The Early Rise of US Government Hostility Towards Post-Soviet Russia

This article employs rhetoric in the US Congress, as well as th e divergence between Freedom House1, Inc (Freedom House, FH* – деятельность организации признана нежелательной на территории Российской Федерации) and Polity evaluations of Russia’s regime type, to quantitatively estimate the US government’s attitude towards Russia over time. Congressional rhetoric is hand-coded on the basis of strict criteria. The FH*–Polity approach is based on preexisting findings that FH* evaluations are distorted by US government attitudes; this article similarly finds that FH’s* evaluations of Russia are quite arbitrary, including in that FH’s* claims of Russian election falsification are contradicted by years of polling data. The Congressionalrhetoric and FH*–Polity approaches yield very similar results, indicating a slightly negative US attitude towards Russia through most of the 1990s, a sharp decline to hostility from mid-1998 through 1999, a steady continued worsening of the now strongly-negative attitude until 2014, and then a final collapse to maximum animosity that is completed in 2016. Such findings contradict the prevailing view of a later US turn against Russia, and they have significant implications for understanding when and why US-Russian conflict became inevitable.

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