Title: Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist
Russia
Author: Stephen F. Cohen
Publisher: Norton
No of pages: 304
Price: ?15.95
ISBN: 0 393 04964 7
This is a book of anger. Its subtitle suggests sorrow, and there is
a bucket of that too, but it is first of all an indictment, Swiftian in
savagery if not in style. In earlier times it would have been printed as
a pamphlet or a tract ("The Conduct of the Capitol") and it retains some
tract-like trappings, including moral outrage, rough edges and perfervid
critique. Stephen Cohen, the pseudonymous "Sovieticus" of The Nation magazine
during the 1980s, may be a hanging judge, but he is an earnest author,
intent on establishing his credentials in this ferociously politicised
field. Failed Crusade comes after the Party is over. It is post-Soviet,
post-Soros, post-satire. It is as convincing as it is disturbing.
Cohen identifies the dominant (not to say overweening) position of the
US establishment on Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union as "a nation
ready, willing and able to be transformed into some replica of America"
- a neo-America on the Moscow River, as he says - transformed, that is,
through the agency of American "missionaries", "advisers" or "fellow travellers",
heavily loaded terminology even with the ideologies reversed. These are
the people the Marshall Plan generation used to call the Friendly Aid Boys,
a moniker with irresistible connotations of the Mob, led perhaps in the
new era by a suitably troubled Tony Soprano. The carefully scripted programme
of these postmodern missionaries had a
clear plot and an easily recognisable signature tune: "transition",
to a liberal democracy and a market economy, a favourite with audiences
of the 1990s and such a change after the endless repeats of the old cold
war.
All of this is anathema to Cohen. For him, the establishment position
was not merely overweening but fundamentally misguided, and the programme
stemming from it - the crusade - "the worst American foreign policy disaster
since Vietnam", with even more perilous long-term consequences, not least
"the destabilisation of a fully nuclearised country". The uncomfortable
truth is that, since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has
suffered an economic and social catastrophe unprecedented in modern times.
On the ground, the evidence is plain for all to see. Most of the population
is impoverished. Three of every four Russians grow their own food in order
to survive. Barter is commonplace. Epidemics of typhus, typhoid and cholera
have re-emerged. Millions of children no longer attend school; many suffer
from malnutrition. Male life expectancy has plunged to that of Dostoevsky's
day and continues to fall. The commander of the Strategic Rocket Force
reports that 80 per cent of his men live in poverty, compelling some to
take second jobs to feed their families. The contemptuous jibe of the cold
war has come to pass: Russia is truly Upper Volta with rockets.
For Russians, the transition is something of a sick joke. For Americans,
Cohen argues, the consequences are hardly less severe. Like China half
a century earlier, Russia has been "lost" - if not directly by the Americans
then by Boris Yeltsin and his gang, at the Sopranos' behest (their motto:
Friendly Aid you cannot refuse) - to say nothing of billions of dollars
and, Cohen suggests, the integrity of US foreign policy. For those of a
more hard-nosed persuasion, Russian-American "strategic partnership", once
Washington's cherished aim, is a nullity.
In the great game of geopolitics, Russia has been marginalised. Yet
US influence is precarious if not chimerical - as witness Chechnya - and
anti-Americanism is rife in every corner of every former Soviet state.
This is what Chalmers Johnson in another recent book calls "blowback",
a term coined by the CIA to describe the unintended and unanticipated consequences
of American policies and activities abroad. Anti-Americanism in the former
Soviet Union is blowback writ large, and with a vengeance.
What is to be done? Cohen has some scabrous fun with the deceiving notion
of "the Russia we want" - a mirage with a pedigree. More important in some
ways is the America we want. This is Cohen's real subject, refracted through
the Russian case history. He is too much on the front line and has no time
to develop it. Nevertheless, the coincidence of his book and Johnson's
is interesting. Failed Crusade and Blowback invite humbling reflections
on fin-de-siecle foreign policy in the home of the brave. Is this a portent
of some deep-dyed, dry-eyed rethinking? Bon courage, Mr President. Surtout
pas trop de zele.
ко-мент