Moscow may question our efforts to build up Ukraine. Its concerns will be understandable. We can ease them by finding ways to be pro-Ukraine that do not appear anti-Russian and by stressing that our policy is based on the manifestly correct view that our interests and those of Moscow and Kiev will benefit from both nations’ being strong, open, and free.
• • •
While I have always been anticommunist, I have never been anti-Russian. As a friend of the Russian people, I understand that it is not easy for many Russians to accept that the country they considered their own no longer exists. I understand why they are concerned about the twenty-five million Russians who, when the Soviet Union collapsed, suddenly became foreigners in their own lands, where they are not always treated with kindness. I also understand why Russians do not wish indefinitely to supply energy and other raw materials at below-market prices to the other newly independent nations, who, after all, decided voluntarily to go their own way. Nostalgia is not a crime, as long as people do not act on it.
As a realist, I am aware that Russia is a big and powerful nation with armed forces stationed in many post-Soviet states. Many of these states are in turmoil—turmoil that Moscow did not invent—and it is well within Moscow’s national security interest to be concerned. I am also aware that when Yeltsin announced Russia’s interest in performing a special peacekeeping mission in the “near abroad,” he did not threaten to do it unilaterally, but instead asked for a U.N. mandate.
Advancing political and economic freedom in this tumultuous setting will not be easy. In fact, it may be impossible. But our vital interests require that we do everything we can to assist those who support these goals. James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, has graphically described the situation: “The failed coup in 1991 brought an unexpected simultaneous end to the largest empire—the Soviet Union; the most influential religion—communism; and the most powerful political machine—the Communist party of the Soviet Union.” He added that what we are seeing is “not a traditional evolutionary or even revolutionary change, but convulsive physiological actions of a large disturbed society occurring in the entrails—the bowels more than in the brains—extending a new vulgarity, banality, and corruption, yet providing its young democratic reformers, who are reviled as ’shitocrats,’ with the capability in which a new civil society is rapidly growing from the bottom up rather than from the top down.” He accurately noted that the profoundly significant difference between this revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution is that, in contrast to 1917, it gives more power to the people rather than to an elite class—a “vanguard” at the top.
Yeltsin and his reformers face mind-boggling problems. Russia’s $820 billion economy has shrunk over 10 percent for the third straight year. In 1993 inflation was at an annual rate of 900 percent, while decreases in oil production could transform a country with the world’s eighth-largest oil reserves into a net energy importer by 1995. There is incredible corruption. A report prepared for Yeltsin last year showed that almost all private enterprises and commercial banks in major cities must pay a tribute of up to 20 percent to organized crime. And while the murder rate in Moscow is still lower than that in Washington, D.C., street crime is up 26 percent, and crimes committed with firearms are up 250 percent. The once-proud armed forces are in disarray, lacking housing, adequate pay, and a mission.
Many believe that Russia may be too huge and too complex to be ruled by a democratic government. We are not talking about Poland or Czechoslovakia, where shock therapy has worked remarkably well. Russia covers eleven time zones and includes thirty-one republics, all of which have declared their sovereignty and some their independence from Moscow. There are 132 different nationalities. After seventy-five years of communist brainwashing, compared with forty-five years in Eastern Europe, there is no Russian free-market managerial class.
Yeltsin and his newly elected Parliament must revitalize an agricultural system that lacks the infrastructure to bring food to the marketplace before it rots, salvage a Russian ruble that makes Monopoly money look strong by comparison, convert a huge military-industrial complex to civilian purposes without triggering massive unemployment that could lead to revolution, and find adequate housing for hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers returning from Eastern Europe and from the other former Soviet states. Their task is immense—perhaps the greatest peacetime enterprise ever undertaken by one people. It is the work not of a year or a decade but of a generation at least, and the United States must remain intricately involved in the process if Russia is to have any chance of succeeding.
