The Tsars and the Bolsheviks

The next time someone asks rhetorically, “How could things possibly get worse?” consider the unfortunate history of the Russians after their revolution, as recounted by a knowledgable commenter over at Takimag:

First, we should consider the possibility that responsibility for the crimes of Communism can be traced to a Russian penchant for oppression.  However, the tsarist regime of terror against which the Bolsheviks fought pales in comparison with the horrors committed by the Bolsheviks when they took power.  The tsar allowed political prisoners to face a meaningful justice system.  The counsel for the defendant could represent his client up to the time of indictment and even beyond, and he could also appeal to national and international public opinion, an option unavailable under Communist regimes.  Prisoners and convicts benefited from a set of rules governing the prisons, and the system of imprisonment and deportation was relatively lenient.  Those who were deported could take their families, read and write as they pleased, go hunting and fishing, and talk about their “misfortune” with their companions.  Lenin and Stalin had firsthand experience of this.  Even the events described by Fyodor Dostoevsky in Memoirs from the House of the Dead, which had a great impact when it was published, seem tame by comparison with the horrors of Communism.  True, riots and insurrections were brutally crushed by the ancien regime.  However, from 1825 to 1917 the total number of people sentenced to death in Russia for their political beliefs or activities was 6,360, of whom only 3,932 were executed.  This number can be subdivided chronologically into 191 for the years 1825-1905 and 3,741 for 1906-1910.  These figures were surpassed by the Bolsheviks in March 1918 after they had been in power for only four months.  It follows that tsarist repression was not in the same league as Communist dictatorship.

We should always ask how broadly does a regime define its enemies.  If it is specific plotters and agitators, then the class of people treated badly (and treated so badly as to constitute injustice) is modest.  Most people have neither the time nor the courage to resist the established powers.  If the enemy is Kulaks, property owners, capitalists, and “enemies of the people,” then millions are in the crosshairs of power, as we witnessed under the Bolsheviks.

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Everybody Loves a Parade

It’s bad enough that the United States criticizes Russia’s elections, the methods it uses against Islamic extremists in Chechnya, and the peaceful sharing of power between Putin and his successor Medvedev, but now certain voices in the government are implying that there’s something wrong with Russia’s celebration of its victory over Nazi Germany by having a military parade. Consider the context: this was the worst, most bloody war in world history, and the Russians bore the brunt of that bloodshed, losing some 23 million people, including 11 million civilians. Further, even with the various horrors of life under the Soviet Union, the Soviet state was powerful and taken seriously on the world scene until 1989. People held down by Soviet reality could take some pride in the nation’s collective power, particularly as private life improved during the Gorbachev era. In the 1990s, under a decade of weak leadership by President Yeltsin, the Russia military went into a state of disrepair, and the Russian state became a laughing stock–a land of prostitutes, fraudsters, selfish oligarchs, military weakness, disappearing pensions, and poverty.

Today life in Russia is good, the military is strong, the economy is improving, and birth-rates are rising. In other words, life is better after Putin’s rule than before, and the nation–full of patriotic people who have always held the military in high esteem–enjoys seeing the military on display, replete with sophisticated weaponry in a state of good repair, operated by troops in a state of discipline and good order.

Interpreting this as “saber-rattling” is a typical misreading of reality by folks schooled in the high theory of foreign policy structural realism. Structural realism takes little account of a nation’s domestic life. It postulates that all states everywhere are aiming for maximum power; it does not matter if a nation is a democracy or dictatorship, nor does it matter that it has ideological and cultural attachments and predispositions. Labeling oversimplified models with fancy names does not make them any more useful; unfortunately, this kind of “crib sheet” thinking is common among Bush’s neoconservative advisers, who studied under the high priests of foreign policy structural realism at the University of Chicago.

