By Razib Khan, City-Journal
For many of us Cold War kids, the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, and the battle between capitalism and global Communism were just background conditions of our youth. But in the United States, what we really talked about wasn’t the Soviets or the Communists so much as the “Russians,” conflating the dominant Soviet ethnicity with the whole nation. Though Russians were only 50 percent of the population of the Soviet Union, Russian language and culture dominated the USSR. Despite being the bulwark of international Communism, the Soviet Union, by the time Joseph Stalin led it in the 1930s, was for all practical purposes the heir of the Russian Empire. This is how a prominent Stalin expert could refer to his subject as the “Red Tsar.”
The abstract rivalry between global alliances and ideologies, between First World capitalism, and Second World Communism, was the concrete battle between Americans and Russians. In 1985’s Rocky IV, Dolph Lundgren’s Ivan Drago is a towering figure of Russian muscle, the perfect villain for Sylvester Stallone’s plucky American underdog, Rocky Balboa, to face off against and defeat. And a national rivalry was seen as such an eternal condition that the original Star Trek, set centuries in the future, had a Russian character, Pavel Chekov, to indicate a rapprochement between the two great powers.
The Cold War had its ups and downs, but Americans tended to see the American–Russian rivalry as a permanent fact of the geopolitical landscape. Despite Ronald Reagan’s optimistic rhetoric about defeating the “evil empire,” the rapidity of Communism’s collapse and the dissolution of the Soviet Union came as a shock. Almost overnight, “Russia” was no longer a vast nation-state that stretched from Europe to the Pacific, enfolding within its frontiers everything from chunks of Eastern Europe to Afghanistan, but a more modest, albeit still massive, country. “Russia” was finally just Russia. That it was now officially called the Russian Federation was just a footnote.
In the 1990s, Russia faded from the American consciousness, with such occasional newsworthy events as internecine violence during the 1993 constitutional crisis or its 1998 financial collapse. Geopolitically, it was all quiet on the Russian front until the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, when Boris Yeltsin objected to the West’s move against Serbia, a historical Russian ally. But change was in the air. On December 31 of that year, Yeltsin resigned, and a then-obscure Vladimir Putin became president. Yeltsin had been a reformer during Mikhail Gorbachev’s time, but as the leader of the Russian Federation in the 1990s he oversaw the rise of oligarchs who came to dominate a society riddled with corruption, while the state became a cat’s paw for Western social engineers experimenting with neoliberal economics. Yeltsin’s descent into alcoholism and personal chaos paralleled the hedonistic anarchy of 1990s Russia.
