A straight line from the SPD curators of the Schlangenbad Dialogue of 2015 to today’s suicidal foreign and commercial policy of Chancellor Scholz
My essay yesterday about Sergei Karaganov and his menacing writings about a preemptive nuclear strike to sober up the West attracted a lot of interest among readers. I received feedback requesting more information on what I saw and heard inside the think tank of Germany’s Social Democratic Party at its annual Russian-German “dialogue” meetings in the resort town of Schlangenbad in May 2015.
My German translator in particular was keen to access the article on that conference that I had published in my collection Does Russia Have a Future? For his benefit and for the benefit of others among you who wish to pursue this, here is the link to the text as it was republished by a news portal which had a vast audience at the time: https://russia-insider.com/en/politics/german-policy-makers-must-return-earth-its-too-late/ri6830
The editors attached a title to my piece which may have seemed alarmist in 2015, but regrettably was all too prescient. I urge you to go to this article, because it spells out what was seriously wrong with Russian diplomacy at the time, which set the stage for ever more aggressive and dangerous Western behavior. It also identifies the new ‘secular religion’ that had taken hold of the Socialist Democratic Party and which was founded on Idealism and on rejection of Realism. In this sense everything wrong with the German Left was and is what is wrong with Progressive Democrats in the USA: they all have fallen into the trap of Neoconservatism, which is the foreign policy formula now taking us to Armageddon.
While trying to find my own MS Word file of the Schlangenbad article I accidentally came upon the file of the notes I took at that conference and later used as a basis for the published work. In these notes, of course, I named names, and that is also useful today in various ways to add depth to our understanding of how Russian society functions.
I have cut and pasted those notes below. They underline the sad fact that within the German Left, which is nominally the Socialist Democratic Party, the vast majority of apparatchiks, and probably of rank in file members had by 2015 abandoned the traditions of détente which were famously laid down by Willy Brandt during his chancellorship. In this sense, the change in German defense and European security policy that Chancellor Scholz announced triumphantly last autumn was merely a belated implementation of the change in mentality that occurred within his party eight years or more earlier.
The Russian Opposition leader whom the Germans in Schlangenbad saw as the next Russian President if fortune went their way was, as I name him here, Vladimir Ryzhkov. Ryzhkov had been one of the top personalities fomenting the public disturbances over alleged election irregularities in 2011-2012 and over corruption more generally. He was allied in this with Boris Nemtsov and with former premier “5%” Kasyanov. Kasyanov got that moniker for his bribe-taking, which did his reformer image no harm. It was at these demonstrations that Alexei Navalny came to public attention.
I mention Ryzhkov now simply to make a point about Mr. Putin’s Russia. Where did Ryzhkov go after doing his best to discredit Putin as a crook? Was he sent off to Siberia? Nothing of the sort! Wikipedia tells us that Mr. Ryzhkov is now a professor at the Higher School of Economics and is also on the consultative board of….”Russia in Global Affairs,” the same publication which just published Karaganov’s article on preemptive nuclear strikes.
Let us speak here about the real world: Even after the departure of many ‘fifth column” personalities following the onset of the Special Military Operation, there remain in Russia many defiant political activists, who are exposed to no persecution. Yes, the nest of subversives in Yekaterinburg that goes under the name “Yeltsin Center” is finally being investigated pending possible designation as a Foreign Agent. But the Higher School of Economics remains a refuge for Russia’s free-market compradors. The country is very big and very complex, a fact that seems to escape the attention of our Russia experts in the West.
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Friedrich Ebert Stiftung - Schlagenbad conference - 28-30 April 2015
Participants - 65 Germans and 15 Russians
A large majority of Germans say in the conference what they would otherwise say on the record to the public: they are all Idealists who subscribe to the secular religion’s trinity of articles of faith:
1) That long-term peaceful relations with authoritarian regimes are not possible, because such regimes are fragile, do not enjoy popular support and so in order to ensure loyalty and keep the lid on opposition, these regimes practice aggressive foreign policies, engage in xenophobia and nationalism. In the Russian case, they cite the successful domestic opposition that brought about the Bolotnoye demonstrations in December 2011.
2) That foreign policy must be values based and not interests based. It must stand for the rule of law, democracy, market economy
3) That nations have the obligation to interfere with one another in defense of human rights
The organizers of the conference have included independent (Karaganov from the Higher School of Economics and another academic from MEMO) and opposition academics and politicians without however alienating the Kremlin representatives. A Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and his wife stay through the full program. They manage not to be present during the worst attacks – by the former MGIMO professor who was dismissed one year ago for his article against the Crimean reunification (he delivers a venomous critique of Putin’s Russia as a godless Communist monster) and Vladimir Ryzhkov, who seems to be especially beloved here.
