American Journalism and Russia's Tragedy (Page 4)

Facts may be stubborn things, but in this case no more so than many US journalists. In 1999 the Yeltsin era and Russia's purported "transition" to prosperity, stability and democracy ended not only in economic collapse and human misery but also in the first civil war in a nuclear country and with a career KGB officer in the Kremlin. A few US journalists spoke of "lost illusions"--though almost never their own[25]--but most merely updated the media's fictitious narrative of the nineties. Thus, on the occasion of Putin's election this past March, top editors of both the New York Times and Washington Post wrote apologias for the entire Yeltsin period and by implication their papers' coverage of the Russian nineties.[26]

Certainly there has been no media (or official) reconsideration of the arrogant, intrusive and dangerously counterproductive US crusade to transform a different civilization. In late 1999 the Post's chief Moscow correspondent extolled the "great Russian transition," marveling that "Russians have accomplished much of what we asked." An editor of the New York Times Book Review, presumably in a position to know, reassured readers of "the desirability of remaking the former Soviet Union in a Western image." And like those of other influential papers, the Post's editors remain unrepentantly missionary: "Yes, meddle in Russian affairs."[27]

Nor has there been any real acknowledgment of the crusade's calamitous impact on the Russian people, whose fate the US government and media so lamented when they were the Soviet people. The "Great Transition Depression," as a UN study properly calls it, is almost never mentioned and the nation's massive poverty only euphemistically, as in "Russians who have benefited little."[28] By the late nineties, according to a Moscow writer admired in America, the "pitiful ruins of the Russian economy stuck out on the bared sandbars as if after a shipwreck." But to a visiting high-level Washington Post expert, "Russia looks terrific." Similarly, for Business Week's ranking specialist, the insider privatization that most Russians equate with plundering and impoverishment remains "one of the most successful reforms of the Yeltsin era."[29]

Even the economic happy talk of the pre-1998 meltdown is back. US press accounts, parroting as they did in the nineties self-serving assurances by Western bankers and investment firms, are again reporting that Russia's half-dead economy is actually "booming."[30] But Russian authorities from economists to President Putin have warned that the modest spurt of industrial output since 1999 is the result of artificial and temporary factors and has done little if anything to benefit capital investment or ordinary citizens. (Capital flight may even have increased during this period.)

* * *

Coverage of Putin himself, the little-known head of the KGB's successor agency only a year ago, has been more mixed. He became president thanks to a nearly genocidal war in Chechnya and an electoral process manipulated by Kremlin insiders hoping for a post-Yeltsin praetorian to protect their power and ill-gotten wealth. Predictably, the Clinton Administration immediately anointed him "one of the leading reformers" and his political rise a "genuine democratic transition." Until it finally acknowledged last month that the new Russian leader is "the un-Boris," the Administration tried to make Putin its Yeltsin of the twenty-first century in order to justify its failed policies of the nineties.

Some US journalists did the same. According to the lead New York Times correspondent, to take perhaps the most influential example, Putin occupied the Kremlin through "a democratic transfer of executive power" and "clearly has an intellectual grasp of democracy," even a "seemingly emotional commitment to building a democracy."[31 ](A six-month investigation by the Moscow Times, an expatriate paper, has just concluded that "falsification" was "decisive" in Putin's March electoral victory.)

When the American press turned sharply against Putin in August over his perceived handling of the Kursk tragedy, the extraordinarily voluminous coverage was no less ideological and sermonizing. It seemed as though the US government had never lost a nuclear submarine and its crew, put "great power" interests above those of victims and their families, concealed strategic information in the name of national security and now has more right to prowl the Barents Sea than does Russia. Indeed, much of the coverage suggested that our former superpower rival should immediately disarm unilaterally. Nor, of course, did the commentary point out how much Yeltsin's US-sponsored "reforms" had done to erode Russia's maintenance and control of its nuclear weapons.

But most of the press still has nothing but enthusiasm for the "excellent" economic program being attributed to Putin--a new dose of severe, admittedly "painful" shock therapy that could only further victimize the poor and profit the rich. In addition to a regressive 13 percent flat tax, it would slash remaining social guarantees, including the housing and utilities subsidies that barely sustain most Russians, raise basic consumer prices and endanger already meager pensions. It is, a US correspondent joyfully points out, "considerably bolder than almost any plans that most Western nations have ever tried to push past suspicious voters."[32]

The mainstream US press may be indifferent to the fate of Russia's impoverished majority but not to that of its handful of "much maligned" oligarchs who were allowed under Yeltsin to "privatize" hundreds of billions of dollars of Soviet state assets for a fraction of their value. The country's economic recovery requires some degree of renationalization, as even the former chief economist of the World Bank argues. But when Putin began to crack down on oligarchical asset-stripping, tax evasion and illegal capital export this summer--steps approved by 75 percent of Russians surveyed--the Washington Post sternly warned him against "revisiting the privatization deals" and the Wall Street Journal, against even "antagonizing" the tycoons.[33]

All this suggests that many American journalists, like Western investors, the US government and the kleptocrats themselves, would hardly object if Putin becomes a Russian Pinochet in order to safeguard Yeltsin's "reforms" and impose his own "excellent program." Thus, a Los Angeles Times correspondent reports, apparently in full agreement, the growing Western view that "a little authoritarianism might be just what Russia needs."[34 ]If influential US journalists and the institutions they represent now share this opinion, we are left with nearly a decade of not only empirical but also ethical malpractice.

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