You say you want a revolution?

Drawing: Niyaz Karim

Why aren’t Russians brimming with admiration for the Arab revolutions? I have heard this question at least 20 times in the past three months. It came from BBC journalists interviewing me; from Western university professors lecturing Russian students; sometimes even from West European diplomats.

Somehow, we Russians (according to others) are never supposed to be free. A refusal to see our condition as anything but the most miserable of states crying for an immediate new revolution is seen at best as resignation before evil; at worst, as a gross injustice. “Don’t you want to have the same freedom as Tunisians now have? How rotten of you not to want it!” This was a question with a readily attached answer from a friend of mine, a British journalist whose every report from Moscow starts with the words, “In another blow to Russia’s democracy”

No, I don’t want to be one of those 25,800 Tunisians currently waiting for the Italian government to decide their fate as illegal immigrants on the island of Lampedusa. We Russians have learnt the hard way since 1917 – or maybe even since 1789, when the first refugees from the French Revolution started coming to Russia – that a revolution’s quality is best defined by migratory flows.

Having overthrown the tsar's autocracy in 1917, millions of Russians suddenly found themselves in the situation of emigres, enduring such humiliations that the tsar’s “humiliating” rule seemed a paradise lost in comparison. Worse still, those who stayed in Russia, and found themselves under Lenin and Stalin, envied their relatives who had left. So, if the wind of change is so sweet as the European press describes it, why are so many people now fleeing North Africa?

But this is a different kind of revolution, my British reader will tell me, one that is not about Communism but freedom. My answer will be: how do you know which form the now flowing Arab lava will take? To the tune of heated debates about a few hundred niqabs in France, a longtime ban on this sort of Muslim dress was lifted in Tunisia and Syria, and I wouldn't be surprised to see hundreds of thousands of them appear. Why? Because Tunisia, for example, which was expected to post economic growth of 4-5pc this year, will actually muster no more than 1pc – not a good time to have to find work for 80,000 young college graduates who will join the labour market this year in Tunisia alone. Consequently, the heightened expectations of the young are going to clash with reality, and then we shall hear the familiar slogan: “Islam is the solution.”

Much has been written about the “conflict” between the Russian president and his prime minister over the Libyan problem. In reality, their two approaches reflect the complicated nature of the problem, which only self-assured ignoramuses could deny. Dmitry Medvedev explained why Russia did not block the UN Security Council’s resolution on helping Libyan civilians, while Vladimir Putin expressed his doubts about the ease with which Western nations resort to force in humanitarian interventions.

Aren’t there grounds for such doubts? Hope is not a strategy, as American president Barack Obama rightly said recently, and Nato action in Libya seems to be more based on hope than on actual knowledge of the situation. The hope, obviously, was that Colonel Gaddafi’s defences would collapse with the first news about French air strikes. The hope was unfounded. But now Nato members are disqualified from working as intermediaries in the Libyan conflict. Would it help if Russia and China, as well as Brazil, disqualified themselves from this role too, by giving their full support to resolution 1973?

One may try to acquit the “French George Bush,” President Sarkozy, by his not having sufficient information on Libya. But who is to blame for Nato and the EU having such sketchy intelligence about the life of their close African neighbour? How did a situation arise where the French president recognises the National Transition Council in March 2011, while the identities of two thirds of its members were still a mystery?

Of course, establishing contacts with the Libyan opposition during Gaddafi’s rule was hard; talking to the “star” of the Russian opposition, Boris Nemtsov, in a fancy Moscow restaurant is much easier. But isn’t it the responsibility of governments and media to see real leaders and threats instead of invented ones?

The European press and the EU’s policy planners failed the Libyan exam horribly, concentrating on imaginary threats for decades. It is enough to recall the sheer amount of stories written about how to respond to Russia’s eventual decision to cut gas supplies to the EU. Whole institutes and policy centres made their living on such plans. But I don’t remember a single story or policy plan discussing a cut in energy supplies from Libya. 

Russians learnt the hard way to appreciate the wisdom of the words of philosopher Joseph de Maistre, a refugee from the French Revolution who lived in Russia in the early 19th century: “Revolutions happen because of the government’s iniquities; but no government iniquity is as bad for people as revolution itself.” The West seems to have forgotten its own wisdom on revolutions, despite the pain of its original acquisition.