By the author of the new book from Oxford Univ. Press, "Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000." From the magazine more , "knee jerkoff Communists, " should read! Michael Pugliese
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020415&s=kotkin041502&c=1
Issue date: 04.15.02
Central Asia's New States: Independence, Foreign Policy, and Regional Security by Martha Brill Olcott (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 202 pp., $19.95)
Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory by Yo'av Karny (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 436 pp., $15)
The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture by Charles King (Hoover Institution Press, 303 pp., $39.95)
Ukraine: The Search for a National Identity edited by Sharon L. Wolchik and Volodymyr Zviglyanich (Rowman & Littlefield, 310 pp., $35)
Return to the Western World: Cultural and Political Perspectives on the Estonian PostCommunist Transition edited by Marju Lauristin and Peeter Vihalemm (Tartu University Press, 387 pp.)
Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals by Dominic Lieven (Yale University Press, 486 pp., $35)
I.
In Washington, the tenth anniversary of the Soviet collapse in December 1991 passed virtually unobserved. Once upon a time, like almost yesterday, Moscow served as the organizing framework of American foreign policy, and even of American domestic politics. Yet today's Russia has come to seem utterly peripheral--distracting for its nukes and poison gas, but supposedly ignorable, with a GDP (estimated at $350 billion) that is no more than the total fraud in the American health care system (and considerably less than the latest proposed Pentagon budget). True, the tragic rediscovery of the outside world by the accidental president-- the media handle Bush's non-gravitas the way they handled Roosevelt's legs-- induced the pundits to crow, again, about American "partnership" with Russia. But Washington under this administration hardly pays any mind to its formal allies. Partner with an ostensible basket case such as Russia, when NATO does not merit a single mention in the State of the Union address?
Yet consider that Washington has already fulfilled a long-held Kremlin fantasy of ejecting the Taliban and re-installing in Kabul the bulk of the Northern Alliance (whose multiple divisions manipulative neighbors find enticing). At a minimum, this turnabout means a rise in obscenely profitable transit "taxes" on the shipment of opium and heroin across Russia. And there is more. The revived American pipe dream of developing and shipping Turkmenistan's gas across Afghanistan remains a non-starter- -no more feasible now than under the Taliban; but the United States might well go after Saddam Hussein, and the sooner the superhawks topple him and re-open Iraq for outsiders (at zero cost to the Russians), the bigger will be the smiles of the cynically protesting Vladimir Putin and the independently powerful Russian energy lobby.
Russia's current trade with Saddam's regime is a pittance, stuck in the twilight zone of sanctions. But Kremlin vaults hold contracts with Baghdad-- they were inked in the late Soviet era--for the development of Iraqi oil reserves, not to mention promissory notes for an $8 billion Iraqi debt to Moscow, all presumably valid under a successor regime, courtesy of the Americans. Back in Soviet times, apparatchiks used to joke when queried about American subversion: who needs the CIA to sabotage the Soviet economy when you have the State Planning Commission? Kremlin wags now have a new one: who needs the Russian FSB (the successor to the KGB) when you have Paul Wolfowitz?
Is this the new new world order? A unilateralist American administration fig- leafing itself with a simulated "coalition" against terrorism, and a shrewd Russian administration reaping the collateral benefits? Yes and no. Putin found common cause with the United States on terrorism, pointedly declaring his support for "the West," but he often means Europe and especially Germany (big- time consumers of Russian oil and gas), and his "Western" strategic orientation came without renunciation of Russian commercial interests in Iran (or China, India, and the Korean peninsula). Our pundits heard what they wanted to hear. They also remain masters of the sideshow--perhaps the silliest aspect of their interminable debate about NATO expansion is the idea that such expansion matters, either for Eastern European security or for U.S.-Russian relations, which will pivot (or not) on economics.
On that score, Putin and his circle are waiting for the American administration to live up to its free- market fundamentalism. Moscow expects that Russian companies will be permitted to sell their substantially less expensive military hardware to an eager South Korea and to new NATO members, sales that thus far have not exactly been encouraged by the Bushies. Moscow further hopes that the American government will award Russian companies windfall contracts in the chimerical pursuit of a missile shield. And the Putinites seek Chinese-style access to the American domestic market, and thus an end to tariffs and the White House's manipulation of anti-dumping laws that shield American businesses against Russian competition in steel and shit (fertilizer).
So far, though, nothing's doing. Putin and much of Russia's elite are all biznes: for them, national greatness derives not from territory and tanks but from GDP. But they face obstacles, albeit misunderstood ones. The mammoth Soviet-era defense and security complex inherited by Russia is still jammed full: the empire vanished, but every pre-1991 office is occupied by a general or an admiral busy subverting desperately needed military reforms even as he ruefully condemns the American seizure of the initiative in re-arranging the strategic map of Inner Asia. Putin has not pressed for what no Kremlin leader could readily pull off--a radical overhaul of the military and security apparatus; and so he watches it decay (which is one type of long-term "reform"), and promotes mediocrities and pits them against each other, while using their loud stomping of sour grapes to demonstrate his own "reasonableness." More troublesome is the contradiction that he and his impressive (by contrast) cast of economic modernizers face between the need to promote political stability, for the sake of a predictable business climate and their own maintenance of power, and the need to deepen structural reforms against powerful interests, which can foil changes and provoke instability.
