Russia

Lord Chartres Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Chartres (CB)]

My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Judd. I declare an interest in that until the beginning of this year I chaired the liaison group between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Church of England.

Our understandable concern with current Russian policies does not, I imagine, blind any of us to the trauma through which the Russian people have passed over the last century and the resulting impact on their world-view. There is no excuse now for misunderstanding the nature of the Bolshevik regime—as there was, because there was a period in our country when it was impermissible to question the importance and the goodness of the great Soviet experiment—and its hangover in present political patterns. One of the most impressive figures to emerge from the twilight of the Soviet era, Alexander Yakovlev, said:

“I came to the profound conviction that the October coup d’état was a counterrevolution that marked the beginning of a criminal-terrorist fascist-type state”.


The civil war, the gulag and the Second World War claimed millions of victims, and among them some of the finest representatives of Russian culture. There were huge numbers of Russian, Muslim, Buddhist and Jewish martyrs.

Given the nature of the trauma visited on the Russian people during the Soviet years and the social and economic distortions, it was perhaps naive—I share the disappointment that the noble Lord expressed—to believe that the transition to anything like liberal democracy and the market economy would be easy in Russia. Russian commentators who are prone to see conspiracies everywhere are especially sceptical about what seems to be a recent western faith in peremptory regime change. With their own experience of the revolution and its aftermath, they argue that deposing a Saddam Hussain, a Gaddafi or an Assad in a structure where power is concentrated at the top is simply inviting chaos.

So while we do, and ought to, refrain from loose talk of the kind which caused so much confusion about the precise intentions of the West in Georgia, and while we demonstrate our utter seriousness about defending our NATO allies in the Baltic states and developing and improving our cyber defence capabilities, as other noble Lords have said, we ought not to be cynical about the Russian capacity for regeneration and ignore the progress being made to restore civil society after its devastation during the Soviet period. I think particularly of the extraordinary achievement of building 30,000 churches since the end of the communist period and developing a community which, as far as the Russian Orthodox Church is concerned, embraces 100 million believers. As the noble Viscount said, the dialogue must include a wide engagement with the whole of culture.

Politicians in our country notoriously are advised not to do God, but wise diplomats in Russia should, and in my experience very often do, recognise the huge potential of people of faith and good will in bringing about social transformation in Russia and, crucially, the need to engage with them.