#6 - JRL 8088 - JRL Home
From: "Wayne Merry" <wmerry@earthlink.net>
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2004
Subject: Re: "A Normal Country" by Andrei Shleifer and
Daniel Treisman in the current issue of "Foreign Affairs" (JRL 8078):
To view Russia in either very positive or very negative terms is an old practice of foreign observers and may say more about them than it does about Russia. In my own years as a Russia watcher, it often seemed that the discussion of the place had more to do with conflicting schools of thought in the West than with Russia itself, as Russia is generally able to provide ample evidence to support almost any hope, fear, or concern an outsider might bring.
My own views of Russia are fairly pessimistic, much more so than the analysis of Drs. Shleifer and Treisman. However, I am under no illusions of the problems Russia inherited from the Soviet experience, as I lived there and traveled extensively in the Brezhnev years and often wondered why it did not fall apart from its own irrational internal contradictions. As I also lived in Moscow during and after the Soviet collapse, I recognize how difficult was the transition, plus how unreliable were almost all the statistics and even the indexes Western experts tried to apply to the unmeasurable conditions of the early Nineties.
Nonetheless, Drs. Shleifer and Treisman do work very hard to emphasize the positive, while not candidly identifying the full range of Russian realities. They describe Russia today as a "middle income country", but in global terms that makes it part of the Third World. In many ways, countries like Brazil and Mexico have better prospects than does Russia, if only because their demographics are much more positive. Objectively, the former Second World has gone in two very different directions: most of Eastern Europe is becoming part of an expanding European First World, while the former Soviet states (the Baltics excepted) have moved downwards into the Third World. Russia is by no means the worst case among these twelve; indeed, it is about the best. Still, it faces a growing gap in living standards and in expectations of living standards with its former socialist neighbors now entering the European Union.
My most serious criticism of this article lies in what it does not address: Russia's critical crises in demographics, health and health care, social infrastructure, education and (to use a harsh phrase) human capital. The authors discuss Russian politics and economics without much recognition that it is the Russian nation at peril. JRL readers are familiar with the basics from items submitted by Murray Feshbach, Harley Balzer, Nicholas Eberstadt, and others (including many Russian experts). I will not recite the grim facts, but no one can deny the danger facing the Russia people; indeed, Putin repeatedly points to his country's demographics as a core priority for public policy (although without giving it much priority in resources).
In addressing the current state of Russia and its prospects, one must at least recognize that the future of the economy and state rest on the conditions of the population (especially outside of Moscow). I would be more impressed by Russia's current positive national account statistics if accompanied by some genuine progress in fighting HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, alcoholism, and epidemic childhood diseases. It is in the health of its people, rather than in the myriad deficiencies of the country's politics and economics, that Russia today so far departs from qualifying as a "normal country". Given the contradictory meanings in Russian of the term "normal", I fear the title of the "Foreign Affairs" article might be construed by many Russians as a bitter irony.
E. WAYNE MERRY
Senior Associate
American Foreign Policy Council
1521 16th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
202-462-6055
Fax 202-462-6045
Email merry@afpc.org.