Rodric Braithwaite. Survival: Global Politics and Strategy. Volume 64, Issue 1, 2022.
Halfway through our traditional Christmas dinner on 25 December 1991, my wife Jill and I stepped onto the balcony of the British Embassy to look across the river at the Kremlin as the Soviet flag fluttered down for the very last time and the Russian flag rose in its place. Mikhail Gorbachev had handed over power to the Russian president Boris Yeltsin formally and peacefully. Nothing like it had ever happened before in Russian history. Then the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Moscow, I went down to the office to cable London a report, titled ‘Gorbachev Goes: The End of an Era’, whose draft I had long been carrying in my head. It concluded that, as winter closed in, and public order became more fragile, Yeltsin would be tempted to make Gorbachev the scapegoat for the difficulties that were piling up around him. ‘We shall see’, I said, ‘how Yeltsin’s liberal principles weather the strain.’ Alas, by the time Christmas came round 30 years later, those principles had been eroded almost to nothing. The current Ukraine crisis is one of many consequences.
Experts argue about whether the Cold War ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, or with the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself at the end of 1991. Either way, by Christmas 1991 the whole world could heave a sigh of relief. The nuclear confrontation was over. Gorbachev called it a victory for the whole of humanity. But for the West the immediate future looked very different than it did to Russia.
The Americans and their allies failed to avoid triumphalism. George H.W. Bush said in his State of the Union message in January 1992: ‘By the grace of God, America won the cold war … A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent power, the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power, and the world is right.’ It was an injudicious statement for a man known for his sober caution. The belief that it was the world’s sole superpower led America into one diplomatic misjudgement after another over the next three decades. By Christmas 2021, there was even doubt about America’s most fundamental strength: the stability of its democratic system, which had been a beacon for so many for so long.
In winter 1991, Russians shared the world’s relief at the end of the nuclear confrontation. Many still hoped that Yeltsin would lead them towards the prosperous democracy that Gorbachev had promised but failed to deliver. But the immediate reality was very grim. The economy was spiralling out of control. The brilliant young economist Yegor Gaidar, appointed by Yeltsin to carry through radical economic reform, feared that the country could face actual famine. Even basic commodities failed to reach the shops. Ordinary people lost their jobs, their pensions and their social benefits. Factory workers were paid, if at all, in kind not cash. The health service collapsed. Old ladies sold their last possessions on the streets of Moscow in order to survive. Officers were sacked, tanks rusted at their bases, the strategic nuclear forces were unable to maintain their equipment.
Meanwhile, the Americans acted as if Russia’s foreign and domestic policy was theirs to shape. Yeltsin’s first foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, later vilified by his countrymen for conceding too much to the West, protested to president Bill Clinton’s adviser Strobe Talbott that ‘it’s bad enough having you people tell us what you’re going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interests to obey your orders.’ Talbott commented that ‘Russia is either coming our way, or it’s not, in which case it’s going to founder, as the USSR did’.
All this seeped into the Russian public consciousness and aroused an overwhelming sense of humiliation and resentment. It coloured Russian attitudes and the making of Russian policy for decades, and was persistently underestimated by Western policymakers and commentators.
Was the Soviet collapse inevitable?
It is not possible to predict the future in detail. But the idea that the collapse was unforeseeable and unforeseen is wrong. The trend was visible for decades, even if individual events often caught even well-informed observers by surprise.
The process can be dated from the death of Josef Stalin in March 1953. By the application of the most brutal methods, and the death of millions of people, Stalin assembled a heavy industry that successfully produced the weapons needed to beat the Germans in war. But without the dictator, his dysfunctional system and the accompanying terror could not work. The regime’s own heavily doctored statistics showed that the economy was growing ever more slowly. Some of the regime’s own economists preferred the figures put out by the CIA, but these too failed to give an accurate picture.
For most of its existence the Soviet Union was largely closed to foreign observation. But the regime could not prevent diplomats, journalists, students and other foreigners living in Moscow from seeing for themselves how very poor the country was: the villages on the outskirts of the capital still had no running water, the sidewalks were still paved in wood. Some of those advising Western governments on the Soviet Union, many with Russian backgrounds, knew this well enough. But others had no direct knowledge of the country and did not speak the language. Many based their analysis on a literal reading of the writings of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Stalin, and the public pronouncements of Soviet politicians. In the decades that followed they nurtured a picture of Soviet strength and menace that was not entirely false but was often misleading.
