The National Interest
Fall 2001

Realism about Russia

by William E. Odom

 

. . . Russia is no longer a great power and is unlikely again to become one over the next several decades. Treating it like one is neither in Russia’s interests nor the West’s. It increases Moscow’s incentives for restoring a repressive regime, for abolishing the modest gains Russians have made in human rights, and for squandering resources on mischief-making in the international arena. Those Western enthusiasts for continuing to treat Russia as a great power are harming the very Russian citizens they claim to admire and desire to help. Ten years of Western policies based on that assumption, among others, have now disillusioned a large part of the otherwise pro-Western Russian intelligentsia. Well-meant financial largess is now widely seen as a CIA-directed scheme to weaken Russia. Creating a special arrangement for Moscow with NATO has given the Russian defense ministry one more lever for pumping up anti-American popular sentiment.

Many Russian scholars, journalists, and intellectuals clearly see the perversity of the present situation. The human rights activist, Sergei Kovalev, has explained how Putin successfully misled the Russian intelligentsia to support the war against the Chechens, a war that Elena Bonner has called "de facto genocide." Mincing no words about the policies of the present Russian regime, she sounded like her famous husband, Andrei Sakharov, condemning the Brezhnev regime in the 1970s. Grigorii Yavlinskii, one of the few liberal politicians who survives in the present parliament, describes Russia’s regime as a "pretend democracy" and warns that it is an illusion to believe, as some Russians do, that the West will not allow a return to dictatorship in Russia or its continued economic and social decline. Putin’s de facto censorship policies, however, are slowly reducing the number of Russian leaders who speak candidly on political issues. Anyone in the West truly wanting to know "what is reality" in Russia could do worse than listen to such voices—while they last. . . .