Source: http://bit.ly/1cBgVne
It is one
thing to comment in a column as the Ukrainian crisis grinds on and
Washington—senselessly, with no idea of what will come next—destroys relations
with Moscow. It is quite another, as a long exchange with Stephen F. Cohen
makes clear, to watch as an honorable career’s worth of scholarly truths are
set aside in favor of unlawful subterfuge, a war fever not much short of
Hearst’s and what Cohen ranks among the most extravagant expansion of a sphere
of influence—NATO’s—in history.
Cohen is
a distinguished Russianist by any measure. While professing at Princeton and
New York University, he has written of the revolutionary years (“Bukharin and
the Bolshevik Revolution,” 1973), the Soviet era (“Rethinking the Soviet
Experience,” 1985) and, contentiously but movingly and always with a steady
eye, the post-Soviet decades (“Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of
Post-Communist Russia, 2000; “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives,” 2009). “The
Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin” (2010) is a singularly
humane work, using scholarly method to relate the stories of the former
prisoners who walk as ghosts in post-Soviet Russia. “I never actually lost the
uneasy feeling of having left work unfinished and obligations unfulfilled,” Cohen
explains in the opening chapter, “even though fewer and fewer of the victims I
knew were still alive.”
If I had
to describe the force and value of Cohen’s work in a single sentence, it would
be this: It is a relentless insistence that we must bring history to bear upon
what we see. One would think this an admirable project, but it has landed Cohen
in the mother of all intellectual disputes since the U.S.-supported coup in
Kiev last year. To say he is now “blackballed” or “blacklisted”—terms Cohen
does not like—is too much. Let us leave it that a place may await him among
America’s many prophets without honor among their own.
It is
hardly surprising that the Ministry of Forgetting, otherwise known as the State
Department, would eschew Cohen’s perspective on Ukraine and the relationship
with Russia: He brings far too much by way of causality and responsibility to
the case. But when scholarly colleagues attack him as “Putin’s apologist” one
grows queasy at the prospect of a return to the McCarthyist period. By now,
obedient ideologues in the academy have turned debate into freak show.
Cohen,
who is 76, altogether game and remembers it all, does not think we are back in
the 1950s just yet. But he is now enmeshed in a fight with the Association for
Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, which last autumn rejected a
$400,000 grant Cohen proposed with his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, because the
fellowships to be funded would bear Cohen’s name. Believe it, readers, this is
us in the early 21st century.
The
interview that follows took place in Cohen’s Manhattan apartment some weeks
after the cease-fire agreement known as Minsk II was signed in mid-February. It
sprawled over several absorbing hours. As I worked with the transcript it
became clear that Cohen had given me a valuable document, one making available
to readers a concise, accessible, historically informed accounting of “where we
are today,” as Cohen put it, in Ukraine and in the U.S.-Russia relationship.
Salon
will run it in two parts. This is an edited transcript of the first. Part two
follows next week.
What is
your judgment of Russia’s involvement in Ukraine? In the current situation, the
need is for good history and clear language. In a historical perspective, do
you consider Russia justified?
Well, I
can’t think otherwise. I began warning of such a crisis more than 20 years ago,
back in the ’90s. I’ve been saying since February of last year [when Viktor
Yanukovich was ousted in Kiev] that the 1990s is when everything went wrong
between Russia and the United States and Europe. So you need at least that much
history, 25 years. But, of course, it begins even earlier.
As I’ve
said for more than a year, we’re in a new Cold War. We’ve been in one, indeed,
for more than a decade. My view [for some time] was that the United States
either had not ended the previous Cold War, though Moscow had, or had renewed
it in Washington. The Russians simply hadn’t engaged it until recently because
it wasn’t affecting them so directly.
What’s
happened in Ukraine clearly has plunged us not only into a new or renewed—let
historians decide that—Cold War, but one that is probably going to be more
dangerous than the preceding one for two or three reasons. The epicenter is not
in Berlin this time but in Ukraine, on Russia’s borders, within its own
civilization: That’s dangerous. Over the 40-year history of the old Cold War,
rules of behavior and recognition of red lines, in addition to the red hotline,
were worked out. Now there are no rules. We see this every day—no rules on
either side.
