MANAS BASE
Response to Wall Street Journal "Russians
Outfox U.S. in Latest Great Game" by Alan Cullison, June 11, 2009
Response to Wall Street Journal "Russians
Outfox U.S. in Latest Great Game" by Alan Cullison, June 11, 2009
When U.S. President Barack Obama first met President Dmitry Medvedev in April, almost two-thirds of Americans were thinking negative thoughts about Russia. Now, less than two weeks away from Obama's meeting with Medvedev in Moscow, the Kremlin is showing new concern about Russia's image abroad. Indeed, the importance of external PR has been elevated by making it a responsibility of presidential chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin.
What can Naryshkin possibly do to change the United States' negative views of Russia? Is simply putting a better spin on things really going to change anyone's mind about anything?
The answer is that it just might -- if it is done correctly. For many years I have studied the ups and downs of U.S. attitudes toward Russia, and what I found is that there seems to be a responsive relationship between attitudinal change and three external factors: leadership initiatives, geopolitical events and negative PR attacks.
Would the Real Ukraine Please Stand Up?
by Graham Stack, Russia Profile
The Ukrainian People May Want a Union State with Russia, but Few Russians Wish to Join the Ukraine KIEV/ Opinion polls show that Ukraine is a Russian-leaning country, very different from the one described by Western media and the Ukrainian foreign policy elite. “If we were to fantasize, and pretend that [the Russian Prime Minister] Vladimir Putin would run for the post of Ukrainian president, then according to opinion poll results he would win right off,” sais Alexei Lyashenko, an analyst at Kiev’s Research & Branding (R&B) polling institute. “His only serious competitor would be [Russian President] Dmitry Medvedev.” The R&B poll published on May 25 shows that for all the rhetoric about the Westward-bound Ukraine breaking free of Russia’s malignant influence and Putin’s imperialism, the reality on the ground is very different. “In fact, Vladimir Putin’s high rating in Ukraine is nothing new, but quite steady,” Lyashenko added. “It was over 50 percent even during the ‘Orange Revolution’.”
REPRINTS
By Anatol Lieven, New America Foundation
Over the last several days, two pieces attacking the realist approach to Russia were published in prominent media outlets in the United States and Russia. One, co-authored by Lev Gudkov of the Levada Center, Igor Klyamkin, vice president of the Liberal Mission Foundation, Georgy Satarov, president of the Russian NGO the Indem Foundation and Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center was was featured on the editorial page of the Washington Post. The other, by Andrei Piontkovsky, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, was released in the Moscow Times.
I read these pieces concerning the moves to improve relations between America and Russia with a profound feeling of depression. This is not just because there is something bizarre and twisted about pro-Western Russian liberals attacking the recommendations of the Hart-Hagel Commission or statesmen such as Henry Kissinger and James Baker. It is also because their criticism serves as a mouthpiece for the agendas of the most bitterly anti-Russian and geopolitically aggressive liberal interventionists and neocons who help maintain tensions between Russia and the West--and actually between the United States and the rest of the world.
The article reviewed below is part of a global debate among Russians and Russia observers that began apparently with a March 31st article in the Russian daily Kommersant by Boris Sidorov. The campaign was carried forth in nearly identical pieces by Andrei Pitontivsky in a June 4th Moscow Times article and the piece reviewed below. A liberal-realist response came on June 10 from Anatol Lieven on www.nationalinterest.com. Lieven’s response was rebutted by Paul Goble using a June 15 Grani.ru article by Russian commentator Irina Pavlova.
To access the full analysis, please click here Download WP_Shevtsova_9_June_09
Response to New York Times "Russia’s Knotty Policies on Islam, Mirrored in
Trial" by Michael Schwirtz, June 3, 2009
by Gordon Hahn
The New York Times has published yet
another U.S. mainstream media article on Russia’s Muslim regions that
completely ignores” jihadi” violence in Russia and focuses instead on the
Russian state’s violation of Muslims’ rights.
To be sure, the Russian state is not yet democratic. Its soft authoritarian regime fairly
frequently violates political, civil, and human rights of citizens, Muslim and
non-Muslim alike, and the media should on occasion cover this issue. However, since the tragic Beslan school
massacre masterminded by Chechen, Ingush and Ossetian jihadists in September
2004 – nearly a full five years ago – not one U.S. mainstream media outlet has
produced a single article focusing on Russia’s jihadists, their ideology, strategy,
tactics, or record of violence and violations of political, civil, and human
rights. Why is this?
During the past five years period, jihadists (Ichkeria) from the ‘Chechen
Republic’, who now call their movement the ‘Caucasus Emirate’, have carried out
thousands of attacks and killed thousands of Russian civilians, civilian
officials, and security, military, police servicemen and officers. They have declared jihad on the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Israel and have published the vilest of anti-Semitic, anti-Western, and anti-Russian articles on their
websites. They lend moral, political,
personnel, and technical support to jihadists fighting American and other
Western forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan
Despite all this, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and The Economist have
totally ignored Russia's jihadi threat.
To access the full analysis, please click here Download NYT_Jihadism_Schwirtz_3_June_09
Response to Foreign Policy "Rethink Before you Reset" by Daniel Klimmage, May 26, 2009
Pikalyovo. The transcript of
Putin’s meeting in the town is worth reading as an illustration of many of
Russia’s problems “in the weeds”: a Soviet-era unified plant complex was broken
up in the privatisations; maybe there was some ripping off; as the sole
employer, it had large responsibilities for the town’s social welfare system;
the world economy reduced demand for its products; the workers exhausted normal
channels and only got attention after blocking the highway; the issue required
the personal intervention of A Boss. It is also an example of Putin’s style and
authority. By the way, he did not call Deripaska a “cockroach” as has been sloppily reported
(see the end of the transcript). This is not the first time Putin has been wilfully misquoted – see,
for example “greatest
geopolitical catastrophe” which
is endlessly recycled to prove his evil.
