Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005
From: Sergei Roy <sergeiroy@yahoo.com>
Subject: Scenario for Russia or Provocation?
Scenario for Russia or Provocation?
By Sergei Roy
Editor, www.intelligent.ru
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has recently produced its Policy Brief #41 entitled “Putin’s Decline and America’s Response,” by Anders Eslund (posted on Johnson’s Russia List #9220). Anders Eslund, better known as Aslund, is introduced as, among other things, senior economic adviser to the government of Russia at the time of its initial market-oriented reforms. Quite a timely reminder. According to some recent polls, Yegor Gaidar, the man who pushed through those initial, shock therapy reforms, is ranked as the most hated man in Russia, vying for the distinction with people like Anatoly Chubais and Boris Yeltsin himself. If there were any justice in this world, Dr. Aslund, with his invaluable scientific string-pulling of the early 1990s, would be there close to the top of the list. Alas, as Anatole France noted in his time, there isn’t any such thing as universal consciousness, and Anders Aslund, unbeknownst to the hate-ridden masses, continues to hand out political “analyses” and advice to governments; in this last instance, to the government of the United States regarding its policy vis-à-vis Russia and, specifically, the methods to be employed by it to speed up the fall of the “Putin regime.”
Those years when Dr. Aslund distinguished himself as the Russian government’s top economic adviser are safely in the past; we in this country are merely saddled for the foreseeable future with the fruits of those policies: the oligarchy; Russia second to just the US in terms of the number of dollar billionaires while some 30 to 40 percent of its population live below the poverty line, life expectancy has dropped to around 59 years, Russia’s people are dying out at the rate of a million a year, most of the economy, save for oil and gas production, in ruins, etc. etc. The list of liberal-economy achievements in this corner of the world is practically endless.
Still, those of us who can, survive; what we need for Russia to finally go up in flames is a nice, full-scale civil war. Toward that end, Dr. Aslund advises the US government to follow the same policy and methods of inciting internal strife in Russia that have worked so admirably in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Kirgizia and only failed in Uzbekistan. In the face of this idiocy, we can but pray for the instinct of self-preservation in members of that same US government to keep them from playing suicidal games with a nuclear power.
How does Anders Aslund lead up to his final – or should I say terminal – advice? You know, the reading of his “analysis” is enough to make any sane person’s hair stand on end and start rustling. Here is someone who is billed as an “internationally recognized specialist on postcommunist economies, especially in Russia and Ukraine,” an adjunct professor, author of six books, director of the Russian and Eurasian Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, etc. etc. Apparently someone who is trained to carefully marshal facts and draw well-substantiated conclusions from them. Yet what Anders Aslund is trying to feed us in his “Policy Brief” is a set of propaganda clichés, often bordering on the ludicrous, about Putin and his “regime.” It’s as if someone locked him up in a cell and drummed into his mind, day and night, tons of rubbish produced by some Putin-hating, Nevzlin-Berezovsky-Gusinsky sponsored propaganda machine like Eho Moskvy or Novaya gazeta or some such.
Aslund imputes to Putin four major, terrible defeats that augur a speedy demise of the Putin “regime,” even before his term ends in 2008: the Khodorkovsky affair, the Beslan tragedy, the Ukrainian “defeat,” and the monetization of social benefits. All these events figured prominently in the propaganda warfare against Putin and Russia that numerous, well-organized, and well-funded agents have waged since about last April. It is useful to remember, though, that President Putin does not have a contract with the Carnegie Endowment or the Bush Administration or any such. His contract is with the People of Russia, and it is from this angle that we should judge Putin’s performance in these and other events and, indeed, the relevance of such events to the success or otherwise of his final term in office.
Considered from this angle, Anders Aslund’s selection and “analysis” of Putin’s “defeats” appears not just muddle-headed but positively pitiful. Let us take those “defeats” one by one.
1. The Khodorkovsky affair, or the jailing of an oil tycoon for a string of crimes like massive financial fraud, tax evasion to the tune of billions of dollars, and other feats that would have earned him a few life sentences in a democracy like the United States (he got nine years here, and judging from his latest letters released to the press, has fully repented of his sins and suggests ways of putting right the iniquities that his kind have inflicted on Russia). Where did the Russian people stand on this? The absolute majority (I’d say 90 percent, if not more) clearly see the oligarchs for what they are, thieves who illegally seized enormous wealth that had previously belonged to the state, with the connivance of the ruling Yeltsin “Family” which in the process of thieving (called privatization) also grabbed some 20 percent of Russia’s entire assets. From the people’s point of view, Khodorkovsky merely got his comeuppance, and if there is any reproof that the masses can throw at Putin, it will be for not following this through by putting all of the robber barons where they belong, behind bars. Still, every little helps, the masses feel, and Putin is in solid with them for his little contribution to the way things ought to be.
