Sikorski: Russia rejects post-WWII, Western 'world of rules'

[HT: AB]  Sikorski, known in Poland for saying controversial things, here blasts several shibboleths of official Moscow. Read on!... 

Europe's Challenge: A 'Twilight Zone' in Russia's Shadow, or a 'World of Rules?'

By Radek Sikorski (Speaker of the Polish Parliament)

November 24, 2014 | The World Post

This comment is excerpted from a speech at Harvard's Center for European Studies late last week.

In Harvard Yard, on 5 June 1947, on the steps of Memorial Church, momentous words were said.

It is logical that the United States should do what it can to assist the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.

Our policy is not directed against any country, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.

U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall set in motion the most profitable financial investment in human history: the reconstruction of Western Europe:

The Marshall Plan was part of a wider Western ambition after World War II. To create a World of Rules.

New global institutions were set up, led by U.S. leadership and generosity. 

The United Nations. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The International Court of Justice.

Despite harsh Cold War ideological differences, these institutions took root. They grew and flourished.

Why? Because the world -- or at least a part of the world -- had agreed that explicit international military aggression had to stop.

Differences between peoples and nations should be settled by peaceful negotiation.

The first principle of this World of Rules was self-restraint: by cooperating, not fighting, we build a shared interest in success.

Self-restraint -- ruling out the war option -- creates stability. Stability encourages investment. This creates innovation and new wealth.

The European Economic Community was only one of many institutions which flourished under this regime. It grew and grew to become today's European Union, precisely because it was based on this principle of national political self-restraint. Success bred success.

The second principle was that this World of Rules was worth defending from those who didn't accept it.

During the Cold War, this required a comprehensive Western approach, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at the heart.

There were programs to share intelligence, especially among the English speaking nations of the West; joint military exercises; exchanges of weapons and military technology.

Institutions such as Radio Free Europe and the BBC pushed back against communist lies and propaganda.

So successful were these economic and security institutions and so attractive to those who didn't enjoy them, that when the Warsaw Pact finally fell apart after 1989, the nations of central Europe made it a national policy imperative to work closely with them, or even apply to join them.

RUSSIA WAS HUMILIATED BY NATO EXPANSION? RIDICULOUS

The events in Crimea and eastern Ukraine are dramatic and dangerous.

They threaten Ukraine's stability. And they pose a new kind of test for the transatlantic alliance set up to protect the West and its rules.

Let me demolish an assertion heard quite often both in Moscow and in Western capitals: that the Ukraine crisis has been "provoked" by Western governments in general, and by NATO in particular.

As few now seem to remember, when the Cold War ended, the transatlantic team of North America and Western Europe welcomed central and eastern European countries into modern democratic society. 

But the impetus for NATO enlargement did not come from a triumphalist Washington. On the contrary, the U.S. initially resisted even the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Since 1990 12 European states have asked to join NATO. They all chose for themselves to belong to this cooperative military alliance.

NATO membership was a key part of "locking in" their turbulent democratic reforms.

NATO programs helped modernize our armed forces, and bring them fully under civilian control.

NATO played a vital role in helping all these countries make a clear break from secret communist-era military intelligence machinations, right at the heart of a supposedly independent state.

While this slow, cautious and -- as I remember well -- in some ways reluctant enlargement did eventually take place, constant efforts were made to reassure Russia.

Russia was welcomed to the Council of Europe, World Trade Organization and given closer relations with the European Union.

No NATO bases were ever placed in the new member states.

Until 2013, no NATO military exercises were ever conducted in Poland, the Baltic states or anywhere else on the eastern flank.

No nuclear installations have been moved to the territory of new member states, even though Russia has them less than 100 kilometers from our border.

A NATO-Russia Council was set up and Russia was promised that as long as it respected borders in Europe, no substantial combat forces would be moved east.

Largely in response to Russian objections, Ukraine and Georgia were in fact denied NATO membership plans in 2008.

In pressing the reset button with Moscow toward Russia, President Obama changed the configuration of the proposed missile defense installation in Poland, then suspended its Phase 4 which Russia disliked.

In short, the assertion that Russia was "humiliated" during this period is ridiculous.

