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American Journalism and Russia's Tragedy

American Journalism and Russia's Tragedy

The US press is again reporting that Russia's half-dead economy is 'booming' - thus playing its part in the crusade to remake Russia in the US image

Stephen F. Cohen

With only a few exceptions, America's professional Russia-watchers--policy-makers, financial advisers, scholars and, not least, journalists--committed malpractice throughout the nineties. They claimed to know the cure for what ailed Russia after the Soviet breakup in 1991, gave regular assurances about the ongoing treatment and, while noting occasional relapses, predicted a full recovery.

Their prescriptions, reports and prognoses have turned out to be completely wrong. Nearly a decade later, Russia is afflicted by the worst economic depression in modern history, corruption so extensive that capital flight far exceeds all foreign loans and investment, and a demographic catastrophe unprecedented in peacetime. The result has been a massive human tragedy. Among other calamities, some 75 percent of Russians now live below or barely above the poverty line; 50-80 percent of school-age children are classified as having a physical or mental defect; and male life-expectancy has plunged to less than sixty years. And, ominously, a fully nuclearized country and its devices of mass destruction have, for the first time in history, been seriously destabilized, the Kursk submarine disaster in August being yet another example.

Underlying all the American misreporting and false analyses of the nineties was an enthusiastic embrace of the Clinton Administration's ill-conceived policy--a virtual crusade to transform post-Communist Russia under President Boris Yeltsin into a replica of America through US-sponsored "reforms," first and foremost economic "shock therapy." The crusade was (and remains) an official project, but it also captivated investors, academics and journalists, who in their respective professional (or unprofessional) ways became its missionaries.

Reporters, editorialists and columnists played an especially lamentable role. Accepting the Administration's premise that "Yeltsin represents the direction toward the kind of Russia we want,"1 they made that nation's purported "transition to free-market capitalism and democracy," as the process of conversion was termed, the guiding concept, prism and basic narrative of their coverage, with little, if any, concern for its impact on the people or the country's stability. As the missionary chorus of the American crusade, they helped obscure Russia's unfolding tragedy and abetted the worst US foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. It was, and in significant ways continues to be, a bleak chapter in the history of American journalism.

Journalists had long been forewarned. At the birth of Communist Russia, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz published an analysis of the US press coverage of the 1917 Revolution and the ensuing civil war between Reds and Whites that became a celebrated textbook case study of journalistic malpractice. Lippmann and Merz found that in terms of professional standards the reporting was "nothing short of a disaster" and that the "net effect was almost always misleading." The main reason, they concluded, was that US correspondents and editors believed fervently in their government's anti-Red crusade and had thus seen "not what was, but what men wished to see."2

Seven decades later, it happened again. Most journalists writing for influential US newspapers and newsmagazines believed in the Clinton Administration's crusade to remake post-Communist Russia. Like a Washington Post columnist, they quickly "converted to Yeltsin's side." Like Business Week's Moscow correspondent, they "hoped for the liberal alternative" and believed in the "job that Yeltsin and his liberal reformers had begun." Like the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, they were certain Russia needed the "same basic model" that America had. And with that newspaper's correspondent, they worried constantly that Russia might opt instead for a "path of its own confused devising." Some were even more embattled. For a longtime Washington Post correspondent still in Moscow today, the post-Communist crusade was another chapter in a "Cold War...not yet really won."3

Leaving aside a plethora of factual errors, the first casualty, as Lippmann and Merz had warned, was professional objectivity. Moscow correspondents, according to a 1996 survey, tended to look at events there "through the prism of their own expectations and beliefs." Three years later, a reviewer of a book by a former correspondent concluded that the author's "spectacularly wrong projections" arose out of her personal hopes for Russia, "which prompted her to accept appearances for reality and desire for fact."4

Such hopes and fears produced a US media narrative of post-Communist Russia that was manichean and based largely on accounts propounded by US officials. On the side of good were President Yeltsin and his succession of crusading "young reformers," sometimes called "democratic giants"--notably, Yegor Gaidar, Anatoly Chubais, Boris Nemtsov and Sergei Kiriyenko. On the side of darkness was the unfailingly antireform horde of Communist, nationalist and other political dragons ensconced in its malevolent parliamentary cave. Chapter by chapter, the story was reported over and again for nearly a decade, always from the perspective of the "reformers" and their Western supporters. It was, a leading Russian journalist thought, a "deception."5

