[c. 6,500 words, 40 illustrations][End]

A presentation by the Expansionist Party of the United States

RUSSIA AND THE UNITED STATES

 
Partnership for Global Peace and Progress

"Make no little plans, for they have no magic to stir men's blood."

Daniel Burnham, architect whose 1909 plan for the Chicago waterfront created vast public spaces

The largest country on Earth is in deep trouble, trouble that could turn to crisis and then cataclysm not just for its people and neighbors, but also for the United States and indeed the entire planet.

As I write this, in early December 1998, U.S. astronauts are connecting the American-built second element of the International Space Station to the Russian-built first, to create the central core of a huge enterprise of unforeseeable scientific and technological possibilities that might produce discoveries of enormous value to life on Earth and will surely prove a steppingstone to exploration of our cosmic neighbors. But down on Earth, the U.S. and other Western powers are letting the country that started us on this noble enterprise flounder in a political, economic, and social revolution that may fail without outside help of many kinds. And if it does fail, heaven help us all.

Russia at the end of the 1990s bears an eerie resemblance to Germany in the early 1930s. Weimar Germany was struggling to create a viable democratic society where none had ever existed, and was about to fail. Other Western powers not only did not help Germans succeed but actually did everything in their power to make them fail. The result was the rise of Adolf Hitler. What will failure of Russia's present attempts to reform produce? No one can say, but picture a Russian Hitler with thousands of nuclear weapons at his command, and you may get a sense of the danger we face unless we act promptly and massively to help Russians succeed in their revolution.

Southeast corner of the Kremlin, Moscow, with the Ivan the Great belltower
and golden domes of Russian Orthodox cathedrals inside the wall.

In 1991 the people of Russia started a new Russian Revolution, inspired by Boris Yeltsin, former Communist mayor of Moscow. They dismantled the Soviet Union, which for almost 73 years had created tumult all over this planet, and with it, the Russian Empire that the Soviet state inherited. The West spent trillions of dollars and suffered huge losses in life and peace of mind in fighting off "worldwide Communist revolution" led by subversives trained and supported by the Kremlin. In 73 years, Communism went from a nutso academic theory to a brutal system of government that ruled over a quarter of the planet, a drive inspired and directed from Moscow. When the people of Russia turned their back on that grim history, did the leaders of the West rejoice and rush to provide every assistance Russians might need to succeed as anti-Communist free people? They did not. Quite the contrary, they seem to have gone out of their way not to reward the Russian people for destroying the Soviet Union but to punish them for the long decades in which they unwillingly served a Soviet master, to make them suffer for their crimes. Never mind that the crimes were not those of the people but of their masters, and Russians suffered grievously themselves in purges and show trials and merciless mass incarceration in deadly gulags. They haven't suffered enough, it seems, for the leaders of the West. Now they must nearly starve in the cold if they won't — or can't — make on their own, unaided, the kinds of reforms that alone will make Russia prosperous and free. But how are people who have never known a market economy and never had a democracy to learn the key skills and attitudes those new institutions require if the West, homeland of those institutions, will not help?

The West, including the White House, has adopted a rigid, cold-blooded attitude toward Russia: "We can't reform their society; they must do it on their own; and if they can't, that's their problem." Oh, no it's not. If they can't, that's everybody's problem. We dare not adopt a sink-or-swim attitude toward Russia, because Russia is so big that if it sinks, it takes us all with it.

The people of the United States must be smarter than their "leaders" and force a change in U.S. attitude toward Russia, away from stand-by-and-see-what-happens to engage, inspire, educate, and integrate Russia into the West, where it belongs. Our "leaders" will follow our lead in this as in public-opinion polls.

We must launch a huge outreach program, public and private, to transform Russia in ways its people want, and bring Russia firmly back within the community of Western nations, where it belongs. Before I discuss what the Expansionist Party proposes in the way of programs, let me provide some background about a country all too few Westerners know much about.