What
galls me the most, there’s no significant opposition in the United States to
this new Cold War, whereas in the past there was always an opposition. Even in
the White House you could find a presidential aide who had a different opinion,
certainly in the State Department, certainly in the Congress. The media were
open—the New York Times, the Washington Post—to debate. They no longer are.
It’s one hand clapping in our major newspapers and in our broadcast networks.
So that’s where we are.
The
Ukraine crisis in historical perspective. Very dangerous ground. You know this
better than anyone, I’d’ve thought.
This is
where I get attacked and assailed. It’s an historical judgment. The [crisis
now] grew out of Clinton’s policies, what I call a “winner take all” American
policy toward what was thought to be—but this isn’t true—a defeated post-Cold
War Russia, leading people in the ’90s to think of Russia as in some ways
analogous to Germany and Japan after World War II: Russia would decide its
internal policies to some extent, and it would be allowed to resume its role as
a state in international affairs—but as a junior partner pursuing new American
national interests.
That was
the pursuit that Clinton and Strobe Talbott, who’s now very upset about the
failure of his policy, in the Yeltsin era. That’s what they wanted, and thought
they were getting, from Boris Yeltsin. You can read Talbott’s memoir, “The
Russia Hand,” and know that all the official talk about eternal friendship and
partnership was malarkey. Now it’s all gone sour, predictably and for various
reasons, and has led us to this situation.
The
problem is that by taking the view, as the American media and political
establishment do, that this crisis is entirely the fault of “Putin’s
aggression,” there’s no rethinking of American policy over the last 20 years. I
have yet to see a single influential person say, “Hey, maybe we did something
wrong, maybe we ought to rethink something.” That’s a recipe for more of the
same, of course, and more of the same could mean war with Russia….
Let me
give you one example. It’s the hardest thing for the American foreign policy
elite and the media elite to cope with.
Our
position is that nobody is entitled to a sphere of influence in the
21st century. Russia wants a sphere of influence in the sense that it doesn’t
want American military bases in Ukraine or in the Baltics or in Georgia. But
what is the expansion of NATO other than the expansion of the American zone or
sphere of influence? It’s not just military. It’s financial, it’s economic,
it’s cultural, it’s intermarriage—soldiers, infrastructure. It’s probably the
most dramatic expansion of a great sphere of influence in such a short time and
in peacetime in the history of the world.
So you
have Vice President Biden constantly saying, “Russia wants a sphere of
influence and we won’t allow it.” Well, we are shoving our sphere of influence
down Russia’s throat, on the assumption that it won’t push back. Obviously, the
discussion might well begin: “Is Russia entitled to a zone or sphere in its
neighborhood free of foreign military bases?” Just that, nothing more. If the
answer is yes, NATO expansion should’ve ended in Eastern Germany, as the
Russians were promised. But we’ve crept closer and closer. Ukraine is about
NATO-expansion-no-matter-what. Washington can go on about democracy and
sovereignty and all the rest, but it’s about that. And we can’t re-open this
question…. The hypocrisy, or the inability to connect the dots in America, is
astonishing.
The
nature of the Kiev regime. Again, there’s a lot of fog. So there’re two parts
to this question. The coup matter and the relationship of the Yatsenyuk
government to the State Department—we now have a finance minister in Kiev who’s
an American citizen, addressing the Council on Foreign Relations here as we
speak—and then the relationship of the Kiev regime with the ultra-right.
It’s a
central question. I addressed it in a Nation piece last year called “Distorting
Russia.” One point was that the apologists in the media for the Kiev government
as it came to power after Feb. 21, and for the Maidan demonstrations as they
turned violent, ignored the role of a small but significant contingent of
ultra-nationalists who looked, smelled and sounded like neo-fascists. And for
this I was seriously attacked, including by Timothy Snyder at Yale, who is a
great fan of Kiev, in the New Republic. I have no idea where he is coming from,
or how any professor could make the allegations he did. But the argument was
that this neo-fascist theme was Putin’s, that what I was saying was an apology
for Putin and that the real fascists were in Russia, not in Ukraine.
