Beyond Peace (11 page)

Similarly, both Yegor Gaidar, then the Russian First Deputy Prime Minister, and Oleg Lobov, Secretary of the Russian Federation Security Council, made a strong case to me that
Russia does not want to accept economic responsibility for other newly independent states. Russian monetary and economic policies during the past year have actually been pushing other former Soviet republics out of the ruble zone—hardly a policy one would undertake if planning to re-create the Soviet Union.

All this does not mean that the United States should not be concerned about heavy-handed Russian actions in the “near abroad.” We should be realistic about our limited leverage in Russia's backyard and should avoid creating the impression that the United States wants to proceed with a new encirclement of Russia. It would be contrary to our interests to give Moscow the impression that we are prepared to help only as long as Russia remains on its knees. Russia is a great country that deserves to be treated with appropriate respect. U.S. leverage depends upon the perception in Moscow that America is a friendly nation that wishes it well and takes it seriously as a major power. At the same time, Moscow has to be told unequivocally that there is a line beyond which unscrupulous conduct in the “near abroad” will be incompatible with good relations with the United States. In this context, it should be explained in particular that Ukraine and the Baltic States occupy a special place in the American heart and—because of their location in the center of Europe—U.S. strategic thinking. The Russian government is entitled to be made aware that encroachments in that region would seriously damage U.S.-Russian relations.

It is not premature to indicate to Russia's leaders at the highest level, quietly, but with complete clarity, that Russia's conduct is coming dangerously close to the point at which no American administration would be able to ignore it. While appreciating Yeltsin's need not to surrender the patriotic high ground to reactionaries, we cannot allow his need to outmaneuver political opponents to become a permanent excuse for an aggressive foreign policy.

It is likely that Russia's leaders, even those who advocate a more nationalist policy, will be practical about the consequences
of any steps that could be construed in the West as aggression against their neighbors. They will bear in mind the fragility of the political coalitions supporting aid to Russia in the West's recession-strapped capitals. They also will certainly not forget that the Cold War was waged not only against communism but on behalf of the people who were suffering under it inside and outside Russia, particularly in Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. Having seen these and other republics finally win their independence, Americans would not tolerate seeing them subjugated again.

•   •   •

Similar sensitivity must govern our policies toward the other post-Soviet states. Of these, the one requiring the most subtlety and finesse is Ukraine. The United States must become much more active in reducing tensions and rivalries between Ukraine and Russia, encouraging political and economic reforms in both, and always taking care to be perceived as neither anti-Russian nor anti-Ukrainian unless either adopts policies that threaten our interests.

Russia and Ukraine have a number of complex issues to settle, ranging from Ukraine's need for Russian energy supplies to the status of Crimea. What matters to the United States is not so much the particular outcome of their disputes as that they are settled amicably. Over time, our involvement in this relationship will be as important in ensuring regional peace as was our role in bringing about improved relations between Israel and the Arab states. Two diametrically opposite possibilities loom along the Russian-Ukrainian border. They could develop a flourishing partnership such as the one between the United States and Canada, or they could find themselves behaving like India and Pakistan, two superarmed scorpions trapped in a bottle. Ukraine's history of domination by Moscow would seem to make the unhappier prospect the more likely one. United States policy should be designed to ensure that both sides realize that the happier prospect is in their interests.

In implementing such a policy, we have a possible ally in Ukraine's President. Leonid Kravchuk is a former hard-line communist who has shown a remarkable knack for ending up on the winning side in Ukraine's internal political warfare. When I first met him in Kiev in 1991, before Ukraine had won its independence from Moscow, I asked him, over a gourmet dinner in the state guest house, whether he thought Gorbachev would win a popular election if one were held the next day in the Soviet Union. He answered quickly.
“Nyet.”
Then I asked if he thought he himself would win an election if it were held the next day in Ukraine. This time he paused for a moment. After a shrug and a resigned smile, he again said
“Nyet.”