There’s a simple truth that too much education can obscure from observers: people like a good parade, particularly when it honors a nation’s military that defeated the Nazis against great odds and after great losses. Americans, who have many criticisms of their own government, have a similarly positive view of the military as the most effective and least self-interested government institution. To look at a parade as an international affairs provocation is a typical misreading of events, though not a surprising one, considering our government’s misunderstanding of the Iraqi people, the nature of the Kosovo terrorist state, and the likely outcome of democracy in the Palestinian Authority.

The prominent display of Soviet symbols does deserve mention. What does it mean? One thing it does not mean is that Soviet-style communism, aggression, and human rights violations are making a comeback. There is no doubt that Putin and Medvedev have rejected Soviet-style control over the economy and the civil society of the Russian people. Private businesses and religious life are enjoying a renaissance. The Russian solution is not the same balancing act of liberty and order as we enjoy in the United States, but neither is that of France, Germany, and the UK, all of whom routinely prosecute conservatives for trumped up charges of “racist” speech. Putin’s positive display of Soviet symbols is part of a broader attempt at national reconciliation.  Putin, to his credit, has embraced the type of solution to national strife employed by de Gaulle after WWII and northern Americans after Reconstruction. That is, he emphasizes those honorable parts of the Soviet past, particularly the strength of its military against the Nazis, while simply setting aside the moral meaning of state control of the economy, the suppression of Russian nationalism, and other evils. This narrative is analogous to the universal recognition of the honor and bravery of the Confederate soldier in America from, say, 1876-1960. In other words, Putin knows that it’s simply too much to ask a man to piss on his father’s grave and for a nation to declare one third or more of its people criminals.  Pride, order, patriotism, and normalcy are paramount, even at the expense of historical accuracy. He’s sought to synthesize the symbols of the pre-revolutionary Russian nation, Soviet military power, and the universal desire for peace and prosperity in the public life and symbology of the new Russia.

Much of modern foreign policy concerns itself with criticizing other nations’ internal affairs, even as diplomats and analysts are steeped in a theory that studiously avoids serious understanding of the character of the world’s peoples and their domestic politics.

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McCain’s Hatred for Russia

McCain’s mind works as follows: all situations are divided between good and evil. No one is simply mistaken, confused, immature, unwise, or, perhaps, correct in a way that McCain cannot yet perceive.  Though it’s become a bad word, there is such a thing as nuance, and it’s particularly valuable when we’re talking about relations with a large country that we’re not at war with that happens to have thousands of nuclear weapons. McCain seems to think that doubling down on the aggressive policy in the Middle East is good and brave and heroic, so he’s seeking expensive and risky confrontations with China and Russia halfway around the globe, even as he shies away from securing our own frontiers with nearby Mexico.  The latter is prosaic and humdrum, while crusades for democracy in the Caucuses, well, that’s the stuff history is made of.  (Unfortunately, that history will be entitled the Decline and Fall of America.)

McCain has the following in mind:

President George W. Bush said in 2001 that he had looked Russian leader Vladimir Putin in the eye and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Senator John McCain says he looked into Putin’s eyes “and saw three letters: KGB.”

McCain, 71, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, favors expelling Russia from the Group of Eight club of industrial powers. He calls for forging a “League of Democracies” to confront Putin and hand-picked successor Dmitry Medvedev, who takes over tomorrow, on Russian threats against former Soviet republics and rollbacks of domestic freedoms.

The candidate’s approach to Russia signals that he has aligned himself with hard-line foreign-policy advisers who favor democracy promotion above all and rejects advocates of doing business with authoritarian regimes when it suits U.S. interests.

This election should be treated as a referendum on open borders with Mexico and a policy of quasi-war with Russia. As bad as Clinton and Obama are, neither of them is so uncompromisingly single-minded and ideological about these two very stupid passions of John McCain.

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Four Years Ago Today: Kosovo’s Kristallnacht

Four years ago I wrote about the largest anti-Serb mass violence in Kosovo since the 1999 war. Today, an independent Kosovo stands as a testament to the rewards of violence–this reward is particularly galling as it occurred under an umbrella of western protection that was supposed to prevent the Albanians from abusing their newfound power as the majority. Indeed, the Albanians have been rewarded well; neither treaties nor concerns for the West’s reputation as an honest broker have done anything to slow them down.

