Margaret Warner (The News Hour) is doing a good job of setting the scene for President Obama’s visit to Russia next week.  Talking in Moscow with a cross-section of media, government spokesmen, activists and Kremlin-watchers, Warner’s reports this week paint a fairly nuanced picture.  Stability but arbitrary authority.  Economic growth (until last year) but great social disparities.  Outspoken voices but widespread public complacency.  Russia sometimes seems capable of continuing on such a course indefinitely.

But for her natural resources and nuclear weapons, Russia would not be a very compelling stop on Obama’s itinerary.  Yet these two exceptions, and the instability along much of the vast periphery of Russia and its “near abroad,” change everything.  How Russia acts internationally, when domestically capable of such arbitrariness, is of great relevance and concern.

Yulia Latynina adds another useful perspective, describing in today’s Moscow Times how Russia’s new oil deal with China is more disadvantageous to Russia than the prospective deal that helped earn Khodorkovsky Putin’s ire.  Another indicator that what would seem to be in Russia’s best interest may not be the road Russia travels.

Obama’s visit should tell us a lot about how we should view Russia.

WWII Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West, a PBS-BBC co-production that premieres in the US on May 6, engages, shocks – and misleads.

When someone at PBS sent the FPA Russia Blog an advance DVD of the series, I was both excited and puzzled by its audacious plunge into the well-trodden turf of such heavyweights as AJP Taylor, Robert Conquest, Richard Overy and Anthony Beevor.

Buoyed by factual accuracy, glossy re-enactments (featuring a pleasantly Georgian-accented Stalin-a nice touch) and eyewitness testimony from survivors, this ‘dramatic’ and ‘propulsive’ documentary (based on a book by Laurence Rees) appears at first glance to survive the encounter.

Unfortunately, that is not enough to redeem the series’ egregious lack of context, which results in massive distortion by omission.

The first episode, Unlikely Friends, explores the international diplomacy during the lead up to World War II, and centres on the Faustian Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939.

“Before he was allied to Churchill and Roosevelt”, reads a voice over dramatised footage of Molotov toasting Ribbentrop, “Stalin, who wanted to keep out of any impending war, offered to help Hitler and the Nazis…much more than the rest of the world knew. Cue swelling crescendo reserved for the entrances of movie villains.

With a sensationalised conspiratorial tone, the series goes to great lengths to portray an enthusiastic Soviet embrace of the Nazis, as opposed to the much more agonised and pained Western reluctance to enter the war.

See Stalin, Molotov and Nazi officials drinking champagne at dinner as they gleefully carve up a leg of lamb, and Poland! Watch as Stalin introduces the sociopathic NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria to the Germans with the words: ‘This is our Himmler! He’s also pretty good at his job!”

Later, as the film shows how Soviet ice-breakers had helped a Nazi warship sail through the Arctic to Asia, a German sailor is quoted saying: “The Russians were on our side, you could say that”.

All this subtlety, I’m guessing, was intended to hammer home some cliché or other about the mutual affinity and moral equivalence of far left and far right dictatorships; and the heart-rending reluctance with which the morally upstanding democracies of Britain and America chose appeasement.

But what was missing? Why was Stalin so eager to sign this pact with a man openly committed (cf Mein Kampf) to the eventual destruction of Russia and its people? Because the Soviet leader had just finished slaughtering his entire officer corps, decimating the army and leaving the USSR unable to engage a serious enemy such as Germany.

Stalin Great Purge

Curiously, this Great Purge (known as Yezhivschina, after the secret police chief who preceded Beria before being ‘purged’ himself) that claimed perhaps a million lives is completely absent from the first instalment of Behind Closed Doors; perhaps because such inconvenient nuances might undermine the USSR-NAZI equivalence at the heart of the film.

The truth is, however, that Stalin’s Russia differed from Hitler’s Germany in one profound way: it treated its own people with even greater savagery and impunity than its enemies and those it conquered.

This brings me to the film’s most serious flaw: its depiction of the division of Poland.

Much is done to visually pair footage of Polish suffering at the hands of Russian troops with images of opulent state dinners at which Soviet and Nazi leaders cemented the division of the country.

At one point, the narrator even suggests that part of Stalin’s brutality towards the Poles is due to his humiliating involvement in a 1920 defeat against that country (amidst such psychologising, little is made, however, of Stalin’s much more incontrovertible obsession with buffer zones and security against invasion).

