World Archives

Wednesday

31 Aug 2022

Will Russians soon realise how remarkable Mikhail Gorbachev was?

Mikhail Gorbachev, the final president of the Soviet Union who died last night, was remarkable both as an international politician and as a domestic reformer. I first met him when he came to London in December 1984, when Mrs Thatcher said that she liked him and could do business with him. He was open, friendly, and spoke without notes: the opposite of his predecessors. Some of Thatcher’s own officials suspected that he was merely an old-fashioned communist who had learned new tricks, and that his charm was seducing her from her clear view of the Soviet threat. Thatcher was right, and the sceptics were wrong. By that time, the Soviet

Lisa Haseldine

How Russia reacted to the death of Mikhail Gorbachev

‘Some will say he bought us freedom. Others that he took our country. Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the most controversial politicians in Russian history, has died.’ This is the verdict of the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda – a mixed review of a politician with a mixed record. And one reflected in a Russian press which today reads rather differently to the British. The broadsheet Izvestia’s long obituary had a pitiful verdict: ‘A communist who buried the idea of communism six feet under (most likely against his own wishes), and the leader of a great country who helplessly watched it collapse.’ Ria Novosti, another state-backing news agency, hones in on the divide

Igor Sushko

The FSB agent exposing the secrets of Putin’s war from within

Deep inside Russia’s secret state an agent is working against Vladimir Putin. The FSB officer, dubbed the Wind of Change, writes regular dispatches revealing the truth about the barbarism being carried out in Russia’s name. The revelations within needed to be shared with the West. It fell to me to translate them. In early March, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I came across a Facebook post by Russian dissident exile Vladimir Osechkin. Osechkin had received an email in Russian from, he said, a source inside Russia’s intelligence agency, the FSB, laying out the anger and discontent inside the agency at the invasion. The letter was deeply intimate;

Douglas Murray

Green parties are facing a reality check

How pleasant it is to watch an idea fall apart. Especially when it is an idea held by people you don’t particularly care for. In recent years all of the democracies have been plagued by green parties. The kindest interpretation of them is that they provide a wake-up call of some sort: a reminder that we should be kind to our planet, that sort of thing. But in every country they got too free a ride. They ended up preaching catastrophism to a supplicant media. And they ended up demanding that we all get off fossil fuels yesterday without any satisfactory explanation of how we were meant to keep the

Lisa Haseldine

Without Gorbachev, would I exist?

Mikhail Gorbachev’s legacy will forever centre around his successful, albeit far from painless, promise to open the USSR, and Russia, to the rest of the world. He brought about the end of the Cold War, allowing the West to breathe a collective sigh of relief. However, my debt to him is more personal. For without Gorbachev, I almost certainly would not exist. Gorbachev’s accession as eighth, and final, leader of the Soviet Union in 1985 marked a turning point in the country’s history. The politicians who chose him could hardly have predicted quite what his rule would entail. Immediately, Gorbachev set about rejuvenating the country: his policies of ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’

Freddy Gray

Trump’s Al Capone moment is nowhere near

When the FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida earlier this month, various pundits suggested the raid could be an ‘Al Capone moment’. The Feds might not have got him for attempted insurrection, collusion with Putin, or corruption, it was said, but he could go down for a technicality: ie, withholding sensitive official documents he legally should have returned. We’ve heard that ‘Capone moment’ motif a lot throughout the Trump years — and it tells you a lot more about the state of American journalism than anything else. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and a deeply shady character in his own right, used to say it to make headlines.