* * *

Yeltsin and his team were, it seemed, the only worthy political figures in all the vastness of Russia. Most Russians saw his economic shock therapy, which had cost tens of millions of ordinary citizens their life savings and plunged them into poverty, and related political measures as extremist, but for the US press Yeltsin was the sole bulwark against "extremists of both left and right."6 There was little if any room for non-Yeltsin reformers. When one, Grigory Yavlinsky, ran against Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential campaign, he was pilloried in US dispatches and editorials: "History will remember who was the spoiler if things go bad for democracy." On the other hand, whomever Yeltsin appointed, however unsavory his political biography, invariably turned out to have "clean hands" and to be "one of the democrats" and a "reformer," including Yeltsin's eventual designated successor, Vladimir Putin, a career KGB officer.7

More generally, affirming that all Yeltsin backers were invariably "reformers" resulted in odd reasoning on the part of US journalists. Thus, Moscow's mayor could be "a democrat" while being "an autocratic ruler." A Washington Post correspondent even included rapacious insider-oligarchs because "they bankrolled Yeltsin's presidential campaign against his Communist rival...and they generally favor the country's rocky transition to a free-market democracy, which has made them fabulously wealthy." His Newsweek counterpart knew who could not be a "reformer"--anyone "generally antipathetic to US interests in Russia."8

Sustaining such a manichean narrative in the face of so many conflicting realities turned American journalists into boosters for US policy and cheerleaders for Yeltsin's Kremlin. As early as 1993, even a pro-American Russian thought the US coverage of his country was "media propaganda." An independent New York press critic made a similar point in 1996, complaining that newspaper reporting was a "mirror of State Department double-think." For a senior US scholar, the media's pro-Yeltsinism even "recalls the pro-Communist fellow-travelling of the 1930s," though the "ideological positions are reversed."9

American journalists created, for example, cults of those Russian politicians whom the US government had chosen to embody its policy. The extraordinary Yeltsin cult of the early 1990s--"as Yeltsin goes, so goes the nation," in Time's formulation--was eventually eroded by his policy failures and personal behavior. But as late as 1999 he remained, according to the New York Times, the "key defender of Russia's hard-won democratic reforms" and "an enormous asset for the U.S."10

As for Yeltsin's "young reformers," no matter how failed their policies or dubious their conduct, their reputations hardly suffered at all, at least not for long. Consider Chubais, whom US officials regarded as a "demigod" and head of an "economic dream team."11 Even after he was widely suspected of having ordered a cover-up of a Kremlin financial crime by his aides (an allegation later confirmed), a New York Times correspondent informed readers that "Chubais is plotting how to carry out the next stage of Russia's democratic revolution." And long after he was known to have personally profited from the privatization programs he administered, in part by rigging market transactions, he remained, according to another Times correspondent, a "free-market crusader," indeed the "Eliot Ness of free-market reform."12 Nor was the Times alone in such reporting. A 1999 study by two American journalists published in The Nation concluded that the Wall Street Journal's Moscow bureau had been "little more than a PR conduit for a corrupt regime."13

* * *

There were even worse malpractices at the expense of professed American values. In 1993 US columnists and editorialists followed the Clinton Administration almost in unison in loudly encouraging Yeltsin's unconstitutional shutdown of Russia's Parliament and then in cheering his armed assault on that popularly elected body. The reasons given were uninformed and ethically specious. Insisting that "it would be not just expedient but right to support undemocratic measures," journalists even rehabilitated the ends-justify-the-means apologia long associated with and thoroughly discredited by Soviet Communists themselves: "One can't make an omelette without breaking eggs."14 Even the next Parliament, the Duma, elected under Yeltsin's own superpresidential constitution, became a target of US media abuse, as though Russia would be more democratic without a legislature, ruled only by the president and his appointees.15

Another example highlights the irrelevance, even cold indifference, of much US reporting on post-Communist Russia, where (even according to a semiofficial Moscow newspaper) most people were "being exploited" and impoverished in unprecedented ways. Discussing the brutal impact of economic shock therapy on ordinary citizens, another pro-Western Russian complained that US correspondents had "no desire to look Russia's tragic reality straight in the eye." A Reuters journalist later made the same observation: "The pain is edited out."16

