National Review: Russian roulette: the United States has friends and enemies in Moscow

The United States has friends and enemies in Moscow -- and we must learn to tell one from the other.

WITH Yeltsin groggy and a succession struggle already under way in Moscow, Westerners need to be clear on who are their friends and who are their enemies.

Few things could be more important than to have friends in power in Russia. The ability of the West to support its friends there will play a bigger role in the outcome of the current crisis than most Westerners realize, since the Russians have placed great weight in the last decade on a good relationship with the West.

Yet there is a problem: public figures in the West have shown an amazing tendency to confuse our friends with our enemies. Some have even preferred the enemies, on the theory that Russia has to be our foe, so better to have open enemies in the Kremlin than friendly sounding people who might fool the rest of us.

Fortunately, when Russia's fate was hanging in the balance during the presidential election this year, the Western governments understood that Yeltsin was a friend and Zyuganov was an enemy. They gave real help to Yeltsin. Except for this, we might already be facing a Communist in the Kremlin again.

However, many other Westerners were so anti-Yeltsin that they might as well have been supporting Zyuganov. Former anti-Communists started talking as if they didn't care if the Communists came back to power, saying things like ''It doesn't make any big difference for the West whether Yeltsin or Zyuganov wins, they're all bad democrats, anti-Western, expansionist . . .'' Pundits waxed enthusiastic about any ''third force'' leader like Yavlinsky or Lebed who appeared on the Moscow scene, turning a blind eye to the evidence that these leaders were far less friendly to the West than Yeltsin.

The Russians, for their part, did understand who was who among their candidates. It was obvious to them who was pro-Western and who was anti-Western. They voted on this very basis, as shown in exit polls. Fortunately for us, the voters were mostly pro-Western and elected the pro-Western candidate.

Asked how they felt about the United States, Russians fell into three attitude groups: 1) 34 per cent of them viewed the U.S. as an ally, 2) 24 per cent viewed us as an enemy, and 3) 37 per cent saw us as neutral. Notice that those who view us as allies outnumber those who view us as enemies by 3 to 2. This attitude is our main asset in Russia, and we need to nurture it. It is our main protection against having Russia as an enemy again.

Its importance is confirmed by the fact that the three different attitude groups correlated with sharply different voting patterns. The correlation wasn't just statistically meaningful, it was overwhelming. 1) Of those who viewed the U.S. as an ally, 49 per cent voted in the first round for Yeltsin, only 20 per cent for Zyuganov. 2) Of those who viewed the U.S. as an enemy, the numbers were reversed: 46 per cent voted for Zyuganov, a mere 17 per cent for Yeltsin. 3) Those who were neutral toward the U.S. voted in disproportionate numbers for Lebed and Yavlinsky.

It was crystal clear to Russians that Yeltsin was the pro-Western candidate and that Zyuganov was the anti-Western candidate. They voted accordingly.

It has become a shibboleth in the West to label Yeltsin an anti-Western nationalist and an expansionist to boot. This has a surrealistic ring in the ears of Russians, who live daily with the consequences of Yeltsin's having contracted the borders of Russia all the way back to pre-1700 lines. Vladimir Lukin -- Yavlinsky's foreign-policy expert -- used to ridicule the Yeltsin government for being ''frozen in a posture of a kiss to the West.'' Yeltsin continues to be more pro-Western than Yavlinsky or Gorbachev, the two Russians most often lionized in the West.

It is standard practice in the Western media to identify Yavlinsky as ''the radical economic reformer.'' Yet in reality this has described Yeltsin, Gaidar, and Chubais, not Yavlinsky, who has been a bitter critic of radical reform.

Once again, Russian voters understood the reality better. Of those Russians who wanted private individuals to own the big industrial enterprises, 62 per cent voted for Yeltsin, only 11 per cent for Yavlinsky. Of those who wanted the state to own the big enterprises, 39 per cent voted for Zyuganov, 27 per cent for Yeltsin, 9 per cent for Yavlinsky.

The ''anyone but Yeltsin'' mentality led to a strange enthusiasm for General Lebed during the elections. The honeymoon ended when Lebed joined up with Yeltsin; after that, his xenophobic outbursts were judged by a higher standard.

LEBED is a very emotional nationalist. He wrote last year that the secret of Russian history is that Russia has no friends in the world -- the point being that Yeltsin & Co. are fools because they think of the West as a friend. Lebed has recently veered from expansionist nationalism to isolationist nationalism; thus he has said that, if the West wants to waste its money on expanding NATO, let it go ahead. In the upside-down world of some Western writers, this comment was labeled pro-Western -- and pro-Western Russians were labeled anti-Western when they said they wanted to be a part of NATO.

Lebed could still conceivably evolve into a pro-Western politician, if the West shows that it can be a friend to a friendly Russia. He has bemoaned the failure of the West to give real help to Russian reform in 1992. As a military tough, what is crucial for him is for the West to show that it accepts a pro-Western approach as being compatible with a muscular patriotism, e.g., by carrying out a joint operation against a common danger, and by organizing a serious Russian - Western alliance through NATO. Failing this, we should be ready for Lebed to revert to an anti-Western posture.

