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Russia – Again
America’s “Dark Twin”?
"After years of ambivalence about post-Soviet Russia,
many Americans appear to be reverting to the historic habit of treating Russia
as America’s shadow self and its leader as the prime villain on the world
stage.
In December, indignant at political manipulation of
parliamentary elections that gave an overwhelming majority to the party
endorsed by President Vladimir Putin, the Washington Post condemned “the
backward march to czarism” and urged that Russia be thrown out of the club of
Western democracies. Only a little more
temperately, the New York Times declared that “The United States and Europe
must let Mr.Putin know that his days of respectability are fast running out.” In the same vein, Senator John McCain vowed
that he “would seriously consider saying the G-8 should not invite [Putin] to
its next meeting.”
McCain earlier grabbed the media spotlight by
repudiating President Bush’s embrace of Putin, announcing that when he looked
into Putin’s eyes he “saw three letters: a K, a G, and a B” (an allusion to
Putin’s first career as an intelligence officer). This month Hillary Clinton gave McCain’s
remark a theological twist, proclaiming that since Putin was a KGB agent “by definition
he doesn’t have a soul.” At the same
time, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a prominent supporter of
Senator Clinton, proclaimed that “a real danger exists that the world will
again be split by competing ideologies, not communist versus capitalist but
democratic versus autocratic.” Among the
many “top-down” rulers around the world, Albright singled out Putin as the
chief potential challenger to America’s championing of democracy.
... To understand the persistence and
resurgence of the American tendency to view Russia as a country that must
either emulate the United States or be condemned as its evil opposite, it is
important to recognize that this habit developed earlier than Stengel realized
and that it does not stem simply from abhorrence of communist ideology or
wicked Soviet behavior. Although some
American critics of Putin have compared him to Soviet leaders – even to the
arch-villain Joseph Stalin – the closest parallel to the contemporary
vilification of Putin is the way that Americans demonized the last Tsar of
Russia a century ago.
Until the late nineteenth century most Americans viewed
Russian Tsars as distant friends of the United States who were extending
Christian civilization to heathen lands and ruling illiterate peasants unfit
for democracy. Then, between the 1880s
and 1905 American journalists and politicians increasingly depicted Imperial
Russia as a barbarous menace to American commerce in Manchuria, a brutal
oppressor of political dissenters, and a savage persecutor of religious
minorities who should be thrown out of the club of civilized countries. In the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom in
1903, political cartoonists portrayed Nicholas II as a lying culprit in demonic
caricatures that foreshadowed the ways cartoonists have depicted “Tsar”
Putin. When Nicholas’s soldiers
slaughtered peaceful demonstrators in the Bloody Sunday massacre of January
1905 he was condemned -- even more vehemently than Putin has been -- as a
murderous medieval despot who had to be overthrown.
The highly charged demonization of Nicholas II and
Imperial Russia served cathartic purposes for Americans who had been divided
over a savage war in the Philippines and who were troubled by domestic problems
such as the lynching of blacks. It also
contributed to some serious miscalculations.
Although many believed that the ouster of the autocrat would bring to
power liberal admirers of the United States, by the end of 1905 revolutionary
turmoil seemed to be yielding more widespread pogroms and violent socialist
uprisings. While most Americans ardently
sympathized with modern, “civilized” Japan in its war against backward Russia,
after Japanese forces thrashed the Russian Army and sank its fleets it became
clear that Japan was the greater threat to America’s “Open Door” policy in the
Far East. Although repudiating the U.S.
commercial treaty with Russia seemed in 1911 an emotionally satisfying blow to
haughty Russian anti-Semitism and an affirmation of American idealism, as New
Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson declared, two years later President Wilson
dispatched a new ambassador to Russia to beseech the Russians for a new
commercial agreement.
If the contemporary vilification of Putin is not
checked it also may have adverse consequences.
Contrary to Albright’s pronouncement, neither Putin’s anointed successor
as President, Dmitry Medvedev, nor Putin himself champions an autocratic
ideology as an alternative to a democratic future, but demonizing and
ostracizing Russia may fuel the xenophobic ultranationalists who are more
popular across the country than the few liberal democrats in the major
cities. Certainly the castigation of
Putin as a soulless KGB agent will do nothing to facilitate future interaction
between a President McCain or Clinton and a Prime Minister Putin when the
United States seeks Russia’s cooperation on real problems such as securing
energy supplies and checking nuclear proliferation.”
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