The psychos next door …

By Rein F. Deer

Date: 10/11/05

One of Silvio Berlusconi's comedy routines was to announce that he was applying for asylum in Russia, since there were fewer Communists left there than in Italy. Every EU country should exempt Russians from visa requirements was another bright idea. The Nordic view is that this is fine, but Italy should first set an example by granting free trespassing and looting rights to all Albanians.

Up north we still watch Russia more closely than most. The 'common European home' stuff doesn't work any more, if it ever did, but there's plenty of sweet talking. It is considered unhelpful to point out the obvious, namely that the old USSR became a frightening political slum, the third world country with nuclear weapons.

Russia's huge national wealth has been plundered and gangsterism, corruption, AIDS, tuberculosis and drunkenness have consumed most of its vitality. Male life expectancy is just 57 years, lower than it was in the old USSR.

A huge part of its spiralling oil income, now mostly plundered back from the plunderers by Vladimir Putin, is being channelled into armaments, instead of anything useful, such as building up an approximately normal civil society.

Russian history gives little cause for optimism. Leaders seem invariably to turn into tsars, as Josef Stalin did. And the default setting of the people? Even now, a form of put-upon serfdom.

As for foreign policy, not too much change there either. Imperial Russia always claimed the right to trample on the neighbours. The 'new' Russia is sticking to tradition in this area, which is one of the many reasons why the newly liberated Baltic states - and Poland - felt so betrayed when Gerhard Schröder flirted so intensively with Putin. The planned gas pipeline is seen as both an environmental scandal and a calculated political insult.

Finland's response is the so-called 'Northern Dimension' initiative, a peaceful means of trying to deal with social and environmental problems. Baltic countries do not bother with all that; they have joined NATO, which always seemed to them more of a guarantee than joining the EU. Let's hope the strategy works.

No doubt aware that NATO is not quite what it was, Finland and Sweden take the line, on the face of it ostrich-like, that "there is no security deficit in the area", so no point in abandoning neutrality. Yet both countries bristle with the latest military technology. Finland's army is the largest per head in Europe and Helsinki stubbornly declines to de-activate the minefields along its eastern border.

Since the time of Carolus XII, it is Finns who have had the honour of fighting and dying for the Swedish monarchy in the endless struggle with the neighbour from hell. But the complacent little Western neighbour where flatpack furniture and always being right were invented can, on occasions, be just as infuriating.

Comment feature looking at the new Russia from a Northern European perspective.