Constantine Pleshakov: The Crimean Nexus

By Russians’ lights, this crossed the line. As a British author put it, Washington would have felt the same had Leonid Brezhnev “invited Mexico and Cuba to join the Warsaw Pact.” [29] Wheatcroft, “Who Needs NATO?”

Since the end of the Cold War, supposedly won by the United States, the winner has scored remarkably few foreign policy victories. No doubt many factors had contributed to the debacles in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere, but one major miscalculation seems to have been the striking readiness to launch political engineering and sometimes endorse regime change in countries that are neither willing nor ready to ally with the West.

The moral permissibility of such interference aside, typically neither the U.S.-sponsored opposition nor the U.S. representatives engineering the transition of power have a positive program in mind. The “down with” bit is the easiest part of any uprising, but if there is no clear answer to the “what next” question, in all likelihood all the sacrifice would be in vain.

In 2004, in the viciously contested presidential elections in Ukraine, the United States supported the “pro-Western” candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, as Moscow rallied behind the “pro-Russian” Viktor Yanukovych. The campaign was nothing short of operatic. A dig in Yanukovych’s dirty linen revealed felony: as a young man, he had been found guilty of violent street crime. Now he professed to be “reformed,” a claim that many did not find entirely convincing. His opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, a very handsome man, had suddenly developed a brutal rash on his face. He claimed poisoning, and blood tests run by a European clinic confirmed the presence of herbicide, dioxin. Blaming the Russian secret services for his Shrek looks, Yushchenko bravely went on campaigning.

The “pro-Russian” Yanukovych claimed electoral victory, but the many reports of fraud coming from polling stations around the country caused popular anger, and that led to riots. Yushchenko refused to concede; as his campaign had been using the color orange for banners, t-shirts, and other paraphernalia, the resistance was dubbed the “Orange Revolution.” The movement got the support of the U.S. government, but the Kremlin, mistaking American cheerleading for a disciplined cabal, exaggerated the level of U.S. involvement. Much was made of the fact that Yushchenko’s wife was an American citizen and a former U.S. State Department official. [30] Mark R. Beissinger, “Promoting Democracy: Is Exporting Revolution a Constructive Strategy?” Dissent , vol. 53, no. 1, Winter 2006, 18–19.

Under pressure, a Ukrainian court annulled the results and ordered a rerun. The schism within Ukrainian society remained so strong that even after the electoral fraud scandal, 44 percent of Ukrainians voted for the disgraced Yanukovych.

With 52 percent of the vote, Yushchenko’s victory was secure, but the Orange Revolution was not. Yushchenko’s presidency was defined by infighting, corruption, abuse of executive power, and ineffectiveness. Running for reelection in 2010, he got less than 6 percent of the popular vote. But Washington’s encouragement of the Orange Revolution had convinced the Kremlin that the U.S. was capable of unseating a government in the post-Soviet space. That was a game changer. [31] Beissinger, “Promoting Democracy,” 23.

To judge from its record of intervention in non-Western societies in the past twenty-five years, America’s urge to improve the world has become persistent, aggressive, and unyielding. Bill Clinton had called the United States the “indispensable nation,” and Barack Obama called it “exceptional.” Despite the fact that Obama’s declaration was largely for domestic consumption, intended to appease conservative audiences in the United States, Vladimir Putin responded with a furious piece on the op-ed page of the New York Times . “God created us equal,” he growled. “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. …It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.” The interventionist intellectual Robert Kagan responded with a smile: “What gives the United States the right to act on behalf of a liberal world order? In truth, nothing does, nothing beyond the conviction that the liberal world order is the most just.” [32] “A Plea for Caution from Russia: What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria,” New York Times , September 11, 2013; Kagan, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire.”

Where Putin saw geopolitical failure—Afghanistan “reeling,” Libya “divided into tribes and clans,” Iraq still in the throes of civil war—Kagan saw promising if unfinished political engineering. Most of the “sizeable” U.S. military operations of the past twenty years, he noted with approval, had not been responses to “perceived threats to vital national interests. All aimed at defending and extending the liberal world order—by toppling dictators, reversing coups, and attempting to restore democracies.” [33] “A Plea for Caution from Russia: What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria”; Kagan, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire.”

The interventionist politician most eager to seize the opportunity for another Kitchen Debate was Senator John McCain. Who is Putin to judge the United States, McCain indignantly asked in an essay posted on the Russian news site Pravda . “He has given you a political system that is sustained by corruption and repression and isn’t strong enough to tolerate dissent.” He had made Russia a “friend to tyrants and an enemy to the oppressed”; he did not even have enough faith in the Russian people to trust them to handle freedom. “I do believe in you,” McCain assured his Russian audience. “I believe in your capacity for self-government and your desire for justice and opportunity.” Exemplary in its tone deafness—McCain was talking to a foreign nation as one would to a delinquent child—the address became infamous. [34] “Senator John McCain: Russians Deserve Better than Putin,” Pravda.ru, September 19, 2013, http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/19-09-2013/125705-McCain_for_pravda_ru-0 (retrieved February 20, 2015).

Furthermore, no term McCain used—“justice,” “opportunity,” “freedom”—could be defined with any degree of precision. Twenty-first-century Americans do not see eye to eye on fundamental rights and liberties, and while debating these fundamentals is, of course, the norm of human existence, it is strange to demand that “they” be like “us” when “we” cannot agree on what we are. Why, for example, advocate gay marriage in developing countries at a time when homophobia was rampant among American presidential hopefuls?

What McCain no doubt viewed as a plain-spoken expression of universal values that only barbarians would oppose, Russians saw as an example of arrogant, almost willful cognitive dissonance. When it came to American support of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot, the dissonance came to seem grotesque.

In 2010, the members of Pussy Riot staged a flash mob performance in the national cathedral in Moscow, chanting “Mother of God, kick Putin out.” It is most unlikely that the action was intrinsically political: the group’s prior performances had included copulation in a natural history museum. The event was more in the vein of Marina Abramović’s artistic provocation than Andrei Sakharov’s ideological dissent. No matter how we define it, however, it involved the desecration of a holy site.

Rather stupidly, a Moscow court sentenced the young women to jail terms. But when commentators in the United States declared Pussy Riot martyrs of the anti-Putin revolutionary movement, many Russians found it odd: they had not forgotten that just thirty years before, the privileges of Russian Christians had sat at the top of Washington’s human rights agenda. In the days of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, desecration of a church in Russia would have been called a godless Communist act. Yet on the day the 2014 Olympics opened in Sochi, Russia, the New York Times ran an editorial stating that no celebration of Russian Olympic hospitality should overshadow the plight of the women of Pussy Riot. Americans saw no contradiction: they had spoken out for freedom of religion for Russian Christians when that was under assault, and they spoke out for Pussy Riot’s freedom of expression for the same reason—even if that expression offended the very Christians they had once supported. [35] “A Spotlight on Mr. Putin’s Russia,” New York Times , February 6, 2014.