The Russians Are Coming, Again

The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce

Jeremy Kuzmarov, John Marciano

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781583676967
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Russian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Karl Marx famously wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” The Cold War waged between the United States and Soviet Union from 1945 until the latter's dissolution in 1991 was a great tragedy, resulting in millions of civilian deaths in proxy wars, and a destructive arms race that diverted money from social spending and nearly led to nuclear annihilation. The New Cold War between the United States and Russia is playing out as farce – a dangerous one at that. The Russians Are Coming, Again is a red flag to restore our historical consciousness about U.S.-Russian relations, and how denying this consciousness is leading to a repetition of past follies. Kuzmarov and Marciano's book is timely and trenchant. The authors argue that the Democrats’ strategy, backed by the corporate media, of demonizing Russia and Putin in order to challenge Trump is not only dangerous, but also, based on the evidence so far, unjustified, misguided, and a major distraction. Grounding their argument in all-but-forgotten U.S.-Russian history, such as the 1918-20 Allied invasion of Soviet Russia, the book delivers a panoramic narrative of the First Cold War, showing it as an all-too-avoidable catastrophe run by the imperatives of class rule and political witch-hunts. The distortion of public memory surrounding the First Cold War has set the groundwork for the New Cold War, which the book explains is a key feature, skewing the nation’s politics yet again. This is an important, necessary book, one that, by including accounts of the wisdom and courage of the First Cold War's victims and dissidents, will inspire a fresh generation of radicals in today's new, dangerously farcical times.

CHAPTER 1

Anti-Russian Hysteria in Propaganda and Fact

In the first part of this chapter, we will look at the new Cold War, reviewing recent accusations about Russia and its president Vladimir Putin as found in the New York Times, the “Newspaper of Record” and the most influential paper in the country. This virtually monolithic attack on Russia and its president by the Times’ leading columnists, feature writers, and editorial board has been part of “one of the biggest fake news operations in U.S. history” according to best-selling author Dan Talbot, “comparable to the yellow journalism promoted by the Hearst papers, which sold military intervention in the Spanish American War.”¹

Re-invoking a historical Russophobia, the Times and media counterparts have consistently warned about a “new Russian imperialism” while casting Putin as a veritable “red devil,” as columnist Maureen Dowd termed him.² Like all effective propaganda, there is a grain of truth to some of the allegations. However, many are unfounded or taken out of context. The U.S. role in provoking some of Putin’s actions is ignored, and inflated metaphors have been used, such as comparisons of the Russian annexation of Crimea to the German blitzkrieg and Anschluss during the Second World War.

The second part of the chapter will challenge the dominant narrative by presenting dissenting views from independent analysts who have placed the contemporary crisis with Russia in proper perspective. Unfortunately, their commentary has been confined to alternative media and hence has not been able to contain the growth of a dangerous “moral panic” that has helped precipitate the outbreak of a new Cold War.

PART I: THE OFFICIAL STORY IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Owned since 1896 by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, which enjoys close relations with many elements of the U.S. power elite, the New York Times relies on revenues from corporate advertisers and loans from banking firms, neither of which would be pleased if the Times took positions hostile to their interests or that of the corporate community at large. Though nominally liberal in its support for environmental and financial regulation, as well as social issues, the “Newspaper of Record” quite blatantly supports the centrist wing of the Democratic Party. During the 2016 election, even its most liberal columnist, Paul Krugman, frequently ridiculed Bernie Sanders, the progressive dissident. The Times has also supported CIA covert operations and U.S. military power abroad. Its Putin-bashing, defense of NATO, and fomenting of anti-Russian hysteria can thus be placed in the larger context of the paper’s history in “manufacturing consent,” often by playing up the alleged atrocities of official government enemies while whitewashing those of its allies.³

After Putin was elected in March 2000, the Times mixed reservations about his KGB background with reassurance that he “seemed to harbor no nostalgia for the suffocating ideology of communism or the terrors carried out in its name.” It noted that he was “smart and articulate” and appeared to be “a skillful, pragmatic manager” with “some democratic credentials.”⁴ A June 2003 editorial stated that “Putin had done a lot to end the chaos of the Yeltsin years” and bring stability to his country and that he was a “sober, Westernizing leader” who was “prepared to cooperate with the United States and Europe.”⁵

