A Tired Anarchy
Mini Teaser: Russia, for our officials and foreign policy leaders, is an increasingly scary and strange place. We don't seem to know where we are or what we are doing.
Russia, for our officials and foreign policy leaders, is an
increasingly scary and strange place. We don't seem to know where we
are or what we are doing.
The Chechen war climaxed a crescendo of bizarre and troubling events.
The Moscow journalist Dmitri Kholodov, who was investigating
scandalous thefts by army generals, the training of mafia hit men by
the army, and FSK (ex-KGB) destabilization operations against
Chechnya, received a briefcase from the FSK. When he opened it, it
exploded and he was killed.
Attention was called to the private armies that exist not only in the
Caucasus region but in Moscow when a millionaire's "security guard"
was attacked in the street by masked gunmen who turned out to be
members of Yeltsin's personal bodyguard. The Moscow KGB came to the
aid of the "security guard" and struggled with Yeltsin's guards; the
upshot was the dismissal of the Moscow KGB chief and the
subordination of the Moscow KGB to Boris Yeltsin's bodyguard.
This bodyguard, under the former KGB major Alexander Korzhakov, and
the larger Main Guards Department under KGB General Barsukov have
become a center of uncontrolled power with forty thousand troops
including tanks and paratroops, and is metastasizing into the
provinces. Korzhakov is now passing on the acceptability of new
ministers and issuing directives to the prime minister to halt
economic reform. His new "analytical center" is framing plans for a
"National Guard," a kind of parallel army, like the Red Guards, the
SA, or the Waffen-SS, which will extend through all the provinces and
answer directly to Boris Yeltsin. Such events, amid the swirling
rumors of canceled elections, emergency presidential rule, and
Yeltsin's blind-drunk binges or terminal illness, display both
megalomania and panic. None of this inspires confidence.
But we're stuck on Boris Yeltsin. And the more strangely or
arbitrarily or insanely he acts, the less he is in control, the more
we cling to him, in our need for something recognizable and
reassuring. As an administration official, evidently Strobe Talbott,
told a reporter, "Just who else are we going to deal with? Yeltsin is
president of Russia, period."
In 1987, when the forces of disintegration first began to show
themselves, there was good excuse for not identifying this reality or
preparing a policy to deal with it. But at this point, after having
waited so long for the strong reformed state of Gorbachev to appear,
and then waiting for the strong reformed state of Yeltsin to appear,
it begins to be strange. Over two administrations our officials have
stubbornly clung to a policy of dealing only with governments, above
all the Russian government, and put all our hopes on the leader of
the moment. Everyone says at this point that this makes policy too
personal, yet we keep doing it. Something is at work here beyond the
normal range of human misjudgment, bureaucratic interest and vanity,
although all these factors are present. This pattern needs to be
understood as something like an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The Pre-Chechnya Consensus
The Chechen war is the culmination of tendencies that were building
through last year. During this time a new direction in Russian
foreign policy became evident, one that is increasingly assertive
and, in its language, increasingly anti-American. By the fall of 1994
there seemed to be a consensus of the foreign policy elite that
Russia needed to assert itself more, especially in the independent
republics of the "near abroad" and on behalf of ethnic Russians
living there. This consensus seemed to respond to a broad popular
mood, but it was also shared by most of the democratic intellectuals
who have been our friends.
The new rhetorical consensus has been supported by some real actions
in the republics of the near abroad. People there share an almost
universal consensus that Russia is extremely powerful, that it is now
working to restore the former Soviet Union, and that almost
everything that happens there, whether it seems to have any
connection with Russia or not, is the result of Russian scheming.
