Russian thugs offer hope to clever underdogs

It has been a depressing couple of weeks for those who worry about Russian imperialism and sympathise with the underdog. But not a hopeless one.

It started off badly: Estonia’s decision to shift a war memorial from the centre of Tallinn to a military cemetery has aroused plenty of hostile passions and alarmingly muted and belated support from friends and allies. All four of the big European countries, Britain, France, Germany and Italy, said little or nothing. NATO and the EU waited until Russia had, as usual, undermined its position by grossly over-reacting. America came up trumps in the end, inviting Estonia’s president Toomas Hendrik Ilves to the White House - but a week earlier would have been even better.

Others sided outright with the Kremlin: Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor who now chairs a Russian-German gas pipeline, said Estonia had "contradicted every form of civilised behaviour". Given that at the time he said that thugs were blockading - and threatening to dismantle - Estonia’s Moscow embassy, it would be interesting to know his definition of "civilised".

But other signs have been rather encouraging. The Estonians, who had been leaning towards taking a share in Schröder’s pipeline, abruptly cancelled his planned visit to Tallinn. Some of Russia’s best independent journalists, initially wrongfooted by Estonia’s bungled handling of the issue, have been putting the other side of the story.

Natalya Gevorkyan on Gazeta.ru pointed out the extraordinary hypocrisy in the Soviet Union’s wartime myths - not least in the shameful treatment of disabled veterans. Why does Russia kick up such a fuss about minor problems and ignore such big ones? Yuliya Latynina on Ekho Moskvy suggested that the fracas over Estonia was a dry run for some bigger and nastier stunt to be staged soon that will give President Vladimir Putin a pretext to ignore the constitution and stay in power.

After an initial burst of government panic, Estonia seems to be getting its own public relations act together too. Someone has coined the phrase ‘Nashism’ to describe the authoritarian populist (ie, fascist) philosophy of the Kremlin-run youth movement ‘Nashi’ [Ours]. After a fortnight when Estonia’s enemies made clever use of the cheap jibe that the country is oozing with nostalgia for the Waffen SS by spelling the country’s name as eSStonia, its president as IlveSS and its prime minister’s surname as AnSSip, it is encouraging to see a counter-attack. Having leapfrogged into the internet age, and with a high level of competence in both English and Russian, few countries are better placed than Estonia to fight a propaganda war in cyberspace.

Estonia’s biggest advantage is Russia’s stupidity. Had the demonstrators in Tallinn pitched a peaceful tent city round the war memorial’s original location, aping the tactics of the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Kiev, the Estonian police would have risked looking heavy-handed when they cleared it away. But instead, the assembled riff-raff quickly dropped the boring business of political protest in favour of smashing windows, looting shops, destroying "fascist bus shelters" and other acts of hooliganism. That blurred hopelessly the message that the Russian spooks in Tallinn had hoped to get across: of peaceful idealistic young people standing up for their rights.

Crashing Estonia’s government servers by swamping them with millions of bogus clicks may have seemed like a good idea at the time. But it was too crude: the clicks bore the fingerprints of Russia’s state-run computers and alarmed NATO.

It no longer looks so bad. But the unsettling question remains - not just for Estonia, Georgia, Poland but for everyone - what happens if once, just once, Russia played its cards wisely and well?

• The writer is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.

It has been a depressing couple of weeks for those who worry about Russian imperialism and sympathise with the underdog. But not a hopeless one.