Kosovo will prove to be a stillborn state, dependent on western protection, perpetually poor, crime-ridden, and a subordinate arm of Albania proper. Our unlawful recognition of Kosovo has created unnecessary friction with Russia and China and, like all our efforts to appease the Islamic world, has resulted in little or none of the promised good will. After all, 9/11 happened after US intervention on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia and in Kosovo. But we keep on trying! To admit a major civilizational difference and the utter irreconcilability of our interests and values would mean the unraveling of liberalism itself, which depends upon a cult of the Sacred Other.

During the 2004 attacks, National Review reported the following (quoted in my blog entry linked above):

A pogrom started in Europe this week, with one U.N. official being quoted as saying, “Kristallnacht is under way in Kosovo.” Serbs are being murdered and their 800-year-old churches are aflame. Much of the Christian heritage in Kosovo and Metohija is on fire and could be lost forever. By these deeds too many of Kosovo’s Albanians have shown that their rhetoric about “democracy” and “multiethnicity” is false, and demonstrates also that the international community’s acceptance of them has been naive.

How did this week’s events begin? Just as in the 1930s, a rumor became a fact and prearranged plans were put into action. Members of the victimized community (in this case, Serbian children) were accused of chasing four Albanian children into a river and causing the death of three of them. Hours later, the U.N. Mission–which is what passes for authority in Kosovo–issued a statement that the accusation against the Serbs was false, adding that the surviving Albanian child had told the U.N. that no Serbs had been involved in the drownings. Nevertheless, anti-Serb violence did not abate. And today Kosovo burns still.

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Putin’s Puppet, So-Called

Dmity Medvedev deserves a chance to rule.  He’s been frequently lambasted as Putin’s “puppet” by know-it-all westerners. But how much worse, how much of a puppet, would Hillary Clinton be?  Isn’t this the high water mark of hypocricy, particularly when this charge is uttered by Hillary herself?

Before his election, Medvedev was a successful lawyer, a law professor, and a participant in the liberal, reformist regime in St. Petersburg during the 1990s.  He ran the huge conglomerate Gazprom.  Then he served as Vladimir Putin’s deputy. Now they will share power differently, with Putin as prime minister. This is unique, but movement in and out of power is not necessarily the end of democracy (ask President and Supreme Court Justice Taft), and it surely is less of a threat than the hereditary duopoly of two mediocre and power-hungry families, as we have at home of late.

Hillary, by contrast, was a reasonably successful commercial lawyer, but in a po-dunk state; she managed to find herself in two major financial scandals (Whitewater and Cattle Futures); there is no doubt she was only elected in NY because of her name recognition and her husband’s fundraising ability.  She failed miserably in her managerial role trying to promote healthcare, and so far has shown little managerial competence in running her presidential campaign.  She has a very thin resume when it comes to executive functions, unlike Putin’s deputy. She has been a competent Senator, but the skills learned there do not translate very well into being President, which is probably why the last six Presidents came from a gubernatorial or VP background.

Hillary’s qualifications are dubious, but all too common in the age of democratic decadence; her First Lady status is something she shares in common with other lackluster, quasi-monarchical “presidents” such as Indira Gandhi (India), Corozon Aquino (Philippines), and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (Argentina).   None of these leaders was known for much more than nepotism and corruption.

Russia is not perfect . . . if the standard of perfection is democratic liberalism.  But neither then is China, South Africa, or Albania.  Yet they all get a pass. Russia is certainly in pretty good shape by any world historical standard.  It is much more liberal than it was during the dark days of Soviet Communism, when American intellectuals were talking about convergence and unilateral disarmament and “economic democracy.”  Finally, Russia would be a natural partner in the war against Radical Islam, if only American leaders and journalists would stop going out of our way to insult its leaders. 

