Don't Mess With Russia by Kevin Brondum

Russia and the United States are not friends. Events since the collapse of the USSR have disappointed the US’s initial euphoric hopes of easy cooperation with its former nuclear rival, and a bright, democratic future for the newly liberalized country. The end result of 74 years of Soviet communism and 15 years of post-Soviet liberal capitalism is a large country frustrated by the loss of its superpower status, struggling to maintain its traditional sphere of influence, disillusioned with its new capitalist democratic system, and engaged in an endless, exhausting effort to defeat the separatist movement in Chechnya.

It can only help so much to assign blame for Russia’s ongoing difficulties to liberal democracy. The West had no role in the escalation of the Chechen conflict, or President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to curtail and gradually undo democratic reforms, but its promotion of the “shock therapy” program, which sought to privatize Russia’s state-run economy as quickly as possible, was disastrous. It put property formerly held by the government up for grabs, and the ensuing economic free-for-all led to monstrously widespread mafia activity and helped boost a robber-baron oligarchy to power. Shock therapy brought about the collapse of the ruble in 1998, from which Russia has barely recovered.

Since then, the United States has managed to gall Russia in some other ways, not least by chipping away at Russia’s regional influence. Everyone following post-Soviet politics from the West has read or heard over-simplified, exultant reports of “color revolutions,” or “flower revolutions” in the media. The most recent examples are the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia (2003), the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine (2004), and the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan (2005). The typical account features a frustrated nation rising to demand that its corrupt, fraudulent, or dictatorial government be replaced with an accountable, honestly elected, democratic one.

The Western press is correct to characterize these movements as useful for the progress of Post-Soviet democracy, but deemphasizes the fact that these little “revolutions” would probably not have taken place without Western encouragement. American businessman and activist George Soros’s crucial financial and moral support for the Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution is well known and widely resented in Russia.

Former participants in the Rose Revolution later joined Westerners in supporting Ukraine’s Orange Revolution a year later in 2004, a popular protest against allegedly fraudulent results in the Ukrainian election. The initial results showed a narrow victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s favored candidate, Viktor Janukovich, which seemed to ensure Russia’s continued and unchallenged influence in Ukraine’s affairs. His opponent, Viktor Juschenko, had been the pro-Western candidate, and the favorite of Ukraine’s rising bourgeoisie. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which sent people to observe how the votes were tallied, reported fraud and voter intimidation intended to favor Janukovich, and Juschenko’s supporters took to the streets waving orange flags and wearing orange clothes to protest. The Orange Revolution, as it was called in the Western Press, successfully reversed the results of the election and granted the pro-Western Juschenko the presidential office.

Certainly, these color revolutions were a victory for democracy in principle. But Russians may be right to suspect ulterior motives in Western support for the “Rose” and “Orange Revolutions” — the politicians that came out the better for those events were, after all, pro-Western.

Whatever its motives, the frequency of Western interference in the affairs of post-Soviet states has won little good will toward our country from Russia. Russians’ feelings about the United States now approach paranoia. Aleksandr Prokhanov, a Russian writer, speculated quite ludicrously that the United States had incited France’s 2004 race riots to bully an ally that had opposed the Iraq invasion, and many Russians accepted the suggestion as entirely plausible. If Russians were capable of imagining that the United States engineered the Paris riots, they might easily imagine ulterior motives for American support of democratic movements in former Soviet Republics that have undermined Russia’s regional influence.

It should also come as no surprise, then, that Russia is beginning to assert itself in the geopolitical arena. At the G-8 summit, Russia refused to kowtow to the United States’ wishes in its policy toward Iran, a longstanding trade partner, and supported Iran’s claim to the right to enrich uranium in direct defiance of Washington’s wishes. Another illustrative example of Russia’s perceptible suspicion of the West was Air Force Commander Alexander Mikhailov’s open declaration in 2003 that Russia would shoot down any NATO spy plane caught flying even a kilometer inside Russian airspace.

The United States and its allies should feel fortunate that Russians’ popular distrust and resentment of the West has not escalated to outright hostility. We have to avoid antagonizing the only country whose nuclear arsenal matches the United States’ for sheer size. Of course the dynamics of deterrence virtually ensure that Russia would not stage a nuclear attack against us, but its stockpile gives it the muscle to assert itself. The Russian government has consistently shown its willingness to challenge perceived intrusions into its sphere of influence. In response to the success of the color revolutions, for instance, Putin accused Russian NGO’s of being “puppet” organizations, serving Western interests, and undermining Russian sovereignty. He signed a law permitting increased monitoring of their activities and funding, and gave the state the right to suspend any organization that got in the way of its governing effectively. The West’s unthinking intervention may, in fact, encourage the Russian state to tighten its control rather than progress toward a democratic ideal.

The Russian state guards its authority and power jealously from other contenders, such as big business, and still exercises much more power over the governed than has become traditional in the long-standing liberal democracies of the West. This is not the place to try identifying any deep cultural and historical causes for the ongoing difficulties of implementing democracy in Russia. I feel I can safely say, however, that democratization in Russia will be slow for a while to come. The West is not in a position to make Russia, nor any former Soviet Republic, democratic and free. After their defeat in the Cold War (and the West has treated it as a defeat), and the failure of “shock therapy”, why should the post-Soviet states continue to seek guidance from the West? Why shouldn’t they doubt Western competence, or the purity of Western intentions, in trying to “democratize” their state systems? If the former Soviet states are to democratize, they have to do it on their own.