The global war on terrorism has created an unusual sense of solidarity between Americans and Russians. Russia has received hard blows from terrorists who killed hundreds of children in Beslan, brought down airliners, and threaten the fabric of society. While Russia's war against Chechen separatists is unique from America's battles, fighting terrorism has connected the two countries with much mutual sympathy. In spite of newfound concordance we should be mindful that Russia is on a much different course than America, sailing a different sea.
President Bush told the UN last week that, "This young century will be liberty's century. By promoting liberty abroad, we will build a safer world." President Putin delivered his own version of the speech addressing his nation on September 13th: "The fight against terrorism demands a deep reshaping of our policies... One of the main, most important issues is the weakness of state executive powers."
William Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute highlights the divergent paths and goals that distinguish Russia and America---Putin's Power Grab:
"...Putin made breathtaking moves to centralize power in Russia and cut off support for his opponents. Russia's governors will no longer be elected. Putin will appoint them. And in elections for parliament, Russians will no longer be able to vote for candidates, only parties. That way, fewer Putin critics will get in.[Putin's power grab] would appear to be a direct challenge to the Bush Doctrine. Bush might have responded by repeating what he said in 2003 to the National Endowment for Democracy: "In the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty." What Bush did say was more cautious: "I'm . . . concerned about the decisions that are being made in Russia that could undermine democracy in Russia."
...Under pressure to offer his own response, Bush said the next day, "As governments fight the enemies of democracy, they must uphold the principles of democracy."
The Russians, for their part, were dismissive of U.S. criticism. "The processes that are under way in Russia are our internal affair," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. "And it is at least strange that, while talking about a certain 'pulling back' on some of the democratic reforms in Russia, as [Powell] put it, he tried to assert yet again the notion that democracy can only be copied from someone's model." Lavrov added, "We, for our part, do not comment on the U.S. system of presidential elections." Ouch.
What is happening in Russia may be the most ominous development in the world this year. Think of it this way: In the past, which has presented a greater threat to the United States--a corrupt dictatorship in Iraq, or a corrupt dictatorship in Russia?"
Russia oversees a vast empire, even in its post-Soviet incarnation. Within her borders are many ethnicities yearning for national identity. If Chechnya’s bid for independence were to be won by a terror strategy, Russia would face an era of national dissolution. An independent Chechnya would be a signal that barbaric terrorism like the Beslan infanticide wins sovereignty for Jihad. Russia’s backyard is the frontier between the Christian West and Muslim East; the mountains of the Caucuses are one of many battlegrounds to stave-off Islamic expansion. While the enemy might be the same---Islamofascist terrorists---what America and Russia each seek, aside from preventing terrorism, is entirely different.
Russia’s war in Chechnya is wholly apart from our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Chechnya’s terrorism is unforgivable, but it doesn’t change the fact that Putin came to power because he subjected the Chechens to a special ruthlessness---people who might have legitimate demands for limited autonomy. We should not believe that Putin and the United States are fighting for the same cause. Putin seeks to supplant Chechen self-rule with Russian imperialism; Bush seeks the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the establishment of democracy where none has existed before. While there are congruencies between our nations in the fight to contain global Islamic fascism, the goals of each nation are divergent.
Russian democracy, if it can be called that at this point, is thin and brittle. Russia’s reflex to terrorist catastrophes will reopen familiar doors to autocracy. We are seeing this now. At this early stage towards autocracy, Russia and America remain conditional allies, but evolution will reveal a growing distance in the goals of each nation, which have divergent, competitive interests. Russia is paving the way for socialism with a nationalist spine, as is China---a National Socialist revival. Europe is attempting socialism with a transnationalist spine, whose digits are yet disjointed and disharmonious. America is divided between its socialist edifice and the Jeffersonian foundation it was built upon. The vast world of moderate Muslims are on the fence, saying little and waiting to see which Western alternative succeeds, as their insane but brave Islamic radical fringe teases the West towards an unknown destiny.
An ironic insert portrait of Ivan Groznii, aka "the Terrible". Ironic as he showed the limited effectiveness of autocracy, as well as its fatal flaw: who succeeds the autocrat?
Who succeeds the autocrat is exactly the problem that needs to be put to Putin. Instead of putting it as a matter of democracy, put it as a matter of professional preparation and good sense contingency planning. How deep is your bench strength? What is your new system going to be to build up reserves of excellent leadership? Instead of asking the hard questions (and who knows, we might just get some interesting and novel answers) we just go for the wagging finger and the call for democracy.