Maybe
there are fascists in Russia, but we’re not backing the Russian government or
Russian fascists. The question is, and it’s extremely important, “Is there a
neo-fascist movement in Ukraine that, regardless of its electoral success,
which has not been great, is influencing affairs politically or militarily, and
is this something we should be worried about?”
The
answer is 100 percent yes. But admitting this in the United States has gotten a
100 percent no until recently, when, finally, a few newspapers began to cite
Kiev’s battalions with swastikas on their helmets and tanks. So you’ve gotten a
little more coverage. Foreign journalists, leaving aside Russians, have covered
this neo-fascist phenomenon, which is not surprising. It grows out of Ukraine’s
history. It should be a really important political question for Western policy
makers, and I think it is now for the Germans. German intelligence is probably
better than American intelligence when it comes to Ukraine—more candid in what
it tells the top leadership. Merkel’s clearly worried about this.
It’s
another example of something you can’t discuss in the mainstream media or
elsewhere in the American establishment. When you read the testimony of
[Assistant Secretary of State] Nuland, this is never mentioned. But what could
be more important than the resurgence of a fascist movement on the European
continent? I’m not talking about these sappy fascists who run around the
streets in Western Europe. I’m talking about guys with a lot of weapons, guys
who have done dastardly things and who have killed people. Does that warrant
discussion? Well, people said, if they exist they’re a tiny minority. My
clichéd answer is, “Of course, so was Hitler and so was Lenin at one time.” You
pay attention and you think about it if you learn anything from history….
We say
we’re doing everything we’re doing in Ukraine and against Russia, including
running the risk of war, for a democratic Ukraine, by which we mean Ukraine
under the rule of Kiev. Reasonably, we would ask to what extent Kiev is
actually democratic. But correspondents of the Times and the Washington Post
regularly file from Kiev and basically re-write whatever the Kiev authorities
say while rarely, if ever, asking about democracy in Kiev-governed Ukraine.
Rewriting
handouts. Is that actually so?
Until
recently it was so…. I haven’t made this a study, and one could be done
in a week by a sophisticated journalist or scholar who knew how to ask questions
and had access to information. And I would be willing to wager that it would
show that there’s less democracy, as reasonably understood, in those areas of
Ukraine governed by Kiev today than there was before Yanukovych was overthrown.
Now that’s a hypothesis, but I think it’s a hypothesis the Times and the Post
should be exploring.
I take
Kiev’s characterization of its war in the eastern sections as an
“anti-terrorist campaign” to be one of the most preposterous labels out there
right now.
But,
then, why did Washington say OK to it? Washington has a say in this. Without
Washington, Kiev would be in bankruptcy court and have no military at all. Why
didn’t Washington say, “Don’t call it anti-terrorist?” Because if you call it
“anti-terrorism” you can never have negotiations because you don’t negotiate
with terrorists, you just kill them, a murderous organization with murderous
intent.
By saying
that this is not a civil war, it’s just Russian aggression—this omits the human
dimension of the entire war, and also the agency of the people who are actually
fighting in the east—the hairdressers, the taxi drivers, the former newspaper
reporters, the school teachers, the garbage men, the electricians, who are
probably 90 percent of those fighting. There are Russians there, from Russia.
But Ukraine’s army has proved incapable of defeating or even holding off what
began as a fairly ragtag, quasi-partisan, ill-equipped, untrained force.
The
horror of this has been Kiev’s use of its artillery, mortars and even its
airplanes, until recently, to bombard large residential cities, not only
Donetsk and Luhansk, but other cities. These are cities of 500,000, I imagine,
or 2 million to 3 million. This is against the law. These are war crimes,
unless we assume the rebels were bombing their mothers and grandmothers and
fathers and sisters. This was Kiev, backed by the United States. So the United
States has been deeply complicit in the destruction of these eastern cities and
peoples. When Nuland tells Congress there are 5,000 to 6,000 dead, that’s the
U.N. number. That’s just a count of bodies they found in the morgues. Lots of
bodies are never found. German intelligence says 50,000.
