What really happened in Russia after the end of the Soviet Union, and how badly experts and the media misjudged it.Failed Crusade is a deeply informed and passionate call for a fundamentally different American-Russian relationship in the post-Yeltsin era. Author Stephen Cohen shows that what US officials and other experts call "reform" has for most Russians been a catastrophic development—namely the unprecedented demodernization of a twentieth-century country—and for the United States the worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. What emerges is an alarming analysis of nuclear-laden Russia after 1991, representing an even greater threat to our national security than during the Cold War, and an indictment of American journalists and policy makers who failed to see or report the truth about the complicity of U.S. policy in a great human tragedy. This paperback edition has been updated to reflect the events of the last year. "Cohen writes with bracing clarity on a subject obscured by euphemisms and double talk."—Robert D. Kaplan, New York Times Book Review
What really happened in Russia after the end of the Soviet Union, and how badly experts and the media misjudged it.Failed Crusade is a deeply informed and passionate call for a fundamentally different American-Russian relationship in the post-Yeltsin era. Author Stephen Cohen shows that what US officials and other experts call "reform" has for most Russians been a catastrophic development—namely the unprecedented demodernization of a twentieth-century country—and for the United States the worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. What emerges is an alarming analysis of nuclear-laden Russia after 1991, representing an even greater threat to our national security than during the Cold War, and an indictment of American journalists and policy makers who failed to see or report the truth about the complicity of U.S. policy in a great human tragedy. This paperback edition has been updated to reflect the events of the last year. "Cohen writes with bracing clarity on a subject obscured by euphemisms and double talk."—Robert D. Kaplan, New York Times Book Review
Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia
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Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia
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Overview
What really happened in Russia after the end of the Soviet Union, and how badly experts and the media misjudged it.Failed Crusade is a deeply informed and passionate call for a fundamentally different American-Russian relationship in the post-Yeltsin era. Author Stephen Cohen shows that what US officials and other experts call "reform" has for most Russians been a catastrophic development—namely the unprecedented demodernization of a twentieth-century country—and for the United States the worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. What emerges is an alarming analysis of nuclear-laden Russia after 1991, representing an even greater threat to our national security than during the Cold War, and an indictment of American journalists and policy makers who failed to see or report the truth about the complicity of U.S. policy in a great human tragedy. This paperback edition has been updated to reflect the events of the last year. "Cohen writes with bracing clarity on a subject obscured by euphemisms and double talk."—Robert D. Kaplan, New York Times Book Review
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780393322262 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/17/2001 |
| Edition description: | Updated |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 102,800 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Stephen F. Cohen is director of Russian studies at Princeton University and a regular commentator on network television.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
America's Russia-watchers, with only a few exceptions, committed malpractice throughout the 1990s. The results have undermined our values and jeopardized our nation's security.
When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, four American professions laid claim to special expertise on post-Communist Russia: government policymakers, economic and financial advisers, journalists, and scholars. Mainstays of what was known as the "Washington Consensus," Russia specialists in all those occupations professed to know the cure for what ailed their subject, gave regular assurances about the ongoing treatment, and, while noting occasional relapses, predicted a full recovery. In reality, their prescriptions, reports, and prognoses were fundamentally and predictably wrong.
A full inventory of the failures of U.S. policymakers, particularly during the years of the Clinton administration, belongs to the final section of this book. We need to recall here, however, that their grand policy was nothing less than missionary—a virtual crusade to transform post-Communist Russia into some facsimile of the American democratic and capitalist system. Moreover, it was not only an official project; it captivated investors, journalists, and scholars as well.
The Crusade for the "Russia We Want"
The idea that the United States might one day remake Russia in its own image, or at least "do their thinking for them," originated after World War II among extreme advocates of the forty-year Cold War. By 1992, the first post-Soviet year and last year of the Bushadministration, it had reemerged in the American mainstream. In April, for instance, a special gathering of government, business, media, and academic representatives recommended that the United States and its allies "deeply and swiftly engage themselves in the process of transforming the political and economic orders of these former Soviet republics." A policymaker-turned-academic was more specific: "The West should create an elite corps of experts to live in the former Soviet Union and help officials there run government and business."
