Streetwise Professor

I came across several articles today that contained succinct statements with which I am in broad agreement.  The first is by Stephen Blank, of the US Army War College (and a University of Chicago PhD who studied under the amazing Arcadius Kahan, from whom I had the honor of taking two classes while at Chicago.)  Writing of Russian hyperventilating over the Arctic in Russia Profile, Stephen says:

Undoubtedly, Russia’s overly aggressive moves in the Arctic have caused NATO and the associated states to react strongly, raising the possibility of a political and military struggle over its resources, especially as they become more accessible.  This has become a continuing theme in East-West relations, where Russia, driven by resentment over Western failure to take it at its own, self-inflated value, makes an excessively aggressive move that it cannot then back up, except at ruinous cost. (Emphasis added.)

That last sentence is priceless, and encapsulates a theme that I’ve sounded on many occasions.  Nursing an injured ego, the Russian government–and Putin personally–goes walking around, chin thrust out, looking for a scrap.  Needlessly, in most cases.  And stupidly, since as Blank notes, the “correlation of forces” (a standard Soviet concept), military, economic, and political, is strongly against Russia.  Part of this is the “man in a hurry” problem that I wrote about some time ago.  Part of it is the neurosis that Putin et al pretty clearly display, and which I’ve also written about.  

Speaking of neurosis, combined with a ruthless authoritarian streak,  Ralph Peters has some trenchant things to say:

The Putin model –  tolerant totalitarianism  – gave the dying command-state a new lease on life. The new czar saw that most human beings don’t care who governs them, as long as the government minds its own business. And if the ruler can revive the illusion of national power, so much the better.

Shamelessly cynical, Putin goes through the stage-managed forms of democracy. He even permits scripted media criticism of the state (though not of himself).

But there are limits to the new totalitarianism’s tolerance. You can call Putin a baboon-butt monkey-boy over the vodka bottle at your kitchen table – butdon’t  do it in public.

Cross that line and you are, literally, dead. A deal’s a deal.

The breathtaking lack of response from the West as the Putin regime murders uncooperative journalists, human-rights activists, defense lawyers, regime apostates and even foreign critics is a glorious gift to Czar Vladimir. His security services are  permitted  to murder ex-pats in Vienna or London. Even an assassination attempt on an American critic in the Washington, DC, area got swept under the diplomatic rug with remarkable speed.

Putin’s starting to look like a slicker version of  Saddam Hussein, with sharper targeting skills (and Vlad really  does  have weapons of mass destruction). As a result of the West’s cowardice, his ambitions are soaring: The most-predictable geopolitical event of 2009 is an assassination attempt on Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, by a “Georgian patriot.”

Working through the traitorous Ukrainian power-broker Yulia Timoshenko, Putin’s also going to do all he can to “reunite” Ukraine and Russia. And he’ll continue to use natural gas as a strategic weapon, while Europe boldly responds,  Oh, dear. . . One really ought not to do that . . . Really, one oughtn’t. . .”

A friend who’s gotten up close to Putin sees the dictator as a mere  chinovnik– a petty bureaucrat promoted above his station. But that view misses the elementary human reality that greatness and pettiness, courage and cravenness, brilliance and banality, can all be attributes of the same individual.

As I’ve pointed out in the past, Putin  does  have two weaknesses: his temper, which leads the ice-man to attack his neighbors in fits of pique, and economic illiteracy.

The one-two punch of the oil-price collapse and a global depression is limiting Putin’s ability to keep up his half of the “other New Deal” by improving Russia’s quality of life. A serious outburst of unrest could fire his temper and wreck his political Ponzi scheme.

Yet protests to date have been minor and managed. Developments could go a number of ways as the Russian economy crumbles.

But whether Putin continues to reign for decades or falls in an orgy of Russian self-destructiveness, his intellectual legacy will endure: the dictatorship that stops at the front door.