Subsequent editorials encouraged “[President] Bush’s instinct to befriend Mr. Putin” and to “write a positive new chapter in relations with Moscow.” Former national security adviser and Iran-Contra felon Robert “Bud” McFarlane urged cooperation in the War on Terror, suggesting that the United States didn’t have to “choose between Russia and Europe. It [was] in America’s interest to cooperate with both.”⁶

When Putin opposed the Iraq war and U.S.-Russian relations soured, the Times predictably became more hostile. Columnist William Safire, who characterized Russia as “authoritarian at heart and expansionist by habit,” launched the first shot in the anti-Putin movement with his December 10, 2003, editorial, “The Russian Reversion,” which urged resistance against the budding “cult of Putin” and his “one-party rule.”⁷ The Times subsequently denounced Putin’s “old-style KGB tactics” when he arrested oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky before he was to sell a majority of shares of his Yukos oil company to Exxon-Mobil.⁸ Columnist Nicholas Kristof suggested that the West had been “suckered” into believing “Putin was a sober version of Boris Yeltsin,” when he was a “Russified Pinochet or Franco” leading Russia to fascism. According to Kristof, a “fascist Russia was [actually] much better than a communist Russia, since communism was a failed economic system while Franco’s Spain, General Pinochet’s Chile and the others generated solid economic growth, a middle class and international contacts” and “lay the groundwork for democracy.” The United States, nevertheless, needed to take its cue from the Baltic states and Ukrainians and “stand up to Putin” and his “bullying tactics.”⁹

In February 2007, Putin delivered what Times correspondent Steven Lee Myers termed an “acerbic assault on American unilateralism” at the Munich Conference on Security Policy, which roiled feathers in Washington.¹⁰ When Russia subsequently sent troops to defend secessionists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which were invaded by the Georgian government of Mikheil Saakashvili with U.S. military support, Times Foreign Affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote that Putin “deserved a gold medal for brutish stupidity.” Many observers blamed Saakashvili, however, for starting the war, and the Russian intervention (orchestrated actually by President Dmitri Medvedev, whom Friedman called “Putin’s mini-me”) prevented South Ossetia’s absorption into a future NATO member state, restored pride in the Russian army, and prevented threatened ethnic cleansing.¹¹

Anti-Putin Invective Grows in the Obama Years

The anti-Putin invective escalated throughout the Obama years, peaking in Obama’s second term during the Ukraine crisis when the Times supported the U.S.-backed Maidan “revolution” of February 2014 that resulted in the toppling of pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovych.¹² An article by C. J. Chivers and Patrick Reveel alleged Russian intimidation, military occupation, and electoral manipulation ahead of the March 16, 2014, referendum in which 95 percent of Crimeans voted to rejoin Russia. The authors wrote that the referendum had the “trappings of the election-season carnivals that have long accompanied rigged ballots across the old Soviet world.”¹³ These claims ignored that Moscow had thousands of troops in an agreement to protect its naval base at Sevastopol, and that the referendum results stemmed from longstanding ambivalence to Kiev and disdain for the post-coup regime among a majority of Crimeans, especially the many ethnic Russians.¹⁴

In April 2014, the Times published photos of Russian fighters in the Donbass and Luhansk regions that purportedly “proved” the charge of Russian aggression in the civil war that broke out in eastern Ukraine, though the photos were proven to be fakes and the Times had to issue a retraction. The Times editorial board still referred to Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine nevertheless, saying Putin’s actions revealed his “arrogance and contempt for international law,” which justified the levying of sanctions and possibly expelling Russia from the G-8 nations.¹⁵

The Times further violated journalistic standards when it published an unsubstantiated allegation by a conservative Russian oligarch that Putin had been provided advance warning of the pro-Russian Yanukovich government’s collapse, and planned in advance to exploit the ensuing chaos by annexing Crimea with the underlying goal of maintaining the gas supply routes that help Russia dominate European supplies.¹⁶ The Times subsequently helped cover up the massacre of thirty-eight pro-Russian demonstrators in Odessa after right-wing Nazi sympathizers burned the Trade Union House where they were taking refuge after their tent encampment had been ransacked.¹⁷

When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, Times columnist Roger Cohen mimicked Secretary of State John Kerry in claiming there was “an enormous amount of evidence” pointing to Russian culpability, including “damning audio and images that capture the crime.” Putin has been “playing with fire,” Cohen wrote, as the shooting down of the airplane “amounts to an act of war,” with “193 innocent Dutch souls dishonored by the thugs of the Donetsk People’s Republic.” The only viable response was to help “transform Ukraine’s army into a credible force,” which “won’t happen. Europe is weak [and] Obama’s America is about retrenchment, not resolve. Putin must be appeased.” At the time of these statements, however, no major criminal investigation had been conducted and Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence privy to all the relevant evidence, said there was “no smoking gun.”¹⁸ Cohen’s column was thus pure hyperbole and an incitement for war.