Russia took charge of all the former Soviet nuclear weapons, some transferred from Ukraine in 1994 when Russia recognized Ukraine's borders, including Crimea. Ukraine's territorial integrity was guaranteed in the Budapest Memorandum by Russia, [the] U.S., [the] U.K. and France.

Presidents Clinton and Bush treated their Russian counterparts as fellow "great power" leaders and invited them to join the G-8, even though Russia did not qualify to join this group at that time, either as a large economy or as a stable democracy.

The U.S. spent billions of dollars working with Russia to reduce Cold War nuclear and chemical weapons stocks, and to achieve new, better arms control agreements.

All sorts of smaller but practical projects have been set up with Russia. The NATO-Russia Cooperative Airspace Initiative aims to prevent aircraft hijackings. We have agreed to help destroy dangerous ammunitions stocks in the Kaliningrad exclave.

Russia has benefited from all these programs, and many more.

Freed from decades of self-inflicted communism, it has joined the global economy as a normal country.

It's seen the benefits. Its GDP was a feeble $570 billion in 1990. By 2013 it has grown to $ 2.1 trillion.

So, in the years following the end of the Cold War, did NATO and EU governments show unwavering hostility towards Russia?

Did we cynically "take advantage of Russia's weakness?"

Have we been "humiliating" Russia?

I answer those three questions in three words. No. No. And no.

The record since the Berlin Wall came down shows NATO and the European Union and their individual member states all working hard, and in good faith, to build normal, purposeful relations with Russia.

And it shows that Russia itself benefiting hugely from this support.

PUTIN'S REAL AIM: PROTECTING RUSSIA'S WEALTHY FROM DEMOCRACY

So where has it gone wrong?

The basic problem is that the current leadership in Moscow depends on corrupt business structures and media manipulation to keep power.

The Russian elite is dominated by former KGB officers who, starting in the late 1980s, used Russian state money, sometimes laundered through Western offshore banks, to purchase land, natural resources and property on a vast scale.

To protect this wealth, they must prevent the outbreak of a democratic revolution of the kind that shook central Europe in 1989, or an anti-corruption revolution as took place on Kiev's Maidan square early this year.

Using military invasions of Georgia and now Ukraine, or strong-arm tactics as in Armenia, or corrupt political proxies in Moldova, they seek to stop nations of the former Soviet Union from daring to join the successful institutions of the West -- and from setting an example that Russians might want to follow.

They are playing games with our public opinion through propaganda tricks. Paid Internet "trolls" pollute our newspaper comment pages, and Twitter, Facebook and other sites. They roll out fake "experts" with fake authority.

They try to legitimize extreme political forces of all kinds, paying for far-left anti-American rhetoric on their English-language Russia Today channel, while simultaneously supporting far-right anti-European politicians in Europe.

NIBBLING AWAY AT WESTERN RESOLVE

Not content with all that, they are testing our very military resolve.

Russian planes buzz American, Swedish, Danish, even Canadian planes.

Russian troops have captured an Estonian security officer working on the Estonian side of the border. The Russian navy captured a Lithuanian fishing boat and held it for ransom.

All these obnoxious ploys are intended to nibble away at Western resolve, and our own and wider faith in NATO Article 5. To test the value of our mutual security guarantees. But also, as events this year in Ukraine have shown, to challenge head-on the most basic rule of international law and the World of Rules: that international borders cannot be changed by force.

A RESTRAINED RESPONSE

The international response to Russia's policies has been restrained. It has been designed to raise the cost to Russia of undermining Western institutions.

The policy is working, up to a point.

Russia's president has admitted that the price his country is paying is high. 

In the decade from 2002-2012, Russia's economy grew on average 5 percent per year. Russia, like Poland, was integrating with the global economy, and seeing positive results.

If Russia grows at that same rate from now until 2025, its GDP will be $ 3.7 billion -- from today's $2.1 billion.

If instead Russia grows at only 1 percent over the next decade because of sanctions and global mistrust of its intentions, its GDP in 2025 will be far less -- $2.3 billion. Cumulatively over the decade, Russia will have lost the staggering sum of over $81 billion! Its leaders have decided to gamble with their own citizens' lives and hopes, by looking to the past, not the future.

Some of Russia's citizens are wondering whether this enormous price is worth paying -- and what Russia is getting for it.

