#39 - JRL 2007-19 - JRL Home
Washington ProFile
www.washprofile.org
January 26, 2007
USSR, U.S. and Russia: Opportunities Lost
An interview with Stephen F. Cohen, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and author of several books, including Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia.

Washington Profile: There have been several prominent theories proposed as to why the Soviet Union collapsed.  In your extensive research on the subject, what is the conclusion that you have reached? 

Stephen Cohen: It is fresh in my mind because I just published a little book in Moscow in Russian on this question.  I call this book: “Why did the Soviet Union end?” The publisher called it: “Vopros voprosov, pochemu ne stalo Sovetskogo Soiuza.”  I don't use the word collapse because I think that prejudges an explanation.  If you say collapse, it implies an analogy with the end of tsarism in 1917, because we always say tsarism collapsed.  And it suggests that the system collapsed because of some internal and irreparable, inevitable factors or defects.  So I simply ask, ‘Why did it end?’ And as I went through the literature, I was astonished to discover that there are somewhere, depending on how you define them, six to10 rather different explanations of why the Soviet Union ended. You find this many in both the Western scholarly literature and the Russian serious literature, scholarly or journalistic.  I go through, in this little book of mine, each of the six which I believe to be the most prominent.  In order to explain the end of the Soviet Union, as historians will be trying to do not only on this fifteenth anniversary, but probably for the next 100 or 200 years, you need to take into account three factors. 

The precipitating factor was Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms that began in 1985 and reached their peak at about 1990 in a form of a rather extensive democratization of the former Communist system.  Essentially by 1990 Gorbachev had dismantled the communist political system, what used to be called the totalitarian system (I didn’t use that word, but we know what we mean by it).   He had loosened state control of the economy.  That made possible other factors to come into play.  Some people, for example, say the Soviet Union ended because of nationalism or the Soviet Union ended because of popular unrest.  But none of these factors would have come into play, probably not even today, had it not been for Gorbachev’s reforms.  Then came the second factor, and that was the emergence of Boris Yeltsin by about 1989, 1990.  Now you had something rather unusual in history, but not unusual in Russian history where leaders have played special roles: you had a conflict between two Russian leaders, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, between two men of extraordinary political will.  I define it as Gorbachev’s extraordinary will to reform and Yeltsin’s extraordinary will for power.  This conflict created the possibility that Yeltsin could go to Belovezh Forest on December 8 and abolish the Soviet Union in order to be rid completely of Gorbachev, and to beat him completely by abolishing his presidency and his country.  But then that leaves a third question and a third factor.  Yeltsin didn’t control an army, he didn’t even have a political party. How would he be able to abolish what was still a nuclear super power of what was still nearly 300 million people, in the face of the Soviet elite, particularly the state nomenklatura, not necessarily the party, that had based its position on this state.  Why did they permit Yeltsin to do this? And here I think would be the third factor, that, the high nomenklatura that might have stopped Yeltsin had been too busy privatizing the wealth of the state to care about defending it.  The struggle over property did not actually begin after the end of the Soviet Union, but early on in the late 1980s.  But by 1990 and 1991, main members of the high elite, ministerial elite, even the army elite, certainly the party elite, were seizing state property for themselves, so while they were stripping the state’s assets, they had no interest in defending it, so they simply stepped aside and allowed the political struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev to unfold, and it unfolded in the end of the Soviet Union.

WP: If those circumstances hadn’t come together the way they did, and the Soviet Union had remained in tact, what, in your view, would “the post-Soviet space” have looked like today? 

