russia's remarkable rise
ARON, LEON
The Remarkable Rise of Democratic Russia By Leon Aron Few propositions about today's world can be stated with greater certainty: Never in its nearly 450 years has the modern Russian state been...
...In June, the regime in Tajikistan and the Islamic opposition ended five years of bloody civil war...
...Most important, Russia has chosen to accept the independence and sovereignty of the former Soviet republics—which Russians designate, tellingly, as the "near abroad...
...Since July 1994, a CIS-mandated peacekeeping force— consisting entirely of Russian troops—has enforced the cease-fire on the border between Abkhazia and Georgia...
...This is obvious to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Russian history...
...The same month, the Abkhaz president spent two weeks in Moscow with top-level mediators discussing an "interim protocol" for settlement of the Abkhaz-Georgian conflict...
...No other non-Russian part of the Soviet Union was so pivotal to Russian national identity...
...From Argentina to China, Malaysia, and Indonesia, countries have resorted to this palliative in recent years to dull the pain of market reforms or economic reversals...
...The other is the settlement with Ukraine, to which Yeltsin, again almost alone, devoted enormous personal effort and which he advanced for five years in the face of bitter opposition...
...President Shevardnadze appealed to Russia for help...
...In four years, Russia repatriated 800,000 soldiers, 400,000 civilian personnel, and 500,000 family members, and it did so despite severe shortages of housing for the soldiers and of jobs for their spouses...
...China, with its 800 million peasants, has yet to complete the transition...
...and with the Russian soldiers' departure from the Paldiski submarine training base in Estonia in September 1995, the Russian presence in East-Central Europe ended...
...Its harmful emanations, like light from a long-dead star, will continue to reach us for years to come...
...Many a nation facing incomparably milder dislocations has succumbed to the temptation of nationalism as a means of securing cohesion...
...Moscow may bemoan the unfairness of the score—it does so often and loudly—but it is not trying to change the rules of the game...
...3) With the "new world order" buried in the hills around Sarajevo, Russia could count on no one but itself to secure peace and stability in the area...
...For that reason, Yeltsin never cared to anoint a foreign-policy alter ego, to endow a Kissinger, a Brzezinski, or a Shevardnadze with much power and independence...
...Moscow will dispense economic and military assistance to friendly regimes and withhold it from neighbors deemed insufficiently accommodating...
...Such prudential considerations were anathema both to traditional Russian messianic imperialists and to Soviet ideologues...
...Yevgeny Primakov, foreign minister...
...Seven years ago, an enormous evil empire that had poisoned everything and everyone it touched broke to pieces...
...Rather, it is pragmatic and selective...
...Unless this new consensus is extinguished by economic catastrophe and a return to dictatorship, Russian militarism is unlikely to revive...
...Another highly charged issue was the status of the port and naval base of Sevastopol, a symbol of Russian military valor since the 1854-55 Crimean War against the British and French...
...and on research and development, an astounding 10 times lower...
...In the foundation of our approach to the building of the Russian state . . . is the understanding that the country begins with each of us...
...Less than 3 percent of the Russian population is Jewish...
...If we are lucky—as we have been with Yeltsin—the Russia they make will be more than half benign...
...The very criteria of national greatness have changed...
...Russia is Europe's largest country, Ukraine its sixth most populous, and their peaceful relations are as essential to post-Cold War European stability as French-German rapprochement was after World War II...
...democracies, even young and imperfect ones, can afford to be far less solicitous of the armed forces...
...In a joint statement, the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania called the conflict "a contest between a democratically elected president and antidemocratic power structures...
...Moscow was urged to threaten recalcitrant states with the "politi-cization" of their Russian communities and the redrawing of borders to reclaim areas with large Russian populations, like northern Kazakhstan and eastern Ukraine...
...At best, in domestic politics, economics, and international relations, they will forge a hybrid...
...The force has lost 50 men to landmines and Georgian guerrillas...
...Igor Rodionov, minister of defense at the time, referred to himself as "minister of a disintegrating army and a dying fleet...
...Yeltsin has unabashedly promoted Jews...
...Mikhail Komissar, deputy chief of staff...
...This chance must not be missed...
...The future development of Ukraine depended on the results of the Russian election," declared President Leonid Kuchma...
...It will be up to the next generation to turn the hybrid into something new and free of the malignant past...
...Except in these instances, Yeltsin ranks foreign policy a distant second to his domestic agenda and uses it to accommodate the opposition rather than to expend his political capital...
