On Russophobia Part II.

Putin has the financial wherewithal and the whim to decide which oligarchs survive.

Opines Guardian journalist Jason Corcoran.

Just like the Tsar with the boyars, Peter the Great cutting of their beards or Ivan the Terrible executing nobles and impaling them on spikes. Things in Russia never change.

Unless a person has actually educated himself by reading objective and more cultured writers on Russia in the West like John Gray, Anatol Lieven or Mark Almond who do not reduce Russia to what Brzezinski calls a 'Black Hole'.

Things in drunken boozy anarchical Russia never change for the better for dolts who parrot the same dreary anti-Russian propaganda.

Unless the change benefits those crooks who literally made a killing by asset stripping and buying control over state industries through insider dealing.

Unless the corruption results in 300 billion dollars of Russian assets being transferred to the West. Which Corcoran omits to mention.

When Corcoran start to mention the millions of ordinary Russians killed by shock therapy, when he begins to mention the 54% increase in the suicide rate between 1989 and 1994 he might begin to shift away from the indulgence of the oligarchs, most of whom are crooks on a massive scale.

Indeed anyone with any knowledge of what happened in the 1990s will be able to see that no nation has been reduced to such a level of crude propaganda in The Guardian and moronic analysis as Russia has.

The following, however, reads like something from a coffee table magazine.

The Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin will have raised some
eyebrows amongst west London's oligarchical clique by rebuffing his image as "a billionaire-slayer.

Putin has been wielding his power to lance the ambition of aspirational tycoons for almost a decade and is showing now signs of stopping now. In an interview with Bloomberg, the Russian leader insisted the country's rules and laws are a level playing field for all of its citizens.

Well, tell that to jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who has
languished in a Siberian prison since 2005 on back-dated charges of tax evasion in what many viewed as an attempt to silence a political opponent. A court rejected Khodorkovsky's parole request last year, citing reasons such as a refusal to take part in a sewing course.

Putin had told a meeting of oligarchs early in his reign in 2000 it
was either his way or the highway. Some of Russia's wealthiest and most prominent businessmen, such as Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, were forced to flee Moscow soon after. The pair had controlled TV stations which were critical of Putin's leadership.

Magnates such as Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich and Viktor Vekselberg opted to play ball. The former agreed to sell his oil company Sibneft to state behemoth Gazprom while Vekselberg impressed by splashing out a fortune to repatriate Faberge eggs to the Kremlin.

This is not a serious way to approach the politics of a nation that will continue to be an important one into the twenty first century.

When Corcoran start to mention the millions of ordinary Russians killed by shock therapy, when he begins to mention the 54% increase in the suicide rate between 1989 and 1984 he might begin to shift away from the indulgence of the oligarchs, most of whom he mentioned are are crooks on a massive scale, no matter what political motives Putin has for curtailing their power.

Indeed anyone with any knowledge of what happened in the 1990s will be able to see that no nation has been reduced to such a level of crude propaganda in The Guardian and moronic analysis as Russia has.

One does not have to be an apologist for Putin to see the agenda being followed by those who see Russia as a drunken semi-comic semi-horrific backwater as Corcoran does here.

Russians have every reason to feel insulted by the scale of the propaganda in the Guardian. At least Islamists have a platform to rebute charges of Orientalism. Yet the sheer scale of the visceral contempt for Russia is seldom challenged.

Few of the hacks who mechanically repeat the usual mantra of Russia under Putin as some Russian Imperialist-cum-Neo Soviet threat seem to be mentally capable of challenging the power agenda that underlies the screed.

Whether Marson, Harding or Corcoran, all follow the the prescription of the propaganda creed laid out by Brzezinski that Russia is some horrid imperial leftover that cannot become a democracy it remains an Empire.

Unless it yields control over all the lands that have lain within its orbit. As if the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had never existed and Texas and California had never been taken by force or the natives not exterminated.

The agenda is simple. Russia when it isn't a grim imploding place of misery, sadism and suffering, is almost vampiric, an unpredictable threat to all of us and always will be because of the nature of the very beast.

This article falls into that tradition. The interests of the Western players in Russia's history are omitted. The way the shock therapy applied inappropriately in the Russian context created those like Berezovsky.

Rather than deal with that and the responsibility of the IMF in creating that chaos and misery, the whole conflict between the old oligarchs and Putin is reduced to the same essentialist archetypes.

Putin is the new Tsar, the old oligarchs are the boyars who fell out of favour and Russia is a inherent shithole full of incorrigible drunks, corrupt kleptocrats, clownish populist politicians, mail order brides and rusting military hardware.

The message being : only by following Western prescriptions for liberal democracy and becoming a responsible member of the global community can all Russians prosper.

Apart from the fact that millions of Russians were immiserated by IMF 'reforms' and do not forget their history like millions of gormless consumerist dolts did in New Labour's crumbling gimcrack Britpop Utopia from the 1990s to the present time.

Putin and Medvedev are attempting to build the Russian state from the Hobbesian anarchy of the 1990s. Without which all attempts at economic reform and to create a 'civil society will fail.

The merging of authoritarianism with populist forms of democracy is hardly absent within the USA or Britain. It's just a lot more subtle and, as those who know the legend of the Grand Inquisitor, a rationalisation of Utopian impulses

All political systems increasingly depend on creating satisfied consumers who have the right to consume and to appropriate to themselves the resources of the earth that their benevolent guardians say they are entitled to.

In the context of depleting natural resources like oil and gas, Russia is naturally a target for ultimate 'regime change; in the interests of those who believe in a militant creed of enlightened self interest and 'trickle down effects'.

In Brecht's phrase first the meal, then the moral. First control over the resources, then then the lecture about civil society, liberal reforms, the inevitability of one global economy and global US benevolence.

Globalisation may intensify the connections between the economies of the globe and their interdependence but unlike the neoliberal propagandists like Marson, Corcoran et al the reality will not be anything like that.

Russia will evolve into what John Gray calls a hybrid of democracy and authoritarian rule that, far from being 'on the wrong side of history' as Obama messianically intones, will be a model for others.

There's nothing good about that. It's just what is happening where there are going to be entire populations desiring inordinate satisfaction of their material needs without heed for the reality.

Eastern Europe is Redefined by Jeffrey Sachs.

It is now a well established truth acknowledged by those who do not buy into the neoliberal market dogmas of the 1990s that 'shock therapy' proved a disastrous economic experiment in the lands of the former Soviet Union.

As John Gray emphasised in False Dawn :The Delusions of Global Capitalism, the attempt to graft an American style market economy in a land where the command system was collapsing into anarchy and mafia activity was unworkable and Utopian.

The main proponent of shock therapy, the freeing of prices overnight, rapid privatisation programmes of state assets and the reduction of state subsidies to ailing industries left over from the Soviet Union, was a certain economist Professor Jeffrey Sachs.

The widely documented effects of all that when applied to Russia's economy and society have now been released by the renowned medical journal The Lancet. A Financial Times report reveals,

”Shock therapy”, or rapid mass privatisation, in the former Soviet bloc in the first half of the 1990s was responsible for the early deaths of 1m people that could have been prevented, according to a paper to be published in The Lancet, the medical journal, on Thursday.

An analysis of the 3m working age men who died across the former communist countries of eastern Europe suggests at least a third were victims of mass privatisation, which led to widespread unemployment and social disruption.

The study adds to growing research in recent years demonstrating how far the economic transition led to widespread suffering through death and physical and mental illness.

Mr McKee stressed that death from alcohol poisoning was the most important immediate explanation for the surge in deaths, while poor diet and the increasing gap between western and communist healthcare from the 1960s also contributed.

However, he said redundancies, particularly among the less well educated and those without forms of social support, was one of the main underlying reasons.

