#6162
[Second Issue of the Day]
#10
The Russia Journal
March 28-April 4, 2002
Pundit’s views shift with political winds
By MATT TAIBBI
This is the second in a series of columns profiling "Russia experts."
Much like international investment, the field of international punditry fascinates and attracts the mediocre. In both, there is the opportunity to profit wildly in an arena completely free of consequence – a precondition for participation by those unburdened by the demands of foresight, talent or conscience.
Investors take advantage of insurance provided by the U.S. government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation and bailouts to guarantee their investments abroad, no matter how stupid or ill-considered they might be. The World Bank makes loans knowing that governments must pay them back to protect their credit ratings, so little attention is paid to the efficacy of their investments.
In punditry, successful "experts" learn early on that it’s not particularly important to be either right or consistent in one’s pronouncements. Instead, the important qualities are enthusiasm and the compatibility of one’s positions with those of the regime in power.
On Russia, there has been no better example of this phenomenon than Michael McFaul, Stanford University professor and fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. About Russia McFaul has been wrong often enough, and changed his mind often enough, that had he been investing his convictions in a just business environment, he would have gone bankrupt long ago. But because of the forgiving nature of the expert business, McFaul’s influence has not decreased over time, but actually increased, as skillful politicking on his part has allowed him to become a favorite son of the Clinton and Bush administrations.
In the mid-1990s, McFaul was perhaps the most visible cheerleader for the "reform" movement, a confirmed optimist (he actually devoted several columns a few years ago to the theme of "optimists and pessimists") who saw progress everywhere while U.S. proteges like Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov were running Russia’s economy. McFaul’s tone and rhetoric back then suggested a kind of defiant centrism and a general sympathy with the Democratic Party; the Republicans who criticized the Clinton regime’s Russia policy were among the foremost of his "pessimists." He was among the first of the Russia experts to describe Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election as a triumph for democracy. Here he is shortly after the election, on July 6, 1996:
"Yet even with all these birth defects, Russian democracy is still alive and growing. Before expecting the worst again once the next crisis in Russia occurs – the pessimists already are warning of an economic meltdown in the fall – we should remember how poorly the gloom-and-doom school served us in this historic and ultimately triumphant year for democrats and democracy in Russia."
The widespread embrace of this notion that Yeltsin’s re-election meant a definitive triumph for Russian democracy was a key factor in the spread of the "optimism" around Russia that spurred massive investment in the country in 1996-97. As the investment bubble continued to grow, McFaul continued to hammer home the theme of pessimists vs. optimists, and defended vigorously the notion that Russia was a democracy. Even after a series of corruption scandals in the summer of 1997 inspired observers to describe Russia as a mafia state, McFaul went out of his way to claim the opposite. In his Nov. 21, 1997, Moscow Times commentary, headlined "The Myth of Absolute Power," he argued that because the power of Chubais had been checked, Russia could not be an authoritarian state:
"In both Russia and the West, most analysts portray Russia’s political system as an authoritarian regime. According to this view, the executive branch of government dictates state policy. Somebody should tell First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais. As the privatization tsar, the architect of market reform and the mastermind of Yeltsin’s re-election campaign, Chubais should be in a position to manipulate this super-presidential system to serve his policy agenda. Yet Chubais’ series of political setbacks during the last year demonstrate that the Russian regime is not a dictatorship. Such constraints on political authority only occur in democracies, not dictatorships."
Getting McFaul to abandon the themes of progress, democracy and developing-market capitalism proved about as simple as stealing a steak from a hammerhead shark. Even as protesters sat on railroad tracks and investors fled the country in anticipation of the impending economic crash, McFaul continued to chide doubters for their pessimism. A May 23, 1998, Moscow Times piece even described the looming crisis as one of perception, not reality. The article was headlined "Russia’s Image Problem." Here is a key passage:
"A second factor that contributes to pessimism about Russian democracy is the Russian economy. Analyses of political and economic reform are often conflated. Commentators accurately report on the dismal record of economic growth and the subsequent human suffering that has accompanied Russia’s painful and slow economic reform, but then misleadingly suggest that this poor economic performance will precipitate a meltdown of the political system."
This despite the fact such a meltdown, or something very close to one, was just a few months away. Like many Russia experts, McFaul proved himself incapable of predicting events already under way.
It is important to consider the context of McFaul’s 1997 and 1998 pronouncements. Then, as now, his analyses of the Russian situation were aimed squarely at the American political elite, and his measurement of Russia’s progress was conducted in terms that made sense only to interested Russian politicians and Americans far from the situation. He instinctively avoided the viewpoint of the average Russian. In 1998, for instance, McFaul was essentially describing as "pessimism" the protests of coal miners who blocked the railroads, pessimism rooted in an inability to suffer through the necessary "pain of economic reform."
