Reacting to the Bush Administration's promise of "realism" in dealing
with Russia, a former Clinton Administration official observed that
"the issue is what is reality." Indeed it is.

Clinton Administration officials had their reality: Russia was on the
path to liberal democracy, albeit stumbling occasionally; it was
building the institutions for an effective market economy, although
suffering periodic setbacks; its large arsenal of nuclear weapons
entitled it to major power status, but at the same time the United
States could help to reduce significantly the number of operational
Russian warheads and to improve the security of Russian nuclear
weapons and materials. This assessment prompted the Clinton
Administration to believe that Russia could be induced to play a
constructive role in the Balkans, with NATO, in Iran, and elsewhere.

The Clinton reality also implied alternative futures, partly
depending on U.S. policy choices. Although never voiced as an
official view, defenders of the Clinton policy outside the
administration emphasized that Russia's progress toward liberal
democracy and economic recovery required constant U.S. support, both
with technical assistance and by encouraging generous IMF and World
Bank loans on relatively easy terms. If such support were not
provided, it was intimated, a "red-brown" Russian dictatorship would
emerge, analogous to Weimar Germany's transformation into Hitler's
Third Reich. The assumption in either case was that Russia would soon
return to the ranks of the great powers, and prudence dictated making
an effort to avoid getting on Moscow's future enemy list. If one
accepts this line of reasoning, then it can be claimed that the
Clinton Administration's assistance programs to Russia made political
sense despite their questionable economic results.

What different reality might the Bush Administration see if it takes
an unvarnished view of contemporary Russian realities? It will see a
Russia that has indeed become a "normal country", which is to say a
member of that large majority of states in the world that are weak,
poor, and ambling along their own paths headed nowhere in
particular--certainly not to liberal democracy or effective market
economies. It will also see that the security of Russia's nuclear
arsenal is beyond significant U.S. influence but, nonetheless, that
nuclear weapons do not make Russia a great power. It will see that
Russia can engage in trouble-making diplomacy in the former Soviet
republics along its periphery, but that it is not capable of major
military operations.

More broadly, it will also see that Russia cannot be expected to act
constructively in international affairs because most of its elite
class angrily blames the West for Russia's drop to third rank
status--although the real culprit is the legacy of seven decades of
Soviet rule. Western magnanimity cannot change Russia's foreign
policy behavior for the better; it is far more likely to make it
worse. Moreover, Russia as a "normal country" in this special sense
of the term may remain in a sharply reduced condition for a very long
time. It is liable to become, in Jeffrey Tayler's colorful phrase,
"Zaire with permafrost."

What if we were reasonably certain that Russia will not soon return
to great power status, either as a liberal democracy or a
dictatorship? What if we knew that no amount of aid and assistance
will produce a dynamic and effective Russian economy? What if, in
other words, Russia simply cannot "make it", with Western help or
without it? What is the evidence for this possibility, and what would
be the implications for U.S. policy?

Russia's Institutional Deficit

Formally speaking, of course, Russia is "making it" to democracy in
the sense that it holds periodic elections in which opposition
parties participate--as long as their chances of winning are scant.
Russia has not yet, however, seen an incumbent president voted out of
office. If "making it" means achieving "liberal" democracy, then
evidence accumulates that Russia is not making it and may not do so
for many decades.

Its formal democracy notwithstanding, Russia lacks genuine
constitutionalism. A true constitutional system requires a durable
elite consensus on: rules for making rules; rules for deciding who
rules; and individual rights that no ruler can violate or abridge.
Russia is developing no such consensus. President Vladimir Putin's
carefully managed succession to President Boris Yeltsin made clear to
all but the most obtuse observers that a genuine breakthrough for
constitutionalism in Russia is not about to happen. Most of Putin's
key programs--taking all effective political power away from the
Federation Council (the upper chamber of the parliament); imposing a
new administrative level over the regional governments; conducting a
genocidal war in Chechnya; and methodically reducing media
freedoms--appear to violate the Yeltsin constitution of 1993, calling
to mind the Russian proverb that "paper will put up with anything
written on it."

The unreconstructed optimist will object, insisting that all this
signifies merely a temporary setback on a difficult road, a claim
frequently made by Clinton Administration officials as well as
numerous analysts and scholars in think tanks and universities. In
truth, however, Russia is on some other road altogether, and this
truth really should not surprise us.