Cold War rhetoric spoke of the two sides to the prolonged conflict as two opposite points of the compass, West and East. The West was "The Good Guys"; the East, "The Bad Guys". The West was led by the U.S.; the East by "Russia" (the Soviet Union as it was commonly referred to, with reason). Such rhetoric denies the fundamentally Western nature of Russian civilization, and it's time to recast Russia as a Western country, not just in Western eyes, but in Russian eyes as well.

Note: Some of the illustrations below are clickable thumbnails that will take you to an enlarged view and caption. Most, however, are a fixed size, and are presented here to offer readers a "virtual tour" of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, and to give viewers some sense of how much Russia has to offer the West culturally. There may be no reason a particular photo appears in one part of this presentation rather than another.

Understanding Russia. In the longest historical perspective, the U.S. and Russia are, respectively, the surviving centers of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. American civilization is based on Rome; Russian, on Constantinople. Mainline American religious denominations are all based on the Roman Catholic Church. The Russian Orthodox Church is based on the Greek Orthodox Church of Constantinople. The dominant languages of the United States are English and Spanish, both written in the Roman alphabet. English, tho a Germanic language in form, derives some 65% of its vocabulary from Latin. Spanish, a Roman(ce) language, derives almost its entire vocabulary from Latin. Russian, a Slavic language in form and vocabulary, is less obviously tied to Greek but employs an alphabet based on the Greek alphabet that was brought to the Russians by missionaries from Greek-speaking Constantinople.

Russia's two capitals in recent history, Moscow, the ancient capital, and Saint Petersburg, capital from 1713 to 1918, reflect Russia's split personality. Moscow's architecture is "Eastern" (Byzantine); Saint Petersburg's, western (Roman). Compare the two buildings pictured atop this page, St. Basil's Cathedral on Red Square, Moscow, "eastern"; the United States Capitol, western (a fine Roman building). Now look at Saint Isaac's Cathedral, Saint Petersburg, also a fine Roman building, on the outside. Inside, it is very much part of the artistic tradition of Constantinople, filled with glorious mosaics and iconic paintings. In context, then, "Eastern" meaning "Byzantine" is just another word for "Western" in the sense of "civilization", the culture of Byzantium (Constantinople) and that of Rome being but two halves of the same walnut.

The art of Russia is decidedly Western, as one can plainly see by contrast with the art of China, Japan, or India. The greatest art museum of Russia, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, is a huge collection of mainly Western art, in a Western building, the Winter Palace of the czars, designed by an Italian architect.

Russian music also falls well within the sphere of Western music, from the rich baritones of Orthodox liturgical music to the folk-influenced music of Rimski-Korsakov to Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker to Rachmaninov's virtuosic romanticism to the works of modern masters like Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, to the punk-rock and, yes, even hiphop outpourings of today's youth. It's all Western music, one more proof that Russia is, fundamentally, a Western country.

Intricate inlaid floor in the Winter Palace
(Hermitage Museum), Saint Petersburg.

Thinking of Russia as "eastern" disserves Russians and the West alike. It has produced a distance between us that is based on a historical misunderstanding and cultural chauvinism in the nations of the West farther west than Russia, which in turn has fed Russian suspicions of the West that survive to this day and threaten future peace.

Russia is an ancient country with few well-defined and readily defensible geographical boundaries. Its main defenses against successful takeover by outsiders have consisted mainly of its vastness and its weather. Neither has always sufficed.

Parts of present-day European Russia have been seized and occupied for decades by various of its neighbors — Poland, Lithuania, and Sweden most prominently. The Soviet film Alexander Nevsky rousingly portrays Russia's defense against invasion by Germany's Teutonic Knights. Made in 1938 by the brilliant director Sergei Eisenstein, the film was a propaganda piece designed to stiffen Russian resolve against impending invasion by Nazi Germany. Despite that resolve, Germany did manage to seize hundreds of thousands of square miles of the Soviet Union. Russia's severe winter weather ravaged German forces, however, as it had, 130 years earlier, ravaged the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had actually taken Moscow, a city the Soviets never yielded. The same severe weather was, alas, the undoing of Russia in the 13th Century, when Mongol horsemen of the Golden Horde galloped across Russia's frozen rivers to ravage the entire region.

