Developments in Russia, 1996-2000
Chronicling the Shift from Opportunity to Strongman

A Preference for Democracy

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
June 20, 1996

The Russian presidential elections - the first opportunity Russians have had in their thousand year history to choose the head of their sovereign state - went pretty much as expected. The polls had indicated that Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the democratic camp, and Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist chief, would run a close race. And so they did. Yeltsin won slightly more, Zyuganov slightly less than one-third of the vote. The remaining third is scattered among several candidates, some of them reformers, others ultra-nationalists. As provided by the constitution, the two leading candidates will now confront each other in a run-off election in early July.

The first phase of the election has brought both good news and bad news. The good news is that Russian voters, even though lacking experience in genuine elections, have shown themselves capable of choosing among a host of candidates offering differing programs. The majority opted for a politician, who, whatever his past mistakes and shortcomings as chief executive, stands resolutely for democracy and the free market. Although we have to wait for the breakdown of the vote, it is fairly certain that the younger, better educated urban voters cast their ballots for Yeltsin. This impression is strengthened by the fact that Yeltsin swept both Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Richard Pipes at a conference in Moscow, June 2000.

The social welfare state option

The bad news is that nearly one-third of Russians opted for a Communist who talks of reconstructing the Russian empire and reimposing controls on the nation's economy. Does this mean that they wish a return of communism? Hardly. Zyuganov has campaigned on a Social-Democratic platform, solemnly assuring the voters that he will respect the citizens' properties and civil rights. A high proportion of those who cast ballots for him, many of them pensioners and unskilled workers, were opting for a social welfare state modeled not so much on the Soviet Union as on Sweden. Even so it is troubling that the red flag, the portraits of Stalin, and the rhetoric of some of Zyuganov's lieutenants did not scare them off.

Electoral polling in Russia has reached a high professional level and hence there were few surprises. The one unanticipated result was the strong showing of Alexander Lebed, a stony-faced retired general, who gathered roughly 15 percent of the vote. Lebed combines ardent nationalism and anti-communism with a platform calling for law and order. He is popular among Russians because he projects the image of a man of action, capable of coping with corruption and crime, which have become so prevalent in post-communist Russia.

Yeltsin's post-election alliance with Lebed was master-stroke because it promises to rid democratic Russia of the social evils the people have come to associate with democracy and capitalism while retaining their political and economic benefits.

A revival of the Cold War averted

The chances are that in July, Yeltsin will win and serve a second term. For one, he is likely to gain the votes of those who on June 16th had supported other reform candidates, notably Grigori Yavinsky. Zyuganov, on the other had, seems to have garnered nearly the entire anti-democratic vote and has little in reserve. Secondly, Yeltsin has a tight grip on television, which in a country of Russia's size and low population density is often the only means of receiving political information.

Although the vote for democracy could have been more unambiguous, there is reason to be gratified by the results. As of now, Russia seems to have averted a catastrophic return to the old regime which almost surely would have spelled a revival of the arms race and the Cold War. It has shown a preference for democracy and the free market which, difficult as they are to realize, offer the only path to stability and abundance.

The End of Communism

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
July 11, 1996

The outstanding news about the Russian Presidential election of July 3 is not that Yelstin won but that Zyuganov lost. Yeltsin very skillfully managed to turn the election away from his own performance into a referendum on communism. A clear majority of Russia's citizens let it be known that whatever reservations they have about democracy and capitalism as practiced in their country since 1991, they do not want a return to communism.

This repudiation pretty much dooms the Marxist-Leninist cause. For although one of Zyuganov's associates has promised a comeback, declaring that "even God cannot destroy the idea of communism," the referendum was not on the idea of communism but its reality.

The other notable fact about the election is that it was honest and that the contenders have accepted the verdict of the people. It is unprecedented in the entire history of Russia for someone defeated in a political struggle to concede defeat, as Zyuganov has done, and then to be allowed to continue his political activities. When Lenin, the founder of the communist party, lost out in November 1917 in the vote for the Constituent Assembly, he had the Assembly dispersed. We may now say with some assurance that Russia has weathered the first, most difficult stage of the transition to democracy.

Future uncertainty

The main cause for worry lies in personalities. Yeltsin is a feisty and deft political in-fighter. The prospect of defeat energizes him. But once he wins, he falls into something akin to depression, losing interest in politics, especially the tedious routine of day-to-day administration. If one adds to this defect the highly uncertain state of his health, there is a good chance that even with democratic institutions in place Russian democracy may face a rocky future.

The Russian constitution does not provide for a Vice-President. Were Yeltsin unable to carry on, authority would temporarily evolve on his Prime Minister, Victor Chernomyrdin, who would be required to arrange for new Presidential elections within 90 days. Chernomyrdin is an able administrator who shies the public limelight.

The trouble, however, is that in order to bolster his chances in the elections Yeltsin formed an alliance with ex-general Alexander Lebed, a man devoid of any political experience but overflowing with political ambition. Appointed to head the Security Council, a body with broad though vague responsibilities, he has began to act as titular deputy to Yeltsin, pronouncing on every conceivable subject. He has let it be known that he favors Chechen independence -- a position which clashes with that of his government. He has declared that Russia is the richest and most intelligent country in the world; that three-quarters of all inventions have originated in Russia and were stolen by foreigners. According to him, only three religions -Orthodoxy, Islam and Buddhism -- have a right to exist in Russia; Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism apparently have no place in it.

In step with the West

Lebed's imperious behavior has already brought him into conflict with Chernomyrdin. Unless Yeltsin quickly acts to cut the ex-general down to size, he may well confront a deep constitutional crisis which Russia can ill afford.

For the time being, however, Yeltsin has reasons to be content: His people have rejected communism and opted for constitutional democracy, a difficult yet unsurpassed political system. With the recent election, Russia has finally fallen in step with the West.

Should NATO Expand?

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
August 22, 1996

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of its military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact, voices have been heard urging the expansion of NATO to the liberated countries of Eastern Europe. The argument in favor of such action is that it will extend the umbrella of military defense to the eastern half of Europe before Russia has had a chance to emerge from her present crisis and once again menace this region. The pressures for expansion come from the countries concerned, notably Poland. They receive added support from Germany. It appears that Washington has virtually decided to back NATO's expansion.

Weighing the risks

It is understandable that Poland, which four times in its history has been invaded and partitioned by Russia, desperately seeks Western guarantees of its safety. Yet such guarantees are fraught with considerable danger. They deserve more public discussion than they have received so far.

For one, Russians of all political views -- nationalists, communists and liberals -- adamantly oppose Western military presence so close to their borders. They argue that Russia does not threaten Eastern Europe; that the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact calls for the dissolution of NATO; that it is highly offensive to Russians to have Germany acquire a military base in Eastern Europe from which it has been expelled by Russian armies half a century ago at immense cost in human lives.

The hostility to NATO's expansion is so widespread in Russia that it forces the reformist and pro-Western Yeltsin government to conduct a more combative foreign policy than it would like to. It further prompts some Russians to argue that in order to balance the West's expansion eastward, Russia, too, should shift east and enter into an alliance with Communist China.

Costs of commitment

The projected expansion of NATO also presents problems for the West. It will be costly. Estimates vary from $20 billion for the most modest programs of upgrading the military capacities of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, to $110 billion for the deployment of several thousand NATO troops in these countries. Most of that cost would be borne by the United States and Germany.

Next, there arises the question whether the United States really wants to make a permanent military commitment to protect a region driven by ancient ethnic and religious conflicts. The Hungarians, for instance, have an ongoing feud with the neighboring Romanians over Transylvania, a Romanian province with a large Hungarian minority. Should this feud result in another regional war, would NATO really be prepared to intervene with armed forces to defend Hungarian interests?

Moscow has recently shown a reluctant readiness to accept the admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO on condition that, as in the case of Norway, no forces or nuclear weapons be deployed on their territories. This concession may pave the way for a compromise. It merits negotiations.

Certainly Russia should not be treated as a banana republic and subjected to military pressures without due consideration of its legitimate interests and wishes. To do so would only isolate Russia and provide ammunition to those extremist elements which insist that their country must once again build up a formidable military force because no matter what it does, it is doomed to be treated by the West as an enemy.

Poles considered Richard Pipes a hero for his 1981 role in "saving Solidarity," the independent Polish trade union. His opposition to the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, however, was far less popular. Despite this, he (at right) received the Polish Commander's Cross of Merit at the Polish Consulate in New York City in 1996 from Consul General Jerzy Surdykowski. Zbigniew Brzezinski is at left and Jan Nowak-Jeziorański in the middle.

Capitalistic Russia

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
September 19, 1996

Because the mass media concentrate on events, especially violent ones, rather than processes, the public has been getting a one-sided view of post-communist Russia. It is constantly reminded of crime and corruption, of rivalries among politicians, and of the ravages of fighting in Chechnia. It is not informed of what in some respects is an unprecedented occurrence in history: The massive shift of national assets from the hands of the state to those of citizens that has been underway since the Soviet Union broke up five years ago.

Post-Soviet privatization

The process of privatization has been partly spontaneous, partly government sponsored. As soon as the old regime collapsed, the higher echelons of party functionaries began to seize state properties, sell them, convert the rubles into dollars, and ship the proceeds to secret foreign bank accounts. Others have made illicit gains by buying natural resources, such as oil, at fixed prices and selling them abroad at international market prices. These actions have given private enterprise in Russia a bad name.

But they are only a part of the story, and not the most important one at that. More significant was the legislation calling for the privatization of industry, farming and trade passed on Yeltsin's initiative in 1991 and the years following. Large industrial enterprises issued vouchers to their employees making them co-owners: These vouchers are now traded on the stock exchanges. Collective farmers have been given the opportunity to pull out and create private farms: An opportunity relatively few have taken advantage of so far because agriculture in Russia, with its poor soil and short growing season as well as virtually non-existent infrastructure of roads and silos, is hardly profitable. The liberalization of wholesale and retail trade, however, once a government monopoly, has led to a stunning burgeoning of private enterprise across the country.

Investing in a free market future

The results? In 1990, virtually the entire national economy of Russia was in government hands. Today, according to Kremlin Capitalism, a study edited by Joseph R. Blasi and soon to be published by Cornell University Press, Russian entrepreneurs have founded 900,000 new small private enterprises. Three-quarters of all the mid-sized and large enterprises are privately owned. The retail business is 82 percent privatized. Other economists estimate that approximately three-quarters of the Gross Domestic Product of Russia comes from the private sector.

The private sector is far from efficient: Management is inadequate and so are opportunities for investment. Exorbitant taxation leads to large-scale tax evasion. Business legislation is in its infancy, forcing some Russian businessmen to resort to the mafia.

Still, the implications of the privatization process are momentous. The Russian government can no longer manipulate its citizenry by granting or withholding economic favors. The new proprietors -- even those who have gotten their possessions illegally -- have a vital interest in the establishment of the rule of law to protect their assets. A growing part of the population has a stake in democracy and the free market: A fact which helps explain the defeat of the communists at the polls in the recent presidential elections.

Ready for Reaganomics?

The worst feature of privatization in Russia is that it has led to the utter collapse of social services, bringing great hardship to the aged and the lower paid members of the labor force. These groups of the population resent capitalism because to them it spells speculation and exploitation. But as the history of western societies indicates, such neglect of the less fortunate distinguishes capitalism only in its early, immature phase. There is every reason to believe that as the political situation in Russia stabilizes, the state will recognize its social responsibilities and the wealth created by private enterprise will trickle down.

What matters most is that the younger generation and the better educated elements of the Russian population -- the country's future leaders -- are committed to private enterprise, a fact which augurs well for the country's economy as well as constitution.

Russia's Politics Heat Up

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
October 17, 1996

The uncertain condition of President Yeltsin's health and his seeming inability to direct the day-to-day affairs of the Russian government have thrown Russian political life into turmoil. Yeltsin is a feisty individual who has more than once overcome seemingly fatal physical and political handicaps. He should not, therefore, be written off. His heart surgery, which has been postponed for one or two months, may well prove successful and enable him to resume his responsibilities. Still, the jockeying for his succession is underway.

The Russian constitution makes no provisions for a Vice President who automatically takes charge when the President is incapacitated. Under its terms, presidential authority passes temporarily to the Prime Minister who is charged with arranging within 90 days for new presidential elections.

Chernomyrdin and Lebed: Leading the pack

By virtue of his position and experience, Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin is a leading candidate in the elections to the post-Yeltsin presidency. He is a skilled administrator who combines pragmatic conservatism with progressive ideas. As one-time director of Gazprom, the world's largest producer of natural gas, he has wide connections among Russia's top executives. He enjoys their support and hence has access to campaign funds denied to his potential rivals. His greatest disadvantage is a colorless personality: His face is easy to forget, his rhetorical gifts are meager, and his not inconsiderable achievements in stabilizing Russia lack the dramatic quality required to galvanize the electorate.

His most likely rival, General Alexander Lebed, is in every respect Chernomyrdin's opposite. When invited by Yeltsin last summer to head the Security Council and endowed with wide powers that encroach on those of the Prime Minister, he had neither political experience nor an organized political constituency. He has learned quickly, however, to guard his speech and to form alliances with various disgruntled politicians, among them General Alexander Korzhakov, once Yeltsin's chief body guard and closest associate. Korzhakov, whom Yeltsin had dismissed last June, is said to have compiled incriminating evidence on many high officials which he can put at the disposal of his new friend.

The political views of Lebed are far from clear. His slogan is "Truth and Order," and his recipe for all that ails Russia is firm authority. His public pronouncements stress that Russia is allegedly on the verge of a social explosion from which he and he alone can save it. His major themes are corruption and crime. Democratic Russia is for him "a garbage heap that greedily attracts more bureaucrat-flies." He projects the image of a doer which has great appeal to Russians disillusioned with the slowness of democratic processes. His success in achieving a cease-fire in the civil war in Chechnya may have alienated extreme Russian nationalities but it has won him great admiration among the population at large, sickened by a conflict that has claimed thousands of lives and seemed incapable of solution. Polls indicate that he is far and away the most popular political figure in Russia.

Something of a dark horse is Yuri Luzhkov, the immensely popular mayor of Moscow, who has managed to find funds with which to reconstruct the decaying capital city.

Yeltsin favors Chernomyrdin, his self-effacing and completely loyal lieutenant, over Lebed, who has publicly demanded that Yeltsin resign and who makes no secret of his ambition to succeed him.

Back to the U.S.S.R.?

Although his chances do not appear too good after the debacle which he has suffered in the July 1996 presidential elections, one cannot entirely eliminate as a possible successor to Yeltsin Gennadi Zyuganov, the leader of the well organized Communist Party. This party has done surprisingly well in recent local elections and seems poised for a resurgence. Its main problem is that the democratic socialist program favored by Zyuganov and popular among many voters is sabotaged by hard-line communists who will be content with nothing short of the restoration of the Soviet Union.

Thus a great deal hinges on the heart-beat of one man. If it should stop, Russia may be plunged into a political crisis that can have unforeseen consequences given that its democratic institutions are still so unseasoned.

How Elections Are Won In Russia

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
November 14, 1996

At the time of the Presidential elections in Russia earlier this year it was apparent that Yeltsin, despite his low standing in the polls, enjoyed very powerful support from groups operating behind the scenes. These groups helped him win the Presidency by providing him with sizable funds to wage his electoral campaign and giving him exposure in the media denied to rival candidates. The nature of this support is now beginning to emerge.

Businesses' candidate

In an interview with the London Daily, Financial News, a leading Russian businessmen, Boris Berezovsky, reveals how in early 1996 he and several of his friends agreed that a Communist victory had to be prevented at all costs. Berezovsky is one of Russia's richest men, whose immense fortune derives from a conglomerate that includes car dealerships, television stations and a bank. He and several other self-made millionaires, who, in his words, control one-half of Russia's economy, formed an alliance with Anatoly Chubais, Yeltsin's right-hand man and a leading force behind the economic reform movement. Yeltsin's daughter Tatian Diachenko, served as their link with the President.

This group provided Yeltsin with around $30 million for campaign purposes; from other sources it is known that some of this money went to help General Lebed whose support the group considered essential to Yeltsin's victory. They took these steps because they saw in a possible Communist victory a mortal threat to their interests.

Influence wielded

During the presidential campaign, the group's access to television ensured that Yeltsin got as much exposure as all his rivals combined and that he alone received positive television coverage. Subsequently, the group arranged Lebed's entry into government and then, after the election was won and Lebed challenged the President's authority, they masterminded his ouster.

Berezovsky subsequently consolidated his power by having himself appointed as a member of Russia's Security Council in October. This appointment, apparently engineered by Chubais, brought out voices of outrage from both the right and left wings of Russia's political spectrum. The right, which in Russia includes the Communist party, cannot stomach the fact that Berezovsky, a banker of Jewish background, has emerged as Russia's third most powerful political figure. The reformist wing sees in him and his associates a new cabal which, hiding behind democratic slogans, is consolidating in its hands Russia's government as well as its economic assets.

