>From Johnson's Russia list. k hanly #1 The Russia Journal December 9-15, 2000 Anti-Americanism winning over Russia's elite By NATALYA GRISHINA / Independent sociologist In its billboards around Moscow, cigarette brand Zolotaya Yava "strikes back" at America, covering its cherished Statue of Liberty in a traditional Russian fur hat. The slogan openly plays on the idea of Russian revenge against the United States. Never mind that Zolotaya Yava cigarettes are actually produced by British-American Tobacco. The dollar-burning protests and embassy-attacking excesses of the Yugoslavia air-strike episode are over, but Muscovites still get a kick out of putting down America. This streak of anti-Americanism can do wonders on the market - witness the triumphant success of the recent film "Brat-2" in cinemas and on video throughout Russia. The film's plot boils down to methodical extermination of Americans, portrayed as emotionless and idiotic automatons. "You've got money and power, and where has it got you? Has it helped you? You don't have truth," the film's hero, a dim-witted Russian hitman says to an American gangster. One of the latest hits on the country's dance floors is a song eloquently entitled "Kill the Yankee." Puffing away on a Marlboro cigarette, the song's author, A. Nyepomnyashchy, confesses to journalists that he'd happily sing something else, but the fans demand "Kill the Yankee." Trying to be politically correct, he explains that it's not physical violence he has in mind. "You first have to kill the Yankee in yourself," clarifies one of his listeners. Decidedly, there's not much to laugh about here. The generation that has rejected communism and has chosen Pepsi and the dollar, the one that mocks the authorities with their pitiful trappings of state patriotism, does not hate or fear America. But it holds it in arrogant contempt. "You have weapons and water, you have gold and women, but you don't have truth." French author Antoine de Saint-Exupery put these words in the mouth of an Arab some 70 years ago. Now, across Russia, millions of people are repeating these words along with the "Brat-2" hero. This is that very same national idea that President Boris Yeltsin failed to find, and that President Vladimir Putin has been so desperately searching for. This anti-Americanism is not just a reaction against losing the Cold War. It's not just nostalgia or ignorance. Nor is it just the disappointment of Ivan the fool, who can't find a place for himself and his familiar little world in the market economy. It is rooted in an intense feeling of cultural alienation from the United States, feelings that distort the image of Americans until they seem more monster than human. Not so long ago, it seemed that only irreversibly communist pensioners and rebellious marginal youth were prey to these primitive views, but "Brat-2" has struck a chord in a much wider audience, proving a hit with young Russian businessmen, for example, including those working in the United States. But this is all the common man's anti-Americanism. What is more unexpected is a new, refined and scientific anti-Americanism such as that which comes through in a book by well-known Russian economist Mikhail Delyagin, "Practice of Globalization." It is one thing to hear a drunken tramp raving away about the Jews who sold Christ and privatized Russia, but it is quite another to hear essentially the same message from a modest, bespectacled intellectual sitting in a book-lined office and throwing in some quotes from the Declaration of Human Rights and 18th century French poets. This is the impression given by Delyagin's book. It argues logically and convincingly that Russia's survival is incompatible with U.S. leadership in the world. The book provides a comprehensive theory for globalization, bringing together financial, economic, technological and even cultural processes. Delyagin analyzes thoroughly the "aggression of the U.S. and its NATO allies against Yugoslavia," which he sees as the final stage of the "first crisis of the global economy of 1997-99." But he doesn't take an accusatory tone, and comes up with the demeaning term "rocket-kvas patriotism" to describe the Russian reaction. But it is precisely this seeming scientific objectivity and self-restraint that produces such a chilling impression. Delyagin sees world competition as zealous Muslims see the Jihad. The fundamental message of his book is the same as that of "Kill the Yankee" or "Brat-2" - that if Russia is to live, it must fight the United States, and if it is to survive, it must beat the United States. That Delyagin wrote this book is significant. In 1990, he was the youngest liberal economist in Yeltsin's team. In his own words, he viewed the Americans in the post-Soviet world the "same way that people in Europe in 1945 saw the Red Army as people who had come to free them." But by 1994, while working for "grandfather of Russian liberalism" Yevgeny Yasin, Delyagin wrote a sharply anti-American work, the "Bible of Russian Revanchism" in which he said that Russia had lost the "Third World War," and now had to prepare for the fourth - on the world markets. Delyagin's latest book is a sign that it is not only the poor, the ignorant or the mad who are at odds with America, but also successful representatives of the Russian elite. Any political idea is not so terrifying when it has won the minds only of the mass at the bottom of the heap. Ideas become terrifying when they win over the elite. ******* #2
