Contemporary academic elite in the US is rather timorous bunch. If in the 1950s many professors resigned from California public universities rather than sign infamous “loyalty oath”— dismissed professors faced much more difficult perspective of finding jobs in McCarthyte America than they are now—these days academic dissent is but non-existent even when professional integrity is concerned. For instance, I haven’t heard a single top international relations expert on the eve of Iraq invasion who mumbled, in any form and shape, that the occupation of the country of 26 million Moslems might not be a walkover imagined by the Bush Administration.
Because of the reported closeness of McFaul to the Obama election campaign, I decided to study his views on my country of origin. I took to McFaul and Weiss-Stoner piece in the “Foreign Affairs” not because I expected to agree with him. Yet, I felt a need to read his article if only to understand opposing point of view and analyze the arguments of the other side. However there was little to understand and argue.
Mike McFaul started his academic career with insightful pieces about Russia. Yet, as a smart man, he quickly understood that saying positive things about Russians does not earn you tenure, especially under motherly eyes of his Chancellor, someone Condi Rice. I am not blaming him: he has a family to feed, or other important ones. To compensate for the sins of a misspent tenure-track youth, i.e. describing events in Russia avoiding overtly abusive if not racist terms of the “mainstream” media, he ought to reform. His exculpation meant engaging to the propaganda, which cannot be characterized in terms other than Goebbelsian.
While the latter term was much overused, it still retains an original meaning of “perversion of facts of grotesque proportions in service of political propaganda.” As an epitomic Nazi intellectual, he sometimes employed pseudo-intellectual garbage, which must have looked high-minded and erudite to haphazardly educated journalists and security police bureaucrats. Few such examples are provided in the "comments" section [1].
I would not entertain an honorable reader with a prolonged exposure to his verbal filth, if it the debating methods quoted in somewhat lengthy Endnote 1 were not entirely applicable to the tone of McFaul and Weiss-Stoner. For instance, McFaul and Stoner compares rates of Russian economic growth to other post-Soviet states, majority of which have either statistics determined entirely by the orders of the local El Supremo (Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, etc.), or whose economy largely consists of foreign aid and remittances of the guest workers, not in the least, from Russia itself (Georgia, Moldova, etc.). Yet, they also unfavorably compare Russian public health statistics to developed nations some of which have four times her GDP per capita (but extremely low growth rates, as it should be). Brazil or Mexico, which have similar per capita incomes also show comparable indicators of public health. [2] When it comes to demographics authors of the “Foreign Affairs” piece tell horror stories about Russians literally dying out because of Putin, as if devastation of two world wars and 75 years of Communist misrule didn’t exist. Yet, easily available sources clearly demonstrate that extremely low fertility rates and, hence, negative population growth are typical for all European post-Soviet states including, by the way, massively subsidized eastern parts of Germany.
Some of the “facts” are either totally fabricated or are the results of institutional malaise of the US agencies having nothing to do with Russia. During the Cold War, CIA and DoD grotesquely exaggerated the levels of technical and economic development of the USSR in support of more funding for the defense programs. After its collapse they revised their estimates as to prove that Russian Federation is a semi-medieval state, which can be safely ignored or harassed. Indeed, there was no more dough in promoting defense acquisitions but plenty in support of America’s colonial wars and possessions. [3] Collision of these revisions sometimes produced comical results. In mid-1990s, according to some US sources (DoD, now-defunct ACDA), Russia spent on the military more than 100% of its entire budget.
I would not spend that much time discussing of what I can not characterize other than a racist pamphlet but I afraid that McFaul and other “experts” have as much influence in Washington now as similar-quality experts on the Middle East before the Iraq invasion.
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“Through German settling of accounts with Moscow, we uncovered the biggest Jewish swindle of all time…The ‘workers’ paradise’ is shown up before the whole world as… a system of exploitation…[with] the lowest possible living standards, from miserable housing and lice-ridden dwellings, neglected roads and filthy villages to the brutish dullness of the people’s whole existence…It will be particularly important to produce a good selection of pictures in which the brutish Bolshevik types are contrasted with frank and open faces of German workers, the filthy Soviet barracks are compared with German workers’ housing estates, the muddy roads with German roads, etc…” (Speech at the Ministerial Conference, July 5, 1941. Cit. by Noakes, J. (ed.) Nazism, 1919-1945, vol.4 “The German home front in the World War II,” slightly edited for readability).
While Stalinist USSR was certainly a horrible place to live, a very real, albeit exaggerated, difference between the living standards of contemporary Russians and Germans existed also between Wilhelmine Germany and Tsarist Russia. Furthermore, Russian economy suffered much more as a result of the World War I and its aftermath. These lessons should have been quite obvious to his listeners for whom it all was a very recent history. Finally, Nazi Germany until the very end of 1944 supported its relatively high living standards through systematic plunder of half of Europe, so hardly anything in comparison could be attributed to alleged superiority of Nazi over Communist economic policies.
Goebbels also ordered “…the production of publications …which objectively demonstrate that USA possesses virtually no culture of its own, that, on the contrary, its cultural products stem essentially from European achievements…” (Daily Conferences, Dec. 16, 1941, op. cit. Italics are mine). The observation, that prevailing American culture was mostly the culture created by the descendants of European colonists is, of course, technically correct, but totally meaningless.
Yet, in the space of 1½ years, in his famous “Total War” explaining the defeat at Stalingrad (Feb. 18, 1943), Goebbels proclaimed: “It is understandable that, as a result of broad concealment and misleading actions… we did not properly evaluate the Soviet Union’s war potential… The Soviet Union over the last 25 years built up military potential up to unimaginable degree…The masses of tanks we have faced on the Eastern Front result from 25 years of social misfortune and misery of the Russian people.” Suddenly, the image of Russians as near-animals during the times of German victories is being replaced in defeat by “mechanized robots,” the term he uses in other parts of the speech. In fact, 25 years to the speech, in 1918, there was no Soviet Union. The territory of the former Russian Empire was divided between several warring states and factions in the conditions hardly conducive to development of technology.
In general, it is very difficult to find a social indicator in public health, housing, education, etc., which has a statistically significant determinant other than GDP per capita if one corrects for obvious outliers: for instance, per capita consumption of pork in Israel, or beef in India is rather small. Moreover, “discovery” of significant factors other than GDP more often than not indicates defective statistical methodology.
Z. Brzezinski openly called many of our newfound allies as “vassals and tributaries.”
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