THE INVISIBLE WARSTHE INVISIBLE WARS
Most European nations are largely populated by the ethnic groups that have been there for centuries. Despite decades of immigration that has increased with European Union expansion and the lowering of many borders, France is still full of Frenchmen and Germany of Germans. The borders of many Central and Eastern European countries were rearranged over and over by force throughout the twentieth century, and even though many groups were finally allowed to go their own ways to independence in the 1990s, there are still a few odd or controversial areas, though most are blessedly peaceful today.
For the most part, disputes are agreements to disagree between friendly neighbors or internal independence movements inside stable democratic nations where ethnic passions are argued in the press or taken nonviolently to the polls. Many Catalans in Spain and many Scots in the United Kingdom might disagree about just how satisfactory the arrangements are, of course, as would many Quebecois in Canada.
The United States is a very different thing. It’s a continent-spanning nation built from scratch by millions of immigrants from every part of the world on top of the bones of its native population. (Argentina has a similar history.) The brutal treatment of the Native American population is not a popular topic for discussion in the United States today, I have found, and it’s not hard to see why. It is as disturbing and embarrassing as slavery to many Americans, which is why it was a popular topic for instruction in the USSR. It was very important for Communist ideology to show we were superior in every way, including morally. (And intellectually, which was why chess was so heavily promoted, fortunately for me.)
Soviet propaganda was also expert in “whataboutism,” a term coined to describe how Soviet leaders would respond to criticism of Soviet massacres, forced deportations, and gulags with “What about how you Americans treated the Native Americans and the slaves?” or something similar. For the most part it was a transparent and shabby rhetorical trick of deflection and changing the topic. As Putin has revived so many Soviet methods and traditions, whataboutism is popular once again today thanks to Russia’s cadres of trained Internet trolls. Scarcely a critical tweet of mine on Russia goes by without a few instant replies saying that the United States (or Israel) did something similar, or worse, or something entirely unrelated but also quite bad. This technique is always popular with the leaders and supporters of autocracies because they have no answers for their own crimes. For example, Arab states often talk as if Israel’s conduct with the Palestinians somehow justifies their own repressive regimes.
The Soviets had many good reasons to want to change the topic. In fact, tens of millions of reasons that became clear as soon as the USSR began to crumble. The works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had already documented the horrors happening inside the USSR under Lenin and Stalin. They were banned in the USSR, and their author exiled, not only because they impugned these men but because of Solzhenitsyn’s conclusions. He made the strong case that the entire Soviet system could only function due to coercion and the threat of imprisonment, as well as the free labor provided by the gulags. But there was much more to what Stalin had done to pacify his patchwork empire, and it would come back to haunt Russia and the world.
The United States is called a melting pot or a salad bowl to describe how its diverse waves of immigrants have mixed together as proud Americans. In an amusing tradition that probably goes back to the first ship to reach Plymouth Rock after the Mayflower, each generation likes to complain that the latest group of immigrants is far worse than their own group was, that they won’t work or won’t assimilate or are in some other way inferior. And yet despite being a nation built on conquest and despite all the squabbling, America keeps churning along, turning new immigrant ingredients into apple pies. I admire this quality greatly as a recent arrival myself, now with a green card despite a dubious job history of “thirteenth world chess champion” and “pro-democracy activist.”
The Soviet Union was a very different creation, and food metaphors fall short. I would say the USSR was a Frankenstein’s monster with mismatched body parts inexpertly sewn on to a Russian head. Instead of assimilating into a shared identity, most of these disparate republics were subjugated into a common Soviet Communist culture (if that word can even be used) by the sheer force of totalitarian bureaucracy and media. For all the Bolshevik talk about the obvious superiority of Marxism-Leninism, state terror and military force were the primary tools used in building and maintaining the Soviet empire.
The total failure of the USSR to move beyond that legacy of invasion and repression in seventy long years was clearly reflected by the eagerness with which the various republics detached from the rotting head of the Kremlin as soon as they had a chance. Even Ukraine, the ancient home of the first Eastern Slav proto-Russian nation-state and with so much in common with Russia, quickly ran for the exit to completely crush Gorbachev’s hope for a new union.
