Window on Eurasia

Western Support for Russian Opposition Said Just Enough to Discredit It, Weaken Moscow

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 14, 2006 – As has often been the case in the past, the level of support Western governments currently offer the opponents of the
incumbent Russian government is having the effect of discrediting them
in the eyes of many Russians but is not sufficient to allow them to win
through, according to a Moscow analyst.

And as a result, Igor’ Dzhadan writes, these governments are
“objectively” serving the interests of the Kremlin -- which is
happy to pose as the defender of Russia’s national interests – in the
short term and their own -- because they recognise that a lack of
genuine political competition will keep Russia weak – over the long
haul.

On the one hand, he says, “the corrupt and non-competitive government
[in Moscow] very much would like to have a corrupt and non-competitive
opposition,” something that the West embraces and hence
discrediting the opposition
[http://www.russ.ru/comments/123217756?mode=print].

And on the other, Dzhadan insists, the governments of the United States
and Great Britain “cannot fail to understand that by their actions
which discredit the opposition, they are objectively strengthening the
monopoly of ‘the democratic nomenklatura’ and again helping to
establish in Russia a politically ineffective regime.”

Recent developments elsewhere have certainly worked to convince
Washington and London of the utility of this course for themselves.
“After the establishment of competitive political systems in such
countries as Venezuela, Iran and Palestine,” Dzhadan writes, those
who have come to power are more firmly committed to defending their
national interests.

The West’s approach to the Russian opposition now has many
precedents. Its support for opponents of the tsarist regime, the anti-Bolshevik
movement, and dissidents in Soviet times provided the governments in
power be they Aleksandr III, Vladimir Lenin or Leonid Brezhnev the
opportunity to portray their opponents as agents of the West.

If the West had provided more support to these groups, that might have
helped them to win, but by providing just enough to allow them to be
discredited in this way, Dzhadan insists, Western governments allowed
the Russian authorities to portray themselves as patriots even as their
country was weakened.

The situation now is even more serious than in the past, Dzhadan
continues. As a recent GMI Internet poll shows, Russians – or at
least the most “politically active” ones -- are twice as likely as their
American counterparts to say that their government should approach
problems solely from the point of view of their country’s national
interests.

Consequently, if the current Russian government is in a position to
suggest that its opponents are somehow linked to foreign regimes, then
the Kremlin will be in a far stronger position politically in the short
term, even if its use of this tactic will put off the day that the
country has a competitive political system.

And the Kremlin’s ability to exploit Western support of Russian
opposition groups is even more useful to Moscow now because, as Dzhadan
writes, “the central Moscow government does not want to openly
acknowledge its special responsibility for the fate of the Russian
nation as such.”

To do so would not only spark controversies among the Russian
Federation’s ethnically and religiously diverse population, Dzhadan
notes, but it would disturb many in the West who have insisted that
post-Soviet Russia must work toward the development of civic identity rather than ethnic nationalism.

Many Russian and Western analysts have pointed to the problems that
arise when Western countries try to provide limited help to opposition
groups in the Russian Federation and elsewhere and to the difficult
choices that these outside governments face in deciding how to deal
with these groups.

But Dzhadan’s analysis is intriguing because unlike many who complain
that the West is either doing too little or too much to achieve its
ends, he insists that the West’s approach is carefully calibrated not
so much to help the political opposition but rather to keep both it and
the Russian regime weak.

 

Latest Window on Eurasia stories | Religion Archive | Islam in Russia and CIS Archive | Orthodox Church in Russia and CIS Archive | All Window on Eurasia Stories Archive |