Constantinople

From The Spectator, 14 November 1914: The Spectator for the last twenty years has urged that the Russians are the appropriate successors of the Turks at Constantinople. Russia is by far the greatest of the Black Sea Powers, and she ought to be given the key to her own back door— the possession of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles being conditioned, of course, by the guarantee of free access to the Black Sea for the shipping of other Powers, on the lines that govern the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal. We do not doubt for a moment that Russia will be perfectly willing to make such an agreement. That

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Citizenfour: the paranoia of Snowden & co will bore you to death

In simple entertainment terms Citizenfour isn’t as interesting as watching paint dry. It is more like watching someone else watching paint dry. People with opinions on Edward Snowden tend to divide into those who think he’s one of the biggest heroes of all time and those who think he’s at least one of the worst patsies or traitors of all time. Either way it’s hard to imagine why either party would want to watch two hours of footage of him typing on a keyboard. And then typing some more. While the camera focuses on him from the other side of the keyboard. For a very long time. Neither is it

Ed West Ed West

England should withdraw from the 2022 World Cup

Mark Steyn once wrote of the United Nations: ‘It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog feces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the U.N.’ It’s a maxim that works double for Fifa, world football’s governing body, which has just cleared future World Cup hosts Qatar and Russia of any wrongdoing but managed to criticise the FA. The BBC reports: ‘As for Russia, they have also been cleared, although the report noted its bid team made “only a limited amount of documents available for review”. ‘According to

Thursday

Stephen Walsh

Mariinsky’s Boris Godunov – a revelation

Anyone who thinks opera singers and orchestral players are overworked should spare a thought for the Mariinsky Opera on its trek round England and Wales this week. After Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery in Cardiff on Sunday, the whole caravan rolled up at the Barbican in the shorter — but not exactly lightweight — first version of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov. And by the time you read this it will have added Shchedrin’s The Left-Hander and (in Birmingham) the first two instalments of Wagner’s Ring, plus, for the chorus (not required in The Ring till Sunday’s Götterdämmerung), two concerts of Russian sacred music in London and Cardiff. The mad genius behind

Victor Sebestyen

What went so wrong for Vaclav Havel?

The unforgettable moment a quarter of a century ago when the Berlin Wall came down was the most vivid drama in that dizzying year of revolutions in 1989 when the Soviet empire fell to its knees. But another event a month later and 250 miles away in Prague was equally poignant. As the playwright/philosopher Václav Havel was sworn in as president of Czechoslovakia and declared in one of the most moving speeches I have heard, ‘Citizens, your government has returned to you’, it was clear that if history hadn’t exactly come to an end, the world had changed utterly. In his own country Havel’s reputation has nosedived since those giddy

Thursday

Ismene Brown

Russians made the theatre space the most liberating imaginative device ever invented

You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a small display of early Soviet avant-garde theatre and film design, tucked away in the V&A’s ‘Performance’ area, proves that they beat us hollow in matters of the dressing-up box too. When you arrive (that is, if you arrive — it is a labyrinthine trek to find it) at Russian Avant-Garde Theatre, you should make straight for the little screen. It shows the amazing 1924 sci-fi film Aelita, in which an engineer living under ‘Military Communism’ builds a spaceship and flies to Mars where he falls for Aelita, Queen of Martians.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 30 October 2014

Home The last British combat troops turned over Camp Bastion in Helmand to Afghan forces and withdrew from Afghanistan after 13 years and 453 deaths. Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, spoke of ‘whole towns and communities being swamped by huge numbers of migrants’. He later withdrew the word ‘swamped’, but David Blunkett, a former Labour home secretary who used the word 12 years ago, said: ‘I believe that both Michael Fallon and I were right to speak out.’ This came after Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, responded to an idea of David Cameron, the Prime Minister, that European Union migration could be renegotiated; she said: ‘Germany will not tamper

Friday

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Our Russian allies

From The Spectator, 24 October 1914: For years past the vodka monopoly in Russia has been a public scandal. Government officials, in order to get good financial returns, have connived at the abasement of the people by encouraging drink. Year by year the revenue from the vodka monopoly has increased by leaps and bounds till the present year, when it was estimated to yield £93,000,000, or very nearly a third of the total revenue of the Russian Empire. Critics of Russia have long lugubriously prophesied that, in spite of all the Tsar’s protestations in favour of temper. ance, he would never venture to take any step which would impair such