NATO MUST AGAIN DEFEND THE WORLD OF RULES

Maybe Russia's leaders too are starting to conclude that this price is not worth paying. I truly hope they do. But we need to be prepared if they don't, at least in the short term. We need to think hard about the health of those institutions we set up a half a century ago.

First and foremost, we need to face a grim reality. Hard, sharp security questions are being posed to us in Europe once again.

The NATO that we have now is not the NATO we need to deal with them.

If we were starting from scratch now, nobody would put NATO troops and equipment where they are now. NATO should shut down unnecessary commands and legacy bases, and get back to its primary mission: deterrence.

NATO is a defensive alliance. But for deterrence to work, our military capability has to look -- and be -- serious.

Second, follow the money.

Have we been complacently turning a blind eye to an uncomfortable truth: that our own tangled, over-complex banking systems have been exploited by international semi-criminal networks, not only from Russia but all over the world?

Simply by firmly enforcing existing money laundering laws and asking hard questions about murky money, we will help ourselves and help others who are trying, against high odds, to join the World of Rules. Peoples around the world would be empowered and kleptocrats would be restrained if only we implemented existing laws!

Third, we need to think hard about how Europe and the U.S. work together in Ukraine and other countries wanting our help. It's demoralizing for them that so much Western money is wasted through duplication and institutional jostling for position.

Swedish technical assistance agencies and Dutch or American technical assistance agencies shouldn't be duplicating or contradicting one another's programs.

Technical expert "advice" works best when supported by pragmatic peer-to-peer consultations.

Ukrainian ministers turn to their Polish counterparts to ask what we think: "You Poles have been through this. What makes sense?"

We do our best to tell them.

A NEW DIVIDING LINE ACROSS EUROPE

Back in 1947 Ukraine, like Poland, was blocked by Stalin from taking part in the generous Marshall Fund programs offered by the U.S..

Let's help Ukraine now, when at last it is free to ask for, and ready to receive, our help.

The principled way out of this crisis is based on all sides returning to the principles that George Marshall articulated at Harvard in 1947.

Teamwork. Cooperation. Russia's return to the World of Rules.

If this happens, sanctions can be lifted. Russia can again participate normally in international financial markets and institutions.

All Russia's grievances concerning Ukraine or anywhere else can be tackled sensibly and fairly through the UN or OSCE or Council of Europe, or other fora created for precisely such problems.

Moscow itself  asked to join all these organizations when it wasn't a founder partner when they were set up.

Moscow itself  has pledged to respect their rules.

Let's be clear.

The alternative to working through these issues normally and peacefully in a spirit of successful partnership is a new dividing line across the European continent. It won't be made of iron but it'll be real enough.

On one side of the line are countries and peoples free to choose their own democratic destiny.

On the other side are countries in a decaying Twilight Zone. A blighted, unhappy and unstable place outside the World of Rules.

If we get this wrong, our shared Western decades-long strategic ambition to create a Europe whole and free will falter.

Poland preps for war with Russia...without U.S. help

[HT: AS]. There are some very harsh words for President Obama and his administration in here.

How much of it is true about Obama's intention and fortitude isn't as important as the common perception within Poland that Obama is weak and America isn't reliable, that we aren't ready to defend our NATO-Article 5 commitments.

Alas, there are no prominent voices on the American Right who are pushing Obama to honor those commitments. Why? Probably because there's no constituency to be won from it. Americans don't care about Europe. It's much easier to bang and blame Obama for ISIS in the Mideast and Ebola in Africa. Republicans want to scaremonger and Monday-morning quarterback those two "crises" for partisan advantage. 

So there is no foreign policy leadership in either party.

Poland Is Preparing For A Potential Russian Invasion

By John Schindler

October 30, 2014 | Business Insider

URL: http://www.businessinsider.com/poland-is-preparing-for-a-russian-invasion-2014-10

Putin using Ukraine to make dictatorship at home (Politico)

This analysis is chilling, sobering reading. The special insights of Poland, thanks to its unique interactions with the Kremlin, are not something you read about often in the Western press. Definitely check this one out!

UPDATE (10.22.2014): Now the speaker of the Polish Parliament Radek Sikorski is backing off his statements to Politico and saying his recollection of Putin's words to Polish PM Donald Tusk about partitioning Ukraine were wrong, and that the meeting that he falsely recalled in Moscow didn't even take place. 

