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What Is Russia Afraid Of?The spread of freedom and the West standing up to it.
By Anne ApplebaumPosted Monday, Aug. 18, 2008, at 7:48 PM ET
Forty years ago this week, on the night of Aug. 20 and early morning of Aug. 21, 1968, thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of soldiers rolled into Czechoslovakia. The goal of the invasion was straightforward: to prevent a Soviet satellite from carrying out democratic reforms, which, if they had been allowed to succeed, could have threatened the legitimacy of the governments of the other Soviet satellites and, indeed, of the Soviet Union itself.
Superficially, it has to be said that the events of August 1968 do bear some resemblance to the events of August 2008, as the American secretary of state has already observed. For yes, not only are there again tanks with Russian commanders rolling over the territory of another sovereign country, some of the invaders' intentions are similar. Once again, Russia is punishing a former satellite whose reforms, if successful, could challenge its own political system.
True, Russia is no longer Soviet. But its ruling clique, led by former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, remains steeped in the paranoid, highly controlled, conspiracy-obsessed culture of the old KGB. He and his entourage are not Communists, but neither do they believe in free markets or free societies. Instead, all important decisions must be made in Moscow by a small, unelected group of people who know how to resist sabotage organized from abroad. Events cannot be allowed to just happen; they must be controlled and manipulated. Elections cannot just take place; they must be determined in advance.
The Russian state's open hostility, not only toward Georgia but also toward Ukraine and the Baltic states, is, in this sense, partly ideological. Genuine elections have taken place in all these countries; people who have not been preselected by the ruling oligarchy sometimes gain wealth or power. Georgia's Rose Revolution and Ukraine's Orange Revolution even involved street demonstrations that helped unseat more-oligarchic regimes. Thus it is not pure nationalism, nor mere traditional great-power arrogance, that makes the Russian leadership disdainful of Georgia and Ukraine: It is also, at some level, fear that similar voter revolutions could someday challenge Russia, too.
Nevertheless, the word superficial is worth repeating here: As I've written before, I don't really like historical analogies, which can conceal as much as they reveal. For one thing, the ethnic conflict that sparked the Georgian president's foolhardy response and the Russian invasion two weeks ago has been twisted and manipulated, but it nevertheless involves real people. Any long-term solution to the current crisis has to find some accommodation for the South Ossetians whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed in the exchange of fire.
More important, though, the international situation is utterly different. Despite some misty-eyed memories of alleged Cold War decisiveness, we had, back in 1968, neither the will nor the ability to help its victims. Our only real response to the Soviet invasion was a bit of public spluttering. Most of Europe was still recovering from the "events of 1968," the student uprisings celebrated across the Continent earlier this year in a haze of post-radical nostalgia.
Today's Russian leaders, despite the paranoia they learned in KGB training, have far more profound relationships with Western institutions, not only the G-8 and the Council of Europe but the Western banks and companies that invest their money and manage their property. Today's Europe is theoretically better prepared to engage Russia, though it has not done so until now. On Aug. 8, I wrote that the West, which failed for many years to address the security vacuum in the Caucasus, would have no influence over Russia, and in the short term this has proved true. Despite a cease-fire brokered by France, Russian troops are withdrawing very slowly, if at all. We have no military means to force them out and should not pretend otherwise.
But if this turns into a long-term conflict, if the Russian military remains in Georgia proper, if this proves to be only the first of more incursions into other neighboring states, there are relationships we have and meaningful levers we can use, whether over Russian membership in international institutions or Russian leaders' luxury apartments in Paris—if, of course, we are willing to use them. The critical question now is whether the West is prepared to behave like the West, to speak with one voice and create a common trans-Atlantic policy. In recent years, Russia has preferred to deal with Western countries and their leaders one by one. Just last week, an affiliate of Gazprom, the Russian state-dominated gas company, added a former Finnish prime minister to its payroll—which already includes former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. If we hang together instead of allowing Gazprom to pick us all off separately, there is at least a chance that this minichill won't last another 40 years.
What Is Russia Afraid Of?: The spread of freedom and the West standing up to it.
Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book isGulag: A History.
Photograph of soldiers by Viktor Drachev/AFP/Getty Images.
COMMENTS
Remarks from the Fray:
Why do powerful countries keep huge armies? Because the gun works. After you accept that logic, then a country will do everything it can to secure it's border against invasion. This is why Russia is concerned about NATO expanding to Georgia. The notion that the West will invade Russia may seem crazy right now, but go back 10 years, the idea that USA will invade a Middle East country is almost as crazy.
You have to look at the broad picture: the US is building a missile shield that has the potential to stop MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction), and at the same time Bush is trying to change the 'no first use' nuclear policy. Following that logic, pretty soon the West will have the ability to nuke Russia without fear of reprisal. Then you add the rhetoric from the Western Media and NeoCons about how Russia is EVIL, and McCain's insistence on 'defeating evil'. Russia may be the next target.
