In a ‘very unusual’ personal letter to Prime Minister Kok, Ambassador De Vos van Steenwijk already warned in the 1990s about Russian lack of understanding for NATO expansion. Now the resident of De Wijk sees in a wry way that his analysis was correct. But even he could not have predicted that Russia would ever become so aggressive.
“I certainly did not see that coming,” says Godert Willem baron de Vos van Steenwijk about the Russian military invasion of Ukraine. De Vos van Steenwijk was ambassador to Moscow between 1993 and 1999 and, although he has been gone for many years, he is following the situation closely. “I believe that until very recently, even well-informed services in the West did not see it coming to its current size.”
Ambassador
In the front room of the monumental house Voorwijk in de Wijk, the former ambassador reminisces about his Russian time. For ‘unusually long’ he served the Dutch interest in Russia and in seven former Soviet countries. It is the final piece of a long international career. The Berlin-born baron (1934) worked for the NRC in India, after which his diplomatic career began. In 1983 he became ambassador to Budapest, followed by Jakarta and Ottawa to end up in Moscow. “A very interesting time”, he calls it.
He arrives in Moscow with his wife Clara Jacqueline Leila Louise Baroness van Pallandt. He receives Russian lessons from the granddaughter of former Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev. His wife does not need those lessons, because she still knows the language from her youth. “We slept in the same bed as my in-laws, because my father-in-law was ambassador to Moscow during the Stalin era. My wife lived through that time as a teenager.”
They are incomparable periods. “When I hear how that went during my wife’s time in the Stalin era, you couldn’t even talk to Russians on the street. She once gave an orange to an old Russian woman, immediately an agent came and took it orange off.”
“The years I served there were of a great openness and curiosity about the West. People were cut off from the outside world for seventy years and suddenly everything opened up,” he paints the picture after the fall of the Soviet Union. “There was a great euphoria in Russia. You could see how those people also craved direct contact.” An ideal entry point for an ambassador. “A window of opportunity, there was a great opportunity to build things.”
tensions
But during his ambassadorship, the baron saw a less optimistic picture on a geopolitical level, mainly caused by what he believed to be an inappropriate jubilation. “In retrospect, it is actually surprising how naively euphoric Western politics reacted to the fact that the iron curtain had suddenly been raised,” says the former ambassador.
According to him, there was a lack of knowledge and historical awareness of what had happened behind that curtain. “People knew so little, there was a lot of whooping. Suddenly it was declared in Washington: ‘We won the Cold War.’ But what does that mean? That was a highly misleading time. We hadn’t won the Cold War at all, the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War. That’s a very different premise.”
According to De Vos van Steenwijk, in the rush of victory it was decided to further expand NATO. “NATO was created to face the Soviet Union. Now that the Soviet Union was gone, you had to explain why you still need NATO. Against what?” he explains. The need to expand the alliance was not clearly explained, according to De Vos van Steenwijk.
The letter to Kok
“I can remember very well that Prime Minister Kok came to Russia for an official visit in 1996,” the former ambassador introduces the most remarkable period of his ambassadorship. Wim Kok sat at the table with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.
“He asked exactly this question: ‘Mr. Kok, you talk all the time about NATO expansion. But to whom?'” De Vos van Steenwijk remembers that Kok replied that it was not aimed at anyone, but that Kok arrived with a story about democratic values. “He was thoroughly brushed aside by Chernomyrdin. When we drove to the airport, Kok said: You must tell me, can we do something to absorb the Russian suspicion and the Russian resistance to NATO expansion?”
The ambassador replied. “We passed that station. But I’ll send you my thoughts on paper.” ‘Very unusual’, is what De Vos van Steenwijk calls it. “Because I had to report to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. I then wrote a personal letter to Kok.”