Russia's fading dream
Pussy Riot, Tupac and Putin
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NYT
Moscow
I’ve been a regular visitor to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and, when I was describing what troubled me most about the place to a wise foreign policy friend, he urged me to read the play “Three Sisters” by Chekhov. It’s the tale of the aspiring Prozorov family, whose three cultured and educated sisters — Olga, Masha and Irina — grew up in Moscow but for 11 years found themselves marooned in the countryside. The sisters are always waxing poetic about their plans to go back to Moscow (the Emerald City), but they never make it and their dream fades.
Putin brings out the Three Sisters in me. Every time I come here, I expect to find that, this time, Russia is really pivoting from being a petro-state, with a heavy authoritarian gloss — and a president who relies on anti-Western rhetoric to maintain his political base — to a country that has decided to invest in education, innovation and its human capital and is ready to be a partner with the West. But it never materializes, and lately it has started to go backward. I wonder if Putin realizes how open the U.S. would be to partnering with Russia today to bring order to the Middle East or to serve as a counterweight to China — especially when the European Union is so weak and America is so inwardly focused.
Yes, NATO expansion was a huge mistake, and it got America and Putin off on the wrong foot. But that’s over. This time it is Putin who has locked himself, for his own cynical politics, in cold-war mode. His anti-Western trope plays well in the countryside, which has become his political base at a time when the rising urban middle classes have grown resentful of his perpetually autocratic rule. Russia would be so much more influential as America’s partner than it would be as Iran’s or Syria’s patron. And its economy would be so much more resilient if Putin tapped his people and unlocked their creativity rather than just his oil and gas wells. But doing the latter would require a much freer political atmosphere. Putin may look like a strongman, but his policies are making Russia weaker. He needs to be careful. The good news for Russians today is that they can leave. The bad news for Russia is that they will.
(More here.)
Moscow
I’ve been a regular visitor to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and, when I was describing what troubled me most about the place to a wise foreign policy friend, he urged me to read the play “Three Sisters” by Chekhov. It’s the tale of the aspiring Prozorov family, whose three cultured and educated sisters — Olga, Masha and Irina — grew up in Moscow but for 11 years found themselves marooned in the countryside. The sisters are always waxing poetic about their plans to go back to Moscow (the Emerald City), but they never make it and their dream fades.
Putin brings out the Three Sisters in me. Every time I come here, I expect to find that, this time, Russia is really pivoting from being a petro-state, with a heavy authoritarian gloss — and a president who relies on anti-Western rhetoric to maintain his political base — to a country that has decided to invest in education, innovation and its human capital and is ready to be a partner with the West. But it never materializes, and lately it has started to go backward. I wonder if Putin realizes how open the U.S. would be to partnering with Russia today to bring order to the Middle East or to serve as a counterweight to China — especially when the European Union is so weak and America is so inwardly focused.
Yes, NATO expansion was a huge mistake, and it got America and Putin off on the wrong foot. But that’s over. This time it is Putin who has locked himself, for his own cynical politics, in cold-war mode. His anti-Western trope plays well in the countryside, which has become his political base at a time when the rising urban middle classes have grown resentful of his perpetually autocratic rule. Russia would be so much more influential as America’s partner than it would be as Iran’s or Syria’s patron. And its economy would be so much more resilient if Putin tapped his people and unlocked their creativity rather than just his oil and gas wells. But doing the latter would require a much freer political atmosphere. Putin may look like a strongman, but his policies are making Russia weaker. He needs to be careful. The good news for Russians today is that they can leave. The bad news for Russia is that they will.
(More here.)
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