From: Matt Taibbi <exile.taibbi at matrix.ru> Subject: STEPHEN COHEN'S "FAILED CRUSADE" Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000
the eXile www.exile.ru STEPHEN COHEN'S "FAILED CRUSADE" Book Review By Matt Taibbi
Let's get the ethical stuff out of the way first: I'm not a disinterested party when it comes to Professor Stephen Cohen's new book, "Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia." The eXile is mentioned in it several times, and Mark Ames and I are footnoted throughout the first section. In one point, we're even credited with producing "some of the best press criticism" coming from Russia. So obviously I have to blow Cohen in this review.
I mention this up front because one of the most interesting things about Cohen's book has been the reaction to it. A lot of the people who reviewed this book were mentioned in it, and of those people, almost none of them-particularly the ones who were villains in the book-admitted to the fact in their reviews.
A conspicuous example is odious sellout John Lloyd of the New Statesman, whose work was cited specifically throughout Cohen's book as an example of some of the dumbest and most irresponsible journalism to come out of Russia in the last ten years. Lloyd's Statesman review blasting Cohen doesn't even mention that he was in the book. (This might have something to do with Statesman policy, incidentally. In a similar case, Oliver Ready recently wrote a smug review of the eXile book for the journal without mentioning that he'd been called a "pencil-necked geek" in our paper).
The Washington Post, while somewhat gentler on Cohen, also chose to give itself a pass in its review. Reviewer Richard Lourie wasn't mentioned in the book specifically, but nearly the whole of part 1 of the book was about the generally shitty performance of his Post's Moscow bureau over the last decade or so. The Post's response, through Lourie, was to take the proverbial "high road", affecting the air of the high school nerd who's been counseled on how to protect himself against abuse from bullies: "Just ignore them." Rather than respond to Cohen's charges that the Post in Russia had been little more than a propaganda organ for U.S.-backed shysters like Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar, Lourie had this to say about Cohen: "He is an excellent critic because he knows his own mind and has no fear of speaking it."
The New York Times was also excoriated in Cohen's book, but if its feelings were hurt, you sure wouldn't have known it from its review. Here's what reviewer Robert Kaplan had to say about Cohen's treatment of his paper:
"[Cohen] derides an editorial in The New York Times for celebrating a new McDonald's in Moscow, frequented by the nouveau riche arriving in Jeep Cherokees and Toyota Land Cruisers, while the average monthly wage 'was about $60, and falling.' Though, broadly speaking, his criticism of the American press is valid, there are important exceptions, notably the travel writer Jeffrey Tayler, who wrote extensively for The Atlantic Monthly about the most distant parts of rural Russia in the 1990's, substantiating Cohen's own claims about the destruction of living standards."
It doesn't get much more smug than that. A famous professor devotes a third of a whole book on the failures of American political journalists in Russia-as exemplified by your newspaper-and you respond by agreeing entirely, taking exception only in the case of some obscure travel writer who a) doesn't write for you, and b) doesn't even write about politics? In the pointy-headed New York pseudo-intellectual world, this is about as close as you can get to a WWF-style dissing. The Times was just flat-out toying with Cohen in its review. In the face of a mountain of criticism, it just dismissed him, with a wave of a hand, as a bitter ex-communist sympathizer whose book means nothing and changes nothing. Then it sighed, yelled "Next!", and moved on to blow the more ideologically-acceptable book by Chrystiya Freeland.
This appears to be sole problem with Cohen's book, that it didn't hurt enough. Constrained by the rules of friendly academic discourse, Cohen-- a great advocate of calling things by their names-- was forced to leave all the names in the small print of the endnotes section. Rat-faced swine David Hoffman thus becomes in Cohen's text "A Washington Post correspondent", while intellectual felon Lloyd becomes merely "A former Moscow correspondent [who exposed] the myth about American shock therapists... without mentioning that he had been their enthusiastic proponent."
These days you can be at or near the top of your profession, write an entire book criticizing a small group of people with the expectation that it will get major press coverage, and yet still have no hope at all of forcing an answer out of anyone on so much as a single question. What could possibly have moved David Hoffman to write "Russia looks great" about a place that hasn't looked great since mastodons roamed it? How could Martin Malia get away with saying about Russia, in April, 1999, "No one anticipated...anything quote like such an impasse"-when in fact there were prominent academics, including Cohen himself, who had publicly predicted the arrival at such an impasse going back many years?
We'll never know the answers to those questions, because these days, if you work for the right side, you never have to answer your critics, even ones as well-known as Cohen. One of the central points of Cohen's book is that people like Hoffman and Malia and Lloyd and Jeffrey Sachs live in a sort of consequence-free environment, where both intellectual and moral errors are rewarded with promotions and accolades. Steve Liesman screws up and wins the Putizer Prize. Andrei Shleifer is caught taking part in an insider trading scheme and wins the John Bates Clarke medal for economics. Scholars and journalists sifting throuh the rubble after Russia's economic collapse contracted amnesia when it came to their own roles, and kept their jobs to screw things up another day.
It seems to me that the lesson in all of this is that it takes more than position papers and endnotes to move the front lines in the fight against these people. You can't fight the David Hoffmans of the world using conventional weaponry. Probably we all need to move on to something more along the lines of the recent activist campaign to jam Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt's mailbox and telephone line, which reportedly forced the former Moscow bureau chief to change his phone number and put a block on his e-mail address. Instead of books like Cohen's, we need to mass-distribute streaming videos of Lawrence Summers sucking off a pony. We don't even need to catch him with the actual pony. We can just assume the pony, put our designers to work on the pictures, and then just send the videos out there without thinking about it.