Methinks Sikorski is now remorseful for his candor and wants to take back the truth.

Putin’s Coup: How the Russian leader used the Ukraine crisis to consolidate his dictatorship

By Ben Judah

October 19, 2014 | Politico

URL: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/vladimir-putins-coup-112025.html#ixzz3GjyVncaf

The myth of Russian humiliation and Western triumphalism

I myself have been guilty of giving the "Russia's humiliation" thesis some credence, probably because many ordinary Russians that I have met exhibit signs of an angry (or sometimes morose) inferiority complex to the West.  

(By the way, it's worth noting that, in an odd way, Russia is valuable to the West because all things become clear in opposition: without the bad example of post-Soviet Russia, we might forget what being the West  is really about. Indeed, over the past year the greater part of the West, the European Union, has recognized itself anew through the inspired eyes of Ukrainians who are determined to join the EU in affirmation of their truly "European values.")

Undoubtedly, many Russians feel humiliated to this day simply for losing the Cold War, (despite, as Anne Applebaum notes below, Russia's retaining many of the nukes and diplomatic spoils of the Soviet empire for itself alone). Then most Russians' saw their population size, savings and standard of living fall for over a decade; meanwhile, Russians have seen the rising standards of living in Poland, the Baltics and other Soviet satellites. Russia is a "great" and "civilizational" power with nuclear weapons, they must think, with a 142 million population and territory spanning two continents... yet how can Russia be falling behind its tiny former client states?  

On the flip side, it's worth remarking -- especially to any Russian unacquainted with average Americans -- that there is no counter feeling of triumphalism in the U.S. over winning the Cold War. It just isn't something we talk about much; and when we do, it's usually the older folks exhibiting their great relief, as in, "We are so glad that dangerous time is behind us now." It would be interesting to analyze why we Americans, who are so fond of spiking the ball and doing an endzone dance over any little trifle, refrain from doing so over the Cold War, but that's a discussion for another post.... Anyhow, the most upsetting thing an American can tell a Russian nowadays -- upsetting because it's true -- is that Americans don't think about Russia much at all. It would be better for their bruised egos if we offered them our hatred and fear rather than our naive disregard....

I am not an ordinary American because I do think about Russia. I don't offer Russians my hatred or fear; yet I'm definitely tired of wondering what ordinary Russians are wondering, or trying to commiserate with the good ones. No matter what I feel about individual Russians, the bottom line is that Russia is a problem state. "It has issues," to put it more politely. Russia's internal issues, of course, are hers to deal with. The problem is when Russia's issues spill over into the affairs of its sovereign neighbors, especially Ukraine, which President Putin does not recognize as a real nation or an actual state. Then my lack of sympathy for "humiliated" Russians turns to enmity. Their feelings of humiliation, or need for vindication, even if well-founded, don't give Russia the state the right to start wars with peaceful neighbors. 

I know, I know, ordinary Russian citizens didn't start any war in Ukraine; Russia's president Vladimir Putin did. Yet ordinary Russians' support of Putin -- which jumped after Russia's takeover of Crimea -- gave his military actions in Ukraine a kind of popular mandate ex post facto, while motivating Putin to continue his Ukrainian gambit in Donbas. 

The myth of Russian humiliation

By Anne Applebaum 

October 17, 2014 | Washington Post

Looking back over the past quarter-century, it isn’t easy to name a Western policy that can truly be described as a success. The impact of Western development aid is debatable. Western interventions in the Middle East have been disastrous.

But one Western policy stands out as a phenomenal success, particularly when measured against the low expectations with which it began: the integration of Central Europe and the Baltic States into the European Union and NATO. Thanks to this double project, more than 90 million people have enjoyed relative safety and relative prosperity for more than two decades in a region whose historic instability helped launch two world wars.

These two “expansions,” which were parallel but not identical (some countries are members of one organization but not the other), were transformative because they were not direct leaps, as the word “expansion” implies, but slow negotiations. Before joining NATO, each country had to establish civilian control of its army. Before joining the European Union, each adopted laws on trade, judiciary, human rights. As a result, they became democracies. This was “democracy promotion” working as it never has before or since.

