A Question To David Miliband And Jaqui Smith: How Come Britain Is Punishing Russian Students?

September 1, 2008

I have been hearing very unpleasant things recently about the way Russian people have been treated by British authorities. Very unpleasant things indeed. A young Russian woman told me, for example, that her scholarship at a British university has been cancelled all of a sudden and the explanation she was given was that it had something to do with the Home Office advising educational authorities to limit the numbers of students from Russia coming to study in Britain.

Also, I’ve been hearing from some people that private schools in Britain have been reluctant to take pupils from Russia, because they are supposedly unruly and difficult to work with, and because their parents make unreasonable demands.

And as for granting student and tourist visas to Russians I’ve heard numerous accounts of the British embassy rejecting applications for no reason at all. I know that for a fact because one of my close relations has been prevented from coming to Britain to study English, even though she could prove that she had sufficient funds and even had a place to stay. Not only was her visa application refused by the British embassy in Moscow but she got a ‘rejected’ stamp in her passport, basically banning her from travelling to Britain for the foreseeable future and making it extremely difficult for her to get a visa to the EU countries and the United States.

The British government has introduced restrictions on the visits of Russian officials to the UK following Moscow’s decision to reject Britain’s demand of extraditing Andrey Lugovoy, the main suspect in the Aleksander Litvinenko murder, to London to stand trial. The sanctions were announced by David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, in 2007. I thought at the time that it was a clever move because the measure was restricted to government officials and did not target ordinary Russians.

But guess what happened in reality: Russian officials continued to visit Britain without any serious problems while the visa sanctions were hitting ordinary Russians. How on earth this is supposed to punish the Russian authorities, I don’t really understand.

I have always been surprised at the way people in the West mistakenly associate Russian people with the actions of their political rulers. Imagine: even in a democracy like Britain – where you have a system of checks and balances, where the government is accountable to parliament and where the free press is monitoring the politicians – the Labour government under Tony Blair still managed to drag the country into an illegal war in Iraq. Even though the majority of the British people were against it. So what can you expect of the Russians? How are they supposed to voice their protest or influence the policy of the state if their government pays no attention to them? They obviously can’t – so why should they be held accountable for what their political rulers do?

You can, obviously, say that the polls in Russia register a high support for the country’s leadership. But let me ask you this: how come the new President, Dmitry Medvedev, who was plucked out of nowhere by Vladimir Putin in the end of 2007, was suddenly so popular in the country? How come he was commanding the support of around 75 per cent of the voters even though no one knew anything about him? That should tell you about the reliability of polls in Russia.

By the way, once I am on the subject of holding Russian people to account for the policies of the Kremlin, I would like to say this: there is a tendency among the leaders of the former Soviet republics to directly associate the former communist regime in Russia with its people. You would hear Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushenko or the leaders of the Baltic states talk about their countries’ past in such a way as if the Russian people were responsible for all those years of communist dictatorship. They also often talk about the ethnic Russians living in their countries as if they are still some fifth column of the Kremlin, ready to respond to its orders at any moment.

It has nothing to do with the real state of things. The fact of the matter is that more Russians have perished during communist times than any other nation in the Soviet Empire. The standards of living in Russia, which was the biggest republic in the USSR, were much lower than the standards of living in Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltics. That alone should prove to anyone that Russian people have not been benefitting from being the largest nation in the Soviet empire. They were the biggest victims of the ruthless communist ideology, brought to Russia, by the way, from the West at the end of the 19th century. Once you understand this, you will understand the whole tragedy of the Russian nation.

So my question to Foreign Secretary Miliband and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is this: are you aware that your people are punishing ordinary Russians for the actions of their unaccountable leaders? And how come your ministries don’t cause any problems for the Russian government officials and for the people who finance the Kremlin, the oligarchs? Or is it a case of saying one thing in public and doing completely the opposite behind the scenes?

I would really, really like to hear the answers to these questions. That is why I am going to send this article to the Foreign Office and the Home Office.

– End –

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