Anne Applebaum: Russia and Europe in the Obama Era

On Wednesday, July 22nd, Washington Post and Slate columnist and Pulitzer-prize winning author Anne Applebaum came to San Francisco to speak with the World Affairs Council about ‘Russia and Europe in the Obama Era.’ While this topic is not quite as urgent, perhaps, as Iran, Iraq, or the economy, that balance could shift in an instant. Now that George W. BushGeorge W. Bush is out of office and Americans, as a whole, have far fewer reasons to hate themselves, we might actually start seeing a similar paradigm shift on an international level. Obama’s recent trips to Europe seem to support this. But to what extent? How is the U.S. attempting to strengthen ties with Russia? What is the political climate now in Russia and how does that affect the United States?

An expert in Central and Eastern European affairs, Applebaum spoke for about thirty minutes and then fielded questions from the crowd for just as long. The entire program can be listened to here.

… We’re pleased to have you with us. You know that our speaker is Anne Applebaum, columnist for the Washington Post and Slate. I am Chuck Frankel a Trustee of the Council and I am honored to be your moderator this evening. The World Affairs Council of Northern California invites you to join us in seeking knowledge, expanding your networks, and discovering innovative solutions to global problems. More information about the organization as well as a recording of tonight’s program can be found on our website soon – the website is www.itsyourworld.org. And when you cannot attend a program you can still stay informed by accessing the council’s podcast and streaming audio online. Many council programs can also be heard on our weekly one hour radio show. It’s Monday nights in San Francisco, it’s called It’s Your World and it’s at 8PM on Monday on NPR, KQED, 88.5FM. Tonight’s program is being recorded for It’s Your World, and we want to thank our audio engineer, Jane Heather.

Please take note of the blue question cards that are on your seats. I encourage you all to write good questions legibly and concisely so that I can read them, and our Council staff will come by to collect them. I’ll seek to ask, paraphrase, or combine questions that you send forward. It would be greatly appreciated if you could now turn off your cell phones if you haven’t done so already, and turn off anything else that might disturb the program.

Finally, let me announce a few programs that are coming up soon that might be of interest to you. On Wed, Aug 5th, join the council for the fourth Guggenhime speaker event of 2009, when we will welcome his excellency Radosław Sikorsky. He is the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Poland. And it is not entirely coincidental that Minister Sikorsky is the husband of the well-known columnist Anne Applebaum. Mr. Sikorsky will speak at the Marine’s Memorial Association and that’s at 6:30PM on August 5th. And then on Thursday, August 6th, the Council welcomes Mr. Steve Levine, Foreign Affairs and Energy Correspondent for business week for a discussion on Russia’s energy policies and how Europe and the West plan to respond to their reliance on Russian energy.

It’s now my pleasure to introduce tonight’s guest. Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate. Formerly a member of the Washington Post editorial board, she has also worked as the foreign deputy editor of Spectator Magazine in London, as the political editor of the Evening Standard, and as a columnist at several British newspapers, including The Daily and the Sunday Telegraphs. Her most recent book, Gulag, a History, was published in 2003 and won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2004. She is currently doing research for a new book on the Stalinization of post-war Central Europe. Over the years her writing has also appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, the New Criterion, and many other prestigious publications. So here to discuss the development of America’s relationship with Russia and Europe under the Obama Administration, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Anne Applebaum. (applause)

> Thank you Chuck for that very generous introduction. It reminds me of a famous Washington, DC story which may or may not be true, I don’t even know. It describes a dinner at which Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger was the main after-dinner speaker. Dr. Kissinger was sitting down and somebody got up to introduce him and said “Well, I’m glad you’re all gathered here tonight. And of course you all know that our speaker is Dr. Kissinger. And, of course you know Dr. Kissinger needs no introduction.” And so Dr. Kissinger stands up and he says in his accent which I cannot imitate, he says: “I may not need an introduction but I so enjoy them.” (laughter) So thank you.

I’m going to talk a little bit very generally about Russia and a little but very generally about politics, and I’m then happy to answer questions depending on your interest more specifically about Russian politics, European politics or indeed, US politics which I also, sometimes, write about. You know, I was thinking about it – usually when I’m thinking about Russia I’m in Europe or on the East Coast, but here I feel close to Russia – you can’t actually see it out of your window like Sarah PalinSarah Palin can, but it’s just over there on the other side of the Pacific, so I think it’s relevant.