After all, as Cohen points out-that's what they do. All of these "transitionologists", as Cohen calls them, just assumed that a triumphant transition to democracy was taking place in Russia, and then wrote about it as fact, whether there was evidence there to support the idea or not. It was this mindset, as Cohen points out, that led observers to describe the non-payment of salaries as "victory over inflation" and the impoverishment of over 75 percent of the Russian population as "reform, remarkable progress, and a success story."
Cohen's book is about as good as a book written according to the rules of academic discourse can be. He gets the whole of the Russia story going back some fifteen years more or less completely right. The most interesting part, in my mind, was part II, in which Cohen reprints articles he wrote going back some ten years to prove that he was right all along. This is an extremely intrepid little maneuver, given that Cohen, as he must surely know, already has a reputation for being a famously self-aggrandizing public personality. It takes serious huevos to stand in front of an audience inclined to dismiss you as a pompous jerk at the slightest provocation, pull out a bunch of old papers, and say, "Exhibit A: How Great I Am and Always Have Been."
But the irony of this whole story is that the Lloyds and the Malias of the world left Cohen with every right to do what he did. By claiming over and over again after the 1998 crash that nobody saw disaster coming, they forced Cohen's hand. In order to make his point that the disaster was partly a result of a collective failure of observation (or unwillingness to observe), he had to go back and make the point that the evidence was out there, in full view, all along. His own work was the best possible argument on this score. Cohen must have creamed in his jeans when he realized how easily he could get away with devoting so many pages to saying, "I told you so."
Cohen called many aspects of the crisis long before the crisis happened. Here's his take on privatization way back in 1992:
"Like yesterday's Marxists, today's communists understand that property is power, so the struggle is raging everywhere, from the capitals to the provinces. Some of these people, perhaps many of them, are sincere converts to marketization and democratization. But it is foolish to ignore the politics of confiscation unfolding since late 1991 and its dangerous echoes of politically-motivated expropriations earlier in Soviet history."
Cohen also offered an advance peek at what would ultimately be the central reason for the failure of the American journalistic and diplomatic corps when he wrote:
"...while our diplomats and journalists seek Russia's destiny in Moscow, it is being determined largely in the vast and remote provinces."
Cohen's book has been attacked largely on the grounds that he is secretly a communist sympathizer, that while he succeeds at being a scrupulously well-informed naysayer, he offered neither then nor now anything in the way of viable alternatives to the West's policies toward Russia over the years. Several commentators have accused him of failing to take note of the fact that Russia's catastrophic demographic and economic decline actually began in 1989 and 1990, before the U.S-backed-"reform" team came into government. The argument goes something like this: since the alternative was a return to communism, and the Russians are hopelessly corrupt and inherently incapable of governing themselves, the present Russian reality is, all things considered, the best we could have hoped for. In this rhetorical scheme Cohen is painted as a typical ivory tower intellectual who knows very well how to enhance his own career, but knows nothing about the "real world" diplomats deal with every day.
Ok, fine. Maybe that's true. If it is, it's a criticism that holds true for a lot of us. But what about the other part of it-all the energetic lying our diplomats and journalists did over the course of the last ten years? Why continually call an unfolding disaster "progress" and a "success story"? Why not protest corruption, or even admit that it exists, until Western investors lose their shirts in a devaluation? What about that end of it? This is the primary question that Cohen asks in this book, and judging by the reaction so far, he won't get a good answer to it.
Some of the book's limitations are built into its structure, of course. Cohen writes for a relatively narrow academic audience, and his prose is correspondingly dry. Reading him is a little like listening to Earth, Wind and Fire without the Earth and the Fire. But within its own context the book is quite vituperative towards Cohen's academic colleagues, and in that sense it is extremely entertaining. The chief pleasure it offers is the image it conjures of the presidents of Universities like Stanford and Berkeley reading in detail about the crass stupidities charges of theirs like Michael McFaul and Stanley Fish (another reviewer who failed to mention his own place in the book) have been guilty of all these years. If you cross your fingers as you read, you can almost hope that the book will cause one or the other of these monsters to be passed over for tenure, which is something like physical death for these people. Oh, wait, that already happened to McFaul, even before Cohen's book came out... Maybe to one of the others, then. There's still hope.
Cohen has long been something of an unofficial spokesman of the American left, a distinction he earned both through his own work and through his association with America's leading left-leaning publication, the Nation (a publication which, incidentally, I've written for). With this book Cohen restores some of the dignity the left lost during its embarrassing infatuation with the Clinton administration. The transformation of the standard "bleeding-heart" liberal of the seventies and eighties into the "think-positive" winners of the nineties (who had "their man" in the White House) was one of the key early causes of America's current disaster of political homogenization. By parting with the "winners" over this issue so dear to the heart of the old liberals-the fate of their fallen standard-bearer, the Soviet Union-Cohen has successfully restored some reason and idealism to the oldskool bearded-lefty way of looking at things. Cohen was the perfect candidate for this task, of course, being the prototypical bearded oldskool lefty. He is said to live in a shadowy book- and Knick-poster-lined lair somewhere on the upper West side, and reportedly has some kind of Luddite aversion to e-mail and even computers. "Failed Crusade", in fact, was supposedly written on a typewriter, one clack at a time. John Lloyd and Chrystia Freeland probably write on two iMacs (one blue and one pink, of course) at a time. Not exactly an improvement.