Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  Among them, Putin’s project to cast Russia as a great power has heavily relied on good old-fashioned nationalism. No different from other varieties, which seek to create an imaginary community of “us” against “them,” the Russian version is also anchored on the perception of a past injustice. It’s no accident that after a decade of Russian flirtation with the West, the United States is again chief among villains. Moscow’s imagined rivalry with the world’s most powerful country not only encourages fond memories of Soviet might but also enables the Kremlin to punch above its weight on the world stage.

  Although some foreign policy experts maintain Putin genuinely wanted to ally with Washington following September 11—not least in order to justify the conflict in Chechnya as part of the global “war on terror”—anti-Americanism has been part and parcel of his stance from the beginning. In regular barrages, he has charged Washington with spreading violence and extremism around the world and with seeking to foment discontent in Russia in order to weaken and even dismember it, then steal its natural resources. He once compared American foreign policy to Nazi Germany’s, saying “new threats” in the world, “as during the Third Reich, contain the same contempt for human life and same claims of exceptionality and diktat in the world.” He also accused Washington of encouraging Georgia to attack its pro-Moscow breakaway region of South Ossetia, which purportedly prompted Russia’s invasion in 2008.

  Putin has made some of his accusations on Russia Today, the three-hundred-million-dollar-a-year English-language satellite channel founded in 2008 to broadcast the Kremlin’s views, often in the form of denunciations of American imperialism and greed and other supposed signs of Western decline. In a 2013 interview in which he publicly offered political asylum to Edward Snowden—the ex-CIA whistle-blower soon after granted temporary refuge in Russia—he went on to criticize the United States for being founded on the “ethnic cleansing” of its native population and for using the atomic bomb on Japan, which he insisted even Stalin wouldn’t have considered.

  Choosing George W. Bush’s scheme for a missile defense system as its main bugbear, the Kremlin objected most strongly to plans for stationing a radar system in the Czech Republic and ten missile interceptors in Poland, two former Soviet Bloc countries. Although Washington affirmed that the rankling installations were directed against Iran and North Korea, Moscow insisted their real purpose was to neutralize Russia’s nuclear weapons deterrent, its intercontinental ballistic missiles. Never mind that the ranges of American interceptors are too short to threaten Russia’s missiles during any time in flight and therefore pose no threat to Moscow’s nuclear deterrence. Or that experts ridiculed Bush’s plans to deploy untested radar technology. Putin threatened to retaliate by directing nuclear missiles at Europe. For the first time since the Cold War, he also resumed international bomber sorties on aging Soviet-era aircraft and sent naval ships to South America.

  For all Medvedev’s supposed liberalism, he picked up Putin’s mantle by greeting Barack Obama’s election victory in 2008 with a threat. As congratulations were pouring in from around the world, the then–Russian president labeled American policies “egotistical and dangerous” in a state of the nation speech delivered in front of top officials gathered in a massive Kremlin hall. Lashing out against the missile defense plans, Medvedev said Moscow would be forced to respond by stationing new missiles of its own near Poland, something even the Soviet Union had refrained from risking. The message—that any expectations that the new US administration would have an easier time dealing with the Kremlin were misguided—was the latest in a string of rants that moved Moscow’s relations with Washington back toward Cold War lows.

  Celebrations marking Victory in Europe Day have seemed to grow longer and larger—and the trumpeting of the USSR’s defeat of Nazi Germany as evidence of Russian greatness ever louder—every year since Putin’s ascendance, even after he revived the Soviet tradition of driving tanks and missiles across Red Square during the annual military parade. American children barely register the date, if at all, but their Russian counterparts are incessantly reminded of that supposedly central part of their national identity in a fashion very much in the mold of the constant Soviet advertising for one or another glorious anniversary of the Revolution. The practice of decorating car antennas and door handles with orange-and-black striped ribbons—called the St. George’s Ribbon, which adorns military medals—became widespread at roughly the same time.

