Russia: Other Points of View

Rethinking Russia: U.S.-Russian Relations in an Age of American Triumphalism

REPRINTS

Interview with Stephen F. Cohen, Professor of Russian Studies and History at New York University and Professor of Politics Emeritus at Princeton University

Journal of International Affairs

Spring/Summer 2010

Journal: The world recently commemorated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. How has this event been received in Russia?

Cohen: For Russians, the more important date is this March, which marks 25 years since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and began the reforms he called perestroika. There will be very conflicting opinions in the Russian press about what happened to the nation in the past 25 years. The angriest view will lament the loss of the Soviet Union, which many Russians still do.

MEDVEDEV’S ‘THAW’, RUSSIA’S DUALITY, AND RUSSIA’S REGIONS

COMMENTARY

by Gordon Hahn

As I have been writing for over two years, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Premier Putin are conducting a political and economic liberalization policy in Russia.  Police, penitentiary, legal and judicial reforms along with some minor political reforms are bringing some democratization with this policy. However, many of the authoritarian excesses of the Yeltsin and Putin administrations remain and will persist for some time.  

This ‘thaw’ does not mean that non-democratic phenomena disappear immediately. Those who focus on Putin’s past controls and ignore the current tandem’s liberalization, will continue to be off target, just as with the past two years in denying that a thaw had begun.  The fact is Medvedev’s Russia is a mix of ongoing reforms and authoritarian remnants.  It is hybrid government moving towards re-democratization.

THE WASHINGTON POST'S MINI-CAMPAIGN AGAINST RUSSIA

COMMENTARY

By Gordon M. Hahn

The Washington Post conducted another of its mini-offensives against Russia on May 25th and 26th.  It consisted of three oped pieces criticizing or proposing ways to counter Russia. One wonders when the last time the Post published three articles in a two-day period targeting the global jihadists, China, Saudi Arabia or other true resistors of democracy?  In relation to Russia such mini-offensives occur several times per year. The Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal never accept oped pieces focused on cooperation with Russia.  

This readiness to register only the negative side of Russia has caused the Post and other U.S. mainstream media to miss the two-year domestic and foreign political thaw under the Medvedev-Putin tandem, the decade of rise of jihadism in the North Caucasus, underestimate Russia’s ability to weather the global financial crisis, and overestimate the Russians’ discontent toward Russia’s leadership.  In other words, the Post and the U.S. mainstream media failed to perform the media’s only function: to accurately inform the public.  Instead, they have chosen to advocate, propagandize, exaggerate, and agitate.

RUSSIA AND ITS EARLY "NEW POLITICAL THINKING"

COMMENTARY

By Gordon Hahn

Over two years ago I reported for ROPV on the upcoming domestic thaw in Russian politics and predicted first a gradual liberalization and then perhaps a gradual democratization of Russia’s political system under the duumvirate of President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.  The U.S. mainstream media could have seen this coming if not for the intense bias against Russia it harbors as a result of a confluence of liberal political correctness and conservative Russophobia.  It is now clear that a similarly ‘surprising’ thaw has occurred in Russian foreign policy.  Although Russia’s hyper-realism, which promotes its economic interests above all other considerations, may limit rapproachement with the West at some point, this is a good first step that heads Moscow in the right direction. 

ISLAM, ISLAMISM AND POLITICS IN EURASIA REPORT No. 15, May 24, 2010

by Gordon Hahn

Monterey Institute of International Studies

CONTENTS

• AN OVERVIEW OF THE CAUCASUS EMIRATE’S (CE) ACTIVITY IN APRIL 2010
• CE IDEOLOGISTS REITERATE CE’S TERRITORIAL CLAIMS FOR EMIRATE AND CALIPHATE
• MOSCOW SUBWAY SUICIDE BOMBINGS UPDATE
• ERKINBEK KAMALOV, “THE KYRGYZ CRISIS: AN OPPORTUNITY FOR ISLAMISTS?”
• GORDON HAHN’S RECENT MEDIA APPEARANCES

To access the full report, click  Download KAVKAZJIHAD_MonTREP_IIPER_15_17May2010 

