American Nero

The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.

—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

INTERFERING IN THE POLITICS OF OTHER NATIONS IS AN ancient and pervasive strategy for gaining diplomatic and military advantage. Almost every European nation hatched plots in neighboring countries during the Middle Ages, and then around the globe in the colonial era. Popes interfered frequently in national politics during the Middle Ages and after the Reformation.

The United States owes its independence in part to French interference against the British during the American Revolution. Knowing the potential dangers, the United States in the 1820s adopted the Monroe Doctrine, deeming European interference anywhere in the Western Hemisphere to be a hostile act.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States turned to the same game of interference, first in the Philippines under President William McKinley, then in Latin America. The United States seized the Panama Canal after orchestrating a Panamanian “revolution” against Colombia. By the 1950s, the United States responded to communist expansionism by interfering in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, with covert operations and military engagements in Chile, Iran, Vietnam, and other countries.

Russia isn’t the only country to interfere with the affairs of other nations, but it relies upon this strategy perhaps more than any other nation. The Russians, moreover, are very good at it.

Russia’s centuries-long history of overcoming geographic and linguistic disadvantages by playing European powers against each other is part of this story. The ideological commitment of post-1917 Bolshevik communism to spread proletariat revolution around the world is another part of the Russian story.

When it comes to undermining the rule of law in democracies, Russia is the world champion.

Under autocratic rule, Russia gained expertise in the art of espionage. Going back to Peter the Great, Russia had a very ambivalent relationship with the West. Russia had been humiliated after Napoleon’s invasion, and though Napoleon was defeated in 1812, the Russians never stopped feeling threatened by the West. Russia responded by sending spies to countries all over Europe and beyond.

One of the first incidents of Russian interference in American affairs occurred in 1871 during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, who was negotiating with Great Britain to settle claims stemming from the Civil War. Great Britain had built the Alabama, a Confederate warship, and Grant wanted reparations.

The Russians and Americans had been allies. During the Crimean War between 1853 and 1856, the Americans had supplied the Russians with arms to fight the British, French, and Turks. Under the rule of Czar Alexander II, Russia had been the only European nation to support the North, but in 1871 as the Americans and the British negotiated a financial settlement, the Russians feared that a deal between the US and Britain would improve relations between the two countries, so they came up with a plan to stir up trouble.

As these negotiations over reparations played out, there was a fight over money owed to Benjamin Perkins, an American who had arranged the sale of munitions to Russia, but claimed that Russian agents never paid him for the arms and powder. Perkins’s widow wanted the million dollars her husband was owed. She hired lobbyists and went to newspapers for support.

Russian Ambassador Konstantin Catacazy, whom American officials described as odious and dishonest, had been saying nasty things about President Grant and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish. Catacazy, trying to scuttle America’s negotiations with Britain, planted fake stories in the media of illegal financial skullduggery and produced fake documents to pit the two sides against each other.

Catacazy launched a campaign in the press and lobbied members of Congress. One fake story he told the New York Sun was that Assistant Secretary of State Bancroft Davis was taking bribes in exchange for supporting Perkins’s widow. The paper called Davis a “cunning and coldblooded scamp.”

The New York World published “fake news”—a letter Catacazy wrote to derail the talks with Britain. New York Times investigative reporters revealed that Catacazy’s statements were “false and malicious,” and called his work “mischievous intermeddling.”

Grant ordered Catacazy banished from the country.

In his State of the Union address, Grant said, “It was impossible, with self-respect or with just regard to the dignity of the country, to permit Mr. Catacazy to continue to hold intercourse with this Government after his personal abuse of Government officials, and during his persistent interferences, through various means, with the relations between the United States and other powers.”

In a letter to his superiors, Catacazy insulted Secretary of State Fish. The letter appeared in the Chicago Tribune, and when President Grant read it, he was furious.

When Catacazy went to the White House, the president refused to see him.

