Washington Post - 06.17.02

 

The Washington Post

 

Chicken Before Chechnya

 

By Fred Hiatt

 

Strobe Talbott, architect of Russia policy throughout the Clinton presidency, recently criticized President Bush and his team for not pressing the Russian government harder to end the war in Chechnya. That civil conflict, Talbott said, is "a cancer metastasizing in the body politic" of Russia, and if Bush would put it higher on the bilateral agenda he could influence events in a healthier direction.

I think Talbott is right. But it's worth recalling that it was Clinton, not Bush, who compared Boris Yeltsin's behavior in Chechnya with Abraham Lincoln trying to hold the Union together -- and who accepted, in a Time magazine article in 2000, Russia's right to "liberate" Chechnya's capital of Grozny.

Which is not to say that Clinton gave Yeltsin a free pass. Although Talbott acknowledged that "we didn't pay nearly enough attention early on" to Chechnya, his administration frequently criticized Russian military behavior during the first war there in 1994-96 -- just as Bush's administration criticizes aspects of Russian behavior during the ongoing second, and equally brutal, war.

But it does seem easier to insist on a moral foreign policy when you're not in charge. Clinton cared about democracy in Russia, but other issues -- serious, legitimate issues -- always seemed to carry greater weight: persuading Russia to remove its troops from the newly independent Baltic states, helping ease nuclear weapons out of Ukraine, winning Russian cooperation in Bosnia or Kosovo or NATO. Just as for Bush, democracy matters -- but not as much as eliciting Russian cooperation in the war on terrorism, in tearing up the ABM treaty, with (yet again) NATO or, yes, in opening the doors to U.S. chicken exports.

Russian politicians, who now understand democracy pretty well, don't find this surprising. "If they have to choose chicken exports or democracy, the domestic steel industry or democracy, I think the trade-off will be very simple," former premier Yegor Gaidar said during a visit to Washington last week. "Just calculate how many states export chickens and you know democracy will go to second place for any politician."

Gaidar was in town with another democratic stalwart, Boris Nemtsov, and their progress report on Russian democracy -- on how things are developing internally while Bush concentrates on chickens and ABM and terrorism -- was not entirely reassuring.

The worries that Gaidar expressed on his visit here last year -- "that I'm not sure that Putin is very serious about democracy" -- "proved to be correct," Gaidar said. "It's nothing very drastic, none of his opponents are in jail." ("In fact, some are in Washington, D.C.," Nemtsov interrupted.) "But the level of control over the political process has increased," Gaidar said. "The concept of managed democracy has increased."

Gaidar and Nemtsov, an economist and a physicist, jumped into politics on the reform side as soon as the Soviet Union crumbled. Over the 11 years since, they have won a few battles and lost a few more; they have sometimes spoken out boldly and sometimes measured the prevailing winds. But unlike so many of the first generation of reform politicians, they have not quit; they're still mixing it up, fighting for freer land codes and tax laws and other nitty-gritty of a democratic market economy.

So when they talk about a restriction of democracy, it's not the sour grapes of politicians in the minority. And the picture they draw is a mixed one, where the forms of democracy remain but the ability to challenge those in power has diminished.

"Elections exist," Nemtsov said, but Putin has manipulated them, through the courts or otherwise, to get provincial governors to his liking. "The media still look independent," but the television companies have been brought under control one way or another. "The upper house still exists, but it is like the House of Lords," with members appointed for the most part by the Kremlin or its allies. And so it goes, as Putin constructs his "managed democracy."

James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress and eminent Russia scholar, said in a recent speech at Georgetown University that in Russia "the two realistic alternatives are respectively far worse and far better than the current conventional wisdom in America has yet seriously considered." On the one hand, he said, a genuine federal democracy; on the other, "an authoritarian nationalism that would be in substance, though not necessarily in form, some new variant of fascism."

Which makes you wonder whether Bush shouldn't put the question of Russia's internal development somewhere higher than chicken exports. The struggle between the two potential outcomes should not be "a spectator sport for Americans," Billington said. He urged cooperation on many levels, including the citizen exchanges he has been promoting and organizing for years.

As elected officials in a proud nation, Gaidar and Nemtsov are naturally more reticent about the virtue of U.S. pressure. Bush "reasonably thinks that democracy is our job, not his job," Gaidar said. "You cannot impose democracy."

But Nemtsov added that Putin, having cast Russia's fate with the West, would listen if Bush would push harder on issues such as media freedom. And -- ever the democratic politician -- Nemtsov advised that Bush do so, for his own sake. "Because if he does nothing, American public opinion will be against him," he said.