For a start, for all its determination to equate the Nazis and the Soviets, the film devotes an overwhelming amount of time to the  Soviet (rather than  Nazi) atrocities, which, culminating in the Soviet execution of 22000 Polish officers and intellectuals at Katyn forest, were of course both undeniable and horrific.

Katyn Massacre

It’s impossible not to be moved and shocked as an elderly Galina Stavaskaya cries recalling her rape and beating at the hands of the NKVD secret police; however, by the time we hear from Anna Levitska – her mansion requisitioned by a Russian officer whose wife gleefully steals her nightgown! – it begins to feel a little like demonisation.

But the most damaging thing is not the film’s relative silence on Nazi abuses, but its refusal to contextualize this violence in light of contemporary events in the Soviet Union itself.

Why hadn’t the series taken the trouble to tell viewers that only a year before the gruesome murders of 22000 Poles at Katyn, Stalin had also ‘liquidated’ over 720000 Soviet officers, intellectuals, ‘class enemies’, politicians, secret policemen, and even leaders of the Bolshevik revolution itself?

Or that, while NKVD executioners (one of whom is chillingly interviewed on camera) shot 250-300 Polish prisoners every night at Katyn, they managed to shoot as many as 1000 Soviet citizens a night in Moscow in 1938.

How many Russian families had their houses seized and their belongings appropriated during the revolution, civil war, and later by their own secret police?

Unlike the Nazis, who had concertedly cultivated the favour of German (and Polish) nobility whilst committing atrocities against déclassé and racial enemies, Stalin unleashed indiscriminate violence against all levels of Soviet society, and of every other country under Soviet control: Polish officers and academics, Russian counterrevolutionaries and party loyalists, Ukrainian peasants and Crimean Tartars, Chechens and Georgians -you name it!

Thus, the idea of the Communist Party and the secret police as simply perpetrators in the Nazi sense is both narrow and shallow: the party and the NKVD themselves suffered disproportionate losses in the Hobbesian purges of all against all.

Telling this broader story does not make one a Stalinist sympathiser, but it does provide a disconcerting nuance lacking in this film’s monochrome moral clarity.

And it can be done. Orlando Figes, for one, managed just this in his magisterial history of the Russian Revolution entitled A People’s Tragedy. Figes - no communist fellow-traveller - devoted a large part of a book very critical of the Bolsheviks, to the context and background of Tsarism.

His vivid portrayal of pre-Revolutionary Russia’s untold brutality and barbarism - the anti-Semitic pogroms, the endemic rape and slavery in the villages, the squalor and casual brutality in its Dickensian cities – was invaluable in situating the subsequent terror and brutality of the Bolsheviks within a wider historical and social framework.

To gain some context, viewers are advised to read Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War, which describes the horror and deprivation of ordinary life in Stalin’s Red Army, in which “nearly three-quarters of the infantry started life as peasants, and many had suffered the traumas of forced collectivization”.

The uncomfortable truth is that the Soviets who pillaged Lvov and raped Berlin emerged from a system of total brutalisation in which they themselves were constant victims. After all, most of the soldiers in the Red Army of the time had grown up during the civil war, between the pendulum swings of Red and White Terror, followed by famine and a genocidal Nazi campaign to wipe out the Slavic race. Like African child-soldiers, they had known only violence their entire lives.

Moreover, for an American or English viewer, it is sometimes easy to view all of WWII as the voluntary, (arguably) honourable engagement based on an (arguably) principled position that it was for those two powers. By contrast, the Soviets, whose cities were overrun by German tanks, had no such decision to make; they were fighting to drive out a foreign invader to ensure their own imminent survival.

Naturally, none of this excuses what took place: countries were occupied and pillaged by Stalin’s forces, war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed. Yet, as one reviewer writes, “watching the TV series, the impression is given that the ruthless Soviet fight to liberate their own country was as evil as the German invasion and occupation. Remember when you read this book that 95% of the civilian victims in the USSR were killed one way or another by Germans”.

Regrettably, very little of that broader tragedy makes it into “Behind Closed Doors”, leaving the viewer with little more than a lopsided, deracinated portrait of Soviet brutality and gleeful collusion with Nazi Germany.