* * *

Poverty and health crises were, of course, reported, but usually as sidebars to the main story of Russia's "transition" and as legacies of the Communist past. Virtually all US correspondents and editorial writers were contemptuous of any Russian proposals for a gradual, "somehow less painful reform," whether by Yeltsin's own vice president in 1993 or Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov in 1998 and 1999. Indeed, they seemed to think, following US officials and economists whose policies had already failed disastrously, that more shock therapy was needed, such as eliminating the housing and utilities subsidies that sustained millions of impoverished families, perhaps half the nation or more.17

Like old-time Soviet journalists, their latter-day US counterparts pardoned present deprivations in the name of a bright future that did not come. There was, for example, this astonishing but not unrepresentative assurance published by an especially influential US journalist in 1997: "While it is undoubtedly true that daily life in Russia today suffers from a painful economic, political, and social transition, the Russian prospect over the coming years and decades is more promising than ever before in its history."18 The following year Moscow's fraudulent financial system collapsed and the "prospect" for tens of millions of Russians became even more "painful."

As Russia sank ever deeper into economic depression and poverty, US journalists continued to parrot Kremlin and Washington assertions that economic stability and takeoff, which still have not really come, were just around the corner. (Vice President Al Gore is quoted as having said in March 1998, "Optimism prevails universally among those who are familiar with what is going on in Russia.") On the eve of its 1998 financial meltdown (and even after), they still found ways to assure readers that Russia was "a remarkable success story."19 Not even Putin's subsequent admission that "poverty exists on an unusually large scale in the country" would make it a focus of US reporting.

Many American correspondents clearly did not like "doom-and-gloom" stories about unpaid wages and pensions, malnutrition and abandoned provinces, where, a Russian journalist tells us, "desperation touches everyone." (Newsweek's correspondent advised the poor to continue living on bread: "They could do worse.")20 Nor did they report more than a very few of the desperate acts of protest taking place around the country, and virtually none of the ways the "reform" government deprived workers of whatever rights and protection they once had in the Soviet system. American journalists preferred other "metaphors for Russia's metamorphosis"21--usually in the tiny segment of Moscow society that had prospered, from financial oligarchs to yuppies spawned by the temporary proliferation of Western enterprises.

Thus, for a Washington Post columnist who had recently been a correspondent, an especially successful insider beneficiary of state assets was a progressive "baby billionaire" and, for the Wall Street Journal, a "Russian Bill Gates."22 For others, including a New York Times editorial writer and also former Moscow correspondent, "one of the best seats for observing the new Russia is on the terrace outside the cavernous McDonald's [that] serves as a mecca for affluent young Muscovites. They arrive in Jeep Cherokees and Toyota Land Cruisers, cell phones in hand."23 In the new Russia at that time, the average monthly wage, when actually paid, was about $60, and falling.

No wonder few readers of the US press were prepared for Russia's economic collapse and financial scandals of the late nineties. Those who relied on the New York Times, for example, must have been startled to learn--from an investigative reporter, not a Russia-watcher--that contrary to its prior reporting and editorials, "The whole political struggle in Russia between 1992 and 1998 was between different groups trying to take control of state assets. It was not about democracy or market reform."24

* * *

Facts may be stubborn things, but in this case no more so than many US journalists. In 1999 the Yeltsin era and Russia's purported "transition" to prosperity, stability and democracy ended not only in economic collapse and human misery but also in the first civil war in a nuclear country and with a career KGB officer in the Kremlin. A few US journalists spoke of "lost illusions"--though almost never their own25--but most merely updated the media's fictitious narrative of the nineties. Thus, on the occasion of Putin's election this past March, top editors of both the New York Times and Washington Post wrote apologias for the entire Yeltsin period and by implication their papers' coverage of the Russian nineties.26

Certainly there has been no media (or official) reconsideration of the arrogant, intrusive and dangerously counterproductive US crusade to transform a different civilization. In late 1999 the Post's chief Moscow correspondent extolled the "great Russian transition," marveling that "Russians have accomplished much of what we asked." An editor of the New York Times Book Review, presumably in a position to know, reassured readers of "the desirability of remaking the former Soviet Union in a Western image." And like those of other influential papers, the Post's editors remain unrepentantly missionary: "Yes, meddle in Russian affairs."27

