TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/070692/0706640.000

Text File | 1993-04-04 | 5.5 KB | 121 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 80

Russia Could Go The Asiatic Way

By David Aikman


    "Yes -- we are Scythians! Yes -- we are Asiatics/ With
slanting and rapacious eyes!"

    -- Poet Alexander Blok, January 1918

    "Russia has made its final choice in favor of a civilized
way of life, common sense and universal human heritage."

    -- President Boris Yeltsin, June 1992


    Is Russia now part of the West, or still something clearly,
if inexplicably, different? Earlier this month, the answer to
that question might have seemed self-evident. After all, there
was Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected leader of Russia,
addressing a joint session of Congress and seeming to wed his
country rhetorically to the great Western traditions of
democratic freedom. Just two months earlier, former Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev was laying to rest the cold war at
Fulton, Mo., the place where Winston Churchill declared it back
in 1946. That vision must have disturbed many older-generation
Soviets nurtured on the ideological red meat of East versus
West, of a Soviet Russia saving the world from its capitalist
original sin.

    Worries about the reliability of Russia's historic course
change are valid. Huge Russian garrison armies continue to
intimidate the newly independent states of the former Soviet
Union seven months after the collapse of the old system. "The
Russians are acting to keep these former republics in their
orbit," a frustrated Azerbaijani diplomat complained in
Washington two weeks ago. To the Moldovans, Latvians (and other
Balts) and Georgians rattled by these "foreign" troops, it is
little comfort that the unwelcome visitors are now Russian
rather than Soviet.

    The fears of Russia's neighbors across the spectrum of
Eurasia have deep historical roots. "Scratch a Russian, and you
will wound a Tartar," wrote the dry-eyed French 19th century
observer of Russia, Joseph de Maistre. The Mongol invasion
(1237-1480) and its aftermath of cruel autocracy had isolated
Russians totally from Western developments, particularly the
Renaissance and the Reformation. That long isolation embraced
every aspect of Russian life. Russia's first modern technology,
in the 17th century, was all imported from Holland and Germany.
Russia didn't have even a single university until 1755.

    This sense of being both backward and culturally different
from the West has haunted Russian intellectuals ever since Peter
the Great (1672-1725) first tried to hector his unwilling
country into the arms of European culture. During the 19th
century, Slavophiles argued that the spiritual and communal
culture based on Orthodoxy was superior to the materialism and
rationalism of the West. Their opponents, the Westernizers,
bemoaned Russia's "Asiatic" backwardness. They wanted their
country to absorb as much of Western economics, politics and
culture as quickly as possible.

    Just before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, it looked as
though the Westernizers had decisively won. Russia was by then a
Western-oriented constitutional monarchy with the
fastest-growing capitalist economy in Europe. Yet two years
later, the Bolsheviks were declaring ideological war on Europe.

    Whether Russia finally joins the West concerns others
besides academic historians. A Russia that thinks it is Western
is more likely to be peaceful, outward looking and moderate on
the international scene. This is the kind of Russia espoused by
Boris Yeltsin, who has even wondered aloud if Russia might
someday join NATO.

    Such sentiments may seem "naive." But it was just such a
pro-Western "naivete" that sent thousands of Muscovites into
the streets to defend fragile Russian democracy last August
after Yeltsin climbed atop a tank to face down a coup.

    The basis for doubts about Russia's long-term commitment to
"Westernness" lies not in Yeltsin or his democratic supporters
but in the ambivalence about the West that still seems endemic
to many Russians. Admiration has historically been tinged with
resentment of Western arrogance and conquest in the past
(Napoleon and Hitler) and with misgivings about the West's
spiritual values. Freedom, democracy and rampant market
economics seem palpably Western; but so do political anarchy,
street crime and the Mafia. Underlying doubts about the
supposed social advantages of a Western-style way of life are
shared by a wide audience. In June 1991 virulent Russian
nationalist candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky, campaigning for
cheaper vodka and the restoration of Russia's empire to three
continents (yes, Alaska too), persuaded 6 million people to vote
for him.

    There are things the U.S. and the West could do to undercut
anti-Western resentment. The best thing right away would be for
Congress to pass the Freedom Support act, which will help ease
Russia's transition to a market economy. Next, Americans should
keep encouraging Russians, as they emerge from Sovietism, that
a system of political accountability is better than any
dictatorship; that private property is always a better hedge
against poverty than collectivist social engineering; and that
Russia's struggle to cleanse itself of communism is as
commendable as Germany's exorcism of Nazism after World War II.

    One other thing. Until recently, some Yeltsinophobes at the
National Security Council continued to gaze upon portraits of
Gorbachev at work. Maybe it's time to take them down.