That is why, in fact, the DDR created the STASI, their Ministry of State Security. To gain acceptance for the socialist goals demanded by the state, they had to create an atmosphere of fear – without which, so many citizens would refuse to accept the life the regime’s rulers mandated. Of course, the rulers claimed it was done for the good of the people. When the STASI  sent its agents to Nicaragua to train its secret police during the Sandinista regime’s heyday in the 1980’s, the Sandinistas cleverly named their secret police- I kid you not- “The Sentinel of The People’s Happiness,” a slogan which was inscribed on the front of the Interior Ministry’s headquarters.

Take the realm of art, which the regime claimed thrived in the years of the socialist society being built in East Germany. As A.J. Goldmann notes in his review of a 20^th anniversary art show on art in both the East and West during the years of the Wall, “in the repressive atmosphere of East Germany, artists often paid a price for making provocative art.” One artist serves as an example. Annemirl Bauer found that her drawings inflamed the STASI, especially one of a naked man suspending from a clotheslines while being pierced through his navel and feet by a guard. As a result, she was expelled from the Artists’s Association, and forbidden by the regime to paint. Another artist, Roger Loewig, was imprisoned for “agitation and propaganda endangering the state.” The STASI destroyed his novel, although a powerful triptych, displayed in the current exhibit, reveals how he composed art that meant to expose the fear that always was beneath the surface of everyday life.

As for the nature of the regime, no one has said it better than journalist John Simpson, the BBC’s World Affairs editor. Simpson knows that: “Nowadays you come across a certain amount of nostalgia for the old East Germany.” But, he writes, “in reality it was a deeply unattractive place. The secret police didn’t just watch people, they beat them up, forced confessions from them, ruined their lives. They only stopped guillotining enemies of the state in 1968, and after that they shot them. Life was full of shortages – except for the politicians and the secret police.”  Recalling what it was like to travel from West Germany to East from 1978 through the mid 80s, he talks about what an intimidating experience it was: “On the Western side, everything seemed normal and safe but as you passed into East Berlin, a huge camera lens was trained on you, searching out your thoughts and intentions. And if there was anything wrong with your visa they would keep you in solitary confinement for hours.”

Next, Simpson says, “after the men with guns had gone through everything you’d brought with you, and confiscated any books they didn’t like, you passed through a creaking gate and found yourself in a darkened street with no cars or taxis and streetlamps suffering permanent brown-out. Nothing was what it seemed.” The government assigned him an official minder, who continually told him how wonderful life was in the DDR. She and her family, he was assured, led a good life.  Later, when she was sure she was not being bugged, the minder whispered to him, “‘I’ve got to get away from here. There’s no future for our children.’”

Most Germans—polls show, despite current economic difficulties, do not regret the fall of the Wall, the collapse of the Communist regime in the East, and the eventual reunification of their country. What doubts there are, however,  come from the ranks of the Western Left, who seem to have the ability to regularly air their arguments in the op-ed pages of  The New York Times. I read one such report in the paper’s pages while visiting Berlin, written by Katrin Bennhold and titled “Lessons From the Former East Germany.”

Bennhold beings by noting that “Like most people, I had slept through the fall of the Berlin Wall.”  At the time, her parents, 60’s activists, sided with the millions of protesters gathered 20 years ago in East Berlin, who were demanding  what she knows was “freedom and democratic rights.”  But as activists of the Left, they feared that the collapse of the DDR (German Democratic Republic) would lead to the leaders of the West cutting apart the welfare state, and adopting a free-market capitalism influenced by what she calls the Reagan-Thatcher model. Their fear, she writes, was achieved. The West “simply swallowed East and in the process discarded 40 years of mostly bad but some good policies.”

She proceeds to identify those “good” policies that existed in the Communist East. They include child care policies that included a “network of day care centers,” paid maternity leave, and women who worked in various jobs. It was a society of both female crane operators and scientists, she writes. She gives as an example the career of the current German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Merkel was a physicist by training, but Bennhold simply ignores that even though Merkel obtained a higher education in the Communist state, she was hardly happy about her life there.

