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WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
Russia’s
Turn West: Sea Change or Opportunism? "We sail in the same boat," an aide to Russian president Vladimir Putin said in late 2002 of relations between NATO and Russia, adding the hope that greater cooperation and better relations between Moscow and the West will develop "dynamically." 1 But do we, in fact, "sail in the same boat?" Should we? Those who object to a closer partnership typically point out that Russia, while democratic in certain political processes, is not a democracy; that the war in Chechnya is indicative of the true nature of the Russian regime; and that in any case Russia is serving only its own blunted imperial ambitions rather than any sense of the greater good, in effect coaxing the West to put its stamp of approval on Moscow’s efforts to recapture the former Soviet empire and to reemerge as a force to be reckoned with in Europe and beyond. The fundamental concern is that Russia cannot (or will not) change, and that Moscow’s turn to the West is insincere, motivated by opportunism rather than conviction. Much of this concern is generated by the perception of President Putin himself, and understandably so. The idea that a former KGB agent, once sworn to the destruction of the Western system of government, has now seen the light and wishes to join the community of civilized nations is difficult for many to accept or comprehend. But this misses the continuity of Russian policy toward the West since 1991. While some of Putin’s domestic policies have represented a shift away from those of his predecessor, his foreign policy is recognizable as a continuation and expansion of Boris Yeltsin’s generally pro-Western line. Putin, even more than Yeltsin, has placed Russia squarely among the North Americans and Europeans as part of the "West." (Putin and Yeltsin have both shown a pro-Western orientation in their rhetoric, but because Putin almost certainly has more control over the decidedly anti-American Russian military and intelligence services than Yeltsin ever did, he has been more able to make it stick as a policy.) The source of this decade-long shift toward the West is rooted in a change in the way Russians—and perhaps more important, their leaders—see themselves. This is not to say that Russia has made a dramatic conversion to all of the democratic West’s values and norms, but rather that Russia since 1991 (and, some would argue, since about the seventeenth century) has been slowly coming to the realization that its destiny is as a Western power, rather than as an outcast or perpetual challenger to the Western international system. Indeed, when asked in 2002 to name their nation’s military and political allies, 27 percent of Russians named Western countries (including 14 percent who named the United States), and 15 percent cited the former Soviet republics of the Commonwealth of Independent States; only 10 percent named communist states such as China, Cuba, and North Korea. 2 Although the warmer Russian-American relationship has generally been attributed to the effect of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, Russia’s turn to the West predated the assaults on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. As Timothy Colton of Harvard and Michael McFaul of Stanford noted at the time, "Russians aligned themselves with the United States in its hour of need—and have been more pro-American in their reactions than their own government—because, in part, of a deep support for democracy." 3 After 9/11, Russian-American cordiality accelerated, not least due to nimble Russian efforts to seize the opportunity. Russian help (or at least the absence of Russian opposition) made the first phase of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan much easier than it might have been otherwise. Putin, despite some opposition to the idea from within the Russian security and defense communities, allowed U.S. aircraft to use Russian airspace and accepted the basing of U.S. forces on former Soviet territory in Central Asia, an unprecedented move that was dramatic even by the standards of the improved Russian-American relationship. The Americans, for their part, have seemed at times either confused by Russia’s cooperativeness, suspicious of it, or uninterested in pursuing it, but this American indecisiveness has so far not deterred the Russians from continuing their efforts to forge stronger ties with the United States and Europe. Lower tensions between Washington and Moscow are encouraging, but the question remains: is this indicative of a sea change in Russian policy (and Russian political culture), or is Russia only seeking a tactical and opportunistic accommodation for its own ends?
