The New Russia

Stephen Cohen’s collection of essays, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia, reminds me of this fact. I say “me” because Cohen names me and others the naive cheerleaders for the revolution. Cohen’s book is an extended “I told you so” to those romantics like myself who believed the revolution that destroyed the Soviet Union was going to succeed. By republishing the essays and opinion pieces he wrote as the revolution unfolded, Cohen proves that he has the right on many issues to say, “I told you so.” On many issues, however, he does not. And on a whole host of others, it is too early to judge.

In the first section of his book, Cohen takes aim at the scholarly community, which he ridicules as a herd of “transitionologists” who do not understand the real Russia. In the second section, he seeks to interpret the Russian developments of the 1990s. And in the third section, he proposes a new approach for America’s policy toward Russia.

In his first mission, Cohen fails completely, and in his third mission he proves a hopeless romantic — which is curious, given how often he has declared his loathing for “romantics.” Cohen’s second mission, however, is intriguing, for it offers a way to have a serious, constructive debate about the nature of the Russian revolution not unlike a similar debate that Cohen joined about the Bolshevik revolution decades ago.

Cohen’s denunciation of scholarship about Russia fails primarily because he does not seem to know that scholarship. Indeed, judging from his citations, the best guess would be that he has never actually read the academic literature he so derides. Most scholars in the profession reject the “transitions” thesis Cohen despises, and we lack any dominant paradigm to unite or polarize the field today. That kind of scholarly discussion — totalitarianism versus its critics — ended when the Soviet Union collapsed. The one methodological division that does sometimes consume the new generation of scholars, rational-choice theory, gets no attention from Cohen at all.

Cohen’s objection to “Russia-watching without Russia” (the title of a chapter in which he argues that no one in the field really studies Russian language, culture, or history) is equally outdated. Most young scholars I know have spent years learning the Russian language and have traveled more widely within Russia than ever before. In fact, what is liberating about the new generation of scholars is that the tired, old debates — area studies versus comparativism, history versus theory — are not central anymore.

But Cohen is not really interested in the scholarship on Russia, though he needs the straw man of mistaken scholars to make his thesis run. That thesis, the point of Failed Crusade, is that the United States’ policy toward Russia in the 1990s has been “the worst American foreign policy disaster since Vietnam.” In Cohen’s view, post-Communist Russia is a mess, and America is partly to blame. The problem, in Cohen’s view, is that Russia is a unique country with its own history, culture, and orientation, and it could thus never become a facsimile of the West. The missionary crusade to transform Russia into the United States was more than naive; it damaged Russia, and it ruined U.S.-Russian relations. In Cohen’s view, the evil “reformers,” who hijacked Gorbachev’s successful evolutionary reforms, never had any support in Russia because the Russians knew the economic and political practices of the United States were ill-suited for their own country.

It’s certainly true that the kind of capitalism and democracy now in place in Russia is not what we missionaries advocated when we traveled to Russia in the wake of the revolution. But were we wrong to try? Were the Russians wrong? Was there an alternative?

These are open questions. But the question of whether the Russians themselves desired change is closed: They may not have wanted the change they got, but change they wanted with all their hearts. Surveys I conducted with Timothy Colton last spring found a different Russia than the one described in Cohen’s book. In our nationwide polls, 85.7 percent of Russian respondents said it was important to elect the country’s leaders, 79.4 percent said it was important to have a free press, and 69.4 percent said it was important to have freedom of religion. When asked “Do you support the idea of democracy?” 62.9 percent said yes; only 18.6 percent said no.

Cohen’s claim that by the spring of 2000 the Russian people “favored ‘order’ over democratic practices” is equally dubious. When asked in our poll, “How should order be brought about in Russia?” only 15.2 percent answered “at all costs” while an amazing 51.3 percent responded “without violating rights.” When asked, “Are you prepared to support a state of emergency to bring about order?” a very high number, 31 percent, answered yes, but the majority, 52.4 percent, answered no. When asked, “Should the army rule the country?” 70.5 percent responded that this was a fairly bad or very bad way to rule.

The Russia of Cohen’s narrative sounds like a hapless colony conquered by armed neoliberals and muscular democrats from the West. In fact, we missionary Americans could only engage in our zealotry if we had invitations from our Russian counterparts. What Cohen really dislikes is the choice of Russian partners and the policy objectives of the Clinton administration. Cohen is fully prepared to sanction domestic interference in Russia as long as it is his kind of aid, to his people, for his purposes.

Regarding those purposes, Cohen is clear: Stability is the paramount goal to which all other objectives must be sacrificed. He calls for a massive inflow of American money given directly to the Russian state (and not civil society) to pay Russian pensions and increase the wages of nuclear technicians. Echoing the chorus of Jeffrey Sachs, Anders Aslund, and Richard Nixon a decade ago, Cohen believes no price is too high — not even, he seems to say, $ 500 billion.

Of course, by advocating this mission underwritten from abroad, Cohen undermines the logic of his book. America would make this investment in the hope that it changes Russia in some way. Cohen’s Russia, it turns out, is not so struck in history and culture that it cannot change with the proper bribe to the proper people.

Then, too, one must ask, where is the new hero who will save modern Russia? In 1992, Cohen pointed to the former vice president Aleksandr Rutskoi. (Cohen might be surprised to learn that some of us American and German missionaries for democracy also took a chance on this horse and provided assistance programs for Rutskoi’s party.) Yet, just a year later, Rutskoi’s party had abandoned him as too reckless.

Is Grigory Yavlinsky the one we should have backed? Cohen rightly praises this leader of Russia’s democratic opposition. (He also might be surprised to know that we democracy missionaries shared Cohen’s hopes and devoted more technical assistance per capita to Yavlinsky’s Yabloko party in the 1990s than to any other political party in Russia.)

But even with more support, could Yavlinsky have saved Russia from the evil 1990s? Doubtful. Cohen’s latest candidate — the Russian state under Vladimir Putin — seems like a poor next bet. After devoting an entire book to telling the reader the Russian state is corrupt and criminal, Cohen ends by advocating more money to this same Russian state.

Most supporters of the revolution against Soviet communism would not challenge Cohen’s list of the ills in Russia today. But a question remains: Were these ills caused necessarily by the revolution’s success, or did they come from a perversion of the revolution’s original goals?

This question is reminiscent of the debate that structured Soviet historiography for decades: Were Stalin and Stalinism the inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik revolution, or was Stalin’s rise a departure from the “real” trajectory and aspirations of the Bolshevik revolution? This is a debate Cohen knows well, since his seminal book on the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin made the case that Stalinism was not inevitable and a better outcome from the Bolshevik revolution was possible.

The same question needs to be asked about contemporary Russia. And the problem is that we still do not know what time it is in Russia’s second revolution. As Cohen wrote in 1992, “If Russia becomes a predominantly democratic state with a flourishing market economy coexisting benignly with the former Soviet republics, historians may conclude that Gorbachev was the twentieth century’s greatest leader, having launched the transformation of its largest country. But if Russia plunges into a new despotism, with a rapacious state economy and imperialism, he is likely to be viewed as another tragic leader in Russia’s long history of failed reforms.” Unfortunately for Gorbachev and Yeltsin and the rest of Russia’s revolutionaries of the 1990s, it is still too early to know which of these places history has reserved for them.

Michael McFaul is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an assistant professor at Stanford University.