Is this good for Russia?

The existence of a powerful group of private entrepreneurs at the center of Russia's political life has positive as well as negative aspects.

Positive is the fact that big money in Russia has developed a vested interest in preventing communism and preserving free enterprise. Its behavior confirms the expectation which I voiced in my September column (dealing with nascent Russian capitalism) that a new class is emerging that has a vital stake in the free market and hence will not tolerate a return to the old ways.

The negative aspect of the situation is that Russia is turning into an oligarchy in which bureaucratic appointees work hand-in-glove with business owners whose hands are not always clean and who are prepared to use virtually any undemocratic method to promote their objectives. Their machinations discredit democracy in the eyes of the people even as they thwart a return of totalitarianism.

Russia's Troubled Military

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
December 12, 1996).

One of the uncertainties in Russia's future is the status and mood of its armed forces. Unlike their counterparts in Latin America, Russia's military do not have a tradition of involvement in politics: Russian officers under tsarism and communism alike regarded themselves as custodians of the nation whose mission it is to defend its interests regardless of who runs the government. They have always tended to look down on civilians.

The good old Soviet days

Although the Russian military has been true to this tradition since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there are indications that they are most unhappy with their treatment at the hands of the democratic government and that their unhappiness could be exploited by ambitious politicians to subvert democracy.

The Red Army, Navy, Air Force, and Strategic Forces were the pampered children of the Soviet regime. They received the lion's share of the national budget; they had an influential voice in economic planning; they enjoyed immense prestige, especially after the victory over Germany in World War II. All this disappeared with the collapse of communism.

Ruble trouble

The main reason for the loss of status of Russia's armed forces are budgetary constraints. The government, unable to collect a large share of the taxes, has had to severely cut funds for defense: the London International Institute of Strategic Studies estimates that the appropriations for the military, compared to 1992, have declined by 45%. Military personnel payrolls are in arrears for months. The same holds true of workers employed by defense industries. The result is that once-proud officers are compelled to drive taxis and engage in other forms of moonlighting to support themselves and their families. Some even turn to crime.

All of this has led the enormous Russian military-industrial complex into severe depression. Production of aviation is significantly down. To add insult to injury, Aeroflot, Russia's national airline, recently has been forced to order ten 737s from Boeing to add to its aging fleet.

Russian officials are well aware of these problems and seek ways to remedy them. One solution is to reduce the size of the army: Latest proposals speak of a standing force of only 1.2 million. There are plans sometime early in the next century to replace the draft with an all-volunteer army. Greater stress than ever is placed on nuclear weapons and high technology; thus Russia recently launched a new-generation submarine which it claims to have no peer in the world. It also is energetically pursuing export of military hardware, especially advanced aviation. As a result of deals with China, India and several other countries, Russian arms exports are expected to bring $5 billion in the coming year, a threefold increase over 1994.

Dissension in the ranks

Still, such plans and such actions do not assuage the unhappiness of the military and its political supporters among the communists and nationalists. The miserable performance of the Russian army in Chechnya is proof of a deep-seated malaise. The recent budget for the armed forces allocates 102.8 trillion rubles ($20.6 billion) instead of the 160 trillion ($32 billion) requested. Critics of the government charge that these figures spell the doom of Russia's military.

Such prognoses are undoubtedly an exaggeration. But it is undeniable that Russia can no longer afford either to devote as large a share of its scarce resources to the military as it has in the past, or to plan for campaigns in which, as in the past, the main weapon is the lavish expenditure of human lives. It has to make up its mind what function its military is to perform. Much of the unhappiness of Russia's men in uniform stems from the fact that in a democratic country committed to capitalism they no longer play the role they had played when it was autocratically run and bent on expansion. Adjusting to the realities of the new Russia will be no easy task.

Yeltsin's Health and Russia's Future

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
January 16, 1997

Boris Yeltsin is a sick man in his sixties on whose health depends a great deal of Russia's future.

Perilous prognosis

Russia's president has been suffering for some time from various chronic ailments that have prevented him from properly exercising his responsibilities. As a result, he has become something of a figurehead, not unlike Brezhnev in his waning years: His executive powers have devolved on the prime minister, Victor Chernomyrdin, and Anatoly Chubais, chief of staff. This would not be a happy situation anywhere but it is especially dangerous in a country like Russia whose political culture has always demanded strong personal leadership.

Should Yeltsin become totally incapacitated or die, Russia will certainly be thrown into turmoil. The constitution calls for new presidential elections to be held within ninety days and there is no reason to fear that this provision will not be honored. The question is: Who will profit from it?

In Russia's fledgling democracy, political parties are rudimentary at best. People tend to identify them with the infamous Communist Party of the Soviet Union and fail to grasp that they are essential to the democratic process. With one exception, political organizations in today's Russia are loose groupings formed around personalities, devoid of structure, finances, and regional branches. As a result, Russia's voters, lacking allegiances but full of grievances, personalize politics and yearn for "strong men" to solve their problems.

Waiting in the wings

The most popular of these "strong men" is retired General Alexander Lebed who made a respectable showing in the first round of the presidential elections last summer, then was brought into the Yeltsin camp, contributing materially to Yeltsin's victory in the second and decisive round, only to be dismissed once the elections were over. Lebed is a forceful personality with a weakly developed sense of politics and almost no understanding of economics. He is anti-communist but he has no program except to call for "Truth and Order." He has more than once demanded Yeltsin's resignation and voiced confidence in his own ability to restore domestic stability and Russia's international prestige. He would undoubtedly enjoy the support of the country's disgruntled military.

His most formidable rival in a presidential race would be the head of the new Communist Party, Gennadi Zyuganov. A colorless apparatchik, he has at his disposal the only functioning party organization in Russia -- a vestige of the old ruling establishment -- and enjoys the backing of those whom the democratic revolution of 1991 has dispossessed: party officials and loyalists along with embittered nationalists and impoverished pensioners. Should he win, he would almost certainly prove unable to restore communism but very likely he would try to reinstate a centralized state at the expense of political, economic and intellectual freedom.

Staying alive

Against these two candidates, the reformers' best champion would be Chernomyrdin. But the prime minister, a politician of considerable experience and pragmatic views, would have a hard time gaining popular support. The liberal forces in Russia, whom he would represent, are thoroughly disorganized and disheartened: They would be no match for the other two likely candidates.

Since the Russian constitution vests strong powers in the president, it is of the greatest importance that Yeltsin stay alive and at least minimally visible for some time longer. In the next few years Russia may well succeed in rooting the institutions of democracy and private enterprise to the point where the prospect of a new dictatorship would be greatly diminished.

Russians and Chechens

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
February 13, 1997

Map of Chechnya Chechnya is a small autonomous republic of the Russian Federation located on the northern slopes of the Caucasian Mountains. Two-thirds of the population consists of Muslims, the rest are Russians and other Slavs. The area's importance to Moscow is due primarily to its oil deposits and pipelines.

A history of resistance

The Chechens have always resisted Russian rule: Tolstoy's novel, The Cossacks, depicts the deadly skirmishes between Slavs and Muslims one-hundred and fifty years ago. At the end of World War II, the Chechens were accused by Stalin of collaborating with the Nazis and deported as a nation to Siberia and Central Asia, from where they returned only after Stalin's death.

As soon as the Soviet Union fell apart in late 1991, the Chechens proclaimed independence. Moscow rejected this claim not only because it did not want to lose Caucasian oil, but also because it feared the unraveling of the Russian Federation of which Chechnya was a part.

The old Soviet constitution had maintained the fiction that the country was a federation, although in fact it was a uniquely centralized state ruled by the Communist Party. To satisfy the national strivings of the minorities, Moscow created two types of federal entities: Union republics for the larger ethnic groups, and autonomous republics for the smaller ones. The union republics were in theory sovereign and endowed with the right to separate themselves and form independent states; the autonomous republics had no such rights even in theory.

Asserting "autonomy"

When the Soviet Union fell apart, Moscow acknowledged -- however reluctantly -- the independence of the fifteen union republics (Ukraine, Georgia, Latvia, etc.). But it firmly refused any of the autonomous republics on its territory a similar right. It came to terms with two Muslim regions -- the Tatar and the Bashkir -- by granting them broader powers of self-government. But the Chechens would not be satisfied with such an arrangement.

The result was conflict. Having failed to take over Chechnya by subversion, Moscow dispatched its massive military forces. The Chechens resorted to guerilla warfare; the Russians responded with terror bombing. Tens of thousands of Chechens and Russians lost their lives. The capital city of Groznyi was virtually destroyed.

Desperate for a way out, Moscow sent General Lebed to arrange for a truce. An agreement was reached with the Chechens calling for a five-year interval following which the two sides will get together and resolve the issues dividing them. The Russian troops subsequently withdrew.

The future of a fierce mountain nation

There is little hope, however, that a resolution satisfactory to both can be found: The Russians insist on Chechnya acknowledging their sovereignty while the Chechens insist just as adamantly on full independence.

In the elections held in Chechnya last month, there were two leading contenders for the presidency, one more extreme, the other more moderate. The moderate candidate, Aslan Maskhadov, won and immediately announced that independence was non-negotiable: Chechnya would become an Islamic republic. To which President Yeltsin responded that he was prepared to open negotiations about Chechnya's future status within the Russian Federation.

The two sides are thus deadlocked. The chances are that Moscow will have to reconcile itself to the loss of the fierce mountain nation because it will not be able to afford a protracted conflict to which there is neither a military nor a political solution.

Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
March 13, 1997

Last year a colleague who had served with me in the early 80s on the Reagan National Security Council attempted to publish a book that would examine the contribution of the Reagan administration to the downfall of the Soviet Union and its empire. Although the list of proposed contributors included such prominent names as Caspar Weinberger, he could not find a single publisher willing to underwrite the volume. Yet, this in a country which publishes tens of thousands of titles a year, much of it unadulterated trash.

Amiable duffer or Cold War hero?

Why should this be so? I believe it is the result of a relentless campaign of liberal journalists and academics to depict Reagan as an amiable duffer who dozed through eight years of his tenure in the White House. He is denied any role in the downfall of Communism and the end of the Cold War. Indeed, some pundits maintain that the hard-line policy pursued by Reagan's appointees, especially in his first term, prolonged the Cold War because the Soviet government reacted to it in kind with a hardened foreign policy of its own.

There is no substance to such claims. As Director of East European and Soviet Affairs in the National Security Council during the first two years of the Reagan administration I can attest that Reagan never dozed at any Council meeting or on any other occasion where I could observe him. He was fully alert and in charge of the general course of U.S. policy toward the Communist camp. Far from hardening the Soviet stance, his assertive anti-Communist line was followed by a Soviet turn to reform and a more conciliatory relationship with the United States under the leadership of Gorbachev.

The Evil Empire's worst enemy

This was not an accident. Reagan was the first U.S. president since the Communists took power in Russia to challenge not merely Soviet behavior but the very legitimacy of Communism. He believed, and said so in his public pronouncements, that the Soviet Union, far from being the stable and popular regime depicted by most Soviet "experts," was in fact doomed to disappear before long. He saw that the cause of Soviet expansionism was rooted in the Communist system and thought that the only way to contain it was by inducing the system to change. In the top-secret guideline of U.S.-Soviet policy signed by him in January 1983 and known as NSDD-75 (it has recently been declassified) he called for various measures to push the USSR in the direction of reform.

One means toward this end was economic denial. Thus, for instance, Reagan pressured the Europeans -- not quite successfully -- to deny Moscow hard currency earnings from the sale of natural gas. Agreements with Saudi Arabia arranged by the head of the CIA, William Casey, to increase its petroleum production, had the effect of drastically lowering world oil prices. Which meant that the Russians were deprived of a great deal of hard currency earnings from oil exports on which they heavily depended. This, in turn, forced them to launch economic reforms that before long unraveled the whole regime.

Reagan's rearmament program, with its emphasis on advanced technology, convinced the Russian military that their future looked bleak and persuaded them to provide critical support to Gorbachev's reform agenda.

Giving credit where credit is due

Future historians will undoubtedly give Ronald Reagan his due as the president who did more than any other foreign head of state to put an end to the regime of Lenin and Stalin. It may take some time, however, for this information to trickle down to the journalistic and academic community.

The Caucasus: A New Middle Eastern Tinderbox?

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
April 10, 1997

The Caucasus is a high mountain range stretching between the Caspian and Black Seas. It is populated largely by Muslim peoples of various ethnic backgrounds, one of whom, the Chechens, have recently been much in the news because of their armed struggle for independence from Russia. To the south lies Transcaucasia, a region that the Russians conquered nearly two centuries ago. It has three principal nationalities: the Georgians and Armenians, both Orthodox Christian, and the Azerbaijanis, who are Shiite Muslims. Each was once a Soviet republic; each proclaimed its independence after the Soviet Union dissolved in the winter of 1991-92.

Post-Soviet geopolitics

For Russia, the Caucasus, especially Transcaucasia, has great geopolitical and economic importance. Control of this region gives Moscow a foothold in the Middle East from which to exert influence and pressure on Turkey, Iran and points south: The border of Armenia is a mere 300 miles from Syria and Iraq.

No less important are the rich energy resources located in this region. Azerbaijan and the Caspian have large deposits of petroleum; Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, Central Asian republics bordering on the Caspian, have proven resources of petroleum and gas, that some estimate to exceed a trillion dollars in value. These resources are being explored by international consortia.

For these reasons Russia has been reluctant to let go of its one-time Caucasian colonies and has resorted to various forms of direct and indirect coercion to bring them to heel.

New relationships or nationalist resistance?

Of the three Transcaucasian republics, Armenia has always been the most friendly to Russia, because it looks to it for protection from its traditional enemy, Turkey. Moscow has helped the Armenians to conquer via Azerbaijan much of Nagorno-Karabakh, a region with a large Armenian population. It has admitted recently to having shipped Armenia weapons valued at one billion dollars.

Georgia for a while resisted Russian demands for closer cooperation. To subdue it, Moscow initiated a "national-liberation" movement among the 100,000 Abkhazians, a Muslim people occupying the western regions of Georgia. In the course of the rebellion, a quarter of a million Georgians residing in Abkhazia were expelled. The rebellion stopped only after Georgia agreed to let in a force of some 8,000 Russian soldiers, forces they have been trying to get rid of ever since.

Azerbaijan, the richest quarry, has been the most successful in resisting Russian pressures. It foiled Russian attempts to stage a coup: Apart from the Baltic states, it is the only one of the ex-Soviet republics not to have Russian troops on its soil. To Moscow's intense annoyance, it has established working relations with Turkey and Iran.

Coming soon: crisis in the Caucasus

The burning issue at present is the location of the projected pipelines to carry Caucasian and Central Asian gas and oil to international markets. Moscow wants them to run exclusively across its territory to the Black Sea port of Novorossisk. One of the reasons for its determination to hold on to Chechnia is that the Caspian-Novorossisk pipeline traverses this region. The republics, with the backing of international energy firms, are designing alternate routes, the most favored of which runs across Georgia and Turkey.

The stakes are high and Moscow can be expected to exert every effort to reassert its hegemony in the Caucasus. The parties concerned are likely to resist. As a result we may see yet another crisis erupting in the Middle East.

Russia and Belarus: Restoring the Old Order?

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
May 1, 1997

Belarus is a small ex-Soviet republic located between Russia and Poland. Most of its 10 million inhabitants are Orthodox Christians who speak a Slavic language that mixes elements of Russian and Polish with some Lithuanian and Ukrainian. The country had never been independent before 1991 and its sense of national identity is weakly developed.

A Stalinist's stance against freedom and sovereignty

Belarus has been in the news lately because its president, Alexander Lukashenko, an unregenerate Stalinist who seeks to eradicate all freedom in the republic, is determined to reunite Belarus with Russia. He seems to have the majority of the population behind him. Opponents of reunification have been ruthlessly suppressed and their foreign backers arrested and expelled. The display of the Belarus flag has been outlawed.

The pro-Russia movement in Belarus has placed President Boris Yeltsin in a quandary. On the one hand, he welcomes Lukashenko's efforts because they may encourage other separated republics to draw closer to Moscow and thus help realize by peaceful means the popular vision of a reconstituted Russian empire. In April of this year, Yeltsin signed a symbolic document with Lukashenko that promised close cooperation between the two countries.

It stopped short of integration, however, because Yeltsin rejects Lukashenko's politics and economics. The Yeltsin administration is more than ever committed to economic reform and democratization. Lukashenko, for his part, has refused to privatize industrial enterprises in his republic and has completely subverted its democratic institutions. Moscow fears that a union with Belarus would strengthen the anti-reform forces in its own country. Russian economists also warn that were Belarus to become one with Russia, its economy would require infusions of money that Moscow can ill afford to spend.