Autocrats have no retirement plans.
Terrific post!
Stop hyperventilating. There is not going to be a national socialist revival. Russia and China re not the enemy, and I'll tell you why: both of their futures depend on foreign economic investement and trade. Trading partners don't hassle one another. Both of those countries are currently persuing the Singapore model of authoritarian politics combined with free markets. This is far from ideal, but hardly the worst thing that could happen.
Russia's political system is still hung over from decades of communist mismanagement and corruption. Most of the regional governors are ineffective at best and thuggish at worst. Yeltsin left Putin with a huge mess on his hands, and while Putin is certainly no angel, he's no moron either, and is doing what he feels he needs to do to clean up the government. Russia can be more democratic or more capitalist, but not both at the same time just yet. As long as Putin keeps Russia moving on a capitalist track, I'm not particularly concerned for its long-term future. Freedom is 4/5ths economic.
TM Lutas is right. The fingerwagging protests about "democracy" (as if it were intrinsically good, no matter what the context) only serve to crowd out more constructive questions about Russia's long-term future, and its relations with the rest of the world. Russia is on our side now, so get used to it.
The answer Schneider's question is... Iraq. As a corrupt dictatorship, Russia v1.0 was of little interest to America aside from the sale of Alaska and some skirmishes after WW1.
In the past, which has presented a greater threat to the United States--a corrupt dictatorship in Iraq, or a corrupt dictatorship in Russia?"
As a state driven by an expansionist totalitarian ideology, however, Russia was extremely dangerous. Once it shrank back to "corrupt dictatorship" status thanks to its elites' utter loss of faith (defector Arkady Shevchenko was already describing Russia as a criminal state back in the 1980s), it soon collapsed and Russia v3.0 became much less of a threat.
The Russian system is still hung over from eight years of Bill Clinton. Capitalism was thier great hope and we gave then 'The Clinton Democracy.' No human on this earth is evil enough to have planned that! Putin can and probably should assert a more centralized government to protect his country. This works.
Smart Russians will never trust America again, and, by the way, the 'third nuclear missiles' they promised after 'The Seven Hour Nuclear War' are better than we think.
Putin cannot make an error when he pulls his country into a safe, centralized, and PROTECTED capitalist democracy.
"And it is at least strange that, while talking about a certain 'pulling back' on some of the democratic reforms in Russia, as [Powell] put it, he tried to assert yet again the notion that democracy can only be copied from someone's model." Lavrov added, "We, for our part, do not comment on the U.S. system of presidential elections." Ouch.
Ouch?
Our system has produced the longest string of stable democratic elections in human history - including one conducted in the middle of a civil war - and only a handful of them have been even the slightest bit problematic. 1876, 1960, and 2000 were problematic. Not bad. You could think of worse things to emulate, and emulating successful democracies is a hell of a lot easier than re-inventing democracy.
Unfortunately, the Russians have been listening to the post-2000 wails of the Democrats. Not surprising, since you could have heard them on Mars. "The system is broken, the electoral college is obsolete, we need UN observers, etc."
Russia doesn't need that kind of cynicism right now.
Russia’s reflex to terrorist catastrophes will reopen familiar doors to autocracy.
A couple of notes about this -
Modern political terrorism was invented in Russia in the 19th century. Prior to the advent of Bolshevism, the largest political party in Russia was the Socialists-Revolutionaries, which had a large and active terrorist wing.
The effect of SR terrorism was to weaken the old autocracy, not strengthen it. The Tsarist forces were restrained by their need to keep the so-called "liberals" (Kadets, moderate SRs, constitutionalists) happy - and the "liberals" refused to condemn terrorism, bitterly criticizing any repressive measures against it.
Of course, SR terrorism helped to create a new autocracy, as it was the Bolsheviks who ultimately benefited from the chaos.
So if we look at Russian history as a guide, what part is Putin playing? Is he a Bolshevik, taking advantage of another opportunity to expand his power, or is he a Tsarist, doing what the Tsarists might have done to defend themselves if they'd only had the nerve?
Glen Wishard,
Modern political terrorism was invented in Russia in the 19th century.
