Blaming Russia First

Pity the unpopular Russians. In July, Mexico elects its first president from outside the country's ruling party; The Economist magazine labels it a "real democracy." Russia elects a president from the political opposition in 1991, then holds no fewer than five competitive, generally free, national elections in the following years; The Economist calls it a "phony democracy." Colombia has a problem with organized crime, and Washington gives its government $1.3 billion to help fight the drug lords. Russia also has a problem with organized crime, and American politicians sternly lecture Moscow not to expect any more aid until it cleans up its act. An undercover U.S. operation finds several Mexican banks laundering drug money in the United States, and Washington apologizes to the Mexicans for conducting sting operations on their territory. An American bank allegedly launders money for Russian organized criminals, and a leading senator accuses the Russian government of being "the world's most virulent kleptocracy." When the Asian crisis scares investors away from the Brazilian market and the real collapses, commentators declare it a bump in the road. When the Asian crisis scares foreign investors away from the Russian market and the ruble collapses, commentators declare the crash proof of the failure of liberal economic reform in Russia.

That many Russians these days see a double standard in Western opinion toward their country is perhaps not altogether surprising. As readers of the Western press know, there are no businessmen in Russia, only mafiosi; no democrats, only corrupt politicians; no citizens, only an impoverished, nationalistic mass. Members of the emerging Russian middle class are often discouraged to learn, upon picking up Western papers, that they do not yet exist.

It has not always been this way. As Stephen Cohen points out in his new book, the Western press was overwhelmingly supportive of Boris Yeltsin and his attempts at reform in the early 1990s. But around 1998, a sea change occurred. Without acknowledging any change of position, Western editorials switched from a guarded optimism about Russia's reforms to a withering condemnation of all associated with them. The scales fell from the editorialists' eyes.

Political and economic developments in Russia in recent years have certainly been disappointing. It is fashionable to point this out. But the current gloom about Russia is as overdone as was the optimism of the early 1990s. The obstacles blocking full democracy and well-functioning markets have always been extremely forbidding -- but never unsurmountable. Successes have always mixed with failures, the good with the bad. Perhaps Western opinion will eventually come to recognize this, but at the moment the frustrations of the naive optimists are joining up with the schadenfreude of the confirmed pessimists to produce a public discourse on Russia that is dyspeptic, often hypocritical, and almost completely lacking in comparative perspective. These three recent books, in different ways and to different degrees, illustrate this inadequacy.

A NEOCLASSICAL CRUSADE

What the optimists and the pessimists have in common is the hunger for a villain -- the urge to cast the story of Russia in the 1990s as a simple morality tale of good and evil, promise and betrayal. They tend to differ in whom they cast in the role of villain, but the structure of their arguments is similar. Cohen, a professor of Russian studies and history at New York University, has been a confirmed pessimist since before it became fashionable. His analysis of Russia in the 1990s is simple and (since he repeats it continually throughout his new book) easy to follow. The Soviet Union in 1991, he argues, was a successfully reforming state. Most of the essential social and economic institutions "were still intact." This functioning system was destroyed by an American political crusade to transform postcommunist Russia into a "replica of America." The "missionaries and evangelists" in this crusade were so-called economic "advisers," usually from Harvard or the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This invasion by Western crusaders preaching "tight-fisted monetarism" resulted in the impoverishment of the Russian population, a drastic fall in life expectancy, and the "demodernization of a twentieth-century country." By letting Jeffrey Sachs and others of his ilk "swarm" across the Russian plains, Cohen charges, the Clinton administration has done more damage to U.S. interests than did the war in Vietnam.

Some readers may enjoy this book's dramatic language and unabashed Old Testament wrath. But as an account of Russia in the 1990s, the argument has, to say the least, more than a few holes. The oddest of all is Cohen's suggestion that the Soviet Union in late 1991 was a well-functioning, reforming state. To anyone who spent time in Russia that year, this claim is completely surreal. By autumn, even privileged Muscovites were standing in line for hours to buy bread. The elite stores, as Chrystia Freeland tells us in her book, had little to offer their nomenklatura clientele other than bags of millet. Only four months' worth of grain reserves remained, and fear of famine that winter was widespread. Before Yeltsin's reformers even touched the controls, Soviet industrial output had fallen by 17 percent in 1991 alone. Even before price liberalization, inflation in Russia in 1991 was more than 160 percent. Russia's general government deficit (including import subsidies and extrabudgetary funds) was almost one-third of GDP. The central planning and supply system had been decimated by Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, and enterprise directors were stripping assets with abandon through the semiprivate cooperatives that Gorbachev had legalized.