The Sand Bar

Clifford Levy writes how the Kremlin seems to be “capitalizing on the economic crisis”, using its political power to “exploit the opportunity” to establish more control over weakened industries. While this may be true in the case of the Yukos Oil Company in 2003, which was briefly mentioned as an aside, and in the case of the Uralkali Mining Company, it certainly isn’t as dire and manipulative that Levy makes it out to be.

After all, the American government did the exact same thing with Citigroup, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and pretty much the entire financial sector, and is considering doing the same thing with the top three automotive industries in the country. The only difference is that here, sentiment toward government bailout of failing companies is not associated with evil conniving political ploys to undermine the honest rights of good citizens. I feel that it is our fear of communism and socialism, which holds its origins in our misunderstanding of both terms, that clouds our ability to objectively rationalize the Kremlin’s moves on this particular matter. It’s easy for we Americans to argue, for example, that the Kremlin is using the economic crisis as leverage to extend its power over private institutions, as Levy does in his article, yet so difficult for us to admit that perhaps the Kremlin is acting in what it feels is in its best capacity to serve and to better its country.

Of course, there still exist widespread corruption penetrating even the highest levels the Kremlin, and the question of whether oligarchs are helpful or harmful to the country is also hard to answer. But we musn’t forget that Russia once was a world superpower, commanding widespread respect and recognition throughout all of Asia and Europe. As a nation that has proven itself capable of handling its people and its identity, we musn’t underestimate their abilities to influence the world, and likewise we musn’t overestimate our own abilities to be the policemen of the world.

As far as my stance on centralization of the economy versus privatization of resource-owning companies, my answer is: it depends. In a place like America where the cultural system is set up to revolve around consumerism and capitalism, a stronger centralized power would be counterproductive to the working class. Profits would fall into the hands of the state, which would in turn distribute those profits equally to the rest of the citizens by purchasing programs like welfare, healthcare, and education. While welfare, healthcare, and education on the cheap sounds like a good bargain, a centralized power also means their is much less potential for any certain individual accumulating significant wealth. On the one hand, this stops corrupt business moguls, and in the case of the Russians, the oligarchs, but on the other hand, it hinders the all-American spirit of working hard to get to good places.

Putting wealth in the power of private industries, then, in addition to being more efficient in running resources than any government would be, provides jobs, opportunities, and potential for growth for the general public.

But in a place like Russia, the democratic reforms that Washington liberals coaxed onto their Eastern counterparts were in my opinion too hard and too fast. Where the infrastructure of big business and commerce was weak, the liberal agendas helped bring about the birth of the oligarch, the business official who exploits those holes in infrastructure to build big profits. Privatization of industries essentially created a business elite class, separate from the general population, hording large amounts of wealth while the public gets none. In fact, Dmitri E. Rybolovlev, the oligarch of Uralkali, just last summer ought a $95 million former Donald J. Trump mansion in Palm Springs, Florida. That money could have been much more wisely spent building apartments for his workers. In addition, the social structure is such that it allows the permeability of widespread corruption, in the following case outlined by “New_oberoton” of Berezniki:

[Translated from a Russian-language blog run by The New York Times]
New_oboroten wrote:

For your information, in my native town of Berezniki, all elections for the ruling party, United Russia, and for Medvedev were financed by Uralkali. They even prevented opposition campaigning and banned advertising for any other parties in the local media (which all belongs to Uralkali). …They did not stop at that and illegally continued campaigning on election day. And so on, and so forth…. In our town of Berezniki, we even found indirect evidence that the election was rigged (the evidence is indirect because for a private citizen it is very difficult to dig out the truth, and all power belongs to Uralkali).

For the city of Berezniki, the United Russia party means Uralkali, even the people and slogans are the same. In Berezniki, as well as the entire Perm region, Uralkali acted on behalf of the authorities, identified itself with the authorities, spread this authority and presented itself as the authority.

When I wrote articles which (to put it mildly) did not praise Uralkali, the URKAs [Uralkali supporters] yelled that I was an enemy of the president and of United Russia. My articles about Putin and the elections were filed in my dossier (kept in Uralkali) as evidence of my anti-state position. Because of all this, presenting Uralkali as a victim of the authorities sounds absurd.

The assumption of private corporations by the Kremlin is not something for we Americans to fear, and is not symbolic of the new-era of Kremlin Terror that we saw before the Cold War. On paper and in practice, Putin is doing what is best for his country, and on this particular issue, I agree with him.

It’s always easier to blame another for your own mistakes than it is to blame yourself. The tension between Russia and the United States is a result of this back-and-forth blaming game that needs to end before any sort of diplomacy can take place. Cathy Young attributes the tensions to “anti-american sentiment”, a “perceived threat to Russian security”, and Russia’s “post-cold war humiliation”. Although these are certainly contributions to the tension, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they are the primary cause.

Young seems to imply that if Russians would just one day stop hating America, that the state of our fragile relationship would be fixed. In the short term, this may be true, but after many years, we would find ourselves once again bickering over who’s to blame.

The cause of our tension is more fundamental. The West has never really taken the time to understand Eastern culture, and likewise for the East. I’ve never personally been to Russia, but I have been to China and Ukraine. In both of those countries, life is much different than over here in the States. The consumer mindset of buy, buy, buy does not exist in China and Ukraine to the same extent that it exists in the US. In the Ukrainian households that I stayed at while I visited the country, their clothes, furniture, and overall decor were fascinatingly simple, clean, and gave me a sense of purity. The families all seemed to take so much pride in their belongings, giving me a sense that they were deeply appreciative of everything they had. In America, I feel like that sense of pride and appreciation is somewhat lost. Bombared by television ads and water-cooler chats about the latest gadgets and electronics, we have become an unsatiable monster, constantly desiring the latest and greatest to come out of the factories.

It’s easy to see how Easterners would think of us as greedy. What they fail to understand, though, is that our consumerist mindset is derived from our capitalist economy and democratic government, and is thus interwoven into our American culture. They fail to realize that our economy is built on the masses buying goods and services. Even though we are perhaps the most consumerist society in the world, we are also at the same time the greatest, most powerful driving force of any economy. In what other country does money exchange hands at the magnitude and the rate that it does here in America? Wealth, therefore, is not accumulated in the hands of a few, but is created, and circulated amongst the hands of many. Because of this, we as a country are able to have higher standards of living than many other countries.

Young postulates that the result of the economic downturn in Russia after the cold war resulted in an inferiority complex toward the West. She sites a few poll numbers that paint the picture that Russians collectively desire an American way of life. I disagree. Young didn’t cite the exact poll questions, so they could have been worded in a way to favor an American perspective. I think what the polls really meant were that Russians would prefer a safer, more economically stable Russia, not a Russia-that-pretends-to-be-America. Like I said before, the Ukrainians I met were immensely proud in their belongings. Likewise, they were also immensely proud of their heritage. In the rural sunflower town of Yalta, it was hard to find anybody that wanted to uproot and move to America. Ukraine was their home, and they were proud of it, even if they didn’t have fifty-inch plasma TV’s hanging off their walls.

It’s so easy for Americans to assume that everybody wants to be like us. But instead of pushing our own political agendas on the world, trying to convert every country we encounter into a poorly-emulated version of ourselves (Iraq comes to mind), we should be more understanding of foreign culture and help them help themselves. Like Obama once said during his past campaign, “We should lead by the power of our example, not by the example of our power.”