It is not surprising that many observers believe Russia is beyond hope. But they overlook what Yeltsin has already achieved in his short time in power. Anxious to find the bumper-sticker message of the December parliamentary elections, too many commentators decided that it was “Reform is dead.” The real message is far more subtle: Reform is different. In Moscow, too, there are many who are very proper in their embrace of classic free-market principles but go on to say naively that Yeltsin has failed because he has not applied them in Russia. In effect, the critics are asking Yeltsin not only to jump from A to Z in a matter of months but from A in Russian to Z in a language few people in Russia even know how to speak. A little tongue-biting is in order for leaders in the United States and other nations in the recession-ravaged West: We have plenty of trouble applying principles of free enterprise in our own countries. We do not have to deal with legislatures as fractious and fractured as the State Duma, nor with a nation that has no tradition whatsoever of economic freedom. And yet in every conversation I had in 1994 with Russian leaders, running the gamut from radical free-market reformers to doctrinaire communists, not one favored taking Russia back to a total command economy. Even the blustery, hard-nosed leader of the communists in the State Duma, Gennady Zyuganov, knows that the past is gone forever, much as he might wish it were otherwise. “No,” he told me, “we cannot cross the same river twice.”
One of the ablest leaders I met during my most recent visit was Russia’s forty-year-old Minister of the Economy, Alexander Shokhin, whom I had first met in 1993 when he was a junior minister. He is a rare bird among economists: He is an optimist. During our ninety-minute meeting he expressed hope about declining inflation rates tempered with concern about falling production. He bristled when I asked whether the departure from the government of radical reformers such as Yegor Gaidar and Boris Fyodorov meant an end to real economic reform in Russia. “We can have [the West’s favored] reformers in government and still have difficulty, while reforms can go forward without these people,” he said. “Perhaps you now have a more pragmatic team,” I offered. He smiled wearily. It was long past dinnertime, and he had come directly from a marathon meeting with the Prime Minister and others in the government who were trying to cut the budget enough to satisfy the International Monetary Fund’s strict requirements. “The team spends so much time convincing others that they are for reform,” he said, “that there is not much time for being pragmatic.”
The government of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin is not pursuing reforms as quickly as its most vocal critics in the West would like, but its efforts are not totally stalled. Privatization is being stepped up, as are efforts to cut spending and boost revenue. Those now guiding the reforms are more aware of the limitations imposed by Russia’s sprawling, nascent democracy. Purists may see a larger state role in electrical power, transportation, and other key industries than they would wish. But rather than criticizing the Russian reforms for their shortcomings, international supporters of the historic transition to freedom in Russia should praise the government for accomplishing as much as it has. Muscovites love to argue about politics. Everyone from Duma deputies to hotel clerks has an idea of the road that Russia should follow. So do Western diplomats and journalists, who supply endless advice based on their intimate grasp of undergraduate microeconomics and their kindergarten grasp of Russian politics. Finding the one road that Russia will follow will take t
ough, principled, pragmatic political leadership. That leadership will be distinctly Russian and will therefore not correspond to Western ideals. As a result, it will be more likely to succeed.
The best news from Moscow in the spring of 1994 is that no politician with any chance of attaining the Presidency wants to go back down the communist road. As Russians know better than almost anyone else in the world, the road to communism and a command economy is a dead end. After seventy-five years of godless communism, communism is dead in Russia. God is alive.
It is time to emphasize more of the other positives. All of Russia’s troops will have left Eastern Europe by the end of 1994. Russia signed a historic arms-reduction treaty with the United States to vastly reduce its nuclear arsenal. Yeltsin has drastically slashed the military budget. He has held the freest elections in Russian history. Russia is a very rich country, not a nuclear-armed Bangladesh. It is rich in natural resources. As Bruce Lincoln has pointed out, Siberia has a sixth of the world’s gold, a fifth of its platinum, a third of its iron, and a quarter of its timber. It is rich in human resources. Ninety percent of Russians are literate. Ninety-five percent of the workforce have the equivalent of a high school education. Russia has outstanding scientists and engineers. The first man in space was a Russian, not an American. Private enterprise is expanding far faster than anyone predicted, with over 30 percent of the Russian workforce now employed in the private sector. Over $1.6 billion in foreign capital has been invested in Russia since 1992.