American critics insult Russia, even as these same public intellectuals make apologies for useless thugs like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Amadinedjead, not to mention Castro.  Why? Pas d’ennemi a gauche!  Putin is perceived by elites in both parties as a “man of the right,” and thus none of his expressions of national pride and authority go uncriticized. 

He is a de Gaulle figure in his country’s history, restoring pride through competent leadership that is consciously mindful of the value of patriotic symbols.  His restoration of the role of the Orthodox Church in particular grates against liberals and atheist comopolitans.  But it is high time that America behaved, if not justly and fairly, at least sensibly towards Russia.  Mere self interest should correct our path and remind us that the only thing we’ve gotten from this campaign of defamation is highly priced oil and a Russia increasingly unified, once more, against American “imperialists.” 

Conservatives in particular should not fall into an outdated Russophobia, because, for us, any nation expressing its particular identity with pride and confidence is a natural friend, a friend against common enemies:  the leveling forces of globalism, unrestrained materialism, radical Islam, and nation-destroying mass immigration by Third Worlders.

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Kosovo Op-Ed Published in Orlando Sentinel

Below is a link to my Kosovo Op-Ed in the Orlando Sentinel.  The comments on the on-line version are surprisingly pro-Serb.  I guess people everywhere are fed up with wars being waged over half-baked abstractions like Democracy and Self-Determination. 

Here’s an excerpt:

No one believes that the Kosovar Albanians will act as tolerant stewards of a multicultural society. Since 1999, Kosovar extremists have destroyed Christian churches and monasteries and expelled thousands of Serbs in a campaign that one NATO commander described as “ethnic cleansing.”

History has not been kind to the Serbs. After World War II, the communist regime murdered Serbians en masse who fought against the Nazi invaders. In the 1990s, though all sides committed atrocities in the Balkans, Americans and Europeans singled out the Bosnian Serbs for condemnation. The hypocrisy reached its peak in 1995 when the West remained silent as well-armed Croatian forces expelled 200,000 Serbs from Bosnia’s Krajina region. Today in Kosovo, the holy land of the Serbs, the West has explicitly approved the nationalist aims of the Albanians by recognizing an independent Kosovo.

This is a bigger issue than Serbia. Once again, the United States has needlessly provoked Russia. In recent years, we’ve meddled in its Ukrainian neighbor’s elections and pushed NATO’S boundaries farther eastward. In 1999, a weak Russia could do little to support its Serbian ally. But today Vladimir Putin’s Russia is strong, and its patience with the West has worn thin.

We may soon find that we have insulted Russia one time too many.

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Kosovo Independence: Unlawful, Unwise, and Unjust

The inevitable denouement of the Kosovo War has come to pass:  Kosovo, a majority-Muslim province of Serbia, has declared independence. In the nearly ten years since the NATO war against Serbia, the raison d’etre of that war has faded away.  It’s become clear that self-serving claims of Serbian genocide against Albanians were false.  Milosovic is out of power.  Far from being victims of injustice, Kosovars have shown themselves to be as rough-and-tumble as any Balkan people and have driven out the remaining Serbs in a campaign of harassment and ethnic cleansing. 

Pathetically, all of this has been done under the noses of a large contingent of NATO occupation troops.  This episode threatens a real confrontation with Russia, whom the US has repeatedly insulted over the last decade on a variety of issues.  Russia promised it would initiate “secret plans” if Kosovo declared independence.  Our own elections suddenly got more interesting.  What would a future president Obama do if Russian and Serb forces retake Kosovo?  We know, of course, a President McCain would go to the mat for the high principle of “stability.”

This event should reveal an important fact.  America under Presidents Clinton and Bush have adopted a value-and-culture-neutral embrace of democracy as a guiding principle in foreign policy.  Retaining a certain older sense of realpolitik, they also both tried to discourage newly minted democratic states from acting rashly or against our own nation’s interests.  This push-back represents what you might call an unprincipled exception to the general endorsement of democracy.  But, since the very democratic principle is a procedure and not a substantive outcome, critics have no real leg to stand on when democratic nations do crazy things, such as electing Hamas in Palestine, endorsing Sharia in Iraq, or, in the case of Kosovo, making our lives more difficult by declaring independence.  In other words, you can’t control democratic client states, and you look foolish when you do so. 

