Contrary to what some believe, we did not "humiliate" Russia after Communism. In fact, America did quite the opposite.
By Cathy Young
As
Russia’s bizarre non-invasion invasion of Ukraine continues to rattle
the world, a familiar theme has emerged in some of the commentary: that
Western powers, especially the United States, bear at least partial
blame for inciting Russian bellicosity by kicking their Cold War foe
when it was down. New York University Slavic scholar Stephen F. Cohen, a
frequent Russia expert on TV, makes this claim in the left-wing magazine, The Nation; across the Atlantic, he is seconded by conservative Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens. Even some pundits with little sympathy for the Kremlin’s actions, such as the New York Times’s Tom Friedman, claim that reckless U.S. policies, above all NATO’s eastward expansion, helped generate the current crisis.
Did
we create a monster by humiliating Russia after the collapse of
Communism? Is the answer — as advised by foreign policy “realists,”
including anti-interventionist conservatives such as Sen. Rand Paul
- to avoid antagonizing the Russian state, treat it with more respect,
and recognize its “sphere of influence” in nearby countries? A look at
the facts suggests that whatever mistakes the West may have made in the
post-Cold War years, Russia’s grievances are less about actual wrongs
than about paranoid insecurities and outsized imperial ambitions — a
mindset Vladimir Putin harbors himself, but also deftly exploits in the
Russian public to shore up his power. And rewarding these attitudes with
more “respect” can only take Russia further down a road dangerous to
itself and the world.
After
the demise of the Soviet empire in 1991, there certainly was a
widespread view that the West had won the Cold War. But it was also
generally presumed to be a victory over Communism, not Russians — who
were widely seen as an oppressed people newly liberated from the
totalitarian yoke. In the early 1990s, the United States eagerly
embraced Russia’s fledgling democracy, its new status as a partner and
ally symbolized by the cordial relationship
between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin; Clinton’s first trip abroad as
President, in April 1993, included a meeting with Yeltsin in Vancouver.
“Russia wasn’t even treated as an equal partner but as a favored
child who was petted and given treats,” the late Elena Bonner, an icon
of Soviet-era human rights activism and widow of the great physicist and
dissident Andrei Sakharov, told me a few years ago, discussing an
earlier round of laments about Russia’s wrongs at the hands of the West.
(Then as now, the chorus of sympathy came in response to a Russian
military adventure in a former Soviet republic trying to break away from
its “sphere of influence” — Georgia.)
The “treats” were quite meaty: Western aid to Russia from 1992 to 1997 alone totaled $55 billion
— not counting private charity and business investment. (In 1995, when
the CIA submitted a report to the White House detailing Russian
corruption that included aid money being pocketed by high-level
officials, Vice President Al Gore reportedly
rejected it and sent the document back with a crude epithet scrawled
across the cover.) In a move that had more to do with political respect
than economic reality, Russia was included in the annual forum for
leaders of the world’s top economies — first in an informal “G7+1”
arrangement, then, from 1998 onward, as a full member of the G8.
What about the alleged insult and injury of NATO expansion, which is also said to break a promise
given to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990? The real story is
far more complex. For one, Mark Kramer, director of Harvard’s Cold War
Studies Project, make a fairly conclusive case in a 2009 article in The Wilson Quarterly
that the non-expansion pledge is a myth (the 1990 negotiations
concerned only the military status of the Eastern part of Germany after
reunification). Ira L. Straus, founder and U.S. coordinator of the
Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO, has pointed out
that when the admission of former Eastern bloc countries to NATO first
came up for serious consideration in 1993, it was with a view to more
extensive engagement with Russia — and its possible membership in the
alliance down the road.
Due to lingering mistrust on both sides, Russia’s leadership
often questioned the sincerity of NATO’s inclusive intentions when
former Soviet satellites such as Poland were given priority in admission
— while the West often interpreted Russia’s opposition to fast-track
admission for those countries as blanket opposition to NATO expansion.
