January 8, 2001   

This Date's Issues:   5012 • 5013

Johnson's Russia List
#5012
8 January 2001
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. Itar-Tass: Price rise is the largest concern of Russians - poll.
2. The Independent (UK): Patrick Cockburn, Russia changes its tune over anthem.
3. Chicago Tribune: THE WORLD UP CLOSE. Colin McMahon on Russia.  FROZEN IN THE...
4. AFP: Putin gives Schroeder Russian debt promise.
5. UPI: Chechnya's ex-president wants Kremlin talks.
6. CENTRAL ASIA-CAUCASUS ANALYST: Dimitri Kemoklidze, HAS THE COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES COLLAPSED?
7. Ira Straus: Adaptation or Integration: The fallacy of relying on one-way adaptation from Russia.]

*******
 
#1
Price rise is the largest concern of Russians - poll
ITAR-TASS

Moscow, 7 January: A price rise seems to be the largest concern of Russians
these days. The Monitoring.ru research team polled 1,600 citizens of Russia
in 200 townships of 47 regions, and 27 per cent of the respondents said
they were most concerned about a price rise. Ten per cent worried about
unemployment, and 7 per cent said it was the overdue pensions and salaries
that ailed them.

Ten per cent of the polled cared most for the situation in Chechnya, 9 per
cent were concerned about the mounting crime rate, 9 per cent worried about
weak state power institutions and the national development programme, and 5
per cent said their largest concern was a crisis of morals.

Eleven per cent of the respondents gave other answers, and 5 per cent found
it difficult to give any answer at all.

*******

#2
The Independent (UK)
8 January 2001
Russia changes its tune over anthem
City Life, Moscow
By Patrick Cockburn

The English, the English, the English are best,

I would not give tuppence for all of the rest,

The Germans are German, the Russians are red,

The French and Italians eat garlic in bed.

THIS IS what a national anthem should sound like: High praise for the home
nation and vigorous abuse of foreigners.

This verse is part of a song entitled "Patriotic Prejudices" by the late
British singer Michael Flanders. Of course it is a little out of date. It
predates the period when the English, under the influence of Elizabeth David
and other cookery writers, started to consume garlic in large quantities.

Note also the reference to the French and Italians eating in bed. This was
probably the last moment when, as the British empire collapsed, the British
thought of the French and Italian as being excessively idle or enjoying a
better sex life than themselves.

The Germans obviously remain German, but the Russians are no longer red. The
problem for the Russian élite is that these days they are not quite sure what
they are. They are clearly capitalists, but most come out of the old
Communist establishment.

This lack of identity has been clearly displayed during the prolonged -- and
sometimes hysterical -- debate over the adoption of a new national anthem.
How much of the past should be jettisoned and how much retained?

The words of the old Soviet anthem had to go. It had embarrassing lines such
as: "O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people, to Communism's triumph
lead us on." Boris Yeltsin blurred the issue by adopting as the anthem a
forgettable tune by the 19th- century composer Mikhail Glinka, but it had no
lyrics.

Hence, Russian gold medallists at last year's Olympics in Sydney were forced
to remain mute when they stepped on to the podium. The Spartak soccer team in
Moscow even wrote to President Vladmir Putin making the claim that the lack
of a singable national song had lost them several games.

No longer. On New Year's Eve Russian television channels played the new
Kremlin-approved song. The music is the same as the old Soviet anthem
composed by Alexander Alexandrov in 1944, but the words are new.

Even by the standards of other countries' national anthems it is pretty
banal. It combines a sort of windy chauvinism with appeals to the Almighty
rather than the Communist Party. "You are unique in the world, one of a kind,
native land protected by God," writes Sergei Mikhalkov, the 87-year-old
composer, who co-wrote the lyrics for Stalin.

President Vladimir Putin said: "The difficulty over Russia's national symbols
is real. If we accept the fact that in no way we could use the symbols of the
previous epoch ... then we must admit that our mothers and fathers lived
useless and senseless lives, that they lived their lives in vain."

The new anthem is full of obvious ironies. The old one stressed the
unbreakable unity of the Soviet Union. The new song speaks of "the age-old
unity of fraternal peoples".

All this would be harmless enough if the legacy of the past could be so
easily laid to rest. But the past year, with the Kursk nuclear submarine
disaster and the Chechnya war rumbling on, shows that the memory of past
achievements, and the desire to recreate them, remains a recipe for disaster.

*******

#3
Chicago Tribune
January 7, 2001
THE WORLD UP CLOSE
IN THESE DISPATCHES, THE TRIBUNE'S FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS LOOK AT THE PEOPLE
AND ISSUES LIKELY TO CREATE NEWS IN THE YEAR 2001 AND REFLECT ON THE HUMAN,
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DYNAMICS SHAPING THE REGIONS WHERE THEY LIVE AND WORK.

FROZEN IN THE...
By Colin McMahon
Tribune foreign correspondent

MOSCOW -- Volodya can't hide anything.

Smile at his colorful metaphors and his face shines. Glaze over during his
rambling anecdotes and his face darkens.

Volodya is as transparent as the water in Lake Baikal, the majestic Siberian
sea that gives Severobaikalsk its name and its identity. Pay attention to the
clues and you know what Volodya is thinking. You know what he will do.

If only Russia were more like Volodya.

In the year since the erratic Boris Yeltsin turned over the presidency to the
sober Vladimir Putin, Russia has become no more predictable.

Putin, a former KGB agent, retains a spy's ability to let his audience think
that he is one of them while keeping his own plans and desires obscured.
Putin has not become the ruthless dictator, as his harshest critics feared.
But neither has he made much progress in creating his "dictatorship of law."

