Enter, a new cold war; The idea of being a junior player on the world stage, a subordinate of America, did nothing for the Russian soul, says LAWRENCE MARTIN. And so, when an autocrat arrived, he was embraced

The old Cold War ended 16 years ago. The new one looks to be starting now.

While a distressing development, it should hardly come as a surprise. Russian pride demands it. In the country's vast, endless landscape, in its history, in its hardened mindset is an aura of power that must inevitably be exhibited.

To live in Russia was to feel that raw strength and, at the same time, a sense of a people shackled. In the Soviet days, the proletariat had a saying: “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” The reformers came along and brought democratic freedoms and a dismantled state. But the idea of being a junior player on the world power board, a subordinate of America, could do nothing for the Russian soul. An autocrat arrived — and they embraced him.
Vladimir Putin — approval ratings near 75 per cent — bombed the bridges with the West last weekend. At the Munich Conference on Security Policy, he turned back the clock. His catalogue of charges against the United States were seen as the coldest blast from the Kremlin since Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table at the United Nations in 1960.

Robert Gates, the U.S. Defence Secretary, responded to the iceman by saying, “One Cold War was quite enough.” But being a long-time student of Russia, he likely doubted it.

If it was all rubbish, empty rhetoric the Russian leader was spewing at Munich, it could be ignored. But much of what he said could find many believers. “Unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions,” declared Mr. Putin, obviously speaking of Iraq, “have not resolved any problems. They have caused new human tragedies and created new centres of tension . . .Today we are witness to an almost unrestrained hyper use of force — military force — in international relations, a force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.”

He continued. “One country, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way . . . This force's dominance inevitably encourages a number of countries to acquire weapons of mass destruction.”
More specific Cold War sabre-rattling came with his allegation that the inclusion of former Soviet satellite nations in NATO had destabilized Europe and threatened Russia. “We have the right to ask. Against whom is this expansion directed?”

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Mr. Gates might well have responded, “It tolls for you.” Few in the U.S. could deny the claim that the Atlantic alliance's expansion, with no invitation to Moscow, had left Russia cornered. This was the same Russia that had dismantled the Warsaw Pact, and allowed the Berlin Wall to come down and the Soviet Union to dissolve. And just look, Mr. Putin was saying, at what we're getting in return.
Those who had allowed the alliance's march to Russia's borders should have known it's not wise to deepen that country's insecurities. In 1962, those insecurities — missiles in Turkey — were one of the reasons for Mr. Khrushchev's attempted stationing of missiles in Cuba.

In Munich, the conditions were right for Mr. Putin's muscular coming out. The state of the world's energy market has given Russia, with its plentiful resources, a new source of strength and blackmail. Its economic growth rates continue to be impressive. Military spending, though still a fraction of the Pentagon's, is going up by leaps and bounds. Its nuclear arsenal is potent enough and the Russian people are unified, under the spell of their clear-eyed, authoritarian leader. Add to the mix America's derelictions under the Bush administration, its weakened global standing, and the door swung open to Iron Curtain-styled assertions.

In the previous Cold War, America and the Soviets stared each other down over territorial influence, arms build-ups, systems of governance. Given the Soviet collapse, it's all on a smaller scale now, but the same elements are in play.

The Russian leader's outburst would have been more convincing had his charges not been so flamingly hypocritical. Mr. Putin has snuffed out many of the liberties in what was a budding Russian democracy. And opponents of the regime somehow quietly disappear, are poisoned or, in the case of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, murdered. The latest outrage came earlier this month with the new charges Russian prosecutors brought against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil-executive billionaire who was a powerful political opponent of the Russian leader. Imprisoned since 2003 on alleged tax evasion charges, he was due for parole this year. With elections on the way, the Putin regime didn't want to risk a free Mr. Khodorkovsky, so it brought forward new 11th-hour allegations to keep him behind bars for years to come.

Opposition is erased at home and crushed in republics such as Chechnya. The old Soviet-like iron fist reaches across the borders into Belarus, the central Asian republics and elsewhere. A most telling account of the Putin bullying is in the soon to be released book, The New Cold War, by Mark MacKinnon.

Before his death, one of the fathers of glasnost, Alexander Yakovlev, told the author that Russian newspapers are less free now than at the end of 1980s. It was then that Mikhail Gorbachev, the great idealist, addressed the United Nations. He advocated that “international relations be freed from ideology.” He talked of a joint quest for world unity, unity through variety. “If we recognize it in politics and declare our adherence to the principle of freedom of choice, then we shall no longer think that some of us inhabit this world in fulfilment of the Providential will while others are here by mere chance.”

Mr. Gorbachev had a suspicion he was being too romantic to be taken seriously. His hopes likely “exaggerated the maturity and development of the human mind.”

Then he looked on, encouraged, as the old Cold War closed and warm relations between East and West came about and arms stocks declined. But, in more recent years, he could watch as American and Russian leaders did their handiwork, and be sure in the knowledge that his initial suspicion was correct — that it was indeed a romantic hope; that he and men like him were aberrations.

The Globe and Mail; 17 February 2007