Winter is Coming (8 page)

There was more than rhetoric involved in these bizarre attempts to prop up an old foe. Billions of dollars in Western aid and loan guarantees were provided to keep the USSR on life support. Germany alone extended an $8 billion aid package that was part of the agreement on German unification. Germany’s financial commitments to Russia would balloon to $45 billion by 1992 and they included money for sending Russian troops home and even building housing for them in Russia.

The United States also stepped in with assistance well before any outcome was clear on democratic reforms in Moscow. On December 12, 1990, President Bush announced a package worth over $1.3 billion in credit and credit guarantees and waived the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment that put strict controls on doing business with the USSR. Four months later, Bush authorized another $1.5 billion in agricultural loan guarantees. The United States also sent medical aid directly to the Baltic States after the Soviet crackdowns there, and to Ukraine for the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe.

American and other G7 multilateral aid and credit to Russia and other Soviet states only increased over the next few years, with Russia by far the largest beneficiary. In March 1993, feeling the need to support Boris Yeltsin’s government, which was under parliamentary pressure, the G7 put together a $43 billion assistance plan. Japan bowed to the pressure of its fellow G7 members and did not tie its nearly $2 billion in aid to the disputed Kuril Islands. The IMF and the World Bank also opened their wallets, with the World Bank making its largest project loan ever of $610 million to help rebuild Russia’s oil industry. Russia failed to collect all of the offered aid due to failing to achieve some required economic reform requirements. Thankfully, it was too little and far too late to keep the USSR together.

Separately, during the 1990s billions of dollars came in to secure the Soviet nuclear weapons and related programs in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. This can hardly be called anything but a wise investment, since the last things anyone wanted to see was a lack of oversight of nuclear weapons and materials or a diaspora of Soviet nuclear scientists in need of employment.

All these numbers are tedious, but it is important to counter the popular Russian victimhood myth spread by Putin’s propaganda and by his anti-American, anti-NATO sympathizers around the world. The story goes that Russia was humiliated by the West when the USSR collapsed, leading to resentment and mistrust. They say the Cold War victors “lost Russia” first by not providing enough assistance and then by expanding NATO too aggressively. Both accusations are demonstrably false. As I will discuss in more detail later, if anything the West has been far too willing to forgive and forget the past crimes and dangerous potential of its old enemy.

In reality, many Western leaders became trapped by the idea that Russia was “too big to lose” and had to be supported at all costs even when it was clear they were throwing good money after bad down a hole of post-Soviet corruption and mismanagement. The danger of hardliners kicking out Gorbachev or the Communists coming back and beating Yeltsin was considered too great. The brief August 1991 coup by hardliners against Gorbachev, whether it was real or of Gorbachev’s own desperate orchestration, resulted in an immediate bump in American aid. Similarly, when the Russian Duma challenged Yeltsin’s reforms in 1993, the US Senate immediately responded by pushing through a $2.5 billion aid package that had been delayed.

In
Anatomy of Fascism,
Robert Paxton includes in his concise definition “the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.” The myth of Russian humiliation at Western, especially American, hands fits the victimhood model perfectly. The false narrative that Russia is surrounded by enemies who are intent on holding it back fills Putin’s need for fuel for his increasingly fascist propaganda. For similar reasons, Putin’s regime is as obsessed with Soviet suffering and victory in World War II as the Soviet Union ever was. Along with the victimhood claim (in this case, legitimate), the WWII fixation fits the Kremlin’s desire to call all of its enemies fascists, despite all evidence to the contrary. Their bizarre logic goes, “We defeated fascists in WWII, and so everyone who opposes us is fascist.”

Ironically, the roots of Russia’s descent back into totalitarianism can be traced to the West doing too much to respect the legacy of the USSR as a great power, not too little. Russia was allowed to inherit the Soviet Union’s seat on the UN Security Council when that organization, which had been designed to preserve the Cold War status quo, should instead have been reformed to reflect the new primacy of the free world. There were no demands for lustration-investigating and prosecuting, or at least ejecting, Soviet officials for their crimes—while Gorbachev was practically canonized in the West.

Not exactly humiliation, unless you count the embarrassment of needing billions in cash and aid from a former rival, a rival that generations of Soviet propaganda had portrayed as heartless and destructive. The USSR lost the Cold War, and losing is painful. This sentiment, feeling like losers, was a consequence of failing to move on from the nation that vanished under our feet. The USSR lost the Cold War, but it was a victory not just for the United States and the West, but for Russians and all Soviet citizens and everyone living behind the Iron Curtain. We were free to live, to speak, and to think for ourselves. The real loss came when we failed to uproot the KGB system and failed to put misremembered glory days behind us quickly, as most of the European Soviet Bloc succeeded in doing. This left Russia and other former Soviet states vulnerable to the humiliation myth and to men like Putin eager to exploit it.

Many today seem to have forgotten that the fall of the Iron Curtain, the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union were distinct events. Closely related events, of course, but by the time the USSR officially disappeared the Berlin Wall had been down for over two years. Anti-Communist revolutions and secessionist movements of various stripes spread across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, beginning with the Solidarity movement in Poland in April. The wave swept through Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania.