Ever
since the Clinton administration, we’ve bleated on about the right to protect
people who are victims of humanitarian crises. You’ve got a massive
humanitarian crisis in eastern Ukraine. You’ve got 1 million people or more who
have fled to Russia—this is according to the U.N.—another half a million having
fled elsewhere in Ukraine. I don’t notice the United States organizing any big
humanitarian effort. Where is Samantha Power, the architect of “right to
protect?” We have shut our eyes to a humanitarian crisis in which we are deeply
complicit. This is what’s shameful, whether you like or don’t like Putin. It’s
got nothing to do with Putin. It has to do with the nature of American policy
and the nature of Washington—and the nature of the American people, if they
tolerate this.
You’ve
written about the second Minsk accord as the only hope we’ve got left. Tell me
briefly your take on Minsk II and whether there’s a chance it will hold.
The
second Minsk Accord has a lot of moving parts. The primary part is the
cease-fire and the withdrawal by both sides of heavy artillery. It would appear
that this has been significantly accomplished, but the cease-fire is very
unstable. The political parts are supposed to come now. Kiev is supposed to
pass certain constitutional reforms, giving a certain autonomy to the eastern
regions. The eastern regions are supposed to hold new elections that in some
way comply with Ukrainian law. If all that happens by December, then the
Ukrainian-Russian border will be turned over to the Kiev authorities along with
some European monitors. The political parts are going to be the hardest because
there is no political support for this in Kiev.
[President]
Poroshenko went to Minsk because he had no choice: Merkel told him he had to
sign Minsk II. But Kiev is ultra-nationalist. They want no concessions to the
east or to Russia. Getting Minsk II through parliament in Kiev will be very
difficult. But the main fact for now is that Minsk II is the last, best choice
to avoid a wider war that might well cause a direct war with Russia. [Since
this interview the Kiev parliament has passed legislation either contradicting
or negating the Minsk II terms.]
Minsk II
was Merkel’s initiative with President Hollande of France, and why, at the last
minute, she suddenly realized that the situation was different than she
thought—desperate—I don’t know. And remember, this is a woman with enormous
executive responsibilities for the economic crisis of the European Union and
Greece. The enemies of Minsk II…
I think
the main enemy is Washington.
That’s
right. I wouldn’t call them the enemy, but we can’t be children about this.
Washington controls the IMF. Washington controls NATO. NATO and the IMF are the
two agencies that can make war happen on a broader basis in Ukraine and in
regard to Russia, or stop it. Whoever is the decider in Washington, if it’s Obama,
if it’s somebody else, now has to make the decision.
All the
enemies of Minsk II speak freely and are quoted in the papers and on the
networks as rational people. And yet there’s not one dissenting voice from the
establishment. Outwardly, it appears to be a very uneven struggle. One hopes
that somewhere in dark corridors and dimly-lit rooms in Washington, serious
conversations are taking place, but I don’t think so. [One March 23, 48 members
of Congress did vote against sending weapons to Kiev, a point Cohen commended
in an email note.]
Our
post-Soviet politics after 1991, it turns out to be war by other means. The
Cold War never ended, in my view. The tactics changed, perhaps the strategy
did, too, but there was very little by way of even a pause.
It’s complicated.
The main problem today of getting the American political class to think freshly
is Putin. They use Putin as the excuse to do whatever they want and not rethink
anything. But Putin came much later.
The
historical facts are not convenient to the triumphalist narrative, which says
that we defeated the Soviet Union and thereby ended the Cold War, and therefore
and therefore. According to Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush, the Cold War ended
either in 1988 or 1990. When Reagan left the White House—I think he wrote in
his diary in January 1989, “We have ended the Cold War”—so he thought he had
ended it with Gorbachev. I was in Moscow when he walked across Red Square in
that heat, I think it was July 1988, and somebody shouted to him “President
Reagan, is this still the Evil Empire?” And he, in that affable way, said “Oh,
no, that was then… everything’s changed.”
