#8
Russia-US Anti-Terror Coalition Likened to USSR-US Alliance Against Hitler
Obshchaya Gazeta
6 December 2001
[translation for personal use only]
Article by Dmitriy Furman: "The World Community and Us: A Friendship Against -- Will the Fate of the Anti-Hitler Coalition Befall the Anti-Terrorist Coalition?"

The decisiveness of the foreign-policy choice in favor of the West that Putin made after 11 September, in my view, has been somewhat exaggerated. When Hitler, against whom the Western countries were already at war, attacked the USSR, our alliance with the West also became inevitable. Stalin and the Western countries did not have any particular choice -- whether to enter into it or not. The alliance between Russia and the West became almost equally inevitable after the terrorist acts in the US, when the West launched a struggle against the Islamic extremists who had been supporting the Chechen separatists and had been threatening Central Asia, which we regard as our "zone of influence."

There was no way we could have sided in this conflict with the Taliban. True, it was possible to take a more "neutral" position, do all we could to accentuate way the suffering of the Afghan civilian population and resist the creation of US military bases on CIS territory -- which would have been more consistent with our entrenched foreign-policy habits. But there were no guarantees, in my view, that the Central Asian regimes would have listened to us and resisted the temptation to become "strategic partners" of the US. Under this scenario we may have said good-bye altogether both to our influence in Central Asia and to the CIS, and found ourselves in total isolation. It is quite likely that Putin decided that it is better to approve what is inevitable anyway. Undoubtedly, our president sized up the situation more quickly than most of our elite. But he didn't have a particularly broad choice. Just as the West didn't have a choice -- whether or not to accept the assistance offered by Putin. We "became friends against" Islamic extremism, just as the USSR and the Western countries once became friends against Hitler.

But it is not easy to be allied with someone against a common enemy and to dislike the ally at the same time. It is hard to judge our president's deep-seated feelings, but for the psychologically simpler Bush, love for Russia was also predetermined by the events of 11 September. And again there is a great similarity here to the anti-Hitler coalition. When Bush reported that he had looked into the Russian president's eyes and saw that they were honest, clearly the same psychological mechanism was operating as the one that prompted Roosevelt to say once that conversations with Stalin had convinced him that deep down the dictator was a real Christian.

The analogy between the current antiterrorist coalition and the anti-Hitler coalition can be extended. They are not only alliances against an enemy that suddenly became a common one, alliances that even give rise to something like love. They are also alliances between social organisms that are fundamentally different and are developing along different trajectories.

The alliance between Stalin's USSR and the West was an alliance between countries with totally different systems, which were not even very comprehensible to each other and that were developing according to their own laws and couldn't move closer to each other just because they had joined a common coalition. Post-Soviet Russia, of course, is closer to Western society than Soviet Russia was. But post-Soviet Russia is still built on completely different, "non-Western" foundations (on the fundamental impossibility of the opposition coming to power), with its own logic of development, which by no means leads in a "Western" direction. I think the alliance with the West will have practically no impact on our internal evolution, just as the analogous alliance in its own time had practically no impact on the internal evolution of the USSR. Even after 11 September and our joining the antiterrorist coalition, "normal" life goes on in our country, not related in any way to foreign-policy developments. A unified party is created, modeled on the CPSU. The new Leningrad-Chekist "family" prepares to "devour" the old Yeltsin "family." "Russian Orthodox" oligarchs try to drive out non-Orthodox oligarchs. The courts and prosecutor's office remove from elections regional leaders who are not to the Kremlin's liking. The authorities get ready to shut down TV 6. A massive event in a typically Soviet style -- the Civic Forum -- is held. None of these events or processes are related in any way to the alliance with the Western democracies. It is possible, of course, that the new friendship with the West will prompt the president to exercise more caution inside the country, even to stress somewhat the need to observe "human rights." The reverse is also possible -- that it will prompt him to fight even more resolutely for a "vertical power structure" while the friendship has not cooled and the friend is forgiven for something that someone else would not be forgiven. But all this represents small deviations and fluctuations around the very nature of our development, which has very deep causes and on which neither an alliance nor a quarrel with the West can exert serious influence.

And if this is the case, then our current alliance with the West cannot be a lasting one, either, just as the anti-Hitler alliance could not be lasting. The alliance between Stalin and the Western democracies broke up not because of "a difference of interests." A difference of interests implies that everyone wants the same thing but each wants something for himself, and this creates the possibility of a rational agreement, of a delineation or unification of interests. That alliance consisted of fundamentally different societies that couldn't even clearly comprehend what the partner could want. They didn't even have a common language in which they could negotiate. As soon as the common enemy disappeared, the alliance did as well. And in the new cycle of the spiral, most likely, a milder form of the same thing is in store for us. That is the nature of "anti-Hitler coalitions" -- they give way to a "cold war." This time there won't be a "real" cold war, but an end to the alliance euphoria and a return to the "difficult" relations that are natural for the West and post-Soviet Russia and are replete with a mutual lack of understanding and suspicion are, in my view, inevitable.

Our integration with the West is not a problem of foreign-policy choice. It is a problem of our internal development, which within the framework of our current regime distances us from the West. Someday the regime will be replaced and our differences from the Western countries will become not differences of various political "species," but differences of national individualities within the same species. And only then will it become possible to have not a situational alliance against a common enemy, but just an alliance, an entry by Russia into the system of relations that exists in the Western world.

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