Johnson's Russia List
#8220
24 May 2004
[log in to unmask] and
[log in to unmask]
A CDI Project
www.cdi.org
#1
Wall Street Journal
May 24, 2004
Reform in Russia: Free Market, Yes; Free Politics, Maybe
Washington's Civic Dreams for Old Foe Fade as People Focus on Making a Living
A Dissident's Post-Soviet Path
By ANDREW HIGGINS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
MOSCOW -- At a meeting in the White House this year, Yegor Gaidar, former
acting prime minister of Russia and chief engineer of its exit from
communist central planning, faced a solicitous question. What, asked
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, might America do to lift the
flagging fortunes of Russia's liberal-minded democrats?
Mr. Gaidar gave a blunt answer: nothing. At least for the moment, he said,
the cause was lost.
For more than a decade, Washington and its favorites in Moscow embraced a
seductive theory: Free markets would anchor free democratic politics in
post-Soviet Russia by creating prosperity and property owners. Now
capitalism has vanquished communism across the former Soviet empire,
destroyed Marxism as a global rival to America's free-market creed and,
after years of turbulence, brought Russia robust growth. But Russians'
faith in Western-style democracy has withered. Liberal economics and
liberal politics, instead of being an inseparable tandem, have drifted
apart. Many Russians even see the two as at odds.
"Our assumptions were all wrong," says Michael McFaul, a Russia expert at
Stanford University who, in the Soviet Union's last months, worked on a
program to promote democracy in President Vladimir Putin's hometown of St.
Petersburg, then called Leningrad. "We all assumed that when the economy
began to turn around, most people would support liberal politics. They don't."
It's an unsettling turn for a place the U.S. has often cited, as it
occupies Iraq, as proof that democracy, with help, can triumph. Months
after the Iraq invasion, U.S. occupation authorities even invited Mr.
Gaidar and other East European reformers to Baghdad for tips on how to help
Iraq escape a legacy of dictatorship. Mr. Gaidar says Iraqis have to find
their own way, and he didn't recommend Russia as a model.
Russia's economy, now mostly in private hands and primed by high oil
prices, has grown steadily for five years, surging 7.2% last year. The
number of mobile phones, a crude barometer of confidence, doubled last year
to 36 million. The share of Russians who call themselves middle class
jumped to 48% from 28% in 1999.
Also distinctly on the rise is support for President Putin and his drive to
replace the cacophony of pluralistic politics with the calm of "managed
democracy." The former KGB officer, who once described a strong state as
part of Russia's "genetic code," in March won re-election in a landslide.
While relentless cheerleading by state-controlled television had something
to do with that, Mr. Putin clearly is in sync with the people.
Russia, he said when he first became its leader, "will not soon, if ever,
become a second edition of, say, the U.S. or England, where liberal values
have deep historic traditions." The oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, jailed
last fall on fraud and tax-evasion charges, recently said in a dispatch
from prison that while Mr. Putin is "neither a liberal nor a democrat," he
is "more liberal and democratic than 70% of the population."
Russia remains far from a Soviet-style autocracy. Outside of Chechnya,
where tens of thousands have died, Mr. Putin hasn't crushed political
opposition, only muffled it. The Kremlin keeps critical voices off
television but mostly gives them free run in print media, which have less
impact. Parliament, though stacked with yes-men eager to rubber-stamp Putin
policies, is chosen through elections.
In some ways, the push to strengthen Russian state power serves American
interests. It has eased one longtime U.S. worry: that a feeble, chaotic
Russia might leak nuclear know-how or even warheads. Moreover, Mr. Putin
sometimes deploys his authority to aid America, as when he aligned firmly
with Washington after the September 2001 hijack attacks and then, against
his advisers' counsel, acquiesced to a U.S. military presence in former
Soviet territory in Central Asia.
Such gains, however, mask a considerable hazard for America in a Russia
fortified by market economics but detached from other Western values. An
emboldened Russian security apparatus is flexing its muscles, hounding
human-rights activists, environmentalists and other independent voices.
Moreover, Russia -- along with China and other economically vibrant but
politically closed societies -- could show the world a potent alternative
to America's democratic recipe for success. "In retrospect," Mr. McFaul
says, "one of the great blessings of the Soviet Union was how poorly its
economy functioned." Now, he says, the "really scary scenario" is the
possibility that, one day, a thriving capitalist economy will serve an
aggressive, authoritarian regime.
Democracy, after a decade of steady advances around the world, has been
showing some signs of fatigue, even in regions that produced some of its
most fervent converts. According to a United Nations study, for example,
56.3% of Latin Americans now believe economic development is more important
than democracy, and 54.7% would support authoritarian rule if it solved
their problems. Four elected Latin American presidents have been forced
from office since 2000.
The dwindling Russian commitment to liberal democracy, like some other
risks the U.S. now faces, is partly one of its own making. In the first
post-Soviet years, Washington vested all of its hopes in Boris Yeltsin, an
erratic leader who also had a mighty thirst. (President Clinton described
Mr. Yeltsin in private as "better drunk than most of the alternatives
sober," according to Mr. Clinton's chief Russia expert, Strobe Talbott.)