But it was the Clinton administration that turned the missionary impulse into an official crusade—though, it should be emphasized, with enthusiastic bipartisan support in Congress. Almost immediately after President Bill Clinton's inauguration in January 1993, his experts were privately discussing "how best to reform Russia" and formulating a policy of American tutelage. The "whole policy" that emerged, as a State Department official later explained, was "aimed at the domestic transformation of Russia." In effect, the United States was to teach ex-Communist Russia how to become a capitalist and democratic country and oversee the process of conversion known as a "transition." Certainly, Russia was not to be trusted to find its own kinds of change, lest it wander off, as a media enthusiast of the crusade warned, on "a strange, ambivalent path of its own confused devising."
The lessons to be taught were simple but stern. Economic reform meant "shock therapy" and tight-fisted monetarism, especially severe budgetary austerity, an end to Soviet-era consumer and welfare subsidies, wholesale privatization of Russian state enterprises and other assets, opening the country's markets to foreign producers, and a minimal role for the government. Political reform came to mean little more than fulsome support for President Boris Yeltsin because, top Clinton officials explained, "Yeltsin represents the direction toward the kind of Russia we want." In addition to free instructions, which meant "dictating national economic policy," the administration promised to help finance the transition, primarily through loans by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), unless Russia "fails to meet our conditions."
In that spirit, legions of American political missionaries and evangelists, usually called "advisers," spread across Russia in the early and mid-1990s. Funded by the U.S. government, ideological organizations, foundations, and educational institutions, they encamped wherever the "Russia we want" might be proselytized, from political movements, trade unions, media, and schools to Moscow offices of the Russian government itself. Among other missionary deeds, U.S. citizens gave money to favored Russian politicians, instructed ministers, drafted legislation and presidential decrees, underwrote textbooks, and served at Yeltsin's reelection headquarters in 1996.
For the sake of appearances, all of this had to be done, of course, with some diplomacy. Rarely if ever was the Clinton administration as bluntly missionary as the former national security adviser who announced that Russia's "economic and even political destiny ... is now increasingly passing into de facto Western receivership." Or as categorical as the anonymous programmatic letter that circulated in Washington in 1993: "The key to [Russia's] democratic recovery is no longer in its hand. It is in ours." Instead, Clinton officials periodically made a special point of declaring (usually when the crusade was going badly), "Russians themselves have to decide. We can't do it for them."
But that was not how the administration really thought or made policy, as evidenced, to take only a few random examples, by its unrelenting insistence on "our conditions"; by the U.S. ambassador's boast in 1996 that "without our leadership ... we would see a considerably different Russia today"; and by the testimony of a diplomatic insider that Vice President Al Gore, who played a leading role in the policy, "undertook to reinvent Russia." Indeed, as late as 1999, one of the crusade's chief architects was still extolling it: "Our policy toward Russia must be that of a lighthouse.... They can locate themselves against this light."
By then, the crusade had long since crashed on the rocks of Russian reality. (One direct result was more anti-Americanism than I had personally ever observed in forty years of studying and visiting Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.) How badly the Clinton policy failed may be a matter of opinion, and we will return to it in the final part of this book. My own view, as readers will understand later on, is that it was the worst American foreign policy disaster since Vietnam, and its consequences more long-term and perilous.
But we can judge the failure by exact criteria. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the foremost goal of U.S. policymakers should have been a Russia in full control of its enormous quantities of nuclear weapons and other devices of mass destruction, and therefore one that was prospering, politically stable, at peace, and fully cooperating with the United States on the most threatening international problems. As the twenty-first century began, neither Russia nor Russian-American relations looked much like that.
American financial specialists on post-Communist Russia also failed spectacularly, and for related reasons. They bought zealously into the great crusade, which for them meant "Russia's emerging market." They too set out to build a neo-America on the Moscow River by using the "best minds that Wall Street and Washington could muster." Among them was the billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros, who personally pledged "to direct the means for solving today's pressing problems in the Russian economy."
