Johnson's Russia List
#6250
17 May 2002
davidjohnson@erols.com
A CDI Project
www.cdi.org
[Contents:
1. Dow Jones: US-Russia Relations Move Toward Economic Ties -Ambassador.
2. Reuters: Russia to abandon OPEC deal by end June.
3. BBC Monitoring: Russian prosecutor responds to MP's inquiry on 1999
apartment blocks blasts.
4. NewScientist.com: Flooding of Soviet uranium mines threatens millions.
5. St. Petersburg Times/AP: Judith Ingram, Russians Put Their Faith in
Letters to Putin.
6. The Guardian (UK): Martin Woollacott, Russia now knows it has no
option but to join the west. Putin is Russia's first leader truly to accept
the limits of its power.
7. Wall Street Journal: Guy Chazan, Official Dismisses U.S. Allegations
Moscow Is Aiding Iran With Nukes.
8. Moskovsky Komsomolets: A HEAVYWEIGHT'S FORECAST. Yevgeny Primakov:
"I hope the US will not make a great blunder"
9. Moscow Times: Neil Parison, Civil Service Reform: For Real This Time?
10. Walter Uhler: Missile Defense and Russian-American Relations.]
*******
#1
US-Russia Relations Move Toward Economic Ties -Ambassador
May 17, 2002
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
MOSCOW (AP)--U.S. Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow said Friday that
President George W. Bush's visit to Russia next week will help develop an
allied relationship that will increasingly focus on economic ties and civil
society - not arms control.
While attention is mostly focused on a landmark arms control deal to be
signed during the visit, "the forthcoming summit may go down in history as
the point of transition to a very different agenda, an agenda in which
non-security issues become more and more the focal point of our relations
with Russia , just as they are in relations with our other allies and
partners," Vershbow said.
"We are increasingly becoming allies in the fullest sense of the word," he
said at a conference on U.S.-Russia relations.
Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Alexei Meshkov said the summit is certain
to further improve already warm relations bolstered by President Vladimir
Putin's support for the U.S.-led war on terror.
"From a generator of global tension, our relations have become an engine of
international stability," he said.
He also said Russia expects a declaration signed at the summit to include
U.S. assurances that its planned missile shield wouldn't be directed
against Russia . That declaration is in addition to the nuclear deal, which
foresees cuts in each country's nuclear arsenals to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads
from the approximately 6,000 each is now allowed.
Despite talk of economic cooperation, Vershbow admitted that U.S. trade
with Russia accounts for less than one percent of its total trade
worldwide, roughly equaling the level of U.S. trade with Costa Rica.
"We have barely tapped the potential for trade and investment," he said,
pointing at the need for Russia to deal with its excessive bureaucratic
regulation and corruption that has stemmed foreign investment.
Vershbow reaffirmed U.S. support for Russia's bid to join the World Trade
Organization, but said Russia will have to make progress in deregulation,
increase business transparency and protect intellectual property rights.
Vershbow also voiced confidence that recent disputes over U.S. anti-dumping
duties on Russian steel and Russia's ban on imports of U.S. poultry will
"eventually be viewed as nothing more than bumps on the road to a larger
and mutually beneficial trade relationship."
*******
#2
Russia to abandon OPEC deal by end June
MOSCOW, May 17 (Reuters) - Russia, the world's second largest oil exporter,
said on Friday it will gradually abandon its deal with OPEC to curb crude
exports within the next two months as it was satisfied with current prices.
Russia's Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told reporters after meeting
domestic oil firms that Moscow planned to bring its exports to pre-cut
levels by the time the deal with OPEC expires at the end of June.
He gave no exact export forecast for the Russia's booming oil output.
"According to the mutual opinion of the government and oil firms,
stabilisation of the market is already close," Kasyanov said.
"In this context we have come to the conclusion that it is time to
gradually abandon the reduction that Russia applied to its oil exports."
"That means we will return to our normal volumes of oil output and exports
to international markets over the next two months," he said.
Russia joined other major non-OPEC producers Norway and Mexico and agreed
to cut oil exports by around five percent or 150,000 barrels per day from
January-June to help the cartel prop up world oil prices.
However, many observers say the country has in fact boosted exports of oil
and petroleum products in recent months.
*******
#3
BBC Monitoring
Russian prosecutor responds to MP's inquiry on 1999 apartment blocks blasts
Source: Ekho Moskvy radio, Moscow, in Russian 0930 gmt 17 May 02
Video film "Attack on Russia" does not contain any proof that the [Russian]
special services were involved in the explosions of apartment blocks in
Moscow, Byunaksk and Volgodonsk in 1999. The above statement is made in a
letter sent by Deputy Prosecutor-General Vasiliy Kolmagorov to the
co-chairman of the Liberal Russia party, Sergey Yushenkov, in response to
the latter's inquiry.
It was the Liberal Russia party that presented to the public the so-called
Berezovskiy's film dealing with the acts of terrorism which took place in
several Russian towns [in 1999].
******
#4
NewScientist.com
16 May 2002
Flooding of Soviet uranium mines threatens millions
By Rob Edwards
Huge dumps of toxic waste from old Soviet uranium mines are threatening to
contaminate the water supplies of millions of people in Central Asia. Up to
23 dumps along the Mailuu-Suu river in southern Kyrgyzstan are at risk of
leaking because of landslides and flooding in recent weeks.
Over two million tonnes of uranium wastes were left behind by a mining and
milling complex which fuelled the Soviet nuclear programme between 1945 and
1968. Tipped into piles or dropped into holes, it has long been "an
accident waiting to happen", according to experts from the World Health
Organization.
Kubanychbek Monolbaev, a Kyrgyz environmental health scientist with the WHO
in Bonn, says that the area is prone to earthquakes, as well as landslides
and floods. Downstream is the Fergana Valley, home to over six million
people from three countries, as well as major rice and cotton plantations.
Recent reports from Kyrgyzstan suggest that, following six weeks of rain, a
large landslide on Sunday blocked the Mailuu-Suu river and caused
widespread flooding. "This is dangerous", says Monolbaev, who inspected the
region in 1995, because none of the dumps have any engineered defences.
Chemically toxic
They contain uranium tailings, which are radioactive and chemically toxic,
as well as arsenic and perhaps other heavy metals. Gerhard Schmidt, a
German researcher who has studied the area's mining legacy, warns that
leaks from some of the waste dumps could make water in the Fergana Valley
unfit to drink.
There are two dumps near the river which contain "relatively high" levels
of uranium decay products, he says. These include thorium 230, radium 226
and lead 210, which have the potential to cause serious long term pollution.
After visiting the area in 1998, Schmidt, who is based at the Oko Institute
in Darmstadt, called for these two dumps to be moved to a safer place. The
government of Kyrgyzstan has been appealing for financial help from other
countries to help tackle the problem.
Earlier this week, the Kyrgyz deputy prime minister, Nikolai Tanaeyev, said
that landslides around the Mailuu-Suu river were potentially very
hazardous. If the uranium dumps were washed away, he pointed out, "it would
represent an ecological catastrophe for the whole region".
*******
#5
St. Petersburg Times
May 17, 2002
Russians Put Their Faith in Letters to Putin
By Judith Ingram
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
MOSCOW - Across the street from the Constitutional Court, Russia's highest
judicial authority, dozens of people jostle to enter the agency they trust
to solve their bureaucratic problems: President Vladimir Putin's Office for
Citizens' Appeals.
"I place my hope in God and Vladimir Vladimirovich," says Raisa Gorelova,
75, clutching a bag full of family photos, ID papers and a few yellowed
pages from a book on Soviet heroes of World War II, including one of her
brothers.
