STILL BEARING DOWN ON US?

As Russians choose a president, Anne McElvoy finds

the West's Russia experts divided as to what to do about that country —just as they were before 1917

TWO YEARS ago, when I was a corre- spondent in Moscow, a Russian journalist came to the office and asked to read our British and American newspapers. He was researching an article about impressions of his homeland abroad. After a day's read- ing, he emerged irritated and perplexed. 'I can't see how your readers know what to think about us,' he said. 'One day it's all "Yeltsin's the people's choice — great guy, man of the people." The next it's "Yeltsin's a drunk and on his way out." One writer says that the Russian bear is preparing to roar again, another says we can't even run the factories, let alone win a war.'

As the Russian presidential elec- tion approaches, and Western stockpiles of prediction grow, my acquaintance would find even more support for his conviction that we are deeply bewildered about Russia. Mr Yeltsin's autoc- racy, demonstrated by his steely hold on the mass media. in the approach to next month's vote, coupled with the clumsy war waged against Chechnya have paralysed the outright optimism which accompanied the demise of the Soviet Union. The approach of Western governments to Moscow today is governed by a mere truism — that while the incumbent's democracy and foreign policy is far from perfect, we must beware of provoking a turn for the worse. In other words, we don't know much about Russia, but we know what we don't like.

My Moscow acquaintance rightly dis- cerned the fundamental confusion in our view of what sort of power Russia is, whether she poses a potential threat to us, and in the light of this what our policies towards her should be. Russia has always exceeded our imaginative grasp. We still stand before her in the awe E.J. Dillon observed when, in The Eclipse of Russia (1918), he launched his haughty account of the slide into Revolution and the West's misunderstandings of it, with the words:

Of all Slav peoples, the Russian is by far the most complex and puzzling. He often raises expectations which a supernatural entity could hardly fulfil and awakens apprehen- sions which only a miracle could lay ... I have often seen political measures adopted which were bound to defeat the objects for which they were planned.

The West's analysis of Russia, before the Revolution of 1917 and after the collapse of the communist state it produced in 1991, can be divided into two distinct strands. The first holds that she is innately an expansionist power and as such demands containment. Such was the view of the Times of 1829: 'When during the last 1,000 years have such enormous acquisitions been made in so brief a period by any European conqueror . . . There is no sane mind in Europe that can look with satisfac- tion at the immense and rapid overgrowth of Russian power.' In the same period, Lord Durham, writing to Palmerston in 1826, believed that 'the power of Russia has been greatly exaggerated. There is not one element of her strength which is not balanced by a corresponding. . . weakness. In fact, her power is solely of a defensive kind.'

The Edinburgh Review of 25 years later, however, was more sanguine, despite the advent of war. 'On the eve of the Crimean war, the government of Russia interposed a thick veil between her and the rest of Europe, leaving the latter to ruminate over her vast yet unknown resources, till at length everyone is affected by a panic fear [sic] for which there is absolutely no reason whatsoever.'

Between 1881 (when the honest, labori- ous Tsar Alexander III succeeded his mur- dered reformist father) and 1905, the year of the first failed Revolution, Russia turned in on herself and renounced the European power game, a state of affairs welcomed by Bismarck who predicted rather too hastily that 'Russia has nothing to do in the West; she only contracts Nihilism and other diseases. Her mission is Asia; there she stands for civilisation.' Bismarck felt that directing Russia towards Asia would benefit the West, because it would draw off Russia's expan- sionary energies in an easterly direction. Today, we can no longer hope for such a simple solution. The prospect of a Sino-Russian rapprochement causes queasiness. The difference, of course, is nucle- ar. Expansions need no longer be territorial to alarm us. A strategic alliance between Peking and Moscow today would give every reason for anxiety because of the shift in balance of power it entails, even if the Russian army stayed firmly in its barracks.

A common assumption is that our cur- rent bewilderment is the result of commu- nism's abrupt ending and the ensuing chaos of transition. But the clarity which the Cold War afforded us about Russia was the exception, not the rule. The striking thing about our various reactions to Russia now is that we have had them all before in the last century, when we first started to con- sider her as an expansionist power (and thus as a foreign policy problem) rather than as a distant realm of exotic cruelties and luxuries — the 'strange and wonderful discovery' which Sir Richard Chancellor chronicled on his journey to Muscovy in 1553.

Tocqueville famously offered the first outright judgment of her as a potential superpower when he wrote of the United States and Russia in his Democracy in America in 1835: 'Each of them seems to be marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe', while the Marquis de Custine in his Russia in 1839 found in St Petersburg's grandiose architecture 'tin trophee eleve par les Russ- es a leur puissance a venir'.