Russia as a
Democracy
There is no shortage of anecdotes to serve as reminders that Russia is still a rough and often brutal country. From the carnage in Chechnya to the corrupt dealings of the Russian political and economic elites, from the violence against Russians who run afoul of the nation’s criminal organizations to the spectacle this past November of an angry President Putin responding to a question about the Chechen war by inviting a French journalist to come to Moscow to be emasculated, it is understandable that Westerners are reluctant to think of Russia as a democracy, and certainly as anything like a Western democracy. But Russian democracy, however unlovely, exists. Russian elections are messy, often vicious affairs, but Russians now take it for granted that they will have them and that they matter, no small achievement in a nation that was a communist dictatorship only a dozen years ago. Like Boris Yeltsin before him, Putin seems to realize that to govern, Russia’s chief executive needs an actual mandate from the electorate or he risks violence and bloodshed in the streets. Press freedoms are under attack, but while journalists all too often work in an atmosphere of fear, they still work, and information still flows into Russia from all sides. (Indeed, the Kremlin learned the limits of its ability to control information this past October, when Chechen terrorists seized hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theater; despite resorting to such desperate measures as shutting down a television station for what the Russian Press Ministry considered inappropriate coverage of the crisis, the story was covered minute by minute by Russian and Western media.) Entrepreneurs and other businessmen have become accustomed to the freedom to make decisions in their private enterprises and to congregate with their colleagues abroad. Even if the Kremlin believed it could figure out a way to sustain a free economy among an unfree people, Russia’s capitalists would not easily acquiesce in the loss of that freedom. 4 But if Russia is recognizable as a democracy, is it a democracy whose interests coincide, or at least do not conflict, with those of the West? After all, despite the fact that a plurality of Russians identify the West as an ally, a solid majority over the past several years have continued to believe that the wealthy and powerful Americans are actively thwarting Russia’s attempts to return to the international stage as a great power—a kind of conspiracy theory of American hegemony shared by many states who see their own weakness as a direct result of America’s corresponding strength. 5 Russian cordiality might therefore be little more than an accommodation with a powerful state for a short-term respite from competition.
Necessity and
Geostrategic Interest
Geopolitics, rather than any hidden anti-Western agenda, also might explain what could be viewed as a calculated decision to embrace the West temporarily, but this is hardly an encouraging alternative, since it suggests that the current situation is a temporary accommodation that serves Russian, but not necessarily American, interests. Rather than pursuing a policy to oppose American power, Putin, in this interpretation, has sought an accommodation with the West in order to legitimate Russian moves in the former Soviet region and thereby bolster Russian power and geo-strategic reach. (This is the thinking underlying the Russian newspaper Kommersant’s recent charge that Putin’s possible acceptance of an American war on Iraq is meant as a quid pro quo for which George W. Bush will be expected to turn a blind eye to Russian aggression in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge region, where Moscow wishes to pursue Chechen rebels who have taken shelter there.) "The alternatives to alignment with the West," former Soviet foreign minister Alexander Bessmertnykh has said, "are to become a problem to it by aligning Russia with the Iraqs and Irans, the North Koreas, and Cubas of the world, or to bow out of international affairs altogether, which with our geographic and geopolitical location is not a serious option." 6 But to ascribe Russia’s turn toward the West as merely a matter of present convenience or careful geo-strategic triangulation is too cynical and discounts the possibility of genuine change. Even if it were likely that Russia’s current Western orientation is an expedient or a ruse, such a tactic would still have a dramatic impact on Russia’s identity Russia’s Turn West 15.as a nation. If Russia is adopting the policies, habits, and norms of a capitalist democracy merely to gain favor with other nations for economic benefit (or even as camouflage), so be it: a country that pretends to be a capitalist democracy sooner or later is a capitalist democracy, as the mounting evidence in the Russian domestic sphere attests. (As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, we are what we pretend to be, and so we must be careful what we pretend to be.) To take one example: Russia wanted, and got, official designation by the U.S. government as a market economy, and it is directly contrary to the interests of Russia’s governing and economic elites to engage in any behavior for the foreseeable future that would endanger that coveted status. Even if the original effort to attain such status was a cynical move for strictly material gain, the Russians will now have to maintain liberal practices in order not to lose it. Ironically, the idea that constant economic interaction with the West, with its attendant pressure for economic liberalization, will create goodwill and cooperation in other spheres is also the hope of many who support "engagement" with China. But China should be a far more worrisome case than Russia, since Beijing is trying to gain all the advantages of Western trade but is striving to maintain a one-party dictatorship, a burgeoning military, and an aggressive foreign policy at the same time. Russia, by contrast, has become increasingly pluralized, has withdrawn from international military competition with the West, and is (especially compared with the Chinese) a reasonable partner in dealings with both America and Europe. Still, it is undeniable that Russia’s economic and military situation has played a role in Putin’s reassessment of Russia’s interests. Russian weakness is a fact, and Putin is clearly trying to retain at least some respect for Russia as a great power by aligning with, rather than against, the most powerful players in the international system. But this is only part of the answer to why Russia is turning toward the West.