The Cold
War was a structural phenomenon. Just because the president says its over
doesn’t mean it’s over, but then there was Malta in December 1989, when [George
H.W.] Bush and Gorbachev said the Cold War was over, and that continued all
through the reunification of Germany. Between ’88 and ’90 we were told
repeatedly by the world’s leaders that it was over. Jack Matlock, Reagan’s
ambassador to Russia, has written very well about this, and because he was
there as a personal testimony, of how this truly was. So the conflation of the
end of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War is an historical mistake.
Bush then
continued to maintain the official line that he had pursued with Gorbachev that
there were no losers at the end of the Cold War, everybody had won. Bush
maintained that position until the polls showed he was running behind Clinton
in his reelection campaign. And then he declared in 1992 that we, and he in
particular, had won the Cold War. I saw Gorbachev shortly thereafter. My wife,
Katrina vanden Heuvel, and I had been friends with him for several years. He
was deeply, deeply hurt, with a sense of betrayal. He’s forgiven Bush, being a
forgiving man.
But at
that moment, ’91 and ’92… well, words are words, but as Russians say, words are
also deeds. By announcing that we had won the Cold War, Bush set the stage for
the Clinton administration’s decision to act on an American victory, including the
expansion of NATO.
This
history brings us to where we are today.
What has
changed in U.S. policy toward Russia between 1991 and now, and what hasn’t?
I think
the history that we know is what I just told you. Behind the scenes, there were
clearly discussions going on throughout the ’90s, and there were different
groups. Big historical decisions, whether we talk about the war in Vietnam, or,
a subject that interests me, why slavery and segregation lasted so long in the
American South, where I grew up, can never be explained by one factor. Almost
always they’re multi-factored. But you got, in the 1990s, some people who
genuinely believed that this was the moment for an enduring post-Cold War,
American-Russian, full-scale strategic partnership and friendship between
equals. There were these Romantics, so to speak.
On this
side of the ocean?
I think
there were people who believed in this. Just like there’re people who really
believe in democracy promotion as a virtuous profession—some of my students
have gone into it. They believe in it: It’s a good thing. Why not help good
countries achieve democracy? The dark side of democracy promotion for them is
either not visible or not in their calculation. People are diverse. I don’t
judge them harshly for their beliefs.
There
were others who were saying Russia will rise again, and we have to make sure
that never happens. To do that, we need to strip Russia of Ukraine, in
particular. Brzezinski was writing that. At some point during this time he
wrote that Russia with Ukraine is a great imperial power, without Ukraine it’s
a normal country. But there were people in Washington, the same people I heard
in private discussions, saying that Russia’s down and we’re going to keep it
down. They were feeding opinion into the Clinton administration, and that
clearly helped lead to the NATO expansion.
They use
the excuse that everybody wants to join NATO. How can we deny them the right?
It’s very simple. People say every country that qualifies has a right to join
NATO. No, they do not. NATO is not a junior Chamber of Commerce. It’s not a
non-selective fraternity or sorority. It’s a security organization, and the
only criterion for membership should be, “Does a nation enhance the security of
the other member countries?” The Ukrainian crisis proves beyond any doubt,
being the worst international crisis of our time, that the indiscriminate
expansion of NATO has worsened our international security. That’s the end of
that story. I don’t know what they think NATO is. Is it like AARP membership
and you get discounts in the form of U.S. defense funds? It’s crazy, this
argument.
But then
you got these guys who are either Russophobes or eternal Cold Warriors or deep
strategic thinkers. You remember when [Paul] Wolfowitz wrote this article
saying Russia had to be stripped of any possibility ever to be a great power
again? These people were all talking like…
It goes
back to your comparison with Japan in ’45.
The
question is why Clinton bought into this. That would then take you to Strobe
Talbott. Strobe was a disciple of Isaiah Berlin, who taught that if you want to
understand Russia, you have to understand the history, the culture and the
civilization. And certainly if you took that view, you never would have done,
as George Kennan said in 1996 or 1997, you never would have expanded NATO. I
knew George during my 30 years at Princeton. George’s social attitudes were
deeply alarming, but about Russia he had a very important idea. Russia marches
to its own drummer, let it, don’t try to intervene or you’ll make things worse.