That is a shame, because there is much that is powerful and striking in the film, such as the testimony of Nikolai Dyukarev, a former NKVD officer who had been tasked with evicting and rounding up Polish families at Katyn:

“We were ordered to re-settle. It was a difficult task, very difficult. Then I was young and it was all, ‘do, do, do!’. But now when I think about it, to leave kids without milk or anything – it was a very hard thing to do. When I grew up, I started to think about it: what kind of task was that? Of course we shouldn’t have done that, when I think about it. And I thought about it then too, but it’s one thing to think, and another to do”.

This - the poignant web of personal complicity, apathy, silence, action, regret, memory and guilt - is the true secret history of WWII.

Why did they have to go and spoil it with the sinister music and ham-fisted histrionics?

Only five months after FPA Russia blog noted the intriguing similarities between Obama and Gorbachev, the AP’s Steven Hurt writes:

While historic analogies are never perfect, Obama’s stark efforts to change the U.S. image abroad are reminiscent of the stunning realignments sought by former Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev. During his short—by Soviet standards—tenure, he scrambled incessantly to shed the ideological entanglements that were leading the communist empire toward ruin.

But Obama is outpacing even Gorbachev.

Ironically, while one of Gorbachev’s foreign policy priorities was to cut ties with Cuba, Obama may be set to do the opposite.

The Council on Foreign Relations today published an interview with Pavel Felgenhauer, the outspoken Putin opponent and astute defence analyst with Anna Politkovskaya’s old paper Novaya Gazeta, about all the main geopolitical questions facing Russia today.

The most interesting part of this was his assertion that Russia believes that the US missile shield in Eastern Europe “is a smokescreen”.

They believe that nuclear missiles will be deployed in Poland near Russia and these nuclear missiles will have also a first-strike capability and could hit Moscow before [Russia's response] could get airborne, so this is going to actually be seen not so much as missile defense as a deployment of first-strike capability.

He also notes that any quid pro quo regarding Russian pressure on Iran in exchange for the US aborting the missile shield is seen as a ploy, as Russia’s lack of the  necessary leverage to force the Iranians away from nuclearisation will give the US a free hand to proceed with the shield.

I think Felgenhauer’s argument is sound, if a little pessimistic. On the plus side, Russia’s recent military reforms, aimed at professionalising the army, should send a strong positive message to the US.

This is because, despite an overall increase in military expenditure which looks threatening on the surface, the reshuffle is actually a revolutionary rejection of Cold War era doctrine of mass mobilisation. By reducing the officer corps and trimming the fat, Medvedev removes the army’s technical potential for a European invasion and reconstitutes it into a more ‘clinical’ small-conflict force no longer for fighting NATO but rather terrorism and regional threats.

Obama would do well to recognise this when weighing the missile shield; if Russia has finally moved to take NATO out of its crosshairs, then the US should reciprocate.

In fact, even the usually sceptical Economist reports that already, “both sides are signalling a truce” and making some tentative steps in renewing arms control negotiations that were either frozen since the Cold War or undermined by Bush.  So much so, that “an early and radical chop in weapons numbers [might] be announced by the two presidents next month”.

In any good horror movie, the psychopathic killer is decidedly ordinary, even a little boring. Entering a sleepy hamlet quietly, he slaughters his unsuspecting victims without fanfare, and is unmasked all too late.

Similarly, the recent appointment of an obscure Stanford academic to Obama’s foreign policy team garnered only a few lines in a handful of local papers, and a paragraph from a Politico blogger (thanks to FPA Russia Blog reader Simon Radford for bringing it to our attention).

Yet the words “Michael McFaul will serve as…senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council” should strike terror into the collective heart of all sane Russia observers.

So how can a second rate professor with a Rod Blagojevich hairdo and a grammar problem destroy US-Russian relations? Read on to find out….

WHO IS MICHAEL MCFAUL?

Iraq war cheerleader, advocate of Russia’s catastrophic economic shock treatment and apologist for Yeltsin’s authoritarianism: McFaul was indeed a man of many jobs.

But for anyone who has served time doing Russia studies over the last decade, McFaul is best remembered as the author of ‘Russia’s Unfinished Revolution’, that vile textbook stuffed down the throats of newbie Kremlinologist wannabies. John Dolan’s definitive review of the book is here.

