God and Global Order: The Power of Religion in American Foreign Policy

6. Getting Russia Right

127 John A. Bernbaum Getting Russia Right Chapter 6 Ten years. Ten months. Ten weeks. Ten days. The years 1989, 1990, and 1991 witnessed the culmination of an incredible acceleration of revolutionary events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. What took ten years in Poland, ten months in Czechoslovakia, and ten weeks in East Germany took only ten days in Romania. The Marxist regimes in these satellite states of the USSR collapsed in an amazing sequence that no one anticipated.1 Then, in December 1991, the Soviet Union itself, the imperial power that previously controlled these Eastern European states, dissolved into fifteen republics with barely any bloodshed. These years, these events, will go down in history as seminal years, hinge years in the course of world developments.2 The catastrophic nature of those events in the former Soviet Union is hard to comprehend, and as time passes, the full scale of these dramatic changes is often forgotten. A cartoon by Mike Peters of the Dayton Daily News, later reprinted in the Washington Post, captured the character of the revolutionary changes in the former Soviet Union. The cartoon portrayed a conversation between a Soviet astronaut and an old babushka 128 John A. Bernbaum (grandmother). The exchange went as follows: The astronaut says, “Comrade , I’ve been in space for a year. It’s good to be back in Leningrad.” The babushka corrects him: “Sorry, Leningrad is out. This is now St. Petersburg.” The shocked astronaut replies, “Leningrad out? But Lenin is the father of Communism.” The babushka again corrects him: “Sorry, Communism is out. We are now capitalists.” The astronaut can’t believe it and says, “Capitalists! But how could Gorbachev allow this to happen?” The babushka explains, “Sorry, Gorbachev is out. He was overthrown by the hard-liners.” The astronaut asks confusedly, “You mean the hardliners are in charge?” The babushka responds, “No, the hard-liners are out. And Yeltsin took over.” The astronaut says, “You mean Yeltsin is the head of the Soviet Union?” The babushka corrects him a last time saying, “No, the Soviet Union is out too.” The astronaut yells, “No Soviet Union! Quick, alert the Warsaw Pact!” The babushka shakes her head and says, “We need to talk.” In this chapter I argue that a deep religious illiteracy on the part of American diplomatic and academic observers, and Western observers generally, not only prevented them from foreseeing the collapse of the USSR but also from rightly diagnosing its causes and prescribing the remedies called for in its aftermath. It is beyond the scope of the chapter to speculate on how U.S. foreign policy might have followed a different path had its leading practitioners acquired any real grasp of the role of culture and religion in the life and death of the Soviet Union. But if my account of that role is anywhere near the mark, this chapter will lend additional support to the claim that both practical diplomacy and academic International Relations omit religion from their field of vision at their peril. The chapter also attempts a second goal: not only to call for a greater reckoning with the empirical reality of religion on the part of diplomats and scholars but also—in the same vein as the chapters by Daryl Charles and Daniel Philpot—to point toward substantive Christian principles of statecraft which might suitably inform American policy toward Russia in the future. A FAULTY DIAGNOSIS The radical changes that took place in Russia were unique phenomena in modern history and they were completely unanticipated by Western scholars. The massive Soviet Empire unraveled and the Union of Soviet Socialist States imploded—not as the result of a war or even of revolution in the streets. Getting Russia Right 129 Conventional wisdom did not prepare us for these events. In 1983, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of Washington’s leading think tanks, published a book entitled After Brezhnev. The volume contained the results of an intense eighteen-month research effort by thirty-five scholars. Their task was to sum up all the available knowledge on the Soviet Union and the central issues that Soviet society faced. Here was their conclusion: “All of us agree that there is no likelihood whatsoever that the Soviet Union will become a political democracy or that it will collapse in the foreseeable future.”3 Hedrick Smith’s popular book, The Russians, also got it...