In the history of the world, when a leader is convinced that he will win without much cost, he'll resort to a war. The biggest deterrent to war is to convince the other side they cannot win.
Fear is the common currency of dictatorships: they are afraid of the openness and influence of the outside world and they fear being wiped out by their own people when those people finally rise up to throw off the dictatorship. So they try to respond in the only way they know how: by creating fear in others.
Russia has been an economically backward feudal state for the past 500 years, made formidable only by its sheer size and the will of some brutally effective leaders (Peter the Great, Stalin). Being "formidable" is just the point. What about benefiting the populace, which is presumably the basis for all government under any reasonable theory of government? Not so much.
We would hope that the goons in the Kremlin would look to the example of China, which has managed a brilliant balancing act of placating its people with economic growth and behaving relatively responsibly on the world stage. No such luck; the Kremlin thinks that the only way to impress its vodka-swilling masses is to go and stomp on some small neighbor who had the nerve to pursue what every people on earth basically want: a western-style, open society.
There is in effect no difference between 2008 and 1968; we have a Europe incapable of an appropriate response, with the helpful French attempting a "third way" by agreeing with unseemly haste to an acceptance of Russia's "sphere of influence", which will in good time extend to Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus...hell, why not all the way to Berlin. Welcome to 1945, folks.
You don't have to be a fan of George W. Bush to understand the desperate need for decisive, even aggressive leadership on the part of the US. Of course, the lame-duck administration shows few signs of providing that. Even more unfortunately the chattering classes in the West and especially Europe have no appetite for that at all. They feel it is much more productive to spend their time and energy bashing the US over global warming, or debating how to punish the Irish for daring to exercise their democratic right to vote against the EU treaty. Anything to avoid having to go out and confront the giant bear that is eating their neighbors, one at a time.
So much of the discussion about Georgia in the US media is full of it. Full of post-cold war withdrawal symptoms, I mean. Russia is not lashing out at democracy - it has shown it can neatly control its elections in order to maintain the status quo, as so many other countries have. Russia is not lashing out at freedom - if anything, the problem in Russia is that "everything goes" there. It wanted to prove to Georgian leaders that the US was just bluffing and that they were foolish to believe in it.
It has been a turbulent decade, but Russia has gotten past much of its hang-ups from the Cold War. They've stopped touting the ideological politics that still drive Washington to invade countries around the world. They focus on their own narrow interests. They had sound economic reasons to destabilize Georgia (oil/gas pipeline planned), as well as populist ones (historical enmity [and] ill-advised Georgian taunting). This isn't the sign of Russia trying to re-establish the Soviet empire, but Russia acting in its own self-interest in its backyard.
On the other hand, the US is desperately trying to revive the threat of the Soviet colossus as a way to keep western countries from acting independently from Washington in the wake of the Iraq debacle. The recent rantings from Rice are an example of the irresponsible behaviour that led Georgia to believe that it could simply ignore Russia, as well as the deep desire of the White House to speak for "the West" without actually bothering to consult those it claims to speak for.
No NATO country will go to war with Russia over Georgia. Not even the US. The US didn't go to war with Germany over Sudetenland or even Poland. Heck, it didn't go to war over Britain, France or Luxemburg either. It left those countries to fight on their own and only went to war after it was attacked itself. It's only under the Cold War spell that the US fought in wars it had no direct stakes in, such as Korea and Vietnam. Whether these wars were worth fighting is debatable, but it is clear that many politicians miss the old framework now that the USSR has gone. The attempt to replace the Soviet threat by the so-called islamofascist threat has failed - it's just too obvious that Al-Qaeda and its ilk don't pose an existential threat to western countries the way the good old USSR did. So now they're back to hyping Russia as the enemy.
So what happens to Ukraine, and other former USSR countries now? Well, they can't pretend that Russia doesn't exist, just as Nicaragua, Columbia and Venezuela can't deny that the US exists. Geography is not open for debate: leaders of small countries adjacent to much bigger ones need to walk a thin line. That's how it always has been, and that's how it remains. Ukraine can continue to move westward, but it cannot frame its politics as oppositional to Russia. The art of doing this is called diplomacy. If Georgia or the US were any better at this, Georgia would not be in this predicament.
Forty years ago this week, on the night of Aug. 20 and early morning of Aug. 21, 1968, thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of soldiers rolled into Czechoslovakia. The goal of the invasion was straightforward: to prevent a Soviet satellite from carrying out democratic reforms, which, if they had been allowed to succeed, could have threatened the legitimacy of the governments of the other Soviet satellites and, indeed, of the Soviet Union itself. 
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Remarks from the Fray:
Why do powerful countries keep huge armies? Because the gun works. After you accept that logic, then a country will do everything it can to secure it's border against invasion. This is why Russia is concerned about NATO expanding to Georgia. The notion that the West will invade Russia may seem crazy right now, but go back 10 years, the idea that USA will invade a Middle East country is almost as crazy.
