Stop Demonizing Russia

I know this is a stretch as a thought experiment, but bear with me.

Imagine that the Nazi party were somehow able to rise to power in Germany without relying on, or even incorporating, an anti-Semitic plank. (I know, I know, just imagine.) Imagine then the incredible wealth of Jewish brainpower and manpower that would have been available to the Germans, along with the great advantage of time, effort, and of course evil saved in eschewing genocide. It’s not preposterous to keep on imagining that a totalitarian German regime tolerant or even accepting of Jews would have secured its grip on Europe, developed the atomic bomb, made an uneasy peace with a strong America and a weak Russia, and persisted as a hulking, paranoid, but culturally sophisticated military powerhouse throughout the twentieth century.

It strikes me that we would look upon this regime with the sort of consternation now reserved for present-day Russia. It is easy to hate fascist Italy for its amateur hour, fascist Spain for being a theocracy,
and fascist Germany for the insane murderous loathing of Jews that (I would argue) brought it to ruin. What I’m driving at is that the world has never really seen a halfway competent and sane fascist state of any size or consequence. We have China, which is close, but criticism of China remains muted by the dazzling way in which the Chinese leadership has proven to the West and to many of its own subjects that political freedom is unnecessary to the gradual democratization of relatively spectacular wealth.

Contrast Russia — a country leaps and bounds more important to the security and prosperity of the West than China, one that the West itself pushed to the brink of survival through awful, if well-intended, trial-by- liberalization policies. We ought to be brimming over with thanks at the work Putin has done for Russia. You think this is bad? Try utter chaos on the frontier of the West, a vast, oil-rich expanse at the collision point of Chinese interests, Muslim expansion, and American fear. Russia may be more fascist than democratic, but the big question to ask ourselves is whether the alternative was worse. The answer is a firm yes.

So let’s please stop demonizing Russia. When we do, it all sounds so paradoxically whiny. Listen to this typical remark by Jonathan Dimbleby at the Daily Mail:

Putin boasts that since he came into office investment in the Russian economy has increased sevenfold (reaching $82.3 billion in 2007) and that the country’s GDP has risen by more than 70 per cent.

Over the same period, average real incomes have more than doubled. But they started from a very low base and they could have done far better.

I’m sorry, but boo hoo — when the alternative is state failure. I’m not interested in sweeping Russia’s many problems, manufactured and structural, under the rug. I am interested in putting things in perspective. Making an enemy of Russia will quite simply destroy America’s position in the world. If we lose Russia, as I have argued many times before, we lose the whole game. Meanwhile, we’re letting our emotions run away with us. There is a whiff of racism about the way we write off China’s profound inequalities as par for the course but rank Russia’s lesser miseries a crying outrage against white standards of living. Call it the soft bigotry of high expectations.

We accept from China a colossal trade imbalance, mass domestic beatings, an ever-more-comprehensive policy of foreign economic penetration in the third world, and a continually swelling and modernizing military. Yet we take one look at Russia’s aging armed forces, its fear of losing its neighbors to a military alliance born its enemy, and its struggle to recover internal sovereignty — and what do we see? The ghost of Hitler. This fatal vision, like Macbeth’s, will leave us fighting phantoms and friends alike. Russia may not yet be a friend. But if we ever want to escape the psychological legacy of both the Second World War and the Cold War — something our younger generations expect by instinct, and not instinct alone — we have got to wake up to the reality of Russia’s position in the 21st century.

In fact, that position is still extremely tenuous. A country can function durably for a long time even with high rates of poverty and low rates of education. It can’t when half the population is addicted to vodka and half is addicted to heroin. Rather than worrying about Russia’s unwillingness to become Switzerland, we should worry about Russia’s difficulty in maintain a healthy and stable population. Then again, these are the kinds of apolitical questions that are devilishly hard to mobilize in accordance with a shopworn and obsolete worldview born of the Great Society and the Cold War.

(Lolputin courtesy of Flickerer abej2004.)