But times change, and the miraculous transformation of a historically unstable region became a humdrum reality. Instead of celebrating this achievement on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is now fashionable to opine that this expansion, and of NATO in particular, was mistaken. This project is incorrectly “remembered” as the result of American “triumphalism” that somehow humiliated Russia by bringing Western institutions into its rickety neighborhood. This thesis is usually based on revisionist history promoted by the current Russian regime — and it is wrong.

For the record: No treaties prohibiting NATO expansion were ever signed with Russia. No promises were broken. Nor did the impetus for NATO expansion come from a “triumphalist” Washington. On the contrary, Poland’s first efforts to apply in 1992 were rebuffed. I well remember the angry reaction of the U.S. ambassador to Warsaw at the time. But Poland and others persisted, precisely because they were already seeing signs of the Russian revanchism to come.

When the slow, cautious expansion eventually took place, constant efforts were made to reassure Russia. No NATO bases were placed in the new member states, and until 2013 no exercises were conducted there. A Russia-NATO agreement in 1997 promised no movement of nuclear installations. A NATO-Russia Council was set up in 2002. In response to Russian objections, Ukraine and Georgia were, in fact, denied NATO membership plans in 2008.

Meanwhile, not only was Russia not “humiliated” during this era, it was given de facto “great power” status, along with the Soviet seat on the U.N. Security Council and Soviet embassies. Russia also received Soviet nuclear weapons, some transferred from Ukraine in 1994 in exchange for Russian recognition of Ukraine’s borders. Presidents Clinton and Bush both treated their Russian counterparts as fellow “great power” leaders and invited them to join the Group of Eight — although Russia, neither a large economy nor a democracy, did not qualify.

During this period, Russia, unlike Central Europe, never sought to transform itself along European lines. Instead, former KGB officers with a clearly expressed allegiance to the Soviet system took over the state in league with organized crime, seeking to prevent the formation of democratic institutions at home and to undermine them abroad. For the past decade, this kleptocratic clique has also sought to re-create an empire, using everything from cyberattacks on Estonia to military invasions of Georgia and now Ukraine, in open violation of that 1994 agreement — exactly as the Central Europeans feared.

Once we remember what actually happened over the past two decades, as opposed to accepting the Russian regime’s version, our own mistakes look different. In 1991, Russia was no longer a great power in either population or economic terms. So why didn’t we recognize reality, reform the United Nations and give a Security Council seat to India, Japan or others? Russia did not transform itself along European lines. Why did we keep pretending that it had? Eventually, our use of the word “democracy” to describe the Russian political system discredited the word in Russia itself.

The crisis in Ukraine, and the prospect of a further crisis in NATO itself, is not the result of our triumphalism but of our failure to react to Russia’s aggressive rhetoric and its military spending. Why didn’t we move NATO bases eastward a decade ago? Our failure to do so has now led to a terrifying plunge of confidence in Central Europe. Countries once eager to contribute to the alliance are now afraid. A string of Russian provocations unnerve the Baltic region: the buzzing of Swedish airspace, the kidnapping of an Estonian security officer.

Our mistake was not to humiliate Russia but to underrate Russia’s revanchist, revisionist, disruptive potential. If the only real Western achievement of the past quarter-century is now under threat, that’s because we have failed to ensure that NATO continues to do in Europe what it was always meant to do: deter. Deterrence is not an aggressive policy; it is a defensive policy. But in order to work, deterrence has to be real. It requires investment, consolidation and support from all of the West, and especially the United States. I’m happy to blame American triumphalism for many things, but in Europe I wish there had been more of it.

Stratfor: Likely Russian moves and U.S. countermoves

Friedman agrees with me that Russia's occupation and annexation of Crimea was more about appearing strong after it "lost" Ukraine to the West, rather than about gaining any strategic military or economic advantage there [emphasis mine]:

The fact was that Yanukovich refused to sign an agreement moving Ukraine closer to the European Union, the demonstrations took place, there was violence, and an openly pro-Western Ukrainian government was put in place. 

The Russians cannot simply allow this to stand. Not only does it create a new geopolitical reality, but in the longer term it also gives the appearance inside Russia that Putin is weaker than he seems and opens the door to instability and even fragmentation. Therefore, the Russians must respond. [...] 