Western governments and their peoples were mesmerised by the Soviet Union’s prowess in space, its growing military power, its successes in the developing world. They overestimated Soviet strength and determination, and feared—without solid evidence—that the Russians might attack them unprovoked. Few appreciated that the Russians were at least as afraid of us as we were of them. Western misjudgements were exacerbated by an almost complete lack of reliable intelligence about the hopes, fears and intentions of the Soviet leaders.
The exaggerations were not entirely innocent. In America they helped generate public support for an immensely expensive policy of overmatching the Russians in every sphere—military, political and economic. When it was all over, Caspar Weinberger, who had served as US secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, justified the multiplication of weapons thus: ‘You can’t afford to be wrong. If we won by too much, if it was overkill, so be it.’ The distortions and misunderstandings were fully matched on the Russian side.
At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy tried to see events through Nikita Khrushchev’s eyes. But he admitted to a confidant: ‘It isn’t wise politically to understand Khrushchev’s problem in quite this way.’ Raymond Garthoff, then a State Department official, believed that ‘the inability to empathize with the other side and visualize its interests in other than adversarial terms’ was one reason American analysts often got the Soviet Union wrong. Garthoff warned that an American official who departed from ‘the implicit stereotypical cold war consensus’ risked damage to his career and influence. Garthoff was of course right. Empathy is too often confused with sympathy even today. You risk being called a Putinversteher if you try too hard to understand what the Russian president is up to.
Tinkering with a failing system
Khrushchev replaced Stalin after a vicious struggle with his colleagues. He knew very well what a mess the country was in, and in the early 1960s he tried to put it right. He permitted a genuine public debate between those who thought that only market mechanisms could save the economy and those who insisted that computers could make state planning work. These ‘men of the Sixties’ provided much of the intellectual underpinning for Gorbachev’s subsequent reforms. But neither then nor later could they agree on practical conclusions. Khrushchev shied away from fundamental changes that would have transformed the system. The measures that he introduced were half-baked and wholly inadequate.
The nuclear confrontation
Stalin feared that the Americans would use their nuclear monopoly after 1945 to blackmail him. He was determined to match them. His nuclear project was ruinously expensive. His people, who had hoped for relief after the war, were plunged back into near famine. But the programme was successful. He had his bomb by 1949, a mere four years after the Americans got theirs. The success was due primarily to the excellence of Soviet scientists and engineers rather than the formidable skills of Soviet spies.
The nuclear confrontation that followed defined the Cold War and set the tone of its diplomacy. The American side developed elaborate and implausible theories about ‘graduated escalation’, ‘extended deterrence’, and ‘limited nuclear war’ in Europe and elsewhere to deter or repel a local Soviet attack. The Russians were sceptical: even some of their generals believed that once the first rocket was launched things could spiral fatally out of control. Similar doubts existed in London and Washington too. All nevertheless continued to develop the most elaborate, expensive and sometimes pointless weapons of which they were capable.
The Russians demonstrated their scientific and engineering prowess when they launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. They put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961. These were spectacular achievements, of which Russians remain justly proud. But the Americans soon forged ahead. By the early 1960s they had more than 1,500 nuclear bombers and a ring of bases surrounding the Soviet Union from which they could hit Moscow. The Russians only had 150 long-range bombers, a few clumsy long-range missiles and nothing that could reliably hit Washington. To right the balance, Khrushchev hit on a dangerously ingenious scheme. In summer 1962, he agreed with the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, to deploy in Cuba nuclear missiles that could threaten much of America and deter the Americans from invading the Caribbean island. In October, US intelligence detected the arrival of the missiles, but not the presence of tens of thousands of Soviet troops armed with battlefield nuclear weapons. American generals and admirals pressed Kennedy to launch a pre-emptive strike on Cuba. The crisis could have ended in a nuclear exchange that would have devastated the Soviet Union and cost America several cities. The prospect appalled Kennedy as much as Khrushchev. A fraught negotiation led to a peaceful outcome.
