A Tired Anarchy

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.

by Author(s): Charles H. Fairbanks

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.

Essay Types: Essay