There's an inherent virtue to a potential reenactment of this fusty horseplop,
however. In point of fact, it would furnish a crystalizing focus on the
hypocrisy and propaganda demonization which marked our post-WW II relations
with the Soviets. And as such, it would be the first genuinely discordant
note in this summer's BillyBob mutual serenade.
None of this necessarily presupposes a Zyuganov victory. In the long term,
a Yeltsin reelection further galvanizes a permanent and extremely well organized
left/nationalist opposition as Russia erodes into a total basket case of
privatized corruption and misery. That opposition, vocal and growing, will
henceforth define the real issues facing Russians, and will be an enduring
reminder to U.S. leaders that the systemic differences between the two nations--
despite any name changes -- remain unresolved. That BillyBob market economics
are proving to be antithetical to the Russian character puts the U.S. squarely
in a dilemma. All the years of unquestioned Truman Doctrine premises which
undergirded American policy toward the Soviet system are finally up for
examination. A "free" Russian populace, on whose behalf we endangered
the world with annihilation, is now at hand. And these newly-minted practitioners
of the franchise have the potential to make us ask ourselves the hard questions
for the first time.
It's at least comforting that the most compelling analysis of the current
Russian yearning for lost grandeur is the besmirched revisionist Cold War
interpretation (not that any of us ever doubted it for a moment.)
Truman's equating radical change as inseparable from communism gave the
green light to containment and the American-initiated arms race. Anyone
capable of understanding a map could see that our encirclement of the Soviets
was not supposition but fact. And anyone with functional reasoning skills
could divine that a battered Russia rebuilding its far-flung domain had
absolutely no interest in overrunning Western Europe. Nor did it have the
capability, as Stalin, at the height of his haughty madness, was wise enough
to note.
The objective of bringing "socialism" to heel was accomplished
by a military-Keynesian industrial policy, every bit as essential to the
U.S.' domestic well-being as the Soviet variant was to its own economy.
The Cold War was a fraud, but a necessary one, as the predicament of a downsized
American work force bears out. The conflict fostered high levels of employment,
and utilized the U.S.' protector role to arm-twist capitalist rivals into
economic concessions. Our trade disputes in recent years with Europe and
Japan are testimony to the end of our chilling ritual of prosperity with
the Soviet Union.
American late-capitalist nostalgia for the halcyon years of yore pales beside
present Russian pining for its lost prestige. The resultant chaos from wholesale
American economic penetration and manipulation of a prostrate Motherland
has summoned up the old Russian nightmares: Twenty-eight million dead in
a war largely fought without allies, seventy years of isolation and quarantine,
rubble and destruction of a magnitude the American mind cannot begin to
conceive of.
No independent left critique of the Soviet Union could have dismissed the grey stultification of life there. Western progressives' sympathy for those forced to abide the stale extolling of scientific socialism was always forthcoming. The difference now is that Russian voters have discovered that the apparatchiks' warnings about the vices of capitalism were right on the mark. As the country carries that sudden illumination to the ballot boxes, the result could be a lesson to us all. What was that old saw about workers of the world uniting?