The temper is obvious.  The economic illiteracy is becoming more apparent by the day.  Easy to look like a genius when oil goes from around $10/bbl to $140; a lot harder when it goes back down to the $30-$50 range.  Putin gives speeches about the importance of avoiding government control over the economy, after presiding during a 9 year period in which the scope of government control has widened significantly.  And, this control is expanding apace during the financial crisis (he has company westwards, in that endeavor.)  He also warns against protectionism while his government is implementing a variety of protectionist measures (ditto.)  Not to mention his warnings–given in Switzerland–about avoiding military buildups, while bragging at home about how military expansion and spending will continue despite the financial crisis.  Several Russian economists of my acquaintance are appalled at the economic ignorance of Putin and the Putin team.  Kudrin is a sensible guy, but he’s only one man, and one in a tenuous position, to say the least.

The last item is from WindowOnEurasia, where Paul Goble discusses the views of Russian scholar Emil Pain, as expressed in Novoya Gazetta. Pain has several interesting things to say, including this which should sound familiar to SWP readers:

But in less than two decades, all that has changed, a reflection Pain insists of the fact that “Russia is a pendulum. Everything in it changes quickly,” and among the things that have changed are predictions about the future, views about the past, and about the very possibility of still more change ahead.

The Moscow scholar argues that it is quite clear “why there is no demand for democracy in Russia today but there is a demand for paternalism, fatalism, and their ‘intellectual’ defenders.” But intellectuals, who pride themselves on their ability to think critically, should not fall into that trap.

And if such people simply look around, they will see plenty of reasons for why the idea of “a special path” for Russia is a blind alley. The world crisis “dispelled illusions about Russia as an island of stability.” Indeed, it showed that countries that try to live by the export of raw materials alone are more at risk during crises than are industrial and post-industrial ones.
That is because the fate of such “banana” exporters is more closely tied to the rest of the world than are the others, Pain argues. Moscow’s attempt to act as if this is not the case has ended in disaster, not only leaving the country more impoverished but also more isolated as its actions in Georgia showed.

When oil was 140 dollars a barrel, he says, Russians and the Russian state could ignore this reality for a time. But in Pain’s view, now that prices have fallen, “the resources of Russian authoritarianism and imperialism are close to being exhausted.” Already at present, he writes, “there is no ammunition, there remains only ambition.”

In this interconnected world, every country has to be prepared to play by a common set of rules if it is to succeed and to transform itself periodically in order to move forward. That is what the United States has just done, Pain says, having overcome the “cruelest” racism in the past to elect an African American as its president. And other countries have made similar strides.
Pain says that he can imagine the response of his opponents to this observation: “Yes,” they will say, “they can but our thousand-year old history does not permit change.” And consequently we Russians can have no hope for change and must simply and fatalistically go along.

Not many years ago, some of the very same people, during the earlier swing of the pendulum toward democracy, “did not want to hear about the concept of the thousand-year-old history” of their country. They wanted to blame everything on the Soviet system, and they believed that having rejected that, they could overcome everything and become like the West.
Now, however, they have become pessimists and talk fatalistically about historical cycles of reform and counter reform in Russian history, ignoring the reality that this pattern is hardly unique to Russia and that other countries have been able to use such cycles to move forward rather than assuming that nothing can be done.

But Russians now talk only about cultural limits on the possibility of progress. According to Pain, the economic limits the country has imposed on itself are more important. “For 300 years, Russia has lived by selling its natural resources,” first wood and furs and now oil and gas. Countries doing that back the values of empire because territory is “the main resource.”  

“No ammunition, only ambition.”  Concise, clever–and correct.

Pain also says:

Now, he is taking on the perhaps even more widespread conviction that Russia cannot escape its culture or survive without an authoritarian state. That serves the interests of those in power, he points out, but it is ahistorical and dangerously wrong when propounded, admittedly with regret, by members of the Russian intelligentsia.  

