Crawling from the Wreckage (16 page)

And here we have Belarus, where a former collective-farm manager legitimately elected to power in 1994 halted the privatization process before it had properly got underway. Lukashenko has preserved both the good and the bad elements of the Communist system almost unchanged (except that the actual Communist Party no longer rules), and as a result there has not been the same crash in living standards in Belarus and none of the soaring inequality and unemployment experienced by almost all of its neighbours.

There is also no free media and the secret police are everywhere. Belarus has the drab conformity typical of late-period Communist states, with occasional state violence against “dissidents,” but Lukashenko would probably have won a majority of the votes honestly in every election and referendum he has held.

Why has it happened this way in Belarus and not elsewhere? Partly pure chance, but Belarus was also an ideal candidate because it has a
very weak national identity (most people there actually speak Russian). Also, there is little of the nationalism that helped most other former Soviet countries to persevere with the changes, and many Belarusians would be happy to be reunited with Russia. But even if this were to happen they would still have to undergo many of the painful changes that they have so far avoided by choosing to live in this time-warp.

Sooner or later, they will have to go through those changes anyway, but not yet. Not in this election.

If you like the Caucasus, you’ll love Central Asia. With the obvious exceptions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, all the ’stans are former Soviet republics, and they sometimes seem engaged in a race to the bottom. They are former Russian colonies, and, as in post-colonial Africa, the successor regimes tend to be both autocratic and incompetent. The roads are crumbling in Central Asia, too
.

And just like post-colonial Africa, Central Asia has become an arena for strategic competition between the great powers
.

Had U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney declared during his visit to Kazakhstan last weekend that “in many areas of civil society—from religion and the news media to advocacy groups and political parties—the government has unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of the people,” human-rights groups would have cheered. But he said that in Russia, a few days earlier.

What Cheney told Kazakhstan’s dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was that “all Americans are tremendously impressed with the progress that you’ve made in Kazakhstan in the last fifteen years. Kazakhstan has become a good friend and strategic partner of the United States.”

Admiration for Kazakhstan’s progress is not actually a leading conversational topic in the United States. The man whom the
Financial Times
recently and memorably described as “the Bush administration’s Lord Voldemort” was merely engaging in a little useful hypocrisy, or so he imagined. The question is whether it really is useful.

Cheney’s blunt condemnation of the Russian government’s behaviour certainly roused a vehement reaction in Russia. President Vladimir Putin’s drift towards a “soft dictatorship” has the support of most Russians, who are still smarting from the anarchy, corruption and poverty of the first post-Communist decade under Boris Yeltsin. Now the anarchy has been suppressed, the corruption is better hidden and the economy is growing, so the Russian media’s bitter response to Cheney’s strictures really did match popular attitudes.

Under the headline “Enemy at the Gate,” the Moscow business daily
Kommersant
, normally a critic of the Kremlin, said that “the Cold War has restarted, only now the front line has shifted.” An overreaction, of course, but Cheney’s criticisms would have been less offensive if he were not so obviously applying a double standard. Kazakhstan will become one of the world’s top ten oil producers in the next decade. It is a close ally of the United States, and even sent a small contingent of Kazakh troops to Iraq. But Kazakhstan is not a democracy, and Nursultan Nazarbayev is not a democrat.

When Dick Cheney became Secretary of Defence in the administration of the elder George Bush in 1989, Nursultan Nazarbayev was the First Secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party. By 1990, he was president of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and a member of the Soviet politburo in Moscow. And, by the end of 1991, he was the president of an independent Kazakhstan and a keen advocate of the free market, as if his Communist past had been merely an adolescent foible.

Fifteen years and three “elections” later, Nazarbayev is still president of Kazakhstan, re-elected last December with a 91 percent majority in a vote that foreign observers condemned as fraudulent. His daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, who controls the Khabar media conglomerate and leads the “opposition” Asar Party, is expected to take power when his current seven-year term expires in 2012. (“I can’t swear it will never happen,” she says coyly.)

Nazarbayev’s regime does not boil people in oil like the regime of his neighbour in Uzbekistan, President Islam Karimov (who was First Secretary of the Uzbekistan Communist Party in 1989). It is not as megalomaniacal as the regime of President-for-Life Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan, who has renamed the month of January after himself, April after his mother, and May after his father. (Niyazov became First
Secretary of the Turkmenistan Communist Party in 1985.) Indeed, among the ’stans, Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan is only the third- or fourth-worst dictatorship, but it is a far less democratic and tolerant society than Putin’s Russia. So why did Dick Cheney castigate Russia’s imperfect democracy while saying not a word about Kazakhstan’s shameless travesty of the democratic system? Oil, obviously, but how could he be so ignorant of Nazarbayev’s priorities?

Senior oil company executives know that you sometimes have to kiss the nether regions of local potentates in order to make the deals happen, but they generally only do so when it seems fairly certain that the deal will really go through as a result. This one won’t.

What Cheney wants out of Nazarbayev is commitment to pipelines that will move Kazakh oil and gas to Europe by routes that do not cross Russia—which means pipelines under the Caspian Sea. In turn, what Nazarbayev wants is a solid American offer that he can take to the Russians, so that he can demand a higher price for his gas exports to them through the existing pipelines. He will also take it to the Chinese and suggest that they build pipelines to bring his oil and gas to China. In short, he has been playing the game at least as long as Cheney, and he holds a better hand.

Nursultan Nazarbayev is holding out for the best price, and the winning bid is unlikely to come from the United States. Cheney’s kowtowing to Nazarbayev is as futile as his chiding of Putin. And although his hypocritical moralizing about the shortcomings of Russian democracy probably has little direct effect on the calculations of a strategist as cool as Vladimir Putin, it does poison the relationship at many other levels. And that still matters because Russia is coming back as a force in the world.

