NATO Expansion in Ukraine and Georgia is Dangerous.

David Davis, a former British Foreign Office minister and shadow home secretary, has some sensible things to say here about NATO in the Guardian today (incidentally, it ought to be written in capital letters because it is an acronym ).

....the starkest threat to Nato's future is the continual pressure for it to advance its borders to the east. When the Warsaw Pact dissolved, there was an understandable wish to bring the new states under the umbrella of Nato - a process I was heavily involved in as a Foreign Office minister. Even then, however, western nations were extremely cautious about countries that would be difficult to defend.

In addition, a standard guideline was not to import into Nato any active disputes or feuds: the focus has always been and should always be increasing the stability of countries within its limit and on its border, and not adding to, or reinforcing, disputes and instability.

Not all nations within Nato took the same view. There is little doubt that successive US governments saw Nato expansion as a way both of expanding their own sphere of influence and of actively reducing that of the former Soviet Union and, in particular, Russia.

This is most starkly obvious in the case of Georgia. During the last year the relationship between Georgia and Russia has gone from poor to disastrous. The same sort of argument applies to Ukraine, especially given the frequent disputes that occur over pipelines and other resources.

Expanding NATO eastwards is particulary a neoconservative project, supported by those who see that as part of a historical grudge match against Russia.

The Russians have used the accession of Obama to get off their unwisely belligerent stance on missiles in central Europe. They have suspended plans to deploy short-range missiles in Kaliningrad, following Obama's decision to review the proposed US missile defence shield.

This tends to contradict what Davies has hinted about the reckless behaviour of Saakashvili, something that amounted to a war crime when he rained down grad rockets on Tshinvali in August 2008. Likewise, the missile shield is an offensive action to which Russia is responding.

As Anatol Lieven writes in as essay in the American Conservative in July 2007, 'To Russia with Realism', bad history is one explanation for this,

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.

The geopolitical strategy of the USA, whether under Bush or Obama, is to extend NATO power into Eurasia via Eastern Europe i.e Ukraine and the Near East in Turkey and Georgia. The missile shield bolsters that plan to create an axis of influence stretching from the Baltic down to the Black Sea.

Looking at the maps helps. Brzezinski, Obama's foreign policy advisor, regards the 'Eurasian Balkans' as a key geopolitical pivot necessary to control in order to drive a wedge between Iran and Russia and contain it so that both Russia and China cannot exert influence over the Middle East.

Yet the danger is that this messianic strategy of creating something akin to Orwell's Oceania through NATO ignores the reality of the corruption and instability of states like Ukraine and Georgia simply because they are part of the master plan to dominate the world.

The real purpose is to try and diversify the supply of oil but as Michael T Klare maintains in Blood and Oil, this can only be done by geopolitical proxy conflicts with other great powers, the channelling of arms to irresponsible states where ethnic tensions are rife. Georgia shows that.

Expanding NATO against the wishes of the majority of the people in unstable democracies like Ukraine could trigger ethnic tension between the Russian speaking East and the Crimea and the Ukrainian nationalists in the West.

This is not least because NATO entry usually comes with the usual neoliberal market reforms that just would not work in Ukraine but impoverish large numbers of Russian speakers in the East where the economy is dominated by heavy industry and mining.

As Lieven states,

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.

Anatol Lieven further pointed out how futile the neoconservative talk of a new Cold War with Russia is,

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.

.....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.

Russia may no longer be a global superpower, but it is certainly a great power when it comes to Ukraine, Belarus, and the Caucasus.

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.

The policy of expanding NATO eastwards is also seen by most Russian, including Solzhenitsyn, as part of a strategy to encircle and reduce Russia to some impotent backwater valued as it was under Boris Yeltsin as a place from which to get control of its resources.

The hypocrisy of prating about 'freedom' when it acts as some kind of code for freedom for Western investors and the super rich oligarchs like Berezovsky is also as odious to many Russians.

......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.

The reaction of Russian society against..... American ambition was.... 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.

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.

Then again, the clients the US has backed, such as Saakashvili give all the signs of actually being insane which is why in the light of the Georgia attack on Russian troops in South Ossetia in 2008, all plans to make Georgia part of NATO should be shelved indefinitely. The same is true with regards Ukraine.

Peter Hitchens :The comb-over Soviet-style tyrant who could soon be one of the West's favourite allies

This article appeared in the Daily Mail ( July 19 2008 ).

Peter Hitchens, a staunch Conservative and opponent of Soviet Communism, has an interesting perspective as he sees clearly the convergence between increasingly authoritarian government and consumer capitalism in eroding liberty.

That appears to be the case in Belarus where consumer capitalism is being slowly phased in under Lukashenko with beneath the mantra of 'market socialism'. Indeed Lukashenko has made it clear he sees China as being a social model here.

That's because the Belarus leader realises that China was able to maintain the dominance of the CCP whilst introducing capitalism without the instability and loss of power that happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Moreover, China has prospered precisely because it rejected the IMF neoliberal model of free market capitalism. This says as much about how catastrophic Western economic policies and engineering 'free markets' within a short time period has been in the ex-Soviet bloc.

It does not necessarily mean that the Soviet Union was, therefore, was a Good Thing, but that the alternative offered by the USA following the end of the Cold War was so unsuited to the ex-Soviet Republics that many citizens have turned their backs to the West.

Peter Hitchens is subtle enough to see that whilst Lukashenko is a somewhat unpleasant 'hardman', his authoritarian rule is still widely popular and, if all the West has to offer is free markets, consumerism and moral anarchy, then people might well reject it.

In any case, its known that people have always been allowed to trade off liberty for the illusion of the security provided through material satisfaction. That was what the Soviet Communists originally aimed at but failed because they rejected market mechanisms as a pricing system.

That's why in Britain, New Labour has eroded lberties but tried to stimulate irresponsible debt fuelled consumerism as a way of gaining political control and to manipulate the population by spin and public relations.

Clearly, Lukashenko is catching on to that, as Hitchens article shows. Lukashenko is authoritarian but also a populist and a demagogue who acts as though he were one of the people, a first among equals who cares for every one of them, except those who are against 'the people'.

Though there is no personality cult and people are generally left alone by the state, the price of dissent, no matter that a lot of it is financed by Western NGO's, can be police brutality.

Get ready for the coming transformation of Europe's last official dictatorship into a smiley, freedom-loving friend of the West.

Step forward Belarus and its President- for- Life Alexander Lukashenko, about to be repackaged as Mr Nice - and perhaps to be ushered gently into the European Union as his reward.

Stranger people have overcome such problems - much of the world continues to fawn on the blood-encrusted tyrant Fidel Castro - and the faults of nastier countries have been conveniently forgotten, especially in Africa, for the sake of wealth or power. But not often.

President Lukashenko seems intent on proving that absolute power can drive a man absolutely loopy.

He has recently taken to proclaiming that his four-year-old illegitimate son is also his heir. His wife lives a reclusive life as a milkmaid in a remote farmstead.

Meanwhile, the President's opponents suffer a variety of sticky ends - truncheons and teargas for the small fry, trumped-up charges and squalid jails for the bigger fish, total disappearance for others.

Troublemaking journalists vanish too, or are found mysteriously knifed to death by persons unknown.

How do you solve an image problem like this? Well, ex-Comrade Lukashenko has been chatting discreetly to none other than Tim Bell (Baron Bell of Belgravia to you), the man whose matchless PR skills smoothed the edges of Margaret Thatcher, helped defeat Arthur Scargill's coal strike and more recently alerted the world to the case of the murdered Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko.