The Mongol invasion has colored Russian perceptions of outsiders ever since. Few Westerners have any conception of how horrendous that invasion was, and how devastating its consequences.

The capital of the Bulgar kingdom of present-day southern Russia was "the beautiful city of Bulgar. . . . [Its] population of over fifty thousand was exterminated and the city so utterly destroyed that it was never rebuilt." After that, "a Mongol army of a hundred and twenty thousand men crossed the frozen Volga into Russia" to attack the principality of Riazan, southeast of Moscow. "It was time for the terror to begin. The Mongol army advanced on Riazan, laying waste the land and sacking all the towns and cities . . . At Riazan [city], . . . Prince Uri, his family and all their courtiers were slaughtered. Some of his people were shot in the streets or flayed alive, others were impaled and left to die in the burning buildings. Even the churches were set on fire, and before they all died, the monks and the citizens who had taken refuge with them watched helplessly as all the young women, including the nuns, were systematically raped. Only at the end were a few survivors allowed to escape so that the news of the terror might spread. . . . Kolomna, the last city of Riazan [before the grand duchy of Moscow] . . . [was] taken and suffered the same fate as Riazan."

After one brief but humiliating defeat by the garrison of Kozelsk [southwest of Moscow], the Mongols rallied "to avenge it. For seven desperate weeks, longer than any other Russian city, Kozelsk held out, but in the end it fell and its population was exterminated in such a hideous slaughter that the Mongols themselves renamed it the 'City of Sorrow'."

"To the Russians, Kiev [first Russian capital, now in Ukraine] was 'the mother of cities'. Standing on the high banks above the marshes of the river Dnieper, along which for four hundred years the ships that traded with Byzantium had brought its wealth and its culture, the golden domes of thirty churches gleamed above its white walls. Even to the invaders who had seen the splendor of Samarkand it was beautiful, and they called it 'the court of the golden heads'. . . . Kiev was taken street by street. . . . The city that had once ruled Russia was utterly destroyed and plundered. All the Byzantine treasures were carried away and even the tombs of the saints were broken open and their bones scattered. Among the irreplaceable ruins, the only building that remained intact was the magnificent cathedral of Saint Sophia, containing the tomb of its builder, Yaroslav the Wise, the man who had revised and codified the Russian laws and established Kiev as the political and religious capital of Russia — an apposite example of the Mongol sense of values. . . .

"Southern and eastern Russia were left in ruins. . . . For the rest of Russia the worst of the fighting was over, but what Karl Marx described as 'the bloody swamp of Mongol slavery' was only just beginning. The next two hundred years of Russian history were to be known as the period of 'the Mongol yoke'. . . . Russia was torn away from Europe, and when the Mongols abandoned it after two hundred years it was feudal and backward. . . . Wherever the Mongols rode they left an irretrievably ruined economy and wherever they ruled they left a petty, self-important aristocracy and an exploited peasantry. In some countries their legacy of indigence and oppression survived for centuries until the desperate peoples resorted to revolution and communism."

James Chambers, The Devil's Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe

The Mongols were even largely responsible for the final destruction of the Byzantine Empire, "the Second Rome", for they displaced the Ottoman Turks from Kwarizm (Persia and central Asia) westward to present-day Turkey, where they created a powerful state that eventually conquered Constantinople. After that disaster to Christendom, Russia became "the Third Rome", bulwark of Orthodox Christianity, which everywhere else was under the control of Moslem states. (Curiously, the Ottomans partly avenged their humiliation in Kwarizm when they subordinated the Mongol Khanate of Crimea around 1475.)

Central dome of St. Isaac's Cathedral, Saint Petersburg.

The Mongols were overlords to most of European Russia from about 1240 to 1552, when Ivan the Terrible destroyed Kazan: 312 years. Ivan went on two years later to destroy Astrakhan, the second of the three Mongol khanates. But it wasn't until 1783 — 543 years after the Mongols thundered across the Volga — that Russia conquered the Khanate of Crimea. Russia's centuries of humiliation have left a permanent scar on the Russian psyche which Americans, who have never known foreign occupation, can scarcely begin to appreciate. But we must try, because that awful, horrendous, seemingly endless humiliation at the hands of the Mongols affects Russians' world view in all things.

Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, Saint Petersburg.

When the U.S. and other nations erected a cordon sanitaire around Communist Russia to defend against an ever-outward drive of Communist imperialism, Russians saw this as "encirclement", a type of siege not of Communism but of Russia. This played very nicely into the hands of the Red Army, which was able to use Russian fear of invasion to steal an ever-larger portion of the nation's wealth and build an ever more fearsome war machine. Naturally, the West saw that military growth as being developed for aggression, whereas the typical Russian was inclined to view it as strictly defensive. The West matched Soviet spending, then overmatched it. The Soviet government tried to keep pace, but couldn't. And the useless diversion of an unreasonable and unrealistic proportion of the Soviet Union's productive capacity to military needs hastened the fall of the Soviet Empire. Perhaps, then, we should be grateful for Russian paranoia risen from its horrendous Mongol experience. But that paranoia is still very much part of the Russian psyche, and we must now disarm it, not alarm it.

Clock in central facade, Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, Saint Petersburg.

Embracing Russia, Not Conquering It. The United States has, at the urging of its European partners, moved to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) eastward to the borders of Russia but has stopped short of inviting Russia itself into NATO as a full participant in the defense of Western values. Instead of full membership, Russia has been offered, and has accepted, participation in the amorphous "Partnership for Peace". This "Partnership" is a sort of halfway house for former Warsaw Pact countries that offers military cooperation and consultation but does not guarantee ultimate membership in NATO. Not surprisingly, some Russian nationalists have reacted with alarm — both genuine and bogus — that NATO is again trying to encircle Russia with hostile armies, this time right up to the borders of Mother Russia itself.

Weather vane atop spire of Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul.

The United States must break thru resistance in both Western European capitals and Moscow itself to full Russian membership in NATO. Russia is far and away the largest country of Europe, four times the area (in Europe! let alone its vastness in northern Asia) and 70 million larger in population than the largest countries of Western and Central Europe. The Russian Army was once, and might again be, a force to be reckoned with, tho it is now in ruins. We dare not see that army rise outside and possibly in opposition to NATO. Russia still has THOUSANDS of nuclear warheads, but its control systems are not modern, and desperate economic conditions suffered by key personnel can prove powerful temptations to sell nuclear technology, nuclear materials, even complete nuclear-weapons systems to nations hostile to the West. Do we really want to see Russia hawking hydrogen bombs to the likes of Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Cuba?

Double-domed tower at back of Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul.

Military Cooperation. Russia must be fully integrated into NATO at the earliest possible moment. Russian commanders and the "best and brightest" of Russia's officer corps should be attending U.S. military academies, learning English, and studying democracy and free market economics in U.S. institutions of higher education across the country. We should be holding joint exercises with the Russian Army and Navy, just as we have conducted joint missions with the Russian space agency. We must persuade Russia's generals, colonels, and corporals that it is far to be preferred that the military might of the United States be arrayed in the defense of Russia than devoted to the destruction of Russia.

Further, the U.S. must recognize that the main threat to the long-term military security of the United States lies not in Moscow but in the emerging Franco-German entente that seeks to dominate Europe and create the European Union into a superpower to rival the United States. A U.S.-Russian entente would put an abrupt end to such ambitions.

 Smolny Cathedral, Saint Petersburg.

Trade. The United States must draw Russia into the market economic system fast. Every school of business in the U.S. should have dozens of Russian grad students at home and send visiting faculty to every major institution of higher education and, indeed, every major school system across Russia. The U.S. should negotiate free trade in mutually advantageous areas, such as mining and computer technology, in anticipation of a sweeping free-trade agreement on the order of NAFTA. U.S. legal experts should be advising every Russian national and local government on the legal reforms needed to create Russia into a modern free-market state, from legalizing private ownership of land, to converting collective farms into coops or private farms, to developing up-to-date corporate forms, such as limited liability companies and professional corporations, across the board. Restrictions on foreign ownership in most fields should be lifted, and joint ventures must be rendered more accountable to foreign partners.

