On the evening of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Manuela Schwesig tweeted a photo of Schwerin Castle, resplendent in the east European country’s blue and yellow colors. “Solidarity with Ukraine. An important sign of the state parliament,” wrote the Minister President of the SPD – and received nothing but outrage. Embarrassing, mendacious, hypocrisy were the milder comments. So it is now with many in the SPD who have a reputation as Putin understanders and Russian friends. You are duped. “I was wrong,” admits Matthias Platzeck, who, as chairman of the German-Russian Forum, has campaigned for understanding and trust in the Russian side to the end, without realizing that such values play no role in Vladimir Putin’s thoughts and actions.
A still large part of today’s SPD members joined the party under the impression of Willy Brandt’s peace policy. His ideas of a system-wide policy of detente, a common security for all Europeans in East and West, in which Russia is of course included, are part of the DNA of the German Social Democrats. One might call that naïve and blue-eyed today. After all, these basic principles have ensured a predominantly peaceful coexistence of most Europeans for many decades.
The West built pipelines, the Soviet Union paid with gas
This is the basis on which very different motivations for close relations with Russia have developed in the social-democratic world – but not only there. This has always included business interests that have always been related to Siberian natural gas, its production and transport. In the 1970s, when Brandt and Helmut Schmidt were chancellors, West German companies such as Mannesmann, Thyssen and Ruhrgas signed contracts worth billions with the Soviet Union for the construction of pipelines, which Moscow paid for with natural gas supplies.
Even then there were disputes with the USA, which warned against the West Germans becoming too dependent on Russian energy and promoted American liquid gas. Incidentally, the business took place undisturbed by drastic political events such as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Manuela Schwesig’s commitment to the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the interests of the local economy has a long tradition. Gerhard Schröder will take a similar view of himself, with the big difference that he now runs the business on his own account.
Friendly closeness between Brandt and Brezhnev
In addition, however, there was always an emotional bond between German politicians and Russia, which was possibly even greater in the case of the Social Democrats with their pronounced historical awareness than in other political camps – and in the GDR it was different again. This is supported by the images of the extremely friendly closeness between Willy Brandt and Leonid Brezhnev, two men of a generation who had witnessed the great war between their two countries, and not on the side of the attackers. But there are also pictures of a relaxed closeness of Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl in a sweater and cardigan in 1990 on a visit to Gorbachev’s dacha in the Caucasus.
Matthias Platzeck, SPD Prime Minister of Brandenburg for a long time, likes to talk about his youth in Potsdam, when he lived with his parents near the border at the Glienicker Bridge. His family shopped in Russian shops and his Russian teacher inspired him with books and films from the great country in the east.
When he then wanted to organize an alternative cultural festival in the spring of 1989, the Soviet soldiers came to his aid against the resistance of the authorities, who were suspicious of the project. “But we then went to the Soviet city commander, who listened to it and said: I’ll send you soldiers with a goulash cannon. The officials here were floored. They no longer understood the world. The Stasi log, which we were able to read later, said: Unfortunately, it was a success. Instead of five hundred, three thousand people came and the Russians made tea.” That was a formative experience for him. Just as it was a great adventure for many young people from the GDR to work on the Soviet “Drushba” route in the 1970s, the East German counterpart to the gas projects in the FRG. It is part of the bitter irony of these days that the section of line serviced by the FDJ was in the Ukraine.
These diverse economic and human relations between Germans and Russians, which developed after the German war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, may have clouded some social democrats in particular for Vladimir Putin’s destructive energy, which has increasingly determined his politics at least since the annexation of Crimea Has. The goal of the social democratic hero Willy Brandt was to make the borders in Europe inviolable. Putin is pursuing the opposite goal. This realization is a late reality shock for many gullible politicians in the West, of whom there were particularly many in the SPD.