OF FACTS AND FAIRY-TALES | March 1st 2008

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With the cold war won, pundits in the West anticipated the clean and easy spread of market forces and liberal democracy. What foolish optimism, writes Edward Lucas in his new book, "The New Cold War". Stephen Hugh-Jones praises the tome and laments today's Russia ...

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What fun it is to meet a book that doesn't call a spade a bicipitally-powered materials-excavation mechanism but a bloody shovel. My former colleague Edward Lucas has just written one. And if "The New Cold War" (Bloomsbury £18.99; Macmillan $26.95) doesn't leave you sharing his detestation of the Putin regime in Russia, the fault is not his.

There were two damnfool ideas going around near the end of the late lamentable century that promised us all a rosier future in the present one. The sillier one, and I mean that word, was to be found in Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man". With the cold war won by the West, the human race, it seemed, had seen the last of ideological conflict. From now on, with whatever marginal variations and disagreements, and occasional falling-back, we would all be the disciples of market forces and liberal democracy.

How anyone could take that fantasy seriously, I never knew. Even at the time, years before 9/11, it struck me as nonsense. Though Fukuyama briefly discussed the topic, one might have thought Islamic fundamentalism had barely been heard of inside the Beltway. By now, we know better.

The other notion was less obviously absurd. With the arms race won, the Soviet Union gone and shrunken Russia seemingly converted, albeit imperfectly, to Western values, we in the West could sit could back and spend the "peace dividend" on higher education, dancing girls and iced lollies. Most countries did indeed cut their military spending, and were probably right to.

Where most of public opinion went wrong was in assuming that what was true at the time would be equally true ten or 20 years later. High-tech military hardware, "toys for the boys", as it was derided, would simply no longer be needed. Wars there might be, but they'd be low-level ones, to be sorted out by helicopters in Africa, not Eurofighters or Star Wars wizardry halfway to outer space.

That could yet be so. But it ignored two realities. One is that the point of weaponry is not just to fight but to be visibly ready to, and so, one hopes, avoid the need ever to use the weapons. The other is that a great nation that has just had its face rubbed in the mud does not usually sit around meekly washing itself clean. Germany had been humiliated in the 1920s by the Treaty of Versailles, and look what followed. The Russians suffered a similar humiliation, by the disintegration first of the Soviet empire and then of the Soviet Union itself.

The people of both countries--Germany and Russia--were ready to believe they had been stabbed in the back. Both were eager, and within 15 years able, to do something about it. Vladimir Putin, appointed prime minister in 1999 by Boris Yeltsin and elected president in 2000, has vigorously exploited and fed this wave of resurgent nationalism, and with great success. He's determined, intelligent, able and popular. And, unlike Yeltsin, he's not a drunk.

He has also had one huge fortuitous aid: a soaring oil price. Thanks to it, Russia—and a great many Russians—is vastly better off than it was 15 years ago. It is still miles behind the United States in weaponry, but it can look the Americans in the face, with hostility if need be. And its wealth and energy resources are proving a more effective weapon in Europe than umpteen armoured divisions might be. Unlike tanks, it can use them.

As it does. Desperate for energy sources, some West European countries, notably Germany, have rushed to sign up for supplies of Russian gas. Major oil companies such as Shell and BP have made deals to develop Russian oilfields. When their deals were cynically disrupted by the Kremlin, these companies have meekly kowtowed on the theory, justifiable enough in commercial terms, that even half a barrel is better than no bread.

These energy supplies can be cut off at the drop of a hat, and indeed might be—the Russians have proved that with their nearer neighbours. Lenin reputedly said that the capitalists "will sell us the rope to hang them with". Russia's state-owned Gazprom has gone one better: it has sold the rope which the West is cheerfully putting round its own neck. The Kremlin may never open the trap, but then it may never need to: the prospect of being hanged does indeed concentrate a man's mind wonderfully, and, more to the point, sap his determination.

Today's Russia doesn't need, as the Soviet Union did, to have toadying communist parties in the West, or to use arrogant traitors like Kim Philby (or sundry hired British parliamentarians) to do its dirty work. It has plenty of western businessmen, Lucas says, especially in Germany, whose mere self-interest inspires them to argue Russia's case.

All this Lucas recounts, and with no small venom. It might seem overmuch if he did not also recount just how venomous the regime he is writing about is. Putin is not a thug, as Stalin was. He is not paranoid, he hasn't sent millions to the gulag, he's not a mass murderer. But he has destroyed the freedom of the media and the beginnings of parliamentary democracy, which Yeltsin, with all his faults, allowed to flourish. Having overthrown the oligarchy of corrupt capitalists who also flourished under Yeltsin--not least by deploying the tax system as an instrument of arbitrary theft--he has replaced them with an oligarchy of state capitalism. The law, which had begun to take on the functions that liberal countries ascribe to it, is back to being a tool of state oppression when it suits the state to use it as such.

And though Putin may not personally be a thug, his Kremlin employs plenty of them, happy to silence critics with police and secret-service threats, "psychiatric" imprisonment, violence and, when useful, murder. The result is still light-years short of Stalinist terror, but the direction is the same.

Not so far short of Stalin's days is the way Russia's army, under Putin as—let's be fair—before, has savaged the Chechen rebels and a great many other Chechens, all of them, cheerfully or not, fellow-citizens. Russians, by and large, have approved. And next? The new Russia has not set out, and maybe never will, to emulate the Soviet Union's long occupation of eastern Europe, or its ruthless war in Afghanistan, one that could make NATO's troops now there "stand astonished", like Clive of India, "at [their] own moderation". But already it stations troops in bits of Georgia and Moldova, not without excuses but against both those countries' wishes. If I were a citizen of any of the three Baltic republics, for half the late century incorporated by force into the USSR—well, these days I'd keep my fingers crossed and an air ticket westward permanently open. And, living in Britain, I wouldn't bet my fiver against your 50 on all three staying independent for the half-century to come.

(Stephen Hugh-Jones is a former writer and editor for The Economist, where he wrote the Johnson column from 1992-99. He lives now in West Sussex.)