Also paying court to President Lukashenko is veteran Thatcherite smoothie Lord Parkinson, who recently accepted an official invitation to the sinister Belarus capital Minsk and was welcomed into the presence of Lukashenko himself.

Another visitor to Minsk is Patrick Robertson, who once provided his services to Chile's unloved General Pinochet.

Belarus is one of the US State Department's proclaimed 'outposts of tyranny', a designation that quietly replaced the old axis of evil. Since January 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has listed it along with Zimbabwe, Burma, Iran, North Korea and Cuba as a five-star pariah nation.

Should he take on the task of polishing Belarus, Lord Bell ought not to despair at this. For, as we shall see, the official rules about who is, and who is not, a tyrant are remarkably flexible.

And having visited quite a lot of prison states, from present-day North Korea and Uzbekistan to the old East Germany, I can vouch for the fact that, at first sight, this is the nicest despotism you are likely to find in a long time.

It even says 'I Love Belarus' on the police car number-plates. And Minsk looks like a child's picture-book version of the old Soviet Union.

But this is a Soviet Union that has, unlike the original, learned how to clean its windows and worked out how to make fridges that don't shudder all day, lifts that don't lurch and lorries that can move without emitting plumes of oily brown smoke.

There are no rust streaks on the freshly painted blocks of flats. The buses rolling along the well kept boulevards are new and shiny, if a little under powered when full of people and struggling to make it up the majestic slope of Independence Avenue.

The shops are full of food, clothes and furniture, and better still, you can actually buy them. The official Press boasts of how Lukashenko has raised the standard of living in a limited sort of way - the average monthly salary can now buy three times as many potatoes (1,425lb, since you ask) as it could 13 years ago.

There are jobs for everyone, though some of the jobs are a bit odd. And in the modern post office people are collecting their pensions on time, no small matter in a part of the world where millions connect the collapse of Communism with the end of their own financial security, and long for the secure past to come back.

See the troops of patriotic youth taking groceries to the old folk or sweeping the streets on Saturdays without pay. Look at the smart new village halls out in the countryside, see the proud young mothers collecting the keys of rent-free apartments as a reward for giving birth three times.

Look in vain for swaggering Mafiosi and their bodyguards, so common across the border in Russia.

Notice the almost total absence of Western brands of clothes, food and cosmetics which line the streets of modern Moscow. No Starbucks. No Pizza Hut. No KFC. No posters featuring foreign models.

The beauties of Belarus are officially protected from foreign competition, and encouraged by State-sponsored beauty contests in which the President takes a startlingly keen personal interest.

In the vastness of Minsk there are two branches of McDonald's and perhaps ten Coca-Cola advertisements. Everything else is - or appears to be - local.

A monumental new underground shopping mall is free of the Western cargo cult that has taken over every other city in the former communist world. Yet it is not a grimy dump, smelling of old fried potatoes and cabbage soup. Far from it.

If you want them, Minsk has all the clubs and modern restaurants you could desire.

If only the old USSR could have provided such things, the whole of history would have been different.

Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of JFK, complained about the absence of such things when, after defecting to Moscow in 1959, he was given a job and a (rather agreeable) flat in Minsk. But as he wrote in his diary: 'The work is drab, the money I get has nowhere to be spent. No nightclubs or bowling alleys, no places of recreation except the trade union dances. I have had enough.' So he headed home, with the result we all know.

Drabness is banned. See the joyous, yet modern posters, using techniques - perhaps learned from New Labour - to make them look sunny and homely.

The methods are new but the slogans are old: 'Prosperity to our city! Prosperity to our motherland! This is a state which exists for its people! We are Belarus!'

Yet some are openly and blatantly like those of the old days - vast red and gold placards celebrate the long-ago liberation from Hitler, using all the old signs except the hammer and sickle.

Policemen and the KGB guards who haunt the deserted streets near the President's office wear enormous peaked caps once popular with Red Army generals, only perhaps a size or two bigger.

A glowering monument to State security 'heroes', built in the shape of a sword and shield - the old KGB coat of arms - is piled with fresh, costly official wreaths.

And there is even a bust of the grisly old monster Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, whose statue in Moscow was the first victim of the crowds when communism fell.

Opposite it is the huge yellow-ochre building where Belarus's KGB still functions under the old name.

Be very careful with your camera round here. Among the happy, happy crowds are an astonishing number of middle-aged men just walking up and down with mobile phones in their hands and nothing much to do.

No wonder there's so little unemployment and so much order.

There's hardly any graffiti, either. Banksy would not flourish in Minsk.

And, good heavens, even the local lager louts put their empty cans in the litter bins before staggering (quietly) home. Anyone would think they were being watched.

Please don't think this is a recommendation. Belarus is very nasty indeed if you are mad or brave enough to challenge the State.

In 1999, opposition leaders Viktor Gonchar and Yuri Zakharenko simply 'disappeared' and are believed to have been murdered and buried in trackless forests by death squads.

Journalist Veronika Cherkasova was unwise enough to investigate an arms deal between Belarus (which still produces a lot of military equipment) and Iraq. On October 20, 2004, she was stabbed 40 times by persons unknown and left for dead in her Minsk flat, with a blade still stuck in her chest and bloodstains on her address book.

Insultingly, the authorities tried to pin the killing on her distraught family.

Another awkward journalist, Dmitry Zavadsky, simply vanished from the face of the Earth on his way to the airport in 2000.

Sometimes, foolhardy people take seriously the country's claim to be a democracy and contest elections. This is unwise.

If they try to hold rallies, phalanxes of riot police come jogging out of secret barracks, clubbing and gassing anyone who cannot outrun them. Prison and spiteful humiliation await anyone who pushes things too far.

Alexander Kazulin, a one-time colleague of Lukashenko, became too popular and was jailed in 2006 on ludicrous charges of 'hooliganism' and 'incitement to mass disorder' after taking part in a wholly peaceful demonstration against the dictatorship.

He even offered flowers to the police, who responded by knocking him to the ground, beating him up and throwing him into prison.

Later, shortly before being locked up for more than five years, Kazulin said: 'We're not afraid of tanks and violence; we're afraid of prisons and having no freedom. We're tired of living in a spiritual prison.'

Mikhail Marinich, another former Lukashenko colleague who tried to oppose him, was preposterously accused of stealing computers from the US Embassy. Despite the embassy pointing out that no computers had actually been stolen, Mr Marinich duly went to jail.

Still more shameful is the case of Yuri Bandazhevsky, a scientist who criticised the State's response to the Chernobyl disaster (a large part of Belarus remains severely contaminated). He got an eight-year sentence for supposedly receiving bribes, though there was no material evidence that he ever did so.

The blatant, unrepentant repression continues even now. Several people who put themselves forward as candidates in 'elections' planned for September 28 this year instantly lost their State-controlled jobs.

You have to wonder why Mr Lukashenko, who made himself permanent leader in a 2004 referendum, bothers to hold these doomed polls at all. They seem designed mainly to encourage democrats to step forward and get clubbed over the head.

Recently, things took a distinctly fishy turn. On July 3, an independence day celebration in Minsk was interrupted by an explosion, just where a large number of young people were dancing to rock music.

Thousands of people all over the country, including many who could not possibly have been anywhere near the scene, were arrested, interrogated and fingerprinted on the excuse of a 'war against terror'. The idea that the opposition were behind the bomb was carefully fostered by the State.

