Kitabı oku: «Statecraft», sayfa 8
WHY ECONOMIC REFORM HAS FAILED SO FAR
What is clear from this sketch of the tangled events of the period between the proclamation of reform at the start of Yeltsin’s presidency and its effective abandonment some time before the end is that the IMF lacked the knowledge and the means to effect the major changes required to bring free-market capitalism to Russia. All they could be expected to do – and what they should have tried to do – was to support positive moves from within Russia and refrain from supporting negative ones. Having lost the only real opportunity to achieve transformation of the Russian economy by those who believed in the project, Westerners consistently overrated the prospects of half-baked reform at the hands of halfhearted reformers. The idea that a government run by Viktor Chernomyrdin, let alone by Yevgeny Primakov, could be relied upon to pursue the same objectives as Western economic liberals was laughable. Yet the rhetoric was always the same: ‘reform’ could only be achieved by more Western money and still greater Western forbearance.
The errors of wishful thinking were compounded by a failure to understand that the Russian economy depended upon Russian power structures. If the power structures remained inimical to reform, reform would simply not occur.
Without a proper rule of law, honest administration, sound banks and secure private property, it is not possible to create a free-market economy. President Yeltsin is often criticised for giving in to political pressures and slowing down or sidestepping the necessary appointments and measures. Perhaps someone with a less mercurial personality would indeed have made a difference. But politicians have to find backing if they are to make changes. If Yeltsin could not gain the support he needed among an increasingly disillusioned electorate he had to find it from the powerful figures that have come to be known as the ‘oligarchs’. With no previous experience of patience being rewarded, the Russian people became increasingly unwilling to go on making sacrifices.
The conditions in which most Russians live are hard indeed. They deserve better. But some of the statistics bandied about are somewhat misleading. When we hear (as we sometimes do) that the country’s economic output is about half the level of a decade ago or that real incomes have fallen sharply, it is worth recalling that economic statistics under the Soviet Union were hardly more reliable than any other official statements. Moreover, a country that produces what no one wants to buy, and whose workers receive wages that they cannot use to buy goods they want, is hardly in the best of economic health. Comparisons between living standards in the last years of the Soviet system and living standards now suggest that measured by the most important criterion – what people are actually able to spend – there has been some improvement. *
Yet it has been very uneven, and there have been terrible moments. The harshest pressures, as public expenditure controls were imposed, were upon people dependent on the state for their living. There were large arrears in payments of wages and pensions and sharp falls in their value, as inflation soared. Probably the worst blow has been against savings. Nothing does more to undermine a society than when savers are impoverished, as the history of Germany’s Weimar Republic shows.
But perhaps the most telling indices of misery are not economic but social – for Russia is sick, and at present it is really no exaggeration to say that it is dying. As one expert has remarked: ‘No industrialised country has ever before suffered such a severe and prolonged deterioration [of public health] during peacetime.’† Death rates in Russia are nearly 30 per cent higher than at the end of the Soviet Union – and public health was already bad in Soviet times. Deaths are now exceeding births by well over half, some seven hundred thousand a year. Life expectancy for Russian men today is about sixty-one – worse than Egypt, Indonesia or Paraguay. The main causes are extraordinarily high rates of heart disease and injuries, in which the common factor is apparently alcohol abuse. Life is simply so bad that the bottle offers the only refuge.
What makes so many ordinary Russians this depressed is, one suspects, not just frustration at their own prospects, but also anger at the way in which a minority flaunts huge wealth acquired from successful speculations, insider trading, cartels and gangsterism. The root of the trouble was that in Russia in the early 1990s, when reform was under way, there was no middle class in the European sense. Tsarist Russia never developed a substantial middle class anyway, but what there was fled or were impoverished or killed by the Bolsheviks.
Under communism no such class could emerge and ‘bourgeois’ values were, naturally, deplored. There were ‘managers’ of course. But these were just political bureaucrats, not entrepreneurs and owners. Consequently, those who found themselves with the knowledge, means and position to flourish in the early years of reform were the class of apparatchiks.
The prospering of this elite renders in the eyes of many Russians the mere notion of ‘reform’ suspect and its proponents odious. And though they are wrong, who can blame them?
Beneath the formalities of memoranda, declarations of intent, statistical projections and neatly typed balance sheets, a series of struggles for power have been conducted. Among the most important players have been: the bureaucracy; the armed forces, whose frustration at their penury has on occasion threatened the security of the state; the magnates, in control (directly or indirectly) of Russia’s vast natural resources, particularly oil, which they bought cheaply and then obtained licences to sell at much higher international prices; and banks, which performed none of the functions of normal Western banks, but rather bought up in rigged auctions the shares of privatised companies.
