Russia's
Disintegration
Has to be Stopped
By JONATHAN POWER
STOCKHOLM--How it looks, it is often said, depends on
where you sit. The Financial Times reported General
Alexander Lebed's public letter as a serious front page
story. The International Herald Tribune relegated it to an
inside page with a headline that suggested it must be a
Lebed joke. The new governor of Siberia was reported as
threatening to take over a local missile base and its
portion of Russia's nuclear arsenal with it. Meanwhile the
Russian parliament, the Duma, has started once again
impeachment proceedings against Russian president Boris
Yeltsin. Always the number one accusation is that Yeltsin
initiated the breakup of the Soviet Union whose denouement,
if Lebed is not joking, is still to come.
No one inside Russia says it, but the truth becomes more
apparent every day if Mikhail Gorbachev had stayed in power
and engineered a gentler transition, not only would the
Soviet Union be whole, the wars in Chechnya, Tajikistan,
Georgia, Dagestan, Uzbekistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan would
never have happened and there would be no dangerous struggle
for oil and pipelines around the Caspian Sea. Not least, the
nuclear armoury would be safe, neither its rockets
dangerously rusting in their silos, nor its scientists and
materials being bought away by rogue states, nor likely to
fall out of the experienced hands in Moscow that control the
authority for use.
We could also surmise that the Soviet economy would have
made a slower but steadier conversion to capitalism, even
though Gorbachev's own economic policies were muddled, to
say the least. With one hand he was encouraging Grigory
Yavlinsky to try and win U.S. support for a rapid change
over to the market. With the other he was making
appointments, such as Valentin Pavlov as prime minister, an
unimaginative, old-school conservative.
When Gorbachev was invited to the Group of Seven summit
in London in June, 1991, the contradictions showed. And the
West, mistakenly, offered no financial carrot to help what
would have been, even in the best circumstances, a bumpy
transition to a smoother path.
The West made the same mistake with the new Yeltsin
regime in late 1991. Yegor Gaidar was appointed economic
overlord with a mandate for sweeping reform. But the West
held back, seemingly a prisoner to old beliefs that Russia
was somehow a future threat. The top westerner to visit
Moscow at this time was David Mulford, the U.S. Treasury's
undersecretary, whose mission was to find out who would pay
the debts of the old Soviet Union.
Either with Gorbachev or in the early Yeltsin years the
West could have swung the balance in favour of intelligent
reform and enabled a less fraught transition one with rather
fewer gangsters and monopolies, with less inflation, less
pauperization and thus much calmer political
relationships.
Now today we see the West in the persona of the
International Monetary Fund desperately trying to plug the
holes in a sinking Titanic. Whereas help before might have
cost, according to Professor Richard Layard of the London
School of Economics, 2% of of NATO's defense spending it
will now cost much more to right the ship. Moreover, instead
of being able to run down NATO as Russia prospered, disarmed
and continued its pro-western policies of the late Gorbachev
and early Yeltsin years, there is a slow but steady return
to the frigidities of the Cold War years.
Hopefully this is to overstate it. The "and" is too
easily hyped up. Two years ago at the time of Yeltsin's
heart operation, the papers were full of reports of Russia
as "disintegrating", "mafia-ridden" and "on the verge of
another revolution". Yet somehow the country weathered the
worst. To some extent the tales of suffering are overstated.
The dramatic rise in the death rate for men, for example,
should be balanced by the fact that women no longer have to
spend 20 hours a week in line, often in the biting cold.
Housing and heating are still incredibly cheap for most
people. Russia has deep foundations in industrial life, in
transportation and above all, in education, the great
legacies of the Soviet system. Because of its political
turbulence, Russia may seem to be falling behind its big
developing country rivals, China, India and Brazil. But once
it finds its political and managerial equilibrium it will
leave them far behind.
Nevertheless, the seriousness of the present crisis can't
be gainsaid. Sit where you want, the situation in Russia is
not, pace General Lebed, something to joke about. If the
West, working with Yeltsin it has no other choice for the
next two make or break years can't get it right then Russia
will cause the world as much mayhem and trouble in the 21st.
century as it did in the 20th..
August 5, 1998,
STOCKHOLM
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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