A new cold war means spies. But what can Russia offer Oxbridge graduates these days?
If that nice Mr Medvedev is right, and Russia is indeed braced for a new cold war, then the spooks must be on a recruitment drive. Ours, obviously, but theirs too. So spare a thought for the Russian intelligence human resources office, because a career in post-KGB espionage can’t be an easy sell.
The modern British teenager merely believes himself to have a God-given right to be an Arctic Monkey. His Russian counterpart, by contrast, surely considers himself a failure if he reaches the age of 21 without a majority stake in the world’s third largest steel corporation, a medium-sized British football club and a girlfriend who looks like a saucier version of Katie Holmes. With horizons like this, how excited will he be by an economy Aeroflot ticket to London and a briefcase full of dodgy fish that can make you look like Darth Vader without his mask on?
Recruitment abroad must also be tricky. The Russian spymaster needs foreign agents. He needs Oxbridge toffs and dilettantes; inscrutable cold-eyed killers who are prepared to form sleeper cells under the cover of a cut-glass accent and a professed love of Radio 4. But where to find them? How to make them turn? It’s not like it was. Melita Norwood was a lifelong communist, groomed to spy by her own mother. Philby, Burgess, Maclean and the others were all equally ripe, being enamoured of socialism and too posh to join the Labour party. Back in the day, a traitor had a cause.
Does modern Russia have a cause? If the Kremlin has any basic ideology at all, then it is a Ryanair ideology — a brutal, minimalist, we-can’t-believe-you-are-falling-for-this-ideology-crap ideology. That’s why this cold war is going to be different from the last cold war. These days, looking east, there is nothing to believe in. There is no reason to betray your country to the Russians except for cold hard cash.
Only it would have to be an awful lot of cash. These are Oxbridge graduates we are talking about. Their career prospects, even now, are pretty good. The Russians may be in the midst of an extraordinary economic recovery, and they may be reaping the benefits of sky-rocketing oil and gas prices, but can the man in the nondescript raincoat really offer the career-minded graduate a starting salary to rival, say, a mid-level management consultancy?
I doubt it. In fact, at any universi ty careers fair, the stall of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (the main successor to the KGB) is going to look pretty forlorn. What’s the appeal? There’s no healthcare, and no pension. You’ve got to get a second job somewhere dismal like the Civil Service or the BBC, and the only perks on offer are bi-annual use of a leaky dacha in Siberia, and a small hamper every Christmas with a tin of fake caviar and some dodgy unbranded vodka that makes your eyes bleed. Far better to sell out to the Saudis, two stalls down, who will probably give you a gold pen just for leaving them your email address. Or even the CIA, who will surely at least teach you how to jet-ski.
That’s what Medvedev and Putin may be forgetting, with all their ‘new cold war’ stuff. This time around, Russia has nothing to offer humankind, even theoretically. That is why it has no way of making friends, beyond buying them. America has its own gospel of liberty to preach, China can demand world attention on a demographic basis; even Iran can appeal to Islamic solidarity. But Russia? For an aspiring superpower, it is missing a whole facet. Beyond bombs and guns and gas, why should anybody care about Russia? What is the point?
The old USSR was like Hugo Drax, my favourite Bond villain. That was Moonraker, you’ll remember, the last film with Jaws. There were some differences: the Soviets wanted workers of the world to unite, Drax wanted to kill everybody from space and repopulate the planet with his own handpicked master race. Mere details. The point is, despite each being bonkers and dangerous and wrong about almost everything, each also believed themselves to be a force for moral good.
You could respect a Hugo Drax. You might shoot him with a strange wrist dart and send him spiralling off into space, but at least you felt he was a man with a sense of history. Putin’s Russia is more like your standard Goldfinger clone, who just wants to hold the world to ransom again. That’s why Oddjob was in it for the money and wound up dead, whereas Jaws was allowed on the spaceship with that girl with the pigtails. Dolly, I think she was called.
As is traditional for a columnist on holiday, I found myself last week adding a new item to my wobbly, eclectic list of ‘things that make me feel very British’. Americans and their lack of kettles, Europeans and their lack of toasters. That sort of thing. This time, I was near St Tropez, and I had just paid €19 to sit on a beach.
They also gave me a lounger to sit on and a parasol to sit beneath, so it is not the price, particularly, which I am moaning about. Elsewhere in St Tropez, after all, you would be hard pressed to get a sandwich for that. Still, the idea of somebody charging me in order to sit on a beach seemed... strange. No. Scratch that. It seemed more than strange. It seemed morally wrong. In Britain, I was always told, land between low tide and high tide is the property of the crown. In practice, that means it is everybody’s and nobody’s all at once.
Stand in a British park, even, and you are dimly aware of being on land owned by somebody or something. A British beach, though, feels like un-space. You can walk along it, as far as you are able, and you won’t be trespassing. Is that right? It feels right. It feels important, too. A little nugget of reassurance, connecting man with land.
It’s certainly not like that in France. Lay down your towel on the wrong bit of beach, and officious little people can come up to you and tell you to go away. And they do. Unless you pay €19.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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