The Hawks Of Peace 

by Dmitry Rogozin

(Glasgoslav Publications, £20.29)

DEPUTY prime minister of Russia and until recently that country’s envoy to Nato, Dmitry Rogozin surveys his country’s post-communist history to provide an insider’s viewpoint in this book. 

As such, though a poorly edited and self-regarding account of Russia’s struggle to recover its status as a significant player in world politics, it is very useful as a counter-narrative to Western propaganda.

Rogozin is virulently anti-communist, damning the “devilish trinity” of Marx, Engels and Lenin. He is, however, a committed Soviet nationalist with no sympathy for the “political crooks and demagogues” whose self-aggrandisement led to the “inevitable disintegration” of the USSR. 

He differentiates between a state and a nation, claiming that a nation should “inhabit its indigenous territory” and, while accepting the many age-old ethnic conflicts that re-emerged with the fall of the Soviet Union, he adamantly defends what he sees as his nation’s right to defend its geographical integrity.

Interestingly, the book has been written before the present Ukraine situation. Rogozin fulminates grandiloquently against what he terms the “so-called Leninist national policy” that allotted “chunks of Soviet Russian territory to… more ‘brotherly nations’ … by chauvinistically-minded communist bureaucracy.”

He is equally condemnatory of “perverse liberalism” which he claims fosters the promotion of illegal drugs and alcoholism, along with “degenerative art, prostitution, propaganda of homosexuality and paedophilia.”

As he progresses through the chapters dealing with events since 1991, recounting his roles in domestic politics and in the crises over Chechnya and Georgia, Rogozin presents a note of smug self-satisfaction.

He’s always the man on the spot, acting purposefully where others vacillated and there is often a touch of heroics as in the 2004 Beslan school massacre when he reports his unaccepted offer to exchange himself for some of the 700-plus children held by Islamist terrorists.

On the home front he is all for driving “unwanted immigration and ethnic mafias” out of Russia while in foreign policy this peaceful hawk despises his bete noire, Yeltsin, for allowing Nato to orchestrate the break-up of Yugoslavia. “We let ourselves be stepped over and wiped the spit off our faces.”

Rogozin warns Europe that it is now on the verge of disintegration — not because of the obvious inner tensions of capitalist competition but because of its “tolerance towards an alien cultural influx.” 

He appeals to Europe to join with Russia in opposition to what he claims is the prospective menace of Chinese imperial ambitions.

Despite the ego-trip element, Rogozin’s book is a fascinating insight into the political chaos of post-Soviet Russia from a man who, had he been British, would have sat happily on the back benches of the Tory Party.