A mediocre political scientist but a consumate bully, McFaul cashed in on the euphoria surrounding the economic and political ‘democratisation’ of Eastern Europe. Peddling mass privatisation and the manichean narrative of ‘Plucky Democratics vs Evil Revanchist Communists’, he became a useful academic salesman for the Clinton administration’s policy of shock therapy and the political support of its guarantor, Boris Yeltsin.

In his role, McFaul came to rival Stalin’s airbrushers in his talent for politically motivated historical whitewashing by extolling the virtues of the “’shock therapy’ of the mid-1990s, which has recently been documented in the Lancet to have “led to 3 million premature deaths in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In Russia in particular rapid privatization was a continuing factor to the five year drop in life expectancy between 1991 and 1994, resulting in an estimated 1 million premature deaths”.

But the worst thing about McFaul is his complete absense of any convictions, beliefs or moral code. While he is instinctively a middle of the road liberal, McFaul is the archetypal chameleon, grovelling to whoever happens to be in power, shifting his views to acquire fresh patronage.

Here is an excellent summation of the way in which McFaul, previously a big Clinton insider, disavowed his previous appraisals and radically changed his views to accomodate the then new Bush administration’s more aggressive stance on Russia.

Perversely, McFaul’s utter sychophancy gives me some hope. He is too spineless, too beholden to whichever direction the wind is blowing, to redefine any existing policy or intellectual atmosphere. Instead, he will safely pander to the ruling ideology and produce the requisite ‘academic’ works to bolster it.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Larry Summers, another high profile Obama man with a decade long history of screwing up Russia (who deserves a post all for himself).

When I read today’s Kyrgyzstan piece from Joel Brinkley, a former foreign policy hack for the NYT, I was convinced it was a spoof.

The article, entitled “Why is Russia Bribing Kyrgyzstan?”, laments  “the sheer gall behind Russia’s open challenge to Washington”, “Russia’s hostile intent”, “Russia’s determination to show Obama that Russia controls Central Asia”, and the limp wristed response from Obama and Biden, which has “let Russian leaders walk all over them”.

Of course, such knavish tricks as bribery are par for the course for the bastardly Russians: “Most people worldwide know America to be a decent, honest state… The world expects better of America. Not so for Russia. The response to the Kyrgyz bribery episode was muted, unremarkable. No one expects much that’s worthy of admiration from Moscow”.

This alone should make Times readers seriously consider the integrity of the international news they receive. But what even trumps Brinkley’s 1950’s Pravda style jingoism are his hypotheticals:

“Imagine the outrage”, he asks us, ” if the United States suddenly offered to give Kazakhstan, another Central Asian state, $2 billion if, in exchange, the Kazakh government terminated Russia’s lease for its space launch center in Baikonur. A hurt, angry outcry would sweep the globe”.

Perhaps he is referring to the hurt angry outcry that swept the globe after the US ‘bribed’ the Kygyz government to open the base in the first place?

According to the NY Times,  “the U.S. base is the greatest source of foreign currency for the Kyrgyz,” Maynes says, referring to the steep user fees the U.S. government pays for the base at Manas. “For them to lose this would be a big thing.” The base contributes some $50 million to Kyrgyzstan’s economy each year, according to the Associated Press. In addition, Bishkek receives roughly $10 million in annual military aid from the United States”.

And how much did it cost the US to ‘flip’ another former Russian ally in 2001? According to the same article, “the Uzbek government received around $150 million in annual aid packages, as well as counterterrorism, intelligence, and law-enforcement training from U.S. government agencies in 2001 in order to open its military base”.

But here’s the kicker:

“The real message behind all this, it seems, is Russia’s determination to show Obama that Russia controls Central Asia. Well, the hypocrisy there is typical for Russia. For the last couple of years, Russia has been buying influence in Latin America and bragging about it. Central and South America are as much America’s neighborhood as Central Asia is Russia’s”.

If indeed Central and South America are as much America’s neighbourhood as Central Asia is Russia’s, and given that the US has two military bases in Central Asia and Russia has none in Latin America, then I expect Mr Brinkley would wholeheartedly support the installation of a couple of Russian battalions in, say, Mexico and Colombia?

With ominous irony , Obama’s deployment of 17000 additonal troops to Afghanistan coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Soviet pull-out from that country. “They have repeated all our mistakes”, said Russia’s Ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin.

