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Yesterday senior GOP House leaders released a 209-page report
entitled "Russia's Road to Corruption." Focussing on Clinton's policy toward
post-Soviet Russia, it gives failing marks to Vice President Al Gore,
who played a major role in U.S.-Russia policy since 1993.
The report states that Clinton's Russia policy has been a disaster.
According to the report: "To find a foreign policy failure of comparable
TRENDING: Greatest Show on Earth: The Hur report hearing
scope and significance, it would be necessary to imagine that after
eight years of American effort and billions of dollars of Marshall Plan aid,
public opinion in Western Europe had become solidly anti-American, and Western
European governments were vigorously collaborating in a 'strategic
partnership' directed against the United States."
The Marshall Plan, also known as the "European Recovery Program," was
intended to relieve Europe's post-war distress. It succeeded beautifully
in consolidating a close and lasting relationship between the U.S. and many
European countries. A similar attempt during the 1990s to relieve
distress in Russia, however, has backfired. Despite billions in U.S. aid, the
average Russian is worse off than before and the Russian government has chosen
communist China as its chief global partner.
According to State Department surveys, 70 percent of the Russian
people
had a good impression of the United States when Clinton entered office.
As of February 1999, only 37 percent of Russians view the U.S. favorably.
In other words, the post-Soviet program of democratization and market
privatization has resulted in hardships for the Russian people. Quite
naturally, millions of Russians now think that Marxism-Leninism was
correct when it alleged that capitalism is a system of exploitation.
And this shift in Russian opinion is no accident. It didn't just
happen.
A very sophisticated organization worked very hard to guarantee this
outcome. After all, how could Russia be worse off after receiving
billions in aid? Even if all the Western money was stolen or misappropriated, how could filching Western money make life harder in Russia?
One has to remember that Lenin wrote about something called
"imperialism," in which the arrival of Western money into a country
serves to conquer and subjugate that country. Therefore, "former"
Russian communists have created a myth about Western money -- that it
has been used to subvert and corrupt the Russian system, and that this
Western money was used to facilitate the theft of billions from the
Russian people themselves (as if the Russian people had billions in the
first place).
Looking at how Clinton and Gore gave U.S. money to the wrong people
in Russia, the House Republican report imagines there would have been
another way to distribute Western largesse. The House Republicans have
not fathomed the basic insincerity of the changes in Russia. They have
not realized that "no good deed goes unpunished" where Russia is
concerned. To blame Clinton and Gore, who played into the hands of
Russia's old communist hierarchy is fair, but one must point out that
the Republicans are guilty of this same offense by claiming that
broadened contacts in Russia, and the promotion of "private sector
solutions" will solve Russia's corruption and economic stagnation
problems.
The sad fact is, the privatization in Russia has been a fake job from
the start. Last February I listened to a panel of American business people
with extensive experience in Russia. They described a country in which there
were no provisions for respecting contracts and no property rights.
How can you have genuine privatization without a legal system that
protects contracts or real property rights?
Here we must be honest. The old communist apparatus merely created
private companies, placing their own creatures in charge of these
ostensibly free market institutions. But the whole thing was a sham from the start.
And that is why blaming America for sucking the entrails out of Russia
is wrong -- especially because Western businessmen have lost far more,
overall, than they've gained by investing in Russia.
So why do many Russians believe the West has penetrated them, and
ripped them off? (With Clinton and Gore at the forefront?)
Because communist propaganda must win out in Russia, and Clinton and
Gore have facilitated this propaganda.
A solid 25 to 30 percent of Russians never had a favorable view of
America to begin with. This is the core communist constituency in
Russia. As it happened, communism did not die. It shape-shifted, as it often
does. And as any survey of Russian opinion will show, Marxism-Leninism
remained alive within a quarter of the Russian electorate -- the same
quarter that consistently elects the communists to the Duma.
It should be noted that a quarter to a third of a country's
population can easily determine that country's political direction. It seldom
requires an absolute majority to hold power. Look at the American Revolution. It
has been alleged that a third of Americans were for the Revolution, a
third were neutral and a third were against. If that impressionistic
rendering is
accurate, the fact that a quarter of Russia remains communist while
another 20 percent are willing to support communist measures for nationalistic
reasons, reveals the real political landscape of Russia.
As Joan Barth Urban and Valerii D. Solovei point out in a scholarly
analysis of Russian politics entitled "Russia's Communists at the
Crossroads," the communists continued to remain organized and
influential in post Soviet Russia. In fact, they controlled the
government ministries, the parliament, the provinces and they largely
control the former Soviet
republics of the "near abroad."
Under these circumstances any aid from the United States to Russia is
totally and completely inappropriate, because the communists who control
the country will not allow this aid to help the Russian people. They
will not allow this money to build a genuinely good life for Russia,
because that would undermine their core beliefs.
Public support for communist ideas in Russia was constantly
stimulated by a subtle propaganda in the 1990s. As democracy was extended, the
standard of living fell. As a bogus form of capitalism was adopted,
corruption and crime was shown to increase. The "former" communist
officials who still controlled everything were the last people who
wanted to see U.S. aid or free market measures succeed. In fact, the
unspoken rule of modern Russia holds that it would be shameful if money
were taken from the West and people's lives improved. This, indeed,
would be the real disaster as perceived by Russia's actual governing
class.
The House Republicans, in failing to understand this, are just as
damned as Clinton and Gore. Their call for the incoming administration to
correct the misapplication of aid is itself misconceived. Any aid to Russia,
however well intentioned, will be misused on the Russia side because the
communists were never purged from power. A "Soviet person" -- president
Vladimir Putin -- sits in the Kremlin. He rules in collaboration with a
communist-dominated Duma.
Do the House Republicans understand what a communist is, and how
difficult it is to purge one's consciousness of dearly held ideological
preconceptions?
The idea that on Christmas Day, 1991, the world's communists gave up
their ideas because the West had won, fair and square -- should be set
aside, once and for all.
Not one cent should go to Russia until there is genuine repentance,
among the rulers, for the wickedness of communism.