The U.S. would lose all credibility if it recognized Kosovo’s sovereignty.  At the end of the 1999 War, the KLA and the former Yugoslavian State endorsed U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244 as the Kumanavo Treaty.  It says, explicitly, that the KLA was obliged to disarm (which it has not), and that the member states, “Reaffirm the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region . . . ” Kosovo’s declaration of independence represents an open violation of this term of the treaty.

The Kosovo War was one of the most shameful and short-sighted interventions in our nation’s history. The war was conducted on the basis of false intelligence and a complete lack of any U.S. interest in the subject other than the “blank check” principle of stability. It was all cost and no gain.  Contrary to utopian promises, it did not create goodwill among Muslims outside of Albania and Kosovo.  Instead, it insulted Russia and made them focus, once again, upon their traditional client state of Serbia.  Americans harmed the nation of Serbia, a Christian nation that has stood with the Western World in both world wars in support stretching back to the Turkish invasions of 1389.   NATO and American forces killed numerous Serbian civilians in an air campaign that had little regard for the principles of just war.  Specifically, President Clinton, hamstrung by an inordinate fear of American casualties, ordered high altitude bombings of urban areas that did not allow pilots to distinguish combatants from noncombatants. 

Now Americanss may face a major confrontation with Russia because our foreign policy in the Balkans is on auto-pilot.  We have only 7,000 troops in Kosovo.  We will have little leverage if Russia sends 50,000 troops by train into Belgrade.  We’ve put ourselves in an impossible situation, and now we may find our soldiers shedding blood to defend the unlawful and unjust Kosovar Declaration of Independence.

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Putin is The Man (of the Year)

I don’t share Romney’s view that the designation of Putin as Man of the Year is somehow “disgusting.”  Let’s consider what he’s done and where he’s brought Russia.

Russia was a mess in the Nineties.  Yeltsin was a drunk embarrassment.  The entire country was demoralized, broke, weak, and lacking in self-respect.  Ordinary Russians understandably wondered how they sunk so low so fast.  Self-certain American advisers foisted free-market reforms that rewarded the Communist elites, well connected black-marketeers, and these reforms unwittingly created the notorious oligarchs. 

Putin is, if nothing else, a strong leader.  His very physique exudes this quality, as does his KGB past.  He has restored pride in the country, dealt manfully with Islamic extremists in Russia and Chechnya, and reasserted Russia’s natural place in the world as a great power.  He is immensely popular with his people, even though some of his reforms have been less-than-democratic.  How can this be?  Why do Russians want him now to be Prime Minister?  The neoconservatives are confused.  This is because Russians are a bit different from us, but they’re also normal human beings, with normal individual and collective desires:  national strength, law and order, economic health, and contempt for get-rich-quick schemers.  They are more comfortable than most Westerners with a strong hand because this is what they’re used to, and they’ve suffered under the weak rule of Yeltsin, whose tenure as a leader never matched his heroic moment in front of the Russian White House in 1991.

Putin is unpopular with the West because too many Westerners naively thought that we could always have a Yeltsin, a weak bought-and-paid-for lackey who would never do much to get his country on its feet.  But there is a paradox.  A strong and economically healthy Russia is also a Russia less likely to do something desperate, like invade its neighbors or threaten to lob a nuclear missile over Washington D.C.  Russia would have been a natural partner in the war against Islamic terrorism, but Bush and his advisers’ commitment to democracy (i.e., the commitment to meddling in certain nations’ internal affairs) constantly burned this bridge.  Instead of remaining aloof from events in Chechnya–a war against al Qaeda on Russian territory–we pretended this conflict had no relationship to our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and proceeded to lecture the Russians on their conduct of the war.  Today Chechen snipers continue to harass our forces in these campaigns.  And Americans endure supercilious lectures from Europeans on every detail of our military operations.

