A New Russia : Less Evil, More Empire /
Symbols get no starker than those dueling flags, back in the 1960s, atop embassies on opposite banks of the Congo River. In Brazzaville, a hammer and sickle on the blood-colored Soviet banner rose above walls bristling with barbed wire, topped with guard posts, as forbidding as the Iron Curtain up north. In Kinshasa, even limp in the muggy air, the red, white, and blue of Old Glory marked a higher road to a Free World.
Things were simpler then, provided you didn’t look too closely. A First World (the United States and its democratic allies) vied with a Second World (the Soviet Union and its satellites) for influence within a Third. This last was a catchall of former colonies and assorted states in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. A few had something important to sell. And each had a United Nations vote.
Because Washington and Moscow both had the capacity to blow the other off the map many times over, statesmen did not worry much about nuclear holocaust. Instead, they fought with carrots and sticks; they simply rented friends who could not otherwise be swayed by argument or arm-twisting.
The good guys had their dark side. U.S. colors flew over Kinshasa, for instance, because Washington arranged the murder of Patrice Lumumba, a popular left-leaning leader, and installed in his place a greedy despot named Mobutu who America backed for nearly 40 years.
When Russia seized the opportunity to establish Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow to win over Africans, most students were appalled at a racist, xenophobic, and corrupt state, a parody of its lofty goals. A few went home to overthrow fragile governments that colonizers had left behind, installing totalitarian regimes with Kremlin help.
As an American news agency reporter in Africa back then, my Soviet contacts were mainly TASS correspondents who presumed I was a spy like them. They were generous with caviar but stingy with useful information. The East-West interplay grew more sophisticated during the 1970s. In 1982, I got a visa to poke around in the belly of the beast.
I had counted on a roots tour. My grandmother, at 12, had made matches until her fingers bled in a Belarus factory. She was an eager firebrand in the 1917 Revolution against the tsars. Then, disillusioned, she spent four years getting the family to America. I was refused permission to visit her old town of Borisov so I took a train that passed through it. But when I stepped onto the platform, a buxom conductor clamped a meaty paw on my shoulder, and she yanked me back aboard. The Soviet Union was that kind of place.
A decade later, back in Moscow, I danced on Red Square the night Communism died. Boris Yeltsin made his fabled leap onto a tank and tipped over the last tottering domino of Soviet power.
Euphoria was beyond description. In ageless Mother Russia, the slate was suddenly wiped clean. Anything was possible. America took credit for defeating a system that had, in fact, crumbled from within. President George H.W. Bush made an effort at magnanimity, trying to assuage wounded Russian dignity. Western leaders did not want freelance nuclear scientists on the job market. They feared that lethal flotsam and jetsam of the imploded Evil Empire would end up in dangerous hands. But no one wanted to squander massive aid on an old foe.
The Clinton Administration and its NATO partners worried little about the toothless bear, taking it for granted as they focused on other priorities. Russia would fall in line when needed if it knew what was good for it. By 1994, Foreign Minster Andrei Kozyrev put aside his willingness to accommodate the West.
“It’s bad enough having you people tell us what you’re going to do whether we like it or not,” he told U.S. Ambassador Strobe Talbott. “Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interest to obey your orders.”
Russian hopes evaporated fast. Yeltsin diminished from folk hero to bumbling, bullying drunk. Old Soviet apparatchiks, oligarchs, and mafia lords – overlapping at the most basic levels – seized the loose reins of power to amass private fortunes.
In 2000, West and East had an historic opportunity to chart a common course. George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, each with fresh mandates, met to take each other’s measure. History is clear enough on how that worked out.
While America’s strength was drained away in Iraq, Putin committed $200 billion to overhaul a military that already had more tactical nuclear weapons than the United States. “The Russian army on the march is a terrifying sight – part Stalingrad, part Mad Max,” Owen Matthews wrote in Newsweek. The article’s headline said it all: “Russia’s military may be no match for NATO’s. But it doesn’t have to be.” Plagued with alcoholism, drug addiction, and poor rural health care, male life expectancy in Russia is only 59 years. Chinese already outnumber Russians 10 to 1. The United States has twice the population and 10 times the gross domestic product.
Yet, with oil production to match Saudi Arabia’s and vast reserves of natural gas, the humbled nation is now a primordial world force. Russia outmaneuvered America and Europe in Central Asia. As Arctic ice receded, allowing access to petroleum reserves that could dwarf deposits under the Gulf, Russia planted a titanium flag on the sea floor to stake its claim. If less evil this time, the empire is back with a vengeance.
As the dust settled in Georgia, Germany and other European Union states edged closer to Russia. In Berlin, Dmitry Medvedev declared the American century was over. German Chancellor Angela Merkel nodded agreement. Foreign policy is pragmatic; noble sentiments aside, national interests usually come first.