Unification: a divisive issue

Lukashenko enjoys enthusiastic support from Russian communists and nationalists. The mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, a popular politician who may be running for the presidency in a few years, has publicly accused Yeltsin's advisors of impeding unification. Many Duma deputies demand Yeltsin proceed rapidly to bring Belarus back into the fold. Thus the issue has caused a sharp political split in Russia, with the reactionary and nationalistic elements lining up behind Lukashenko and using Belarus as an argument to accuse the Yeltsin administration of neglecting Russia's national interests.

The Belarus issue emphasized to what extent imperial ambitions still play a part in Russia's domestic politics. Although the majority of its people are too engrossed in the daily struggle for survival to care about such issues, the politically active minority deeply resents the loss of the borderlands. They want in some way -- economic pressure, internal subversion, or, if all else fails, military force -- to reintegrate the fifteen separated republics. The trouble is that such an imperial reconstruction is possible only at the cost of abandoning democracy and market reform.

En route to Evil Empire II?

A revived empire, to the extent that this prospect is even conceivable, would indeed make Russia a mightier state, but only superficially so. In the modern world, genuine power derives from popular support and economic prosperity, not territorial expanse. To attain these, Russia has to concentrate all energies and resources on rebuilding the wreckage left by seventy years of communist rule.

For this reason, the fate of Belarus is of considerable importance. If the Belarus opposition manages to depose its would-be dictator and jointly with its Russian sympathizers thwart his attempt at unification, the cause of democracy and market economy will gain in both countries. If they fail, both will take a fateful step in the direction of restoring the old order.

NATO Expansion: Who Wins?

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
June 5, 1997

Now that the Russians have formally agreed to the expansion of NATO, it is time to ask who has gained by this diplomatic accomplishment.

On the face of it, the United States did. The Russian government acquiesced to something it had staunchly resisted in the past and by so doing demonstrated its geopolitical weakness. At least three neighboring countries, once vassals of Moscow, will be reintegrated into the West and guaranteed their security.

What price victory?

But at what price has this triumph been won? This is far from clear.

First, Russia will be isolated. Although this was not the intention of the Western leaders, if they bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic back into Europe, they will effectively exclude Russia from Europe. The effect of this is that Russia will be more likely to exert pressure on its one-time imperial dependencies, such as the Ukraine and Central Asia. They will force the former dependencies to maintain closer military and economic relations, in order for Russia to assert its great power status in the face of the United States and its allies. Russia will also be tempted to provoke the West by moving closer to China.

Secondly, to gain Moscow's approval for the extension of NATO, the West has had to make a variety of concessions that in time may prove NATO's undoing. The most troublesome of these is the establishment of a new Permanent NATO-Russia Joint Council. Although the authors of the accord signed in mid-May strenuously deny that Russians will have anything beyond a conservative voice in NATO deliberations, this is not how the matter is viewed in Moscow. President Yeltsin has flatly asserted that the agreement gives Moscow a veto over NATO decisions and the document signed at Helsinki during his meeting with President Clinton seems to bear him out. For although it explicitly denies that either party will have a veto over the actions of the other, it also envisages the Council providing "to the maximum extent possible" a forum of "joint decision-making and action on security issues of common concern." The risk is, therefore, that Russian representatives on the Council will be in a position to interfere with and possibly sabotage the Alliance's defensive actions against their country. Ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has rightly pointed out that as a result of this concession NATO will cease to be an alliance and become a system of collective security. And, as we know from history, such systems do not work.

The backlash risk

Yeltsin's approval of NATO's expansion is seen by Russia's communists and nationalists, who between them control the Duma, the lower house of Russia's Parliament, as a national humiliation. To punish Yeltsin and the United States for it, they are delaying ratification of the Start II treaty which calls for substantial bilateral reduction of nuclear missiles. These reductions in weapons capable of destroying the United States affect our security much more than the hypothetical Russian threat to the sovereignty of Poland or Hungary.

The entire concept of NATO expansion has never been given the public scrutiny that it requires. It has never been properly justified to the American people whom it asks to guarantee the defense of three or more countries in a region not known for stability. Conceived as a campaign gimmick by Clinton advisors anxious to gain their candidate the Polish vote, it has set in motion an international upheaval of potentially incalculable consequences. For this reason it is imperative that it be subjected to intense examination by U.S. public opinion and, when the time comes for its ratification, by the U.S. Senate.

Russian Generals Plan for the Future

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
July 3, 1997

In my December 1996 column, I depicted the sorry state of Russia's military establishment: severe cuts in budgetary allocations, loss of status, absence of defined mission. But this is only part of the story. For there is evidence today that Russia's brass hats have adjusted to the strained circumstances under which they must operate and begun to take steps which, they hope, in ten to twenty years will help Russia regain the rank of an imperial superpower.

This adjustment might be worthy of notice by the rest of the world, for in some respects, the mood and the actions of the Russian generals recall those of the German Reichswehr under the Weimar Republic.

Adapting to a new military era

Stunned by the triumph of American arms in the Gulf War, Russian military planners have concluded that they must abandon traditional Russian strategy and tactics of relying primarily on offensive by hordes of foot soldiers regardless of casualties. For one, Russia no longer has at its disposal unlimited human resources: more of its citizens are dying every year than are born, many of those who survive suffer from genetic disabilities, and draft-dodging is rampant. Secondly, as Desert Storm demonstrated, information warfare and precision-guided missiles are now capable of neutralizing an army before serious combat operations even get underway, lessening the need for huge forces.

With these considerations in mind, and adapting to budgetary cuts, Russian generals have decided to reduce procurement of weapons and concentrate their limited resources on research and development. Their aspiration is to draw on Russia's impressive scientific talent to blueprint military technology that in the not too distant future will give them fighting capabilities unmatched by any potential rival. Emphasis is laid on directed energy, electronic data equipment, lasers and other futuristic weapons that are being designed with the help of U.S. supercomputers.

While these instruments of warfare are being developed and deployed, Russian strategists intend to rely on the nuclear deterrent. In line with this reasoning, the new Russian military doctrine has renounced the "no first use" pledge and adopted the flexible response doctrine of NATO.

Is there a German parallel?

Modernization lies in the future. In the meantime, Russian generals, with the support of Yeltsin's government, are laying the groundwork for the restoration of the empire. The Russian ruling elite has not reconciled itself to the separation of the fifteen dependent republics which, with the Russian federation, made up the Soviet Union. Their loss has deprived Moscow of nearly one-half of its population as well as valuable natural resources, notably Ukrainian food and Caspian oil. Military weakness along with fear of foreign sanctions precludes simple reconquest. But they do not inhibit gradual military penetration of the sovereign states of what has become known as "the near abroad."

Under the terms of the Mutual Security Treaty, which most of the sovereign republics signed with Moscow in 1992, some voluntarily, others under duress, Russia has introduced thousands of its troops into all the former republics of the Soviet Union except the three Baltic ones and Azerbaijan. Their ostensible mission is to protect the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) from foreign encroachments; thus, for example, Russian troops stationed in Tajikstan keep out Muslim fundamentalist forces operating in Afghanistan. In Transcaucasia, they guard the border of Armenia and Georgia with Turkey.

But their true long-term mission is to promote the "integration" of the CIS. Georgia -- which had been compelled to accept a Russian peace-keeping force to maintain order along the ethnic border separating it from the Abkhaz minority whom, coincidentally, the Russians had incited to rebel -- has not been able to get the visitors to leave.

These are troublesome developments. While the West is extending its protective umbrella over Central Europe to defend it from a non-existent threat from the east, moves inside Russia are quietly underway to restore its global military capability and rebuild the empire. It is worth remembering that less than a hundred years ago, Germany made a remarkable comeback from a more serious setback. Prohibited by the Versailles Treaty from maintaining a modern army, they got around it by developing a Blitzkrieg strategy and surreptitiously training cadres of future officers. Russia's constraints are domestic but they can be circumvented in much the same spirit.

Legislation of Church and State: Established Religion in Russia?

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
August 7, 1997

In the turmoil that has afflicted Russia since the downfall of the Soviet Union nearly six years ago, the Orthodox Church has played a minor part. Its persecution has stopped; its churches have slowly reopened; and it has become customary for the Patriarch to participate, side by side with government officials, at great state occasions. The new constitution assures Russian citizens of religious freedoms: The orthodox church enjoys no special status, at least officially.

The new double-speak

Thus it came as a surprise when suddenly last month, the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, took a step which points to new restrictions on religious freedom in favor of Orthodoxy. By an overwhelming vote of 300 to 8, the Duma passed a law which, as had been habit in Soviet days, carried a totally misleading title of "On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations." Approved by the Federation Council, the parliament's upper chamber, the law restores communist discrimination against all religious organizations which are not officially recognized. Currently, other than Orthodoxy the only three faiths recognized are Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism.

No official status

In order to obtain license to function, all other religions will have to register with the government during the next year and a half, furnishing detailed information on their doctrines and membership. Under the new law, the Catholic and Protestant churches enjoy no official status, which means that they are prohibited from carrying on religious work or owning property on the territory of the Russian Federation. If strictly enforced, the law will lead to the closing of their churches, especially the numerous Catholic parishes, scattered across the country.

The unconstitutional law was almost certainly passed to protect Orthodoxy from the proselytizing activities of other Christian faiths, for which reason it received the prompt blessing of Patriarch Aleksii II. It is no coincidence that the three legitimized religions do not threaten Orthodox Christianity.

Religious nationalism on the rise

The Orthodox church has always concerned itself primarily with the spiritual succor and salvation of souls, staying out of politics and ignoring social problems. In tsarist times, it supported autocracy. In Communist times, after an initial phase of fierce resistance, it capitulated and made its peace with a government that inflicted on the country, especially its religious institutions, unprecedented suffering. Its conservatism and aloofness from the everyday concerns of the people, its failure to provide moral leadership, have made the Orthodox establishment vulnerable to inroads by other Christian denominations. This was true already of tsarist Russia whose government treated conversion from the established Orthodox church as a crime. The new law is an effort to stanch the gains which foreign denominations have been making among Russians: It is a major step in the direction of acknowledging the Orthodox Church as the official faith of Russia, and a repudiation of the principle of separation of state and church.

President Yeltsin last week refused to sign the bill into law but the lopsided vote in both houses of parliament makes it likely that his veto will be overridden. In rejecting the new legislation the president risks alienating a large part of the population, which considers the church the most trustworthy of all Russian institutions: A recent poll reveals that it enjoys the confidence of 54% of the nation. This is not a very impressive figure except when compared to the 11% who trust the federal government and the 10% who have faith in parliament.

Yeltsin's opponents claim that his rejection of the bill was dictated from abroad: Patriarch Aleksii has compared the influx of foreign churches to the expansion eastward of NATO. Xenophobia is thus once again rearing its ugly head in Russia: As in tsarist days, religion fuses with statehood and nationalism to thwart democracy and civil rights.

Whither Russia?

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
September 25, 1997

The great difficulty in analyzing contemporary Russia and predicting its likely future derives from the fact that its government is detached from the society which it administers. This was always a feature of Russian history and the reason why the collapse of some of its governments -- whether in 1917 or 1991 -- has been so sudden and unexpected. For these governments did not emanate from society and were not tied to it by the myriad bonds which link western regimes with their people. They were allowed to rule only so long as they had the physical capability to enforce their will: Their mandate was so tenuous and their roots so shallow that it was -- and still is -- possible, virtually overnight, for a seemingly impregnable regime to crumble.

The Yeltsin administration has been duly chosen in a legitimate presidential election. Yet its prestige is extremely low and were new elections held today no one could foretell how they would come out. Hence all predictions of Russia's future have to be of necessity very tentative and based on analysis of deeper sources of behavior.

In my evaluation I shall deal with three aspects of Russia's life: its politics, its economy, and its society.

Problematic politics

The most troubling aspect of Russian political life today is the absence of a national consensus. Effective democracies require that the country agree on certain fundamentals: the sanctity of private property, the necessity of a lawful order, the separation of church and state. In Russia such an agreement is missing. The country is divided into two hostile blocs which find next to nothing in common, and whose disagreements, therefore, concern not the best means of attaining common objectives, but the objectives themselves.

The situation is aggravated by the weak development of political parties. For various reasons, deeply rooted in their historical experience, Russians mistrust parties. Yet these are necessary for channeling opinions and interests and creating parliamentary discipline. The Duma appears to be a casual agglomeration of individuals with personal axes to grind, swinging wildly to extremes, and in principle opposing everything the executive wants. Which has the effect of leaving the executive hanging in the air.

This said, on the positive side it must be stressed that Russia has for the first time in its thousand-year history a head of state elected by a popular vote, a constitution approved by a popular referendum, and local officials chosen by the people whom they serve. All this is so new that it should occasion no surprise that the political process does not function as smoothly as one might desire. Democracy is infinitely more difficult to practice than despotism.

Emergence of a new economy

It is my impression that the Russian economy is doing better than the press would have it. True, the privatization program was miserably implemented, allowing ex-communist officials and shady speculators to accumulate immense fortunes at public expense. Still, it was a privatization program that in scope had no parallel in world history. The bulk of Russia's Gross Domestic Product today comes from the private sector, which is an extraordinary fact given that a mere seven years ago virtually the entire productive sector of the economy was in the hands of the state. If one is to judge by the experience of Western states, the transfer of wealth into private hands develops its own momentum inasmuch as the owners of wealth -- even that ill-gotten -- have an interest in promoting a legal order capable of safeguarding their possessions.

It is a matter of utmost importance that the government introduce as rapidly as possible legal guarantees of private property for both citizens and foreign investors. At present, a major hindrance to large-scale foreign investment in the Russian economy is bureaucratic arbitrariness as manifested in erratic tax policies. Russians who for so long learned to seize such opportunities as presented themselves to make some rubles have yet to learn that in the capitalist system good will is more important than quick profits. A very encouraging sign is that the younger generation of Russians is adapting to the free market economy and shedding old habits.

Post-Soviet society

When the Soviet Union dissolved it was widely feared that the collapse of its government would lead to extensive social conflicts such as had taken place in 1917 following the abdication of the tsar. Such fears, fortunately, proved groundless: No large-scale social violence has occurred anywhere in Russia (if one excepts, as one must, Chechnya where violence was caused not by social but by ethnic and religious differences). I am inclined to attribute this quiescence to fatigue brought about by over eighty years of war and domestic terror: Russians no longer believe that settling scores with each other will solve anything. This is a most positive development.

The greatest dangers to Russia today, in my judgment, are nationalism and imperialism. Under the communist regimes, Russians and their subject nations were told they were the most advanced, the freest, and the most prosperous people in the world. This delusion was maintained under Stalin by an impenetrable wall placed around the Soviet Union which made it impossible for its inhabitants to challenge it. The fact that the USSR was the largest empire in the world and that its nuclear arsenal earned it the status of a superpower lent credence to this propaganda.

The wall began to crumble soon after Stalin's death, first by the penetration of foreign broadcasts, then by the relaxation of bans on foreign travel in and out of the Soviet Union. By the 1960s more intelligent and better informed Russians began to doubt government propaganda. The collapse of communism exposed Russia to untrammeled intercourse and comparison with the rest of the world. And it soon transpired that territory meant little on the scale of either global power or popular well-being; that by most indices of what made a country great and mighty in the late twentieth century, Russia lagged sadly behind both the Atlantic states and the more advanced Asian ones; that Russia's living standard was that of a third world country.

Misplaced nostalgia; optimistic outlook

All this has produced a traumatic effect. Much of the nostalgia for the old regime stems not only from the yearning for the relative economic and social stability it provided but also for the feeling of national greatness which it inculcated in its people. Hence the demand for the "reintegration" of the separated republics into a fictitious Confederation of Independent States. Hence also the grandstanding at international conferences and the spoiling role played by Russian diplomats in the Balkans and the Middle East.

I think this is exceedingly dangerous. Russia can gain the status of a genuine great power only by falling in step with the advanced industrial democracies, and this means giving up dreams of territorial expansion and military or diplomatic bullying. The task of building up Russia from the bottom up -- politically and economically -- is an arduous one, but it is the only sure means of acquiring the kind of greatness that the communists promised but were unable to provide.

Over two hundred years ago the Scottish philosopher David Hume, when told that Britain stood on the verge of ruin, replied, "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." It was a very wise remark and pertinent to the subject under discussion. For unlike individuals who have only one life to live, nations die and are reborn daily, and thus perpetuate themselves. This gives grounds for the belief that for all the mistakes it has committed and difficulties it must confront, Russia, too, will in time regenerate itself.

When One-Time Foes Meet Face-to-Face

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
November 20, 1997

I have just returned from a fascinating international conference held near Warsaw. Organized by Polish and American academic institutions, it confronted in direct dialogue, some of the principal actors of the drama which occurred on December 13, 1981 in Poland when that country's Communist government, headed by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, declared martial law. On orders of then-President Reagan, the United States, correctly attributing this move to Soviet pressure, responded with economic sanctions against both Poland and the Soviet Union. The Cold War experienced another dangerous crisis.

