Winter is Coming (31 page)

At the World Russian Press Congress in Moscow on June 11, 2008, Medvedev pledged to “support media freedom.” Would there be any changes? The signs were not good. He touted the need for a “Cyrillic internet” and criticized the closing of Russian-language media enterprises in former Soviet states, where local languages were reasserting themselves after Soviet-era restrictions. Medvedev also added that Russian television is “one of the highest quality in the world.”

Kremlin paranoia about who and what appeared on Russian television had reached new heights by then. Vladimir Posner, president of the Russian Academy of Television, confessed that he submits a list of guests he would like to have on his own show to Channel One management, who then let him know whom he can and cannot invite. Needless to say, people like Nemtsov, Navalny, and myself have never appeared on his show.

The Kremlin’s subjugation of the Russian press was, along with the rise in oil prices of over 700 percent, the biggest reason behind the perceived success of Putin’s regime. The oligarchs of the 1990s may have been robbing Russia blind, but at least we could find out about it in the news. Those days are over and the elite circle of oligarchs around Putin have power and riches beyond the dreams of Yeltsin’s entourage. In 2000, when Putin took charge, there were no Russians on the
Forbes
magazine list of the world’s billionaires. By 2005 there were thirty-six. In 2008 there were eighty-seven, more than Germany and Japan combined, in a country where 13 percent of our citizens were under a national poverty line of $150 a month. Putin and his defenders abroad bragged about Russia’s rising GDP, but it was like taking the average temperature of all the patients in a hospital.

According to the 2015 numbers, even after a year of Western sanctions and plunging oil prices, there are still eighty-eight Russian billionaires on the
Forbes
list, which still doesn’t list Putin or several of his closest cronies. I find it impossible to believe that a man like Putin who holds the power of life and death over eighty-eight billionaires is not the richest of them all. The occasional leaks about mysterious Black Sea mansions and enormous bank transfers to nowhere add more circumstantial evidence to the case that by now Putin is likely the richest man in the world.

On October 25, 2011, I gave a lecture on Russia at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. Georgia was under great pressure from the United States and others at the time to allow Russia to join the World Trade Organization, despite two large pieces of Georgian sovereign territory still being occupied by Russian forces, as they had been since the 2008 invasion. Many in the media and even some governments still refer to Abkhazia and South Ossetia as “disputed territories,” not occupied, ignoring the fact they were taken by military force from Georgia by Russia.

Despite heavy pressure from Russia after the invasion, including economic boycotts, tiny Georgia had remained defiantly pro-democratic and pro-Western under Saakashvili, and yet it was clear that getting Russia into the World Trade Organization (WTO) was of greater importance to Europe and the US than protecting the rights and territory of an ally. Putin’s administration liked to boast about how they had kept Georgia and Ukraine out of NATO during the Bush 43 administration and that WTO membership would be another feather in their cap.

As part of my presentation, I put up a slide with an image of a set of folders, labeled like KGB case files. First came the folders for
operation yukos
and
operation kadyrov
. Khodorkovsky’s case has been well covered already. Ramzan Kadyrov is the Chechen warlord who boasted of killing his first Russian soldier at the age of fifteen and was put in charge of the devastated region by Putin in 2007. Kadyrov’s agents have assassinated Putin’s enemies in other Russian cities as well as on foreign soil. It is hard to compare what Putin has done to the Russian Caucasus to anything else anywhere. He is not interested in attempting to better integrate these peoples, who are, after all, Russian citizens. Kadyrov is still in charge in Chechnya and has become Putin’s most loyal soldier. How long that loyalty would last if the flow of money from Moscow dried up is yet to be seen.

The next folder was labeled
operation medvedev
. I described it as Putin’s most successful operation of all. It was a variation of the old Soviet game, letting the West think there was a chance of promoting moderates, or of a possible rift in the hierarchy. Everyone would scramble to figure out what was happening inside the Kremlin, wasting their time and energy. Putin’s inevitable announcement that he would be reclaiming the presidency in 2012 made it clear that Medvedev was never anything more than the hoax many of us had said he was, that he had never been anything more than a shadow. But the United States spent considerable time trying to strengthen the imaginary “Medvedev faction,” dreaming about a split between Putin and Medvedev, and fantasizing about liberal reform despite all evidence to the contrary.

I briefly met President Bush in September 2008 at a lunch he hosted for global dissidents in New York City. He had strong words about Putin then, but this was right after Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August, which by all accounts, including his own, had infuriated Bush. In his memoir,
Decision Points,
Bush writes, “My biggest concern was that the Russians would storm all the way to Tbilisi and overthrow the democratically elected Saakashvili. It was clear the Russians couldn’t stand a democratic Georgia with a pro-Western president. I wondered if they would have been as aggressive if NATO had approved Georgia’s MAP [Membership Application Plan] application.”

