Russia's hold on eastern Europe By Nick Thorpe BBC News, Budapest The European Commission has expressed concern about Russian plans to acquire gas pipelines and other strategic assets, but the Russians have already been buying up energy and other firms, particularly in countries which used to be part of the Soviet Union.
"How many tank divisions has the Pope?" Josef Stalin is reported to have asked when it was suggested to him that he might make a conciliatory gesture towards the Vatican. It is a phrase which Jefim Fistejn, the head of the Russia desk at Radio Free Europe in Prague, quotes with relish today when I ask him about President Vladimir Putin's approach to eastern Europe. Oil and gas pipelines have replaced tank divisions, Fistejn argues. And the eastern Europeans do not have that many. While Putin's brash new Russia has a lot, spreading like tentacles across the region. "As far as we are concerned," a Putin advisor teased the editorial staff at Gazeta Wyborcza, one of Poland's most prestigious dailies, "Warsaw is just the third stop on the Moscow to Berlin railway." Russian muscle "No other nation on earth would be so crass as to express that thought publicly," fumed an affronted Polish journalist, "even if they harboured it in their hearts." Poles prefer to see themselves as the most important of the recent members of the European Union, and a country with ample historic proof of standing up to both eastern and western neighbours. There is a lot of Russian muscle on display in eastern Europe at the moment. Kosovo would be independent by now - if Russia had not frightened the United States and the European Union with the hint of her veto - if the UN Security Council were to dare to vote on the recommendations of the UN special envoy, Martti Ahtisaari. Serb nationalists like to think the Russian stance is based on pan-Slav solidarity. To other observers, it looks more like a combination of Russian business interests in the Balkans and a chance to teach the West a lesson. When the hammer and sickle disappeared overnight from a Soviet war monument in the Czech city of Brno, the Russians immediately issued a protest note. Under Yeltsin, Fistejn argues, the incident would have been dismissed for what it was, the work of local tinkers, fuelling their furnace with any old iron they can get their hands on. What is so confusing for the east Europeans is that the Russian lion is not just flexing its muscles "When a lion is sick, there will always be a monkey who pulls its tail," a Russian diplomat lamented when Russia foreign policy was still weak and listless and prone to Polish provocations. But what to do when the lion's coat regains that healthy sheen, and those handsome jaws roar? I asked Polish deputy Karol Karski, from the governing Law and Justice Party. "The Russians have to understand that this is not a zoo," he replies indignantly. "And we are not monkeys," he adds. Russian wealth What is so confusing for the east Europeans is that the Russian lion is not just flexing its muscles. It has opened an attache case of cash. Russians have bought up the Czech spa resort of Karlovy Vary and the Hungarian airline Malev. They are fingering parts of the Czech energy giant CEZ and Hungary's biggest oil and gas firm, MOL. They want Magyar Telecom and its subsidiaries in Macedonia and Montenegro. And that would give them access to the mobile phone calls and e-mails of a Nato member country. This is not all new. Six years ago, the Poles were shocked to find four fat fibre-optic cables running down a Russian gas pipeline, an information highway powerful enough to transmit the contents of 78,000 encyclopaedias a second - or simultaneously handle 38 million phone calls, according to newspapers at the time. One by one, eastern European leaders - Ferenc Gyurcsany of Hungary, Robert Fico of Slovakia, Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic - troop off to Moscow, or the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi to seek an audience with the Russian leader. It sometimes feels like the 1980s. But the alarm bells are not ringing everywhere. "We have nothing to fear from a Russia in the ascendant," the Czech philosopher Erazim Kohak explains. In fact it should be welcomed as a factor of stability, he believes, in a dangerously lopsided American-run world. In his eyrie overlooking the charming, chiming bells of old Prague, political commentator Jiri Pehe worries about the missile defence system which the Poles and Czechs have offered to install on their territory, at the behest of Washington. "Our leaders fail to recognise that this is a game between the Russians and Americans," he says. And as a result, they overplay their hand. So where will it all end? The Hungarian writer, Sandor Marai, offers one answer, from a very different era. Describing his first encounters with Soviet soldiers, riding their horses beside the frozen Danube, in January 1945, he wrote: "It is becoming apparent that they do not just want our wheat and our pigs. They want our souls." >From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Thursday 19 September, 2007 at >1100 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World >Service transmission times. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7002511.stm Published: 2007/09/20 10:35:31 GMT © BBC MMVII
