Washington Post - 06.17.2001

 

 

The Washington Post

Okay, They've Met. Now Let's Get Engaged

By James H. Billington

President Bush's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin has come at a time when Russia is moving in a generally positive direction -- and when America could play an important supporting role.

The Russian economy has improved significantly since its near-meltdown in August 1998; and the long crisis of political legitimacy has been largely resolved by Russia's first peaceful transfer of power with a strong electoral mandate under a widely accepted constitution. Putin's reputation has fallen in America because of the war in Chechnya, the growing assertiveness of internal security forces and the dismemberment of Russia's leading independent media conglomerate. But he remains popular in Russia, where he is seen as lessening the dependence that the aging Boris Yeltsin came to have on the hated oligarchs. Nearly every high-level Western figure who has talked extensively with Putin comes away convinced that he sincerely intends to press on with major reforms. He has dramatically reduced taxes, given key economic ministries to market-oriented advisers and encouraged committees of the Duma (which he essentially controls) to work directly with members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Moscow on legal and administrative reforms.

Putin wants to be a de Gaulle -- a hero who restores national pride by asserting strong central authority. But there is danger that nationalism, fueled by the pessimistic depression of ordinary Russians, might turn him or a successor into a Milosevic -- a tyrant who restores pride by reestablishing Russian hegemony in parts of the former U.S.S.R., much as the Serbian leader tried to reassert Serbian dominance in a disintegrating Yugoslavia.

There is a tragic possibility that Putin could end up unintentionally destroying the fledgling democratic system he is trying to reform -- rather in the way Mikhail Gorbachev broke down the communist system he was only trying to restructure. If Russia were to lurch into some new nationalist version of its historic authoritarian tradition, the destabilizing effects would be incalculable. Having won the Cold War, the West would risk losing the older and more basic geopolitical conflict between authoritarianism and freedom in Eurasia.

America can make a constructive contribution at this key moment. Our country is still Russia's basic model for attempting to build a federal democracy with a rule of law and a market economy on a continental scale with a multiethnic population. But we are not taking advantage of the opportunity. The Western media's one-sided focus on crime, corruption and other negative byproducts of Russia's sudden plunge into freedom has obscured the magnitude of constructive change there. Russia has been transformed in unprecedented ways during the past decade: opening up communication and commerce with the outside world, establishing freedom of religion and assembly, and institutionalizing pluralism and the private ownership of property.

Even the dysfunctionality of centralized administrative, banking and legal systems has created a great deal of innovative enterprise, particularly in the provinces. Pressure is increasing from the bottom up and from the periphery in for further change in a society that had always been controlled from the top down and center out. Despite the near-total withdrawal of state subsidies, lively new educational, theatrical and musical companies are reviving Russian culture. And a post-Soviet generation of journalists and other professionals is developing a new national identity that is compatible with participatory political institutions.

One of the most neglected features of Russian history is the way its people have repeatedly ended long periods of passivity with sudden, large-scale innovation in fields where they had no previous experience. Three powerful forces lay behind these past explosions of creativity and are already producing changes in today's Russia:

• The ability to adopt wholesale the key institutions of a previous adversary. Russians raided Byzantium before taking over its culture, fought the Swedes before adopting their method of government, Francophied their aristocratic culture even as Napoleon razed Moscow, copied German modes of large-scale industrial organization while fighting Germany in two world wars, and are now seeking to replicate many of the political and administrative features of the America they once threatened to "bury."

• A religious heritage rooted in Orthodox Christianity and branching out now into other faiths. The dirty little secret of totalitarianism was its denial not just of freedom, but of responsibility; the top-to-bottom mantra of the bureaucratic culture was eto ot menia ne zavisit -- "it doesn't depend on me." In the wake of the failure of the world's first atheistic state, Russia's moral and communal traditions provide a basis for the kind of personal responsibility that helps create an accountable government.

• Russians' special feeling for the nature and environment of their vast land. The suggestion in the late Soviet period that Russia itself should secede from the U.S.S.R. came not from liberals, but from Russian traditionalists outraged by the chemical, biological and radioactive despoiling of nature, and by proposals to reverse rivers and transform the ecology of the Siberian heartland. Today, the pro-Western Gorbachev -- much like the conservative critic of Westernization, Alexander Solzhenitsyn -- makes the preservation of Russia's natural heritage his main public policy priority. This offers Western-style capitalist development the chance to prove it can enhance nature rather than pollute it as communism did.

A United States willing to engage more fully with Russia, therefore, has much to work with. But America's special status in ordinary Russians' eyes has been diminishing and will decline further if we continue to treat Russia patronizingly, as a kind of bad boy on probation. Russians believe that they accomplished a heroic deed by putting an end to Soviet communism, and that America has responded with only "small deeds." They expected that from Europe, but not from the United States.

American citizens, however, have established a wide variety of successful people-to-people contacts with the Russian people during the past 10 years. Cities, states, businesses, and all manner of federal and nongovernmental organizations have participated. At the Library of Congress, the Open World Russian Leadership Program has brought 3,650 young leaders from 88 of Russia's 89 provinces to America in the past two years. They have an optimism and openness totally unlike older holdovers from the Soviet era, and not a single one has failed to go back to Russia.

America, as well as Russia, would benefit from greater contact between our countries. Russia has a large share of the world's untapped natural resources and of its under-used scientific talent. The building of open, accountable systems in a land bordering on so many hot spots can be our greatest long-term insurance policy for peace.

As a consultant to the Chase Manhattan Bank in the early 1970s, I was surprised by the ambitious plans many American and other Western firms had for developing resource-rich Siberia. The time may be ripe now to dust off the file and craft at least one updated major demonstration project for that vast region. It could earn new respect for capitalism by producing something important for direct human use by the widest possible public (like packaged food or pharmaceuticals). Russians have so far seen only conspicuous consumption capitalism, and mainly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They need to see foreign investment helping to satisfy basic human needs deep inside Russia rather than just the extravagant desires of a Moscow elite.

Siberia is the ideal location because it has become the emotional focus of Russia's quest for a new national identity as a developing frontier civilization rather than a militant imperial power. Siberians feel that without major foreign investment their region will be taken over by China in the future. (Chinese guest workers are relentlessly infiltrating the Russian far east; China needs both the living room and the energy resources that a largely empty Siberia has to offer.)

Authoritarian nationalists inside Russia currently make the argument that foreign capitalism will destroy the unspoiled deep interior of Russia. Environmentally responsible capitalist development can counter that argument, and help Russia construct both a more dynamic economy and a more healthy sense of national pride.

There are many other ways that our two countries could combine our unique strengths to meet our respective needs. While no foreign force can determine the future of Russia, America has a much greater opportunity than we may have yet realized -- let alone acted upon -- to both strengthen and benefit from the constructive developments taking place in Russia.

James Billington, the librarian of Congress and author of "The Face of Russia" (TV Books), is writing a book about Russia's search for a post-communist national identity.