#6
Moscow Times
April 1, 2002
History: Bad Teacher or Bad Students?
By Matt Bivens
WASHINGTON -- Several months ago, Judyth Twigg, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, briefed a dozen members of the U.S. Congress on the state of Russian public health. Twigg says she mentioned a few positive trends in what was otherwise overwhelmingly a litany of doom. Yet after she finished, Twigg says, a member of the house thanked her publicly for "a positive presentation that focuses on the good things happening in Russia." Twigg says: "She just didn't hear the majority of what I was saying!"
Tales of being seen yet not heard were plentiful at a two-day conference here sponsored by the Kennan Institute about misadventures in Russia-watching and Kremlinology -- a topic that could fill a small library. There was the U.S. State Department official who insisted Boris Yeltsin never slurred his words: It was just his regional accent. There was the memo alleging Russian corruption that U.S. Vice President Al Gore returned to the CIA along with a dismissive "barnyard epithet."
Or there was aid worker Fred Cuny's struggle to get the State Department's help with brokering a cease-fire in the carpet bombing of Grozny, just for a few days, to evacuate thousands of civilians. When Cuny flew to Washington in March 1995 to make his case, high-level officials in President Bill Clinton's administration expressed shock at his account of the carnage (as if it wasn't leading CNN every night), even as Secretary of State Warren Christopher opined, "It's best in such matters to leave it to the judgment of President Yeltsin. ... I'm sure he thought through what he was doing before he did it, and it's best we let him run such things."
But buying the Potemkin Village was not, as it sometimes seemed, an exclusively Clinton administration failing. Much of the conference dwelled upon how wrong the U.S. intelligence community was about Soviet staying power and military might. Conference participants spoke of a tension between diplomatic defense attaches -- on the ground getting Russian mud on their boots -- and "threat inflators" back in Washington writing the Pentagon budgets.
Mark Medish, a former deputy assistant treasury secretary, suggested a similar bureaucratic arc was in play when writing aid budgets for the Yeltsin team. "Our [administration's] advertising about what was happening in Russia tended to be boosterish," Medish said. "To get appropriations out of Congress, we had to tell a big story about the transitions that were possible. We led the markets."
But are Washington politics the only reason Americans so often misread Russia? No, says James Schlesinger -- a former director of central intelligence and former U.S. defense secretary, among other things. Invited to give the final speech, Schlesinger could have championed any of a number of explanations for why Americans get it wrong: from an emotional need to see other people a certain way, to a failure to foster, or respect, in-country experience.
Instead, Schlesinger drily noted "the infinite power of the human mind to resist the introduction of knowledge."
He did not offer a forceful view on current Russian affairs. But he did say Americans were still probably getting it wrong. "Will we do better? I wish I could be optimistic, but I do not think so. We are missing the forest for the trees again."
In a slow and grave voice, he concluded: "The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history."
Matt Bivens, a former editor of The Moscow Times, is a Washington-based fellow of The Nation Institute [www.thenation.com].
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