There was also a power-grab incentive factor in many cases. Regional bureaucrats and party bosses dreamed of being autocrats and realized they would have more power and a greater ability to line their pockets in independent states, even if their economies and regimes remained largely dependent on Moscow. Still, even the Central Asian republics that had tentatively agreed to stick things out with Gorbachev’s new USSR-lite eventually abandoned him.
The fifteen former Soviet republics quickly recognized by the United Nations as independent nations turned out to be the least of Russia’s problems. No fewer than five others declared their independence around the same time as the fifteen but failed to achieve it. Most are known to westerners only due to the fact that they remain disputed regions that occasionally flare into violence. Abkhazia and South Ossetia were semiautonomous regions of Georgia within the USSR and both claimed statehood when the USSR began to fall apart. After off and on conflicts they both instead remained as part of Georgia and were later exploited by Putin to provoke the 2008 war with Georgia. Both are now essentially occupied Russian zones, though still recognized by the UN as parts of Georgia.
Transnistria and Gagauzia had roughly similar experiences with the USSR and the newly independent Moldova. (I hope residents and experts forgive my simplifications for the point of expediency.) Putin’s Russia has similarly meddled in these autonomous zones, as always, stepping into any nearby power vacuum. Nagorno-Karabakh, a long-disputed area between Azerbaijan and Armenia, also declared itself an independent state in 1991. Its current status is officially Azerbaijani territory, but it is de facto independent and essentially functions as part of Armenia.
But we are not quite done, and I have saved the worst for last. I think only real specialists will recognize the name Ichkeria. It is seldom used anymore, and to my knowledge was rarely used even when its full name, Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, was still valid. That is, if it was ever valid, which of course is the question that led to two wars, thousands of terrorist attacks, and hundreds of thousands of deaths, most of them civilians, and almost all of them inside Russia.
Most people today have heard of Chechnya, and always for negative reasons. Its name is associated with the export of brutal mafiosos, militants, and terrorists. It was back in the news recently when it was revealed that the Boston Marathon bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, were Chechen Americans. Home to over a million people, predominantly Muslim, tiny Chechnya fought two vicious wars for independence from Moscow. The first started at the end of 1994, when Yeltsin tired of Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev’s anti-Moscow consolidation of power in his unrecognized republic. In the long tradition of overconfident leaders of large nations attacking small local forces in the mountains, the Russian offensive turned into an embarrassing quagmire that turned into a full-scale war that lasted twenty months. An estimated one hundred thousand civilians were killed and close to twenty thousand Russian troops. Human rights violations by the Russian forces were epidemic, and the Chechens turned to hostage-taking outside of Chechnya.
The brutality of the war and the terrible destruction of the Chechen capital of Grozny helped enrage and radicalize a generation of Chechens, who already had no love lost for Russia. Chechnya and its neighbors, Ingushetia to the west and Dagestan to the east, had declared independence from Russia as a united mountain republic in 1917 only to be yoked into the Soviet Union by force four years later. Despite the honorable participation by the region’s inhabitants against the Nazis in World War II, Stalin had nearly all of them, close to half a million people, rounded up and deported to Kazakhstan in 1944. They were allowed to return in 1957 as part of the de-Stalinization process, but a huge number had starved or been killed.
It’s no coincidence that most of these disputed and conflicted regions are located in the Caucasus. (Not Moldova, which is on the west side of the Black Sea between Ukraine and Romania.) There are patches upon the patchwork quilt of the region and innumerable bloody rivalries both ancient and new. This contentious region reaches from my birthplace of Azerbaijan in the south on the Iranian border and the Caspian Sea over to Georgia on the Black Sea with Armenia in between and Turkey to the south. In the north, on the Russian side of the border, it includes Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia as well as Kabardino-Balkaria (home of Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe) and north to the Kalmyk Steppe. It is home to over fifty ethnic groups, dozens of languages, and nearly every kind of religion.