  Although the Kremlin toned down its rhetoric after Obama canceled the missile-shield installation in the Czech Republic, it continued to threaten retaliation against the new scheme. Seeking to undermine the Kremlin’s so-called zero-sum view of foreign policy—the idea that a benefit for one side necessarily constitutes a loss for the other—the White House’s top Russia adviser, Michael McFaul, a Stanford professor appointed to the National Security Council, led an attempt to engage Russia with a nuanced “reset” program of cooperation on mutually beneficial issues. The realist approach facilitated the signing of a nuclear weapons treaty and a significant boosting of diplomatic ties on various bureaucratic levels. But after the scholar—who advocates democratization in Russia and other countries—was appointed ambassador to Russia in 2011, he was greeted in Moscow with a withering attack on state television that accused him of seeking to overthrow the government. Alluding to the Soviet use of secret sleeper agents, Putin chimed in by blaming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for orchestrating that year’s public protests against him. She set their tone, he said. “They heard the signal and started active work.”

  The government ordered the US Agency for International Development to shut down its Russia operations soon afterward for what the Kremlin characterized as meddling in its internal affairs. Some of Russia’s most active civil-society groups, which Putin once characterized as “Judases,” were among beneficiaries of the fifty million dollars that USAID distributed in Russia each year. They included Memorial and Golos, the vote-monitoring group whose thousands of volunteers played a central role in documenting the mass fraud during the parliamentary elections of 2011. A foreign ministry spokesman explained that the American funding had sought to “influence the political process, including elections at various levels, and civil society.” During the first parliamentary hearing on US human rights abuses since the Soviet collapse, lawmakers used the opportunity to lash out against the United States again by criticizing Americans for waterboarding, abusing children and issuing “anti-Russian propaganda.”

  Responding to criticism about such rhetoric, Putin said he regularly followed public opinion polls to ensure he understood the opinions of “not just the intelligentsia, which I respect, but also the native Russians.” Such nationalistic fantasy, which pits “us” true Russians against a group of malevolent “others”—a lumping together of intellectuals, opposition leaders and foreigners—is aimed at redirecting public anger over a government unable to address the country’s widespread poverty, corruption and mounting predictions of economic downturn because its overarching concern is with preserving Putin’s power.

  Not to be outdone, a new parliament convened in January of 2013 to propose a list of initiatives to curb foreign influences in Russia, an absurd surge of patriotism meant as a display of loyalty during increasingly repressive times. Having recently banned adoptions of children by Americans, legislators proposed a complete ban on all foreign adoptions, along with a requirement that Russian officials who have children studying abroad lose their posts if their offspring fail to return to Russia immediately afterward. Another initiative would have barred them from studying abroad at all. Other proposals included a bill to prevent foreigners, as well as Russians with dual citizenship, from criticizing the government on television and a bill forbidding officials to marry foreigners from countries outside the former USSR.8 No such measures were ultimately adopted.

  If legislators believed their zeal would protect them from the president’s mounting anti-Western campaign, however, they wer
e mistaken. After pledging that the country would “de-offshorize” its economy, Putin sent them a bill banning officials from holding bank accounts abroad and investing in foreign government debt. A provision outlawing the ownership of any property abroad was toned down to stipulate only that foreign assets be declared, an alarming prospect nevertheless for an elite whose ownership of foreign property is legion. “Managing a foreign property without a foreign bank account is hardly possible,” wrote a young opposition legislator named Ilya Ponomaryov. “But that’s the whole point of the new legislation: to turn more people into criminals.”9

  Alexei Navalny leaped at the opportunity by publicizing revelations that no less a figure than the head of the Duma’s ethics committee, a United Russia founder, had failed to declare apartments and other property in Miami Beach worth more than two million dollars. Although Vladimir Pekhtin initially dismissed the allegation as “unmerited,” he was soon forced to resign by colleagues who were worried that his denial would expose the party to a public backlash. The standing ovation in parliament he received on leaving no doubt reflected relief instead of the supposed restoration of respect for political morality for which he was lauded. That would have been premature. Another United Russia member deputy, a billionaire, soon also resigned, for “health reasons,” and Navalny continued helping expose other United Russia leaders—lawmakers, governors and others—as “liars and hypocrites” by publishing their patriotic-sounding public statements denouncing corruption and the West next to foreign property registration documents and Google Maps photos of their luxurious villas on the Riviera and other holiday destinations.

