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SummaryHistorically, Russia has vacillated between two extremes. At one extreme, Russia enclosed itself, separating itself from the rest of Europe on every level. At the other extreme, Russia opened itself to the West, absorbing everything Western as superior to anything Russian. Russia has found it very hard to find the middle ground between the two extremes. Each cycle of Westernization hollowed out Russian self-confidence. Each cycle of anti-Westernism liquidated the Westernizers, sometimes physically. Russia spent the last decade in the most extreme spasm of Westernization ever experienced in its history. We would expect the inevitable reaction to be equally severe. We expect that reaction in the coming decade.AnalysisIt is important to understand that Russia literally turned itself inside out during the last decade. It is not simply a matter of learning from the West. For a time, Russian decision-makers gave more credibility to a Harvard economics professor than to all the Russian economists. Russians sought to adopt Western party politics, in spite of the fact that Russia had not been genuinely democratic in its history. Russia abandoned an empire that had taken centuries to build, including the spoils of a world war in which it lost tens of millions of Russians, expecting in return Western-style prosperity and integration into Western civilization. The list is endless.The results are not. Russia achieved, in return, less than nothing. Where in 1980 it was a poor but feared superpower, in 2000 it is substantially poorer, weaker and internationally marginalized. The question of why this happened is entirely academic at this point. We expect scholars to debate for centuries why Westernization failed and who was responsible. For us, it is sufficient to note that the latest Westernization experimentation has failed, and that this failure is in keeping with what happened in all previous Westernizing experiments. They always fail. The more extreme the embrace of the West, the more extreme the later rejection of the West, and the harsher the fate of Russian Westernizers. The issue now is to try to map the consequences of this failure.Gorbachev attempted to initiate a massive reform intended to save the Communist Party system. He and those Soviets familiar with the evolution of technology in the West, particularly those charged with this within the KGB, were painfully aware that the Soviet Union was slipping hopelessly behind. They also understood that in order to reverse the situation, the Soviet Union needed a massive influx of technology from the West.Gorbachev knew two things. First, while the Cold War raged, investment and technology transfer were unlikely. Second, unless there was major reform in Soviet institutions, no amount of capital or technology could be absorbed. Gorbachev therefore needed to end the Cold War, convince the West that fundamental reforms were underway that would prevent the resurrection of the Cold War and reform Soviet institutions so that the Soviet Union could take advantage of investment and technology.Neither Gorbachev nor the relatively sophisticated bureaucrats who gravitated to him intended to dismantle communism or the party apparatus. Certainly none of them expected to be forced to withdraw from Eastern Europe. The thought of the Soviet Union disintegrating was the farthest thing from their minds. They badly underestimated the weakness of their own system. They failed to understand that liberalization of an ossified system creates uncontrollable forces. By 1989, the situation had spun out of control, and both the party and the empire collapsed.Still, there was no revolution - a critical fact missed by most Western observers. The Soviet Union disintegrated into its constituent republics with the loss of only the highest tier of officials. The old guard retained control of the Russian government and the perestroika economy, and even held the leash of the extreme pro-Western reformers. With the old system intact, there could be no sweeping change. Without a revolution, the "new" Russia was doomed from the start.The collapse of the Soviet Union and its institutions opened the door not so much for reform as for theft. In a country that had no system of private property, no system of legal documentation for ownership, no impartial judiciary for adjudicating disputes, property was suddenly "privatized," whatever that meant. Opportunists seized control. Some were political opportunists, like Boris Yeltsin. Others were economic opportunists like Boris Berezovsky. Ultimately, the two classes of opportunists merged into one. The result was catastrophic.Westerners completely missed the situation. Most had no idea whatsoever what was going on, focusing on grand theories of liberalization based on a foundation of air. Others participated in the systematic looting of both the Russian economy and Western investment. In Russia, the distinction between liberalization and theft became difficult to define, as was the difference between liberal and thief.The opposition to all of this was an unimaginative coalition of Brezhnevites, Stalinists and fascists. An advantage of incompetent democracy is that the opposition is as ineffective as the government. Lacking his own political currency, President Yeltsin approached Russia's problems on a tactical level, appointing a series of disposable prime ministers appropriate to the crisis of the moment, as Russia sank deeper and deeper into the morass. The basic outlines of the opposition remained intact.
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