But Khrushchev’s credibility in Moscow was fatally undermined. His colleagues were increasingly unimpressed with his futile attempts at reform. In October 1964, the Communist Party, the army and the KGB removed him from power.
Stagnation
Under Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev, an exhausting effort enabled the Soviet Union to match the United States in space and at cuttingedge military technology. But the weaknesses ran deep. In 1976, Soviet per capita consumption was said to be one-third that of the United States—probably an exaggerated figure. In 1989, the Soviet health minister said that 24% of Soviet hospitals had no drains and 15% had no running water, not least because the Soviet Union spent less on healthcare than any other developed country. Russians scornfully called Brezhnev’s rule the ‘period of stagnation’. There was a modest improvement in living standards, but consumer goods, even foodstuffs, remained in short and erratic supply. To catch them, housewives had to queue for hours.
Brave people had occasionally spoken out even under Stalin. Most came to a bad end. Under his successors people spoke more freely. But it still required courage, and you could easily find yourself packed off to a labour camp. Andrei Sakharov, the physicist who had helped to devise the Soviet hydrogen bomb, told Brezhnev in 1970 that the Soviet Union would become a second-rate provincial power unless its bureaucratic style were replaced by measures of democratisation. The powers banished him to the provinces and cut his contact with the outside world.
Unease was not confined to such brave dissidents. Government and party officials, military officers, industrial managers, scientists, economists, even the head of the State Planning Committee, were increasingly convinced that things were going badly wrong. In 1983, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the Soviet chief of staff, lamented to Leslie Gelb, then a New York Times journalist and earlier a senior US Defense and State Department official, ‘We will never be able to catch up with you in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we have an economic revolution without a political revolution.’ Though dissidents and an increasingly angry intelligentsia played an important role, insiders were the main driving force for change that was to come.
The arrival of Gorbachev
The men in the Politburo were elderly, conservative and unimaginative. But they were not stupid, and they could not ignore the crisis. Gorbachev came from a poor peasant family in Southern Russia: the Moscow intelligentsia sneered at his provincial accent. Brilliant at school, he got a scholarship and studied law at Moscow University. He then worked back home until the Communist Party brought him back to the centre and into the Politburo. In March 1985, they chose Gorbachev—young, energetic, effective, apparently orthodox—to put things right. The man they hoped would save the Soviet Union accelerated its collapse.
He believed that bureaucratic central planning was strangling the economy, and that the crippling burden of defence spending could only be reduced by bringing the Cold War under control. The country was stagnating because the initiative of ordinary people had been stifled. They needed to be brought into the business of running it.
Russians now forget how popular Gorbachev was at first. They flocked to listen as he spoke with a lively frankness unmatched by his predecessors. They believed he might give them what they called a ‘normal country’: open to the world, prosperous, at peace with its neighbours, where their rulers at last listened to their views and acted accordingly. Gorbachev hoped to save the Soviet Union from itself. His first tentative steps were intended to preserve the ‘socialist’ essence of the system. Looking for his support, he brought Yeltsin, the first party secretary of the Sverdlovsk region, likewise the son of a peasant, into the Politburo. Immensely ambitious and a brilliant instinctive politician, Yeltsin preferred to make himself popular by publicly attacking Gorbachev’s policies as fraudulently inadequate. In Stalin’s day he would not have escaped with his life. In Khrushchev’s he would have been exiled. Gorbachev threw him out of the Politburo but allowed him to continue in politics. It was a measure of how far things had already changed.
In April 1986 the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine exploded after a mismanaged test. The government immediately undertook remedial measures. The people on the ground acted heroically to limit the damage. But the fallout and the news leaked to the West. Gorbachev mismanaged the publicity. Some Russians trace their final disillusion with the Soviet system to this catastrophe.