She has traveled 30 kilometers on a bus to deliver her petition at the
office on Ulitsa Ilyinka. She is seeking a grant so she can afford to move
to a town where her relatives live, from the city where the government
assigned her housing 12 years ago when she fled ethnic tension in Central
Asia.
As a guard nudges open the office door and the crowd surges inside, some
shrieking and pushing, Gorelova hangs back calmly. "I'm number 120 on the
list today," she says. "But I think I'll get help - even if I'm just one of
the millions who need it."
For centuries, Russians have brought their problems large and small
straight to the top - petitioning the tsar, then the Communist Party, now
the president. The tradition reflects public frustration with lower-level
offices dominated by bureaucrats indifferent or on the take and with the
country's underdeveloped administrative law system.
"People don't turn to the president because they've already knocked on
every door and been turned away," says office head Mikhail Mironov. "People
turn to him because he's been elected by the people, and the constitution
says that the president is the guarantor of basic rights and freedoms in
Russia."
This president in particular seems to inspire hope. As well as seeing
between 120 and 150 people who visit the office every day, Mironov and his
25-member staff handle reams of letters. Putin got 565,000 letters last
year - about twice the annual average for former President Boris Yeltsin.
In addition, some 492,000 people telephoned or sent Internet messages just
during the week preceding Putin's televised national call-in show in
December. That public-outreach effort was part of what appears to be a
concerted Kremlin effort to project an image of Putin as a caring leader.
"Vladimir Vladimirovich reacts and responds to people's problems actively,
whether they be schoolchildren, veterans or workers in various
enterprises," Mironov says.
Mironov and his staff spend much of their day meeting with supplicants.
Once the petitioners get inside the door and go through the metal detector,
they line up quietly at two windows, where clerks enter their names, other
personal information and the reason for the visit into a computer. Then
they sit in a corridor waiting to be called into a private office for a
conversation with a staff member. Most meetings take about 15 minutes,
Mironov says.
"From the homeless to academicians, they all come to our offices," he says.
"We have to find not only a common language, but solutions to their
problems."
Every Saturday, Mironov sends Putin and his key aides a two-page summary of
the letters and visits the office received the previous week. About 70
percent of the letters concern complaints about social rights such as
housing and pensions, and fewer than 10 percent contain policy proposals,
he says. Many letters are forwarded to lower-level agencies responsible for
the issues raised. Others prompt phone calls to government offices from
Mironov or his aides. The office also prepares briefing material before
Putin's tours around the country. When Putin sits down with a regional
governor, for instance, he has a thick file of popular comments on the
governor's performance.
"Vladimir Vladimirovich very clearly has put an accent on increasing
government officials' personal responsibility: 'You've been elected, you
should answer to the people,"' Mironov says. "He talks knowing what
problems they face."
The visitors to Mironov's office are indifferent to their role in shaping
Putin's vision of Russia. What they want is a solution to their problem, be
it a new apartment, higher pension or citizenship, the latter one of the
few issues that fall directly within Putin's responsibility.
The appeals office decides on every appeal for citizenship - a potentially
huge job, considering the millions of ethnic Russians who have arrived over
the past decade from elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. Other former
Soviet citizens, too, are pleading for citizenship in Russia, where the
economy is stronger and political life more stable than in many other
former republics.
"I'm 99 percent sure my appeal will be answered positively," says Sergei, a
50-year-old construction engineer from Armenia who spent 11 years building
gas pipelines in the far north.
Others have no faith they will succeed. Lena Yersh, a 30-year-old ethnic
Russian from Kazakhstan, says she's been living in Russia for eight years.
She says she has visited the appeals office repeatedly, only to be sent
away. She's back seeking a final, written rejection she can present to the
Canadian Embassy to back up her family's application for emigration.
"You get the feeling they don't read the letters," she seethes. "They mock
us."
*******
#6
The Guardian (UK)
17 May 2002
Russia now knows it has no option but to join the west
Putin is Russia's first leader truly to accept the limits of its power
By Martin Woollacott
Russia today is a colder and more remote country than it was a century ago,
in spite of global warming and the revolution in transport. This strange
fact, recently clarified by research at the Brookings Institution in
Washington, is the result of the Soviet Union's efforts to fill up its vast
regions, however inhospitable or distant, with cities, industries, and
people. The temperature per capita charts devised by Brookings show average
Russians struggling with lower temperatures as the years went by, simply
because Stalin pegged so many of them out in icy parts. The economic and
social costs of this cold weather imperialism are just one element of the
immense overall price Russia paid, through tsarist and Soviet times alike,
for its attempts to control and consolidate the mass of territories it had
accumulated.
The agreements reached by Russia, the United States and Nato this month on
strategic weapons cuts, a new Russian role in Nato and, possibly, on
anti-ballistic missile development, may be seen in the future as marking
the moment at which what had become an impossible task was finally
abandoned. This is not because the agreements are far reaching or radical,
because they are not, but because in their relative modesty they are
symptomatic of a Russian readiness to cut its national coat according to
the available cloth.
The Russian analyst Dmitri Trenin has called the transition through which
his country is struggling "the end of Eurasia". In his book of the same
name, Trenin describes the great "collecting of lands" of Russian history,
the later colonial and strategic expansions, and the efforts to stabilise
and make coherent the result. In this context, what Eurasia means is that
Russia's mission is to maintain an impregnable centre of power and of
independent culture straddling Europe and Asia, capable of projection into
both and of resisting incursions from outside. Or, to put it more shortly,
an empire by one name or another. It is well known that such ideas by no
means disappeared in 1989. As late as the Kosovo war, for example, some
Russians still thought that the west could be outflanked there by an
audacious seizure of Pristina airport, an operation which fortunately
failed, since its success would have led to deep embarrassment for both
sides.
Both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin imagined that Russia could, in
some vaguely conceived way, "join the west" and yet continue to enjoy a
polar role, equally or almost equally, with the US. What they discovered,
as Trenin says, was that "Russia was to be treated according to the
realities of its economic, political, social and legal systems, not the
inflated ideas that its leaders had of themselves". Equality with the US
was a pipe dream, and the only slightly more realistic idea that Russia
would marshal an informal grouping including China, India and Iraq, which
could resist at least some American and western purposes, was also
unsustainable. The march of Nato and the EU towards Russia's western
borders signalled "the end of the hope that sometime in the future when
Russia emerges from the crisis and grows economically strong and powerful,
it will be able to restore its 'natural' sphere of influence". Trenin
concludes: "The harsh reality is that... there is no Eurasia left for
Russia to return to."
While the ideas Trenin describes survive in some quarters in the military,
the bureaucracy, the parties and the intelligentsia, Vladimir Putin has
been generally accepted as the first Russian leader who truly understands
the limits of Russian power - not only now but even in a future where
Russian strength has been restored. Certainly his prudence means he has
consistently avoided unwinnable confrontations. He saw immediately, for
instance, that to try and fail to stop the Baltic states joining Nato, or
to act as if the US needed a Russian licence to operate in central Asia
after September 11, would be disastrous. The arms treaty just signed with
the US is another example of his determination to avoid unnecessary
defeats, or at least unnecessarily public defeats.
One Russian expert concluded gloomily in advance that the document would be
"an empty treaty containing few figures of real significance". He was not
far wrong, since it simply enshrines what the US had declared it would do
anyway, while also allowing it to change its mind at will and with a
minimum of notice. If a joint committee on anti-ballistic missile
development does emerge after next week's summit meeting between Putin and
Bush in St Petersburg, it is bound to be similarly weighted towards
American interests.
The new engagement with Nato does not fall into quite the same pattern. The
Americans are comfortable enough with it, but from one aspect it represents
an attempt by the Europeans, with Britain and Germany in the van, to make a
flagging Nato more relevant to the US. Putin appears to share with other
leaders the fear that America under the Bush administration tends to be
heedless to the consequences of its policies for others. It is not so much
the decisions the Americans may unilaterally make but the possibility that
they will make them without thinking through what might happen to other
countries, in different locations, with different borders and neighbours
than themselves.
