When Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union as an evil empire in his 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, the empire part was not the sticking point. The United States had often worked with European empires, after all, and Reagan himself had been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II—an accolade, among other things, of the British Empire. For Reagan and many other U.S. presidents, empire was more a fact of life than a self-evident example of politics gone awry. It was the Soviet Union’s evil that bothered Reagan. He loathed the Soviet capacity to project that evil through its dominion over others.
And Reagan was right. A thread of evil ran through Soviet history. The Bolsheviks admitted no law higher than their party’s expedience as defined by Lenin and Stalin. They imprisoned and executed and tortured at will. They subordinated whole peoples to the state they were building. Siberia’s gulag and Moscow’s Lubyanka prison were the proof, and they were the tip of the iceberg. Stalin made terror a fulcrum of Soviet society, adding a string of atrocities and secret-police actions in central Europe to his résumé.
The Soviet Union moderated after Stalin’s death in 1953, but it was an exceptionally coercive state at the best of times—a tyranny and an empire hidden behind the veil of a benevolent and acutely theoretical Marxism–Leninism. Reagan saw evil in the unfreedom of a command economy that left people poor, their potential unrealized, and their creativity eviscerated.
Reagan may have worried most of all about the Soviet Union’s refusal to allow religion. “Let us pray,” Reagan said in his 1983 “evil empire” speech to the evangelicals, “for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God.” What the evangelicals heard, and what they were supposed to hear, was a condemnation of state-imposed atheism in the Soviet Union. While the British Empire housed the Church of England, the Soviet empire housed the perverse relics of Lenin for pilgrims to visit on Red Square. The evil of the Soviet Union, according to Reagan, was its pharaonic contempt for the People of the Book whose sorrow it was to live there.
Yet Reagan was also wrong. The implications of his political metaphysics—the simplified Old Testament flourish that had come so naturally to him—went on to have a corrupting effect on the United States. Reagan made a medieval knight of Washington, placed this knight at the head of a crusade, and waved the banner of righteousness before going on to slay the dragon of evil. Such blissful self-mythologizing incurred two separate costs for U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis what would become the former Soviet Union. First, it obscured the myriad attachments that Russians (and others) had to their Soviet pasts, rendering aspects of post-Soviet Russian politics incomprehensible. Second, it made the presumption of goodness continuous with the project of a whole, free, and peaceful Europe. So virtuous was U.S. policy, in Americans’ eyes, that there was no one entitled or likely to challenge it until Russia inexplicably did in Georgia in 2008 and then more ambitiously again in Ukraine in 2014. Russia was not just intransigent. Its intransigence was entirely unanticipated in Washington in 2014.
The United States was also operating under a bad analogy. When the Nazi evil empire fell, West Germany exited the forest of its authoritarian history and, by atoning for Hitler’s evils, it guaranteed the integrity of German democracy. The German precedent furnished an appealing—even optimistic—course of action for the United States. If the Soviet Union was evil, the story went, it deserved to collapse. It deserved to be replaced by another political system and to be integrated into another international order. And if the United States was good, it could generously offer to Russia its political system and its idea of international order, once the Soviet Union had finally vanished.
For a while, in the 1990s, it seemed like the familiar script was playing out. Russia acquired a president, it adopted elements of U.S.–style campaigning (Boris Yeltsin famously did a version of the twist on the campaign trail), and capitalism was seemingly the only option. The Russian economy would be subjected to shock therapy as a path to creating a democratic culture. The citizen could vote, the citizen could start a business, and in the public sphere, the citizen could take an honest look at the Soviet past. With knowledge of the crimes and of the evils in the Soviet story, responsibility would surely come. The freedom to know, Germany had already proven, is the freedom to atone.
But the Soviets were not the Nazis. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War by ceasing to exist, but it lost nothing on the battlefield, and post-Soviet Russia was never occupied or reeducated by the United States. The Soviet Union had also existed for far longer than Nazi Germany had. It had more benign and more pathological phases, the later decades reflecting a steady softening since Stalin’s death in 1953. Most importantly, the Nazi analogy broke down because the Soviet Union itself was attacked in 1941. It bore the brunt of Nazi brutality, enduring the worst of the war, and contributing more than any other country to Hitler’s defeat. Many Russians today cannot associate their Soviet past with evil primarily because of the Great Patriotic War, their great victory against evil. The contradiction of Stalin’s rule was—and remains—formidable for those with a family connection to it. The tyrant who killed with the same abandon Hitler did is also the man who defended the homeland from Hitler. In light of this contradiction, good and evil fall along multiple axes in Soviet history, especially in the Soviet history Russians themselves have retained. These antipodes can oppose one another—good versus evil—and they can reside in one another.
For all the repressiveness, all the tyranny, and all the madness of the Soviet political economy, the Soviet Union was still a place of everyday life: a place of families and customs, and even a place that gave many of its subjects the gift of time and the unhurried, uncommercial banality of Soviet life. Over its seventy-four years, these little things gathered in a vast storehouse of Soviet sentiment and memory, a storehouse that did not disappear in 1991. In Russia and even in places that had chafed against Russian domination, people found aspects and elements of the Soviet past that they wished to hold on to.
Reagan’s blanket declaration of an evil empire hid these emotions from view. For many U.S. observers, there was only one thing to say about the Soviet past: good riddance. This was their right as observers but, in saying good riddance to the Soviet Union, they adopted a schematic attitude toward the post-Soviet region. That which had broken away from the Soviet legacy was deemed good; that which remained of the Soviet legacy was deemed bad. This scheme could make the political dynamics of the post-Soviet world unnecessarily obscure.