A kind of democracy comes to the Soviet Union
As his initial measures stumbled and the economy continued to decline, Gorbachev set out to revolutionise Soviet politics. He encouraged glasnost, ‘openness’, about the conduct of public business. The press attacked official abuse relentlessly. Sakharov, whom Gorbachev allowed to return to Moscow, demanded that the Communist Party be stripped of its constitutional monopoly of power. He and others set up Memorial, an organisation to celebrate the memories of the individuals—men, women, even children—who has disappeared into unmarked graves during Stalin’s Great Terror. History became a national obsession. People joked that the Soviet Union was a country with an unpredictable past. One liberal author confided that the victory in the war against Adolf Hitler was the only thing that Russians could still be proud of.
In summer 1988, Gorbachev allowed the Russian Orthodox Church to celebrate the millennium of Russian Christianity. Churches and monasteries were rebuilt from the ruins into which the communists had allowed them to decay. Young people flocked to become priests and nuns. The leaders of the church grew closer to the politicians, the sources of prosperity and influence.
Next Gorbachev announced new elections. Previous Soviet elections had been empty rituals in which citizens voted in droves for the only available candidate. Now they would be able to choose freely among candidates. March 1989 saw the first real vote in Russia since 1917, complete with the trappings of democracy: vicious intrigue over the selection of candidates, noisy meetings on the streets, vitriol from an unshackled press. The vote swept senior communists from seats they had held for years as of right. Yeltsin was elected to the new ‘Congress of People’s Deputies’ by four-fifths of Moscow’s voters. A firestorm of criticism directed at the party, the government and the KGB broke out when this new congress opened in May. It was all shown on television. Glued to their TV sets, people abandoned their everyday work.
Our Russian friends feared it could end in bloodshed and civil war; they knew what had happened at Tiananmen Square. But in March 1991, under pressure from the streets, the congress abolished the party’s constitutional monopoly of power. Political pluralism was no longer illegal. A kind of fragile democracy had arrived.
Ending the Cold War
Gorbachev passionately believed that the nuclear confrontation was absurdly dangerous. He was determined to dismantle it. He was fortunate in his interlocutor. Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’, expanded his predecessor Jimmy Carter’s rearmament programme and allowed the US military to mount provocative probes against the Soviet frontier. But he too was profoundly concerned about the confrontation. He reached out to Gorbachev. When the two met in Reykjavik in 1986, they made an unsuccessful attempt to abolish nuclear weapons altogether. Cold warriors in Washington and London were appalled. When Gorbachev announced in December 1988 that he was withdrawing significant forces from Eastern Europe, advisers to the incoming president, George H.W. Bush, called it another communist trick.
But the international scene was now changing beyond recognition. Between 1954 and 1968, the Russians had put down dissent in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. They got the Poles to do it for them in Poland in 1980. The Eastern Europeans were unconvinced when Gorbachev told them in June 1988 that they could find their own way. But once the Soviet elections demonstrated how much Russia itself was changing, the Poles immediately held their own elections and the Polish communists were thrashed. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. Other Eastern Europeans followed the Poles to freedom. The demand for independence, or at least autonomy, was growing inside the Soviet Union itself, in the Baltic states and the Caucasus. Ukraine was ominously quiet. If it too began to move, the consequences could be dramatic indeed. We were, I thought, even before the wall came down, witnessing the break-up of the last great European empire.
German reunification had now become an urgent possibility. Moscow and Washington realised that the only alternative to chaos was negotiation. The United States and its allies were determined that Germany should be reunited inside NATO. Gorbachev attempted to resist from a very weak negotiating position. Western negotiators gave him ambiguous assurances that NATO did not intend to expand any further. He did not request, nor was he offered, anything in writing.
Over time, Western intentions changed. The Baltics and Russia’s former Eastern European satellites eventually joined the Alliance. Many Russians believed they had been double-crossed. They were also shocked by NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999, fearing that it was a foretaste of what Russia itself could expect. They came to believe that Western talk of democracy was a smokescreen hiding a determination to destroy Russia.