While Putin has toppled some of Russia's unsavory financial tycoons, others
rise up to replace them. Shady banks and companies have gone bankrupt, but
others have appeared in their place. The highest levels of Russian government
remain dark wells of intrigue.

These Moscow intrigues seem far away in towns such as Severobaikalsk, 2,300
miles east of the Russian capital. But the effects of Russia's decline are
everywhere you look.

Severobaikalsk is a stop on the Baikal Amur Mainline, Russia's second and
lesser-known trans-Siberian railroad. The BAM was supposed to be a great
Soviet socialist people's project, but by the time work on it was stopped in
the 1980s, it had become a symbol of communist hubris and wastefulness.

Now many BAM jobs have disappeared. The men and women who moved to Siberia
for BAM have neither a place to go nor the money to take them. Like millions
of people across the former Soviet Union, they have no idea what to do next.

Like most people along the BAM, Volodya, 43, went to Siberia to work on the
railroad. Even after 20 years, his Ukrainian accent still gives that away.
Though he earns only $125 a month operating an excavator for BAM, though he
can no longer afford trips home to Ukraine, Volodya considers himself
fortunate. That $125 a month is a good wage in Russia, and usually it arrives
on time.

These people who dug trenches out of the tundra and laid roads through the
Siberian forests are not lazy. But they surely are not entrepreneurs. They
cannot start anew. They came of age depending on the state to provide for
them, and most of them will die that way.

The towns along BAM are shrinking at alarming rates, just like Russia as a
whole. Russia's population has fallen by more than 500,000 in the past year,
down to 145 million.

Within 15 years, Russia's population could dip to 130 million.

"We're a lot smaller now, sure," Volodya said of Severobaikalsk during a tour
that required just a few minutes to hit the high points. "But there will be a
boom here soon, thanks to BAM. How could there not be? Look at all of
Siberia's rich resources."

It may seem that way, Volodya, but it is not so easy.

Russia is rich in oil and gas, diamonds and precious metals. But those
industries are infected with corruption, inefficiency and legal uncertainty.
It's why investors stay away.

Spend a few days with Volodya along the BAM route and you will want those
investors to come. Drink tea with people remarkable for their generosity,
hear their tales of hardship and fortitude, and you come away thinking that
Russia deserves a lot better.

But then spend a day at Perm 36, a former forced labor camp turned into a
museum, and you come away thinking that Russia deserves what it gets.

Like the Sakharov Museum in Moscow, Perm 36 illustrates that barbaric
political repression in the USSR did not end with Josef Stalin but continued
into the Mikhail Gorbachev era. The museums also raise questions about
collective guilt, an issue that Russian society has barely glanced at since
the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In 2000, the Russian people elected as president a man from the KGB, the
agency that acted as both engine and tool of Soviet repression.

Not only has Putin never apologized for the KGB's actions, but he still
speaks of them with pride. He has chosen as his top aides former KGB
comrades, steely men like him who excel at keeping their emotions, not to
mention their personalities, in check.

Show one face to the world, but keep the real face a mystery. No Yeltsins in
this crowd.

For the most part, this method has served Putin well. He remains popular
despite not having accomplished much.

Russia's economy is better, but even Putin's own top economic adviser credits
higher oil prices for that.

The conflict in Chechnya has killed more than 2,600 Russian soldiers and
shows no signs of ending.

The military remains a disaster. Look into Putin's grand reform plans and
promises of across-the-board military cuts and you will see the same rhetoric
of the Yeltsin era.

Russia cannot adequately train or equip the hundreds of thousands of people
in uniform. It cannot maintain the thousands of nuclear warheads in its
still-fearsome arsenal. It cannot fuel or fix its ships, tanks and planes.
And yet it keeps building more.

The tragedy of the Kursk nuclear submarine offered a sad but telling window
into Russia.

Even as the 118 sailors aboard the Kursk lay dead or dying on the floor of
the Barents Sea, Russian naval officials turned away offers of Western help
and talked confidently of a rescue operation. Never mind that the only
Russian rescue teams capable of such an operation had been disbanded years
earlier.

A world naval power should not have to ask for help, and Russia did not want
to appear as anything but.

When Volodya talked about the men who died aboard the Kursk, he was not
worried about appearances. His sorrow was genuine, and his face gave him away.

He did not don a mask of cynicism, or patriotism, or fatalism.

It was the same when we paid him for helping us out in Severobaikalsk. We
handed Volodya some bills and told him we were grateful. He looked confused.

"What's this?" he asked, his face open in a question but his eyes closing
into a squint.

We thought it was just a friendly if fake protest against being paid. But
then we realized that the question was literal. Volodya had rarely seen U.S.
currency before and certainly not a $50 bill.

Back home in Moscow, U.S. dollars are never a problem. Muscovites know to
hold a bill up to the light, study its face, check the watermark.

They know that many things in Russia are not as they seem.

*******

#4
Putin gives Schroeder Russian debt promise

MOSCOW, Jan 7 (AFP) -
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday that Russia would repay all
debt inherited from the former Soviet Union, an issue which had threatened to
cloud a visit by Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

"Russia intends to pay, and will pay, debts inherited from the USSR," Putin
said at a press conference at Moscow's Vnukovo airport.

Despite a warm reception for the Chancellor on Saturday, many thought that
the question of outstanding debt would put a chill on relations between the
two during Schroeder's informal weekend visit to the Russian capital.

On Friday, Russia said it would delay the first payments on its 48 billion
dollar debt to the Paris Club of international creditor countries this year.

The move, described by Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Ulyukayev as "not a
default, but a technical delay of repayments", provoked a swift response from
Germany, which is Russia's biggest creditor.