Bennhold  should look at the message that Merkel gave Germans on the anniversary of the fall; the first female chancellor told her fellow Berliners: “The great theme [of the current celebration] is happiness and satisfaction that everything developed the way that it did.”  Acknowledging that Germany has problems as a result, Merkel explained that “It was the fate of one generation that essentially had to pay for the inefficiency of the G.D.R.’s economy, and whose expectations could no longer be fulfilled.” The fall of the wall,  Merkel said, “ the end of the Socialist Unity Party dictatorship and German reunification transformed my life. In short, I would not be chancellor, nor even politically active, if the wall were still standing. After Nov. 9, 1989, thoughts became thinkable that before had been completely unthinkable. For the first time, a person like me had the opportunity to engage in community life, to take on responsibility.”  There was no alternative, she said. “Reunification in peace and freedom was a great blessing for our country. The integration process went well for the most part. I think we put things more or less on the right track at the time — otherwise the rebuilding of the Eastern states would not have gone so successfully.”

The museum catalog sets out its purpose: “The DDR Museum is the only museum which concentrates on everyday life in the GDR. We don’t only show the crimes of the State Security or the border defences at the Berlin Wall but we display the life of the people in the dictatorship: Maybe you know the spreewald pickles, nudism beaches and the Trabi – the rest of the life in this socialist state is unfamiliar to most of the people in the world.”

Going through its space is a rather surreal experience. A major success after one year in operation, the museum combines what Germans call “ostalgie” or nostalgia for the old Communist state that divided the capital of Germany with a somewhat critical perspective revealing the failure of the socialist dream.

For example, one exhibit shows a Stasi operation- in which the secret police regularly took photos of attendees at rock concerts, whom they scrupulously sought to identify, assuming that at some future time they could emerge as regime critics:

Another exhibit covers the well known insistence of beachcombers to swim in the nude. The text explains that the nude beach movement was a form of rebellion against prudish Communist protocol, a way of asserting individuality for those who lived in a regime that sought to control most aspects of life, in order to break down any independent civil society and create as thorough a totalitarian regime as was possible.

Strangely, though, the museum curators do not seem to realize that nudism was to some extent favored by Marxist ideologues, who building on the attempt of Wilhelm Reich to fuse Marxism and Freudianism into a coherent ideology, believed that nudism was one mechanism for advancing the cause of socialist revolution. Indeed, in the 1960s in this country, the late Lee Baxandall created a Nude Beach Movement in which he asserted just such an argument, and sought to translate the East German reality into protests in Cape Cod and elsewhere that he thought would easily move its adherents towards revolutionary socialism.

One of the most interesting exhibits takes place in a replica of an East German cinema, in which one gets to watch an official propaganda film made in the late 1970s that details the plans for future apartments and other dwellings prepared by State employed architects. The film emphasizes, as the narrator says in its closing moments, that socialism means “fulfillment of one’s dreams,” in which the Party plans massive and humane dwellings for the citizens of the future socialist Germany. By the year 2000, those who saw the film when it was made were told, the DDR would have built great new apartment dwellings in areas that were then vacant land, nicely landscaped centers that included ample space for greenery and children’s playgrounds.

In truth, those who have seen Brezhnev era worker’s homes in Moscow can see immediately that both the interior and exterior of the DDR homes and apartments were so far superior to that built by Stalin’s successors, that Russians who worked in East Germany must have been shocked at the disparity.

The apartment shown above is supposedly typical of what the interior of the cement block apartments were like in areas like Stalin-Allee, the massive complex of worker’s homes provided by the regime for its citizens who worked in factories. Of course, the museum does not show us the mansions lived in by Erich Honecker and the top Party cadre, who lived in luxury in leafy suburbs like the Pankow area, or along Lake Wansee, where celebrity artists like the American born defector and country-folk singer, the late Dean Reed, lived.

That is why it was so refreshing to hear Senator Joe Lieberman on Fox News Sunday, where the maverick Democrat now independent dissident dared to say that Hasan “reportedly showed signs of being a “self-radicalized, homegrown terrorist.’” There were indications, he noted, that Hasan “had turned to Islamist extremism” which should be investigated.  If so, his action was not that of a mentally unbalanced individual, but “a terrorist act.” The military should have acted, Lieberman added, and once they got notice of various reported signs about Hasan, he should have been gone.