He was half right. Today, Gorbachev is a fixture on the international lecture circuit, while Kravchuk is the elected leader of an independent nation of fifty million people that is destined to be a major European power.

After she first met Gorbachev in 1985, Margaret Thatcher shook up some of her anticommunist supporters when she said, “I can do business with Mr. Gorbachev.” I would say categorically that we can do business with Kravchuk if we recognize him for what he is—a cold, shrewd, tough-minded political operator who was always more a Ukrainian than a communist. (Holding on to power will take all of this resourceful survivor's remaining nine political lives.) Once the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, Ukraine is now one of Europe's worst basket cases. Its economy makes Russia's look like Singapore's. Its currency is virtually worthless. Industrial production has all but collapsed. It is torn by ethnic, religious, and political divisions. Unlike Russia, it has made hardly any progress toward free-market reforms.

As we cultivate better relations with Kiev, we should stress that economic reforms must go forward if the Western investment it so desperately needs is to materialize. Meanwhile the West should open its market to Ukraine and other nations of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. When I saw him again in 1994, Kravchuk told me that his country had become
an economic orphan. “The Russians cannot buy from us because they have no money,” he said, “while the Europeans limit our imports with quotas.” Economic revitalization is as much in our interests as in Ukraine's. If Russia were to revert to authoritarianism, a strong Ukraine would be a vital deterrent to aggression. A prescription for disaster in Europe would be a weak, vulnerable Ukraine joining forces with a newly imperialist Russia. Also, Ukraine is far more likely to follow through on its disarmament commitments if our relations with it remain strong. We should move forward on the full range of cooperative policies, including military-to-military contacts, economic assistance, and wide-ranging educational exchanges. Once Ukraine adopts real economic reforms, every assistance program open to Russia should be open to Ukraine.

Moscow may question our efforts to build up Ukraine. Its concerns will be understandable. We can ease them by finding ways to be pro-Ukraine that do not appear anti-Russian and by stressing that our policy is based on the manifestly correct view that our interests and those of Moscow and Kiev will benefit from both nations' being strong, open, and free.

•   •   •

While I have always been anticommunist, I have never been anti-Russian. As a friend of the Russian people, I understand that it is not easy for many Russians to accept that the country they considered their own no longer exists. I understand why they are concerned about the twenty-five million Russians who, when the Soviet Union collapsed, suddenly became foreigners in their own lands, where they are not always treated with kindness. I also understand why Russians do not wish indefinitely to supply energy and other raw materials at below-market prices to the other newly independent nations, who, after all, decided voluntarily to go their own way. Nostalgia is not a crime, as long as people do not act on it.

As a realist, I am aware that Russia is a big and powerful nation with armed forces stationed in many post-Soviet states.
Many of these states are in turmoil—turmoil that Moscow did not invent—and it is well within Moscow's national security interest to be concerned. I am also aware that when Yeltsin announced Russia's interest in performing a special peacekeeping mission in the “near abroad,” he did not threaten to do it unilaterally, but instead asked for a U.N. mandate.

Advancing political and economic freedom in this tumultuous setting will not be easy. In fact, it may be impossible. But our vital interests require that we do everything we can to assist those who support these goals. James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, has graphically described the situation: “The failed coup in 1991 brought an unexpected simultaneous end to the largest empire—the Soviet Union; the most influential religion—communism; and the most powerful political machine—the Communist party of the Soviet Union.” He added that what we are seeing is “not a traditional evolutionary or even revolutionary change, but convulsive physiological actions of a large disturbed society occurring in the entrails—the bowels more than in the brains—extending a new vulgarity, banality, and corruption, yet providing its young democratic reformers, who are reviled as 'shitocrats,' with the capability in which a new civil society is rapidly growing from the bottom up rather than from the top down.” He accurately noted that the profoundly significant difference between this revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution is that, in contrast to 1917, it gives more power to the people rather than to an elite class—a “vanguard” at the top.

