Things look very different from here in Moscow, almost as if one is observing things from another planet.

The other night I watched a story on Russia Today, a semi-official Russian news channel. It showed CNN footage purporting to come from the apparent Russian "capture" of the Georgian town of Gori. Actually, the film was (unattributed) Russia Today footage of damage from the Georgian attack days ago on Tskhinvali, the So. Ossetian capital.

But even aside from the difficulty of getting anything resembling accurate news here, the Russian point of view is, predictably, vastly different from the knee-jerk Russophobia in the U.S. press. And to many of us here, the Russian point of view is at least as compelling as the mainstream U.S. attitudes we hear about.

Russians have always been sensitive to western views of them and are particularly alert for attitudes that smack of inequality and hypocrisy. The vast majority of people here are amazed, sad, and confused at the way the western media has transformed the Georgian side, which started the war, into the victims. When Prime Minister Putin decried the west's cynical "turning black into white" he spoke for large numbers of Russians.

People here were amazed and insulted when President Bush bragged about his "stern" warnings to Putin. Like Putin, they cannot imagine a reason to pay any attention to such a person, whose paternalistic but helpless schoolmarm lectures are considered here to be "not serious."

Russians wonder how, before Russian intervention, something more than a thousand deaths including the destruction of villages and shooting of civilians by the Georgians escape western notice.

They wonder why Georgian attempts to suppress the Ossetian alphabet were not cultural genocide and Russian defense against Georgian attack is.

They wonder how prying Kossovo away from Serbia was popular self-determination but So. Ossetian independence from Georgia is not.

They wonder how President Bush, who for the sake of regime change invaded Iraq far from his shores, nevertheless managed to denounce Russian use of force and complain that the days of regime change had passed.

They wonder why, in 1942 when attacked by Japan, the U.S. did not follow its own advice about a "measured response" and stop her counterattack on Japan at Pearl Harbor. "Were the Japanese the victims then, just like the Georgians?"

They wonder why, as one puzzled but sincere friend put it, "you Americans hate us so much when we do what you do."

But mostly they wonder why US leaders cannot come up with a more sophisticated world view for the 21st century than surrounding Russia (which after all has nuclear weapons and much of the world's oil) with verbal abuse, hostile alliances and provocations. They don't understand why US leaders cannot see beyond or outgrow the cold war. Another asked, "So Cheney and Rice, they aren't your most advanced global thinkers, right?"

J. Arch Getty
Moscow
[Professor of History, UCLA].