As for the Bushies, they know that Russia is an energy Goliath, with a transformed oil industry already capable of substituting for Saudi Arabia--on top of being the world's superstore for doomsday weapons. Yet White House politicos do not know how long they can or want to sustain the current global campaign in which Russia has been acknowledged as (temporarily) useful. Such a moment of unrealized opportunities--with half the Kremlin begging for business and arms deals while the other half mourns imperial "loss," and with Washington stumbling in search of a "homeland" defense that is somehow not encompassed by "national" security--seems a fitting time to take inventory of the entire post- Soviet space. And so I invite readers to a tardy tenth-anniversary-of-the- collapse "package tour," a comprehensive circuit by means of selected books. What emerges from such a tour is the outline of a subtle strategic shift, thus far independent of American policies.
irst, some preliminaries. The Soviet Union was congenitally illiberal, plagued with divide-and-rule malignancies and guilty of crimes that few other states could rival; but the post-Soviet Union has been, for most ordinary people, one step forward and two steps back. The Soviet empire's crack-up was not an overseas decolonization. Seventy million people (one in four) resided outside their national "homeland," if they had one at all; and countless families woke up to find that their relatives, and sometimes their own children, lived not some distance away but abroad, making separation permanent unless one pulled off a tricky apartment barter with others who were similarly blindsided, or gave up everything to start over as an immigrant.
Economic interdependence meant that even potentially profitable enterprises nose-dived when they were suddenly cut off from suppliers and customers in what became foreign countries, with different currencies and convoluted rules, or non-rules, for foreign exchange. Politically, independence has often resulted in still more arbitrary rule. When the Soviet Union was dissolved, it was replaced by ... the Soviet Union, only with more border guards, more customs posts, more "tax" collectors, more state "inspectors"--in short, more greasy palms outstretched. Estonia stands out as the great bright spot (approaching the level of Slovenia, the star in East-Central Europe). But elsewhere around the former Soviet Union, we see a dreadful checkerboard of parasitic states and statelets, government- led extortion rackets and gangs in power, mass refugee camps, and shadow economies. Welcome to Trashcanistan.
Let us be clear. Readers should look elsewhere for yet another wrongheaded slam of the market. What brought about today's widespread poverty was not "reform," but the near complete absence of the neo-liberal reforms, and behind that the long-drawn-out planned economy, which in addition to a non-market incentive structure and corruption produced powerful social constituencies and other facts on the ground that were utterly inimical to reform. But another cause of the ongoing misery, I think, is the idolatry of "national" self-determination-- usually attributed to Wilson, but equally attributable to Lenin--which continues to wreak havoc across the globe, as it did throughout the Cold War.
Although each case for a nation-state may appear just, and although those who have already achieved statehood may seem in no position to deny the same to others, "national" self-determination is too often a recipe for Trashcanistan-- for systemic malfeasance and economic involution, with convenient cover for the worst political scoundrels and their legions of apologists ("Sure it is a criminal regime, but it is our criminal regime"). By contrast, self-government within an existing entity-- or, better yet, an enlarged entity--where citizenship trumps ethnicity constitutes an altogether different proposition, especially when borders are open and markets are greatly broadened. What the European Union has been struggling mightily to transcend, the newly independent states of the dismembered Soviet Union have inflicted upon themselves.
The ironies here are exceptionally rich, for among the many causes of the Soviet state's demise, the most widely cited--I mean nationalism--was one of the least salient. If deep-seated nationalism brought down the multinational Soviet Union, as the analytical herd asserts, then what accounts for the profound post-1991 weakness of the nations and the nationalisms in almost all the successor states? A part of the answer is that they, too, are multinational. And equally important, of course, was the circumstance that when the Communist Party, which alone held the federal union together, underwent "reform" and disintegrated, the Soviet Union's internal Leninist nation-states became perfect vehicles for elite self-preservation and self-aggrandizement.
Consider further that despite the analysts' long-standing repudiation of the existence of a "Soviet nation," something funny confronts a traveler crisscrossing the former empire today: he encounters Sovietness at almost every turn. (Analysts had scoffed at the notion of a genuine East German identity, too, until post-reunification showed otherwise.) What should have been apparent from the Russian-speaking Jews who left the Soviet Union for Brighton Beach-- transporting and freezing a 1970s moment of Soviet culture--is no less clear from today's Russian-speaking populations in most of the newly independent states, as well as the self-declared additional Trashcanistans within them: the various post-Soviet nations emerged deeply Soviet. <snip> Facilitating cooperation in Caspian and especially Russian energy development should have been a no-brainer even before America's dependence on Saudi Arabia came into question. Opening the American domestic market more to Russia as well as Ukraine, the way it has been opened wide for Communist-led China, is a long- term strategy for promoting change and mutual benefit. And rather than stroke Russia or contrive some Russian relationship with a manifestly obsolete NATO, which neither side truly wants, the United States should transform existing bilateral programs for destroying and managing weapons of mass destruction into a formal strategic alliance with Moscow on non- proliferation. This is not a matter of "partnership" or "friendship." It is a matter of raw mutual interest. Skeptics and emotional Russophobes take note: no other country has Russia's capacity to counterbalance Saudi Arabia's role in Western energy supply. And no other country has Russia's capacity to arm rogue actors with weapons of mass destruction, by design or accident, and generally to play the role of spoiler simultaneously in Europe, Inner Asia, and East Asia--except, of course, the United States.
Stephen Kotkin teaches history at Princeton and is the author, most recently, of Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (Oxford University Press).