The Western Media and Russia in the'90s

Back in the '90s, looking at the Soviet system in ruins, the Western media displayed immense gratification at the condition of the "defeated" enemy; professed endless "optimism" about the process of economic reform initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (the greater, I suppose, amid the general bullishness about neoliberal capitalism at its '90s-era peak); and derived a voyeuristic, in respects burlesque, pleasure in the images of the criminality and the hedonism so evident in the capital, which in the '20s had represented World Revolution now representing what Chicago did in the same years, the reign of the gangster.

Looking back from 2025 it seems pretty clear that few if any scholars, journalists, artists or other members of the misnamed intelligentsia displayed any desire whatsoever to take advantage of the chances the Iron Curtain's being down to work to better understand the Soviet past and Russian present and the whole history of our times so bound up with them. Rather the media's coverage reflected its characteristic prejudices, its superficiality, and its extreme ignorance about human societies, if anything more conspicuous when it looks at societies besides its own; its thoroughly Establishment "confirmation bias," Schadenfreude and irony toward a country and a people it could never forgive for 1917, and to which sensibility the image of Russia's turmoil was so gratifying, while that sensibility was equally evident in its breathless hucksterism about the supposed cure for what ailed the country; and its reveling in vulgar spectacle, its fawning respect for oligarchs and kleptocrats and kakistocrats, its callousness toward if not contempt for the ordinary people as they died by the millions under their heels as a result of the "reforms" they so celebrated.

All this was not a great help in understanding Russia at the time, or where the country was going--and from everything I see of that media now, far from having got better it has only got worse in the decades since.