But Putin's Sunday announcement looks set to clear the air over the issue.
The Russian president reaffirmed that 25 percent of budget spending had been
earmarked for that debt, Russian news agencies reported.

"It is in nobody's interest to put the Russian economy in a situation where
it can no longer fulfil its international debt obligations," Putin said.

Schroeder added that a group of experts was due to meet in January to discuss
terms of the repayment, the Ria Novosti agency reported.

The German leader has suggested that some of the debt could be restructured
into holdings in Russian companies, something which he says the two will have
to look at further.

Schroeder first aired the suggestion when Russian Prime Minister Mikhail
Kasyanov visited Berlin at the beginning of December.

Germany has opposed a reduction in the former Soviet country's debt, which it
considers is now in a position to be able to repay.

Putin and Schroeder have struck up a business-like relationship since the
Russian leader -- who speaks fluent German picked up while he was a KGB agent
in Soviet-era East Berlin -- assumed power in the Kremlin a year ago.

Earlier on Sunday the two, accompanied by their wives enjoyed a traditional
ride on a troika sleigh in the snow-covered grounds of Moscow's Kolomenskoye
estate.

On Saturday, they attended midnight Christmas mass at the Cathedral of Christ
the Saviour -- the Russian Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on January 7,
Christmas Day under the Orthodox Julian calendar.

The two leaders later travelled to the Orthodox monastery at Sergiyev Posad,
70 kilometres (40 miles) northeast of Moscow.

German diplomatic sources played up the informal nature of Schroeder's visit
but their Russian counterparts stressed that such excursions would provide
ample opportunity for the two leaders to broach a wide range of subjects.

As the visit ended Sunday, the two leaders answered press questions over
fears of health risks for personnel who served in the Balkans where United
States NATO forces used shells tipped with depleted uranium.

The Russian leader condemned the use of force in Yugoslavia as "absolutely
unacceptable and it matters little whether it is with depleted uranium or
not."

Schroeder said Germany wanted to know "why such weapons were used" in the
Balkans, adding that "the use of such weapons which harm soldiers' health is
unacceptable."

"We still have too little information on the issue to draw conclusions, but
even the fact that force was used is bad," Putin said simply.

As the press conference wound up, the two said that in a spirit of
co-operation they would move towards the return by Moscow of some 200,000
works of art, looted during World War II and declared Russian property in
1999.

Schroeder was expected to arrive in Hanover in Germany late Sunday.

*******

#5
Chechnya's ex-president wants Kremlin talks

MOSCOW, Jan. 7 (UPI) -- Self-styled Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov went
on the air Sunday to propose negotiations with the Kremlin to stop the
bloodshed in the breakaway republic, Interfax news agency reported.

Maskhadov, who abandoned his office and joined the rebels after Moscow
launched a major crackdown on Chechen terrorists in fall 1999, used an
illegal radio transmitter to broadcast his 40-minute message.

It was broadcast on "Free Chechnya" radio station that airs on medium-wave
band and has not been under the authorities' tight surveillance in recent
months.

Maskhadov said the Chechnya crisis would drag on as long as the Kremlin
continued to reject holding peace negotiations with him as the Chechen
leader, without any preconditions.

The Kremlin spokesman on Chechnya, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, has said several
times that talks with Maskhadov were completely out of the question, except
if the subject were his unconditional surrender.

Speculations have also arisen as to whether Maskhadov is able to control
numerous rebel squads that are headed by other warlords who allegedly exert
more influence than him.

Many experts on Chechen affairs point to warlord Shamil Basayev as the
strongman capable of rallying the largest number of remaining guerrillas and
brand him the Kremlin's main antagonist.

On Sunday, Maskhadov outlined the circumstances that led to the Chechen
conflict and named a group of Chechen politicians and field commanders whom
he blamed for the current situation in the volatile republic. Interfax did
not specify the names of public figures Maskhadov had mentioned in his
address.

Meanwhile, Russian news agencies reported Sunday that another Chechen
cleric had died at the hands of the rebels.

Khasmagomed Umalatov, the imam in the district of Urus-Martan, succumbed
to seven gun wounds late Saturday.

He had been shot at the threshold of his home by unidentified gunmen. The
attackers used gun silencers and the corpse was discovered Sunday morning.

Umalatov shared the fate of his predecessor -- last June, imam Umar
Idrisov was shot twice in the head and killed just days before Chechnya's
clerics were to elect the republic's chief spiritual leader, the mufti, who
should have taken place of Akhmad Kadyrov.

Kadyrov, who had served as Chechnya's mufti until then, was appointed by
the Kremlin to the post of Chechnya's chief civilian administrator -- a job
that required him to leave the previously held position. The vacancy
immediately triggered a series of rebel threats and retaliatory attacks on
the clerics such as Idrisov whom the rebels had considered loyal to the
Kremlin and therefore not deserving the post of mufti.

In a separate incident Saturday night, the rebels used a grenade launcher
to fire at a column of military vehicles near Grozny, subsequently hitting a
police car with three officers inside. All three died on the spot and their
bodies were sent to the Russian army's military base at Grozny's Khankala
airport.

>From there, the corpses will be transferred to the officers' home republic
of Tyva in eastern Siberia for funerals.
 
*******

#6
Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2001
From: "jc benadam" <jcbenadam@hotmail.com> (by way of David Johnson
<davidjohnson@erols.com>)
Subject: HAS THE COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES COLLAPSED?
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by mail.cdi.org id
CAA01747

David,
For your consideration.
Justin Rudelson
410.467.7477

CENTRAL ASIA-CAUCASUS ANALYST
January 3-16, 2001
HAS THE COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES COLLAPSED?
Dimitri Kemoklidze
AUTHOR BIO: Dimitri Kemoklidze is an expert with the EU-TACIS Project,
Georgian-European Policy and Legal Advice Center in Tbilisi. He was recently
an IREX Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at George Mason University. Research
for this article was supported in part by the Bureau of Educational and
Cultural Affairs, the US Department of State under the Freedom Support Act,
and administered by IREX. These organizations are not responsible for the
views expressed.

Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS) was created to preserve linkages between the
countries. While for Russia the CIS was the only means to keep a dominant
position in the post-Soviet space, most CIS countries considered the CIS no
more than an interstate instrument of civilized divorce. This autumn, during
the UN Millennium Summit in New York, very important events took place with
dire implications for the CIS. The presidents of GUUAM countries began
negotiations toward creating a free trade area within these five countries.
At the same time, the Customs Union of the CIS was transformed into the
Eurasian Economic Union. Do these events spell the collapse of CIS?

BACKGROUND: Only several of the CIS leaders hoped that it would be possible
to reintegrate the national economies and thus maintain a single post-soviet
economic space. This was to be achieved by the Agreement on Economic Union
concluded on September 1993 by eleven of the CIS states. However, this
agreement never was implemented. Another proposal from the Russian side was
to create the Customs Union of the CIS, which required its member countries
to introduce common external tariffs on the level of Russia's tariff
schedule. In 1996, a customs union was created involving only four CIS
members, namely Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The governments
of Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan
rejected the CIS-based customs union because of the predominance of Russia,
which would directly or indirectly dictate trade policy conditions. In
reality, the Customs Union has only existed on paper.

The Collective Security Treaty signed by nine countries in 1992 was another
means for preserving the CIS though Ukraine, Moldova and Turkmenistan have
never been members of this collective security pact. In 1999, the Security
Treaty expired and several members, namely Azerbaijan, Georgia and
Uzbekistan, decided to end their participation in the collective military
cooperation framework because the treaty provided no actual protection of
its members security, rather it has more to do with extending Russia's
interests. The rest of the CIS countries, previously members of the
collective security treaty, were in favor of prolonging the pact and signed
a relevant protocol.

Georgia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan withdrew from the treaty and formed a new
military-political-economical-grouping (GUUAM) along with previously neutral
Moldova and Ukraine. The presidents stressed cooperation in establishing the
Eurasian Trans-Caucasus transportation corridor (TRACECA), in conflict
settlement, peacekeeping activities, transportation projects, and
integration into the Euro-Atlantic and European structures of security and
cooperation. In 1999, Uzbekistan joined the GUUAM. In September 2000 in New
York, the presidents agreed on institutionalization of GUUAM and began

negotiations toward creating free trade area within these five countries.
The following month Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan
agreed to set up the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) on the basis of the
previously established Customs Union.

IMPLICATIONS: The newly established Eurasian Economic Union will be the
means for political control over the member countries regarding their
economic policies and external relations. This is indirectly written in the
documents signed in October 2000. The new decision-making procedure, adopted
by the same document, guarantees Russia's dominate position in the Union.
According to the voting formula, Russia will have four votes, Kazakhstan and
Belarus, two each, and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan one vote each. Considering
the level of political and economic integration of Russia and Belarus,
Russia will have majority (4+2) in the decision-making scheme of Eurasian
Economic Union.

Regarding economic integration, the appropriate document has been signed
according to which Union member countries will have to negotiate common
external tariffs/trade barriers, which will probably create a Russian-led
trading bloc. This will complicate bilateral and multilateral trade
negotiations with WTO members for Kazakhstan and it will become impossible
for Kyrgyzstan to fulfill obligations agreed during the negotiations with
WTO members. Kyrgyzstan will be required to choose between Russia and
western integration (WTO).

The GUUAM free trade area, since Georgia is already WTO member, will not
complicate WTO negotiations for Moldova, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan
because the free trade area does not require member countries to harmonize
external tariffs and thus foreign trade policies. There is no doubt that
GUUAM countries will set up a regional organization during the first quarter
of 2001 and start negotiations on the creation free trade area among GUUAM
countries. The result would be that all import tariffs and other trade
barriers will be removed between GUUAM members and each country will
continue to retain its own international trade measures vis-à-vis countries
outside the free-trade area. Regional free-trade areas are very important in
the structure of world trade. With outside countries, trade continues to be
governed by bilateral treaties and the WTO/GATT framework. The creation of a
regional free-trade area allows a group of states to cooperate in increasing
their own wealth without waiting for the rest of world.

CONCLUSIONS: The fact that GUUAM countries have common economic, political
and probably military interests strengthens this regional grouping. Among
the top priorities will be the political interaction within the framework of
integration into Euro-Atlantic and European structures of security and
cooperation. This includes the establishment of a special dialogue with NATO
on issues of mutual interest, as well as interaction with the United
Nations, OSCE and other international organizations. Economic cooperation is
of special importance, considering the plans to establish the Europe-South
Caucasus-Central Asia transit corridor on the Silk Road in which the GUUAM
countries would play an important role. The energy sector is another sphere
of cooperation, particularly development of Caspian oil deposits and the
construction of multiple pipelines to the international market.

Different political, economic and military interests divide the CIS into a
pro-Russian Economic Union and a pro-Western GUUAM. Despite Russian
insistence to the contrary, the CIS is characterized by a lack of political
cohesion and there are divergent views about the role and status of the CIS
among member countries. Russia is still willing to support an integration
process that ultimately could lead to the creation of a unified political
entity. However, the CIS cannot operate as a real integrative institution,
especially after the creation of GUUAM and the Eurasian Economic Union, two
regional organizations within the CIS that do not inspire much optimism
about the future of the CIS even from a purely economic perspective. The
CIS's future will depend on it becoming an important force in the
independence and territorial integrity of its member states. This does not
seem likely at this time.