U.S. investors were as missionary in their way as the Clinton administration. "Prominent U.S. investment advisers packaged most of the Russian bond offerings," a former Wall Street Journal correspondent reminds us, and "American stock-brokers wrote the book on Russia's supposed industrial recovery." Solicitations they sent to potential clients could have come from an American businessman already in Moscow: "This is entrepreneur's heaven. There's no telling how quickly this country ... could look like the United States." And so legions of Western profit seekers also invaded Russia "with American investors leading the charge."
The failure of these Russia-watchers can be quantified, at least approximately. Western bankers and investors were reported to have suffered their biggest single loss in history, potentially $80 billion to $100 billion, in Russia's financial collapse in August 1998. (Soros' Quantum Fund alone lost $2 billion, and several small funds were bankrupted.) American financial specialists on post-Communist Russia also failed in another way. They entered the twenty-first century mired in charges that their ventures had resulted in huge money-laundering schemes and other dubious transactions.
Nor can most American journalists who wrote about Russia in the 1990s look back with pride. Still worse, they had long been forewarned. At the birth of Communist Russia, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz published an analysis of U.S. press coverage of the 1917 Revolution and ensuing civil war between Reds and Whites that became a celebrated textbook case study of journalistic malpractice. Lippmann and Merz found that in terms of professional standards the reporting was "nothing short of a disaster" and that the "net effect was almost always misleading." The main reason, they concluded, was that American correspondents and editors had believed fervently in their government's anti-Red crusade and had thus seen "not what was, but what men wished to see."
Eight decades later, it happened again. Most journalists writing for influential American newspapers and news magazines believed in the Clinton administration's crusade to remake post-Communist Russia. Like a Washington Post columnist, they quickly "converted to Yeltsin's side." Like Business Week's Moscow correspondent, they "hoped for the liberal alternative" and believed in the "job that Yeltsin and his liberal reformers had begun." Like the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, they were certain Russia needed the "same basic model" that America had. And with that newspaper's correspondent, they worried constantly that Russia might opt instead for a "path of its own confused devising." Some were even more embattled. For a longtime Washington Post correspondent, the post-Communist crusade was another chapter in a "Cold War ... not yet really over."
Leaving aside a plethora of factual errors, the first casualty, as Lippmann and Merz had warned, was professional objectivity. Moscow correspondents, according to a 1996 survey, tended to look at events there "through the prism of their own expectations and beliefs." Three years later, a reviewer of a book by a former correspondent concluded that her "spectacularly wrong projections" arose out of her personal hopes for Russia, "which prompted her to accept appearances for reality and desire for fact."
Such hopes and fears produced a U.S. media narrative of post-Communist Russia that was Manichaean, at best one-dimensional, and based largely on accounts propounded by U.S. officials. (As a Washington Post correspondent explained approvingly, a determining feature of the saga was "IMF standards for becoming a normal market economy.") On the side of good were President Yeltsin and his succession of crusading "young reformers," sometimes called "liberal democratic giants "—notably, Yegor Gaidar, Anatoly Chubais, Boris Nemtsov, and Sergei Kirienko. On the side of darkness was the always antireform horde of Communist, nationalist, and other political dragons ensconced in its malevolent parliamentary cave. Chapter by chapter, the story was reported over and again for nearly a decade, always from the perspective of the "reformers" and their Western supporters (the "smartest Russia-watchers") who were invariably also its sources. It was, a leading Russian journalist thought, a "deception."
Yeltsin and his team were, it seemed, the only worthy political figures in all the vastness of Russia. Most Russians saw his shock therapy and other measures as extremist, but for the U.S. press Yeltsin was the sole bulwark against "extremists of both the left and the right." There was little if any room for non-Yeltsin reformers. When one, Grigory Yavlinsky, ran against Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential campaign, he was pilloried in American dispatches and editorials: "History will remember who was the spoiler if things go bad for democracy." On the other hand, whoever Yeltsin appointed, however unsavory his political biography, invariably turned out to have "clean hands" and be "one of the democrats" and a "real reformer," including Yelstin's designated successor, Vladimir Putin, a career KGB officer.
