ONE of the most consistently mesmerising shows on the internet is The New Yorker Radio Hour, hosted by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick. If you don’t already subscribe, I’d highly recommend it.
The weekly podcast frequently circles back to some of the host’s favourite intellectual projects, one of which is the subject of Russia. Remnick was based in Moscow for four years in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the Washington Post’s Russian correspondent, and his interest in the country has never waned.
A couple of months ago Remnick interviewed 2015 Nobel Prize winner and Belarusian historian Svetlana Alexievich. He asked her about her writing, specifically her book of oral testimony, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, which unflinchingly documents ordinary Russians’ feelings of grief, loss and disorientation at the collapse of the once great Soviet empire, and many ordinary people’s longing for Russia’s more "glorious" past. I have not yet read it but it sounds extraordinary.
Describing Vladimir Putin, Alexievich used a turn of phrase that has stuck with me. She describes how, some way into his political leadership, Putin "took off all his masks" and abandoned "playing at democracy".
The idea of Putin irritably performing a role he thought he ought to, before becoming fatigued with the nonsense of it all and — secure in the seemingly genuine and overwhelming domestic support he enjoys — gradually revealing his true self, is helpful.
It is instructive in making sense of the increasingly bold chess moves Putin has made in recent years.
Russian incursions into Georgia in 2008 and the annexure of the Ukraine in 2014 come to mind most immediately. But in the last few weeks Putin has moved to the next level. The bombing of Aleppo by the Russian military, including a convoy of UN humanitarian aid trucks, seems to be in a league of its own.
Somehow the word "bombing" doesn’t fully cover what Russia’s air force did to the eastern rebel-held half of the city. One resident called it "hell on Earth"; another a "war of extermination".
Certainly the footage is enough to leave one thunderstruck by the entirety of the horror and human misery.
Putin’s enthusiastic support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s seemingly psychopathic crusade to murder his own people is impossible to ignore, even in a society as unwaveringly committed to violent self-analysis as SA is right now.
On the recent Russian atrocities in Syria, there has not been a peep from our own government. This is possibly because from their perspective, there isn’t really a problem in Syria to start with.
Back in June, International Relations and Cooperation Deputy Minister Nomaindia Mfeketo chirpily told the media that things in Syria were just fine, and that only "incorrect narratives" were giving the false impression of a festering wound of rape, violence, torture and daily killings, from which hundreds of thousands of refugees would risk their lives, and those of their children, to flee.
In fact, Africa more broadly has been silent on Russia and Putin’s increasingly energetic international forays.
This is unsurprising given the extent of the wooing Putin has undertaken with many African governments. Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni visited Putin in Moscow in late 2012, and since then has fostered ongoing and close ties to Russia, culminating in a massive energy deal with Rostec earlier this year to build an oil refinery.
The evidently immortal President Robert Mugabe was in the Kremlin as recently as May, carping to Putin about their common burden of sanctions.
And in April this year then-African Union (AU) Commission chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma announced, upon return from her second official visit to Moscow, that aside from the obvious economic co-operation, Russia had offered a sweeping pledge of "total support" on "Africa’s positions around UN resolutions, on the basis of the AU’s principle of African solution [sic] to African problems".
And, of course, our very own Russophile, President Jacob Zuma, has visited Putin in Moscow no less than six times since 2010.
Many of us may have already forgotten about Project Condor, the joint launching of a Russian-South African spy satellite in late 2014, so shrouded in secrecy that even our own intelligence services didn’t appear to know the full details of the arrangement.
The nuclear deal that threatens to bankrupt SA was just the culmination of years of courtship.
In a different world, recent evidence of Russia’s conduct might shake even the most ardent Putin fan.
Two weeks ago a Dutch-led investigation confirmed that a Malaysian Airlines commercial plane was indeed shot down over Ukraine in July 2014 by a surface-to-air missile supplied and deployed by Russia, killing 298 civilians.
In the last few weeks, testimony about the deployment of earth-shattering "bunker bombs" and photographs of babies in the rubble in Aleppo might be pause for thought and re-evaluation, no matter how special the relationship.
But in SA, the stakes are too high, the magnitude of the commitments too vast — and the precedent of looking the other way too established.
It is probably too much to ask for the South African government to issue a public condemnation of Assad’s terrorising of his own people, or to challenge Putin’s enthusiastic participation in this ongoing horror. Indeed, some days it is hard to get a coherent position out of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation on just about anything. Even if we do care, we can’t show that we do.
But it does pose difficult questions about the quality of the friends in which the Zuma regime chooses to invest its time and effort. By virtue of the ANC’s decisions, the South African people are being placed in an ever-deepening alliance with an increasingly muscular Russia.
If this is Putin with all his masks off, no longer "playing" at democracy, the long-term problem is likely to be bigger even than the nuclear deal.