Yet it is against this background that Anders Aslund declares that as a result of the Khodorkovsky affair “Putin can no longer claim to represent the population at large, because his power base has shrunk to a small group of KGB officers from St. Petersburg.” Is this lunacy, or is it?
2. The Beslan tragedy is another occasion served up as a terrible defeat for “Putin’s regime,” which is said to have become “dysfunctional” because of its authoritarian nature. I do not know if this rubbish was written before or after the London bombings in July, but it was certainly produced after the 9/11 tragedy and the Madrid bombings, and in neither case had authoritarianism, democracy, monarchy or any other political feature played any role in the outcome. Terror is terror, people die alike in democracies and under “authoritarian regimes,” and using their blood as mud to sling in propaganda warfare plain stinks. Especially when an event is described in the style of a cheap thriller: “On the third day, the brave local Ossetians took out their Kalashnikovs from their closets and stormed the school themselves, shooting several useless special troops in the process.” Just for the heck of it, one assumes, and the special forces, which Aslund himself describes previously as “Russia’s finest,” somehow meekly refrained from returning the fire, standing politely aside and being mowed down by the “brave local Ossetians.” This little sentence alone ought to relegate the whole “Policy Brief” to the potboiler prose genre posing as “analysis.”
Now, to consider the Beslan tragedy from the angle that is really relevant here: the relationship between Putin and the people. It is a fact which Aslund himself makes much of, that Putin’s popularity is largely based on his fight against separatism, for the unity of Russia. So what was the outcome of the Beslan terrorist act? The same as in the Dubrovka Theater siege: all the terrorists (except one, in the Beslan case) died. Do the people approve of such an outcome? You bet, after the abject shame of the Budyonnovsk affair ten years ago and the general attitude toward the Caucasus among Russia’s masses (regrettable, I am sure). Does Aslund think that, in consequence of Beslan and similar events, the people of Russia will ditch Putin for some West-loving, Yavlinsky-type leader who will meekly give up Chechnya to Basayev’s bloody child-killers? If he does, then God help anyone who takes his artistic “briefs” seriously.
3. Number three on the Aslund list of horrible defeats of “Putin’s regime” is the victory of the “orange” revolution in Ukraine. Well, it may have been a defeat for Putin in the eyes of the West; little wonder about that, considering the financial, moral and all the other kinds of support the West invested in the Ukrainian species of Orangism. Whether it was a victory not just for the West but for the Ukrainian people is quite another matter, and enough has been written already about the post-revolutionary, less than democratic antics of the Yushchenko regime. We will not go into any of that; the really relevant question is, What was the impact of the Ukrainian events on the relationship between Putin and the People of Russia?
I’d say that impact was zero or close to zero. For the people of Russia, it was mostly a TV event, something to watch in the evenings and forget by morning. There is this Russian expression, otrezannyi lomot’ “a slice of bread that has been cut off from the loaf,” usually said of a daughter that has been married, no longer with her parents. Ukraine is definitely an otrezannyi lomot’, and whatever the fate of its people will be, will be decided by the people themselves. If they cannot stand up to the West-funded Orangists, that is their business. Sure we feel sympathy for the folks in the Crimea, in Odessa, in Donbass and generally Left-bank Ukraine, which is not Ukraine proper at all, not Malorossiya but Novorossiya, New Russia, inhabited by ethnic Russians since the times of Katherine the Great (the 18th century, in case you have forgotten). But shall we form Cossack units to go and liberate them from the Yushchenko yoke, like the Cossacks had done in the case of Serbia? Not on your life. They are big boys now, they voted for Ukraine’s sovereignty back in 1991, they passively let the three backward, West Ukrainian regions hold political sway over the rest of the country, especially the Russian, industrial east, so let them sort it all out for themselves. Just please do not steal Russian gas from the pipelines, with or without the West’s approval. That is money from our collective pockets.
In the eyes of the people of Russia, throughout that Ukrainian affair Putin stood up to the West, and if he did not win, so much the worse for the West: it will be all the more disliked, if not hated, by the Russian masses for its intervention on historically Russian turf. You have to be a fantasist like Anders Aslund to believe that this affair in any way damaged the contract between the Russian electorate and the president.