Naturally, the prescriber of shock therapy, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who now advocates public and private partnerships, market solutions to global warming alongside determined state action and poverty reduction for Africa, all with the benign patronage of U2 singer Bono, is not that happy about

The research, conducted by David Stuckler and Lawrence King from Cambridge University and Martin McKee from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, takes a specific swipe at the legacy of Jeffrey Sachs, the US economist, who advocated shock therapy at the time.

Mr Sachs called the paper ”analytically profoundly flawed and did not establish a causal link.” He said a number of the countries studied such as Poland had experienced rapid privatisation accompanied by rising life expectancy, while others like Belarus had little liberalisation but the health of its citizens suffered during the 1990s.

Well, the catastrophic effects of shock therapy were not experienced in Poland but in Russia which really is in Eastern Europe whereas Poland, whilst part of the former 'Soviet bloc', is widely considered by most who know anything about it to be part of Central Europe with very different political, economic and social history.

Jeffrey Sachs disingenuously conflates Eastern Europe with Poland in order to point to the relatively benign effects of the Balcerowicz Plan and rising life expectancy, something made possible by the Lancet writers own confusion of Poland with 'Eastern Europe'. That allows Sachs to get away with claiming that more generally shock therapy was 'successful'.

Evidently, “shock therapy”, or more precisely a rapid transition to a functioning market economy, had no discernible adverse effect in these countries on life expectancy. If anything, its effects were positive. Diets improved considerably in eastern Europe. The authors of the Lancet study indeed note that their theory of “shock therapy” does not apply in eastern Europe, but they persist in criticising me anyway, though I was adviser to several of eastern Europe’s successful reform governments.

The elevated mortality rates occurred in parts of the former Soviet Union, not in eastern Europe, and most notably among middle-aged Russian males. The fact that Russia used a voucher privatisation during 1992-94 is certainly among the least of the potential causes of Russia’s mortality crisis, and probably played zero role. Russia was in turmoil for far more weighty reasons – a collapse of a Russian-led empire, mass corruption, and chaotic political and economic conditions. But probably the key to understanding is that Russia’s life expectancy had been falling prior to the transition from communism, since the end of the 1960s.

By any normal definition, Russia would be included in Eastern Europe unless one is thinking of it as Zbigniew Brzezinski does, some quasi-Asiatic 'Black Hole' that cannot be considered part of Europe 'proper'. Yet it also helps if one wants to obfuscate the sheer scale of the immiseration and poverty caused by Sachs market reforms in Russia.

The use of the term 'elevated' to describe mortality rates suggests something has remained at a high level and not in fact that the rate of death, including suicides, rocketed during the early 1990s.

Whilst Russia was in turmoil after the collapse of the Soviet Union the pathologies unleashed were intensified by shock therapy. But voucher privatisation was only one of the three components of shock therapy that did not itself plunge Russia into deeper poverty but was merely ineffective because most workers had to sell their shares to put bread on the table.

That was the result of Gaidar's 'liberalisation' of price controls and the way Chubais' privatisation programme worked in practice through insider dealing, something that was always going to happen when the state was collapsing into Hobbesian anarchy, a reality that Sach's studiously ignored and that was made worse by shock therapy.

Russia's life expectancy had been falling since the 1960s but the steep decline in the 1990s was unprecedented in modern history. But, of course, it just had to be all the fault of the Soviet Union in promoting unhealthy food choices and too many fry-ups washed down with vodka.

The best lead on this long-term crisis is given by the nutritional epidemiologists, including Prof Barry Popkin, who notes in his new book The World is Fat that Soviet planners were actively promoting a fatty, high-red-meat diet: “Saturated fat, cholesterol, total caloric intake, obesity, and other potential negatives were ignored [by Soviet planners].” Only decades later, “adults in the former Soviet Union have the highest heart disease rate in the world, are overweight and obese, smoke a great deal, drink extensively, and just aren’t healthy”.

That still would not explain why life expectancy for men dropped by almost a decade in the 1990s and those who grew up during the later years of the Soviet Union all started dying off after 1991.

The Lancet authors make the incredible assertion that “Russia fully implemented shock therapy by 1994”. This shows the flimsiness of their economic concepts. Almost the opposite was the case. Russia experienced growing chaos, not a transition to a functioning market economy as in Poland, for example. I myself resigned as an adviser to the Russian government in the first weeks of 1994 in protest against the rising corruption in Russia and the failure of the west to be at all helpful to the reformers, who were left to the mercies of their corrupt political competitors.

Well, the reason why shock therapy was abandoned why precisely because the costs were too great and such reforms wholly unsuited to Russia. Sachs is one of those arrogant and hubristic ideologues who seeks to blame the patient for reacting badly to the medicine instead of just admitting that his diagnosis of what was needed for Russia was just badly wrong and destructive.

Anatol Lieven on 'The New Cold War'

To Russia with Realism.

The American Conservative, March 26 2007.

As if the U.S. did not have enough on its plate, the latest strongly anti-American statements of President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials suggest the possibility of a new Cold War with Russia. And from the Russian point of view, these statements are only responding to a series of bitterly anti-Russian statements and actions by the Bush administration over the past year, including plans to bring Ukraine into NATO; the speech by Vice President Cheney in Vilnius last July attacking Russia; backing for Georgia in its conflict with Russian-backed breakaway republics; and the latest move to extend American anti-missile defenses to Eastern Europe.

At best, deep mutual hostility be-tween the U.S. and Russia represents a serious distraction from America’s infinitely more important and urgent problems elsewhere, including Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the rise of China, and the deterioration of U.S. influence in Latin America. At worst, this tension could lead to Russia arming Iran, joining global energy cartels to put pressure on the West, and inflicting on Washington geopolitical humiliation on the territory of the former Soviet Union. This would occur if the U.S. agreed to defend Ukraine and Georgia as part of NATO and then proved unwilling or unable to defend them when Russia attacked.

For while Russia cannot remotely match America’s global power, we should remember the key lesson of Iraq: all real power—that is, power that can be applied to a particular place and issue—is in the end, local. Russia may no longer be a global superpower, but it is certainly a great power when it comes to Ukraine, Belarus, and the Caucasus.

And in contrast to the launching of the Cold War, for the U.S. to take these risks is not remotely justified by vital American interests. In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union was the heartland of a revolutionary ideology that threatened to suppress free-market democracy, freedom, and religion across the world and, by dominating Western Europe and East Asia and fomenting revolution in Latin America, to pin the U.S. within its own borders, surround it, and eventually stifle it.

Today’s Russia is like many U.S. allies past and present: a corrupt, state-influenced market economy with a partly democratic, partly authoritarian system. Russia has no global agenda of ideological or geopolitical domination but mainly wants to exert predominant influence (but not imperial control) within the territory of the former Soviet Union and the centuries-old Russian empire. Moves by the state to dominate the oil and gas sector are unwelcome to Americans but entirely in line with world practice outside the U.S. and U.K. Russian corruption is extremely serious, but on the other hand, the fiscal restraint of the Putin administration holds lessons for the present U.S. administration, not the other way around. Like India, Turkey, and many other democratic states, Russia has used brutal means to suppress a separatist rebellion.

Like Turkey for several decades when it was a member of NATO, Russia combines an increasingly independent judiciary and respect for the rule of law with selective repression (both formal and covert) against individuals seen as threats to the state or the ruling elite. The media scene is rather like India until the 1980s—a combination of state domination of television with a free and vocal, but much less influential, print media.