In fact, both Yeltsin and Putin at different times voiced interest in
NATO membership for Russia, and Straus is critical of the West for not
being more receptive to these overtures. Nonetheless, his own accounts
in a 1997 paper and a lengthy 2003 article
leave little doubt that Russian attitudes — suspicion of the West,
reluctance to commit to NATO’s strategic agenda, and resentment at being
invited to join NATO’s membership plan on the same terms as other
countries — were a big part of the problem.
Notably, Russia was included in NATO’s Partnership for Peace
program in 1994 and in the NATO-Russia Council in 2002; both provided a
framework not only for military cooperation (and Western assistance to
Russia in such areas as job training for decommissioned officers) but
for a NATO obligation to consult Russia about possible threats to its
security.
The prospect of Georgia and Ukraine membership in NATO is often
said to stoke Russia’s fear of “encirclement” by hostile entities,
provoking an understandably aggressive reaction. But fear of what,
exactly? In October 2008, not long after the war in Georgia, retired
Russian general Vladimir Dvorkin, formerly a top-level arms negotiator,
published a fascinating column
on the independent Russian website EJ.ru (“The Daily Journal”). Dvorkin
pointed out the obvious: given Russia’s nuclear arsenal, a military
attack on Russia by NATO forces is unthinkable no matter how many of its
neighbors join NATO. The real danger to Russia, he warned, is
“civilizational isolation” if it fails to modernize its economy and
liberalize its political system and finds itself surrounded by neighbors
integrated into the democratic capitalist West.
For Dvorkin, the solution to was to embrace modernization and
freedom. Not so for Putin, who is keenly aware of the threat of such
“encirclement” — and, crucially, of its effect at home. It is worth
recalling that Moscow’s sharp anti-Western, anti-American turn in the
mid-2000s came after the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine,
where peaceful demonstrations against rigged elections brought down
authoritarian pro-Kremlin regimes. It wasn’t just the loss of allies
that mattered but the power of example: today the Maidan, tomorrow Red
Square.
Putin’s response was to blame these revolutions on American
perfidy, with George Soros and George W. Bush implicated in the same
conspiracy. In the lingo of the Russian political establishment,
“orange” — the color worn by Ukraine’s pro-democracy protesters —
acquired the meaning of “foreign-backed subversive” and became a
standard epithet to smear the liberal opposition. In 2011-2012, it was
widely used as a slur against Russia’s own protesters who turned out to
denounce rampant election fraud and Putin’s cynical gambit to return to
the presidency after using his obedient “heir” Dmitry Medvedev to get
around the constitutional two-term limit.
In his third term, Putin has been more blatant than ever in his
use of nationalist and anti-Western rhetoric to prop up an authoritarian
kleptocracy. In doing so, he taps into a real sentiment among Russians —
78 percent of whom completely or mostly agree
that Russia should reclaim its status as a “great empire.” Yet this
sentiment is more nuanced than appears at first glance. The share of
those who “completely” support empire restoration has dropped from 59
percent in 1999 to 40 percent in 2011. And, in a 2012 poll,
Russians overwhelmingly preferred (by 78 to 22 percent) to see Russia
as a country with a comfortable standard of living in which individual
well-being is paramount than a great military power in which the
prestige of the state comes first. Russians are not inherently
anti-liberal or democracy-averse; but when the state controls virtually
all of the mass media, it has a great deal of power to cultivate
society’s most illiberal attitudes.
Behind those attitudes is the very real national humiliation many
Russians felt after the collapse of Communism. But, as Bonner told me
in 2008, it was hardly the West’s fault: “Russia humiliated itself. It
spent 70-plus years building Communism, and reaped the results.” A wise
leadership would help Russia come to terms with this reality. Instead,
Putin has worked to channel popular discontent into resentment of the
West while promoting pride in the Soviet-era past and using imperial
dreams to salve the nation’s bruised ego.
Of course the United States should not seek out confrontation
with Russia. But a respectful relationship should not include
recognizing Russia’s “right” to bully its former colonies so that it can
maintain a zone of friendly “buffer states.” Losing its buffer against
democracy could be the best thing to happen to Russia as well as its
neighbors.
Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. She is also the author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (Ticknor & Fields, 1989).
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