"The issue for Putin," write Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill in a recent
paper for Brookings, "is that the US is highly unlikely to protect Russia
from any fallout it might face if events get out of hand." He has therefore
chosen to align himself with other leaders, like Blair and Schröder, who
also hope to influence US decisions, and the new Nato arrangement could
provide a framework for such efforts. On this argument Putin has moved away
from any idea that the US has plans to further demote Russia, to the
distinct view that America might nevertheless inadvertently damage his
country.
If Eurasia is dead, joining the west is, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has
written, "Russia's only strategic option". But joining the west, as the
disillusion which followed the collapse of such hopes in the 1990s proved,
is not a matter of one action, one decision, or one treaty. It is a
process, requiring a much more substantial convergence between Russia and
the west than at present, and one in which there are large responsibilities
on both sides.
Russian weakness could undermine it, as could American and European neglect
or malice. The campaign against terror, which has played an important part
in changing the Bush administration's attitude toward Russia, could also
lurch in a direction which could seriously damage a Russia which must watch
its relations with Muslims both inside and outside the federation, and
which is already playing with fire in Chechnya. Trenin looks forward to a
future in which Russia would become a full member of both Nato and the EU,
but it is a future which he thinks could be 30 years away.
Saying goodbye to Eurasia without an immediate entry into Europe is a
painful business, but the only alternative is for Russia to stay, quite
literally, out in the cold.
*******
#7
Wall Street Journal
May 17, 2002
Official Dismisses U.S. Allegations Moscow Is Aiding Iran With Nukes
By GUY CHAZAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
MOSCOW -- Escalating a row that could sour next week's presidential summit
in Moscow, a senior Russian official dismissed U.S. claims that Russia is
helping Iran develop nuclear weapons and challenged the Bush administration
to provide solid evidence that it was exporting sensitive technologies to
Tehran.
"We have adopted comprehensive measures to exclude the merest possibility
of missile-technology transfers," said Nikolai Shumkov, an official at the
Russian Space Agency. The Americans "said they were satisfied with these
measures. Then suddenly we get a new flurry of complaints from them, and we
don't know why."
Relations between Russia and the U.S. are blossoming, boosted by this
week's nuclear arms-reduction agreement and a deal giving Moscow greater
influence in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The two countries have
also been exchanging intelligence information since President Vladimir
Putin threw his support behind the U.S. war on terror last year.
This new entente is expected to be cemented next week when U.S. President
George W. Bush makes his first trip to Moscow. But differences over Iran
remain a sticking point. The Bush administration says Iran, identified as
part of the "axis of evil," is developing weapons of mass destruction --
and Russia is helping it. It says it will bring up the issue at next week's
summit.
Mr. Shumkov, head of the space agency's department of military missile
technology, said a joint Russian-American commission set up five years ago
to address earlier U.S. concerns about Iran had recommended tightening
Russian export controls at both private companies and government agencies.
The measures, he said, had been implemented in full and "U.S. fears had
been calmed." But in recent months, the White House had revived its
complaints.
"We ask, 'Do you have any evidence [of illegal nuclear exports]?"' he said.
"They say, 'Yes, but we're not going to tell you." '
A senior Bush administration official said this week that the U.S. has
"solid reason" to believe Russia was cooperating with Iran's nuclear
weapons and ballistic-missile programs, and the two presidents would
address the issue at their summit. "Our objective is to tee up discussions
at a very senior level," he said.
The official said the U.S. wanted to cooperate more closely with Russia on
halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction, but that Russia itself
posed a proliferation risk, partly by its failure to comply with existing
biological and chemical-weapons treaties, and partly by its nuclear
cooperation with Iran.
But Russia , which is helping Iran build a civilian nuclear plant in the
southern city of Bushehr, says all its trade with Iran is in compliance
with its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Mr. Shumkov said Russia had been criticized by the U.S. for selling Iran
goods that had no apparent military application. But he added that Bush
administration officials had acknowledged there were no nuclear leaks to
Iran at the Russian government level.
******
#8
Moskovsky Komsomolets
May 17, 2002
A HEAVYWEIGHT'S FORECAST
Yevgeny Primakov: "I hope the US will not make a great blunder"
Author: Mikhail Rostovsky
YEVGENY PRIMAKOV, FORMER PRIME MINISTER AND NOW HEAD OF THE CHAMBER
OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY, DISCUSSES CURRENT POLITICAL ISSUES IN RUSSIA
AND ABROAD. HE DISCUSSES THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN, AND THE POSSIBILITY
OF A US STRIKE AGAINST IRAQ. THEN HE COMMENTS ON THE SITUATION AT THE
NEW TV-6 CHANNEL.
Yevgeny Primakov, president of the Chamber of Commerce and
Industry, agreed to an interview on current issues in domestic and
foreign politics.
Question: Many observers believe that the terms of the new
agreement on cuts to nuclear weapons are mostly favorable for the US,
not for Russia. Is this true?
Yevgeny Primakov: I disagree with this conclusion. It is
necessary to sign this agreement. Of course, this is a compromise. The
US has given up its position of refusing to sign any agreement at all.
To all appearances, Russia also has not turned its insistence on
compulsory destruction of all dismantled nuclear warheads into an
insurmountable obstacle to the signing of this treaty.
Question: How would you assess the results of the past eight
months of the battle against terrorism?
Primakov: It's too early to judge if the anti-terror operation
has achieved its ultimate goals. Much remains to be done. The Taliban
is not neutralized yet, and it may resume its activities. However,
there are two positive results. First, the events of September 11
showed that international terrorism has acquired new forms. Now it is
a self-sufficient entity not connected with any particular state.
Consequently, it is now impossible to trace international terrorists
by traditional methods. It is impossible to combat terrorism by
persuading any particular nation to stop funding terrorist
organizations. Under these circumstances, it was extremely important
to unite all forces against the mutual problem.
Second, US foreign policy is gradually evolving. Now the US is no
longer as certain that its unilateral policies will be unconditionally
supported by everyone. Most likely, the opinions of the Russian
Federation and the European Union (EU) have played important roles in
this. Even Britain, the closest ally of the US, opposes unconditional
American dominance. As the Afghanistan war has shown, even a country
like the US cannot achieve its aims on its own. For instance, it would
have been impossible to mobilize the Northern Alliance so quickly.
Without Russia's consent, the US would have been unable to use
airfields in Central Asia for the military operation in Afghanistan.
Question: You've said that the US is giving up the idea of
unilateral foreign policy. Is this true? The US media refer to an
upcoming strike against Iraq as a settled matter...
Primakov: The number of nations included in America's "axis of
evil" is increasing, I agree. But I don't think this means that these
states will certainly be targets of the next US strikes. If the US
does take such steps, these actions would not have any objective
motivation. They would be a gross blunder by the United States.
Question: How would a strike against Iraq affect Russia, if the
US does go ahead with this?
Primakov: In this case it will be extremely difficult for the
Russian government to continue taking a line of complete solidarity
with the US. But this question should be broader: how would this event
affect the global situation in general? The main outcome of this move
would be to break the international unity of support for combating
terrorism. A strike against Iraq would not improve the US positions in
the Arab world. On the contrary, the Arab and Islamic worlds will
split. Most Arab and Islamic countries would be opposing the United
States.
Question: You've said that the US does not have objective motives
for a strike against Iraq. But the Americans claim that Iraq is again
stockpiling chemical weapons, and is trying to make a nuclear bomb.
Primakov: One cannot rule out the possibility that Saddam Hussein
may be attempting to acquire some weapons of mass destruction.
