Back in the USSR: Peter Jarman has a tale of two Russians

‘I am dismayed that Russians like Alexander are not governing Russia today.’

I’d like to tell the story of two Russians. One of them relinquished power over another country; the other seeks to gain power by invading Ukraine.

During the cold war years, Quaker Peace and Service (QPS) organised a series of bilateral seminars and visits between Soviet and British citizens. As QPS’s east-west secretary, I organised one in the UK in 1988. As part of his visit, a man called Alexander Likhotal joined me for a walk across the Sussex countryside. He said that he was a personal assistant to Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the USSR. ‘We have decided to let Poland go its own way’, he remarked, meaning to release it from Soviet control.  ‘If you let that happen’, I queried, ‘what would happen to East Germany?’ ‘Yes, we have thought of that’, Alexander responded. Within a few months its communist regime collapsed, and the Berlin wall came down.

When Gorbachev was displaced, he established the Green Cross International in Geneva with Alexander as its president. It aimed to protect the environment. Alexander is now a professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations. He has recently published an insightful account of why Russia has invaded Ukraine and what might have been done to prevent it.[1]

I am dismayed that Russians like him are not governing Russia today. In 1992, while serving as a Quaker representative in Russia (and as the Moscow correspondent of the Friend), I was asked to find a group of ex-KGB officers who could be invited to a conference in Britain. The KGB was the Soviet security service – Vladimir Putin was a junior officer of it in East Germany. I was curious about ex-KGB officers and arranged to have a meeting with them. One of them, Yuri, met me clandestinely in a shopping arcade in Moscow, and took me to a meeting of his colleagues in the basement of the former KGB headquarters, the Lubyanka. Many Russians had been interrogated and shot there, so I had some trepidation entering it. About a dozen ex-KGB officers were there, and were intrigued at the prospect of being invited to the UK. After I met them, however, I urged Quakers not to invite them.

A few days later Yuri phoned me and invited me to meet some current Russian security officers. They had a proposition to put to me. I met six of them in a luxurious flat previously earmarked for senior communist officials.  ‘We have a business proposition to offer you that would be mutually very profitable’, they said. ‘Russia has unique defence equipment surplus to its needs, and you could act as our agent to sell them in the UK. We can assure you of absolute confidentiality and security, especially from our mafia – for we control the mafia’.

‘Gentlemen’, I concluded, ‘goodbye, your business is not the same as mine!’. I feared that they intended to govern Russia as they do today.

1. www.cadmusjournal.org/article/volume-4-issue-6/root-causes-russian-invasion-ukraine.

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