Why do Westerners get it wrong when it comes to Russians? Three different groups can be blamed for this: Communophilic leftists, Russophobic rightists, and status-quo centrists.

Too many leftists? Do some liberals actually need a Communist Russia for the sake of the moral balance of power vis-a-vis capitalism? Is it possible that, when they label Yeltsin a poor democrat or an anti-Western nationalist, their real complaint is that Yeltsin is too pro-Western and pro-market? Certainly many Cold War leftists built up an interest in an anti-Western Russia, if only to have a chance to interpose themselves as peacemakers. Third Worldists also had an interest in Soviet Communism; it was a bulwark in the global struggle against Western influence. They have been weakened by Russia's accommodation to the West. Their worst nightmare is to think of the Russians -- who are too white and European to begin with --joining the Western-imperialist club.

Too many rightists? Are there too many old Cold Warriors around, people who miss having the Soviet Union as an enemy? Obviously. However, the true anti-Communists were never against Russia, they were against Communism. President Reagan changed his line on Russia just as fast as Russia itself changed. Too many centrists? Is it perhaps, then, the centrist Cold Warriors who need a hostile Russia? If so, they can do the most damage, since they are deeply entrenched in the foreign-policy apparatus.

There is a special breed of centrist ''realist'' that is deeply attached to the status quo. It is proud of all that it has learned about how to manage the status quo. It doesn't like changes that render its expertise useless, and tries to deny that they are real. In the 1980s it was denying that Gorbachev was for real. Nowadays it is inventing arguments for a continuity in adversary relations with Russia. It doesn't want a sharp conflict with Russia, but it is still arguing for something like detente with Russia; that is, a quiet cold-war relation.

This school always looked down on the simple moral ideas of the common people, with their unmediated impressions of good and evil, friend and foe, Communist and democrat. It doesn't bother to ask if Russians want to be our friends; it simply defines Russia as an enemy on the basis of one of the geopolitical checkerboards of yesteryear.

Seen on the actual global checkerboard today, Russia is one of the European populations that constitute a shrinking minority in the world. It is the tail end of Europe, with a mere fifth of its population and rapidly shrinking. Real living Russians, no longer our enemies on a musty checkerboard, are acutely conscious of their common interests with the other Europeans in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and to the vast growing populations in the South.

The years since 1985 have been hard on the status-quo centrists. To defend their preconceptions, they had to take a leaf from their arch-enemies, the conspiracy theorists, and deny that any real change was taking place under Gorbachev. This was the source of much of America's inability to recognize her friends, and it led her often to range her tremendous influence de facto on the side of her enemies.

This may explain a few things about the Bush Administration. For most of its time in power, that Administration was on the wrong side of things in Moscow, opposing our best friends there and ridiculing all proposals for supporting them.

Mr. Bush ran in 1988 on a platform of his past expertise on foreign relations. He indicated that President Reagan was naive in supporting Gorbachev and in believing in the end of Communism. He promised a more cautious line, one based on the enduring realities. When he came to office in January 1989, his National Security Advisor explained that the changes in Russia were cosmetic, meant for dividing and deceiving the West. Hints were dropped along the same line that we would later hear from supporters of Zyuganov: that maybe it would be better to have an open enemy in the Kremlin instead of a cunning one like Gorbachev. The Administration had to change its tune after the Berlin Wall came down, but it still cut down efforts to aid the new Eastern European democracies. It warmed up to Gorbachev in 1990 -91, when Gorbachev was more hard-line and was fighting against Yeltsin. In 1992, Bob Dole and Richard Nixon both chided the Administration for failing to help Yeltsin's Russia. They were right.

Underlying the tendency to keep Russia as an enemy is a failure to visualize the prospect of Russia as an ally. For many centrists and rightists, this is too much of a change; for many leftists, it is bad if America has any allies at all, let alone a new white ally. Those who cannot bring themselves to wish for alliance are left with the option of enmity: neutrality is not an alternative for a superpower.

The realities of the globe impel Russia and the West toward alliance. In a world of five billion people and growing, it only makes sense for the one billion in stable populations in the European and industrialized countries to be allied. Non-alliance would mean a regression from unipolarity to bipolarity, with all its costs -- global competition for influence in the South, proliferation, nuclear stand-off. When the option of alliance is closed off, the pressures of interdependence can only pile up backward in the direction of enmity.

People can mix up their friends and their enemies because of vested interests in old enmities. The Reagans of the world have known how to distinguish America's friends from its enemies, and since 1985, so have the Clintons; the Bushes have not. Dole needs to make sure he is with the Reagans and the Clintons on this one.

It is especially dangerous for a superpower to fail to understand who are its friends and who are its enemies. This can lead it to undermine its friends and to push entire countries back into the arms of its enemies. This is the danger we have been running with Russia. We will continue to run it until we get it straight in our own minds that we want to have Russia as a friend, and that we want our friends not our enemies in power within Russia.