I once thought that these suspicions were the result of a paranoid
imagination, which is a common experience for Westerners in the
post-communist world. But careful study of the evidence does show
that in at least three important cases Russia has worked to
destabilize the independent governments of other Soviet successor
states. When Abulfaz Elchibey, the nationalist and pro-Western prime
minister of Azerbaijan, was about to sign an oil investment agreement
with Western firms, he was overthrown by Surat Huseynov with Russian
arms. When Elchibey's successor, Heydar Aliev, signed a similar
agreement last fall, Russia protested and a similar attempt to
overthrow Aliev was made. And in Georgia, the Russian "power
ministries"--the defense ministry under Grachev, the internal affairs
ministry (MVD) and the successor agencies to the KGB--supplied the
Abkhaz rebels who were fighting to secede from Georgia with arms and
Russian and Chechen mercenaries, putting pressure on the Georgian
side to sign a truce. When the truce was signed and the Georgian
heavy equipment withdrawn, the Abkhaz side, receiving back their
equipment from the Russians, broke the truce and won a complete
victory. Then Yeltsin used the disaster to force Georgia to accept a
continuing Russian military presence and membership in the CIS. The
chairman of the defense committee of the State Duma, Sergei
Yushenkov, has characterized the principles of Russian policy thus:
"They are very simple. Take the Caucasus, for example. We are trying
to establish our power in the region using other people, stirring up
civil war, and supporting warring forces and groupings with arms and
ammunition and even personnel."
The Chechnya Crisis
The Russo-Chechen conflict provides a better window on real Russian
policy, and the domestic reaction to it, than any of these events.
As a side effect of the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991,
Chechnya declared its independence under the leadership of General
Dudayev. This is one of the events in the world whose drama we have
scarcely absorbed. It is as though Quebec or Brittany or Scotland had
actually declared its independence, was armed to the teeth and
serving as a base for criminals who plundered trains going from one
part of the country to another. General Dudayev made no effort to
give Chechnya the orderly structure of a normal state. He behaved
like a bandit, at best a medieval Robin Hood figure who, thanks to
Russian forbearance, had a state to play with. Chechnya was not only
a real problem, but a standing humiliation for Russia and an
incitement to other non-Russian areas to declare their independence.
So Russia had very serious reasons to reject the independence of
Chechnya. Here, if anywhere, you would think, the new national
foreign policy consensus would apply.
There was, in fact, an intervention following the Chechen declaration
of independence. It failed and was disavowed by the Russian Supreme
Soviet. Luckily, it was not necessary to use force, because Chechnya
was completely isolated by Russian territory on three sides, and by
the highest chain of the Caucasus mountains on the remaining side.
There are no roads across the Caucasus mountains here; all the roads,
all the railroads, all the oil pipelines between Chechnya and the
outside world pass through Russia, but there never has been any
effective blockade of Chechnya. The explanation may be that, as many
Russian journalists have charged, powerful officials were using
Chechnya as a sort of free port for illegal exports of oil, gold,
diamonds, and arms. Perhaps there were also political reasons: some
of the illegal arms seem to have gone to Serbia, and Chechen
mercenaries were used in the Russian operation to tear Abkhazia away
from Georgia. The most amazing thing is that Chechnya, having
declared its independence, defied Russia, established an army,
intended to establish foreign relations was until very recently
receiving a subsidy from the Russian government, like any other
backward province.
So Chechnya maintained its independence for three years. It is one of
ten post-communist mini-states, extending from Croatia to the old
Soviet-Chinese border in the Pamirs, that have factual independence
but no international recognition and no international
responsibilities. During the three years of Chechen independence, a
slow exit of Russians took place. Grozny, the capital, is an old
Russian town founded in 1818 as a fortress against the Chechens. When
the USSR collapsed about three quarters of Grozny's population was
Russian. About half of those people were driven out, not apparently
by any decision of the Chechen government, but just by the fact that
life there was so difficult and so dangerous. The concern of Russia
for Russians abroad has to be seen in the light of this kind of fact.
Russians in the near abroad do suffer from discrimination; in some
places they feel or are made to feel unwelcome. But, on the whole,
Russia has not done anything about it, contrary to a very popular
myth both within Russia and in the West.
Around the end of the summer of 1994, the Russian government broke
with its three-year pattern of de facto toleration of Chechen
independence. Clans which had always opposed Dudayev were armed and
organized to overthrow him. Such a decision was certainly
understandable on the part of Russia. But it seems to have been part
of a pattern of restoring Russian influence and military presence
over the entire Caucasus, as part of the more assertive foreign
policy described above. It was actually preceded by the maneuvers to
destabilize independent Georgia and Azerbaijan, on which it was
modeled. Yeltsin's decision has to be seen in the context of his
increasing dependence on the "power ministries" which had organized
those earlier adventures. His struggles with the communist and
nationalist opposition in the Supreme Soviet, now the Duma, which
culminated in the street fighting of October 1993, had antagonized
the right. Meanwhile, in the absence of a communist enemy, the
democratic forces were breaking into small quarreling groups, which
were antagonized by Yeltsin's use of force against the Supreme
Soviet. There remain few cohesive entities that could prop up
Yeltsin, except for the army and the security police.