By and large the conference attendees come back year after year.
My host, Krumm, finally spends ten minutes with me at lunch on this third day. It is clear he has no enthusiasm for co-hosting my planned September event in Brussels about Germany’s New Ostpolitik. He does not like the idea of a German foreign policy. The official line seems to be that there is no German policy, only an EU policy. The Germans are hiding behind the fiction of Brussels. Otherwise there are obvious lessons from this Schlangenbad conference: the Stiftung likes behind closed door events for the benefit of invited politicians and government officials. Krumm says they don’t like scholarly events (what he means is they don’t like public events. I think the television angle is not for them). He suggests that I write him a one-page proposal to co-sponsor the September event, but I think this is just a polite way to shift responsibility for what will be either silence or a nyet.
While at lunch, Vladimir Ryzhkov sits down to my right and Reinhard Krumm introduces us. I explain who I am and what I am doing, setting up Round Tables. To move to safer areas of chat, I ask him who he thinks killed Nemtsov. He says there is no doubt the murder was ordered by Kadyrov as a present to his boss. The FSB know all the details, the actual gunman is now in Grozny and is being protected by Kadyrov. There is a fight going on between what Ryzhkov calls the two pillars of the regime: the FSB and Kadyrov. Ryzhkov says that the Chechens were also behind the Politkovskaya murder, doing it exactly on Putin’s birthday as a present to him. Getting serious, I turn to Ryzhkov and tell him that we have something in common: he is a Russian dissident and I am an American dissident. I say that I think he is an optimist, whereas I am a pessimist – I think that we are heading for WWIII. I mention the old issues of the Cold War are back with us: the permanent existential threat of nuclear war, the issue of better Red than Dead, the issue that the more you put pressure on Russia the more repressive the domestic regime will be. Note: Ryzhkov was totally silent for the first two days of the conference. However in the Thursday morning session, the last plenary, he unleashed a lengthy attack on Putin and the regime, including its representative here Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Meshkov and his insistence that the European Home can and must still be built. To have such a house you must have house rules. You cannot throw dogs or cats from the roof, you cannot beat little children, you must not have loud music at night. Point: you cannot do business with this Putin regime as it breaks all the rules. Even if you accept that there was a coup d’etat on 22 February, which we do not, this gave no reason for seizing the Crimea. Etc, etc. Similar argumentation, almost the same playbook as what I heard from Elmar Brok in his debate with Russian ambassador to NATO in Brussels Grushko.
Talk today Friday at breakfast with the quite young Fedor Voitolovsky, deputy director of IMEMO, the Institute of World Economy and International Relations. This guy is an opposition personality but is open to discussion, civilized. Could pay to look him up in Moscow. Also with Vladimir Handl, research fellow from the Czech Institute of International Relations, Prague. Also very critical of the Putin regime, onset of fascism, whom they half expect to move into Mariupul next. Highly critical of the bullshit presentations from the Russian officials starting with Meshkov and their phony denials of Russian intervention in Ukraine which discredits the regime in their eyes. Both gents hear me out on the uncivilized dialogue today, on the ‘’stooge of Putin’’ and other ad hominem argumentation of the mainstream. Also we have a common point with Voitolovsky on how the NYT is today no different from Fox News. I argue that Germany has not yet come to grips with its objective role as a direct competitor with Russia in geopolitical space. I mention that in the USA, the conflict is seen as a strictly US-Russian confrontation and here it is strictly an EU-Russian confrontation, that both conceptualizations are incomplete and make a solution impossible. They have never seen the question put this way, though they say that the US view is mirror image of how Russians view it
They are very happy when I criticize the Putin government for its obvious foreign policy weaknesses. As for example, its putting bets on the European Right and thereby alienating the German Far Left, ignoring the reality that no Right forces can succeed in Germany by definition.
At the wine tasting in our “cultural program’’ this afternoon, Alexei Kosygin joins me and we chat about my work in the liquor industry. He is a fan of single malts, especially Oban.
See the German political correctness: We are just bunny rabbits. We in Germany and Europe have virtually disarmed, we can pose no military threat to Russia, so why all the muscle flexing, why the hot rhetoric.
We Germans have never practiced regime change, orange revolutions, so why is Russia so excited.
Germany has no Ostpolitik. Our foreign policy is made in Brussels.
[Note: I indeed organized a Round Table on Germany’s New Ostpolitik on 29 September 2015 in the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations, which is the think tank of the Belgian Foreign Ministry. I did so on behalf of the American Committee for East-West Accord, of which I was then a co-founder and board member. The co-sponsor was Germany’s Heinrich Böll Stiftung. See Germany’s new Ostpolitik and Russia: from strategic partnership to geopolitical competition? - Egmont Institute ]
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