The Russians Are Coming

Given what we know about Russian activities in the 2016 election and the opacity of the so-called Trump Administration, I have no reservations about a thorough investigation of those activities and Russian connections with the Trump campaign.  Nor would I limit that investigation to just the election.  How much of America's polarization and mistrust is influenced by false information spread by Russian state media and trolls?  Beyond the meddling, Russian nationalism and aggression are also cause for real concern.  And, of course, Putin is a thug.  Whip all of that into America's consciousness and Americans have every reason to be wary of Russia and to seek answers.

What we have no reason to do is to hate Russia or its people.  I've never been to Russia and I have been exposed to negative stereotypes of the country and the people my entire life but I have studied Russian history, including first-hand accounts of life in Russia.  What I have learned is that Russians are as patriotic as any American and take great pride in their history and culture.  Like us, they want peace and security.  Unlike us, Russians have endured privations and hardships that Americans can hardly imagine.  Russians are human beings endowed with the same inalienable rights that we claim as Americans.  Russia has its share of miscreants, bullies and opportunists--just like America--but everything I've learned about the country and its people tells me that Russians deserve my respect. 

To read the news these days, it would seem that the Russians are the archenemy, engaged everywhere, a threat to everything.  Concern over possible election meddling gives creedence to American militarists who see Russia as nothing but a naked aggressor.  But Russian history offers plenty of clues for understanding and defusing its aggression.  Simply put, Russia is insecure.  Always has been.  Tsar, Commissar or Oligarch, it makes no difference.  Russia feels exposed without control of its "near abroad".  The devastating German invasion in WW2 cemented that need into modern Russian consciousness.  Stalin built the "Iron Curtain" ut that fell apart with the collapse of Communism.  Now Vladimir Putin is trying to assemble his own version of the near abroad.  It's what Russian leaders do.

American and NATO policy since the fall of Communism have given the Russians reason to feel exposed.  Not only did the countries of its near abroad abandon Communism, but many Soviet republics that had previously been part of Imperial Russia became independent and hostile to all things Russian.  If that were not enough to unsettle Russia, many of its former allies joined NATO and turned their weapons east.  At the same time, the free marketeers and capitalists were looting the country in a fire sale of state assets to privileged insiders while destroying the economic security all but a privileged few.

Russians look back on the past 25 years and see disappointed hopes and lost greatness.  This is clearly evident in Svetlana Alexileivich's excellent collection of oral histories, Second Hand Time, that covers the years 1991 to 2012.  That sense of loss gives rise to a politician like Putin who can reassert Russian authority and restore a degraded society.  Putin has been clever enough to manipulate Russia's weak democratic institutions to create a new autocracy.  Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy's Mr. Putin:  Operative in the Kremlin provides a good analysis of his thinking and his methods.  

History offers a cautionary tale for our times.  WW1 ended with a vindictive treaty that set the stage for Hitler and WW2 two decades later.  WW2 ended with a settlement that accommodated Russian (if not Eastern European nations') interests and lasted for half a century.  The Cold War ended with Americans and the West dancing on the Soviet Union's grave and the impoverishment of many Russians.  Why is anyone surprised that Russians found that unacceptable?  Russians have long memories.  The West will be a long time earning the trust and respect of Russians.  Trust and respect are work both ways, after all.

Donald Trump is absolutely correct in seeking improved relations with Russia.  That's a no-brainer.  What is difficult is understanding the Russians and bridging our differences with them.  I realize that is always challenging and have no easy answers.  The one answer I can offer is to demilitarize and avoid war.  It's not easy and certainly runs counter to trends in Europe these days that more resemble 1914 than what we hoped for the 21st century.

Another answer is to investigate Russian attempts to covertly influence American elections and policy.  Like Russia's assertion over its near abroad, its covert activities are nothing new.  They've been doing it in one form or another for close to 100 years.  These days the methods are more sophisticated and its reach vastly multiplied by the internet, but the basic function is unchanged:  to thwart adversaries and create an environment favorable to Russia's interests.  That is unlikely to change.  What an investigation will do is tell us its extent, methods and how best to protect our democracy.

