Upper volta with missiles schmidt
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And it came against the backdrop of protests under the Kremlin walls of Westernized, urban, white-collar Muscovites demanding a more transparent, accountable form of government. Then came the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and, quite nearly, Bashar al-Assad - all in the name of Western democracy. He responded by actively marginalizing his opposition, creating a militant pro-government youth movement, and castrating what was left of the independent press at home. This terrified Putin, who feared Washington would support something similar in Moscow. Bush’s program of regime change and democracy promotion supported democratic uprisings in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. They, and Putin, resented Westernization, especially in its geopolitical manifestations, like NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia in spite of Moscow’s protestations. It was an imposition of a foreign system of government ill-suited to Russia’s traditions and historical insistence on greatness, unity, and the subservience of the individual to a strong, centralized state. To some conservative Russian thinkers, many of whom came to influence Vladimir Putin in his third turn at the presidency, the very idea of Russia as a democracy was itself a kind of defeat. Its elites chafed at having gone from being one of the world’s great empires to being labeled “ Upper Volta with missiles.” Or derided by Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google and one of the many émigrés who made their fortunes elsewhere, as “Nigeria with snow.” Or, as one Republican Senate staffer once referred to it in conversation, “China’s gas station.” Even for Russians most critical of the Kremlin, the humiliation could be searing. Warsaw Pact countries and former Soviet republics lined up at NATO’s door, and Russia came to be seen as the land of drunks and mail-order brides, a place to be mocked rather than feared. Western products flooded the Russian market: Coca Cola, Hollywood, cordless phones.Īt the same time, Russia quickly went from being a nuclear superpower to a backwater, culturally and geopolitically. The dollar became the preferred, trusted currency.
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Western businessmen swarmed the country to make a killing but also brought with them their new, seemingly superior ways of doing business: boards of directors, corporate governance, stocks and bonds. Those same Harvard wonks - young men like Jeffrey Sachs - helped push the painful transformation of the Soviet command economy into a market one. There was suddenly a freewheeling and adversarial press in the Western mold. The era of Soviet one-party rule gave way to a raucous parliamentary system that, at one point, had more than 100 political parties, including one for beer lovers. The first constitution written in Russia after the 1991 collapse of the USSR was drafted in the Western mold with the help of young Harvard University wonks. Just get rid of communism, they thought, and they’d start living like their American and European counterparts.Īnd Westernization came. And it was decided that the Western way of government, 25 years ago, would govern the new Russia, too.Īs the USSR crumbled, many in the urban intelligentsia longed for a Westernization they believed would turn their country and their lives around.
#Upper volta with missiles schmidt free#
Twenty-five years ago, the Western conception of government - democracy, free markets, human rights - seemed to be proved to be the best, most stable, most moral way to govern. I’m not one for historical anniversary stories, but this one seems to me to be truly significant, though mostly in its breach. Twenty-five years ago this week, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the Cold War ended.