Cohen: Well, it would have depended on a central question.  Gorbachev set into process a Soviet reformation. He called it perestroika, but putting it into the context of history, and not just Russian history, we would call it an attempted reformation.  Had that reformation continued, with or without Gorbachev, because by 1989-1990 it no longer required Gorbachev’s leadership; his historic role was to put it into motion… After all, there was a moment in the struggle between Gorbachev and Yeltsin in 1990 and 1991 when Yeltsin’s intent had not been to abolish the Soviet Union, but to become president of the Soviet Union and displace Gorbachev.  The question is, would there have continued to be a reforming Soviet Union, or would something like the failed putsch of August 1991 happened again and stopped the reformation? If the Soviet Union had continued to reform, it would have meant the reform of the Union Treaty, and therefore the Soviet Union certainly would have been smaller.  Three Baltic countries would have certainly gone, it’s possible that Georgia would have gone.  It’s not clear about Ukraine because that was a very unusual situation, driven more by elite politics then public opinion.  But if a reforming Soviet Union had continued to exist, I think the outcome would have been a smaller Soviet Union, maybe eight, nine, 10 republics, but still the bulk of Soviet territory, people, and resources.  In so far as, say, the Central Asian republics had remained under the political influence of Moscow, they would have had to continue to democratize.  The democratization of Central Asia ended with the end of the Soviet Union.  The only reason they began democratization in the Central Asian republics was because they were compelled to do so by Moscow’s leadership.  Once free of that, they reverted to authoritarianism.  In the economy you would have gotten some unstable but functioning mix of a state economy and a private economy, something like what Putin is probably trying to recreate today.  You would have had a Soviet Union, I see no reason why you wouldn’t have, but it would have been a different Soviet Union.  On the other hand, had the reformation been ended, and it only could have been ended by force, and you can’t rule that out, then you would have had a very nasty looking dictatorship.  Remember, when the coup makers sought to overthrow Gorbachev in August of 1991 and imposed martial law in Moscow by bringing troops into the center of Moscow, almost all of the republic leaders, who until then had been acting as though they were sovereign or independent, immediately either fell silent or collaborated with the coup makers.  In other words, they were afraid of Moscow.  It is only when Moscow under Yeltsin said, “We no longer want you, clear your own way, we are no longer going to subsidize you,” they went away, ran away.  But had that not happened, had Moscow not driven them away, or really, disowned them, because remember, the Soviet Union was abolished by the three Slavic republics.  The others would have still been there, certainly Kazakhstan would have been there; Nazarbaev wanted to preserve the Union.  The others were afraid of Moscow, they would have stayed.  So it all depends on whether this reformation would have continued, and had it done so, I think the Soviet Union would not have looked bad today.  Had it not done so, it would have been pretty terrible. 

WP: With the war in Iraq and the focus on anti-terrorism, Russia is by far not the main foreign policy concern for the United States.  How would you characterize the U.S. “Russia policy”? What are its goals and what have been its results?

Cohen: I think American policy toward Russia today actually began in the 1990s, particularly during the Clinton administration.  My view is that not all, but a large part of the negative content of American-Russian relations today -- and that relationship is very, very negative, as bad as it has been in many years -- is the result, primarily but not only, of the Clinton administration’s decision to treat Russia as a defeated nation in the Cold War.  When the Cold War ended -- it was officially said to have ended in Malta in December 1989-- the first President Bush and Gorbachev announced that the Cold War was over.  In announcing that the Cold War was over, both said there are no winners, there are no losers. We have agreed to end the Cold War, and in that sense, we are both winners. That tone changed after December 1991, when the Soviet Union ended and the first President Bush began to say, not as a matter of policy but more as a matter of getting himself reelected, that the United States had won the Cold War, but it didn’t have much consequence then. The Clinton administration embraced this view and drew an analogy between the defeat of Russia in the Cold War and the defeat of Germany and Japan in WWII, that we were the victor nation, they were the defeated nation, and therefore they should be supplicant and subordinate to the United States. That was a terrible mistake, and some of us warned against it at the time.  What we said was, that’s not what happened, without Gorbachev the Cold War would not have ended, so Russia deserves as much credit as the United States, and secondly, Russia is weak now, and you can get away with using and abusing Russia, as we did when it was ruled by Yeltsin, but, we warned, that’s not going to last.  And if you treat Russia like this now, you are going to regret it.  Because when Russia rises to its knees, it’s going to be resentful about how it was treated.  And that’s what’s happened.  Because the Clinton administration did two things: first, it tried to control Russia’s post-communist transition by telling Russia what to do and not to do.  To a degree, we were sending legions of advisors there to write their legislation.  Americans were sitting in Russian ministries, writing legislation about privatization, textbooks, all sorts of intimate matters involving a nation that no foreign nation has any right to meddle with.  There was bound to be a backlash against this, particularly when economic and social catastrophe came upon Russia in the 1990s. 