You can still see the small scar in the turf where it went off and, despite a strong feeling of being watched, I went to examine the scene.

Clearly, many are not fooled by the official version that this was anti-government terror - or the official story that nobody was seriously hurt.

A woman working nearby, falling into the hysterical rumour-mongering that always infects censored states, claimed to me that nine people died. Who knows? Though, judging from the small size of the crater, it seems far-fetched.

Most amazing of all, some incredibly brave soul managed to write the words 'Stop Terror' in blue chalk on the pavement outside the KGB headquarters - the writing facing towards the building's main entrance. I was lucky enough to see it during the few minutes it was allowed to exist. It was obviously an accusation.

I wouldn't give much for the chances of the culprit, who must surely have been spotted by Minsk's secret army of plainclothes men, and whose life will now be systematically ruined by the State.

Like Russia to the east, Belarus is ready to crush anything like the 'Orange Revolution' that convulsed Ukraine.

Yet at first sight, you can only tell it's not a free country from President Alexander Lukashenko's continuing failed attempts to conceal his baldness. In any country with a free Press, Mr Lukashenko would long ago have been mocked into rethinking his hairstyle.

But discreet portraits of him, proudly combed-over, are to be seen all over the place - a strange, small-scale personality cult that is gradually becoming a serious problem.

In the many State shops, with their large, uniformed staffs, you will find a little corner containing one (or sometimes two) portraits of the President, next to the national flag and the words of the national anthem, which declares 'We are Belarus ... We are free to work!' And you may buy your own copy, as I did. In which case the staff will reverently roll it up and wrap it in tissue paper, lest it get damaged on the way home.

As yet, no statues have been raised to him. He is still not Kim Il Sung, but it may not be long before he is.

A series of startling weird events suggest that absolute power has gone absolutely to his head.

He has begun appearing in public, at ice-hockey games and church services, with his four-year-old illegitimate son Nikolai, proclaiming that the bewildered child is his anointed successor.

'He is going to be President,' he cackles. Then, irritably but incredibly, he all but confirms rumours that the boy is the result of an affair with his personal physician, Irina Abelskaya.

Lukashenko, at least, can say what he likes - the one free man in a country of nearly ten million who must do his will.

Lukashenko is mysterious, an insignificant functionary risen to extraordinary heights. It is hard to work out how he rose to his position, just as it is hard to work out why tiny, indefensible, economically unviable Belarus even exists as an independent country.

It just seems to have been left lying around unclaimed after the Soviet Union collapsed in a cloud of rust in 1991. Both are anomalies.

No biography of the President is permitted and his apparently dull past life as a collective farm chief is lost in Soviet murk.

But we do know he already has two sons - Viktor, 29, and Dmitri, 25.

Viktor is a 'national security aide' but Lukashenko jeers at him in public, dismissing him as a useless weakling who will soon become even weaker.

Meanwhile his spurned wife Galina toils as a sort of milkmaid, in official obscurity, at a remote dairy farm deep in the forests of Belarus.

She is probably better off there. For here is another curious thing about this bizarre country.

I took elaborate steps to find an ordinary citizen, to find out how the people of this unusual country really view their leader and his policies. For fear of giving the Belarus KGB any clue to her identity, I will not go into the details of how I found her or where our conversation took place, but if she knew she was talking to a Western journalist, it wasn't me who told her.

Was she really genuine? In this spy-infested nation, it is impossible to be sure. It is conceivable that Viktoria, as I shall call her, was an official plant, cunningly introduced to me by an immensely subtle and all-embracing secret police. But what if she was not?

I discovered her in a small town remote from Minsk. She was almost blissfully happy to be in Belarus.

'I am proud I was born and raised here,' she said. 'I never miss a chance to tell people I am Belarussian.'

She was particularly keen to stress this to Russians, who she thinks have got a much worse bargain.

'Life is good here. I'm concerned that outsiders view my country as somehow strange. They say we are not democratic. Well, I know that in a democracy you have the right to criticise those in power. But I have nothing to criticise them for.'

She knew all about Lukashenko's peculiar family life and chatted in a relaxed way about his goings-on much as a Westerner might speak of a Hollywood star's scandals.

She spoke of a carefully and thoughtfully revived countryside - unlike the blighted, drink-sodden, dying villages of Russia.

She was full of praise for the strong, Soviet-style community spirit - people look out for their elderly neighbours and do voluntary work, patrolling and cleaning up the streets at weekends. She believed that corruption was punished.

A lot of what she said sounds ludicrous but is almost exactly what many former East Germans now say, as they muse nostalgically about the days when there was order and everything tasted better.

This kind of thing comes naturally from grizzled old Stalinists. It is rather odd hearing it from a tanned, leggy brunette with a smart new mobile phone.

And yet I am not sure that most British people are that different. There is strong public support for the steady suppression of British liberty.

Tory MP David Davis's resignation, which prompted a by-election, left more than half his constituency unmoved. Most people seem relaxed about identity cards and 42-day detention, and the Government has quietly piled up near-dictatorial powers with very little protest.

A government that promised to get rid of street disorder and to look after the old properly would get a lot of votes, with not too many questions asked about how it would do the job.

If only President Lukashenko could discover oil or prove useful to the United States or the EU, I think he would quickly find that his status as an 'outpost of tyranny' was cancelled.

Uzbekistan, a grim hellhole of repression, was for years a US ally because it hosted an American airbase.

Azerbaijan, another former Soviet republic with severe North Korean tendencies, is an honoured friend of the United States, its election-rigging blithely overlooked. And it receives, though rather quietly, visits from the Duke of York. Its leader, Ilham Aliyev, inherited power from his KGB-veteran father. But he can beat up his opponents as much as he wants, for he has oil and gas.

Belarus has one strong card to play. As well as being on the main invasion road between Russia and Germany, and so naturally rather insecure, it is also the route by which huge amounts of oil and gas reach the West from Russia, costly and difficult to bypass.

Probably thanks to this, it has for years received cut-rate fuel from Moscow - and made a tidy living by selling it elsewhere at a big profit.

But relations with the Kremlin are now not so good, and nor are the prices.

With the subsidies from the East drying up, Lukashenko knows that the arms trade alone will not keep him going.

He will have to look West for the cash and investment he needs to keep his tight, cunning little state in being. That means us.

Which is presumably why Lord Bell and Lord Parkinson have become so welcome in the dark corridors of Minsk. That comb-over will have to go, though.

The Last Soviet Republic by Stewart Parker

Few people outside diehard militant Communists and 'Ostalgics' for the Soviet Union know about Stewart Parker's The Last Soviet Republic. It has not received any reviews in the mainstream media and is published by a minor publisher by the name of Trafford. As such it has remained on the fringes of discussion about Belarus, a nation that itself to use the words of a BBC Report has 'slipped off the radar' of international politics.

This is not because Belarus is not the subject of a barrage of propaganda that portrays it as some European version of North Korea, one of the states that comprises what George Bush called an 'Axis of Evil' and Condoleeza Rice an 'Outpost of Tyranny'. Parker sets out to challenge this propaganda without 'providing an apology' for Lukashenko.

Parker successfully dismisses some of the more lurid and idiotic claims about Belarus as a nightmare Stalinist dictatorship whilst failing utterly when trying to rationalise Lukashenko's undoubtedly authoritarian and populist regime as being some inevitable outcome of Belarussian historical development.

That this is Parker's aim is made clear.

'The history of the nation of Belarus is inextricably linked to the Soviet Union'.