If in 1992 one had taken the best theories available on how liberal
democracies come to be, and what kind of state institutions are
required for effective economic performance, one would have known
that Russia's chances of taking the liberal path were poor. After a
decade of post-Soviet experience, one should now conclude that the
chances are trivial to none, barring a major dislocating shock such
as a major war or revolution, or the very improbable emergence of the
kind of elite consensus that produced the Meiji restoration in Japan.
Russia is now locked into a mix of old and new institutions that
daily becomes more costly for the Russian elite to escape than to
perpetuate. This predicament is neither unusual nor abnormal; most
countries are trapped in the "weak state" syndrome and locked into
economically ineffective institutions. Abnormal countries are the
wealthy liberal democracies located almost exclusively in North
America, western Europe, and a few rim-land states in Northeast Asia.

Political theory, and not just Russia's experience, supports these
observations. It does so by clarifying the link between political
institutions and economic performance.

Clearly, all liberal democracies have market economies where, despite
sometimes large welfare programs, prices are set largely by supply
and demand. But the reverse is not true; not all market economies
exist within a liberal democracy. Indeed, the rim-land economies in
Asia, some of their leaders have insisted, perform well precisely
because they do not have liberal democratic governments. Thus, the
connection between good economic performance and liberal political
institutions has been a disputed one, and the mixed empirical
evidence allows disparate views their day.

Mainstream Western economists have shed little empirical light on
these disputes, preferring instead the many simplifying theoretical
assumptions of neoclassical economics. This is why individual Western
advisors to the Russian government in 1992-93, including officials of
the IMF and World Bank, ignored such complications. Ironically, the
winner of the Nobel Prize for economics in 1993, Douglass C. North,
who had published the last of several books in 1990, confronted
directly the question of the connection between political
institutions and economic performance. In his 1993 acceptance speech,
he called attention to the relevance of his work for the Russian
case--evidently in vain.

A few of this Nobel laureate's central ideas should have given pause
to U.S. policymakers as well as to those economists advising Russia.
First, North observed that if neo-classical economics could explain
economic development, then all countries, whatever their level of
development, would be moving on converging axes toward a common
efficiency level. But, as North's research shows, they do not converge. The
reason, he suggests, is that they have different institutions, and
institutions greatly affect economic performance. Looking at the
historical record, those institutions arising from the Glorious
Revolution in 17th-century England--especially stable property rights
and a judiciary largely independent of royal power--work best because
they greatly lower transaction costs, facilitating profitable
commerce and investment.

North stresses that effective "third-party enforcement" is critical
for achieving sustained, long-term economic growth. In his words,
"third-party enforcement means the development of the state as a
coercive force able to monitor property rights and enforce contracts
effectively, but no one at this stage in our knowledge knows how to
create such an entity." This should have been a chastening
observation for those Western advisors and policymakers who marched
with such confidence to help Russia. Did they "know how to create
such an entity"? These economists clearly did not, and as U.S.
policymakers funded hundreds of technical assistance programs for
implementing the rule of law, privatization, accounting methods, and
so on, it soon became clear that neither did they.

Even as the importance of institutional reform began to dawn on many
observers, certain critics of the Clinton Administration's policies
insisted that there was a "better" or a "right" way to help Russia.
But they, too, failed to show how one can induce the Russian state to
perform an effective "third-party enforcement" role. It is difficult
to see how the key Western governments, even had they pursued some
wiser set of aid policies, could have overcome Russia's political and
economic development problems without an extremely intrusive overhaul
of virtually the entire institutional structure of the Russian state.

This is not to say that there are no examples of U.S. policy
producing effective "third-party enforcement" in other countries;
there are, specifically, in Germany and Japan after World War II. The
Marshall Plan itself did not cause this development in Germany.
Rather, the U.S. military occupation government did. True enough,
roots for an autonomous judiciary existed there and, to a lesser
degree, in Japan, but it was the conscious use of a military
occupation to sponsor precisely the institutional developments called
for that explains the success. An effective Marshall Plan for Moscow,
then, would have required a military occupation as well as hundreds
of billions of dollars--and might still have failed, for Russia has
no heritage of inchoate liberal institutional development toward
effective constitutionalism that both Germany and Japan had achieved
by the turn of the 20th century (or that the Baltic states and the
countries of central Europe have today to one degree or another).