Letting Chechnya and its ultraviolent neighbors become independent was never going to appeal to Russian leaders. It wasn’t just that they were convenient punching bags to rally the domestic base. Nor did they have much in the way of resources. The problem was, if they became independent nations they would instantly gain the rights and protections of independent nations, free to make allies, sign treaties, and complain to the United Nations—all with no way these broken states could control the flow of violence. Dealing with a failed Russian state was bad. Dealing with a failed neighboring country was much worse, a lesson the Soviets had learned in Afghanistan.
Not to defend Yeltsin on the matter, but another factor made a split nearly impossible: the lack of clear borders. The USSR was made up of republics and the borders between them were quite clear. When the USSR broke up there were very few conflicts between the new nations over geography. But inside of Russia the borders had never been drawn so clearly since they had no sacred meaning inside the vast republic. So when the Chechnya-Ingushetia region declared for independence in 1991 nobody was sure exactly what that would mean. The breakaway’s leaders insisted their new nation might extend all the way to Stavropol, two hundred kilometers west of Grozny, and it was difficult to deny their claim or make an alternative one based on anything concrete. Where did Chechnya begin and end? And what of neighboring Dagestan? It was a Pandora’s box. Chechnya was also unique because there were no external influences on its rebellion. All the rest had neighbors pushing for or against rebellion in one way or another. But Chechnya’s revolt was entirely internal.
It is tempting to jump ahead to the second Chechen war that brought an unknown prime minister named Vladimir Putin to the presidency. This first war not only set the stage for the second, but it is also an important illustration of the light-handed way the West treated Russia during the 1990s. Thanks to the magic of e-books I can tell you that Bill Clinton’s memoir, My Life, mentions Chechnya exactly four times in its thousand-plus pages. Even if you discount the first half of the book that takes place before he became president, this is astonishing. It is also an accurate representation of where Chechnya and other global hot spots ranked on Clinton’s radar while he was in office, especially during his first term. (The 1994 Rwandan genocide earns a few more mentions, mostly in the form of his regret at not having done anything to intervene.)
It’s not as if the first Chechen war was widely ignored at the time. Human rights groups and the Western media covered the atrocities as closely as they could. The Russian military’s failure to pacify the region as quickly as promised became an embarrassing issue for Boris Yeltsin as the 1996 election approached, forcing him to talk about it at public appearances. Remember, this was back when Russia still had a free media. The word “Chechnya” itself would practically be banned from the Russian press soon after Putin took power. Yeltsin even spent some awkward moments standing next to Clinton at press conferences in 1995 and 1996 answering questions about Chechnya, mostly denying that violence was taking place despite the overwhelming reports of war crimes.
It’s a remarkable feeling to read those news conference transcripts today. A Russian president, pressed to answer tough questions from the Russian press! You could be forgiven for forgetting that such a moment had ever existed in Russian history. At their conference in Moscow on May 10, 1995, one reporter got straight to the point after hearing Yeltsin’s usual dismissive remarks.
REPORTER: “President Clinton, you’ve just heard President Yeltsin describe the situation in Chechnya in a way that may be at odds with news dispatches coming from the part of the country describing a massacre. And I wondered if—what your reaction is to his description, whether you accept it, if not why not, and what impact these reports of terrible things there may be having on the countries eager to join NATO, and what you would have to say to him about that?”
Clinton’s response referred to how the civilian casualties and the prolonged fighting in Chechnya had “troubled the rest of the world greatly and have had an impact in Europe on the attitudes of many countries about what is going on here and about future relationships.” He said he had urged Yeltsin to make a cease-fire and “bring this to a speedy resolution,” concluding that “it’s been a difficult thing for them [Russia] as well.”
So then, what could the American president or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) do about a bloody civil war in Russia where tens of thousands of civilians were being displaced, tortured, and murdered? One clue comes from earlier in the same press conference, when President Clinton was asked what he would do about Russia’s continued support for Iran’s nuclear program.
REPORTER: “Will you resist Republican threats to cut off foreign aid to Russia?”