4. Monetization of social benefits, now. Here we really have a factor that brought Putin’s popularity ratings down from superb to merely excellent. But Aslund’s putting the people’s disaffection over the issue down to Putin’s “dysfunctional authoritarianism” is best described by the Russian idiom popal pal’tsem v nebo “he’s hit the sky with his finger.” The replacement of benefits in kind, inherited from the socialist system, with money payments is a purely liberal measure initiated by the liberal section in the government, and Putin is taking the flak for doing something that is completely in line with the sort of economic policies that Anders Aslund himself once advised. Do you know what Putin should do if he really wanted to be an authoritarian ruler, dysfunctional or otherwise? He should kick out of his government the Gref-Kudrin-Zurabov fundamentalist-liberal trio for botching the reform (which they have botched) or on any other pretext. On the following morning, his popularity ratings would go through the roof, and his ultra-democratic credentials as the defender of the people, Hugo Chaves style, would be confirmed beyond all doubt. Yet he stubbornly sticks to the Western, liberal (some say pseudo-liberal) socioeconomic model, and for this Anders Aslund heaps scorn on him and predicts his ousting long before his term in office legally expires. Perverted logic is the expression that naturally springs to mind here.
Now, as to the “ousting” bit. Here Aslund falls on sheer woolgathering. A certain “former senior Russian offical” told him (we have a nice abbreviation for this kind of argument in Russian, OBS, odna babka skazala “a certain granny told me”) that “within Putin’s KGB circle, Putin is not considered the leader… The powerful men surrounding Putin may conspire in a putsch against him.” This is not just a conspiracy theory, it’s a conspiracy theory of the silliest sort, based on nothing but gossip and wishful thinking. Who are those “powerful men”? Name one, man. Name just one who would dare risk a face-off with Putin, who would dare go to the nation in competition against him. Name just one who would be bloody idiot enough to jeopardize the country’s hard-won stability and, by starting political turmoil, risk interrupting the flow of oil and gas money into the state and other sundry coffers, just to please Anders Aslund’s “analytical” mind. Russian periodicals regularly publish lists of the country’s top politicians, and a careful perusal of these fails to produce even a single idiot of this sort. So much for the KGB putsch.
But the woolgathering proceeds apace. Next Aslund dreams of a “popular uprising through escalating spontaneous protests” by the “uncommonly irritated” population “inspired by the recent revolutions in Ukraine and the Kyrgyz Republic.” The downtrodden masses would be joined by other forces, like “disenchanted regional governors” and “many big businessmen”; in other words, the downtrodden would fight the Putin regime side by side with those who are now ruthlessly treading on them. Umarmt euch, Millionen, in short. Well, it may be a secret to Aslund but not to the Millionen: the governors are part of the oligarchic regime, and the “big businessmen” are hand in glove with the oppressive and corrupt bureaucracy; more than that, business and bureaucracy are in a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde relationship here, both on the federal and regional levels. Aslund’s whole lunatic scenario culminates in his choice of leader for this joint uprising of the exploiters and the exploited: “former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov,” better known in this country as Misha Two Percent, after his favorite figure for the kickback he got each time he put his signature to some government decision or permit.
Now, it is easy to poke fun at Aslund’s fantasies, but there is a dangerous side to it as well. His recommendations to the US government somehow evoke the figure of an ape playing with matches around a powder keg or, if you prefer a more polite term, that of an agent-provocateur. I particularly have in mind his inciting the US government to apply to Russia the same mob-rule tactic that has worked elsewhere. This is what Aslund recommends, literally: “The most effective protests in the region have been those led by student activist organizations: Otpor in Serbia, Kmara in Georgia, Zubr in Belarus, and Pora in Ukraine. These techniques are well known, and can and should also be disseminated in Russia.” Moreover, his recommendation is not to wait until election time, at which these techniques have been successfully applied: “This is hardly a necessary precondition for Russia, because an election is not necessary to unleash either a coup or a protest movement.”
I would say that this advice is not just lunatic, it is criminal. If it is taken at all seriously, if enough foreign funds are invested in these “techniques,” the upshot might be a bloodbath on a Rwandan scale in this country, with the possibility of a nuclear holocaust looming just on the horizon. Anyone sufficiently informed about the real state of affairs on the ground in Russia will know that this is no scare-mongering but a fairly conservative assessment of the present situation and its inherent possibilities.
Question A: Is there revolutionary potential or, putting it more cautiously, potential for a social upheaval in Russia? Answer: Yes, there is. Potential aplenty. Huge amounts of combustible material. Recall the January 2005 protests, for starters.