Soviet troops in Afghanistan called the mujahedeen fighters “dukhi”, or ghosts, for their ablity to spring up out of nowhere and then blend back into the terrain.  Indeed, the USSR’s last war continues to haunt Russian relations with an old adversary that seems intent on ignoring history.

Today’s New York Times writes of the tensions between the US and Russia engendered by the closure of an important American base in Kyrgyzstan. The base was very important for re-supplying Afghanistan and the US believes that Russia had pressured its southern neighbour to close the base to put a spoke in the wheel of the US led operation.

The Russian response?

“A lot of these things,” he said, “are the consequences of the attitude that NATO takes and has taken in recent years toward mutually important issues that touch upon the interests of Russia — beginning with the Balkans and Yugoslavia, Kosovo, NATO moving eastward, to Ukraine and Georgia, the Baltic states. And if more attention had been paid toward Russia’s opinion, then the situation would now be much better.”

Nevertheless, the US and Russia share an overwhelming number of strategic goals in Afghanistan, so any Russian posturing is more about linkage rather than genuine attempts to hobble American success.

The Kremlin also seems reluctant to offer significant help until it knows the Obama administration’s stance toward Russia. Relations soured under George W. Bush after he called for Ukraine and Georgia to enter NATO, and proposed an anti-missile system for Eastern Europe. Mr. Obama has not yet said whether he will pursue those policies.

Edward Lucas, the Economist's man in Moscow, has a lot to answer for.

In 2008, he wrote a provocative book called “The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West” which paints a harrowing picture of the country's new assertiveness. A year on, his thesis continues to makes waves, with a review in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books (which he has called 'the greatest accolade’) What follows is a review of that review.

Lucas's thesis is, roughly, that Putin's Russia is reverting to Cold War era behaviour by cracking down on freedoms at home and becoming aggressive and expansionist abroad.

Moreover, he warns that Russia is using capitalism and the strength of its energy and minerals exports to bully its neighbours and divide-and-conquer the West in a similar way that the USSR sought to drive a wedge between Europe and the US in the 1970s.

Most importantly, Lucas is troubled by the fact that despite having rejected Communism, Russia steadfastly refuses to adopt ‘Western norms’.

Naturally, this is a rather capricious position to take, and the NYRB's Christian Caryl, a critical journalist who has reported out of Russia, seems well placed to contend some of these very controversial points. Yet he targets all the wrong aspects of Lucas's argument, taking its most objectionable assumptions for granted.

1. NATO ENLARGEMENT

Caryl writes, agreeing with Lucas: “Contrary to popular belief, NATO enlargement was driven less by a grasping, hegemonic United States than by the desire of Washington's European allies to stabilize the belt of newborn democracies to the east. There is no question that they have succeeded in this aim…NATO's requirement that candidate countries resolve border conflicts with their neighbors before they can be admitted forced would-be members to confront and air old historical grievances that could have easily poisoned the region's future”.

This is patently inaccurate. Whatever the ‘motivations’ behind Nato expansion (and there is no evidence to suggest that they were nefarious), it flatly betrayed the promise made by Clinton to Yeltsin in 1992. That is a fact. The oft-cited argument that Eastern European nations such as Poland wanted to join Nato, and the US could not stop them is empty: the US is in charge and only the US can decide who to let into its club.

Caryl brings up a very obscure and marginal example of Hungary, a country with no significant border issues with its neighbours, as a testament to Nato peace making. Yet for every Hungary and Poland, there is a Kosovo.

In fact, NATO policy in the ex-Warsaw Pact is not even relevant. That Rubicon had been crossed back under Clinton. After much empty bluster, Russia came to terms (grudgingly) with the incorporation of the Warsaw Pact into Nato and could do nothing about it.  The most painful issue today, many times more sensitive for Russian public opinion (which Caryl ignores) is the question of Nato membership for countries that were integral parts not of the Warsaw Pact but of the Soviet Union itself. This is a different situation entirely, and until recently was the ultimate taboo. The US and Western powers, keen to placate Russia over betraying her by letting in Eastern Europe into Nato, drew a line at the old USSR borders. Those commitments are now null and void.

