Here is the unedited version of an op-ed I wrote in response to another piece on Russia.

A Bear Reborn
The Dartmouth
May 17, 2007

I was very surprised to read on this page that Zachary Hyatt ’09 thinks the United States and Russia share similar national interests (“The Rumbling Bear: A Dying Art,” May 15). I believe that Russia’s recent actions, policies and rhetoric indicate the contrary.

For the past seven years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has eradicated the vestiges of democracy and civil society that his predecessor, the late Boris Yeltsin, had struggled to build. Putin eliminated the popular election of governors; now he appoints them. Putin has eliminated privately-owned Russian television stations; Kremlin told Russian radio stations that 50 percent of their news reports must be positive. Putin has consolidated Kremlin’s control over gas and oil through the Gasprom and Rosneft state monopolies. Putin has been accused of personally ordering the murder of his political opponents and critics. Putin’s steps consolidate power in long arm of the Kremlin, not in the hands of the Russian people. This goes against America’s interest, because democratic consolidation can ensure the stability of the world’s second largest nuclear power.

Hyatt thinks he has found the “one thing [Russia and the United States] both want more than anything else, and that is stability.” Mutual stability sounds silly because Russia wants nothing of the sort. The main reason the Russian people have taken to Putin, as Hyatt correctly suggests, is that the Russian GDP has been growing by an astounding average of 7 percent each year since 1999. The Russian people have been willing to trade democratic decline for relative economic prosperity.

The source of this economic miracle is oil and gas revenue. The IMF and the World Bank estimate that in 2005 the oil and gas sector represented 20 percent of the country’s GDP, and 60 percent of its export revenue. Russia’s future is tied to the price of oil and gas. According to an IMF study, a $1 per barrel increase in oil prices for one year will raise Russian federal budget revenues by 0.35 percent of GDP, or $3.4 billion. And what, above all else, keeps oil prices high? Instability. Specifically, unrest in the Middle East.

Political instability raises the price of oil and encourages importers to turn to Russia in efforts to diversify supply. So Russia continues to build the Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran. It provides no troops to NATO efforts in Afghanistan or American efforts in Iraq. In fact, Russia is rumored to have supplied Iraqi military with U.S. war plans before the invasion. It sells weapons to the region. Russia has sold Syria $2 billion-worth of weapons, including surface-to-air missiles. It has sold Iran weapons worth $4 billion. Russia sells weapons to Hamas of the Palestinian Authority. It seems that America’s enemies in the Middle East are Russia’s friends. I don’t know about Hyatt, but that’s not what I call “mutual interests.”

Hyatt’s myth of “mutual interests” doesn’t even work from the Russian side of the story. From their perspective, for the past two decades the United States has been pushing for NATO expansion eastward against Russian protestations. While Russia was down, America advanced. The U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty was a slap in the face to the Russians. Now, the United States wants to put ten missile interceptors in Poland and a mid-course radar in the Czech Republic. No matter that the interceptors are few in number and defensive in nature. Russia views U.S. military expansion into former Soviet territory as a challenge to Russia’s sovereignty. So, in a predictable fashion, it withdraws from treaties that control its military expansion into Eastern Europe and proscribe the construction of long-range missiles.

In another geopolitical setting, Hyatt’s desire to cooperate could have been salvaged if Russia and America cooled their tensions (as Condoleezza Rice is doing in Moscow right now) and found some sources of cooperation—a common ideology, mutual benefits, or mutual threats. But geopolitics prevent Russia from prolonged cooperation. Russia is threatened by an advancing U.S.-NATO alliance to the west, a rising China in the east, and Islamic extremism in the south. In short, the Russian bear has awoken and found itself cornered.

So I am sorry to disappoint Hyatt, but his question still remains—“How do we deal with an independent and bellicose Russia?”

This op-ed was published in the IAJ International Update.

The Eulogy Putin Gave
May 3, 2007

The famed philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote that a eulogy is a fundamentally selfish act. The eulogizer elevates himself, constructing his image through the death of the other.

Russian President Vladimir Putin knows that lesson well. The eulogy Putin delivered at the funeral for former President Boris Yeltsin last Monday was the eulogy Putin himself wants to receive years hence. The speech was all democracy and greatness, bereft of Russia’s fall in Chechnya, the rise of the oligarchs, and today’s undemocratic democracy. As the Russian state archives have slowly closed, an official state history has begun to rise. Steven Lee Myers of The New York Times compared the eulogy to Stalin’s treatment of Lenin: “appropriating his legacy by transforming him ‘into the realm of state propaganda’ to be used for other ends.” By presenting a beautiful Boris, Putin created a wonderful, problem-free Putin—construction through exclusion, as Derrida would say.

