It is time for the United States to think hard about what it really wants the Russia of the future to be.
Oh, sure, we’d like it to be a big Netherlands-serene, unthreatening, prosperous, capitalist and impeccably democratic. Until this month, we thought that, despite some hitches, Russia was headed that way and might even arrive.
Forget it. The parliamentary election two weeks ago portrayed a flight from freedom by a nation that has known nothing but autocracy, feudalism and communism for 1,000 years and has virtually no chance, or intention, of developing anything different.
In the election, one-quarter of the vote went to a strange, bitter fascist who wants to regain Alaska and another quarter went to an assortment of Communists and other anti-reform, anti-capitalism, anti-democracy parties.
After the election President Boris Yeltsin, the U.S. administration’s favorite Russian democrat, fired the director of state television and shook up the secret police, indicating that he sees both as no more than vehicles to make sure he wins votes.
This is more than the growing pains of a nascent democracy. This is the swift reversion of a vast, unstable, incompetent nation to the despotic and Byzantine heritage that is its past and its future.
This presents a danger to the world, to Europe and, most immediately, to Russia’s neighbors-both the 14 newborn nations that broke off from the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries.
The United States should do nothing to speed Russia down its slippery slope into dictatorship. Nor should it forget that it is better if the government in Moscow, of whatever stripe, is friendly.
But it would be folly to pretend that Russia is likely to become a Western-style democracy. Wisdom dictates that official policy be based on reality-the trend toward dictatorship. Once that is done, steps can be taken to ensure that, whatever happens there, Russia’s neighbors can live in peace.
Some say that Russia today is only going through the inevitable false starts and stumbles that every democracy, including the United States, experienced en route to the real thing. This school notes that America has had its demagogues and France and Germany are wrestling now with neo-Nazism.
This is true-and meaningless. The United States and the nations of Western Europe are experienced, resilient democracies, strong and tolerant enough to absorb and eventually defeat those who would use democracy’s rules to destroy it.
More important, American democracy was not invented by a bunch of 18th Century politicians in Philadelphia. The governments that rule the Western democracies are heirs to centuries of Western thought.
Every American who votes, writes his congressman or fights city hall is in debt to the Magna Carta, to John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, to the Reformation and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. He may never have heard of these people or movements, but what they thought and did is bred into the mindset of everyone in these countries.
Russia literally had none of this. Russia’s culture is based not in the skeptical search for reason that has characterized Western thought, but an entirely different mentality, born in the Byzantine Empire and imported north via Kiev.
It stresses submission to an all-powerful authority, embodied for most of Russia’s history in an autocratic czar who drew his authority straight from God. While Western theologians redefined man’s relations with his God and his government, the Russian Orthodox Church turned its back on reason to reinforce the autocracy of the nation’s rulers.
Communist Russia did not change this mindset, but merely adapted it. An autocratic party, drawing its authority from the immutable laws of history, enshrined Lenin and his successors and imposed their autocracy as firmly as that of any czar.
Clearly, this is stony soil for the tender roots of democracy. In history, anything-even democracy in Russia-is possible, but one shouldn’t bet on it.
In the eight years since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, Russia has gained freedoms and an electoral system but not democracy.
There is more to democracy than elections, and the other trappings are nowhere in sight. They include attitudes, such as tolerance and compromise, and bulwarks, such as the rule of law and a loyal opposition, and institutions, such as strong political parties and a press able to defend its freedom.
In many of the former Communist countries in Eastern Europe, these habits and institutions are evolving. Not coincidentally, these nations are mostly Western in history, philosophy, religion and mindset. With luck, they’ll make it.
They also have a running start toward economic reform. Russia, again, does not.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s strong showing in this month’s election has been blamed on the voters’ reaction to the pain of economic reform and the “shock therapy” prescribed by Western economists. Much of this thinking is simply wrong.
Compared with Eastern Europe, Russia barely has started its reforms.
In their new book, “Russia 2010,” foreign affairs experts Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson note that virtually every factory survives on state subsidies. Unemployment is still low because labor has not begun to move to useful jobs. Prices are still irrational. There is no tax system, no functioning financial or credit structure, no framework of laws to regulate and protect property.
In Russia, these foundation stones of a market economy have yet to be laid.
In short, as Yergin and Gustafson wrote in an article for the Tribune, there has been more shock than therapy. Zhirinovsky’s voters reacted not to economic reforms but to the fear of economic reforms. This means that no future government, including Yeltsin’s, will dare move strongly toward reforms.
Instead, Zhirinovsky’s success probably means that any progress toward reforms will end, out of fear of voter reaction. Ditto with foreign investment: What investor wants to put his dollars into a country that might be run by a Zhirinovsky?
This in turn means that Russia’s economy, lacking real reforms and serious money, will just run down. There will be more inflation, more shortages, more corruption. The central government, lacking purse strings to pull, will lose control of outlying regions.
There’s a limit to how far this can go. The best bet is that, at some point, Yeltsin or some other leader will use the army and police to take back power and establish control over the nation and the economy.
This won’t be a democracy, even by current Russian standards. But it could be what the country needs, not only to avoid total collapse but to give Russia the prosperity that seems to be a requisite for democracy.
Almost all the world’s rich nations are democracies and almost all the democracies are rich; India is a big exception. Only broad-based prosperity can create the confidence needed for democracy.
Russia won’t become a democracy until it has the standard of living to support one. By trying to introduce democracy before it rebuilt its economy, Russia got its priorities backward and guaranteed that both would fail.
The Clinton administration has indicated that it thinks that the election changed nothing. Instead, it should ask itself if it wants to go on pushing democracy and market reforms, since these good things, in Russian hands, seem to be producing a new Hitler.
America’s real interest now is not in a democratic Russia but in a stable Russia, with an economy that provides a decent standard of living, run by a government that is in control and is favorably disposed toward the West.
This is modest but realistic. Anything more ambitious, as the elections showed, is likely to lead to much worse.