In 2014, for example, when Ukraine descended into crisis, some of the on-the-ground disputes among Ukrainian citizens proved baffling to Americans. After a popular uprising in the capital city had toppled the Russian-leaning government, the clearest source of contention was political and geopolitical—between those who favored a new government with closer ties to Europe and those still attached to the old, Russian-leaning government. Another source was linguistic, between Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers. But yet another was the battle over monuments—especially over statues of Lenin whose state, by 2014, had been gone for some twenty-three years.
A vague and blurry line ran across Ukraine. Lenin, of course, was peripheral to the situation, but some Ukrainians flocked to his statues, which represented the recollection of a Soviet past that had value. In the western parts of the country, the narrative was about Ukraine escaping Moscow’s clutches. In the east, however, some counterprotests clearly remembered that it was the Red Army that had liberated Ukraine from the Germans in 1944 and 1945, having saved Ukraine from Europe, as it were. It was a matter of dueling, irreconcilable narratives. Russia fueled these disputes from the outside and intervened militarily for the sake of perpetuating them, but the disputes were not in and of themselves artificial; they were legitimately internal debates about the future of Ukrainian politics.
The foreign policy establishment in Washington, D.C., however, expressed its complete support for one side of the argument in Ukraine and was reluctant to acknowledge the other. One side appeared good, and this was the side that considered anything Soviet evil. The other side was not necessarily evil, but it was less good, in part because it appeared to be mired in the Soviet past; it had not moved on. As a result, this side was seen as the sickly flower of media—and Putin’s—manipulation. By choosing sides at the beginning of this ongoing conflict and by succumbing to the Reaganite inheritance, Washington lost the chance to operate as an honest broker, to tamp down tensions on both sides, and to push them toward a mutually acceptable resolution.
An irony is that Reagan’s reductive rhetoric did not impede his own foreign policy in the same way. He was more flexible than his wording implied. When he had the chance, he worked brilliantly with Gorbachev. Yet the burden of Reagan’s rhetoric has grown and endured, imposing on U.S. foreign policy the unspoken attribution of goodness to the United States. This has been bad for the U.S.–Russian relationship. The underlying U.S. assumption is that Russians must accept U.S. action in Europe as a force for good. After 1945, after all, the United States brought lasting peace to Western Europe. It built up structures for the multilateral resolution of conflict, including what would become the European Union. It helped put to rest the Franco-German animosities that had resulted in two world wars. In 1989, this assumption goes, the United States managed the end of the Cold War peacefully, wisely presided over Germany’s reunification, and then joined with Germany, France, and other Western European powers to extend the blessings of the Pax Americana to Central and Eastern Europe. The lynchpin of U.S. policy was granting sovereignty to small states. There would be no spheres of influence. Nobody was entitled to an empire in Europe. Lithuania had the right to choose EU and NATO membership. So, too, in theory, did Georgia and Ukraine, and this right was the cornerstone of a free and peaceful Europe.
Not every Russian would disagree with this U.S. policy toward Europe, with the benefits it has brought, and with its intellectual and strategic validity. But a great many do. There is the widely held belief in Russia, for instance, that the United States broke the promises it made about NATO at the end of the Cold War. NATO was supposed to not be expanded beyond Germany, and then it was expanded not just to Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, but all the way to Estonia—a few hours’ drive to Saint Petersburg. In 2008 NATO even gestured toward Georgia and Ukraine. Russians regard Western diplomacy on this point as dishonorable and the eastward drift of NATO as dangerous.
That the United States wields its power for the sake of good is anything but clear from a Russian vantage point. It is not incumbent on Russians, after all, to share the ideals of U.S. foreign policy. The United States is far away from Russia, and its culture and history are radically far away. Even though the two countries have often been allies, they have never been partners. Some degree of conflict is inevitable. Friction and government propaganda have given rise to wilder speculation: the thesis, say, that the United States has employed the CIA to sponsor a “colored revolution” in Russia; that the uprisings in Ukraine were in fact a U.S. plot; that the United States would be happy to exploit Russian resources if given the chance; or that the United States will willfully invade, destabilize, and overthrow whatever government stands in the way of its maniacal hunger for hegemony.
All of which is to say that, rational or irrational, the negative attitude toward the United States in Russia is real. It shapes Russian politics, and it orders Russian foreign policy. To anticipate Russian actions, the makers of U.S. foreign policy need to have the imagination to see themselves in the unflattering light in which they often exist in Russia. The United States may have had its reasons for expanding NATO, but it should have expected the eventual Russian response: the explosion that came in 2014. The United States also has its reasons for supporting Ukraine, but its presence there is vividly provocative to Russians—and not just to Putin and to the Kremlin.
And yet Reagan’s rhetoric still hampers us today. A country that is autocratically ruled, that invaded its neighbor (Ukraine), that intervened in Syria on behalf of Bashar al-Assad, that supports antidemocratic movements worldwide, and that hacked the U.S. election of 2016 can only be evil. The temptation to think in these terms is immense, and the accusation of Russian evil haunts contemporary U.S. popular culture, media, and political discourse. But the concept of an “evil Russian empire” should be abandoned. Russia is more rational than evil; it works from its own logic and assumptions, which we are in desperate need of understanding. To reject these assumptions of evil is not to declare Russia right or unworthy of opposition. Rather, it is to make Russia legible so that a suitable response can be formulated. The United States can do more good by doing less to rid the world of evil.
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