The coup of August 1991
By 1991, Russia’s middle-class liberals had concluded that Yeltsin was the more authentic democrat and switched their support to him. Ordinary people were tired of Gorbachev’s failure to improve their lives. His closest allies deserted him. He recruited replacements from among the reactionaries. When Soviet special-operations forces killed 13 people in Vilnius in January 1991, he could not escape responsibility. On 29 March, the government deployed troops in Moscow to counter a massive demonstration in support of Yeltsin. Bloodshed seemed quite possible. But Gorbachev blinked, and the troops were withdrawn. As his authority waned, it seemed only a question of time before he was ousted by the hard men or, through some unforeseeable chain of events, by Yeltsin. That night I roughed out the first draft of the telegram reporting his departure.
Rumours of a coup had abounded for years. But almost nobody—not Western leaders nor their intelligence agencies, nor I, nor Gorbachev himself—foresaw the actual event. On 18 August, conspirators from the party, the army and the KGB—the same combination that defenestrated Khrushchev—arrested Gorbachev in his Crimean holiday home, moved tanks into Moscow and formed an emergency administration. But they bungled their plans to arrest Yeltsin. He was besieged and defiant inside his office, the ‘Russian White House’. Thousands of people flocked to support him. That evening the plotters tried to explain themselves on TV. Some were drunk. Three young men were killed the following night in a scuffle with soldiers. But the conspirators lacked the resolve to settle matters by storming the White House. They withdrew the tanks. Yeltsin had them arrested and banned the Communist Party.
Gorbachev returned to Moscow, but Yeltsin had won the game. That autumn he whittled away at Gorbachev’s authority, using the collapsing economy and the prospect of Ukrainian independence as levers. On 8 December 1991, he secretly met his colleagues from Ukraine and Belarus to declare that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. It was a breathless piece of opportunism for a man who, like most Russians, believed that Ukraine was an integral part of his country. For the Soviet Union, it was the death blow.
Back to the past?
There was much sympathy for ordinary Russians in the West. But Western governments’ efforts to help Russia repair its economy, build a healthy politics and take part in the management of international affairs as a cooperative equal were half-hearted. Western businesses ruthlessly exploited opportunities for profit. Overpaid Western consultants peddled solutions that ignored Russian reality. Russia slid into economic misery, political dysfunction, deeply rooted corruption and a jungle capitalism in which rivals murdered one another for profit. As Yeltsin declined into alcoholism and ill health, his regime became increasingly incoherent. He groomed Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, as his successor.
Putin did not grow up under Stalin. Like Gorbachev and Yeltsin, he was a product of the Soviet system, but his emotional attachment to it was shallow, and he has denounced its excesses. He started to emerge from the obscurity of a mediocre career in the KGB while working for the liberal mayor of Leningrad after the 1991 coup. Most foreigners underestimated him, if they noticed him at all. Yeltsin’s talent scouts recruited him to work backstage in the Kremlin. He impressed Yeltsin with his administrative competence, his intelligence, his political cunning, his ruthless determination and his loyalty. When he succeeded Yeltsin in January 2000, a new era of Russian politics began.
It was never likely that one man or one generation could move Russia from age-old autocracy and a stultified economy to political and economic liberalism. When I left Moscow in May 1992, my view was that democracy could take firm hold in Russia. But its culture would have to change radically. That would take three or more generations—a hundred years—and there would be plenty of setbacks on the way.
Putin has turned out to be a very serious setback indeed, as illustrated by his recent decision to mass troops on the Ukrainian border. He is said to have told George W. Bush at a NATO meeting in Bucharest in April 2008: ‘You don’t understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state.’ Putin subsequently set forth his beliefs in an article in July 2021. His ideas are not new, and many Russians agree with him wholeheartedly. They believe that today’s Russia is the direct descendant of the mediaeval state of Kievan Rus, and that Ukraine and its language are merely a subset of a greater Russian story. The history is tangled. But a strong sense of Ukrainian national identity was developing from at least the end of the eighteenth century; many Ukrainians would place the date very much earlier. Outbursts of Ukrainian nationalism were brutally repressed by the tsars and the communists alike. Ironically, it was Stalin who gave Ukraine the skeleton institutions of government and a founding place in the United Nations, which the Ukrainians turned to account after independence in 1991.
