Christopher Clark, the distinguished author of a bestselling account of the outbreak of the First World War, has come up with an ingenious explanation of why the Russians are currently behaving so badly: they are suffering from ‘false memory syndrome.’ In a piece which Mr Clark wrote with Kristina Spohr in the Guardian on 25 May, he picks on the way Mr Putin has justified his annexation of Crimea when the Russian President claims that the West ‘has lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs… This has happened with NATO’s expansion to the east.’
But, says Mr Clark, the Russians never asked for any guarantees that NATO would not enlarge, and none were given. Putin’s wayward handling of history matters, he contends, because it calls into question the European settlement, which emerged after the dramatic reunification of Germany in the autumn of 1990.
Putin is indeed rewriting history to encourage and exploit Russians’ sense of humiliation and so fuel his current adventurous and aggressive policies. But Mr Clark’s own account omits important facts, evades difficult issues of interpretation, and leaves unanalysed the practical and political pressures that surrounded the German negotiations and the events that followed.