But Mr. Yeltsin's instincts sometimes appeared far from democratic, as when
he sent tanks to shell a hostile parliament in 1993.
The U.S. also pushed Russia toward the shock-therapy of free prices and a
sweeping selloff of state assets. While the privatization succeeded in
rendering a communist revival impossible, it was laced with corruption,
created a few fabulously wealthy "oligarchs" and helped sour Russians on
Western values.
The Russian liberals whom America supported helped to discredit their
democratic cause by championing the flawed privatization, helping make
democracy, in some minds, a fancy word for fraud. In Russia today, Mr.
Khodorkovsky says, "the words 'liberalism' and 'democracy' are almost
swear-words."
Building a whole new political and economic order was a staggering task in
a nation that suddenly lost its empire, its identity and its bearings. "We
had a revolution, more or less peaceful but still a full-scale revolution,"
says Mr. Gaidar, who was acting prime minister in 1992-93 and then
economics minister. "In America, where the revolution [against England] is
seen as the start of history, revolutions are viewed as something nice and
romantic. But revolutions are terrible things.... Inevitably, people get
tired."
Russians support Mr. Putin's strong hand for mostly straightforward
reasons. The state has started paying pensions and salaries on time.
Oligarchs are running scared -- witness the jailing of Mr. Khodorkovsky,
Russia's richest man. And Mr. Putin, unlike Mr. Yeltsin, doesn't get drunk
in public and play spoons on the head of a bodyguard.
More complicated -- and vexing for liberals like Mr. Gaidar -- is a thirst
for order among Russians who cheer free markets but question the value of
free politics. "Russia doesn't need debate but growth," says Konstantin
Tublin, a publisher in St. Petersburg. "We need to limit the space for
political discussion."
An anti-establishment gadfly in the Soviet Union, Mr. Tublin now runs a
thriving business whose hit titles include "Give Me!" a teen memoir laced
with sex and drugs, and a brutal novel called "Head Crusher." The proceeds
pay for tennis lessons at a private sports club for his young daughter and
a Mercedes SUV for himself. He travels abroad, plans to buy an apartment in
London and rejoices in post-communist freedoms. But real democracy can wait.
Such attitudes, unthinkable in the euphoria of the early 1990s, signal a
return not to the Soviet past but to a powerful strand of Russian reform.
As the Soviet Union slouched toward oblivion in the late 1980s, Adranik
Migranian, a reform-minded academic, put forward a thesis in a journal of
ideas that appalled Western-oriented liberals: Russia couldn't leap from
totalitarianism to democracy but must transit through a long period of
authoritarian rule. Only then, he argued, could Russia prosper without
political and ethnic tumult.
Mocked then as a reactionary, Mr. Migranian today gloats at the disarray of
Russia's liberals, whom he calls "idiots completely divorced from reality."
He views Mr. Putin's tough rule as a "second chance to do what I suggested
before." Though not close to the Kremlin, Mr. Migranian coined its
best-known slogan: "managed democracy." He says he came up with the term in
late 1993 after Yeltsin aides complained about an article in which he
called a new constitution authoritarian.
His model is China, which he hails as proof that market authoritarianism is
a better recipe for modernization than market democracy -- and that harsh
methods are sometimes needed. The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 was
"absolutely correct," he argues, because "one billion people are more
important than a few thousand students shouting stupid slogans." China's
Communists, big fans of Mr. Migranian's theories, have translated two of
his books and regularly invite him to Beijing.
Other Russian reformers have looked to Chile, where Augusto Pinochet
overthrew a socialist government in 1973 and imposed radical market
economics in tandem with a brutal dictatorship. Among Gen. Pinochet's most
fervent admirers is Vitaly Naishul, a mathematician who in the 1980s wrote
an underground tract called "Another Life." Working then at the State
Planning Commission, he saw communism's failures up close and embraced
unyielding "Chicago School" free-market theory with a gusto that unnerved
even dissident economists.
In 1990, Mr. Naishul led a group of young Russian economists to Santiago to
discuss market reform and meet Gen. Pinochet, then still head of the
Chilean army. "He is a political genius," says Mr. Naishul. He praises
President Putin for realizing that Russia can gain from free-market methods
but "cannot copy Western democracy." One of the architects of Gen.
Pinochet's economic program, Jose Piņera, recently attended a conference at
Mr. Putin's country home.
Mr. Naishul has visited Chile five times. He has a medal, given him by a
Chilean economist, inscribed "Mission Accomplished." Overturning an
ingrained economic system, Mr. Naishul says, inevitably triggers pain and
resistance, and to continue, the effort requires either political consensus
or force. "The level of repression depends on the level of resistance," he
says, adding that Russia was initially slowed by foolish mimicry of Western
politics.
"We tried to be good pupils in the beginning. We attempted, in a very
primitive way, to imitate Western systems. It didn't work," he says.