Ambassador Catacazy’s bad behavior almost caused the cancellation of the three-and-a-half-month grand tour of the United States planned for Czar Alexander’s fourth son, twenty-one-year-old Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich Romanov. But the Grand Duke’s tour proceeded, and his charm apparently glossed over Russian intentions perhaps more accurately portrayed by the actions of Catacazy.

New York was one of thirty-four cities the grand duke was visiting on his goodwill tour, followed by Niagara Falls and Chicago, which had burned to the ground in the Great Fire only weeks before. He was an honored guest in every city at dinners, balls, and theater performances. Germans and Poles protested his visit. There was talk in New York that Polish nationals were going to kill him.

Arriving in North Platte, Nebraska, by special train, the grand duke was the guest of General Philip Sheridan. Colonel George Armstrong Custer was part of their contingent, and their guide was Buffalo Bill Cody.

They drank a lot, and on his twenty-second birthday on January 14, 1872, Romanov hunted buffalo. The Russian was a lousy shot, but Cody made sure he got to kill an old and slow buffalo, much to the joy of his royal highness.

One of America’s first visiting celebrities, Romanov returned to Russia in December.

The Americans and British completed their negotiations. This time, Russian interference had failed.

Meanwhile, the Russian monarchy was plagued by a growing revolutionary movement. In 1881, the grand duke’s father, Czar Alexander, was killed by a terrorist’s bomb.

After Russia, under Czar Nicholas II, suffered an ignominious defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905, Russia lost a great deal of influence in China and what was then Manchuria.

Things did not improve over the next ten years, and they got worse with the start of World War I.

By early 1917, Russia was on the verge of collapse.

Some Russian revolutionaries, along with intellectuals who supported them, turned to German philosopher Karl Marx for inspiration about a different, and presumably better, social order.

Marx believed that laws existed to oppress the working class. Under communism, he suggested, everyone would be treated equally. In sum—as soon as a society moved away from conventional, bourgeois legal norms, violently or otherwise—a new rule of law for the working class would somehow come into being.

This ideology was a very suitable tool for anyone eager to destroy the existing rule of law in their own country or another, and it turned out to be lethal. What type of regime might replace the bourgeois rule of law was an afterthought for some. For others with political power in mind, the aftermath of communist revolution was part of a concealed plan.

The revolt knocked Russia out of the war against Germany and Austria.

Czar Nicholas was ordered to abdicate. Having no choice, he agreed. The Romanov family and their loyal servants were kept prisoners in the Alexander Palace, and after being moved twice, on the night of July 16, 1918, they were murdered at the instructions of Vladimir Lenin.

The brutal, unjust rule of law that existed for centuries under czars was destroyed. What would replace it was far worse.

The communist revolution, it turned out, was no panacea for Russian workers. Emma Goldman, an anarchist who had been deported from America, lived in Russia in 1920 and 1921. She wrote a piece on the conditions there titled “There Is No Communism in Russia” that described an authoritarian, centralized government. As for the factories and the tractors, she said, they weren’t nationalized, as Marx had theorized. They were taken by the government.

She concluded, “I think there is nothing more pernicious than to degrade a human being into a cog of a soulless machine, turn him into a serf, into a spy or the victim of a spy. There is nothing more corrupting than slavery and despotism.”

Soon thereafter, Lenin died, and a ruthless Joseph Stalin took over. Freedom died as the Russian Revolution sank into a totalitarian state. All criticism, all opposition, was eliminated. Stalin killed anyone he thought to be a traitor, and he saw traitors everywhere. To maintain control, Stalin killed an estimated twenty million people over twenty-five years.

In the end, those in power convinced themselves and others that their position was synonymous with the national interest. Inevitably those in power always saw the need to eliminate all threats to that power. Russians built concentration camps before Nazis did. Lenin and Trotsky created 315 concentration camps in the Soviet Union by 1923. Stalin would later refine these camps into holding cells and chambers of horror for millions. Stalin began his purges. Meanwhile, the NKVD, the secret police that terrorized the populace, stepped up surveillance. Party purges in non-Russian republics were particularly violent. By the time the purges ended in 1938, millions of Soviet leaders, officials, and citizens had been imprisoned, exiled, or executed.