Nor has there been any real acknowledgment of the crusade's calamitous impact on the Russian people, whose fate the US government and media so lamented when they were the Soviet people. The "Great Transition Depression," as a UN study properly calls it, is almost never mentioned and the nation's massive poverty only euphemistically, as in "Russians who have benefited little."28 By the late nineties, according to a Moscow writer admired in America, the "pitiful ruins of the Russian economy stuck out on the bared sandbars as if after a shipwreck." But to a visiting high-level Washington Post expert, "Russia looks terrific." Similarly, for Business Week's ranking specialist, the insider privatization that most Russians equate with plundering and impoverishment remains "one of the most successful reforms of the Yeltsin era."29

Even the economic happy talk of the pre-1998 meltdown is back. US press accounts, parroting as they did in the nineties self-serving assurances by Western bankers and investment firms, are again reporting that Russia's half-dead economy is actually "booming."30 But Russian authorities from economists to President Putin have warned that the modest spurt of industrial output since 1999 is the result of artificial and temporary factors and has done little if anything to benefit capital investment or ordinary citizens. (Capital flight may even have increased during this period.)

* * *

Coverage of Putin himself, the little-known head of the KGB's successor agency only a year ago, has been more mixed. He became president thanks to a nearly genocidal war in Chechnya and an electoral process manipulated by Kremlin insiders hoping for a post-Yeltsin praetorian to protect their power and ill-gotten wealth. Predictably, the Clinton Administration immediately anointed him "one of the leading reformers" and his political rise a "genuine democratic transition." Until it finally acknowledged last month that the new Russian leader is "the un-Boris," the Administration tried to make Putin its Yeltsin of the twenty-first century in order to justify its failed policies of the nineties.

Some US journalists did the same. According to the lead New York Times correspondent, to take perhaps the most influential example, Putin occupied the Kremlin through "a democratic transfer of executive power" and "clearly has an intellectual grasp of democracy," even a "seemingly emotional commitment to building a democracy."31 (A six-month investigation by the Moscow Times, an expatriate paper, has just concluded that "falsification" was "decisive" in Putin's March electoral victory.)

When the American press turned sharply against Putin in August over his perceived handling of the Kursk tragedy, the extraordinarily voluminous coverage was no less ideological and sermonizing. It seemed as though the US government had never lost a nuclear submarine and its crew, put "great power" interests above those of victims and their families, concealed strategic information in the name of national security and now has more right to prowl the Barents Sea than does Russia. Indeed, much of the coverage suggested that our former superpower rival should immediately disarm unilaterally. Nor, of course, did the commentary point out how much Yeltsin's US-sponsored "reforms" had done to erode Russia's maintenance and control of its nuclear weapons.

But most of the press still has nothing but enthusiasm for the "excellent" economic program being attributed to Putin--a new dose of severe, admittedly "painful" shock therapy that could only further victimize the poor and profit the rich. In addition to a regressive 13 percent flat tax, it would slash remaining social guarantees, including the housing and utilities subsidies that barely sustain most Russians, raise basic consumer prices and endanger already meager pensions. It is, a US correspondent joyfully points out, "considerably bolder than almost any plans that most Western nations have ever tried to push past suspicious voters."32

The mainstream US press may be indifferent to the fate of Russia's impoverished majority but not to that of its handful of "much maligned" oligarchs who were allowed under Yeltsin to "privatize" hundreds of billions of dollars of Soviet state assets for a fraction of their value. The country's economic recovery requires some degree of renationalization, as even the former chief economist of the World Bank argues. But when Putin began to crack down on oligarchical asset-stripping, tax evasion and illegal capital export this summer--steps approved by 75 percent of Russians surveyed--the Washington Post sternly warned him against "revisiting the privatization deals" and the Wall Street Journal, against even "antagonizing" the tycoons.33

All this suggests that many American journalists, like Western investors, the US government and the kleptocrats themselves, would hardly object if Putin becomes a Russian Pinochet in order to safeguard Yeltsin's "reforms" and impose his own "excellent program." Thus, a Los Angeles Times correspondent reports, apparently in full agreement, the growing Western view that "a little authoritarianism might be just what Russia needs."34 If influential US journalists and the institutions they represent now share this opinion, we are left with nearly a decade of not only empirical but also ethical malpractice.

The following abbreviations are used: Business Week (BW); Johnson Russia List, e-mail (JRL); Los Angeles Times (LAT); The New Republic (NR); New York Times (NYT); Washington Post (WP); and Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Considerably more evidence and examples appear in my Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York, 2000).