The second thing we did which was equally bad, and this is often forgotten, that in 1990-1991, when Bush asked Gorbachev to permit both a united Germany and a united Germany in NATO, and Gorbachev agreed and that was a historic agreement, Gorbachev was promised, Russia was promised by Bush, and I’ll quote his secretary of state at the time, James Baker, that “NATO will not move one inch to the east.” That was a solemn promise.  Now in Russia, it is said that Gorbachev should have gotten it in writing as a treaty.  But when it came to the United States, Gorbachev was a little naive.  He was smitten with his own ideas of the new thinking, a common European home of human values.  He thought that we ascribe to those values, that the United States saw eye to eye to him about that and about how great powers should treat each other.  But Clinton during the 1990s violated that solemn promise and began to expand NATO eastward toward Russia, and that continues today.  That expansion of NATO and the violation of that promise that has driven the conflicts with Russia over both Ukraine and Georgia, and so long as NATO continues to take those former Soviet republics in, that conflict will continue to exist…After all [NATO is] a military alliance right on Russia’s borders.  The former Baltic republics are already in NATO, NATO is knocking on Ukraine’s door, and there are U.S. bases already in Central Asia. Russia sees itself as being encircled, and so long as that is happening, so long as Russia has that view, there will be no good or stable relations between Russia and the West.  Now let me say that Yeltsin went along with all this for reasons that don’t have to concern us today; I think they were partly economic and partly psychological; it was partly Yeltsin’s sense that he had done something illegitimate, that he abolished the Soviet Union and he gave the wealth of the state to the oligarchs and he needed somebody who passionately supported him, as Clinton did, because certainly nobody at home of any repute much supported him by the mid 1990s.  But once Yeltsin was gone, Putin was clearly a different cat altogether, although he may have been put there by Yeltsin to protect Yeltsin and the oligarchs, but the United States began to realize this in about 2001, 2002, 2003.  There were different episodes, there was the so-called NTV episode, there was the Khodorkovsky affair, there was Ukraine, there were various episodes.  But a good deal of the animosity toward Putin grew out of the growing awareness of the American political class that he wasn’t Yeltsin, that he wasn’t going to play the supplicant role that Yeltsin had played.  Now once that became a factor, the Russian political elite under Putin didn’t handle it very well.  They did a lot of stupid things to make the matter worse.  But I think as we were proactive, they were reactive.  They were responding to us, to the way we treated them in the 1990s, to the expansion of NATO, and had they been clever people about international affairs, they could have responded in a way that might have changed American foreign policy in some way, but they didn’t.  But as Reagan liked to say, now we have two tangoing.  And we really are back in a cold war.  You can call it whatever you want, but it is a cold war whose frontiers, whose epicenter has moved from Germany to Ukraine and Georgia, and it’s very dangerous. A new arms race is under way.  Both sides are building nuclear weapons. If you look at the Litvinenko affair, that’s worse than anything that has happened in the Cold War.  I don't recall anybody ever accusing Brezhnev of killing anybody abroad. 

WP: How would you say average Americans view Russia today?  In what ways does the U.S. media shape that image? 