Lieberman’s view is especially refreshing when compared to that offered by Army Chief of Staff General George Casey, who told CNN that “You know there’s been a lot of speculation going on, and probably the curiosity is a good thing, but we have to be careful, because we can’t jump to conclusions now based on little snippets of information that come out.” Rather than acknowledge the obvious, General Casey was concerned instead that undue speculation could “cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers,” and that while Hasan’s action was a tragedy, “it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

Any objective observer would think it a tragedy if the Army swept the motivations of someone like Hasan under the rug.  He  not only yelled out “Allahu Akbar” before his shooting spree, but told various people that American Muslims should not be fighting other Muslims abroad, and that actions taken of a violent nature like suicide bombings were justified.

But perhaps the single most egregious post on these events comes, rather predictably, from those good folks at The Nation magazine, in which John Nichols writes “the incident inspired an all-too-predictable explosion of Islamophobia.”  Nichols perceives  that what triggered Hasan’s attack was that he feared getting combat related stress as he had observed in the soldiers he had treated. Of course Hasan would have been assigned to a medical unit treating soldiers in need of psychological counseling, and he himself would not have been in a combat situation.

Yesterday, Frank hit rock bottom with his rather inane attack on Glenn Beck. What upsets him is Beck’s expose of Anita Dunn’s now famous remark that Chairman Mao was one of her “favorite political philosophers,” who along with Mother Teresa, she regularly turned to for inspiration. At PJM, our colleague Roger Kimball has already dealt shrewdly with the very notion that Mao could even be called a philosopher.

That definition of Mao is not what upsets Mr. Frank. Rather, he argues that to Beck, “Ms.Dunn was yet another person who deserved to be added to the long list of radicals that Mr. Beck had uncovered within the government.” Evidently, it does not disturb Frank one bit that Mao, to anyone who knows some history, was one of the bloodiest tyrants and most vicious totalitarian dictator of the last century.  The point is not that Dunn is another left-wing radical snuck into the White House, but that an individual who speaks with the President’s authority to young people can without a hint of apology be recommending Mao to them as an inspiring figure to emulate.

Second, Mr. Frank thinks it unfair that Beck did not phone those he attacks and ask them to appear on his program to defend themselves. Instead, Beck rants on the air about how the White House will not phone him to explain themselves. Two individuals whom the WH either consulted with or appointed were Robert McChesney, whom Frank simply calls “a frequent target of Mr. Beck,” and Mark Lloyd, the new Chief Diversity Officer at the FCC.

So Frank phoned them up; he calls McChesney an “old friend” and disarmingly describes him as head of an “advocacy group on media policy.”  It sounds like a simple non-partisan organization that McChesney heads. But a quick perusal of his own articles, like this one,  immediately reveal that he is an unabashed sectarian Marxist of the old school, who sees the U.S. media as a tool of the capitalist ruling class that maintains hegemonic control over society. For McChesney, journalism  “smuggles in values conducive to the commercial aims of the owners and advertisers as well as the political aims of the owning class.” Indeed, to McChesney, journalism is simply  “ideological class warfare.” As he concludes: “Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.”

Now if this man has indeed been to the White House more than once to consult on media policy, shouldn’t this be a concern of ours? How ingenious of Thomas Frank to leave the details out, and simply complain about how Beck has defamed his old friend, without giving him a chance to respond.

Next Frank tells us how he e-mailed Mark Lloyd, whom Beck somehow unfairly defamed by “repeatedly airing video clips in which he appears to hold noxious views.”  Look at Frank’s words: “appears to hold.” Come on, Mr. Frank. The videos, as we all know, were shown in full. They reveal Lloyd telling an audience, fairly recently, how he admires Hugo Chavez and his ability to curb a free media in Venezuela by shutting down opposition stations. Mr. Lloyd is also shown praising Chavez’s revolution.  

In  a public and videotaped panel in 2008, Lloyd called Hugo Chavez’s government the result of “really an incredible revolution…a democratic revolution.”  As a result of his triumph, Lloyd argued that “the property owners and the folks who were then controlling the media rebelled,” with the result that Chavez and his cadre had to move and close their media outlets down. Then he said the US sought to oust him, but Chavez came back stronger than ever, “and  had another revolution,” and then “started to take the media very seriously in his country.” Viewing Chavez’s totalitarian actions favorably, Lloyd implied that opponents of the right-wing media should do the same here.

