Friends and Rivals: The US-Russia Relationship Needs To Be Cleaned of Ideology

Regardless of what anyone says, the U.S. and Russia are doomed to an eternal geopolitical rivalry. It seems that two great powers with global interests cannot continue any other way. But this should in no way play the main role in their relations.

The Institute of World History is running an international academic conference, “Changing Perceptions of Russia in the U.S., Changing Perceptions of the U.S. in Russia,” to mark the 80-year anniversary of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and USSR [now Russia]. On the whole, it was dedicated to the experiences of cooperation which forged a path through all the years of confrontation between the two countries’ systems. The very fact of its existence improved the nations’ perceptions of each other. To quote one of the compilers, Director of the Institute of Ethnology and anthropology scholar Valeria Tishkova, “Our mutual images have changed, and we have changed ….”

However, from the reports of American Russianists and Russian Americanists, we can see that they have inexorably reached the same conclusion: In 80 years of Russo-American relations, including every single type of relation, the perception of a people came from their politics, not the other way around.

In socialist times, according to a number of scholars, the tone of Roosevelt’s experiments represented Russians as something like a second, inferior copy of themselves: “Let them have Bolshevism, but they are free from imperial oppression, have won freedom and are now engaged in overcoming frontiers and moving into new spaces and possibilities.” Furthermore, at that point the USSR was in no way a rival to the U.S. apart from in its ideology.

Then came the war. America and Russia were allies, fighting against a common enemy. And however suspiciously the elites, ideologies and secret services looked at each other, the Russo-American relationship was incredibly close. It was slightly more restrained on the Russian side — not because they were angry in the delay over the opening of a second front (for that they were more angry at the British), but because they knew very little about the U.S. And their curiosity in this direction was, to put it mildly, fraught ….

And then there was war — and another war, and another. The war was carried out by satellite states, but nobody was fooled. Everybody understood that the Korean, Vietnam and African conflicts, the crises around Berlin, Cuba, Hungary — these were just small flames taken from the main fire, the global opposition between two superpowers. Naturally, at the time when nuclear destruction was not just a threat but actively ready to start on both sides, in these relationships the image of the enemy was dominant. There even existed a “confrontation” between the historians of the two countries, as head of the Russian association of professional historians Vladimir Sogrin noted.

In comparison to that time, ideology in Russo-American relations has almost disappeared. Russia no longer adheres to Marxism-Leninism; instead, communism, as the well-known joke goes, is limited to the Olympics, and capitalism has built up to such a level that we are about to overtake America in our number of billionaires. Meanwhile, in the perceptions of the two nations there is still a sort of “asymmetry” present, in the words of one American researcher.

The continuing divide between Russians and Americans lies not in the ideological, but rather in the dogmatic sphere. It is simply that Russia and the U.S. are too great and powerful, and their spheres of interests are too diverse for them not to bump elbows on our little planet. Even without meaning any harm. It’s just the nature of things. But if even during the “hottest” periods of the Cold War, through the cobblestones of Berlin and the jungles of Vietnam some form of cooperation was able to survive, then today it should be able to survive on an even greater scale — regardless of our rivalry and its inescapable continuance.

That means that it is in our mutual interests to clean any kind of remaining ideology from our relations — all these petty jabs about NGOs, sexual minorities, “dissent” and so on.

We still have to defend our tiny little planet against terrorists. It is better to do that in a state of mutual respect than to follow the fluctuations of ideology.