Freedom isn't free but the answer is not always a bullet.

Best Comment About US Policy on Crimea

Dr. Wes Browning:

Particularly funny is the possibility that the United States and the European Union might enforce economic sanctions. Not only Putin, but all of Russia with him, are thinking, “You are joking, right? Sanctions? Who cares?”

Never mind that they lived through Stalin (Well, those that did, did.) Never mind that they got hit by a giant meteor last year, and listened to the radio while they watched it hit, and when it blew out windows said, “Let us that do not have arteries cut by shards go out in the -20 C weather in our shirtsleeves and smoke cigarettes on this occasion, and wonder what that was.” Never mind that a day of economic sanctions is what they call Tuesday.

Russians have a calendar filled with Tuesdays.

Meaningless Theater

This description of Russian politics in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election fits well here in America as we approach our own plebiscite next year.

“I believe there is no competition,” says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a member of Putin’s United Russia party and a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences who studies the decision-making elite. “Our politics are a theater. There are directors and a script. And for some reason they love it when the public says there are conflicts.”

Lilia Shevtsova, a mordant critic of the administration and a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center, uses remarkably similar language in reaching a comparable conclusion. “There are no politics,” she says. “Politics exist where you have an independent media, attentive audience and unpredictable script. What’s interesting is that the Kremlin supports this story-telling.” (emphasis added)

We certainly have no independent media, no attentive audience. We do not have an unpredictable script. The only unpredictable elements in American politics are which shill will be chosen to serve the moneyed interests and how irrelevant the public discussion, to the extent it occurs at all, of critical issues will be.

The similarities between Russian and American politics these days are enough to make a body wonder who buried whom? The glitz and pretense in Russian politics are definitely American and western features. But for much of its history, Soviet Communism was primarily an elite convincing the masses that they were living in paradise while forcing them to accept much, much less. These days that sounds all too familiar in America.

The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! *

As a kid in the 1950's I was terrified of the Russians. Everything I knew about them was scary: they were evil Communists, a “Soviet” government controlled all aspects of their lives. Children spied and reported on parents; secret police detained all manner of people, especially Catholics (the nuns who taught me were most emphatic on this point), who disappeared into prisons and labor camps. The Russians had nuclear weapons and were going to take over the US. Hell, my hometown was even captured by “totalitarian” forces for a day before being “liberated” by the 82nd Airborne Division in a pretty big deal (parachutes and armor!) exercise. During the exercise the local paper printed a front page as it would be under occupation, complete with a picture of the “prison camp” for town officials and an announcement that the school day would last from 7:30 to 5:30 six days a week (we’re talking serious scary here). It was a tough time to be a kid, not knowing if my future would be nuclear war or subjugation by the Russians. As I grew older, I began to see much of this for the alarmist hype that it was, although the Cuban Missile Crisis a few years later vividly reminded me that it wasn’t all hype.

America survived the Russian menace, albeit with some close calls, dumb mistakes and a continuing level of alarm and hype. The Russian Communists are no longer a threat but the Russians are certainly still around and operating in much the same way they have for centuries. Their history is grimly cyclic: autocracy versus some form of liberalism. I use the latter term because Russian liberalism, by which I mean open, democratic, humane society, has never really had a chance to flourish. Between Czarist absolutism, economic collapse, revolution and civil awr, Stalinist terror and Communist bureaucracy, liberal thought never had much opening in Russia. Whatever opening followed the collapse of the Soviet Union was soon overtaken with a new round of economic chaos and immiseration.