What!? Yes, this was the situation in 1995! Today, exactly twenty years later, the Iranian nuclear program Russia built is back on the front pages for mostly the same reason: fear over Iran making a nuclear bomb. It all started while American aid was helping keep Russia afloat (and helping Yeltsin get reelected in 1996). Surely making such aid conditional on dropping support for the Iranian nuclear program or on ending the massacre in Chechnya should have been discussed. In fact, such conditionality was discussed quite a bit in the US Congress, in both houses, in 1995 and 1996.
The Russian nuclear agency, MinAtom (succeeded by RosAtom in 2007), brought in desperately needed hard currency and was run with an alarming degree of autonomy. Its chief, Viktor Mikhaylov, had made a secret deal with Iran to deliver a gas centrifuge that would enable them to produce weapons-grade uranium, and he had done so without even telling Yeltsin. The rogue agency also had the support of Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who promoted close political and economic ties with Iran.
Clinton recounts in his book that when he first met Yeltsin in the Kremlin on that trip, they “shook hands” on Yeltsin publicly announcing Russia wouldn’t give any nuclear technology to Iran that could be used for military purposes. He duly did so at the press conference, but Yeltsin wouldn’t officially prohibit such weapons-related transfers until August 1996, over a year later.
Many members of Congress were outraged and added conditions to restrict aid to Russia if it continued to support Iran’s nuclear program and to wage war on civilians. But the Clinton administration managed to include a provision in the Russian aid bill to “allow the President to waive this restriction if he deemed it in the interest of US national security. The Administration argued that it was inappropriate to condition aid to Russia on a particular desired behavior in either Iran or Chechnya inasmuch as the aid program was intended to benefit reformist elements in Russia and ultimately facilitate a transformation that might ensure a more cooperative relationship in the future.”
That paragraph lays out everything that is wrong with dropping the moral element from foreign policy. For the sake of a vague hope for “a more cooperative relationship in the future,” the Clinton administration fought to keep the Iranian nuclear program and Chechnya massacre off the table. The money wasn’t the issue; a few billion dollars wasn’t going to make or break either country, although Yeltsin certainly needed all the help he could get as the 1996 election approached. (I campaigned for him myself.) Instead of tying foreign aid and foreign policy to the immoral slaughter of civilians in Chechnya, Clinton expressed concerns, made vague remarks about how it might drive other countries toward joining NATO (which it did), and called it an internal affair.
Clinton and Europe missed the chance to draw lines of acceptable behavior for Russia, at least anywhere beyond the Baltic States. In Central Asia and the various conflict zones in the Caucasus, the West tacitly supported a Russian sphere of influence. As the New York Times reported in October 1994, two months before Russian forces stormed into Chechnya, the West refused to provide peacekeepers to the newly formed states, allowing Russian ones to step in to manage the conflicts they themselves had provoked.
Reagan and his moral foreign policy had shown the way, but it was now completely abandoned. It was not based on what could be done unilaterally. No one could ever imagine that the United States or NATO would directly aid the Chechen separatists, for example. The important element was to show clearly and consistently that human rights mattered and that human lives mattered. Clinton was so invested in hoping “for a more cooperative relationship” that he could not simply state that massacring civilians and helping a state sponsor of terror build a nuclear program were unacceptable.
This record of immoral passivity also puts more nails in the coffin of the myth of Russian humiliation. Clinton treated Yeltsin in good faith throughout, provided Russia with intelligence on Iran, began to massively demilitarize Europe, and even helped disarm other ex-Soviet states with the effect of guaranteeing Russian preeminence. Nineteen ninety-four was the year the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, the US, and the UK all sat side by side at a long table in Hungary to sign what would be known as the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.
This brief document is far from a comprehensive treaty or even a security guarantee, but its intent and purpose was clear. Ukraine was giving up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world under heavy pressure from Russia and the United States. In exchange, Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma wanted a public pledge from Clinton, Yeltsin, and John Major that they would “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.”
Obviously Russia violated the agreement when it invaded and then annexed Crimea in March 2014. As for the other signatories, there are no means of enforcement in the memo and the only promised response is to seek UN Security Council action “if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.”