The decline of the Russian economy began long before Yeltsin was elected President. The economy was terminally sick when Gorbachev came to power. He tried to treat a malignant growth with aspirin, beginning with political reforms rather than economic reforms—exactly the opposite of what the Chinese are doing and what the South Koreans, Taiwanese, and Chileans did.
The United States cannot afford to remain a bystander in the historic drama unfolding in the post-Soviet region. The great need is for a hardheaded evaluation of developments in the post-Soviet region and their relationship to crucial U.S. security and economic interests. The promotion of human rights and political freedom should be an important American objective. But the pursuit of freedom in the explosive Russian environment, with its unique traditions and circumstances, cannot be based on ideal Western notions that may have little to do with local circumstances.
We should not expect Russia to adopt American-style democracy. Serge Schmemann reported in The New York Times that the Russians are really looking for a third way—a blend of the Soviet welfare state with the prosperity of capitalism and some “dollops” of Christianity. “Communism was a grand failure, but it is hard to overstate how deeply it inserted itself into the hearts and minds of the nation,” he wrote. “Russia is locked in a fateful race between the collapse of its inherited structure and the growth of new ones; between nostalgia for the enforced security of its past and the promise of freedom only vaguely understood.”
Sergei Stankevich, a democratic member of the State Duma and a leading Russian political thinker, stresses that Russia was socially oriented long before communism and will therefore have a larger welfare system, closer to those of Germany and France, than the United States has. He pointed out that there are three models of capitalism—the American, the European, and the Asian. Each works because it conforms to its society’s principles and values. Russia will have to select elements from all models to get a successful, fully developed free market.
The United States has a vital interest in Russia’s becoming a democratic nation, and not just because Americans are freedom-loving people. Although the historical record does not always support the conventional wisdom that democracies never fight one another, a democratic system of checks and balances makes it more difficult to launch aggressive wars. American public opinion would be better prepared to support an enduring strategic relationship between the United States and Russia if Russia was seen as a nation committed to freedom and human rights.
In advocating democracy in Russia, we must be realistic and patient. If we demand that the Russians become instant Jeffersonian democrats, we may end up with people in power who are not democrats at all. Russia has to find its own path to freedom. “A shock-therapy-style economic reform at home and a foreign policy that responds to all of Washington’s preferences abroad,” Dimitri Simes has warned, “cannot in all probability be supported by a democratically elected Russian Parliament.”
The impressive showing by Zhirinovsky’s party, as well as by the communists and their allies in the Agrarian Party, suggests widespread disaffection with the policies of the current Russian government. Forty-three percent of those who voted in the December 1993 parliamentary elections selected these parties, while only about 15 percent supported Russia’s Choice, the bloc most identified with radical economic reform. These results should not be overdramatized. For weeks after the Russian election last December, every bizarre utterance Zhirinovsky made was front-page news in the West, as though the 23 percent of the vote his party received represented a majority rather than a fringe. To put his showing in perspective, in 1968 in the United States, George Wallace received 14 percent of the presidential vote, and in 1992 Ross Perot received nearly 20 percent of the vote. And yet Wallace was never perceived to be anything more than a regional-protest candidate, and Perot’s influence probably peaked in the election among Americans who refused to vote for Bill Clinton and yet wanted to vent their frustration about President Bush’s handling of the economy.