The leaders of these power ministries have had three tries at
subduing Chechnya but have botched the campaign month after month,
turning it into a national crisis and threatening Yeltsin's own
position. Because they have not been removed as a result of the
failures, the impression that Yeltsin depends on them personally is
growing.
Phase one of the campaign began during the fall of 1994. Relying on
the "Abkhaz Model"--using local proxies to achieve Moscow's ends--the
power ministries organized and equipped Chechen opposition clans to
attack Dudayev. Those attacks failed; the Abkhaz model did not work.
Phase two began on November 25. Reinforcements of Russian troops from
elite units like the Kantimirov division, which protects Yeltsin's
position in Moscow, were added to the Chechen opposition forces.
Reporters were briefed that they would seize Grozny and occupy the
presidential palace the next day.
Ignoring the ridges that dominate Grozny, the attack made straight
for the center of the congested city and the presidential palace with
tanks. Not surprisingly, the attack fell apart and the Chechen
opposition and their Russian allies retreated to their bases,
ignominiously.
The KGB and MVD having completely mismanaged these first "covert"
operations to destabilize Chechnya, Yeltsin dumped the mess in the
lap of an utterly unprepared army. Most of the senior Russian army
commanders opposed it, but Minister of Defense Grachev accepted with
alacrity. Yeltsin issued a 48-hour ultimatum for Dudayev's forces to
lay down their arms; it was extended several times, showing the
muddle in Moscow, but finally the invasion, phase three, began on
December 11. Once again the attack disintegrated. When Chechens who
found themselves in the path of the invasion took hostages, Russian
commanders refused to advance or to fight for the release of the
hostages. Moscow tried again with a grand assault on New Year's Eve.
Once again the troops went straight into the center of Grozny, were
cut off there and either burned to death in their tanks or
surrendered in panic.
The tactical orders seem to have been given, not by any military man,
but by Nikolai Yegorov, a former collective farm chairman appointed
by Yeltsin to coordinate the destruction of Chechen independence.
Yegorov, according to one army general's conjecture, had read as a
young communist some party textbook that explained how, in 1917, the
Bolshevik sailors had been ordered to seize the palace, the railroad
station, and so forth. So Yegorov gave the same orders on the last
day of 1994. The timing of the attack, according to some Russian
sources, was determined by Grachev's birthday, January.
Yeltsin responded to the disaster by adding intensive, wildly
inaccurate bombing and shelling to the ground assault on Grozny.
These tactics were more effective, although at the cost of enormous
numbers of civilian casualties and refugees, including many Russians.
By mid-January, the Chechen militias had abandoned the presidential
palace. By early February, Grozny was virtually destroyed, and
Dudayev's forces were apparently pulling back from what had been his
main base of support.
Thus Yeltsin succeeded in greatly weakening Dudayev--but at the cost
of his own last link to the democratic movement, most of his
remaining popular support, the remaining support for a Russian
connection in Chechnya, and tens of thousands of civilian and
military lives. The weakening of Dudayev has not meant the
strengthening of Yeltsin's administration; resistance has not ceased
in a single town where it was going on previously. As of January 24,
the Russian headquarters in Grozny still worked underground for fear
of Chechen snipers in the surrounding buildings. What Yeltsin has
actually accomplished is to add to the already wide areas of the
Russian Federation that are not controlled by any government.
Four Conclusions
So what were the reactions in "chauvinist, assertive Russia" to the
invasion? Contrary to that characterization, virtually all the
democratic forces and public opinion as a whole have been
passionately opposed to the Chechen war. The Communist Party opposes
the fighting in Chechnya vehemently. The biggest surprise is what the
Russian nationalists did. Zhirinovsky, the most extreme nationalist,
has become one of only three prominent politicians supporting the
war, but his party's first reaction was condemnatory: "The
anti-national government in the Moscow Kremlin conceives the war in
Chechnya as an endless war, till the death of the last..."--Russian,
one might think, but no--"...Chechen." This oddly cosmopolitan
sentiment passes, in the Russian context, as ultra-nationalist.
