Former great reporter at L’Express, Bernard Lecomte has a sense of storytelling. Russia, where he served for more than ten years as a special envoy, provides him with the material. With a lively and pleasant pen that betrays the ex-journalist, the biographer of Gorbachev (Gorbachev2014, Perrin) revisits the greatest mysteries of the country of the tsars since 1917. His work, initially published in 2017, reappears today, augmented by a chapter on the war in Ukraine (Secrets of the Kremlin: 1917-2022, Perrin). Maintenance.
L’Express: What is the biggest mystery in Russian history?
Bernard Lecomte: She is impenetrable! Russian history is full of fascinating mysteries and incredible distortions of the truth. Today, in Russia, one does not find in any manual or any book the slightest allusion to the alliance of Stalin and Hitler from August 1939 to June 1941. The Nazi-Soviet pact has been erased from Russian history! It is no coincidence that, in December, the police authorities liquidated the Memorial association, founded by Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov to document Stalin’s crimes. All this has been erased from Russian history.
The USSR was nicknamed “the country of the big lie”. Does the expression apply to today’s Russia?
This is one of the fascinating observations made by connoisseurs of Russia: the incredible backward movement provoked by Putin and his friends, who absolutely want to return to a USSR without communism. We are witnessing the return of the “country of the Great Lie”, title of the book by the former Yugoslav communist Anton Ciliga. The original title of his testimony, published in 1935, is Ten years in the land of disconcerting lies. And in fact, we are disconcerted by the power, the depth and the systematization of this “big lie”!
How to explain that lying occupies such a place in Russian history?
The question deserves a book on its own! I was permanent special envoy to Moscow for more than ten years. It is difficult to penetrate Russian culture, and when we do, we discover its difference from ours. We are used to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin. These authors fascinate us because they are profoundly Russian. We find in them a breath of truth that makes their literature fascinating, but it is not the spirit of Voltaire, Chateaubriand or Hugo! Our culture, with Greco-Roman antiquity and the Renaissance up to this kind of mixture of Christianity and the Enlightenment, results in privileging truth, law, the human person, the freedom of the individual. Russia has other values: the collective, solidarity, power, strength. We find this dichotomy in the war in Ukraine. What Ukrainians want is to adhere to this European culture. Russian culture, increasingly autonomous, violently rejects the history of Rome and Constantinople. It has proclaimed itself the “third Rome” and claims to replace our “degenerate” and “rotten” West, to quote Vladimir Putin.
There is a misunderstanding, a multi-secular gap, between Western Europe and this kind of Slavic East which, from time to time, seems to be sucked into the latter. Pierre Le Grand, de Gaulle, Jean-Paul II or Gorbachev believed – and they were not the only ones – that it was possible to mend the two cultures, to form a whole, a “common house” between Western Europe and Russia. Conversely, Vladimir Putin is now systematically and violently deepening this age-old gap.
Is Vladimir Putin Stalin’s Heir?
Putin is first and foremost his admirer. But in fact, his practices are strangely reminiscent of those of Stalin: intox, violence, repression, lies. He is his perfect student.
You devote a chapter to the rise of Vladimir Putin, whom nothing predestined to lead Russia… Is this man mediocre?
He’s an average character, who is, like all of us, a product of his childhood and youth. His childhood, that of a little thug in the streets of Leningrad, will mark his personality. He managed to get out of it thanks to an intelligent judo teacher who wanted to save him from the streets and from delinquency. He aspired to become a KGB agent and, by sheer willpower, succeeded. Like any KGB agent, Vladimir Putin is a manipulator, that’s his job. Called as a lawyer for the cabinet of the mayor of Leningrad, Anatoli Sobchak, he will become, by dint of tricks and manoeuvres, Boris Yeltsin’s candidate for his succession. Even today, he manipulates the West, the European Union, Russian public opinion. He is an outstanding manipulator, who will go down in history as such. As a Muscovite proverb says, “There is no such thing as a former KGB agent”: once you’ve been one, you’ll stay that way for the rest of your life.
Surprisingly, you bring the KGB, a training school for Russian political elites, closer to our ENA…
It’s not me who makes this comparison, everyone said that at the time. Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB for seventeen years (1967-1982), was an extremely intelligent man. He transformed police brutes into well-informed leaders, who learned other languages, read the foreign press… They constituted the elite of Russian society, and the comparison with the ENA was justified. The KGB was decapitated at the end of the USSR, in 1991. Putin put it back on its feet [sous le nom de FSB depuis 1995, NDLR], but its leaders are much less intelligent and cultured. Around Putin there are still a few survivors of the KGB of the heyday, like his right-hand man, Nicolai Patrushev, who began his career as a major at his Polytechnic and Naval Institute. Today, nothing is done without the FSB, the cornerstone of power, but this service is very different from the KGB of the 1980s.
Knowing Russian history, is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine really a surprise?
All the great stages in the history of Russia, tsarist then Soviet, resemble accidents; but they always refer to the same political and cultural references: the chief is always right, the army obeys him, the people submit. We have on the one hand a Ukrainian army, aided by the West, which is trying to recover its territory. And on the other, a Russian army which has shown its weaknesses, under the orders of an isolated, violent power which relies on international law.
But this power knows it has time, it is a major aspect of current events. Putin and his entourage want to freeze the conflict. At all times, the Russians have sought to do so. Remember the Baltic countries: the Russians had frozen their occupation in 1944-1945 and made them Soviet republics. We can also mention Ossetia and Abkhazia, in 2008, and Crimea, in 2014. Playing the clock is a constant in Russian history. Russia has no limits, neither in space nor in time. Putin annexed four oblasts and decided that they would be Russian: they will be in time. What can alter this story is an accident: an assassination of Putin, an absolute defeat of the army followed by a collapse of society. We are not immune to it. But for the majority of Russians, one day, in 30 or 50 years, Ukraine will return to Russian control.
From the point of view of communication, hasn’t Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine taken over Putin’s Russia?
Nobody can deny that Zelensky, a former actor and television producer, has burst the screen. He is one of the greatest communicators in modern history, so much so that everyone compares him to Churchill. I would still put a downside. In Russia, propaganda has turned him into a kind of mafia clown. I have the weakness to think that Zelensky is a brilliant warlord, because he obeys our military and communication criteria… But do the majority of Russians share this opinion? Nothing is less sure !
You present the invasion of Ukraine as the “war too many”: for whom? For Putin?
First of all, of course, the war is too much for Ukraine. This conflict also accelerates the disorganization of what was the world of the last century. Finally, it is one war too many for Russia. I love this country, its culture, I took pleasure in visiting the Caucasus or the Crimea, places with which I have an emotional relationship. I am devastated by the gigantic setback that Putin is imposing on his society. A certain number of its decisions are barbaric, inhumane, they consist in making suffer millions of people. The Russians had the right to progress, to civilization, to freedom, and they will be permanently deprived of it.