Steven Lee Myers has a feature-length piece (link probably will not work) in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine about the campaign-like activities of the two main candidates to succeed VVP, called, appropriately enough, Post-Putin. A friend of mine who has Times Select emailed me the article, and I've had the chance to read it. It's thoroughly reported - from the quasi-hustings with Dima and Seryoga - and although the overall picture of "operation successor" is not too positive, there is this nugget:
Putin’s greatest legacy would be a smooth succession of power, still a rare occurrence in a country with the violent, authoritarian past that Russia has. History might ultimately judge him as Russia’s George Washington, the man who did not let the possibility of retaining personal power overrule a young country’s laws and democratic principles.
All of this thinking about Russia and the NYT magazine reminded me, I thought, of a time many years ago, when I was a foolish and naive grad student [
Ed.: sort of like now?
LA: shhh!] and the "Who Lost Russia?" debate was raging in the aftermath of the financial crisis of August 1998. For some reason, I had emblazoned in my memory an image of a NYT Mag cover with the headline, "Who Lost Russia?" However, I searched the
NYT archives for the phrase, and didn't find anything that matched up exactly (but the second sentence
here tells me I have a better memory than the NYT website).
The phrase headlined this
book review by Robert Kaplan from October of 2000, which looked at a couple of the books that came out around the time the "WLR" debate was taking place, but I don't think that's what I was remembering - my memory could be mixing up the NYT pull-out Book Review section with the Magazine, but the date isn't right. There was also a piece in the NYT Mag in August 1999 titled "
The Russian Devolution," which the NYT website summarizes as follows:
Article by John Lloyd on decline of Russia in years following collapse of Communism; cites host of reasons cited by West as to cause of decline, noting that it is becoming one of most charged foreign-policy debates in the United States; says in Russia, charge is that New Russian reformers, abetted by the West, have destroyed country's economy while enriching themselves; traces West's involvement in Russian reform; says Russia has suffered from West's mistakes and preconceptions but ultimately will make its own accommodations; says Russia was never ours to lose and that Russia lost the trust in itself that makes societies civil and functioning
Although that easily qualifies for densest
paragraph sentence I've seen all week - shoehorning a decade of failed policies into less than 10 lines - for insightfulness in retrospect, it's got nothing on the correction that appears underneath it on the
page containing the article's archived link:
Correction: August 15, 1999, Sunday The article beginning on page 34 of The Times Magazine today, about Russia's troubles since the end of Communist rule, contains outdated references to Prime Minister Sergei V. Stepashin in some copies. On Monday, after the printing of the magazine had begun, President Boris N. Yeltsin replaced Mr. Stephasin with Vladimir V. Putin.
History in the making.
Unsatisfied with the results of my NYT archive search, I expanded my horizon to
Google, found
a NY Review of Books article from April 2000 headlined "Who Lost Russia?" by George Soros, and thought for a moment that this may have been the cover piece that stuck in my memory.
More interesting were some of the other results that came up. Who would have guessed that it was (apparently) Pat Buchanan who first used the phrase in a
headline for a column in February of 1998? Buchanan seemed to have a crystal ball set for six-month and nine-year windows, or maybe it's just that the more things change in US-Russian relations, the more they stay the same:
Today, Yeltsin blusters that U.S. strikes on Iraq could ignite a "world war," as Moscow's defense minister berates William Cohen. Russia ships missile technology to Tehran, sides with Saddam in the Persian Gulf, and establishes a "strategic partnership" with China. The rise of anti-Americanism in Russia is a strategic disaster that may yet lead to an open breach, financial collapse and Yeltsin's replacement by an anti-Western nationalist. For this state of affairs, however, Russians alone are not culpable. Much of the blame rests with a haughty U.S. foreign-policy elite that has done its level best to rub Russia's nose in its Cold War defeat -- as it thumped its chest and trumpeted America's claim to be the "world's only superpower." [...]
Given the present balance of power, Russia can only seethe and plot with our enemies behind our back, as we hand out NATO membership cards to nations lately in her sphere of influence or even part of her empire. But the present balance will not forever endure. [...]
Americans might ask themselves: Why at the peak of our global pre-eminence do we seem so universally resented? Is it perhaps because the Old Republic is behaving like an arrogant empire?
Buchanan liked the headline so much that he used it again, for a
May 2003 item blasting the finger-wagging style of "those twin protectors and proctors of global democracy, Joe Lieberman and John McCain."
A
Salon.com headline asked the WLR question on Sept. 1, 1998, and the eXile - still in its heyday - first wrote in its
press review about "a thing people are calling the 'Who Lost Russia?' piece," listing the key elements of such an article, and then
answered the question in a typically absurd but funny way. Although the phrase stuck around for years, by the fall of 1999, James Baker was already giving a talk at the Kennan Institute on "
Moving Past 'Who Lost Russia?'" But of course those directly involved in the events of the early-to-mid-'90's could perhaps be expected to want to avoid too much debate on the subject.