However, the Americans will not manage to solve this problem by
unilateral forcible methods. Moreover, this would exacerbate this
situation. It is necessary to admit that not only Iraq but also some
other countries are ready to develop mass destruction weapons. But it
can't be appropriate to bomb all such countries. And who will
determine which country may be targeted, and which may not? The only
way of preventing global disasters and chaos is to have such problems
resolved by the international community as a whole, not by one
particular country.
As for Iraq, the West is also partly to blame for the situation
there. It was quite possible to agree with Saddam Hussein on
continuation of the international monitoring there. Now it is clear
that Richard Butler, former head of the UN special commission,
provoked many negative events. Even his own deputy has confirmed this.
Question: It is thought that Moscow has made many unilateral
concessions to the US, but has not received anything in exchange. Do
you agree with this statement?
Primakov: This is the approach of a haggler. Indeed, Russia
approved the decisions of Central Asian countries to permit the US to
use their airfields. Should we have compelled the US to give us
something in exchange? It won't do to behave like this in politics. Of
course, there is some risk here. I'm convinced that the US military
presence in Central Asia should be directly connected only with the
military operation in Afghanistan. If the US military intends to stay
in Central Asia for a long time, this won't stabilize the situation.
Question: Do you believe that the US will really leave Central
Asia after the end of the war in Afghanistan?
Primakov: I'd like to believe this. If America does not withdraw
its forces from Central Asia after the end of the Afghani operation,
this will make a great hindrance to the development of Russia's
partnership with the US. Besides, it is necessary to count with the
position of China. China is also not interested in the permanent
presence of American troops near its borders. As for guarantees, we
don't have any. However, nobody has absolute guarantees of anything.
Question: Rumors are circulating in the Russian media that the
TV-6 channel is doomed. What do you think of these rumors?
Primakov: Of course that isn't true. But we are having some
difficulties. Before a TV channel can start operation, it is necessary
to resolve a number of issues. The main issue is who will be
responsible for the channel's finances. There are two points of view
on this account. Journalists want to manage this money all by
themselves. The group of people funding this project opposes this. I
believe it is necessary to find a compromise between these two
positions. Sponsors should know how their money is used. And the
journalists should have the opportunity to see to it that this money
is spent efficiently.
Question: You've never concealed your negative attitude toward
tycoons associated with the previous president. How are you getting on
now with Roman Abramovich and Alexander Mamut?
Primakov: Actually, I don't even meet with them. But I'd like to
note that I don't have any prejudices preventing me from cooperating
with any particular person. The main point is that our cooperation
should be useful for some business.
Question: You opponents claim that you may become either the
senior censor or the dummy chairman at TV-6. What do you think about
your role at this channel?
Primakov: I'll be neither a puppet not a controller. My role is
to optimally minimize all obstacles encountered while TV-6 is being
set up. Neither Arkady Volsky nor I will interfere in the editorial
policy of the channel. We only want to help journalists overcome the
crisis and create a truly popular television channel, independent of
tycoons and the state. By the way, these statements will be set out in
the contract that will be signed by Media-Socium and the journalist
team. I hope this contract will correspond to four principles: stick
to the facts, be objective, don't do any harm, and let your opponents
express their views.
Question: The TV-6 journalists have many fears about you. For
instance, they are afraid that you may try to change part of their
team.
Primakov: Rumors about personnel changes are nonsense. I don't
have any such plans. I think my relations with the journalists are
quite normal. They have met with me in my office and seen my approach.
Question: It is also rumored that TV-6 cannot possibly become
profitable, and therefore, many investors have left it.
Primakov: It sounds as if the channel were already functioning,
and I were its manager. It is too early to talk about the channel's
self-sufficiency and terms of reaching it.
Question: Some observers also claim that money from private
investors will not be enough, and the state will have to pay the
remaining sum for TV-6.
Primakov: If any more investors should leave TV-6, their places
will be taken by other investors. We don't intend to obtain money from
the treasury.
Question: There are rumors that you were not very eager to be
involved in TV affairs, but the president just presented you with a
fait accompli.
Primakov: But I've become involved in this business, so the
matter is settled. And the president did not intervene in this affair.
(Translated by Kirill Frolov)
*******
#9
Moscow Times
May 17, 2002
Civil Service Reform: For Real This Time?
By Neil Parison
Neil Parison is a program team leader with the World Bank providing support
to the Russian government's civil service reform work and former head of
the EBRD's office in Moscow. He contributed this comment to The Moscow
Times. The views stated are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of
the World Bank.
Halfway through what is still widely expected to be only his first term as
president, Vladimir Putin made a renewed call for major reform of the
government administrative machine and of the country's civil service system
in his annual address to the parliament last month. This was greeted with
skepticism in some quarters: Is this reform for real? If it is such a
priority why has it been left until now? Is Russia's fabled bureaucracy
indeed capable of being reformed?
There have been a number of attempts to reform the bureaucracy over the
past 10 years. The first was in 1992-93, when a small group of radical
reformers in the government's personnel directorate, Roskadry, developed a
set of reforms very much along the lines of programs at that time being
launched in some countries in Central and Eastern Europe (downsizing,
recertifying all existing civil servants, and removing security
apparatchiks from civil service positions). The response of the bureaucracy
was swift and effective: Roskadry itself was simply and summarily abolished.
Then in 1996-97, deputy head of the presidential administration (and
current First Deputy Prime Minister) Alexei Kudrin announced plans he had
developed to dramatically streamline the government machine. This time,
then-President Boris Yeltsin stepped in to thwart this.
Significant reductions in the central civil service were nonetheless
achieved: The Moscow-based central civil service was cut by 10 percent from
1995 to 2000, from 33,800 employees to 30,300 employees. There was also a
small reduction of around 2 percent in the number of federal civil servants
based in the regions, from 382,400 to 374,400. However, over the same
period the number of civil servants employed at the regional level
increased by 7 percent, from 582,900 to 624,800.
So while it is true that the total number of civil servants at all levels
of government has gone up over recent years (from 1.06 million in 1995 to
1.16 million in 2000), the staffing of central ministries in Moscow,
already small by international standards, has been cut significantly.
Finally, in 1997 a concept for administrative reform was developed by a
group of senior advisers to Yeltsin. Yeltsin himself in his address to
parliament in 1998 devoted a significant amount of his address to spelling
out the reforms envisaged. Yet nothing happened. None of the reforms
announced were implemented. Will it be any different this time around?
There are a number of reasons why this time things look different. The
measures enunciated by Putin represent perhaps only the tip of a reasonably
sized iceberg. Significant effort has already been devoted to this set of
reforms over the past 2 1/2 years. The original program of German Gref from
early in 2000 as produced by the Center for Strategic Studies comprised
three components: state reform, economic and structural reforms, and social
reforms. While the latter two became the core of the present government's
work program, the first was never published.
From media discussion at the time it was clear that the state reform
program comprised a number of fundamental reforms: the development of the
federal districts, intergovernmental fiscal reform, judicial reform,
deregulation and civil service and administrative reform. The Gref team had
looked long and hard at the lessons from development and particularly
implementation of reforms over the previous 10 years in Russia. They had
concluded that it would not be possible to achieve the results hoped for in
the areas of economic and social reform without also implementing this set
of radical deeper institutional reforms. And this view also chimed neatly
with the conclusions then-Prime Minister Putin had drawn and summarized in
his first major political and economic policy statement in December 1999.
So why then has so little been heard about this reform, while major
attention has rightly been paid to related reforms such as judicial reform
and deregulation? The answer appears to be that the reform team had
understood the lessons from the earlier reform efforts in this area and had
decided to approach development of reforms very carefully both from a
strategic and tactical perspective. A lot of effort over the past two years
has gone into building up within the government and the presidential
administration a broad consensus around the strategic objectives for, and
priorities of, reform of the civil service system, to create a modern,
merit-based and corruption-resistant civil service.