RUSSIAN FEDERATION WEEKLY SITREP

By Patrick Armstrong

Totalitarianism. Some excitement has been occasioned by Medvedev describing the USSR as “totalitarian” as if this were some sort of never-before breakthrough. “His comments on the USSR, the most outspoken by a recent Russian leader, will be seen as an attempt to distance himself from…Putin”.  Seen by those who don’t pay attention to what Putin says, that is. Putin in 2000: “We have already lived under a totalitarian regime”. In 2005, describing things that did not exist “in the Soviet Union within the context of a totalitarian system”. (This was said during an interview with French TV which is interesting, given that the standard report everyone is recycling comes from AFP). And, in 2007, how the “pride of the nation” was killed in the Stalin years. But, of course, for years Putin has been mis- or selectively quoted by people who can’t be bothered to read what he says or who only want to find something they can twist to fit a preconception (“attempt to distance himself from Putin”). I stress again: always read the original at the official website; never trust a reporter’s agenda-driven (and ill-informed) partial quotation.

Grappling With Soviet Symbolism

REPRINTS

By ANDREI ZOLOTOV Jr.

International Herald Tribune

Published: May 14, 2010

Five years ago, Russia Profile, the English-language, government-funded but editorially independent publication I run, came under attack from an overzealous government official for trying to analyze Victory Day — the sacred Russian holiday that marks the end of World War II in Europe — from several different standpoints.

One of our publication’s presumed sins was that, along with traditional fare such as interviews with veterans, we commissioned a Polish writer to do an article on the resentment in much of Central and Eastern Europe over the fact that liberation from Nazi occupation was followed by Soviet domination. We also analyzed how over-reliance on our World War II victory was being used as the basis for forging a modern Russian identity.

START AND ABM

by Patrick Armstrong

Despite the general satisfaction in the two capitals over the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed on 8 April, a potential misunderstanding is visible. As before, it concerns American plans for missile defence. Last month, US Secretary of State Clinton declared “And the treaty places no constraints on our missile defence plans – now or in the future.” Perhaps a finicky reading of the Treaty may lead one to conclude this, but Moscow has made it clear that the missile defence issue could cause it to leave the Treaty. Therefore, US missile defence programs could “constrain” the new Treaty. But Russian statements have also made it clear that they don’t have to. This misunderstanding – and perhaps that is all that it is – must be cleared up if the Treaty is to last for its ten to fifteen years and be succeeded by further reduction treaties.

There is a weird logic to nuclear weapons. The subtext of Einstein’s famous letter to Roosevelt is that we cannot afford to let the other side be the only one with nuclear weapons; from here, step-by-step, the logic builds to the arcane issues of first strikes, secure retaliatory strikes and all the rest. The theory is that, no matter what one side may do, the other side will always have enough weapons left to destroy the other. This is the logic of MAD – mutually assured destruction. Therefore, the theory runs, each side is deterred from ever using the weapons because of the certainty of destruction. The weakness of the theory is that no one knows whether it is actually valid: all that is known is that the USA and the USSR never used the weapons against each other. Will deterrence work against “rogue states”? No one can be sure and that uncertainty is the impetus for attempts to create a missile defence system.

The Stratfor Menu: Interesting Analysis With a Side Order of Russophobic Paranoia

COMMENTARY

By Gordon M. Hahn

Again Stratfor has raised the spectre of wide-ranging Russian political interference and military intervention across the former Soviet space (“Russia: Unrest as a Foreign Policy Tool,” Stratfor, April 28, 2010, 1208 GMT, www.stratfor.com).

It does so by discussing once more “tactics” and “levers” that Moscow “could” use or supposedly is using to divide and rule its neighbors.  Stratfor provides no evidence that Russia has used these levers in the past or is prepared to so in the future.  Put another way, there is no evidence that Russia has ever used the tactics and levers noted by Stratfor beyond the degree to which most democratic powers have employed in the past; that is, in order to maintain influence or stability in countries where they have vital national interests. 

THE REAL CHALLENGE FACING U.S.-RUSSIA RELATIONS

COMMENTARY

By Gordon M. Hahn

The impending signing of a new nuclear arms agreement in April is bound to be accompanied by some euphoria over an ostensible ‘reset’ in U.S.-Russian relations. 

Reducing U.S.-Russia’s nuclear arsenals and preventing the creation of new ones elsewhere around the world is bound to improve the prospects for cooperation in other areas of the relationship and is an enormous plus for international security.  

However, the core problem in U.S.-Russian relationship is the conflict between Russia’s preference that states along its borders are friendlier to Russia than to far-away states and America’s desire to expand its influence into Russia’s neighboring states.