Russia is not coming back as a coequal superpower to the United States, of course. That role is reserved (if they want it) for the Chinese. But it is coming back as a dominant regional power with a sphere of influence that other great powers respect, just as the other great powers respect the dominant role of the United States in Central America and the Caribbean
.

I am too fond of the Russians, so I may be an unreliable guide in these matters, but I do think that Russia will evolve into a modern democracy one of these days. Generational turnover solves a lot of problems and, in the end, I think it will erase the bad memories of the 1990s and make
democracy respectable again in Russia. Although many Russians (and many Europeans) would dispute it, Russia is a European country, and democracy has become the European norm
.

On Sunday, July 1, the Russian rouble will become a fully convertible currency, traded under the same rules as dollars, euros, pounds and yen. The date was obviously chosen to impress President Vladimir Putin’s guests at the G8 meeting in St. Petersburg in mid-July with Russia’s economic progress. And there really has been quite a lot of progress on that front since he took over. But the Group of Seven, “the world’s most exclusive club,” was originally meant to be an annual gathering of the leaders of the biggest industrialized
democracies
.

It would be stretching the term to say that the new member of the Group of Eight, as it became in 1996, is a democracy anymore. While sections of the Russian press still conduct raucous political debates, the all-important medium of television has been brought under direct or indirect state control, and more and more power has been concentrated in Putin’s hands. He speaks of a “managed democracy,” but his chief economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, resigned last December saying that Russia was no longer free or democratic.

It’s equally questionable whether Russia is really an industrialized power anymore. The Russian economy resembles Nigeria’s or Iran’s more than those of its fellow G8 members: oil and gas account for 70 per cent of the country’s export earnings and 30 percent of its entire economy. Even after six years of Putin’s rule, Russian oil production has not risen back up to the level of the early nineties, and only the high price of oil worldwide gives Russia some prosperity at home and some clout abroad.

Since the whole purpose of inviting Russia to join the G8 was to encourage the growth of democracy and a modern free-market economy in the ex-Communist giant, Russia’s fellow G8 members are filled with consternation at the way things have turned out. However, they are at a loss for how to deal with the cuckoo in their nest. Quiet persuasion doesn’t seem to work, but neither does noisy outrage.

Putin simply doesn’t feel the need to listen—and neither do Russians in general. The remarkable thing about Putin’s rule is that after six years in office he continues to have the approval, according to reasonably reliable opinion polls, of 77 percent of his fellow citizens. Indeed, although Putin will obey the constitutional ban on a third consecutive presidential term and leave power after the 2008 election, there is huge popular support for changing the constitution to allow him to stay on for another four years (59 percent yes, 29 percent no). What’s the matter with the Russians? Doesn’t everybody want democracy?

No, not everybody wants democracy. According to Leonid Sedov, a senior analyst at the
VTSIOM-A
polling agency, about 80 percent of Russians say they dislike democracy, although they are less clear on what they do like. Only 3 percent want the return of the tsars, some 16 percent want a tough authoritarian ruler like Stalin, and the rest are scattered all over the political map. But they like Putin because he has given them back stability, prosperity and self-respect.

It’s a reaction to the chaotic process of de-Communization under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, which was misleadingly called “democratization,” and it doesn’t necessarily mean that Russians would dislike real democracy. (They were keen enough on it in 1989–91, before “democratization” impoverished most of them.)

Russians are still among the best-educated populations on the planet, and once the middle class feels prosperous and secure enough, the demand for democracy is likely to re-emerge. But that may be years away, and what are the democratic majority in the G8 to do with this authoritarian cuckoo in their nest in the meantime?

Put up with it, and pretend not to notice that it doesn’t really fit in. Nag it about its more severe human-rights abuses, and demand that it give at least lip service to its democratic principles, but don’t drive the regime out into the cold. When the tide finally turns in Russian society, the survival of formal democratic structures and the rule of law, however much abused in practice, will make the task of building a genuine democracy in Russia a lot easier.

In effect, that is what the other seven members of the G8 have decided, and they are probably right. Of course, the fact that Russia has all that oil and gas to sell may have influenced their decision, too.

I have only met Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili once, and have no special insight into his character. (I was not in the region when the war broke out in 2008, and had no access to special sources of information.) So why was it obvious to me that it was the Georgians who had started the war, while the English-language news media, with a few honourable exceptions (the British Broadcasting Corporation, the English service of Al-Jazeera and one or two others), fell for the Georgian claim that they were being attacked by the Russians?

All the early reports placed Georgian troops well inside South Ossetia, some of them right in Tskhinvali, the capital. What the hell were they doing there if the Russians had started the war? And yet the Western media fell for the old stereotypes of big bad Russia and gallant little Georgia that Saakashvili started pushing as soon as his little smash-and-grab operation went wrong
.

The Georgians’ greatest blunder was that they did not give absolute military priority to getting a blocking force into place at the exit from the Roki/Roksky Tunnel under the main Caucasus range, a 3.6-kilometre tunnel that connects North Ossetia, part of the Russian Federation, with the rebel Georgian province of South Ossetia. There were barely a thousand lightly armed Russian peacekeeping troops in South Ossetia when the Georgians attacked them, but leaving that tunnel open meant that they would be facing major Russian armoured forces within twenty-four hours. That is exactly what happened, and three days later the Georgian army broke and fled. Stupid, stupid, stupid
.

The war in South Ossetia is essentially over, and the Georgians have lost. This was Georgia’s second attempt in eighteen years to conquer the breakaway territory by force, and now that option is gone for good. So are the country’s hopes of joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (
NATO
). Yet sections of the Western media are carrying on as if the Russians started it, and are now threatening to invade Georgia itself.