Red flag flying over Kremlin, Moscow, 1984.

Crime and Corruption. Among the most surprising developments in post-Soviet Russia is the collapse of a police state into a Mafia state. Organized crime places a powerfully restraining arm upon modernization and foreign investment, because foreign visitors and entrepreneurs (both foreign and Russian-born) who establish successful concerns are subject to extortion, kidnapping, and murder. Corruption has reached the highest levels of police administrations and local and regional governments, as people who haven't been paid reasonable salaries in months decide that honest public service won't pay the bills. Russia must develop effective instruments of law enforcement and destroy corruption in police departments and government agencies root and branch, with the utmost severity. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has already begun to train Russian investigators and administrators in modern law-enforcement techniques, but much more remains to be done. The United States has its own problems with corruption, of course, but they are trivial as against the bulk of the world, and we may be able to have a crucial impact in this area.

Changing of the guard at Lenin's Tomb, Moscow. Note that rifles do not touch the shoulder.

There is more than a little self-defense in such measures, because various Russian criminal organizations have started up operations in the United States, and are looking to muscle in on the international drug traffic that so devastates the United States. Much of the training of Russian police should be done in the United States, in cities where the Russian Mafia has been active, such that the Russian language facility of trainees here can be of dramatic assistance to American police departments, few of which have any competence in Russian whatsoever.

Ballroom in Winter Palace (Hermitage Museum), Saint Petersburg.

Immigration. There are hundreds of thousands of Russians who would like to resettle in the West, for personal and economic reasons. The United States should regard this temporary condition as an opportunity to get high quality immigrants who are used to cold weather and who would be eager to settle in areas of the United States that have been progressively depopulated (at least in relative terms) by internal migration to the Sunbelt. Many Russians are extremely well educated, and special programs should be established by licensing authorities to cut thru red tape and speed the acquisition of professional licenses in the United States by qualified immigrants. Immersion programs in English can remedy language problems in short order, and such programs can be undertaken and financed by public authorities, labor unions, and professional associations of many kinds.

Malachite Room, Winter Palace (Hermitage Museum), Saint Petersburg.

Moreover, Russian authorities should actively solicit temporary or permanent immigrants from the United States to the vast open spaces of Russia, a "new frontier" for rugged individualists interested in nature, wildlife, and economic opportunities in an undeveloped market. Immigration should be seen as a convection of people and ideas, in which some people live a few years or decades in a different country, then return to their own, more than just traditional immigration that requires people to cut themselves off from "the old country".

View of southern portion of the Kremlin, Moscow.

English-Language Instruction. U.S. educational institutions and private English as a Second Language (ESL) schools should be training Russians in this most useful of international languages, as at once to make the vast storehouse of information available in English accessible to Russians in all walks of life and to expose ordinary Russians to the literature of democracy. Tho some materials, such as the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Federalist Papers, are available in Russian translation, there is so much more to the everyday maintenance and repair of democracy that goes on in the cultural institutions of English-speaking countries, from letters columns in newspapers, to talk-radio call-in programs, to talking-head public affairs programs on the major television networks, that is not accessible to people who are not fluent in English. We who have grown up with this constant discourse have been shaped by it. Russians have never had any such discourse, so don't really know how democracy works, where one person's rights end and another's start, etc. They need to be drawn into the conversation, and they can participate fully only in English.

Moscow River, Kremlin.

Cultural Exchanges. Russia is a great civilization more than just an enormous country. In 1988 Russia celebrated 1,000 years of Christianity. Magnificent works of art and architecture, music and literature, science and technology — remember, it was a Russian satellite, Sputnik, that launched the Space Age — have sprung from Russia, and we in the West know almost nothing of it. It's time we learned. Oh, we've seen some of the ballets and heard the "1812 Overture". But there's so much more.

Onion domes inside Kremlin, Moscow.

