Too much for one post here, so forgive me for shortening your post to deal with a small part of it. Let me first comment that “the west” doesn’t operate Gulags the way China, Russia and Iran do. They don’t fear the west for “ruthlessness”. They know better than that. The oppose the west together because they’re all ruthless dictatorships that could not survive democratization of their countries.
But let’s look at Russia’s “transition” after the Soviet era. Russia was utterly broke. The reasons are easy to understand, but I won’t linger on them here. The Soviet state owned a lot of enterprises; some worthless, some valuable, though communism made it unclear which was which. Yeltsin, who had been a communist appratchik himself and could, for that reason, perhaps be forgiven for not knowing a good deal from a bad one economically, formed corporate owners of those enterprises and distributed the shares to the people. Some, of course were worthless, and the craftier fellows bought up the shares of the good ones; sometimes at a tiny fraction of their real value and sometimes out of bullying. Russians, not being used to any of that, got largely suckered and few gained anything. I don’t know what Putin had on Yeltsin, who had health (and drinking) problems anyway, and traded immunity from prosecution (and perhaps assassination) for leadership. Putin then proceeded to persecute and prosecute some of those earlier capitalists, distributing the best assets among himself and his major supporters; a pattern he will surely follow in Ukraine.
So, was the Russian economy doomed when Communism fell, just as it was when Communists took over? Well, it seems likely. After all, “West Germany” has spent billions upon billions of dollars rehabilitating “East Germany”, and those people were Germans, after all, the “best off” in the entire communist world. (never mind that the Trabant was a piece of junk, at least it ran and fairly ordinary people owned them.)
So, but for the brief, abortive Yeltsin interlude, Russia went from being an economy in which the ruling bigwigs got everything worth having, to one in which the ruling bigwigs get everything worth having; from a commodity-based economy to a commodity-based economy.
Could it have been better? Absolutely. But as the integration of eastern Germany into a whole Germany was, and is, tough, integration of Russia into a modern economy would have been tougher. Would it have been worth it? Well, the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Czechs, Hungarians and others seem to think so, even though the transition is still difficult for them.
But it has to be admitted that the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, etc had memories of better times, more freedom and being part of Europe. The Russians, having been enslaved in 1917, (and for many, longer ago than that) no longer did. What Pole does NOT know what it’s like in Germany and has at least some inkling how it works? What Russian DOES know? Does no one recall that, for example, Stalin killed or imprisoned ordinary Soviet soldiers who had seen “too much” of Germany?
Could the west have played a better part in the rehabilitation of Russia at a crucial point? I think it could have. One minor example. At a point in Clinton’s administration, meat was almost nonexistent in Russia and Russian nutrition was really bad. At the very same time there was a glut of dark poultry meat in the U.S. (Because Americans prefer white meat, and the dark meat is hard to get rid of) The U.S. government could have bought up immense quantities of the dark meat and sent it to Russia for resale at next to nothing. But the U.S. government didn’t do it, despite the fact that some of the poultry processors were begging him to do it. Why he didn’t see that, and a lot of other things, I’ll never know.
So, do the Russians remember that? Maybe they do. But that’s still not a good enough explanation for the fact that Russia is now a thug state. After all, Poles weren’t any better off at the time. Poland might have been even worse off because it had been so thoroughly looted by Russia. Neither Russia nor Poland could afford to even send the Russian occupation forces back to Russia. The U.S. did pay for that.
Poland. Russia. Why is there a difference, and why is that difference attractive to the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians? I realize this seems simplistic and in some ways is simplistic, but a big part of it, I think, is that the Russians just don’t know how. Despite some small amount of westernization prior to 1917, Russia has never known what it is to truly be “European”. Russians have never known what it is to NOT be ruled by a despotic regime that owns or controls everything, whereas Eastern Europeans alive today remember what it was like before Russian occupation; when they were consciously and willingly part of Europe, not unwilling parts of Asia.
Poor Ukraine is “neither fish nor fowl”. It does not want to be part of a Russia whose rulers have never been anything but despots and Russian ethnocentrists, but has trouble understanding exactly how to become integrated into a Europe that, by comparison to the Russia they know and have known, must seem like a miracle. And, in terms of human rights and economics, Europe truly is a miracle, compared to what they have known of rule by Russia. One should not blame them for that, and certainly not for the sake of a despotic, threadbare, would-be empire.