Gavin Mortimer

British bobbies have much to learn from French police officers

Priti Patel wants the police to get back to basics and solve crime instead of parading their progressive credentials at every available opportunity. It’s about time: recorded crime in England and Wales is at a 20-year-old high. Villains have never had it so good. Just 5.6 per cent of offences reported to police resulted in anyone being charged or summonsed in 2021-22, a drop of ten per cent from 2014-2015. The Home Secretary is said to support a paper by the Policy Exchange think tank that warns that the police’s persistence in espousing social justice causes is ‘hugely damaging’ to public confidence. There is a growing sense among the public that

Sara Wheeler

How Putin manipulated history to help Russians feel good again

Every country has an origin story but none has ‘changed it so often’ as Russia, according to Orlando Figes. The subject is inseparable from myth. In this impressive and deeply immersive book, the author sets out to reveal Russia’s history, its people’s perception of their past and the manifold ways in which those in power manipulate both events and legend to shape the present. It is a saga of multi-millennial identity politics. A bestselling historian with a storied background himself, Figes arranges his material chronologically over ten chapters, beginning with the medieval chronicles of Kievan Rus. Those sources launched myths that became fundamental to the Russian understanding of nationhood. He

Daniel DePetris

Iraq is fracturing again

Political turmoil is nothing new in Iraq. The American invasion and occupation turned the country from a brutal dictatorship led by the late Saddam Hussein into a quasi-democracy that spends more time fighting against itself than providing for its citizens. Iraqi politics is laced with sectarianism. When the US helped construct Iraq’s political system, dividing the spoils among Iraq’s three main groupings, the Sunnis, Shia and Kurds, it was thought to be the best way to ensure the system didn’t collapse. The more buy-in from Iraq’s major communities, the logic went, the more incentive they would have to make Iraqi democracy work. Since then, the world has become familiar with factional

Tuesday

30 Aug 2022

Mark Galeotti

Gorbachev was no saint. But he was a kind of hero

Mikhail Gorbachev is dead at the age of 91, and in a way I feel orphaned. I became fascinated by what was still then the Soviet Union in its late years of sclerosis, when one moribund geriatric at the top of the system succeeded another (the dark joke at the time went as follows: a KGB guard stopped someone at one of the state funerals and asked him if he had a pass – ‘oh,’ came the reply, ‘I’ve got a season ticket’). But my early years as a Russia-watcher were during his time as General Secretary, and if my seniors had become used to the idea that the USSR was a

Jonathan Miller

What kompromat does Trump have on Macron?

Did Donald Trump have kompromat on Emmanuel Macron within the secret files seized by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago Xanadu? One of the files is known to have been titled ‘Info re: President of France’. And Trump is known to have bragged for years that he knew details of Macron’s sex life. Well, possibly. There’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Macron is not entirely conventional in the sexuality department, not least in his marriage to his former drama teacher, 25 years his senior. Early in his presidency, Macron himself weirdly volunteered that his former bodyguard Alexandre Benalla was ‘not my boyfriend’ Maybe the spooks of the CIA are

Steerpike

Meghan Markle vs Mariah Carey: who’s the biggest diva?

It’s Tuesday. That means that once again, it’s time to listen to Meghan of Montecito talk about herself on her new podcast Archetypes. This week, to pad out the hour, Meghan brings in Mariah Carey to talk about the ‘complexities’ surrounding the word diva. Oh great, more words that Meghan doesn’t like! Steerpike was starting to think she had run out of so-called ‘labels’. During the episode, pop star Mariah opened up about the difficulties she faced growing up, saying (in a slightly garbled confessional tone): ‘I didn’t fit in, it would be more of the black area of town, or then you could be where my mom chose to

Cindy Yu

What happens if Liz Truss designates China as a ‘threat’?

Early on in the Tory leadership campaign, Liz Truss was the only contender to say that she wanted to sit down with Vladimir Putin – so that she could ‘call him out’. It now seems that President Xi Jinping will be next in her firing line, after her team briefed yesterday that as PM she intends to put China on the same footing as Russia. According to campaign sources who spoke to the Times, Truss intends to redesignate China as a ‘threat’ rather than the ‘systemic competitor’ the government described Beijing as in last year’s integrated review. In the 114-page document setting out Britain’s foreign policy, the review described Russia