The phrase did have legs, though - Joseph Stiglitz used it for the title of
a chapter of his 2002 book, Globalization and its Discontents. And the debate may have at least one lasting lesson. In 1999, Michael McFaul
wrote that "
The 'who lost Russia' debate reveals more about US electoral politics than it does about Russian realities." This may be something to keep in mind as 2007 already begins to seem like 2008, although perhaps the American electorate at large is even less concerned with Russia now than it was 10 years ago.Back in the late '90's, the debate knew no ideological boundaries: a
headline in Socialism Today posed the question yet again in October 1998; and the Heritage Foundation held a
lecture hoping to answer the question in early 1999, featuring, predictably, James Woolsey, Cap Weinberger, and of course Ariel Cohen. AEI's Leon Aron took up the question in a 1999 article in the Weekly Standard (somewhat incongruously
reprinted on the website of PBS program Frontline), the first paragraph of which mentions the elusive 1998 NYT Mag cover story that started me on this trip down memory lane.
Now that the trip has come full circle, and my desire to discuss an overused phrase has run its course, I'd like to return to Myers's article, which made me think back to 1998 in a different way, at least when I read this portion:
Ivanov has never expressed the desire to be president — neither in public nor, as far as anyone who knows will tell, in private. Neither has Dmitri A. Medvedev, the other first deputy prime minister and the other presumed-to-be-leading candidate. Nor have Valentina I. Matviyenko, the energetic governor of St. Petersburg; Vladimir I. Yakunin, another former K.G.B. agent who heads the state-owned Russian Railways; Sergei S. Sobyanin, a former governor and the president’s chief of staff; Dmitri N. Kozak, the presidential envoy to the turbulent Caucasus; Boris V. Gryzlov, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament; Sergei M. Mironov, the chairman of the upper house; or Sergei V. Chemizov, director of the state arms-marketing monopoly who served as an intelligence officer with Putin in East Germany.
All have been mentioned as possible successors to Putin, not because they have said anything or even distinguished themselves in any particular way but because they are close to Putin.
What made me think back was the utter flatness of all the candidates mentioned here. Medvedev and Ivanov get enough air time for everyone to see they are bland. Mironov, Gryzlov and Matviyenko, who are kept in the running only in case Putin decides he
really wants to control things from behind-the-scenes after 2008, are total hacks. Yakunin and Sobyanin don't seem to have the necessary name recognition, although the same could have been said of Putin in 1999, and the 2008 "election" is still a long way off - anyway, I don't know much about either of them, much less about Rosoboroneksport's Chemezov, although I feel OK about the latter since even the NYT appears to have misspelled his name (old-school source
FBIS has some outdated dope, though).
Kozak is an interesting candidate, and may be the dark-horse with the best chance if one of the front-runners stumbles, but I'll forever associate him with the unsuccessful Russian bid to settle the Transnistria conflict in a way that would have allowed the Russians to influence Moldovan policy in perpetuity. The deal, almost but not quite signed, was immortalized in a document known as the
Kozak Memorandum, since he was managing the Russian side of the negotiations. All of which may actually be a plus for Kozak's standing the Russian voter, if that even really matters.
Anyway, my point was about the past, not the future. Remember the Russian political scene in 1998-1999? Well, I do. It turned out that we were all fooling ourselves, but a lot of Russia-watchers seemed to think that people like
Boris Nemtsov,
Yuri Luzhkov, and
Aleksandr Lebed' had a chance to reach the Kremlin, and the development of political parties was studied in the West with genuine interest and a sincere belief that it was happening. The internet was a new source of material, the website compromat.ru had just come online, and in general I recall a feeling of wide-open-ness, though perhaps that was my youthful naivete.
Regardless of what might have happened to Russia if any of those three (or the others who were in the mix at the time) had become President, the sense was that there was a possibility for an electoral contest. Although there are a number of oversimplifications in this sentence, in the end, Yeltsin, because of his move naming Putin acting president just months before the 2000 election, may be remembered as both the midwife of Russian democracy and its executioner.
I was reminded of this seemingly long-lost era - the late '90's - not only by my "Who Lost Russia?" reverie; a few days ago, a book arrived that I had ordered from Amazon: a 1998
biography of General Lebed' by sometime British politician
Harold Elletson (which I ordered in fact just to add to my collection of Lebed'-abilia, but ostensibly for a paper I'm working on about Transnistria, the place that made Lebed' a household name and that first gave him an international stage for his quotable antics).
As such books often do, this one has a section of photographs in the middle. The last page of photos has one of a grinning Lebed' with his wife, and below it one photo each of Nemtsov and Luzhkov, captioned "Possible rivals in the next race for the presidency. The enthusiastic free-marketeer Boris Nemtsov...and Yuri Luzhkov, whose dynamic management style has transformed Moscow." Lebed', sadly, was dead and buried years ago - can the same now be said of democracy in Russia?
Perhaps I just miss the carnival aspect of the Russian political scene of the late Yeltsin era; after all, it's nearly impossible to argue that the average Russian is not better off today than he was seven or eight years ago. But it does seem a shame that we're back to clocking air time on the news on state-run TV to get an idea of who will be the next leader of Russia.
Read More...
Summary only...
Near Soroca, Moldova, Aug. 4, 2006.
