By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW â With a shower of paint bombs, rocks, eggs and bottles, thousands of demonstrators outside the US embassy here on March 25 expressed outrage at the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
Next morning, an estimated 5000 people demonstrated outside the British embassy. The protesters included large numbers of students, as well as factory workers organised by the Moscow Federation of Trade Unions.
As the day wore on, the US embassy again became the target of protest. As many as 7000 people gathered, chanting and flinging projectiles. Press reports noted the unusual range of people taking part â from skinheads and teenage football fans to office workers and pensioners.
From around Russia came news of further demonstrations. Yesterday Iraq, Today Serbia, Tomorrow Russia, read a placard in St Petersburg. Nationalist organisations signed up military veterans to defend Yugoslavia.
According to survey findings, no fewer than 93% of Russians oppose NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, where the majority Serb population have traditional ties with Russia. Sensing the popular mood, Russia's state leaders have tuned in to it â at least rhetorically.
As the first reports of the bombing came in, President Boris Yeltsin hinted that Russia might respond with measures of a military character. In an interview on March 27, foreign minister Igor Ivanov accused NATO of committing genocide against the Yugoslav people, and suggested that the alliance answer for its actions before the UN war crimes tribunal.
For anyone who remembers the mood of Russian leaders â and of a good part of the population â in the early 1990s, the scenes of the past days and weeks have been brimful of irony. Seven or eight years ago, so far as Yeltsin and many of his followers were concerned, the Western powers could do no wrong.
But faith in the West has slid steadily since. As the bombs rain on Yugoslavia, the last shreds of belief in Western good will are being replaced by cynicism.
In the Russian press, the rationalisations offered by Western leaders to explain the bombing campaign are treated with open scorn. So the NATO powers claim to have gone to war from a commitment to defend the rights of the Kosovar population in Yugoslavia? There is an unquestionable double standard, the Moscow paper Novye Izvestia observed on March 26, if one recalls how harshly Turkey, a NATO member, deals with the Kurds.
The mood of hostility to the West is especially marked in the military. Most Russian military personnel are expressing direct readiness for armed solidarity with the Serbs, the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported on March 27. The US and NATO are now associated exclusively with the image of the enemy.
It is not only among military officers that suspicions of NATO have grown stronger in the past few years.
Why, Russians often ask themselves, has the NATO alliance even been preserved, now that the Cold War has ended?
For a decade, liberal ideologues have tried to suppress the instinct of many Russians to view political questions in terms of class. But as the bombs and missiles have pounded Yugoslavia, even Russian liberals have been admitting that NATO is a military club of the rich, an armed alliance for enforcing the interests of the haves of North America and Europe against the have-nots.
As citizens of what is now the great have-not of Europe, Russians have been quick to note that the bombing of Yugoslavia also carries a powerful message for them. If the Russian state should dare to pursue its interests in ways not to the West's liking, the message says, the consequences for Russia could be devastating.
These are valid reasons for the Russian masses to fling beer bottles, including full ones, at the windows of the US embassy. The Russian elite have been flinging epithets, but after years of implementing Western economic prescriptions, the Russian government can now come up with little in the way of concrete action to keep NATO in check.
When news of the bombing broke, Russian representatives in the United Nations Security Council moved a resolution demanding an immediate halt to the air strikes. The resolution, predictably, was heavily defeated.
Russian military collaboration with NATO has now been frozen, and ratification by Russia of the START-2 nuclear arms reduction treaty has been postponed. The effect of these moves on the NATO governments, however, has been undetectable.
Meanwhile, calls for Russia to provide military aid to Yugoslavia have been quietly pushed aside by the authorities as impractical and dangerous.
The failure of Russian leaders to make any impact on NATO is not, however, simply a reflection of Russia's drastically reduced influence in the world. The will is not there either.
The leaders' expressions of outrage at the bombing of Yugoslavia have been accompanied by assurances that no big changes in Moscow's orientation to the West are desired or contemplated.
In a dramatic gesture on March 23, Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov called off a trip to the US after being denied guarantees that air strikes would not begin while he was there. Other members of his delegation, however, made their way to Washington, and while bombs fell on Belgrade, most of the meetings planned for Primakov's trip took place.
A meeting between Primakov and International Monetary Fund chief Michel Camdessus, which had been due to take place in the US, was quickly relocated to Moscow. The Russian government was seeking IMF credits of as much as US$4.8 billion, needed to forestall a default on foreign debt payments. Nothing the NATO powers might do in the Balkans, it became clear, would be allowed to prejudice these negotiations.
It might be argued that in stating emphatic opposition to NATO's attacks on Yugoslavia, Primakov and the Russian elite have passed an important test. But given the popular mood, they could not have done otherwise. If their statements are analysed, it becomes clear that the Russian rulers have dealt with the imperialist bombers much more kindly than they might have done.
A striking feature of the rhetoric issuing from Moscow â both from official spokespeople and major newspapers â is the whitewash of the Yugoslav government and its refusal to address the real history and dynamics of the situation in Kosova. According to Novye Izvestia on March 26, Yugoslavia has been under attack for solving strictly internal problems.
To foreign minister Igor Ivanov, quoted in the Moscow press, the Kosova Liberation Army consists simply of Albanian terrorists and Muslim extremists. Meanwhile, all but a few dismissive references to Serbian atrocities against the Kosovars have been expunged from the Russian media.
The Russian elite is quite happy to underline its various differences with the West by permitting and even encouraging chauvinist fervour. But promoting a serious understanding of national rights and self-determination â something which would really give NATO problems â is not its line.