Be patient, understand Russian history, the forces in Russia. That was Isaiah
Berlin’s position. Once, that was Strobe’s position. Look at Strobe Talbott
today: We have to send in weapons and overthrow Putin and turn Russia around. Now
it’s all outside agency.
How did
this guy go from A to B?
Well,
they say power corrupts, or at least changes people. He had been Clinton’s
roommate at Oxford, and he ended up in the White House as a Russia aide, very
smart guy. I think Russia disappointed him. One phenomenon among
Russia-watchers is that you create an artifice, and that’s your Russia. And
when it disappoints you, you never forgive Russia. Check out Fred Hiatt at the
Washington Post. Fred was writing from Moscow during the ’90s that democracy
was going to be great. So did most the guys who are now were still in editorial
positions. Russia let them down. They can’t forgive Russia anymore than they
can the ex-wife who cheated on them. They can’t think anew. It’s a phenomenon,
probably not only American, but it’s particularly American. You cannot reopen
any discussion with these people who bought into Yeltsin’s Russia in the 1990s
and were certain that though the road was rocky, as they liked to say… “Failed
Crusade” is about this. They can’t get over it.
Part of
it also had to do with Yeltsin. He was so desperate, not only for American
affirmation but for American affection. He was so insecure, as his health
declined and he became more and more the captive of the oligarchs, that he
wanted to mean as much to Washington as Gorbachev had. He was getting close to
virtually giving Washington anything, saying anything, until the Serbian war.
Then it dawned on him that Washington had a certain agenda, and the expansion
of NATO [was part of it], but by then it was too late, he was a spent force.
Later,
when Dmitri Medvedev was president [2008-12], I think, he told a group of
people that Yeltsin hadn’t actually won the election, that Gennadi Zyuganov,
leader of the Communist Party, had. So assuming that Medvedev wasn’t lying and
assuming he was in a position to know, all this talk of American support for
democracy, when it comes to Russia, at least, is, shall we say, complex.
Let’s go
to Putin. What is your view here? What is he trying to accomplish?
It’s
impossible to answer briefly or simply. This is a separate university course,
this is a book, this is for somebody with a much bigger brain that I have. This
really is for historians to judge.
I wrote an
article in, I think, 2012 called the “The Demonization of Putin,” arguing that
there is very little basis for many of the allegations made against Putin, and
that the net result was to make rational analysis in Washington on Russian
affairs at home and abroad impossible, because it was all filtered through this
demonization. If we didn’t stop, I argued, it was only going to get worse to
the point where we would become like heroin addicts at fix time, unable to
think about anything except our obsession with Putin. We couldn’t think about
other issues. This has now happened fully. The article was turned down by the
New York Times, and an editor I knew at Reuters published it on Reuters.com.
The
history of how this came about [begins] when Putin came to power, promoted by
Yeltsin and the people around Yeltsin, who were all connected in Washington.
These people in Moscow included Anatoly Chubais, who had overseen the
privatizations, had relations with the IMF and had fostered a lot of the
corruption. He came to United States to assure us that Putin was a democrat,
even though he had been at the KGB.
When he
came to power, both the Times and the Post wrote that Putin was a democrat and,
better yet, he was sober, unlike Yeltsin. How we got from 2000 to now, when he’s
Hitler, Saddam, Stalin, Gaddafi, everybody that we have to get rid of, whom we
know killed Boris Nemtsov because from the bridge where Nemtsov was killed [on
February 27] you can see the Kremlin…. Well, remember, Sarah Palin could see
Russia from Alaska! It’s preposterous. But the demonization of Putin has become
an institution in America. It is literally a political institution that
prevents the kind of discussion that you and I are having.
Kissinger
had the same thought. He wrote, last year, I think, “The demonization of Putin
is not a policy. It’s an alibi for not having a policy.” That’s half correct.