...A great power is a self-reliant and talented people with initiative...
...For almost two centuries a staple of Russian poetry, site of the most popular Russian resort, dotted with tsars' summer palaces and the dachas of Russia's best painters, musicians, and writers, the Crimea had been "given" to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by Niki-ta Khrushchev in 1954, back when an independent Ukraine was inconceivable...
...Kiev was the birthplace of the Russian state and the city from which Christianity spread throughout Russia...
...The shrinking of Russia's armed forces is due to the loosening of the state's grip on the economy and to the new constraints imposed on imperialism, aggression, and brutality by public opinion, a free press, and competitive politics...
...In the next two years, the pitfalls of this modus operandi will be increasingly obvious...
...actions and will challenge them often—rather as France does...
...Alexander Lifshits, deputy chief of staff and economic adviser to the president...
...At the same time, a demilitarization historically unprecedented in speed and scope was underway in Russia itself...
...Within months, Russian first deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov declared that Russia could no more unite with Belarus, a dictatorship with a Soviet-style economy, than South Korea could unite with North Korea...
...This is the critical distinction between the imperial and postcolonial modes of behavior in the region, and the region's leaders understand it well...
...In poll after poll since the fall of the USSR, a majority of Russians has agreed that the United States was "using Russia's current weakness to reduce it to a second-rate power...
...Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the nationalist opposition and chairman of the Russian Communist party, meanwhile, was calling the Founding Act "unconditional surrender" and a "betrayal of Russia's interests...
...In the end, Russia gave up Crimea and Sevastopol and ceded to Ukraine the entire Black Sea Fleet...
...In the country that gave the world the "pogrom," the "pale of settlement," the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Doctors' Plot, there is today a flowering of Jewish cultural and religious life astounding in its richness and color...
...Why are there so many Jews in the Russian government...
...In the case of especially recalcitrant neighbors, support for internal rebellions is always an option...
...Weimar Russia," as some called it just a few years back, did not usher in a National Socialist Russia...
...Such actions elicit a deafening chorus of support from the flagships of the leftist-nationalist media—Pravda, Sovetskaya Rossia, and Zavtra, with a combined daily press run of over half a million—and from the nearly 300 pro-Communist local newspapers...
...Just as certainly, rapprochement will alternate with periods of Sino-Russian tension and perhaps outright hostility...
...A week later, ostensibly in retaliation for the jailing of a Russian journalist in Belarus, Yeltsin refused permission for the Belarussian president's plane to enter Russian air space...
...Yevgeny Yasin, minister without portfolio for coordination and analysis of economic programs...
...Coming after five years of turbulent negotiations, this success was all the more stunning for the conspicuous auguries of failure...
...All means were acceptable, including the stirring up of nationalist and irredentist passions among the 25 million ethnic Russians living in the region...
...Zyuganov was asked by his supporters last winter in Rostov-on-the-Don...
...The warmth of the congratulations sent to the victor by the leaders of the new states far exceeded the requirements of protocol...
...and Emil Pain, longtime adviser to the president on interethnic and regional prob-lems—to name just a few...
...In July 1997, Yeltsin signed decrees mandating a further reduction, to 1.2 million...
...In Russia, too, the nationalist Left, known as the "national patriots," has continually urged pugnacity in foreign policy...
...This broke into the open in August 1992, after Georgian troops entered the Abkhazian capital, Sukhumi, and opened fire on the Abkhazian parliament...
...After the peacekeepers' mandate expired on January 31, 1997, Shevardnadze pleaded (successfully) with Moscow to renew it...
...Predictably, Russian diplomats' zeal to defend the reformist regime has often been less than overwhelming...
...This is perhaps the most generous, and least publicized, bilateral foreign-assistance program in the world today...
...His interests, instincts, and passions—like Ronald Reagan's (and unlike Nixon's, Carter's, or Gorbachev's)—are engaged mostly and most profitably by his country's internal affairs...
...By October 1993, the Georgian regime was in grave danger from the Abkhaz separatists and even more from the rebellion led by former president Zviad Gamsakhur-dia, Georgia's first freely elected leader, deposed by Eduard Shevardnadze in a military coup...
...The second model, which might be called post-colonial, was far less ambitious...
...Their Moldovan counterpart called the supporters of the Supreme Soviet "Communist, imperialist forces who want to turn Russia into a concentration camp...