Instead of a stable, pluralistic system, the country got a "spoiled
democracy" of chaos and corruption. But the people want clear orders, he
says, citing a Soviet-era maxim: "One bad boss is better than two good ones."
One eager pupil of the U.S. example was Oleg Rumyantsev, a young lawyer
steeped in the works of Jefferson and Madison. As a member of Russia's
first legislature, the Supreme Soviet, he led a commission writing a new
constitution. America's National Endowment for Democracy invited him to the
U.S. for seminars. American funds equipped his office and paid for a trip
to Venezuela to study an election.
Mr. Rumyantsev's faith in checks-and-balance democracy collided with the
reality of political power in Russia and with American Realpolitik. In late
1993, Mr. Yeltsin issued a decree disbanding a parliament elected shortly
before the Soviet Union's 1991 demise. Washington supported the legally
dubious move. Mr. Rumyantsev joined fellow legislators, who ranged from
neo-Nazi nationalists to moderate democrats, in defiance.
The constitutional tug of war swiftly became a violent showdown. Members of
parliament, barricaded in their offices on a bank of the Moscow River,
stocked arms and named a parallel government. Mr. Yeltsin cut off their
water and power. When legislators sent an armed rabble to storm state
television, the Kremlin shelled the parliament building with tank fire. Mr.
Rumyantsev was inside.
"What happened then was a disaster for Russia, for democracy and for
myself," says Mr. Rumyantsev, who has given up politics and works for Royal
Dutch/Shell Group. "Everything that is happening now has roots in that time."
Russia's current system -- a czar-like president and emasculated parliament
-- took shape shortly after the 1993 bloodshed with adoption of a new
constitution. It wasn't Mr. Rumyantsev's draft, which favored a strong
parliament. The U.S. applauded Mr. Yeltsin's decisiveness. "This was the
end of the romantic part of our history," Mr. Rumyantsev says.
Washington shed romanticism, too. It cut funding for "democracy building"
projects that found little traction, their English-speaking staff often
having scant feel for Russian society. Some met aggressive hostility. A
team of Americans from the National Democratic Institute got beaten up in
2002 in southern Russia.
Other organizations harvested unexpected results: A Siberian "democracy"
project spawned a Russian bride business. Citizens Democracy Corps, set up
by the first President Bush to work in the former Soviet Union, changed its
name to Citizens Development Corps and wound down its program in Russia.
Russian voters exasperated American policy makers and pundits. In 1995 they
elected a parliament full of nationalists and others hostile to the U.S.
and its plans for Russia. President Clinton, according to Mr. Talbott,
asked: "How many more of these things is it going to take before they stop
electing fascists and communists?"
Today, fascists and communists have been eclipsed along with the democrats,
who got wiped out in parliamentary elections last December. Replacing them
is a breed of politician defined not by ideology but by loyalty. Boisterous
debate has given way to gray calm.
Vitaly Votolevsky, a manager for a construction company, welcomes the
quiet. Sales are up and property values are soaring. His firm's projects
include a lakeside housing development called New Scandinavia. Brochures
show clean-cut, Nordic-looking Russians enjoying a quiet barbeque with
fruit juice. "Our middle class is not very mature yet," says Mr.
Votolevsky. "It's got money but is not clear what else it wants."
When Communist hard-liners attempted a coup shortly before the Soviet
Union's collapse, Mr. Votolevsky rushed to Marinsky Palace in St.
Petersburg to shout defiant slogans. Now, he wants politics kept off the
street. He isn't keen on the Chilean or Chinese models -- far too harsh --
but likes Japan, where the Liberal Democratic Party has been in power every
year but one since 1955. "They have 'managed democracy,' too," he says.
At Moscow's Ostankino TV center, Mikhail Leontiev, a pugnacious and very
popular commentator, prepares for his prime-time program on Channel One
beneath his own version of a Russian icon. It's a photo of himself with
Gen. Pinochet, whom he interviewed in 1997. Seventy years of communism and
a decade of democratic chaos, Mr. Leontiev says, left Russia a corpse in
need of a strong hand to swipe away swarming flies. "I had hoped for other
creatures -- butterflies, dragonflies and grasshoppers. But they all turned
out to be worms and bugs."
The career of Mr. Leontiev has traced the full trajectory of Russia's
political course over 15 years: dissent under the Soviets, democratic
idealism in the early 1990s and now ferocious dedication to Mr. Putin and
his vision of a resurgent Russian state. "We were all raised on dissident
literature and liberal ideas. We took the West as an ally," he says. "I now
realize: This was complete idiocy."
Mr. Gaidar, the liberal former government minister, remembers meeting Mr.
Leontiev at a birthday party soon after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in
1985. They talked about the hopes for reform unleashed by perestroika. Mr.
Leontiev was working at a small museum dedicated to Boris Pasternak, the
author of "Doctor Zhivago" and a hero of the dissident intelligentsia. The
TV commentator, says Mr. Gaidar, "has obviously changed. Unfortunately, the
whole picture has changed."
********
|