A comprehensive concept for reforming the civil service was prepared by a
team with broad representation from the administration of the president,
the government and leading Russian experts and academics in this area. This
was formally approved by Putin in August 2001 although not published.
The concept covers modernization of the federal civil service as well as
regional civil services. Putin's order of August 2001 setting up a
government commission on civil service reform, led by Prime Minister
Mikhail Kasyanov, and a working group led by Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy
head of the presidential administration, were however published.
It now seems that a detailed action plan for civil service reform has been
finalized and that this should be formally approved -- and published --
within the next few months. Early priorities appear to be: to improve
government decision-making capacity; to undertake a comprehensive series of
functional reviews so as to align functions more closely with key
priorities of the government work program and to eliminate, commercialize
or spin off non-priority functions and all commercial services and
functions at present provided by federal government structures; to initiate
major pay reform, targeted at senior management and professional skills
areas where recruitment and retention difficulties are being experienced;
to revisit service decentralization; to strengthen internal and
particularly external accountability mechanisms and institutions and
significantly increase participation by citizens, service users and the
private sector in decision-making; and to build a new culture of openness
and transparency.
So this reform does indeed seem to be for real. The president and
government appear extremely serious about ensuring real implementation of
civil service reform. The reform itself has been carefully prepared and
seems to command a degree of consensus that was lacking in earlier reform
efforts. While this is extremely good and positive news, it is also of
course the case that reforms in this area can take some years before they
deliver results in terms of more effective policy analysis, development and
implementation; improved quality of public service provision; and reduced
corruption.
The business community can however do its bit to help accelerate the
implementation of these reforms by demanding effective and appropriate
behavior from the public agencies and officials with whom individual
companies, banks and managers interact at all levels of government. The
business community should also demand more effective participation and
consultation on matters affecting the investment climate, should press for
greater transparency of decision-making by government both centrally and
locally, and should insist on greater accountability.
Complaints about the bureaucracy are legion and legendary. And skepticism
about the present beginning reform will remain until it starts to deliver
results. But now would be a very good time for the private sector also to
try and help make a real difference.
*******
#10
From: WaltUhler@aol.com (Walter Uhler)
Date: Thu, 16 May 2002
Subject: Missile Defense and Russian-American Relations
In light of the indications that some agreement on national missile
defense might be reached next week, I offer to JRL my paper -- which I'll be
presenting in St. Petersburg next week. The endnotes will be provided upon
request.
National Missile Defense and Russian American Relations
December 3, 1998 found Arizona's U.S. Senator Jon Kyl extolling the merits
of national missile defense (NMD) to a large gathering of like-minded
enthusiasts in Washington, D.C. Although his was a decidedly preliminary
performance, designed to wet the appetite for the main event -- a
pro-missile defense speech by Lady Margaret Thatcher, Kyl urged immediate
steps -- perhaps first utilizing the Navy's AEGIS cruisers in a ship-based
system -- to protect the entire (not just continental) United States from a
missile attack by a "rogue" state, such as Iran, Iraq or North Korea.
Dramatic events during the summer of 1998 appeared to support Kyl's sense
of urgency. In July, the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat
to the United States, headed by former and future Secretary of Defense,
Donald Rumsfeld, issued its recommendations to Congress. Not only did the
commission conclude that, within five years, Iran and North Korea could
develop missiles able to strike U.S. territory, it also found that "the
threat to the United States posed by these emerging capabilities is
broader, more mature, and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in
estimates and reports by the intelligence community."1
Events on the ground appeared to buttress the commission's conclusions.
In May, Pakistan and India had conducted underground nuclear tests. Iran
flew its first Shahab 3 medium range missile in July. And, most ominously,
on August 31, North Korea launched a three-stage Taepodong-I missile over
Japan in an attempt to put a satellite in orbit -- leading to speculation
by some analysts that it could strike parts of Alaska or Hawaii.
Senator Kyl knew quite well that the missile defense systems he advocated
would violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty signed by the United States
and the Soviet Union in 1972. Kyl also knew that Russia, the only state
possessing a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the United States,
believed that the treaty remained the cornerstone of strategic stability.
Nevertheless, he seemed quite willing to risk alienating Russia in order to
deploy missile defense. Knowing that his words were being broadcast by
C-SPAN, I sought the reason for his unconcern about Russia. Our exchange
went something like this:
UHLER: Senator Kyl, I'm Walt Uhler -- with the Department of Defense.
What about Russia's sensibilities concerning missile defense?
KYL: During the Cold War there were two schools of thought about how to
deal with the Soviet Union. One school thought the Soviet Union should be
accommodated. The other, led by President Reagan, forced the issue. We now
know who was right. Like Reagan, I feel that we should explain our point
of view to the Russians, but if they object, we must proceed. They
eventually will come along.2
Although Kyl did not specify how Reagan "forced" the issue, it is safe to
conjecture that every conferee knew what he meant. For it is an
unquestioned assumption among political conservatives in the United States,
and among an even a broader segment of its populace, that President
Reagan's massive arms buildup during the 1980s -- especially his Strategic
Defense Initiative (SDI, also known as "Star Wars") -- precipitated the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
National missile defense enthusiasts are not shy about this matter. On
June 20, 2001 one of the biggest NMD cheerleaders, U.S. Representative Curt
Weldon, was more explicit in an article titled, "Bush can follow Reagan's
lead in policy on missile defense," published in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Congressman Weldon is the author H.R 4, which made it the policy of the
United States to deploy a national missile defense.
According to Weldon, "when George W. Bush made his first visit to Europe
recently, it was like a rerun of Ronald Reagan's first visit to Europe in
1982, when a new president with a new defense vision faced skittish
European leaders and a hostile Russia.
What did Reagan do in the face of such opposition? He did what comes
naturally to wise statesmen facing decisions of great consequence. He
faced down the protests, reassured our allies, called Moscow's bluff, and
went ahead." Although Weldon does not specifically identify the elements
of Reagan's "new defense vision," he does assert that calling Moscow's
bluff led to a "sweeping" international victory.3 Although Weldon's
article attempts to connect Reagan in 1982 with Bush in 2001 on the issue
of national missile defense, Reagan's famous Star Wars speech was not
delivered until March 1983. True, in October 1981 the president had
discussed missile defenses as a potential solution to the vulnerability of
America's ICBMs. 4 And it also is true that America's 1982 Defense
Guidance urged the pursuit of "competitive strategies;" 5 or the
development of "weapons that are difficult for the Soviets to counter,
impose disproportionate costs, open up new areas of major military
competition and obsolesce previous Soviet investment." 6 Specifically
proposed was "prototype development of space-based weapon systems." 7
But 1982 also was the year when the nuclear freeze movement gained great
momentum. The most persuasive evidence indicates that Reagan's Star Wars
speech was intended to halt that movement, to "break something new" 8 that
would "provide the nation with something reassuring that might stem the
growth of the freeze." 9
Furthermore, Weldon's historical revisionism overlooks the fact that
Reagan's rhetoric and arms buildup brought the world to the edge of the
nuclear abyss. The Soviet Union's KGB inaugurated Operation RYAN (Raketno
Yadernnoe Napadenie), or an unduly frantic search for evidence that America
was contemplating a surprise nuclear attack, soon after Reagan's
inauguration.
