On December 25, 1991, President George Bush, Sr. delivered a televised 7-min. triumphant Address to the Nation, following Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation, rejoicing in the fall of the evil empire and the end of the Cold War.
In his emotional speech Mr. Bush spared little compliment addressing democracy and Washington’s unwavering stand in upholding liberty, something never experienced under the Soviets. “Eastern Europe is free. The Soviet Union itself is no more. This is a victory for democracy and freedom. It’s a victory for the moral force of our values,” stressed the president.
Analysts and journalists tried to outdo each other eulogizing the victory of good over evil. To some observers, however, that “end of story” smacked of cynicism, considering that the US political and intellectual Establishment had not been so outspoken only several years back.
The tradition of making concessions to Russia on the part of intellectuals in the West is not a modern myth. It suffices to remember the Walter Duranty phenomenon Dr. James Mace masterfully described in “A Tale of Two Journalists: Walter Duranty, Gareth Jones, and the Pulitzer Prize,” carried by The Day (July 15, 2003). Whereas Gareth Jones was the first to tell the horrible truth about the Holodomor man-made famine in Ukraine (1932-33), Walter Duranty denied the fact, contrary to moral principle and journalist ethics. Such people, acting as blindfolded proponents of the Lenin model in the West, were first jokingly, then seriously tagged as useful idiots.
Indeed, brazen falsehood and illusions spread by communist propaganda affected more than one intellectual in the West, including American Kremlinologists who closely collaborated with the CIA and State Department.
Kremlinology took shape after the end of WW II and became an important Cold War weapon. A number of research facilities, like university chairs, materialized within several decades to be generously funded by the federal budget. All this served one purpose: learning more about the enemy, identifying its strengths and weaknesses.
Under the circumstances, Kremlinology has been traditionally described as openly anticommunist from day one. Reality, however, proved somewhat different. During the Cold War, most US intellectuals proceeded from two key assumptions in their research of the Soviet system: (a) the Soviet Union has a strong “vitality” and you cannot expect to change this system from the outside; (b) “peaceful coexistence” (convergence) of the communist and capitalist systems can be achieved only by mutual concessions. Kremlinologists were convinced that the United States and the Soviet Union were competitors in the big game for world domination, rather than bitter rivals. Hence the idea of mutual recognition, by the two superpowers, of the spheres of influence that could not be violated, come what may. The recognition of the Kremlin’s “special interest” in Eastern Europe (the so-called Yalta syndrome) was completely consistent with that political sentiment.
By the mid-1960s, the McCarthy era (when communism was proclaimed the number-one enemy of the United States) was over, having vanished without a trace. Now was the time for undisguised cynicism. The Russian Research Center at Harvard boasted a portrait of Karl Marx until practically the Soviet Union’s collapse and the staff enthusiastically celebrated the centennial of birth of Vladimir Lenin. This was symbolic as it reflected the predominant atmosphere within the US Establishment in the 1960s-1980s: fear of the Soviet Union and a desire to come to terms at all costs. Why such political shortsightedness, such illusions in the Kremlinologist mainstream? Why couldn’t anyone predict the fall of the Soviet empire like the proverbial colossus with feet of clay?
Strange as it may seem, the founding fathers of American Kremlinology were Russian emigres, among them Michael (Mikhail) Karpovich, pupil of Vasily Klyuchevsky, who planned a Russian history chair at Harvard [but in 1949 was named Chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, to remain in this position until 1954, when he became Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, retaining this title along with that of Professor of History until his retirement in 1957. – Ed.], George (Georgy) Vernadsky who headed the Russian School of Law at Yale University, and Alexander Kerensky, ex-leader of the Russian Provisional Government who taught graduate courses at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, California. They raised a generation of American intellectuals while instilling in them their perception of Russia (most Kremlinologists regarded the Soviet Union as a Russian monoethnic state [Soviet Russia]). The Russian intellectual expats taught Americans that the accursed communist regime should not be identified with Pushkin and Dostoevsky’s Russia; that the Bolshevist period was a historical anomaly. In other words, there was no “everlasting Russia” that one’s mind couldn’t fathom, to quote from the Russian classic, Feodor Tyutchev, and which was categorically opposed to the West. In other words, an America-Russia dialog was a possibility worth considering.