Reassessing a Cold War crisis

There are many unresolved questions about this historic event. The most controversial of these is whether Jaruzelski resorted to force to crush the nationwide Solidarity Movement in order to forestall an imminent invasion of Warsaw Pact armies, as he himself claims, or whether his aim was to preserve the Communist status quo in Poland, as his critics assert. In other words, was martial law really the "lesser evil" as Jaruzelski would have it, anxious to be seen by his compatriots as a patriot? Or was he a Polish Quisling?

The participants in the conference represented four groups. There was General Jaruzelski himself, accompanied by his principal civilian and military associates of the time. To the right of him sat Marshal Victor Kulikov, the one-time commander of the Warsaw Pact, and his chief of staff, General Anatolii Gribkov. Opposite them, were the leaders of Solidarity, several of them newly-appointed ministers of the Polish government. Also present were representatives of the U.S. administrations involved in the Polish crisis of 1980-81, among them Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Advisor, and myself, who in 1981-82 had served as President Reagan's advisor on East European and Soviet affairs.

As soon as the discussions were underway, General Gribkov demanded, in a booming voice, to be heard. He wanted to make it clear that the conference was not a "court" and the non-communist participants were not entitled to act as prosecutors. To which the Polish professor chairing the session calmly responded that the meeting had been convened not to condemn or justify what had happened sixteen years earlier but to ascertain the facts. Gribkov's intervention set the tone for the Russians' behavior throughout the meeting which was distinguished by glum silence broken from time-to-time by peremptory statements that brooked no dissent.

The Polish crisis of 1980-81 went through two phases. According to all available intelligence, in early December 1980 the forces of the Warsaw Pact stood poised to invade Poland to crush the "counter-revolution" represented by the workers and intellectuals organized under the Solidarity banner. The projected invasion, however, never materialized. There followed a year of political turmoil during which Moscow applied relentless public and private pressure on the Polish government to use force against Solidarity which by then had some ten million members, that is, virtually the country's entire working population. The denouement occurred on December 13, 1981.

Truth or dare?

Two questions dominated the discussions: Did the Warsaw Pact really intend to invade in December 1980 and, if so, why did it not follow through? And, secondly, was the Warsaw Pact prepared to intervene militarily one year later if Jaruzelski failed to impose martial law?

Marshal Kulikov answered both questions with a categorical denial that the Warsaw Pact had plans to invade Poland either in 1980 or 1981. When some participants pointed out that his chief of staff, General Gribkov, had admitted in print the existence of such plans, at any rate in 1980, Gribkov broke in to explain to the civilians present that there are two kinds of military "plans": precise operational blueprints, and nametki or rough drafts. The Warsaw Pact had prepared only nametki. Hence there was no contradiction in what he and his superior had said.

The Russian position gave little comfort to General Jaruzelski whose defense rests on the contention that in December 1981 he had saved Poland from a bloodbath that was certain to follow a foreign invasion directed from Moscow. With the support of his predecessor in the post of First Secretary of Polish Communists, Mieczyslaw Kania, he declared that Warsaw had numerous indications of an impending invasion in both 1980 and 1981. Kania recalled that in early December 1980 he had gone to Moscow to explain to Brezhnev the disastrous consequences of a military assault on Poland. These admonitions, reinforced by stern warnings from the Carter administration, apparently dissuaded Moscow from implementing its designs. The price the Poles had to pay for this concession was to lay plans for the imposition of martial law.

Jaruzelski jumped the gun

As concerns the events of December 1981, the evidence contradicts Jaruzelski. Minutes of the Soviet Politburo meetings made available to the participants revealed that its leading figures had told their Polish vassals in the fall of 1981 that under no circumstances would they send troops into Poland and that the duty of suppressing Solidarity fell on them. Yuri Andropov, the chief of the Soviet secret police, who would replace Brezhnev in 1982 as head of the Soviet government, at one point told his colleagues on the Politburo that military intervention in Poland would set in motion Western economic sanctions which the Soviet Union could not afford. If unavoidable, he conceded, Moscow would have to come to terms with a Poland governed by Solidarity.

Jaruzelski had great difficulty coping with this evidence. A Communist officer of aristocratic origin, he behaved very defensively: his hands shaking and voice faltering, he insisted that he had no choice but to act as he did. His most convincing argument lay in the reaction of Washington. He knew, he said, that Washington was in possession of all his plans for the imposition of martial law because the Polish officer in charge of the preparations, Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, had for years collaborated with the CIA, supplying it with detailed information. (Kuklinski was extracted from Poland along with his family in November 1981.) Why did the Reagan White House not react and warn him of the consequences of martial law as the Carter administration had done a year earlier? He mentioned that during a private meeting between his Deputy Prime Minister and Vice President George Bush held in early December 1981, Bush made no allusion to Polish martial law preparations. This silence Jaruzelski interpreted as an indication that Washington regarded martial law as less of an evil than a Warsaw Pact invasion and hence gave him, tacitly, the green light to proceed with his plans.

The duty of explaining the Reagan administration's feeble reaction fell to me. I said that two factors created the false impression that we were amenable to a Polish solution to the crisis. One was that the intelligence supplied by Kuklinski was so closely held by the CIA that most of the leading figures of the Reagan administration had no knowledge of them: Alexander Haig, the secretary of state, for one, was not even aware of Kuklinski's existence. Secondly, it so happened that when the Polish crisis came to a head, the Reagan administration had no national security advisor, for Richard Allen had quit the previous month and his successor had not, as yet, been appointed. There was thus a considerable amount of both ignorance and disarray in the White House.

One less mystery in history

My personal conclusion of what had happened in Poland in 1980-81 from the massive evidence presented at the conference may be summarized as follows: In December 1980, the Warsaw Pact was prepared to invade Poland because Moscow was deadly afraid of the spread of democratic trade-unionism, represented by Solidarity, to the Soviet Union and the rest of its empire. It called off its invasion plans in part because, being bogged down in Afghanistan, it would not risk yet another military debacle, and in part because it heeded the strong warnings of the Carter administration.

To extricate it from its dilemma -- how to destroy Polish democratic forces without resorting to foreign intervention -- Moscow pressured Warsaw to impose martial law. Kania and then Jaruzelski hesitated because they doubted their ability to crush Solidarity and hoped somehow to come to terms with it. Soviet pressures, however, and the failure of the Reagan administration to give resolute warnings, eventually forced their hand. I tend to agree with the Solidarity representatives attending the meeting that Jaruzelski could have stood up to the Russians and refused to subject the country to the miseries of martial law. According to Jaruzelski, the sanctions which Washington imposed on Poland following its imposition, cost that country between 12 and 13 billion dollars.

Apart from providing much information, the conference afforded a fascinating spectacle of a confrontation among individuals who less than two decades ago had regarded each other as faceless and mortal enemies but now interacted as ordinary human beings. It was high drama. When the conference adjourned, the events of the past emerged as much more complex than they had appeared at the time.

Moscow as Dishonest Broker

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
December 18, 1997

There is an old story about a preacher who would sometimes reduce his congregation to tears by castigating its sins and graphically describing the punishments that the sinners would suffer in hell. On one such occasion, as the church resounded with wails and sobs, one man in the assembly remained perfectly calm. "How, sir, can you be so composed?" he was asked, to which he responded, "Oh, you see I am from another parish."

On Iraq's behalf

This anecdote occurred to me while observing the reaction of Russia to the most recent crisis in Iraq. The facts are clear and so are their implications. Saddam Hussein has been regularly contravening United Nations resolutions by preventing U.N. inspectors from visiting 60 or 70 sites that he has declared his "palaces." There is every reason to believe that these "palaces," many of them constructed after his defeat in the Gulf War and some as large as New York's Central Park, are in fact military installations manufacturing and assembling nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Recently, under the pretext that the Americans on the U.N. teams were CIA "spies," Hussein forced the teams to withdraw, which gave him three weeks during which his people apparently completed certain phases in the military buildup without being observed.

The United States responded to these measures with threats of military action, and it might, indeed, have put an end to Saddam and his odious regime, were it not for the sudden intervention of Moscow. The Russian Foreign Minister, Evgenii Primakov, an old KGB hand specializing in the Middle East, has never concealed that his sympathies lie with the Arabs. Supporting rogue Arab states enhances the role of Russia on the world arena. In addition, Iraq owes Moscow a great deal of money and lifting the embargoes imposed on it by the United Nations would enable Baghdad to repay some of its debts. This is why Primakov did his best in 1991 to thwart military intervention in the Gulf and why now he has served as broker in forging an agreement between Baghdad and the Western powers that averted military action. A grateful Saddam Hussein told Gennady Zyuganov, the head of Russia's Communist Party, that "the world needs a stronger and more active Russia."

Down an old road

Now the question arises whether the new Russian government feels that it lives in "another parish" and that the destructive potential that the Iraqis are acquiring presents no threat to itself. (The same, incidentally, may be said of France and China, which for reasons of their own have similarly threatened to veto any U.S. moves to use force against Iraq.) Russia has spent nearly three-quarters of a century in isolation, pursuing a policy of unmitigated hostility to the Western democracies on the assumption that whatever was bad for them was good for itself. This zero-sum-game conduct ended in political and economic collapse. Russia's post-communist rulers have wisely adopted the principle that their country is part of the global community and shares common interests with it. In that, it is imperative that Russia's economic reconstruction receive constant infusions of western loans and investments; just this month Moscow has asked the International Monetary Fund for nearly two billion dollars to pay arrears in salaries.

The reversion to the zero-sum game policy in the Middle East may satisfy the frustrations of those Russians who yearn for the days of super-power status but it is detrimental to Russia's true interests. In 1939, Stalin signed a non-aggression treaty with Hitler enabling the German army to launch World War II, in the hope that the war would be long and exhaustive, making it possible for the Soviet Union to conquer ravaged Europe. It was a fatal miscalculation that cost Russia dearly since barely two years later Hitler threw his armies east and nearly conquered his one-time ally.

The situation today, of course, is not comparable: Saddam Hussein may have Hitler's ambitions but he lacks his human and material resources. Even so, it is troublesome to see Russia, barely seven years after throwing off communism and rejoining the world community, once again making mischief on the international scene in the hope of reaping benefits from the discomfort of the Western democracies. Hussein's Arabic imperialism threatens Russia too; so do the weapons of mass destruction which he is readying. Like it or not, Russia cannot stand alone.

The State of the Russian Union

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
January 8, 1998

By and large, the Western media concentrates on bad news from Russia: poverty, political instability and ethnic conflicts. Such negativism is built into mass journalism, and it also affects the coverage of Western events.

But in the case of Russia, there is the additional factor that not a few journalists and commentators in some measure sympathized with the old communist regime -- if not for its actual performance then for its professed ideals. The collapse of that government has upset them, and they compensate for their disappointment by stressing that ever since Russia has adopted democracy and capitalism, things in the country have been going from bad to worse.

Recovery is underway

But have they? In assessing the state of Russia today, one must bear in mind that the country endured unique cataclysms. Tens of millions of its people perished in war, civil disturbances, government-sponsored massacres, deportations, famines and epidemics. Among the victims were some of the most enterprising, intelligent and courageous citizens, doomed because they threatened the regime's monopoly on power.

Agriculture was devastated by forced collectivization and the peasantry decimated. Industry developed in a lopsided manner because of over-centralized management and the priority accorded to military hardware. And last but not least, basic civic virtues -- such as the work ethic, mutual trust and honesty -- were subverted by a culture that required cunning and disregard for others as the price of survival.

This legacy, common to all ex-communist countries, weighs particularly heavily on Russia because it suffered the longest. Hence, it is to be expected that it will take Russia time -- possibly a generation, if not two -- to overcome the burden of its past.

There are many indications that the process of recovery is underway.

To begin with, there is the economy. With Western help and oversight, Russia has managed to stabilize its currency, the ruble, which, since January 1, has had a value of six to the U.S. dollar. That puts the ruble on par with the French franc. Inflation in Russia, meanwhile, is down to about 1% a month, or half of what it was the previous year.

Fiscal stability is a prerequisite of economic growth, and it may encourage wealthy Russians who have salted away billions of dollars in foreign banks to repatriate their money and invest it at home. Foreign investment in Russia still is lagging, due mainly to arbitrary taxation and the absence of a viable legal system to protect private property, but remedies are being considered. (Incidentally, the Russian stock market led the international markets in 1997.)

Economic improvement also has reduced somewhat the crime rate, which, according to the Russian Ministry of the Interior, is down 20% compared with the year before.

Signs of political maturity

Very encouraging is the growing political maturity of Russia. The country's parliament, the State Duma, in the past a forum for irresponsible attacks on the executive, has settled down to business and shows itself capable of compromises. Gone are the days when a buffoon like Vladimir Zhirinovski could win a massive vote and when the communists seemed capable of regaining power.

Keeping Russia on the path to democracy

According to a public opinion survey released recently in Moscow, the most popular politician in the country is Boris Nemtsov, a young, attractive deputy prime minister who is favored by 23% of the voters. He is followed by Iurii Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, with 14% and President Boris Yeltsin with 11%.

Nemtsov and Yeltsin, of course, are reformers committed to keeping Russia on the path of democracy and the free-market economy. Luzhkov's politics are more difficult to define, for he combines populism with fierce anti-Westernism, but he is no communist. Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the communists, did not make it among the top three.

I do not mean to gloss over the many problems that remain in Russia. It is depressing to learn that half of the population there lives below the poverty level, that more Russians die each year than are born and that the average life expectancy of a Russian male today is a mere 56 years of age. But the country is moving forward -- moving to rejoin humankind after seven decades of self-imposed isolation and utopian experimentation.

Yeltsin's Antics

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
March 5, 1998

Just prior to the Russian Revolution in 1915-16, the government was in constant flux as ministers came and went with dizzying speed. The turnover was such that it became common to speak of "ministerial leapfrogs." It was a sign of deep malaise in the tsarist government. High officials had no time to familiarize themselves with their responsibilities before they were replaced, so authority passed to mid-level officials who simply kept things going on their accustomed paths. Government drifted, unable to cope with the mounting problems faced by a country involved in a world war.

I do not mean in the least to suggest that Russia today faces a similar situation. The country is not at war; it receives foreign investments and aid; it faces no revolutionary threat; the population yearns not for violent change but for tranquility and normalcy. Yet some similarities with the old Russia do exist, particularly the inability of the government to create a stable administrative corps at the highest level. Russia must have this corps if it is to rule efficiently and effectively implement the transition to democracy and a market economy.

Musical chairs in Moscow

Not long ago, President Boris Yeltsin dismissed his minister of defense. Last week, he released three more ministers, including those in charge of transport and education; on Monday of this week, he suddenly fired his minister of atomic energy. No explanations are given for these actions. Moreover, Yeltsin repeatedly has threatened to sack his two deputy prime ministers, Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov, the most powerful advocates of reform in his administration. No minister seems safe in his post. No one knows when the ax will fall or why.

There are two possible explanations for this situation, one political and the other psychological.

Although the new Russian constitution gives the president great theoretical powers, Yeltsin knows that in practice his powers are highly circumscribed partly for lack of an apparatus to enforce his decrees, partly because of the hostility of a parliament dominated by communists and nationalists. Perhaps he whimsically appoints and dismisses high officials to create the impression of immense power, to convince the country that he represents the "strong hand" that Russians admire. Of course, such practices also enable him, in time-honored tradition, to shift to subordinates the blame for whatever goes wrong.

The other reason might be found in Yeltsin's personality. Four years ago, a translation of Yeltsin's The Struggle for Russia, appeared in English. It is a remarkably candid autobiography, unlike any by a statesman holding high office. Yeltsin revealed in it his distaste for politics and politicians, his sense of being betrayed by his closest associates, his boredom with day-to-day administrative duties. The book leaves the impression that Yeltsin is temperamentally ill-suited for high office because of his thin skin and impatience with routine.

Crisis addict or aspiring autocrat?

He is at his best in crisis situations. Then his inborn feistiness comes into play. He hates to lose, whether in sports or in politics. When confronted with a challenge, he rises to the occasion and give his all. But once he has triumphed, he grows restless and weary. He then creates crises for himself by playing ministers against one another and acting like an autocratic tsar.

Whatever the reason -- and both likely are at play -- Yeltsin, to whom Russia and the world owe a great debt for having delivered the death blow to communism, does not help his country's transition to stable democracy with his executive antics. Nor does he help Russia's international position with bizarre public remarks, such as those in which he warned that an American assault on Iraq could trigger World War III. Regrettably, there is something very unstable about this president of a country that needs and yearns above all for stability.

Russia's Latest Political Ordeal

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
April 9, 1998

In my most recent column, "Yeltsin's Antics," I called attention to the whimsical way Russia's president runs the government, routinely dismissing and appointing ministers without apparent cause. I suggested that one of the reasons he did so was "to create the impression of immense power, to convince the country that he represents the 'strong hand' that Russians admire."