Sustaining such a Manichaean narrative in the face of so many conflicting realities turned American journalists into boosters for U.S. policy and cheerleaders for Yeltsin's Kremlin. As early as 1993, even a pro-American Russian thought the U.S. coverage of his country was "media propaganda." A New York press critic made a similar point in 1996, complaining that newspaper reporting was a "mirror of State Department doublethink." For a senior American scholar, the media's pro-Yeltsinism even "recalls the pro-Communist fellow-travelling of the 1930s," though the "ideological positions are reversed."
American journalists created, for example, cults of those Russian politicians whom the U.S. government had chosen to embody its policy. The extraordinary Yeltsin cult of the early 1990s—"as Yeltsin goes, so goes the nation"—was eventually eroded by his policy failures and personal behavior. But as late as 1999 he remained, according to the New York Times, the "key defender of Russia's hard-won democratic reforms" and "an enormous asset for the U.S."
As for Yeltsin's "young reformers," no matter how failed their policies or dubious their conduct, their reputations hardly suffered at all, at least not for long. Consider Chubais, whom U.S. officials regarded as a "demi-god" and head of an "economic dream team." Even after he was widely suspected of having ordered a cover-up of a Kremlin crime by his aides (later confirmed), a New York Times correspondent informed readers that "Chubais is plotting how to carry out the next stage of Russia's democratic revolution." And long after he was known to have personally profited from the privatization programs he administered, in part by rigging market transactions, he remained, according to another Times correspondent, a "free-market crusader," indeed the "Eliot Ness of free-market reform." Nor was the Times alone in such reporting. A 1999 study by two American journalists concluded that the Wall Street Journal's Moscow bureau had been "little more than a PR conduit for a corrupt regime."
There were even worse malpractices at the expense of American values. In 1993, U.S. columnists and editorialists almost in unison followed the Clinton administration in loudly encouraging Yeltsin's unconstitutional shutdown of Russia's Parliament and then cheering his armed assault on that elected body. The reasons given were uninformed and ethically specious. Insisting that "it would be not just expedient but right to support undemocratic measures," journalists even rehabilitated the ends-justify-the-means apologia long associated with and thoroughly discredited by Soviet Communists themselves: "One can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." Even the next Parliament, the Duma, elected under Yeltsin's own constitution, became a target of U.S. media abuse, as though Russia would be more democratic without a legislature, with only the president and his appointees.
One other example should be given because it underlines the irrelevance, even cold indifference, of much U.S. reporting on post-Communist Russia, where (even according to a semi-official Moscow newspaper) most people were "being exploited" and impoverished in unprecedented ways. Discussing the brutal impact of economic shock therapy on ordinary citizens, another pro-Western Russian complained that American correspondents had "no desire to look Russia's tragic reality straight in the eye." A Reuters journalist later made the same observation: "The pain is edited out."
Poverty and health problems were, of course, reported, but usually as sidebars to the main story of Russia's transition and as legacies of the Communist past. Virtually all American correspondents and editorial writers were contemptuous of any Russian proposals for a gradual, "somehow less painful reform," whether by Yeltsin's vice president in 1993 or Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov in 1998 and 1999. Indeed, they seemed to think, following U.S. and Russian economists whose policies had already failed disastrously, that more shock therapy was needed, as in eliminating the housing and utilities subsidies that sustained tens of millions of impoverished families, perhaps half the nation or more. In May 2000, a New York Times editorial even urged Russia's newly elected president, Vladimir Putin, to abandon progressive taxation—a fixture of democratic capitalist systems—for a plan that could only benefit the well-off and further victimize ordinary citizens.
Like old-time Soviet journalists, American correspondents pardoned present deprivations in the name of future benefits that never materialized. As the country sank ever deeper into economic depression and poverty, they continued to parrot Kremlin and Washington assurances that the economic stability and takeoff, which still have not come, were just around the corner. (Vice President Gore is quoted as having said in March 1998, "Optimism prevails universally among those who are familiar with what is going on in Russia.") On the eve of its 1998 financial meltdown (and even after, as we will see later on), they still found ways to assure readers that Russia was "a remarkable success story." Not even Putin's subsequent admission that "poverty exists on an unusually large-scale in the country" made it a focus of U.S. reporting.