• Van Onselen is an independent political risk consultant and analyst
Russian leader Vladimir Putin delivers a speech in Moscow in September. Putin’s enthusiastic support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s seemingly psychopathic crusade to murder his own people is impossible to ignore, even in a society as unwaveringly committed to violent self-analysis as SA is right now, says the writer. Picture: REUTERS//IVAN SEKRETAREV
ONE of the most consistently mesmerising shows on the internet is The New Yorker Radio Hour, hosted by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick. If you don’t already subscribe, I’d highly recommend it.
The weekly podcast frequently circles back to some of the host’s favourite intellectual projects, one of which is the subject of Russia. Remnick was based in Moscow for four years in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the Washington Post’s Russian correspondent, and his interest in the country has never waned.
A couple of months ago Remnick interviewed 2015 Nobel Prize winner and Belarusian historian Svetlana Alexievich. He asked her about her writing, specifically her book of oral testimony, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, which unflinchingly documents ordinary Russians’ feelings of grief, loss and disorientation at the collapse of the once great Soviet empire, and many ordinary people’s longing for Russia’s more "glorious" past. I have not yet read it but it sounds extraordinary.
Describing Vladimir Putin, Alexievich used a turn of phrase that has stuck with me. She describes how, some way into his political leadership, Putin "took off all his masks" and abandoned "playing at democracy".
The idea of Putin irritably performing a role he thought he ought to, before becoming fatigued with the nonsense of it all and — secure in the seemingly genuine and overwhelming domestic support he enjoys — gradually revealing his true self, is helpful.
It is instructive in making sense of the increasingly bold chess moves Putin has made in recent years.
Russian incursions into Georgia in 2008 and the annexure of the Ukraine in 2014 come to mind most immediately. But in the last few weeks Putin has moved to the next level. The bombing of Aleppo by the Russian military, including a convoy of UN humanitarian aid trucks, seems to be in a league of its own.
Somehow the word "bombing" doesn’t fully cover what Russia’s air force did to the eastern rebel-held half of the city. One resident called it "hell on Earth"; another a "war of extermination".
Certainly the footage is enough to leave one thunderstruck by the entirety of the horror and human misery.
Putin’s enthusiastic support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s seemingly psychopathic crusade to murder his own people is impossible to ignore, even in a society as unwaveringly committed to violent self-analysis as SA is right now.
On the recent Russian atrocities in Syria, there has not been a peep from our own government. This is possibly because from their perspective, there isn’t really a problem in Syria to start with.
Back in June, International Relations and Cooperation Deputy Minister Nomaindia Mfeketo chirpily told the media that things in Syria were just fine, and that only "incorrect narratives" were giving the false impression of a festering wound of rape, violence, torture and daily killings, from which hundreds of thousands of refugees would risk their lives, and those of their children, to flee.
In fact, Africa more broadly has been silent on Russia and Putin’s increasingly energetic international forays.
This is unsurprising given the extent of the wooing Putin has undertaken with many African governments. Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni visited Putin in Moscow in late 2012, and since then has fostered ongoing and close ties to Russia, culminating in a massive energy deal with Rostec earlier this year to build an oil refinery.
The evidently immortal President Robert Mugabe was in the Kremlin as recently as May, carping to Putin about their common burden of sanctions.
And in April this year then-African Union (AU) Commission chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma announced, upon return from her second official visit to Moscow, that aside from the obvious economic co-operation, Russia had offered a sweeping pledge of "total support" on "Africa’s positions around UN resolutions, on the basis of the AU’s principle of African solution [sic] to African problems".
And, of course, our very own Russophile, President Jacob Zuma, has visited Putin in Moscow no less than six times since 2010.
Many of us may have already forgotten about Project Condor, the joint launching of a Russian-South African spy satellite in late 2014, so shrouded in secrecy that even our own intelligence services didn’t appear to know the full details of the arrangement.
The nuclear deal that threatens to bankrupt SA was just the culmination of years of courtship.
In a different world, recent evidence of Russia’s conduct might shake even the most ardent Putin fan.
Two weeks ago a Dutch-led investigation confirmed that a Malaysian Airlines commercial plane was indeed shot down over Ukraine in July 2014 by a surface-to-air missile supplied and deployed by Russia, killing 298 civilians.
In the last few weeks, testimony about the deployment of earth-shattering "bunker bombs" and photographs of babies in the rubble in Aleppo might be pause for thought and re-evaluation, no matter how special the relationship.
But in SA, the stakes are too high, the magnitude of the commitments too vast — and the precedent of looking the other way too established.
It is probably too much to ask for the South African government to issue a public condemnation of Assad’s terrorising of his own people, or to challenge Putin’s enthusiastic participation in this ongoing horror. Indeed, some days it is hard to get a coherent position out of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation on just about anything. Even if we do care, we can’t show that we do.
But it does pose difficult questions about the quality of the friends in which the Zuma regime chooses to invest its time and effort. By virtue of the ANC’s decisions, the South African people are being placed in an ever-deepening alliance with an increasingly muscular Russia.
If this is Putin with all his masks off, no longer "playing" at democracy, the long-term problem is likely to be bigger even than the nuclear deal.
• Van Onselen is an independent political risk consultant and analyst