Above all, when it comes to the main lines of its foreign and domestic policy, the Putin administration has the support of the vast majority of ordinary Russians, while the Russian pro-Western liberals we choose to call “democrats” are supported by a tiny minority—mostly because of their association with the disastrous “reforms” of the 1990s. Thus, far from rallying democratic support in Russia, American attacks on Putin in the name of democracy only foment the anger of ordinary Russians against the United States. It does not help when criticism of Russia’s record on democracy and freedom comes from that notorious defender of human rights Dick Cheney or when these statements are immediately followed by warm and public American embraces of even more notorious ex-Soviet democrats like President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.

Russia today is by no means a pretty picture, but to compare it in terms of repression and state control with the Soviet Union—or indeed with contemporary China—is grotesque. We should remember that as late as the summer of 1989, a Soviet leader who envisioned Russia as it now exists would have been received with incredulous joy by the West as representing a future beyond our most optimistic dreams. And at that time a Western policymaker who advocated such megalomaniacal, horribly dangerous projects as drawing Ukraine and Georgia into an anti-Russian military alliance, and taking responsibility for their security, would have been regarded as completely insane.

On two recent occasions, I have assumed that U.S. hostility to Russia, and anti-Russian U.S. geopolitical agendas, would largely evaporate. The first time was immediately after 9/11, when the extent of the murderous threat of Islamist extremism to the U.S. was fully revealed. It seemed self-evident that the American political elites would automatically reconsider their attitude toward Russia. After all, since the end of the Cold War, Russia had not been responsible for the death of a single American or threatened a single truly vital American interest and had itself suffered terribly from Islamist terrorism.

The second time was in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq as the extent of the debacle there, and of America’s military overstretch, became fully apparent. Once again, it seemed that U.S. policymakers would instinctively wish to reduce their military commitments accordingly or at the very least not seek to undertake any new ones—especially given the rise of Chinese military power, and the threat to Taiwan, in the Far East.

As we know, things have not turned out that way. Instead, hostility to Russia in the Bush administration, both parties in Congress, and the American media has only grown. So too have American ambitions vis-à-vis Russia. Last year, the administration, with the full support of the Democrats, was pushing an offer of a NATO membership action plan for Ukraine at NATO’s summit in Riga, in the face of private Russian threats of drastic retaliation including a massive program of arming Iran against the U.S.

The case of Ukraine and NATO is worth considering as a prime example of the deep irrationality affecting U.S. policy in the former Soviet Union. For it is not just a question of Ukrainian NATO membership infuriating Russia, real though that threat is—and understandable. After all, the Russians have lost far more men fighting in Ukraine in various wars than have died in all of America’s wars put together, and the Russian flag was flying over the naval port of Sevastopol before the United States was even created. Even more important are two more facts almost never mentioned in the American debate on this subject—if one can call it a debate. The first is that according to every reliable opinion poll, the great majority of Ukrainians do not even want NATO membership. They are convinced that far from bringing Ukraine greater security, inclusion in the alliance would lead to fierce internal divisions and potentially even split up their country, as well as vastly increase the threat from Russia.

Leaving aside the deep historical and cultural ties between much of Ukraine and Russia, Ukrainians are well aware of how economically dependent their country is on Russia and how little by comparison the West has done to help them. Until it was reduced at the start of 2006, Russia’s annual gas subsidy to Ukraine was worth more than four times as much (between $3 and $5 billion dollars) as the whole of U.S. aid to Ukraine in the five years since 2000 (less than $800 million). Millions of Ukrainians work legally in Russia and send their families remittances, which contribute immensely to the Ukrainian economy. By contrast, only a handful of Ukrainians receive work visas for the U.S. and the European Union.

The second fact is that if Ukraine does become a member of NATO, the U.S. cannot defend it. Given American commitments in the Middle East, where is Washington to find another army with which to defend Ukraine? Would any American administration be prepared to re-introduce the draft in order to defend Ukraine? If it did, would any Congress agree? And even if one can imagine this happening in some parallel geopolitical universe, is there any chance that American troops would be used to shoot demonstrators in eastern and southern Ukraine calling for their regions to break away from Ukraine in order to remain allied with Russia?

This entire plan for Ukrainian NATO membership violates one of the most fundamental rules of strategy: never make an important, visible commitment that you already know you will not be able to keep in a crisis but from which you cannot withdraw without terrible humiliation. Above all, don’t do this if your move is actually going to increase the threat of crisis. To make false promises of this kind is not only deeply reckless, it is also deeply unethical.

The Bush administration knew that if it had offered to suspend the extension of NATO membership, Russia would in return have become much more helpful in stopping Iran’s nuclear program. Yet it was not opposition in Washington that led to the Ukrainian “Membership Action Plan” being shelved last year, for there was almost none. Only the collapse of the pro-Western “Orange” coalition that took power in Ukraine in 2004, and the return to the premiership of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych, led to this project being suspended. As a result, the U.S. has infuriated Russia while gaining precisely nothing from the whole business.

All this was well known to experts on the former Soviet Union and to many American officials, and many of them were willing to admit as much in private. Why then did they not speak out against it? Why was there almost no public opposition to further NATO expansion in Washington?

The behavior of America’s political and media elites with regard to Russia shows some of the same mixture of fanaticism and cowardice that afflicts the U.S. “debate” on the Middle East. Powerful elements are obsessed with particular loyalties and hatreds. Others, with no particular axes to grind but passionately concerned with their own careers, are cowed into silence by the prevailing atmosphere.

This combination was seen in last year’s Council on Foreign Relations report on Russia, several of whose signatories would almost certainly not have put their names on this arrogant and insulting document if they had not felt intimidated by their superiors and the general Beltway mood. In the case of the non-debate on NATO membership of Ukraine, once the leaders of both the Republicans and Democrats had committed themselves to this, no Washington expert who hoped for a job in the next administration—i.e. most of them —was going to raise his or her voice in protest. This is the way that most of the Washington think-tank world works.

This leads to the question of why the general U.S. mood toward Russia is so bad, especially when contrasted with attitudes toward China, a much more authoritarian state and a much more threatening future rival. Part of the reason is obviously the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union—not Russia, but too many people in the West never made the distinction—was the principal enemy. Out of the Cold War came the particular influence in Washington of Polish, Baltic, and West Ukrainian lobbies, with ethnic hatreds of Russia that long predate their countries’ subjection to Soviet Communism. And unlike the case of China, the influence of these lobbies is not balanced by a powerful business and financial lobby with massive investments in Russia and therefore a major stake in good relations between Russia and the U.S.

Finally, there seems to be a particular hatred of Russia on the part of many members of the Washington elite because long before the Iraq disaster, Russia “betrayed the magic,” the set of beliefs forming the ideological basis of America’s global empire since the end of the Cold War and used to justify the costs of that empire to the U.S. public. Put starkly, “the magic” is a completely irrational set of assumptions, at the center of which is the idea that America represents and leads the spread of Freedom and Democracy around the world and that nascent democracies will automatically follow its lead both politically and economically, if necessary sacrificing their own national interests in the process. It only seemed for a while to have some empirical basis because this mixture did work in former Communist Eastern Europe. But that of course was only because nationalism in these countries was utterly committed to escaping the hated domination of Moscow and because the European Union did the heavy lifting in terms of economic aid and institutional transformation. This mixture does not work anywhere else—not in Latin America, not in the Muslim world, and most probably not in China.

In all these places, growing democracy is associated with growing nationalism (or, in Muslim countries, a mixture of this with religious radicalism) and therefore with hostility to the United States. In the case of Russia, it was always quite crazy to think that the Russian public would willingly accept the replacement of Russia by the U.S. as the predominant power in the former Soviet Union, any more than the American public would ever accept the loss of predominant influence in Central America and the Caribbean.