It became a reality in the 1960s when President Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, a very influential diplomat, pioneered the policy detente with the Soviet Union. Later, the Nobel Prize winner became an active proponent of the policy of “appeasement” of communism, what with the Soviet political elite’s attempts to reform the system by way of “thaw” and partial de-Stalinization. Like another noted expert on geopolitics, Samuel Huntington, Kissinger thought in terms of convergence theory, to the effect that different political and ideological systems become similar, following the road leading to modernization. Since there appeared to be no structural contradictions between communism and capitalism, compromise was a matter of time. In fact, a large number of intellectuals, politicians, and diplomats in the West (some left-bent) fell in love with the Russian “openhearted” character and would doggedly stick to this thesis.
Mentality was one of the reasons behind that implicit faith in the need of achieving a compromise with the Soviet system. Kremlinologists proceeded from the assumption that all peoples on earth were similar, more or less – therefore, Russians were just like Americans, even if deep inside; that all it took was letting them have a chance and they would surely adopt the democratic values and the liberal model. With time, however, it transpired that the American experts were a bit naive to trust man’s inborn kindness of heart, or that the world would eventually inherit the American way of life.
The new generation of politicians and scientists who replaced the anticommunist hardliners of the early post-WW II years mistakenly assumed that the threat of a nuclear war could be eliminated only by making an alliance with Moscow. Most Americans at the time knew practically nothing about Marxism or Russian/Soviet history. They treated the problem of communism only in terms of foreign policy. All they wanted was a way to ward off a nuclear catastrophe and avoid sharpening the relationships between the West and the socialist camp, assuming that such sharpening could well trigger off the catastrophe. Under the circumstances, the Kremlinologists took a conformist stand, stressing positive achievements of the Soviets and their allies, reducing to a minimum the differences between the two systems.
Richard Pipes, a noted American academic of Jewish-Polish parentage who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union (he was a leading critic of Kissinger’s detente and in 1981-82 held the post of Director of East European and Soviet Affairs under President Ronald Reagan) compared the situation in Washington in the 1970s with Chamberlain and Daladier’s appeasement policy toward Nazi Germany. He said that the predominant mood at the State Department, with regard to Moscow, didn’t differ much from that at the Foreign Office in the 1930s.
At times, US analysts found themselves actually believing the Russian myth about Uncle Joe being resolved to conquer the world. Those who warned against making unreasonable concessions to the commies were tagged as cold warriors and ostracized as dangerous warmongers who could trigger off a third world war that would mean the end of the world. Every effort was made to keep them away from the top level decision making process while the doves in the foreign policy domain received every kind of support in upholding their ideas of peaceful cooperation and the immunity of the spheres of influence.
Personalities are known to have played exceptionally important roles in world history. President Ronald Reagan is one of them. He declared: “It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history. ... [It is] the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history, as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.” He called for taking consistent irreconcilable measures aimed at burying the evil Soviet empire. America owes its victory in the Cold War to this man. Reagan, not Bush, Sr., did most to cause that empire to fall apart. But by a strange quirk of fate, George Bush, being one of the conformist doves, made his triumphant speech, declaring the end of the Soviet Union, greeting the emergence of new independent states on its ruins, countries whose independent status is still being called into question by the descendants of all those useful idiots.
Big illusions concerning the peaceful nature of the Kremlin’s expansionism are still there. All calls for an appeasement policy re Putin, who is struggling to revive the Soviet superpower by threatening the entire civilized world, are rooted in the traditional Western political mainstream approach to Russia. Not coincidentally, Kissinger is now urging to understand Putin, referring to his policy as one based on common sense. He is thus bringing back the phantoms of Cold War geopolitics. During this 92-year-old diplomat’s latest visit to Moscow (February 2016), one could hear repeated calls for another detente, even to the detriment of Ukraine and other countries in the region. The West retains its unwavering stand in the matter of Russia’s aggression. Hopefully, this stand will last, considering that what Kissinger, this pariarch of world politics, had to say on the matter made about as much common sense as the ravings of his KGB friend.
