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MOSCOW -- Which would you rather have mad at you: A healthy bear, with long claws and sharp teeth, confidently patrolling its corner of the forest? Or a wounded, hungry, cornered animal that has lost much of its power but blames you for its humiliation and dreams of revenge?
That describes the dilemma of U.S.-Russia relations in the post-Cold War world. Russian power and influence are greatly diminished, but Russian dislike and distrust of America are widespread and rising.
Paul Goble, a Russia expert and director of communications for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said Russian polls early this year indicated that the percentage of Russians who say they hate the United States was up to 70 percent, compared with about 33 percent who said so in 1994. "The real irony," said Goble, who has traveled in Russia for decades, "is that in Soviet days, you never met anybody who hated America."
A U.S. Information Agency-sponsored poll in January found that three-fourths of Russians said they believed the United States was trying to reduce Russia to a second-rate power, and three-fourths also said they thought the United States was too easily inclined to use force against less powerful nations.
And that was before the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Kosovo and Serbia. In March, then-Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov ordered his Washington-bound plane to turn around in midair when it became clear that the bombing would start during his visit. Anti-American demonstrators rioted outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
While the NATO mission was confusing and divisive in the United States, it was clarifying and unifying in Russia, where it was perceived as high-handed aggression designed to demonstrate NATO's might and intimidate any nation that wouldn't follow its orders.
That Serbia was a traditional Russian ally, that Serbs were, like Russians, Orthodox Christians and Slavs, made the bombing a direct affront to Russia. That NATO acted without approval by the U.N. Security Council -- which Russia could have vetoed -- and disregarded Russia's vociferous objections to the bombing made Russians feel their face was being rubbed in their weakness.
The campaign created an anti-Western climate so strong that even President Boris Yeltsin, whose critics portray him as a lackey of the West, came back this summer from one of his many health crises to reassure his shrinking band of supporters of his vigor by announcing: "I am ready to fight, especially with Westerners."
Visitors to Russia this summer could not find any Russians who viewed the Kosovo operation the way Washington portrayed it, as a humanitarian mission.
Instead, Russians from across the political spectrum described the U.S.-led bombing as illegal (because it wasn't authorized by the Security Council), immoral (because it was a one-sided battle that killed civilians) and self-serving (because the United States wanted to demonstrate that in a one-superpower world it can impose its will on anyone).
"I believe that the United States is the most aggressive country in the world," said international affairs analyst Alec Aliev in his Moscow apartment. "Its goal is hegemony -- to rule the world and to force its values on the world."
Even Russians inclined to favor the United States as a model for Russia's future denounced the Kosovo operation. For example, Sergei Nikolayevich Yushenkov, a liberal, pro-free market deputy in Russia's Parliament, called the bombing "the biggest mistake the West could have made. The NATO operation in Kosovo demonstrated perfectly that however much the Americans preach that the rule of law must be supreme, political necessity is above the law."
Desperate to demonstrate that it could still act without NATO's permission, Russia sent 205 troops to occupy the airport at Pristina, Kosovo's capital, on June 10, before NATO's troops had entered the province. Although it accomplished little militarily, the mission was extremely popular in Russia.
In focus groups conducted in July to explore Russians' plummeting attitude toward America, the U.S. Information Agency found unbridled enthusiasm for the airport maneuver. "Cool," said a young engineer from Rostov. "Our guys took the airport and NATO flipped out." "It looked great," one Muscovite said, "to suddenly burst in there when we were doing nothing and take the airport, which is useless now."
Yeltsin gave a medal "for services to the Fatherland" to the general who commanded the unit and lesser medals to all the troops who participated.