Help or Interference?

In November 2004, The Globe and Mail’s then Moscow bureau chief, Mark MacKinnon, was in the thick of it as Ukraine experienced its remarkable Orange Revolution. After almost two months of massive demonstrations and a historic supreme court decision to rerun the contested presidential election, Viktor Yushchenko and his comely but fractious sidekick, Yulia Tymoshenko, took power as president and prime minister respectively. It was one of the turning points of the post-communist era. Massive infusions of Russian money (the figure MacKinnon gives is about $600 million) and influence had not been enough to turn the tide in Moscow’s favour. Putin’s ambitions to bring Ukraine firmly back under Russian control before it got entangled in the encroaching western alliances such as NATO and the European Union had been, for a time at least, thwarted. Many Ukrainians were jubilant.

But according to MacKinnon, not everything was as it seemed. As genuinely grassroots as the struggle had been, the United States, too, had invested money in it—$65 million is the figure he cites, about a tenth of what the Russians poured in. Much of it went to a host of non-governmental organizations, some indigenous, some American or European, that had been working on projects aimed at restoring the institutions of civil society and providing Ukrainians with the tools they could legitimately use—through the electoral process—to break the stranglehold President Leonid Kuchma appeared to have on the country. As well, Kiev became a Mecca for veterans of earlier struggles: on the streets of Kiev, MacKinnon observed leaders from student groups such as Otpor from Serbia, Kmara from Georgia and Zubr from Belarus—all of them likewise funded from various non-governmental sources in the West—helping their sister group, Pora, to support Yushchenko’s presidential bid. In MacKinnon’s view, then, the Orange Revolution was not just a Ukrainian thing; because the aims of the NGOs were close to those of American policy, it was easy to see them as a kind of fifth column. Thus he saw Kiev as one of the battle-grounds in a new standoff between Moscow and Washington.

Before examining this thesis more closely, it is worth noting that the Orange Revolution, whatever else it may have meant, vividly encapsulated two dominant trends in the former Soviet Union, trends that we have not yet seen the end of.

The first of these was the efforts of Vladimir Putin to consolidate, centralize and expand the absolute power of the Kremlin, not just over Russia, but over the former Soviet Union’s spheres of influence. Putin began at home by gradually imposing on Russia a renewed authoritarianism—euphemistically called “managed democracy”—that trades diminishing freedom in the public sphere for increased economic stability and a hard line against Chechen terrorism. To some observers, although possibly not to MacKinnon, the trend is as sinister and dangerous as the emergence of German fascism in the 1930s. Putin’s rise, starting with the mysterious apartment bombings in and around Moscow in 1999 that enabled him to vault into power on a fear of terrorism, has been well documented. MacKinnon sketches in vividly how Putin went on to sideline billionaires such as Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky—who had used their money to counter the Kremlin’s growing power—either by driving them into exile or, in the case of Khordorkovsky, into prison. At the same time, Putin created a new elite, loyal to himself and comfortable with the KGB-style vertical command structure through which he, a former KGB operative, exercised power. Next, he attempted to restore Russia’s influence to the “near abroad,” another bit of warmed-over terminology from the bad old days.

This brings us to the other major trend in the region: the wave of democratic uprisings (some of which, like the Orange Revolution, were in fact electoral upsets with lots of street action) that have swept through the near abroad since the late 1990s, from Bratislava and Belgrade to Minsk and Tbilisi and beyond into Central Asia. MacKinnon’s detailed reports on each of these events suggest two possible interpretations: they were either popular revolts borne of frustration over the unfulfilled promise of that first, euphoric break from communism or they were the result of western-financed conspiracies to install pro-American regimes in Russia’s sphere in an effort, reminiscent of the Cold War, to surround and isolate it and incidentally, especially in Central Asia, to control the area’s vast oil reserves.

Because the NGOs are so open about what they are up to, MacKinnon is able to marshal plenty of evidence to make his point that western NGOs, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) or George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, are, in effect, acting as proxies of Washington. He has far less solid information about the machinations of the Kremlin because, unlike the western NGOs, Kremlin operatives don’t give interviews or show their hand.

MacKinnon, then, contends that the events he has witnessed amount to a new cold war, one being fought, he says, not in far-flung battlefields like Angola or Vietnam, or through nuclear standoffs, but “closer to the Kremlin’s doorstep.” Like the old cold war, this one too has an “ideological overtone, the U.S. once again donning the cloak of defending ‘freedom’ and individual liberties, with Kremlin officials occasionally pining openly for an outright return to the Communist system of days past.” The old Cold War weapons have been replaced by new ones: “rigged elections, stage-managed revolutions and wrangling over pipeline routes. But,” he concludes, “it was still Washington versus Moscow.”

