Alan Cowell: Churchill's definition of Russia still rings true
[Alan Cowell writes for the International Herald Tribune.]
Somewhere in Central Europe, at a secret hideout, the chief executive of a huge oil company struggles against the maneuvers of Russian partners to depose him. At the headquarters of NATO in Brussels, a Russian diplomat lays out a plan to sideline the alliance set up decades earlier to contain and repulse Soviet power. Within the United Nations Security Council, a Russian envoy casts a veto backed by China to thwart Western diplomacy in Africa.
Famously, Winston Churchill defined Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma," and his words in 1939 spoke eloquently to the Western sense of Moscow as the "other" - an inscrutable and menacing land that plays by its own rules, usually to the detriment of those who choose more open regulations.
In the past few weeks, events at the TNK-BP oil company, at NATO and at the United Nations have all reaffirmed that sense of hostile otherness, albeit with some 21st-century qualities. If Churchill's description were to be recast for the present day, then Russia would still be a riddle and an enigma lodged, like the innermost core of a matryoshka nesting doll, in a diplomat's pinstripe folded round a pugilist's muscle and an oil baron's checkbook.
But Churchill's analysis was only part of a formula that seems as relevant now as it was then. Perhaps, he said, "there is a key" to the riddle of Russia, concluding, "That key is Russian national interest."..
Read entire article at IHT
Somewhere in Central Europe, at a secret hideout, the chief executive of a huge oil company struggles against the maneuvers of Russian partners to depose him. At the headquarters of NATO in Brussels, a Russian diplomat lays out a plan to sideline the alliance set up decades earlier to contain and repulse Soviet power. Within the United Nations Security Council, a Russian envoy casts a veto backed by China to thwart Western diplomacy in Africa.
Famously, Winston Churchill defined Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma," and his words in 1939 spoke eloquently to the Western sense of Moscow as the "other" - an inscrutable and menacing land that plays by its own rules, usually to the detriment of those who choose more open regulations.
In the past few weeks, events at the TNK-BP oil company, at NATO and at the United Nations have all reaffirmed that sense of hostile otherness, albeit with some 21st-century qualities. If Churchill's description were to be recast for the present day, then Russia would still be a riddle and an enigma lodged, like the innermost core of a matryoshka nesting doll, in a diplomat's pinstripe folded round a pugilist's muscle and an oil baron's checkbook.
But Churchill's analysis was only part of a formula that seems as relevant now as it was then. Perhaps, he said, "there is a key" to the riddle of Russia, concluding, "That key is Russian national interest."..