It was borderline. After more than a year and a half, we have become accustomed to the courageous Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression. Wrongly. Vladimir Putin could certainly have come out on top in his war against Ukraine in the spring of 2022.
His ideological plan to leave the neighboring country with a Blitzkrieg could be Russified classic wishful thinking, which arose from a centuries-old and since 2014 unbridled disdain towards Kyiv. But Putin’s subsequent geopolitical goal of splitting NATO and the EU was not a delusion but a variation on 19th-century imperialist conceptions of Russia.
If, apart from some rhetorical outrage and sanctions, Germany would keep its distance after the attack on Ukraine, the strategy went, France and the Netherlands would also be left behind, after which the United States and Great Britain could be isolated .
For decades, Putin had therefore invested in a network of political agents in Germany. The spider in this web was former SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who led a clan that had a foothold almost everywhere in the centers of power. The network was run by SPD members, but also had access to CDU members and FDP members. Only the Greens remained inaccessible to Putin.
No misunderstanding. Numerous Russophile voices could also be heard in high circles in the Netherlands at the time. But compared to the Schröder clan, the polder lobby was intellectually and politically of a third, sometimes infantile, set. Think of then VNO-NCW chairman Hans de Boer, who even after the MH17 disaster continued to advocate for normalization of business relationspartly because his son had Russian Facebook friends.
Putin was not just concerned with lobbyists for the Nord Stream pipelines, which would allow him to subject the German economy to Russian natural gas. He also wanted to corrupt part of the elite in Germany. Through Schröder, half the top of the SPD plus family was sucked in: from the mayor of Hamburg, via the prime ministers of Lower Saxony and other states to the key departments of Defense, Foreign and Economic Affairs in Berlin. Consultants and journalists also contributed. Putin appeased them with money, honorary doctorates, honorary consulates and other paraphernalia.
Two journalists from the Frankfurter Allgemeine ZeitungReinhard Bingener and Markus Wehner, describe the ins and outs of this infiltration in their shocking book That Moskau Connection. Das Schröder-Netzwerk und Deutschlands Weg in die Abhängigkeit, discussed clearly earlier this week by NRC correspondent Nynke van Verschuer. According to the authors, the Schröderians were concerned with gain, but not simply with money. They really believed in their ‘Kremlinkitsch’, a mix of sympathy for the allegedly deep Russian soul and Putin’s authoritarian recovery agenda, based on romanticized memories of the détente policy of the socialist patriarch Willy Brandt.
The fact that Schröder had no formal political position most of the time – CDU leader Angela Merkel had been Chancellor since 2005 – hardly bothered Moscow. The annexation of Crimea and the military intervention in the Donbas did not lead to a turnaround. Germany’s dependence even increased without concern: in 2012, 34.6 percent of imported gas came from Russia, in 2018 this was 54.9 percent.
Only in the last ‘grand coalition’ of CDU/CSU and SPD led by Merkel (2017-2021) did things start to dawn. Suddenly, SPD leader Olaf Scholz and the party chairman dared to put aside the candidate from the Schröder clan for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in favor of outsider Heiko Maas.
In retrospect, this was an important break with our own past. Imagine if Schröder had had men in the government until the beginning of 2022, then NATO and the EU would have been in a worse position and the whole and half polder Putinists in the FVD and PVV would now have had better prospects in the Netherlands.
Hubert Smeets is a journalist and historian. He writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the September 21, 2023 newspaper.