Belarus only really developed as a nation as the BSSR both in its rapid industrialisation and by having the highest living standards of all the Soviet Republics by the 1960s and 1970s. Stalin rewarded its sacrifice during World War Two by making it in 1945, along with Ukraine, a state represented at the UN.

For Parker, Belarusian nationalism is just a distraction from its trajectory from an undeveloped backwater under both the Tsarist Empire and under the rule of Poland over it's Western half until the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 divided Poland and 'reunited' it with the Eastern half that had remained under Bolshevik control after the Revolution.

Typical of the Stalinoid content and argument is the way the first independent Belarusian state in 1918 is promptly dismissed as being 'the legitimate one' rather than the Soviet Republic that followed the forcible suppression by the Red Army in 1919 of the Byelorussian Nation Republic and its democratic congress.

To this extent, Parker tries to claim that Lukashenko is somehow the heir of Lenin as at the time that a union with Russia was posited both in 1917 and 1994 both were surrounded by economic collapse, unable to survive on its own and surrounded by hostile Western imperialist powers. Thus nationalists are all 'objectively' against the will of the people.

The notion that the people of Belarus have some kind of identification with Eastern Pan-Slavic unity of all the people of Rus is, of course, one connected with a Greater Russian Imperialism fostered by the Tsars and carried on by Stalin once the fantasy of a continental revolutionary conflagration was replaced by 'Socialism in One Country' and a policy of territorial conquest.

Parker exploits the lack of public knowledge about Belarus and what he surely hopes is an ever credulous leftist public ready to swallow a mendacious use of propaganda myths connected with the Soviet Union and that Lukashenko draws upon to provide some weight of natural legitimacy to his image as bat'ka or 'father of the people'.

There are so many flaws in Parker's history that it would be impossible and pointless to deal with all of them. Most of his sources are drawn from works written by revisionist or leftist historians like Ian Grey whose biography of Stalin: Man of History dates back to 1979. If not his history comes from a selective use of post-Glasnost historians like Richard Overy.

It's almost as though Parker hopes people have not in fact read Overy's Russia's War because most of what Overy writes contradicts his own slant on the 1930's and 'The Great Patriotic War'.

Typical of Parker's statements is the following,

'Stalin's drive to create a modern, industrial socialist country within a single generation was a bold step....' and that the first five year plan in 1928 was, as Ian Grey puts it, 'a challenge to the Russian nation; that summoned the people to a life of heroic endeavour'.

Certainly Stalin's breakneck agricultural collectivisation was 'bold' in that the net result in the Soviet Union was millions of dead peasants, especially those deemed to be Kulaks' or fists, the richer peasants who had prospered from Lenin's earlier NEP which restored payment from grain in place of the earler policy of expropriating it by force.

Describing Stalin's mass murder as 'controversial' is a euphemism worthy of those George Orwell criticised for as providing seemingly rational explanations that soft peddle over the hideous realities. Parker relates it like this,

'In order to acheive socialism, and also to free the towns from the financial maneouvering and whims of the Kulaks, Stalin and the Communist Party established two goals in the countryside, firstly collectivisation and secondly the 'liquidisation of the Kulaks as a class'

was stretched to accommodate the middle peasants too. Despite less than 5% of of peasant households being defined as 'The relatively backward nature of Belarusian agriculture meant that the definition of a Kulak in 1927, almost 15% of the same peasant households were maked for 'dekulakisation' in the early 1930's'.

Parker does not seem to like the words terrorise nor to want to explain how Stalin used that to encourage other peasants to do what the Soviet State told them.

'For collectivisation was not actually compulsory, joining was up to the individual, but as the collective farms were established and prospered the benefit was obvious'.

An obvious 'benefit' was not being classified as a Kulak and deported into the huge network of concentration and slave labour camps that existed across the Soviet Union something Parker calls their 'relocation to remote areas of the USSR, where they would be able to work, but never again pose any threat to the new government or its plans'.

Accompanied by the Great Terror, the persecution of the Belarusan inteligensia, their murder and also the later mass extermination at Kurapaty are all brushed over as 'contoversial' episodes and part of the determination that Belarus would be 'Socialist' first and Belarusan second, as opposed to the Nationalists'

Important because it is in confronting the reality of Belarus's past as part of the Soviet Union that still resonates today with those who support Lukashenko. Parker is right that Belarusians sense of independent nationhood is rather weak but he omits to link that together with the way in which it was supressed and its leading political and cultural leaders killed off.

That together with the fact that Belarus , as the Soviet Republic that lay furthest to the West on the transit route between Germany and the the USSR, made it always the most rapidly developing part following state led industrialisation , especially with regards its metallurgic and petro-chemical industries.

This was one of the many reasons for the Nazi-Soviet 'Non-Aggression Pact' of 1939.

What is not mentioned, and which still makes Belarus geopolitically significant today for both Russia and the West, is the degree of tacit co-operation there was between the Soviet Union and Gemany right up until the outbreak of war between them in 1941. That's why Poland in particular is singled out for its support for the US Imperial project to remove Lukashenko.

For both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had every reason to co-operate to evade the terms of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 which was the work of Western Imperialists. This cynical totalitarian pact is still often drawn on by Polish politicians like Radek Sikorski to pretend that the Soviet Union and supposed minions like Belarus are part of a seamless totalitarian threat.

In fact, Sikorski did use the analogy of the Nazi-Soviet Pact to catigate Angela Merkel's dealis with Vladimir Putin over closing pipeline deals and energy supllies without consulting Poland or, in other words, without trying to use the issue to wrest concessions on the expansion of NATO power in Eastern Europe and into Eurasia.

However, there really are those like Radek Sikorski who form part of a network of pro-American Imperialists who believe it is their duty to maintain a client relationship with it over the heads of their own people as in Poland where public opposition to the Iraq War and to entanglements in conflicts in far off lands that are about maintaining US world leadership.

Few Poles are ever told that Sikorski was a former Executive Director of the "New Atlantic Initiative," a part of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute which contains all the main ideologues who pushed for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the construction of the missile shield in Poland, supported Saakashvili in his war with Russia and want NATO expansion into both Georgia and Ukraine no matter what

Sikorski chaired a conference held in the offices of the American Enterprise Institute under the slogan"Axis of Evil: Belarus – the Missing Link" and was attended by leaders of the Belarusian opposition and various US officials. Curiously, Charter97 activists have been photographed holding banners, in English, supporting Iraq and linking it with Lukashenko's 'tyranny'

All of this is part of the strategy of promoting US global hegemony over their own nations which are staging posts for the greater unfolding of its reach. It does not matter if people in these nations want it for the aim is to have the elites groomed for power in Washington think-tanks and US universities.

For in reality the contest between 'the West', Russia and Lukashenko's regime over Belarus is very much about control over the Beltransgaz oil and gas pipelines and refineries with 'democracy promotion' thrown in as a means to deliver the economic and strategic dominance over Belarus that the US wants as part of its plan to project NATO deeper into Eurasia.

Control over the globe's diminishing oil reserves is a geostrategic imperative for the USA and Belarus forms part of 'the gateway' to Central Asia. Parker emphasises that Belarus has its own high tech sector, part of which is used for a weapons industry that trades with other 'rogue states' like Venezuela.

So the historical irony of this is that the US 'Drang Nach Osten' is informed by precisely the same geostrategic imperative that was beneath Hitler's plan of conquest over what Halford MacKinder called the World Island of Eurasia and through which hegemony vis a vis China is going to be maintained into the 21st Century.