As for the army, the bulwark of nationalism, General Gromov, deputy
minister of defense, and General Lebed, both officers on active
service and heroes of the nationalist-communist opposition, denounce
the policy of the president and defense minister. On December 16,
General Ivan Babichev, the commander of the western third of the
Russian attack forces and of the elite Pskov airborne division,
announced publicly that, regardless of orders, he would advance no
further: "...we are not going to use tanks against the people."
Rather than being removed from his command for mutiny, Babichev was
apparently sent to command a quiet part of the front, where he made a
personal non-aggression pact with the opposing Chechen fighters.
(Later he was somehow persuaded to return to the battle.) As the
destructive war against civilians ground on, many other officers and
units of the army and security forces refused to be involved,
resigned or returned home without orders.
This is all very strange. From it, I think one may draw four
conclusions. First, Russia does not have a government in the normal
sense of the term: an organization where the decisions of higher
officials are binding on lower officials. The Soviet state has been
disintegrating since 1985, and we can see now that Yeltsin's attempts
to knit it back together after the October 1993 street fighting have
failed.
This is not just the conclusion of a Western academic. Andrei
Kortunov, perhaps the most brilliant foreign policy specialist of the
Moscow establishment, has concluded from the Chechen war that "Alas,
today there is no state as such--as the West understands it--in
Russia." From a quite different part of the political spectrum
General Alexander Lebed simply asserts, "The state no longer exists."
The adventure in Chechnya has made the situation even worse. The head
of Yeltsin's own presidential administration has recently stated that
"manipulating the situation in Chechnya, reactionary forces in
individual regions are trying to tear pieces of power away from the
federal authorities....These problems must be solved as soon as
possible."
"Yeltsin is president of Russia, period," said President Clinton's
"senior official," using the title to block inquiry into the reality
it is supposed to express. When we speak of a president, we mean
someone who is the head of a state that he can generally deliver on
important issues. If there is no state, in the sense of a hierarchy
of officials habituated to obey each other, there can be no president
in the sense that interests us diplomatically. It is worth quoting
Kortunov once again:
"Boris Yeltsin no longer has control over the actions of his
enforcement structures and in general has a very vague idea of what
is happening outside the Kremlin. And since this is the case, what is
the point of the current summits, talks at the highest level,
international conferences and consultations, and so on? Talks with
the president become a meaningless exercise in rhetoric."
The second conclusion to be drawn is that the culture of foreign
policy debate in Russia today is a Western democratic culture. That
is, it has the same messiness as equivalent debates in the West, with
everybody making charges about everything. There is no national
unity. Without a public consensus on the existence of a real threat
and public confidence in the government, the government is not able
to rally people. If the present Russian government had the
patriotism, legitimacy and competence to carry out difficult efforts
on behalf of Russian national interests, this sort of public climate
would be a real obstacle to serving the public interest. But with the
political system that Russia has at the moment, half-formed and
half-collapsed, it has to be considered as an aspect of democratic
checks and balances. That is why it is vital that some vague sense of
democracy in Russia be maintained. The disorder of Russian public
debate restrains, for the moment, adventures that would be injurious
both to Russia and to us.
By refusing the Yeltsin government's attempt to mobilize them for war
in Chechnya, Russians have shown that, in a profoundly important
respect, they are like us. This is perhaps the biggest surprise of
the Chechen crisis. Our opinion-makers tend to present Russian
officials as Western-oriented, but to imply that there are vast
forces of aggression and intolerance within the Russian people. This
conventional wisdom now seems to be almost the opposite of the truth.
On one side there is a small circle of ex-communist officials who are
trying to recreate the USSR with a Russian label, using the brutal
and cynical tactics that the communist regime fostered. On the other
side of this issue there is the vast bulk of the Russian people. Like
their Western counterparts (but unlike the Chechens and Serbs) the
Russians of today do not like fighting, killing and dying. There is a
deep horror of using the state's armed forces for any serious
purpose. In fact, Russians seem less willing to use force than
Americans and possibly equal today's Germans in their distaste for
it. Perhaps, as in Germany, the brutalities of the totalitarian
regimes, against the background of latent coercion that these regimes
exemplified, have discredited in a lasting way the use of force.