The president's prerogative

Soon afterward, Yeltsin gave greater weight to that suggestion when in one fell swoop he fired the entire Cabinet, from the prime minister down. It was an extraordinarily irresponsible action, the only explanation for which is the president's desire to demonstrate he is boss. This hypothesis is supported by three items of evidence.

One is the person Yeltsin chose to succeed Victor Chernomyrdin as prime minister. Chernomyrdin is a rather bland bureaucrat but a man of considerable administrative experience. His hand-picked successor, Sergei Kiriyenko, is a 35-year-old with only seven months of government service. One suspects that Yeltsin chose him to prove he can appoint as head of government anyone he pleases.

Secondly, Kiriyenko has pledged to continue Chernomyrdin's reformist policies, which means Yeltsin did not place him in charge because he wanted the government to pursue a different course. In justifying his nomination, Yeltsin said Kiriyenko does not belong to any political party or movement, which indicates that he wants the prime minister to be fully dependent on him. Chernomyrdin, by contrast, is closely connected to the "Our Home Russia" party and has made no secret of his presidential ambitions.

Thirdly, immediately upon dismissing the Cabinet, Yeltsin re-appointed as "acting" ministers four of its highly influential members: Evgenii Primakov to head the Foreign Ministry, Igor Sergeyev to run Defense, Mikhail Zadornov to be in charge of finance and Sergei Stepashin, once of the KGB, to head the Ministry of the Interior. This indicates that the purge was not complete but selective.

Dealing with the Duma

The Duma at once declared itself in opposition to Kiriyenko: All Duma parties except that headed by Vladimir Zhirinovskii have announced that they will reject Kiriyenko's candidacy. On this issue the communists, nationalists and liberals are at one. They object to Kiriyenko because he is too young and too inexperienced to head the administration of a country as large and complex as Russia. An additional argument against him is that in the event Yeltsin became physically incapacitated, Kiriyenko, as prime minister, would assume interim presidential powers for which he has no qualifications.

According to the constitution, the Duma has three chances to approve or reject the candidate for prime minister. If it rejects him three consecutive times, Yeltsin has the right to dissolve the Duma and call for new elections.

In recent days, both sides have shown a desire to come to terms. At Yeltsin's invitation, Duma deputies have attended a roundtable discussion with the government, at which they voiced their concerns. Yeltsin, for his part, has expressed a willingness to consider their opinions. But he stands firm on Kiriyenko.

Confirming Kiriyenko

The Duma is scheduled to vote on the issue on Friday, April 10, and the likelihood is that sooner or later, it will relent. The reason: In new parliamentary elections, the Communists and Nationalists are not expected to do as well as before, which spells for many of their deputies the loss of valuable perquisites. Confirmation of Kiriyenko would defuse the crisis created by Yeltsin's erratic action.

But the fundamental problem would remain: Democratic Russia still lacks a democratic mindset and a president capable of governing democratically.

Russia's Designs on Georgia

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
May 14, 1998

As is generally known, Russia has had great difficulty adjusting to the fact that its empire, built by conquest over centuries, disappeared in 1991, depriving it of rich borderlands and nearly half its population. The difficulty is in no small measure psychological for the Russians have always derived great pride from the fact that their state was the largest in the world. Regaining status as a global power, in their mind, entails regaining, in one way or another, the separated borderlands.

Pipelines and power politics

These psychological factors are reinforced by economic interests which are especially intense in the region of the Caspian Sea where immense reserves of oil and gas have been discovered. Moscow seems to have reconciled itself, at least for now, to the loss of these energy resources to the republics of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. But it insists that the pipelines from this region run through its territory for loading on tankers at the port city of Novorossiisk on the Black Sea.

This proposal has met with stiff resistance from some foreign governments and the international energy consortia. There is fear that in the event of a crisis, Russia would turn off the pipeline taps. The Turks do not wish a steady stream of tankers, liable to accidents and spills, to pass through the vulnerable Straits. An alternative route crosses Iran, but this is staunchly opposed by the United States on political grounds.

Hence, the preferred routes projected for full development early in the next century run from Azerbaijan either to the Black Sea port of Supsa and from there to northern Turkey, or else entirely overland to northern Turkey, each terminating at the eastern Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. Both will traverse Georgia. Moscow adamantly opposes such routes and resorts to its traditional strong-arm methods against Georgia to force their abandonment.

Sabotaging Shevardnadze

These methods take two forms. One is physically to eliminate Georgia's president, Eduard Shevardnadze, and replace him with someone more pliable. Two attempts have been made on Shevardnadze's life since he had been elected president -- one in 1995, the other this year -- each of which he fortunately survived. They were professionally organized, and the would-be assassins fled to Russia with the help of Russian air units stationed on Georgian soil. When he returned from a visit to Turkey in April, Shevardnadze's Georgian military jets failed to accompany his plane, as planned. It turned out that they were stationed at a Russian air base, unable to fly because sand had been placed in their engines. While the Georgians do not officially blame the Russians for masterminding these acts of terror and sabotage, they come close to doing so unofficially.

Russia also uses political pressure to restore its influence over Georgia. Shortly after Georgia had gained independence, a small minority nation, the Abkhaz, who occupy most of Georgia's Black Sea littoral, rebelled, claiming independence. Moscow promptly took advantage of this uprising by arming the Abkhaz and having its troops stand by while the Abkhaz massacred and expelled some 200,000 Georgian residents. The Abkhaz recently have put the world on notice that unless their claim to independence is recognized, they will disable any oil pipeline running across or near their territory. Such threats and the fear of instability in Georgia are delaying plans for the construction of the projected pipeline.

The Georgians are doing their best to shake off Russian domination and force the withdrawal of 15,000 Russian troops stationed on their soil, but theirs is a small country confronting a mighty neighbor. They are forming economic and even military alliances with Turkey and Azerbaijan. They receive a certain amount of support from Washington, but the distracted Clinton administration shows little decisiveness in confronting Russian expansionism in the Caucasus or in any other part of what used to be the Soviet Union.

This does not bode well for the future of a region that has some of the most valuable energy resources in the world.

Lebed: Russia's Rising Star

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
June 11, 1998

In several of my previous columns, I have had occasion to refer to retired Gen. Alexander Lebed as a potential successor to President Boris Yeltsin. With his recent victory in the contest for the governorship of the Siberian Krasnoyarak province, this prospect has acquired reality. It has made Lebed one of the three or four leading contenders in the presidential election scheduled for 2000.

Moving toward 2000

Lebed's gubernatorial victory is significant for several reasons. He defeated a popular and effective incumbent backed by Yeltsin as well as Iurii Luzkhov, the mayor of Moscow, another prominent candidate for the presidency. The immense province of Kraskoyarsk is regarded as representative of Russia as a whole. It is also one of Russia's richest regions, the largest producer of nickel and aluminum. The new post thus provides Lebed with an excellent base from which to pursue his presidential ambitions.

Although Russia's political polls are notoriously unreliable, there is no doubt that Lebed enjoys great popularity. It is due not so much to his program which is vague and filled with slogans rather than concrete solutions, as to his personality. An ex-paratrooper, he exudes self-confidence. Because of the country's weakly developed social structure and lack of experience with self-government, Russians have always admired strong leaders. They expect government to rule by decree rather than by consent, because consent is unattainable, and they are prepared to hear the consequences of arbitrariness as preferable to the anarchy that in their experience accompanies democracy.

Lebed has succeeded in appealing to the broad spectrum of public opinion. He despises communism and communists as having brought nothing but misery to Russia. He believes in private property: His mission, he said, is to make Russia "rich and fat." This wins him the sympathy of two-thirds of the electorate that is anti-communist.

At the same time Lebed is a nationalist who rejects western values as inapplicable to Russia and a threat to its traditions. He wants Russia to be great and strong as well as affluent. This wins him the support of a considerable part of the so-called brown-red (fascist-communist) constituency dismayed by Russia's decline to the status of a second-rate world power.

Interpreting his message

The very vagueness of Lebed's political and economic program is an asset because a more concrete platform might alienate one group or another. He is fond of platitudes, such as the following from his autobiography, My Life and My Country: "We have to stop fighting and start living. People are not trash, they are not fertilizer for the fields. Human blood is not water. It has a price." Who can disagree with such sentiments?

Ultimately, Lebed's message is: "Trust me. I will resolve the problems created by communism and aggravated by democracy. Under my leadership, Russia will once again be proud and prosperous."

Such a message carries obvious dangers in a country beset by immense problems of its own making and populated by a nation that seeks shortcuts to world status and wealth. For although Lebed says he would like to reduce the powers of the presidency in favor of parliament, nothing either in his personality or program suggests that if elected he will be anything else than a willful ruler.

Russia Rescued from Financial Crash

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
July 16, 1998

July 15, 1998 -- During the last ten days Russia had come closer to financial collapse than at any time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Its government faced the prospect of having to redeem, before the end of the year, state obligations amounting to $30 billion while holding in reserve gold and foreign currency deposits of about $13.5 billion.

An easy way to meet this problem would have been to print vast amounts of money, but this measure would have led to a rapid devaluation of the ruble, causing inflation and inflicting heavy losses on foreign buyers of Russian stocks and bonds, thereby discouraging future investments. Social unrest was certain to follow. Such prospects caused a panic on the Russian stock exchange, bringing the index down by two-thirds since May.

Rather than devalue the ruble, Moscow raised the interest on short-term Treasury bills to more than 100%. But even this desperate measure did not help because skeptical investors bought only a fraction of the proffered obligations.

Emergency loan or political extortion?

There was only one reliable way out of the predicament: foreign loans. On July 10, President Boris Yeltsin called personally on the heads of state of the United States, Germany and France, as well as the director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), pleading for a prompt loan of $15 billion to $20 billion to shore up the reserves of the Russian Central Bank and to enable it to meet current obligations.

On strictly economic grounds, it would be difficult to justify such a request. Russia has not solved any of its fundamental financial problems, especially with its wholly inadequate system of collecting taxes. The loan it was requesting would only provide temporary relief, with the likelihood that in a year or so a new financial crisis would erupt and more billions would have to be pumped into Russia.

But Russia's finances are not merely an economic problem. Russia is an enormous country located in the heartland of the Eurasian continent and equipped with thousands of nuclear warheads. There is the fear that a collapse of the ruble would aggravate the already-tense social situation and possibly topple the democratic, reform-minded government, replacing it with some kind of a dictatorship. Moscow knows well how to exploit these fears and in pleading for foreign loans engages in a subtle kind of political blackmail.

On July 14, it was announced that a package of loans was being readied, with the bulk of the money coming from the IMF and additional funds from the World Bank and Japan. The total sum amounts to $17.1 billion, with $12.6 billion to be dispensed this year and the rest in 1999. The commitment, however, is conditional. Before most of the payments will be authorized, the Duma must, prior to adjourning for the summer vacation on July 17, approve the drastic plan of economic reforms submitted to it by the government. Its approval is by no means certain, for in prior discussions the parliament has balked at a number of reforms, notably those calling for higher taxes.

Even so, the hope of a bailout has had an electrifying effect on the Moscow stock exchange, its index soaring 20% on Monday and Tuesday of this week.

Russia's split personality

To place Russia's fiscal predicament in perspective, it is helpful to draw a comparison with the United States. The Russian government has made the loan of $15 billion to $20 billion a matter of life and death. In the United States, by contrast, in a single week (July 2-8), private investors have poured $25.5 billion into mutual funds and money market accounts. These figures underscore the terrible poverty of Russia, a poverty brought about by 70 years of communism and concealed for 70 years by nuclear sabre-rattling and unprecedented secrecy.

And yet the destitution that forces Russia, hat in hand, to importune foreign powers for loans, does not deter it from making mischief in Iran, India, Iraq, Cyprus and Serbia against those same foreign powers. While adamantly refusing to return to Japan the four Kuril islands it had seized at the end of World War II, Moscow feels no compunction in requesting a sizeable loan from Japan.

There is something incongruous about Russia's Third World penury and its ambition to play the part of a great world power.

How the Soviet Union Fell Apart

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
August 27, 1998

When in December 1991 the heads of Russia, Belorussia and the Ukraine, meeting privately in a Belorussian forest, announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the news seemed so incredible that they immediately gave rise to a host of legends.

One myth, popular in Russia, held that the event was a conspiracy hatched by the CIA. Another, spread both in Russian and abroad, claimed that Yeltsin along with his Ukrainian and Belorussian colleagues were in a drunken stupor when they signed the declaration: Yeltsin was said to have fallen off his chair during the negotiations and lain prostrate on the floor.

Setting the record straight

These stories have now been put to rest by then-chairman of the Belorussian Supreme Soviet, S. Shushkevich, in a May 1998 interview with the Polish Daily, Rzeczpospolita (The Republic). Shushkevich, who represented his country on this occasion, says that the action of the three heads of state was the result neither of a foreign plot nor of alcohol. It was rather a deliberate move to confront the inevitable and to make the transition to a new political regime as painless as possible.

The Soviet Union was in the 1920s by the forceful annexation to Soviet Russia of a number of independent republics located along Russia's borders. Although a highly centralized state directed by the Communist apparatus from Moscow, it was given the appearance of a voluntary federation that any member state could leave at will. The union held as long as the Communist Party remained united.

But the reforms of Gorbachev, carried out after 1985, quickly threw it into confusion. The instant the politicians of the non-Russian republics felt the center wobbling, they began to clamor for their national rights. Thus, Georgia declared its independence in April 1991; Azerbaijan and the three Baltic republics followed suit that August. In the Ukraine, the largest and most important of the non-Russian republics, with over 90% of the population -- including the 12 million Russians residing there -- voted for separation and sovereignty.

These declarations and referenda could have been dismissed as meaningless gestures. Apparently this was the opinion of American diplomats who had advised President Bush, on his visit to Kiev in August 1991, to urge the Ukrainian to remain in the Union. But under communism, where symbols meant more than reality, they signified that the Soviet Union was falling apart, that it existed only on paper.

The conclusion, according to Shushkevich, was drawn by the heads of state of the three Slavic republics. The question they faced was how to clothe the new reality in a form that would make possible a peaceful transition and avoid the kind of civil war that tore apart the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after its dissolution in the summer of 1991. In October, Gorbachev proposed a confederate plan. In theory, a confederate is a looser arrangement than a federation, but on closer inspection his proposed state turned out to differ from the old Soviet Union only in name.

Taken to a logical conclusion

At this point, Yeltsin accepted the invitation of Shuskevich to meet in the privacy of a national park in Belorussia to settle the issue. They invited the president of the Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, but deliberately kept out Gorbachev. The trio proceeded on the assumption that the Soviet Union was dead. After intense discussions among themselves and with their legal experts, they agreed to declare the Soviet Union formally dissolved and to grant each of its constituent republics full sovereignty. The alternative, in their view, was to maintain the fiction of unity by resorting to force that would inevitably lead to massive bloodshed.

These revelations are significant not only because they set straight the historic record. They indicate that the dissolution of the Soviet Union had become unavoidable and that when the Russian parliament, the Duma, votes to annul the December 1991 decision, it is acting in a totally irresponsible manner. The same holds true of the Russian military and other imperialists who dream of re-imposing Moscow's rule on the separated borderlands. Russia has lost its empire not from foreign conspiracy or drunkenness of its leader, but from the force of political reality. Hence, there is no way this process can be reversed.

Russia Enters a New Historic Phase

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
September 24, 1998

When, two months ago, I described how the International Monetary Fund and other international organizations pulled Russia from the brink of economic collapse, I believed that the injection of some $20 billion would keep that country solvent for a year or so. It did not turn out that way: Russia's finances broke down in less than a month as the government defaulted on its loans and shut down banking operations. The default on the state obligations sent shock waves through the global economy, unsettling stock markets and accelerating the flight from securities to bonds backed by the governments of the leading industrial democracies.

It is safe to say that in August of this year a chapter in Russia's history has drawn to a close: a seven-year attempt to introduce democracy and capitalism into a country ravaged by 70 years of communism and kept down by tsarist patrimonial rule for nearly 700 years before that.

It was a naïve attempt. Many Russians thought that they merely had to adopt democratic institutions and privatize the economy to leap into the kingdom of freedom and prosperity. Westerners who advised them, accustomed as they were to operating in societies in which private property, law and popular sovereignty were solidly established, ignored the absence of such traditions in Russia. The result was a crash that will force Russia to follow a somewhat different path.

A return to communism is not in the cards. The communists themselves reject such a prospect, which is desired by only a small part of the electorate, mostly the elderly and poorly educated. It is impractical in any event because it would require the expropriation of millions from new owners of small enterprises and dwellings, an action for which the government has no strength and the population no stomach.