Late in 2007, the Russian specialist Dimitri Simes warned in Foreign Affairs that something like the Georgia crisis was all but inevitable. “Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Russia has not acted like a client state, a reliable ally, or a true friend – nor has it behaved like an enemy, much less an enemy with global ambitions and a hostile and messianic ideology. Yet the risk that Russia may join the ranks of U.S. adversaries is very real today. To avoid such an outcome, Washington must understand where it has gone wrong – and take appropriate steps today to reverse the downward spirit.”
The message is clear enough: A humiliated Russia has had enough bear-baiting.
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To fathom this new Russia, dispatches called on perceptive insiders and enlightened outsiders from across a wide gamut.
Mark Franchetti, London Sunday Times Moscow correspondent since 1997, is happy sipping tea in high places or manhandling a motorcycle across remote steppes. Eloquent in five languages, he gets close to his story. He won the 2003 British Press Award for twice entering the besieged Moscow theater to interview Chechen hostage-takers.
Russia has been Russia for a very long time, Franchetti notes, and its reaction to outside pressure has remained constant: Push too hard and you bring out the worst.
Andrew Meier, a seasoned Russia hand who left Time to write independently, builds on Franchetti’s theme in a dispatch from Omsk. Siberia is no longer shorthand for “fallen off the edge of the earth.” It booms, as do former Soviet Asian republics where Putin’s hard-nosed diplomacy thwarted an American offensive. Russia, he shows, is the world’s first energy superpower.
Ilana Ozernoy visits the summer camp of Nashi, Putin’s “anti-fascist” movement, which smacks of the Hitler Youth. Nashi means “ours” with a particular twist: “not yours.” Ozernoy is the daughter of an eminent astrophysicist and Jewish refusenik who worked with Andrei Sakharov and took the family to America in 1986. She sees Russia with the clear eye of an inside outsider.
Andrei Soldatov, who keeps tabs on security issues for his investigative site, Agentura, explains how the KGB has morphed into the FSB, a hydra-headed monster with a Kremlin power base, ties to vast fortunes, foreign agents, and police powers that touch all aspects of Russian life.
Alison Smale, International Herald Tribune managing editor, offers poignant reflection from the dacha she visits often with her Russian composer husband.
She has been close to the heart of Russia since the 1980s. As an Associated Press correspondent, Smale frequently talked with Kremlin leaders and dissidents who later took charge. When the Berlin Wall opened, Smale and a young German woman she was interviewing were the first two people through Checkpoint Charlie.
Louise Shelley, who runs the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University in Virginia, shows how a parallel economy corrupts Russia. She has testified on Russian mafias in the U.S. Congress, at international tribunals, and in criminal courts. Shelley travels often to Russia, Georgia, and elsewhere in a region where her roots run deep.
Novelist Martin Cruz Smith, whose detective Arkady Renko led so many readers into a snowy, Soviet Gorky Park, has the final word. In an interview, he compares the Russia he first saw in 1973 to the place he visited at length in 2008.
Photographer Seamus Murphy was dispatched to Russia’s Far East, the new frontier of the energy boom that has propelled Soviet remnants back to world power status. Company officials in Moscow and London made promises they apparently never meant to keep. Authorities in Siberia made outright threats. Prevented from photographing oil and gas installations, Murphy set out on a road trip across the lyrical landscape of the remote, insular region from which Russia’s power flows.
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What emerges from this mosaic is a Russia far different from what anyone imagined on that night we splashed vodka and hugged strangers near Lenin’s Tomb. Hopes and fears have mingled inextricably, and both exceed expectations.
Democracy is off the table, and exceeding limits exacts a price. Nearly 300 journalists have been murdered since 1990, some gunned down in plain sight, others dosed with polonium in the fashionably Russian manner. If state connections are seldom clear, few killers are caught.
But is this hardly the old evil empire. A glance at the new quarterly Russia! depicts one aspect of the new mood. On a recent cover, two male cosmonauts embrace in a soulful kiss among emblematic snowflecked Russian birches. A nightclub scene inside elevates half-clothed hedonism to inspired heights.
Plummeting oil prices hit Russia hard late in 2008. Oligarchs dropped in droves off the Forbes billionaires list, yet they still buy up the Riviera from Monaco to Montenegro as well as fancy urban enclaves in London and New York. Wealth trickles down as never before. Entrepreneurs with good ideas can flourish overnight. Yet a distressingly numerous underclass sees a bleak life that grows steadily worse.
In November 2008, presidents and prime ministers sent effusive congratulations to Barack Obama, but Medvedev was pointedly silent. In a speech, he said a new U.S. administration might devise a more sensible foreign policy. Russia, he added, would deploy more missiles to counter a Western threat in Europe.
Clearly, those old watchwords of Ronald Reagan’s are no longer enough. Trust but verify, sure. But then what?
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