My third conclusion is that military and public strategy have been
bungled from start to finish, and it is an open question whether
the governme nt that did all this can manage equally complicated
and controversial processes of economic reform and democratization.
Dudayev's military forces have done rather well, given that they
are civilian militias or bandits. Where did they get their arms
and training from? The Russian army signed an agreement to turn
over half its weapons, including aircraft, tanks, and rockets,
when they evacuated Chechnya. The Chechens got more weapons, as
well as invaluable training and combat experience, in Abkhazia,
where they fought on the Russian side against the government of
Georgia. So the Russians trained and equipped a force that is now
working against them. Fighters are being recruited in Abkhazia
to fight for Dudayev, and Russian government spokesmen have been
threatening Ardzinba, Abkhazia's president, for sending them.
But it was Russia that put Ardzinba there and made Abkhazia an
independent mini-state. This is a very incoherent form of
Russian expansion.
Fourth and last, one can conclude that Russian national reassertion
is not a mass taste or instinct, but a posture or gesture. To clarify
what I mean, I would suggest that it is something rather like racism
is in the United States. You hear racist jokes, but if you were to
ask the people who make those jokes, "Well, shall we bring back
segregation? When? How?" they would be very disoriented and perhaps
frightened. Postures and prejudices are not policy. I think that
there is no public instinct for Russian national reassertion that
supports the assertive policy that seemed, even a few weeks ago, the
consensus of the Russian establishment. To make it clear: the Russian
public is not imperialist.
The concern for Russians abroad is also a posture in this sense.
Russia has done more for the Serbs, the Abkhaz and the anti-Dudayev
clans in Chechnya than for Russians abroad to date. We will see.
Maybe they will do more.
Russian nationalism does manifest itself in anger at outsiders. But
it does not result, so far, in solidarity, discipline or sacrifice
among Russians. Thus it does not have the consequences that, say,
Serb or Palestinian nationalism has.
New Reality, New Policy
The end of the sixty-year struggle against totalitarianism has
produced a new reality: the disintegration of states. Our experience
of this phenomenon, as with Chad in the 1980s or China in the 1930s
and 1940s, usually was incidental to solving more urgent problems.
Even in China, from the 1911 revolution to the Red Chinese triumph in
1949 the struggle was between strong state-building forces: the
Guomindang, the Japanese, the communists. Today, in the former Soviet
Union, there are no such forces, nor an ideology with remotely the
appeal of communism in intra-war China.
But if Russia and her neighbors seem fated for a period of anarchy,
it will be a tired anarchy; Russian nationalism is combative, not
imperial. The anarchy is unlikely to end in a traditional civil war
waged for ultimate stakes; after Afghanistan and in the wake of
Chechnya, Russians have little taste for fighting.
The United States should recognize that Russian combativeness is
easily discouraged. It reflects not a persistent desire to achieve
specific objectives but a need for recognition of Russia as a
society. When this yearning does create real dangers (for us or for
Russia itself), it should encounter obstacles, but these need not be
major to be effective. Nor is there any reason to say whether we are
responsible for them.
Thus, symbolism becomes the core of the U.S.-Russia diplomatic
relationship. On this basis, we should take great care not to ignore
or exclude Russia. We should look for opportunities to involve Russia
where we do not disagree; Somalia or Rwanda are examples. We should
avoid arguing in public or challenging Russia. In cases where we
disagree, it may be fine to agree to disagree, as Clinton and Yeltsin
did at the summit on Bosnia. Above all, we should avoid tests of will.
NATO expansion to the east is destined to be particularly divisive.
Pushing the alliance to the border of the old Soviet Union would be a
po werful symbol of Russian otherness, of its rejection by the West.
It is not that the inclusion of Poland, the Czech Republic, and
Hungary is a bad idea; in itself it is very useful. The problem is the
lack of a parallel "security structure" that links the West to Russia.