What frightens me these days about Russia is the return to autocracy. I see that clearly in Anna Politkovskaya’s A Russian Diary. Not so much a memoir but an account of the slow strangling of political space and expression in Russia under Vladimir Putin, which is also evident if you follow events in Russia. She describes abductions, assassinations and criminal gangs within the security services. The truth of her stories lies in her clear observations and understanding of post-Soviet Russia. Her truth is also apparent in her fate–shot dead in the elevator lobby of her apartment building, a crime so far unsolved. Her diary records the developing cult of Putin, an autocracy with a slight veneer of democracy that gives it some little distinction from the Communist oligarchy it has replicated. The recent parliamentary and presidential elections confirmed the new oligarchy’s dominance, something already apparent to Politikovskaya in the years before her murder.

Putin’s Russia is a “capitalist” variant of the Soviet Union, the only real difference being that the Soviets shared at least some of the wealth with the citizenry whereas the new autocracy is more than willing to hoard wealth in the manner of the Romanovs or the Exxons. Russia’s post-Communist journey to freedom seems to have been side tracked; what modernization and change have occurred has simply replicated an all too familiar leadership style and cult of personality in Russia that places the leader above and beyond the control of mere mortals. In Politikovskaya’s Russia, the elections are rigged, the courts are controlled and violence against citizens is common, a state of affairs that is little different from life under the Communists or the Czars.

What also frightens me is that all of this reads like an extreme but possible future America following the logic of CheneyBush unitary executive theory and his rendition of Constitutional government and rule of law as “quaint”. In CheneyBush’s America elections are rigged by the two party monopoly, corporate cash and the odd ballot discrepancy. Courts are bypassed by executive fiat and terror law. Our police are becoming less protectors than a paramilitary force to be used against citizens. I am uneasy reading this book because I see too much of America in the events Politikovskaya describes. I would like to think that our two centuries of somewhat democratic, open government would keep us from devolving into such lawlessness and criminality. I would like to think that but I find it difficult to look past a president who claims unlimited authority and a Congress too timid to challenge that president.

I guess I’m still scared of the Russians but these days it seems as if we are our own Russians.


* Also the title of a very funny movie.

Engaging Russia in the 21st Century

KPLU-FM in Tacoma, one of two local NPR stations serving the Olympia area, carries the Bob Edwards Weekend show, which I heard for the first time this past Saturday. I’ve been a Bob Edwards fan since I first heard him on Morning Edition in 1979. He has a voice that was born for radio and has always impressed me as an interviewer. I’m glad that he found a new venue after NPR dumped him.

The show I heard featured an interview with the Russian/Soviet spy, Sergei Tretyako, and Peter Earley, author of Comrade J, which recounts Tretyako’s role as the head of Russia’s spy network in New York that operated from Russia’s UN mission during the 1990's. Probably the most notable statement he made during the interview was that Americans foolishly believe that the Cold War is over since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That comment reminded me of an enduring fact of which American’s are largely ignorant, namely that Russia is always Russia, whether its leaders are czars, commissars or technocrats. That was a major lesson I learned in college studying Russian history and following events in that country for the past 40 years. Simply put, Russians have a great sense of their nation’s destiny, a sense that equals anything Americans believe about the United States.

This sense of destiny grows out of the Russian state’s 1,000 year history and has been consistent regardless of which of the two competing strains of thought prevail at any given time. One strain, the Slavophiles, holds that Russian culture and society should base itself on Russian history and experience, that the west and other societies have no relevance to Russia and offer no lessons or models for Russia. Even the Communists, who emerged from the international Marxist movement, were largely Slavophilic despite their internationalist rhetoric. The second strain, the Westernizers, believe that Russia should look to the West for ideas and culture. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great are perhaps the most notable Westernizers. Maybe Gorbachev. The Bolsheviks were no doubt influenced by non-Russian ideas but Stalin ruled as a Slavophile.

