Then and Now

Ten years ago, on March 29, 1999, I was welcomed to Moscow by a grenade launcher.

The U.S. had recently begun bombing Serbia, Russia’s Slavic ally in the Balkans, hoping to halt Slobodan Milosevich’s aggressive actions in Bosnia. As a result, U.S.-Russian relations took a nosedive. Suddenly it was rather uncomfortable to be an American in Russia.

That’s where the grenade launcher comes in. Fifteen minutes after my cab drove me past the U.S. Embassy to my hotel, a crazed gunman took aim at the embassy from across the ten-lane highway with a grenade launcher. Thankfully, it failed to fire. But he raked the building with machine gun fire before speeding away.

On November 5, 2008, I was once again riding past the embassy in a cab – this time to the airport. Less than half an hour before, I had been sitting in my hotel room, my bags packed, watching Barack Obama deliver his inspiring election victory speech from Chicago’s Grant Park.

As I passed by the embassy, I turned to Alexei, my thirty-something cab driver, and asked if he had heard that Obama won the election.

“He won, really?” Alexei exclaimed. “Unbelievable.”

“Yes,” I agreed, at a loss to sum things up more concisely.

“I like Obama,” Alexei said after a short pause. “He’s a very likeable fellow.”

A few days earlier, at the conference I was attending in Moscow, I met Dr. Abdramane Sylla, a tall, gentle soul from Mali. In the 1980s and 1990s, he had studied in Moscow on a scholarship – the Soviet Union extended many such scholarships to promising Third World students. Today, Dr. Sylla is a senior politician in that West African nation (Mali’s president, he noted, also studied in Russia).

We talked about the election, then still a few days off.

“Is the election getting much attention in Mali?” I asked.

“A huge amount of attention,” Sylla replied. “There has never been anything like it.”

“And what do people in Mali think?”

“I can tell you this,” he continued. “In our country, 99% of the people favor Obama.”

I did not press him on the reasons for this. Perhaps because I was surprised that the residents of an African nation most Americans have never heard of (Mali is nestled to the right of Senegal and just above Nigeria), could be so interested in the American presidential election. No matter how many times I encounter it, it always astounds me – the palpable sense of American power and influence one can get when traveling abroad. It is at once awesome and humbling.

Which brings me back to 1999. A 24-year-old welder, Alexander Lazarev, interviewed by the L.A. Times in the wake of the March 1999 attack on the U.S. Embassy, said: “The Americans should be given hell. They’re arrogant – they think they’re the world’s policemen. America thinks Russia has fallen so low compared with the U.S.S.R. in terms of military might that they can dictate conditions anywhere. But our patience may run out, and that would lead to World War III.”

That year marked a low-point in recent U.S.-Russian relations – one we have hardly risen above over the last decade. Whether the Obama administration can “reset U.S.-Russian relations,” as the president-elect declared (see page 64 for other insights), will hinge on whether it (and the “new” Medvedev administration) is more interested in finding places where Russian and American national interests overlap than in exploiting places where they diverge.

Enjoy the issue.