Losing Russia

America: a Beacon, not a Policeman	LOSING RUSSIA	Americans Against World Empire Homepage

The percentage of Russians who believe that Washington's hidden goal is to take advantage of their country's weakness is at a new high -- 81 percent compared to 59 percent in 1995, according to the International Herald Tribune

A Few Exerpts from
Russia Pines for a New Savior: NEW YORK TIMES 11/21/99

By MICHAEL WINES

"MOSCOW --......... For Americans, the irony is that they may have done a lot to set the mood for Russia's current attitude toward Chechnya. Conflict there may have been unavoidable; Islamic militants effectively gave the Kremlin and its armies a choice of fighting or losing both territory and Russia's honor. But both the rules of the battle and the mentality of its leaders have been molded by NATO's relentless bombing of Yugoslavia last spring --
opening an East-West rift that U.S. diplomats then predicted would soon
be papered over, but that has only yawned wider in the intervening
months.

In Russia, the Kosovo war is remembered as a conflict NATO launched
in utter disregard of Moscow's emotional pleas and warnings of disaster.
This time around, Moscow has returned the cold shoulder, ignoring
Western pleas to mediate and even to closely observe the conflict.

Now, in Russian eyes, Moscow's day-and-night bombardment of
Chechen targets mirrors NATO's round-the-clock raids, save the smart
bombs and accurate missiles that minimized civilian Yugoslav deaths.
Then, Russia denounced as war crimes the civilian deaths that did occur,
from errant NATO missiles or bombs that hit refugee sites. Now those
same horrors have become justification for ignoring complaints about
Chechen civilian casualties...............

Just for a moment, imagine the corked-up fury of
life in a failed superpower, a place where the government seems
impotent and scandal-scarred; where the army is demoralized by defeat
and incompetence; where the economy seems to rock between inflation
and depression................Americans cannot truly imagine Russians' frustration at
their imperial disintegration and economic collapse. But
perhaps they can get a whiff of the emotional release Chechnya evokes
among Russians by recalling how good it felt, after two decades of
Vietnam, Watergate, Iran and Lebanon, to finally regain their military
prowess -- striking back first at Libyan terrorism in 1986 and then, far
more dramatically, against Saddam Hussein in Kuwait in 1991.............

This is the context in which the Kremlin, eyeing the presidential election
next June, is casting the war as a Russian wake-up call -- a "don't tread
on me" warning to domestic bandits and foreign critics alike, from a
people whose faces are black with heel marks............

Military policy-makers are bristling over U.S. attempts to fill the power
vacuum along the old Soviet Union's shrunken borders. NATO's
three-month bombing campaign against Yugoslavia last spring was, in
retrospect, a fault line in relations between the two countries. Chechnya
provides a chance to reassert Russian military strength in its own
backyard, and to show that Moscow will not surrender its old spheres of
influence so easily.............

To Russian foreign-policy-makers, subduing Chechnya keeps Russia in
the pipeline game, since a stable Chechnya is central to building new
routes nearby or enlarging pipelines already in the area. And it allows the
Kremlin to return the thumb in the eye that it clearly believes has been
delivered by America and its allies on issues from pipelines to economic
reform.

Just how little daylight separates them is clear from one remarkable
scene: A leading Western-oriented member of parliament, Grigory
Yavlinsky, suggested a negotiated Chechen peace earlier this month. And
immediately, the man who is perhaps closer to Washington than any
politician in Russia, the Kremlin adviser Anatoly Chubais, called it the act
of a traitor."

http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/novak13.html

DARKNESS FALLS IN RUSSIA WITH EVERY NATO BOMB
May 13, 1999

BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Arkady Murashev, a relentless and fearless fighter for Russian democracy over the last decade, made a special trip to Washington last week to deliver this message: The U.S.-NATO bombing of Yugoslavia is a boon to the forces of darkness in Russia.

Making the rounds of cable networks and radio talk shows, Murashev called for an end to the aerial assault that he said generates rising popular support for Communist, ultra-nationalist and other anti-democratic elements in the former Soviet Union. His appeal struck a responsive chord with friendly members of Congress, but the policymakers in the Clinton administration and their bipartisan supporters on Capitol Hill resist such arguments.

The foreign-policy establishment is so preoccupied with righting ethnic wrongs in one small province of one small Balkan state that it is paying little attention to the future of the world's second-ranking nuclear power. The feckless effort to micro-manage Kosovo has so far resulted in rising global anti-Americanism from Moscow to Beijing.

This is the latest setback in trying to establish the firm basis for a democratic Russia. Murashev has pursued that dream since cracks in Soviet totalitarianism first appeared 10 years ago. I met him in Moscow in 1990 when, as a 32-year-old scientist and a Christian, he defeated three Communist candidates for election to the Supreme Soviet. He was a leader in the parliamentary faction that was guided by persecuted nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov. He then served briefly as police commissioner of Moscow and most recently lost his seat in the Duma with the breakup of reformist forces in the chaos of today's Russian politics.

For the long haul, Murashev is still optimistic about the triumph of democracy and true--not crony--capitalism. But for the short run, he is gloomy--especially since the attack on Yugoslavia. "This confirms what the Communists and the extremists have been saying about NATO for years: that they are against us and our friends," he said.

Accompanying Murashev to Washington was Edward Lozansky, president of the American University in Moscow (Russia's first private college). As a nuclear physicist in the 1970s, he was stripped of research and teaching positions for criticizing Soviet policy. Last week, he described a group of young people in Moscow protesting NATO bombing by carrying a poster saying: "Goodbye, America, Ideal of Freedom." One young man told Lozansky that "wittingly or unwittingly, America helps the red-brown [Communist-nationalist] coalition to win the Duma elections and enter the Kremlin."

"Each day of bombing brings this coalition closer to power," commented Lozansky. The two leading candidates to succeed Boris Yeltsin--the corrupt Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of Moscow, and the authoritarian Gen. Alexander Lebed, governor of Krasnoyarsk--are living off public anger expanded by the Chinese Embassy fiasco.

President Yeltsin, who in the early '90s was embraced by Murashev as leader of the reformers, faces imminent impeachment proceedings by the Communist-dominated Duma as he alternates between physical decrepitude and violent threats against NATO. His current favorite lieutenant is newly designated Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, a former police general and KGB political commissar. Known as the "butcher of Chechnya" for his brutal policies in fighting that province's insurrection, his is an extreme nationalist voice at Yeltsin's ear.

State Department diplomats never cottoned to the Russian reformers and are not much impressed by the warnings of Murashev and Lozansky. More surprising, Sen. Richard Lugar, long one of the most thoughtful and sensitive Republican voices on foreign policy, complains that the reformers "have been telling us that . . . for two years. It doesn't matter what we do."

Still, Lugar added in a CNN interview, "they're right in a way" because "this bombing has hit a nerve" in Russia with more than Communists and nationalists. The senator, who has advocated a ground campaign, then declared that the problem was "a war in which you constrain yourself just to bombing."

This formulation echoes the misplaced emphasis of U.S. policy on demonizing a petty dictator like Slobodan Milosevic while ignoring the truly dangerous people threatening to move into the Kremlin (not to mention the boost for Chinese hard-liners). There is more justification for opposing this war than distrust and dislike of Bill Clinton.

Robert Novak appears on the CNN programs "Capital Gang" at 6 p.m. Saturday and "Evans, Novak, Hunt and Shields" at 4:30 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Sunday.