My Anti-Russian Bias

Is Russia a bunch of good guys manipulated by a bad guy? Or is it more complicated than that? Let's start at the simple level. Why is it that I get this feeling of uneasiness whenever a Russian crosses my path? I tell myself it's silly, there is no rational reason for this, but it keeps recurring. Worse, too often my suspicions are confirmed. Let me give you an example.

In my neighborhood, many houses are just for vacation use, owners are absent for long periods, and neighbors often use their parking spaces. So it happened one day a year or two ago that a Russian-registered car, a nice new BMW X6 SUV, turns up in this absent neighbor's car port. “Good going”, I thought, “Russians doing well and establishing themselves in our area. - Still,” I thought, “what a long drive!” But after a couple of weeks, as I'd been walking my dog past the Russian car every day, it occurred to me I hadn't seen any Russians, and the car hadn't moved, it was just sitting there gathering dust, more by the day. A month goes by, two months, no change, just more dust. So finally I ask the German lady in the next house if she knows who owns the car. “Someone I know,” she says vaguely, and leaves me standing there. The next day the car is gone; I've never seen it since. (It may be added that, as far as I know, there are no Russians living in our neighborhood, only other expatriates and the odd Spaniard, including this surly lady friend of the BMW “owner's”. She now has an E-minus in my book.)

There has been a steady stream of emigrants from Russia in recent years. Not merely to the Greek-orthodox EU tax haven Cyprus (where they tend to bunch up), but also to the US and Canada and parts of Western Europe (Britain, France, Spain, and Greece among them). Of course, retirees seek the sun more than anything. And they are welcome in the south, bringing their money to the wobbling Mediterranean economies. But then there is this curious fact about them: most of the recent Russian arrivals seem to be young swingers, not exactly retirement age. And they are always well supplied with cash. A local businessman tells me he has more and more Russian customers - “--- they pay cash for everything, leafing their bills out of big wads of money,” he says. “And they gladly pay everything in advance.”

I am curious as to how it is that these young folks are not back home in Russia helping Mr. Putin run his (their?) country – or simply working at an ordinary job in the roaring raw materials economy of the beloved Motherland, instead of working at shipping money out of it. In the new post-Cold War international environment in which Russians are free to do things they never could before, they have a few favorite activities: foreign investment (often in somewhat odd activities); bank accounts abroad; freewheeling spending as they travel. Western financial commentators are drawn by the money flow to pay attention to such facts, less to asking where all this money comes from. I can only guess.

During a year I spent in Paris 1997-98 I always passed a Russian restaurant on my way to and from work, a small bistro elegantly decorated, attractively lit. During that year I never once saw a guest in that place, except for a Christmas party. Obviously it was part of a money-laundering scheme. Of course, this is just anecdotal. Yet, somehow I believe repeated random examples are to some extent indicative of a larger phenomenon. Russian business abroad is in no small measure about money-laundering.

Of course, I am biased. Because, if you lift your glance from the personal-anecdotal to a broader view of international politics, Russia is doing well, back in positions of power, rebuilding its influence after the soviet breakdown. In its own eyes, if not in those of others, Russia is playing the role of a great power the way Russians always wanted and felt entitled to. The once powerful soviet military – which turned out to be a potemkin village of rusting equipment - is now being restored to a more usable (Russian) version of its former glory. The export of raw materials is obviously what pays for this, but that extractive business is also what Putin is using to bait his trading partners into long-term relationships of supply and dependency.

Diplomacy is a central part of this offensive. In the old days, Soviet negotiators were hard to beat, brought up as chess players, able to sit for hours and hours without a break, and - according to a Norwegian Russia expert of that period - without saying a word either, if that was required. In Russian, he said, the expression of approval was “steel ass”.

Today, with international law less beholden to power plays, Russian negotiating skills and steel asses are less productive. Also, Putin's government has little patience for negotiations. The priority is for Russian gas and oil exports to get to their markets without delay, and especially without the delays of dealing with transit countries for pipelines or transshipment. Trouble-making intermediaries (such as, especially, Belarus) have been cut out without mercy. Old gas and oil pipelines from soviet times have been carefully rerouted to escape bothersome transit partners like Latvia, Belarus, Poland and Estonia. Oil shipments through Latvia were quickly done away with when the Latvians faced down angry Russian expat pensioners in Riga in 1997-98. By an incredibly rapid effort the Russians built several large new oil transshipment terminals near St Petersburg. After those started operating from 2001, the Latvians were left sitting there with nothing to show for their previous precious asset, the old soviet era oil terminal at Ventspils, once the biggest on the Baltic.

The subsequent project to build a gas pipeline along the seabed of the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany (“Nord Stream”) was a stroke of geopolitical genius – all the intermediaries, potentially 3-5 bothersome governments, were swept aside at one go. Who could object to such a convenient routing scheme? Of course, the neighbors did their best. When the Russians asked permission (as they legally had to) for their pipeline to cross the others' maritime exclusive economic zones, the neighbors pulled out all the stops, throwing up legal objections to the best of their ability. But if this “harassment” of the Russians had some success, it was only passing. Eventually the Russians tackled the obstacles, one by one. After that, when the pipeline had been built, there was no longer anything to protest.