Russian art collections might usefully circulate with American collections across our two countries, in a program of touring exhibitions from the Hermitage, Met, Smithsonian, etc., subsidized by U.S. corporations and insured by U.S. insurance companies.

Diplomats' entrance, Winter Palace (now main public entrance to the Hermitage Museum), Saint Petersburg.

American performers should add Russia to their list of destinations for major concert tours and offer master classes at major stops. Russian orchestras and ballet companies should target underserved U.S. markets and hold master classes here too.

Spassky Tower (tallest on the Kremlin wall), Moscow.

Student exchange programs should be sending hundreds of thousands of American kids to Russia's best schools and bringing hundreds of thousands of Russian kids to American schools, from high school thru doctoral programs.

Computer hardware and computer services companies should be installing PC's all across Russia and connecting them to the Internet. Gurus who anticipate that providers of computer services might someday give away computers as part of the package can do pilot programs in Russia and iron out the bugs.

Washed-brick wall of Kremlin, Moscow.

Long-Term Cooperation. Will Russia ever want to join the Union? Well, eventually this whole planet will be brought under a single government, and we of XP would much prefer it be in the form of the federal union governed by the U.S. Constitution, not the bureaucratic and high-handed institutions of the European Union or the quixotic, unpredictable, and undemocratic ambitions of the United Nations.

Back of Saint Basil's Cathedral, Red Square, Moscow.

Tho geographically huge, Russia has only 150 million people, as compared to some 270 million for the United States. Accession of all of Russia to the Union would not swamp us with a population so great as to take over our institutions and turn them against us. Russians are used to a larger "Union".  That word was employed for many things in the days of the Soviet "Union":  "Union Republics", "All-Union" this, "All-Union" that. Russians might be very comfortable in a larger union.

Russia and the United States have many similarities. There are 21 major ethnic communities in Russia represented by "republics" within the Russian Federation. The Soviet Union and Russian Empire before it were also multi-ethnic societies that dealt with intercommunal problems and possibilities. Russia and the United States were allies in World War II, and together defeated Nazism. We are racially similar. The U.S. is predominantly white with substantial black and Latino communities (the latter largely Indian/mestizo racially), and a relatively small but growing Asian community. Russia is preponderantly (c. 83%) Great Russian racially, but has various other European and Asian communities of size.

Small Throne Room, Winter Palace (Hermitage), Saint Petersburg.

Russians belong to a larger linguistic community, in that there are millions of Russian-speaking former Soviet citizens still resident in former Soviet republics beyond the present borders of Russia, and most Slavic languages are mutually comprehensible if people speak slowly and carefully to people outside their own group. The U.S. has the English-speaking world to broaden its view.

Archway with stained-glass picture of Jesus beyond, St. Isaac's Cathedral, Saint Petersburg.

Both are huge countries with great populations. Russians in Siberia and Americans in Alaska have much the same feeling of being part of a very special place, in communion with a great emptiness filled by nature rather than people. And of course Alaska is a geographical and historical link between our two countries. Former "Russian America" and Russia are separated by only a few miles across the Bering Strait.

Detail of the arch above the doorway to that stained-glass window.

Moreover, both peoples have borne the burdens of superpowerhood. We have felt ourselves pushed and pulled by demands to do this and refrain from doing that, in areas far from our borders and distant from our cultures. We both remain great nuclear powers to this day, and share responsibility for defending against nuclear proliferation, fighting international terrorism, and promoting equitable development worldwide.

Angel-capped screen of many icons, St. Isaac's Cathedral, Saint Petersburg.

In early 1991, I wrote a letter to then-President of the then-Soviet Union urging him to use his power to restrain the United States from waging an unjust war against Iraq, and suggesting ways to bolster the internal cohesion of the Soviet Union. (My state's U.S. Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, had already publicly foreseen the breakup of the USSR.) Rather than incorporate those arguments into this presentation, let me simply provide here a clickable hyperlink to that letter, "Peace in the Middle East; Preserving the Soviet Union", which contains in turn a link to a presentation on Iraq's justification for retaking Kuwait and two attachments. The Gorbachev letter outlines the kind of cooperation Russia and the U.S. should seek in promoting peace and justice all around the world.

