whose strongman only understands the language of force. According to Swiss journalist Guy Mettan, Russophobic discourse has its roots in the Middle Ages when Charlemagne competed with Byzantium for the title of heir to the Roman Empire, and anti-Orthodox Catholic propaganda followed the schism between the West and East of which Russia was associated. Russophobia, Mettan says, resembles both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in that it “exists first in the head of the one who looks not in the victims’ alleged behavior or characteristics. [It is] a way of turning specific pseudo-facts into essential one-dimensional values, barbarity, despotism and expansionism in the Russian case in order to justify stigmatization and ostracism.”38
What popular demonology leaves out is that many of Russia’s problems are structural and linked to the predatory actions of Western financial interests in the 1990s, and that Mr. Putin has a base of popular support because he has revived Russian self-respect and power from the Yeltsin era. In his time in office, Putin has ordered the oligarchs to pay taxes and jailed or exiled some, regained national control over oil and gas deposits sold to ExxonMobil and other Western oil companies under Yeltsin, and asserted control over the Russian Central Bank. Putin has further prevented Russia’s disintegration while implementing policies that improved infrastructure, living standards, and led to a decrease in corruption and crime, something the Times has admitted. Inflation, joblessness, and poverty rates have declined while wages have improved. Putin has overcome Western sanctions by improving trade relations with China and other “BRIC” nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and advanced his vision of a Eurasian Union uniting Kazakhstan and Belarus in a regional trading bloc.39
The Times and other media outlets promote a double standard in singling out Putin for his authoritarian style when the United States supports murderous tyrants around the world like the Saudi royal family and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, and authoritarian leaders in the former Soviet republics whose abuses are rarely highlighted or exposed. Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, was characterized as “the father of Russian democracy” and compared to Abraham Lincoln when he used tank cannons to storm the parliament following a constitutional crisis he precipitated, resulting in around five hundred deaths, killed thousands in invading Chechnya, and imposed disastrous “shock therapy” economic policies pushed by American advisers—dubbed “the Harvard Boys”—that resulted in an unprecedented rise in the mortality rate. Yeltsin also allied with oligarchs who essentially bought him the presidency in 1996.40
Paul Craig Roberts, assistant secretary of the treasury under President Ronald Reagan, points out that “the initial collapse of the USSR worked very much to the West’s advantage. The [United States and its allies] could easily manipulate Yeltsin, and various oligarchs were able to seize and plunder the resources of the country. Much … American money was part of that. When Putin came along and started stopping this and trying to put the country back in place, he was demonized.”41
There is a gap in quality between at least some of the Times reporting and the opinion pieces. In April 2016, for example, the Times ran an informative article by William J. Broad and David E. Sanger discussing the race for the latest class of nuclear weaponry between Russia, China, and the United States. They pointed out that while American officials have largely blamed escalating tensions on Putin and the Chinese for their apparent aggressive drives in the South China Sea, these two “adversaries look at what the United States expects to spend on nuclear revitalization—estimated up to a trillion over three decades—and use it to lobby for their own sophisticated weaponry.”
The article went on to point out that President Obama himself had recognized that his nuclear weapons modernization program could undermine his own previous record of progress on arms control.42 From this example we see that Times journalists are capable of first-rate analysis. However, in our assessment, instances of quality reporting have been overshadowed by the barrage of pieces painting Putin and Russia in the darkest of hues, which contribute in turn to the popular impression that the Russians are coming, again.
PART II: FURTHERING OUR CRITIQUE
In a December 2016 interview with David Barsamian on Alternative Radio, a weekly public affairs program that provides analyses and views that are often ignored or distorted in the corporate media, Stephen Cohen, the noted scholar on the Soviet Union and Russia, reminded listeners that the Russian people have a long memory of the staggering loss of human life and physical destruction brought on by the Nazi invasion during the Second World War. Their celebration of V-E Day (Victory in Europe) on May 9 is their “most sacred secular holiday.” Vivid memories of the war “awakened … ferocious reactions in Russia” over what was unfolding in Ukraine. “When you get guys who look and smell like neo-Nazis running around burning up people, as they did in Odessa in 2014, it awakens memories of World War Two and the Nazi occupation.” It was greater because the United States helped bring about the coup in Ukraine, the result of years of U.S. intervention there, aided by the Soros Foundation and the National Endowment on Democracy (NED), which worked to undermine the existing regime. Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state under Hillary Clinton, admitted before Congress that the United States spent $5 billion “building democracy” there before the crisis. What does it mean to “build democracy”? It is “to create a country aligned with us, because there’s probably less democracy in Ukraine today … than there was when they overthrew” the former president Victor Yanukovych, in February 2014.
Cohen says it is a misnomer to claim that Putin invaded Ukraine when what he did was “react” to a Western encroachment that was part of a “long-term effort to bring Ukraine into NATO. The documents are there to be read.” Putin was given intelligence information stating that there “was going to be a march on the Russian historical and strategic naval base on the Crimean peninsula” and this possibility presented “a grave danger.… We could argue that he overreacted; you can make a case. But he was reacting.” After the United States helped “to overthrow the government there or abetted the overthrow of a legally elected leader—and it was recognized that the Ukrainian election of Yanukovych had been fair—and bringing an unelected regime to power,” why wouldn’t Russia react? “Taking Ukraine over, recognizing the new government immediately, bringing these guys to Washington, with McCain and the others in the streets egging them on, did we think Russia wouldn’t react? Why is that Russian aggression?”43
Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, who supported the Maidan protests and produced a film investigating the death of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, concurs with Cohen’s assessment, pointing out that Putin is not a threat to world security any more than the United States, which is much more powerful. Nekrosov further stated in an interview that “there is simply no evidence of Putin’s excessive riches [as the media has reported]; not even a single evidence of some bank accounts, or a bribe he or his wife for example got from an industry or such thing [whereas] there was such evidence in Yeltsin’s case, quite specific and direct.” Though not personally enamored of Putin, Nekrosov says that he gets “elected and is hugely popular in Russia and doesn’t need to suppress democracy very much, even if he were able to.… The media apart from the big national TV channels is relatively free.”44
Robert Parry of Consortium News suggests that the broad demonization of Putin has set the groundwork for a potential “regime change” and program of isolation designed to punish Putin for blocking American machinations in Syria and Iran and to ensure control over the Eurasian heartland. The first phase of this plan was the Ukraine coup where Victoria Nuland “was caught on an unsecure phone line telling U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt” how they “would ‘midwife’ a change in government that would put Nuland’s choice … in power.” Parry has raised doubt about Russia’s culpability in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, based on the fact that the State Department refuses to make public radar information that Secretary of State Kerry said points to the location of the offending missile. Parry spoke to an intelligence agent who indicated that as U.S. “analysts gained more insights from technical and other sources, they came to believe the attack
