In praise of cultural diplomacy

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As ties between London and Moscow grow increasingly frosty over the role a cultural organisation, BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall looks back at the history of the British Council in Russia.

Exchanges continued even at the height of the Cold WarFirst I must declare an interest.

It is thanks to a British Council scholarship that I first went to live in Russia in the 1970s, spending 10 months in an industrial town called Voronezh - an overnight train ride south of Moscow.

It is hard to imagine how cut off the Soviet Union was then.

Almost no British firms did business there. The only regular Western visitors were diplomats and journalists whose actions and contacts were severely limited.

So to find ourselves living cheek by jowl with ordinary Russians, sharing rooms with them in a student hostel, experiencing the daily grind of a grey grim town deep in the heart of Russia, was a bit like being sent on a space mission to Mars.

We dozen British students soon slipped into local habits: hunting through empty shops for food; taking the tram to the local bathhouse for a weekly steam bath; steering clear of the 'stukachi', the KGB informers.

No-one at home could possibly imagine what it was like. None of the Russians we lived with had an inkling of where we had come from.

'Building bridges'

Politicians talk about culture and educational exchanges as building bridges. And that was what we were enacting.

Under Yeltsin, the British Council's activities were welcomed

London and Moscow were Cold War enemies. Political relations were often fraught with ideological tension. But the student exchanges went on.

We learnt Russian, made friends, some even got married.

The Soviet authorities kept a close eye on us.

But as long as we did not get into trouble (stealing a Soviet flag to impress his girlfriend got one chap sent home) no-one bothered us much.

Nor, curiously, seemed to care if we returned home to Britain with horrific tales of Soviet queues, brutality and corruption.

Perhaps there were just too few of us to matter.

In retrospect it turns out some students did play a small political role.

In the early 1980s I went back to Moscow on a British Council research grant, but ran into obstacles getting access to the archives I needed.

Once a month we students would update the British cultural attache from the embassy on our bureaucratic battles, so he could complain to the Soviet authorities on our behalf. I ran into him recently in London.

'Frontline'

"Did you students realise how important you were?

"You were the front line in the embassy's attempts to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki final agreement on human rights, which included giving scholars access to research materials," he said.

It had never occurred to me I was a footnote to history. So why now is it the other way round?

Moscow is increasingly suspicious of foreign organisations

Why should the British Council and its seemingly innocuous grants, libraries and exhibitions, instead of being the glue that keeps bilateral relations going, itself be the flashpoint?

Let's not forget there is now plenty of other glue to keep the two countries working together - the thousands of bilingual Russians who shuttle back and forth from Moscow to their homes in London.

And the thriving business ties that make Britain one of Russia's most important trading partners.

So you could say the British Council matters less.

But in a funny way, perhaps it matters more.

In the 1990s, the pro-Western Yeltsin years, the Russian government was delighted when the UK opened British Council branches in a whole series of provincial towns - places not unlike where I lived as a student.

Visit those places and you would see crowds of young Russians queuing up to borrow books, use computers, find out more about Britain and, until the Putin government banned them as illegal commercial activity, to sign up for English lessons.

'Soft power'

But in the last few years, the Russian government's attitude to foreigners has changed.

First, President Putin warned that organisations, funded from abroad, could not be trusted. Then a new law called for all foreign non-governmental organisations to re-register.

And after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine brought in a pro-Western government, the Kremlin claimed the upheaval had been fuelled by the Americans and openly accused the West of trying to meddle and undermine Russia.

Perhaps seen through this veil of Russia's fresh paranoia, books about the British way of life in a British Council library no longer seemed so innocuous.

After all, the last thing Mr Putin wants is an Orange-style Revolution in Russia.

And perhaps the larger lesson is that "soft power", as it is sometimes called, has everywhere become more important.

Just look at the Islamic world, where the British Council's work is now a high priority for the British government as it seeks to persuade young Muslims the world over not to become foot soldiers for al-Qaeda.

Cultural diplomacy is no longer a political backwater.