Lloyd  also said that the “fairness doctrine” isn’t enough, that we need new “structural rules” to put teeth into it, and that “good white people in important positions” should “step down so someone else can have power.” Is it important that a man who now is Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer of the FCC has these views, and that the public get to hear about them?

It is good journalism to report on what Lloyd believes—to show him uttering his actual words- and to call into question with editorial comment the judgment made by the Obama administration in appointing this man to an important media post.

Does Thomas Frank really think that he is making a sound explanation when he writes “that lots of people, including conservatives, have cited Mao and Lenin and other such demonic figures in all sorts of contexts.” I suspect that conservatives, and liberal democrats (with a  small d) who believe in the Western heritage of liberalism have cited these people to criticize their philosophies; quite a different thing than citing them approvingly as figures to emulate or as philosophers of class struggle who should guide our views on media policy.

So, let me close with Thomas Frank’s own words. What Frank argues is “only possible to believe after you have utterly closed yourself off to conventional ways of knowing, after you have decided that the reporting and analysis and scholarship on these subjects are not worth reading, and that you will choose ideological fairy tales over reality….”

Frank, of course, was referring with the above sentence to Glenn Beck. But his words apply to Frank himself. So here are two books he might send to Anita Dunn, Robert McChesney and Mark Lloyd. I would start with Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s acclaimed biography, Mao:The Unknown Story, followed by the book by Plino Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.

These would be a fine start to help Thomas Frank get over what he accuses Beck of: “a new kind of ignorance.”  These authors indeed have “professional standards of inquiry,” the kinds of standards that Dunn, McChesney and Lloyd are obviously deeply in need of. I agree with Frank that “ideas have consequences.” The problem is that those Thomas Frank so admires are those whose heads are filled with bad ideas; ideas that history has shown have resulted in the horrors of the totalitarian century that just passed.

Perhaps it is not too late for Thomas Frank to do some reading himself.

America remains a center-right — and not a center-left — nation. Remember, in New Jersey, Obama did all he could to try and guarantee Corzine’s success. He appeared with him over and over, and tried to attach his popularity to that of the governor whose own ratings were quickly tanking to the lowest digits. It didn’t work. Christie won 50% of the vote, and Corzine got a meager 44% in a state that went overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008. How Democrats can ignore this rather obvious conclusion is an issue for the psychologists, not for election analysts.

Yet, Republicans and conservatives too have to carefully evaluate the meaning of the results, and refrain from reaching conclusions that are not warranted. On this point, I second the analysis offered today by my PJM colleague, Roger L. Simon. The reason Doug Hoffman lost in the NY 23^rd Congressional District is that he ran as a purist of the take no enemies Right — that believes simple continual statements of the most far right conservative principles, particularly emphasizing so-called social conservative issues like opposition to abortion and to gay rights, would be the path to electoral triumph.

Instead, moderate and centrist voters who likely would have supported a Republican conservative like, let us say, Joe Scarborough — fiscally conservative and socially libertarian — or would have voted for the winning Bob McDonnell in Virgina, deserted the once solid Republican bastion (in that column since the end of the Civil War) and voted instead for the Democrat Bill Owens. In Virginia, although McDonnell is a traditional conservative, he downplayed the social issues and ran an effective campaign that stressed issues like transportation and jobs — issues that moderates and centrists are deeply worried about.

Here, we can learn from the analysis of a left-wing journalist like John B. Judis who writes today on TNR’s website:

If the results of New York’s 23rd are placed alongside those of New Jersey and Virginia, there is a clear lesson for the Republicans. In New Jersey and Virginia, the gubernatorial candidates ran to the center. Christie is a moderate, and McDonnell at least pretended to be. And as a result, they got the swing vote of independents and moderates. In New York-23, a diehard conservative backed by rightwing groups repudiated the center and lost to a neophyte Democratic candidate who probably could not have beaten Scozzafava in a one-to-one contest.