...Unlike the Russian reformers, China's leaders opted for nationalism to unite the nation during its dizzying economic transformation...
...2) In the breakup of the Soviet Union, literally millions of economic, political, and human ties linking Russia and the republics had been torn, and some sort of mending—some "reintegration"—was imperative...
...Like an old bulldozer—once mighty and responsive, now slow, hard to handle, its motor nearly worn out—Yeltsin is still clearing the boulders deposited by the receding Soviet glaciers, but he is clearing them now one at a time, with much screeching and creaking, and sometimes is even losing ground...
...Another was sovereignty over the beautiful and fertile Crimean peninsula, where ethnic Russians outnumbered Ukrainians by more than two to one...
...Back in 1992, everyone from the nationalists on the left to the radical free marketeers on the right agreed on four points: (1) A stable and prosperous Russia was impossible without a modicum of stability in the former Soviet republics, scene of a dozen civil wars and ethnic conflicts, from Moldova to Tajikistan...
...got underway...
...Any worsening of Yeltsin's health will increase the influence of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the diplomatic corps—perhaps the most recalcitrant institutional relic of the past and a class whose fall from the pinnacle of Soviet society, in both material comfort and prestige, can be likened only to that of the military...
...Equally remarkable has been the massive entry of Jews into the highest echelons of government, politics, and the economy, all of which had been judenrein for almost half a century...
...One was the fate of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, to which both countries had legitimate claims...
...Indeed, early in 1996, the Duma actually voted to annul the Belavezhskie agreements of 1991, which formalized the dissolution of the Soviet Union...
...Yeltsin would not die before doing so...
...Haltingly and inconsistently, Russia opted for the latter approach...
...Between 1992 and 1995, Moscow met all of Mikhail Gorbachev's international commitments, completing a remarkable voluntary, peaceable renunciation of the empire bequeathed to it by the Soviet Union...
...Yeltsin's victory, he continued, was "a signal that Ukraine should press ahead with economic reform...
...This imperial, revanchist, and ideological agenda was advocated largely, though not exclusively, by the nationalist Left...
...Today, Russia sells China submarines and MIGs, and Chinese migrant workers and entrepreneurs flood the Far East and Siberia, setting up Chinese-language schools for their children and opening the best restaurants in Ekaterinburg, Irkutsk, and Vladivostok...
...Secure in the 40 million votes he had received on July 3, 1996, Yeltsin was unafraid...
...Four months later, Zyuganov gave the post of economics minister in his "shadow cabinet" to the Communist governor of Krasnodar, Nikolai Kondratenko, who last month managed to refer to "kikes," "kike-Masons," "Zionists," and "cosmopolitans" some 61 times in a single speech...
...Russia's truculence is not informed by ideology...
...and in August, he traveled to Tbilisi for his first face-to-face meeting with Shevardnadze since the war began...
...Along the way, the Russian army's manpower shrank from around 4 million in January 1992 to 1.7 million by late 1996...
...Clearly, demilitarization is an expression of Russia's profound reorientation...
...Historically, the transition from traditional to modern society, from a village economy to an urban economy, has displaced workers from the land...
...Only after Georgia agreed to join the CIS and granted Russia permission to retain the former Soviet military bases in the Black Sea port of Batumi and on the Turkish border did Moscow send in tanks, marines, and advisers and save Shevardnadze's life as well as his job...
...This, however, does not spell the end of our Russian problem—which may even get worse before it gets better...
...It is not directed to strategic objectives inimical to the vital interests of the United States, and it is not part of a relentless, "antagonistic" struggle "to the end...
...For Yeltsin's opponents this is an especially galling aspect of the postimperial transition...
...Reintegration was conceived as incremental, something that would occur naturally, through the functioning of a privatized Russian economy and a stabilized Russian democracy...
...He did, however, arrogate firmly to himself two key areas of international relations...
...Though often laid up by illness, President Yeltsin fired two defense ministers, the head of the general staff, and the commanders of the paratroop and space forces and ordered the retirement of 500 generals from the immensely bloated field-officers corps...
...Since 1995, the nationalists have enjoyed a plurality in the Duma, the lower house of parliament...
...Said Shevardnadze, "In my thoughts I am on the barricades with the defenders of Russian democracy...
...Inevitably, given its history, geography, and domestic politics, Russia will find much to dislike in U.S...
...And the sole measure of the greatness of our Motherland is the extent to which each citizen of Russia is free, healthy, educated, and happy...