In the absence of a compelling refutation of North's interpretation
of the historical evidence, we should recognize that no available
U.S. policy can put Russia on the path to a liberal political system.
Nor is North alone in suggesting such a conclusion. Political
scientists have long noted the powerful role of political culture, a
concept that embraces, among other things, what North calls "informal
institutions" in a society. Robert Putnam has exposed centuries-old
continuities of political culture that block the effective use of
public funds in parts of Italy today. Notwithstanding the "third
wave" of new democracies since World War II, the number of truly
liberal democracies--that is, those that have fully instituted a
constitutional breakthrough, or have become what Robert Dahl calls
"mature polyarchies"--has not grown much since 1945. By Dahl's count
in 1989, Germany, Japan and Austria were the only new ones, solidly
rooted through more than two decades of existence. Today he would add
Spain and Portugal as third-decade democracies, and perhaps South
Korea and Taiwan as second-decade candidates. The special conditions
that favor the emergence of liberal democracies exist in fewplaces,
meaning that the prospects for additional ones are not promising.
Judged against Dahl's prerequisites, Russia would appear to have
dismal prospects.

Russia's Path Dependence and the Weak State Syndrome

Those poor prospects can be best described with the aid of North's
concept of "path dependence." At its most basic, path dependence
means that once a country has put in place a set of
institutions--formal and informal--they are difficult to change. The
origins of the "path dependence" idea are varied and old. Historians
as well as political scientists have long noted the propensity of
social and political arrangements to persist in countries, devising
in some cases theories of historical continuities. Samuel
Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis is a recent example of
such an approach. In technology, the idea has acquired more
specificity, of which the typewriter keyboard is one example. The
"QWERTY" key layout was designed to slow down fast typists so that
the keys did not pile up on early models. As mechanical designs
improved and typewriters became capable of handling very high-speed
typing, the less efficient keyboard layout was retained because the
costs of retraining typists and buying replacement keyboards were
judged too high. We are thus still "locked in" to the "QWERTY"
layout, and similar "lock-ins" can be observed in other technologies.

North applies this concept to institutional development. When England
broke out of its old institutional pattern based on absolute
monarchy, it established a far more effective economic path, one that
also took hold in Holland at about the same time. Meanwhile, France,
Spain and other European countries remained on their old paths,
chained to absolutist institutional arrangements that yielded far
less effective economic performance. They remained locked in for a
long time, trailing the booming English and Dutch economies for the
next three centuries.

If we view Russia today through the "path dependence" concept, what
do we see? First, the legacies of Soviet institutions--e.g., informal
rules on property rights, on the place and purpose of courts and
legal practices, taxation, accounting systems and others--remain
strong. Second, in the absence of an effective "third-party
enforcement" role by the state, alternative methods of enforcement
have begun to take root. Contract disputes are more often settled
informally despite the fact that new laws and legal remedies are
formally available in the courts. Private security firms will readily
handle such disputes, resorting to rough measures and even murder if
necessary. Much of the old Soviet bureaucracy remains in place,
allowing poorly paid civil servants to supplement their incomes
through "rent seeking" and the misappropriation of state property and
funds. Regional governors and mayors have many means for extracting
wealth from their citizens, not as legitimate taxes but for lining
their own pockets.

With every month that passes, the mix of Soviet and post-Soviet
institutions becomes more costly to reverse. Several studies of the
business "oligarchs" who gained enormous wealth during the Russian
privatization process have noted that although the oligarchs
initially supported reform, they began blocking further reform once
they themselves got rich. They prefer the murky arrangements that
made them wealthy to an environment of effective "third-party
enforcement" by reasonably honest state officials. Thus they persist
in asset stripping, moving capital abroad, and tax evasion, although
such practices yield terrible economic consequences for the country
as a whole.

Boris Yeltsin and many of his close supporters in the government came
to share an interest in the status quo as they themselves learned to
profit from it. Putin claims to be committed to reining in the
oligarchs in order to break these perverse institutions, but will he
create better institutions or merely displace the first generation of
post-Soviet oligarchs with his own supporters? His primary bases of
political support--the military and the intelligence services--would
lose their strong claims on the state's resources if more effective
institutions existed. This and other evidence has persuaded the
Swedish economist, Stefan Hedlund, that a post-Soviet equilibrium has
already been reached, signaling the virtual permanency of these
institutions; i.e., a path- dependence lock-in has already occurred
in Russia that promises very poor future economic performance. To
escape from it, Russia would have to experience powerful changes in
the pay-off matrix that now exists for businessmen and state
officials. A few top leaders alone are not likely to be able to
change it, even if they wished to do so.

Two aspects of Russia's reality should now be clear. First, the
country will not become a liberal democracy within the next several
decades, maybe much longer. Second and concomitantly, the Russian
economy will perform poorly for the indefinite future. Taken
together, these judgments support a third one: Russia is now locked
in the "weak state" syndrome.