Yeltsin created a constitution, said Putin, that declared the rights of the person as its highest virtue. But this is not Putin’s virtue. Earlier this month, he banned all foreigners from all retail markets across the vast country. Putin credited his predecessor with creating a government that “allowed people to freely express their thoughts.” But this is not Putin’s government. The previous week, his administration told all Kremlin-controlled radio stations—which are all of them, except Echo Moscow—that at least 50 percent of the news they report have to be positive, regardless of reality. Where Yeltsin grumbled but ultimately gave way for NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, Putin is making a Cuban missile crisis out of ten missile interceptors that even his generals concede pose no harm.

What do we students care of Russia’s government and its leaders’ eulogies?

Russia is not the great power Soviet Union once was. Our generation will not face an existential nuclear threat of Soviet proportions. We will face, instead, a people who search for identity in a largely imperial past—from the Romanov empire to the Soviet empire; from the czar to the general secretary. Building democracy with a guilty memory is hard, perhaps impossible. Germany did it once, but the communist grip has proven stronger. Even in Berlin you can tell when you cross into former East Germany.

We care, in short, because, while mitigated and transformed, the threat remains. Our generation will witness the unraveling of conflict in a dauntingly complicated and increasingly important region. If we are to understand that conflict, if we wish to offer constructive solutions, then we must learn the history of the region and its peoples—lest we repeat the mistakes of cowboy-style democratization.

Another Moscow eulogy was delivered later last week. Mstislav Rostropovich, the greatest cellist of his generation, passed away on Friday. Rostropovich was exiled from the Soviet Union for “anti-Soviet” activities that included providing shelter for the regime’s most potent critic, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. In 2005, an interviewer asked Rostropovich about the proper attitude towards Russia: “Don't you think that the silence of the West might be justified by the necessity of peaceful world coexistence?” Rostropovich nodded as his wife, Galina, answered: “That was already done under Hitler, and that was enough! That method had been tried. Now maybe we should try another approach: force or disobedience!”

Here is the unedited version of the op-ed that ran in The Dartmouth today.

Boycott the Beijing Olympics
The Dartmouth
May 1, 2007

Last year, the Darfur Action Group at Dartmouth participated in a noble, successful but ultimately ineffectual effort to divest from companies that do business with Sudan. Their end was just—to facilitate the end of the Darfur genocide. But their divstment campaign was off the mark. They should have urged Dartmouth to divest from China.

China opposes all political solutions to the Darfur crisis that might compromise its economic interests in Sudan. Until recently, Beijing has threatened to veto any attempt by the American representatives on the UN Security Council to put sanctions on Sudan. China fears that sanctions would harm its oil interests in the region — and China has significant interests in Sudan.

Sudan is China’s largest overseas oil project. Over the past decade, China has invested billions of dollars into oil refineries in Sudan and pipelines to the Red Sea. Sudan has used the profits from its oil sales to China to buy Chinese T-59 tanks, howitzers, fighter aircraft, and landmines. And their military cooperation continues to grow. Last week, China’s minister of defense visited Sudan and pledged increased cooperation in “every sphere.”

China is Sudan’s largest supplier of arms. It is a knowing and willing accomplice in the Darfur genocide.

This genocide is serious. Over 200,000 Africans have been raped and killed by the Arab militants in Darfur since 2003; 2.5 million have become refugees. Just yesterday, a special UN panel reported that over the past six months, the Khartoum government has used planes disguised as UN aircraft for aerial bombardments of Darfur villages. Those planes were likely made in China.

I propose the revival of the Darfur Action Group. They should call on companies to boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics — China’s most important public image campaign.

We know that the Communist government has a weak spot for its Olympics. After actress Mia Farrow called the Beijing Games the “Genocide Olympics” and compared Steven Spielberg, the artistic adviser to the Beijing Olympics, to Leni Riefenstahl, Spielberg wrote a letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao, urging him “to bring an end to the human suffering” in Darfur. The plea, cloaked in the threat of a PR disaster, worked. President Hu bulged. He flew to Sudan and called on Khartoum to let 3,000 UN peacekeepers into Darfur. The Sudanese government relented, but has refused to allow a larger 21,000-member joint African Union-UN force to relieve the African Union soldiers already on the ground.

The Khartoum government hides behind the protective cloak of the Chinese veto. Pressure on Sudan has not worked. But pressure on China might do the trick. That pressure should be the focus of the Darfur Action Group.

The Group’s divestment effort failed because it was misdirected. Companies that do business with Sudan are not significant contributors to the crisis. Financial divestment has simply allowed Dartmouth to wash its hands free of implicit consent in genocide. It has not stopped that genocide. If Dartmouth activists are true to their pledge to stop the atrocities in Darfur, they must boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics.