An ambition, inordinate and immense, one of those ambitions which
could only possibly spring in the bosoms of the oppressed, and could
only find nourishment in the miseries of a whole nation, ferments in
the heart of the Russian people. That nation, essentially aggressive,
greedy under the influence of privation, expiates beforehand, by a
debasing submission, the design of exercising a tyranny over other
nations: the glory, the riches which it hopes for, consoles it for
the disgrace to which it submits. To purify himself from the foul and
impious sacrifice of all public and personal liberty, the slave, upon
his knees, dreams of the conquest of the world.

--The Marquis de Custine, Russia in 1839

During the Cold War, Americans by and large forgot Custine, perhaps
the grumpiest tourist and most scathing vilifier of Russia who ever
wrote. Locked in conflict with a totalitarian state, we thought that
the main reason the Soviet Union made trouble for us, and for the
world at large, was that it was not a democracy. Take away Bolshevik
ideology, the command economy, and the power of the Politburo, and
you'd be a long way toward normalcy. Dissolve the Warsaw Pact, slash
military spending, give the non-Russian republics their independence,
and it would be hard to see what we might fight about. Adopt a
constitution, end censorship, respect religious freedom, hold
elections, then hold more elections: Could a country that did all
these things really be a threat?

Apparently, yes. Political institutions, we are now told, solve much
less than was once imagined. They do not address deep psychic and
socio-cultural torments, and legions of new Custines have begun to
argue that for Russians no torment is deeper than that of being a
fallen superpower--unless perhaps it is that of being a fallen
superpower while also undergoing the transition to a market economy.
In any case, the pain is excruciating and is said to be relieved only
by an increasingly belligerent foreign policy, ideally by
re-establishment of the Soviet Empire. As for other countries, they
need to understand the deep roots of this affliction, while resisting
any thought that the tools of modern medicine can ameliorate it.
Foreign policy, says one authority, is not a realm of "psychological
engineering." Russia, says another, is not our "patient." (These
authorities, it will be seen, do not always follow their own advice.)

Nations do have neuroses. If an unhappy past is one of the causes,
Russia must have at least its share of them, and probably more. But
for all its pseudo-historical depth, the current psychiatric school
of analyzing Russia's politics and policies tells us very little
about what is going on there. As a result, it cannot be a proper
basis for formulating policies of our own.

The Diagnosis

An exceptionally diverse group of analysts and political commentators
subscribes to some version of the diagnosis just set forth. It is
embraced by those who were the most ardent critics of the Soviet
order and those who are trying their best to restore it, by lowly
working journalists and eminent former officials. Despite their
differences, they agree on this: Russian imperial consciousness is
not dead. To the contrary, writes Richard Pipes, perhaps our greatest
historian of Russia, the loss of empire "has produced bewilderment
and anguish."

"[N]othing so much troubles many Russians today, not even the decline
in their living standards or the prevalence of crime, and nothing so
lowers in their eyes the prestige of their government, as the
precipitous loss of great-power status."

Anatoly Lukyanov (once one of Gorbachev's principal lieutenants, then
one of his principal betrayers, and now a leader of the revived
Russian Communist Party) seconds this view. "We communists", he has
said (this is an admission he would hardly have made in the old days,
when good communists despised bourgeois liberties), "always
understood perfectly well that the Soviet man, the citizen of Russia,
had fewer political rights than a European. But that shortfall was
compensated for by the sense of belonging to a great nation, a great
state." Yeltsin undid this formula, thereby making Russian democracy
vulnerable to a communist revanche.

"He took away that sense of world importance. Any party which takes
advantage of this today will be on top. That is why the communists
have so many patriotic slogans, slogans of statehood, of nationhood."

The reason that popular government does not mean peace, in short, is
that the people don't necessarily want peace; they want to be on top
again. As Henry Kissinger has put it, "[W]hat passes for Russian
democracy too often encourages an expansionist foreign policy."
Yeltsin can hardly let the Communists be the only ones to tap the
people's mood, so he ends up taking positions that "differ only in
degree from those urged by Zyuganov", his Communist challenger in the
June presidential race. As one measure of how domestic political
pressures work, Russia is now inclined "to conduct adventurous
policies in Asia for no other purpose than to augment its prestige."

For Kissinger, this mad preoccupation with "ancient glories" is no
mere election-season phenomenon, but something more durable--and more
dangerous. "Foreign policy", he announces, "has emerged as the deus
ex machina for Russia's elite to escape present-day frustrations by
evoking visions of a glorious past."

A deus ex machina, of course, always transforms the story of which it
is a part, and Russia will be no exception. Chrystia Freeland, who
writes from Moscow for the Financial Times, worries that what she
calls Yeltsin's "shift to the nationalist camp" will prove to be "a
dangerous watershed in Russian history." It means nothing less than
that he has "abandoned the effort to forge a new post-communist and
post-imperial identity." Instead of endlessly pretending that their
past was so great, she feels, Russians should "undergo a process of
national repentance." This self-examination is the only way back to
political health: "[B]efore they can construct a new, democratic
national myth, Russians must confront their murderous communist past."

For Zbigniew Brzezinski, Russia's need to take "a hard look in the
mirror" is more than a mere scholarly conclusion. It should be the
core of U.S. policy. After all, "democracy and modernization begin
with self-education." Unfortunately, what he sees in Russia today,
even among its democratic leaders, is a "self-deluding obsession with
power and status." Getting the Russians to listen won't be easy, he
acknowledges, but we have an obligation to tell them--"calmly,
frankly, and firmly"--the truth about what ails them and about what
it will take to recover.

Toward a Second Opinion

It is difficult to think of a time when so much distinguished
pundit-power has been devoted to putting an entire country on the
couch. Consider the psychiatric vocabulary that runs through the
discussion. There is "anguish", "loss of status", "identity" and a
"sense of belonging", "repentance", and "self-deluding obsession."
Russia, once a country that needed a revolution, now seems to need
something even more profound: professional help. It's not enough to
be free, you also have to be cured.

The mere fact that our leading foreign-policy commentators have
started to talk like therapists does not, of course, prove that they
are wrong. But the mode of analysis is, to say the least, a little
unusual--not least because it is so often combined with a vehement
insistence that U.S. policy toward Russia must not be, as Henry
Kissinger himself put it years ago, "a subdivision of psychiatry."
Let us therefore try to verify the diagnosis.

The geotherapists assert the following four propositions. First, that
public opinion creates irresistible pressures, to which Russian
leaders have to respond, for an expansionist foreign policy. Second,
that the Russian elite retains a strong imperial mindset and, in
particular, is determined to regain control of the old Soviet Union.
Third, that Russian leaders are dangerously preoccupied with
questions of prestige and status, and believe that in the past these
were their country's proudest asset. And fourth, that the indulgent
attitude of the West, and above all the United States, toward Russia,
even when it defies us, is making all these pathologies worse. (There
are, it has to be said, some differences among the various
commentators who argue this case. Some feel more strongly about one
proposition than another. But we will be in a better position to
decide how seriously to take these little nuances once we see whether
even one of the propositions stands up.)

Evaluating these four claims should not be hard. A patient in such
terrible shape is going to give daily proof of how much is wrong with
him. If Russia really were as sick as this, we should find useful
evidence everywhere we look--in domestic struggles for political
power, in the conduct of foreign policy, in the strategic concepts
embraced by officialdom and the intelligentsia. Do we?

The Traumatized Public

The Russian political system lacks legitimacy; it can't deliver
bread, only imperial circuses; expansionism, and expansionism alone,
diverts the popular mind from its misery. For symptoms of this
problem, we can start with the recent presidential campaign--a
political event that in many countries does bring neuroses to the
surface. Boris Yeltsin, it should be remembered, ran for re-election
on the basis of a dual strategy, and it was often a quite unedifying
sight. On those issues where the Communists had him on the defensive,
he pandered and dissembled. Hence his promises to pay all back wages
and to end the war in Chechnya. At the same time, on those issues
where he had them on the defensive, Yeltsin turned up the pressure.
Hence his lurid evocations of the Communist past and policy
initiatives, like his decree on private land ownership, that were
meant to frame the election as a choice between politicians who
accept the new order and those who don't.

Now, where did imperial nostalgia fit into this strategy? Leave aside
for the moment the fact that those candidates who put nationalist
themes at the center of their campaign lost badly, and that exit
polls put the number of voters who were swayed by foreign policy at
only 2 percent. If the geotherapists were right about the country's
mental state, we should have seen Yeltsin scrambling to prove that he
is part of the revisionist patriotic consensus. Instead, we saw him
use foreign policy as a tool to demonstrate the differences between
himself and the Communists, and to remind voters of what they don't
want to retrieve from their "glorious" past.

The issue was not simply a matter of rhetoric and mood, but of
conflict between the legislature and the executive. On March 15,
1996, the Russian parliament passed two Communist-sponsored
resolutions annulling the acts under which the Soviet Union was
dissolved in 1991. It declared that the agreement to create a
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in place of the USSR "did
not and does not have legal force", and charged that the officials
who had "prepared, signed, and ratified" this decision had
"flagrantly violated the wish of Russia's people to preserve the
USSR."

With this bold move, the opposition clearly thought that they had
Yeltsin trapped. On the one hand, he could hardly endorse a
resolution that personally denounced him. On the other, opposing it
would put him on the wrong side of a supposedly super-charged issue.
As things turned out, however, the Duma's action proved to be the
moment when Yeltsin's campaign got on a winning track for good. It
gave the president and his allies their first, best opportunity to
persuade voters that the Communists really were bent on restoring the
old order. Yeltsin called the resolution "scandalous" and, showing
that he had no fear of seeming too attentive to foreign opinion,
immediately instructed Russian diplomats to tell other governments
that the vote would have no effect.

There is a Moscow witticism that goes: Anyone who does not regret the
collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart; anyone who wants to
restore it has no brain. The Communists bet that people did not
really believe this; they lost the bet. The March 15th resolution and
its aftermath certainly put a question mark over the idea that the
loss of empire has left Russians in a state of "bewilderment and
anguish." But it is, admittedly, only a single incident. Perhaps the
Duma's action was too bald, with too many overtones of restoring
communism intact? Perhaps for this reason the Russian people weren't
quite able to respond to it as they might have liked, with honest
imperial relish?

Fortunately, there is other evidence to work with. In the course of
the election campaign, Yeltsin did pander on some foreign policy
issues. Even before the Duma's March 15th resolutions, his advisers
openly acknowledged that he intended to respond in some fashion to
the electorate's presumed unhappiness with the state of relations
among the former republics of the USSR. These initiatives, they said,
would keep the Communists from monopolizing popular discontent. And
sure enough, at the end of March and beginning of April, Yeltsin
unveiled new agreements with three of these states: a quadrilateral
"Treaty on Deepening Integration in Economic and Humanitarian
Spheres", signed by Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; and a
bilateral treaty between Russia and Belarus, which created "a
qualitatively new phase in relations" between them. The closer one
looks, however, the less these agreements, and the public response to
them, seem like proof of a growing appetite for empire. As they
scrutinize the menu, Russians appear quite undecided about how hungry
they really are, and eager to make sure they don't overeat.

Both integration agreements were replete with commitments to advance
this or that concrete interest, such as increased trade and
investment, joint efforts in science and technology, coordination of
education policy and veterans benefits, etcetera. The quadrilateral
treaty, in particular, was precisely the kind of diplomatic
"breakthrough" that Russians long ago learned not to take seriously.
As for the "union of the two" with Belarus, the real question was
whether the agreement marked the first big break in Russia's
reluctance to cooperate too closely, on the grounds that it would be
too expensive and slow down Russia's own economic stabilization
program. There was, in fact, some reason to see the agreement as
something new: Russia had for the first time agreed to a monetary and
a customs union. And yet the conditions for implementing the
agreement remained extremely stiff. For "integration" to take effect,
Belarus has to bring its economic reforms and policies fully into
line with Russia's--and this is virtually inconceivable.

There was perhaps no better confirmation (even if indirect) of
Russian skepticism about the new relationship than the speech given
by the president of Belarus, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, at the treaty
signing ceremony in Moscow. Sensing that this was his best chance to
speak to the Russian people about the agreement, he devoted the bulk
of his remarks to refuting the idea that only Belarus would benefit
from it, at Russia's expense. ("That is not so. It is a lie, to say
the least", he fulminated. "Belarus has never been dependent on
anyone and has never been a parasite.")

Lukashenka did not seem aware that the Russian soul is possessed by
demons that drive the country toward integration whether it will
benefit or not. He appeared to believe that he actually had to defend
the treaty on the humdrum ground of interest. Accordingly, he spoke
of all the goods that Belarus produces for the Russian market, of the
revenues it used to supply to the Soviet treasury, of the value of
coordinated national policies on such matters as "finding employment,
health care, acquisition of property, housing construction, and so
on."

After the April agreements were signed, there was a typical bit of
Moscow squabbling about who deserved the real credit for this
gigantic achievement. Was it the Duma, as the Communists insisted,
that had pushed Yeltsin in this direction? Or had the president, as
his aides rebutted, been deeply committed to integration for a long
time? This was precisely the sort of struggle for political advantage
that could bolster the geotherapists' case. Except for one thing: The
controversy seemed to evoke no public interest. It lost its fizz
almost immediately, and the politicians turned to other issues, where
it really mattered who got the credit.

An Imperial Elite?

The fact that reconstituting the Soviet Union has been a bust
politically makes it hard to defend the first of the geotherapists'
propositions. There is no identifiable pressure from jingoist public
opinion that radicalizes all policies until they "differ only in
degree." But we can hardly be certain that Russia has sworn off
empire just because its people are not imperialists. The elite may
have its own, very different aspirations, and lack of popular support
will not necessarily keep them from being realized.

This second proposition is a bit harder to put under the microscope.
The Russian ruling class is far more diverse than ever
before--politically, economically, regionally, generationally,
ethnically, and in other ways as well. It is therefore quite
artificial to speak of what the elite thinks. (This was beginning to
be true even in the last years of the Soviet era.) All the same,
there are many organizations purporting to express what they claim is
a hard-boiled centrist consensus, and none does so more convincingly
than the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (CFDP). The group is a
self-styled analog to our own Council on Foreign Relations in its
heyday, a comparison made credible by the former's success in
bringing together corporate leaders and experts on international
affairs. Its members--among whom ambitious insiders, trimmers, and
climbers are very well represented--know exactly what is respectable
and what is not.

Last winter and spring, the CFDP conducted a series of meetings to
discuss a draft report--"theses", they were called--on the issue of
integration. The document went through three versions, was greatly
expanded, heavily revised, and published in May under the signature
of forty-four bankers, industrialists, journalists, and policy wonks.
In its final form (bearing the title, "Will a Union be Reborn?"), it
represents the most revealing statement to date of elite opinion
about Russia's relations with the other former Soviet states.

The most arresting passage in the CFDP "theses" is the repudiation of
the idea of recreating the USSR, which is labeled "an extremely
reactionary utopia." Pursuing it, says the report, will only weaken
Russia and cause much bloodshed.

However humiliated the national consciousness of the Russians may be,
today Russian society is absolutely unprepared to pay the price of a
lot of blood to make up for geopolitical losses.

To be against a restored communist imperium and against bloodshed is
not, of course, to be against re-building Russian power. The CFDP
believes that the collapse of the Soviet Union left Russia with much
less international influence, and it proposes to try to increase it.
But how? Bloodshed, it turns out, is just one constraint among many;
so is cost.

The new Russian political and economic elites are oriented more
toward economic rather than military-political domination in the
territories of the former USSR (the latter is more troublesome and
more costly).

"Economic domination", it should be said, doesn't mean a readiness to
subsidize poor countries; Russia had its fill of "donorship" in the
old days. For the CFDP, the main way to make Russia a "magnet" for
the rest of the CIS is through "the successful development of Russia
itself, the continuation of democratic and market reforms, and the
beginning of an active policy of economic growth."

The CFDP prides itself on being hard-headed and unsentimental, just
like the "establishment" (a current Russian vogue word) that it
claims to represent. Accordingly, while it favors the goal of
"rapprochement and integration", it can't help pointing out the
emptiness and stupidity of many proposals for achieving this goal.
Russia's relations with therest of the former Soviet states, for
example, should not be over-institutionalized: grand designs are
silly. The CFDP "theses" propose instead

"to shift the center of gravity of activities in the space of the
former USSR away from the highest level--the establishment of
superstructures, the signing of treaties and agreements and the
like--to support for specific projects of interaction in the
cultural, social and above all economic spheres: the exchange of debt
for ownership, the creation of financial-industrial groups, the
facilitation of financial transactions, the establishment of joint
banks, and so forth."

When it comes to achieving "economic domination", what these
hard-headed, unsentimental folks say they want is "a common market
for goods and services", and their reasons have a distinctly
familiar, UN-imperial ring. "Openness of markets", they note, "helps
to create jobs in all states, alleviating the political and
psychological consequences of the disintegration of the USSR."

To be sure, there is also a strong military side to the program. The
CFDP definitely supports defense cooperation with CIS states. But it
opposes the reflexive broadening of Russia's ambitions and
commitments just because it sounds tough and because some neighboring
states (for reasons that may not serve Russian interests at all) are
willing to cooperate. The "theses" specifically object to creating "a
system of collective defense" for the CIS.

It is one thing to organize specific cooperation in several areas
(air defense, ABM defense, border service, training of officer
cadres, supply, etcetera), but it is another thing to create an
alliance costly for Russia that will be perceived by many neighbors
as a threat and not only not increase but rather decrease Russia's
defensive possibilities.

So, a multilateral alliance seems to be out. And even bilateral
ties--no matter how close the state's historic connection to Russia
is--may not make good strategic sense:

[U]nder present conditions a military alliance with Belarus may be
used by the adherents of a very rapid expansion of NATO, an alliance
with Armenia may harm Russia's interests in Azerbaijan, and an
alliance with Kazakhstan may cause a certain amount of concern in
China. For this reason it is advisable to build alliance relations
"from the bottom up" under conditions of maximum possible
transparency and in dialogue with neighboring countries.

The core judgment of the CFDP's report is that, over the long term,
closer relations between Russia and the former Soviet states are
probably inevitable. But its core recommendation is that Russia
should aspire to "leadership, instead of control." Trying to
accelerate the process will accomplish nothing, and may even slow
things down.

It used to be said of U.S. policy in the Western hemisphere that
Americans would do almost anything for Latin America except hear
about it. The Russian elite spends so much time talking about its
former Soviet neighbors--and the discussion is so full of cautions,
hesitations, and fine print--that one is tempted to ask: Is there
anything Russia will do for the "near abroad" except hear about it?

The Matter of Pride

Let us turn to the third element of Russia's allegedly neurotic
politics--the preoccupation of its leaders with their country's
international status. Brzezinski sees them as "obsessed by the notion
that Russia be hailed a great power." And Kissinger, in describing
the consequences of Russia's "almost paranoid sense of insecurity",
speaks of "adventurous" policies that he claims have no other purpose
than "prestige."

In ordinary Russian discourse on foreign policy, the question of
prestige does come up in a way that is, at first sight, quite
different from what one encounters in an American context. A
bureaucratic document produced for President Clinton by the staff of
the National Security Council, for example, would not ordinarily
speak of protecting the prestige of the United States as a major
national interest. Yet last spring Nezavisimaya Gazeta devoted three
full pages to the publicationof just such a document, "The National
Security Policy of the Russian Federation, 1996-2000", prepared by
the staff of Yeltsin's Security Council. It declared, among other
things, that securing and protecting Russia's "international status"
were right at the top of its foreign policy goals:

"Russia's most important national interest at a global level is its
active and full participation in building a system of international
relations in which Russia is assigned a place corresponding in the
highest degree to its potential political, economic and intellectual
significance and its military-political and foreign-economic
potential and needs. "[emphasis added]

This effort was said to be all the more important because other
countries are bent on taking Russia down a peg. For this reason,
"maximum efforts must be made to elaborate and use means of
effectively countering attempts to weaken [Russia's] international
positions and prestige."

How kooky is this? Brzezinski argues that it is extremely
destructive. These fits of self-glorification allow Russia to ignore
how far it has fallen behind economically. Worse, the inevitable
emphasis on past greatness, the nostalgia for a time when the Soviet
Union could compete on equal terms with the United States--all this
implicitly "legitimizes the Communist Party" and postpones "genuine
democratization."

Perhaps. But it is worth looking more closely at the "National
Security" document just quoted, for taken as a whole it lends all
this talk of prestige a different, indeed opposite, meaning.
Brzezinski himself could not ask for a blunter description of Russian
reality than one finds here--in, of all places, a public document
released on the eve of the presidential election. Far from diverting
attention from economic backwardness, Yeltsin's national security
staff warns that "it will take several generations before we can
compare ourselves with the United States, Japan, Germany, Sweden,
France, and so forth." Far from pining for lost superpower equality,
the document explicitly "renounces the principle of
military-strategic parity with the United States." And far from
encouraging the confrontational outlook of old, it says something
that will surprise those who know of these matters only what the
geotherapists tell them: "Russian citizens must mobilize state
structures, the public, the family, and schools to mold a
non-aggressive type of individual and a secure society and state."
Given all the work that has to be done, Russia's foreign policy
bottom-line is a very simple one: It needs to be able to direct its
resources to the successful completion of massive internal tasks.

Russians have no trouble understanding the fix they're in,
because--unlike us--they're in it. They can barely think of anything
else. In these circumstances, a "policy of prestige" has the function
that Hans Morgenthau had in mind when he described it as the effort
to impress others with "the power one's own nation actually
possesses, or with the power it believes, or wants other nations to
believe, it possesses." Strictly speaking, wrote Morgenthau, when
your power is not in fact as great as you want others to think, it
should be called a "policy of bluff." But the purpose is the same--to
discourage them from taking advantage of you in the way that they
might if they knew how weak you really were.

Looked at in this light, concerns for prestige should actually seem
completely familiar to Americans--and not in the least neurotic.
Wasn't the Nixon administration's determination to keep the war in
Vietnam from damaging America's international role--the rejection of
"peace now" in favor of "peace with honor"--based on exactly the same
insight? Certainly anyone who says that the confusion of U.S. policy
after South Vietnam's collapse emboldened the Soviet Union is
describing the same phenomenon.

Russia's "obsession" with prestige is at bottom an admission of
weakness. Recall that Yeltsin's "National Security" document, quoted
earlier, speaks of the importance of winning an international role
based not on Russia's power, but on its potential. The determination
to protect the country's prestige is not a demand for "adventures"
that will show strength, but a hope to get by without being put to
the test. Prestige is not a means of dodging the necessary work of
democratization, but--if it works--of dodging unnecessary defeats
while this work goes on. (In this sense, the war in Chechnya
represents a conspicuous self-inflicted failure of the policy: the
Russians have called their own bluff.)

The way Russians talk about NATO expansion supports this view of what
they mean by prestige. What is most vexing to them about the Western
plan to bring the Atlantic Alliance into Eastern Europe is that it
dramatizes Russia's loss of standing. It shows Russia to be isolated,
without the ability to affect events, without "standing" in the
juridical sense--that is, without the right to have a grievance heard
in court. Two prominent Russian specialists on America, Aleksei
Bogaturov and Viktor Kremeniuk, wrote recently that NATO expansion
shows America's complete "disregard for [Russia's] opinion." Russians
may be pained by this, they said, but the truth is that Washington
"does not have even a shadow of fear over Moscow's possible reaction."

"Coddling" and its Consequences

Since the end of the Cold War, American presidents--first Bush and
now Clinton--have treated Russian leaders with exceptional personal
courtesy, and with the diplomatic hyperbole embodied in the term
"strategic partnership." Russians see this. Bogaturov and Kremeniuk
acknowledge "a measure of humanism" in U.S. policy toward their
country. The West does not want to "unduly hurt Russia", they say,
and will even "spare Russia's self-esteem to the extent possible."

Now the geotherapists are not against politeness as such. What
bothers them--and this is their fourth proposition--is the thought
that the United States might go beyond cordiality, and actually
reshape Western policy to take account of Russian objections (or
worse yet, Russian excuses about the