How
Russiagate has impacted a vital struggle in Russia.
For
decades, Russia’s self-described “liberals” and “democrats” have touted the American
political system as one their country should emulate. They have had abundant encouragement in this
aspiration over the years from legions of American crusaders, who in the 1990s
launched a large-scale, deeply intrusive, and ill-destined campaign to
transform post-Communist Russia into a replica of American “democratic capitalism.” (See my bookFailed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia.) Some Russian liberals
even favored NATO’s eastward expansion when it began in the late 1990s on the
grounds that it would bring democratic values closer to Russia and protect
their own political fortunes at home.
Their many
opponents on Russia’s political spectrum, self-described “patriotic nationalists,” have insisted that
the country must look instead to its own historical traditions for its future
development and, still more, that American democracy was not a system to be so
uncritically emulated. Not infrequently, they characterize Russia’s democrats as “fifth columnists” whose primary loyalties are
to the West, not their own country. Understandably, it is
a highly fraught political debate and both sides have supporters in high
places, from the Kremlin and other government offices to military and security
agencies, as well as devout media outlets.
In
this regard, Russiagate allegations in the United States, which have grown from
vague suspicions of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 presidential election to flat assertions that
Putin’s Kremlin put Donald Trump in the White House,have seriously undermined
Russian democrats and bolstered the arguments of their “patriotic” opponents. Americans, who
may have been misled by their own media into thinking that Russia today is a
heavily censored “autocracy” in which all information is controlled by the Kremlin, may be
surprised to learn that many Russians, especially among the educated classes
but not only, are well-informed about the Russiagate story and follow it with
great interest. They get reasonably reliable information from Russian news
broadcasts and TV talk shows; from direct cable and satellite access to Western
broadcasts, including CNN; from translation sites that daily render scores of
Western print news reports and commentaries into Russian (inosmi.ru being the most voluminous); and from the
largely uncensored Internet.
How
many Russians believe that the Kremlin actually put Trump in the White House is
less clear. Widespread skepticism is often expressed sardonically:
“If Putin can put his man in the White House, why can’t he put a
mayor in my town who will have the garbage picked up?”
Others, who
believe the allegation, often take some pleasure, or schadenfreude, from it,
having grown resentful of US “meddling” in Russian political life for so many years. (In recent
history, the remembered example is the Clinton administration’s very
substantial efforts on behalf of President Boris Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996.)
But what should interest us is how
Russiagate allegations have tarnished America’s democratic reputation in Russia
and thereby undermined the pro-American arguments of Russia’s liberal
democrats, who were never a very potent political or electoral force
and whose fortunes have already declined in recent years. Consider the
following:
·
Russian democrats argue that their country’s elections are
manipulated and unfair, including, but not only, those that put and kept
Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. “Patriotic
nationalists” now reply that Russiagate rests on the allegation,
widely reported and believed in the United States, that an American
presidential election was successfully manipulated on behalf of the desired
candidate and that the entire US electoral system may be vulnerable to
manipulation.
·
Russian democrats protest that oligarchic and other money has
corrupted Russian politics. Their opponents argue that special counsel Robert
Mueller’s convictions and other indictments - in the cases of Paul
Manafort and Michael Cohen, for example -prove that American political
life is no less corrupt financially.
·
Going back to Soviet times and continuing today, a major complaint of Russian democrats
has been the shadowy, malevolent role played by intelligence agencies,
particularly the KGB and its successor organization.
Patriotic nationalists point to disclosures that their US institutional
counterparts, the CIA and FBI, played a secretive and major role in the origins
of Russiagate allegations against Trump as a presidential candidate and since
his inauguration.
·
Russian democratic dissidents have long protested, and been
stifled by, varying degrees of official censorship.Their Russian opponents
argue that campaigns now underway in the United States against “Russian disinformation” in the
media are a form of American censorship.
·
Many Russians distrust their media, particularly “mainstream” state media. Their opponents retort that
American mainstream media is no better, having undertaken a kind of “war” against President Trump and
along the way having had to retract dozens of widely circulated stories. In
this connection, we may wonder what Russian skeptics made of an astonishingly
revealing statement by the media critic of The New York Times - an
authoritative newspaper in Russia as well - on January 21 that the “ultimate prize” for leading
American journalists is having “helped
bring down a president.” By now, Americans may not be shocked by
such a repudiation by the Times of
its own professed mission and standards, but for Russian journalists, who have
long looked to the paper as a model, the reaction was likely profound disillusionment.
·
Putin’s Russian democratic critics often protest his “imperial” foreign policies, so
imagine how they interpreted this imperial statement by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen on
January 15: “Nations, like children, crave
predictability. They need to know the rules. The United States is like a
parent. Other countries look to it for guidance and to enforce the rules. Trump
has utterly failed in that regard.” Any Russian with a medium-range memory is
unlikely to miss this echo of the Soviet Union’s attitude toward the “children” it ruled. And yet, a columnist for The Washington Post - also an authoritative newspaper in
Russia - emphasizes Trump’s failure to “enforce the [imperial] rules” as a Russiagate indictment.
·
Perhaps most Russians who are informed about Russiagate believe
that all the various allegations against Trump are actually motivated by US
elite opposition to his campaign promise to “cooperate
with Russia.” This
means, as Russia’s “patriotic
nationalists”
have always argued, that Washington will never accept Russia as an equal great
power in world affairs, no matter who rules Russia or how
(whether Communist or anti-Communist, as is Putin). To this, Russia’s liberal
democrats have yet to find a compelling answer.
One
Russian, however, who personifies biographically both that system’s recent
democratic experiences and its nationalist traditions, has had a mostly
unambiguous reaction to Russiagate. Despite US mainstream-media claims that
Russian President Putin is “happy” with the “destabilization and chaos” caused by Russiagate in the United
States, such consequences are incompatible with what has been Putin’s
historical mission since coming to power almost 20 years ago: to rebuild Russia
socially and economically after its post-Soviet collapse in the 1990s, and to
achieve this through modernizing partnerships with democratic nations -
from Europe to the United States - in a stable international environment.
For this reason, Putin himself is unlikely to have plotted Russiagate or to
have taken any real satisfaction from its woeful consequences.
Which leaves us with an as-yet-unanswerable
question. Eventually, Trump and Putin will
leave office. But the consequences of Russiagate, both in America and in
Russia, will not depart with them. What
will be the subsequent, longer-term consequences for both countries and for
relations between them? From today’s perspective, nothing good.