In late September 1983 -- the year of Reagan's "Evil Empire" and "Star
Wars" speeches and shoot-down of Korean Airlines flight 007 by a Soviet
interceptor -- and thus when mutual suspicions were at their peak, "an Oko
satellite reported that a massive U.S. ICBM launch had taken place." 10
Fortunately, the duty officer, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, concluded that it
was a false alarm and did not pass the warning up the chain of command.11
Unfortunately for Petrov, he was removed from his position and forced into
early retirement. 12
In November matters became even more serious. A U.S. - NATO exercise,
called Able Archer, tested "the command and communications procedures for
the release and use of nuclear weapons," 13 prompting Moscow KGB "Center"
to issue a flash alert for all information indicating that the U.S. was
preparing an imminent nuclear strike. This was subsequently seen to be an
extremely serious matter because, "prevailing nuclear doctrine at the time
held that in the face of an impending nuclear attack, the Soviets should
have sought to avoid disaster by launching a preemptive nuclear attack of
their own." 14
Moscow did upgrade "the alert status of twelve of its nuclear-capable
fighter aircraft" and "in East Germany and in Poland, Soviet forces began
to prepare for a retaliatory nuclear strike, "15 lending credence to the
conclusion of Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky that these events
brought the Soviet Union and the United States closer to nuclear war than
at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. 16
A former CIA director, Robert Gates, attributed the Soviet Union's
alarmist behavior to being "out of touch" 17 or to their "growing
desperation." 18 But surely, much of the blame for this hair-trigger
tension can be traced back to the reckless rhetoric and behavior of the
Reagan administration. Even Reagan professed to be "perplexed but
disturbed" 19 by the KGB's response, and the thought that the Soviet
leaders might believe the United States capable of such action "contributed
to his desire for face-to-face contact with Soviet leaders." 20
Thus, one might ask what, indeed, did President Reagan's Star Wars program
accomplish prior to the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev on the world's stage
in March 1985.. Except for the hair-trigger tension of 1983, we have
Matthew Evangelista's considered conclusion that it accomplished nothing.
As of March 1985, according to Evangelista, "none of the Reagan
administration's expectations for the SDI's impact on the USSR had come
true. There was no massive, economy-busting increase in Soviet military
expenditures, no concessions on arms control, and no interest in 'sharing'
SDI with the United States." 21
The main thrust of the Star Wars argument, however, concerns moves made by
Mikhail Gorbachev. I heard it, most recently, on June 28, 2001, when
another NMD enthusiast, Robert Pfaltzgraff (Professor of International
Security Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts
University and President of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis) told
a gathering of national missile defense enthusiasts in King of Prussia,
Pennsylvania that Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative precipitated the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
At the end of his presentation, I rose to request evidence to support his
assertion. Rather than answer me, however, the floor was turned over to
Ambassador Henry Cooper, former head of the Strategic Defense Initiative
Organization under the elder President Bush. Cooper assured me that, based
upon his personal involvement in arms control negotiations, especially with
Marshall Sergei Akhromeyev, the Soviet leadership knew it was defeated
when Mikhail Gorbachev failed to persuade Reagan to abandon in his SDI
program at Reykjavik in October, 1986. Adjournment of the afternoon
session immediately after Cooper's response prevented further dialogue.
But his history had a familiar ring to it. It had been presented in a book
by Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy
that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union. And it was just as
erroneous.22
First, Schweizer erroneously claims that Gorbachev's "perestroika was a
consequence of Reagan policy" because "with the Reagan administrations
commitment to high-technology systems such as the Strategic Defense
Initiative, economic reform became a necessary evil." 23 Anyone familiar
with the thinking of Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov might find such an assertion
to be plausible. But actual participants, such as V. V. Shlykov
(Department Chief of the Main Intelligence Administration of the Soviet
General Staff, 1980-88), Roald Sagdeev, former head of the Soviet Space
Research Institute, and Aleksandr Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev's closest
advisors, claim otherwise.
According to Shlykov, "The notion that Gorbachev's perestroika was started
as a result of Reagan's Star Wars program was concocted in the West and is
completely absurd." 24 Sagdeev told American Sovietologist, Matthew
Evangelista, that SDI had "absolutely zero influence" 25 on the origins of
perestroika.
When Yakovlev was asked to assess the impact of Reagan's defense spending
on the new leadership, he stated that "it played no role. None....Gorbachev
and I were ready for changes in our policy regardless of whether the
American President was Reagan or Kennedy, or someone even more liberal. It
was clear that our military spending was enormous and we had to reduce
it....There have been better and smarter Presidents. I can't say that
Reagan played a major role..." 26
Schweizer correctly notes that Star Wars worried influential individuals
within the Soviet military and the scientific community. 27 In fact, in
1983 Yuri Andropov authorized the Soviet Union's ongoing investigation into
potential ballistic missile defense applications to escalate from Fon-1
(advanced concept and technology development) to Fon-2 (engineering
development).28 Nevertheless, some of the Soviet Union's most prominent
scientists, such as Yevgenii Velikov and Roald Sagdeev, "quickly focused
their attention on the dangers posed by an arms race in space weaponry,
including SDI." 29
A clear indication that Schweizer's effort is more a political polemic
than a serious work of history can be found at the end of his book. The
last chapter of his book, discounting the five-page epilogue, ends with the
Reykjavik Summit of October 1986. Although Gorbachev had been in power but
nineteen months at the time of this historic meeting (and had five more
years of rule ahead of him) Schweizer claims that "the Reykjavik Summit
proved a watershed meeting in many ways."30
Yet one searches Schweizer's book in vain for the devastating impact of
Reykjavik on the Soviet Union. Instead the reader finds suppositions about
the impact of Star Wars rather than proof. For example, Schweizer recounts
the discussions of John Poindexter (a member of Reagan's delegation) with
Marshal Akhromeyev to demonstrate that the prominent Soviet military
officer "had an abject fear of SDI." 31 Schweizer also asserts, rather
than proves, that "Gorbachev's willingness to agree to dramatic cuts [in
his strategic and intermediate nuclear forces] and link them to strategic
defense was further evidence of just how desperate Moscow was for relief
from the West."32 Thus, Reagan's refusal to bargain away Star Wars was a
crushing blow because "Soviet hopes of eliminating the SDI research program
were dashed once and for all." 33
As this paper will demonstrate, Schweizer's is an extremely poor, biased
and incomplete history of the Cold War's culmination. But it merits the
consideration given to it here because Richard Pipes, an extremely erudite
and serious student of Russia's history, once wrote that Schweizer's book
-- although it "lacks scholarly rigor" and is based upon interviews, "many
of which cannot be verified" -- "comes closer to explaining the end of the
Cold War" than Raymond Garthoff's extraordinarily researched book, The
Great Transition.34
Pipes (a member of the CIA's "Team B," author of the alarmist and now
thoroughly discredited article, "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight
and Win a Nuclear War" and advisor to President Reagan during the first
years of his first term) notes with approval that Schweizer "opens with
three quotations from three high Soviet officials ... conceding publicly
that Reagan's programs, such as the Strategic Defense Initiative,
'accelerated the decline of the Soviet Union.'" 35
Lending further scholarly weight to the Star Wars argument is Martin
Malia's book, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia,
1917-1991. Malia wrote, "SDI posed a technological and economic challenge
the Soviets could neither ignore nor match." 36 He adds that "former Soviet
military personnel and political analysts generally agree that the Soviet
Union's inability to keep up its half of the arms race, in particular
regard to SDI, was a principal factor in triggering perestroika." 37
According to Malia, "the crucial turning point was the INF Treaty of
1987...Gorbachev bowed out of the Cold War essentially on the West's terms
and without obtaining any concession on SDI. No doubt one reason he did so
was that by 1987...the internal difficulties of perestroika had become
acute." 38
There's plenty of evidence, much of it emerging after Schweizer, Pipes and
Malia offered their interpretations of events, to refute every claim made
for Reagan and the Star Wars interpretation. First is the emerging
evidence that in 1985, the Soviets undertook "a separate effort, code-named
Protivodeistviye (Counteraction)...as an asymmetric response to SDI, aimed
at improving the ability of ICBMs to survive against space-based weapons."
