A long-time friend (who used to live in New York and collects art) visited my husband and me for a few days this past week. He’s an American who’s lived in Moscow for the past 14 years, runs his own business there, and is married to a Russian woman. Since the events in Georgia were at the top of the news when he visited, and our friend has lived among and worked with ordinary Russians for a long time, I was curious about what he had to say about the situation. He talked a lot about the huge amount of energy reserves in Russia, and the critical importance to Russia of controlling the pipelines in the Caucasus—information that’s been in the news lately. But I asked him to tell us about something we don’t find discussed much here at home—namely, the reaction of the Russians to Putin’s attack on Georgia.
What follows is his response. For obvious reasons, he asked me not to use his name.
You need a little background to understand what’s going on with Putin. When I first arrived in Moscow in ’93, it was a completely different city than it is today. Back then, Moscow was a country that was imploding. Today, it’s the most vibrant city, economically speaking, in the world—with negative unemployment, high inflation, and among the most expensive residential real estate you can find.
Moscow is now the largest city in Europe, with the biggest traffic jams and the highest cost of living for a Western standard of life. There’s lots of economic opportunity but little leisure life opportunity. For example, there are only three golf courses. For a while, the favorite leisure activity for anyone with even a little money was going out to dinner, but escalating prices put an end to that.
Gorbachev had given all Russians the right to own 400 square meters of land. People from his period until now rushed to get land and build anything from a shack to a palace on it. They started in the suburbs, but as that became too expensive, they moved as far out of Moscow as 150 kilometers. All this has now been jeopardized by the incredible weekend travel. By the way, the most popular car—everywhere but in Moscow itself—is the low-cost Russian car, the Lada. In Moscow, it’s easily 80 percent Western cars. But back to the main point: When it comes to entrepreneurial hustle and greed, New York is nothing compared to Moscow. Moscow is made up of millions of people clamoring for the bucks the Putin kleptocracy churns out.
In the beginning, being an American was, except for the dangers, all positive: You got respect, Russia was interesting, it offered great business opportunities, and an American man had his choice of women to date. But as Russia has evolved economically, Americans no longer attract even a second glance.
Prior to the Bush era, café discussions with Russians centered on how Russia had collapsed and everyone’s particular role in the disaster. To the Russians, there was only one adversary in the Cold War that mattered—the United States. They didn’t even think about Europe. The critical thing Americans have to know is that during the Cold War, the Russians deeply respected us. And post-1991, they still respected us because at that point they learned exactly how dominant we truly were. Their self-esteem was low—they were sitting on an economic collapse and they knew they’d done really bad stuff during communism.
The Bush era sparked a renaissance of Russian self-esteem because now they can easily point to what they see as the American policy of “Do as I say, not as I do.” They think that we now see international laws as applying to everybody but the United States. The invasion of Iraq gave Russia a new breath of self-esteem because it demonstrated that even the shining nation on the hill would go and invade a sovereign nation to serve its economic self-interest. To them, that showed that we were as corrupt and immoral as they were at their worst.
In the old days, Americans could argue with Russians about the differences in values in the two countries. With the Bush era, it became really hard. Now Americans and Russians have made a silent deal that we just don’t talk about this sort of thing any more. When something happens like Abu Ghraib, we Americans shrug and the Russians shrug along with us. We agree that everybody’s a slimeball and everyone’s corrupt.
My interpretation of the events in Georgia is that America enabled the Putinist aggressive foreign policy by providing for the Russian people, and government, beneficial comparisons of their foreign policy with Bush’s foreign policy.