We have not had the imagination to devise something entirely new for
an entirely new epoch of history.
Not that we should rush to sign treaties with a disintegrating
Russian government, because it cannot commit the country and the
future. Only such agreements as can be fulfilled immediately and
verified by our own resources should be considered. An agreement to
destroy all of a certain category of nuclear weapons, for example,
might be such an agreement; if all are destroyed, none can reappear
easily. But treaties and agreements that require a disintegrating
Russian government to carry out a complex policy course involving
many bureaucracies over a long period of time are an invitation to
trouble. The major salt and start treaties of the past, and the
already-violated CFE treaty, are examples of what to avoid in the
future. If Russian generals do not obey a direct wartime order, why
should we expect them to obey the complex details of an international
treaty for years at a time?
More importantly, we should recognize that diplomacy is only a part
of the total relationship between the United States and Russia. The
Moscow government is so weak that major advances cannot be made by
diplomacy. The Russian position should be thought of as not only the
position of the Moscow government, but as that of the parliament, the
various ministries, the provinces and the larger Russian society. In
Chechnya, for example, it is the policy of the Moscow government that
is brutal and stupid; the position of Russian society is prudent and
humane. We are allowing politics to stand for the whole of our
relationship with Russia, in the totalitarian manner.
Since it eased the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the reunification
of Germany, which were valuable accomplishments, diplomacy has
achieved little in the post-communist world. We tried to save
Gorbachev and keep the Soviet Union together. We tried to save
"reform" by keeping Yeltsin in power. We have tried to resolve crises
in Bosnia and Nagorno-Karabakh by negotiations. So far we have failed
in every case. The disintegration of the post-communist state
machinery is a great impediment to diplomacy. While diplomacy skims
along the surface, the true shape of Russian reality is being forged
in the society and the economy.
Engagement and Its Limits
Despite the limited opportunities for diplomacy, the relationship
between the United States and Russia is still of vital importance. It
is hard to remain detached from great upheavals and the attendant
human suffering, as our long misery in Bosnia shows. But an
understanding of the situation and a consistent policy can shape and
limit our commitments. A proper response requires both a recognition
of the need for continued engagement and a sense for its limits.
The case for engagement is compelling. The former Soviet Union is an
enormous reservoir of power; American interests will be hurt if this
power is exercised by the wrong hands. At the moment, the crux of the
problem is the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and the
facilities and human skills that attend them. We cannot predict from
one year to the next who will control these weapons and, in the
current situation, the precedents and prospects are not happy ones.
The Soviet Union has a long tradition of employing nuclear threats,
and in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis this almost led to war.
Brandishing nuclear weapons may prove a tempting and easy response to
the mood of resentment and discontent now rising in Russia.
Beyond nuclear anxieties, there is a long-term danger that Russia
will again become an aggressive state dominated by an extremist world
view. A combination of sustained disorder, suffering, and humiliation
tends to produce this outcome. There is little movement in that
direction now, but the seeds are visible; common sense suggests a
need to maintain what influence we have over the anarchy in which
they may grow or wither. By doing so we are buying an insurance
policy; we develop the understanding, connections and capabilities to
act more energetically should a major threat develop. (Not allowing
our armed forces to atrophy is another part of this insurance policy
and an essential part of a strategy for dealing with post-Soviet
disorder.)
However, engagement with the Russians should not be merely a matter
of containing current or future threats. The debate over post-Cold
War foreign policy has been strangely fixed on threats while ignoring
opportunities. And there are enormous opportunities in any vast area
that is opening up and undergoing fundamental change. Young Americans
are moving to Prague, Budapest, and Moscow in droves because they,
unlike the old foreign policy elite, sense that is the last frontier.
The need for engagement should be disciplined by calculating
possibilities for American influence; it is easy to both exaggerate
and underestimate. If administration officials argue that the
International Monetary Fund must give a six billion dollar loan to
Russia to keep Yeltsin in power, to keep Chubais in the government,
or to keep "reform" going, they are trying to make us believe in
magic. The major decisions in Russian politics will be made for
Russian reasons, and the Russian anarchy is too complex, too rapidly
changing, and too poorly understood for us to influence it in a short
term, tactical way.
