I thought Russians were the bad guys

When I was younger, I didn’t think much about getting old. I was a smoker then, so if I thought about old age at all, I probably assumed I would work to retirement, get lung cancer and die.

What I didn’t anticipate was passing my 70^th birthday and spending the next two years virtually isolated inside my own house, all the while watching helplessly as the United States of America teetered precariously on the edge of democracy. I certainly didn’t anticipate that a U.S. president, his closest advisers, members of Congress and a popular outlet of broadcast news would cozy up to a global adversary like Russia and echo Russian propaganda in rallies and speeches and on the nightly news.

That’s because I was brought up to believe that the Russians were our enemy. President Ronald Reagan said so in the 1980s when he called Russia the “evil empire.” I didn’t like Ronald Reagan but millions of people did. Most of them still believe he was one of our greatest presidents ever, so when he said the Russians were the bad guys and stood up to them, he couldn’t have been wrong. Am I right?

Going back even farther into the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy had to ward off World War III by standing up to Russia during the Cuban missile crisis, when Russia was setting up missile bases on the Caribbean island with the range to destroy Washington, D.C. Russia was our enemy way back then, and if not for Kennedy’s diplomacy, might have brought the world to a catastrophic result. I did like Kennedy, who is also considered to be one of our greatest American presidents, and, like Reagan, he thought the Russians were the bad guys. Was Kennedy wrong, too?

I don’t believe that he was.

For most of my lifetime, Russia has been our global adversary. That was true even after 1991, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was dissolved into Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and a few other republics with “Stan” for last names. We had “glasnost” then (meaning openness) and “perestroika” (which means restructuring) as leader Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to modernize Russia and open it up to the world.      

With the Cold War a bad memory, we tried our best to get along. There were summit meetings, diplomatic relations, trade agreements, scientific ventures, joint missions into space, economic cooperation, nuclear arms treaties, the admission of Russia into the G8 and multiple talks between American presidents and Russian leaders. U.S. relations with Russia were cordial during the 1990s if not completely cozy. (After all, how cozy can two nations be while sitting on a stockpile of nuclear weapons?)

Then, at the turn of the 21^st Century, on May 7, 2000, Russia handed over its leadership to a former KGB spy named Vladimir Putin, and everything began to change.

As one observer put it, “It feels as if Russia came full circle” after Putin ascended to power. Instead of openness and restructuring, Putin’s government has been marked by “steady, if gradual, repression and the complete erosion of those freedoms” instituted by his predecessors. Almost from the beginning, Putin began consolidating power by restoring the role of a strong central government.

One of his first acts was to seize control of the media, and he has increased the pressure over the succeeding years. Other highlights: He created the Russian national guard to quell any opposition or protests that threatened his authority. In 2003, a referendum declared that the Republic of Chechnya was now a part of Russia. In 2012, Putin won his fourth term in office amid widespread accusations of vote-rigging. And in 2014, he seized control of Crimea, which gave Russia access to ports on the Black Sea.

When Russia intervened in the war in Syria in 2015, it marked the latest move in an assertive foreign policy and provided further evidence of Putin’s world view, which is to revitalize Russia while eroding the power of NATO, weakening the United States and stirring discontent among citizens in the West. He hit the jackpot in 2016 when his candidate, Donald J. Trump, was elected president of the U.S. with Putin’s help.

Now, of course, he has invaded Ukraine, and most foreign policy experts believe his ultimate goal is to reassemble the old Soviet Union by bringing all of its former territories back into the fold.

None of this would be remarkable, given the uneven history of U.S.-Russian relations after World War II. As I said, we have tried to be friends but our alliance was always shaky at best. What is remarkable is the number of American politicians who have demonstrated pro-Russian leanings in 2022, and the willingness of members of the Republican Party to buy into Russian propaganda while blaming the world’s problems on President Joe Biden.

I’m reminded of the fictional TV show “The Americans” in which Russian agents came to America in the 1980s, assimilated into our society and continued to spy for Russia for generations while acting like typical American citizens. They were playing the long game with a well-crafted plan to create cracks in American democracy and to widen those cracks over a period of years. Today, that program doesn’t seem fictional at all. Not when we live in an era when truth is discounted as “fake news” and phony propaganda is accepted as truth.

I don’t have to think about old age any longer. I have arrived here now, and I’m somewhat shocked at what I see. If you had told me when I was younger that Russians would finance political campaigns, help elect presidents, flood our media with propaganda, invade sovereign nations right under our nose and encourage one of our political parties to support authoritarian rule, I would probably have opted out.

I don’t know what I was expecting in my golden years, but it certainly wasn’t this.