Russia

Lord Luce Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Luce (CB)]

My Lords, I first visited what was then the Soviet Union 41 years ago in 1977 as a member of an all-party parliamentary delegation. That visit made an indelible impression on me. I returned with two reflections, which, in a broad sense, remain the same today. First, I believed that we must retain our defences in the West and ensure that Soviet leaders, as they then were, understood our determination to do so. Secondly, I recognised that we are both proud nations and share a European culture, but are massively ignorant about each other, and need to get to know each other better as a people. I learned for the first time on that visit that 20 million Russians had been killed in the Second World War, and that millions more died under Stalin in the 1930s. I came back with the view that they were a tired, worn-out people, whose leaders were spending a disproportionate amount of their resources on defence. These characteristics apply broadly today.

We have seen the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the chaos, the anarchy and the lack of the rule of law. This has been exploited by gangs of oligarchs at the expense of the people. Ironically, many of their children are educated in the United Kingdom and the west today. As they often do in that country, they have swung from anarchy to authoritarianism. Putin has become a nationalistic dictator, tightening his grip in order to stay in power. We in the west need to carry out a penetrating and accurate analysis of the nature and scale of that threat.

Today, I want to make one point. The vital part of our strategy must be sustained: long-term dialogue between our people, as well as Governments, to strengthen our mutual knowledge and understanding, because there is so much ignorance about each other. Of course, ignorance breeds fear. I do not know how many in this Chamber have read the works of Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Her diaries are based on interviews with hundreds of Russians, and they are very telling. They demonstrate that the lives of so many Russians are, to use my own words, nasty and brutish, but that these people are also deeply spiritual and Christian.

I endorse very strongly the work of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. Paragraph 187 of its report of March 2017 said that the Government,

“must look beyond … Putin and develop a long-term strategy to engage with the Russian people”.

There must be more exchanges in education, culture, business and science, recognising the work of the British Council and the BBC World Service. Above all, there must be a,

“people-to-people strategy building bridges”.

I will therefore end on one example of an already very successful people-to-people strategy, which could be followed by others. The Pushkin Trust was established in 1987 by the Duchess of Abercorn, who was a descendant of Pushkin. It now involves thousands of schoolchildren in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and Russia using modern networking to link up and encourage creative programmes in the spirit of Pushkin and, through dialogue, to establish common ground and understanding. It has broken down barriers between Roman Catholics and Protestants and is now breaking down barriers between the Irish and Russian schoolchildren. This is truly about the future and it stimulates mutual understanding among young people. We now need a flowering of initiatives such as that of the Pushkin Trust. I hope the Minister will endorse the policy of dialogue and encourage more people-to-people contact.