Many American correspondents clearly did not like "doom and gloom" stories about unpaid wages and pensions, malnutrition, and decaying provinces, where, a Russian journalist tells us, "desperation touches everyone." (Newsweek's correspondent advised the poor to continue living on bread: "They could do worse.") Nor did they report more than a very few of the desperate acts of protest taking place around the country, and virtually none of the ways the "reform" government deprived workers of whatever rights and protection they had had in the Soviet system. American journalists found instead preferable "metaphors for Russia's metamorphosis"—usually in the tiny segment of Moscow society that had prospered, from financial oligarchs to yuppies spawned by the temporary proliferation of Western enterprises.
Thus, for a Washington Post columnist who had recently been a correspondent, an especially successful insider beneficiary of state assets was a progressive "baby billionaire" and, for the Wall Street Journal, a "Russian Bill Gates." For many others, like a New York Times editorial writer and also former Moscow correspondent, "One of the best seats for observing the new Russia is on the terrace outside the cavernous McDonald's [that] serves as a mecca for affluent young Muscovites. They arrive in Jeep Cherokees and Toyota Land Cruisers, cell phones in hand." In the new Russia at that time, the average monthly wage, when actually paid, was about sixty dollars, and falling.
No wonder few readers of the American press were prepared for Russia's economic collapse and financial scandals of the late 1990s. Those who relied on the New York Times, for example, must have been startled to learn—from an investigative reporter, not a Russia-watcher—that contrary to its prior reporting and editorials, "The whole political struggle in Russia between 1992 and 1998 was between different groups trying to take control of state assets. It was not about democracy or market reforms."
To be charitable, we might find partial excuses for the failures of all these Russia-watchers. Policymakers may have been misled by politics, investors by profit seeking, journalists by deadlines and their editors' expectations. Moreover, Russia was not the primary profession of most of them, who actually knew little about the country, not even its language. (The latter factor no doubt accounts for the striking absence of references to the local press by most American correspondents in Moscow.)
But how to explain the equally large failure of scholars, at universities and think tanks, whose careers were devoted to the study of Russia and who were supposed to be exempt from those financial and political considerations? Begin by putting aside two misconceptions: that academics could not make elementary errors of fact or judgment; and that they rarely engaged in public affairs.
Consider two disparate examples of error. In their eagerness to denigrate the anti-Yeltsin Parliament of 1993, two senior professors writing in the New York Times apparently mistook that legislature, which had been freely elected in the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union in 1990, for the Soviet Parliament elected less democratically in 1989. And in 1999, when commercial misrepresentations in Moscow were commonly known, Harvard's Russian center wildly overpaid for what it thought would be the first U.S. copies of Soviet-era archive documents but which had been at another American research institution for years. Said the associate director, "Oh, brother. That's embarrassing."
Table of Contents
| Introduction | xi | |
| Preface to the Updated Edition | xiv | |
| I | Russia-Watching Without Russia | 1 |
| The Crusade for the "Russia We Want" | 8 | |
| Transitionology | 23 | |
| Russian Studies Without Russia | 31 | |
| What Is to Be Done? | 48 | |
| II | The American Crusade and Post-Communist Russia: Folly and Tragedy, 1992-2001 | 73 |
| What's Really Happening in Russia? (1992) | 78 | |
| A Cold Peace? (1992) | 103 | |
| Can America Convert Russia? (1993) | 114 | |
| "Parliament Is Burning!" (1993) | 124 | |
| America's Failed Crusade (1994) | 135 | |
| "Who Is to Blame?" (1995) | 144 | |
| Transition or Tragedy? (1996) | 151 | |
| The Other Russia (1997) | 156 | |
| Why Call It Reform? (1998) | 168 | |
| "Who Lost Russia?" (1998-2001) | 171 | |
| III | Toward a New Russia Policy | 189 |
| U.S. Policy on the Wrong Side of History | 192 | |
| Does Russia Still Matter? | 208 | |
| Toward a New Russia Policy: Priorities and Premises | 218 | |
| Reengaging Russia | 229 | |
| The Owl of Minerva | 258 | |
| Notes | 279 | |
| Index | 335 |