Weak states are best identified by the ineffectiveness of their tax
systems. The cost of effective modern government is somewhere in the
range of 20-30 percent of GDP, and most tax revenue must come from
direct taxes. Direct taxes, however, are the most difficult to
collect, requiring strong local government, communications, reliable
local police and courts, and so on. An effective tax system is
normally good evidence that the appropriate state structures and
institutions exist and operate reasonably well. Because indirect
taxes require less administrative capacity, and export-import taxes
very little indeed beyond control of airports and seaports, they are
less compelling measures of state strength. Finally, weak states tend
to be directly in business; that is, they are "statist" states.

The clear majority of states in the world belong to the weak state
category and, once in it, escape is the exception, not the rule.
Military dictatorship is no salvation; on the contrary, praetorian
regimes are almost always manifestations of the weak state syndrome.
Many of President Putin's policies--"statism" in some parts of the
economy, arbitrary use of violence and intimidation, as in Chechnya
and against the media and the oligarchs, and changes in state
organization by unconstitutional processes--stand as illustrations of
Russia's status as a weak state. Worse, such policies will perpetuate
Russia's "weak state" condition and perhaps weaken the country
further.

Russian Reality and Russian International Behavior

A congenitally weak Russia is very unlikely to play a constructive
role in international affairs. The Western goal of integrating Russia
into the international economic and political mainstream is laudable,
but will prove exceedingly difficult to achieve. The wounded pride of
Russia's elite cannot be assuaged by restraint, such as no more NATO
enlargement, or by inclusion in organizations like the G-7 or in
peacekeeping operations in the Balkans. Moscow is more likely to use
such opportunities to cause trouble rather than to cooperate. Under
the new code word for anti-Americanism, "multipolarity", Putin has
focused most of his diplomatic attention on China, India, Iran, Iraq,
Libya, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam. In other words, Moscow
apparently seeks to lead those countries with poor economic
performances and repressive social and political institutions, and at
the same time to participate as a great power in Western
international organizations. This is obviously a losing strategy. It
cannot in this manner aggregate sufficient power to counterbalance
the United States--its ostensible aim--but will certainly irritate
Washington and most capitals in Europe.

Moreover, Russia simply does not have the political or military power
to act constructively on a global scale. It is strong enough,
however, to menace its weak and newly independent neighbors, and it
manifests an increasing appetite for doing so. Some will object to
this evaluation, citing Russia's nuclear weapons as the key to its
strength. But that objection is both perverse in the kind of Russian
behavior it encourages and dubious in the measure of power it imputes
to nuclear weapons.

The perversity is that expressions of Western fear about nuclear
weapons tempt Russian leaders to exaggerate their value and to charge
a higher price for their own good behavior. The Nunn-Lugar monies
have achieved some modest results, but they probably have also lined
the pockets of military leaders, nuclear power officials and other
bureaucrats. The Russian government simply lacks the administrative
capacity to use those funds effectively and neither good intentions
nor the use of Western firms under contract to dismantle the weapons
can change this reality. Thus, the more Western leaders worry openly
about Russia's nuclear weapons, the more Russian leaders are likely
to fan public fears in the West as a way of securing access to funds
that they can skim for personal gain.

Besides, Russia stands to lose as much from nuclear proliferation as
the United States, more so in the cases of Iran, Iraq and North
Korea. That the Russian government actually supports nuclear programs
in some of these countries is evidence that it often cannot act even
in its own national interest. This says very disturbing things about
what one can expect any Russian government to do, even if it promises
to be cooperative.

Nor do nuclear weapons really convey all that much power to their
owners. The Russian military cannot invade Europe or South Korea or
Japan with nuclear weapons alone. That would require a large
offensive capability in conventional forces. Nor could nuclear
weapons add much to a defense against a concerted Chinese invasion in
the Far East. Nuclear weapons do nothing for Moscow in its war in
Chechnya and its involvement in the periodic civil war in Tajikistan.

In today's strategic context, the coin of nuclear weapons has
declined in an objective sense, but this new reality has yet to be
fully recognized. The United States, therefore, is wise to accelerate
that devaluation by simply treating these weapons as not all that
important anymore. The administration is therefore quite right to
want to extract the United States from the constraints that arms
control treaties and the negotiating processes that achieve them
impose against unilateral deep U.S. reductions and the restructuring
of its arsenal. The record of nuclear arms control to date has mainly
been to codify increases in weaponry or, at best, to drag out the
time required to achieve reductions. Much can be said for making
those reductions early rather than dawdling through another ten years
of U.S.-Russian negotiations. If Russian leaders prefer to keep their
large, aging and increasingly unreliable stockpile of nuclear
warheads for years to come, let them.