In August 2015, Andrew Higgins and Michael Gordon reported that “Russia had escalated tensions with Ukraine to the highest levels since its stealthy invasion of Crimea in the spring, sending more than 200 trucks from a long-stalled aid convoy into rebel-held eastern Ukraine over the objections of Kiev and, NATO said, conducting military operations on Ukrainian territory.”¹⁹ The latter operations, however, were unverified and the aid convoy was designed to assist local populations devastated from missile and other attacks by Ukrainian government forces. The Times furthermore omitted the United States, European Union (EU), and Canadian role in providing weapons, intelligence support, and training to Ukrainian regiments, which were led in some cases by neo-Nazi militias.²⁰

Times writers Michael D. Shear, Allison Smale, and David Herszenhorn had invoked the Nazi blitzkrieg in referencing Putin’s “invasion” and “lightning annexation” of Crimea, which, they said, “shocked” the NATO countries because it revealed Russia’s “abrupt abandonment of the rules of cooperation and territorial integrity that have governed East-West relations for decades.”²¹

Amy Chozick and Ian Lovett reported uncritically on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s comparisons between Russia’s issuing of passports “to Ukrainians with allegiances to Russia” to what Adolf Hitler did before Germany began invading bordering countries.” Though differentiating Putin from Hitler, the assertion that he had to go into Crimea to protect the Russian minority there was said to be “reminiscent of claims made back in the 1930s” when the Nazis asserted they had to invade Eastern European countries to “protect German minorities.”²² In Crimea, however, Russians are the majority at 65 percent, while Ukrainians and Tatars are the minority. Crimea was historically part of Russia and sacred as the place where Vladimir the Grand Prince of Kiev brought Christianity to Russia and Russian troops heroically fought Britain, France, and Turkey during the nineteenth-century Crimean War.²³

Supporting NATO Expansion

Just as the British press whipped up fear about Russian aggression on the eve of the Crimean War, the “Newspaper of Record” is creating a new Red Scare by echoing U.S. government officials warning about the “re-Sovietization” of Central Asia and Russia’s “resurrection [under Putin] as a global disrupter.”²⁴ Strong offense has been taken at Russia’s “furious” opposition to NATO’s expansion on its borders, despite the fact that Russia had been promised NATO would not expand there. In early 2017, the Times editorial board critiqued President Trump and Defense Secretary James Mattis for calling NATO “obsolete” and suggesting the United States might not support NATO members that have not met their financial obligations at a “time the Western alliance was again facing an assertive and aggressive Russia,” an “especially worrisome” trend “given Mr. Trump’s possible links to Moscow.” In the Times version of history, these are “fraught times for the Western alliance, which even after the Cold War remains a critical unifying bond among the democracies of North America and Europe and whose members have worked together to confront terrorism in Afghanistan and promote stability in several Middle Eastern countries.”²⁵

Russian Interference in the Presidential Election

The official indictment against Putin holds that he ordered an “influence campaign aimed at the U.S. election,” with the goal of “undermining faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrating Hillary Clinton, and harming her electability and potential presidency.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), representing seventeen intelligence agencies, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determined with “high confidence” that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and leaked documents to WikiLeaks that showed efforts to undermine Bernie Sanders and exposed some of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street high-rollers. DNI James Clapper testified that “Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 campaign went beyond hacking, and included disinformation and the dissemination of fake news often promoted on social media,” with Putin being said to have “personally directed” the operation.²⁶

Like the good soldiers they are, the Times commentators reported the allegations as fact when conclusive evidence was lacking. Columnist Charles M. Blow asserted that Russian hacking made it “more … clear that … Trump’s victory [is] tainted beyond redemption.” He wrote: “A hostile power stole confidential correspondence from American citizens … and funneled that stolen material to a willing conspirator, Julian Assang...