OPINION:
At the end of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan and his successor, George H.W. Bush, were two happy statesmen. They had achieved their prized goal of ending hostilities with the Soviet Union. For that matter, the Russian president, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, were pretty happy too.
Mr. Gorbachev was perhaps less happy than his American counterparts, but he came around to accepting that the conclusion of hostilities between America and the Soviet Union was not a bad thing. He, you will recall, had objected when Reagan famously said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The wall was the Berlin Wall, and it separated East and West Berlin. Still, Mr. Gorbachev came to accept this ending, and his successor, Yeltsin, was clearly delighted by it. He was no longer going to be faced with bankrupting bills in his military budget — just as Reagan had predicted.
I met Yeltsin shortly after the wall came down. Before meeting him, I conferred with then-Director of Central Intelligence Bob Gates at his office at CIA headquarters. Time spent with the cerebral head of our CIA was never time wasted. On that occasion, we had a wide-ranging talk, and among the points Mr. Gates made was that Russia was proud of its cultural achievements. It wanted them recognized. The Russians thought of themselves as part of the West.
Mr. Gates made the point that while American universities were ashamed of American history, Russia was proud of its history. With Mr. Gates in mind, I was quick to tell Yeltsin, as I chatted with him at the White House, that I had listened to a Prokofiev symphony and read “The Brothers Karamazov” in preparation for my evening with him and his Russians aides. I added that Russia’s culture was a great culture and that it had contributed richly to Western culture. He smiled broadly. That was my pitch to be Bush’s ambassador to Russia. Bush did not take the hint.
Now the Russians under President Vladimir Putin are again bellicose. Mr. Putin is responding to another aspect of his Russian culture. The historian Helene Carrere d’Encausse wrote in her magisterial work “The Russian Syndrome: One Thousand Years of Political Murder.” The great historian writes: “The history of Russia is first and foremost a continuous history of political murder.” When she wrote that line, she was not thinking of Prokofiev or “The Brothers Karamazov,” but she was thinking of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great and Lenin and Stalin.
I was also reminded of a Russian warship that almost sank in the Middle East during military exercises that were supposed to demonstrate Mr. Putin’s increased military prowess to the West. There have been lesser mishaps surrounding the Russians’ maneuvers too. I believe the Russians are about as weak as they were at the end of the Cold War, but I am not so sure. Last week when our 79-year-old president had his talk with Mr. Putin on the telephone, I hope he was forceful but politely reminded his Russian adversary of how the Cold War ended. Putin should not be rattling the saber once again. We are prepared for him.
Yet I am reminded of another thing that the great historian Ms. d’Encausse wrote in her monumental book on Russia. A great country never escapes its history. Russia has endured 1,000 years of bloody murder. Win, lose or draw, the Russians are a bloody-minded people. What have we endured? Well, we have endured some 250 years of nation-building, much of it inspiring.
We have saved the civilized world at least twice. We have in those 250 years ushered in modern times, rendering a massive frontier the most modern landscape on earth. In practically every one of the sciences, we have been a force for good, but now we come to the last few decades. Increasingly it is seen as the “Era of the Snowflake.” Particularly with the young men, it is the Era of the Snowflake. Oh yes, and it is also the “Era of the Woke Folk.”
What will happen if the snowflakes and the woke folk are confronted by 1,000 years of “political murder”? Scholars are studying the snowflakes and the woke folk now, and they are convinced that they are studying the infantilization of the West. I hope Mr. Putin has not been watching.
• R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator. He is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and the author most recently of “The Death of Liberalism,” published by Thomas Nelson, Inc.
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