But what form would the 'power to come' take and what was the West's correct response to it? De Tocqueville is often falsely quoted as having predicted the Rus- sian-American clash of the Cold War, which he did not. Nowhere else in his writ- ings did he suggest that the will of heaven dictated that Russia would come into con- flict with the United States. That notion that it was a threat to Western Europe was popularised by Palmerston. As Kingsley Martin writes in his volume The Triumph of Lord Palmerston, the run-up to the Crim- ean war was accompanied by the conscious formation of a public image of Russia as cruel and aggressive: 'The forces of bar- barism were led by the Tsar and his Scythi- an hordes,' writes Martin, 'the forces of civilisation by Palmerston and the troops of Turkey, England and France.'

Robert Thompson, Professor of Govern- ment at the University of South Carolina, has just produced an absorbing paper which compares the formation of the Palmerstonian policy towards Russia with Secretary of State Dean Acheson's selling to the Senate of what would become known as the 'Truman doctrine' of contain- ment after 1945. 'The language of Palmer- ston reminded me immediately of Ronald Reagan and his Evil Empire,' Professor Thompson says. He defines a dichotomy which seems to be lasting in our perception of Russia — that she is at once strong and weak, and that the West seeks to define its own aims and identity at any given time with reference to those perceived strengths and weaknesses. 'As portrayed to the British public,' he notes, 'Russia possessed unlimited aims of conquest, but fortunately was weak enough to be stopped.' Even before the nuclear age, then, the notion of Russia as 'Upper Volta with rockets' was embedded in the Western mind.

The Cold War made the task of judging Russia much easier. Because she was embedded in the Soviet Union, whose mili- tary might and repressive ideology could be seen to pose a direct threat to Western val- ues, we were able to derive our policy towards Moscow from a clear moral stance. This was the zenith of Woodrow Wilson's theory of foreign policy. America and its allies represented 'the universal dominion of right' and its role was to transform international politics rather than merely respond to the flow of developments. The Soviet Union's expansion into Eastern Europe after 1945 and the revelation of Stalin's crimes gave added force to this view. The foreign policy of the United States was thus fundamentally aimed at transforming the Soviet Union as well as containing it. As in the Palmerstonian era, the great powers of Britain and America respectively in the mid-19th and the mid- 20th century saw their purpose not merely as maximising their own security, but as a crusade for the values of liberal capitalism. The expression of this intersection of secu- rity and moral interests was Nato and the accompanying commitment to nuclear armament.

But the recently published memoirs of the great diplomat and Russia-watcher George Kennan make clear how fragile the coalition of American 'moralists' and 'con- tainers' was.

The West, he argues, had no justification for the wasteful and dangerous build-up of weapons. Russia, in Kennan's view, was already effectively contained during the early stages of the Cold War. 'I see the weapons race', he wrote in the mid-1980s, it's Friday night and damn it, I can't decide what to wear.' 'as a serious threat in its own right, not because of the aggressive intentions of either side, but because of the compulsions, the suspicions, the anxieties, such a compe- tition engenders.' For the same reasons, he concludes today that the planned expan- sion of Nato into Eastern Europe is a mis- take, one of those measures which Dillon — shaking his head at the short-sighted- ness of over-heated politicians — would have dismissed as 'bound to defeat the objects for which they were planned'.

How similar the Russia we know today is to her pre-1917 self is the most important question of the moment for Russia-watch- ers because the answer to it automatically determines our basic responses to her.

Because, as Professor Thompson says, we adapted our 19th-century view of Rus- sia qua expansionist power to fit the Soviet Union, the collapse of that entity deprived us not only of a worthy and potent foe, but of a wider historical intellectual framework within which to make judgments. Only the most determinedly naive commentators would regard Mr Yeltsin's Russia as essen- tially the same as the USSR of the General Secretaries. Having translated our Palmer- stonian view pretty much directly into an Achesonian one during the Cold War, it is hard for the West to muster an intellectual coalition to support a third containment theory — this time directed at a nominally democratic and peaceful Russia. Hence the unspoken desire of many American right- wingers and 'Cold War liberals' for a com- munist return to the Kremlin. That would certainly make our choices a lot simpler.

In the absence of such a development, we tend to give post-communist (so far, that is) Russia the benefit of the doubt. We are unsure whether to be grateful for small mercies, or to judge her by the normal standards of civilised democracies. Robert Service, Professor of Russian Government at London University, thinks that the West has made the same mistake repeatedly in backing individual leaders rather than a process of democratisation. 'In some ways, our standards are not high enough when it comes to judging Russia,' he says. 'We choose a leader and back him with some vague idea that he is better than the alter- natives. And if — as in Yeltsin's case — he does not come up to all our expectations, we make excuses for him and continue to support him until the next likely figure comes along.' Professor Service also notes that Western terminology about Russia is far more imprecise than in our analysis of other major cultures. 'The word hardliner shifts its meaning all the time, which makes it a useless tool,' he says. 'Is Gennady Zyuganov [the Communist candidate for the presidency] more or less hardline than Mikhail Gorbachev, for instance? We talk of the danger of Russian nationalism. But so-called "nationalist" politicians like Vladimir Zhirinovslcy pursue aims which would aggrandise Russia without benefiting her economically and which Russians show no sign of desiring. We probably mean "chauvinist" or "expansionist": But then it is not clear whether Russia is an expansionist (as in imperial) power in the usual sense of the word. It presided over two great extensions of influence in the mid-19th century and after the second world war, but has not proved adept at administering or preserving empires. The casual sacrifice of the Crimea to Ukraine by Khrushchev and the spontaneous quit- ting of Eastern Europe after 1991 suggest that she lacks the will to hold onto territo- ries gained in recent times by conquest. 'Russians', adds Professor Service, 'are obsessed by Russia. The West tends to imagine that their horizons are a lot wider than they actually are.'