  No one could have seriously believed the party purges represented a real opposition victory, however. The applause for Pekhtin was closer to the standing ovations Stalin received from Communist Party leaders quaking in their boots. If Putin’s rule had been relatively benign for loyal members of the elite, it was now becoming dangerous even for them. The new campaign, which included a presidential decree ordering more than a million officials to declare their expenses as well as their income and assets, did much to reestablish the traditional threat of arbitrary punishment that had attained its most extreme form under the totalitarian dictator. However, the new version was much closer to the more predictable Brezhnev system, under which the Party kept some of its corruption in check by punishing those who stole too much. It gave Putin even more leverage over the globe-trotting elite while making a show of cracking down on their excesses and doing ever more to further his drive to isolate Russia from the West. Taken together, such recent actions have pushed the Putin system of rule toward fully formed maturity.

  In other quarters, the anti-Western feeling that has ebbed and flowed in Russia over centuries has diminished since foreign travel and uncensored Internet use made the West available to the Russian people for the first time ever. But while popular sentiments continue to be shaped and channeled from above, a wellspring of nationalism has risen from the grassroots, perhaps also for the first time in the country’s history—and it is complicating our understanding of its society. For example, a Pew Research Center poll conducted in 2012 reported that only 31 percent of respondents were satisfied with how democracy was working in Russia—an indication that more and more Russians recognize a gap between democratic values and their perception of Russian reality. Nevertheless, 72 percent of those same people said they held a favorable opinion of Putin. It’s probably no coincidence that 73 percent believed Russia deserves more respect in the world.

  The most intense hatred of Americans I’ve witnessed in Moscow had come a dozen years earlier, in the backlash to NATO’s bombing of Serbia. The desire for revenge it prompted was mixed with admiration, envy and feelings of rivalry that came partly from an older, collective sense of inferiority and shame for Russia’s backwardness and place in the world. To put it crudely, people’s first unfettered look at the outside world during the 1990s made them realize that mammoth reforms were required for genuine competition, and it activated an easy excuse for why they weren’t undertaken. It was a short jump from “we’re different” to “we’re better!”

  Within a few years, I began noticing fewer Russians at parties given by foreigners and fewer foreigners at Russian parties. By 2005, the trend was unmistakable. Although troubling, the de facto segregation lightened the atmosphere among fellow Americans by enabling us to speak more freely because things had become stickier in mixed company. Instead of being able to bemoan local and national problems with sympathetic Russian friends, I found myself watching my words for fear of appearing to insult their country.

  Even many young people, including those in their teens and twenties who were studying foreign languages and had traveled abroad, shared Putin’s near-xenophobic chauvinism. A visit to an eleventh-grade history class at one of Moscow’s most prestigious schools shortly after Obama’s election seemed typical in that way. A friendly, well-spoken student named Dima Osafkin condemned the United States for meddling in the affairs of other countries. “America has pursued anti-Russian policies in Georgia and other former Soviet countries on our border,” he told me without rancor. “That’s unfair, and we don’t like it.” A classmate named Danil Kuznetsov said Medvedev was right to threaten to deploy new missiles. “It wasn’t just tied to the American election. It was a smart move because the United States has been surrounding us with its own missile bases.”

  Widespread suspicion of the United States troubled Georgy Mirsky, a veteran foreign affairs specialist. Apart from the intelligentsia and urban middle classes, “our people are much more nationalistic, chauvinistic and antidemocratic than Putin himself,” he told me. “So the current regime is by no means the worst we could have.” Mirsky said that unlike the masses, however, Russia’s political elite—whose members continue to regularly travel to the United States, send their children to study in British and American universities and still keep their money in foreign bank accounts despite Putin’s anti-Western campaign—doesn’t hold store in its own propaganda.