39 That effort's greatest contribution was the Topol-M ICBM that was
specifically designed to counter Star Wars.40
The Topol-M not only survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also
the economic duress that plagued post-Soviet Russia during its first
decade of existence. The first ten Topol-Ms were deployed in 1998. Ten
more were deployed in 1999. Proponents of the Star Wars interpretation
might want to reconsider their operating hypothesis, based upon that fact
alone.
According to reports gathered by Nikolai Sokov, "Topol-M's warhead is
precision-guided or uses other technology with the same effect ...this
single-warhead ICBM carries more decoys and penetration aids than a
ten-warhead Peacekeeper (MX). Reportedly, the warhead is hardened, and only
a direct hit by an antimissile could stop it on the descending
trajectory...Topol-M's booster is intended to reduce the duration and the
altitude of the active (boost) phase of the trajectory. This was done
specifically to avoid the impact of 'various-types' of antimissile defense
systems, such as ultra-high-frequency emissions, lasers and so forth -- a
clear reference to the 'exotic' 'Star Wars' space-based systems."41
With this evidence in mind, Mikhail Gorbachev's statement to President
Reagan at Geneva, in November 1985, takes on added significance. Referring
to Star Wars, Gorbachev said, "I think you should know that we have already
developed a response. It will be effective and far less expensive than
your project, and be ready for use in less time." 42
In this context, Roald Sagdeev's assertion that "Marshal Akhromeyev and
his people never attributed much to SDI's technical prospects." 43 becomes
more plausible than John Poindexter's. Thus, also gaining plausibility are
the assertions of M.I. Gerasev (Institute for the USA and Canada), General
M. A. Gareev, and V. V. Shlykov that denigrate SDI's significance.44
Finally, Professor Malia's interpretation of the INF Treaty does not
withstand compelling evidence to the contrary. First, we now know that
Andrei Sakharov -- who called Star Wars "a Maginot line in space" --
persuaded Gorbachev in February 1987 to avoid allowing his concerns about
Star Wars to prevent him from negotiating the INF Treaty (if not the START
treaty).45 Second, the incursion, not only into Soviet airspace, but into
Red Square of Mathias Rust's Cesna airplane in May gave Gorbachev the
excuse he needed to purge the military. Gorbachev subsequently remarked,
"Let everyone here and in the West know where the power is -- it is in the
political leadership, in the Politburo." Gorbachev had overcome a major
obstacle to his pursuit of "mutual security." 46
Third, and perhaps most significantly, immediately after the signing of
the INF Treaty, Gorbachev and his Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze
"stood up, beaming, and raised their arms straight up in a victory
gesture."47
However, two other beliefs prevent such evidence about the Soviet collapse
from receiving an unbiased hearing among missile enthusiasts. First,
crediting Grobachev, and not Star Wars contradicts what many of America's
defense and national security specialists consider an article of faith: the
Soviet Union was a totalitarian system that was impervious to internal
reform.
As Stephen F. Cohen has noted, the dominant view of the totalitarian
school "held that 'no fundamental changes were likely, short of the violent
destruction' of the Soviet system." 48 Cohen quotes the following from the
1953 edition of 'the field's best textbook," Merle Fainsod's How Russia is
Ruled: "The totalitarian regime does not shed its police-state
characteristics; it dies when power is wrenched from its hands." 49
During the 1960s and 1970s, the totalitarian school of Soviet history came
under assault by a new generation of "Revisionist" historians. But on the
eve of President Reagan's election, the totalitarian interpretation
reemerged, thanks, in part, to an article ("Dictatorships and Double
Standards") that Jeane Kirkpatrick published in the November 1979 issue of
Commentary magazine. There she attempted to demonstrate that authoritarian
regimes "are more compatible with U.S, interests" than totalitarian
regimes, because they are more susceptible to "progressive liberalization
and democratization." On the other hand, "the history of this century
provides no grounds for expecting that radical totalitarian regimes will
transform themselves." 50
Obviously, those who subscribe to the totalitarian interpretation of
Soviet history must look for some external cause when attempting to explain
the Soviet Union's demise. That's why two of the most prominent members of
the school, Richard Pipes and Martin Malia, turned to Reagan and Star Wars.
And that's why so many lesser scholars and defense analysts persist in
their belief, notwithstanding the substantial evidence to the contrary.
Yet, they would do well to recall the many conservatives who criticized
Reagan, near the end of his administration, for creating a false euphoria
and for giving the Soviet Union breathing space. 51 Writing in Newsweek, a
prominent conservative columnist, George Will, asserted that "Reagan has
accelerated the moral disarmament of the West -- actual disarmament will
follow." 52
Obviously, Gorbachev's radical reforms demolish the totalitarian
shibboleth. As Gorbachev scholar, Archie Brown, has observed, "from the
spring of 1989 it is scarcely meaningful to describe the Soviet Union as a
Communist system. It is not only that the greater part of Marxist-Leninist
dogma had been abandoned by then -- and by the party leader himself -- but
also that the most important defining characteristics of a Communist
system, whether structural or ideological, had ceased to apply as a result
of policies introduced during the period of radical reform which got
seriously under way in 1987 and became more fundamental in 1988."53
More recently, Professor George W. Breslauer has concluded: "On his own
terms, then, Gorbachev was successful in deligitimizing the inherited
approach to political life at home and abroad and its hostility to a
democratic political order and a post-Cold War international order.
Indeed, such change may be his principal claim to fame as a
transformational leader."54 Breslauer also observes that "Gorbachev went
far to fulfill...many of the prescriptions of those scholars who have
examined the lessons of evolutionary strategies for transforming regimes in
non-Leninist settings."55
Perhaps even more devastating to the totalitarian interpretation, however,
is the scholarship demonstrating that the Soviet Union began throwing off
its quasi-totalitarian traits immediately after the death of Joseph Stalin.
For example, Robert English's recent book, Russia and the Idea of the
West, persuasively demonstrates the inexorable post-Stalin inroads made by
Western ideas until they were sufficiently powerful to capture leaders such
a Gorbachev and permit them to gain leading positions within the Soviet
system. 56
American "exceptionalism" is the second reason why missile defense
enthusiasts doubt Gorbachev and credit Star Wars. The arguments of
exceptionalists go something like this: "Why should a country on a mission
from God sully itself with arms control agreements and other compromises
with lesser nations, when its technological prowess will provide its people
with the invulnerability necessary for the unimpeded, unilateral
fulfillment of their historic destiny." 57 Exceptionalists often are
technological utopians, but foreign policy "realists" and, consequently,
unilatreralists.
The only argument against American exceptionalism -- which became more
virulent in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse and became known as
triumphalism -- is to demonstrate that neither Reagan, nor Star Wars (and
thus neither realism, unilateralism nor technology), but Mikhail
Gorbachev's policy of "mutual security" brought an end to the Cold War.
We are quite aware, by now, of Gorbachev's pronouncements about mutual
security as well as his actions to match deed with word. Not only his
repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrine or his historic announcement of a
500,000 man troop reduction, but his denunciation of the use of force
during his historic speech at the United Nations in December 1988.
We know from Anatoly Chernyaev's memoirs that, in preparation for his
meeting with Reagan at Reykjavic, Gorbachev explicitly articulated his
concern for mutual; security: "We are by no means talking about weakening
our security. But at the same time we have to realize that if our
proposals imply weakening U.S. security, then there won't be any agreement.