When I spoke to the first Ukrainian president, Leonid Kravchuk, in Kyiv in late 2014, he was adamant that the United States had betrayed Ukraine to Putin by reneging on the obligations Clinton assumed in Budapest. He said it had always been Clinton, even more than Yeltsin, who had pressured him and the presidents of Kazakhstan and Belarus to relinquish their nuclear arsenals. No doubt this was a worthy goal and a worthy achievement at the time. But what does it say when twenty years later Ukraine is practically helpless against the giant nuclear-backed war machine of Vladimir Putin and the United States tells Ukraine sorry, but it should have read the fine print in Budapest?
To answer my own question, it tells the world that American security promises are worthless (and British ones, for good measure). The only point of Budapest was to demonstrate to any potential aggressor—all eyes on the Russian bear next door, obviously—that the United States was putting Ukraine under its nuclear wing. If such displays are meaningless, and having one’s own nuclear weapon is the only way to be safe from aggression, it will not take long for other countries to move full speed toward acquiring them. Japan and Taiwan count on America to deter China. South Korea counts on America to deter North Korea. And whether they admit to it or not, half of the nations in the Middle East have rejected a push for nuclear weapons to match Israel’s because of America’s long shadow. It is difficult to see that restraint lasting very long if President Obama continues to meet Russian military aggression with weak sanctions, worthless negotiations, and expressions of deep concern.
Since he is still very much a public figure, Bill Clinton himself should be asked what he thinks of Obama’s indifferent attitude about the document Clinton signed in Budapest. Especially since they are of the same party and Hillary Clinton served in Obama’s cabinet as secretary of state. It probably never occurred to any of the reporters in Budapest to ask Clinton what his administration would do if Russia rolled tanks into Ukraine as they have now done, but I would very much like to hear his answer today.
There is an irresistible tendency to look only for big moments in history. While such moments do exist, long-term trends and patterns usually matter more than any one decision or event. When we talk about the collapse of Russia’s democracy and the Western appeasement that facilitated its collapse, it is important to look at how each moment fit into an overall pattern.
Bush 41 supported Mikhail Gorbachev to a fault and to the bitter end. Bill Clinton’s administration was similarly enamored of Boris Yeltsin and supported him at the expense of a coherent and consistent policy of pressuring for economic reform and democracy in Russia. As I’ll discuss in the next chapter, Bush 43 made the same mistake with Putin by putting his trust in an individual instead of the democratic institutions, policies, and principles Russia so badly needed. The West would find someone they liked, or felt they could work with, and jump in with both feet. When the results inevitably failed to live up to the unrealistic hopes, it was awkward or impossible to back away.
At the same time, American authority and credibility on the global stage was being whittled away throughout the 1990s. The United States looked all powerful at the end of the Cold War, like the Wizard of Oz before the curtain was pulled back. By 1999, when Clinton finally got it right in Kosovo, the curtain had been pulled back, torn down, and burned in effigy. The “Blackhawk Down” catastrophe in Somalia, the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, conceding to Russia on Chechnya and limiting NATO expansion: each was a blow to global stability and its supposed guarantors in the United States and the European Union.
Far from the imperial overreach and hegemonic tendencies that Russia and China kept warning about, the United States retreated instead. By 1998, Clinton’s personal credibility was also diminishing rapidly. The Monica Lewinsky scandal exploded in the headlines in January. The media circus, trial, and impeachment became a huge distraction for the government and the American people. Later in the year, Clinton had his wag-the-dog moment when he ordered a cruise missile strike on what turned out to be a benign pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.
As convenient as it would be to put all the blame for the collapse of Russian democracy on Putin, the truth is more complicated. Russia’s return to dictatorship was not a sudden fall. Many small, quick steps in the same direction resemble a smooth slide. Just as when analyzing a completed chess game, what we call the postmortem, talking as if everything was going just fine until this or that event is usually absurd and harmful to the process of honest analysis. Of course huge isolated blunders in otherwise good positions do occur, but they are even rarer in diplomacy than in world championship chess.