Copyright 2001 The Analyst
All rights reserved

*******

#7
From: IRASTRAUS@aol.com (Ira Straus)
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001
Subject: re 5009-Brzezinski

Adaptation or Integration:
The fallacy of relying on one-way adaptation from Russia
By Ira Straus

Zbigniew Brzezinski's latest article provides the key to the failure of the
West in its relations with Russia since 1989. His ultimate goal (inclusion
of Russia in the Euro-Atlantic community) is sound, much of his specific
advice is also sound (particularly, to accept the reality that Europe is
going to remain linked to America), but the connecting links between the
goal and the advice are utterly unsound.

The actual policies of the West, in the absence of sound links from advice
to goal, have led to goals opposite to the proclaimed one. The actual
connecting links have largely been reduced to using the advice, or rather a
one-way selection from the advice, and as a set of preconditions for
cooperation. Thus the seemingly endless string of demands for one-way
adaptation. The result has not been integration but estrangement.

What Brzezinski writes ("Strategic Dialogue in St. Petersburg," Washington
Post, January 5, 2001; JRL 5009) is that Russia should be lectured on the
"unavoidable" realities in Europe and the world to which it must adapt; for
example:

"Germany's commitment to democracy, its reliance on economic pluralism, its
rejection of imperialism, its acceptance of post-World War II territorial
realities, its promotion of European unity and of Euro-Atlantic security,
as well as its engagement in globalization are all lessons directly
applicable to Russia's condition. But nations do not change their
self-definition and historical trajectories because they want to; they do
so when they have to. It is less a matter of free will and more a matter of
recognizing necessity.... It was not only Germany that in the course of the
past century had to undergo a profound reassessment of its place and
aspirations in the world. The British, French, Dutch, Turks and other
imperial nations were also compelled by circumstances to recognize that
contemporary global realities necessitated a basic change in the very
definition of their national roles and geopolitical interests. Russia's
only hopeful future is, indeed, in Europe. But it is in a Europe that is
truly democratic and that knows its global role involves an organic
connection with America. And only accommodation to such a Europe will
permit Russia to become a modern, democratic, prosperous and thus
influential member of the growing Euro-Atlantic community."

These formulations go to the heart of the mistake of the West. Russia has
been told that it is solely by "accommodation to" Europe and NATO, by
one-way adaptation to "unavoidable" external "realities", that it will
become a healthy, wealthy, and "influential" part of the Euro-Atlantic
system. In real reality, Russia has made a series of drastic adaptations to
West since the 1980s, and these have correlated to a drastic collapse in
its influence. Serious arrangements have yet to be made for incorporating
even its residual influence into the Euro-Atlantic system.

In normal life, influence comes through two-way accommodations: through
adaptations to the valid basic interests of both parties and through
working out creative ways to realize those interests at the same time. In
the modern European world of interdependence, this means not only classical
diplomatic compromise but also integration, i.e. forming arrangements for
joint shaping of policies in an agreed sphere of interdependence, including
adequate joint institutions for this purpose. Adaptation without either
Mutuality or Integration means a one-way street, giving away one's leverage
and creating a habit of getting taken for granted. No wonder it has
correlated to loss of influence.

Adaptation and Integration are often treated as if they were the same
thing. Actually they are two separate species. They may have some surface
similarities but very different internal structures. Integration does
indeed require considerable adaptation, but mixes this in with other more
creative endeavors; it is the exact opposite of reliance on a long string
of one-way adaptations to fixed inevitabilities.

Application of the methods of Integration has been the exception not the
rule with Russia. The main positive case has been the inclusion of Russia
in the G-8, which is not even an institution, but nevertheless has been the
most fruitful institutional move the West has made in regard to Russia: it
provided in 1999 the political space -- coupled with the goodwill and
remaining political reserves of Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin -- for Russia to
work out a deal in which NATO won its war in Yugoslavia without a much
higher level of bloodshed, and in which Russia organized Serbia's surrender
while preserving a modicum of dignity. Otherwise, the relationship has been
dominated for demands for one-way adaptation.

This has continued year after year, despite the extraordinary one-way
adaptations that Russia already made in 1989 and 1991, and a series of
substantial one-way adaptations ever since. The point of integration would
not be to meet Russia half-way to Communism or to the Warsaw Pact, since
those old positions were unjust and inorganic, but to meet it anywhere at
all and find ways to accommodate its valid remaining interests, now that it
has already come over the vast bulk of the distance to the Western position.

For this, the situation remains unsatisfactory. While a NATO-Russia Joint
Council has been created for external consultations, paranoia continues to
be manifested in NATO about any Russian influence on the plans of the
alliance proper. Prospects of such influence are ritualistically described
as a "de facto veto" and expurgated as something intolerable. This attitude
is clearly incompatible with Russia having the "influence" in the
Euro-Atlantic community of which Brzezinski speaks; yet it continues, no
matter how much adaptation has been made. Russia has been asked to keep
jumping through a series of hoops that never seem to end while the goal
post keeps getting moved; it is asked to "redefine" its interests and
territory only by shrinking them, accommodating to everyone else's claims
rather than finding new methods for shared adjustment of claims.

When Dr. Brzezinski writes that the "British, French, Dutch, Turks and
other imperial nations" all redefined their national roles and interests,
the evident meaning is that they gave up their empires and shrank their
claims of interest to their limited metropolitan territories: this is what
they all have in common. The implicit advice to Russia is obvious, but
misguided. In none of this is there a model appropriate for mechanical
application to Russia, whose empire is of a very different character. The
differences, irrelevances, and negative relevances are manifold:

1. Turkey is the case most frequently cited as a model for Russia. Its
transformation into a "normal" national state came at a terrible cost in
ethnic cleansing and genocide. In the Russian Federation, the requisite
ethnic cleansing would be many times worse if that country were to take the
advice of trying to turn itself into a "normal" national state of the
ethnically Russian people, becoming "Russkiy" not "Rossiyskiy" as
Brzezinski has advocated in his scholarly writings.

