I don’t like picking on a new user, but since I disagreed with just about every point in Carolinaman’s rec-listed diary on that topic, I thought it’d be worth writing a quick rebuttal rather than just a (long, long) comment.
Apologies for how brief some of the commentary below is, but I don’t want to write a book and you probably don’t want to read it.
During the Cold War, there was a constant effort on the part of the Soviet Union to destroy our democratic capitalist way of life. Their overwhelming motivation was to spread the doctrine of Communism, with a capital "C", throughout the world. Our policy was to fight that spread on a humanitarian and an economic level. That was why we fought in Korea and in Vietnam, and why we went to the Moon, and why we encouraged defections and spent billions on projects like Radio Free Europe and the United Nations.
I’m surprised the dkos commentariat didn’t have a bigger problem with this. It’s true that the Cold War was motivated in large part by a seeming ideological rift between our two countries, but the fact is that, just as we had policy interests above and beyond the spread of capitalism, Russia didn’t spend its waking hours plotting the destruction of the West. Its invasion of Poland in 1919 was the first and last hurrah of a foreign policy purely driven by Communist-colored glasses.
What we usually call the Cold War involved six different heads of state — Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev — with six different relationships with the West ranging from grudgingly friendly to cool to hostile, sometimes over the course of the same administration. Nor does this get into the intraparty fighting, greatly shifting policy changes, the tensions between central and regional policies, etc. etc. that drove Russian foreign policy rather than a single-minded quest to destroy the West.
The biggest moments of friction have had less to do with ideology in itself and more with power: what does it mean to be a superpower? To protect one’s perceived national interests? To liquidate potential threats to those national interests? These questions are highly contextual and depend on everything from current events to the current temperament of the head of state. These questions are why, over the course of this ostensibly ideological Cold War (and beyond), we sometimes found ourselves strange bedfellows with countries completely averse to our values otherwise. Realpolitik tends to underpin national choice-making more than our rhetoric does.
Americans tend to be fuzzy on Russian history, so this kind of superficial view of their foreign policy isn’t a huge surprise, but I am surprised there wasn’t more pushback on the diary on the notion that American spread of values was so straightforward and unobjectionable.
After the second Russian revolution in 1989-90...
*Third, maybe fourth depending on who’s counting.
Moving from a State owned and controlled economy to one that required private ownership was a difficult one, and required unusual solutions. What emerged was a system where concentration of industrial wealth was the easiest answer. The energy sector, the mineral reserves, the manufacturing sector, were all distributed to a very small group of influential former Communist Party officials, especially those that were part of the old K.G.B., and the rise of Vladimir Putin and the super wealthy Oligarchs was the result. No longer was Communism their motivating force. Money and the protection of that great wealth became their prime objective.
Oof, where to start. Concentration of industrial wealth was the feature of state-run and later state-owned enterprises well before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and one of the reasons it remained that way in the 90s was the lack of an infrastructure otherwise: most of these enterprises are Moscow-based and operate according to vertical structures that are very difficult to break up into constituent parts without the edifice collapsing. But I promise that the heads of these vertical structures, even during the state-owned years, were not exactly drawn away from wealth by the siren call of Communism. In the transformations from government ministries to state-owned companies to privatized corporations, much of the actual operational structure remained intact.
Nor were former KGB or Communist Party officials the ones to profit off these shifts: the first generation of what we call “oligarchs” were instead especially savvy younger people who learned how to work the new system more quickly than the creaky bureaucrats around them. Chubais was an economist and local deputy pushing for market reforms throughout the 80s. Gaidar was a journal editor. Berezovsky and Aven were university researchers. Fridman was washing windows. Khodorkovsky ran a café. What these people (especially the latter four) had in common was a quick grasp of entrepreneurship, which they leveraged to gain influence straight up these vertical power chains of power into billions of dollars.
The diarist seems to think that both Putin and the oligarchs rose due to this economic arrangement, but this is wrong: Putin’s rise came on the heels of widespread anger at oligarchical excess, as a perceived corrective against it. His early, very popular moves as president were to curb the power of the existing Russian oligarchy, though a new generation of oligarchs, including those loyal to Putin, later arose in its place. Putin’s circles are volatile, though, and quite a few figures have risen up and fallen out of favor in the last 17 years.
