EDITH KURZWEIL
A Slice of Russia
I
WAS INVITED TO GIVE A TALK
at Moscow State University for Inter–
national Relations (MGIMO) during the days of the presidential
summit. President Bush allegedly had prepared himself for this trip
by reading the works of the patriotic Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose mysti–
cal saints and guilt-stricken madmen inhabit Russia, rather than those
by Vladimir abokov, who after having moved to France and then the
U.S. wrote about what Russia lacks and the West has to offer. Mr. Putin,
as most newspapers pointed out, is aware of both dimensions of Russia,
but remains determined to move forward. (Our president's lack of
sophistication, along with his various maladroit blunders, was the topic
of editorials and comments all over Europe and the U.S.)
According to Quentin Peel, in the
Financial Times
of May
27,2002,
" the summit in the Kremlin between erstwhile superpower rivals, with
a treaty on nuclear missiles thrown in for good measure," got the pun–
dits excited. But, "scrapping nuclear weapons, even several thousand
apiece, scarcely seems dramatic anymore, [because] this summit
between U.s. and Russian presidents was really just a footnote to his–
tory, a belated move to bury the Cold War long after it had been
declared dead." The summit that matters, Peel goes on, is "the meeting
between Mr. Putin and the leaders of the European Union (EU): it mat–
ters because it is about the future, whereas the meeting between Russia
and America is about the past." He then takes on a heap of gritty issues
that would have to be settled before Russia could seriously apply for EU
membership.
According to
Le Monde,
in this "holy American-Russian alliance"
between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, they have come to multi–
ple agreements about nuclear arms, trade, and fighting terrorism. One
of these "allows Washington to permanently install itself in Central Asia
and in the Caucasus." This "new strategic relationship" is to confront
together "overall challenges as well as to help resolve regional con–
flicts-oil at the heart of a new partnership on energy."
On the plane, I had been reviewing
Partisan Review's
anti-Stalinist
articles on the Soviet Union of the 1940s. Thus, when on our drive from