  He believed the elite exploited popular anti-American feeling in order to blame the United States for Russia’s problems. “Who could be a better scapegoat?” he asked. If there was Marxism-Leninism under the Soviet Union, the eminent scholar concluded, “Russia’s ersatz ideology today is patriotism. And it’s interchangeable with anti-Americanism.”

  In the 1990s, reporters could call on any number of liberal Duma deputies for interviews. Even high-ranking officials of Yeltsin’s administration such as Boris Nemtsov and other young reformers were sometimes willing to shed light on how the government carried out its decisions. And while it was easy to dismiss their main opponents—the communists who controlled parliament—as retrograde obstructionists, even they could be enlightening. Although one of their leaders, a former Soviet prosecutor named Victor Ilyukhin—who led an effort to impeach Yeltsin on charges of genocide against Russians and helping to end communism—sometimes appeared to embody the party’s worst aspects, he spoke intelligently, with empathy for his electorate, and appeared to be trying to do the right thing by them in his own way.

  Putin’s rise caused almost instantaneous change. During the rare instances they agreed to engage, officials reverted to Soviet-like stoniness they sometimes leavened with saccharine, paternalistic manners. I resorted to gleaning scraps of information about attitudes among the great and good in government during lunches and other informal meetings with one or another of a small handful of low-and middle-level officials I knew. Otherwise, Moscow bureaucrats generally took their cues from the president, whom I once questioned during one of his annual news conferences, held in front of a thousand-plus journalists crammed into an aging Kremlin auditorium. I asked him to explain a recent rant of his about foreign countries he had accused of seeking to portray Russia as an enemy. “Do they include Washington and London?” I inquired. “Otherwise who specifically do you believe wants to damage Russia’s image?” Since I’d submitted a different question to his spokesman a w
eek in advance, Putin’s answer wasn’t entirely unprepared. Having been late to join the hours-long line to get into the auditorium, however, I found myself sitting on a distant balcony beside a powerful stage light that obscured the view of me from the stage below. Ignoring the frantic hand-waving of more visible reporters next to me, the moderator managed to pick me out.

  Putin adapted his answer with the menace he often reserves for foreign journalists. “There’s a dishonest attitude to the interpretation of events,” he lectured, glaring up in my direction. “That’s the work of Russia’s ill-wishers. If you write those kinds of things, you’re among their number.” Uncomfortable as it made me feel, I found his response instructive for appearing to confirm that the news conference had been choreographed to appear spontaneous while enabling Putin to control his responses.

  Although I found that and other aspects of reporting in Russia similar to what had been required under Soviet rule—for example, having to ignore loathsome officials’ anti-American barbs for the sake of opening doors for important interviews—nothing I experienced approached the games my father had to play to remain in good enough standing to be allowed to visit the USSR.

  Fiercely critical of the Communist Party authorities as he was, he never shared the common Western impression of the Soviet Union as little more than one big labor camp. The topics he covered, mostly involving people’s lives and thoughts beyond politics, enabled him to describe some of the “normal” and even positive aspects of life, from ballet to mushroom picking. Therefore he was taken aback and a little hurt when an especially plodding Soviet publication called Molodoi Kommunist (“young communist”) ran a scathing denunciation of him. Rashly deciding to complain, he visited the journal’s editorial office, where the staff had no idea what to make of him and his protest. Seemingly chastened, however, the editors asked him to return for lunch several days later, apparently to get rid of him before reporting the incident to higher authorities. At the lunch, which was typically grand for a semiofficial occasion, the friendly as well as apologetic editors suggested more mutual understanding could be achieved in a second, smaller meeting. Toward the middle of a third lunch, supposedly a heart-to-heart with a single man who hadn’t been present at the previous meals, it dawned on George that the man was no editor but a KGB officer.