It's here where Parker's account of the scale of US meddling and plots to coalition democratic forces that will get rid of Lukashenko is important. Trying to compare the USA and the 'sinister neoconservatives' with a new threat that is not dissimilar to Nazi Germany is hysterical propaganda, no matter how odious George Bush's administration has been.

The scale of the hypocrisy though is bound to make it easy for Belarusians to reject the calls of 'democracy activists' funded by Western NGO's and the US government. Something made official policy in the USA by the passing of the Belarus Democracy Act of 2004. Parker shows how Michael Kozak, a former US ambassador admitted that,

'the US sponsored 300 non governmental organisations ( NGO's ) ...some of the NGO's were linked to to those who were seeking political change'

Parker points out that the strategy often consists of trying to cause as much trouble as possible and to provoke the police into dispersing crowds so that Digital camera shots and videos can then be made to show how the people are living under some police state. Activists are even imported to try and stoke up a maximum of outrage over Lukashenko's victory in elections.

However, this is trivial compared to the way Saakasvili, a pro-Western candidate who was supported in the 'Rose Revolution in 2003, has used authoritarian methods to crack down on dissent and whose riot police, trained and equipped by Western suppliers, used machine guns in 2007 to disperse riots in Tblisi.

That 'democracy promotion' really means US geostrategy and radical free market reforms that in practice will impoverish many ordinary Belarusians is not a spurious claim by Parker but one with a basis in fact if the record of 'reform' in other now pro-Western ex-Soviet Republics like Georgia or the Baltic states is considered.

Parker again draws attention to interesting facts about the way the economy in Belarus has improved comparative with those states that submitted to the Washington Consensus of market reform via the World Bank and IMF. One of the reasons he was able to get into power was because he reversed any moves towards selling off all Belarusian state assets as elsewhere.

in 2005 some 80% of industry remained under state control, pensions were paid and workers did not fail to be paid as elsewhere. As Parker writes, ' Of all the countries of the CIS, only Belarus has thus far equalled the level of the pre-1991 Soviet level of GDP physical volume, this was achieved in 2002.' Inflation was reduced from 313% in 1992 to 34.8% in 2003.

Though in the light of the 2008 financial crash has led Belarus agreeing to an IMF loan, it's economy and society have not seen Latvia's instability.

As the radical writer Naomi Klein has said in the wake of the genuinely spontaneous and violent rioting in Latvia,
...'the very policies that allowed the "Baltic tiger" to grow at a rate of 12% in 2006 are also causing it to contract violently by a projected 10% this year: money, freed of all barriers, flows out as quickly as it flows in, with plenty being diverted to political pockets. (It is no coincidence that many of today's basket cases are yesterday's "miracles": Ireland, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia). In Latvia, much of the popular rage has focused on government austerity measures - mass layoffs, reduced social services and slashed public sector salaries - all to qualify for an IMF emergency loan (no, nothing has changed).

Belarus, on the other hand, has managed to avoid the mass unemployment and terrible poverty experienced after 'shock therapy' and still has managed to have an economy that was growing by 8% a year. A BBC Report ( Belarus Comes Out from the Cold 21st November 2008 ) has shown that far from Lukashenko's regime putting off investors they seem very much interested.

The report came with opening of the first Belarus Investment Forum is worth quoting at length,

"If two years ago somebody had told me Britain would be nationalising its banks and Belarus privatising, I would not have believed it," said one British lord attending the meeting.

Now Belarus has decided to embrace capitalism in earnest and offer state-owned assets for sale. It has launched a massive rebranding campaign in the West.

Belarus is a strange animal in the post-Soviet space. Virtually unreformed and with 75% of its economy in state hands, it nevertheless managed to keep its plants running and sell its machinery, fertilisers, textiles and cosmetics across the former USSR. Its people continued to enjoy social welfare benefits unheard of in other former Soviet republics.

Then a sudden drop in commodity prices hit Belarus's trade balance and forced it to seek aid from both Russia and the IMF, who pledged $2bn each.

Belarus Prime Minister Sergei Sidorsky surprised observers by announcing a list of some 600 companies slated for privatisation, as well as plans to streamline business regulations and reform the tax code.

"Just in one year, we moved 30 points up the World Bank's Doing Business ranking, to occupy 85th position - an improvement by 30 points on the previous year," Mr Sidorsky said proudly at the forum.

A High Technology Park has opened in the capital Minsk - a sort ofBelarus Silicon Valley, offering IT companies based there a tax haven until 2020.

there are some success stories, involving global brands such as Heineken or Siemens.

Austrian business, particularly active in Eastern Europe, entered the market with Telekom Austria buying Belarus's second largest mobile operator and the Raiffeisen
banking group acquiring a Belarusian bank.

Belarus wants to avoid the mistakes made by neighbouring Russia and Ukraine in the early 1990s, when hundreds of enterprises were asset-stripped and sold at bargain basement prices.

"If you want to buy shares, you can do that. But it's not about one dollar, but billion of dollars," President Lukashenko told the UK's Financial Times newspaper.

"When people queue for a year to buy our tractors, we can negotiate," he said, referring to the continuing demand for Belarus machinery in Russia.

Belarus will have to perform a delicate balancing act, juggling Western and Russian business interests.

That ties in with the economic facts that Parker draws attention to that have been the glowing subject of the World Bank Reports, the very organisation that castigated Lukashenko for rejecting Western advice a decade before. One entitled 'Belarus: A Window of Opportunity' drew attention to Belarus's genuine economic development and how it maintained social welfare.

For Belarus is not some rusting Soviet era theme park but a combination of nationalist and authoritarian government with dynamic capitalism, what Lukashenko calls 'market socialism'. By retaining control without politicians deferring to the needs of Western investors, Lukashenko has retained an ability to deal with both West and East.

That in itself should not act as a ex post facto rationalisation for the Soviet Union or that a Communist system was better but as a indicator of how badly the people in these states have been treated by Western nations that regarded them as nothing more than as opportunities to plunder the economy in the name of global harmony and 'freedom'.

Lukashenko has been able to maintain power precisely because they know that the price of regime change will be unemployment, rising poverty and social inequality and because batka has exploited that in his propaganda whilst giving enough Belarusians a real reason to vote in large enough numbers for him in the form of minimum wages and social security net.

That they do is accepted, despite manipulation of elections not unknown in the West. One need only think of George Bush's victory after the electoral manipulations in Florida. The main opposition candidate Milinkevich's own Website states that even without irregularities Lukashenko would get 60% of the vote.

Had Parker's account only contained history as propaganda myth, it would have not been worth the bother to read. Yet it contains lots of information collated from various sources that point towards a different picture in Belarus today than that continuously rattled out by 'civil society' activists.

US Geopolitical Strategy with regards Russia and Iran

Jonathan Steele has written a few interesting comments on the Munich Security Conference yesterday ( Biden in Munich: Mixed Messages ).

'On Russia, his remarks were especially welcome after the hysteria of many European politicians and pundits who talk of a new cold war and warn of Russian "energy blackmail". By contrast, Biden deplored the "dangerous drift" in east-west relations in recent years. Going on to repudiate "the zero sum mentality", he threw out the central calculus of the old struggle between Russia and the west – the notion of implacable enemies with no common interests.

He said "Russia's strength" did not mean "Nato's weakness". Although he also said no country could have a sphere of influence, his calm and unworried reference to a strong Russia was the more significant point at a time when some see a threat in the fact that Russia has regained its confidence after the shock of losing its empire almost overnight and the economic chaos of the 1990s'.