The answer is almost certainly no, though we have little way of knowing for sure, since Western leadership has consistently avoided even trying to stand up to Putin. And yet the mistake was repeated six years later in Ukraine, the other country on Putin’s hit list that had failed to gain MAP status in 2008 thanks to opposition from Germany and France, who were quite open about saying it was because they didn’t want to anger Russia. (In another memorable remark in the book, Bush writes, “At a G-8 dinner in St. Petersburg, most of the leaders challenged Putin on his democratic record. Jacques Chirac did not. He announced that Putin was doing a fine job running Russia, and it was none of our business how he did it.” Clearly the French president was a greater fan of
fraternite
than of
liberte)

Later in his book Bush dedicates considerable time to the freedom agenda and his various disappointments and satisfactions. He concludes the section with, “I met with more than a hundred dissidents over the course of my presidency. Their plight can look bleak, but it is not hopeless. As I said in my Second Inaugural Address, the freedom agenda demands ‘the concentrated work of generations.’”

It most definitely does, but any hope for bold American support for human rights and democracy abroad ended abruptly with the result of the 2008 American election.

Berlin is an ideal place for an American president, even a would-be president, to speak to the world about freedom and shared values. The visit of presidential candidate Barack Obama on July 24, 2008, evoked the famous speeches there by his countrymen John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, speeches that defended the line, real and metaphorical, against the Soviet Union and the tyranny it represented in Eastern Europe. Although the line, the Wall, and the USSR itself are now gone, nuclear-armed dictatorships still pose dangers, something the senator declined to mention in Berlin.

The stage for Obama’s performance had been set several weeks earlier when the Illinois senator rejected his opponent Senator John McCain’s proposal to eject Russia and exclude China from the Group of Eight. Obama’s response suggested that it was simply impossible to work with Russia and China on economic and nuclear nonproliferation issues while standing up for democracy and human rights at the same time.

Not only is this false, but it has repeatedly been shown that the exact opposite is true. Commercial agreements, arms control, and other mutually beneficial projects can be pursued without tacitly endorsing dictatorship. Senator Obama spoke of enlisting

China to help write the “international rules of the road.” This is the same twisted logic that led the United Nations to place China, Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia on its Human Rights Council. Do we really want to live under rules created with the approval of such regimes?

While Obama talked about the importance of receiving Russia’s help in containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Reuters reported that Tehran was acquiring advanced S-300 surface-to-air missiles from the Kremlin. If that was the level of cooperation the West earned by including Russia in the G8, it is difficult to imagine what Obama feared would occur should Russia be expelled. In a serendipitous echo, right now in April 2015, Iran’s nuclear program and Russian S-300 missiles to protect it are again in the news. Alarmingly, Obama the president doesn’t seem any more concerned about them today than he was as a candidate in 2008.

In Berlin, Obama repeatedly mentioned the 1948 Berlin airlift. And in a previous interview he had said he would like to “bring back the kind of foreign policy that characterized the Truman administration with Marshall and Acheson and Kennan.” It was a strange statement, since President Truman, a great hero in my estimation, fought against giving up even an inch to the Communists on any front around the world. And the “Man from Missouri” was facing down no less a brute than Josef Stalin, who was making no secret of his desire for global dominance. Not only did Truman save West Berlin, but South Korea, Taiwan, and Western Europe also have much to thank him for. (In the light of current events it is also worth noting that Truman also forced Stalin to end the Soviet occupation of Iran in 1946.) Contrast that hard line to Obama’s campaign advisors Madeleine Albright and William Perry, secretaries of state and defense under Bill Clinton, who also criticized McCain’s proposal to respond to human rights abuses by major powers with more than lip service.

Also in his Berlin speech, Obama asked if the West would stand for “the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe.” Commendable, but what of the political prisoner in China and the convicted blogger in Russia? Both Mugabe and Medvedev came to power in blatantly fraudulent elections. The hypocrisy of condemning weak dictatorships while embracing strong ones destroys American and European credibility and undermines any attempt at global leadership; in fact, it seems to encourage smaller autocracies to aspire to greater ambitions. Great leaders are formed only by taking on great challenges. Those of us living behind the Iron Curtain were grateful Ronald Reagan did not go to Berlin in 1987 to denounce the lack of freedom in, say, Angola.

Other than Obama’s stance on Iraq, the candidate of change sounded a lot like he would perpetuate the destructive double standards of the Bush 43 administration. Meanwhile, the supposedly hidebound John McCain wasn’t too old-fashioned to suggest that if something is broken you should try to fix it. Giving Russia and China a free pass on human rights to keep them “at the table” has led to more arms and nuclear aid to Iran, a nuclear North Korea, and interference from both nations on resolving the tragedies in Darfur and Zimbabwe. Would all of these things have occurred anyway had the United States and Europe threatened meaningful reprisals? We can’t know, but at least McCain wanted to find out.

In 2008 and today there are wheeling-and-dealing capitalists and nationalists running the Kremlin and China’s National People’s Congress instead of Communist ideologues. They do not represent the existential threats faced by Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Reagan. And yet Obama is still reluctant to confront the enemies of democracy to defend the values he touts so convincingly in his speeches. The Cold War ended and democracy became the global standard not because Western leaders merely defended their values but because they projected them aggressively.