The communist program of today echoes Social-Democratic slogans, calling for greater government intervention in the country's economy. On more than one occasion the Communists, ignoring Lenin and Stalin, have invoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt's policies during the U.S. depression. As for democratic procedures and civil liberties, they implicitly accept them. One may, of course, question their sincerity, but polls indicate that the vast majority of Russians do not want a return to the past, and hence that it would likely require a bloody revolution to turn the clock back.

The wrong solutions

The present government appears to be a transitional administration charged with keeping the country together until the next presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for 2000. Its head, Yevgeny Primakov, is not a fanatic or even ideologue but a practical politician with little knowledge of domestic politics. The team he is assembling to revamp the economy consists largely of economists who served under Gorbachev and thus contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has no clear program, save to print bank notes to pay wage arrears and save bankrupt banks and industrial enterprises. It appears to be thrashing about, hoping that a workable policy will somehow turn up.

The current government certainly cannot meet its obligations to foreign holders of Russian bonds without foreign assistance, and it is doubtful that it can jumpstart Russia's economy without such assistance. The question on the table is, therefore, whether the West should once again come to Russia's help with injections of tens of billions of dollars.

Some in the West favor continuing political and economic aid even to a wobbly regime as long as it professes loyalty to popular government and the forces of the market. Some urge a Russian Marshall Plan.

Such recommendations must be treated with great reserve. When the Marshall Plan came into being, western Europe was physically devastated, but its human element was intact: The knowledge of democratic government and capitalist entrepreneurship survived the war; hence, the infusion of U.S. capital produced remarkably rapid improvement.

In Russia, the situation is reversed: The physical plant, such as it is, remains in place but the talent capable of using Western help is lacking. The loans extended by the IMF and other Western institutions, when they were not stolen, have gone largely to pay current bills. The loans have also served as an excuse for delaying fundamental reforms, especially in the field of tax collecting.

A crisis of culture

The point is that Russia's current crisis, unlike Japan's, is not the result only of weak leadership and misguided policies. It is much more fundamental in nature: It is really a crisis of culture that prevents Russia from making a rapid transition to modernity. Conditioned by their past, Russians trust no one, neither their fellow citizens nor their government. Experience has taught them to look out for themselves. They are deeply suspicious of foreigners whose aid they interpret as a cynical device to gain control of Russia's resources. These are not attitudes conducive either to democracy or the operations of the free market.

The Russian mindset is not immutable, but culture changes slowly and through personal experience rather than instruction. People have to unlearn the lesson of communism and acquire the habits of a civil society. Such political and economic transformation has to begin below, at the grass-roots level. The 89 provinces of Russia, now fairly independent of each other and the central government, are a good vehicle for such an evolution: Business ties can be forged and political platforms articulated more readily on a local rather than a national level.

Russia faces a long and arduous path to modernity. We cannot expect a quick recovery but should be prepared for a prolonged period of political and economic vacillation until the younger generation, which is maturing under conditions of freedom, takes over the reins of power. This means that we must trust in the Russians to solve their own problems and not try to do it for them with infusions of money they have not earned and are unlikely to repay.

We should give advice -- when asked -- and offer moral support to democratic forces, but we should not assume responsibility for Russia's future as happens when we tell them what to do. Let them tell us how we can help them, as George Marshall requested the Europeans to draw-up their plans for reconstruction, and, short of lavishing billions on them, see how we can meet their needs. Once the Russians have put their house in order and repatriated the tens of billions they presently hold in foreign banks, then and only then will the time be ripe for the international community to resume investing in Russia.

Russia's Presidency in the Balance

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
October 29, 1998

By now Boris Yeltsin must be the only person who still believes he is capable of carrying out the duties of president of the Russian Federation.

Will Yeltsin regain his physical and mental health?

The problem is more than Yeltsin's physical condition: his constant bouts with bronchitis and high blood pressure and whatever else that ails him and his physicians conceal. The main trouble is his mental condition. His mind seems to have deteriorated recently to the point where he resembles Leonid Brezhnev in the last year of his rule. On a recent trip to Sweden he thought he was in Finland. Similarly, while visiting Central Asia he was not always clear he was not in Moscow. Reading a speech in Kazakhstan he proceeded from the beginning to the end and then read the middle part.

The cancellation of Yeltsin's projected trips to Vienna and Malaysia merely underscores his incompetence. His popularity several weeks ago plunged to 2%; today it is probably a fraction of that.

The new favorite

This is understood in Russia where the race for the presidency is entering into high gear. Russia has no vice president to take over when the chief executive dies or can no longer carry out his responsibilities. The Constitution provides for the prime minister in such an eventuality to assume caretaker functions and to arrange within 90 days for new presidential elections. This may happen any day now.

Political careers in contemporary Russian resemble meteors rather than fixed stars: They cross the firmament with startling rapidity because the absence of political structures make the constituencies extremely fluid. In my previous columns in IC I called attention to Victor Chernomyrdin, Boris Nemtsov and Alexander Lebed as leading contenders for the presidency. The first two have faded.

The most prominent candidate for the presidency today is the popular mayor of Moscow, Iury Luzhkov. Luzhkov is something of a novelty in Russia, a pragmatic politician who avoids ideology and programs, following the classical dictum of Tip O'Neill that "all politics is local." He has managed to build a powerful political base in the capital city by attracting business and spending lavishly to beautify it. His apparent aim is to create a government of national unity. To this end, he has secured the support of the Communists, who control nearly one-third of the electorate: a powerful bloc but not enough to propel their candidate into the presidency. But he is also trying to win over Grigori Yavlinsky, the leading liberal reformer.

An all-party government would not be a bad thing for Russia whose efforts to stabilize the economy have been hampered by party bickering. However, certain aspects of Luzhkov's politics are troubling. He is an ardent nationalist who insists that the Ukraine "return" the Crimean peninsula to Russia. Recently, in an overt appeal to those who feel nostalgia for the past he has organized "Pioneers" on the model of the Communist youth organization of the same name. The impression his pronouncements and actions give is that he is seeking to combine nostalgia for the Communist past widespread among the older generation with forward policy responsive to the mood of the young. It is a potent combination.

A lot at stake

Of the other potential candidates, Lebed cannot be counted out for with his image of a "strong man"; he attracts many Russians prepared to surrender their democratic rights to a leader who promises to solve their problems. But serving as governor in distant Siberia he seems at present to be outside the mainstream. The Communist leader, Gennady Zyuganov, has apparently decided that he cannot possibly win because his constituency, though large, cannot rise above 30%; hence, he is backing Luzhkov. As for Yavlinsky, the polls do not indicate that he enjoys the kind of support that he needs to become a serious contender. The current prime minister, Evgenii Primakov, has repeatedly denied any presidential ambitions.

The Russian Constitution vests great powers in the president, and an ambitious politician can translate these powers into nearly dictatorial authority. We can be reasonably certain that whoever wins the contest will exercise his prerogative in a much more authoritarian fashion than his counterparts in Western democracies. How responsibly he will do so remains to be seen.

Some Good -- But Mostly Bad -- News From Russia

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
December 3, 1998

I was hoping this month to report nothing but encouraging news from Russia for a change. But unfortunately, the good news has been overshadowed by a political tragedy: the murder of Galina Starovoitova, Russia's outstanding female politician and a fearless fighter for democracy and law.

Toward the rule of law?

The good news concerned retired naval Capt. Alexander Nikitin. The Russian Federal Security Police, the successor to the KGB, arrested Nikitin early in 1996 on charges of espionage. His "crime" was to share with a Norwegian environmental organization data on the radioactive pollution caused by leakage from Russia's decommissioned and disintegrating submarines. Nikitin says all the information he had provided was available in public sources.

After being held in prison and under house arrest for two-and-a-half years, he finally was brought to trial in October. In a bizarre twist of legal procedure, the Navy regulations Nikitin was accused of violating were declared so secret that the Defense Ministry refused to show them either to him or his lawyers.

The St. Petersburg judge in charge quickly ruled that the prosecutors had failed to provide sufficient evidence against the defendant. Although he refused to acquit Nikitin, who remains under house arrest while the prosecution digs up more evidence, the verdict was unprecedented. In the words of the Financial Times, "For the first time in history, a Russian court has thrown out treason charges" brought against a citizen by the secret police.

... Two steps back

Then came the bad news. In October, a communist member of the Duma, retired Gen. Albert Makashov, delivered publicly an inflammatory anti-Semitic speech, in which he called for Russia's "yids" to be rounded up and jailed. Then he complained to an Italian newspaper that there were too few Russians in the government and called for the introduction of ethnic quotas in government appointments.

What aggravated the situation was the refusal of the Communist Party to condemn such pronouncements by one of its members. Indeed, the head of the Moscow branch of the party declared himself in agreement with the ex-general. Subsequently, President Boris Yeltsin denounced Makashov, and so did the patriarch. But Makashov has been punished neither by the state nor his party for violating the human rights provisions of the Constitution.

In this charged atmosphere Starovoitova was murdered the night of Nov. 20, the first political execution of a dissident woman in Russia since Stalin's death. Starovoitova, born in 1946, had been involved since the 1980s in the democratic movement. Later she worked for Yeltsin, breaking with him over the war in Chechnya. On the eve of her assassination she called on the Duma to condemn Makashov, which it refused to do. A marvelously courageous and yet gentle woman, she won many friends in Russia and abroad.

Her murder had all the earmarks of a contract killing. Although the Russian police claim to have some valuable leads, so far no one has been arrested and, given the record, the prospects of the assassins being brought to justice are not good. In fact, not one contract killing of a prominent personality has been solved so far.

The likeliest explanation for her murder is that Starovoitova obtained evidence of criminal political activities in her native St. Petersburg, which she was about to reveal. She also announced her intention to run for the presidency in 2000, which threatened the interests of some potential candidates. Although she well knew she had no chance of winning, she might have attracted enough votes to endanger the other contenders.

A climate of violence

The most disturbing fact about today's Russia is that the communists and neo-Nazis (the two are often indistinguishable), who have lain low since the collapse of the Soviet Union, are now crawling out of the woodwork and openly challenging the fledgling democratic order. Genocidal ideas are openly pronounced, and murder is increasingly employed to remove political opponents from the scene. The Constitution plays virtually no role in Russia's politics, which means that the rule of law is yielding to violent language and violent action.

Echoes of Cold War in Moscow

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
January 21, 1999

International Affairs, a periodical published in Moscow, deals, according to its subheading, with "World Politics and Diplomacy and International Relations." Originally founded in 1954, shortly after Stalin's death, it has served for a long time as a Soviet propaganda outlet for the Soviet line in the Cold War. During the past several years, it has turned into a serious academic journal, not unlike our own Foreign Affairs, that addresses a broad range of international issues, ostensibly without espousing a particular point of view.

Reading the latest issue, however, I was struck by two aspects of its contents that suggest to what extent, despite democratization, Russia's political culture remains rooted in its recent past.

America as Russian interloper

For one, not a single one of the 21 articles dares to criticize the current Russian government. Polls indicate that only between 1% and 2% of Russians hold a favorable view of President Boris Yeltsin, and yet reading this publication, one would suspect nothing of the kind.

All the policies of the regime -- diplomatic, economic and military -- are approvingly commented upon or, at any rate, not questioned. This is very much in the old Soviet tradition, contrasting sharply with practices in the West, where political commentators go to great lengths to avoid conveying the impression that they are government spokesmen.

The other striking feature of the journal is its anti-American tone -- muted, to be sure, compared with what it was in the days of the Cold War, but still unmistakable and almost equally invidious.

The lead article written by Sergei Rogov, the director of the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies in Moscow, called "Russia and the United States: Test by Crisis," notes that a good share of the assistance earmarked for Russia by the Agency for International Development went not to Russia but to American organizations working on behalf of economic reform there. Rogov suggests that this reform was bungled by the employment of "second-rate professors," presumably Americans sent to help guide Russia to democracy and a market economy.

"The Clinton administration is not an onlooker: upon the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Washington assumed the role of a Moscow mentor in the political and economic reforms," Rogov writes. "To a great extent, the United States are responsible for the results of the 1990s in Russia."

Another anti-American accusation

A second noteworthy article was written by an equally prominent Russian commentator on world affairs, Sergei Kortunov, counselor to the head of the office of the president of the Russian Federation. His contribution bears the title "Is the Cold War Really Over?" In his analysis of the Cold War, the author claims that U.S. foreign policy aimed not so much at defeating communism as at breaking up and weakening the Soviet Union along ethnic/territorial lines.

Such (alleged) American plans, he writes, "in effect did not in any way differ from the plans of the German Nazis. ... [I]n this context we can say that in 1945, the world anti-Russian center moved from Berlin to Washington."

One rubs one's eyes in disbelief reading such Stalinist accusations. As someone who since the 1950s has been deeply involved in the study of Soviet nationality problems and who tried, throughout the Cold War, with little success, to make Washington aware of their importance, I can state categorically that breaking up the Soviet Union along ethnic or territorial lines was never U.S. policy.

Quite to the contrary. Fearing the destabilization of Eurasia, Washington actively discouraged the claims of the Soviet nationalities to sovereignty.

Some things never change

At no point in the Cold War did Washington call for the break-up of the Soviet state. As late as August 1991, when the USSR was well on its way to self-destruction, the then-President George Bush delivered in Kiev a speech that was widely interpreted as urging the Ukrainians to refrain from claiming independence.

Blaming the United States for the failures of Russian reform attempts and comparing it to Nazi Germany carries ominous overtones. Such irresponsible talk suggests that not only communist and nationalist politicians but also Russian establishment intellectuals have not yet matured to the point where they can assume blame for their own mistakes -- and be prepared to learn from them.

Irreconcilable Differences

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
February 25, 1999

Although 54 years have passed since the end of World War II, two of the major protagonists, Russia and Japan, still have not concluded a peace treaty. At issue are four small, economically and strategically insignificant islands which the Russian include in the Kuril chain and the Japanese call "Northern territories." All efforts to resolve the dispute have so far failed.

A historical disagreement

The history of the Kurils is a complicated one. Originally inhabited by the Ainus, a people who differ racially from the Mongoloids, who dominate East Asia, they were occupied by Russian colonists in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Between 1855 and1875, the Japanese expelled the Russians and seized the entire Kuril chain. By the Treaty of St. Petersburg, signed in 1875, Russia conceded these territories to Japan.

There the matter rested until World War II when at Yalta, Roosevelt, in his eagerness to involve Stalin in the war against Japan, generously offered him the Kuril (along with Sakhalin) in exchange for a promise to enter hostilities against Japan within three months of the capitulation of Germany. The offer was not only of dubious legal status but entirely unnecessary since no force could have stopped Stalin from assaulting Japan in order to assist the Chinese communists and to seize territories in the northern Pacific. Roosevelt later tried to back off his pledge by asserting that all he had promised was to back Russia's claim at the peace conference but the Yalta protocols refute this assertion.

On August 8, 1945, two days after the United States had dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Disregarding Japanese capitulation, on August 14 Russian troops landed on the Kurils and occupied the entire chain. Early the following year, Moscow formally annexed it. These actions violated the neutrality treaty which the two countries had signed in April 1941, on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Russia -- a treaty which almost certainly saved Russia from defeat at German hands because it freed it from having to fight a two-front war.

What's at stake?

The Japanese have reconciled themselves to the loss of most of the islands, but they adamantly refuse to give up the four southernmost ones on the grounds that they do not belong to the Kurils, having always been under their sovereignty. The Russians reject this definition and insist that the four have been permanently annexed. The dispute has prevented the two countries from signing a peace treaty.

The "Northern territories" are an impoverished, sparsely populated region, whose inhabitants live off fishing. The Russian residents depend in considerable measure for economic and medical sustenance on the Japanese. Clearly, at stake here are not important national interests but national pride. The great loser is Russia because Japan refuses to make major investments in a country until the dispute is resolved.

Yeltsin has promised to do so by the summer of 2000 when his term of office expires. The prospects of a settlement, however, are dim. Part of the problem is that the Russian constitution forbids changes in the country's boundaries. There is also the fear that if Russia gives up even a small part of her World War II conquests she may be pressured to give up more. For the Japanese, the Northern territories are an inalienable part of the homeland.

Various compromises are being bruited. The Russians want to ignore the Kuril issue in a peace treaty; the Japanese, for their part, propose that the Russians acknowledge Japan's sovereignty over the four islands and continue to administer them for a specified number of years. The negotiations on this matter go on but success seems elusive. Only a few days ago the Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, declared flatly that no peace treaty will be signed by the year 2000.

To an outsider, it seems a pity that the issue of sovereignty over four insignificant islands should poison relations between two major powers half a century after the end of hostilities between them.

Boris Gets Angry

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
April 8, 1999

It is probably safe to say most people believe major decisions affecting national security, especially when they involve resorting to force, are reached by a careful, inductive process -- a process in which all the available information is conveyed upward and then subjected to judicious analysis, with all the pros and cons weighed until a decision is reached.