But the desire for change manifested in Kiev and elsewhere was not something cooked up in Washington: it was already there. Despite all the western support they received, Otpor or Pora were not concocted out of thin air. The cash they dispensed did not go for bribes or weapons or exploding cigars, but for computers, software, printing presses, know-how: the basic tools of democracy. Think of it: for the price of a day or two of murder and mayhem in Iraq, a handful of NGOs were able to help bring about peaceful, if somewhat tenuous, regime change in a country such as Ukraine, with more than double Iraq’s population. Even if it were a conspiracy hatched in Washington, was ever money better spent?

Moreover, one of Putin’s greatest opponents and one of the strongest meddlers in that part of the world, could hardly be called a proxy of Washington. MacKinnon devotes the better part of a chapter to George Soros,the Hungarian American billionaire philanthropist who, ever since the real cold war, has been pumping his own money via the Open Society Foundation into projects that promote democracy and democratic values. Soros comes by his passion for democratic institutions and practices honestly, having barely escaped the Holocaust in the 1940s, and then the communist takeover of Hungary after the war. Nor was Putin his only target: Soros spent millions of dollars during the 2004 presidential election trying to defeat Bush.

There is a compelling story here, and one that MacKinnon merely hints at: Soros versus Putin. Given President Bush’s sentimental view of Putin as a soulmate, and given how mired the Americans are in the Middle East, it has seemed, at times, that Soros (who has since bowed out of Russia) and other western NGOs were the only ones carrying the flag for democracy in a territory where democracy was losing ground as rapidly as it appeared to gain it less than two decades ago. In fact, you could argue that the models of non-violent regime change that these NGOs have put into action on a relative shoestring in places such as Ukraine and Serbia are, for a tiny fraction of the cost, a form of compensation for the United States’s failure to bring democracy to the Middle East or, for that matter, to Cuba or North Korea. Eastern Europe is, or was, a great success story for non-military forms of western intervention.

MacKinnon’s angle of vision and rhetoric sometimes blind him to the less sinister aspects of what he is writing about. One small example: he says that Slovak strongman Vladimir Meciar was “toppled by American-supplied NGOs as much as he had been voted out of office.” But the sentence is historically incorrect on both counts: Meciar was neither “toppled” nor voted out of office. In fact, despite the best efforts of “American-supplied NGOs,” Meciar’s party still won more seats in Slovakia’s parliament that any other single party. It did, however, fall short of an absolute majority, making way for his more liberal opponents to form a coalition government that excluded him. This was hardly a coup d’état but it did mean that Meciar’s baleful sway over Slovak political life was over. When former Czechoslovak foreign minister Pavol Demes told MacKinnon that western support had been crucial in defeating Meciar, it was no more sinister than saying that western aid is crucial in helping to eradicate disease in Africa.

At the end of the book MacKinnon, still somewhat perplexed, asks himself a loaded question. “Were the Western-backed uprisings in Belgrade, Tbilisi and Kiev a good thing?” The answer he gets from Serbs and Ukrainians and Georgians is yes, life has changed for the better. The answer he gets from the NGOs is yes, but there’s a difficult road ahead.

Yet he can’t help feeling that there is something wrong about sending in the NGOs. He has two reasons for this: one pragmatic and one idealistic. He argues that the revolutions, especially in Kiev and Georgia, have been a major setback to a pro-democratic faction inside the Kremlin, a setback, he leads us to believe, that can be laid at the feet of those who fomented those revolts. But that argument shifts the blame in the wrong direction.

Everything MacKinnon has told us about Putin suggests that Putin would have cracked down on his own opposition anyway. Western NGO activity became an excuse for his taking a hard line, not its cause.

MacKinnon also argues that programs that “dabble in the political systems of other countries … are in clear violation of the principle of national sovereignty.” But if it is a violation, it is anything but clear. As far as I can tell, most of these programs were welcomed by citizens (and some governments) desperate to learn the basic skills of democracy so long denied to them. They were not illegal. To declare them in violation of “national sovereignty” amounts to equating them with invading armies. Given MacKinnon’s own account of how they operate, this is absurd.

So are we in the middle of a new cold war, or are we not? I would say not yet. But at least since the Orange Revolution, the Kremlin has been gradually curtailing the activities of western-based NGOs in Russia, sometimes banning them outright, sometimes subjecting them to the same kind of harassment it directs at independent journalists or indeed against any local protest groups. And in the recent confrontation between Russia and the U.S. over placing elements of Bush’s notorious missile defence system in Central Europe, one can once more hear the distant jangle of rattling sabres. MacKinnon may ultimately be right, although not necessarily in the sense he intended: the closer Putin comes to fulfilling his dream of a “greater Russia”—a dream that now appears to include the high Arctic and maybe parts of the Middle East—the closer we will be to a real new cold war.