This is a point of disagreement I often have with my more diplomatically minded friends today. They look back over twenty years of Russia-US relations and it doesn’t look so bad, so the complete catastrophe of 2014 is viewed as a sudden shock. But as I have been warning frequently for at least fifteen of those years, Putin’s latest eruption of repression and violence has been steadily building all the time and was only intensified by years of Western compromises and pretending that everything was fine. There was no big shift by Obama that provoked Putin, or any dramatic changes in Putin’s attitudes or Russia’s fortunes that necessitated the invasion of Ukraine. It was always moving in this direction, and the only question was whether or not Western leaders would change their ways to prevent such an eruption from taking place. Unfortunately, as we now know, the answer was no.
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the streetlights. As I admitted earlier, I supported Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection despite his increasingly undemocratic attitude toward Russia’s institutions and the independence of our elections. Yeltsin abused the power of the state to fight off the challenge of the Communist Party that still had the power to terrify the reformers. It also had taken control of the Russian Duma in the 1995 parliamentary elections, so it was no imagined threat. Yeltsin was deeply unpopular, polling under 10 percent at the start of the year with only six months until the June election.
The Yeltsin administration’s trope of accusing every critic and opposition figure of trying to drag Russia back to the dark past became less and less effective as the economy struggled. The outside world didn’t think much of Yeltsin’s chances either. In February, Communist Party leader Zyuganov was treated like a rock star at the World Economic Forum in Davos, of all places, the belly of the capitalist beast. Of course Zyuganov was completely clueless about what to do and would have been an unmitigated catastrophe as president, but it certainly looked likely to happen. It wasn’t simply a case of people in hard times voting with their pocketbooks. There was a real sense of confusion and betrayal in Russia, and the natural target was the president.
Here is where we come to one of the most difficult concepts to explain to outsiders about the Russian rejection of democracy. When Soviets pondered the collapse of our country and the future ahead, democracy was not a very well-defined or well-understood concept to most of us. Yes, we desired freedom, rights, and all the things that come with an open society, but for most people these are abstractions. What we really envied about the West was opportunity; specifically the opportunity to improve our lot economically. The free world had elections and it had money and we had neither, so these things obviously went together: a package deal.
So when we happily mobbed the polls in 1991 to vote for Yeltsin the first time it was as if many Russians expected the ballot boxes to operate like ATMs: put your ballot in and money will come out! This conceptual misunderstanding later made it easier for an authoritarian like Putin to roll back civil rights by claiming that democracy had failed, that it had all been a Western scam to exploit Russia, and so on. The economic situation didn’t help much either. If there is anything worse than empty store shelves it is shelves full of expensive new products you cannot afford to buy.
We had sobered up quite a bit by the time special parliamentary elections were called in 1993 after the constitutional crisis that nearly toppled the entire government. Yeltsin attempted to dissolve the Supreme Soviet in September, something he did not have the authority to do according to the constitution. In retaliation, the parliament impeached Yeltsin, who of course refused to recognize their act of defiance. After weeks of dueling protests and street violence, Yeltsin called in the special police and the parliament building was sealed off. It was quite uncertain what would happen. Pitched battles were taking place in the streets outside the government building and nearly two hundred people would be killed and hundreds more wounded.
Along with the rest of the world, I was watching all of this unfold on CNN from afar. My 1993 world championship title defense against Nigel Short began in London on September 7 and lasted, as matches did in those days, for six weeks. As it had been in 1990, it was difficult to focus on chess when my country was again facing revolution. Fortunately, I jumped out to a big lead in the match and could play with less psychological pressure. I felt comfortable enough to give a few interviews on the situation in Moscow, where I said Yeltsin was fighting for the free future of Russia.
After days of violence and frantic negotiations on all sides, the allegiance of the Russian army to Yeltsin was the decisive factor. In an unbelievable scene, on October 4 a row of tanks fired on the White House (as we call the parliament building) and the top floors of it caught fire. Special forces stormed the building and clamped down on the street protesters. Back in control, Yeltsin wasted no time in pushing through constitutional reform, demoting the parliament and creating the very strong presidency that haunts us today. The Supreme Soviet was obsolete, of course, but in a country with such a fragile civil society it is important to have power spread as thinly as possible.