Yet the idea that the offer of a new new diplomatic reapprochementwith Russia is somehow disconnected with Iran is misleading. Steele writes,

'Where Saturday's speech and, by implication, the current state of thinking within the new administration are disappointing is on the Middle East and Iran......It is one thing to criticise Tehran's "illicit nuclear programme". But to condemn Iran's "support for terrorism" is a false mantra from the Bush years. If Biden means Iran's support for Hamas and Hezbollah, he is out of sync with the views of most Arabs, let alone Iranians, who see them as legitimate resistance organisations'.

Remember that Biden said in Munich,

"We will continue to develop missile defences to counter a growing Iranian capability, provided the technology is proven to work and cost effective."

That is not really a departure from the Bush administration, though it might be bluff as the real aim of the Obama presidency in foreign policy is to control Iran on the pretext that it might be developing nuclear weapons.

The reason for insisting the missile shield programme will continue is to increase pressure upon Iran and Russia for the aim of Obama's diplomacy is to drive a wedge between Iran and other major regional powers.

Namely Russia and China, as Iran is according to Obama's 'brain' Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the 'five geopolitical pivots' essential for the USA to control if it is to control Eurasia, the World Island', and hence the globe.

Brzezinski outlined all this back in 1997 in his The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geopolitics Imperatives. That is to prevent collusion between Iran, Russia and China.

"To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together."

Whilst the diplomacy of Obama and Biden is intended to reduce tensions with Russia in the short term, the ultimate aim is still the same as under the previous Democratic administration of Bill Clinton.

The key difference is the way that the USA's inexorable destiny as global hegemon is to be brought about. The goal is, after all, substantial control over Central Asia, especially in the post-Soviet republics or 'the stans'.

For Brezinski invading Iraq in 2003 was a catastrophic mistake as it is Iran that should have been first on the diplomatic agenda. Invading Iraq has only emboldened Iran which is why its now on the list of global terrorists.

"Moreover, they [the Central Asian Republics] are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China also signaling an increasing political interest in the region. But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold."

By controlling or 'containing Iran', the projection of NATO power into Eurasia can proceed, Russia can be reduced to an impotent backwater or 'Black Hole' and China dealt with on stronger power political terms.

Yet proxy conflicts over control of the oil with Orwellian style shifting alliances in Central Asia will just funnel lots of weapons to regimes that will vacillate between tyranny, anarchy and Islamist insurgencies.

Though the major strategic powers have every interest in co-operating in some cases, it would only take a major geostrategic earthquake in the Middle East to initiate a conflagration and to draw the West into potentially global conflicts.

That was seen in August 2008 with the pro-US client Saakashvili initiating a war with Russia in order to upgrade his ailing power base and to procure the aid needed to keep him and his cronies in power.

Brzezinski was one of the main supporters of that strategy of installing pro-US clients in order to advance US power into Eurasia whilst ignoring the 'reality on the ground'.

There are all kinds of problems associated with this messianic strategy.

Indeed of Brzezinski's five geopolitical pivots only Turkey and South Korea have been erstwhile US allies and the Iraq War. The others are Ukraine and Azerbaijan.

However, the refusal of the Turkish government to allow US aircraft to use NATO bases there and it's criticism of the Israeli actions in Gaza show tensions emerging even here.

Brzezinski pins his hopes on Ukraine, a potential EU and NATO candidate, is a 'Democratic Bridgehead' into Eurasia. Brzezinski called its independence the third most significant event of twentieth century history.

Control over Ukraine is the most urgent imperative for the USA after Iran as it is the unifying link connecting Poland to Turkey, from the Baltic down to the Black Sea.

This axis contains Georgia and Azerbaijan as well, the latter of which shares a northern border with Iran. Control of that axis would block off Russia and China from exerting influence upon the Middle East.

Yet 70% of Ukrainians are hostile to NATO expansion there, Yushchenko the pro-US 'Orange Revolutionary' gets only 3.7% of the vote from nationalist Western Ukraine and pushing this agenda threatens to promote ethnic tensions.

So the issue of Iran cannot be seperated from that of Russia nor Ukraine nor Central Asia. It has all been interconnected since the Soviet Union, the invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution back in 1979.

John Gray on Russia's "Market Bolshevism".

This essay is an important precis of the reasons why Russia now has Vladimir Putin in firm control and why it now thumbs its nose at 'the West' and the pontifications of 'democracy promotion' advocates in the West.

The great irony with Russia's post-communist 'transition' is that the ideology of neoliberalism applied in a Russian context emulated some of the characteristics of the Communist system not simply in the authoritarianism and use of state power to ram through unpopular policies.

It is that the very ideology itself had certain similarities with Communism, not least the rationalist doctrinaire view that mankind can be forced to be free through reforms that presuppose vast generalisations about how all mankind is fundamentally motivated.

The idea of rational economic man maximising his utility and pursuing his self interest would lead to aggregate increases in harmony and well being once the state had dissolved many of its functions and control over the economy was a myth.

The Bolshevik Revolution in some ways was an extension of such ideas connected with the ideal of a Revolution that would inaugurate the End of History and the liberation of mankind from it in the form of consumer choice.

In many ways such neoliberal ideas then gave way to the subsequent neoconservative doctrines in the USA which were prefigured in Russia-a blend of authoritarian government and the increased use of state power to force through necessary reforms to which there is no alternative.

Entombed in Poverty: Russia Under Market Bolshevism
The New Statesman, 28 October 2002.

John Gray reviews two books on post-communist Russia.

Russia: Experiment with a People. Robert Service.

Russia's Bitter Path to Modernity: a History of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Alexander Chubarov.

With the fall of communism, it might have been expected that the specialists who were charged with keeping Lenin's remains preserved would be unemployed. In fact, the embalming of corpses is a thriving trade in post-communist Russia.

Despite a strengthening of state power in recent years, criminal mafias continue to exercise considerable influence in many areas of life. Sentimental about their dead, the new criminal elite had prevented the art of embalming from following communism into oblivion. In this, as in other contexts, Soviet traditions live on.

The embalming of dead mobsters is only one of many echoes of the Soviet era that are identified in Robert Service's indispensably useful and arrestingly well- written new book. Not only the habits of mind and social structures of post- communist Russia, but even its physical appearance, show many deep marks of the Soviet regime.

Yet it would be a mistake to think one can understand Russia today simply by looking to the regime that collapsed just over a decade ago. The deeper continuities are between post-communist and pre-communist times.

Russia as we know it today is a product of two experiments in westernisation, one imposed by Lenin, and the second by the market Leninists who ruled the country during the ill-fated years of neoliberal "shock therapy". Both were disastrous. In the wake of these failed attempts to achieve modernity by blindly following western models, Russia is returning to its pre-communist, Eurasian past.

As in late tsarist times, when the country had one of the highest rates of economic growth in the world, Russia today has a highly dynamic economy that blends wild entrepreneurship with far-reaching state intervention. Today, as in the 19th century, Russia leans towards Europe, while remaining unalterably distinct from Europe in its religious traditions, culture and Asiatic vastness.

The government of Boris Yeltsin was one of a long line of westernising regimes that have sought to make Russia an unequivocally European country. Like Lenin's Bolsheviks, the market liberals of the Yeltsin era tried to reshape the country in accordance with what they perceived as the most progressive current in European thought.