2. Turkey is also the only one out of the entire batch of successor states
to its former empire that comes anywhere near to democracy today. In this
sense -- the sense that decolonization hurt the colonies even worse than
the colonizers -- it does indeed parallel the situation of Russia, which
for all of its shortcomings has far more elements of democracy and economic
recovery than the other CIS countries.

3. The Germans and Turks were deprived of their empires by defeat in global
wars and overthrow of their central government in revolutions. Russia
withdrew voluntarily, as a result of the twists in the logic of a peaceful
domestic revolution.

4. The British and French gave up their empires after winning, if being
weakened by, the world wars. They did it under the heavy pressure of
American and Soviet anti-imperialism. Whether this decolonization was wise
-- for themselves , for the subject peoples, or even for its ideological
promoters, America and Russia -- is not the simple question that most
people, accepting Victor's History, assume. In South Asia, the British
withdrawal left secular democracy in India but not in Pakistan; it also
left millions of dead in massacres and wars. Elsewhere, it left democracy
in a number of small islands which, like India, had long been under British
rule, but not in lands of briefer imperial rule, many of which suffered
terribly from independence. Victor's history was rescued in Africa by
blaming it all on the colonial legacy (no matter that it was where
colonialism had lasted longer that the legacy turned out better) and
demanding that the white man not intervene any more but leave it to the
people to sort themselves out. Decades later, a wave of democratization did
finally occur in Africa, but also a wave of new international interventions
in face of further waves of democratic failure, state collapse, chaos, and
ethnic massacre. It would be hard to see in all this a lesson in favor of
mechanical transference of support for break-up of empires.

America itself, despite its national creed of anti-imperialism, quickly
came to appreciate the benefits of British and French influence in their
former colonies in Africa and Asia. It did not start a campaign to
"strengthen the independence" of the newly independent states from their
former European masters.

Such a campaign was, however, started by America in Central Asia and the
Caucasus in the mid-1990s. It was invented by anti-Russian geopoliticians,
among them Dr. Brzezinski. They argued that America had not hitherto being
sufficiently harsh in forcing Russia to restrict its interests and its
influence to its own territories. The logic, then as now, was that Russia
should be hemmed in and forced to "adapt" to post-imperial conditions. Thus
the "Silk Road" strategy and the revival of the "Great Game".

We were told that this would be good for Russian democracy, since 'Russia
can be either an empire or a democracy, not both' (a dictum which usually
was allowed to pass as a truism, although it is contrary to the historical
and empirical evidence). In the same period, it was being widely argued in
the West that expansion of NATO into the former Soviet empire, without
incorporating Russia itself, would be good for Russian democracy: it was
supposed to force Russia to give up hope of reconquering Eastern Europe --
a hope which was not in evidence -- and "dry up" its imperial temptations.

The two policies coincided; and the actual results from both were
catastrophic for Russian democracy. They made fools of the Russian
democrats, who had argued only a few years earlier that Russia could afford
to give up its empire because the West was not an enemy and Russia could
better realize its interests abroad in cooperation with the West. What was
"dried up" was the remaining political capital of the Russian Westernizers;
what was confirmed was the nationalist and Communist argument, which
charged the Westernizers with treason. The Russian military and security
doctrines were subsequently re-revised to acknowledge that the enemy in the
West had not disappeared, as the earlier Yeltsin-era revisions had
optimistically maintained.

Russians came to feel that the West was more or less deliberately
surrounding them, hemming them at every point, driving out their influence
everywhere and replacing it with Western influence and NATO exercises,
using the pretext of "strengthening independence" in order to foster
"geopolitical pluralism" i.e. counterweights to Russia, promoting
disintegrative nationalist forces and even, (through Taliban) extreme
Islamist forces all along the lengthy southern periphery of Russia,
penetrating deeper into the core of Russia through agents of influence and
financial levers and connections with the Russian regions, helping
decentralization spin out of control ... with the break-up of Russia proper
as the endgame. Top generals and politicians and ordinary Russians alike
have spoken of this nightmarish scenario as a reality that has been coming
true, step by step, before their eyes. It is a scenario that they have said
they are fighting against in Chechnya; it is a scenario that tells them
that it is a fight that they must carry through to the end, as a matter of
national survival. In the devil theory version of it, poor old Zbigniew
Brzezinski sits as the great satan at the very heart of the Western
conspiracy, the one who has predicted it, has advocated most of it, and
somehow has been making it come true. The Red-Brown publicists, who also
predicted it but opposed it, are validated by it; their arguments and
accusations, once marginal and viewed as hysterical, have become mainstream.

5. Britain and France remained intact through all the colonial
divestitures, since theirs were overseas empires. Russia has not remained
intact. Its has been a contiguous empire. Only the Turkish comes close to
the Russian case in this sense. But the Russian case goes much farther: its
has been far more of an organic, ethnically interpenetrated empire than the
Turkish empire. The Russian Empire has more in common with the United
Kingdom; a simple cut-it-apart version of "decolonization" would be a
catastrophe, especially in the absence of an overarching European Union to
hold all the parts together in a form that would remain fairly deep if novel.