Pain begins his essay by noting that in Soviet times, many Russians blamed the country’s climate for the chronic shortages of food. Now, even though the climate has not changed, few talk about it, focusing instead on “the so-called cultural determinism” that supposedly makes it impossible for Russia to be anything by an authoritarian empire.

According to Russia’s current rulers, the country’s current “imperial form of rule, which is called ‘sovereign democracy,'” is the product of Russia’s “special path” of historical development about which nothing can be done, however much some in the intelligentsia may regret that fact.

In the view of “the ideologues of [this] new edition of official nationality in Russia,” Pain continues, “the best periods of its history have been connected with despotism,” whereas “all attempts at liberalization and democratization have taken place during periods when the state was weak and the country experiencing crises.”

At a superficial level, of course, this argument may appear convincing. When things are going well, no one thinks about changes, and consequently reforms always occur when the state is weak, something Pain says that sets off “a new cycle of swings of the Russian pendulum, from the strong hand to freedom and then back again.”

Russia’s liberal intellectuals who “angrily reject” the regime’s suggestion that this special path represents “a millennium of the greatness of Russia” are nonetheless quite “ready to accept this very same myth in another form” and view the history of their country as being “a millennium of slavery.”  

One can understand why Russians accept this fatalistic view about their past and hence their future at present, Pain says. Making bleak prognostications is profitable: If they turn out to be true, their authors are viewed as visionaries; if they don’t, “no one will take note and all will be happy.”  

But he goes on to say that such views now are not so much a manifestation of Russian national culture as “a sign of the times.” In the early 1990s, “during the period of democratic euphoria and massive hopes for a rapid improvement in life,” few talked about older historical and cultural factors that would make that task extremely difficult in the short term.

It is more than ironic–in fact, it is tragic–that the “liberal” episodes in Russian history are deemed catastrophes, while the eras of autocratic rule are idealized, and the more autocratic the era, the more it is worshipped.  This attitude gets cause and effect exactly backwards.  The liberal eras occurred because of the utter collapse of autocratic regimes due to their inherent failings.  Those in power during the (relatively) liberal periods were reaping what had been sown by the autocrats that proceeded them.  Case in point: the USSR couldn’t feed itself in the 1980s because Stalin had destroyed Russian (and Ukrainian and Kazahk) agriculture in the 20s and 30s.  When oil prices collapsed, so Russia couldn’t pay for imported food, the entire system collapsed, leaving a shattered hulk of an economy as its legacy.  That is, the autocratic failure ushered in the (relatively) liberal era, and bequeathed it with an existential economic problem.

Now, Yeltsin and the “reformers”/”liberals” made errors, but I doubt anyone could have done much with the catastrophe they inherited.  Blaming them for the Russian economic travails of the 1990s is like blaming the paramedic who couldn’t revive the guy with a gunshot wound to the temple for the victim’s death.  

So, the autocrats get the glory, even though they are the prime culprits behind the periodic catastrophes that Russia has suffered.  

Sadly, though understandably, in the aftermaths of autocratic collapse, Russia has not been able to build institutions that would support the development of a (relatively) free economy and civil society.  Instead, the conditions of chaos have proved tailor made for opportunistic wielders of force to create their own autocratic systems.  

And that is the Russian conundrum.  How to get off the pendulum?  

Or is it a see-saw?  De Custine has an interesting passage about the this “favorite amusement of the Russian peasants”:

The two performers, sometimes of the same, sometimes of opposite sexes, place themselves, always standing, and with legs firmly planted, on the two extremities of the plank, where they preserve their balance by taking hold of the cords.  In this attitude they are impelled through the air to a frightful height, for at every swing the machine reaches the point beyond which it would turn completely over, and its occupiers dashed to the earth from a height of thirty or forty feet, for I have seen posts at least twenty feet high.

An apt metaphor for Russian political history.  

Oh, and DR–just having a little fun at your expense (you’ve seemed a little testy lately).  No offense taken, I hope;-)