The reaction of Russian society against this American ambition was all the more fierce because radical free-market economic change in the 1990s proved utterly disastrous for ordinary Russians, plunging tens of millions into deep poverty and driving millions to an early death. Ordinary Russians’ association of these changes with Western influence was not wholly fair, as the most rapacious and ruthless aspects of the process were the work of the new Russian elites themselves. Nonetheless, the elites justified their actions in the name of “westernization,” and the proceeds of Russia’s 1990s kleptocracy were to a great extent transferred to Western bank accounts, Western real estate, and Western luxury goods. So the hostile reaction of ordinary Russians is also quite understandable.

In fact, we should be very glad that the Putin administration is as pragmatic as it is in its international policy and as relatively law-abiding at home. During the 1990s, given what was happening to both Russian living standards and Russian national power and prestige, I and many other Western observers in Russia feared an eruption of outright fascism, with catastrophic results for Russia and the world.

This is one reason that present U.S. attacks on the Putin administration are so over the top. The other is that the post-Cold war era should have begun with a presumption of Russia’s innocence on the part of the West. After all, two years before it collapsed the Soviet Union had already withdrawn peacefully from Eastern Europe on the informal promise that these countries would not be incorporated into NATO. This withdrawal removed the original casus belli of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, which began not because of anything that the Soviet state was doing within its own borders but because of its domination of European states beyond its borders in ways that were clearly menacing to Western Europe and vital American interests there.

Moreover, all the repressions and conflicts that accompanied and followed the fall of the Soviet Union put together pale next to those that attended the end of the French and British empires, both of them ruled at the time by Western democracies. One forgotten French campaign in Madagascar alone was estimated by the French military to have cost 89,000 dead, the vast majority civilians. The British suppression of a minor rebellion in Kenya may have cost up to 100,000 lives according to two recent British studies.

Millions more died in Indochina, Algeria, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent as a result of colonial wars or post-colonial civil wars and ethnic cleansing. And with the exception of Algeria, the British and French wars to preserve their empires, like the U.S. wars in the Muslim world today, took place thousands of miles from the shores of Britain and France. The Chechen wars have taken place on Russia’s own sovereign territory. The valid parallel is not Iraq but past U.S. campaigns against the Native Americans in North America itself.

Before the Soviet Union collapsed, most Western observers confidently predicted that the Soviet establishment and the Russian people would fight to the death rather than allow Ukraine and other areas to become independent. Nothing of the sort occurred. In Kazakhstan, more than 10 million Russians were incorporated in the independent state of Kazakhstan without a single act of violent protest or armed intervention by Moscow.

But instead of this leading to Russia beginning the post-Cold War period with a presumption of innocence in the West, from the day that the Soviet Union collapsed—and while Soviet troops were still withdrawing from eastern Europe and the Baltic states—prominent voices in the West simply continued previous rhetorical lines about how both the former Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia embodied permanent Russian drives toward empire and aggression.

Thus George Will declared in 1996, “Expansionism is in the Russians’ DNA,” and Peter Rodman stated in 1994, “The only potential great-power security problem in Central Europe is the lengthening shadow of Russian strength, and NATO has the job of counter-balancing it. Russia is a force of nature; all this is inevitable.” This was despite the fact that since the end of the Soviet Union no leading Russian figure, with the exception of the clownish Zhirinovsky, had expressed the slightest desire to dominate Central Europeans. On the contrary, the overwhelming sentiment in Russia was that past attempts to do so had been a dreadful mistake.

As Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of The National Interest, has acutely pointed out, a critical problem in relations between Russia and the U.S. since the fall of the Soviet Union has been that Americans have interpreted that collapse, and the Russian withdrawal from empire, as a straight Russian defeat and U.S. victory akin to the American victory over Germany and Japan in 1945. Russians, on the other hand, have always seen it as a deal in which they gave up enormous territories and influence in return for promises of Western partnership and massive economic assistance, neither of which was forthcoming.

In the eyes of Russians, their withdrawal from anti-American strategies in Central America, Africa, and elsewhere was predicated on an assumption that the U.S. and its allies would not seek to destroy their interests in the former Soviet Union. As a former Soviet officer once put it to me, “If we had known what you had in store for us, do you really think that we would have let the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc fall to pieces in the way that they did? We would have fought to the death to hold on to them, and you would have had another world war on your hands.” Present U.S.-Russian hostility won’t result in a world war, but the consequences could still be bad enough, especially when it comes to American interests—and American lives—in the Middle East.

The U.S. political establishment therefore needs to do two things when it comes to formulating policy toward Russia. The first is to remove emotional attitudes deriving from the Cold War and instead approach Russia in the same spirit of pragmatism that the U.S. addresses China. The second is to think hard and clearly about what are truly America’s most important interests with regard to Russia and what are secondary or minor interests.

A truly objective analysis along these lines would lead to an identification of the following four vital American interests vis-à-vis Russia, the ones to which the U.S. would devote real effort.

First, to keep Russian weapons and materials of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists and to persuade Russia to prevent potentially dangerous countries like Iran from acquiring such weapons. This means, among other things, much stronger support and funding for the Nunn-Lugar program, designed to enhance the security of Russian nuclear, chemical, and biological sites.

Second, together with Russia, to help prevent Islamist revolution and the creation of safe havens for Islamist terrorists in the Muslim regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Third, to preserve reasonably open international access to the energy reserves of Central Asia and the Caucasus. This requires not just new pipelines but also improved relations with both Russia and Iran.

Fourth, to prevent any outbreak of major new conflict within or between states in the region, with all the suffering that this would involve for the peoples concerned and all the disruptive effects this would have on the world economy and on international stability. This means the U.S. strongly opposing any Russian military intervention in Ukraine and Georgia but also refraining from trying to draw them into an anti-Russian military bloc, as both these moves are likely to lead to regional conflict.

In other words, the U.S. needs to develop a strategy toward Russia tailored to real American interests and real American strength. Surely the country that produced George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and Dwight Eisenhower must still be capable, somewhere in its being, of this kind of strategic wisdom?

Mark Almond on Belarus in 2006.

Less Bizarre than It Seems

The Guardian. Tuesday March 21 2006.

After the death of Slobodan Milosevic, the west did not need to look far to find another bogeyman. Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus was on hand and facing re-election.

Journalists routinely report on Belarus as a landlocked Stalinist theme park run by a Hitler-loving tyrant who makes his opponents disappear. Condoleezza Rice and her chief assistant for democracy promotion, Dan Fried, never tire of urging Americans and their Nato allies to sponsor civil-society projects in Belarus to foster true democracy there.

Our media have a split personality when it comes to these two guardians of democracy. On Belarus they are quoted like Old Testament prophets, but mention them in connection with Iraq and people recall that they were the only US officials with President Bush and Tony Blair on January 30 2003 when Bush suggested provoking an incident with Iraq to get the war with Saddam going.

Of course if you believed them about Iraq then you won't choke swallowing their story about Belarus. But let's avoid the slick argument that just because veterans of the US's Central American policy under Reagan allege that Lukashenko has "disappeared" some vocal critics that cannot be true either.

While unsolved cases cast a shadow over the government, the evidence is deeply contradictory: one of the "disappeared", the former National Bank chief Tamara Vinikova, resurfaced in London months before our Foreign Office admitted she was no longer missing. The politicisation of the issue has obscured the hunt for the truth. Yet Lukashenko faced a question about the claims at his post-election press conference yesterday, when opposition journalists from newspapers widely reported as "banned" asked him questions.

The issue isn't unknown in Belarus, where people don't live in an information black hole. But human-rights charges lack traction because the western-backed opposition has offered no economic platform, just echoes of these western allegations against Lukashenko.