I have concluded, from my personal experience and my historical studies, that reality does not correspond to this idealized picture. For one, the information provided to the decision-makers is too voluminous and usually too contradictory to produce clear judgement. Secondly, personal and emotional factors -- frustration, anger, envy -- plague statesmen as much as ordinary mortals.

The problem with attacking the West

These thoughts spring to mind as one watches the erratic reaction of the Russian government to the events in Yugoslavia. It is true that Russians have had close emotional ties with the Serbs going back centuries, based on shared religion and Slavic ancestry. On a number of previous occasions, when the Serbs revolted against the Turks and then again notably in the summer of 1914, they had come to their defense. But in these instances, the Serbs were either tyrannized or threatened by foreign powers. In 1999, by contrast, they are tyrannizing a minority within their own borders.

One could understand if President Boris Yeltsin made a reasoned argument against NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. Such arguments can carry weight. But he did nothing of the kind: He singled out the United States as the bully responsible for the bombing and even threatened a general war as a result of it.

"Morally, we are above America," Yeltsin declared, and, as if to prove it, announced that he had decided not to use unspecified "extreme measures" at his disposal.

These intemperate words suggest that he was acting out the pique that Russia's counsels on the issue did not prevail. The words also suggest that there is no one on his staff able to dissuade him from making inflammatory speeches directed against the West, and the United States in particular.

Yeltsin's actions are pernicious for two reasons. One is that his administration is firmly committed to Western-style political and economic reforms. Attacking the West undermines support for these reforms and plays into the hands of the most reactionary communist and nationalist elements, Yeltsin's sworn enemies.

Secondly, Russia is heavily dependent on Western loans and investments to reconstruct an economy in deep distress. It can go to a certain point but no further in alienating the Western countries without courting economic disaster and political isolation.

Empty rhetoric?

But, so far, emotions have prevailed over common sense. Ten years ago, Yeltsin identified with the United States and modeled his administration on it. Presumably, like many Russians he thought that elections and the free market were a quick road to riches. In reality, it is a long and arduous road. And as the obstacles mount, Russians become increasingly frustrated. They blame the United States for the catastrophic shape of their economy, for giving it allegedly poor advice in order to buy Russia's rich natural resources at bargain-basement prices.

They also despise the United States for having emerged from the Cold War as the sole superpower. Ordinary Russians are too preoccupied with surviving to care much one way or the other about this issue. But the politicians, intellectuals and generals care deeply. Unable to do much about it, they vent their frustration in self-defeating rhetoric.

In reality, the Soviet Union was never a genuine great power; in the contemporary world this status is earned by economic prowess and the international appeal of one's popular culture. Russia neither disposed nor disposes of such assets. It was allowed the illusion of being a world power by the West from fear of its nuclear arsenal.

Few people in the West realize the bitterness the Russian elite feels at what it considers its humiliation at having been robbed of this illusion. A couple of months ago, Harvard gave a farewell dinner for a group of 30 Russian generals and colonels who had spent two weeks as its guests. I engaged one of these generals in small talk. Suddenly, without provocation, he switched the subject. "You Americans are riding high now," he admonished in an angry voice, "but it won't be forever. Don't throw your weight around or you will pay for it."

I suspect that it is such emotions that explain the erratic outbursts of Russia's first democratically elected president. They divert the country from its real task, which is not to posture as a great world power but to rebuild itself from seven decades of communist ruination.

Governed by Chaos

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
May 13, 1999

The rumors have been floating for some time and now they have come true: Boris Yeltsin fired his prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov earlier this week, plunging Russia into yet another political and possibly economic crisis.

Governed by chaos

Primakov received his appointment last September, shortly after the financial crash that drove the ruble down from 20 cents to the dollar to less than five, and cost the Moscow Stock exchange 90% of its value. Ostensibly, he had been brought in to carry out major economic reforms. But Primakov, whose background was that of a Middle East expert for Soviet Intelligence services, had no economic experience. The more likely reason for his appointment was that, having established good connections with the Communists who liked his Soviet-style mindset and personality, he could defuse the looming showdown between the Communist-led Duma and the president.

Up to a point he succeeded in this task, bringing a certain amount of political stability to Russia. His lack of ideology combined with his moderate anti-Westernism and equally moderate opposition to economic liberalization corresponded to the mood of the Russian people. Unfortunately for him, it also made him Russia's most popular politician, a rival of Yeltsin and a leading prospect in the presidential elections scheduled for next year. Yeltsin is exceedingly jealous of competition and this was a major factor in his growing coolness toward Primakov.

In his formal announcement, the president justified the prime minister's dismissal by his inability to come up with a strategic plan for improving the nation's economy. While the charge is true it rings hollow because Sergei Stepashin, the man Yeltsin nominated to succeed Primakov, is even less qualified to produce a comprehensive economic blueprint. His whole experience has been with the security organs, first as head of the Federal Security Service, a successor to the KGB, then as justice minister and finally as minister of the interior. His main qualification for the job is undeviating loyalty to Yeltsin, a quality that Primakov apparently lacked.

To the extent that one can penetrate the fog of Byzantine intrigue that engulfs the Kremlin, the event that triggered Primakov's fall from was his inability to fend off the Duma's impeachment proceedings against Yeltsin due to begin today. He had valiantly tried various compromises but none worked and there is a good chance that at least one of the impeachment articles -- charging the president with waging an illegal war in Chechnia -- will win the required majority. Because of various constitutional safeguards, it is most unlikely that the vote will lead to Yeltsin's removal from office but it may well paralyze Russia's government.

The prospects are that the Duma will reject Stepashin's nomination. If it does so three times in succession, the president can either submit the name of another candidate or dissolve the Duma and call for new parliamentary elections. In either event, the political crisis will be exacerbated and burning economic problems even less likely to be dealt with.

A long standstill

On the other hand, it is unlikely that this crisis will spawn social upheavals: the Russian people today have no appetite for violence and not even the Communists think of seizing power by force. Most plausible is a stand-off between the legislative and executive branches which will defer for at least one more year any serious attempt to deal with the country's pressing problems.

Will these events affect Russia's involvement in the Kosovo conflict? I think not. Russia's inability to prevent NATO's hostilities against Yugoslavia has made it keenly aware how powerless it has become on the international stage. By the same token, it has made it very eager to play the role of peacemaker. The satisfaction of having the mighty United States and the NATO allies plead with Moscow to extricate them from a seemingly unwinnable war is too great to give up. The domestic crisis may divert somewhat Yeltsin's attention from Kosovo but the chances are that he will continue to be personally involved in the matter, successful resolution of which will enhance his personal prestige and that of his country.

On balance, the ever impulsive Boris Yeltsin seems to have committed a serious blunder in firing a man who, whatever his limitations, did bring Russia a modicum of political unity. It only serves to demonstrate how cut off Yeltsin is from Russia's public opinion to which at one time he had been so finely attuned.

Russia's Priorities

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
June 17, 1999

Although Russia covers enormous territory and has 150 million inhabitants -- more than France and Germany combined -- it is a desperately poor country. Its estimated annual gross domestic product (the total value of goods manufactured and services rendered) is estimated at $152 billion.

By comparison, the capitalization of Wal-Mart is $226 billion. The value of the 50 largest Russian corporations amounts to 22 billion, which is less than the capitalization of a single medium-sized U.S. corporation like Emerson Electric ($27.3 billion). A few months ago, before the Moscow Stock Exchange began to recover from the August 1998 crash, in which it had lost 90% of its value, its turnover was only between $5 million and $10 million a day.

The poverty of the population at large is glaring. Russian Cadets earn 20 rubles a day for collecting 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of carrots, beets and potatoes. The Russian government calculates a monthly income of $34 as securing minimum subsistence. In the estimation of Russian economists, approximately one-third of the population earns less than this minimum, and the World Bank reckons that before the year is over, one out of five Russians will have no more than half that meager income.

Real life in Russia

How do Russians manage? In a variety of ways. They hold more than one job. They barter goods for goods and services for goods -- even car manufacturers barter their products for steel and other essential materials. They grow vegetables in small garden patches on the outskirts of towns, often along railway tracks. They forage the woods for mushrooms and berries. Their inherent fatalism and ability to bear patiently misfortunes help them survive.

Such facts cast a sharp light on the realities of Russia as distinct from its dreams of being a world power. Granted that Russian economic statistics have always been suspect -- under the Soviet regime they were inflated in order to meet plans, whereas now they are understated to avoid paying taxes -- yet it is still clear that there is a glaring discrepancy between Russia's political ambitions and its economic resources. If Russia were a small country, tucked away in one of the less-developed continents, this discrepancy would hardly matter. But because it occupies what in the vocabulary of geopolitics is the "heartland" of Eurasia, it is always on the world stage. The result is permanent tension between its domestic imperatives, which call for the concentration of resources on the construction of a modern state and economy, and the claims of international politics, which satisfy national pride and divert attention from this task.

A joke making the rounds in Russia these days says, "the light at the end of the tunnel has been extinguished for lack of electricity." Still, not everything is bleak, and the Russian economy is not heading for collapse. The ruble lost 80% of its exchange value in August 1998 but, contrary to widespread fears, it has stayed fairly steady since then. The expected hyperinflation has not occurred, in good measure because instead of flooding the country with bank notes, the government has resorted to foreign borrowing. Russian exports, consisting primarily of commodities, especially energy resources, are recovering because of the rise in the world prices on oil.

At the same time, the sharp devaluation of the ruble has made imports expensive and helped native industry re-conquer some of the domestic market in consumer goods. The economic situation in provinces run by enlightened officials, as for example Samara and Novgorod, is surprisingly good.

What it takes

There is general agreement among both Russians and foreign observers generally agree that the country faces two critical tasks.

One is to create a competent federal government able to crack down on the most egregious forms of crime and corruption. Only a stable government can guarantee property rights and the rule of law, the foundations of economic progress. Whether such a government can be created is an open question because the numerous political parties agree on very little, and without a broad agreement on national priorities, effective government is out of reach. The unremitting conflict between President Yeltsin and the Duma, somewhat mollified by Prime Minister Evgenii Primakov during his premiership, is not likely to disappear now that the latter has been unceremoniously dismissed.

Connected with this issue is the government's inability to collect taxes, especially from large corporations. Russia owes foreign creditors at least $150 billion (the bulk of the debt goes back to Soviet days). It has, in effect, defaulted on the bulk of its foreign loans.

Without putting in place an effective government, Russia cannot hope to reimburse the debt, and at the same time pay wages and pensions. And without servicing its foreign debt, Russia is unlikely to receive further loans and investments from abroad. These investments are presently pitifully small, amounting in 1998 to 2.2 billion, which is one-third of the capital invested by foreigners in neighboring Poland in the same period.

Russia's problems are severe but not insoluble. The country needs above all to establish some kind of consensus among political parties and between the executive and legislative branches of government. It also has to give up -- at least for some time to come -- the claim to being a great world power in order to turn all its energies inward.

Spreading the Gospel of Democracy in Russia

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
July 29, 1999

Although the media rarely report on such activities, since 1991 there have been numerous contacts between western intellectuals as well as academic centers and Russian institutions for the purpose of acquainting Russians with democratic procedures. One of the most effective of these exchanges takes place several times a year under the aegis of the Moscow School of Political Studies, a private organization supported financially by various European and American sponsors. Founded in 1992, it strives to introduce "members of Russia's new political class to the skills and concepts of democratic politics." The school holds seminars in various cities of Russia; it also occasionally transports its rotating student body to European cities to have it observe democratic politics in action.

The school's founder and director, Dr. Elena Nemirovskaya, is a remarkably energetic woman, dedicated to spreading the democratic gospel among those young Russians who are likely to step into positions of power in the years ahead. Its typical students are men and women in their thirties employed by the national and regional dumas, ministries, city governments and the media. The school also carries out a publication program directed by her husband: it brings out books, mainly translations from foreign languages, which are distributed free of charge to universities and libraries.

What I saw in Moscow

I attended a session of the school held in Golitsyno, outside Moscow, in the third week of July and delivered a talk to some 100 attendees on the subject "What Russians should do and avoid doing in the Twenty-First Century." In dealing with the second part of my subject, I stressed the need to give up -- at least for some time to come -- the notion that Russia is a world power. Russia qualifies for this status neither in terms of economic prowess nor those of influence on global mass culture. True, it has a vast arsenal of nuclear missiles but these weapons have no practical utility. The illusion of being a world power diverts the country from its most essential task which is constructing a lawful society able to protect the individual rights and private property of its citizens.

Russians are accustomed to treating professors, especially foreign ones, with deference and rarely take issue with them. Thus my remarks did not elicit a sharp response. But both on this occasion and during a talk delivered to another but similar audience in Moscow, I had the distinct sense of resentment.

No matter how hard one tries, it is difficult for a Western speaker to avoid giving the impression that he is lecturing to a defeated nation, and this inevitably gives offense. This became evident when an elderly participant rose to make some irrelevant remarks about the pollution of Russian culture allegedly caused by American films: it was the only comment from the audience that elicited spontaneous applause.

Russian opinion

A notable contribution to the seminar was made by Iurii Levada, the director of a major public opinion institute and a man with a profound understanding of the Russian psyche. He stressed in his report the apathetic mood of the Russian public since 1996-97, when the early illusions that democracy and capitalism would bring instant prosperity gave way to disappointment and bitterness. Today's Russians, he observed, rely on themselves and expect very little from the government. For that reason they desire first and foremost stability and order. On these grounds Levada predicted that the winner in next year's presidential elections will be the candidate able to persuade the voters not that things will get better -- only 20% entertain such hopes -- but that they will not get worse.

Levada emphasized the failure of the Russian government to mobilize public opinion by appealing to national passions whether on the issue of Chechnya or of Kosovo. There does exist widespread resentment of the West and its main intellectual exports, democracy and capitalism, but when push comes to shove, Russians prefer not to press the issue too far. Thus 62% of the people polled believe that Russians can intervene in Yugoslavia only in agreement with the West.

According to Levada, there are extremist trends both among the elderly and the young, mostly the uneducated. Thus 15% of the population is aggressively anti-Semitic, and the number of neo-Nazis among youth is growing. But these phenomena are marginal and do not represent a threat to society.

The impression one gains both from personal observation and public opinion surveys is contradictory. On the one hand, the majority of Russians is estranged from government and prefers to rely on itself. This is all to the good in a country where for so long government ran everything and people came to depend on government largesse. On the other hand, such estrangement makes it difficult to rally the public for the constructive work of creating a modern Russia, which should be the country's foremost priority.

Russia's Troublesome, Scandalous Times

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
September 9, 1999

For the past several weeks, news reports from Russia have focused on two subjects: the Muslim fundamentalist rebellion in the Northern Caucasus, whose leaders demand independence for Dagestan, and financial scandals implicating some of the country's highest officials.

Russia in trouble

The rebellion in Dagestan is most unwelcome news for Moscow for it raises once again the question of Russia's territorial integrity. After failing to suppress the uprising in neighboring Chechnia, Moscow has settled on a truce that grants this Muslim region de facto independence. The Dagestan turmoil revives the threat to Russia's southern flank and jeopardizes the calm in Chechnia.

The new Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has promised to liquidate the insurgency within two weeks, but more than a month has passed, and the fighting continues. Experience indicates that a regular army, especially one as enfeebled as the Russian one, cannot quickly crush guerrillas operating in mountainous territory, least of all if they are inspired by religious fanaticism.

But the Dagestan conflict has been overshadowed by insistent reports of gigantic financial frauds involving billions of dollars. Although it is commonly believed that the frauds involve only the Russian Mafia, in fact they also incriminate President Boris Yeltsin and his closest advisers.

Recently, the Italian daily, Corriere de la Sera, reported that a Swiss construction firm, Mabetex, which had been hired to renovate the Kremlin at the cost of $300 million, had deposited $1 million for Yeltsin's personal disposal at a Hungarian bank in 1994. It further claimed that Mabetex has paid credit-card charges for him and his family. Swiss authorities have confirmed that in a raid on Mabetex offices last January they found credit-card slips signed by Yeltsin as well as his two daughters, Tatiana Diachenko and Elena Okulova.

The president's office has indignantly rejected these accusations, blaming them on Republican politicians in the United States, allegedly interested in embarrassing President Clinton for his pro-Yeltsin policies. But it has added fuel to the suspicions by dismissing, without explanation, the Russian official in charge of the investigation of these charges as he was about to depart for Switzerland.

Missing money

An even greater financial scandal, which might also involve the Russian government, broke in mid-August when it was revealed that the Bank of New York had quietly handled at least $4.2 billion and possibly as much as $10 billion of Russian funds in 1998 and 1999, much if not most of it probably money "laundered" by criminal elements in and out of government. Involved in these operations were bank employees of Russian origin.

Again, Moscow responded to the allegations of corruption with political counter-charges. Foreign minister Igor Ivanov has said that the charges were "politically orchestrated" and intended to isolate Russia from the world economy.