Our main goal now is to prevent the arms race from entering a new stage."58
Chernyaev adds, however, that at that same Politburo meeting, "directions
were issued to focus on the quality of weapons in case we failed to prevent
a new phase in the arms race." 59
Most persuasive, however, is Raymond Garthoff's conclusion that "Gorbachev
repeatedly took the initiative to go beyond American positions, to make
greater sacrifices of Soviet military advantages than those called for by
the United States, both in unilateral actions and in pushing the United
States to go further in negotiations." 60
Garthoff was mistaken, however, when he concluded that "although the
restructuring of the Soviet Union failed, the restructuring of
international relations succeeded."61 Having failed to understand the
reasons for the Cold War's end, the United States pronounced a "New world
Order" that, first and foremost meant that the U.S. "forestall the rise of
'peer competitors.'" 62
Partisan politics were also at play. In 1994, Frank Gaffney (a former
assistant to one of the Reagan administration's most notorious hawks,
Richard Perle, and head of a conservative think tank) convinced Congressman
Newt Gingrich to include in his 1994 "Contract with America" a provision
"requiring the Defense Department to deploy antiballistic missile systems
capable of defending the United States against ballistic missile attacks."
63 He worked tirelessly to convince leaders of the Republican Party that
"missile defense could be a winning issue in the 1996 presidential election
against Bill Clinton." 64
And although additional evidence has emerged recently to further expose
the partisan nature of the Rumsfeld Commission's report,65 concerns by
Republicans and the government of Israel about the transfer of missile
technology from Russia to Iran were legitimate. They appear to remain
legitimate today.66
Nevertheless, misquided faith in Reagan's legacy, especially concernng the
efficacy of weapons technology, plays a large role in the Bush
administration's decision to withdraw from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty
next month in order to pursue various paths to deploying a layered national
missile defense system. And this, notwithstanding a national intelligence
estimate (in January 2002) that acknowledges, according to one report, that
"rogue states or terrorist groups are unlikely to use missiles as their
method of choice for delivering weapons of mass destruction." 67
Even prior to the reemergence of national missile defense in 1998,
however, the U.S. had squandered its honeymoon with post-Soviet Russia by
failing to deliver the economic aid Russians expected and by reneging on
Secretary of State Baker's promise to Gorbachev that, with his help to
permit a unified Germany within NATO, "there would be ironclad guarantees
'that NATO's jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward'"68 Making
matters worse was the bombing of Yugoslavia, which violated the 1997
"Founding Act" that committed Russia and NATO to refrain "from the threat
or use of force against each other as well as against any other state, its
sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence in any manner
inconsistent with the United Nations Charter." 69
Notwithstanding such errors and policies, President Clinton's Secretary of
State would claim that the U.S. "stands taller than other nations, and
therefore sees further." 70 Not to be outdone in hubris, the younger Bush
administration would have its incoming Secretary of State, Colin Powell,
suggest that "the U.S. can do pretty much what it wants because its
sophisticated democracy makes it politically and morally superior to the
rest of the world -- and sometimes even exempts it from international norms
and treaties." 71
Were one to examine William Zimmerman's superb analysis of the foreign
policy views of Russian-- based upon polls conducted in 1993, 1995, 1999
and a reinterview in 2000 -- he would find that the Russian attitude
toward America had deteriorated significantly.72
Finding that his study of Russian attitudes confirmed the categories -- of
elites, attentive public and masses -- found in studies of the foreign
policy views of Americans, Zimmerman also confirmed that Russia's attentive
public serves much the same purpose as it does in America -- to adopt and
transmit elite opinions to the largely ill-informed masses. He also found
that, as in the United States, the attentive public does not play its
designated role very well when resistance among the masses is high.
As Zimmerman notes, "the fundamental instinct of mass publics is
isolationist."73 Elites are both more "militantly internationalist" and
more "cooperatively internationalist." Nevertheless, "in 1999 and 2000, as
they had been in 1993 and 1995, the [Russian] mass publics were more
isolationist than were the elites, though they were significantly more hard
line than they had been in 1993 and 1995."74
During the 1990s, increasing wariness, if not hostility, toward the United
States caused Russia's leaders to reject Gorbachev's vision of mutual
security and adopt foreign policy realism. Thus, Vladimir Putin might very
well be Russia's foremost realist. Yet Putin's realism is "cooperatively
internationalist," especially since September 11th, when he cast his
country's lot with the U.S. in its war against terrorism. Putin
recognizes, as one analyst recently noted, "that an alliance with the West
is the only path to Russian economic progress and protection against
Islamic fundamentalism." 75
However, as noted Russia scholar, Stephen F. Cohen, observed last
November: "It is unlikely that Putin can stay the American course against
terrorism without significant concessions, if only because he is surrounded
by political elites deeply distrustful of Washington and unhappy with his
decision."76 Writing in the April 15, 2002 issue of The Nation, Katrina
vanden Heuvel and Cohen state that "the opinion [is] spreading across
Moscow's political spectrum that the Bush Administration's war on terrorism
now has less to do with helping Russia -- or any other country -- fight
Islamic extremism on its borders than with establishing military outposts
of a new (or expanded) American empire...with control over the region's
enormous oil and gas reserves as its primary goal." 77
Moreover, "not surprisingly, President Putin, Bush's alleged 'partner,' is
coming under increasing high-level attack in Moscow as a result of White
House policies. Putin's policies have unleashed angry charges that he is
'losing' Central Asia and the Caucasus while succumbing to US imperialism.
Of special importance, and virtually without precedent in Soviet or Russian
history, has been a series of published 'open letters' signed by retired
generals, including one of former President Yeltsin's defense ministers,
accusing Putin of 'selling out' the country and 'betraying' the nation's
security and other vital interests."78
And it appears that elite sentiment is filtering down to the masses.
According to one survey, "the number of Russians who regarded
Russian-American relations as 'friendly' or 'good' dropped from 20 percent
in September 2001 to 13 percent in March 2002."79
Thus, the Bush-Putin Summit being held as we speak might reverse an
ominous trend. Atmospherics alone should help. But Russian and American
analysts already are questioning the value of a written arms control
agreement that fails to make the nuclear arms reductions irreversible,
just as they are wondering whether the new NATO-Russia Council (NRC) will
be any more satisfying than the highly disappointing NATO-Russia Permanent
Joint Council it replaces. A Public Opinion Foundation poll of 1,500
Russians, conducted just prior the Reykjavik summit that announced the new
NRC, found that 52% of the respondents were "convinced that NATO is a
security threat to Russia," (although only 44% of respondents between the
ages of 18 and 35 thought so).80
A cynic might also question whether President Bush's signature on this
nuclear pact will "begin the new era of U.S.-Russian relationships" 81 as
Mr. Bush claims, or whether it simply provides political cover for a useful
subordinate on the eve of America's withdrawal from the ABM Treaty.
In either case, unless the U.S. and Russia come to some agreement on
national missile defense or unless relations improve substantially, the
American decision to deploy weapons in space -- already a foregone
conclusion among America's missile defense enthusiasts -- will probably
become the issue that strains relations to the breaking point.
Because Russia already possesses the capability to penetrate any NMD
system that the U.S. might deploy within the next fifteen to twenty
years,82 and has serious doubts about America's ability to even deploy an
effective system, the world must immediately worry more about China's
response to America's post-ABM treaty NMD efforts (and thus India's and
Pakistan's). But, at some point, given America's technological utopianism,
American efforts to weaponize space will persuade Russia's leaders that the
U.S. is not content with a limited NMD system designed to protect against
rogue states, but intends to pursue a system that renders it invulnerable
to any retaliatory strike, including Russia's.
Given the enormous role that Russia's nuclear arsenal currently plays in
defending the Russian people, such a move by the U.S. would constitute a
hostile act that would demand a response and, consequently, Russia's return
to the arms race. No longer could Russia afford even a well-founded
complacency about the effectiveness of such a system.
*******
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With support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and
the MacArthur Foundation
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