HOW SHE SEES IT Freedom haters rushing to blame America for turmoil in Ukraine

By ANNE APPLEBAUM
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- Just in case anyone actually thought that all of those people waving flags on the streets of Kiev represent authentic Ukrainian sentiments, the London Guardian informed its readers otherwise last week. In an article titled "U.S. campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev," the newspaper described the events of the past 10 days as "an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing." In a separate article, the same paper described the whole episode as a "postmodern coup d'etat" and a "CIA-sponsored third world uprising of cold war days, adapted to post-Soviet conditions."
Neither author was a fringe journalist, and the Guardian is not a fringe newspaper. Nor have their views been ignored: In the international echo chamber that the Internet has become, these ideas have resonance. Both articles were liberally quoted, for example, in a Web log written by the editor of the Nation. in the Reagan White House."
The United States has historically backed "stability" in Ukraine, which is another way of saying Russian influence. President Bush's father once made a speech in Kiev calling on Ukraine to remain in the Soviet Union, mere weeks before the Soviet Union disintegrated. Nevertheless, these ideas have traction.
Last weekend an Irish radio journalist angrily asked me why the United States is so keen to expand NATO into Ukraine: Didn't Russia have a right to be frightened? This week a colleague forwarded to me an e-mail from a Dutch writer condemning the campaign that the "CIA and other U.S. secret services" have conducted across the former U.S.S.R.
Overrated influence
This phenomenon is interesting on a number of accounts. The first is that it rather dramatically overrates the influence that American money, or American "democracy-promoters," can have in a place such as Ukraine.
More to the point, rather larger amounts of money were spent in Ukraine by Russia, whose president visited the country twice to campaign for "his" candidate. If the ideas that Americans and Europeans promoted had greater traction in Ukraine than those of President Putin, that says more about Ukraine than about the United States.
The larger point, though, is that the "it's-all-an-American-plot" arguments circulating in cyberspace again demonstrate something that the writer Christopher Hitchens, himself a former Trotskyite, has been talking about for a long time: At least a part of the Western left -- or rather the Western far left -- is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States.