Before giving Moscow State University a statue of the humanist poet Walt Whitman yesterday, Hillary Clinton should have started by disowning the ideas of his nefarious namesake, Walt Whitman Rostow.

Squandering all the promise associated with the cuddly Tolstoy look-alike after which his Socialist Russian-immigrant parents had named him, Rostow spent his life promoting the Vietnam war and preaching the deterministic, neo-liberal gospel of modernisation theory in the (dis)service of American foreign policy.

But even from beyond the grave, Rostow’s crazy, debunked theory (the so-called Take-Off Model) continues to muddle the way Americans see the world, and particularly Russia.

Here’s how: In his deterministic vision of human progress, Rostow held that the entire world was destined to one day make itself in the image of America in a prosperous, free market and democratic ‘age of mass consumption’.

Today, American policy-makers and media continue to see Russian history as a fitful movement from an underdeveloped (authoritarian, communist) past to a developed (democratic, capitalist) future.

According to this linear and procrustean version of events, any Russian policy that does not correspond to the liberal democratic, capitalist tropes is characterised as anti-modern, as somehow ‘backsliding’ to the past.

This may explain the media’s obsession with pointing out the ‘Soviet past’ of any Russian leader that demonstrates qualities or enacts policies that go against liberal capitalism, even though the past of every post Communist Russian politician was a Soviet one (what other sort of past could it have been?).

For example, we are constantly told about the Soviet background of Vladimir Putin, but never that of, say, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose past leadership of the entire Komsomol did not prevent him from being portrayed as the (short lived) face of a ‘modern’ , ‘liberal’, and ‘capitalistic’ Russia.

Earlier, we were similarly inundated about the ‘KGB past’ of Evgeny Primakov, a Russian foreign minister whose independence and outspoken opposition to the Yugoslav war we did not like, but remained in the dark about the early years ‘modernist’ darling Yegor Gaidar spent editing the hard line  Party propaganda organ “The Communist”.

My problem with all this is not the childish deployment of selective memory against the perceived opponents of US policies, but the deeper Rostowian conviction that these opponents are somehow trapped in the past, whereas the present and future have room only for the liberal, capitalistic Russians we like.

It’s time to press the reset button on the Rostowian notion that only when it chooses policies and politicians favourable to US interests can Russia can ‘modernise’ or ‘progress’, and that any deviation from these signifies a ’step backwards’.