1. Quoted by Daniel Williams in WP, March 13, 1993.

2. "A Test of the News," supplement to NR, Aug. 4, 1920.

3. Jim Hoagland in WP, Nov. 6, 1992; Rose Brady, Kapitalizm (New Haven, 1999), pp. 242-43; Thomas Friedman in NYT, Oct. 24, 1999; Steven Erlanger, ibid., July 28, 1993; David Hoffman in WP, Sept. 19, 1999.

4. Ellen Shearer and Frank Starr, "Through a Prism Darkly," American Journalism Review, Sept. 1996, p. 37; Anthony Olcott in WP Book World, June 27, 1999, p. 6. For a general indictment of press coverage, see Matt Bivens and Jonas Bernstein, "The Russia You Never Met," Demokratizatsiya, Fall 1998, pp. 613-47; and Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, The eXile (New York, 2000). For references to factual errors, see my Failed Crusade, p. 252, n. 17 and p. 264, n. 92.

5. Leonid Krutakov interviewed by Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames in JRL, Oct. 23, 1999. For "giants," see Lee Hockstader in WP, Jan. 1, 1995. For examples of sourcing, see Steven Erlanger in NYT, April 9, Dec. 4, 1993; Fred Hiatt in WP, March 26, 1995, Dec. 10, 1996; and David Hoffman, ibid., Dec. 13, 1997. On the other hand, Russia's many opposition politicians and economists were rarely quoted or interviewed, except to be dismissed. Still worse, there is little evidence in the coverage that US correspondents in Moscow read the Russian press.

6. NYT editorial, Dec. 14, 1993. Similarly, see David Hoffman in WP, Oct. 1, 1995.

7. For Yavlinsky, see Michael Specter quoting Michael McFaul approvingly in NYT, May 5, 1996; and similarly the NYT editorial on May 1, 1996, and Specter's dispatch on May 18, 1996. For "clean hands," see Michael Wines on Sergei Stepashin, ibid., May 13, 1999; and, similarly, Michael Gordon's promotion of the inexperienced and inept Sergei Kiriyenko, ibid., April 12, 1998.

8. Alessandra Stanley in NYT, June 10, 1997; David Hoffman in WP, Jan. 10, 1997; and Carroll Bogert in Newsweek, March 21, 1994, p. 51.

9. Vladimir Kvint in NYT, Jan. 24, 1993; James Ledbetter in Village Voice, May 28, 1996; Robert V. Daniels, Russia's Transformation (Lanham, Md., 1998), p. 193.

10. John Kohan in Time, Dec. 7, 1992; Celestine Bohlen and Thomas Friedman in NYT, April 15, 16, 1999, and similarly the editorial, June 6, 1999.

11. Bivens and Bernstein, p. 620.

12. Michael Gordon and Alessandra Stanley in NYT, Oct. 17, 1996, Nov. 17, 1997. Similarly, see David Hoffman in WP, Sept. 9, 1997; Paul Quinn-Judge in Time, Dec. 15, 1997; and Carol Williams in LAT, March 25, 1998.

13. Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames, "The Journal's Russia Scandal," The Nation, Oct. 4, 1999, p. 20.

14. Charles Krauthammer and Jim Hoagland in WP, March 19, 1993. For omelettes, see also David Remnick on Charlie Rose, PBS, Oct. 4, 1993. For voices in unison, see A.M. Rosenthal, the editorial and Leslie Gelb in NYT, March 16, 22, 28, April 29, 1993; George Will in WP, March 25, 1993; and editorials in Chicago Tribune, May 9, 1993, and NR, April 12, 1993.

15. See, e.g., Alessandra Stanley in NYT, Jan. 19, 1997; Chicago Tribune editorial, May 9, 1998; and Jim Hoagland in WP, Dec. 16, 1999.

16. Oleg Bogomolov in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Feb. 8, 1994; and John Morrison cited in Shearer and Starr, p. 39. For exploitation, see Iraida Semenova and Aleksei Podymov in Rossisskaia Gazeta, Jan. 24, 2000.

17. See Steven Erlanger in NYT, April 24, 1993; for more shock therapy, see WP, editorial, March 12, 1997; Michael Gordon in NYT, July 13, 1997; and below, note 32.

