DISADVANTAGE/RUSSIA

LINK: WE MUST NOT PAMPER RUSSIA

PAMPERING RUSSIA IS THE WRONG POLICY -- WE MUST CONFRONT IT

Georgie Anne Geyer, Universal Press Syndicate The Columbus Dispatch November 17, 1999, SECTION: EDITORIAL & COMMENT, Pg. 13A HEADLINE: WAR IN CHECHNYA SHOWS MOSCOW IS ON THE OLD SOVIET PATH // ln-acs 12/18/99

First, this new picture of events in Russia should make it clear to thinking people in the West that virtually none of the principles of liberal democracy are taking root in Russia. Actually, it is going the other way -- and more Western pampering of a Russia that does not exist is hardly going to help.

For instance, a recent study of the Russian Academy of Sciences showed that Russia's criminalized "shadow economy,'' far from being an aberration, is actually transforming the rest of the country. Its rules are dominant and will be even more so in the future, as they become the new legality.

These trends in turn are likely to increasingly threaten the rest of the world.

USA NEEDS TO RECOGNIZE RUSSIA AS AN IMPERIALIST STATE AND STOP BABYING IT

Georgie Anne Geyer, Universal Press Syndicate The Columbus Dispatch November 17, 1999, SECTION: EDITORIAL & COMMENT, Pg. 13A HEADLINE: WAR IN CHECHNYA SHOWS MOSCOW IS ON THE OLD SOVIET PATH // ln-acs 12/18/99

The war in Chechnya, it can now be seen, in truth represents the Russian retreat from any transformation to liberal democracy for what is probably a very long time, and a return to autocracy and imperialism. It is past time for the United States to recognize this salient reality of a mythical "post-Cold War world'' that is rapidly consolidating into a kind of post- Soviet Sovietism.