I’ll start by sketching out, just because I feel that the current political system in Russia isn’t actually all that well understood in the West, or in this country anyway anymore, and I’d like to start out by sketching out some of the institutional and intellectual components of the current system just because as a background to foreign policy I always think that’s very important. Searching for a way to explain it – some people have called the current Russian system Managed Democracy. Other people talk about Corporate Capitalism. Since I think it’s a bit of both I am electing here to call it, with great originality, Putinism. At the heart – because I do believe at the heart of the system sort of symbolically and otherwise it’s still Putin himself and let’s remember who he is. He’s a former KGB officer who maintains and continues to cultivate the mentality of that organization. And it’s the mentality of the former KGB that continues to sort of govern the culture of the ruling class. Some elements of it, you know, the very deep suspicion of the West, a certain kind of obsession with the United States, a sense of grievance – you know al of that comes from his education and is then reinforced by the people around him, many of whom are also from that organization. Medvedev is clearly the President of Russia now, but he too is absolutely a creation of Putin and of Putinism. And so therefore I feel justified in continuing to use the name of the former President. Clearly the most central and most obvious element of Putinism is the carefully controlled and managed Russian electoral process, and the managed political parties which take part in it, and the managed results. There’s nothing remotely unique or even very Russian about falsified election results, you know. Let’s just say these things have been known to happen in the most democratic of democracies as well. You know nor is the phenomenon of a leader anointing his successor completely unheard of, either. You know look no further than Tony BlairTony Blair and Gordon BrownGordon Brown. But the Russian manipulation of politics – political outcomes goes a lot deeper, though even Gordon Brown sooner or later has to face the electorate, in Russia voters really are at no stage allowed to intervene in the democratic process, and there are no accidental victors in Russian elections because there are no accidental candidates.

Many people have talked about Putin as some kind of reversion to the past, you know, the Stalinism coming back, but it seems to me that that’s incorrect. Putin isn’t Stalin in fact. But neither is he interested in – he’s not trying to bring back the past but he’s not – neither is he interested in helping Russia become something truly different, you know, or in helping Russia become what we would call liberal society. Leaving aside democracy. You know deep down this KGB culture doesn’t allow him or the people around him to believe that Russian citizens, left to their own devices, will make good political or economic choices. You know they don’t believe that the modern equivalent of the dissidents, the small band of journalists and activists who continue to oppose centralized Kremlin rule are worth cultivating or encouraging. You know he continues to believe instead as his predecessors did, that all important decisions should be made in Moscow by a small unelected group of people.

With some exceptions Putin also does not rely on old methods, that is mass arrest or imprisonment. Instead he’s instituted this thing I described earlier as managed democracy. So in Putinist managed democracy you’re allowed to speak and write what you think as long as not too many people are hearing or reading what you say. And in ? Russia you can publish an anti-Kremlin newspaper, and one – several exist – as long as that newspaper circulation is not too high. You can also form an anti-Kremlin political party as long as not too many people join it. And this is actually a very intelligent way of managing the society, so there isn’t mass arrests of anybody who objects to the system, but there’s a control over how large that opposition is allowed to become. What you can’t do is run a television station that’s anti-Kremlin, or even an objective television station, you know meaning not pro-Kremlin. You know a few years ago when Putin used financial legal tricks to shut down one of the few remaining independent stations it was called NTV, there was a lot of tut-tutting in the international press. But that was in fact the final stage of a process he had begun earlier under Yeltsin – I first became properly aware of what was happening to Russian television five or six years ago at a conference in Volgograd, where I encountered a group of Russian journalists. One of them worked for a local TV station that was owned by the regional government (as are most local TV stations in Russia), and I asked her what would happen if she broadcast something critical of the governor. She looked at me like I was an idiot and she said: “They would shut us down.” So, you know, that’s essentially the system.

At the moment the Glasnost Defense Foundation which is a Russian Media watchdog that keeps track of these things reckons that less than a quarter of the country’s media is even nominally in private hands, and many of these are businessmen who front for the state authorities. So across the country there are very powerful regional governors appointed by Putin who have also created media holding groups which control access to advertising, so effectively eliminating any even semi-independent regional media at the moment.

