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Moscow Times
May 12, 2004
Igor Ivanov and the Russian Retreat to Moscow
By Mark Almond
Mark Almond, lecturer in modern history at Oriel College, Oxford, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.

It is getting to be a habit. Any post-communist leader seeing Igor Ivanov across the threshold of his presidential palace knows his time is up.

On Oct. 6, 2000, it was Slobodan Milosevic who received the then-Russian foreign minister as graciously as a living political corpse can receive his undertaker. Late last November, it was Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze who found Ivanov escorting him off the premises of the presidential villa in Tbilisi.

Now Adzharia's Aslan Abashidze and assorted family members and hangers-on have been given a one way ride on Ivanov's plane from Batumi to Moscow.

Even after swapping his role from foreign minister to secretary of the Security Council, Ivanov has carried on his role as an angel of political death. Oddly, the victims of Ivanov's political version of euthanasia have all been on Washington's rather than Moscow's hit-list of obvious geopolitical targets.

It seems that whenever popular discontent at poverty and corruption reaches a critical mass fired by George Soros' money and CIA muscle, Ivanov is on hand to offer the coup de grace. Perhaps President Vladimir Putin sometimes wonders whether one day -- after seeking a controversial third term? -- he will receive a gentle nudge into obscurity, or even a ticket to the Hague from Ivanov.

Russia has been in retreat since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many of us can remember how in the late 1980s people in Boris Yeltsin's camp explained that Soviet imperialism was bad for ordinary Russians. Hadn't the British or Dutch got richer as their empires vanished? Wouldn't Russians be even better off without the burdens of Brezhnevian overstretch? In many ways they were right. Ordinary Russians had paid a high price for the Kremlin's superpower status. But sadly, the opposite of imperialism is not necessarily any more advantageous.

It would no doubt be nicer if Russians could just get on with trying to make a living. Siren voices say that that is precisely what is happening now. Economic growth is making life more bearable for more Russians than at any time since the early 1980s. No longer is it just a rich micro-percentage that benefits from reform. And so no wonder Putin enjoys real popularity.

Yet Russia's retreat from world power politics, personalized by the prominence of Ivanov in the Kremlin policymaking apparatus, could easily have dire domestic economic consequences.

At present, high oil prices buoy up the Russian economy. Even pensions are getting paid on time. But step by step, Russia's significance as an independent actor in the world of natural resources is being cut back.

The reach of the United States deep into Russia's hinterland has reached the tipping point. With the whole of the southern Caucasus within grasp and U.S. garrisons pock-marking Central Asia, Russia's own energy resources are falling under the shadow of U.S. power, and the routes to export Russian oil or gas, independent of Washington's sphere of influence, are narrowing.

High oil prices temporarily obscure how parlous Russia's geostrategic position is in its only area of economic strength -- the export of natural resources.

The United States' grab of Iraq's oil reserves has misfired for the moment, but Libya has been brought on side by Washington and London to release oil to fill the tankers left empty by Iraqi sabotage. At the same time, the West is closing in on Russia's remaining export routes.

With the oil terminal at Batumi under the guard of President Mikheil Saakashvili's troops, who were parading on CNN under the banner "Georgia-USA United We Stand," the Silk Route to Central Asia is safely in Western hands. Does anyone doubt that Gazprom's export pipelines via Ukraine and Belarus will soon pass through states enjoying the same kind of "Rose Revolution" which Georgia has accomplished?

Armenian President Robert Kocharyan has an embryonic Rose Revolution budding already and must be waiting for Ivanov's visit. Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma has probably got an arrival date for Ivanov pencilled in his diary. Even that refusenik against the New World Order, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, ought to expect a knock on his door soon after the Ukrainian president goes into exile.

What have Russia as a state or Russians as people got out of a weary withdrawal to a state smaller than Peter I's?

Arabs used to raise the joke-question: Why is it better to be an enemy of the British rather than their friend? And answer: Because if you are their enemy they will certainly buy you, but if you're their friend they'll certainly sell you.

Certainly Russia's retreat has bought it no friends. The Western media portray Putin as a war criminal worse than Milosevic over the war in Chechnya and accuse him of meddling in Georgian affairs as his lieutenant hustles Moscow's friends into exile.

A huge gap exists between the Western media's portrait of Russia under Putin as a reviving great power playing and winning subtle games in its former sphere of influence and the reality of a Russian retreat which has been gaining pace since Yeltsin's retirement. Ivanov is a man who straddled the two presidencies in Russia. More than anyone else he personifies the age of accelerating withdrawal.

For instance, Ivanov was working for the political demise of Milosevic well before his arrival in Belgrade on Oct. 6, 2000. Ivanov played a major role in advising the NATO states how to start the war in Kosovo in 1999 that led to Milosevic's ultimate downfall. Both Madeleine Albright and German officials have revealed how Ivanov urged them not to go to the United Nations Security Council so that the Russian government could avoid pressure from its own people to veto a U.S. resolution for war.

By all accounts, the signals from Smolenskaya Ploshchad to George W. Bush in March 2003 were: Storm Iraq, then ask the UN to pick up the pieces as in Kosovo. But Tony Blair needed to show the British public that the Security Council was on his side, which forced Russia's hand into voting "No" alongside France and China.

What is to be done?

After Margaret Thatcher sent troops to fight the Argentine invasion of the Falkand Islands in 1982, Henry Kissinger remarked, "No nation retreats forever."

No doubt Russia's slinking back deeper into a Eurasian hinterland will stop some day, but Russians must be asking themselves whether the retreat to Moscow will stop before or after Ivanov tells Vladimir Putin it is time to go.