In 1996, Yeltsin had little popular support but he could count on many of the oligarchs whose fortunes he had enabled and the financial backing of the West. Despite a campaign spending limit of $3 million, still out of reach of most parties, the Yeltsin campaign spent somewhere in the range of one to two billion dollars according to later investigations. Even more important was a huge loan from the International Monetary Fund in February. The $10.2 billion allowed the Yeltsin government to pay long overdue wages and pensions.
If that had been all, dubious financing and pork-barrel politics on steroids, it might not have done damage lasting beyond Yeltsin’s term in office. But there was also the media influence and outright electoral fraud, weapons that are very hard to put back in the closet after being used. It was all enough to earn Yeltsin a narrow lead over Zyuganov in the first round, 35 percent to 32 percent. Yeltsin had a serious heart attack between the June 16 election and the July 3 run-off against Zyuganov, a potentially dangerous situation that was successfully hidden from the public thanks to government and media complicity. Yeltsin won the runoff 54 percent to 40 percent, with even more evidence of widespread voter fraud later coming to light.
At the time, had I known everything that was going on, it still would have been very hard for me to wish for anything other than a Yeltsin return. In 1996, Gennady Zyuganov wasn’t the performing pet Communist he is for Putin today. He was a Communist revanchist who had fought against liberal reforms every step of the way and he would have been a dangerous man with the power of the presidency. There was a real possibility that an election that brought him to power would be the last election we would have for a long time. And yet the lesson of 1996 is that institutions must matter more than the man. The Yeltsin campaign undermined nearly every aspect of a democratic society and it never recovered. His successor would quickly take up Yeltsin’s campaign tools of repression and corruption and apply them to everyday governance. Putin was no Communist, but he was a Soviet revanchist through and through.
I feel I must also apply to myself the standards I regularly urge on the leaders of the free world who so often put expediency and personal affinity over nurturing institutions. The fear of the unknown, of losing a reliable ally, often drives democratic leaders to the utmost hypocrisy. It leads them to support “friendly” dictators against their people, as was seen recently by the tepid reception the Arab Spring movement received in the Obama administration and in much of Europe. I have long railed against this in regards to how Putin was embraced by the G7 despite his crackdowns on civil liberties, but this is far from a uniquely Russian problem.
My thoughts on this have been further shaped by my work as the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and at the Oslo Freedom Forum organized by the HRF and its founder, Thor Halvorssen. We invite dissidents from all over the world to speak about their movements and their fights for liberty. One common denominator is how dangerous and demoralizing it can be for the so-called leaders of the free world to downplay or to ignore their plights, or, as often happens, to openly support the authors of their repression. Often, European and American visitors were surprised to find out that their governments were actively supporting some of the world’s most repressive regimes.
I may be idealistic, but I am far from naïve. I understand that every democratically elected head of state will do what is necessary to protect the interests of his or her people. In foreign policy, sometimes that will mean shaking a hand with blood on it or trading with a country with atrocious labor practices. We can, however, demand transparency and accountability for these deals. We do not have to like it and we can let our politicians know that it must change.
The world’s dictators are very aware of the power wielded by the free world today. This is why nearly all of them role-play at democracy with sham elections and perform other acts of theater to stay in the good graces of the world’s largest economies and militaries. Unfortunately, the free world is too uninformed, callous, or apathetic to use this influence. They enjoy the benefits of engagement with dictatorships—oil from the Middle East, gas from Russia, everything else from China—while the dictators use the money to fund repression. But not all dictatorships are the same.
The pro-democracy sit-in protests in Hong Kong that started in September 2014 led to speculation about why such an Occupy-style movement has so far failed to materialize against the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin in Russia. It’s an awkward comparison at best; the student Hongkongers who could barely recall the 1997 handover from the United Kingdom to China were accustomed to their special status of rights and democracy relative to the rest of China. The flame of Russian democracy flickered only briefly before Putin squelched it, and the memories of the chaos and corruption of the 1990s are not fond ones for most Russians.