...on procurement and military construction, 9 times lower...
...And a democratic evolution will take time...
...Beyond this core agenda, intact to this day, consensus dissolved, and two sharply divergent sets of objectives and strategies emerged...
...Given the economic and political fragility of most of the post-Soviet states, which depend on Russian resources (especially energy) and remain susceptible to ethnic and civil strife, Moscow will sometimes be able to determine the fate of regimes...
...First, there was the sheer magnitude and intractability of the issues between Russia and Ukraine...
...Russia would lease some of Sevastopol's naval bays and half of the fleet, with the payments subtracted from Ukraine's enormous debt to Russia for gas and oil, estimated at the time the treaty was signed at between $3 billion and $3.5 billion...
...Only in Nagorny Karabakh, over which Armenia and Azerbaijan had fought to a standstill, did Russia fail to make progress...
...Nations held captive for two and a half centuries were freed, and Russia returned to its 17th-century borders...
...Everywhere, this surplus of peasantry has been attended by social convulsions, revolutions, violence, and cruelty...
...Its funding, already delayed, was slashed 20 percent...
...Dictatorships and autocracies depend on an army's good graces...
...In the private sector, the heads of five of the top seven "financial-industrial groups" are Jewish, among them Vladimir Gusinsky, owner of the Most media empire and president of the two-year-old Russian Jewish Congress...
...In public, Moscow loudly linked its retreat from the Baltic states to the granting of full civil and political rights to the ethnic Russians living there—but all the while, it continued quietly to withdraw...
...His biography of Boris Yeltsin will be published next year...
...Russia has also shed another attribute of its imperial past: state-sponsored anti-Semitism...
...Slow to bestow on Russia its other blessings, democracy has already made high defense expenditures and imperial adventures difficult to sustain...
...Even as it was defining its role in the post-Cold War world, Russia had to make critical choices about the former Soviet lands...
...Its time frame stretched over decades...
...As for maintaining its regional dominance, however, there should be no illusions: Russia will behave much as great land powers have for millennia in asserting control over their self-declared spheres of influence...
...This state of affairs is the result of a series of complex, often difficult choices made by the first post-Communist regime...
...After much bluster, Yeltsin chose to sign the NATO-Russia Founding Act and to accommodate the United States and its partners, rather than reprise the Cold War even rhetorically...
...They cannot be counted on to fashion a world of which they know little...
...And when America's wishes are communicated at the highest level, forcefully and unambiguously, Moscow is likely to moderate its opposition and even extend cooperation, as it did in Bosnia...
...Postcolonial Russia can be expected to probe relentlessly for weakness and to exploit its neighbors' troubles in furthering its regional dominance...
...After the treaty was signed, Ukrainian officials told reporters that "only Yeltsin had the political will and strength to drop Russia's residual claims on Ukraine" and that their leadership "prayed that Mr...
...In the end, the fundamental choice that Russia had to make in foreign policy was whether to accept the existing international order or seek to alter it...
...On September 4, in the presence of Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin, the presidents of North Ossetia and Ingushetia (autonomous republics inside Russia) signed an agreement settling a conflict over North Ossetia's Prigorodny district, where fighting had broken out in November 1992...
...As long as China remains authoritarian, its military buildup is likely to continue...
...Russia is suddenly filled with brand-new Jewish schools and summer camps, newspapers and magazines, synagogues and theaters, learned and cultural societies, and Jewish-studies programs in colleges and universities...
...Last June, in a televised address to the nation on the seventh anniversary of Russia's Declaration of State Sovereignty, Yeltsin said, "A great power is not mountains of weapons and subjects with no rights...
...Thus, until the recent cabinet shakeup, his government included Boris Nemtsov, first deputy prime minister...
...The public's pressure to end the war in Chechnya is a case in point...
...And (4) Russia's preeminence as the regional superpower was not negotiable...
...With Yeltsin's near-miraculous resurgence after heart-bypass surgery, Moscow moved to settle all the hostilities in the region...
...Some of the most fateful decisions were made between 1991 and 1996, when Russia was reeling from economic depression, hyperinflation, market reforms, and postimperial trauma...
...Reduction" is a ridiculous euphemism for the systematic starvation to which Yeltsin has subjected the Soviet armed forces and military-industrial complex...
...What will never serve U.S...
...Yakov Urinson, deputy prime minister and minister of the economy...