One could argued that it was invented in the early modern period, during the wars associated with the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation (the English Civil War had numerous incidents which can only described as political terrorism). Or one could argue that it was invented in the United States by the KKK and other like minded groups. I still remember that stupid quip by Horowitz about how the first acts of terrorism committed in the U.S. were by leftist groups like the militant splinter group formed out of the SDS called the Weathermen.
Putin did not start the move towards autocracy; Yetlsin did.
The one exception I can think of Nazi Germany and the USSR.
Colt,
I can think of many exceptions; for example, during the early modern period Spain and England; England and France; England and the Netherlands; etc. all went to war with one another, though each were significant trading partners. In some ways the wars were fought because of these trading relationships. The U.S. and Britain went to war with each other in 1812 despite the fact that Britain was America's number one trading partner (or maybe it was because of it). Despite the myth, trade does not neccessarily equal peace; states can have very different ideas than the economic interests of its citizens or a class of its citizens (or those economic interests may include a desire to destroy a trading relationship so as to take away an advantage or a source of trade from the trading partner).
I suppose it would be nice were Russia to stop assisting Iran's nuclear program.
But that might be a bit much to expect.
In the meantime, though, we can (if we ignore enough) feel solidarity with Russia (now that she has tasted her share of terrorism---and is obviously empathetic to America's concerns) and convince ourselves that she will stand shoulder to shoulder with America in the GWOT.
IF Putin is adopting the Tsarist model, then remember that one role of the Tsars was as a bulwark for the common people against the Boyars.
It didn't start out that way, exactly, but the roots of that role are very old. Ivan the Terrible represented the final playing out of the founding of the tsars in Moscow. His great-grandfather collected taxes and enforced edicts for the Mongols in return for their tolerance as he accumulated power and built what had been a small trading post in the deep forest into a capital.
Of course, collecting tribute for the Mongols put the Moscovite leaders in direct conflict with regional warlords and the remnants of the old Kiev nobility who had fought off the Prussians from the west (c.f. Prince Igor) and fought against the Mongol advances from the east. But since those leaders were pretty autocratic and brutal in their own right after the fall of Kiev and the dissolution of the old dumas model (which gave a voice and some influence to a peoples' assembly), the common people were grateful to Moscow for opposing those leaders.
Net result: a deep cultural tendency in much of Russia to value a central leader who could take impose order in the face of ethnic tensions and restrain regional warlords and entrenched aristocracy.
My own family has historically had mixed reactions to that centralizing tendency. I am Ukrainian on my father's side and grew up in the Eastern Orthodox church. (My mother's family go back to before the Revolution here, a completely different heritage.)
One half of my father's family has roots in the old Kievian state. Not fond of Moscow and its claims.
On the other hand, the male line of my father's family are descended from the tribes of horsemen whose leaders were recruited by the Tsars in the 17th century to patrol the Ukraine (literally, "the frontier) in exchange for large land grants. As recently as my great-grandfather and his older sons, my ancestors continued to do just that, raising horses and training and leading mounted patrols in the vast grasslands.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that the Russians themselves have a long experience with attacks at their borders, a dissolving state and the usefulness of a strong central authority. They also, of course, have long experience with the downside of that authority.
What they don't have is any experience similar to the centuries during which British law evolved a Parliament, a deep tradition of common law, the Protestant Reformation, the British Civil War or the philosophies of Locke and Hobbes on which to found a constitutional democracy, as we did. And I rather have to agree that it is naive at best to think that our model can be fitted easily and naturally into their environment .. or even to be sure ours is the best model they could follow at this time.
MMcIntosh, et al,
I didn't intend to say that we could only drift into a war with Russia or China. Economic trade bewteen us and them does limit aggression. And I don't expect them to become nationalist socialists in the twentieth century mould.
What is troubling about the war on terror is that it makes for strange bedfellows, forging alliances that would be anything but if not for the common threat of terrorism. We needn't war with Russia or China to see that our interests are quite different.
As far as whether or not economic improvement begets freedom, maybe yes, maybe no. Time will tell. During the 1930s, Nazi Germany was one of the fastest-moving economies in the world---the envy of many in a world soaked in depression. Prosperity spiked there along with the regime. We don't see a Hitlerian regime in Russia or China, but the idea that a rising economy is a guarantor of freedom is conditional with many imponderables, and far from inevitable.