(While we’re on the topic, there’s also a persistent idea among certain corners of the Western left that it was these wild days of 90s capitalism that soured Russia’s relationship with the West, as we introduced capitalism and let them flounder. In fact, Russian attitudes toward the United States (for example) remained relatively stable — more positive than negative — until the sanctions in 2014. It’s not like Russian history wasn’t replete with con-men before we got involved.)
What evolved from the revolution was a system of organized crime like the world had never seen before. Organized crime breeds corruption, and we only need to look as far as our own history with the Mafia in America to understand how this system works. People who are a threat to the survival of the organization are eliminated. Consolidation of power is paramount in such a world. A free press in Russia was the first institution that had to be eliminated. The assassination of journalists was meant to send a signal to all media that their very lives depended upon compliance with the demands of the Oligarchy and its leaders. Political resistance was the next thing to be crushed. More high profile murders became commonplace, and they persist today.
“Organized crime breeds corruption” is an amazing line, but even taken at face value, this is a mishmash of two different time periods to create a cause-and-effect story that isn’t close to accurate. Though they’re still an integral part of Russian economic life in some areas, the real heyday of the mafia was the mid-90s, when they operated openly and with relative impunity. Though various observers have described the Putinian circle of power as mafia-like, Putin had a mostly negative relationship with what we call the mafia proper.
Consolidation of state power, on the other hand, is a process that began in the next decade, during Putin’s presidency. The free press was not the first institution “eliminated” — for one thing, it wasn’t, but I’ll get to that later — it was local power. Early in Putin’s presidency, he proposed a law allowing the president to dismiss local governors, and by the shift to his second term, popular elections for governor were eliminated in favor of presidential nomination and local legislature confirmation. A major theme of Putininian politics has been this, in fact: a strengthening of federal power at the expense of local power (except in cases like Chechnya where the federal government largely leaves them to their own devices, as long as separatism isn’t on the menu.) To the extent to which there is an ideological element to this trend, it has to do with the belief that Russia is so expansive and poorly run that it requires a strong center, a belief shared by Russia’s tsarists and communists and capitalists alike.
(On that note, the real sweep of Putin’s evolution as a head of state has been his gradual shift from semi-anonymous functionary to eventual embrace of his own cult of personality. The Putin of 2001 looks very different from the Putin of 2017, another reason these storybook retellings make so little sense.)
This consolidation eventually got around to much of the public pres during Putin’s second term, and with a fury during his third. The major television news networks have been brought back under the state umbrella, along with no small number of print and online resources. There is a still a free press in Russia — and often a very, very good one, with quite a brigade of hardworking journalists out there… Who do you think broke the story about gay persecution in Chechnya?! — but most of it operates on a smaller, more marginal scale than state press. Censorship of state news is often self-driven rather than centrally organized: that is, producers know the general tone and tenor of what they should report rather than receiving direct orders from the Kremlin.
First there was Georgia. An uprising there by factions against these powerful crime syndicates was quashed by Russian tanks and soldiers. The message was sent to all the new democracies that unless they fell in line with Moscow's leaders, their futures would be in doubt. For awhile, that intimidation worked, but then there was The Ukraine. A Moscow puppet, Yanukovych (Communist Party of the Soviet Union member, 1980-1991), was ruling the country. It didn't take long for Ukrainians to realize that their country had been hijacked by this man and his "friends".
I don’t even know where to start with this, but pretty much everything here is either wrong or lacks any useful context. The conflict in Georgia had nothing to do with “factions against… powerful crime syndicates” but the complicated ethnic politics of post-Soviet countries like Georgia, a consequence of Soviet-era policies that moved people around and/or drew lines that pitted local nationalist groups against one another. Russia’s rising and falling fortunes likewise affected the balance of power within its republics, and Georgia was only one of the most prominent examples of this.
Nor did it take Ukrainians long “to realize” that Yanukovych was a Putin ally, since Putin himself stumped for Yanukovych on the campaign trail. The drama of Ukraine trying to figure itself out in the shadow of Russian influence goes back nearly thirty years and has very few heroes on either side — but that’s another book, and we have a diary to finish.
Harsh economic sanctions were immediately slapped on Moscow and its powerful oligarchs, and those sanctions were effective, causing an immediate recession in the Russian economy. The Russian people suffered, and a suffering populace, who had seen such a rise in their standard of living under capitalism, became an immediate threat to Putin and his friends.