Although the west has never batted an eyelid about accepting a 97% vote obtained by a favourite such as Georgia's rose-revolutionary President Saakashvili, at first sight four-fifths voting for one candidate seems hard to credit. But if you look at the socioeconomic reality of Belarus and compare it with its ex-communist neighbours, as Belarussians do, then the result is not so bizarre.

No communist-era throwback, Belarus has an evolving market economy. But the market is orientated towards serving the needs of the bulk of the population, not a tiny class of nouveaux riches and their western advisers and money launderers. Unlike in Georgia or Ukraine, officials are not getting richer as ordinary folk get poorer. The absence of endemic corruption among civil servants and police is one reason why the wave of so-called "coloured revolutions" stopped before Minsk.

But even if the government in Minsk is not corroded by corruption, its opposition depends upon support from abroad. If people resent anyone for getting rich quick undeservedly they resent the opposition types who receive lavish subsidies from the west to promote civil society and flaunt the latest iPod.

The irony of the west preaching civil society and shock therapy at the same time is that you cannot have both. Western advisers made economic transformation a priority, but wherever their advice was followed it was poverty, not pluralism, that resulted. Across the old communist bloc "shock therapy" enriched a few dozen oligarchs and their foreign economic advisers, but the mass unemployment it caused and the collapse of public spending it demanded smashed the foundations of the civil society emerging under Gorbachev.

By protecting Belarus from the ravages of free-market fundamentalists and delivering economic growth and prosperity for the mass of Belarussians, Lukashenko has sown the seeds of a pluralistic society far better than by handing the state's assets over to half a dozen cronies of western advisers.

Belarus is far from perfect, but it is a country where masses of ordinary people are getting on with life and getting a bit better off. That is why Lukashenko inspires fear and loathing in the thinktanks and foreign ministries of the west. By saving Belarus from mass unemployment he set a terrible example. What if the neighbours tried to copy it?

The Quiet Election in Belarus

On September 28 2008 there was an election in Belarus. The curious thing was that in past elections there had always been a great fuss in media in Western nations about how they had been rigged.

This time there was hardly a peep as one journalist Lionel Beehner pointed out in The Guardian ( Why we need Belarus October 9 2008 ) whilst drawing all the wrong conclusions.

Belarus held a parliamentary election last week and nobody in America paid any attention.

Well, that's because Lukashenko had been signalling that he wanted better relations with 'the West' and so the very electoral irregularities that the OECD kicked up a fuss about during the "Denim Revolution" in 2006 have been hypocritically overlooked this time.

If one looks at the Zubr website, it remains eerily and forlornly flickering in cyberspace as an abandoned attempt to stage manage a revolution by those who demand immediate freedom to be part of the EU. It hasn't been updated since. So much for the continued struggle of principled dissidents.

The website seems like a pastiche of the democratic 'refolutions' of 1989-1990, fabricated by an elite that is largely funded by the West. For that reason Zubr is not popular nor is it representative of the majority of people in Belarus. As the Oxford University history don Mark Almond wrote in 2006,

'No communist-era throwback, Belarus has an evolving market economy. But the market is orientated towards serving the needs of the bulk of the population, not a tiny class of nouveaux riches and their western advisers and money launderers. Unlike in Georgia or Ukraine, officials are not getting richer as ordinary folk get poorer. The absence of endemic corruption among civil servants and police is one reason why the wave of so-called "coloured revolutions" stopped before Minsk.

...... even if the government in Minsk is not corroded by corruption, its opposition depends upon support from abroad. If people resent anyone for getting rich quick undeservedly they resent the opposition types who receive lavish subsidies from the west to promote civil society and flaunt the latest iPod'.

The OECD itself, as Almond has argued, is essentially made up with placemen from powerful nations who dislike Lukashenko not so much because he is an authoritarian populist but because he won't sell out and privatise the economy for the exclusive benefit of Western investors.

Belarus is not a dictatorship and though Lukashenko does have the nasty habit of jailing democracy activists like and dissidents such as Alexander Kozulin as jailing those who challenge his power

But Lukashenko has been able to portray the 'united opposition' funded by the USA, NGO's and Soros as trying to stage a coup against him and that these politicians don't care about ordinary Belarusians who will lose their jobs because of the 'necessary reforms'

People in Belarus know what happened in Russia was mass unemployment, despair in rural areas and they are content enough with the economic security that the so-called 'The Last Soviet Republic' provides.

The demand for reform comes from the designer revolutionaries who are trying to fake the idea that they have some potential wide constituency for their demand for reforms, something they never spell out when it comes to the economy.

Even the CIA Factbook has drawn attention to Belarus' quite impressive economic growth since Lukashenko rejected the one-size-fits-all neoliberal model. People are materially better off under Lukashenko than they have been in places lauded for market 'reform' such as Georgia where poverty has actually increased since 1991.

Even without the staging of elections in such a way that gives Lukashenko some 82% of the vote, obviously through fraud and force, he would still be voted in by the vast majority of the electorate in Belarus.

Belarus does need more democracy but as Lukashenko himself has argued it must come from within Belarus itself and be reform that the people there want and not just that demanded by Western investors who just want easy pickings and to surround Russia as part of a geopolitical strategy.

There is very little in the way of objectivity on Belarus.

Beehner does not really explain ‘why the US needs Belarus' but simply reproduces a set of platitudes about Belarus' geopolitical position and Lukashenko as ‘Europe's Last Dictator'.

Certainly, some on the ‘hard left almost venerate Lukashenko for being the leader of ‘The Last Soviet Republic.

The important thing is to let people know what is really at stake. Beehner does not do that. He just starts from the unquestioned assumption that US and NATO expansion into Belarus is somehow 'historically inevitable'. Curiously, that's the way Soviet expansion was once seen.

In accordance with Orwellian doublethink the desire for expansion is projected wholly on to Russia.

The image of Russian tanks moving into Georgia can't sit well in Minsk. Belarus will not be joining Nato anytime soon – even though it arguably is more qualified for membership than Georgia, given its recognized boundaries – but nor should we assume Belarus is just some extension of Russia, or a beachhead for its expansionism westward.

Well, nor should 'we' assume that Belarus is not entitled as a sovereign state to choose neutrality as Austria did in 1955 during the Cold War or Finland did, thus giving the world the term 'Finlanisation', that is maintaining trade ties with both the West and East whilst remaining non-partisan in politics.

The alternative can be seen with the state of Georgia and the conflict in August 2008.

The US is interested in Belarus for two key geopolitical reasons.

Firstly, Belarus is a main transit route for Russian oil and gas to Western Europe. It has an oil refinery industry that is controlled by the state and estimated by Prime Minister Sidorsky in 2006 to be worth $1 billion per year. The gas industry controlled by Beltranzgaz is worth a lot too.

The decision in 2006 by Gazprom to ramp up prices has been exploited by the US which claims that the decision to charge market prices , provides an opportunity to exploit the potential discontent.

This is hypocritical because the US wants Belarus to become a market economy but reacts with pseudo-moral outrage when Russia ends what effectively amounts to a subsidy.

Yet Gazprom's decision was part of a strategy of holding Belarus to ransom and getting them to yield control of Beltranzgaz, something intensified by continued US meddling in the ex-Soviet republics surrounding it. In turn that has compelled Belarus to increase transit fees to the West from Russia.

Beehner just insinuates that Lukashenko alone is playing some kind of geostrategic game to preserve his power without explicitly mentioning how US and Russian strategy has interacted to bring about the policies the Belarusian leader has pursued.

In the long term this is the plan of encircling Russia, controlling transit routes and using that as a lever to force it to do business with the USA again exclusively on its terms as during the Yeltsin years.

This is a cross party consensus in the USA. Obama's foreign policy advisor is the viscerally Russophobic Pole, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in his book The Grand Chessboard ( 1997 ) writes of Europe as 'The Democratic Bridgehead' and Russia as 'The Black Hole'.