A similar process is taking place in politics. Again it’s legal to form an opposition political party in Russia, but anyone who actually seems on the brink of really obtaining power in Russia risks quite a lot. The most famous example of this is the case of Mihail Khodorkovsky. This is an oil magnate who became too friendly with Western companies a few years back and too independent of the Kremlin, and too close to democratic opponents of the regime. And so a few years ago the authorities decided he’d become too big for his boots and they threw him in prison for tax fraud. While it’s probably true that Khodorkovsky broke tax laws and maybe many other laws – his company had a rather dirty reputation at one point – but if Kremlin was arresting businessmen for corruption and tax evasion, then there would have been plenty of candidates. So the reason to single out Khodorkovsky was – it was widely interpreted and still is – was to set an example for others who might have also thought of defying the Kremlin. And this is actually a method they’ve used in many times. You don’t have to kill many many journalists in order to make journalists afraid. The death of Allapattah Kofskoyav – this was a very famous oppositional journalist in Russia who had written really extraordinarily detailed and very honest, brave articles describing the Russian and Chechnyan war in Chechnya – was murdered in a very brutal and open kind of Mafia-style hit killing in central Moscow a year or two ago, and that was you know, that was understood by and incidentally her – nobody’s been found to, nobody’s been blamed. There’s a trial for her crime but the process of finding who did it is very murky. And that’s understood by most other journalists as a kind of warning. You know, don’t do what she did. And that has been the system that has been very successfully used to control public opinion and to control politics in Russia. I could add quite a bit more to this picture. I could talk about real electoral fraud, you know, changing the numbers, which is widespread, or the more recent incidents of Russian political intimidation of human rights groups. There was another reason: assassination in Chechnya, very recently, a couple weeks ago.

But since I don’t think you all want to be here all night I’ll turn now to the implications of this. Because Russia’s internal policy does form the background to America’s relationship with Russia, which has been in the last few years the subject of a lot of Washington debate, you know everything I’ve said until now is a kind of roundabout way of saying that American diplomacy toward Russia needs to take this into account and it needs to start to change. I’ll talk a little bit about what has been happening in the last eight years or so, because it’s been a very strange period of time in American diplomacy. You know, in the eight years following September 11th – eight years? Yes, eight years – almost – American diplomacy has been colored almost entirely by the war on terrorism, and our relationship with Russia initially, for several years, was seen almost entirely through that lens. And it’s true that Russia’s decision to immediately side with the United States in that war was very important. You know Russia lent us military aid in central Asia at some key points, voted with us at the UN on one or two key points, and was, at least in the beginning, very supportive – and this was, in Washington this was understood to have been Putin’s personal decision. You know, why? He immediately interpreted the Al-Queda attacks as part of the same war that the Russians were fighting in Chechnya. You know remember that Putin himself came to power sort of on the back of the Chechnyan war and this remains very central to his persona, his public persona and his public policy. And so he wanted if not American support then at least American acquiescence in that war, you know that we would ignore it, and he absolutely got it after 9/11.

Partly as a result of that personal decision but party also as a result of this kind of long tradition of personal diplomacy between American and Soviet leaders, the Bush administration initially made something like a fetish of Putin. You know when George Bush met Tony Blair the atmosphere was friendly but businesslike. When he met Jacques ChiracJacques Chirac the atmosphere was unfriendly but businesslike. But when he met Putin Bush really bent over backwards, at least initially but even to some extent later on, not just to be businesslike but to be really friendly. You know there were very public moments where they would put their arms around each other, you know the US President famously looked into Putin’s eyes and said you know, he trusted him. And so on. He invited him to his ranch, he invited him to Maine. And there was enormous effort to sort of bring America close to Russia through the relationship to Putin.
To be fair to Bush that changed over time. As the administration, as we got farther from 9/11 as those initial Russian decisions mattered less, and as they began to see that it didn’t have any effect on, for example, the Bush administration has been trying, tried for many years to get the Russians to change their relationship with Iran, to halt the sales of nuclear material to Iran, and generally to be more cautious about the Iranian nuclear program, and they absolutely failed. They made no impact at all on Russia’s Iranian policy. That element plus the increasing evidence of the, you know, emergence of this Putinist political system did leave the Bush administration to start in the second term to be both in private and in public to be more critical of the Russia human rights record and of, you know, some of the incidents: he Kofskoyav incident, the Khodorkovsky incident. And this backfired dramatically. I mean The Russians were absolutely not interested in hearing any criticism. Putin took it as a kind of personal affront. You know here’s his friend Bush, you know, attacking him. And that backfired, and you know the Russians – partly because we had started out with this personal diplomacy Putin understood it as a personal insult. You know we were insulting him by complaining and in Russia this change of tone and the increasing chilly-ness in the US was understood as American dislike of Russia’s return to power or something along these lines you know. ‘They’re angry because we’re becoming more powerful.’