Zhirinovsky’s showing in Russia should be viewed in a similar context. Polls indicated that many voted for his party as a protest against Boris Yeltsin and the economy. To others, he represents Russia’s lost empire, just as Wallace was to many southerners the pride of the Old South. When I saw him in 1994, he told me that his most effective issue has been his promise to crack down on the so-called Russian mafia. Zhirinovsky has even less chance to be elected President of Russia than Ross Perot has to be elected President of the United States. For us to rethink our entire Russia policy as a result of his party’s limited success would be a major mistake. Centrist elements in Russian politics received a larger share of the vote in 1993 than Bill Clinton did in 1992. In view of the progress the Russian people have already made toward a free political system and a free economy, we should accentuate the positive rather than dwell obsessively on the negative in the unfolding Russian saga.
Still, the magnitude of the protest vote must be taken into account by Yeltsin if he is to succeed in governing democratically. And we should be sympathetic to his efforts to find the right balance between the requirements of economic reform and of politics. Confronted with fierce resistance from communist and nationalist reactionaries, the young and fragile Russian democracy must be able to defend itself. Temporary detours from perfect constitutional norms may be necessary, and some emergency limits on political expression may be inevitable. The United States supported some temporary restrictions on political activities in post-Nazi Germany. It is shortsighted and hypocritical when liberal American commentators go ballistic every time the Yeltsin government, under extreme circumstances, makes even minimal departures from Western-style democratic procedures.
The military only reluctantly supported Yeltsin against the now-defunct Parliament. They did not want to become involved in politics or to spill Russian blood. Yeltsin is keenly aware that their loyalty cannot be taken for granted. As a result, he has gone a long way to cultivate the military. He doubled officers’ pay in September 1993, promised more money for military housing, and also began to pay greater tribute to “patriotic” values. If Yeltsin gets involved in a confrontation with the new Parliament, his reliance on the military may become too great for comfort. Then the generals could become arbiters of power in Russia and demand a considerable price for their support.
Instead of developing a long-term policy with specific goals, the United States and the West have reacted crisis by crisis. Almost half a year elapsed after Yeltsin launched hi
s economic reforms before the West announced a major aid program, and most of that aid has yet to be delivered. Ignoring the problems in Russia may have been convenient because of short-term domestic political considerations, but it was disastrous for our long-term security interests. President Clinton has justifiably been criticized for his administration’s snafus in Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti. But he deserves credit from his critics as well as his supporters for recognizing the importance of the success of political and economic reform in Russia, for mobilizing Western support for economic aid, and for being the first major Western leader to speak up in support of Yeltsin during his conflict with the reactionary majority of the old Congress of People’s Deputies.
Our aid should be targeted to Russia’s emerging private business sector, not dying state-owned enterprises or government boondoggles. We should particularly channel more funds into loans to new small businesses, which will not only hire unemployed workers but also begin the essential accumulation of domestic capital. These principles too often have been honored only in the breach. Our efforts so far have been scattershot, uncoordinated, and ineffective. In 1994, not a single Russian leader had a positive word to say about the U.S. aid program. A recent Senate report said millions had been squandered. After World War II, the West created what became the Organization for Economic Development to oversee and coordinate the Marshall Plan. A similar organization should be created for Russia and the other former Soviet states. These mechanisms will assure the people of the West that their resources are not being wasted.
Aid from the United States and other Western governments has been supplemented by loans and grants from multilateral international organizations. Unfortunately, the International Monetary Fund has imposed draconian conditions on its loans. They are virtually impossible to meet. The approval in March 1994 of a $1.5 billion loan package was a classic example of too little, too late. Too often, IMF policies are based on normal conditions in a normal country. Russia’s case must be considered on a separate basis because the penalties of economic failure there are infinitely higher than elsewhere. There has to be a unique Russian solution to the unique Russian problem. The IMF must act like an international lending organization, not an international loan shark. It must be more willing to loosen its conditionality to fit Russia’s situation. If it does not do so, the United States should provide aid to Russia and other former Soviet states unilaterally rather than through international organizations, for which, as it is, we pick up over one third of the tab.
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