So, secondly, Belarus lies on the eastward path of the next phase of NATO enlargement and poses a threat because it has inherited from the Soviet period a developed arms industry.

Unlike Poland, whose foreign minister Radek Sikorski recently agreed to host part of the US missile shield, Belarus has concluded bilateral trade agreements with Venezuela in the field of weapons and the petrochemical industry.

Such nations are considered ‘rogue states for rejecting US control of their economies. This is why in 2004 the US senate passed a Belarus Democracy Act to fund the opposition to Lukashenko.

It is also why Sikorski himself inaugurated a conference that took place in the offices of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, entitled "Axis of Evil: Belarus – the Missing Link," attended by leaders of the Belarussian opposition and various US officials.

The AEIs other affiliates include David Frum, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz, the architects of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq back in 2003. So even though Belarus does not have oil, it is part of the USA's design expand control over the oil and gas of Eurasia.

Some of these facts on the way the USA has sought to influence events in Belarus appear in Stewart Parker's curious tract 'The Last Soviet Republic',

Throughout this propaganda work the writer soft peddles the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union. Indeed, it is recommended by curious groups like The Belarus Solidarity Campaign and those with a certain 'Ostalgia' for the Soviet regime.

Yet it does try to deal with Belarus that looks at the degree of external manipulation and it usefully sees Lukashenko's regime in the context of its Soviet inheritance and how Belarus' population tend to regard their nation as a 'social state' that has protected them from the worst post-Soviet ravages.

Even Peter Hitchens, the conservative columnist has drawn attention to this in The American Conservative where he deflates the image of Belarus as some ramshackle nightmare totalitarian state like North Korea,

It is all very simple. Belarus is a bad country, sinister and dangerous, ruled by a man of doubtful sanity. And yet it is also not that simple. Visitors to Minsk, expecting a malodorous dump, find a startlingly clean, sylvan, and well-ordered city, a sort of idealized version of what the Soviet Union would have been like if it had worked. The buses are new. The main roads are smooth. The windows are washed. State-controlled shops are full of goods. The newspapers trumpet the fact that an average monthly salary can now buy three times as many potatoes as it did 13 years ago. (1,425 pounds, since you asked.).....

By contrast with every other ex-Communist capital, Minsk has not in general surrendered to the cult of Western brands. There are only two branches of McDonalds. There are no billboards for Western cosmetics or clothes, no Starbucks. The gangsterism and boomtown raffishness of Russia are also absent.

In the ornate restaurant of the Hotel Minsk, stately, unruffled staff ponderously serve ice cream and coffee, sometimes long after customers have forgotten what they ordered. In this refreshing shelter from speed and urgency, a trio of musicians plays popular classical works in a continuing effort to raise the cultural standards of the masses. Workers in the banks will helpfully tell you (as they did in Soviet times) to go elsewhere to get a better exchange rate. Work is constantly ceasing for statutory breaks or audits (as it did in Soviet times). The terrifying gales of market capitalism have yet to come roaring down these placid streets. In the central bookshop, regiments of staff, whose equivalents would be unemployed in the West, stand about waiting for custom. Asked to supply a portrait of the president, they roll and wrap it with reverent care. Every retail outlet has its little corner devoted to a portrait of the president, just as Lenin was once honored in Communist times.

Yet there is no personality cult, rather an air of distance and mystery. There are no biographies of Lukashenko to be found anywhere, not even sycophantic ones, and he has yet to pen any grandiose theoretical volume.

In the picturesque countryside, where storks still nest in chimneys, there are neatly modernized small towns—–the fruits of a serious effort to keep people on the land. It is often said that the curse of vodka is far less potent here than in Russia, where village life is generally lived in a haze of alcohol, with all the side effects you would expect.

Remember that Hitchens is viscerally anti-communist. But his meeting with people in Belarus runs counter to what Beehner writes,

I made a special effort to find and talk to an ordinary citizen where there was little chance of surveillance or an arranged meeting. The smart young woman I found was embarrassingly keen on her country, comparatively prosperous, orderly and happy, and quite undisturbed by the levels of surveillance and the absence of political choice. I am increasingly convinced that she must have somehow been planted on me, but I simply cannot work out how. What, though, if she was genuine?

It seems the complaint of many of those who want change is that Belarus is just a bit dull to young people, as one radio DJ on a BBC interview called Belarus a 'dead zone'. Which is not to detract from the human rights abuses. But there is more to Belarus than made out by those labelling it a Stalinist state.

On Russophobia

Anna Matveeva has written an interesting short blog for the Guardian on the subject of Russophobia.

This was much in evidence during the Russo-Georgian conflict this August but also with regards the somewhat hysterical view that Putin runs a neo-Soviet KGB police state that is bent on 'bullying' its neighbours

The roots of Russophobia have their origin in the transcendental hypocrisy of the USA and the UK in playing the Great Game for the resources of Eurasia and attempting to do so with absolutely no regards at all for Russian interests or Russian people.

The reaction of the media and the politicians was overwhelmingly anti-Russian, because their gut feeling told them who was in the wrong. More objective reports appeared much later. Why was the conflict in South Ossetia so important? Because Russia was a party to it. Readers were led to believe that minuscule South Ossetia is a proto-state like Kosovo, while no parallels were drawn with Nato action in ex-Yugoslavia in support of Albanians.

This was blindingly obvious to anyone who wanted to retain a semblance of objectivity. Yet throughout the British media all we had was the parrot like repetition of 'Russian aggression' and spurious comparisons to Stalin, Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland and 'appeasement'

The question is: can Russia do anything good? In Russophobes' eyes, it should (1) surrender and apologise, (2) give western companies control over natural reserves because Russians mismanage them anyhow, (3) limit their ambitions to culture and (4) award Boris Berezovsky a medal for democracy-promotion.

Obviously Russia can do nothing good to neoliberals and fanatical neoconservatives who want to change NATO into some messianic politico-military bloc designed to promote control over the Eurasian heartland and who regard Russia, in Brzezinski's words, as nought but a 'Black Hole'.

Brzezinski is Obama's foreign policy advisor and far more viscerally Russophobic than even the neoconservatives. He condemned Bush for being too soft on Putin. The reason is that Russia stands in the way of Brzezinski's strategy of advancing NATO power into Eurasia.

The ultimate goal is to reduce Russia to a second rate provincial backwater and to eventually carve up Russia entirely as it is a semi-asiatic land Empire that Poles like Brzezinski see as a historical mistake and one that allowed it to dominate Europe for too long.

Yet such fears are now irrational as Russia is not the Soviet Union and Russian power has been pushed back from Central Europe. The reason the fear of the Great Bear is being pushed to the hilt is because Brzezinski wants the Transatlantic bloc to control Eurasia and to control China.

The Iraq War was the more risky fast track option that Brzezinski opposed because 'stirred up Muslims' are always more difficult to control than at least partly rational people in nations like Georgia where there is a hostility to Russia that can be used to promote US hegemony and power.

Anatol Lieven gets it right in his article Against Russophobia,

Brzezinski's statement that "[the Russians] have denied many, many times now that they have committed atrocities [in Chechnya].¼ In 1941, they killed 15,000 Polish prisoners, officers in Katyn, and they denied that for 50 years." In his account, "the Russians" as a collectivity are fully responsible for the crimes committed by the Soviet Union under the Communist dictatorship of Joseph Stalin-an ethnic Georgian who at the time of the massacre at Katyn was also responsible for murdering or imprisoning millions of ethnic Russians who were accused of hostility toward communism or toward Stalin himself. This Stalinist past is then made part of a seamless continuity of "Russian" behavior, running unchanged through the years since Stalin's death. The condemnation of Stalinism by Nikita Khrushchev, the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, the peaceful Soviet withdrawal from Poland, the Russian recognition of the independence of the other Soviet republics-all this is ignored.