Russia as a
"Western" Power
Despite the occasional nods to Soviet nostalgia, such as restoring the old Soviet national anthem and keeping the Red Star in military markings, Russians and their leaders now have little interest either in a return to the Soviet past, or in the recreation (for now) of Russia as a superpower. This is not to say that Russians are satisfied with their second-rank status in international affairs, but rather that the Imperial and Soviet impulse to expand and conquer, the messianic will to power, seems finally to have dissipated and may even have been displaced to some extent by a greater desire to integrate into the prosperous West. This is a change that took place relatively quickly. From the late 1980s and into the first few years after the Soviet collapse, there was a palpable sense in Russia of stung pride and thwarted imperial ambition. Russian parliamentary elections in 1993 confirmed what could be heard on the street: Russian voters handed a parliamentary plurality to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the man who wrote of his dreams to recapture Alaska, dump nuclear waste on the Baltics as punishment for their impudence, and see Russian soldiers washing their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. (Especially worrisome was the fact that the Russian military voted for Zhirinovsky in staggering numbers, with 70 percent of the overall vote and over 90 percent in some military balloting stations.) The Zhirinovsky vote was a powerful message to the Kremlin that the public saw Russia as defeated and prostrate before the Western powers—the assertions of some in the West that nobody "won" the Cold War is not a position that would find many takers among Russians—and it seemed for a time that there was a danger of Russia being turned onto an ultra nationalist, anti-Western path. Fortunately, Yeltsin and his team managed to sidestep this danger, in no small part by buying off people like Zhirinovsky with perks and perhaps even cash. (Zhirinovsky has since lost most of his previous support; he is now usually a supporter of the Kremlin when he’s not playing the part of the Duma’s court jester.) More important, however, were the events of October 1993, when anti-Western elements in Russia had their last, best chance to derail Russia’s growing integration into the West. For days, an amalgam of Soviet, fascist, and ultra nationalist forces in the parliament tried to depose Yeltsin, even calling on the military to honor its Soviet roots and to mutiny against its own commanders if need be to aid them in ridding Russia of Yeltsin and others like him. (The parliament’s putative "defense minister" warned that Yeltsinite "traitors" would "wash in their own blood." 9 ) The result was open combat in the streets of Moscow, with Yeltsin’s tanks quickly victorious over the plotters. Once the would-be authoritarians of the October 1993 uprising were defeated and the spasm of outrage that produced Zhirinovsky’s victory subsided, Russians found that what they were, most of all, was tired: tired of endless political conflict, tired of being poor, and just as important, tired of being reviled by so many in the world. Conservative Soviet-minded military officers, chastened by the bloodshed of October 1993, resigned rather than rebel again. In the years following the 1993 events, Yeltsin won reelection, and successive parliamentary elections have resulted in a more centrist governing coalition in the Duma. Despite evident anger over heavy-handed American policies like NATO expansion and the 1999 U.S.-led war in Kosovo—a just conflict nonetheless characterized by needlessly abrasive diplomacy—Russians by and large (and particularly the Russian elite) have since come to view their future as lying with the West. This is the legacy that was handed to Putin in 1999. The generally pro-Western character of current Russian foreign policy is all the more encouraging given how slow America has been to respond to it. Washington’s policy toward Russia in the 1990s was at best inconstant, and seemed to many Russians to be aimed at continual humiliation of the Russian Federation rather than at consolidating the peace made after 1991. NATO expansion in particular seared Russian pride, not because of any actual military threat it posed to Russia proper, but rather because a constant theme running through the enlargement argument has been that Russia is still a threat to Europe. (Even more moderate Russian foreign policy thinkers in the 1990s asked what more America could possibly want, now that the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact had been dissolved and Russian military power reduced to minimal levels.) U.S. tariffs on steel, the "chicken war" over agricultural exports to Russia, and the continuing, if irrelevant, existence of the Jackson-Vanik amendment that was aimed at punishing the USSR by linking Soviet emigration levels to improved trade relations with America also seemed to suggest that for all of the talk about bringing Russia fully into the Western embrace, Washington would run