In fact, a kind of economic theatre of the absurd was functioning well before the 1998 crash. Industries, which because of their inefficiency were incapable of making a profit, were kept afloat because their bosses used influence and connections to escape paying taxes to the government, gave worthless promissory notes to their creditors and often remunerated their workers in barter. The absurdities of the Soviet system were being recreated. As the joke ran in those times (referring to the fact that both industrial products and industrial wages were effectively worthless): ‘We pretend to work – they pretend to pay us.’ But now, as often as not, no one was paid. Such are the circumstances in which – in spite of the fact that 70 per cent of industry is notionally in private hands, that consumer prices have been deregulated and that a return to socialism is probably impossible – we have to conclude that economic reform has so far largely failed.
One of the most crushing verdicts on what has occurred is that of the economist and current adviser to President Putin, Andrei Ilarionov:
… [S]ince the summer of 1992, with few exceptions, the political struggle has not been over whether the government should implement more liberal or more interventionist economic policy. The real struggle has been over a different issue: who or whose team (group, gang, family) would control the state institutions and instruments that control the distribution and redistribution of economic resources … The only distinction among the groups participating in the Russian transformation was their ability to camouflage their deeds to make them suitable for public consumption in Russia and abroad.*
The West cannot behave as if this were not the case. We have to learn from our mistakes. We have to face up to their consequences. And we have to do better.
Developments since the crash of 1998 have provided Russia and the West with a breathing space. As one would expect after a dramatic fall in the currency, Russian goods are now cheaper and exports have soared. The economy has been growing again (by 5.4 per cent in 1999 and 8.3 per cent in 2000). The trebling of oil prices has also benefited Russia, one of the world’s major oil producers, and the government is now raising US$5.5 billion annually from the energy sector.
These favourable conditions offer a new opportunity to tackle the fundamental obstacles to prosperity. As a basis for future action to shift Russia back on course towards becoming a ‘normal country’ I suggest the following:
There must be no more self-deception. If the people and policies dominant in Russia at any time are opposed to real reform there should be no financial cushion provided by the West or the IMF. Such aid is worse than useless – it’s doubly damaging, because it associates the cause of reform with failure
We must keep the long-term goal in view, which is to create a real free-enterprise economy based on sound money, low taxes, limited government and above all a rule of law. Barely a start has been made on achieving these things. And while the foundations are rotten, so will be the economic edifice
While connections, corruption, crime and cartels form the basis of the Russian system there can be no true freedom and no genuine democracy. The West must speak the truth about this openly to the Russian people
We have to stop regarding the only people who matter as being the political and bureaucratic elite in Moscow. Russia is naturally extremely rich – with major deposits of coal, oil, gas, timber and strategic minerals. But its greatest potential wealth lies in the millions of young would-be Russian entrepreneurs. They must be helped to understand what capitalism is about – and what it is not about. Above all, perhaps, we have to be patient. Today’s Russians face the Herculean task of undoing the harm done, not just by seventy years of Soviet communism but by previous centuries of autocracy. And ultimately only the Russians themselves can perform that task.
RUSSIA AS A MILITARY POWER
If almost a decade down the track from the end of Soviet communism we were now dealing in Russia with a ‘normal country’, that is a stable democracy with a functioning market economy, the West could afford to take a relaxed view of Russian military power, strategic interests and political intentions. Of course, even in those happy circumstances, the operation of the balance of power in Europe and possibly Asia would mean rivalries and tensions between Russia and the United States and its allies. But such problems would be more manageable and the reactions of Russia more predictable.
The worst error, as always in dealing with Russia, is naïveté. The Clinton administration initially sought to treat Russia as a ‘strategic partner’. But, however important Russia remained in its own backyard, the Russians had neither the will nor the means to enter into any global partnership with the United States. Moreover, Russian Cold War rhetoric between 1995 and 1997, when it tried and failed to block NATO’s expansion to take in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, revealed the emptiness of any such project. This, it will be recalled, was when President Yeltsin warned: ‘NATO will get as good as it gives. We have sufficient deterrent forces, including nuclear forces.’*
For as long as they could afford to do so, the Russians also frustrated Western aims in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. If Russia was supposed to be the West’s partner there no one seems to have told the Kremlin. As a result of NATO’s Kosovo air campaign against the Serbs in March–June 1999 Russia suspended all military contacts with NATO. But most revealing of the emotional temperature among Russia’s military and political elite was the threatening language they again used. The chief of the General Staff pointed out that he supported ‘the use of nuclear weapons to protect Russia’s territorial integrity’. The chairman of the Defence Committee of the Duma helpfully suggested that the state’s strategic concept should be amended to include the option ‘to deliver pre-emptive nuclear strikes’. Another retired general demanded Russia’s withdrawal from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
The fact that the Russians acquiesced in Kosovo and eventually seem to have helped bring President Slobodan Milošević to the negotiating table reflected their weakness rather than their good will. Above all, it reflected their economic weakness, for the IMF was about to release a further tranche of $4.5 billion over eighteen months when the campaign began. Even then, the Russian generals (with or without the knowledge of President Yeltsin) sent Russian troops to seize Pristina airport, for the sake of swagger, so risking with no apparent concern a major international confrontation.
