• The Guardian Sat urday 30 Apr il 2022

4

W

ar in Ukraine has made the

Firth of Clyde busy again.

We used to have neighbours

• he died, she moved away


• who could remember the
  view from their house when
  it was fi lled with shipping
  during the second world
  war: when big liners such as the Queen Mary and the
  Queen Elizabeth arrived, as my neighbours used to
  say, “as regular as clockwork”, packed with troops and
  supplies on their way to the D- day beaches from the
  ports of North America.
  There is nothing quite as momentous as that now.
  What happens more frequently is the humdrum
  arrival or departure of an oil tanker. Two or three
  tugs from Greenock will sail round the headland and
  take up their positions in the channel; a large tanker
  will move slowly into view from the lower fi rth;
  the tugs will settle ahead, astern and abreast of the
  tanker; together the small convoy will head across
  Rothesay Bay towards the Nato jetty in Loch Striven.
  There, tanks submerged in the green hillside store oil.

Merchant ships fl ying fl ags of convenience bring the

oil in; navy tankers in various shades of warship grey

take it away, presumably to Nato fl eets exercising in

the North Atlantic.

Late last month a particularly imposing ship

came and went from the jetty. I identifi ed it

from an online shipping movements site. It was

the USNS Patuxent , 31,200 deadweight tons, an

American “replenishment oiler” that could, like a

giant sow, refuel two warships, one lying either side

of it, at the rate of 3.6m litres of diesel an hour. I sent

a photograph to a friend, and my friend wondered

what would happen if she posted it on Instagram:

what view would the authorities take, given the war

in Ukraine? And I replied that the authorities – the

Ministry of Defence, MI5 or whoever – would be

entirely relaxed. A week or two before, the Royal

Navy itself had published a video of one of its

vast new aircraft carriers in the narrow waters of

Loch Long, where it had gone to restock its armoury

from the munitions dump in Glen Douglas. The idea,

presumably, was to publicise British armed power.

Other wars, not least the cold war, produced

diff erent behaviour. In the 1940s, when midget

submarines and bouncing bombs were tested in

Loch Striven, security men visited the few people

who lived on its shores to make sure their curtains

were closed. From the 1950s to the 1980s, aerial

photographs that included the Clyde’s military

infrastructure were marked “secret” or “restricted”

and kept from public view.

Even 10 years ago a car thought to be loitering

suspiciously on the roads near the nuclear submarine

base in the Gare Loch (or its nuclear warhead-

fi tting facility in Loch Long) might be followed for

a while, if only to give the watchers some practice in

watching. It probably still happens. Even now, ship-

tracking sites will record the movement of everything

from prawn dredgers to supertankers, though not

Trident submarines.

In general, far more powerful and less obvious

forms of surveillance have replaced the old

restrictions and gumshoe techniques. Meanwhile

the enemy, the potential target of the weaponry that

the secrecy exists to protect, has become harder to

defi ne and describe.

Is it just Vladimir Putin and the clique around him?

Is it the Russian state? Is it a majority of the people who

Opinion

Who rules

the waves? On

the Clyde, it’s

no longer clear

live in it? Does it include the music of Tchaikovsky or

the Russian tennis players shunned by Wimbledon?

Should the government’s new found distaste for

oligarchs extend to all of them, as ruthless looters

of the Soviet people’s assets, or are some oligarchs

better than others?

I am shocked by my own ignorance. In the

week that the Patuxent arrived in Loch Striven,

the local Argyll paper carried a story about an

oligarch’s superyacht that had been stranded in the

Norwegian port of Narvik because dockworkers

had refused to refuel it. The yacht, the Ragnar,

was said by the paper to be owned by the Russian

businessman Vladimir Strzhalkovsky , “a former KGB

comrade of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin”, though

as yet absent from the EU and UK lists of sanctioned

oligarchs and also from the US’s much longer list of the

possibly sanctionable.

H

is house in Monaco is some way

outside the Dunoon Observer

and Argyllshire Standard’s core

circulation area. What explains

the paper’s interest in him

is his son Evgeny’s purchase

in 2017 of a country estate 10

miles from Dunoon. The estate,

Knockdow, covers 250 acres of the Cowal peninsula

and includes two lakes, two 2,000ft hills, a millpond,

pastureland, a forest and an 18th-century mansion,

Knockdow House, which has 12 bedrooms, six

principal reception rooms and as its centrepiece a

“glorious domed cupola”(Country Life) supported by

Ionic columns.

For two centuries it was one of the homes of the

local gentry, the Lamonts, who like many prosperous

families in the west of Scotland made at least some

of their fortune from slave-worked sugar plantations

in the Caribbean. Evgeny, whose employment is hard

to discover but whose interests are yachting and

re-enacting historic battles, is said to have paid £4m for

it. His father is thought to be worth at least a hundred

times that amount, after a short post-KGB career as the

chief executive offi cer of Norilsk Nickel. You might say

that the riches of the earth, cheaply and sometimes

brutally harvested abroad, have kept the place going

since the beginning.

I can see the estate from our window, though

the house itself is hidden behind a slope. It lies

just three miles away across the water at the

beginning of Loch Striven, but to reach there by

any transport other than a small boat means a ferry

crossing and a 40-mile drive: the Clyde estuary has

a complicated geography. For that reason I’ve been

there only once and never bothered to know it. It

might have been the moon – this is what I mean

by ignorance. Last month, looking at a plan of the

estate, I saw that it surrounded the Nato jetty and its

oil tanks on all three landward sides. In other words,

the big grey ships come and go from a small square

of M o D land that sits inside 250 acres bought by

Evgeny Strzhalkovsky from funds that may well have

been supplied by his father.

Until recently, that might have served as an

advertisement for globalisation – old enemies living

together, outbreaks of peace. Today it looks like the

outcome of a perplexing historical episode. Welcome,

oligarchs! No questions will be asked.

Even a decade

ago, a car

thought to be

loitering near the

nuclear submarine

base might be

followed for a while

ILLUSTRATION: NATE KITCH

Ian Jack