Center for Research on Globalization, Canada
Dec 1 2007

One Cold War Was Enough: Russia Needs Our Help, Not Our Condemnation

by Charles Ganske

Global Research, November 30, 2007
World Politics Review – 2007-11-19

Trying to understand Russia through the prism of the British and
American news media these days can be a real headache. On one hand,
if you read the business pages of the Wall Street Journal or the New
York Times lately, you will learn that Russia is now one of the
world’s leading emerging markets, and the Russian economy has grown
at an average annual rate of 7 percent since 2000. On the other hand,
if you turn to the international headlines or the editorial pages,
you will read that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been busy
crushing democracy and reviving the Soviet Union.

While Americans are constantly having their eyes opened to the
possibilities for growth and economic freedom in the People’s
Republic of China, a far more free and open society in Russia is
judged more harshly in the Western news media. Why is this? Is it
because the shelves at Wal-Marts across America are not stocked with
goods from Russia? Or is it simply because, as some cynical Russians
imply, there is one American and European expectation for people who
"look like us," and another for others (Asians, Africans, and Arabs)
who don’t? Or could it be that American perceptions of Russia are
still formed by a combination of stereotypes left over from the Cold
War and more recent images of Russia in the nineties as the Wild East
— an exotic backwater whose main exports were supposedly mail order
brides and ruthless mafias?

Russia, we are told by the advocates of a new Cold War, is helping
Iran build a nuclear bomb. In reality, Russian technicians have
helped Iran to build a nuclear power plant that would use
civilian-grade uranium, but the Russians have repeatedly halted their
work at the Bushehr site on the Persian Gulf due to Teheran’s unpaid
debts. The Iranian regime has responded to these setbacks by accusing
Moscow of giving in to American pressure for taking these actions.

Earlier this year, President Putin offered President Bush the use of
bases in Azerbaijan and southern Russia that could host a joint
missile defense system to counter the threat of Iranian missiles
targeted at Europe. Yet the Bush Administration continues to insist
that placing ground-based interceptors 2,000 miles away from Iran in
Poland and the Czech Republic makes sense, even when alternative
sites are available much closer to Iran’s borders. And while many
members of the Bush Administration probably don’t trust the crafty
ex-KGB agent Putin to follow through on his pledge, perhaps they
should remember that it was their hero Ronald Reagan who first
proposed sharing missile defense technology with the Russians in the
1980s.

Many of the same conservative commentators and think tanks in
Washington that cheered the collapse of the Soviet Union have
essentially remained on autopilot when it comes to Russia since 1989,
always looking for signs of a return to the good old Evil Empire days
rather than honestly accepting change. For their part, many liberal
Democrats seem to view the 1990s, when President Clinton and Boris
Yeltsin developed a real friendship, as a golden age of democracy in
Russia, rather than the low, dishonest decade of hyperinflation and
chaos that most Russians remember.

It hasn’t helped that millions of dollars from the jailed Russian
oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky have been paid out to PR agencies in
Washington and London, creating a small but vocal anti-Russia lobby
on both sides of the Atlantic. For his part, Khodorkovsky has been
transformed from the Russian version of Ken Lay into a political
dissident. The same exiled-oligarch-funded PR machine has also
insisted that Alexander Litvinenko, a former Federal Security Service
officer who died from radiation poisoning last year in London, must
have been murdered by the Kremlin, rather than by the numerous
personal enemies he had in Russia and abroad. The same people who
warned us about "loose Russian nukes" during the 1990s apparently
believe that terrorists or criminals could not possibly obtain a few
hundred grams of polonium without state sponsorship.

In addition to arguing that every sensational killing in Russia and
abroad is connected to the Kremlin, the New Cold Warriors also like
to argue that Russia uses its enormous oil and gas reserves as a
political weapon to bully former Soviet republics like Georgia,
Belarus, and Lithuania. In reality, all of these countries have been
forced to pay higher premiums for energy simply because the Russian
natural gas monopoly, Gazprom, can no longer afford to subsidize
Russia’s neighbors with cheap gas. Countries that have traditionally
enjoyed excellent relations with Moscow, like Armenia and Azerbaijan,
have actually paid more for Russian gas this year than Ukraine, which
has had a more strained relationship with Moscow in the last few
years.

None of this is to say that Russia does not have real, severe
problems that threaten its immature democracy and recent economic
gains. In 2008, the Russian Federation is projected to lose 700,000
people, equivalent to the population of Austin, Texas. This means
that while Russia enjoys a very high literacy rate, Russian companies
often struggle to find enough talented managers to sustain their
growth. And while Russia’s major cities are growing, the countryside
is losing people, due to high mortality rates and bleak prospects in
rural areas. Russia imports some 40 percent of its meat and dairy
products, and this has left ordinary Russians vulnerable to the
recent run of inflation for basic consumer staples. Russia continues
to suffer more abortions than live births every year, and the Russian
army draft deprives many small towns and villages of their best young
men.

What should America do to help address these real problems? The first
step is to stop accepting the folly that a weakened Russia would
somehow be in America’s best interests. This is particularly
important due to the rise of China next to Russia’s unpopulated
regions and the painful history of Islamic extremism and ethnic
separatism in the Caucuses.

The second step is to stop obsessing about the Kremlin and start
concentrating on promoting more trade, entrepreneurship, and genuine
philanthropy between our two countries at the grassroots and
corporate levels. If we can do this with China, a country that does
not respect religious freedom and which actively censors the
Internet, why can’t we do it with Russia, whose government does not
do either of these things?

As with so many other ventures, when it comes to Russia, the private
sector in America remains miles ahead of the media and the political
class when it comes to introducing real change. If some American
politicians and pundits can find reasons for optimism even about
war-torn Iraq, surely they can spare some for Russia.

Charles Ganske is a former writer for Discovery Institute’s Real
Russia project in Seattle, Wash., where he served as the editor of
Russia Blog. He currently lives in Fort Worth, Texas.

Global Research Articles by Charles Ganske

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