Russia has for centuries grown used to compensating for its economic underdevelopment by means of its military strength. For the Soviet Union, particularly in the last decades of its existence, such an approach was the only means of remaining a superpower. Today’s Russian leaders appear to have inherited something of that outlook.
But only something – for although it has over a million military personnel, and its defence spending still probably runs at over 5 per cent of GDP, the state of Russia’s armed forces as a whole is pitiful.* Non-payment of wages or payment in kind has left soldiers and sailors in some areas forced to grow cabbages or to engage in black-marketeering to avoid starvation. Morale and discipline are generally bad.
This has made some Russian generals and politicians keen to maximise the effectiveness of their most sophisticated weaponry. Both President Yeltsin and President Putin have emphasised the central importance of Russia’s nuclear defence. In November 1993 Russia’s new military doctrine both ended the previous Soviet pledge of ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons and outlined more flexible options for their use. In April 1999 President Yeltsin responded to the opening of NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia by holding a special meeting of his Security Council on the subject which he opened by stating that ‘nuclear forces were and remain the key element in the national security strategy and Russia’s military might’. Mr Putin chose to make one of his first visits as President to a centre for nuclear weapons research at which he told his audience: ‘We will retain and strengthen Russia’s nuclear weapons and its nuclear complex.’ The symbolism and the message were clear.
Russia has been concentrating on the development of a new generation of missiles and warheads, while seeking to extend the life of existing weapons systems. The most important new programme is that of the SS-27 Topol-M Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). Russia’s problem is that the cost of maintaining any kind of nuclear parity with the United States is likely to be prohibitive, given the rate at which Russia’s existing arsenal is becoming obsolete.
President Putin was widely praised in the West for having secured the Russian Duma’s endorsement of the START II treaty. He has more recently called for further substantial reductions to America’s and Russia’s nuclear arsenals. The driving force for these proposals is penury rather than mere goodwill. But they may well make sense all the same. For as long as Russia continues to hold a nuclear arsenal which it cannot afford properly to maintain, the rest of the world will be at risk of such weapons falling into the wrong hands or of an accidental launch. Furthermore, Russian scientists and advanced technology must if at all possible be kept in Russia to be productively redirected, not put up for sale to the highest international bidder.
Another potential worry for the West is posed by the former Soviet Union’s chemical and biological weapons capability. Such weapons are notoriously difficult to detect by ordinary verification techniques. They can be easily hidden, as we know from Saddam Hussein’s activities in Iraq. They can also be developed alongside or under cover of ordinary commercial, civilian processes. Three Russian officials have been reported as saying that Russia has twenty-four poison gas factories, six of which it plans to destroy and eighteen of which it has either converted or will convert to non-military uses.* Unfortunately for us, the Soviet Union’s biological weapons programme was very closely integrated into ostensibly civil programmes of research. There are worries about how far the necessary disentanglement has gone. Above all, however, it is the possibility of such weapons developed covertly in a Russian laboratory falling into the hands of rogue states or terrorists that is the main worry.
In the end, it is probably upon the massed if uneven ranks of the Russian army that any credible projection of Russian power depends. At present Russia’s armed forces are demoralised and their resources depleted. But it would not be wise to assume that this will always be so. The Russians are traditionally a martial nation. While it is most unlikely that Russia will ever again be a global superpower, it will remain a great power – too big to rest content within its own borders, too weak to impose itself far beyond them. All of which makes for troubling instability.
But the West has to cope. How?
We must never forget that Russia has a huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. So some of the most important Western aid programmes are those, like the Nunn—Lugar programme aimed at ensuring proper oversight of Russia’s nuclear weapons, which satisfy our own security needs. Indeed, in all our dealings with Russia, the right approach is to put our security interests always and everywhere first
We must try to persuade Russia that its willingness to sell military technology to rogue states may well rebound against Russians – both for reasons of basic geography and in view of Russia’s problems in its relations with much of the Muslim world
Finally, we dare not take Russia for granted: the seeds of danger are often planted in the soil of disorder, as the world has learned to its cost before.
