But, first, how did we get to our present straits?
Like the breakup of all empires, the breakup of the Soviet empire wrought enormous changes way beyond its borders.
Many of these were indisputably for the good:
- a more cooperative superpower relationship between the U.S. and Russia;
- the spread of democracy and civil society in Eastern Europe and the Baltics;
- better prospects for resolving regional conflicts like those in South Africa and the Middle East, once Soviet mischief-making had been removed;
- the discrediting of socialist economic planning by the exposure of its disastrous consequences in Russia and Eastern Europe;
- and the removal of Soviet obstruction from the United Nations and its agencies.
These were - and still are - real benefits for which we should be grateful.
But in the euphoria which accompanied the Cold War's end - just as in what Churchill's private secretary called "the fatal hiatus" of 1944 to 1946 - we failed to notice other, less appealing, consequences of the peace.
Like a giant refrigerator that had finally broken down after years of poor maintenance, the Soviet empire in its collapse released all the ills of ethnic, social and political backwardness which it had frozen in suspended animation for so long.
- Suddenly, border disputes between the successor states erupted into small wars in, for instance, Armenia and Georgia.
- Within these new countries the ethnic divisions aggravated by Soviet policies of Russification and forced population transfer produced violence, instability, and quarrels over citizenship.
- The absence of the legal and customary foundations of a free economy led to a distorted "robber capitalism," one dominated by the combined forces of the mafia and the old communist nomenklatura, with little appeal to ordinary people.
- The moral vacuum created by communism in everyday life was filled for some by a revived Orthodox Church, but for others by the rise in crime, corruption,gambling, and drug addiction - all contributing to a spreading ethic of luck, a belief that economic life is a zero-sum game, and an irrational nostalgia for a totalitarian order without totalitarian methods.
- And, in these Hobbesian conditions, primitive political ideologies which have been extinct in Western Europe and America for two generations surfaced and flourished, all peddling fantasies of imperial glory to compensate for domestic squalor.
No one can forecast with confidence where this will lead. I believe that it will take long years of civic experience and patient institution-building for Russia to become a normal society. Neo-communists may well return to power in the immediate future, postponing normality; but whoever wins the forthcoming Russian elections will almost certainly institute a more assertive foreign policy, one less friendly to the U.S.