The first step was simply making official what has been a reality. Crimea is within the Russian sphere of influence, and the military force Moscow has based in Crimea under treaties could assert control whenever it wished. That Sevastopol is a critical Russian naval base for operations in the Black and Mediterranean seas was not the key. A treaty protected that. But intervention in Crimea was a low-risk, low-cost action that would halt the appearance that Russia was hemorrhaging power. It made Russia appear as a bully in the West and a victor at home. That was precisely the image it wanted to project to compensate for its defeat.

Russia Examines Its Options for Responding to Ukraine

By George Friedman

March 18, 2014 | Stratfor

URL: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/russia-examines-its-options-responding-ukraine

Zakaria: Obama is right on missile shield

I'm not convinced that America needs any missile defense system against Iran -- even against its short-range missiles -- but this decision by Obama is at least a step in the right direction.

National Security Adviser Z. Bzrezinski famously called the $150 billion boondoggle defense system "a scheme that doesn't work against a threat that doesn't exist."

Iran was never a threat to Poland or Czech Republic. The planned missile defense system was an extremely expensive -- and dishonest -- way to demonstrate America's commitment to these countries' security against evil, neo-imperialist Russia. At least, that's the "experts'" revised version of history. But why then did we expand NATO membership to Czech Republic and Poland in 1999? A Russian attack against them would precipitate an automatic counter-attack by NATO, according to Article 5 of the NATO treaty. So what good is NATO, where is NATO's credibility, if it still takes expensive U.S. missile defense programs to guarantee NATO's security commitments?

No, missile defense in E. Europe was a neocon ploy to either (1) anatognize Russia and possibly extract concessions, and/or (2) the neocons really believed that they could perfect this hopeless system and neutralize or reduce Russia's nuclear first-strike capability, thereby unbalancing the scales of MAD, thereby making the world a much more unpredictable, dangerous place. I'm open to other possibilities, but the "official" version of Dubya was an obvious lie, and the revised "new official" version still makes no strategic sense.

Anyway, kudos to President Obama for backing away from this crazy plan.

Zakaria: U.S. did the right thing the wrong way on missiles

September 11, 2009 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/09/18/zakaria.missile.defense/index.html

Obama will can E. European missile shield?

If this is true, it's great news. Sanity has at last prevailed. The so-called missile shield was never about Iran or "defense," it was about reducing Russia's first-strike capability, thereby threatening the principle of MAD, thereby initiating a new arms race and destabilizing Russia-US relations, thereby making the world a much more dangerous place. It was sure to be a multi-billion dollar boondoggle to boot.

The idea was a dangerous relic of U.S. neoconservatives' mad dream to guide the rest of the world by force of arms; hopefully it will be retired to the dust bin of history, along with the disgraced neocons themselves.

Although U.S. Vice-President Biden would not confirm yet that the missile shield was being shelved, he did tell CNN the following: "I am less concerned - much less concerned - about the Iranian potential. They have no potential at this moment, they have no capacity to launch a missile at the United States of America," he said.

Wow, after years of Dubya's lies, finally the truth!

U.S. to Shelve Nuclear-Missile Shield in Europe

Defense plans for Poland, Czech Republic to be dropped as Iran rocket threat downgraded; Moscow likely to welcome move

September 17, 2009 | Wall Street Journal / Associated Press, FOXNews.com

URL: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/17/shelve-nuclear-missile-shield-europe/

This Pole's got balls!

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Polish pianist stops show with anti-US tirade

By Andrew Gumbel for LA Times

April 29, 2009  | Guardian

Krystian Zimerman, the great Polish concert pianist, is usually a man of few words. He doesn't, as a rule, talk to the audience during performances. He says little or nothing in the press between his all-too-rare concert tours - not even about his habit of travelling everywhere with his own Steinway grand piano. He rarely grants them the pleasure of an encore.

So he triggered more than the usual rumble of discomfort when he raised his voice in the closing stages of a recital at Los Angeles' Disney Hall on Sunday night and announced he would no longer perform in the United States in protest against Washington's military policies.

"Get your hands off my country," Zimerman told the stunned crowd in a denunciation of US plans to install a missile defence shield on Polish soil.  Some people cheered, others yelled at him to shut up and keep playing. A few dozen walked out, some of them shouting obscenities.

"Yes," Zimerman responded with derision, "some people when they hear the word military start marching."