In giving up the main part of its empire, Russia and its colonies have
already suffered catastrophe, economically, socially, and morally. And
Russia has already given up 25 million ethnic Russian citizens to new
nation-states, along with 120 million non-ethnic Russian citizens. Despite
this loss, Russia remains by far the largest state in continental Europe,
both in land mass and population size. This is because Russia, like
America, is the outward extension of Europe, one that moved into vast
lightly populated territories. Russia simply cannot shrink its interests
and redefine itself as an ordinary-sized European state -- not unless it
were to break even its core part into pieces. Such a break-up of Russia
proper, incidentally, is something Brzezinski that has suggested elsewhere.

6. Britain and France gained the benefits of American protection, making it
a good security bargain to give up their empires in keeping with American
moral requirements; and America proved to be a protector that paid genuine
regard to their interests and concerns. Indeed, the actual sequence was the
reverse: they got the protection and aid first (including help in starting
their integration into a bigger European whole), gave up their empires
second. It was the protection and aid and the new unification that enabled
them to decide that it was safe to give up their old empires. Russia gave
up its empire first, hoping for subsequent integrative connections with the
West to cover for the risk; a gambit that is all too easily portrayed at
this point as a terrible miscalculation if not outright treason.

7. The Europeans did not merely "adapt" in the passive, negative sense of
the word, i.e. by one-way shrinking and yielding to the new "realities" in
their relations with one another. Rather, they actively united with one
another. They formed a bigger union rather than breaking up into smaller
states. They mutually adapted in order to form the union and upgrade the
common interest. Rather than shrinking their interests in order to
accommodate to total respect of one another's boundaries, they broke down
the boundaries in order to accommodate the reality of expanded intertwined
interests.

The traditional diplomatic prescription for ending conflict was to
accommodate by shrinking of claims of interest within national bounds. It
was the failure of this prescription and the realization of its utopianism,
as technological and economic growth led to inevitably increasing
interdependence and expansion of interests, that led to the idea that what
was needed was enlargement of the playing field, i.e. integration into
larger groups. Thanks to this widespread understanding, extraordinary
diplomatic and political initiatives were taken after 1946 for joint
construction of elements of a joint polity.

The traditional, one-way adaptation method was applied to Germany after
World War I: it was supposed to shrink its claims and accommodate to the
victors. The result was World War II. The second, integationist method was
applied after World War II, through the European Union and NATO, thanks to
the visionary leadership of Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer,
William Clayton, George Marshall, Theodore Achilles, and John Foster
Dulles; and thanks to the preparatory work of thinking that had been done
in the wartime years and interwar years, as people contemplated the failure
of the accommodationist approach and worked out the substance of the
federalist and functionalist integrationist approaches instead. The result
has been a long European peace, one that has been uniquely cumulative and
progressive compared to the former truces of accommodation; and one which
Russia has been trying ever since 1985 to join in some form.

There has been no more German problem in relation to the West since late
1940s. The German economy and polity has been fully engaged in shaping the
EU economic space and participating throughout its breadth, not just
accommodating to it. The Germany army has been fully integrated into NATO
defense training and planning, and its diplomatic and political leaders are
fully involved in determining the shape of the Western security space; they
are not kept at arms' length for consultations with a NATO external to
themselves, as is done to Russians with the "NATO-Russia Permanent Joint
Council". NATO took upon itself the defense of Germany against the
neighboring Red Army; it did not make supercilious remarks about this being
Germany's problem, much less cynical remarks such as the one that has been
heard repeatedly since 1991 that "we won't defend the Russians from the
Chinese". NATO also took upon itself the responsibility of upholding of
Germany's revisionist interest in the reabsorption of East Germany, even
though there was no realistic military way of pursuing this interest; this
being the condition for asking Germany to renounce unilateral pursuit of
the same interest. In contrast, Western policy since 1991 does not formally
recognize the validity of major Russian interests in the imperial lands it
has given up. It does not take upon itself any multilateral responsibility
of upholding those interests, in return for Russia giving up their
unilateral pursuit; rather, it asks Russia unilaterally to give up
unilateral pursuit of those interests. The picture is not all black: the EU
made some effort de facto to advance the rights of ethnic Russians in the
Baltic states; but there is no commitment to Russia in this. The West has
reserved all its rhetoric for instructing Russia to renounce its claims of
special interest in these areas and for denouncing any such Russian claims
as imperialist.

The policy that the West has applied to Russia since 1985 has been
essentially the Versailles or post-World War I policy that had been applied
to Germany, coupled however with the rhetoric of the Marshall Plan or
post-World War II policy. The rhetoric has been integrationist; the
policies and demands have been mostly one-way accommodationist. This has
been true even of the aid programs, which have been longer on conditions
than on genuine aid. The only substantial financing has been for loans, and
they bear close comparison to the debt relief packages put together for
Germany in the 1920s: stopgap financing without adequate long-term vision.

It took the West two world wars to get it right with Germany. The price was
horrendous, and that was before the age of nuclear weapons. It is a
nightmarish thought that it might take us two global struggles before we
get it right with Russia, too.

We only barely survived the first global struggle with Russia -- and we
survived it only because Russia voluntarily folded its Communist challenge
to us. It is improbable that we would survive a second round. One of the
reasons why Russia folded peacefully in the first round was the belief that
we would be generous victors and would apply the methods of the Marshall
Plan not the methods of Versailles. It would not believe this a second time
around and quietly fold again. We need to think in terms of this round
being our one and only chance to get it right.

It is one thing to ask small states, like the ones in Central-Eastern
Europe to adapt one-way to the Euro-Atlantic system that has been
constructed without them. Small states are used to adapting to the dictates
of their larger neighbors, and they can be happy to adapt that it is to a
multilateral union whose dictates they are adapting too, doubly so in that
they have been given a serious promise of membership in that union, i.e.
participation in its further future shaping, once they have done sufficient
one-way adaptation. But it is another thing to ask an historic great power
and empire to adapt one-way to the West, and do it without any serious
promise or prospect of equitable integration thereafter. These countries
have had a strategic perspective of their own for centuries, and they
continue to have the option of a separate perspective; indeed, they have a
tragic obligation to uphold a national perspective and all the interests
that are contained therein, until such time as their perspective is
subsumed in a greater common perspective where the interests can be
reliably defended jointly.

