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FAILED CRUSADE:
Stephen Cohen’s “Failed Crusade”
By Matt Taibbi
Let’s get the
ethical stuff out of the way first: I’m not a disinterested party when
it comes to Professor Stephen Cohen’s new book, “Failed Crusade: America
and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia.” The eXile is mentioned in it
several times, and Mark Ames and I are footnoted throughout the first
section. In one point, we’re even credited with producing “some of the
best press criticism” coming from Russia. So obviously I have to blow
Cohen in this review.
I mention this up front because one of the most interesting things about
Cohen’s book has been the reaction to it. A lot of the people who reviewed
this book were mentioned in it, and of those people, almost none of them-particularly
the ones who were villains in the book-admitted to the fact in their reviews.
A conspicuous example is odious sellout John Lloyd of the New Statesman,
whose work was cited specifically throughout Cohen’s book as an example
of some of the dumbest and most irresponsible journalism to come out of
Russia in the last ten years. Lloyd’s Statesman review blasting Cohen
doesn’t even mention that he was in the book. (This might have something
to do with Statesman policy, incidentally. In a similar case, Oliver Ready
recently wrote a smug review of the eXile book for the journal without
mentioning that he’d been called a “pencil-necked geek” in our paper).
The Washington Post, while somewhat gentler on Cohen, also chose to
give itself a pass in its review. Reviewer Richard Lourie wasn’t mentioned
in the book specifically, but nearly the whole of part 1 of the book was
about the generally shitty performance of his Post’s Moscow bureau over
the last decade or so. The Post’s response, through Lourie, was to take
the proverbial “high road”, affecting the air of the high school nerd
who’s been counseled on how to protect himself against abuse from bullies:
“Just ignore them.” Rather than respond to Cohen’s charges that the Post
in Russia had been little more than a propaganda organ for U.S.-backed
shysters like Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar, Lourie had this to say
about Cohen: “He is an excellent critic because he knows his own mind
and has no fear of speaking it.”
The New York Times was also excoriated in Cohen’s book, but if its feelings
were hurt, you sure wouldn’t have known it from its review. Here’s what
reviewer Robert Kaplan had to say about Cohen’s treatment of his paper:
“[Cohen]
derides an editorial in The New York Times for celebrating a new McDonald’s
in Moscow, frequented by the nouveau riche arriving in Jeep Cherokees
and Toyota Land Cruisers, while the average monthly wage ‘was about $60,
and falling.’ Though, broadly speaking, his criticism of the American
press is valid, there are important exceptions, notably the travel writer
Jeffrey Tayler, who wrote extensively for The Atlantic Monthly about the
most distant parts of rural Russia in the 1990’s, substantiating Cohen’s
own claims about the destruction of living standards.”
It doesn’t get much more smug than that. A famous professor devotes
a third of a whole book on the failures of American political journalists
in Russia-as exemplified by your newspaper-and you respond by agreeing
entirely, taking exception only in the case of some obscure travel writer
who a) doesn’t write for you, and b) doesn’t even write about politics?
In the pointy-headed New York pseudo-intellectual world, this is about
as close as you can get to a WWF-style dissing. The Times was just flat-out
fucking with Cohen in its review. In the face of a mountain of criticism,
it just dismissed him, with a wave of a hand, as a bitter ex-communist
sympathizer whose book means nothing and changes nothing. Then it sighed,
yelled “Next!”, and moved on to blow the more ideologically-acceptable
book by Chrystiya Freeland.
This appears to be sole problem with Cohen’s book, that it didn’t hurt
enough. Constrained by the rules of friendly academic discourse, Cohen—
a great advocate of calling things by their names— was forced to leave
all the names in the small print of the endnotes section. Rat-faced swine
David Hoffman thus becomes in Cohen’s text “A Washington Post correspondent”,
while intellectual felon Lloyd becomes merely “A former Moscow correspondent
[who exposed] the myth about American shock therapists... without mentioning
that he had been their enthusiastic proponent.”
These days you can be at or near the top of your profession, write an
entire book criticizing a small group of people with the expectation that
it will get major press coverage, and yet still have no hope at all of
forcing an answer out of anyone on so much as a single question. What
could possibly have moved David Hoffman to write “Russia looks great”
about a place that hasn’t looked great since mastodons roamed it? How
could Martin Malia get away with saying about Russia, in April, 1999,
“No one anticipated...anything quite like such an impasse”-when in fact
there were prominent academics, including Cohen himself, who had publicly
predicted the arrival at such an impasse going back many years?
We’ll never know the answers to those questions, because these days,
if you work for the right side, you never have to answer your critics,
even ones as well-known as Cohen. One of the central points of Cohen’s
book is that people like Hoffman and Malia and Lloyd and Jeffrey Sachs
live in a sort of consequence-free environment, where both intellectual
and moral errors are rewarded with promotions and accolades. Steve Liesman
screws up and wins the Putizer Prize. Andrei Shleifer is caught taking
part in an insider trading scheme and wins the John Bates Clarke medal
for economics. Scholars and journalists sifting throuh the rubble after
Russia’s economic collapse contracted amnesia when it came to their own
roles, and kept their jobs to screw things up another day.
It seems to me that the lesson in all of this is that it takes more
than position papers and endnotes to move the front lines in the fight
against these people. You can’t fight the David Hoffmans of the world
using conventional weaponry. Probably we all need to move on to something
more along the lines of the recent activist campaign to jam Washington
Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt’s mailbox and telephone line, which
reportedly forced the former Moscow bureau chief to change his phone number
and put a block on his e-mail address. Instead of books like Cohen’s,
we need to mass-distribute streaming videos of Lawrence Summers sucking
off a pony. We don’t even need to catch him with the actual pony. We can
just assume the pony, put our designers to work on the pictures, and then
just send the videos out there without thinking about it.
