From Anarchy to Zhirinovsky?

THE Russo-American “honeymoon” is over even if official Washington doesn’t know it yet. Harbingers abound: Russian missile sales to India; Russian troops interfere in Georgia and Kirgizia; Russian spy caught with his hand in the CIA cookie jar; Bosnian Serbs’ chestnuts pulled from NATO fire by Russian ultimatum. Curiously, all of these signs of discord are met by official denial in Washington. None of them, we are told by the White House, signals any cooling in the cozy post—Cold War romance between Russia and the United States. And, like a mindless society editor, the media continue to report how ecstatic the couple is.

The increasing strains on the Moscow-Washington relationship are aggravated by the erosion of Boris Yeltsin’s political supremacy. This seems to be accelerating. First the elections produced a Duma in which the reformers, expected to win easily, were more or less level-pegging with a red-black coalition of nomenklatura bureaucrats and managers and authoritarian nationalists. Secondly, in forming a new government, the president had to throw overboard reformers such as Yegor Gaidar and to accept the appointment of ministers dedicated to “stagnation therapy.” Most recently, the Duma passed an amnesty for Yeltsin’s bitterest enemies, the coup plotters of 1991 and last October, by a four-to-one vote that suggested his parliamentarian support had fallen even further since the election. Given that the economy continues to decline, the outlook for charismatic demagogues like Vladimir Zhirinovsky must be considered promising. That is why the most dangerous bit of dizin-formatsia coming our way is that Zhirinovsky is a clown, a buffoon, and a nut who needn’t be taken seriously. Wrong! In fact, he was the only politician running in last December’s election campaign who showed any understanding of the typical Russian voter’s mindset. He’s a master of the television medium, and he’s the front-runner in the 1996 presidential campaign—already well under way.

RJ

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Richard W. Judy

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THE Russo-American “honeymoon” is over even if official Washington doesn’t know it yet. Harbingers abound: Russian missile sales to India; Russian troops interfere in Georgia and Kirgizia; Russian spy caught with his hand in the CIA cookie jar; Bosnian Serbs’ chestnuts pulled from NATO fire by Russian ultimatum. Curiously, all of these signs of discord are met by official denial in Washington. None of them, we are told by the White House, signals any cooling in the cozy post—Cold War romance between Russia and the United States. And, like a mindless society editor, the media continue to report how ecstatic the couple is.

The increasing strains on the Moscow-Washington relationship are aggravated by the erosion of Boris Yeltsin’s political supremacy. This seems to be accelerating. First the elections produced a Duma in which the reformers, expected to win easily, were more or less level-pegging with a red-black coalition of nomenklatura bureaucrats and managers and authoritarian nationalists. Secondly, in forming a new government, the president had to throw overboard reformers such as Yegor Gaidar and to accept the appointment of ministers dedicated to “stagnation therapy.” Most recently, the Duma passed an amnesty for Yeltsin’s bitterest enemies, the coup plotters of 1991 and last October, by a four-to-one vote that suggested his parliamentarian support had fallen even further since the election. Given that the economy continues to decline, the outlook for charismatic demagogues like Vladimir Zhirinovsky must be considered promising. That is why the most dangerous bit of dizin-formatsia coming our way is that Zhirinovsky is a clown, a buffoon, and a nut who needn’t be taken seriously. Wrong! In fact, he was the only politician running in last December’s election campaign who showed any understanding of the typical Russian voter’s mindset. He’s a master of the television medium, and he’s the front-runner in the 1996 presidential campaign—already well under way.