What Russians and Americans both need most is a better definition of what is going on in the post-communist world. Because Russian combativeness is more a matter of symbolism than of concrete gains for the disintegrating Russian state, how events are labeled, which policymakers sometimes dismiss as mere "rhetoric," becomes a vital part of policy both for Russia and for us. Russian combativeness and Western intolerance both are rooted in the myth of a painless, "velvet" revolution. When Gorbachev undertook perestroika, and the West welcomed it, we all wanted change, but without disruption. This was an impossible hope. The great longing of the people in the Soviet bloc was for a normal life, and diplomats likewise have tried to return to a normal foreign policy. In Russia's situation, this meant a nineteenth-century foreign policy; as one of Yeltsin's advisers told me gleefully this fall, "This used to be called the Great Game, and we're back in it!" But the nineteenth century is over, and the diplomatic attempt to return it has only created more instability around Russia's periphery, and in Moscow, as the Chechnya muddle shows again.

In the West, the reaction to disorder, whether in Russia or in Bosnia, tends to be to isolate and abandon the area. Yeltsin's Chechen war already has produced new declarations that Russia is hopeless; this reaction is destructive to our own interests.

The collapse of communism is a vast historic transformation, equal to the collapse of the ancien regime in France or even the end of the Roman Empire in the West. Moreover, this transformation occurs not in a static world but one simultaneously undergoing other transformations, such as those connected with the new global economy. The whole world, not just the ex-communist world, is entering a new age; indeed, the former Soviet Union, where all the old patterns are being broken at once, may enter the new age first. The disorder of the post-communist transformations will not subside easily or quickly. While these transformations are occurring, they are the largest events in our world, at once too promising and too threatening to leave us detached.

Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr. is research professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

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