I just… I can’t. The sanctions may have worsened the recession, but the proximate cause was the collapse of oil prices in early 2014: Putin had failed to leverage the boom years into anything like a lasting, stable economic infrastructure, so the whole system was fragile enough that this drop in prices affected it top-to-bottom. The sanctions left Russia without some escape valves, but even before the sanctions were imposed, Russia had difficulties using those valves effectively. Moreover, the recession has ended despite the continuing sanctions, so this cause-effect version makes no sense.
Russian families certainly felt the pinch during the recession, but nothing like the widespread despair many felt during the capitalist 90s, so the claims above are… strange to say the least. In addition, much of the recession-fueled anger was directed our way (our approval collapsed among Russian poll respondents), though Putin’s popularity did take something of a hit, as well, and wealth is still moving out of Russian whenever and wherever it can.
Although the Russian military continued its provocative harassment of Western forces, further incursions were not the answer for Moscow, but finding a way to escape from the suffocating sanctions became their only hope. They turned to the only weapons that they had available at this point, cyber attacks. If they could somehow exploit the weaknesses inherent in free and open societies, they might succeed in changing the leadership in those capitals, and through that change, have the sanctions relaxed or lifted completely. Remember, these are very, very, wealthy people who will stop at nothing to protect that wealth.
Espionage existed before the recession, espionage existed during the recession, and espionage will continue to exist after the election. If countries are willing to leverage any of their abilities to meet foreign policy goals, the significantly cheaper and less dangerous methods of espionage, like cyberespionage, are likely continue. The idea that this is driven by a hostility to “free and open societies” is fantasy.
Let’s get down to brass tacks here: the “real reasons” Russia meddled in our election is the reason Russia has a foreign policy at all, which is to advance its foreign policy interests, same as us. In fact, if I were going to draw an overly simplified lesson from all this, it’d be that Russia remains our singular “villain” because we’re so much alike. We’re both countries that perceive ourselves to be superpowers and, as such, believe we have both a right and a responsibility to maintain zones of influence in which the sovereignty of other countries is secondary to the security and health of our own. We (Americans) export those values and believe them to be universally valid, even if it means invading a country to impose democracy (with the support of neighboring dictatorships). Russia, lacking the hegemonic sway it held during the Cold War, has mostly busied itself among its neighbors, some of whom don’t want to be bothered. Our foreign policies are driven by a self-image that doesn’t come under serous scrutiny often enough.
(I’m explaining but not defending: one of the counterarguments I don’t have much patience for is that Russia had “no choice” in the face of NATO expansion, an argument that seems to take for granted Russia’s claims over its perceived sphere of influence. There’s a reason nearby countries flocked to alternative allies. Russia damned well has a choice, just as we do.)
To the extent that Russia meddled in Western elections, and I think the evidence is strong that they did, there is a long-term benefit to having more Russia-friendly heads of state among former adversaries, not to mention a less cohesive regional agreements, which would allow Russia to negotiate better terms with individual countries. The EAEU was never going to be as robust as the EU, and BRICS involves too many countries with competing regional interests, but as long as Europe are Russia’s largest gas customers and gas continues to drive the Russian economy, it is in Russia’s interest to secure better terms for negotiating that relationship. What galls me on this point is his realization that dealing with local nationalist movements is more to his benefit than with regional alliances, which means Russian money going into what we’d call far-right, often xenophobic movements. But dealing with old adversaries on such frequently inept terms means that very little real progress has been made.
Finally, look, Putin is no evil genius. He seems to get real pleasure out of trolling but he’s not the great manipulator he believes himself to be. His long-term domestic policy changes are a real mixed bag. His voters are less enthusiastic than they used to be (but there aren’t many real challengers). His efforts abroad have been just as likely to backfire as pay dividends: Russia’s central place in the world has not been restored, and the economy continues to putter along on half-measures. I’m sure the one real benefit to a Trump presidency is that Putin now has someone in the room who is unequivocally stupid, so he can at least enjoy that.
I want Putinism to fail because it stands in opposition to a lot of values that are important to me — just as I want certain values of Republicanism to fail, or certain ideas about what it means to be an American. But I don’t think we get to any better understandings of our relationship with Russia — to its government, to its people — by concocting such broad, inaccurate stories about an eternal struggle between our values and their illiberalism, between our humanitarianism and their corruption. This is the Boris Badenov parody our allies have been warning us about. The other diary said, in so many words, “They hate us for our freedom.” Resist the urge to do this, please.