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Analysis: Experts fear for Russia's future
By Martin Sieff
Senior News Analyst
WASHINGTON, March 21 (UPI) -- Bush administration policymakers take Russia's stability and its predictable, cooperative, subservient behavior for granted. But according to leading U.S., Russian and German experts, they shouldn't.
Since the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington on Sept. 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin has boldly led his country on a course of cooperation with the United States in toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Now Putin is even working with United States to root out al Qaida groups operating in the former Soviet republic of Georgia in the Caucasus.
But Putin's policies are increasingly unpopular in Russia. They are widely and even boldly criticized in the Moscow press. And they are widely unpopular in the Russian Foreign Ministry and among senior commanders in the armed forces, according to some Russian political sources.
Putin appears to remain firmly in the saddle, possessing a democratic mandate to retain power to the end of his presidential term. But Lilia Shevtsova, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a leading expert on current Russian politics, warns that his power and the general stability of Russia's democratic system may be far more tenuous than is comfortably assumed in the United States, all the way to the top of the Bush administration.
In early March, Shevtsova, co-director of Carnegie's Project on Russian Politics and Political Institutions, told an audience at the Endowment's Washington headquarters that Russia's current apparently strong political stability and economic growth were in fact based on a bureaucratic authoritarian regime.
The vast nation's new political institutions, she said, were still weak. And they would remain so until an advanced economic structural reform and a political administrative reform to divorce "business from bureaucracy (and the) economy from power" could finally be implemented.
Heinrich Vogel of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, or SWP, in Berlin echoed this concern. Writing in the spring issue of journal Internationale Politik he praised Putin's achievements over the past two and a quarter years, especially "implementation of important reform laws in the Duma; reduction of outstanding wage debts; raising of wages, pensions and salaries in the public sector; and a start in disciplining the administration."
But Vogel then continued, "There are doubts, however, about the durability of this unaccustomed stability." It was based, he said, upon "political structures that are not very transparent ... There are also basic questions about how much stress public institutions can sustain."
Russian living standards have grown since 1999, Vogel said. But they still remain far below the standards even of December 1997. He then painted a grim picture of a nation of 140 million or more people of whom more than a quarter, or 27 percent, still lived in utter destitution "with a per capita income below the minimal subsistence level ... Accompanying the hardship is a demographic catastrophe ... Yet there is not even any effective political medium-range strategy for coping with (these) problems."
What will happen if things get worse? Will the strongly centralized state institutions Putin has revived maintain their current course under his successor? Or if Putin himself decided to change direction and crack down more harshly, what could stop him?
Oleg Kalugin, a former general in the KGB secret police who came to the United States, warned that strong, even ferocious anti-Western sentiments still circulate in circles of Russian policymakers as well as among the wider public. At the moment, they still appear marginal and unrepresentative, but that could changed, he warned, if Russia suffers yet another major economic crisis in the near future, before its current, still horrendous economic and social problems have been alleviated.
Current expressions of hostility against the Catholic Church and other Western-based religious institutions in Russia have been widely reported and still appear to be on a small scale.
But Kalugin, now a professor at the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies in Alexandria, Va., told an audience in Washington's University Club earlier this month that if Russia's still fragile economic and political stability were to collapse again, the virulent, ultra-nationalist extremist forces involved in such activities could take over the entire vast, nuclear-armed nation.
"If Russia plunges again into poverty and hopelessness, this intolerance will become another resource for terrorism (against the entire Western World)," he said.
At the moment, no one in the Bush administration takes such concerns seriously. There is a widespread consensus that Russia's leaders recognize they must cooperate with the United States in their own interests on a slew of major economic and strategic interests, and there is no sense that Putin may either unexpectedly change direction or be toppled and replaced by someone who will. And as long as Russia's economy remains relatively stable, even at its current low level, that may well be the case.
But as Vogel noted, the wretched economic and social problems of post-communist Russia have not been solved and still fester. And as Shevtsova pointed out, no stable democratic structure of strong institutions and public confidence has yet been built to ensure continued freedom.
Therefore, if the apparently small groups of which Kalugin warned could seize power or gain significant support in the army, then the behavior of one of the world's two most heavily armed thermonuclear nations could become dangerously threatening and unpredictable with stunning suddenness.
Those scenarios do not appear imminent at the moment. But as these warnings indicate, they are by no means impossible either.
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