The Weimar Analogy Myth

If Russia's nuclear arsenal is in truth a wasting asset, can Russia
restore its conventional military power? Can it overcome its military
weakness, as would be essential for the Weimar Germany analogy to
make any sense? The answer is "no"; it cannot do so soon because the
defense ministry effectively evaded systemic reform under Mikhail
Gorbachev, successfully continued this strategy under Yeltsin, and
appears to be following it against Putin, as well. The personal
interests of senior military officers take priority over reversing
the decline in Russian military power, something that would require
large personnel reductions, particularly in the senior ranks, radical
organizational change, and new relations with Russian defense
industries. As long as the generals succeed in blocking reform,
therefore, Russian conventional military forces will remain weak. The
path-dependence phenomenon has a grip on the Russian military just as
it does on the Russian economy and political system.

What if systemic military reform is nevertheless successfully imposed
from above? Russian military power will still remain greatly
constrained, first by the country's weak economy and second by
adverse demographic and health trends. Russia is not Weimar Germany,
with a healthy, young, expanding population. It does not have a
world-class industrial economy that has competed effectively in
global markets, as Germany did. It lacks a proud, unified and
professionally competent officer corps, as the Reichswehr had. A
strong Russian military, rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the
Soviet collapse, is improbable. Still, a modest increase in military
capabilities is possible--enough to pose a menace to those CIS
countries that resist Moscow's dictates.

What, then, are we to make of the apparent increases in the Russian
GDP over the past year? Is the economy truly recovering, as senior
Russian officials claim and as some Western observers believe?

In the first place, all measurements of the Russian GDP are suspect.
Russian officials have repeatedly and skillfully manipulated GDP
figures to please the IMF. But they have done this so often that it
is now doubtful that they themselves know which figures are accurate.
Second, sharp reductions in imports of Western consumer goods after
the 1998 financial crisis undoubtedly boosted domestic production in
some sectors, but it did not lower transaction costs or improve
factor productivity across the board--the real keys to economic
growth. Meanwhile, commodity exports, especially oil at rising world
prices, have brought more Western currency into Russian coffers, but
this may only be temporary, and probably harms Russian institutional
development. Countries living on oil export revenue, such as Nigeria,
Venezuela and others, are notoriously poor at tax collection and
mired in official corruption--key symptoms of the weak state
syndrome. The present oil boom, therefore, is double-edged for Russia
as well as for the other CIS oil-producing states, both a boon and a
menace.

Moreover, the apparent good news on the Russian economy is in fact
mixed. The Russian State Statistics Committee calculated capital
flight for the first quarter of 2001 to exceed foreign direct
investment by about $400 million. That means that for every foreign
dollar coming in, more than one dollar flees the country--not a good
sign for growth. Moreover, most foreign investment comes from Cyprus
and the Netherlands, favorite places for Russians to hide their
capital abroad. In other words, most of the money coming in is not
really foreign investment, but recycled plunder from oligarchs and
others. Western investors actually provide only a tiny fraction of
the capital coming into Russia, hardly a vote of confidence in the
Russian economy. Finally, President Putin's economic advisor, Andrei
Illarionov, has consistently warned that the failure of institutional
reforms portends economic stagnation, and that growth in 2001 is
likely to be close to zero. Optimistic reports on Russian economic
performance, therefore, should be taken with a heavy dose of
skepticism.

Russia is no longer a great power and is unlikely again to become one
over the next several decades. Treating it like one is neither in
Russia's interests nor the West's. It increases Moscow's incentives
for restoring a repressive regime, for abolishing the modest gains
Russians have made in human rights, and for squandering resources on
mischief-making in the international arena. Those Western enthusiasts
for continuing to treat Russia as a great power are harming the very
Russian citizens they claim to admire and desire to help. Ten years
of Western policies based on that assumption, among others, have now
disillusioned a large part of the otherwise pro-Western Russian
intelligentsia. Well-meant financial largess is now widely seen as a
CIA-directed scheme to weaken Russia. Creating a special arrangement
for Moscow with NATO has given the Russian defense ministry one more
lever for pumping up anti-American popular sentiment.