NATIONALITY PROBLEMS AND THE ‘NEAR ABROAD’
Russia is a huge country that covers eleven time zones. Its border – thirteen thousand miles of it – is the longest in the world, running from Europe to Eastern Asia. This gives Russia a unique opportunity to interfere in other countries’ affairs – particularly because so many of its neighbours were for so long subject to Moscow’s domination.
The fact that Russia’s nation-building and its territorial expansion were in tsarist times so closely interlinked means that Russia has traditionally regarded its frontiers as fluid not fixed. The Cold War stasis lent an appearance of permanence to the Soviet Union’s external perimeter. But with the disintegration of the USSR into Russia and fourteen other independent states that situation ended.
Russia itself felt vulnerable, and this vulnerability explains some – though not all – of the subsequent aggressive rhetoric and manoeuvring. Some twenty-five million ethnic Russians remained living outside the frontiers of the new Russian Federation after the winding up of the Soviet Union. For Russians this diaspora’s existence is both a reason and an excuse to claim the potential right to intervene in other former Soviet republics. On the other hand, the population of the Russian Federation is far from homogeneous: almost 20 per cent of the Federation’s inhabitants are non-Russian. The loyalties and aspirations of these non-Russian nationalities are among Russia’s least soluble problems.
In facing up to such problems, today’s Russian Federation and its neighbours find themselves once more living in the sinister shadow of the old Soviet Union. Stalin’s policy towards the peoples of the USSR was a mixture of calculation and spite. Altogether he uprooted some two million non-Russians, about a third of whom died directly or indirectly as a result, and deported them to Central Asia and Siberia. There was also a planned movement of Russians in the other direction, out of the Russian heartlands, to take up industrial and other jobs in far-flung but important parts of the Soviet Union. These Russian minorities enjoyed a (relatively) privileged existence. Indeed, a policy of promoting Russian interests against those of other nationalities, while trying to avoid any upsurge of ‘bourgeois’ Russian nationalism, was an important part of Moscow’s policy towards the Soviet Empire.
Of course, it failed, and long before the end anyone outside the Kremlin knew it. Surely one of the most memorably stupid pronouncements of any Soviet leader was Leonid Brezhnev’s of 1972 on the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the USSR: ‘The national question, as it came down to us from the past,’ affirmed Brezhnev, ‘has been settled completely, finally, and for good.’* Within twenty years nationalism would have helped abolish the Soviet Union ‘completely, finally, and for good’. It remains to be seen whether it will do the same for the Russian Federation.
Against such a background, it is not surprising that ethnic and national suspicions are easily generated. In the years after the end of the Soviet Union a series of crises erupted in the territories of the Russian Federation and its neighbours. The common factors were threefold: Russia’s concern for the Russian minorities in what it called, in a phrase with alarming overtones, the ‘Near Abroad’; Russia’s attempts to use the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as a means of re-integrating the former Soviet republics into a Russian-led confederation; and Russia’s struggle to control its own nationalities and their subordinate republics and regions.
Each region has had its own distinctive features. In some areas stability has returned. In others the outlook is uncertain. And in some of the latter the implications for the West are important.
Western countries have naturally been most concerned with events on Europe’s – and now NATO’s – eastern flank. The fate of the Baltic states was immediately bound up with that of the Soviet Union. One of the most reassuring acts of the new regime of Boris Yeltsin was his statesmanlike acceptance that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – which had only been snatched by the Soviet Union by force and fraud under the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact in 1940 – had the right to be independent sovereign states. The difficulties which subsequently arose about the Russian minorities – particularly in Estonia and Latvia where they represented about 30 per cent of the populations – were a direct result of the previous Soviet policy of swamping the local population with Russians. Naturally, the Estonians and Latvians were determined to restore control of their countries and their culture, which left Russians disadvantaged. Tensions are real and could still become extremely dangerous.
Left to themselves, the Baltic states will increasingly gravitate away from Moscow and towards their Scandinavian neighbours. These highly advanced, extremely talented and profoundly European peoples see themselves as part of the West and want closer integration with it. Russia has no right to stand in their way. Post-imperial hangovers affect all former great powers and are also a headache for their neighbours. It is perfectly understandable that Russia is concerned to secure decent treatment for its Russian minorities in the Baltic states. But it cannot expect to determine their potential orientation.