Elsewhere, there are projects for Russian oil, and especially gas, moving both westward and eastward, in several gigantic projects. Gas exports to China have been under negotiation for a number of years, and the first major Russian oil pipeline to China has been operating since 2011. (China is not self-supplied with oil and gas.) To the west, the South Stream project towards southwest Europe is a copy of the Nord Stream pipeline, similarly stretching across the ocean floor, in this case the Black Sea. The project is a competitor to the simultaneous (non-Russian) Nabucco pipeline project, offering gas to Europe from Azerbaijan piped via Turkey and Bulgaria. In geopolitical perspective, Russia seeks to tie the EU to Russia for the long term, while Nabucco is designed to relieve the EU of such Russian dependency.

These projects show that Russian policymakers have learned something important from the failures of the Soviet system: Economic ties don't have to be kept in place by military means; in fact, things work much better without the clumsy tools of violence; economics has its own incentives and its own sanctions.

Still, behind all of these projects is the same old geopolitical thinking. Geopolitics is a Russian favorite worldview, an idea that makes sense to them, more than to most other nations, except perhaps the Chinese, who seem lately to have discovered it too. Power is linked to territorial control, in whatever way you can achieve it. Russia discovers, now that the receding Arctic ice is opening a new, shorter sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, there are new geopolitical advantages becoming available to them all around. The Northern sea route drastically shortens the maritime connection between Europe and East Asia. Also, of necessity it passes close to the Russian coast all the way from Northern Norway to the Bering Strait, close enough to check or block transits on demand. The same goes for the Trans-Siberian Railway, now functioning as a major cargo link between east and west.

Of course, you and I would never think about trade in terms of control and blocking potential. But if you think the Russians don't, you should think again. The thing is, it's not just the blessed little father in the Kremlin who does all the geopolitical thinking and scheming. It's a major bureaucratic undertaking. And it's everyman's pipe dream. We are not talking democracy here, it's not as if the State Duma invents these schemes based on popular opinion of geopolicy. Rather, the public – minus the still vigorous anti-Putin opposition (bless them) – are the cheering spectators, loving every minute of the carousel ride Mr. Putin offers them.

What Russian democracy under Boris Yeltsin never achieved, a stable economy and regular payment of pensions, has been achieved by Vladimir Putin, not because Mr. Putin is more honest, but because he understands the risk of not performing on these scores. Besides, he has much more efficient control of the cleptocracy centered in the FSB that runs his regime than Mr. Yeltsin had of the cleptocracy that ran his.

So much for the country that many of us had high hopes for in 1990 or thereabouts. We have learned, not just from the Russian case but from others even more complex, the dangers of thinking a deep culture of governance can be turned around just by a snap of the fingers (say, an election), or just by helping them throw off existing fetters.

The deep culture of voluntary authoritarian government is well chained and anchored wherever it's found, and it is widely spread around the globe. Hence, my anti-Russian bias is misdirected; it is too narrow. But Russia is a heck of an example of things that are wrong in the world. So I suspect my anti-Russian bias - like Russia itself - won't change in the foreseeable future.

Myths – just myths?

I dislike myths, or more correctly: I dislike stories that people call myths. I distrust them. You might laugh at that and say, "That's their point!" Well, listen up. They used to fascinate me. Now I've had enough.

Here's where I started in my innocent youth: A myth was a legend or story, usually of the distant past, that nobody was able to prove or disprove, though many may have believed in it, but it did not matter in practice whether it was true or not. Like the legend of Atlantis.

Those simple days are gone. Today things are different. Now myths are tools of manipulation - pedagogical, rhetorical or political. Notice first that when someone uses the word myth, it always implies that the user believes – indeed, claims to know - that the idea referred to is false. “Let me tell you a famous story that's actually false.” When one of my colleagues in the social sciences promises to expose a myth, it is either an easy task using relevant and previously unknown data, or (as I usually suspect) something he or she is not really sure of, like “the myth of nations”.

This is where the manipulation comes in. The word myth carries an unstated premise - and promise - that its secret separates a knowing minority from the illiterate mob. By learning, and accepting, the story the listener joins a select in-group. Some of these stories mark significant boundaries in public debate, ultimate borders to cross or not to cross. Do you believe in the (myth of the) holocaust that eradicated Jews and other minorities during World War II? Do you believe in the (myth of) evolution? Do you believe in (the myth of) global warming? Gradually, by accepting some stories as truth and rejecting others you take on a certain personal profile. And so a myth to you is the truth to someone else.

It shouldn't be like that. Myths have lost something along the way. Over time, the core idea of a myth has lost one of its basic criteria, namely the lack of proof. A myth is a story that could just as easily be true as false, because there is no proof. Instead, these days a myth can be any idea one does not like, but which large numbers of people seem to take seriously. Or it is an idea someone wants to expose as false, whether or not it really is false.

Myths should be kept separate from superstitions. Superstitions are provable falsehoods, ideas known to be false that people nevertheless believe in, like horoscopes, “evil eyes”, ghosts, or - in certain African countries - the idea that sexual intercourse with an infant can make a grown man immune to AIDS.

Still, some of the common uses of “myth” are innocent and even useful. The New York Times writes (Jan 31, 2013) about “myths about obesity and weight loss”. According to the writer, these stories (here labelled myths) are “... misinformation pretending to be fact ...”. Not a bad definition, but it should be superstition, not myth. We are talking about misinformation whose falsity can be proven. Exposing it is a useful and important exercise.

Data will debunk superstitions, but as long as there are no data, we have … myths. Let's leave it at that.