The non- or semi-Western great powers are countries of what Alexander Yanov
has defined as the "Weimar" class -- Germany, Russia, Japan, China. When
they have had the chance of two-way economic-strategic integration with the
West, accompanied to be sure by one-way political-ideological adaptation,
they have thrived; thus Germany and Japan after 1945. However, their
experiments in one-way liberal adaptation to the West, when not accompanied
by two-way integration, have invariably ended in systemic failure,
disillusionment with the West, totalistic ideologies and totalitarian
regimes, coupled with wildly revisionist claims against the international
system.

Brzezinski is, I think, sincere in saying that Russia should be integrated
with the West. However, his suggestions for how Russia is to get into the
West have been unworkable. They are, in their own way, a utopian fantasy.
Russia cannot continue forever with a one-way process of adaptation, a
process that has correlated with catastrophic national decline and has come
to be seen as suicidal; it has long since passed the limits of its patience
with this approach. In response, Brzezinski has tended to push his goal
post farther back and make the requirements harsher. One does not integrate
a great country in this manner; one loses one's historic chances in this
manner.

Already in the 1960s, in a book on the Atlantic alliance, Brzezinski wrote
that Russia is essentially a European country, and that the Euro-Atlantic
construction provides the future home for Russia: the home that Russia will
need on the other side of the end of Communism. He has continued with this
line ever since, repeating the same basic points on a number of occasion.
There can be little doubt but that this is an integral part of his thinking.

In 1998, after Poland's accession to NATO was ratified and he needed no
longer to worry about this, Brzezinski wrote an article, "On to Russia,"
arguing that NATO and the U.S. President should make clearer and more
convincing statements that the door is open for Russia to join the
alliance. However, his own statements in this regard, in the next breath,
were actually somewhat more hedged and more unconvincing than those that
had already come officially from NATO and the U.S. President. The problem
was not so much in NATO's statements as in its lack of a serious, workable
plan for including Russia in the alliance in this era of history.
Brzezinski offered no suggestions for making NATO's plans more workable or
for how Russia could be profitably included in the alliance.

On the economic side, Brzezinski in the 1990-93 period translated his
theoretical statements about integrating Russia fairly convincingly into
practice, or at least proposed practice: he made proposals for serious and
substantial aid to Russia in its moment of need and opportunity, much more
than was actually provided, and with much greater vision and planning.
However, on the geopolitical side, his translation of theory into practice
has been wanting.

Instead of proposing the necessary initiatives for the two-way adaptation
and integration which is essential precisely in the geopolitical sphere,
his vision has not gone beyond one-way adaptation. This is often couched in
a language that seems cruelly punitive. Russia is portrayed as helpless,
useless, defeated, unworthy of such support as it gets; always at fault in
any problems with its neighbors, or for that matter, for problems within
its neighbors and among them; impotent, incapable of hitting back in any
intelligent or effective way, trapped in the dilemma of a single choice, no
longer a superpower nor even a great power, an economic dwarf, virtually
insignificant -- a "black hole", in one of his many colorful put-downs.

This sort of language, coupled with some of his more colorful counsel --
such as that Russia might do better to split into several states and that
this is the likely outcome of developments in Russia -- serves to brand him
in the Russian mind as an enemy of their country. And a dangerous enemy at
that: one who has great influence in Washington (he is attributed by
Russians far greater influence than he actually has), an eminence grise,
the teacher of Madeleine Albright, who, with NATO expansion and the war in
Kosovo and the Great Game, is thought to have been carrying out his
prescriptions for surrounding, humiliating and ruining Russia. It is not
easy to overcome such a reputation once formed. This is something I can
attest to personally: I tried to tell my students in Moscow that Brzezinski
was not the enemy they thought, that he had more than the average share of
good intentions and good advice for Russia as well as some bad attitudes
and advice, and they should read his counsel with an open mind for the
wisdom that is often there; but it rarely seemed to penetrate. At best,
Russians might concede that there are two Brzezinskis:

Brzezinski I, a global American strategist, founder of Trilateralism and
proponent of Euro-Atlantic integration;

Brzezinski II, a Polish patriot, one who cannot help but be aware that,
centuries ago, the wrong side won in the battles of the Time of Troubles
circa 1600 and in the earlier conflicts between the Polish-Lithuanian state
and Muscovy; and whose prescriptions seem to be for somehow reversing those
outcomes and impelling Muscovy to adapt to the small size it ought to have
had.

Now, even the most extreme Westernizing Russian, one who might agree that
the Russian people would have been better off if the Polish-Lithuanian
state had triumphed in the struggles among the eastern Slavs, would
nevertheless think that it is time to adapt to the reality that Muscovy won
those ancient battles and dry up the dreams of a grand historical revision.
The business of a statesman and a global strategist is to make the best of
the big Russian society that has long since come into being.

Russians cannot help but notice that, while the first, integrationist
Brzezinski formulates the grand principles, it is a second,
negative-adaptationist Brzezinski who seems to provide the specific
operational prescriptions for what to do with Russia.

The principles are appropriate. The prescriptions are inappropriate to the
principles, and for that matter to reality itself.

New prescriptions are needed, for mutual accommodation, and for one-way
accommodation on both sides to the real realities; and for mutual support
and integration in advancing the valid interests of both societies.

******

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