The United States is proud of the freedom of its press, and justifiably so. On most any issue, the truth is out there ?€” in print. However, when the publication of facts is drowned out by the dissemination of ideology ?€” itself a constitutionally protected right ?€” the value of a free press is severely diminished. Such, as Stephen F. Cohen demonstrates in Failed Crusade, is the case with Americans?€™ understanding of contemporary Russia. Facts are readily available, but they are submerged in a sea of free-press propaganda.
Recently the European Children?€™s Trust found that the former Soviet Union now has 40 million children living in "genuine poverty," "tuberculosis levels usually associated with the Third World," and a life expectancy that has dropped to the level of India?€™s. Major U.S. newspapers did report all of this, but it was back-page news. Meanwhile, their front pages and editorial pages continued for the most part to convey a quite different take on Russia.
The quasi-official views are decidedly more upbeat: In 1998, Vice President Al Gore could explain that "Optimism prevails universally among those who are familiar with what is going on in Russia," and the following year, political scientist Michael McFaul found that "seven years into the transition, basic arrows on all the big issues are pointing in the right direction."
For Cohen, who teaches Russian Studies at New York University, this ideological adherence to the message of the failed crusade to turn Russia into a successful capitalist society has meant that "American scholars and journalists have told us considerably less that is truly essential about Russia after communism than they did when it was part of the censorious Soviet system." Instead they have engaged in a boosterism of Boris Yeltsin that "recalls the pro-communist fellow traveling of the 1930s," albeit from an opposite point of view.
How much slack did U.S. opinion makers cut Yeltsin? Well, shortly after he shut down the Russian parliament and ordered tanks to fire on it in 1993, an act that Cohen considers without parallel since the 1933 German Reichstag fire, President Bill Clinton?€™s secretary of state arrived in Moscow to praise Yeltsin?€™s Russia as a country "being reborn as a democracy." On the other hand, ignorance rather than cynicism was the problem when The New York Times published the opinions of two American Russia "specialists" who ?€” separately ?€” appear to have mistaken the legislature that Yeltsin attacked for the last Soviet parliament, elected in 1989. The parliament had, in fact, been freely elected in the Russian republic of the Soviet Union in 1990. To this day, The New York Times reporters count "a rebellious parliament" among Russia?€™s biggest problems, as if a nation?€™s highest elected body was responsible to some higher authority.
Cohen takes a distinctly harsh view of Yeltsin, and notes that no Soviet leader was ever able to appoint their successor the way that Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin. (Putin?€™s first official act, prohibiting the prosecution of his predecessor, brings to mind not a Soviet parallel, but an American one ?€” Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon for whatever he might be charged with after Nixon had left the White House to him.)
Above all, Cohen would have Americans confront the stark results of the vaunted "shock therapy" that U.S. doctors of economics prescribed for their Russian patients: Total capital flight estimated in the range of $150 billion-$350 billion; the number living in poverty in the former Soviet Union up from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million nine years later and a male life expectancy that fell below the age of 60. In short, "the literal de-modernization of a 20th-century country."
In the hopes of finding something that might strike a more sympathetic chord among U.S. policy-makers than massive human suffering, Cohen continually hammers on the dangers inherent in the fact of the "destabilization of a fully nuclearized society." Already, in Chechnya, Russia has experienced the first civil war in a country with nuclear weapons. It lacks the funds to pay the security and maintenance personnel responsible for those weapons adequately and, in some cases, even regularly. A situation in which a nuclear arsenal was under tight control has devolved into a murky one. Yet the attention paid to it in the United States is minor, Cohen argues, compared to "the campaign against Iraq?€™s infinitely lesser weapons of mass destruction."
He suggests that American foreign aid payments targeted at helping Russia pay the costs of maintaining an adequate nuclear security system would prove a far better and cheaper investment than building ever more complex and expensive defense and weapons systems. But, unfortunately, the recent American presidential campaign displayed a bipartisan consensus for just such systems.
What of the fate of the Russian people? Cohen feels that Russia?€™s best missed opportunity was the 1998-99 government of Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, which proposed measures "akin to Franklin Roosevelt?€™s anti-Depression reforms of the 1930s." But there appears to be little prospect for American government support of that type of option either. On the contrary, the fact is that Western capital has no current interest in supporting another Roosevelt anywhere in the world. His reforms were only accepted by moneyed interests because they feared their other options would be far worse, and they have spent much of the past 20 years trying to undo them, and much of the last 10 trying to roll back the European welfare state as well.
Where it will end no one knows, but things have gotten to the point where even U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot acknowledges that the current state of Russian affairs has "given a bad name to democracy, reform, the free market, even liberty itself." As "Failed Crusade" so clearly shows, the American public has been poorly served by Russia watchers whom Cohen charges with "malpractice throughout the 1990s."
Meanwhile, some Russians have continued to manage through the bleakest of situations with the aid of a dark sense of humor. As the joke goes, "We thought the Communists were lying to us about socialism and capitalism, but it turns out they were only lying to us about socialism."
"Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia," by Stephen F. Cohen. 160 pages W.W. Norton. $21.95
Tom Gallagher is a political writer based in San Francisco.
Recently the European Children?€™s Trust found that the former Soviet Union now has 40 million children living in "genuine poverty," "tuberculosis levels usually associated with the Third World," and a life expectancy that has dropped to the level of India?€™s. Major U.S. newspapers did report all of this, but it was back-page news. Meanwhile, their front pages and editorial pages continued for the most part to convey a quite different take on Russia.
The quasi-official views are decidedly more upbeat: In 1998, Vice President Al Gore could explain that "Optimism prevails universally among those who are familiar with what is going on in Russia," and the following year, political scientist Michael McFaul found that "seven years into the transition, basic arrows on all the big issues are pointing in the right direction."
For Cohen, who teaches Russian Studies at New York University, this ideological adherence to the message of the failed crusade to turn Russia into a successful capitalist society has meant that "American scholars and journalists have told us considerably less that is truly essential about Russia after communism than they did when it was part of the censorious Soviet system." Instead they have engaged in a boosterism of Boris Yeltsin that "recalls the pro-communist fellow traveling of the 1930s," albeit from an opposite point of view.
How much slack did U.S. opinion makers cut Yeltsin? Well, shortly after he shut down the Russian parliament and ordered tanks to fire on it in 1993, an act that Cohen considers without parallel since the 1933 German Reichstag fire, President Bill Clinton?€™s secretary of state arrived in Moscow to praise Yeltsin?€™s Russia as a country "being reborn as a democracy." On the other hand, ignorance rather than cynicism was the problem when The New York Times published the opinions of two American Russia "specialists" who ?€” separately ?€” appear to have mistaken the legislature that Yeltsin attacked for the last Soviet parliament, elected in 1989. The parliament had, in fact, been freely elected in the Russian republic of the Soviet Union in 1990. To this day, The New York Times reporters count "a rebellious parliament" among Russia?€™s biggest problems, as if a nation?€™s highest elected body was responsible to some higher authority.
Cohen takes a distinctly harsh view of Yeltsin, and notes that no Soviet leader was ever able to appoint their successor the way that Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin. (Putin?€™s first official act, prohibiting the prosecution of his predecessor, brings to mind not a Soviet parallel, but an American one ?€” Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon for whatever he might be charged with after Nixon had left the White House to him.)
Above all, Cohen would have Americans confront the stark results of the vaunted "shock therapy" that U.S. doctors of economics prescribed for their Russian patients: Total capital flight estimated in the range of $150 billion-$350 billion; the number living in poverty in the former Soviet Union up from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million nine years later and a male life expectancy that fell below the age of 60. In short, "the literal de-modernization of a 20th-century country."
In the hopes of finding something that might strike a more sympathetic chord among U.S. policy-makers than massive human suffering, Cohen continually hammers on the dangers inherent in the fact of the "destabilization of a fully nuclearized society." Already, in Chechnya, Russia has experienced the first civil war in a country with nuclear weapons. It lacks the funds to pay the security and maintenance personnel responsible for those weapons adequately and, in some cases, even regularly. A situation in which a nuclear arsenal was under tight control has devolved into a murky one. Yet the attention paid to it in the United States is minor, Cohen argues, compared to "the campaign against Iraq?€™s infinitely lesser weapons of mass destruction."
He suggests that American foreign aid payments targeted at helping Russia pay the costs of maintaining an adequate nuclear security system would prove a far better and cheaper investment than building ever more complex and expensive defense and weapons systems. But, unfortunately, the recent American presidential campaign displayed a bipartisan consensus for just such systems.
What of the fate of the Russian people? Cohen feels that Russia?€™s best missed opportunity was the 1998-99 government of Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, which proposed measures "akin to Franklin Roosevelt?€™s anti-Depression reforms of the 1930s." But there appears to be little prospect for American government support of that type of option either. On the contrary, the fact is that Western capital has no current interest in supporting another Roosevelt anywhere in the world. His reforms were only accepted by moneyed interests because they feared their other options would be far worse, and they have spent much of the past 20 years trying to undo them, and much of the last 10 trying to roll back the European welfare state as well.
Where it will end no one knows, but things have gotten to the point where even U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot acknowledges that the current state of Russian affairs has "given a bad name to democracy, reform, the free market, even liberty itself." As "Failed Crusade" so clearly shows, the American public has been poorly served by Russia watchers whom Cohen charges with "malpractice throughout the 1990s."
Meanwhile, some Russians have continued to manage through the bleakest of situations with the aid of a dark sense of humor. As the joke goes, "We thought the Communists were lying to us about socialism and capitalism, but it turns out they were only lying to us about socialism."
"Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia," by Stephen F. Cohen. 160 pages W.W. Norton. $21.95
Tom Gallagher is a political writer based in San Francisco.
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