By STEPHEN F.COHEN. 160 pages. W.W. Norton $21.95

"We thought the Communists were lying to us about socialism and capitalism, but it turns out they were only lying to us about socialism."

BOOK REVIEW by Tom Gallagher.

   The United States is proud of its freedom of the press, and rightly so. However, when the facts are drowned out by the dissemination of ideology -i.e. facts relegated to the back pages- the free press is severely diminished. In 'Failed Crusade', a book by Stephen F. Cohen, we see the failure of the free press to inform Americans as to the situation in post-communist Russia.

     Recently the European Children's Trust found that the former Soviet Union now has 40 million children living in "genuine poverty…with tuberculosis levels usually associated with the Third World," and a life expectancy that has dropped to the level of India's. This was back page news in American newspapers. The front page and editorials, however, continued for the most part to convey a different message.

     The quasi-official views are decidedly more upbeat: In 1998, Vice President Al Gore could explain that "Optimism prevails universally among those who are familiar with that is going on in Russia."
-Whose optimism? -
  The following year, political scientist Michael McFaul found that "Seven years into the transition, basic arrows on all the big issues are pointing in the right direction."
  The author, Cohen, who teaches Russian studies at New York University, finds this positive spin in the right direction, paramount to a lie! "American scholars and journalist have told us considerably less than is truly essential about Russia after communism, than they did when it was part of the censorious Soviet system."

  Cohen further adds an insightful analogy, about the bolstering of the Yeltsin regime. "…recalls the pro-Communist fellow traveler of the 1930's," albeit from the opposite point of view.
  How did the U.S. opinion makers view Yeltsin? Shortly after he shut down the Russian parliament, and ordered tanks to fire on it in 1993: an act that Cohen considers without parallel since the 1933 German Reichstag fire, President Bill Clinton's secretary of state, arrived in Moscow to praise Yeltsin's Russia as a country "being reborn as a democracy."
- Whose democracy? - [What, like the democracy the U.S. protected during the Gulf War? What, like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore? Oh, he means Corporate democracy.]

  Cohen takes a distinctly harsh view of Yeltsin, and notes that no Soviet leader was ever able to appoint their successor the way Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin: whose first official act was prohibiting Yeltsin from prosecution. This act was modeled on former U.S. President Gerald Ford, who pardoned his predecessor, Nixon, from prosecution after Nixon left office.
  It would seem as though Yeltisin was being protected before anyone had the chance to put their prosecution case forward. Now that has got to be a fine example of a democratic path. Above all, Cohen would have Americans confront the stark results of the vaunted "shock therapy" that U.S. doctors of economics prescribed for their Russian patient.
   Russia lost a lot of blood while on the table. Total capital flight is between U.S$150 billion - U.S$350 billion; the number living in poverty in the former Soviet Union up from 14 million in 1989, to 147 million nine years later. The life expectancy for a male has fallen below the age of 60. In short, "the literal de-modernization of a 20th-century country."

   "Failed Crusade" tries another tack with U.S. policy-makers. Massive human suffering hasn't struck a sympathetic chord, so Cohen suggest that "the destabilization of a fully nuclearized society" may do so. Already in Chechnya, Russia has experienced the first civil war in a country with nuclear weapons. The security, maintenance, and military personnel charged with looking after these weapons are not being paid regularly. There is little attention paid to this problem, this is glaringly obvious in comparison with the hysteria surrounding "the campaign against Iraq's infinitely lesser weapons of mass destruction." Cohen suggest the aid payments targeted at helping Russia pay maintenance costs for an adequate Nuclear security system, would prove far better and cheaper than building ever more complex and expensive defense and weapons system.

  Both parties in the recent U.S. presidential election showed an interest in a revamped 'Starwars', missile defense system. What of the fate of the Russian people? Cohen feels Russia missed its best opportunity in 1998-99, when the Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, proposed measures "akin to Franklin Roosevelt's anti-depression reforms of the 1930's." The American government and Western capital in general, have no interest in supporting another Roosevelt program anywhere in the world. Moneyed interests only accepted his reforms because they feared the alternative; also, they have spent the last 20 years trying to undo the reforms and the European welfare state. The U.S. Deputy Secretary of state, Strobe Talbot, acknowledges that the current state of Russian affairs has, "Given a bad name to democracy, reform, the free market, even liberty itself." As 'Failed Crusade' so clearly shows, the American public has been poorly served by Russia watchers whom Cohen charges with "malpractice throughout the 1990s." A dark sense of humour pervades Russia in this form..."We thought the Communists were lying to us about socialism and capitalism, but it turns out they were only lying to us about socialism."

   Tom Gallagher is a political writer in San Francisco.