...In 1992, some Western experts were predicting war between Russia and Ukraine, even a nuclear exchange...
...No other Russian or Soviet leader, not even Stalin, ever attempted to remove simultaneously so many pillars of the defense establishment, for fear of destabilizing the regime (to say nothing of risking his life...
...Russia's new foreign and security policies stem from Yeltsin's domestic revolution and personal leadership, rather than from any clever global vision...
...In just a few years, the Russian defense sector—once the country's omnipotent overlord, master of its choicest resources, source of national pride, and livelihood of one-third of the Russian population—has been reduced to beggary...
...Hence also the sigh of relief with which the neighboring countries welcomed Yeltsin's victory over Zyuganov in the 1996 election...
...In no other instance were the self-imposed constraints on Russia's imperial tradition and instinct put to a more painful test than by an independent Ukraine...
...The two nations undertook to "respect each other's territorial integrity, confirm[ed] the inviolability of the existing borders," and pledged "mutual respect, sovereign equality, a peaceful settlement of disputes, and non-use of force or its threat...
...Washington must counter such actions with unflinching resolve...
...On September 1, 1994, when the last Russian troops left Germany, most such forces had already been removed from Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic...
...He replied that he had already proposed to the "Jewish community" that "all nationalities must be represented in the government strictly in proportion to their share in the general population...
...Nevertheless, Moscow will be constrained by a cost-benefit calculus and wary of open-ended, long-term, and expensive commitments in the former Soviet lands...
...Wherever the United States provides an opening, either by seeming not to care much about an issue or, as in Iraq, by seeming to hesitate, Russia is likely to assert its claim to be reckoned with as a major international player...
...Russia's leaders came of age and rose under the empire...
...interests, however, is blindly to apply old stereotypes to a new reali-ty—a reality that, in some essentials, is remarkably auspicious...
...How plausible is a lasting accord between two giant nations that vie for regional supremacy, share nearly 3,000 miles of border (much of it in dispute), and have competed for centuries for the huge, underpopulated land mass east of the Urals...
...Russian behavior in the latest Iraq crisis, when a clearly disengaged Yeltsin mouthed a bizarre line about World War III, is a foretaste of things to come...
...Czech president Vaclav Havel called those clashes in Moscow not simply "a power struggle, but rather a fight between democracy and totalitarianism...
...Yeltsin has promised to shrink it to 3 percent by the year 2000...
...With or without Moscow's connivance, local Russian commanders provided the Abkhaz with supplies, instructors, and even occasional air support...
...During the next two days in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, Chernomyrdin held meetings with the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, who all announced they would "soon" sign border agreements with Moscow...
...While the transition may well take longer than three years, for a Russian leader even to talk of ending almost two centuries of conscription proves how far the country has moved from the traditional Russian (let alone Soviet) militarized state...
...No one but Russia, Shevardnadze continued, "had the ability to help us in this matter...
...For decades, the Muslim Ab-khaz minority had harbored resentment over Georgians' political and cultural dominance...
...The Remarkable Rise of Democratic Russia By Leon Aron Few propositions about today's world can be stated with greater certainty: Never in its nearly 450 years has the modern Russian state been less imperialist, less militarized, less threatening to its neighbors and the world, and more receptive to Western ideals and practices than it is in 1998...
...In February 1994, after signing a treaty of "friendship and mutual assistance" with Yeltsin in Tbilisi, Shevardnadze said that, although many nations had offered help with "instructors and inspectors," only Russia had agreed to supply weapons to "rebuild Georgian armed forces...
...The cost—in treasure, world opinion, and even blood—was no object...
...The president's inevitable physical decline and his lame-duck status will change things...
...China is relevant to this discussion in another respect as well...
...When the government implemented an across-the-board spending "sequester" in May 1997, defense was again hit hardest...
...One aimed at reviving something resembling the former USSR as quickly as possible...
...Already Russian courts are throwing out by the dozen cases brought by the army against "deserters" who exercised their constitutional right to alternative service...
...The demilitarization of conflicts in the near abroad is a central tenet of the postcolonial creed, and for this, 1997 was by far the most productive year to date...
...Yet even when President Boris Yeltsin has been handed opportunities to propitiate the nationalists and reap a political windfall, he has passed them up—as he did in the case of NATO expansion...
...The Chinese political class, already anxious about the migration of millions of destitute peasants to the city, is justifiably afraid of instability, and its fear is the single biggest impediment to Chinese democratization— and, consequently, to demilitarization...