When Stalin took over in Russia in 1924 after the death of Vladimir Lenin, he displaced millions of Ukrainian farmers. When they refused to go into communes, he shipped them to Siberia. There was a famine, and millions died.

This was known as the Great Terror.

The USSR also intensified its efforts to undermine Western democracies.

In the mid-1930s, Russia began a new program of attracting and recruiting spies for so-called Perception Management, or Information Operations. The plan was to attract smart young communist sympathizers from Cambridge and Oxford Universities. The new Russian bureau called “Cominform” was opened to attract students to the cause.

The Soviets also spied on the United States. The Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB, sent an army of agents to America.

The Communist Party of the United States grew fastest during the economic catastrophe in the 1930s when many young Americans distrusted capitalism. But success was limited. Most labor unions were resolutely anti-communist, and apart from concentrations of intellectuals and renegade labor leaders in a few urban areas, communism never had much appeal to most Americans.

The Soviets were far more successful in influencing European internal affairs after World War I when communist parties became active in many of the new representative democracies established under the Treaty of Versailles, and again after World War II, when the Nazis were defeated.

Soon after taking control of the USSR in 1924, Stalin portrayed the Western powers, especially France, as warmongers eager to attack the Soviet Union. To aid the triumph of communism, Stalin was intent on weakening the moderate social democratic parties of Europe.

In the early 1930s, Russians even sought to help Adolf Hitler, head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), later known as the Nazi Party. The Comintern ordered the Communist Party of Germany to support the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, even though the Nazis were anti-Soviet. The Soviets hoped that the Nazi movement would worsen social tensions, destabilize German democracy, and lead to a communist revolution in Germany. Stalin’s election meddling in Germany thus helped bring about Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

Dictators love an aspiring dictator, even if he might later become an enemy. Their common enemy is democracy.

On August 23, 1939, Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler, agreeing not to aid the allies if war broke out. Hitler in turn agreed not to invade the USSR. They also agreed to parcel out Poland, with Hitler giving the Baltic States to the Russians.

Dictators can make peace with other dictators—but only for a while.

A week after signing the pact, Hitler invaded Poland, then invaded France. In 1940, Stalin’s troops marched into Russia’s “share” of Poland and the Baltic States. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, and parts of Romania would fall to the Russians.

Then the dictators turned on each other.

Hitler broke the pact on June 22, 1941, by invading the Soviet Union. Stalin wasn’t prepared, and in three weeks, 750,000 Russians died. By the end of 1941, 4.3 million Russians had died and another three million were captured by the Germans.

In 1942, the Germans marched on Stalingrad. Though the Russians lost more than two million men defending it, Stalingrad held. It was a turning point in the war. The US and Russia were allied for the three and a half years that both countries fought Germany.

Winston Churchill warned FDR about Stalin taking advantage of the allies at the Yalta negotiations, but to little avail. Stalin had a plan for post-war Europe, and he executed it masterfully.

During World War II, the Russians sent the Red Army into Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other countries to liberate them from the Nazis. Meanwhile, the Communist Party operating in these countries before, during, and immediately after the war collaborated with the Kremlin. Soviet tanks thus reinforced the political interference that the Kremlin has often used to subvert Western democracies.

The result was the dropping of the “Iron Curtain”—as Winston Churchill famously called it—all across Eastern Europe.

The Soviets weren’t always successful in their takeovers. Communists attempted to take over Greece, resulting in fighting in the 1940s, but the unsuccessful coup ended in what came close to a civil war.

There were attempts in Italy and other countries, but the communist parties were pushed back.

The communists also firmly believed that the United States would become communist, and that it was their duty to do everything in their power to make this happen.