The reality is entirely different. The Clinton administration, which has based its Russian policy since 1993 on consistent support of Yeltsin, has been impeding inquests into corruption by Yeltsin and his Cabinet. Afraid that Republicans will use the administration's Russia policy as a weapon against Vice President Al Gore in next year's presidential campaign -- Gore being in charge of relations with Russia -- it has done all it can to downplay evidence of financial irregularities there.

And last but not least is the issue of the loans extended to Russian by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Rumors abound that some of the money laundered by the Bank of New York was diverted from IMF loans. The IMF has denied it has any evidence to this effect, but it has also acknowledged that it does not know how the more than $20 billion it has loaned to Russia has been used.

Furthermore, the IMF admitted that in 1997 and 1998 -- that is, the year and a half immediately preceding Russia's financial crash of August 1998 -- the Central Bank of Russia has lied to it about its international reserves and other economic data. Even so, the IMF gives every indication that it intends to pay out the next installment of the $4.2-billion loan to Russia approved earlier this year.

A country of thieves?

The English weekly, The Economist, has called Russia "the world's leading kleptocracy." A survey of 4,000 leading businessmen asked to enumerate the world's countries most favorable to private enterprise placed Singapore as number one, the United States as number two, and Russia, along with Colombia, Zimbabwe and the Ukraine, at the very bottom of the list.

This pervasive crookedness and corruption is not the fault of Russian national culture, as some westerners think, nor of the capitalist system, as many Russians believe, but the legacy of 70 years of Communist rule which taught Russia's citizens that crookedness and corruption are the keys to personal survival. It will take much time to unlearn this lesson.

Russian Outrages in Chechnya

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
October 28, 1999

I had intended to devote this month's column to the new military doctrine announced recently in Moscow, but it seems to me that this theoretical subject should take back seat to the appalling barbarisms Russians are perpetrating in Chechnya.

The horror

First, as concerns Russia's justification for the Chechen campaign: The official reason for the operation is that Chechens are responsible for several terrorist attacks against the civilian Russian population in which more than 300 people lost their lives. Yet to this day authorities have produced not one shred of evidence that the culprits were Chechens. The suspicion is that these terrorist bombings are a pretext to bring to heel a region that four years ago inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Russian army and to bolster the prestige of President Boris Yeltsin's unpopular regime.

Moscow has some grounds for dealing sternly with Chechnya and its Islamic fundamentalists. The region has been a hotbed of criminal activity, of kidnappings and drug smuggling the weak government of President Aslan Maskhadov has been unable to halt. More broadly, Russia is genuinely afraid of the spread of Muslim fundamentalism to its southern borders. Just two months ago, hundreds of armed fundamentalists invaded the republic of Kyrgyzstan, raising fears that their movement would spread to the rest of central Asia.

But even if this point is conceded, the question arises whether a brutal campaign, such as the Russian army is presently waging in Chechnya, is the proper way to address the threat. The Russian army, having learned from its past mistakes and NATO's operation in Kosovo, and anxious to minimize its causalities, is proceeding more cautiously than in 1994-95. But in so doing it is inflicting horrible losses on the Chechen civilian population with its tactic of indiscriminate bombing.

Ostensibly, these bombings are meant to root out "terrorists." But bombs and rockets do not discriminate between terrorists and peaceful civilians. People are killed; housing and industrial facilities are destroyed; harvests rot in the fields. The net effect is for the terrorists to gain new recruits from among the desperate population, especially now that the Russian army has sealed the one road leading to neighboring Ingushetia that had enabled some 160,000 Chechen refugees to escape the fighting.

So far, the Russian army has accomplished the easy part of its task -- namely, seizing the flat northern third of the region. As it pushes into Groznyi, the capital, and then into the mountainous territory to the south, it is certain to face fanatical resistance. The fighting will give a hollow ring to Yeltsin's Wednesday remarks that the Russian army "will return peace and calm to the long-suffering Chechen territory."

Where's the anger?

Two broader aspects of the Chechen war call for comment.

One is the vicious nationalism displayed by the Russian generals who are today the main heirs of Soviet-style thinking and who act with increasing arrogance while their country is mired in a persistent political and economic crisis. The Yeltsin government, unable to solve its problems, is relying on them to give the Russian people a false sense of national pride and Great Power status. Russia is now threatened with becoming, like a number of non-Western countries, a regime in which a civilian government provides the façade for military rule.

Secondly, it is disturbing to see how gently the Western powers are reacting to the Russian terror campaign. European leaders gave Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin a verbal scolding when he recently met with them. But the U.S. administration has been noticeably muted in its reaction, expressing "concern" but displaying no outrage at these barbarities.

It is part of a mistaken policy of the Clinton administration to pretend that, by and large, all is well in Russia. Then it does not have to get involved with one more foreign-policy problem and to confess that its policies toward that country may not have been as successful as claimed.

Portents of the Russian Election

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
December 23, 1999

The Russian parliamentary elections are over and the results generally matched expectations. The Communists, Russia's best organized party, once again won the largest number of votes (nearly one-quarter), although their share of the seats has fallen 25%. The next three largest parties, in order of votes received have come into existence since 1995.

The new shape of the Russian Duma

The most successful of these, Yedinstvo or Unity, was created barely three months ago by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and is generally perceived as representing the interests of the Kremlin. The same applies to the Union of Right-Wing Forces. Between them, the two pro-Kremlin parties gained one-third of the vote. Fatherland-All Russia, the centrist party headed by ex-Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, won a disappointing 12.6% of the vote. Finally, Yabloko, the only true liberal and democratic party, headed by Grigory Yavlinsky, barely qualified to be represented in the new parliament.

The outstanding fact of the election is the meteoric rise of Putin, an ex-KGB spy and total unknown until a few months ago when Yeltsin nominated him as his preferred successor. Putin not only led his fledgling party (formally directed by Sergei Shoigu) to a stunning second place, but handily beat all potential competitors in the opinion polls that register voter preferences in next year's presidential elections.

The Western press, by and large, has hailed these results as positive on the grounds that the new Duma will be more pro-government than the outgoing one and, hence, more likely to cooperate with the executive. Pleasure was also expressed with the fall of the Communist vote. Thus The Wall Street Journal expressed satisfaction with the strong showing of the reformers, "54% of [the] vote going to centrist or economically liberal parties" the Journal said. The New York Times, a bit more cautious, on the whole also found the results reassuring.

An unrealized danger

It is true that the good showing of the pro-Kremlin parties enhance the prospect of political stability. It is now possible that various reforms and legislative bills, previously blocked, will pass; the ratification of Start II is one of them.

But to this observer, at any rate, the negatives outweigh the positives. The Communists are no longer a danger to Russia. They appeal largely to the disgruntled older citizens and the rural poor. Their constituency is steadily declining, and they form a permanent opposition party, much as once the case with their namesakes in France or Italy. Moreover, they have abandoned calls for a return to the Soviet regime, well aware that they are entirely unrealistic because it would require a new revolution and civil war. They have lost their bearings, vacillating between social democracy and the aspiration to reconstruct the Soviet empire.

The real danger to Russia and the rest of the world is Russian nationalism, which expresses not so much love of one's country and the willingness to sacrifice one's private interests for its sake as it does anti-Western xenophobia and imperial ambitions. The good showing of the Putin bloc would have been heartening had Unity ran openly on a reform platform calling for an end to lawlessness and corruption, accelerated privatization and cooperation with the West.

But, in fact, it presented no electoral platform. It ran exclusively on Putin's record as conqueror of Chechnya and the first statesman since the collapse of the USSR openly to defy world opinion by asserting Russia's right brutally to crush the rebellious province. Not long ago he declared that the solution to Russia's economic difficulties lay in increasing the military budget. Even more ominously he has recently hailed Russian secret police, from the Cheka to the KGB, as having "always guarded Russia's national interests." His ideal is Russia as a Great Power in the sense of a country able to challenge the United States and bully its neighbors. This dangerous program greatly appeals to Russians, 78% of whom tell pollsters they want Russia to be a Great Power.

Strike one for nationalism

More noteworthy than the good showing of the pro-Kremlin bloc is the poor showing of Yabloko, whose leader, Yavlinsky, had the temerity to criticize the Chechnya campaign. The voters punished him by cutting his party's Duma representation in half.

In Russia, communism is history. The future hovers between democracy and aggressive nationalism. As of now, the latter is on the ascendant.

Putin's First Month

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
February 3, 2000

One week after the appearance of my last column in these pages, Boris Yeltsin pulled what in retrospect appears to have been something close to a coup d'état. He resigned six months before the scheduled presidential elections and -- since Russia has no vice president -- elevated his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, to the post of acting president. The ploy was clearly designed to help Putin win the election in two ways.

First, by giving his hand-picked successor the opportunity to serve for three months as Acting President, Yeltsin endowed him with the aura of head of state. This will discourage many Russians from casting ballots against him because they have great respect for government authority (vlast) and do not like to vote against it. During January, a number of prominent politicians associated with rival parties have jumped on the Putin bandwagon. One of them explained that it would be "embarrassing" for Russia to present to the rest of the world the spectacle of contending presidential candidates. It may turn out, therefore, that in the March elections Putin will face only token opposition.

The Chechen dilemma

Secondly, Yeltsin and his protégé counted on the Chechen campaign to be won well before the election, establishing Putin's image as the man who has restored Russia's international prestige. Although Moscow seized as an excuse on several terrorist bombings, which, without providing the evidence, it attributed to Chechens, and the ill-advised attempt of Chechen fundamentalists to raise the flag of rebellion in neighboring Dagestan, it is know known that the campaign against Chechnya had been planned months before these events took place -- perhaps as early as February-March 1999. Originally intended as a limited operation, it was expanded into an all-out war by Putin to reestablish Russia as a power to be reckoned with and to avenge the humiliation suffered as Chechen hands in the previous conflict. Putin subsequently defined Chechnya as "the place where Russia's future is being decided."

The full-scale assault on Chechnya may have been a miscalculation. After quickly seizing the indefensible and undefended flat northern half of the country and in this manner raising enormously Putin's prestige, the Russian army, moving south ran into stiff resistance. The demoralized and undisciplined Russians, made up partly of raw recruits and partly of mercenaries more interested in looting and raping than winning the war, have been bogged down in Groznyi, unable, despite relentless bombing, to seize the center of the city. Repeated promises of quick victory notwithstanding, it is nowhere in sight. As casualties mount, Putin's popularity is dropping: recent polls indicate that it has declined from nearly 60% to 48%.

Return to the old?

Putin's views and intentions are far from clear. In some remarks, he extols reform and democracy; in others, he insists that Russia is ready neither for democracy nor free-market economy. What Russia wants, he has declared recently, is "the restoration of a guiding and regulatory role of the state." One suspects that the former statements are meant for the ears of Western powers whose credits and investments Russia desperately needs, while the latter are addressed to the large segment of the electorate which is tired of turmoil and yearns for a return to the security of the Soviet era.

What bolsters this interpretation is the deal Putin struck with the Communists after the parliamentary elections. Calling for the sharing of the most important committee assignments between the pro-Putin party, Unity, and the Communists, the deal shut out rival parties. This alliance displays a disturbing lack of principle on Putin's part in that it cold-shoulders parties which stand for reform, his avowed objective, and makes common front with the leading opponents of reform.

Disturbing, too, are the various measures implemented by Putin to limit criticism of the Chechen campaign. The independent NTV network, which has dared to present evidence of greater military casualties than the government has been willing to admit, has been barred from the military journalists' pool. Sergei Yastrzemsky, appointed by the Kremlin to serve as the main source of information on events in Chechnia, warned in this connection: "The media should take into account the challenges the nation is facing now. When the nation mobilizes its forces to solve some task, this imposes obligations on everyone, including the media." Inasmuch as governments are always and everywhere "solving some tasks," these ominous words suggest that the Putin administration is not averse to reimposing censorship if the going gets tough.

Putin's Coronation

By Richard Pipes
IntellectualCapital.com
March 23, 2000

In the unanimous opinion of experts and pollsters, Russia's presidential elections scheduled for Sunday, March 26, are a foregone conclusion: acting President Vladimir Putin is expected to defeat his only serious rival, the head of the Communist Party, Gennadi Zyuganov, by a margin of five to two if not better. There remain only two unresolved questions: whether enough voters will turn up to meet the constitution's requirements, and whether Putin will get 50% or more of the votes to avert a run-off election. But even if neither requirement is met, the outcome is not in doubt: Putin will be Russia's next president.

Russia's political psyche

Inevitable as it appears, this prospect is nonetheless astonishing. A year ago, no one but Putin's superiors in the secret services and a few politicians in St Petersburg knew of him. And yet a country of 150 million, in deep psychological and economic turmoil, is willing to place at the head of its government for the next four years a man of whom it knows next to nothing, who has no record of any accomplishment, and who offers no program except the promise of strong leadership.

One can offer for this enigma several explanations.

Russians have very little experience in multiparty elections and, indeed, in the give and take of political culture is rooted in the traditions of the communal village where all questions were resolved by acclamation and the objective was unanimity. They are bewildered and even disgusted by the open conflict among contenders for high office, viewing it not as a healthy contest of opinions and interests but as selfish pursuit of private gain. In the polls conducted not long ago, in the answer to the question, "Have multiparty elections brought Russia more harm or good?", 52% responded "more harm" and only 15% said "more good." These results mean that only one in seven Russians has a positive view of democratic processes; the rest either reject them or do not care one way or the other.

For this reason, Russians tend to rally behind a single leader who promises to solve all their problems. In this manner a synthetic unanimity can be obtained that gives the country the feeling of unity -- and unity spells strength. It is an amazing spectacle to see one after another of Putin's potential rivals jump on his bandwagon, until only a couple of serious contenders are left.

The novelty of Putin

This said, the question remains: Why Putin?

It is precisely his obscurity that attracts Russian voters. They want their leader to produce miracles, to restore to their country its international stature of a Great Power, and to solve all their domestic problems, beginning with low salaries and arrears in wages and pensions. He is to crack down on crime. They know from experience that the other, familiar candidates cannot achieve these marvels because they have tried and failed. He just might.

Putin has very cleverly exploited these sentiments, drawing on public opinion polls and employing public-relations techniques borrowed from the West. He knows what the voters want, and he promises to satisfy their desires without spelling out in detail what he will accomplish and how he will go about it. His message is simple: "Trust me." He projects a macho image whether routing competitors on the karate mat or massacring Chechen civilians. He speaks sparingly, using down-to-earth language that occasionally shades into criminal slang. He is a self-assured leader in sharp contrast to the bumbling Yelstin.

He is helped by the fact that what is left of his opposition presents no serious threat. The Communists are quite demoralized. Their constituency consists mostly of older and less educated voters who have been especially hurt by the inflation that followed free-market reforms and by the collapse of social services. It is a group that dwindles year to year. Zyuganov has no clear program to offer them except vague promises that if elected he will restore all the good features of Communism and none of the bad. But Russians have tried Communism and want no part of it.

The other serious rival is Grigorii Yavlinsky, the head of the liberal Yabloko party. A courageous politician, he is one of the few to have openly condemned the Chechnya campaign. His following is concentrated in the large cities and confined to the better-educated voters. His democratic program is unlikely to attract more than 10% of the electorate.

The China model

What kind of a president will Putin make? Given the deliberate vagueness of his program, one can only make tentative assessments.

Judging by his pronouncements, Putin believes in two things: the free market in economics and authoritarian rule in politics. This program, if one can call it that, has been linked to policies pursued by czar Alexander III, who reigned between 1881 and 1894, which combined encouragement to capitalist industry with rigorous enforcement of autocracy. But a more likely model is contemporary China, which has managed rather successfully to blend capitalism with strict party monopoly on political life and public opinion.

Putin has more than once expressed the belief that western-style democracy is not suited for Russia -- at any rate, for some time to come. Recently, he has gone so far as to state that "Russia has from the very start developed as a super-centralized state. It is part of its genetic code." On another occasion he blamed the collapse of the Soviet Union on "laxness."

So there can be no question that he will attempt to strengthen the power of Moscow over the provinces and make life difficult for opposition parties. Centralization also implies harnessing public opinion in support of government policies: a foretaste of which are the harassment of newspapers and television networks that do not support the war in Chechnya, as well as the indictment of Radio Liberty's correspondent who broadcast from Chechnya as a "criminal."

In foreign policy, Putin is cautious. He makes no secret of the fact that he wants Russia once again to be an international power. He speaks of reviving the national spirit. He wants to substantially increase the military budget, and he is quietly reintroducing military training into schools. A new military doctrine stresses foreign dangers to Russia and commits its armed forces to making first use of nuclear weapons. But Putin seems well aware of the need for foreign loans and investments and softens his tough nationalist rhetoric with pledges of cooperation with the West.

As Boris Nemtsov, the one-time deputy prime minister under Yeltsin, recently put it: "Putin enjoys such broad support because people don't know what kind of a person he is, and they pin their expectations on him. As they get to know Putin, they will become more sober." It seems a reasonable judgment.