#19 - JRL 8222 - JRL Home
Date: 24 May 2004
From: Dimofte Catalin <catalin.dimofte@rdslink.ro>
Subject: Re: 8220-Higgins/Reform
I definitely hope I misunderstood the sense of Mr. Michael McFaul’s statements quoted by Andrew Higgins in his recent WSJ story (Wall Street Journal: Andrew Higgins, Reform in Russia: Free Market, Yes; Free Politics, Maybe. Washington's Civic Dreams for Old Foe Fade as People Focus on Making a Living. A Dissident's Post-Soviet Path, JRL 8220, May 24, 2004).
Mr. McFaul is quoted as saying that “In retrospect… one of the great blessings of the Soviet Union was how poorly its economy functioned.” He surely hasn’t meant that… Yes, what a blessing that was… Too bad the Soviet economy hasn’t functioned even worse than it did, or maybe that wouldn’t have been any Russians left to give us headaches today…
Makes one wonder which one was more important for some people the ideological competition, the supremacy of a political construct (one that, admittedly, has a proven track record of success), or the livelihood (or lives indeed) of USSR’s 300 million? I surely don’t recall any statement even remotely similar to this from my nights spent 15-20 years ago listening Radio Free Europe or Voice of America, like so many other teenagers did. The message back then was due to communism, your economies are a tragic joke, and so are your living standards. And now, as these economies try to get out of the abyss after 40-50 years (or nearly one century, in Russia’s case) of communism, we’re taught that those dysfunctional economies were a blessing??? For who? No, surely I must have misunderstood…
As for the really scary scenarios of nowadays, if Russia does indeed step on the footprints of the Chinese and “other economically vibrant, but politically closed societies,” that would appear to suggest that some 1.5 billion people (or 2.5 billion, if India is included in the setup) have found a different path to the prosperity of their denizens, wouldn’t it? And what precisely is wrong with that?
The possibility that, “one day, a thriving capitalist economy will serve an aggressive, authoritarian regime”? Yes, that is indeed a scary possibility, one that cannot be a priori excluded. Although, if very recent history teaches us anything, that could be for instance the unpleasant fact that the likelihood of liberal democracies becoming aggressive cannot be excluded either.
Statements like these go a long way towards explaining the acknowledged failure of the Russian liberals, perceived, rightfully or not, as being far more interested by some abstract concepts than by the lives of their denizens.
Seen in the bigger scheme of things, the situation is remarkably simple. Russia is still very much considered the same deadly foe that erstwhile Soviet Union was, but meanwhile expected to behave as a faithful ally. These expectations are, to say the least, funny.
Otherwise, all the kudos to Andrew Higgins for his story. What a masterpiece.