But we do have power, enormous power. We have what the people in the former Soviet Union want: hard currency, efficiency, high technology, a normal life (as they consider ours to be) in global civilization. The trick is to figure out how to convert this raw power into usable influence. We are lucky that the power we have is used more easily on the post-communist societies and economies than on the central state, for these are the most important part of the U.S.-Russia relationship.
Policy toward Russian society should aim at deepening ties with the West and strengthening first of all those people and groups that are democrats and capitalists. But we should by no means abandon Russian nationalists or define them from the beginning as our opponents. The Chechen war has exposed the emptiness of combative rhetoric; the shared opposition of democrats, communists and nationalists reveals how misleading these labels can be. Our strategy should be to lead Russian nationalism in a constructive direction, not to fight it. Economic policy should be guided by the principle that privatization is in American interests, even if it is by theft or goes to the old communist nomenklatura, because it will slowly create interest groups that will defend those interests, undermine the possibility of any return to effective despotism, and lay a basis for oligarchic or even democratic politics.
American and Russian Means
There are a variety of tools for achieving these policy ends. The tools may seem weaker or less directly effective than those familiar from the Cold War, but their number, both in the West and in Russia, is substantial, and includes both governmental and private implements.
The most important mechanisms for strengthening Russian civil society are the National Endowment for Democracy and the political, labor and business institutions associated with the endowment. In the conditions of the disintegration of the Russian state, these become, in principle, our main policy instruments toward Russia. The endowment's success is hard to measure. But my judgment would be that, by promoting democratic groups such as Sergei Kovalyev's Moscow Helsinki Group, it has certainly helped create the Western, democratic tone of public debate that is so visible during the Chechen War. Given these facts, there is an astonishing disproportion between the level of our support to the endowment - it has averaged thirty million dollars or so per year - and our support for the programs and organizations, such as international financial institutions and the State Department, that address the needs of Russian society less directly and successfully.
The formal mechanisms for improving Russian economic life are not perfectly suited to the task. Our government, like others, tends to prefer to distribute aid through international financial institutions, because they make foreign aid less controversial. But these institutions exist primarily to extend aid to well-established governments, in return for changes in government policy. Most of the post-Soviet governments are not strong enough to implement these kinds of conditions; the World Bank or IMF must either bend their standards - as is becoming their habit with these countries - or confirm the prevalent anti-Western belief in the existence of sinister outside forces trying to control Russia. But the fundamental problem is that of giving aid to a disintegrating state; we should be giving most of our aid to individuals and groups who support democracy and free markets.
In this regard, bilateral aid is superior. While our aid programs need trimming and reorganization if they are to be responsive, we must be careful not to destroy foreign aid. Given a cast of disintegrating states, money is the most powerful lever we have to shape the evolution of the former Soviet Union. Few realize how much can be achieved at how small a cost: the United States taxpayer employs hundreds of thousands, in fact millions of people to negotiate with, make policy toward and potentially defend against these countries; for every such person we employ in Washington, we could employ about fifty people in Russia, or five hundred in Georgia, for the same cost.
But of course the big economic impact will come from Western businesses. Even with the bleak prospect Russia faces after the Chechen debacle, there are enormous amounts of money to be made in the former Soviet Union. Still, cooperation between business and government could be greatly improved. Businessmen tend not to be very political, which means they often misread the political context which determines whether they can work in a country or not. On the government side, diplomats do not like to work for American business.
Disintegration and chaos paradoxically open up avenues for progress. Not only are the provincial governments of greater relative importance, but the various bureaucracies in Moscow now offer windows through which the winds of American influence may blow.
Already important, the power of the provinces is waxing. It is based not on formal government regulation but upon the realities of post-Soviet society: kinship, friendship, local respect, mutual advantage and the power to intimidate others or pay them. Power on the playground or the drill-ground is more real than power in any bureaucracy. Consequently, we need to be in touch with all the regions of the Russian Federation, and to have policy toward each, even if it consists of deciding that what happens there doesn't matter to us. At the same time, we need to do this without further discrediting the Moscow government. The principal purpose of our contact with the Russian provinces is not to conduct diplomacy, but to channel foreign aid, support democracy-building trends and target Western investment to areas where we could make a significant difference. These might be areas where democratic sentiment is strong or areas that have better than average chances of prospering in conditions of a disintegrating Russia, or preferably both.
