By Savithri Guruge

The West sees Russian President Vladimir Putin, who stands at centre-stage in world news at the moment, as a comic-strip super-villain, a Borat-type nut-case dictator, someone to laugh at and be afraid of at the same time, Fascist and Communist, Hitler and Stalin rolled into one big mass of genocidal energy, a corrupt oligarch who somehow hands his ill-gotten gains over to his enemies for safekeeping.

Also, he meddles in other peoples’ elections.

His opponents in the West seem not to see the irony of accusing someone else of doing what they have been doing for years. This seems obvious from US President Joe Biden’s remarks following his meeting with Putin last June:

“How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country.”According to Hong Kong University’s assistant Professor of International Relations Dov Levin, the US Government meddled in foreign elections 81 times between 1946 and 2000, more than any other government. Of course, Biden’s attitude is very similar to that which finds Ukrainian casualties of the current conflict in that country less palatable than those in Iraq, Syria or Yemen – the victims in the former are blond and blue eyed, Us, as opposed to the latter’s’ Them. This attitude contains a certain degree of white-racist “holier than thou”: We can bomb Them, but They can’t bomb Us. We can interfere in Their elections with impunity.

Interestingly, one of the 81 elections was the Russian Presidential Election of 1996. The renascent Communist Party stood on the brink of defeating incumbent President Boris Yeltsin, who had an approval rating of just 3% in January 1996. Yeltsin’s neo-Liberal “shock therapy” had reduced Russia’s economy, already battered by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s market reforms, to 70% of its 1988 level. His “voucher privatisation” programme caused most Russians to lose all their savings, but enriched a handful of oligarchs, who took advantage of the huge price difference between Russian and world market prices to buy and sell at enormous profits – which they did not re-invest in Russia, but deposited in foreign banks

The US Government heaved in, to ensure victory for their protégé. In the first place, it prevailed on the IMF to give Yeltsin’s government a US$ 10.2 billion loan to tide off economic collapse – following the election, the economy dropped to rock-bottom, 35% of it 1988 level. Parts of this loan, as well as of other Western aid, found its way to the overseas bank accounts of Yeltsin and his associates. The siphoning-off of monies totalling US$ 10 billion stretched back to 1994, being intended to enhance Yeltsin’s re-election chances, went on with the full knowledge of Western governments and agencies, including the IMF.

Secondly, at Yeltsin’s request, Clinton, who visited Moscow to boost the former’s chances, delayed the planned expansion of NATO to 1999. This enabled the West to be presented as unthreatening and secured the support in the second round of nationalist candidates defeated in the first round. Most important of these were the supporters of ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, to woo whom a series of vicious attacks on Communism from a nationalist angle, utilising the Great Russian chauvinist trope that the Communists had favoured the minorities against the majority, who had consequently declined in status and power.

This ultra-nationalist drive was part of the US Government’s third approach, an election campaign designed by a modern American election team, its highly-paid US advisers using sophisticated techniques. They concluded early that Yeltsin had nothing to recommend him, so they concentrated on a negative campaign against the most popular candidate, the Communist Party’s Gennady Zyuganov.

Of course, it is likely that Yeltsin’s team also fiddled the results. In 2011, Michael Meadowcroft, the head of the OSCE’s election-monitoring mission in Russia in 1996, reported that both the OSCE and EU authorities pressured him to ignore election irregularities, and that EU officials suppressed a report about manipulation of the media. In 2012, then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said of the 1996 election, “There is hardly any doubt who won. It was not Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.” In response, Anatoly Chubais, who headed Yeltsin’s re-election campaign, admitted that there had been frauds, but said they were not sufficient to change the election result.

Incidentally, Chubais resigned recently from his post of Kremlin adviser, in opposition to the current conflict in Ukraine. He first gained notoriety for introducing Yeltsin’s unpopular “voucher privatisation” programme in 1992.

In 1999, Yeltsin appointed Putin as his prime minister. And, of course, Putin himself has further reason to be grateful to western interference in Russia. Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in 1999-2004, admitted collaborating with Putin’s presidential election campaign in 2000. Then British PM Tony Blair attended state functions with Putin prior to the election. He would scarcely have done so without an OK from the White House.

“Putin has enormous potential, I think,” US President Bill Clinton had told him in 1999. “I think he’s very smart and thoughtful. I think we can do a lot of good with him.”

“I believe that Vladimir Putin is a leader,” Blair said at the time of his visit, “who is ready to embrace a new relationship with the European Union and the United States, who wants a strong and modern Russia and a strong relationship with the West… It is necessary to be a strong leader to sort his country out.”Blair’s assessment was probably about correct. However, a vast gap existed between what Putin considered a new relationship – dialogue between equals – and the West’s concept of Putin as a lackey. Putin was willing to play along, for example, sending emissaries to Baghdad in 2003 to beg Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to go into exile. However, Iraq was also a turning point. Putin found he had to balance his wish to foster Russia’s nascent rapport with the USA against Russia’s interests, as well as his personal ambitions: he could hardly support a war opposed by nine out of ten Russians. As Russia regained strength, Putin’s course became more independent of the West.

And therein lies Putin’s great crime. The West’s reaction is not unlike that of Charlesworth the Struldbrug in Pohl and Kornbluth’s Gladiator-at-law: “We hate you, Mundin. You said we were not God Almighty.”