Moldova and US-Russian Relations

This is an excellent column from Tuesday's Moscow Times. It's especially insightful on the topic of media hostility on both sides of US-Russian relations.

Moscow Times, March 29, 2005
More Missed CIS Opportunities
By Ira Straus

From Ukraine to Moldova to Kyrgyzstan, there is a pattern of rapid learning by Russia and the United States. It is hopeful, but as yet artificially limited. In Ukraine there was mutual opposition and in Kyrgyzstan mutual caution, to avoid tearing the country apart. Both Russia and the West perceive a need to go further and cooperate to stabilize Kyrgyzstan, but have yet to do so. Moldova is the missing link, indicating where the obstacles lie.

A strange thing happened in Moldova earlier this month. Russia and the West were essentially on the same side regarding the elections there March 6 -- a remarkable fact, considering their real differences over Transdnestr. Yet no one heard about this. Just the opposite: A fair amount of noise was made, particularly in the media, as if the two sides were adversaries on Moldova, just as they had been a few months earlier on Ukraine.

Both Russia and the West called for freer campaign conditions before the elections. Both could have hoped for the moderate Democratic Moldova bloc to do as well as possible against the nationalistic Communist Party government. In the end, Democratic Moldova got 28 percent of the vote and the Communists 46 percent, much less than the large majority the Communists won during previous elections, when they had run on a pro-Russia platform. The change gives DM significantly increased bargaining power. But fairer elections would have given it even more votes and bargaining power.

Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe both criticized a string of unfair campaign practices. It would have made sense for them to apply pressure together: As a joint force, this pressure would have been hard for the Moldovan regime to resist.

Yet there was no active or visible Russia-West solidarity. Instead, there was the appearance of friction, which to a slight extent reflected reality. The Russian and U.S. media portrayed their two countries as somehow on opposing sides in Moldova.

Russia, trapped by its own polemic against OSCE interference in CIS countries, simply didn't think of joining hands with the OSCE on Moldova. The Russian media polemicized against supposed Western designs for the next Orange Revolution, even though such a revolution would have been Russia's best hope due to its rocky relations with Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin. It did not help, to be sure, that the color orange was usurped in Moldova by the Christian Democrats, a small, anti-Russian, Romanian-nationalist party well to the right of DM.

Here we see in operation the way vicious circles are created. First, the Western and Russian media both pinned a misleading, oversimplified anti-Russian label on the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Then, anti-Russian ethno-nationalists in Moldova proceed to take up the orange banner as their own. Finally, Russians attacked any prospect of anything orange in Moldova.

Some Western papers wrote, as if totally ignorant of the country, that Moldova was a Russian-controlled dictatorship. In this way, they managed to reconcile their anti-Russian sentiments with their distaste for the authoritarianism of the Moldovan Communist regime. Moldova was often lumped together with Belarus, and anything wrong in either country was blamed on Moscow.

The facts didn't seem to matter much to the Western media, perhaps because none of them really cared about Moldova. What mattered was to present data -- real or imagined -- in the form of arguing against the "other side" and creating the impression of a Russia-West conflict. That was, after all, more interesting to reporters and editors than internal Moldovan issues, and it fit within their pre-established storyline about U.S.-Russia relations.

In short, some of the basic facts about the elections in Moldova simply failed to register unless they could be fit into an anti-American or anti-Russian mold. [...]

The experience of the Moldovan election shows that the mere passive fact of shared U.S.-Russia interests is not enough to overcome old habits of conflict and confrontation. Solidarity would require a deliberate effort to work out a strategy in common, followed by a visible effort to implement it in common. Only then, it seems, will it be understood at the core of national institutions -- the media, the military, the state bureaucracy -- that the West and Russia really are in the business of cooperating, not competing. [...]

In Moldova, the two sides had a chance to gain election results somewhat better for both of them and, in the process, to repair their mutual relations after the Ukrainian revolution. In Kyrgyzstan, they had a chance to smooth the transition, in the process building positive mutual relations. The need is still there: The situation in Kyrgyzstan remains unstable, and difficult reconciliations are needed.

Russia and the United States missed their chance in Moldova. They need to ask themselves how many more opportunities they can afford to miss.

I would add (not entirely on-topic) that I see more anti-Americanism on the Russian media side and simply apathy on the US media side. Here, Channel 1 and Rossiia cover the US approach toward Russia as big news, or at least they cover some Kremlin spin doctor's idea of the way the US approach toward Russia should be portrayed as the sinister explanation for whatever the day's bad news is for Russia; in the US, on the other hand, not many people care about what the Russian government is saying, especially not about something happening in Moldova.

Nothing makes an average American's eyes glaze over like mentioning Moldova, let me tell ya - then you mention "former Soviet republic," and you can see them mentally categorizing it under "Russia." But I digress, and these comments are not really that relevant to the ideas discussed in the column above. To conclude the rambling, maybe if the Russian government was involved in promoting democracy in Canada or Mexico, Joe Sixpack would care, but I don't think the average American is as concerned about or interested in Russia as the average Russian is about America.