In Lenin's day, this was Marxism, which instructed the Bolsheviks that the only way forward for Russia was rapid industrialisation and the reorganisation of Russian agriculture on the model of factory production. As he showed in the New Economic Policy, which allowed some peasants to grow rich, Lenin recognised the necessity of tactical retreats. But he never renounced the classical Marxist view that socialism could be fully achieved only when Russia had become an industrial society.

The result of the policies suggested by this orthodoxy - which, contrary to conventional wisdom, Stalin followed faithfully - was the collapse of Russian farming, ecological devastation and the deaths of millions of peasants. Those who survived did so by relying on the produce of smallholdings - vestiges of the peasant agriculture that had to be destroyed if Russia was to become a western-style modern country.

The Yeltsin era saw a rerun of the Bolsheviks' forced modernisation from above, but this time the western model was American, not European, and it demanded the creation of free markets rather than central planning. As in the past, Russia's westernising elites were keen to implement what they took to be the most advanced ideas.

Western opinion had changed from the time when Sidney and Beatrice Webb had written of Stalinist Russia as the embryo of a new world civilisation; but the conventional wisdom had not become any wiser. It still insisted that the only possible future for Russia was for her to remake herself on a western model, and it continued to approach this prospect with missionary zeal.

Just as in the 1930s, a stream of political pilgrims flowed from west to east - not, this time, the communists and fellow-travellers who lauded Soviet achievements while millions starved, but instead a motley band of international civil servants, investment bankers and tacky think-tank operators. They all preached the gospel of the free market as the Russian economy spiralled into one of the greatest depressions of the 20th century.

As could be foreseen from the beginning, the market Bolshevism that was imposed on Russia in the early 1990s by the Yeltsin government - strongly influenced by the IMF - was ruinous in its effects. Millions of people did not die of starvation as they had during the Stalinist experiment, but a large part of the population was entombed in hopeless poverty.

As in the past, millions survived on the output of private, peasant-style plots. At the end of Russia's neoliberal experiment, the country was far from the modern society envisaged by the financial engineers of the IMF and its own romantically pro-western elites. It was trapped in a Byzantine labyrinth of crime and corruption from which it is only now emerging.

Providing a much-needed and richly informed historical perspective on Russia's development over the past decade, Alexander Chubarov tersely sums up this half-tragic, half-farcical story: "The 'shock therapy' of the early 1990s . . . inflicted great pain but gave little cure. It was a Bolshevik-style attempt to destroy an old economic system to its foundations in the hope that the phoenix of the market would rise from the ashes. This, however, did not happen."

Service and Chubarov add to a growing list of books highlighting the errors, crimes and follies of Russia's neoliberal experiment.

Of this number, the most comprehensive remains Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski's The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: market Bolshevism against democracy (United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001). Reddaway and Glinski provide a penetrating analysis of the undemocratic politics underpinning this experiment, but neither they nor, so far as I know, anyone else has yet been able to explain fully how a project so manifestly absurd could have been launched, and pursued with some consistency, in post-communist Russia.

When the USSR collapsed, none of the conditions for a western-style free market existed. Something between one-third and a half of the economy was a military-industrial rust belt that had no hope of survival in the global market. There was no law of property or contract. The rule of law itself was not even a memory. Schooled by decades of Soviet experience, most people associated enterprise with crime.

Against this background, the prospect of a swift transition to a market economy was sheer fantasy. Yet it was the basis of all the policies of western financial institutions and governments until Russia finally defaulted on its debts in late summer 1998. How are we to make sense of this bizarre tale?

If answers are to be found, they are in the longer intellectual history of Russia and in the recurring utopianism of the European Enlightenment. From Peter the Great onward, a section of Russia's ruling elites has sought to wrest the country from its Eurasian ambiguities and lock it irrevocably in to the west.

By no means all Russians who belong in this pro-western camp have believed that the west supplies a simple formula for modernising Russia. In their different ways, the liberal Ivan Turgenev and the radical Alexander Herzen believed that Russia would make progress only in so far as it entered fully into European culture, but neither of them imagined that this could be achieved by mechanically replicating European models.

Unfortunately, Turgenev and Herzen are not characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia, which has always been attracted to the most doctrinaire strands in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment thinkers who have been most influential in Russia have not been sceptics such as David Hume or empiricists such as John Stuart Mill, but rationalists such as Fichte, Hegel and Marx.

Infecting Russia's elites with a utopian mentality, the quasi-religious view of history advanced by these European thinkers has had a disastrous impact on the development of the country. Politics became a matter of absolute choice, rather than the piecemeal borrowings and evolutionary adaptations through which other countries have edged towards their own distinctive versions of modernity.

The misfortunes of Russia in the 1990s came from the interaction of its indigenous tradition of pro-western Romanticism with the new right's victory in the west.

For the bureaucrats of the IMF, there was only one route to modernity, for Russia or anywhere else, and that was the narrow path of free-market development prescribed by the "Washington consensus". Never mind that the US had achieved economic development behind the high walls of protectionism. The only salvation for Russia was in joining the global free market.

Many other factors lie behind the tragic comedy of Russia's "market reform" - not least spectacular corruption. Its ultimate source is in the deadly combination of the west's ideological enthusiasm for free markets with the Russian belief that modernisation can be achieved only by adopting western models.

Now that the era of the free market is nearly over, it remains to be seen whether Russia - under the aegis of Vladimir Putin's subtle and flexible authoritarian regime - can at last discover a version of modernity that matches its own peculiar history.

John Gray on the West, Shock Therapy and Russia.

Russia's Fall

The Guardian, 22 September 2000.

Russia's human population has gone into free fall. Over the past decade it has dropped by around 6m. On present trends it will shrink by nearly 40m more over the next quarter-century. Poor nutrition, alcohol abuse and, to an increasing but not precisely measurable extent, intravenous drug use have produced a drastic reduction in life expectancy. Over half the teenage boys living in Russia today will not reach 60.

A parallel drop in birth rates has come about owing to a ruined healthcare system, large numbers of infant deaths and the widespread use of abortion as a means of contraception. Russia is facing a population collapse unprecedented in any peacetime country.

Russia's desperate plight is unique in modern history and calls for explanation. Curiously, western governments are silent as to its causes. It is as if the conditions that prevail in Russia had nothing whatever to do with them.

Rightly, the west is giving economic and humanitarian aid, but no one accepts any responsibility for the conditions that have made it necessary. None of the transnational agencies which shaped Russia's economic policies at the behest of western governments has admitted any role in bringing the country to its present pass. Nor, so far as I know, has any of the army of western advisers who trooped in and out of the country touting the virtues of the free market.

In fact, not a single person accepts responsibility for urging on Russia economic policies utterly unsuited to its history and circumstances. Apparently, no one told Russia's economic reformers to scrap price controls - a move that was bound to trigger inflation, given the strength of monopolies in the economy. Equally, it seems, no one recommended the reckless privatisations that left much of the country's resources in the hands of a few oligarchs. Presumably it is Russia's rulers who must shoulder all the blame - the west's hands are clean.

The Russian government should not be exempt from criticism. As its wooden response to the tragedy of the Kursk has shown, Soviet habits die hard. Even so, the desperate straits in which the region finds itself today are as much an indictment of the west as they are of Russia's rulers.
The country's misfortune is that the collapse of communism coincided with market triumphalism in the west.

The crackpot policies that were foisted on it had little to do with the country's needs and everything to do with the neo-liberal hubris that had gripped western governments. It was clear from the start that the country's uniquely daunting problems required pragmatic solutions, not ideologically-driven programmes. It never made any sense to imagine that the Russian economy - largely a military-industrial rustbelt - could be made over into an Anglo-Saxon free market.

