COMMENTARY
Response to Lilia Shevtsova's "The Kremlin Kowtow - Why have Western leaders and intellectuals gone soft on Russia's autocracy?" www.foreignpolicy.com, January 5, 2010.
by Gordon M. Hahn
In a recent article, Carnegie Endowment Moscow Center
political analyst Lilia Shevtsova issues a complaint toward Westerners who
cautions America's leaders 'not to put Russia's democratization' at the top of
America's agenda for U.S.-Russian relations. From her point of view, Dr. Shevtsova's complaint is
natural. Western-oriented Russian
liberals have in the past counted on the U.S. to support their battles with the
Kremlin. However, today the West
is burdened by grave security challenges for which it needs Moscow's help; it
cannot risk further alienating Moscow.
Shevtsova's "values-based" pro-democracy model is a Cold War
model which today could do irreparable damage to West-Russian relations.
The U.S. simply cannot uphold Russian liberals today as it once did Soviet dissidents, and we should not conceptualize Russian state-society relations as a modified version of Soviet state-society relations. Russia has come along way from the Soviet totalitarian model. The Soviet system's omnipresent repression and cruelty created state-society relations that Anna Akhmatova once described accurately in the early 1950s as two Russias confronting each other: one, the imprisoned - the other, their wardens. Thus, Western leaders had reason to suspect during the Cold war that hatred of the communist regime inside the USSR was such that, there was a thirst for democracy and freedom - and sooner or later, it would have to be quenched. If and when the Soviet system opened up, movement to democracy and the market could be expected.
The situation today is much different. Although the Russian state remains today overbearing and on occasion repressive, there is a modicum of democracy and markets providing considerable room for the opposition to live, speak, and organize openly. The opposition is simply not given the opportunity to win elections. State administrative electoral manipulation of various sorts and state media domination are largely at fault, but so too are the liberals' unpopularity with Russia's electorate, their poor governing record in the 1990s, and their internal divisions and petty squabbling for which Russians rejected them as a viable option for leadership. The absence of an effective or responsible democratic opposition renders any aggressive Western backing of democracy forces against the Kremlin a losing proposition.
The cost of backing losing propositions and candidates is always high, but it is extremely prohibitive in the current geopolitical and security challenges, which any Western leader faces today. A deep rift between Russia and the West could be a tipping point in the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which itself could be a tipping point in our struggle against the global jihadist or 'al-Qa`ida social movement.'
Furthermore, the U.S. cannot reasonably apply the Cold War approach recommended by Shevtsova, given the post-Cold War record of U.S.-Russian relations. There can be continued democracy promotion efforts and behind-the scenes coaxing. However, the old-style public lecturing and exacting a high price for Russian failure to fully democratize at our pace and according to our preferences would be counter-productive for both Russian democratization and West-Russia relations and is out of the question. The West no longer has the 'carrot' of integration into Western institutions to entice Moscow into better behavior. We discarded that card by expanding NATO without Russia in the early 1990s. This geo-strategically catastrophic decision will negatively impact U.S.-Russian and West-Russian relations for decades to come, unless some solution for its consequences is devised. Also, because of NATO expansion and other U.S. policy mistakes (failure to provide timely economic assistance for Russia's great depression in the early 1990s, preservation of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, unilateral withdrawal from the ABM treaty and attempting to deploy ABM systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, etc.), we no longer have the Russians' trust - either at the level of the elite or among the general public.
Dr. Shevtsova charges that putting arms control negotiations at the top of the relationship's agenda now is misplaced and that Moscow and Washington are using "a Cold-War era mechanism to try to imitate cooperation." The fact is if we used her proposed "values-based" approach, arms control would be the only cooperation possible.
Valuable cooperation would be lost in a host of other areas
- Afghanistan and the overall war against jihadism, space, and anti-piracy -
just to name a few.
Shevtsova is also concerned that some Westerners serve on the boards of, and shockingly even seek "deals in the shipping and automotive sectors" with Russian companies. But some Westerners sit on the boards of Chinese companies, and everybody does business with Beijing. Dr. Shevtsova needs to ponder the following question: Which country - China, Saudi Arabia, or Russia - is the least authoritarian and most respects its citizens political, civil, and human rights? If the West refrained from economic cooperation with Russia, it would not only completely drive Moscow farther from the West while damaging its economic interests. Moreover, it would be engaging in a gross double standard if it simultaneously continued economic cooperation with more authoritarian regimes like those in China and Saudi Arabia.To be consistent and fair, it would have to further damage its economic interests and cut off business ties with all non-democratic states; all this without any guarantee the resulting isolation of Russia and other more authoritarian regimes would further their liberalization. Indeed, the very logic of, or at least the main argument for deep engagement with China's economy, is that it will foster democracy.
