Europe
Letter from the Editor
Potemkin Presidents
Russia is always on Americans’ minds. You might be old enough to remember Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the desk at a 1960 U.N. General Assembly meeting, vowing to bury the United States. If you’re young enough, images of the Clinton-Yeltsin era’s bear hugs and bonhomie frame your view of U.S.-Russian relations. Despite Americans’ much-ridiculed tendency to ignore the world beyond our borders, even the most parochial among us have a hard time discounting Russia.
The Cold War rivalry that defined postwar U.S. foreign policy also formed indelible images in the popular consciousness about the people and politics of the other superpower. The Soviet Union’s demise deflated our more hyperbolic perspectives on Russia’s strengths and the extent of its threat. But those myths were replaced by a new set of skewed images: valiant democrats joyfully embracing free markets.
In this revised scenario, Boris Yeltsin was a stalwart, if rarely sober, reformer, a friend of the United States and of Bill. The Clinton administration put its money where its foreign policy was in 1998, shoring up the collapsed Russian currency to insure Moscow’s progress toward American-style democracy. But the payoff, in the form of genuine political and economic reform, never materialized.
Instead of free markets, Russians got a prolonged economic and social free-fall. Kremlin cronies gobbled up as much of the country’s wealth as they could grab during the so-called privatization of the 1990s. The rest of the population struggled with a steadily declining living standard and a precipitously declining life expectancy. Corruption rather than the rule of law prevailed.
Political institutions fared no better. Russia’s current president, Vladimir V. Putin, came to power not through a genuinely democratic political process, but as Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, maneuvered into office as acting president, then elected after a campaign noteworthy for its manipulation of the public television channel ORT in the service of his candidacy. In this issue’s cover story, “The Putin Enigma,” Kremlin-watchers in the Russian press and around the world try to fathom Putin’s motives, agenda, and political cast.
On the eve of Yeltsin’s resignation, Putin posted his manifesto on the Russian Federation’s Web site. “Our future depends on combining the universal principles of the market economy and democracy with Russian realities,” he stated, and went on to outline a notion of “Russian renewal” in which the Russian people’s embrace of “supranational universal values—freedom of expression, freedom to travel abroad, and other fundamental political rights and liberties—must be measured against Russia’s traditional values.”
In Putin’s view, the power of the state is paramount among Russia’s traditional values, eclipsing the power of the people. And in his philosophy of a “dictatorship of law,” order trumps liberty. Putin has zealously put this doctrine to work, prosecuting print journalists and broadcast media magnates who happen to criticize his administration.
p Well before George W. Bush arrived at the White House, Putin had reset the thermostat on relations with the United States to cool. And he embarked on a campaign to reposition Russia as a great power. Putin has met as guest or host with dozens of world leaders, cementing or renewing ties with many of Russia’s Soviet-era allies, aiding former Soviet republics, and wooing skeptical Western heads of state.
It’s too soon to tell whether either bellicose bombast or personalized politics will mark the Putin-Bush era. Certainly, their initial signals to one another about military buildups and missile-defense systems evoke an uneasy sense of déjà vu. But more to the point, the profiles of the two presidents that fate, Boris Yeltsin, and the U.S. Supreme Court have conspired to place at the helm of our respective countries give prognosticators precious few leads to the future direction of U.S.-Russian relations. The enigmatic Putin and the untried W. serve as Rorschach tests for a watchful world’s hopes and anxieties.