According to Mark Swed, the Los Angeles Times's veteran classical music critic who witnessed the incident, Zimerman hesitated before deciding to speak up. He was about to strike up the first notes of the final piece on his programme, Karol Szymanowski's Variations on a Polish Folk Theme, when he "sat silently at the piano for a moment, almost began to play, but then turned to the audience".

Swed said he delivered his tirade "in a quiet but angry voice that did not project well".

Zimerman appears to have been upset by Barack Obama's decision, announced this month, to maintain the Bush-era policy of installing a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Obama insisted the shield was part of a defensive posture against Iran, not Russia, and that he intended to remove it as soon as the threat from Iran subsided. But many Poles have accused the US of wanting to mount a military occupation of their country, and fear the shield could make them a target of Russian aggression.

Classical musicians are not exactly famous for political ranting. When Beethoven became disillusioned with Napoleon after he crowned himself emperor in 1804, the loudest thing the composer did was remove the dedication to him from his Eroica symphony. Leonard Bernstein spoke out against the Vietnam war and hosted a notorious fundraiser for the radical Black Panther movement, but never discussed his politics from the conductor's podium.

Zimerman, though, has developed something of a track record - especially since the 9/11 attacks. In 2006 he announced he would not return to the United States until George Bush was out of office. The same year, at Baltimore's Shriver Hall, he prefaced his performance of Beethoven's Pathetique sonata with a denunciation of America's prison at Guantánamo Bay.

At least some of his opprobrium appears to be personal. Shortly after 9/11, his piano was confiscated by customs officials at New York's JFK airport, who thought the glue smelled funny. They subsequently destroyed the instrument.

For several years he chose to travel with just the mechanical insides of his own piano and install them - he is a master piano repairer, as well as player - inside a Steinway shell he borrowed from the company in New York. In 2006 he tried to travel with his own piano again, only to have it held up in customs for five days and disrupt his performance schedule.

Putin threatens the West?

Yeltsin's reforms! That's a real laugh.

I disagree with many points in this article by Martin Wolf of the Russophobic Financial Times. Michael McFaul and Anders Aslund, two Russia "experts" cited here, are particularly execrable. Russia's GDP declined so astronomically in the 90s precisely because it took the IMF and West's advice to privatize state enterprises before competition and rule of law were in place, liberalize prices (which led to immediate hyperinflation), and open up financial markets before real banks existed and financial controls were in place. All of this resulted in overnight loss of savings and purchasing power by the people, asset stripping by managers and corrupt politicians, and money laundering out of the country.

The Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote about this quite eloquently in Globalization and Its Discontents. In the future I will scan some relevant chapters from his book, because it is so instructive.

As for lack of democracy in Russia... We can't blame the West, but the West -- and yes, Bill Clinton! -- certainly undermined the legitimacy of democracy in Russians' eyes by supporting corrupt "reformers" like Chubais and Yeltsin. Demokratia (democracy) became known as dermocratia (shitocracy) among ordinary Russians. America in particular was so frightened of a resurgent Communist Party that it was ready to throw money and support at anybody parroting the "free markets" and "democracy" shtick. The tragedy is that the Communist Party was and remains the only real party, by Western standards, in Russia. It could have been encouraged to transform into a modern Social Democratic party on par with many other European democracies, but instead it was marginalized, undermined, and then ignored. The irony is that anybody who was anybody in Russia was a former party member, including Yeltsin.

Poland, which is cited here as a success story, initially followed "shock therapy," but then considerably slowed down the pace of reform, and concentrated on sequencing. As Stiglitz argues, timing and sequencing, not to mention avoiding cookie-cutter approaches advocated by the IMF and World Bank, are the real keys to successful reform.

Unfortunately, many Russians now hold a "conspiracy theory" view of the West's motives in the 90s; they think our real goal was to cripple and emasculate Russia under the guise of smiling friendship. I don't agree with this view, but I can certainly understand why they feel that way. Even more, I can understand why they're telling us now to take our sanctimonious advice about democracy and rule of law and shove it. (Our invading Iraq didn't do much for our moral authority either).

The next U.S. president should first make an apology to Russia for our, er, well-intentioned errors in the 90s. And he should reverse NATO expansion and anti-missile systems on Russia's doorstep. If the next president would do those three things, we'd find Russia -- especially ordinary Russian voters! -- much more receptive to friendly relations and our "expert" advice.