Dr. Shevtsova is particularly worried that the West has tried to integrate Russia into its international institutions, while she ignores the West's expansion of NATO without Russia and against her preference: "Having accepted Russia into European institutions – the Council of Europe in particular -- European leaders try not to notice that Russia's system does not conform to the very principles these organizations are designed to promote. One could get the impression that, for the sake of advancing their economic interests, European governments have decided not to make an issue out of these principles, convincing themselves that Russia is simply not ready for them yet."
But she needs to remember that other CE members from the
former USSR also fall short of democracy.
Almost all post-Soviet states are hybrid regimes of democracy and
authoritarianism. Azerbaijan and to a lesser extent Armenia tend towards the
authoritarian side. Georgia and
Ukraine are barely more democratic than they are authoritarian. Would it
further Russia's or any of these states' democratization prospects to eject
from the EU? Does the CE really
include such states solely for economic benefit, as Shevtsova suggests, or does
the EU calculate that these states are sufficiently democratized so that more
contact with the democratic West will foster further democratization?
To support her call for Russia's isolation, Shevtsova notes that Sergei Kovalev, Garry Kasparov, and Grigory Yavlinsky have long supported such an approach. However, last month's congress of Yavlinskii's Yabloko party decided to advance cooperation with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Kovalev was a State Duma deputy until 2003 and has attended meetings with President Medvedev, so he is not averse to cooperating in limited fashion with the regime that Shevtsova recommends the West should shun. The only true recalcitrant in her group of admirable dissidents, Gary Kasparov, has allied with the neo-fascist pornographer, National Bolshevik Party leader Eduard Limonov.
To be sure, Western leaders should judiciously and carefully criticize the worst violations of political, civil and human rights in Russia and raise them with Russia's leaders, so long as these abuses involve personnel or institutions directly under the Kremlin's charge. But they should not criticize Russia any more than they do the Chinese, Saudis or other foreign leaders.
It seems to me that the Obama Administration has struck upon a potentially useful mechanism for keeping democratization on the agenda with the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission's Working Group on Civil Society co-chaired by the President's National Security Council adviser on Russia, Micheal McFaul, and Russian Presidential Administration First Deputy Chief Vladislav Surkov.
The working group's discussions could foster cooperation in building Russian democracy as partners. This would be better than the previous approach in which the all-knowing "American professor" tutors the Russian kindergardener, with the former then publicly declaring to the pupil's parents (Russian society) and neighbors (the international community) how slowly the Russian learns, how little he really wants to study, and how his culture probably makes it impossible for him to ever 'get it'. All the while, the professor is openly arming the Russian family's closest neighbors (NATO expansion) and warning that failure to learn will mean ostracism from their heavily-armed club.
Unfortunately, the commission and working group seem to be slow in getting off the ground. The website of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow shows that only 2 of the 16 working groups even has a mission statement ready, and neither is the Civil Society Working Group.
There are projects that would be worthy for the U.S.-Russia Civil Society Working Group to cooperate on. One is former U.S. Army Colonel Charles Heberle's democracy education program, which the Russian Ministry of Education is preparing to institute in all of Russia's schools and has been functioning for years in schools in Petrozavodsk, Karelia. Dr Shevtsova is especially off base when she asserts there are few in the U.S. who believe Russians are ready for democracy.
Today's Kremlin and today's Russia are not yesterday's Kremlin and the USSR, and Russia's liberals should use the system to change the system. Their dependence on the West discredits them internally, could make them subservient to forces that are not as devoted to Russia's development as they, and foist on them ideas that may not be suitable for, or politically marketable in Russia in the near future.
The best way for Russia's democrats to push for change is to engage the Kremlin and embrace Medvedev's moves towards reforms while sticking to their larger principles of democracy and the market. The best way for the West to assist them is to support Russia's efforts when possible, engage the Kremlin in democratization projects, and improve the relationship so that the distrust built up through much of the post-Cold War period begins to evaporate. Remember that when U.S. President Ronald Reagan seriously engaged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987-88, the latter's position was strengthened such that he could push his perestroika reforms in earnest.
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