As Brzezinski's statement illustrates, this essentialist attitude toward Russia has played a major part in the reporting of and commentary on, the latest Chechen war. Take, for example, a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times: "Russians also fight brutally because that is part of the Russian military ethos, a tradition of total war fought with every means and without moral restraints." Unlike, of course, the exquisite care for civilian lives displayed by the French and American air forces during the wars in Indo-China, Korea, and Algeria, the strict adherence to legality in the treatment of prisoners, and so on. The editorial read as if the wars against guerrillas and partisans involving Western powers had been wiped from the record. (What was most depressing was that it followed two articles on Russian and Chechen atrocities by Maura Reynolds and Robyn Dixon in the same newspaper that were the very models of careful, objective-and utterly harrowing-reportage).

Lieven's essay continues in a prescient echo of the media reporting of the Russo-Georgian conflict in August 2008 the following,

Concerning Russia, the main thrust of the official Western rhetoric with respect to the enlargement of NATO, and Russia's response, has been that the alliance is no longer a Cold War organization or a threat to Russia, that NATO enlargement has nothing to do with Russia, that Russia should welcome enlargement, and that Russian opposition is not merely groundless but foolish and irrational. It is of course true that Russian fears of NATO expansion have been exaggerated, and some of the rhetoric has been wild. Still, given the attitudes toward Russia reflected in much of the Western media (especially among the many supporters of NATO enlargement), a Russian would have to be a moron or a traitor to approve the expansion of NATO without demanding guarantees of Russian interests and security.1

The reason Russia is loathed so much by many windbags in Polish politics has all to do with exploiting Polish fear of Russia into justifying the expansion of NATO power as a substitute for long standing revanchist tendencies.

When Radek Sikorski started banging on about how Merkel's cautious diplomacy with Putin was a resurrection of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, it's clear that there is a form of Polish nationalism that is fanatical, though tempered by craven subservience to the USA.

Such attitudes and blind hatred of Russia are as fanatical as the worst forms of Great Russian chauvinism. The history of that goes back to the mid-seventeenth century when Poland stretched far into Ukraine.

For Radek Sikorski, who fancies himself as a somewhat foppish eighteenth century magnate (The Polish House etc etc ), the Bucharest Conference was an opportunity to revive the Polish i.e 'Western' drive to the Black Sea.

France and Germany recently have had the most sensible attitude towards diplomacy with Russia based on a realistic assessment of mutual interests free from messianic missionary guff about freeing the world.

Significant parts of the Polish political classes remains embarrassingly adrift in a world of an anti-Soviet and martyred Christ of nations posture that means an essentialist anti-Russian and 'they are all barbarians' view of an entire people and its history.

There is nothing very Christian about this pose, as based as it is on blind fanatical hatred, demagoguery, and President Kaczynski's attemt at whipping up popular fear of Russia in order to bolster the flagging fortunes of his pitiful PiS Party.

Part of this is a neurosis embedded within a certain strand of Polish opinion. We are kulturalny and 'we' are totally European in a way they can never be. The kind of ritualistic snobbery that annoyed Dostoevsky in Siberia when listening to them whine on about it.

http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=626&prog=zru&zoom_highlight=lieven

John Gray on Russia and the Return of Geopolitics.

The following article written by John Gray aptly describes the flaws behind the Russophobic ranting that accompanied the incursion into Georgia in August 2008 in response to the its attack on the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali.

Gray has continually criticised the imposition of Western neoliberal 'shock therapy' reforms in the 1990s as a form of Utopian experimenting that destroyed the lives of millions for the sake of an ideological dogma.

He also opposes the simplistic line of those who see Putin as just a neo-Soviet style autocrat and as a certain improvement on Yeltsin whose 'Market Leninist' government used Communist dictatorial methods and admass propaganda to impose economic reforms.

The difference, of course, is that Yeltsin was a Western client supported by pro-Western oligarchs who looted the economy. Western investors ripped off $300 billion worth of assets in this period whilst the vast masses of Russians sank into poverty.

The drivel about the Russian bear and a 'resurgent Russia' is continually invoked irrespective of the facts. Not least during the war with Georgia launched by a US placeman Mikheil Saakashvili who is the best example of a post-Communist nationalist who serves US geopolitical interests.

Namely, protecting the pipelines from the Caspian and advancing NATO power into Eurasia as a means of encircling Russia and negotiating from a position of strength vis-a-vis China. Reducing Russia to a 'Black Hole' to use Zbigniew Brzezinski's words is part of that strategy.

Ultimately it will mean that Russia has to cede control over its oil and gas reserves as part of a geopolitical strategy of aggrandisement whilst the US expands its power into the Caucasus and Central Asia. Any dissent from that is reviled as 'Russian aggression' or 'resurgence'.

Folly of the Progressive Fairytale

The Guardian. Tuesday September 9 2008

The current panic about Russia is a curious phenomenon. By any objective standard Russians are freer in the authoritarian state established by Putin than at any time in the Soviet Union. Many are also materially better off. Russia has abandoned global expansionism, and is now a diminished version of what it has been throughout most of its history - a Eurasian empire whose chief concern is protection from external threats. Yet western attitudes are more hostile than they were during much of the cold war, when many on the left viewed the Soviet Union, which was responsible for tens of millions of deaths, as an essentially benign regime.

To see how this state of affairs has come about one must understand the progressive narrative - embraced nowadays as much on the right as the left - that shapes western perceptions. The Soviet collapse was a defeat for communism, a prototypical progressive ideology. There was never any prospect of post-communist Russia embracing neoliberalism, another western model. Something like Putin's Russia was always on the cards, but the return of history isn't part of the progressive script. Most of our leaders are disciples of Woodrow Wilson, with a religious faith in what Francis Fukuyama only the other day described as "the march of history towards global democracy". Prosperity brings bourgeoisification and liberal values, or so they believe. Russia - rich, nationalist and authoritarian - doesn't fit this progressive fairytale, and the west's reaction is a mix of threatening bluster and mounting panic.

Nothing is more misguided than talk of a new cold war. What we are seeing is the end of the post cold war era, and a renewal of geopolitical conflicts of the sort that occurred during the late 19th century. Their minds befogged by fashionable nonsense about globalisation, western leaders believe liberal democracy is spreading unstoppably. The reality is continuing political diversity. Republics, empires, liberal and illiberal democracies, and a wide variety of authoritarian regimes will be with us for the foreseeable future. Globalisation is nothing more than the industrialisation of the planet, and increasing resource nationalism is an integral part of the process. (So is accelerating climate change, but that's another story.) As industrialisation spreads, countries that control natural resources use these resources to advance their strategic objectives. In deploying energy as a weapon Russia is not resisting globalisation but exploiting its contradictions.

We are back to great-power politics, shifting alliances and spheres of influence. The difference is that the west is no longer in charge. With their different histories and sometimes sharply conflicting interests, Russia, China, India and the Gulf states are not going to form any kind of bloc. But it is these countries that are shaping world development at the start of the 21st century. The US - its bankrupt mortgage institutions nationalised and its gigantic war machine effectively funded by foreign borrowing - is in steep decline. With its financial system in the worst mess since the 1930s, the west's ability to shape events is dwindling by the day. Sermonising about "law-based international relations" is laughable after Iraq, and at bottom not much more than nostalgia for a vanished hegemony.