In my recollection, the Soviet media covered these incredible events with the schizophrenia typical of the glasnost period. In theory, the press was free at this point, but television in particular was still under centralized Kremlin control. Programs that discussed the Baltic uprisings in an insufficiently critical way, for example, could suddenly disappear from the airwaves. It was also in response to these political shifts that a more aggressive form of propaganda began to appear on Soviet television instead of just bland news and light entertainment. The print media had come a long way since the party-line
Pravda
days before 1985 and periodicals were bold enough to accurately report the fall of one European Communist regime after another. The transformation was remarkably peaceful, with the notable exception of the execution of vile Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who had ordered his troops to fire on anti-government protestors and where an estimated eleven hundred people were killed during the violence.

China’s Tiananmen Square protests and massacre should also be mentioned in any discussion of “the Spirit of 1989,” especially since Gorbachev visited Beijing in May, right in the middle of the protests, three weeks before the tanks were sent in to crush the demonstrators. Dictators seem to learn from history much better than democrats, by the way. The Putins of this world view Gorbachev as having been too weak to hold the USSR together and take from Tiananmen the value of brutal force.

Far more blood would soon come from a sadly predictable quarter, Yugoslavia, which, while Communist, had remained officially nonaligned for decades. When dictator-for-life Josip Tito died in 1980, the tight lid he had clamped down on the many ethnic and territorial divisions in the patchwork Balkan nation began to rattle. Federal control was already very weak by the time the European anti-Communist movement arrived and led to the country’s first multiparty elections. But instead of settling things, the elections highlighted the irreconcilable differences among the country’s terribly intertwined republics and its ethnic and religious groups. The ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo was resentful of the Serbs while separatist parties in Slovenia and Croatia promised independence at the same time Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic worked to strengthen the federal system that he largely controlled. It was a recipe for disaster that would soon become the first test of the post-Cold War security system.

With enough problems already stemming from the 1989 revolutions, NATO and the Western powers were happy to ignore the initial phases of the Yugoslav wars as internal problems. Europe had to figure out how to deal with 130 million impoverished new friends and their fledgling democratic governments. The Bush administration was focused on the USSR and, from August 1990 to February 1991, with the first Gulf War and its aftermath. The US-led coalition to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait was notable for being the first time the two superpowers had been on the same side of a crisis since the end of World War II. The Soviet Union had been Saddam’s main supporter, so the joint US-USSR statement condemning his invasion was another signal that the Cold War was fading. (Although it later turned out that Gorbachev had hedged his bets and left Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze to push the statement through on his own.)

The moral clarity and stubbornness of Ronald Reagan had done its job in the end. In 1976, Reagan lost the Republican nomination to Gerald Ford, but succeeded in introducing the “morality in foreign policy” plank into the GOP platform. It is no exaggeration to say this modest achievement changed the world, as well as my own destiny. The Wall was torn down as Reagan had demanded and the evil empire fell. Lesser problems were left to lesser men.

While I am not an admirer of the first President Bush due to his extreme loyalty to Gorbachev, and I railed against his fecklessness at the time, his administration did a fair job of cleaning up the pieces in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution. He had a mature and competent foreign policy team whose lack of vision and courage before and during the USSR’s collapse wasn’t such a drawback when it came to managing the fallout. Bush, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Dick Cheney, and the rest grudgingly began to work with “loose cannon” Yeltsin on practical matters of nuclear security and economic reforms.

I would still take issue with how those economic reforms and aid packages were handled, although it was a hugely difficult task under any circumstances. The history of left-wing dictatorships transitioning to democracy with market economies is a short collection of horror stories. Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn’t do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else. It destroys the human spirit on an individual level, perverting the values of a successful free society.

It is no coincidence that right-wing autocracies have a much better track record of emerging from political repression and achieving democratic and economic success. Chile, Portugal, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan—their regimes were about power for the sake of power, without a deeper ideology. When their regimes fell, with elections in most cases, the roots, the human values of individual freedom, were still healthy enough to flourish. Communist ideology attacks both root and branch and poisons the soil. Many countries in Eastern Europe are still struggling, despite the stabilizing influence and massive financial support provided by the European Union for decades. For some nations it was psychologically easier to uproot Communism because it was seen as a by-product of the hated Soviet occupation and they were eager to throw it all out.

Of course this is hardly an endorsement of any type of dictatorship. I believe Churchill’s famous phrase: “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” But it partly explains why the former republics of the USSR have struggled so badly and why the regimes of Cuba and North Korea have proven so durable. It is the difference between people resenting that they are not free and people believing they do not deserve freedom.

The year 1992 saw the beginning of a modest debate over what the new world order should look like. It was no longer split between two rival superpowers. Was it a unipolar world where the United States, with most of Europe in tow, would set the agenda and enforce its will? Or was it a multipolar or nonpolar world, with no center of moral gravity? The US, with its massive military, enormous economy, and lack of any political opposition, was the de facto global hegemon, whether it wanted to embrace the role or not. The real question was how it would use this influence.

In 2015, after two exhausting and mismanaged wars, a humbling financial crisis, the rapid rise of China, and America’s apparent impotence in various global hotspots, it’s easy to forget just how dominant the United States was in the 1990s. In 1992, the US economy of $6.5 trillion was nearly double Japan’s, triple Germany’s, and thirteen times larger than China’s. Russia barely made it into the top twenty, where it would stay until the price of oil shot up enough to push it into the top ten. The balance in military spending and capability was even more tilted toward the US and NATO in the 1990s, as it was revealed that the fabled Soviet military machine was as antiquated and feeble as the rest of its economy. China’s relatively small military budget wouldn’t take off until the 2000s.