For our part, Western countries have to make this clear to Moscow, so as to reduce any Russian temptation to bully. The best way to do this will be to take the Baltic states into NATO. The timing, though, is important. We should always aim to inform the Russians of our intentions well in advance and try to reassure them that our actions pose no threat to Moscow’s interests. President George W. Bush was, therefore, right to signal very clearly before he went to Slovenia for his first meeting with President Putin that he believed that the Baltics must indeed be brought within NATO.* It will be necessary to reiterate this at some point, so that Moscow is not misled into thinking that its cooperation in the war against terrorism has won for it a veto on NATO’s expansion. But when we do take the final step, bringing the Baltics or indeed any other state within the Alliance, we should know what we mean and mean what we say – for, let us never forget, NATO membership is not merely symbolic. It implies that we would fight to preserve the territorial integrity of each and every member state.
Equally important from the viewpoint of Western interests is the future of Ukraine. There was rather more excuse for the Russians to begrudge Ukraine its independence than the Baltics. Kiev was, after all, from the ninth to the twelfth centuries the centre of Kievan Rus, the predecessor of the Russian state. Large numbers of Russians still regard Ukraine as part of Russia. Mainly Orthodox Eastern Ukraine feels closer to Russia than does the fiercely independent west, which is predominantly Uniate. Potentially serious disputes between the new Ukrainian state and Russia existed as regards the fate of the Black Sea fleet and the future of Crimea. The fact that in the first years after independence Ukraine made even less progress along the path of economic reform than its Russian neighbour also raised questions about the country’s prospects and indeed viability.
The government of President Kuchma, whatever its other shortcomings, in fact managed to resolve most of Ukraine’s outstanding problems with Russia. A Ukraine is emerging which recognises its historic ties with its eastern neighbour, but which also looks to the West. Ukraine is large enough – with fifty-one million people – and potentially wealthy enough – its soil is rich, though its economy is in terrible shape – to be a pivotal country in Eastern Europe. It is thus also important to us in the West. Ukraine is not to be treated as falling within a Russian ‘sphere of influence’. Rather, a strong Ukraine will act as a buffer between Russia and NATO. That would also probably be good for both parties.
In order to plot a path of independence, while seeking to resolve disputes as amicably as possible, Ukraine has vigorously resisted Russian attempts to turn the CIS into a pale imitation of the Soviet Union.* At the other extreme, Belarus’s President Lukashenko has consistently sought to reunite his autocratically ruled state with Russia in a new political, military and economic union.
Most of the other former Soviet republics have pursued a path somewhere between the two, often altering course according to the requirements of the moment. The five Central Asian Republics were all initially keen to join the CIS. None of them had been used to controlling their own affairs, which had been planned from Moscow, and their economies were still heavily dependent on links with Russia. But as the years have passed, other developments have affected their orientation – developments which are of some importance to the West.
First, the ethnic identity of the peoples of Central Asia has assumed greater significance. Four of the five states’ populations – the majorities in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – share a common ethnic origin with the Turks. Although Turkey does not share a border with these states, it is active in the region and its influence as a prosperous, powerful, Westernised state is likely to grow.
Second, in the aftermath of the collapse of communism Islam has assumed much greater importance. It provides a rallying cry against corruption and abuses of power in Central Asia as elsewhere.
Third, partly in response to these perceived challenges – ethnic tension affecting local Russian populations, the influence of outside powers, above all the growth of Islamic militancy – Russia has reacted forcefully. There were thousands of Russian troops deployed in the Central Asian Republics long before the region became strategically crucial to America’s campaign against the Taliban. Moscow provided strong support to the Tajik government in its war with Islamic forces. It stations seventeen thousand Russian troops on the border. Russia also backed Kyrgyzstan with military aid in 1999, and has 2500 troops there. Fifteen thousand more are based in Turkmenistan.
In June 2001 the Moscow-led reaction to Islamic insurgency took what now appears a significant step further. Russia, China and the four Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan agreed a security cooperation treaty in Shanghai. It was explicitly aimed at resisting Taliban-sponsored terrorism across frontiers.*
Three months later, in the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington, the Central Asia region acquired a sharply increased significance. In order to launch campaigns against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, while seeking to minimise potentially destabilising operations from Pakistan, the US sought the cooperation of the states bordering Afghanistan to the north. The governments of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan agreed, the former with particular enthusiasm, to welcome US bases. Kazakhstan also allowed the US to use its air space. The Uzbeks and Tajiks had their own special reasons to cooperate against the Taliban. But, as the dominant power in the region, it was Russia’s support for US aims that was crucial in overcoming local fears and hesitations. (I shall examine later the implications of this for US–Russian relations in the longer term.)