Has the spectre of Nato membership for the ex-USSR republics contributed to peace? Not if one possible explanation for Saakashvili's assault on Abkhazia that precipitated the Georgia-Russia war 5 months ago is to be believed. According to this account, Georgia used the cover of satisfying NATO membership requirements as an argument for trying to retake Abkhazia by force. Is this what Caryl meant when he wrote that Nato offers a powerful incentive to “confront and air old historical grievances” and “confront long-running historical disputes”? Are similar bloody "confrontations’ to be expected in Transdniestr, Crimea and elsewhere?

Indeed, numerous current members of NATO joined the organisation precisely at that a time when they were in the full throes of civil war and territorial dispute: Turkey and its war in Cyprus and Kurdistan ; Spain and the Basques, France and Corsica, and England and Northern Ireland.  Nato  has not done much to end any of these conflicts, because it is a political-military bloc for the advancement of US strategic interests; if they are served by a certain country being a member, then it is allowed in regardless of whether it has fulfilled the entry conditions.  Only the EU and its (dwindling) promise of prosperity has helped push these countries together.

Caryl then writes: “Were a pro-Western government in Kiev to vote on NATO accession, political turmoil would immediately ensue. The eastern part of the country‚ dominated by Russia and with a large proportion of Russians‚ would almost certainly respond with mass protests, possibly culminating in violent opposition to the central government or demands for secession”.

Caryl talks of Ukrainian membership of Nato (supported by its pro-Western government) in positive terms and sees only “the Russian dominated East” as a source of sabotage to such an enlightened move. Yet, a recent poll by the Taylor Nelson Sofrez Ukraine agency showed opposition to Nato membership at 63%, far more than the share of “Russians” could explain. I did not have to go far to get this fact: it is on Wikipedia.

Of course, this should come as no surprise, as governments’ decisions to join Nato are often staunchly opposed by their own people; take the case of Spain in the 1970s. But Caryl is being very disingenuous here in painting a conflict between a pro-Nato governmental elite and its anti-Nato population as one between a pro-Western Ukraine and a spoiler-Russia.

2. LA GUERRE FROIDE N'A PAS EU LIEU

Caryl's analysis succumbs to a much more fundamental flaw than a misunderstanding of NATO. In order to determine whether Russia is heading for a new cold war, it helps to understand the old one, and Caryl does not. Or rather, he subscribes to the same conventional narrative as Lucas, which makes it difficult for him to challenge the latter's arguments.

For a start, Caryl holds that the old cold war "the real, bipolar, Manichaean cold war, divided the world fairly neatly into friends and foes". This is of course a gross over-simplification, if only because it leaves no room for China, or India, Roumania, Yugoslavia, Ghana and Libya, the group of 77 etc etc. And even in charting the relationship between the USSR and the US, it throws détente and Khruschev's thaw into the same pot as the militant communist internationalism of the 1920s and the Stalinism of the 40s and 50s.

But that's not even the main problem with Caryl's account.  The problem lies with his reason for why the Cold War cannot return: the real reason "is that Russia, contrary to all the feverish talk about its presumed status as a revived superpower, is nothing of the kind. It is a rising regional power that enjoys the benefit of immense geographical reach and huge natural resources. Yes, it has a nuclear arsenal and a big army‚ but, as Lucas correctly notes, the former is outdated and poorly maintained, and the latter, as its less-than-stellar performance against Georgia's tiny army demonstrated, is still a long way away from a state-of-the-art modern force".

He then goes on to recount all the ways in which Russia is weak: militarily, economically, demographically, politically.

All of which raises an important question about the fundamental origins of the Cold War. If the Cold War cannot return because Russia is too weak, is not a superpower, then the first cold war started precisely because Russia was a strong power, a super-regional rival to the USSR, and not due to some "Manichean' ideological struggle suggested by Caryl in an earlier paragraph.

So which is it, Caryl? Perhaps the truth is, pace Baudrillard, that the "cold war' never happened at all.

If the Cold War were really an ideological struggle, then the change of regime from Communism should have fundamentally altered the US approach to Russia. However, this did not happen: far from disbanding, NATO continued to expand unabated and the Bush white house recently actually scrapped Soviet era arms control agreements.

If the Cold War were really caused by Russia's superpower status, in the sense that it presented a military threat to the US, then why did successive US leaders see it fit to exaggerate the Soviet military might throughout the post war years? (See: the Missile Gap and Bomber Gap controversies). The fact is that the USSR was never a match for the US and Western Europe militarily or economically, lacked the capacity to project decisive force beyond its hemisphere and throughout the 20^th century remained an overwhelmingly regional power rather than a global superpower. In this sense, while Russia has become much weaker since the fall of the USSR, it had always been very weak.