It’s much worse now, because they did have a policy. I think the “policy”
growing in some minds was how to get rid of Putin. The question is, “Do they
have the capacity to make decisions?” I didn’t think so, but now I’m not so
sure, because in a lot of what comes out of Washington, including the State
Department, the implication is that Putin has to go.
I asked a
question rhetorically several years ago of these regime changers: Have you
thought about what would happen in Russia in the event of regime change? If
what you say is true, if Putin is the pivot of the whole system, you remove
Putin the whole system collapses. Russia has every known weapon of mass
destruction in vast quantities. What would be the consequence of that conceit
on your part—that we’re going to get rid of Putin—for the rest of the world?
So this
Putin phenomenon has to be explained. How did he go from a democrat for sure,
now to maybe the worst Russian leader since Ivan the Terrible. How do you
explain it? Does that tell us more about Putin or more about us?
I think
his sin is an unacceptable take on, broad-brush terms, Eastern ethos vs.
Western ethos, and on narrower terms a rejection of a neoliberal economic
regime in the Washington consensus style. Although he’s got a lot to answer
for, I think, in this respect, he’s not an evangelist for what he’s doing. What
does he face domestically? What’s he trying to do?
Let me
tell you just briefly. When I ask Russians, they think the answer is American
presidential envy. We’ve had a lot of unsuccessful presidents lately.
Clinton left basically in disgrace, Bush left not beloved for the war
that he had got us into and lied about, Obama is before our eyes a shrinking,
failing president. And here’s Putin, now in his 15th year of growing
stature inside Russia.
And by
the way, until recently the preeminent European statesman of his time, no doubt
of this. In the 21st century, only Merkel can stand anywhere near him as a
European statesman, whether you like what a statesman does or not. This, of
course, changes everything. Not to take the famous cop-out, but let history
judge. X number of years from now, when we’ve joined the majority, as Lenin used
to say, historians will undoubtedly look back and do the pluses and minuses,
and it’s going to be a very close call.
For my
short-term take on Putin, he was put in power to save the Yeltsin family from
corruption charges, and the first decree he signed upon becoming acting
president was to exempt the Yeltsin family from future prosecution. He has
honored that, by the way. One of the beefs against Putin in Russia is that he’s
honorable to his friends and appointees to an extreme; he can’t bring himself
to fire anybody. He’s got this KGB code of honor. I kind of like it. I’d rather
that than people stab you in your back….
I operate
under the assumption that no matter how or why people come to power, when in
power they begin to ponder what their mission is, what history asks of them.
For Putin it was quite clear: The Russian state had collapsed twice in the
20th century. Stop and think what that means. It had collapsed in the 1917
Revolution and the Soviet Union didn’t collapse in 1991— it was plucked apart—
but then the state collapsed and the result was what Russians call smuta,
a time of troubles. It means misery; it means foreign invasion; it means civil
war; it means that people fall into poverty. This is the Russia that Putin
inherited. Remember, when he came to power in 2000, Russia was on the verge of
collapsing for a third time as a result of Yeltsin’s policies. The governors
were corrupt, were not obeying the law, were not paying taxes, were running
criminal fiefdoms in scores of regions. Russia was highly vulnerable, NATO was
expanding, Russia had no influence in world affairs.
Putin
comes to power and perceives that his first mission has to be to stop the
collapse of the Russian state— which he calls the vertical, because Russia has
always been governed from the top down, which has made it ungovernable because
it’s so big— and, most of all, to make sure it never, ever, ever happens
again. In Russian history, the worst thing that can happen to Russia is smuta,
when the state collapses. Stop and think: Between 1917 and 1991, it happened
twice in the largest territorial country in the world. Is there any precedent
for that in history? How a leader could come to power and not see that….
======================================
Patrick Smith is the author
of “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century.” He was
the International Herald Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo
from 1985 to 1992. During this time he also wrote “Letter from Tokyo” for the New
Yorker. He is the author of four previous books and has contributed frequently
to the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington Quarterly, and other
publications. Follow him on Twitter, @thefloutist.
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