Blame Everything on Kissinger

Once again, Russian and American presidents are trying to establish a channel of cooperation: Nikolai Patrushev, Russia’s Security Council Secretary, set off for Washington with a letter to Barack Obama. He met with U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and discussed missile defense and Syria. Hagel expressed hope of meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu.

Although the American side is clearly striving to continue dialogue with Russia and, it seems, is trying to iron out all the rough edges, the “reset” is still stalling. Normalizing relations between the two countries has become the victim of domestic politics in both Moscow and Washington — and it doesn’t seem that a favorable solution will be found anytime soon.

Both sides are always looking for someone to blame for these continuing difficulties in the relationship. In the United States, more often than not, the Russian president is often to blame. In Russia, the responsibility has usually fallen on Clinton or Bush Junior, and sometimes on Madeline Albright or Zbigniew Brzezinski. Individual experts remember with unkind words the evil neocons, who tricked the United States into the Iraq War. Almost no one, however, says anything about one prominent and surviving political figure who stands apart from all of these altercations and appears not to want to take any part in it all. I am talking about the former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Next week, this most authoritative of living statesmen turns 90 years old, giving us reason to examine him and his successes more closely.

It is necessary to say that for some time, the Russian attitude toward Kissinger was very benevolent. I can even say exactly when this happened. This happened in 2003, when the former secretary of state became the voice of reason in our country against the noisy neocons, who demanded at the time to punish Russia for failing to embrace the America position on Iraq, and especially during the “Yukos affair” [oil company bankruptcy]. During this time, Kissinger visited Russia often, meeting with national and local leaders, trying to convince us that the saner parts of the Bush administration did not have malicious feelings toward relations with our country and our leaders. Afterward came Condoleezza Rice, making belligerent statements about the fight for democracy, but by that time everyone had been alerted to not taking her statements too seriously.

Then, many began to remember that although Kissinger — the architect of détente in the 1970s — acted shyly and cautiously, he was against American intervention in the Kosovo conflict, resulting in human rights activists on all sides deriding him as a Pinochet or a Milosevic. In general, Kissinger was seen here as a voice of “realist” America, with whom Russia could engage.

Frankly speaking, even I thought all this, until I picked up Kissinger’s latest book, “On China,” and read it cover to cover. I was especially shocked to read where Kissinger talks about how in 1969, during the Sino-Soviet conflict over Damansky Island, then Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin made “frequent visits” to Kissinger “in order to inform him of the Soviet version of events.”* Dobrynin, about whom Kissinger writes with barely concealed contempt, tells Kissinger the real truth, hoping for the Americans’ understanding: He says that the Chinese began the conflict, trapping Soviet border guards. But Kissinger found it necessary to present the issue in a different way: The aggressor was the USSR. The ex-secretary of state writes, “Let our analysis of the causes of the collision be wrong, let us lie to ourselves and our nation — but in fact, we made a clear step toward rapprochement with Mao Zedong.”*

Well, what happens if you look at this pettiness from a position of broader history? The Soviet Union in 1969 relied on the understanding of the Americans. The Soviet Union at that time, of course, was far from a democracy, but it was no longer a totalitarian monster: Economic reform had begun, the rejection of Stalinism was underway, and leading up to 1969, those who insisted on his rehabilitation had been defeated. Of course, from the American point of view, the Soviet Union was not ideal, but was prepared for cooperation and rapprochement with its potential partner. However, at this historic moment the United States was turning away from our country and selected as its ally the totalitarian regime of Mao, who had just undertaken his bloody “Cultural Revolution,” meaning an open pogrom of his economy, culture and education. The main ideologue of this U-turn was no other than the aforementioned future hero of the day, who does not hide the fact that in order to deal with a monster, he coolly beat the naïve, simple-minded Brezhnev leadership.

But things could have turned out quite differently. After all, if Kissinger believed Dobrynin and Nixon supported the Soviet version of events about Damansky Island, if there had been no sort of alliance between Mao and American conservatives, this would have, most likely, strengthened the liberal position in the Soviet Union; it would have strengthened the position of those who wanted the USSR to move closer in the direction of euro-communism and the final dismantling of Stalinism. This general climate of relations between the two powers would have also been governed by people like the academician Andrei Sakharov, on one side, and the economist John Kenneth Gilbert, on the other. I mean people who dreamed about a gradual convergence of the two systems on the basis of progressive, scientific-industrial developments. This would be a true union of two developed worlds.

But Kissinger made a different choice — he preferred to unite capitalist America with a huge reservoir of cheap labor. As we understand it today, this historic choice made possible the geopolitical collapse of the Soviet Union, punctured in Afghanistan, and the approval of global capitalism. But with this same step, the movement of scientific-industrial progress stopped not only in the Soviet Union, but also in the Western world and, in the end, became the cause of the current global impasse. Not only do relations between the two countries now exist at such an impasse, but also, it seems, does the entirety of human history.

Alas, today hardly anyone in Russia and the United States is prepared to look at our common problems from this height. But what if overcoming the Kissinger heritage is the only true basis of normalizing relations between our two countries? If this fateful choice in March 1969 had been different, today we would not have to guess how to find a common language on issues of nuclear safety and Middle East peace.

Kissinger at ninety — isn’t now a good time to fix this historic dislocation, which does not currently allow our countries to exchange a friendly handshake?

* Editor’s Note: Though accurately translated, I was unable to verify quotes.