Question B: Would the goal of such an upheaval be the overthrow of Putin’s “dysfunctional authoritarian regime” in favor of a more Western-oriented government, like in Georgia and Ukraine? Answer: There is no reason on earth to believe that the people of Russia are dreaming day and night of boons like American-style “freedom and democracy,” and that they would be prepared to rise up in arms to get them.
The mood of the masses is not just different but the direct opposite of this nonsense. Look, I knock about the country rather a great deal, north, south, east, west. I talk to people from various walks in life, above all the most ordinary folks. One theme dominates all such heart-to-heart talks: the people’s hatred for the nouveaux riches thieves and robbers; for the fat cats who have grown not just fat but obese while the majority are subjected to privation and degradation; for the fat cats who are selling the Motherland’s natural wealth abroad, have their bank accounts abroad, have property abroad, send their children to foreign schools and colleges while these ordinary people of Russia subsist on potatoes and cabbages and rotgut vodka. What we need is another Stalin or Beria, they say; believe it or not, I heard this even from descendants of people who were banished to the inhospitable regions in the north during the Stalin reprisals. When they say “Stalin,” it is just a way of expressing their yearning for a more just and fair social order, in which thieves and robbers would be slapped down, not awarded huge chunks of state property. And it is against this background that Dr. Aslund is dreaming of his anti-authoritarian, pro-American democracy putsch. Crazy…
It is the easiest thing to predict what would happen if the US government followed Aslund’s advice and allocated enough funds to buy the services of twenty or thirty or more thousands of young people in Russia to pitch tents anywhere in downtown Moscow. Unless guarded day and night by the police (And why should they? Who would tell them to? The US Embassy?), they would be beaten to pulp by crowds of young and not so young hoods descending on Moscow from Lubertsy, Balashikha, Elektrostal, Orekhovo-Zuevo, Sergiev Posad and a hundred other townships near Moscow, amid scenes like Moscow saw a couple of years ago at the time of the defeat of the Russian soccer team by the Japanese, with a rampaging mob setting fire to cars right by the Kremlin walls, smashing shop windows, beating up policemen and generally living it up. You know why? Because these downtrodden, jobless, vodka-swilling young men hate the West and the rich, and the two are thoroughly intertwined in their minds. Western values like American-style democracy, and the people who propose to enforce them, are not very popular with these angry young men. They have their own values, and do not hesitate to disturb the peace to let them be known.
What would happen next is harder to foresee. Similar scenes might erupt throughout the country, the nouveaux riches’ recently built castles might be looted and burned down, the fat cats might think that the H-hour had arrived and rush for the airports, destination Europe, Israel, America, wherever. Contrariwise, the authorities might decide that enough was enough and declare a state of emergency, impose martial law or do something of that sort. Politically, the outcome would be inevitable in any case: a shift to the ultra-nationalist end of the political spectrum. Precisely the opposite of what is intended by the Aslund scenario, and something that he dismisses with a glib phrase, “All rulers in the Kremlin since Joseph Stalin have warned about hard-liners in the wings,” which is as false historically (no Kremlin rulers before Gorbachev ever talked about “hard-liners in the wings”) as it is stupidly cavalier in the present situation.
The possibility of such a drastic shift in Russia’s politics (which he describes as a shift to the “Nationalist Left”) is discussed by Ira Straus in his critique of the Aslund memorandum. His reasoning on this score is basically sound, though the use of “topological” terms like right, left, center, left of center, right of center in connection with the topsy-turvy world of Russian politics merely confuses the picture unless they are carefully defined each time – and even then not all such definitions are inherently acceptable. For instance, to me right-wing means nationalist and conservative, not fundamentalist-liberal and comprador, foreign-oriented.
Au fond, Russian politics are fairly simple, the tectonic fissure dividing the political field is there for all to see: politicians are either for Russia, its unity and its future existence as a significant geopolitical entity, or else they see this country as a sort of space in which to indulge their hedonistic and predatory instincts (as often as not hating it and even publicly expressing their hatred, like Alfred Koch did), with the ever-present option of leaving it for good. The real (not Aslund-diagnosed) weakness of the Putin “regime” is that Putin attempts to splice these two strands of Russian politics, striving to assert Russia as a full-fledged, internally monolithic geopolitical player while at the same time letting the fundamentalist-liberal elite plunder and degrade it to their heart’s content. Like I have tried to show, a foreign-sponsored attempt at an orange or any other color revolution in Russia will result in a crushing blow to the comprador, fundamentalist-liberal section in Russian politics, so that we democratic patriots may yet have to say thank you to Anders Aslund some day for his poorly informed, incredibly biased and, let’s face it, downright dim-witted attempt at a scenario for Russia’s future.