Bush and Europe’s continued agitation of Russia–specifically by criticizing its internal affairs and through NATO’s military expansion into Russia’s backyard–is incredibly provocative and short-sighted.  Nothing seems crazier than our support for the now rotten Orange Revolution in Ukraine.  It is natural that Russia views its immediate neighbors as countries over whom it should have a certain amount of influence, just as America regards the Western Hemisphere as a natural sphere of influence. Can you imagine the justifiable outcry in America if Iran, Venezuela, or Russia tried to influence an election in Mexico? Yet we do so in Ukraine as if it were perfectly natural and unobjectionable.

Putin is no angel.  There’s no doubt his supporters, either with his formal or tacit consent, have cracked down on opposition parties and critics in the journalistic community.  These are not good things.  But there are worse things.  And they’re not really our business.  Russia gave birth to dozens of billionaires in the Nineties whose only claim to fame was shrewdness and access to foreign capital.  They undervalued the assets they managed for the Soviet State, bought them at artificially low prices at rigged auctions, and quickly traded their Communist Party cards for keys to Ferraris.  Millions were impoverished.  Private wealth did not trickle down, but was instead trucked off to New York and London.  It was a pathetic spectacle, in light of Russian soldiers in the Nineties selling their boots and gear in Red Square for spending money.  This wealth amassed when Russian girls were being tricked into working under slave conditions in whorehouses in Amsterdam and Tel Aviv.  It was notable how rich these guys were getting as 80 year old Russian women, whose pensions were wiped out by hair-brained economic reforms, sold cigarettes at the Metro stops to pay their rent.  This is not the Russia we or the Russians should want.

Putin is hated by Western elites because he represents a strong, nationalist Russia.  And lots of people–Germans, Americans, Poles, Jews–have a natural aversion to a strong Russia. After all, Russia’s record with internal minorities has been pretty abysmal, whether under the Tsars or the Soviets.  Its record in foreign policy has also been fairly aggressive, though many of its wars have a realist rationale.  But this is a different day; Russia has not indiscriminately cracked down on Jews, Gypsies, Tatars, Cossacks, or anyone else in Russia, other than on an individual level, such as in the prosecution of corrupt Yukos Chairman Mikhail Khodorkovsky or the crackdown on Chechen extremists.  There is a long road from normal majority rule by Russians to the oppression of minorities, but this distinction is lost on fair-weather democratizers.  For the average Westerner, Russia is seen, wrongly in my view, as an atavistic and uncivilized nation to be opposed at all costs.  This is not fair, and, more important, this is an unwise manner of characterizing a strong nation that will demand to be respected one way or another. 

Russia hopefully will find its voice in the world:  a voice that is European, Christian, proud of itself, its culture, and its highly educated people. Putin is impressive to me as a type of Burkean reformer in the manner of a Napoleon or De Gaulle. In other words, he is trying to forge a healthy national identity among a people whose identity has been permanently altered by an ideological revolution.  He has managed the transition from Communism by emphasizing that era’s patriotic aspects, technical achievements, and victory over the Nazis, while deemphasizing its concern for ideology and total state control of society.  At the same time, Putin has restored respect for the Old Russia, the Orthodox religion, the historical Russian identity, and the traditionally expansive authority of the Russian State.  America should encourage this development in a tone of mutual respect, rather than hectoring Russian leaders with abstractions like free markets and democracy, especially considering the recent history of such advice in the Nineties.

A true nationalist does not wish harm to other nations.  Patriotism is not a zero-sum game.  Nationalists and Patriots the world over recognize the corrupting influence of homogenization and globalization.  Whether in the guise of NATO, the EU, “democratization,” or short-sighted American interference with internal affairs, all of these are potentially a threat to national cultures and their distinctive peoples.  I want to see Russia evolve in a natural and independent direction.  I would like the same respect from them.  But how can I or any American ask for such respect when we view it as our role to be the Nanny State to the world, dispensing unwanted and often bad advice wrapped in veiled threats of retaliation.

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