The other great failure of the Bush administration, in my view, was the real failure, and this applies in many other spheres, to bring Europeans into this conversation. You know in fact, the one really scary incident of the use of weapons of mass destruction in Europe in recent years was the use of radiation poisoning in London by some Russians whose identities remain unclear against Litvinenko who was a former Russian secret policeman who was living in London at the time. Maybe you remember this incident. And the British were certainly an obvious ally in trying to figure out what should our new relationship to Russia be, and yet they were ignored, they were sort of … they weren’t brought into the conversation. The Germans and – in Germany and France you can certainly hear voices in the press – there’s more criticism of Russia – there’s more, you know, there’s a lot of concern about the Russian relationship with Georgia and with Ukraine. And yet there was never any attempt to come up with a kind of common Western way of speaking with or to Russia. You know it was kind of here’s the United States on that hand, here’s the Europeans on the other.

Obama, when he first arrived in office – I don’t think, you know to be fair to him and to everybody else, I reckon Russia is issue number 11, you know, or 15 maybe on the list that starts with Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, you know the economy, the stock market, the health care. You know it’s not a priority at all of this administration. And I think that, initially, they started out kind of naively hoping that changing the rhetoric, you know, would change the situation. There was that wonderful moment when Hillary ClintonHillary Clinton went to Moscow and said “I’m going to press the reset button. And we’re going to reset this relationship.” And unfortunately in Russian she used the wrong word. It didn’t mean reset it meant something else. But if you like, if you will it was symbolic of the difficulties of making rhetorical changes. You know, the relationship requires more than a rhetorical change.

They had also an idea, you know because the Russian relationship with Iran is a problem for the Obama administration as well, they had an idea well maybe they can sort of trade, they can deal with that. The Bush administration as some of you know began a missile defense program or had begun talking, really, about a missile defense program that was designed to defend against Iranian missiles that would have had some components in Central Europe. Some of the people around Obama thought well let’s trade that Russian’s don’t like it let’s trade it away and in exchange they’ll make friends with Iran. You can’t do those kinds of deals. The Russians aren’t interested in that kind of deal. And that’s just not how these relationships work anyway. We don’t even know if Russia has any influence in Iran aside from a business interest.

Where we are now is sort of an odd point. Having gone through the first two cycles really, of first realizing we don’t want to be like Bush; secondly realizing that just talking more nicely isn’t going to bring about the change; the Obama administration has effectively now two tactics. One tactic now is to try and deal with, try and discuss real issues that we have in common that sort of have nothing to do with things that bother all of us. Like let’s talk about Afghanistan. What kind of deals – how can we work together in Afghanistan. Russians have a real interest in stability in Afghanistan, you know, isn’t there something we can do there together. The Obama Administration also decided let’s talk about weapons reductions again. Let’s talk about bringing down the number of nuclear missiles. Not even necessarily because anyone thinks these missiles are going to be used any time soon, but because here is a complicated problem, it involves lots of negotiations, we can do it together, we can achieve some things. We can have some successes in our relationship with Russia that has nothing to do with human rights on one hand, Georgia on the other hand, you know none of the controversial subjects.

The other decision the Obama administration made, which is interesting, is the decision to not deal with Putin. You will notice Obama went to Moscow and he met exclusively with Medvedev, the President. They had dinner together, they did some official events together, and then he had breakfast with Putin, which I think lasted an hour or two. And he chose not to have dinner with Putin but instead he had dinner with Michelle. And with Sasha and Malia who were also in Moscow. And you know I don’t think it was rude. In a way somebody in the White House said to me you know protocol was on his side because Obama’s the President of the United States, Medvedev is the President of Russia, there’s no reason they shouldn’t deal with each other. Now we know, and I think even the Obama administration knows that Medvedev is not the person who makes most decisions in Russia today. You know when there’s a big event, when something important happens, following the invasion of Georgia, following the argument with Ukraine over gas that happened last winter, it’s always Putin who appears on television, it’s always, almost always Putin who is doing the negotiating. Nevertheless -- knowing that, the Obama administration has decided well since we don’t have that much to talk to him about anyway, we’re going to talk to Medvedev. He’s the President. And Medvedev has recently...