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..