This was outrageously offensive by any standard, but typical of the positions of Russia experts at the time: Russians who protested the nonpayment of their $40-a-month salaries, the wiping out of their pensions, the rolling back of their medical benefits and the general wholesale theft by the state of their dignity were inevitably described as revanchists and pessimists who did simply not understand the mechanics of capitalist development. In order to preserve their ideological stands, experts like McFaul rejected any kind of empathy with the ordinary Russian.
McFaul struggled to find his sea legs for some time after the economic crash of 1998. In September of that year, a month after the crisis began, he was still clinging to the old model, writing op-ed pieces under headlines such as "Russia Still Redeemable." In 1999, he backed off the specifics somewhat and began painting his optimistic picture with broader strokes. "Russia is a radically different place today than it was 10 years ago," he wrote. "And just seven years into the transition, basic arrows on all the big positions are pointing in the right direction."
As his benefactor Bill Clinton – McFaul had been an adviser to the U.S. government during Clinton’s presidency – prepared to leave office, and as he was faced with the prospect of irrelevance in light of his pre-crisis record, McFaul reinvented himself. His most significant innovation came with the abandonment of the word "transition" and its replacement with "revolution." Since revolutions are by nature messy, it was now possible to excuse everything that had happened in Russia over the past decade, and since there was no mass guillotining going on in Red Square, it was even possible to describe the preceding 10 years as unusually speedy progress. Here is McFaul on Jan. 28 of this year, in a piece titled "Two out of Three is Not Good Enough":
"Ten years ago, President Boris Yeltsin and his newly minted government launched a set of revolutionary changes comparable in scale and scope with the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution. Unlike their counterparts in France in 1789 or Russia in 1917, Russia’s anti-communist revolutionaries added an additional task – the dissolution of the Soviet empire. In some respects, then, the agenda of change introduced a decade ago in Russia was even more far-reaching than that which the Jacobins or Bolsheviks sought to achieve.
"A decade ago, few predicted that ‘the reformers’ (they were really revolutionaries, but the label has a very negative connotation in both Russian and the West) would be successful in implementing their agenda of triple transformation. At the time, Russia’s elite and society were deeply divided on every issue of this agenda. . .
"A decade later, one has to be impressed with the scale of change already achieved. Well into the 1990s, it remained unclear (1) if boundaries between new states would become permanent and peaceful, (2) if capitalism would ever take hold or (3) if democracy would ever be consolidated. Amazingly, only a decade after this revolution began, two out of three of these transformations have been completed. Ironically, however, democracy – the one change that seemed most secure in 1992 – is most threatened in 2002."
It’s not clear which two out of three McFaul is talking about here, since Russia’s borders are dotted with military conflicts in several places and there is still plenty of evidence that the capitalism practiced in Russia is not distinguishable from that practiced by the Lucchese or Genovese families. But one gets the point: McFaul has recast the "transition" as "revolution," "reformers" as "revolutionaries," and decided to measure favorably their progress against the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks – not the most demanding of intellectual tasks. Note the casual disingenuousness, so characteristic of McFaul, in the line, "[F]ew predicted that the reformers would be successful in implementing their agenda of triple transformation." McFaul includes this passage knowing full well he was one of those who DID predict the reformers would be successful. Not surprisingly, he does not bring this up here, as that would weigh down his argument in favor of low expectations. McFaul’s final adjustment, spurred by the changes in the post-Sept. 11 political climate, was to abandon his earlier touchy-feely rhetoric about human rights, and to dress in the costume of a hard-line Reagan rightist. Previously, his career had been dedicated to the idea that American-led "reform" was an expression of the United States’ desire to help others, that it was first and foremost in Russia’s best interests. Now, in the new flag-waving atmosphere of today’s Washington, McFaul has abandoned his concern over human rights and come out as an open colonialist. Here he is in a recent op-ed:
"The process of defeating the enemies of liberty is twofold: Crush their regimes or the regimes that harbor them and then build new democratic, pro-Western regimes in the vacuum."
Then, in the Moscow Times last month, he changed his attitude not only about Chechnya, but about democracy and authoritarianism in general. In the above-mentioned "Two out of Three is Not Good Enough," he mused sarcastically that "perhaps the emasculation of the Federation Council and the brutal methods used in Chechnya could be overlooked or justified."
Eventually, though, he came out against the expansion of executive power under Putin. Why? Not because it would be wrong or because it would be harmful to Russia, but because it might be harmful to America’s commercial interests: "A Russian state strong enough to take away TV6’s license can also seize Boeing’s assets."
McFaul, a master politician, understands well that the crowd now in charge in Washington doesn’t respond to the same rhetoric the Clinton administration did. To maintain his position as an influential expert, he had to learn to talk a different game. And he has. As a result, McFaul today remains one of the most-quoted analysts in the Russian arena, and his opinions continue to appear in major American newspapers.
(Matt Taibbi is co-editor of the Moscow alternative newspaper The eXile.)
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