Posts Tagged ‘lukyanov’
Mixing Human Rights and Trade Relations: Dealing with Today’s Russia
After trying for some two decades, Russia will join the World Trade Organization, or WTO, later this month. For the Kremlin, it’s a hugely symbolic moment. Russia has joined the club.
Russia’s entry to the WTO should make it easier for nations to trade with them. By some estimates, the US could double its exports to Russia in the next five years.
But there’s a catch: A Cold War law remains on the books, which prevents normal trade relations between the two countries. It’s a law that many US businesses, ranchers and farmers want removed immediately. American Unions want Congress to take a tougher stance with Russia. The World’s Jason Margolis has more.
To understand why US companies won’t be able to trade freely with Russia anytime soon, we need a brief history lesson.
In the 1970’s, Soviet Jews, many of whom faced persecution, were prevented from emigrating from the USSR. Svetlana Boym was one of them. She’s now a professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
BOYM: “I was born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. I came to the United States as a refugee. The reason I was able to enter the United States and exit the former Soviet Union was thanks to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment.”
The “Jackson-Vanik Amendment” was passed by Congress in 1974. The Amendment denied equal trading rights to countries restricting emigration. It was designed to put pressure on Soviet leaders to open their borders. Many argue it worked. Some 1.5 million Soviet Jews were able to leave.
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An unbeatable insight into the minds that control Russia
Foreigners seeking to explain the paranoia of Kremlin’s elite need only look to the country’s state-sponsored television.
Russia Today, the state-financed television channel for foreigners, is a must-watch. Not because of journalistic excellence: it has glitzy presentation but huge holes in its coverage and bizarre quirks in its editorial outlook. But it does give an unbeatable insight into the minds of the people who run it – and into the regime that sponsors it.
To be fair, I should note that the channel has substantial strengths. It reports thoroughly on official utterances and it covers most of the headline stories in Russia with reasonable professionalism. In that sense it is quite different from the old Soviet media, which simply ignored topics that did not fit the official line. Russia Today has reported, for example, on the grotesque posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in prison after exposing a $230 million (€175m) fraud against the Russian taxpayer, perpetrated by officials. It also rarely misses a story about UFOs or life on Venus.
But the hallmark of Russia Today is anti-Westernism. It gleefully highlights weaknesses, anomalies and double standards in countries that like to criticise Russia. The message is blunt: get your own house in order before lecturing others. Human-rights violations, political corruption and economic weaknesses get a particularly enthusiastic outing, even when the factual basis is tenuous or non-existent. One commentator says that the US is fascist. Another report claims that Nazism is on the rise in Germany and the Baltic states.
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