UPI - 05.26.2002

 

 

Walker's World: 
Moscow's Soul Brothers

By Martin Walker
UPI Chief International Correspondent
From the International Desk
Published 5/26/2002 6:10 AM

In the old days of the Soviet Union, the workers in whose name the country was supposedly run had their own version of the social contract -- "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work."

Now we have a new Moscow contract. George Bush pretends to treat Vladimir Putin as the head of a superpower. And in return Putin pretends to be the kind of free market soulmate Bush could meet down in the Rotary Club of Crawford, Texas.

And just like workers and managers in the old Soviet days, both men know they are faking it.

Putin is good at camouflaging the reality of systemic collapse. The Russians had no choice but to agree to cut strategic warheads back to 2,000 -- they can neither maintain nor guard the 6,000-plus warheads they have now. They lack the tritium to keep the warheads reliably potent. They cannot even afford the traditional manpower of the old Strategic Rocket Forces, and in some cases, have not even been able to pay the electricity bills of the missile bases.

The once-famed Red Army, humiliated in Afghanistan and frustrated in Chechnya, is a military joke. They still make sweet warplanes, and some brilliant weapons systems like the S-300 missile, but Russian pilots get less than one-fifth the flight time of the U.S. equivalents. Back in the 1970s, the Soviet military actually devised most of the high-tech warfare concepts that we now call the Revolution in Military Affairs and admire when the Pentagon does it. These days, the Russians probably couldn't even take on Poland.

Their economy, on the most generous estimates, is still smaller than that of Holland, whose population is one-tenth that of Russia. And things are going to get worse. Russia's infrastructure of roads, bridges and rail lines, of power stations and transmission lines and pipelines and sewers, faces an urgent rebuilding and modernization bill that is equivalent to three years of GDP.

Under low birthrates, HIV/AIDS, alcoholism and suicide, the population is shrinking fast. Putin may well live to see the Russian population, which has already dropped from 151 million to 144 million in the last decade, drop below 100 million.

The country is a demographic and environmental disaster zone, with China to one side and Islamic countries to the south, understandably wondering whether this etiolated former superpower has the strength or the will to defend all that desirable, mineral-rich real estate of Siberia.

Putin knows all this, and also knows that the best -- and possibly only -- hope Russia has to defend its resources and modernize its economy lies in joining the West. For the next years, and probably the next seven, this means playing the part of Bush's best buddy with Stanislavskian conviction.

A cynic might say this calls for the kind of dissimulation that is second nature to anyone who rose through the ranks of the old KGB. And yet looking at the array of Putin reforms, the 13 percent flat rate tax, the cuts in corporate taxes and the enactment of commercial codes and the steady progress towards a market in farmland, Bush's top advisers like Condoleezza Rice now on balance think Putin is a genuine and well-intentioned reformer.

There is one point where this new Moscow contract between Bush and Putin can break down. The Americans remain not wholly convinced. They have therefore established a litmus test -- the fat Russian contract to complete Iran's Bushehr nuclear power station, and possibly to build another. Since the Pentagon assumes (and Russians diplomats joke) that the reactor will never go critical before Israeli bombs or cruise missiles take it out, this is the wrong litmus test.

There are others. A full accounting of the old Soviet chemical and biological warfare programs is long overdue. A free media would be desirable. Some more transparency in the operations of Russian banks and energy corporations would be good, particularly over their investments in eastern Europe.

The Czechs, for example, suspect but cannot prove that Russian money is now behind two of their private TV channels, and Russian funds -- some clean, some dubious - are buying up pipelines and gas wholesalers across the region.

The kind of relationship that the two leaders fulsomely claimed to be building in Moscow is unlikely to prosper or to endure if it is built on the cynical old Soviet-style contract that Bush pretends to respect Russia and Putin pretends to reform it. We tried that with Boris Yeltsin, who at least was a convinced enough democrat to allow a free press to flourish. For all his avowed intentions and warm words to Bush, Putin still has a lot to prove.