Take, as our first example, Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of The Slate Group. Writing in last week’s Newsweek, Weisberg explained at the start that anyone who watches Fox News knows immediately that Anita Dunn’s charge that Fox has a “right-wing bias” is correct, since Fox always confirms “it with its coverage.”  Referring to Fox’s own reporting on the administration’s attacks on the network, he notes that Fox showed what he calls a “textbook example of a biased journalism.” If it is true, it is hardly surprising, since the very network under attack might be expected to come to its own defense.

Next, he refers to its commentators as “platinum pundettes and anchor androids.” He offers no names. Could he be referring to Chris Wallace, whose weekly Sunday broadcast is widely acclaimed as one of TV’s best weekend programs, and who publicly complained that never in his decades of broadcasting has he come across more of a bunch of “whiners” than he has seen in the Obama administration?  Is he referring to Megan Kelly, who did a yeoman’s job questioning ACORN founder Wade Rathke in a long and exclusive interview? Wouldn’t he want a defender of ACORN to speak on the one network that reported on its scandals? Is he upset, perhaps, that Kelly came off better than Rathke did?

He thinks it is a silly comparison to their charge that the war on Fox is similar to Nixon’s enemies list. Of course, he gives no reason why the analogy is false — perhaps because to most observers, it isn’t.

Next, he attributes the success of the many “tea parties” as due to Fox’s sponsorship of them — ignoring the fact that it was an internet created phenomenon that Fox alone chose to cover when others ignored them.  Evidently, Weisberg can’t distinguish between paying attention to events it finds newsworthy and sponsoring them. [I acknowledge that Glenn Beck anchored his show’s special coverage of the Washington DC tea party, which he supported.]  Weisberg’s fear is that now “ideologically distorted news” drives ratings up, and that others will soon imitate them in order to gain more viewers.

Not one word by Weisberg about MSNBC’s equally tilted drift to the precincts of the far left. Chris “thrill up my leg” Matthews is an unabashed liberal whose brand of politics stands at the left end of the Democratic spectrum, and its mainstays in prime time, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, are as far Left as O’Reilly, Hannity and Beck are on the right end of the conservative spectrum. If Fox reports critically about ACORN, for example, one can count on Maddow and Olbermann to offer unabashed defenses of the group presented as accurate news analysis.

Weisberg’s problem is that he takes pride that the press had an “old tradition of independence,” one that serves the “public interest” and not “parties, persuasions, or pressure groups.” He claims to be standing firm with this model instead of the Murdoch “model of politicized media” that is slanted in one direction.  Does he really act on this? Look at his own publication, Slate. Is there any reader of it who believes for a moment that it is anything but reflective of a certain kind of left/liberal mentality? Sure, it has one maverick — Christopher Hitchens — whose fame and persona as a media star allows them to run him, even though he alone continues to support a tough foreign policy against Islamic radicalism.  Just look through their list of columnists on their home page, and I defy you to find one voice aside from Hitchens who is outside of the liberal consensus.

Now, of course, Rahm Emanuel is seeking to blame the supposed need for a careful review on the failures of the previous administration, and to find some way to account for Obama’s indecisiveness on the issue of what to do in Afghanistan.  Cheney, as expected, argues that General McChrystal’s recommendations are solid and well thought out, and that Obama should implement them immediately. “Now,” he added, “they seem to be pulling back and blaming others for their failure to implement the strategy they embraced. It’s time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a war he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity.”

The problem is that because Cheney is making that argument, liberals and Democrats will run to say that this is the position of the extreme right-wing, and hence should be abandoned. After all, Obama ran as the anti-Bush, and any policy put forth by the former vice-president is for the liberal-left going to be reason enough to reject it.

That is why the new issue of The New Republic that was waiting for me in the mail is so important. It contains in its pages two major articles on the U.S. and Afghanistan. The first is by Peter Bergen, a senior fellow at The New America Foundation, and author of a highly regarded book on Osama Bin Laden. Bergen argues that the argument we are hearing today from so many, that al-Qadea is the real enemy and is in Pakistan and that hence we can ignore and forget about the Taliban and Afghanistan, is completely false.

