Some 45 years ago, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev paid his first visit to the United States. It was a turbulent encounter for both Khrushchev and Americans. Khrushchev scoffed at American economic prosperity, deplored Hollywood’s tastelessness, and predicted communism would bury capitalism. (Some prediction!)

Seeking to deflect criticism of Russia’s lack of freedoms, he was on the offensive. At a state dinner hosted by President Eisenhower, Khrushchev got into an exchange with Vice President Nixon about the US press, suggesting that it was a submissive handmaiden of the American government. Present in the room was the editor of The Christian Science Monitor, Erwin Canham. Pointing to Canham, Nixon explained that he couldn’t possibly control the editorial policy of the Monitor, Canham’s newspaper. Khrushchev responded dismissively: “I don’t believe you.”

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Incredibly, almost half a century later, Russia’s current leader, Vladimir Putin, was as similarly defensive about Russia’s lack of media independence, and as similarly lacking in his understanding of American freedoms. At his meeting in Europe with President Bush earlier this year, President Putin argued that if the US press was so free, how come Mr. Bush had been able to get rid of Dan Rather and those other pesky CBS reporters? The Russian’s apparent belief that in the US, the president could fire reporters filled Bush and his staff with incredulity.

These two little anecdotes, more than four decades apart, underline a continuing lack of comprehension at high Russian levels of what democracy really means, and how it works.

It is a misunderstanding that bedevils the US-Russian relationship as Bush preaches the values of democracy, and Putin proclaims them but edges away from practicing them.

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