The Russian foray is a joke, albeit one with dangerous possibilities.
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>From today's NY Times:
Muscovites Savor a Caper After Being Down So Long
By Michael Wines
Moscow -- As a military operation, it was insignificant. But as a symbol, there is no more potent metaphor for Russia's regard of the West than the image last weekend of 200 Russian soldiers seizing a Kosovo airfield, and then lining up armored personnel carriers to keep NATO troops out.
Kremlin officials offered a strategic explanation for the move, involving the need to acquire bargaining chips in talks on Kosovo's future and to establish Moscow once and for all as a player in the peace process.
But most Russians were uninterested in the diplomacy. For them, it was a moment to savor, a rare act of one-upmanship by a faded power against a military that once viewed them with fear and awe. But it was a chance to say vicariously what they increasingly feel: that they are fed up with the overbearing West in general, and the United States in particular.
It is not easy for most Westerners to understand. But 78 days of war in Yugoslavia, a country a thousand miles removed from Moscow and no special soul mate of Russia in any case, seems to have convinced many Russians that the West is their enemy.
"All the anti-Western attitudes that were accumulating in the society resulted in this explosion when the war began," Igor Bunin, a historian and director of Moscow's Center for Political Technology, said in an interview. In focus groups involving scores of Moscow residents, he said, "many respondents said at the time that the bombs were not falling on Yugoslavia, but on their own heads."
The feeling is not universal. Some polls show Russian opinion of the United States and the West has softened somewhat since the war's peak. But even Russian newspapers, which viewed last weekend's operation in Kosovo as a diplomatic and public-relations debacle, called it "dashing" and lightning-fast.
One noted with satisfaction that Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott's airplane had been forced to perform a mid-air U-turn and return to Moscow when news of the troop movement surfaced -- just desserts, because former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov had been forced to abandon a Washington trip in mid-air when the bombing began in March.
If Russia's pleasure at such slight victories seems out of place, one need only listen to politicians and military leaders to realize the depths of their anger at the West's supposed efforts to feed on Russian weakness.
In anonymous remarks this weekend, Russian military officials repeatedly talked of ending their humiliation by American and NATO forces, which bombed Yugoslavia with impunity. Ordinary Moscovites frequently express the conviction that NATO and the West have Russia in their sights, and that the Yugoslavia war was merely a test run for a larger conflict.
Much of their reasoning is no secret. In the former Soviet Union, average people suffered, but could still take pride in military and scientific achievements. Democratic Russia promised affluence, peace and full membership in the club of Western nations that many Russians had admired for decades.
But none of it has come about. Russia's foundering transition to capitalism was plotted largely by American academics and business leaders and carried out by pro-Western politicians; some now see it as a Western plot to impoverish the nation. Except for honorary memberships in organizations like the G-8 group of industrial nations and NATO's Partnership for Peace, Moscow has largely been shut out of Western decision making.
NATO itself has proven far more of a sticking point than many Westerners realized. The West rebuffed Russia's early proposals to move toward full membership in the alliance. When the United States and Europe first announced plans to admit new members to NATO from Central Europe, Russian leaders immediately complained that they were being encircled by a potentially hostile military force -- fears that NATO tried to allay by giving Russia an advisory seat in the organization.
"The decision to enlarge NATO could not be understood by anybody in Russia because Russians know very well how weak Russia is today," said Sergei Rogov, who heads the government's Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada. "On the other hand, Russians felt that we ended the Cold War and started to behave nicely by dissolving the Warsaw Pact, withdrawing troops, cutting arms. And thus the very maintenance of NATO was seen as strange."
Rogov argued that the West consistently underestimated the Russian public's suspicion of NATO's expansion. That raised the prospect of an anti-Western explosion should NATO became involved in a European crisis, he said.
And Bunin, of the Moscow center, said Yugoslavia provided the spark. The problem, he said, was not that Russians saw Yugoslavia or its president, Slobodan Milosevic, as allies or martyrs; rather the problem was the Russians had no opinions about them.
"There was no anti-Milosevic propaganda in Russia," he said. "Nobody looked at Milosevic as a new Hitler or as the person who is seen in the West. And so the NATO and U.S. attack looked to us as completely unprovoked, as the step toward world hegemony."
[end]
Carl Remick