Polls raise question of how to tie Russia with West

By Jonathan Power

HAMBURG, Germany (JP): Recently, a most striking photograph was taken of smiling NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, offering his long, outstretched hand to the obviously moved Russian foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov.

This was no photo opportunity. This was catching a moment of rare spontaneity as Russia's supposedly hard-line foreign minister announced that his country was no longer against the eastward expansion of NATO and the incorporation of three former members of the Warsaw Pact, Poland, Hungary, and that the Czech Republic could go ahead without serious Russian opposition.

It was almost out of the blue. The diplomatic world had expected that this would perhaps, and very much perhaps, come later if Boris Yeltsin wins re-election. But hardly anyone predicted it now, when Yeltsin is struggling to garner every vote he can. One would assume that he would not want to alienate either his military or the proud motherland fervor of the older generation.

Nothing more reflects Yeltsin's confidence in his impending victory. And equally nothing more underlines how sensible Washington was under the twin influences of Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to slow the debate about NATO enlargement until the Russians themselves felt more comfortable in their knowledge of NATO.

And nothing more proves that out of the dreadful mess of disintegrating Yugoslavia has come an almighty good -- the integration of Russian troops into NATO's peacekeeping exercise and the access to the inner councils and deliberations of NATO's Brussels HQ that this participation gives them.

Of course, you can look at it another way. This is Yeltsin at his realpolitik worst -- giving the West an irresistible bribe to turn an eye from any electoral fiddling and fixing that the Yeltsin camp may feel it has to do to ensure victory.

But this is too cynical by half. Anyway given the way the election is organized serious fixing looks too difficult to pull off. The explanation is elsewhere. Yeltsin, for all his faults, has the supreme political virtue of usually keeping the big picture in view.

It is this that has kept economic reform marching in more or less the right direction, for all the incompetent rough and tumble and the diversion of scarce assets and resources into the hands of the few.

It is this that has allowed him to cut important face-saving deals with the former nuclear components of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, that has led them to agree to forsake their nuclear arsenals.

And it is this that gave him the confidence to cut through layers of legal gobbledygook and introduce a major land reform earlier this year putting land in the hands of the cultivators, a policy that has been endlessly but fruitlessly discussed since the time of Catherine the Great.

Yeltsin, despite many signs to the contrary at various, usually drink-filled intervals, is not one of Dostoyevski's Russian devils leaping over the cliff.

If Yeltsin wins then the time has probably arrived to take some profound and, in their context, revolutionary steps to bind Russia into a new military and strategic relationship with America and its NATO allies. One of the most sure-footed exponents of this is Christoph Bertram, the diplomatic editor of the influential German weekly, Die Zeit, and before that director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

In an interview here he underlined the thesis of his new book, Europe in the Balance. "What is now required for Russia is a place of respect and legitimate influence in a new Europe." It cannot be as part of NATO or the European Union, Bertram argues, Russia is too unmodernized and unconsolidated for that. (Although one day, hopefully, it will be ready for admission.)

Thus a new institution is required: a NATO-Russian Forum which at its apex would have the Secretary-General of NATO and a high- level Russian counterpart, themselves responsible to a Council of Foreign and Defense ministers.

By means of such an institution "matters of concern for each partner could be taken up without the inflating and politicizing effect of summit meetings." If it had existed the last few years it could have brought tremendous influence to bear on issues as diverse as the Chechnya conflict and the Russian demand for rescinding certain provisions of the treaty limiting conventional forces in Europe.

This, after the election, must be the way to go. If the West continues to keep Russia outside a framework of close consultation and coordination it will only strengthen its sense of isolation and heighten the temptation, already dangerously strong in many Russian circles, to define Russia's interests in a way irreconcilable with those of its neighbors.

The photo said a lot: there is a will there -- and Russia has just made a significant down payment on future cooperation -- but the hard work of new institution building must shortly begin.