The ultimate aim is to create nuclei of relative order, prosperity and pluralism that can play a growing influence on the evolution of Russia as a whole. In the likely conditions where pan-Russian economic planning has collapsed and where state subsidies no longer protect the poorer areas, some regions simply are going to be much more successful than others. The energy-rich areas and those on the periphery, where local economies will be lifted by contact with the dynamism of the European and Chinese economies, are likely to be more successful.
The most important determinant of success will be whether markets and the forces of the international economy are allowed to function or are arrested by xenophobia, nostalgia for central planning, autarchic dreams, over-regulations, high taxation, or the attempt of political elites to control all wealth. Democracy, too, will determine success: regions able to give residents some sense of sharing in the community and to control the enormous popular resentment that now exists in Russia will be more stable. Moscow, itself a region, will retain importance meanwhile as the seat of central authority and a center of democratic strength.
With time, the gap between successful and failing regions will widen, and the successful ones will become more powerful and objects of imitation. They will be able to induce the failing regions and the weak central government to cooperate with them on their terms. If Moscow reasserts its authority someday, the more successful regions will retain a disproportionate role in the composition and character of the government that then emerges.
American policy toward Russia's provinces must be guided by a ruthless sense of priorities. Inevitably, some provinces will sink, because their rulers are hopelessly mired in communist ways of thinking or because they have no resources, no fertile soil and no place anyone would choose to live. Our own resources are limited, and they will only count if we concentrate them in a few areas that are particularly promising. Fortunately, our modest means will be relatively powerful by the provincial standards; those in danger of sinking will be eager for any help they can get.
This principle should also guide our dealings with the various Moscow bureaucracies. We can choose our partners, within limits. For example, Kozyrev supports the Chechen war, while Prime Minister Chernomyrdin clearly has worked against it. Now that Vice President Gore has opened a channel to Chernomyrdin, why should we reward Kozyrev by giving him things that Yeltsin wants? Give them to Chernomyrdin and let the channel between Kozyrev and Secretary of State Warren Christopher languish. This "bureaucratic targeting" would allow us to make the most of our financial support: aid to the central government should be reduced drastically, but not eliminated, and we should disburse no aid where we do not approve the specific bureaucratic units that will control it, pay it out, and benefit from it. All of this would offend an ordinary government in ordinary times, but these times are strange.
What Russians and Americans both need most is a better definition of what is going on in the post-communist world. Because Russian combativeness is more a matter of symbolism than of concrete gains for the disintegrating Russian state, how events are labeled, which policymakers sometimes dismiss as mere "rhetoric," becomes a vital part of policy both for Russia and for us. Russian combativeness and Western intolerance both are rooted in the myth of a painless, "velvet" revolution. When Gorbachev undertook perestroika, and the West welcomed it, we all wanted change, but without disruption. This was an impossible hope. The great longing of the people in the Soviet bloc was for a normal life, and diplomats likewise have tried to return to a normal foreign policy. In Russia's situation, this meant a nineteenth-century foreign policy; as one of Yeltsin's advisers told me gleefully this fall, "This used to be called the Great Game, and we're back in it!" But the nineteenth century is over, and the diplomatic attempt to return it has only created more instability around Russia's periphery, and in Moscow, as the Chechnya muddle shows again.
In the West, the reaction to disorder, whether in Russia or in Bosnia, tends to be to isolate and abandon the area. Yeltsin's Chechen war already has produced new declarations that Russia is hopeless; this reaction is destructive to our own interests.
The collapse of communism is a vast historic transformation, equal to the collapse of the ancien regime in France or even the end of the Roman Empire in the West. Moreover, this transformation occurs not in a static world but one simultaneously undergoing other transformations, such as those connected with the new global economy. The whole world, not just the ex-communist world, is entering a new age; indeed, the former Soviet Union, where all the old patterns are being broken at once, may enter the new age first. The disorder of the post-communist transformations will not subside easily or quickly. While these transformations are occurring, they are the largest events in our world, at once too promising and too threatening to leave us detached.
Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr. is research professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Essay Types: Essay