USSR, Inc.

Why Russia attacked where it did, and when it did

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
8/12/08
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/bear.htm

...and just like that, the Russian bear is back.

I didn’t need to read the headlines from Georgia to know that. The hysterical screams from the American right about how “the Soviet Union” is attacking poor little Georgia would have been enough.

No, I’m serious. Some of these clowns are so frightened and upset that they’ve taken up referring to Russia as the Soviet Union.

Now, I’ve been referring to Russia as “USSR, Incorporated” since Vladimir Putin took over. But I don’t share the paranoid Bircher delusion that “the commies was just laying doggo on us.”

It didn’t take much examination of the icy little former KGB apparatchik to realize that Vladimir Putin would play nice with the West for exactly as long as it suited his purposes, and no longer. When Putin decided he didn’t have to make nice with the West, I realized, all bets would be off.

But the American right made several assumptions about Russia over the past 15 years that have just blown up in their faces, and now they are in a blind panic.

The first assumption was that with the fall of the USSR, Russia was finished as a super power. Certainly, in the bleak days of the early nineties, when Westerners strode across the Russian landscape, making humiliating offers for natural resources in return for scant survival, gangsters stole much of the remaining common wealth, and the Russian people, depressed and broke, suffered a population loss never before seen in a developed nation in peace time, such a belief was sustainable. Russia, right wingers smugly assumed, had been destroyed by communism, and wouldn’t be a world power again any time soon, if ever.

But they forgot that Russia is a country of extraordinary resilience and that it has come back from far worse than what they faced in the early 1990s. In 1946, the entire infrastructure of the Soviet Union had been destroyed by the war, crops were destroyed, and over 25 million Soviet citizens were dead, either outright from the war or from the attendant famine and destruction of all medical facilities.

By 1950, starvation had vanished from the Russian landscape – and unlike Western Europe, they didn’t have help like the Marshall Plan. By 1953, the infrastructure was largely in place, and when Stalin, seen by the American right as the most murderous despot ever, died, there was a massive and spontaneous outpouring of grief, even in the Soviet prisons where Stalin’s political victims even mourned. (Read “The Gulag Archipelago” by the late Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. He was there to bear witness.) By 1957 the USSR was a space-faring nation. And this was despite the indisputable inefficiencies and inflexibilities of a centralized economy.

If Americans underestimated the Russians in 2007, then they were just repeating a mistake made only 60 years earlier. An American General in 1947 stood before Congress and said that the Russians, a backward people, wouldn’t have the atomic bomb until the year 2000, if ever. For a while during the 1990s, American contractors rubbed their hands in glee at the thought of “rebuilding” Russia (much the same way they’ve “rebuilt Iraq”) and were stunned when the Russians went ahead and did it themselves. They saw the buffoonery of Boris Yeltsyn and missed the rapid development he oversaw of Russia’s oil industry, the source of the sudden Russian strength and prosperity.

The second assumption was that by “becoming capitalists,” the Soviets somehow became nice people. Leaving aside the question of whether Russians have some sort of inferior moral and charismatic character (the evidence says “not”) there isn’t a shred of evidence that capitalism ever improved anyone’s moral character. Russians got a first-hand look at the “virtues” of capitalism – cronyism, corruption, gangsterism, and theft, waste and loss that made communism look efficient – and begged the government to step in and crush the gangsters. Whether Putin was successful or not is a matter of conjecture, but he certainly established an authoritarian regime of the sort a country needs in order to rebuild in a hurry. It’s that authoritarianism, and its own brand of centralization of the economy, that leads me to refer to the present Russia as “USSR, Inc.” But it is capitalist, and not communist. Hence the “Inc” after the name.

The third assumption was that Russia would now like and trust the west. American right wingers believed their own propaganda that Russians hated and feared the west because they were commies, and westerners weren’t. Russians may or may not hate the west, but they are deeply mistrustful of the west, and the west has given them good reasons over the centuries. Napoleon and Hitler were just two of the neighbors who proved to be unfriendly, and helped establish a Russian desire for tall fences. That “tall fence” consisted of buffer states along the Russian frontier, what was known as “the Iron Curtain”. It didn’t help that Russia always had something of a cultural inferiority complex, and would gyrate wildly between over-the-top efforts to match European achievements in art, architecture and music, and a sullen withdrawal and rejection of cultural exchange. The Soviet government was said to be coldly furious in the 1930s when they heard that a disillusioned western intellectual had said that “communism might have worked, if it hadn’t been tried in Russia first.” The Russians were always watching to respond to western sneers, and the west was far too frequently willing to oblige them.

American missteps led the way to this week’s events in Georgia. President Clinton could have offered the Russians real help back when they really needed it, and made some friends. Instead, he elected to privatize the help, which translated to sending in American businessman eager to make a buck off the starving Russians. Russians were unamused when they heard about American right wingers crowing about Reagan’s “genius” in “defeating the USSR” and how putting a MacDonald’s in Moscow would civilize the Russians.

But the Putsch junta and the neocons running it made even bigger mistakes. While it was understandable that America would want to extend influence into the sphere left open by the fall of the Soviets, the neocons simply didn’t know where to stop, and apparently lacked the common sense to look to Moscow to see how the establishment of all those military bases in the ’Stans and “breakaway Republics” was going over. Pushing NATO eastward pushed Russian buttons: they need their buffer states for their sense of security and well-being, and American-led intrusions into Russian hegemony were leaving Moscow increasingly agitated. Putsch’s efforts to put missiles in hegemenous regions didn’t go over (much like the Cuban missile crisis didn’t go over with Americans in 1962) and it was an unmistakable warning shot when Moscow proposed putting “defensive missiles” in Cuba a few months ago. That Putsch made the fatuous claim that the missiles were to “fight terrorism” added insult to injury. The Russians have more to fear from Islamic extremists than does America, and they didn’t like the implication that they were lumped in with the terrorists.

One problem America has right now is that the people in Moscow are a whole lot smarter than the Republican assholes in Washington, and so Moscow simply bided its time and waited for an excuse to strike in a way that would show the West they meant to defend their sphere of influence, and did it in a way that left the west with its hands tied.

The Georgian President Saakhashvili, as big an imbecile as Putsch, obliged, and had his soldiers fire on Russian troops, apparently in the serene belief that Putsch’s overtures to him back when America was still trying to get Georgia into NATO meant that in the event of armed conflict, George would come running to his aid. A brief glimpse at Republican realpolitik would have shown him that Republicans will deep-six their friends at the earliest opportunity if it means any actual inconvenience to support them. Just ask the Kurds.

It’s worth noting that the Russians struck while Putin and Putsch were both at the Olympic opening ceremonies, where Putin could get a good look at the expression on Putsch’s face. I suspect that in his cold, quiet little way, Putin quite enjoyed the reaction of a man who once humiliated himself by saying he had looked into Putin’s eyes and seen a warm soul.

It’s also significant that French president Sarkozy brokered the cease-fire last night. Russia may not be all that fond of France, but they don’t mind driving a wedge into the already tenuous relationship that now exists between America and France – a relationship made tenuous by missteps by the same neocons who insulted France for not supporting the Iraq invasion and made even bigger missteps in assessing Russian reaction to their overbearing efforts to take over Russian border areas.

The bear is back, and while there is no law that says he must be an enemy, it is he, and not the Chinese and certainly not the rag-tag bands of terrorists, who will be America’s greatest challenge throughout the 21st century.