Cohen: It is a very good question, and the short answer is I don’t know. .. I don’t know what the polls show about public opinion, but I believe that to the extent that the United States and Russia lost a historic opportunity to end the Cold War after 1991, it was lost, and in my judgment, it was primarily the United States that caused it to be lost, but ordinary people had nothing to do with it; it was the political elites of the two countries who messed everything up.  And in those political elites you have to include the mainstream press, which during the 1990s eulogized Yeltsin’s so-called reforms, called them wonderful, called them democracy, called them the transition to a free market society at the very moment that about 80 percent of the Russian people were being plunged by those so-called reforms into poverty.  That was one reason why hostility among ordinary Russians grew into a kind of obratnaya reaktsiya, a resentment against the United States during the 1990s.

I will give you a contemporary example.  Not along ago, Tom Lantos, who will be the new head of the House International Relations Committee, gave an interview to Izvestia, published in Russian, where he said Russians had been better off during Yelstin… For an American congressman, to say that in a Russian newspaper, and that was widely reported on Russian television after he said it... I don’t know what he was thinking.

So the mainstream media has played a very negative role in the relationship both in misleading rank and file Americans, who don’t have time or the access to acquire information on their own about what’s going on in Russia, and by projecting into Russia, because these newspapers are reported there, a very bad image of America.  And we see it again in a more dramatic way in the Litvinenko case, where we have a scandalous moment in the history of American journalism, which hasn’t abided by its own canons in two respects.  First, it never seriously considered the possibility that Litvinenko’s death was not murder, but an accident of a smuggling operation, a black market dealing of polonium.  All of the evidence is circumstantial and is equally consistent with or compatible with, if not more so, a smuggling operation gone bad.  The American press never even raised that possibility even at the hypothetical level and at the same time being sure that it was murder -- and it may have been murder -- but in treating it only as murder, it has repeatedly and consistently pointed its finger at Putin.  The Washington Post began by saying, well if Putin didn’t order it personally, he is responsible because he has created the situation in Russia.  What situation are they talking about?  That would be like saying that somebody assassinated in Latin America is Bush’s responsibility because of the situation he has created in Iraq.  What’s the connection?  And they have pointed the finger and said, well he has probably killed Politkovskaya, too.  A detective would always ask this question: who had motive?  Only Putin had no motive.  He is the one who has taken the fall, he is the one who has suffered the PR catastrophe, he is the one whose European policy has been disrupted by this, so he is a victim of this death of Litvinenko, whoever killed him, or whether or not it was an accident, and yet the media blithely goes on in its cartoons, in its editorials, in its reporting, pointing the finger at Putin without a shred of evidence, of course.  That’s not consistent with what are supposed to be the virtues and practices of American journalism. 

WP:  How do you see Russia 10-15 years from now?

Cohen: My teacher about Russia was Robert C. Tucker. Professor Tucker is retired, but he is in Princeton, working on the third volume of his biography of Stalin, and I consider him to be the greatest Russian expert of his generation.   Married to a Russian woman and having lived in Russia during World War II, after the war, he used to tell his students the following: “When it comes to Russia, never say never.”  I think when you ask about how you see Russia evolving, you don’t rule out anything.  Who would have said in 1982 that three or four years later Russia would be in the throes of democratization?  Nobody I know of.  Some of us saw reform coming, and it coming from Gorbachev, but we didn’t see it leading to actual democratization.  That said, I think there are a lot of factors shaping Russia’s future today.  There is a profound debate in Russia among the intelligentsia and the political class about where Russia belongs: with the East or the West, or by itself.  It’s an old debate in Russia, but it’s more acute today.  More and more, Russia is turning away from the West.  That may not be the worst thing that happens to the West or Russia as long as it turns away in a friendly manner.  But that debate is very, very important.  There is the condition of the Russian economy, which I believe is less stable than the petrodollars make Russia seem.  There is the future of the education system, which at the moment is privileging the privileged.  One thing about Soviet education, whatever you think of it, is that it was truly universal.  What kind of education is the generation going to school since the end of perestroika going to get?  What is the future of this quasi-fascist movement that is unfolding in Russia among young people but with some support from the political class and middle class people, too, “Russia is for Russians”?  That was never the case under the Soviet Union, this is something new.  I am not convinced that that is the future of Russia, but it is a factor that has to be taken into account.  So there are many such factors, there is the question of who is going to be the next leader.  Leaders are always important, even weak leaders, in Russia.  If there is even going to be a next leader – Putin may remain the leader in a different form.  I think American foreign policy is a factor.  If we keep pushing at Russia with NATO, bad things are going to happen.  If we “chill out”, as my kids would say, and back off a little, I think we would create some space for some good things to happen. 