So, if Russia was neither an ideological nor a military threat, what the hell was going on in the 60 years since world war II?

It's time to return to William Appleman Williams. In the 1950s and 60s, he led the revisionist school of Cold War scholarship in arguing primarily that the cold war was had very little to do with the USSR and a lot to do with the US's "open door policy' of forcibly opening up foreign markets to American capitalism.

This can explain the relentless drive into Eastern Europe and within Russia even after the "official' end of the "cold war' in Malta in 1989. The US would not be done until Eastern European and Russian state enterprises were dismantled and saturated with American business interests through the mechanism of the "free market'. However, because at that time the free market was dominated by the US, it created an idea condition to fulfill the open door prophesy. During the 1990s, and even before, US policymakers routinely conflated "free market capitalism' with "democracy' and, in cases of conflicts between the two, routinely defaulted to the former over the latter.

All through the 1990s, Russia, under American tutelage and with a bit of help from the IMF, was encouraged towards the triumph of the free market over democracy. Kotz and Weir, Boris Kagarlitsky and Stephen F Cohen have comprehensively detailed the slow death of political pluralism, democracy and free speech during the Yeltsin years. Political parties that had huge popular support but rejected the market integration (the Communist Party, CPRF) paid a huge price: Yeltsin, aided by cash from oligarchs in exchange for vastly deflated natural resource concessions (Loans for Shares Scandal) was abetted by the US in rigging the 1996 presidential election.

So after a decade of reinforced learning, Russia has finally, under Putin, learned the precedence of the free market over political democracy. And what does it get for its troubles? People like Lucas from the Economist, a magazine that has been consistently cheerleading its anti-democratic marketisation during the 1990s, now condemns it for playing the West's game, the same game it has been taught during the last decade and a half. There's just no winning, is there?

That is what's so weird about the central tenant underlying Lucas's book:

“If you believe that capitalism is a system in which money matters more than freedom, you are doomed when people who don't believe in freedom attack using money.

If that sounds like a bizarre position for an Economist journalist to take, it is; yet the NYRB's Caryl rather charitably calls it only “something of an intellectual leap”.

Funnily enough, after being shown and told since 1991 that capitalism is the only game in town; after learning the hard way the techniques that the US utilized in wedding big business to national power politics to bully countries like Russia to do its bidding; after having beated out of its system any notion of justice and freedom at odds with "the market'; after mastering the same techniques and philosophy with an amorality and ruthlessness undreamed of in the hypocritical and politically correct west, and after beating the West at its own game by having Gazprom stock snapped up by eager shareholders at the London stock exchange and gaudy Russian villas infest Courchevel, Russia is now told: stop!!! Where are your morals? Where are your values?

In light of recent history, these complaints, which were legitimate when voiced by dissidents in the early 1990s resisting the Yeltin-US marketi "reforms, can be nothing more than the laments of a sore-loser when voiced by The Economist and its apologists at the NYRB.

But even in remembering, all of a sudden, about the centrality of liberal values, morality and the rule of law (where were you in 1991-2000, Lucas and Caryl?), Lucas has still failed to repent and eschew the authoritarian approach that characterized the West's market evangelism at the expense of democracy. Only now, it's liberal evangelism at the expense of democracy.

The sentiment underpins Lucas's very philosophy, which, like Fareed Zakaria's theory of ‘illiberal democracy’, elavates liberalism, a particular political-economic conception, over democracy, majority rule. While democracy is a process, liberalism is but one of several particular outcomes of that process. Lucas only seems to support democracy when its outcome is ‘in accordance with Western values’ (ie. to his personal liking).

When I met the gracious and self-deprecating Lucas at the book's launch in Washington, what surprised me most about him was his deep affection for Russia; in that light, I realised that he harbours none of the anti-Russian racism of a Richard Pipes.

Lucas's ire is directed at the Russian regime, not its people. And because of this, he must put aside his fanatical liberal proselytizing and trust in them to choose their own way.

Nearly a decade ago, the cover of the Atlantic Monthly featured a close-up of a gaunt Russian policeman, or was it a soldier, his eyes obscured by his cap, the words “Russia is finished” emblazoned around his waist.

