#8
The New Republic (TNR Online)
ONLINE DISPATCH -- KIEV
Power Failure
Citizens of former Soviet states know what a crumbling empire looks like and
think we're next.
by Benjamin Smith
Benjamin Smith covers the Baltics for the Wall Street Journal Europe.
November 1, 2001
On the afternoon of September 11, ordinary Ukrainians bet against the United States. They rushed to street kiosks and handed over dollars for about 75 cents in the local currency. In the Latvian capital, Riga, the dollar reportedly got as low as 50 cents at some exchange points. The same scene was repeated in other former Soviet republics, until nervous central banks put a stop to it.
Listening to the stories that circulated around here just after the attacks, you understand why people panicked. In Riga, one normally reliable friend told me that hackers have disrupted America's satellites. Another reports that her mother just called her in tears, begging her not to make a planned trip to the United States. Her mother, it seems, had heard that terrorists were planning a wave of chemical attacks for the following Friday. "People here expect the worst," said Boris Epstein, a Latvian financial analyst who spent the days after the attack reassuring friends and relatives that the American economy would not "collapse." In the Eastern city of Donetsk, a coal mining consultant, Vladimir Kholod, treated me like an orphan after I told him I was from New York. He, himself, had a friend, a British consultant, whom he thinks might have been passing through the city in September. He kept repeating the man's name, apparently assuming that the man was dead.
In the weeks since the attacks, the panic in this corner of Europe has darkened into gloom. While writing in Monte Kristo, a slick Latvian coffee house, a few weeks ago, a bored-looking man at the next table struck up a conversation with me in English. He was dressed like an American, in jeans and a casual fall jacket; his accent was hard to place, as was the name he gave--Sergei McArdle. It turned out that he was a commercial photographer from Latvia who has spent the last decade living and working in New York and Los Angeles under that professional name. He was visiting home on September 11, and told me that he's now delaying his return indefinitely, seriously debating whether he should go back to the United States at all. "New York could be in big danger," he said, shuffling idly through a pile of headshots. "If the U.S. sets off a small spark somewhere in some Muslim country, I'm not going to live in New York or Los Angeles or whatever. If I do go back, I'm going to find some small place and live there." Now the war has begun, and Sergei's still in Latvia.
Don't mistake any of this for anti-Americanism. Quite the contrary, America has few truer friends than the citizens of Europe's new independent states. They recognize the United States as a source of inspiration and aid--a guarantor of their independence. And so the attacks on New York and Washington have generated profound, honest sympathy, along with offers of support that vary from the useful (Ukrainian airspace, Czech intelligence) to the silly (Belarusian rescue squads). Ordinary citizens turned up at U.S. Embassies with tears and flowers, and friends have called me just to voice their solidarity. Even America's only enemy in the region passed on the chance to kick the United States while it was down. Belarus's authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko just survived a concerted attempt by the United States government to disrupt his rigged election. Nevertheless, he called on Americans "to unite around the U.S. leaders and, first of all, around President Bush."
Indeed, my only exposure to schadenfreude would come at an expatriate bar in Kiev. There, a diplomat from a Western European country that has been the victim of terrorism told me, "Now you know how it feels." But he was wrong. Only people who have been citizens of a superpower can know how it feels to have your sense of invincibility shattered. Russians, Ukrainians, Latvians, and the rest witnessed the unthinkable when their country, the Soviet Union, suddenly ceased to exist in 1991. And this, as opposed to some grim satisfaction at America's sudden misfortune, is the source of their current pessimism. Gloomy by nature, they sense that America is in big trouble, just as the Soviet Union was in the late 1980s. The fact that the United States now seems to be bogged down in the mountains of Afghanistan merely confirms the hunch.
Afghanistan is often called "the Soviet Union's Vietnam," but a better comparison might be the defeat of Rome by the Goths. It wasn't just a humiliating defeat. It was a humiliating defeat that presaged the empire's fall. Few understand this better than Dainis Turlais. Turlais arrived in Kabul's royal palace in 1986 as the Red Army staff colonel responsible for planning; three years later, he oversaw the Soviet retreat. Now he is retired, a silver-haired former politician with a paunch and a small consulting business in Riga. He says he knows Afghanistan "better than my own country," and he shuddered when he heard President Bush use the word "war." Folded into a small office chair, Mr. Turlais reminisces on the hazards of Afghanistan--the formidable guerillas, the treacherous supply routes, the shortage of water. He recalls handling the American Stinger missiles that the Soviets captured from the Afghan resistance and plastic Italian landmines. (The mines were hard to detect, he says, but when his soldiers were able to disarm them, they fashioned the yellow plastic covers into lampshades.) Then he repeats something he recently heard from a seven-year-old girl: "She said, 'I have been told that once we lived in a very powerful country, and therefore nobody liked us.'" He didn't quite say so, but I sensed that he felt the United States is in for a similarly rude awakening.
I have been working here for two years now, but I didn't sell my dollars. I understand that the analogy between the United States and Soviet Union is a false one. I know that it was not the Afghan rebels who ultimately tore the USSR down; it was long-suffering Soviet citizens who longed for the very things--freedom and prosperity--that Americans already enjoy.
Still, if the former Soviets' analogy is off, their pessimism is haunting in one important sense: They understand the fragility of power in a way we did not until September 11. They are right to see that, in the wake of the attacks, we aren't quite as powerful as we used to be. For a decade, our country was so strong that we could afford to rest easy with a high-minded foreign policy. Now, confronted with our own vulnerability, we are dispensing with our reservations. In our campaign to get Osama bin Laden and his accomplices, we are holding our noses and seeking help from violent, authoritarian regimes in Islamabad, Moscow, and beyond. Last month, the President Bush appeared to endorse Russia's brutal war in Chechnya. That's an irony the people of these former Russian colonies can really appreciate.
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