...To be sure, there will be periods of Sino-Russian rapprochement...
...But perhaps the greatest obstacle to Russia's recognition of Ukraine as a separate nation was Ukraine's unique place in Russian history and consciousness...
...On May 12, Russia signed an accord with Chechnya, granting it all but official recognition of independence...
...Of all the morbid fantasies about a "Russian menace," the coming Sino-Russian alliance against the United States is intellectually the most embarrassing...
...This explains the newly independent states' and former satellites' wholehearted support for Yeltsin in his suppression of an armed revolt by the left-nationalist supporters of the Supreme Soviet back in September-October 1993...
...Within days, the leader of the self-proclaimed Transdniester Republic (a secessionist Russo-Ukrainian enclave on Moldova's border with Ukraine) signed a memorandum in the Kremlin that effectively affirmed Moldova's sovereignty over the area...
...Like every great and successful modern leader with the exception of de Gaulle, Yeltsin is primarily a domestic leader...
...While they quickly learned to overwhelm some American columnists with complaints about Moscow's armtwisting, they see clearly the difference between meddling and subjugation...
...According to Sergei Rogov, director of the USA-Canada Institute in Moscow, the armed forces' spending on organization and maintenance was at least 2.5 times lower in 1996 than in 1990...
...It is the connection between democratization and national-security policy that makes Russia's situation so different from China's...
...Like history's other pair of perennial combatants, Germany and France, Russia and China will come together only when both are stable and prosperous democracies—that is, not in our lifetime, and perhaps not in our children's—by which time their joining forces is unlikely to threaten the United States...
...In two years, the number of Russian troops in Estonia dropped from as many as 50,000 to 3,000...
...But by far the most impressive diplomatic coup of that busy year was the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Russia and Ukraine, which Yeltsin and Kuchma signed in Kiev on May 31...
...Until now, Yeltsin's unique place in Russian politics, and the clout and confidence he derived from his 1996 landslide, have kept Russian foreign policy on course...
...policymakers must be prepared to encounter Soviet threads in the fabric of Russian behavior—such as relentless, senseless spying or sales of technology and weapons to nations hostile to the United States...
...Russia's epoch-making choice to disarm is the result of democratization, not of a weak economy, as is often suggested—as if insecurity, hatred, wounded honor, messianic fervor, and a dictator's will did not regularly override economic considerations in determining the priorities of nations...
...In Russia, the "solution" was Stalin's forced collectivization and industrialization...
...More than once, the East and the West have missed opportunities to reconcile," Yeltsin said in February 1997 when the final negotiations with NATO Leon Aron is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...In addition, we can expect a growing rhetorical shrillness in the next two years, as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs strives to please the contenders in the 2000 presidential election—all of whom seem far more susceptible than Yeltsin to the nationalist temptation...
...Even the April 1997 "union" with Belarus, which some American observers hastened to declare the beginning of Russia's inexorable westward march, has been quietly diluted...
...U.S...
...The case of Georgia, which initially refused to join the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States, is paradigmatic...
...Thus began the process of squeezing the military's share of Russian GDP from at least 20 percent to between 5 percent and 7 percent today...
...Yet this Russian assertiveness must not be mistak-en—any more than French prickliness is—for anti-Americanism of the kind professed by the Soviet Union, by Iran in the 1980s, or by Iraq, Cuba, and Libya today...
...Then, too, there was abundant precedent for bloodshed attending postimperial divorces—the cases of England and Ireland, of India and Pakistan, of Bosnia and Serbia come to mind...
...Russia chose to accept it...
...One is the relationship with the United States, which Yeltsin preserved single-handed when he signed the Russia-NATO Founding Act—against the advice, and despite the dire warnings, of virtually the entire political class...
...Russia will try to play the Chinese card in its dealings with Washington, just as China will try to play the Russian card—but the United States will remain far more important to both than they will be to each other...
...In 1992, acting prime minister Yegor Gaidar ordered an 80 percent cut in defense procurement...
...This must not take Americans by surprise...
...The rout of the once-invincible defense sector became evident in the year following the 1996 presidential election...
...Finally, Yeltsin announced the coup de grace for Russian militarism: elimination of the draft and the move to an all-volunteer force of 600,000 by the year 2000...
...This episode is emblematic of post-Communist Russia's broader strategy...
Vol. 3 • April 1998 • No. 31
