Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 8 – Thirty years ago
today, President Ronald Reagan introduced the term, “evil empire,” to describe
the nature of the USSR, a term that helped change the way people around the
world saw that entity, contributed to its demise, but despite all these changes
remains relevant to this day, according to Russian commentators.
On March 8, President Reagan
delivered a speech to an Orlando, Florida, meeting of the National Association
of Evangelicals in which he described the Soviet Union as an “empire of evil”
and said the West’s struggle with it was a moral one rather than simply a
military competition and that a country committed to the defeat of evil must
continue.
In his memoirs, Reagan said that “for
too long, our leaders were incapable of describing exactly what the Soviet
Union was. People involved in our
foreign policy, in other words, liberal experts, the State Department and various
columnists, considered [my] speech illiberal and a provocation. But I always
believed that it is important to point out distinctions because in life and
history it is necessary to make a choice and take decisions.”
Reporting on this anniversary, three
Voice of American Russian Service journalists Aleks Grigoryev, Anna Plotnikova
and Anastasia Laukannen, point out that Reagan’s term “evil empire” remains
very much alive. A search on Russia’s Yandex found more than two million
references to it, and one on Google found more than 27 million (golos-ameriki.ru/content/evel-empire-phrase-reagan/1617412.html).
But more important than these numbers
are the comments they received from Russian experts and activists about the
continuing relevance of this speech. Maksim Bratersky, a professor at Moscow’s
Higher School of Economics, noted that Reagan’s phrase “really left its mark in
history.”
It had both “positive” and “negative”
consequences, he continued, “but this formula remained, and many people will
appeal to it … [because in clear and accessible language] for the first time
some so clearly put a certain idea and a certain idealism at the foundation of
the foreign policy of such a major state.”
Rafail Ganelin, a corresponding member of
the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that Reagan’s words were a response to
the anti-American propaganda that dominated Soviet ideology from the very
earliest years. The Soviet leadership,
he noted, was accustomed “to explain all [its] difficulties and failures” by
the actions of “the enemy.”
Viktor Kremenyuk, the deputy director of
the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of the USA and Canada, observed that
the USSR “really conducted itself” like “an ‘empire of evil.’” It was a system
based “injustice and force,” and Americans, especially those who did not pay
constant attention to foreign affairs, found it easy and appropriate to see it
as a conflict like that in the movie “Star Wars.”
Boris Kagarlitsky, the director of the
Moscow Institute of Globalization and Social Movements, agreed. In his view, “the
phrase of Reagan will remain in the memory of people just as people will
continue to view ‘Star Wars.’” His words are “beautifully formulated” and allow
people to invest them with whatever meaning they want.
Ivan Tsvetkov, an instructor at St.
Petersburg State University, says that Reagan’s term helped the US president in
his talks with Mikhail Gorbachev: “Reagan taught us a very important lesson”
because he showed the power of “the moral aspect” in international relation, something
that many of its practitioners downplay or ignore.
Mikhail Delyagin, director of the Moscow
Institute of the Problems of Globalization, was more critical. He suggested
that “the West will consider Russia its enemy regardless of what historical
form it takes. Therefore, as long as Russia exists, the West will consider it ‘an
evil empire.’”
Ganelin, the VOA journalists note, has
another explanation for the continuing vitality of the term. He notes that the
recent back and forth between Moscow and Washington over the Magnitsky case and
Russian orphans showed that the Russian authorities are still behaving like
their Soviet predecessors when they say “But the Americans are killing Russian
children!”
At the end of December, the Voice of
America story continues, Yury Melnichuk, an activist of the RPR Parnas Party,
demonstrated in support of the US Magnitsky law by appearing outside the US
consulate general in St. Petersburg and holding up a sign: “’Mr. Reagan, Come
Back! The Evil Empire has been reborn!!!”
Three weeks later, in an action that
provided evidence of that, Melnichuk asked for political asylum in
Austria. He told VOA that he didn’t know
much about Reagan’s domestic policies, but “his foreign policy was in [his]
view absolutely adequate to the situation. With a monster such as the USSR was,
it was possible to speak only from a position of force.”
Unfortunately, he added, “Russia continues
a policy of the Soviet model,” but “the reaction of certain civilized countries
of the West to what is happening with us in Russia does not entirely correspond
to the real situation. This reaction is
too soft and uncertain. Just as the Soviet Union was an ‘evil empire,’ so
[today] Rsusain represents a threat to democracy and civilization in the entire
world.”
Melnichu called on the West to remember
Reagan’s words and take steps lie boycotting the 2014 Winter Olympiad in Sochi,
“because ‘the evil empire’ is returning, and it is necessary to take certain
steps in order to restrain it.”
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