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The Globe and Mail (Canada)
11 June 2002
The new Russian patriot: not exactly rallying around
the flag
By ANDREI PIONTKOVSKY
There are various ways that a country can express a territorial dispute with Russia. One way is to give the claim a latent form, such as when Chinese textbooks say vast stretches of territory in the Russian Far East and Siberia were illegally seized from China by Czarist Russia.
Then there is the direct form of claim, such as when Iran declares itself no longer bound by the Soviet-Iranian agreement giving it control of 13 per cent of the Caspian Sea and demands that its share be increased to anywhere from 20 per cent to 50 per cent at the expense of Russia and its partners in the Commonwealth of Independent States. And to back up these demands, Iran puts on impressive displays of military force.
Iran's refusal to budge on the issue led to the failure of the Caspian states' summit in Ashkhabad. This meeting must have made a deep impression on Russian President Vladimir Putin, because he went straight from Turkmenistan's capital to Astrakhan, where he met the commanders of the Caspian military flotilla and ordered them to hold large-scale manoeuvres.
Iran, in response, called the Russian-Kazakhstani agreement on dividing the northern part of the Caspian "unacceptable and legally insignificant." And Iran's parliamentary speaker said "Iran does not show aggression itself and will not stand for aggression toward it."
Full-scale co-operation with Iran had involved, among other things, supplying Tehran with the diesel submarines and helicopters that now oppose Russia in the Caspian. Russian foreign policy has come a long way since then, but the possibility that it could slip back into the old line is still very real because, unlike Mr. Putin, most of Russia's political "elite" hasn't come a long way at all.
This is illustrated by the reaction of the "patriotic public" to Iran's Caspian challenge. Logically, everyone would rally around the flag and the president in his decision to stand up to this challenge. But the patriotic press has formed a united front on the side of Iran.
According to the newspaper Zavtra, "Iran's demands to increase its share to 50 per cent are absolutely justified in the eyes of international law. . . . Putin has, in essence, made a direct threat to Iran, a brutish and unmotivated threat. How he plans now to reach an agreement with [Mohammed] Khatami, Allah alone knows. He's going to go sailing on a junk."
As for Nezavisimaya Gazeta's military correspondent, he is more concerned with keeping up supplies of modern arms to Iran. "Time will soon tell whether Putin can defend the Russian defence industry's national interests, or whether the logic of the Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin era will again come to the fore."
In other words, it's not Russia that has national interests that must be protected by its defence industry, it's the defense industry that has some kind of independent "national interests" that Mr. Putin is supposed to defend.
As the patriots understand it, these interests involve selling as many arms as possible to countries hoping to get their hands on Russian territory either today or in the future. And the job of a Russian president is to defend these interests, even at the risk of having nothing but a junk on which to sail later.
That Russian "patriots" should side with Iran over the Caspian shows just what a diseased state their consciences are in. And the issue is not just about the selfish economic aims of the agencies whose interests they traditionally lobby.
Most of the Russian political class has yet to realize that the objective of Russia's foreign policy is to defend Russia's interests, not to cause maximum trouble for the United States.
Iran is one of the sacred cows in the mythological picture of the world in which the Russian political elite continues its virtual rivalry with the United States. Andrei Piontkovsky is director of the Centre of Strategic Research in Moscow.
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