roughshod over Russian interests and feelings if it suited it. If Putin had wanted to retaliate, he had plenty of opportunities. The most obvious example was over arms control, when the Bush administration wanted Russian acquiescence on withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Legally, there was nothing to stop Washington from giving notice and withdrawing from the treaty, but full-throated Russian opposition could have made doing so a diplomatic nightmare. In the end, the ABM Treaty passed into the history books with relatively little outcry from the Kremlin—or from anywhere else, for that matter. (The strongest language Putin used about the U.S. decision to withdraw from the treaty was to call it a "mistake.") A month later, when Bush proposed deep cuts in strategic nuclear arms, the Russians agreed quickly—only to find that some Pentagon planners were arguing for storage, not destruction, of U.S. arms. This was especially galling to the Russians, because the age and condition of their arsenal meant they would have no choice but to destroy their warheads, thus making the American position little more than a framework for unilateral Russian disarmament. Instead of withdrawing from the entire scheme and inflicting a stinging embarrassment on Bush, however, the Russians agreed to negotiate the issue and averted a diplomatic collision. The Cubans were to feel particularly betrayed by Putin, who in October 2001 decided to close the Lourdes intelligence post, a prized Soviet possession that allowed the USSR to eavesdrop and gather intelligence on the United States from America’s own backyard, depriving Havana of precious cash while offering a concession to Cuba’s hated enemy, the United States. By some estimates, Russia will save $200 million a year by closing Lourdes, but when taken together with its early withdrawal from its naval base in Cam Ranh Bay, it is difficult to ascribe such a dramatic retreat from Cold War outposts to mere economizing. Rather, it appears that Putin is taking the opportunity to send a message to the West by visibly distancing Russia from such well-known Soviet- era facilities. Any number of American policies could have been the trigger for a Russian suspension or even abandonment of this ongoing withdrawal from former Soviet imperial possessions—and should have been, if Putin was trying to extract corresponding concessions from the United States.
Chechnya and
the War on Terrorism
In light of previous American criticism of the conduct of the Russian military in the war on Chechnya, the American decision to go to war in Afghanistan was the logical moment to try to lift some of the international pressure from Russia for its involvement in the Chechen quagmire, where the Russian government and Chechen separatists of various stripes have been fighting a no-holds-barred campaign intermittently since 1994, a continuation of the blood feud between Russians and Chechens that dates back to the nineteenth century. The Russian government (and many Russians) feel they are at war with a terrorist insurgency, and while the situation is far more complicated than that, there is also a great deal of truth to the charge. The Chechens, like the Palestinians, are cursed by extremists in their midst whose brazen acts of violence and terror make accommodation impossible and negotiation arduous. Osama bin Laden did not help the Chechens by applauding the Moscow theater attack, making it seem as though a line ran directly from the Twin Towers in 2001 to the Moscow hostage-taking in 2002—and thus playing directly into Putin’s hands, the Russian leader having claimed all along that he was fighting the same enemy in Chechnya that the Americans were fighting in Afghanistan. This is an exaggeration, of course. Nominal Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov still, as of this writing, continues to deny any accommodation with al-Qaeda terrorists, but many Chechens are linked to al-Qaeda and have fought for it, regardless of their relationship to Maskhadov’s beleaguered regime. This does not make Chechen terrorism and al-Qaeda’s operations a seamless whole, however. Nor is it reasonable to assume, as the Russians sometimes seem to do, that all Chechens are rebels, terrorists, or criminals. While it is impossible to say with any certainty what portion of the Chechen population—those left, anyway— favor ending the uprising against the Russians, it is nonetheless clear from the peace brokered after the "first" Chechen war of the late 1990s that there are a significant number of Chechens who would accept an arrangement that left Chechnya within the Russian Federation, which is all that Moscow really wants. Unfortunately, as in any rebellion, a settlement is only as stable as the most violent group in the opposition allows it to be, and the Russian position at this point seems to be to lay waste to Chechnya rather than to try to figure out who among the Chechens could emerge as a moderate leader that the Kremlin would tolerate. The Moscow theater outrage has, for the time being, undermined any incentive for Putin to negotiate or even to consider conciliation, a situation that the terrorists have brought upon themselves and their fellow citizens. Rather, the Russian government now has a pretext for increasing the pressure on the Chechens and to claim that they are acting as an American ally by doing so. (As one Russian bystander at the Moscow siege said bitterly, "Putin has only one choice. Bush showed the world what to do with these bastards after September 11. It’s Putin’s turn to liquidate them in Russia." 