Article content continued

During the American Civil War, when it looked like Britain or France might enter the war on the side of the Confederacy, Russia’s Czar Alexander II sent his Baltic and Pacific fleets to New York and San Francisco, along with instructions to their admirals to report to President Lincoln for duty should their presence in American harbours fail to dissuade the Europeans from entering the war.

Alexander II, like Catherine, had an affinity for the United States. The two countries had, in the words of his foreign minister, “a natural community of interests and of sympathies.” One such area of common interest was the civil rights of the populace, a sore in their body politic for decades. Alexander’s Emancipation Manifesto, which freed the serfs in 1861, preceded Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1865.

Russia and America both fought on the same side in World War I and even in World War II, after Russia had become the Soviet Union and the struggle between the communist and capitalist ideologies made these countries enemies. No sooner had communism fallen in 1991, though, than the Russians immediately turned to the U.S. for guidance, rapidly privatizing much of the economy and holding democratic elections.

The U.S. tends to blame today’s poor relations between the two countries on bad faith by the Russians, but the Russians, too, have reason to be leery. The post-communist privatizations that occurred under U.S. auspices became corrupt, creating a crony capitalist system of hated Russian oligarchs — multi-billionaires who overnight gained control over much of the Russian economy in the transition from communism to capitalism.