Many Russian scholars, journalists, and intellectuals clearly see the
perversity of the present situation. The human rights activist,
Sergei Kovalev, has explained how Putin successfully misled the
Russian intelligentsia to support the war against the Chechens, a war
that Elena Bonner has called "de facto genocide." Mincing no words
about the policies of the present Russian regime, she sounded like
her famous husband, Andrei Sakharov, condemning the Brezhnev regime
in the 1970s. Grigorii Yavlinskii, one of the few liberal politicians
who survives in the present parliament, describes Russia's regime as
a "pretend democracy" and warns that it is an illusion to believe, as
some Russians do, that the West will not allow a return to
dictatorship in Russia or its continued economic and social decline.
Putin's de facto censorship policies, however, are slowly reducing
the number of Russian leaders who speak candidly on political issues.
Anyone in the West truly wanting to know "what is reality" in Russia
could do worse than listen to such voices--while they last.

Still Living with a Sick Bear

Many years ago in these pages, Henry S. Rowen wrote about the
challenge for U.S. policy of "living with a sick bear." Rowen's was
perhaps the first crystallized argument that weakness emanating from
Moscow could come to occupy U.S. concerns as much as or more than
Russia's strength. As it has turned out, a more or less permanently
weak and trouble-making Russia is still a serious problem for U.S.
foreign policy, but it is no longer a first-order strategic
challenge. Other problems greatly transcend it: maintaining Western
security alliances; managing international economic institutions;
global pollution and other environmental issues; and preventing
eastern Europe from lapsing into economic and political crisis. While
Russia remains important, it is not all that important.

Adapting U.S. policy accordingly does not mean slamming the door on Russia, but it does suggest fewer U.S. efforts to shape Russian domestic developments through economic and technical assistance programs. It also requires candor about human rights and anti-liberal behavior by the Russian state. But the major change should come in how the, United States treats Russia in the international arena. U.S. policy toward Russia should depend largely on whether Russia pursues a constructive foreign policy rather than one that engages in posturing and trouble-making diplomacy. If it chooses the latter, Russia would be slamming the door on itself.

One may anticipate an objection to this approach. It may be so that Russia is weak, but would it not be wiser to treat Russia as a great power than as a marginal one, lest we feed its resentment and be surprised by its still possible return to great power status? In light of the record of the past decade, the question is better put the other way around: Is it not wiser to end the pretense about Russia's status today even if we believed that it would return to great power status tomorrow? A decade of experience of including Russia in the circle of major powers has not been rewarding. Nor has it brought increasingly favorable Russian sentiments toward the United States--which is really no surprise, for the record of countries rewarding their former enemies for benevolent treatment is not good.

Even some observers who share the assessment of Russia presented here may fear that it is too harsh to present openly, too discouraging for the Russians to hear. They may worry that it will cause them to give up hope, to believe that they are permanently excluded from the West, and to behave even worse in the international arena than they otherwise might. But progress in relations between Russia and the West cannot be built on falsehoods and pretenses. It has to rest on genuine mutual understanding. One imperative understanding is that seven decades of Soviet rule are mostly to blame for Russia's present predicament, not the West. And escaping that predicament requires facing the facts, not pretending that things are otherwise by restoring the Soviet national anthem, insisting that the Baltic states voluntarily joined the Soviet Union in 1940, stirring nostalgia for the Soviet Union, and failing to purge the old nomenklatura and its KGB associates. Germany--the Western part, at any rate--was quickly and succ essfully reintegrated into the international order after 1945 because it faced the facts, not because the United States refrained from publicly acknowledging the truth about German fascism and its crimes.

Still others may object that the case made here is too fatalistic. Admittedly it has a strongly deterministic character. Yet it does not entirely rule out a role for political voluntarism of the sort that Yavlinskii and a few others have urged Russian leaders to exercise. Rather, it explains what these leaders are up against and how poor the odds are that they can quickly produce a significantly different outcome. Russian leaders may eventually find a way to escape their institutional path, and to alter it significantly for the better. Political leaders have broken their countries from path dependence in a few cases. But if it happens in Russia, as it did in Meiji Japan and Kemalist Turkey, it will be a homegrown affair, not one induced by Western ventriloquy, largess, pretenses and toleration of international mischief-making. It is more likely to happen earlier, moreover, if the United States insists on building its relations with Russia on the uncomfortable realities of the present day. In the meantime, th e West can help marginally by keeping Russia's international role to a level commensurate with its power; to do otherwise would be to reinforce Russia's perverse path dependencies.

William E. Odom is a senior fellow at the Hudson. Institute and an adjunct professor of political science at Yale University. Lt. General Odom (USA, ret.) served as director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988.

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