His point is that the evidence clearly shows that they are not distinct groups, and in fact have essentially merged into one new jihadist body. The heart of his argument is this:

These arguments point toward one conclusion: The effort to secure Afghanistan is not a matter of vital U.S. interest. But those who make this case could not be more mistaken. Afghanistan and the areas of Pakistan that border it have always been the epicenter of the war on jihadist terrorism–and, at least for the foreseeable future, they will continue to be. Though it may be tempting to think otherwise, we cannot defeat Al Qaeda without securing Afghanistan.

If returned to power in Afghanistan, Bergen shows, the Taliban would not become responsible and moderate, as “realists” like Stephen Walt and others claim. They will not become, he quips, “an ultra-rational clique of Henry Kissingers.” And if we fail to defend Afghanistan, al-Qaeda will gain new momentum and strength. To gain their ends, they want and need a state; and if we let them have control over Afghanistan, we will most assuredly up the ante for a major new attack on our homeland.

As Martin Peretz points out, “America’s new membership on the Human Rights Council has had no results in the fairness of the process. Did anyone imagine it would? Well, I suppose the president did.”  Peretz is right. And the current administration’s reversal of staying out of the farcical body is one of the affronts to dignity of our current Chief Executive.

As for the latest broadside, “The report therefore discusses, besides the human rights of women, the gendered impact of counter-terrorism measures on men and persons of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, and addresses how gender intersects with other prohibited grounds of discrimination, such as race and religion.” What this gobbledygook legalese means is that when the Israelis engage in counter-terrorism against terrorists and suicide bombers, they are threatening the rights of trans-gendered individuals. How? When a man dresses as a woman, the Israelis might embarrass an honest cross-dresser by subjecting him/her to a humiliating search, thereby interfering with the person’s sexual identity and human rights. They state: 

The report identifies the ways in which those subject to gender-based abuse are often caught between targeting by terrorist groups and the State’s counter-terrorism measures that may fail to prevent, investigate, prosecute or punish these acts and perpetrate new human rights violations with impunity. These violations are amplified through war rhetoric and increased militarization in countering terrorism, both of which marginalize those who challenge or fall outside the boundaries of predetermined gender roles and involve situations of armed conflict and humanitarian crisis in which gender-based violence and gendered economic, socialcand cultural rights violations abound. 

They add: “The report then draws attention to the fact that contrary to these international human rights obligations to ensure equality, some Governments have used the human rights of women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex individuals as a bartering tool to appease terrorist or extremist groups in ways that have furthered unequal gender relations and subjected such persons to increased violence.” 

On page 19 the report says: “Enhanced immigration controls that focus attention on male bombers who may be dressing as females to avoid scrutiny make transgender persons susceptible to increased harassment and suspicion.” (my emphasis.)

There is nothing as crude as exaggerating a serious critique of Obama’s foreign policy, one that Liz Cheney regularly makes with aplomb and dignity, by dumbing it down to make Cheney sound absurd. Dowd is obviously furious that Cheney along with Bill Kristol and others have formed a new group, Keep America Safe, that seeks to heighten public awareness of the need to come together as a nation and demand a policy that protects our national security.

Dowd is scornful that Cheney charges Obama will “make America weaker.” After all, didn’t the Nobel Prize Committee respond to its critics by saying that Obama won the prize for contributing to a “world with less tension.”  But as Sean Curvyn writes on his website, “It’s a less tense world. Tell that to the Chinese dissidents…By conceding to the Russians on missile defense, he is reducing “tension” with Putin. By granting the Iranians further stages of delay before there are any real consequences for their pursuit of nuclear weapons, he is reducing “tension” with the Persians.” As he quips aptly, “if only he could reduce tension with Fox News.”

Another commentator who agrees is Marty Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic as his recent “Spine” blogs at TNR’s website makes clear. As he writes today , “Obama hasn’t reset the American relationship with Russia. He was taken for a ride. Maybe his vanity won’t let him admit it. But, believe me, the Russians know they have taken him (and us) for a big ride, indeed.” Obama, he adds, gave the Russians what they asked for, in the hope that Putin would then agree to tough sanctions against Iran. Secretary Clinton then goes to Russia, only to be informed by Putin that his government does not believe sanctions are appropriate. As Peretz concludes: “Of course, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. In fact, with the Russians, if you don’t demand and threaten a little, you get zero.”