To President Trump, the time for talking to Vladimir Putin is really over. He’s insulting you daily with the military attacks on Ukraine. The more you strain for a peace deal, the more he bombards Ukraine, shaming you. As you talk peace, he wages war. Only you can improve history, yet you still haven’t learnt your lesson with this wily thug.
Let’s take a quick history lesson on Kremlin thugs.
Vladimir Putin was born in October 1952. For 15 years, he served as a foreign intelligence officer in the KGB, until 1990, when he retired from active KGB service with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
In 1981, when Putin was a 29-year-old KGB officer, there was a secret meeting in Moscow. The Soviet leadership had agreed to a low-key exchange of views with one of the private policy advisers of the UK’s then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. George R. Urban, my father, had been invited to join ‘Thatcher’s private band’ (as The Times put it) to give her direct access to his expertise in communism in all its manifestations; and how best to manage communist regimes. He, and a small team, went prepared for an ideological tussle, contrasting communism with free market capitalism, questions of personal freedoms and such attributes of a democracy versus command economies and oppressed, fearful citizens.
It was those early 80s days, the USSR was the Cold War enemy of the West, and my father was known as a ‘cold war warrior’, as The Times called him up to and including the flattering obituary they published on his eventual death in October 1997.
‘In his many interviews, seminars and books, he uncovered the true workings of communism,’ wrote The Times in his obituary.
He was also a crusader for European unity. The Guardian’s obituary began: ‘In a hypothetical post-communist state of Mitteleuropa, there would have been one candidate for Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and maybe President – George Urban.’
He eventually became disillusioned with Thatcher. He had always been disillusioned by communism and fled the Soviets soon after they set up camp in Hungary after the war. There followed the thuggish Stalin years of brutal oppression, its horrors documented in retrospect by books and films, forecast in George Orwell’s novel, 1984, and recorded with emotive power in The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. My own childhood memories in Hungary are covered by the cloud of communist oppression and fear of the State.
This is the context in which I argue that we can connect the 2022-25 thuggery of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine to the entire history of communist regimes. From the USSR and now Russia, Cuba to China, from North Korea to Venezuela. When he returned from Moscow, my father explained what he had added to his knowledge about communist leaderships: ‘We expected a robust exchange on ideology and the like … we found a bunch of thugs.’
The KGB was the Thug in Chief of the Soviet administration. The KGB template was adopted in all the Soviet satellites, where torture and the threat of it was the primary tool of controlling a population not disposed to communist rule. The misplaced ideological basis for Putin’s behaviour is more complex than that, the brutality justified by a grandiosity of vision, with him at its apex.
What must also be remembered is that members of the secret police were among the elite of the Communist Party, enjoying the many financial and lifestyle benefits that were denied the others. Why this is important is because it provided the strongest motivation for supporting the party line. The higher standard of living in a society where poverty was forever knocking on the door, is a powerful attraction. More so than ideology, comrade. It is self-serving.
Now, Russia’s President Thug is one of the clan, a clan that includes (among others) Lenin, Khrushchev, Castro, Tito, Mao, Maduro, Ho Chi Minh, and the aforementioned Stalin. None of these thugs went hungry when their people did.
The clan has its genesis in Marxism and the birth of communism, when thugs took power by force and kept it by force. That movement was a product of its times. But times have changed. Forced child labour, for example, is no longer a scourge of the capitalist class. ‘Workers unite’ is an obsolete slogan.
These communist leaders are living versions of Animal Farm ‘bosses’, so let’s not be surprised by their violent behaviour, even towards their own people.
If you digest this history, President Trump, you will get close to the only strategy that will succeed against Putin. Don’t mistake thuggery for strength. It’s thuggery, with all the moral shortcomings that must be defeated in a civilised world. If not you, Mr President, who?