Parallel to this sense of destiny is a sense of inferiority, the belief that despite its history and culture, Russia is at a disadvantage in competition with other nations (ie, the west). Given Russians’ belief in their cultural superiority, Russia’s disadvantage can only result from subterfuge or sabotage, thereby further heightening Russians’s sense of encirclement.

What all this means to me is that the demise of the Soviet Union simply changed the format of Russian government and gave various nationalities the opportunity to declare independence (Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, etc). It did nothing to change Russians sense of destiny. Along with this sense comes paranoia, the fear of alien, non-Russian ideas that can corrupt the national will, something to always guard against. The early post-Soviet years only heightened this fear as Russians saw their empire fragment, economy tank, and corporate oligarchs take control of major industries. In those years, Russia was a carcass, pickings for foreigners and capitalists, a great nation .

A decade later, much has changed. Vladimir Putin, a Slavophile, has reasserted Russian nationalism and is pushing back against western influences and encroachment. This is no surprise to me. Rather, it’s simply Russia being Russia, a nation that believes in its destiny and is now in a position to demand that other nations recognize what Russia considers its vital interests.

Russia has always sought to buffer itself from the west, by embargoing the flow of outside ideas and by surrounding itself with friendly (or at least compliant) states. The czars did it. So did the Soviets. These days Russia is looking at its immediate neighbors and seeing NATO allies. Americans seem to consider Russia a defeated nation, a second rate power in a world of American hegemony. Needless to say, Russians do not share this view.

Therein lies the danger of American policy toward Russia. Expanding NATO to the east, placing missile defense batteries on Russia’s doorstep and dealing with Russia as a second-rate nation plays directly into Russian fear and paranoia. And we are seeing the result of this misguided policy. Now that Russia is emerging as a major energy producer, its leaders are in a position to assert its national interests far more effectively than could the commissars or their immediate successor, Boris Yeltsin.

Mr. Tretyako’s revelations are a reminder that American interests remain at risk to Russian initiatives and policies. The Cold War did not end so much as change one of the competitors. The American belief that we won the Cold War is an illusion. Communism collapsed largely due to its internal contradictions, influenced perhaps by American policy. What did not change was Russia. Russia remains Russia, a culture and society that sets itself apart from the world.

I’m not advocating a return to Cold War truculence and competition so much as I am asking American leaders to look at Russia on its own terms and develop policies that recognize this context. We should have been doing this for the past 60 years. It's not too late to get real now.

21st Century Aggression

Apparently Russia attacked Estonia early this month. Or more precisely, multiple waves of coordinated, sophisticted attacks were launched on Estonia's internet services. The story is only now coming out and in the process I learn that Estonia is one of the most internet enabled nations in the world. For that reason, the attacks are serious.

Estonia and Russia have no shortage of bad blood between them. Centuries of bad blood, which successive Russian and Soviet regimes have generated, along with a few years of Nazi occupation or liberation, depending on one's national perspectives. All suspicions turn toward Russia, whose governmental IP addresses figure prominently in the attacks. The Russian government denies involvement, claiming hackers appropriated public IP addresses as cover. The Estonians are suspicious; they accuse the Russian authorities of non-cooperation and failing to assist in the investigation.

Russians probably aren't too bereaved about the attacks on Estonia. In fact, Russian chauvinists consider Estonia part of Great Russia. Many other Russians believe Estonians are dishonoring Russian sacrifices to liberate Estonia from the Nazis. Russia, like the United States, has a sense of destiny and prerogative. Estonia is their neighborhood. It would not surprise me if the attackers are the Russian equivalent of American wingnuts, taking action where they believe the government has failed.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin can say, "Shocked. I'm shocked."

postscript

I orginially titled this piece "The 21st Century War" but as I wrote, I discovered that this hostility lacks the blood, destruction and body parts which I consider the definition of war. This attack does not require the direct taking of human life. So it's not war. It's serious business and can cause great losses but it's not war. Regardless, the world is likely to see more of these attacks as it becomes ever more dependent on information systems.