10 ) Indeed, polls now show that the number of Russians willing to accept Chechnya’s independence from Russia has actually been dropping since the renewal of hostilities in 1999, and the terrorist attack in Moscow—a Chechen blunder that shows once again that terrorists in general are poor strategists—has hardened Russian attitudes to the point where even Putin himself has had to warn the military against taking revenge on the battlefield. The Chechens have also made Putin’s case for him by taking refuge in the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia. Moscow for a time threatened to go after the rebels if the Georgians wouldn’t, and this immediately raised fears that the Russians were going to use the war against terrorists as a pretext for establishing neo-imperial control over a former Soviet republic. This also seemed to place Moscow and Washington on a potential collision course: the Russians were chafing to intervene as American troops arrived in the region to train their Georgian colleagues in counterinsurgency warfare. Russian ire, however, did not lead to a direct challenge to the Americans over Georgia. Indeed, some of the toughest opposition American officers in Georgia faced in their efforts to train Georgian forces came not from Moscow (which did not express strong objections), but from atavistic Georgian senior commanders whose loyalties apparently lie more with the former Soviet Union than with Georgia itself. While there are many in Moscow who would like to see the country’s president, Eduard Shevardnadze, toppled, Russia has neither the will nor the forces to turn an attack on rebels in Pankisi into an imperial recon quest of Georgia. The issue for the United States in all of this is whether Chechnya should be the deal-breaker in improving Russian-American relations. It is hard to imagine that any Russian president would fail to take note of the prevailing international winds after 9/11 to press the case that the Chechens must be put down, and to seek American acquiescence while doing so. But the most important point about the Chechen situation, as distasteful as it is to acknowledge it, is that Russian military operations do not pose a threat to U.S. or Western interests. This is not to applaud the brutal Russian campaign itself: even though the Russians are right to insist that Chechnya is an internal Russian matter, they should not be given license to commit war crimes against Russian citizens. Yet it is important not to confuse Russia’s incompetent and even sadistic military operations in Chechnya with the larger question of whether the war should be fought at all: it is neither in the American or Russian interest—or, indeed, the world’s interest—to allow the insurgents to withdraw Chechnya from the Russian Federation, perhaps setting in motion the further unraveling of the Russian state and creating what would almost certainly be a terrorist entity in the Caucasus. The outcome to the conflict that would best serve Americans, Russians, and the Chechens themselves would be an arrangement in which Chechens could run their domestic affairs largely as they wish (consonant with, at least, the Russian constitution), but for Chechnya to remain within the federation and under the Russian security aegis—precisely so it does not become the terrorist haven that Putin claims it already is, and which it seems well on its way to becoming. The obstacle, of course, is that the only way to achieve this outcome is to destroy the terrorist groups currently active in Chechnya. Since this is an activity that will assuredly be undertaken with the same clumsy brutality and rage that Russian forces have already shown in the conflict, there is the danger that the very actions needed to root out Chechen terrorists will radicalize others and provide more recruits for the fight against the Russians. Given the aims of the terrorist insurgents, however, Moscow has no option but to continue the fight. The establishment of a terrorist state in Chechnya must not be the unintended outcome of American policy. Washington must make a clear distinction between criticism of Russian aims in the Chechen war and Russian methods in fighting it, a shift that would without doubt be welcome in Moscow. The White House and the State Department are already moving in this direction, dropping terms like "rebels" and "freedom- fighters" when referring to the conflict. In the end, the United States may be able to exert more influence over the situation if it is not perceived as uniformly hostile to Moscow’s attempt to keep the Russian Federation intact.