After all, as Cohen points out-that’s what they do. All of these “transitionologists”,
as Cohen calls them, just assumed that a triumphant transition to democracy
was taking place in Russia, and then wrote about it as fact, whether there
was evidence there to support the idea or not. It was this mindset, as
Cohen points out, that led observers to describe the non-payment of salaries
as “victory over inflation” and the impoverishment of over 75 percent
of the Russian population as “reform, remarkable progress, and a success
story.”
Cohen’s book is about as good as a book written according to the rules
of academic discourse can be. He gets the whole of the Russia story going
back some fifteen years more or less completely right. The most interesting
part, in my mind, was part II, in which Cohen reprints articles he wrote
going back some ten years to prove that he was right all along. This is
an extremely intrepid little maneuver, given that Cohen, as he must surely
know, already has a reputation for being a famously self-aggrandizing
public personality. It takes serious huevos to stand in front of an audience
inclined to dismiss you as a pompous jerk at the slightest provocation,
pull out a bunch of old papers, and say, “Exhibit A: How Great I Am and
Always Have Been.”
But the irony of this whole story is that the Lloyds and the Malias
of the world left Cohen with every right to do what he did. By claiming
over and over again after the 1998 crash that nobody saw disaster coming,
they forced Cohen’s hand. In order to make his point that the disaster
was partly a result of a collective failure of observation (or unwillingness
to observe), he had to go back and make the point that the evidence was
out there, in full view, all along. His own work was the best possible
argument on this score. Cohen must have creamed in his jeans when he realized
how easily he could get away with devoting so many pages to saying, “I
told you so.”
Cohen called many aspects of the crisis long before the crisis happened.
Here’s his take on privatization way back in 1992:
“Like yesterday’s Marxists, today’s communists understand that property
is power, so the struggle is raging everywhere, from the capitals to the
provinces. Some of these people, perhaps many of them, are sincere converts
to marketization and democratization. But it is foolish to ignore the
politics of confiscation unfolding since late 1991 and its dangerous echoes
of politically-motivated expropriations earlier in Soviet history.”
Cohen also offered an advance peek at what would ultimately be the central
reason for the failure of the American journalistic and diplomatic corps
when he wrote:
“...while our diplomats and journalists seek Russia’s destiny in Moscow,
it is being determined largely in the vast and remote provinces.”
Cohen’s book has been attacked largely on the grounds that he is secretly
a communist sympathizer, that while he succeeds at being a scrupulously
well-informed naysayer, he offered neither then nor now anything in the
way of viable alternatives to the West’s policies toward Russia over the
years. Several commentators have accused him of failing to take note of
the fact that Russia’s catastrophic demographic and economic decline actually
began in 1989 and 1990, before the U.S-backed-”reform” team came into
government. The argument goes something like this: since the alternative
was a return to communism, and the Russians are hopelessly corrupt and
inherently incapable of governing themselves, the present Russian reality
is, all things considered, the best we could have hoped for. In this rhetorical
scheme Cohen is painted as a typical ivory tower intellectual who knows
very well how to enhance his own career, but knows nothing about what
“real world” diplomats deal with every day.
Ok, fine. Maybe that’s true. If it is, it’s a criticism that holds true
for a lot of us. But what about the other part of it-all the energetic
lying our diplomats and journalists did over the course of the last ten
years? Why continually call an unfolding disaster “progress” and a “success
story”? Why not protest corruption, or even admit that it exists, until
Western investors lost their shirts in the devaluation? What about that
end of it? This is the primary question that Cohen asks in this book,
and judging by the response so far, he won’t get an answer to it.
Some of the book’s limitations are built into its structure, of course.
Cohen writes for a relatively narrow academic audience, and his prose
is correspondingly dry. Reading him is a little like listening to Earth,
Wind and Fire without the Earth and the Fire. But within its own context
the book is quite vituperative towards Cohen’s academic colleagues, and
in that sense it is extremely entertaining. The chief pleasure it offers
is the image it conjures of the presidents of Universities like Stanford
and Berkeley reading in detail about the crass stupidities charges of
theirs like Michael McFaul and Stanley Fish (another reviewer who failed
to mention his own place in the book) have been guilty of all these years.
If you cross your fingers as you read, you can almost hope that the book
will cause one or the other of these monsters to be passed over for tenure,
which is something like physical death for these people. Oh, wait, that
already happened to McFaul, even before Cohen’s book came out... Maybe
to one of the others, then. There’s still hope.
Cohen has long been something of an unofficial spokesman of the American
left, a distinction he earned both through his own work and through his
association with America’s leading left-leaning publication, the Nation
(a publication which, incidentally, I’ve written for). With this book
Cohen restores some of the dignity the left lost during its embarrassing
infatuation with the Clinton administration. The transformation of the
standard “bleeding-heart” liberal of the seventies and eighties into the
“think-positive” winners of the nineties (who had “their man” in the White
House) was one of the key early causes of America’s current disaster of
political homogenization. By parting with the “winners” over this issue
so dear to the heart of the old liberals-the fate of their fallen standard-bearer,
the Soviet Union-Cohen has successfully restored some reason and idealism
to the oldskool bearded-lefty way of looking at things. Cohen was the
perfect candidate for this task, of course, being the prototypical bearded
oldskool lefty. He is said to live in a shadowy book- and Knick-poster-lined
lair somewhere on the upper West side, and reportedly has some kind of
Luddite aversion to e-mail and even computers. “Failed Crusade”, in fact,
was supposedly written on a typewriter, one clack at a time. John Lloyd
and Chrystia Freeland probably write on two iMacs (one blue and one pink,
of course) at a time. Not exactly an improvement.
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