The picture, of course, is different and the risks higher in the Caucasus and the Baltics, which many Russians do consider to be part of their immediate horizon (hence the telling phrase 'near abroad' used to describe the regions of the former USSR, as opposed to the 'far abroad' beyond that). Nowhere is the present con- fusion about Russia's nature and the West's uncomprehending view of it better evinced than in President Clinton's latest gaffe. On his summit visit to Moscow, aimed at buoying up Mr Yeltsin before the vote, he compared the Russian leader with Abraham Lincoln, equating Russia's war to subdue the Chechens with the battle against slavery. White House aides were horrified at both the ahistoricism and the outright callousness of' the remark, which undermined the official US position of sup- porting Russia's right to regain control over Chechnya, while holding strong reser- vations about the wanton brutality of the campaign. For a President uninterested in foreign affairs, however, the matter must have seemed simple. His advisers had told him to come to this God-forsaken land and support President Yeltsin. He had simply absorbed the subliminal message of the West's shift from absolute hostility to the Soviet Union to overnight affinity with Mr Yeltsin's Russia.

The muddle over Russia's probable development, intentions and dangers bedevils the debate about Nato expansion. Previous Left-Right splits over the purpose and conduct of Nato have given way to far more nuanced arguments about the pros and cons of enlargement. A growing num- ber of former senior diplomats oppose expanding the Alliance initially into the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and pos- sible Slovenia. Their influence is slowing down attempts by the Foreign Office (which is heavily in favour of the expan- sion) to secure it on the planned timetable of a first wave of new entrants early next year. John Killick, an ambassador to Moscow in the Brezhnev years, wrote to the Times earlier this month warning that expansion would needlessly anger Moscow, weaken the Alliance's ability to form con- sensus and leave the current members hostage to the behaviour of new ones. 'I devoutly hope', he concludes, 'that it may yet be possible to change course even at the cost of appearing to climb down in the face of Russian pressure.'

Sir Roderic Braithwaite, ambassador under President Gorbachev, also believes that the move is more likely to provoke trouble than to contain it. 'We are in the post-Cold War world now, with Russia on its back. But what will happen if she rises again? The worst thing would be for us to expand Nato so that it buckled under its own weight. And there is no point in the West giving security guarantees it has no real intention of keeping.' Robert Con- quest, the historian who revealed the full extent of Stalin's terror to the Western reader, agrees: 'The mistake is to confuse Nato with a democratic alliance. It is not that. It is a military alliance against a com- mon enemy. And that common enemy is potentially Russia. If we did not think that Russia could be expansionist, we would not be having this debate. As long as Russia remains unpredictable and has nuclear weapons, that is the way things will remain.'

The only abiding certainty is that Russia will continue to confound all of us — reserving special embarrassments for the grandest Western analysts. Take Elihu Root, the United States ambassador extraordinary to Moscow in 1917. In March of that year, he wrote of his 'satisfaction and joy upon the establishment of a free government in Russia . . . the new govern- ment will be impregnable.' In June, he praised the country as 'one mighty, striving democracy' which 'can not be indifferent to the ideals of liberty'. By the end of that year, he had fled the Bolsheviks and the Civil War back to America, where he wrote bitterly, 'If their character is unequal to the task [of freedom], all the aid of the great countries cannot give them their freedom . . . the law has lost its sanction. It died with the Czar.'

Nearly eight decades later, Strobe Tal- bott, Root's successor in the post of special ambassador, was afflicted by the same reckless optimism. The list of possible sce- narios he drew up at the beginning of last year for developments in Moscow did not even mention a Communist candidate as a potential challenger to Mr Yeltsin in this year's elections, let alone predict that with just over two weeks to go to the vote, Mr Zyuganov would still be ahead in the more credible opinion polls.

But the most demoralising comment on Russia's tendency to cast off oppression, only to embrace it yet again in altered form, comes, of course, from a Russian. Viktor Chernomyrdin, Mr Yeltsin's dour Prime Minister, was once asked how he felt about the country's progress since the col- lapse of the Soviet Union. 'We wanted it to be different,' he replied, gloomily. 'But it turned out just the same.'