*
It was eight in the evening Moscow time and all was quite in the city, Moscovites, like all other Russians, were in the middle of their most important religious holiday. It was Sunday, 8 January 2015, the day after the Orthodox Christmas and the first day of their New Year Week.
Ekaterina was in Kaluga, one hundred and fifty kilometres to the south of Moscow, spending Christmas with her parents and would not return to the capital until midday Monday.
His flight had arrived from London in the late afternoon and the idea of eating in the hotel restaurant alone did not inspire him. It was too early to turn in, but any idea of a refreshing walk was out of the question, outside was a thick layer of fresh snow and the temperature had fallen to minus twelve degrees centigrade.
Francis picked up the copy of the Moscow Times and served himself a whisky from the well stocked bar and settled into an armchair. His suite in the National Hotel was spacious and comfortable, he appreciated its old world style. The five star hotel was situated on the corner of ulitsa Tverskaya, opposite the Kremlin. It had been built in 1903 and had been the home to Lenin for some days at the time of the Revolution. During later Soviet times it had suffered neglect, but was since restored to its past glory and had become part of the Meridien Group.
The Moscow Times reported the continued decline of the rouble and the fall in oil prices. Fewer Russians had gone abroad for the year end holidays as the cost of buying dollars and euros had become prohibitive.
THE ‘EVIL’ EMPIRE
Vladimir Putin’s dream of a new Russian Empire was as frozen as the hard snow on Moscow’s streets. The rouble was plunging in concert with the price of oil, the lowest since the Lehman debacle. Sanctions imposed following Moscow’s seizure of the Crimea were biting and foreign goods, if they had not already disappeared from shops, were unaffordable.
The collapse of oil and the vital revenues it brought to the state, coupled with the disastrous annexation of the Crimea and the pro-Russian rebellion in East Ukraine, should have moderated Putin’s exaggerated ambitions. Unfortunately for Kiev it was not the case, the ex-KGB officer had become an autocrat, surrounded by his cronies, a tight band of oligarchs, who like their Soviet predecessors harboured little or no consideration for the common people.
Before Putin launched his campaign to recreate a Greater Russia, he should have consulted his history books and more precisely heeded the words of the Hapsburg general: Count Montecuculli, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, who once remarked that to wage war, you first of all needed money; second, you needed money; and third you also needed money. A commodity Russia sorely lacked as it headed for a severe economic contraction.
The collapse and dismantlement of the Soviet Union resulted in its successor, the Russia Federation, inheriting three quarters of its territory and barely half of its population. The later would fall to just a mere one hundred million by 2050, according to specialists, casting a sad shadow on Moscow’s dream of past glory.
Cornucopia Page 36