A more concrete answer is that the Communist dictatorship in China needs its people, especially its young and educated people. Hong Kong is still a large and strategically critical piece of the Chinese economy. That economy also depends almost entirely on consumers in the free world, consumers who have far more information about the protests than nearly anyone in heavily censored China. A Tiananmen massacre in Hong Kong, transmitted around the world on millions of Chinese-made iPhones, could make “Made in China” into a bloody mark. Anti-China boycotts could hurt the Chinese economy enough to lead to wide-scale unrest.
Putin, on the other hand, has no use for the people of Russia, especially its young and educated people. He and his junta have turned the country into a petro-state, and exporting natural resources to an insatiable global market doesn’t require entrepreneurs or programmers, let alone writers and professors. Boycotting oil and gas also requires coordinated political will, a substance Putin now knows is far rarer in the free world than the platinum and diamonds in Siberia.
Decades of economic and political engagement with the West and improved standards of living were supposed to liberalize these dictatorships and provide leverage against them. But leverage is only useful if applied, and it is also double edged. Europe buys four-fifths of Russia’s energy exports, giving it tremendous economic leverage over Putin, who has made the Russian economy totally dependent on oil and gas. But instead of aggressively developing alternative supply routes in order to be able to use that leverage to stand up to Russia, Europe dithers and cries foul when Putin blackmails Eastern Europe with the gas supply as winter approaches.
China and Russia have similar social compacts with their dictatorial governments: economic stability in exchange for their citizens’ human rights. They both have heavily censored state propaganda instead of news, sham elections, and minimal freedom of speech and assembly. The skyrocketing price of oil through the 2000s allowed Putin to fulfill, if minimally outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, his promises of pensions and payrolls—and oil is also why stoking Middle East instability that keeps the price high is always a priority for him. China started from a much lower point and managed to raise a billion people out of poverty by turning an entire nation into the world’s factory. Globalization, economic integration with rich free economies, made both the Russian and Chinese scenarios possible.
The reality is that most consumers in the developed world would rather not know where their phones and gas come from as long as the prices are low. If you know, you must act, so it is better not to know. The occasional scandal over inhuman working conditions in Chinese factories (or women’s rights in Saudi Arabia) allows some liberals to feel better when a Nike or Apple announces an investigation that is quickly forgotten by the time the next shoe or gadget comes out.
Now then, is the case of China really such a failure, you might wonder. Should we have condemned those billion souls to poverty and hunger for the sake of politics? This is empathy from the innocent but it is also the false choice the autocrats love to present to the world. It is the false choice between freedom and food, between repression and stability. There is no reason China could not have enjoyed similar or greater economic success with a more liberal regime. In fact, there’s a great deal of evidence that democratic countries perform better. Do not fall for the false choice. Repression may begin as a means to an end, but it always ends up being an end unto itself.
The protests in Hong Kong were also a refutation of what I have mockingly referred to as the genetic theory of democracy. For years I have been told that Russians (or Arabs, or Chinese) simply aren’t disposed to democracy. They require a “strong hand” or “love a tough leader.” This is just one of many theories people born in the free world use to mask their privilege, their inaction, and their shame. How could this be true when Taiwan is composed of the same people but is a flourishing democracy? What about East and West Germany, North and South Korea?
There are countless reasons democracy fails to take root, or why some military coups succeed and others fail. None of these reasons are based on ethnicity or geography. Our governments are human constructs, as are our traditions and beliefs. As Milton Friedman said, “Society doesn’t have values. People have values.” We must decide what we value and decide what is worth fighting for and then—the most important part—we must fight for it. If we fail to do this we will lose to those who believe in other things, in worse things. We will lose to those who don’t believe in the value of human life or liberty, and who are willing to fight to impose their dark vision for humanity on others.
We may call the rights we cherish inalienable or universal, but this isn’t the same as being entitled to democracy, or even to basic human rights. No, these things must be fought for. And if it takes brave students in Hong Kong to remind the world of this, then their protest was a success, however brief it may have been.