They insisted there could be no rule of law in a country that espoused capitalism. They insisted that legislators, judges, and all legal establishment in non-communist countries were always dominated by the capitalist class and inherently against the proletariat. Overthrowing this regime—overturning the rule of law—was their overriding priority.

The Soviets had very little success gaining a political foothold in the United States, despite our massive overreaction in the Red Scare of the 1920s and again in the McCarthy era of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which we will discuss in Chapter 7.

The Soviets, however, were expert spies.

There was, for example, an espionage attempt in the UN Security Council. Henry Cabot Lodge, the US ambassador to the United Nations, blew the whistle on the Russians. At a press conference, he displayed a wooden reproduction of the Great Seal of the United States. Inside, he said, the Russians had placed a listening and transmitting device. The seal had been presented to the US embassy in Moscow by a Russian citizens’ group in 1945. A security sweep at the embassy revealed the spying device. Over the years, more than a hundred such devices were found in American embassies throughout the communist bloc.

The listening device at the US embassy wasn’t found until 1952. The Russians had seven years to listen in to American secret conversations.

The Russians also established successful spy rings. In Great Britain, the most famous was Kim Philby’s “Cambridge 5.” In the United States in the late 1940s, Julius Rosenberg helped a spy ring steal secrets that assisted the USSR to develop the atomic bomb. The guilt of his wife Ethel is still disputed. Both were tried and executed.

For decades the United States waged the Cold War against Soviet communist aggression, ultimately with success, but at a heavy price.

Communism in Russia collapsed in 1991. Immediately afterward, President Boris Yeltsin brought in Western-style representative democracy—and capitalism. Russia quickly learned about corruption. Without strong democratic institutions or a viable political philosophy, and with a centuries-old history of brutal authoritarian rule, representative democracy in Russia was unable to survive the problem of corruption.

With rapid denationalization and privatization of major state-owned industries came the opportunity for Russian organized crime figures and other oligarchs to reap billions in profits by currying favor with government officials. The Clinton administration flew experts to Russia to advise on the privatization process and the functioning of free markets. Plans were made to draft a detailed code to regulate Russian stock markets. Some of the American experts came from private industry, including Wall Street banks, seeking to profit from Russian economic expansion. Others came from academia. Most did not understand the potential for widespread corruption in Russia’s burgeoning capitalist economy. A relatively weak central government in the Kremlin made the problem worse.

Some American advisors were themselves corrupt, or they at least had personal financial conflicts of interest. In an infamous federal court case, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) sued Harvard University for breach of contract. USAID had sent Harvard law and economics professors to Russia to advise on privatization without screening for or preventing financial conflicts of interest. The professors—or their spouses—traded in the newly issued shares of Russian companies. Harvard settled the suit with USAID in 2005 for $26.5 million.

That American “advisors” couldn’t keep their hands out of the Russian cookie jar made it clear that, without a strong central government, Russia was ripe for the picking. Russian mobsters and their allies in business and government acted in a far worse way, shooting many of their competitors and political opponents dead on the streets. Russia needed to control the chaos—and give the economy and culture back to the Russians.

They found their man in Vladimir Putin.

In July 1998, Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin as Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor of the KGB, where Putin had prior experience. In 1999, Putin became prime minister of the Government of the Russian Federation. By December 1999, Yeltsin had resigned. Before long, Putin was functionally in control of the Russian government. He has been in charge of Russia now for twenty years.

Only after Putin’s election in 1999 did Russia finally change its strategy away from subversion on the political left through communist movements. Russia shifted back toward the traditionalist and intensely nationalist ideology of the czars. Official atheism was abandoned, and the Russian Orthodox Church was brought back to power, adding a religious element to Russian nationalism.

From then on, Russian interference with the affairs of other nations, and attacks on the rule of law, would emphasize the role of the political right—ideally steeped in nationalism and ultra-conservative religion. Russia—after carrying the communist banner for seven decades, losing the Cold War, and abandoning the political left—was finally poised to influence the United States.

It didn’t take Russia—or Putin—long to figure out how to hit pay dirt.