You have to look at the broad picture: the US is building a missile shield that has the potential to stop MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction), and at the same time Bush is trying to change the 'no first use' nuclear policy. Following that logic, pretty soon the West will have the ability to nuke Russia without fear of reprisal. Then you add the rhetoric from the Western Media and NeoCons about how Russia is EVIL, and McCain's insistence on 'defeating evil'. Russia may be the next target.
In the history of the world, when a leader is convinced that he will win without much cost, he'll resort to a war. The biggest deterrent to war is to convince the other side they cannot win.
--Ronin8317
(To reply, click here.)
Fear is the common currency of dictatorships: they are afraid of the openness and influence of the outside world and they fear being wiped out by their own people when those people finally rise up to throw off the dictatorship. So they try to respond in the only way they know how: by creating fear in others.
Russia has been an economically backward feudal state for the past 500 years, made formidable only by its sheer size and the will of some brutally effective leaders (Peter the Great, Stalin). Being "formidable" is just the point. What about benefiting the populace, which is presumably the basis for all government under any reasonable theory of government? Not so much.
We would hope that the goons in the Kremlin would look to the example of China, which has managed a brilliant balancing act of placating its people with economic growth and behaving relatively responsibly on the world stage. No such luck; the Kremlin thinks that the only way to impress its vodka-swilling masses is to go and stomp on some small neighbor who had the nerve to pursue what every people on earth basically want: a western-style, open society.
There is in effect no difference between 2008 and 1968; we have a Europe incapable of an appropriate response, with the helpful French attempting a "third way" by agreeing with unseemly haste to an acceptance of Russia's "sphere of influence", which will in good time extend to Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus...hell, why not all the way to Berlin. Welcome to 1945, folks.
You don't have to be a fan of George W. Bush to understand the desperate need for decisive, even aggressive leadership on the part of the US. Of course, the lame-duck administration shows few signs of providing that. Even more unfortunately the chattering classes in the West and especially Europe have no appetite for that at all. They feel it is much more productive to spend their time and energy bashing the US over global warming, or debating how to punish the Irish for daring to exercise their democratic right to vote against the EU treaty. Anything to avoid having to go out and confront the giant bear that is eating their neighbors, one at a time.
--freetrader
(To reply, click here.)
So much of the discussion about Georgia in the US media is full of it. Full of post-cold war withdrawal symptoms, I mean. Russia is not lashing out at democracy - it has shown it can neatly control its elections in order to maintain the status quo, as so many other countries have. Russia is not lashing out at freedom - if anything, the problem in Russia is that "everything goes" there. It wanted to prove to Georgian leaders that the US was just bluffing and that they were foolish to believe in it.
It has been a turbulent decade, but Russia has gotten past much of its hang-ups from the Cold War. They've stopped touting the ideological politics that still drive Washington to invade countries around the world. They focus on their own narrow interests. They had sound economic reasons to destabilize Georgia (oil/gas pipeline planned), as well as populist ones (historical enmity [and] ill-advised Georgian taunting). This isn't the sign of Russia trying to re-establish the Soviet empire, but Russia acting in its own self-interest in its backyard.
On the other hand, the US is desperately trying to revive the threat of the Soviet colossus as a way to keep western countries from acting independently from Washington in the wake of the Iraq debacle. The recent rantings from Rice are an example of the irresponsible behaviour that led Georgia to believe that it could simply ignore Russia, as well as the deep desire of the White House to speak for "the West" without actually bothering to consult those it claims to speak for.
No NATO country will go to war with Russia over Georgia. Not even the US. The US didn't go to war with Germany over Sudetenland or even Poland. Heck, it didn't go to war over Britain, France or Luxemburg either. It left those countries to fight on their own and only went to war after it was attacked itself. It's only under the Cold War spell that the US fought in wars it had no direct stakes in, such as Korea and Vietnam. Whether these wars were worth fighting is debatable, but it is clear that many politicians miss the old framework now that the USSR has gone. The attempt to replace the Soviet threat by the so-called islamofascist threat has failed - it's just too obvious that Al-Qaeda and its ilk don't pose an existential threat to western countries the way the good old USSR did. So now they're back to hyping Russia as the enemy.
So what happens to Ukraine, and other former USSR countries now? Well, they can't pretend that Russia doesn't exist, just as Nicaragua, Columbia and Venezuela can't deny that the US exists. Geography is not open for debate: leaders of small countries adjacent to much bigger ones need to walk a thin line. That's how it always has been, and that's how it remains. Ukraine can continue to move westward, but it cannot frame its politics as oppositional to Russia. The art of doing this is called diplomacy. If Georgia or the US were any better at this, Georgia would not be in this predicament.
--endorendil
(To reply, click here.)
(8/19)