Arched gate thru wall of Fortress of Sts. Peter and Paul, Saint Petersburg.
Note the two-headed eagle of Imperial Russia over the archway.

One way of promoting world development that Russia is well suited to pursue is by relieving population pressures in some of the more overcrowded countries of the world by taking in significant numbers of immigrants of child-bearing age. Such immigrants could be admitted conditionally, that is, on condition that they settle in empty areas, bring skills Russia needs (for instance, entrepreneurship), and/or practice contraception. Sovereign Russia is able to place any conditions upon immigration it may see as necessary or desirable. The Russian government could limit the concentration of any given national community in order to prevent cultural fragmentation and preserve Russian civilization, albeit with the kinds of dynamic evolution all modern societies experience. That is, it is in the nature of immigration that one person arrives from a sending country, establishes himself, then sends for family members. They then invite friends to come over, and help those new arrivals get settled. Those new arrivals send for their family, friends, and neighbors, and a community of size gradually develops. The ultimate consequence of too much of this can be the creation of an insular community of foreign-minded individuals who do not integrate with the host country but become a foreign object in the body politic. To prevent that, Russia can from the outset establish mixed communities of new immigrants, so that as each group enlarges, it will have to relate to others. (For more about the values and hazards of immigration, see our presentation "Isolationism and Immigration".)

Yin and Yang. Russia and the United States are natural partners. Their strengths complement each other. Both are big and rich in natural and human resources. What Russia lacks in entrepreneurial experience and startup capital, the United States has in huge supply. In turn, Russia has some natural resources in short supply in the United States. The U.S. is a relatively new country, lacking both in history and appreciation of history. Russia is an ancient country with a deep sense of history, and the lessons history can teach. The U.S. is a society constantly in search of the new, the different. Russia is a society that understands that new is not necessarily "improved"; that long-established cultural forms and traditions have value. Tho the U.S. still has plenty of wide open spaces, it is so urbanized that it is getting to feel crowded. Russia's enormous emptiness is a breath of fresh air (often cold air, but fresh). Tho U.S. culture can soar, too much of the popular culture is shallow and flighty. Russia's culture has the depth and gravity to anchor a synergistic cultural partnership.

Characteristic curved tusks of skeletal mammoth in the Hall of Mammoths, Zoological Museum, Saint Petersburg.

Russians have learned, the hard way, that capitalism without a heart is a monster. They will in time find a way to tame that beast, with or without input from the United States. But U.S. investment and technological and entrepreneurial knowhow can greatly speed the process of transforming Russia's economy from inefficient and environmentally destructive Communism to a successful mixed economy that takes the best of capitalism while spreading the benefits of economic success widely across society. Once Russia has created that successful mix, the Russian model might prove more appropriate for a number of developing countries in the Third World than a purely American model.

Stuffed mamoth in Hall of Mammoths, Zoological Museum, Saint Petersburg.
This is not a reconstruction from bones but an actual skin-and-bones mammoth as found in permafrost.
The end of the trunk, not visible here, was shortened for having been eaten away by dogs
when the carcass was exposed to the elements in 1905. The mammoth's awkward position
is that in which it was found, the way it apparently landed on falling into a ravine,
where it died and was frozen in flesh and time for 40,000 years.

Once Russia starts to move, its partnership with the U.S. can transform the world. Between us we have over 400 million people and 10 million square miles of resource-rich territory. We can bring in huge numbers of temporary immigrants to stabilize world populations, educate them, and send them back to their countries to teach their neighbors the skills and values they need to modernize. Our military might, combined, can guarantee that no major war will ever again ravage the Earth. And our two networks of influence, interconnected and cooperating, can encourage peaceful resolutions of problems of all types. Mediation in Moscow, Washington, New York and other centers in our two countries can hammer out accords on military, social, political, and economic conflicts between groups who are unwilling, absent our good graces, to sit down with each other. And always we can hold out both carrot and stick: development aid and transfer of technology as carrot; coordinated Russian-American military strikes as stick. We can crack the whip over the United Nations, tame the General Assembly, make peace in the Middle East, Guatemala, Tibet — pretty much anything we care to do, we can do, together. Who's to stop us? And all the while our very different perspectives will keep us both honest and restrain each other from arrogant misuse of power.