Russia Media Watch Comparative Media Analysis
To underscore this point, we offer two articles – one by the U.S. mainstream New York Times and another from the Russian newspaper Kommersant – covering the alleged mutiny against Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili at a Georgian military base on May 5.
Continue reading "MUTINY AGAINST GEORGIAN PRESIDENT SAAKASHVILI" »
ARTICLE CRITIQUE
Response to Foreign Policy "Ukraine on the Brink. All eyes on the reset button, Washington has failed to notice Russia's meddling in a crisis next door" by David J.Kramer and Damon Wilson, May 28, 2009
by Gordon Hahn
The Duumvirate. A thoughtful piece by Igor
Yurgens discusses the political power situation. "It is very unusual that
there are two very respected and influential people who are friendly and share
a single ideology, but occupy two different, powerful positions. For the first
time, our country literally reflects our coat of arms, with the two-headed
eagle. Some people get confused, especially political experts. In business,
there is more common sense, though.” I have come to believe that Putin’s decision to
become PM was a step towards political pluralism and that he and Medvedev operate
as heads of a team (and have done so for some years.) I agree that many
political commentators are confused. One of the bigger problems in Russia
coverage is what I call neo-Kremlinology: the assumption that Russia only has a
dozen or so actors and the story is their interaction and (presumed) power
struggles. For my money, this is usually wrong-headed and a waste of time. I have also
been struck for some years how differently businessmen see things, probably
because they spend so much time away from the hothouse atmosphere in Moscow. The
duumvirate is a peculiar situation, quite new to Russia and uncommon elsewhere:
it deserves careful thought and observation rather than the Procrustean
approach. Yurgens also points out that it is misleading to focus on the principals:
“there is no duumvirate, there is a collective of people who have decided to
deal with this situation as a team”.
When I was a graduate student at Berkeley twenty years ago I was trained in traditional diplomatic history. My dissertation generally reflected that approach, with its emphasis on the narrative details of how Americans sought in limited, indirect, and secretive ways to help non-Bolshevik Russians retake power after the revolution of October 1917.
As I was
turning the dissertation into my first book in the early 1990s, much of the
American public discussion of Russia centered on how the revolution of 1991 had opened the way for the rapid transformation of Russia into a
democratic, capitalist, and Christian country. Since that conception seemed to me to parallel the euphoric
American misinterpretation of the revolution of February 1917 , I
became interested in examining the origins of an American messianic drive to
liberate and remake Russia that I believed had distorted American perspectives
on Russia before, during, and after the Cold War. So, in the project I started when I was a fellow at the
Hoover Institution in 1995, one of my ambitions was to challenge the obsessive
conventional focus on “the Cold War” of 1945-1989 as a unique and discrete
epoch.
To access the full text, please click here Download David_Foglesong_Stanford_Lecture_May_19_2009
Russia-EU Summit. The summit was held in Khabarovsk (Moscow wanted to
show the Europeans just how big Russia is) last week. As is normal with such
meetings, the results will only become clear after time. It seems to me that
Europe is more open to Russia – I still maintain that the August war was a reality
check for most Europeans about the nature of Saakashvili’s regime and the way events
were drifting. Perhaps a first sign is the Italian Foreign Minister’s saying that
the EU should “enhance strategic relations” with Russia. The summit discussed
security (with at least rhetorical openness to Medvedev’s proposals about a new
security structure), energy (see Ukraine entry below – another reality check
for Europe that perhaps the gas supply problem does not begin and end in
Moscow). Press conference is avaialable here.
by Gordon Hahn
Although the article
reviewed here is hardly the most egregious example of media bias in the U.S. mainstream media’s reporting on Russia. It is actually instructive regarding some of the techniques used to get a more
sensational story than one which actually exists. In this Time article, mistranslation and reordering phrases are used to give Russia's mid-May "National Security Strategy to 2020" a more sinister edge
than it in fact has. At times, the
article contradicts itself in order to maintain the sensational at the expense
of the more mundane and accurate.
To access the full analysis, please click here Download Time_Wendle_May_09
REPRINTS
U.S. and Russian negotiators began a three-day meeting in Moscow on May 19 to work out a replacement for the 1991 START I treaty, which expires at the end of 2009. START is the document governing strategic nuclear weapons in the two countries, and the nuclear parity the treaty legally establishes serves as the cornerstone of the broader U.S.-Russian relationship.
Normally, nuclear arms talks are tedious affairs that require years to negotiate. They involve representatives from both states' intelligence, military and diplomatic communities and necessitate seemingly endless discussion of painstaking details about weapon systems, delivery methods, timetables and inspection regimes.
Ironically, this time the devil may not be in the details.
It appears this time around that all of the technical details already have been broadly agreed to and the militaries have either signed off or been sidelined. The instruction from the political leadership on both sides seems to be to get a deal done as soon as possible - probably within mere weeks.
Our point of view is not political, is not theoretical, and is not academic. It comes from decades of working at the grassroots of Soviet and post-Soviet society and being avid watchers of Russian politics, economics, history, societal conditioning and current mindsets. Please review our history in order to better understand our perspective on Russia today.
This blog has a companion program, the Russia Media Watch (RMW), which analyzes select pieces of western media for accuracy or inaccuracy of content based on 17 objective criteria. Analyses are then sent to the journalist, the publication and to a wide list of American Congress members, think tanks, business and civic leaders throughout the country.