So there are all these factors, but I believe the single most important factor is property.  Every poll taken in Russia tells us that, overwhelmingly, 70-80 percent continue to deeply resent the fact that the wealth of the Soviet Russian state was given to a small, rapacious band of men who have brought perhaps 300 billion dollars of their profits abroad, who flaunt this wealth with their excessive consumption and their lavish homes and their soccer teams abroad, who flaunt their wealth in Russia as well.  It has never happened, I mean there were rich people in the Soviet system, but they kept it secret, there is going to be a reckoning over this property, about that I am convinced.  What I don’t know is how that reckoning, which Russians call social justice, and we have to remember that for Russians, social justice is still a very virtuous concept, and that concept, that ancient concept of Russia, social justice, with this profound sense of injustice having been created in the 1990s the property was turned over to a few and the great majority fell into poverty – that is a time bomb ticking inside the Russian political-economic system today.  Now Putin has diffused it a bit in two ways: first, by restoring state control over part of the assets that were given away by Yeltsin, and of course we protested that.  It was wildly applauded in Russia, and we seem to be tone deaf about that.  By the way, most countries that have large quantities of oil and natural gas keep them under state control.  Only in the U.S. and England are they significantly under control of private companies, so Russia is not doing anything that violates world practice here.  Putin has eased or diminished this problem of resentment a bit …and by being lucky enough to be the recipient of all these petro and gas dollars, some of which, though not a lot of which, have trickled down to the people who are most resentful – the 50 percent or more who still live in something close to poverty.  But the problem remains, and so to me it is a question of how this problem of property and resentment and poverty is solved.  If it’s not solved by legislation, and there are all sorts of proposals in Russia, a major tax, a renegotiation between the oligarchs and the state, some kind of negotiated settlement, then it will be settled in an older Russian way: by force.  That of course will be very bad for the political future of Russia.  To me, this is the ticking bomb, and until it is diffused wisely, or God forbid, unwisely, we won’t know the direction that Russia is going to take, but it is the single most important determinant of Russia’s future.  And it’s an issue of course completely missed in the United States where we go on blathering about the virtues of private property, even if it was stolen. [Regarding] Khodorkovsky – I knew Khodorkovsky, I met him several times, I liked him, the treatment he got was not just or fair, but we have turned this into a Sakharov issue.  It is not a Sakharov issue, nor is Berezovsky Sakharov, nor is Litvinenko Sakharov, this is idiocy. A wise American policy understands the ordinary Russian’s attitude towards social justice and its former state property and we stop telling them that every time they assert some state control over that property, that they are committing an evil.  But we won’t stop, we are victims of our own ideology and myopia. 

WP: In light of all this, how do you see U.S.-Russian relations evolving in the near term?

Cohen: It’s going to get worse.  It’s going to get worse for a lot of reasons.  But one reason is that first of all, the resentment in Russia about the United States is growing.  They are just fed up with us, with our lecturing, our double standards: We can meddle in Ukraine but they can’t; Georgia is ours now, it’s not theirs; we can reward our friends with subsidized prices and foreign aid but they can’t reward their friends with subsidized oil and gas; we tell them to get with the market system, but when they raise prices of their natural resources for the former Soviet states we say they are being neo-imperialist with their energy.  It’s all preposterous, and they hear it and they think we are either crazy or we are living by a neo-imperial double standard of our own.  So things have gotten bad.