By Donald Meissner
St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Thursday, May. 12 2005

On his historic trip to Russia, Latvia and Georgia, President George W. Bush honored the mighty role Russia played in the defeat of Nazi Germany and exhorted all nations to pursue democratic reforms. Twenty-seven million Soviets died in World War II, which the Russian people bitterly recall as the “Great Patriotic War,” in the process of liberating millions from Nazism.

But the president also noted that the Soviet Union was hardly an invited guest of the sovereign nations that became satellite republics under Soviet occupation and domination for the next half-century.

Despite the muscular grip on power of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his wavering commitment to democracy, Putin cannot stop Russia’s slow march to freedom. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was based on an impossible theoretical convolution: Future freedom would arise from Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

In 1981, I studied Russian at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow and spent several weeks touring the country, including Ukraine and Estonia. Although mainstream tourists were escorted by guides from the Intourist agency, college students — most of us spoke Russian fairly well — were tended to by guides from a different arm of the government, the so-called Sputnik agency. Its employees were somewhat less formal and less polished.

Informal or not, our handlers took a dim view of our often successful efforts to travel, fraternize, shop where we pleased, sell American blue jeans and change money on the black market. The official exchange rate was $1.25 per ruble, but through connections set up in advance by our professors in the United States — including with dissidents and refuseniks, mostly Jews, who were forbidden to leave the country — we were able to get 10 rubles to the dollar.

We were naughty American college kids, although it took only a brief lecture from a Sputnik guide to put the fear of Brezhnev into us. But on our bus tour of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, we had a Sputnik guide who seemed quite different from the suspicious Russians we had encountered previously. She spoke English beautifully, dressed upscale and had a sense of  humor.

She described Estonian history in detail: Estonia had been conquered and occupied by The Livonian Order, Teutonic Knights, Denmark, Sweden, Poland and Imperial Russia. Then she paused, wearily, and her cadence changed: “and then . . . of course . . . in 1917 . . . we had the Great . . . October . . . Revolution.”

We all looked around at each other and then back to our guide, who was smiling.  Someone giggled nervously. It was unmistakable: Our guide had just intoned a tacit protest against Soviet occupation by infusing the denouement of her spiel on Estonian history with a sardonic lilt. Anything more explicit could well have damaged her career — or worse. Such was the cloak-and-dagger world of the Soviet Union and the many satellite nations chafing on their short leashes.

During his recent trip, President Bush astutely balanced his exhortations to freedom and democracy with realpolitik. In Latvia and Georgia, he offered strong support for continued independence from Russia; in Russia, he showed Putin respect and friendship.

Moscow does not enjoy the realignment of former Soviet republics with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Putin took a few prickly swipes at the United States on “60 Minutes” last Sunday. Yet even such bristling statements do not compare to the posturing and brinksmanship that characterized U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War. The pace of détente continues to be frustrating, but détente itself continues.

Donald Meissner, Editor Grateful Right