The analogy of Russia and China becoming more like the Singapore model is intriguing, and has great merit. One big difference is, of course, that managing an city state is much different than managing a vast empire of multiple time zones or hundreds of millions of people. The Singapore analogy will have its logical limits, and is probably a hat that won't fit.
The Singapore model does show something that appears to be evolving in China and Russia---a kind of smiley face national socialism. The 'smiley face' is capitalism and all the modern trinkets it affords, the stuff of consumer culture. This may indeed be our best hope for our Chinese and Russian neighbors. Whether or not the pressures of vast population and very long borders leaves us with national socialists on the march or at home with TiVo is a question I wouldn't hazard to guess at this point. Time will tell.
Gary Gunnels -
The SR terrorists were, I believe, the first to have an explicit political philosophy of terrorism. Russian terrorism is older than the Ku Klux Klan, and subsequent terrorist organizations were inspired by their example, not the Klan's.
SR terrorist Lev Tikhomirov:
Terror requires neither the support nor the sympathy of the country. It is enough to have one's convictions, to feel one's despair, to be determined to perish.
And the SR Executive Committee (in 1879):
Terrorist activity has as its objective undermining the fascination with the government's might, providing an uninterrupted demonstration of the possibility of struggling against the government, in this manner lifting the revolutionary spirit of the people and its faith in the success of the cause, and, finally, organizing forces capable of combat.
I was traveling in Russia (St. Petersburg) in early August. St. Petersburg reminded me of New York City in the late '70's. They had terrible traffic, incompetent government, a big crime problem, and lots of people who were working hard and trying to make the best of things.
Russians were a lot nicer to tourists who didn't know the language than New Yorkers can be.
While it's difficult to have much sympathy for Putin, it's easy to see why he would be suspicious of American help when a group of influential Americans, members of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC) are negotiating with the Chechen 'resistance' and blaming Russia for terrorist acts.
Members of this 'peace' organization include Richard Perle, Zbigniew Brzezinski and P.J. O'Rourke (!)
The ACPC claims that Chechens are not Islamic fundamentalists - but a local Chechen Mullah said that their jihad would not end: "until the Shariah Law is established. Praise God that He gave us this Jihad. People were not living by the Shariah before. It is the mercy of Allah that we have the opportunity to wage Jihad on His Straight Way."
So, why are people like Richard Perle interested in helping the Chechens? Is it because they're all about peace, love and understanding?
As hypocrites, they make Berkeley look tame.
mary,
The Chechens practice a "moderate" Islam compared to the Wahabis.
Problem is Saudi has sent imams to the Chechens to "strenghten" their Islam.
So I could see why there might be diverging views on the subject.
Give it a couple of months and see if their positions have changed.
Glen Wishard,
The SR terrorists were, I believe, the first to have an explicit political philosophy of terrorism.
The KKK and allied organizations also had a fairly specifici political ideology; much of it was written down.
Russian terrorism is older than the Ku Klux Klan, and subsequent terrorist organizations were inspired by their example, not the Klan's.
So what? The KKK could have been first and the SR's could have independently adopted such an ideology. No influence is required.
BTW, the Vikings also had an ideological component to their raids; indeed, along with getting their riches, one of the reasons why they attacked and terrorized monastaries was to destroy the ideological threat that they posed to the culture. Political terrorism is nothing new under the sun.
M. Simon - The general Chechen population may practice a more tolerant version of Islam than the Wahhabis, but the 'rebel', 'separatist' (ie. terrorist) groups are mostly Wahhabi influenced. Chechens are also influenced by tribal loyalties.
On a Chechen 'rebel' website, two reasons were given for the recent mass murder spree - local mullahs claimed that it was in the name of jihad and shariah law.
On Chechen TV, Basayev gave this reason for the murder of children and other innocents. It was to settle an old tribal score with the "Yamadayev brothers":
"At the same time Chechen Commander Shamil Basayev appeared on the air of Gudermes TV and made a brief address to the country’s population. He assured Chechen citizens that units of Mujahideen are going to deal a whole number of crushing blows to the invaders and their accomplices. Commander Basayev addressed to the most notorious national traitors, the Yamadayev brothers, personally. This is what he said in Chechen: «Where are you dogs roaming? You threatened to kill me, but I’m right here under your very nose, speaking on TV. Beware, I’m going to rip your heads off, and you’ll see if it’s an empty threat or not»."
If Americans are negotiating with scumbags like Basayev, they are doing so in opposition to everything we stand for.