Looking West from Russia.

• Author: Lukin, Vladimir

Karl Marx once described a situation where the weapon of criticism gives way to criticism by weapon. It's a remark that captures the latest round of tensions between the West and Russia quite well. Are we witnessing a collision between two different systems of values--or one between two different interpretations of a common system of values?

If we are about to launch yet another "crusade" and our outlooks are fundamentally different, then the conflict admits of no solution other than that there can be just a more or less prolonged "peaceful coexistence" as a prelude to an eventual head-on collision. If Carthage is innately and essentially vicious, it must be destroyed. The question is who is Carthage and who is Rome. And that question is really not very difficult to answer: Rome survives. All the rest is a matter of tactics and methods. The possibility for maneuver and resourcefulness is locked within this narrow alley.

That is precisely what both Moscow's and Washington's approaches looked like throughout a greater part of the classical Cold War. The zero-sum game was played best in the limelight of ideological irreconcilability at the most acute moments of political confrontation (in Berlin in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Cuba in 1962, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979-1989). Meanwhile, as the Soviet model continued to corrode, certain ideas pushed their way to the surface. First, they gained a niche for themselves within the domain of the official Marxist-Leninist ideology, then pushed the latter away and replaced it with values and concepts that were very unusual for that time.

A more or less similar process, naturally with certain allowances for the pluralistic nature of the Euro-Atlantic ideological universe, proceeded in the camp of the antagonists of the Soviet-Communist bloc. Very soon these processes brought into being the term "convergence," understood first and foremost as a mutual penetration and interweaving of values and principles underlying the socio-political systems of capitalism and socialism (as interpreted in the Soviet Union).

Inside one bloc, the free market economy began to be mentioned ever more frequently as the sole way of overcoming chronic economic problems (by no means canceling socialism but, on the contrary, making it stronger). In China and Vietnam, this ideological ploy, masking a fast-tracked transition to a fundamentally new mode of life, is still deployed by the authorities. In the meantime, the West suddenly remembered that the system of communist ideological formulas was a direct descendant of the great Western ideas that took shape in the era of the Renaissance. Much later, those ideas took root in Eastern Europe and Asia, where local radical fanatics adjusted the life's work of two bearded German thinkers to the practical needs of attaining, at last, the ultimate and resolute truth--first in their own haven, and then the world over.

The advent of perestroika, or "new political thinking," was a direct outcome of convergence. Moreover, it was a foreign-policy offshoot of that concept. Incidentally, all that graphically manifested itself in the heritage left to us by our outstanding contemporary, Andrei Sakharov. Many believe that the father of the "new political thinking" was Mikhail Gorbachev. Indeed, that phrase was one of the former Soviet president's hobbyhorses. But the roots of that outlook can be traced back to the 1970s, when a group of ambitious and talented people at the administrative staffs of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee, at the Foreign Ministry and at the Soviet Academy of Sciences' think tanks succeeded in their efforts to push through to the high-ranking officials the idea of a fundamentally new approach to European identity and security. That idea took the shape of the Helsinki Process. In the most general terms, Helsinki was a certain common understanding of the priorities and values of a future long-term pan-European sociopolitical development.

For nearly twenty years, these common values existed in some sort of clandestine form. At the turn of the 1990s, they were adopted officially by the heads of state and enshrined in the Paris Charter, which proclaimed a strategic goal of building a united Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok. But alongside this process, a movement in other conceptual...