Neva River, Saint Petersburg, looking toward the Zoological Museum from a window in the Winter Palace (Hermitage Museum).

Russia and the United States became great powers of huge size and wealth thru the ambitions of great men. Recently, both countries have lost their way. Today's political "leaders" are small people of no vision. All their ambition is personal, and trivial. They want to be loved, admired, voted for. And that's about all they want — unless it is to get rich, legitimately or illegitimately, thru public office or the contacts they make while in public office that they can exploit as lobbyists after they leave office. Such little people with little minds cannot make a great future.

Polished stone sarcophaguses of czars and czarinas
in the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, Saint Petersburg.

A U.S.-Russian condominium scares some people — outside the U.S. and Russia. Europeans eager to create the European Union into a great power — nay, superpower — want to keep the United States and Russia as far apart as possible. That is not in our interest, not any of it. Russia and the U.S. must forbid Europe from becoming a superpower. Divided, the powers of Western Europe conquered almost the whole of the Earth. What might they do united? Europe must be tamed and restrained by wiser heads in Russia and America. They must be permitted to unite meaningfully only within the context of a larger union, not their own alone, with Russia as the eastern bookend and the United States the western.

XP's Chairman in Red Square, Moscow, 1984. To the left is GUM department store; center, St. Basil's Cathedral; right, Spassky Tower (tall), Lenin's Tomb (low red building), eastern wall of the Kremlin. Note that the whole of Red Square (in whose name "red" oddly means "beautiful" rather than Communist) is paved in what we in New York call "cobblestones" (rectangular stone blocks).

In all our activities for peace and progress, North-South issues must be uppermost in our minds. The appallingly unfair distribution of wealth on this planet must be fixed. Who is to do that if not Russia and the United States? Western Europe didn't do it when it dominated the globe. It used its colonies and abused many of them rapaciously. By contrast, Russia integrated the peoples it took into its Empire and made them full citizens. One Georgian even became a brutal dictator over the Russian people. The United States too integrated the peoples of the areas it conquered and extended full citizenship to them, and has become a hugely successful multi-ethnic society, from that and from massive immigration from many countries. Tho Russia lost its external Empire, the Russian Federation retains the majority of the Russian Empire's territory and many ethnic communities of size. So it understands and respects diversity, a necessity for really helping in world development.

North wall of the Kremlin (right), historical museum (left), Moscow. Red Square is beyond the Historical Museum.

The people of all nations must work together to cure horrendous problems, not just of peace but of injustice: economic inequality, social injustice, developmental backwardness, starvation and malnutrition, preventable and curable diseases that nonetheless ravage millions, intercommunal and interreligious violence, and on, and on. Solving these problems will require leadership from people who respect diversity and know how to get people of different communities to work together. Russia and the United States are two societies that by their nature have had to deal with diversity. We are naturally suited to leading the way into a world of universal prosperity, health, and real peace: interpersonal, intercommunal, interreligious. But before we can lead anyone anywhere, we must agree that this is something we want to do.

Private persons and private organizations must start the great conversation that Russians must have among themselves and with Americans about what we want from each other and can offer each other, then offer the world. Let's talk. If enough of us talk loud enough, our governments will listen.

Russia is temporarily unable to project its power. But it will emerge from its present crisis. When it does, it may be friend or foe. If we continue to let Russians suffer from hardships we could perfectly well ease; if we encircle them rather than bring them into our circle, we may find ourselves on perilous guard in a new Cold War. Surely we cannot want that.

Text and photos by L. Craig Schoonmaker, Chairman, Expansionist Party of the United States

Flag graphics courtesy of FOTW Flags Of The World website at http://fotw.digibel.be/flags/. [Animated XP logo contributed by Todd G. Sutherland of Mississauga, Ontario]

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