Deluded about its true place in the world, the west underestimates the risks of intervening in Russia's near abroad. Russia's weaknesses - demographic decline, cronyism in the economy and a seething sense of national humiliation - are well known, but western vulnerabilities are no less real. Our leaders bore on about Russia needing us as much as we need Russia. In fact, despite a recent blip, investment in Russia is a byproduct of the global market that will continue for as long as it continues to be profitable, whereas Russian energy supplies can be curtailed at will by the Russian government. Economists will tell you the country is too reliant on oil. But the world's oil reserves are peaking while globalisation continues to advance, and Russia stands to gain from any international conflict in which supplies are disrupted. Again, the west needs Russia if the Iranian nuclear crisis is ever to be defused peacefully, and without Russian logistical cooperation Nato forces will find it even harder to bring the aimless, unwinnable war in Afghanistan to any kind of conclusion.

Right-thinking bien-pensants in all parties believe Russia would be more amenable to western interests if only it were more truly democratic. But Putin is wildly popular precisely because he is asserting Russian power against the west; if he were more accountable to public opinion he might be harder to deal with. Democracy has numerous advantages, but it is no guarantee of a reasonable foreign policy. The current Georgian imbroglio is itself a spin-off from democratic politics. Mikheil Saakashvili's reckless incursion into South Ossetia, where Russian forces had been stationed under international agreements for 16 years, was most likely encouraged by elements in the Bush administration in the hope of damaging Obama in the run-up to the presidential election. The gambit may have worked, but the result has been a conflict that increases Russia's leverage over the flow of oil in the region and strengthens Iran in central Asia. If Dick Cheney's pledge of support for Georgia during his travels last week was a move in the Great Game it was spectacularly ill judged.

Clearly, with the exception of some in "old Europe", our leaders do not know what they are doing. The grandstanding of David Miliband and David Cameron in Ukraine illustrates the point. Blathering about national self-determination and territorial integrity, they seem not to have noticed that the two principles are normally incompatible. Self-determination means secession and the break-up of states. In the Caucasus, a region of multi-sided national enmities, it means a wider war and worsening ethnic cleansing. The stakes are even higher in Ukraine. Deeply divided and with a major Russian naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, the new state will surely be torn apart if an attempt is made to wrench it from Russia's sphere of influence. The country would become a battlefield, with the great powers irresistibly drawn in. Playing with Wilsonian notions of self-determination in these conditions is courting disaster.

Let there be no mistake: Russia is, in some respects, a dangerous state. With their background in the security services, its leaders are ruthless pragmatists who will use any means to achieve their objectives. Their goal may be to roll back western influence in Russia's near abroad, but their strategy is to take whatever they can. Perceiving the west to be in decline, they are testing whether it has any coherent strategy to protect its interests. From what we have heard from our leaders, it does not.

A start would be to shelve plans for further Nato expansion, while making it unequivocally clear that existing commitments in eastern Europe and the Baltic states will be honoured. At the same time every effort must be made to reduce Europe's dependency on Russian energy. Western leaders need to acquire a capacity for realistic thinking, or else they will be woken from their dream of progress by the force of events.

Mark Almond on Gazprom

As this blog is meant to act as a resource for good quality journalism and commentary on Eastern Europe, often there will be articles reproduced by those whose work does not fit into the mould of propaganda.

One important writer is the Oxford historian Mark Almond who wrote this on Wednesday 7 2009 on the gas row between Russia and Ukraine.

A Capitalist Revolution

Russia's energy giant, Gazprom, is at the heart of a new cold war pitting the Kremlin against Washington. In the old cold war, Soviet gas still flowed west at the height of rows between Reagan and Brezhnev - but postcommunist Russia is proving less pliant than the "evil empire".

Gazprom is at the heart of modern Russia. Its former chairman is the country's president, and many key executives work part-time in the Kremlin. It is, above all, not only Russia's biggest company but the world's biggest energy supplier. Back in the sleepy Brezhnev days it was run like the gas board here under Harold Wilson, and with as much geopolitical significance. Now the west's fear is that Gazprom is beginning to play a role like that of America's oil companies or BP in the days when the west's energy interests determined who ran countries such as Iran.

Gazprom's dispute with Ukraine is multilayered. The west prefers to focus on the strategic significance of Russia's desolate neighbour, while the Russians put money first. It makes sense for Washington to see the issue solely in great power terms because America doesn't depend on Gazprom like the EU.

Last month, in the dying days of the Bush administration, Kiev signed a "strategic partnership" with Washington. Keeping Russia hemmed in is why Ukraine matters to America. Apart from its status as a geopolitical pawn, Ukraine is little more than a pipeline route for Gazprom's exports.

Washington's indignation about a Russian energy oligarch sitting in the Kremlin does not extend to Ukraine's energy oligarch, Yulia Tymoshenko, sitting as prime minister in Kiev. Qualifying as a market economy used to be about buying cheap and selling dear, but now politics trumps economics in western estimations.

Although its EU allies pay around $500 per unit, Washington wants Gazprom to subsidise the anti-Russian coalition government in Kiev by charging the poor Ukrainians only $175. Gazprom's response is market economics red in tooth and claw.

The west wanted Russia to be a market economy, but Russia never asked how countries become market economies. Is a political-economic juggernaut like Gazprom just a relic of Soviet days? Didn't so-called chartered companies - monopolies in effect - like the East India or Hudson Bay companies play a huge role in the development of Britain's model market economy? Without their protected profits and ability to call on Westminster to back up their trading practices with power, would Britain's economy have taken off 300 years ago?

This spat at the gas tap has hit western Europe, but the region is yesterday's growth market so far as Gazprom is concerned. Apart from Britain, where the blinkered market-makers set free by Tony Blair failed to anticipate demand, let alone invest to meet it, there are no new importers from Russia in the EU.

New pipelines via the Baltic to Germany and through the Balkans to Italy are primarily to cut out the risk of destitute ex-Communist states "doing a Ukraine" and siphoning off unpaid gas while demanding their rich EU partners stick up for them in Moscow.

Gazprom is looking for new clients, and US policy helps. American sanctions on Iran suit Russia well; Washington has pressed Turkey not to buy gas from Iran, so Gazprom offers the alternative. Chaos in Afghanistan has hit the prospect of a pipeline from Turkmenistan to India - which, with Japan and above all China, is tomorrow's market for Gazprom. While western Europe sweats over whether to pressure Ukraine to pay so Russian gas can flow, or to fight Washington's new cold war by proxy, Moscow is building new routes east and south. Medvedev announced a new pipeline to China on entering the Kremlin.

Western triumphalists marked Russia down for inevitable decline. Certainly so long as Yeltsin let his crony capitalists plunder the country and deposit the loot in London and New York, pessimism was justified. Now, however, Russia's capitalist crew are not fly-by-night asset-strippers but ruthless capitalist politician-businessmen of the sort Britain used to produce.

Gazprom's executives are the 21st-century equivalent of Britain's 18th-century pioneers of unscrupulous national power and wealth. Suddenly, yesterday's proponents of the unbridled free market have discovered a distaste for the brute realities of supply and demand. Rather like poker players who have won all the chips on the table, western states recognise that the odds will turn sharply against them, so they insist on the economic equivalent of a whist drive. But will the hard young men running Gazprom take up this granny's game?

Eastern Europe Watch.

The purpose of Eastern European Watch is

1) To collect together articles and commentary by objective and more non-partisan writers on Eastern Europe who, in my view, offer a realistic assessment of geopolitics in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and ex-Soviet Republics.

2) To develop and present my own musings upon the subject and to dissect some of the propaganda that comes not just from the Kremlin but also from Western NGO's and 'democracy promoters' who seem to be more interested in getting control over the economies and pipeline routes.

3) To challenge the simplistic narratives, mass manipulation and admass version of politics that lies behind the colour coded designer 'revolutions' from the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine 2004 and the Denim Revolution in Belarus in 2006.