That's more to Putin's soul than President Bush saw

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By DAVID A. MITTELL JR.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
PUSTOMYTY, Ukraine _ Tolstoy records that when Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862, word of it began to filter across the vast Russian Empire. In a few months the news had reached the remotest villages, where serfs bound to the land knew Lincoln's name and held out hope for their liberation.

On March 8, 1983, Ronald Reagan urged an audience "not to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire (the Soviet Union)." Reagan was referring to the nuclear-freeze movement, which tended to see the two superpowers as moral peas on a pod.

In Moscow the remark was denounced, and among right-thinking people in the West it was ridiculed. But as word reached imprisoned Soviet dissidents it had the same effect as Lincoln's announcement 121 years before. To those in cells, "evil empire" gave misery a name and gave them hope that they weren't abandoned.

Such is the power of the idea of freedom, which, until recently, at least, the United States inspired as no other nation. But a consequence of President Bush's instant psychoanalysis of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in June 2001 ("I was able to get a sense of his soul"), was an unannounced understanding that the United States would no longer speak officially about conditions in Russia.

Mr. Bush went on to use lethal weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of freedom, but he gave up our most powerful non-lethal weapon in a country where freedom was young and fragile. Strategic considerations after Sept. 11, 2001, may have justified that. But we should be under no illusion that the abandonment of our moral support has done the Russian people any good.

Mr. Putin went on to take effective control of Russia's industry, courts and major media. Critics, even potential ones guilty only of latent political power, have been jailed. Journalists are regularly murdered _ 261 since the fall of the Soviet Union. The atrocities of the puppet rulers of Chechnya go unreported. The lethal blunders of security forces in responding to incidents of terrorism are covered up. Russians have a lot more personal liberty than they did under communist rule _ so long as they do not call themselves to the attention of the government.

Mr. Putin also has been using Russia's gas and oil wealth, along with Soviet-style propaganda, to reassert Russian control over other former Soviet states. In the last few weeks the propaganda seems to have intensified in several countries _ no more so than in Georgia, on the eastern Black Sea.

Georgia's crime was to depose its president, former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, in a free election and to replace him with American-educated economist Mikheil Saakashvili. The press called it the Rose Revolution. Georgians' reward was a ban on sale in Russia of their best cash crop, their wines; and Russian arms for secessionists in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions.

In September, Georgia detained four Russian army officers on charges of espionage. The four were deported in customary diplomatic fashion, but not before Mr. Putin cut air, rail and postal service to Georgia, and began rounding up Georgians living in Russia and expelling their children from schools.

The Russian government also began issuing statements accusing Mr. Saakashvili of "repeated provocations" _ propaganda with the ring of that which preceded every Nazi and Soviet invasion of another country. Russia hasn't invaded Georgia, but I don't think that we can exclude the possibility she would invade a former Soviet state.

Another candidate would be Moldova, a small, very poor Romanian-speaking country. Moldova also has a secessionist region, Trans-Dnestr, that Soviet/Russian troops have never left. Moldova's reward for electing a forward-looking democratic president: Her fine wines are banned in both Russia and the European Union _ for political and anti-competitive reasons, respectively.

The prize that Mr. Putin let get away was Ukraine. Having seen his attempt to name Ukraine's president thwarted by the Orange Revolution of 2004, he petulantly reneged on a deal to supply natural gas. On New Year's Day 2006, he actually cut off the supply of gas. In September, he began accusing officials in the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk of suppressing the speaking of Russian in public. A Russophone journalist who went there found more Russian than Ukrainian in magazines and on television, and people conversing openly in both languages. The propaganda was lies _ ominous lies.

According to Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya (a Tolstoy descendent), the "soul" George Bush didn't see in Vladimir Putin is the KGB. In Soviet times this spy agency was efficient and patriotic, possibly the only efficient, patriotic institution in the Empire. By his own lights former KGB agent Putin is acting in the new Russia's national interest.

But where Mr. Putin's policies are atavistically evil they must be called so. An American president who forswears his non-lethal weapon, the bully pulpit, forsakes millions of people 15 years removed from centuries of tyranny and decades of totalitarianism.

(David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Providence Journal's editorial board.)