There is a nasty smell of Weimar in Russia nowadays. All the talk is of Russia’s need to reassert itself and show the world it is still a great power. On the streets, skinheads and racists beat up foreigners and attack dark-skinned Caucasians. Gays are attacked, liberals jeered and opposition protests forcibly disbanded. At home there is growing intolerance of anything except the government line, while abroad President Putin picks quarrels with his neighbours and threatens his erstwhile Western allies.
Is Putin leading Russia into fascism? That is now the accusation of Western critics. Is it not time, they say, to drop pretences of partnership, stand up to Russian bullying of its neighbourhood, denounce the clampdown on basic freedoms and chuck Russia out of the G8? Those who remember appeasement trumpet the dangers of Western drift.
The historical parallels are inviting, but misleading. This is not Germany in 1920 or even 1932. Yes, Russia has a national humiliation complex, just as Germany did after 1918. But this has been going on for 16 years. Nostalgia for the Soviet Union is not nostalgia for a failed economic system: it is a hankering for the time when Russia was strong, the leader of an empire, a supposed equal of America and a superpower feared abroad. Many still mourn the break-up of the Soviet Union. Many do not accept that Ukraine or Georgia should really be independent.
Until now, however, Russians have had little chance to express this anger. But today, as the money pours in, Western energy chiefs come courting and national incomes are rising again, the Kremlin can give vent to the mood. How dare impoverished Georgia tweak great Russia’s nose, call in US advisers and talk of joining Nato? Why is Estonia free to insult the memory of Russia’s war dead, safe behind the EU fence? Why should Poland indulge historical animosities without paying a price in trade and exports?
There is something now of what Stalin once called “the dizziness of success” – the arrogance of wealth after years of drabness and hardship. Certainly any visit to Moscow confirms this arrogance: wealth conspicuously flaunted, architecture and art as vulgarly flashy as the “new Russians” who commission it, callousness towards the weak and contempt for the honest.
But Russians know that this success is brittle. And national behaviour reflects this, lurching from one extreme to another, from eagerness to be accepted as a responsible Western partner to rage at perceived ingratitude and slights at Western, mainly American, hands.
How much is Putin a moderating force in this maelstrom of frustration and emotion? He certainly has a shrewd grasp of the national mood: from restoring the old Soviet national anthem to his barrack-room abuse of Chechen separatists, he is the articulate, forceful embodiment of mainstream Russian opinion. Little wonder that his popularity ratings are the envy of any Western leader, or that a “draft Putin” movement is attempting to overturn his decision not to defy the Constitution and stand for office again.
Russian nationalism is an old and potent force, however, and Putin has shown little sign of standing against it. He has openly courted the Right. In some areas, including his fervent embrace of the Russian Orthodox Church, this has usefully reconnected Russia to its shattered past traditions.
In others, such as the quasi-official sponsorship of Nashi, the gangs of nationalist youths who harass enemies of the State on command (including the British Ambassador), the connections are more sinister.
Putin is no racist, however. He has not egged on the present mood. The parallels with fascism must not be overdrawn. Russia has always had its skinheads, and Putin has repeatedly denounced the beating-up of foreign students or Azerbaijani market traders (though the attacks have not stopped). He enjoys good relations with Russia’s Jews. He has not allowed his form of nationalism to take on the nastier agenda of Balkan ethnic animosities.
Russia’s G8 partners will wonder how long this new belligerence will last. Some, they must know, is bluff: talk of retargeting Russia’s missiles is intended to frighten Western opinion and put pressure on Washington to scrap its deployment of missiles on former Warsaw Pact territory. Retargeting can quickly be reversed: Boris Yeltsin’s announcement that Russia no longer targeted the West was well received by Western voters, but cut little ice with arms control experts who knew that what mattered was the existence of the missiles rather than their co-ordinates.
Russian arms experts know the US shield is in no way directed at Russia. But public opinion, conditioned by centuries of fears of encirclement, sees it otherwise. It will not accept a symbol of American might on its doorstep (which extends hundreds of miles in the Russian view). Nor will Putin. Again, he reflects the mood.
Many politicians will jump on the nationalist bandwagon in the approach to the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2008. Dr Bobo Lo, the senior Russia analyst at Chatham House, argues that the optimistic scenario would have this wave dying down in a year as a new leader concentrates on the business of government. But the pessimistic alternative is that Russia becomes more prickly as friendly EU leaders change: Berlusconi has gone, Schröder been replaced by the more Russia-sceptic Merkel, Sarkozy (a personal friend of President Saakashvili of Georgia) may be less accommodating than Chirac, and Brown has never had the honeymoon Blair once enjoyed with Putin.
Were the oil price to slump and Russia suddenly become poor, the Weimar ghost might walk again. The hope must be that money will soothe the anger and Russia rein in its nationalists and their frustrations.
Michael Binyon