America’s Opportunity
Still, America has an opportunity to forge a closer relationship with Russia. Indeed, if the United States wishes to influence Putin’s government on matters ranging from ensuring greater freedom of the press to the conduct of the war in Chechnya, a closer relationship is imperative. There are a number of steps to this end. First, the United States should actively accept Russia as a partner in the war on terrorism. This means acknowledging the Russian contribution to the war in Afghanistan, placing Moscow squarely within the U.S.-led coalition rather than as a peripheral, if friendly, combatant. This should include expanding intelligence and military-to- military contacts, a policy that could have positive effects in Chechnya as well, as Russian officers become less isolated and more conversant with the culture and norms of Western militaries. The United States should speak out against the brutality of the war in Chechnya, but as a friend of the court rather than as part of the prosecution team. Without clearly affirming our support for keeping the Russian Federation whole and for destroying terrorists wherever they are found, Washington cannot expect to have credibility or weight on Russian methods with either the Kremlin or the average Russian citizen. It is long past time to slow (or even better, to halt) NATO expansion, an idea whose time has long gone and whose rationale was never clear. NATO expansion is a solution in search of a problem, a placeholder for a coherent policy that was never developed; rather than being guided by a coherent strategic vision, NATO expansion developed a momentum of its own that was detached from a judicious appraisal of actual threats. The Clinton administration’s clumsy embrace of the policy did little but needlessly humiliate Moscow and poison Russian-American relations, putting those Russians who were pressing for closer relations with the West on the defensive. While slowing NATO expansion will irritate those nations waiting for entry (and for whom membership in the alliance is seen as the path to European Union membership, a motivation more likely than any real fear of the Russians), it would be an important step that could reverse some of the damage done to relations with Moscow and with the Russian public in the 1990s. Finally, the United States and its allies must insist that the price of Russia’s presence in the G-8, and in the councils of the industrial democracies in general, is the steady improvement in its record with respect to democratic freedoms. Russia cannot expect to trample on press freedoms and prevent the free flow of information, or to massacre its own citizens in Chechnya, and still be accepted at the table of civilized nations. Again, however, the Western powers should come as a friend and ally, not as an inquisitor, and with due recognition of the distance Russia has traveled since 1991. The United States and the European Union should continue to monitor Russia’s press freedoms, civil rights, and military conduct, and promote those practices and institutions that reflect our values and that we hope will take deeper root in Russia. What we should not do, however, is to place Russia in the position of a supplicant being graded by its betters. It is an approach we do not take with far more repressive regimes than Russia’s—China again comes to mind—and the Russians could be forgiven for asking why they alone should be held to a higher standard. The price of failing to seize the opportunity before us to forge a stronger U.S.-Russian relationship could be considerable, particularly at a time when America is at war, and facing enemies against whom we could make common cause with Moscow. We should be encouraged by the realization that Russia is unlikely to return to a policy of confrontation with the West. There are no plausible issues over which the United States and Russia could come to regard each other actively as enemies, and certainly not to the brink of nuclear war. There is no issue between Russia and the United States that compares to the tension between China and the United States over Taiwan, or between the United States and Iran and Iraq over nuclear proliferation, or with other states over their support of terrorism. Perhaps most important, there is no foreseeable situation, either at home or abroad, that is likely to convince most Russians and their government that Russia is somehow more like China or Iran than it is like Germany, France, or the United States. In short, it is difficult to see what would impel the new generation of Russians to tear apart everything, at home and abroad, that so many of them have striven to create since 1991. Beliefs die hard. Although Washington has begun to shed Cold War assumptions about Russian foreign policy, there are still echoes of the great conflict with the Soviet empire. The West, led by America, must leave behind the image of Russia as an imperial threat. Although it is difficult to accept this so soon after 50 years of confrontation, the Russian Federation not only is no longer an enemy, it is even a potential ally. • *Thomas M. Nichols is chairman of the Department of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College, and the author of Winning the World: Lessons for America’s Future from the Cold War. Notes 1. The aide was Sergei Yastrzhembsky. The original report was carried by RIA/Novosti and is available as "Moscow Hopes for Dynamic Development of Relations with NATO," Johnson’s Russia List, #6554, November 15, 2002, at www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/. 2. Mikhail Kochkin, "Russia and the United States Post September 11: What Do the Russians Think?" Russia and Eurasia Review, November 5, 2002. 3. Timothy J. Colton and Michael McFaul, "America’s Real Russian Allies," Foreign Affairs, vol. 80 (November/December 2001), p. 47. 4. Parts of this section are drawn from a longer exploration of this question in Thomas M. Nichols, "Putin’s First Two Years: Democracy or Authoritarianism?" Current History, October 2002. 5. Tom Bjorkman, "Russian Democracy and American Foreign Policy," Brookings Institution policy paper 85 (Washington, D.C., July 2001), available at www.brookings.org/comm/policybriefs/pb85.htm. 6. Quoted in Martin Walker, "Post 9/11: The European Dimension," World Policy Journal, vol. 18 (winter 2001/02), p. 8. 7. Russia has even bucked the trend of falling American favorability ratings found among the other European nations by actually increasing in public admiration of the United States. See Adam Clymer, "World Survey Says Negative Views of U.S. Are Rising," New York Times, December 4, 2002. 8. See Vladimir Shlapentokh, "Russian Attitudes Toward America: A Split Between the Ruling Class and the Masses," World Affairs, vol. 164 (summer 2001). 9. Quoted in Thomas M. Nichols, The Russian Presidency: Society and Politics in the Second Russian Republic, revised and expanded ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 77. 10. Reuters wire report, October 26, 2002. [Go to interactive discussion forum]
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