Predictably, the results of attempting this impossible task have been ruinous. The upshot of a decade of western-inspired reforms in Russia is that anti-western feeling is stronger than it has been for generations. Xenophobia and anti-semitism are rife. Fervently pro-western 10 years ago, Russia has now reverted to all the troubled ambiguities of its historic relationship with the west.

The credit for this remarkable turn-about must go chiefly to western policy-makers. Russia has wasted a decade following worthless western advice. As a consequence, today it has few options open to it, none of them attractive.

Before it can have a modern economy Russia must have a modern state. That is what Mr Putin seems to be trying to build up from the privatised fragments of the totalitarian apparatus he has inherited. It is too early to know whether the Russian leader's policies are the beginnings of a reassertion of government, or merely another episode in internecine conflict within the oligarchy. An authoritarian state might be an acceptable outcome if it really meant - as Mr Putin has claimed - "the dictatorship of law". If it turns out to mean the rule of the oligarchs by other means, the future is dark. Anarchy may be staved off, but at the price of despotism.

Extending the Hand and Unclenching the Fist

Russia is not merely a part of Eastern Europe but also part of Asia and so the geopolitical rivalry between the USA and Iran is bound to have ramifications upon it, not least with regards the plans to base the missile defence shield in the Czech Republic and Poland.

Whilst both these nations are now considered rightfully a part of 'Central Europe', Ukraine still remains in Eastern Europe whilst the CIA World Factbook accepts that but not that Russia is because it's a 'transcontinental' power.

That ties in with the worldview of President Obama's 'brain', Zbigniew Brzezinski, who consistently criticised the Bush administration for trusting Putin too much and for failing to engage diplomatically with Iran. It found expression in Obama's inauguration speech,

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

Whilst the shift away from unilateralism and 'confrontation' is surely a better strategy, the continuities are also as evident. Not least with regards the view that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

Think tank experts lauding Obama and utterly certain his rise to power just must mark a historic watershed in world politics are getting excited. For example, Kenneth Weisbrote from the Robert Schumann Centre for Advanced Studies. He opines in the Observer today,

US President Barack Obama's administration has lost little time in announcing that it will seek direct talks with the Iranian government. This means, at the very least, a tough confrontation over Iran's quest for a regional strategic advantage in the form of a nuclear weapon.

A major boost to confidence would be a clear-cut strategic commitment from the west in the form of an extension of Nato's own deterrent to the Middle East. It need not single out Iran, and would be more effective than a unilateral US guarantee to Israel or any other single state. Instead, Nato members should pledge to defend any Middle Eastern state that is attacked with nuclear weapons. Under ideal diplomatic circumstances, Russia and China would be persuaded to join with Nato in a joint declaration.

Such steps alone are unlikely to deter Iran or fully to reassure the region's other states. But, along with continued international pressure from the United Nations security council and the International Atomic Energy Commission, they would send a clearer signal that the major powers of the world regard Middle Eastern peace and security as critical to their own. That would help to diminish the possibility of an unbridled regional arms race if talks fail and Iran some day tests a weapon.

Few commentators and experts on Iran seem to mention the fact that Iran's nuclear programme, and the myth that it is on the brink of developing nuclear weapons, is really connected to an offensive geopolitical strategy.

Weisbrote is just yet another who tries to posit the whole issue as though it was only Iran that was seemingly making the attempt to rachet up the arms race. For Iran is a one of Brzezinki's five global geostrategic pivots which it is considered essential for the USA to control.

The others are Ukraine, Turkey, Azerbaijan and South Korea. By controlling all five, the USA can ultimately be in pole position to contain China, reduce Russia to an impotent backwater, 'the Black Hole' as Brzezinski calls it,

The aim is still global domination or hegemony no less than it was under the neoconservative regime between 2000 and 2008. Driving that is the quest for energy security, meaning the ability to control the vast remaining oil and gas reserves of Eurasia.

Obama's election has changed nothing in this regard. Despite noises about cancelling the missile shield in Central Europe, Joe Biden said yesterday that it would go ahead as planned.

The reason for that might be to increase pressure upon Iran and Russia for the aim of Obama's diplomacy is to drive a wedge between Iran and other major regional powers, namely Russia and China.

That is the one outlined by Brzezinski back in 1997 in his The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geopolitics Imperatives. That is to prevent collusion between Iran, Russia and China.

That can only be done through advancing NATO power into Central Asia via the 'gateway' of Ukraine and Georgia into 'the stans' by funding the supposedly democratic opposition forces where possible.

This long term strategy is proposed by Brzezinski as a better alternative than trying to install democracy through hard power as Bush attempted to do in Iraq in 2003, a war he and his pupil Obama opposed.

Control over 'the stans' ensures the aim of energy security as laid down by during the Clinton adminstration and setting up a 'guardpost' over the Middle East.

Kyrgystans's decision to have the US base removed shows how Russia is attempting to counter that strategy and why Biden is now putting the missile base issue back on the agenda.

For the development of the missile shield is primarily concerned with trying to detach Iran from co-operating with Russia as the latter has continued to sell Iran nuclear technology.

What Washington does not want is an independent Iran capable of unsettling US hegemony in the Middle East and impervious to 'regime change'.

Divisions over the invasion of Iraq were predicated on calculations about whether it would trigger off a domino effect in neighbouring states whose people would demand democracy and regime change as well.

Yet the invasion of Iraq, the collapse of a functioning state there, the Shia ascendancy has bolstered Iran's standing no less than Hizbollah's proxy war against Israel in 2006.

For the whole point of invading Iraq was to control the second largest oil reserves and use that as a bargaining lever with a rapidly industrialising and energy hungry China.

Any move by Iran towards closer co-operation Beijing and Moscow raises the spectre of defeating the ultimate goal of US geopolitics irrespective of whether the administration in Washington is Republican or Democrat.

That is, control of the Eurasian World Island.

The stark reality is that 'the West' is crucially dependent upon oil from very dangerous and unstable regions where geopolitical conflict over its control tends to undermine any chance for democratic development.

That's especially so in 'the stans' where Brzezinski has advocated supporting any dictator who preserves the USA's vital interests. Democracy tends not to work for 'stirred up Muslims', the term Brzezinski used for the mujahadeen he backed in 1979 against the Soviet Union..

Yet proxy conflicts over control of the oil with Orwellian style shifting alliances in Central Asia will just funnel lots of weapons to regimes that will vacillate between tyranny, anarchy and Islamist insurgencies.

Though the major strategic powers have every interest in co-operating in some cases, it would only take a major geostrategic earthquake in the Middle East to initiate a conflagration and to draw the West in even deeper.

Of Brzezinski's five geopolitical pivots only Turkey and South Korea have been erstwhile US allies and the Iraq War. However, the refusal of the Turkish government in 2003 to allow US aircraft to use NATO bases there and its criticism of the Israeli actions in Gaza show tensions emerging.

The other pivot in Ukraine, a potential EU and NATO candidate, is also a 'Democratic Bridgehead' into Eurasia, control over which is the most urgent imperative for the USA after Iran as it is the unifying link connecting Poland to Turkey, from the Baltic down to the Black Sea.

This axis contains Georgia and Azerbaijan as well, the latter of which shares a northern border with Iran. Control of that axis would block off Russia and China from exerting influence upon the Middle East.