Reading Jeffrey Tayler's unreflective, misguided, naive and offensive tirade at my home country, I felt angry and alone, like I was the only person on earth who sat hunched over the magazine with a red pen, futilely rebutting his facile middle-brow liberal orthodoxy and sneering orientalism, (regarding his notion of the Russians’ “oriental tradition of hospitality toward strangers”, I’d have liked to extend to Tayler the Russian hospitality of my pen towards his face!)

Of course, one glance at any issue of The Exile, or any article by Stephen Cohen, or, for that matter, one minute speaking with a genuine Russian person who had not been parachuted into the country in 1993 as had been the article's author, would have persuaded any sane reader of Tayler's inextricable troglodytism.

But what frustrated me was that the sane, educated, middle-brow liberal readers of The Atlantic, interested mainly in literary short stories but with an occasional taste for well written non-fiction exoticism, did not generally read the Exile or hang out with impoverished babushkas: the poor suckers would swallow Tayler's nonsense hook line and sinker!

So long as the Russian experience continued to be filtered for the West through the eyes of such eloquent morons, I fumed, there could be no hope of challenging their noxious paradigms except in the margins.

How times have changed!

Tayler's article was all about Russia spiraling into an abyss of organised crime and political authoritarianism (without ever acknowledging the true sources of this decline). So I was very curious to find a very similar article in yesterday's Boston Globe, an editorial entitled “Murder Incorporated in Russia”.

Except this time, the article about Russia as “a Mafia petrostate crouching behind a Potemkin democracy” featued a comments section, with 7 comments, each of them containing eerie Slavic grammatical idiosyncrasies.

For example, “Egorsha” writes:

Funny that you refer to Litvinenko case where the British, not Russian authorities simply refused to cooperate with the Russian investigation, refused to hold trial in Russia and instead absolutely impudently DEMANDED to change Russian Constitution prohibiting extradiction of Russian citizens.

Here is “1000119″:

The article is political manipulation on a murder. Well, what do you feel when children, young people kill other pupils and students in U.S. schools and universities? How can this country be called? I’m simply wondering..

and “Ragozzi”:

I’m not saying that human rights are crap in general, but I think that too much freedom is bad. It is the cause of degradation, demoralization and decadence. It's happening in America and I wouldn't want to see that in Russia. State controlled economics and politics is the only right way for Russia.

And last but not least, “Strukov”:

Who is the Boston Globe to judge anyone. The fact is that the media should report the facts, not try to sway public opinion with their biased version. You need only look at how the so called “free press” is in the tank for Obama. If Col. Budanov were a black guy on death row in Pennsylvania for killing a cop in Philly, the Globe would be leading the parade to get him out. I hope Russia gives America and Europe the big finger as much as possible.

These comments are very reminiscent of similar recent “pro-Russian” threads on The Guardian's articles about the Litvinenko case, and all feature the same hallmarks: virulent pro-Russia jingoism packaged in mostly-fluent right-wing and anti-West diatribes.

I should be happy to finally see “the Russian side” getting a voice in the Western media, finally doing what I longed to do in 2001, but the tone and content of it all make me a little queasy. I’m not saying that some sort of KGB ‘psy-ops’ team is trawling the internet for rebuttal opportunities, but maybe it is.

Whoever they are, the commenters are doing much more harm than good, and it is part of a trend. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Kremlin is not interested in true understanding with the west: why else would they have closed down the Exile, a paper consistently, compassionately and critically bringing the Russian side of the story as a powerful antidote to the Taylerian drivel in the Western press, a paper that has been the biggest ally of the ordinary Russian and the biggest critic of spineless US academic ‘Kremlinology’?

There are plenty of well-reasoned and compelling arguments with which to discredit the Western narratives about the new Russia, yet inexplicably, the very people engaged with that have been replaced with the likes of ‘Ragozzi’: authoritarian bullies who serve only to validate those flawed stereotypes.

Instead of an intelligent debate that could finally achieve understanding between Russia and the west, we seem to have leapt from the frying pan of Western journalistic malpractice into the fire of Russian state propaganda.

Russia fugitive and international dissident Mark Ames has written an inspired first hand account of the media's coverage of the Russia-Georgia war. His searing tale of Western media incompetence during the conflict has been published both in his zine Exiledonline and The Nation.

Required holiday reading!