18. David Remnick, Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia (New York, 1997), p. 362.

19. See, e.g., Steven Erlanger, the editorials and Richard Stevenson in NYT, Aug. 22, 1994, July 16, Sept. 25, 1995, May 24, 1996; Fred Hiatt, Margaret Shapiro, Michael Dobbs and the editorial in WP, April 2, July 30, 1995, March 19, 1997; Carol Williams in LAT, Dec. 2, 1997; Steve Liesman in WSJ, Jan. 28, 1998; and Hiatt in WP, July 12, 1998. For Gore, see Mark Egan, Reuters dispatch, JRL, Oct. 8, 1999.

20. Carroll Bogert in Newsweek, May 31, 1993, p. 12. For more impatience with "doom and gloom," see Steve Liesman in WSJ, Sept. 26, 1996. For the provinces, Leonid Krutakov cited above, note 5.

21. Ann Hulbert in NR, Oct. 2, 1995.

22. Fred Hiatt in WP, March 9, 1998; WSJ quoted in Bivens and Bernstein, p. 631. Similarly, see Richard Stevenson's enthusiasm for the Russian-American investor Boris Jordan in NYT, Sept. 20, 1995, in light of the exposé of Jordan's activities by David Filipov and Matt Taibbi in the Boston Globe, Oct. 22, 1997.

23. Philip Taubman in NYT, June 21, 1998. Similarly, see Steven Erlanger and Michael Specter, ibid., July 23, Oct. 12, 1995; Carol Williams in LAT, Dec. 24, 1997; David Hoffman in WP, Sept. 16, 1999.

24. Timothy O'Brien quoting Nodari Simonia in NYT, Sept. 5, 1999.

25. Michael Dobbs and Paul Blustein in WP, Sept. 12, 1999. Similarly, see Fred Hiatt, ibid., Aug. 29, 1999; John Lloyd in NYT Magazine, Aug. 15, 1999, pp. 34-41, 52, 61, 64.

26. Bill Keller in NYT Book Review, March 19, 2000, pp. 1, 6; Fred Hiatt in WP, March 23, 2000. Similarly, see David Hoffman's defense of Vice President Gore's role in the crusade, ibid., June 4, 2000.

27. David Hoffman, ibid., Sept. 19, 1999; Barry Gewen in NYT Book Review, Oct. 31, 1999, p. 34; WP editorial, June 1, 2000.

28. Human Development Report for Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS 1999 (New York, 1999), p. 15; Paul Quinn-Judge in Time, July 3, 2000, p. 41.

29. Tatyana Tolstaya in The New York Review of Books, Nov. 19, 1998, p. 6; Robert Kaiser, Charlie Rose, PBS, Sept. 10, 1999; Rose Brady in BW, March 13, 2000, p. 14E12.

30. Michael Sesit in WSJ Europe, July 7-8, 2000. Similarly, see Reuters dispatch, JRL, Feb. 19, 1999; Michael Wines in NYT, June 2, 2000; and James Cox in USA Today, July 21, 2000.

31. Michael Wines in NYT, May 8, Feb. 20, July 9, 2000. For other pro-Putin pieces, see John Lloyd in NYT Magazine, March 19, 2000, pp. 62, 64-67; and David Hoffman's minimizing of Putin's role in the Chechen war, in WP, March 20, 2000.

32. Michael Wines in NYT, June 29, 2000. For similar enthusiasm, see David Hoffman in WP, July 7, 2000; Paul Hofheinz (who calls it an "excellent program") in WSJ Europe, July 5, 2000; and the NYT editorial on the flat tax, May 28, 2000.

33. WP editorial, July 22, 2000; Paul Hofheinz in WSJ Europe, July 5, 2000. Similarly, see David Ignatius in WP, July 23, 2000. For whitewashing the "much maligned" Boris Berezovsky, widely considered the most rapacious oligarch, see Michael Wines in NYT, July 15, 2000; and the way Berezovsky is presented, or allowed to present himself, by David Hoffman in WP, July 18 and 20, 2000; and Paul Quinn-Judge in Time Europe, July 17, 2000. For the survey, see Vedomosti, Aug. 3, 2000.

34. Maura Reynolds in LAT, March 24, 2000. Similarly, see Michael Wines in NYT, Feb. 20, 2000; and David Hoffman in WP, March 25, 2000.

Stephen F. Cohen is a professor of Russian studies and history at New York University. This article is adapted from a section of his book Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia, which has just been published by Norton.

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