Yeltsin and his reformers face mind-boggling problems. Russia's $820 billion economy has shrunk over 10 percent for the third straight year. In 1993 inflation was at an annual rate of 900 percent, while decreases in oil production could transform a country with the world's eighth-largest oil reserves into a net energy importer by 1995. There is incredible corruption. A report prepared for Yeltsin last year showed that almost all private enterprises and commercial banks in major cities must pay a tribute of up to 20 percent to organized crime. And while the
murder rate in Moscow is still lower than that in Washington, D.C., street crime is up 26 percent, and crimes committed with firearms are up 250 percent. The once-proud armed forces are in disarray, lacking housing, adequate pay, and a mission.

Many believe that Russia may be too huge and too complex to be ruled by a democratic government. We are not talking about Poland or Czechoslovakia, where shock therapy has worked remarkably well. Russia covers eleven time zones and includes thirty-one republics, all of which have declared their sovereignty and some their independence from Moscow. There are 132 different nationalities. After seventy-five years of communist brainwashing, compared with forty-five years in Eastern Europe, there is no Russian free-market managerial class.

Yeltsin and his newly elected Parliament must revitalize an agricultural system that lacks the infrastructure to bring food to the marketplace before it rots, salvage a Russian ruble that makes Monopoly money look strong by comparison, convert a huge military-industrial complex to civilian purposes without triggering massive unemployment that could lead to revolution, and find adequate housing for hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers returning from Eastern Europe and from the other former Soviet states. Their task is immense—perhaps the greatest peacetime enterprise ever undertaken by one people. It is the work not of a year or a decade but of a generation at least, and the United States must remain intricately involved in the process if Russia is to have any chance of succeeding.

It is not surprising that many observers believe Russia is beyond hope. But they overlook what Yeltsin has already achieved in his short time in power. Anxious to find the bumper-sticker message of the December parliamentary elections, too many commentators decided that it was “Reform is dead.” The real message is far more subtle: Reform is different. In Moscow, too, there are many who are very proper in their embrace of classic free-market principles but go on to say naively that Yeltsin has failed because he has not applied them in Russia. In effect,
the critics are asking Yeltsin not only to jump from
A
to Z in a matter of months but from
A
in Russian to Z in a language few people in Russia even know how to speak. A little tongue-biting is in order for leaders in the United States and other nations in the recession-ravaged West: We have plenty of trouble applying principles of free enterprise in our own countries. We do not have to deal with legislatures as fractious and fractured as the State Duma, nor with a nation that has no tradition whatsoever of economic freedom. And yet in every conversation I had in 1994 with Russian leaders, running the gamut from radical free-market reformers to doctrinaire communists, not one favored taking Russia back to a total command economy. Even the blustery, hard-nosed leader of the communists in the State Duma, Gennady Zyuganov, knows that the past is gone forever, much as he might wish it were otherwise. “No,” he told me, “we cannot cross the same river twice.”

One of the ablest leaders I met during my most recent visit was Russia's forty-year-old Minister of the Economy, Alexander Shokhin, whom I had first met in 1993 when he was a junior minister. He is a rare bird among economists: He is an optimist. During our ninety-minute meeting he expressed hope about declining inflation rates tempered with concern about falling production. He bristled when I asked whether the departure from the government of radical reformers such as Yegor Gaidar and Boris Fyodorov meant an end to real economic reform in Russia. “We can have [the West's favored] reformers in government and still have difficulty, while reforms can go forward without these people,” he said. “Perhaps you now have a more pragmatic team,” I offered. He smiled wearily. It was long past dinnertime, and he had come directly from a marathon meeting with the Prime Minister and others in the government who were trying to cut the budget enough to satisfy the International Monetary Fund's strict requirements. “The team spends so much time convincing others that they are for reform,” he said, “that there is not much time for being pragmatic.”