Monday

29 Aug 2022

Jonathan Miller

The culture wars are coming to France

The infection of France by le wokisme continues apace. Last year, president Emmanuel Macron vowed to stand against intersectionality only to see his parliamentary majority swept away in the recent National Assembly elections in part by the leftist coalition of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Now a new woketarian front is opening against the mores of traditional France as transgenderism asserts itself with a campaign by Le Planning Familial, the non-profit association influenced by the movement created originally in the United States, active in France for 62 years and that has recently transitioned itself. The movement, which is subsidised by the government, has moved from offering advice on contraception and abortion to a

Steerpike

Meghan’s Mandela moment

It seems that the last two years of interviews, podcasts and media briefings actually count as Meghan keeping shtum. Towards the end of a 6,500-word interview with the Cut, which covers the duchess’s views on the monarchy, the British press and racism, she says that she ‘never had to sign anything that restricts her from talking,’ adding ‘I can talk about my whole experience and make a choice not to’. At this point, Mr S doesn’t know whether this is an attempt at satire or if Meghan genuinely believes her ‘truth’. The interview, titled ‘Meghan of Montecito’, comes less than a week after her Archetypes podcast with Serena Williams (in which listeners might have hoped

Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine stuns Russia with a counter-offensive in Kherson region

The southern city of Kherson, which fell to Russian forces in the first few days of the war, is one of the places Ukraine would need to liberate if Putin’s army is to be repelled. But what realistic chance is there? Many argued that the Russian occupation is a one-way process: that having taken Crimea, Putin would extend his reach northwards and westwards – with the only question being how long Ukraine could hold off an offensive from its far-bigger enemy. But that conversation is changing, and fast. This morning, the Ukrainian army broke through the first line of the Russian defence in Kherson region – a move that was

Philip Patrick

Japan’s cult of safetyism

The Japanese government has launched an initiative to encourage young people to drink more alcohol. Yes, really. The national tax agency’s ‘Sake Viva’ campaign is an appeal for ideas to get youngsters boozing after taxes on alcohol products, which accounted for 5 per cent of total revenue back in the hard-drinking 1980s, fell to just 1.7 per cent in 2020. So, at a time of economic hardship, Japan’s youth are being asked to do their patriotic duty and get hammered. The falloff in social drinking is being attributed in part to the pandemic. Japan didn’t have a full-blown lockdown imposed from above, but the more subtle bottom-up lockdown that demonised

Peter Wood

One worldview has taken over the historical profession

Professor James H. Sweet is a temperate man. He seeks to avoid extremes. But he also seeks to be bold in his temperance. You can do that by emphatically stating an opinion that seems above reproach. But Professor Sweet miscalculated. His emphatic bromide blew up, and he was left offering emphatic apologies. For those who have not followed this little academic circus, Professor Sweet, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is also the president of the American Historical Association (AHA). That’s an important post. The AHA has more than 11,500 members. It publishes the American Historical Review, ‘the journal of record for the historical profession in

Mary Dejevsky

Why Crimea could be key to Ukraine winning the war

Over the six months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the ambitions of President Zelensky and his compatriots have only grown. From an early readiness to engage in talks – first in Belarus and then in Istanbul – Kyiv has progressed to an insistence that Ukraine can win, and from there to a definition of victory that includes not just a return to the status quo before the war, but the restoration of Ukraine’s post-independence borders, and now also the recovery of Crimea. Zelensky himself has often seemed slower than some in his entourage to expand the mission. But he has been adding his voice to those calling for the recovery of Crimea for

Saturday

27 Aug 2022

Luke Coppen

What is Pope Francis up to?

If you think your diary looks busy over the next few days, spare a thought for Pope Francis. The 85-year-old, who was confined to a wheelchair for several months this year, is preparing for a big weekend. He will be spending it in the company of the world’s cardinals – the red-clad figures who are supposed to be his closest advisers but seldom meet en masse in Rome these days. Now the pope has finally decided to gather them together – in the Eternal City’s unforgiving August heat. The pope will be adding to the cardinals’ number today. Tomorrow, he will be dashing off to L’Aquila, the Italian city that