The related dispute about whether the Ukrainians have a ‘right’ to their own country is futile. Of course they do, just as much right as any other country in the hodgepodge we call Europe. How long a country has existed as an independent state is equally irrelevant. Rather few of the states in today’s Europe existed before the First World War. When Christopher Columbus discovered America, Germany, Italy and Russia, even Britain and France, were still fragmented, and the Polish-Lithuanian Union was on the way to becoming the largest state in Europe. But Ukraine’s history and geography, like those of many other European countries such as Poland and Ireland, greatly complicate the diplomacy and politics that surrounds it.
Since 1991, Western diplomacy in Eastern Europe has been by turns arrogant and incompetent. The initial enlargement of NATO to include the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland was probably unavoidable, both politically and morally: the West could not afford to betray Eastern Europeans with false promises yet again, as they had in 1938, 1956 and 1968.
But the Americans and their allies continue to mutter pieties about the Ukrainians’ right to choose their own alliances, while simultaneously announcing that they have no intention of sending combat troops to defend Ukraine should it need them. That is an unserious position, and risks setting up the wretched Ukrainians for yet another betrayal.
Putin’s military posturing around Ukraine is several degrees more irresponsible. It may be intended to generate enough anxiety among the Americans to force them into a negotiation that would correct Gorbachev’s failure to get written assurance about NATO enlargement. But America can hardly accept the ultimatum Putin has issued. The chances of getting his proposed treaty on Ukraine through the US Senate are zero. His experts in the Russian Foreign Ministry know that perfectly well. No doubt, like other leaders, he prefers to rely on his unaided intuition. If so, he is taking a page out of the playbook Khrushchev used when he placed missiles in Cuba. Perhaps both sides can repeat the success of 1962 and negotiate an arrangement whereby each can claim ‘victory’ without the Ukrainians being betrayed. That would require ingenuity and goodwill, both currently in short supply.
At first Putin was a domestic success. The economy boomed, Russians prospered as never before and many welcomed the skilful way he stood up to foreigners, not least by his decisive use of the military in Georgia. They saw his increasingly brutal methods of government as an acceptable trade-off. That honeymoon has been fading for a decade or more. Putin has been in office so long that his judgement has coarsened. He may believe he can help his faltering domestic position by playing the ‘Crimean card’ again. But the evidence from the polls seems to be that a majority of Russians dread a Ukrainian quagmire.
On 28 December 2021, the Russian Supreme Court used the law on ‘foreign agents’, directed against non-governmental organisations critical of Putin or his government, to close the most prestigious of them all, the Memorial, which had persisted in turning up inconvenient facts about Stalin’s Terror. Ordinary Russians will doubtless regard the closure of Memorial as the least of their woes. But it is a terrible measure of how sour the heady liberalism of the early Gorbachev days has turned.
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Can Russia escape the cycle of bungled reform and brutal repression that has marked so much of its history?
Russia was a very different country from what the Soviet Union had been, its huge size diminished by jet aircraft, modern communications and the internet; its people urban, educated, open to the world, comparatively well informed and prosperous by the standards of the past. But the questions remained. Would the Russians ever put together the ‘normal country’ for which so many of them have hoped? Where they could choose and sack their political leaders as they saw fit? Where it would no longer be true, as a tsarist secret policeman once said, that the law was for underlings only, not for their bosses?
Japan reinvented itself in the nineteenth century and again after 1945. The Germans, the Italians and the Spaniards experimented with brutal dictatorship and abandoned it. French, German, Spanish and Swedish armies terrorised Europe for centuries, then decided they preferred peace after all. The Europeans gave up their empires and turned instead to liberal democracy. Only the most obstinate historical determinist would insist that Russians are congenitally unable to make similar changes. Nothing is predictable, but one thing is sure. Russia’s future will be shaped by the Russian people themselves, regardless of the hopes, fears and wishful thinking of foreigners.
There’s another thing. Despite Putin’s success in reinserting Russia onto the world scene, the Soviet Union’s role as the second superpower is no longer available. That place has been taken by China, with ten times Russia’s population, ten times its national wealth and three times its expenditure on defence. And China makes things that everyone wants to buy. The Soviet Union was never able to do that, and Russia seems unable to do it either. So the temptation to see the rivalry between China and America as a replay of the Cold War needs to be avoided. It is only too easy to draw the wrong lessons from the past.